Nirvana Bites (19 page)

‘Do you realise, Miss Stern, that you could be charged for wasting police time?'

Oh, for fuck's sake. We both knew the cops were more than capable of wasting their own time without any help from me.

‘Um, yes. I realise it was foolish. I really am sorry.'

This shit was going to take ten years off my life.

‘OK, Miss Stern. We'll move on from there – for the moment. I'd like you to tell me, if you will, the exact nature of your relationship with Della Courtney. How and when you met, where you saw each other, how frequently etc.'

Needless to say, I'd prepared for this. I had to come up with a plausible answer that had no connection to the Scene or to any of Della's other friends or acquaintances. I looked him straight in the eyes and span my tale.

‘We met about a year ago. At Peckham Library, not long after it opened. We were both using the computers there and she realised I was floundering and helped me out. We just sort of gelled, if you know what I mean.'

Mackay raised an eyebrow. I ignored it and ploughed on.

‘After that, we met a couple of times a week. We both had time on our hands and it was somewhere to go. Sometimes we'd pop across the Square for coffee at the Pulse.' I shrugged to emphasise the banality of the connection.

Had it come out too pat? I held my breath, while attempting to appear to be breathing normally. A clever trick, if you can manage it. Two pairs of cop eyes drilled into me. I stifled a nervous fart.

‘You never met anywhere else?' Mackay enquired.

I shook my head.

‘Did you know Ms Courtney was found near there? In the car park of the old leisure centre…'

The thought of Della being dumped there, among the burnt-out car wrecks and smashed glass, was hard to bear.

‘No,' I murmured. ‘I didn't know that.'

‘She ever mention other friends? Any disagreements possibly? How she spent her time?'

‘No. Not really. I got the feeling she was quite lonely.'

‘And she never mentioned anything to you that would suggest she was worried about anything?'

‘Nothing I can think of. Obviously I've been racking my brains since I saw her in that terrible state. But I just can't think of anything…'

Mackay jotted something down in his notebook, then looked back up at me. Bartlett shifted position and the chest of drawers let out a protesting creak. I glanced up at him. He rewarded me with a wolfish leer. With teeth as yellow as his, he really should keep his mouth shut.

‘Could you please tell me the kind of things you would talk about?' Mackay continued.

‘Oh, small talk mostly, I suppose. Books, movies, the weather. The state of the world. That sort of thing.'

Mackay allowed another long pause. I kept my hands clasped loosely in my lap. No white knuckles to give away my tension.

‘So how come you knew Ms Courtney was in hospital?' Mackay asked.

I was ready for that one and launched in with gusto. This was the one part of my story that would check out. I was bargaining on them not asking at the library. ‘I know her address. I'd seen it on some letters she typed. When she didn't turn up for a couple of weeks, I thought I'd pop round to see if she was OK. The man in the flat opposite told me she was in hospital.'

Another millennium-length pause. I gritted my teeth to stop myself filling the silence by embroidering further. The golden rule: say as little as you can get away with.

‘One more question, Miss Stern. Did you know about Ms Courtney's – er – confusion – er – her…'

I watched him flounder. It was the only bit I had got any pleasure from so far. The cop at the hospital must have reported that I knew about Della's sexuality but Mackay was still trying to catch me out. I didn't think he had any concrete suspicions about me, he just couldn't help himself. I watched him redden and I gave a beatific smile. Bartlett snarled.

‘…sexual gender-based identity issues,' Mackay finished in a rush, having remembered the Equal Opportunities seminar he'd been forced to sit through once.

‘Yes, I did,' I replied. ‘She was totally open about it.' I leaned forward. ‘Though I'd have known anyway,' I said in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘It's the hands. You can always tell.'

Bartlett looked sick. Mackay frowned. I could see him trying to work out whether I was taking the piss or not.

I think in the end he decided I was just an irritating pain in the arse. Yes! Mission accomplished. Mackay shut the notebook with a snap.

‘Well, I think that's all for now, Miss Stern. We'll be in touch again if we need to pursue this line any further. In the mean time, perhaps you would be good enough to contact me if you think of any details you may have missed. Anything at all. No matter how trivial it may seem to you.'

Yeah, yeah. I know. I too have seen
Crimewatch
.

He handed me a card. I laid it on the table next to the phone. I doubted if I would ever use it to contact him. But it would make good roach fodder: just the right thickness.

Mackay heaved himself out of the armchair with a grunt and they turned to go. I couldn't resist pushing my luck just a smidgen.

‘I hope you don't mind me asking, officer, but was it really necessary to conduct this interview at five-thirty in the morning?'

Mackay curled a lip at me. ‘We're busy people, Miss Stern. We have to fit things in as and when we can. Officers work on a case like this twenty-four hours a day.'

I didn't like the sound of that. ‘A case like this?' What, non-stop copping for one ‘pulverised pansy pervert'?

I followed them down the stairs. In the doorway, Mackay paused and turned back to face me.

‘You may as well know, Miss Stern, that we are now conducting a murder inquiry.'

He paused again, enjoying the expression on my face.

‘Ms Courtney died at eight-thirty yesterday evening.'

The car doors slammed and the engine started up, just as the door to Maggot's flat crashed open. She reached me in one giant stride and cradled me in her arms on the floor, in the corner where I had subsided, gasping for breath.

‘Baby, baby. Ssshhh. Ssshhh. It's all right, baby,' she crooned.

I allowed her to raise me to my feet. She half supported, half carried me into her flat and laid me gently on the massive bed that filled her back room. I turned my face into her soft pillow, drew my legs up to my chest and hugged them with my arms. There was a low moaning sound. I knew it was me, but I was powerless to stop it.

Some time later, she raised me into a sitting position and popped a couple of torpedoes purloined from Stan's stash into my mouth. She held a mug to my lips and I washed the tabs down with swigs of hot sweet milk. Then she laid me back on to the pillow, pulled her red, green and gold fluffy duvet up to my chin, and stroked my hair until I fell asleep.

22

IT WAS A
long, deep, dreamless sleep. When my eyes next opened it took a while to work out where I was. I gazed through the double doors into the garden, trying to guess what time of day it was. I took in details of the welfare of the vegetables and flowers I'd planted days before. In another lifetime. BDD. Before Della Died.

I allowed the memory to seep back into my consciousness.

‘Jen? Don't do that, honey. Please don't do that'.

I tore my reluctant gaze from the garden. Time to deal with People. I swivelled my head to look at Mags.

‘Don't do what?' I croaked. My mouth felt like the bottom of a cage belonging to a hamster whose owners had gone on an extended holiday.

‘Bang your head like that on the pillow.'

‘Oh.' I didn't know I was. ‘What time is it?'

‘It's five o'clock. In the afternoon. Tuesday afternoon. You've slept for nearly thirty-six hours.'

I groaned and flung an arm over my eyes. ‘Fucking hell. What were those pills?'

‘Dunno. But I reckon they were the only partly responsible. You needed the rest, honey. You haven't been taking care of yourself. When did you last eat? I mean a proper meal, not a crisp sandwich or something.'

I didn't move.

‘You can't remember, can you? Right.'

Mags disappeared off into her kitchen, where I heard plates crashing. A moment later she reappeared, carrying a steaming bowl on a tray.

‘OK,' she bustled. ‘Sit up and get yourself on the outside of that.' Yam, sweet potato, green bananas and carrots jostled for space in the spicy coconut-scented broth. Almost against my will, my mouth began to water. ‘And when you're finished,' she continued, ‘We're going to talk. Or rather, you are. I want to know what's going on, Jen. What's
really
going on. All of it. Not just the bits you fancy sharing. OK?'

I nodded meekly and raised the spoon to my lips.

Mags drives a hard bargain. The soup was delicious. I had three huge, invigorating bowlfuls. But it came at a price.

After the first bowl, we opened the back doors and allowed the late-spring sunshine to flow into the room.

After the second bowl, we took two wooden folding chairs and sat on the concrete slabs behind the houses.

By the time I'd consumed the third bowl, it was dark and I'd told Mags all there was to know about Della, Stan and the Scene and the part it had played in my life. Mags yawned and stretched.

‘That's good, Jen. But not good enough,' she accused. ‘So far you've barely told me any more than you've told Ali and Frank. You owe me more than that.'

We took a sheet of plastic and laid it on the clods of earth that had, until recently, been called a lawn. On top of that we laid some giant floor cushions, then us, then the duvet. We lay side by side and looked up at a black velvet sky studded with diamanté stars. Della would have liked the image. My father wouldn't.

The occasional train thundered by. From Nick and Robin's flat, we could hear Robin strumming an acoustic guitar. Badly. From Frank's came the muted drone of a TV. Next door, Tyson periodically raced round the garden and head-butted the fence. The other sound was my voice. Hesitant and shaky at first, but gaining momentum as my defences melted into the darkness. I told her everything. All of it.

Maggot's response was threefold.

First, there was compassion. But meted out with care, not slapped on with a trowel so as to devalue it. Just enough to make me feel supported, but not weakened.

Then there was empathy. Mags told me her own story. She never knew her father. When she was three, her mother came to England, leaving Mags with her grandmother. The old lady was a strict disciplinarian, but Mags had never doubted that she was loved. When she was twelve, her mother sent for her. She came to England to live with a woman who was a virtual stranger to her, a cold and distant stepfather and three younger half-siblings. Mags, who was a country girl to whom even the larger towns in her island home were bustling and unfamiliar, came to London. To Harlesden. In January. She said she cried for weeks as she watched the sunshine drain from her skin and her spirit. Mags had never told me any of this before. I knew she was only telling me now to even up the balance.

Her third response was pure hard-headed practicality.

‘Right. We need to work out a strategy. But not now. Tomorrow, first thing, we'll get to work'.

I frowned. ‘What day is it tomorrow? Won't you be at work?' I turned to face her. I couldn't make out her expression in the dark. ‘Come to think of it, how come you weren't at work today?'

I saw her teeth glint as she grinned.

‘Or yesterday. I'm taking a sickie. My first in three years. In a job that has an acknowledged burn-out rate of about two years. I reckon they owe me.'

See what I mean about Mags? She's s-o-o-o balanced. We bade farewell to the cool mid-May Peckham night and each crawled to our own bed.

23

A BREAK
, a real-life solid-gold lucky break, is a strange thing. You can't predict it. You can't make it happen. Without it, you don't stand a chance. You may represent everything that is good, and the forces ranged against you may represent all that is evil in this world, yet without that lucky break you stand less chance of success than a slingshot against a rocket launcher.

Of course, Gaia would say there's no such thing as luck. There's synchronicity, kismet, the divine plan. I don't care what you call it. Without it, you're sunk. But with it… With it, it's like being thrown a single nylon thread when you're adrift in a raging torrent. It may not save you in the end, but it gives you a glimmer of possibility. It gives you something to cling to. It gives you hope. And without hope, we are truly lost.

A lucky break. That's what we needed. And that's what we got.

It was the following day. I was in Frank's front room, waiting for the others to arrive for the meeting Mags had arranged. Stan wasn't invited. I don't think I could have handled seeing him. Anyway, I didn't want him to know about Della until we'd worked out the possible implications.

Frank clattered cups on to a tray in the kitchen. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall, gazing out of Frank's window. The view was almost identical to mine except it was swivelled a few degrees to the left. I knew how it felt. The close presence of death unsettled me. I felt as though I'd been tipped off my axis and the cogs weren't quite meshing. My father's death had left me feeling hollow. Della's left me feeling like something crucial had been ripped from the centre of my being.

I shivered and hugged my arms round myself. Next to me on the floor was an old sweatshirt of Frank's. I picked it up and put it round my shoulders. Underneath was last week's copy of the
South London Press
. I turned the pages, trying to tear my thoughts from the grave. The usual stuff – a plea from a mother to catch her son's murderers, a library book returned after twenty-four years, a battle to save some allotments…