Strange Sight

by Syd Moore

  Ray nodded at the hook, which had congealed mauve-russet splashes on it. ‘He was strung up on that.’

  ‘But why?’ I said again. ‘What’s that all about?’

  The burly restaurateur shrugged. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

  Sam, fully prepared, though God knows how, had put on a face mask. ‘Surely that rules Mary out? How heavy was Seth? She would neither have been able to overpower him nor lift him up on to the hook presumably.’

  Ray shook his head and pointed to the nearest wall. ‘Pulley,’ he said.

  The rope coming out of it was halfway across the floor. ‘Mary cut him down when she found him,’ he explained.

  ‘Why do you have it there?’ asked Sam. ‘This hook? Does it have a purpose?’

  ‘Never got rid of it. Sometimes we’ve hung cured hams on it.’

  The thought made my stomach convulse again. If I spent much longer down here, I’d end up contaminating the crime scene myself.

  Sam walked right up to the hook and tapped it. There was a slight echo to the noise it made. Which was odd as the place was quite full. The acoustics must be a little screwy. That’s not unusual in basements and other subterranean spaces. ‘Looks old,’ he said. ‘Has it always been here?’

  Ray grunted. ‘Since we bought La Fleur.’

  La Fleur, I thought. The Flower. The Flour. Does that mean anything? But I didn’t say it out loud. I didn’t want us down here any longer than was absolutely necessary. Apart from the smell and smears, the place was totally creeping me out: beyond the bloody murder, if that wasn’t enough, I could feel another dark discord. It was hard to describe, but I could really imagine Mary hearing chains down here. It seemed to fit. Somehow. I didn’t know in which way, exactly, or why. But maybe that would come. And again, I found myself believing Mary’s testimony. Of course, on the other hand, my imagination could purely be galloping away as a result of the current multisensory onslaught. I’d have erred that way a couple of weeks ago but now I found my inner voice telling me to keep an open mind.

  I was developing nuance.

  I’d looked it up last night in bed. It referred to subtle differences. That wasn’t going to come easy, so I’d made a commitment to keep my mind alert to it. After all, I’d declared it to be my middle name. Rosie Subtle Difference Strange. Didn’t trip off the tongue, I had to admit.

  The light, suspended by a short cable, started to jiggle: Sam was tapping the hook again. As a consequence there were shadows dancing to and fro absolutely everywhere. I so wouldn’t want to be down here if it went out. The effort it was taking not to puke or run away was making my eyes tear.

  It was easy to see why Mary had been spooked. Or seen something down here that she believed was ghostly. ‘So this is where Mary also said she saw the ghost? Originally?’ I asked Ray.

  ‘It is where Mary saw the ghost,’ he said with firmness and omitting a few pertinent words.

  Sam was smoothing over one of the ceiling beams. ‘Interesting,’ he said, and put his hand on his chin, tipping up on his toes and craning his head closer to the wood. ‘A demon trap.’

  ‘What?’

  A circle had been carved into the beam. Within it, the petals of a simplistic flower had been engraved.

  ‘It’s an apotropaios,’ said Sam and, slipping his phone from his jeans pocket, took a photo.

  ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ Ray growled over my shoulder and made me jump. I hadn’t been expecting him to be that close by.

  ‘This one is a daisy wheel,’ Sam went on. ‘Look you can see how someone has carved it in.’ His finger traced the circle and then the petal pattern within it. ‘It’s a ritual protection symbol. The idea was that demons and evil spirits were very stupid and that if they saw this they would follow the line to its conclusion. Of course, these lines interlink with each other so the demons would stay in them for ever trying to find the end.’

  ‘Demons?’ said Ray and shuddered. ‘So that’s something that adds to Mary’s statement, right? Someone else thought the place was haunted too?’

  ‘A long time ago, I’m sad to say, Ray. Look at how dark and aged these cracks are.’

  We bent closer.

  Just at that point someone shouted down the stairs, ‘They’re here, Ray,’ and we all started. I hadn’t realised how quiet it was in the cellar. The hum of traffic and commotion of millions of people swarming over old London town was completely blocked out. The cellars must be virtually soundproof. Thick walls probably. Old.

  ‘Right, have you seen enough?’ Ray began to back up. ‘Because I want to get the cleaners in. I can’t …’ he began, ‘I can’t stomach …’ Then he gagged, stuffed another hanky in his mouth and began climbing the stairs.

  Sam continued to snap away at some more marks further down the beam. His seeming indifference to the blood and guts was unexpected but admirable. ‘Where’s the flour bag?’ he called up the stairs to Ray. ‘Did they find it?’

  ‘No one’s mentioned it,’ the boss shouted over his shoulder. ‘Don’t mean nothing though.’

  ‘Can we go now, Sam?’ I asked. ‘There’s not much else to see is there?’

  ‘Meet you upstairs,’ he said, bending down to the floor. ‘I’ll be two minutes.’

  Ray instructed us to get out of the way while the cleaners made the restaurant safe. They had taken over the yard as well, so we set ourselves up at a more private table close to the spiral staircase. I referred to Ray as the boss – he was employing us too now. He smiled wearily when he heard me and suggested we spend the rest of the day talking to the staff. There were several coming in, he said. Ones who couldn’t afford to lose a day’s pay. Tragedy might strike but life had to go on. Some of them had families that depended on wages earned at La Fleur. Those who turned up were expected to get involved in some more deep cleaning and polishing to spruce up the restaurant for its reopening tomorrow.

  I was laying out the table with notebooks and water and had opened a voice-recording app on my phone, ready to capture the staff interviews. It made me look like I had a clue, even if the reality was rather different. From time to time the doors to the kitchen opened and I caught glimpses of the professional cleaners erecting a tent-like structure in there. Occasionally a whiff of hard-core cleaning fluid would leak out. It was marginally less vomit-inducing than the odour of decaying body matter.

  ‘I didn’t like it,’ I told Sam, when I’d finished setting the table.

  ‘It’s a crime scene,’ he replied eventually. He was taking things out of his big brown suitcase and laying them on his side of the table. ‘You’re not meant to like it. Unless you’re a ghoul.’

  ‘That’s your job description, isn’t it?’

  He sent me what he thought passed for a hard stare.

  ‘But doesn’t it make your flesh creep? This whole thing?’ I shuddered for the third time and said, ‘Brrr,’ as if I was cold.

  ‘I refer you to my previous answer,’ he said without looking up and muttered something else about magnetics that was not meant for me.

  ‘And, I might add,’ I said, really feeling I should get a pressing concern off my chest, ‘Sam, I’m worried that we’re out of our depth here. I mean, how can we solve this murder? We’re not detectives. We don’t know anything about it …’ I struggled. ‘I mean, do we look like Sherlock Holmes and Watson? Or, just to balance that, Cagney and Lacey? No, we don’t. I haven’t got a clue what’s going on or what we’re meant to do. And this is serious. It’s murder. Neither of us know what the police are looking at, what forensics they’ve found? All that stuff. Stuff that is important and is on Crime-watch and usually leads to successful convictions. And do not assume that those guys, the police, are going to share anything with us. Because they won’t.’ My voice had climbed a fair few octaves as I’d ploughed through the speech. ‘Because we’re not really credible, are we?’

  Sam had put a small electronic device on the table and folded his arms. Despite the gabbling onslaught his eyes we
re steady.

  ‘You know what I think?’ I continued, not waiting for his answer. ‘I think we’re up a certain creek without a paddle and with a seriously scary man in our canoe. One who is expecting results. And possibly, probably, expecting them bloody soon!’

  I sat down and took a breath.

  Sam put his hands on the table and leant over. ‘Finished?’

  ‘Not sure,’ I told him.

  ‘You’ve finished,’ he said. ‘We haven’t been asked to solve the murder, Rosie. We’ve been asked to investigate the ghost.’

  I crossed my arms over tightly. ‘Yeah, I know, but the ghost is meant to have killed Seth. If you believe what Mary said,’ I whined. ‘And that’s another thing. Do we have to believe her? I mean, I do anyway. But what if we didn’t? Would he sack us without pay?’

  Sam took a deep breath. ‘None of this is in our remit either. You need to take a deep breath and calm down, okay?’

  I followed his instructions and pointed my face at the front windows.

  ‘Good,’ said Sam, watching my chest rise and fall. ‘We don’t need to work out if the apparition killed Seth. Just to investigate it. I’m not sure that ghosts can kill people.’

  ‘Well,’ I whinged, ‘how are we going to do that? Investigate the ghost? I’ve never had to investigate a ghost before. I can’t even believe I just said that. My life used to be so straightforward before you turned up in it.’

  He cocked his head to one side and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Okay,’ I corrected. ‘Before I turned up in yours. Same difference.’

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be okay. We’re going to do what Ray Boundersby tells us to do and interview the staff. Then, when the cleaners have done their job, we’re going to investigate the place, using the equipment we’ve brought. After that we’ll write up a report. That’s all. What Boundersby does with it is also not our call.’

  ‘We’re going to investigate La Fleur? How are we going to do that?’ The thought did not please me. ‘When are we going to do that? Not tonight?’

  ‘I don’t know. How long does it take to clear up a crime scene? Well, we’ll find out.’

  ‘Oh my god. I’m not sure I can go down to that cellar again.’

  ‘I’ll take that section then. But there won’t be any blood. It will look fresh, sanitised, different. That’s why the cleaners are in.’

  ‘But you’ll want me here, will you? In La Fleur? Can I keep the lights on?’

  ‘Rosie,’ he began, but a deep sonorous voice announced itself across the table.

  A tall man with powerful shoulders, a short fuzz of black hair and a very sour face repeated, ‘My name is Femi. Ray says I must speak with you.’

  Femi Conteh turned out to be the sous, or junior chef, at La Fleur. He had been one of the longest-serving members of staff and was there before it opened to help get the kitchen ready. He was no stranger to hard work and was happy to go for sixteen-hour shifts as he had ambitions to get to the top. All of this we learnt in the first three minutes of our meeting, before he had taken a seat. Femi Conteh did not like to waste his time. Nor did he like wastrels. Not at all.

  ‘Saturday night I went home and to bed. My wife and children confirm. Police have already spoken with them,’ he said, when we’d finally persuaded him to sit.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said, and wrote down alibi because it was tough maintaining contact with his intense dark eyes.

  ‘I have no joy that Seth is dead,’ he went on. His accent was hard with pronounced consonants, which had the unfortunate effect of making you feel like he was telling you off. ‘But I have little sorrow either. No, none. As a chef, he was skilled, yes. As a man, not so.’ His eyes burnt as he spoke. Everything around him looked smaller.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘As a man?’

  Femi hunched his massive frame over the table. He was wearing his kitchen whites and took a moment to push the sleeves right up to his shoulders before bending his elbows on to the table. ‘I tell you – he drank. Much. He gambled. He blasphemed. He had women.’

  I glanced at Sam who was making notes and waited to see if he was going to pick up on this. He raised his notebook and pen and said to Femi, ‘So when did you become aware of the ghost?’ Which I thought was maybe the wrong direction but then again, Sam was only keeping us focused on the subject we’d been tasked to investigate.

  The chef bristled as if he had been insulted. ‘I do not like to talk of such things. They are against nature.’

  I leant in, to show I wasn’t intimidated by his hugeness. ‘But you were aware that things had been said about it?’

  Femi fixed me with a tight frown. ‘I do not like witchcraft,’ he said, almost as if he was scolding me, personally. Man, that gaze was blistering. ‘I do not countenance the Devil.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I went on. The bloke’s muscles were coiled tightly beneath his skin. I couldn’t help it – I leant back and away from him. Sometimes you had to give in to your instincts. ‘Who did you hear it from, Femi? Have you had any experiences with the alleged ghost?’

  To my surprise he banged his fist on the table. ‘I do not need anyone to tell me evil walks here. You can feel it.’ He threw his hand flat on the surface and sucked his teeth.

  Sam seemed not to notice this sudden outburst and flipped back a few pages to put his finger on a line of his notebook. ‘Are you referring to the curse? I understand you mentioned it to Mary, after she stated she had witnessed an apparition in the yard outside? Is that out there?’ He pointed through to the kitchen and to the courtyard beyond.

  Femi eyed the doors fiercely. ‘Yes, the yard is there. But the curse, you say? I knew of it before then. Before he told me.’

  ‘Before who told you?’

  ‘Jackson,’ he said, and pointed at the wall behind us. ‘Before he told of the curse. I—’ His hand gave up on the pointing, formed a fist then beat against his heart. ‘I knew it. In my soul.’

  ‘And this is Jackson who …?’ I made a show of looking efficient and picked up my pen.

  ‘Jackson next door,’ said Femi. ‘His place is next door. Import-export. He mind the business for his uncle while he back home.’

  ‘Oh okay,’ I said, and added Jackson to our list of people to interview. ‘What did Mr Jackson say?’

  ‘I knew before Jackson,’ Femi repeated. ‘This court, this place – evil. This is a wicked part of the city, you know?’

  ‘How wicked?’ I asked, not that I disagreed. The feeling I had got in the basement had been potent.

  ‘The demon butcher,’ Femi stated plainly.

  ‘Sweeney Todd?’ Sam was prodding him on. It didn’t surprise me to learn that my colleague knew what the junior chef was on about. Sam was like a macabre Wikipedia. Oh, the things he could tell you about cephalophores. That’s headless saints to you and me.

  Femi grunted. ‘The demon butcher prospered here. In this filth and corruption. These streets have blood beneath them.’ I shivered and thought of the tiles with the rusty flakes between their cracks. ‘The spirits, they are still here. Still walking.’ He finished and darted glances either side to make sure he wasn’t being overheard. I remembered Joel doing exactly the same thing. ‘Sometimes, at night, you catch a whimpering, you know? Like the creak of a door or moan of floorboard. But it is not such things. It is the evil.’

  Uh-huh, I thought, and wrote down not floorboards or doors – evil.

  ‘Any particular spirits?’ Sam asked.

  But Femi shook his head. He’d said enough. ‘Evil.’

  ‘And,’ I continued, ‘this Jackson told you this, did he?’

  He nodded. ‘But I tell you we all hear – the crying. One day, below,’ he jerked his head in the direction of the cellar door, ‘I saw salt fall off a shelf and fly across the room. One of the waitresses, she was there; Mary-Jane, she saw it too. And Miss Boundersby, she has seen the evil herself. Out in the yard.’

  Yes, we knew that. ‘Did you see this ghost?’ I asked. />
  ‘Not me. But it is here,’ he said.

  Sam wrote something in his book. ‘Thank you, that’s helpful.’

  Femi leant back into his chair and crossed his arms. ‘I am a Christian man. God will protect me. He does not protect the unholy.’ Then he shot me another weird glance.

  I didn’t know how to respond, so tried a smile.

  It didn’t work. Femi grimaced and shot to his feet. ‘And now I must clean.’

  Then without so much as a goodbye, he turned and left us.

  The heating system clanked on and began wheezing.

  Sam and I looked at each other. I wasn’t sure if he was thinking the same thing as me, so I asked, ‘Another suspect?’

  He put the pen in his mouth and bit the end. ‘He’s got an alibi.’

  ‘Yeah, but wife and kids? They’d confirm whatever he said, wouldn’t they? Always do on the TV shows.’

  ‘I don’t know. Femi was certainly very open about it all. But what’s his motive, what does he have to gain?’

  ‘Moral crusader? He didn’t approve of Seth’s lifestyle. Or, now that the occupant of the top slot has been removed, he could be in line for a promotion? He wants to get to the top of the ladder, after all.’

  Sam wasn’t convinced. ‘If there isn’t a restaurant, then there isn’t a ladder to climb. He hasn’t got enough experience to run it yet surely? And anyway, far too obvious. I would imagine if his alibi wasn’t watertight the police would have got him in.’

  ‘Well, we should check out this Jackson then, shouldn’t we?’ I wrote it down.

  A young man slouched into Femi’s newly vacated chair.

  ‘Howsitgoing?’ he asked, without drawing breath.