Читать книгу Bleak Water - Danuta Reah - Страница 13

When Kerry woke up, she felt better. She got up early and ironed the grey skirt and maroon jumper that was what they made you wear for school. She’d taken the skirt in, and turned up the hem. She’d asked Mum for some money to buy a top, one of those with eagles and flowers like she’d seen Samantha Mumba wearing, but Mum had said, ‘I haven’t got money for T-shirts, Kerry. Don’t go on.’ So Kerry had got out her tiger one that came from the World Wildlife Fund, and she’d jazzed it up with sequins and things, but she couldn’t do much with the jumper.

She put on the top, pulling the sleeves down to cover the fine tracery of cuts that ran up the inside of her arm. It was chilly, but she draped the jumper carefully round her shoulders, tying the sleeves loosely at the front. That looked better. The skirt felt loose. She was going to have to take it in again. She brushed her hair and looked in the mirror. If she’d washed it yesterday, she could have worn it loose like Buffy. She tied it up with a band. She looked in the mirror and smiled at her reflection. Buffy smiled back. That was all right.

She went downstairs. There was post on the mat. She picked it up. A letter in a brown window envelope. A bill. It was in red with Final Demand written above the address. A letter addressed to Mum – it was from the school, Kerry recognized the postmark. She slipped it into her pocket. No letter from Dad.

Mum was in the kitchen, and she looked up as Kerry came through the door, picking up the green mug that was beside her. She was still in her dressing gown. ‘Are you off now?’ she said. She smiled, but she sounded anxious and there was a flat, strained look to her smile. She wanted Kerry to go. That smell, sweet and penetrating like nail polish, hung round her. Kerry knew what that meant.

She got down the cornflakes. ‘You want some, Mum?’ she said.

‘I’ll get something later.’ Mum lit a cigarette and watched Kerry pour milk on to her cereal.

‘Aren’t you going to work?’ Kerry could hear her voice sounding small and angry. She put the brown envelope on the kitchen table. ‘You’d better go, because there’s another bill you haven’t paid.’

Mum stared at the window. ‘Oh, Kerry, don’t nag,’ she said. ‘Hurry up. You’ll be late.’ She shifted restlessly from foot to foot. Kerry wanted to say something, but Mum looked at her so blankly that she couldn’t think of anything. She picked up her bag and looked in the mirror again. This time it was just Kerry who looked back, but somehow she couldn’t care about it any more.

She left the house, heading towards the bus stop, her feet moving slower and slower. She opened the letter from school as she walked. It was the usual stuff. Dear Mrs Fraser…Mum didn’t call herself Mrs Fraser any more, but the school kept making that mistake, because Kerry went on being Kerry Fraser. Dear Mrs Fraser…Kerry pulled a face. Blah, blah, blah…unexcused absences…blah, blah…She was about to screw it up and throw it away, when a phrase caught her eye:…excluded for a period…She read the letter closely, but it was all right. She wasn’t excluded, but she had to stay after school on Friday. She would be excluded if she missed that…without good reason…At least they couldn’t phone Mum now. She remembered the last time the school had phoned. Mum’s eyes had looked tired. ‘I can’t cope with this,’ she’d said. And Kerry had felt cold inside. What if Mum sent her away? What if she put Kerry in care? That’s what she’d done to Lyn. Then what could she do to help Dad?

But the phone had been cut off. That was another bill Mum hadn’t paid. Kerry had told Lyn, and Lyn had pulled one of those faces, but she’d given Kerry the phone. ‘Don’t let her get it,’ Lyn said. ‘I worked hard to buy that.’

She kept it deep down in her bag, where Mum wouldn’t see it, and she kept it switched off so it wouldn’t beep and give her away. She switched it on now. She wanted to call Lyn, but if Lyn was mad at her she might not talk. She thought for a moment, then keyed in sori I woz l8. She pressed ‘send’, holding her breath. Was Lyn so mad she wouldn’t get in touch? She sat on the low wall by the bus stop, the phone in her hand, watching up the road for the bus. It didn’t mean anything if there wasn’t a reply. Lyn’s phone might be switched off, she might be busy, anything.

She could see the bus in the distance now, pulling in to the stop further along the road. She was about to stow the phone safely in her bag when it beeped. She nearly dropped it. The message signal was flashing. She felt breathless as she pressed the read button. It was all right. Lyn wasn’t mad at her – Lyn was worried. The letters ran across the screen.

RUOK?

Eliza got up early and watched the sun rise over the canal. She hadn’t slept much the night before. Every time she began to drop into sleep, she thought she heard those soft footsteps again on the other side of the wall.

By eight, she was dressed and breakfasted, and glad to go downstairs and start work, to get back to the world of the normal, the commonplace, the everyday.

Jonathan arrived late. He’d had a bad night, he explained irritably, and he didn’t want to spend all day shut in his office in the gallery. That reminded Eliza she was supposed to check and sign the statement she’d given to DC Barraclough the day before. She was probably the last-known person to have seen – or at least to have heard – Cara alive. Jonathan sighed when she told him.

‘I’ve got to go out,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a meeting and I don’t want to leave Mel on her own.’

This was the first Eliza had heard of any meeting. ‘Can’t it wait? Mel needs supervising.’ Or she’ll spend all morning with her feet up and her magazines.

‘Mel’s fine,’ he said.

She looked at him. He seemed tense and anxious. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Oh…’ His sigh was audible. ‘The police have been in touch. They’ve searched her flat, and the stairs, and now they want to look over the gallery.’ So that was the reason for the sudden appointment. He didn’t want the hassle of dealing with them. There was nothing she could do about that. ‘When will you be back?’ he said.

‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, more sharply than she’d intended. ‘I’ve never been involved in a murder inquiry before.’

He looked a bit shamefaced at that. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Oh, well, you’ll have to go. Oh, I suppose I can rearrange things.’

Eliza left early for her appointment. She wanted ten minutes to herself with some decent coffee before she had to think about Cara again, about Cara’s death, about the shabby flat and the still bundle in the cot. She walked along to the canal basin, to the café, and sat in the window in a soft chair, watching the boats, people coming and going along the towpath. Something caught her eye. A picture in a newspaper being read by a young man, glimpsed as he ambled by.

There were newspapers in the racks and on the tables. She went to look, flicking through the nationals, not seeing what she was looking for. Then she saw that the early edition of the local paper was out. She opened it, and the photograph looked back at her. Cara and Briony Rose. She put the paper down on the table in front of her. What had she expected? Of course it would be in the local paper. It was probably in the nationals somewhere. She looked at the headline. She read it once without taking it in, then she read it again. CONCERN FOR CHILD IN PROSTITUTE KILLING. It must be the wrong story. The story didn’t go with the picture. It…

She read the article slowly, her heart sinking. The police were treating Cara’s death as suspicious; and they believed that Cara had been a prostitute. She had been out on the streets the night she was killed, the article said. That was ridiculous. Cara hadn’t been a prostitute. She…But Eliza’s rejection of the idea was starting to lose its force. The gallery was very near to the red-light areas of West Bar Green and Corporation Street. Eliza had seen the prostitutes waiting at the kerb side often enough. And Cara had been young, lonely and poor.

But the main focus of the article was the baby. Eliza had a feeling that, if it hadn’t been for the involvement of the child, Cara’s death – Cara’s murder? The police hadn’t said anything about murder – would have merited only a brief paragraph on an inside page. She read on. Briony Rose had been hypothermic and dehydrated when she was found, having been shut in the flat for over twelve hours. She was still being treated, but was ‘expected to make a full recovery’. Cara must have left the baby while she went out to work. And then the editorial rehashed Ellie’s murder in a dramatic ‘canal of death’ paragraph.

She read through the article twice, trying to make sense of it, then she looked at her watch. Shit! She was late. She grabbed her things and ran along the road and up the hill towards the brick block that housed the police headquarters.

‘Ms Eliot, thank you for coming in.’ It was DC Barraclough, the young woman Eliza had talked to the day before. She was still tired and heavyeyed. It looked as though she had a social life to match her appearance. ‘I know you’re busy at the gallery.’

‘It’s the private view on Friday,’ Eliza said, moving automatically into PR mode. ‘Why don’t you come?’ she added, remembering the woman’s interest – I thought it was a red horse…

DC Barraclough looked surprised. ‘Maybe I will,’ she said.

‘I’ll send you an invitation,’ Eliza said.

The other woman focused on the papers in front of her. ‘There’s one or two things in your statement I wanted to check…’ she said now. She frowned as she looked round the room. ‘Thank you for coming in,’ she said again. She shook her head, trying to organize her thoughts.

‘Before we start…’ Eliza said.

DC Barraclough shot her a quick look and waited.

‘The baby,’ Eliza said. ‘Briony Rose. How is she?’ She couldn’t get the image of that still bundle out of her mind.

‘She’s doing well, she’ll be out of hospital soon.’

‘What’s going to happen to her?’

DC Barraclough shook her head again. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, taking out a sheaf of notes. ‘That’s in the hands of social services. Now,’ she changed the subject briskly, ‘let me run through those timings with you again,’ she said. ‘We’d like to get them a bit more specific.’

‘You said it was a general idea you wanted,’ Eliza said. She felt a mixture of relief and anxiety about the baby.

‘Just a bit more specific. You closed the fire door a bit before midnight –’

Eliza nodded. ‘It must have been, because I heard her walking around in the flat later.’

‘– and then you say you heard the baby crying, and that was when you heard Cara? Can you remember the time?’

‘I remember I looked at the clock,’ Eliza said. ‘I was so fed up about being woken up again. But I can’t remember what time it was. You said it must have been around midnight.’ She frowned, thinking back. That was the way it had happened, wasn’t it?

She saw DC Barraclough look past her, and turned round. A tall, fair-haired man had come into the room. It was a moment before she recognized him as Roy Farnham, the man from the funeral, the man who had been at the gallery yesterday, taking charge when they found the baby.

‘Thank you for coming in, Miss Eliot,’ he said.

‘Eliza,’ she said. He nodded and looked thoughtfully at DC Barraclough, whose face was a bit pink.

‘Is everything all right, Barraclough?’ he said. His voice was polite, but DC Barraclough looked more flushed. He turned to Eliza. ‘I’d like a clearer idea of the evening. Can we go over it again?’

She nodded. ‘I was explaining to DC Barraclough,’ she said. ‘It’s really hard to remember.’

He dismissed that. ‘Don’t worry. Let’s see what we’ve got here.’ He took her through the evening with Cara, the time Cara left her flat, what Eliza had done next. ‘You don’t give yourself much time off,’ he said with a quick smile. She smiled back. ‘Right, so you worked for – what – all of the evening? Did you do anything else?’

‘No, I worked, then I felt tired, so I got ready for bed.’

‘And then…’

‘I went to bed. I read for a while…’

‘Let’s go through that again,’ he said. ‘It was about half past seven when you went upstairs with Cara Hobson. You had coffee and then she went – how long did she stay?’

‘Oh, only as long as it took to drink the coffee. Twenty minutes or so.’

‘OK. So about half past eight, you started working. How much work did you get through?’

‘There was a folder of stuff – I got that finished. It must have taken me more than a couple of hours…Yes. The news was finishing – I meant to watch it and I missed it.’ He didn’t say anything, just waited. ‘I had a shower,’ she said. It was coming clearer.

‘So it would have been about eleven by the time you got to bed.’

She nodded again. ‘And then I read until I began to fall asleep, you know.’

‘And something woke you up?’ he prompted.

‘It was the draught from the door,’ she said. ‘There’s a fire door leading on to the steps, and sometimes Cara didn’t shut it properly when she came in. I had to get up and shut it.’

‘So you were wide awake,’ he said. His smile was sympathetic. ‘And an early start the next day?’

She looked at him. ‘I remember now, I looked at the clock. It was after one. I was really pissed off. And that was when I heard the footsteps. I was trying to get to sleep, but I could hear Cara walking around with the baby.’

‘And then…’

She frowned. ‘Something else woke me up later, I remember that. I spent the rest of the night in the chair. The baby was crying. But it was something else woke me up.’ She shook her head. She didn’t know what it was.

‘Someone going out? Opening the fire door?’

Eliza shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t hear that. I don’t know what it was.’ In her mind, she could hear the wailing cry of the wind as it blew through the empty windows of the derelict buildings. She shook her head. She’d be guessing now. ‘I made myself a drink. It was about two, I think. I’d forgotten.’ She felt pleased with herself for remembering.

Farnham nodded. ‘Did you hear anything else from Cara’s flat? Apart from the baby.’

Eliza thought. ‘No, it was only the baby. I don’t remember hearing anything else.’

‘OK,’ he said again. ‘And you didn’t see Cara at all after she left your flat?’

‘No.’ Eliza remembered Cara as she walked towards the door. Hindsight – was it hindsight? – made her a sad and lonely figure. ‘No, I didn’t see her again.’

He stood up. ‘Thank you, Miss Eliot, you’ve been very helpful. DC Barraclough will sort out your statement with you.’ Eliza was aware suddenly of the other woman as a silent presence in the room, aware of a tension in the air.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There was something I wanted to know…I don’t know if you can tell me…’

Farnham waited, his hand on the door.

She knew he must be busy, but she had to ask. ‘The paper,’ she said. She could see his expression changing, becoming cautious. ‘They said something about the canal, they called it “the canal of death” and they mentioned Ellie Chapman. Why are they making a connection? Is it just the canal?’

He looked at her. ‘You knew Ellie,’ he said. He seemed to hesitate, then he said, ‘We found Cara Hobson’s body near Cadman Street Bridge.’

Of course. The place where Ellie’s body had been found dumped in the undergrowth by the towpath, an accidental find. The police were searching the towpath after a junkie had OD’d in a boat moored by the canal side.

‘It’s a deserted place,’ he went on, ‘but it’s bang in the centre of the city – and there’s a lot of dodgy places close by, you must be aware of that – a good place to shoot up, a good place to take a punter. A good place to dump a body.’ He looked at her to make sure she understood. ‘There’s no other link,’ he said.

It was gone twelve by the time Eliza left the police station. Somehow, she had expected the news of Cara’s death to have more impact, for the people going about their business in the city to be concerned, aware, talking about the death that had occurred in their midst. Eliza only felt that sense of involvement, that sense of something cataclysmic having happened, because she had known Cara. Otherwise, would the death of a prostitute have weighed heavily on her mind?

The thought depressed her and she returned to the gallery in a bad mood. The police had been and gone. The search of the gallery had revealed nothing, and Jonathan was preparing to leave for the meeting he’d been agitating about earlier. She showed him the paper and he scanned it in trepidation. ‘They mention the gallery,’ he said.

‘Well, they would.’ Eliza hung up her coat and pulled on the smock she used to protect her clothes when she was moving stuff around. ‘Cara lived here.’

‘She lived in the flats, Eliza. They’re nothing to do with the gallery.’ He rattled the paper irritably.

‘Yes, well…’ Eliza’s mind was moving between the events of yesterday and the work she still needed to do.

‘I knew it was a bad idea letting the flat to that child,’ he said. ‘And now we’re going to have all the pimps and kerb crawlers knocking on our door. It was bad enough when it was a kindergarten, but now we’re a fucking brothel.’

‘What other kind of brothel would there be?’ Eliza said wearily. ‘Shut up, Jonathan.’

He looked a bit abashed. Eliza wasn’t really angry with him. He’d had a stressful day, the preparation for the opening disrupted by the visit from the police team. She supposed he was just dealing with it in his own way. He pulled his coat on. ‘I won’t be back today,’ he said. ‘Phone if anything urgent comes up.’

‘It won’t,’ Eliza reassured him. She made herself some coffee – instant, yuk – and took it upstairs so that she could get on with her work for Flynn’s exhibition. She was behind now. But the words ‘suspicious death’ kept resonating in her mind, and she kept thinking of feet moving silently through the gallery in the dark, in the night, a couple of floors below where she slept, coming to the stairs, beginning their stealthy climb…Stop it! ‘Drama queen!’ she said out loud. No one had come into the gallery. The police had checked. The paper said that Cara had gone out, gone working, leaving the baby alone in the flat.

Cara had been in the flat during the night – Eliza had heard her. She must have gone out after that. She could remember the sound of crying. The crying had sounded almost hysterical, and then it had gradually faded into hiccuping sobs, and then into silence. Eliza stood still in the empty gallery, the light from the low winter sun casting long shadows across the floor. What had been going on, on the other side of the wall, in the dark, in the night, when she, Eliza, had been curled up in her chair, drinking cocoa, slipping away into dreams?