The Five Bells and Bladebone

by Martha Grimes

  “Look, I don’t bloody care about screwing anything, just can you do whatever needs to be done to get some lights on in here?”

  She needn’t be so sharpish, Tommy thought. He was the one who came for help, and she didn’t seem to be of a mind to give it. He stuffed his cap in his pocket and his case over the sill and said, “Any man can fix a fuse,” just to let her know there was a difference between men and women that way.

  He wasn’t much into what they were calling “women’s liberation.” He’d never known a girl yet that could change a fuse.

  She led him through a room as big as a lake. The huge windows that looked out toward the river reflected the light from her torch, giving the weird impression that someone on the other side was seeking him out. Tommy always carried a small torch clipped to his belt in case of emergencies. There were always emergencies round the house in Gravesend — light bulbs shattering as if someone had shot them, the fridge and cooker breaking down, blinds snapping up as if raised by invisible hands. The light’s beam was slender but strong, and it danced on the kitchen’s enamel and chrome.

  The fuse box was in a larder off the kitchen. He ran the thread of light across the top of it; there were a dozen fuses at least scattered there, different strengths, different-colored tops, probably spent. It was hard to tell in the dark.

  “What’s this lot, then?” he asked, picking up one and looking at the glass top. She was holding her torch on the box.

  “Fuses. They look rusty to me. They were here when I moved in.” Impatiently, she shifted the light. “I thought the hell with it and just went to bed.”

  Tommy shook his head in dismay. Just went to bed. Probably thought little men would come in the night to sort out the fuses and screw in fresh ones. From all the money it looked like went into this place, why didn’t she have a circuit breaker, anyway? He asked her.

  “A what? Look, you needn’t put on that face. I certainly wasn’t going to stop here all night trying to work them out, putting one in, then another. I had to hold the torch, too.”

  “You got two hands.” Waiting for someone to come . . . In all of this business he had nearly forgotten why he had come along. “What time’s it now?”

  The way she sighed you’d think she was paying him by the hour. She flashed the light on her watch. “Five of. If your sister’s gone to the pub, she’ll be back soon. Can’t you get on with it? I’m cold.”

  Again he wondered at this total inability of women to fix the simplest things. Faced with the easiest of mechanical tasks, like changing a fuse or a tire, or hoisting a sail, their hands turned to clubs. Aunt Glad was like that. She could do anything when it came to cooking or slipcovering chairs, but if he hadn’t been around, Aunt Glad would be living in the dark (just like this one) amongst crippled appliances.

  “The thing is,” said Tommy, “I’ve come all the way from Gravesend.” He squinted down at the little circle of glass and determined that here was a good fuse, at least it looked like. “And I don’t see why Sadie’d be going down the pub when she knew what time I was getting —” Lights everywhere sprang up, as if it were Christmas and switches were being thrown all over London.

  She looked around, marveling at this sudden display of light. “Well, you’re pretty clever!”

  Clever. Tommy squinted his eyes in disgust. Sometimes he thought Sadie was the only sensible girl he knew. Probably that was because she’d been on her own for so long. Sadie was the clever one, by half.

  “I expect the least I can do is give you a hot drink.” She went back in the kitchen, a modern butcher’s-block and white-surfaced length of workspace, where she started rattling about with pans.

  “I expect you don’t have an Altman’s or something.” He had to give her one thing, she took it in stride, none of this looking him over to check and see if he was old enough. When he sat in the Dolphin with Sid, both of them smoking, both of them drinking Altman’s, he felt comfortable enough. But not if he had to go into a pub on his own, like the railway bar at the station. Didn’t that one ever stare him practically to bits. And Tommy thought London would be more worldly.

  No Altman’s, but she did have Bass. He sat on a high stool, nodded his head in a world-weary way. Sid was cool, calm. Once Tommy’d seen him turn the public bar of the Dolphin pub into sawdust without so much as blinking. Tommy, on the other hand, was always being told he looked innocent as an angel, clear-skinned, eyes so bright they blazed, like the lights that had just sprung to life.

  She set about uncapping two Bass’s ale and sat down on the mate of the high stool by the kitchen counter. “Well, I don’t know your sister — what’d you say her name was?”

  “Sadie. Sadie Diver.”

  “What’s yours, then?”

  “Tommy.”

  “You’re her brother.”

  Tommy bit his lip and looked up at a big calendar. If you tried to nail the IQ of this one up there, it’d fill one square, maybe. But he supposed if a person was that pretty, she’d almost have to be dumb. Nodding, he drank his ale and tried not to look at her. Maybe she didn’t look the soul of innocence (as he did), but how could she, with those sultry eyes and burnished hair, and thirty.

  “What I don’t understand is, why she didn’t leave a note. That’s not like Sadie.”

  She pulled a packet of cigarettes from the windowsill above the counter, took one, and slid them across the counter to him. This was pretty nice, thought Tommy; being around here was certainly better than sitting on a cold stone step. Though his aunt and uncle would probably argue the point.

  “Is she on the phone, your sister?”

  Tommy talked round the cigarette that dangled out of the corner of his mouth. “Hasn’t got one connected up yet. You know Telecom,” he added wisely, recalling some complaint his uncle had made about the time they took.

  “Don’t I ever. It was four months, four, until they did mine.” She took a mouthful of beer and seemed to be thinking.

  He liked the way she drank right out of the bottle. Maybe she wasn’t as stupid as he thought at first. And with the next thing she said, he knew she wasn’t stupid.

  Sliding from her stool she said, “Well, come on, then. We’ll have to break in.”

  Tommy stared. “What do you mean?”

  Already she was pulling a black slicker from a peg by the kitchen door, and stuffing her torch in the pocket. “Just what I said. You didn’t even try the windows, apparently. And if that doesn’t work, we can use a credit card. Have you got one? I hate hunting for mine.”

  Credit card? Was she kidding? “I pay cash.”

  “Smart.” She let the cigarette drop in a metal bin, and led him back through the wide, glossily waxed room, where she plucked a tan bag from a high-backed chair and rummaged through it, tossing out tissues, cigarettes, loose bills, lipsticks.

  “I don’t know about this,” said Tommy, still talking round the cigarette. “I mean, breaking into my own sister’s flat—”

  In the wake of bag-debris, she had, in passing, opened a plastic compact to check her hair and bite her lips. Tommy guessed they took any opportunity. “You’d rather break into one that wasn’t your sister’s?” She snapped the compact shut and tossed it in the little rubbish heap, and went on searching.

  Sometimes he felt at a loss. “Of course not; I never broke into anybody’s flat. I guess you have.”

  “Sure, I’m in the business.”

  Open-mouthed, he sat down on a row of leather strips that he supposed was a chair. It was about as comfortable as the stone step; indeed all the furniture, and there were hardly enough pieces to fill his own room at home, much less this one, had spindly-looking legs and bent chrome arms that looked as if they’d come out of a Star Trek set.

  Impatiently, she sighed, flipping through a many-pocketed card case. “I’m only kidding. You’re looking round like you think you’ll find a great big bag with swag printed on it. Here it is!” Triumphantly, she held up the plastic card.

  On the w
ay out, he said, “Where’d you get all that funny furniture?”

  “All that funny furniture happens to be Bonoldo. You were sitting on a chair worth five hundred quid, in case you didn’t know.”

  Tommy didn’t. He supposed it must be swell to sit around on her friend’s furniture, but it didn’t feel like it to him.

  • • •

  The house was still completely dark, the pinkish light glowing in the basement. There were only the two small windows facing the street, protected by an ironwork grille that looked about as strong as lace. He would have to mention this to Sadie; in a pinch he could have taken out the grille and broken a window, but he didn’t want to.

  As there was no other way of entry on the side or the rear, the only thing to do was to try and get past that lock. He looked around and saw her keeping watch, standing in the same pool of light from the streetlamp, looking up and down the pavement. Her dull gold hair was tucked into the collar of the black slicker, and that and the black boots she’d drawn on made her look mysterious, dangerous even. Her hands were shoved in her pockets.

  Tommy whistled and she walked over and down the four steps and drew out not a gun but the plastic card. It wasn’t a deadbolt lock, for after a half-minute’s jimmying the card eased through and he heard the click of a tumbler.

  Just as she opened the door, he was suddenly frightened. It occurred to him for the first time that something was really wrong, and he didn’t know what they might find in the flat.

  Nothing. He let out his breath. The flat looked as if someone had simply stepped out for a while; magazine open on the sofa, mug of cold tea on the end table. Tommy could tell it was a brand-new sofa bed. Everything looked as if it had been taken out of the window and brought here. He saw her looking at it, chewing her lip, and could see it through her eyes. Even if the weird stuff in her place felt hard and looked austere, Tommy could tell that Sadie’s looked pretty cheap by comparison.

  But she said nothing, just sat down in the pinkish chair by the pink lamp and took out her cigarettes. A cuckoo clock on the wall startled him; from its dark green door in its fake walnut hut, the painted bird sprang out and announced half after eleven.

  He sat on the edge of the sofa. The nubby material scratched his rear end. “What’s happened, do you think?”

  She tossed him the pack of cigarettes, and looked round the room. Then she rose, walked about, looked at the bookshelves, frowned. “What does she look like, your sister?”

  Tommy pulled out a snapshot Sadie had sent him over a year ago. Her hair was piled on top of her head; she was wearing what looked like a velvet evening gown, and around her throat was a string of pearls.

  She got up, dropped her cigarette, half-smoked like the others, in the clean ashtray, without comment, except to say, “Now you’re in, at least; so you’ve a place to sleep.”

  “Well, but I don’t know I want to stay here — alone, I mean. I mean, I’m not afraid to . . . .” He was, too.

  “I have a friend. I might call him.”

  He followed her the few steps to the door. “Who?”

  Her answer was indirect. “He might know something.”

  Tommy could tell, from the way she looked at him, head tilted slightly, the eyes half-shut in a considering sort of way, that she didn’t want him to know what she was thinking. It was the way Sid had looked at him when he’d said he wanted to come to London.

  It was written all over her face that Sadie was missing.

  Sixteen

  TOMMY WAS DRAGGED from a dream at six in the morning by the knocking on the door of Sadie’s basement flat. Breaking the surface of sleep, he felt like someone who’d had to force his way upward against the heavy weight of water.

  And the dream he was slowly sloughing off had been about water. A great flow of water bearing dream-images along: Sadie and himself looking out through a watery pane of glass in a house he didn’t know, as both they and the house were being borne along in a flood; the two of them floating in a small boat chopping little hard-edged waves, rowing uselessly because the water flow was carrying them. The dream was colorless, a monochrome. Dark gray water, pale house, and their paler skin looking moonlit against the drab backdrop. In the distance, a foghorn sounded.

  Thus when Tommy woke his arms were still moving in waterdarkness, and the foghorn, he realized, must have been the sound of a knock at the door. He looked around, squinting through a veil of weak gray light that confused rather than illuminated, so that the room looked full of shifting, wavering things, furnishings as fuzzy as the curtain of the kitchen alcove, the room unrecognizable as the house in the dream. He didn’t know where he was.

  When he realized it was the sound of knocking, he tripped over the little footstool in his haste to answer, the thought coming to him only at the last moment that Sadie wouldn’t be knocking on her own door —

  Tommy stood blinking at the two men standing at the bottom of the brick steps. They might have come from his dream, standing there shadowy and fixed, yet giving the impression of pursuit although they made no movement.

  His eyes widened. Even Tommy could tell police officers when he saw them. And didn’t they always come in pairs, like oars? He felt exposed, standing there in bare feet and wearing only this old flannel nightshirt. The two of them were so thoroughly dressed they looked as invulnerable as knights in armor.

  They showed him their identification. Sergeant Roy Marsh of Thames Division and Constable Ballinger from Limehouse police station. “Might we come in?” asked the constable, with an embarrassed and shabby attempt at a smile.

  “Did you find her, then? Sadie?” He thought if he kept them outside he might be able to hold back what he knew, in the back of his mind, was the truth.

  “If we could just come in?”

  It was Sergeant Marsh who asked this. Tommy, for all his thinness, seemed to fill the doorway. “What happened?” he asked.

  “You’re related to Sarah Diver, son?”

  Tommy nodded. “I’m her brother.”

  “There’s been an unfortunate . . . accident.”

  Dead. Tommy dropped his hand from the doorframe and stood back. Dead. That’s what “accident” always meant on the telly, but he didn’t think police in real life would actually say it. With the saying, the two of them, like enormous cartoon shadows that spring up walls, half covering them, filled the room. Tommy felt as he had in the dream, caught up in an unstoppable flow of water carrying strange images along like household objects: upended tables, broken chairs. Nothing was falling into place.

  The one from the river police, Marsh, said, “I’m the one found her. I’m sorry.”

  Marsh was a square-faced, muscular man, and his voice surprised Tommy, for it was low and soft. It made Tommy think of the tread of a cat. Slightly pulling his mouth up at one end was a small razor-thin scar that gave to his expression an ironic cast. He was heavy for the small chair he’d sat on, its fussiness and femininity made even more pronounced by his sitting in it. Ballinger preferred to stand, propped against a cabinet in which were kept curios and books and magazines.

  From a brown shopping bag, Marsh pulled a small woman’s purse, one of those things women called “clutches.” He handed it over to Tommy, who took it, feeling its clammy wetness. He frowned. Was he being told that this was all that was left of Sadie? Was it some talisman or charm, did they mean? It was wine-colored with sort of snakeskin inserts. Was he supposed to do something with it?

  Again from that incongruous bag, as if they’d been out doing the shops, he pulled a compact, snakeskin like the purse, a small hairbrush, a comb, a lipstick missing its top. Sergeant Marsh lined them up carefully on the table, where they lay like ancient artifacts, water-ruined.

  The leavings of the flood, thought Tommy, picking each of them up and setting it down again. He blinked. If he shut his eyes and shook his head quickly, they would be gone — purse, lipstick, police. But they seemed determined to stay. “How do you know this stuff’s Sadie’s?” he
asked dully.

  “This.” Roy Marsh dropped a small plastic case on the table, like a trump card. “This. Library tickets, a credit card —”

  Tommy frowned, pushing at it with his finger. “She never had a credit card. Once she bought some stuff on hire-purchase. It’s only the nobs have credit cards.”

  Roy Marsh smiled. “Well, they’re pretty common now, Tommy.” In that level, soft voice he went on: “We need someone to identify her.”

  “Thought you had,” he nodded toward the line-up on the table, “ — with that stuff.”

  The sergeant leaned closer. “Formal identification. I’m sorry. It’s usually done by family. Husband, parents . . .”

  “There’s no one. There’s our aunt and uncle. Mulholland’s their name,” he added, when he saw the notebook come out. “We live in Gravesend.” He glared at Roy Marsh. “You haven’t told me what happened.” He still couldn’t believe anything had happened to Sadie, but he might as well go along with this mistake. After all, he’d talked to her only a week ago, hadn’t he? Tommy dragged his jeans from where he’d thrown them on the sofa bed and pulled his boots from under it.

  Roy Marsh paused. “The body was found on a slipway by Wapping Old Stairs. But we can’t be sure it’s your sister, yet,” he added quickly.

  “Drowned?”

  Again, Roy hesitated. “No.” He hesitated, looked at Ballinger. “Stabbed.”

  Tommy dropped the boot he’d been about to pull on.

  “We found her two hours ago.”

  “Then it happened last night?”

  Roy Marsh shook his head. “The night before.”

  “Took you long enough.” Trying to hedge the raw feeling in his throat that could only mean tears, he took solace in anger.

  Constable Ballinger asked, “Do you carry her photo, lad? Snapshot, something like that?”

  Mutely, Tommy drew out his wallet, showed them a small, rather cheap portrait-shot of Sadie in a low-cut dress, hair piled high on her head.