The Drowned Detective

by Neil Jordan

  May I? she asked the assistant. And the assistant nodded.

  She began to pull the tray.

  I stepped to one side, to give her room.

  A mist came out, as she pulled the handle back, as if a ghost had exhaled. I told myself it was the refrigeration. But what I saw next told me it wasn’t.

  I saw a pair of coloured canvas sandals on the horizontal tray. Then a pair of ankles, slim calves, whitened by their spell in this dead refrigerator, but I knew their skin colour had once been sallow, almost dark. I saw a dress then that I recognised and the outline of underwear beneath it that I would have recognised too, because they both had lain on top of mine on the bare floor, when she pointed them out from the mattress and asked, Don’t they look good together, our clothes? I saw the hands, which must have been placed across the stomach by some dutiful lab attendant. There was a torn V at the neck of the dress, and part of her frozen breast was exposed. The dark, inert hair curled around her chin and her mouth, which seemed pursed slightly, as if ready to ask a question. A question, perhaps, about this absurd cold metal bed she was lying on.

  Her eyes were closed. The same dutiful lab attendant, probably. I thanked him silently for it. Her eyelashes were stiffened with hoarfrost.

  How long has she been here? I asked, though my voice seemed too loud, even to me. There was a hush in this moment that was beyond speech.

  The assistant turned her canvas shoe sideways, and I saw an identification tag attached to the strap.

  Close to three weeks now.

  Where was she found?

  Floating in the river.

  A suicide? I asked.

  Most likely. No one has claimed the body.

  You get them all the time? asked Istvan. His voice was matter-of-fact, as if he had seen nothing out of the ordinary. And for once I wished I could be like him.

  Every now and then.

  Autopsy?

  If one is requested.

  We think we know who this girl is. Right, Jonathan?

  Yes, I said. Perhaps we do.

  Petra, he said. And he checked the screen on his phone. Pavel.

  And I excused myself. I said I needed some air.

  I stood out by the plastic strips where the lab assistants had been smoking. I tried to breathe, slowly. I heard the clack of heels on the dull cement then and saw that Gertrude had followed me. She had a cigarette packet in her hand, with one already dangling from her mouth.

  You want one?

  I don’t smoke.

  There is a time for everything.

  And she placed one in my mouth, took a lighter from her pack and flicked the little wheel.

  Tell me, she said, as the cigarette burned and the unfamiliar smoke filled my lungs.

  I know that girl, I said.

  How could you? she asked.

  I don’t know, I said. I pulled her from the river.

  You saved her?

  In a manner of speaking.

  And now she’s dead.

  Maybe she was dead then.

  You really mean that?

  You told me, some time ago, there was something dying inside me.

  Something dead.

  Maybe you meant her.

  Maybe.

  Can you make sense of it for me?

  She looked at me and exhaled slowly, through those carefully painted lips. A small stream of grey smoke came with her breath.

  Some things don’t make sense, Jonathan.

  She separated the syllables.

  One long and two short.

  35

  We drove back along the brown river with three different kinds of silences between us. Istvan’s was practical, regretful, and his face above the steering wheel had settled into a solemn mask, the mask of someone who is used to death and knows how to deal with it. Gertrude was shrouded in electronic smoke in the back seat, which created a halo around her immobile silhouette. I simply said nothing.

  Istvan broke it, eventually.

  We must inform the parents, no?

  Of course, I murmured.

  Will you do that or will I?

  You have their details? I asked. Give them to me and I’ll call them.

  You knew? Istvan looked at Gertrude through the rear-view mirror.

  Knew what?

  That she was dead? In that small room that she could not leave?

  I’m sure all three of us suspected. Even the parents.

  But it’s your job to know, isn’t it? All about the dead?

  My job is to hold palms, close my eyes, tell people what they want to hear.

  But you told him about the room? The small room.

  Is just some nonsense I spouted. Came into my head.

  So you’re not what they would call psychic, then?

  No. There is another word for me. Charlatan.

  And she blew the smoke away, waved it from her face with her hand.

  Let me out here.

  You want to walk?

  I have to.

  I could see the bridge with the stone angels looming up ahead of us, when he stopped the car. And I felt the need to walk as well.

  Let me out here, I told Istvan, and he nodded, as if he understood.

  We all need some air, he said. I drive back to office, call the parents?

  No, I said. Let me do that.

  She was walking by the parapet, and I could see the tourist boats beyond her in the river below. As the car passed me, I drew alongside her. She bent down to the Pomeranian, fixing a small lead to the collar round its neck.

  I think Phoebe needs to walk, too.

  And we both walked then, slowed to a crawl by the tiny scraping feet of the dog.

  You want me to make sense of it for you? I can’t. But all I will tell you is, you are a good detective.

  Am I?

  Parents asked you to find the girl? You found her. Long before you knew it.

  I met her there.

  I pointed towards the huge but oddly delicate hawsers of the suspension bridge.

  On the bridge?

  She had climbed beyond the protective wire. She was in the shadow of the statue of the angel.

  And what? You thought she was about to jump? You stopped her.

  I tried. She jumped anyway. Then I jumped after.

  Was your first mistake.

  Why do you say that?

  I don’t know. Just a feeling.

  And my second?

  I don’t want to know either. Can only imagine.

  Come, let me show you.

  And so I retraced our wet steps, from the river to the small cobbled streets, to the arch, with its almost Moorish tiles, where there was no cello playing.

  I walked home with her, through here.

  Again I must ask, why?

  I told myself I was worried. That she needed a hospital.

  You told yourself.

  Yes.

  We walked through the arch and entered the small, fanciful courtyard.

  And then?

  We walked up those steps, to her rooms.

  Her rooms.

  She played the cello. She told me she was on sabbatical from the orchestra.

  And?

  Every time I walked back past, I heard the cello playing.

  You hear it now?

  I shook my head. I walked towards the steps, which fanned upwards towards the shadows.

  Don’t ask me to go up there.

  Why not?

  Some things I should not know.

  She took two steps backwards, into the shadow of the arch. Her legs, with their elegant shoes, stayed in the bright sunlight. She had kept herself well, I remember thinking.

  You stepped out of time, no? You did that thing that lovers do. There was no beginning or end. You had met each other in another life.

  How did you know?

  And she smiled at that.

  I was young once.

  But she didn’t exist. She was dead.

  The loved one never does.
We create them, out of some damnable need. And when I think back now, I pity the ones I did it with. I would have torn them to shreds and put them back together again to fit the thing I wanted.

  And you, Jonathan, she said, you would have been my type. All those years ago.

  How many? I asked again. And she had the grace to smile.

  Never ask a woman’s age. Jo-na-than.

  And she turned, walked back into the arch, towards the hot band of sunlight outside it.

  Do I need help? I called after her.

  But she mustn’t have heard. Or if she did, she didn’t want to answer.

  I did need help, but I walked up those stairs again, alone. I heard my footsteps echo round the curving walls. The shadows above me seemed darker than before and I heard the sharp scratch of a curtain, pulled. It was the neighbouring woman, I saw, with the dark hair behind the lace and I suddenly understood her trepidation. I would have knocked on her door, but I knew now why not to do so. Any questions of mine would have frightened her. And I felt something deeper than fear, like a piece of ice in my stomach.

  The door was barely ajar, the way it always had been. I pushed it gently, and heard the familiar creak. I managed to walk inside then and saw the room, bathed in the sunlight from the window. There was a sofa there, with no cello perched upon it. And maybe there had never been a cello. I opened the door to the small kitchen and there was a dryer there, the orbed glass covered in a fine dust. I knelt down and rubbed my finger off the dust, which must have been several weeks old. There was a pink dress inside, lying like a dead thing at the bottom curve of the stainless-steel tumbler. I thought I saw a face then, distorted in the glass, and jumped backwards, slamming my head against the kitchen door.

  I must have been stunned for a moment, because I heard the dryer begin to whirr. I shook my head and rubbed my eyes, and it was whirring, manically, then shaking on the bare boards of the kitchen floor, the way unbalanced dryers do. I must have hit a button when I wiped the glass, I thought, and began to press them at random, the wide, worn plastic things, and its whirring grew faster, until I must have hit the right combination, and it gradually began to wind down.

  What explanations did I need, I wondered, watching the pink dress float lazily in the last rotations of the tumbler. Maybe I came in alone, wet from the river, maybe I had found this place, this empty hell or heaven. Maybe I had drowned. Maybe I was dead.

  I managed to stand and pulled at the kitchen door. It didn’t open for a moment; I had to pull it hard enough to splinter the wood, and there was the room outside again, with the sofa, curved like an enormous reclining nude.

  I had touched the dead, I thought, or imagined I had, and there was the smell of soft, loamy clay in the room. I forced myself to walk through it, and looked right into the bedroom.

  There was the mattress on the bare boards, with my envelope lying on the sheets. Someone had opened it. And that smell was everywhere now; was it sweat or was it clay or was it something much more intimate, an intimacy that was impossible because the other one was dead? I tried to walk into that room, but couldn’t make it. I saw the crumpled paper I had written on, with my handwriting, the scribbled word: ‘dear’.

  36

  I was cold, walking back through that arch, through the small cobbled streets on to the hot boulevard with its crowds and its traffic and its humidifying sprays. How easy it was, I found, to remove oneself, to feel barely alive, just a splash of shadow walking through these sunlit passers-by. A boy on a skateboard bumped me and I was glad I could feel it; it reminded me that I had presence, was a physical fact, like all these others, surging around me.

  I was a good detective, Gertrude had told me, and I turned that phrase over in my mind, as if it could have brought me some relief. There should be some satisfaction in a job well done, concluded, a case closed, but in this case there was none. I had fulfilled my task without knowing it. The small room she couldn’t leave was a morgue refrigerator and she had lain dead inside it on that cold tray for the past three weeks. I could feel a tingling, like that hoarfrost on her eyelashes, all over my skin. I passed the jeweller’s and saw the squat grey wedding cake of the opera house on the other side. I walked across the street towards it for no other reason than that it seemed familiar, part of a common landscape that could never have been or a memory that shouldn’t exist. I could hear music from inside, and paid the entry fee to the attendant, although she told me that there was a rehearsal in progress, and that tourists could only access the upper levels. It sounded like an overture and I thought I heard a phrase from what she had played from Rigoletto as I ascended that huge staircase with its profusion of cherubs and nymphs. There was a group of elderly Japanese tourists staring upwards, holding wireless headsets to their ears as the mysteries of the past were explained to them in a language of their choice, and I mounted the steps past them, to a large, extravagantly mirrored foyer at the very top. I could see my pale face, multiplied everywhere in different directions, brocaded by the red satin curtains wherever I looked. The sound of the orchestra came from somewhere off, a cascading Italian dance that was joined by the distant voice of a tenor. I opened a mirrored door and found myself in what must have been the gods, rows of hard wooden seats, behind a curved balcony with a vertiginous view of the stage far below, and the orchestra pit.

  I could see his thinning hair from up above, and the cello between his knees. She had called him Grigory, I remembered. There was a woman next to him, dark hair cascading over her bowing hand, and for a moment I thought that everything else had been a dream – Gertrude, the parents, Petra, the visit to the morgue – and that her sabbatical had finally ended and she was back playing here. Then she bent her head sideways, to turn the pages of the score, and I saw the pair of horn-rimmed glasses the cellist wore, and the matronly bosom, and realised there was no relief, that I was wrong about that too.

  So I did what one does when all else fails. I went back to work. Istvan sat at his desk with the fan balanced precariously on the ledge of the open window. He seemed as bothered by the heat as I was by the cold.

  I saved you the trouble, he said. I called them.

  The parents?

  Yes, he nodded. Better to hear it in their own language. The mother wept and I did my best to – how you say it?

  Commiserate? I hazarded, and he nodded once again.

  But at least they will have what they long for. In those American cop shows.

  And what is that?

  Closure, he said. Is that not the word? They always need it, before the drama can end, the advertisements come up.

  But what if there can be no closure? I asked him softly.

  Always is. Otherwise no commercial break.

  So, we were in a drama, I thought. Of someone else’s devising. Maybe that would explain the arbitrary rules.

  They will need an autopsy, I said.

  I have asked for one, he said. For dental records, however sad that might seem.

  You asked them gently?

  Istvan always asks gently, he said in his blunt way.

  It was dark when I left and there was not so much rain as mist falling. Mist doesn’t fall, I thought, so maybe it was precipitation coming from the river. A kind of summer fog.

  I had parked the car across the river so I walked over the bridge again and I looked up at the streetlight gleaming on the wet stone curve of the angel’s wing and there she was.

  Her back to me, behind the wire mesh that divided the parapet from the walkway. And I wondered how I had climbed it, three weeks ago. It seemed impossible. Maybe I hadn’t.

  The angel is like you, it cannot see.

  She let her hair fall over her eyes as if she didn’t want to see either.

  And I know, she said, you want to end it all. I know you have a wife waiting in that small shop beneath the castle. But I will have my say before I go. You taught me many things, and I enjoyed all of them but one. You taught me what timbre should be, how to soften and slow my vibrato
, you taught me that in the cello suites there is everything one needs to learn about the instrument. And so I learned them all and played them and will keep playing them if there is anything for me where I am about to go. When you start something the way you did, when you make promises the way you did, you have to realise it never ends. I have a child now that can’t be born so I’m an unfinished thing, the way those angels are unfinished things. You taught me that too. The man forgot to make the eyes.

  She was talking to someone else, I realised. To the first cellist in the opera orchestra.

  And she turned to me, from the parapet, where I had met her first, three weeks ago. I could feel her brown eyes looking through me.

  Stupid historical fact, she said. And she jumped.

  I watched her fall, her coloured canvas sandals leading the way, and she vanished into the mist that obscured the brown river. But I did hear a distant splash.

  Yesterday, upon the stair,

  I met a man who wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t there again today,

  I wish, I wish he’d go away.

  Jenny would have loved those verses, I thought. But I dearly hoped she would never learn them.

  I heard sudden footsteps on the bridge. But with the mist around, I could see nothing other than the huge hawsers and the steel ropes that clung to them, vanishing into a blur. Then out of the haze I saw three coloured balaclavas running towards me, with bright pastel-yellow dresses beneath them. Black Doc Marten boots and coloured tights. Their dark mouths were open in a scream of panic and I ducked sideways to avoid them. Then behind them came a group of youths in military fatigues, bits of broken metal in their hands, black balaclavas on their bellowing heads.

  There was no mistaking the sex of these ones. They were male and they were on punishing business. But the coloured ones had vanished like a wisp, almost the way the girl had vanished, and there was no catching them now.

  As the sound of the riot echoed about me, I looked down at the water. The mist was clearing and I wondered would I see her, drifting or floundering her way to the cement bank. I had heard a splash, after all. But I saw nothing.

  So I walked on. Faces loomed out of the mist, towards me and away, like ghosts. And that’s what ghosts should do, I thought, they should appear and disappear and not cling to the living. I had taken the job, I had found her before her time, but I had found her after all and, whatever else had happened, the job was done.