by M. P. Wright
There was a real chill in the air as I walked out from my digs, and I started to wish I’d stayed on my bed and finished the other half of the bottle. I was still unsure if Linney had been straight with me and whether he had given me the whole story on Stella Hopkins and her vanishing into thin air like a conjurer’s assistant. Had I become so desperate to know I had cash in my hip pocket that I was prepared to take on what looked to be a fool’s errand? Like a knight errant, it appeared that I was.
“There ain’t no fool like an old fool,” my mama would say. I could be walking into a whole world of mess and all for five pounds a day. Was it worth it? Hell no, but I needed the money.
The snow had stopped falling earlier that afternoon, and after what little sun we’d had dropped out of the sky, the temperature fell and it had started to freeze, making the pavements icy and difficult to walk on. I arrived at the Hatchet Inn just after nine o’clock. It was quiet, thankfully, and the few customers sitting inside were more interested in their booze than in some black guy needing a drink on a cold Sunday evening. I went to the bar and bought a pint of Guinness and a double shot of Lamb’s Navy rum from the blousy barmaid that Vic had his eye on, then went and found a secluded table at the back of the pub, took my raincoat and hat off, and threw them on to chair next to me. I drank a third of my pint before pouring the rum into the rest of the beer, then took another swig of the ale–spirit mixture before sitting down.
My lack of sleep the previous night was starting to take its toll upon me. I yawned as I ran my hands down my face from forehead to chin. The liquor I’d been drinking earlier in the day had left me feeling ill-tempered and restless. I wasn’t in the best frame of mind to be jemmying into a house I had no place being in. With no idea what I was looking for, I knew I had to start earning the money that Linney had coughed up and Hopkins’ house seem as good a place to start as any.
Something was niggling at me about Stella’s disappearance that I couldn’t put my finger on. The alderman had left me some basic details, which included her home address, physical appearance and a couple of contact numbers where I could reach him, but I knew little else. She had no real friends or family, and didn’t socialise with colleagues or have any romantic associations with the opposite sex. She did odd-job work at the council chambers, which from what I could gather added up to nothing more than counting paperclips; she was capable of using public transport, which she used to get from her home to work and back but went nowhere else unaccompanied; and it appeared that Mr and Mrs Linney did everything else for the girl from cooking her meals to wiping her ass. She’d walked out of the offices on to College Green in the centre of Bristol city on Thursday, January 8th and hadn’t been seen since. From what I understood, the police had put up missing posters, dragged the local rivers and had gone door to door around the streets near her home in St Pauls, but they had come up with nothing.
I took another hard draught of my beer and slumped back into the crimson velour chair, turning my pint glass in my hands before raising it to my mouth and finishing the ale in two more hefty gulps. I leant forward and placed the empty pint onto a beer mat on the brass-covered circular table in front of me.
The pub was practically empty. “Who in their right mind would wanna be out on a lousy night like this?” I asked myself.
Two men sat at either end of the bar, both worse for wear because of too much Scotch, their lifeless, alcohol-flushed faces peering into their drinks, their sins staring back at them from the amber malt, each seeking an absolution they’d never find while they kept sipping on the hooch. I closed my eyes and pinched my nose with my fingers and stayed like that for what seemed like an age before being brought back to the land of the living by the sound of glass touching metal.
“Here, looks like you could use this.”
I opened my eyes, which at first struggled with the low lighting before refocusing on the replacement pint of stout in front of me. On the opposite side of the table stood Vic. He was wearing a long black leather coat, a black polo neck jumper, and trousers. His hands covered in a pair of tight-fitting black leather gloves, his face hard like stone, staring down at me. He looked like the Grim Reaper, only with a helluva lot more style.
“Ever since I can remember, you gits a face on you just like the one you got now when you been drinkin’ rum.”
“You’re the one handed the damn stuff out to me,” I said sourly.
“Maybe I did, but you didn’t have to drink so much of it, fool. Anyhow, this should put a smile back on that sorry-assed-lookin’ face of yours.”
He quietly laughed to himself as he took out a small black hip flask from his pocket, unscrewed the silver cap and poured a nip of rum into the beer he’d just bought me. Vic put the flask to his lips and drank from it slowly, savouring the aged flavours of the stolen rum before wiping the back of his huge gloved hand across his mouth. I watched as he drank, and then glanced over to the bar to see if the barmaid or landlord had caught sight of what he’d been doing. Thankfully they hadn’t. The last thing I needed was for Vic to be getting into a brawl over drinking his own illicit booze in another man’s joint. I looked at my wayward cousin and shook my head.
“What? Hell, I ain’t buying any o’ that shit from the bar when I got my own. I look stupid to you?” he asked me, as he stuffed the hip flask back inside his coat, his voice full of boyish playfulness.
Before I could answer him he leant forward, firing off another question, only this time his voice was a whisper, the playfulness gone.
“So you still thinking of creeping in through that gate-door?” His eyes bore into mine as he waited for my reply. I knew he wouldn’t be happy with the answer.
“Course I am, it’s someting I gotta . . .”
Vic interrupted me, still whispering, still holding my eyes with his own.
“You ain’t gotta do shit. JT, this ain’t your way, man, you a thief-taker, not some damn cat burglar. What the hell you think you gonna find in that house anyway?”
I didn’t have an answer for him and Vic knew it.
“Whatever you got yourself mixed up in, snooping round that bitch’s house ain’t gonna help you any. Now you let me go straighten tings out with whoever got you mixed up in this bullshit, you hearing me?”
“I hear you, Vic . . . I ain’t mixed up in nuttin’. Like I said, I’m just doing a little digging around.”
I was struggling to convince him.
“Digging around, shit, who the hell you think you are, Perry Mason?”
I stared at my cousin, and in the language of a lesser man I offered him nothing but my silence. Despite the fierceness of his demeanour, he had only my best interests at heart, his concerns both valid and heartfelt. He deserved better from me, but at that moment silence was all I had to give him.
We sat for a couple of minutes, our faces staring out across the room, neither one speaking to the other, our mutual hard-headedness preventing further dialogue between the two of us. It was I who finally broke the stillness of our self-imposed taciturnity.
“You brought me those picks?”
Vic reached into the inside of his coat and drew out a small dark-brown chamois wrap, tied tight with a single piece of nylon cord. He slid his hand from his chest underneath the table in one smooth motion and gently dropped the tools into my lap before standing up and pulling his gloves off, finger by finger, then slapping them onto the table in front of me.
“You gonna need these, unless you wanna leave your name all over every part o’ that house,” he said sternly as he walked out of the pub and into the night.
5
A sharp frost had begun to set in by the time I left the Hatchet Inn. It was just before ten thirty and the city was practically emptied of human life. I made my way across town into the Montpelier district, taking as many of the back lanes and smaller roads as possible. There was no moon to illuminate the evening sky, and I tried to stay clear of the amber street lights that picked out my shadow as I walked. At this time of night a blac
k guy out alone would definitely attract the suspicions of the local law working the graveyard shift. The last thing I needed was to be pulled over by the police and found to be in possession of a set of lock picks and a pocket torch.
By the time I reached Thomas Street and the missing girl’s house it was just after eleven. Her home sat at the end of the road facing St Agnes’ church. It was a flat-roofed two-storey building that looked the same as every other in the row. The front door was set back off the pavement and the property was shielded by a two-foot-high red-brick wall. I opened up the waist-high iron gate, then checked behind me to make sure nobody was about.
The front door was fitted with a brass cylinder pin lock. Picking it wouldn’t be easy: it required patience and a sureness of touch. Vic was a specialist in the art; he could open one up in a heartbeat. But I wasn’t as skilled as my cousin and it would take me a little longer.
I took the chamois pick bag out of my coat pocket along with the torch. I switched it on, then stuck it in my mouth, holding the blue plastic torch between my teeth. With both hands free, I removed a tiny tension bar and a snake rake from the bag. I placed the lip of the bar into the lock, applying a little weight to it, and then gently inserted the rake until I felt the mechanism; I rapidly began sliding the pick past the series of pins repeatedly until the lock released. It had taken less than a couple of minutes and I was in.
Now I’d walked into houses where a rotting corpse had lain undiscovered for weeks. You don’t forget that kinda stink in a hurry. But this was different. The first thing that hit me when I walked through the door was the smell of disinfectant: the scent of heavy pine permeated the house, its chemical stench hitting the back of my throat, making me gag. With my back against the front door, I ran the beam of my torch up the length of the hallway towards what looked like the kitchen at the rear of the house, and then shone the light across the walls, locating the stairs and a closed interior door to the right of me. The place felt colder than outside. My breath caught in the torch’s beam.
I went into the kitchen and quietly opened drawers, which contained very little. The cupboards had no tinned foods or dry goods. The work surfaces had nothing on them. An unopened box of sugar puff cereal stood by the electric cooker.
The fridge was empty, scrubbed to within an inch of its life and pristine white. Next to the back door was a small larder, the light from my torch hitting the shelves, which were all strangely bare. On the floor, arranged in neat rows, were dozens of tins of Jeyes Fluid, bottles of bleach and other cleaning materials.
I made my way back along the hall, opened the door and went into what appeared to be the living room. Like the rest of the house, it stank of antiseptic. I suppressed a series of coughs by covering my arm with the sleeve of my coat before shining the torch across the room: there were no pictures on the walls and no photographs of friends or family. A single armchair was positioned next to a tiled fireplace, its grate prepared with fresh kindling, and above it, resting on the mantelpiece, was a wooden crucifix. There were no letters, books, magazines or newspapers.
I closed the door of the living room and carefully made my way up the stairs. At the top of them, directly in front of me, was the bathroom. Even with the slight beam of my torch I could tell it was pristine clean. There was no mirror, and sat on a shelf mounted on the wall over the bath was a single bottle of shampoo. A tube of toothpaste and a brush stood next to each other in a glass perched on the edge of the sink, and next to the toilet were more bleach bottles.
Making my way along the landing, I entered the open door of the first of two bedrooms. A single bed, its sterile white sheets crisp and clean, was positioned against the far wall. The curtains were drawn. There was no other furniture in the room, and its floor was covered in the same dark carpet as the stairs. It reminded me of my place, only cleaner.
The last room’s door was closed. I took hold of the Bakelite handle, turned it and went inside. Again, the curtains were drawn. Inside, it reeked of a heavy, caustic odour. I began to heave as the acrid vapours filled my nose and mouth, my eyes watered from the overpowering chemicals. I swallowed hard to fight off the desire to be sick.
Taking centre stage was a large double bed, which was raised high off the floor by large brass legs. Its frame glinted back at me as it was caught by the strafing beam of my torch. It was neatly made up with a heavy red quilt on top. Another small crucifix was nailed to the wall above the bed, which gave the room a peculiar aura. I had the feeling that I was standing in a place of holy orders, where monastic vows had once been taken. Unlike the other bedroom, this one contained some pieces of furniture. There was a dark wood dressing table at one end of the room and a wardrobe on the far wall.
An opened Bible sat on a small table next to the bed. In the corner of the room stood a galvanised bucket. I approached it cautiously and found it filled to the brim with what appeared to be a mixture of water and more bleach.
I went through each of the drawers and found underwear, stockings, socks and assorted cardigans and tops. It felt wrong to be going through her belongings, and I closed the bottom drawer sullied by the task and no wiser as to what I was looking for. In her wardrobe, dresses and skirts hung alongside a winter coat, and numerous pairs of shoes were lined in a uniform row below. I closed the door and stepped back a few paces. I turned back to the bed, ran my arms around the base of the frame and lifted the mattress with one hand – nothing.
Getting onto my knees, I shone the torch under the bed, which had been brushed clean, and as I was about to get up my eyes were drawn to the legs of the wardrobe and the four-inch gap beneath its door. I moved around the bed on all fours and sank to my stomach to get a look underneath. I lit up the floor with my torch only to find bare, scrubbed floorboards. Sticking my arm into the gap, I felt around and touched the skirting board with my hand. As I drew my arm out, the cuff of the back of my glove clipped something attached to the base of the wardrobe. Turning on my side, I used my fingers to trace what felt like a thin book that had been securely taped at each of its edges. I grabbed hold of the spine and pulled hard.
I sat up, my back resting on the bed, the book in my lap. I shone the beam of my torch on to the cover, which had the words “News Cuttings and Scrapbook” printed on it. I took off one of my gloves and opened it up, flicking through the pages, which were all empty.
From the looks of things there had once been photographs carefully stuck inside, but they were now all gone. Each one had been attached at the corners with a small clear triangular mount. It wasn’t until I reached the inside of the back cover that I found glued to it, face down, a brown Manila envelope. Inside that was a small back and white photograph. It was hard to see who was in it. I held it closer to my face, but still struggled to make out what I was looking at. I’d had enough of crawling around in the dark and retching my guts out. I picked myself off the floor and slipped the photograph into my back trouser pocket, then stuffed the scrapbook inside my coat and put my glove back on. I quietly closed the bedroom door before making my way down the stairs and out of Stella Hopkins’ home.
Outside in the street, I took deep breaths of cold, fresh air to purge the taste and smell of the house from inside of me. As I walked away, the image of the opened Bible on the girl’s bedside table crept back into my mind and lingered like an unwelcome companion in my thoughts as I made my way back to my digs.
6
In my nightmare, I watch as the chattel house burns. Two big men hold my arms and shoulders while a third grabs my waist as they drag me to the ground. I frantically fight to free myself from their powerful grip, my legs flying out in all directions until they too are pinned down on the concrete road. My face contorts with anger and fear. Smoke and flames billow from the windows, the glass blown out by the extreme heat. Shouting out her name, my cries are lost in the roar of the blaze. I watch helplessly as she runs through rooms on fire, her hair alight and the skin on her body blistering in the white heat of the inferno.
&nbs
p; It was her screams that wrenched me back to consciousness. I sat bolt upright in bed, perspiration covering my face, neck and chest. The stale taste of alcohol clung to the inside of my mouth as the reoccurring nocturnal horror withdrew back into the hidden recesses of my memory. With my back against the headboard, I smelt the warm, pungent scent of my sweat, which alerted me that I needed to take a bath, badly. I drew my legs over to the edge of the bed, my head in my hands before looking up at the clock on the wall: it was eleven thirty and I still felt tired.
I forced myself up and slowly made my way into the bathroom. The bath, a big white enamel tub, took a good ten minutes to fill from the slow-running hot water tap. I left it to do its thing and walked naked into the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee, hoping that a caffeine hit would knock some of the fatigue out of my body.
I shaved, then grabbed a towel from the airing cupboard, wrapped it around my waist and lent against the bathroom wall, sipping at the boiling-hot liquid, my eyes closed, listening to the flowing stream of water. I got in and slid underneath the water, the warmth soothing my tired muscles and calming the edginess out of me. I ran a bar of soap across my body and hair, then lay there for a good twenty minutes before getting out and drying myself.
Winter sunshine rays illuminated the bedroom as I pulled open the curtains. The street below was still covered in thick snow with no sign of the start of a thaw.
I opened my chest of drawers, pulled out clean underwear and fresh socks, and flung them on the bed, then chose an olive-green plaid shirt, dark Levi’s and a thick knitted cardigan from my wardrobe. On the inside of the door a full-length mirror caught my reflection and I stared at myself for a moment. I’d gained a little weight around my waist, but was still in good shape, and the excess I’d easily lose with some rope work at Perry’s gym. At over six feet, I was broad and muscular across the shoulders, like my father. My eyes carried the same hazel colouring inherited from my Mama, but, sadly, I did not have the kindness of her smile. I dressed slowly, strapped my old watch to my wrist, rubbed Bay Rum through my hair and took the newspaper out of my shoes, which had soaked up the damp in the soles overnight, and put them on, tying the laces tight.