Mourning the Little Dead

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘Great,’ he agreed and she knew instinctively that he felt the same. ‘And...’ he hesitated as though what he had to say was a secret he wasn’t certain he should share. ‘I’ll tell you about my world,’ Patrick said.

  *

  Penny Jackson sat on the top step in her father’s house, half-hidden by the balustrade that ran across the landing. Below, through the turned spindles, she could see down into the hall and the living-room door just at the corner of her view. She had long lost track of the numberless nights she had sat up here, perched in this corner of the landing, listening to her parents’ voices in the room below.

  Sometimes there would be just a low murmur of conversation against the background noise of music or the television and she would go to bed happy, knowing that they were talking and at peace with one another. Other times, far too many times in Penny’s memory, the voices would be raised in anger, snatches of their conversation rising up on waves of rage to break about her on her cliff-top step.

  The arguments always followed the same pattern. They were always about The Job, her mother pronouncing the words as though they were writ large in capitals, and the way it ruled Joe’s and therefore all of their lives.

  ‘You’re a good man, Joe,’ her mother said, ‘but you’re a bloody street angel.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Exactly what it sounds like it means. Out there, you’re Mr Wonderful. Mr Compassion. Mr I Care. But I ask you, Joe, when was the last bloody time you brought that compassion home?’

  ‘Out there are people who need me.’

  ‘And we don’t?’

  It’s not the same.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘You know damned well it’s not.’

  ‘Sometimes, Joe, the only way I think we’ll get you to notice us is if we wind up dead. Would you see us then? The great Inspector Joe Jackson—’

  She remembered how her mother had broken off then. The sharp recoil of her father’s hand slapping her mother’s face and the soft crying that followed.

  And her father’s voice. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, love...Oh God, I’m sorry...I just didn’t mean...’

  And then the phone ringing and her father coming slowly out into the hall, drawing a deep breath before he picked it up. ‘Jackson...Oh, hello. No, of course it’s not a bad time. That’s all right...’

  Knowing it was Naomi, or if not Naomi some other voice in the night come to take her dad away.

  ‘You’re going out again?’ Her mother’s voice, thick with crying. As Penny leaned as far as she dare, her mother’s face visible, the cheek red, the fingermarks on her pale skin.

  ‘I have to go. She’s going through a rough time...’

  ‘And we’re not?’

  ‘Leave it, Lydia. Leave it, please.’

  She heard her mother begin to cry again and her father open and then softly close the door.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Bill’s voice from close behind her dragged Penny momentarily back to the present.

  ‘Yes. I’m OK.’

  ‘Oh no, you’re not.’ He sat beside her on the step and held her tight, drawing her against him, the warmth and comfort of his arm across her shoulder almost more than she could bear.

  ‘Still watching the ghosts?’ he asked her softly and she nodded, her cheek rubbing against the rough fabric of his woollen sweater.

  What about me? The child, Penny thought, her pain reaching into the mind of the adult and stirring the memories afresh. What about me? Doesn’t she have a mum and dad of her own? Why does she have to steal mine?

  Twenty-Three

  Alec arrived on Sunday morning just as Naomi was about to get breakfast ready. He had a holdall with him and a bundle of newspapers tucked under his arm.

  ‘Can I stay for a few days? I can go and find a hotel if it’s a problem, but I don’t think now is a good time to be at home.’

  ‘Stay? Of course you can. You should know that, but a “hello Naomi how are you this morning” would be nice first.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She heard him drop the bag to the floor and the papers after it. He reached out and drew her into his arms, kissing her firmly on the mouth. ‘Hello Naomi and how are you this morning?’

  She smiled and lay her cheek against his chest. ‘That’s better. Now, what’s going on?’

  ‘Alec’s in the papers,’ Patrick announced. ‘Wow.’

  ‘What?’ Naomi lifted her head and looked in the boy’s direction. ‘What do you mean, Patrick?’

  ‘Gary Williams sold his story,’ Alec told her. ‘He’s made claims of police harassment and yours truly has been named as chief persecutor. Phillips gave me a call about an hour ago. I threw a few things into a bag and came over here.’

  ‘What if the reporters know about Naomi being your girlfriend?’ Patrick asked. It seemed like a fair question.

  ‘We just hope they don’t,’ Alec told him. ‘If we find an outside broadcast unit camped on the doorstep later on, well, I’m afraid she’ll just have to marry me.’

  ‘You sound very cheerful about it?’

  ‘No point not being, really.’ She felt him shrug. ‘No, I’m completely pissed off, I’m also hungry, ’cause I missed breakfast and I’m sorry to land this on you.’

  ‘Don’t be. Patrick, read them out for me while Alec earns his keep.’

  ‘OK.’ She heard him flop down in the kitchen doorway and spread the newspapers on the floor. ‘I’m here, is that all right?’

  ‘For now, yes.’ He’d got used to giving her updates on where he was standing, what he was doing and if he’d left anything on the floor. She found it both amusing and rather touching.

  ‘“—I’ve been hounded out of my home, my job, my life, claimed Gary Williams, thirty-six, yesterday, in an exclusive interview with the Sunday Star”.’

  ‘Oh, brother,’ Alec moaned. ‘I suppose he claims I did the hounding?’

  ‘Sort of. I’m getting to that bit. “Gary Williams, whose life has already been touched by more tragedy than...”’

  ‘Spare us,’ Alec said. ‘Just give us a resumé, Patrick. I don’t think I can cope with the journalese.’

  Williams had really gone to town. His life story seemed to have been one of unmitigated woe—broken home, absent father, mother who was a binge drinker—culminating in the loss of his wife and children two years before.

  ‘It is sad though, isn’t it?’ Patrick interrupted himself.

  ‘It’s bloody awful,’ Alec agreed. ‘I pity the man, but that doesn’t stop him being a scrote and a toe rag.’

  ‘What’s a scrote?’ Patrick wanted to know. ‘Anyway, he says that you’ve victimized him, spread rumours about him all over the Radleigh Estate.’

  ‘That I’ve spread rumours? Nice one, Gary.’

  ‘He says that because you’ve spread all these rumours and dragged him away from his job and made all these unfounded accusations that his flat was wrecked and he was forced to flee the Radleigh in fear of his life.’

  ‘I take it that last bit’s a direct quote? Naomi, I’m going off the idea of bacon.’

  ‘Tough, it’s half cooked now. Since when did you let the media put you off your breakfast?’

  ‘Since now. I’m not usually the star attraction.’

  ‘There’s a good picture of you,’ Patrick told him. ‘Look.’

  Alec looked and groaned. ‘Me and the venerable Viccy Elliot,’ he told Naomi, ‘looking far too friendly.’

  ‘Really? I wonder when that was taken.’

  ‘Oh, I can work out when it was taken,’ Alec told her. ‘The question is, who took it?’ He sighed impatiently. ‘OK, go on.’

  ‘He calls the residents of the Radleigh Estate a load of inbred animals,’ Patrick continued. ‘He said they haven’t got a brain cell between them and all they’re good for is wrecking other people’s lives and living on a place like the Radleigh.’

  ‘That’s good, coming from someone who lost everything pissing it against the wall,
’ Alec observed. ‘And it’s going to go down really well when Viccy and her mob hear about it.’

  ‘That’s about it,’ Patrick told him. ‘Pictures of Gary Williams.’ He held them up for Alec’s inspection. ‘And a woman called Cathy.’

  ‘The neighbour.’

  ‘Right, she says they’re animals, too.’

  ‘Subtle, but it lacks variety. She should think up her own insults. She won’t get very far recycling Gary Williams’.’ He groaned and flopped back against the kitchen counter. ‘Great way to start a Sunday morning.’

  ‘Can you move the stuff and lay the table for me?’ Naomi asked Patrick.

  ‘Sure.’

  Alec handed him the cutlery and then went back to the stove to fry eggs. ‘Make the most of it,’ he said, his irritation really showing through and his attempts to laugh the whole thing off rapidly turning sour.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The peace and quiet.’

  ‘You reckon there’ll be more trouble on the Radleigh?’ Naomi commented.

  ‘You can bet your life,’ Alec said.

  The rest of the morning was, however, surprisingly quiet. Over breakfast they told Alec about their walk the evening before and how they had stopped at the arcade on the way back.

  ‘Lord, it’s months since we went in there,’ Alec laughed.

  ‘Months? No, it’s a couple of years. The last time was before...’ She didn’t need to finish.

  ‘She nearly thrashed me though,’ Patrick was clearly impressed.

  ‘You know, it was funny,’ Naomi said. ‘I remembered what sounds the game made when I did different things. I mean if you’d asked me before, I’d have looked at you stupid, but it was weird. I knew it made a kind of buzzing noise when I got close to the enemy and if I’d scored a near miss it kind of whined. It was fun,’ she finished.

  Alec reached across the table and squeezed her hand. He swallowed down the emotions suddenly blocking off his throat and found himself at a loss for words.

  The afternoon was punctuated by a phone call from Harry and then a brief visit when he brought round Patrick’s PlayStation and drawing stuff.

  Mari was unwell, he said, when Naomi asked him how his mother was feeling. He had persuaded her to go to bed.

  Harry was clearly worried about his mother. He stayed for long enough to assure himself that his son was happy and Naomi not tired of having him around, and then he left.

  After Harry had gone, the boy disappeared into the spare bedroom and hooked up to the portable TV Naomi had in there. It was the last they heard of him for a while, just the faint sounds of the game filtering out through the bedroom door.

  ‘He’s a nice kid,’ Naomi said. ‘I’m glad he was here last night. We went walking on the beach. You know, he told me he wants to design computer games when he grows up. He’s designing this...world...heroes and monsters and maps. Even a language. He’s not the kind of kid I’d expect Harry to have.’

  ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I was up to my ears in paperwork till after eleven. Unpaid overtime.’

  They were just relaxing into the idea that Alec’s assessment of further trouble had been wrong when his mobile phone rang, the sound painfully intrusive in the quiet room.

  Alec listened and Naomi leaned closer to him so that she could catch the controller’s voice on the other end. The expected trouble on the Radleigh Estate had at last begun.

  *

  By the time Alec and Superintendent Phillips reached the Radleigh Estate things were getting nasty. The evening light had been thickened by black smoke from a pile of burning tyres set light on the end of Needham Road, the main drag through the estate and the road that crossed between Viccy Elliot’s house and the flats.

  The other end of the road had a living barricade. People were crowded there to a depth of four or five and their mood was angry. Defiantly so.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Phillips demanded.

  ‘Stalemate at the moment, sir. The two officers we had on obs in the second block are still holed up on the top floor. The crowd’s gathered around the ground floor entrance. We can’t reach them and they can’t get down.’

  ‘You’ve maintained radio contact? What’s their condition?’

  ‘They’ve barricaded the door. They’re not happy, sir.’ Phillips pursed his lips and frowned.

  ‘When did this flare up?’ Alec asked.

  ‘It’s been like this for about an hour,’ the officer told him. ‘Been building all day, though, from when the news broke this morning. Seems the residents object to being called animals.’ He sounded as though he agreed with Williams’ assessment.

  Alec ignored him. Not the most helpful of attitudes, he thought. He began to make his way towards the human barricade. A low wall surrounded the front garden of the house at the end of the road and Alec clambered up on to this, looking over the heads of the crowd and down towards the flats. She was there, in the thick of it, as he knew she would be.

  Glancing back, he saw the first of the outside broadcast crews arrive, pulling up to join the little knot of newspaper journalists already gathered.

  ‘Viccy!’ Alec shouted. ‘Viccy Elliot! I want a word.’

  The crowd, almost beneath his feet, surged and rumbled. ‘Say please, copper.’

  ‘What d’you want our Viccy for? She ain’t done owt.’

  Viccy Elliot turned and looked his way. For a moment, Alec thought that she would not respond and then she spoke to someone close beside her who ran toward the crowd.

  ‘Alec! What the hell are you doing?’ Phillips shouted at him.

  Alec jumped down from his place on the wall and as if by magic the human barricade parted before him and closed up in a solid wall behind as he passed through.

  Viccy Elliot was waiting for him on the other side, arms folded over her considerable chest. Black smoke hung in a solid wall behind her at the other end of Rathbone Street and even here the air was chokingly full of it. Alec coughed and groped in his pocket for a handkerchief. Viccy Elliot seemed unmoved. A forty-a-day smoker, Alec reckoned. Maybe she was used to smoke.

  ‘Bit thick for you?’ she asked him.

  ‘Just a bit. God. Viccy. Whose fool idea was all this?’

  ‘Kids lit the tyres,’ she said. ‘We told ’em it was a stupid move, but kids will be kids.’ She shrugged, looked critically at Alec’s watering eyes. He was aware that the crowd behind him had shifted focus. He was now it.

  ‘Can we go inside?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she told him. ‘Owt that has to be said can be said out here, in plain sight.’

  Plain sight, he thought. The smoke was filling the street now. ‘What started this?’ he repeated.

  She huffed at him in a way that momentarily reminded him of Harry. ‘Them up in the flats not tell you?’ she demanded. ‘Too busy with their binoculars watching Emma Sanders get undressed with her curtains open, most like. Or her mam turning tricks.’

  ‘We know he left,’ Alec returned evenly. ‘Left in a car with his neighbour and two men. And I read the papers. I know what he said, but Viccy, is that worth all this? You’ll be proving his point, nothing more.’

  ‘Bloody journalists,’ Viccy Elliot snapped back. ‘Bloody perverts.’

  ‘Aw come on. The man was questioned and released. There were no charges brought and no evidence of him doing anything beyond having a mouth on him and if that was a crime, Viccy, I’d be pulling in half the kids on this estate on a daily basis. Viccy, I may be being thick here,but Gary Williams is gone and you lot did smash his place up. I did arrest him. The man thinks he has a grievance, he has the right to say so.’

  The look she gave him told him that Viccy Elliot thought he was more than thick. ‘Liar,’ she said.

  ‘Liar? What am I meant to be lying about?’

  Viccy Elliot snorted at him. ‘Coming on all Mr Reasonable,’ she said. ‘Williams was here now, you’d want to wring the bugger’s neck same as the rest of us.’

 
Alec shook his head. ‘Too many witnesses, Viccy.’

  That earned him a grudging half-smile. ‘We ain’t animals,’ Viccy told him.

  ‘No, Viccy, no you’re not,’ Alec agreed. And certainly not inbred, he added to himself. Viccy’s brood had four different fathers to Alec’s count.

  ‘You can bet she put ’im up to it,’ Viccy Elliot continued. ‘That woman what lives next door. Not the sense for something like that, Williams hadn’t.’ She wriggled her shoulders and re-crossed her arms. Emphatic body language in the Viccy Elliot vocabulary, Alec figured.

  A shout from the walkway outside Williams’ flat attracted Viccy Elliot. She looked up and then gestured towards Alec. ‘You’d best be out now,’ she said. ‘I can’t promise to look after you no more once things really get going.’

  ‘Get going? Viccy...’

  ‘Shift yourself,’ she said. ‘Like now, copper.’

  ‘Viccy, what about our men in the other block?’

  Viccy had already turned away. She turned back now and gave him a none too gentle shove back towards the battle lines.

  ‘They’d best have the sense their mothers gave them and just stay put,’ Viccy Elliot said.

  Alec was never certain how he made it back through the human barricade. Things happened very rapidly after that. He realized with a pang of gratitude that Viccy had somehow ensured him safe passage back to the police lines and he was thrust unceremoniously through a rippling, surging crowd and spat out the other side. He fell, stumbling at someone’s feet and felt himself lifted and shoved on again, fetching up this time on the other side of a line of officers dressed in full riot gear, standing behind a wall of shields.

  So that, Alec figured, was what Viccy meant when she talked about people really kicking off. They’d been waiting for the tough guys to arrive and now they were here, the Radleigh would see it as a declaration of war.

  ‘Alec, what the fricking hell you think you were doing?’

  ‘Talking to Viccy Elliot.’