Siren Song, page 36
Sunny was sceptical. ‘It would have come out by now,’ he said. ‘One way or another, Fowler would have told you all about it.’ He continued to move around the model, taking pictures. Just like the police photographer had moved around Nicholson’s corpse. He continued asking Laura about its constituent parts and how these had been put together.
‘Will you destroy it?’ I asked her, guessing that this was what she was now going to do to the figure.
‘That was another reason I wanted you to come,’ she said.
‘To watch it happen?’
‘You could at least tell Helen’s mother what I’d done. So that if she genuinely was upset by it, then she could stop worrying.’
‘Why not take Louise Brooks’s money and then destroy it,’ I suggested, knowing that Helen’s own exhibit had been the cause of considerably greater concern and regret to Alison Brooks.
‘If I did that, it would look as though I was doing it because it was what she wanted me to do. I loved Helen. I really loved her. To Louise, all this is just an uncomfortable reminder of something she’ll be happy to put behind her. To me it’s – it’s—’ She started to cry.
‘You don’t have to explain,’ I said.
‘Yes I do. Because there was something I never told you.’ She held her hands over her eyes.
Sunny looked up at the remark.
‘It’s something I should have made clear to you right from the start,’ Laura said.
She rose from where she sat beside me and went across the room to the model at the window. She caressed Helen Brooks’s upper arm, held a finger to the lipstick pieces of her lips. She ran her hand down over the papier-mâché and material of Helen’s stomach and rested it on the clippings of pubic hair and used sanitary towels at her crotch. She hesitated, withdrew and then replaced her hand. She seemed momentarily uncertain of herself, half lost in her reverie of remembering.
I started to say something, and Sunny told me to shut up.
Laura Lei started to pull at the glued-on hair and the stained towels, letting them fall to the floor as they came loose. Her tears continued to run unchecked over her cheeks. She pulled harder at the thicker layers beneath the hair and scraps of material – the old tights and knickers – until she had torn a hole in the model. She held her other hand against Helen’s chest to keep her steady and upright. Eventually, the hole she was tearing was large enough for her to reach inside the figure, where she groped around for a moment, and then withdrew holding a collection of white sticks.
She held these out to me.
‘Pregnancy testing kits,’ she said.
She laid them along the arm of the chair in which I sat, rearranging them, placing them in a specific order.
‘It was Helen’s idea.’
Sunny came closer.
Laura Lei started holding the sticks up for me so that I might see them more clearly. There were ten of the indicators, and she counted as she performed the simple ritual.
She paused at number eight.
The previous seven indicators had shown a single, vague blue line at their tips. The final three showed double, darker lines.
‘Spot the difference,’ she said.
‘Helen Brooks was pregnant,’ I said, the words and the thought and the realization and all they implied forming simultaneously, and all three of them far ahead of any true understanding of what I was being shown and told.
‘Three months,’ Laura said. ‘The final fuck-up. The fuck-up to set the seal on all the other fuck-ups. Fuck-up: The Musical.’
Sunny photographed the indicators on the arm of the chair, and then the three Laura still held.
‘Who knew?’ I asked her.
‘Who do you think?’
‘Her mother?’
She shook her head.
‘Louise? Fowler?’
She raised her eyebrows and shrugged. ‘Helen told me she’d told her sister – something to do with Louise working at a hospital – Birmingham, she said – and being able to get her a scan without anyone here ever finding out.’
‘And Fowler?’
‘She didn’t want him to know. I thought Louise would have told you all this by now.’
Sunny took the three indicators from her and laid them with the others.
Laura Lei’s sobbing became convulsive.
Sunny put his arm around her and pulled her to sit beside him on the sofa. He was three times her size and she was lost in his embrace. His hand rested on her head and he stroked her short black hair.
I looked from them to the hole in Helen Brooks’s groin, at its frayed edges and at the darkness inside. I heard the boys in the other room through the thin wall, cheering something on the television. The sun coming through the window beside the punctured model showed every collapsed web, dead fly and desiccated spider of that long dry summer, and I looked up into it and was momentarily blinded by it.
44
‘I THINK YOUR priority now is working out what it all means,’ Sunny said.
We sat together on a bench in Pearson Park, the glasshouses behind us. Ahead of us the grass was covered with sunbathers and playing children.
‘It means Louise lied to me from the very beginning,’ I said. I tried to remember what she’d told me about her own unwanted pregnancy and termination ten years earlier.
We’d come into the park from Park Grove before returning to the agency. Sunny called Yvonne every ten minutes, but her phone remained switched off. He didn’t share my concerns regarding the implications of Helen Brooks’s pregnancy, and he in turn was angry that I didn’t share his concern over Yvonne, who he was convinced had been arrested. There was nothing from her on his voicemail.
‘It means that not only did Fowler kill Alison Brooks’s daughter, but her grandchild, too,’ I said. It was only the beginning of my understanding.
‘About which she was totally unaware,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do – tell her? Don’t you think one unresolved and unpunished murder might be enough for her to have to cope with at the moment?’ He’d been reluctant to leave Laura Lei, and had followed me out of the house only at her promise to call him if Louise returned.
‘Are you saying that Louise kept it from me for the same reason – because her mother never knew and she wanted her never to find out?’
‘It’s more than a possibility. What would you want if you were the woman’s only surviving child?’
‘I’d probably do the same,’ I admitted.
‘Precisely.’ He called Yvonne again, but there was still no answer.
I offered to go with him to the Queen’s Gardens police station.
‘Too early,’ he said.
‘It’s why Louise made such a big thing of the photographs she’d taken from Helen’s files,’ I said. ‘She wanted me thinking more about them than about Laura’s model because she knew what I might find there.’
He shook his head. ‘You were never going to find anything without Laura Lei showing you. Talk to Louise. Tell her you know. I don’t see what more you can do, or what real difference it’s likely to make to anything, not now. You’ve got Brownlow sufficiently interested again. Leave things to him. Fowler or Marco will fuck up eventually.’
‘What – and this time Brownlow will be waiting and all will be revealed?’
‘No. But enough might come to light to secure convictions concerning Nicholson and his wife.’
‘Nothing’s ever going to do that for Helen Brooks,’ I said.
He took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his face. ‘I imagine Fowler’s been giving all this considerably more thought than you have,’ he said.
‘Meaning he’s got his own clean, well-lighted path out of all of this and that nothing’s going to stop him from walking?’
‘In all likelihood, yes. I think it’s something you ought to get used to.’
I shook my head.
‘Suit yourself. But suppose Alison Brooks did know right from the start about Helen’s pregnancy – how would you feel about things then? If I were you, I’d be thinking long and hard about how you’ve been used in all of this.’
‘Meaning if I hadn’t gone to Fowler with my theory about Marco, Nicholson and Nicholson’s wife, Nicholson would still be alive now? And if I hadn’t gone back to the salvage yard, the old guy there might still be alive?’
‘I’m just saying it’s something you should think about, that’s all. No one made Fowler – or whoever – do what he did.’
‘But I pushed him into jumping sooner rather than later?’
‘That would be one interpretation. Another would be that it was what Louise Brooks wanted you to do all along because she knew what was likely to happen.’
‘And you think she might have gone to Fowler with everything I discovered about Nicholson before I did?’
‘It makes sense in light of what just happened to him,’ he said.
‘And if Marco killed Nicholson without Fowler knowing about it?’
‘Same thing. Marco still knows what he knows about the night Helen Brooks died, and about what happened to Nicholson’s wife as a consequence of that. Now it’s just his word against Fowler’s. Like I said, leave them to Brownlow and start thinking about what you’re going to tell Alison Brooks. Fowler’s only let you go on pushing him this far because he needed to see how it was all going to play out; because he wanted his deal with Webster to be completed; and because he needed to know as much as you did about what was going on between Marco and Nicholson. You might think you’ve been worrying him by bringing all this back out into the light again, but you’ve also done him one or two favours along the way.’
‘Meaning Marco’s going to turn up dead soon, and all Fowler’s going to do is point out the connection between Marco and the Nicholsons and finally wash his hands of the whole affair?’
‘Or perhaps Marco will go the same way Helen Brooks and the trafficker went. Perhaps he’ll sleep with the shellfish for a very long time to come. Either way, there would be nothing left to tie Fowler – via either Marco or Nicholson – to what happened to Helen Brooks out on the sea. If it makes you feel any better about your own part in it all, go to Louise and tell her that you know she’s been lying to you all along.’
‘And then what? Listen to her say, “So what?”?’
I regretted the remark immediately.
I regretted even more the fact that everything he’d just suggested, every speculation, guess and connection he’d made had been wrong, and that I’d known before sitting with him on the bench that the truth of everything lay in another direction completely. The piece of cloth in my pocket told me that much. All I’d been doing was using him as a sounding board for the version of the truth I most wanted now to fit the changing facts.
Finally exasperated by my remark, he rose from the bench to leave me, and as he did so, his phone rang. He answered immediately. ‘Yvonne.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Arrested?’ He said nothing for a minute. ‘I never even gave you a second thought,’ he said. ‘Plus, there have been one or two developments out here in the real world.’ He asked her where she was and told her how long it would take him to get to her with his solicitor.
He repeated everything she’d told him, unable to hide his relief.
‘You’d better go to her,’ I said.
He started walking away from me, then paused and turned. ‘Think about what I said,’ he called to me. ‘It’s always wise to know when your part in something’s over.’
‘Tell Yvonne I said, “Hello, jailbird.”’
‘She’ll appreciate it. It’ll help with her Woman Of The People image.’ He turned away and continued walking.
Waiting until he was out of sight beyond the glasshouses, I took out the piece of material I’d picked from the edge of Nicholson’s small fire.
I laid it in my palm, smoothing out its creases. I looked at it closely and sniffed it again. And then I closed my hand around it and put it back in my pocket.
I left the park in the opposite direction to that taken by Sunny.
On Beverley Road I caught a bus back into the city centre.
I walked from Victoria Square along the marina back to Humber Street, where I sat for the rest of the afternoon clearing my mind and trying to decide what to do next.
At six, I went to the Minerva, sat outside for an hour with a drink, walked to the empty pier and then to the footbridge over the river. The aquarium rose starkly above me, its tinted glass in shadow, no longer reflecting the sun which heliographed the building’s presence like the coming future over the old and empty harbour and the silted dock basin.
At dusk, I returned briefly to Humber Street.
I called Louise Brooks and left her a message, asking her to call me.
The rain which had held off for the previous six weeks was again promised for either later that same night or early the next morning. It had already rained in Wales and the south-west, and summer storms were gathering on the far side of the Pennines. The forecaster on the radio sounded desperate to be believed, as though his need for this had some bearing on what now happened, on whether the rain finally came or if it continued to stay away. He told those of us who were the most desperate for the downpour – those of us who felt as though we had dried out over the summer – to pray for it. Just put your hands together, lift your faces to the sky and pray for it, he said, near-evangelical now in his own uncertain desire.
45
I CALLED ANDREW Brownlow the next morning. Everything I asked him about the fire made him more evasive. It was almost midday; I’d been trying to contact him since nine.
Finally, he started to answer me.
‘To begin with,’ he said, ‘all this is preliminary. Nicholson died of both smoke inhalation and the blow to his skull. The fumes meant he was probably unconscious when the timber fell and finished the job.’
‘And that’s the all-inclusive official line, is it?’
‘Just listen. There was a two-inch bolt in the timber. The skull fracture was just as likely to have been caused by that as by anything else.’
‘You can’t even convince yourself of that,’ I said.
‘Excuse me? Man found lying in burned-out wreckage of his home, lungs full of soot, beam with bolt lying over his skull. It sort of adds up. If you know differently, then tell me. Now.’ He waited for me to say something.
‘And the small fire of burned clothes?’ I said.
‘You were the one who told me why Nicholson might want to get rid of the last of his wife’s possessions. There were patches of burned grass between that fire and the house. Nicholson had tins of turps, white spirit, boat varnish and diesel in the lean-to. He was covering the last of his tracks and it all went wrong.’
‘And, presumably, you’ve spoken to Fowler between then and now.’
‘He was at the Guildhall at eleven in the morning. He left at two. The fire officer puts the fire as starting somewhere between twelve and one.’
‘Good margin of error calculation on Fowler’s part.’
‘Believe what you want. Whoever started the fire, it wasn’t Fowler.’
‘And he, of course, has no idea who might have done it, or who else might have wanted Nicholson dead.’
‘Accidents happen, Mr Rivers.’
‘They do in the cases you’re supposed to be investigating.’ I expected him to hang up, but he knew as well as I did that however Nicholson had died, he had been killed, and that the fire had been started in an attempt to cover this up.
‘You’re not telling me something,’ he said eventually. ‘Why is that, I wonder. Because you think it gives you the edge? Because you know that, whatever else happens, nothing bad is now going to find its way back to Fowler, and you plan on doing something about that yourself? Or, as Fowler again suggested to me yesterday, is it because you’re not seeing things as clearly as you once did and you now have a wholly personal motive in all of this, in trying to pin everything on Fowler and get yourself even deeper into Louise Brooks’s good books?’
‘That’s—’
‘What? A malicious and unfounded allegation? Of course it is. But nine times out of ten, they’re the ones that make the most sense. That’s why people make them. You need to look more closely at the cards you think you’re still holding, Mr Rivers, before you start pointing out everyone else’s deficiencies.’
‘Meaning?’ The word was a reflex; I knew exactly what he meant. Everything he was telling me, Sunny had already told me in the park the previous day.
‘Meaning that until Helen Brooks’s evidence-covered body shows up, nothing is going to connect her death to Fowler – not in the way you and her sister want it to be connected. Meaning that without Nicholson, and without his wife – who might or might not have known about what you allege he alleges he saw – then ditto. Meaning that no one, Fowler included, knows where Marco might now be. Meaning we can all make our guesses, Mr Rivers, but that’s all they are. And even though you might think your guesses carry more weight than mine, they don’t. Meaning that Louise Brooks herself never once came to us after the coroner’s verdict with any of this. Why do you think that was? Why do you think she came to you with it all with her cleavage showing and her legs opening and closing until you properly understood all she was asking you to do? I daresay you’ve asked yourself the same question, but I don’t imagine for one minute that you’ve looked too hard for an answer. You’re very quiet now, for instance.’
I hadn’t spoken to Louise since seeing her at the hospital.
‘What’s wrong, Mr Rivers?’ he said. ‘Some of those benefits been withdrawn a little sooner than you’d anticipated?’
‘Where do you think Marco is?’ I asked him.
‘I think he’s somewhere where he hopes Fowler will never be able to find him. At least not until he makes Fowler fully aware of the benefits of the pair of them living together into a ripe and peaceful old age. And when that happens, then the last of your tiny cracks closes shut and stays shut.’
‘What does the fire officer think?’ I said.
