“Oh, yes? So why are we looking for her, then?”
“Because you’ve been misinformed. Obviously. Last year’s lover, maybe, but she’ll know nothing to interest you, one sniff and she’s gone...” Then it caught up with me, the full sense of what he’d said. I gazed at him for confirmation, saw it in his tension; and, “You don’t know where she is either, do you?”
“Either?” he repeated.
“I don’t have a clue,” I told him, to his transparent and intense frustration. “She’s not at home, you’ll know that; and when she’s not home, she moves around. Sometimes she gets in touch, usually not; only if she wants me. And if she’s wanted me any time since January, I wouldn’t know. Would I?”
“Doesn’t it worry you?” he challenged me. “That she’s disappeared?”
“We’re not close,” I said levelly, and let him read what he liked into that. My anxieties were my own affair, not for sharing.
“Mrs Marks?” He turned past me to Suzie, and I was suddenly stricken with doubt, holding my breath to hear my mother betrayed. “Do you know where your mother-in-law is just now?”
“Sorry,” she said, “haven’t a clue,” and her voice was all Oriental inscrutability, and neither DCI Dale nor I had any notion if that were true or not.
So it was back to me again, and, “Well, never mind. She’ll turn up. Meanwhile, she’s definitely a connection; and you may not be close, but you’d get involved, wouldn’t you? To protect your own mother?”
Yes, of course I would, but he wasn’t listening. “She won’t be involved,” I said, “she won’t need protecting. Involvement doesn’t happen to my mother.”
“Unh.” Another grunt, and then, “So let’s see if we can work out what your involvement is, eh? Why don’t you tell me everything you can, about what Nolan was up to?”
“I only know what I read in the papers,” I protested.
“Wrong. You only think you know what you read in the papers. Actually, you know a whole lot more than that. That’s what Vernon Deverill’s employing you for, hadn’t you twigged that yet? You’re his secret weapon, to get his money-man out of jail.”
Out of a jail in Madrid, and fat chance of that; what did I know of Spanish law? Still, some things I couldn’t argue with, and this was one: that Vernon Deverill had given me a lot of money—and why so much? was a question that still needed answering, that this kind of mission didn’t resolve at all—and that it was something to do with Nolan, which meant it had to be something to do with getting him out of jail and off the hook.
“So come on,” DCI Dale said, “talk me through it. Lindsey Nolan. Who is he, what’s he done, where is he now and what’s he waiting for?”
If he was a friend of my mother’s, then even this much was treachery, or would be in another kind of family; but would she immolate herself for me? Would she hell. I said, “He’s an accountant. Deverill’s right-hand man, or used to be: Deverill made things happen, he brought the money in, Nolan squirrelled it away. Half a dozen laundry schemes, tax shelters, very smart investments that had the SIB looking at them good and close for any sniff of insider trading, and all they ever found was a massive stink and no evidence at all.
“He was bloody good at his job, and he should’ve stuck to it. Deverill would’ve looked after him where he needed looking after, which was anywhere in the big wide world outside his job. But Nolan got greedy, or ambitious, or whatever. He wanted to be someone on his own account, maybe, not living forever in our Vernon’s pocket. So he went a little bit freelance, didn’t he, working evenings and weekends on his own account.
“He sat on the board of a big local charity, Deverill encourages public virtue; and because of who he was, they made him treasurer. And he played all his old games on this new money, and by the time anyone noticed he had a neat little half-million or so sitting in his own bank and earning interest when it should’ve been out there on the streets and doing good.
“Someone tipped him off, that he was blown; so he jumped on a plane to Spain before you lot could catch up with him. He got picked up over there, though, and at the moment he’s sitting in a cell fighting extradition, yes? He was, at any rate, the last I remember.”
“Still is,” Dale confirmed. “But that was very neat, son, a nice little summary. You had that ready.”
And actually that was how it had felt in my mouth, in my head: like a tidy package waiting to be accessed, and not for the first time. Which made it the first access to any of my missing mind. Not the facts, I’d had all those from before, I remembered reading them, hearing them, seeing them on telly; but their collation into that handy couple of hundred words, I couldn’t have done that without practice.
But there was nothing else I could call to mind, no further facts, try as I might at Dale’s urging. And no, I was sure, my mother had never mentioned Nolan to me. But then, had I spoken to my mother in the last six months, nine months, year? That I wasn’t sure of, couldn’t swear to one way or the other. Very Pinteresque, my mother and myself; many pregnant pauses. Long, long silences a speciality.
“All right,” he said at last, reluctantly and far too late. “Let that go, for the moment. Whatever’s in your head, we can’t get at it. But you must have files, yes? You’ve been working on this, working on something, at least—”
“For Deverill,” I said, finishing his sentence. “You suppose he’d let me put anything significant on paper? Be reasonable.”
“Well, you’re not one of his regulars, are you? You’re not practised at his game. I thought maybe you’d do things your own way.”
It was a point I granted him, grudgingly. I said I’d look, but I wasn’t hopeful. Actually what I wanted to look at was the computer; there if anywhere, I thought. But I wasn’t going to plug that in and boot it up while he was here. If I even admitted its existence, I thought he was in a mood to take it away, and I wasn’t having that. He could take what I gave him, when I chose to give it. Nothing more.
“So let’s look at what happened last night,” he said, deprived of anything else to look at. “There’s the place you were thought to be, the hotel; and there’s the place you actually were, which is here; and burglars have had a crack at both. That’s not a coincidence, Jonty.”
“No,” I agreed.
“So what were they after?”
“Well, me, presumably.”
“What for?”
I didn’t know. He knew I didn’t know; this was getting us nowhere, and Suzie’s mask was about ready to crack. I saw her rub a finger across her lips, the most nerves she’d shown so far in public.
“Put it this way,” I said. “We’re assuming that for some unknown reason, Vernon Deverill has hired me to help get Nolan out of prison, yes?”
“Aye.”
“So who’d be most keen to frustrate that?”
“You tell me,” he said; so I did.
“You would. You lot. You’ve had him arrested and banged up, presumably you want him to stay that way. If I was you, Detective Chief Inspector Dale, I’d be asking questions around your own team. Okay?”
o0o
Clearly not okay, not by a long chalk, though Suzie was practically cheering. A point for us, and it was nice to be unequivocally on the same side for once.
He tried to wring some other suggestion from me and failed utterly, for the very good reason that I had no other suggestion to make. The unknown me might have been able to help him further, but not I. I think, no, I’m sure that he thought I was stalling or stonewalling, being stroppy and uncooperative. In the end, though, he gave in with a shoddy grace. He tried me with the man dead in the van, but I couldn’t help him there either, I’d never heard the name. At last he left, promising to return. “And you keep in touch, Jonty,” he said. “Anything happens, anything occurs to you, your memory comes back, anything, you let me know. Understood?”
Oh, yes. Well understood, officer; and thanks for calling round; and farewell.
And with the door closed a
gainst his returning, Suzie and I stood looking at each other, waiting perhaps for a bright or brilliant move, a suggestion, a solution; and the phone saved us from our own failures and each other’s. We both moved for it, but I was closer. I almost had my hand on it before I checked, her flat, her phone, and glanced at her for permission.
And got it with an irritable wave of the hand, it’s your flat too, how often do I need to tell you?
And picked the phone up, heavy in my hand, and felt no presentiment at all; and said, “Hullo?” expecting only to hear the voice of a stranger asking for Suzie; and heard instead the voice of my mother running like silver, creaking like wood in the wind and coming with such delicious timing that surely I should have known, it could have been no one else. DCI Dale wouldn’t be down to street-level yet, and here was his most-wanted mother coming through to her son beautifully behind his back.
“Darling,” she said. “Is it safe, can I come out yet, can I go home? I’m bored with all this hiding.”
“God almighty, Ellie...” I needed a sofa, right there and ready to drop into; and there wasn’t one, and I wasn’t up to the walk across the room. Not when there was wall at my back strong enough to slide down, floor beneath me strong enough to hold me once I’d slid.
“Oh, is that her? I don’t believe it,” from Suzie, “is she all right, where is she?”
And from my mother into the other ear, “That sweet wife of yours hasn’t improved your language any, swearing at your mother,” which was deeply rich coming from her. And also suggested some sort of collusion, some idea of common cause between her and Suzie, which I didn’t much like. An uncomfortable pairing that would be, even outside of crisis.
But meanwhile we were in crisis, we were deeply in the shit and someone was heaving bricks at us; no time for stray anxieties, my too-well-known mother and my unknown wife, what dark games might they be playing, these dangerous women, at what might they play in the future?
“Mother, where are you? Where’ve you been?”
“I’ve been keeping my head down,” and I rather thought that was genuine surprise in her voice, and I was genuinely surprised to hear it. “Like you told me to, darling. Only I was bored, and I thought one little trip to town wouldn’t hurt, if no one knew I was coming. I’m at the station.”
“You’re what?” But the shrieked question was redundant, because she’d told me already; and doubly so because her response was inaudible, drowned by a bellowing tannoy. Had to be the station for sure, and let’s hope Dale nor anyone else had put a tap on the telephone. “Why didn’t you— no, never mind.” Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?—I’d asked my mother that a dozen times in my life, and the question had never made any sense to her. Why spoil the surprise? Darling? Instead, “Did you know the police are looking for you?”
“No,” she said thoughtfully, I thought truthfully. “You didn’t tell me about the police, darling.”
But there was no responding question from her, no Why would they be doing that? I chewed my lip, feeling fretful and uncertain; then said, “Look, listen. Stay where you are, okay? I’ll come down.”
“Right you are. You’ll know where to find me,” she said cheerfully, and hung up.
o0o
When I left, a minute later and in a rush, it was no surprise to find Suzie pounding down the stairs beside me. I’d almost expected that; almost counted on it, indeed.
Even so, honour required a challenge. “You don’t have to come, she’s my mother.”
“She’s my mother-in-law. And you’re foul to her. I think she’s great,” stretching up to fit her own baseball cap onto my head. Two birds, one stone: cover the bad haircut and the tracery of red-and-purple scars, advertise her club. And remind me that she was looking out for my interests, where I was forgetting all about them in my urgency. Three birds.
Crashing out of the street door and into the street, “You never had to live with her,” the automatic defence, used so often before when friends had met my mother. But then, a thought that seemed to follow naturally from what her words implied, “So do you know where she’s been, or what she’s been doing? If you get on that well?” Maybe my wife talked to my mother, I was thinking, where I did not. Except that apparently I did, apparently I’d told her to get the hell out for a while; so maybe my wife had been privy to that conversation, or the thoughts and fears that lay behind it.
“Nah,” she said, holding me up a second while she took cigarettes from her pocket, stood still to light one. “If I’d known where she was, I’d have known where to find her, wouldn’t I? When I was looking for you, you bastard?”
“Oh. Yes. But,” part two, “do you know why she’d have gone away, did I tell you that? Why I’d have told her to?”
“No. Did you? Maybe you knew the cops were after her.”
Maybe that was it, though it didn’t feel right; and then I remembered, You didn’t tell me about the police, darling, and that was what didn’t feel right about it.
“Something else,” I said. “Not the cops, she didn’t know about them.”
“So ask her,” Suzie suggested. “Find out what she does know about.”
I just grunted. I would do that, of course I would, but already I was not expecting too much joy from an interrogation of my mother. Tried that before, too often; failed too badly, also too often.
o0o
We shouldn’t have stood still so long. There was a banging of car doors and a hurry of feet, and suddenly more people to ask us questions. These were the press, frustrated from their vigil last night, determined to get answers today: where had I been, what did I remember, how much had I lost? How did I know Vernon Deverill, why was I working for him, what could I tell them about the fire-truck?
Luckily I’d had some recent practice with reporters, and national ones at that, so much tougher. A few months ago—no, more than a few, better than half a year it must be now—a young client of mine had died of other people’s carelessness. Poor little Marlon Thomas, violent, confused, inadequate: and now dead with it, dead at seventeen and his death a matter for questions in Parliament and front-page headlines on every paper in the kingdom, a lead story for all the media. And he was my client and I had to be his voice as best I could, and in public because it would never go to court, no one was ever going to be charged with the rank negligence they were guilty of.
So I’d had my taste of dealing with the press, and learned the knack of it. How to say what you want despite the questions they ask, how never to say more than you need. I told them enough to satisfy their editors, if barely; then I pushed through the scrum with Suzie all jabbing elbows and scowls at my side, and rather to my surprise they let us go.
o0o
I glanced down and sideways to where Suzie was swinging healthily along, keeping easy pace with me and smoking as she went; and I said, “Do you have to do that?”
She knew what I meant, and for some reason she looked delighted. “Yes,” she said unequivocally. Then she took the cigarette from her mouth, hawked deep in her throat and spat a neat ball of phlegm into the gutter.
“Oh, for God’s sake...”
But she was laughing up at me, her head cocked on one side and her eyes alight. “Just checking,” she said, slipping an arm through mine and hugging herself against my shoulder as we walked. “Finding the bits of you that haven’t changed a bit. Actually I stopped spitting, after you blew a gasket in the street one time. What is a gasket?”
“Something you blow,” I said distractedly, and barely registered her snort, her nudging elbow, fnaar fnaar and who’s a dirty boy, then? There was only a short walk from here to the station, and my mother was waiting at the other end of it; I wanted to be ready to meet her.
Couldn’t meet the situation, didn’t know enough; but I’d had a lifetime of coming face to face with my mother, and that always called for preparation, mental alertness, on your blocks and balanced and fit to run.
Didn’t help much to have Suzie on my arm, or shou
ldn’t be helping: enough of an unknown quantity on her own account, team her up with my mother and this was a triangle balanced on its point, on my frail shoulders, and I doubted I could bear the weight of it. So why was I not exactly glad, perhaps, but not at all sorry to have her there?
Because you’re chicken, my private voices murmured. Because your mother scares you at the best of times, when nothing in the world is going on that touches you or her; and this is not that, not by the longest of chalks; and any dilution is better than the pure spirit unadulterated. Sooner a cocktail than a straight shot, every time.
Fair enough. Good analysis. I chanced another glance down at Suzie, who was still puffing on her cigarette and not in the least at the pace that I was setting, was even tugging at me a little, trying to hurry me faster; and this was something new to me, even those friends who enjoyed my mother not tending to scamper quite so eagerly towards a new revelation of her. Carol had always dragged her feet, lingered, tried to delay.
With, always, my own ready connivance.
Today we went swiftly through the sights and smells of this one-street Chinatown, then cut through an old Georgian square, across a busy road and down a back lane. Steel-shuttered storefronts and graffiti’d walls, a couple of pubs and a casino; and so out into width and light and traffic, and the railway station like a palace the other side of the parade and my mother somewhere inside it, waiting for us no doubt like a queen.
o0o
The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, screeched on the tiles as she leapt up, drawing all eyes to us.
“She’ll be in the bar,” I’d said; and she was, of course she was. The only civilised place to wait, dear, and the availability of alcohol taking second place—of course—to the general aura of civilisation. A close second, perhaps, but nevertheless and genuinely second. Sometimes I’d even found her without a glass on the table, waiting with nothing but her cigarettes for company.
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