Dispossession

by Chaz Brenchley

  “What have you got?”

  “Everything. Cornies, muesli, Fruit’n’Fibre; toast and marmalade, toast and honey; Woodall’s, of course, and free-range eggs to go with...”

  “What’s Woodall’s?”

  Her hands were still, fractionally. Then, “You told me about Woodall’s. Best bacon in the known universe, you said it was to die for. And I said only if you were a pig, and you snogged me. First time of snogging, that was.”

  Never mind the snogging, there was something there that took me a frowning moment to pin down. Timing, that’s what it was. I’d never heard of Woodall’s bacon; and if I’d introduced it to her regardless of that, then I must have met it myself somewhere in the time between my last active memories—late January—and the time I’d first snogged Suzie...

  So do mind the snogging, mind it much. “Don’t remember the date, do you?”

  “I’ve got a diary,” she said. “And don’t laugh,” clipping me over the back of the head right where I’d had the stitches and still had no hair to act as a cushion so that it really did hurt, though I didn’t actually need to yelp so loudly.

  She wouldn’t let me read it, but her diary fixed the date. February fifteenth: “That’s right,” she said, “I remember. A day too late for Valentine’s, I was dead pissed off about that. No romance, that’s your problem. One of your problems.”

  Least of my bloody problems, I thought it was just then. I was still trying to work things out on my fingers. “So somewhere in that fortnight or so, someone else must have introduced me to this stuff. Is it really that good?”

  “It’s brilliant,” she said. “But you could’ve bought it in a shop.”

  “Maybe.” If I’d been changing lifestyle already, determinedly spending money I’d never had before, then maybe. But I didn’t think I’d have spent it on posh bacon, even so. Not without prompting. Never a priority in my life.

  “But so what, anyway?” Suzie demanded. “So someone else told you how good Woodall’s was, where does that get us?”

  I wasn’t sure myself, how to answer that. Not until I did it, at any rate. Suzie was good for me, seemingly: making me say things aloud, making concrete and usable what otherwise would have stayed unstated, nebulously in my head. “Because it wasn’t any of the people I know,” I said slowly. “This is a marker, or it looks like one from here. It’s not important in itself, but it’s the earliest thing we know about so far, that I don’t recognise. If we can find out or figure out who it was that gave it to me, then that really might be important.”

  “Deverill,” she said. “Nothing but the best for Vernon. And I bet he’s an eggs and bacon man, breakfast every day.”

  “Likely he is,” I agreed, thinking of the weight of him, and the symbolism inherent in what he was. Real crooks don’t eat muesli. “Why would I be having breakfast with Vernon Deverill?”

  She shrugged. “I wouldn’t know, would I? It was before my time. Since we’ve been together, you’ve had breakfast with me. But you were buddy-buddy with him all through. That could’ve started with a power breakfast, he probably does deals right from the time he wakes up. He probably does deals in his bath.”

  Which was clearly heresy, and the outrage of it nothing to do with presumptive nakedness. Bathtimes must be sacred in this flat; and breakfasts too, maybe, which was maybe why she was so demonstrably not having breakfast with me today. Trying to emulate me at last, to keep some distance here, not to waken more echoes that she couldn’t bear to hear?

  “You could always phone and ask him,” she went on. “He’s probably waiting to hear from you anyway, wondering why you haven’t called. He’ll reckon you owe him one. It was his bodyguard saved your bacon, remember; so go on, give him a ring and ask him about his.”

  She tried a smile there for self-applause, but it was a poor imitation of her usual. I thought she must be thinking about the circumstances, the truck and the fire. Suzie couldn’t easily joke about that. Neither could I, having seen the consequences, a man burning like a candle.

  But I thought Vernon Deverill would know very well why I hadn’t phoned him. He clearly hadn’t known the extent of my amnesia when he came to see me, but he’d have found out by now. He’d have copies of all the doctors’ notes, I imagined. A man hard to say no to, he would be potentially a very useful friend...

  Which was presumably why I’d been cultivating him so assiduously, even to the extent of working for him, and letting him make me gifts. And why he’d want to use me was one question, and why I’d let him was another, and I urgently needed answers to both.

  In the second bedroom, what Suzie called my study, I opened the wardrobe to confront what Suzie called my clothes, though I still had no sense of ownership. Choosing was impossible; I just pulled out jeans and a sweatshirt at random, underwear and a soft pair of shoes and never mind the names on all the labels, they fitted fine and that was good enough.

  Back in the main room, Suzie was pleased to approve. Then, “Breakfast?” she reminded me.

  Breakfast didn’t seem half so important as getting a few of those questions answered; I wasn’t even curious to try the bacon. Not this morning. Too much on my mind to be concerned with my stomach. I’d have missed breakfast altogether, except that I thought I’d not be allowed to and I couldn’t be bothered to fight.

  “I’ll just get myself some cereal,” I said, moving purposefully towards the kitchen to kill any ambition in her to do it for me. Self-reliant I had to be, or she’d be pushing me more and more into the role of partner, where she wanted me, where I felt like a trespasser or a kidnap victim, both.

  “Okay.” For a wonder, she didn’t even follow me through to point out the proper cupboards—though on second thoughts maybe it wasn’t such a wonder after all. No fool, Suzie; she’d recognise my need for space, and just now at least was generous enough to allow it. “Tell you what,” she called after me, “I’ll nip down the shop, get a local paper. See what they’re saying about you this time.”

  “Don’t bother on my account,” I said.

  “I’m not,” she said, and laughed, and was gone.

  o0o

  And was back too soon, far too soon, before I’d poured milk onto cornflakes: back frowning and disturbed and looking to me, giving me an equal share in her trouble and by implication an equal voice in her response.

  “What is it?” I asked, as soon as I saw her chewing on a thumbnail and not bursting with whatever news it was had brought her straight upstairs again.

  “Someone’s been messing with the fire door,” she said. “Trying to jemmy it open, I think. I had trouble getting it unlocked, and it’s usually dead smooth; so I had a look when it was open, and the wood’s all scratched and gouged around the whatchamacallit, the plate thing.”

  I took a second to assimilate that while she stood quiet and watched me, dark eyes all unreadable; then I said, “What about the street door, did you check that?” Back to the questions again, but practical ones first. I was tired of asking who and why, and getting no replies.

  She shook her head. “No point. The club’s open till four o’clock, remember, they could just walk in. And they must’ve thought they could walk right up to the flat, only I’d locked the fire door; and they wouldn’t be able to do much with the club right there, people coming in and out, they’ve just had a quick go and gone away. But it’s scary, Jonty. It wouldn’t have been the papers, you’re not that big a story. I just keep remembering Jacky, and what they did to him...”

  Nothing in the world to say that this was the same people who had killed her brother. I told her so, but she only shook her head, that kind of useless reassurance not at all what she wanted from me. So I gave her something of what she did want, God help me, what else could I do?

  Actually I hardly did anything that she could have seen, I made only the slightest movement. It was in my mind that the greater shift occurred, from denial to reluctant invitation. All my keep your distance wariness came down, because I kicked it
down. That was what she saw or sensed, and she came to me in a hurry and a hug, and it wasn’t only training or duty in me that hugged her back.

  Short and slender, she fitted easily, familiarly against me, her head nestled into my shoulder and neatly under my chin. Compared to Carol it was like hugging a boy, almost, all bones and tension and no prominent padding; except that there was no more of a boy’s awkwardness in her, hugging a man, than there was a stranger’s. Only I felt strange and awkward, and that only for a moment. Guilty lasted longer—why her when it should have been, used to be Carol?—but even guilt wasn’t strong enough to have me draw back or push her away.

  Her choice, when to move: and she made that choice sooner than I wanted her to, in all honesty. One last tentacular squeeze, and her arms uncurled themselves from my ribs; her head lifted and tilted, till she could look at me; her hands sat lightly against my chest for a moment, then slid up over shoulders and neck to cup my cheeks; and then she kissed me.

  Stood on tiptoe to do it, and still had to stretch. And my hands were helping, gripping her waist and lifting almost, supporting certainly, without my brain having anything to say in the matter.

  It was a kiss stillborn, though, a kiss that failed, a clash of agendas with no common purpose. Stale and unprofitable it was, stumbling and uncertain. Again it was she who moved to break it, wriggling free of me and stepping back.

  “Thanks,” she said, avoiding my eyes as if she were awkwardly thanking a stranger for a too-personal service rendered. Which she was, perhaps, but only from my perspective. I think I blushed, a little.

  “What now, then?” I asked, trying to bump us quickly over onto an easier track. When in doubt, dodge the issue; it’s a native human reaction. She had her way, a stream of words meant often to hide whatever she might be feeling; I had mine. I’d sooner be doing than talking.

  “Police, I suppose,” she said, shrugging. “They’ll be no help, but doing things properly—it’s a promise I had to make to Jacky, before he ever let me work at the club. No short cuts, nothing unofficial.”

  Smart lad, her Jacky, if he could keep her acting responsibly even now. I offered him silent, respectful applause while she switched the phone on, first time since last night, and looked to me: “What’s the number for the police? I don’t want to go 999, they wouldn’t love us if we tried to pass this off as an emergency.”

  I took a breath to tell her—one number served the whole city, and I must have dialled it a thousand times, the years I’d been working here—but before I could name even a single digit, the phone rang in her hand.

  She quirked an eyebrow at me, pressed a button, said, “Yes? Hullo?” and listened; grunted; quirked again, and passed the phone to me. “It’s the hotel,” she said, deflated by anticlimax.

  Me, too. Calls in dramatic circumstances should have dramatic content, even if the drama’s only a matter of timing. I said hullo, and could hear the uninterest in my own voice; presumably this was the call they’d promised me, to say the coast was clear and I could go and collect my hire car unpestered.

  So much for presumption. Not the same man I’d spoken to last night, but the same anxious discomfort in his voice as he said, “Mr Marks? I’ve been trying to reach you all morning...”

  “We had the phone switched off,” I said, without a trace of apology. “What can I do for you?”

  “Something rather strange has happened, Mr Marks. I understand from my colleague Mr Hobden that you did not in fact occupy the room that was allocated to you last night?”

  “Well, only for an hour or so. I had a shower and a drink...” And were they going to charge me for it after all? House policy, perhaps, overriding the earlier decisions of a night manager?

  “But you left no luggage in the room, is that right, Mr Marks?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” None to leave; but already I was getting an inkling of where this was leading, and hairs were rising on the back of my neck. I lay no faith in coincidence.

  “I’m glad of that, at least,” he said. “You see, the room was broken into sometime during the night. There’s no damage that we can find, except that the lock was forced; but it was turned over very thoroughly, and if there had been any property of yours in the room, I’m afraid it would be gone now.”

  “No, nothing,” I confirmed. “Have you told the police?”

  “Yes, of course. They’re here now, as a matter of fact, and they’d like a word with you, I think.”

  “Uh-huh. Put them on, would you?”

  Only a uniform constable, for a busted hotel door; but after I’d spoken to her she invited us to stay where we were, to await a visit, and no surprise that it wasn’t she who came visiting.

  Who it was, it was the same plain-clothes and presumably quite senior detective who’d talked to me in the hospital, whose name nor rank I could remember.

  Luckily, though, “Detective Chief Inspector Dale,” he said as Suzie opened the door to him, as I lurked a little distance behind her.

  “Hullo,” she said neutrally. And then, “It’s only a jemmied door, do we need a Detective Chief Inspector?”

  “Nothing but the best,” he said, his voice all affability as he stepped into the room with a young suit at his heels, some DCI-in-training, no doubt. “But I talked to your husband once before, Mrs Marks, at the hospital that morning, and it saves time if we don’t have to cover the same ground twice.”

  First policeman I ever heard of who didn’t want to cover the same ground twice and three times and a dozen times more; but I nodded when he caught my eye, and shook his hand when he held it out to me, even gave him something of a smile when he said, “You’re looking better than you were, lad, last time I saw you.”

  “I expect I am,” I said. “I wasn’t at my best.”

  “No. Any memory come back, then? Doctors told me it might.”

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  “Aye, well. It might yet; and you’ll let us know, yes? If it does?”

  “Yes, of course,” though I thought I was probably lying. I no longer hoped to recover anything from those lost weeks; but if I did, I thought, I’d want to keep it to myself awhile. At least until I had it sorted, the old world and the new held in some kind of equilibrium in my head.

  “Good lad. Now,” moving smartly on against my incipient resentment, don’t you patronise me, “let’s see if you can remember this, shall we? Are you by any chance any relation to Mrs Elspeth Marks of Eskdale, Cumbria?”

  The way he asked it, he already knew; but my heart was sinking none the less. Oh Ellie, God, what are you up to now? Most of my troubles, adolescent or adult, had started something like this.

  Still, I’d never denied it yet and wasn’t about to start. “She’s my mother,” I said warily, wearily, whatever.

  “She sure is,” Suzie put in from behind me, and how could she be so cheerful about it? Naïvety, that was how, that was the only explanation: sheer inexperience of her new role as daughter-in-law to the Lady of the Lakes.

  “Mmm,” he said. I noticed his little Klingon was in the corner now, taking discreet notes. “It’s a pity you didn’t tell me that before, don’t you think?”

  “Is it? Why?”

  “Because it would have answered one of my other questions, wouldn’t it?”

  He waited, I gave in. “Would it? Which one’s that, then?”

  “What your connection was with Lindsey Nolan, of course.”

  I tried, but I couldn’t find any “of course” there, any connection at all. Two people, two different universes so far as I knew.

  “Give up,” I said. “How do they fit together, my mum and Deverill’s bent accountant?”

  “How do any man and any woman fit together?” he snapped back, and I thought he was just being a policeman, couldn’t walk a conversation past an innuendo without picking it up and playing with it. I gave him nothing for it, no smile nor grunt nor grimace; and after a moment I think he believed me, or at least pretended to. “She’s one of his kn
own acquaintances,” he said.

  ”‘Known acquaintances’? What does that mean?”

  “In this context, it means she was his mistress. I’m sorry,” as if that news had somehow power to hurt.

  “Lover,” I said, automatically correcting. “Not mistress. My mother was never anyone’s mistress,” though plenty of men’s lovers she had been, and a different woman for each of them, to my judgemental eye. “But—Christ, Lindsey Nolan...?”

  “Uh-huh. Did you really not know?”

  “I really didn’t know.” And was still trying to take it in, to make it fit somewhere between what I knew of my mother and what I knew of the runaway accountant, currently languishing in a Spanish jail.

  Didn’t compute, really. Must be something I didn’t know, I thought: about one or other of them at least, maybe about both.

  But that was hardly news. My mother was all mystery to me, always had been.

  “Since when?” I asked. “And how long for?”

  “Since the middle of last year, that we know of; and she still would be, I suppose, if he hadn’t done a runner. She’d be visiting him in Durham nick.”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  Actually the word had been out there in the big wide world, making its own way before I’d thought to say it, let alone stop it. Still, too late now, and I had this habit of honesty. “No, she’d have been long gone before you picked him up. She’d have choked him off, petered him out, packed her bags and left. My mother has an instinct, she can smell trouble coming and she always, always gets out in time, before the shit starts flying.” Always. That was an article of faith with me, and the world would shake the day I was betrayed in this. Unless that was another aspect of my new world, of course, that the old had shaken itself to pieces and I’d been rebuilding in a universe where my mother didn’t have the nose for a hard rain coming or the sense to seek shelter before it fell.