Absent Light (19 page)

“Your skirt's too short, dear,” Gran said, sitting down, tapping Helen's leg with a bony hand. “You should meet Joan. You'd get on well together. Right little tramp.”

Helen choked back a reaction, and rummaged in her bag. She couldn't think of anyone less slatternly than her mother, and wondered, God rest her soul, what she'd have made of the insult. Helen took out a big library book, opened it up and set it on her gran's lap. The old woman looked at it, her face instantly melting into an adoring smile.

“Lovely fur,” she said, stroking the picture of a dog with an aged finger. “Lovely fur,” she repeated rhythmically.

Helen turned the page. Gran's eyes dimmed with ancient recollection. “Lovely. Special brown,” she said, in the peculiarly coded way of the dementia sufferer.

“Did you have a dog like that?” Helen asked.

The old woman turned to her, almost whispered. “Joan killed him. Joan killed baby, too.” She stared at Helen with open eyes, waiting for a suitably shocked reaction.

Helen swallowed. She knew that it was common for people like Gran to lose words and memories, and to sometimes recreate their own, but she couldn't help thinking that the old woman, in her delusion, was also voicing some deeper truth, reflecting the hidden enmity between mother and daughter. More than ever, she believed it was the right choice to keep her daughter's death from her. “That must be very sad for you,” she managed to say. “You must miss them.”

Gran nodded. Her rheumy eyes filled with tears. “And my mummy never comes to visit me. Why hasn't she been?” she said plaintively.

“I don't know,” Helen said sympathetically, taking hold of her grandmother's hand, feeling the looseness of her gran's wedding ring in her fingers, “ but I'm here, and I've got a bar of chocolate in my special bag for you.”

Gran gave a toothless grin and clapped her hands together. “I love sweeties,” she beamed, the plea for her mother forgotten.

Helen smiled back, leaned over and took out the bar, unwrapped it and broke it off in small pieces, feeding them to her gran, who popped them into her mouth like a greedy starling, bit by bit. When she took the last piece, she offered it first to her doll before snatching it back. “Babies shouldn't have sweeties. Bad for them,” she pronounced, wagging her finger.

“What's your baby called?” Helen said, looking at the doll, a cheap plastic thing with staring open eyes.

“He's a boy,” Gran said proudly, clutching him tighter. “My son. I had two husbands, you know.”

Gran was only married once, but Helen nodded in agreement.

“Lovely man,” Gran said, dreamy-eyed. Then a look of agitation crossed her face. “He'll expect me home soon,” she said, gathering up the doll, standing up as if ready to sprint.

Helen didn't know how to respond. She knew from experience that there was no point in argument. It only made matters worse. “Would you like to have a look at my photos before you go,” she said, trying to divert her.

“Well, I…” Gran looked around distractedly.

“Come on,” Helen said brightly.

Gran sat down again and turned to Helen with wary eyes. “Who are you?”

“I'm Helen.”

“Ah yes,” Gran said, though Helen couldn't be sure that she really remembered. “I forget, you see,” Gran said with sudden and painful lucidity.

“I know,” Helen stroked her hand. “You have this illness that makes you forget things. It's not your fault. It just happens to some people.”

Gran's face grew serious. There was a pleading expression in her eyes. “Have you come to look after me?”

“To talk to you,” Helen said, showing her a photograph of the only time they'd all been together: her father, her mother, herself and Gran. They'd gone out for a Mothering Sunday lunch. It was Helen's idea. Her mother hated every minute of it. Helen was cross with her at the time, she remembered, thought her mean-spirited.

Gran stared at the print and caught her breath. She put a trembly hand to her wet mouth. Her eyes were glassy with fear. “I don't like him,” she gasped, pointing at Helen's father.

Helen put her hand gently on her gran's shoulder.

“He's a bad man,” Gran said, clearly distressed.

“Is he? Who do you think it is?”

“Don't be stupid,” Gran snapped, sending spittle flying onto Helen's cheek. “That's Wyndham.”

Helen didn't know what to say. Wyndham had been her gran's husband. Helen had never heard her utter a word against him. In fact she hardly ever spoke of him at all. Neither did her mother, for that matter. Death seemed to have obliterated every trace of his existence. Obviously, something somewhere had got snarled up in her gran's memory bank, Helen thought.

“You won't take me back to him, will you?” Gran said, clutching Helen's hand, a wretched look in her eyes.

“No,” Helen promised, taken aback.

“Can I stay here with you?”

“Yes.”

“And Lee?” Gran said, looking down at the doll.

“Is that his name?”

“I
think
so,” Gran said tentatively. She was often wary of questions. They required knowledge and memory, something she no longer had.

“He can stay, too,” Helen smiled.

Her gran sighed with relief. “We'll hide him from Joan,” she grinned mischievously, nudging Helen's arm. “We'll keep him a secret.”

Helen smiled sadly, patting her grandmother's hand.

She arrived back at the coach-house shortly before six. It felt chilly inside in spite of the heating. She changed back into a pair of jeans, poured herself a glass of red wine and slid a CD into the player, flicking through the tracks, homing in on Bono singing how he'd hurt himself, hurt his lover and discovered that what he thought was freedom was just greed. Feeling a certain, morbid empathy, she decided to give Stratton a call when the phone beat her to it. Expecting it to be him, she snatched it up.

“Hi,” she said breathlessly.

“Helen, it's Jen.” She sounded different, Helen thought. Not her usual bubbly self.

“You all right?”

“Yes,” Jen replied simply. “I wondered…erm…heard any news today?”

Oh great, Helen thought, another of Jen's doom and gloom stories. She snatched a mouthful of her drink. “No, thank God. I've been over at Dad's then I went to visit Gran. Look, Jen, I'm not really in the mood for anything grim at the moment. I've had a bellyful, lately.”

“I know, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart
, Helen thought, pulling a face. Whatever was the matter with her?

“Would it be all right if I pop round? You're not going out or anything?”

“Jen, what's this all about?” Helen said, unable to conceal the sudden note of worry in her voice.

“I'll explain when I get there.”

Ten minutes later, Jen was sitting on her sofa, armed with a drink. Although she managed a smile, her eyes looked sad. For a horrible moment, Helen wondered if George had died. When Jen took Helen's hand, Helen felt seriously worried.

“It was on BRMB's five o'clock news,” Jen began.

“What was?”

Jen glanced away. “About Adam.”

“Adam?” Helen stared, mystified.

“That was his name, wasn't it, Adam Roscoe, the policeman chap you had a fling with?”

A fling, Helen wanted to say. It was so much more than that but she'd only ever told her newly acquired friends the edited highlights of her story. All the comprehensible bits. Hadn't wanted to bore them to death with the rest of it. Hadn't wanted to…

“They said he was from Birmingham, that he used to work for the West Midlands Police and had recently set up as a security advisor in Iraq. Do you think it's the same Adam?” Jen was looking at her anxiously. She was waiting for Helen to deny it. Wanting her to.

“What about him?” Helen blurted out.

“He's kind of got an unusual surname, hasn't he?” Jen said as if wishing he hadn't.

Helen's stomach flipped. “Has something happened to him?”

Jen's clear blue eyes settled on hers. “He was shot dead last night. Some guys loyal to one of those Arab militias. I'm so sorry, Helen.”

Later, and alone, Helen stared through a window scarred with rain. The moon was a big, gauzy disc in a star-less sky. She wondered crazily if Adam was out there somewhere, her mother, too. Each in their own separate place.

She'd already downed several glasses of wine. Maybe that's why her thoughts kept crashing into each other, she thought, feverishly taking another pull. That's why she felt as if her brain had finally dislocated.

She felt shocked beyond belief. He'd have put up a fight, she thought. He wouldn't have gone easily. Not like he did with the police. He'd have bucked and cursed and fought against his fate. At least a bullet in the head was quick, she tried to console herself, if that's what it was. She couldn't bear to think of him running away, disintegrating bit by bit, his beautiful body riddled with bullets. She couldn't bear to imagine his anguish, his physical suffering, the blood spattering, the foul ‘blow back' effect of close contact wounds, or the ragged, gaping holes caused by shots from further away. It made her want to howl.

She took another snatch at her drink. At least he'd no longer be a figure of speculation and loathing, she thought bitterly. And yes, in spite of the complications, the muddied waters, all the things you can't explain, she'd loved him. Once.

Adam's sudden and violent death brought into focus her mother's untimely demise, her
escape
. And that's what it was, wasn't it, Helen thought, an escape from reality, from pressure, from demand? In the same way human beings can will themselves to live, Helen believed that they could also will themselves to die.

Her heart creased with pain. She had this strange thought that her mother had committed suicide. Ridiculous. Unless you count a lifetime of boozing a self-induced death. The truth was neither she nor her father were enough to sustain her mother. It didn't matter how much love she was shown, how much obedience or loyalty, she couldn't be reached. And, between them, they'd tried hard. Yet, over three decades, her mother became more disjointed, unhappy, vulnerable, clinically depressed, Helen guessed. And nobody knew the reason why. Sure, she'd had a raw deal when younger, but plenty of people bounced back from things like that. Especially when you're loved, when you had tons of money, when you had a child and a pampered life, Helen caught herself thinking angrily. And Adam had no life at all. It had been smashed.

Her mind was grasshopping again. If only she'd been a better daughter, she thought, brushing away the tears as they started to fall, if only she'd fallen in with her mother's plans for her, if she'd made more of an effort, been less critical in private, less fond of her father in public. Oh God, she thought, the tears really falling now. With both of them gone, it felt like the end of an era. And all the things she could have said and didn't, she sobbed, while knowing in her heart that, had her mother survived, she would have said nothing at all.

She got up, spilling some wine onto her hand. Soaking it up with the sleeve of her sweater, she stumbled into her bedroom, almost colliding with the doorframe. Her mother's address book was on the floor by the side of the bed. She had meant to look at it before but couldn't face it. While she had no problem with corpses and trace evidence, blood and bits of bone and brain, she found it peculiarly disturbing to look at the handwriting of her recently deceased mother.

She sat down hard on the floor, resting her back against the solid wooden bed and, steeling herself, opened up the black leather-bound book, starting with the first page. Each entry jogged her memory and conjured up a fresh picture. Under C, she remembered Sam Coles, the good-looking chimney sweep. While other tradesmen failed, Sam always managed to charm her mother into a cup of tea and a slice of cake. She got quite girlie in his presence, Helen recalled with a fond smile. It was lovely to see her mother having fun. Strange, she'd never witnessed it with her father.

She carried on through the D's, E's and F's. It read like a novel. Her mother's friends were all there, each name invoking a name and a memory, heating engineers, garages, schools Helen attended, the private telephone number of Mrs Gillespie, the nursing sister at Roselea, all the small but significant details of her mother's life. Some of the entries were badly faded others fresh and bold. And there were doodles: a cork whizzing off a bottle of champagne next to the wine merchants, a dog's face underneath the veterinary surgeon they hadn't needed in years. Some of the entries crossed over with others so that Aunt Lily appeared twice: once under her maiden name, Powers, once under L for Lily. Helen went to turn the page and stopped. There was another name, squeezed into the corner, tucked away, a single name, three letters, no surname, more surprisingly no phone number or address attached to it. She trawled back through the address book, combing it again to see if the name was cross-referenced. It wasn't. She said the name once, out loud, her voice rasping with surprise.

“Lee.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

R
AY WAS BACK AND
in irrepressible form. He looked brown and round and happy. His dark hair had grown long and flopped over his face. He pushed it back in a theatrical gesture with a pudgy hand. “Pour us a drink, Powers, and fill me in on what's been happening.”

Helen gave him a warm smile. He always called her Powers, just like he called Jewel, Ronnie – an affectionate bastardisation of the girl's surname, Rono.

Over a couple of gin and tonics, it wasn't long before she confided in him.

“Christ Almighty, why didn't you phone and tell me?”

“So that you could get the next plane back?”

“But your mother…”

“Jewel held the fort,” she cut in smoothly. “We weren't that busy. It was all right…honestly.”

Ray cast her an appraising look. Are you for real? he seemed to say. “And this other business?”

“It's over,” she said, trying to sound convincing. “Just a nasty individual who eventually got her comeuppance.”

“Divine retribution, more like.”

Helen agreed, but, if she were coldly clinical, the woman's motives were easy enough to identify with. They weren't complicated by hatred or revenge or a desire for power, but simple, unadulterated greed. We all lust after things, she thought, chasing rainbows we can't afford or have.

Ray leant towards her. “You should take some time off.”

“I'm all right.”

“It's not a request, Powers.” He was smiling but his soft hazel-coloured eyes were implacable.

“It's January. It's bloody freezing. Where do you suggest I go?”

“Abroad?”

“I'd have to fly half way round the world to find a suitably temperate climate.”

Ray's face split into a grin. “Then how does the Wyre Forest sound?”

“Like hell.”

With an almost psychic vision of the collapse in stocks and shares, Ray had invested in a number of properties some years before. They were mostly let out on short-term tenancies. The cottage was rented as a holiday home.
A good little earner,
as Ray frequently informed her. She imagined that after the Christmas break it would stand barren until Easter.

“It's quite cosy. Open fire. All mod cons. You're not exactly cut off from civilisation. Plenty of local pubs and shops.”

“Plenty of people asking questions,” she chimed in.

“Don't be so miserable,” he said with a despairing look. “It would do you good to have a change of scenery. You need to get out more.”

Get a life, was what he meant, she thought.

“If you must insist on shutting yourself off from the rest of the world, it's ideal,” Ray conceded. “Better still,” he said, a playful gleam in his eye, “take a close friend with you.” Ruthlessly fishing, as usual, she thought, not without amusement.

“Think I'll stick with my own company.”

“Always the dark horse.”

Was it that obvious, she thought? She gave him a big smile. “So where is it exactly?”

Ray looked shifty. “It's not really the Wyre Forest – that's just how we sell it to the tourists.”

Helen let out a laugh. “You mean it's a shack off some dirt track somewhere?”

Ray shook his head. “There's a proper road leading to it. It's nearer to Clows Top, really.”

“Clows Top? Sounds like something from the Archers.”

“It's lovely,” Ray insisted, “close to Bewdley. There's a river and everything. Pity the Safari Park won't be open. They've got elephants, camels, giraffes and there's a splendid rare breed of white lions.”

Helen wasn't listening. Ray mentioned Bewdley. It was a bit further on from the carpet-producing town of Kidderminster. That close, she could make a few enquiries of her own about her mother. She could go where she wanted, visit whom she wanted, and ask all the questions that still needed answers.

All she had were the ramblings of a senile old lady and a doodle in an address book. It was nothing to go on and yet she felt that they were deeply symbolic.

Ray, in a haze of post-holiday magnitude, gave her the rest of the afternoon off. She drove out to Roselea again. She wasn't sure what good it would do. It was impossible to hope that she could get Gran into the right time frame to talk and, even if she did, how could she trust what she was saying? On the last visit Gran accused her own daughter of murder.

When she looked in on Gran, she was fast asleep in her chair, face slack, mouth slightly open. Helen looked round for Mrs Gillespie, the matron who ran the home. A slim, attractive-looking woman in her middle fifties with swept-back hair, she was arranging a large display of flowers in the hall.

“I was wondering if I could have a word about Gran,” Helen said.

“Of course, Miss Powers. Come into my office.”

The office was a small, windowless room tucked between the day room and dining area. Helen noticed a box of biscuits on the desk. The lid was off and she could see that all the foil-covered chocolate ones had been eaten. Mrs Gillespie indicated a chair and offered her the box.

Helen put up her hand. “No, thanks.”

“I was very sorry to hear about your mother. It must be a great sadness to you. So?” Mrs Gillespie inclined her head with a smile, her grey-blue eyes settling on Helen. Helen smiled back. Now that she was there, she didn't know how or where to begin. The silence extended. Mrs Gillespie filled the void. “Have you seen your grandmother today?”

“She's asleep at the moment. I came on Sunday. That's what I wanted to talk to you about, you see. We had this…erm…conversation.” Helen broke off. This was daft, she thought. A loose arrangement of words and phrases in no particular context hardly constituted a conversation.

“Go on,” Mrs Gillespie said.

“Thing is,” Helen said, starting again. “How much do you think she remembers? Is it possible that bits from the past break through to the surface?”

“I'd say that's entirely common at this particular stage of the disease.”

“It's as if she has flashes of lucidity,” Helen said, “but I can never be certain if what she's saying has any truth in it.”

“And that's important to you?”

“Frankly, yes.”

Mrs Gillespie nodded. The eyes didn't waver. It was as if she were weighing up what it was that Helen was driving at. There was circumspection in her expression. She intuitively seemed to know to tread carefully. “Many Alzheimer's sufferers retain the essence of their characters. In certain individuals, those traits come to the fore. Someone who's been a bit intolerant when they were well can become quite aggressive when they're sick. Likewise, if the sufferer had a tendency towards depression in earlier life, this can also become a problem later. If they enjoyed a good gossip then, they'll enjoy it now.”

“So it's not as if they lose everything that makes them unique?”

“Not at all. Their life stories often give a good indication of how they'll react to change in their current circumstances, which is why we like to know as much about the patient as possible; it gives us a context in which we can work. In your grandmother's case, I gather she had a period of illness during her forties, possibly around the time of her menopause.”

Something that hadn't occurred to Helen before. “But nothing was ever found to be physically wrong with her.”

“Not physically, perhaps, but certainly mentally. You can't take to a wheelchair for over a decade of your life without something being wrong.”

“You mean she was making it up?” Helen said, nerves catching.

“Not literally. It was probably her way of dealing with a certain difficulty.”

So now there were two secrets to unravel, Helen thought. “Seems extreme.”

“Given enough pressure, we're all capable of extremes,” Mrs Gillespie smiled.

Helen shuffled uncomfortably in the chair.

“Going back to your specific question,” Mrs Gillespie said. “Alzheimer's patients have a tendency to hallucinate.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Failing eyesight and hearing, mostly. Sometimes because parts of the brain are particularly sensitive when the light is poor.”

“So what they see and say is just delusion. It has no bearing on the truth?” Helen found it difficult to mask the disappointment in her voice.

“I'd hate to be that dogmatic,” Mrs Gillespie said. “Alzheimer's really is a shades of grey disease. Sufferers live in the past for a very good reason – they can access the information better.”

“A bit like a computer overload but the hard disk is still intact?”

Mrs Gillespie smiled. “I'm not computer literate, I'm afraid.”

Helen tried another angle. “What you're saying is that while the disease alters behaviour and mood…”

“Sometimes leading to paranoia and delusion,” Mrs Gillespie chipped in. “It can also release and bring resolution to unhappy or frightening experiences. It's why people with Alzheimer's repeat stories of old traumas and disappointments again and again. It's their way of making sense of the really important bits of their lives. Weirdly enough, people with totally fragmented short-term memory can possess an astonishingly accurate grasp on the past.”

So what my gran was saying could contain a grain of truth, Helen thought, shocked.

Clows Top turned out to be a loose association of houses built around a crossroads with a traditional butcher's shop on one corner and a post office opposite. Following the main road to Cleobury Mortimer, as instructed, Helen took a sharp turning to the left and followed the road for roughly half a mile. The scenery was glorious in spite of the rain and the ravages of winter. Badgers Cottage was exactly as Ray stated; brick-built, covered in dormant Virginia Creeper, lying in a cleft, standing alone.

She drove up the narrow drive, lifted a solitary bag from the passenger seat and let herself in, her nostrils flexing at the slightly musty smell. Very quickly she acquainted herself with her new surroundings: small hall, square-shaped sitting room, dining-kitchen. Upstairs there was a tiny bathroom, two double bedrooms and a box-room with an old-fashioned hand-carved wooden toy-box inside. After testing out the bed in the front bedroom, she went downstairs and into the kitchen and worked out how to put on the hot water and heating, then she drove into Cleobury where she ambled about and picked up some basic provisions. Later, she opened a bottle of Merlot and cooked and ate a dish of chicken in a mushroom sauce. As an afterthought she'd popped the latest novel by Nicci French into her bag and was attempting to read it. When she found herself going over the same sentence again and again, she put it down.

She felt like a geologist interpreting the layers of rock to read the landscape. Except she couldn't. It was as if she were continually slipping through shale. She wanted to phone Stratton, to talk to him, to explain that she wasn't really being a cow, that she was trying to do him a favour, but then they'd get talking and she'd blurt out her latest hunch and he'd think she was crackers and that would be that.

It was hard to think of her gran in her forties. Come to think of it, she'd never seen any photographs either of her mother as a little girl or her grandmother as a younger woman. Was it significant? She thought about her own family photograph album. It revealed quite a lot about the players. Her mum was always slightly set apart, even if it was in the way she was looking, not quite focused on the camera, or the way she was standing – one shoulder very slightly turned away. Her dad was always beaming, larking about, the master of ceremonies, keeping things together – easy when you're only dipping in and out. As for her, well, she was the photographer, which probably explained why there were more shots of her father, her home, and pets than of her mother.

Letting her mind go into freefall, she thought back to her childhood self. In her experience, kids were big on secrets – secret places, secret dreams, secrets not to tell. Don't tell anyone, it's our little secret, the molester tells the abused child. But there are other secrets, too, the grown-up kind, the ones to save our skins, our sensibilities, protect others, for the greater good, as Adam always told her, for greater glory. The Mafia code of omerta meant honour and silence – at least if you wanted to stay alive. So what was her mother's big secret? Was it cause for blackmail? Was it linked to her grandmother's flight from reality? The next day she intended to find out.