The Gardens of the Dead (18 page)

‘Sorry
I’m late,’ she said sweetly sitting down, ‘three kids under five. Don’t do it.’

‘I’ll
try not to.’ Each ear was weighted with a substantial holly-berry earring,
irregular in shape, probably painful to wear and undoubtedly made by one of the
under-fives. Her hair was a deep, rusty brown; it had been cut very short,
leaving precise lines. ‘I think when we last met,’ she said kindly ‘you’d just
opened the door to let Mr Riley out.’

And
now,’ replied Anselm, ‘I hope to open another that will bring him back in.

Inspector Cartwright was,
of course, wholly unaware of Elizabeth’s hope to ‘take away Riley’s good name’
and her contingency plan should death overtake the fulfilment of her project,
so Anselm related what had transpired since the day he received the key.

‘Unfortunately’
he said, in conclusion, ‘I came to my responsibility a mite later than she
anticipated. When I got to Trespass Place, George had gone.’

Inspector
Cartwright had listened with fixed attention, a hand at intervals repositioning
an earring. She glanced at the cake selection, saying, ‘I’ve already played a
part in this business, only I didn’t realise it until now Would you hang on a
moment?’ She waved at the counter and asked for a date slice. ‘Kids. I need
sugar.’ The waiter returned with a small plate and a small cake. After
reflecting for a moment she began to speak.

A few
years ago a friend of mine put a file on my desk. He has an informant in the
field called Prosser who trades in antiques at the bottom end of the market. He
goes round the fairs and fêtes. He’s on a retainer to tell us what he sees and
hears. Usually it’s handling stolen goods — stuff being moved on for cash
without a receipt. Sometimes it’s drugs. It happens that he’d filed three
reports on Riley’ She leaned on the table, one hand on top of the other. ‘Prosser
said Riley was up to something, but he couldn’t pin it down. But he was sure
that people came to Riley’s stall, handed over cash and left with nothing.’

‘A
payment?’

‘Apparently.’

‘The
same people?’

‘Not
always, but often.’

‘Paying
protection?’

‘We had
him watched but he does nothing but empty dead men’s houses and sell on what
they’ve left behind.’

Anselm
called up the sorts of questions that were once basic to his trade: ‘Is the
profit margin too high for his kind of business?’

‘No.
And the accounts are perfect — all filed on time at Companies House.’

‘Is he
funding a lifestyle beyond his earnings?’

The
Inspector shook her head. ‘He’s got a tatty bungalow, no car and never goes on
holiday. So we dropped it.’

‘But
people still give him money for nothing?’ said Anselm.

‘Yes,
they do.’

Anselm
waited.

A
couple of years ago I was at the Bailey for a trial,’ said the Inspector. ‘One
morning I was in the canteen and Mrs Glendinning took a seat right in front of
me. Without saying hello, she asked if I’d heard about the death of John

Bradshaw
I said I had. And then, like a timetable enquiry, she said, “Will you get Riley
in the dock for the killing?” I shook my head and she just made an ‘Ah,” as if
a train had been delayed. And then she said, “I wonder if he’s gone straight?”
That’s when I told her about Prosser, but she didn’t seem that interested.’

Anselm
smiled to himself. With two straightforward questions, Elizabeth had learned
what she wanted to know: the state of the police inquiry into John’s death, and
whether Riley was still believed to be involved in crime. Armed with this
information, she’d tracked down George and begun her scheme. In a reverie,
Anselm saw afresh its crucial antecedents: her troubled visits to Finsbury Park
and Larkwood, where she’d worked out the framework for her actions.

Inspector
Cartwright tapped her plate with a teaspoon. ‘Hello.’ She seemed to be peering
into a pipe. ‘I’m a police officer. Put your hands up.’

‘Forgive
me,’ said Anselm, blinking. ‘I was distracted by a kind of vision.’

‘Really?
What did you see?’

‘That
Elizabeth drew you forward; as she drew my Prior; as she drew me.’

For a
time neither of them spoke.

‘I
suppose that makes us comrades,’ Inspector Cartwright said at last. She held
out her hand. As their palms met Anselm saw Elizabeth leaning over a box of
Milk Tray — when it had all begun. Her hair had fallen like a curtain. In his
imagination, Anselm peered behind it, and caught her faint smile. ‘I’ve been
tidying up my life,’ she’d said.

‘I
never heard from Mrs Glendinning again,’ resumed the Inspector. ‘On the day she
died, she left a message on my answer machine. She just said, “Leave it to
Anselm.”‘

They
both now understood what that meant. But Anselm wanted to know something else. ‘How
would you describe her tone of voice?’

‘Supremely
confident.’

Standing outside the café,
Anselm said, ‘Out of interest, did you ever take the Pieman seriously?’

‘We ran
the name past all our contacts in the field,’ said the Inspector, ‘and we
pushed it through the computer, but nothing came up. When I interviewed Riley
he wouldn’t answer a single question, but I kept coming back to that name.’

‘Why?’

‘I
noticed it made him sweat.’

Anselm
left Inspector Cartwright on the understanding that he would contact her as and
when he heard from Mr Hillsden. Watching her walk down Coptic Street, Anselm
recalled Lamb’s question to the old benchers of the Inner Temple:
‘Fantastic
forms, whither are ye fled?’

5

One freezing morning Nancy
had walked from Poplar to her shop. Dumped across the entrance was a pile of
cardboard marked FRAGILE in red. She reached over with her keys, glancing down
to keep her balance. That’s when she saw the finger poking out. She gasped,
thinking it must be a body from a gangland war. She tapped the surface with her
foot, wondering if the man had been cut up into bits, but the finger moved and
a flap opened like a trap door and there was this man, his face black and
hairy, his eyes hidden by goggles. She’d thought he must have been a fighter
pilot from the First World War.

This
man rolled onto his side, drawing up his knees. Then he felt his way up the
door, using the handle to lift himself out of the cardboard… It was packaging
for a fridge.

‘Am I
in the way?’

‘Not at
all, but you’re nearly in the road. Can’t you see?’

‘No.’

It was
arctic and the man’s hands were a dirty blue. Cars whipped over the hump in the
road, making them scrape and bang. Nancy said, ‘Won’t you warm up inside?’

‘May I?’

Mr
Lawton used to say things like that.
May I?
She opened up and dragged
the cardboard through to the back room. It wouldn’t feel right, throwing it
out. When she came back he was standing inside, his hands on what Riley had
called a figurine lamp — a woman with scarves all over and a light socket
sticking out of her head. His fingers moved so gently building the thing in his
mind, that it became beautiful.

‘I’m
Mrs Riley.’

‘I’m Mr
Johnson.’

Who
would have believed it? Over the following months they became friends. He was
her one secret from Riley And then he disappeared. In one sense it was for
good, because a very different man eventually came back. He seemed frail and
uncertain. He sat down with shaking arms.

‘What
happened?’ asked Nancy anxiously.

‘I got
my head kicked in.’ His goggles moved on a rumpled nose. ‘I can’t remember much
of the present. This morning, last week… they’ve gone down the plughole.’

Nancy
lit the gas fire, and she thought of the entertainment Uncle Bertie used to
kick off when they were in Brighton. It was called ‘Silly Secrets’. Cheerily
she said, ‘Shall we play a game?’

‘All
right.’

‘You
tell me a secret, and then I’ll tell you one.’ The idea was that people confessed
to daft things they’d done. (Once, in a shop, Uncle Bertie had used a toilet,
only to find it was part of a mock bathroom for sale.)

‘That’s
not fair,’ said Mr Johnson. ‘I won’t remember and you will.’

‘I’ll
tell no one.

Mr
Johnson said, ‘I once had a son.’

Nancy
covered her mouth. He leaned forward, vapour rising off him, his goggles full
of condensation, and he talked about summers in Southport with the same longing
that she had for Brighton. And Nancy waited, sensing that something awful had
happened to his boy but he never said what. The next day Mr Johnson turned up
and Nancy tipped out things she’d never said and thought she’d never say — how
she’d met Riley the life she’d lost at Lawton’s, the children she’d never
had.., the trial. And Mr Johnson listened, warming his grey-blue hands: a
gentleman who would remember nothing.

Nancy glanced at the
sputtering fire. On her lap was a plastic bag. She’d found it a couple of weeks
ago when she went into the back room to pick up her shopping. It was full of
notebooks, each neatly numbered on the front. They belonged to Mr Johnson, the
gentleman who could remember nothing. Nancy had waited for him to come back,
but he’d vanished in the mist, just like Riley on his way to Tottenham. She
glanced towards the door… and reached into the bag. It was wrong, she knew,
but ever since that barrister had died, the trial had returned. Sensations from
that time had been prickling her like pins in a doll. The only way to numb the
pain was to fill her mind with something else, and the puzzle book was full —
she rooted around for number one. On the front was written ‘My Story’.

Her
mouth was open and her hair tingled. This wasn’t right.

I call myself
George.

She hadn’t known that. He
was just Mr Johnson.

I’m a Harrogate
boy a Yorkshire lad. There’s a little lane that runs by a bowling green and a
tennis court of orange grit. On the other side are houses with mown lawns. At
the end of the lane there’s a clump of trees and a fence with a gate. It seems
that the sun is always shining here and the flowers are taller than me.
Foxgloves, I think they’re called. But my earliest memory of this place is in
the rain. My mother had made a canvas shelter for my pram.

Nancy
snapped it shut. This was wrong. But she reached in and opened another number,
wondering what had happened to Mr Johnson when he’d grown up.

I’d seen her
quite a few times, and always at night. She stood beneath a street lamp, hands
behind her back like Dixon of Dock Green. The most amazing thing was her white
headdress. It was like a tent without guide ropes.

The
doorbell sounded.

Nancy
dropped the book, composed herself and presently sold a mirror to Mr Prosser —
a dealer in quality second-hand. He was always mooching around, asking how her
man found such good stuff. She told him nothing. When he’d gone she tied a knot
in Mr Johnson’s bag and pushed it into the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.

But
that left her exposed. She fell back in her seat, eyes clenched and hands over
her ears. In that inner darkness, she sensed the patient ‘attendance’ of Mr
Wyecliffe. It was a word he’d often used. She’d thought he was a sorcerer. How
else did he pull off the impossible?

After being charged, Riley
was hauled before a porky magistrate with a runny nose, who, between sneezes,
sent her man to Wormwood Scrubs on remand. But Mr Wyecliffe got him out within
a week. No special keys or dodgy chains. ‘Just words, well used, ma’am,’ he
said, waving a grey handkerchief. ‘All that requires my attendance now is the
trial.’ He sniffed and blinked, as if he hadn’t worked out how to do it yet.

The
solicitor had brought Riley home and stayed for a ‘preliminary conference’.
They sat in the living room, drinking Uncle Bertie’s ‘poison’. Riley was
humiliated and speechless and couldn’t look in Nancy’s direction. He was
quaking.

‘We’ll
use counsel,’ said Mr Wyecliffe significantly to break the silence. ‘I’ll get
the best.’

‘I know
who I want.’ It was the first thing Riley had said. He glanced at a spot near
Nancy’s feet and asked for some sandwiches.

When
she came back, Mr Wyecliffe was making notes, and Riley appeared deathly calm.
The shaking had stopped. He spoke under his breath while the solicitor stuffed
his face as if he’d had no breakfast. Her man stared at the carpet and said, ‘How
the hell am I to know what the tenants get up to? I’m hardly ever over there.
Ask the wife.’

‘I
will, in due course,’ promised Mr Wyecliffe. ‘In the meantime, might I have
another sandwich?’

Nancy
gave him hers.