by Helen Slavin
I was sitting at The Glade with Atalanta who was giving out tea and advice that I wasn’t really listening to. Atalanta means very well. She has a good heart and all that, salt of the earth, but she hasn’t lost anyone. She hasn’t been married, except for six months shortly after she left university, and that ended amicably. She still goes occasionally on Peruvian hiking holidays with her ex-husband, Jasper. As I once pointed out to her rather sourly, at least her husband didn’t go off on a Peruvian hiking holiday as a slight detour home. I thought of Evan then, in Peru. Or possibly Brazil with the last of Hitler’s escapees, ancient villains kept alive with the blood of Peruvian monkeys. Or tapirs.
I’m rambling. I was rambling then. Atalanta had to serve a couple of customers then and as she was at the counter one of the journalists entered. He started to ask questions of a group of teenagers. Questions about sex sessions in the woods at night. Raves. They were questions that had nothing to do with Goatmill Park or with the girl or even the Fisherman. Unless you thought of them as bait.
The teenagers all looked puzzled, one lad laughed uncomfortably. He was pounced on. The journalist pulled up a chair next to the lad, and all his questions were aimed at him.
‘Did you know her?’ ‘Were you her boyfriend?’ ‘What were you doing on the day she died?’ ‘You weren’t fishing?’ ‘You got any hobbies then?’ ‘You go fishing at all?’ ‘Did you kill her?’
As he talked, his questions took on an odd sheen of truth. It is amazing how the truth is something that simply has to be spoken out loud. If he sat there for long enough and said it loud enough. All the mates around the table clammed up and the journalist sat for five uneasy minutes at their table until Atalanta approached and asked, ‘Anything else?’ and she wasn’t talking about the menu.
I knew I had to kick into gear. I had to find that woman again and ask her. And I stopped myself there; that was not the way. I knew the way. There was a huge sign pointing out the way and I was blanking it.
It became a tug of war in my head. And then the mother waited for me in the lobby afterwards one night and we lurched over the line together.
‘Please.’ The word was little more than a hoarse breath. She wasn’t crying now. She had drained all her tears, she was quivering and insubstantial under her surface. Waiting. Make no mistake, she knew where she was going and I was going to be the one to escort her.
‘Please.’
I had known there was only one way. Go straight to the victim. I had not seen her since that day at the lake. I had not gone back to the lake because I was cowardly, afraid. In the chilly lobby as the girl’s mother stood before me I was ashamed. There was only me to help them. And I was angry. Chiefly at myself.
Say something. Say anything. I had always pleaded for information. Please.
The lake was black and there was a scent of old leaves to the water, metallic and cold. The pebbly shoreline quickly gave way to big boulders and jutting rocks, hidden and bearded with weed and plants. I started off walking the perimeter, back to where I had seen her.
I stayed there a long time. Fishing season was over and since the murder no one had wanted to paddle in there. There were no rowing boats out either that day. They were tied up at the jetty by the boathouse. No one had wanted to row out onto the lake, even though her body was long gone now.
There were others in there, a couple of schoolkids had drowned in the fifties and one teenage boy on a hot day in 1976. I didn’t see them. They didn’t have any unfinished business. They had gone to an endless summer day where they would never have to come out of the cooling water and get dry.
The afternoon shadows shifted and lengthened. I took a rowing boat. Pushed out. Onto the lake. Across the black and glass-cool water. The oars didn’t seem to make much noise as they slapped and dragged the water. The sound was oddly muffled. I rowed until my arms ached. Then I pulled the oars inside and I sat in the boat.
The girl was not shivering. She looked silvery like a fish and her eyes were as glassy black as the lake, as if she was a vessel, filled to the brim with the water. I could see from the corner of my eye that an older man walking his dog had spotted the boat. He was standing on a banking, his hand shielding his eyes from the evening sun, watching me. His dog was running onwards, backwards. Barking. Barking.
I was waiting for her to speak. Then I thought, I have spent my whole life waiting for the others to speak.
‘I can help you if you tell me. I tried to find the Fisherman’s wife but she’s gone too. Did he kill her?’
‘Did he kill me? Is that it? Is that what’s wrong?’
She gave a quick shudder then, like a swimmer after a dip. She looked at her hands, the skin pruned with moisture. I hesitated to answer. It was hard enough for her to be confused, it would be harder still for her to suddenly find out she was dead.
‘Is this Heaven? Looks just like Goatmill doesn’t it? Are you an angel?’
‘This is Goatmill. I’m not an angel but I can help you. Who brought you here? What happened? If you give me information I can help you. That’s all I want. I want to do something. I want to be useful.’
She took a long moment, looking into the water, looking up at me. The lake water brimmed over in her eyes.
‘What’s the last thing you remember?’
‘I remember you.’
It was late when I arrived at the police station and it was even later by the time I had decided I couldn’t go in. Later when I picked up the phone book. Later even when I headed back out. Later still as I reached the edges of Old Park and turned into Bartlett Avenue. Detective Inspector Knight lives in Bartlett Avenue. Two doors from where my Great-aunt Edna lived, with and without Sidney.
There was nothing for it but to ring the bell and it ringed and dinged horribly in the quiet of the night. At that time of the morning even the hum from the dual carriageway and the motorway sliproad was silent. A low light winked in a window above as a blind twitched back. I was looking up at that when DI Knight opened the door. He looked disappointed. Then showed me in.
It was a relief not to have to explain myself. He was aware of who I was and he didn’t mess about. We moved through the hall to the kitchen and he began to make tea. His wife hovered, drowsy in the doorway, checking that everything was fine and then she yawned her way back to bed.
Perhaps it was pyjamas that made this easier, or perhaps it was the unreality of night. Or possibly the fact that I didn’t think he’d believe me and therefore I was telling some sort of hideous bedtime story, something to give him nightmares when he returned to bed. Something to get me off the hook.
In a serious and factual way I told DI Knight that I had had contact with the Goatmill Girl and I gave him all the bits and pieces she remembered. He, in a serious and factual way, listened.
Afterwards, there was a silence. It stretched itself out like a lazy cat. I felt dizzy now, and a butterfly battered against the walls of my stomach trying to get out. What I read from DI Knight’s face was that he was thinking. Not dismissing. Thinking.
‘Let’s face it. I have to listen to you,’ he sighed at last, his shoulders bending inwards slightly under the T-shirt he was wearing. ‘I’m fucking desperate.’
I had to go to the station. DI Knight wanted me to look over some of the evidence they found to see if it tallied with anything the girl had said.
Alex. Her name is Alex. Will always be.
I knew the killer was a widower because his wife started this at the meeting. Alex had offered facial details, a particular and pungent brand of aftershave that she remembered. Her left hand catching on the floor panel where the spare tyre was kept as he shoved her inside, into the darkness of the car boot. And a particular fishing box she was shoved up against for that last journey. A leather tog on his shoe.
DI Knight talked everything through with me and expected the details to be mine. He wasn’t giving me anything, he wanted to be sure of what I had to give him. What convinced him was the leather tog. This was something
not released to the public domain. When he heard about the tog he knew. When I saw it in a small evidence bag it jarred my nerves. It was found in the undergrowth near the edge of the lake and never discounted. The togs on the shoes. The last thing she looked at.
In order to keep credibility he began with the car. He could say, quite truthfully, that someone saw the car at the lake and had recently reported it to the hotline. I was going to be kept in the shadows, because let’s face it the Crown Prosecution Service might not accept evidence from the dead victim, however true and nothing but the truth. I wanted to be in the shadows. This was not about me.
They found the car. The owner fitted the physical description I had and also, more crucially, he had lost his wife recently. However, nothing in the car seemed to be of use. Nothing seemed to be evidence. It was a neat, well-valeted car. He was a man with a power hose and a wet-and-dry vacuum cleaner. He did not have a pair of shoes with elaborate and fancy leather togs. He was not a man with an unusual fishing box. All his tackle was run of the mill. As DI Knight put it, ‘Any bugger can get hold of that stuff.’
More worryingly, as the investigation began to crank up, Alex’s mother came back to me. She didn’t attend the meeting. She waited outside for me, waited till everyone had gone and I was alone. The first time, she leapt out on me from behind the door to the toilets. She had a febrile, desperate look.
‘I want to talk to her. Let me talk to her.’
I tried to explain that it doesn’t work like that. I couldn’t conjure Alex out of the air. But that was not what she wanted to hear. She pinched her lips together. Left.
After the next session, and the next, she pounced on me. ‘I want to talk to her.’ Clipped, decisive. Trying to make me think I had no choice. I noticed that her eyes had that black, glassy look as if she too was filled with the lake water. ‘I want to talk to her.’ And once again I tried to explain. She was angry then, a hand whipping out to snatch at me. She was hurting my arm.
‘You can’t do this to me.’
Alex’s father arrived at The Glade the next morning. It was clear it was quite an ordeal for him to enter Goatmill. His pleas were an ordeal for everyone else.
‘She just wants to talk to her. To say goodbye, you must be able to understand that. Please. It’s just relaying a message. Isn’t it? Isn’t it that easy? For you?’
And I didn’t know what to do. Where does it end if I begin it?
DI Knight had the car stripped out, carpeting, seats, the lot. No shoe tog. But wedged into the crack between carpeting and spare wheel they found a broken-off piece of fingernail. As they commenced the DNA testing on the nail a uniformed constable found a battered old vacuum that the Fisherman’s wife had used. Inside the bag, amongst the cat hairs and the belly-button fluff, was a fancy leather shoe tog.
Her mother ambushed me again. This time waiting for me outside the supermarket. I looked at her and I saw how grief was eating her alive. I knew then that I couldn’t take her to the lake, that if I did, there would never be a goodbye for her. She was clawing at my clothes, repeating over and over, ‘Please, please.’ Her husband came towards us, tried to unpeel her from me. She was wailing, keening, a high-pitched animal sound and it was if something switched inside me.
I saw, for just a moment, My Mother. Not, I hasten to add, in any chocolate brown outfit. She was sitting at the scratched and scrubbed table in our old kitchen. Her eyes looking over the top of her reading glasses to squint at the instructions for a torch. It was a huge security light with a candlepower equivalent to that of a small lighthouse. She had ordered it specially from a mail order firm. Behind her on the stove a pressure cooker was coming up to steam, hissing and fussing. Her glasses were perched halfway down her nose and she was trying to shoehorn the batteries into the compartment. I could see her fingers fiddling.
The batteries click. She gives a triumphant grunt. Clearer than I have ever remembered her face, I see her thumb, the ridges striping the nail, the healing cut from where she sliced it open the previous week, being careless with a corned beef tin. The thumb pushes the switch, the torch light beams on. ‘TA-DA,’ she says, adopting a magician’s-assistant pose, just as the pressure cooker explodes behind her.
Now, when I need it, when I can understand, I get the message. She does not have to come back to tell me, it is already there for me to find. That there comes a time when it is goodbye. And if you’re going, go.
And it’s gone.
The journalist at The Glade wrote his book. His angle was the mystery police informant who became known as Phone Box simply because that is the best the journalist could come up with in light of DI Knight’s determination to keep quiet. All he ever said was, ‘How the fuck should I know? All I know is the bugger called from a box.’
Phone Box. I ask you. If he could only know the truth, it was me, the Freakshow Kid, the Midwich Colville. If I felt the tug of the Bourbon biscuit packets, I would lift myself with the secret knowledge of what the journalist could have made out of my life. If he had just sidestepped a couple of tables and asked me a question. Who knows what voice might have blurted out through my mouth?
I liked the fact that they didn’t know me, that they made things up; it tied me to her. She was not alone.
Alex’s father broke down in court the day they sentenced the Fisherman. He was so overcome he had to be stretchered out, the silver gurney knocking into a couple of photographers’ legs as they rushed forward wanting to be the first to capture the grief. Her mother shielded him, holding his hand. The beginning and the end for them.
I thought about if I died. There was no one going to be stretchered out on a trolley for me.
I thought about My Father.
Dig Deep with Arthur: historical footnote
I was digging at a Roman fort in Northumbria. We were just off Hadrian’s Wall. At least when I started the dig they had thought it was a fort; some beggared outpost of the empire which might have served as a Claudian or Vespasian Checkpoint Charlie. Merchants and goods in.
We kept on digging and as we brushed away more dirt we travelled farther in time and the fort expanded to a brothel and a granary and before we knew it we were brushing our way past fountainheads and courtyards on the main street of a full-blown Roman town.
I’ve dug a lot in my time, through choice. I’ve dug holes in the road, foundations for award-winning public buildings, trenches for cabling and gas pipes. Archaeology was a slight detour I’d taken that year, something almost new. After all it was still digging.
They were the best holes, though. They led somewhere. An undercover world. I liked peeling back the crust. I got a hell of a kick from it. Every bucket of dirt revealed a little bit more of the past and led me a step nearer to my future.
I liked the organic stuff best. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the stonework, the bath house and the latrines. But I liked a worn-down step. I liked the sole of a shoe, a curse written on a lead tablet, a fragment of drinking glass, an amber bead, a ring. I liked the sewing needles and the broken bone combs. The everyday. The personal. The Stuff.
We all stayed at a nearby youth hostel. Cheap and cheerful ex-land army barracks with no telly. Suited me fine, although some went stir crazy without their fix of ‘Newsnight’ or soap opera. Me, I was happy to sit with a smoke and some cards and hear the true life soap operas from the lips of those around me.
There was Bridget Flinch. Professor of Roman Sandals. Slight woman. Small flat breasts like pockets, the nipples hard little knobbly buttons that would have your eye out, cut your lips if you dared to kiss them. Long, frazzled hair in a variety of faked browns, always escaping from its elastic-band bondage.
You watched her of a morning in the kitchen; well, I did. I would watch her flip that hair in her fingers like a snake, twisting and strangling it into a Gordian knot. I wondered why she bothered. Have it shorn off. Give yourself five more minutes for another cup of tea. A bit more toast and marmalade. She kept that hair because it was her strength. If
she’d cut it she’d have vanished.
We all rubbed along, playing poker for Smarties, because no one had any cash. Cribbage. Whist. Headed a bit upmarket towards bridge. Along the way I got to know that geophysicist Andy was more in love with his sister than his wife.
You have to understand Andy didn’t say this outright. No one ever does. What you say is in the pauses, the unconscious stuff, the things you don’t say. Take Andy and his sister. For the first week we were there Andy and the others thought Maria was his wife. I listened harder. Maria says this, he would say. Then later, my wife doesn’t do that. The two phrases never met. Never my wife, Maria. Maria, my wife. You get me? His wife is called Gwen.
Bridget doesn’t have to say anything at all. She wears skin-tight tops, licks her fingers and ritually bumps her target with her backside. Andy was in the midst of the hunting ritual and didn’t even know it. I’m taking mental notes. It isn’t voyeurism. This is anthropology.
As the fort expanded and the trenches got deeper and longer and bigger they needed more labour. They’d put out an advert for paid volunteers, students, retired people, people with, frankly, nothing better to do.
It was a Thursday. Andy, Bridget and a group of the others headed off to the pictures. Beer, film, curry. I was tired so I opted out, took a shower and then sat with my cards and a smoke. That I never got around to smoking.
I was going through all the patience games. I don’t know anyone who really plays patience anymore, not with cards. It’s all on computer, Freecell and Solitaire where the king is always twitching at you. Me, I like the cards. Cards have come with us through the centuries. Portable.
As always I ended up playing klondike. Which most people think is patience itself. Your basic seven-card stacks, red on black, black on red. You know it. I’d played a couple of abortive hands. I’m not usually prone to cheating. Seems pointless. Cheating yourself. I’m a shuffle-and-deal man.