by J.G. Ellis
Chapter Nineteen
Sergeant Turner said, “A young lady to see you, ma’am. Lorraine Nash from Princes Street. Insists on seeing you personally – won’t talk to anyone else. I did try. She’s in a bit of a state.”
Lorraine – or Rain – had fallen asleep on the vinyl bench in the waiting area, her head – hair tucked under a woollen beanie hat – resting on her arm. She was well wrapped up, which made me suspect she might have spent the night out, in a capacious over-everything black coat that went down to her ankles. A green plaid scarf hung loosely about her neck, and she was wearing fingerless purple gloves and pull-on canvas boots.
I put my hand on her shoulder and roused her gently. “Lorraine?” I said softly. She opened her eyes and looked up. “I’ll buy you breakfast,” I said. “We can talk in the car.”
Prompted by her mode of dress, I asked her if she’d slept rough. She said that she had because it was an okay night weather-wise and things had got a bit antsy at the house, and Ken – who apparently looked out for her – was away visiting his nan in Bolton. “She lives in – what’s it called? – supported accommodation, but he’s afraid she might have to move into a nursing home because she needs more and more help doing normal stuff. I think it'd be better if she just died.”
“Better for whom?” I asked.
“For her – obviously. She’s just going to end up sitting in her own piss otherwise being shouted at and pulled about by thicko staff who don’t give a shit about her.”
I parked the car in the shopping centre car park and we walked the short distance to the main road and a café called Everyday Fryday, which has its premises on the corner. Everyday Fryday was, and is, popular with shoppers, and is always crowded at weekends. There’s another café two doors down, which also does good business, but Everyday Fryday gets our vote and patronage – myself and Paul’s, that is – because of their generous helpings of scrambled eggs, and the fact they make a virtue of using free range, their set vege-breakfasts, and the consistent quality of their coffee. The floor is terracotta-tiled with rows of four-seater tables on either wall. The chairs are metal framed with upholstered red vinyl back and seat. There are mirrors and plants and abstract paintings on the walls. You order at the counter and pay while you’re there, are given a ticket with a number on it, and then wait for your order to be brought to your table.
Lorraine opted for the full English and I scrambled eggs on toast. I went to the counter to place the order and returned with two cups of coffee and two sets of knives and forks in paper napkins on a tray, and the ticket with our number on it. I passed Lorraine her coffee and her knife and fork.
“What did you want to see me about?” I asked.
She said, “I don’t want you to arrest me before we’ve had breakfast.”
I smiled and said, “Breakfast is unconditional, Lorraine. We’ll have breakfast whatever you tell me.”
“Seriously?” she said, and I wondered if she were trying to build the drama for reasons to do with an inadequate desire to be – momentarily – the centre of attention. “So if I confessed to murdering lots of people, we’d still have breakfast.”
“Yes, of course. Why not? We’re here now, and it’s on its way.”
She had undone her coat and removed her gloves, but the hat remained in place – perhaps because she was self-conscious about the current state of her hair. Her face was bloodless, unadorned with make-up, or the residue thereof, and looked as if it had been washed a lot in cold water. Her eyes were edged with redness, though they weren’t bloodshot. Her lips were thin and whitishly pink. And, rather pathetically, she was about to confess to something she hadn’t done.
She said, “There’s no such thing as a free breakfast.”
I said, “Well, this one is – unless you imagine you’re going to be lulled into telling me something over breakfast that you might have remained guarded about at the police station. You wanted this meeting, remember?”
“Maybe I should go,” she said. She sounded sulky, a little forlorn.
I said, perhaps a little impatiently, “Oh, don’t be absurd – you can go after breakfast. You might as well eat. If you must go off in a pet, you might as well do so on a full stomach.”
The waiter, a young man wearing a striped apron over his jeans and shirt, brought our food on large oval plates, one in either hand. No tray. He was, however, wearing disposable latex gloves. I dusted my scrambled eggs with pepper, while Lorraine set about her fare with something approaching abandon. Once she’d made inroads into her breakfast, she paused and – with her head down – said, “I killed Adrian.”
To which my immediate thought was: Oh, surely not. How perfectly ridiculous. I said, “You will need to explain how and when, Lorraine – and, if at all possible, why.”
She returned her attention to her breakfast, head down again, avoiding eye-contact. I suppressed an urge to giggle while watching the top of her hat. I was sure – all right then, assumed – that she was ashamed of something, but wanted, while confessing the facts, to avoid representing herself in a shameful light. She finished her breakfast, and, pushing the plate away from her, said, “That was nice. Thank you,” – rather as if I’d cooked it for her personally.
I said that she was very welcome.
She said, “I wanted to die, but I was afraid.” She stared at – or through – me, her eyes moistening. “Do you believe in God?” she asked.
I shook my head and said, “No, I don’t,” and left it at that.
She said, “Neither did Adrian. He called him the bogeyman in the sky.”
“You do, Lorraine, I take it. And you can’t commit suicide if you believe in God, can you? Because your body and soul are not your own, are they? They’re his. You should be busy thanking him for your shit life – preferably on your knees – and wondering wonderingly at his mysterious ways.” I was quoting – almost verbatim – from an online discussion between Adrian Mansfield and Caroline Meadows, both of whom were contemptuous of religious belief.
“You sound like Adrian,” she said, wiping her mouth with a paper napkin. “That’s the sort of thing he used to say.”
I said, “How did you kill him?”
She said, “I stabbed him. He wanted me to. He said it was symbolic. I would be killing a dead man. He said things like that a lot.”
“And your belief in God didn’t stop you going along with that?”
“That’s what’s so fucked up,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t right, but he made it sound okay, like I was doing a good thing. He said God would know I couldn’t do anything evil.”
“He must have been tremendously persuasive, Lorraine – Adrian, I mean, not God – so persuasive that you agreed to kill him. I’m sorry if I sound incredulous, but there must be more to it than that. Were you having a sexual relationship with him?”
“No,” she said. “Honestly, I wasn’t. I wouldn’t have minded, but we were just friends. I think he might have been having sex with Sharon. She was really into him – talked about him all the time. Probably killed herself over him.”
“And yet you allowed yourself to be talked into murder? Why, Lorraine?” I sounded like a frustrated parent who desperately wanted to understand.
“I told you. He asked me to. He wanted to die. After the picnic, I went with him to the lake.”
“The picnic? What picnic?”
She faltered. “We had a picnic. Didn’t I tell you? We had a picnic in the dark – before we went to the lake. I should have set him on fire. He wanted me to set him on fire in the boat and push it into the lake. We thought it would be beautiful, but I couldn’t do it. I was scared. I suppose I let him down.” She was crying quietly. “I betrayed him,” she said. “He said I would. He said it jokingly – that it didn’t really matter – but I wish I hadn’t.”
“Who else was at the picnic?” I asked.
Suspicion, like flint, sparked in her eyes. “You want me to betray everyone,” she sneered. “I’m th
e one who killed him.” Defiantly. “Aren’t you going to arrest me?”
“Was Sharon at the picnic?” I asked.
“I didn’t come to see you to grass on people,” she said. “Anyway, she’s dead now? Does it matter?”
“No, indeed,” I said, sipping at my coffee, “which is why I asked. You can hardly grass the dead. Anyway, according to you, she’s already on God’s naughty step, so how will it hurt her – or you, for that matter – if you tell me whether she was at the picnic or not? I can’t help thinking you’ve already blown your chances of an eternity listening to angels playing harps.”
It was a mistake, and inappropriate, to talk to her in this way. I think I was rather too buoyed by the knowledge that she hadn’t killed Adrian, and assumed, when I got around to telling her, that she would be too; and I grossly, and crassly, underestimated the other complicated things that were going on with her. I should have told her there and then that she hadn’t killed him. It was a mistake not to have done so.
She said, “I prayed that something good would happen for me and Sharon. I prayed and prayed in my room, and then went to church to see if that would make a difference. I lit a candle and offered to hurt myself.” She shook with emotion, her face etched – shadowed and cracked – with grief. “And now she’s dead. You don’t think she’s being punished?” She sounded accusatory, bleakly hopeful.
“No, Lorraine, I don’t.” I was lumpishly emotional, though I don’t believe I was close to tears. “And isn’t that a good thing? Being dead is like all the years before you were conceived. You just don’t exist. You obviously didn’t experience a hundred years ago, and you won’t experience a hundred years hence.” What on earth was I thinking of? I’d have done better – and I really ought to have realized this – to try and persuade her that her friend, Sharon, had, suicide notwithstanding, been afforded a warm welcome by Saint Peter at the pearly gates. It would surely have been fairly straightforward for me to have represented myself as having a better knowledge of her belief system – and comfort story – than she did, and then to tweak it and play it back to her in such a way that it suited the circumstances and offered the solace she needed and craved. When I was fifteen, a nine-year-old neighbour told me her grandfather had died and was now a star in the sky. We were sitting on the doorstep together, feeding a stray cat. I didn’t contradict her, and rather felt ashamed of myself for not doing so. Much later on, of course, I was relieved I hadn’t done so, and wondered at the intellectual arrogance of my younger self.
“Great,” she said; “so nothing and no-one gives a shit about me. Cheers.”
“It’s not up to me or anyone else to make your life meaningful, Lorraine. That’s up to you. If you need a vision of a god or gods to do that for you, then pick a religion and go for it. We all have to find meaning somehow, even if it means lying to ourselves. I’m quite comfortable with the idea that my existence is an accident, that I would have been a different person had I been conceived an hour earlier or later than I was. I don’t know, but it might be that a minute or a second would have fundamentally changed who I turned out to be. Indeed, it’s wrong to think of it in terms of being an I or me at all; it would have been someone else, no more me than a brother or a sister.” I sipped at my coffee. Lorraine was staring down at the table-top like a sulky teenager. “Does any of this resonate or make sense to you, or am I just a boring member of a privileged class going on in the way that people like me always do? I don’t mind; I’m just interested in what you think.”
She lifted her head and stared at me – rather vacantly, really as if she were ill, or her mind were entirely elsewhere. Finally, she said, “I don’t have to worry about all that shit now. I’ve committed murder. What’s the food like in prison?”
I said, “Murder’s a crime, Lorraine, of which you’ve yet to be charged, never mind convicted.” I must have sounded irked and impatient. What was the matter with me? I think I had a sense that I was wasting my time and was irritated at myself for the condescending feeling of pity I had towards her. Caroline Meadows infuriated me over the course of the investigation, but at no time did I feel sorry for her. Caroline was exceptional; Lorraine was the small tragedy of the broken ordinary – the chip or crack in a household cup that makes it useless for purpose. “We’ve yet to establish that you killed him. How many times did you stab him?”
“Once,” she said. “I did it how he told me to do it.”
“Where did you dispose of the knife?” I knew, or thought I knew, the answer to this.
“I didn’t. I left it in him. Why, did someone nick it?”
“Who would do that, Lorraine?” I asked. I was forming a bizarre picture of young people writing their own history in terms of life and death, and it not going entirely to script. Someone had taken the knife after the event, and after the filming of the event. So who and why? There was so much I didn’t know. Had there, indeed, been a picnic in the dark? I thought of it capitalised, possibly with the definite article, like a historical event – The Picnic in the Dark – though the battle for its definitive narrative had yet to be won. What we call history is a winning spin on events, on things that happened, sometimes very bad things. Half-truths with good PR often become history, and myths are often nothing more than history narratives with the troublesome contradictions removed – truth served the way we like it, unmessy and unequivocal.
“Dunno,” she said with a shrug; “but if you say they did, they did.”
“Maybe someone wanted a souvenir,” I said. “You must have seen the video, Lorraine. The knife was there when that was filmed.” I was wondering when the spoiler video would appear, the one featuring Adrian with the arse sign around his neck. Surely it would appear. It would only take a mobile phone to film or photograph it and a few minutes on a computer to upload it. Wasn’t that the point of it – to derail and ridicule the suicide’s narrative? I said – for Lorraine, having come to confess, seemed reluctant to speak: “What was he doing when you stabbed him?”
“Nothing,” she said. “He was tied in the boat, completely out of it by then – dead to the world. He’d been drinking and taking drugs all night. He planned it like that.”
I said, “He was dead, Lorraine – you didn’t kill him. And, yes, he did plan it like that. I’m guessing he wanted you to stab him because he didn’t want to risk being alive when you set him alight, which you actually failed to do. It might have made a good video – we’ll never know now – but I wouldn’t want to risk being cremated alive, would you? Did you tie him into the boat?”
“I helped with the last bit. He did most of it himself. I mean, I was supposed to be doing the hard bit by setting him on fire.”
“How were you going to do that?” I asked.
“A can of lighter fuel and a match basically. I think someone might have brought a fire-lighter. Can we go? I’m getting hot.”
I said, “Why don’t you take your coat off then?”
She said, “I want to go. Can we go?” She sounded panicked. I wondered if someone had come in whom she recognised, or she feared would recognise her, though I hadn’t noticed anyone paying her – or us – any particular attention.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked. But she had got to her feet and was heading for the door. It was a bright day, and her back became a silhouette as she crossed the threshold into the light. Despite a sliver of panic, I got up and followed her without haste.
On the pavement, she said, “Aren’t you afraid I’m going to run off?”
I said, “Well, I’d rather you didn’t, Lorraine; I’m an inelegant runner – and since you came to see me, it would seem a bit rude.” Actually, I was anxious to get her back into the car, though I didn’t want to risk forcing the issue.
She smiled coyly, and said, “I think you’re afraid I’m going to run away.”
“Not really,” I said. I swept passed her and returned to the car park without looking back. I got in and slammed the door. She was standing on a rai
sed square of grass on the edge of the car park, where inverted U-stands were provided for parking and chaining bicycles. Darkened to a silhouette by the sun, she looked like a caped scarecrow with its head at an awkward – broken – angle. I leant across and opened the passenger-side door, and waited. A cloud shrouded the sun. Lorraine straightened her head and walked slowly towards the car. She got in, leaving the door open, and stared straight ahead – at, rather than through, the windscreen. I leant across her and closed the passenger door, and we sat, still and silent for a moment, staring out the windscreen. Finally, I started the engine and backed out. While I was doing this, Lorraine shrugged – carefully – out of her coat. Indeed, she did it by increments with a cautious eye on me. I thought of an animal sloughing its skin and its attendant risk of predation. She folded the coat on her lap and tugged at the cuffs of her sweatshirt. I caught a glimpse of something the colour of red wine – a mark, a blotch – on her left wrist. She noticed me noticing and tugged the cuff further down. I said quietly, “Show me, Lorraine.”
She said, “Fuck off,” and turned away from me.
I said, “Show me. I’m not going to judge you.”
We were in slow-moving traffic – which was a mercy – because I wasn’t quite prepared for what she did next. She pulled her sleeves up to her elbows and held her arms out in front of her, palms up. I was reminded of depictions of Christ displaying his crucifixion wounds. She said, “I can’t kill myself. I don’t know why. I wish I could.” Her bruised and mutilated arms were apparently being offered to me as a monstrous tapestry of some fairly serious attempts to do so.
I asked about the Picnic in the Dark – who were the attendees?
She said, “Just me and Adrian.”
I said, “I don’t believe you, Lorraine.”
“I don’t care,” she said; “it’s the truth.”
I said, “Why did you say someone might have brought a fire-lighter?”
“I meant one of us,” she said.
“So who filmed and uploaded the video, Lorraine – you?”
It would not be quite accurate to say she started screaming, though I thought of it like that at the time. Rather, she hugged herself in a desperate, violent way, her fingers clawing her upper-arms, and a moaning or keening – tortured and demented – rose from within her and grew in volume until it filled the car. Deafened and sickened – and a little panicked – I pulled over on to a patch of gravel in front of a church, braked abruptly, and turned off the engine. I might have sighed, but I remember something like non-movement and silence, or non-noise. Lorraine appeared to have passed out and was leaning against the door. Possum-playing or some epileptic absence, I couldn’t be sure, but a second after – or so it seemed – the door was open and she was out of the car and running. A trick of the light or mind – to do with her pulling on her coat as she ran – created an illusion of a shadow-bird with a broken, trailing wing trying desperately to take off; but the wing mended and straightened and took air, and then she was gone, vanished in the light. Forever, as it turned out. I would never see her alive again. The open door – through which light sharply splashed the passenger-seat – seemed like a gash, a rupture, in a sinking ship. I called in to have her picked up; I was hoping to save her life.
Her decapitated body – actually, it was less tidy than that – was found two hours later on a railway track half a mile outside Amberton. She had stolen a bottle of Scotch and consumed most of it before making a pillow of her coat and lying down beside the track with her head on the track-side of the rail.