Good Bait

by John Harvey

  She still didn’t go, not for the best part of another hour, but then, when there really was nothing more she could do, she decided to take Ramsden at his word.

  The kofta was cold; she took one bite and dumped the rest into the bin. The red wine tasted sour. She made herself a cup of weak tea instead, two sugars, and drank it while she got ready for bed. The book she’d been reading was on the floor, a scrap of paper marking her place; she picked it up and began to read.

  Black Water Rising: Attica Locke.

  Houston, Texas in the late sixties. Revolution in the air. Aretha Franklin singing Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change is Gonna Come’. Stokely Carmichael, about to throw in his lot with the Black Panthers, speaking at a student rally on the subject of Black Liberation, speaking to those few Negroes, armed with their passports — their university degrees — who had escaped into middle-class America. Integration was not the way. Integration meant accepting that your own culture, your own way of life was worth nothing, not worth hanging on to.

  Karen could remember, as a young woman, dancing to that slice of seminal James Brown in a way that would have made her poor aunt feel shamed, shaking her hips, hands in the air, singing it loud, how she was black and proud.

  Those young people, young men from Tottenham and Wood Green; those like Hector Prince who were ganged up, others like Derroll Palmer, caught between — no danger of them joining the white middle class, getting university degrees. Their choice, she wondered, or somebody else’s? And if so, whose?

  Kids like that, Ramsden had said, they take their lives in their hands each time they step out the front door.

  And here she was, a black woman who, as one of her sisters had informed her when she was still out patrolling the streets, was wearing the white man’s uniform, enforcing his laws. No answer from Karen, other than to move on, the sister had spat in her face.

  Some days, years later, she still reached up a hand to wipe it away.

  Only when she could feel her eyes failing did she set the book aside and switch out the light.

  19

  Carla James had been in Karen’s year at secondary school, a bit of a star even then; the lead in the school production of The Wiz, her picture all over the local paper, Acton’s own Diana Ross. In the sixth form she had hung out with the guys who were forever putting together some band or other, rumours of recording contracts that never quite came off, Carla laying down vocals that somehow got lost in the final mix. Her boyfriend then was an athlete on the fringes of the national team, a sprinter; thigh muscles, Carla told them all proudly, like you wouldn’t believe.

  Karen would go with her sometimes, evenings, down to the track to watch him train: stretches, drills, strides; sweat dripping off him beneath the lights, making his body shine.

  Honey to the bee.

  A levels over, Carla applied to drama school and failed to get in; she got a job in a bar instead, sang back-up for a band that did Motown covers in places like Basingstoke and Stevenage, and took classes, part-time, at the Poor School near King’s Cross — movement and voice, dialect, singing, stage fighting, Shakespeare and contemporary text. At the end of the year, she reapplied and was accepted. All of that more years ago than she cared to remember.

  There were still periods when she signed on or worked in bars; in between there was the odd show in Manchester or Liverpool; twelve weeks understudying an all-black production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the West End; bits and pieces of telly — Wire in the Blood, Silent Witness, The Bill — usually, as she put it, standing around on street corners with my skirt up my arse looking for business, waiting for someone to smack me upside the head with a hammer.

  Right now she was at the National, Jacobean tragedy, twenty-three performances at the Cottesloe, then out on tour. Carla playing five different roles and loving it.

  They met at a place near the theatre, loud music, Mexican food and cocktails, Carla’s voice rising above everything: ‘Karen! Girlfriend! Over here.’ Carla with brightly beaded hair extensions, cleavage to die for, colours that clashed as deliriously as something in a Matisse painting.

  After a hug and a kiss and a perfunctory, ‘So, how’s it all going?’, Carla set off, as Karen knew and hoped she would, on a rousing and ribald account of the previous few months of her life that drew applause and laughter from listeners at the surrounding tables.

  After a day of no progress whatsoever, other than Hector Prince’s mother, between convulsions of grief and angry tears, identifying her son in the sterile cold of the morgue, Karen hadn’t wanted to spend the evening alone.

  ‘Don’t turn round now,’ she said, as the waiter delivered a fresh pair of mojitos, ‘but that guy over by the back wall, is he looking at us?’

  Carla leaned over and fiddled with the strap of her shoe. ‘Black turtleneck, short hair, that the one?’

  Karen nodded.

  ‘I should hope so.’

  ‘No, really. I’m serious.’

  ‘What? You fancy him? Doesn’t look like your type.’

  ‘No, it’s not …’

  ‘’Cause I can go over, make an introduction …’

  ‘No.’ She grabbed hold of Carla’s arm. ‘No, it’s fine. Just jumpy, that’s all.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  The next time Karen looked, the man had gone.

  ‘Bad day, huh?’

  ‘Bad couple of days.’

  ‘Want to talk about it?’

  Karen shook her head.

  They went to a club across the river, just a nightcap, vodka tonics. When someone stumbled over his feet asking her to dance, Carla just laughed. ‘I ought to be heading home,’ she said, glancing at her watch. ‘Matinee tomorrow.’

  They stood on the Embankment, looking out over the river, the slow trail of lights down towards St Paul’s.

  Carla lit a cigarette.

  ‘Let me have one.’

  ‘I thought you’d given up.’

  ‘I did.’

  Something caught Karen’s eye up on the bridge. The flash of a camera. Tourists capturing the city, the Thames at night.

  ‘If it was ever really getting to you,’ Carla said, ‘you know, really doing your head in, you’d chuck it all in, right? Step away.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, of course.’

  Even as she said it, she wondered if it were true. It was her life, after all. What else could she do? And besides — Make somethin’ of yourself, her father had said. Make a difference if you can. She owed it to him to keep trying.

  Five minutes later, she and Carla were in the Underground, different destinations, separate trains. A five-minute walk for Karen from Highbury and Islington, five or six, soft echo of her footsteps along the pavement. Someone, somewhere playing Al Green’s ‘Belle’, a song she’d always loved; an upstairs window left open, volume just high enough to tempt her into singing along. The living-room light was on as she’d left it, muted through closed curtains. Key in her hand, she looked up and down the empty street.

  Inside, she slipped the bolt and turned the key. Switched on the TV and listened to the canned laughter from some rerun comedy as she moved around the flat, taking off her clothes. The man in the Mexican place earlier, standing up against the wall, bottle of Dos Equis in his hand; she knew him, someone like him. The way he had looked at her. As if he were in the job. God! What was this? Burcher on her tail from nowhere, checking up on her, asking questions. Ion Milescu’s father expressing concern, friends in high places, and now she was getting paranoid.

  Ridiculous.

  She clicked off the light.

  The man in the restaurant: off duty or on?

  The bedroom struck cold. Curling into position on her side, knees drawn up, one hand close to her face, she was asleep before realising she’d closed her eyes. Flat out.

  And still she dreamed.

  20

  Come all this way, Kiley had said, with reference to the bookshop Letitia’s father ran in Hastings, shame not to check it out. Besides, it was too l
ong, Cordon thought, though little time enough, since he had seen the sea. The smell, catching the air from as far back as the railway station, drawing him down.

  He made his way past the chippies and the pizza parlours and the petty amusement arcades, on past the signs advertising Smugglers Adventure and Underwater World to where the fishing boats, bright reds and blues and greens, sat propped on a slope of pebbles beneath the East Cliff; net houses, narrow and all-over black, stood tall, shielding them from the road.

  Cordon walked between the boats, sniffing the air, listening to the squawk and call of gulls, relishing the roll of small stones beneath his feet. Letitia might even like it here, he thought, the south coast, remind her of some of the things — few enough — she missed about home. A touch closer to Penzance than Finsbury Park.

  He sat.

  Letitia’s face came clear to his mind. Not that last time, the last time so far, herself and Maxine dolled up to the nines, a night out on what passed for the town. This was Letitia at sixteen, just old enough, as she had put it, to be legal; Letitia the night she had let herself into the flat with the key she used when she came to walk the dog; let herself into the flat and into his bed, and Cordon, caught between fantasy and dream and recognising, just in time, the warmth and reality of bones and flesh, had pushed her out, and, stumbling to the bathroom, hand across his all-too-humanly tumescent cock, had splashed cold water in his face, and when he looked up, had seen Letitia’s face behind him in the mirror, half-mocking, half-exposed from the pain of being rejected, cast aside.

  After that, between Letitia and himself, it had never been the same. And still there were times, when, unbidden, the memory returned, caught him off guard, riven between desire and shame.

  He lifted a stone and weighed it in his hand before skimming it out to sea. One bounce, two, and he had turned away before it had sunk from sight.

  Back beside the main road, he crossed against the traffic and headed for the centre of the old town.

  The shop was tucked away between a web of narrow streets, the sign over the door in faded purple paint, Clifford Carlin, Bookseller. Antiquarian and Second-Hand. A couple of boxes stood partly blocking the entrance — Any Book 10p. Inside, books rose, floor to ceiling, up every wall; tall shelves of paperbacks, arranged by type, jutted out, maze-like, across the floor.

  Taking his bearings, Cordon paused before a large selection of Westerns: Jubal Cade, Herne the Hunter, Apache, Edge. Who was that writer his father had liked to read? Louis L’Amour? They were here in their dozens. And there was somebody else, he was sure. Oakley someone, was that possible? Oakley Hall?

  In the far corner, near the window, there was a children’s section with a little plastic table and chairs, crayons in old coffee tins, scraps of paper on which to draw, copies of old Beano annuals fanned out, one above the other. A pair of Goths was looking at the section labelled Alternative Medicine amp; Psychotherapy; an earnest young man, head angled awkwardly sideways, was browsing through Science Fiction amp; Fantasy.

  Music played from a battered beat box perched precariously atop a tower of encyclopedias. Twangy guitar, slapped bass, flailing vocals — rockabilly? Is that what this was? Cordon glanced at the red cover of the CD as he stepped past. Charlie Feathers. He was none the wiser.

  Carlin — he presumed it was Carlin — was talking to a customer weighed down with plastic bags that seemed to contain all his worldly goods. Long hair pulled back off his face and tied in a pony tail, goatee beard, Carlin was wearing a faded T-shirt from the Rolling Stones tour of ’76. Late fifties he’d be, Cordon hazarded, early sixties. Ten years, or thereabouts, older than he was himself.

  The customer demanding all of the proprietor’s attention, Cordon looked again at the Western shelves, and there was Oakley Hall, but out of sequence. Not Warlock — he remembered the title now — that was the one his father had read, not once but several times; there had even, Cordon thought, been a movie. This was a tall paperback, close on three hundred pages: Separations. A painting on the cover of a deep canyon, sheer cliffs leading to slate blue water.

  He turned to the beginning and read the first sentence.

  When Mary Temple read in the Alta California that a white woman had been reported seen in an Indian village in Arizona Territory, she knew it was her sister.

  So many stories, Cordon thought, fact or fiction, began with someone looking for someone else. Searching. He closed the book and carried it with him to the desk, the man with the carrier bags just leaving.

  ‘Two-fifty?’ Cordon queried.

  ‘If that’s what it says.’

  ‘Most of the others are less.’

  ‘That’s ’cause most of the others aren’t so good.’ Something sparkled, some fragment of gold, inside Carlin’s mouth when he smiled.

  Cordon passed across a five-pound note and kept his hand out for the change.

  ‘Your daughter,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your daughter.’

  ‘Who says I have a daughter?’

  ‘Rose. Letitia.’

  Coins spilled through Carlin’s fingers. ‘You’re what? Police?’

  ‘More a friend.’

  ‘Of Letitia’s?’

  Cordon nodded. ‘Down to you, that. The name. Or so she said.’

  ‘Suited her. Back then especially.’

  ‘Joy and happiness.’

  ‘That’s what it means.’ He shook his head. ‘Never liked Rose. Her mum’s choice, not mine.’

  He broke off long enough to sell one of the Goths a book on Ancient and Medieval Necromancy.

  ‘You heard about her mother?’ Cordon asked. ‘About Maxine?’

  Carlin nodded.

  ‘The reason she was in London,’ Cordon said, ‘as far as I can make out, she was looking for Letitia.’

  ‘Meant to come here, wasn’t she? Right after New Year. Called to say she was getting on the train. Last I heard of her. Till a couple of days back. Got a postcard. Here — I’ve got it somewhere.’ He started to rummage through one of the desk drawers. ‘Lake District somewhere. Here you are. Keswick.’

  Cordon looked at a picture of artificially coloured lakes and mountains; spidery writing, kisses, a name.

  ‘Working in a hotel, that’s what she says.’

  ‘Why there?’

  ‘Why not? Law to herself, Letitia. Don’t seek to reason.’

  ‘You’re not worried then?’

  ‘No. I mean, I was, a bit anyway. But now I’ve heard …’ He gestured with his hands. ‘With her, that’s the way it is. Since she was knee high to a grasshopper it’s been the same. Mind of her own. Wouldn’t bend. Break, maybe, but not bend. And since she got of an age, no stopping her. Here today, gone tomorrow.’ A hasty smile. ‘Mostly the latter.’

  He looked at the book in Cordon’s hand.

  ‘You want a bag for that or …’

  ‘No, thanks, you’re fine.’

  ‘Down for the day, is it?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Letitia phones — not as that’s likely — but if she does, who shall I say it was asking?’

  Cordon fished out one of his cards and placed it on the desk.

  ‘Police, then. I was right.’

  Cordon shrugged.

  ‘Police and a long way from home.’

  Maybe too long, Cordon thought.

  ‘Enjoy the book,’ Carlin said.

  ‘Do my best.’

  Charlie Feathers was still doing his thing as Cordon walked to the door, just hitting the closing chorus of ‘We’re Getting Closer to Being Apart’.

  21

  In the short space of time Cordon had been in the bookshop, the weather had changed: a cold wind buffeting along the narrow street, the first thrusts of rain. There was a pub a short way down on the opposite side, an exterior of blackened wood and brick. Cordon bought a pint of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord and took it across to a corner table, prepared to wait it out, the bookshop entrance just visi
ble through a smear of glass. Two sups and he cracked open his book, the search for the sister, the missing girl. He was at chapter six, ‘Eureka’ — a journey downriver, shooting the rapids — when Carlin emerged and carried the boxes of sale books back inside; then, duffle bag on his shoulder, drab green waterproof still unzipped, he padlocked the door and turned away towards the interior of the town. Cordon swallowed the last mouthful of his lingering pint, used a beer mat to mark his place, and, book in hand, set out after him.

  As the street broadened into a T-junction, he quickened his pace, crossing into a narrow ginnel between housebacks, then climbing a tall flight of stone steps that changed direction midway, following the line of the cliff.

  Below, he could see the patchwork of boats stretched out across the stones below, the beach where he had sat earlier, staring at the sea. The rain less insistent now, little more than mist.

  Gulls wheeling above his head, riding the wind — for a moment he could have been back in Newlyn — he continued to climb until the top of the steps was reached and the land levelled out, a crown of bushes ahead and a well-worn track posted to Hastings Country Park and the Saxon Shore Way. For a moment he thought Carlin had slipped from sight, but there he was, hood up, following a grass path away to the left; less hurried now, slowed perhaps by the climb, the realisation he was nearly home.

  The path dropped down towards the rear gardens of some thirties houses, conservatories stuck to their backsides like carbuncles; a narrow ginnel leading out on to a quiet street, a crescent, the fading toll of an ice-cream van the only clear sound.

  Cordon waited to see where Carlin was headed; watched as, at the gate to number seventeen, he fumbled out his keys. Dark curtains were partly drawn across the windows of the downstairs bay. In the garden, a gnome, three foot high, wore a black beret at a rakish angle on its head, dark glasses covering half its face, a Ban the Bomb symbol painted in psychedelic colours on its chest. A few desultory snowdrops gathered in a cluster beside the gravelled path.