by D. B. Martin
‘What do you sometimes know?’
‘Where’s my glasses. Can’t see without me glasses. Are you Kenny?’
‘Yes, Mary.’ I cast a sideways glance at Kat and shook my head. Kat looked desperate. She mouthed something at me. I couldn’t decipher what it was but I could guess.
‘We’ll have to go soon, Mary.’
‘You can’t go until I’ve found me glasses.’
‘Here,’ Kat swooped on the bottle-glass lenses lying on the small box next to Mary’s chair. ‘Are these your glasses?’ Mary snatched them from her and put them on. She stared at Kat through them and the lenses magnified her eyes to distortion.
‘You’re the brown lady, not the white one,’ she said accusingly.
‘Yes,’ Kat’s voice was shrill. ‘I’m not the white lady.’
‘I can’t tell you then.’ She shuffled her feet and kicked the box towards me. ‘But it’s all in there.’ I leant forward and carefully picked it up, breath withheld. Placing it on my lap, I dislodged the lid.
‘May I open it?’
‘I gave it you.’
‘OK.’ I steeled myself for revelation and pulled the lid off. It was empty. I looked at Kat and she looked at me. The dismay was palpable on her face. It was a wasted journey. Whatever Kimmy or Margaret may have said to Mary, when they visited, it was irrelevant.
‘There’s nothing in it, is there?’
‘No, Mary. It’s empty.’
‘Good. Couldn’t open it up myself in case it wasn’t.’
‘What did you think was in there?’
‘All of us – you and Win, Binnie, Sarah, all the little twinlets. Even the cat.’
‘The cat?’
‘The cat out of the bag,’ and she laughed until tears started to run down her face. My skin iced over. Jaggers’ phrase in his note. Mary didn’t seem to notice my fear. She trilled on, like a bird warbling. ‘I let the cat out of the bag and now she’s dead. Poor kitty. Poor white kitty.’
‘I think we’d better go.’ I stood up and put the empty box on the seat. Kat fidgeted beside me. I pushed her gently towards the hanging bird line.
‘Wait,’ Mary caught at my arm. ‘Kenny?’ Her eyes were misted – huge and vacuous behind the over-magnification of the bottle-glass lenses. I hesitated. ‘You really are Kenny, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I acknowledged.
‘You were always the nicest one.’ She smiled and her expression was serene. The years dropped away from her when she smiled. ‘You were kind. You didn’t pull my hair or pinch me. You ran up and down the mound with me.’ She stood and we faced each other. She was surprisingly tall – only a few inches shorter than me. ‘Pop wasn’t his dad. Not Win’s. That’s why Pop was so angry, but he stayed with her anyway. Maybe no-one else would put up with him? Win knew that. I don’t know how. No-one else did, apart from her. Kitty-cat. Poor white kitty-cat. She told him about everything – the pretty flowers, Jonno, Pop, Kimmy, Danny, you. I heard it all – but she let the cat out of the bag. He twisted it out of her.’ She spiralled a finger in front of me. ‘Twisty, twisty, twisty. She wasn’t as smart as she thought she was, and I heard it all. People don’t think I listen, but I do. All the time. I listened when they made their plan, and I listened when they argued. Then I listened when it all went quiet.’
‘Who argued about what?’
‘Win and Kitty-cat. They were going to let the cat out on you, twisty-twisty you. You have lots of money. Loaded. And you have power. Twisty, twisty power.’
‘Who is Kitty-cat, Mary?’
‘The white woman.’
‘Margaret – my wife?’ The deathly white queen of the night bloomed again for me. ‘Why? What plan did Win and Margaret have that involved me?’ But it was pointless. The veil had fallen. Mary had returned to her world. I took Kat’s hand, small and cold, and we ducked back through the birds. I still felt cold too. Brushing though the birds it felt as if they were attacking me like in the Hitchcock thriller of my childhood. I shivered and paused to disentangle one from my hair. Kat had already made it to the door. I imagined the bird’s beak pecking at me, turning into rats’ teeth and the tremors of fear rippled through my body as the dangling bird strings knotted tighter. It was Mary who disentangled me, deftly and tenderly. I turned in surprise.
‘I always loved you Kenny.’ She sounded gentle and my reply was both involuntary and rhetorical, considering now how life had panned out.
‘I don’t think I know what love is, Mary.’ She astonished me by touching a finger to my cheek as lightly as if a feather from one of her creations had brushed against it before being carried away by the prevailing wind. The hand dropped and she pressed something into mine. It was a carefully folded bird made out of printed paper.
‘But you know how to find it. Ma showed you, and now you can.’ Her eyes flicked towards Kat. ‘Kitty-cat,’ she smiled. Then they drifted far into the distance, following the breeze of her thoughts.
22: Circassian Circle
In every case one takes the journey can be as much personal as professional – to a greater or lesser degree. Of course for me, the only choice originally had been to make the professional journey, but in this case there was barely any professional journey to make. It was all personal. It wasn’t so much that I’d been mistreated all my life – more that I’d learnt how to exist for so long in an atmosphere of mainly callous indifference, sprinkled with moments of malicious cruelty. I couldn’t imagine anything different – until now. My personal journey of suppression – of hope, emotion and faith – had started the day I went away. Away from my home, away from my family, away from Ma. At some stage I had to make the journey back – the circular journey – complete the cycle.
I dropped Kat home and went to complete a part of my journey in front of the miserly headstone they’d placed over the small mound that had been my mother, in a mossy and overgrown cemetery I vaguely remembered from childhood adventures with Win and Georgie when Ma had taken us to visit our grandparents’ graves. It was mid-afternoon and hot, but the graveyard was cool from carefully arranged shrubs and trees with overhanging branches canopying its residents. The tree in the far corner was ‘fainsies’ – home. The wall along the back edge our imaginary Hadrian’s Wall – we the marauding army storming the battlefields. Battlefield it was in reality too – the battle of death over life, peace over struggle. RIP. Standing at the foot of her grave, I said it bitterly to her and her legacy to me, but the bitterness couldn’t last.
Sarah had told me some of the details they’d pulled together after we’d been taken away. Jill, Emm and the new baby had been allowed to stay – they were all obviously too vulnerable to farm out anywhere, but it had only been only a brief reprieve as Ma had fallen ill shortly after the birth. First she’d had flu, then pleurisy. The baby struggled along with her, until Ma was taken to hospital and succumbed to pneumonia. All the days I’d been counting off, wondering why Ma didn’t come and claim us back, she hadn’t even been alive. She’d been softly and quietly deposited in this mossy green respite and sunk into her own kind of peace. Away from demanding snot-nosed kids and the rigours of childbirth. Away from Pop and his drunken Saturday night demands and the gossiping neighbours commenting how she was so-so again – their colloquialism for pregnancy. And away from the despair of trying so hard and never quite managing.
The bitterness gave way to sadness and to my relief, private tears, for the cemetery was as deserted now as it had been when we childish soldiers came to conquer it years ago. A vast expanse of the dead and their accompanying grief, visited only by appointment. There are too many at Highgate for it to be quiet. Their unheard voices clamour, but few go there to listen – really listen. I couldn’t remember crying as an adult. Margaret’s death hadn’t wrung any tears from me, and nor had the news of Georgie’s, even though the ache it had brought had been deep and gnawing. Still the tears wouldn’t come then. I hadn’t thought I had any in me, but it seemed there was a vast reservoir of them, j
ust waiting for the dam gates to be inched apart.
Mary’s bird became a phoenix, rising from the ashes of disappointment we’d both felt on leaving Mary. I’d been sure there was something ‘rellyvant’ as Danny would put it about Wins’ deliberate inclusion of Mary in his list. She wasn’t quite mad, but nor was she completely sane. Perhaps interludes of sojourn in this world enabled her to keep pace with it, but they were limited. I suspected whatever dealings Win had with Kimmy or Margaret had been managed under the cover of a visit to Mary – poor Mary, who he thought wouldn’t be aware of anything. That was why she’d been able to listen in to whatever they’d planned, but unfortunately whatever that was had been too far confused in the mists in her mind to be relayed to me. It was a dangerous game Win was playing, nevertheless. Why? At every turn he’d fed me information to lead me on to another discrepancy and with it another piece of evidence. Yes, he claimed to want to have his revenge on Jaggers, so leading me to Margaret’s involvement in the baby business – and through FFF to both her identity and that of her brother’s – pointed me in the right direction, but it hardly established a way to achieve what he wanted. The bird explained a lot. Clever Mary after all.
The bird was Win’s birth certificate on one side, and back-to-back, his father’s death certificate – Jorge Wilhelm Jans. He’d died from ‘complications’ following an injury at work – excessive blood loss. Mary had said Win had a different father to the rest of us. So this was he. And then realisation dawned; Jans anglicised to Johns. Wilhelm Johns was Win’s half-brother. Jesus Christ – no wonder he was baying for blood. The defining factor was parentage after all – family. And I could guess now the reason Jaggers had targeted me first for the Johns case in 1988, then by Margaret, and now by Win. It was a long line of family cause and effect, starting with the venerable Justice Wemmick; the Wemmick legacy.
I hadn’t known about the Jaggers connection when I’d groomed the old judge, and Jaggers hadn’t known who my main ‘client’ had been. We’d worked it together, the old judge and me – he for secrecy and me to be left alone. Judge Wemmick must have known about Jaggers and his little pimping ring all along – how could he not through his happily participating friends? Whatever reasons there’d been at the time for Jaggers not disclosing his real identity, and the judge for not admitting to the connection, they’d also set up the mechanics of this whole goddamn mess. It must have been a nasty shock when the will was read, and the family found out the judge’s money was to be lawfully diverted out of their hands. After that it didn’t take much research to suggest that some of John Arthur Wemmick’s investments had been less than fruitful over the past few years, and his empire was falling. A few phone calls to a few grateful ex-clients filled in the gaps.
The father’s removal to Dubai had been for financial reasons, and indeed FFF and its associates were no doubt fulfilling the double role of profiting from others’ misfortunes, and laundering the proceeds of the other less high profile activities Jaggers was involved in to meet his debts. But why wait so long to come after me? It occurred to me I needed to see the will, and read the fine print of the various clauses, but it may equally have been little more than circumstance that put the plan together; Win coming out of jail and going after Jaggers, only to end up partnering him and Jonno. Perhaps they’d fallen out, and Jaggers had fixed Jonno up to get rid of him. Win could have been the provider of the willing sap ready to take on any well-paid dead cert of a case in order to avoid going under – me. Margaret would then provide the means to control me until the sting was ready to be made; now. It didn’t explain Danny’s involvement but he seemed more likely to be simply a pawn in a dirty game, which Win enjoyed creatively twisting the knife with as the rest of the plan unfolded.
Of course I could have easily gone to the authorities with what I surmised, but Win had cleverly made the risk posed by three of my own indiscretions abundantly clear to me along the way. First, the Wilhelm Johns case –Chambers’ collective part in which, no doubt wouldn’t bear scrutiny. Then there was the miscarriage Heather and Kat had also been parties to in order to clear Kat’s brother. Dirty Chambers, dirty briefs; no ermine and knighthood for me then. And finally, my own childish indiscretion, which had landed Win in jail. I was sure Jaggers would rejoice in publically admitting to his part in if he had to in order to annihilate my good name – with a well-placed ‘mea culpa’ to minimise his culpability. The adoption was doubtless Margaret’s own creative addition to benefit from her own bit of twisting. Twisty, twisty – that was what Mary had said, but it didn’t really matter about the ‘why’ any more – it was the ‘what’ I needed to know about.
There was just one more twisty I’d already bargained for but hadn’t expected to come from Kat. It arrived in a horrified phone message left on my ansaphone whilst I was ruminating over how badly I was about to be screwed over in front of Ma’s grave.
‘Lawrence, I think you need to know this before it breaks anywhere else. Danny’s family have all been tested for the faulty genes and there’s a bit of bother with the results. The hospital rang me this afternoon because they were concerned about the impact on him if he gets to find out before we’ve worked out what to do about it. Terry Hewson is completely clear, and so are the other kids – in fact they don’t even have the same blood group. That means he can’t be Danny’s father. I can’t get hold of Kimberley at the moment ...’
The message rambled on longer about legalities and parental responsibility but I switched off after hearing the salient point. It was too late to ring the hospital to find out my own test results – which presumably would also be back now, but maybe I didn’t need to after all. It seemed from what I now knew, there was potentially another candidate for Danny’s other parent – and another explanation for why he was baying for blood. Half- brother and unacknowledged son, both being destroyed by Jaggers – why wouldn’t he? And so the circle was complete, apart from the price to be extracted from me. I had to find that out from the man himself, not his messenger this time.
23: Patchwork People
It was surprisingly difficult to reach the message himself – Jaggers. I didn’t want to contact him through Win. That felt like doing things his way and I wouldn’t ever do that again. In the end I resorted to the only way I knew would get to him. It took forty-eight hours for the note I hand-delivered to the reception desk of FFF to get a response. I wondered how many of those hours had been in the delivering, and how many in the deliberation of said response. They didn’t show in the reply. It was brief and to the point, as mine had been. A time, a place and a date. A meet.
I drove there so I could easily leave when I wanted to. No waiting around for non-existent taxis – apart from which I didn’t want anyone else seeking a ticket to the party or tracking my path there. The area was seedy – back-street Finchley – and from the outside the building looked like any other run-down tenement in the area. It was the peephole in the door that gave it away. I knocked and waited, casting glances over my shoulder at the passers-by and the tramp on the corner. Look-out maybe? The tramp had a small terrier-like dog with him, and was perched on a dirty red sleeping bag, cap out and with the usual begging letter scrawled on mud-spattered paper perched behind it, but the dog’s collar was new. The area smelt of stale urine and despair.
I turned back to the door, black paint peeling and chipped. The doorstep had been painted red – brick paint. It reminded me of how Ma had scrubbed the stairs up to our flat as part of her weekly routine. When they were dry they were dull, blood brown. When she was scrubbing them the wet patches were bright red – fresh blood red. Why had she bothered? By the time we kids had tramped up and down them, Pop had dropped his fag ash en route to the bookies and numerous other purveyors of gossip, sugar borrowers and visitors with what passed for neighbourliness had all made use of them, the clean veneer was inevitably back to how it had been an hour or so before. What a pointless task. Surely she must have seen the futility of it – the futility of life itself in
that environment? Or maybe I was just biased now and current events had wrought an inability in me to see any good in my childhood world. Sarah wasn’t so bad – and nor in their ways were Jill, Emm and Binnie. We were just worlds apart and now the gap between us was unlikely to ever be filled by common experience. And I deserved and accepted their hostility – it was my reward for years of abandonment. The only bridge was Danny, and I had still to decide whether to cross it.
The peephole was filled by a distorted eye and it reminded me of Mary and her bizarre world, with its own peephole through the hanging birds. The look-out had obviously done his job satisfactorily. I passed muster and the door swung open to a narrow entrance and banged shut immediately behind me. The corridor was gloomy and the walls painted a dreary brown, but there was sufficient light spilling from the doorway at the end of it to see that my companion wasn’t Jaggers.
‘ID?’ he demanded. He was muscle-bound, tattooed and smelt of cheap aftershave. I felt around in my pocket and came away with nothing.
‘I’m here by invitation.’
‘Don’t give a shit, mate. ID.’ The only thing I had vaguely resembling a passport was Margaret’s birth certificate – or maybe I should say Molly’s birth certificate – ages old. I flashed it under thug’s nose and it worked like ‘open sesame’. I followed him into the room at the end of the corridor to find it was an old-fashioned snooker hall. Three full-sized tables complete with overhanging lights graced its length with a bar at one end and some rickety looking tables and chairs. It was speak-easy days personified. One the tables contained a huddle deep into a card game, a pile of crinkled tens and fives heaped in its centre, ringed by full ash trays and poker faces. They’d obviously been at it all night judging by the five o’clock shadows the unshaven ones sported and the under-eye bags they all nursed along with their un-played hands. One or two others lounged at the bar, whisky-deep and oblivious of me.