‘How am I going to cope?’ she says. Her voice is small.
I don’t know what to say. A hundred different things come into my head, but they all sound so trite. They’re all from the same movie script as the woman and her breathing instruction.
‘Nat did everything. I mean, literally, everything. Some days…’ She stops to laugh ruefully, shaking her head. ‘Some days I wouldn’t change a nappy after about midday because I knew he’d be in eventually and could do it. Seriously. Seriously… I’m that bad of a mother.’
‘How d’you get on tonight?’ I ask.
‘Look at me drinking, and I didn’t offer, sorry,’ she says, ignoring the question. ‘Are you sure you don’t want something?’
‘I’m good, thanks. Got to drive.’
‘Stay the night?’
‘I don’t think that’d be a great idea,’ I say.
What do I mean by that? That I think we’ll end up in bed together? Really? I could just have said no! She shakes her head and looks slightly puzzled as if she wasn’t sure what I’d just said, but doesn’t really want to think about it.
‘When will your mum get here?’
Deep breath. Another moment sweeps over her. Her mum is coming. Why is her mum coming? The realisation sparks across her face. That’s the thing with grief. It won’t leave you alone for long. If, for some reason, you manage to think about something else for even the briefest of moments, the grief swiftly comes hurtling back in.
‘Her flight gets in at eight. She’s got a car hired, so I don’t need…’
She lets the sentence go. We sit in silence. I wish it was comfortable. I wish I was better at this.
‘I don’t want to go to sleep tonight… When I wake up… when I wake up I’ll have that moment. I remember it from Dad dying. That moment where you don’t remember. You wake up and there’s a second, maybe two, that’s all, where your mind is getting going and you haven’t quite realised yet that your world has just collapsed into nothingness… And then you remember, and it’s like finding out for the first time all over again.’
* * *
In the end I stay until she falls asleep on the couch. I find a small blanket from somewhere, one she uses for the kids, and lay it over her. I stare at her, making sure she’s not about to wake up. I don’t run my hand through her hair, or kiss her cheek. I can’t show her any affection, even though she’s asleep, a little bit drunk and probably wouldn’t notice anyway.
I walk out into the hallway and look up the stairs. She’s forgotten to close the gate at the top. I feel duty-bound to go and check on the children. Someone should, shouldn’t they?
They share a room, and they’re both asleep. The baby monitor is on, but I didn’t see one downstairs. I find it in Nat and Ellen’s bedroom – where the sheets are ruffled, the bed unmade – and take it downstairs and place it on the floor beside her. Then I leave, clicking the Yale lock behind me.
Sudden death, the total carnage of the spirit.
I stand on the doorstep and look up at the sky. There’s nothing to see, no moon, no stars. Across the road a curtain moves, there’s a brief wink of light, and then it’s gone. I walk to my car and drive home, deciding that it’s too late to let the Chief Inspector know that Ellen Natterson is alive and well and utterly devastated.
* * *
Dorothy comes to me in the night. I suppose it’s a dream. Maybe it’s the actual Dorothy, or what’s left of her on earth. Her spirit. I feel her pressed against me in the bed, her right arm wrapped around me, her face held lightly against my shoulder.
Her hand finds mine, and our fingers entwine. I don’t know what she’s wearing, can’t sense clothes on her, yet it doesn’t feel like she’s naked.
‘You don’t mind,’ she says.
Her voice sounds small. For a moment I think it might be Ellen, her voice was small too, she was equally sad. The moment passes though, as I come out of sleep – at least, it feels at the time that I’m coming out of sleep, but maybe I’m sleeping the whole time. The middle of the night, surrounded in darkness. How would I know?
‘No, it’s fine,’ I reply.
I realise that there was a different quality to Ellen’s sadness. Perhaps she just hadn’t got used to it yet. Dorothy had had fifteen years getting used to the fact that her husband and daughter were gone. A long time to become entrenched in and consumed by her sorrow. It was still fresh for Ellen. She still hadn’t become accustomed to it. As she said, she still had to wake up and not realise. She still had to turn and ask if he wanted a cup of coffee, she had to buy his favourite pasta sauce at the supermarket, she had to look to see what time he’d be watching the football, she had to have a conversation with him in her head that she might have later; she had to think and do all of these things, the instinctive things that come with living with someone, before being struck by the crushing sucker punch of realisation.
‘Why are you here?’ I ask. ‘I thought you’d be free.’
There’s no reply. Her face presses against my shoulder a little harder. I feel the dampness of a tear.
Her sorrow seems to seep into me, the osmosis of pain. Why is she here? Because her spirit cannot find what it’s looking for. In that spirit world, wherever it is you go when you die, her child isn’t there either. How could she have been when she was never born? Not in this life. And perhaps her husband was nowhere to be found, or his spirit was as dismissive of her spirit as it had been before he’d died of the heroin overdose.
‘I won’t come every night,’ she says. ‘You understand, don’t you?’
I squeeze her hand. I don’t think we talk any more. I feel like I fall asleep again, although perhaps I was never awake in the first place.
She’s not there when the alarm goes off at 5.45 a.m.
34
Walking into the station at just after 8.30 on a Sunday morning. Mary is there, which seems strange, but I could tell from the car park that more people than usual had come in. Yesterday was tragic. Yesterday the station had been brought to its knees by an unexpected death. Today we get on with the job, regardless of what damned day of the week it is, we do it well, and if it makes it easier for some people, they can imagine they’re doing it for Nat, and that somewhere, he’s watching.
‘Call for you,’ says Mary.
‘Right now?’ I ask. I start to look at my watch.
‘The Embassy in Tallinn. I saw you coming, he’s holding.’
I glance at the stairs up to the main room and then lean on the counter.
‘I’ll take it here.’
She hands me the phone.
‘Kenneth,’ I say, making the assumption.
‘Inspector,’ he says.
‘It’s early.’
‘Already 10.35 here.’
‘Of course. Any news?’
‘Mr Baden will be on a plane this morning, indeed our people are already taking him out to the airport. He’ll be back in London by early afternoon. He’ll be met by the Foreign Office, I suspect someone will take him to the office and he’ll be further debriefed, and then they’ll put him up in a hotel for the night. Maybe you could help coordinate from there, and I presume you’ll need to get the social services involved etc. Wouldn’t look good if the government just dumped him on the streets.’
‘OK, cool. Can you e-mail me his flight details and a contact in London, and we’ll start getting it sorted this end?’
‘Of course.’
Having not been expecting to speak to him so soon, I haven’t quite gathered my thoughts. Race through them to remember what it was I’d decided I needed to be asking him.
‘Can we talk?’ I say. ‘I mean, how secure is this?’
He laughs. ‘I’d say not very. I mean, we’re probably all right, as long as we don’t say anything we don’t want the Russians to hear.’
‘It’s not the Russians I’m worried about.’
Silence, although I can tell it’s neither frosty nor uncomfortable. He’s nodding.
�
��Go on,’ he says after a moment.
‘I don’t have any confirmation, but I want to work on the basis that this man, this really is John Baden. There’s no brainwashing, there’s no question of him being someone different but somehow being made to think that he’s Baden.’
‘OK.’
‘And here, in the UK, as soon as he’d turned up in Estonia, people started dying. People started getting murdered.’
‘Someone got the information back.’
‘Yes, they did.’
He thinks about it for a moment.
‘Someone in the police, or someone here at the Embassy?’
‘Either that or it was Baden himself.’
I need him to ask a few questions, but I pause, waiting for him to offer.
‘OK, leave it with me,’ he says. ‘I’ll speak to some people.’
‘Thanks, that’d be great. Appreciate it.’
We say our goodbyes, I hand the phone back to Mary, it’s 8.37 a.m. and that’s already the first item of the day chalked off the list.
* * *
Standing in the front room of a new house, up the hill in Inverness, overlooking the city, the Kessock Bridge and the Moray Firth. Clear day. You can see every contour on Wyvis. I could stand here all day. Wish I had a view like this. I live in the Highlands, and I thought at the time I bought the house that the view doesn’t matter so much, you can walk out your door, you can get in the car or on your bike and see the view in a couple of minutes.
Stupid thought. Tried selling my house a couple of years ago, but didn’t get anywhere. Waited and waited, then picked a really bad moment to go to market. Gave up after having to keep the place permanently tidy for six months. Might try again in a little while. Sure, you can see a little of the water from my dining room window, but no one’s chasing me out of there for the view.
She comes back into the room, two small mugs of tea in her hand.
‘Sure I can’t get you a bacon sandwich?’ she asks.
I would love a bacon sandwich, but have already decided to stop in town and get one before heading back to the station. The view won’t be as nice, but I won’t have to ask questions with my mouth full of food.
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
She stands beside me and we look down the hill, out towards the Firth.
‘Don’t suppose you can see the dolphins from up here?’ I ask.
‘I like to think so,’ she says, smiling, ‘but I’m probably just fooling myself. I go down, often enough, to North Kessock.’
We stand there, in comfortable silence, Margaret and I, for a few moments. I get the sense of her, have had it since coming into the house. No sign of a husband, or of there ever having been one. She’s a couple of years younger than her sister, and there’s the same dreamy, slightly detached quality about her.
One of those houses you walk into and there’s a feeling of a lack of fulfilment hanging over the place. Impossible to pin down, but there’s something.
‘Never married?’ I say, although I hadn’t intended to. The words just appeared.
‘Is it that obvious?’ she asks, smiling.
‘Sorry, not really relevant,’ I say, immediately feeling slightly embarrassed.
‘That’s all right. There was a chap… there’s always a chap, isn’t there? Never quite happened. We were in Sri Lanka together in the sixties. Ceylon, of course, as it was then. He got posted to Germany, and that was rather that I’m afraid. We hung on to each other for a while, but in the end he married an American girl.’
She takes a sip of tea. Glance at her. She’s looking out at the view, but her mind is somewhere else. She’s in Sri Lanka, with her chap, in 1963. Probably sitting on a veranda at sundown, drinking a gin and tonic, listening to the cicadas.
‘Moved to Michigan,’ she says. ‘Don’t know what became of him after that.’
I almost ask about Sri Lanka, how long she was there, what she was doing. But we’re a man down in this investigation and I need to be getting on with it. Don’t have time for the idle chitchat.
Look back out over the view. It’s glorious, in its way, but I wonder how it looks compared to the colours and warmth of Sri Lanka?
‘Tell me about the time you pretended to be your sister and identified your nephew’s body?’ I say, deciding just to go straight for what I’m beginning to presume is the truth.
I glance at her. She’s looking impassively out at the view, but I can see that her hand, previously steady, has started to shake a little.
‘Is that what she told you?’ she asks.
‘Tell me how it happened and how it played out,’ I say.
‘What makes you think it didn’t play out… that Andrew and Elsa didn’t go and see John’s poor body?’
I pause just before dropping the news on her. You want to shock people sometimes, because that’s when their guard is down, but that hand of hers is shaking a little more, and we could end up with a cup of tea on the floor, and while this investigation is more important than her carpet, the distraction could be enough for her to regain her composure, to retreat to the lie.
I put my tea down on a small table, and then take her mug away from her, laying it down beside the other one.
‘Seriously,’ she says, ‘I don’t know why you would…’
‘I know Andrew and Elsa didn’t see John’s poor body, because the body wasn’t John’s. He’s still alive.’
Hand to the mouth, she takes a step back. I put my hand on her back, so that she doesn’t walk into a piece of furniture.
‘You want to sit down?’ I ask.
I don’t entirely have the confidence of what I’m saying. There’s a certain amount of bluff, of course, given that I don’t know any of this for sure. But maybes and mights are easier to fend away. I need to start making serious headway.
She slumps into a large comfy seat, which is turned towards the TV, rather than towards the view.
‘Tell me what happened,’ I say. Her hands are fretting away, she’s staring at the carpet. Head shaking slightly now.
‘Margaret, I need you to talk to me,’ I say. ‘I know you did something wrong, but there’s unlikely to be any comeback for it at this stage. We just need to know the truth so that we can press on with our current investigation.’
‘Where is he?’ she finally says, looking up.
‘In a minute,’ I say. ‘Tell me about the identification.’
She stares in my direction for a moment, her gaze going right through me, her lips moving slightly.
‘She always said. Elsa. Elsa always said. It can’t be him. He’s not dead.’
Another pause. Another long stare into the depths of the past. Her head starts moving, slowly, from side to side. She seems to have aged, suddenly. Now the younger sister looks about ten years older. I wonder how much younger Elsa will look when she learns her son is still alive, if that’s what he is. Perhaps she will just smile and say, of course he is.
‘The police asked his parents to come along. Andrew couldn’t face it on his own, and Elsa refused to go. Point blank refused. She’d already… Andrew was worried, he’d spoken to the doctor, they were worried that she had the first signs of dementia, and her refusal to accept the bad news, they just thought it was part of it.’
I didn’t see that, even twelve years later. Not dementia. I could imagine a twenty-year-old having the same, dreamy, detached view on life.
‘I went with him. He told them I was John’s mother. I’m not sure why, or what he was thinking. They didn’t know any different, they’d asked for John’s parents… The body was awful. Blue and bloated. The face was badly beaten. It was horri–’
‘–The face was beaten?’
‘Yes, I could barely look. Andrew stood over him, stood over John, looking down. But his eyes were closed. He couldn’t look. He couldn’t bear to see his son like that.’
‘Didn’t the police notice? Someone? Someone must have seen him standing there with his eyes closed.’
She shakes her head. If she were younger I’d think she might be about to start crying, but her eyes are dry.
‘I don’t think so. They were to the side, behind him maybe. I was standing across from Andrew. He was in a terrible state. I felt so bad for him, the poor man.’
‘But you looked at the face?’
‘Yes.’
It shouldn’t have been badly beaten. There was no mention of that previously. The face must have been beaten to cover up the identity, and the body was then cremated. And all of it done on Detective Inspector Rosco’s watch.
‘And you couldn’t tell it wasn’t your nephew because of the state of his face?’
The head is still shaking, she looks up, bemused.
‘Actually I could.’
‘What?’
‘I could tell it wasn’t him.’
The eyes drift away, and suddenly I can see the shock and the nervousness bleed from her, as she is made to face up to the long-forgotten and long-denied truth.
‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘They told me it was John. They’d told Andrew and Elsa. The police had gone to their house and said to them that John’s body had been found. They said Emily had identified him. It had to be John… The body… the body was so puffed and horrible… the skin stretched, that frightful colour. I hardly looked. I thought, it doesn’t look like him, it really doesn’t. But, who would look like himself in that state?’
Not sure what to say. At last, however, we’re getting somewhere. The real John Baden is coming back from Estonia today, while someone else died twelve years ago. It also raises a substantial question about Emily King, although those questions have been growing. She, too, surely couldn’t have identified the body with her eyes closed?
‘And the policeman said, he said even before he pulled the sheet back, don’t worry if you don’t think, if you don’t think it looks like him. His face is… different. He used the word different. I wasn’t even sure that Andrew hadn’t just done what I did, looked quickly and then closed his eyes. So I just thought, it must be him. It must be John. And the little voice that doubted, I was able just to ignore.’
Song of the Dead Page 19