Towers of Silence (17 page)

I came away with a card for six months time; a numb face, peculiar new textures for my tongue to explore and an unshakeable sense of defilement. There’s something deeply disturbing about having a stranger mess about in your mouth. It strengthened my resolve to keep to the hard-line with Maddie and to insist that anything sugary was saved for meal times, even birthday treats from school and lollies that well-meaning shopkeepers handed out. Sometimes it felt as though the whole world was intent on bathing her little pegs in sugar from dawn to dusk.

I made a cup of tea at home and sipped carefully. It was hard to tell how hot it was and difficult to drink without dribbling. Chewing was out of the question so lunch was soup and noodles. I put dirty clothes on to wash, wet clothes in the dryer and dry clothes in the right piles for Ray, the kids and myself. A handful of Christmas cards had arrived, I opened them and put them on the hall table. We ought to start hanging them up, keep the kids happy till the tree materialised.

Feeling began to return to my face bringing increased control along with deep aching where the needle had gone in and along my jawbone. I tried talking to the mirror. Everything looked as it should.

Time to tackle Horace Johnstone. He was only living a few miles away from his estranged family. In a maisonette in Collyhurst, north of the city. It was a poor area. Money had been poured into it recently to smarten it up in time for the Commonwealth Games and some of the more obvious signs of vandalism and neglect had been cleared away. Nevertheless, the squat rows of maisonettes and the tiny houses, with narrow windows like horizontal versions of the slits on Norman castles, looked grim in the dim, grey weather. A carrier bag fought for freedom in the branches of a solitary tree. At the roadside a car had been abandoned, probably stolen, its interior charred, tyres gone. The bus shelter had been worked on too, fragments of glass glittered on the pavements, and lay in frosted heaps.

Mr Johnstone had an upstairs flat, reached by exterior stairs. I rang the bell and was greeted by gruff barking but no one came to the door. I tried again. From the landing I could see the three tower blocks down on Rochdale Road towards the valley bottom and beyond them the sweep of Cheetham Hill, the outline of Strangeways prison and beside it Boddingtons brewery. All those men locked up and smelling the yeast of the beer-making each day. Reminding them of what they were missing. A train made its way along the track towards Victoria station, in between the old warehouses and mills. Some of these were rotting, roofs gone, walls bowing, wood crumbling in the broken window frames. Others clung on, housing workshops and storage.

East Manchester was the wrong side of town. It was home to a large population but no one else ever had cause to go there. There was nothing to go there for. Unless you were a cycling fan and went to the Velodrome. People would travel through here to the stadium for the Games, the arterial roads would be kept spruced up but the estates behind wouldn’t change much. And when it was all over, when the medals had been handed out and the last trumpet blown, I imagined the area settling back into its timeworn role as the dead end of town.

I wrote a note asking Mr Johnstone to ring me and pushed it through the letter box. Down the stairs a pasty-faced woman, wearing a thick brown woollen coat and what looked like a tea-cosy on her head, was waiting.

She eyed me up. “He’s not in.”

I nodded. “Thanks. I’ve left a note.”

“You’ve taken your time, haven’t you. They said last Wednesday, then it was Monday and yesterday they said they couldn’t promise anything. And what’s a note going to do? He’s had warnings before. I’m fed up with it. The television’s that loud I can follow what they’re saying. I’ve a heart condition, you know. I shouldn’t be having this stress. And the dog’s barking all bleedin’ night while he’s at the pub. That’s where he is now. You should go down and sort him out not just leave a note and then bugger off for the next six months. He’s there more than he is here. Bleedin’ alki. ‘Cos he’s black int’it? All this Equal Opportunities malarkey means you can’t get nothing done if they’re black, in case they say it’s racist.”

Did she believe this crap?

“I don’t sleep. Friday night ...” she began.

I interrupted her.

“Which pub?”

“The Cat and Ferret, Jersey Street.”

“I’ll try and catch him.”

“He’ll be there all afternoon.”

I escaped without even trying to correct the misunderstanding.

The Cat and Ferret was warm and smoky and busy. Huge plastic cartoon cut-outs of Santa and Rudolf, sleighs and bells had been taped to the walls, garish against the flock wallpaper. Dingy streamers were strung about. Brewery posters advertised Christmas Fayre and family fun. I was marked as a stranger as soon as I walked in. Conversations were suspended as people waited to see why I was here. I scanned the room. Horace Johnstone sat with a group of men. He was the only black person. I was the only woman.

The resemblance to his son Roland was striking. I braced myself and crossed to the table. They were playing cards. One of the men shuffling the set.

“Mr Johnstone?”

He turned, peered at me. His grey hair was wiry, just covering the top of his ears. “Yes?”

I moved closer, lowered my voice. “I need to talk to you.”

He frowned. “Who are you?”

“Sal Kilkenny. I’m working for your daughter Constance.” His eyes widened in surprise. “Roland told me where to come.”

A burst of laughter came from the bar where more men were watching a television suspended up in one corner.

“If we could talk in private?”

He looked at me cautiously, nodded once and picked up his glass. He swallowed it down, his Adam’s apple rippling as he did. He pulled the coat from the back of his chair. “Deal me out, Dave.”

The men were clearly tight with curiosity but Horace didn’t furnish any explanation and they were unsure of me enough to forego any banter. I was an official, they knew that much: the social, the council, the filth. Someone to be given a wide berth.

Horace Johnstone pulled on an olive green, flat cap and buttoned his coat. He took his time. I sensed the ferocious concentration of the habitual drunk in the slow way he moved.

We walked in awkward silence, into the wind, and back to the maisonettes. There was no sign of his downstairs neighbour.

The dog barked loudly as Mr Johnstone unlocked the door.

“Don’t mind him,” he said. “He’s in the kitchen.” He stooped to pick the folded paper from the floor.

“I left a note,” I said, “before I came to the pub.”

The door led into a narrow hallway. Mr Johnstone hung up his coat and took me through the door ahead into a small, rectangular, low-ceilinged room. No one had cleared up for a long time. The navy carpet was covered with dog hairs, bits of lint, crumbs. Yellowing newspapers were piled up on the sideboard and the room smelt stale, like the morning after a party, old beer and cigarettes and the meaty scent of dog. There was no sign of Yuletide, not even a card.

Mr Johnstone gestured for me to sit in one of the shabby armchairs and he sat in the other.

“I’m a private detective. My name is Sal Kilkenny. Constance hired me because she was unhappy about the inquest into her mother’s death. She wanted to know more about the day itself, where Miriam had been, who she’d seen; that sort of thing.”

He regarded me suspiciously. “And Roland?”

“He told me that he’d found you, that he’d been seeing you in secret. He said you’d arranged to meet at Heald Place. He hoped you and Miriam would let bygones be bygones.”

He gave a sigh, he sounded exasperated.

“One moment.” He went out and returned with two cans of cheap lager. He popped one and drank from it.

“I’m the first person Roland’s told. He’s convinced that seeing you drove Miriam into a panic. He blames himself for what happened.”

He frowned, took another swig. “That don’t make no sense,” he said.

“I know but he does.”

“No,” he held the can out towards me to emphasise his point, “I don’t mean that. It makes no sense,” he said carefully, “because Miriam never saw me. She wasn’t home when I called at the house.” He nodded solemnly and took a drink.

“What did you do?”

“I thought maybe Roland had cold feet. I waited a little bit and I asked at the shop. They told me about this centre she goes to. I wondered if she’d be there or if Roland had gone there maybe, to give her some warning about me. I thought he said twelve fifteen then I got to thinking if I had it mixed up and then ...” He shrugged. His speech was slurred. “I went to the centre and she gone.” He shifted and pulled a tin of tobacco from his pocket and some Rizla papers. He began to roll a cigarette with slow, practised movements.

“Miriam had left. I missed her.” He struck a match and lit his roll-up. He took a drag and blew smoke into the air, drank some more.

“What would you have done if she’d been there?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know. Was all Roland’s plan and he was nowhere in sight.”

“Have you seen him since then?”

“I rang him and he said to keep in touch.”

Really? Roland’s version was that he had hung up the phone, refused to talk to his father. Why this little lie? Was it all lies?

“You never went to the funeral?”

“I wasn’t welcome. Miriam and me we parted with very, very bad feelings. She turned them all against me. She never let me see my son.”

“Did you try?”

“She wouldn’t let me, no way,” he said evasively.

“She became ill just after you walked out,” I said. “It must have been difficult for them.”

“She had a weakness,” he said. “Some people, that’s the way they are.”

“Were you surprised when she killed herself?”

“No, ” he took a long drag. “It’s like a bomb waiting to go off, you know? Sooner or later ...” He made a gesture with his hands tracing the shape of an explosion.

He was the only person I’d talked to who had known Miriam and hadn’t expressed surprise or disbelief at her suicide. He hadn’t seen his wife for fourteen years - maybe that had something to do with it. Perhaps emphasising her mental vulnerability and the inevitability of her fate was a means of absolving himself of any responsibility for the way her life had gone. If Miriam was weak and destined for suicide his walking out would be neither here nor there. Was that it?

“You had no contact over the years?”

“No.”

“Did you contribute financially?”

“No,” he said defensively. “I can’t do that. I never had lots of money and why should I pay? I never see my own children. I don’t have food cooked or my washing done or nothing”.

But we were wandering, now.

“After you’d called at the centre, what did you do?”

“I thought about trying the house again. Maybe she walked a different way. But I decide to give her a bit of time. I went for a little drink.”

“Where.”

“The Albert.”

I knew it. I nodded.

“I stayed there awhile and I thought, you know, maybe Roland he set me up. Some sort of silly matchmaking and that’s why he wasn’t there. Though he must realise that it’s going to be a big, big shock for her if I turn up out of the blue and no Roland to have his say.”

“He was delayed,” I said. “He got stopped leaving school.”

He peered at me, trying to take in this new scenario. “Delayed?”

“Yes.”

The ash fell from his cigarette onto his trousers, he rubbed it in. Had a drink.

“He’s a fine boy,” he said. “He came to find me. His sisters, they never bothered. Father,” he pointed to himself, “and son,” He pointed away. He had a last suck on the roll up and dropped it in the beer can. There was a tiny hiss.

“Then I was thinking, in the Albert, I was thinking if Roland had come back and his mother they were maybe waiting for me. I got some Dutch courage and I went back to the house,”

I imagined him a little worse for wear, walking along to Heald Place.

“What time was this?”

“They were still serving.”

Before three-thirty then.

He stifled a belch. Popped his second can. “But Miriam had her own business to attend to,” he said sarcastically.

“What do you mean?”

“She was busy, going out with her fancy man.”

I stared at him.

“You saw her?”

He nodded. Belched. “Both of them. Come out of the house and get in the car.” Nicholas Bell? Albert Fanu? “Bloody cowboy.”

For a moment I thought he was referring to the style of the vehicle or the attitude of the man driving. Cowboy builders, cowboy mechanics. A con man, a wide boy, flash and trashy. But it was simpler than that.

“Like Wild Bill Hickock. Big mess of a beard and them cowboy boots.” He made a sucking noise with his teeth.

Eddie Cliff.

My stomach lurched and my scalp prickled with unease.

Eddie Cliff.

What the hell was
he
doing there?

“I was gobsmacked,” I told Diane. “He’d already claimed that Roland wanted to keep in touch which I knew was a lie and then he sprang this. But I couldn’t see that he’d be making it up. As far as I know he’d never clapped eyes on Eddie before.”

“Bit weird.” She agreed. “What’s this Eddie like?”

“All right. Well, I thought he was. Good with people, passionate about his work. Helpful.”

“So, ask him about it.”

“Oh, I intend to. As soon as possible. It’s a bit awkward though because it means he wasn’t being straight with me. And I can’t see why. Of course the other side of all this is Roland, who thought his father turning up on the doorstep had led to his mother cracking up and that wasn’t it at all. He must have been to hell and back, poor kid. Now I can tell him how wrong he was, once I’ve talked to Eddie Cliff and got things a bit clearer.”

“Another?” Diane held up her beer glass.

“Please - and crisps.”

While she was at the bar I worried some more about Horace Johnstone’s version of events. There was a possibility that he was writing himself out of the picture because he felt guilty, though I’d not seen much sign of that. Maybe he had met Miriam and she’d freaked out. He’d panicked and left her. Later he hears she is dead. But the description of Eddie Cliff was too close to be coincidental. He must have seen him. Could he have seen him at the centre and then invented the bit about the car. Possibly, but why? To point me in a different direction? That only made sense if Horace Johnstone had done something he wanted to keep hidden. The more I chewed it over the more muddled I became. I thought about the timing - it wasn’t exact but presumably it was after Roland had gone off to wait in the park at two-ish and before Martina got in around four o’ clock.