by Jessie Keane
Relishing the moment, she thought. He’s got me and he’s going to draw this out, enjoy it to the full.
Sears was standing there like a statue. His muddy eyes were wide open, staring.
And then he started to topple forward onto Clara. She let out a cry as his whole weight leaned upon her. And as he fell forward, she saw there was a large kitchen knife protruding from between his shoulder blades, buried up to the hilt in his flesh.
And she saw Bernie, standing right behind him.
Their eyes met.
‘Shit! I couldn’t . . . I bloody couldn’t do it . . . ’ moaned Bernie.
Clare stepped to one side, and Ivan Sears crashed down onto the escape, dead.
Clara was too shocked to think, or even speak. Bernie had saved her. Marcus was running up, he’d soon be here.
‘I couldn’t do it,’ said Bernie, and she was sobbing crazily now. ‘It’s all your fault, everything is your fault, and I wanted to do it, but I couldn’t.’
Clara’s legs couldn’t hold her up for a second longer. She collapsed onto the fire escape and closed her eyes.
There was a heavy tread on the metal and then Marcus came up onto their level. ‘Clara?’ he said.
Clara opened her eyes and looked up at him. Marcus took hold of her hands and pulled her to her feet, pulled her into his arms. She clung to him helplessly.
Marcus eyed Bernie over his wife’s shoulder.
Bernie had stopped crying. Her face was wet with tears but she was smiling and there was something manic, something terrible, in that smile. ‘You ought to watch yourself with her,’ she said, nodding to Clara. ‘She’s a dangerous woman.’
And then Bernie spread her arms as if she was about to fly.
‘No!’ Clara turned, reaching out desperately, and Marcus moved too, but they were both too late.
Bernie leaned her waist into the edge of the fire escape, arms still spread, and overbalanced. She fell without a sound, without the merest suggestion of a scream.
‘Bernie . . . ’ said Clara, bursting into tears.
And then Bernie hit the ground far below.
111
It all came out over the next few horrible days. Numb with grief, Clara sat in the police station with Marcus beside her – no Henry. Henry had vanished after Bernie had committed suicide, without a word to his older sister.
They gave statements. Told the Bill that Sears had a grudge against Clara because his younger brother had become obsessed with her, that Ivan Sears had followed her to Bernie’s flat and it was there that he’d chased her out onto the fire escape; and it was there that her sister had saved her, knifed Sears to death, then flung herself from the fire escape in a paroxysm of guilt.
Clara knew the true explanation was nowhere near as simple as that, but it would do.
There were endless questions, it took hours: but finally they left the cop shop and went home to the Calypso.
‘I need a bath,’ said Clara vaguely, and she locked herself in the bathroom and ran a bath, stripped and sat in the hot water and cried bitter tears over the loss of Bernie. She’d been so stupid, so blind, not seeing what torment Bernie was going through, and blaming it all on Henry – who was totally innocent. No wonder he hated her, when she had treated him so badly, misunderstood him so completely.
Oh Christ. Bernie.
Her poor sister. In the end, the pain had all been too much for her. Trapped inside her own tormented head, she had done the only possible thing: she had set herself free.
Clara could see it all over again: Bernie taking flight from the fire escape, falling end over end to her death. The chilling, God-awful smack of her body hitting the pavement. They had all run down after that, as if they could do anything. Ridiculous, really. Pitiful.
Bernie had been lying on her back, her neck twisted, blood pooling out from the back of her head. Her eyes were open, staring up at the sky. She was dead, of course she was dead, what did they think, that they could reassemble her or something?
Henry, white-faced, had gone to a phone box, called the police.
They’d reported it. They had to. People had come out from neighbouring properties at the back of the building, there were witnesses.
And now it was over. Still so hard to believe that Bernie had done all that she did. Killed Toby, Toby who had been so kind to her, because of Clara objecting to her relationship with David Bennett.
David Bennett.
She thought of him, and Sal, and Yasta Frate. Yes, she believed Henry when he said he didn’t kill Sal – but she had to know who did.
She stood up and dried herself and put on Marcus’s towelling robe that was far too big for her. Then she went back into the sitting room. Marcus was there. He poured her a gin and tonic, himself a whisky. Handed her the drink as she sat down.
‘You OK?’ he asked. He knew she wasn’t.
Clara nodded. Sipped at the gin, put her glass aside. He sat down beside her and she cuddled in against him. He put his arm around her shivering shoulders.
‘I’m bloody sorry,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said in a small voice.
‘Anything I can do?’
Clara looked up into those black eyes. ‘Right now? Just hold me, will you? And later . . . ’
‘Yeah? What?’
‘I have to go and see someone. And I want you with me.’
‘OK,’ he said, and held her, stroked his hand over her hair.
At last, she had someone she could depend on. He wasn’t Frank. He wasn’t Toby. Maybe he had married her for Toby’s clubs, but right now she didn’t care. Agonized over Bernie, she could only be glad that he was here with her.
Bernie was over.
No more pain for her, no more torment. Clara closed her eyes and wept and hoped that somewhere, somehow, her sister was finally at peace.
112
There was only one way Clara felt she could stop herself from going completely mad over Bernie’s death, and that was to distract herself. So within a couple of days she was up and dressed and wanting to make some visits. There would be a funeral soon to sort out, and they had already been to the registrar’s to register the death. It was all too awful to even think about.
So she didn’t.
Instead, she took Marcus with her to pay another visit to Yasta Frate.
‘Shit! Not you two again,’ said Frate when they came into his cellar club one evening, jazz pounding out, everyone hurling themselves around on the dance floor, the whole place reeking of cigarettes, the atmosphere thick with smoke and the scent of sweat and hard liquor.
There he was at one of the candlelit tables, elegantly dressed in his pony-skin coat. Clara wondered, didn’t he sweat to death in that thing in here? There was no air. But she guessed he wore it like armour, that coat and the rakishly tilted Stetson hat – he liked to make an impression.
He was certainly making an impression on Clara: she thought he was a nasty piece of shit.
‘Yeah, us two,’ said Marcus, and there were four of his boys with them tonight, white boys in black territory. They were getting a lot of hostile stares.
‘So what you want this time?’ asked Frate. He was puffing on a Havana cigar, sending out perfect circles of smoke into the fuggy air.
‘How about a confession?’ said Clara. One of the boys pulled out a chair for her, and she sat down. Marcus and the others remained standing.
‘To what?’ Frate asked.
‘Sal Dryden. You were her landlord last year, weren’t you. And you like to collect your rents in person because you don’t trust anyone else enough to have them do it for you. That right?’
‘So what?’ He blew a smoke ring in her face.
‘So: Sal lay there dead for quite a while. When a colleague of mine went there to check on her, the door was closed. When we went back later and found Sal dead, it was ajar. So someone had been in there. And I think that someone was you. Because the rent man would certainly have called during that time. Or the landlor
d, in this case, and that’s you. You called in that time, and you killed her.’
Yasta Frate gave a big beaming grin and picked a fleck of cigar leaf out of his teeth. ‘Imaginative! I like that. And you’re putting this together how? Because I had a little something going with the girl for a while? Because we had our pictures taken together?’
Clara’s eyes hardened. ‘No. Because you were her landlord. And you must have been there. Collected the rent. You always collect your own rent, don’t you. Or you tried to. Forget the pictures.’
‘That Bennett guy, he’s clever with that camera.’ Yasta grinned and waggled his eyebrows. ‘Gets the angle just right, yeah? Shows off a man’s finer parts. He’s not so smart when it comes to the money side, I heard though. Amazin’ what a man will do, when some hard cash is involved, don’t you think?’
‘I said forget the pictures. The Bill obviously have. Kind of them.’
Clara glared at him while he smiled complacently back at her. The coppers were in his pay – deep in, they must be, to let it all pass the way they had. She cleared her throat. She felt physically sick, just talking to him.
‘Were you jealous when she took up with Henry Dolan last year?’ she asked him.
Yasta shrugged. ‘What’s that to me? We done. Strictly business after that. Hey, you know what? Maybe it’s that Henry you should be questioning, girl. There’s a bad buzz around that fella. Heard all sorts.’
‘Like what?’ Clara’s heart was thumping.
‘He’s a bad motherfucker. Things back in his past, I heard. Word is, he was killin’ stuff when he was in short drawers. That’s what I heard. Now that ain’t right. And you come round here askin’ me about it? You’re lookin’ in the wrong place.’
Clara looked up at Marcus. He raised an eyebrow, shook his head.
‘You must have been there,’ she insisted. The pounding of the music, the mad swirling of the dancers, the smoke, talking to this piece of scum, all of it was giving her a headache.
Yasta leaned his elbows on the table. ‘You want the truth?’ He stubbed the cigar out in an ashtray.
‘That’s all I came for,’ said Clara.
‘Truth? Honey, the truth is, I was there.’
Clara went very still. ‘What?’
‘I was there. I went to collect the rent and the door was open. I looked in and there she was, laid out dead, slit right open.’
‘And you didn’t report it.’
‘You kiddin’ me? She was dead, what could I do?’
‘So what did you do?’ Clara looked at his face, sheened with sweat. Was he lying?
‘I took the money out of her purse – it was there on the table by the door. Truth was, I was shaken up. Nasty in there, she was ripe. I think I dropped a few coins on the floor, chucked the purse back down, and I vamoosed.’
Her brain was spinning. Sal. Toby. Bernie. Her whole world had crashed around her and she felt bereft, bewildered. And now he was saying this. Making her think Oh God, Henry, did you? Could you? If Bernie hadn’t killed Sal, then had Henry done it?
She stood up. She had to get out of here, get some air.
‘Hey, don’t I even get a thank you for helping?’ shouted Yasta Frate after her departing back.
Clara didn’t turn around. She walked out of the club with Marcus and the boys and stood panting in the night air outside, gasping in each breath, trying not to pass out.
‘Come on,’ said Marcus, taking her arm. ‘Let’s go home.’
113
Clara felt ill, drawn, a ghost of herself. The nightmares were back, and she was finding it hard to go on. But she had to. What else was there to do? She lay in bed at nights beside a slumbering Marcus and thought, Could Henry have done that? For so long she had believed the worst of her brother, but all that Bernie had confessed to her showed that she’d been horribly mistaken.
Maybe it’s just bad blood, she thought.
That was possible. Their dad had fiddled the accounts, run out on them. Bernie . . . ah Jesus, Bernie! . . . had been twisted, wrecked by all that had happened to her. And Henry . . . Henry was the enigma. Misread all his life. Capable of strong-arm stuff on the streets now. More than capable.
But was he capable of murdering Sal?
Frate’s last words to her about his visit to Sal had the ring of truth to them. Poor old Sal, always desperate for money, desperate enough to sell herself, sell her soul, and yet never managing to hold on to the cash she craved so much. But Frate was a practised liar, was he really telling the truth? Was Clara mistaken? She’d been mistaken about so much in her life.
In the gloom of the night, she watched the dim outline of Marcus, sleeping. Her husband. Who didn’t love her, but wanted her in bed with him. Who kept a mistress in luxury.
Was he keeping her still?
She thought of Paulette and ground her teeth and wished . . . for what? That he was in love with her. That he would commit himself to her, not some tart. Because she knew she was in love with him, and it was a reckless love, a complete love, like . . . like Bernie had felt for David Bennett.
She rolled onto her back and stared into the darkness and thought about Bennett. She wished so much that Bernie had never met him, then she would not have intervened, and the whole train wreck that had become their lives would not have happened.
Too late for that now, though.
Bennett had been the thing Bernie fastened upon in a bid to save her sanity. Clara saw that now. A man who had a talent but was poor and also devious. Who couldn’t keep money and never made much and could put his scruples aside when it suited him. Who had to crawl to filth like Frate to scratch a living. Who’d been there on the spot when she’d found poor butchered Sal, who had been flush with extra cash before she died . . .
‘Marcus?’ she whispered. Dawn was creeping through the curtains, lighting the room with an ambient glow.
‘Hmm?’ he rolled over, threw his arm around her. ‘What?’ he mumbled.
‘Wake up.’
114
David Bennett was there at the desk, stamping the backs of small prints, each with a corner cut off. He looked up as they came in, her, Marcus and two of the boys – not Liam, he was off resting up. Ivan Sears had hurt him, but he would be OK.
‘Fuck! You again,’ said Bennett irritably when he saw her.
‘Yeah, me again,’ said Clara. Raw as she felt with pain over Bernie, she had to do this. ‘I wanted to talk to you about Sal.’
‘There’s nothing to say. It’s a pity, what happened to her. That’s all.’
‘Oh, I think there’s a bit more than that. Where do you keep your bank statements?’ asked Clara.
‘You what?’ Bennett half-laughed.
‘I want to see your bank statements.’
‘Fuck off!’ snapped Bennett, and stood up.
Marcus shoved him back down. ‘Where are they?’ he asked, his black eyes boring into Bennett’s.
‘What the f— what the hell would you want to see them for?’
‘Where are they?’ repeated Marcus.
‘None of your fucking business,’ said Bennett.
Marcus’s gaze was stony. He cocked his head, and the heavies went to the desk, started rifling through the drawers.
‘Hey . . . ’ Bennett protested.
They carried on. Then straightened, shook their heads.
‘Where?’ asked Marcus again.
‘I don’t think—’
Marcus hit him. Then he hit him again. Blood spattered all over the prints and Bennett let out a yell of protest.
‘Where?’ said Marcus again. ‘You’ve got three seconds to answer or you’ll get another one.’
‘I don’t see—’
‘One.’
‘Why do you—’
‘Two.’
‘All right, for God’s sake! All right! They’re in there, down in the darkroom.’ With a shaking hand he clutched at his bleeding mouth and indicated the door on his right.
‘Is it locked?’
‘Of course it bloody is.’ Bennett opened the top drawer, took out a key, gave it to one of the heavies.
The two men went to the door, opened it to darkness. Flicked on the light. They went down a shallow set of steps. Clara followed. At the bottom was another door. One of the men pushed it open. Inside was a gloomy red-lit square box of a room, with prints pegged up on a small line, and red, white and grey dishes lined up. There was a strong whiff of chemicals down here. And there, in the far corner, was the file cabinet.
Clara took the key and went over and opened it. David Bennett was pretty organized for an artistic type. Things were neatly labelled. CAR and INSURANCE and NEGATIVES 1-250, all set out. Not alphabetical, but neat nevertheless. BANK STATEMENTS was easy to find. Clara pulled out the file and took it back up to the reception area with her. Marcus’s two goons followed.
Marcus was still at the desk, and David Bennett was still in his chair, a reddening handkerchief clamped to his mouth. He went both wide-eyed and pale as Clara laid the file out on the desk, opened it up, took out his statements for the last year.
‘My friend Jan told me something very interesting and I’ve only just remembered it,’ she said to Bennett. ‘She said that Sal Dryden had been flush with more cash than usual before her death. Bragging about her bank book and how much dosh she had in it. And . . . ’ Clara hesitated, looking down the lines of figures . . . ‘Dear me, you’re a bit hard up, aren’t you? Especially here, in the months before Sal died.’
‘Look . . . ’ he said.
But Clara went on.
‘There were some big sums going into the account now and again . . . I guess that was Yasta Frate’s input for the porno pictures, yes? Not many of those. But there was a regular payment going out, five hundred pounds every month. That’s a big amount, wouldn’t you say? And I would also guess that if the police were to check Sal’s old bank book – if they cared enough to bother – they would find that same amount going in every month. Looking at these statements, those payments stopped when Sal died. Isn’t that funny?’ She looked into his eyes. ‘No, not funny at all, actually. She was going to tell Bernie, my sister, your sweet little fiancée, what you were really like, unless you paid up. Sal was blackmailing you. Wasn’t she?’