High John the Conqueror, page 6
I look at Tamla, who appears quite happy for me to do the next bit on my own. ‘I was going to come to that,’ I say. ‘I feel like the aunt is sincere, not mad and not a bullshitter, but may have brought some of her existing prejudices to this… mystery.’
‘So basically an unsubstantiated and vague accusation without the slightest shard of evidence,’ says Orridge. ‘A woman’s intuition! Go on, I’d like to see you rescue this lost cause.’
‘Albeit a more intriguing one than yours about cheap package holidays and gang warfare… Your gut really tells you there is something to this, Balance?’ Grace asks.
I am about to see if anyone wants to microwave the tea, to allow me time to make a case, when the caravan shakes like cheap scenery, the banging on the door only stopping when Tamla shouts, ‘Just come in, won’t you!’
PC Lydia Holiday, a rangy gazelle dressed in combat trousers, boots and a peaked cap, missing only a machine gun to complete the paramilitary look, cries excitedly, ‘We’ve just had word, sir. Another one has gone missing, and the same place too. The misper’s nan… She’s been snatched from her bed…’
‘What? Iggy’s… grandmother?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, yeah, his auntie, Eileen Pertwee. She’s just called 999, she says their nan has been… taken.’
‘Taken? You have got to be joking…’ Tamla shakes her head. ‘We were only just up there…’
Grace cracks his knuckles. ‘Internment of all posh people will have to wait. Look lively. You lot are on your way back up to Hanging Hill, and I don’t want any of you coming back down here again without a misper.’
CHAPTER THREE
THE HANGING GARDEN
I glance briefly at my reflection in the rear-view mirror before getting out of the car, adjust my hair in a way no one apart from me will notice, and forget to close the door as I get out, doubling back clumsily to shut it. This is the second time I have been up here this morning, and while I want to remain sensitive to decorum in a house of grief, I grin as Mrs Pertwee acknowledges me, in the time-honoured tradition of allowing those we are pleased to see know involuntarily. Rather than upgrade me with a correctional scowl, having lost a nephew and now her mother in a matter of days, Mrs Pertwee appears to be inviting brash familiarity. Standing guard at the threshold of ‘Cair Paravel’, her long fingers tapping on her thighs and mousy hair bundled in a stack like a Palaeolithic warrior-queen, I wonder what else has changed, before registering a pair of raspberry leggings and an aquamarine crop-top that were not there before. This alone is enough to arouse suspicion, but unlike Christopherson, who looks genuinely puzzled by her perky bonhomie, I am carried away by the suddenness and ease of seeing someone in a new light, again.
‘Preparing for another Spice Girls reunion, Mrs Pertwee?’ I say, unable to help myself, conscious that I may be being played for a fool.
‘Yoga, Inspector. Anything to take my mind off all the shocking stuff that is happening. It’s the only way I can see God in this madhouse.’
‘It’d be difficult for him to miss you.’ She is stood blocking our way to her front door with an imperious disregard for the cold and propriety.
‘That’s what I thought. Better he watches me practise the pelvic tilt stretched over the floor in this get-up, than tip a bottle of cheap white down my throat in those horrible work clothes you saw me in earlier.’
‘God must have seen worse.’ I can feel Christopherson breathing heavily behind me, and I step off the path into the garden, so he can at least see what the delay is all about.
Ignoring him, Mrs Pertwee replies, ‘Not if he is watching me. You’re probably a good drunk — I’m not. I change completely and start talking loudly and swearing and making up stories about people that aren’t true to show my friends I know things they don’t. And if I am by myself I get so pissed that I just stare at the sink, and after a while don’t even know I am there.’
‘Isn’t getting into that state the point of yoga?’ I take a step towards her and stop, as she does not move back, and I do not want to be standing on her toes.
‘It might be, but I’m talking about getting pissed, Inspector. Yoga I do for the Lycra. I have a sort of fetish for it — I like the way it clings to my arse and makes it look bigger. A second skin.’ She slaps at her femur. ‘Drinking, especially in my family, is a different sort of exercise altogether.’
‘I met your sister earlier. It looked like she’d overdone it on the breakfast wines. You struck me as being the more cautious type.’
‘Oh, boring you mean? She’s nothing compared to me when I get going. Exhausting trying to figure me out, isn’t it?’
I am in danger of being professionally embarrassed. Neither of us appears to be in a hurry to get to the point, but I have to, as this is getting out of hand, and there is no such thing as appropriate flippancy when dealing with missing persons.
‘I don’t try and figure people out, Mrs Pertwee. And when I do, only as much as it is necessary to know whether they are serious or not.’
I cannot tell whether Mrs Pertwee is hissing at me, or if running her tongue across her teeth quickly is simply her way of suppressing laughter. Christopherson is stroking his goatee impatiently beside me, Tamla having driven up to Iggy’s school with Orridge, and a muttering line of neighbours are respectfully forming a vigil round her gate. We have an audience she seems completely unaware of, and I put this down to shock rather than having eyes only for me, much as I would like to believe it.
‘I’m sorry your bad luck is holding out, Mrs Pertwee. Iggy and now your mother? You must think you’re in a waking nightmare,’ I offer, careful to not sound too jaunty.
‘Any excuse to see you again, Inspector,’ she says, brushing her elbow into mine as she turns. ‘I must just be enjoying the attention.’
Adjusting my smile, so that my face looks like it is trying to make the best of a painful accident, I check the desire to sway unsteadily into her, and trying to look no further ahead than one foot in front of the next, follow her into the house.
‘At last,’ whispers Christopherson. ‘If you ask me, she’s buying time for someone.’
With a thud, he walks straight into my back. Mrs Pertwee has stopped again, blocking us into the corridor. My first thought is she has just thought of something she wants to share on an impulse, but as she dropped her hand to her hip again, and leaning on the wall with her elbow, it seems as though this is where she would like our interview to continue for the time being.
‘You told the operator she was, “taken”?’ I ask.
‘Yes. I think I said something like that. I didn’t know what to think at first, but what else could it be?’
‘Forgive me if this sounds silly, but taken in what way? Are you saying someone came into your house and literally took her away with them, snatched her as it were?’
‘Well, I don’t know. I mean she was gone, just gone, just like that,’ she snaps her fingers. ‘I went into her room, and basically, she wasn’t there. She can’t walk without help, her knees and hips are completely buggered, so she couldn’t have got out of there herself. She has Alzheimer’s as well. It’s got pretty bad. That’s why I said to the operator “taken”, or whatever it was I said. I know that sounds dramatic, but I didn’t know how else to describe it. Or what else to make of it. Somebody must have got her is what I thought.’
‘And practically, how could they have done that do you think?’
‘Through the window in her bedroom? There’s no other way out of the house without my seeing her leave.’
‘Right, what I’m trying to get to is this: did you actually witness an abduction?’ I feel Christopherson shift uneasily behind me, as once again our physical position precludes him from partaking in the interview or seeing our witness.
‘Oh no, that’s why “taken” was all I could think of by way of an explanation. That is, unless you can see something I can’t, and think there was another way she could have left?’
‘Not unless she could move of her own free will.’
‘Impossible, and as I say, I would have seen her.’
‘And there’s no one else that you might have spotted around here, looking suspicious, that could have… “taken” her?’
‘No one. Only that lot coming and going.’ She points at her neighbours. ‘And what would they want with my mum?’
‘Then it isn’t so much that she was taken, but that she actually vanished? Isn’t that what you’re actually saying happened?’
‘Am I?’
‘I think you are.’ I try and put it as helpfully as I can, ‘If you haven’t seen her being “taken” by anyone, or physically leaving here of her own accord, what else would you call it?’
‘I guess you’re right… but when you put it like that, vanishing, you know… it starts to sound like something from a fairy story, doesn’t it?’
I smile uncertainly and Christopherson clears his throat loudly. Standing on his tiptoes, he is a foot shorter than me. Bringing his face over my shoulder like a waiter forced to communicate through a service hatch, he asks, ‘Do you think she may have taken off herself? I mean are you sure she can’t get about on her own, that she’s never popped out before without you knowing and thought that she might like to again… There’s a window in her bedroom? Couldn’t she have got out that way by herself?’
‘Absolutely no chance of that. She hasn’t been out of the house on her own in years.’
‘You don’t think she might have tried to make a break for it, show her independence for one last time?’ Christopherson persists, ‘No offence, but old people can be crafty and stubborn. They were young people once.’
Mrs Pertwee shrugs her shoulders, and slides backwards and then sideways into the sitting room, allowing myself and Christopherson to cut in so we are both facing her at last. ‘Like I say, she can’t walk without help. And there’s no way she would have got through that window on her own.’
‘No one else has been in the house? Not your daughter or any other witnesses you saw who could corroborate what you think has happened here?’
‘No. Annoying, isn’t it?’ she laughs.
Christopherson looks at me with bemusement.
‘You actually told the operator “they” had taken her,’ he says. ‘Funny figure of speech, that, if you didn’t see anyone do it. I’m guessing an old lady like your mum couldn’t have had that many enemies.’
‘Did I say “they”?’ Mrs Pertwee touches her lip with her finger. ‘I don’t remember that. I was in shock, you know. I remember making the call, but I don’t remember speaking those words. Sorry.’
I have no control over what goes on in other people’s minds, but if I did, Mrs Pertwee is regarding me in a way I would like her to if this were a far-fetched dream — one I would wake warily from. The pleasure she appears to derive in my standing here, from my existence itself, and I from her need, is too close to what I desire to be trusted. Trying to snap out of it, I ask with as much tight-lipped rigidity as I can feign, ‘When, then, did you actually see her last?’
‘About five minutes before you and that pretty little girl you arrived with earlier came to the house.’
‘She was still in your house when I was here with DCI Sioux?’
‘Oh yes, as far as I know.’
‘And you didn’t hear anything later, before you came in to check on her, no sounds of her being “taken”, or commotion of any kind?’ Quickly I try and work out the timing for myself.
‘Absolutely nothing. That’s the strangest part, really. Unless it happened when you were here, but then we would all have heard, wouldn’t we?’
‘We would have. And how long was it after we left that you went in to check on her?’
‘You know, not that long. I think… maybe half an hour or forty minutes at most.’
What she says is just about plausible, but with the kind of margins that only work if you are already inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.
‘So whoever took her did so noiselessly and in something like record time for moving old ladies?’ I ask, wishing there was some way this could look less bad for her.
Christopherson shakes his head at the floor ruefully. ‘While you, Mrs Pertwee, were in such shock that you waited a further half hour before calling us so you could fit your yoga in and see God?’
‘Be nice, Sergeant,’ Mrs Pertwee replies. ‘I called right away. It’s not my fault it took so long for you to find out or come. It was nothing like half an hour, and the yoga I did waiting for you. Something awful might happen to you one day. It’s not like you can plan your response to things.’
‘You may be right,’ he says, walking past her into the little open-plan dining area, ‘but with all due respect, Mrs Pertwee, I have to say that if it did, and I were you, I would be more worried about how this looks. And I would act a whole lot more concerned too.’
‘I think I’d better have a look at her room, and Sergeant Christopherson will check all the exits,’ I say, trying to keep things friendly.
‘Of course, Inspector. I was going to suggest the same thing. You’ll be much better at knowing what to look for than me.’
She turns away from us, and I am conscious of the effort it takes to look away from her backside, which appears to be moving in time to music played at a frequency no one except us can hear, evoking desires so simple as to insult the intelligence of anyone who cannot accept that desire is sometimes so obvious. ‘The weird thing is…’ she mentions over her shoulder, stopping abruptly — I stumble into her and harden instantly, ‘…is the window in her room,’ she says, resting against me firmly enough to be aware of my anatomical reaction. ‘Sorry,’ I murmur, aware that at this moment she knows me better than I would want anyone to.
‘What about the window?’ calls Christopherson from the lavatory, where he is banging against glass.
‘What’s weird is how they… I’m sorry, I am back to “they” again, how they or even she could have got through the window,’ she continues, acknowledging with a smile what we both knew seconds earlier — that my erection was pressed against her arse. ‘It was locked from the inside when I came in with her tea, actually locked, if you’ll credit it…’
‘That is weird…’ My judgement is a meek and flimsy thing; intimacy creates trust, but if she is having us on it is with the natural aplomb of a practised and seasoned liar. ‘And that’s the only way out of her room if you didn’t see her, right?’
‘I am afraid so, Inspector. A bit hopeless, isn’t it?’
‘You sure it was locked?’ asks Christopherson over my shoulder.
‘Positive. Another reason why her going doesn’t make sense. It’s just bizarre.’
Christopherson grumbles behind me, ‘Hard to believe a word, boss.’
Replying to him, but talking to me, she sighs airily, ‘I suppose you think I should be acting differently. People complain I’m a cool customer, that I don’t do feelings…’
I would contradict her, but before I can open my mouth I notice it again: the odour from earlier; meat ripening in the blistering sunshine, a target for enterprising flies to lay their eggs in, reaching everywhere at once, like the breaking of bad news. I lose the tightening in my loins, and try not to wretch, hanging on until the stench lifts so suddenly that I suspect it was banished by my revulsion. As with the first time I sensed it, the episode is over in a twinkling. I want to ask Christopherson if he noticed it too, and I wonder why I had not mentioned it to Tamla earlier, but he tugs my sleeve, whispering sceptically, ‘She’s hiding something, boss. Her attitude’s all over the place. And look at her — she’s dressed up for yoga! Unless she’s a nutter, it’s county lines. It’s got to be. Snatching a woman and kid — it’s got to be a warning…’
Mindful that Mrs Pertwee has uncommonly good hearing, I cut him short, ‘Maybe.’
‘They’ve got to her. Please, can I…?’
I groan. While all things are futile, some things are more futile than others, and I realise that Christopherson will not be denied today. ‘Go on. Permission to take your best shot.’
‘What are you two nattering about?’
Christopherson tries to wink at me, and instead squints with both eyes, reminding me of a suspect attempting to disguise the effects of the drugs he has just swallowed to escape arrest. I allow him to move past me so that for the first time he is standing in between Mrs Pertwee and myself, and thanks to this distance, I begin to feel more like a policeman.
‘Mrs Pertwee, there’s something we have to ask you,’ he announces haltingly, a little nervous having to do this for real. ‘You alluded to goings-on in this area to the inspector and DCI Sioux, “dark” goings-on, but wouldn’t say exactly what they were. We want to stop anything worse from happening, but we need to know what you were talking about to do that. And if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to come right out and say it for the record, and that’s that I’m not buying any of this stuff about posh people. That line you gave earlier.’
‘What will you buy then, Sergeant?’
‘Well, I would be receptive to a little bit of candid honesty. Drugs, for example. Have you seen much movement of them recently?’
‘Drugs? There have always been drugs here,’ she replies, pursing her lips.
‘I don’t mean Hells Angels or crusties. I mean new faces, pushing new drugs.’
‘I’m not sure I understand what that has to do with an old lady going missing, Sergeant…’
I can sense her trying to peer round Christopherson and reconnect with me. Ignoring the impulse to come to her aid, I peel off into the missing person’s bedroom, which has the desolate feel of an unoccupied cell despite the magenta bedding and fluff-flannel rug, which I catch in the door. The bed has been pulled away from the wall to either make the room look fuller and less lonely, or because Mrs Pertwee has been playing around with the window when conducting her own investigation. The window itself is bolted from the inside by a nasty-looking latch. That observation is welcome; I want things to be just the way she says they are. But my next discovery disconcerts. The span of the old woman’s window frame is too pokey to push a pensioner with dementia through without at least occasioning a struggle that anyone with hearing would think of mentioning to an investigating officer. I nudge the catch. It won’t move without considerable force from the inside, and the glass would have to be broken from the outside for anybody to get in that way.
