Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time

by M. P. Wright

  I noticed Linney wince at the mention of the word “whore” and carried on appraising him.

  “Miss Landry told me that Papa’s so-called associates sought out ‘special girls’: attractive, pure black women not tainted by the streets like his hookers are. Once he’d got his dirty claws into her, she had little choice but to attend and was picked up the next weekend. She was taken blindfolded out to the Blanchard place and hauled down into a basement and raped.”

  “She was raped! Oh sweet Jesus.”

  Linney rubbed repeatedly at both temples with the tips of his fingers as he took in the severity of my account.

  “Yeah, well, Jesus, he wasn’t around to help out that night. In my experience he never is when the shit’s about to hit the fan, Mr Linney.”

  “Keep your blasphemy to yourself.”

  He pulled himself up out of his seat, stood upright and starting brushing out the creases in his gabardine overcoat with the back of his hand.

  “This young woman, Landry . . . Did she . . . er, go to the police, report what had happened to her?”

  “No . . . she did not. Seems that she was popular on the night with the white gentry and they sure wanted a quick return from her in the future. She was so scared of Papa’s threats that she agreed to his demands to go back there some time soon.”

  “She must be insane . . .”

  “No, Mr Linney, she ain’t insane, but she was scared outta her mind at the thought of what Papa was gonna do to her if she refused to go back. I gave her some of your money to git outta Bristol and lay low fo’ a while till this is sorted; with any luck she’ll be on a train going north some time later today. Anyhow, there’s more, Mr Linney . . . Virginia Landry said there was another young woman who was being violated in that basement. She’d been stripped naked and then held in front of Landry and made to watch the assault. Now this other young woman, she didn’t scream, cry out or attempt to break free. She stood there silent, and not as much as a peep came outta her.”

  “My God . . . You think . . . she could be my Stella?”

  The agitation the alderman had felt previously had now been replaced by distress, which was clearly engraved upon his face.

  “Well, she’s deaf and dumb, ain’t she . . . Why else would any woman who’s being subjected to that kinda misery not cry out . . . unless she can’t?”

  I watched as Linney got up and began to pace the short length of the room, his hands clenched together behind his back, his head sunk low, eyes focussing on the threadbare carpet. His mind seemed to be locked away in a room of disquiet and pain. I broke his anxious concentration with another query.

  “You sure you’ve never had any dealings with this Papa Anansi guy?”

  “Absolutely . . . I’ve told you befo’, until you turned him up, I’d never heard of the man.”

  “So tell me . . . How the hell did Stella hook up with him, Mr Linney? If what you’ve told me is on the up and up, then it don’t make a bit of sense that a young woman you say was shy, reserved, scared of the big wide world and who barely left the house other than to work under your wing at the council offices should ever end up in the company of a lowlife criminal like Papa.”

  “Just exactly what are you saying here, Ellington – that I’ve been lying to you?”

  “I ain’t saying nuttin’, I’m just trying to fathom out how a guy like Papa manages to meet a girl like Stella. Those two should never have crossed paths. Somebody had to have introduced him to her . . . Ting is, who?”

  “Can’t you put a little more pressure on this Mayfield fellow, see if he knows more?”

  “That would be difficult.”

  “Look, if it’s a question of money . . .”

  Linney reached inside into his coat. I raised the palm of my hand, stopping him in his tracks.

  “No amount of money in this world gonna make Clarence Mayfield talk to me, Mr Linney, he’s long gone. I found him all butchered up and stuffed in his kitchen larder with his throat slit night befo’ last.”

  I ignored the old councillor’s shocked reaction to hearing of the doorman’s death and continued laying it on the line for him.

  “Now, somebody already knew Mayfield had been talking to me. I’m guessing it was Papa . . . Look, man, since the day I took this job on, I’ve been chasing my tail, either being given the runaround, threatened or having the crap beaten outta me. I finally find out there are black woman being used as top-grade call girls fo’ some wealthy white guys, one of them you know, and that Stella may have been one of those girls. It all stinks, and at this point I couldn’t tell you whether she’s dead or alive. The one ting I do know is that there are two murdered people linked to all of this and I could easily be put in the frame fo’ killing them. If you got anyting else to tell me ’bout what’s going down here, then you better cough it up now, cos brother, I’m ready to walk.”

  At that moment I wanted to stick the photograph of the young child sitting on a man’s lap that I’d found hidden in Stella Hopkins bedroom in front of his face, but something told me to hold off and to trust my old policing instincts for just a while longer.

  “Everyting I’ve told you is the truth. I’m shocked to hear how Stella could have become mixed up with this man Papa and his seedy little businesses or why she would have chosen to associate with the kinds of people you find in a shebeen. My reasons for originally employing your services were based on my desire to uphold a promise that I made a long time ago: I swore to take care of the child’s well-being . . . to protect her. I don’t intend to go back on that promise . . . I know she’s out there somewhere and I’m asking you to find her for me. Do you understand what it means to make the kind of vow I have, to safeguard those you care about, Mr Ellington?”

  Linney looked at me with the kind of eyes that were holding back a river of tears. There was something in the way he’d just spoken about Stella and looking out for her that had reached inside of me, and I realised that he was telling the truth.

  “Yeah . . . I understand.”

  I dropped into my armchair and watched as the old man took a fountain pen and a small crocodile-print leather diary from the pocket of his jacket. He wrote inside one of the back pages and tore it out, reaching down and giving to me.

  “This is my home address . . . Whatever other information to have, you bring it to me there.”

  “OK.”

  I folded the piece of paper and placed it on the arm of the chair as Linney returned his pen and diary to his pocket, then withdrew his wallet and took out a wad of banknotes and placed on top of the lid of my Dansette record player.

  “I’m a rich man, Mr Ellington. This means a lot to me . . . Here’s a further one hundred and fifty to keep you motivated. Locate Stella, bring her back to me and I’ll give you another thousand pounds.”

  He pulled his trilby down over his eyes, then drew the lapels of his coat across his chest and left, letting himself out as I sat in silence, staring at the pile of cash next to me, wondering whether in accepting it I’d just bought myself a one-way ticket to the hangman’s noose.

  27

  As soon as Earl Linney was out of my front door, my thoughts returned to the mutilated body parts of the late Clarence Mayfield that were sitting stinking underneath my sink and how the hell I was going to get rid of them. I looked at my watch: it was just after 4.30 p.m. and the onset of dusk. Whatever I was going to do with them, I knew that the nearing nightfall would be a welcome ally. I hesitantly returned to the kitchen, lifted the box with its sickening contents and put it onto the table. I stared at it for a moment and the hairs on my forearms and neck stood on end. I must have stood staring at that box for damn near ten minutes when a name from the past edged into my brain and showed me a way out. A guy called Brian Dulland had worked with me in the stores at Wills’ cigarette factory and had a habit for rattling on about useless trivia and an unhealthy obsession with coarse fishing that drove me and anyone unlucky enough to be in his presence to despair when he’d cat
ch you during your lunch or coffin-nail break. But for once I was grateful for his aimless meanderings. He’d told me about a place called Bathurst Basin and his unsuccessful attempts to fish in it.

  “There’s s’posed to be bream and roach in that dirty old sump pit, but I’ve never caught a bloody thing in it. Only fit for dropping a corpse in is Bathurst Basin, only a corpse!”

  At the time I had taken little notice of Brian’s rambling, but now his macabre recommendation had a weighty persuasiveness about it. The basin joined the main harbour in the city. Brian had told me that it had been built on an area where an old millpond once stood and had lost its water supply when the New Cut river was created, which, unlike the River Avon, was not tidal. With no current in its flow, what went in the water stayed in the water.

  I went into my bedroom, opened the bottom drawer of the battered Schreiber dressing table and pulled out one of Aunt Pearl’s pillowcases that she had given to me when I first moved in, then walked out of my digs and downstairs into the street and walked across the road towards the dilapidated wall that surrounded the run-down corner tenement building. I checked behind me to see if anybody was about or if my downstairs neighbour Mrs Pearce was snooping from her front window. When I was sure no one was watching, I felt along the crumbling masonry of the top layer of red bricks and found one loose; it pulled away from the old, loosening cement easily and I walked away back towards my bedsit with the block held partially out of sight behind my leg. I returned upstairs and back into my kitchen, put both the box and brick into the pillowcase, and drew the fabric of the cotton pillowcase together in one hand. Then I picked up the string that had previously been looped around the box and tied it all together tightly in a series of heavy knots. I grabbed my coat, car keys and my Bristol street map from the sitting room, then picked up the box and walked out of my bedsit feeling like a low-grade Sweeney Todd.

  It wasn’t difficult to find the basin. I drove the two miles from St Pauls across the Prince Street Bridge and parked my car up close by on Lower Guinea Street. I got out and suspiciously looked up and down the road, which was thankfully free of human life. I’d been fortunate not to be caught during my earlier vandalistic activities obtaining the brick. I was hoping that my luck wouldn’t run out now. The last thing I needed was to be stopped by a copper and found in the possession of a number of severed body parts and a rotting chicken’s limb all bundled up in a box. I leant back into the car and lifted the grisly contents that were housed in the cardboard and Irish cotton sarcophagus from off of the passenger seat and quietly closed the car door, then briskly walked across the road and followed the river’s-edge path opposite the run-down warehouses that had once been a hive of Victorian commercial activity. I made my way over the old iron bridge on Commercial Road and continued travelling on the opposite side of the embankment towards the far end of the jetty. My urgent desire to rid myself of the contents I carried was less about ridding myself of incriminating evidence and more about my lifelong dread of the power of the hex and the voodoo magic associated with the warning I had been given. I was about to send them to a secluded and nameless grave.

  After about fifty yards I turned to check that I was still alone, then walked over to the edge of quay and without any hesitation slung the bagged-up box of chopped-off auricles and the intimidating chicken’s foot as far as I could and watched it rapidly sink into the gloomy waters of the basin.

  I returned to my car with my flesh crawling, the stink of human decay lingering on what I was wearing. My nostrils retained the unwelcome odour of death and I had a bitter taste in my mouth that I associated with both my previous visits to a morgue while I was a cop back home and the putrefying appendages I had just dispatched to the bottom of the cavernous marina. I spat out saliva onto the cold pavement and felt the urgent need to scrub both my clothes and skin. But the primal, superstitious fear that that I had known since childhood and which now clung to my insides as I drove back to St Pauls would not be so easy to wash away.

  28

  The fifteen ten-pound notes were still sitting in a neat bundle on top of my old record player when I returned from disposing the body parts that had belonged to the dead doorman. The money was a stark reminder as to how far down a very murky road I had gone in my search to put hard cash in to my wallet. I felt grubby and strangely corrupted by my earlier actions and needed to wash away the sullied deed that I had just undertaken.

  I returned to my sitting room after having a shave and a hot bath. I felt cleaner but still strangely tainted by what I had just done. I’d lain in the tub for the better part of an hour trying to forget about the malevolent reminder of Clarence Mayfield’s murder and the voodoo chicken’s foot warning I’d been sent, as well as the matter of Stella Hopkins’ disappearance and the further sizable retainer that my wealthy employer had left for me earlier. But I still couldn’t get my mind to settle and I again began to question what the hell I’d gotten myself into and why the taciturn alderman was prepared to cough up his hard-earned riches for me to do his bidding and why he needed to keep the local law on the back burner. In the short time that I had been searching for the missing girl, two people had been murdered and I been beaten up and attacked by a dog. Moreover, it was likely that there was a group of local bigwigs that were up to their necks in seedy acts of depravity, and their shady activities were probably being covered up by bent law who were most probably on my tail and attempting to warn me off with hacked-up flesh and black magic. If I’d had any sense left at all I would have heeded their threats and left things well alone, but I’d never liked being threatened and I never could let sleeping dogs lie.

  I genuinely believed that Earl Linney’s need to find Stella was heartfelt and sincere. During our last two brief encounters he’d fleetingly shown to me an inner vulnerability that from my policing experience I knew was only visible when an individual had their back against a wall, was desperate and with nowhere else to run. I kept asking myself what Linney’s story was in all this. The photograph I’d found at Hopkins’ place made me question whether he was more than just Stella’s guardian. If he was her real father, if in fact they were kin, then what kind of parent allows a stranger to try to locate his lost daughter while he hides in the shadows? None of it weighed up. If that had been my kid out there lost, not seen for days, I’d have been tearing up both the streets and anybody that had got in the way of finding her. I knew one thing for sure: I’d certainly unsettled Linney when I’d informed him of my belief that the wealthy lawyer Terrence Blanchard could possibly be involved in Stella’s disappearance.

  I knew deep down in my guts that the wily Jamaican councillor was still holding out on me about his true relationship with the slick honky barrister and I was damn sure it went deeper than the two of them sitting cosy around a table at a town-planning meeting at the council chambers. I knew I needed to start digging a little deeper and try to find something else that linked the two of them together in all of this mess.

  To bring that kind of information out of the woodwork would require me to start nosing around again, and that in turn would invariably lead me to me getting beaten out of joint for my trouble. I rubbed at my brow with the tips of my fingers, wondering what to do, then looked back down at the tidy bundle of dough on the lid of my Dansette player and decided that for the kinda cash I was being offered, my nose could take another beating to find out what I needed to know.

  I walked into my bedroom with the money in my hand and dropped it onto my bedside table, then pulled on my new strides and took the blue sea island cotton shirt from off of its hanger, which was hooked on the handle of the door, and put it on, noticing as I did that the swelling on the lower part of my left arm from the dog bite had gone down nicely. In years past when I was still on the force I’d taken my fair share of beatings and had always healed up real quick. The bite on my arm was proving to be no different. It was another war wound to add to a collection of many scars, which seemed to increase as each of my years passed. I loo
ked into the mirror on the front of the wardrobe and carefully knotted my knitted navy tie so that it sat flush in the centre of my collar. I rubbed Bay Rum through my hair and then massaged a palm full of Old Spice aftershave into my stubbleless jowls before pulling on the shiny brogues I had bought earlier and tying them in tight double knots. I stretched out on my tiptoes to start to break in the new leather a little.

  The stiffness of the hide pinched at my ankles as I took the first few steps across the room to collect my hat and grey herringbone jacket from the bed, and I reminded myself that I’d need to buy some sticking plasters later to prevent the inevitable painful blisters from erupting on the sides of my feet. I slipped my jacket on, collected the cash from the bedside table, folded it in two and put it into my inside pocket. I dropped the black felt trilby onto my head, pulling its brim down low across my eyes, and walked out into hall, turning off each of the room lights as I made my way towards my front door. I felt in the dark for my newly acquired hand-me-down tatty old duffle coat that was hanging on the hat stand and threw it over my shoulder as I closed up and made my way downstairs. Outside in the street, I stood for a moment taking in the peaceful calm of the winter’s night; then from the corner of my eye I saw my elderly neighbour Mrs Pearce watching me suspiciously from her living-room window. I waved up to her as she eyed me in the street and I felt the top of my lip break out into a riled sneer as she quickly darted back behind the curtain, embarrassed at being caught spying on me. I slipped my arms into the threadbare sleeves of the coat, pulling it across my back and buttoning it up. A rebellious smirk crept across my face as I thought of Vic’s appalled reaction later to what I had to tell him, and to the fact that I was still wearing the garment that he detested so much.