When Tally woke on the morning of the funeral her mother was already dressed. The black frock with its low back and short sleeves had been hanging in the wardrobe for the past five years and was perhaps a little tight, but her mother had squeezed into it. At Tally’s tentative suggestion that it might not be altogether suitable, Rose had made it plain that she would not be taking it off.
“I’ve been waiting for an occasion since I bought it,” she said. “This is it.”
Her hands and arms were covered in scratches and cuts. They looked red and raw like marks left by long clawed cats. Blood oozed from several of them and was brushed, unnoticed onto the dress leaving darker stains on the black lace fabric. “I’ve been making that,” he mother said by way of explanation.
“Oh mum,” Tally said. “I really don’t think.” She fell silent, her mother’s determined expression telling her not to waste her breath. “That” proved to be a wreath of roses. Long stems cut from the rambler in the garden and twisted into a woven circle, the vicious thorns responsible for the bloody damage done to her mother’s hands. Ivy and fresh flowers pillaged from the hanging baskets finished the decoration, wired in place, the end of the wire left long and bare. The ring was small, a parody of a crown rather than a funeral wreath and Tally shuddered as she thought what her mother might have in mind to do.
They got the taxi to St Luke’s. Rose donned long black gloves to hid e her hands. They came up past her elbows and she had adorned her wrists with bracelets of twisted beads. She had rummaged in Tally’s cupboard, finding clothes that she deemed as suitable. Black long sleeved shirt and a skirt that Tally had outgrown the year before. It was dark, certainly, but it was far too short even for every day, never mind a funeral. Tally, shy and uncertain at the best of times, felt cheap and painfully exposed. The taxi driver said nothing, but his look told Tally everything she didn’t wish to know.
“Can’t we just go home, mum?”
“Not until I’ve seen him.”
“But he’s dead, mum.”
“Best thing for him. I just want to see.”
Tally sighed and said no more but concentrated her attention on little Carl, who, in the nature of small children, seemed to be taking everything in his stride. They sang nursery rhymes together and songs he had learnt at playgroup while her mother maintained a silence that was as profound as her appearance was absurd. Tally was really afraid that her mother had lost it this time and wondered how she was going to sneak away long enough to phone for aunt Bee to come and help.
The service had begun by the time they had arrived. Rose opened the heavy door and ushered the children inside, then let it slam loudly behind them.
“Mum!” Tally flushed scarlet. Every eye in the church had turned upon them. A man in a dark grey suit had been standing at the front giving some kind of address but he too fell silent as Rose led her children down the aisle and towards the altar.
Tally followed reluctantly, leading Carl by the hand. The church was filled with flowers. Lilies and deep red roses. Their fragrance flooded her senses and she followed her mother more slowly as the scent of angels turned her footsteps to lead and fogged her mind, washing away the embarrassment and fear of what her mother was about to do. Finally, she halted, watching in a dream as her mother continued her slow promenade towards the coffin.
“Look, Tally, look!”
Carl’s high little voice broke into her thoughts. She looked to where the child was pointing. Somewhere at the front of the church she could hear a woman scream and a man lifted a child into his arms, turning to his neighbours to help with the woman before he hurried away, the child’s face turned towards him so that he should not see.
Briefly, Tally wondered about the woman’s cries but it was the child that Carl had pointed to and the child that now held tally’s eye.
She had known about her father’s other son of course. Had lived through months of her mother’s wailing when she discovered that barely a month separated Carl and this little boy in age. Tally could have picked the child out in any crowd. The eyes, clear and blue as her own, where Carl’s were brown, she had always thought of as her mother’s legacy but it was clear now that they came from her father’s genes. And the soft blond hair waving around the small face, a hint of copper in the curls, reminded her of Jack.
The man who held him paused where Tally stood, he hesitated, then shifted the boy onto his hip and gently took her arm.
“Best we go outside,” he said.
For a moment, Tally resisted, staring past him to where the woman screamed and her mother fought. She took a further hesitant step down the aisle. Her sleeve caught the lilies tied with white ribbon to the ends of the wooden pews. They spilt bright pollen that looked red as blood against the black sleeve of her shirt. She stared at it, then looked up and nodded gratefully at the man, thankful to be taken away. Away from her mother struggling with the vicar and the grey suited man and the other woman screaming and the congregation surging forward, overturning the tall pillars that supported the ornate floral displays, sending lilies and deep red roses spilling to the floor crushing perfume beneath their feet.
Chapter Forty-One
On the Friday afternoon, Simon’s report of the incident at Ingham Comprehensive appeared in the local paper. On that same afternoon, Alec went again to visit Tally Palmer. This time he had with him copies of the letters her agents had received some three years before from the man who she claimed had stalked her when she lived in London.
The letters were explicitly sexual, but vague and, Alec guessed, apart from that one reference to a dead man, unconnected with any particular incident. They said more about the writers character than anything he might know or even suspect about Tally. One thing the agents hadn’t known but apparently Tally had, was that the letter writer and the stalker had been confirmed as one and the same. A man called Gerry Mac. Tally was not his only obsession. He wrote to others, stalked others, switching allegiance from time to time. Gerry Mac had died a short time before Tally moved. A road accident. Letters had been found in his pockets and at his home that confirmed the connection.
She had been unwilling to speak to Alec or even let him in, finally stepping aside to give him entry into her flat only when it became obvious he wasn’t planning on going away.
Alec sat down without her invitation and drew the letters from his pocket. “Do you remember these, Miss Palmer?”
She glanced at them without taking them from Alec’s hand. She frowned, “I told them to get rid of that filth.”
“Your agents? Oh, they did. These are copies from the police records. You made a complaint, Miss Palmer, that this man wouldn’t leave you alone.”
She nodded and sat down, but remained, perched on the edge of the chair as though unable or unwilling to relax. She looked even more tired than when Alec had last seen her. Eyes ringed by dark shadows and her usually bright hair lacking in sheen.
“He turned up everywhere,” she said, “wouldn’t let me alone. Kept sending letters and one day he followed me home. After that, it got worse. He’d hang about outside and wait for me. The police didn’t seem that interested.”
“So Jack dealt with him for you.”
“What?” She stared at him and for an instant, Alec was almost convinced.
“Gerry Mac died three months after you filed your complaint,” Alec summarized. “A hit and run apparently, though the post mortem showed that whoever knocked him down backed over him while he was lying in the road just to make sure.”
“No one told me,” Tally said flatly. “If the police had suspected my involvement, wouldn’t they have interviewed me, Detective Friedman.”
“According to their reports, they did. Only as a matter of routine, but the interview still took place. You were never a major suspect, Miss Palmer and besides, you had an alibi for that night.”
Irritably, Tally got to her feet and crossed over to the window, she stood, looking out over the grey city, arms folded in a way that loo
ked almost defiant, but just a little pathetic. “They talked to me for maybe, five minutes, Detective Friedman. If you want to call that an interview, then go ahead.”
“You gave me the impression just now that you didn’t know about Gerry Mac’s death.”
“I knew he’d died. No one told me how. Car accident they said. That was all.”
“Why lie to me Miss Palmer and over such a trivial thing? The police would have told you exactly how he died. It’s a suspicious death, Tally, and I’ve a transcript of your interview. Your statement was taken at the local police station and would have taken a good deal more than five minutes to write.
“And your point is?” She turned sharply to face him, still hugging her arms as though cold. It reminded him of Sarah Crane, on the defensive, facing a past she wanted to forget.
“My point is that people have an unfortunate habit of dying after contact with you. What happened, Tally, did he get in Jack’s way? It that what fate Simon Emmet has in store for him if he tries to see you again?”
The pain in her eyes was genuine this time, Alec would bet on it. Then she frowned again. “What do you know about Simon Emmet?” she asked. “What does he have to do with anything Jack did to Naomi?”
Alec cursed softly to himself. Of course, he thought, Tally did not know of his connection to Simon, or of Naomi’s connection to himself. He really should hand this on, Alec thought. Today, before he made a bigger mistake.
“Simon Emmet was arrested for standing in your car park and disturbing your neighbours,” Alec said, recovering himself. “Of course I know. It’s pertinent.”
She continued to regard him with suspicion but said no more. Alec moved the conversation sideways.
“I went to see your father’s second wife,” he told her. “Tally, did you hate your father? Did you see him chasing Jack? You must have been there that day. You knew about Sarah Crane and your father meeting on the embankment. It doesn’t take a genius to work out the rest.”
She shook her head emphatically. “I wasn’t there,” she said. “We were playing hide and seek. I hid elsewhere. The first thing I knew was hearing the ambulance.”
She came back to her sea and sat down wearily, this time leaning back and closing her eyes. Her skin so pale, ashen, even her lips tinged with blue.
“Who called the ambulance, Tally. Was it your father?”
“Don’t your precious records tell you?”
“Anonymous, they say. Who called them, Tally?”
Tally sighed, sat forward again and opened her eyes. “No,” she said finally. “It was me. I found him. I called them. I knew there was something wrong. I felt it, so I went to look for him. I found him lying there. He, our father, he just stood up there on the embankment, looking down. Just looking down.”
Despite everything, Alec felt a sudden wave of pity for her. For the child Tally, just nine years old and the woman she had become. “I can’t imagine how that must have been.” He spoke softly. Then, “Worse still to know that your father had left him there for however long. Done nothing when...a little sooner...Jack might have been...”
She seemed startled then as though the thought had just occurred to her. Then she looked away. He voice thickened with tears she announced, “I hated him. I hated him more than you can ever know!”
Alec left her soon after but as she saw him out he pulled a copy of the evening paper from the pocket of his coat and gave it to her. “In case you want an update on Jack,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen much of him lately. And you might also be interested to know that the Miles Bradshaw investigation has been re-opened. We’ve a new lead on who killed him.”
*
She closed the door and stood with her back against it fighting for control, then slowly, slid down on her haunches, leaning against the solid wood, weeping fit to break her heart.
Never had she felt so hopelessly alone, unless in those days between Jack’s death and his funeral, before he had found a way back to her. There had always been Jack.
Briefly, her thoughts strayed to Gerry Mac, the man who’d made such a nuisance of himself in London and who had been instrumental in her decision to move back here. He’d frightened her on occasion and Jack knew that. He’d seen Jack, spotted him many times leaving Tally’s place and his jealousy led to rages that left her fearful.
Jack had taken care of him. Ridding her of the idiot, the trouble, the fear. Jack had always sorted out her problems...even when she hadn’t wanted him to.
Like now, with Simon. To Jack, just another problem to be solved.
*
By the time Tally was thirteen, Jack was beginning to lag behind her in his development and they were neither of them sure of what to do. He had studied every lesson that Tally had, helped her with each and every essay. Read the books that she had read and, now that Tally was allowed a television in her room, watched every programme that she had watched. He had even taken to amusing himself with daytime TV when Rose was out of the house and Tally off at school. He had a liking for chat shows, the more outrageous the better and soon had a working knowledge of every possible variant on the human condition as described by the likes of Jerry Springer and Sally Jesse Rafael. He could diagnose the onset of testicular cancer and bake a more than passable sponge cake, a talent that nearly landed Tally in deep trouble when she was forced to take credit for it. Rose was fully aware that her daughter couldn’t successfully boil an egg never mind fold the white of one carefully into cake mixture.
But this was not enough for Jack to achieve the development he wanted. Tally was now taller than Jack. Stronger, more knowledgeable about the real world and Jack was increasingly frustrated. He wanted friends of his own again. Wanted to be able to go out when Tally did and have conversations with people other than his sister. Tally was still his obsession and the heart of his existence, but Jack had to admit that only having Tally to rely on could make life pretty lonely.
They gave a lot of thought to this, Tally as eager as Jack for him to acquire some independence. Jack restricted her in ways she had never dreamed he would. She couldn’t sleep over at friends’ houses because it meant leaving Jack behind. Couldn’t go on school trips – she had missed out on skiing this year and there was a French trip planned for the following spring that she was desperate to take part in. After school activities were hard because it meant neglecting her brother and even friendships had to really be confined to school. How could she bring other people home knowing that Jack was there? Most people didn’t even see him, but there had been several near misses when those more perceptive souls had asked who the boy with sandy hair might be. Jack had become so solid and so perceptible that on occasions Rose had demanded to know who Tally had in her room when she had heard their voices. Jack still had the capacity to blend into the background. To become invisible at will but he complained that it made him feel funny these days and anyway, who wants to be forgotten and ignored when all around them life is going on?
Tally could never have not reinvented Jack, but now that she had, she was finding the going really tough and solutions to the problem were not exactly of the kind you could look up in a book or ask a teacher about.
“What do you want to be like?” Tally asked him.
“Older, old enough not to be in school.” The local police were pretty hot on youth crime and tended to stop anyone they thought should have been in school. Then there was the truant officer to consider. “And I’ve got to look different, Tally.” If Jack was going to be able to take part in life again he needed an identity separate from any that might be recognized.
They talked about possession, about taking someone else’s body but both Tally and Jack had reservations. They had no moral problem with it, both too single minded to be empathic about someone else’s loss and pain. The problem was that Jack would then be confined in a particular identity. Have to live with that person’s family and live the life that they had led. That did not appeal to Jack at all. Even so, Jack experimented
with the concept, trying hard to slip into the body and consciousness of another but it was harder than he had ever anticipated and he was always afraid of complete immersion for fear he might be trapped inside. Small children offered no resistance – but who wanted to be a two year old? The elderly and the dying similarly were easy targets for Jack’s attentions but were equally unsatisfactory from his perspective. The drunks and the addicts only left him feeling nauseous and weak. But Jack was learning. From each mind he encountered he gathered information, emotion, experience of the world, piece by tiny piece. At first it could take him days or even longer to assimilate even a fraction of his latest touch, but as time went on, Jack became a collector par excellence of the trivia and incidentals that went so far to making up the human experience.
Tally noticed the change in him and he let on to some of what he was doing, though some instinct warned him not to tell too much even to his beloved creator. He sensed that to achieve true autonomy this was something he had to do alone, make it impossible for it to be undone even by Tally herself.
“There’ve been a lot of flu deaths this year,” Rose observed one night as she read the evening paper. “They reckon that little ones and the elderly seem most susceptible and anyone in poor physical shape to start with. They found a drunk dead in the street last week. Stumbled out of the pub and keeled over. Someone picked him up and called an ambulance but he was already dead by the time they got there. They said that was the flu.” She sniffed haughtily as though it served the man right. Tally said nothing but she glanced across to where Jack was standing behind his mother’s chair. He had changed over the past few months, though so gradually it had been hard to trace. His hair looked darker and his eyes more hazel and he had grown, there was no doubt of that. Jack seemed to have gained a good two years’ worth of height in as many months.
“Flu?” she questioned when they were alone together.
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