The Bullet Trick

by Louise Welsh

  They were random faces, more young than old, though the old were there too, looking out from their photographs or hiding behind the faces of their younger selves in pictures taken decades ago. Long hippy hair, seventies mullets, eighties flat-tops, photographs so dated they’d make you smile, if they’d not been turned tragic by circumstance. The same skewed aspect clung to all of the images. The lost mothers and brothers, sisters, aunts, daughters, sons and uncles generally had a carefree air, caught at a family celebration or a party or maybe just the last photograph in the spool.

  There were two photographs of Gloria Noon. The familiar image I’d come to know from the newspaper reports and a second, digitally aged one. The page flashed from one to the other: young Gloria, aged Gloria, young Gloria, aged Gloria. The images were imperfectly aligned and her shoulders moved up and down between the two, making it look like Gloria was shrugging as she smiled out from the screen of lost faces. Her résumé summarised the time and known circumstances of her vanishing. It said nothing about possible murder.

  Even at my lowest I’d never totally vanished. I wondered how many of the disappeared were dead, how many had been coerced into leaving. I wondered if they even knew that they were missing, that there were people who loved them, desperate to forgive whatever they had done. But then who was I to jump to conclusions? Maybe some of them had committed acts too awful to be absolved.

  I clicked to the next page and a warning that the following images might disturb me; I clicked again and the screen threw forth photographs of some of the found. There were only three of them. A woman washed up in the Thames, a youth discovered dead in Petersham Woods and an elderly man who had lain in the bushes in Richmond Park for a very long time before his skeletal remains were uncovered. All of them had lost their features to decay and the images on this page showed reconstructions of how they might have looked in life. The technicians who rebuilt these faces were more magician than I’d ever be. They crafted an illusion of flesh onto bare bone, dragging back the lost features of the dead. The technicians’ skill was painstaking and exact, but the images were ghastly. The smiles of the missing people that had shone carelessly from the previous page were all gone. There was no glimmer of expression here, the skin was too smooth, the eyes too blank, the lips too set, no living face ever held such deathness. The missing may yet be alive, but one look at the remoulded faces of these three showed what their fate might be.

  I closed the site. The dead and the missing weren’t going to tell me anything, my search had to be through the living. I logged onto yell.com and started to search for Gloria’s sister, Sheila Bowen.

  There were several Bowens in the telephone listings but only one Bowen’s & Sons Gents Outfitters. I jotted down the number then checked my new Veritable Crime email account.

  There was a welcome to the server and an offer to enlarge my penis and supply me with Viagra. Maybe my enlarged penis would be too big to keep up without help. There was no message from Mr Manson.

  The Internet café resembled a large open-plan office where the dress code ranged from casual to scruffy-as-youlike. I sat for a second listening to the sounds around me, the clatter of computer keys and occasional exchange of muted conversation, the kind of ambience a busy newsroom might generate. I collected a fresh coffee then took out my new mobile, dialled Bowen’s outfitters and asked to speak to Mrs Sheila Bowen. I expected the woman on the other end to say she was retired, dead, or too busy to come to the phone, but instead her voice became guarded.

  It said, 'This is Sheila Bowen. Is it about Gloria?'

  London

  FOR A WOMAN whose sister had disappeared without trace from her own home in the middle of the day, Sheila Bowen was remarkably lax about security. I gave her a big smile and one of the business cards that I’d had made in a machine at the railway station, identifying me as Will Gray, freelance journalist. She glanced at it casually then invited me in.

  Sheila lived in one of a row of semi-detached houses built in the fifties to accommodate lower-middle-class commuters. Today it was probably worth a small fortune. She greeted me at the door, and then led me through to a lounge decorated in pale parchment shades.

  Her white blouse and cream slacks blended with the room. Maybe her sister had taken the coordinating colour scheme too far and simply faded into the wallpaper.

  I had hoped she’d leave me alone to get my bearings while she made a pot of tea, but Sheila had obviously had faith in my punctuality, or maybe she’d simply wanted to occupy her nerves in a domestic task. A tray holding a teapot, two matching cups and what looked like homemade cake was already waiting on the blond wood coffee table.

  If we’d met socially I would have supposed Sheila Bowen a well-preserved, middle-class housewife whose only concern was finding the right shade of white for her hall carpet or keeping her husband’s cholesterol down. The slim woman sitting on the ivory-coloured couch opposite me was surprisingly unchanged from the photographs in the thirty-year-old newspapers I’d found in the Mitchell. Her hair was ash-gold, styled in soft fronds around a pale face that was remarkably unlined considering all the troubles she’d encountered. It seemed that I wasn’t the only one who could create an illusion.

  She started to pour the tea and I noticed that her hands were steady. There was a wedding band and a diamond eternity ring on her left hand, and a slim silver ring that looked cheap against her other jewellery on her right. She passed me my cup.

  'You came all the way from Scotland?'

  'I took the train down from Glasgow this morning.'

  Sheila looked confused.

  'Gloria never went to Scotland.'

  'I know.' I smiled. 'I just happen to be based there at the moment.' I took a sip of tea.

  'It’s good of you to see me. Many unsolved cases like Gloria’s are under review at the moment, but sometimes it needs a bit of outside pressure to get the police to reopen them.'

  Sheila rubbed her thumb nervously over her chin and then folded her hands in her lap as if someone had told her it was an irritating habit.

  'My husband’s always said that they never shut cases like Gloria’s.'

  I leant forward putting a note of sincerity into my voice.

  'He’s right, they don’t. But, as I’m sure your husband will tell you, the police are undermanned and overworked. Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of press attention.'

  Sheila nodded silently. 'I know it must still be very painful to talk about Gloria’s disappearance even after all these years. Are you willing to give me a brief interview?'

  Sheila looked at me.

  'I’d walk barefoot into Hell to get my sister back, or even just find out what happened to her.'

  'OK,' I smiled but there was no answering smile on Sheila Bowen’s face. 'I’ll get straight to the point. In all the press reports at the time of Gloria’s disappearance, there seemed to be an underlying suggestion that it was her husband Bill who was responsible. Do you agree with them?'

  Sheila Bowen looked over towards the picture of a Cotswold scene hanging above the living gas fireplace. It was a restful view across green fields to a little thatched cottage inside a neatly fenced country garden. It looked like the kind of place where nothing bad ever happened. There were even roses round the door. But who could guess what horrors might lie inside its rustic walls? At last Sheila met my gaze.

  'Well, you’re certainly direct.' She poured more tea into her cup then left it untouched on the table. 'This is difficult. There was a period after Gloria disappeared when I didn’t…

  couldn’t talk about her at all. I was suspicious of everyone, especially men.' She looked at her lap and began twisting the cheap silver ring on her right hand. 'But as time passed I began to realise that by shutting out memories of her I was denying the life that she had had. And by giving in to constant suspicion I was ruining my own life as well.' Shelia paused as if trying to order her thoughts. 'Her son’s dead too, Billy.' I nodded to show that I already knew and she carried o
n talking, her voice level. 'He was a sweet boy but after Gloria went it was hard to keep in touch with him.' She shook her head. 'There was a lot of bad feeling between his father and me after the investigation. I suspected him and he accused me of sending the police on the wrong track. It was hard to come back from that. Maybe I should have pressed more, but I wasn’t in the best of health myself… then I got married. Jim hated to see me upset and it became easier to shut that part of my life up.'

  'Perhaps you had to, to protect your own sanity.'

  'That’s what Jim said, but now I wonder; if I’d been around more, if I hadn’t been so determined that his father was guilty, maybe Billy would still be alive.'

  'You can’t torture yourself with what-ifs. You did your best.'

  'You and Jim should get together. That’s exactly what he says. Jim’s always wanted to protect me, he encouraged me to forget.' She took a sip of tea. 'When my children were young it was easy for a while. I was so busy. Then they began to grow up and I realised I was ready to talk about Gloria again, but by then no one was interested.' She looked into my eyes. 'You’re the first one who’s asked about her in a long while.' Sheila put her cup back on the table and straightened her back ready to get on with answering my question. 'Gloria’s husband, Bill, was very handsome and compared to the family that Gloria and I grew up in, very comfortably off. Perhaps she should have asked a few more questions about where his money came from, but Gloria was young and pretty and wanted a good life. I never blamed her for marrying Bill.'

  'But he hit her?'

  Sheila looked at her feet again.

  'I only saw evidence of it once.'

  'The time Bill claimed Gloria had fallen down the stairs?'

  Sheila nodded.

  'Yes, and I believed her. Bill was in the nightclub business. You don’t get anywhere in that world without knowing how to throw your weight around, and why should Gloria lie?

  Yes, of course I believed her.'

  'I’m sorry. Some of these questions are going to touch on difficult ground.'

  Sheila nodded and gave me a brave smile.

  'Do you smoke?'

  'Yes.'

  'Then let’s go outside and have a ciggy.'

  We went through French windows onto a small terrace. Life had proved itself unreliable, but Sheila had managed to inflict order on nature. Her garden was an almost symmetrical arrangement of lawn and well-disciplined flowerbeds. There was a wrought-iron table and chairs beside us on the patio, but Sheila led me down the lawn, stopping occasionally to deadhead plants or pull a reckless weed from a border. Perhaps it was too chilly to sit outside or maybe she found it easier to talk of her sister without looking into someone else’s eyes.

  'Jim doesn’t like me smoking, but an occasional one doesn’t hurt and it sure as hell helps.' She laughed and for the first time I thought I could see a trace of her sister Gloria in her face. 'You want to ask about Gloria’s lover.'

  I nodded, relieved she’d broached the subject.

  'Yes.'

  'It always comes down to that in the end doesn’t it? Sex.'

  'It’s a powerful force.'

  'Is that what you call it?… He was very hush-hush, Gloria’s amour.' Sheila pulled a brown-edged leaf from a bush and crushed it between her fingers. 'They never found him you know. It wasn’t for the want of looking.' She opened her palm, looked at the crumpled leaf and then let it drop to the ground. 'He’s never said so, but I know Jim thinks Gloria just made a lover up to make life a little more exciting.'

  'And what do you think?'

  'I think he was probably married.'

  The rain that had threatened all day started to spit; Sheila and I moved back indoors, she glanced at her watch and I got the sensation that our interview was drawing to its end. I asked, 'If there was a lover do you think that Gloria would have left her husband?'

  Sheila looked at me.

  'I don’t know and I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. That day has coloured everything since, even when I met Jim there was the shadow of it hanging over us. I used to think that she would have, but as I’ve got older I’ve wondered. She was devoted to Billy and his father wouldn’t have let him go easily. Maybe if it was the love of her life, maybe then, but the maternal bond is the strongest one of all; I think it would have taken a lot of persuasion for her to jeopardise it.' She nodded towards a dresser where a group of framed photographs crowded together. 'I should know, I’ve got two of my own.'

  I glanced at the photographs: two nondescript boys in school uniform, flanked by the graduation photographs of two nondescript young men, followed by the formal portraits of the same boys/men, balding now, wearing dark suits reminiscent of their school blazers. I wondered how many more pictures it would take to complete the set. To the right of the arrangement in a chased silver frame was a studio portrait of Gloria Noon.

  I said, 'Do you mind?'

  Sheila nodded her permission and I picked it up.

  'She was a beautiful-looking woman.'

  'Not just to look at, she was beautiful inside too.' She gave me the smile that was like Gloria’s. 'It sounds silly, but sometimes I imagine that she’s on a long journey around the world. I can picture her in Egypt or Turkey… Marrakech; always somewhere exotic, somewhere sunny.' She took the photograph from me and for the first time since we’d met I thought that she might cry, but instead she gave a short laugh. 'You know, if she came back now and said she’d just been on an extended holiday I might kill her myself.'

  I watch Sheila’s slim hands replace Gloria’s portrait on the dresser and a second framed photograph caught my eye. I reached over and lifted it, keeping my voice as casual as I could.

  'A family friend?'

  'What made you say that?' Sheila’s smile was warm. 'That’s my husband, Jim.'

  'Mr Bowen?'

  'Bowen was my first husband’s name. He died two years before Gloria vanished.' She shook her head. 'Myeloid leukaemia, he lasted six months after the diagnosis. Gloria going would have hit me hard whatever happened but after Frank’s death…’ She shook her head, remembering. 'Well you can imagine, I thought that was going to be the end for me too.

  Then along came Jim.' She smiled again. 'He was part of the investigation team. I think deep down the rest of them just thought Gloria was an immoral woman who’d left her husband. Those were different times. But Jim never believed that. He kept on pushing and that was when I fell in love with him.' She smiled. 'I kept the name Bowen over the shop, Frank’s grandfather was the founder and it would have been wrong to change it.' She smiled. 'That was how I knew that you were phoning about Gloria. No one calls me Bowen any more. I’ve been Sheila Montgomery since I married Jim.'

  My mind was full of what might have happened had James Montgomery come home early and found me in his front room interrogating his wife. Part of me wished he had.

  What could he do with her there? But a larger part was relieved to escape.

  I walked as swiftly as I could away from the Montgomery house, cursing suburbia’s open streets, not daring to catch a train back in case I passed him en route to his home.

  Eventually I found a parade of shops and managed to catch a bus that would take me out of the district.

  Back in central London I used a public email telephone to check my VeritableCrime inbox. Technology might have moved on but people were still pissing in phone boxes. I held my breath and tried to work out how to use the machine. The connection was painfully slow and I had time to read the details of a dozen women eager to dance, massage or generally entertain me. I wondered if they knew the risk they were taking.

  The Viagra people had got back in touch and so had Drew Manson. He was keen to meet and had left a mobile number.

  He answered on the third ring. I explained that I was heading off to a publishing conference tomorrow but would love to see him before I went, was he free for a late lunch?

  Mr Manson was free. He suggested a gastropub somewhere near Farringdon. I’
d taken a dancer there once. The food had been expensive and she’d gone home for an early night saying she had to keep fresh for the next day’s show. I hoped I’d have better luck with Mr Manson.

  Drew Manson’s author photograph showed a man in his thirties wearing spectacles of the kind favoured by David Hockney and an intense stare under a shock of dark hair styled in a manner popular with young intellectuals in the sixties. Manson looked up from the typewriter on his desk with a mixture of surprise and intellectual rigour on his blunt face, his right hand frozen above the keys in mid-strike as if he’d been surprised in the act of writing a very big word.

  The clues were there in the sixties styling, the lack of computer and the publication date on the inside cover of the library book in my bag. But I wasn’t prepared for the balding man in his sixties who walked into the pub, even though he was wearing the same glasses, or a close relative of them. I let him stand in the doorway for a second, looking around the pub with the controlled anxiety of a man who has attended many disappointments, but still harbours some hope, and then I stood up and went to meet him.

  'Mr Manson?'

  'Yes.'

  His accent was how I imagined old-school Cambridge would sound and I was glad I’d decided to try for an intellectual look by wearing my own specs.

  'William Wilson, thanks for agreeing to see me at such short notice.'

  Manson looked self-consciously writerly. His trousers were a deep chocolate jumbo cord, his tie bore a monogram I didn’t recognise, but would probably signal something to the initiated, and his tweed jacket was patched at the elbows. I wondered if he was the real thing or an old fraud. I started to go through the spiel about the new line in crime books that my very small, very newly established publishing house was hoping to reprint with updates on any developments since the original publication.

  'I’m interested in the Gloria Noon case because of the recent murder of her son Bill.'

  Manson nodded and made a hissing noise, sucking the air between his teeth like a man giving something serious thought.

  The waitress came with our menus and Manson began studying his with the intensity of a shortsighted don assessing a borderline exam script. When the waitress returned he ordered, 'Steak, rare, with a green salad and a bottle of Barolo. I’ll have a glass of Pouilly Fumé while we’re waiting.' He watched as the girl bobbed off to the kitchen then turned to me, smiling patiently.