Shadows on the Mirror

by Frances Fyfield

  No one, thought Sarah, has ever done that. And I shall go with him. He’s a kind man, so unused to having an ally – I must help him swim in those crowds. There was a glimmer of resignation as well as mischief which Simeon found puzzling, but dismissed in his pleasure at her acceptance.

  ‘I knew I would win in the end,’ he said triumphantly. ‘You’ll enjoy it, and of course, it won’t cost you anything.’

  ‘It might,’ she replied.

  On her way home, Sarah forgot the prospect of the Ball, remembered Simeon’s questions and regretted the luxury of words. What little she had said had been entirely true, but however bland, any form of confession weakened the self-sufficiency she carried before her like a talisman, and all the explanations had been contrived. She did not know why she was as she was or how she had so simply arrived at living as she did, alone but accompanied by the balm of constant activity. There were precious few clues in either past or present. Perhaps she was just a little wild. In any event, she hated introspection which nailed her down on the crucifix of the past for nothing. A good girl, such a good girl in childhood and marriage. Studious, anxious and abused for her earthy beauty in the early stages, utterly devoted in the second, pinioned by the constant desire to please. Sarah thought of her blond and muscular husband, the friends of his whose sophistication had puzzled and defeated her once. Maybe she had not been much fun then. Well, I am now, she thought. Now there is no one to disapprove, no one to look. As for Simeon, again, why not? Don’t ask, do. There was nothing to it apart from all her lack of inhibition in contrast to all those dry and dreadful rooms of the law, where loneliness and frustration existed behind frozen smiles on faces refined by conventional success, masking personal agonies. She would have no such agonies, would prefer to kiss and stroke such faces rather than accept their severity, preferred to touch rather than stand outside gracious windows looking in. No, there was no explanation to placate the logical mind of Simeon or anyone else who could not understand the simpler pursuits of pure pleasure, the freedom of choice granted by money, both seen as an end in themselves, a freedom. She was becoming eccentric, knew it and did not care. Without showing the symptoms of freakishness, she had always been the outsider who was never accepted. Nothing had altered except for the fact that she had given up trying. If in doubt, which was rare, Sarah followed base instinct, and felt the better for it without realising how. It was the sheer, determined joy in her which made her so attractive.

  Sarah’s taxi juddered to a halt outside her door, while the driver delivered the last of his homily on the troubles of married life. She had heard him sympathetically, listening from the outside in, standing on the edge, the way she always had, wondering why there was anyone left who kept to the rules. Envying them very little, there being no shred of envy in her, paying a large tip for the pleasure of being home.

  Turning the corner of the street, jogging away from the basement entrance, Malcolm heard the taxi, turned back, padded on. Neighbours were neighbours. In the weeks of living above and alongside these, in his new flat, he had done his best to ignore their existence and they had reciprocated the indifference. As he skimmed over a patch of dirt, avoided the arms of a last drunken straggler from the pub on the corner, he did not care if his neighbours noticed him any more than he cared about the fact that he had become extremely odd, and if they were odd too, always coming home at midnight or three in the morning, so much the better.

  The habit of running by night, generally only ever functioning by night at all, coasting by day on a few hours’ sleep, working on auto-pilot, had become entrenched. He was sure now it was his chosen work, as much as his bulk, which had pushed him to the edge of the world. Sympathetic criminal lawyers, like policemen, know too much, and he knew himself to be uncomfortable company in the civilised world. Very little human society intruded on his isolation, and those who did were filtered by the answerphone. When all those slept, along with his neighbours, Malcolm came to life. Like Dracula, he thought. Once fat Dracula.

  In the terms of his own description, defined by the friendly policeman who stopped him twice and with whom he was now on waving terms, Sir had become addicted to neon-lighting, finding sunlight pale by comparison. The constable did not say it like that; he had merely remarked on how Malcolm obviously preferred the night-shift as he did himself, and warned him against muggers similarly fleet of foot. Malcolm agreed. He loved the scenery of the night, that great divide of city darkness between two disparate ways of life, two whole societies. Sometimes he would run twelve miles, around Hackney Marshes and the Lea Reservoir, then back, or up to Hampstead Heath, avoiding nocturnal lovers, but mostly he preferred the streets. He had been running now for almost two years, and he was as lithe and as self-possessed as a cat.

  So far, this preference was no more eccentric than that of a policeman or night-security guard. But the darkness inspired Malcolm with mischief; he could understand, if not copy, the vandal’s secret glee of midnight desecration, Kilroy with spray. I was here, I tell you, but now I’m not. Since he was not yet free of a law-abiding nature, although his sympathies had come to lie with those who had the opposite, most of the mischief was faintly philanthropic. The Rolls-Royce in the square, the one parked nightly by an arrogant owner to the maximum inconvenience of everything around it: letting down those expensive tyres three nights in succession before the guinea dropped, might have been juvenile, but hardly wicked. Sprinting down the back alley of the same rich square to find a burglar half-way into a window, warning him of the imminence of discovery without doing more, was an act of debatable charity, but Malcolm could only empathise with the wild-eyed creatures of the night.

  For years, he had met them all by day; he knew them better than they knew themselves and had somehow lost the knack of condemning. Malcolm’s job was to prosecute the lawbreakers, read of them, question them, only nobody had ever told him there might come a time when he would cease to see them as outsiders, feel more at home with them, even if he did not emulate them. Some of them, the regular car thieves, prowlers, dustbin-bag watchers, scavengers, saw him as a kind of harmless vigilante. Others, including the stray constable, knew different, and wondered how far he would regress. Those on the outside come to see nothing other than the outside.

  Malcolm, reborn, became one of those completely at home in the midnight desert, blinking at dawn and the intrusion of light, and might well have forgotten even his sense of pity as his actions became more careless and his intervention more direct, if it had not been for the one regular sighting which niggled his bizarre contentment. Unlike the misplaced statues, the silly, changed direction signs, the other frivolous, absent-minded jokes he had played, there was no chance of humour with this pair. The man and his dog were a sight he had grown to dread in the last few weeks: both filled him with grief, the anger focusing on the man, leaving nothing but pity for the dog.

  Always in the early hours, as if their respective needs could only be met long after midnight and without witnesses. A bulky man and scrawny animal, walking the mean Hackney streets, the only sight which, in Malcolm’s growing indifference to humankind, almost provoked tears. A stocky man of indeterminate age, good clothes, but scruffy and careless, peculiarly light-footed, always more than slightly drunk or drugged, difficult to tell without smelling, as if this state, along with the hour, were a prerequisite to taking the dog for an impatient exercise which was far from a labour of love. On these swaying perambulations, the man muttered, grumbled and pulled with the dog’s lead clenched inside his pocket, so that the animal danced, front paws scrabbling, strangled neck extended through every tortured step, whimpering for relief. ‘Turn on him, bite him, and run away with me.’ These were the instructions Malcolm formed in his mind, but he had never gone far enough to act. He saw them most nights, though not every night, and dreaded it, swaying, yelping, cursing in mutual suffering, man hating dog, but bound to each other. Burglars, sad prostitutes on Seven Sisters Road, some of whom waved and jeered at his useless
custom whenever he passed, watching him waving and grinning back, all of them, theoretically at least, made some sort of choice. But poor bloody dog, he thought, did not enter the world with an owner’s grudge, did not deserve it. Or a neck redraw from the pulling, or the lead. Or slow abuse and slower starvation, poor bitch.

  You must not interfere unduly in the lives of others, even to save them, and thou shalt not steal. Authorities exist to prevent man’s inhumanity to man or beast. Wasn’t that the rule behind all his prosecutions, the criminal law bible, as well as the commandments of his own English schooling? Malcolm stood in front of his mirror, not a deliberate move, but the mirror was there in his bedroom. In it stood a vision of mangled dog, by the side of a slender, cowardly man. Himself. Mirrors always carried into his life accusations, premonitions and waves of disgust. Malcolm picked up a chair and hit the glass, watching it smash into smithereens, shattered picture of a hypocrite who could act daily to imprison lawbreakers, but could not even rescue a suffering dog. Tomorrow, then, he would deal with theft. The day after, or whenever he saw them next, he would commit it. After that, God knew what he might become. He did not particularly care, but old morals, old images, died hard. He was happier without the mirror.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘Just like old times, sir.’ Ryan knew he sounded over-jovial.

  Chief Superintendent Bailey grunted and eyed the walls. After the conference with counsel on the infinitely tedious subject of mortgage fraud, they had been aiming for the usual pub in Fleet Street opposite the High Court, the same gloomy place to which Ryan, Bailey and others had resorted with speed and several years of practice. Like camels, with the hump and the thirst, Ryan had said. Bailey, ex-Flying Squad, murder squads, and half the worst divisions in the Met, now basked in the relative predictability of Fraud, tinged with the quiet excitement of a late love affair, and these days rarely stayed out drinking. Not that Ryan imagined there was much temptation in a place like this. Bailey had shunned the regular haunt for its overpowering crowds, and they sat instead in the relative calm of the wine bar. Within minutes, the calm had been shattered by baby barristers baying for dry white wine. Ryan looked at his ice-cold continental lager. Not bad, for an arm and a leg. Man’d spend a fortune getting pissed in here, and he’d needed something stronger to duck and dive beneath the serene questioning of his lord and master which he knew was just about to follow. Bailey was wearing his gentle, inquisitorial air, and it was he who had suggested the drink. But drink made no difference. Whatever Bailey consumed never seemed to touch the sides, one of many reasons to admire him. And Ryan liked Bailey, respected him above all others, which was not saying much but was still considerable, although the liking was tinged with the reserve he would always have for indecently naked intellect and a copper who actually lived with a brief. Such a union was, as Bailey’s Helen had put it, rather like a Montague actually joining a Capulet, placing Bailey even further outside the ranks of his own than he had been before, and her further still. Neither seemed concerned and Ryan envied them.

  Cheshire’s Wine Bar was all plants and bent-wood chairs, subtly uncomfortable. The young barristers went there to see their friends, and to be seen; the older ones hovered round the edges. Police officers were a rare phenomenon against the painted woodwork, and all the tables wobbled. Get on with it, Ryan asked his companion silently. For once, he wanted to go home. Whatever Bailey was going to ask, he knew he wasn’t going to like it.

  ‘I was wondering how you were getting on with Tysall.’

  Oh, oh . . . No beating about the bush then, no how’s your father and the kids: straight for the jugular. Feign honesty.

  ‘Bloody awful. I told you what Simeon Churcher QC said, didn’t I? Can’t find any more angles for now. I mean, except for the fact that he steals ideas and makes people bankrupt, appears to manage a brothel in that hotel of his, may have left the Stock Exchange before they caught him for insider-dealing, certainly steals from the taxman and trades in stolen antiques, and probably murdered his wife, the man’s as clean as a whistle.’

  ‘I see. You’ve joined his fan club? Look, Ryan, I know I’ve given you free rein, but we are supposed to be investigating fraud. That’s why this is a Fraud Squad, if you see what I mean. There’s supposed to be some connection with fraud in our daily lives, if you understand me. So if Tysall’s a hopeless case for a fraud charge, forgery, deception, anything you like, you’re supposed to report any other suspicions you have to his local Division, and let them run with it. Fraud is what we do.’

  Ryan fingered the glass, brushing the moisture from round the side in straight lines.

  ‘Are you telling me to do that? Sir?’

  ‘You would insist on being so bloody direct.’ Bailey’s smile always transformed his heavily lined face, and Ryan remembered on sight of it how much he liked the man.

  ‘. . . And no, I’m not telling you to do, or not do, anything. I’m just telling you not to get caught with your toes on the corns of some DCI on Division. Do what you like, with that in mind, and remember I don’t need to know about it provided you’re turning in a respectable amount of legwork on all the other cases. But it’s limited to three months. That’s all the time you have to find something. Is that clear?’

  Ryan nodded. Bailey relaxed.

  ‘Now you can tell me why you go into overdrive whenever Tysall’s mentioned. I’ve never known you so keen. Come on, Ryan. Tell me something about the man I don’t know.’

  ‘You know most of it . . . Oh shit. Look who’s here . . . Mr Cook, sir, coming over . . . He’s seen us.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bailey. ‘I thought he might be here.’ Rather than pull himself into the shadow, Ryan’s instinct, Bailey was waving at Malcolm Cook, who forged a path to their corner. Ryan sighed. Sly old bastard. No accident avoiding the crowded pub, was it? Smoothly oiling us both in here, knowing bloody well he’d get old Malcolm into this conversation. Probably thinks I need educating, and need the restraining hand of the Crown Prosecution Service. Amid the prickle of resentment for Bailey’s effortless manoeuvres and Cook’s inevitable legal authority, Ryan nevertheless felt the stirrings of relief. He had been ploughing a lonely furrow after all, and the relief persisted even as the deliberate blankness of both his interrogators showed the prearrangement of the whole trap.

  ‘Ryan was just telling me,’ Bailey remarked, pouring wine for Malcolm and lager for the Sergeant with remarkable economy of movement on the small, wonky table which had come to rest, painfully, on Cook’s muscular thigh, ‘everything he knows about Charles Tysall.’

  The ‘everything’ was stressed lightly. Ryan was in the middle, another subtle trick: he was the stockiest but smallest of the three, and it seemed best to admit defeat. It took a secretive man like Bailey to recognise another, and Ryan supposed Bailey had understood his own hesitation in talking to lawyers, even lawyers like Cook, and even lawyers on the same side, especially lawyers on the same side who had the power to stop you, but he’d thought Bailey might have forgotten all that, what with marrying one of them. Montague and Capulet indeed, posh stuff. Beauty and the Beast, more like.

  ‘Everything I know about blue-eyed Tysall? Well, you can have it in one sentence. He’s a bastard.’

  ‘No, no,’ protested Malcolm, laughing. ‘He’s innocent, like all those people in prison. But apart from making his own companies super-rich at the expense of making others go under to the tune of a dozen suicides? That’s all you ever told me.’

  ‘That’s all you ever asked.’ Ryan was still truculent.

  ‘Ryan,’ said Bailey delicately, ‘thinks that Tysall has a lethal attraction for redheads. Not they to him necessarily, although that does seem to happen, but more the other way round. Ryan is very worried about Mrs Tysall, whoever, and wherever, she may be. Also other redheads. My Sergeant has a vested interest in redheads.’ Annie, lovely Annie, had been a kind of ginger. Ryan shot Bailey a glance, half plea, half venom. Bailey shook his head. No, he agreed tacitly, they need not
mention Annie. Not if Ryan behaved.

  ‘Come on, Ryan. Drink up, and cough up.’

  ‘I didn’t know Tysall had a wife,’ said Malcolm, thinking in a shocking moment of his own pipe-dream and shrugging it away.

  ‘We don’t think he has either,’ said Ryan, finally admitting familiarity in the sudden desire to tell. ‘Not any more.’ Each took a strong pull of drink, and waited. Bailey knew how well Ryan could tell a story.

  ‘Half of this is gossip, you know, but I used to work out of Kensington, three years ago, before Mr Bailey saved me from ruin.’ He shot Bailey his best glance of wolfish friendliness, the look which had enraged so many prisoners and frightened not a few. Never touched them, sir, only smiled. ‘. . . And once upon a time, filthy rich Charles Tysall, getting better-looking all the time, the women said, moved into a mansion block opposite Harrods. Seen after that, when we raided a couple of clubs on a big gaming round-up, but not a gambler. Always with a redhead, who sat so close you’d think she was tied to him. Mrs Tysall, that was; very nice looking woman, real charmer. Same woman seen by me, as it happens, when I was . . . out with this woman . . .’ No, don’t say it was Annie, or talk about Tysall’s personal revenge on his clumsy pursuer, seen as clearly as his own observation. ‘Well, never mind what I was doing, but I saw her in this club, with a man who was not Mr Tysall, her lawfully-wedded husband. I got the lads to keep a look-out: seems Mrs T might have been over the side, once or twice. Anyway, she paid for it. Came into Kensington nick looking as if she’d been hit by a bus, three times over a year. Once she told us he’d tried to rip out her fingernails, but she wouldn’t show her hands to the divisional surgeon. Don’t know what she wanted us to do about it, apart from give her shelter until he’d calmed down, because she’d never make a statement, and she’d never charge him.’