Walking with Ghosts

by Baker, John

  She does not need a reply. You stroke her body, you make sounds of encouragement. You coo like a bird. Like a silly old bird.

  ‘You’re all I’ve got, Dora. You and Billy. I can’t face it if you die, and Billy is only there in dreams. I don’t know what’ll happen to me.’

  You tell her it will be all right. A woman’s life is like that. No one can see into the future. Sometimes it is bad, sometimes it is very bad. But the good times come round again, often when you least expect them. You cannot afford to be weak. Not too weak, anyway; and certainly not all the time. Life is good. In the end life is good. Whatever they take away from you, there is always so much left. She will probably marry a rich old man, have children of her own. You laugh, Dora, hoping she will laugh with you. Yes, why not? Children of her own. She is only twenty-seven. Stranger things have happened.

  ‘I wish we were a normal family,’ she says. ‘I wish Father was still alive.’

  You have not been a good mother. You never approached perfection.

  ‘But that’s not what I mean,’ Diana tells you. ‘I wouldn’t want you to change, Dora. You’re my mother, and I love you. Only I don’t know what drives me. I don’t know why I’m like I am. I don’t know why I’m different, Dora. Do you understand? I don’t know why I’m not normal.’

  She loves you, Dora. That is what she said. It is another incontrovertible fact. Your Diana has never been one to mince words. If she says love, she means love. You pull her to your face and feel the warmth of her entering your body.

  Her life has not yet begun, you tell her. You had exactly the same fears at her age. It is not hopeless. It is never hopeless. You will always be with her. You will live inside of her. Long after you are dead you will still live inside her. She will never be able to shake you off. And there will come a time for her when she turns a corner, when the past, when everything that has hampered her will fade away. The physical past will no longer be there, it will be spiritualized, and she will be able to take from it whatever she finds useful. That is how it is in life. It is like the sea. It comes and goes in waves, now turbulent, crushing, frightening, exciting, full of passion, and then it is calm, peaceful, empty, boring, slow, and silent. You only have to remember that the waves come and go, come and go. There is constant change. Life and death. Life and death. It is the rhythm of the universe.

  She kisses you, Dora. She really kisses you. She reaches up her face to yours, and you feel her lips on your cheek She gets to her feet and stands back, hands on her hips.

  You tell her there is a song by Lady Day, ‘I’ll Never Be The Same’, and she goes off to find it. Buck Clayton and Lester Young together for the intro, then Billie holding back, intentionally lagging behind the beat all the way. Recorded in 1937, one of the happiest years of her life, and you can hear it in her phrasing, in her harmony. How she takes hold of banality by the throat and coaxes from it a kind of nectar.

  ‘You were always a bloody philosopher,’ Diana says. But she is smiling. She used to smile like that during your time with Smiley. At least at the beginning. During the first few weeks.

  You were both in love with Smiley. For you he was a man, a man who had pulled you out of yourself, given you the key to your sexuality. But for Diana he was a dream. For Diana he was a reincarnation of Arthur. He was exactly what you and she were looking for. Nothing. A heaven-sent nothing. A spaceman filling up the spaces in your lives.

  Smiley was comparatively fresh in those days. He had died an existential death the day the Russians moved into Czechoslovakia, but as yet the smell of death had not consumed him. He had removed his body from the Party, but there was no way he could recover his soul. And it was his body that came to you and Diana, a cadaver, an empty projectile wrapped in a paisley-patterned cravat.

  You cannot be hard on Smiley, Dora. The dead are forgiven everything.

  18

  Sam was out of bed at six. It was still dark. He pulled on his clothes and checked Dora. She was sleeping. Barney followed him out of the room and he took the dog to the park. Donna, his first wife, had come back in the night, in a dream. He hadn’t recognized her at first. He’d thought she was Dora in disguise. She kept trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t make out what it was, couldn’t hear her. There was a mist, in which she was half dissolved. And an overamplified chorus of ‘Visions Of Johanna’, the man at the Isle of Wight in a white suit wishing he was somewhere else. Sam sweating in the dream, a yellow bandanna tied around his head, a Californian sun squeezing him like a sponge.

  ‘Visions Of Johanna’ was punctuated regularly by the piercing scream of a child, and Sam held his fists to the sides of his head wishing for a drink, knowing that wasn’t the answer, but wishing for a drink anyway. A drink in a glass as long as a dream.

  Donna came crashing through it all. She didn’t look anything like Dora. She burst through the mist and the amplified music. She was wringing wet, dripping a river, dressed in those tight black jeans and her T-shirt, like always, her skinny arms hanging by her side. ‘You’ve forgotten us, Sam.’

  Sam hauled in the dog’s lead, patted Barney’s head and let him loose. He took the pebbled path behind the tennis courts, then veered left under the trees and along the edge of the water. Donna, and their daughter Bronte, had been his life before they were swept away by a hit-and-run driver. The twenty-five years between then and now sometimes seemed like hours. It was a lie about time being a great healer. Time was nothing.

  Sam smiled as he lengthened his stride to keep pace with the dog. There were no ghosts apart from the inventions of the human mind. There was memory and fear and guilt, and the three of them had somehow conspired in the night to bring his long dead wife to the forefront of his mind. But the vision that spoke to him was wrong. He hadn’t forgotten her. She was as fresh in his memory as the breeze that skipped over the lake. ‘I’ve changed,’ he said to himself. ’I’m not the same man I was then. But I haven’t lost my memory. God knows, sometimes I wish I had...’

  Celia arrived at the house a few minutes before nine. She had been Sam’s secretary for four years, after retiring from a career as a schoolteacher. For the greater part of her life she had paid lip service to middle-class good taste, but since getting involved in the PI business she had let all that go. This morning she wore a wide-brimmed hat, shades, and a bright red T-shirt under a black velvet trouser suit. She’d clipped a thin gold rope around her neck, and she had rings on seven of her fingers. Her lips were outlined with peachy pink lipstick, which somehow contrived to highlight the slight gap between her two front teeth.

  ‘You look stunning,’ Sam told her.

  ‘I know, and it took a long time,’ she said, ducking under his arm and heading for the stairs. ‘How’s Dora?’ It was a rhetorical question, which Sam didn’t attempt to answer. Celia was sixty-nine years old, she drove an ancient black MG with no heating, and she only listened when she wanted to.

  At the top of the stairs she stopped and turned around. ‘I know where everything is,’ she said. ‘I don’t have anything else planned today, so take your time.’ She flashed him a smile designed to melt an iceberg. *

  *

  Geordie was using the Montego, so Sam got his bike out of the shed. Diana had found the address for Pammy Shelton, the girl who had been keen on Billy before he did his disappearing act. Although it was seven years ago, the telephone directory still had Pammy’s parents listed at the same address. Sam had resisted the temptation to telephone, knowing from long experience that a face-to-face was the best route to information.

  He took the cycle track along the river, leaving it at Water End and carrying his bike up the stone steps. The house was large, five bedrooms at a guess, built of custom bricks with a slight sheen to their surface. Carefully tended roses were blooming in the garden, on both sides of the path. The net curtain in the ground-floor window moved slightly as he approached the front door.

  He hit the bell and listened to an old-fashioned chime, like the prelude to B
ig Ben’s gong. Kind of thing would drive you crazy if you lived with it. Unless you didn’t get any visitors.

  There was a scratching sound on the other side of the door, then it was opened wide by a handsome woman in her forties. Dark hair with the occasional grey wisp. What looked like dried mud on her jeans, and behind her a chemical smell, some kind of air freshener.

  ‘Mrs Shelton?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name’s Sam Turner. I’m looking for Pammy Shelton. Your daughter?’

  The woman’s face changed. It was as if the blood had been sucked out of her in front of his eyes. She reached forward and put her hand on the door-frame to support herself. But it wasn’t enough. Her knees buckled, and Sam took a step forward and offered his arm, fearing she would faint. There was a chair in the hallway, beside a telephone table, and he lowered her into it. ‘Can I get you something?’ he asked. ‘A glass of water?’

  He left her in the chair and went through to the kitchen. He found a breakfast mug with a picture of a cherry on it rinsed it under the tap and half filled it with water.

  ‘I’m going to need something stronger than that,’ said Mrs Shelton. She had left the hallway, closed the front door and followed him into the kitchen. Now she walked through an alcove to a sitting room and took a bottle of vodka from a glass cabinet. She waved the bottle at Sam. ‘You’ll join me?’

  ‘No, thanks. Are you OK?’

  ‘Give me a second.’ She poured a double and a half into a leaded glass, took a good swallow and let herself sink into a deeply upholstered black leather chair. ‘Sit down,’ she said to Sam, waving with the bottle in the direction of a low settee.

  There were eight bottles on the floor, beneath the cabinet. A group of three, then a gap and a group of two, then another gap and a single bottle. After that there was a flute case and two more bottles. Sam had a look-see what they were. The first group were Côtes de Luberon, a Navarra, and Bulgarian Russe, all from Sainsbury’s.

  Then there was a Santa Ema 1990, and a Beaujolais Villages. The Santa Ema wasn’t from Sainsbury’s. The single bottle was La Mancha. After the flute case was a bottle of Campari with only two inches in the bottom, and two thirds of a bottle of Ginger Wine. We weren’t talking serious drinking here.

  Sam settled himself into the low settee, watching a shoal of brightly coloured tropical fish travel the length of an aquarium that spanned the wall behind Mrs Shelton. She took another sip of the vodka and appeared to have regained her composure. She looked Sam in the eye. ‘Pammy.’ She hesitated, flicked her eyes away from him for a moment, then continued. ‘She doesn’t live here any more.’

  Sam shook his head and looked at the fish. Some were ultramarine, tiny, as if they had been squeezed from a tubepiggment. There was another one, much larger, light orange in colour, which seemed to consist of two huge eyes and a mouth equipped with fins and a tail.

  Mrs Shelton caught his gaze and glanced behind her. Her tone was sharpened when she spoke again. ‘I said Pammy doesn’t live here any more.’

  ‘I heard what you said. Trouble is I’m having a hard time putting that together with your reaction when I asked for her at the door. Something’s gnawing at you, and if you don’t want to tell me what it is, I won’t push you. But it seems like the fish are making more sense at the moment.’ She put the remainder of her glass of vodka away in one swallow. Must have been two centimetres there and she didn’t even blink. ‘What’s your business? Why’re you looking for my daughter?’

  ‘Mrs Shelton, I’m looking for my wife’s son. Billy Green-hills. I understand he was friendly with Pammy some years ago. There is a possibility she could help me trace him. She might even know where he is.’

  Sam watched as Mrs Shelton’s body exhaled. The glass slipped from her grip and lay on her lap. A tic on her lower right cheek staggered once or twice then went into a flamenco. ‘Pammy’s dead,’ she said. ‘She was murdered three years ago.’

  Sam let his breath go. He began to speak, searching for some formula of words that would not be patronizing, that would express his regret, his intrusion.

  She held a hand up to wave away his apology. ‘People don’t ask for Pammy any more. Most of the time they avoid speaking her name.’

  ‘If you’d rather not talk about it, or if it would be better some other time, I don’t mind.’

  The woman picked up her glass and splashed vodka into the bottom of it. ‘You’ve started me off now,’ she said, a smile without joy moving round her eyes. ‘Once I start talking about Pammy I can’t stop.’ She sipped from the glass. ‘Billy Greenhills. Yes, I remember him. Nice boy. Polite. They were the same age. He was round here a couple of times, just after they left school. Pammy was keen on him, always talking about him, but he went away.’

  ‘You don’t know where?’

  ‘London, wasn’t it? I don’t remember. I’d forgotten all about him.’

  ‘You never saw him again? When he came back to York?’ She shook her head, slowly, from side to side. ‘I didn’t even know he’d come back. When was that?’

  ‘Three years ago, we think. During the summer.’

  Mrs Shelton wasn’t listening. She spoke with a quiet dream-like voice. ‘Pammy died in the autumn. September. She’d been married for eighteen months. Sandy, her daughter, was six months old. They thought it was her husband, Russell, but he was devoted to her. He’d never have harmed her.’

  ‘Did they arrest him?’

  ‘No, but they wasted a lot of time with him. By the time they’d finished with Russell the real murderer had covered his tracks.’

  ‘So he was never caught?’

  She shook her head. Her mouth fell open.

  ‘Mrs Shelton, is your daughter’s husband still in the area?’

  ‘Russell? Yes, he and Sandy live in Clifton. Not far away.’

  ‘Could you give me his address? There’s a possibility he might know where Billy is.’

  She left the chair and found a small address book. Sam took it from her and copied Russell Wright’s address and telephone number into his own notebook.

  When he left, Mrs Shelton didn’t see him to the door. She was tucked in between the bottle and the glass, framed by the relentless voyage of the multi-coloured fish in the aquarium.

  He had intended to ride round to Russell Wright’s address, but once he got on the bike, Mrs Shelton’s grief got to him. He followed the cycle track along the river, back into town. The woman’s sorrow over the death of her daughter brought back Sam’s earlier thoughts about Donna, his first wife, and Dora who would soon return to him his widower’s mantle. He fully intended to speak with Russell Wright later, but after facing the grief of Mrs Shelton, the breeze and the boats on the water were too good to miss.

  He bought a chicken tikka sandwich and watched the river flow.

  In the Walmgate offices of the Evening Press he read through the newspaper reports of the murder of Pammy Wright. Three years earlier, during the first days of September, she had been found by her husband when he returned from work. She was stretched out on the kitchen floor, strangled with a rope. Their infant daughter, Sandy, was upstairs in a high-sided cot, her nappy heavily soiled. She was distressed because she had missed a couple of her feeds, but otherwise unharmed.

  The killing was puzzling, as there appeared to be no motive. Pammy had not been sexually assaulted, and there was nothing missing from the house. The woman’s purse, containing nearly fifty pounds, was left by the kettle in the kitchen, in open view. There were signs that there had been a short struggle before she was overpowered.

  The press called the killer the Surgeon - because he was meticulously clean, having left behind no fingerprints, nothing to indicate who he was.

  And because, before he left to fade away into the anonymity of the city, he had taken a knife from the cutlery drawer and stabbed deeply into both of the dead woman’s eyes.

  Sam asked the receptionist to ring the crime-desk and see if Sly Beaumont was available. In the age
-old tradition of favour-for-favour Sam had a couple of points in hand with the old reporter. But Sly was looking for even more. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it as he walked over the plush carpeting. ‘Sam. You’ve come to offer me a scoop. Am I right?’

  ‘If I had one I’d give it to no one else, Sly. But I don’t have anything. I’m looking for enlightenment.’

  The old guy laughed, his face creased up like a crumpled paper bag. He took a long draw on the cigarette and coughed. ‘Enlightenment? Sorry, old son, you’ve got the wrong department. You want my wife.’

  ‘The Surgeon,’ Sam said.

  ‘You know something about the Surgeon, Sam?’ Sly’s tone changed abruptly, he reached for the notebook sticking out of his hip pocket.

  ‘I only know what’s been in the press, Sly. What I’ve heard and seen on the news. I’m here to find out what you know.’

  ‘Let’s walk.’ Sam followed Sly out of the office and joined him on the pavement outside. They walked towards Walmgate Bar, the Elizabethan house on top a perfect silhouette in the afternoon sun.

  ‘He’s a nutter,’ Sly continued. ‘Strangled three women in the last three years. Leaves no evidence, no clues. Doesn’t steal anything, has no sexual intentions, doesn’t even ruffle their clothes.’

  ‘I know about Pammy Wright,’ Sam said. ‘I talked with her mother, and I read up your articles. What about the others?’

  ‘Pammy was the first. The following year he killed Amy Munroe, thirty-five-year-old, mother of three. Lived out at Escrick. Then last year Lynn Camish, a widow. Her daughter found her in the kitchen, like the others. House on the Haxby Road.’

  ‘No connection between the women?’

  ‘Nothing at all. Amy Munroe was Afro-Caribbean, Lynn Camish was from the coast, she’d only been in York for two years and Pammy Wright was born in the city. They’d never met, didn’t belong to any of the same clubs, their children went to different schools.’ They reached the Bar and walked through it, passing the wooden doors and portcullis.