It was the funny feeling in the pit of the stomach, the same as it was when she had first encountered Ivy, that there was everything to say and nothing she would be ashamed to admit. Weird in these circumstances, where there was hardly an element of trust, except, self-evidently, his towards her. Could she like a hypocrite, a bully, a multiple offender? But men changed, didn’t they?
He was everything she suspected, including his authority, his history and his charm, and yet she approached him with as light a step as if he was real, and as if she had known him for ever. It felt both right and utterly wrong.
They met at St James’s Park Underground station, closer to his place of work than hers, an easy passage for her on the Circle Line from the City. A grey day like this was ideal for a walk in the park, he said. Did she like to walk? Yes, she did now, she told him, although she had not always. She had been the one who took the fastest route to the next stop, ignoring the scenery. It was Ivy who encouraged the walking in winter and spring. All the better for feeling free, seeing things, and besides, it’s the cheapest way.
On a cooler day, with a troubled, rain-filled sky, the glories of St James’s Park became more exclusive to dozens of admirers, rather than thousands. On a hot summer day the grass would be littered with wall-to-wall bodies, sitting on deckchairs, lounging on the ground, clogging the curving pathways which led around the lakes in an inner circle, while on the outer circle people moved purposefully and joggers moved ahead beneath a canopy of trees.
They began at Admiralty Arch, looking down the Mall towards Buckingham Palace in the distance, then walked into the park itself, drawn towards the irregularly shaped lake which meandered the length of the valley, the territory for ducks and swans. Willow trees drooped gracefully from the bank; there was a bridge for standing and dreaming, and halfway down, a mysterious island rising out of the water in a million shades of green, yellow and rust where she somehow imagined all the birds went at night. Seen from the bridge, the ducks were iridescent in shades of turquoise, white, black, brown, comical and ever busy, while the swans moved slowly, pausing as if to acknowledge an audience without any gesture as vulgar as waving.
Carl bought coffees for them both from a stall, and joked as they sat on a bench that it looked as if he certainly knew how to give a girl a good time. A walk in a park, and a cup of coffee. Rachel said that was fine by her, and this was surely the most beautiful park in London, a user-friendly park made for exactly this, sitting on a bench and enjoying. The cool of the evening made her glad of the old jacket, all the same, and she felt for the fragment of bone in the pocket to remind herself of a sense of urgency. They were not addressing the subject matter of their meeting, and yet they were strangely at ease, as if both of them were content to avoid it for a while, and simply be. It was a good sensation, and could not last.
‘Did we come here to watch the swans?’ she asked.
He shook his head. There was energy in all his movements and gestures, but he looked tired. She hoped it was the result of a sleepless night – he deserved that, at the very least – but all the same, she wished he was not tired.
‘I come here for all sorts of reasons, I suppose. Principally to see people at peace, enjoying themselves and recuperating. It’s an exercise in harmony, isn’t it? A walled park, a safe place, mimicking the countryside, but very far away from the rigours of that. Wildness tamed. I wish I could achieve that in my courtroom. I keep saying we should have flowers.’
He waved in the direction of the yellow palace, half hidden through the trees.
‘I also come here to admire my inheritance. Palaces, kings and queens, a constitution which still works better than most; it brings out my not so latent patriotism. Makes me proud of what we have. Odd, how unfashionable it is to be patriotic, even at times like these.’
‘Part of your own inheritance,’ she suggested. ‘To have a need for patriotism.’ He nodded, and smiled at her, self-conscious and wanting understanding. Rachel did understand. She had taken to counting her own privileges, which included a vote.
‘Yes. My father chose to be here. He embraced it. He could take nothing for granted, and nor can I. And I’m so sorry, I forgot to ask, how is your father? Better, I hope? When will you see him?’
‘When he wants to be seen. Pride, you know.’
She found herself explaining how her father had left his inhaler and his emergency pills in her flat after he had come for supper and how he had no remedy on the train for an asthma attack. Even as she explained this, as she already had to people at work that day, several times, she wondered if she was repeating it to reassure herself. Embellishing it and adding details to the story to make it ever more true. Such a nice supper too, she added now. Ivy cooked it, she’s good at it. She bit her lip; he would know that.
‘Did they get on well?’ he asked.
‘No, not now you mention it, but that’s my father for you. He doesn’t take to anyone easily.’
He was silent for a minute, nodded in sympathy, then suggested they get up and walk. Finally they were back to Ivy. Rachel noticed how he adapted the pace of his walking to hers, slowing his faster footsteps to match. She wished they could postpone talking about Ivy, Grace and Ernest, and talk about themselves and the colours of the park instead. Sit and people-watch, in shared amazement.
‘I liked your Sam,’ she said. ‘He’s outrageous, but he’s terrific. He’s all flash and fire and no inhibitions. He sort of shines, you know. I wish I could be like that, even for a day.’
Carl raised his eyebrows, grimaced and smiled again. There was pride in his voice.
‘Why on earth do you think you aren’t? You shine. You shine with beauty and purpose. Sam shines too, but the trouble with him is that he always has to impose. He has to challenge everyone, test their reactions, run the risk of enraging and shocking them, just to see if they’re going to accept him. I don’t know if that’s part of being gay, or just insecure. Or simply mischief, he’s got plenty of that. And I like him the way he is. He’s acquiring confidence.’
‘He can talk for England,’ Rachel said. Rounding the last curve in the lake, facing a bank of vivid flowers, she had a vision of Sam meeting Grace in a flurry of colours and noise. If only it could happen; it would happen; it must happen; it could only enrich them both. Then Ivy would come in, and they would love each other too, and she, Rachel, would slip away, leaving happily ever after.
‘Look at the swans,’ Carl said. ‘I make myself look at the swans.’
‘Ivy still likes swans,’ Rachel said. ‘She has a poster on the wall, of Leda and the Swan, Matisse, I think. It’s all graceful shapes and curves. The swan is blue and Leda is yellow, all bordered in red. It’s a very abstract swan.’
‘Leda, wife of a king of Sparta, mother of many famous children, Clytemnestra and Helen, mates with Zeus, who takes the form of a swan and produces a god-like child. Yes, I can see why Ivy would like to have that on the wall. We had it at home.’
Rachel winced at that. It reminded her of everything she did not know. She only knew about the miseries of which she had been told, nothing of the happiness. She felt old, envious and curious.
‘Another version of a virginal birth, the god sent from heaven, no choice about it,’ Carl murmured. ‘Impregnation appears to have happened via the ear, the swan hovering above, but maybe Leda got confused, she had children already. Perhaps Ivy would prefer that as an explanation of conception. Just as she preferred to think that Cassie did not die, but became a swan, like a daughter of Mir, surviving as long as the swan survived. Do you know, I would much rather talk about something else. I didn’t bring you here to look at swans. Oh, I wish this was over.’
Obligingly the swans turned a bend on the south of the island, out of sight. Carl and Rachel got up and moved on. He tucked her arm in his, protectively, shielded her from a boy on skates racing towards them.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t so difficult, thinking it over, it’s all obvious, isn’t it? I have to try and make my peace with Grace and Ernest, for everyone’s sake. I have to try and help them financially if they’re in trouble, I promised my father that, I made a will when we married …’
‘Grace never mentioned that.’
‘I know that’s not the issue. I have to meet them, and from that somehow forge a way not only to persuade my reluctant son to meet his mother, but also to persuade him it was all his own idea. So much is overdue. I can cope with Plan A, so let’s do it. I’ll go and see them, take it from there.’
He paused. ‘But what worries me is you. You’re somehow inside the toils of something which has nothing to do with you, and it’s going to put you in the awful bind of keeping secrets from a friend, which you must, you know. If I go to Midwinter Farm, say in a day or so, say next weekend, you’re the intermediary, which seems bloody unfair to me. I shan’t be able to tell my son where I’m going, and you can’t tell Ivy. And I want to do this because you were brave enough to suggest it, and at the same time I dearly wish we had met each other in any other context. I want you to know I’m not the devil incarnate, and I should dearly, dearly like to know who hurt you so much that you come out, blinking like a fledgling in sunlight, lovely and shining and determined like you are. I should like to know everything about you, I should like to court you, Miss Doe, I really would, and I am not fit. Yet. And I’d love to meet your father.’
He would like him. Of course he would. The thought of that swam into her consciousness like an injection of something warm. She tried to shut it away, but a feeling of joy persisted.
‘I’m not fit to be courted myself, Carl, and what a quaint way to put it. The last man who got close to me was a thief and I sold him down the river. I’m no good at selecting the male of the species, no good at judging, Judge, and I harm the men nearest to me. Are you really saying you would do this, I mean meet Grace and Ernest on their own territory, for the sake of my good opinion? Or is making me blush simply another tactic in your armoury?’
He was serenely unoffended, sat back and considered, smiling.
‘The lover-thief might explain a lot about you,’ he said.
‘I worked with him,’ she said. ‘He was a … colleague.’
Carl stopped smiling and touched her hand.
‘Poor you. That must have put you on quite an island. You must have been very lonely. But yes, for the record, I’d go a very long way to secure your good opinion of me. As a preliminary. Anyway, Sam likes you. We do instant liking, Sam and I, instant judgements. Unfortunately for those concerned, they tend to last.’
‘So, if he likes me on one meeting, I might be in with a chance of persuading him to meet his mother?’
‘Play your cards right.’
He was smiling at her, teasing gently, trying to make all this less serious than it was. She could not resist it and smiled back.
‘Tell me about the lover-thief.’
Rachel sighed. She wanted to do just that, say what it was like to be a whistle-blower. But it was not the time or the place to describe cynicism and loneliness, unless to say how it was Ivy who had made her change.
‘The lover-thief glamorises him rather,’ she said. ‘I think, in retrospect, his greatest crime was having no sense of humour, and gradually depriving me of mine.’
‘But not taking away your ability to do what you thought to be right?’
‘No. Not yet.’
‘That’s my kind of woman. Enough. Now, when shall I go and see these two in the lion’s den of Midwinter Farm?’
YES! She took a deep breath.
‘Saturday. Ivy won’t be there.’
He took a diary out of his back pocket, and then put it back without looking at it, nodded.
‘Yes. I know that’s good. Free day. Sam’s going to Crete on Thursday, so he’ll be out of the way, and I’ll be able to resist telling him. What about you? Will you be there?’
She hesitated. ‘Yes, if you want me …’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘… to be there,’ she finished.
‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘If I knew you were in the background, it would make it so much easier for me, even though it isn’t fair to ask.’
‘We’ve done that bit. I’ll be there as a friend of Grace and Ivy and Ernest.’
‘And me,’ he added.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All of you.’
Carl got up, held out his hand, and said, shall we walk and talk of other things?
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.
It was later, when they parted, with a mutual reluctance they were both trying to hide, that he ruined it all. Ruined the dream that they were two normal people, walking, talking, eating, drinking, enjoying one another.
He insisted on getting a taxi to take her home. It was as quaint as courtship. She didn’t want it, but he put his foot down, and while they waited by the side of the road, watching black cabs with orange lights swim by, but quite unable to part, he said, ‘There’s something else … I ought to tell you. Your father and his inhaler. It reminds me of Sam. She used to hide his inhaler, she used to take it away. That was the last straw.’
And then the taxi arrived, and she got in, and he paid, like an old-fashioned gentleman, ignoring protests, making it a courtesy rather than condescension, and leaving her sitting in the back, suspecting him again. He couldn’t leave it alone, could he? He had to make an unpleasant suggestion, an implied criticism of Ivy, and leave it lingering, the German bastard. He had to resurrect an image of Ivy as monster mother, to justify himself. Bastard. Rachel was triumphing in what she had achieved, she had been happy, and now she felt limp as she stumbled out of the taxi in front of her house, which no longer felt like home.
Must phone Grace. Must not ever again look in Ivy’s room. Must never again betray anyone. Must not divide loyalties, all men were shits, especially charismatic judges, but her eyes in the bathroom mirror where she rushed to wash her face, were shining with hope and doubt.
In the event, as policemen and lawyers are liable to say, Donald Cousins went nowhere that Monday, except to West End Central Police Station, in response to a direction to postpone his hopeless little enquiry into the matters of a lesser judge of German origin, because there were better things to do, even for him, who was so often the last chosen for a team. What was needed, this weekday morning, was old-fashioned skills, of checking and cross-checking, finding and interviewing. They might have remembered he was good at that, but Donald was not kidding himself. He had been hauled back into real work because there was a panic on, the sort of panic started by a tabloid newspaper article the week before, which in turn provoked the sort of activity designed to head off yet more adverse publicity for the police. The subject of the article, copied by other articles on the no-news days which followed the commencement of the holiday season, was inner-city violence, and the disgraceful level of non-detection of apparently casual, apparently alcohol-fuelled murders. Such as the awful death of the man in the ambulance, the death in the autograph-hunters’ queue, and one in an office. Some brilliant mind on a computer had come up with the notion of a connection between the latter two. They had both happened at night. The same cleaning company had featured. Not much of a link, and only slightly better than nothing, but it was one of those days when something had to be done.
Donald had been expecting something of the kind, because that was what happened at this time of year. There was a briefing meeting, the necessary flurry of activity. They were like bees, buzzing. He thought of his proposed trip out into the country; he thought of needing to see Blaker, and sighed. It was ever thus. He was never allowed to finish anything, and now, to his own surprise, he needed to finish this little enquiry, even though he had resented it in the first place. He put in his two pennys’ worth, his own little mite of observation, which wasn’t much. There were all sorts of night shifts, for theatres, offices, shops, bars, pubs, and what did that have to do with anything, he said sagely, and was dismissed as negative. What was this company called? Clean Co. Was it worth pursuing?
We need to find someone who does the theatre shifts, someone said. Can’t find a boss, gone on holiday. Donald wanted to say they could never find a needle in a haystack, and thought of haystacks. Then he thought of a way through it. He was skilled in getting what he wanted. Feeling ever so slightly treacherous, he raised his hand and put Blaker in the frame. Said out loud that he knew a parolee, a man with a vicious record and nothing to lose, a man known to work these shifts, could he start with him? Not a suspect, no, but a talker.
It took all day to get that far, to make Blaker officially his. Until he had licence to do what he had wanted to do in the first place. Go and find him, alone. Invite him to assist with enquiries, at least as a general part of rounding up the usual suspects. The day had spread well into the evening before he found him.
Which was why, at nine on a Monday night, he sat with Blaker in the waiting room at Accident and Emergency, with Blaker’s mumbling, blood-streaked face in his lap, the grime of mucus making a real mess of his trousers. It was like dealing with a large slobbering dog in someone else’s house: some code of manners dictated that you had to let it happen to you. The mumbling had followed the sobbing which followed the other mumbling, and if the body was the temple of the soul, as Donald had been told, this one had been bombed. The injuries were superficial enough, a bang on the head and awful scratches round the neck. It was the damage to the soul that did for him. Donald was rubbing Blaker’s back, saying, there, there. Oh, she did, did she? Thinking at the same time that this really was over and above the call of duty, and then thinking maybe not, since Blaker’s woeful condition was really his, Donald’s fault.
Somewhere along the line he remembered Blaker telling him that a favourite hang-out of his was Victoria Embankment Gardens. The gardens were hidden from view by railings and stretched alongside the Thames by Hungerford Bridge. They were long and narrow and evergreen, good for loitering in any weather because of the shelters. It was too crowded, though, because there was musical entertainment in the summer and too many hobos coming from both sides of the river, too many hot bodies on a hot day, like everywhere. It had not been a hot day; it had been cool and wet when Ivy had found him in the late afternoon, two hours before Donald did.
‘She knows I come here most days,’ Blaker said. ‘I always tell her where I might be. Believe it or not, I try to plan my day.’
‘What happened?’
Blaker had been sitting on the ground, recognisable with one swollen eye and only as much ignored by passers-by as the other dozen or so of the walking-wounded homeless who hung around, sleeping off the day’s bottle and looking bashed about by falling over. Self-harming, injured people were part of the scenery, to be walked around without eye contact most of the time, pity not something to be wasted on hopeless causes. Nor was anyone likely to interfere in their squabbles, the drunken debates turned sour and the half-hearted spats and blows, the raucous laughter.
‘She was angry,’ Blaker said. ‘I was sitting on a bench by myself, and she just came up behind me, put one hand on my neck, and punched me, then she put both her hands round my neck, and … shook me. I didn’t see her at first, but I smelt it was her, and I started to choke. I was saying don’t, what’s the matter, and she just hung on like grim death. Look.’ He fingered his own neck, where a line of grazes decorated it like a red and purple necklace. ‘I thought she’d kill me. She didn’t care who saw. I got my hands on her arms and tried to fight her off, but I was dying there, man, dying, without being able to ask why. And then she stopped. Like all the anger went. She let go. I sort of slumped forward, and … and then she came and sat beside me and said she was sorry. And I said, what did you do that for, Ivy? and she said, you know what you did. You’ve been talking to someone about me.’
Blaker raised bloodshot eyes to Donald’s face, the intensity of his gaze shocking in its sorrow.
‘I think we’ll maybe get to a hospital and get you checked out,’ Donald said.
Blaker did not want that, but above all he did not want to be left alone. So they were sitting in the queue, and Blaker, fuelled by burbling sorrow, soreness and the whisky his attacker had left him, began to snore in Donald’s lap, and Donald detached him to curl up in the plastic chair next to his own. Then he took out his notebook and started to make notes.
He always wanted to begin, like an old Victorian copper giving evidence, by saying, As I was proceeding in a westerly direction … he always wanted to write his notes like telling a story, but all notebooks had issue numbers, all had to be accounted for, returned and examined, they were not the place for putting down what you thought. They were for writing a précis of facts and dialogue. He put back the official, date-stamped, serial number 1366197 notebook and took out his own, wrote in that because he could use his own language. He could make up an official record of events later, if ever.
Blaker is a persistent offender, HIV positive, with not a lot to lose. He was attacked today, in the open, by an angry woman he has known for years, simply because she found out I had spoken to him and thus knew of her. She knew this because she stays with Ms Rachel Doe, whom I had phoned because I was idle and in the mood to set a red herring to catch I didn’t know what. It follows that Ivy W. has something more than usual to hide about a strange and tragic background. I believe that Blaker (who’s a lovely old queen, whatever he’s done, including robbing women because he fancied their handbags as much as anything else) is complicit with Ivy, and that Ivy used him to send e-mails, with images, to her ex-husband. I have absolutely no proof of this, but I think it. I also believe that Ivy is violent but not uncontrolled. Blaker bears witness to this. It’s a very bold move to attempt to throttle someone in public, very bold indeed. It wasn’t her hands she put round his neck … looks to me like it was some sort of rope, there are grazes and scratches. A sort of garrotte.
Blaker also bears witness to her kindness. Is this consistent? He says she left in tears and full of apologies after what she had done, giving him a half-bottle of whisky. Kindness, or a short route to oblivion. She left him saying she was very, very sorry, but she had things to do, and he must not talk about her to anyone. Talk about what? What’s so bad, that Blaker knows?
Blaker stirred and Donald scribbled.
What is she like? I know this much. She’s potentially murderous. She loathes her ex-husband, the judge, so Blaker says. According to the son, she was violent to him. Is either telling the truth? And she’s worked endless night shifts. Supposing she has a vendetta? Against men? Or a particular kind of man?
Garrottes. I brought him here because when you’ve got grazes, however shallow, you risk things getting septic, and I don’t know what an HIV bloke should risk. She wasn’t trying that hard, not as hard as it looked, she was making a point that she could do far worse, and she could, you know. No one would notice in Victoria Embankment Gardens.
He paused for an irrelevant thought. Queen Victoria had brought the German influence. Through her, the Germans did so much for this particular city. Victorian morality. There was always a down side to the up side of achievement. Poverty, prostitution and monuments went together somehow. Then he shook himself and went on writing.
Ivy W., a girl brought up on a farm. She might know how to kill animals, but not how to kill human beings. Am I missing a trick here?
She’s a night-time animal who works and befriends. She is as kind as she is vicious. Blaker keeps talking about practice.
He swapped the private notebook for the one with the serial number, and began again.
I found Mr Blaker, who was poorly and intoxicated. He was unable to tell me anything about Clean Co. because of this. He told me that he had been attacked. I took Mr Blaker to A and E. I am pursuing enquiries into the matter of his alleged assailant …
He was full of an unholy sense of glee, yes, yes, yes, because whatever he had seen, he had perfectly legitimate grounds to arrest the ex-Mrs Schneider for assault on Blaker. And he knew where to find her. He could go and haul her in, question her about why she had done that, and about night shifts.
No, he couldn’t. The correct course of action would have been to take Blaker to the nearest nick, West End Central, as it happened, and let the locals deal with it, or call someone straight to the scene. Pursue it as just another street crime. He was perverting some course of justice; he was already hopelessly compromised by what he had done. He was not doing anything like his duty. He was doing what Blaker wanted and shielding him.
Blaker stirred, nuzzling his shoulder, like a child.
‘She didn’t mean it, you know. Fuck this, can you take me home?’
‘You need looking at. Cleaning up. Antibiotics.’
And I need evidence from a doctor.
‘You’re not going to report her, are you? You’re not going to tell anyone what Ivy did to me? I don’t want her in trouble. If you do anything like that, I’ll just deny it, I’ll say it was someone else. I shouldn’t have told you. Why the fuck did I tell you? I’ve been out of it, haven’t I? What else did I tell you?’
Donald was deliberately silent, for a long time, until Blaker nudged him, hard.
‘Promise, fuck you, or I’ll get you in trouble.’
Then he began to cry again. ‘No, I didn’t mean that. Oh please, Don, don’t do nothing. I want her to come back. I wish she’d killed me.’
‘Why on earth should she do that?’
Blaker shut his eyes.
‘Did you e-mail stuff to the judge, Blaker? I thought I heard you say that in your sleep.’
Blaker nodded. The pain was beginning to kick in, along with a dull, defeated, overdue anger, at himself, at everything. This was good, Donald thought, although what the hell he could do with anything Blaker said was another matter. He wished he did not have to react like a policeman and could recover the other instincts of a normal human being and just do something kind, because that was what he wanted to do.
No chance.
‘Sending that stuff, pictures from books, is that what she didn’t want you to talk about to someone like me?’
Another nod, then a violent shaking of the head, which hurt.
‘That’s not much to worry about, is it? Or was it something else?’
Blaker was sobbing again, clutching his throat.
‘She’s going to kill him,’ he said at last. ‘She’s been practising. She boasts about it to me, because no one would believe me. She’s going to kill him, one way or another. She says she’s got someone to help her.’
Oh, shit. Donald wanted to shout. Here he was in collusion with a fantasist with a death sentence and a horrible knack of telling the truth. Maybe he could restore his reputation with this one. Maybe this was a coup. But Donald had never had a coup in his life, and who would believe Blaker?
What would his wife think if he brought Blaker home? If he turned Blaker in, he’d be bailed by the morning, off and away as soon as he’d retracted everything he’d said, and Donald would look a real Charlie.
A nurse was coming towards them. She looked long-suffering, faced with her twentieth drunk today.
Donald thought it was time he took advice from the judge. Maybe not. The judge would not want Donald going anywhere near his ex-wife, he knew it, otherwise he would have mentioned her in the first place. He nudged Blaker, who was shrinking away from the nurse.
‘He’s HIV positive,’ Donald said to her, wondering if this was information Blaker would have volunteered.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’ll just get some gloves.’
Donald settled back.
‘Well that’s put me to the back of the queue,’ Blaker said spitefully, quite cheered by her reaction. ‘Thanks.’
No, Donald could not take him home. He wasn’t that good a man. He had daughters to consider.
‘It’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Now, my friend. You said this Ivy was a model. When she’s not doing something else. Where was it you said she did the modelling?’
Blaker looked up in surprise, confusion coming down again. He could not remember telling Donald that.
‘Just up the road. At the art school. She wasn’t going to go far away, was she?’