Play Dead (24 page)

She left her Mini in a Ritson Mall supermarket car park and took the short-cut path across Elms towards Guild Square. This was the beginning of the murdered policeman's route, an area pictured by the media many times just after the death and during the trial. At some point she knew she must branch off towards the Jaminel villa. As far as she could remember, none of the reports had explained why he made this diversion but, obviously, he did. She took a torch although for now it was a clear evening with a good moon.

The house was one of two or three nearest completion when the money ran out, and banks took against lending. That would be in the first dip of the recession. The second confirmed it. Once she could see their roofs clearly she switched course and made her way towards them. If Noreen and Noreen's pals had things correct, this section of the Elms was becoming a sort of pilgrimage venue. Emily had turned groupie. The track grew muddier and was littered with debris. She had to be careful not to trip. These hindrances pleased and comforted her. This was how a building site ought to be, carpeted with lumpy bits, jagged bits, soil, furls of discarded, rusting barbed wire, muck, stones, half bricks, wood fragments, glass fragments, all of it real and ordinary, not part of a horrifying nightmare fantasy. Occasionally, on some particularly rough stretch of ground, a piece of rubble would jab at her shoes and hurt one of her feet. Good. In fact, excellent. The pain confirmed the reality and told her she should have put on hiking boots. What had Tom Mallen, the dead detective, been wearing on his feet? Well, not three-quarter heels.

Following his footsteps, she tried also to follow his thinking. What made him divert? Had he seen something, somebody, on the path he didn't want to confront - didn't want to get spotted by? Or had he simply made a mistake, taken the wrong direction? He wasn't a local officer and might not be familiar with the geography. This seemed an unlikely answer, though. The short-cut had been so well-trodden that anyone could see the usual direct trail. Even if he were half asleep or half drunk he should surely have felt the change of terrain underfoot.

Had he, perhaps, glimpsed something in or near the Jaminel house that made him curious? She thought the distance from the property to where Mallen had probably left the path too great for that. It had been dark at the time, of course, as it was now. Had someone called out to him from the house? But surely he wouldn't respond - would suspect some trickery, some hazard. He was an undercover cop and no doubt alert always to hints he'd been rumbled. He'd interpret a shout from one of the houses as a possible invitation to catastrophe and, of course, he'd have been right, dead right.

Ahead of her now, and very near the Courtenay Jaminel property, Emily made out a woman - navy anorak, jeans, short green wellington boots - not moving much but crouched forward, as if searching for something on the ground. Another Elms pilgrim? She must have heard Emily's footsteps and straightened suddenly, then turned towards her. She'd be in her late thirties, Emily thought, a longish, wary, but not unfriendly face, short fair to mousy hair cut short, the anorak hood not in use.

‘I suppose one day they'll finish all these and there'll be a nice, tidy estate, instead of this no-man's land,' Emily said.

‘Oh, are you thinking of buying here, then?' The accent was not local.

‘No, no, we're very settled. But I find it so sad to see properties like this. Well, hardly properties at all, yet.'

‘On the news they said the economy is picking up slowly. Soon, there might be activity here again.'

Emily thought she didn't seem to favour the idea. ‘You're wise to put on wellies,' Emily said. ‘I'm foolishly unprepared.'

‘This isn't the first time I've been here,' she said, ‘so I know the conditions.'

‘The place has a hold on you?'

‘Yes, I suppose you could call it that.'

‘In a weird fashion I can't explain, it has a hold on me, too,' Emily said.

‘Oh, I think I could explain why
I
come here,' she said. It was spoken in a cut-and-dried, statement-of-the-obvious, no-choice tone, a tone Emily herself, the natural chairperson, could often take.

‘Yes? You have some special reason for visiting?' Emily replied.

‘Certainly.'

Nothing came, though. She seemed to think Emily should be able to work out the answer for herself. And perhaps she could. Her brain was whirring. What would bring a woman repeatedly to a grim place like this and give her the habit of wellingtons? Emily could think of one answer. Only one. She would go gingerly, though. ‘Excuse me,' she said, ‘and excuse me particularly if I've got this wrong, but are you . . .?'

‘Iris Mallen,' she said. ‘My husband, sometimes Tom Parry, was shot here. Two bullets, one in the face, one in the chest.' That same clipped, almost offhand style.

‘Oh, God, I'm sorry.'

‘It's a while now.' She pointed up to a front bedroom. ‘From there. A widow-making window. But I expect you know the story. Tom had what Andy Warhol would term his fifteen minutes of fame, the bulk of them posthumous.'

‘Well, yes - the Press and TV.' Emily reckoned Iris Mallen had deliberately toughened herself, at least in conversation, as a way of making things tolerable. Her plain speaking was of a different sort from Emily's.

‘He had an “I love Torremolinos” T-shirt on, except the word “love” was represented by a heart, in that way you see stickers on car windows,' Iris replied. ‘One of the rounds, the second, went through that red picture to his actual heart, a neat merging of the figurative and the real. Of course, he'd never been to Torremolinos - not our type of resort: Blackpool with sunshine. This was part of his assumed character - the Parry aspect of him, not the Mallen.'

‘I don't remember reading about the T-shirt,' Emily replied. She did, but it seemed kinder not to say so, kinder to herself as well as to Iris Mallen. The first shot knocked him down, but he'd stood again and made himself a target for the next. Emily had met Mallen-Parry several times when he was part of Leo's firm. She'd liked him and would prefer not to revisit too thoroughly the details of his slaughter. She'd leave that fullness to Iris Mallen. Possibly, talking about it without constraint had become a sort of therapy for her. People dealt with their setbacks in all sorts of ways.

‘You wanted to have a look at the location for yourself?' she asked Emily. ‘Not the right shoes, but with a torch.'

‘It was a terrible time back then.'

‘You can see why I wouldn't greatly want the Elms to become . . . to become . . . what did you call it, “a nice, tidy estate”, everything concreted over, including this sliver of soil where it happened. This will be a pavement. The milkman will step on it every morning.'

‘Yes, I see, I do see your thinking,' Emily said. So, the Elms, and this house on the Elms, and this small stretch of ground, did combine to make a symbol - a grief symbol for Iris Mallen. ‘But you live elsewhere, don't you?'

‘A different police manor, yes. That was important - so Tom wouldn't be recognized here. A wise precaution, of course. Routine in that kind of spy job, he said. But also, of course, sometimes the routine doesn't work. It's not all that far for me and a fair bit of it is fast motorway. I can get here and back in less than four hours. I'll be home around half nine. The children are at friends' houses.'

Emily thought there might be two, a boy and a girl, the boy a teenager. It must have come out at the trial and been reported. Obviously, Tom Mallen-Parry wouldn't have told her that, or anything else about his real background. His real background had been an absolute secret. Evidently it had become not so absolute at some point.

‘I don't know who you are,' Iris Mallen said, chattily. ‘We share an interest, are both, as you put it, held somehow by this house and slice of ground, and yet you haven't told me why you're here.'

And Emily couldn't say, could she, couldn't admit she was married to the outfit who might have done for her husband, Tom, also known as Tom; the outfit who had put him down on to the mud and then put him down again via his Torremolinos heart after he'd somehow managed to stand once more? ‘It's not of any significance,' Emily said, in her coolest chairperson voice. She was used to editing meetings into the shape she wanted.

Iris Mallen shrugged, didn't show annoyance or resentment. Maybe, married to a spy, she'd learned that many of her questions would go unanswered.

She'd be doing some guesswork. Emily couldn't edit and shape that. ‘You seemed to be searching for something when I first saw you,' she said.

‘I was. It's missing. A Biro. An old Biro. I stuck it in the ground to mark where Tom lay, in case after a spell away I got confused about the location.' She paused, shook her head. ‘No, that's rot. I'd always know the couple of square metres, wouldn't I? The pen was a sort of symbol, I suppose. It used to belong to Tom. Green ink. He liked green ink. One of the last things he wrote with it was a birthday message to our son, Steve - tied to a mountain bike Tom had bought him. I heard these rumours about construction picking up and was afraid the Biro might disappear under tarmac. So, I would have liked to reclaim it, a memento. No luck.'

She began to walk swiftly away, the wellingtons making a gentle flapping sound against her lower leg, like driving on a flat tyre. She turned her head and called out: ‘Nice to see you, whoever you are, expensively, inappropriately garbed and shoed. Don't take that wrong. Please. I'm sure you have your reasons. You're involved in all this somehow, aren't you? On the distaff side?'

‘Look where you're going. You'll trip,' Emily replied.

‘I must get to the multi-storey in Guild Square and hot tail it. Perhaps we'll meet here again. It might be a neighbourhood by then, though, the house alive with lights and a family, and all the shit families can run into willy-nilly.'

Yes, families could, couldn't they? Emily stayed. She had another fifteen minutes or so to spare. This expedition hadn't turned out as she wanted, not so far. She might still salvage something. She'd come here to get comfortingly acquainted with the solid, honest, temporarily skint basics of property building, and instead had been shanghaied into Iris Mallen's terse but heavy sentimentalizing of the Torremolinos T-shirt, her boy's birthday mountain bike and an old green Biro. Yes, poignant and graphic, but not what Emily sought. In fact, they were the kind of emotive items she didn't quite trust: too many bloody overtones. Overtones should be kept under.

She switched on the torch and walked across the front garden, as this stony, brambled oblong should one day be, and put a hand on an immaculately pointed area of wall beneath a boarded downstairs front window. This was going to be a house, just a house, with charmingly antiqued, factory-made brickwork, and a black damp course let into it near the ground, guaranteed to keep the rooms weatherproof and snug. She felt better for the simple contact. She patted the wall three times and thought, ‘Well done, house.'

She moved her hand up to get similar contact with the window boarding and was surprised to find it shifted slightly under this minimal pressure: surely damn useless if it gave way so easily. She played the torch beam on to where the screws should have been keeping it in place and saw instead that all the bottom ones had been removed and, at the top, only a single screw plugged each board to the wall. It meant a wooden panel could swing on it; could be pushed aside, like a curtain. This was probably the same for each nearly completed house. They'd probably all have unofficial guests squatting in them now and again. Some might not fancy sleeping in number 14, the actual murder house.

Emily realized that maybe she should have given more weight to what Noreen had told her. Then she wouldn't have been startled to find the boarding here so adjustable. This must be the spot where the woman seen by Noreen's chums had been talking to somebody inside the house - as if in a chinwag with the Delphic oracle, as one of them had suggested: Noreen would have that sort of mouthy, bookish mates. Emily eased a board aside and lit up part of the room. The floor was wood block and almost as littered with rubble as the ground where she and Iris Mallen had talked. It didn't smell as Emily would have expected an oracle to smell. Just the same, Emily thought she should get through the gap and have a look around.

She had come here to prove to herself that a building was a building and not much else. And buildings had interiors to be taken account of, as well as outsides. It would be chicken, wouldn't it, to turn away now. To retreat after finding this entrance might suggest the house husk really did represent a special, forbidding symbolism.

Getting in required some gymnastics. She pushed one of the boards back on its fulcrum screw, leaned over the sill and put the torch, alight, down flat on the inside, because she needed both hands free. With her left, she held the board open, then used her right to help lift and drag herself up and over, taking care not to kick and possibly dowse the torch. As Iris Mallen had said, Emily wasn't really dressed for clambering about on a construction site but she'd give herself a good brush down with her fingers before she arrived at the museum committee meeting. She had on a dark woollen suit - pricey, as Iris Mallen had also said - and any creasing should fall out of such quality material all right.

Of course, when she stood in the room she had to let go of the board and it slipped back into place behind her, clunking against the other one with a noise like a door blown shut in the breeze. That shook Emily for a moment; more than a moment, although she ought to have foreseen it would self-close: gravitational pull. She should have put something there to prop the board part-open so the gap was easy to identify when she wanted to get out, and she might want to get out in a rush.

She felt enclosed, trapped, too dependent on the torch. It would have been sensible to put new batteries in before starting all this. She couldn't remember how much use the present ones had had. She picked up the torch, turning the beam on to where the entrance gap was, and tried to get a picture into her memory of the exact location in the bay window space. The light seemed OK, no flicker-ing, no fading from white to yellow. She let it linger on the board for a few moments, scared to give it over to darkness and perhaps make it unfindable - particularly if she were panicked. Then she became ashamed of her timorousness and brought the ray around to the other side of the room and to the door space leading from it, though no door was hung yet.