The repetitions of the girl’s fall reverberated like drumbeats in Dudley’s skull, pounding his thoughts into less than words. “I’ve got the weekend to come up with something,” he managed not quite to plead.
“If you have any ideas you can always email them.” Vincent seemed more at ease with saying “My car’s five minutes along here if anybody wants a lift.”
“Mine’s up there too,” said Mr Killogram.
Dudley would have liked to spend time with him, but just now it was crucial to stay with his source of inspiration. “Don’t get yourselves tangled up in the rush hour,” she said. “I don’t mind walking.”
“I don’t either,” Dudley said at once.
He was just as quick to turn his back on the men. If they thought he intended to do whatever they would have done with Patricia, that was another reason why they could never imagine the truth, but he didn’t want her glimpsing any winks they sent him. In a few seconds they were out of earshot, and the policewoman had rejoined her colleagues. Not even the actress was watching him. “Patricia?” he said.
“Are you upset?” She halted by the police cars and blinked at him. “You’re upset,” she said.
“Don’t you think I should be? He’s mine. I thought of everything about him.”
“Nobody’s trying to steal him from you. You heard Vincent, he’d still like you to be involved.”
Dudley had to risk seeming inadequate; nobody else would know he had. “I’ve got no ideas for him.”
“He’s given you the weekend. Maybe you’ll have some by then.”
“I will if you help.”
Patricia raised the eyebrow that was closer to him. “What are you asking?”
Below the rail behind her a car sounded its horn like a warning or a fanfare. She was almost close enough to the wall to be thrown over it if the police hadn’t been there, but in any case he wasn’t about to repeat himself—quite the opposite. “I want you to help me research,” he said.
TWENTY-FOUR
“Research,” Patricia repeated and saw a frown twitch Dudley’s eyes to indicate the police behind him. He mustn’t want to antagonise them further. “Let’s talk about it,” she said and started past the marked cars.
He overtook her at once. She had to hurry to keep up with him alongside the slope planted with saplings and littered grass. He didn’t slow until they were beside the university and well out of sight of the police. “What did you have in mind?” she said.
“Explore a bit and then we could have dinner if you like.”
“Explore where?”
“Just walk and see if anywhere gives us ideas.” Somewhat less impatiently he said “I want you to say if you get any. You don’t know how helpful you could be.”
“I don’t think I’m very likely to have your kind of idea.”
“You never know what’ll happen. You could inspire me.” Before she had time to demur he said “I wouldn’t be having so much trouble thinking of ideas now if you’d published the story you said you would.”
That was scarcely her fault, but by aiding him she would be helping the magazine. “Why don’t we walk along to James Street and then we’ll see,” she said.
They had reached the six-way racetrack of an intersection. Several hundred yards away, traffic lights were releasing the competitors for the nearest lanes. Patricia made to outstrip them, but Dudley caught her arm. “Not yet,” he blurted and let go at once.
She dealt with the intersection when it was safer and used the crossing by the museum. Above the Kingsway Tunnel, which was swallowing cars with the left side of its mouth and regurgitating as many with the other, Dale Street led towards the river. The sandwich shops on the ground floors of office buildings tall as houses piled on houses were shut now, and the traffic in the one-way street was slackening. Since the setting appeared not to enliven Dudley, she said “Can I talk?”
“Don’t let me stop you if you’ve anything to say.”
“I wondered why you took a dislike to that girl back there.”
“Didn’t you? She was trying to make it harder for us.”
“Not the policewoman, the girl in the reconstruction.”
“She wasn’t in much.”
“What more would you have expected her to do? Or are you criticising how she was dressed?”
“It’s no wonder someone threw her over when she looked like that, is it?”
“I’m sorry, no, actually I’m not, but I find that offensive.” This earned Patricia such a blank stare that she had to ask “Am I missing the point? Are you trying to be your character?”
“I don’t need to try.” He stared up one of the alleys that squeezed between or, in this case, through the buildings. Five secretaries were chattering and clattering along it to a pub that had grown drunken with age. “No use,” he said.
“I won’t talk if it stops you concentrating.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll help.”
“You go into your role when you work on a story, is that it?”
“That’s me.” As though to demonstrate he said “You saw that girl. That’s not how they described her in the paper.”
“So what are you objecting to?”
“They always make out like whoever gets killed is a terrible loss to the world, this person that’s so good and so important they’re better than anyone could ever be, well, almost anyone. It isn’t fair.”
Patricia thought he was trying rather too hard to convince her as his character. “People want to think as well of them as they can when they’re the victims. Or do you think the killers are somehow?”
“I don’t know any killer that’s a victim.”
They had reached the Town Hall on the brow of a hill, beyond which the rest of the business district sloped down to the dock road and the Pier Head. She was turning towards James Street when the sight of the river set off a thought. “Have you ever used the ferry?”
“Not since my dad took me on it,” he said, and then his eyes glinted. “I see what you mean. That could work, couldn’t it? Only if you come on it with me.”
She could catch the train on the far side of the river. “All right, let’s try and make sure you’ve got a story,” she said and started downhill.
All six lanes of the dock road were still racing. The sketch of a man as red as a wound healed at last, and she dashed across into a huge distorted shadow, the silhouette of one of the metal birds on top of the Liver Building. She didn’t know what kind of bird the shadow reminded her of. She could almost have imagined Dudley’s were its footfalls as she hurried past the lengthy grey eight-storey façade and across the flagstoned open space to the ticket office above the river.
A boxed-in ramp flattened their footsteps thin while a ferry bumped the tyres at the edge of the landing-stage and a man in a luminous orange tunic tossed a rope to another. A further member of the gang rode a gangplank on its chains until it struck the deck to let the passengers board: Patricia, Dudley, a helmeted cyclist who lingered on the lowest deck. An enclosed staircase climbed to a section of open deck beside a deserted saloon. Patricia was making for one of the pairs of wooden benches that occupied the deck, their backs pinched together, when Dudley said “There’s a diagram.”
He was gazing at a picture inside the saloon. It showed the workings of the boat, displaying a side view of the innards above an overhead illustration of each of the three decks. It reminded Patricia of the instructions for a boy’s model kit, but she suspected it meant something else to Dudley. “What are you thinking?” she said.
“What are you?”
“Someone could fall overboard, I suppose.”
“Drowning’s not that interesting.”
She couldn’t help being annoyed by the remark. “You couldn’t get caught up in the propellers,” she found she was actually disappointed to observe. “They’re underneath. If you fell off the stern you’d end up in the wake.”
“What about if you fell over the side?”
�
�I suppose you might be dragged under.”
The gangplank rose with a rattle of its chains, and a metal barrier rumbled into place on the bottom deck. “Let’s see what we can see,” Dudley said.
As they made for the rail beside the stern the ferry swung towards the peninsula. Having lined up parallel with it, the boat began to cruise along the middle of the river past Birkenhead to Seacombe. Patricia gripped the rail and craned over a lifebelt attached to the outside. Fluid tubes of neon streamed past the weathered flank of the boat to merge with the churning wake. “What can you see?” Dudley was anxious to learn.
“Nothing you can’t, I should think.”
“Can you make out the propeller at all? Anything to do with it, even?”
“Such as what?”
“I don’t know. You’re better placed than me. It was your idea.”
Patricia stood on tiptoe and leaned over. All at once her foothold felt unsteady with the muted throbbing of the engine through the deck. The neon ripples were trying to snag her vision and bear it away. The lifebelt shifted under her fingers as if she was losing her grip on the rail. Perhaps all this was why she fancied Dudley was about to seize her by the shoulders; he was no longer beside her. Why should he expect her to strain like this for him? He was taller than she was—most people were. She lurched backwards and aside before she turned, one hand clutching the rail. “I still can’t see anything,” she said. “You look if you like.”
His fingers were covering his mouth in a shape suggesting prayer. He seemed to be having difficulty in keeping his feet still, as if the sensations of the engine were troubling them. He darted to the rail and leaned over more precariously than she had. Was this meant to demonstrate her lack of daring? Far more quickly than she had, he stepped back. “I can’t either. I’ll need to bring Vincent, anyway.”
“That’s a point. Would he be able to film that kind of scene here?”
“He’ll have to. It’s his job.”
As the ferry veered towards Seacombe, Patricia caught sight of a pub half a mile along the promenade. For longer than she was proud of she didn’t know why the Egremont Ferry sounded familiar. “Isn’t that where Shell . . .”
“Where she what? You can say it. It’s not going to bother me.”
“All the same, I wish I hadn’t gone on about falling overboard just now.”
“She only drowned. Your idea’s better.”
Patricia didn’t care much for the praise. She watched the cyclist disembark at Seacombe, where nobody boarded. When the ferry set off for Birkenhead she was unable to stifle a question. “What do you mean, better?”
“More interesting. More spectacular.”
“What kind of spectacle are you thinking of? A girl’s body being shredded under there? Her bones being ground up and splintered and broken? All her blood?”
“That sounds good.”
Her attempt to shock him had merely succeeded in making Patricia feel uneasy about her own depths. At least she’d silenced him. He’d said nothing more by the time they disembarked at Woodside and tramped up the ramp. He hurried past a gathering of dormant buses to Hamilton Square, and she wondered if an idea was driving him.
The chatter of two girls who followed them into the station’s capacious lift appeared to distract him. She rather hoped he would recapture his idea, since it seemed to have chased the notion of dining with her out of his mind. He didn’t meet her eyes until he’d sat opposite her in an otherwise empty carriage, and he looked so preoccupied that she was inclined to leave him alone wherever he was. Then he stretched his upturned hands towards her as though indicating her to somebody unseen. “Let me know when anything develops if you like,” she said. “If my phone’s switched off you can always leave a message.”
“I thought you’d rather it was while we were together.”
“That’s imaginative of you.” Patricia very nearly said that, but restrained herself to murmuring “That won’t be for much longer. If you’ll excuse me, I’m off home.”
The train gave a lurch that extinguished all its lights. After a moment of utter darkness they flared up to show him crouching at her. “What about dinner?” he said.
Patricia didn’t flinch. “Gosh, I’ve never heard a meal sound so much like a threat.”
He peered into her face before sitting back. “Depends who you think you’ll be with.”
“Nobody tonight. I’m sorry if you thought I said I’d join you. I’m a bit exhausted.” Her upbringing prompted her to add more politely than sincerely “Maybe another time.”
“You don’t mind disappointing Kathy, then.”
“It’s news to me if I am.”
“I told her we were meeting and she said you should come back for dinner. I thought you realised that’s what I meant.”
Patricia might have relented if he hadn’t looked so secretly amused. “You should have told me Kathy had invited me. I hope she hasn’t gone to too much trouble. Make my apologies. No, I will.”
She was reaching for her mobile when Dudley snatched out his. “I will. It’s my fault, isn’t it? She’s my mother.”
He dialled as soon as the tunnel opened to the sky at Conway Park. He hadn’t received an answer when the train burrowed once more into the dark. Patricia might have raised the question of when he’d written “Night Trains Don’t Take You Home” if he hadn’t begun to look nervous. Perhaps explaining to Kathy would be enough of a strain for now.
The carriage had barely emerged into the sunlight when he redialled. Patricia had begun to count the number of rings she was just able to hear by the time he said “She isn’t answering.”
“Oh dear. I hope she isn’t busy on my behalf.”
“She wouldn’t be this busy.” He held the phone away from him to let Patricia hear the small shrill pulse more clearly, then pressed it against himself so hard his cheek reddened beneath his ear. “I don’t think she’s making dinner,” he said.
His eyes were growing watery with more emotion than Patricia had ever seen in them. “What’s the matter, Dudley?” she had to ask.
“We had a row.”
“People do. Was it bad?” she said, wondering if Kathy had at last not given in to him.
“Some of the things I said might have been. She went on my computer and finished a story I was writing.”
“She must have been trying to help, mustn’t she?” With rather less conviction Patricia asked “Was it any good?”
“I wouldn’t want it to be published.”
Patricia tried and failed to imagine a successful collaboration between him and his mother. He ended the call and immediately redialled. “She was really upset,” he said. “I thought having you round for dinner might make her feel better.”
Had he suggested it, then? Patricia wasn’t entirely happy with his using her in this way or assuming that he could. Before she could raise a gentle objection he held the shrill unanswered sound towards her. “She wouldn’t have gone out when she thought you were coming. She must be there, but then why can’t she answer?”
The train was slowing for Birkenhead North. He switched off the mobile and thrust it into his pocket as he sprang to his feet. “Will you come and see with me? She might have—I don’t know.”
“What’s the worst she could have done? She seemed pretty well in control of herself to me.”
“You’ve never seen her upset. Once she said if she ever thought I didn’t love her—I don’t want to say. Can’t you see I’m scared for her?”
He must be, Patricia decided: otherwise she didn’t think he would have exposed his feelings like this. While she wasn’t convinced that Kathy would harm herself, she wasn’t sure either. “Is there a neighbour you could call?” she said.
“I don’t know anybody’s number. I don’t know the neighbours.”
He sounded more desperate than ever. A frown that appeared to be striving to prevent his eyes from widening only made them bulge. “All right, I’ll come,” she said.
He was off the train before the doors had finished parting. He dashed through the stubby passage of the station and along a terrace of houses that edged the pavement opposite, then halted by an empty playground caged by wire as if a thought had pinioned him. Patricia thought he’d been inspired until she saw that he was staring at the supermarket across the road. “I’ve got to buy something. Because of her,” he explained with very little patience.
“Shall I go on? I remember the way.”
“Go on, then. I’ll catch up.”
Patricia hurried to the intersection that was pinned down by a church. She was halfway up the sloping road opposite a car wash when she heard him running after her. A large supermarket bag thumped his thigh at each step. As he overtook her she glimpsed the contents of the bag. For a dismayed moment she thought it was full of bandages, and then she grasped that they were rolls of heavy parcel tape. “Why do you need those?” she called.
“I said. Because of her,” he panted without turning or slackening his speed.
Presumably Kathy had asked him to buy them. Perhaps doing so expressed his hope that she had come to no harm or his reluctance to find out the truth. Patricia sprinted to end up alongside him as he dodged into his road. He glanced at the house next to his, but the curtains—net, which always reminded Patricia of elegant cobwebs—didn’t stir. He shoved his key into the lock and twisted it, and shouldered the door wide enough for Patricia to follow him at once.
At first she didn’t know why he refrained from speaking even once he’d closed the door behind them, and then she noticed that there wasn’t a hint of dinner in the air. She took a breath that seemed flavoured with absence, thinned by it. “Kathy?” she rather more than said.
As if this was his cue or had shattered his trance, Dudley hurried to throw open the kitchen door. “She isn’t here,” he came close to wailing.
“Do you think she may have left a note?”
Patricia didn’t think it was an unreasonable suggestion—not one that deserved to be ignored by him, at any rate. He pushed past her and ran upstairs as she looked into the other downstairs rooms. She heard him fling a bedroom door wide, and then there was silence. She might have found breathing easier once he spoke if it hadn’t been for his tone, so hushed as to be uninterpretable. “Patricia.”
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