Shadow Play Read online

  Though truth to tell, the scrappy eating and total lack of cooking which had featured in the last ten days, during which time she had passed the supermarket with two fingers raised and no potatoes to rub her shins as they strained at polythene bags, owed only as much to retrograde eating behaviour as it did to a strange feeling of nausea. The eggs eaten late were committed to the sewerage system so quickly it was as if they only lived in her digestion on borrowed time. They were unable to pay rent, these eggs, like most other foods except crisps, sharp, artificial, savoury tastes, or items of sickening sweetness. And she was thinner, definitely thinner: the waistband of her skirt that morning had hung loose: halfway through a court case, she had risen to shout some reply and found the skirt had swivelled round, back to front, crumpled and out of shape. That small incident vexed her.

  She stood in her kitchen, admired for its warmth and flair like all her other rooms, the product of a hundred junk shops encouraged into interesting life and a little out of control. ‘I love this old dresser,’ Geoffrey had said. ‘I love your old, cracked, unhealthy enamel sink, your mugs from the wedding of Charles and Di, and I love the ancient carving knives which came from car-boot sales, but, my dear, they do not cut.’

  She was hungry and sick, sick and hungry. Three, four drinks with Dinsdale and the mastication of nibbles with all the nutriment of air, and she ran for the bathroom with its old and beautiful tiles, pictures on the walls even in there, only to be sick. What is this? she thought, raising from the basin to the mirror a face which was horribly pale. What the hell is this?

  Helen West, arrogantly accustomed to health, an avoider of doctors when possible, rummaged in the cupboard beneath the mirror for something to settle this intestinal riot. Bisodol, Rennies, Nurofen, aspirin, every hangover cure under her sun. A pregnancy kit about a thousand years old which her hand nudged and knocked to one side in search of something efficacious enough to allow eating without retribution later, but the fingers stopped of their own accord and dragged out the unopened box as she squatted back on her haunches, rocking with the shock of her own conclusions. When was the last time she’d had the curse? And when last had she and Bailey celebrated the one thing they always seemed to get a hundred per cent right? His house, her house, something usually missing. You weren’t fertility plus at thirty-five, but age was irrelevant to an egg.

  Helen got her coat and made for the street. Dammit: she craved the produce of the Chinese takeaway; she would have it in any event, and she could not stay here with her own thoughts.

  Outside, the night was peculiarly still and stiff with an icy cold which formed her breath into puffs of vapour, so cold, she immediately wanted to turn back inside, but driven by her own hunger, she did not. The frost which had formed in the darkness of dawn and melted in the afternoon, now drew exquisite patterns on car windscreens like some exotic artist. From the great distance of a mile or more, she heard in the stillness the great roar of an enormous crowd. There was no sound the same: the sound of the mountain moving to Jehovah. Helen stopped, chilled to the marrow by that distant roar of the jungle lion waiting to get out. Then the cars started again: the lights of the main road hit her eyes. The sickness had passed.

  Oh Lord, do not let me be afraid of the dark.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Redwood was often asked to give lectures – to new recruits, to clubs, to Justices of the Peace. They were good for his profile, so he did them when he could not farm them out.

  ‘The mandate of the Crown Prosecution Service,’ he was fond of beginning in a good, loud voice, ‘is to prosecute without fear or favour, according to the evidence, those who break the criminal law. Evidence is supplied to us by the police. It is we who decide what to do with it.’

  He made the process sound civilised and eminently streamlined. What he did not say was that his own office was drowning in paper. They were more vulnerable to paper than they were to heart attacks. The paper would kill them first.

  ‘Our office is computerised, of course,’ he would say, remembering not to cringe. So it was, in a manner of speaking. The computer received information and dictated the next move for every case: they all had pathetic faith in it without any understanding, but it did not obviate the necessity for portable paper to go to and from courtrooms and barristers’ chambers, fraying in a dozen sets of hands, often without a duplicate, until finally it was filed in the vast areas of the basement where Redwood never trod.

  ‘Because of the confidential, incriminating nature of the material we keep, we do, of course, take great care with security …’

  Even he had to wince at that. By security, Redwood meant the high railings with their lethal spikes, the assiduous sccurity men they had by day and the lazy character they had between seven in the evening and the same hour next morning, and also at the weekends. He came from an agency, it was cheaper. Redwood hated the building so much, he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to get in. Only a fearless child could climb the railings. It didn’t occur to him there was any need for better security.

  ‘Rose, any chance I can have tomorrow’s paperwork by one’clock? Like I asked earlier? Only I’d rather not come back this afternoon.’

  Rose raised a harassed face from the files she was marshalling into piles, in date order, each like a rocky monument on the floor round her desk.

  ‘I dunno. Doubt it,’ she said rudely. Helen felt her temper rise. The link between her worries and her sense of humour was proving tenuous, the thread of it not only thin but frayed. She made a last effort.

  ‘Please can you find me tomorrow’s files? Surely it isn’t too much to ask?’

  Rose was embracing a bundle of six to her bosom, and she dropped them abruptly, turning as she did so. She was shaking with tension, but it looked like a gesture of petty defiance.

  ‘Rose,’ said Helen with warning in her voice, ‘I really do have to go at one, and I might not be able to get back. Can you sort tomorrow’s stuff for me now? Please?’

  Rose turned to face her, livid with anger. The spikes of her hair, subdued of late, seemed to rise round her head like the defensive spine of a hedgehog.

  ‘And supposing other people have to leave early too? Supposing there’s no-one else to do their fucking work and the computer’s screwed and silly cows like you are asking for the moon? You can fuck off. Your bloody files are in here somewhere. Either find them your bloody self or come back later.’ She kicked one of the heaps with a booted foot and the files lurched sideways, but Rose had not finished. There was an impulse to malice she could not resist.

  ‘And while I’m at it, don’t you come this holier-than-thou bit with me ever again. You and Mr Cotton, both with an afternoon off each? Good, isn’t it? What’s it to be then, your place or his?’

  Helen wanted to slap her: Rose was waiting to be slapped, but something in the insinuation raised an inhibiting twinge of guilt. The files toppled in slow motion as Rose strode from the room. The other clerks watched from their tables and desks in a deathly silence. Helen breathed in and out slowly. She stared at the window where she had seen Rose’s reflection two weeks before and saw only her own, paler and older face. With the others as an audience, she knelt on the floor and began to go through the papers, looking for those which bore her name, seething but still using her eyes. For the moment she hated Rose to the same degree the girl seemed to despise her in return. Perhaps that was why none of the clerks helped her, but let her grub around on the floor, humiliated. If they’d offered, she would have refused.

  Redwood came into the room, as uncertainly as he always did for fear the clerks might bite him or reveal his failure to remember most of their names.

  ‘Who was shouting in here? I won’t have it … Oh! Helen, what are you doing?’ She looked up from the floor with a fiendish grin.

  ‘Looking for a contact lens, sir.’ Sir was inconsistent in his observations, but there were some details he never forgot.

  ‘I didn’t think you wore lenses.’

  ‘I d
o now. Was there anything in particular you wanted?’

  ‘That shouting …’

  ‘It was me.’ He beckoned her out of the room with evident disgust, poised for a reprimand. From beyond the door, Helen heard the buzz of voices no longer suppressed, cutting through her back like an icy wind.

  In the lavatory, Rose Darvey sat and gulped. Trained as she was in several aspects of self-control, she had long since mastered the technique of crying while remaining silent. You held your nose, so that the effort of breathing through the mouth somehow suspended the rising of the noisier sobs. Putting her hands over her ears also encouraged the silence which had always seemed so imperative when she cried. She sat with the door locked, trying one method after the next, while large tears ran down her face and made a mess of the make-up so carefully applied in the spotlight over her bedroom mirror. She couldn’t make shadows in here: it required a light without a shade. She had bitten her fingernails down to sore stumps, another reason for habitually playing with her hands. Granny had placed some bitter solution over them once to make her stop it: it had worked temporarily. Granny, Granny, help me now, please help me now, where are you? The vision of Granny somehow increased the size of the hairball in her chest: the effort to make no sound felt like a thistle lodged in her throat. Granny, she thought. Got to try and see Granny. Granny could help. See Granny and do something about this bloody baby, before I go mad. Can’t tell Michael, just can’t. He’ll never love me.

  ‘Rose?’ A timid voice. ‘Rose. You all right Rose?’ A plaintive whine from one of the others sent to enquire. Rose was her colleagues’ heroine; she made them laugh, she knew more than any of them and was afraid of no-one. ‘Rose, come out of there, will you? Only we’re worried about you. Come out, please.’

  The plea in the voice made her freeze for a moment. Come on out, darling, and no harm will ever befall you again. Rose dropped her handbag on the floor, rummaged inside for her make-up bag, the old protector. She made a loud noise with the toilet roll, tearing it, blowing her nose with unnecessary violence, scrubbing at the ruin of the mascara. The same voice again, though not so wheedling, assumed less reminiscent proportions. It might be all right if she just carried on without too many cracks in her armour.

  ‘Rose, are you all right? Talk to me, what’s the matter?’

  How she despised the tragedies of the ladies’ lavatory; why did she come here when she could have hidden in the nice, warm womb of the basement? She gave an exaggerated sigh.

  ‘Of course I’m bloody all right. Just get me a vet. I need putting down.’

  The voice beyond the door giggled in relief. Same old Rose, their leader. And which one of you, Rose thought, as she ran her fingers through her hair to encourage the spikes she had been subduing because Michael did not care for them much although he never said so, which one of you is fiddling the computer then and stealing the files? Which one?

  Margaret Mellors sat in the doctor’s waiting-room at twelve-thirty, wondering who would go in next. She knew her own turn in this never-ending queue had been delayed for an emergency: she had been asked if she minded, which was an unusual courtesy, and out of habit, she had said, ‘Of course I don’t,’ but she did. She had lost her faith in medical expertise when Jack had been dying, but she had never ceased to regard doctors as God. Even if they did not know what made a sick man sick, they surely had the last word over many things, police, fire engines and madness. They told you what to do and they gave orders to multitudes, and that was why she was here. Margaret never thought of her own long-delayed treatment, six weeks’ wait for every appointment, the wilful continuation of her own disability while she waited one year, two years for a new hip; she still saw a doctor and smiled as if he or she could alter the world, and she still gave up her place in the queue, composing in her mind a series of apologies for being there at all.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but …’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m paid for. How can I help?’ A strained smile from a young woman who had listened to her fill of winter casualties. Carmen something, her name was. Margaret preferred doctors to be middle-aged men, they were better fitted for their deity, but why oh why did she never ask, and why did she feel so wretchedly tongue-tied? As if her pension was charity and this white-coated waif a grand inquisitor.

  ‘Well, I wondered …’

  ‘Let’s have a look.’ She had a look, tutted, wrote on a pad.

  ‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? You’d better go back and see the consultant …’

  ‘Actually,’ said Margaret, gathering courage in the panic-stricken knowledge that she would be out of the door in thirty seconds if she didn’t, ‘I can live with the stick. It was something else.’ The doctor smiled encouragingly, sat back, unoffended by this oblique approach.

  ‘It’s my neighbour.’ Having got this far, Margaret could only continue to blurt it out. ‘I’m worried about him. He hears voices. He sings a lot and he told me yesterday his favourite place was the graveyard. He’s mad you know, well, he’s always been a bit mad, but now he’s madder. He frightens the children.’ The patient smile of the doctor was fading and Margaret’s message was fading too: she could not bring herself to say Logo was dangerous, correction, might be dangerous.

  ‘How does he frighten the children?’ The doctor’s voice was sharper.

  ‘I don’t know. He chases them I think, he’s always looking for his daughter … They keep taking him to court, but nobody ever asks me.’

  ‘Well, the police know all about it, then. Does he have a job?’

  Margaret nodded. The white coat relaxed visibly. ‘They must know about it too, I suppose. Have you spoken to the police?’

  Margaret leapt, as if the doctor had spoken an obscenity. ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. I wondered … I wondered if you could send someone round to him.’

  ‘Well, Mrs …’ she looked hurriedly at the notes, ‘Mellors … I just don’t think I can do that. He wouldn’t come in and see me, would he? No? I didn’t think so. Are you sure he’s registered with this practice? Well, you try and persuade him to come in, will you? Only it has to be voluntary, or not at all. Look, I’ll put you in touch with Social Services, see if they have any ideas.’

  No, they did not, and yes, he was getting madder. Banging about in his own home these last three nights, weeping and wailing in his kitchen. For the first time, Margaret had hopes that he would get arrested again, and attract some attention. She met patience without comprehension whenever she complained, but then she was not quite telling the truth, and when invited to exaggerate the eccentricities she described, she could only minimise them. One thing she understood clearly was that there was no provision for those in the limbo land he occupied of the half mad, half dreadfully sane, and there she was, a second-class citizen, an elderly woman, part disabled but smelling sweet. They looked at her as if madness was contagious; until she began to think it was.

  She did not, could not, tell anyone about the suitcase.

  Margaret Mellors trudged the dim route home on a grey afternoon, promising herself she would light a fire. Down the alleyway, the last light already fading, she wondered how anyone could endure the cold without a fire. The landlord had blocked up her own years ago: with Logo’s help, she had unblocked it and the thought of that and all the firewood he brought her, made her feel guilty. When she opened the door, there was a letter on the mat. First-class post, such extravagance. The writing had a vague familiarity. She turned the envelope over in her hand, postponing the excitement until her hands began to tremble and she put it to one side while she lit the fire. When the kindling wood began to crackle, she tore open the letter and read the single sheet within, flushed with pleasure and the light of the flames. ‘Oh my dear,’ she kept murmuring to herself, ‘oh my darling dear.’ Four years without even a note, and her darling writing now, oh, my dear. She found it difficult to let go of the letter: it simply could not be consigned to the hidden boxes of other letters, it had to remain visible as
a constant reminder of its tidings. With great reluctance, Margaret finally placed the letter along with the other in the drawer where she kept her kitchen knives.

  That way she could look at it again and again.

  At six o’clock on Friday moming, someone rang and rapped on the grim doors of the old hospital. The bell sounded in the night watchman’s room where he locked himself in with his TV and the phone every evening and all day Saturday and Sunday, neglecting to patrol since he found the confusion of stairs, corridors and ludicrously insecure exits peculiarly eerie: there were rumours of a ghost. Nothing here but paper anyway. Nor did he obey the stricture to note in a book the names of members of staff who sought entry outside office hours. Sometimes they came late at night, especially the fraud teams on the first floor, forewarning him by telephone so he knew to be by the door as they sped in and out with armfuls of forgotten files required for the next day, but it was rare for anyone to arrive so early in the morning.

  The person on the other side of the door, stamping feet in the cold, smiled, waved an office pass and disappeared upstairs with all the swift ease of total familiarity. The watchman shrugged and fell back to dreaming of breakfast.

  Three floors up, a feminine, well-manicured hand turned on the computer. There was no code for entry into its realms of information introduced by the surge of power. The hand tapped out in quick succession the serial number of a file already retrieved. The fingers shifted the burden of paper, deleted the last line from the screen which described a date of trial and the necessity to warn witnesses, and added instead, ‘No Further Action: Withdraw summons … Defendant now deceased.’ For the next file, the hands simply deleted the whole text. For the next, the finger paused and the hands massaged one another, still cold. A fastidious piece of destruction. Redwood was right: software made life easier. Then with equally neat footsteps, the person concerned went down the innumerable stairs to the basement to take an alternative exit, shoved up a sash-window down there, next to the boiler room, humming. There was less chance of being remembered if one did not pass the doorman twice.