Shadows on the Mirror

by Frances Fyfield

  A depressed mood, Bailey sensed, the somnolence of enforced leisure. Then Bailey remembered Ryan had kept an eye on Tysall for two years, a long time for a man with a preference for quick results.

  ‘Have you spoken to Malcolm Cook? I know he was interested.’

  ‘Well, yes, a phone call. Nice bloke, Malcolm. We were going to have a drink, but he couldn’t this week. I get the impression he’s fed up hearing me bellyaching about Tysall. No one wanted to know apart from me.’ There was a note of mournful self-pity, provoking Bailey to brisk reply.

  ‘Best leave it then. For now.’

  ‘All right, sir.’ There was the familiar wolfish grin. ‘For now.’

  ‘He’ll come back, Ryan. They always do.’

  ‘I know, sir, I know.’

  Ryan might be growing up at last. ‘Never flog a dead horse, or you’ll never make old bones yourself. Let sleeping dogs lie. My new philosophy, or should be. If you see what I mean.’

  ‘I do,’ said Bailey, mouth twitching at the mixture of metaphors. ‘But I thought you’d mind.’

  ‘So did I,’ answered Ryan. ‘But just at the moment, I don’t. Much.’

  Malcolm’s indifference to Ryan’s cheerful voice so soon after the discoveries of Gray’s Inn Lawns was not entirely calculated, nor had he meant it to sound as clear as it had. It was simply the fact that he did not know what to do, and had no wish to discuss Charles Tysall until he was able to discover the role of the man in the life of one Sarah Fortune. He had no doubt that his father could assist with his knowledge of one or the other, but it was all a question of how to ask. Now he actually knew where she was, he was reluctant to act on the knowledge without acquiring more, afraid of treading on toes. So he waited. With all his lawyer’s caution, Malcolm had never really believed in Ryan’s ogre, and the belief was lessened by the awareness of the innate respectability of his stepfather’s clientele. He did not consider that their respectability was anything more than surface, but could not envisage his father allowing thief and psychopath through the portals. Such characters, a source of fascination to himself, would bring nothing but revulsion for Ernest. Now, having seen Charles in company with Sarah, he hoped that his own assumptions were true, and willed them to be so. He was neither wilfully optimistic nor careless, but on the day when he would have pursued his father, healed the rift and found his answers, Ernest Matthewson was proving elusive. Until he could find his father, Malcolm did not wish to speak to Ryan, but the more he tried to make contact, the more he met with frustration. Ernest had chosen this day to disappear.

  When Malcolm telephoned, Ernest was first of all sitting in a dim West End pub, then, on the second occasion, sitting in another, both chosen deliberately for their down-at-heel anonymity. Ernest was on a bender. An anniversary, that is what it was. A remembrance of the same day two years before, when Mrs Elisabeth Tysall had telephoned from a Norfolk call-box and asked him to help. ‘Please, Ernest, please . . . I know you belong to Charles, but please . . .’ He remembered how the word ‘belong’ had stung him, as if he needed a reminder even then. It had made him stiff with resentment, so that he had said, in his most pompous tones, ‘I don’t actually belong to either of you, but if I did, it would have to be to your husband, Elisabeth. He pays for exclusive service, so I don’t know if I could help you.’ As the phone had been gently and hopelessly replaced, he had regretted the words, and in the light of all he had learned since, regretted them more.

  Hiding from the office, hiding from home, with an ache in his side and a bad conscience, all compounded by the nagging anxiety inspired by Pen’s careless account of the Ball, and who she had seen with whom. Time for Ernest to break the habits of a lifetime, swallow his pride and enlist the advice of his stepson. Plodding further and further away from his office he could feel the pain which heralded sickness, worried by the prospect of a familiar pattern of stress and the prospect of seeing the son he had failed to meet for so long.

  Deal with the stress first, his doctor had said. Do nothing else today, except hide, and make a resolution for tomorrow. Today was an ill-starred day. Leave it until tomorrow. Today he would think it out; tomorrow he would speak. And after that, he might salve his conscience if possible, take Pen down to the coastline which had been the scene of that haunting phone call from the woman he hoped still lived, who had been the source of his misery since. He was comforted by the thought of a journey of retribution. Wherever it was, this place from which she had spoken, he had always imagined it calm, blue and somehow sublimely peaceful.

  The wind had blown, loud and chill, up the channels the week before, driving the tide to a new fury, so that even the boy was afraid, turning back to look for drier land before the water moved. Before this, he had stayed out until the last minute, pitting himself against the tide’s speed, playing games with it, calculating close odds on which of them would win his self-appointed challenge, risking all the time. Now he did not dare: the weather was dangerous, the water unpredictable, making him turn and run before it, quickened with fear. The fishermen laughed at his anxiety: now you’ll learn, boy, nothing stays the same, didn’t you realise? You think you know these channels like the back of your hand, but they break in these freak tides, split and crumble in the floods, never quite the same again. Find a new place for your boat. Last time this happened the sea came closer and killed your father. Don’t be surprised.

  In the summer storms none feared the results more than the new stepfather, but inevitably, it was the boy himself who found her in the same spot where those exhausting attempts had been made to spare his eyes. Sand-woman, stained brown, clothed, but not recognisably so, imperfectly preserved in sand, mud and salt, scarcely human. She was betrayed by the existence of limbs and hair, the bones of five toes and fingers, but difficult to imagine she had ever breathed, or put the clothes on that decayed body, let alone spoken words through the sand-filled orifice which had once been a mouth. Slack tide when he found her, as indifferent as that mouth; part of the bank crumbled away, split itself into a fissure six feet deep, with fragments of mud left for the next tide’s shifting, and there she was, a brown, lumpish thing lying in the gap, only the head of her washed into something vaguely recognisable, a shiny forehead, free of flesh. The boy had looked closely, then he was sick, and half ran, half waded to the safety of the quay.

  No time to reach the pathologist before the tide swept back. Dear God, what was the point, she was very dead already. He could wait, so that after the boy had found his uncle and a posse of men he could lead them back. They believed him and followed willingly, but having looked and retched, all they could do was carry her back in the boat before the water caught her again. Her skull was covered, her mud-heavy skirt pulled down decently.

  Ah, poor creature. A death not like a violent city death, made worse by this involuntary and undignified disinterment. Poor, poor creature, the doctor said. He was never a stranger to tears.

  Take this down, I cannot write and examine at the same time. Colour of hair, red. (They had washed a morsel of it; even below the sand it had grown into a wild mane.) Human type: Caucasian. Eyeless, sand-stained, no colour left on the hefty brown remnants of flesh even after hosing down, but cleft to the cheekbones, skin might have shown scars. Hands: long, clever, some broken fingers, either cut or crushed, the skin receded from them. A slim-built, proportional woman of thirty summers, possibly more. Most likely cause of death under the sea, water in the lungs, in common parlance, drowning. Extracts from the bone marrow revealing the presence of the same diatoms found in the surrounding sea, proof she had died in these waters and not in any others. Impossible to say what had been in that bloodstream apart from salt, and equally hard to be certain about the times. No telltale organisms beneath the sand, the pathologist explained, not like a body in a field where he could have collected the squirming life still breeding on the carrion and sent them away for someone else to judge the time of death by the dreadful cycle of the predators. A dipocere, a waxy lard, present
in abundance, preserving shape. She had been buried deep, most likely within a few hours of death to remain as recognisable as this. Before she began to hum, someone joked grimly. Clothes, synthetic material, virtually intact. Some damage by marine life. The eyes long since gone, the toes no more than bone. Another decomposition expert said again, poor creature, reckoned at least a year, never more than eighteen months since she had first lain there. All discussed in the pub on the quay, with the stepfather breathing a sigh of relief, thinking how well it was for experts to be so certain. Police Constable Curl looked at his brother and his nephew, shrewdly remained silent, as did they, the boy as taciturn as usual. Having each other, the mother and the sea, they needed neither trouble nor questions. They did not even form a conspiracy. As a silence, it was simply complete.

  But Constable Curl remembered Ryan, and remembered what little else he knew on the science of dead bodies. Someone would find out who she was because of the teeth, even less destructible than those plastic cards. Dentists, strange beings, would be sent a diagram of those less than perfect, if only slightly mended, teeth and one of them would recognise that picture as easily as others would recognise a face. Experts in death found people by teeth even if there was nothing else left, and it only took days. Hardly the concern of PC Curl, but after many hours, with the London copper in his slow mind, the Norfolk constable telephoned Detective Sergeant Ryan. No point him saying it then, but he had known as soon as he lifted the decomposed legs of her into the boat, exactly who she was. What he could not fathom was who it was who had buried her.

  Maria was submerged beneath blankets in her own tiny room when Ted had found her. Thin thing, lithe as a lizard, dark honey-coloured hooker, kind-hearted kid. As he looked at her swollen eyes and reddened cheeks, he could see in the pulsing finger marks on her shoulders the souvenirs of larger hands grasping smaller bones. In the distant memory of a luckier youth before he discovered the experience of constant abuse, Ted pitied Maria, weeping not for a lost life, but with all the confusion of a wounded animal.

  ‘What’s up?’ He knelt by the side of her unmade bed, and smelt Tysall. ‘Here, you silly girl, show me what he did.’

  Slapped, that was all, held by one hand, slapped by the other, with fingers on that tiny throat. He could feel them, almost see them. Two bloodshot eyes, no white spots of suffocation, not so bad, although her ears must still be ringing. ‘Bastard,’ he muttered, ‘bastard.’ She winced slightly at the touch of his hands.

  ‘He pull my hair, Ted. Says nothing, suddenly goes bang, Teddie. What did I do? Don’t know why. He pull my hair very hard.’

  ‘Who pulled your hair?’ As if he did not know. She sighed.

  ‘Who you think, Teddie? Mr Charles, who else? Bad man.’

  ‘First time?’

  ‘First time, yes, but before I was very careful. I leave too quick for him to do what he wants, then go, whoosh! In, out, run away. But I knew he would, one day; I always knew he would. That kind, Charlie boy. Not so bad, Ted, I promise; not so bad. I stop crying now. You buy me drink.’

  ‘You can have a bucketful, sweetheart. Go and bathe those eyes.’ Her thin arms clung around his neck, then she dried her eyes carefully. Ted could only stand so much of that; he would go if she kept on crying. He held her briefly, suddenly bereft, wondering if the state of her face were some kind of revenge.

  It had been a Machiavellian touch in Charles to link the two of them in his service, worse to have seen them both in the same afternoon. They had been in Tysall’s flat within hours of each other, separate times and entirely separate purposes; he at noon, Maria at four. Perhaps Maria had paid for the understated insolence which Ted had been unable to control; the thought made him clench his fists in impotent rage, relax at the thought of his own helplessness. He should not have taken a drink before arriving to make the report of the last two months’ work, resenting his captivity in those graceful rooms as soon as he walked through the door, knowing that every word he repeated of his illegal activities put him further into Tysall’s hands, further beyond pale normality, and deeper into the realms of blackmail. Being so thoroughly in Tysall’s power had made him enjoy the man’s discomfiture, but it seemed now as if Maria had paid. Ted did not count who else.

  The profile on the life and times of one Sarah Fortune had been episodic, compiled over twelve weeks as far as Tysall’s expense account was concerned, although Ted had discovered all he needed to know in less time than that, with a little help. Yes, he answered diffidently, he had been to the home today, and here were the keys Mr Tysall had obtained himself and Ted had used, safe on the table, while in his head was a history of her daily rituals. All of them, nothing excluded, from the early morning visitors to the destinations of her taxi rides, and the occasional, oddly misspent lunch hour. Ted knew whom she saw and the purpose of the meetings, and did not omit his own firm conclusions as to what this beautiful woman did in all her respectability, with any time about her slender person which could be called spare. However, he did not say why she did it, since even he could not account for that. Nor why this peculiar lack of vulgarity or greed in her, as well as a dearth of any conspicuous riches in her clothes, her choice of shops, her acquaintances.

  ‘Do you really expect me to believe this?’

  ‘I’m not paid to lie. Sir. Nor would I bother recording it if it wasn’t what I’d seen. And concluded. Sir.’

  Soberly said. Ted felt he could afford this hint of sneering in the face of the white shock on Charles Tysall’s face. That shade of insolence in Ted’s voice was registered, but provoked no instant retribution. Charles walked to the window, spoke softly.

  ‘The woman’s a whore.’

  Ted shrugged, waiting in the silence. What was the point in telling Tysall, yes she was, but she was so much more than that; someone he had actually grown to like through simply observing her? A woman who took out stray kids on Sundays and had them screeching with joy; whose paying men regarded her with genuine affection? Not for him to describe how she was patient and popular, loved or liked by all who dealt with her. And what the hell was wrong with being a tart in the first place, keeping other men’s desires as well as their secrets, and in this case, as far as he could see, preserving their sanity as well. It was not inconsistent in Ted’s mind that a female of these proclivities should be also a funny and generous woman. Considerate, kindly Sarah Fortune proved it was possible, but the word ‘whore’ had been pronounced like a whispered curse.

  ‘I didn’t say that, with respect.’ Ted’s vocabulary still borrowed from the judicial. ‘I was simply suggesting that, discreetly as may be, she sees plenty of men.’

  ‘And keeps accounts of them, no doubt.’

  ‘Possibly. Probably. Well, yes.’

  Charles stood by his wide window, his back to Ted, while Ted stood uncomfortably in the middle of the floor, hands crossed behind back, shifting his weight occasionally and imperceptibly as he had learned through hours of waiting. He preferred to stand. Sitting rendered the relationship even more unequal, and standing he allowed himself a fleeting smile in the mirror.

  ‘Damn Porphyria,’ said Charles loudly, but absently. ‘She was supposed to be perfectly pure and good.’

  ‘What did you say, sir?’

  The insolence was becoming more pronounced. Ted clenched his teeth to restrain it.

  ‘Did you know,’ said Charles, spinning on his heel and striding towards Ted so swiftly that he had brought them face to face before the words were fully formed, ‘that my wife was a whore? And I have been combing the ranks of women to find her equal, as perfect in all respects, but without that fatal flaw. Did you know that?’

  The words emerged with such venom that Ted stepped back, drew in his chest to increase the distance between them.

  ‘But she wasn’t . . .’ No, she had not been anything of the kind as Ted recalled, a little flighty maybe, but not his concern until the end.

  ‘It’s not my business to know anything of the kind, sir.’
>
  ‘Good.’

  Charles wandered back to the window. Ted was shaken, wondered if he was dismissed.

  ‘Won’t have me, the bitch? She’ll learn,’ said Charles so quietly the words were no more than an outward breath.

  ‘How, sir?’

  Ted had finally spoken out of turn; he closed his mouth abruptly.

  ‘That’s all. Get out. Leave me the keys and get out. Forget all this, will you? My regards to young Maria.’ The last words were affably accompanied by a smile. Ted had wanted to slap him. Instead, he left without gesture or word.

  Looking now at Maria’s face, Ted was glad his report had been incomplete; more pleased still that he had not mentioned to Tysall the nuisance factors and all the coincidences which had made his task so bizarre. First, the connection with Joan which had helped so much; then, that bloody dog loping across the park last night, following the jogger into the nether regions of Sarah Fortune’s house. Elisabeth Tysall’s dog, then Ted’s own dog; the impotence of seeing that animal was the last factor which made him try to warn her. A light warning, only by moving the chair a fraction, putting his fingers on the mirror which dominated the hall. He would have liked her less had her rooms been pristine, without the postcards showing normality, the dust on the mirror, the creased clothes. But in all of her belongings, there had been this strange and total absence of any vanity, and under its spell, against all his instincts, he had left some trace of himself and touched the mirror, moved the chair in one room, and hoped for her observation.

  A woman so different from Maria. No powers of observation here beyond the minimum necessary for a creature of instinct, not a calculating mind like his own, currently moving with speed. Maybe Tysall would do nothing more; far more predictable that he should simply watch, but even if he merely abandoned his pursuit for less direct retribution, it was time for Ted to move on. With this skinny little outsider, perhaps; not ever with Joan and his children. Somehow the sight of the dog he had brought to them, so carelessly stolen from himself, underlined for him how far he had gone from ever being forgiven for what he was, or from making decisions at all. He had better try to save something from this. He put an arm round Maria’s shoulder, and with the other hand reached for the whisky she had left for him on the table.