The Waxwork Corpse: A legal thriller with a chilling twist (Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers Book 5)

by Simon Michael

  ‘Hello?’ he answers.

  ‘Charles? It’s Davie. Is Dad there by any chance?’

  ‘Yes, he is. I just got in and he was waiting outside. Do you know where —?’

  ‘She’s here. She arrived half an hour ago with a suitcase, asking to stay. She’s in the spare room. Sonia’s trying to talk to her.’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘As far as I can tell. And Dad?’

  ‘All right.’

  David senses that Charles can’t talk. ‘Is he in the room? Don’t answer; there’s nowhere else in that cubby hole he could be. What’re we going to do?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest. I thought it might have been … I wasn’t sure how serious it was till you phoned. Are you going to let Mum stay?’

  ‘What choice do I have? She refuses to go home. What about Dad?’

  ‘He’s brought a suitcase too.’ Charles pauses. ‘If neither of them is going to use their house, maybe we could move into it.’

  David laughs sadly. ‘This is crazy.’

  ‘At least she can stay with you for a while. There’s nowhere here for Dad to sleep. The bed’s a foldaway, and much as I love him…’

  ‘Has he told you what’s wrong?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mum won’t speak about it either. Charles, I think this is serious.’

  Harry gets up in search of the bathroom. Charles takes the opportunity to speak quickly. ‘Maybe, but I doubt it,’ he says, his voice low. ‘They’re both getting old and cranky, and I guess they’re each waiting for the other to apologise. In any event, we won’t find out tonight. It might do some good if they’re apart for a night.’

  ‘I don’t think they’ve spent a night apart since I was born.’

  ‘Precisely. It might bring them to their senses.’

  ‘OK. I don’t think I’ve a choice anyway; I can’t get Mum out of our spare room. What’ll you do?’

  ‘Sleep on the floor, I guess. The couch wouldn’t sleep a ten-year old.’

  ‘Best of luck,’ says David.

  ‘And you. I think you’ll need it more than me.’

  ‘Call me tomorrow, Charles, eh?’

  ‘Will do. Bye.’

  CHAPTER 17

  At just after opening time, The Grave Maurice is almost empty. Mikey McArthur nurses half a pint of mild at a corner table as he idly leafs the pages of a newspaper extricated from under the foot of his wobbly table. It’s a day old and half the pages are glued with dried beer, but Mikey’s never been interested in the news — reading, even newspapers, has never been his strong suit — and right now he’s not even focusing on the stained pictures. It just gives his hands something to do as he ponders his next move.

  He’s cross with himself at the waste of nine pence ha’peny; he should have known there’d be no one around at this time of day, but he had to get away from the old woman’s huffing and glaring, and he’d hoped to bump into someone he could touch for a couple of nicker, now that his welcome on Deala’s lounge sofa looks to have expired.

  He tapped up Deala for a couple of nights on the couch the previous Sunday, but it’s now Friday of the following week. Deala’s missus has a face like a cold steel vice at the best of times, but the look she gave him as he ate his toast that morning made it clear: time to make other arrangements. However, he now has less than four quid of his dad’s pension money left in his trouser pocket, he needs a change of clothes and things are becoming a bit desperate.

  Mikey avoids the barman’s suspicious glance from the other side of the bar. He realises that, once he got within sniffing range, he narrowly missed being ordered back out of the saloon bar, but the barman changed his mind once Mikey showed him the price of a pint.

  Mikey has run out of ideas. Over the last few days, he’s discovered that most of the faces he knew from the forties have moved on, and those who haven’t aren’t keen to renew his acquaintance. The plan to squeeze that Jew-boy Charlie Horowitz had come to nothing. It was never really a plan, so to speak. Mikey’d just glimpsed him across the bar, recognised the face and taken a punt. But he’d no idea where the geezer had gone now nor how to get hold of him, and in retrospect it’d been a daft idea. Still, fancy bumping into him so far from the Smoke, and after so many years, eh? Last time Mikey heard anything about him, he’d become some sort of war hero, gong and all, but that was over twenty years ago.

  The saloon bar is briefly illuminated as the street doors open and a noisy group of young men enters. They order drinks and take them upstairs from whence Mikey soon hears the click of snooker balls being racked.

  Mikey knocks back the last of his drink, stands and closes the newspaper. He puts the empty glass on top of it, looks down and there, right in front of him and as large as life, is a black and white picture of Charlie Horowitz.

  He’s in a group of suits descending the steps of a building that Mikey knows well but can’t, at that second, quite place. Horowitz’s head is turned away from the camera as he speaks to someone next to him who’s largely hidden by other figures, but Mikey has no doubt at all; it’s him! Mikey’s heavy unshaven jaw drops and he slowly lowers his bulk back onto the chair, his mouth hanging open slackly. What are the chances? he asks silently, full of wonder and disbelief.

  He has a sudden vivid memory of the day his mother died. It was during the 1918 pandemic and Mikey was eight, a permanently hungry and grubby boy with, even then, unusually large hands and knees. He’d been called in off the street to sit reluctantly at one side of her bed, trying to avoid eye contact with his weeping aunt at the other, as the dying woman wheezed through her last minutes, her glistening body trembling with fever and the intervals between each painful breath growing steadily longer. Near the end, in a rare moment of lucidity, Dot McArthur opened her eyes, recognised her only son beside her, and reached up to stroke his hair.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mikey,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll always be with you. I’m your guardian angel.’

  Mikey silently thanks his long-dead mother, because he cannot otherwise explain how the very man he was thinking about should suddenly appear before him in this way. Maybe she was his guardian angel, after all, because this surely had to be a sign.

  He leans forward and pulls the newspaper closer to him. His stubby forefinger slowly traces the text beside the photograph, his mouth moving soundlessly as he deciphers the words. He’s not sure he’s understood it properly, but it seems that Charlie Horowitz now calls himself “Charles Holborne”. One fact emerges clearly, however: Horowitz is now a brief, and he’s on a big case. And everyone knows what briefs earn.

  Mikey sits back in his seat. Fuck me, what a turn up, he thinks, as a slow grin spreads across his lumpy features.

  CHAPTER 18

  Charles spends a third night back in his familiar bed, and again sleeps wonderfully. No doubt it’s still exhaustion; he barely slept at all for the first two weeks after Harry’s arrival. Night after night he tossed and turned on the lounge floor with only a scratchy blanket and shifting sofa cushions beneath him. Finally acknowledging that his father wasn’t going to return to Golders Green any day soon, Charles took a taxi to one of the army surplus shops on Tottenham Court Road and returned with the most expensive foldaway he could find. He intended to use it himself in the tiny living room, but Harry insisted that Charles must return to his own bed, now there was an alternative. He’d be perfectly happy on the foldaway, he said.

  Much to Charles’s consternation, Harry seems to be settling in for the long haul. He has already revolutionised both Charles’s kitchen and his eating habits. Separate crockery and cutlery — two of each item, just enough for father and son — have been acquired from somewhere, and now the proper kosher division of utensils between “meat” and “milk” meals has been made. Over the first couple of days, Charles worked his way through the pork sausages and bacon rashers in the fridge without a word from his father, but they have not been replaced. Food stocks are now rigidly demarcated into meat and milk, and b
right new kitchen towels, red for meat and blue for milk, hang on the rail behind the door. Almost without his noticing it, Charles’s flat has become kosher, or at least sufficiently kosher for Harry not to object to cooking and eating in it.

  To Charles’s surprise, despite the cramped living conditions, adjusting to life with his father has not been difficult. Harry seems to make do with only five or six hours’ sleep a night, retiring late and rising early. By the time Charles comes out of the bathroom in the mornings the living room has been cleared, Harry’s night things are stowed away and a pot of tea usually awaits on the tiny kitchen table. During the day while Charles is at court or in the Temple Harry amuses himself by taking gentle walks through the city, revisiting old haunts, reading the newspapers at Holborn Library and buying odds and ends of food from kosher butchers and greengrocers.

  Charles has always known that his father is well loved within his community — he’s never heard a bad word said of him — but he’s not before seen, close-up, the effect the little tailor has on those around him. He befriends everyone. Despite having known him for no more than a fortnight, Harry has somehow already received an invitation to the home of Dennis, the concierge, in Plaistow, something Charles hasn’t managed in several years, and he appears on first name terms with half the Jewish shopkeepers in the City.

  Twice Harry has taken a bus and dropped into his little factory in Mile End to keep an eye on things. Now he’s in the City it’s a lot less tiring than coming down on the Northern Line, he says. In truth, the place has been running smoothly without his daily attendance for several years now, and although the staff are always delighted to see him, Harry, who is now 79, knows they’re merely being polite and his visits are interrupting their work. The business of manufacturing dress hats and fur coats for the carriage trade, to which Harry and his father gave, together, over one hundred years of their working lives, now runs perfectly well without him.

  Harry doesn’t always eat in the evenings, but on a couple of occasions he has prepared something for them both and so, for the first time in a long while, Charles feels as if he’s coming back to a home at the end of the day.

  Despite Charles’s gentle but persistent probing, Harry refuses to be drawn on the issue of the rift with Millie. Whenever Charles raises it, Harry thanks him for his concern but politely declines to enter into any discussion on that subject. He tries not to mention Millie’s name, even in innocuous contexts, in case he is drawn into deeper waters. At first Charles concludes that his father’s reticence must be caused by pain, but after a while he realises that it’s more a sense of delicacy. Harry is of the traditional view that a couple’s matrimonial difficulties are no business of anyone except the parties themselves. They are most particularly not subjects for the children, who might be forced or, worse, choose, to take sides. It’s private.

  After a few days, Charles’s frustration is replaced by an appreciation of his father’s wisdom. Whatever they may be doing to address the impasse, Harry and Millie will have to be allowed to get on with it in their own time. Charles only discovers that negotiations are afoot with Millie by virtue of a chance remark about a forthcoming visit to David and Sonia’s house.

  So, as the days lengthen to weeks and the glorious weather of that summer begins to fail, the two men settle into a relaxed and easy companionship. Charles begins to look forward to the hour or two late at night when Harry makes them both a hot drink and they sit chatting in the semi-darkened lounge, the sound of vehicles outside becoming less and less frequent as the City falls asleep.

  Charles begins to appreciate that he has never really known his father at all. As a child he saw a quiet, authoritative figure, a distant, reasoning mediator in a household of emotional traumas. Almost as soon as he left home for university, he perceived a narrow, rigid man who couldn’t grasp the value of anything outside his own inward-looking culture. There was no intermediate period for Charles to learn what Harry Horowitz thought, what he liked, why he was liked — which Charles knew he was, with great warmth, by everyone who knew him — or what he had wanted for himself.

  As Charles hears stories of life in Stepney before the First World War when Harry was himself a young man, of a large and noisy family, its friendships and feuds, its successes and failures and, most particularly, of Harry’s warm and close relationship with his father, Charles starts to realise how barren and lonely his life is in comparison. Charles is approaching his fortieth birthday, still with no wife, no children, not even a proper home. His relationship with his parents has been bitter and angry, especially compared to the intimacy of a family whose children lived in the family home until they married, sometimes even afterwards.

  But this family thing; it has always been so painful, so raw. His childhood and adolescence were a constant battle to be himself and not to conform with what his religion, culture and, most importantly, his mother, wanted of him. At the time, marrying Henrietta and putting behind him all that archaic Jewish mumbo-jumbo had been a relief, like amputating an infected limb. Now, as he listens to Harry speaking of Shimon Horowitz, Charles’s grandfather, he wonders if anyone would ever speak of him with the same respect and affection. For the first time in his life, the possibility occurs to him that he has taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line; thrown out something that, in retrospect, was important.

  Harry watches his troubled son, deep in his thoughts. ‘Charles? Son?’

  ‘Sorry, Dad. Miles away.’

  ‘I saw.’

  Harry leans forward, frowning, something evidently on his mind.

  ‘What’s up?’ asks Charles, rousing himself from his reverie.

  ‘I want to say something to you, Charlie, and I don’t want you to get upset or angry, or shout me down.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Well, you might. For years I was frightened to open my mouth to you.’

  ‘It’s not like that now.’

  ‘With your clever words you used to leave me feeling confused and frustrated, so I couldn’t make my point.’

  Charles grins in acknowledgement. Henrietta and, more recently, Sally, used to say the same.

  ‘I promise to listen.’

  ‘OK then. I have watched you and your mother fight like cats in a sack for almost forty years,’ he starts.

  Charles holds up a hand. ‘I promise to listen, and I will, but is this a safe subject, Dad?’

  ‘Hear me out. You think I’ve been unaware of what’s been going on? Two of the people I love most in the world constantly at one another’s throats? The whole household ruled by the warfare between you two?’

  He shakes his head sadly, turns away and falls silent. When he finally does speak again, it is quietly and with profound sadness.

  ‘I used to come home from the factory with my heart in my mouth, wondering what I’d find. The two of you used to suck all the joy out of the place. I sometimes wonder how Davie managed to survive at all, but it was no thanks to your mother, because so often she had no space left for him, or…’ He tails off, backing away from expressing that thought, but Charles is certain he was going to add the words “or me.”

  This is the first time Charles has ever heard either of his parents criticise the other, even obliquely, and he is shocked. He wonders again if this may be what lies behind the present rift.

  Harry appears to change subject. ‘You didn’t know your mother’s parents, did you?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  Harry shakes his head. ‘They were pillars of the Jewish community, especially her father. A real Torah scholar, too. But not warm.’

  ‘Warm?’

  ‘Your mother once told me that never, not once in her whole life, can she remember either of her parents cuddling her, holding her hand, stroking her hair and so forth.’

  ‘What, not even grandma?’

  ‘Esther Cohen was an invalid for much of her life. The family had money, and she was always being sent off for rest cures here and there. They had a hous
ekeeper for as long as I can remember.’

  ‘What was wrong with her?’

  Harry shrugs. ‘I always thought she was a hypochondriac, but then she went and died in her early forties of TB, so what do I know? The point I’m making is that your mother had very little experience of living in a loving home. Your grandfather was very strict. Very strict. So, I think your mother had no examples of how to praise or encourage.’

  ‘Have you spoken to her about this?’ asks Charles.

  ‘Not really. When you were first born I could see her struggling with you. You wouldn’t feed, you cried a lot and she had no one to turn to, to ask for advice. She thought she could discipline you out of it.’

  Charles puts his hand on his father’s, and speaks gently. ‘Why didn’t you say something, Dad? Do something. Intervene.’

  Harry sighs and shrugs again. ‘Now, I wish I had. But what did I know? I’d never been a father, never had a baby, and I grew up in a household full of boys. Your mother’s … well … a woman of strong opinions, as you know. She said she knew how to manage it, she was the woman, and so I let her get on with it. She ran the household and I went to work. In the end, I suppose I hoped that her love for you would soften her.’

  ‘Her love for me? I don’t think she ever loved me.’

  ‘Son, you couldn’t be more wrong. You are the apple of her eye.’

  ‘It’s a funny sort of love, then, when it can be turned on and off at will. She could be cold and distant to me for days on end, and I never knew what I’d done wrong. Just that I had done something wrong.’

  ‘I know. She didn’t know how to manage your disobedience, your independence. But I promise you, Charlie, that doesn’t mean she didn’t love you. She just did the best she could, with the hand she was dealt. And you have to remember, you did test us. In marrying out, in abandoning your Jewishness, you broke a thread that goes back thousands of years, father to son, mother to daughter. I don’t think you’ll ever understand how much pain that caused us. All the milestones your mother and I foresaw, a big Jewish wedding, years of festivals and family celebrations with you and our grandchildren, their bar mitzvahs, all that … well, it just disappeared.’