Walking with Ghosts

by Baker, John

  ‘No, please,’ Sam said. ‘She looks as refreshing as a day with the tax man.’

  Geordie left Janet with a group of young people and walked over to Sam. His eyes were sparkling. ‘This is great,’ he said. ‘I should get married more often.’ He looked at Sam’s face. Held out a half-smoked joint.

  Sam shook his head. Smiled.

  ‘Come on, Sam, it’s a wedding. A little bit of blow won’t hurt you. Don’t be so serious.’

  ‘Serious. Christ, Geordie, I’m an alcoholic.’

  Celia was deep in conversation with Janet’s mother, so Sam helped J.D. and the band set up their instruments. Took a long time.

  ‘Tell you what,’ J.D. said to the lead guitarist. ‘Once we get going we won’t be able to stop one song and start another.’

  The guitarist thought about it for a while. ‘Right,’ he said eventually.

  ‘What we could do,’ J.D. told him. ‘We could run through all the numbers without stopping.’

  ‘Like fade out one and bring up another?’

  ‘No. You’re not listening. Don’t be a bunny. What we do is, we allow one song to metamorphose into the next one.’

  ‘Like Kafka, man?’

  J.D. raised his eyebrows. He handed a tambourine to Marie. ‘You can play this, pretty woman.’

  Marie took it from him and shook it, then she turned it upside down and shook it again. Seemed to play better that way.

  J.D. turned to Sam. ‘Did I thank you for letting me run with the pack?’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Sam.

  ‘I can’t forget it. Pm jingle brained with dope and goofy about this woman here, and I still can’t forget it.’

  They went into the first song, and Sam listened closely for the time it would metamorphose into the next one, but it didn’t happen. After twenty-eight minutes, ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ showed no signs whatsoever of transforming itself into a second song.

  Everybody in the band reckoned it would do, though, eventually.

  With a little help.

  Sam drifted over to Celia and Janet’s mother. Celia had the butt of a joint between the first and second fingers of her right hand. There was a guy in front of them had adopted the fig-leaf position. Both of the women were staring at him. But he was out of it. Didn’t even know they were there. Paralysed with paranoia.

  ‘How’re you doing?’ Sam asked, indicating the cigarette. Celia waved her hand nonchalantly. ‘Over-rated, this stuff,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel any different at all.’ She got to her feet and headed for the buffet table. ‘Hope there’s something left to eat. My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.’ And she howled with laughter.

  Late at night Sam took the newly wedded couple to see Dora. They sat with her for around fifteen minutes. She laughed at their descriptions of the reception, but she quickly tired. ‘I’m not sorry about missing the party,’ she said. ‘But I’d have liked to be at the ceremony.’

  ‘I thought about you, then,’ Geordie told her. ‘I thought about my mother for a while, then I thought about you.’ Dora reached for his hand, and he gave it to her. ‘Thank you, Geordie,’ she said. ‘I thought about you as well.’ She glanced at Janet. ‘Both of you.’

  A couple of minutes later she was asleep.

  Sam took the two of them home in the Montego. They got into the back seat. ‘You should have gone away,’ he said. ‘Even if it was only for a couple of days.’

  ‘Too much responsibility,’ Janet said. ‘Geordie doesn’t want to go away till this case with India Blake is finished.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Geordie. ‘And your mother. We can’t go away and leave her by herself in the house. When that’s all sorted we might go to Amsterdam for a couple of days. I’ve bought a Dutch phrase book. We read it in bed.’

  ‘Not tonight, though,’ said Janet.

  ‘Not likely,’ Geordie agreed. ‘Whadda you think I am? Reading in bed on our honeymoon?’

  27

  There was a moment there, when she first opened her eyes, Marie didn’t have a clue who it was in bed with her. Her consciousness had wiped J.D. out of the reckoning, totally forgotten about him, so he didn’t figure in the equation. She knew Gus was dead, so it couldn’t be him. There’d been a wedding and a party long into the night last night, so taking everything on balance, including the alcohol and the Nepalese Temple Balls, it could be just about anybody. She sneaked a look at him.

  It was J.D. with his mouth open.

  Christ! J.D. How could she have forgotten about him?

  She lifted her head from the pillow and swivelled round, swinging her legs over the side of the bed, and a knife, several knives, a canteen of cutlery fell off a shelf inside her head and almost forced her eyes out of their sockets.

  ‘Yuuuuuuuuuk,’ she said, gently lowering her head into her hands. ‘Yuk, yuk, yuk.’ But no one was listening. As she sat there she recognized that her head was only one of the problems. There were so many things wrong with her she couldn’t begin to count them. She needed to pee, that was the first thing. Then the sphincter guarding her back passage seemed to have taken on a life of its own, and was currently dividing its energies between a rhythmic spasm, something akin to African tribal drums, and a bubbling intensity like the dance of hot metal being poured into a mould. Her limbs ached, arms and legs, especially the legs, thigh and calf muscles having been forced into exertions of dance never before contemplated. And then there was the inside of her mouth. She knew all the old descriptions from the politically incorrect Arab’s armpit, to the bizarre bottom of a budgie’s cage, but the imagery that came to Marie’s mind now reminded her of the photograph of the decayed body of India Blake.

  She didn’t have time to dwell on it, however, as the absolute need to pee forced her mind to organize the reluctant tissue and muscle. The journey to the bathroom was one for the Israelites, or those guys who hauled the big rocks to Salisbury plain, but she made it.

  Nepalese Temple Balls. Never. No more.

  Everyone would be late in the office. Geordie might not make it at all, with a honeymoon on his hands. She and J.D. had walked Celia home last night, Celia telling jokes she’d heard in the nineteen thirties and not been able to understand. Marie and J.D. still didn’t understand them now, but all three of them laughed just the same. Then Celia had gone into a medley of Gracie Fields’ greatest hits, ‘A Little Dutch Boy And A Little Dutch Girl’, ‘Little Donkey’, ‘Sally’, and ‘Around The World’.

  Marie did try to get J.D. out of bed, but decided she’d have more luck raising Lazarus. He had said that he’d come to the office with her last night, but now he was full of reasons why that wasn’t possible. He had to go back to George Forester’s house to collect his drum kit. He’d arranged to meet up with the guys in the band. He needed to do something quiet, like maybe play some cards.

  ‘Did I tell you I was reliable?’ he said.

  ‘No, but you did say we’d spend the day together.’

  ‘I can’t get it on. The band’s got another gig tonight, somewhere up near Whitby. I need to sleep.’

  ‘Please yourself,’ she said. ‘It’s your life.’ When she left the house, J.D. didn’t look like he had enough ambition to make the trip to Whitby.

  When she got to the office, Joni Prine was sitting at the top of the stairs waiting for her. When she saw Marie, Joni developed a coy smile. There was more than a hint of apology in it, but it would have taken Raphael to disguise the underlying avarice.

  Marie waited until Joni got to her feet. She watched as the girl smoothed the wrinkles out of her skirt, and continued watching as the same wrinkles cracked straight back into place. ‘Does this mean you want to talk to me about Edward Blake?’ said Marie.

  ‘Five hundred quid’s a lot of money to somebody like me,’ said Joni. ‘I’ve got Jacqui to think of as well, that’s my daughter. With that kind of money I could go back to Sunderland, get a place near my mum now the old man’s given up the ghost.’

  ‘Sounds lik
e the right decision,’ said Marie, leading her into the office and showing her the clients’ chair.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ said Joni, ‘as long as Eddy doesn’t find out it was me that grassed him. If something happens to me who’s gonna take care of Jacqui?’ She became agitated, rubbing the backs of her hands on her thighs, gnawing away at her bottom lip.

  ‘You’re still not sure, then?’ asked Marie.

  ‘I think it could work,’ Joni said. ‘It’s a good plan, the way you explained it to me. But there’s still a risk.’

  Marie nodded. ‘Small one.’

  ‘What I thought,’ said Joni, looking down at her hands. ‘I thought I’d feel better about that risk if there was more money involved.’

  Marie felt a smile building inside her, but she kept her face straight. ‘How much were you thinking, Joni?’

  ‘Six hundred. If that’s possible. I’d feel a lot better if the pay-off was gonna be six hundred quid.’

  Marie put her hands on the desk and leaned forward. ‘Joni,’ she said. ‘If the story is as good as you say, and provided it’s all completely true, you’ll end up with six hundred as a minimum. If we get the timing right and catch Edward Blake with his proverbial pants down, you could et a lot more.’

  ‘A lot,’ said Joni. ‘What we talking here, a grand?’ Marie nodded. ‘Maybe. Just tell me the story.’

  ‘He’s working for the tobacco industry,’ Joni said. ‘I don’t know how much he’s allowed to spend, but it seems like there’s no limit on it. What he does, he has to get MPs to vote the way the tobacco companies want. They’re frightened that the government’ll be pressured into banning cigarettes, you know, by doctors; or they’ll have to put out adverts saying that smoking fags gives you heart attacks as well as cancer, and if you’re pregnant it makes the kid get born with two heads but no brains. Stuff like that.

  ‘There’s a few MPs who keep at it, bring up bills to ban smoking. What Eddy has to do, he has to make all the other MPs vote against the ban. And the way he does it is to make them realize that the tobacco industry is always gonna give them a good time.’

  ‘By paying them?’ asked Marie.

  Joni nodded. ‘Cash and sex,’ she said. ‘Booze, holidays, anything they want. Tell you the truth, I don’t know the half of it. I only really know the bits that’ve involved me. I’ve spent weekends with MPs, done more or less whatever they want, then at the end of it I’ve slipped them a brown envelope bulging with used notes.’

  ‘Can you give me names? Dates?’

  ‘Names, yeah. Dates I can probably work out. But I can do better than that. The last year I’ve been recruiting girls for Eddy. He’s got a couple of cottages in Wheldrake now, and he sets them up with an MP and one or two girls, whatever the guy wants.

  ‘Or if there’s two guys he’ll put three or four girls in there. Or boys if they’re that way. We stock up the bar, make sure there’s plenty of mirrors in the bedrooms, dressing-up clothes, everything they might need, and leave them to it. The girls do whatever the guys want. They’re young, they like them younger all the time, so we recruit runaways homeless kids, whatever. After a bath and a bit of scent and make-up they all look great. Eddy gives them a hundred quid for the weekend.’

  ‘You know where these cottages are?’ asked Marie.

  ‘Sure. Eddy doesn’t go anywhere near them. I have to get them cleaned up, stock the bars, deliver the girls down there.’

  ‘D’you get much warning?’ Marie asked. ‘When will the next party be?’

  Joni smiled. ‘That’s why I’m here,’ she said. She pulled two fat brown envelopes from her bag. ‘Eddy gave me these last night. I’m taking four girls to the cottages today. Then a couple of politicians’ll arrive around six o’clock tonight. According to Eddy one of ’em’s a top civil servant, but the other’s a cabinet minister.’

  When Joni left, Marie went through the India Blake file. She read through the transcripts of Geordie’s interviews as well as her own. Something was nagging at her. Something they’d missed. But she couldn’t work out what it was. She made coffee and drank it looking out of the window. The pain in her head slowly ebbed away. She turned to the file again and read it from beginning to end.

  She was putting all the paperwork back into order when Sam arrived. Marie told him about Joni Prine, and what she’d said about Edward Blake.

  ‘It’s only a hunch,’ he said. ‘But if I was on this case I’d have another go at India Blake’s old friend, whatever her name was.’

  ‘Naiomi Leaver? You think she knows more?’

  ‘Just reading between the lines,’ Sam said. ‘There was no love lost between Naiomi and Edward Blake. Naiomi could still be guarding India’s secrets in the belief that she was killed by her husband.’

  ‘Slow down, Sam,’ Marie said. ‘We can’t be sure that Edward Blake didn’t kill her.’

  Sam shrugged. ‘The police don’t think so. If they did they’d never have let him go.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I don’t have anything else to go on. I’ll drive over to Naiomi’s house. Got the car keys?’

  Naiomi Leaver was posing in the doorway to her cottage. She was a perfect miniature, composed entirely of fat-repelling enzymes. So small, she’s almost a waste of skin, thought Marie. Then checked herself quickly. Women’s bodies were a no-go area. Soft targets. Easy meat. She’s just small, for Christ’s sake. You could be, too, if you lived on pencil make-up and eye-drops.

  This morning Naiomi was dressed in white designer jeans and a short-sleeved red top with a plunging neckline. The plunge was extraordinary, almost reaching the woman’s navel, yet betraying not a hint of mamilla, not an air bubble, or a blob. Marie reflected that the entire garment would not supply herself with enough material for a headband.

  No scones or fine tea service today. Marie was invited into a warm kitchen and provided with a ladder-backed chair next to a red gas-fired Aga. Naiomi Leaver remained standing. She poured coffee from a cafetière into black mugs, handed one to Marie. ‘Didn’t expect to see you again so soon.’

  Marie sipped the coffee. A lot of money had gone into cutting Naiomi’s age from a good thirty-five to an excellent twenty-eight. ‘I want to ask you again if India was having an affair.’

  Naiomi shook her head. ‘I thought she was, yes. But when I asked her about it, she told me she wasn’t. I told you that last time.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But you said you were fairly sure, not absolutely sure. What did you mean by that?’

  Naiomi tightened the lines around her mouth. ‘Who can be absolutely sure about another person? People tell you what they want you to know. The rest is guesswork.’

  ‘Did you believe she was killed by her husband?’

  ‘Yes. I still do. Edward is a rotter. He’s capable of anything.’

  Marie put her mug on top of the Aga. ‘He’s certainly a womanizer,’ she said. ‘And his political and business methods aren’t exactly whiter than white. But there’s no evidence to show he murdered her. On the contrary, it looks as though he didn’t.’

  Naiomi laughed harshly. ‘He’s clever, that’s all. He fooled the police, and now he’s fooling you.’

  ‘But what if he isn’t as clever as you think, Naiomi? What if India was killed by someone else? And that someone else was left free to kill again? Because of your vendetta against Edward Blake.’

  ‘It’s not a vendetta.’ Naiomi Leaver clenched her fists, the tension turning her knuckles white.

  ‘OK, what would you call it?’

  ‘I don’t call it anything. India was my friend. Edward fucking Blake left her to starve to death in that shed. I think he should be punished for that.’ Her voice had risen to a shout. But she checked herself, and the next words were little more than a whisper. ‘I couldn’t believe it when the police let him go.’

  There was a pine kitchen table behind her, and Marie could see her hands gripping the edge of it. Suddenly Naiomi raised herself up on to the table. Her eyes glazed over and a single t
ear fell down her cheek. ‘He even tried it on with me,’ she said. ‘He knew we were friends and he’d happily have taken me to bed.’

  ‘The guy’s the worst kind of slime,’ Marie said. ‘He cheats and lies, and he’s always on the lookout for the main chance. But that doesn’t make him a murderer. If you know something else, something that India mentioned, about another man, then you should tell me.’

  ‘India didn’t mention anything.’

  ‘Maybe she wasn’t having an affair. Even if it was a friendship, we should know about it.’

  Naiomi shook her head. ‘I asked India about it, and she told me she wasn’t having an affair. She never mentioned another man. Not a lover. Not a friend. Nothing.’

  Marie sighed and got up from the chair. ‘The police have closed the case against Edward Blake. They’ve looked at all the possibilities and decided that he didn’t have anything to do with her murder. We’ve also looked at it and come to the same conclusion. I’ve personally interviewed the guy, and I have all the same reservations about him that you have. But I don’t think he murdered his wife.

  ‘And something else. He’s not going to be arrested again. Whoever it was murdered India Blake has got away with it up to now because everyone assumed her husband did it, and a lot of time was wasted investigating him. I don’t know if you’re trying to protect India’s reputation, or if you’re hoping that Edward Blake’ll be arrested again. But whichever it is, the end result is that the man who killed India is still free and liable to murder again.’

  Marie walked to the door of the cottage and opened it. Naiomi stayed put on the table. ‘Thanks for your help,’ Marie said. She walked out of the door and closed it behind her. She got into the Montego and put the key into the ignition. She’d reversed around the white Rover before the door of the cottage opened and Naiomi came over to her.

  Marie wound the window down.

  ‘Come back,’ Naiomi said. ‘I don’t think it’ll help, but I’ll tell you what I know.’