(1990) Sweet Heart

by Peter James

  She gritted her teeth against the banshee din.

  There were two other cars crammed into the small area, both under dust sheets. Tools and bits of motor cars lay on the floor, the work top, the shelves. There were boxes, tins full of nuts and bolts, loose spark plugs. More tools hung from racks. Old wheels, tyres, were propped around. The bonnet of a car was suspended on wires from the roof girders and there were several metal advertising signs fixed to the walls, Woodbine cigarettes, Esso Extra and battered licence plates, mostly American.

  The noise died. There was a clank and something metal rolled along the grimy concrete floor. Hugh lifted his head out of the engine compartment and saw her. ‘Hi!’ He gave her a welcoming grin and laid the tool on the ground. The two halves of the hinged black bonnet sat up in the air like claws behind him.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘I got the head off.’ He wiped his forehead with the back of his oily fist and nodded at the engine compartment.

  She peered in; car engines always baffled her. She saw a tangle of wires, rubber tubing, several thin metal rods sticking up beside elliptical holes in what looked like the main part of the engine.

  ‘Considering she hasn’t been run for years, she’s not too bad. I need a couple of gaskets, and I might get her started up. Take you for a spin.’

  She smiled thinly, feeling the odd recognition stirring again.

  Chewing gum.

  ‘How much do you know about its history?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m going to try and trace the provenance. I don’t think Miss Delvine was the original owner.’

  No, she wasn’t, Charley wanted to say. His name was Dick.

  Her fingers felt as if they were touching ice.

  Touching an old knife.

  ‘I’ve written off to the licensing people in Swansea.’ His eyes stared at her, penetrating, a deep curiosity in them, and she looked away uneasily.

  ‘Have you seen Viola Letters today?’ she said.

  ‘No. She came round yesterday evening searching for her cat.’

  ‘She came to me as well. She wasn’t well. I’ve just been to see her. The cat’s on her doorstep, and it doesn’t seem like she’s got out of bed. I hope she’s OK.’

  ‘Maybe she’s asleep. Taken some pill. All that booze she knocks back, I should think a couple of aspirins and she goes critical.’

  Charley smiled.

  ‘Let’s try phoning her.’

  They went into his house, Ben was invited too. In contrast to the neat exterior it was a ramshackle chaos, mostly of books and manuscripts, among them, she noticed to her surprise, a row of James Herbert novels. The walls were hung with old framed maps; there wasn’t much furniture, and what there was looked masculine and slightly dilapidated. Comfortable, in a lived-in sort of way, none of it would have looked out of place in a student room at a university.

  He picked up the phone from under a pile of papers on his massive desk, rummaged through a book for Viola Letters’s number and dialled. He let it ring a dozen times, then redialled.

  There was still no answer.

  ‘I’ll pop by later on and see if she needs anything,’ he said. ‘Actually, while you’re here, I was wondering if you and your old man would like to come and have supper on Saturday, if you’re not doing anything.’

  She blanched. ‘I — we’d — he’s away — business. I don’t know when he’s coming back.’

  ‘So you’re on your own?’

  She nodded.

  He was quiet for a moment. ‘I’m going to the pub this evening. Why not come? There’ll be a few people there.’

  ‘I —’ Cheery faces. No, no thanks, couldn’t face it, could not face lying about Tom. Could not face —

  Being alone in the house. Waiting for Tom to call. Tom could go to hell.

  ‘Thanks. That would be nice.’

  A police car was parked on the grass bank by the upturned skiff, and two policemen were standing on the footbridge with a local farmer she vaguely recognised, peering down into the sluice pond. She walked through the gate pillars, wondering what they were looking at.

  Then she saw it herself. For a moment she couldn’t make out what it was. A carrier bag blown by the wind, maybe?

  It was wrapped around one of the blades of the mill wheel, flapping like a trapped animal in the water that surged over it.

  Bright yellow.

  Her heart came up into her mouth. Yellow. She began to run. Ben ran with her, thinking it was a game. Yellow.

  Viola Letters had been wearing a yellow sou’wester last night.

  It was a yellow sou’wester that was wrapped around the blade of the mill wheel.

  Then she saw the huge chunk that was missing from the bank the other side of the footbridge. The path and the shrubbery had gone, collapsed into the sluice pond, leaving raw earth like a wound from which the dressing had been ripped.

  The yellow sou’wester flapped again.

  Charley screamed.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The man from the Water Board cranked the small round handle at the side of the wheel; the rods and gears it was attached to were rusty and creaked. One of the policemen cranked the opposite handle. The two corroded steel gates moved slowly, inches at a time, until they locked together.

  Charley was aware of the new silence, as if a tap had been turned off. A bizarre silence.

  The last of the water slid down the slimy concrete blocks of the weir and the level began to sink rapidly down the circular wall of the sluice pond.

  The man from the Water Board knelt, peered over the edge of the bank and took out a measuring stick. ‘Four inches,’ he said. ‘The level’s high. It’ll rise that in an hour. I can give you forty-five minutes then I’ll have to open the sluice again.

  Charley barely heard them talk as she stared over the parapet at the slime rising around the brick walls and the dark shapes becoming visible below the surface.

  Be an old sack. Please be just an old sack, or plastic sheeting.

  The top of a gas cooker appeared first; but by then the shape beside it was clear to them all, and their expressions tightened as the water fell further and they gazed at the dark sludge and the body wearing yellow oilskins and red galoshes that lay face down in it, between the mangle and the bicycle and the rusted bedstead.

  ‘To look for her cat? You think that’s why she went up there?’ Constable Tidyman’s notebook was in front of him on the kitchen table. His face was puffy, the smooth skin, on the turn from youth to middle age, streaked by red veins. He had the eyes of a small bird.

  The kitchen still smelled of molten plastic. Through the window she could see two policemen stretching white tape around the weir. A Scenes of Crime officer was walking around with a camera, taking shots.

  ‘Yes. She seemed in a bit of a state about it.’ Steam from her tea rose. She saw Viola Letters sprawled in the sludge, arms outstretched as if she had been dropped from a great height. She had not been able to watch her body being hoisted out.

  The policeman tapped his pen on his notepad, his nose twitching at the lingering unpleasant smell. Hammering echoed around the house and there was the whine of a drill. ‘You saw her last night?’

  Charley nodded.

  ‘What time?’

  ‘About nine o’clock.’

  ‘And you gave her a drink?’

  ‘A gin and tonic.’

  ‘A large one?’

  The question disturbed her; he was trying to lead her somewhere and that angered her suddenly. She didn’t fall, for Christ’s sake! It was a landslip. She contained her anger. ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think she might have been tipsy when she left?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Had she been drinking before she came here?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  The beady eyes stared at her accusingly. ‘The dam wall was not maintained properly. Water must have been seeping through, undermining the path. It only needed one heavy rainfall to sweep it aw
ay.’

  Charley shook her head numbly. She did not like the way the policeman had suddenly changed tack, as if he were determined to lay the blame on her.

  ‘The wall is the Water Board’s responsibility. I understood that it’s checked every year,’ she said.

  The policeman heaped a spoon of sugar into his tea, stirred it, then tapped the spoon dry on the rim of the cup, more taps than were necessary. ‘Did her cat stray often?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’ve only been here a few weeks.’

  ‘Do you suppose there’d be any other reason why she might have gone up there?’

  ‘No, I —’ Her brain fogged.

  I wonder if you’d mind terribly nipping down and telling Viola I’ll be a bit late. I’ve lost my damned watch somewhere and I must go back and look for it.

  The voice of Viola Letters’s husband rang around inside her head, and she felt her cheeks getting hotter. Constable Tidyman leaned forwards, as if he had picked up a scent.

  ‘Was there anything odd about Mrs Letters’s behaviour last night?’

  Yes, officer, she was very distressed by a photograph. Unfortunately it got burned this morning.

  ‘She wasn’t feeling very well. I did offer to walk her home.’

  The first time we met, when you came with that message from my late husband. Did I tell you I’d had the same message before? On the day he died?

  ‘Is there something else you’d like to tell me, Mrs Witney?’

  ‘No. No, I’m sorry. I feel very upset; she was a nice woman; she was kind to me.’

  The beady eyes did not leave her. ‘I understand she lost her dog recently.’

  The eyes drew her like magnets. Bored into her. She nodded.

  ‘Accident with a kettle?’

  ‘Teapot,’ she mouthed.

  ‘Another accident,’ he said.

  She bit her lip. Tidyman looked solid in his serge jacket with its polished chromium buttons. He looked like a man who enjoyed afternoon cake in front of the telly and a pint with his mates, a man who was happiest dealing with shotgun licences and lost property. He asked a few more questions, finished his tea and prepared to leave. She let him out of the front door. At the top of the drive two men were loading a large black plastic bag into a white van. The Scenes of Crime officer was changing a lens on his camera. Water was tumbling down the weir once more.

  Some people thought death was OK, they could accept it, some religions thought it was OK too. She could not. Death of people she knew always affected her badly. Death was evil. It disturbed her, disoriented her, as if the world had been given a half rotation so that instead of looking up at the sky she found herself looking down into an abyss.

  She wondered sometimes what it felt like to die; what Viola Letters had felt plunging down the bank, into the water, being sucked under the water. Some man on a television programme about death, a jolly, earnest fellow whose name she had forgotten, said drowning was quite a pleasant way to go, actually.

  It hadn’t seemed very pleasant from where she’d stood at the top of the sluice.

  It hadn’t seemed very pleasant when they’d put Viola Letters’s body into what looked like a bin-liner.

  The application form for her birth certificate was missing from the table. She searched the kitchen but it was gone.

  She thought back to last night, to when Viola Letters had come into the kitchen. The cassettes had been on the table then, the old woman had noticed them. Had she moved them? The frame? Her mind was fuzzy; her sense of recall seemed to have gone.

  Another time, dear. We’ll talk about it another time.

  That had gone too.

  Hugh picked Charley up at half past seven in his elderly Jaguar saloon which felt solid and rather quaint. The ignition was on the dash and there was a starter button. She groped around for the seat belt.

  ‘Afraid there aren’t any.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ she said, feeling slightly foolish, as if she should have known there wouldn’t be. There was a low whine from the gear box as they moved off and a gruff roar as he accelerated up the drive. The instruments flickered, the speedometer bouncing around the dial without settling.

  The beam of the headlights picked up the white tape that cordoned off the sluice pond and the weir, and was staked across the footpath with a large sign in front, ‘POLICE DANGER’.

  She said nothing until they were past the old woman’s cottage. ‘Lovely car.’

  He smiled. ‘She’s getting a bit tatty.’ He changed gear, then slowed for a pothole outside the driveway of Yuppie Towers, stopped at the end of the lane then pulled out on to the road. He drove gently, rather sedately, as if he were nurturing the car along, respectful of its age, tilting his head for a moment and listening like a doctor to the note of the engine. She found herself comparing his driving to Tom’s frenetic pace.

  ‘Where’s your hubby gone?’

  Hubby. Sounded cosy. The acid in her stomach rose as steadily as the sluice water had fallen. ‘He’s — in the States.’

  ‘Does he travel a lot?’

  Never. ‘Yes. Quite a lot.’

  ‘He does international law?’

  ‘Yes, a bit. Child custody and things.’ She was uncomfortable at lying.

  ‘Do you mind being on your own?’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ she said too hastily. ‘I suppose I’m more used to being on my own in a city than in the country. I don’t think I’ve quite got used to it yet.’

  ‘You haven’t had a very good start.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I haven’t.’

  The pub was quiet; she was glad not to see Zoe and Julian and to have to listen to how well the girls had ridden and how soooooper Elmwood Mill was and weren’t she and Tom simply adoring it?

  Two wizened men sat at the bar with their own personal tankards, one smoking a pipe, the other tapping his cap which was by the ashtray in front of him. Hugh nodded at them and the one tapping his cap nodded back without interest. A youth was playing the fruit machine and a plump girl in her late teens sat eating a packet of crisps behind him. The fruit machine bleeped and there was a clatter of money.

  Hugh ordered her a drink and exchanged a few words with Vic, the landlord, about Viola Letters.

  ‘That path been goin’ f’years. Any fool could a see’d it,’ the old man with the pipe said to Vic.

  Vic nodded, his dark funereal face ideally suited to the gloomy atmosphere.

  Charley sat on a bar stool. Tom had rung again, left another message sometime in the afternoon when she had been out, gone for a long walk with Ben, tramping across the fields. She had not rung him and she was pleased, took a certain bitter satisfaction in playing his voice back. It would not last, she knew that; it came in waves, and when she was at the top she was fine, but each time she sank down into the trough she wanted to pick the receiver up and dial him and hear his voice telling her all was fine, he was coming back.

  She thought of Viola plunging with the landslip into the water. Was it the cat that had made her go up that path in the darkness? Or her husband? Had she gone to try and communicate?

  ‘Charley must have been the last to see her,’ Hugh was saying.

  ‘That path been goin’ f’years,’ the man with the pipe repeated. ‘F’years.’

  Hugh handed Charley her spritzer and clinked her glass lightly with his beer tumbler. ‘Cheers,’ he said.

  ‘Cheers. Thank you.’ She sipped the drink; it was cold and rather sharp. Vic walked down the bar and began to tidy some glasses.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Hugh said.

  ‘Pretty shitty.’

  ‘Blaming yourself?’

  ‘I offered to walk her home. She wouldn’t let me. If I had insisted …’ She was silent for a moment. ‘She didn’t have any children, did she?’

  ‘No.’ Hugh was wearing a battered jacket, crumpled shirt and a vivid red tie with vertical stripes that reminded her of toothpaste. He ran his eyes across her face, searching for whatever it was he
looked for.

  Right now, she was not missing Tom. She was glad to be alone with Hugh, to have a chance to talk.

  ‘Hugh. If — If I told you I had proof I have lived before, how would you react?’

  The serious expression on his face did not alter; he studied her a little more intently. ‘What sort of proof?’

  ‘Didn’t you say that to prove you have lived before you need to know something that happened during a previous life that no one else living knows? And which you could not possibly have found out any other way, unless you had lived before?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He took his pipe from his jacket pocket.

  ‘You said it could be something small.’

  He rummaged in another pocket and pulled out a leather tobacco pouch.

  ‘I have two things.’

  He unzipped the pouch and pushed the bowl of his pipe in. ‘Tell me.’

  She told him: about her background; everything she could remember about her regression sessions; about the stables, Viola Letters’s husband, the Triumph and the chewing gum, about the locket, and the note inside it, the inscription on the rock and the knife.

  She did not tell him about digging the locket back up again, and burning the photographs; nor that Tom had left her. She did not want him to think she was nuts and dismiss everything as her imagination, because she was not nuts, not really — well, maybe just heading a little that way. But not the whole hog.

  ‘D loves BJ?’ He tapped his teeth with the stem of his pipe. ‘Do those initials mean anything to you?’

  ‘His name is Dick.’

  ‘And what’s yours in these regressions?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Hugh struck a match and lit his pipe; the blue smoke drifted towards her.

  ‘You’re adopted and don’t know your real parents?’

  ‘I’m trying to find out now.’

  ‘So cryptomnesia would be the most likely explanation.’

  ‘Cryptomnesia is things one knew as a child and have forgotten, isn’t it?’

  ‘Totally forgotten, as if they never existed.’ He sucked on his pipe. ‘Memories of the ages one and two, for instance. Very few people can remember anything at all, without the help of hypnosis.’ He peered at the bowl and prodded the tobacco with his finger. ‘Maybe you were down here with your natural parents, before you were adopted.’