Deep Sleep Page 17

  Write it down, she had told him fiercely. Write it down: you can write history, think, read, function. Take this as a start.

  ‘Oh, I may, I may. This has been a shot in the arm, you see. There, Helen West, you’ve achieved something and people like you always have to be achieving things, do you not? You can never let life alone, can you? And I’ll tell you something for free: that woman was murdered, probably deserved it. Not that it matters, you know, not really. Let the poor bastard be. And don’t come to me with my raked up past, accusing me with questions. I don’t care about your case.’

  She looked down at the shops, up at the lights. Consumer society, the long after-effect of war, the antidote to peace. Do not strive so to achieve, he had said: nothing is worth so much. The woman is dead already. Only nurture what you have; learn to protect it.

  A nihilist, for all his wit. She had not, after all, made a friend.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT was only because of Hazel that the short bulletin overheard on the radio at home struck any chord. Unexploded wartime bomb: East End evacuation, reminiscent of wars. Army disposal experts on hand to defuse what may be largest amount of explosive yet discovered. Helen did not really register the area concerned; the East End was a widely ranging definition, loosely used, but in the middle of pondering the events of her day, she also considered the quirkiness of a bomb which did not do its business but remained underground for almost half a century. Maybe a lazy bomb, like a Friday afternoon car, made by the night shift, designed never to work. A soft sort of news item which she ignored until she realised the implications, and even then the news was still bizarre enough to be faintly funny. It was a change from other bombs, Semtex, the IRA, Palestinians and other hell raisers who were not funny at all. And no one was hurt, yet. Like everyone else whose curiosity was faintly aroused, she had blind faith in the experts, some vague admiration for such cold bravery and a belief that everything would be rectified quietly. Revenge from the Luftwaffe at this stage in history seemed absurd, an incident which lacked any element of justice. Even the kind which was purely poetic.

  The reality of the thing only impinged further when Bailey rang. Helen had not forgotten his part in making her look an idiot in the little matter of the criminal record of one Dr Hazel. If she and Bailey had joined forces for the night, he was in for some sharp words, to which, of course, he would reply with sour reason, leaving her even more afflicted with futility. Of course he had not been malevolent: Bailey was well able to define the meaning of malice, but it had no part in his makeup, indeed, it was his mildness which sometimes infuriated her, but all the same, the timing was spiteful. As if he had chosen to say, there, I have always known more than you after all; we have our resources, we persons in authority, run away and do your homework. Sharpen the instinct and then try and pretend the law is not really your pet blunt instrument designed to miss the target. Tell me something new, Helen was thinking. Tell me the law is not such an unwieldy instrument that we cannot catch a murderer by legitimate means and we have to stage a trial like a strange musical, with everyone’s face painted whiter than white to mirror the cleanliness of their souls. According to Redwood, she would never be able to invite to the witness box anyone who had ever lived hard enough for tragedy, long enough to make mistakes, or fallible enough to command affection. She would look for another dry and blameless doctor. Tomorrow.

  When Bailey rang, there was no time for the bone picking, no more suggestion of it than her saying, Oh, it’s you, is it?, instead of some more instantly friendly response. She would have thrown off the resentful feeling as being both idiotic and unattractive after a minute or two of this, but news prevailed over the need for such effort.

  ‘Going to be around here, all night, I reckon …’

  ‘What?’ Helen had not been listening.

  ‘Herringbone Parade, everybody out. They’re being very good-natured about it. This bomb, you must have heard. Apparently big enough to devastate a large area. All police hands stand by, etc. I’ll probably run a soup kitchen.’

  ‘You don’t cover Herringbone Parade. Oh, I see. They need you. Like a riot.’

  ‘No, not like a riot. Peace prevails. But everyone available has to stay. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, wait a minute. Look out for the chemist, will you?’

  Helen still could not confess she had seen him. Remembered those bleached blue eyes.

  ‘Women and children first,’ Bailey replied, and that was the end of the conversation. Only later, chewing a sandwich, the sort of sloppy self-provision he detested, dissecting the duplicate papers she had purloined from the office, spreading them out over the living-room floor, statement by statement, in an effort to work out a whole new strategy, did she begin to wonder what Bailey was doing. Looking inside Bailey’s mind was a rare privilege, a door opened to an occasional glimpse, like a view into a dim house caught in passing as someone came out or in. Never fully open, not even in summer. Beside him, she could feel garrulous, obvious, rather too talkative, as open as a book. Ah, he had said once. I know why you talk. A disguise, darling: in the end you keep as much secret as I do. Sitting by the fire, Helen could see an element of truth in the observation. She listed the cast of characters in and around the Carlton case, stung by the words of the doctor; conscious of a nagging sensation of danger which had dogged her ever since the first page of the report, wondered long and hard about the motives of men and the dearth of her own instinct.

  Many of the refugees had gone to relatives, hence half the Asian population of the square next to the Parade was notably absent from the church halls. Others had been warned not to come home from work, stayed with aunts, uncles and occasionally resentful friends. All had blind faith in the experts, and muttered knowledgeably about steam and explosive, everything perfectly all right by tomorrow, old son. In the centres along with the Red Cross and the St John Ambulance, there were camp beds and blankets, tea and sympathy, laughter and card games with the elderly who never encountered such esprit de corps in daily life. Mrs Beale’s mother, whom daughter had nurtured crossly for a dozen years, felt herself hugged for the first time in a decade, by a fireman who had lifted her out of her house and called her darling. The thought of that, and the sharp memories of war, made her weep. Amid the organising at which he excelled, Bailey’s eyes were everywhere. Five streets and one square had been cleared, or so they’d been told. There was no telling where all of them were. Of Kimberley Perry, and the son he had failed to recognise, there was no sign. In that fact alone there was no cause for concern. She had relatives, she had, albeit reluctantly, Duncan: she need not have come to any of the centres, but her absence, as outside the school gates, worried him. Neither was there any sign of the chemist, which was merely strange without being sinister. On the basis of his reputation, Caring Carlton was unlikely to miss such opportunity for being seen to be charitable to a fault. He could have dispensed the aspirins and the soup, whipped up for himself a round of applause. Ash Grove church hall was stinking warm, fuggy with gas heaters borrowed from a warehouse. The scene inside was reminiscent of an airport lounge full of anxious people subdued into patient behaviour by their belief in authority. Some of them slept. Some of them were a nuisance, talking away anxiety, glad of the holiday. Bailey was a man who seemed to carry his own heat, never more than half wearing a coat, and the atmosphere oppressed him. Then he saw Duncan, huddled into an anorak which had seen better days, walking up and down the rows, checking. Looking for Kimberley. He felt a prickle of alarm, like an itch he could not quite reach.

  Herringbone Parade was detached from the world by tapes across each end. From behind, the fairy light crane glowed obscenely, dimmer against the floodlights. A quiet noise, Tom thought: the kind of noise which you could almost touch but without any kind of form to it, like a muttered conversation indicating something important, events out of earshot, slightly languid. He wanted to go towards this mysterious noise of industry, but dared not. To do so would be trouble, yells, sh
outs, pursuit. He wanted to be on top of the crane, looking down and eating sweets, warm above the world, watching. At first, he visualised the bomb as something the size of a hand grenade, something thrown, and could not understand the fuss he had witnessed. Any understanding at all was diminished by the creeping cold and the leg cramp, the sucking of the strap of the satchel, biting his nails, nothing made sense, and the sheer emptiness of the street, the absence of all the familiar sounds, made for disorientation. Like a film on telly about what would happen after the other kind of bomb. A frightening film which he was not supposed to watch, showing a street which might have been desert, nothing in it, like this one, but buildings and drifting wind. The thought struck him that this was the kind of bomb they meant: it had already fallen and apart from the formless noise, he might be the only person alive, anywhere. That particular, whimpering fear made him move. He had to know the worst. Then there was a shout from far beyond him. His eyes, luminous and enormous in the dark of the service road, caught sight of a uniformed figure, adjusting the tape which isolated the road and fluttered in the breeze. The figure disappeared. Tom knew then he was not the only one alive, and therefore felt justified in postponing decisions to remain where he was. He resumed his chewing of the satchel strap, sticky and dirty, like a dog worrying a bone. In a minute, just a little minute, he would go home. In the bottom of his pocket, he found the key he had taken illicitly that morning.

  At the far end of the service road, a door opened quietly. Philip Carlton stood outside in the tiny yard beyond the hidden entrance to his dark dispensary, looked at the glow of the sky with satisfaction. He was dressed in an overall which was a duplicate of the one he wore in the shop, apart from the colour. In the black cotton of the tunic, buttoned to the neck in the style of Nehru, he was insignificant in the dark, giggling slightly. While Tom crouched back out of sight, dismayed by the emptiness of the street, Pip revelled in it, Lord of all he surveyed. He was higher than the crane, brighter than the stars, glowed with more power than the light which oozed out of the building site. They were digging in there, excavating in the vicinity of a bomb and he did not care. Pip was too young for wars, a man of peaceful memory, bar the screaming of families, the confederacy of women who had brought him to adulthood and ruled him ever after. They spoke of a war he did not know, relived it for his benefit with tales of hardship and ration books, told him how lucky he was, but he knew them all, these aunts, as liars, cheats, persons of manifest ugliness who had held him down for his daily bath, fondling him into screaming, laughing with the laughter which still rang in his ears when he fingered what they had fingered, the echoes of that laughter coming back in his own small giggle of relief. They would tickle, too, oh you like that, don’t you, look at him laughing, so comic, the agony of tickling, the hideous humiliation of the whole body squirming out of control. Rearing and arching like a frightened horse, oh please, please, please sto-o-o-p. And now what was he, a man who had only learnt what a man does with a woman with the help of the chloroform, the private ether frolics which made it all possible, but had never yet made him quite understand what he had to know. Such as why the pleasure was great enough to be the cause of wars, the pivot of life in peace. Margaret, poor wrinkled Margaret had not been able to explain the puzzle, but Kimberley Perry, pliant, luscious as fruit would be better than the honeydew melon purloined from Mrs Beale, who had offered other services too. Kimberley would be better than that, or the lonely masturbation of the back room, or the poking of Margaret which had led only to that out of control humiliation which was so similar to the tickling. Kimberley would give him release and she would not even have to participate (oh, if only Margaret had kept still). The girl upstairs had only to remain sleeping, as beautiful and passive as she was, fed with dreams, like a corn-reared chicken, loving without demands. That would do nicely.

  Pip had made a new mask. Not new, but old, a replica of the one he had used with Margaret in the days when she had cavorted around the room wearing nothing but. She had raised goose bumps of disgust on him until he breathed the vapour from the duster and at last his penis rose like a flag hoisted at sunrise. Stayed fit for action only as long as it would have taken to whistle three bars of the Last Post, measure itself in supine Margaret, and explode into anticlimax leaving him nothing more than that same helpless sensation of fatigue which had followed the tickles. As for her, she seemed pleased, even if she wept after, unsatisfied, but less than she might have wept if he had never tried at all. She meant to be kind, kept insisting. Until he could bear it no longer.

  Pip carried the mask, a duster hidden from sight up one sleeve, and a hip flask. He had plucked the key to Kimberley’s flat from the hook where he kept all spare keys to every cupboard and door of his whole domain, enabling him to move from the back dispensary to his own flat, up to Kim’s, into the shop; such short journeys, such ease. He staggered slightly. In the piercing cold which threatened frost before dawn, the only visible part of him was the still sweet-smelling vapour that surrounded his mouth, and the bared teeth of his uncontrollable smile.

  Upstairs, Kimberley Perry slept the sleep of peace. Knocking on her door had failed to rouse her, as had the exodus of human life from every habitation. Drugging Kimberley Perry was easy, involving no poisons. Really, they had laughed, Pip, Margaret and she, at this small vulnerability of his assistant: one soporific cough drop and she would sleep. He had watched the reaction yesterday, the glazing of the eyes, the lack of co-ordination in the lovely limbs, the growing fatigue which had made her so muzzy today. Each cup of tea, another capsule of Night Nurse. Nothing lethal: she would wake tomorrow, fuzzy but unharmed, imagining herself ill with flu, perhaps. He did not want to harm her. What Pip had in mind for a winter afternoon, after she had left the shop to sleep and he had shut up the doors to follow, was something he had also had in mind to repeat. A very quiet impregnation, a coupling with one of them conscious, not too fast, but not slow either. But the bomb was a blessing: Pip had never imagined there would be a time quite as perfect as this, so free from prying eyes. That part was sheer fluke and when the warnings came, he had been thinking fast, pretending to obey, lock his doors and follow the crowd which departed in bus and car. Then he had stopped and smiled, retreated beyond his boxed-in door and stayed almost still; playing, thinking, smiling, putting against his face the smooth silky touch of Kim’s stolen negligée, the brassières, knickers and slips as yet untouched.

  Kim Perry had woken once. To be sick in one sleepy stagger to the lavatory, trailing back, confused by the sounds from outside but not caring, shrugging out of the nylon blouse which made her sweat in bed, not quite remembering where she was. She called for Tom, thought she heard him reply. There had been a knock on the door which might have been someone bringing him home. Then she slept, half-dressed, her feet growing cold, her generous body half covered, one arm under her head, the other outflung in an attitude of open abandonment. Her hair was wild, spread on the pillow, and her half-open mouth suggested invitation. When Pip came into her room on his soft-shod feet, she looked like some picture he had seen, some Victorian depiction of a woman lost. He smiled, catching his breath, unable to stop smiling. Paused for a long moment, watching her.

  Duncan Perry was following Bailey round the room, like a dog at a master’s heels, three steps behind with a kind of urgent dignity, not quite plucking at his sleeve or tripping over his shoes, but almost. Bailey had noticed that Duncan smelled slightly of drink, not enough to cause offence or even be noticed by anyone less observant, and not enough to impair his performance. Only the residue of lunchtime or early evening when Duncan would seek the solace of a pub as soon as possible after darkness. Already they seemed to be swimming in the middle of the night, an impression extended by the dozing evacuees, but the hour was early, no more than seven in the evening, black as pitch. The winter solstice, mid December, drawing everyone away from the moon and into despair. Bailey no longer believed such thoughts were fanciful. His mouth was downturned, his spirits
too: he wanted away from the irritation of Duncan’s presence, a man with less to recommend him than many of the others who came looking, mildly worried, for their grannies.

  ‘Sir,’ Duncan was saying insistently, the way he did whenever Bailey paused. ‘Sir, I can’t find them anywhere. I thought she might come to me when they all had to get out: they had time to phone and make arrangements after all, why didn’t she come to me?’

  ‘Look, Duncan, she could have gone anywhere. Friends, relatives, anywhere. We don’t know where half the people have gone.’

  ‘She hasn’t gone to her relatives. There’s only her mother and she doesn’t get on with her mother. She goes to her sister, but she didn’t, I rang. I know. I want to go and see if she’s still in the flat.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. We’ve moved all the uniform to the edge of the area. This bloody thing is for real. Why the hell would she stay?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Duncan mumbled.

  ‘No, neither do I,’ said Bailey briskly. ‘I should go home. She may be trying to ring you. They won’t let you anywhere near, so don’t try. Go home, man, where you might actually be useful.’

  Duncan gave him a look such as a man might give to one who had betrayed him, a look expressing plea and contempt.

  ‘That’s my woman you’re talking about.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about her, not as such.’ Bailey’s irritation took the form of pedantry. ‘Listen, I’ll go out there in a little while and look. Where’s Tom?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been saying. No Tom either. Tom would have been coming home from school …’ The light of hope appeared in Duncan’s eyes as he talked more to himself than his audience. ‘Oh, I get it now. Kim would have gone to meet him, so they would never have got back into the flat, the timing … She must have gone off with someone else from the Parade. They would have been coming back just as everyone was leaving.’ The anorak slipped further off one shoulder. ‘I wish she’d phoned, though. Might’ve known I’d worry. Women. I phoned that bloody flat of hers, to make sure she’d gone, but there was no reply.’ The smile which broke through on to his face illuminated his features into something human, even likeable. For one brief moment, seeing the mischief behind the smile, Bailey could understand why a woman might once have adored him.