In the Flesh (3 page)

  He threw her a sullen look.

  'Wrong again.'

  The suggestion that she investigate was not a bad one, though doubtless he had ulterior motives for

offering it. She viewed Trevor less charitably day by day. What she had once thought in him a fierce commitment to debate she now recognized as mere power-play. He argued, not for the thrill of dialectic, but because he was pathologically competitive. She had seen him, time and again, take up attitudes she knew he did not espouse, simply to spill blood. Nor, more's the pity, was he alone in this sport. Academe was one of the last strongholds of the professional time-waster. On occasion their circle seemed entirely dominated by educated fools, lost in a wasteland of stale rhetoric and hollow commitment.

From one wasteland to another. She returned to Spector Street the following day, armed with a flashgun in addition to her tripod and high-sensitive film. The wind was up today, and it was Arctic, more furious still for being trapped in the maze of passageways and courts. She made her way to number 14, and spent the next hour in its befouled confines, meticulously photographing both the bedroom and

living-room walls. She had half expected the impact of the head in the bedroom to be dulled by

re-acquaintance; it was not. Though she struggled to capture its scale and detail as best she could, she knew the photographs would be at best a dim echo of its perpetual howl.

  Much of its power lay in its context, of course. That such an image might be stumbled upon in surroundings so drab, so conspicuously lacking in mystery, was akin to finding an icon on a rubbish-heap: a gleaming symbol of transcendence from a world of toil and decay into some darker but more tremendous realm. She was painfully aware that the intensity of her response probably defied her articulation. Her vocabulary was analytic, replete with buzz-words and academic terminology, but woefully impoverished when it came to evocation. The photographs, pale as they would be, would, she hoped, at least hint at the potency of this picture, even if they couldn't conjure the way it froze the

bowels.

  When she emerged from the maisonette the wind was as uncharitable as ever, but the boy waiting outside - the same child as had attended upon her yesterday - was dressed as if for spring weather. He grimaced in his effort to keep the shudders at bay.

  'Hello,' Helen said.

  'I waited,' the child announced.

  Waited?'

  'Anne-Marie said you'd come back.'

  'I wasn't planning to come until later in the week,' Helen said. 'You might have waited a long time.'

  The boy's grimace relaxed a notch. 'It's all right,' he said, 'I've got nothing to do.'

  'What about school?'

  'Don't like it,' the boy replied, as if unobliged to be educated if it wasn't to his taste.

  'I see,' said Helen, and began to walk down the side of the quadrangle. The boy followed. On the patch of grass at the centre of the quadrangle several chairs and two or three dead saplings had been piled.

  'What's this?' she said, half to herself.

  'Bonfire Night,' the boy informed her. 'Next week.'

'Of course.'

  'You going to see Anne-Marie?' he asked.

  'Yes.'

  'She's not in'

  'Oh. Are you sure?'

'Yeah.'

  'Well, perhaps you can help me...'She stopped and turned to face the child; smooth sacs of fatigue hung beneath his eyes. 'I heard about an old man who was murdered near here,' she said to him. 'In the summer. Do you know anything about that?'

  'No.'

'Nothing at all? You don't remember anybody getting killed?'

  'No,' the boy said again, with impressive finality. 'I don't remember.'

  Well; thank you anyway.'

  This time, when she retraced her steps back to the car, the boy didn't follow. But as she turned the corner out of the quadrangle she glanced back to see him standing on the spot where she'd left him, staring after her as if she were a madwoman.

  By the time she had reached the car and packed the photographic equipment into the boot there were specks of rain in the wind, and she was sorely tempted to forget she'd ever heard Anne-Marie's story and make her way home, where the coffee would be warm even if the welcome wasn't. But she needed an answer to the question Trevor had put the previous night. Do you believe it?, he'd asked when she'd

told him the story. She hadn't known how to answer then, and she still didn't. Perhaps (why did she sense this?) the terminology of verifiable truth was redundant here; perhaps the final answer to his question was not an answer at all, only another question. If so; so. She had to find out.

  Ruskin Court was as forlorn as its fellows, if not more so. It didn't even boast a bonfire. On the third floor balcony a woman was taking washing in before the rain broke; on the grass in the centre of the quadrangle two dogs were absent-mindedly rutting, the fuckee staring up at the blank sky. As she

walked along the empty pavement she set her face determinedly; a purposeful look, Bernadette had once said, deterred attack. When she caught sight of the two women talking at the far end of the court she crossed over to them hurriedly, grateful for their presence.

  'Excuse me?'

  The women, both in middle-age, ceased their animated exchange and looked her over.

  'I wonder if you can help me?'

  She could feel their appraisal, and their distrust; they went undisguised. One of the pair, her face florid, said plainly: 'What do you want?'

  Helen suddenly felt bereft of the least power to charm. What was she to say to these two that wouldn't make her motives appear ghoulish? 'I was told... she began, and then stumbled, aware that she would get no assistance from either woman. '...I was told there'd been a murder near here. Is that right?'

  The florid woman raised eyebrows so plucked they were barely visible. 'Murder?' she said.

  'Are you from the press?' the other woman enquired. The years bad soured her features beyond sweetening. Her small mouth was deeply lined; her hair, which had been dyed brunette, showed a half-inch of grey at the roots.

  'No, I'm not from the press,' Helen said, 'I'm a friend of Anne-Marie's, in Butts' Court.' This claim of friend stretched the truth, but it seemed to mellow the women somewhat.

  'Visiting are you?' the florid woman asked.

  'In a manner of speaking - '

  'You missed the warm spell - ' Anne-Marie was telling me about somebody who'd been murdered here, during the summer. I was curious about it.'

  'Is that right?'

' - do you know anything about it?'

  'Lots of things go on around here,' said the second woman. 'You don't know the half of it.'

  'So it's true,' Helen said.

  'They had to close the toilets,' the first woman put in.

  'That's right. They did,' the other said.

'The toilets?' Helen said. What had this to do with the old man's death?

  'It was terrible,' the first said. 'Was it your Frank, Josie, who told you about it?'

  'No, not Frank,' Josie replied. 'Frank was still at sea. It was Mrs Tyzack.'

  The witness established, Josie relinquished the story to her companion, and turned her gaze back upon

Helen. The suspicion bad not yet died from her eyes.

  'This was only the month before last,' Josie said. 'Just about the end of August. It was August, wasn't it?' She looked to the other woman for verification. 'You've got the head for dates, Maureen.'

  Maureen looked uncomfortable. 'I forget,' she said, clearly unwilling to offer testimony.

  'I'd like to know,' Helen said. Josie, despite her companion's reluctance, was eager to oblige.

'There's some lavatories,' she said, 'outside the shops - you know, public lavatories. I'm not quite sure how it all happened exactly, but there used to be a boy... well, he wasn't a boy really, I mean he was a man of twenty or more, but he was - she fished for the words, '...mentally subnormal, I suppose you'd say. His mother used to have to take him around like he was a four year old. Anyhow, she let him go into the lavatories while she went to that little supermarket, what's it called?' she turned to Maureen for a prompt, but the other woman just looked back, her disapproval plain. Josie was ungovernable, however.

'Broad daylight, this was,' she said to Helen. 'Middle of the day. Anyhow, the boy went to the toilet, and the mother was in the shop. And after a while, you know how you do, she's busy shopping, she forgets about him, and then she thinks he's been gone a long time...'

  At this juncture Maureen couldn't prevent herself from butting in: the accuracy of the story apparently took precedence over her wariness.

' - She got into an argument,' she corrected Josie, 'with the manager. About some bad bacon she'd had from him. That was why she was such a tune.

  'I see,' said Helen.

' - anyway,' said Josie, picking up the tale, 'she finished her shopping and when she came out he still wasn't there - '

  'So she asked someone from the supermarket - Maureen began, but Josie wasn't about to have her narrative snatched back at this vital juncture.

  'She asked one of the men from the supermarket -' she repeated over Maureen's interjection, 'to go down into the lavatory and find him.'

  'It was terrible,' said Maureen, clearly picturing the atrocity in her mind's eye.

  'He was lying on the floor, in a pool of blood.'

  'Murdered?'

  Josie shook her head. 'He'd have been better off dead. He'd been attacked with a razor - she let this piece of information sink in before delivering the coup de grace, - and they'd cut off his private parts. Just cut them off and flushed them down a toilet. No reason on earth to do it.'

'Oh my God.'

  'Better off dead,' Josie repeated. 'I mean, they can't mend something like that, can they?'

  The appalling tale was rendered worse still by the sang-froid of the teller, and by the casual repetition of 'Better off dead'.

  'The boy,' Helen said, 'Was he able to describe his attackers?'

  'No,' said Josie, 'he's practically an imbecile. He can't string more than two words together.'

  'And nobody saw anyone go into the lavatory? Or leaving it?'

  'People come and go all the time - Maureen said. This, though it sounded like an adequate explanation,

had not been Helen's experience. There was not a great bustle in the quadrangle and passageways; far from it. Perhaps the shopping mall was busier, she reasoned, and might offer adequate cover for such a crime.

  'So they haven't found the culprit,' she said.

  'No,' Josie replied, her eyes losing their fervour. The crime and its immediate consequences were the nub of this story; she had little or no interest in either the culprit or his capture.

  'We're not safe in our own beds,' Maureen observed. 'You ask anyone.'

  'Anne-Marie said the same,' Helen replied. 'That's how she came to tell me about the old man. Said he was murdered during the summer, here in Ruskin Court.'

  'I do remember something,' Josie said. 'There was some talk I heard. An old man, and his dog. He was battered to death, and the dog ended up... I don't know. It certainly wasn't here. It must have been one of the other estates.'

  'Are you sure?'

  The woman looked offended by this slur on her memory. 'Oh yes,' she said, 'I mean if it had been here, we'd have known the story, wouldn't we?'

  Helen thanked the pair for their help and decided to take a stroll around the quadrangle anyway, just to see how many more maisonettes were out of operation here. As in Butts' Court, many of the curtains were drawn and all the doors locked. But then if Spector Street was under siege from a maniac capable of the murder and mutilation such as she'd heard described, she was not surprised that the residents took to their homes and stayed there. There was nothing much to see around the court. All the unoccupied maisonettes and flats had been recently sealed, to judge by a litter of nails left on a doorstep by the council workmen. One sight did catch her attention however. Scrawled on the paving stones she was walking over - and all but erased by rain and the passage of feet - the same phrase she'd seen in the bedroom of number 14: Sweets to the sweet. The words were so benign; why did she seem to sense menace in them? Was it in their excess, perhaps, in the sheer overabundance of sugar upon sugar, honey upon honey?