Hold Back the Night

by Hold Back the Night (retail) (epub)

  ‘It was them,’ she said quickly. ‘Though I did agree. I got a call from the man they were using, telling me where you were, and that Lucy might be in the club. For an additional fee I could probably have your camera stolen. I’m afraid I didn’t stop to think how it would be done.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘And if you had?’

  ‘I would have told him no,’ she insisted. ‘I promise you.’

  Her cold slate eyes and pursed lips told me she had no doubts about her own justification. I took another sip of juice and sighed. It was too late to care about the morality of what she’d done but I was annoyed that it was Mrs Bradley who’d had me followed. If it had been Lucy I could have found the guys; there would have been a connection to her. Maybe they would have known something. Instead, all it was, was some useless bastard at Sirius trying to cut corners when all he’d had to do was stay there himself until the girls had come out of the club. He couldn’t be bothered to stay up all night, or else the bouncers had told him to get lost, so he paid the three guys to get my camera. They’d given me a beating because, by exposing the film, I’d probably lost them a bonus. They hadn’t, however, had to get my camera at all – he should have just told them to follow me. Sirius. Ha. No one could claim that their man was the brightest star in the universe.

  I told Mrs Bradley that I didn’t hold any grudges against her. I may have received a kicking but she had lost a daughter after all. I took out my notebook and looked down a list of questions I’d written out. The first was whether Lucy had ever spoken of anyone in London whom she’d had any contact with here.

  ‘No. Lucy didn’t meet anyone when we were here, outside of the family. Or not that I know of. She may have known people in London of course, people she’d met elsewhere. Lucy was always going to music festivals, things like that. We used to get a lot of people staying. I wouldn’t have them in the house but James used to let them camp in the back field…’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘So she may have known the boy who I saw, before she came to London?’

  ‘Possibly. We wouldn’t have known about him though. Lucy wasn’t exactly communicative.’

  ‘So I understand. But would you happen to know if she kept a diary at all?’

  ‘The police asked me that. I don’t know. Emma had a look for one but she said she couldn’t find anything.’

  ‘Emma?’

  ‘Yes, she’s been at home, although she’s back now. I wanted her to stay down there but she wouldn’t. She wants to be here. I’m sure it’s not doing her any good. This whole thing has been awful for her. I only hope she gets over it.’

  ‘I’m sure she will in time,’ I said, taking out a pen. ‘I’ll need to have the number in Sussex if you don’t mind? Are you planning on going down there at all?’

  ‘No,’ Mrs Bradley said. ‘At least not yet, although I’m going to have to at some point. I’ve got a ton of things to do, I really have. A business can’t run itself, and no matter how good your staff are, they’re either just not committed enough, or else—’

  Mrs Bradley stopped suddenly and looked at me. My face must have given away what I was thinking because her mouth set firmly and she sat up in her chair.

  ‘You think I’m very callous I expect.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said quickly. ‘Life goes on, there’s nothing you can do here really, just so long as you can be reached. And work is probably the best thing to do to deal with a thing—’

  ‘You think I’m very callous.’ She nodded to herself and then lowered her head slightly. ‘And no doubt I am, concerning myself with work at a time like this. But it’s all I can do, you see? I don’t know how to be otherwise.’ Her eyes flickered. ‘Not like James. Or Emma. He’s just gone to pieces and she’s disappeared inside her own head, hardly letting anyone within ten feet of her. I’m not saying it’s easier for them, but at least they both seem to know. To know what to feel. I…I’m like an actor without a part. I haven’t got a clue how to be.’

  ‘Losing someone is hard. I don’t think there are any rules, any fixed answers on what to feel afterwards.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ Mrs Bradley’s eyes flashed and she suddenly raised her voice. ‘For a mother who’s lost a child? I would have thought there were, wouldn’t you?! A long list of answers. Grief perhaps? Or sorrow? Anger at the killer? Loss? Emptiness? Misery? Hopelessness? And what about despair? Shock? Or guilt? They’re all fixed ways of being, wouldn’t you say? They’re what most mothers would feel I should imagine. And any of them would do,’ she added.

  I waited for Mrs Bradley to go on, but even though I could tell she hadn’t finished thinking about it she didn’t add anything. She just stared at the coffee table, at a huge lump of jet that was acting as a paperweight. I took the chance to study her, and thought once again about the contrast between this haughty, attractive woman and her husband. They both seemed overwhelmed by what had happened but he had somehow seemed to accept it, he had let it enter and become him, so that his whole essence seemed to be grief at the loss of his daughter. But his wife was resisting, holding herself up against it and refusing to let it appear in her behaviour. She squeezed herself tight, only letting out hints. She was like an empty house with many rooms and I was following the footsteps. As soon as I pushed open one of the doors, only her perfume remained.

  Mrs Bradley sat in silence for a while, her look far heavier than the lump of jet it fell upon. I stared at her and wondered how she really felt about the loss of her daughter, the tearaway disappointment who would never cause her trouble ever, ever again.

  The breeze had given up, and my host’s cigarette smoke clung to itself in the air, twisted rings and knots that stubbornly refused to disperse. I looked at my list again. I asked for any other pictures of Lucy that I could use, and my host fetched me some from a drawer in the kitchen. I told her that I’d take care of them but she didn’t seem too bothered. Then I told Mrs Bradley that the main reason for my visit was that I wanted to ask her if it was all right if I visited her home.

  ‘I want to look through Lucy’s things,’ I explained. ‘If she did keep a diary she may have hidden it. Teenagers do that. I want to see if there’s anything that might give me a clue to people Lucy might have known. You told me that Lucy went to festivals. She may have met the boy there, the one we’re after. He might be in a photograph somewhere. The police have probably gone through them all but I’ve actually seen the boy, I’d be more likely to pick him out.’

  Mrs Bradley was instantly defensive but when I told her why I wanted to go she agreed. Reacting against things in the first instance was evidently just her way. She told me that the woman who ran the post office was holding a spare key at the moment, and that she would phone ahead and tell her it was all right to give it to me.

  I finished up my juice but declined another glass. I asked about Emma, and Mrs Bradley told me that she thought she was in shock. She’d barely said ten words since her sister had been killed. I could picture her, running the events over in her mind, blaming herself. I asked Mrs Bradley where she was.

  ‘I sent her out to get some sun,’ she replied, her voice softening. ‘There’s a small park we go to sometimes. I sent her out there with a book.’

  ‘I’ll pop over and see her if you think it’ll be OK?’

  ‘Yes, yes I’m sure that will be all right. Just so long as you don’t make her talk about anything that she doesn’t want to.’

  I stood up and put my notes away. A bee flew in through the open window but quickly decided that the atmosphere didn’t suit him.

  ‘That’s a lovely roof garden you have,’ I said, my eyes following the bee back to the flowers.

  ‘Oh, that’s all James’s work,’ Mrs Bradley replied, sounding glad to be talking about something mundane, but at the same time slightly irritated. She stepped round the sofa and walked out of the French windows. I followed her into the heat and the aroma. ‘He’s the one with the green fingers. I don’t have the time, or the inclination really. I’
ve never seen the point of gardening. It’s the sort of thing if you have enough money you get someone else to do. I work hard enough as it is.’

  Mrs Bradley stood in the centre of the patio and turned round, suddenly seeming to wonder why she’d led me out there. She picked up a plant sprayer and awkwardly started sending plumes of water out. I was pretty sure that it was the wrong time of day, that she was liable to burn the leaves, but I didn’t say anything. She had her back to me, and she’d only got to half of the plants when she stopped, as if she’d thought of something. She stood quite still, for a little too long. I was about to ask her what she was thinking, when the hand holding the sprayer dropped to her side. Then, very deliberately, Mrs Bradley sat down on a flat wooden bench, built into the side wall. Having moved her position I could see a patch of cement in front of her that had been left deliberately bare. Three words had been etched into it before the cement had dried. They were ‘Lucy, Emma, James’ followed by the date: 2/6/1991.

  Mrs Bradley was looking at the names. The truth of the situation she was in suddenly seemed to find her. I thought she was going to say something, about the names she was looking at, but she didn’t. But neither did she look away. Instead she squinted, her eyes seeming to hurt her, like someone deliberately staring into a fire. Her grey eyes clouded and I thought that she might give way to tears, but instead she gave a short, harsh laugh. An ugly smile took possession of her mouth but she didn’t move. I didn’t know whether to say something or just to leave her there with her thoughts. I was stepping back into the flat when she stopped me.

  ‘She nearly killed me.’

  It was the softest I’d ever heard her speak, barely more than a whisper. It didn’t sound like her voice, it didn’t seem to come from her.

  ‘I…?’

  ‘She nearly killed me.’

  Mrs Bradley looked straight ahead, her motionless head framed by rose petals shifting almost imperceptibly in the light air. She wasn’t looking at me but she must have sensed my reaction. She gave another, sour laugh.

  ‘Lucy?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘Mr Detective. It was before she was born. They didn’t have scans in those days, not in Saudi at any rate. Somehow the doctor missed her. He didn’t even know she was there, the useless, patronizing old fool. And I didn’t have a clue, I mean, why should I have? What did I know? Emma came out fine and I thought that was it, but then … there was this pain.’ She stopped for a second and shook her head in wonder. Her face paled at the thought of it. ‘Another child. The nurse said it like it was the most amazing thing in the world, but all I knew was agony. I’ve heard women say that they forget the pain of childbirth, but I’ll never forget that. And it wasn’t like it was before, it was pain that felt…wrong. Then she started to come. I was so relieved, and for a second I thought everything would be all right. But she stopped. She just, stopped. And then she was in the wrong place for a Caesarean. She was all twisted up. They had to hurt me to get to her. Cut at me. And the pain then … They had to do it quickly because the cord was strangling her. All they cared about was her, it was as if I wasn’t even there. I was nothing. They used things…you wouldn’t believe what I watched them use to get her out of me, before they put me under.’

  Mrs Bradley stopped, and I could tell that she was back there, giving birth to her dead daughter.

  ‘I used to think of the pain later,’ she went on. ‘When I was looking after her. What I went through so she would be there. Even as a baby she was impossible. Never being able to sleep, crying, screaming all day and all night, until I just wanted to scream back at her. I put Emma in a separate room, because Lucy was always waking her, but it didn’t make any difference, Lucy somehow managed to make herself heard wherever she was. I used to think I’d given birth to a devil. As a man you’ll never be able to understand what feelings a mother can have towards a baby like that. The dark feelings, the feelings that make you cringe with guilt, when you leave her crying in her room because you’re afraid to go in to her. You’re afraid that her yelling will send you mad, you’re afraid that you’ll do anything, anything to make her quiet.’

  Mrs Bradley’s eyes were wide open, her breath short and shallow. I left a second, then spoke quietly. ‘And is that why you didn’t have any more children?’

  The eyes I was looking at turned heavy as cobblestones. ‘No. That wasn’t the reason.’ Again, that ugly smile. ‘It wasn’t a choice. After Lucy was born I nearly died. And I couldn’t have any more after that. I wanted to, it was what I’d always wanted. It was what women did, I wanted to be a wife and a mother. I wanted lots of them, lots of lovely, pink babies. But my insides were torn. Torn up. I still get problems. I went to some different doctors, some proper English ones when we came back, but they all agreed it was useless. They all said the same thing. When Lucy came, all sorts of things got ripped, ripped and broken.’

  Her face was blank now, pale as mildew. She looked down from the patch of cement she was staring at to her hands, folded on her lap, and I had the curious impulse to take one of them, just as I had with her daughter Emma. But then she raised her head and once again she was the woman who had come to my office. Her back straightened and her jaw trembled, quenching the sheen that had found its way into her stone grey eyes. She looked at me almost as if she was challenging me to something.

  ‘And now she’s done it again,’ she said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I got the A to Z out of my glove compartment and looked for the nearest park. It was a couple of minutes walk away. Not a park really, more like a green or a garden. I tossed the book onto the seat and locked the car.

  I hadn’t asked Mrs Bradley where the park was. I’d thanked her for her time and then asked if I could use her toilet. I didn’t really want to but I did want to see more of the flat. There were two bedrooms that I could see. The door to one was open and through it I could see two single beds, one of them strewn with the clothes of a teenage girl. The other bed was turned back. The room was dark but I could make out a hairbrush lying on the floor. There were some posters on the wall and a stack of CDs piled on top of a mid-range hi-fi, a lot of them out of their cases. The second door was closed but I pretended to have got Mrs Bradley’s directions wrong and I pushed it open. The room was bigger than the first and contained a double bed and two wardrobes, as well as a built-in sink unit. I closed the door as quickly and nonchalantly as I could before turning to the door that Mrs Bradley had told me was the bathroom. She was standing at the top of the narrow corridor with her arms folded. I don’t think I fooled her.

  I found the small park and I found Emma. The park was littered with bodies, buzzing with toddlers and the odd frisbee. Emma was wearing cut-off jeans and a pale green vest top. She was lying on her side on a rug, a fat Dostoevsky novel unopened beside her. I sat on the nearest bench, next to an old drunk the colour of ketchup, watching her. Emma was asleep. Her face was resting on her left arm, her mouth slightly open, a line of saliva making its way down her cheek towards the rough tartan cloth she was lying on. Her face was all squashed up and this made her look even younger than she was. I sat there for ten minutes and she didn’t move once. Emma was so completely asleep that she looked shocked, almost like she’d been frozen in suspended animation. It was the kind of sleep you wake from not knowing where you are, the kind of sleep that the body occasionally demands, which it will not be denied no matter what. Emma looked about as far away from her conscious life as she could possibly be.

  And so I left her there. Her body and her mind both obviously needed to go to another place, somewhere far away from the events of the last few weeks. I wasn’t going to wake her up, jolt her back to reality, and I wasn’t going to wait for her either. For one thing she wouldn’t be in any sort of state to talk to me properly, and I didn’t think it fair that as soon as she came round by herself she would instantly be reminded of what she had been so thankfully removed from. I was a little concerned for her legs though, but when I
looked closer I noticed a bottle of Ambre Solaire lying next to the paperback. I glanced at the drunk and stood up. He was staring at the girl too, and I could tell that he had his own thoughts about Emma’s legs. I hesitated for a second, but reasoned that there were plenty of people around. Also, I wasn’t absolutely sure the old man could stand. I walked out of the gardens and back to my car.

  Sitting in the Mazda I almost enjoyed the weight of traffic I had to negotiate. I didn’t bother lane-hopping or diving through amber lights. I sat listening to miserable old Mr Cohen whose dolorous tunes perfectly underlined the sombre mood, which was not so much my mood but which seemed to hang in the car nonetheless. I thought about my employers, and wondered whether it would have made any difference if I had found Lucy, and passed on her sister’s message to her. Would she have gone home? I didn’t know. Such a fuck up, such a glorious fuck up, the seeds of which were planted so long ago. And how arbitrary it seemed, how terrible, that instead of the simple estrangement and resentment that may very well have followed the feelings I had heard about from all the members of the Bradley family bar one, there was this death, this death so awful it seemed almost surreal. This death that came out of nowhere and broke open a family like a spade rammed straight into a wasps’ nest.

  I was heading for the other side of Camden, and though I didn’t have to I drove straight through the middle, past the place where I’d first seen Lucy. As I stopped at the lights I saw her again, and remembered the feeling I’d had as she bent over to Donna. How, in an instant, I’d seen myself screwing her. And how stupid I’d felt when the car behind had sounded its horn. Caught out and foolish. Maybe that’s why I’d taken against Lucy initially, because she’d made me feel stupid and I’d never even met her. Maybe I liked her sister more because she was just a girl, she had confided in me, made me feel wise and solid, someone in control of himself, someone with the answers, someone to lean on. Not a guy in his thirties getting the horn for young girls. The reasons why we like people or we don’t are so bound up with the way they make us feel about ourselves.