A Little Death (34 page)

‘They claim to be kidnapped?’

‘You know, by aliens or something. The nutters.’

‘Did they say she was a nutter?’

‘God, no. Nothing like that. Sorry, I wasn’t suggesting—’

‘No, no, it’s OK. Can we just… just be quiet for a moment? I need to think.’

He went over to one of the filing cabinets and picked at a dying spider plant while I sat there and tried to take it all in. Remember the Etch-a-Sketch toy? You’d twiddle the knobs and try to draw a house or something on the screen, but all you ended up with was a load of jagged lines. My mind was like that—nothing connected up or made sense. Except, he’d said the woman was homeless. If it was my mother, she was homeless. I might have passed her on the street and not recognised her. She might have asked me for money and been refused.

‘Do the shelter people know who you think she is? Could they talk to the press? Surely the papers don’t have to know if it’s someone who
thought
they were my mother?’

‘You needn’t worry about that. As far as the shelter people are concerned, she was just another customer.’

‘But if it is her, then the papers will have to know eventually, won’t they?’ God, why was I even asking? They’d have a field day, I knew they would. We both did.

‘We’ll have to release the information, yes. There’s something else: she had a couple of plastic bags with clothes inside. There were some photographs in one of them. Do you want to see them?’

I didn’t, but I knew I had to.

Inspector Halstead left the room and came back with three very small clear plastic bags, each with a photograph inside. He put them on the table in a row in front of me, face down. I didn’t want to turn them over. When I heard Inspector Halstead say she was homeless, I knew I didn’t want it to be her. I suddenly felt desperate to go home and forget all about it.

The photographs must have been handled a lot and fixed to walls because their edges were tatty and they were covered in Blu-tack marks and pin holes. Inspector Halstead turned one over and pointed at it. ‘Do you recognise this?’

Shit.
It was a photograph of me as a toddler, standing in a paddling pool in the garden at Camoys Hall, wearing a blue swimsuit with a white pleated skirt and waving a little red spade.

‘That’s me. I think I was about two. Joan—Miss Draycott—has the same picture.’

‘And this one?’

The second one was black and white. My mother and father. It looked like a portrait; my father used to get them done for Christmas cards. Mum’s sitting down and he’s standing slightly behind with one hand on her shoulder. She’s smiling, but it doesn’t look natural, and her legs, which are sort of tucked in and crossed at the ankles, look as if they’ve been arranged by someone else. She’s wearing a pale coat with a wraparound collar in black fur and big black buttons down the front, like a pierrot at an old-fashioned end-of-pier show. He’s wearing a dark suit and looking handsome and glamorous. He was like Marilyn Monroe, my father. He could turn it on and off at will.

‘I’ve never seen it before, but those are my parents.’

‘This?’ He turned over the third photograph.

It was a photograph of me in the middle of a group of people at a party. Not taken with my camera, because I don’t own a camera. I usually leave when people start waving cameras about, partly because you never know where the negatives will end up, and partly because I don’t understand this mania for recording everything as if it didn’t really happen unless you’ve got a bunch of snaps mouldering away in an album somewhere.
I remembered the photograph, because I can usually smell a camera at fifty paces and it was one of the few times when I didn’t realise it until it was too late. I’m blurred and my pupils are red dots, who whoever took it must have been pissed.

‘This was taken last Christmas. If that woman in there really
is
my mother, I don’t see how she could have got hold of it.’

‘Do you remember who took it?’

‘It was just some man at a party. I didn’t know him.’

‘Whose party was it?’

‘A friend of mine. Tony Hepworth. But I don’t see—’

‘Are you sure your mother—or someone calling herself your mother—has never tried to contact you?’

‘Never. We all thought she was dead.
Everyone
thought she was dead. The
police
thought she was dead. There was a memorial service. There’s a plaque in the church at Camoys Hall. My father remarried, for God’s sake. Oh Christ, it
is
her in there, isn’t it?’ I felt the tea surge back into my throat and for a moment I thought I was going to throw up, but I managed to get it to go down again. ‘I should look at her again, shouldn’t I?’

‘Do you want to?’ He wasn’t exactly shouting ‘Result!’ and punching the air with his fist, but I could tell he was pleased, even if he was trying to keep it out of his voice.

‘I couldn’t see her eyes. She had a brown mark in one eye. They’re green, but one of them has a little brown patch. We used to do Cyclops—you know, the game where you get nearer and nearer to the other person’s face until you can only see one eye—and I could always see it. She used to call it her birthmark. If I saw that, I’d know it was her.’

Inspector Halstead said he’d see what he could do and left me with one of the uniforms. I felt sick again. I
looked at the sludge of sugar crystals at the bottom of the tea and tried not to think about them having to prise open her eyes. I kept getting this picture of the pathologist or whoever it was doing it with forceps or tongs or something. Inspector Halstead came back eventually and took me into the room.

The eyes seemed to be looking straight at me. Their surface—the viscous humour or whatever it’s called— had sort of congealed. They looked dull and shiny at the same time, like unmade jelly. But the brown patch was there. I’d know it anywhere.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s my mother.’

NOT
ONE
WORD
HAS
BEEN
OMITTED.

A
LITTLE
DEATH

A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING
HISTORY

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eISBN: 978-0-307-48756-8

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