From Monika
For The dress
Sum £300
There was a phone number scrawled on the top. Not a person who used a computer, a reminder that half the world still preferred to write. Thomas entirely forgot his nervousness about entering his recently burgled, still untidy office, and dialled the number. He got that angry, sad voice he had heard in Marianne’s flat, the voice of the woman who had phoned when Frank was there, some bloody old woman, going on about a blasted dress while dopey Frank unpicked cushions.
‘Yeah? What you want?’
‘Ms Monicker, I’ve got your invoice. As I said, I’ll make sure it’s paid by return, although it might take a day or two. Is there anything else I should know?’
‘What?’
There were background sounds of children yelling.
‘Anything else? Anything else I can help you with?’
A pause.
‘Can you collect the other stuff?’
The noise increased.
‘What other stuff was that?’
‘All that stuff she left with me. She brought it round while she moved. Only for a week or two, she said. What am I supposed to do with it?’
‘What kind of stuff?’ He hated that word.
‘Paper and books and stuff.’
‘Could you describe it more accurately?’
After a while, he put down the phone.
Eureka. He did a little jig round the room. How like a cunning collector to leave her personal possessions with someone unknown and careful. How like Marianne to dump stuff, not on a friend, but on someone who needed her money and therefore someone she would feel free to abuse, like a backstreet Ukrainian dressmaker.
Case solved. He had never really needed Peter Friel at all. There was so much to be said for not being proactive all the time. Everything comes to those who wait.
Cross-examination of Marianne Shearer by Marianne Shearer, QC
Name, date, d.o.b: Irrelevant.
Q. Ms Shearer, tell the court, what’s the best thing you have ever done in your life?
A. Given birth to a daughter. Only really positive thing I ever did. Failing to abort her. A negative achievement, but I enabled her to live.
Q. I didn’t ask for details. Please give one answer at a time.
A. Right.
Q. And what do you regard as the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life?
A. I killed her.
Witness is distressed.
Q. There’s no room for hysteria, Ms S. Pull yourself together. What do you mean, you killed her? With your bare hands?
A. Please ask one question at a time.
Q. Why should I? You don’t. How did you do it?
A. Oh, perverting the course of justice in the interests of justice. Humiliation, degradation for real and by proxy. I encouraged someone else. I continued the destruction he began. I made it inevitable.
Q. You’re being obscure, Ms S.
A. Am I?
Q. It’s for me to ask the questions. You either killed your daughter or you licensed her death, which is it?
A. I entered the conspiracy, it amounts to the same thing.
Q. Does it? Of course it does; the responsibility’s the same, so pleased you haven’t forgotten your law, but did you behave this way towards this person because she was your daughter?
A. No, I didn’t know then who she was.
Q. She was just a another girl, Ms S, and you just helped in tearing her apart, is that it?
A. Yes.
Q. So it didn’t matter if she was just someone else’s daughter?
A. No. No, I mean not then.
Q. So you’re getting all weepy and conscience-stricken just because it was your daughter? You have to wait to kill your own flesh and blood before thinking about what you’ve done to other daughters and sons?
A. Yes.
Q. What does that make you, Ms Shearer?
A. It makes me criminally irresponsible. Like some terrorist who’ll kill anyone but family. It makes me a heartless winner with nothing, nothing to be proud of. It makes me as amoral and dangerous as Rick Boyd.
Q. Well, you are, aren’t you?
A. Can you clarify, please?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
They didn’t believe him, perhaps because he was stuttering. They thought he was constructing a story out of thin air, all speculation and no proof. Until Peter came up with names and someone phoned, someone who knew all about Rick Boyd, in the form of another disgruntled police officer who had left the courtroom on the last day of that trial in his company. The one like Peter, who never forgot, and remembered Marianne Shearer as a kind of murderer. The ignominy of that defeat and its aftermath had not improved his credibility, either, and even with him, it was half belief. No one wanted to believe that Rick Boyd still existed. They sent a car for Ann, who would not open the door at first. It all took some time.
How long to drive from London to the emptier stretches of Kent? Depends on traffic. They would not let Peter go. They might send along the one policeman on patrol between two townships on a cold Saturday afternoon, but not on suppositions like this. After all, Peter, think about it; who knows who took Ms Joyce and where they went? How well do you know her?
Mr and Mrs Joyce had gone out together for the day, for the first time in many months, their answerphone message said. WJ Storage closed on Saturday afternoons. Sunday was the busy day when the storing public arrived in numbers to reunite themselves with the contents of the attic, adding to and subtracting from the rubbish.
Rick Boyd held the remains of Hen Joyce’s hair and forced a pill into her mouth as soon as they got into the car. Keep her quiet for an hour. He pulled the hat down over her forehead. She pouched the pill into her cheek, like a hamster, storing it, and feigned sleep. There was, after all, nothing to say. She was leading them on to her own territory. Frank drove badly, cursing and swearing. Neither of them was fully in control; they had lost the plot and they were at odds. Hen thought of embroidery stitches and her mother. The magic number for cross-stitching on linen is two. The basic stitch on linen is done from left to right, bottom to top, like handwriting, slanting over two threads and up two threads. Chain stitches, particularly useful for joining the edges of fine linen… Herringbone stitch, the sort that is used to sew the label in your coat. Nun’s stitch for lingerie.
Perhaps my father will be there to rescue me. Perhaps there will be a party, waiting for us, with lights and music and everything. In between reciting descriptions of stitches to herself, she listened to the men talk. Nervy, angry arguments, strange snatches of conversation, while the man called Frank drove too fast, and braked too hard. They woke her up for directions. She had been mumbling in her sleep about what was in the storage room, key no 3611. Jewels, she muttered, money and treasure and clothes and papers and everything, all sorts of things that Marianne Shearer left for Angel and me.
WJ Storage, disused hospital, place of contagion and safety. Rooms within rooms, cells within cells. She knew it well and she was well known to it. It had seemed her father’s kingdom when he had started it and she was a child. She had been in awe of its vast emptiness. No one else’s mum and dad had access to so much space for playing hide and seek. Gradually, it became fuller and more of it was out of bounds to anyone but her. Other children did not want to play, not even Angel who had been willing until she got scared of the dark corners. Such a safe, sanitised, but still diseased place that no one wanted, Dad said. Because of ghosts? No, no, no. Because it’s ugly, superfluous, wrong shape for anything and jerry-built. You can’t open the windows and people died here. She and Dad were the only ones who loved it, although Mum had her moments. She made the front office cosy.