by Adam Creed
‘How did she meet Anthony?’ asks Staffe.
‘Had to come home, didn’t she? Tail between her legs when she couldn’t get a job with that fancy degree that got her into all that debt. And we put her up without a word.’ She looks daggers at Michael, mutters, ‘Soft lad.’ Teresa stands up. ‘They went together at school and she dropped him. But when she came back …’ She collects the mugs on a tray. ‘He did the right thing, like a shot. Loves her to bits, he does.’
‘Zoe was pregnant, so they got married?’ says Staffe.
‘What do you think?’ says Teresa, leaving the room to get more tea on the go.
As soon as the door closes, and without looking up from his lap, Michael says, ‘She’s the baby, you know. My baby and always has been. She’s a lovely girl. Different from the rest, but I love them all the same.’
‘How often did you meet up with her, Mr Flanagan? Once a week?’ says Alicia Flint in a softer voice.
‘I never said that.’
‘She didn’t even tell her mum she was pregnant again, did she?’
He shakes his head. ‘She would’ve made a wonderful mum, you know.’
‘She will, still,’ says Alicia Flint, putting her notebook into her briefcase and slipping Michael Flanagan a business card. ‘You should come to see me, Michael. On your own. We’ll find Zoe, don’t you fret. If there’s anything we can do, it’ll be done, but we can’t be having all these lies. Every hour counts. Every hour, Michael.’
Staffe follows Flint out. Back on the street, the kids flock around them.
‘I need a drink,’ says Alicia Flint.
‘Where do you suggest?’
‘I have no choice. I’ve got to get home, it’s only round the corner.’
‘There’s a pub over there.’ Staffe nods at the Empress, recognising the tall and slim, embossed early-Victorian hostelry from the cover of a Ringo Starr album.
‘I have a child,’ says Alicia. ‘My mum puts him down for three hours in the afternoon so I can bath him. You go to the pub if you want.’ She gets in and revs the car and Staffe turns back to the house, sees Michael Flanagan’s face in a chink between the nets. His wife must catch him because he flinches and the curtains quickly close.
*
Josie checks her watch and looks down the list of contacts that Staffe had distilled from Kerry Degg’s phone records, address books and her old Christmas cards, and from the interviews on the neighbourhood knock. This one is Cello Delaney, a club singer, who sent Kerry a card on her birthday and was in her phone and was also mentioned by another singer she had interviewed the day before yesterday – describing Kerry and Cello Delaney as ‘thick as thieves’.
The house is a tidy little terrace off the New North Road, by the Regent’s Canal. When the door opens, a smell of cooking oozes from the darkened hallway, and Cello Delaney looks put out. She says, ‘Police? I was wondering when,’ and steps aside, showing Josie in, not bothering to scrutinise the warrant card.
The blues is being sung from the kitchen and Josie listens, thinks it might be Billie Holliday – not her bag, though, so she asks.
‘Bessie Smith,’ says Cello. ‘Kerry loved her. I miss her already.’ Cello looks at Josie with wide eyes and smiles, as if touched by a good memory. ‘She always came on a Wednesday and I would make soup.’
‘That explains the smell,’ says Josie. She thinks Cello might be out of it. She looks more intently, sees her pupils are dilated. ‘It’s a bit late for lunch.’
‘Is it? I don’t believe in time.’
Josie wants to ask how she gets to her gigs on time and what would happen if her audience didn’t believe in time. ‘Tell me about the fathers,’ says Josie. ‘The fathers of Kerry’s children.’
‘She loved them. I never met them, of course, but Kerry would never have slept with anyone she didn’t love and when she had Maya, she absolutely wanted her. But she just couldn’t cope. It’s a responsibility, isn’t it? I remember we went shopping in the market up Dalston and we got stuff for goat curry and some saucy pants and some other stuff and then went to the Nags and I said, “Where’s Maya and Miles?” And Kerry said, “Shit! Not again.” And Maya was in a pushchair. I mean, how can you forget you’re not pushing a pushchair?’ Cello laughs, fondly.
‘And Sean? Where was he when she was with her men?’
‘Sean? She was better than him. I don’t know why she kept going back to him – but she did. She never loved him. She loved the others.’
‘So the two children have different fathers?’
Cello shrugs. ‘They’re both the spit of Kerry. How would I know? It’s not Kerry’s style to bang on about that sort of thing. She lived in the moment, not the past.’
‘Did she want this latest baby?’
Cello shrugs again.
‘What do you make of Sean?’
‘Don’t you know, he doesn’t have friends. Not any. Only Kerry. I’ve got to stir my soup.’
Josie follows Cello into her kitchen. The units are hand-painted in thick oils: bright colours and abstract. The tiles are multicoloured and jars are everywhere. Vegetable peelings litter the work surface.
Cello bends down and opens the oven door. The draught of heat is fierce and Cello reaches in. Before Josie can call out, Cello takes a hold of the bread tin. When she hears Josie’s voice, Cello turns round, the piping hot tin in her hand, and then the pain must prick whatever narcotic bubble she has around her and Cello screams, but doesn’t drop the tin. She places it onto the worktop and then wrings her hand.
‘You should put it under water,’ says Josie.
Cello nods, her eyes wide; she holds her hand under a rushing tap and begins to stamp on the ground, moaning. ‘Shit! I have something for this upstairs.’
‘Shall I go?’
‘No!’
Which arouses Josie’s curiosity. She watches Cello go up the stairs, then rushes back into the kitchen, unlocks Cello’s phone handset and clicks through the last numbers called, all the way back to the last time Cello called Kerry, just a week ago, but the call history tells Josie it was not answered. Then she reads the texts, shuffling along the hall and listening for a tread on the stairs.
Earlier today, a number not assigned had texted Cello to meet at the Half Moon – tomorrow night.
Josie hears Cello on the landing, above. She goes back into the kitchen, noting the number that texted Cello, and locks the handset, puts it where she found it.
‘You say Sean had no friends, but he must have been well connected, to be in that game.’
‘What game’s that?’
‘He’s an impresario. A curator, he says.’
‘A dodgy cunt is what he is. I don’t know how he’s got through life without someone having a right pop at him. Well, I do …’
‘Go on,’ says Josie, trying not to appear overly interested.
‘I need to sort this soup. I really do.’
‘Sean had somebody to look out for him. That’s what you’re saying.’
‘I’m not sure I’m saying anything.’
‘You said you knew why nobody had taken a pop at Sean.’
Cello suddenly looks more alert. ‘No, I didn’t.’
Josie nods upstairs, says, ‘Do I get a tour?’
‘No.’
‘Never mind.’ She knows Cello has clammed up, and knows also that there are Half Moons all over London. But she knows for a fact that the one in Putney is known for its music.
*
Alicia Flint’s mother has left and her daughter is bathing her son, Ethan. Before she disappeared upstairs, in the duplex apartment she owns overlooking Princes Park, Alicia had tossed a wad of takeaway menus onto the ornate, far-eastern coffee table and given Staffe a bottle of Amstel without even asking, had said, ‘You decide. I’m starving. Anything spicy.’
He feels the beer hit his throat and leans back in the sofa, swallows, then takes out his phone, sees he has a missed call from Pulford. He makes the call.
‘Cr
awford hadn’t left the place or had any visitors for nearly two days,’ says Pulford. ‘But today she went on the Tube.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I followed her.’
‘I told you not to take any chances.’
‘She didn’t see me. And I lost her because I didn’t get too close, but she had this bag. Or, she didn’t have this bag but someone gave it her on the Tube and she gave it to someone else.’
‘You saw it?’
‘No. But I saw another man with it.’
‘What?’
‘And he gave it to Vernon Short.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They met in the Argyll in Oxford Circus, and Short had the bag when he left the pub.’
‘The same bag?’ Staffe hears Alicia coming down the stairs.
‘It must be. What are the chances?’
Staffe smiles at Alicia and raises his eyebrows, to give the impression it is an unwanted social call.
‘What should I do?’ asks Pulford.
‘Things are fine up here,’ says Staffe. ‘You take it easy.’ He hangs up, thinking how it suits them, for Lesley Crawford to know Vernon Short, for there to have been contact.
‘What did you order?’ asks Alicia Flint, now in a running vest and jogging bottoms, her hair in a high-up ponytail and all her make-up scrubbed away. Her skin sings.
‘Don’t you cook?’
‘You’ve got to be joking.’
‘I’ll do us something,’ says Staffe, standing up, going into the open-plan kitchen area which has a window overlooking the park. Way down below, it is getting dark. A group of youths with straining killer dogs loiter by the gates, exchanging something barely disguised. ‘Can I?’
‘Go ahead.’
He opens a cupboard.
‘I can’t wait till we can hit Anthony Bright with that appointment at the clinic. Why’d he lie to us?’ says Alicia, beside him in the kitchen. She pulls a beer from the fridge. ‘I don’t know what you’ll find to cook. Rusks and baby jars is all I buy,’ she laughs, swigging from her bottle. She bends down, reaches into a cupboard and plonks a butternut squash on the work surface. ‘I don’t know what to do with this. Mum brought it round.’
‘Do you have any garam masala?’
‘What?’
‘It’s OK,’ says Staffe, finding some cumin and chilli powder at the back of the spice cupboard. He toasts the cumin and puts the oven on; dices the squash and thinks about whether to tell Alicia Flint about the connection they might have established between Lesley Crawford and Vernon Short. He roughly measures out the risotto rice and pops the kettle on to make an instant stock.
‘What’s happening your end? Any news about Sean Degg or that bloody Crawford woman?’ she says.
‘How spicy do you want this?’
‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’ she says.
‘As soon as I know anything, you’ll know. I need to make a quick call.’
‘What did your DS do to piss you off?’
‘My DS?’
She frowns. ‘Don’t take me for a fool, Inspector.’
‘He followed Lesley Crawford and lost her.’
‘Could she be tied up with the private members bill of that idiot Short?’
‘It’d be nice,’ he says.
‘Very nice,’ says Alicia. ‘You’d better make your call. And as much chilli as you like, for me.’
Staffe shakes up the roasting squash and puts the boiled water to the bouillon, then calls Finbar Hare, his old friend and string-puller. It is no surprise that he gets no response. At this hour, Fin will either be sleeping off a long lunch or having an aperitif – either with his beautiful wife, or somebody else’s.
He says, into that message board in the ether, ‘It’s Staffe. Just wondered about getting together some time. Give me a call. And, oh … I’m looking for a job for someone I know. He’s pretty desperate, just something menial. It doesn’t matter, really, just to keep him occupied. Better if it didn’t involve a police check. He’s a good lad. Love to Flick and let’s hook up some time.’ He blows out his cheeks, trousers his phone and gets a raise of the eyebrows from Alicia Flint who is pulling out another pair of Amstels from her fridge.
*
The light flicks off and her heart hurdles a beat. After hour upon hour of nothing happening, just the slow arc of the sun and the pale fading of the weather against the Welsh hills, Zoe is nervous of change. The man and the woman who come, in masquerade masks and black raincoats, keep telling her she need not worry. They asked her about the baby and gave her a vitamin supplement. It will be soon, she thinks. It feels soon; sooner than the dates she gave the doctor. The last baby was too soon: too small, too weak.
She closes her book in the dark. She has been reading it slowly and deliberately, so as not to be without it. She has tried to get inside the mind of Toni Morrison, to distinguish her from the narrator. The task stretches the book and exercises her mind, something she has learned to do in private.
Zoe undresses and slides between the sheets on the mattress which she has moved to beneath the window. Last night the moon was unobscured. Not so tonight. The shapes within the room emerge slowly from the dark as her eyes adjust.
She passes her hand across her belly in slow circles. The baby hasn’t kicked since after lunch. She wishes it would. She closes her eyes, remembers the look on the doctor’s face as they agreed upon a termination. The woman was insisting on a final scan, but there was no smear of emotion, no hint of the right and wrong of it.
And before she finds sleep, in those bulrushes between the conscious and the not, Zoe wonders whether, if this one dies, it will find its brother. And she dreams that when she wakes, she is crying. She begins to dream that she is between the leaves of a book, listening to this stupid woman cry.
Twelve
A sea fret comes up from Albert Dock and drifts around the sandstone monolith of Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral which broods high above cobbled Huskisson Street. Below, the city slopes away from Staffe. Above the seam of mist, he can see the sun glint on the hills, which must be Wales.
Staffe has stopped by the entrance to a bail hostel – fashioned within a grand neo-classical house. He looks behind him, up to the beautiful, stately Falkner Square where the brass is already out, tricking, or buying their daily dose. Boys in black track suits and black trainers skulk with their hoods drawn up. Somewhere, a peal of laughter smooths through the mist. It is the sound of students. He checks the address he jotted down from the stamp in Zoe’s books, and carries on.
Before long, he sees the large Chinese arch and carries on past, down Duke Street. There are more junkies in these streets, just one block off the main drag, and even though it isn’t yet ten o’clock in the morning, they are carrying cans of super-strength lager as if they were styrofoams of coffee.
The Curious Cat is no ordinary bookshop. Tucked away between a done-up boozer and a fancy Japanese restaurant, it is in a double-fronted, rickety Victorian building that opens out into a small bazaar. The sandwich board at the entrance to the indoor market tells you these are shops for the socially aware, funding the victims of government crime. It says, ‘IF YOU CARE, SHOP HERE’. Above the entrance, on a cracked plastic banner, in red letters: ‘ALL PROCEEDS TO THE VICTIMS OF GOVERNMENT CRIME’.
The Curious Cat is opposite a tattoo parlour called Free Ink. Behind its counter, chewing on an unlit roll-up and reading the Guardian, is a dreadlocked woman aged thirty, or thereabouts. She smells of cat and Staffe wonders if this could be deliberate.
She looks up and frowns at Staffe, sussing him for precisely what he is. ‘I ain’t done nothing wrong,’ she says.
Staffe ignores her, clocks that a final demand for her council tax is lying on the Guardian: ‘Ms Petal Broome’ of 102 Devonshire Road. He mooches around the bookshop, winding up and down between the shelves which go back and back. The books are mainly fiction and travel but there are good sections on politics and biograp
hy, too. They are alphabetised and fairly priced. Every now and then he takes a book down, flicks through, thinking about the lives the books have had before. It makes him wish he had more time to read.
Ms Broome comes up to him, says, ‘I’m going for a fag. Don’t nick nowt.’
‘Don’t you want to know why I’m here?’
‘Couldn’t give a toss. I’m clean.’
‘There’s a woman shops here, mid-twenties, smartly dressed. She comes regularly. Called Zoe.’
‘Zoe. She won’t take no money for them. The deal is, we buy our books back. We pay half what they paid if they bring them back, so long as they’re in good nick. We sell some dozens of times. It’s a good cause.’
‘Who do you give your profits to?’
‘It’s a co-op. There’s plenty causes – political, like. We’re very political.’
‘When did you last see Zoe?’
The woman shrugs.
‘She’s missing, Petal.’
‘How d’you know my name?’
‘I want to help her. We’re not all bastards, you know.’
Petal shrugs. ‘She’s nice enough. Sometimes, she brings me ginseng tea. Proper stuff. Not Starbucks shit. What’s happened to her? She was having a baby.’
‘Do you believe in a woman’s right to choose, Petal?’
‘Up to the woman to decide if she’s a right to choose. She’d be due soon. She’ll have finished that Toni Morrison, and an A.L. Kennedy.’
‘Do you have another Beloved?’
Petal slinks away and comes back with a dog-eared copy. He gives her a fiver. When Petal gives him the change, he leaves a quid for her, says, ‘Have a ginseng tea.’
‘Week or so since she’s been in. She’s not come to no harm, has she?’
Staffe gives her a card with his number on, can practically hear Petal’s cogs whirr. ‘She’s in trouble. That’s for sure. Do you have anything to tell me?’
Petal shakes her head.
‘You ever see her with anyone else? A fella?’