Chad smiled at him. ‘It is a bit like that, talking to God.’
‘Mostly I give up.’ Tobias sat down and took another chip. His gaze fell on the diary. ‘What’s this doing here?’ His hand went towards it. Chad saw the sticky, greasy fingers and dived for the book. He straightened up, holding it, embarrassed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he began, looking at Virginia. ‘It’s just – ’ he gestured towards Tobias, who now had a chip in each hand. ‘It’s such a beautiful thing. The idea that it might – ’
‘The World can’t arise out of Chaos by the Laws of Nature,’ Tobias intoned. ‘That’s what he says in there. He says that blind Fate could never make all the Planets move in the same way. He calls it “Orbs concentrick”, with a “k”. That’s because it’s old.’ He dipped a chip in a puddle of ketchup. ‘And then he goes on about God. And then the other writing at the end says that she’s very unhappy and she wants to die, but that’s not about the atoms and the orbs and the planets, that’s about her husband who’s not nice to her. Amelia, she’s called. It’s difficult to read because of how they wrote in those days.’ He stopped, breathing. He smiled at Virginia. ‘We think he’s right, don’t we, Auntie? There can’t be nothing, can there? Everything is stuff. Even what they call a vacuum, it’s just a different kind of stuff. That’s what I tell the people at work, and they argue with me and then I get upset and I have to sit in the fridge thing until I feel calm again.’
‘The fridge thing?’ Her voice was tight.
‘It has a nice hum,’ he said.
She glanced at Chad. The only sound was Tobias finishing his chips.
Chad held out the book to Virginia. ‘I’d better be getting back,’ he said.
She looked down at the book in his hand, then looked up at him. ‘Keep it,’ she said.
‘Keep it?’ He stared at her.
‘It’s trouble, that book. We don’t want it, do we Tom?’
Tobias looked across at the book. ‘Doesn’t matter to me,’ he said. ‘I know it all in my head. I use it for my mixtures.’
‘It belongs to my husband,’ she said. ‘Belonged,’ she corrected herself.
‘So – ’ Chad looked at her. ‘Don’t you want to… I mean, surely…’
‘No.’ Her lips were set in a thin line. ‘Nothing but trouble, that book.’
‘Well, as a loan,’ Chad began. He felt the smooth leather between his fingers.
‘If you want to see it that way…’ She took a step towards the door. He placed the book in his coat pocket, turned to Tobias. ‘It’s nice to meet you,’ he said.
Tobias gazed up at him. ‘Why?’
‘It just is,’ Charles said.
Tobias nodded. He dabbed at some salt, then licked his finger.
The sun was low in the sky, and the clouds were gathering. In the doorway he held out his hand to her. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ he said.
She heard the warmth in his voice. ‘Thank you for coming to see me,’ she said.
He took a step on to the path. She was standing behind him.
‘What you said,’ she said. ‘About blame. Always blaming yourself. Do you think it will be over now he’s dead?’ And as he turned back to her the tears fell. ‘Or will it be worse,’ she was saying, ‘knowing that they’re both gone, knowing that wherever our boy is, Murdo is there with him, if there is such a place?’ She dashed her hand against her eyes. ‘And I’m left here.’ She felt in her pocket for a tissue. ‘For a long time I thought I simply couldn’t live without him, without my son. And then I realized that that was how it was going to be. You can’t will your own death. Unless you do it yourself. And I was a coward about all that.’ She dabbed at her eyes, then looked at him. ‘Does that make Murdo a coward? Or does that make him brave, to fling himself off that tower at high tide and wait for death?’
Her face was luminous, her eyes dark with feeling. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, to give her hope, but he knew he had none to give. He shook his head. ‘Virginia – I don’t know.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t know either.’ She was staring at the floor.
‘What was his name?’ he said. ‘Your boy.’
She looked up at him. ‘Jacob,’ she said. ‘I don’t say it very often. Not out loud, anyway.’ She gave a sob, turned away. ‘I must go in,’ she said.
He touched her arm. ‘I’ll see you again,’ he said. She said something in reply, but her hand was across her face and he couldn’t catch the words. He watched the door close behind her.
‘I feel sick.’ Mary dabbed at her nose with a paper handkerchief. ‘That smell… My sixth one, and they get me every time.’
The mortuary coffee bar was warm and noisy. They sat by the wide, sunlit window.
Berenice stared out at the car park. ‘I still don’t get why he drove there. Did he know someone was waiting for him? And the records show there were threats to the lab too, hate mail kind of things… but then why that lighthouse, what’s it called…’
‘Hank’s Tower,’ Mary said. ‘It was never used as a lighthouse, they say. Out on the flats there. No one knows what it was for.’
Berenice sipped her coffee. ‘Someone’s going to have to talk to the wife again. Don’t you think?’
DS Mary Ashcroft shrugged. ‘All I’m thinking is, I wish I hadn’t splashed my best perfume all over this handkerchief. Now I’ll always associate Stella McCartney with the smell of that poor bastard half eaten by fish.’
Berenice smiled.
‘And you’ve got your work cut out,’ Mary went on. ‘Unlawful killing now. And there’s the Chief going on about how he’s relying on you to head up the team.’
‘Yeah. In spite of my “lack of local knowledge”… Perhaps he’s waiting for me to fail.’
‘You’ll just have to prove him wrong, then, won’t you?’
Berenice drained her mug. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s what I usually do.’
Clem Voake walked unsteadily up the steps of his caravan, leaning heavily on the flimsy rail. He spent some minutes fiddling with the door handle, until the door opened in front of him.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Dad. Where were you?’
‘I’m OK, girl. I’m OK.’
‘Drinking again.’ She turned and went inside.
‘Only a bit. Got to give the dead a good send-off, eh?’
She curled up on the seats, gathering a thick blanket around her. ‘No gas either,’ she said.
He seemed not to hear. He sat down heavily at the small table.
‘Where were you last night, then?’ she said.
He shook his head.
She looked at him. He was tanned and muscular, with a shock of black hair, a growth of black stubble, a shabby checked shirt. His bright eyes settled on her. ‘What you staring at, girl?’ He smiled.
‘You.’ Her face softened.
‘Peas in a pod, you and me. They might say you’re just like your mother, but you and me… peas in a pod.’ He yawned. ‘Anything to eat?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s freezing in here.’
‘Like I said. No gas.’
‘Enough for a cup of tea?’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe. Then that’s it. We’ll have to drive to the retail park.’ She got to her feet, lit the small hob.
‘You’re a good girl, Lisa,’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure you don’t come to any harm.’
‘Gavvers were here,’ she said.
‘Hmm?’
‘Feds. Cops. You know.’
He blinked. ‘Feds? Here?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did you tell them?’ There was an edge to his voice.
‘I told them you weren’t here. Cos you weren’t.’
He was punching his fists together. ‘Bastard cops. How did they know… Did they say what they wanted?’
‘Oh, yeah, like to invite us to tea? Course they didn’t.’
He stared at her, blank-eyed. Then he stumbled to the tiny f
ridge. ‘Nothing to drink,’ he said.
‘Told you. No money, innit.’ She smoothed down her jumper. ‘Just tea.’
‘Tea,’ he said. He flung himself back down on the seat. ‘Tea. That’s all they bleeding gave us.’
‘At the church?’
‘Weren’t a church. Crema – Crema thing. You know.’ He fished in his pockets. ‘No fucking fags neither.’ He looked at her. ‘Who else was here?’
‘No one.’
His eyes narrowed in his thin, leathery face. He surveyed her.
She looked at him, thought how it was just like him to wear a red checked shirt to his cousin’s funeral.
‘What?’ He stared her out. ‘You got a problem?’
‘No, Dad. No problem.’
The kettle’s whistle broke the silence. She poured water into two mugs.
‘What I want to know is, what did that cow think, sending you over to me? She knows I can’t claim for you?’
‘It weren’t like that, Dad.’ She stirred sugar into his tea, passed it across to him.
‘You’re a good girl,’ he said, again.
She sipped her tea in silence. Then she said, ‘Hank’s Tower, was it? Last night?’
He shrugged.
‘Don’t know what it is with that place,’ she said. ‘Tobias is always going down there too. His experiments, he says. Far as I can see all he does is stand at the top and throw stuff off it. Stones and that. And it’s dangerous, innit, there’s signs up there saying keep out, I’m always warning him…’
‘Dangerous,’ he repeated. He seemed not to have heard her.
‘And anyway,’ she said, ‘it weren’t like that with Mum and you know it. She didn’t send me here so you could get benefits. It was me who wanted to come here – ’
‘Yeah, and it leaves her free to live at my expense with her fucking pimp too – ’
‘Dad – ’
‘She’s always got her own way, that one. They tried to warn me – ’
‘Dad – I came here because – ’
‘Selfish bitch. Always was. Always will be. I should have listened…’
‘I came here because I wanted to be with you.’ Her last word was a sob.
He looked up at her. She stood there, under the low roof, with tears in her eyes.
‘Baby girl…’ he tried to say.
She turned away. ‘Don’t matter,’ she said.
‘Babes…’ he tried. He watched her for a moment. Then he drained his tea, noisily. ‘I’ll go and get gas,’ he said. He got to his feet. ‘Did the feds ask about the van?’
She still had her back to him. ‘No,’ she said.
‘I’ll take the car just in case,’ he said. ‘I’ll get us some chips too, eh? You’d like that, baby, wouldn’t you?’
She shrugged. ‘Sure,’ she said.
‘I haven’t eaten for hours.’ He pulled on his coat. ‘Those van fucking Mielens,’ he was saying, ‘and they’re still too mean to give Digby a decent send-off. Still, all that will change now, eh Baby? You and me, we’ll have money now, won’t we?’
She sniffed, dabbing at her cheeks with her fingers.
‘Won’t be long, babes.’
The caravan door rattled as he shut it behind him.
She waited until the roar of his car engine had faded. She went outside, stood by the tow bar of the caravan. She rested one hand on the tow bar. In her mind, the first few bars of piano music. In her mind, she was wearing pink, like Miss Helen at the Centre, with her hair pinned up and shoes with points and everything. And third position. And point, and close, and point…
It was quiet outside the caravan. Soon she’d hear the return of his car. But for now there was calm, and light, and the thought of satin shoes.
Chapter Three
The sea is a soft background sound in the wide, light room.
My studio, Helen thought, looking at herself in the mirror, her right arm balanced on the barre. My ballet studio.
Once there was a real studio, a real ballet company, and me, a part of it, and the mirrors reflected us layered in cardigans and leg warmers and our feet in pink.
Now there is just me. Alone. Silent. Silent, that is, apart from the sea.
She placed her hand on the barre. And plié en seconde. And rise, and down. And fifth, plié, rise -
She stopped and crossed the room to the CD player.
And all because I followed my husband, she thought. All because I said, yes, to Chad, yes of course we can move from here, leave the city, take up a new parish on the coast, if that’s what they want you to do. If that’s what you want to do.
She pressed a button on the CD player. A few sparse piano notes filled the air. She returned to the barre. It had been a condition of the move that one of the huge empty reception rooms in the vicarage would be converted into a room for her, with a floor and barre and mirrors…
Battement tendu. And point, and close…
Her arms were fluid in their movement, her face fixed in concentration. Questions hovered, several questions, in fact, that she might have asked herself. Was it, in the end, what Chad had wanted to do? She hoped he was happier here. In the nearly six months since they had moved, it was difficult to tell.
He gave no indication of being unhappy, she thought, turning to face the other way, placing her feet in first position. He seemed busy in his work as the new priest in this quiet parish by the sea, no less busy than he had been back in the inner city with its noise and life.
She wanted him to be happy. Six years ago, he’d asked her to marry him, standing in the rain outside his church in Hackney, at the end of an evening which had started with a broken-down bus which meant they didn’t get to the film they’d planned to see, a French new wave thing, she remembered now, they’d always meant to get the DVD but never had. And then dinner in a Thai restaurant, in which he’d confessed to never having eaten crab before, ever, or lobster for that matter, or squid. She’d laughed. Mussels? Oysters? He’d shaken his head. ‘Why?’ she’d asked him, laughing still. ‘I think my mother thought they were fancy foreign things,’ he said. ‘Something to do with the French. And the war. Like rare steak. Or fresh cream cakes. And my father thought they were unclean,’ he’d said, and blushed.
‘Unclean?’ she’d asked him, ‘like, not kosher? But you’re not Jewish.’
In answer, he’d described his father. A man of strong and rather selective Biblical beliefs, who married late and not very happily, produced two sons of which he was probably, quietly, very proud but never showed it. An upright Christian man, for whom God was more the vengeful God of wars and smiting than the God of love and forgiveness. A man who sent his sons to boarding school rather than admit that his own schooling had been torment…
‘And was it torment for you too?’ she’d asked.
‘Yes,’ he’d said. ‘But probably not as bad as it had been for Father.’
She’d heard herself ask, ‘How did you keep your faith?’
‘I don’t know,’ he’d said.
There had been a silence, and then the conversation had drifted back to the shallows; his first taste of prawn, (he wasn’t sure if he didn’t agree with his mother after all), the next film they ought to see, should the Number Thirty-Eight bus be working after all, the dance show that she was about to open in, a modern ballet set to a minimalist score…
‘You know,’ he’d said, ‘before I met you, I knew nothing about dance. Or minimalism.’
‘Or prawns,’ she’d said.
He’d reached across the table and grasped her hand.
Leaning on the barre, now, with the piano notes falling softly around her, she remembered how he’d turned to her, later that evening, standing at the gate of his church. He’d said to her that all through his childhood, somehow, in the face of his father’s diminished and mean-minded God, he had always had a sense of another way of thinking about it all, a way of love and beauty and warmth and generosity, and that even with no evidence, it was enough to hope th
at the world might turn on such things. And that through her he’d come to see that it was true. And that what he hoped more than anything was that she might agree to spend her life with him.
‘You’re asking me to marry you?’ she’d said. Incredulous first, then pleased, delighted - ‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘Yes, I will.’
She stepped away from the barre and stood in the middle of the room.
And we were happy. For a long time, we were happy. But now…
Was she happy teaching dance rather than performing it, her classes of little girls at Miss Dorothy’s School of Dance during the week, with the occasional boy, or the haphazard collection of teenagers at the Community Centre at weekends?
And why, every day, without fail, was she to be found in her studio, practicing her barre work, when a glance in the mirror would show you a woman in her late thirties, chin-length blonde hair already touched slightly with grey, her once-lean dancer’s body beginning to fill, to curve…
She looked away from the mirror. This was a question she refused to ask, refused to hear in the silence of the room, in the whisper of the distant sea. She crossed the room, turned up the music, allowed the piano notes to fill the space, and point, and close, and point, and close, en seconde, and close…
She rose up on pointe, balanced, poised, her hand barely touching the barre.
The tide was going out, and the daylight was fading into evening. Chad walked back towards the town.
Above him, the canopy of sky, pricked with the first faint stars. He felt the book in his pocket. He wondered how that odd woman in the tiny cottage had come to possess it. He wondered why she was so keen to part with it. Pages of handwritten natural philosophy, quoting Newton. Some kind of debate or disagreement, from what Tobias had said, about the nature of matter and the existence of the vacuum. Written by a man called Johann van Mielen.
To one side, the sea, as dark as the evening. At his feet, the pebbles, worn smooth by the waves’ to-and-fro, over years, over centuries.
And all this exists, he thought. All this is here, when it could so easily not be. Determined by chance? Or by God, the God that doesn’t answer when you call, as Tobias so rightly pointed out. The fact that matter comes into being, and goes out of being, and yet, quite randomly, there is all this, the waves of the sea, the stones at my feet, the breeze against my face…
Dying to Know (A Detective Inspector Berenice Killick Mystery) Page 3