by David Mark
‘I’m sorry,’ interrupts Grace, her head spinning. ‘If I could just steer us back on track – exactly how did Larry contact you? And why?’
‘Oh, did I not say? Bloody hell I’m getting old. Same as you, love. Google search led him to a Wikipedia page and that led him to my homepage. He got himself on the forums, I checked him out, called him back – put the wind up him a bit when I said I knew all about him. That’s me, love. Knowledge is power, and all that. Anyways, we got talking, he said he was looking for information on Pamela Garner, same as you. I made a couple of calls on his behalf.’
‘For a fee?’
‘There would have been, though I doubt it’ll be paid now. It wasn’t a hardship. I’ve got old pals in every borough in the East End so it’s never a big job finding stuff out.’
Alison suddenly realizes there’s a gap in the conversation. King Rat seems momentarily unsure whether to press on with his story.
‘Pamela Garner,’ she says, quietly, trying to make it sound like they both know a secret that the world does not. ‘I think we’re on the same page.’
Something like a sigh of relief crackles out of the receiver. King Rat seems far happier with noise than silence and Alison hasn’t had to push very hard to get him to continue talking.
‘Tragic case was Pamela,’ says King Rat, and his sadness sounds genuine, even through the cigarette smoke. ‘Big pals with Alison when she was a nipper. Went to the same posh school as she did, even lived in their big house out Dunmow Way. Close as sisters, the way I heard it. Bloody horrible what happened to the lass.’
‘Well, of course …’
‘Like I told Larry, he might be as well to leave that one alone. Whoever did for Pamela will have already had their punishment, mark my words. To do that to a girl of that age? They won’t have stopped killing him for months. Jardine’s a ruthless cunt, and I mean that with all due respect. And Effie – well, he’s a fucking monster.’
Grace frowns, trying to disentangle it all. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbles. ‘For clarity, you’re saying you think Larry upset the wrong person?’
A laugh snuffles down the receiver, as if somebody is tickling a pig. ‘Hell love, I just throw the theories in the air and see who shoots them. But if Larry went wading in, knocking on doors, trying to stir up memories, well it’s no surprise it cost him, though I’d have given one whole bollock and half an arm to know what he found out before it all went tits up. Will you want me to say all this again on camera, by the way? Telly, was it? Which channel?’
Grace realizes her leg is jiggling up and down. She’s sweating across her shoulders and back.
‘Have you spoken to a DCI Bosworth about this?’ she asks, surprised at herself for remembering the name.
‘The shooting star? No, I don’t go out of my way to help the coppers – my reputation depends on it. I’m not a grass. I know a lot and I’m not frightened to tell the truth but I don’t go out of my way to make new enemies – least of all when there’s this new breed coming in who don’t seem to respect the rules. You’ll have heard Nick Kukuc has done a bunk, have you? Greasy little weasel. He won’t be missed. Wouldn’t surprise me if he’s in the ground somewhere, though plenty say he’s in Witness Protection or sunning himself somewhere pretty. Alison’s her old man’s daughter. She won’t have thanked him for making waves, though I doubt he had the brains to do Larry in and make it look like Effie did it. Besides, he’ll be too old for that caper now anyway. Must be seventy-five if he’s a day.’
Grace takes a moment to pretend to glance at her notes. ‘Larry visited various properties owned by a firm with links to Alison Jardine …’
‘Silly bastard. Well, that’s that, then. Probably saw a chance at an easy payday. Did he have a wife? Kids? Not that it makes it any worse, mind – everybody who dies is mourned by somebody. Maybe not Effie. Respected, yes. I doubt he was ever loved.’
‘I presume you wouldn’t recommend me trying to speak to Alison Jardine about her old friend, would you?’ asks Grace, and there is a catch in her voice.
‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ asks King Rat, laughing. ‘Of course, I said the same to Larry, and now he’s on a slab, but he was a private investigator with a habit of lining his pocket. You might get further. Tell me again, was it ITV? It’s just I’ve a book coming out in the New Year and if you use me as a talking head I’m going to want the title in the caption, yeah? If you hang about I’ll find you a number for the snooker club.’
‘Snooker club?’
‘If you’re wanting her that’s where she is – unless she’s down Bayswater having her nails done or her fanny waxed or whatever it is she does when she’s not buying up great bloody chunks of Canning Town. I swear, she’s going to be richer than her old fella. Would make him proud, if he were still well enough to know about any of it.’
Grace writes the number down. Bluffs her way through a thank you and a promise to call him back. Then she hangs up.
Only then does she let out the breath she has been holding.
Adam, she thinks, and the thought is full of tears.
ELEVEN
Dysart Avenue, Drayton, Portsmouth
7.36 p.m.
‘Coming into money,’ says Pat, counting the bubbles in the top of Adam’s mug. ‘That’s a fortune I’ve poured you.’
‘Thanks,’ he says, from behind his hand.
‘You can stop covering up,’ she says, over her shoulder. ‘I spotted the split lip. Fingers too. I’m sure you had your reasons. Least said, soonest mended, eh?’
‘Thanks, Mum.’
Pat puts the teapot back on the work surface and begins putting biscuits on a patterned plate. She hums to herself, nervous, fingers nimble despite the arthritis; fussing and fidgeting and smoothing down her apron every time she bends down or stands back up.
Adam takes the opportunity to look at her properly. Stares at her looking for something familiar – some curve of jaw or hereditary protuberance that might suggest they share the same blood. Sees nothing. Doesn’t know whether to feel depressed or relieved. She has aged a lot recently, looking after Billy. The skin beneath her neck and arms looks loose and dangly, and her back, which has begun to curve in recent years, is now positively humped. She’s dressed today in a pleated beige skirt, blue jumper and cardigan, and has recently decided to stop dyeing her hair. The last of the bottle brown she has branded herself with for the last four decades now flecks the tips of her curly grey perm.
‘What about the little one?’ she asks. ‘I got some of those Froosh Toots when I was at Morrisons. Does she still like them?’
‘Fruit Shoots, you mean? Yeah, she loves them.’
Pat makes a low grunt of exertion as she bends down to the cupboard by her knees and pulls out a bottle of flavoured water, which she hands to Adam. He takes the top off and calls Tilly through from the front room, where she is playing with building blocks in front of the TV. She takes the bottle with a smile and a ‘’nk you’ then toddles off back to her game.
‘She’s got lovely manners,’ says Pat.
‘We try.’
They stand in silence for a moment in the kitchen of the tiny bungalow, with its neat gardens and double glazing and its wall insulation and its four-bar electric fire and its geriatric neighbours. Knackers Yard, Pat called it, before she began to sense that such things upset her son. God’s Waiting Room.
Adam feels his spirits settle, like lime juice sinking to the bottom of a glass of soda water. He nods at the wall which divides the kitchen from the guest bedroom. ‘Any improvement?’
They consider the invalid in the next room. Billy Nunn is dying, they both know that. The asbestosis in his lungs is turning him the colour of a garden statue: all cracked greys and streaky, rain-lashed greens. His dry smoker’s cough, so familiar to Adam in his youth, is now a wet, nauseating thing filled with lumps of phlegm and cherries of blood. He’s shrunk, too. His big, imposing frame is slowly deflating, and he lays beneath the clean sheets of the guest
bed like a cold sausage between slices of white bread. It’ll get him soon, the doctors say. He won’t be here much longer.
‘They were talking about the hospice again,’ says Pat, shaking her head. ‘Cheek of it.’
‘Do you really feel up to this, though, Mum? You look exhausted. And he’s only going to get worse.’
‘I’ve looked after him these past months, haven’t I? And besides, he’s on the mend.’
Adam, looking up at the clock on the wall-mounted microwave, allows his mother the lie. They both know that Billy’s mind is unravelling. It began years ago, when he became convinced he had a hair on the end of his tongue. He would sit for hours, worrying at his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, trying to catch the end of the non-existent irritation. Then the library in his mind started misfiling people. Family members suddenly exchanged names. Children were suddenly old friends. He would ask after work colleagues who had been dead thirty years. Then last year he got up at six thirty and started making his bait for work. Pat had found him in the kitchen, grumbling that there was no luncheon meat for his butties and telling her he had planned to be on the road for seven. Pat, frightened and confused, had to tell him he had been retired more than ten years. He’d got cross with her, then. Told her he wasn’t in the mood for wind-ups. Told her to give Adam a kiss for him and then he’d gone outside. He’d been back in, moments later, furious, flustered, telling her the car had been stolen and to phone the police. Saying that he couldn’t ask Mally Santinello to cut him any more slack on his time-keeping.
That was the start of the ugly, slithering descent that had grabbed Pat by the ankle and threatened to pull her down too.
‘Are you going on through, then?’ she asks, pointedly. ‘He might be waking up right about now and he’s better about this time.’
Adam knows he can’t put it off any longer. Knows he has to face him, even as the name ‘Francis Jardine’ kicks away at his insides. He wishes that Billy Nunn would get better just for long enough to give him some advice on what the hell to do next. Billy’s always been a capable man. Does what has to be done. Decent, hard-working, easy to chat to. Adam’s always been proud to call him ‘Dad’ and seeing him so reduced only makes it harder not to be grateful that his own blood may have sprung from another source. God, how he wants to ask him.
He changes so much every week, he tells Grace. It’s like seeing photographs of the stages of deterioration. Every time I open that door, he’s shrunk a little and his face has sagged a little more and his colours gone a shade more sickly.
Adam takes a breath, like a nervous smoker sucking on a filter tip. Pushes the door. Into half-light and a fog of hospital smells …
Against the white of the pillow, Billy’s face is the colour of butter that has melted and reformed. His eyes are closed, but his expression changes in accordance with the different sensations that stab at his guts and grate at his lungs. To Adam, he seems like a newborn baby; his world turned inwards, his countenance a mirror of his hunger and thirst, his pain and irritation.
‘Dad?’
‘I can hear every bloody word, y’know,’ rasps Billy, not opening his eyes. ‘These walls are made of spit and paper.’
Adam closes the door behind himself and leans against it. He’s smiling, because his dad is behaving like his dad, and not the crazy man who has been wearing his ever more ragged skin these past months.
The room is half-dark, the way Billy likes it. A lamp sits on a chest of drawers, a handkerchief over the shade to drown the glare of the bulb. The curtains are open no more than a crack. A bedside cabinet serves as a plinth for Billy’s necessities. There’s a sewing kit, emptied of needles and thread, and filled with his daily doses of pills, divided into compartments, and neatly labelled with times and doses. His ‘sweeties’, Pat calls them. They sit beside an untouched cup of tea. A jug of water and a half-empty glass. The grey mask that the doctor will plug into the oxygen cylinder when he calls this afternoon. Billy’s cream, rubbed into his skin each day for more than thirty years, cooling the burn and salving the broad pink fossil on his chest and shoulder. A picture of Billy and Pat, trouser legs rolled up, jumping waves on the beach at Lytham; each holding one of Adam’s plump, toddler hands.
‘You feeling well enough to grouse then, are you, Dad?’ Adam finds himself stumbling over this word, now an impostor on his tongue.
‘Feeling well enough to give you a bloody good hiding,’ says Billy. His voice is like parchment rustling.
Adam sits on the foot of the bed. The old man’s hands lay on top of the blankets, and he wonders if today he will reach out and take one of them in his own. He knows he will not.
‘Where’s the pain?’
‘Every-bloody-where. I feel like I’ve been wanting a shit since May.’
‘Maybe you have.’
‘You seen the size of me? I let this one go I’ll drop to under a stone.’
They sit in silence, until eventually, Billy turns his head and opens his eyes. They’re wet and rheumy. Grey-green.
‘Do I hear the little one? Young whatshername?’
‘You know her name.’
‘Aye, but I’d rather not use it. Who would give a little one that cross to bear?’
‘It’s a lovely name. It rhymes with Billy, for God’s sake.’
‘So does Willy and Silly and both of them go better with Nunn.’
‘Dad …’
‘It’s a bloody good name, Nunn. Goes back generations. Why can’t you just marry that darky and then you can call her what you want?’
Adam sighs and lowers his head. He half hopes that Billy will slip into his usual confusion so they can drop this. So he can go. Leave. Continue his betrayal. Find himself a father to replace the crinkled lump in the bed.
Billy will never understand why Tilly has got Grace’s surname. Nor can he fathom why Adam lives with somebody else, with kids that aren’t his. ‘You’re in a pickle, son,’ he says. ‘One grandchild you give me, and she’s got somebody else’s name. Then you shack up with another one and they aren’t Nunns either …’
A cloud drifts across his face, blocking the sun. He’s gone again.
‘They like the scar,’ says Billy, suddenly. ‘All the women like the scar.’ Billy’s eyes snap open and he begins to pull down the bedcovers. ‘You seen it?’ he asks.
‘Only every day for my whole life, Dad,’ says Adam, standing, trying to stop his father; wondering why, suddenly, he seems to want to show everybody a wound he spent so much of his life covering, greasing, soothing, hiding.
‘Saw my own skin peel off,’ he says, proudly. ‘Still had hairs on it as it unrolled and lifted off, like a sheet of asbestos. Could smell my own flesh burning. That’s what I think Hell smells like, don’t you …’
Billy is unbuttoning his pyjama top, now, eyes still closed. Adam is standing up, leaning over him, trying to pin down hands that feel and look like dry twigs stripped of bark. Billy tears the top button off his striped top and Adam glimpses the top of the wound that has branded his father for half of his lifetime.
‘Was lighting a cigarette in the wind,’ he’s saying, wheezing, his words almost a cough. ‘Forgot I’d been using turps. I was covered in white spirits, I was. Ducked out for a fag, couldn’t get it lit. Lifted my coat over my head, struck a match. Went up like a bloody volcano, I did. Put myself out. Didn’t find me for hours. I was in a hospital bed, wrapped up like a mummy, stinking like a bacon sandwich, and Mally walks in and says, “Billy, that Nunn of yours must have been looking down on you …”’
Billy’s hands suddenly contort as a cough kicks him in the chest and he starts hacking and bringing up great handfuls of phlegm. It runs down his chin and neck like slime.
Adam stands, repulsed, confused, feeling hopeless and guilty and useless, until the door opens and Pat comes in, matronly, a box of tissues in her hand, and she takes Billy’s hands, and wipes them, and then his face, and she strokes his lank, white hair back from his face, and whispers to
him, and holds him until he gives a shudder, like a dying animal, then gives in to unconsciousness.
Pat turns, smiles weakly at her son. ‘He’ll be out for a while, I’d say,’ she whispers, motioning for him to follow her outside. ‘Maybe try another time with the little one.’
In a voice of shattered glass, Adam calls for Tilly, and she bumbles through from the living room all excited and eager. He crouches down to her, needing a kiss, something pure and soothing. His daughter stops, holds up a tiny pink finger for inspection, and says, ‘Sore.’
Adam smiles, leans down. ‘Magic kiss,’ he says, and plants his lips on the wounded digit. Tilly smiles, and throws her arms around her father. She kisses his cheek, unbidden, and Adam’s heart begins to slow.
Pat is fetching Tilly’s hat and coat from the cupboard, and fussing over them both. She wants them to go, so she can start looking forward to the next time they visit. Everything is an intrusion, now. Her life is taking care of Billy.
Adam kisses his mum on her warm, comfortable cheek. He wants to tell her. Wants to ask if she knows Francis Jardine. Wants to apologize for what he will make her endure these coming months, heaping more miseries on a back that is already buckling. He wants to tell her that this morning he was arrested in connection with a murder. Instead he says, ‘Let me know if you need anything.’
‘Of course, of course,’ says Pat, manoeuvring them to the door with her clucking and fussing.
‘Bye,’ says Tilly, as instructed. ‘Ee oo ’oon.’
Pat smiles at her granddaughter, the way an old woman should, and watches them safely into the car. She waves as they pull away, and catches the heavy, double-glazed door on her slippered bunion as she closes it. The dam breaks, and her tears fall.