The Big Snow

by David Park

  The word ‘murder’ seemed to galvanize her into action and Swift watched her whispering in the ear of an older man who sat at a desk in the corner of the office, then point back at him. A few seconds later he was ushered into an adjoining room and shown to a seat. The man was in his late fifties and the shoulders of his black suit were sprinkled with a fine fall of dandruff which made it look as if he’d just come in from the snow. When Swift explained what information he was seeking, the man wrote the address down on a piece of paper and stared at it, as if he might find the answer by looking at it. ‘So you want to know who lives at this address,’ he said. ‘That shouldn’t be too difficult.’ His voice was superior, smug, confident that such details were easily available to him, and still staring at the piece of paper he phoned through the details to someone in another office. As he sat waiting, he glanced at Swift and fingered the edge of his desk as if he was lightly playing a piano. ‘A murder case?’ he asked. ‘That girl who was strangled – the one in the papers?’ Swift nodded. The envelopes on the desk were all addressed to a Mr Johnston. Past the man’s head he could see out through a window and for a second he thought it was snowing again but realized that it was little flurries disturbed from higher parts of the building. ‘A terrible business,’ the man added, attempting to fill the silent wait for the requested information. Swift said nothing. He had already learned from Gracey how effective a weapon silence was in putting people at a disadvantage. A few minutes later the woman who had dealt with him earlier returned with what looked like an account book and pointed at some of the lines with a pencil. The man nodded as if he understood, then flicked the pages backwards, keeping the original place with his finger.

  ‘Our records show, Constable, that the house has been empty since the last family – the Gowdies – gave it up. About six months ago.’

  ‘A woman called Alma Simons has been living in the house,’ Swift said. ‘And it’s Detective Constable Swift.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s possible Detective Constable Swift,’ the man said, using his finger to underline the information. ‘There’s no current occupant listed – you can see for yourself if you like.’

  Swift didn’t move but said, ‘The records are wrong. Alma Simons has been living there for six months. Living in that house until someone murdered her.’

  ‘I can’t see how that’s possible,’ the man insisted. ‘She can’t simply have walked in off the street and taken up residence.’

  ‘It’s beginning to look as if she did. Did she pay rent?’

  ‘The house is definitely listed as empty so there won’t be any record of her or any payment of rent.’

  Swift felt an impulse to lean across the desk and brush the dandruff off the man’s shoulders. He felt as if he’d reached a dead end. Through the window the sky looked blue and quickened into life. It was almost the same blue as the ledger.

  ‘Why would a Corporation house sit for six months in Belfast when there’s a waiting list as long as your arm?’ Swift asked, the words in his mouth almost before he’d thought of them.

  The man blew a thin stream of breath through his tightened lips and shifted on his chair. ‘I couldn’t give you the answer to that,’ he said, closing the ledger and holding it tightly in both hands.

  ‘Is it normal practice for a house to sit unallocated for that length of time?’ Swift asked, stretching his hand across the desk.

  ‘No, it wouldn’t be normal practice. Not unless the house was deemed dangerous or in need of urgent repairs.’

  ‘The house didn’t kill her, Mr . . . Mr Johnston. The house wasn’t dangerous. And another thing, would it be normal practice for a young unmarried woman to be given a house in preference to those on the list with families?’

  ‘In normal circumstances, no, but sometimes there might be special circumstances.’

  ‘And what would those special circumstances be?’

  ‘Well, it’s quite a complicated business,’ Johnston said, holding the journal to his chest like a breastplate, but making no effort to elucidate.

  ‘I’m told that it’s often quite simple,’ Swift said, ‘that it’s often who you know.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ Johnston said. ‘And I’m not sure that it’s a proper thing for you to be coming here and saying. What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Detective Constable Swift. And I’ll not be troubling you any longer. I can see you’re a busy man.’ As he stood up he glanced down at the little slivers of damp his boots had left on the floor. He felt the stir of malice and as he was about to leave he paused at the door and asked, ‘Did you ever meet Alma Simons, Mr Johnston?’ then merely nodded at Johnston’s flushed denial, before stepping into the corridor.

  He had gone only a few steps when he remembered that he had never been in the City Hall before and, with nothing better stretching ahead of him on his day off, decided to take a look at the front entrance. There was a wedding party in the corridor, obviously just come round from Cleeland’s in Great Victoria Street to add the grandeur of the building to their photographs. The bride and groom’s cheap-looking suits were embellished by bits of fern in silver paper. There were only five people in the group and the absence of parents and family made Swift guess it was a mixed-marriage job. As he followed he saw Johnston come out of his office, almost colliding with the newlyweds, then scurry on down the corridor. He followed at a distance, tucking in behind the spill of laughter and back-slapping. They were going to have their photographs taken on the great white marble staircase, and while he shadowed them and kept Johnston in sight, Swift felt a sudden sadness that he wasn’t the one walking with his new bride and somehow that he had been cheated of that moment. Maybe for ever. Despite the cheapness of their outfits, the poverty of the wedding, they had something which he had never known and which echoed his steps with envy and regret. He patted the ring that he still carried in his shirt pocket and something made him stop and put it on. She’d have the best wedding dress that money could buy – he’d buy her more things than anyone had ever given her, and she’d cry and say that no one had ever treated her as well as he had. But it wasn’t just the things he’d give her – he’d be more gentle than any man she’d ever known and the love she’d feel for him would wipe away the memory of every other hand that had ever touched her.

  They reached the great entrance and the sweep of marble stairs that looked as if they had been brushed coldly by snow. The bride and groom posed stiffly, momentarily chastened and made small by the arch and thrust of space and their laughter swallowed by the remote silence of the building. Johnston was on the stairs, his back bent with the speed of his steps and his face down, so he almost collided with a man coming in the opposite direction. This was evidently the man Johnston was looking for, and at his beckoning they went and stood together at the top of the first flight of stairs. But when Swift moved forward to get a better look, a tap on his shoulder made him start and spin round. He found one of the wedding party sheepishly holding out a camera towards him. ‘Would you take a photo for us?’ the man said, and Swift nodded. As he waited for them to sort out their positions he studied the dark-suited figure bending towards the smaller Johnston. He had placed one of his arms on his colleague’s shoulder as if to steady him. He heard someone call, ‘Everybody say cheese!’ and raising the camera he focused on the group’s self-conscious pose and then, as their smiles stiffened, took the picture. ‘Thanks!’ the groom shouted but as he walked towards the camera Swift raised his hand to stop him, saying, ‘Just one more to be sure,’ and then before they could rearrange themselves he focused on the two men at the top of the stairs and, pausing only long enough to stop the shake of his hand, clicked as both their faces turned to look at him. It felt like a cheap camera but Swift prayed, with all the desperation of someone who didn’t believe, that it would prove good enough to capture the scratches that flamed and scrawled down the man’s cheek.

  As he knocked on the door, Swift realized that he was still wea
ring the ring and, slipping it off, squirmed his hand inside his coat and dropped it gently into his shirt pocket. There was no reply so he knocked again, this time with more urgency. From inside he could hear the sound of a radio or television. He blattered the door with his fist, then, while he waited, felt in his coat pocket to reassure himself that the camera was still there. It hadn’t proved as difficult to persuade the newlyweds to part with it as he had imagined it might; he told them that it was urgently needed in a police case and promised that their photographs would come to no harm. The hardest bit had been convincing them that he was a detective, but when he had managed that he had left them wide-eyed and bemused, with something else to talk about over their celebration drinks.

  There was the rattle of a key in the lock. Something made him turn and look around but the street was empty except for a couple of children polishing and smoothing a slide in the middle of the road. Beckett looked even smaller than he remembered him. He was wearing a brown woollen dressing-gown, braided at the collar and tied in the middle by a tasselled cord. Even when he saw the identity of his caller he didn’t open the door fully, but sought to fill the partial view into the hall with his body.

  ‘You’re not tellin’ me that you’ve got another corpse on your hands,’ he said.

  ‘No corpse, just some photographs that need developing,’ Swift answered.

  ‘Did Gracey send you round?’

  ‘Yes, he says he wants these right away. Needed urgently.’

  ‘Bloody hell, this is a bit much. I’m just at my tea, watching the television. I’ll bring them round in the morning,’ he said, holding his hand out for the camera and starting to close the door.

  ‘Gracey wants them now, says I’m to wait,’ Swift insisted.

  Grumbling to himself under his breath, Beckett reluctantly opened the door and nodded Swift inside. The house had a strange smell, something vaguely similar to that of a chemist’s shop but infused with the stale smell of food and a mustiness that had a sickly, sweet edge to it. It felt like a house that had never had a window opened, and Swift tried not to breathe in the air as he followed Beckett down the narrow hall, which was strewn with cardboard boxes and suitcases. Ahead, in the kitchen, he could see a clothes-line strung from a hook above the back door and from it hung a string of shirts and underwear. The shirts looked as though they belonged to a child.

  Beckett pointed him into the living room. It was a mess. Coats, old newspapers and magazines, bits of indefinable machinery, littered the chairs and floor. It looked as if there had just been a burglary. There was a plate of corned beef and mustard on a table in front of the television and a cup of tea. Double Your Money was on the television and Beckett went to the set and turned the sound down. ‘A monkey could answer those questions,’ he said. ‘It’s probably all a fix. I’m waiting for Z Cars to come on – it’s not bad now. You can tell it’s been written by someone who’s actually talked to a policeman for more than five minutes.’ He moved a pile of papers and motioned Swift to sit down. ‘I’m just tidying up, sorting through some things.’

  Swift nodded and stared at the silent screen. He hoped it wouldn’t take long to develop the photographs. ‘So what’s so urgent about these pictures?’ Beckett asked, examining the camera. ‘He’ll be lucky if he gets anything worth a shite out of a cheap camera like this.’

  ‘It might be evidence in the Alma Simons case,’ Swift said, trying not to look at the plate of corned beef with its smear of mustard.

  ‘A good-looking girl,’ Beckett said. ‘Those shots I took came out really well. She could have done a bit of modelling if she’d had someone to tell her what to wear, how to present herself.’

  ‘Someone like you?’

  ‘I do a bit, a bit of everything. I’ve done some glamour work, sold some of it in London as well. I don’t just take pictures of stiffs. But you need the girls, and there’s so many cowboys about it scares a lot of them off. If you like, you can have a look while you’re waiting. I can do copies of anything takes your fancy.’

  Swift felt as if he was being sold dirty postcards or shown a mucky photograph in the school playground but he needed the photographs developed, so he nodded and watched Beckett open a sideboard drawer and take out a red-backed album.

  ‘There you go, Swifty, son, that’ll help put the time in. And not a scrubber in sight. Put some lead in your pencil for you.’ Beckett laughed and left the room. Swift sat with the unopened book on his knees and listened to his slippered feet slither and press the stairs. There was the sound of a door being closed. He stared at the silent television screen for a few moments, then opened the album. The pictures were all similar in style and composition, with heavily made-up girls puckering and simpering to the camera in predictable poses of coy revelation. Wide-hipped, wide-eyed flouncy girls in polka-dot or frilled swimsuits, equipped with little props, such as parasols or a beach ball, which were supposed to bestow an air of elegant informality. They threw their heads back as if a warm breeze was blowing through their hair and the facial expression was always a cute naughtiness that suggested anything improper was only in the eyes of the beholder. The girls weren’t good-looking enough to be glamorous, and after a while the photographs merged into a repetitive oneness that was drained of everything except a tawdriness which began to repel him.

  Some of the girls might have been pretty, but, by being pulled into the lens of Beckett’s camera it felt to Swift that they had become sullied and he remembered the brown- and yellow-stained snow cast up at the side of the road. He thought, too, of the nicotine-stained fingers of Burns and it seemed to him that so many things in the world were gripped and stained by such hands. What was the way to break them free, to let them breathe the cleanness of the first falls of snow? With a shudder he remembered the sound of Brown’s long, thin fingers being broken by Gracey’s falling truncheon. There had to be some other way than that, but what it was he couldn’t think, and as he set the album down on the floor he wanted to be gone from the house and all the other houses that marred his memory.

  He looked around the room and was disgusted by it. He understood that rooms were lives and it sickened him to have his own touched by this. And there was something else, too, something that he couldn’t stop his mind circling constantly round. Somewhere in this house there was another album – Beckett’s collection – and in it, if it wasn’t there already, would be a photograph of Alma Simons with the soft white curve of her breast exposed to the rapacious, consuming camera lens. He looked round the room again. Above his head Beckett’s footsteps creaked the ceiling. There was the sound of glass knocking against glass, of water running. Swift stood up and walked to the sideboard, hesitated a second then opened the drawers, but there wasn’t another album or anything that looked as if it contained photographs. Part of him was glad. But he guessed that it was probably kept somewhere safe, somewhere higher in the house, and without seeing it he could smell the sickness contained between its covers. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and hoped it wouldn’t take Beckett long to complete the business.

  He sat down again and closed his eyes. He wondered if his father was managing all right and decided he’d travel down at the weekend. It was easier now to think of excuses why he didn’t make it home so often, as he could always put it down to the shifts, but he didn’t really need to tell any lies because his father made no comment on the irregular pattern of his visits. He hated sleeping in his old room – it always felt as if he was stepping back into a past he wanted to leave far behind. And there was a moment, always a moment when he lay in his bed in that wood-panelled room, when he remembered things he had tried to forget. It was his mother’s long, slow illness which confined her to her room until she never came out, the short visits supervised by his father when he stood by her bed and she told him to be a good boy or work hard at school, or some other whispered encouragement. Her voice made him think of the ebbing sea or the wind carrying off winter leaves and he’d nod, then feel his father’s tap
on his shoulder which signalled that the visit was over. He never understood where her voice got its strength to shout at his father. At first he didn’t believe that it was hers, but it broke again and again against the silence of the house as he lay in his bed and tried not to understand, but even as he did that an other part of him could not prevent the piecing together of the snatches, the repeated scorn of the words, and finally the unmistakable rhythm of pleading.

  He was good at piecing things together. Even as a boy. Making things fit. But only in his head. As he sat in Beckett’s chair he knew that for some reason he couldn’t do it in his life, couldn’t turn the knowledge of his need into something tangible or real. The more he tried, the more he felt windblown, hollow at the core, and he was frightened that into the hollowness was about to flood all the shit and sickness of the world in which he now found himself. He looked around him. From out in the street he could hear the whoops of the boys on the slide as they were released into the fleeting freedom of speed. Maybe that was what had made Gracey what he was: it had to be that. You looked at shit all day and eventually you were absorbed seamlessly into that world and maybe, too, that was how you survived it all. What was he going to do? Be sick in the snow, then cover it up? Just maybe Gracey had it right, just maybe it was the way you had to be if you wanted to survive.

  He sat for what felt like a long time, slipping in and out of memory, trying to fix a better destination for his journey. Eventually there was the sound of a door opening and Swift stood up when he heard Beckett’s footsteps on the stairs. The footsteps stopped. ‘Come up, Swifty, they’re still drying. But what these’ve got to do with the Simons case is beyond me. Maybe Gracey’s losing his marbles. There’s nothing there but some shots of somebody’s wedding – a City Hall job by the look of it.’ As Swift climbed the stairs he felt a rising nervousness and placed his hand on the banister to steady his steps and tried to breathe calmly. On the landing he saw Beckett disappearing into a room and he followed, pushing his way through a double curtain that brushed his face and smelt of must. It was a small room and everywhere was bathed in a red light. ‘This is the nest, Swifty; you’re lucky – not many people get in here,’ Beckett said.