Scar Tissue

by Judith Cutler

  Chapter Five

  The next day, on the grounds that if I was thoroughly busy I wouldn’t have time to worry, I put in a good hard day’s work on the most inaccessible bits of the Daweses’ house. We had a minor triumph. Over the porch Meg and I found a name and a date: Fullers, 1502. OK, it was painted out with many coats of whitewash but we could fix that easily enough. We were all as pleased as if we owned the place ourselves. Fullers. I was glad we’d found the origin of its name.

  But it wasn’t the excitement of other restoration work there that kept me awake that night, though it certainly figured in the endless calculations I kept doing in my head. It was simple fear. The nightmares had been bad enough. My favourite, if that’s the right term, had me yelling blue murder as usual – one reason I couldn’t ever consider sharing a flat, however much money it would have saved. But being awake – lying there, remembering Granville’s threats that he wouldn’t just carve my face, he’d slice into my stomach deep enough for me to see my own insides – was worse, far worse. I knew he’d relish the chance. Enjoy the feel of the knife going in; enjoy the sight of my face. He’d told me, more than once, his favourite war story, about this man staggering into the field hospital with his guts looped over his arm so he could carry them. That was how he wanted me to turn up in A and E.

  By six, sleep and I completely gave up on each other. So it seemed a good idea to get up and take a load in the van to the laundrette before anyone else got there. Although it was Chapter Five going to be another glorious day, I didn’t have anywhere to dry so much laundry – sheets, towels, T-shirts – so I forked out for the dryer, too. I took care folding, as I always did, and piled everything neatly into the wicker basket I’d bought at a craft fair in Canterbury. And then I picked my way towards my flat. It couldn’t have been eight, because some man on the Today programme – Meg had got her sticky fingers on this radio too – was just introducing the weather forecast. And I was thinking how this was one day we didn’t need a forecast when I saw Arthur the Postie pushing his bike into the street. I waved. He waved. He dug in his bag and fished out a package, which he brandished at me. Then there was an almighty bang and there was no packet and no bike and no Arthur.

  No. There was an Arthur. An Arthur screaming like people scream on war movies because their hands aren’t there any more. OK, only one of Arthur’s hands wasn’t there any more. The other was grasping at his face, which also wasn’t there any more. I had to stop the blood spurting. I had to find my mobile and I had to stop my hands shaking long enough to dial 999.

  Somehow I must have managed, because very soon the street was full of emergency vehicles and a paramedic was congratulating me on my first aid with the clean towels. I’d almost certainly saved his life, he was saying. Though what life there was to save if you’d only one hand and no face I didn’t know.

  I didn’t ask to go in the ambulance with him. I was too much of a coward. I just stood in the road watching it drive away. So did lots of other people. We all liked Arthur, even if he mostly brought us bills. But I was the only one herded into a police car.

  My brain started working again. ‘I have to call my boss,’ I said. ‘I’m responsible for driving the van to pick up the rest of the team.’

  ‘You won’t want to drive that van for a bit,’ observed the young PC who’d shoe-horned me into the car. It seemed he’d been detailed to stick with me – there were plenty of other uniforms milling round by now, making nuisances of themselves with police tape just when people needed to get their cars out to go to work, but none of them took any notice of me.

  ‘It’s got all our gear in it. Everything. So even if your scene of crime guys need to look at it –’

  ‘“Even”! You said “even”! What planet are you on, miss?’

  For the first time I noticed he’d got ginger hair and white eyelashes. I loathe white eyelashes. ‘I’m going to be sick,’ I announced. It was a ploy I’d had to use countless times. Never failed. The only difference was that this time I was sick. Very. Like the other day at Fuller’s. Even if I’d had no breakfast, there was bile.

  But at least I was out of the police car and had my mobile in my hand. Paula answered first ring.

  I explained about the van as best I could. My brain seemed to have deserted me, along with the contents of my stomach, and I’d only managed to stutter a couple of sentences when Paula announced she was coming over. I passed the handset over to the young man. He made various protests – ‘We have to – we need – you’ll be able –’ – that kind of thing, but he soon switched off, defeated, to judge by the expression on his face. ‘She says to wait here,’ he said, as if for one moment he needed to.

  The breathing space had given me time to get my brain back into gear. ‘I need to wash and change,’ I said.

  ‘I’m under orders to see you don’t,’ he muttered.

  ‘You’re going to arrest me if I wash a dying man’s blood off my hands?’ I asked, loudly enough for the neighbours to hear.

  There was a murmur of sympathy. Someone stepped forward with an old counterpane – we none of us earned much, and no doubt she couldn’t afford to ruin a good duvet – to wrap round me. ‘You poor girl,’ she said, smoothing the hair from my forehead. ‘And brave, too. You should get a medal. Shouldn’t she?’ she rallied the rest of the women.

  Someone produced a mug of tea.

  ‘I’ll get a bath running for you now, sweetheart,’ another said. ‘And if you give me your keys I’ll get you a change of clothes.’

  That was one offer I wouldn’t be accepting. Everyone knew Sal’s kids were the biggest thieves on the estate, and Sal the biggest fence. But according to her lights it was a kind offer. And it produced an escort of women to my own front door. The constable was literally biting his nails with worry.

  Tough.

  Paula’s hatchback suddenly screeched to a halt – goodness knows how many speed tickets she had picked up. When she emerged, however, her manner was as serenely unflappable as ever, and she greeted the constable as if he were a ray of daylight in an especially dark cave. At the same time she scooped me from my doorstep into the tiny hall: we all have keys to each other’s homes, in case one of us goes home with something vital. When the constable muttered something sounding like ‘forensic evidence’ she snatched a bin liner from a roll in my cupboard and thrust it at me. ‘Clothes in there. Now, about my van –’ she began.

  I beat it to the bathroom.

  The sight of Arthur’s blood sluicing down the drain made me sick again. But at least I knew I was clean now.

  No towels, of course. I’d wrapped my bath towel round the stump of his arm and covered the little left of his face with the other. In a well-regulated household there are probably lots of spare towels. When you’re on not much more than the national minimum wage, and Paula really, truly couldn’t afford to pay any more than she did – she’d shown us the books – you don’t have spare anything.

  I used the bath mat.

  Whatever Paula and the constable had been saying to each other, it had kept Paula from passing fresh clothes into the bathroom. I found I couldn’t put on anything I’d put on clean only a couple of hours ago. And of course they were supposed to be put in that bag for the policeman.

  You’d think, after all these years, I wouldn’t be embarrassed about men seeing my body. But that was then. Now I was a private citizen, entitled to as much bodily decency as the next woman. And I could no more have walked naked in front of that young man than I could have flown to the moon. Holding the bathmat in front of me, I opened the door a crack and hollered.

  ‘If I can’t stop you coming with me,’ I told Paula – and to be honest, I hadn’t tried very hard – ‘you must at least call van der Poele and Todd and tell them you’re held up.’ Van der Poele would be furious to know that his work was being delayed; Todd Dawes would be horrified by the reason. There’d be some sort of action, from one of them, for better or worse.

  ‘You’re right. If,’ s
he added, sarcasm running in beads along her tongue, ‘it’s OK by you, Constable?’

  I had a funny idea that it wasn’t, but since his partner, a young woman who’d turned up while I was in the shower, was mouthing vigorously at him, he simply nodded and started looking at my books.

  I could almost hear Detective Sergeant Marsh sneering, ‘Read a lot for someone of your sort, don’t you?’

  And the funny thing was that that was exactly what he did say, half an hour later, when we were in an interview room, together with a totally silent WPC, back at Ashford nick.

  ‘I don’t see what my reading habits have to do with the death of a decent, kindly old man,’ I said.

  ‘Who said he was dead?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, copper, a man loses a hand and most of his face. Is he really going to survive?’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, sounding like a ten-year-old contradicting his mum, ‘he just might. He’s in intensive care and it’s touch and go.’

  What could I say? Most people in that situation might prefer to die. Perhaps Marsh thought the same. A little silence, less hostile, grew between us.

  He broke it. ‘So why should anyone want to kill Arthur?’

  He wasn’t catching me that way. We both knew that Arthur must have activated a parcel bomb meant for someone else, didn’t we? But I’d let him tell me. I shook my head. ‘He was a very nice, friendly, decent man.’ Not a bad epitaph, come to think of it.

  ‘But someone tried to kill him.’

  I shook my head sadly, like some philosopher shocked at the evil man can perpetrate. Evil in the abstract, that is. Man in general. I had to do something with my face, after all: I wasn’t going to let Marsh have the pleasure of seeing me weep, or even throw up.

  ‘Who tried to kill him, Cathy?’

  I didn’t correct his pronunciation.

  ‘You must know who tried to kill him, Cathy. After all, the parcel that exploded was addressed to you.’ It came out like a vicious accusation.

  The policewoman gasped. I didn’t blame her. I’d have gasped if I hadn’t sussed that out the moment the first splatter of blood hit my windscreen. But I’d rather he didn’t know that, or know that my brain had been on overtime ever since trying to prove to myself that I didn’t know who’d sent it when I obviously did. When I’d moved to Kent, I’d been so naïve, naïve to the point of stupid, hadn’t I? As if Ashford wasn’t just three short motorway hours from Birmingham (OK, M25 permitting it was three). I’d done my civic duty and registered as an elector; I was in the phone book; the household bills were in my name.

  It wouldn’t have taken Clive Granville long to find me, not if he’d put his mind and the minds of his minions to it. An hour? A day at the very most. And he would have been on the phone to order the package as soon as he knew where to send it. When he told the bomb-maker to make sure it would get delivered the next day, he’d be obeyed. It was only because Arthur, kindly old Arthur, had raised the package in the air to show me my bounty that he’d been the victim. Except that that didn’t sound like the work of one of Granville’s usual henchmen. If it was, in fact, Granville would be furious – raging, ranting furious – that anyone had produced such an unstable device. He’d boasted once that when one of his hit-men had shot someone in the stomach, leaving the victim to die a hideous lingering death, he’d killed the hit man the same way, just to teach him a lesson. He knew a great deal about pain and pain thresholds did Granville – perhaps there was some truth in the persistent rumour that he was an ex-medic. No one ever accused him of being a professor of logic.

  It would have been such a relief to pour all this out. If I’d been talking to that nice woman sergeant on The Bill I would have done. She’d have written it all down and got me police protection and the baddies would have been found and taken to court without being able to threaten the witnesses – and they’d have gone to a jail where they couldn’t tell their accomplices on the outside whom to punish. But I wasn’t talking to a nice TV cop. I was talking to Detective Sergeant Marsh, the man who had almost certainly connived in the moving of a body – a body tied up with our own blue rope.

  I’d better get angry. I could do anger quite well. I’d practised so I could do it without yelling or swearing or bursting into tears. Unless I had to, of course. So I slammed my palms flat on the table. If they’d had the tape-recorder running – and come to think of it, why didn’t they? – I might have joggled the tape off its spools.

  ‘Listen,’ I said not loudly, but very clearly, ‘you’re treating me –’

  Someone tapped on the door and opened it.

  I carried on louder, clearer, ‘– like the villain, not the victim. Being a victim’s never appealed, but being a villain certainly doesn’t.’ I wanted to tell him to stop dissing me, but maybe the language of black kids hadn’t reached this far south yet. In any case, the idea wasn’t to give him language lessons, but to get me out of here.

  It’s a good job there wasn’t a tape recorder because it would have almost certainly have fused at the number of blue words March shot off when he saw Messy Mascara’s face appear.

  ‘Ms Tyler’s legal representative is here,’ she announced, not so much flinching as raising her eyes in boredom at Marsh’s language.

  ‘What’s she doing with a legal representative? We’re not charging her with anything.’

  I should hope not. Even Marsh couldn’t be that stupid. Not when he’d just admitted the parcel was meant for me. He stomped off, slamming the door behind him. Pity the effect was spoiled by the constable who opened it immediately and peered in. It was White Eyelashes, of course, the one who’d been so user-unfriendly at what even I might describe as the scene of the crime. Yes, it was easier to call it that than personalise it by thinking of it as the place where Arthur was blown up. Poor Arthur: after years of being almost toothless, he’d recently saved up for a full set of dentures, which had been giving him all sorts of trouble. And now he didn’t have a mouth to put them in.

  I mustn’t cry. I mustn’t cry. Because if I did I’d have to admit I didn’t know who I was crying for, him or me.

  I must think about who my legal representative might be and how he or she had got there. And who was going to pay. I’d never been the proud possessor of such an exalted person before. I’d known about the duty solicitor whose miserable job it was to represent anyone unfortunate enough to be hauled in for questioning who’d asked for legal support. I’d even met a few, with greyish, sagging suits – and for all I knew, greyish, sagging brains to match. But ‘Ms Tyler’s legal representative’ sounded a good deal more professional than that. I looked forward to meeting a very sharp suit indeed. The only question was who was paying for the suit – not to mention the brain inside. I certainly couldn’t afford to. I hoped to God the Pots hadn’t clubbed together – they had no cash to throw around.

  What if it wasn’t a legal eagle? What if it was a particularly devious move by Clive Granville to get hold of me? But even I didn’t think he could get away with murdering me in a police station, no matter how much I distrusted Marsh. Except getting away with wasn’t exactly the same thing as murdering, was it?

  The silence was broken by the re-entry of Marsh. With his thumb – a remarkably straight, uncurly thumb, the cuticles bloody fringes where he chewed them – he gestured me out of the room.

  I followed the direction of Marsh’s unyielding digit.

  Had I given the matter any thought, I’d have supposed that my legal representative would have been allocated a halfway decent room and that I’d have been discreetly ushered into it. I didn’t expect to be decanted into the public waiting area, full of those posters alerting me to rabies and other interesting conditions. And I didn’t expect to see Jan Dawes sitting on a plastic seat, wearing one of those linen suits that crease in the right places, with an ultra-smart briefcase on her knee. Although there was a folded Guardian on the case, she was staring at the same posters. I might have had a stare, too – you never
knew when you might need to know about the Colorado beetle – but I found myself yelling, ‘Jan,’ and letting her enfold me in her expensive linen arms. Her case and the paper slid disregarded to the floor.

  Jan turned in outrage towards the door where Marsh should have been. In his rapid absence, she had to content herself with turning on Mascara.

  Before either could say much, I stepped between them, holding up a peace-making hand. ‘Hang on, hang on. She isn’t paid enough to be shouted at. It’s people higher up you want to skin alive.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Jan said, her voice having a steely edge I’d never heard before. In a marginally less frightening but still icy voice she continued, ‘Please tell the officer in charge that I do not intend to discuss private matters with my client in a public waiting area. If your colleagues can’t provide me with a suitable interview room I shall have no hesitation removing my client to other premises. Should they wish to speak to her again, they can do so via my office. Here is my card.’

  And we were out of the building before you could say ‘parcel bomb’.

  ‘I’ve got to get away from Ashford,’ I said. ‘I’ll go back to Brum or even stop off in London.’

  Jan, occupied by reversing out of her parking space, merely grunted. But she headed in the general direction of my flat, so I assumed she wasn’t going to argue.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a lawyer,’ I ventured, when the traffic thinned.

  ‘Oh, yes. That was how I met Todd. I like to keep my hand in. But I prefer choosing curtains. Now, you go and get your things together, and I’ll run you to the station.’ Her voice was pretty cold. I shot a look but her face gave nothing away. Had I caused some sort of row – had what I thought was a quip about curtains been a sign that she’d really not been happy with the descent of Paula’s Pots on her property? She certainly wasn’t behaving like the woman in whose arms I’d cried in my flat.

  She stopped at the end of my street. There was still a lot of police activity, a couple of TV vans and some ominous sheets of plastic sheeting around. ‘I’ll wait here. Go and get as much as you can comfortably carry and leave the rest. And don’t hang about, Caffy – you’ve got a train to catch.’