'I woke up straight out of my sleep, something had fallen in the kitchen. And then I heard steps. People moving about –'
'No,' Murray said, 'it was just me.'
She patted her hair trying to flatten it. At another thought, she covered her mouth with her hand. From behind it, she said, 'Upstairs was broken into. All round here. Because of the drugs, they need money. The couple in the paper shop, they were tied up. I woke up and heard the noise.'
'I've been looking for Irene. I didn't really think she'd be here, but – and so when I walked in I was sure there was no one. I thought you would be at the hospital.'
She kept her hand over her mouth, but she wasn't afraid any more. She frowned and said angrily, 'I'm going to bring Malcolm home.'
'Home?' Murray tried to make sense of the word. He stared round the cramped overcrowded bedroom. 'He doesn't live here. What do you mean – home? Even the furniture's new. You don't even have any of the old furniture.'
'Are you drunk?' Mother asked. 'Like your father, are you drunk?'
There wasn't much time.
It occurred to him that while he was out searching for her, Irene might be at his flat, locked out, and waiting for him to come back.
As he hurried past, the old paperseller Barney caught at his sleeve. 'Hang on, I've something to tell you.' But he would not risk being overheard and so kept up a monologue punctuated by the sharp slap of folding each paper before passing it across. '... bloody brother-in-law. Never worked a day in his life. You know what a parasite is? A parasite. Now he's getting it posted. The form, I'm talking about. The form, the fucking form and the giro. Because he's taken her out into the country, he doesn't even have to sign on. They post – Wait, Murray! That certain person – the one you mentioned to me...' The change of tone was abrupt as they got the pavement to themselves. 'He's got a wee trick of dressing up like a lassie. I just remembered that. And I hear he can get away with it – even though he's such an ugly cunt.'
Murray stared at him speechless.
'That's what I hear anyway...' Barney trailed off.
'That's what you wanted to tell me?'
The paperseller put a hand to his lips in a gesture that, despite the pouched eyes and the grey unshaven jaws, was oddly childlike. 'Oh, Christ, Murray. Did I tell yous that already? I did, didn't I? For fuck's sake, I think my head's wasted.'
'No. It's all right,' Murray said. 'Thanks, Barney.' The old man grinned in relief.
'Anytime. I hear things yous never would.'
The years caught up with everyone. The years and the red wine.
And, of course, Irene wasn't waiting for him outside his flat. He accepted in his exhaustion that it would be Miss Timmey, knocking and knocking on the broken door as he climbed towards her. What she had to tell him, he heard like a message from his own despair.
'...his head just looked too big for his wee body, not a stitch of clothes on him, all his ribs standing out, you could have counted them, it was like one of those pictures you'd see of the poor folk during the war in the camps or some wee black bairn in Africa, and he was just bruises all over and what was...between his legs, you know, there, was hurt.'
'It was a girl they had, it was a girl,' Murray protested, not pointing but holding up one hand as if for protection against the closed door of the middle flat. A girl, happy, healthy, as fat as she could roll; a child of love held between two of the beautiful people, Moirhill version. Every time you saw the couple they looked as if they had just got out of bed, glossy and replete; you could see how the sight of them might drive an old woman, a dry spinster, demented; so that she imagined a child was being tortured, pestered you with what she had imagined she had heard. That was an easy problem for him to solve, a man who understood human nature, a detective.
'It was a girl,' he repeated stupidly. 'The child in there was a girl.'
'Nobody knew, you see, about the wee boy, he was never let out, they say she had him by another man before she got married, if she was – married that is, and they kept him tied to a cot but something must have happened and he got out and they found him crawling down the stair... and he was that light, that light, you felt you could pick him up and hold him in one hand.' To Murray's horror, the old woman wept.
'I said to the police I told you what I'd heard. They were right angry. They'll be coming to see you, I expect. I had to tell them I'd told you.'
Crossing a vacant piece of ground at the corner of Florence Street, Murray began to shudder. From somewhere out beyond the suburbs, the wind carried a sprinkling of snow. A long time ago in the Northern shop, autumn then too, and one of the other policemen arguing with him about how exactly they executed traitors under the old savage laws of England, thick lipped, emphatic, a white complexion under red hair; arguing until he went to the phone to settle it. The voice of the librarian had replied at once, 'The traitor was hung and the bowels drawn out and burned in front of his eyes while he was still alive. Oh, and he was castrated. And then –' What had been strange to Murray was that he had answered at once, without having to check any book, as if he had been waiting for just that question.
Behind him, the light of the shop window threw a lozenge of yellow on the wet pavement. It was dark and getting late; he was running out of time and this felt like his last chance. Although he hadn't eaten that day, the smell of food made him feel sick.
'Kujavia?' the Indian behind the counter repeated thoughtfully.
'No, I do not know the man. That is quite unfamiliar to me.' Despite the beleaguered shutters over the windows, he had the air of a man in transit, passing with cardigan wrinkling over a full paunch from Moirhill to better things.
'Now that surprises me,' Murray said with a tired sour grimace.
He made as if to go, then turning back asked almost casually, 'Is the black girl still here?'
Involuntarily, the shopkeeper's eyes widened. He bent his head over the bundle of papers on the counter, and tapped at a face in a picture with a hard brown finger. 'It's absolutely wrong,' he complained. 'Why should educated people still want to read of such a person?' Even upside down, yesterday's monster, Idi Amin, was unmistakable. 'I could not tell you how much I hate that man. We lived in the same street as him. He was our friend. And no sooner were we at the airport than he took all our furniture. Lovely furniture – made in Denmark to our order. We had seven cars.'
'Is that where you got a taste for the black ones?'
The shopkeeper frowned in offence. 'We do not care for them. Not in that way.'
'I've just come from one of Kujavia's whores,' Murray said.
'She didn't know where he was – of course. But she told me she'd seen the black girl coming in here. All I want to do is talk to her – that's all.'
Slowly, the large brown eyes turned to look towards the back of the store. A curtain was drawn across the opening. 'She was in distress,' he said. 'It was an act of humanity.'
As he put back the curtain, he heard the shuffle of feet. She was edging away step by step, but the back room was small and it didn't take long for her to reach the end. She watched him with wide fixed eyes, the pupils dilated as if she was drugged or in shock. An enormous bruise distorted one side of her face, and as she sucked in her lower lip with a parody of something appealing and childish a gap showed where a front tooth was gone. She was young, and under the ruin of her face enough was left to suggest she had been fine looking.
'She won't talk to you, you know,' he heard the shopkeeper say.
'I have given her tea. It was an act of humanity. Something dreadful has happened, but she will not talk.'
Murray stepped through and let the curtain drop behind him.
The weak single bulb cast a drained light. 'You don't have to be afraid of me,' he said to the black girl. 'Did you come from Mary O'Bannion's?'
She nodded.
'Was Kujavia there?'
She stared at him, blank and fixed as if she had not heard. 'Did something happen?'
In the long momen
t of waiting, her smell came to him – a female scent rank and pungent; and then something else, a sweet sickliness of unwashed flesh that did not seem to belong to her, but reminded him of the fat woman – and their smells were different yet strangely mingled and confused, partaking one of the other, so that suddenly he had an image of them intertwined obscenely on the fetid bed.
'Did something happen?'
And at last she folded one hand into a long fist as if holding something and swung it in the air.
An iron bar, beating down...
'Is she dead?'
Into the gap of the broken tooth, she sucked her lip stroking it with her tongue and then, sweetly, unexpectedly, like a child, she smiled.
'I cannot tell you how much I hate that man,' the grocer said as Murray left. There was no way of knowing if he was thinking of Kujavia or Amin. 'If I had that man here, I would stick pins in him and pour in salt.'
30 Trap
MONDAY, OCTOBER 15TH 1988
In the corridor where the dog had lain, the mountain of flesh that had been Mary O'Bannion had given up the ghost. One arm was flung out and, despite himself, he noticed how small it was and fine boned as if it had been spared for a cruel memento. He searched the kitchen and the back room and remembered as he was leaving to check the little lavatory, but no one was in hiding. He pulled the outer door shut and it looked all right although he had broken the locks to get in.
The light on the landing below was out and he felt his way down; the slippery chill of the wooden banister sliding under his palm. Perhaps Kujavia had told Mary O'Bannion that he was going to meet Irene. Perhaps she had tried to persuade him not to go, tried to tell him it was a trap, made of herself a gross barrier to block his way. He had killed her and gone. But where? Where would Irene ask him to come? The risk she was taking; there was no place where she could be safe with him, the man who had killed her sister. Where would she want him to come? The man who had killed her sister…
Someone was coming up, a man's steps, climbing fast. It was as if his ears had been closed in a dream and suddenly he heard.
He stepped into a corner of the dark landing. There was a hasty panting, absurdly loud, and he held his breath and felt instead his heart tick in his throat. The shape came from below in a rush.
Stepping on to the landing, it was tall, taller than Kujavia, and Murray let his breath sigh out. At the sound there was an exclamation of fright and the figure stretched out a hand towards him and then fled stumbling upwards. The light from above glowed through a bristling mane of hair; there was no mistaking that halo.
Tommy Beltane had come to visit again.
Yet he did not believe Kujavia would come.
He prowled from room to room, keeping away from the windows. In the bedroom, he slid open the drawers in turn. It seemed he should recognise some of the things he had spilled out on this floor. The police must have gone through the flat after she was killed, but her stuff lay in the drawer laundered and folded, like clothes that had never been worn waiting for an owner. Soon perhaps the real owners, the shadowy figures behind John Merchant, would dispose of the place. There were books on a shelf by a bed, but their titles meant nothing to him. No more than the clothes had they anything to do with her: props of the part she had played for Merchant. From the bottom of the last drawer, he lifted out the child's doll, old and ragged with only a tuft or two of yellow hair. As he gripped the scabbed toy, he had an image of the woman snatching it up, how she twisted her body so that he was never out of her sight. A child trapped in the desolate cottage by the edge of the sea where Annette Verhaeren's daughters had been taken would have needed something to comfort her. Or she might have come across it in a corner of this flat, discarded by some previous woman: there was no way of being sure. Gravely, it watched him out of the one remaining eye in the battered face.
In the bathroom, big fluffy orange towels were folded on the rail as if she might step out alive from behind the hinged leaf of marled glass that concealed the shower. There was a hand basin inset into a black surface; and a circular mirror above it that showed him a coil of light reflected in his eyes. He fingered the contents of a shelf: Charles of the Ritz boxes, Aludrox, a medicine, L'Homme Roger et Gallet, Creme a Raser, at the end a smokey brown bottle, Eau de Toilette, the cap black and round with a bronze press knob. Like the clothes, like the books, he could not find Frances Fernie. She had seemed wary and not easily to be caught; but she had opened the door that night to a hunter more cunning than herself. Carefully, he pulled the cord to put out even the light around the mirror before he opened the bathroom door, but light flooded in and the shape of a woman straightened from where she was laying her coat on the bed.
'When I came in, I thought you'd changed your mind and gone,' Irene said. 'You've been sitting in the dark.'
'No. I had the light on in here. Not at the front – in case he was watching from the street.'
'He'll be here soon,' she said.
He blinked at his watch. It was exactly eleven o'clock. 'In half an hour, if he's punctual. Where did you go?'
'I just drove around like you wanted me to,' she said. 'When I thought it was time, I came back. If he's down there, he's seen me coming in alone. Wasn't that the idea?'
'He'll be afraid of a trap. He'll be watching somewhere out there.'
'If he was out there when you came in, then he knows you're here,' she said.
Murray shrugged. 'I did some looking myself before I came in. I'm betting he wasn't there.'
Without being sure...
He had not told her about the murder of Mary O'Bannion. Where would Kujavia have gone after the fat woman's death? He did not think he would come here.
'If he comes at all,' he said to her.
'Oh, yes. There isn't any doubt about that.' She began to laugh. Pointing, she asked, 'What's that you've got?'
He was still holding the doll by an arm, dangling from his left hand. He looked at it in bewilderment. Irene appeared enormously alive to him. The light hurt his eyes and head, he had not eaten since the day before; with an aching floating clarity, he saw that excitement had heightened her into something that glittered like beauty. She was full of expectation. Beside her he was diminished.
'You're not well,' she said. 'Why don't you go before he comes? That would be better. You still have time.'
Instead of answering, he held out the doll. With a movement he would have been ashamed of if it had been conscious, he stroked a finger down the yellow hair. 'I found this in one of the drawers. It belonged to Frances.'
'I don't think so.'
'I saw her with it that time I came here. It belonged to her.'
She sat on the bed. 'It doesn't seem worth arguing about. I mean what difference does it make who it belongs to?'
'I don't know, I was looking for something that would help me to understand her. It's as though she never lived here. I was trying to remember her face.' The woman in front of him, however, his brother's wife, had kept intruding into his thoughts; now it was as if the two sisters were one; mysteriously the living and the dead had merged. 'But I only met her that once. It'll be different for you, you'll remember how she looked.'
'Suppose I did? Why should you care?'
'She killed men. I was trying to understand what might make a woman who would do that.' He flicked the doll and it sprawled on to the bed beside her with legs apart and one hand flung up above its head. She tensed at the suddenness of it then relaxed. 'She was your sister. Didn't you see her playing with that when you were kids? It must have meant something to her, something special. Did you get it from your mother, from Annette?'
'I don't remember,' she said, so emphatically that he accepted it as honest. She stood up. 'It's almost time.'
As if she could not keep still, she yawned and stretched. She went back and forward two or three steps one way then the other. A stranger brilliant with some dazzling expectancy smiled at him and took up the bag that lay beside her coat on the bed.
'H
ere, Murray,' she said. 'You're so anxious to understand everybody. I'll make you a present of that.'
It was a pocket diary with Frances' name in front; but there were only notes of hair appointments, a visit to the dentist, an entry: 'Walked in the park'. Even these jottings became less frequent, stopped at last in May, so that most of the little book was blank.
'He'll come,' she said. 'We have to be ready.'
He followed her along the passage. A door that he had not remarked at the end on the right led into a very small narrow space like a pantry. In the corner, there was a window that looked into the living room. It was set deep in the wall like part of an old conversion, and was covered on their side with a net curtain.
'You could watch from here,' she said.
Without answering her, he went out and through into the living room. Set high, dirty, the window in the corner wasn't anything to notice. Glancing that way, the attention was taken by the painting of brown fields with a tiny cold moon-sun low over a hill. Through the open door, along the short passage, he could see the bed with her coat thrown on it.
'But you can't be in here,' she said, coming after him. For the first time, she seemed uncertain of herself. 'Not when he comes. I have to see him on my own.'
'We want a confession.'
He would play out the game until she realised it was hopeless and that Kujavia would not come.
'You know if he sees you it won't work. You said yourself he'd think it was a trap. He'd go away – you'll spoil – I didn't want you here. Please, please –'
She almost wept in the distress of her frustration. He thought of the men who had been killed, of fat Leo Arnold weeping for his brother, of Merchant. 'If Frances wasn't worth it...' He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to hold her.
'No!' She swayed back and struck away his hand. 'None of that.' Her lips writhed as if getting rid of filth.
Three spaced knocks beat against the outer door. 'Now,' she cried softly. 'Please, please. He's here.'
Because he had not believed Kujavia would come, the sounds went through him as separate shocks each one like a blow. He rubbed at the side of his head and caught himself in the act of that unconscious gesture which had become a habit with him.
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