Siren Song, page 4
We sat together for a further hour. The bright sun moved from one side of the blind towards its centre, from one dead stalk in a pot to another. I had seen Yvonne’s own small garden and the abundance it contained.
When I rose to leave, the heat and the whisky had taken effect, and I stood for a moment to catch my balance.
‘I can let you have a look through our file,’ Sunny offered.
‘A disk would be good.’
‘I can let you have a look through our file on the drowning and the inquest,’ he repeated. He went to one of the cabinets, searched it, and drew out a file considerably thinner than I had anticipated after all they had just told me. ‘I’m away until Monday. You can have it until then.’
‘Why would you need it back?’ I asked him.
He laughed. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘You’re right. You go stirring through the bucket of shit that is Simon Fowler and I might need the file for background when a third body finally turns up.’ He pushed the folder under my arm.
‘In which case,’ I said, ‘I don’t suppose I could borrow your file on everything else connected to Fowler for the same time.’
‘Fowler and his lawyers were adamant about no records relating to his business activities being kept or used without his explicit and written permission.’
‘Meaning you don’t have a file on him?’
‘Meaning I’m having to think a little harder about this one before handing it over to someone like you.’
‘I won’t mention your name if he finds out and tortures me,’ I said.
‘Hm, big joke. And of course, once he knows you exist and what you’re up to, he’ll never make the connection back to here.’ He looked at Yvonne, waiting for her to decide whether or not I was to be trusted with the second file.
‘We’re waiting on the word of “Miss Pineapple”?’ I said.
‘The funny bit finished,’ Sunny said, his eyes still on hers. ‘This is Simon Fowler we’re talking about.’ He trusted her with his life, and she trusted him with hers, and anywhere else these would have sounded like portentous and unbelievable claims.
‘Fowler will make the connection anyhow,’ Yvonne said eventually.
Sunny went to another cabinet, unlocked the bottom drawer and took out a considerably thicker folder.
Yvonne rose beside me. She, too, was surprised by the effects of the drink.
Sunny gave me the folder.
‘Have a good time in Scunthorpe,’ I told him.
‘I’ll try,’ he said. At the door, he took my hand again. ‘I’m glad you came,’ he said.
I nodded.
Beside me, Yvonne put her arms round both our shoulders and said, ‘Group hug, anyone?’
She alone came with me beyond the cool air of the fans back out onto the heat of the fire-escape, where she stood and watched me go, just as she had stood and watched me arrive. She raised her hand to me as I turned the corner, and I waved back.
5
THE FILE ON Helen Brooks’s death told me little that I hadn’t already learned from her mother’s own carefully chosen clippings. Again I read the subtext over and over – that death by drowning was both something that should not surprise us, and that it was, in most instances – always that qualifier – something that was avoidable. We were an island flowing with rivers, seas that came and went; and some of those rivers and seas remained unfathomed even today; and others changed their configuration with every tide.
And of all these dangerous rivers and unfathomable depths, the Humber ranked high on everybody’s list of dangerous waters to sail on.
I noted the names of the local reporters, and saw that Sunny himself had written several of the articles, that he had interviewed Peter Nicholson at length the morning after the drowning.
I turned to the file on Simon Fowler. Its contents proved even more disappointing. Listening to Sunny, and watching him as he had retrieved the file for me, I’d imagined it to be stuffed with details of Fowler’s property dealings and development plans. Instead, there were only several dozen clippings, most of which showed Fowler receiving an award for his building work or revealed him at some function surrounded by the better-known faces of the city councillors and other civic dignitaries. By and large, the two groups were interchangeable.
Fowler was referred to as a major property-holder and developer. He owned letting agencies. Local contractors and tradesmen had nothing but good to say about him. He had been invited onto the boards of several regeneration committees. Hull was in a state of perpetual regeneration. Jerusalem was always waiting to be builded here.
Several of these reports referred to the recent tragedy in Fowler’s life, and repeated his comments that he was now working even harder than before to help get himself through a difficult time.
In two of the later articles, he was pictured with a woman on his arm, in a revealing dress, a few inches taller than him, and with long, vividly blonde hair. He introduced her as Nikki and said she was a great comfort to him. Those were his words, and after what Sunny had told me, I imagined all the pieces had been seen and vetted by Fowler before being published.
And somewhere between these two folders, Helen Brooks and all the concerns of her mother had disappeared.
At the bottom of the file were several whole newspapers, folded tight and laid together. I took these out, hoping for a more detailed profile of Fowler, or even something to substantiate what both Sunny and Yvonne had suggested concerning his alleged criminal activities upon which much of this bright and shining enterprise was supposedly founded. The papers were nationals, complete, and all dated within the last month. I searched the first of them, but found nothing. I went through it again, scrutinizing the articles where Fowler might conceivably have been mentioned in connection with someone or somewhere else, but again there was nothing.
Whatever Sunny’s reasons for including the papers, I would have to wait until his return to the city to find out. I knew from my previous forays into his files that, in contrast to the apparently haphazard manner in which he lived and worked, his records were meticulously kept, indexed and cross-referenced. Nothing of any value was ever lost to him, and it occurred to me that the material relating to Fowler might have been filed elsewhere by Yvonne, and that Sunny had given me the wrong file.
I called the agency, spoke to the answering machine, and waited. It wasn’t late. Sunny might already have left for Scunthorpe, but Yvonne was usually there until at least seven each evening. I told her I could hear her typing and to pick up the phone, but there was still nothing.
6
THREE DAYS LATER, Monday morning, as I crossed Dock Street alongside the marina, I saw a woman sitting on one of the benches overlooking the moored yachts there. At first I thought it was Alison Brooks who had returned to see me, and who had come to wait by the water upon finding my office empty.
I approached closer and saw that it was not Alison Brooks, but a woman twenty years younger – in her late thirties – but who resembled her so closely that she could only have been her surviving older daughter.
As I neared her, she turned to watch me. She knew I had seen and recognized her. She carried a small bag and a newspaper, which remained folded in her lap.
I crossed the cobbles to her. I had Sunny’s files with me, but there was nothing marked on the folders to indicate their contents.
‘I thought for a moment you were your mother,’ I told her.
‘She described you,’ she said, ‘but I wasn’t sure.’ She put down her bag and held out her hand. ‘Louise Brooks.’
She made no effort to leave the seat and its view over the yachts.
‘This was where he kept it,’ she said.
‘Does your mother know you’ve come to see me?’ I sat beside her.
‘I told her I wanted to, but she tried to dissuade me.’
‘Meaning she knows you’re here.’
She nodded once.
‘Are you here to tell me you think she’s wasting her time and her money?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t know. But that’s it, isn’t it – time. Whatever she thinks she’s doing, whatever she hopes to achieve, I don’t want her to tie herself up in all of this Fowler business again when she could be doing something more worthwhile.’
‘She didn’t strike me as the kind of woman who might take herself off on a world cruise,’ I said.
‘She isn’t.’
‘I haven’t actually done anything yet,’ I said. ‘I told her I’d call her and let her know what course of action I considered best.’
‘She’s convinced you’ll do it. I was with her at the hospital when you called her. If you aren’t going to do what she wants, then tell her immediately, Mr Rivers.’
‘She seemed determined. She’d find someone else.’
‘I know.’
‘Are you here to persuade me to tell her to forget about it?’
‘Hardly. She stopped listening to whatever I had to say on the matter a long time ago.’ She turned to face me. ‘What you have to understand, Mr Rivers, is that my mother and I have never shared the same understanding of this whole Helen thing from even long before she drowned.’
It seemed a clumsy and evasive way of expressing herself.
‘Do you think your sister’s death – whatever the circumstances – was an accident?’
‘And that it should all be left behind us? Perhaps. Especially now.’
‘What did the doctor tell your mother?’
‘It was more a question of what she told him.’
‘That she wasn’t going to submit herself to his treatment? Were you with her when she told him?’
‘I work at the hospital. I’m on a year’s contract. Site Practitioner. Human resources. My predecessor’s on maternity leave. Most days it’s just a juggling act, begging, pleading, pushing and cajoling. From surgeons to cleaners.’
‘Where were you before?’
‘Birmingham. Three years. And before that, Nottingham. I’ve been here for ten months.’
Meaning she’d probably come back to Hull to be with her mother at the time of the inquest twelve weeks after the drowning.
‘And afterwards?’
‘I’m waiting to see what happens,’ she said, meaning her mother.
‘What do you want to happen?’ I asked her.
She smiled at the suggestion, as though even that degree of choice had never before been offered to her.
‘I wish my mother would concentrate on herself and on her own needs.’
‘I think this is a need,’ I said. ‘The two things seem bound together for her.’
‘I know. And I sometimes wonder that if she hadn’t had the worry and stress of all this—’ She stopped abruptly.
‘What? That the cancer wouldn’t have returned?’
She nodded and then shook her head. ‘I know it’s not that straightforward or simple, but I know things would have been a lot easier for her if she’d been able to accept the verdict of the inquest and let everything go.’
‘I don’t doubt it, but the—’
‘But what – the return of the cancer’s brought everything back into sharper focus for both of us?’
‘I was going to say the distinction between the two things seemed clear enough to her.’
She laughed.
‘Also on the plus side,’ I said, ‘I didn’t make any remark about you being called Louise Brooks.’
‘Not many people know who she was.’ Her dark hair was cut in a severe line along her jaw. She wore no eye make-up, only a faint lipgloss. ‘It was deliberate. My mother thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Sophisticated, intelligent, powerful.’
‘And so that’s what you became?’
‘I had the haircut as a girl to please her.’
‘It suits you.’
‘You don’t know me.’
‘No. But I know you’re here to sound me out and to decide whether or not I’m the man for the job, or if you should persuade your mother to go elsewhere.’
She acceded to this in silence. ‘She used to tell us that true choice only ever existed in the province of the rich,’ she said. ‘One of her sayings. She had a hard life with my father. It was a lot easier for her with her second husband, Helen’s father, and after she’d started making something of herself.’
‘She told me about her floristry.’
‘She owned eight shops and a delivery business. She employed almost thirty people before she sold up.’
‘Did either you or your sister work with her?’
‘Did she expect one of us to take over from her, you mean? It was the last thing she wanted. She wanted us to make our own ways in the world. When Helen started at university—’ Again, she stopped abruptly.
I didn’t press her.
‘Lulu in Hollywood,’ I said.
She understood me. ‘That’s what Helen used to call me when she was small – Lulu. She’d started doing it again in the few years before she died.’
‘Were you close?’
‘I’m – I was – eighteen years older than her. We were always more like three generations instead of two. And in answer to your question – no, we were never particularly close. Like I said – life with my own father was never easy. They struggled.’
‘Whereas the second marriage—’
‘Was considerably more comfortable for everyone concerned. I don’t know if Helen was planned, or even wanted, but it was a completely different world by then. By then we’d left the flat on Orchard Park and moved to Brian’s house in leafy Cottingham. He’d been married before, but there were no children. Helen was only three when I went away to university. London. I saw her often enough, but I was never a proper sister to her, more like an aunt.’
‘And you resented the fact that your mother, Helen and Brian appeared to have made a completely new family in your absence, and one which didn’t include you?’
‘Something like that. He was a good man. He took care of her, of us all.’
‘But everything you and your mother had had beforehand was lost?’
She considered this. ‘I went away, grew up, and when I came back, it was all gone. She brought me up alone. Most mornings she was up at four or five, and she took me with her most places she went while she was getting her shops up and running. I can still walk into any florist’s and name every single flower. I can give you wholesale and retail, blooms and accessories, all across the range. I can make you up a wedding bouquet or a buttonhole. I can probably even spell out your name in tight red roses for your coffin.’
‘You sound as though you miss it.’
‘Not really. Once, it was all I lived for – I was determined that it was what I was going to do – but, like I said, everything changed. I worked in London for eight years. By the time I moved to Nottingham, Helen was already a teenager and I was just another distant adult to her.’
‘Is that one of the reasons why you can’t share your mother’s conviction now?’
‘Probably.’
‘Were you jealous of her?’
‘Of course I was. And I’d be lying to you if I said a small part of me didn’t still resent my mother’s obsession with all this now.’
‘She would have done the same for you.’
‘I know. But I never asked it of her.’
‘Meaning there were other things where Helen was concerned?’
‘Some.’
‘Things you knew about and also resented?’
‘Let’s just say that certain allowances were always made for Helen which were never made for me. And I doubt if “resentment” is the right word. I think Helen wrapped Brian and my mother round her little finger. With my father gone, it was just me and my mother. But with Brian eager to play the doting daddy there was always another card to play.’
‘You think she manipulated them?’
‘I know she did. It was never how they saw it, of course. Or if my mother did see it, then she made allowances or excuses.’
‘And you, meanwhile, continued to feel excluded.’
‘I excluded myself. I had a life of my own – first in London, then wherever.’
‘Would you have come back here if Helen hadn’t drowned?’
‘And if my mother hadn’t become terminally ill?’
She rose, walked the short distance to the railings and leaned out over the water. Her bag and paper lay on the bench beside me. The sun flashed where it was reflected off the aluminium hulls. She turned to face me, resting on the rail.
‘Were you telling the truth when you said you hadn’t started looking into Helen’s death?’ she said.
I patted the folders. ‘Mostly.’
‘And you haven’t done anything yet to alert Simon Fowler that the whole thing’s about to be stirred up again?’
‘Not as far as I know. Why?’
She turned back to look out over the yachts. On the far side of the marina, a crane was lifting one of the vessels on to a waiting lorry. She watched the slow progress of this before answering me.
‘I don’t necessarily share my mother’s conviction that Fowler was wholly responsible for Helen’s death. If you’d known her those last few months of her life, you’d understand a little better about what she was and wasn’t capable of doing all by herself. I’m not saying Fowler wasn’t somehow involved, just that his part in it all might not be what my mother wants it to be, that’s all.’
It was a lot to take in. The remark about her sister had seemed unnecessarily harsh, and her comment on Fowler obscured more than it revealed. I sensed there was little to be gained by confronting her directly on either of these points.
‘But, like your mother, you believe Fowler – what? – led her astray?’
‘Nice word. But, yes, I do.’
