The Unquiet Dead

by Gay Longworth

  ‘She can’t hear me,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s over.’

  ‘I see a woman, I think it’s Mum, I get closer, but it’s never her. Why isn’t it ever her?’

  ‘Who is it?’ asked her brother.

  ‘It’s me.’

  Bill stroked her head. ‘Because you are her, Jess. That’s why we don’t miss her as much as you do – we still have her, because we have you.’

  Jessie stared up at him.

  ‘Isn’t that what life after death is?’ he said. ‘Sometimes you look so like her that I forget she’s dead, but you never get to see it.’

  ‘I don’t look in the mirror much,’ said Jessie, realising as she said it, it was true.

  ‘You should, you’re a great-looking girl.’

  ‘Once I caught sight of her inside a shop. I ran in. She wasn’t there, naturally – we’d buried her the year before. When I went back on to the street I realised there were mirrors in the window display. I’d seen myself.’

  ‘She wasn’t afraid of dying, Jessie.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘We talked about it.’

  ‘Wasn’t she sad she’d miss out on watching us grow up?’

  ‘She thought she’d still be able to.’

  ‘That’s bollocks, Bill. She isn’t watching us.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I’d have heard from her by now.’

  ‘The Africans I treat go through very lengthy rituals to make sure the dead person’s spirit goes on a one-way journey to the other side. They don’t want their ancestors popping back over. They think that calling up the dead is as stupid as it is evil. Be glad Mum isn’t wandering around picking up your wet towels and straightening out your knicker drawer.’

  Jessie felt a faint smile cross her lips.

  ‘You’ve got me into terrible trouble,’ she said, her head still resting on his chest.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t matter,’ she said, leaving the dream behind her. ‘I got further this evening than I would have without the story breaking.’

  ‘She swears she didn’t get the information from here.’

  Jessie looked up at her brother. ‘Do you believe her?’

  ‘I don’t know. I really liked her.’

  ‘But you’re going back to Africa anyway. Aren’t you?’

  He shrugged. ‘For the first time in a long while, I’d entertained the thought of staying here. Hanging out with you guys, seeing Colin and Kate’s new baby born. But if she shafted you, it would change things. Do you think she could have got that information from anywhere other than the notes you left here?’

  She wasn’t going to lie to him. ‘No.’

  ‘She was here when you told me all about everything that had been going on at the baths, the day you were sick.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Bill, I shouldn’t have told you!’

  ‘Sorry. It isn’t often you get things off your chest like that, I didn’t want to stop you. I didn’t know she’d be listening, but then she ran off to work even though she’d said she had the day off. I didn’t think at the time. Who’s the mug?’

  Jessie squeezed his shoulder. ‘I might be wrong. She must have other contacts in CID.’

  ‘You’re a terrible liar, Jess, but thank you for trying.’ He ruffled her hair. ‘Are you feeling better?’

  Jessie could see the wood clearing in her mind’s eye. ‘Much. Thanks.’

  ‘Any more bad dreams, you come and get me.’ He kissed her goodnight.

  ‘Will do. Thanks. And, Bill, I’m sorry about Amanda.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Plenty more fish in the sea – isn’t that what we all keep telling ourselves?’

  Jessie sighed heavily. ‘Fat lot of good it does’ us.’

  ‘They were saying a lot about you and that guy on the news.’

  ‘They don’t know anything.’

  ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’

  Jessie laughed in surprise.

  ‘Well, you were sick, and then …’

  ‘No, that’s not it.’

  ‘Doesn’t he want to see you again?’

  ‘It would be easier if that were the case. Actually, that might be the case now. Either way, it’s a mess.’

  ‘So he did want to see you, this P. J. Dean?’

  God, it sounded strange coming out of her brother’s mouth like that.

  ‘I resisted, Bill, for a while. But he’s persistent, I’ll give him that. And so convincing; he makes me think that it could actually work between us, that it’s possible to go out with a man who the entire world knows. But it isn’t.’

  ‘Why isn’t it?’

  Jessie rubbed the fog out of her eyes. She couldn’t keep things from Bill as well as she could keep them from herself. ‘Because I’m terrified that I’ll never find anything better.’

  ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not if you’re a fling, it isn’t.’

  Bill nodded. ‘Ah.’

  ‘Anyway, the last few times we’ve spoken it’s ended up in a horrific row, the likes of which I’ve never had with anyone.’

  ‘It’s because you like him, Jess.’

  ‘Me and every fourteen-year-old girl in the country. It’s hopeless.’

  ‘It’s risky, sure. But life is risk. Africa teaches you that. It’s also a privilege. Don’t blow it because you’re scared of what might happen. No one knows what’s going to happen. That’s the miracle of life.’

  ‘It’s fucked up now, Bill, it’s too late.’

  ‘If you can’t talk to him, write to him. At least then you’ll know you did what you could. People rarely regret the things they do, only the things they don’t.’

  A terrible feeling of regret … That wasn’t always the case.

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Write the letter, even if you don’t send it. It will clear things up in your own head. Trust me, I’ve been writing letters I don’t send for years.’

  ‘Who to?’

  Bill smiled. He didn’t have to answer her question, Jessie already knew.

  18

  Vision Inc was the low-rent porn shop near Marshall Street Baths where Mr Romano had worked. Of course Jonny’s friends would have known where it was, they were sixteen-year-old boys. Jessie wasn’t sure what Mr Romano’s involvement with the outfit was; maybe he was just a security guard with a little habit of his own, or maybe he was the mafia don, capable of murder, who had frightened Peter Boateng into conjuring up an evil drug dealer in the shape of Malcolm Hoare. Somehow Jessie doubted it. She believed the Romano story to be more tragic and more costly than either. Mr Romano had needed money to afford his son the chance of a better life, so he’d decided to do a little moonlighting in the speed trade. What was supposed to save his son, killed him. Jonny must have found the drugs, taken them to school, as Peter had said, and handed them out to his mates. It was only small amounts, Mr Romano probably didn’t even notice until one day the amphetamine caused Jonny to have a seizure. Had it not been for the fact it occurred in a pool, and had it not been for the fact that Don Firth had been told by the teachers to ignore the rowdy Italian boy, the seizure would have left Jonny unscathed and maybe even a little wiser. But fate had other ideas.

  Peter Boateng had been afraid of Mr Romano; fear made his story of Ian Doyle all the more convincing. Mr Romano was afraid of himself; it was fear that made him believe. Even so, deep down Mr Romano must have always felt that he killed his own son. The son he loved, took pride in, worked for, broke the law for.

  Jessie knocked on the black door for what she thought would be the last time, then waited for the grieving father and abandoned husband to admit them to Flat G and play his final role. That of the guilty man. She didn’t have to wait long.

  The door opened of its own accord, the latch ripped from the frame. Jessie stared at the mess. Pictures hung at precarious angles along the wall, others lay smashe
d on the floor. Jessie stepped over the glass. All the drawers in the kitchen had been pulled out, cutlery and crockery covered the ground in an aluminium patchwork. The fridge door swung on one hinge, all the compartment trays marked with a spider’s web of cracked plastic; milk from a burst carton tapped out a strange tune as it dripped on to the plastic floor. Jessie knew before she pushed open the door of Jonny’s room that this was no violent burglary. The room was a mess, but it was in exactly the same mess it had been in for fourteen years. She radioed for assistance.

  The first police officer to arrive at the flat was a young, spotty lad, who had a look of concern in his eyes that was not reassuring. Lisson Grove was his beat. He knew Romano well.

  ‘I arrested him two nights ago for drunk and disorderly behaviour out by the allotments. He was shouting and screaming at no one. He slept it off in a cell and in the morning I discharged him. I know about his loss, see. I know it’s been hard for him. Maybe I should have read the situation differently.’

  ‘Have you seen him since?’

  The officer shook his head. ‘It’s ’cause of that body in the baths, isn’t it? It’s making him relive it all, brings it all back. Poor bloke, enough to send anyone round the twist.’ They were in the small sitting room. The pine dresser had been pulled from the wall, Mr Romano’s notebooks lay sprawled over the carpet. Jessie picked one up, and flicked through it. Take them, he had said. It’s all there, everything you want to know about that evil man. She had dismissed his words. At the time she couldn’t face reading the ramblings of an increasingly deranged mind. At the time, she couldn’t take on more grief. Jessie looked up when she heard Burrows and Niaz out in the corridor.

  ‘I’m in here,’ she called. Jessie told them everything Peter Boateng had told her. A call to a mate in the narcotics department had confirmed that the Italians had run the drug trade in the late eighties. Since then the Albanians had taken over.

  Niaz and Burrows took in the mess with their eyes, then looked at Jessie.

  ‘Do you still think Mr Romano is protecting his wife?’ asked Burrows.

  ‘No. He’s just like Mr Scott-Somers: he’s been protecting himself all along.’

  ‘But criminals are the only people who leave no paper trail,’ he offered.

  ‘You’re forgetting the dead, Burrows,’ said Jessie. ‘Peter Boateng suspected that some fate had befallen Mrs Romano, he hinted at it when Niaz and I first went to see him. The question is, what did Romano do with her once he’d killed her?’

  ‘How do you know for sure that he killed her? She didn’t go missing for two years. Their divorce was through, he didn’t have a reason to kill her.’

  ‘He did if she’d worked out that Doyle didn’t exist. He did if she’d worked out where her son had got the drugs from. He did if she was threatening to tell. Peter Boateng was right when he said keeping Doyle alive meant no one having to face up to their own responsibilities. It was easier for Romano to blame the mythical drug dealer than admit his role in his son’s death. Everyone was convinced.’

  ‘Except his wife,’ said Niaz.

  ‘When he could no longer convince her, he killed her. In a terrible way, Mr Romano’s life only became significant after Jonny drowned. The sympathy, the social standing, the support – it all came because of his loss. A guilty man would lose all that. He is very afraid right now, very afraid and very dangerous. We need to find him before someone else gets hurt.’

  ‘I’ll put an APB out for him,’ said Niaz, reaching for his radio. ‘What do you want to do about Mrs Romano?’

  ‘We should get forensics down here. Blood leaves stains that are invisible to the human eye.’

  ‘Not to the human conscience,’ offered Niaz. ‘We know what that sort of pressure did to Don Firth, and he didn’t murder the boy. Imagine what sort of state Romano’s mind must be in by now.’

  ‘He’s on the edge of an abyss, looking down,’ said Jessie. She should have seen it earlier.

  ‘You think he’s going to fall?’ asked Burrows.

  ‘Worse, I think he may take someone with him.’ Jessie looked over the spidery writing in the book, then at the bold angry capital letters, then back to the illegible scribbles. She had been right about one thing: these were undoubtedly the scrawlings of a deranged mind. A message she was not qualified to decipher.

  She dialled a number on her mobile and smiled when she heard Father Forrester’s soft voice accept the call.

  ‘Ah, Jessie, I was just thinking about you.’

  ‘Without corroboration, Father, I cannot accept that as evidence.’

  Father Forrester chuckled. Glass marbles. ‘I’ve been to see your friend. The dreams are a common thing among retired CID officers. The brain is a muscle like any other; adrenaline will get an athlete through a race, but when the run is completed the pain that could not be felt before rears up. No one can suppress pain for ever.’

  Jessie stared at Romano’s illegible scrawlings.

  Father Forrester continued: ‘It can be like a tiny leak. No one knows about the dripping pipe until the roof caves in.’

  ‘Father Eric, I’d like to ask you for another favour …’ She told him the address of the flat in the Lisson Grove Estate and outlined the task in hand.

  ‘What happened to this Romano fellow?’

  Jessie looked around the room again. ‘His roof just caved in.’

  ‘He said he liked to think of his ex-wife in Spain, that she liked the food or something,’ said Burrows, reading back over his notebook. ‘We should get on to Interpol.’

  ‘I remember – the stuff about tomatoes, she liked tomatoes,’ said Jessie.

  ‘He grows them,’ said the young police officer. Everyone turned to look at him. ‘He showed them to me. He hands them out when he’s got a good crop.’

  ‘This is down on the allotment?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where you arrested him?’

  ‘That’s right. I’ve even helped him carry his stuff down there – what do you call it? He makes it himself to go on the garden …’

  ‘Compost?’ ventured Jessie.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it – compost.’

  Jessie turned back to her officers, her fear reflected in their expressions.

  ‘He said she liked the feel of the sun on her bones,’ said Niaz. ‘Do you remember?’

  ‘What do you want me to do, boss?’ asked Burrows.

  Jessie felt deeply disturbed by the inevitable conclusion they were all drawing to. ‘This is so sad,’ she said. She wanted the woman who had buried her son to be slicing vine tomatoes in the sunshine, sipping sherry and enjoying a little of life. But in her heart she knew that wasn’t the case.

  ‘Dig up his allotment. Start with the tomatoes.’

  ‘We’ll need a court order,’ said Burrows.

  ‘Then get one.’

  Jessie felt heavy hearted as she walked up the stairs to her office. She had been right about Mr Romano all along, his grief had become his alibi, but that only depressed her more. Outside the canteen she toyed with the idea of eating, but found she had no stomach for it. A piece of well-thumbed newspaper fluttered as the canteen door swung closed on its hinge. The movement caught Jessie’s eye. She walked towards the noticeboards. She expected an embarrassing ghost story. She found one, in full-colour copy. P.J. was photographed in the back of a stretch limo. He had a leggy blonde on either side. Models both, if the pose they struck for the intruding lens was anything to go by. P.J. had his hand up one of the girl’s skirts. They were girls, too. No more than eighteen. Jessie felt a lump in her throat and before she knew it, she’d ripped the page off the wall and thrown it in the bin. It missed. In her pocket she felt for the recently sealed envelope, the letter her brother had suggested she write, and scrunched it into a ball.

  The next person to come out of the canteen was Mark. They looked at each other; he glanced at the clipping on the floor, then back at Jessie. He’d aged in a week. She wasn’t sure who looked worse. Slow
ly he bent down and picked up the offending article. He screwed it up and dropped it in the bin. Jessie was mute. As he walked past her, he squeezed her arm.

  ‘His loss,’ he said.

  Jessie shook her head. ‘I don’t want your pity,’ she said quietly.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Your support.’

  Mark nodded once. ‘Ditto.’ He moved away.

  ‘I’m sorry about your –’ He held up his hand to silence her. She understood the gesture. It was too early for words of sympathy to cause anything other than more pain. Jessie bit down on her lip as she watched his hunched shoulders walk away.

  Outside her office was a young WPC whom Jessie liked.

  ‘I can’t –’ Jessie began, but the lump in her throat was making it difficult to talk.

  ‘There’s a woman in your office who needs to see you.’

  Jessie shook her head. ‘I can’t –’

  ‘She says it’s very important. Her name is Clementine Colbert. She was the woman who –’

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Jessie, finding her voice. ‘I know who she is.’ She held up her hand. ‘Just give me a few minutes.’

  The WPC retreated. ‘I’ll get you some tea.’

  Tea, the panacea WPCs were taught to give to victims, thought Jessie. You didn’t need psychic powers to spot one. She leant back against the wall and summoned the strength to go on.

  The Scott-Somers’ nanny had aged well. Like most Parisian women, she was immaculately dressed, with shiny, neatly cropped hair, and a silk scarf peeking out between the stiff collars of her white shirt.

  ‘I am a lawyer now,’ she said. ‘International law. I only took the job with the Scott-Somers to perfect my English …’ Clementine Colbert paused. ‘I stayed too long.’

  ‘How long were you having an affair with Mr Scott-Somers?’ asked Jessie.

  The Frenchwoman’s eyes rose to meet hers. ‘Who told you?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘I loved him,’ she said in plain English. ‘I was not a silly little girl with a crush on her boss, it was not like that. There was a real connection.’

  ‘Isn’t there always?’ said Jessie, more angry than she had a right to be.