Human Pages Page 7

  As Emmet had expected, Walter proved to be a lissom and subtle dancer. Each of his moves perfectly complemented and underscored his partner’s now blossoming verve. For a brief moment, she began to exude a demonstrable grace, which he counterpointed in the sway and thrust of his jutting hips. Then the music changed, and, with a nonchalant wave of his hand, he moved aside to backslap another potential supporter. Her eyes still shining, she rejoined Emmet.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘That was a good idea. Can I get you something? Something to drink or do something for you?’

  ‘No. Don’t worry about me. Relax. I’m hired help. I’m Emmet Briggs by the way.’

  In an unguarded second, she flashed him the look then recovered her composure. ‘I’ve heard of you. I’m Corinne. Just Corinne. That’s how people know me.’

  ‘Where you learn to dance like that?’

  She laughed. ‘You don’t have to be black to shake it. I practised is the answer.’

  Emmet nodded. ‘It does make perfect.’

  ‘Shall we sit down? I could do with a break.’ She left unsaid the thought that, with him, none but the foolhardy would be likely to demand her services. ‘Tell me if it’s not okay.’

  ‘It’s alright, so long as I keep an eye on Papa Le Bas over there.’

  ‘Why do you call him that? He’s Walter Sembele isn’t he?’

  Why indeed, Emmet thought, for Walter was all too human, a trickster certainly, but in no sense, in spite of his religious jive, a divine messenger. It was the kid’s doing, he realised. Somehow the memory of the kid had prompted him to use the name. Granma used to know all about it, but what it was he did not seem able to retrieve. ‘Only a way of speaking,’ he said. ‘Let’s sit here.’

  The image of a smiling Antoine Viall, pulling the trigger of his newly purchased automatic, flitted into his mind. There was no sound and no visible target, just the memory of the two bodies, now fused in coitus, in the bed upstairs, then, as suddenly as it had come, it went. He felt Corinne’s hand slide into his trouser pocket, and he became aware that she was starting to tell him about her childhood in Veldar, a place he had good reason to remember.

  ‘ . . . in my home town of Veldar when I was twelve. They were busy building the extension spur to the North-South motorway at the time. Gangs of construction workers were billeted in a trailer camp near the site. In the evenings and at the weekends especially, when their shifts were finished, they came into town to get drunk, get stoned and, if possible, get laid. Naturally, this often resulted in fights with our local youths who had not been hired for the job. You could say the town was equally divided between those who benefited from the extra business and those who increasingly resented the disturbance of our somewhat somnolent everyday tranquillity.

  ‘During the preceding years, the closure of first the shoe and furniture factories, and then the tanneries and sawmills, had dramatically changed our way of life. Long gone were the days when Veldar’s slopes and riverside hummed with industry, and its sons and daughters followed their fathers and mothers into the same work. As a very small kid at play in that disappeared world, I can still see my two older sisters watching over me, while I toddled freely, my hair crowned with daisy chains, amongst the lads and lasses sunning themselves on the riverbank. Then the hooters sounded, telling them that their lunch break was at an end, and they rose and left us to our skipping and chanting outside the factory gates.

  ‘From drip to increasing flow, that comforting bustle and commerce was replaced by stagnation, followed by migration, until the time arrived when Greenlea commuters, seizing the chance of improved road communications, began to buy up rundown properties.

  ‘They brought with them a new level of expectation and sophistication. One of the old tannery buildings on the north bank was converted into a disco-cum-nightclub called My Friend Felicia’s.Normally, it operated a policy of selective membership coupled with a strictly enforced dress code. However, in their wisdom, the owners decided to cash in on the short-term construction boom, so, for the month of September, they threw it open for anyone over twenty-one. The first body was discovered there on the morning of Wednesday the fourth.

  ‘The story went like this. Mary Langlands, a bag lady of no fixed abode, had wandered in through the open door of the service area. Whilst George Aarons, the bar manager, was angrily escorting her off the premises, she told him that she had seen a corpse in one of the rooms. Unlikely as it seemed, her information proved to be correct, for, on later inspection, there in the general manager’s office, sprawled on the floor, was a cadaver.

  ‘The deceased, whose identity was never satisfactorily established, was a Caucasian male of around twenty-five to twenty-nine years of age. The cause of death, surmised by the police doctor and then confirmed by the pathologist, was drowning in fresh water. DI Pinson of the local force led the inquiry.

  ‘The second body was found ten days later, lying beside an earth-moving machine at the roadworks. It had been a clear, moonlit night with the onset of hoar frost already whitening the ground when Lewis Wilson, one of the security guards, made his way round along the western perimeter of the site. Scarcely needing the beam of his torch, he thought he had come across simply another drunk as he glimpsed a slumped, comatose figure on the ground. Swearing, drumming on his shoulder and poking with the toe of his boot for encouragement, he tried to lift him to his feet. The clothing he grasped was soaking wet. The drunk felt limp and lifeless. Then, according to Wilson, an extraordinary thing happened. The man groaned, escaped from his hold and staggered away round the digger, where he collapsed again.

  ‘Of course, after the police and the doctor had examined the body, his testimony was discounted. Wilson was tested for drugs and alcohol, but the results were negative. Once more, death was by drowning. The deceased had been in fresh water for at least four days.

  ‘This time, however, dental checks got an identification. The dead man was Ezzard Ambilene, age forty-three, a sales representative employed on commission-only by the Steady Drift Insurance Company. He left a widow, Catherine, and two children, Lois and Maurice. For most of his life he had lived in Greenlea.

  ‘The last known sighting of Ambilene alive was at My Friend Felicia’s in the early hours of Tuesday morning, tenth September. Three people remembered him there. Vera Sowenwell, the part owner and general manager, had been cold-called by him on the previous afternoon, a fact that he mentioned when he introduced himself to her in the club later on the following night. George Aarons, under questioning, produced Ambilene’s business card; he vaguely recalled chatting to him about vintage cars and life insurance some time after midnight. Finally, Liz Congreve, a local supermarket checkout woman, stated that someone resembling his description had propositioned her on the dance floor around 1.30 a.m. She had not seen him after she had refused his offer. Meanwhile, Lewis Wilson stuck vehemently to his preposterous version of events.

  ‘The appearance of the third body raised a complete furore. Tragically, it was that of an eight-year-old child, Alice Michaels, whose parents had reported her missing a fortnight earlier. In truly heartbreaking circumstances, she was found being nuzzled by the family dog, an Airedale terrier, in the backyard of her home. Its frantic whines and yelps brought first her mother and then her father to the scene. She, like the other two, had been drowned, but on this occasion her body had only been in the water briefly. Up to an hour, it was reckoned.

  ‘Mounting suspicion, rapidly overtaken by hate and execration, fell on the poor child’s parents. Rennie Michaels was well known as a blustering bully. He had numerous convictions for aggravated and grievous bodily harm. Milena, his cohabitee, had a history of credit card theft and petty fraud, supplemented in hard times by casual prostitution.

  ‘Accordingly, from day one, the media stoked up the fires against them, with the unsurprising result that their house was soon besieged by enraged locals bolstered by a contingent of rubber-necking ghouls. Dog and human excrement was regularly deposited thro
ugh their letterbox. Fascist inscriptions bedaubed their walls, and, for their own protection, they were ferried to a safe address somewhere out of town. The national police force, much to Pinson’s chagrin, now took charge of the investigation.

  ‘Their operation was headed by Superintendent “Cheb” Alakhin with Chief Inspector Susan Marshall as second in command. The ops room was run by DS Cameron Sinclair in a portakabin which they set up on a strip of waste ground at the corner of Luscan Embankment and Fairlie Street.’

  A hand alighted on Corinne’s thigh. A garnet signet ring slowly rubbed against her stocking. ‘Talking loses time for fucking,’ a voice said.

  Emmet, who had been listening carefully to Corinne’s account, not least because he knew for certain the first corpse was that of Little Sammy Tyrell, who had been eliminated in the fallout after the Minty Wallace, Ute Manoko and Joe May fiasco, looked up with a baleful stare. ‘Fuck yourself,’ he said, as he checked Walter was still okay. ‘It’s rude to interrupt. I’m talking with the lady here.’

  ‘She’s paid to screw,’ Antoine Viall sneered, ‘not to listen to the tired reminiscences of a clapped-out gangster.’

  Corinne stirred to get to her feet. Emmet motioned to her to stay put. ‘It’s simple. I won’t repeat it. Move away or I’ll kill you. Well, what’s it to be, brother?’ he said, heavily accenting the last word.

  Viall flushed then turned pale.

  ‘Just walk away. It’s easy.’

  ‘Be sweet. Not like this, please,’ Corinne whispered to Emmet.

  ‘There’s no other way to be. Right, Antoine?’

  ‘Right.’ In spite of himself Viall’s finger and thumb started to pull at his ring, twisting it up and down. Fear was drying up his saliva. An acid taste filled his mouth. He turned away abruptly, then, from a safer distance, offered his parting shot, ‘There’s plenty others. They’re all the same in the dark. Meat’s meat, pussy pussy.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Emmet. ‘You were talking about the portakabin.’

  Corinne sighed. Her hand slid back in his pocket. ‘From its southern window,’ she continued, ‘they had an uninterrupted view of the river. Its varied noises filled each silence and hiatus in their work routine. I often used to play there, staying out until the gloaming when the older kids chased us younger ones away. That very piece of wasteland had been one of our favourite dens. Runners used to speed from it in our game of hares and hounds, laying as many false trails of blatantly chalked arrows as they could, while their true course was camouflaged with tiny ones posted high and low. Then, after counting to a hundred, or, more likely, ninety-seven, the chasers set off in pursuit.

  ‘So, although expressly forbidden by my mother to go down there after the murders, the lure of the place was too strong to be denied. One afternoon, coming out of school, I slipped away on my own and walked down the hill to the river. A woman in a black trouser suit was standing with her back to the water, dragging on a cigarette in short, sharp inhalations. She watched me mooch about for a few minutes then she came over and introduced herself as DI Susan Marshall. She found my Veldar accent strange and, to begin with, I had to repeat my answers to her questions. Her eyes were tired but kind, and I liked the look of her soft bob of strawberry-blonde hair curling over her ears. DS Cameron Sinclair, whom she called Cammy, came out of the portakabin and joined us chatting for a while.

  ‘Over the next weeks, I saw one or both of them on most schooldays. Sometimes we bumped into them when I was out in town with my mother or sisters. They often talked about Superintendent Alakhin’s fearsome reputation, his ruthlessness and the political jiggery-pokery he had used to advance his career. I began to look on them as a kind of second family. I imagined they were in love with each other and that one day they would have a child who would look like me. I spoke of them more and more at home which eventually led my mother, who secretly longed for juicy tidbits about the murders, to invite them round for tea.

  ‘Susan came alone. Cammy was on duty. After a polite chat about me, our health, the town and the weather, she readily brought us up to date on police progress. She believed they were getting close to a breakthrough. It all turned on the testimony of one Wesley Ganrich, aka Joe Harmonica, a former one-man-band busker and now alcoholic vagrant, who had been arrested and charged with demanding money with menaces in Luscanpool, a nearby village.

  ‘Once in the cells, Ganrich claimed that he possessed information concerning the Veldar inquiries, but he would only divulge it to Cheb in person. To Susan’s surprise, Alakhin dropped what he was doing and immediately arranged an interview.

  ‘On his return, he summoned her and Cammy to his office and told them what Ganrich had said. According to the vagrant, the key factor in the whole mysterious affair was a conspiracy plot to murder Ambilene and place his death in the middle of a concocted sequence of bizarre discoveries. Whether the first victim had been an accident, a suicide or a murder, he could not say, but the body had been stage-managed to gain maximum publicity. The same held good for the reappearance of the unfortunate Michaels child.

  ‘Ganrich, prior to his arrest, had consorted off and on with Mary Langlands. She had attached herself again to him during a recent drinking bout with Con Green, “Peaches” and “Lazy Hambone” outside the car park of the DIY store on the Luscanpool road. When their grog had run out, a fight developed. Among shouted threats and sporadic fisticuffs, Lazy Hambone attacked Mary. With a cry of triumph, he waved a wad of banknotes, which he had managed to wrest from her within her layers of wrapping. Goaded, Ganrich stabbed him in the arm and continued to do so until the pain registered and he dropped the bundle. Ganrich then took charge of the money, peeling off enough for a further serious intake, which would see them through the rest of the afternoon. Over the following few hours, he pieced together, as best he could, what had happened to Mary.

  ‘As he told it, her story began when she was waylaid by two men whom she supposed were plain-clothes detectives. They bundled her into a car and drove her to a destination she now only dimly remembered. At first, she sensed they had left her in a police cell, but its lack of WC and the sheet of plain glass in the window did not tally with her previous experience. In spite of that she was not unduly frightened. After all, passivity and fatalism were day-to-day necessities in her struggle for survival. However, as time wore on, the dawning, dreadful realisation that she had no drink about her made her flesh crawl and soon she entered the clammy horror of the shakes. The gradual transformation of first the walls, and then the ceiling and the floor, into the squirming mass of her “little friends”, as she called them, steadily engulfed her into her own private hell. Time stood still as the room yielded more and more of their swelling bodies.

  ‘Then a voice spoke. She heard it clearly. It was a woman’s voice. A figure appeared with a woman’s shape. The figure stroked her hair and said something she did not understand. Afterwards, they took her outside and shoved her in the back of a van. Who they were she could not say. There was something else riding alongside her. It had lain face upward, rolled in a frayed brown carpet. The weave of the fabric kept mutating in front of her bleary eyes as she held on, trying not to be thrown about too much on the jolting journey. The face staring up at her looked like her old pal, “Soldier” Mike Hobart. She thought he had been dead for the past twenty years.

  ‘In the middle of another room, she saw the body again, but it no longer looked like Mike. The carpet now was a gold and green affair. People were very kind. A tall woman called her Mary and patted her hand. Her bags were returned to her. The woman pushed money held by an elastic band into her pocket. “Tell them this,” the woman said gently. A man helped her repeat the words, whatever they were. Finally, in another room, he was joined by a second man who listened to her story then let her go. Before her next salvation drink passed her lips, she vowed to leave Veldar forever.

  ‘Susan Marshall openly and persistently expressed her doubts about Ganrich’s credibility, but, in the end, her chief cut her
short. “I knew him when he was a different person,” Alakhin said. “His word is good for me.”

  ‘As by this time we were all agog, Susan went on to tell us about the follow up. Two local officers, who had taken Mary Langlands’ statement, were interviewed and suspended from duty. They continued to protest their innocence. Alakhin intensified the investigation into Ambilene’s background and all those involved in the running of My Friend Felicia’s. Vera Sowenwell and George Aarons were arrested, but nothing stuck and they were released without charge. Any connection with the Michaels family proved fruitless.

  ‘Although we later tried to cajole Susan, and also Cammy, for further information, neither of them volunteered any more details. Meanwhile, the road extension was finished on time, fulfilling the contract stipulations. The workers left. My Friend Felicia’s resumed its old routine. Vera Sowenwell and George Aarons continued to be seen about the place as though nothing had happened. There was no sign anywhere of Mary Langlands. Ganrich was released by the Luscanpool police and the charges against him dropped. Susan and Cammy no longer came to our house and I lost the urge to visit the corner of Luscan Embankment and Fairlie Street. The river ceased to yield any more corpses.

  ‘Then early November came and with it the arrest of Larry Kambilski, a neighbourhood acquaintance of the Michaels. After two days of intensive interrogation, he broke down and confessed to the murder of their daughter. Traces of her presence were confirmed in his house. He admitted confining her, sedating her and drowning her in the river, “so that she wouldn’t have to bear another minute of this terrible life.” He denied leaving her body where it was eventually found.