Walking with Ghosts (6 page)

Marie looked over his shoulder. India Blake had been a striking woman. She was thirty-six, but could easily have passed for someone in her late twenties. The photograph was taken by some fashionable professional, and showed a beautiful woman wearing a thirties’ style coat with heavily padded shoulders. The coat was open, revealing a black lace blouse and a skirt with a cut to die for. The gaze of the woman was upward, past the left shoulder of the photographer, nonchalant, wistful, as though the camera had caught her unawares, in a private moment.

Behind her was a parapet, and beyond that a series of rooftops. It could have been taken on the city walls, or the roof of the Minster, but Marie didn’t think so. Maybe the photographer had a penthouse studio somewhere?

Cod handed her a list of substances found in and around the allotment shed. ‘That’s a list of everything we’ve identified,’ he said. ‘The second column shows where it was found, and the third column is a guesstimate of the approximate quantity.’

The next photograph had been taken inside the allotment shed shortly after the corpse had been found. If you looked really hard you could have identified her by the hair. There was no face left. The bugs and crawlies had got inside her eyes and stripped the flesh from her nose. Her lips had gone, as had most of the tissue from the inside of her mouth. There was still some flesh on her forehead and chin, creamy coloured, like full-fat cheese, but with black marks.

The body had been concealed beneath the flooring of the shed. A couple of teenagers looking for somewhere to screw had disturbed the flooring and found something that put a strain on their relationship before it ever got going.

‘Piophila casei,’
Simon Cod told her. He held up a cellophane bag. Inside was a small fly. ‘Known as the cheese skipper, because it’s a pest in stored cheese and bacon, which to its simple mind is dead meat. This is the adult variety. She appears quite early on a dead body, but her larvae are never apparent before two months, and often take between three and six months to show themselves. There were no cheese skipper larvae on the body of India Blake.’ Marie peered at the fly, but didn’t find it very interesting. ‘OK ’ she said. ‘So this,
thing
, tells us that death occurred less than two months before the body was discovered. So she was alive for about a month after she disappeared?’

‘Right. But, speaking biologically, death is more of a process than an event. Different tissues and organs die at different rates. We also found these.’ He showed her another sample. ‘The pupa of
Diptera,
blowflies to you. The adults are usually the first to arrive, they colonize the natural openings of the body, the mouth, nose, eyes, ears, vagina, penis, anus, and any injury sites.’

‘Yuk,’ said Marie.

The doctor smiled. ‘Yuk, indeed, Marie. Having said all that, they usually concentrate on the head area, or on open wounds. But in the case of Ms Blake there was a heavy infestation of the vaginal area. This would lead us to suspect some injury in that area, maybe the result of a rape, perhaps something worse.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘There wasn’t enough tissue left to know, but the circumstantial evidence leads us to speculate.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes, these little chaps’ - he indicated the pupa of the blowflies - ‘tell us almost to the day when she died. Give or take a day either side, she had been dead for three weeks.’

‘No longer?’

He shook his head.

But she was missing for three months. How long does it take to starve to death?’

She didn’t starve to death. She dehydrated. She was undernourished, too. There seems little doubt that she was abandoned there. Whoever put her in the hole left her with no food or water.’

‘How long?’ Marie said.

He shook his head. ‘A week? She wouldn’t know much about the last couple of days.’

‘But why keep her alive for two months, longer than that, and then leave her to die?’

‘You asking me?’ said the doctor. ‘I thought you were the detective.’

‘And the pregnancy,’ said Marie. ‘How old was the foetus?’

‘Sixty to sixty-five days. It was developing in very bad conditions. But somewhere around there.’

‘A couple of months. About the same time she was kidnapped?’

‘Yes. Just before or just after.’

He sat at his desk beaming at her as though he’d invented her. Christ, she thought. Dr Simon Cod. Not exactly a traffic stopper. When Marie had worked at the hospital he’d sniffed around her as if she was a bitch on heat. He was the kind of guy, when he wasn’t around any more, you missed him like a cold sore.

She glanced at the list of substances found in and around the allotment shed. Many of the names were unreadable, but some she recognized. Charcoal, cyanide, Dettol, glycerine, greasepaint, horse manure, nicotine, nitrate of soda, paraffin, pyrethrum, soot, talc, Vaseline, washing-soda, wood-ash... Marie dropped the list on to the passenger seat and turned on the ignition.

One or more of those substances could have been brought into the shed by the murderer. But which one? And even if it was possible to isolate one of them, and say, yes, this is it, this is what he brought with him, what then? Where would it lead say, if murderer had left behind a quantity of tincture of opium?

They were waiting for her in the sitting room in Sam and Dora’s house. Sam had gone upstairs to talk with Dora, but Geordie and Celia were sitting there, drinking Sam’s coffee which was the best coffee in the world. And Geordie introduced her to the other guy, J.D. Pears, the writer. I suppose you have to call it chemistry, she thought. It was there right from the first moment they clapped eyes on each other. He couldn’t hide it, he was really interested in her. And she was so taken with him she didn’t hear a word Geordie said. Only J.D. Everything else was a blur.

‘What?’ she said, taking her eyes off the guy before everyone got embarrassed.

‘J.D. Pears,’ said Geordie. ‘Sam says it’s OK for him to follow us around. He’s doing research.’

‘For a book,’ J.D. explained. ‘I write crime novels. Need some info on how you gumshoes work.’

Marie nodded her head. She wanted to take his glasses off, ruffle his hair a little. But then again she wanted to leave him exactly as he was. Not spoil the picture one little bit. Except maybe for the beard.

‘So,’ he continued, ‘would you mind if I join you for a few days? I’ll only be hovering around in the background.’ Marie was still nodding her head.

Celia, Sam’s elderly secretary, said, ‘Marie, sweetheart, why don’t you sit down, have some coffee. You look like you’ve had a busy day.’

By the time Sam came down and Marie had got halfway through her second cup of coffee, she’d begun to be coherent.

She told them what the doctor had said about the body, and gave her impressions of Edward Blake.

‘Did he do it?’ asked Geordie. ‘You think he killed her?’

‘He’s decidedly iffy,’ Marie said. ‘But that doesn’t make him a murderer.’

‘So I missed something today,’ J.D. said. ‘You’ve been grilling the main suspect, and I wasn’t there.’

Marie turned towards him to tell him he could be with her tomorrow, the next day, he could be with her whenever he wanted. But in the turn she forgot what she was going to say. Instead, she said, ‘Are you married?’

She looked at him, her mouth open.

J.D.’s eyes surveyed the room. ‘Used to be,’ he said. ‘But she lammed off with another woman.’

‘They don’t make them like they used to,’ Marie told him.

7

Sam’s footsteps on the stairs. He opens the door quietly, expecting you to be sleeping. You never sleep, though, only close your eyes. Barney raises his head. He keeps you company; sits upright, ears cocked like an ornament.

Sam comes to the chair and takes your hand. What does he want, this strange young man? Well, young for you. What does he want with your thin and pale hand, your diseased and decaying body? Why does he care?

‘Penny for them,’ he says.

You shrug your shoulders. You don’t need a penny.

‘A kiss, then,’ he says, bringing his face forward. You feel his lips on your nose, the aroma of digested coffee and peppermint toothpaste.

You shake your head. He makes you feel like a girl, and you don’t like that. You are not a girl. You are a living corpse.

He kisses your cheek. He is better looking than Dylan Thomas. There are no tickly bristles, no smell of figs, nothing moralistic or priest-like about him. He has no expectations. Is it possible? He leaves you free.

His face is all smiles. His eyes are wide. He is playing a game. You push him away, not too roughly, telling him he must guess. Your voice croaks, and something moves in your throat. Something that should not be there. Something that is growing.

The past,’ he says, going straight to the mark. He has found you out. He knows your mind. He would like to Protect you against the past, drag you out of it into the light of the present. But it is your life, Dora, you can’t leave it behind. Not even for Sam.

‘The children?’

You shake your head.

‘Arthur?’

‘Yes.’ For a moment you feel as though you will weep. J tear comes to your eye and hovers behind the lid. But it dissolves there and slips back inside you.

Sam squeezes your hand and places his head on your lap. He wants to reach back through the years for you, wishes he could pluck you out of the horror and hold you close to him in the here and now.

You stroke his head. You run your white fingers through his hair. Your life is overshadowed by a pear tree, but grace has been sent to you, late and lovely.

‘Arthur’s dead,’ he says. ‘He’s dead and gone, Dora.’

Dead? Arthur?

What a cruel thing it was.

Money was the problem. Money was the barrier. You could not leave, not with two children and no money.

Money? Surely not? But it
was
a barrier then. You had to think of the children. If it had been now it would not have mattered. Now you would have taken the chance, starved if necessary.

You earned a little. Private tuition, coaching the children of the rich. Arthur did not take it into account. You were supposed to use it on clothes for the children. You put half of it in a biscuit tin, high up in the larder behind the Kilner jars. Only mice moved up there.

When enough pennies and twenty pence pieces and pounds had accumulated in the tin you changed them for five pound notes, ten pound notes, and eventually a twenty pound note. You remember the twenty pound note, you remember the first large, twenty pound note, bringing it home and standing on the chair in the larder to reach the tin. It crackled as you folded it neatly into four and hid it out of reach. The tin was as light as the dream it , represented.

Was it you, Dora? Was it really you? The woman is tall and thin, already the fine skin around her eyes is beginning to crease. Her three-year-old daughter is playing in the garden, her baby son is sleeping in his cot, her husband out at work. The sun is in the living room, and the back of the house is in shadow. She stands in the doorway, moving from one foot to another. She rattles a few coins in the pocket of her apron, her head cocked to one side. She is listening. All her senses are alive.

She takes a chair from the kitchen and stands it inside the larder door. In a moment she is on the chair and reaching up into the dark of the topmost shelf. She glances at the three ten pence pieces in the palm of her hand and drops them into the biscuit tin. A moment later she is back at the door, moving from foot to foot, her listening head cocked.

That was the first time you put money in the tin which you had not earned yourself, Dora. Those three ten pence pieces were saved from the housekeeping money. You bought bones instead of meat. You were learning to survive.

Dora Greenhills. Guilty.

If anyone else had done it, Dora, you would have been the first to forgive them. But you could not forgive yourself. You were a thief. You were faithless. Your self-respect, your dignity, they ebbed away like the murky waters of the Ouse. You submitted to Arthur’s beatings with something approaching the joy of a penitent. When his white and hairy forearms took you from behind, cutting your lungs off from the world, and the fist of his free hand pummelled your kidneys, then, and for a time afterwards, you were released from guilt. You were a Catholic during those years, Dora. You were a Catholic and Arthur was your priest.

But your will was not broken. Every week something went into the tin. You changed your coins to notes, and the notes into higher denominations, until finally you had enough to buy a broken-down house on the banks of the River Foss. A house surrounded by factories and shaken by lorries, a house with no garden and only poky, grimed windows. A house of your own. Paradise.

The switchboard operator put you through. Arthur had that note of impatience, something approaching anger in his voice. He didn’t like you to ring him at work.

‘Dora? What is it? I’m busy at the moment.’

‘I’ve left you.’ The line buzzed into silence.