Blood From Stone

by Frances Fyfield

  She’s not the one, Frank, lay off, sit down, you’ve got to drive. I WANT TO KNOW WHERE MARIANNE PUT HER STUFF. Can you hear me? WHERE IS IT?

  Frank sat back in the same chair. He was the one with the dirty boots, not the polished shoes.

  ‘She’s not?’

  ‘Of course she fucking isn’t. But she knows who is. Get a grip, Frank, just relax.’

  Turning back, talking softly, Where’s the stuff? Where did you put it? What did Marianne send to you?

  Her voice, too calm, almost inaudible.

  ‘I don’t know. She didn’t send it to me. She sent her clothes to Angel.’

  ‘She got her shag to send stuff to Angel, yes I know that. But what about the stuff she sent to you? What about the stuff you sent to her? Where’s my camera, where’s my notes, where’s my photos, where’s my Angel, where’s my fucking LIFE?’

  Silence. The screaming voice seemed muffled by the presence of all the clothes. Ann shrank further back.

  ‘My fucking life, you bitch. You took it away. What did you do with what you took? Is it here? Shall I get Frank to look? Shall I get him to tear this place apart?’

  The voice was rising, going out of control, returning to a whisper. Someone beat the table with a fist. Ann could feel the vibrations of small and large objects scattering and falling to the floor. A reel of cotton rolled away beneath the long garments and came to rest touching her foot. The tiny contact made her want to scream. There was a brief pause while the other man mumbled.

  ‘Tear it apart, Rick? Why should I do that? What am I doing here, Rick? If it isn’t her, what am I doing here?’

  ‘Shuttit. You wanted a woman, didn’t you? You can have her when we’ve finished.’

  ‘Why, Rick? What’s this got to do with me?’

  ‘Oh, look what I’ve found. A big pair of scissors. Shall I start with these, sweetheart, snip, snip, snip, or let Frank have a go with his big, bare hands?’

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ Hen said quietly. ‘I sent everything to Marianne Shearer. I wanted her to know. I thought she would need it for her memoirs. Did you kill her too?’

  ‘I’ve never killed anybody. Not my style. If they choose to jump or take the pills, or move when they should stay where I tell them, that’s up to them.’

  He was back in control, as if she had said something flattering, a suggestion of his own prowess that mollified him. Then he sighed.

  ‘Better get on with it then. Hold her still, Frank.’

  There was the decisive clip of scissor blades, clop, clop, clop. The big scissors, used for the proper cloth, not the small scissors for clipping silk threads; those had their own, small sound. The massive scissors went clop, clop when you practised with them, not clip, clip, like the Chinese scissors she used for silk. There was a single, sharp scream. The feet moved, busily. Then they sat, one of them tapping his feet.

  ‘All right,’ Hen said. ‘I know where it is.’

  ‘At last,’ Rick said. ‘I thought you’d never say. It’s all in Daddy’s little attic. Like I thought. Daddy hates clutter.’

  ‘You won’t be able to get it out,’ Hen said. ‘But I could. Shall we go? They close soon. I want to help, Rick, I do. Always fancied you.’

  The scissors fell to the floor. A large hand scooped them up, and they all went away. The draught from the door they slammed behind them sent eddies of curly auburn hair drifting across the floor towards Ann’s hiding place. She clutched a handful of Hen’s hair and whimpered. It was all like noises in your head that had nothing to do with you. It was long after all the footsteps had died away along with the voice of the other man, whining, and the downstairs door slammed, that she uncurled and crawled out from behind the dresses and coats. She went on her hands and knees across the objects strewn on the floor, pulled herself up over an overturned chair and leaned against the table. The bodice on the dummy was ripped to pieces; there were small spots of shining blood on the table. The only other things left were the sewing machine and the heavy old phone. There were hats littered on the floor.

  The phone rang. She fumbled for her own mobile in confusion and only when she couldn’t find it picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hen? Is that you?’

  ‘No,’ she said, beginning to cry. ‘It isn’t Hen. It’s me.’

  Thomas Noble hated to work on a Saturday, but it had been an extraordinary week. Nothing had been achieved except the complete and utter wreckage of his peace of mind. He was still no further forward in the matter of the sorting out of the estate of Ms Marianne Shearer, QC and he seemed to have done nothing but disservice to his client. Nor could he do anything to explain matters to him, since Frank Shearer was not at work. It would have been the perfect morning for an informative discussion with Peter Friel about his own frolics and what, if anything, they had revealed apart from somehow resulting in the death of an old lawyer, for which he, Thomas Noble, could not be held accountable, but Peter Friel was booked in with the police. Nothing for it but to tinker round the edges of the problem, spring clean his own room and restore order again.

  He had detoured into the museum on the way, simply to calm himself and prove that there were some things that had not changed and surely never would. The blood-red of the walls in one of the rooms, the way the building was designed to let light into its own darkness and show the facets of all the fragments of Greco-Roman sculpture the man had collected. The room where the Hogarth paintings were artfully displayed on panels which swung from the wall to reveal another sequence behind, the sheer ingenuity of it, the whole place a monument to the rare and beautiful, gathered into a very private, comfortable house. It might also have represented a vivid kind of kleptomania, a devotion to the grand and the obscure, and it always gave him the feeling of being let into a secret.

  Sir John Soane, architect and collector, probably manic. The oasis these rooms created put into perspective the horrors of burglary, homicide and suicide, because after however many hundreds of years, it was all still there. Thomas had never entirely believed in death, because in this place that he visited at least once a week, it was irrelevant. Collectors like Sir John Soane and himself would last for ever. Someone would remember Thomas Noble for his fine collection of porcelain that covered every inch of his home.

  Marianne was a collector. He had seen it in her. She had disliked his eighteenth-century porcelain, but admired him for collecting it, the way one collector respected another without questioning why they did it.

  Restored by the kindred spirit of Soane, he went into the office with a lesser amount of dread, using the new code for the lock on the door and breathing easier as soon as he got the smell of Saturday morning emptiness in the absence of the few weekday personnel. The post was in the box behind the door: it made him feel vaguely important to act as delivery boy between the floors, and be, for the moment, in charge of something apart from his own china. There was still something to celebrate, and still his personal view of the Fields.

  Marianne, collector. Hence the frightful skirt. He felt that the least he owed her was to make sure she was buried in something decent, although preferably not the skirt in which she had jumped, however much restored. A decent, elegant shroud was what was required. Thomas reminded himself that the arrangements for the funeral were his responsibility and already well in hand for whatever date available after the body was released. Toxicology reports, all that. There was no one but himself to agitate for the speeding of the process. Dear Frank couldn’t care, and Frank was way off beam anyway. Not at work, not anywhere. Except lurking in the Fields, the other evening. Thomas put that out of his mind.

  Ever dutiful to his client. If it had been Frank who had mugged Henrietta Joyce, it was not for him to say.

  He was ripping open an envelope addressed to himself in what he diagnosed as a foreign hand. Sloping too far to the right, big loopy letters, not used to writing in English. There was an invoice inside, written out in the same hand in the same uncertain letters, using the sort of p
rinted invoice form you could still just about buy from small stationers. The sort of communication he privately preferred, since you could read it at leisure and argue a discount before the immediate command to reply.

  To Miss Shearer

  From Monika

  For The dress

  Sum £300

  There was a phone number scrawled on the top. Not a person who used a computer, a reminder that half the world still preferred to write. Thomas entirely forgot his nervousness about entering his recently burgled, still untidy office, and dialled the number. He got that angry, sad voice he had heard in Marianne’s flat, the voice of the woman who had phoned when Frank was there, some bloody old woman, going on about a blasted dress while dopey Frank unpicked cushions.

  ‘Yeah? What you want?’

  ‘Ms Monicker, I’ve got your invoice. As I said, I’ll make sure it’s paid by return, although it might take a day or two. Is there anything else I should know?’

  ‘What?’

  There were background sounds of children yelling.

  ‘Anything else? Anything else I can help you with?’

  A pause.

  ‘Can you collect the other stuff?’

  The noise increased.

  ‘What other stuff was that?’

  ‘All that stuff she left with me. She brought it round while she moved. Only for a week or two, she said. What am I supposed to do with it?’

  ‘What kind of stuff?’ He hated that word.

  ‘Paper and books and stuff.’

  ‘Could you describe it more accurately?’

  After a while, he put down the phone.

  Eureka. He did a little jig round the room. How like a cunning collector to leave her personal possessions with someone unknown and careful. How like Marianne to dump stuff, not on a friend, but on someone who needed her money and therefore someone she would feel free to abuse, like a backstreet Ukrainian dressmaker.

  Case solved. He had never really needed Peter Friel at all. There was so much to be said for not being proactive all the time. Everything comes to those who wait.

  Cross-examination of Marianne Shearer by Marianne Shearer, QC

  Name, date, d.o.b: Irrelevant.

  Q. Ms Shearer, tell the court, what’s the best thing you have ever done in your life?

  A. Given birth to a daughter. Only really positive thing I ever did. Failing to abort her. A negative achievement, but I enabled her to live.

  Q. I didn’t ask for details. Please give one answer at a time.

  A. Right.

  Q. And what do you regard as the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life?

  A. I killed her.

  Witness is distressed.

  Q. There’s no room for hysteria, Ms S. Pull yourself together. What do you mean, you killed her? With your bare hands?

  A. Please ask one question at a time.

  Q. Why should I? You don’t. How did you do it?

  A. Oh, perverting the course of justice in the interests of justice. Humiliation, degradation for real and by proxy. I encouraged someone else. I continued the destruction he began. I made it inevitable.

  Q. You’re being obscure, Ms S.

  A. Am I?

  Q. It’s for me to ask the questions. You either killed your daughter or you licensed her death, which is it?

  A. I entered the conspiracy, it amounts to the same thing.

  Q. Does it? Of course it does; the responsibility’s the same, so pleased you haven’t forgotten your law, but did you behave this way towards this person because she was your daughter?

  A. No, I didn’t know then who she was.

  Q. She was just a another girl, Ms S, and you just helped in tearing her apart, is that it?

  A. Yes.

  Q. So it didn’t matter if she was just someone else’s daughter?

  A. No. No, I mean not then.

  Q. So you’re getting all weepy and conscience-stricken just because it was your daughter? You have to wait to kill your own flesh and blood before thinking about what you’ve done to other daughters and sons?

  A. Yes.

  Q. What does that make you, Ms Shearer?

  A. It makes me criminally irresponsible. Like some terrorist who’ll kill anyone but family. It makes me a heartless winner with nothing, nothing to be proud of. It makes me as amoral and dangerous as Rick Boyd.

  Q. Well, you are, aren’t you?

  A. Can you clarify, please?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  They didn’t believe him, perhaps because he was stuttering. They thought he was constructing a story out of thin air, all speculation and no proof. Until Peter came up with names and someone phoned, someone who knew all about Rick Boyd, in the form of another disgruntled police officer who had left the courtroom on the last day of that trial in his company. The one like Peter, who never forgot, and remembered Marianne Shearer as a kind of murderer. The ignominy of that defeat and its aftermath had not improved his credibility, either, and even with him, it was half belief. No one wanted to believe that Rick Boyd still existed. They sent a car for Ann, who would not open the door at first. It all took some time.

  How long to drive from London to the emptier stretches of Kent? Depends on traffic. They would not let Peter go. They might send along the one policeman on patrol between two townships on a cold Saturday afternoon, but not on suppositions like this. After all, Peter, think about it; who knows who took Ms Joyce and where they went? How well do you know her?

  Mr and Mrs Joyce had gone out together for the day, for the first time in many months, their answerphone message said. WJ Storage closed on Saturday afternoons. Sunday was the busy day when the storing public arrived in numbers to reunite themselves with the contents of the attic, adding to and subtracting from the rubbish.

  Rick Boyd held the remains of Hen Joyce’s hair and forced a pill into her mouth as soon as they got into the car. Keep her quiet for an hour. He pulled the hat down over her forehead. She pouched the pill into her cheek, like a hamster, storing it, and feigned sleep. There was, after all, nothing to say. She was leading them on to her own territory. Frank drove badly, cursing and swearing. Neither of them was fully in control; they had lost the plot and they were at odds. Hen thought of embroidery stitches and her mother. The magic number for cross-stitching on linen is two. The basic stitch on linen is done from left to right, bottom to top, like handwriting, slanting over two threads and up two threads. Chain stitches, particularly useful for joining the edges of fine linen . . . Herringbone stitch, the sort that is used to sew the label in your coat. Nun’s stitch for lingerie.

  Perhaps my father will be there to rescue me. Perhaps there will be a party, waiting for us, with lights and music and everything. In between reciting descriptions of stitches to herself, she listened to the men talk. Nervy, angry arguments, strange snatches of conversation, while the man called Frank drove too fast, and braked too hard. They woke her up for directions. She had been mumbling in her sleep about what was in the storage room, key no 3611. Jewels, she muttered, money and treasure and clothes and papers and everything, all sorts of things that Marianne Shearer left for Angel and me.

  WJ Storage, disused hospital, place of contagion and safety. Rooms within rooms, cells within cells. She knew it well and she was well known to it. It had seemed her father’s kingdom when he had started it and she was a child. She had been in awe of its vast emptiness. No one else’s mum and dad had access to so much space for playing hide and seek. Gradually, it became fuller and more of it was out of bounds to anyone but her. Other children did not want to play, not even Angel who had been willing until she got scared of the dark corners. Such a safe, sanitised, but still diseased place that no one wanted, Dad said. Because of ghosts? No, no, no. Because it’s ugly, superfluous, wrong shape for anything and jerry-built. You can’t open the windows and people died here. She and Dad were the only ones who loved it, although Mum had her moments. She made the front office cosy.

  Towards the end of the journey,
listening, reciting descriptions of stitches and remembering the geography of the place where they were going, she was less afraid, because she was the only one who knew it.

  They parked the car and went towards the office at the back, past the Chinese containers. Hen’s hat, a green beret designed for a man with a large head, was rammed down over her hair and stuck to her scalp. Together with the boiler suit and its many pockets, it made for a businesslike ensemble, suitable for collecting storage or moving house. They were amateur kidnappers, careless with angry excitement, never checking the prisoner’s pockets, her mood, her cooperation, assuming her docility; they were pirates in pursuit of some buried treasure, ready to kill the messenger once they had found it. Hen was conscious of aches and pains and blood on her scalp. The one called Frank had taken the scissors that Rick Boyd had handed to him. He used them to prod her in the back on the way downstairs and he giggled at himself as if a man holding dressmaking shears was really as ridiculous as that. Driving the car had given him confidence. He was punch drunk, but he still carried weight and he pinched her arm with the sort of affection that made bruises as he swaggered across the car park with the intoxicated gait of a bow-legged, brain-dead cowboy coming out of the bar.

  John, the manager of twenty years, was packing up to go home early, the way she knew he did on Saturdays. Hen knew he did that and he knew that Hen knew and Dad didn’t, a harmless conspiracy entered into a long time ago, when she used to help out. The three of them shuffled in like Siamese twins with an escort, the scissors in Frank’s pocket bumping against her hip, Rick standing apart and behind, pushing Frank into the line of the video cameras first while ducking to avoid them himself. Frank waved to camera, while clever bugger Rick turned his head. John the manager was not an observant man. He was simply pleased to see Hen.

  Just got to get something from Zone A . . . Dad left it yesterday.