Sam drove the dented Ford as if it was a taxi, complaining about the fact that it did nothing for his street cred. He knew every back double between the Isle of Dogs and the West End, and every road-checking camera. It was not simply the speed of it, before they reached the City outskirts, which made Rachel feel old; it was the confidence. He chattered like the dawn sparrows at Midwinter Farm; he seemed to have a talent for confiding which reminded her of both Grace and Ivy, as if it had never occurred to him that anyone would disapprove, and everyone he met was a potential friend who would like him as much as he liked them. Self-absorbed, yes – who was not, at nineteen? – but likeable and beguiling and artlessly funny. He had a beautiful profile. A strange thought arrived unbidden, namely that she was at risk of being at least half in love with the whole damn family.
‘Pity you’re Dad’s accountant. On a Sunday! Just get him to up my allowance, will you? He’s really tight. Wants me to discover financial necessity before it’s too late and I’m totally corrupted. Wants me to move out, for the sake of worldly knowledge. Preaches a lot. I want to stay ’cos I don’t want him to be alone. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to move in? Pity. So how much is he worth, then? No, don’t answer that. Don’t Sundays go on and on? A day for the movies. At least you can park. Not near Leicester Square, though. Did you read about that bloke killed in the ambulance? And the one behind the theatre. Awful. We don’t need terrorists, do we, got them already. I suppose there’s a difference between one at a time and fifty all at once. Where do you live again? Cool, that’s a really cool place to live.’
Rachel remembered that she had not read a newspaper for weeks, and felt vaguely ashamed of the loss of an old habit, but she was concentrating on the opportunity she was being given. She adored the chatter, but wasn’t going to give up a chance. Surely Carl knew he was either misguided or overtrusting to leave her with his gloriously garrulous son. Perhaps he intended it; perhaps it was planned: either way, it was fun and she did not care.
As they bowled across London Bridge, she said, ‘I know your father’s divorced. Do you ever see your mother?’
Sam slowed down for the red light on the far side of the bridge. Beyond that, she could see the inevitable queue of traffic, scaffolding and building works narrowing the road into a funnel. Good. People of all ages talked in cars. It was turning into a lovely evening, with the vehicles ahead still shining wet after the rain. She wished she had not left that balcony with its view of the river.
‘No,’ he said. Then laughed. ‘You want to know about my mother? Cool. Could this mean you’re interested in my old man after all? Isn’t that the way? Scout the scene? See if there’s any opposition lying around? Old or new?’
‘You’re a very impertinent young man,’ she said, mimicking a pompous voice, and laughing at the same time, because Sam made her laugh. Like his grandmother, like his mother.
He punched the steering wheel, veered to the left and up through the City. Confident and sure and just in control. He would worry me to death if he was mine, she thought. I would worry about him getting cold. The traffic remained stalled.
‘Well, you’re in with a chance,’ Sam said with his infectious grin. His hair glinted chestnut. His skin was sallow. He would tan easily, like his granny. ‘’Cos there’s no one on Dad’s scene. The ex least of all. We haven’t seen her for years. He likes clever women, see, preferably blonde. Short supply. Can’t bear junkies. And all I remember about my mother is her trying to kill me. And telling me how she was going to kill Dad one day. She grew up on a farm. She knows how to kill things. She’s really, really good at it. Made me learn to swim. She was barking bloody mad. She stuck pins in me. She hit me. I hit her back. I had asthma. I could pack a punch when I was nine. Do you know we’re three-quarters grown at nine? Couldn’t do it now, though. Don’t like to think about it.’
He hit his fist against his forehead in a dramatic gesture which neutralised any hint of self-pity and made it all seem contrived for amusement.
‘I was a tortured child. Does it show?’
‘Not that you’d notice, no.’
‘Shame. You might feel sorry for me. That’s a great linen jacket, where did you get it?’
‘Camden Market,’ she said, nearly adding, with your mother. Your mother knows where to find things. Didn’t say it. Not all of Sam’s remarks were in the best of taste. He exaggerated, fancied himself as a comic clown. She bit her tongue. Sam looked at his watch.
‘Film showing at six. I’m going on holiday next week, courtesy of Dad. Have you been to Crete? I’ve got the endof-term high. I’ll miss that when I have to go to work. Don’t you love Sundays?’
‘I certainly liked this one.’
‘Good,’ he said, pulling out of the traffic and down a side street. ‘Goody good. So he’s really in with a chance, is he? Don’t worry about my mother, she’s long gone. Hope it stays that way. He’s got the police on the case anyway.’
You rotten little lying hound, she said to herself, without quite the fervour she meant, and without, quite, being able to lose the instinct to like him. That profile, so unlike his father. Life drawing class, creating new tiers of judgement and appreciation. Too much information today. The traffic unsnarled and they raced through the city like a bullet. As they drew closer to Clerkenwell, with Sam chattering about which film to see, what did she think, Rachel thought, why don’t I ask him in to the flat, maybe Ivy will be back, and I’ll say, Ivy, this is Sam, Sam, this is Ivy, and maybe they’ll fall into each other’s arms and he’ll see she’s not what he thinks. Or what he might have persuaded himself to think, in order to dramatise himself. It’ll be love at second sight. Instead, Sam found her street without further directions, as if he had a map of everything in his head. He knew it, he said, because there were some really cool bars nearby, did she ever go? She didn’t, but she would now, she said. He bowed her out of the decrepit car with a flourish and roared away, tooting the horn, leaving her on the pavement, smiling.
The rain was in abeyance, replaced by the muggy, damp warmth which signalled more, and the flat was as empty as a plundered grave. Rachel checked the messages on the landline. Ivy knew she preferred it. None from her father. One from Ivy, warm and concerned. How’s your father? Don’t forget we can bring him here next weekend, or the week after. I’ve got to help Dad this afternoon, coming home on early train tomorrow, straight to work, see you. Phone if you need. Love you.’
Rachel was dizzy with impressions. She did not quite know what to do with herself. The curse of Sundays descended. Confusion, dread, the ordinary desire to push the next week back, clear up, prepare, a reluctance, a horror of facing the dead space for thinking which yawned now. The flat seemed subtly different, as if a breeze had blown through it. She could not find anything, looked for something to occupy her hands, and where had she put the mobile phone? Safely in her room, instead of leaving it lying around, why?
Thinking time. Dangerous. Tough day, Monday, meetings wall to wall. He had said, Let’s discuss meeting after we’ve thought. She just wanted to see him. She was a stupid, credulous idiot, bearing the impression of the last person who had sat next to her, with a history of being duped by men. She liked him, that was all. And they were wrong, so wrong, about Ivy. That boy said shocking things. She was beginning to feel suspicious and wanted to put that somewhere else too. She wrote a list for the week in her clear, strong handwriting.
Monday, Tuesday, full to bursting. Wednesday evening, last life drawing class. Shit. Her sketchbook was full. Meant to buy another. Drawing was therapy. The pencils she had used were down to stumps, too small to sharpen. She did what she often did, hauled out the sketchbooks and examined what she had done these last evenings in class. She could see her own progress, her own increasing freedom. Looking at what she had done over the last term cheered her. There was the Plonker, there was Ivy, there was all the in-between. She wanted to draw; she did not want to listen. She had run out of paper. She wanted to draw him. Drawing soothed her. She had first wanted to do the drawing because of endless Sundays. It used up her brain and cleansed it.
The landline phone rang. She answered. Dad, Carl, Ivy, Grace, anyone please.
‘Hello. Is that Mrs Schneider?’
‘Mrs Who?’
She was late in recognising the name. There was no Mrs Schneider here. There was Ivy, Ms Wiseman, and herself. Get the names right. Mrs Schneider? Ivy was that person once, not any more, he meant Wiseman. She spoke without thinking, Ivy always on her mind.
‘Nope. Sorry, she’s out at the moment.’
Then she put her hand over her mouth. It was as good as announcing Ivy lived here.
‘Oh, sorry. Is that Miss Rachel Doe? It’s DS Donald Cousins here,’ he said. There were the sounds of a TV in the background, the sonorous voice of someone talking to camera about live things in jungles. ‘We met the other day.’
‘Did we?’
She remembered him, with fleeting dislike. There was an uncomfortable pause. The TV sound droned on. She looked round wildly, imagining it was hers. The blank screen looked back.
‘Well, if she’s not there, that’s that. If she should happen to come back, would you tell her that her friend Mr Blaker is asking after her?’
‘Her friend? Mr Who?’
She has no friends. Her hands felt slippery wet on the phone she held. She was suddenly angry.
‘I’m not a message service,’ she said. ‘Get lost.’
She put the phone down. She was furious. She had been set up again. Bastard.
The swine, the shit. That bloody judge, using her and her emotions, all that trust-me, shite. Treating her sweetly, leading her on, food, wine, fucking trust, and then he goes and gives out her number to a wet, sedulous policeman with a moustache, who wants to find Ivy for some miserable purpose of his own, how dare he? Somehow it followed that neither Carl nor his son was capable of saying anything which was true; every single bloody thing was all contrived and engineered, for WHAT? She found herself shredding the last piece of useful drawing paper out of the sketchbook, tearing it up into ever smaller pieces. Thinking of Carl warning her against Ivy’s hatred, the shit, Sam speaking casually of maternal violence for something attention-seeking to do at a traffic light, and she, silly child-free ignoramus, had listened and swallowed as if she was being paid for a blow-job. What they wanted was for Ivy to be abandoned and given up, like before, for something she had not done, like before. As if they could not stomach the sheer fact that Ivy had emerged from her chrysalis as good and strong as she was, and that she had a friend. They wanted her to buried all over again, and they could fuck off, because it was not going to happen. It was not going to work because she knew what she knew and she was not going to be deflected from what she knew. Which was what was right and just, what Ivy deserved, what Grace wanted.
When Cassie drowned, Carl had lost a child. Ivy had lost everything.
Rachel prowled. She wanted to talk to somebody, but there was nobody. She wanted to pick up the phone and shout at Carl. Instead, she dialled 1471 and wrote down Donald Cousins’ number. Then she sat with the full sketchbook on her lap, turned over the pages. She had drawn Ivy several times in the last term; she would do it again, this week. She had an overpowering desire to scribble, she felt the urge to etch graffiti on the walls, make herself concentrate on something in order to clear her mind. The very act of drawing anything had that effect of release, whether she did it well or badly. She wanted to draw what was in her mind. Sinuous shapes, slithery ferrets, rats, swans. There was nothing better to do, but she had torn up the last sheet of paper and the pencils were stumps.
Ivy always had pencils and paper. She never used a pen, only a pencil. Ivy was always willing to share what little she had. She would give you her last penny. Rachel went into Ivy’s nest, looking for the pencils and paper she knew Ivy kept in her pink folio.
The room was tidier than when she had seen it last. There were traces of Blu-Tack from where Ivy had detached the sketches she had used to decorate the walls, replaced with the poster of Leda and the Swan. The folio case stuck out from under the unmade bed. Rachel moved to straighten the duvet, an automatic reaction which was the same as the one which made her pick up anything which had fallen to the floor, an instinct for tidying up as she went along for which Ivy had teased her. Ivy would leave the dropped object where it was until she needed it. Rachel stopped herself. How Ivy left her room and her bed was entirely up to her. Rachel had given her this room for her own. She pulled out the folio case, opened it and searched inside for pencils and paper. That was all she wanted. She would always resist the urge to look at the rest. It would be like reading someone else’s post. In the middle of this slow activity, she had a mental image of Sam crumpling up the letters from Grace which might have been addressed to his father, posting them back. She could see him doing that.
There were no pencils in the untidy mess of the folio case. Rachel sat down on the bed, suddenly weary beyond belief. There was a lump under the duvet, a sound of crackling plastic. She got up and pulled the duvet back, concerned that she had sat on something breakable, found a polythene bag bearing the legend of a shop she did not know. She opened it to see what she might have broken. Inside she found an inhaler, and two small brown bottles of pills, folded into a handkerchief. She held one of the bottles up to the light. Prescribed pills, with a white label almost worn away from contact with the material of his coat, and her father’s name still legible.
The room began to spin around her. She put the bag back.
Donald Cousins was thinking to himself that maybe the phone call to Rachel Doe had not been so very clever, and he was still trying to work out why he had done it. Perhaps because there was no one at home on a Sunday evening, the whole lot of them round at his mother-in-law’s, and he was bored, and Blaker had been haunting him. Despite the hours now spent in Blaker’s company, he had never managed to pose a direct question which was relevant to his investigation, never quite summoned up the nerve. Since Blaker had told him that he was HIV positive, it seemed cruel to do anything other than chat, sit in the sun in Temple Gardens, as if it was really open to the public and they owned it. Very private, better than Embankment Gardens, Blaker said. Donald did not doubt that what Blaker said about being HIV positive was true: people did not announce their own death sentences unless they really wanted attention, and Donald did not think that Blaker wanted that kind. He could check anyway, and it did add another dimension. What did the poor bastard have to lose by issuing threats to a judge, either on his own behalf or someone else’s? He was looking at a short life where all the major risks had already been taken and the gamble lost, however long it took the Grim Reaper to call in the debts. He could murder and threaten with impunity; what could punish him now that the worst had happened? And no, he had not asked Blaker if he used internet caffs to send threatening images to a judge; Blaker might tell him, in time. Instead they chatted about Blaker’s old friends, and the changing history of Soho. Blaker looked sixty and he was scarcely forty. Donald counted his own luck.
She was a brave lady, Mrs Ivy Schneider, to embrace and befriend an HIV-positive man. Blaker had been diagnosed three years ago, before the last prison stint. Ivy made me check it out, he said. When I found out it was yes, she hugged me. That’s as far as we ever got. I reckon she would have shagged me to prove a point, but she knows my preference. Big, dark buggers, who know where to go. The disabled lavatory in Starbucks, more room in there. Donald knew he was not really a citizen of the real world. He belonged in the suburbs, thought he knew about London, but he didn’t. He only knew it as it had been, through the pages of history books, which told him it had always been a den of iniquity and delight, not always in equal shares, and not all of those drawn to it survived it.
The different dimension added by Blaker’s liability to AIDS was an additional interest in Ivy Schneider or Wiseman, simply because it made her more compassionate. Blaker said she came into Berwick Street once or twice a week, or Embankment Gardens, at no prescribed time, on her way to or from whatever work she was doing. Couldn’t stay away, he said, it’s my charm. There was something Blaker wanted to tell him about this woman, namely that for all her restored status, he was desperately worried about her and what she might do. It all meant that Donald could not ignore the Ivy connection, or at least it gave him an excuse to protract his useless investigation for a few more days of summer by including her. He could not allow himself to think that such a long-divorced wife who by choice and design maintained no contact with her estranged son could really pose a threat to the good judge, but Blaker had said she hated the man, so he’d better talk to her. Maybe he was barking up the wrong tree with Blaker, and all the threats really came from somewhere else, and she might know about that. She would know about the distant past, not the obvious present.
It was later he remembered the hurried introduction to Rachel Doe, a good friend of my ex-wife, and the judge’s shifty insistence that this beautiful girl, who looked at him with such undisguised contempt, did not know where said wife lived. Oh yes? What kind of good friend was that? He felt better about the phone call now. A brilliant ploy, an impulse rewarded. Of course he could have hung around Berwick Street waiting for the tall woman to come back, but he was sick of the place. It was dying on its feet. Tesco Metro would bury it. Not that knowing where Ivy Wiseman lodged was an instant answer to making contact, but at least it was a start, as well as a change of scene.
It distracted him from tending to his wilting garden, a domestic task he loathed but that was his by default. Mine’s the house, yours is the garden, his dear wife said, and was kind enough not to hold him to that too strictly. Snaresbrook was a nice place to live, convenient for the Central Line, which went straight into the heart of the City, bisecting it from beneath, and from which he emerged, blinking like a mole to breathe the polluted air he preferred, wondering why anyone would be daft enough to imagine Londoners being deterred by bombs. What they did to one another on the street was far more frightening.
Another Sunday task was reading the papers and catching up with the news of what the wider world was up to, as well as what his comrades in arms were doing. Police bulletins, issued daily, including details of the unsolved and the unsolvable. Trying to get better at identifying terrorists made them so much worse at everything else; there were only so many experts to go round. Computer literacy required, far in advance of his own. Good. Leave me alone. Better being an old has-been than being out there with a smoking gun.
He read in the bulletins now e-mailed to him at home about new credit-card scams, exotic thefts and unsolved deaths. No one was any further forward in discovering who had garrotted the injured bloke in the ambulance, except it might have been the product of Albanian gang warfare. Well, maybe; no one wanted to know if it was all home-grown. He read about a man who drank bleach in an office, about another man stabbed in a queue waiting to get an autograph, no progress in any direction, and the only grateful feeling which came to mind was his own huge relief not to be on the night shift which found the bodies.
Night did indeed shift, uncomfortably into day and back again, like a thief, taking hostages under cover of darkness. It grew cooler as he sat in his untended garden, hoping they would all come back and hoping they wouldn’t, grateful for the fact that the afternoon rain meant he did not have to water the plants. It was early yet; they could be hours, those beloved, so often discontented, daughters of his, and their mother who liked to be out of the house.
A woman’s rage … night shifts. Did anyone notice that the unconnected deaths, two murders and one apparent suicide, all happened around the same time of day? No great force required, two shifty killings, a knife, a garrotte, a woman could have done it. Come on, man; hardly coincidental; homicide usually favours the cover of darkness, unless done in the name of war. How comfortable to reflect upon it in the safety of his own garden. The whole problem in his own little investigation was that the judge was only telling him half of it, and the other half he might not actually know.
The judge, Donald feared, suffered from an unhealthy belief in the essential goodness of human nature, believed everyone deserved a second and third chance. He had that look about him; he was a light sentencer. He had acted upon the threats made against him only for the protection of his son. He did not really believe anyone, apart from a religious fanatic, could nurse purely individual hatred for long, for years if need be, because he could not have done it himself. He would not see the point, any more than his father would dwell on losing the war.
Since meeting Blaker, Donald had reluctantly looked into the matter of Ivy Schneider, née Wiseman, and she had thoroughly taken hold of his imagination. He had the date of the marriage, more than twenty years ago, the date of the death of the child, Cassandra. He knew where Ivy had been born. He knew she had acquired a minor criminal record in her late twenties, early thirties, drug abuse, clogging up pavements, that kind of thing. No theft, no dishonesty. He knew she had redeemed herself, been rehabilitated, and remained a friend to an HIV-positive loser, and that raised her in his estimation. And what the earlier phone calls of the evening had told him was that the Wisemans owned a farm-cum-guest house in Kent, and apart from the accidental death of the child, nothing was known to their discredit. It was only very recently that they had come to police attention, on the periphery of something else. A young man who had stayed as a paying guest at Midwinter Farm, a Londoner, had disappeared, only to reappear as a drowned corpse on the nearby coast. The last known sighting of him had been in the local pub, getting drunk in the company of Ivy Wiseman and her mother, Grace, before setting off back to his London home. It took three weeks to identify him.
Donald did not know why this stuck in his craw. He was haunted, daily, by the thought that one of his daughters would leave the house one day and never come back. There were plenty of Londoners who thought that with good reason. But not to know what happened and why, that was hell.
Slowly it was coming to him that he might just have to go and find this damn farm, if only because that was where the daughter had died and that provided enough of a link to justify the time in the final report. Donald hated the countryside, but a day out in this weather could be fine.
He heard the phone go from his place in the garden and ambled indoors to answer it without hurrying. Nothing could be terribly urgent on a Sunday evening, except his own business.
‘Hello?’
‘Rachel Doe. You rang me.’
He was surprised. ‘So I did. You told me to get lost.’
She ignored that. ‘I want to know why you want to contact Mrs Schneider, and she’s called Wiseman. You can’t just phone up out of the blue and demand to know where someone is … why do you want to know?’
She sounded as if she might have been crying. ‘I need to know,’ she said. Her belligerent voice began to falter. ‘And I need to know who gave you this fucking number. It’s outrageous, you’ve no right. Bloody Carl gave you the number, didn’t he? He’s no right.’
Donald drew a deep breath. God save me from wailing women, some king had said.
‘As a matter of fact he didn’t, Miss Doe. I had your name, and your telephone number’s in the directory, if you must know. And I didn’t know the lady frequented your establishment until you confirmed it for me.’
There was a pause before her voice resumed with more determination, half belligerent, half pleading.
‘I must know why you want to contact her. What’s she supposed to have done?’
Another deep breath. She was a professional woman, well dressed, well set up, he remembered. He could see a complaint winging in from the side. Something which was not going to improve his already diminished career. Interference with the civil liberty of another, invasion of privacy, blah, blah, blah. He spoke in a conciliatory rush.
‘Why, absolutely nothing, madam. Nothing at all. In fact, from what little I know of her, she appears to be a kind woman. It’s just that we’ – always hide behind ‘we’ – ‘are making enquiries into an unrelated matter which, in which …’ Now it was he who began to stutter. The jargon failed him. It always did when he was at home.
‘Look, Miss Doe, I acted out of turn in phoning you. We are not investigating Mrs … Wiseman for anything, but we are investigating an acquaintance of hers, from the distant past I believe, and I hoped she could help. That’s all.’
‘Oh.’
Another pause, then she went on with ever greater certainty.
‘So what is it he’s supposed to have done? Why should Ivy be able to help?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say, madam. Except that it isn’t anything particularly serious.’
‘Serious enough to be trying to find her on a Sunday evening?’
‘Police work knows no set hours, Miss Doe. Sunday evening’s a good time to find people at home.’
‘This isn’t her home. I’ve no idea where she is. She has stayed here, she doesn’t now.’
Too hurried to be truthful, but communicating. It didn’t matter. The prospect of a complaint receded. He chanced his arm a little further.
‘Could you tell me where she works? I could maybe trace her there. No urgency.’
‘Works? Ivy? No one works like Ivy. She works all over the place. West End, City. Night shifts, cleaning, modelling, anything …’ This, he noted, was said with pride, before another pause. He waited it out.
‘Why did you say you thought she appeared to be a kind person?’
He thought about that.
‘Because she has been conspicuously kind to the person who is the subject of our enquiries, and believe me, Miss Doe, he’s not someone a normal person would want to touch.’
Night shifts.
‘Thank you,’ she said. She sounded enormously relieved. ‘If I see Ivy, I’ll think about giving her the message.’
Ivy was the kindest person she had ever met. Rachel told herself she must remember that.
Then why had she done that?
Done what? The pills must have fallen out of his pocket when the coat was thrown on the bed, but he never kept them in a polythene bag, he wanted them accessible all the time. He always wanted to be able to touch them.