He asked me to sing him something. That’s how it all started. I asked what. He said anything I wanted. It felt strange just to stand there and sing while he sat on the edge of the bed watching and listening. But I did it. I sang ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’ because I loved Dusty Springfield and that was my favourite song of hers. I just couldn’t believe it. I felt like pinching myself. There I was, little Linda Palmer from Leeds, singing for Danny Caxton! We had some more champagne and he said I was very good and with a bit of coaching I could go a long way. I would also have to pass more tests if I wanted to be on Do Your Own Thing! I asked him what sort of tests he meant and he smiled and patted the bedspread beside him and told me to sit down. My head was beginning to spin and I felt a bit dizzy, so I sat. It was a pink candlewick bedspread, I remember that. I can remember the texture of it to this day and I’ve hated candlewick ever since. I was starting to feel nervous, as well as light-headed, with butterflies fluttering in my tummy, but I sat. ‘It’s more than just singing ability, you see,’ he said. ‘You also have to project yourself, be sexy. Can you be sexy?’ I muttered something like ‘I’m only fourteen,’ and started to get up. He grabbed my wrist. He was strong and it hurt. He pulled me back down. ‘You know what I mean by sexy, don’t you? Of course you do, you little tease.’ He squeezed my breast and a strange expression came over his face, a kind of serenity. He sighed. I tried to get up again. My heart was beating fast and hard. My face was burning and my breast ached. I just wanted to run out of there. But he was too strong. I cried, ‘No, no, no,’ but he—
Linda stopped and leaned back in her chair, reached for a cigarette. Her breath caught in her throat, and the sheen of sweat on her forehead wasn’t entirely due to the heat of the sun. Even now the memory had the power to move her, to disturb her. She looked across the river to the tree, but it was getting late and the kingfisher had gone. With a shaking hand, she picked up her pen again . . .
I was tall for my age, and everyone said I had the most beautiful blond hair. It tumbled down to my shoulders and the fringe at the front touched my eyebrows. I was wearing my yellow sundress, I remember, which came to just below my knees. I loved that dress, the bright colour of sunshine, the touch of cool cotton against my skin on a warm day. He pushed me on my back. Holding my wrists together and pinning me down with one hand while his other hand went up my dress, over my thighs, pushing between my legs, roughly. He was very excited now, making little grunting noises. I told him again to stop, that he was hurting me, but he just laughed and pulled at my underwear. I struggled and he turned me over so I was on my stomach, and he was holding my hands tight behind my back, like handcuffs. I was crying now and begging him to stop. I knew there was no use struggling. I suppose I abandoned myself to the inevitable. I had entered that place where there was no hope.
Then I felt him inside me, hard and rough, pushing. I cried out because it hurt so much and I think I struggled again. He kept my hands pinioned behind my back and covered my mouth with his other hand, so it was hard to breathe then his arm went around my throat squeezing hard enough to make me quiet. His shirtsleeve buttons must have been undone because I could feel the hairs of his forearm on my throat. He pushed my face into the bedspread and it smelled of the warm fabric and soap. I could hardly breathe. It was hot in the room. He was all sweaty and he tasted of something. It was like make-up, but then I didn’t know what it was. Later I realised it must have been the greasepaint that he’d worn onstage. The window was open but I don’t remember any breeze, just the sounds of the Big Dipper rattling on its tracks and the screams of excited riders.
I don’t know if all that is true or not. Some of it is. I know he raped me, but I don’t remember the details very clearly. The dialogue may be reinvented. Perhaps my imagination is working overtime. It was mostly just a blur of pain, struggle and the room spinning. Perhaps they will ask me in court, though I can’t imagine why, and if they do, I suppose I will have to tell them the truth as best I can. But I do remember something I had forgotten. It may mean nothing, but when I caught a glimpse of his forearm, I noticed some numbers tattooed on his skin. I had no idea what they could have been. A telephone number written in blue ballpoint? But I’ve since seen enough films and read enough books to know that it was something like the concentration camp numbers the Nazis used to tattoo on people’s arms. Which is odd, because I don’t think he was Jewish and I thought he grew up over here. But it might mean something to you. At least it’s something that might help to verify my identification, if that’s required. It seemed to me that these numbers were something he wanted to keep secret, but I saw them. I’m just sorry I can’t remember them the way you remember Elvis’s Teen and Twenty Disc Club membership number.
When he had finished, he left me like a rag doll, sprawled there. I hurt all over. I even thought my arm might have been broken. I could hear him talking to someone. I couldn’t make out the words through the fog of pain but I thought I heard him say, ‘You know you want to. Go on, do your own thing!’ Then he laughed. I had forgotten about the other man, the one who’d taken photographs earlier. Maybe I assumed he’d left the room. I don’t know. Most likely I didn’t think about him at all. I had been vaguely aware of occasional sounds in the background I suppose I must have thought they were coming through the open window. Someone must have put a coin in the machine, because the Laughing Policeman started up from the Pleasure Beach and sounded like he would never stop. I hate that sound to this day.
As I slowly turned myself over and tried to get up, I saw him again, the other man. He was very close to me and he was fumbling with the front of his trousers. I probably screamed or cried out again. I don’t remember. Again I was forced down and again a man forced himself on me, in me, and again I don’t remember much about it.
Maybe after Caxton I was even more passive. I’d stopped struggling completely. There was no point. They were too strong. I was frightened they’d hurt me if I fought back. I just lay there and closed my eyes, trying to imagine being in another place but failing. I didn’t fight. I’ve always felt guilty about that. Like it was my fault for not fighting.
Maybe I blacked out with the pain and fear. All I knew was the weight was suddenly gone from me and I could move freely, if painfully. I had a bag with me, I remember, a shoulder bag I always carried, where I kept keys and money and Lorna Doone and my autograph book, and for some reason it was in my mind. I had to have my bag. I was leaving and I had to have my bag. It was on a little polished wooden table with bowed legs by the door and I must have picked it up as I stumbled out. Nobody tried to stop me. I heard Caxton say behind me that I wasn’t to tell anyone. Something like that. Nobody would believe me. People would just think I was a lying little whore. He said I ought to be grateful that he’d had sex with me. That I’d lost my virginity to the great Danny Caxton. They were talking again as I went out but I don’t know what they were saying. I was in a daze and God knows what I looked like but I walked down the corridor, found a lift and pressed the button for the ground floor. I don’t know if anybody noticed me in the lobby but I felt as if everyone was looking at me and they knew I’d done a bad thing.
I must have walked around Blackpool for hours, but all I remember is being sick in the street, people skirting around me, looking at me, thinking I was just a drunken whore. I wanted to scream out and tell them what had happened to me, but the shame was too great. Was it my fault for singing that song? Did he think it was some sort of an invitation?
I was so late back that I missed dinner. I must have looked a sight. I just remember my father telling me off for being late and my mother saying I didn’t look well. I said I didn’t feel well, either, and I wasn’t hungry. My mother was worried. She felt my forehead, said it was a bit hot and she hoped I wasn’t coming down with something. I thought she could smell the sick on my breath and maybe thought I’d been drinking. All I wanted was a bath to wash off the filth of what had happened to me, but we weren’t allowed to run the hot water
at that time of evening, so I just went to our room, undressed, brushed my teeth for ages and tried to wash myself as best I could with cold water from the basin. Then I curled up in bed and cried and cried and cried.
I don’t remember when Melanie came to bed. Perhaps I was already asleep. She told me the next day she saw some spots of blood on my knickers, which I had just dropped by the bedside. She asked me what happened. I said my period must have come early. That was also why I could get away with not feeling well and being a bit off all the following week. It was common knowledge between Mum and me that I had ‘difficult’ periods, that sometimes the cramps were painful and I became moody and withdrawn. It was the perfect excuse even though I wasn’t due for another week and a half. I wasn’t always as regular as some people—
Linda put down her pen and refilled her wine glass. She had let her cigarette burn down on the ashtray while she wrote, so she lit another. She noticed that her hand was shaking as she did so, perhaps because it had been so tense gripping the pen to write. Dusk was gathering quickly, and the shadows lengthened on the garden, the river itself already dark under the shade of the sheltering trees. A blackbird sang somewhere, louder than the other birds. She knew she was almost finished now and already felt spent, the way she did when she knew she’d got to the end of a particularly difficult poem after weeks of drafts and revisions. She put the cigarette down again and set off on the final words . . .
The rest of the week went by like a bad dream. I don’t think Melanie knew what to make of me but she never said anything directly. I tried to do the things we enjoyed doing, but my heart wasn’t in it and I’m sure Melanie knew. It was hard to believe at first that life just went on as normal when we got back home, that people just went about their business as usual as if nothing had happened, like in Auden’s poem, while Icarus’ wax wings melt, the horse scratches its behind and the dog goes on with its doggy life, when all I really wanted was to stop all the clocks. No, that’s not true. That’s a different poem. And I didn’t want a big fuss. I didn’t want anyone to know, especially after that abortive visit to the police. I wanted everyone to go on like the horse and the dog and not notice me, my imaginary wax wings melting as I approached the sun, falling, falling into the darkness of the sea. Icarus died. I pulled myself out of the darkness, shook myself off and went on with my life. I squeezed it all into a ball and hid it away in the deepest darkest place I could find, where it remains to this day, a dark star inside me.
In a very odd way, I feel that I’ve been feeding off it ever since, the poetry has been feeding off it, though never about it, this dark star I made of the thing that happened to me when I was on the cusp of adulthood. This dark star that I haven’t told anyone about. I think even now talking about it worries me not so much because it upsets me, though that is certainly the case, but because I’m afraid I might lose something by letting out the darkness that feeds me. Lose my muse, my creativity, my poetry. I wrote earlier that sometimes I need the darkness, and I believe this is true. But it doesn’t mean I wanted what happened.
It’s odd the way memory works on the sense of time. When it happened, it all seemed to happen so fast. Though the pain seemed never-ending, details flashed by, hardly noticed. The texture of candlewick, smell of greasepaint, the Laughing Policeman, the numbers on Caxton’s arm. When you think about it afterwards, it runs in slow motion. You remember the details. But when you recall it so many years later it has settled, then shifted and altered in your memory and become something else. Not that it didn’t happen, and not that it didn’t happen more or less the way I remember it happened, but I have perhaps forgotten some things and even added some. I couldn’t swear to the Laughing Policeman or the click of the camera. It may have been longer between my arrival in the suite and the rape. But I do remember that two men raped me that day. Surely that is the important thing? One was Danny Caxton, the other is the man I saw in the photograph. I did sing ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’, and I do remember the numbers. Maybe Caxton said something else when I was leaving. Maybe more was said, but if it was it has gone now. This is the best I can do. It’s as true as I can make it.
When I first started out, my poetry was free, fanciful, shocking, with outrageous imagery and flights of jazzy rhythmic cadences. I couldn’t get it out quickly enough, tripping over my own feet to find out what the next metaphor would be. I hardly ever revised anything. Now, though, my verse seems crabbed, constipated, metaphysical, slow and hard to squeeze out. The critics like it. They tell me it has a certain stately grace. Is that what’s happened to me? Strange that it should flow so easily in my youth, after what happened, then seem to harden, to crystallise and insist on taking certain rigid forms and structures in my middle age. Stately grace is all very well, but sometimes I long for that free loping rhythm and ringing cadence of my youth, like I long for that carefree innocent young girl that was.
Linda closed the notebook and put down the pen. She could hardly see any more for tears. Darkness had fallen, and the last of the swallows were swooping and diving over the woods. The bats would be out soon. She rubbed her eyes, filled her wine glass to the brim and lit another cigarette.
16
‘Well, Paul, it looks like the end of the road for you, doesn’t it?’
‘No comment,’ said Warner. He was sitting nervously in the interview room beside his legal aid solicitor, who didn’t seem too happy at being woken up early on a Saturday morning. Warner had balked at Jessie Malton, perhaps because she was a woman and she was black, but he was quickly put in his place and told it wasn’t as easy as that to change legal aid representation, and you certainly couldn’t do it simply because you objected to the lawyer’s colour and gender.
‘I think your attitude might soon change,’ said Annie, opening the thick folder in front of her. While Annie and Gerry had been enjoying themselves at the Riverside Inn, they had managed to persuade Jazz Singh to work a late shift and Vic Manson to stay on an extra hour. Vic was married, so all he had to do was phone and say he’d be home a bit late, but Jazz had had a hot date that she wasn’t too pleased about cancelling. On the other hand, she knew what had been done to Mimsy Moffat, and she wanted to contribute her best efforts to putting her killer away, and if her girlfriend couldn’t understand that about her by now, she told Annie, there was no point going on with the relationship. Perhaps Annie and Gerry could have gone at him that evening, too, but they wouldn’t have had anywhere near as much ammunition as they had now – including Mimosa’s sketchbook and mobile – and he wouldn’t have had a night in the cell to probe his conscience, if he had one, or anticipate the worst, if he didn’t.
‘First off, we managed to recover Mimosa’s belongings from the van she was in on the night she died,’ Annie said, ‘and we found a couple of interesting things among them.’
‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘There’s a little sketchbook, for a start. They were sketches of mostly people she knew – Albert, her mother, Jade, the other girls, Sunny and his pals. And you.’
‘I’ve seen that. So what? She always had a pencil and a sketchbook in her hands, even when you wanted her to do a bit of work.’
‘Then there was her mobile,’ Annie went on. ‘Calls to and from Albert, Jade, Sunny, home. And again, you. Mostly from.’
‘I told you she helped me and Albert out sometimes.’
‘So these phone calls were all work-connected?’
‘What else would they be?’
‘Most went unanswered. About fifteen over the past month. Couldn’t you get through to her?’
‘Obviously not. No doubt she was busy with her Paki friends.’
‘They weren’t friends, Paul. At least not towards the end. What was so important that you couldn’t pass on a message to her through Albert? You saw him often enough.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Fifteen unanswered calls. Your friend’s little sister. It’s odd, that’s all.’
‘I d
on’t see why.’
‘Did she tell you anything about her association with the Pakistanis?’ Gerry asked.
‘No. For Christ’s sake, I’ve told you, she agreed with us!’
‘Us?’
‘Me and Albert. I don’t understand this. Mimsy was always making disparaging remarks about Pakis. She even got in trouble for it at school.’
‘But you didn’t talk about her odd behaviour with Albert last Tuesday night, didn’t get him all het up?’
‘No. I told you. We watched DVDs and fell asleep.’
‘What about the fingerprint?’ Annie said.
‘What fingerprint?’
‘We found Albert’s fingerprints in Jim Nuttall’s van, as you’d expect. But why did we also find yours? The same van that Albert Moffat drove on a casual basis, the one that was parked in the lane at the back of your building on the night in question.’
‘No comment.’
‘You’ve already been told you don’t have to say anything,’ Annie reminded him, ‘so it’s well within your rights to say “no comment”, but as I’m sure Ms Malton will tell you, that bit about later relying on something in court is a deal-breaker. Should this case go to court, and I have to tell you the CPS think we have a good case, then you will almost certainly be asked this question, among others, and your “no comment” from today’s interview will be noted at the time. But we do have the fingerprint. Think about it, Paul.’
When the Music's Over: The 23rd DCI Banks Mystery Page 43