by Baker, John
‘Oh, dear.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘It isn’t for Sam. It’s for you.’
‘Me. But no one knows I’m here.’
‘It’s addressed to Miss Angeles Falco. But it’s not written, the letters have been cut out of a magazine and stuck on with Sellotape.’
While Janet watched, a shudder ran down the other woman’s body. Angeles began trembling, first her hands, then her lips, and she tottered backwards up against the wall. She turned and took a step forward and to the side, her hands out in front of her. She turned again, and again, almost spinning, until she was so disoriented Janet thought she would fall over.
29
One of JD’s many talents was as a drummer in a country rock group, and it was while practising his solo for ‘When I’m Drinking I am Nobody’s Friend’ that he began cogitating on Sam’s hypothesis about a mythological solution to the case. There were other mythical figures, apart from Samson, who were blind; Oedipus blinded himself before he went into exile. Athena blinded the young Tiresias by covering his eyes with her hands when he surprised her naked. Odysseus blinded the Cyclops, Polyphemus. The only blind heroine he could think of was Fortuna, the blind goddess of fate; though he remembered that the Little Mermaid was dumb.
None of them really fit the bill. JD couldn’t make a connection between any of them and the case of Angeles Falco. And yet, he thought, there are none so blind as those who will not see.
Watching Angeles and using her as a study for the blind character in his novel, JD had confirmed something that he had suspected for a long time. As a musician, and especially as a drummer, he had always known that sound is almost indistinguishable from touch. When he played his drums he could feel the vibrations through his feet, and the group’s violinist, Eddie Jones, had shown him how to tell a high note from a low one just by touching the instrument while it was sounding.
What this meant, of course, was that, while blindness was a kind of absolute, deafness was not. There was another route, touch, which led into the world of sound, whereas the visual world, the world of light, was isolated among the senses.
‘Where are you going with this?’ Sam asked him. ‘This’s only gonna be useful if it can catch the killer.’
‘I don’t know yet,’ JD said. ‘It’s just an idea. The thing about a mythological solution doesn’t work.’
‘I knew that as soon as I thought it.’
‘So we have to find something else to work with. I think the fact that Angeles is blind could be a factor.’
‘Maybe,’ said Sam.
‘What d’you mean, “maybe”? You started this thing.’
‘I mean “maybe”, JD. I’m not discounting it. It seems likely at the moment.’
‘All right. We’ve got light and sound. These are two phenomena with different qualities. Light travels in a straight line.’
‘And it’s fast,’ added Sam.
‘Yeah, fast. Sound, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily travel in a straight line. It’s slower, and it can get blown off course.’
‘Yeah,’ said Sam.
‘But something else,’ said JD. ‘When the band are playing we get complaints from the neighbourhood. Y’know why?’
‘Crap band?’
JD let a wry smile invade his face. ‘Because sound can travel through walls. It’s much stronger than light. It can even go round corners.’
‘It plays tricks, though,’ said Sam.
‘Yeah, and so does light. Magicians and illusionists use it all the time.’
‘The other thing about sound,’ said Sam. ‘It gets reflected off the surfaces of things.’
‘Echoes. And how many times d’you mistake somebody’s voice? But the interesting thing is, you never get magicians and illusionists who work with sound. They always give us optical illusions because they are the kind that unsettle us. We believe in what we see much more than in what we hear. The things we see, or think we see, affect our sense of how things fit together in space.’
‘That’s right,’ said Sam. ‘We see things, but we don’t hear them. I remember when that woman was jumping up and down in the road, after I pushed her out of the ambulance. I didn’t hear a woman or a cop, I only heard the ranting.’
‘That’s right,’ said JD. ‘Sound gives us qualities. We never actually see light; we only see the things that are illuminated by it. But we actually hear pure sound, not something that is in the sound, but the thing itself.’
‘I suppose this all goes back to your man Descartes?’ said Sam.
‘Him and all the others who came before him, and the rest who followed him as well. It’s a philosophical perennial.’
‘Hasn’t cracked the case, though, has it?’
‘Maybe it helps us understand Angeles Falco a little better, and that in turn might help us to see the guy who’s watching her?’
‘Let’s hope so,’ said Sam. ‘All this philosophy is going on her bill.’
‘You have to take the opposites into account, as well,’ said JD.
‘Darkness and silence?’
‘The dark impedes light. It stops you seeing things that are there. The wardrobe, the psycho in the doorway. But silence doesn’t actually impede anything. It is silence in itself. It denotes the absence of sound. Emptiness.’
‘People go mad with sound,’ Sam said. ‘They hear voices. Go insane.’
‘Maybe that’s the guy we’re looking for?’ said JD. ‘Someone with voices in his head?’
‘Something else,’ said JD, ‘which you’ll say is completely irrelevant. If this was a novel or a Brad Pitt movie, there’d be a scene where the good guys get together and hatch a plot to make the villain show himself.’
‘Like using the heroine as bait?’ said Sam.
‘Could be, yeah. That’d give it some tension. The one who was in love with her would argue against it at first. “You can’t send that defenceless creature out into the dark night.” But eventually the other guy’d win him round. They’d take care of every eventuality they could think of, then send her out there. And she’d want to go. She’d be sure that they’d look after her.’
‘If this is a roundabout way of saying you want Angeles back in her own house...’
‘It’s not,’ said JD. ‘I’m just playing around with concepts here.’
‘... I’m not gonna fall for it. She’s staying in my house, and out of the way until we find some way of nailing the guy.’
‘What I was coming round to,’ JD continued patiently, ‘was the Heisenberg Principle.’
Sam shook his head. ‘JD, with you on the case it never gets dull. But it never gets brought to a conclusion, either.’ He threw his hands up. ‘OK, Heisenberg, German Jew, I suppose? Nineteenth century?’
‘No, later than that, I think. And I don’t know squat about his origins. But I remember the principle: when you measure a system you disrupt it. So those guys who did the experiments with rats, they discovered that rats often fulfil the aspirations of the watcher. If you believe a rat in a cage will take a certain path to its food, there will be a tendency for the majority of rats to take that route.’
‘I’m getting a headache.’
‘Private eyes don’t get headaches. They get their hands smashed and they end up walking with a pimp-limp, but they don’t get headaches. The watcher, before we got involved, he was in a closed system. There was just him and Angeles, right?’
‘What about Isabel?’
‘Keep it simple. There was him and the object of his obsession.’
‘OK.’
‘But now we’ve arrived on the scene. We’re disrupting the system. We’re becoming part of it. We know we’ve changed it, and he knows we’ve changed it. What we have to work out is how we can change it so that he shows himself to us without knowing that he’s doing it.’
‘I knew you were gonna end up here. You want us to use her as bait.’
‘I want bait, yeah, but it doesn’t have to be Angeles.’
‘You suggesting we use somebody else? Janet, for instance? I can really see Geordie going for that. Or Marie?’
‘They’d have a great advantage, Sam. They can see.’
30
Russell Harvey was in a box about two metres long. The undertaker had done a good job on him, so he appeared cleaner in death, altogether more healthy than when he had been drawing breath. A close shave and a touch of rouge to the cheek bones had removed the illusion of sleaze, transformed it into mere roguish charm. The bluish tinge high on the neck had not been obliterated by the black art of cosmetics and still bore faint witness to a death administered by his own hands.
Not entirely self-inflicted, though, Marie reflected. Russell Harvey had not been independent of the world. While it was true that he was a victim of his own personality, life had equipped him with a pack containing a fairly hefty wedge of bad cards.
It was late evening. She had let the day grow old and the shadows lengthen before making her way here. Putting off the inevitable.
‘No one else has been. You’re the first.’ The undertaker’s apprentice had confirmed what she already knew. She’d had to come and sit with Russell’s corpse, because if she didn’t do it, who else would?
She inspected the box; not for the quality of the work, the dovetailing of the joints, the depth of surface sheen, but for some obvious flaw that would mark it out as a factory reject. She didn’t find anything and was surprised that Russell should be given something that would hold its own, not fail him at the last moment. Perhaps it was true, then, that death was a great equalizer? She shrugged, decided to ignore the quality of the boards and the fittings. Not teak or oak or African mahogany, but some altogether softer, unrecognizable timber, perhaps a composition of sawdust and glue; and for its handles, only gilded pig iron, no silver or brass.
There’s always more than one casualty of a murder, Marie reasoned. At the trial they spend a lot of words proving that the perpetrator has wasted a life. But there are other lives, in the wings so to speak, equally broken. The lives of the loved ones.
Russell Harvey was Isabel Reeves’ loved one and when she was snatched away the rest of his life stretched out before him like a bed of cinders.
Marie Dickens, as an ex-nurse, had seen many lifeless bodies, the first well before she was out of her teens. It was part of the initiation into the profession to be able to deal with a patient whose essential systems had closed down. Most student nurses, by the end of their first year, have first-hand experience of the tasks involved. But for Marie that lingering sense of a soul departed, the shell-like emptiness of the still, carnal body, never failed in the poignancy of its moment. It had been there with every patient lost in the night, it had been there with her mother and her father, and it was here again with Russell Harvey. What had been human, with all its flaws, its spiritual or physical lesions, had come to an end. Packed up and skipped town.
You could choose to ignore it. Like one of those extremely efficient people who reach for a roll of string and a cork. But that was running away. A death, any death, is a full stop; it is a mark of punctuation that demands that you take a breath. And it is in the space of that breath, when the old sentence is buried and before the new one is begun, that a different language is spoken. You can call it grief if you like, grief or mourning or, simply, shock. In truth it doesn’t have a name.
It is the space in which the only possible response is prayer. In the old world, when the line between humanity and the gods was clearly defined, our ancestors knew instinctively what to do. They didn’t have to fall to their knees and lift their voices to the heavens. A silent utterance was just as effective; a ghost moving over the lips for the ghost of the one who has been taken.
Marie shook her head. Big problem in the twenty-first century. We’ve forgotten how to pray. The space where the prayer took place remains, but it is an empty place. The dead body before us is like a mirror. We see emptiness where there was life, and we know in that moment that there is the same emptiness inside ourselves. We can try to ignore it or we can fill it with rubbish, but it will remain there nevertheless, always empty, until our time comes round.
A trick of light passed over the coffin and Marie shifted uneasily on her chair. For a moment she thought the body of Russell Harvey had moved. He’d blinked, perhaps, or unselfconsciously wrinkled up his nose. But nothing had happened, his make-up was still intact, his lungs and heart and the synapses in his brain had closed for business. The shutters were down. The proprietor had gone away.
It was here, in this very room, that she had come to find the body of Gus and contemplate the end of her marriage. At the time it had seemed like the end of her life. It was, she reasoned, the end of the life she had led up to the moment that Gus looked into the gunman’s eyes. Her first act had been to leave the hospital and take up Gus’s place as Sam’s partner. A role in which she excelled, and for which she had no regrets.
What had proved altogether more difficult was to plug the hole in her emotional life. There had been a more or less constant trickle of men and from time to time one of them seemed like he’d been designed for the job. Only use and familiarity would reveal a series of tiny errors or omissions that made life on a day-to-day basis impossible. An inability to change his socks, perhaps, or the gift of walking through a room and laying it to waste. There had been Clancy, she remembered, who could not, even for one night, lie from the head to the foot of the bed, but would shuffle around until his body was across it, and her. He had additional failings too, dear man.
Other men, usually the ones who seemed eminently possible at first, had more serious drawbacks, like wives and families. God knows, Gus, her philandering, now long-dead husband, had not approached perfection, but he had been like a prince compared to the fare she had been offered since he’d gone.
‘Is it just luck?’ she asked him in the coffin, there, thinking he looked strangely different and then realizing that it wasn’t Gus at all she was keeping company tonight, but Russell Harvey.
‘Is it just luck, Russell?’ she asked. ‘Did you meet a selection of slimy ladies before you found your Isabel?’
With more selective lighting, a candle, say, Russell might have made a sign. But there were no shadows in the room apart from the corpse himself. And Gus, of course, somewhere indistinct, rather as he had been as a husband.
Deep breath. Sit up straight. Get your act together, girl. Dwell not on the bloody past.
The current man was David Styles, Steiner school teacher, very hairy. Gentle. He was away for three days at a conference in Forest Row.
He’d been married once, briefly, to a mistake. No children. He was tall but not gangly, which was nice. Had hair on his head as well as everywhere else, which was also nice. He was a thinker, but not an intellectual. Read philosophy and was able to reinterpret it into everyday language. Of course, he was a teacher.
The best thing about him was his sense of humour, which was always present. He could make her laugh, and did so frequently, sometimes so much that she’d clutch her belly and beg him to stop.
The other thing, of course, the thing that clinched it for Marie, was his lack of materialism. He wasn’t interested in the things that money could buy. Didn’t own a car.
If there was a questionnaire, something you could fill in to describe your ideal mate, Marie would end up with something very similar to David Styles. He’d look more or less the same, but be broader across the shoulders. He’d have the same sense of humour and the same contempt for the world that puts things before people.
Only he’d be rougher. More like Sam. Not Sam himself, of course, that’d never work. He’d probably be a lorry driver rather than a Steiner school teacher. She didn’t know why, couldn’t work it out. David Styles, in some inexplicable way, was not man enough for her. He was too much like Marie herself. Her soft, rounded body yearned for hardness in a man. She wanted someone who had an oily rag hanging out of his pocket and calluses on his hands. Someone wh
o went out in the morning and messed with the sharp end of life.
‘God help me, Russell,’ she said. ‘Even when they’re perfect they don’t match up to requirements.’
Marie wanted Gus back, even after all these years. She wanted Gus or someone so like him that it made no difference. And the search took her out in the morning and kept her at it until the stars came out. The result was an emotional desert with the occasional watering hole.
‘The difference between you and me, Russell, apart from the obvious, of course, is that it didn’t work for you. In the love department we both managed on fairly frugal diets. But yours killed you, whereas mine nourishes me. Only just, but I get by.’
Sitting up all night with the body of a man she hardly knew. She was keeping a vigil. It had to be done. Russell Harvey had spent his life alone, but for this night he would have company.
It was a wake, she decided, after the pale light of the dawn had crept over the surfaces in the room. She kissed the tips of her fingers and put them to his cheek. Outside the air was sharp, the streets beginning to stir with people making their way from bed to work. Marie headed for home and the warmth and comfort of her single duvet.
31
‘Is Sam rich?’
‘It’s a simple enough question,’ said Ralph. ‘You don’t have to repeat it back to me.’
‘Is Sam rich?’ said Geordie. ‘How can you think he’s rich? He’s a private eye. Sometimes he doesn’t have enough to pay us our wages.’
‘That’s exploitation,’ Ralph told him. ‘You could sue him for that.’
It was two o’clock in the afternoon and they were playing snooker in the Stonebow. Ralph had come up tops on a dog the night before, and when he got out of bed around 11.30 he’d taken Geordie out for breakfast. Geordie had already had breakfast with Janet and Echo four hours earlier, but he didn’t mention that, not wanting to hurt Ralph’s feelings.