by Bateman
‘Dead, yes,’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘She was certainly a force of nature.’ I nodded. ‘A law unto herself,’ she added. ‘And you’re well?’
‘Perfectly,’ I said.
We nodded some more. Then I shuffled to one side, and to take my mind off my suicidal mother and the tiles that wanted to talk to me, I studied a small noticeboard. There was a poster advertising the Friends of Purdysburn’s fund-raising production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I supposed it was to be an ironic production, and liberating, and inspirational. I would not be attending. Not after the last charity event I’d been persuaded to buy tickets for, when the Brittle Bone Society’s production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers had ended in bloody carnage.
There were footsteps on the stairs and Nurse Brenda appeared, smiling. She glanced across at the woman behind the desk and raised her eyebrows at her, which I did not much like. I was interpreting it as her saying, ‘Thanks for calling me down to see a nutter,’ but I could have been mistaken. She could have been saying thank you. I am a glass half-empty kind of a guy. I know that. Alison has told me often enough. She says I often take offence where no offence is intended. I took offence at her for pointing this out to me. She said I was too judgmental. I rest my case.
Nurse Brenda said, ‘You’re getting to be quite the regular. Next you’ll be wanting a wee bed for the night.’
It was supposed to be funny, and out of respect for our past relationship, I gave her a smile. But I didn’t like it. She put a hand on my arm and guided me away from the desk, then made sure to position herself so that her back was to the receptionist.
‘Sorry,’ she said quietly, ‘but that one’s a nosy cow. How’re you doing? Wasn’t that a dreadful thing the other night?’ Without waiting for my response she went on, ‘I was going to call you as soon as I saw daylight, but I’ve been on duty ever since with just a couple of hours of a lie-down upstairs to keep me going. I didn’t sleep, of course, for worrying. There’s been people coming and going all day.’
‘The Man in the White Suit – has he said anything?’ I asked.
‘Not a dickeybird. They sent a solicitor up to represent him, but he got nothing either. He just sits there looking vacant. I mean, my boy. I feel so dreadfully sorry for him.’
‘Even though he’s a murderer?’
Nurse Brenda took a deep breath. She looked at me, and glanced back at the receptionist, and then moved me a little further away. ‘There is absolutely no doubt about it that he did commit murder. Half a dozen people saw him.’
She hesitated.
‘But?’
‘Those half a dozen, they were all patients. Well – you know what it’s like up there. That copper fella was tearing his hair out after he took their statements. They all agreed that our boy did the murder, but they’ve all given wildly different accounts of it. One of them was in rhyming couplets. That copper said he wouldn’t even consider submitting the statements or bringing the witnesses to court.’
‘But The Man in the White Suit is still being charged?’
‘I don’t know. The copper said because there was so much blood, and everyone tramped through it before the police got here, and one patient actually rolled in it, that the usual forensics were going to be very complicated. They all seemed to have had a bit of a play with the murder weapon before it was handed in as well.’
‘There’s many been put away with less,’ I said.
Nurse Brenda blew air out of her cheeks. She put a hand to her chest. When she had finally composed herself, she continued: ‘What he seemed to be suggesting was that our man might be brought before a court, but only so that they can lock him away somewhere without him actually having to stand a proper trial and with no possibility of ever getting out. We have a secure facility here, but it’s not peopled with murderers and psychopaths, it’s really just to protect patients from themselves and add an extra layer of protection for the staff. You know that.’
‘I was never in the secure unit.’
‘No . . .?’ She looked at me doubtfully. She did not seem convinced. This served to make me doubt myself. I was virtually certain I had never been in the secure unit. But there were gaps. 1994 was a bit of a blur. She said, ‘But you see what my concern is? That nice, placid, peaceful boy up there, who might have murdered someone, is quite possibly going to be locked up somewhere really horrible for the rest of his life. Irrespective of whether he’s guilty or not, he deserves to have someone in his corner, and it isn’t going to be that idiot Legal Aid solicitor they sent, and it isn’t going to be me because they’ll be sending him somewhere else pretty sharpish. It has to be his family, and until we know who he is and who they are, there’s nothing can be done for him. He’ll just be swallowed up by the system. He has no one.’
‘No one but me,’ I said.
She appeared to glow. ‘Exactly,’ she said.
‘I’m his last best hope,’ I added.
We were interrupted by the elevator doors opening behind us and several nurses coming out. Nurse Brenda had a brief banter with them, and then waited until they were out of earshot before returning her attention to me.
‘Sorry,’ she said. She moved a little closer. ‘But you have to understand, if this wasn’t official before, now it has to be even less so. I was going to sneak you in to see him, but I can’t do that now. I’ll have to work out another way.’ She put a hand on my arm. ‘You’re a good man. You care. I always knew you had a good heart.’
She meant metaphorically, because my literal heart could explode at any time.
Also, she was completely and utterly wrong.
Neither she nor Alison seemed to understand that really I did not care about this mysterious man. He was nothing more than a curiosity to me, a puzzle wrapped up in an enigma. I like to know the answers to questions. Once I had worked him out, it would make no difference to me if he was banged up for life or sliced up by his enemies. I have to admit, however, that although I didn’t care one jot about him, there was a very small part of me that rather liked the idea of being someone’s last best hope. Usually I was the last person someone would choose to turn to in a crisis.
I said, ‘There’s no chance of me seeing him now?’
‘No.’
‘For five minutes. If I can just get a picture of how he—’
‘No. Honestly. I will work out a way for you to see him, trust me, but it’s going to take a while. This is still the NHS – there are levels of bureaucracy here you wouldn’t believe.’
‘It’s absolutely vital,’ I said. ‘Please, just two minutes, I can be in and—’
‘Nurse Brenda says no.’
I nodded and studied my feet.
Involuntarily.
I had forgotten how powerful she could be. She was well-used to using trigger words with which you had no choice but to comply. She had never been a force for evil, but she was very definitely one for order. You needed something like that and someone like that to keep a lid on the mental wards. But it was still a little too close to The Manchurian Candidate for comfort.
She said, ‘I will call you as soon as I have a plan. It may be later today, tonight maybe.’
She took my numbers, and with the important stuff out of the way asked some inane questions about Page and how I was coping, and then said she’d better get back upstairs. She gave me a wide smile and hurried away, but something had been niggling at me so I called after her and she stopped and turned.
I moved closer and said, ‘Nurse Brenda? This concern for The Man in the White Suit. I was just wondering.’
‘Yes?’
‘You don’t seem overly concerned for the victim here – the man he stabbed.’
She had been on the third step up. But now she came back down and drew close to me. ‘I’m a nurse,’ she said, ‘and I have to concern myself with the living. Also, the man he stabbed was new on the ward, and uncooperative, and a bit of a shit. I’m sorry, but we’re only human, and we
have our favourites. Once, you were my favourite. Now it’s him. I just feel that there’s something special about him. I know this will sound ridiculous, but once you see him, you’ll understand. He’s naïve and innocent. You know what I call him sometimes? My little angel. Daft, I know, considering what they say he did, but he’s just so placid and lovely and . . .’ She sighed. ‘Well, that’s how I think of him. My little angel. Yes. Can you understand that at all?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said.
I could not only understand it, I could relate to it.
8
Nurse Brenda had always worn a small silver cross around her neck, so I could see how she might even be open to the idea of The Man in the White Suit literally being an angel. If you’re into God, you have to swallow the whole kit bag and caboodle. You can’t be a bit religious. Over many years of looking after the mental wards she had been exposed to the extremes of human behaviour – to all of the sordid, disgusting corruptions of which men and several women are capable – so it probably helped to have some sort of overriding faith. But I had presumed that she was long enough in the tooth to understand that you really couldn’t judge a book by its cover; yet The Man in the White Suit, a man accused of a bloody murder, had somehow managed to win her over. Perhaps she had just been on the front line for too long.
I returned to No Alibis and waited and pondered. There wasn’t much else to do. Between the hours of 2 and 4 p.m. I had precisely one customer. I should qualify that. Customer suggests that there was even the remote possibility of him buying something, but he was really just keeping out of the rain. He entered the shop, did a few circuits, and left. He did not make eye-contact.
Alison had suggested that I should try and be more welcoming and perhaps offer customers a cup of coffee and engage them in conversation. But Jeff was still away doing his exams, so there was nobody to make the coffee, and small talk has never been my forte. I can talk about books forever, I can guide you to precisely the right volume despite only having known you for a few minutes, but I need an opening, an in. I have a horror of shops where sales assistants put you under pressure to buy with their obsequious wheedling and hand-wringing and their, ‘Is there anything I can help you with today, sir?’
Mother, when she worked the till, didn’t have my reticence, and while I didn’t condone her lamentable attempts at customer relations, I at least understood them. She had once cried: ‘Either buy a book or get the fuck out,’ to a customer. The tearful child, searching for a birthday present for her father, was absolutely distraught. The father came raging into the store after Mother had finished her shift and would have decked me if I hadn’t suffered a timely epileptic fit. He ended up putting me in the recovery position and telling me about his passion for the works of Elmore Leonard, even the crap Westerns.
I had suffered from epilepsy since the age of eight. It came on after I cracked my skull by becoming the boy who really did run out from behind an ice-cream van without checking for oncoming traffic. The ice-cream vendor was very concerned by all the blood, and instead of waiting for an ambulance, he bundled me into his van and rushed me to hospital. Or at least, he tried to rush me, but the traffic slowed him down. Vehicles don’t pull over to the side of the road for a Mr Whippy in the way that they do for an ambulance when it sounds its alarm. On the plus side, he was knowledgeable enough to jam my broken head between two large tubs of mint chocolate chip ice cream for the journey, thus lessening the eventual brain damage.
But I digress.
During my long afternoon in the shop during which this ‘customer’ was my only disturbance, I had ample time to think. Denied immediate access to The Man in the White Suit, I began to wonder if I might approach the case in another way, by trying to discover exactly why he had so suddenly turned to violence. That knowledge might lead me back to the original point of the investigation – his identity. To this end I turned to the internet to consult the newspaper reports of the murder. There were not many and the details they contained were sketchy at best. The man The Man in the White Suit had murdered was called Francis Delaney. He was a thirty-one-year-old mechanic from North Belfast who had been admitted to Purdysburn suffering from depression. The police said that a man had been arrested at the scene but that no further information was being released while their investigations were ongoing. The Belfast Telegraph carried a single death notice which stated that Francis Delaney would be deeply missed by his wife Sonya, and that a funeral service would take place at St Malachy’s on the Shore Road at 11 a.m. the next day.
I checked Directory Enquiries and found a number for a Francis Delaney in Mount Vernon Park, which was close enough to the church on the Shore Road to convince me I had the right late man. Before I called the number I got a Twix and a can of Pepsi Max from the fridge in the kitchen. I positioned myself with my feet up on the counter and devoured one leg of the Twix. I took a drink. I was about to interrogate someone who had recently lost her husband. It was important to be relaxed. I don’t like using phones at the best of times, but I prefer them to actual interaction with real breathing humans. Alison says I have difficulty empathising with people. I say that I don’t consider it a difficulty.
I phoned and a man answered in a rough Belfast accent. I asked if I could speak to Sonya Delaney and he asked who was calling and I told him my name was Sergeant Cuff from CID and he said it was an appropriate name for a cop and I agreed it was. He probably didn’t know that Sergeant Cuff was one of the first and greatest of fictional detectives, appearing in 1868 in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone – a book, incidentally, hailed by Dorothy L. Sayers as probably the very finest detective story ever written. Dorothy was no slouch herself, if a bit of a dry old tart. I used Cuff’s name rather than my own because I have a business and its reputation to protect and it is best not to confuse my parallel careers. And I suspected that the denizens of the Shore Road might not be familiar with the works of Wilkie Collins or books in general.
The man on the phone said he would go and get Sonya. A few moments later she said hello. Her voice was as rough as his. She said, ‘Youse have more questions? I said everything to the other guy.’
‘Detective Inspector Robinson?’
‘Aye, him.’
‘He’s quite a disagreeable fellow, isn’t he?’
‘A what what?’
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘This will only take a minute.’
‘Aye, all right, fire away. It’s just, I’ve people here. You know, for a drink, to see the . . .’ and she faltered, and she sniffed up. ‘You know, the . . .’
‘Corpse,’ I said.
‘Don’t say that,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry. I meant – the deceased.’
‘Don’t say that. It’s so . . . final.’ There were many things I could have said to that, including Precisely. But I held back. I waited for her to gather herself. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said after a bit. ‘It’s just been such a shock.’
‘I understand.’
‘You must deal with murders all the time.’
‘Frequently,’ I said. ‘They’re like water off a duck’s back.’ She let out another little cry. ‘Mrs Delaney, I won’t detain you too long. Your husband, did he ever mention this man who is accused of murdering him? I know he was only in Purdysburn for a few days, but if you were visiting him, did he ever say he’d had a run-in with him or anything like that?’
‘No, no, nothing like that.’
‘Did he mention him at all?’
‘No.’
‘He suffered from depression, your husband?’
‘That’s right. I told all this to the other mister.’
‘I understand that. Sometimes we have to double-check these things. I won’t take up much more of your time. He was clinically depressed?’
‘He was depressed, yes.’
‘Had he been hospitalised before?’
‘No. And what difference would it make if he was?’
‘In case he had run into this man, the man
accused of his murder, on a previous occasion.’
‘Accused? He killed my husband.’
‘Yes, quite. Do you mind me asking what your husband’s behaviour was like before he was admitted?’
‘He was depressed.’
‘But how did his depression manifest itself?’
‘Manifest?’
‘Was he violent? Uncontrollable?’
‘No. He was depressed. Listless. Didn’t want to go out, or go to work.’
‘Okay. Listless, didn’t want to go out. Did he talk to you, or relatives or friends about it?’
‘No, he didn’t really talk to anyone. He was depressed. He sat in the corner and stared at a wall. Why do you need to know this?’
‘It’s helpful to us in building up a picture of what might actually have prompted this attack. If your husband had been violent, then you could see how a fight might occur; but if he was quiet and unobtrusive, then that is so much more unlikely.’
‘Can’t you get this from his doctor or psychiatrist?’
‘Yes, of course, and we will, but quite often they only get to see patients under specific, clinical conditions, they don’t see what they’re like in their day-to-day lives, what their behavioural patterns are like away from the spotlight, or stethoscope, or microscope of medical observation. So it’s good to talk to the widow as well.’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Call you what? Oh, you mean widow?’
‘Yes, I don’t like that. It’s a horrible word.’
‘I understand. It’s a dark word indeed. Unless you add Twankey.’
‘Excuse . . .?’
‘Sorry. I’m just saying, it’s the only way to lighten a word like widow. Its connotations are otherwise usually always dark . . .’
‘I really—’
‘Like the Black Widow Spider. Or the Black Widows themselves.’
‘The Black—’
‘Widows of Liverpool, sisters – were hanged for murder in 1884.’
