Shadow Play (3 page)

He tossed a pack of cigarettes from one of the bottomless pockets in her direction. She caught them nimbly in both palms. Margaret's hands and her mind were unaffected by more than seventy years' hard labour with no great expectations of life even at the beginning. Blessed are they who expect nothing, she was wont to say, for they will not be disappointed. Logo and Logo's family had given her much of the joy she had ever had. He looked at her with that smile which wooed magistrates and said softly, ‘Good to you, Mother? Other way round, isn't it? I don't know what I'd have done without you, but it's fat thanks we get, eh?' She shook her head, not anxious to follow this line of conversation, but he was determined.

‘What would I have done with a wife like mine, eh? And a daughter to raise with a wife like that? I don't know. You were mother to us all, Mother, you and Jack, God rest him. And what happens after all that loving kindness, eh? Wife runs off with someone else, and the daughter can't give her father the time of day. Never mind you, Granny.'

Margaret shrugged, still hoping the conversation would die away. She had no real doubt she deserved the accolades but it did not follow she wanted to hear them, and the thought of the missing daughter, as well as that pretty wife, still filled her with anguish sharper than any physical pain. She was accustomed to it and told herself that since Logo was talking about his own blood she might not understand his obsession, having no kids of her own to throw into the balance. She had taken Logo's child instead but she knew she had no right to her now.

‘You haven't seen them, I suppose?' he asked wistfully. For a moment she thought he might mean the neighbours who hated him most, the landlord of their identical houses and his wife, but that wasn't what he meant at all.

‘Seen who? Oh, I know who you mean. No, you daft thing, of course I haven't. Not in four years. Don't be silly. Why do you always ask?'

The whisky, which she drank sparingly but greedily, was already in the system, dulling the pain, though not the regret and the guilt. ‘I did what I could was all,' she said. ‘I wish you wouldn't keep on asking. I've never seen your daughter or your wife since soon after Jack died, and you'd be the first to know if I had. Will you let up, you mad son of a bitch?'

Logo threw back his head and laughed with a sound as glorious as the best of his singing. The sombre mood, as quick and flimsy as the rest of him was light and spry, seemed to have fled. Oh, you had to love him: he was a character, rising like a cork over all his difficulties, holding down a job no-one else wanted: she admired him for that. Who else would be a road sweeper and trundle that big old trolley around all day, picking up rubbish? She felt as loyal to Logo as she had always felt, as protective as if he had been a son and just as worried. None of the other old souls in the street had a son half as attentive as this one.

‘I've got some nice soup, if you want some,' Margaret said. ‘But whether you do or you don't, I think I'll just have another of these,' and the pain in her chest, that premonition of tears, eased with the sound of liquid.

 

‘N
o I won't have another, thanks. Two's plenty.'

‘You're joking. We haven't even started. One more?'

‘No, thanks. Look, do you mind if I leave you to it? I think I'll just go round to her place and see if she's in. It's not like her …'

‘Sir, Geoff, it's just like all women.' Ryan was upset, more to the point, enraged. He'd seen sir home to find no-one there at all, not even a burnt meal or a cup of soup, just a scarf on a chair to show she'd visited and left sweet all else behind. Man could not live on a waft of perfume. The answerphone had been blinking and winking like some creature with a cast in its eye and no sign of a lit fire or a petticoat. Welcome home our conquering hero, amen. Ryan, who could stand anything but another man's discomfiture at the hands of a woman, placed the patched, black-eyed hero in his motor and shuffled him off elsewhere. In his own experience, if you were late, you might as well be very late and very pissed. The later you left it, the more relieved they were to see you and the anger was the same after two hours as it was after six.

‘All right. Listen, I'll take you there. Then I have to go, OK?'

‘Yes, of course. You've been very kind.' There was a strange chill in this return to formality. Bailey never lost control, whether punch drunk or plain drunk, he could be colder and more dangerous than black ice and all of a sudden, Ryan did not envy Helen West, whom he liked and admired, if only she'd learn to behave like a woman.

They pulled up outside the large old house which contained her flat. Ryan knew the route from the pub, the way he always did. Even though he lived outside London, he'd knocked around it like a cabbie. From the door of the pub, turn right, cut down Legard Street past the football stadium, left at the park, over the lights and into respectability. Not exactly Ryan's stamping ground, but Bailey was familiar with it, because the woman lived there, God help him.

Ryan waved and revved the car even while sir was stepping out. Then, two doors down, he cut the engine, got out and walked back. Helen West had a handsome front door to her basement and the lights were on. Ryan stood in the darkness and watched sir ring the bell. ‘Where were you, Helen?' he was saying to her as the door opened. ‘Where were you? Couldn't you wait?' He watched the older man push inside, heard her words. ‘I'm sorry,' she was saying. ‘I'm sorry. Oh, what have you done? Not again …'

That was more like it. Ryan was glad about Bailey wearing a patch. Made him look hurt but still like a pirate.

He cut back up through Legard Street on the way to the motorway. What did anyone mean by late? It wasn't late at all by his standards. He wondered about stopping off on his way home. Down, boy, down: he remembered. Bramshill the day after next, be good and get home by ten. His wife knew better than to call that late. Swinging right, enjoying the speed and the sensation of righteousness which came from being sober, Ryan dimly recognised a familiar face in a car he passed, weaving its way through the double-parking of those dubious streets round the stadium. Do you know, he was thinking to himself, I thought I could predict the way this evening might go. I thought I'd get him pissed and I shall yet. He'd taken bets on it.

 

R
ose Darvey had known exactly the way the evening was going to go, but she was still disappointed to find it quite as predictable as it was. There was a price to be paid for any escort away from the office. Exacted now and all for a ride in a beaten-up Ford Cortina, the best a rookie police constable could afford. He'd taken her to a pub for three rounds of drinks and three of crisps, then, more reluctantly, to a McDonald's, where they had sat in silence, munching the best of the menu under the kind of light which transfixed her into silence, and all as the prepayment for dessert. Rose Darvey, with her knickers round one ankle and the tights which had bagged at the knee now hidden under the bed where she lay in a police section house. With Constable Williams working his way between her thighs before leaving for the night shift, and making a great deal of noise about it. Oh, Rose, Rose, Rose, as if the name mattered while he still had his shirt on, thrusting between her legs with his face all trembling. She watched him, uninterested, as he towered above her. Her hands were on his thin buttocks, kneading as she might have kneaded dough: men were dangerous when roused, you had to behave as if you enjoyed it. Rose was stretched and sore: he was taking his time to the tune of her artificial groans and the scluck, scluck of the sound, while her eyes gazed at the artex ceiling. Just when she thought he never would, he finished and collapsed. Oh, Rose, Rose, Rose. Shut up, she thought, but she remembered to keep on stroking. Ten minutes later they were back in the Cortina, he on his way to work and her to bed. They went down Northchurch Street, where Rose knew Ms West lived, because she knew all those things. Lights on down there: I expect she's drinking her cocoa. Her eyes at this point were fixed straight ahead, like they were most of the time. Paul began to doubt her silence, but he knew better than to question his luck.

‘Which number is it again?' he said when they were two miles beyond the stadium.

‘Wouldn't you like to know?' said Rose pertly, the tights now more or less in place, but a disturbing stickiness between her legs. ‘Just drop us at the corner, it's easier. See you.'

He obeyed, his mind elsewhere, building up his concentration for the night shift, wishing he'd slept more by day. She walked down the street slowly for as long as he was in sight and then she began to run.

Oh Lord, save me from admitting I am frightened of the dark.

 

T
he offices of the Crown Prosecution Service did not look any more dignified in the early afternoon than they did after dark, but Brian Redwood, lord of all he surveyed, comforted himself with the thought that the visual irritations were at least unusual. He had always wanted a huge office if only to reflect status, though he now recognised it was a myth since he was a king without a crown. The room he occupied was large enough for a potentate to sit like a pea on a throne at one end, but the splendour was that of a ruined Russian palace and offered all the comforts of a cave. When forced into these premises the year before, in pursuit of the ever-cheaper lease, Redwood could not believe his eyes and although his incredulity had diminished, the disappointment had not. It was all part of the humbling process and he was never sure whether that process was deliberate. The only feature of the building he liked was the magnificent railings outside, which surrounded the place on three sides, standing tall and close-ranked with lethal tips at the end of each elegant fleurde-lis, a barrier against the world. Redwood vaguely approved of these as a means of keeping his staff in, rather than keeping others out, defying the truant and the escapee, but he hated the rest of the building. He was an unmemorable man, one of the grey brigade, uncoloured by humour but far from stupid. He had never found problems with the letter of the law; which was why he had chosen it, but human beings were a different matter.

 

O
n this afternoon, he was conducting an exercise in better communication with his professional staff. An excruciating management course had informed him this was not only long overdue but imperative, since staff morale was his responsibility. In vain he had tried to explain that no single chief marooned in a building like this could remove the dust of ages and make the Indians happy unless he increased their wages. The response to this from above was derisory: he was supposed to win their hearts and minds and make them tolerate the intolerable. The end result was monthly meetings for the lawyers only, held at teatime. They sat in his room on a medley of chairs, and ate the jam doughnuts he had paid for out of his own pocket. Redwood had a very old-fashioned idea of a treat and did not see why a waste of time should be expensive.

 

T
hey were supposed to discuss, in mutual confessional, those cases which troubled them, which is what they did, more or less, among themselves, ignoring Redwood, whose gaze meanwhile travelled round the walls. High ceilings with broken mouldings, big, panelled doors so thick with a dozen layers of shiny paint the panels had all but disappeared. There was a large and ugly open fireplace from the 1890s obscured by an electric equivalent from the 1950s, now defunct. Gas pipes ran up the wall, again redundant since the newer radiators stood side by side with the old. It was a room of many additions with nothing taken away except what might have been beauty. He almost broke his fingers each time he tried to open one of the huge sash-windows which rose from near floor level to above his head. He was uncomfortably aware that below his feet and over his ceiling, there were rooms in this colossal warren of a building he had never even seen. On arrival, it had taken him three days to find the lavatories on this floor and even now, he took a different route each time.

Smoking was not allowed within his personal domain, and Redwood noticed with obscure satisfaction that Helen West was not only fidgeting but looked as if a strong gin would be preferable to weak tea. He regarded her with his customary mixture of grudging respect and awkwardness. She had changed, recently. Before, she had always seemed to campaign for them to be aware of the possible innocence of those charged with criminal offences, but now she seemed obsessed with their frequent inability to prove guilt. At the moment she was keeping them all entertained with the story of a man named Logo.

‘Well, he came in, suit, tie, the lot, looking the soul of poverty-stricken respectability, and, oh yes, I forgot, clutching his Bible. “I brought my own,” he said sweetly and bowed to the bench. He listened to all the evidence, asking only the most pertinent questions, as if he'd been representing himself all his life.'

‘He probably has,' said Dinsdale, laughing. Helen was accompanying her saga with a number of gestures. He, too, had seen Logo before and he anticipated the perfection of Helen's mimicry.

‘“Excuse me,” he says to the mother of the first witness, “but your dear little daughter did not complain that I had touched her in any way, did she?” “No, she never,” the witness concedes. “I only offered her sweets, as I offered them to others?” “Right on,” says the witness. “I did not accompany my offer with any kind of lewd gesture?” Witness puzzled. “What's one of them?” “I don't know, madam. I cannot really define what I could not do, but I thought that was what I am accused of.” Oh, he's so horribly articulate. “I'm afraid, madam,” he says finally, “I only followed your daughter from the school gates because she was alone and crying, because I was concerned for her, and because she so resembles my own daughter, who I've lost.” He had the witness in tears, feeling guilty. And the bench. He's sort of naïvely ingenious. Then he told us how rough the police were, showed us the handcuff burns and no-one dared point out they weren't recent at all. Everyone ended up turning somersaults to be nice to him and then when he was acquitted, you know what he did?'