Walking with Ghosts (5 page)

‘Won’t be long,’ says Sam, taking the tray, running down the stairs. You remember Sylvia Plath, something about the street brings back a line...
Poor and white, barely daring to breathe or achoo
... and you want to rush to your books and search for the memory, bring the poem back to your chair by the window and read it aloud to the empty street. You move your head slightly to watch a woman with a child locking the door of a house over the way. You have never seen her before. They have repopulated the street.

The people who lived in that house in 1970 - what were they called? - won the neighbourhood prize for the best-kept garden. The house was made up like Noah’s Ark. You were pregnant with Diana and waddling about on the last road to motherhood. History had been put aside in the interests of biological necessity - Arthur’s phrase - and you had moved to York with his job and your widening hips. It did not seem like promotion, really, moving to York, but it made him happy, and that was important. Arthur had to be happy, he had been in a war, defending the Suez Canal. He had been in the desert, making the world safe for democracy.

You waddle to church with him every Sunday morning. In the church they sing, ‘Eternal Father, Strong to save’, which is the only thing that keeps you going. Arthur pretends to like it all, the entire service. He falls heavily to his knees to pray, while you thank God that Diana, growing inside you, precludes you from that humiliation. If God had not already been established, Arthur would have invented Him.

When Diana is three months old, Arthur is sitting in his nichair after church. You are cooking. Diana is crying and Arthur is reading titbits out of the newspaper aloud. The sauce is getting lumpy. You decide never to go to church again.

‘What?’ says Arthur, later, when Diana is quiet and the washing-up finished.

‘I don’t believe in it any more,’ you tell him.

‘But our child. Our... our civilization.’

‘I’m sorry. It seems ridiculous to me.’

He looks at you as if you have shot him. His face runs to wrinkles with the effort of comprehension.

‘You go on your knees to pray,’ you tell him. ‘And you go on your knees for sex.’

Arthur’s lips turn blue. He lurches to his feet and rushes over to the draining board, taking you by the shoulders. You cannot imagine what has happened for a moment. You see his arm go back and the flash of his fist and then you are on the floor and the coffee cups are breaking around you and your eye is beginning to close. The room is swimming, and you look up at Arthur who has become huge, standing astride you, looking down, his fists clenched by his side.

‘Don’t talk to me like that again,’ he says. He thunders out of the room, and you reach for the door of the cupboard to pull yourself up. You do not know what you have said. You had only begun your speech about knees. He should have let you get to the part about washing the floor.

You hear her for the first time. You turn on the radio and there she is. She sings, ‘I Don’t Know If I’m Coming Or Going’. You walk out of the house with her name on your bps. That is all you have. You don’t know she is a black woman. You don’t know she is dead. You don’t know that her voice will haunt you for the rest of your life. Lady Day. You will name your son after her.

The trouble with Arthur was his need for violence. He was the son of a miner. He had been in that war. It was not easy for him. He could never be sorry about it. There was always justification. Violence to him was a kind of love. And you were his wife. And he loved you. In his way.

And you loved him. And you
did
love him, Dora, in spite of the beatings. It wasn’t as if he beat you every night, or even every week. Only when you crossed him. Only when he realized that he had been wrong. The rest of the time you could love him. For a while, at least. A long while. Some years. Hoping all the time that he would change. That he would begin to see your world, as you strove to see his. Hoping that he would see the futility of the violence, that he would recognize that he could not hurt you, even if he killed you. And it was too many beatings later before you realized that you were not a wife at all. That you were a symbol. A hated symbol. That you had been replaced in his mind by some
thing.

You held your breath too long in those days. You should have raged. You had every right to rage, Dora, while Arthur was squeezing the life out of you. While he appropriated all the life forces that came into the family, all the forces of renewal and regeneration, and grew stout and red-necked. You should have gone underground, poisoned his food, sawed through the leg of his chair. It would have been worth it. He would have seen you then.

But you were a traditional girl, like your mother before you. You believed that Arthur should come first, that he should get the best cut of the joint, that his ideas and aspirations were more informed, more valid. You believed in sacrifice, Dora. You were a mystic.

There was a more or less hazy conviction that if you gave your life to him, he would, like God, give life back to you. But for Arthur there was no mysticism, only duty. And he was short on that. Arthur went through life explaining everything. He left a trail of destruction behind him.

After Billy was born you decided to leave him. How long after Billy was born? A week, Dora? An hour? Perhaps it the moment of birth itself, the child being an image of release. Suddenly it was possible to throw everything off, to leave yourself vulnerable. Then it would be up to you. But it was not courage. It was desperation that drove you to leave. You had seen yourself in a mirror, seen your hopelessness the dark rings around your eyes, the pathetic smile. You could not afford to lose more weight. The midwife had shaken her head at your lies.

If it had been courage, Dora, you would have left at once, but desperation kept you going for another five years. Five years in which Arthur grew larger, more dominant every day. Five years in which you furiously fuelled your hatred of him. Five years in which you grew bolder, more reckless, in which you listened and did not speak. It was during that time that your body coddled the seeds which now swim as eggs and discs beneath the skin. Without those five years you would still be healthy, Dora. You would still be young for Sam.

6

Marie Dickens had drawn Edward Blake, the husband. She had not spoken to him on the telephone, but dealt with his secretary. The first story was that his appointment book was full for the next two weeks. But when, at Marie’s suggestion, the secretary had consulted her boss, it turned out that his itinerary was not as rigid as it had appeared. Marie’s appointment was fixed at three-thirty that same afternoon.

She used the ladies room before going in to see him. A hair had appeared on her left cheek, and she plucked it and flushed it down the drain. Where did they come from? Facial hairs, Jesus. Didn’t they know she was a woman?

He was a tall man, three or four inches over six feet, broad shoulders. His suit was silver-grey, tailored well to hide a paunch; conservative tie and shoes. He had a small but immaculate collection of chins. His hair, which was plentiful, was a couple of inches longer than you would expect. Vanity, thought Marie. And a sexual magnetism about him which he did nothing to disguise.

His smile was disarming. It activated well over half a century of laugh lines, but in no way diverted one from the serious and deep-brown hue of his eyes. The man’s ace, however, was in the timbre of his voice. Marie had never quite worked out if that professional voice was a gift from God, or something that was developed. Many politicians had it, some broadcasters and actors, and the best doctors and salesmen. It was designed to put you at your ease, take you off guard, so that you could be severely shafted from the rear.

Marie sat down.

‘I thought you might have brought me a cheque,’ he said. He could have smiled again, then. It was hard to tell.

‘Not part of my brief, I’m afraid, Mr Blake.’

‘But off the record, of course, can I look forward to early settlement now the police have dropped the case?’

‘As I said, that’s not my department. But I have been led to believe that our investigation is not to be protracted unnecessarily.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘How can I help?’

‘I have to ask some personal questions,’ Marie explained. ‘And I’m also going to have to talk about your late wife, India. I don’t want to upset you in any way, but—’

‘Just ask,’ he interrupted. ‘During the time I was in police custody, any feelings I may have had were completely shredded. I assure you I won’t be upset. My only desire is to put the whole sorry story as far behind me as possible. I’ll answer all your questions as fully as I can.’

‘Did your wife have any intimate friends?’

‘I’m sure you can do better than that,’ he said. ‘Good Lord, a private investigator with a sense of delicacy. This really won’t do, Ms Dickens. What you mean is, was my wife having an affair? Did she have a lover? Isn’t that what you’re saying?’

Marie nodded.

‘No. India was a faithful wife. She did not have a lover.’

‘But would you have known? Many cuckolded husbands are the last to suspect.’

‘Is that the voice of experience?’ A hard edge had come into his tone, and he checked that now. ‘I’m sorry. I try to be objective, but it still gets to me. My wife was eighteen years my junior, but I believe she loved me. You may well think I’m an old fool who’s deluding himself, and you are, of course, free to hold any opinions you wish. But I’m sure you’ll take your investigation into other quarters, as did the Police before you, and I doubt very much if you’ll turn up any evidence to the contrary. My wife was faithful, and she was murdered by a kidnapper who was clever enough to avoid capture. I know that is not a very satisfying solution for you, and I assure you that it is not for me, either. But it is all we have got, Ms Dickens. And unless the kidnapper decides to come forward and identify himself, it is all we are likely to have.’

‘What about the insurance?’ Marie asked. ‘Why did you insure your wife for such a large sum at that particular time?’

‘My financial adviser had a heart attack. I had liquid funds to dispose of. An insurance policy seemed a good idea.’

A very good idea, thought Marie. Especially in retrospect.

‘I bought a small house as an investment at the same time. And a car. All during the same week. You can ask my secretary for the accounts when you leave. I’ve asked her to give you access to anything you think pertinent.’

She was a middle-aged secretary with a blue rinse and a tired smile. Definitely not a steroid enthusiast. Marie didn’t have to ask to discover that the woman had three children (all girls, to her husband’s eternal disappointment) before retraining and returning to work. This was her fourth job during the second phase of her working life, and Marie foresaw that the woman would have several more in the future. It was impossible to stop her talking. She was like an amplifier: tuned in to her own internal stream of consciousness and broadcasting out to the universe.

She found some of the documents Marie needed, but couldn’t put her hands on the bank statements covering the week when Edward Blake had taken out the insurance policy on his wife. ‘Goodness, I had them earlier,’ she said. ‘Mr Blake thought you’d want to check them, and I made a point of getting them ready. You know how it is, I’ll find them as soon as you’ve gone. Probably be looking out of the window to see if your car’s gone from the car park.’

‘You could fax them to the office,’ Marie told her, giving a card, trying to make a getaway before the woman worked up a second steam.

When she got back to the car park Marie checked the car for tracking devices. Women like the blue-rinse secretary always seemed to know where to find her. Once inside the car she let the engine turn over while she sat with her forehead on the steering wheel, her eyes closed. ‘If there’s a god ’ she said, speaking into the far reaches of the cosmos, ‘please don’t let me end up like that.’

Dr Simon Cod met Marie at the entrance to his office in the York District Hospital. He was a full head smaller than her, maybe forty years old. He had a broad smile, carefully cultivated to hide every one of his feelings. To Marie’s knowledge he never took it off. Perhaps, if a person was to go to bed with him, get really intimate, he might remove it then? Marie didn’t know, and she didn’t intend to find out. A night with a guy that short, and for what? So he could stop smiling for a while? Christ, right after breakfast he’d look just the same as he did every other day of his life.

The smile was there now, on his face, and it really was very good. You wouldn’t know it was a mask unless you spent some time with him. He had all the earnestness of a Lada salesman.

‘Marie,’ he said. ‘Still playing at being a detective, I see. Such a shame, when you have good qualifications, excellent experience. You’re sadly missed in the department.’

That was another thing. It wasn’t just the smile. The sad little bastard was patronizing, too. But Marie could play that game.

‘It was you who gave me the idea, Simon. Pathology is a kind of detective work, isn’t it?’

‘Pathology? Yes, I suppose so. Post-mortem certainly is, and I think that’s why you’ve come to see me.’

He led her into the office and retrieved a large file, which he flipped open. ‘Mrs India Blake, deceased.’ He sighed looking down at a photograph of the woman, taken a few weeks before her abduction. ‘Such a waste.’