Mystery Man 04 - The Prisoner of Brenda Read online

  ‘What the hell are you pair doing here?’ DI Robinson barked.

  ‘Visiting,’ I said.

  He stopped before us. He studied me. And then Alison. He wasn’t our nemesis, exactly, more like our competition. What irked him most was that we got to solve crimes free of paperwork and any kind of responsibility. Alison had once said that he probably had a kitemark on his arse. I didn’t much like her thinking about his arse and sulked.

  ‘Have your baby?’ he asked.

  ‘Obviously,’ said Alison.

  ‘Congratulations.’ He looked at me again, but was still addressing Alison. ‘Everything fine?’

  ‘Absolutely. He’s a bouncing—’

  ‘I haven’t time for this.’

  DI Robinson stalked off and the two uniforms followed. He stopped by the lift and prodded the button twice. He looked up at the lights above, then went for the stairs on his left with his comrades scrambling after him. As they disappeared, and their footsteps receded, Alison said, ‘Fancy seeing him.’

  ‘He always had an eye for you,’ I said.

  Alison shook her head. ‘Your head’s a marley,’ she said.

  ‘I notice these things.’

  ‘Well, despite him having the hots for me, he didn’t seem pleased to see us.’

  ‘He did not.’

  We pondered.

  ‘What sort of cases does he normally investigate?’ Alison asked after a while.

  ‘Criminal ones,’ I said. Alison raised an eyebrow. ‘That tend to involve violence.’

  We both looked towards the lift, and could see that the lights above were now rapidly descending.

  ‘This is just a puzzle,’ I said. ‘There’s no possible danger in it.’

  Nurse Brenda appeared out of the lift, looking fraught and frazzled. There was a streak of blood on the shoulder of her uniform. She said, ‘I’m awfully sorry, but I’m going to have to cancel.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked. ‘We saw the police – they’re not anything to do with . . .?’

  ‘I’m afraid they are. The man you were coming to see, The Man in the White Suit, I’m afraid there’s been a stabbing.’

  ‘Is he . . .?’

  ‘He’s fine, but the man he stabbed is not. They’ve rushed him to the City but I don’t think he’ll make it. Stomach wounds are . . .’ She let out a long sigh, and then focused in on Alison. ‘Are you . . .?’

  ‘His better half, yes.’

  ‘And you just had a little one?’ Alison nodded. ‘Look at you, there’s not a pick on you.’ And then she looked at her hands, and saw that she had blood on them. ‘I’m sorry, I’m such a mess. It was a bit of a shock.’

  ‘Why did he . . .?’ I began.

  ‘Oh, there’s no rhyme or reason for things in here, you know that. An argument over a piano, that’s all. Next thing you know . . .’ She moved as if to rub her hands on her uniform, then thought better of it. ‘I’m sorry to have wasted your time. He’s been transferred to the secure unit, and the police will be talking to him there. I’m sure they’ll be half the night at that and they still won’t get anything out of him. And I don’t suppose it matters so much any more who he is or who has lost him, because he isn’t going to be going anywhere for a very long time.’

  Alison said, ‘Anything we can do to help?’

  ‘No, honestly, the police have it under control. I’d better get back up.’

  She nodded at us – time to go. Alison gave her a sympathetic smile, took my hand and led me away. Just as we were going through the doors Nurse Brenda called out to us and we stopped and looked back.

  ‘I just wanted to say – Page. It’s such a lovely name.’

  There was something very sad, I thought, about the way she said it. But I didn’t know how to respond, so I just gave her a stupid grin and the thumbs-up, and went on out into the mizzled night.

  4

  I did not think much about The Case of the Man in the White Suit for the rest of the night, because that was taken up with Jeff’s head wound.

  We found him nursing Page in the crook of his left arm on the sofa in our lounge, while pressing a wad of kitchen roll to a nasty-looking gash above his right eye with his other hand. He said, ‘Your mother attacked me.’ We did not really need to ask why, because we knew Mother. Her motivations were often obscure and her actions rarely justified. But we asked all the same, and tended to him. I went up to see her. She was sitting up in bed reading James Hadley Chase’s pulp romp No Orchids for Miss Blandish, with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream in the other. I had recently bought her a Kindle, and spent several hours lying about its virtues and downloading out-of-copyright books for her, and she was getting full use out of it by using it as an ashtray. The paperback in her hand was yellowed with age and had a cracked spine, but it was a thing of beauty.

  I said, ‘Mother, did you strike Jeff with a table lamp?’

  She raised one eye, and kept the other on the book. Hadley Chase was a horny old misogynist, but he was difficult to put down. ‘Jeff?’ she said, somewhat laconically. ‘I don’t think so. I defended myself against a pervert. He tried to molest me in the bath.’

  ‘He says you shouted down the stairs for a cup of tea, and he took it up to you and you clobbered him.’

  ‘He barged in on me while I was in the nuddy. He could have been anyone.’

  ‘It was Jeff. You know Jeff.’

  ‘I didn’t have my glasses on.’

  ‘I told you he was here, looking after Page.’

  ‘Who?’

  I looked at her. She had had a stroke a while back, but she was now largely recovered. The doctors had said there might be some residual brain damage, and she had seized on this as a convenient cover for her more extreme acts. The truth was that she had always been barking.

  ‘I get confused,’ she said.

  ‘Jeff is babysitting for free, you can’t go abusing him.’

  ‘He was trying to abuse me. I was in the bath.’

  ‘Mother, there is no table lamp in the bathroom.’

  ‘I brought one in with me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘In case somebody tried to molest me.’

  ‘Mother . . .’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it. I’m tired now. I’m going to sleep.’

  She reached across to switch off her bedside lamp. Before the light winked off, I saw that there was a small pool of blood at its base. The room was now lit only by the dull glow from her half-melted Kindle, which she knocked over as she turned away from me, wrapping herself in her quilt, spilling ash and butts across the cover. I wasn’t about to start cleaning them up, so I retreated to the doorway, but then lingered there for several moments, thinking.

  Eventually I said, ‘Are you enjoying the book, Mother?’

  ‘No. It’s a lot of shite.’

  ‘Do you want me to take it away?’

  ‘No, I want to see what happens.’

  I recognised the Hadley Chase conundrum, although it was not exclusively his.

  I said, ‘’Night, Mother. Love you.’

  There was no response. I didn’t mind that. I was lying.

  I followed the drips of blood down the book-lined, carpet-free stairs back into the lounge, where Alison had repossessed Page and Jeff was struggling into his army surplus jacket while continuing to try and staunch the flow.

  ‘It’s going to need stitches,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be scarred for life. I should press charges.’

  ‘She says you tried to molest her,’ I said. ‘It’s your word against ours.’

  ‘Ours?’

  ‘Family always comes first, Jeff, you know that.’

  He stared at me.

  Alison said, ‘Don’t listen to him, Jeff, you know he’d sell her and all of us down the river if there was a couple of quid in it. Even my little darling.’ She juggled Page in her arm.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ I said. ‘Mother, you and Jeff – yes, obviously. But P
age absolutely not. I would expect more than a couple of quid.’

  I smiled. Alison smiled. Jeff did not.

  ‘I’m serious,’ he said.

  I doubted that. He was a well-known whingy whinger. ‘C’mon,’ I said, ‘I’ll drive you to the hospital.’

  Alison gave what I can only describe as a guffaw. She got up from her armchair. ‘If you drive him to the hospital, he’ll probably bleed to death by the time you get there. I’ll take him. You look after our baby.’ She pushed Page into my arms, and I’d no choice but to accept. ‘It’ll do you good. You don’t spend enough time with him.’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Don’t argue, just do it. He doesn’t bite. Unless you intend to breastfeed him. C’mon you,’ she said to Jeff, scooping up the keys to the Mystery Machine and quickly ushering the dripping Amnesty International apologist out of the living room and down the hall, leaving me speechless, with Page snuffling in my arms and gazing curiously up at me.

  He looked like Kojak.

  It was not a good look.

  I tried to put Page in his cot, but he was having none of it. Alison had left expressed breast milk in the fridge, and I fed him that. For a while I thought about what it would be like to have enormously engorged nipples, one on each breast and a third in the middle of my forehead. I wasn’t sure what the practical application of having a nipple in the middle of my forehead would be, but I was sure, given time, that I could have come up with something. I had plenty of time. Eight hours, if the National Health Service was up to its usual standard. I knew Alison well enough to know that she would not merely dump Jeff at Casualty the way I would have done. She would stay with him until he was stitched and infected with clostridium difficile. He’d be lucky if he came home with both legs.

  Soon, Page started crying and would not stop. I whispered, and sang, and cuddled and cooed to zero effect. I even peered into his nappy to see if that was the source of the problem, and was relieved to find that it was not. He was just crying for the sake of it. I walked the floors with him. Up and down the stairs. I went out into the back garden, and then out with him in the stroller and up and down the street. I peered up at windows in the vain hope of seeing someone getting changed. I checked out cars for personalised numberplates and was relieved to find none in the immediate vicinity. It had been a while since I had scratched the paintwork of cars with personalised numberplates with my nail; mostly it was the recession that was making them rarer, but I liked to think that their absence had at least a little bit to do with my campaign of hate. While I pushed the stroller, I also toyed with the thought of just thrusting it out in front of the first lorry that came along, just to see how quickly it would stop, but it was late at night and there was little traffic.

  Page had quietened down pretty quickly once we were outside, but the minute we went back through the door he started up again. I walked the house some more. It was a big house, with a lot of rooms, most of them stacked with books, and I walked them all, with the exception of Mother’s room and next to it, what had been, in a bygone era, an old luggage room. At Alison’s request I had recently allowed her to convert it into a small studio where she could pursue her hobby of drawing comics. She said she needed somewhere to escape to. I said, ‘From the baby?’ and she nodded, vaguely. It was a room I had not lately ventured into because I have no interest in her unfulfilled ambitions. Sometimes I pretend to be fascinated by her comics, but I’m really not. She should get a life. But now, desperate to try any change of surroundings that might quieten the mewling, I slipped into it, flipped on the light and stood blinking for a moment while my eyes grew used to the brightness, and then struggled to comprehend what they were seeing: taped to the walls, and indeed the ceiling, were dozens, possibly hundreds of drawings of a baldy-headed baby, but so distorted, so bloated, so disjointed and scaly-skinned, so monstrously mutant and hellish – and yet, still so recognisably Page – that my paper-thin heart almost imploded.

  Page’s cries turned to screams.

  From the next room Mother yelled: ‘Will you shut that child up! I’m trying to fucking sleep!’

  5

  I had a lot on my mind the next day in work. I always have a lot on my mind, very little of it to do with affairs here on earth, but this was different. I was very disturbed by what I had found in Alison’s studio, but had not yet raised it with her. She had returned very late from the hospital, so late that I was already feigning sleep. Page had finally succumbed to the drugs I administered. I was up and away out before either of them woke in the morning. This was not unusual. I am an early riser. I do not sleep much, and haven’t since the Falklands War, but I could have hung around to question her about the paintings and drawings. I chose not to because I do not like confrontations, or arguments, or contrary opinions, at least until I can get straight in my head what I think about something. It is easy to lose an argument if you haven’t properly considered every possibility or explored every tangent. It is why lawyers often present ridiculous scenarios in court and then harry and bully a defendant to respond quickly, so that what he or she says is inevitably ill thought through and incoherent, thus underlining their guilt, when what he or she really needs is time and the opportunity to give a sober and considered response, possibly by e-mail.

  There were no customers all morning. This was not unusual. The book trade was dying on its feet. There was plenty of time to ruminate, while also reading the most recent Dennis Lehane. I am a great multi-tasker. Since Parker died, Lehane is now Boston’s finest living crime writer.

  I was not only worried about Alison’s paintings, but by Mother’s sudden explosion of violence. Jeff was off studying for his finals, through one eye. The other had swollen closed and there were six stitches above it. I wasn’t worried for Jeff, obviously, because he’s a useless idiot, but for Mother. Not because she had lashed out – that had been her form since I was a nipper – but by the weapon she had chosen. She had wielded the lamp in the bathroom. There was not normally a lamp in there – it is already an extremely well-lit room. According to Jeff she had not only clobbered him with it, but swung it at him at the end of the electrical flex, the way a South American gaucho might swing a bolas. But the fact was that it had been plugged in from her bedroom, stretching to the edge of her bath via two adaptors. To go to that much effort for a little extra light – there’s a shade on the lamp and a low-wattage bulb – didn’t make any kind of sense. Unless she was intending to plunge the lamp into the bath. It now seemed obvious to me that she had only struck out at Jeff as a reaction to being interrupted in the act of committing suicide.

  Which worried me, a little.

  Mother had always been an evil old witch, but she was my evil old witch. If anyone was going to kill her, it should be me. Clearly she was depressed. But why? Was it my fault? She would be dead soon anyway, but I couldn’t think of any reason for her to want to speed up her conclusion. She was old, decrepit, a brain-damaged harridan and a violent psychopath to boot, but she had always been as such. These were no reasons for her to want to top herself. If I have learned anything in life, it is that you should learn to embrace your deficiencies. And appreciate your situation: Mother was waited on hand and foot, she had access to an inexhaustible supply of sherry, she had her own dutiful son living with her and a lovely little baby bringing renewed life to her shabby old house. She should have been singing ‘Roll Me Over in the Clover and Do It Again’, yet she had chosen instead to try and kill herself using a lamp fitted with an energy-saving light bulb.

  I couldn’t settle my head, and turning my thoughts to Alison’s bizarre paintings certainly did not help. Was she merely letting her imagination run wild, or were they some mad kind of manifestation brought about by the trauma of giving birth or living with Mother? Or what if she had literally become possessed? Was there some unspeakably evil force loose in the house, something intent on picking off the members of my family one after the other?

  I needed to confront Alison. That much was
clear. I needed to look into the eyes of the demon.

  But first, lunch.

  I don’t normally close the shop at lunchtime because I send Jeff out for it, but with no alternative I locked up and sauntered across to Starbucks. I order from their menu in strict rotation, going through it from start to finish once a month, although this applies only to their beverages. I very rarely eat their sandwiches because I had found that I had to stand perusing the ingredients for so long that lunchtime was invariably over by the time I finally found something I was able to eat without putting my life at risk. I am allergic to many things, including ham, cheese, chives, oregano, molasses, pesto, Polo mints, leather thongs, Shredded Wheat, Romanian Big Issue sellers, humans, dogs, leopards and geese, but not, as far as I could determine, to anything in my eventual choice that day, a Roasted Vegetable Panini, containing 350 calories and 25 mgs of cholesterol.

  I was just about to take my first bite, when the chair opposite me was pulled out and a man said, ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ and then sat before I could protest. I don’t like to eat in front of people because generally they make me sick, and Detective Inspector Robinson was no exception.

  I set down my Panini and pulled my Caramel Frappuccino closer. I looked warily at him. I had absolutely no doubt that this was not a coincidence, and also I knew from sad past experience that it was never a good sign when DI Robinson came looking for you. Here, in Starbucks, we did not even need to go through our regular charade, which involved him asking me to recommend collectible books while I tried to avoid giving him any discount. Today he looked grey, and there were bags under his eyes.

  ‘So,’ I said.

  He was studying me. He said, ‘I still haven’t quite worked you out.’

  ‘I’m unworkoutable,’ I said.

  ‘You’re either as mad as a bag of spiders, or it’s all an act.’

  ‘I’m allergic to spiders,’ I said.

  He nodded. He had a plain black coffee. He stirred sugar into it. I waited, patiently.