Amphetamines and Pearls

by John Harvey

  ‘Mitchell, that’s a cheap remark!’

  ‘I’m a cheap detective.’

  ‘At your rates?’

  ‘Remember my rates for this job are special.’

  ‘Then could you arrange a little high-class chat to go with it?’

  I paused for breath. This sort of thing was more wearing than being knocked around by some big guy in an even bigger overcoat.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘can we call a truce?’

  ‘Call anything you like,’ she said, ‘only look after yourself, will you? And think about what I said—Crosby didn’t mean to behave like he did.’

  ‘Did he tell you to phone and apologise for him?’ I asked. ‘Or are you using your secretarial initiative again.’

  ‘You don’t make things easy, do you?’

  ‘No-one makes things easy, sweetheart. Not any more. Not even for folks with lots of money in the bank and houses on Millionaires’ Row.’

  ‘Now you sound bitter and jealous,’ she retorted, anger rising in her voice.

  ‘Bitter, yes, but jealous, never. Not any longer. I’m not a kid any more.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Skip it. It’s too long a story to tell over the phone … and too boring.’

  She mellowed her tone. ‘You should have stayed the night. Then you could have taken your time and told me. That and all sorts of things.’

  A pause, then she said, ‘Why didn’t you stay?’

  ‘I was afraid of sleepwalking … all the way to your room.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ she asked, and the voice was really low and soft now.

  ‘I was afraid of who else I’d find there apart from you.’

  She called me a very rude name and slammed down her phone so hard that the sound echoed in my ears for several minutes afterwards.

  I shook my head all the way to the kitchen and carried on shaking it while I made coffee.

  The album Blake had given me was full of the usual kind of stuff. Cathy as a baby dressed in white and either sitting up in her pram or being held by various adults—all, I noticed, female.

  Which was odd. If her father had been killed when she was one year old then there could have been a picture of him with her, holding her. Maybe he just didn’t like holding babies; maybe he was always behind the camera; maybe …

  There was Cathy with her first skipping rope, Cathy with her dolls, Cathy with her kitten, Cathy in her school uniform, blonde hair, brown satchel, a brace across her teeth. Underneath that picture it said her age: ten years.

  Then she got older. Uncle Crosby began to appear more and more frequently. At the seaside, building her a sand castle. In the country, holding the reins of her pony. In the garden, splashing her with water from a hose pipe while she held her hands to her face, her bikini patterned over her growing body.

  The next page was empty. There had been a photograph there, you could tell from the shading on the paper and the slight tears where the mounts had been removed.

  I stared down at the blank page for a long time, trying to imagine the photograph that had been stuck there, then removed. Removed or fallen loose?

  It had to be the former. Then the next question was, by whom? And what had been in it?

  My mind shot up lots of partial answers but none of them seemed right, none fitted. I wondered who had that photograph now. Supposing it still existed.

  I turned over another page, and another. Shots of Cathy as a teenager, wearing long dresses with her hair pinned up; wearing tee shirts and jeans. Cathy at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. All the while growing more attractive, except …

  There was something in her eyes that wasn’t right. With Crosby Blake it had been the mouth, with his niece it was the eyes. They were dark and something more; they looked at the camera yet somehow failed to focus on it. Almost as though they were staring back inside Cathy herself, looking at something there which she could never leave alone, never forget.

  I wondered what it could be. When it had happened. What had happened.

  Carefully, I thumbed backwards through the album, then forwards again.

  The eyes in the early photos were all right, quite normal, alive and girlish. Then suddenly, they were the eyes of a young girl no longer. They knew, they had seen and what they saw was driven down deep within her. Yet still she could see it although no-one else could. Still she looked at it, not wanting to, yet unable to prevent herself.

  The change came after the empty page, after the missing photograph.

  I put down the album and looked at my watch. It was well past one o’clock. The coffee pot was empty again. I walked slowly upstairs to bed.

  Something woke me up around four. Something that screamed at me inside my head, but screamed without a sound. It had woken me up before, that same scream. I’d never heard it yet, only sensed it, the terror of it. The mouth wide open, the lungs bursting: silent horror like a drowning man seen through the glass sides of an aquarium.

  I sat up in bed and knew that my body was covered in sweat. Whatever my dream had been it hadn’t been pleasant. But it had told me something; all I had to do now was understand it.

  I closed my eyes and tried to bring it back. The projector clicked into action. I was back in an old house. There were a governess and two young children, a boy and a girl. Fear filled each room. The woman’s fear. Fear of the two children. Fear that showed in her face when she looked into their eyes.

  Eyes that stared at her, through her, as though seeing something, someone that she could not. Knowing things that she did not know; things that they should not have known.

  My legs were suddenly cold, cold as ice. My skin felt oddly sensitive. The hair at the back of my neck tightened; my scalp began to itch with a prickly feeling.

  The children were staring past the governess, staring straight at me. I blinked and rubbed my eyes: they were still there. Staring still.

  The governess lifted the boy up from the floor.

  ‘Time for bed,’ she said, as though afraid no longer. She carried him out of the room.

  The little girl remained. She was wearing a long garment, white. A nightdress. She walked slowly towards me.

  ‘Aren’t you going to take me to bed?’ she asked and all the while she looked deep inside me.

  She put up her arms to be lifted and I bent down. The little arms flung themselves around my neck and clung on tight, almost choking me. When I loosened them, the face was almost touching mine; the eyes, dark and large, were burning into my face. She smiled a strange smile.

  ‘A good night kiss?’ she asked.

  I lowered my head over hers and felt her breath on mine. It should have been warm, but it was cold, cold and musty like the damp air at the centre of an old wood.

  I put my lips to hers gently, but immediately her mouth opened wide and she drew me inside. I felt her small pointed tongue pushing itself between my lips …

  That was when I had heard the scream. That was when I had woken up.

  I thought about trying to get off to sleep again, but decided against it. I was going to have to leave for Blake’s place early as it was.

  My legs pushed out over the edge of the bed and my feet found the floor there beneath them as usual. This morning, at this time, nothing would have surprised me. Even a bottomless pit.

  Don’t tempt providence, Mitchell. They’re probably saving that for later. They. He. Whoever runs this thing. I mean someone must. Nothing could get as fucked up as life just by accident.

  I thought I could try standing up. That’s better! Easy does it now! Take the stairs one at a time. Good. Now don’t splash the water into that kettle too loudly.

  I took my coffee into the living room and pulled the photo album over from the table. Turned to the blank page. I looked at it for a long time and waited until things settled down in f
ront of my eyes, until they stopped revolving round in my head like a roundabout that was chasing itself hard into oblivion.

  Finally it slowed down enough for the people to get off. There were only two passengers. One was Cathy Skelton, the other was her uncle. I turned through the pages until I came to the most recent picture and slipped it from its mounts. I’d stand a better chance of finding out where the missing lady was if I knew what she looked like.

  Perhaps.

  An hour or so later I dialled Tom Gilmour’s home number. It rang ten times with no answer so I put the receiver down and waited half a minute then tried again. The third ring did the trick.

  The voice at the other end sounded as though it was owned by a grizzly bear that had got its head caught tight in a noose. I was glad to be out of reach of its claws.

  ‘What stupid mother is calling me at this godforsaken hour?’

  ‘Steady, Tom,’ I said, ‘I could be the Commissioner.’

  ‘Like a monkey’s tit, you could!’

  ‘Take it easy, Tom. You’ll never make your pension at this rate.’

  He told me a few things I could do with his pension, which seemed unusually charitable for a man who had only just been rudely awoken from hard-earned sleep.

  ‘Anyway,’ he finally growled, ‘why aren’t you over at the Blake place?’

  ‘I’m on my way,’ I said. ‘There were a couple more things I wanted to ask before I went.’

  ‘Get on with it then.’

  ‘When this thing broke the other day, did you check Blake out?’

  There was a short silence at the other end and I tried to work out what the expression on Gilmour’s face might be.

  Then he said, ‘We asked a few questions. At the time there didn’t seem to be any point in going further. Are you suggesting there is?’

  ‘No. I’m not suggesting anything. I only wondered if there was something you knew about him which might help.’ I let out my breath, then added, ‘It might be interesting to know how he made all his money in the first place, though.’

  Gilmour didn’t say a thing for a while. Perhaps he was one of those people who don’t like to talk early in the morning.

  ‘One other point,’ I added after a while, ‘do you have somebody watching the house?’

  ‘Shit! Of course we have someone watching the house. What the mothering hell do you think we’re playing at?’

  I didn’t tell him. I said, ‘But not from the house directly opposite?’

  ‘No, smart guy, not from the house directly opposite.’

  ‘And you’re not using two heavy looking musclemen, one of whom could be deaf and dumb and the other wearing a few dozen yards of blue overcoat?’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Okay, okay, forget it. But, Tom, if your man there doesn’t log the fact that those two characters were sitting in the street in a green Zodiac last night and that they followed me away, then you’d better find out if he’s asleep on the job or just on the take like nearly everybody else.’

  People were always hanging up on me in the noisiest possible ways. I’d have to take a Dale Carnegie course in telephone tactics if my ear drums were going to survive.

  I went out and started scraping the frost from the windscreen. Maybe I should use the garage more often. I’d probably wait until the weather changed.

  It was still dark and the street light shone brightly above my head. I was beginning to feel hungry. I wondered if she was a good cook, too.

  Buy The Geranium Kiss now!

  About the Author

  John Harvey (b. 1938) is an incredibly prolific British mystery writer. The author of more than one hundred books, as well as poetry and scripts for television and radio, Harvey did not begin writing professionally until 1975. Until then, he was a teacher, educated at Goldsmiths College, London, who taught literature, drama, and film at colleges across England. After cutting his teeth on paperback fiction, Harvey debuted his most famous character, Charlie Resnick, in 1989’s Lonely Hearts, which the English Times called one of the finest crime novels of the century.

  A police inspector noted for his love of both sandwiches and jazz, Resnick has starred in eleven novels and one volume of short stories. The BBC has adapted two of the Resnick novels, Lonely Hearts and Rough Treatment (1990), for television movies. Both starred Academy Award–nominated actor Tom Wilkinson and had screenplays written by Harvey. Besides writing fiction, Harvey spent over twenty years as the head of Slow Dancer Press. He continues to live and write in London.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1976 by John Harvey

  Cover design by Julianna Lee

  978-1-5040-3883-6

  This edition published in 2016 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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