Deep Sleep

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Go home, Dan.’ The voice was sharp.

  Daniel went, his own pace never varying, carrying with him a cloud of discomfort. Ever watchful Daniel, that half-smile playing havoc. Pip was shaking, memory stirred uncomfortably, a different memory from all that panic which had preceded the knock. Another memory of a figure outside in the dim light of pre-dawn, but Daniel was not a man with memory. Pip shook his head again, concentrated instead on the image of Kimberley Perry’s rounded bottom as she bent down, her legs when she climbed the step ladder to the top shelf in the dispensary, her comforting bosom under the overall. Give her time, give her time, stay still for now. And then he would really know. For now, he would clean his house and his best suit instead. Ready for a funeral.

  Whistling tunefully, Pip set about his domestic tasks, a little apprehensive about tomorrow and what he would say. He swiped at the stainless steel sink, already shining from washing-up liquid, plucked the ironing board from a cupboard and fetched his suit. Went to hunt for the dry-cleaning fluid he used for spot cleaning wool flannel. Gone, missing from under the sink he had just made new, gone with all the other rubbish hidden along with it, Jif, Sparkle, environmentally friendly washing powder, all taken by the police. Now that gave him a moment’s pause for thought, not a nice moment, but a minute or two in which he sweated freely and was forced to sit down. Repeating a few mantra-like phrases to himself, such as, it does not matter, this will pass, they won’t connect, nothing wrong anyway. I’ve got an explanation, and the one thing they’ll never do is find evidence, no one old enough. Policemen are not chemists. Then the lassitude of the evening won again, bringing in the wake of the sweat a repetition of the earlier optimism which was his own hallmark, along with a feeling of recklessness. Perhaps he would go and see Kimberley. He rummaged in the drawers of the dresser: sweets for children, children like any kind of sweet, even the fusty chocolate bars which Margaret had provided to make him fat; a sort of memoriam, never to be consumed. Armed with these, he made for the balcony, the thought of Kimberley sharpening his breath. He had to know: he had to find out: she was the only one who could show him, the only one he had ever desired … With his constant care for economy, he turned out the light before he opened the glazed back door. Stood by the rail, stung by the cold of the air, and heard, to his chagrin, his own name called from the road below.

  ‘Never mind, Tombo, never mind. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. Parties don’t matter, only I wish you’d said how much you hated it last time and I’d have made an excuse for you not to go. What on earth made you think I’d be cross about something like that? You are a silly.’ She ruffled his head. ‘Anyway, you raced out of there, went to Uncle Philip while you were waiting for me to come back; you were lucky he let you in. No one’s allowed in the back dispensary, not even me. Anyhow, then what did you do?’

  ‘Sat on the step, in the dark. After …’

  ‘After what?’ She could sense he did not want to answer, but would answer if she was patient, stayed as she was, stroking his head which he always seemed to like. A worrying state to find him in, shivering without a coat, sick as soon as they came indoors. Put to bed with more ceremony than usual, attended by more than the customary guilt. ‘After what?’

  ‘After Daddy went,’ he muttered, feeling the treachery reach to his stomach as well as to the eyes which still threatened tears. But he stopped when he saw that Mummy was calm and not even surprised.

  ‘Just a minute, Tom, I’m getting a cigarette.’ Out of the room to hide the shaking of the limbs, the feeling of shock. She lit the cigarette hurriedly and came back, disguising distress in the smoke and apologies. Tombo at his tender age was remarkably puritanical about smoking: so, at the best of times, was she.

  ‘I didn’t know Daddy was coming this evening,’ she said conversationally. ‘Though he does come quite often, I know. Just to check we’re all right, you know. He doesn’t have time to come in.’ If only that were true, she thought: if only I had never let him have a key. If only he did not watch us, watch me, rather. He doesn’t watch over Tombo enough. Nor does he steal Tombo’s nightwear. Nor does he cross-examine him every time they meet, like he does me.

  ‘What time was it roughly, tonight, when you saw Daddy, I mean, and did you get a word with him?’ She slowed down the frantic puffing on the unfamiliar cigarette, pretending to try and blow smoke rings, pulling faces to make him laugh.

  ‘Only ten minutes before you came back. I wasn’t waiting long, honest. Bit cold though.’ He was feeling comfortable now, warm and loved, sleep intruding into the corners of his busy brain.

  ‘Bet it was, you poor old thing. You’ll have to wear your anorak for school in the morning. I’ll go back and get your coat from the grocer’s, Mrs Beale. I know you call her Mrs Bum, but I can’t call her that. Wouldn’t I like to, though. Pretty good name, isn’t it? Suits her.’

  Tombo giggled, giddy with the relief of being part of a pair. Mummy was laughing: she rarely laughed but when she did, laughing with him, like now, he knew with great certainty how ready she was to fight for him, look after him, if only he asked. Asking was the trouble. Pride was a barrier the size of a reef. Nor was this invisible support, this fervent love, so tangible now, always beyond doubt in a school playground which stretched for a hundred miles each side, to say nothing of the pavements of Herringbone Parade.

  Mrs Beale was puffing on the customer’s side of the counter at Carlton’s Caring Chemist, enjoying a sense of her own importance and only faintly apologetic. Ever so sorry to bother him, she was, but she guessed he’d be in (he was never out and nor should he be, widowed so recent, wouldn’t be right), and her need was greater. Mrs Beale did not believe in the local doctor, a gentle man admittedly but never a gentleman because of being as black as the ace of spades and called Dr Gupta. Not good enough for her mother-in-law’s ulcer, oh no. Pip Carlton was the man for that, any damn chemist with a stock of pills was the man for that and bloody Mother playing up like a baby because of all the disruptions of that party. Pig. She had an ulcer from eating like a sow and complaining every alternate breath, serve her right. Truth to tell, she had been trotting up the back road simply to be out of her way as much as because she thought she needed medicine. Herringbone Parade might have been full of neighbours by day, but was certainly not particularly neighbourly by night, not like the old days. Not like it was in the days of the dim-remembered war. There was a proper spirit about the place then, Mother said; never stopped talking about the bombs which wrecked the landscape in the Blitz. Now, nothing stirred after seven o’clock, when the service road assumed the silence of a grave, the odd, snorting car, nothing else. So it was nice, very nice to have a word with Pip, who was never out of patience, never said no, was ever so caring. Yes of course, Mrs Beale, but how are you? Can’t give you anything you could only get with a prescription, mind, but I think I’ve got something which is just the job; can you come round the corner to the shop? Never keep anything like that in the flat, you know: Margaret wouldn’t have it. Mrs Beale was touched by the way he always spoke of Margaret as if she were still alive, maybe because they hadn’t had a funeral yet. Sad, that, but not very. She was well aware that Margaret would have sent her packing, protected Pip from the inconvenience he actually liked and told her to call a doctor.

  ‘I’m ever so sorry,’ she repeated for the seventh time, although she hadn’t meant it the first, ‘but she does play up, you know. Wouldn’t get a wink if I left her like that, would I?’ ‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said Pip with a twinkle in his eye. ‘You could always, you know, distract her. How about one of these nice nighties here while you’re at it?’ She roared with laughter, always appreciative of his little bit of flirting. ‘Oh get on, can you see me in one of them? I’d have a heart attack just looking in the mirror.’ ‘Sold one to your friend in the dress shop, you know. How was the party, by the way?’ She ignored the question, but not the roguish glance, the raised eyebrows at the mention of the lady whom Tombo called Mrs Bosom, the
chance of poking a little fun at that glamorous rival too good to resist. Not that Pip ever said anything nasty, but the look was enough. ‘Did you now?’ Mrs Beale murmured. ‘Did you indeed? Just tell me what colour and I’ll never mention it again.’ His turn to laugh, handing her the medicine, putting both hands round hers as he pressed the bottle into her palm. Pip always touched first, before he was touched. ‘More than my life’s worth, Mrs B, you know that, more than my life’s worth.’ They beamed at each other in mutual approval.

  ‘Come back for a cuppa,’ Mrs Beale said. ‘Not late, is it? Don’t like to think of you on your own. Mum would love to see you. Talk about old times.’

  Pip looked gratified, hiding the wariness. Ah, the love of the neighbours, the various kinds of love Margaret had denied him, but old Mrs Beale had known him as a boy, half a mile and a million years away. She had known the family, the aunts and his mother, the only person in the Parade who did, and Pip was not ready for reminiscence. ‘Oh, you are kind, but not tonight. Work, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well, another time then. You look after yourself.’

  Ten doors down, Mrs Beale senior sat by the fire, waiting. She wondered why, with her compendious knowledge, the police had never been to see her, sat as she had sat for weeks, in a state of silent offence.

  Solitude was onerous. There were times when Hazel bore it as lightly as he carried his shambling fifteen stone; other occasions when these night hours were so oppressive he felt them suffocating his heart, remembered by logical association the anaesthetics he had used as a childish man. A believer in science and the power of healing, dear God, those were the days. Holding down a patient and making them breathe their escape from pain, even while they resisted. No, this was his imagination: he had never actually done so. That was what was done in the olden days, the earliest, mid-nineteenth century anaesthetics, when more patients were killed by the new discoveries than had been killed before, even when they screamed their way through hideous surgery, removed from the populous hospital wards so that other patients might not hear the yells. Well, as he reflected when looking at his collection of books, at least they gave the poor bastards a choice of death, these knock-out fumes applied at first by the surgeon himself or whoever happened to be around, magic formulae in unsteady, ignorant hands, administered with such liberality that the patient need not wait to die by the knife. There was no such animal as an anaesthetist then: there was simply a student or a nurse with the mask, looking like an executioner, often inadvertently fulfilling that same function. Sean Hazel knew all this and knew he would not have such nightmares if it was not his habit to read such history. There was in his brain the dream book, the papers he had never written, the story of these lives, as told by his own father, read in these dry volumes, known by himself, as one of the few doctors old enough to have used the same stuffs. The new breed did not want to know and did not need to know, what history was like. Or how they owed respect to their elders for their very existence, even if those elders, like Hazel himself, were burdened with useless knowledge.

  He was talking to himself again, getting ready for bed in the cabin-like room, gesturing to his books, the old Victorian manuals, to prove to himself his own point. ‘You’d manage best in the jungle, boy, surely. You’d know how to improvise.’ The thought was satisfying, pointless self-flattery, he knew, but still reassuring. He looked towards the brandy bottle: only two fingers gone, good lad. He had tried them all, alcohol last; none of them worked. Oblivion was the hardest thing of all, fatigue the best he could ever achieve to blur the pictures in his mind or rid his nostrils of the smells.

  He had used chloroform on his son.

  There had been nothing else.

  Helen had gone to work with Bailey’s admonitions ringing in her ears, not a lecture, only the same few words, very softly spoken. ‘Don’t interfere: let others do the work they are paid for …’ She had not told him how the self-same advice had already been given by her own superiors, and since she was never immune to advice or to criticism, she was beginning to think she should listen. Arrogance was so foreign a sensation she did not really know what it was: conviction was another matter entirely, but as she strode up the corridor, armed with the second-best suit from the dry cleaner’s, conscious of feeling well, wanting a quiet life with Redwood, Mika and everyone else, she was feeling blithely cooperative, ready to apologise to the world for causing it trouble, anything to keep the peace.

  Until Mika came into the room with a memo, on her face the reproving glance given to the person who is late by the person who has arrived early. ‘Chief Inspector Davies has been phoning. I wrote it down. He’ll phone back, but he had to go out.’

  ‘Oh, shit.’ The in-tray was full again, the Carlton papers still on the corner of the desk. ‘Chloroform’, said the memo, the one word carefully dictated to ensure the spelling, never Mika’s strong point, was correct. ‘Chloroform in dry cleaning fluid.’

  ‘He was going on about something else,’ Mika said. ‘An … afro, afrodissy … something to do with sex. Rude.’

  ‘Aphrodisiac?’ said Helen.

  ‘That’s it, that’s it. You’d better ring him. He’s ever so cross.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Helen again, and dropped the dry cleaning in her arms to the floor. It was the mere thought of the smell. Anti-aphrodisiac, and the world was not only bad, but mad.

  CHATER FIVE

  ‘THE truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.’

  Helen looked up from the document in front of her, met the eyes facing her own. The new officer, Detective Inspector Collins, was anxious to please without being deferential. So far, she liked what she saw. He caught Helen’s expression, allowed a half smile.

  ‘I didn’t make him say that, Miss West; he insisted.’

  ‘Well, that’s quite enough to put me off.’

  She had begun at the end, reached what she privately considered the greatest indecency in Philip Carlton’s statement. Pleas to Jehovah, promises made on my mother’s life, all that hypocritical hogwash in promises of truth, raised alarm bells as well as the slight tendency to be sick.

  ‘I don’t understand why he couldn’t have said any of this before. It was the obvious thing to say.’

  ‘Didn’t want to shock, he said. Anyway, neither Mr Davies nor anyone else asked him. No one would have asked him, or looked at all the stuff under the sink if you hadn’t, well, insisted.’ Inspector Collins coughed in polite deference, a repeated cough. Helen considered offering one of the cough sweets in the desk drawer, decided he would be even less at ease if he had to sit there with a lozenge in his mouth. ‘No one knew there was more chloroform until we got the dry cleaning fluid tested. Anyway, he explains that. Says he really did use it to clean clothes, much better than a normal solvent, he says. But really, none of this makes much difference, does it? Still an accident.’

  ‘Accident. Only it turns out the poor, daft chemist’s wife has been taught how to sniff this stuff by her bloody husband. She wasn’t a pharmacist. She was only a shopkeeper’s daughter. The bastard.’

  ‘An accident,’ said Inspector Collins firmly. ‘Nasty accident, but not a crime. So far. Nobody made her sniff dry cleaning fluid. She was on her own.’

  ‘I’d like to think about this,’ said Helen firmly. ‘For a day or two.’

  ‘Is there anything else you want me to do? I could do some house to house, but it’s not as if we’re investigating a murder.’

  ‘You’ll check his alibi, of course?’

  ‘I was going to do that again. He was definitely in his hotel, but we can check the details again. I should have said.’

  Verbal rap on the knuckles, a reminder he knew his trade.

  ‘And you’ve checked his shop?’

  ‘Of course. Davies did that thoroughly: I don’t think I need to repeat everything, yet. That chemist keeps immaculate records of all his prescribed drugs, very thorough, not that they have much choice, you know. He isn’t exactly dangerous.
They have to account for everything they prescribe. He has chloroform, for preparations, but that’s legal. For him anyway.’

  ‘Fine. Well I think that’s all for the time being.’ She smiled again reassuringly. Don’t tell the man how to do his job, this one knows perfectly well and the sound of nagging was creeping into her voice. Anxiety put words in one’s mouth. Helen’s renowned patience was a sham half the time, a question of pretending to be the mild professional instead of someone who, once alone, strode up and down her own messy room, the pacing an attempt to subdue the energy of frustration and the futility of ignorance.

  She looked at the statement again.

  ‘… I once told her chloroform could be an aphrodisiac. We tried it, for fun. You pour some on to a clean duster, sniff it for about sixty seconds. Not me, of course, I told her about it from one of my older pharmaceutical books: I only kept some chloroform in the flat for spot cleaning a suit. Then I discovered she syphoned off some of her own. Used it to help her with sex and give herself a high. She knew I disapproved, but I couldn’t really stop her …’

  Chloroform? An aphrodisiac? How little one knew in this world. Helen had thought it put people to sleep.

  ‘While ignorance is bliss,’ Sean Hazel wrote, ‘knowledge is dangerous. Especially pristine knowledge, untarnished by experiment. Or rather by experience which is the multi-plural of experiments. Experience also tells one not to trust, to use a small repertoire of drugs rather than a larger range, because the manner of use is as important as the quality of the substance itself, and the brain can only remember so much …’

  Or very little, as the case may be. He wanted to write, in the form of a pamphlet, a history of futility. Something to show how doctors were prone to behave like dangerous sheep, getting others to chew what they had just been sold, but the written word, which he had hoped would be the solace of old age, turned any message from his pen into porridge. The analogy was distasteful: he had hated porridge as a child and he was very tired. ‘Our little life is rounded by a sleep,’ he said to himself, ‘Only soon, I hope.’ He could not wield a pen; cigarettes, whisky and wild women were also out, apart from the cigarettes and whisky. So what else? Nothing. And then, a voice on a telephone, needing knowledge which no one else ever even requested, let alone needed. A delicious voice, at that.