by Morag Joss
‘Christ! Turn that off, please!’ Sara hissed.
A youth in the doorway straightened. ‘Wha’, the radio? Aw right. Don’t notice it, ‘s always on.’ He disappeared and the noise stopped.
In the blessed silence Sara looked further. On either side of the kitchen door another corridor, at right angles to the one Sara had just walked down and lined with tall cupboard doors, led off, left and right, to Ladies and Gents. Turning left, Sara came upon Joyce standing in front of the door marked Ladies. She had the knuckles of both hands in her mouth. She peered at Sara out of the gloom.
‘Joyce?’
‘I … I … was just … you know … kind of thing … ’ Her voice tailed away. The double doors of one of the built-in cupboards lining the passage were open. ‘Just got lost. A …a … tourist. I suppose.’
Sara looked down. Lying half in and half out of the cupboard, with her face on the carpet right at Joyce’s feet, was a small, dark-haired woman dressed in a denim skirt and polo shirt, with a cardigan round her shoulders.
Sara was still holding the bloody ice cream and chips. Resisting the urge to fling them as far up the passage as she could, she deposited them on the carpet behind her, trying to recall what to do when someone fainted. She crouched down to turn the woman over and undo a neck button. But on closer inspection, even in the gloom of the passage, Sara was at once struck by two things: the woman was dead, and she had been strangled with her camera strap.
Behind her, Joyce whimpered, ‘Dear me, yes. An awful lot of tourists. They’re everywhere, aren’t they?’
CHAPTER 7
LEECH’S STOMACH WAS sending him the usual message about its being about time to stop for a bite to eat, but what was not usual was that Ivan had left him some lunch today. Ivan and Hilary didn’t give him food regularly, he didn’t think. Hilary called up the garden sometimes to say there was hot water if he wanted a bath, and sometimes there was something to eat on the kitchen table afterwards, sometimes not. Sometimes she washed clothes for him. It wasn’t regular, or perhaps he was just bad at remembering. But it seemed that sometimes Ivan was chatty and worked with him in the garden, other times he was silent, at others just not there. What he was pretty clear about was that he, Leech, slept in the shed on the allotment, a big place full of seeds and plants and tools that he had found one day (when, no idea) on a day, anyway, on which he had wandered a long way along the canal path out of the town. They had put a folding bed in there after a while so that meant, he supposed, that they didn’t mind. So, as far as his life had any pattern or content that Leech could point to and say yes, that is my life, he knew that he owned a sleeping bag and some clothes, he slept in the shed and worked in the garden, went with Ivan in the van sometimes, got his money from the post office. The shed had acquired a kettle and a mug and plates and he bought tea and UHT milk. He walked to Limpley Stoke in one direction and Bath in the other, along the tow-path, when he needed bits and pieces, tobacco or food, a bottle of Coke. Not that he reflected on any of this, but he thought that Ivan did not usually leave him lunch.
Today, when Ivan had brought the food down for him, he had told him to work on the beans and lettuces until he got back. Stay here and do the beans and lettuces till I get back, all right? I’ll be cutting the rye later today. Don’t you touch it, I don’t want you using the scythe. I’ll do it later when the sun’s been on it all day. Wear this, he had said, smiling and holding out the shirt, it’s a nice shirt for you. And don’t forget your hat. There were two white cotton hats on a nail on the back of the shed door and they each wore one on sunny days. Give me that T-shirt, it needs a wash.
It was so long since Leech had reflected on anyone’s reasons for things that it did not occur to him now to wonder why Ivan had placed the plastic-wrapped sandwich, banana and bottle of Coke at the end of the patch where he was to work that day and told him it was his lunch. It had felt good to be given a gardening shirt to wear, though as far as he could remember (not far, he knew that much) Ivan had not done that before, either. As Leech weeded and hoed, he managed to sustain a mood of self-scrutiny long enough to realise that in his mind ‘before’ was, like all concepts relating to time, vague and amorphic, a word he had not realised he knew. ‘Before’ demanded the ‘what’ or it made no sense. Before what? ‘Before’ required a firm grasp of some notion of time previous and a recognisable period since, a then and a now between events, a space of time segregating all the sometimeses—the sometimes this, the sometimes something else—into recognisable memories that would sit obediently in their places in Leech’s past and present, allowing themselves to be joined up into a continuum that would be his life so far. And Leech did not have any such firm grasp. On a good day he knew this, on better days he forgot he knew, as he forgot words such as amorphic. So those things that Ivan had not done ‘before’ might have been not done before yesterday, last week, last year or, for all Leech knew, the dawn of time. Meanwhile, his stomach was still telling him it was time to eat.
Settling himself on the ground at the end of the bean rows Leech pursued his mental exercise as he bit into the sandwich. He found to his pleasure that he had what felt like a clear recall of the morning. He had got up in a way that was familiar (encouraging him in the belief that he had done it that way many, many times now) and gone to watch the train. The train came every day, early, and he had got up and watched it pass—this, too, he felt with certainty, was something he often did. Then he thought he had walked down to wait behind the hedge at the house until Ivan came out. Today it had been different, because it was Hilary who had come out. She had come out to piss in the garden, which he did not think she had done before. No, that was wrong. That was yesterday. Or possibly not. Another day, anyway, if not today.
The sandwich, at least the wholemeal bread it was made with, was not good. Leech pulled out the white cheese and ate that, buried the remaining bread in the soil beside him, and ate the banana. He stood up to drink the Coke and walked along with it into the shed, wondering about the rest of the morning. He was wearing the blue shirt and white hat so yes, it must have been today when Ivan had told him to wear them, but that now seemed a long time ago. And he remembered, or his stomach did, that he had been hoeing a bean row when lunchtime came. Memory of anything between those two points had already slipped away like the dreams he sometimes woke up knowing he had been having, knowing too that they were already gone even as his brain clutched for recollection.
In a bundle of clothing at the foot of his bed he found his stuff and rolled a cigarette, sitting in the doorway. A lazy, afternoony warmth clung to the shed; it twisted the smells of never-quite-dry concrete and creosoted wood and burning match, rolling tobacco and banana skin into the air, and in the fly-buzzing, soft leaf-lifting, almost breezeless calm Leech wondered if he might go and sleep for a while. Ivan’s voice telling him to work until his return was receding into the already vanished morning. He sat in the doorway and looked out, swigging at the flat, warm Coke at the bottom of the bottle, sucking on his cigarette, while the scents of earth and cheese on his hands mingled with the smoke. Then, more as a pulse which moved the air than as a sound, he began to sense the whispering, metallic whipping of a distant train. He dropped the bottle and cigarette, hurried down the allotment to the far end, scrambled up the bank and through the hedge, across the brambly stretch of waste ground and up the steep slope of the embankment opposite. The steel noise was now beating from the rails in a quickening, hardening rattle. Leech scrambled upright and stood swaying, his eyes squeezed tight, as the diesel-hot wind lashed across his face, sucking him in, pushing him back, flapping the blue shirt against his chest, and behind his closed eyes he felt the lurching, dark train blot out the daylight as it rocked and whacked along the rails two yards from his feet.
CHAPTER 8
SARA TOOK STOCK. She was sitting on a bar stool opposite her chronically alcoholic house guest plus revolting dog, in love with a divorced, suddenly absent detective, and jealous of a corpse.
Andrew had leapt, with altogether too much zeal, Sara considered, into Detective Chief Inspector mode. Once he had delivered the screaming waitress into fresh air and the care of the pub landlady he had run back in, ordered Sara and Joyce away from the scene and shooed everybody out of the kitchen and into the lounge. There they had been instructed to wait. The sale of any more alcohol had been forbidden, and the bar staff were sullenly serving brackish pub orange juice that tasted of marmalade, and fizzy apple juice, gassy, sugary and innocent of apples. Sara sighed. Andrew obviously expected that they would be stuck here for ages and did not want any sozzled witness statements. Then he had disappeared, telling Sara that he would have to guard the scene until the investigating officers and forensic team arrived. A few minutes later they had turned up with the usual theatrical lights and sirens. At the sound someone had opened the pub’s double doors and Sara had seen through the rectangle of brash white light that outside the sun shone as brightly as before but that the tables and chairs were being carted away so that police vehicles could park outside. The party was over.
Andrew did not reappear. Sara cast a look towards Joyce, who was rocking gently to and fro, crooning at Pretzel while with both hands she kneaded his ears over and over. Pretzel gazed back at her through wet eyes, the look on his face conveying perhaps deep sympathy, perhaps deep hunger, or perhaps the fervent wish that she would leave his ears alone. It was not clear who was trying to comfort whom, nor how successfully.
The pub furniture was depressingly dark and covered in fake Jacobean tapestry, the ashtrays were bright plastic and the beermats curling. Polystyrene models of ladders and snakes were stuck unconvincingly over the dark wall-paper. The lounge doors had been closed again and now no natural light reached them. The place should have smelled of warm, hoppy beer and plummy spirits, of red wine, wood smoke and roasting meat; instead it almost stung Sara’s nose with the usual mixture of bar disinfectant, frying and fag ash.
At Joyce’s side Sara seethed more with jealousy than anger. It had come at her once again and without warning, that dimension in Andrew’s life that took precedence over anything to do with her. Another stupid corpse had jostled its way to the front and seized all his attention and until the stupid person who killed the stupid corpse was found, she knew she could expect little of his energy or imagination to be directed towards her or her needs. She felt sullenly that she was being elbowed out of her own relationship, and by a dead tourist.
She peered further into the gloom of the lounge, determined not to care who else was here or what they might think at being detained at the scene of the crime. The mainly young people, mostly men, looked completely, utterly ordinary: ordinary clothes, haircuts, accents and, presumably, drinking habits. They probably also had utterly ordinary tastes, opinions, jobs, homes, and she did not care how lazy it was of her to think so. She yawned. Yet someone, perhaps one of them, or one of the pensioner couples or quartets, or one of the pairs of young girls dressed for sexual combat, might be responsible for strangling the woman in the corridor. But Sara, yawning again, thought not. Most murders were domestic affairs. And unsatisfactorily married people go on holiday too, possibly more often than happy ones. She yawned again, tipped a practically empty bag of peanuts into her mouth and was rewarded with a throatful of gritty salt.
But it did seem now as if something was happening. Three uniformed police officers, accompanied by another man whom Sara recognised, recoiling, as Detective Sergeant Bridger, had entered the room. Two of them set themselves up at the bar with notebooks, and one by one the pub customers were called up and questioned. Nobody was kept for more than a couple of minutes, so Sara guessed that they were being asked only for their names and addresses, possibly also when they had arrived at the pub or visited the loo. One or two of the young men seemed to find the proceedings funny or embarrassing, turning to their friends, grinning or making faces, but most seemed to take their cue from the police officers who went about their job with undertakerly seriousness. Gradually the numbers in the place dwindled.
While this was going on Bridger and a female police officer had installed themselves at an empty table. Sara watched as the landlord and landlady, with much head-shaking, were questioned in turn. The screaming waitress now seemed calmer but no more forthcoming, judging by the fifteen minutes it took Bridger to be appraised of all she knew. The WPO was now approaching their table.
Joyce glanced up from Pretzel’s ears, looking old and frightened.
‘I’m going to stay with my friend while you speak to her,’ Sara blurted. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’ The WPO glanced back at DS Bridger. ‘Should be,’ she said. As an afterthought she added softly, ‘Just insist, if you have to.’
But she didn’t. Bridger gave Sara a cold but respectful smile which told her that while she was no more popular with him than she had ever been, he now knew her to be his boss’s—what? This little problem was one that she sometimes scratched at. Girlfriend? She was a woman of thirty-nine. Lover? Such a private thing should not be paraded by a public label. Partner? She wasn’t, not properly, nor did she like the business implication. Companion? The pensioners’ choice, suggesting days out to factory shops and evenings in.
‘Miss Selkirk is a close personal friend of DCI Poole,’ Bridger informed the WPO. Friend, pronounced ‘furrend’ to convey extra friendliness. As if it mattered now. Sara thought of Andrew and his desertion with a sudden wave of irritation.
‘Now, Miss Cruikshank, I understand that after ordering lunch’—Bridger was checking some notes, presumably information from Andrew—‘you left your seat outside at approximately a quarter past one in order to go to the toilet. Would you please tell me exactly what you did when you got there?’
Joyce blinked a few times and her lips wriggled like two worms trying to free themselves of each other. ‘I didn’t go to the toilet. I went to the lavatory. And it’s none of your business what a lady does in the lavatory,’ she said. Sara drew in her bottom lip and looked at her hands. She had better not laugh, but God bless Joyce and Kelvinside.
‘I mean, of course,’ Bridger said wearily, ‘after you’d used the toilet. Assuming you went straight to the ladies and er … used the facilities. What happened then?’
‘I washed my hands, of course,’ Joyce said primly. ‘And then I tidied my hair and left the lavatory.’ She patted her head in emphasis and Sara looked at her, knowing this to be a lie. The hair had obviously not been touched that day and looked more as if it had been ploughed than tidied.
‘And then?’
‘Those doors—there were doors in the corridor, going down the wall. She fell straight out, she fell right out on top of me.’ Joyce looked round the table with indignant eyes, trying to enlist sympathy. ‘The door must have been left open. Half open, anyway.’ She seemed on the brink of complaining to the management.
‘Did you see anyone else, either in the ladies’ toilet or in the corridor outside?’
‘No. Just me.’
‘Really? Nobody at all? It’s a busy day for the pub, after all. And there were a lot of people outside on the street who could have been using the toilets.’
‘There wasn’t anybody else. I was minding my own business. I don’t go round looking at people in the lavatory, I’d like you to know.’
‘And you say you think the cupboard door may have been open. What do you mean by that? Try to remember—when you came out and saw the doors, were they open or closed?’
‘Did you not hear me? She fell straight out on top of me. So they must have been open. Or maybe half open. I think they may have been open, I’m not sure.’
‘Were the doors open or closed when you went past them on the way in?’
‘They were closed.’
‘You’re sure of that? They were definitely closed?’
‘Yes, definitely,’ Joyce said. ‘They … well …’ She had sensed a trap, too late.
‘You see, if you’re quite sure they were closed on the way in—obvio
usly you could see them clearly—how is it you’re not sure if they were closed on your way out?’
Joyce shrugged. ‘It’s no business of mine, what the doors were doing is nothing to me. I just …’
‘If the lady fell out on top of you, you’re saying, I think, that she must have been propped upright in the cupboard with her weight against the inside of the door? Which must have been closed, mustn’t it, otherwise our lady wouldn’t have been inside the cupboard at all, she’d have been on the floor in the corridor, wouldn’t she?’
Joyce said nothing.
‘Which suggests to me, Miss Cruikshank, that you must have opened the cupboard yourself. Is that what happened?’
Joyce was shaking her head vehemently. ‘No, I didn’t open any cupboard. I don’t think I did … it’s not what I …’ She turned to Sara. ‘Can we go home now, dear? Pretzel wants to go home.’
‘Look, she’s had a bad shock,’ Sara said. ‘You can’t go on with this.’
‘What would I be opening a cupboard for? It’s not my cupboard.’
‘Will you please tell me why you opened the cupboard, Miss Cruikshank?’
‘I … wasn’t just … I don’t do that kind of thing … I wouldn’t …’
‘Look, what’s the point of this?’ Sara demanded. ‘How dare you put her through this? Can’t you understand what it must be like to have a corpse fall on top of you out of a cupboard?’
Joyce had covered her face with her hands. She gave a quiet wail, which Pretzel answered with a protective bark. He scrambled to his feet and took up a wriggling guard in front of her knees, dancing up and down on his splayed front feet and growling softly. Bridger sighed. This would have to be followed up later at the station, with any luck when Poole’s ‘close personal friend’, aka his bit of fanny, and the fucking dog weren’t around.