by Mark Morris
In my car I fished out the grubby strip of paper the girl in Alex’s building had given me and dialled Cressley’s number. He picked up on the fifth ring and barked his name.
‘Mr Cressley,’ I said, ‘this is Ruth Gemmill. I called you the other day about my brother, Alex. He’s a tenant of yours at five Moxon Street.’
‘Oh aye,’ Cressley said. ‘You’re the one what dragged our Lance out on a wild goose chase.’
I ignored the jibe. ‘Mr Cressley, Alex still hasn’t turned up and his family and friends are getting very worried about him. I was wondering, therefore, whether it would be possible for me to drop by and pick up the keys to his flat. It’s possible that there may be some clue to his whereabouts in there: a diary, an address book, something that might tell us where he’s gone.’
Cressley sighed. ‘I thought our Lance had already had a look round.’
‘A cursory one, that’s all. He was only in the flat for thirty seconds.’
‘Aye, well, I’m not in the habit of giving out keys to my properties willy-nilly.’
‘But this is an exceptional case, surely?’
He snorted. ‘Every bloody case is exceptional, love. You’d be surprised some of the stories I’ve been told.’
‘All right, then,’ I said, ‘if you won’t lend me the keys, I’ll have to call the police, see what they have to say.’
I was hoping that the magic ‘P’ word would encourage Cressley to reconsider, but he merely said, ‘Yeah, you do that, love.’
‘You don’t mind the police getting involved?’ I said, a little deflated.
‘Why should I? I’ve got nothing to hide.’
‘Right. Well, the police it is, then,’ I said. ‘Goodbye, Mr Cressley.’
I waited for him to say something, to sigh and concede that maybe we could get this matter sorted out between us, after all, but instead he put the phone down without saying another word.
‘Pig,’ I muttered, frustrated. I had no intention of going to the police. They and Cressley were probably in cahoots, involved up to their fat, red necks in whatever was going on. No, if I was going to get anywhere I had to resort to more drastic means. What I was planning made my stomach squirm with nerves, but I was determined not to be deflected from my course. I drove out of the car park and around Greenwell for a bit until I spotted a hardware shop, then I bought what I needed and headed up to Moxon Street. I kept my eye out for Cressley’s Espace, but all was quiet. Parking my car a little way up the street in the hope that he wouldn’t spot it if he or his son turned up, I put on my jacket and slid the crowbar I’d bought up my sleeve.
As I walked back down the road to number five, I had to make a real effort to stop myself glancing from side to side. I even had to concentrate on walking normally, my legs felt so stiff and uncooperative.
My heart was pounding when I reached the door and pressed the buzzer for flat three. What would I do if Cressley turned up now? Run for it? Try to bluff it out? ‘Come on, come on,’ I muttered and pressed the buzzer again, even though I’d only given the flat’s occupant maybe five seconds to answer my first summons. She must have been nearly there when I’d buzzed the second time, because almost immediately there was a crackle and a voice said, ‘Who is it?’
‘Hi,’ I said, ‘it’s me again. Ruth Gemmill. Could you buzz me in, please?’
There was a pause, then the girl said, ‘I don’t think I’m supposed to. You got me into trouble last time.’
‘What sort of trouble?’ I asked. When the girl didn’t answer I said, ‘They didn’t hurt you, did they?’
‘No,’ said the girl. ‘They threatened me. They said they’d throw me out if I let in anyone else who didn’t live here.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry about that.’ And I genuinely was sorry, but my need to get into Alex’s flat overrode my guilt at the further trouble I might be about to dump her in. I’d never considered myself very good at lying, but now in an easy, light-hearted tone I said, ‘But it’s OK this time. My brother’s still not turned up, so Mr Cressley’s given me a key to look round his flat. The only thing is, he didn’t have a spare key for the house. He said there’d be somebody here to let me in.’ I paused, and then took what I knew was a big gamble. ‘You can ring and ask him if you don’t believe me.’
I fully expected her to say, All right, I will, but after a wait of maybe ten seconds the door buzzed. I pushed it open triumphantly. I was in! Excited and scared, I ran up the stairs, bypassing the girl’s closed door and all the other closed doors in the building, all the way up to Alex’s flat.
Breaking in felt like crossing an invisible line. Despite my good intentions, I knew it was something that could drop me in the biggest pile of kak imaginable. The only remotely unlawful thing I’d done in the past was stealing a sugared jelly snake from our local corner shop when I was eight years old. As I rammed the curved end of the crowbar into the gap between door and frame and heaved, I felt that exact same terror-rush of adrenalin that I’d felt all those years ago. I winced and gritted my teeth as though that alone could cushion the sound of wood splintering. The noise of the door giving way seemed abysmally loud in the quiet building. I expected doors to open all the way up from the ground floor, residents to come rushing to see what was going on. But nothing happened, and with a final heave and a final groaning crunch the door to Alex’s flat swung open.
The damage to the lock didn’t look too bad. I thought that if I cleared up the bits of wood that had fallen on the floor, pushed some of the splayed splinters back into position and closed the door when I left, then there was a chance that no one would even notice the flat had been broken into for a while, maybe not even until Alex returned to it. I glanced behind me, then stooped and cleared up the debris, which I carried together with my crowbar into the flat. Just inside the door was the note I’d pushed under the first time I’d come here. I picked it up and scrunched it in my fist, then closed the door behind me.
Alex’s flat was dim, the curtains closed, and it smelled of dusty unoccupation. But beneath that smell was another – a warm, homey smell, a smell that you couldn’t really define except by saying that it was Alex’s smell. I breathed it in, and was surprised to find that it brought a tear to my eye, a lump to my throat. It was like being a hair’s breadth away from him and yet unable to hear or see or touch him. At that moment I longed to look up and see him standing there smiling at me, longed to hear him say, Hiya, Gemmo. How’s it going?
‘Alex,’ I whispered, but the word sank into nothingness, deadened by dust.
As I glanced down his narrow entrance corridor to the open door at the far end, I saw what I always saw wherever he lived – shelves crammed with books and videos and CDs. His flat was as cluttered as all his other rooms and flats and houses had ever been. Despite his sexuality my brother was a typical man. He collected things, and like all men who collect things, if he had one of something then he had to have them all. If he found an author he liked, he wouldn’t be happy until he’d bought and read every word that author had ever written. If there was a band he enthused about, he had to own every song they’d ever released. He had to buy every episode of a favourite TV series on video, or every film of a particular actor or director. And the trouble was, Alex had a mass of wild and eclectic passions: Alfred Hitchcock, Wim Wenders and Stanley Kubrick; Australian movies; Carry On films; Kenneth Williams and Joe Orton; The Avengers, Blakes’ 7 and Friends; Hammer Horror; Sherlock Holmes; Star Wars.
As a result, wherever he lived was always crammed with stuff, much of it tat to you and me, but a treasure trove to Alex and his like-minded friends.
And then there was his work too. However passionate Alex was about all these things, he was doubly passionate about his work.
I walked down the corridor, bypassing a door on my left (bathroom) and one on my right (bedroom). The open door at the end led to the main room, the living room, which was large and rectangular. It contained a sofa bed and matching armchair in pale blue
material, which I knew came from Ikea because I had gone with Alex to choose it God knows how many years ago. The armchair faced a big TV and VCR, videos and magazines stacked beside it in a haphazard pile. The TV stood in front of a heavy old sideboard on which stood a lava lamp, a large glass ashtray containing a pile of bits and pieces (paper clips, elastic bands, a book of matches from a restaurant, a broken skeleton key ring, a plastic cockroach, a black marker pen) and tons of action figures – Darth Vader and Godzilla; a Dalek which I knew talked when you pressed a button on the top of its head; an alien from Independence Day; Dracula sitting up in a coffin; a large and fearsome-looking scorpion; Pinhead from Hellraiser; some kind of robot which looked vaguely familiar; a few others that I couldn’t identify.
Alex liked so much stuff, his life was so enriched by his many, many interests, that I find the only trouble when describing him – as now – is that sometimes I’m reduced to lists. Whenever I think of my brother, it amazes me that one person could be interested in so much. Because as well as all these sedentary, insular pursuits, Alex loved being outdoors too. He loved mountain-climbing; he’d been on expeditions; his work had taken him to some of the remotest places in the world. He had friends from all walks of life – mountaineers and explorers and archaeologists were forever staying with him in London. He regularly received e-mails from places like Tibet and New Zealand, China and Tanzania.
Standing here in his flat, surrounded by everything that was Alex, everything but the man himself, brought it home to me how incredible and unlikely his decision to relocate to Greenwell had been. What was going on? There was some hidden agenda that I couldn’t (or was refusing) to see. I felt like a murder detective, surrounded by every clue you could possibly need, and still unable to grasp the solution. I stood there looking around, as if wondering what to tackle first, and eventually walked over to his desk.
It was at the far end of the room, next to a glass-fronted bookcase containing multiple copies of Alex’s books. I turned on his computer, waited for it to boot up. When it had I clicked on Outlook Express to check his e-mails, but there was nothing in either his inbox or in the sent items file. Strange. I rooted around in the papers on his desk, but it was all academic stuff, journals and photocopied articles and copious reams of notes, nothing personal whatsoever. Also, oddly, there was nothing that related to Alex’s teaching post at the school – no piles of homework to mark, no dog-eared curriculum, no missives bearing the school crest.
I straightened up, licking my dry lips, disturbed not by what was here, but by what wasn’t. It was as though someone had come in and carefully excised every part of Alex’s recent life. But why? There was only one reason I could think of in order to remove any incriminating evidence. I searched the flat, but even though it was all achingly redolent of Alex (the Millennium Falcon hanging above his bed; the climbing equipment heaped in the hallway; the clutter of Body Shop toiletries in the bathroom beneath a poster of Hitchcock’s The Birds), there was no clue as to where he might have gone.
There was, however, one thing in his flat which gave me hope, which led me to believe that he may have left here willingly. In his bedroom was a large shelving unit stacked with around two dozen empty glass tanks. The tanks were where Alex normally kept his menagerie – his spiders and scorpions and snakes and exotic beetles. If he had been abducted then surely these tanks would now be full of dead or dying creatures. Of course there were other possibilities – maybe Cresswell had insisted Alex get rid of his pets, or maybe someone had taken them, perhaps transferring them from their large tanks into more portable containers. It did cross my mind, thinking of the fiddleback I had seen on the stairs, that someone may simply have come in here and let them all go. However, if that had been the case, there would surely have been some evidence of their occupation. The flat had been closed and locked up, and most of Alex’s collection would have been too large to squeeze under the door. Some would have been eaten by others, some would have sought refuge in the cracks and crannies, but there would still have been enough of the little darlings around for me to feel as though I’d blundered into some phobic’s nightmare.
Wouldn’t there?
I shuddered and looked around, up at the ceilings and walls. I took a step back from the bed that I was standing too close to in case something large and black and many-legged scuttled out from beneath it.
Moving more warily now, I made my way back to the main room. As I stepped through the door, my eyes darting everywhere, a memory suddenly jumped to the forefront of my mind. I had a recollection of something moving at the periphery of my vision, of turning my head and glimpsing a lumpy shape beneath the dust cover on a settee. It’s hard to explain how, but all at once the memory seemed to spark a connection in my head, and I rushed over to Alex’s old Ikea sofa and, regardless of what might be lurking under there, pulled off the cushions and threw them on the floor behind me.
There, as I had somehow known it would be, was what I had been looking for. With a trembling hand I reached down and picked up the two books bound together with an elastic band. One was an address book, the other a chunky blue cloth-bound diary. I removed the elastic band and opened the diary. It felt unreal somehow, even magical. I half-expected to hear the tinkle of tiny bells, see a glittery puff of fairy dust, as if by opening the book I had broken the seal on some enchantment.
I knew the books had been left for me. I don’t know how I knew, I just knew. I realize that sounds trite, but I felt there were already enough forces working against me in this town, and that this little bit of good fortune was simply no more than I deserved.
Alex had moved to Greenwell around seven weeks ago. I turned to 12 August, the date he had arrived. In his diary, in his looping, sloping script which always seemed to convey a sense of excitement and enthusiasm, was written: Arrived in Greenwell! Moved into 5 Moxon Street!
I smiled. Alex always wrote significant personal events down in his diary because he was a great one for anniversaries. He’d often say things like: ‘Do you realize it’s seven years to the day since I broke my leg falling down that mountain?’ Or: ‘You wouldn’t believe it was exactly ten years since I left home, would you?’ Or even: ‘It’s Joe Orton’s birthday today. If he were still alive, he’d be sixty-five. Officially an old-age pensioner.’
It would drive me mad sometimes. ‘So?’ I’d say to him. ‘What’s your point?’
‘Well,’ he’d reply, ‘it makes you think, doesn’t it?’
‘No,’ I’d say, ‘not really,’ to which he’d cry in exasperation, ‘What’s the matter, girl? Have you no sense of history?’
It’s funny how little things that irritate us about the people we love often make us feel affectionate towards them when they’re no longer there. I knew that next 12 August Alex would be saying, Do you realize it’s exactly a year since I moved to Greenwell? I grinned at the thought, but beneath the grin was a sense of sadness so deep it was like an ache. If I could only find Alex he could spout all the anniversaries he wanted at me – well … for a little while at least.
I flicked forward through the diary, and on 21 August found the proclamation: Met Keith at the Lame Duck!!! There were several other references to the mysterious Keith, before, on Monday, 4 September, I came across an entry which read: Started at SW! Met Liz! SW was presumably Alex’s abbreviation for the Solomon Wedge High School, but who was Liz? It was odd, but even though Alex and I had talked at length over the phone for the first six weeks he’d been here, I couldn’t now recall anything concrete about our conversations. Had he told me about Keith and Liz? About his new job? About the town? More important, had he ever even hinted that anything was wrong here? Because if he had had even an inkling that things were not as they should be, then he would have told me, I’m certain of it.
Hard as I tried, all I had in my head was a vague recollection of sitting in my flat with a phone in my hand, talking to him. But as to what was said between us, there was nothing but a blank. What was wrong with me? Had
Matt hit me over the head a few too many times? Were the pills that I often took to help me sleep messing up my memories? Certainly parts of my recent life seemed hazy, certain events insubstantial. Disturbed, I tried to focus on the matter in hand.
There were various references in the diary to Keith and to Liz, sometimes separately, sometimes together. 11 September: Keith and Liz. Bellini’s. 7:30; 13 September: Liz. Badminton. 6:30; 15 September: Keith’s Farewell Meal. La Dolce Vita, 8:00; 27 September (a week ago – was that the last time I’d spoken to Alex?): Dinner at Liz’s.
Keith and Liz. Were they a couple? Was Liz perhaps Keith’s wife or girlfriend? No, because Alex had met Liz on 4 September, the day he’d started teaching at the Solomon Wedge High School, which would seem to suggest that she was also a teacher there. Besides, his meeting with Keith had been written in huge, joyous capitals. ‘It’s definitely wedding bells, darling,’ Alex’s wilfully camp friend Charlie would have said.
I put the diary aside and picked up the address book. As I looked carefully through it, I wondered why Keith had had a ‘farewell meal’. Was he moving jobs, moving away from the area, or was this perhaps Alex’s blackly humorous way of marking the end of a brief relationship? Scanning the pages of the address book, I couldn’t help but feel jealous that I had had no input into this part of Alex’s life, which brought to mind Cressley’s snide comment about my possessiveness. I scowled and flipped the page over. I was already on ‘S’. And then I saw it, the last entry on the page: Liz Sykes.
There was no address, just a phone number. I took out my mobile and punched it in. After four rings came an answerphone message. ‘Hi, this is Liz. Sorry I’m not here to take your call, but if you leave your name and number I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’