And she thought, Is that it? Was that really me who was loved like that? Or is it what he thought I needed, a good screw after three days’ absence and then I won’t ask? Am I that easy? Does he think I need nothing else? What am I good at? What am I good for?
Then she remembered the click of the bedroom door at around 2.25 in the morning. Ah, that explained it. She had not been his priority at all. He had come in, gone straight to his lair and remained there until he imagined she might be receptive. She was only another thoroughbred cow, mollified by an activity associated with breeding. The ghastly painting came first. And he had not noticed the holes in the antique glass display, any more than he had really noticed her.
He painted; she wept.
The body had been with her, but she was not sure about the mind.
CHAPTER TWO
Keep pets under control at all times
Dr John Armstrong had found the reference that morning in his library at home by delving into the section that dealt with birds. He rarely looked at it now.
The bird is about the weight of the jack-daw, but of a taller and longer shape. The bill is long, curved, sharp at the tip and of a bright red; the iris is composed of two circles, the outer red, the inner light blue; the eyelids are red, the plumage is altogether of a purplish violet black; legs brilliant red like the bill; claws large, hooked and red. It builds on high cliffs . . . in a wild state, it feeds chiefly on insects and berries. It is easily tamed, becomes extremely docile, and is very fond of being caressed by those to whom it shows attachment, but its shrill notes and mischievous qualities render it sometimes a troublesome inmate.
A two-century-old description of a bird, known as the chough, now almost extinct. There were other descriptions. Acrobatic and overfriendly. Soothsayer. Omen of Hope. He thought of all of these descriptions now. The wind blew and the sun shone. Good April weather, suitable for stilted conversation on the cliffs.
‘Nobody knows who she is.’
‘I think you mean “was”.’
‘“Was” then. But we still have a body, which is.’
He shivered.
‘Getting cold, are you?’
‘Not yet. You?’
‘Never feel it, myself.’
Or much else, John thought, pulling the hood of his jacket closer round his ears, watching out of the corner of his eye the way his companion managed to keep alight the thin cigarette that looked damp against his stained fingers. It smouldered constantly, even in drizzle. The morning was bright with spring in evidence, but still that breeze, worrying away at his neck and making him regret the scarf he had left behind. Edwin, the expert, always wore a cotton scarf, winter or summer, which he used for innumerable other tasks than insulation; a multi-purpose item. Edwin could walk through a gale naked apart from the scarf, and always seemed to appear out of the blue, or the grey, to reimmerse himself within the landscape and take on its colours. He had good-quality, expensive outdoor clothes, however unwashed they were, which was surprising in a man with no visible means of support other than the dole he collected every fortnight. He did occasional odd jobs on the edge of town, fixing roof tiles and painting garden gates, always out of doors, to augment that income. Otherwise he was a moving fixture on the cliffs. A loner who watched out for the birds and shunned the people. He had always seemed ageless to John, although he was only a few years younger. They could have been children together, although on different sides of the tracks. His had been the luckier life.
‘Nothing on her, I daresay,’ Edwin volunteered.
‘You saw. A stitch or two. Nothing to identify her, nothing at all.’ He could not say why this bleak fact made him so sad, but it did. It afflicted him.
‘Not one of the botanists, then.’
‘C’mon, Edwin, you’d have told us first. You’re everywhere on these cliffs. And they say not, and there’s none of them missing. They’ve finished work now, and gone. I showed them the photo to remind them to be careful, and in case they might know her, although only a mother might recognise her from that. She was a bit of a mess. Head fell apart when they lifted her. It’s the impersonality of her that’s so haunting. I hate that. She’s no one. What about her mother or her sister? Not to know . . . It’s so rare to have no trace. No jewellery, no handbag, no shoes.’
The idea was choking him. Edwin was unmoved. Nothing moved Edwin but birds.
‘And the fall killed her instantly?’
‘It would, wouldn’t it?’
‘And no one else saw?’
‘Unless you did.’
Edwin shook his head in that infinitesimal gesture which typified the economy he imposed on his movements as long as he was resting, sprawled on the chalk without ever moving or changing his position, his body supported easily on one elbow, while John sat, crossing and recrossing his ankles, hugging his knees, shifting his weight every minute to avoid the cold of the ground. It marked the difference between the visitor to the cliffs and the virtual inhabitant. John knew that Edwin lived in a tiny bedsit above a shop in the centre of town, but the cliffs were his real home. Old rumour had it that Edwin had escaped to the cliffs as soon as he could walk, with good reason.
‘Nope. I can’t be everywhere. I was in Cable Bay, and a couple of the botanists saw me. Came over yonder after the others arrived. Lent a hand. You’d already got your bloke by then and there was quite a crowd. Don’t ask me did she fall or was she pushed, I don’t know any more than you do. Looks like someone stripped her first.’
‘Took away her personality first. That’s what bothers me. Someone trying to make her untraceable, forgettable. That’s what so cruel. It’s robbery of more than a life. I think she was thrown, Edwin. On account of what that bloke said. He said she seemed to have been projected out, “hovered”, he said. She was only a little lightweight.’
Edwin grunted. ‘And you’d heed what a bloke says when he’s said he’s seen the chough in flight? Here? More fool you. There hasn’t been a chough here in over a hundred years. Some excuse, he has.’
‘Some people live in hope, Edwin. Some have only read bird books from the last century. And miracles happen.’
‘There’s more of them plain ignorant liars. Why did they let him go?’
‘Can’t keep him, Edwin. No connection. I pinched a photocopy of his sketch. Rather good, I thought. Are you sure you’d never seen a girl like her before?’
‘Did I say so? I might have done . . .’
John waited patiently until Edwin got to his feet, carefully, and stretched his arms above his head. ‘I’ll have to go over it in my mind,’ he said. ‘Things come slowly, you know. I’d seen him,of course. Trying to sketch from behind bushes, dirty bastard. He was always hiding. She might have been hiding, too. I’ll have to think about that.’
Edwin did not like to linger in this populated part of the cliff path, preferring the lonelier, more dangerous stretches of his favourite Cable Bay and beyond. Not such an invaluable source of information, then. His fierce shyness would have made him reluctant anyway. His whole manner of standing indicated that enough was enough and he was ready to move. Beginning at dawn he walked the coast path end to end every day, fourteen miles each way, varying where he paused and watched, sat and stared, acting as its very own policeman, although it was not the people he wished to protect. John wondered if every half-tamed, wild place like this had a similar, self-appointed custodian, an invaluable source of information – if he chose, and the choice was always his. He economised with his knowledge and information in the same way he did with his movements. Dr John Armstrong could not quite like Edwin, although he did admire anyone who could maintain such passions, and admiration was enough to sustain a close acquaintance of mutual respect, laced with a tinge of pity. He had treated Edwin for a broken leg years before, admired his bravery, and there existed between them a bond of ill-defined loyalty. It was slightly diminished by John’s association with the police, which Edwin suspected, and John reckoned it was only because Edwin knew tha
t he, too, dwelt on the cliffs as often as time allowed, walked the path at least once every month of the year and had some real knowledge of the flora, fauna and history, that he consented to talk to him at all. Plus the knowledge that John wasn’t a policeman, merely a semi-retired, part-time medical examiner, hardly empowered to investigate, or arrest, a fly. The sort of harmless doctor at home in a police station, who made tea for the prisoner and held his hand rather than asking the questions, useful in welfare for his mildness of manner and a necessary presence when the health of a detainee was in doubt. They moved a few paces together, Edwin well aware that John did not like to walk all that close to the cliff edge and contemptuous of him for being so careful. He could not have known that John had liked the artist, the man Edwin referred to as ‘bloke’ or ‘dirty bastard’, because in their brief conversation he had admitted he felt the same fear. In a short time they had managed to discuss their vulnerability to vertigo and a number of other, surprising things. Yes, John had liked the artist a lot, thought about him and the girl ever since, to his own irritation. They were preoccupations that took him by surprise. He had become, to his own mind, a dry, dispassionate, emotionless man.
Edwin was suspicious of all authority in the manner of a loner who was always waiting for someone to take away what little he had. John remembered details of his background from those long-ago but plentiful medical notes. There had been a history of non-accidental broken bones. He had been taken into care as a teenager, abandoned by violent and abusive parents but only after the abuse occurred, and become apparently incapable of forming relationships, redeemed by his love of the birds and the cliffs. Maybe Edwin was not so impoverished after all, John thought. At least he had his passions and principles and lived with a kind of dignity, which was more than John felt he had achieved himself.
For all his irritating and cunning qualities, there was a harsh gentility about Edwin. He always extended his hand on parting and then wrung John’s so hard that he felt his bones would break and the tender skin erupt in grazes. It was the only occasion of which John was aware that Edwin ever touched anyone, and it was as if he did not know how it was done. He had never felt skin like that, a series of knobs and calluses, like rusted iron roughly fashioned into the semblance of a hand and always cool on the warmest day. Edwin extended the hand, then withdrew it, remembering something.
‘John, if you ever hear of any walkers wanting to go down to Cable Bay, tell them no, won’t you? We’ve . . . we’ve rare visitors there. Oh, don’t tell them that. Tell them it’s dangerous.’
Rare visitors must mean blasted birds. Again.
‘Surely no one but a fool would go there. The earth’s still moving, isn’t it, and the path’s been diverted. What kind of birds?’
‘The sort that nest early. Forget I said that.’
Bugger the birds, John thought, and waited.
‘It’s the pathways do it, you know. Always them.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Pathways. The thoroughfares that take people from one place to the next and open up the land. But what they also do is close it down. They give vantage points, all that, but what happens is that the land either side of them is never used, becomes less and less used, so that it becomes the wilderness, never used at all. Rank, unkempt, overgrown, full of hiding places, the new hidden zones that the pathway was supposed to open up, while really it closed them down. Created a new habitat. Don’t go off the path, John. Like she did. Like dogs do.’
Such a long speech. John was amused by it, and did not want to let the man go.
‘Do all pathways go somewhere?’
‘Yes and no. They make a matrix, like a cardiovascular system, going round and round on themselves but with connecting paths leading off. There’s probably an interconnecting point on this path that leads straight to that man’ s door, that so-called artist, all the way to London town. I could walk it in three days, I reckon. Without going on a path.’
Then he smiled and extended the hand again. The sun came out.
‘You’re a good enough man, John. Don’t try so hard.’
John felt flattered that so many of the usually few words had been placed at his disposal, even if he did not understand them. No one knew more about Edwin’s background than he did, and yet it was so little. He was a man with a certain insight, and that was all John needed to know. Perhaps it was all anyone wanted to know about Edwin.
‘That artist,’ he ventured, knowing that delaying Edwin could risk alienation, ‘I don’t know why, but I thought he was a good man, too. He was honest.’
Edwin was moving, from slow to fast, hands on hips to push himself forward and get his stride, talking back over his shoulder, not caring if he was heard and not raising his voice.
‘I said you weren’t a bad man. Doesn’t mean you aren’t also daft. No good man would sit still and sketch a body when she might still have been alive.’
‘There was never a chance of that, Edwin.’
All they really had in common was surely their grizzled, grey heads. And one of those uncertain affections which arrives too late and has nowhere to go, making them pleased to see one another, and making Edwin ration information so that John would come back, as if he would not, anyway. Wily old sod. Patrolling the cliffs like the Lone Ranger, the only man he knew who actually loved seagulls and other winged scavengers. John shivered inside his jacket. Once he had loved and watched the birds. Now he preferred plants and flowers and it seemed a long time since he had felt anything at all. Until now.
He walked back the way he had come, back towards the car park, deserted apart from his Vauxhall, climbed into it. Pathways led out in the form of a road into the port; from there led others to every point of England and Europe. Trunk roads, ancient and modern routes connecting metropolis to metropolis. A route to his house. A route for refugees.
The photocopied sketch crackled inside his top pocket, where it had been for three days. Another example of unuseful, neurotic behaviour, since none of it was any of his business. His help had been solicited way beyond the limited scope of his usual role in this investigation simply because he knew the cliffs, was on nodding acquaintance with the botany team who had just finished work, and the beleaguered police service had got into the habit of taking help where they could get it, especially when they did not have to pay. Help us out here, John, and he did, willingly. But something had persisted, which might not have lingered in his pragmatic mind if he had not had a daughter, had not felt, as probably every father would have felt on being told there was the body of a girl at the foot of the cliff, Oh God, is she mine? Followed by that sickening relief when it proved to be somebody else’s. Why he should have thought the body was Maria when she, as far as he knew, was still at the other end of a pathway in London, tormenting him with silence, he did not know. Except that it would have been a fitting revenge on him, and Maria was good at that, although maybe not to the point of self-destruction. He would pay for his perceived neglect of her some other way, perhaps, until she was older and might begin to understand how it had been. Maria would always think that her father had let her mother die, rather than been powerless to prevent it.
Nor was the existence of a body without an identity sufficiently intriguing to warrant this attention, not in a town that was a conduit for immigrants, stateless persons of all ages, arriving in the dead of night, the uncontrollable trickle of those who did not want asylum or registration, separate from the constant flood who did. Immigrants like the container-load of Chinese youths who had paid to be smuggled direct to London, not trusting the sanctuary of officialdom, only to perish en route. Some of those who wanted entry and a hiding place simply died, were found in corners of this town and the country beyond, and were left unclaimed. But the sallow-skinned girl of the cliff with her dyed hair was well nourished, with a different profile.
His mind went back to the phrase ‘well nourished’, so commonly used in a post-mortem report and frequently misunderstood. A young woman might fin
d it an insulting description, meaning fat, but all it meant was adequate flesh on the bones, i.e. not actually starving. For the unidentified immigrants where he certified death, malnutrition and disease were obvious causes. What a cheerful occupation he had for three days a week: certifying death; identifying drug overdose, mental instability, drunkenness and bruises in the still living. It could explain a bleak outlook, but not entirely. It suited the needs of a man gone a little sour: he could be kind to them because he would probably never see them again and he preferred his contacts to be temporary. Like Edwin had always done, he supposed, afraid of the obligations of permanence.
But something had changed. He had been called to the scene to assess the mental and physical health of the artist, and his interest should have stopped there. The artist was a novelty because of his age, sobriety and ability to articulate, while most of the doctor’s customers in the cells were young, speechless and brutal, spat rather than spoke and challenged his humanity as much as his ability to withstand halitosis at close quarters. He had only been called to the artist because of their doubts about his state of mind, and the bruise on his left cheek, which looked suspiciously like the familiar effect of a fist. About which the man made no complaint, although he winced when he was touched. A strong, able-bodied, older, but not old, man, definitely well nourished and obviously capable of shrugging off far worse.
Semi-retirement did not suit John. He had too much time on his hands, and enough money not to be hungry, leaving a vacuum for haunting. A dead wife and a daughter who blamed him for it, a mild case of depression. And if guilty curiosity about a single death out of the hundreds he had seen was a substitute for the intellectual challenges that no longer inspired him, he had better get back to his garden. Or live somewhere else, with less rough trade and fewer memories – if only he could bring himself to leave the cliffs, which would haunt him more than anything else, because he knew the temptation to jump. Go right to the edge and launch himself into delirious nothingness. Fall prey to that belief that a man could fly, like Icarus, away from his own loneliness, into a less sterile sky.
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