Veil of Darkness

by Gillian White

  ‘The dad and the kid,’ nods the blonde, blinking wildly. ‘He was forced to fight the father off and it seems that this might have caused the man’s death. Did Dom have a drink problem when you were with him?’

  At this Bernie can’t help snorting. ‘Like hell. We all did. We were pissed as farts the whole time.’

  ‘Aha,’ says Belinda knowingly. ‘So it started a long time ago.’

  ‘Not so bloody long,’ corrects Bernie. ‘Last year to be exact.’

  ‘Last year? Are you sure? Dom assures me it was ages ago.’

  ‘Look,’ says Bernie impatiently while inside her heart sickens and sinks, hurting so much it’s like there’s a chainsaw hacking its way down the centre. She wants to hide, and be alone. ‘What is this? Why are you here? Did Dom send you? Does he want to see me?’

  ‘God, no,’ says Belinda, ‘that is the last thing he needs right now. Dom and I are working hard to build up our relationship. Poor Dom, he’s so insecure underneath, so emotionally vulnerable, a child at heart with such a thick defensive veneer…’

  ‘Balls,’ says Bernie too loudly, causing several Burleston guests to pause and look distastefully at her.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I said balls.’

  ‘But you must have noticed Dom’s inability to form any lasting relationships, especially with women. His desire to hurt them. To love them and leave them. It’s his mother, you see, he wants to punish her for sending him away at eight years old. Did you know that, Bernadette?’ And Belinda leans forward confidentially in order to pass on these special secrets. Bernie wants to slap her face and knock it out of the way. But she does nothing. She just sits here taking it. ‘Poor Dom was sent away to prep school when he was just eight years old. Before that there was a string of nannies. I can see from your expression that Dominic must have hurt you, too. He must have hurt you very, very badly, Bernadette.’

  ‘I don’t need this shit.’

  ‘Bernadette. Please don’t push me away like this.’

  ‘You fuckin’ eejit. I’ll push you over this bloody table if you don’t get out of here.’

  ‘Now now, ladies,’ says Charlie the barman, gliding over on feet like castors, his circular tray making do as a shield. This is not the time or the place to be fighting over young men.’

  ‘Young men?’ screams Bernie, losing her cool. ‘Young bastards with their brains in their pricks.’

  Poor Belinda looks mortified as she hurries out of the Burleston bar, red, palpitating, muttering and wondering whether it might have been wiser to leave matters alone. But she’d been so afraid that the questing Dominic might take it into his head to renew this old relationship, which had clearly been rather special, on her side, that much was obvious. Is it possible that Belinda might have construed matters wrongly in spite of her psychology A level? After all, she and Dom have only been a serious item for twelve days, five hours and… might she, too, be the victim of some lamentable infatuation?

  Heartbreak hotel.

  Total is the darkness of Bernadette’s despair.

  ‘But Bernie, he sounds like a right little jerk.’

  ‘But I love him, Kirsty, I love him.’

  ‘How can you possibly love a man who makes you so unhappy?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Bernie weeps majestically on. ‘How can you understand?’

  ‘Ask a silly question,’ says Kirsty, eyes staring back into memory.

  Bernie is dragged from her deepest pain by the look of fear on Kirsty’s face. ‘You can’t still think he’s looking for you?’

  ‘I know he is.’ Kirsty goes quiet.

  ‘But why can’t you divorce him? Take out an injunction or something? Surely the law has some way of protecting women from bastards like him?’

  ‘I never dared tell the police,’ Kirsty spreads helpless hands, ‘when it was all going on. Listen, I was so scared of Trev at that time I believed he was hiding out in my head. And if I’d asked for help he might have kept away for a while, but sometime he would have been back, crazier than ever. He’s always made out it’s me who’s cracked and I was frightened they would believe him and take the kids away. He said that’s what he’d do if I left him.’

  ‘But he won’t find you here. He can’t.’ Poor Bernie’s face is bruised from crying. Her eyes are so swollen and sore she can only just peer out.

  ‘I don’t think he will. Not really. And the kids are safe for the moment, thank God, as long as I can keep out of the limelight. It’s not that Trev reads books, but news like that gets around, especially locally, and Trev has his mates; there’s blokes at the pub he goes round with. He’d know if I had a book published.’

  ‘So can’t you divorce him from here? Where you’re safe? There must be ways of doing it without him finding you.’

  ‘I will. But wait till I get my kids back. Wait till I find a home for them. The moment I get on my feet I’m off to find out what I can do. But first I have to get my head together.’

  ‘He’s evil.’ The sniffing Bernie is briefly inflamed, and relieved, by straightforward hatred. ‘Sick. You need to get even with him just like I need to get even with that cocksucker, Dominic’

  ‘Look at you, Bernie, look in the mirror, see what you’re doing to yourself. We mustn’t give in, that’s what’s important now if we want to come out of this winning,’ says Kirsty, squeezing her hand. ‘Think what Magdalene would do if she saw us being so pathetic. God, she’d have taken those nerds apart and fed them to the ducks by now. Like the time she found that rapist and took out his eyes with the crochet hook she used for her hassocks.’

  ‘Stop it, Kirsty! Stop it!’

  Bernie shivers, terribly tired, and it’s not the result of the crying this time. Trying to imagine Magdalene’s revenge makes her blood run cold. If Trev is a monster, then what does that make Magdalene? The anti-heroine in Kirsty’s book, the nun with her prayer book and her arsenal of weapons, is more innately evil than Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, madder than Jack Nicholson in The Shining and more manipulative than Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

  Bernie laughed at all those films, but she can’t raise a smile for Magdalene.

  The nun has the power to draw people to her.

  Sometimes Bernie thinks she would rather not be part of this, as if, in some unexplained way, contamination might be possible. Perhaps she should make an act of contrition, lest her sin be proclaimed at God’s tribunal in the valley of Jehoshaphat and she suffer the punishment of the damned.

  As Mammy has so often threatened.

  It’s still a puzzle to understand how a character so grotesque can evoke such reader satisfaction, such understanding of where she comes from, demented black laughter, even, when joined by eye to Magdalene, this savage, satanic, sanctified sister.

  Thirteen

  LIKE A HOUND WHO has finally found the scent—proved by the satisfied howl he emitted when the girl at the surgery made her disclosure—Trevor Hoskins can now make some progress. He spends hours during his long, lonely evenings dialling through the telephone book—a Cornish edition of Yellow Pages that British Telecom sent him for free, a service he hadn’t known existed.

  ‘Good evening,’ he says authoritatively. ‘I am detective inspector Bates from Merseyside CID and I’m looking for a white female with two children believed to be working in a hotel in Cornwall. Her name is Kirsty Hoskins, thirty years old, height five feet five inches. She could be using a false name. She has long brown hair worn up in a knot, a pale complexion, large brown eyes, and her main distinguishing feature is the gap between her two front teeth.’

  He smiles when he puts the phone down and crosses off the last name on the list. One down… more to go. He can afford to take his time. He will track her down eventually, as she must have known that he would. If they ask what the law wants her for he merely says, ‘That’s confidential, I am afraid,’ in a voice that suggests something sleazy.

  Trevor visits his solicitor and fills in
the legal-aid forms. Now he is hot on Kirsty’s trail he must plan his next actions with care. His solicitor is too young, in Trevor’s opinion, to be dealing with cases other than driving offences—which Trevor considers a waste of time—and he seems concerned that, although Trevor is not suing for divorce, he wants custody of his children.

  ‘I love my wife,’ lies Trevor, in Gas Board time, the give-away van safe in the firm’s private car park. ‘She can’t help her mental illness. And I doubt that she’ll want to divorce me, either. We’ve been to hell and back, me and her. But we’re fond of each other, Mr…’

  ‘Gillespie.’

  ‘Well… Mr Gillespie,’ says Trevor, uncomfortable with the higher rank in spite of the tender years, ‘she has lied to my own mother on occasion—broke her own arm once and swore I’d done it and my mother will testify to this. Kirsty seems determined to show that during our eight-year marriage I constantly abused her.’ Trevor pauses to roll his eyes, to smile with mock understanding. ‘She was always cutting herself with bits of mirror, bruising her arms, biting bits of her own body. If I was smashing the hell out of her, don’t you think she’d have left before now?’

  ‘Unless she was too afraid,’ says Mr Gillespie, meeting and holding Trevor’s eyes. Is he a poof? Trevor worries.

  ‘Kirsty was never afraid of me. My wife used to fantasize, you see. It was the bloody books she kept on reading. She’d see herself as the heroine and start believing she was a fashion designer, or an airline pilot, or a sodding film director. Anything. Can you believe it? Whatever the latest book was about. But she couldn’t have been bored. She worked full time,’ and Trevor hots up, sensing audience disbelief, ‘and none of her workmates ever heard her complain about me or her marriage. And I’ve already spoken to one or two.’

  ‘What a good thing her heroines were always benign,’ muses Mr Gillespie. ‘How about the neighbours?’ he asks next, his sleeves rolled neatly below his elbow in the fashion of namby pamby professionals who have never done a decent day’s work.

  ‘We never lived in our neighbours’ pockets.’ Trevor shifts in his chair, remembering the several occasions when nosy parker Mr Terry from next door came banging on the door to ask if everything was all right. ‘But there were times when Kirsty’s fits grew hellishly violent, sometimes I had to physically control her and it could be that people thought the worst.’

  Mr Gillespie leans forward, tapping his teeth with his silver pen. Why isn’t the bugger getting all this down? ‘Why is it that during all this time you never asked for help with Kirsty’s problem? You could have spoken to your doctor, the social services, the mental welfare department. How is it you never considered getting professional help? I mean, your children’s health must have suffered a great deal as a result of your wife’s mental state. You must have been very concerned, particularly over her violent outbursts.’

  Trevor hangs a sorry head. ‘If she’d had the kids taken away Kirsty would have lost it completely.’ His eyes take on an unhappy shine and he swallows hard to digest the lie. ‘I put her first, Mr Gillespie, and that is where I fell down. My overriding concern was always for my wife. And despite everything the kids did love her.’

  The solicitor crosses his legs and leans back, something Trevor cannot do because his chair is too upright. This puts him at some disadvantage. ‘But now you’ve changed your mind? Now you’re prepared to take action?’

  ‘Well yes, who wouldn’t be? I can’t have Kirsty hauling my kids up and down the land on a whim. I can’t allow that. Without me to keep an eye on the situation, God knows what will happen to them.’ Trevor shrugs his solid shoulders. ‘Hell, I don’t even know if they are alive! And I tell you this, I’ve lost my patience with this basket case; she’s gone too far this time and I’m bloody angry. Wait till I get my hands on her!’

  Mr Gillespie nods many times. ‘Has she ever shown any violence towards the children in the past?’

  Trevor’s lies slip easily off a well-practised tongue. ‘Only awful rages. She locked them in their rooms a few times, scared the poor little buggers stiff. You should see her, Christ, she turns into a raging witch, so bloody strong, and it’s getting worse. I think it might run in the family; her dad was a very odd bloke. She was brought up by her dad, you see, because her mother died when she was born.’

  ‘And you went to the police, you say?’

  ‘They weren’t interested,’ says Trevor defiantly, his brain disorganized by anger. ‘It seems that unless there’s a proven history of trouble they call it another marital scrap and they’re not prepared to take any action.’

  ‘Are you quite sure the police haven’t investigated the whereabouts of your children?’ Mr Gillespie goes carefully on. ‘It could be they have made enquiries and discovered that all is well.’

  ‘They would have told me.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  This young man is too damn flippant.

  ‘Why the hell not?’

  ‘Not if they thought things were best left.’

  Trevor sits forward. His fists are tightly curled balls. ‘What are you bloody well getting at?’

  ‘Calm down, calm down, these are matters I will have to go into before we take this any further.’

  ‘But you do think I have a case?’

  ‘If what you’ve told me is true, certainly, you do. Her illness sounds, to me, like a form of schizophrenia. What we would have to apply for is a section order under the mental-health act, something that’s harder to achieve than you might imagine. It involves the signatures of two psychiatrists.’

  ‘I wouldn’t waste my bleeding time coming here and making up all sorts of crap, of course it’s true. But Kirsty’s not going to break down in front of two of your shrinks; she acts as sane as you or I. On the surface no-one would ever believe…’ With difficulty Trevor takes hold of himself, noting his lawyer’s anxious eyes.

  ‘Look here, Mr Derek,’ says Candice Love, leaning forward confidentially. ‘It isn’t going to look too good, to be honest, if the media arrive to find your barmaid slumming it in some garret.’

  Mr Derek looks mortified. He has agreed to lunch with Candice Love, this sophisticated woman from London, in the conservatory, a vast Victorian structure of iron and glass, filled with vines and trailing blossoms. They share a table for two in the window overlooking the bay through the fuzzy tips of fir trees.

  ‘What do you suggest we do?’ enquires the hotel manager over a frosted ice bucket of terribly dry white wine while Candice picks at her lobster.

  ‘Bernadette tells me she has no intention of returning to Liverpool, which is a pity because that’s where her family are and, although they don’t sound too bright, at least with them she would have some protection.’

  ‘Protection from what?’ asks a well-intimidated Mr Derek.

  ‘From exploitation, of course,’ says Candice, dabbing her lips with a napkin. ‘Your barmaid is about to become a very wealthy woman.’

  ‘Then perhaps it might be best, for her sake, to keep her out of the public gaze.’

  Candice’s laugh is as brittle as the frost round the rim of the bucket. ‘Can’t be done, I’m afraid. Not if we want to do our best for her, which is, after all, what we are about.’

  Mr Derek hesitates before suggesting, ‘I suppose I could—’

  ‘No, no, no, a big mistake. It wouldn’t do for somebody in authority over her to take on a protective role. That could be construed as taking unfair advantage.’

  ‘There’s always Moira Stokes,’ muses Mr Derek.

  ‘Oh no, that would give the wrong image completely. No, are there any particular friends who are close to Bernadette, anyone slightly more worldly, for example?’

  Now Mr Derek has dealt with many rich and famous guests during his time at the Burleston. New money, old money. Pop stars, aristocrats. But this is the first time he has come face to face with a vamp so totally confident that she picks her teeth openly with a lobster claw, pulls her knickers free from her c
rotch while pouring herself extra wine, snaps him to silence by batting a mauve eyelid and cuts him in half with a cutlass scorn produced by a slight twitch of the lips.

  ‘There’s always Kirsty Hoskins,’ Mr Derek starts gingerly; ‘she is slightly older than the others and strikes me as a woman with some common sense.’

  ‘And who is Kirsty Hoskins?’ The name rings a bell. Oh yes, that was the name on the letter, the name Bernadette first used, the person Candice asked for when she first telephoned the hotel. Miss Love produces a cigarette holder in exaggerated Hollywood style.

  ‘One of our seasonal chambermaids. No, now I come to think of it, I believe Mrs Hoskins is employed on a full-time basis, keen to rent a cottage in the grounds for the winter season. Other than that, I’m afraid, there’s only Avril Stott.’

  ‘I had better have a word with both of them.’

  Mr Derek automatically holds out a lighter towards Miss Love’s swaying cigarette, ignoring the ‘no smoking’ sign hidden behind the side salad. He clicks his fingers for an ashtray to be brought to their table.

  ‘Which doesn’t answer the question of what to do with your old barmaid.’

  ‘Old barmaid?’

  ‘Well, you surely don’t imagine that Bernadette will continue to work in your bar? Not now!’

  ‘I hadn’t given it much thought, to be honest; this is all so sudden and unexpected. What would you suggest, Miss Love?’

  ‘If you want your hotel to benefit from the surge of worldwide publicity about to explode around this little cove, I would suggest that you find Miss Kavanagh and her chosen companion a decent room pretty pronto.’

  Mr Derek could counterattack with the fact that the Burleston is full most of the year and no longer needs to court publicity. In fact, many of the hotel’s regulars would shy away from that sort of thing, privacy being paramount. And yet, and yet, you cannot ignore the worrying trends—business is not good for most of the Burleston’s competitors; one day they might be glad of a famous author and her entourage. But instead he hears himself saying out of habit, ‘I don’t think we have any rooms that would be suitable.’