“If you have the time.”
Tony yawned again. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll be in touch if …” He didn’t finish the sentence: he started up on his computer again. That was it, no good-bye, he had done with me. It wasn’t personal-Tony never was one for social niceties, and I knew he’d contact me if he found anything of interest. And besides, who was I to stand between a man and his collective’s accounts? I left him to them.
Or tried to. I’d forgotten how much Tony liked to hold his conversations in transit. “Kate,” he called when I was almost at the door.
I turned.
“Maybe you should let the business die,” he said.
I shrugged and left.
I spent the evening on my own-alone, that is, so long as you don’t count my alto. I counted it, I’d just had the whole thing resprung, and I spent a few hours rediscovering both its range and my limitations.
I usually played to get away from work, but this time I failed. An image of a man they called the Mouse kept weaving its way through the blues I played. I saw him as he stood there in my office, his bright clothes, contrasting with those sad eyes, a man with no home trapped for tax evasion. I was beginning to feel sorry for him-sorry that I had treated his visit as a hoax, sorry that I hadn’t asked him more. That, I thought, was why I liked the job-and why I would miss it so much when I was forced to close. It wasn’t often that you get the opportunity to meet giants who want to thank their social worker for introducing them to literature. Thelma must be quite a woman, I thought-certainly more trusting than I. I should have been more friendly; I should have tried harder.
I shook my head, moved the beat up tempo to fit with my version of South African township jazz, and put a brake on my regrets. Thelma, if she existed, was the social worker, not me. I would try and find her, that’s all I could do. I had enough troubles of my own, I had the business to worry about.
Without noticing I slipped back into the blues.
It was hot when I got up, the kind of heat that visits London once every thirteen years. I opened the wardrobe in the hall, the one where I stored the clothes I never got a chance to wear, and stared at the uninspiring choices. In the end I decided to go for broke, fitted myself out in a tight black cotton skirt and flimsy pink T-shirt, threw a pair of thonged sandals on my feet, and took a jacket for protection from the vagaries of the English climate.
The flimsy pink number was already showing signs of wilting when I arrived at the address Martin Malloy had given me. What’s more, it clashed with my destination.
The building was plum in the middle of the Arsenal, a cheerful item if ever I saw one. It was round and squat, and red and yellow-a low thing in the middle of a long row of detached gray brick. A kind of eighties version of a sixties domed tent, it was part of the council’s attempt to decentralize its services in order to benefit the community.
The community, consisting mainly of women and children, who were crowded into a big room with narrow slanted windows, did not look impressed. I can’t say I blamed than: the place was hot and, although cheerful, downright uncomfortable. When I asked for the duty social worker, I was told to take a seat. I gingerly lowered myself into a red plastic item that, bolted to the floor, resembled a bucket with large holes.
“Gets to your bum after an hour or two,” said the woman to my left.
“Our Johnny got stuck in one once,” said the woman to my right. “Had to get the fire brigade to cut him out. They blamed me, of course.” She reached over and slapped her Johnny, who seemed to be making a second bid for fire brigade fame.
“Miss Baeier,” a voice called.
I was shown into a small cubicle of a room, airless and lit by fluorescent, in which stood two chairs, a table, and a woman in her early thirties. She smiled at me from her seat and gestured to the second one. When I sat, I could hardly see her for the mound of papers piled in front of her.
She shifted to the right, pulled a manila file from the pile, and opened it. It was, I saw, lined with blank paper. She frowned, turned to her side, dug into a bag that could have doubled as a haversack and that hung on the back of her chair, and pulled out a biro. I saw that it was doing extra work as an advert for sausages. She used the pen to transfer my name from the slip I had filled in onto the first sheet of paper.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“I’m trying to find someone,” I said.
The woman glanced up sharply, saw that I wasn’t joking, and shut the file with a bang. “Ms. Baeier,” she said clearly, “we are not all-powerful. We have strict guidelines to which we always adhere. I can tell you, without needing to check, that we draw the line at tracing missing persons. You might care to try the police-we never have much luck with them, but don’t let that stop you.” The lines in her face belied the aggression in her voice: she looked too tired to have only just started work.
I smiled at her. “Bad morning?”
She half returned my smile. “The worst,” she said. “Except for yesterday and tomorrow.”
“I won’t waste your time then,” I said, “I’m looking for a Thelma Parsons.”
A look of alarm crossed the woman’s face, a flash of response quickly concealed as she ducked behind the pile of papers. When she reemerged, she had gone bland again: I wondered whether I’d been imagining the sheer panic that had cut through her fatigue. She raised an eyebrow.
“Thelma was a social worker,” I continued, “based here once. Hated the job as much as you all do and managed to escape. She’s an old friend of mine. I was hoping you could help me find her.”
It was weak and I knew it. Marlowe would have done better. But then I wasn’t Marlowe, was I? I was just a private detective in a land that didn’t like detectives, and a woman, not a man.
But then, I thought brightly, as her face seemed to soften at the mention of my friendship with Thelma, neither was this woman a reluctant witness with something to hide-just an overworked social worker fighting the disillusionment that seemed to come with the job these days. Maybe it would work.
It didn’t. “We never release addresses of former employees,” she said. “Nor, for that matter, of current employees.” She was good at her job, but not good enough. Her eyes were narrowed, beaming hostility, contradicting her seeming unconcern.
I opened my mouth to try again, but she shook her head in the general direction of the door, dismissing me with a determined finality. She discarded the manila file and began her way through the one underneath, I got the message: I left,
My way out was blocked by a woman who thrust a small child toward me,
“Here, do me a favor and watch him for a second,” she said. “Got to change the baby, and those chairs are useless.” She was a pro: she sped down the corridor with yelling infant in arms. I looked down at the abandoned child.
He was a cute enough item if you managed to ignore the effluent issuing from his nose. I couldn’t ignore it, so I took a tissue from my bag and moved it downward. He was out of range before the tissue had even a chance of reaching his face.
I recognized him. “Johnny?” I asked.
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and nodded sullenly. I smiled. A gift from heaven, I thought, snot and all.
“How’d you like to earn fifty pence?” I asked.
Visibly he sized me up. “A pound,” he said.
“Seventy pence?”
“A quid or nuffing,” he said firmly. He folded his small arms together and stood there, facing me, his feet planted stubbornly on the ground.
I knew when I was beaten. I knelt down beside him and explained what I wanted. He nodded. When I had finished, he held out his hand, palm up. Into it I placed a pound coin that rapidly disappeared into his pocket. Then he nodded again.
As agreed, I walked away from him until I had rounded the comer. Then I waited.
Nothing happened. I waited some more-still nothing. I’ve been had I thought. Maybe Tony’s right, I’m no detective. Then suddenly, fro
m around the corner, issued a scream, a bloodcurdling scream, the likes of which I had never before had the privilege of hearing. Once it came, paused, and then once again.
It worked like a dream. I heard a door open and a woman, my woman, call out, “What the hell’s going on?”
She got another scream for a reply and some words this time. “My brovver,” Johnny screamed. “My brovver, he’s stuck.”
“Oh save me,” the woman muttered,
Johnny screamed again.
“All right, all right,” she said. “I’ll get him out. Just do me a favor and stop screaming, will you?”
They rounded the comer at a brisk pace, Johnny leading, the woman following. As they passed me, Johnny let out another yell and the woman quickened her pace, giving him a push as she did so.
I walked fast in the opposite direction, running when I had rounded the corner. I opened the door of her office and stumbled over to her chair. I grabbed her bag and began to rifle through it, one ear on the commotion outside.
It was a bottomless chasm I faced and a messy one at that. I pulled things out at random. The screaming had stopped and I heard the sound of a slap. I had little time left.
The bag was incredible. I dug deep, throwing out old Kleenex, keys, a plethora of credit cards (social workers must be better paid these days, I thought), and the occasional half-eaten nut. None of the contents fitted my preconception of what should be there. I dug again.
I was on the verge of giving up when I found what I’d been looking for-an address book, small and black. Except I was probably too late. I heard footsteps outside.
I opened the book to the P section. No Parsons there. The footsteps were coming closer.
I turned to the T section. And there it was, the name Thelma, no surname, just Thelma. Except it did me no good because underneath the name was a blank piece of paper, stuck on, tight. I know it was tight because I tried to get it off. No luck: I heard a rustling outside the door. So I did what I had to. I pulled the page out, shoved the book along with the rest of the garbage back into the bag, threw the bag over the chair, and ran for the door. I collided with her there.
“Forgot my pen,” I said. “One day I’ll forget my head.” The anger in her face faded. “Tell me about it,” she muttered before closing the door on me.
In a workers’ café across the road I sat over a cup of milky hot water masquerading as tea and stared at the stolen page. There was no way I could remove the covering blankness. I’d tried again and all I’d managed to do was to tear a corner off it.
I turned the paper over. I could see the writing there, faint and inviting, but still indecipherable. I held the page up to the light and it became clearer but still incomprehensible. Well, it would be, I thought. It’s backward.
I left my tea to its own devices and went to the toilet. I held the back of the page up to the scratched mirror above the basin-again the writing appeared, but still illegibly. I got a pen out of my bag and, holding the paper up to the exposed bulb, I slowly started to trace the lines that I could see.
It took a long time, but I managed it in the end. And when I’d finished, I could see, in writing that was not mine, an address, clearly written.
My tea was still waiting for me. I put some coins beside it and left them all to their own devices.
Thelma lived in a small terraced house almost opposite the football ground. Hers was in the middle of a row of look-alikes, all built from dingy gray brick, with lace curtains covering small square windows, low front gardens whose walls could never hold back the tide of litter from the fans, and dark-red-stained front steps that would once, in another age, have been daily scrubbed.
I stood on the steps and rang her bell. I got no response, no sound at all. I rang again but again without luck. I turned to go and it was then that, out of the corner my eye, I saw a portion of the dingy lace twitch. I waited but still nothing happened. I got the message. I turned away and walked back to my car, climbed in, rewed it ostentatiously, and drove off. I drove around the block and then returned to her street, parking a few doors down, away from the lace curtain. I switched off the engine and waited.
It was two hours before anything happened. I concentrated mostly on my business or lack of it. I sat and I boiled and I wondered what I was doing, trapped in my own car on a sunny day, watching the minutes tick by and the money diminish, waiting for a fictional Thelma to make a move so I could report back to the fantastic Mouse. Tony was right, I thought, and Sam as well-it was time to move on, time to reenter the real world.
My hand was on my car keys, ready to switch on and leave, when I heard the footsteps. I ducked down, landing heavily on the floor. I strained my neck as I peered through the side mirror. It was her, all right, the woman from Thelma’s old office, walking briskly down the pavement. She crossed in front of my car, so close that I could almost smell the anxiety emanating from her, and walked purposively up to Thelma’s door.
It was opened almost immediately and kept open. I saw a hint of blue, but otherwise my social worker concealed her protagonist from me. For protagonists they obviously were: I didn’t need to hear their conversation to guess that it was ugly-I could see it in the gestures of the social worker, in the hard set of her back, in the way she reached into her bag and flung something toward the door, in the way she walked away, and in the bang that sounded as the door closed.
I crouched down as she passed by me, but I needn’t have bothered. She walked fast and angrily, lost in a world of her own making, muttering to herself. At one point she stopped and hit herself-quite literally hit herself on the head with the flat of her hand. I heard the sound of the blow from twenty yards away.
She started up again, and only when she had turned the corner did I get out of my car. I ignored the front of the house and instead walked round the block, counting houses until I reached Thelma’s back gate. I pressed against it and it yielded slightly. One long push was enough to break the lock.
I made my way down the narrow path, past the overflowing dustbin and the small outhouse that must once have been the house’s only toilet until I reached the kitchen door. I put my hand on the doorknob, and it opened as if it had been waiting for me. I stepped in.
I found myself in a kitchen that stank of neglect, Dishes were piled on both sides of the sink, unwashed and uncleared. On the floor stood two saucers, one with the dregs of old milk, the other piled high with cat food. Plants wilted on the windowsill, geraniums that instead of enjoying the sun were being finished off by it.
And yet it was not a kitchen that I would ever have described as poor. It was packed with consumer durables, with microwaves, coffee percolators, automatic juicers, stainless steel knives, still wrapped and shining, and a variety of food processors of the latest design. An ideal home gone mad, I thought, as I walked through the room and into the hall.
I was faced with the choice of two doors that opened onto the narrow corridor, and I chose the one at the front, the one from which the lace curtain movement had originated. I found myself in a small room, dirty but tastefully furnished. There was one person in it, a woman in her middle thirties, clad in jeans and a low-slung silk blouse, her thin blond hair hanging weakly down the sides of her long face. She was standing by a small antique maple desk, staring at something on it.
She turned and saw me as soon as I entered, but otherwise she didn’t move. Her face did, but not her body. On that pale face, a gamut of emotions crossed-displays of shock, of fear, and finally of a kind of resignation.
“What are you doing here?” she asked dully.
“The door was open,” I said. “The back door.”
“Have you got a warrant?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I’m not the police,” I said. I watched as the resignation turned to slow anger.
“Well, in that case,” she said, “I’ll call them.” She reached across the desk for the phone and picked up the receiver. But the movement seemed to have exhausted her. She stood still, holdin
g it and staring at me. “What do you want?” she asked. The anger was replaced with despair.
I walked over and looked behind her. On the desk, I saw, were pieces of paper, scrawled with writing. There was some tracing paper there too, askew on one piece of the writing, but when she saw my eyes light on it she brushed against it, catapulting it to the floor. She stared at me defiantly.
“My name’s Kate Baeier,” I said. “I’m a private detective. A man called Martin Malloy hired me to find you.”
“Martin?” Her voice rose and she repeated it. “Martin?”
“You used to visit him in prison,” I said.
Her face cleared as she remembered and then it disintegrated again, not in fear, this time, but rather in hilarity. The laughter came slowly at first, from deep inside her, surfacing as a giggle but soon transformed into near hysteria. I stood and waited as she laughed in my face, laughed and laughed until the tears streamed down her cheeks.
Gradually the laugh subsided. She sniffed and wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. She looked at me and giggled again, controlling herself only by looking away.
“A private detective,” she muttered. “You’re not for real.”
I shrugged. “Martin wants to see you,” I said.
“Well, he can’t.” Her words had a final ring to them.
“He just wants to thank you,” I explained.
The look she threw me was one of pure contempt, not for me, I thought, but for Martin.
“Gimme a break,” she said.
“To thank you for opening up the world of fiction to him.”
She looked as if she was going to laugh again, and I didn’t really blame her. Put like that, it sounded ridiculous. If I hadn’t met Martin Malloy, I too would have laughed.
And Thelma had met Martin. She didn’t laugh. She smiled but not in mirth.
“He taught me something too,” she said in a voice that was pure malice. “The dumb bastard.”
A Woman’s Eye Page 29
