The Unquiet Dead

by Gay Longworth

  Focusing on the metal treads, Jessie took one step at a time.

  ‘Gold-digger,’ he whispered.

  Jessie turned.

  Mark held up his hand. ‘Now, now, settle down. We wouldn’t want anyone hearing about your little indiscretion. DCI Moore was quite taken aback – she’d begun to think there was nothing in the Dean rumours and that you were a dyke. Imagine how surprised she was to discover that you’re actually a whore.’ He held on to her arm. ‘What, you can’t take a little teasing? That’s a pity, because you’re going to be getting a lot more, and worse besides. But then you should have thought about that before banging a suspect. Jesus, I thought you might have learnt by now, but he obviously has something that keeps all those women coming back for more. I guess it’s his sparkling personality.’

  Jessie prised his fingers off her arm.

  ‘Of course, we could keep your dirty little secret quiet, I suppose …’

  She backed away from him.

  ‘… come to some sort of agreement. Let’s say I get to keep my nice new office and you get to keep some sliver of respect among your peers.’

  Mark stepped closer until Jessie had her back against the wall.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was a difficult choice. But I know how slowly a woman’s brain works, so I’ll give you until the end of the day. You should know that I’ve come to like my new office a lot, and I would be very sore to lose it. Catch my drift?’

  He left her standing on the stairwell. Jessie hated to think what Mark Ward had done to suspects over the years he’d hidden his anger behind the protection of a badge. She wandered to her shoebox of an office and sat in her slightly wobbly chair.

  Across the hallway, Burrows’ door was open but his office was empty. On his desk was a small cross. By not taking on Mark, she was like the empty-worded fisherman, she was like the battered wives who walked into doors. If Burrows was brave enough, she was brave enough. Mark Ward wouldn’t get his office and she wouldn’t allow him to degrade her any more. Jessie picked up the phone.

  Niaz knocked on Jessie’s door.

  ‘Hang on a sec.’ She blew her nose and quickly straightened her hair, then shouted, ‘Come in.’

  ‘There is someone here to see you. I’ve put her in the conference room.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘She says her name is Mary Adams – she is the medium who works with Father Forrester.’

  ‘She doesn’t have an appointment and I don’t have time for that kind of thing right now.’

  ‘I think you should see her,’ Niaz said calmly. ‘What harm can it do?’

  A lot, thought Jessie.

  ‘For your information,’ said Niaz, ‘the structural engineers have finished checking the Marshall Street Baths. They couldn’t find anything wrong with the electricity.’

  ‘I don’t care what any of you think, I refuse to believe in anything I can’t see,’ she said as she stood up and stalked off in the direction of the conference room.

  Mary was sitting by the window in an electric wheelchair. She wore a frumpy blue nylon trouser suit and jaunty red trainers. Her hair was pulled back in a bun and Nana Mouskouri-style glasses hung from a chain around her neck, entangled in an amber pendant.

  ‘Can I help you?’ asked Jessie.

  ‘I was hoping to be able to help you,’ said Mary in a voice that stroked the soul. This was how it began, thought Jessie angrily.

  ‘That’s where you are all wrong. I don’t need your help, or Father Forrester’s, and I certainly didn’t ask you to come here.’

  ‘Well, now that I am here, perhaps you will give me a few minutes to explain why I thought it was important to come all this way.’

  Jessie winced as she involuntarily looked down at the wheels. Mary laughed and said, ‘Yes, they are a great help in the art of manipulation.’

  ‘All of it is manipulation,’ replied Jessie, suddenly feeling too tired to stand. Too tired to fight.

  ‘I agree that certain elements of institutionalised religion depend upon manipulation. A big clue is if they start taking donations by direct debit. Those churches are definitely to be avoided.’

  ‘You’re not religious then?’ asked Jessie.

  ‘I spend a lot of time with religious people, but I’m a heathen compared to them. Luckily, Father Forrester and Beatrice are not the type of fundamentalists who deny the right to Heaven to anybody outside their particular sect. Those churches, too, are best avoided – though they usually go hand in hand.’

  ‘How come your sister went that way?’

  ‘I’m fairly sure I scared my sister Beatrice into Holy Orders,’ Mary replied. ‘When we were kids we used to play this game of guessing what colour car would come round the corner next. At first it was funny because I always won, and then it got plain weird. Beatrice obviously thought I was a witch and we needed some top-of-the-range divine influence on our side to counteract the demons. Hence the habit.’

  ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ said Jessie, folding her arms.

  ‘I know you’re struggling with this, but it isn’t about you, Detective,’ said Mary. ‘Something happened at Marshall Street Baths that falls outside your remit.’

  ‘Murder is my remit.’

  ‘And what happens after they’re dead is mine,’ Mary stated. ‘I receive messages from people who are no longer physical entities. Whether they are floating around us or carried within the heart of another person, I don’t know. What I do know is that, since my accident, I have been able to hear what previously I could only sense.’

  ‘You couldn’t throw me a name, could you?’ said Jessie. ‘It would save me an awful lot of time.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Mary. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose it does.’

  ‘Let me tell you how it does work. I believe in the redemption of scarred souls and that people can try to make amends for past wrongs, either before or after they’ve passed over. You should know that you are looking for someone filled with regret for all the bad decisions they chose to make in their life. They are stuck here until an act of forgiveness releases them.’

  ‘Aren’t you contradicting yourself? If it’s all mapped out for us, if you know what colour car is coming round the corner, how can our decisions affect us – we have no choice.’

  ‘It is true that psychics can see into the future and receive concrete messages and evidence for their claims – like the colour of the cars,’ said Mary. ‘But that doesn’t mean everything you do is predestined. Think of life as a tube map – your life begins in Wimbledon and will end in Potters Bar. How you get there is up to you. We are all given guides who try to direct us on the best journey, but you need to acknowledge the possibility of their existence and be prepared to listen to their messages. Ever noticed electrical appliances or lights doing funny things?’

  ‘I’m a bit deaf when it comes to extra-sensory babble,’ said Jessie.

  ‘No you’re not. You’re listening all the time, you just call it intuition. In fact, Jung described intuition as communication by means of the unconscious.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Intuition is simply how we communicate psychically. In other words, how we get in touch with sources of the past and future that are beyond rational knowledge.’

  Jessie was shaking her head.

  ‘You are receiving messages from your guides all the time, Jessie. Things you think of as “coincidence” –’

  ‘Actually, I don’t believe in coincidence.’

  ‘Well, there you are then. You think of a friend out of the blue, the friend calls. You’re trying to make a decision and you’ll find pointers in strange places. Posters, adverts, songs on the radio. Those are messages from your guides. Trust me, you are more psychic than you think. It’s what makes you a great detective.’

  I can’t hear her. ‘You’re wrong. Your psychic powers must be letting you down.’

  ‘Actually, I’m a sensitive. That’s a
psychic, healer and medium all in one.’

  ‘Busy lady,’ said Jessie, standing. ‘I wouldn’t want to take up any more of your time.’

  ‘It certainly gets noisy sometimes,’ Mary laughed. ‘And before you jump down my throat, I don’t do any of this for money. I don’t agree with that. Mostly, I help Father Forrester with his soul-rescue work. I channel the spirits and try to understand why they are stuck, and then Father Forrester can set them free.’

  ‘Yup, Father Forrester told me why they get stuck and all the absolution bit. Truly, it was very enlightening.’

  Mary leant forward. ‘Tell me honestly that you didn’t feel a sense of foreboding at Marshall Street Baths?’

  Jessie shivered as she remembered the mist surrounding her in the basement and the effect it had had on her mood, the unreasonable level of anger she’d felt towards Mark, hitting him – an act so out of character, and the lessening of all those feelings as she moved away from the boiler room. She stopped and stared out of the window. ‘You really believe that the Marshall Street Baths are haunted?’

  ‘Haunted is your word, but, yes, I think there is a great deal of unsettlement there. You’re right to search for the logical explanation to all this, but you will not always be able to find one. Wouldn’t you prefer this world to have just a little bit of mystery, a little bit of magic?’

  ‘Of course, and our need for mystery explains why we have religion. We need to believe in something greater than ourselves. Call it faith, call it Christianity, call it astrology, magic – I don’t mind. Without it, what is the point? Why continue? Belief is simply an adaptive Darwinian trait. By keeping our spirits, even in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, we keep ourselves alive. It gives us a sense of purpose, a reason to continue. The uneducated and the poor are the most willing believers. Why? Because they have more need than most to believe that further down the line they’ll be rewarded for surviving their shitty lives.’

  ‘That’s a little patronising don’t you think? If that were really the case, there would be no animals, no birds, no fish or fowl, for they do not have gods. And yet they manage well enough to survive.’

  Jessie would not back down. ‘They don’t have the brainpower to question what we question.’

  ‘Maybe not to question, but they can sense things that we cannot,’ continued Mary. ‘While the caretaker was in hospital, the council hired a security guard with a dog to patrol Marshall Street Baths. But the dog wouldn’t go in there. In fact, every potential developer has encountered problems in the basement. Why do you think that a prime site in the middle of London has stood empty for so long? Father Forrester was approached by the developers a long time before the schoolgirl disappeared.’

  ‘First I’ve heard of it, and I’m in regular contact with the council over this case.’

  ‘Then they are not telling you for a reason.’

  Jessie continued to stare out of the window into the courtyard below. She heard Mary’s chair edge towards her, but she wouldn’t turn round. ‘Tell me what car is going to pull into the street and I might start believing you,’ she said before she could stop herself. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.’

  ‘But you were thinking it.’ Mary leant over the sill and looked down.

  ‘I wasn’t being serious, honestly,’ said Jessie, moving away from the window.

  ‘Yes you were.’ Mary watched the road. She frowned. Jessie studied her closely. ‘A pink motorbike,’ she said finally.

  Jessie swung round so fast she heard her neck crick. She bore a hole staring at the street below. A few seconds later a white van pulled in and parked.

  Mary frowned deepened. ‘Sorry, pink motorbike didn’t sound right to me either. I must have been picking it up from somewhere else.’ She turned to face Jessie. ‘Wishful thinking, maybe.’

  Jessie scowled.

  ‘Look, I know that there are many charlatans out there ready to exploit the newly bereaved, and I don’t agree with any of them. Please, don’t let your experience colour your judgement of us all.’

  ‘That’s just what a charlatan would say,’ said Jessie, turning her back on the woman. She listened until she could no longer hear the hum of the mechanical chair pulling away. For a long time she stayed in the conference room, staring out of the window at the roof of a dirty white van. The silence was rudely broken by a radio bursting into life from another office. She marched down the hallway towards the noise, ready to tear a strip off whichever police officer was messing around, but the Klein incident room was empty. Everyone had gone home for the weekend.

  ‘… that was the Malcolm McLaren hit “Buffalo Gals” on Magic 105.4 FM …’

  Furious, she hit the off button and stormed away.

  12

  Jessie slipped into the seat next to her former boss, the grey-eyed Jones. Already he looked older. More tired. How, wondered Jessie, could retirement leave you more tired? In front of him stood an untouched pint of beer.

  ‘How are you, sir?’

  He ignored the question. ‘Tell me about the case,’ he said instead. ‘It feels like I haven’t talked shop for a while.’

  ‘We’re still trying to identify the corpse. The NIB 74c search threw up a few names; we’re trying to establish whether anyone on the list can be linked to the Marshall Street Baths. Burrows is working on it. You probably heard we found Anna Maria Klein. She made one phone call from the Ritz. We’re trying to trace the number. And that’s about it. What have you been up to?’

  ‘You didn’t come here to talk about my life, did you?’

  ‘No, sir, I didn’t.’

  ‘Thank God for that. It’s dull living it, torture retelling it.’

  He smiled, so Jessie smiled with him, though she wasn’t sure what they were smiling about.

  ‘What’s on your mind, Detective?’

  Jessie let it tumble out. All through her vitriolic outburst about Mark Ward’s behaviour towards her, Jones sat quietly staring into his pint. When she was finished he nodded once. Jessie waited. Finally he spoke.

  ‘This is a big step you’re proposing to take. A harassment case is no picnic, you know. They’ll go over every case, every interview, every decision …’

  ‘I can’t just go on taking it.’

  ‘You joined a boy’s club, Jessie. Don’t tell me you’re surprised by what you found.’

  ‘I’m surprised by the relentlessness of it. Mark Ward has not given me a moment, sir. He called me a whore – surely there’s a line?’

  ‘Have you entertained the idea that he may be the scared one?’

  ‘Scared of what?’

  ‘You and Moore. The boy’s club becoming a girl’s club.’

  ‘Well, there’s no chance of that, sir. She doesn’t like me. And so far the feeling is mutual. I don’t know how she got to be a great detective. She wants me to use a frigging ghost buster on the case!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Some guy called Father Forrester. He sees dead people, or some shit like that.’

  ‘Jessie, have you noticed that your language worsens whenever you’re feeling threatened or upset?’

  ‘I am threatened. I am upset.’

  ‘Not by Father Forrester, I hope.’

  By all of them. She counted to three. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he’s a good man, if a little misdirected.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I know Father Eric, and he’s a great man with powerful friends.’

  ‘Not you as well, sir!’

  ‘If you go through with this harassment case, Jessie, you could use a man like Father Eric in your corner. It gets very dirty, very personal. All your colleagues will be questioned; they will be asked to choose sides. How can you be so sure that they will choose yours?’

  Jessie leant back against the upholstered bench. ‘He thinks that I’m too afraid to fight him. I can’t exist like that.’

  ‘You could just go.’

  Jessie was horrified. Go? Retreat? Lose?
/>   ‘It isn’t always about winning, Jessie. At some point you have to decide on your quality of life. Maybe it would be easier to move on.’

  ‘I never thought I would hear you say that.’

  ‘You have to decide, Jessie: CID or life.’

  ‘No, I do not have to choose, I should be able to have both. But that won’t be possible while I’m terrified that Mark Ward is going to perform a public ritual of humiliation every time I get close to someone.’ Jessie stood up. ‘I know you like him, sir, and I know he’s an old colleague, but if I was your daughter you would be incensed by what he puts me through. Well, you should be incensed. I like being teased as little as the next person, but I can handle it – I grew up with three brothers. This isn’t about being teased. This is about being torn apart, and it shouldn’t happen.’

  ‘You and he have been getting on so much better. Have you asked yourself why he should start behaving like this now?’

  ‘Because he’s an arsehole.’

  Jones wasn’t going to agree or disagree. He remained silent. It annoyed her that he could go on defending Mark when, like Moore, he knew what the guy was capable of. ‘You should talk to Mark,’ said Jones, ‘rather than be angry with me.’

  ‘I am angry with you. At some point inertia becomes collusion – isn’t that what we tell the women who stand back and watch their partners kill their children?’

  ‘That isn’t comparable.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. They at least have the excuse of being terrified.’

  ‘Well, I am terrified.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’ve come back to haunt me,’ said Jones.

  Jessie was not sure she’d heard him correctly. Slowly she sat back down again. ‘Did you say –’

  ‘All those dead people, all the bodies we drag up, dig up, peer over, discuss and debate. Those photographs pinned up on the baize board, all the faces, the limbs, the lacerations, strangulations – just your normal, everyday image at CID. It was all so matter of fact at the time. Didn’t matter what age it was, or sex, whether it had been sexually assaulted or stabbed, we’d discuss it quite normally over tea and biscuits, like we were chatting about the weather. You’ll be doing it now – staring over those preserved limbs and wondering, wondering … How did they get there? Who did this? Why? There isn’t time to really absorb the person, the person is a problem and remains a problem until the case is solved, then he or she is filed away, buried under the next problem. Well, finally, when there are no more problems to think about, the people come back. The names, the voices, the home videos, the terrible pain they suffered in the days, hours or seconds before their death, they come back. There is so much anger. So much pain.’