The Drowned Detective

by Neil Jordan

  So he was walking, through the aisle of linden trees, until he came to what seemed like a shell made of concrete rising out of the pavement, and he took a series of steps downward and vanished from sight. I sidestepped through the traffic and saw a metro entrance, the dark shape vanishing sideways, the hot-enginey wind blowing upwards into my face. Of course I followed, and found him on a platform with a random group of tourists in the grinding subway heat, as if all of the day’s humidity had gathered itself down here into one hot, fetid cloud. A train came, which he let pass, and then another, which he took. I jumped on the carriage behind, and could see the back of his head through the rear window, appearing and disappearing in the contrary motion of the carriages.

  Why was I following? I had no idea. For the pure pleasure of it, I suppose. I was a follower. One of those who latches on to a life that seems more urgent than their own. It was habit, and I was curious. To know the story that had driven her to that bridge, to get some inkling into what she called the love-thing. To see did he wear cufflinks too.

  And the train swayed and slowed and I saw him grab the handrail and saw the frayed cuff of his shirt and knew that he didn’t. Not that it mattered anyway. But the shirt was poor and maybe he was too. What did a cellist earn in an opera orchestra in this backward place? I had no idea.

  The train shuddered, coming to some destination, and I felt a sudden, irrational surge of panic that the station would be my own. I had never taken the train home; the car was a necessity, what with schools and music lessons. What if I followed him up a set of steps, down a winding street and saw him enter a faux-wooden Tyrolean structure that was my own? What if Sarah was home and embraced him with a familiar hug, a kiss, brought him through that heavy door for an hour or two of questionable pleasure? It was absurd, I knew, but out of the lulled daydreams of the follower’s mind, all sorts of strange fancies emerge. Most of them are useless, but the follower entertains them because one in a thousand might turn out to be true. And the train came to a halt at an unfamiliar station, and I saw him elbow his way to the carrriage door and walk with a distracted air down a suburban platform towards another set of steps. And of course I followed.

  We emerged into the hot, dying day. On a steeply rising cobbled street, almost medieval, with façades on either side that seemed to lean towards each other, as if their gutters and gables wanted to touch. And maybe one day they would. There was three hundred years of leaning in these structures, the tiny windows crushed out of shape by the weight of brick above them, and the roofs had lost all semblance of anything like a straight line. The sun was setting and there was an amber glow to the light that remained. A tiny sliver of its reddened ball was all that was left of it behind the dark silhouetted mass of a castle rising above those layers of irregular rooftop. And he walked down this street without a thought, as if it was his own.

  His shoes echoed on the cobbled surface. An older woman with a headscarf passed him and nodded in some kind of recognition. So people lived on these medieval streets, they were more than picture-perfect postcards; they were home, at least to him.

  He turned left now, down a narrower street, though one wouldn’t have thought it possible. But there it was, a dark ribbon of cobbles among single-storey houses, and he took a key from his pocket and opened a door and walked inside one of them.

  I stood on the corner for a breath or two. I heard the woman walk back the way we had come. I watched the sun vanish completely behind the dark shape of the castle. And I heard another sound then, a rhythmic creaking, and realised it came from the door above the house. It was a small wooden sign, and it was angling backwards and forwards. There was no breeze, so it must have been the motion of the door as he entered that caused it to move. I walked towards it, slowly, after what seemed like a decent enough interval. There was faded handwritten lettering on the wooden sign. It spelled, in faux-medieval Germanic letters: Musikinstrumente.

  Why the German, I had no idea. But it was a sign, and it advertised a shop, a tiny one, which I had to observe through the small, almost crushed windows. I could see musical shapes, inside, of a cello, a viola, a violin. I could see shelves stacked with sheet music for sale. And I could see him making his way past a counter, through this elongated room into another room inside. And in there I could see a woman and a child seated at a kitchen table.

  He had a wife, of course. He ran a music shop to supplement his income from the orchestra. And he had a child, and hadn’t wanted another.

  24

  She was late home and of course I wondered why. But a simple sentence like that conveys nothing of the turmoil the fact gave rise to. I cooked a meal for Jenny and tried to occupy my mind by laying out a separate plate for each of her imaginary friends. There were three of them, as far as I could remember. Melanie, Jessica and a third whose name always escaped me. I cooked a simple pasta and the chopping of the onions made me cry. She was practising inside on her violin, the halting finger scales that bore very little relationship to music, when they changed into a gentle arpeggio that she repeated and repeated, as if practising for a school concert.

  What’s that? I asked her.

  It’s the cello thing, she said. That the lady played.

  Ah, I thought and then felt guilty that I had taken her down that street, let her hear that sound.

  I’ve laid out plates, I told her, for Melanie and Jessica but I can’t remember the third name.

  Rebecca, she said.

  Will they all take Parmesan cheese? I asked.

  No, she said. Melanie’s lactose intolerant. Jessica and Rebecca are on a diet.

  Ah. The same diet? I asked.

  No dairy, she said, continuing with the same arpeggio. Do da dee da dee da dee da do da dee da dee da dee da.

  And you? I asked. You are the important one, after all.

  Parmesan for me, she said and laid down her violin and bow and walked through the inner door.

  Where’s Mummy? she asked.

  Working, I imagine. So it’s just the two of us.

  Daddy! Tut tut.

  Sorry. The five of us.

  Was it a game that she played that had become too real? Or was it a childhood reality that she would soon grow out of? If it was a game, it was fun to play it, the pretence of laying a precise ladle of pasta on every plate, with a spoonful of sauce and a small conversation about each invisible one’s eating habits.

  Jessica thinks you should make it up with her.

  But we’ve never fallen out.

  Yes you have. Jessica says you can’t hide things from her.

  Why would I fall out with Jessica?

  Not with Jessica. With Mummy.

  Ah.

  That loaded word again. I thought about it while we both ate.

  But I have made it up with her.

  No you haven’t. You say you have but you haven’t.

  Darling, you know Mummy and Daddy love each other.

  She thought for a moment, then twisted some bands of spaghetti on her fork until they were uniformly red.

  Jessica says that sometimes that’s not enough.

  Oh dear. Jessica had far too much insight into domestic affairs.

  Has she been watching those TV programmes?

  You mean the ones where the couples shout at each other over the man with the white hair?

  The Jerry Springer Show? Yes, I suppose I do.

  I resolved to supervise her television diet more thoroughly. But I began to realise how useful Jessica was as a conduit into my daughter’s thoughts.

  She watches it sometimes.

  And she knows that she’s not meant to? It’s for adults.

  Then why is it on in the daytime?

  Why? I had no idea.

  Tell her your mother and your father are nothing like those couples. We don’t pull each other’s hair and fight on television.

  But, she said.

  But what? I asked her.

  Nothing, she said and filled her mouth with spaghetti. Maybe so she
wouldn’t have to continue the subject.

  I want to learn it, she said, eventually.

  What? I asked.

  That tune, the woman plays.

  Bach, I told her. The cello suites.

  And I pressed a button on the CD player, and the sober sound of Casals filled the room.

  It sounds different, she said.

  Yes. This is a man who died a long time ago.

  Ah, she said. Maybe that explains it. I don’t like this. I prefer the woman.

  What woman? I asked. And maybe I was fishing, to find out what she knew, or what she could intuit.

  The woman we heard playing, on the way to music. Jessica says she sounds like jealous.

  The cellist, I said.

  And Jessica hears her too?

  She looked at me and smiled, with a mouth reddened with sauce, and said nothing more.

  I had her in bed by the time Sarah came back.

  Forgive me, she said, with the kind of formality that implied there was something to forgive. I got caught in a riot.

  Nothing dangerous, I hope.

  Nothing like Mesopotamia, she said.

  She liked the classical term. It blunted the reality of charred bodies and severed heads.

  The dig, she said. We had to shift a tree. A crowd gathered. The tree is sacred, apparently. A vapis.

  A what?

  We left under police escort. Riot shields, tear gas, the works.

  You want some food?

  Please.

  She sat. I filled a plate. There was a smudge of mud on her forehead.

  You got hurt?

  She shook her head.

  A rumour spread. About the body in the bog.

  The girl.

  That it’s a boy. St Panteleimon. That the wounds are marks of persecution.

  St who?

  A martyr, under Diocletian. Sacred to one side or the other.

  And is it?

  No. It’s a girl. From centuries before. Early Bronze Age. But. They want excuses. To throw things at each other.

  No killing.

  Not yet.

  25

  I lay awake and watched her sleep. Not so much watched, really, as felt. I listened to the rise and fall of her breathing, inhaled that musty odour of hairspray, face cream and day-old beauty products, together with something older and more primal, a mixture of clay and newly mown grass. If I turned my head to the side I could see her profile, against the dim, cream-coloured wall behind. She slept on her back that night. She normally slept sideways, her body curled into a curve that used to match mine. Her finger brushed off her nose in her sleep, as if an invisible fly had irritated it. She shifted her head and said the word ‘church’ as if she was dreaming of one. I took her hand in her sleep and brought it close to my face. I could see the dark line of something underneath her painted nails and wondered if it was clay from the dig.

  I had the kind of dreams that felt like waking. There was a naked body with skin the texture of leather trying to rise from a riverbed of slime. It was as thin as a handbag or the kinds of chaps that rodeo riders wear. The hands curled round my face like old calfskin gloves and the legs wrapped round mine like broad flaps of seaweed underwater.

  I awoke to find her already dressed, bringing Jenny’s face to mine in a goodbye kiss.

  We’re late, she said. And it seemed you needed to sleep. I’ll do the necessaries.

  And then they were gone.

  There was a strange peace in the house with its Tyrolean pretensions and its garden through the French windows with the parched grass and the linden or laurel trees. A car drifted by outside with its horn pressed in a long wail that reminded me of the cry of a peacock. We had walked through a ransacked palace in the months when we first met and the same damaged cry echoed round the empty halls and there was a miniature zoo visible through the windows with the ruined walls and cages and a peacock took to the air and flapped its way to freedom, its tail hanging backwards like a feathered diadem. I rolled out of bed and was washing my teeth when my mobile rang and I saw the name Frank come up on the display. I went to turn it off and must have pressed the wrong icons because a GPS map of the city revealed itself, with a pulsating red dot, and I remembered the system we had installed, with their mutual tracking devices, so that each phone could situate the other. So I knew where he was now, I realised with a kind of dull, subdued surprise, and I wondered why I hadn’t used such a tool when I most needed it. I poured myself juice and cereal and was drinking tea and chewing the crust of a piece of buttered toast when I saw the dot begin to shift and realised he was on the move.

  I drove into the city then, and kept one eye on that red dot and its movements. I kept the phone perched by the dashboard and saw it was moving as slowly as I was, approaching the river from the other side, stuck in a matching lane of traffic. In the future, I thought, we will all be traceable at all times and then I realised, with whatever is the opposite of déjà vu, that this future had already arrived. Was I following him? No, not yet. I was merely following a similar path to his. Jealousy, like love, works in strange ways. It’s only after some time that we come to realise we are living under its influence. So I drove as I would have driven any normal day until I saw that his red dot had stalled, somewhere on the river’s left bank, and I put two and two together and realised he was parking his car. So I parked mine. I walked then, along the grey concrete banks, and kept pace with his dot as I moved along the opposite side. He was heading towards the suspension bridge with the huge metal hawsers arcing from the giant pillars and the stone angels blindly facing the river below. I walked up the stone steps under the archway and lost the signal for a moment, under the weight, I supposed, of the granite from above. So I kept walking up and the red dot reappeared, coming towards me now, so I walked across the traffic to the opposite side. I walked through the morning crowds, the buskers already squatting on their chosen spots, the young businessmen with the short white sleeves and the designer backpacks, the cyclists dodging the mid-morning tourists, and then I saw him for real, silhouetted against the green water, walking the other way. There was a purpose to his stride, but no particular speed. Then his mobile must have buzzed, because he took it from his pocket and began to talk to someone as he walked. I stopped and watched him pass me by. If he had turned he would have waved, I suppose, in some collegiate greeting, crossed the road to speak to me, and asked how things were going. But thankfully he didn’t. The conversation kept him engrossed, kept his head to one side, and I crossed the road and followed.

  So I was a follower again, a real one; he was five or six pedestrians in front of me and as he approached the steps I had ascended, he looked to his left and waved to somebody on the riverbank below.

  I looked down and immediately wished I hadn’t. But I had known what the outcome would be, I suppose, when I began following that red dot. It would be something to do with her. It would be everything to do with her. If it had been someone else down there, waiting for him, it would have still been to do with her. But it wasn’t someone else, it was Sarah. She was wearing the clothes she had left the house in, with a new addition, a straw sunhat which shaded her face and the phone that she held to her ear. She looked up. She nodded, but she didn’t wave. And I stepped back behind the shield of oncoming pedestrians in case she saw me too.

  He walked on, and walked down, and soon vanished. She stood there, waiting, and looked down at her feet and kicked a pebble into the water. There was a barely perceptible splash. She was quite alone down there, on that band of cement littered with detritus from the river. She waited, her shoulders slumped, something sad about her posture, and I felt sorry for her, from my perch way above, as if she was as lost and as lonely as I was. As he was, perhaps. I remembered how I had pulled the girl to the other cement walkway on the other side. Then he appeared beneath the bridge, a lean dark shadow walking towards her, and I turned away. However they would greet each other, I didn’t want to see it.

  It was only love
, after all, no one had died, the crime was the familiar one and the only victims were ourselves. I felt a strange, wintry sense of release and didn’t like it at all. I was cold, for some odd reason, in that city heat. I wanted to lie down. I wanted to sleep. I wanted anything but the skin I had to live in.

  And so I walked. I was following nothing now, just a remembered sound. I crossed to the other side and traced my way through the boulevards to the tiny streets where I had heard it first. But there was nothing playing. I found the courtyard, walked up the stone steps to the now silent door. I pushed it. It was open. And when I entered, there was no one inside.

  There was the sofa, without the cello. There was the open door to the bathroom. There was the bedroom inside, with the mattress on the floor. And I lay down on that mattress and did what I should have done last night. I slept.

  26

  I dreamt of an entanglement of limbs in brown soupish water. Hair like green weeds drifting over my face. A woman naked under a pink ski mask, the open black O of her mouth, into which I was sinking. She was bound to a shower rail by a golden cord and the water whipped down on her from the silver spigot.

  It was mid-afternoon when I awoke. Or so the band of sunlight pouring through the window told me. There were tiny fragments of dust wheeling in the sunlight, and a buzzing mosquito. I reached out to grab it, but it arced away from my hand as if it already knew my intention.

  I heard the sound of falling water, like the last breath of the dream I had come out of, but it didn’t go away, it persisted. I turned my head to the bathroom door and saw the glass of the shower fogged up with steam, the shape of a woman behind it. The shape moved and a hand grabbed a towel and the towel was pink and she emerged, her head bound in this pink towel like an unruly turban. She was naked underneath it and everything was suddenly real, too real. She knelt down on the sheet that covered me and unwrapped the weight of her body around me, underneath it.