The Ties That Bind (22 page)

There was one possible solution that made sense of her fear and defensiveness. Opposite him, Sandy was trying to light a cigarette that was the wrong way around in her mouth. Luke gently righted it and held up the match.

‘About halfway along I realised that I was feeling better, but that it was a bloody stupid place for a girl to go on her own. And it was
spooky
. Most of the lights were off, and all the clown faces painted on the walls at Laughter Land looked like they were alive . . .’ She shook her head violently.

Silence swelled to fill the room. Everything balanced on a knife-edge. The wrong question now would push the truth back in for ever. The right prompt would draw it out.

‘Sandy, this new coat. What colour was it?’

Her eyes, finally still, told him that she knew the significance of the question, and of her answer.

‘Red.’

Chapter 32

Luke took hold of her shaking hand, hoping she could not feel the speeding pulse in his own palm.

‘But, Sandy . . . this is . . . the police were looking for you for
years
. Why didn’t you tell anyone?’

‘I had my reasons,’ she said, snatching her hand away and folding her arms. Luke panicked at the first signs of drunken hostility. He blamed himself for letting her get like this; you
never
judged your subject.

‘Was Nye still alive when you saw them?’

‘Yes,’ she said. Luke dared to exhale.

‘They were still only shouting at first. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, the wind was against me. I knew who they were. Everyone knew a lad who’d been roughed up for stepping over the line in one of their clubs. They were pacing up and down, going in and out of the light – only the side lamps were on, so the boardwalk was lit up in spots but outside those it was blackness. Then Nye said something, I don’t know what, and it got physical like
that
.’ She clicked her fingers. ‘It’s funny what you think: they both had on these lovely camel coats and my first reaction was, I do hope they’ve had those Scotchgarded, if they get blood on that wool they’ll have the devil to get it out.

‘I’d seen two men fight to the death before, in a street brawl when I was a kid, and this was the same thing. They were
lost
in it. I don’t know how else to explain it. It was like . . . you know, if you were in bed with a fella, and you were really into it, and the four-minute warning siren could be going off and you wouldn’t even notice. It was like that, only with fists. Jacky grabbed Joss’s glasses and hit Joss with them still in his hand. They cut his palm up, so he dropped them and while he was staring at the cut, Joss got his hands around his throat. I moved then. I stepped back into a shelter and when I looked up again, Jacky was on the floor. His eyes were all glassy, I knew he was gone. I tell you, I’ve never sobered up so quickly.’

He hoped she didn’t sober up now. She was in full flow. ‘The thing is that most of me was completely terrified, but there was another part making mental shorthand, thinking, if I can get out of this in one piece, I’ve got the story of the
month
here, I’ve got the scoop of the
year
. I was taking it all in, trying to get every detail in my memory.’ Luke felt the same way now. Never mind 94% recall; he knew that he would remember every word of this speech, every breath and hiccup, nuance and cadence, not just for the time it took to transcribe it but for the rest of his life. ‘So, Joss walked back to the entrance. I thought he was just going to leave the body there, but he started shouting at the bloke in the Bentley – I say shouting, but he was roaring, really, like a lion. I heard the noise, if not the words, and so did the driver, because he came running out. Joss was pointing at his eyes and shouting. Next thing, the driver was back and he’d given Joss a new pair.’

It was an interesting detail but that was all: the key was not the provision of new spectacles but the fate of the old ones.‘And what happened to the broken ones?’

Sandy’s glass was empty and she held it out to Luke. Keen to keep her as close to this level of inebriation as possible, he poured a small measure from a great height for the illusion of plenty, another trick from his secondary career as a barman. She knocked it back and smacked her lips.

‘That’s hit the spot, thanks.’ But seconds later a slick of perspiration broke through her makeup. Clamping her lips together, she staggered to the kitchen sink and vomited noisily, the initial splash followed by aftershock retches followed by the sound of a running tap.
Shit
. He looked at the gin bottle, two-thirds empty. He’d misjudged this, badly.

A minute stretched into two, then three, until Luke decided that her safety was more important than her dignity. ‘Sandy, are you all right?’ he called. No response. He found her on the kitchen floor, her legs halfway to doing the splits, kitten heels kicked aside. As he pulled her to a sitting position her legs buckled under her again like a fawn’s on ice.

Oh
Christ
, thought Luke. ‘Wake up, Sandy!’ He put his hands under her armpits and hauled her to an upright position. Even as a dead weight she felt light. He stood there holding her for a few moments as realisation dawned that he didn’t actually know what to do next. He had a vague idea that you ought to put someone in the recovery position to prevent them choking on their own vomit, but what was the recovery position? He ought to know. They’d made him do a first aid course when he was working at the gallery but he’d been so exhausted from writing all the way through the previous night that he hadn’t taken any of it in.

He carried her to the sofa and laid her on one side, wondering if he should call an ambulance. If it was Viggo or even Charlene he wouldn’t have panicked, but Sandy was sixty-one. A vague recollection came to him, something he’d read, about old people metabolising alcohol differently to the young, but he couldn’t remember whether it made them more or less vulnerable to its effects. He put his hand close to her lolling mouth, grateful for the warm mist on his palm that told him she was still breathing.

After a twenty-minute eternity, Sandy flickered back into life again. Her eyes registered surprise at Luke’s face looming over hers and then, briefly, something Luke thought must be regret. His guilt at having bullied an old woman into revealing her secret was washed away by relief that he hadn’t killed her.

‘Do you want some water?’ he asked.

‘Coffee,’ she said like her life depended on it. When he came back in, she was sitting upright, huddled in a blanket. He waited for her to tell him to get the hell out of her house. Instead, she wiped her nose on her sleeve like a child before sipping tentatively.

‘So,’ she said in a deflated way. ‘Now you know. If that doesn’t put you off interviewing Joss Grand, I dunno what will.’ She lurched in close enough for her hot stale breath to tickle his ear. ‘Promise me you’ll leave it here, Luke,’ she slurred. ‘For your own safety. There’s a
reason
this book has never been written.’

‘I gave you my word, didn’t I?’ It seemed that he was not the seasoned liar he thought he was; this untruth had a surprising and unwelcome bitterness to it. He reached for his glass but found that not even fine spirits could chase away the aftertaste.

‘Sorry lovey, you’re right, I’m just, it’s just . . . I can’t quite believe what I . . . one minute I’m having a quiet night in and the next thing I know I’m pouring my heart out to some kid I met five minutes ago.’ She laughed sourly. ‘I mean I always worried it would come out eventually but I always thought it’d be someone I
knew
.’

Luke was stunned. ‘Surely I’m not the first person you’ve told? Not your sister? Not your
husband
?’

Sandy’s eyes widened. ‘No! They were the
last
people I could tell. The more I loved someone, the worse it was that they might find out.’

‘I don’t follow.’

She mumbled something into her chest.

‘Sandy?’

‘Because of what he did next,’ she said in a tiny voice.

Luke rewound the narrative to the point of interruption. What was the last thing she’d said before getting sick? When he remembered he got pins and needles in his fingertips.

‘You were going to tell me what happened to the glasses,’ he said. Her answer followed to the letter the one he had predicted, and he was angry at himself for the swoop of disappointment in his belly.

‘The driver chucked them into the water.’ She mimed a loose overarm throw. ‘And then they threw Jacky over after them. It took both of them. That’s why he was found so quickly. On the water the light breaks up and moves about, and anything floating is really obvious. I watched him bobbing about face-down and I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone saw him. Mind you, I wasn’t on the water and they saw me, didn’t they?’

‘They saw you?’ He struggled to believe this. How was she even still alive? ‘Bloody
hell
, Sandy.’

She began to work the edges of the blanket between her fingers. ‘The only reason they didn’t see me before was cos they hadn’t turned around yet. I wasn’t hiding as such, I was just pressed up against one of those little booths. You couldn’t miss me, all in red. He asked who I was and called me darling but the way
he
said darling it sounded like a swearword. I could barely remember my name, let alone say it.’

The coffee had only taken the edge off her drunkenness: she was now a frustrating combination of articulate and indistinct, her language precise but her words a babble, running into and tripping over each other.

‘He got my wrist in his hand . . . he had bony little fingers on him but they felt like metal, he had such a strong grip. It hurt so much it took my breath away. I had a bruise for weeks afterwards. My handbag was still hanging off my arm and he held me tighter as he went through it. He took out my purse. It had my press card in one window and that picture of Janet and Jill in the other. So he had my name, my job, and my family. Everything I cared about in his hand. He called me a stupid little slag, and the worst thing was I agreed with him, I felt so stupid and so young. “Janet and Jill,” he went, “What pretty names. Pretty faces, too. Shame for any harm to come to them. One word, Cassandra Cameron, one word in print, or out loud, to anyone and we come after
them
. I know how to find people. I’ll be watching you. If you ever get married, if you ever have kids of your own, I’ll know about it. I don’t think you need me to spell out what I’m capable of.” And he looked over his shoulder to the water. Like I needed reminding of what I’d just seen! Like I wasn’t going to be having nightmares about it for ever! He went, “Do you understand me?” and he tightened his hand around my wrist until I got the word “yes” out. I didn’t care any more about my scoop, I just wanted to get out of there alive. I waited till the car had gone, and then I went too. I was barely across the street when someone screamed up on the promenade, and I knew the law would be on their way.’ She listed to one side and Luke poised himself to catch her if she passed out again, but she righted herself and only the coffee cup fell over, spilling its dregs onto a chopped-up copy of
Vogue
. Luke picked it up and set it on the table.

‘Do you want another one?’

She shook her head. ‘No thanks, lovey. This one’s repeating on me enough as it is. So I went back into the pub to find Mark, but he wasn’t there, and while I was asking after him the sirens came. The whole press were out of the pub in seconds, up the road to the West Pier. I just sat for, I don’t know, five minutes, until he came back. I pulled my sleeve right down over my fingers in case he noticed and asked what had happened to me but he was so angry, he wouldn’t have noticed if I’d had two black eyes. He was livid, said he’d sent some woman into the Ladies to see if I was all right and when I hadn’t been there, he’d walked the Lanes until he got lost, convinced I’d got myself taken advantage of. He didn’t even notice the others had gone until he saw all the drinks half-finished. You’ll know as well as I do that there’s only one reason hacks ever abandon a pint halfway through and that’s for a story. I had to think of something before the barmaid or someone told him where they really were. I mean, I couldn’t go back to the crime scene, could I? So I said something was kicking off on the Palace Pier. I led him through all these little alleyways, stalling for time, blaming it on the drink, but I could only make it last so long and when we did get to the Palace, it was obvious that it was all happening in the other direction. I thought he was going to hit me and I didn’t even care. By the time we got to the West Pier, it had a police cordon all around it. The entire press pack had followed the police a hundred yards to Le Pigalle, they’d got their shots of Joss in the street talking to the police and they’d all got back to London in time to catch the last press. All except us. We could’ve phoned the copy in, but no photo meant no front page.’

Sandy made a strange swallowing sound, repressing tears or possibly vomit. Instinctively Luke inched away from her.

‘You must have known you were committing career suicide.’

‘It was suicide or murder, wasn’t it? It was me or my family. I’d just seen what Joss Grand was capable of. I wasn’t going to call his bluff.’

‘What did your editor
say
?’

‘I never spoke to him again,’ she said, eyes brimming. ‘Mark made me stand outside the phone box while he rang the desk. I suppose I can see it from his point of view now. His job was probably on the line for a mistake like that, too. I might have done the same if some rookie photographer had ruined my story. I knew I was finished. You didn’t get second chances in those days, especially not if you were a woman. And so I came home to Brighton, and the local rags. Nowhere else would have me.’

Her voice carried the pain across the decades.

‘The accounts I’ve read, Grand went to ground pretty much as soon as he was released without charge,’ Luke said. ‘But you saw him again. Or at least you wrote about him.’

‘Oh, you’ve seen that, have you? Well, after the funeral, as you’ll know, Grand wound down all the dodgy stuff and went into property. For once he seemed to be doing everything by the books. I was sent to cover the opening of his big penis extension of a high-rise up at the marina.’ Her cackle was short and dry. ‘He made a beeline for me, made sure that no one else could hear, and all he had to say to me was,
Hope the family are well
. And I wrote the story the way he wanted me to. I had to do a dozen more puff pieces on him, and each one made me feel sicker than the last.’