by Baker, John
‘Plymouth is further afield than I thought,’ Marie said.
Is there anyone in the North?’
‘There’s a young man near York making a name for himself. I haven’t seen his work but one of my customers said he was charged four figures for a doll. Exquisite but expensive. We are perhaps leaving behind the realm of craft and entering into the world of art.’
‘Four figures. Is that unusual?’
‘It certainly is. We provide a superior product here, Marie, but we have always found that the psychological barrier of four figures is more than most of our customers want to contemplate. For four figures, after all, one could purchase the company of several warmblooded partners.’ He smiled. ‘Good-time girls. Escorts. Ladies of the night.’
‘The woman in Plymouth and the young man in York, do you have their contact details?’
He took a business card from a neat stack on the corner of his desk and scribbled on the back of it. ‘That’s the Plymouth address,’ he said, gliding the card across the polished surface of the desk. ‘I don’t have an address for the York chappie, but he’s probably in the book. Goes by the name of Nott. Couple of initials which I also can’t remember. But you being a private detective, Marie, I’m sure you’ll be able to track him down.’
It had been muggy in Joshua’s office, not too easy to breathe, but when she closed the door on him the air cleared immediately.
32
Ellen Eccles lit up a Benson & Hedges while standing on the corner of the street. She could see the bay windows of the magician’s house and was intent on walking over there and ringing the bell. All she needed was the courage. A couple of tots of the amber nectar would’ve done the trick, but it was too late for that. She should’ve thought of it earlier, cracked open a bottle before leaving the house.
If she’d done this with the other men that Marilyn had set her sights on she might’ve saved herself and them and Marilyn a lot of pain and anguish. Jeremy Paxman would’ve been left alone to perfect his acerbic journalistic style, the footballer would have topped the goal-scoring table, and Ellen herself would’ve been able to spend more time in the wild places above Aberdeen. She didn’t want to be doing battle with the Sassenachs at this time of her life.
She was still rooted to the spot, getting down towards the filter of the cigarette, when the car came around the corner. It was one of those inexplicable moments of certainty. She didn’t know what kind of car he drove, or the colour of it, and the vehicle was already past her before she could see the driver, but she knew it was him. She watched as he manoeuvred the tight left into his drive. Mr Mann left the car and went around to the Passenger door. He fiddled with the seatbelt for a long time. From where she was standing Ellen couldn’t see if it Was somebody or something in the passenger seat. What was obvious was that the magician was having a real job trying to extricate it from the seatbelt. There must be something faulty with the release mechanism. Not the kind of problem one usually associated with a magician.
Eventually Mr Mann got it open and backed out of the car. He had a kitbag under his arm. Ellen couldn’t be sure but when he turned towards the house, pulling the garage door down with his free hand, she thought she saw a pair of feet poking out of the kitbag. By the time she’d blinked and taken another look he was already at his door and the bag was on her blind side.
Magicians. What did Ellen know? Yes, it could be a body, ha, ha, ha. But it was obviously not. Perhaps it was a bag full of feet? Some aid to one of his tricks. She’d heard somewhere that you needed an extra pair of feet to do that sawing a woman in half trick. The woman was folded up at the top end of the container with her head sticking out of a hole and what you thought were her feet were actually a pair of model feet.
It began raining again as she flicked the dog-end of her B&H into the gutter. The sky was grey overhead and away to the north it was black. The local news was all about the flooding and how much worse it was going to get. If the river broke its banks in the centre of town there could be another 20,000 people affected. It was already fourteen feet higher than normal. Visitors were being told they should only come to the city if their journey was essential. The police and emergency services didn’t want to waste time on traffic problems. The flood was the most important thing, they needed to concentrate all their manpower on that.
Ellen pulled up her collar and moved along the street. She walked up his path to the red front door and punched the bell. She looked at the net curtains but could see nothing beyond them.
Almost a minute passed before she heard him coming to the door. She had been wondering whether she should ring again, or perhaps try a knock, even though she had heard the bell ringing inside the house. Migraine had been hovering over her all day long. Not a pain so much as a dull ache behind her eyes, but always threatening to get worse. Too much television, too many late nights and early mornings. Too much to think about. Too much life with Marilyn.
He was in his shirt-sleeves and looked at her enquiringly, not an unattractive man in spite of his prominent nose. The small patches of premature silver hair at his temples helped enormously. Ellen wasn’t sure if she should be pleased or worried that her daughter’s taste in men mirrored her own. Ellen would have been quite happy on the arm of this man, or of Jeremy Paxman and many of the others. She wasn’t quite so sure about the footballer. A little too rough and ready with his overt machismo and sexuality. The kind who wouldn’t take long to get around to suggesting a threesome and who would want to take a bottle of whisky to bed.
‘Can I help?’ the magician said.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ Ellen told him. ‘I’m Marilyn’s mother. Marilyn Eccles?’
Danny Mann shook his head. ‘I’m sorry I don’t...’
‘Marilyn, she followed you to Newcastle.’
‘Oh, my goodness. That one. Sorry, I mean, Marilyn, yes. Your daughter?’
‘Can I come in?’
‘I don’t know,’ the magician said, looking up and down the street. ‘Do we have anything to discuss?’
‘My daughter is a little odd, Mr Mann. I’d like to see if we can work together to stop her bothering you.’ She gave him a smile. ‘You don’t have to worry about me. I’m completely normal.’
He stood aside and let her walk past him into the house. The living room was a woman’s room but there was no sense of a woman in the house. There was a shelf of books and the walls were covered with rather old-fashioned wallpaper. The three-piece suite had covers with a faded floral pattern. On the wall was a velvet picture of a wizard with a black cloak. On the couch the kitbag was now empty.
‘Do you live alone?’ Ellen asked.
He didn’t hesitate. ‘Since my mother passed away, yes. Does it show?’
‘Oh, no, I didn’t mean...’
‘Please, sit down,’ he said. He scooped up the kitbag and made space for her on the couch. ‘Can I offer you something? Tea, coffee?’
‘No, thank you. I don’t want to take up your time.’ He sat opposite her. He sat on the edge of a chair, his knees together, rather prim for a man. He waited, eyes fixed on Ellen.
‘Marilyn told me what happened,’ she said. ‘How she followed you to Newcastle, approached you on the train.’ He nodded but he didn’t speak.
‘She’s a strange girl,’ Ellen added. ‘She’s formed an attachment to you, a kind of obsession. Oh, it’s nothing you’ve done. This kind of thing, it’s happened before, with other men. Prominent men, celebrities. It’s an illness. She’s being treated. On medication.’
‘I was rather frightened on the train,’ Danny said. ‘I didn’t know if she was dangerous.’
‘She wouldn’t hurt you,’ Ellen said. ‘She might hurt herself. But there’d be no question of violence towards you.’
‘If she thought I was rejecting her?’ the magician said. ‘Those feelings sometimes lead to violence, do they not?’
‘She’s ill, Mr Mann. She suffers from a condition known as erotomania. She’s preoccupied with
sexual passion and morbid infatuation.’
‘Jealousy?’
‘Yes, intense jealousy. But the medication keeps everything in check.’
‘So I take it that she’s not using her medication at the moment?’
‘She wasn’t. When she followed you she wasn’t. But she is now. I don’t think she’ll bother you again.’
‘Why have you come to tell me this, Mrs Eccles?’
‘I wanted to apologize. I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea about Marilyn, or to ring the police. And I wanted to ask you to contact me if you have more trouble from her. If she stops taking the medication again or if she needs it reassessing I can take her back to the doctor. But I wouldn’t necessarily know she was bothering you unless you told me.’
The magician got to his feet. ‘I’ll help in any way I can,’ he said.
Ellen no longer found him attractive. She couldn’t think what it was about him that had attracted her a few minutes earlier. He was effeminate, almost fey, but with a fierce intelligence. He was co-operating and that was all she had wanted or expected. She offered him her hand and he took it and shook it gently.
But why be so hard on him? she thought as he showed her to the door. Like most people he couldn’t see beyond the limits of his own conflict. But that was no reason to damn the man.
33
Ruben went up the stairs and into the doctor’s office where Sarah Murphy, the counsellor, was waiting for him. He wasn’t disappointed. She looked just as good as he remembered her. Nice smile on her face. Wearing a suit this time, grey for business, but she still had the silver choker on. Little make-up round the eyes. No lipstick.
She looked at his crimson strides for a while, as if she couldn’t believe that a guy like him had so much dress sense. And there was a tiny movement around her nose as she caught a whiff of his Brut.
‘How’ve you been?’ she asked.
He liked the way her shoulders sloped away from her neck, and how she kept her hands still in front of her on the desk. She’d been an object of fantasy for the last couple of days, since their first meeting, and he’d been hoping for the fantasy in the flesh. But she was subtly different.
Before he’d gone to prison Ruben knew women who could be the fantasy. They had the knack of seeing what you wanted and giving you it almost exactly. But Kitty hadn’t been like that and that was one of the reasons he’d been so in love with her. And now there was Sarah Murphy and she was the same. He couldn’t tell if she sensed what he wanted her to be but he was sure that whether she sensed it or not she wasn’t going to compromise herself. She was going to be who she was and nothing more or less.
And the beauty of it was that she still came across real good. She’d definitely had lipstick on in the fantasy and the fact that she didn’t wear any now didn’t diminish the memory for a second. If anything it enhanced it. He couldn’t think why. He just knew that he wasn’t disappointed.
‘I’ve been good,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been paralysed. I’ve done what I need to do. The grief s still there, but I understand that. I know grief, how it’s good for you. Like a natural process, something I have to go through. And I’ve been sad, a leetle bit depressed. But before it was incapacitating me, I couldn’t work. Now it’s more like sadness. I think I’m over the hump.’
Her smile got wider. ‘It’s good to hear,’ she said. ‘But sometimes these things get better before they get worse. There might be a reaction.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Maybe not. But it’s as well to be aware that it could happen.’
‘What I thought,’ he told her, ‘because I’m so much better and because mostly it’s to do with you and the talk we had, I wondered if we should shut up shop here and go for a drink?’
She took her hands off the desk and put them under it, maybe on her lap, he couldn’t see where they went. She was lost for words for a moment or two. The smile disappeared but she kept the eye contact. Seemed to be drilling right through him, like nobody had ever asked her to have a drink before. But he couldn’t believe that. She was a good-looking woman.
‘Somewhere in the town,’ he said. ‘You choose the place. We don’t have to talk about me. We can talk about you. Be more democratic. Get to know each other.’
‘That would be rather unprofessional of me, Mr Parkins.’
‘Come on, call me Ruben.’
‘When someone has been through a traumatic event, like you, with losing Kitty, there are a number of possible reactions. One of the best known is what we call transference. The subject becomes fixated on the therapist or the counsellor. It might feel like affection or love or a strong attraction but in reality it’s gratitude. I can only help you, Mr Parkins, if I remain at a distance, retain some objectivity. It wouldn’t be helpful for our relationship to go further than the bounds of professional decorum.’
‘That’s OK,’ Ruben told her. ‘You don’t have to give me an answer now. Think about it for a couple of days. I don’t want the professional stuff anyway. I want to get to know you. I’ve got a feeling about it. I think we could be good. Sometimes I’m wrong and if I’m wrong about it I won’t keep you on a string. I’ll walk away from it. Kitty taught me that. She taught me how to live better and just because she’s dead I’m not gonna go back to the old ways.
‘This is not transference or whatever you called it. I’m just asking you to have a drink with me, swap a few stories, see where it leads. That’s a normal thing to do. I’m a guy and I like the look of you and you’re a woman and you’re interested in me.’
‘I’m what? Now I know you’re deluded.’
Ruben opened his eyes wider. ‘Hey, I think we’re getting somewhere.’
Sarah Murphy smiled and shook her head. ‘You’re very direct.’
Ruben gave her a grin. ‘I don’t hear you denying it. The chemistry.’
‘And you don’t hear me confirming it either.’
‘No?’ Ruben said. ‘Not with your voice.’
He left her there, sitting behind her desk with a bemused smile on her face, his mobile number, scribbled on a slip of the doctor’s stationery, clutched in her hand.
On the stairs he passed her next customer, a young man as sleek as a wet seal.
It was one of those lucky days. Ruben had known it before he got out of bed. Maybe it was in the stars, if you believed in stuff like that, horoscopes, astrology. What Ruben believed and what he used to tell Kitty was that you made your own luck. If he’d been out trying to make his own luck when he was younger, instead of wanting to fight everybody, rob everybody he saw walking down the street, maybe he’d never’ve ended up in prison. If there was something in the astrology stuff then all the guys born on the same day as him would’ve ended up stashed away in Long Lartin. They’d’ve had their own wing.
As he walked back towards the car park where he’d left the Skoda he looked at the people on the pavement and realized that it never crossed his mind to rob them. Guy there with the business suit, probably had notes stuffed in every pocket, but he wasn’t a mark. Just somebody on the street. And it wasn’t Ruben’s prison sentence, the time he’d spent in Long Lartin that had brought about the change. It was Kitty. And it wasn’t the threat of going back in there, spending another chunk of his life behind bars that kept him out. It was the thought of Sarah Murphy with her short brown hair and the scent of her and the feeling that before too long he’d be getting together with her and they’d be swapping stories and lending each other books and be living like normal people lived.
Not that he’d forget Kitty. He’d never do that. She’d always be there for him, somewhere close by, and he’d never forget the way she’d died. Though it was true the last couple of nights the images of Kitty had blurred into an image of Sarah. Ruben had fought that for a while, coming awake in his bed and shaking his head, trying to keep them separate. But in the early hours of the morning he’d surrendered to his subconscious, if that’s what it was, something older and wiser than his co
nscious brain. They weren’t the same person, he knew that and didn’t want to pretend they were. But there was something about each of them that included the other, something beyond manners and class and physical similarities. And Ruben would discover what it was, that evasive quality. It might take him the rest of his life, but he didn’t mind. He had time and the subject was fascinating. Must be like that for people who get Nobel prizes; they find a little thing that interests them and they study it for years and years and they don’t ever get bored.
It was like a jeweller’s shop but a small place, not one of those with big windows where everything glitters. Ruben went in because he thought he might find something for Sarah, when she came round to the inevitability of them being together. He didn’t have a real idea, a ring or a bracelet, maybe, something like that.
When he looked around there was nothing that would suit her. He’d imagined something fine, tiny links made in soft metal, something so smooth you’d hardly notice it. But what they had in the shop was chunky stuff, kind of things that biker chicks went for. A bangle with a couple of skulls on it. Ankle chains looked more like leg-irons.
As he was going out of the door he noticed a cabinet with a selection of teeth in it and stopped to look. They wouldn’t do for Sarah, there was nothing in the place that would be good enough for her. But there was one long tooth there, shiny white, mounted in a gold cap and dangling from the end of a chain, that Ruben fancied for himself. He called the assistant over, a short youth with wide trousers two inches too long for his legs. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘Shark’s tooth. The chain’s twenty-four-carat gold.’ He opened the cabinet with a key and took out the chain with the tooth and handed it to Ruben.
‘There’s no marks on it,’ he said. ‘If it’s gold it should be stamped.’
‘Indian gold,’ the assistant said. ‘If it was British gold it’d cost an arm and a leg.’ Ruben turned his attention to the tooth. ‘Shark’s tooth?’