She is astonishingly attractive. Despite my initial desire for simple company, I am aware as we ride across Dulwich towards Bermondsey that in the bar I had already imagined her naked several times, had considered the sensation of unhooking her bra and kissing her shoulder as my hand runs under her small breasts. I feel like there are certain protocols I should be observing in this situation, which I am unaware of: unwritten rules of conduct between a call girl and a punter, such as not kissing on the mouth.
We get to the boat and I fix us mojitos while she looks around. She asks me about the guitars and then asks me to play her something. I ask her if she’s heard of Skip James and she says no, so I tell her a little about the man. I describe his life as a bootlegger and how, when he was 28, his friends convinced him to enter a music competition that he subsequently won, earning him a record contract with Paramount Records. He recorded 18 songs on both piano and guitar in two days and was offered a flat fee or a percentage of profits from sales of the record in payment and Skip, believing people were going to love his music, opted for the percentage. He took the train back to Mississippi with a light in his heart. The trouble was, it was 1931 and America was caught in the Great Depression. People didn’t have money for food, never mind records, and pretty soon after Skip did his recordings Paramount Records went bust and Skip’s songs were forgotten about. Some say that Skip took his broken dreams to the bottom of a whisky bottle and others say he found solace in religion, but no-one knows for sure.
Thirty years later, Skip’s records were found in a dusty old basement and caused something of a sensation. The word went out to find this legend. Skip was found in 1964 in a hospital in Washington, suffering from life-threatening cancer, and was hauled out to play at the Newport Folk Festival. He blew the crowd away. Young Eric Clapton was a huge fan of Skip’s and Cream recorded a cover of one of his tunes, the proceeds of which were sufficient to pay for life-saving surgery for Skip, who went on to make many more recordings and play gigs to a wider audience until his eventual death in 1969.
I pick up my beat up old Tanglewood, drop into the D-tuning and begin to play ‘Devil Got My Woman’. I watch my fingers as they work the fret board, hanging and holding the long swing notes and lingering through the licks, just like Skip. When my voice starts, it comes from an ache so deep it almost catches on the way out, but I cradle those words and offer them up to this girl, and within every moment of every note I am utterly lost and I show her this without shame.
When the last note has finished, she leans over and gently kisses me long and slowly on the mouth and when I reach up to the back of her neck and squeeze her hair and neck she moans softly. She pulls away for a moment and reaches over to her handbag, opens up her purse and takes out the £220 I had given her earlier and puts it on the table. She tells me that she doesn’t want a flat fee; she wants a percentage.
She tells me her name is Lorenza.
Slacks
I get back in the van and make myself look like I’m doing some paperwork. ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ by Queen comes on the radio and I hum along in approval as I look at the signature on the receipt. It’s clearly a ‘J. Kent’ underneath all the squiggles. I’m still not going to let myself believe it was the same bloke, but the coincidences are mounting up: the name and address fit the profile; the property couldn’t look any more like a drug baron’s tasteless demonstration of ill-gained wealth, boasting ridiculous pseudo-Roman pillars juxtaposed with thatch and black and white timber frame among other horrors; and now the man himself – unquestionably shifty, and lounging around in a football shirt after 9am on a Monday morning.
“So what?” I say to no-one in particular. Even if this is the infamous, drug-dealing, murdering James Kent, what do you intend to do about it, Annabel? Pop in the back of the van for a torque wrench, ring the bell again and then beat him to death on his doorstep to avenge the murder of your lover’s brother, which he may or may not be responsible for? Since when did you become Charles Bronson? And, if you didn’t need reminding, you have a family to provide for, a bank that is threatening to repossess your house, three more deliveries to make before 1pm – all of which are long swingers – and a boss with a very short fuse. A boss who would love an excuse to fire your arse, cute though it is in those pink 1970s action slacks with the rainbow stitching down the side, which she hates and wants to use as an excuse for your dismissal, and would have if Dorian hadn’t told her it would have been discrimination (in what way discriminatory, Mrs Birch can’t tell, but the word is a scary one). Either way, regardless of the context of the action slacks, beating a customer to death with a torque wrench is not going to win you employee of the month.
I must admit I can be pretty convincing at times.
I put the Merc in gear, turn up ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ and swing around the immaculately-kept lawned roundabout with a small Japanese Maple tree in the middle and start the journey down the long wooded drive. But I’m still mulling. There was just something about his face – he looked scared. I pull the van to the side of the drive, next to a thick rhododendron, stop the engine and open the catch on the bonnet. I turn off Queen and then radio HQ and tell Dorian that I’ve got an engine problem and that I’m just going to have a quick look – might be that oil leak again. All our vehicles have trackers and if Mrs Birch sees a blip on her screen sitting still for more than five minutes, she will expect an explanation. I get out of the van, release the hood fully and then start checking the oil.
Petra took me there once. Her brother’s body had washed up on an artificial beach, next to a holiday park overlooking the estuarine Thames, and we had walked along there at low tide, stepping over the groynes and round the bladdery weeds and watching the gulls swoop and cry over the mirror-flat slack water. Petra is the most giving, generous person I have ever met, but it took a long time for her to tell me about her past; there were a lot of painful things that she preferred not to raise of her own accord. We sat on the cold damp beach under a clear bitter February sky and with my arm around her shoulders, she told me the whole story about Christos.
When their parents had separated, Christos had taken it hard. He’d always been something of a mummy’s boy, happy to wallow around in the house, being waited on hand and foot by their tireless mother, just like his father, but when their mother had tired of the life of a slave and ran off with a milky tea-drinking builder that had come to fix their neighbour’s wall, when it had fallen into their garden during a storm, Christos lost his taste for home comforts and began to seek his pleasures elsewhere. Petra had already left home by this point, but she would receive anxious calls from her father now and again, asking her if Christos was with her. The answer was always no.
Petra had gone back to the house one weekend and found the place empty and in a state – clearly her father and Christos had not yet managed to fill the domestic void left by her mother’s departure. She found an old pair of Marigolds under the sink and started to clear the empty beer cans and ashtrays. There’d been a hard knock on the door. Petra had described the man in detail, so he’d clearly made quite an impact: sharp, dark tattoos snaking out of his V-neck and ending under his jaw, small piggy eyes, piercingly blue in colour, an almost vertically flattened nose and small incongruous looking rosebud lips. The man had said “Christos,” to which Petra had replied that he was not home, and then the man had just looked at her for what felt like a very long time. He hadn’t asked when Christos would be home, or where he was; he’d just looked at her. Petra had felt analysed, threatened and violated all at once by that long, cold stare and then a car horn had sounded and the man had turned without another word and walked away.
No sooner had Petra seen the car disappear at the end of the road than she’d locked the house and gone looking for Christos. She’d tried all of his old friends’ houses that she could remember. Most of them said they didn’t see much of Christos any more, but eventually one told her that he was usually knocking about at Dee-Dee’s place, over on the Pembroke E
state – not a very salubrious location, to say the least. After pounding on the door for a few minutes, it was eventually answered by a chubby Caucasian girl with dark bags under her eyes and a sluggishness to her movements. The sound of a baby screaming came from somewhere within the dingy confines of the flat. Eventually Christos was summoned from the darkness, bare-chested and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. She described the man who was looking for him and he’d told her to calm down – ‘Teenth’ was an associate of his. He was a businessman now, didn’t she know, and both he and Teenth and Jim – she must remember Jim Kent from school – had gone into business together.
Petra had found it very hard to describe her brother on what would be the last time she had seen him alive. She said it was like he had been partially erased: when he spoke to her, his voice was devoid of emotion; the pigmentation of his skin had been taken away, leaving a paleness where olive brown had been before; the vitality had gone from his physicality and even when she battered her fists on his chest to try and get a response, like a medic administering CPR, he had remained unresponsive, not bothering to even raise his arms in protest.
Petra had cried and begged him to come home, she’d said she was sorry that their mother had left, but that if he only came home, she’d come back home too, and they could be a family again and things could be right, but he’d slowly, gently taken her hands from his too-thin upper arms and put them by her side and, with his empty eyes looking at an indeterminate point behind her, he’d wordlessly closed the door.
The police had been unable to contact either of her parents six months later and so she was the one who had been taken to identify his body. She never described it, but I know that the body had been in the water for a couple of days before it washed up, so I can only imagine that it must have been incredibly traumatic for her. Christos had been shot in the back of the head, from close range, execution-style. Petra had given the police a statement and Jim Kent had been interviewed in connection to the murder, but he said that he knew Christos only as a friend of Dee-Dee’s really and he certainly didn’t have any business dealings with him. Dee-Dee told the police she had not seen Christos for six months. The police did some background checks on Mr Kent, who had a small number of properties that he let out, but everything seemed legitimate. The police were unable to track down the man called Teenth that Petra had described to them. With no murder weapon and no witnesses that could claim to have even seen her brother since she had, the murder investigation had not gotten much further and remained unresolved.
It begins to rain heavily. I have no idea what I’m doing here. I have checked the dipstick, taken a bottle of oil and a funnel from the back of the van and topped it up. I have replaced everything and now I’m stood at the back of the van as the rain starts to pour. I have no reason to stay here. I look around at the damp woodland around me: tall, thick ash trees, with little in the way of ground cover in between each great trunk. I shake my head. I look again, harder this time. I could’ve sworn I’d seen a figure moving between the trees, somewhere near the boundary wall, which is just visible in places 150 metres directly to my right. I squat down and scuttle to the edge of the rhododendron. Yes, there is definitely a person moving very quickly, light in build and dressed in dark clothes. Again, they are moving towards the house in incredibly swift, fluid bursts. Whoever it is, they don’t wish to be seen. I cannot believe that I haven’t been seen, but then I realise that although my van is bright yellow, with red lettering all over it, it is also obscured from the person in the wood’s trajectory by the big rhododendron bush. Is this why Jim Kent looked freaked out? Was he expecting a visitor – the kind of visitor that climbs over your wall and sneaks through your woods when they pop round?
I’ve lost them. Suddenly I feel very exposed. What if Mr Kent’s guest does a circuit of the grounds before they drop in for a cuppa? What the hell am I doing squatting behind this bush? I need to get back in the van and drive away immediately and quickly. I have a strong sense that I am in danger here. I can smell the sweet dank cloying smell of rotting hummus. Great fat globules of rain drip through the forest from the treetops.
I have heard gunshots many times before, as I grew up on a farm, but I am used to the sound of shotgun blasts, bold and brash, echoing away down the valley. This sounds different, quieter and muffled and considerably more frightening. I get up and quickly walk to the van door, then stand still and quiet again, listening. The wind blows the tops of the trees, releasing a cascade of droplets onto the leaf litter below.
I am amazed at what I am doing, even as I am doing it. “This is clearly not the most prudent course of action,” I say to myself as I turn and begin to walk back up the drive towards the house from which I have just heard gunfire. I mean, Mrs Birch may believe me to be a woman who lives life on the edge because I wear pink and rainbow action slacks to work, instead of the standard black uniform trousers, but those trousers are my one act of rebellion, they are my one single comment to the system, whose rules I otherwise adhere to like a Velcro teddy bear. Petra loves me because I am not adventurous, I do not do stupid, crazy, unpredictable things; she thinks I am rational and wise and dependable.
I find myself walking up the drive like a Zen master who has let go of the mental reins for too long and found, when they drifted back down from meditation, that someone else has taken command of her body; a stranger, a demented stranger. I am rounding the bend in the drive and am in full view of the house and my heart is beating so hard my head hurts. The gravel crunches like atom bombs going off under my feet. The rain falls heavily, but certainly not loud enough to disguise the explosive crunching of my feet carrying me noisily up the drive. I reach the little roundabout, listening for the sound of another gunshot, looking for the flash from a window that will give me the split second to get my affairs in order before I die. I do not hesitate and walk right over the grass, past the Japanese maple, and over the gravel once again and up to the house. I stop. I look down at the large stone doorstep, dry beneath the pillared, Romanesque porch. I wonder whether my feet were dry when I stood there before, or if my wet footprints dried. I cannot go further. I feel that if I go one step nearer to the door, it will be the end of me. Rain drips from the prow of my baseball cap. I feel the Zen master gently taking back the reins from the demented stranger and suddenly all my boldness has gone and I am terrified. I lurch on tiptoes around the porch and, as I squat down in some thick shrubbery to the left of the front door, I hear the sound of the door handle turning. She is a middle-aged woman, wearing a brown, tight-fitting jacket and black trousers, and I am less than five metres away from her. I do not breathe. I assume that if I can see this woman, if she were to turn and look in my direction, she would see me. The woman takes out a silver case from her pocket, puts a cigarette in her mouth and, holding a protective hand up to shield her lighter from the wind, she tilts her head towards me and flicks the flame to life. The flame is directly between her eyes and me. I do not move a muscle. I can see the flickering light in her eyes. She shuts the lighter off and turns her head away, taking a deep inhalation and then blowing evenly out. She puts her lighter back in her pocket and steps into the rain, quietly crunching across the gravel, directly past my hiding place and then onto the lawn, moving back in the direction she had approached the house from.
I breathe finally, deep and quiet. Her cigarette smoke hangs in the air.
I remain hidden like that for a long time, the rain falling on my crouching back and soaking me through. I know I should stand up, walk back down that drive, get in the van and drive away, but I can’t stop wondering what is behind that door. I imagine Mr Kent shot and dying. I imagine going to him and saying, “Did you kill Christos?” and him nodding sorrowfully as he coughs up blood and then saying, “Tell Petra I’m sorry.” At the same time that I am telling myself that this scenario is utterly cuckoo, I am standing and slowly moving back round the porch. The front door is ajar. I untie my laces and step out of my shoes, onto the dry stone step
, and push open the door. Beyond the door is a wide hallway with a sideboard on the right and coats hung up on the left. I step silently in. At the end of the hallway, a flight of carpeted stairs on my right lead upstairs, whilst an open door on my left leads into a large kitchen. I can smell coffee in the kitchen, but when I poke my head in the room is empty. There is a door at the far end of the kitchen but this appears to lead to the garden. I turn slowly back around and look up the stairs. It is darker up there. I see a light switch at the bottom of the stairs and pulling my sleeve over my finger I flick the switch. A trail of little spotlights illuminate the stairs and disappear along the landing. I walk quietly up the stairs. They do not creak. The landing has several doors, all of which are shut, apart from the one at the end of the landing, which is open slightly, with daylight showing around the edges and through an odd-shaped hole in the upper left panel of the door at about head height. I walk along the corridor, past the closed doors, and stand before the door with the hole in it. I can smell cordite and wood dust. Splinters of wood are splayed out from the hole in the door and looking at the wall of the landing I see a neat hole where a bullet finished its journey.
I nudge open the door. Mr Kent is lying on his bedroom floor in his boxer shorts, with a shirt half done up. His arms are spread out wide and his right leg is bent at the knee and thus raised off the ground. He would look like he was sunbathing, were it not for the pencil stub sticking out of his bloody eye socket. There is a gun in his hand. I can smell aftershave. I feel sick.
OK, so no last minute confession from the late repentant. I need to get out of here now. Too late; I’m going to be sick. There is a door leading into an en suite that I barge my way through and then I’m on my knees, throwing up the veggie burger I had for breakfast. I take some deep breaths, calming myself down, and realise I actually feel a lot better now that I’ve been sick. I pull my sleeves over my hands again and wipe down the toilet seat and outer bowl, flush the toilet and turn to wipe down the door.
The Laundry Basket Page 20