The Big Snow

by David Park

  When he returned, Gracey was standing reading his report. He saw him glance at him. ‘You’re a bright boy with words, all right. I’ll give you that.’ He looked at the report again. ‘Do you never think you might be better off pushing a pen somewhere? Some nice office job with sensible hours – that sort of thing.’ For a second he thought of telling Gracey how much like his parents he sounded but instead he shook his head and handed over a mug of tea. ‘Two sugars?’ Gracey asked before he started to drink.

  Outside at the desk the phone was ringing. Gracey made a disparaging remark about the fire as some snow came down the chimney and made the coal hiss. A few minutes later Maguire came into the room with a scrap of paper in his hand. ‘There’s some woman just off the phone, says she’s worried about the girl next door to her. There was some shouting during the night and she sees no sign of her this morning. The woman’s cat’s sitting on the window ledge lookin’ in.’

  ‘In the name of God, you don’t expect me to be headin’ out in a blizzard because some cat’s lookin’ in from the cold,’ Gracey said, stamping his feet on the floor. Maguire shrugged indifferently, and for a second it looked as if he might crumple the paper and throw it into the fire.

  ‘I could do with a walk out,’ Swift said, stretching his hand out for it. ‘If you don’t need me here, can I take a look, Sarge?’

  ‘Didn’t know you were an animal lover,’ Gracey said, turning his face to the fire. ‘Go if you want but you’ll need a bloody pair of snowshoes.’

  Swift nodded his gratitude and scampered out of the room before there was a change of mind. The address was a couple of miles away and he decided to walk rather than take a bicycle. Maguire got a pair of Wellingtons for him from the store. They were a size too big but it was the best on offer. ‘If you’re not back in a couple of hours I’ll send out the huskies,’ Maguire said as he watched Swift head out through the doors.

  There was a lull in the snow but already it was lying thickly on the roads and pavements. He held his head up and felt the joy of the coldness on his face. He kicked up little flurries of snow like a schoolboy and took pleasure from those moments when his footprints were the first to press on a virgin stretch of pavement. Sometimes he glanced behind at his crinkled and ribbed trail. The boots were uncomfortable and he hoped he wouldn’t have to run. As he walked one of his socks slipped down and once he stopped and, holding on to railings, hoisted it up.

  But when he got closer to the street his spirits sagged a little. It was probably a domestic dispute, and experience painted an unfolding scene in which a woman with a split lip or a blackening eye would cry, then tell him that it was out of character and the neighbours had no business sticking their noses in. If the husband was there, and mostly they weren’t, he’d be either a sullen silence in the corner of the room or else a sobbing repentant, making a welter of promises. He didn’t know which was worse. And they’d look at him with his boyish face and think of him as a double outsider; someone who came from another class and so didn’t know what it was to live in the ordained mesh of their lives; and someone unmarried and ignorant of the eternal conflict that raged inside every attempt of men and women to live together. Then he’d confirm their evaluation by uttering some platitude, some patronizing little homily. For a second he wondered if Gracey wasn’t right after all and imagined himself taking the man out into the yard and grabbing him by the throat, or somewhere worse, then threatening him with a slew of curses and an ‘If you ever lay another finger . . .’

  He checked the number of the caller’s house against the piece of paper. The rustling curtain confirmed it was the right one. It was a mid-terrace house, solid and dignified, with a name plaque that said ‘Bethany’. Even the imposition of the snow’s uniformity couldn’t prevent the house proclaiming its pride in its respectability. She had the door open for him before he had pushed the gate through the resistance of snow. A smallish woman with auburn hair pinned up in a bun and held with black metal clips Her pink framed glasses with thick lenses made her eyes seem large and milky.

  ‘Mrs Graham?’ he asked, smiling at her.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said, staring at him but not returning his smile.

  ‘I’m Detective Constable Swift.’

  ‘You don’t have a uniform,’ she said, inspecting his face.

  ‘That’s because I’m a detective. You phoned the barracks earlier. About your next-door neighbour.’ This wasn’t going to be easy. For a second he thought almost affectionately about the office back at the barracks.

  ‘You look a bit young to be a detective,’ she said.

  ‘I’m still training,’ he answered, ‘but I am a detective. Now, would you like to tell me what the problem is?’

  The woman told him to come in but her swimming milky eyes watched him with suspicion as he knocked the snow from his boots. He thought of taking them off but decided there would be no dignity in interviewing her in his socks. Once inside he talked about the snow and tried to set her at ease. But his heart dropped again when with no warning she quoted the Bible at him. ‘Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be white as snow,’ she said, smiling. He smiled back and nodded, repeating ‘white as snow’.

  ‘So, Mrs Graham, you’re worried about something – your next-door neighbour. What’s her name?’ he asked.

  ‘Calls herself Simons, Mrs Simons,’ the woman sniffed, ‘but she doesn’t wear a wedding ring and as far as I can see there isn’t a Mr Simons. There’s men all right, but they come and go. Who knows what’s what?’

  Swift watched her tighten and squirm a little on the chair as if she felt the repugnance of her own words. Her mouth was a tight little purse untouched by lipstick or colour and out of its meanness slipped the kind of statements that told him he had met the type before. God-fearing, people-hating, confirmed in the knowledge of their election by something more primitive than Swift cared to think about. And if they didn’t break temporal laws, he always felt it was against something deeper, something essentially profound, that they transgressed. He wanted to get the business done as quickly as possible and be back out in the unfettered freedom of the snow.

  ‘So you heard voices arguing last night,’ he said, wondering what other voices this woman heard on a nightly basis.

  ‘There’s always noise, never a moment’s peace and quiet since she moved in, what with her music and television going at all hours and comings and goings. I’m not a person to complain or pass judgment but sometimes you have to wonder about it all.’

  Swift could imagine the hours of vicarious pleasure it must have provided, but he resisted the temptation to smile and asked her why she was concerned on this particular morning.

  ‘Well, there’s been no sign or sound of her all morning and she’s hardly likely to’ve gone out on a morning like this. And, well I’m not exactly sure but I thought I heard a bit of a fight going on – shouting and the like. You wouldn’t believe the language comes through those walls sometimes, and out of a woman’s mouth as well. Her cat’s been squealing to get in all morning – she always brings it in, sometimes before she’s even half dressed.’

  ‘Might she not just be having a lie-in?’ he ventured.

  ‘Could be, she doesn’t live like the likes of us.’

  Swift shifted on the seat and felt uncomfortable at being so quickly assimilated into this woman’s world. He wondered why it seemed to happen so readily in relation to worlds to which he didn’t aspire and so tardily to those to which he did. He glanced towards the snow-spotted window and felt a vague sense of being an outsider, without fully understanding what it was kept him outside.

  It wasn’t a very complicated business and he was glad that he didn’t need to sit any longer, breathing in the stuffy vapours of the room. Something about it reminded him of the wardrobe in his mother’s bedroom. The same smell of must, the feeling of shadow and of clothes that would never see the light of day. He had wanted to clear it after her death but his father had reacted with horror, as if
he had proposed something obscene. So it was allowed to sit untouched like a mausoleum, its double doors with their swirls of walnut inlay permanently sealing the silent decay within. He stood up and thanked the woman for her time and concern. He’d go next door and check that everything was all right, then come back and let her know. Probably nothing to worry about, but he’d check it out just to put her mind at rest.

  Outside the snow was falling in lazy spirals of puffy flakes, like drawings done by children. The flakes looked so big he felt that if he was to stretch out his hand and catch one it would reveal its inner structure complete, like the photographs he had once seen. Mrs Graham came to watch as he stepped over her little fence and went next door. There was no gate to negotiate, and as he walked the few steps to the front door he saw that all the curtains were drawn, but through the thinness of those in the front room he could see that the light was on. He was aware of Mrs Graham watching from her doorway and was glad the snow had prevented her from coming out. There was no answer to his ring or heavy rattle. Standing back from the step he called out the woman’s name and watched the upstairs window for response. When none came he walked to the end of the street and down the entry that ran behind the row of houses. For a few moments he was unsure which was the back of the house until he saw a number painted on a door. The entry was an undisturbed trench of snow, a valley formed by the brick on either side. Already the top of the walls had started to scab and blister in white.

  He double checked it was the right door and got himself ready to shin over the wall and into the yard, before, as a kind of afterthought, he pushed the wooden door and found only the resistance of snow. A couple of shoves with his shoulder opened it wide enough to slip sideways through. There was a light in the kitchen and on the window ledge a black cat whined and squirmed against the glass. It paused to look at him with its green eyes before returning to its self-pity. Through the window he saw a narrow kitchen but no sign of anyone. He knocked on the back door and called her name without response and as he looked up at the back window the snow feathered his eyebrows and trickled down his face. He wondered if his luck could be in twice and tried the handle of the door. It turned smoothly and cleanly. His new shout echoed through the house and returned to him unheeded, and as a whisper of snow sidled into the kitchen behind him he pulled the door behind him.

  In the sink was a clatter of unwashed plates and there was a bundled pyramid of what looked like unwashed clothes in a basin. A hybrid smell of stale food and kitchen drains, mixed through with cigarette smoke and sickly perfume, laced the air. It seemed intense after the clean blankness of the outside world. His boots dripped water on the linoleum when he moved tentatively towards the hall, his sense of intrusion into somebody’s home making him call out again. There was a phone on a glass-topped hall table and a brown carpet with a swirl of yellow flowers. The entrance to the living room was close to the front door and as he glanced up the stairs he called again to dispel his sudden nervousness.

  The living-room door was partly open and as he paused before entering he could see a television set in the corner and a radiogram with its lid open. He knocked on the door and when he entered, the first face he saw was his own, in the winged mirror that hung above the fireplace. She was lying on the blue vinyl settee in a black satin-style dressing gown, her head hanging backwards over the padded end, her open bulging eyes staring at the ceiling. He didn’t move. For a second he looked again at his reflection in the mirror as if to confirm that he was really there in this room, really there in this moment. He was glad he didn’t need to touch her to know she was dead. Already he had seen the belt, probably from her own gown, that had been twisted round her neck and choked the life out of her. But it wasn’t that, or even the sliver of tongue lolling from her blue bruised face – it was the frozen frenzy of her body. No living thing could have maintained that terrible posture, in which every sinew was tensed and twisted into a ferocious resistance of what sought to choke the life out of her, squeeze by squeeze. She hadn’t been a ready victim. He knew that by what he saw. Her legs were wide apart – the one jutting off the settee had been used as a lever in an attempt to throw off whoever pushed on top of her, the other was bent at the knee, with the foot jammed partly down the gap between the white buttoned cushion seat and the settee’s back.

  He stepped closer to her, smelt the scent again, the dark stain of her urine and something else he didn’t know the name of. His brain was racing now, desperately trying to stop his slide into panic. He had to think. He had to think calmly. There was a sudden tumble of sickness in his stomach. He spun round, letting out an involuntary shout as he did so, aware of movement behind him, his arms instinctively rising to protect his face. The cat jumped onto the settee, its slinking blackness giving a momentary illusion of movement to the body lying there. He grabbed it and lifted it away while he tried frantically to remember the schools of instruction, to turn the pages of the training books that before this moment he could almost quote. Behind the blur of his confusion and the in-rushing flow of extraneous and irrelevant images he struggled to fasten on to what precepts he could remember. He had to preserve and protect the scene – that was the priority – preserve the crime scene intact. The cat’s body was warm and pulsing between his hands as he carried it to the kitchen door, which he hadn’t closed properly. Thin fringes of snow had filtered in through the open door. Conscious for the first time of fingerprints and unable to remember what he had and hadn’t touched, he slipped the cat into the entry and closed the door with his shoulder in the middle of the wood.

  He didn’t want to go back inside the house. The newly whitened world held itself unsullied and pure. He didn’t want to exchange it for the smell of the house, the sight of her face bruised dark and dinged like the damaged skin of a plum or rancid fruit. It felt as if life was laughing at him. Wasn’t this what he wanted, wasn’t this the very thing for which he had been desperate? Something for him to pit his wits against, something to bring thought to, the search for clues, the construction of the final picture. He hesitated at the kitchen door, then went to the corner of the yard and was sick, hiding the traces under kicked-over snow and wiping his mouth with a fresh handful which burned his hand with its coldness.

  As he stepped back into the kitchen the silence of the house seemed to press down heavily on him, making him intensely aware of the rustle of his clothing, the murmur of his breathing. He stopped stock still at the end of the hall – he had been a fool, a complete fool. For all he knew the murderer was still in the house – he hadn’t checked anywhere and he imagined the danger that might lurk inside. The taste of his sickness was still in his throat. His issue Webley was back in the barracks – Gracey had already made clear his disdain for firearms, calling them toys for little boys – and now he felt naked and vulnerable. There was a tray of cutlery on one of the boards and momentarily indifferent to fingerprints he lifted a bread knife and held it in front of himself as he moved slowly down the hall. He prodded the coats hanging under the stairs, separating their lifeless forms with the blade of the knife, then moved to the foot of the stairs. As he hesitated he shouted out, ‘This is the police. Is there anyone there?’ and immediately felt the foolishness of his action.

  However, when he climbed the stairs he strained his full weight into the squeaking boards and kept the knife at full arm’s length in front of him as if he was shining a torch into his fear. There were two rooms and a bathroom. The box room was empty except for a few off-cuts of carpet and cardboard boxes. The bathroom was tiny, incapable of affording a hiding place, and decorated in pink and purple that jarred his senses. He turned to the remaining room, where he found only an undisturbed bed, a dresser and a skinny wardrobe which he opened with the knife still stretched in front of him. Now he needed to phone the barracks, but going back down the stairs he first went to the kitchen and pushed the knife to the bottom of the cutlery pile. He thought he should use the phone next door but couldn’t bring himself to report it with the
woman listening to every word, so, taking out his handkerchief, he lifted the receiver by the mouthpiece. It was Gracey he asked for and after what seemed a long delay he heard the familiar thin wheeze of laboured breathing and his initial irritation at being disturbed.

  ‘A woman murdered?’ Gracey said, the disbelief in his voice barely disguised. ‘Are you pulling my leg, son? You just went out for a wee walk and you’re telling me you’ve got a woman murdered? We had one six months ago – we’re not due one for a good while yet.’

  ‘She’s dead and unless she choked herself, then someone murdered her,’ Swift said, no longer prepared to hide his own impatience.

  ‘Right, then, we better take a look at this murdered woman of yours. We’ll be over in few minutes. God in heaven, it’s not still snowing is it? Where did you say the house was?’

  All Swift had to do now was sit and wait. He thought of starting to look for evidence. For clues. But the tautened, twisted presence of the woman’s body seemed to drain his will and overpower any inner energy he could muster, and so he slumped into the armchair facing her and did nothing but wait for Gracey and the others. At first he tried not to look, but then he found himself glancing furtively at her, as if her eyes might suddenly meet his and rebuke his intrusive gaze. She was probably in her early thirties and her face had once been pretty. Her hair was too black to be completely natural, and her fingernails and toenails were painted the same strong red. Maybe he should have closed her eyes, ended that fierce scream of a stare, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch the body and so he stayed slumped in the chair.

  He tried to pull himself together before Gracey arrived. It wasn’t as if it was the first dead body he had seen – there was the man who’d had a heart attack at work, the old woman they’d found dead in her bed, and there was the boy. He didn’t like to think of the boy, for the image never lost its power to gnaw at his insides, quivering away like the oily slime of water they’d pulled him from. He hadn’t been so old himself – it was his first month in his first posting and the boy had been missing for three days when they found him. Four years old and no bigger it seemed than a big fish as he helped the boy’s uncle haul him from the Lagan. Twigs and scummy green trails of plants trailing from his hair, the print of his face smeared and running like a piece of paper crumpled and blotched by incessant rain.