The Big Snow

by David Park

  ‘Maybe you weren’t givin’ her what she needed,’ Gracey was saying. ‘Maybe she was givin’ it to others besides you – was that it? Couldn’t bear the idea of somebody else givin’ it to her, givin’ it better than you – that it, Johnny boy?’ And Linton was shouting ‘No’ and his face was a mixed stream of tears and mucus which made him look like an hysterical child who needed a parent to come and hold him. Then the voice dropped to a whisper and Swift had to strain to hear Linton say, ‘I loved her, I loved her,’ before he lowered his sobbing head into the pillow of his arms. But there was no respite and it went on for another hour until Gracey stood up and wiped the sweat of his exertion with his handkerchief. He was wheezing a little and he dabbed the corners of his mouth while he looked at his watch and told Burns the interview was suspended. Swift stood listening as Gracey lumbered down the corridor and banged the office door closed. He hesitated a second, then without looking at Linton he, too, was gone.

  In the harsh light of the cell Linton’s face seemed to have collapsed in on itself, his eyes shadowed and darkened, his cheeks scooped hollow and drained of colour. They had taken his laces and the belt from his trousers and he sat hunched on the concrete shelf of a bed with his legs pulled up tight. He didn’t look as if he’d slept much and occasionally he shivered, but Swift wasn’t sure if it was from the cold or from what memories afflicted him. It was still very early and there was little prospect of Gracey arriving for a while yet. There had been more snow during the night and even to reach the station would be a long, difficult struggle.

  He offered Linton the mug of tea he had brought and looked at his hands as he reached out for it. Were these the hands that had choked the life out of Alma Simons? He didn’t know and he thought of the child on the swing, pushing back against the air, her hands holding on to the chains, the smile on her face. Swift knew he shouldn’t be in the cell with Linton, that Gracey would be very angry when he found out, but for some reason he didn’t care any more. He was angry himself now, but didn’t know why. Was it the way he had been treated by Gracey? The way Linton had been treated? That a woman was dead? Or was it something else, something he didn’t fully understand? He wondered what it would be like to feel the living warmth of her arms, the slow giving of her love. In Gracey’s mouth it had sounded coarse, sordid, the words he used seeking to strip away its dignity. Maybe it hadn’t been like that, maybe it had been something completely different, the way Swift, in the quietness of his barracks bed, imagined it would be for him, when it happened.

  ‘Did he send you?’ Linton asked.

  ‘Who, Gracey?’

  ‘He’s off his head,’ Linton said. ‘Why doesn’t he ever listen?’

  Swift sat on the end of the bed and stared at the opposite wall. It was painted the same lime green as the interview room. ‘When did you first meet Alma?’ he asked.

  ‘I was playing in a dance band,’ Linton said. ‘She was at the dance. It was a big bill, there was a lot of waitin’ around. It was the Orpheus – she claimed it was the best floor of them all. Has that spring.’

  ‘Who was playing?’ Swift asked.

  ‘The Freshmen were headlining; the Kestrels, the Vernon Girls, Johnny and the Teenbeats. She got the idea that I was Johnny of that group – I went along with it for a while until she realized. The next night she was there at Milano’s. I left her home – it went from there.’

  ‘Did you kill her?’ Swift asked, still staring at the wall. The wall in his bedroom had wooden panelling. When he was a boy he used to imagine he saw images in the grain of the wood – people’s faces, an Indian tepee, the wings of a bird. Sometimes he saw the lines as rivers flowing to an invisible ocean.

  ‘I never killed her, I would never hurt her. Never hurt a hair on her head. She was the best thing ever happened to me.’

  Sometimes in his bed facing the wooden panels and under the sloping roof it felt as if he was sleeping in a box. Sometimes he had a recurring nightmare that someone was hammering down a lid on this box – he tried to shout but he had no voice and then there was darkness and he knew that if he didn’t break out he would suffocate.

  ‘We had a fight that last night. I wanted her to come away with me – I thought that was what she wanted, too. We’d talked about it all the time. I had it all arranged, had fixed up a job in Glasgow through a mate. Then she told me she wasn’t goin’, said it wasn’t possible any more. We rowed but honest to God I never touched her. I’ve never ever touched her – not like that, not like that.’

  Suffocating would be the worst way to die – so slow, with each desperate struggle only using up the very thing you needed to survive.

  ‘She told me it was over, that I had to go. I had the boat tickets in my pocket – I showed her them but it didn’t make any difference. She told me I had to go.’

  ‘What time did you leave?’ Swift asked.

  ‘About half nine. She really wanted me out of the house.’

  ‘Which way did you leave? Front or back?’

  ‘Back. She has this nosy old cow of a neighbour. I left through the yard.’

  ‘You still have the tickets, then,’ Swift said.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Linton said. ‘When she put me out I’d lost the head and I threw them at the back door, them and the ring she’d given me. Stupid thing to do. Like a bloody child. But I wanted her to come away with me – I wanted it so bad.’

  ‘What sort of ring?’

  ‘Gold, snake-shape. Only thing she ever gave me and I threw it away.’

  ‘Where did she get the money to pay for the house? – she wasn’t working,’ Swift asked.

  ‘She said her father had bought it for her. He owns a couple of shops, has a bit of money.’

  ‘Did you ever meet him?’

  ‘No,’ Linton said, ‘She didn’t talk much about him. Her mother was dead – killed in a car accident long time ago.’

  ‘Did you know she was pregnant?’ Swift asked. He had seen the doctor’s report twenty minutes earlier. About two months gone.

  ‘She wasn’t pregnant,’ Linton said, as if Swift was trying some new way to trick him. ‘We were always careful – always. She wasn’t pregnant.’

  Swift didn’t reply but stood up and looked for the scrap of paper he carried in his pocket. ‘Do you recognize this address?’ he asked. Then when Linton shook his head he hammered on the cell door for the duty sergeant. As the key turned in the lock Linton, too, stood up and said again, ‘She wasn’t pregnant. I would have known. She wasn’t pregnant.’

  When Swift went to the front desk, Maguire gave a long litany of towns and villages cut off by the snow, of impassable roads, of search parties. There were power lines down and army helicopters having to be used to take supplies to remote areas. One had also flown in to ferry a doctor and midwife to a woman about to go into labour. Even burials were having to be postponed because they couldn’t dig the frozen ground. Snow ploughs were getting stuck in ten-foot drifts, the Belfast-Dublin express had collided with a local train at Lisburn station, injuring eight people. Maguire recited it all wide-eyed, pleased by the authority his information gave him. ‘It’s like the North Pole out there, Swifty – there’s never been anything like it. Well maybe ‘47 but I don’t think it was half as bad as this,’ he said shaking his head. ‘It’s a bloody blizzard blowin’ out there. The Corporation has a thousand men, a hundred mechanical units, tryin’ to keep the main roads open and they’ve put out a radio SOS for more volunteers. They’ve opened an office down the unemployment to recruit those on the dole to help out.’

  ‘No signs of Sergeant Gracey yet?’ Swift asked.

  ‘Probably snowed in – you might have to go round to dig him out, Swifty boy. And the airport’s closed. He hasn’t phoned in, but then there’s exchanges out of action as well.’ As he spoke, a line of constables filed in and Maguire pointed to the pile of long-handled shovels in the corner. ‘Right, gentlemen, I want the front of the barracks cleared and the pavements along the front, so put your
backs into it and get crackin’.’

  ‘I didn’t join to be a bloody navvy,’ Johnston said out of the corner of his mouth as he took the shovel handed to him.

  Swift watched the men trundle out of the barracks, some of them poking each other with the shafts of the shovels as they went. There was one shovel left. He went and lifted it. ‘Goin’ to help out? Good man yourself,’ Maguire said, then tried to tune out the interference he was getting on the radio. Swift nodded, but when he got outside he walked past the group of constables, who were already using the shovels to scoop snow at each other. As he hurried on he heard a voice shout, ‘Goin’ to build a snowman, Swifty? Hey, Swifty, what’s the difference between a snowman and a snow woman?’ He stared ahead as if he hadn’t heard. ‘Snowballs!’ He didn’t turn round but carried the men’s laughter in his ears while he walked the single track that furrowed the middle of the road. On either side were banks of snow at waist height and higher. It made Swift feel as if he was traversing an unending mountain pass and, although the snow had stopped falling, the wind whipped up the light surface and stung it against his face and eyes.

  When he had left the barracks far behind he took his woollen scarf from the pocket of his overcoat and wrapped it round his neck and the lower part of his face. All around him the city was transformed into something only partly recognizable. Familiar landscapes were smoothed and rendered indistinguishable and everywhere a great weight of white pressed down on the buildings, layering and shadowing them into an echo of each other, and the snow had a shiny brilliance to it that the grime of the city had been unable to consume. Sometimes, already, the weight of snow had proved too much to bear and some wooden roofs had collapsed. But as he walked past a humped-back bridge of nose-to-tail cars, Swift felt none of this weight, for the snow had given him a temporary release from the predictable and an escape from the deadening shadow of Gracey, and its sudden offer of infinite possibilities made him wish it would stay for ever.

  All schools were shut and tribes of boys roamed the tundra, pelting passers-by and spotting windows in unbridled rowdiness. A gang of them stood on a street corner and when they saw his approach bent down to gather ammunition, but he put his head down and hurried by as the volley of missiles plopped harmlessly into the banks of snow. In some of the streets he passed, there was a narrow channel cut down the middle of the street and from it tight pathways to each door in the terrace. At the end of one of these streets was a breadserver’s van with people queuing to buy something from the van’s extended drawers. Many of the women wore shawls over their heads like a scene in a remote village in the depths of rural Ireland.

  When he reached Alma Simons’s street he approached the house through the entry. He had to use the shovel to dig away the snow from the door into the yard so that he could open it wide enough to squeeze through. The snow was knee deep and each step pushed his boot down to the frozen base. As he walked to the door he felt he was walking on a great iced cake which crumbled and crunched under his weight and he wondered if his intention was mere foolishness, but he dropped the scarf from his mouth so that he could breathe more freely and then marked the immediate vicinity of the back door into a series of gridded squares, about a yard square, with the point of the shovel.

  Moving the snow was a slow, frustrating business because he couldn’t simply dig it in deep scoops but had to skim and scrape each of the marked squares, removing every new layer into a corner of the yard which he could only hope didn’t hide what he was looking for. While he worked, his mind constructed a score of potential reasons why his search might ultimately be futile but he kept going, all the time hoping that the lull in the fall of snow would last long enough for him to finish the job. It was in the third grid, when his arms were already getting sore and the stream of his breath smoked the frozen air, that he found them. The tickets were in a sodden cardboard envelope which turned to mush in his hands but even then he could distinguish the ink-bled name of Larne-Stranraer and he took a small bag from his pocket and slipped what remained inside. So many thoughts were swimming round his head that he couldn’t catch hold of them and he went on scraping in the snow in an attempt to put them in some order. Linton had told him the truth about the tickets, but what did that mean? Only that he did have a reason to kill her, driven by his anger and disappointment. He tried to think it through as he continued to work the shovel, the rhythm calming and directing his thoughts. If Linton had murdered her, was it likely that he would have left through the back door, then stopped to throw the tickets into the snow? Even for a man in panic this seemed unlikely. But what if he’d thrown them after a row on the doorstep when he’d arrived, then forced his way inside and killed her? While he was in the house a fall of snow could have covered them and made it impossible to find them on his way out – that was a possibility. The tip of the shovel scraped against a glint in the snow. He bent down, took off his glove and delicately picked up the ring with his thumb and forefinger. It was as he had imagined it from Linton’s description, and he rubbed it dry with the end of his scarf, then placed it in the breast pocket of his shirt.

  The snow had started to fall and he was pleased by its timing, knowing that it would soon remove the traces of his work, and he helped by back-filling where he had cleared. But there were still too many unanswered questions for him to feel sure about anything. Suddenly he had a feeling of being watched and, gripping the shovel more tightly, he spun round and faced the yard door but there was only the strengthening drop of snow. Then he looked up and he saw Mrs Graham standing watching him from her back bedroom window. Her eyes were blanched out behind the glass and she was cradling something to her chest. Something black. It was Alma Simon’s cat. He raised his arm to her but she stepped back from the glass.

  When he knocked at her door it took a long time for her to answer. It wasn’t somewhere he wanted to be but there were questions he had to ask and he thought it best to get it over and done with.

  ‘You’re not looking for another body?’ she asked, her eyes wide and staring.

  ‘No, no more bodies, Mrs Graham,’ Swift said. ‘Just looking for evidence.’

  ‘I hear you’ve got the man who done it,’ she said. ‘It makes me shiver just to think about it. I could hardly sleep last night turning and turning it over in my mind.’ The cat sleeked into the room and rubbed itself against her legs, then went to a cardboard box by the side of the fire and settled on the towel bed. ‘I felt I needed to give it a home – there doesn’t seem anyone else. Couldn’t have it starving to death. He’s really settled well so I must be taking good care of him,’ she said, preening herself and watching her new acquisition with obvious pleasure.

  Swift thought of the cat moving across the dead body of Alma Simons and stared into the fire. Something made him put his hand inside his coat and briefly pat the ring, and then he thought of the white swell of her breast that Beckett had uncovered. He imagined him at that very moment in a dingy dark room that smelled of chemicals and sweat, staring at it as it slowly emerged from the striated swirl of fluid. Holding it up to see it better. Part of his collection.

  ‘That Mr Burns is a very nice man,’ she said, moving her reddening shins back from the heat. ‘Said I’d been very helpful, said I’d helped them solve the case. I have a good memory for things, all right.’

  ‘That’s what Mr Burns said about you,’ Swift answered. ‘You’ve been a very big help to us, all right. He wanted me just to check a few small things with you, just tidy up a couple of wee things. You’ve been very patient.’ She nodded and placed her hands on the armrests of the chair, as if bracing herself for a physical effort. The fire cackled and rushed into a momentary blue flame. ‘The man you described to us came mostly by taxi, isn’t that right?’ Swift asked. She nodded again. ‘But you didn’t see him leave the night of the murder.’ It was important he got it right in his own head. ‘So what was the time you heard the fighting?’

  ‘It went on a long time,’ she answered. ‘About shortly afte
r ten o’clock, I think it was. Lasted maybe half an hour or more before it went quiet again. But there’d been shoutin’ earlier as well, about nine – I’ve told Mr Burns all this. He wrote it all down in his book. I was making a cup of tea in the kitchen when I heard a rumpus. I felt I couldn’t leave the cat outside to starve in weather like this – do you think they’ll let me keep it? It’s settled so well, as you can see.’

  Swift told her that it was very kind of her and that he thought it would be all right. Then he asked her all the questions he had worked out the night before, paring them down to the bare essentials, anxious not to provoke impatience or confusion.

  ‘So sometimes Mrs Simon’s visitors stayed all night?’ he asked, conscious of the indelicacy.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid so,’ she said. ‘I can’t say anything else, for it’s only the truth. And if we’re telling the truth, maybe the end she came to was the terrible punishment that comes to all sins. God is not mocked.’

  ‘How did you know they’d stayed all night?’ he asked without looking towards her.