by Marjorie Orr
‘It’s almost as if he wants to go to prison. But I know he didn’t do it.’
Tire typed his birth details into her astrology software, pulled up his birth chart and said he seemed like a typical number-cruncher: dry, meticulous, hard-working, emotionally reticent, a backroom personality, not ego-driven and not aggressive. His immediate future looked grim.
So immersed was Tire in her thoughts that she nearly turned right to continue looping round Hyde Park. Forcing herself into a left onto Kensington Road, she lengthened her stride. Past the Italianate dome of the Albert Hall and the gaudy Indian temple memorial to Queen Victoria’s lost love, she struggled to remember the detail of last night’s conversation.
Greengate, Erica explained, had worked as an accountant for Cerigo, which ran high-end holiday resorts in several countries with nothing to suggest that it was anything other than sound and profitable.
‘The boss is Harman Stone, son of Paul Stone, you know who does good work for the elderly.’
Tire looked up his birth date in Google and pulled up Harman Stone’s chart. She took a minute to absorb what she saw. Venus Moon in Scorpio, badly aspected Jupiter Neptune and his Gemini Sun tied into Mars, Pluto and Uranus. She knew Erica did not want the detail so she simplified it to a thumbnail sketch: overly impulsive, chaotic, fond of the good life, insincerely charming, into sex of the sleazy variety, slippery, with a cruel father.
‘No, I don’t think that’s right,’ said Erica, ‘The father is a saint. He organises holidays for poor children, raises millions for charity.’
Tire had given an enigmatic smile and shrugged. Erica had left shortly after, still anxious about how to approach her defence strategy but hoping sleep would clear her mind.
Six hours later she was dead. And in a place she wasn’t supposed to be. Tire wracked her brain trying to remember other threats that Erica had mentioned. The Pakistani family of a girl rescued from a forced marriage. And there were others. What were they?
A wasp buzzed round her head so she swatted it with her cap, taking the chance to shake her damp hair loose. Checking her phone she saw she had three miles still to run, so she focused on holding to a steady pace down West Cromwell Road, trying not to breathe in the fumes of the cascade of buses, lorries and motorcyclists that were crawling alongside. Her heart was pounding and sweat trickling down her back, sticking her tank top to her skin. She sped past a Tesco supermarket and an airport terminal of an emporium, sheltering under a bulbous, high-rise block of apartments. Only when she reached MacDuff Road in Hammersmith did she start to slow down. Past the Hope and Sail pub, she saw signs for the underpass that ran under the A4 Great West Road. Nearly there. She almost stopped in the dimly lit tunnel, reeking of piss and beer, reluctant to face what was on the other side.
Blackstone Gardens came as a shock after the rumble and reek of urban flux. A handful of detached houses that had once been grand sat in a cul-de-sac that ran down to the river, where four men in a sculling shell were flowing along, with a lone kayaker further downstream.
Then she saw the spot. Police tape was looped round a small wall bordering the road that had collapsed in the middle, with a dark stain across it and several paint-flecked gouges where metal had collided with stone. Erica had been smashed against that. Tire’s stomach heaved and her head seemed to be floating in mud. Collapsing onto the wooden bench, she bent forward, her elbows over her cap, arms blocking her eyes.
When she raised her head, a stout elderly woman walking past with a small fluffy terrier smiled at her. The normality of the scene made it worse. She had seen bruised and bloodied corpses before on her travels to remote places, tripping twice by mistake into war zones. But never a friend. And never on home territory. Except once. Maybe that was why she was so rattled. She drank heavily from her water bottle and reached into her jogging belt for a cigarette.
‘That’s what I like to see. A health freak with vices,’ said a voice behind her. She jerked round to see a weedy youth in jeans and an anorak holding a camera and grinning at her. He focused on the wall and clicked several times.
About to remonstrate with him, she stopped herself and asked: ‘Are you press?’
‘Yeah,’ he answered, about to walk away.
‘What do you know about the… accident?’ Her question came out more fiercely than she had intended.
He shrugged, ‘Not much. It was early hours. No one about. The police have no idea.’ He jerked his head towards two uniforms standing nearer the river. ‘Though the papers and telly have got pics of the body from someone who was passing.’ He paused and then emphasised with a grin, which made her want to punch him: ‘After the corpse was found by a jogger.’ He licked his fleshy lips and sighed. ‘They won’t use them all, mind you. Too gory even for the gutter journos. She might have been raped. No knickers on.’
He leered at Tire, who was standing rigid, her brain stalled, staring back at him. Everything had gone into slow motion, her eyes lost focus and she stopped breathing. She felt as if she was fragmenting and about to float away in the wind in tiny pieces. A hand on her arm made her jerk backwards and she gulped in air.
‘Why are you interested? You knew the victim?’ His expression livened at the prospect. A draft of curried breath made her move further away.
Her shake of the head was instantaneous. ‘No.’ The movement jerked her back into coping consciousness. Erica raped. She couldn’t cope with that here, so shut it down. Erica murdered. Don’t let it sink in. Wait till she was on her own. Concentrate on the here and now. Photographs, he had photographs. Through gritted teeth she said: ‘Got a card?’
‘Always pleased to do business.’ He moved closer, looking her up and down suggestively, pressing a grubby card into her hand. ‘I do all sorts of portraits. I’m just up the road in Stanford Brook.’
After he left, she sat staring at the rippling water. The effects of shock and not enough sleep were making her shiver but she had her mind under control, panic firmly battened down.
A coffee at one of the pubs might help. She stood up, flexed her leg muscles and started to walk. Within a few yards the wobble in her knees forced her to stop and aim for the riverside wall, where she sat down heavily on top of the white and blue Do Not Cross tape, leaning forward, her arms wrapped round her chest.
‘Ma’am, you OK?’
The older, stockier of the two policeman was standing beside her, concern crinkling his eyes. The sympathy in his tone threatened to derail her again.
‘Yeah, fine,’ she croaked. Then before she could stop herself it tumbled out between gasps. ‘I knew her. Erica. With her last night. At the opera before… this.’
He sat beside her and put his arm round her shoulders and she allowed herself to lean against his solid body, her eyes tightly shut.
The words of the photographer cannoned back to her.
‘She was raped?’ She turned and clutched at his arm. ‘Tell me?’
His moustache quivered with disapproval. ‘Now, Ma’am, we don’t know anything yet. You don’t want to be listening to that deadbeat. He makes things up and causes us a load of grief.’ He patted her hand, then stood up, straightening his high visibility jacket. ‘But we will need a statement from you later, down at the station.’
An awkward shuffle of his feet preceded a muttered, ‘I’m truly sorry about your friend’, before he turned away to speak into his phone.
A taxi pulling up outside The Raven, disgorging two passengers, jolted her back into gear. She found a business card in her belt, handed it to the younger policeman and ran for it. The driver looked askance at her outfit, but nodded when she pulled two twenties out of her belt. She slumped back on the seat and then had to hang onto the armrest as the cab swerved to avoid a lingering motorcyclist. Blue Suzukis, she thought, a plague of them.
Back at her apartment, she called ‘hi’ in the direction of the thumps from the kitchen and went straight to her bedroom. Having dragged on an oversize polo neck and jeans, she caught sight of
herself in the mirror and winced. Her grey eyes looked haunted, the dark circles under them thrown into sharp relief by her blonde hair.
Don’t think, she murmured to her reflection, don’t feel. Just get the sink fixed and him out. She marched into the kitchen with what she hoped was a bland expression on her face. Once finished, he leant against the work surface drinking the mug of tea she had offered him. His feet moved restlessly, although his square face remained impassive. ‘How d’you know I was army then? I’ll need to sort my camouflage better.’
She forced a smile and strained to remember what she had said. ‘Boots, straight back – and the eyes. Seen too much.’
He glared at her and said defensively: ‘Aye, well, goes with the territory. But that’s all behind me. On to better things. Anything else you want fixed, I’m around for a couple of days. Be down in the cellar if you need me. But don’t tell the landlord, he wouldn’t approve.’
Tire showed him to the door, where he paused and tapped the bronze statuette with solid arrowheads curving upwards. ‘You could do a load of damage with that, if you stuck it in the right place,’ he said. ‘I’ll remember next time to ring you in advance.’
In spite of herself, she grinned. Over his shoulder he added: ‘And if you don’t mind a personal comment you’ve got the loveliest smile I’ve ever seen. Don’t let it get rusty.’
What came up as the door clicked shut was not the torrent of grief she had expected, but a spiral of visceral rage that gripped her belly and shot up through her chest. She’d get whoever did this and make them pay. Whatever it took. Her schedule was packed but she’d clear space. She owed Erica that much.
CHAPTER 4
In a second-floor council flat in Dowancross Street in Glasgow, south of Byres Road, a small, grey-haired woman in her sixties was laying two mugs of tea onto a small plastic floral tray, beside a cracked saucer with three tea biscuits on it. The cramped kitchen was painted blue on the walls, with green plastic handles on the cupboards matching the scuffed laminate surface. The window above the sink overlooked a strip of grass on either side of the road below, with a red sandstone, four-storey Victorian tenement facing.
‘Jimmy, d’you want one biscuit or two?’ she shouted.
‘Aye, aye, don’t yell, Elly, I’m only ten feet away,’ answered a thin, white-haired man of similar age. He was sitting at a table by the window of the narrow sitting room. The room was crowded with two worn, dull red armchairs either side of a gas fire. One had a large basket filled with white knitting wool beside it and the other a side table with a reading lamp and a pile of books. On the opposite wall was an old-fashioned television set with an upright piano pushed down to the window end. Several watercolours in cheap frames hung on the walls, all variations of the same scene, with a bright blue sky and a row of conical cypresses running into the distance along a stone walkway.
Jimmy was pencilling a sketch with obsessive concentration, rubbing out mistakes every so often, muttering an irritated ‘ach’. His grey flannels, a size too big for his frame and with the hem stitched up, had seen better days although they were clean. A green cable-knit sweater over a grey shirt did nothing to improve the pallor of his skin.
‘What’s up with you?’ Elly asked anxiously, putting the tray on the low black plastic table in front of the fire. ‘I hope you’re not going peculiar again. We’ll have to go to the doctor and maybe get you some better pills. He said to come back anytime.’
She came across to examine his drawing of a mongrel dog with elongated legs and said: ‘Och, you’re doing these awfy ugly animals again. They make me feel very odd.’
‘Elly, I’m fine. Don’t get so het up. I’m just kind of out of sorts for some reason.’ He turned to pat her hand fondly as she leant against him.
‘You only draw these things when you’re getting real uptight. Is that man back inside your head?’ she asked peering at him, her lined face and sagging jowls giving her a hangdog look. She fidgeted with the ties of the floral apron she wore over a dark tweed skirt and homemade jumper.
‘Every time he pops up you get bad-tempered and faraway inside yourself. Just forget him. He’s no real, a fiction of your imagination, that’s what the doctor in the Hall said. You should paint one of your nice gardens instead. They settle you better.’ She indicated a cheaply framed scene on the wall, with two rows of conical cypresses extending down a stone path with a fountain in the distance.
‘There was someone on the television last night that reminded me of him, that’s all.’ He tried to smile reassuringly at her, standing up to get his tea.
They were a couple who could walk down to their local Spar supermarket and not be noticed, approaching old age and leaning on each other’s arm. They often held hands outside, although more out of insecurity than affection as if one was scared the other would get lost. They switched parent-child roles constantly, so it was never clear who was looking after whom.
With tea drunk and cleared out of the way, Elly picked up her needles and ball of white wool, knitting a pair of baby’s bootees.
‘Why don’t you play something? I like that when I’m knitting and it calms you down. That gymnastics piece is nice. Then we can go to the community centre. I’ve got four pairs of bootees finished and a wee jumper I want to give them. And you can talk to Len about your exhibition.’
Jimmy walked slowly over to the piano, lifted the lid and started to play, his eyes half-closed, rarely glancing down. His fingers moved fluidly, absent-mindedly, across the keys. The poignant strains of Erik Satie’s ‘Gymnopédies’ filled the sitting room. Truth to tell, Elly was sick of listening to it, but this was his favourite. She had heard it so often in the last two decades it had become as familiar as wallpaper. But she had a lifetime’s experience of accepting what she didn’t like and told herself often that she should be grateful if this was all she had to bear.
He played on and she kept knitting steadily. She had just finished the second bootee when he stopped, looking, as he often did at the piano, sad and lost.
CHAPTER 5
Try as she might, Tire couldn’t get her brain to focus. The rest of yesterday had passed in a jumble with a half-hearted attempt to write the penultimate chapter of her current book on a Mexican cartel hitman. But her concentration kept unravelling and she couldn’t find the words. The bloodstained wall where Erica died came into her mind every time she thought about Sanchez, so she gave up trying.
Why hadn’t she listened more attentively when Erica told her about difficult cases where threats had been made? They were brushed aside lightly as part of a criminal barrister’s job. No sense in getting paranoid, she’d say with a smile, tossing her hair back and pressing her hands together as if in prayer. But not all threats are a belch of vengeance. Clearly, one had been carried through.
Her secretary, Susan, would know more and she had agreed to meet up for a coffee near her flat in Shepherd’s Bush after Tire had given her police statement in Hammersmith.
The evening had passed in a blur of red wine and several episodes from a box set of ‘Spiral’, the gritty French police and law procedural, whose bleak view of degradation in low-life Paris with corruption in high places suited her savage mood.
A phone call at 5 am from Jin in Dubai reminding her they had a Skype chat booked was met with a groggy response.
‘What the hell time is it there?’
‘9 am sunshine, babe. Beautiful day here. I got a flight to catch at 11 so I’m rushing. We can do this when I come back, mebbe next week sometime.’
She had let him go without telling him about Erica, feeling guilty and irritated at herself. Wherever he was going it would be risky and she hated not having a proper conversation before he went. Normally she could push her fear for his safety aside and ignore it, but this time it was a constant, low-level dread.
The dawn light was making feeble inroads through heavy cloud when she made her way to her desk with a mug of coffee and lit a cigarette. Beethoven was playing quietly in th
e background. How do people listen to voices yattering at them in the morning on the radio or, even worse, television? She shuddered. Her entry into the day required at least two hours’ gentle easing, preferably people-free.
Jin lingered on her conscience, so she turned her chair to look at his photographs, enlarged and unframed, black and white, hanging on the long wall. A deformed, leafless tree with amputated branches stood alone in a cratered desert. It had echoes of Paul Nash’s ‘Menin Road’ without the puddles. A century on from the war to end all wars and here we are again. She pulled her black kimono tightly round her.
Next to it was a bomb-blasted building, its front wall ripped open to expose a family home reduced to pathetic chaos. On the ground floor, in the shadow of a few mud bricks left intact, squatted a small boy, his eyes wide and wary but also curious as he gazed up at the camera. Where would he be now?
These were what Jin cynically called his ‘War as Art’ series. They sold well. Normally they gave a chic look to the modernist room. Today she could barely cope with them.
A Korean American, he was well over six foot, with broad shoulders, a chiselled oriental face with heavy-lidded eyes, straight nose and full lips. They had bonded in a ditch under gunfire in Ethiopia eight years back. She had been writing a travel piece about wilderness backpacking in northern Kenya and had crossed into Ethiopia to look at the Yabelo Wildlife Sanctuary. Jin was a photojournalist on a break from the fighting on the northern Eritrean border, recovering from an injured shoulder.
A local tribal dispute had trapped them for three weeks in distinctly unsanitary conditions. By the time it blew over they were firm friends, showering together with relief when they reached a hotel.
The delight of Jin was they could be apart for six months and still feel instantly at ease when they came together. She never cared what he got up to when she wasn’t there and he often related his funnier liaisons, which amused her.