Blood From Stone

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘The two missing fingers?’

  Peter sipped the whisky Thomas handed to him. He was going on too long because he needed to rehearse it to himself. Connect. Revenge. Why would Boyd want revenge?

  ‘I can’t be brief, because that wretched trial went on and on. Charges were knocked out before evidence really began to be heard. Rumours abounded about how Shearer was going to lay into these girls once they were in the box. The diminishing of the charges meant Shearer had a case for Boyd to be let out on bail. She applied for it, failed for once, but the first girl, the other with the missing finger, got wind of it and just quietly disappeared. She’d been summoned to court five times and never called. She sent a message saying she wasn’t coming back. So, the similar fact evidence went out of the window. Sorry, I’m losing the thread, and that’s another long story. We all lost the thread, except Boyd and Shearer. The second victim withdrew her evidence rather than give it. She had a nervous breakdown and couldn’t be forced. So the trial of the century was left with only two important witnesses. The third victim, Angel Joyce, and her sister. A trial that should have lasted three weeks had gone on for eight months. We were left with their word against his.’

  ‘A question of interpretation. Which of them was the fantasist?’

  Thomas lit another cigarette and coughed, pointedly, to spur him on.

  ‘Marianne insisted that the Prosecution called Henrietta Joyce first. I don’t know why my learned leader agreed, but he’d lost the will to live by that time. Shearer did a hatchet job on the first Miss Joyce. It was as if she had been instructed to exact personal revenge on her, which makes sense, because after all, it was her intervention that led to the charges in the first place. Also, Hen had something to hide. Marianne could find the smallest untruth like someone else finding a needle in a haystack. It was vital to undermine her and she did. Then she had a whole two days with Angel Joyce in the witness box, toying with her like a cat with a mouse. Angel Joyce went home with her parents on the second night and, either by accident or design, killed herself. Some variation of shame, or just too tired. Case collapses, end of story. It was a brilliant job. Sorry not to be brief, but it has occurred to me in the telling why Rick Boyd might have come here today. What it is he might really want, apart from revenge.’

  ‘Revenge on whom, dear boy? Surely he’d got it? He was acquitted, wasn’t he? And it sounds as if he’d driven his accusers demented. Isn’t that revenge enough?’

  Peter shook his head.

  ‘No. Not for a man like that. He might have been acquitted, but he wasn’t proved innocent. He wasn’t exonerated, he was merely let out of prison, and that wasn’t enough for his pride. Plenty of hubris, this man. Acquitted, but exposed,’ he slapped his hand on the desk so hard that Thomas jumped and Peter winced. That hurt. He was so clumsy, always bruising himself, not good in a courtroom. His nephews loved it, but no one else laughed. His sister said he was a man who could cut himself on paper.

  ‘Sorry. Two things. Connect. What is the connection? Boyd, here. Boyd everywhere. Boyd hates Marianne, because although she’s done a great job, she hasn’t restored him, and never cared about him anyway, because she never cared for anyone.’

  ‘I take exception to that.’

  ‘But, also, she’s got all the notes, all the instructions, personal material, everything he wanted to say when he took the stand, all the stuff, and she knows, down to the last detail exactly what he’s done and she’s the keeper of that knowledge. She had to know the truth about him in order to defend him. She’s got enough for a book. He wants that back. He may have hounded her to get it back; he might have threatened her to get it back. She’s got him, his words written and recorded, his soul, if you like.’

  ‘Where has she put her THINGS?’ Thomas yelled. ‘WHERE are they? That’s all I want to know.’ He stopped. ‘Wait a minute, that’s what he said. He said, “she knew me better than anyone.” How very uncomfortable. The second thing?’

  ‘Revenge. The trial was supposed to get him revenge. But he didn’t get it. He used Marianne to expose the Joyce sisters. He sat in court, hating Henrietta Joyce like poison. She made her sister report him and she led to the finding of the others. She was the catalyst who put him into prison. There was something she kept back, something he said she stole . . . Oh, hell, I’ve lost the plot.’

  Thomas was sober again, and tired, but he knew a good storyteller when he saw one.

  ‘Well, yes, I’m hearing what you’re saying, but I can’t quite see how I should make it my business, unless he actually came up behind Marianne and pushed her out the window. In which case, it is my business. Shall we look at these wretched, smelly clothes while you’re here? Please say yes.’

  Peter swam back into the present, with a terrible gut ache interfering with his breathing. He was remembering the awful feeling of impotence and inertia and fury. Charismatic, persuasive Rick Boyd. Marianne had won, but there were no winners, only losers and unfinished business.

  ‘Sorry. Let’s do it.’

  Without waiting for further invitation, knowing what Thomas wanted, Peter went towards the labelled paper bag unstrategically placed in the corner of the room, exactly as it had been delivered and treated as contagious ever since. He could quite see why. Thomas handed him a pair of industrial-sized scissors with huge black handles and blades like heavyweight saws. He thought, irrelevantly, how useless they would be as a combat weapon, no good for stabbing, only for cutting. A vital piece of equipment for a lawyer’s office; as useful as the paperclip. In the face of such scissors, it was disappointing to find the tough paper so fragile. No exhibit labels, no seals, therefore, no crime; although everything about him screamed out to say there must be. He simply laid the bag on its side and cut across the top.

  The skirt spilled out like something live, a fantastic vision of crimson, red, blue, a creature escaped from a cage. It expanded as they watched, and settled on the floor, breathing out and breathing in, crumpling, finally, amongst its own folds and settling down. Both of them took a step back, watching it deflate like a parachute. The garment seemed to be made of tightly pleated delicate material, which increased from its own folds into volumes of cloth that needed to breathe. The colours took Thomas’s breath away, they were so unexpected. In the photographs of her free-fall death, this garment had been a blurred mass of dark fluff. Thomas regretted it on her behalf. So unlike Marianne Shearer, in her killer black suits, so horribly alive in its own right. She never wore skirts; she wore immaculate trousers. There were so many yards of material in this it should have changed the direction of the fall.

  It was Thomas who tipped out the rest of the bag. A boned corset, stockings, suspenders, a heavy silk slip embroidered with lace, camiknickers in lockknit silk. Small, heeled boots, not for walking. The delicate but substantial undergarments were split, bearing the soak of what little blood there was. Death instantaneous, external bleeding to the torso minimal, contained in the undergarments, leaving the skirt almost fit to be worn. The delicate, pleated silk moved with the breeze from the window. Peter thought it was beautiful.

  There was a very long pause. Thomas filled the glasses and sat back on his office chair, old, slumped and bewildered.

  ‘Why did she die dressed like that?’ Thomas howled, crying into his whisky. ‘What the hell kind of funeral garment is that? Could she have hidden something inside it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Peter said. ‘But I may know someone who does. I’ll take it all away, shall I?’

  Thomas threw his glass through the open window. They both heard it smash on the pavement.

  Frockserve.com.

  Henrietta Joyce rescues clothes and knows all about them. And might need rescuing herself, if Boyd was around. She had something of his.

  Peter put the clothes and the boots back into the bag.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘I can’t pay much,’ Hen was saying to the new girl, ‘because I never seem to end up getting paid very much myself, and at th
e moment I use most of what I make to buy something else. Increase my own stock and buy the chemicals.’

  The girl, whose name was Ann, was looking round herself, turning this way and that and saying, Oooh, ooh, look at that, bustling around with wary enthusiasm.

  ‘And,’ Hen said, ‘I’ll have to be very careful about what I let you do. Don’t want injuries or you drawing blood on scissors. We’ll stick to alterations for the time being, shall we?’

  ‘I don’t care what I do,’ Ann said. ‘I just want to be here.’

  That was nice, and made Hen smile, because it was exactly the way she felt herself. The feeling might not last beyond a day or two in a newcomer, but it had lasted in herself for years, or anyway so long she had stopped counting. A room like this, full of clothes, a myriad of colours and textures catching the light from the big window and looking like an invitation to dance. To the left, a selection of five evening dresses, carefully hung from the waist, as if they were making a bow and shaking out their own creases. Green and scarlet and midnight blue. Next to them, a row of sombre black jackets, hung from the shoulders, all showing on closer inspection that black was never really black and no black quite the same. A selection of multicoloured shawls draped themselves over the shoulders of the black clothes, as if they were embracing each other. On the hanging rail to the right were some shabby wool suits and voluminous skirts, next to a small selection of cloaks, which gave way to the whites and creams of a wedding dress and a selection of large pieces of lace. On the shelves high above the garments were the hats, tilting towards them on wire stands, showing off every colour of the rainbow. Beneath the hats were the shelves of knitted clothes laid flat.

  ‘You always lay the knitted stuff flat,’ Hen said. ‘Preferably not on top of one another. They take up a lot of space. If you fold them, you have to fold them another way every so often. Creases weaken the fabric. If you hang them, they stretch. I’m not sure what I’ll ever do with these.’

  The centre of the room was empty space occupied by a very old and worn rug in various faded shades of rose madder and olive green. At the far end of the room was the workstation, a large, old pine table that could have seated six and was spotlit from above. The surface was covered with two sewing machines, boxes of threads, scraps of material. From the open door of the shelved wardrobe that stood behind it, Ann could see small samples of cloth and pieces of other clothes, stuffed in and spilling out against a large roll of muslin propped against a wall. The mirrored wardrobe doors reflected the room and doubled the light.

  ‘Never that much light in here,’ Hen said. ‘Light might be good for the eyes, but not always for clothes, not in the long run. I’m not skilled enough to know how things fade, but I know they do, and you can do a lot to restore stuff but you can never put back the colour. Doesn’t matter so much for these things. They’re work in progress, might not be here long. Storage is another matter. Here, look at this. I shan’t make you wear it, promise.’

  From amongst the black garments which were not really black, she pulled a Victorian maid’s dress with a boned bodice of bombazine and a full wool skirt which fell in stiff, pockmarked folds, the severity of it softened by the addition of cream lace at the neck and wrist. The hooks and eyes fastening the front were orange with rust.

  ‘Don’t know what the hell I can do with it. It’s a learning garment, like a sampler. I’ve ruined it, really. I tried freezing it to get rid of an infestation, which did the trick, but moth eggs are organic, they rot, so when you freeze them and they dry out, you get mould spots.’

  She could see the girl hesitate.

  ‘It’s sort of . . . quaint.’

  ‘Not very comfortable unless you happen to be a Victorian midget and don’t mind the same dress every day. It’s been mended almost to death and it’s the oldest dress I’ve got. I’m not into costume, although you never know. The kettle’s over there. I’ll put it on. May as well start as we mean to go on. Tea, every hour at least.’

  Ann wrinkled her nose, crossed her arms and shivered in pleasure, forgetting that unpleasant word infestation.

  ‘A dressing room,’ she said. ‘With its own stage.’

  Hen laughed.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you like it, because I love it, but I’m afraid when the sun comes out you might see it for what it really is, which is one big room full of tat. Second-hand rubbish of no value to anyone but the owners, a scrapyard really, but the scrap’s made of cloth rather than metal. It looks better in the dark, in winter. This is the fun side, where I try and make something out of nothing for people who want it. The business end’s in the basement. Everything that comes in here is already damaged, but it has to go through the basement, first, to be cleaned. Only comes here when either it’s fit to mend or fit to turn into something else. This room’s for sewing or trying things out. Downstairs is more serious: other people’s clothes. Do you have milk and sugar in your tea?’

  Ann nodded, still looking round. A nice, insecure girl, with a mother who despaired of her and wanted to find her something to do. She likes sewing, the mother said in disgust; she wants to learn to sew. Nice girl or not, Hen reckoned she would get through the day and no longer. Not every teenager could stand a job in a room with no company other than a grown-up and the radio. What had been Hen’s idea of heaven might become Ann’s idea of hell, especially when Hen gave her the first task. Which would be to unpick the bodice of the Victorian maid’s dress, let out every seam and put it back together again a whole size larger. That way, they would see if she could sew.

  Making the tea, sitting down at the table in the wardrobe room, Hen felt a moment of uncomplicated contentment, because although in this room she might make mistakes, she could do no wrong to anyone, except perhaps mislead a newcomer to her own black arts about the financial prospects of sewing and cleaning for a living. They were as doubtful as they always had been. She frowned to herself. It wasn’t quite right that she could do no harm to anyone in here, and she looked at the girl with a touch of worry, because she did not want to care for her. She did not want responsibility for another human being, however temporarily, and she did not want to have to be cheerful. Too late, the girl was here; she had promised, and that was that.

  ‘I don’t exactly know what you do with all this,’ Ann said. ‘Only Mummy says what you do with stuff is priceless.’

  ‘Priceless? As in ridiculous?’

  ‘No . . . no, I think she meant beyond price.’

  ‘What a kind woman your mother is, but I doubt it’s true, and it’s probably a bit of an exaggeration to call it a business, more like a surgery, but such as it is, it’s based on sentiment as well as frustration. Because your modern man and woman seem to have all the choices in the world when it comes to clothes, but they don’t really. Enough people want what they simply can’t find in a shop or a catalogue, some people don’t know what they want, and a lot of people just like old stuff, or want back what they’ve seen, or owned before. And some yearn for haute couture, I know I do, or they want old things made new, or they want a clean slate. I’m not doing very well here, am I? That’s what I want the business to be, but the bare bones of the thing is all about dealing with rot, stains and bugs and that’s in the basement. I just love old clothes. I can’t bear them dying.’

  Mustn’t lecture her, Hen told herself. I’ve nothing to lecture about, because I really don’t know enough. I’ve learned on the hoof, and from Jake and it’s all my mother’s fault. Ann was looking at the maid’s dress.

  ‘I think it’s been let in and let out lots and lots of times.’

  ‘Exactly. Probably had a dozen wearers and none of them owned it.’

  If ever Hen was asked for her job description, she either said she messed about with clothes or that she was a cleaner of clothes, both accurate. There was, she would say if asked, a difference between conservation and preservation; you conserved a thing for further use, while you preserved it for posterity. She was never sure if she had the definitions right
, but what she meant was that she was making things wearable again, even in another form. She was giving garments another lease of life, and if they were really at the end of their natural span, turning them into something else. There was a customer who mourned the loss of a red moth-ridden skirt and a blue cashmere coat, both beyond redemption, so she used the surviving material from both to make a patchwork waistcoat now worn with jeans. The remnants of a favourite silk dress, faded with age and hopelessly torn and stained, had the makings of a scarf or a sash. Old could be restored or incorporated with new; an old quilted jacket could be lined and bordered with emerald silk, radically revamped with buttons. Hen had an ongoing love affair with buttons. Buttons had weight; she had thousands of buttons. She would rescue, redeem, conserve anything for anybody, let out, let in, remodel, persuade against remodelling, recreate, tear apart, treasure and above all, clean. She would also buy what she could. This room was not a museum, it was a tailor’s shop where someone might also come and find something which suited what they were, or what they had been, or what they might become, rather than what current fashion said they should be. I rescue things, she said. I have a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry that did not lead to this, and I blame it all on part-time jobs and my mother’s dressing-up box.

  Hen sat, in her favourite room of all time, sewing. She had coveted Peter Friel’s linen napkin as the perfect lining for a small pouch of a handbag made out of a badly perished embroidered linen jacket. What are you, Hen? What do you do for a living, Hen, with all your qualifications? I’m a scavenger, trying to make a business out of doing what I like, and today, for the first time in ages, I feel content. I think I’ll stop doing wedding dresses, though. They simply don’t adapt; too many dreams attached.