Her eyes slid left and the older girl was watching her again, her broad face tense with thought. Hen returned with a labelled box and two shillings for Aloysius. She had lit a cigarette and it rested between her lips.
‘Mind what I say now,’ she told them. ‘Don’t abuse it. Build up nice and slow. Hot bath. Cold bath. Alcohol. Anything you like to help it along a little bit.’ Hen showed them down the stairs.
The temperature had dropped even lower; the sky had become more grey; afternoon was creeping past. In the street, Anna gestured silently for Aloysius to follow her across to the cafe. When they were standing outside he asked her: ‘Why didn’t you just tell her about Iolanthe?’
‘Because I didn’t want to panic her. And then because I didn’t know what to say. And then because her daughter definitely knew something. I could tell she knew who I was talking about.’
‘You got that from a look?’
‘Yes. And she looked panicked. So, I thought we’d give her a bit of time. Slip over the road. Give her an hour to come and find us. If I’m wrong …’
‘Yes?’
‘If I’m wrong we walk back over there and ask Hen straight out.’
‘Okay. But I’m thinking this is a waste of time.’
‘One hour. We both need a drink. I need the facilities. I hope they have facilities.’ Anna looked up at the dirty windows of the caff. ‘Come on. Let’s get me a sandwich.’ And she pushed open the door.
The cafe’s walls were as brown with grease as the flat’s had been with nicotine. The radio was playing the Walker Brothers; a man in a butcher’s apron was cooking eggs on a giant griddle at the counter. Anna ordered an egg sandwich for herself, a bacon sandwich for Aloysius – who sat at a table in the corner and turned his broken face to the wall – and mugs of coffee. The man grudgingly allowed her to use the disgusting toilet in the back yard.
They sat and ate. Outside a few flakes of snow drifted down from the clouds. The towering red buses arrived and departed, their exhausts steaming in the cold air between times. The park beyond looked brown and barren. On the radio a man with a Home Counties voice told a news reporter that the abolition of the death penalty would see a surge in the number of murders and molestations. Anna asked herself again if Iolanthe really had gone missing.
‘We are all capable of the most terrible crimes,’ her father had told her. ‘Everything is context. Everything is … mutable. Man is not capable of absolute good or absolute evil. He hovers in between the two and most of us beat our wings harder and harder as the years go by, fearing how far it is that we might fall.’
Someone was singing. Paul McCartney telling her there was no time for fussing and fighting. He made it sound easy. Music made love sound easy. Poetry made love and friendship sound possible, attainable. Why had the policeman beaten Aloysius when it would have been so easy not to beat him? Surely not committing acts of violence was the easy road.
She watched the line of shops across the high street, studying the peeling windows of the flat above the bookies. Had the girl understood what she was meant to do? Aloysius took off his glasses, laid his swollen head down upon his folded arms and slept. Anna took his crusts and wiped up the yolk on her plate.
The bell above the door clanged and there she stood: Hen’s daughter, the older one, dressed in jeans and a blue hand-knitted sweater. She stared at the sleeping Aloysius. Anna rose and beckoned her across to a free table.
‘Can I buy you something? A cup of tea or some toast?’ she offered.
‘I can’t stay. I came down to get Mum some fags.’
‘Did you know? Who I meant?’
‘The older lady? Older than you. Beautiful. I saw her picture on the front of the paper.’
Anna was speechless for a moment. Now that it came down to it she was scared to ask. ‘Her name was Iolanthe Green. What happened to her?’
‘She rang Mum on the Friday, asked if she could come over Saturday, late. Mum says fine. The lady’s offered her five pounds so Mum and me stay up. She comes after midnight. Lots of money in her purse. She lays it all out for us. She says she’s three maybe four months along – she’s not sure of the dates but it’s about that – and she buys the pills and the tea and the oil. Mum gives her all the stuff about not mixing and not going over the dose. The lady offers us another five pounds if we can find her a room for the night. She says she doesn’t want it happening where she’s staying and she wants a bed for Saturday maybe Sunday night. Says she’s expected back in work on Monday and wants it over with. Mum tells her it might take more time but we’ll sort her out with a bed.
‘So, Mum knows the Barkers up Rancliffe Road and they run a B & B. They’re not up that late but Mum sends me out with her to knock them up and see if we can get her in there. So I walk her down and she gives me another pound and we bang on the door and finally Mrs Barker gets up and lets us in. They’ve got a single free. No bath. And the lady’s not happy but says it’ll have to do. I leave her there and off I go.’
‘What then?’
‘So then I think nothing of it until Mrs Barker rings up on Sunday afternoon and says we’re to come round and talk to our friend because she’s sick. Mum’s with a lady so she sends me down and tells me to smooth it over. I get there and Mrs Barker says the lady has been crying out in pain but when Mrs Barker tries to call for a doctor the lady goes mad at her, swearing and cursing her and all that. The place reeks of sick – sorry to be disgusting but it does – and I go in to see the lady and she’s curled up in a ball on the floor. So, I know she’s overdosed, right, ’cause it happens. We get overdoses bouncing back to us every few months. I ask her what she took and she says lots of pills, but she needs it to happen now; she needs to get it out of her before she goes back to work. She’s crying. It’s … just really scary.’
The girl stares at Anna and shakes her head, seemingly lost in the memory of it.
‘So what did you do then?’
‘So, obviously we don’t want people going to the hospital ’cause then everyone’s in the shit. When stuff gets bad my mum calls her sister-in-law, ’cause she’s a nurse. She gives us advice and stuff. If it’s really bad she comes over. So, I tell the woman this and she says she doesn’t want to stay … she wants to go and see my aunt herself. Except my aunt lives up in Essex outside Clacton and that’s a hell of a way. The lady gets us to call a cab and she tells him she has fifty pounds to spend and to take her out to my aunt’s at Holland-on-Sea and off she goes.
‘I go back and I tell Mum what happened and she’s fucking furious – pardon my French – because she says we don’t send people off like that without my aunt’s permission. She calls my aunt, warns her, and then that’s that. We wait to hear if the lady’s got there.
‘On Monday we get a call from my aunt to say the lady’s very weak and she’s worried she’s got liver failure and it could be time to take her to a hospital. Mum’s going nuts because she’s so scared and she begs my aunt to carry on nursing her. Then we don’t hear any more for a few days, except when I go to get Mum’s fags from the newsagent there she is – the lady – on the front of the Daily Mirror. I didn’t even tell Mum that, she gets so stressed. I thought: what’s the point? But I’ve kind of been waiting for the police to come.’
‘Is she dead?’ Anna asked then wished that she hadn’t. Now that it came to it, she didn’t want to know the truth.
‘The lady? No, I don’t think so. She was still at my aunt’s on Sunday. Haven’t heard from her since then. Thing is: if you go and find her, you can’t tell anyone about Mum ’cause that wouldn’t be fair. ’Cause I helped you, right. So, you can’t tell on us.’
Anna laid a hand gingerly on the girl’s clenched fingers. ‘We won’t tell on you. We just want to find her alive. She doesn’t even have to come back if she doesn’t want.’
‘Okay. You want the address?’
‘I do. I really do. I don’t even know your name.’
‘Don’t worry. We’re better off that way.
’
Barnaby Hayes
Thursday, 11 November
Carnaby Street. Roaring Twenties. No sign of Charlie Brown this time. The door was firmly closed. Barnaby Hayes knocked. After a minute there was running on the stairs and a young man levered the door open with his foot, a cluster of empty beer bottles seeming to hang where his fingers should have been.
‘We’re closed.’
Hayes pulled his warrant card from his pocket and showed it silently. The man with the beer bottle hands held the door open and let him through.
The room downstairs was dimly lit. One side was piled with tables and chairs. A heap of rubbish lay beside a broom near the stage. Two men were examining a speaker the size of an industrial refrigerator, the younger of the two sitting right on top of it. By the bar two other men were debating the order of a set.
Hayes tried to judge the pecking order, the hierarchy of this place.
‘Excuse me,’ the young man called to him from on top of the speaker. ‘Can we help you?’
Hayes pulled his belt tightly around his waist, straightened his lapels. ‘My name is Detective Sergeant Hayes. I’m investigating the disappearance of Iolanthe Green.’
The young man frowned deeply. ‘She went away.’
‘Are you Delbert?’ Hayes asked.
The young man paused. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘A man called Mark Chapel told me you were dating her. Is that true?’
Delbert paused. He pulled a tissue from his pocket and wiped something from his hands. ‘Maybe. I got nothing to say about her going, though.’
‘You’ve got nothing to say,’ Hayes repeated. He thought about this. ‘What’s your full name, Delbert?’
‘Watkins.’
‘Mr Watkins. You are the third, maybe the fourth person today to tell me that Iolanthe Green is not your problem. That she’s not important to you. That she doesn’t matter.’
‘I didn’t say she didn’t matter.’
‘Iolanthe Green has been missing for twelve days. No one’s seen her. No one’s heard from her. She wasn’t homeless, wasn’t a drug addict. She had a life and a family and a job. So something bad has happened to her. At this point we start to think murder. But it could be kidnap. Or assault. Suicide. Maybe manslaughter. There are dozens of possibilities, none of them good. And yet everywhere I go people wash their hands of her. Iolanthe Green. Oh yes, I knew her. I took her to bed. Had my way with her. But she’s not my problem. Not now.’
Delbert climbed carefully down from the speaker and stood facing Hayes. He was a young man, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, slight, with delicate hands and long limbs. He had a boyish look about him, all dark lashes and smooth skin, teetering on the edge of beauty.
‘She was a fantasist,’ he told Hayes in a quiet and insistent voice. ‘One story after another. Said she’d been sleeping with a sheikh from Arabia in some big house in the country. Said she’d been sleeping with the blue bloods, stealing their wine. Said she’d had it off with journalists, with anyone and that she was this black girl from Boston, her mother dark as me. She got it in her head one night I could rescue her. Make some life in the country. Buy her a cottage. She was crazy.’
‘So you had a relationship with her?’
Delbert shrugged. ‘We slept together.’
‘Were you still seeing each other on the thirtieth of October, the day she disappeared?’
‘We split before that. Like a week before, maybe. I couldn’t cope.’
‘She was annoying you? Bothering you?’
‘No. She was just mad.’
‘Mad in what way? Was she frightened?’
‘She just … She couldn’t stop talking. Always talking, all this stuff she was telling me. I couldn’t tell what was true and what was lies. Was there a baby? I don’t know. Her stories didn’t make sense. In the end she was just this sad lady, tripping out.’
‘She told you she was pregnant, though?’
‘She told me every fucking thing. She told me black was white. I just … It was meant to be a bit of fun, you know. And then all that … female intensity.’ Delbert shook his head. ‘I got no ill will to her. I just couldn’t do it.’
‘Do you have any idea where she might have gone?’
‘Found some man to buy her a house? I don’t know. In the end … I just felt sorry for her.’
‘When’s the last time you saw her, Delbert?’
‘Five, six nights before she went. She was in here. But we weren’t talking, so …’ Delbert shrugged.
‘Do you know a man by the name of Cassidy? American. Might have been an acquaintance of Iolanthe’s?’
‘Cassidy? No. We were together, like, two weeks. I didn’t know any of her friends. Didn’t even know if she had any.’
Hayes nodded. He thought about Mark and then he thought about Delbert. These were not – on the surface of it – violent men. But then perhaps their nervousness was the key to understanding them. In his experience insecure men fell to violence when they couldn’t cope. Iolanthe had ended things with Mark. Violence, in that case, would make some kind of sense. But Delbert had broken it off himself, so what would be his motive?
I’m doing it again, he thought. I’m trying to make her fit inside a narrative. Battered women make sense to me. They are predictable, unexceptional.
‘I’ll be back, Mr Watkins.’
‘You know,’ Delbert told him, ‘I’ll help you if I can.’
‘I’ll be in touch.’
Hayes escaped up into the street and started to walk back towards the station. On the corner of Beak Street a couple leaned against the wall of a pub. The man had his hands up under the hem of the woman’s skirt. Hayes stopped and looked at them for a moment. One of the girl’s stockings was rolling slowly down her leg. The man’s body was pressed so far against her that he couldn’t see the woman’s arms and her face was hidden behind his head of hair. It’s like he’s eating her, Hayes thought, and a flood of images came tumbling back into his head from the sermons of his youth.
He had done his best to adjust his morals to the place, he’d done his best to accept that people had union out of wedlock. He had had union out of wedlock. An ember of resentment burned in him still, in spite of Gracie, in spite of the good that it had brought. Orla had promised him her body, her vitality … she was to be the life and spark of their family.
They’d been happy in those first few months after the wedding. Orla’s belly got big and she gave her notice at work. Brennan found them a place to live, a flat on Sun Street so he could walk to work. They joked about their differences. Their child would be outgoing like its mother but disciplined like its father.
Gracie’s birth was a bad one, long and scary. Orla came home to their cold flat stunned and tearful, unable to talk about anything except the horrors of it all. When Brennan came back from work, tired and anxious to enjoy his wife and daughter, Orla raged at him for his absence and his uselessness about the house. She barely left the flat as far as he could tell. Just sat in the living room nursing Gracie and watching her sleep. There was never milk in the fridge or bread in the bread bin. He learned to live on biscuits, which he kept at work.
That autumn, as Gracie turned six months, he passed his sergeants’ exam. They celebrated his promotion with pound cake and a bottle of cider. The wages weren’t enough to get them a house out of town but they made the flat a little nicer, bought a sofa, put a gas fire in Gracie’s bedroom.
Brennan had hoped that they might start to sleep together again after that terrible first year. But Orla always had other things to do, other ways to fend off the loneliness of motherhood. She sat up late reading, sewed into the early hours. If Gracie was sick or had a nightmare, Orla would get into bed with her.
As Gracie turned two, Brennan was transferred from a station in the East End to the Criminal Investigation Department at West End Central, which was seen by those around him as quite a step up. Inspector Knight, his new commanding officer, did not lik
e his accent or his provenance.
‘I hate the Micks, Hayes. You’re lazy and you’re deceitful and you’re unpatriotic. You come here with a flowery fucking reference and it makes me think you’ve been playing girlfriend to your last inspector. Shall I start calling you Nancy – little Fenian Flower – or will Mick do for now?’
Brennan stood and listened and said nothing. He needed Knight to like him, to want to work with him. Was it time to give in? To accept that success always came with compromise? He made a decision and he made it on his own. He took himself to Knight’s office and announced that from now on he wished to be known as Barnaby Hayes at work. Knight accepted his decision with a nod.
Barnaby Hayes sloughed from his skin every last trace of Irishness. He never mentioned his childhood, the names of his parents or his wife. When he arrested a fellow émigré he made sure to draw a clear distinction in the minds of everyone around him between himself and the faithless Mick he was arresting. Some nights he walked through the door and winced at the sound of Orla’s brogue.
Brennan never told Orla about his change of name. She would not have been sympathetic. As Gracie grew she was recovering herself – he could see that – but in her recovery she only seemed to grow away from him. To shape herself as a new Orla, different from the one she had been before. He no longer found her crying in her chair when he came home from work but she didn’t share her joy with him. Some nights he would stand outside the door of Gracie’s room and hear the two of them together, giggling and whispering like schoolgirls. He felt jealous of his tiny daughter, jealous that she had stolen a connection which had once belonged to him.
Life as a newly made sergeant was hard. If the coloureds weren’t rioting in Notting Hill then motorcycle gangs were terrifying people on the fringes of London; brawling on the promenades of southern England, knives stuffed into their boots, razor blades sewn to their lapels. Soho was awash with drugs: with heroin, which appeared as if from nowhere. The streets teemed with girls and boys who could be bought and used for pennies. Barnaby Hayes, in his new-found Englishness, felt himself rising a little higher above the mess. His new voice commanded more respect, his new name spoke of privileged beginnings. He didn’t belong anywhere, he was aware of this, but he looked like he belonged, sounded like he belonged. The police were a family and he was learning to fit in.
Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars Page 20
