57
Thursday, 3 May 2012
‘It has a curse on it. Some nights I don’t sleep.’ Lucille May poured herself a generous measure of vodka chased by a cursory splosh of tonic, cracked an ice tray into a bucket and, with a chef’s skill, swiftly reduced a lemon to a pile of thin slices.
Jack was back on the sofa in Lucille May’s sitting room, watching her fix herself the ‘first drink of the day’. He had refused one himself.
She returned to the sofa and, nestling against his arm as if they were old friends, tilted the glass at him in silent toast and drank. ‘A woman topped herself on that settee. Overdosed. Ten years ago this November. Not that settee, obviously.’ She slurped her drink. Jack suspected it was not her first.
‘Why?’ Jack had claimed he wanted advice about getting into journalism, a flimsy excuse that Lucille made no pretence of believing. He draped his arm along the back of the sofa behind her.
‘She didn’t leave a note. Looked like your typical husband playing away, bored housewife reliant on “Mother’s little helper”, swigged down with “Mother’s ruin”. Ha!’ She gestured at the ceiling with her glass. ‘Same day as Myra Hindley snuffed it. The fifteenth of November 2002. I should have had Hindley, but our f*ck of an editor handed it to the new kid on the block. New kid’s the boss now.’
‘But it wasn’t typical?’ Jack brought her back.
‘Her son was Michael Thornton, a sweet little thing killed in a fatac in the sixties. Hit and run, driver never traced. My editor wanted it revived to spice up her suicide. Boy with the face of an angel who brought joy and laughter eeecetarah! Story had traction: sixties nostalgia, heartbroken mother, empty swing.’ She stopped and, uncurling from the sofa, returned to the dresser and sloshed vodka over the melting ice cubes. No tonic this time, Jack noticed. Everything in the woman’s behaviour added weight to Stella’s theory. Almost everything.
‘Did you know that when you moved here?’ He risked the question.
‘What are you, my psychiatrist? Listen Jackaranda, I’m not superstitious and I’m not easily freaked, but this house is toxic. It’s cold even with that fire lit. Look at you all wrapped up in that lovely coat.’ She had not answered his question.
Jack pulled his coat tighter. The room was chilly. It was evening now and a dreary grey light penetrated the faux lattice windows.
‘She never got over her baby boy dying. No one did.’ Lucie stopped still. ‘The sanctity of sons! Bet your mother loves you!’ She meandered back to the sofa and plonked down beside him, spilling her drink.
‘Not sure you ever get over the death of a loved one,’ Jack said.
‘I wouldn’t know, no one sticks around long enough to die on me. I’ve wanted to kill a few in my time.’ She patted her short blonde hair. ‘Michael Thornton haunts me day and night.’ She glared at Jack as if he too were a ghost.
‘When did Michael die?’ Jack wanted her to flesh out the facts. ‘You said he was a sweet boy. Did you know him?’ He held his breath.
‘Figuratively speaking. He was before my time! My predecessor covered it in his size-ten hobnailed boots. It was the year the Moors Murderers went down so there was a hue and cry about kiddies. Sixty-six. Clot angled it that the mother was at work when the boy came home from school, a “latchkey” boy fending for himself.’ She used Jack’s thigh to lever herself up and wove over to the French doors. ‘They got sackfuls of irate letters about the mum not being fit to have kids. Blah blah blah. Enough to drive her to top herself. It’s a wonder it wasn’t sooner.’
‘When you went to the police about Marquis Way, who did you speak to?’ Jack asked airily.
‘Questions! You don’t need my help to doorstep anyone! Most of them avoid me even when I help them. It was Terry Darnell, one of the sharper knives in the drawer, always up for a goss at the Ram, that place by the river? A charmer like you is all I shall say, me lud.’ She tapped the side of her nose.
She opened the French doors and stepped outside into the garden. Jack went too. Who was charming whom? Terry Darnell had known what he was doing.
‘This was Michael’s’. She raised her glass at the swing. ‘It’s bad luck to move it and bad luck to leave it. I’m stuck with the bloody thing. Stuck with this place too. Puts buyers off.’
‘Most people wouldn’t know the history.’ They would feel it. Jack was grateful to be in the sunshine.
‘We buy houses with our hearts not our heads. Never mind damp, dry rot or subsidence, we draw a line at the corpse in the lounge and the dead brother on the swing.’
‘Brother?’
‘Son, husband, brother. The place is tainted.’ She gave her raucous laugh. ‘Mother never left her home after he died. Not until it was feet first.’
‘How did he die?’ Jack trod carefully as an idea took shape.
She scowled. ‘Sneaked out for sweets.’
Jack looked at the house. The suburban Edwardian villa, apparently benign and homely, leaked profound pain from every brick. Had he come into the garden on one of his night walks he would have known a Host lived here.
‘They spent a whack on a f*ck-off monument at Hammersmith Cemetery. St Michael, an angel like the boy. It creeps you out.’ She stomped over to the fence, close to the mosaic under the holly bush. ‘You go to Jamie’s grave?’
‘I prefer to look after the living.’ Keep up. He had forgotten his supposed link with the dead driver.
‘You saying a girl made this gave you away.’ Lucille May aimed a kick at the mosaic, dislodging a chip of glass. ‘Sure you won’t join me in a quick drink, darling?’
‘I should be going.’ Jack longed to restore the glass to the mosaic, but Lucille would interpret it as a criticism. He hadn’t said a girl had made it, he had used the word ‘child’. ‘Gave what away, Lucie?’
‘First law of journalism, don’t steal from others.’ She pouted her lips and ground the glass into the soil. ‘I’ve had it up to here with effing journos.’
‘How long did you say you’ve lived here?’ Jack held her gaze.
‘I didn’t, sweetheart.’ She shook her glass, making the remaining ice cubes spin around the bottom. ‘You could call it a lifetime.’
‘Where is Mr Thornton now? Were there any other children?’ No point in holding back now. She had his measure.
‘Dead. And he was an only child.’ Lucille May eyed her glass. ‘Like Robert Smith.’
‘I could sort through your material on the accidents? Put it in order? It’s the kind of thing I do.’
‘And steal my story?’ She looked her age, raddled and tired in the cold evening light. Her eyes were watery, as if she might cry.
‘I don’t have your narrative skills, Lucie. I’m just good at tidying up.’ Jack touched her elbow and then let his hand drop.
‘What a lovely man.’ She stumbled on a tussock and steadied herself on his arm. ‘I’m going to trust you. Just pull it together then I’ll be off and running.’
Jack closed the French doors. He looked back at the garden. The swing was moving.