Читать книгу Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars - Miranda Emmerson, Miranda Emmerson - Страница 11

Monday, 8 November

Orla Hayes climbed the stairs and pulled on a jumper and another pair of socks. She put her head round the door of Gracie’s little room and pulled the quilt and sheet and blanket up to her chin. She stood for a moment looking down at Gracie’s fat, beautiful face; listening to the sound of the breath that came through lips slightly parted; allowing her hand to brush strands of dark hair away from her closed eyes. Nothing on earth must be allowed to disturb Gracie, for if Gracie was fine then so was all the world.

She left her little one sleeping and crept downstairs to turn off the fire, though it was only ten o’clock and the nights were becoming bitterly cold. Her fingers were tingling now and her nose and the tips of her toes. She had wanted another hour of light and reading or else to darn Gracie’s socks before she went to bed but the cold was going to be too much for her.

She pulled the blue-flowered quilt out of its cubbyhole and made the sofa into a bed, arranging her cushions as she always did. She briefly lit the gas and warmed half a cup of milk, which she mixed with sugar and drank down straight. Then she ran to get warm while the effects of the milk could still be felt and pulled the quilt right up to her eyes. The window in the kitchen whistled and shook in the wind. Brennan was late home tonight and she wanted to be asleep when he came in.

She must have been lying there more than an hour when she heard his keys rattling against the door. Then a click and a scrape of wood and brush against the floor and a gust of cold blew across her face and fingers. The door shut again with a soft crunch.

Brennan Hayes paused for a minute, standing on the mat, listening to the silence in the flat. Then he crept into the kitchen, poured water into a glass, left his boots by the understairs cupboard and softly plodded up towards his bed. Orla listened to him do this just as she had done on hundreds of other nights and she waited for him to speak to her, though this he never did.

The little carriage clock ticked on the windowsill in the darkness. She guessed it was nearly midnight; he was rarely home earlier than half past eleven these days. In six hours Gracie would be awake, sitting on her mother’s stomach, poking her awake and she would grudgingly agree to light the fire again and make them both tea and porridge and the radio would be playing ‘Make It Easy on Yourself’, which always made Orla want to cry. And after seven he would come downstairs, washed and shaved and in his smart, clean uniform and he would drink a cup of tea at the kitchen table while Gracie told him some crazy story about monsters and eyes and tigers walking her to the shops and then he would kiss his daughter on the forehead and say goodbye and he would be out of their lives again for another fifteen hours or months or even years … because in every real sense he had been cut adrift and it was she who had done the cutting.

Tuesday, 9 November

At twenty past seven Brennan Hayes walked out of the house, squeezing the door closed behind him. He could still just feel the warmth of Gracie’s head where he had kissed her. The sky was dark grey and rain spotted his uniform. He turned north onto Finsbury Square and then headed west towards Smithfield Market. Fleet Street. The Strand. Charing Cross Road. Leicester Square. Piccadilly Circus. Savile Row. And at the end of it all – at the end of the road crossings and the grey-suited shuffle and the noise of angry bus drivers and the taste of petrol on his tongue and the spiky cold air of a London morning which thrilled him and froze him in equal measure – at the end of it all lay a different name, a different voice and a different life.

***

‘Excuse me. My name is Anna Treadway. I’ve been called in for an interview at eleven.’

The desk sergeant continued to stare at her sleepily. Anna felt compelled to continue but couldn’t think what else to say.

‘Shall I go and sit over there?’ she asked, nodding to a wooden bench by the door.

The desk sergeant frowned for a moment, as if this was a truly ingenious question to ask. Then he looked her in the eye as if seeing her for the first time: ‘Yes.’

Anna retreated gratefully and sat down, squeezing herself to the very edge of the bench – against the armrest – in case some strange or large or terrifying other should arrive at any moment and be told to sit with her.

Iolanthe had been missing for ten days and Anna could not shake the feeling that not enough was being done to find her. She’d been all over the fronts of the papers for a few days, and posters had appeared on the lamp posts asking for information, and Anna had found herself thinking how ridiculous it all was, and what a waste that Lanny wasn’t here to enjoy all the fuss. But then the boy had been injured in Golden Square, the headlines had changed and she hadn’t seen or heard from a policeman in over a week until the call last night.

She thought about Lanny’s story of her father, her mother and then her brother dying. She was the very last of her little family. Surely she was meant to carry on – to have children, even. Iolanthe was forty but it might still be possible. If she met someone soon she could have the chance of a child. Maybe she could adopt. She had asked Lanny once about men: was there anyone, was there someone back home in the States?

‘I’ve never been a great one for relationships. And I’m not too good at sex and nothing else. I grew up really fast, really young. Went straight over that drippy crush stage and into the cold, hard world. Men are dangerous, Anna, you never know what they’re really thinking.’

‘I suppose. I’m not any good at relationships either. I quite like having my own life.’

‘That’s it. That’s it exactly. I have my life.’

‘Miss Treadway? Is it miss?’ A tall man carrying a bunch of folders under one arm was calling her from across the hallway. She raised her hand, nerves rendering her momentarily dumb. The red-haired policeman advanced on her with an outstretched hand: ‘Good morning, miss. I am Detective Sergeant Barnaby Hayes. We’re in interview room four. Would you follow me, please?’

Anna followed Hayes along a beige corridor and then another. In the distance she could hear the murmur and rattle of a works canteen, but for the most part the station was oddly silent. Voices murmured and muttered behind half-closed doors; file drawers squeaked and rolled in and out in offices as they passed.

‘Here we are.’ Hayes knocked on the door and when no reply came back they entered. The room was windowless, but held a table and three chairs. The walls were painted pistachio green and the floor was black linoleum.

‘Cup of tea?’ Hayes asked.

‘Yes. Please. Milk, no sugar. No, actually, sorry … sugar please. Two.’

‘It’s comforting, isn’t it?’ Hayes smiled at her. ‘June!’ he cried down the corridor and a door somewhere unseen opened.

‘Yes, Sarge, what’ll it be?’ a voice came back.

‘Two teas for interview room four, please. Normal for me. Milk and two for the young lady.’

‘Your wish is my command.’ Hayes shut the door.

Sergeant Hayes spread the folders out in front of him and pulled out half a dozen forms and bits of paper.

‘Now, I wanted to go back over your statement and then I also wanted to ask you about this interview. The one from The Times.’

‘I was there for that. I was in the room.’

Hayes blinked at Anna with a look that signalled genuine interest. ‘Right. Well … First things first. Would you describe Iolanthe Green as a stable person, Miss Treadway?’

‘Define stable.’

‘Really?’

‘I mean, how stable is stable? She was stable enough … in the grand scheme of things. But she was human. I mean, she was a bit highly strung and a bit, um, prone to moodiness. But then, when I say these things sitting in an interview room, they suddenly sound much more serious, much more terrible, than I think they are. She was … there’s no good way I can put this … she was female and she had female insecurities and she was an actress and she had those insecurities too but that makes it sound like I’m trying to say she was mad when really I just think she was rather ordinary.’

‘So, you’re saying she was essentially ordinary?’

‘Yes. Ordinary woman. Ordinary hang-ups. Ordinary … intelligence. You know, Sergeant …’

‘Hayes, miss.’

‘You know, Sergeant Hayes, actors and actresses are very, very ordinary people. They do a job and half the time the people around them yelp like castrated cats, howl with pleasure and tell them that they are the saviours of the world. But most of them, the ones who don’t let the publicity drive them mad, know that they are very ordinary people, with a basic technical ability: like a plumber or a welder. Except that half the world has decided that this type of welding is akin to performing miracles.

‘Iolanthe wasn’t clever. Not book clever, I mean. But she wasn’t stupid either. She knew that what she was involved in was a kind of popular conjuring trick. And she knew that her career would be finite and that she had to make the best of it and save for the future. She didn’t spend her money on fancy things. The Savoy gave her that room for publicity. She was sent clothes by department stores and designers. She wore costume jewellery and never caught a cab if she could help it. She told me once that she had been born into poverty and had half a mind that she would die that way too. She took her money and she sent it back home. Every month, every shilling she could spare, she squirrelled it away somewhere.’

There was a knock and Hayes rose to let in June, who was carrying two cups and saucers.

‘’Bout time too,’ he noted drily.

‘Up your bottom, Sarge,’ said June, winking at Anna, who was slightly outraged at this piece of rudeness in such an austere setting.

As June shut the door behind her Hayes started to arrange the papers into a chequerboard in front of him.

‘You spoke about Miss Green sending money home to be deposited. And we have talked with Miss Green’s agent in New York and with their in-house accountant who very kindly gave us select details of the accounts Miss Green deposited her earnings into. Now I don’t have a record of amounts but I do know that over the years Miss Green deposited money into a series of accounts with a variety of names attached to them. We have three accounts in the name of Iolanthe Green. One account in the name of Yolanda Green. Two accounts in the name of Nathaniel Green. And one account in the name of Maria Green. Would you happen to know anything about these other names, Miss Treadway?’

‘Well, Nathaniel was her brother but she said … I heard her say that he died in ’45 or ’46. Just after the war … in Japan. He had a car accident.’

‘And yet he has two savings accounts still open. One held at a bank in Boston and the second at a bank in Annapolis, Maryland. Any ideas?’

‘None. She always said she had no family … Her mother and her father died in the forties or late thirties and her brother died just after. There wasn’t anyone else … though I suppose aunts and uncles?’

‘Her agents knew nothing about her wider family, it seems. They only have addresses and phone numbers for Iolanthe herself. They never met anyone else from her family. Though we have to suppose, given the shared surnames, that all these people belong to the same family. In the interview she said she came from Cork.’

‘Her grandparents came from Cork. She’d never been there. I never saw a card or a letter in the dressing room that looked like it came from family … I mean, she got them from fans, from other actors, from her agency, from the studios she’d worked with …’

‘Did you notice anything which might suggest that she was in contact with people in Ireland? Did she want to visit Ireland? We’re wondering if … well, sometimes people find themselves under pressure and they run. We’re wondering if Miss Green might have run away to Ireland.’

‘To be honest she’d never mentioned the place. Not before the interview.’

Hayes smiled and changed the subject. ‘I gather she was a big star but I have to confess I’d never heard of her. Perhaps I recognised her face …’

‘She is a star … of a sort. She’s had top billing in at least one film. But she isn’t Julie Andrews or Elizabeth Taylor. And she probably made it too late. If you’re a woman you have to make it at twenty and then stay there and even then … It’s a very uncertain business. My theatre manager, Leonard, he says she’s got maybe another three years in pictures and then she’ll need a stage career. That’s why her agent wanted her to do this play.’

‘Was she depressed about all this? About the uncertainty of it all?’

‘She never said she was. She always seemed very philosophical about it. She just wanted to work. I mean, she worried about money. She always worried about money.’

‘This interview she gave … have you read the transcript? I mean the bit they printed in the paper.’

‘Not really. I was there for nearly all of it and it rather annoyed me. The way they printed it after they knew she was missing.’

Hayes drew out a newspaper cutting.

‘I’m going to read from it. I want you to tell me if anything might have been left out, or added, or if there’s anything you don’t remember her saying … Okay. There’s a load of silliness at the beginning: “lies back on her green velvet chaise longue”, “tale of heartbreak and longing”, blah blah blah. Then it begins. “Wuthering Heights was my big break, though. It really made my name. From my humble beginnings among the Boston Irish I could never have imagined I’d be so successful in Hollywood. California seemed like another planet, not where a girl of my humble origins belonged at all.” How does it sound so far?’

‘Well, the gist of it makes sense. I don’t remember Iolanthe saying it quite like that and he’s leaving out a lot. But it’s sort of rightish.’

‘Okay. She goes on: “In many ways I’m doing all of this for my little brother Nate. He was killed in Japan at the end of the war and it broke all our hearts. My poor mother never got over the shock of losing him. By the age of twenty-one I was all alone in the world.” Okay?’

‘I’m pretty sure her mother died before her brother did. The chronology’s wrong.’

‘Anything surprising?’

‘Not really.’

‘“I ask Miss Green about her connections with Ireland. ‘My grandfather’s family – the Callaghans – claimed to have pledged allegiance long ago to Perkin Warbeck when he made his claim to the English throne. And I like to think that a piece of that rebel heart lived on in all of us, helping us to fight a little harder for the things we believe in.’” How’s that?’

‘I can’t imagine Iolanthe knowing who Perkin Warbeck was. But … I don’t know. They did talk about Ireland. And I was cleaning things and moving around. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention.’

‘It goes on: “I ask Miss Green what she’s enjoying most about her time in London. ‘Oh, James, it’s hard to choose. I’ve lived in Boston and New York and Los Angeles but there’s something really special about London. Some magic ingredient. I think it’s the coming together of so many different, vibrant people all in one spot. I’ve loved the parties I’ve been invited to here: at Ronnie Scott’s, the Marquee and the Flamingo. The music you have in England is amazing. I think there’s something in the Celtic heart that responds to that beating of drums, that essential rhythm of the night.’ I tell her that our diarist was thrilled to spot her coming in and out of Roaring Twenties on Carnaby Street on several nights last week, but Miss Green just blushes and stands to fix her make-up. She has another show to do. I let her rebel heart prepare.”’

‘Yuck.’

‘Well, yes. But is it accurate?’

‘I’ve no idea. I didn’t know Iolanthe went to clubs. As far as I was concerned she was trotting off back to The Savoy every night at eleven. I don’t … I’m sorry. I can’t honestly say that she didn’t mention this because I might have missed it, but it doesn’t bear much resemblance to the conversation I heard.’

Barnaby Hayes stared down at the clipping in front of him and wrinkled his brow.

‘Is that helpful?’ Anna asked.

Hayes looked up at her and smiled a smile of frustration. ‘Well, it’s all helpful if it’s true, isn’t it?’

‘Is it, though? Does it get you any closer to what happened to her?’

‘The thing about truth, Miss Treadway, is that it’s not always the friend of narrative. My job is to figure out your friend, Miss Green, and to construct a likely narrative that will help us to determine if she left of her own free will or was taken. And there are two ways I can go about this. I can invent a number of plausible narratives and try and hold them up against the facts until I find the one that fits. Or I can listen to all the facts – with no particular narrative in mind – and then assemble the known knowns in such a way that they reveal the basic truth of the matter.

‘And I have to tell you that in my experience the human brain only wants to do the former. It wants to think like a scientist. Hypothesis. Experiment. Results. It doesn’t want to look at all the facts in all the world and wait for a pattern to emerge. Because that is a ridiculously hard thing to do. It’s the sort of thing that only geniuses can achieve. Normal people need a narrative. And currently your Miss Green refuses to offer much of one.’

‘Why do women usually go missing?’

‘Because their husbands beat them. Or they have affairs and decide to run away. Some of them are murdered. But not many. Mostly it’s violence. At home.’

Anna watched Hayes scanning the pieces of paper and was briefly jealous of the job he did. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been asked to use her mind for anything much at all beyond the dressing and undressing of actresses.

Hayes sighed. ‘Let’s go back to the names. Yolanda, Nathaniel, Maria. We know Nathaniel was the brother. Killed in Japan. Yolanda and Maria?’

‘Well, one of them must be the mother. Or an aunt.’

‘But if they’re dead …’

‘… then why is she giving them her money?’

‘Unless it’s just tax avoidance.’ Hayes shook his head then he looked Anna hard in the eye. ‘You talked to Iolanthe more than most, didn’t you?’

‘Probably. At work anyway.’

He tore a piece of paper off the bottom of one of his notes and wrote down two numbers on it.

‘This one’s work. This one’s home. If you think of something; doesn’t matter what. Ireland. Names. Clubs. Money. Men. Will you call me? Please? I would like to find her alive.’

Anna took the slip of paper and filed it in the pocket of her handbag. Then they sat for a moment in the silence of the room, looking at each other. It occurred to Anna that there was an odd kind of intimacy to a police interview. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been alone in a room with a man, certainly not a man who looked to be the same age as she was.

Hayes gave her a slightly embarrassed smile. ‘I hope we find her,’ he said. And then he stood and almost seemed to be bowing but offered her his hand instead. Anna took it and shook it and wished that her own wasn’t so slippery.

‘It was nice to meet you, Sergeant Hayes.’

‘And you, Miss Treadway.’ Hayes opened the door to let her out into the corridor.

***

On Sun Street, Orla and Gracie made oatmeal biscuits because having the oven on made the kitchen warm and then Gracie drank milk at the table and drew a monster in blue and purple crayon with eyelashes that licked the edges of the page. Orla made them toast and beans for lunch and drank cup after cup of tea to ease the passing of the hours.

After lunch they bundled up in everything woolly they owned and went to watch the trains in Liverpool Street station. When Orla had the money she would treat Gracie to a cup of hot chocolate from the buffet or a tube of fruit pastilles from W. H. Smith. In leaner months she would pack a little picnic of biscuits or butter sandwiches and they would wait for a bench to perch on and play I Spy and Twenty Questions and Botticelli – the characters in the latter taken entirely from the pages of children’s books, for Gracie only knew the worlds of Andersen and Grimm and Lewis.

‘Are you a princess but only after marriage?’

Gracie thought about this. ‘No,’ she said at last, ‘I’m not Cinderella.’

‘Are you furry and mistaken for a witch?’

‘What’s that?’ Gracie frowned at her mother as if Orla was being grown up and clever just to annoy her. ‘I don’t know.’

‘The cat. Musicians of Bremen. The robbers think she’s a witch. I’ve got a proper question! Are you royal?’

‘Yes,’ said Gracie with a haughty arch of one eyebrow, ‘I’m a queen.’

‘Of course. Okay, okay. Did you send your neighbour a little gift which could have doomed him?’

Gracie blinked and stared out towards the chuffing, chugging, waiting, steaming trains and watched the great black hands of the great white clock sweep round. Orla felt a pang of regret that she had made the question so hard because she could feel sadness leaking out of her daughter. Was she – as a mother – meant to coddle her daughter or challenge her? She never really knew for sure, so in her own haphazard way she would do first one then the other, just as she felt inclined at that moment in time.

‘I don’t know,’ Gracie said in a very small voice.

‘Sorry. Was that mean? I’m the Emperor of Japan with his mechanical nightingale.’

‘Okay,’ said Gracie, clearly fizzing with annoyance. ‘Have another question.’

‘Are you queen of a dying world?’

Gracie fixed Orla with a long, withering look. ‘Yes, clever Mummy. I am Queen Jadis and you win …’ she threw her arms up towards the ceiling, ‘everything.’

‘You’re really narked with me, aren’t you?’ said Orla.

‘You make it too hard. I’m four.’

‘I know. Mammy knows.’

‘You shouldn’t make me cross.’

‘Shouldn’t I?’

‘I can make the world blow up.’

‘Really? And how do you do that?’

‘I say the deplorable word.’

‘Well, you should do it. Go on, Gracie, blow it all to bits. Just tell Mammy one thing first. What is it?’

‘Bum,’ said Gracie. ‘Bum is the deplorable word.’ And she held her mother’s stare for half a minute until Orla’s face cracked into a bright-toothed smile.

The men in their camel-coloured coats swept past and the trains honked and blew out steam that seemed to scorch the cold air above their heads. Mother and daughter held hands and watched all the people in the world pass by, aware only of the features and topography of their strange and dazzling bubble life together.