Hokey Pokey, page 13
“The police won’t believe a story like that,” James said.
“The bones prove I’m right.”
“I have the bones. I’ll say my father tried to burn them.”
“My mother needs to be punished for what she did.” Silently, Nora added: as do I.
“I’m telling you to say nothing,” James said.
“Don’t you have a heart for your own father – he didn’t do it—”
“Stop.” James looked again at the diagrams on the ground. “Let him hang.”
Nora made it as far as PC McEwan’s house. It happened as James predicted. She was a little girl, telling a story of a wicked woman in the woods with a cooking pot, and without the bones she had no proof. It was more plausible that she had fallen ill, overheard Valery and Jaroslav discuss the mystery of who killed Miss Lowrie, and merged these fragments into a feverish hallucination where Valery was guilty.
For Nora had been in a delirium all week. Anyone could see she was still weak. The clothes were hanging from her. The policeman sent word to her father: she must be collected. Dr Čapek had to carry her back home, she was so tired. And at the end of the week, he sent her to Zurich.
6
Nora didn’t return to England for ten years. The war wasn’t long over, and she was just about to commence her medical studies in Switzerland, when she received word her parents had died in a house fire. This ran counter to Nora’s expectation Valery would outlive Jaroslav.
So Nora came back to the country of her birth for the nominal purpose of attending the funeral; but when the day arrived, she felt no inclination to travel from London to Alspath. Instead, she diverted to Mayfair. This was where the beauty salons proliferated. She was in search of a very particular treatment, and had identified, in a ladies’ journal, an advert for surgical procedures upon the skin. Such a procedure was part of the new wave of services using electricity, which also included hair drying, massaging of the face and removal of hair. Nora wished to avail herself of one particular electrical gadget: a square box of vibrating needles which imparted ink to the body, usually for the purpose of permanent rouge.
The salon was on North Audley Street, in a quiet spot surrounded by townhouses of the affluent. Nora was admitted by a well-spoken receptionist in a nurse’s uniform, who took twenty-five guineas from her, then led the way through to the consulting room. A man with a stiff-bosom shirt, a cravat and a stethoscope sat behind an imposing desk ornamented with anatomical mannequins. Eye test charts hung on the wall behind him. As a doctor’s daughter who planned one day to be a doctor herself, Nora recognised that these were props to reassure the customer rather than signs of genuine medical expertise. The nurse informed Nora this was Professor Charpentier, passed him a chit with Nora’s details upon it, then left the room silently.
“Mademoiselle.” He bowed his head courteously. “Let me begin by assuring you of the safety and simplicity of our procedures. The operation is virtually painless, and uses the very safest vegetable matter for colouring the top layer of your skin. We harness the very latest—”
“I have some specific requirements of my tattoo,” Nora interrupted.
In a tone of mild reprimand, he replied: “We do not speak of tattoos in Professor Charpentier’s salon.”
“Very well, I have specific requirements of my procedure. I need the blushing to be imparted to my forearm, not my face; I wish it to have the appearance of a nettle rash. And I would like a small illustration. Will that be possible?”
“Bien sûr,” he said with a nod, and Nora cringed inwardly at his ersatz accent. “There will be an additional charge for the illustration. What would you require?”
“A small chrysanthemum, about the size of a postage stamp.”
“That would be fifty guineas.”
“Can it be done right away?”
“If that is your wish. It is our practice to take a photograph of the finished work; once the procedure is complete you will be shown through into the relevant studio.”
He walked her into an adjoining room which seemed at pains to suggest luxurious comfort rather than the medical authority of Professor Charpentier’s quarters. The curtains were swagged taffeta, the floors elaborately mosaiced, and pink marble abounded – both in the fireplace and the pedestals that supported palms at the borders of the room. At a black lacquered table, seated in a bamboo chair, was a man of perhaps thirty – balding, bespectacled, braces over his shirt. At his fingertips were a selection of inks in jars, a blade, and the machine which Nora had come for.
“Professor Thomas,” said Professor Charpentier. Nora wondered who at the salon was not a seasoned academic. “Mademoiselle has requested some special ornamentation. Might you show her the possibilities?”
Nora took the other bamboo chair as Charpentier left, and explained to Thomas what her requirements were. He provided her with a large bound book, containing a variety of tattoo designs. She turned the pages for some time, newly nervous that the image she had in mind was going to be difficult to replicate exactly. How much variation could there be in a flower? Endless, it seemed. But a third of the way through its pages, her eyes settled upon one that was indistinguishable from Miss Lowrie’s. It had not, then, been drawn uniquely for her teacher. It was an image common enough for Nora to find, years later and miles away from the village by the woods.
“This one,” she instructed Thomas.
He nodded, and indicated she should roll up her sleeve. Once the work was under way she grasped that Charpentier had lied about it being painless. But she was glad to endure it. The pain was minor compared to amputation. It was minor compared to lying on a forest floor while your blood nourished the earth.
“You could have paid less if you’d come to me at Mile End,” Thomas said quietly, his vowels recognisable as east London. “The society ladies… They don’t want to be associated with sailors and the like. But you’re not one of those, are you? You’re not titled.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I didn’t want to pay less.”
Thomas gave his full attention to the artwork, dotting the nettle rash where she indicated she wanted it. The rest of the procedure was conducted without conversation, and Nora departed bearing a permanent reminder of her crime. She had meant the image to be an act of remembrance. It elicited another feeling Nora barely dared own. She enjoyed the resemblance to Miss Lowrie she had created. It was not the result of shifting shape, yet it felt similar, and it tempted her into whispering the words of Miss Lowrie she still remembered. Nora was blessed with a prodigious skill for mimicry. Didn’t all prodigies regard their talent as an ambiguous joy?
PART THREE
THE REGENT HOTEL,
BIRMINGHAM, 1929
1
Carlo Merlini woke in the darkness of his suite. It was glade-like in his bedroom, because of the green suede which covered the walls, and he thought he might have been dreaming of wolves. Cancelled performances often made him sleep fitfully, as though, having anticipated hard work, his body refused to adapt to the new circumstances. But he suspected – this time – something else had startled him into wakefulness. A noise? He could hear nothing now; the bedroom was too far from the corridor for him to be troubled by the other guests, and the rain on the window panes was soft.
“Tuono?” he muttered to himself. If there had been thunder, it had ceased. No, it wasn’t thunder that would put him on edge like this. He couldn’t shake the feeling someone else had been in the room. The bedroom door was open, and the darkness in the gap was pitch. Merlini sat up in bed, with the cautiousness of someone who has read too many cheap ghost stories, trying not to catch the attention of shadows. Berenice had a key, of course, though he was not expecting her.
He cleared his throat. “Vroni?”
The name was loud in the quiet of the suite. No response came. Normally Berenice’s perfume preceded her. There was a scent in the room, but it wasn’t her. Merlini sniffed: what was that? Decaying leaves? The thaw had made the hotel damp, perhaps. If only he had one of Berenice’s stray kreteks to hand. Burnt cloves would have sweetened the atmosphere.
Merlini’s wristwatch lay on the carpet next to the bed. He squinted at the faintly reflective figures: two in the morning. The bars and the kitchens would be long closed. A pity. He had no appetite for food as such, but light and conversation would have been welcome. They were the remedy for a tingle in the skin, and an over-fast pulse caused by ghostly visitations. He might prevail upon Berenice for the night instead, except she was displeased with him again. Iva Pacetti had been on the wireless and he made the mistake of praising her singing. Berenice threw a vase at his head. It wasn’t enough for her to excel in her own right. It wasn’t enough for her to be the best. He mustn’t notice any measure of talent in another soprano to avoid offense. But Merlini accepted Berenice’s caprice. This was their way; an explosion of temper, a retreat, until one of them flattered the other enough to reconcile. From past experience he knew he should leave her longer to cool. For now he had no alternative to his own company. He would start by drinking a glass of water, and maybe some knock-out drops to send him back to sleep.
The chloral hydrate was in the bathroom. He walked there now, switched on the electric light – a fat white pearl too bright to gaze on directly – and faced his reflection above the basin. He yawned. Grabbed the tooth mug. Held it beneath a spluttering tap.
It was halfway to his mouth when he noticed the colour. Against the mug’s white enamel, the water was tinted pink.
Merlini cursed, tipped the water down the drain, and let the tap run again for a while. Maybe rust needed clearing from the pipes. Damp and rust, a fine hotel this was turning out to be. Once again he filled the mug. Still pink. He wasn’t drinking that.
With a sigh he retrieved the chloral hydrate bottle from the cabinet. He took it with him to the drawing room, mixed a few drops in a glass tumbler with a shot of whisky, and downed it. His clothes from the previous evening were scattered across the banquette. Once he was passably attired, he left the suite, to rap on the housekeeper’s door. What was her name – Frye? The matter could have waited till morning, but if he had to sleep badly, he derived some satisfaction from waking another person up. The English said misery loves company. Presumably she was making herself decent, but his mood wasn’t improved by waiting. He knocked again. When the door opened he reflected sourly she had a face just like a milk pudding.
“Mr Merlini,” she said mildly. “May I be of assistance?”
“Your water isn’t clean,” he spat, dispensing with niceties. “I turn on the tap – it’s filthy! And there’s a bad smell in the suite.”
Frye tried to mollify. She would, naturally, investigate the problem with the water supply. Her attempt at conciliation increased his belligerence. After lurid nightmares and the sense of being watched it was relieving, nay enjoyable, to shout at this woman about the problems with his room. That was her job, to take his ire.
“Just fix the damn pipes!” Merlini hoped that his orders were loud enough to disturb Berenice, in her room. Curiosity might draw her out, prompting an early peace-offering. He raised his voice further as he demanded of Frye: “Tell Quarrington. Do you hear me? He needs to fix the damn pipes.”
He walked away before Frye could reply. The satisfaction his outburst gave him was short lived. Almost as soon as he closed the door, his wariness of shadows returned. He half suspected a curtain or table cloth shielded an assailant. Not an ordinary kind of foe, to be fought with your fists or a broken bottle; but a threat to the soul as much as the body. In such moments, he knew that Berenice’s visions were beautiful artifice; sensually charged, compelling as performance, as inspired as her song, and a product of her own exquisite mind. They lacked genuine portent. He’d felt true foreboding only once before, at the Palais Garnier. Merlini knew the opera house in Paris well. He found the building very ugly, and he wasn’t alone; amongst singers the Palais was known as the Wedding Cake due to its gaudy ostentation. In the final years of the last century, during a performance of Helle one spring, one of the baroque chandeliers – a behemoth of brass and crystal – had crashed from the ceiling. The structural supports had failed. An elderly lady in the top box was killed by the weight and inevitably in the decades that followed performers and patrons alike claimed to have seen her ghost. Merlini made no such claim himself. But his very first night singing there, he had been locked, accidentally, into the trap room below the stage. Before his release he had felt the same tingling of the skin, the same rapid heartbeat, and the same sense of being observed that he felt tonight. He knew the Regent was built over an ancient water source. The Palais had a lake beneath its foundations. Merlini speculated that brick should be planted in solid ground, for superstitious reasons. Maybe water made it harder for the Regent’s dead to move to their proper place. Venice must be full of hauntings.
Merlini wished all such experiences could be dismissed as the overactive imagination. He tried again to do so now. His fear should shame him, because it was a child’s dread, not that of a grown man. When he was reluctant to undress, thinking he might need to hasten from the suite again, he told himself he was merely too fatigued to disrobe, because the knock-out drops were taking hold and his legs felt leaden. In the bedroom, he took off his shoes but nothing else before lying down. Paper rustled in his pocket. He removed it, puzzled. Ah. Those notes from the mad house that Vroni stole. He settled in to read the reverse side, which he’d ignored last time, hoping the detached language would trick him into thinking more rationally about his own surroundings. The doctor emphatically dismissed such fancies. Patient MCCLX does possess unusual powers of vocal mimicry; she is typically indistinguishable from the human or animal she is repeating. In her accuracy she is disconcertingly similar to a dictation machine. She attributes her skill, in her delusion, to being a hyring, though she conveniently claims she isn’t sure how to physically transform in appearance as her mother did. I suspect she has a defect of the respiratory tract. If we draw a comparison with mimetic birds we might develop a reasonable hypothesis regarding her physiology. Birds have a syrinx which is situated low in the chest, with a two-part structure, which enables a wide reproduction of sounds beyond the capabilities of other species. Exploratory surgery upon the throat of Patient MCCLX, should it be compelled, would identify what features of her voicebox and respiratory tract allow her extraordinary powers of imitation. If she can be trusted that she has possessed mimetic abilities since infancy, and her mother had the same trait, the defect is likely congenital.
The words stopped staying in one place. Merlini screwed the note paper into a ball and tossed it to the carpet. Scientific talk had failed to influence his foreboding. That left only prayer. When he extinguished the light the room was glade-like again. Beneath his breath, for as long as he stayed wakeful, he murmured a petition to God. The plea petered and stalled. His sleep was drugged but the dreams didn’t abate: more wolves, in the over-bright bathroom, and the stink of rotting foliage. Merlini turned the taps in his dream too. This time, they ran red with blood.
2
A mere month of work remained for Geraldine Frye. She was engaged to be married, to a colonel rather older than her, who had frequented the Regent for years. With her new life in prospect she was less inclined to run herself ragged for guests. She thought them self-important, Merlini included, and her livelihood no longer depended on soothing them. Against a history of diligent service, who could object if Frye’s work were merely sufficient in these final few weeks? Her prior standards were so exemplary that relaxing brought her in line with the average. She chose to address Merlini’s complaint at a pace comfortable to her. Rather than trouble Quarrington immediately, she first checked whether her own sink were affected. Although she tried very hard to imagine the water was clear, she did have to accept the tap gushed with a suspicious tint.
Her bathroom was downpipe of Merlini’s suite. The problem might yet be confined to their rooms. Better for her beauty sleep if it wasn’t. She would suffer a trip to the fourth floor, and if they were having the same issues, Harvey could stay awake to sort it out with Quarrington. The practice would be good for her. Frye held the most prestigious housekeeping position; when Frye was gone, someone would have to step in. A touch more responsibility would put Harvey in good stead for the role. Frye was almost doing Harvey a favour.
Fortunately Merlini’s outburst hadn’t summoned any of his neighbours. As Frye passed through the corridor all was quiet. The sullen liftman was on duty, not the chatty one who would tell you how to build a clock if you asked him the time. All of which boded well for her fast return to bed, except a distraction arose at the final hurdle. Just before reaching Harvey’s room, Frye noticed there might be a problem with number 427.
The door was open. An arc was scratched into the pine floor near the threshold. To her annoyance, Frye sensed something was wrong, something needing further inquiry. She entered reluctantly. The room was moonlit. A boggy, foresty smell mixed with something sharper and more chemical was on the air.
“What a pong,” she murmured.
Someone had moved the walnut dressing table from its rightful place; it stood far from the wall and was askew, as if it had been pushed in haste then abandoned. That accounted for the scratched floor. Unfortunately there were also scratches on the top of the dressing table, right underneath the mirror. That could only be intentional. The guest must have vandalised it.
Hotel housekeeping soured you on people’s nature. And guests did worse than scratch at the furniture. This had been a source of pessimism for Frye before her engagement: she anticipated never marrying, because men liked an ignorant bride, and hotel women saw too much to be truly ignorant. The work made you worldly. When you looked at old housekeepers you could see in the lines of their face and the wariness of their posture that they were jaded. They were up at all hours, at dawn, at noon, at two in the morning; they inhaled, drank and ate the hotel. Frye had joined the Regent in 1919; she’d been given her start in the laundry. At any English hotel you might expect, in the course of the year, one or two guests to die; often of natural causes, sometimes from mishaps. Excesses of drugs could lead to deaths on the premises. Many people plotting self-slaughter were drawn to the anonymity of hotels. Laundries saw the results of the clean up. The Regent workers did clean everything up, scrupulously; they were discreet for the sake of the guests’ reputations and their own. At least they’d never had to report a murder. Yet they did have a peculiar, inexplicable secret, which Quarrington discouraged them in the strongest terms from discussing. From 1922 onwards, the number of suicides at the Regent had increased to four or five a year. Still stranger, the overdoses and hangings they were used to became a minority of cases: the increase was in bloody deaths, savage cuttings in the bath or on the bed sheets or what-have-you. Over the same seven years the Regent saw an increase in unpaid bills from guests on midnight flits, who resisted subsequent attempts to trace them. It made no odds that the Regent was a hotel of standing, the first choice for the very wealthiest visitors to the city. Rich guests had demons and vices and unpaid debts. And they got up to other things too; dirty business. Adultery for one thing – like that Miss Oxbow and Mr Merlini carrying on. He had a key to her room. Quarrington bent the rules for guests in the suites and Frye had to stay tight lipped. But they probably did it the normal way, unlike some. Frye didn’t like to think of the guests’ peccadilloes and very soon she wouldn’t have to.
