Shadow Play Read online

  ‘Panic attacks,’ he said languidly, waving his own, photocopied notice. ‘He gets them on Mondays.’

  ‘What’s it all about? He hates meetings.’

  ‘Don’t we all? It’s all about missing cases. Something of the kind, anyway. You know that débâcle with poor Riley last week? No, you wouldn’t, you weren’t in on Friday.’ It was said neutrally, but still made her feel like a defector who had left the family behind. ‘Anyway, I told him about it on Friday evening, which he was quite content to ignore, but there’s been a bit of a stink. Not from public authorities or the police, I hasten to add. Only from the solicitor who was hired to represent Riley’s drink-driver, but was sacked by the client before the last hearing, on the basis of the client saying, I quote “it was all fixed”. The solicitor’s furious at the loss of a private fee. He wants to know if it was “fixed”. He goes to the same golf club as Redwood. That’s what it’s all about.’

  ‘Drink-driving?’

  ‘No, suburban golf.’

  ‘So what’s this meeting for? Increased handicaps?’

  ‘Something like that,’ murmured Dinsdale as they dawdled towards Redwood’s throne room. ‘Sorry about the weekend by the way. I gather your man was back.’

  Dinsdale could always make her blush. So did the mention of Bailey.

  ‘Pity,’ she said lightly. ‘Another time, if your harem lets you go.’

  The door to Redwood’s room was open: the meeting was already called to order. This is my life, thought Helen, should I ever want to progress in it. It will owe all the success in terms of status to being good at meetings, attending courses, bullshitting selection boards. It will have nothing to do, as Redwood’s elevation does not, with being a good advocate and a creature of passionate common sense. Nothing to do with falling over in the course of justice, spending days on your knees looking for paper. She looked round the room at the others, seeking a mirror to her frequent frustration. The set of gargoyles looked meek and expectant. Optimism shone on their little faces, all but Dinsdale, who had the serene look of the respectful, ever-amused, ever-removed cynic. Redwood looked as if he were about to embark on a witch hunt. Normal.

  ‘It has come to my attention,’ he began, portentously, ‘that we may be losing files from the office.’

  This opening was greeted with hoots of laughter, some loud, some smothered. Lost files, lost cases and causes and egg all over advocates’ faces was not exactly news. It might have been ironic if he had not looked so thunderous. The laughter died away. Aren’t you a little worm, thought Helen, who had laughed loudest of all. Redwood raised a hand like a vicar stressing a point in a sermon, a gesture both of blessing and cursing.

  ‘Be quiet. Is this the way you behave in court?’

  A long time since you’ve been to court, sir, we laugh all the time.

  ‘Someone has been interfering with the computer …’ again, more smothered laughter. It sounded indecent.

  ‘… and emptying it of vital information,’ he continued. ‘About ten cases appear to have been syphoned away, quite deliberately.’

  ‘The evidence?’ Dinsdale’s voice, calm and interested. ‘Does the evidence point to a culprit?’

  Redwood looked at him meaningfully, man to man.

  ‘Yes, Mr Cotton, we have a very good idea, from purely preliminary investigations, I hasten to add. We have one absentee from the whole staff, one only today. Of course, the nonprofessionals are not at this meeting, they will have their own, and I think we may know who … The whys, apart from some kind of vendetta, have yet to be established. Obviously we cannot ask the persons who have managed to get themselves acquitted, and we don’t want to involve the police who have no powers in these circumstances to do more than ask for voluntary responses …’

  ‘You’ve got to try. Even if it’s entirely off the record, you’ve got to try. I’ll try, if you like.’ Helen’s voice. Riley was nodding. He was remembering his own drunk driver of last week, the smugness of the man. Helen was remembering hers of this morning. Bribery and corruption? Mistake? Redwood thinks he knows who. She knew in a flash which way his meeting was going.

  ‘I needed you here to discuss,’ Redwood was saying, ‘alternative methods of record keeping. New forms are being prepared. To be submitted to me, each week. With your diaries.’

  Helen remembered him looking at desks late on a Friday night. She found herself on her feet.

  ‘You think it’s Rose, don’t you?’

  ‘… She’s off today, was off Friday, has refused to leave an address … knows how to work the machine, spends a lot of time in the basement …’ Redwood was saying it like a litany.

  ‘And is down with the lowest paid and the easiest to sack, so that’s convenient, isn’t it?’ Helen was shouting. The others shifted in their seats with embarrassment. Redwood was shouting back.

  ‘She’s the only one who stays late. The only one—’

  ‘With an attitude problem? OK.’ Her voice had gone down an octave: Redwood was momentarily relieved. Then it rose again, not quite as high but still rising. ‘What about her notebooks?’

  ‘What notebooks?’

  ‘You don’t know? Well, they’re the sort of thing you might collect on a Friday night, if you happened to be tidying up,’ she hinted broadly. Redwood had the grace to pause. ‘Anyway,’ Helen continued, ‘anyone can get in here. My friend got in here, yesterday; so did I, just by flashing plastic, all of us here know how easy that is, apart from you. And it isn’t Rose. If it’s anyone at all.’

  Helen sat down to refuel. She wasn’t finished yet. Dinsdale looked discomfited. ‘Steady on,’ he murmured in her ear. The proximity of his shoulder to hers was disturbingly public. ‘Steady what?’ she hissed, recoiling from his reservation. Now all she noticed was the perfection of his hands which she did not want to restrain her.

  The room, with its draughts and floor-length windows, was alive with little sights and sounds. The wind outside, rattling those inside, the muted buzz of shocked conversation, Helen’s red cheeks, Redwood’s sudden, public paleness. So that was what they were, those notebooks, bottom drawer left, next to one of his feet. He could not move. He had amassed them on Friday-night perambulations without any notion of their significance.

  ‘OK,’ said Helen, conciliatory but ominous. ‘No meeting with the clerks, no stones thrown without evidence, OK? And if there’s a real suggestion of malpractice, the police can investigate us just as they would anyone else. And no more forms to make up for lousy security, all right? We’re already sinking in paper.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Redwood frostily. ‘Now, unless there are other comments, I suggest we postpone this meeting for a day or two …’

  There were other suggestions. There was a chorus of complaints, a comparing of notes, a vote of confidence for prickly Rose Darvey, who treated them all with equal rudeness and served them well.

  Dinsdale was silent, apparently vastly amused. Helen found herself irritated; all he could do was sit with one elegant hand fingering his silk tie. True to form, nothing emerged from the meeting; no master plan, no conclusions, nothing except an adjournment for a week and their silence requested. And Redwood’s agreement that Helen West could keep Rose Darvey strictly at her own side, until the next meeting.

  ‘That man,’ she said, striding away with Dinsdale, ‘needs a sign on the door asking you to knock so he has time to jump into a cupboard in case you ask him to make a decision.’

  ‘Could you do better?’ said Dinsdale lightly.

  ‘No, probably not,’ said Helen cheerfully. ‘But it would be different.’

  Cheerfulness to this degree often followed the catharsis of anger. It always made Bailey deeply suspicious.

  Helen went to the clerks’ room, casually. They were ill at ease, full of speculation and her grinning presence was reassuring.

  ‘Anyone know Rose’s address? Thought I’d send her some flowers.’

  One of them gasped in astonishment; flowers for Rose, a
fter what she’d said, but no, they didn’t know. They all knew vaguely where one another lived, but names and street numbers, no. Helen phoned PC Michael’s station from the privacy of her room, he would surely know where Rose lived, but Michael, she was told, was also off sick. The reserve officer was cagey, but a little verbal bullying and stressing of urgency revealed more. An accident, Whittington Hospital. Too bad if Michael didn’t want visitors: if he couldn’t worry about Rose, she must.

  On Ward C, Michael Michael was sweating. My, haven’t you been lucky, they said, if you’d been less fit, that beam would have killed you. But you’ve only got a hairline crack in your great big head, ha, ha, plus a face which would not look good in a mug shot at the moment, and a broken arm. No, you can’t go home, not yet. The manic cheerfulness of doctors depressed him. He didn’t feel lucky, he felt indescribably foolish. Flowers from Mum and Dad in Catford, fruit, food and forbidden alcohol from his relief, a trickling of cards so far, all with rude messages, winks and conspicuous attention from the rare nurses, a headache fit to blind and a heartache of worse intensity. What would Rose think? What had she been thinking? He could no more have told the wretched Williams, or Singh, or any of the others he knew well enough, to go round to Rose’s place, knock on the door and give her a message. Faced with such a caller, she would think she had been placed back in the section house pot.

  Michael persuaded a nursing auxiliary to try at work. Not there, said the auxiliary, apologetic for not being able to aid the course of romance. When told there was someone to see him, his heart had leapt against his ribs, then descended.

  The woman was slim, dark and smart, a professional-looking stranger with a nice face, but she was not Rose Darvey.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Helen, presenting a dozen white daffodils. ‘This isn’t a social call.’

  When she left, he felt better.

  Rose Darvey’s mind had crawled up and down walls for thirty-six hours. Late on Saturday night when the disappointment was becoming terminal and she was sick with the cigarettes that her body loathed but her misery craved, she was stationed by her bedroom window when she heard a panda car cruising down the street. By that time the bitter hurt was belly side up and beyond logic. Oh, go on, she’d told herself earlier, he only half promised, no more than that, and was not comforted, then the sound of an engine sent her rushing to the light switch to turn her bedroom into darkness. If it was him, she would be out, teach him a lesson, make him worried; who did he think he was, that Michael? Half of her knew, even as she resumed the watching by the window, that she would never keep it up. That if he got out of the car and rang the bell, she would fling open the window and yell at him, or run down to the door, whichever movement occurred first, but she could not have let him go. The other girls, with their new friendliness, told her what a find Michael was. ‘Yeah?’ she shrugged.

  They went out, she stayed in, couldn’t bear to step out of doors in case she missed him, waited in silence with her mounting anger and misery. Gran was forgotten, except for a furious guilt about how she had made a mess of that longed-for reunion, but then what did she expect? She always screwed up everything, every bloody thing. Rushing Gran home, so she could be back here to wait for nothing but this agonising pain, making her feel as if she were some live specimen, with a spike through her head and a chain to the wall, confined to the circuit of her room, tethered, pacing, wincing.

  On Sunday she rallied, after furious dialogues with herself had somehow induced a sort of sleep. She thought briefly of all the reasons why he might not have arrived the night before. None of them bore close inspection.

  ‘Did he turn up? Mr Gorgeous, I mean?’

  ‘Naa. He phoned though,’ she lied. ‘Extra duties, he said. Probably a football match.’

  ‘What, at the stadium? But they didn’t play last night. At least I don’t think—’

  ‘What do you know?’

  She cleaned her room again, singing to pretend she hadn’t been found out and that within this little, expedient household she was becoming ever more the freak. Out to an off-licence with her much abused credit card to buy beer for the girls and enough booze for herself to induce a total anaesthetic. On Sundays, they went home to see mothers: complicated journeys to Crystal Palace and Neasden which made a trip to the Gulag sound easy, the way they described it. They would come back grumbling about nagging and trains while she died of envy.

  Sunday, early evening, the phone rang. She launched herself towards it.

  ‘Hallo, is that Rose baby? How ya doing?’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Paul. Paul Williams. You remember me, surely? Police Constable Paul Williams. Thought you might like a drink.’

  ‘Who was it you said you wanted?’ She put on her haughtiest mimic, trying to sound like Dinsdale Cotton. The odious voice on the other end paused, briefly.

  ‘Aw, come on, Rose, I know it’s you.’ He knew it from the diary taken from Michael’s pocket as they looked for the address of his next of kin. ‘What about that drink, then? Aren’t Sundays boring?’

  ‘Not that boring,’ said Rose.

  The room swam as she crashed the receiver back on the kitchen wall. Little shit. Cheap jack little shit with a cock like a thin banana. Shit on Michael too. They all did that. Passed you along. Left you wide open for your big daddy to find you, with your legs spread open on a slab. Get your knickers off, Rose.

  Sunday night, bad coughing. Glazed over a TV film, beer, martini. Monday morning, decided she couldn’t show this face to the world, wouldn’t be able to keep up the façade and crack jokes all day. Lay down, got up, walked around, afflicted less by Michael than all the dirty laundry of her grubby little life and the self-disgust which went with it. Shadow play, distraction as the light fell and the condensation formed at the window, and she had nothing to do, the phone was silent and she felt dead. Shadow play, lying alone with the second tumbler of stuff, her back uncomfortable against all her teddy bears and dolls, her fingers making eagles on the far wall. Then a bunny rabbit with waggling ears. Then a house with a roof you could turn inside out by inverting your hands against the light. Here’s the church, here’s the steeple: open it up and you see the people.

  ‘No, I liked the bunny rabbit,’ she heard herself saying, nervously. ‘Give me the bunny rabbit. Or the kangaroo, jumping, I don’t mind.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’ Daddy’s voice. ‘You don’t mind? Here, feel this.’

  ‘Don’t, Daddy, please don’t, don’t, don’t, I don’t like it, please don’t, Granny wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Granny says it’s fine, it’s good for little girls, to look after their daddy …’

  ‘Don’t, Daddy, please don’t. I’ll scream, Daddy.’

  ‘You wouldn’t do that, now would you? What’s the matter? It’s only my little lollipop.’

  ‘I don’t want it, Daddy, I’ll scream.’

  ‘No you won’t. Who’ll hear? Just put it in your mouth. No harm …’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Yes you can. No, put it in the other place. You want Daddy to love you, don’t you? Then I’ll make you a bunny rabbit.’ That sound of desperate breathing he made as they lay on his bed, she sticky, weeping.

  And on, and on. The shadow play for two years: pain and soreness and itching and crying and never telling, in case she should lose him. Only her and Dad against the world. Then a pause for two whole years in which she could not quite stop looking round all the time. Then again, with a different violence when she was nearly fourteen, still a child, but old enough to know and to fight. Hit him with the kitchen knife. Trying to cut at Daddy’s lollipop because she could not bear it any more, didn’t care if she lived or died, carving a loop in his stomach instead. Blood all over the lino on the kitchen, that look of hatred on his face, Mum coming home.

  Daddy said she tempted him, she was the devil. No wonder no-one could love her. They would want to stone her, he had shouted, like they did in the Bible. Outside the city wall
s. Stone her to death and leave her there.

  Rose came round, sweating. You could always relive being fucked by Daddy.

  A shower of gravel hit the bedroom window. Small stones stinging the glass. Rose had been transfixed by her hands twisting themselves into shadows against the far wall which she watched like one waiting for an omen. She swung her feet off her bed as another shower followed the first. An alarming sound, one which should have had her hiding, but so novel in its peremptory summons for attention that hope sprang, then faded as she heard someone shouting her name. It came from the great distance of the street below. The voice sounded like something from the penumbra of the same dream, Gran’s voice, scolding to make her achieve.

  Down in the street, Helen waited for a response. She had aimed for the only window showing light and now she leant against the front door. When it opened fast, she stumbled and both of them swore.

  ‘What the hell …? What the fuck do you think you’re doing, chucking things at people’s windows? Oh, for Christ’s sake, come in. You doing welfare as well as law, now? Come in.’

  Once the foundations of defence showed cracks, it was easy to let them crumble further as long as a bedrock was left. Rose took Helen indoors because they had found each other in a pregnancy clinic and they both liked shopping. Tea was made. The kitchen was immaculate; somewhere in two days’ meandering, Rose’s small amount of surplus energy had taken a domestic direction. Helen opened the fridge to find milk to go with tea and found four cans of lager, diet coke, jam, low-calorie margarine, all the typical foods for three girls slimming or slumming.

  ‘Now, Rose. What’s up?’

  The child shrugged, desperately relieved to see another face but trying not to let it show.