by Sarah Dunant
I went back to the fax and all the little Castle Deanies who’d plumped for surgical self-improvement as a way of spending even more money. It wasn’t that long a list and on the second page in I found her—Muriel Rankin, or Mrs. Pear Shape with the slasher past. Forty-eight last year, she had spent ten days at Castle Dean in a super-deluxe room with all the trimmings. Ten days—she wouldn’t have come away with much change out of two grand. I checked out her occupation. She didn’t have one. Her husband did, though. He was the owner of a fleet of garages. No encouragement to walk, I suppose. Which is why she had such trouble with her thighs. And still did, despite her appointments with Maurice Marchant. I went back to his notes on her case. In the margin, by her return visit (to which she’d brought her husband), there was a little scrawl, made even scrawlier by the photocopier. I had noticed it yesterday afternoon but couldn’t be bothered to try and decipher it. Now I tried harder. “Unstable personality?” I think it read. Her or the garage owner?
It was all so easy I was almost ashamed.
Chapter 9
Iwon’t bore you with the journey. One trip round the North Circular is much like another and although the A10 may end up in the romantic fens of Cambridgeshire, it passes through a lot of crap on the way.
Not her address, though. It was on the outskirts of a sleepy little town called Hoddeston, and although the house may have been built on axle grease it was sound-enough property. Neo-Georgian I think the term is—all new brick, fake cornices, and carriage lamps, the kind of thing that makes brave young architects want to throw themselves from the Lloyd’s Building lifts to draw attention to the alternative. It had probably always had a queasy relationship to kitsch, but the dozen or so brightly colored garden gnomes scattered liberally around the front garden had definitely pushed it over the edge. Weird.
It was mid-afternoon by the time I had parked the car and walked up the front drive. The weather had reinvented itself in the way only English weather can, and after the rain of the day before, there was now warmth and stillness, summer already kicking at the heels of spring. I rang the doorbell. No one answered. I wasn’t surprised. They probably couldn’t hear it over the sound of Roy Orbison blasting out from the back. “Pretty Woman.” In this case not so much a song as an attempted way of life. I peered through the front windows into a large dining room, empty save for a handsome table and a set of removal boxes stacked at the sides.
I went round the side to the back garden. It was what estate agents call “well established,” mature fruit trees and flower beds framing a cricket-pitch lawn. There’s a limit to what a girl can learn from tending a window box, but it so happened I had just been listening to “Gardeners’ Question Time” on the car radio, and they’d been getting so excited about bedding plants that even I noticed the gap at the front of the beds where this year’s petunias should have been. Put that together with the packing cases and you might be forgiven for thinking that someone was leaving. I tell you, people pay me money for this kind of thing.
They hadn’t taken everything, though. The art remained. The French windows were flung open and on the lawn were a number of large paintings, some propped up against boxes, some just lying on the ground. On closer inspection they were all by the same artist.
There was one straight in front of me as I turned. Large, maybe ten by twelve, it was a family portrait: a blond man and a redheaded woman sat on a sofa with two little girls around Amy’s age in front of them, all staring directly out of the canvas. I’m not a great one for art appreciation, more of a “I know what I like” kind of girl, but even I can read crude homage when I see it. The artist didn’t have anywhere near the subtlety or talent of Lucien Freud but did share some of his obsessions—most notably nakedness and a Leigh Bowery size of body.
It wasn’t quite what you expected in your average happy family. The word dysfunctional crept into mind (another gate-crasher or a helpful social addition?) and I found myself checking out the man’s penis for signs of unacceptable life. But when I managed to find it, a curled slug on a bed of crispy kale, it seemed remarkably benign, not to mention almost forgotten. I thought back to the before and after pictures of Mrs. Rankin’s bottom and thighs. And I must say I was rather disturbed.
The other pictures were more of the same. In some of them the background was different—for sofa read a kitchen table (the chairs looking dangerously uncomfortable and spindly under the weight of their occupant) or a garden rug—but the nudity and the bulk of the family remained the same. And so did the gaze. Look at us, the figures seemed to say, aren’t we challenging?
“What do you want?”
I turned to see her standing in the frame of the French windows, the sun straight on her. My first thought was how small she was, lost in a pair of baggy men’s overalls, untidy long fair hair caught up in a dirty band. My second, how young.
“Hello. Are these yours?”
“You’re on private property. You’d better leave.”
“Actually I was looking for Mrs. Rankin. Muriel Rankin?”
“She’s gone. She doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Oh.” I glanced down at the paintings. “Did you—”
But she just wasn’t the chatty type. “This is my house now.”
“Fine. Well, if you could just tell me where I can find her?”
She stared at me, eyes squinting into the sun, then she sniffed loudly and rubbed her hands down on the side of her overalls. “Sure. It’s not far. If you go back out of here and take the first turning on the left. Follow that road for about three, four hundred yards and the entrance is on your right, just after the traffic lights. You can’t miss it. Hers is one of the new ones.”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling her eyes on me as I walked away.
She was right. It wasn’t hard to find. And hers was one of the new ones. Three and half months to be exact.
In terms of size Muriel Rankin had definitely traded down. The stone tried hard to make up for that. Pink marble, veined and carved. Fancy. Worth a few bob. The writing was fake gothic script. The kind they used to put on the tombs of Dracula’s victims so the master would know where to find his loved one again.
MURIEL RANKIN
BELOVED WIFE OF TOM
AND MOTHER OF SARAH AND CILLA
INTO THE SHADES
FEBRUARY 28TH 1995
That was it. No words of comfort, no hope for the future. Dust to dust. I wondered how far the worms had got with their alternative method of flesh reduction. Not the world’s most comforting thought. Maybe I should have accepted Frank’s offer of the computer fraud after all. The only thing overweight there would have been the numbers.
I stood for a while working out how much petrol I had wasted on the journey. But those naked bodies kept coming back into my mind—mother, father, and little Sarah and Cilla, and I knew I wasn’t finished with the Rankins yet. Not least because Big Daddy was still alive.
I drove back and parked outside the house. Roy Orbison had given way to Bonnie Tyler. “It’s a Heart Ache.” She was singing her lungs out. For a young girl she had old tastes. Maybe it was her mother’s collection.
She was standing in the lawn with a brush in her hand, staring at one of the canvases. It was the portrait of the family around the kitchen table. The sun had been chased away by some showery clouds and the garden looked a little less vibrant. The paintings, though, were still striking. “Well,” she said, her eyes on the figures. “Did you find her?”
Good hearing, I thought. “Yes, thanks, I did.”
She didn’t say anything for a while, just kept on looking. Not so much emotional as professional. And the animosity from before seemed to have faded away. Sarah or Cilla? Not Cilla, surely?
“I’m sorry.” But she didn’t say anything, just gave a little shrug. “I … wonder if I could ask you some questions, Sarah?”
“Farah.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The name is Farah. F not S.”
Gothic
script. It plays havoc with the curly ones. Farah and Cilla. God save the children of mothers who watched too much television.
“Farah, then. I’m Hannah Wolfe. I’m a private investigator.”
“Really,” she said with a hint of bad American in her voice. “I thought they only existed in books. Or else they were greasy little men snooping round hotel rooms.”
I have to admit that my mouth dropped open with surprise. I mean for me Raymond Chandler is just part of the myth, the kind of thing PIs read instead of fairy tales, but I don’t expect others to be so well versed. Or so interested. But was it the book or the movie? “How do you know that?”
“Muriel had this video of a film—”
“The Big Sleep?”
“Yeah. She used to play it all the time when we were growing up. She was in love with the woman in it.”
“Lauren Bacall.”
“Yeah, that’s her.”
In love with Lauren Bacall, eh? She wasn’t the only one. I shot a glance at the big woman in the painting. They didn’t look like they had a lot in common.
“In the same way she loved Farrah Fawcett Majors?”
The young woman laughed. “No, that was more of a crush. The kind of thing you get when you’re pregnant. Poor me, eh? At least Cilla’s famous again.”
Eight weeks on and she was coping very well. Now I could see her better I realized she was indeed as young as her name suggested. Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Cilla presumably would be older. “Can I ask how your mother died?”
And now she turned toward me. “Why? What makes you want to know?”
I gave her a massaged version of the truth.
“Marchant? Yeah, I remember him. I didn’t think he was that bad. She’d been to others who’d done worse.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. She was quite an expert on cosmetic surgery, was my mother. Before the guy in Harley Street she’d had her nose and tits done at some clinic, and then her face lifted somewhere up north.”
Cowboys, that’s what Olivia Marchant would have said if she’d been here. “Had they been successful?”
She laughed. “I’ve no idea. She looked a bit smiley, though.” She put up her hands and pulled her cheeks tight back against her ears. Her face took on a definite death-skull look. She released the skin. Boy, the young. They sure know how to bounce back. “It never made her look like Lauren Bacall, though, that’s for sure.”
“And she minded that?”
“Listen … My mother minded everything. She spent her entire life wanting to be someone else. Having her hair done to look like a magazine picture, her teeth fixed so she smiled better, her thighs sucked to make her legs look longer. And the more she did, the worse she felt.”
“Did she see anyone about it?”
“You mean a real doctor, as opposed to a flesh man?”
“Yeah.”
“I think my dad took her somewhere once. But it didn’t help.”
My, I thought. Some people. All I had were parents who aspired too high and set a teenage curfew an hour earlier than any of my pals. And for that I went ballistic. How about you? I wanted to ask. How did you cope? Maybe being sisters helped. Someone to talk to when the going got rough. But I got the impression the question wouldn’t be welcome. “I see. So the operation with Maurice Marchant—”
“Was just like all the others. She got excited before and then depressed when she saw the result. I think she might even have threatened malpractice. She often did.”
“What about your dad?”
“Oh, he just went to work a lot. The weird thing is he really did love her. Or at least what he could remember of her.”
I looked at the pictures scattered over the lawn. How much was caricature? When you really looked, there was quite a sweet face inside all that chubbiness. And that big body would have offered its own warm comfort to a couple of little girls. Except for the fact that in none of the pictures was anybody touching each other.
She saw me looking. “They’re not meant to be realistic,” she said tartly.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t suppose they were. According to my client files your father went back with Muriel to see Maurice Marchant after the operation. Would he have been angry?”
She shrugged. “Well, he’s a businessman, Dad. Likes to get value for money. So he might have been a bit uppity. But he wouldn’t have done anything. I mean he knew her. That one was the last straw for him. It was only a couple of months later that he moved out.”
“And what happened to your mum?”
“She went into a decline. I think that’s the phrase. She killed herself three months later. Swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.”
“Where were you two?”
“I was at art college in Manchester and Cilla was working in Scotland.” She shook her head. “And in answer to the next question. No. I don’t feel guilty at all. She didn’t really bring me up, anyway. Cill and me spent more time with my gran than we did with her. If you ask me, I think she probably did exactly the right thing. Growing older would have killed her, anyway.”
“How about Cilla? How did she feel?”
“Pretty much the same, I think. She’s not a great one for feelings, is Cilla. She came back for the funeral and we haven’t seen her since.”
“And your dad?”
“I think he was more relieved. He stayed to sort stuff out, then packed his bags and moved to Majorca. He’s started a new garage business there with a couple of his pals.”
“Leaving you two the house.”
“As you see.”
I wanted to ask her how it was for her now. I had a suspicion that the big overalls might be hiding a too skinny body, overcompensation for all that fat. But I could have been wrong. Some people survive the most amazing things, probably do better than if they’d had it easier. On the other hand, in my job you have to believe that.
I took an address for Cilla and her dad, just in case (her handwriting was long and fluid, a real artist’s flourish, not at all anonymous), and left her to the touching-up. When I looked back at the paintings again, I found they didn’t freak me so much. She was busy applying a little extra beige to the line of her mother’s thigh. Oh, Lauren. You and your sort have got a lot to answer for. But I still love ya.
Time to go home. In the front the gnomes were even more vibrant. And very new. It passed through my mind that they might have been a deliberate satirical commentary on the notion of a happy home. These postmodern days you never can tell.
It was dark by the time I got to London and I was hungry. The evening stretched out before me like an empty Formica tabletop and at home there was bound to be nothing to put on mine. So I stopped at the Malaysian in the Kentish Town Road, where I ate some slices of an indeterminate animal larded with peanut butter and accompanied by some very strange beer.
By the time I had finished it was after ten. Too early for bed, too late for work. Or most work, that is. Had the day been more successful, I might have been tempted to quit while I was ahead. As it was, I didn’t feel tired enough—or maybe I just worried about the idea of sleep and the fat families that might muscle their way into my dreams. I went back to the list in my little black book. And there was one name that stood out in the night silence. A working girl who only came out when the sun went down.
I decided to take a gamble.
Chapter 10
Rumor has it London is one of those cities where foreigners come to have a good time when the sun goes down, frequenting the sort of places you find in tourist guides under the heading Nightlife. In retrospect I should have read the chapter on casinos. It would have saved me a good deal of time and aggravation.
According to the address the Majestic was attached to one of the big hotels near to the Aldwych. It didn’t exactly call attention to itself. But then presumably most of its clients knew it was there. I turned off the main road and followed the parking arrows down below.
There was a time when I loved undergrou
nd car parks, saw them all as homage to Deep Throat and the fall of the Nixon government (now there’s a man who managed serious reconstruction of his image as he grew older). But a million bad movies and conspiracy documentaries have devalued their sense of urban paranoia. Even my local supermarket has one now—now, alas, the only thrill they offer is death by shopping.
I stashed the car radio under the seat and straightened my skirt. I had had a little trouble deciding what to wear. Since my only experience of casinos was a James Bond movie so old that Sean Connery still had hair, I was somewhat ignorant of the prevailing dress codes. There are, however, advantages in having my limited size wardrobe. I went for smart over shiny, but broke out a new pair of Lycra tights for the occasion. In homage to Pussy Galore I used a lot of eyeliner.
The entrance was modest. A nice pile carpet, a set of racing prints, and a security camera blinking quietly on the wall. I was feeling almost at home. Trouble was I couldn’t get in.
“I’m sorry, madam,” said the man at the reception desk. “That’s the law.”
“What is?”
“That after joining you must wait forty-eight hours before you can gamble.”
“Why?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know the reason. Only the law.” He was about my age, with chiseled good looks and a jaw that looked as if it had come off a wooden puppet. He had a similarly natural way with dialogue.
“If it’s a question of checking out my credit ratings?” I said, confident of Olivia Marchant’s crisp fifty-quid notes in the bottom of my handbag.
“No, madam, it’s not to do with credit. It’s simply the law. First you must join. Then you must wait.”
“I see.” I bet he wouldn’t treat Lady Penelope like this. If only I’d come in the pink car. “So how much does it cost to join?”
“Twenty-five pounds.”
I considered asking if I could just slip in and have a look around, check out whether it was worth the money, but you could see how from his point of view anyone who thought twenty-five quid that important wasn’t the right kind of customer, anyway.