Shadow Play (7 page)

Margaret called to the child and when she ran back, seized her firmly by the hand and led her up the street towards her house. Disconsolate, Logo remembered his icy feet and stamped them. He courted the cold, did not really mind it and the stamping was more ritual than necessity. He waited until Margaret was out of sight, then drew in a lungful of air and began to sing.

‘Jesu, saviour ever mild, Born for us a little child, Of the virgin undefiled:

Hear us Holy Jesus.'

Keeping close to the walls, backing out of Legard Street, pushing the cumbersome trolley like a big old pram, he moved in the direction of the crowds which would throng the thoroughfares beyond. Looking for a small, dark child, with a headful of black curls cascading from the neck to her waist and streaming out behind her like the tangled mane of a thoroughbred filly as she ran away. From him.

 

D
insdale Cotton thought Helen West was beautiful. He did not say as much, but the conclusion had been on his mind from the moment he had first met her. He could follow the present discussion with his brain all the more easily because it gave him a better opportunity to look at her eyes, hands, hair, legs in whatever order they happened to present themselves without quite seeming to devour her. He knew it was still far too soon to do anything else, that would be like spitting in public, but he planned it anyway, enjoying what he had for now. Besides the conversation was always worth while, even if they both chose to deny the undercurrent which flowed between them.

‘Evidence,' she was saying. ‘Come on, Dinsdale, why the hell aren't you doing this? Why me and not you, giving a lecture on evidence? How come I even got volunteered and not you, when you can talk the hind leg off a donkey and everyone knows I've never understood law at all? I only practise it. What do I say to them?'

He took a covert look at her slender crossed ankles, as she sat back in the beastly lounge of the Swan and Mitre, and decided he could look no further so he might as well entertain himself by intellectual effort.

‘What you say always depends on the audience,' he said. ‘And there's no audience, apart from a symposium of scientists, who do not want their information as simple as possible.'

‘Just as well. I can't manage more than that. Come on, surprise me. Ten minutes is what I have to deliver, on the subject of, What is evidence? The audience being Justices of the Peace with nil legal training. Your starter for ten, please.'

Dinsdale sipped his drink, vodka in tomato juice, which did not look at all effete in his hands. He removed an imaginary pair of glasses and shuffled an imaginary sheaf of papers on the rather dirty table.

‘Evidence, my dears, is fact. It comes in the form of brick or cement. There are basically three kinds of evidence. The first is the most direct, say from an eye or ear witness to an event, the horse's mouth evidence. Then it comes, less directly, from those who follow on behind, picking up the pieces of the smashed car, testing the blood samples and the semen stains and who can thus say, this event happened. This is circumstantial evidence, although they are recycled bricks, they are the most certain of all. Evidence also comes from a number of unrelated facts which surround the victim and the defendant but have nothing to do with them, and this is the cement. They are little facts, positive and negative, which point to one conclusion. Thus, one witness hears a door slam at three in the morning, another sees a man in a street soon after; a third person mentions someone he met in the local earlier that evening who looked the same; a fourth mentions, by chance, a possible motive. By the smallest and most innocent innuendos brother betrays brother. A network of facts, individually irrelevant. You need this cement if you do not have enough of the bricks alone. Like bloodstains and fingerprints.'

‘Confessions?' Helen asked, vastly amused. ‘Are they direct enough evidence to make into bricks?'

‘Oh, certainly,' Dinsdale said airily. ‘Finest kind of brick, but in this generation, it has a tendency to crumble. What you must tell this audience, of course, is that the only evidence which can be used in the construction of a case is evidence that has been properly obtained. Thus if you make the defendant shit the brick, you cannot use it to build the wall around him. Will that do?'

‘Certainly. But your recitation has taken precisely two minutes. What shall I do for the other eight?'

‘Tell them stories. The taller the better. Another drink?'

 

H
elen was about to refuse, responding to the automatic pilot-light which ignited inside her head some time before eight in the evening to remind her it was time to go home. Then she remembered there was no Geoffrey Bailey at his home or her own, hadn't been for a week. There'd been no trailing around a supermarket in her inefficient pursuit of their needs. The thought of her own relief brought into her throat an indigestible lump of guilt which she decided to swallow. She might well love Geoffrey Bailey, she was usually well aware that she did, but freedom from the routines of the relationship, from the sheer time it took to be with another, felt like a prize she had worked towards for months. Especially if the privilege included sitting with a man of Dinsdale's distinguished ease, warmed by his admiration and his sheer ability to talk. It made a change from the barks and grunts of familiarity.

‘Well yes, why not? Aren't you due home, or something?'

Dinsdale shrugged noncommittally. Helen could not imagine his life to be unaccompanied by less than a select harem, but his domestic loyalties were his own concern and she did not have to consider them. She did not, at this moment, have to consider anyone or anything at all apart from the state of her digestion.

‘Speaking of evidence,' said Dinsdale, returning from the bar with a napkin which he used to wipe the table clean in small, fastidious movements, ‘is what I see over there evidence of anything at all? Or is it a figment of my over-fertile imagination?' Helen looked and whistled softly.

The Swan and Mitre was a pub with little to recommend it apart from proximity to a thousand offices and a heavy sense of age created by sherry casks hung above the bar. The grime was unfeigned and the crowds stumbled their way through raucous gossip in the artificial gloom. Smoking was mandatory: scores of men and women had been released from work to indulge a number of bad habits before retiring to the rigours of their homes. The wooden booths lining the walls gave some scope for intimacy: for the rest, the assignations were as public as a meeting in a telephone kiosk. In one booth, selfishly occupying space enough for four, prohibiting invasion by the cunning placement of coats which made it look as if someone else was expected, sat Rose, flanked by a young man. The size of him, the uniform shirt and the short haircut betrayed him as a policeman or a security man or suchlike, but there was no need for guesswork.

‘Don't look so obviously, Helen, you do stare so. Is that PC Michael? He of boxing fame?'

‘I think so. Why shouldn't I look? My God, they're actually talking to one another …'

‘Well, so were we, it's a natural consequence of human proximity.'

‘Among others,' Helen said lightly, ‘in which Rose is supposed to be something of a specialist. She's been looking very pretty over the last couple of days, have you noticed? More subdued, less spiky.'

‘I thought that might have been your influence. You know, having a little chat with her, woman to woman, like Redwood asked you to do.'

‘Asked once, then again and again, after more complaints and a fight in the section house. Yes I did try and talk to her, you know, Rose-is-there-anything-worrying-you? kind of thing, anything-where-I-could-help-you? But I didn't do much good. Quite the reverse, I must be losing my touch. I've never heard such a stream of insults in my life. No, that isn't true, I have, but not usually so fluent. The message was, Fuck off, leave me alone, you old cow, how can you understand at your age? And if Redwood wants to sack me, let him try. I made a tactical withdrawal.'

‘Bloodied, but unbowed?' Dinsdale asked, smiling to show teeth which were admirably white.

‘No, both bowed and bloodied. I wish there weren't such a thing as the age gap. I like her, I can't bear to see this brooding anger of hers, but she finds it impossible to like me. You can't convince her you might know what she means.'

‘The effort was commendable,' said Dinsdale gravely, sensing a real humiliation. His hand on the now clean table hovered close to hers. The sight of it, pale, with its neatly pared nails, made her feel unaccountably lonely. The fingers tapped a neat rhythm, as if listening to some hidden music which was not hers to hear. Like the music which vibrated between Rose and her man, hidden but harmonic, cutting across the smog of the room to where they sat, the two adults. Helen thought she remembered what it was like, the music of romance, and felt older than Noah. Older than the sherry casks and just as deaf.

 

T
he pub on the corner of Legard Street and the main avenue which led to the football stadium also served sherry, but only if asked, with the request repeated several times. Their speciality was the kind of pie which, even when microwaved within an inch of its life, still challenged the digestion of a steam engine. The pie was held by the edge of the cellophane wrapper and it was not wise to examine the contents. Logo was indifferent to food and the pub was empty.

He ate his pie. It was burnt on the outside and chilly in the centre and did nothing to cure his hunger, but it made him feel bigger as he swallowed it. The concave stomach, knitted together in the middle by a scar which made him look as if he had been bitten by a shark, relaxed beneath the belted trousers. He belched, softly, looking round for an audience. The barman regarded him with marginal interest, less tolerant than usual. He was restocking the shelves for when the crowds came out of the stadium. On a night like this, during the silence in the middle of the two storms, he could do without Mr Logo, and if the bastard sang, he would pack him out of doors among the phalanx of parked cars, into the roar of sound which would reverberate as soon as someone scored a goal.

‘All right, are you?' he said pleasantly and threateningly enough.

‘All right,' said Logo. ‘And you?'

‘All right. Time you went home, isn't it?' He leant over the table, wiping the surface with a busy fussiness which betrayed watchful idleness and anxiety. Logo always leant over things without ever actually sitting down, the better to clear his chest for the next hymn, the barman thought, although Logo knew different. He found it uncomfortable to sit. The old scar was a wound known only to himself and some doctor who had long since moved on without his notes. The stitches were cumbersome, but they had been inserted in the middle of the night in a casualty ward without thought of future vanity, and they were old now, twitching in their wisdom to remind him not to sit with his small store of belly flesh curled into him, but always to stand proud, like a tin soldier who cannot bend. The barman made a mock punch in the direction of the old wound. No injury was meant – it was a playful gesture to underline a point and occupy the idleness – it was supposed to be friendly. But the reaction was absurd: Logo doubled up as if to pretend the punch was real, cried out in pain and lurched against the wall behind the now clean table. His arms were crossed over his abdomen and he wailed like a child. ‘Aagh, aah, aah, please, please, don't.
Aagh!
'

The barman was unmoved. He did not care for the ulcerous pains of anyone who ate his pies; nor did he have to take hysterics from a little Bible-pushing creep like this.

‘Oh go home, fuck off. I never touched you. Get out! Go on, get out, get out, get out!'

Logo, clutching his stomach, went out into the gloom without a backward glance. It had been warm in there, the pie inside him was warm enough and he had enough cash for another drink, but he went anyway. He took his litter trolley and its brushes inside from where he had parked it outside the door: it gave him stability as well as music as they went down the silent streets. Rumble rumble, wheels of worn rubber going round and round as if, in their bad design, they were as bewildered as he was himself, though he wouldn't have changed them for the world. The big trolley was good for a scavenger.

Home, don't spare the horses.

‘“His roots shall be dried up from beneath, and above shall his branch be cut off,”' murmured Logo to himself, thinking of the barman, and then, self-pityingly of himself. “‘His remembrance shall perish from the earth and he shall have no name in the street.”'

 

T
here was a great, sore-throated roar from the stadium as he passed; the streets were full of cars without people. Logo clutched the handle of his barrow and moved on, listening to the sound of thousands singing, ‘Walk On! Walk On! You'll never walk alone!' feeling his Bible thump against his pocket, his feet warm now, as long as he kept moving. Which he did faster and faster, as far as the distant doors of his own house, no singing, no carrying on, nothing of the kind. He'd been a good boy, a very, very good boy; it was still early, so he wouldn't go in and see dear old Mother in case she was still trying to tire out that little blond brat playing hide and seek. Then he stopped, suddenly sober and cold.

Hide and seek inside his house as well as Granny Mellors', that's what it looked like. The lights were lit on his own ground floor, pouring from the frosted pane of his kitchen into the alley. He could not believe that Margaret had sent the child, that blond, naughty little thing, to play in his house, but that was the only explanation that sprang to mind. Unless the child had gone there alone, pushed the door open, entered to plunder and explore. He knew he was not expected home before eight: he rarely was, but for Margaret, for both of them, especially the child, to assume his absence, felt like a violation. He quietly laid down the trolley and tiptoed to his door.