The Wolf in the Attic

by Paul Kearney

  SOMETHING HAS CHANGED. I wake up late in the morning – I know it is late by the mere fact that there is daylight in the room, peeping round the drapes. For weeks now I have been getting up in the dark.

  The wind has dropped, but the house is not at peace. There are voices downstairs, and as I lie there I hear the front door open and close.

  It is snug and warm in the bed with Pie next to me, and I have to try and run over yesterday in my mind again. The pub, and talking to Jack and Mr Ronald, and then Luca in the attic

  A day to remember. If only all days could be as interesting as that.

  It is very late, and no-one has woken me up. Usually Pa comes in and out of a morning and sees that I wash my face and get dressed in time for my lessons. I suppose Miss Hawcross has cried off due to the snow, and I am to have a lovely, toasty lie-in.

  Luca will be back in the woods by now, I suppose. I shall go up later in the day and check, just to be sure. Right now, no matter what I said in the night, I am quite glad that I am here in bed with Pie and not sitting on the cold forest floor in the snow.

  Footsteps coming up the stairs. I am dozing off again… It must be Pa, come to wake me at last. I remember what he told me the night before, about our family, and that sends me to wondering in that delicious half-asleep way where all things are possible. I hope he will tell me more. I hope it cheers him up to think how grand our ancestors were.

  There is a tiny knock on the door, not like Pa at all. Before I say anything, it is opened, and I am startled to see Miss Hawcross standing there. Her face is white except for a red nose, and she is still wearing her hat.

  There is someone else behind her on the landing, because she turns to look back at them, and then nods.

  ‘My dear,’ she says, coming into the room, ‘I looked in on you earlier and you were fast asleep.’ She is kneading her hands together as if washing them, and her eyes are red-rimmed. She has been crying. I sit up in bed.

  ‘But you have to get up now, Anna. You have to be very brave.’

  Is it Luca? Have they found him? I say nothing, but stare at her, and hug Pie close.

  She sits down on the bed beside me and tries to take my hand, but I won’t let go of Pie. She is trying to say something, but seems to be struggling with the words. Finally, she just blurts it out.

  ‘Anna, your father is dead.’

  Her eyes are watery, and her fingers are very cold as she sets them on mine.

  ‘No he’s not,’ I say, and rub my eyes, sure I am not quite awake. ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’m so sorry my dear.’ She tries to lean in and hug me but I back away until I am at the headboard.

  ‘He’s not dead. He tucked me in last night. He told me my real name. You’re wrong.’

  ‘I wish I was. It was I who found him this morning.’ She gives a little hiccup, and her voice takes on a tone I have never heard before. ‘The front door was ajar, the hall full of snow, and he was in his study. There is no mistake. Anna, you have to get up and get dressed now.’

  There is a horrible hanging moment when I feel as though someone has silently slapped me across the face.

  ‘You’re lying!’ I spit at her, and smack away her hand. ‘He’s alive – he’s alive! My father is not dead – he’s just downstairs – and you’re lying to me! Why would you say such a thing?’

  A tall dark shape enters the room behind her. It is a policeman. He has his helmet under his arm and a handlebar moustache and a silver chain and brass buttons.

  ‘Now young lady. You must get a hold of yourself. I don’t want to be seeing no hysterics. Miss Hawcross here will get you dressed, and then you must come downstairs and let us ask you a few questions.’

  I stare up at him. The police are here in our house. A policeman is standing here in my room.

  Then it must be true.

  It cannot be true. I look back at Miss Hawcross.

  ‘No,’ I say, very quietly.

  And this time when she takes me in her arms I do not fight, but bury my face in her big soft bosom, and smell her perfume, and feel the hard edge of her brooch on my cheek.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  I want to go back a few minutes, just a few minutes. To that moment before the door was opened. I want to have that second again, and keep it, and stay there in the warm bed with my father alive down below and the world all strange and exciting, but in its place. Everything as it was.

  I want to stay in that part of the passing morning when everything was all right, and I am only a child I suppose, but I know right here and now that will never happen again, and I shall never have that feeling again.

  THERE IS ANOTHER policeman downstairs. The hall is tracked with footprints and melting snow. Standing in it is Matthew Bristol, and he tips his bowler at me and looks me up and down with a smirk on his sharp-edged face. He has not waxed his moustache and it looks like a wet mouse on his upper lip.

  Another man comes out of Pa’s study, so that the hallway seems very crowded. He is wearing a pale trench-coat and is smoking a cigarette.

  ‘This is her?’ He sets a hand on my shoulder with the cigarette burning in it.

  ‘I want to see my father,’ I say.

  ‘All in good time – Anna, isn’t it? I have to ask you a few things Anna.’

  I try to dart round the door but the other policeman catches me and holds me back.

  ‘Don’t let her in there, Brough,’ the trench-coated man says. ‘It won’t do her any good.’

  ‘I want to see Pa!’ I yell, and I struggle, but the policeman has me held fast. ‘There, there lass,’ he says quietly. ‘Do as the Inspector says, and we’ll all be better off.’

  ‘No,’ I say, and I can hear the break in my voice, but I will not cry, not in front of all these strangers, and especially not in front of Mr Bristol, who looks positively bored and is not even pretending to be sorry, and I want to kick him for it.

  ‘Let’s go down into the kitchen,’ the trench-coated man says, and the big policeman hands me to Miss Hawcross whose hands fasten onto my shoulders like chilled claws, and she steers me down the stairs to the basement. It is icy cold down there, and I can see my breath in front of me, and they make me sit at the big table where once I sat and had tea and talked to Elsie and Mrs Bramley, back in days that already seem impossibly distant.

  The Inspector lights a second cigarette from the first and tosses the butt into the sink and then thrusts his hands into his pockets and puffs out grey smoke and looks at me, while Miss Hawcross holds one of my hands and strokes my hair. At least she has stopped blubbering now. I don’t want to see her tears. It is hard enough looking after my own.

  ‘Miss Francis,’ the Inspector says, ‘did you hear anything odd last night? People coming or going – the sounds of an argument perhaps?’ He picks a speck of tobacco off his lower lip.

  I shake my head, wondering even as I do if Luca has anything to do with this, or the Roadmen he told me about.

  ‘It was blowing a gale last night. You can’t hear much from her room when it’s like that,’ Miss Hawcross says. I wish she would stop stroking my hair.

  ‘The door was not forced,’ the Inspector goes on. ‘Was your father expecting visitors? I know that he has a lot of them, due to his… activities.’

  ‘He’s really dead,’ I say slowly, as if I have to test out the words.

  ‘I’m afraid so my dear. And it is my job to fathom out how it happened.’

  I look at him. ‘Did someone kill him?’

  ‘It looks that way, Anna.’

  ‘Was it the Turks?’

  ‘What?’ he looks at once interested and bewildered.

  ‘They killed everyone else. Perhaps they came here to finish the job.’

  ‘Turks?’ He steps forward, but Miss Hawcross raises her hand from my head.

  ‘It’s not what you think. Her family Inspector, back in Greece in the early twenties…’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course. So you said. But that is an angle
we shall have to look into. This so-called committee, and the things he got up to in London –’

  ‘Not in front of the child,’ Miss Hawcross snaps.

  ‘So you heard nothing untoward last night, Anna?’ the Inspector asks me, ignoring her. He really is quite rude.

  ‘Nothing. I was asleep.’

  ‘Still, it’s only up a couple of flights of stairs,’ he says, looking hard at me.

  I stroke Pie’s hair. ‘I was asleep.’

  He sighs. ‘Very well then. No witnesses. This is a nasty turn of affairs and no mistake.’

  ‘I want to see him,’ I say.

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible just yet.’

  I look at Miss Hawcross, and I am fighting the tears, and I don’t want to let them go, not in front of everyone. It comes out as a cracked little whisper.

  ‘Please. Let me see him.’

  She looks at the Inspector. ‘Let her.’

  ‘I’ve no wish to be giving a little girl nightmares, Miss.’

  ‘Not seeing can be worse than the sight of it,’ she says. And I know as clear as day that she is thinking of her own lost soldier at that moment, and how she never saw him buried.

  The Inspector stands there. He takes his cigarette out of his mouth and looks at it.

  ‘Simkins.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Let the girl into the study. One minute, mind. And make sure she doesn’t touch anything.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  HE IS LYING on the floor, on his back. The study is snowed over with papers, books torn off the shelves, drawers hanging out of the desk. There is a broken glass lying, and the whisky bottle is on its side, empty.

  His eyes are closed, and so I will never look into them again. His face is peaceful, almost surprised, and one arm is flung out as though he is pointing at the window.

  He is lying in a small muddled pool of blood which has soaked into the papers littering the floor. I cannot see where it is coming from at first, until I make out the wound in the side of his chest, the darkening of the waistcoat there. It was a knife did this. A knife killed my father.

  And I think of Fat Bert on Port Meadow, and Luca flinging the knife away with the blood on it, black in the moonlight, and all these things seem to whirl together in my mind like horses on a merry-go-round. Perhaps the Romani boy did this, and if that is so, then it is all my fault.

  I reach out and touch Pa’s hand. It is cold and horribly solid, as though it is an effigy lying there, not the flesh and blood of my father at all. I cannot believe that the eyes will not open and he will not get up off the floor and dust himself down and check his pocket-watch.

  The watch is gone, the fob hanging loose from his waistcoat. They robbed him then.

  I tug on the chain, but at once the policeman behind me barks, ‘Don’t be touching that now, girl. That’s evidence that is.’

  Miss Hawcross takes my shoulders again – why will she not let me alone? She tries to move me away from Pa, but I fight her, and stay on my knees beside him.

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  There is another voice in the room, a hateful one.

  ‘Keep a close eye there constable. He owed me six weeks in back rent, he did, though he wasn’t short of a few bob – all those weekends gallivanting round London with his trollops. If there’s any cash left in here, I have a claim to it – I’m owed. I want that set down fair and square.’

  It is Matthew Bristol, the landlord. He is rubbing a finger along his moustache as if petting it.

  ‘No-one is touching nothing,’ the policeman growls. ‘This is a murder we have here, Mr Bristol.’

  ‘All the same –’

  ‘When the estate is wound up, you’ll get what you’re owed out of it, I’m sure. Now kindly step out of the room sir.’

  Bristol backs away round the door, bristling. The policeman adjusts his helmet and whispers, ‘Tosspot.’

  ‘That’s enough now Anna,’ Miss Hawcross says to me. ‘Say your goodbyes, and come with me.’

  I look at Pa one last time. I think of the day Mama was taken away, the day we stood on the burning quay with everyone wailing and dying around us. All that, he survived, only to lie here like this on a floor in Oxford, on a snowy Monday morning.

  How pointless, all of it. I wish he and I had died that day too, in our own country, in the middle of family and people we knew.

  I wish I was dead. If there is a God, then he has a heaven, and all the people I loved are in it together now, and they have left me alone down here on earth.

  ‘Herete,’ I say to Pa, remembering that word from an age and a world ago. Then I let Miss Hawcross tug me to my feet, and out the door.

  DAYS PASS, AND they are at once agonising and slow, and a mere blur.

  They take Pa away in a black van with double doors at the back, and the police go over the house, but they do not find the way into the attic.

  Things are kicked over and left to lie, and there is wet on all the floors with the feet coming and going, and the fire is never lit, and at night Miss Hawcross stays in the box-room across the landing and she makes sandwiches and tea for everyone, but I cannot touch any of it. I spend most of my time curled up in bed with Pie, staring at the white light beyond the windows.

  The snow melts slowly, and Christmas comes and goes without anyone noticing or caring. I lie in bed and listen to the bells of Oxford ringing out as though nothing has changed, as if the world is all the same.

  Men in top hats and black coats swoop in and out with papers under their arms, one with pince-nez spectacles who looks me over as though I were a dog in a pet shop. I catch phrases here and there as they conduct conversations on the landing.

  ‘Tragic, absolutely tragic.’

  ‘Well, he made no provision…’

  ‘The gambling ate it all up.’

  ‘And then there were the women.’

  ‘A foreigner. He made a decent fist at being an Englishman, but these Mediterranean types you know –’

  ‘Yes, completely untrustworthy.’

  ‘The committee funds…’

  ‘All gone, every farthing. If he hadn’t been nobbled he would have done the deed himself. He was an inch away from having his own collar felt.’

  ‘The blackguard. And the child is nothing more than a pauper now.’

  ‘Yes. Tragic. Absolutely tragic…I cannot make sense of them and I do not even try. There is only me and Pie in the world now, and everything else means nothing, counts for nothing.

  12

  I MANAGE TO sneak up to the attic one afternoon when Miss Hawcross has popped out to do some shopping. With the daylight, it does not seem strange and menacing at all, just a dim, dusty space full of junk.

  I find my old coat lying there with a crust of brown blood on the sleeve. The cheese is gnawed down to the rind, and there are mouse droppings around it. I look up at the skylight and wonder where Luca is right this minute, and if he ever thinks of me. I could have given him more clothes, even some shoes. Pa will never miss them now.

  I do not believe Luca had a hand in Pa’s death. But I do not know if the world he revealed to me had any part of it either. What he said to me of the Roadmen keeps coming back, like the endless scratch of a gramophone record which has finished but is still spinning. And I do not trust the police, either.

  And as for Matthew Bristol, I should like to stab him myself.

  THE LOWER ROOMS are being cleared out bit by bit. We did not possess much, Pa and I, but such as there was is being pawned by Miss Hawcross on my behalf. She has given me half a crown. The rest, she says, goes on expenses. Food, lamp-oil, coal. I could not care any less. I still have Pie, and a few treasured books in my room, and I cannot imagine wanting much else. With Pa gone, it all seems rather silly, worrying about pennies and shillings. But I suppose these things are important. Because the pennies and shillings will decide what happens to me in the end.

  Once the police and the coroner finish their examinations, they com
e to the conclusion that Pa had been stabbed to death in the early hours of the 22nd December by person or persons unknown. How clever of them.

  The murder weapon was not found, and though the study had been ransacked, very little was deemed missing except for a Breguet pocket-watch.

  The investigation will go on, of course, and the police will keep the file open. But there seems little more to add. Little that truly matters. I know that I should feel the need for justice, for revenge, but I do not. Pa’s death seems like the end of some unfinished business which began long ago, in another country.

  WE BURY HIM in St Sepulchre’s Cemetery on Walton Street. There is Miss Hawcross and me and a few of the old Greeks there to see him laid in the ground. It is a plain plank coffin, and he has no headstone because there is no money to pay for one. I remember from somewhere that there should be a flower on the coffin, and I pull away from Miss Hawcross as the priest is mumbling out the words over it and the gravediggers stand by with their caps in their fists.

  ‘“Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upwards…”’

  There is nothing blossoming in the graveyard, which is Midwinter-bare. But in one sheltered corner I catch a glimpse of scarlet, and in the hedge there is a holly tree, heavy with berries. I break off a spray, the leaves scoring my hands red, and set it on Pa’s coffin just as the priest finally finishes.

  And I feel that, more than anything, is goodbye, and I have to hide my face in my hands while Miss Hawcross grips my shoulder.

  The gravediggers lower the coffin down with ropes, and then cover the open grave with a tarpaulin. As I wipe my eyes I hear them tell Miss Hawcross that there is an old tramp to be laid in on top of him that afternoon. The Sepulchre is full to bursting, they say, and the paupers, they are stacked four deep.

  Pa was buried like an Englishman, but an English beggar. There is nothing Greek about it at all. The Priest is Anglican, and keeps blowing his nose, and he wears mittens against the cold.

  I cannot believe that my father is in a box, and that they put him in the ground and left him there. It seems the most callous thing.