by William Shaw
‘Right,’ Daniel said, nodding. ‘Of course. How awful.’
‘Sorry. I’m not brilliant at small talk. Or whatever that was.’
‘No problem.’ He spread his hands. ‘Directness is a virtue, and I’m here to help,’ he said, checking his watch.
‘I’ll just start, then,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind. What do you remember about her?’
‘Look, Alex… May I call you Alex? That’s what Elfie calls you.’
She smiled back, looking him in the eye. ‘“Sergeant” is customary. But it makes no difference.’
‘Right. Of course. Fair enough.’
‘You knew Hilary?’
‘I just want to be clear before we start. I’m really eager to help you. Nothing about my past is a closed book.’
‘Thank you,’ she replied, though anyone who ever said that always meant the opposite.
‘When I knew Hilary Keen… it was a very different time in my life, you understand. I still had a lot to learn.’
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘I was young. We were doing… you know, things…’ He smiled that charming smile again.
Cupidi decided to help him out. ‘I know Hilary Keen abused drugs. If you knew her, you probably took drugs too. In so far as I want to know as much as I can about her, that’s relevant but, frankly, I don’t care about that, and none of that has to leave this room. It’s certainly of no interest to the police after all this time. I just want to know as much as I can about her. You were close?’
His eyes flickered to the French windows. ‘Sort of close. She was quiet. Quite passionate, I suppose. We all were. I still am, I like to think. This place is all about passion.’
Cupidi looked around. ‘What do you do here?’
‘Anhata is the heart chakra. It means “unhurt” in Sanskrit, but it also means “pure”, or “stainless”. Rather than just heal or restore, we find people’s pure centre here. We help people find their undamaged heart.’
‘There was me thinking it was a spa.’
He laughed. ‘If that’s what you want it to be, it’s a spa. We think of it as something a little more fundamental. But it’s entirely possible some of our clients just come here for deep pore cleansing or a colonic.’
‘Is it expensive?’
‘Very.’ He smiled. ‘But worth every penny, obviously. And we offer generous discounts to people who we think would benefit.’
‘Hilary Keen,’ she said, nudging him back to the subject. ‘Where did you know her from?’
‘My God. The Peace Convoy. Do you even remember that?’
Cupidi shook her head. ‘The Peace Convoy?’ The receptionist emerged with a tray, on which were balanced two tall porcelain cups of tea.
‘Oh, Lord. It was something else. We were nomads. By the mid-eighties we had formed a kind of tribe. In those days we moved around the country in buses and caravans and converted trucks. We went to all the festivals and the CND camps. In the papers they called us New Age Travellers!’ He laughed. ‘Some newspaper dubbed us “The Peace Convoy”. I know… hard to imagine, with all this…’ He opened his arms to indicate the solid, bourgeois surroundings in which he found himself.
‘You’ve done well.’
‘I have.’ He smiled. ‘Back then, all I had was a bus. Seriously. A Bristol LH410,’ he said, enunciating each letter and number as if it were holy. ‘You should have seen it. A complete tank to drive, but it was beautiful. Built some time in the seventies. Bought it off the local football team who wanted something classier.’ He laughed again. ‘I had a bedroom, fitted kitchen units, bathroom, everything in there. The bed was massive. It was the whole of the back of the bus. It was glorious. This was the eighties, you remember. That was my mansion, back then. I had everything I needed. Just like now, really.’
‘Apart from the hot tubs and the swimming pool.’
‘Apart from those, yes.’ A giggle. ‘What were we supposed to do? Stay at home and sign on the dole? There were no jobs for us in the eighties. So we did the best we could. Our biggest sin was that we were so obviously enjoying ourselves. Look. I’ve got some photographs.’
He stood. She was expecting a photo album. Instead he went to a coffee table in front of the large fireplace, picked up a big white book and started flicking through it.
‘Here.’ He grinned and passed it to her. It was heavy and solid. She half closed it, to look at the plain white cover.
Embossed on it were the words, Love Everything That Happens To You, and the author’s name, Deva Kay. ‘Deva Kay is you?’
‘Daniel, Deva… call me what you like,’ he replied, adding as an afterthought, ‘Sergeant.’ Another grin. ‘It’s a book about what I’ve learned. I give it away to guests.’
She turned back to the page he opened it at. There was a large, grainy black-and-white photograph of a bare-chested young man, standing in front of an old-fashioned, flat-fronted bus.
His hair had been long in those days, but the parting was on the same side. The man, who must have been in his early twenties when the picture was taken, grinned at the photographer. She peered at his face. The scarring was not there. In front of him, leaping into the air, a grey lurcher snapped at the camera. On each side of Daniel were long-haired women, one with dreadlocks. Both were thin and young, and both wore T-shirts that had been cut short at the shoulder and cropped to show their stomachs.
Together, they looked reckless, beautiful and cool.
The bus’s destination indicator read: ‘HEAVEN’. The photo was captioned: ‘On the road to enlightenment. A journey starts with a single step. For ten years in the ’80s and ’90s, this was my home!’
She looked up. Daniel was grinning down at her. ‘Crazy days,’ he said.
‘Who were the women?’
‘Actually, to my shame, I don’t remember their names. I tend to live in the present. Find eternity in each moment. And we moved around a lot, of course.’
‘And you took a lot of drugs.’
‘Some of us. That might have contributed.’ Another giggle.
She looked at the photograph. He had his arm around one of the women.
‘Did you sleep with this one?’ She pointed at her.
‘I think I probably did.’ He smiled. ‘I don’t want to sound boastful, because it’s nothing to boast about. But this was before we knew much about HIV. We thought it was a gay thing. Awful thing to say, I realise, but it’s true. Everybody slept around a lot.’
‘But you remember Hilary?’
‘Oh yes. Hilary was sweet. Quite shy. Stunningly pretty. I mean, really, really beautiful.’
‘You don’t have a photograph of her?’
‘Afraid not. I lost nearly everything I had from those days, you see. A friend gave me this one, years later.’
‘Did you sleep with Hilary?’
‘Maybe.’ A small smile.
‘Meaning yes.’
He laughed. ‘Yes. We did sleep together. Who wouldn’t? She was gorgeous, and so generous. Like diving into warm water. First time I saw her was at Elephant Fayre down in Cornwall. She was singing with some band, I think. Had an amazing voice. She was on the road with us for a while. I wasn’t the only one. I remember her getting pregnant, too. I don’t think she was at all ready for that.’
‘Julian. That would have been the boy’s name.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Probably.’ He turned his back, moved to the French windows and opened them. ‘She got into drugs, though, I seem to remember.’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘That was a shame. We were all so naive about that sort of thing then. We thought the world would come around to our way of thinking. Every month it seemed like more people had joined us.’
‘What do you mean, your way of thinking?’
‘We had real values. We were connected to the earth. You lot were living through this boom–bust, boom–bust. There was an economic crash in 1987. People were having their homes repossessed and even af
ter they’d lost the roof over their heads, they still owed the bank thousands. You’d be amazed how many people came to join us after that. We owned our homes, even if they were just teepees or benders. People would make their houses out of anything. Hazel sticks, tarpaulins, old gas cylinders for stoves. We were living in things that people thought had no value, but to us it was wonderful.’
Cupidi picked up her tea. ‘I can see that.’ Her own mother, then in her late thirties, had lived in a bender at Greenham Common. When Helen had described it to Cupidi’s father, he had been horrified. ‘But why?’ he’d asked. ‘I’ll pay for a hotel if you like.’
‘We shared everything we could,’ said Daniel. ‘Back then, farmers used to actually invite us onto their land. We’d do a bit of work for them and then move on. But then it all began to change. All the millionaires who made their money screwing everyone else started buying up houses in the country. And suddenly it was the 1990s and the countryside was just for rich people.’
‘You don’t look like you’ve done so badly yourself,’ she said, looking out at the lush lawns.
‘Oh, this is my company’s property, not mine,’ he said. ‘But yes, you’re right. I have been blessed. People like what I offer. They reward me. All this is done in the spirit of openness and generosity. That’s why it succeeds.’
A blackbird was digging at the lawn just outside the doors. ‘You were talking about the 1990s. You said it had turned nasty. Why did you stay on?’
‘It’s not so easy to just quit,’ he said.
‘You mean drugs, or the lifestyle?’
‘The lifestyle,’ he said. ‘And all the ideals we had. At the start we all believed we were changing the world. I still do, actually. But it took a while for us to understand that we needed to move on from it all.’
‘From heroin?’
He frowned. ‘I suppose it got pretty dark, yes.’ The blackbird had a juicy, wriggling worm now; it darted away with it. ‘It had all been so optimistic at first. But then in came the Criminal Justice Act. They started treating us as criminals. Do you know labelling theory? People behave how they are treated, if you ask me.’
‘So you were little angels until the nasty policeman came along?’
He laughed. ‘Obviously not. I won’t pretend. There were drugs. Sometimes we stole a bit of wood here and there. There were bad people, just like in the straight world. And there were some people who were mentally ill, too. This was the time when they were closing down mental hospitals. Care in the community… remember? Some of these people had nowhere else to go. We tried looking after them…’
‘Was Hilary one of those?’
‘No. Not really, but she was vulnerable, I suppose. She was so pure. I think that’s what made her such an easy target.’
‘For who?’
‘Do you believe in the concept of evil?’
‘I’m a police officer. It comes with the territory.’
‘As a Buddhist, I believe that there is good and evil in us all, inseparably. Evil is the inner darkness. Someone who allows their darkness to become unbalanced can corrupt the people around them.’
‘Hilary came into contact with somebody who was evil?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who?’
He took a breath. Exhaled evenly. ‘Her name was Freya. She was one of those people who is ruled by self. Whether she had been like that all along, before she discovered drugs, I don’t know. I suspect so. She was a full-on user. As the authorities were cracking down on druggies in the cities, they came and tagged on to us. Freya was one of them.’ Another breath. ‘The problem with evil is that it disguises itself so well.’
‘A heroin addict?’
‘Big time. And a dealer. I remember her arriving. She was driving a beat-up old fifties Mercedes. She had that kind of Nico cool, you know? A detachment that can be really sexy, but it’s evil. Evil creates illusion. It is a literal separation from the light, but it can look very alluring sometimes. And all the men were crazy about her, of course.’
‘Including you?’
For the first time he had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘I suppose.’
‘Did she spend time in your massive bed?’
‘I thought we were talking about Hilary,’ he said, offended. The smile had gone.
‘So did I.’ There was a moment of awkward silence. ‘So it was Freya who got Hilary addicted?’
‘Yes,’ he said curtly. ‘Absolutely.’
‘Tell me about Freya, then.’
‘Not much to say. She was on drugs. She turned our convoy into a kind of druggie hell, if you ask me.’
A man who talked of evil and hell, she noted. ‘When was the last time you saw her?’
‘I don’t really remember. It sort of just fell apart. I don’t usually talk about it.’ He looked at his watch again. Outside on the lawn, three women appeared and laid out yoga mats. Dressed in Lycra shorts and tops, they were lean, beautiful, and looked rich. In unison, they began doing stretches, pulling their legs back, thrusting out their chests. It reminded Cupidi of a 1980s pop video.
‘You say it fell apart. When was that?’
‘We carried on for a few years more, but it didn’t mean anything anymore. I think I sold my bus in 1995, went back to the city shortly after that. Licked my wounds for a while, then started teaching Japanese Buddhism.’
‘When did you last see Hilary Keen?’
‘God. Hilary had already quit the scene by then. She went off to live in Spain. A lot of people left the country around that time. Things were just getting too difficult here by then. The whole trip was starting to die.’
He took a sip from his tea.
‘Why did Hilary leave?’
‘She was trying to clean up, she said. Get away from negative influences.’
‘Freya?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And you never heard from Hilary again?’
‘Nothing. I wasn’t surprised. In the nineties the whole heroin scene was just as bad in Spain, it turned out, if not worse. Frying pan into the fire. Not a day went past when I didn’t wonder how things had turned out for her, poor girl. I failed her. We all did. And you say she’s dead now?’
The women were on their backs nows, legs in the air, opening them them into ‘V’s. She wondered if Daniel slept with any of them. He probably did, she reckoned. His guru-shtick, plus that hint of a bad-boy past, would be quite appealing to the bored, rich, middle-aged woman. If he hadn’t been so self-satisfied, she could have seen the attraction herself.
‘I want to show you something,’ she said, lifting her handbag from the side of the armchair.
Digging out a brown envelope, she pulled out a picture. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked.
And the widening of his eyes as he took it from her told her she had been right about one thing, at least.
THIRTY-SIX
‘Freya,’ he said, holding the photograph. ‘It’s Freya.’
His voice shook a little as he spoke. A piece of the puzzle fitted into place. She had been right when she had suggested the dead woman wasn’t Hilary at all.
Daniel peered a little more closely at the picture. ‘My God. Is she dead?’
‘Very.’
He looked up. ‘So both of them are dead?’
Cupidi didn’t answer, but watched him lower his eyes again to the photo. ‘How awful,’ he said.
They were exactly the same words he had used when she had first mentioned the name Hilary Keen. That time he had clearly meant it. This time, though, they sounded as if they were what he thought she expected him to say.
How awful.
If eyes could really sparkle, though, his would have been doing that.
Looking at him, Cupidi could see nerves; excitement, even. They suggested he was glad Freya was dead. Which, if true, would be very interesting indeed.
‘What was Freya’s last name?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Really?’ She smiled at him. ‘You don’t
remember?’
‘No. I mean… it was an informal kind of life we lived then. We didn’t go round saying, “How are you, Miss Cupidi?”’
‘I don’t think I believe you, Mr Kay’ she said.
He hesitated just a fraction too long before he said, ‘Well, I don’t. Simple as that.’
‘Were you a heroin-user too?’ she said.
‘I don’t have to answer that.’
‘No. Of course you don’t.’
‘I’m not proud it.’
She let the thought linger for a while. She wasn’t threatening him; just letting him know that she knew the man he had really been. He could talk of the seeker’s journey, pose like an eco-warrior in front of his humble bus, ooze New Age charisma at middle-aged women, but there were more sides to any story. She knew that; he knew that she knew.
‘How much do people here know about your past?’ she said. ‘Just what’s in this book? Or the rest of it?’
‘Is that some kind of threat?’
‘I just want to know her name. What was it?’ she asked again.
‘I think she may have been called Brindley,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’ Outside, the women were standing now, stretching down to clutch their calves.
She held up the photograph again. ‘Freya Brindley?’
‘Yes. How awful,’ he said again.
But when he showed her to the door, offering her an expensive-looking washbag full of essential oils and massage lotions as a parting gift – which she declined, obviously, because she was a policewoman – there seemed to be an extra spring in his step.
She took notes for a minute in car. And when she drove back down the driveway, he was there with the three women. They were all sitting in front of him; straight-backed in the lotus position. He was kneeling, lecturing them and smiling beatifically.
London was dying; she did not miss it at all. It was full of small flats, piled in boxes on top of each other, all pretending they were different. Some were rendered, others clad in tiles, wood or glass, but they all had the same pinched size, the same small balconies crammed with bicycles, plastic furniture, dead plants and exercise equipment.
The city was exhausted, burning itself out. She was glad she was out of it.
