by Neil Cross
‘What about Adrian?’
‘What about him?’
‘What does he know?’
‘About what?’
‘This.’
She said: ‘Fuck you,’ under her breath and made as if to leave. He reached out a restraining hand.
He said: ‘Please. This is important.’
She sat, coat in hand. ‘This is surreal. I don’t believe you’re doing this.’
‘Doing what?’
‘This. Again. We’re separated. Get over it.’
‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘Believe me.’
She folded the coat into a bundle on her lap.
‘Well. Good.’
‘Has he filmed you?’
She recovered the cigarettes from her bag. Her hands shook and it took a while.
‘Kate,’ he said. ‘I need you to be honest.’
She leaned close enough to spray him with spittle. ‘No he has not.’
He had barely slept for thirty-six hours.
‘You haven’t kept any home movies,’ he said ‘—secretly or otherwise, that Adrian might’ve found and decided to pop in the post to me?’
‘Oh, Christ,’ she said. ‘Jesus Christ.’
He grabbed her wrist. ‘Somebody is trying to get me, Kate. Blackmail me. Or something. Somebody is setting me up for something.’
She squirmed from his grasp.
‘This is mad,’ she said. ‘It’s not happening.’
He wanted to punish her. The boy you fucked is dead.
There was something in her eyes he had not seen for many years. Fear of him, perhaps. So he calmed down and they talked for a while and he told her not to worry. Then he watched her stand and leave and go home to Adrian.
At home, he thought for a long time about killing himself.
He never fully understood why he chose not to. He just stood there, in the electric light, wondering what he was going to do.
9
The day Shepherd was rejected for a job as a minicab driver, they saw the news about Joanne Grayling.
Shepherd was morose and disheartened. Although Eloise and Lenny privately agreed that his ineptitude must have been truly wondrous, they tried to cheer him up. They ordered a takeaway.
Shepherd turned on the TV. He forked greasy chow mein into his mouth.
They saw the report and others like it four times that evening: twice on the BBC, once on ITV and again on Channel 4.
External shot of a low-rise, red-brick police station. An austere reporter, behind whom various personnel can be seen entering and leaving the building.
Joanne Grayling was last seen driving a black Volkswagen Golf. She had arranged to meet friends in Bristol’s fashionable Clifton area. Police are very worried for her safety and have appealed for any member of the public who might have information to come forward—
A photograph of Joanne. Close-up. Head thrown back. Laughing. Blurred.
The following morning they watched similar reports on GMTV and BBC Breakfast News.
Absently, Eloise folded a triangle of white toast and Marmite into her mouth. She wore a long T-shirt and thick woolly socks, and her sleek, blunt bob was sleep-disordered.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘That poor girl.’
Shepherd was on the sofa in his stripy pyjamas. An uneaten bowl of Cornflakes was warming in his lap. He looked cartoonish and unkempt. His toenails were horny and nicotine-yellow.
He looked at Eloise.
‘She’s alive,’ he said.
Eloise wanted nothing to do with it.
‘This isn’t research,’ she said, with a twist of real contempt. She and Lenny were upstairs in the bedroom. ‘It’s not an experiment. It’s just another Lenny mind-fuck.’
Lenny laughed.
‘Then what harm can it do?’
Late for work, she was hunting for her shoes.
‘If he’d dreamed an address,’ she said. ‘Or even a name, for God’s sake, I might think differently.’
She looked beneath the bed.
Lenny said: ‘But what if it helps the girl?’
‘What girl?’ said Eloise. She retrieved an alternative pair of shoes from the wardrobe, hastily polished the toes with a cuff. ‘She’s not a girl to you. She’s an objective. She’s just a piece of true crime.’
Lenny looked hurt. He made his most endearing monkey face.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘That’s not fair.’
Eloise balanced on one leg, tugging on a shoe.
She said: ‘You know more about dead girls than live ones.’
But when she had gone, Lenny and Shepherd decided to make the call anyway.
Because Lenny assumed that most domestic telephone conversations were recorded, they chose to make the call from a phone box at the top of Holloway Road. Close to a tube station and several main bus routes, it offered various means of escape.
They wore beanie hats and sunglasses. Shepherd towered over Lenny like a toothless fighting bear on a length of chain. Lenny loped along the pavement in Travis Bickle chic: olive drab and faded denim and RayBan Aviators. Not without difficulty, they squeezed into the booth together.
‘There is something to do with trains and water,’ Shepherd muttered down the line. Clutching the receiver, his knuckles glowed orchid-white through the hairy skin.
At length, he replaced the handset in its cradle. He looked blank.
‘Fuck,’ he said.
Fearful of passing police cars, they hurried across the road towards Highbury Fields. Here they removed the beanie hats.
They walked to Blackstock road, where they ate a morose, wordless lunch at the Moonshine café.
10
I
In the early morning, Holloway drew aside the blind.
The world was crisp under a blue sky, like an impossibly accurate scale model. He glanced up and down the street. Other than the sinuous flicker of a startled tomcat, he saw no movement.
He dressed in his best, Italian-cut Marks & Spencer’s suit. Blue shirt, iridescent green tie. Suede shoes with rubber soles. Into his jacket pocket he slipped a lock-knife.
Settling behind the wheel of the new, tomato-red Nissan Micra, he popped the ring-pull on a can of Coke and drank it in a single draft. He belched fruitily and started the car, pausing on the corner to turn the radio on. The Today programme was just beginning.
It was about to end, handing over to Midweek, when he crossed the knotted spine of the Pennines into Yorkshire. It was a melancholy thought that the landscape he considered to be his heartland did not reflect his long absence or mark his return.
He parked at a roadside picnic area and sat on a wooden table close to the lay-by. The wind ballooned his jacket and threw his tie over a shoulder. He scanned the moors.
He did not doubt this land contained a power.
Lesley Anne Downey in the ground.
Peter Sutcliffe.
He remembered cars and vans racing to Manchester, full of young men in Leeds United colours. The exhilaration at the tribalism of it. The blood on the land.
Barry Prudom is our friend.
History telescoped away from him. Chamberlain clasping Victorian lapels. Churchill a mythical animus, soul of the moors, the Sussex downs; the Fens. Hitler a Grail Knight astride a steaming war-horse. The winter sun reflects on silver armour. The horse stamps, impatient, at bloody soil. The old Gods at his shoulder.
As a young constable, Holloway looked out of depth in his uniform, as if it were half a size too large. He took hurt offence at copper’s talk. He was faded and weakened after working door-to-door on the Yorkshire Ripper case, and fearful at Elland Road, where thousands of drunken men hated him and chanted:
Barry Prudom is our friend, is our friend
Barry Prudom is our friend,
Shoots the bastards one by one, one by one
Shoots the bastards one by one
Barry Prudom
Caroline’s birth obliged Kate to take a year away from her degree. The three of them lived in a one-bedroom flat above a bakery in Headingley. Kate’s university friends didn’t come round.
As time passed, the university found ways to accommodate Kate’s requirements; certain grants and subsidized childcare facilities were made available to her. She made new friends who did come round.
One day in 1983, Will came home to find Kate’s sister cuddling a sticky-faced and noisily protesting Caroline. The next week, Kate’s mother and father paid a visit. There were tears of reconciliation and some formal introductions. Kate’s father approved of Will, of his determination to do his best by his small family. That Sunday Will and his father-in-law went to the cricket, and the Sunday after that. The following week, her brother came along.
They spent that Christmas at the family house in Manchester. The following year, Kate passed her degree with a good first. Her father offered her a £20,000 loan to subsidize her postgraduate study.
In 1984, busloads of Essex policeman were shipped in to break Yorkshire picket lines. They beat accompaniment on their riot shields and rode superb, chestnut horses as if into battle: brutal mercenaries wielding blood-clotted batons. Legally picketing miners in jeans and T-shirts scattered before their onslaught. Will’s tattoos became objects of shame.
He drove on and into Leeds.
The city centre was like a bereaved old friend, returned from abroad with new clothes. A Leeds more familiar to him pulsed beneath the façade of the new, as if it were a projection on a flimsy curtain. He passed the Wool Exchange, turned along the Headrow, the chalky white university clocktower.
In Headingley, at the junction of Hyde Park and Victoria Road, he pulled up outside a detached, stone-built Victorian house. Perhaps formerly impressive, it had crumpled and settled like an old hat. There was a catastrophically overgrown front garden, in the centre of which four stone steps led to the front door.
Self-consciously lackadaisical, listening to music on a portable stereo and smoking Marlboro Lights, four young women and a young man were arranged on the steps. One of the young women was his daughter.
Like the city to which she had elected to return and see out her youth, Caroline was a flickering sequence of superimpositions. Everything she had ever been gleamed faintly round her edges like a corona.
She wore three-quarter-length cargo trousers and rectangular, gold-rimmed sunglasses with green lenses. Nike walking sandals and a plain white cotton vest top. There were no more piercings that he could see, but her hair was even shorter and hennaed into spikes—the kind of haircut students who called themselves punks wore in 1978.
He slammed the Micra’s door behind him.
She sauntered over to him, smiling and squinting in the sun. She put her weight on one hip and said: ‘Hello, dad.’
He saw himself in her, and Kate: her mother’s hips, his colouring, pale skin, heavily freckled. Green eyes, but her mother’s nonetheless, that animated her face, even in repose.
It was not possible for a young woman even of Caroline’s age to greet a parent without some awkwardness, an imperative to which he capitulated by nodding once, somewhat vaguely, and scowling like James Dean.
‘Nice day.’
She stood before him and gently tugged on his lapels. Then she stood back and half turned:
‘Have you met everyone? Steve, Becky, Camilla, Lucy?’
He nodded to each in turn, categorizing them half consciously and without guilt. The girls: two white, middle-class. Girls’ school, followed by a mixed-sex private sixth form college. The third black, third-generation North African, cropped, bleached hair and the clothes of an androgyne. The boy was slim and louche, in clubber’s clothes. Long hair in an elastic band, sideburns. A day’s stubble round his chin only and sub-hippie paraphernalia round his neck and wrists. Sinister Oakley sunglasses. A pouch of Golden Virginia and a ripped pack of green Rizlas on the ground next to him.
Holloway glanced briefly over the rim of his sunglasses and said hello. Then Caroline linked her arm through his and led him up the cracked, weedy stone steps, her fellows shifting this way and that to accommodate their passage, into the damp coolness of the hallway. It stank of cat piss.
The old house had been converted into six flats on three floors, including the attic. The cats who pissed in the hallway seemed to be nobody’s in particular.
Caroline led him into the first flat on the left, which presumably she shared with one of the girls on the steps outside. It was full of mess, which he automatically assessed and concluded to be exclusively feminine. In the sitting room, an iMac computer sat on a rickety wooden table. Its monitor showed dust and fingerprints. The computer had been a joint gift from Holloway, Kate and Adrian. (Adrian had insisted Holloway be permitted to contribute.) Over it was thrown a pair of blue jeans, turned inside out. Caroline had a thing for Apple Macintosh.
He stood in the centre of the room, watching the traffic of people outside, while Caroline went to the kitchen, from which she returned balancing two mugs and half a pack of chocolate Hob Nobs on a book called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
She said: ‘For God’s sake, take off your jacket. You must be boiling.’
He compromised by removing his tie. The air was cool at his throat.
The sofa was orange and swampy. He sank into it, first gingerly, then rather further than he had expected. Hastily, he corrected the balance of the mug. Then he set the tea on the floor and dabbed at his scalded inner thigh with the cuff of his jacket.
He said: ‘How are things?’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘My Post Feminism and Popular Culture dissertation is nearly finished.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Finished?’ he said. ‘That’s amazing. How long did you say it had to be?’
‘Fifteen thousand words.’
He looked blank.
‘What’s that in pages?’
‘Oh. I don’t know. Loads. Millions.’
‘It sounds like it. What’s it called now?’
‘Flicking the On Switch.’
He laughed approvingly and she beamed in response.
‘Cheeky monkey,’ he said.
She took a half-empty pack of ten Marlboro Lights from the hip pocket of her cargo pants and offered him one. He declined (he had not smoked since New Year’s Eve, 1989), but watched her as she lit a battered, bent cigarette with a disposable lighter.
She sat back, exhaling. She crossed her legs and tapped her foot. Her mother’s action, recreated precisely and entirely unconsciously.
He felt himself to be in two places, two times, simultaneously.
He said: ‘Did you manage to get that address for me?’
He had called her two days before, from a public telephone.
From the same hip pocket she removed a much folded sheet of A4 paper which he took with steady hands.
‘Good work,’ he said. ‘Well done.’
Shortly before he disappeared in 1995, Derek Bliss sold his share of Executive Solutions to his junior partner, Henry Lincoln. In 1997, Henry Lincoln sold Executive Solutions to another detective agency, William Gull Investigations, Ltd, which was based in York.
‘Good work,’ he said again. ‘Clever girl.’
The paper clasped in his fist, he began violently to vibrate.
Caroline said: ‘Jesus, dad.’
He looked at his hands. Muscles twitched beneath the skin.
‘I haven’t slept,’ he said.
‘You look terrible.’
He asked for sugar and she dashed to the kitchen, returning with a jar of Gale’s and a stained teaspoon. Holloway shovelled honey into his mouth. When the jar
was empty, he sat back and closed his eyes while Caroline made another cup of tea.
‘Dad,’ she said. ‘You really need to see a doctor.’
‘I will,’ he said. ‘As soon as I get the chance.’
She watched him sip. ‘You always say that. Mum thinks it’s diabetes.’
‘It’s not diabetes.’
‘Who says?’
‘I say.’
‘And you’re a doctor, are you?’
‘Is your mother?’
‘At least she knows how to take care of herself.’
Holloway let it drop.
He said: ‘I need you to drive me to York.’
She’d been clubbing the night before and didn’t feel able to drive. Fiercely protective and full of imagined horrors, he had taught her well. But, after lack of sleep, the drive to Leeds and what he thought of as a hypoglycaemic episode, was in no fit state himself.
She suggested her boyfriend drive them.
Listening to her quiet pleading over the phone, Holloway slipped into a doze from which he woke with a start. Before him stood Caroline and an unshaven, handsome young man in jeans and a hooded sweater. The young man introduced himself as Robert. His hair was short and dark, tightly curled and prematurely thinning at the crown. Holloway liked him. He regretted the manner of their meeting.
In the back seat of Robert’s rattletrap Ford Escort, Holloway slept again. Intermittently, he was woken by the sweet sound of his tone-deaf daughter humming along to the radio. It was summer and it was hot, and the songs on the radio sounded old and familiar to him, although they were not.
Even looking back, even knowing he was wrong, Holloway remembered about his marriage only a solar happiness, a ceremonial intensity that lay beneath the surface of the everyday.
His wife and his daughter.
Kate worked long hours. En route to various promotions, she endured the protracted, circular exasperations and temporary setbacks of office politics. Holloway submitted to his own professional incentives: he wanted to get out of uniform, to bring home a detective’s salary. During her first two years at secondary comprehensive Caroline had problems which nearly broke his heart. But they solved the problems by moving her to an all-girl’s school, where she was happy. There was the death of Kate’s father. He remembered Kate sobbing into her fist at the kitchen sink. There was the fond chaos of the family bathroom, his razors blunted on her legs, her roll-on and his aerosol, the tights and socks and knickers and bras spilling from the laundry basket.