by Penny Grubb
Annie handed across a disposable lighter and threw a glance towards the door. Smoking couldn’t possibly be allowed in here. Presumably that explained the coat. She wondered where Eliza wanted to go.
‘What’s wrong with matches? I don’t know what it is with youngsters today. Everything throwaway and poor quality. Does it work?’
Annie took the lighter from her and flicked it to a tongue of blue flame. ‘It’s fine. I’ve matches in the boot of the car if need be.’
‘I’m not ready to go anywhere yet,’ Eliza said. ‘We need to talk first.’
Annie felt a ripple of apprehension that took her right back to school days and smuggling forbidden substances on to the premises. ‘We’ll have to go out if you want to smoke.’
Eliza sniffed. ‘We can go in the garden for that. They’re stuffy in here. It’s the law, apparently. You can’t do as you please in your own home these days. I don’t suppose you bothered with the ice.’
‘Yes, it’s here.’ Annie patted the bag. The thermos flask she’d borrowed from her upstairs neighbour and filled with ice cubes from his freezer stood upright next to the brandy bottle.
Eliza seemed surprised. ‘I expected you to forget that. Then we can have a drink later if we want to. There’s no law says we can’t do that. And a lemon too. Now did you bring a knife to slice it? No? I thought you’d forget something. You couldn’t cut butter with the knives they give you in here.’
‘I’ve a sharp penknife in the car.’
‘You keep quite a kit in that car of yours.’
Annie wondered what Eliza would say if she were to show her the balaclava, the picklocks, the whole motley collection. She asked, ‘Do you want a drink now?’
Eliza shook her head. ‘No. I need you to do something for me. If you agree, we’re going out. It’s something I promised May, but I left it too late. You don’t think you’ll end up reliant on others like this. It creeps up on you.’
‘I’ll help if I can.’
Eliza turned to her and seemed to weigh her words. ‘I’ll make up my mind in a while. Tell me what you want.’
Annie opened her mouth on a set speech about wanting to know about May’s life, about her eightieth birthday, but then she paused. She thought about the way Eliza’s carers talked to her, as though she was a child not quite old enough to make her own decisions. Eliza’s physical frailties were obvious, but Annie detected no chink in her mental capacity. Why not be open? Or anyway, fairly open. Apart from anything else, Eliza had no one to tell.
‘I’m a private investigator,’ she began. ‘I’ve been working on something that concerns a recent court case. Someone was murdered, and one of May’s carers popped up as being involved. A woman called Donna Lambit.’ She watched Eliza as she spoke Donna’s name, but saw no hint of recognition. ‘The murdered man was a Michael Walker.’
‘Michael Walker?’ Eliza murmured. ‘I can’t remember names. Would it have been in the papers? We have people come in and read the papers to us.’
‘Yes, the case has been all over the local press. May’s carer, Donna Lambit, claims she and May discussed Michael Walker six years ago, but she either can’t or won’t remember the detail. If May was alive, I would ask her.’
Eliza gave a wintry smile. ‘You wouldn’t get an answer. May’s mind was going even then. So she knew these people, did she? Poor May.’
‘I don’t know … I’m not sure about any of this. May might have known Michael Walker, or maybe his family. Joshua Yates accused Michael Walker of some terrible crimes. There wasn’t a scrap of evidence, but it turns out it wasn’t the first time he’d been accused. He was reported to the police six years ago.’
‘By the man who killed him?’
‘No, by Donna Lambit, May’s carer. She claims to have had her evidence from May.’
Eliza turned her clouded gaze to Annie and tried to focus. ‘May’s mind was going. The woman’s a fool if she’s believed anything May said.’
‘Frankly, it’s hard to know what to believe. But she’s not saying May told her. She claims she saw documents.’
‘What documents?’ Eliza’s tone was sharp.
‘From the locked box.’
‘So that’s why you asked me about the Jawbone Gang. You saw the writing inside the box.’
Annie nodded, and watched as Eliza’s claw of a hand reached shakily across to the table at her side to feel for the outline of the water glass, which she clutched and lifted to her lips. After taking a drink, she held the glass in her lap, both hands around it, resting it on top of the hat and gloves that nestled there. Her gaze swung round again, not quite to Annie’s face but somewhere close, making Annie wonder if she could see better in her peripheral vision than directly.
‘So this woman took documents from May?’
‘She would have done, but she couldn’t find the box. It didn’t come to light again till after May died, and it was empty then. At least, that’s what Susan told me.’
Eliza nodded. ‘What did this woman say these documents were?’
‘She didn’t know.’
Eliza barked out a short laugh. ‘She doesn’t sound very bright. But tell me, how did May know this man, the one who was murdered? What was his name again?’
‘Michael Walker. I don’t know how May knew him. I haven’t been able to verify that she did.’
Eliza eased herself upright in her chair as though marshalling her thoughts. She licked her lips before speaking. ‘You want to know what was in May’s locked box?’
‘Yes, can you tell me?’
‘I can.’ Eliza smiled. ‘But I didn’t keep in touch with May after the war. I know what was in that box when May was a girl, but how it is going to help you to know what May wrote back then?’
It was a good question. If there had been anything relevant in that box, it must have been more recent. The documents Eliza referred to would be from decades before Michael Walker was born.
Eliza sat up and raised a crooked finger to point at Annie. ‘That’s what you came for, isn’t it? You wanted to know about the Jawbone Gang and what was in May’s locked box.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Annie admitted with a sigh. She’d semi-promised to do something for Eliza if Eliza gave her the information she wanted. It looked as though she might be committed to it on the back of a wild goose chase. She glanced at the brandy bottle and hoped the rest of the bribe would not be as expensive. ‘So what is it you want me to do?’
‘Good,’ said Eliza, ‘I thought you’d forgotten. I need you to complete the job May entrusted me with.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Ah no, you don’t catch me out so easily. I’ll tell you what it is once I know you’ll do it.’ Eliza took another sip of water and then began. ‘The Jawbone Gang. May picked up the term when she was small. Her father would come back from sea with all manner of tales. He was a big romancer by all accounts, made life on the whalers sound like tremendous fun. I don’t remember him, of course, but all our fathers were the same with their stories. May was a big child. Clumsy, you know, and quite chubby. A bit of a bully, but only because she got it from the older girls.’
Eliza’s bent finger shot out. ‘Pull your chair round so you’re facing me. I don’t like to keep turning my head.’
Annie did as she was told, and Eliza went on, ‘May’s Jawbone Gang was something I grew up with. There were all manner of gangs then. The boys all had to be in gangs, of course. The girls’ gangs were different somehow. Not that there was much time for play in those days, but I used to see May’s Jawbone Gang all sitting round this tiny hedge in Tommy Ferens’s garden. He was a bigwig in Hull back then. He had a lovely big garden when all we had were shared yards. It wasn’t open house, but he’d let some of the children play in there. The ones that didn’t go wild and mess things up. Our attic overlooked a corner of that garden. He left it to the people of Hull when he died, you know. They made a park of it.’
Annie noted a half smile of reminiscence on Eliza’s
face and took a surreptitious glance at her watch.
‘Were you one of May’s gang?’
‘No, I was never a member of that gang. I was too young, but she was kind to me. I remember watching them sitting round that hedge, May with her paper, scribbling away. I longed to be a part of it, but you have to remember, May was ten years older than me.
‘Yes, that pen never stopped. May was slow at writing but she loved to do it. Handwriting now, that was one thing she could do, but what she really wanted was to get the words on the paper, to tell the story. But she was so slow. She couldn’t have recorded half of what they talked about. Not that it mattered to May. It was all a game and what she wanted was the pieces of paper filled with words to go in her locked box. No one but the Jawbone Gang was ever allowed to look.’
Annie noted and squirrelled away the discrepancy that Eliza, never a member of that gang, knew what was in the box.
‘What did she write? Minutes of the meetings?’
Eliza laughed. ‘Not as anyone would have recognized them, but yes, essentially that. She wanted to see words on paper. They were important to her. You see, she’d been allowed to attend meetings at the church from being quite small and she’d seen the minute-taking, seen how important it was, how powerful a tool words on paper could be. She was after the power. That was May.’
‘And the Jawbone Gang?’
‘May stopped bothering with it soon before the war. But you want to know what was in the locked box? Reach behind you to the bed.’
Annie looked round, surprised.
‘Look under the bottom of the counterpane.’
Annie lifted the cover and pulled out a handful of lined sheets of paper.
‘There.’ Eliza looked smug. ‘I had them all ready for you. You can take a proper look.’
Annie shot the old woman a glance, then turned her attention to the papers in her hand. They were pages torn from an old exercise book. The paper itself was stiff with age. Annie had to turn it to catch the light because the words were so faded. She made out a date, Thursday 5th March 1931, written in the same immaculate lettering she’d found inside the box, followed by the words:
We seven met today. The sun shone brightly.
The page was closely written. Her eye scanned down the text. Each new date began a new line. Otherwise, every inch of the surface, front and back, was used.
Clouds were in the sky … Today there had been rain…
She read a couple of the pages word by word and scanned the rest. Then she looked at Eliza who shrugged an I-told-you-so.
‘Is it all like this? How much is there?’
‘Oh, there’s a lot. The box was crammed full. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking what could anyone have taken out of here about that man … what did you say his name was?’
‘Michael Walker.’
‘Yes, well, I have an idea about that. Go to the last page.’
Annie turned to the last of the half-dozen pages. There she read,
Mother is a cow. She is a Jezebel. Why should I do everything? Why cannot she work, not just beat me?
‘You see?’ said Eliza. ‘May wrote all sorts. That’s where it says her mother beat her, isn’t it? I looked out that bit specially, just to show you what she was like. If there was ever a hand raised in May’s house after her father went, it was May’s against her mother, not the other way about. Someone has read something she’s written and taken it the wrong way.’
Annie flicked through the pages again, but said nothing. Eliza’s theory took her back to where she’d started. The one story that made the rest hang together was that Yates had targeted the wrong man. Could this be the basis of some spurious evidence on which he’d done it? Surely not. There had to be more to it than this.
She stared across at Eliza. Looked that bit out specially, had she? And with her failing sight. The old woman knew these papers intimately.
‘Are you saying May could have written stuff about Michael Walker?’
‘Who knows what May might have written? She had an imagination on her.’
Annie looked again at the pages in her hand. ‘What was the most recent entry? Did May keep on writing this all her life?’
‘No, no. Just the Jawbone Gang years. I wonder sometimes if she ever had that box open from when she was fifteen to when she was eighty. I think it just sat in a cupboard. A box of bad memories rotting away.’
Annie did the calculation. ‘So the papers in the box went up to when? The 1930s?’
‘1934.’ The answer came surprisingly easily to Eliza’s lips.
That put paid to any written tales about Michael Walker. But then Eliza and May had been out of touch for years. Who was to say what was in the box when Donna saw it? Or maybe there was another Michael Walker. She asked Eliza, who shook her head.
‘Michael who? Oh, the murderer, you mean?’
‘No, the victim. The one who was murdered.’
Eliza shrugged a negative. It was all the same to her. The names of people attached to recent events were not lodged securely in her mind. She pushed Eliza for her own theories of how Donna might have gleaned the wrong information, but Eliza had no ideas.
‘Where are the rest of the papers?’ she asked.
‘I have them all safe.’
‘Can I see them?’
‘I’ll let you take a bit of a look, but there’s nothing to see. Just more like that. Now, May would understand why I’ve let you see those notes, but she’d hate anyone to know what she wrote about her mother. She wouldn’t have wanted anyone reading it through in detail. I only looked that page out because I wanted you to see she could write some bad things. Oh yes, she could be a bad ’un, could May, but then she had a lot to put up with.’
‘OK,’ said Annie, cautiously. ‘I’d like to see them, all the same.’
‘Then I’ll need your promise that you’ll finish the job I started for May. I promised her I would take the papers and burn them, so no one would ever know what she’d written. She was housebound by then and had no one to trust. She’d started on burning them once, but you know how paper can float once it’s alight, and she singed the carpet. She was lucky the whole house didn’t go up. They stopped her having open fires then. She insisted they be done bit by bit. Put a whole wad of paper on a fire and it doesn’t always burn all through. You’ll help me to do it, once and for all, won’t you? And none of this taking them away to put on the fire or putting them in the bin for recycling. I want to see them burnt. I promised May.’
Annie gathered from this that she wasn’t the first to be asked, but she could see the old woman’s point of view. If she’d made this promise to a friend, it would weigh on her mind that she was no longer physically capable of carrying it out.
‘Yes, I’ll do it, but I want to see them first.’
‘You’ll be forever if you want to read them all through, and I don’t want you doing that. I promised May they’d be burnt. They’re all the same as the ones I showed you. There’s nothing you could be interested in.’
‘I just want to flick through and check the dates. If there’s nothing more recent that the 1930s then it’s of no interest to me anyway.’
‘All right, you can do that. Now do you promise me that you’ll help to burn them?’
‘Yes, I promise. This happened at May’s eightieth birthday party, didn’t it? Is that when she asked you to take the papers? And why not the whole box?’
‘Don’t be daft. We didn’t talk about anything like this with people around.’
Annie thought back to what Donna had said. It hadn’t been the day of May’s birthday party. It had been some days later. Eliza was the ‘some old cow’ Donna had overheard talking with May. What had she heard? And what had she seen? Whatever it was, she had assumed it came from the locked box, but maybe it hadn’t.
‘When you went to visit May the second time, a few days after her birthday, was anyone else there?’
‘No, just the two of us. Who else would
there be?’
‘Not May’s carer or anyone like that?’
‘There was someone in and out. The post came, I remember that.’ Eliza lay back in the chair, closed her eyes and held out one hand towards Annie. ‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘You tire me out with all your questions. You’ll have to leave. I’m too tired to go out now. You’ll have to come back some other time, maybe next weekend. Give me those papers back.’
Annie placed the papers into Eliza’s hand and watched the bony claw close round them. She had no intention of waiting until next weekend, but this wasn’t the moment to say so to Eliza. This was the moment to sit back quietly and wait.
Eliza’s hands closed round the papers in her lap, scrunching them up. Her eyes remained closed. Annie sat still as she pictured the scene six years ago. May, housebound, entrusting her old friend with the task of burning her childhood diaries. Eliza, still mobile then, but of slight build. Of course, she couldn’t have taken the whole box. She would never have managed it. The papers must have been stuffed into a carrier bag or similar. And maybe Eliza had shoved the empty box under the stairs. She could ask now. No reason not to tell her the truth. But she said nothing as she watched the elderly woman sink lower in her chair.
As Eliza’s breathing settled to gentle snores, Annie reached forward and moved the bell-push just enough out of place that an instinctive lunge for it would miss. At her age, Eliza wouldn’t sleep deeply and probably not for long. But there was little furniture to check. If she were careful, it would take only minutes to find the rest of the papers and have them tucked away in her bag. She would return them tomorrow to be burnt as she’d promised. Eliza might accuse her of theft, but she would swear that Eliza had allowed her to take them. And the carers would believe her because she was young and Eliza was old and physically frail.
She slid smoothly out of the chair and down, out of Eliza’s line of sight. A flash of movement might be enough to wake her.
Once behind the chair, Annie moved quickly, easing open the drawers in the 3-drawer chest and feeling through the contents. Her search found only clothes. A pad of paper on top held notes from Eliza. Annie skimmed through them – a complaint about a dripping tap; a shopping list. Eliza’s writing was spidery and frail, but very neat, trained from childhood just like May’s. She moved on to the large old-fashioned wardrobe, but it yielded nothing of interest. She crept right to Eliza’s side on hands and knees to feel through the chair’s capacious pockets. Then she stood behind, hanging over the sleeping woman, looking for any sign the papers were somehow tucked in the chair with her. Finally, she turned her attention to the bed. An unlikely hideyhole, but it was where Eliza had stashed the few pages she had seen. Nothing under the mattress; nothing between the covers. Frustrated, Annie stood in the middle of the room, at a loss. Other than ripping open the upholstery or taking up the carpet, she had run out of places to check.