'I don't understand,' Mother said. 'A film of what?'
'About Jack the Ripper,' Irene cried, her eyes sparkling. 'With fog and hansom cabs and beautiful young actresses arranged under the street lights, just pretending. In real life, Polly Nicholls had been thrown out of her doss-house because she didn't have four pence for a bed. She hadn't eaten all day before she was killed.'
'This week Billy Shanks didn't make me laugh,' Malcolm said sourly, with a side glance at Murray as if in some obscure way the fault was his.
'Billy Shanks,' his wife ignored the interruption, 'describes how he walked down this lane and saw the body of the man spread out on the ground and the doctor examining it. He makes you see it all. It's what reality is like, he says.'
'Billy saw all of that...' Murray shook his head. 'I wish now I'd read it.'
'Prostitutes and murder! There must be something better to talk about than filth like that.' Malcolm made a movement of disgust. The yellow under his tan made him look ill.
As he turned his head, his mother stopped him with the back of her hand against his chin. 'Your poor face!'
On his cheek the last visible bruise of the beating he had taken after Heathers' party was fading.
'I fell.' He put up his hand as if to shade his eyes. 'When? You didn't say anything to me about falling.'
As she reached for his hand, he pushed hers away. It rose up trembling as if in protest, before falling to her side.
'Yes,' and she went round into the kitchen, but was quickly back saying as she came, 'anyway, isn't it silly? If it was a man killed like you said, and didn't Jack the Ripper kill women? And in London at that. Wasn't it a man killed?'
Irene laughed. Her eyes shone with the joke of it. 'That's a change for the better, Mum Wilson.'
'No,' Mother said, 'there's nothing better about a man being killed. Whatever sort of man he was.' That was impressive, but as Murray looked at her with her hand resting on Malcolm's shoulder he was afraid for her. For her second son she had such ferocity of concern, like a young woman bending above a cradle. It defied her age; it made her vulnerable. He could not imagine how she would survive if anything happened to Malcolm.
BOOK TWO
9 A Letter from Jill
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3RD 1988
Murray got a tomato juice at the bar and made his way over to the table in the left alcove at the back. Billy Shanks had two rules: he never stood a drink or let one be bought for him and never made introductions. One of the two men already there was tall and heavy with a full prophetic beard flecked with white; the other, an ageing youth of forty or so, had a narrow sweating face that looked as if it had been moulded out of used blotting paper.
'Why are you asking for an opinion, if you're so sure it's from a crank?' the Prophet was asking.
'Why?' Billy Shanks' arms flew up, endangering the table load of glasses. 'Because I want everyone to tell me I'm right, of course. There's always crank mail on a Monday. People have too much time on their hands at the weekend. They brood.'
' “Modern days Jill rips Jack,” I like that,' the Prophet said, looking at the sheet of paper he held. 'Only it should have been in red ink. Jack's were.'
'It was,' Shanks said. 'The colour doesn't show on a Photostat.'
'It was worth passing on to the police then?'
'Routine.' Billy Shanks' laughter had a false sound.
'You're sure the original wasn't in blood?' the Prophet asked hopefully.
'Christ, no!'
'In his first letter to the police Jack talked about saving what he called the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle. Only it went thick,' the Prophet said, 'and he couldn't use it.'
Murray decided against asking to look at the letter. He had no reason to be interested in it. Yet he leaned forward unobtrusively and saw it was printed in block capitals, each carefully shaped as if by a child. Even if somewhere you had seen the person's normal writing, there would be no way of recognising it from this.
'It's all rubbish,' the ageing youth sneered. A drop of water on the end of his nose swung from its precarious position over his beer into Murray's direction. 'Do you not think it's rubbish?'
'Theo thinks everything is rubbish,' Shanks said by way of explanation.
'It's not likely,' Murray said, thinking aloud, 'what you have there was written by any murderer. Billy's right. Some old lady – or a kid left too much on his own.'
Billy Shanks launched a hand soaring that turned like a tern in mid-flight to retrieve the Photostat. 'Right! Jack the Ripper didn't write his letters, I'll bet. And Peter Sutcliffe didn't send that tape to the police in the Yorkshire Ripper case. They still haven't found whoever did that.' He nodded in triumph. 'Murder's one trade, drama's another. Different trades, different talents.'
'Oh, the real Jack wrote some of his letters,' the Prophet said. ‘“I am down on whores and I shan't quit ripping them till I do get buckled.” Or – “From hell, Mr Lusk, sir, I send you half the kidney I took from one woman, preserved it for you, t’other piece I fried and ate it; it was very nice”.’ He had a voice like a preacher, or an actor, paced and resonant. It was odd how even in the warmth and noise of the bar, the words of the old letter made a pause. 'I can't see that being written by an old woman – or a kid.'
But the watery Theo sniffed, 'I don't know. I've got a girlfriend whose kid plays at hanging his Action Man.'
'...I could believe that,' the Prophet said.
'Anyway,' Billy Shanks intervened across their mutual dislike, 'it looks as if whoever wrote our letter was trying to imitate the style the Ripper used.' He swept a wide gesture of relief. 'I can't imagine Jack the Ripper – or even Jill – sitting in a library taking notes.'
'Can you not?' The Prophet was taken by the spirit of contradiction. 'That's because you imagine him – or let's say her,' he smiled benignly malicious at Shanks, 'only at the moment of the crime. A knife that moves in the dark, no other reality, out of the shadows into the darkness. It's that defect of our imagination that will keep her safe, for she'll have another existence, sit next to you at the office, come to supper, seem the most ordinary person in the world.' He was the rare kind of talker who exerts a spell. Murray thought about the ones who went on Sundays to visit. 'It's like the story by Le Fanu about the man who feels himself to be haunted by something he senses but can't see, by a presence. There's just a hint that he has some reason to suffer from guilt. He runs away abroad and thinks he's escaped from it, but it comes back. He retreats to his own country, into the most isolated place, and takes with him just one person who loves him and will guard him. The story is called "The Familiar". Mr Le Fanu had his own ending for it... but the one I wanted would have had our hero waking up one night in his secure refuge to find the loved one leaning over him, mad and demonic. That's the real horror.'
'I like it,' Billy Shanks said.
'The Watcher,' the Prophet said. 'You'll find a surprising number of stories with that theme. It was one of the ideas that haunted the nineteenth century – the Watcher – or wakening out of a fit to find you'd been buried alive.'
'Bollocks!' Theo snarled. 'What does that nineteenth-century bollocks mean to your average punter? You want to fucking wake up. Nineteenth century? We're nearly out of the fucking twentieth century.'
'I'll give you a twentieth-century ghost story, if you'd like one.' The Prophet transfixed Theo. 'You and I are alone in a house in the country. Oh, not a Gothic mansion, but, let's say, an old manse, painted, refurbished, Rentokilled from end to end. You'd buy it in a moment. Only it has a cellar – you can guess the kind, with a door and a flight of steps down into the dark. You have to give me those – put anything you like in the cellar, mushrooms, wine, but as an investment, that's modern enough. We've been arguing about ghosts and you begin to press the notion that there's “something down there”. Something predatory and unnatural down there. But the victim – in this case myself – knows that it's only a foolishness, a joke that would like to be cruel. And so
– being much stronger than you – I tie you up and leave you by the cellar door. I mean to come back, of course, after the second cigarette. Only, while you're lying there not able to move, comes the knock and slithering of something climbing the steps, I would call it “Charley-in-the-Cellar”.’
Theo rolled a white eye at him like a spooked horse. 'I don't have to listen to this crap,' he said.
It was the Prophet, however, who got up and bent impressively over them. ‘“The shallowest of mortals is able now to laugh at the notion of a personal devil.” That's not me – a dry stick of a nineteenth-century civil servant said that. “Yet the horror at evil which could find no other expression than in the creation of a devil is no subject for laughter, and if it doesn't survive in some shape or other, then the race itself will not survive.” He lived to be eighty-four and died the year before the First World War started. He wasn't far wrong, eh, boys?'
'That's a wonderful bloody man,' Billy Shanks said, gazing after him affectionately.
Murray decided that rather than hearing Theo's response, he would prefer to go to the lavatory.
Two men were relieving themselves in consort. The nearer looked quickly round as Murray stood into the wall. Tall and solidly built with a high red colour in his cheeks and prematurely white hair, he seemed healthy and prosperous. 'All right, so Parker is from the Bible Belt,' he boomed at his companion, 'but don't tell me his religious observances require him to drink coke and eat hamburgers exclusively. It's just that when he comes over here, he enjoys making the hostesses squirm. Coke and ham – burgers every time when they're longing to do the nouvelle cuisine bit – and everybody has to eat them – all the ambitious shits chewing away and smiling. But when I was at head office, he had me out for Thanksgiving and that was frightfully traditional – sausage forcemeat and turkey. The wine, though, was Californian.'
'Lucky turkeys,' his companion said, giving himself a hygienic shake.
'You're on your own then,' Murray said, remarking on the obvious as he sat down again.
'Alone at last,' Shanks grinned. 'The poet has folded up his tent.'
'You know some strange people. I've never heard a guy talk quite like that one, but then I don't know many poets.'
Shanks laughed. 'Poet? You mean Tommy Gregory?' 'The big guy. With the beard.'
'Ah, it's the beard that does it. And he is a marvellous bloody talker. If you could work a typewriter with your tongue, Tom would be rich. He's a clerk with the Region. I get the odd juicy bit from Tom.'
'That'll help to keep him in biros.'
'No, it's not like that. Tommy Gregory wouldn't take money.' Shanks signalled reproof with one palm pushed away flat against the air. 'But he likes to talk.'
'So it was the other one who was the poet. The crap merchant.'
'One of the gifted. Theo is bidding to be the bard of our fair city.'
'He seemed a right idiot.'
'Oh, he's a complete cunt,' Shanks agreed. 'Never mind him. What do you want to ask me?'
'Maybe I just looked in for the pleasure of your company.' Murray smiled briefly. 'I've heard a rumour John Merchant keeps a girlfriend. Would you know anything about that?'
'I could give you a name and address – if you'd tell me why you want to know.'
'I couldn't do that. It's for a client.'
Shanks studied him thoughtfully. 'You've got the wrong idea; I'm the one who's supposed to get told things. It strikes me, Murray, that with you everything goes one way.'
'I'll buy you a drink.'
'It would be a dear whisky.' Shanks chewed his lip. 'Would this be anything to do with Blair Heathers?'
'You didn't hear me saying anything about Blair Heathers.'
'If it was, I might give you that name.' Murray shrugged and waited.
'I keep hoping somebody will nail that evil old bastard,' Billy Shanks said. 'And if Merchant got flushed down the tubes as the message boy that would be a bonus.'
'I thought you only got angry in print.'
'Shows you're not a regular reader. I don't get too angry in print any more. Not after Heathers sued.'
'Sued you?'
'The paper – it happened before you came back. Judges have a weakness for millionaires. Particularly that judge. He felt it was really wrong of me to write about a children's home where rain came in on the beds and the floors buckled and they had to rip out the heating and try again. Writing stuff like that can damage a man's reputation. So we lost and I still get to write the column and everything's the same. I work hard at making it look the same. And nobody sees any difference except me. Me and Tommy Gregory and a few thousand others. It's our secret.'
'Nothing to do with padding your expense account? 'Murray said unsympathetically. 'So you'll tell me who Merchant's girlfriend is?'
'After I get something to drink,' Shanks said. But when he came back, sipping his drink, he remarked instead, 'Imagine them using Southpark again for a murder enquiry. When I was at school there, the father of a mate of mine was the janitor. This girl Muriel and I could get into the school at night. It was an adolescent's bloody dream world. We tucked in the gym and the ladies' staffroom, we even did it in the lavatory, but mostly we went into the Headmaster's room. God, he couldn't have had any sense of smell that Headie or he'd have sent for the police.'
'Can we talk about Merchant's girlfriend?' Murray scowled. He disliked this kind of reminiscence, and Billy knew it.
'It wasn't all my fault, Murray. Nobody should meet a girl who'll do anything – not when you're fifteen. I did things with her I've never done again in my whole life with grown-up women. I used to sit and try to work out what else I could do to her. Books have got a lot to answer for, Murray. I even went in the back door there on the carpet in front of the Headmaster's desk. I kept looking at it while Standers was talking to me. It looked like the same carpet.'
As Murray felt his face being studied for a reaction, it occurred to him that he was being punished for casting doubt on Billy's expense account. After a pause, however, as if the act of remembering had set something unexpected going in him, Shanks went on, 'Muriel was younger than me. One day I got together a bit of money and we played truant and took a train down the coast. She was a good swimmer – big made with long legs. She stood in the water splashing me – a big daft kid. The thing is I've always had a bad conscience about Muriel. I felt I'd – stupid bloody word! – corrupted her.' And it was true he got out the word “corrupted” only with difficulty, as if it stuck in his throat.
While he spoke the last few sentences, he had been fiddling with one of the empty glasses. Now he looked up, blinking.
'Don't worry,' Murray said with authority. 'Muriel's conscience will be clear. If ever you meet her, she'll be too respectable to talk to you. She'll be some nice guy's old lady.'
Immediately, unreasonably, Shanks looked relieved.
'I wouldn't tell stuff like that to anyone else, Murray. Frances Fernie.' He scribbled down the name and address under it. 'It's a street off Moirhill Road – further out, on the respectable side.'
'I'll find her.'
Having got what he wanted, Murray stood up. Shanks looked up at him.
'That stuff about Jack the Ripper in Saturday's column. It's what I use now to hide what's missing. Who cares about a children's home? Nobody wants to read the small print – not in contracts or Acts of Parliament – it's boring. When the century gets its tombstone, that's what'll be written on it: They got bored too easily.'
Murray picked up his glass of tomato juice and finished what was left in it.
'Here's to Muriel,' he said.
He didn't really like tomato juice.
10 Whores are Different
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5TH 1988
It didn't bother Murray that old Barney wiped a finger under his nose before folding the paper and passing it over. Situated at the Cross, selling papers every day of the week in all weathers, the old man was a storehouse of local knowledge and a magnet for gossip. It was wo
rth putting up with his idiosyncrasies. Anyway, it was another voice to make a pattern of the days; living alone, that counted for something.
'Where you off to then?' Barney asked.
'Up the Road a bit.'
'A fair step?'
'So so, up past the canal,' Murray conceded.
'You're going to see somebody?' The old man hazarded a guess. He had a voice like vinegar and razor blades from too many wet mornings and fogbound afternoons.
'That's right,' but went on since it was part of the game to give something, 'I've been trying to get her in since Monday.'
'Her,' the old man repeated. 'It's a woman then.' Honour satisfied, he reverted to a favourite topic, 'All the people you have to see, you should get a motor.'
'The sun's shining,' Murray said. 'It's a good day for a walk.'
'Ay, but,' Barney said, wiping his nose again, 'in business, time is money.'
Speaking as one businessman to another, which was funny, but didn't provide a car to replace the Cortina which had failed its test – 'if it was a horse, ye'd shoot it,' the mechanic had said; or shorten the dusty length of Moirhill Road on the day of a bus strike. Time being money, he walked too fast, so that when for the third time he turned into the street where John Merchant's girlfriend was supposed to live his temper was sour and his collar stuck to his neck with the heat.
The metal grille at the entrance to the close was unlocked and folded back which was an improvement. The walls were lined with blue tiles each with a white flower and it was suddenly cold out of the warmth of the sun. As he came to the first landing, a man was coming down from above carrying a parcel clumsily wrapped in brown paper and Murray watched him out of sight before knocking.
For a deceptive moment, Murray thought that he knew the woman. She had blonde hair cut short and a narrow pretty face with high cheekbones. It was only when she tentatively smiled showing crooked slightly overlapping teeth that the impression of a resemblance vanished.
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