The Drowned Detective

by Neil Jordan

  Is most irregular, she said.

  Perhaps, I said. But I just need five minutes.

  Tray number eleven, she said. You can open yourself?

  I heard the doors close softly behind me as I walked forwards. She was giving me privacy, and I wasn’t sure I welcomed it. But I pulled back the handle on the tray and saw the coloured sandals again, the stiff dress edged up above the knee where the birthmark I had never known about was evident. Unde.

  And now it looked nothing like a dove. Just a smudge, slightly darker than the rest of the skin. I reached out a finger and touched it and for some reason was surprised by the cold, dead feel.

  I pulled the tray back further and saw the hands, clasped above the stomach. The frozen cleavage above the dress, and the face, with the hair stiff and forever parted. The eyes closed with the white hoarfrost on the lids and lashes. I bent down and put my lips to the edge of hers. They felt like cold, abandoned plastic.

  Let me go, I whispered.

  Though it felt absurd, because there was nothing here that could clutch. There was nothing that could hear, there was nothing that could answer.

  Then I heard a polite cough behind me.

  Must go now, she said.

  I must, I agreed. I raised my head and pushed the tray back into place. I heard the metallic scrape for the second time.

  You find what you want? Clues?

  There are no clues, I told her. Just a girl who threw herself in the river.

  And there are too many of those, she said.

  She jerked her head towards the corridor outside. She seemed to find my presence there amusing.

  Surely one is too many, I said.

  Yes, she said. I must remind myself never to do it.

  39

  I felt the need for an hour of Gertrude. Her scrabbling dog, her electronic cigarettes, her wheatgrass and her crème de menthe. She was mixing it in a blender with ice, into a pale-green-coloured smoothie, and she asked me if I wanted some. I shook my head and asked for water.

  You should try these, she said, as she puffed on her tubular thing, works wonders for the nicotine crave.

  I don’t smoke, I told her.

  Or only other people’s. And only lately.

  And I had smoked, I remembered, that morning, by the ambulance bay.

  Tell me about the dead, I asked her.

  I know nothing about them. I am fake, like I told your colleague, charlatan.

  My wife, I began.

  Ah, she said, you still have one? Things are looking optromistic.

  Optimistic, I corrected her.

  Yes, she said. Look on the bright side. The dead can’t.

  She is working on a dig, I said. She’s uncovered a body, from centuries ago. It’s causing riots.

  Maybe it has unfinished business, and she exhaled a billow of smoke. She must have known how mysterious it made her. Those painted lips, those Slavic cheekbones.

  Don’t you get it, you damn rationista?

  What’s a rationista? I asked her.

  You are. With that English thing you call logic. The dead can cause more trouble than the living. In fact, they invariably do.

  How?

  That business. Unfinished. They want us to finish it for them.

  She inhaled some more and drank the green stuff.

  How do you think I make my living?

  You just said you were a charlatan.

  Doesn’t stop the requests. The need. The palm read, the ouija board. All the best psychics are charlatans. It just depends, she said and smiled, how good a charlatan you can be.

  She took a pack of cards and began to shuffle them, expertly.

  I used to be a croupier. Same thing.

  Where?

  I asked her.

  Monte Carlo, she said. So, you want to play blackjack now or you want your cards read?

  Neither, I said. I just wanted to talk.

  You went to see her again, she said quietly. With the parents. And don’t ask me how I knew. It is that English thing, logic. Deduction. Is your job.

  I said nothing. And her eyebrows arched.

  And? she said. Tell me, Jonathan.

  My daughter talks about her.

  Ahhh. So that’s why Jonathan is here.

  She hears her playing cello.

  The way my darling Jonathan did.

  Maybe.

  And that is – what is the word? Begins with F.

  I think you mean fucked.

  Fucked, she said. Interesting word.

  An English word, I told her.

  Not Latin? Not romance?

  No, I said. Pure Anglo-Saxon.

  The dog leapt suddenly, from an embroidered chair on to my lap.

  How do I stop this? I asked her.

  I can hear the pain there, Jonathan. Just tell yourself it’s your imagination.

  I can’t.

  Then finish that business, whatever it is.

  I don’t know what you mean.

  The dead business. Otherwise they whisper, they murmur, they don’t know they’re dead.

  40

  We both realise, don’t we, Sarah said, this place is about to blow apart?

  A little like us?

  She had turned on the television, next to the fridge. And I realised I’d never even noticed it was there. There were pictures of burning tyres, of black-masked youths in coastal cities, pulling up pavements.

  I gave them two weeks’ notice. From today.

  Because of me? I asked.

  It’s becoming impossible, anyway. Every stone we move causes a crisis. I’m getting a little tired of police protection, riot shields.

  They never worried her before, I thought. But every word was a potential crisis, at the moment. So I didn’t say it.

  So you’re leaving? With Jenny?

  I was hoping we might leave.

  We meaning, all three of us?

  That’s what it used to mean. To me, anyway.

  And then we both heard it. The first arpeggio of the prelude to the first cello suite.

  Oh God, she said. Help me, help me. It’s coming from her room.

  It was perfectly, beautifully played. And as she shivered and I put my arms around her, I wondered how I could notice things like that. Then I realised. It wasn’t a cello playing. It was a violin.

  Let me go and look, I said.

  I can’t, she said. I can’t move. I know I should. I should go and protect her, but my legs won’t function.

  Sit down, I whispered. And I wondered why I was whispering. But the beauty of the playing seemed to demand it.

  I moved her towards a kitchen chair, as though she was a marionette. I could hear her breathing, soft and shallow, and thought she was about to faint. But she clutched at the table leg, so hard that the veins seemed to pop. And I let her go and walked slowly towards the music, and Jenny’s half-open bedroom door.

  I pushed the door open, slowly, and heard it creak. I remembered I had heard a door creak before, to just that piece of music. But this was in a higher register, soaring towards the heavens. I felt I had never heard such chilling perfection. And the door swung to, and I saw Jenny standing by her perfectly tidy bed, playing her child’s violin.

  She was poised, head to one side, her cheek indented by the chin rest. Her small fingers, which had hardly been able to form basic scales, glided over the tiny finger-board, and her bow coursed across the strings, like a professional.

  I could only stand and listen until she had finished. I looked from Sarah to her and back again, both of them framed by the open doors.

  Where did you learn that, love? I asked gently, when she had hit the last two high sustained notes.

  She teaches me, she said, with that maddening simplicity of hers.

  Who teaches you? I asked, rather redundantly.

  You know who, Daddy, she said.

  I took the violin from her hands, laid it on the bed with the bow and led her into the kitchen. Sarah stared at her as if she were
a stranger, some kind of interloper into our domestic domain. But Jenny hardly noticed. She ran towards her in just that girlish way she had, and clambered up on to her knee.

  Good morning, Mummy.

  It’s not morning, darling. It’s the middle of the night.

  Sorry. I woke up. I was practising.

  Yes, I heard.

  I have a new piece – she began and then stopped. Some childish instinct must have kept her from elaborating further. And I wondered at that strange intuition as I lifted her from her mother’s lap.

  I’ll take you to bed, I said. Your mother needs to sleep. There, kiss her goodnight.

  I leant her forwards, so her lips ended up on Sarah’s cheek. Sarah’s hand reached up to touch her hair. But she didn’t turn, or say a word, as if she couldn’t. Some questions can’t be asked, I surmised. I brought my lips to the crown of Sarah’s head, and realised, with a sickening lurch in my stomach, that Jenny and I both shared something that she didn’t.

  Will you make sure she sleeps well tonight? Sarah asked, in barely a whisper.

  I told her I would. So we both slept together that night, in the small wooden bed with the flower-pot covers and the wooden swan that hung from the strings that came from the light bulb. She said nothing more about the incident, fell almost immediately asleep in my arms as my feet dangled over the floor at the other end. And it was only in the morning, when she woke, that she made mention of any of it.

  I was woken by her hand, tapping my cheek.

  What happened to her, Daddy? she asked, briskly curious, so early in the morning.

  Who? I asked. I felt it was my duty to pretend ignorance, although I already knew.

  Little Petra.

  Her parents lost her, I said as delicately as possible, when she was very young.

  Like Hansel and Gretel, she said.

  No, I told her, and began lifting her out of bed. Hansel and Gretel were left in the forest, as far as I remember. Something to do with a nasty stepmother.

  So how did they lose her?

  Maybe they lost her to music, I said, very anxious to change the subject.

  She heard the music playing one day, and she followed it.

  Yes, I told her. Something like that.

  In the forest. There was a prince playing, in a clearing.

  Maybe, I said.

  41

  There was a prince, playing in a clearing. I imagined him wearing one of those Tyrolean hats we see in fairy tales, a feather sticking out from the brim, in a pair of high, thigh-length boots as he strode through the undergrowth, sawing his bow. The large mossy trees echoed with the music, intermingling with the sound of the morning bird chorus. Tiny hamlets scattered around and one child is woken first by the unearthly melody. She walks out and follows and is lost for ever.

  I was daydreaming. I was taken out of it by one word.

  Haunted.

  Haunted. The Viennese repeated it, sceptically twisting the end of his moustache.

  We deal in objective realities here, he said.

  You do?

  I was surprised, to say the least. Buried memories, suppressed desire, hidden motivations, marital secrets. There was nothing objective about any of them.

  Perhaps, he said tentatively, the stresses of your situation has led to a parallel fantasy in your daughter.

  And how do you explain – her sudden virtuosity?

  You said she had heard the tune, he told Sarah. You had been playing the Bach collection by—

  Casals, she said wearily, Pablo Casals, as if he should have already known.

  I’ve handed in my notice, she continued. I can’t take this any longer.

  This – disturbance —

  The whole thing. Jenny. The demonstrations, the riots, the sense of something just about to burst. The heat. And there’s something my husband is not telling me.

  I’m sure there is. That is the purpose of these sessions.

  Maybe he can tell you. Can you tell him, Jonathan? Whatever is the hidden key, the secret, the unmentionable thing? Because we’re leaving without you if you don’t.

  He waited, expectantly, but without any hope of illumination. As if he was too used to these scenarios to be really surprised.

  She died, I said.

  We already know that, Sarah almost spat. You left her the note and the next thing they pulled her from the river.

  No, I said. She died before that.

  Oh God, Sarah moaned, please take me out of here.

  She died the night I met her, I said bluntly, coldly, as if none of it mattered any more.

  Help me, doctor, Sarah said, this is the father of my child talking. This was a rational man, a functioning partner, a good parent.

  I met a girl on the bridge. I pulled her from the water. I took her back to her apartment, on the other side of the river. When I traced a missing girl to the morgue in the twelfth district, it was her. And the records show that she died that night.

  Isn’t there a word for that, doctor? Insanity? Or perhaps necrophilia? He gets emotionally entangled with someone who’s dead? At least his wife chose the living.

  Please, Sarah—

  There is no ‘please’ about it. I’m taking Jenny back to London. And I would like you to come, if you can rid yourself of this . . . thing – this obsession – this mad fucking—

  And she stood.

  I’m sorry, doctor. I have to go now.

  After she’d left, we sat in silence for a while. I heard a street musician outside, playing through the opened window. I thought of the prince again, and his melody weaving through the mossy trees, like blowing hair.

  You find it hard, the therapist said, and I understand, we all do. Something happened that you can’t explain; it’s like life, we can’t explain the bulk of it, and though it’s my job to pretend to, I know at heart I am – what is that word? – a charlatan.

  That word again. I would have stopped him there, but he had some burning need to continue.

  Take things at their face value, as they happen to you; you are presented with a puzzle and if there is a solution, find it. Does it matter if the elements of the puzzle are rational or irrational, happened to the individual or didn’t happen? The result is the same. The problem is the same. The trauma is the same. Who am I to say that the source of any upset is imaginary? I can see the result, the pathology in front of me. Whatever caused that gave rise to a physical outcome. So if imaginary causes lead to actual outcomes, can the cause be justifiably termed unreal, imaginary? No. It has its own reality. Its own rules. And if those rules can be found, be identified, be traced, then maybe a solution is possible.

  He looked at me, his grey eyes burdened with some kind of inner exhaustion.

  And I, like your wife, am tired of all of this. You are a detective – no? – of kinds. Your job is solutions. Not mine. My job is consolation. Of whatever kind I can offer.

  42

  There seemed only one place to go, under such histrionic circumstances. To the opera.

  The large, over-decorated doors were locked. There was a cardboard sign, askew behind a glass window frame, and from the operatic sounds booming from the interior, I presumed what it said was that rehearsals were in progress. So I walked round, beneath the carved-stone caryatids, until I found a side entrance open.

  I relished the gloom for a moment, as the voices echoed above me and the orchestra dutifully echoed them back. It was Verdi, I could tell, from the simple, almost peasant force of the melodies. Bo ba bo bo bo ba bum.

  I climbed a narrow staircase which I assumed would lead me backstage, or somewhere close to the orchestra pit. But the steps just kept going, winding their way up into the impenetrable shadows above. There was a thin wintry sense of light then, and I saw a door and pushed it open, and found myself in a box, six seats covered in that tired dusty velvet and an equally red velvet balustrade.

  There was a full rehearsal in progress on the stage, a chorus dressed in military fatigues and black ski m
asks and those that I could only assume were the principals dressed in the pastel-coloured balaclavas of the street riots. There was a set of crumbling Soviet-style buildings, strewn about with overturned monumental sculptures of muscular bronze workers, hammers and Kalashnikovs jutting from the stage rubble at unlikely angles. It was Rigoletto, in some post-modern interpretation, I could only presume, from the choruses that filled the empty auditorium; from the baritone, bent double far below me, moving like a crab through the apocalyptic wreckage of the set. I took a seat by the balustrade and bent my body like his, my chin against the velvet armrests, worn smooth by innumerable elbows, and listened to the small orchestra in the pit down there until the last aria had ended and a soprano dressed in pastel colours died in a black-clad figure’s arms. Gilda, I assumed, the cursed one, remembering the conversation that could never have happened, in that same orchestra pit.

  A director walked on from the wings and dismissed all of the cast but the hunchbacked baritone, who repeated an aria until his back seemed to trouble him, then sang it one last time, half upright. There were raised voices, a balaclava pulled off, and a plastic machine gun kicked across the boards. Differences of interpretation, I assumed, until the stage finally emptied and the orchestra began to pack.

  I saw the first cellist rise and recognised from above his thinning hair, his shining patent-leather shoes as they stepped from the pit through the empty auditorium. Then they stopped, in a band of sunlight that lit the frayed carpet from the high windows and I thought for a moment he was about to bend down and polish them. But he didn’t. He looked up from his shoes, directly at me. He put one hand in his pocket, searching for something. Then he dropped his gaze and walked on, out of sight.

  I sat there in the shadows as the orchestra cleared. I could hear the snap of music cases and the shuffle of departing players and the sound of a pair of shoes, mounting the stairs behind me. They were hard-heeled shoes of patent leather, I imagined. But I couldn’t have been sure.

  Then the door slowly opened, and it was him, all right, with an unlit cheroot between his lips.

  You like opera? he asked.