by Thorne Moore
‘I suppose someone has to do it.’
‘And who better than Babs, the imminently, but not quite, dead.’
‘Is she ill, then?’
‘No. Not Babs. Doesn’t drink, you see. You have to drink to be ill.’
I could think of a few other ways.
‘Our Babs just lives to be dead. She’s made her own will, you know. She told me. Quite proud, like it’s her life achievement, making her own will. I suppose that’s because she’s minted. Must be. Ever met a poor solicitor?’
‘No.’
‘And do you know what she’s going to do with all her millions? She’s going to leave everything to a cat charity. Can you imagine that? A cat charity.’
‘Now, now.’ Denise bustled in with a tray. She placed a mug carefully on a coaster in front of Angela, which seemed utterly pointless, since the table was scored and scuffed and acid-burned by cigarettes and whisky. Then she pressed a mug into my grasp, folding her hands around mine and gazing at me with pained sympathy.
The mug was burning hot. I flinched free and put it down.
Denise seated herself, knees together. ‘I think it’s the best thing any of us can do, to leave our worldly goods to charity. As the Bible tells us—’
‘Bloody cats? I’m not leaving mine to stinking moggies.’ Angela burst into harsh laughter. ‘Not that I’ve got anything to leave.’
‘Oh but all your lovely photos,’ said Denise.
‘You think they’re worth something? Great. That means there’s a chance for me to cause chaos by dying intestate. Intes-tate. Lovely word.’
‘No it isn’t. It’s a horrible word!’ Denise had to rise to everything Angela said.
To Angela’s satisfaction, of course. ‘Can’t you picture it? All your relatives clawing their eyes out over your treasures when you’ve snuffed it. Ah, but nobody’s going to argue over my crap. Do they still do pauper’s funerals?’
‘Stop it!’ said Denise. ‘Don’t talk about dying, Angela. You’re not going to die for years and years.’
‘Will if I want to.’
‘I’m not going to let you!’ Denise’s response was shrill and demented. It’s always interesting to observe insanity in others if you’re insane yourself. She switched an internal button and calmed down, back to being bossy ward sister. ‘You’re doing very well, and things are really beginning to pick up.’ She turned to me. ‘She has an exhibition, you know. In Hay.’
‘Yes, I saw it. The gallery was just packing it up.’
‘Anything sold?’ Angela shrugged. ‘I doubt it. Denny organised it. It’s called “Getting Angela back on track.” Quite delusional. She unearthed all my tired old shots. Haven’t taken a picture in years. Why should I? I never wanted to be a photographer. I was going to be an Olympic medallist.’
‘That’s how I remember you. Always running and jumping.’
‘But she had a little bit of an accident at college,’ confided Denise.
Angela’s gruff cackle drowned her out. ‘Three o’clock in the morning and I decided to take on the hurdle track. Which seemed perfectly sensible, as I was pissed as a newt. The hurdles won. Quite decisively. Think I’ve still got a bit of one in this leg. I carry it round as a keepsake.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes, well, don’t suppose I’d have really made the grade. Anyway, there was nothing for it then but to do something harmless, like photography. At least it had one benefit. It got right up Ruth’s nose. Can you imagine, her hearing I was taking up photography? I do believe she actually foamed at the mouth. Never forgiven me. I offered to photograph her kids when they were young. Thought she’d have a seizure. So easy to wind her up. I never do kids. Or adults, for that matter.’
‘Yes you do. That beautiful one of pensioners on a bench by the sea.’
‘That wasn’t a bloody portrait. It was a study of wrinkles. Done it. Don’t want to do it any more.’
‘Now, now,’ said Denise. ‘You mustn’t deny your God-given artistic talent. It’s in your soul. Still there, Angela. You’ll find it again as soon as you pick up your camera. It was always there, just waiting for the opportunity to come out. In fact, I think, maybe that accident was just God’s way of guiding you to your real vocation—’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake.’ Angela grabbed her mug, took a desperate swig, realised it was tea and put it down in despair. ‘You don’t half talk total bullshit, Denny. Karen here was the artistic one. You an artist, Karen? Whatever, I don’t suppose you made it all the way here, into the wilds of sheep-shagging country, just to hear about my professional hiatus.’ Her incoherent babbling was becoming even more slurred as her eyes began to droop. She looked as if she might fall asleep mid-sentence.
‘No, of course not.’ Denise looked at me with brave expectation. ‘Karen came here to lance the tragedy of the past.’
‘Lance away,’ muttered Angela. ‘Squeeze all the pus out.’
It was exactly why I’d come. I decided not to prevaricate in case Angela passed out before she could answer my question.
‘1966. What happened? I can remember some of it, but not all. I haven’t been well.’
Denise nodded understanding, encouraging me to go on.
‘I know Janice was murdered. I know – I think I know she got into a car. I think I told Serena. Is that true?’
Angela’s eyes didn’t open wider, but her fidgeting stopped. She froze.
Denise shut her eyes and crossed herself again.
‘Yeah, you told Serena you’d seen it,’ said Angela.
‘What exactly did I say?’
‘Just that. I don’t know. Was there any more? It was all the police were interested in, anyway. Inspector Whinn. Serena’s father. In charge of the investigation.’ She managed another humourless cackle. ‘Must have wished he wasn’t. My God, he must have. Got pilloried for the way he handled it. Cocked it up from start to finish. Not even a court case to show for it. I suppose, officially, it’s still an open case.’
Denise gave a whimper.
Angela ignored her. ‘I reckon that’s why he buggered off to Hong Kong. Colonial police. We never saw Serena again for years.’
‘But you’ve seen her since?’ I was on the edge of my seat.
‘Oh yes.’ Angela’s eyes shut. I thought I’d lost her. Then they opened again a slit. ‘Saw her. Didn’t speak about it though. None of us wanted to resurrect it, did we. Not until you turned up.’
‘I see,’ I just managed to say.
‘Want to know more, go ask her. Not that she’ll remember. It was all years ago. Years and years and years ago. She’s probably forgotten all about it.’
‘No!’ Denise gave a little scream, like a mouse in agony. ‘Not that. None of us can forget!’
One moment the kindly nurse and the next a mental patient. I could tell her exactly how she was feeling. Her nerves were jangling, like metal girders beginning to come apart, the edifice beginning to shake. Share the love, share the insanity. ‘Do you know where she is?’
‘Serena Whinn-Davison-Canterbury.’ Angela folded her hands, piously, as she slumped further down the sofa. ‘Our globetrotting saint and merry widow. Yes, she’s back in Blighty, rich as Croesus. That’s what you get with two wealthy hubbies. Why weren’t mine ever millionaires?’
‘Yours aren’t dead, Angie. That’s horrible.’ Denise was verging on fierce tears. ‘I think Serena would rather be poor and have them alive than have to go through all that. She didn’t deserve it. And she is wealthy, it’s true, but there’s no one better that God would entrust wealth to. She’s so generous to everyone. She supports all sorts of charities.’
‘Yeah, yeah, the Blessed Serena.’ Angela shrugged grudgingly.
‘She runs a counselling service, you know. Helps people with phobias and motivational problems and that sort of thing. I want Angela to go and see her.’
‘To hell with that.’
‘You’re still in contact.’ I didn’t want to hear about her wealth, her
dead husbands or her business plans. For months, Serena had been turning towards me, waiting for me to come to her. Why couldn’t they just shut up and lead me to her?
‘We chat on the phone, don’t we, Denny? Let her give us little pep talks. Little embraces of encouragement. And we’ve visited. Oh yes. Denny insisted on dragging me back to Lyford to see my brother Colin and do family penance. So we took a trip out to Serena’s grand estate and were served lapsang souchong by the butler.’
‘Now, now,’ said Denise. Her favourite phrase. ‘She has a very nice house, that’s all.’ She was back to being ward sister, though every few moments she compulsively bit her finger. ‘It’s complete nonsense about her having a butler. She made us coffee, and lunch in the garden. She said she has a lady who comes in once or twice a week, but that’s all. She helps out at the local school and the old people’s home.’ She gripped Angela’s arms with a sudden surge of earnest enthusiasm. ‘That’s the sort of thing you should do, Angela. Get involved in the community. Be of service. It’s a reward in itself. To serve God and our fellow man.’
Angela pulled free, stuck a finger down her throat and pretended to retch.
‘So she’s living in Lyford again?’ Just tell me where, please!
‘Not in Lyford.’ Angela attempted a pantomime posh accent, which failed because she was slurring far too much. ‘One does not live in Lyford, darling. One’s cleaner lives in Lyford. One lives over the hill where Lyford is not quite visible.’
Denise bit her finger again. ‘She lives in Thorpeshall. You know it?’
I shook my head.
‘One of those lovely villages on the downs. And why shouldn’t she, after all she’s been through? It was terrible, you know. Tragedy after tragedy. Tony Davison, her first husband, died in a plane crash, out in Australia. Left her with a business in chaos and she didn’t know anything about running a business, so she had to sell up. To his bitter rival, which made it even worse. She felt so guilty about that, on top of everything else. Then back in England she married lovely Jack Canterbury – they worshipped each other, and he was diagnosed with cancer and he…’ Denise’s voice was rising to hysteria pitch. ‘Took his own life. Truly terrible. A mortal sin.’
‘Especially since it turned out he didn’t have cancer after all,’ said Angela, staring into her mug of cold tea. ‘Bit of a bummer, don’t you think?’
‘Serena was distraught. So awful. So many deaths.’ Denise’s frantic wittering subsided into a sob.
‘Yes,’ said Angela. ‘So many deaths. Starting with little Janice Dexter. But not including Karen, apparently. That’s a turn-up for the books, isn’t it? Karen still alive.’
I chilled at her words. They were too sinister to be comfortable, not sinister enough to be malicious. ‘Sorry?’
‘Word got round, you know, that you were dead too. You and Janice, both. Would have been nice to think the bastard in the glass got it wrong.’
A sharp intake of breath from Denise. Her eyes turned up as if she were about to faint. ‘That Ouija board. That was it. Holy Mary, Mother of God have mercy on us. It was Satan at work.’
Angela choked on her own attempt at laughter. ‘It was a crap game, you silly cow. It wasn’t real, was it?’ She stared at me for a second, with blatant accusation. ‘Was it, Karen?’ Then her eyes flickered away again. ‘How come they decided you were dead? Must have been because no one heard from you. Not a peep, all those years. Until you popped up like the Ghost of Christmas Past on Ruthie’s doorstep. So.’ She leaned forward to stub out the remnant of her cigarette on the table. ‘What’s really brought you out of the woodwork, at long last?’
An apple, rolling into a drain…
‘I started to remember things. I don’t know why. I’ve been ill.’
‘So you said.’ They looked at each other. I didn’t need to say more on that score – thanks, Barbara.
‘I remembered Serena first, and then – Janice – the murder, but…’ I clasped my head. I was trying to keep calm, just to get the simple information out of them, but my inner unravelling was running out of control. I was grabbing at threads, slippery as spaghetti. ‘I just can’t remember what I – what happened. I can’t remember!’
‘Seriously?’ Angela shrugged. ‘So you don’t have any revelations, after all? Can’t tell us what really happened to Janice?’
‘I don’t know what happened!’
Denise knelt in front of me. She took my hands in hers and looked up into my face with tearful eyes.
‘Karen. Look into your heart. You know the truth. Tell us. Get it off your conscience now. Be washed in the blood of the Lamb. Confess.’
‘Yes, I would, I will, but confess what?’ I got up, desperate to get away from her.
They looked at each other. Why did they have to be so bloody oblique?
I pushed. ‘They knew the man who did it, is that right?’
Denise did one of her about-turns on a pinhead again. She clasped her hands to her lips, less in prayer this time than in panic, and started shaking, with a low moan. One moment recommending the virtues of confession and the next a quivering wreck at the thought of what she might hear.
Angela was equally disturbed. She stood up suddenly, walked to the open window and leaned out, breathing deeply. Then she turned back and faced me.
‘They had a name, all right. But not a body to go with it. Leastwise, not intact. The 4:22 saw to that. So no one even got to question Nigel Knight.’
— 15 —
Nigel Knight follows us home from school sometimes, laughing, lolloping like a great big dog. He doesn’t laugh like the boys at school, mean and sneery. He laughs like everything’s just funny. He’s big, Nigel, bigger than most of the men on the estate. But then he is seventeen. He’s not at school any more. He lives with his dad on Cherry Way and he works on his dad’s allotment, on the other side of Foxton Road. He doesn’t have a proper job because he’s a bit simple. That’s what my dad says, but Mummy says he’s not normal and a menace and they ought to put him somewhere. He’s not really a menace. He just stands in the road sometimes and the cars have to brake, and the drivers shout and honk their horns. He follows us because he really wants to play. Sometimes we let him come to the swings with us, but he’s much too big. Grown-ups usually warn him to clear off…
*
How could anyone have accused Nigel Knight of anything – of this? And yet, in the seething whirlpool of my mind, memories float to the surface. Memories of his name being snarled, of angry voices, dogs barking. And then whispered voices, shoulders shrugged defensively. Mr. Knight, his father, standing in the road, looking just as bewildered as his son had ever done.
‘Not Nigel,’ I whispered.
‘That’s what the police thought,’ said Angela, turning back to the window, groping for another cigarette.
‘It was me!’ Denise wailed. ‘It was me. God forgive me, I did it! Because you wouldn’t talk. You wouldn’t tell them. I knew what you’d said to Serena. She told me. I had to tell them, you see. I had to make them believe. I shouldn’t have done it. I’ll be punished all my life!’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, always the histrionic guilt-trip,’ said Angela. Denise, still on her knees, was trying to beat her head on the carpet. She was too stout to manage it with ease. ‘Silly bitch, how’s that going to help?’
I grabbed Angela’s tea and swigged it, because my mouth was too dry to speak. I cleared my throat and croaked. ‘What was it you told them?’
‘I told them I’d seen Janice getting into the car with Nigel. Like you told Serena. Except that that’s not what you told her, was it? You just said into a car with a stranger. It was because Serena – you told her something about it being a dark car, like, you know, purple, and about bits of wood? So I thought, well, it had to be Mr Knight’s car, didn’t it? You know, the maroon Morris Traveller. With the wooden frame. And he used to let Nigel drive it sometimes, didn’t he, round by the prefabs? When no one was watching? I wanted them to be sur
e, that was all, so I told them I saw it too. From way down Aspen Drive. I told them it was Nigel Knight.’
Whatever it was I’d told Serena, I could not conjure up an image of Janice and a Morris Traveller. I couldn’t conjure up an image of Nigel Knight. It was wrong. All wrong.
‘What happened to him?’
There was silence as Denise and Angela exchanged glances.
‘The police went to arrest him. Well they had to, didn’t they, because of what I’d told them!’ Denise wiped her eyes, then her nose, groping in her cardigan sleeves for a tissue. ‘Mr Knight, wouldn’t let them in the house. He said everyone was always picking on his boy and Nigel was harmless and wouldn’t hurt a fly. Well, he wouldn’t, would he?’
‘No.’ Angela and I spoke together. It was the one thing we were all certain about.
Denise blew her nose loudly. ‘Nigel must have been frightened by all the racket. He ran for it. The police got a big search going. All those policemen, banging on dustbins, knocking on doors, swarming everywhere. And the dogs. And all the people on the estate up in arms, threatening to burn Mr Knight’s house down, and… It was horrible.’
Another silence. We could all hear the baying mob.
‘Anyway, they finished up at the – the allotments. They’d got the idea—’
‘All right!’ Angela threw herself round the room like a tiger trapped in a small cage, flinging open cupboards, searching. ‘Where’s the fucking whisky? You cow, Denny. You’ve hidden it again. Yes! All right. They went looking on the allotments because I told them to.’
‘Nigel’s shed…’ I could see it, plain as day.
*
The allotments are our playground at weekends, and on weekdays for anyone who bunks off school. There are always whiskery old men around, planting their peas and hoeing their lettuces, or sitting in their wooden sheds, sharing a Thermos of tea, ready to shout at us if we run too near to their precious dahlias or beanpoles, but there are so many allotments, squeezed into the wedge of land between Foxton Road and the railway line, there’s always somewhere for us to run shrieking, without anyone to mind.