Creatures of the Pool (19 page)

In any case I should be home and making certain my father’s research doesn’t suffer any more damage. There’s a
branch of Frugo Corner, the shop-sized version of the supermarket, at the Castle end of Lord Street. A supervisor sporting a Frugoal football supporter’s shirt, which is striped red and blue so as not to take sides in Liverpool, loses his enthusiasm for helping me once he discovers that I’m after empty cartons. When I produce a crumpled receipt as proof I often shop here he makes with some reluctance for the stockroom.

A succession of hollow thuds puts me in mind of trapdoors before he reappears, kicking cartons in front of him as if he wants to live up to his shirt. I nest as many as I can inside one another and stumble almost blindly out with the pile of them. I have to rely on the crowds to move out of my way as I tramp past the regal monument and down towards the river. In my street more people than ordinarily use it to retreat into doorways or otherwise vanish from my path. In more than one instance their footsteps sound loose and rubbery—boots for the weather, of course.

I return to the lobby to collect half the boxes. Once they’re all in my apartment I gulp handfuls of water from the bathroom tap. I’m on the way to the main room when I abandon the boxes in the corridor. I’ve yet to check that my father’s computer has survived the damp.

I disconnect my computer tower and plug in his. The monitor flickers like the first hint of a storm, and after the usual computer preamble the opening screen fades into view. I’ve never seen it before, and it takes me off guard. It’s an image of my parents on either side of me, somewhere by the river. We’re decades younger; I’ve yet to reach my teens. The opposite bank of the river is smudged by fog, which also obscures a large vessel in the middle of the water. The blurred reflection helps produce the illusion of a vast dark shape rearing up into the fog. It can only be a ship, though perhaps my father reshaped the image—but as I reflect that he must have scanned the old photograph into the computer, the screen grows as black as the bottom of the sea.

Computer Combinations wouldn’t be able to deal with the problem for at least a week. Computer Shooter might have time to examine the system within five days, but I’d have to take the computer to their premises several miles away in dockland. Computer Mission offers me the same wait, but they’re even more distant, all of which is also the case with Computer Commander and Compurity. I’m close to calling a taxi to transport me and the lifeless monolith of a computer tower to dockland until I speak to one more from the yellow pages, PC Tec. They can collect the computer within the hour and attend to it tomorrow.

I wish this were more of a relief, but too much else is wrong. There hasn’t been a message from my father while I was busy on the landline, and I feel as if he has vanished as utterly as his web site. Will the computer experts be able to retrieve his work? I tried switching the system on and off half a dozen times, but the screen remained as blank as dreamless sleep. At least I can save his research from any further harm, and I take the new cartons into the main room, only to falter. Last night I thought my tiredness was rendering the material illegible, but every visible document is so smudged by moisture that I can’t decipher a word.

I snatch them off the cartons and strew them about the floor. The pages they were covering up are blurred too, but with some effort they’re readable. Where the topmost item is a book, the pages have become a pulpy mass. There’s no point in letting despair creep any closer. I line up the unsalvageable books and pages along the hall, and then I set
about transferring the contents of the soggy boxes into the dry ones. Bits of information snag my mind. The women who made cords along the rope walks were known as the hempy girls, apparently a reference to visions some of them gained from the cannabis in the hemp. The commonest vision was of a giant rope or umbilical cord that could draw forth a creature hidden under the land. In the early fourteenth century performers of miracles that involved the Pool—healing people by immersion in it, especially cases of possession or mental states perceived as demonic—were banned from the town. In 1775 a society was formed “for the recovery of persons apparently drowned.” Couldn’t the rescuers tell? As I empty another box my mobile starts to sing about love.

The display leaves the caller nameless. That can’t be my father, and so I don’t speak until Lucinda asks “Gavin? Are you on a tour?”

“Do you know, I’m not.”

“Good,” she says, which exacerbates my bitterness. “You were wanting to know about William Colquitt.”

“Are you at work? I’ll ring you back.”

As I grab the landline phone it occurs to me that one of her colleagues may answer. How much of an argument will that involve? After my encounter with Waterworth I’m more than ready for one, so that my eagerness takes some relinquishing when Lucinda says “Record Office.”

“William Colquitt.”

If my abruptness takes her aback, she stays professional. “There’s nothing in his poem about burying the Pool.”

“Nay, though it be buried furlongs deep…” I sound as if I’m making this up and growing antique too. “It’s only in the edition you’ve got,” I insist.

“Nothing like that. I read the whole poem. There was only ever one edition. He wasn’t that popular.” With barely a pause she adds “Did you say your father copied it and wrote something about John Strong? Maybe he—”

“If you haven’t got it, tell me where else it could be.”

“I don’t think I can, Gavin.”

“In his head and mine, you mean. You don’t need to say it.”

“I wasn’t about to. I’m just trying to tell you the truth.”

“You’re pretty fond of doing that, aren’t you.”

“I hope so. Honestly, Gavin, you sound—”

I’m even angrier for having made such an apparently idiotic comment. “Telling your colleagues about me, for instance.”

“Who says I did that?”

“Hank Waterworth.”

“I’ve no idea who that is.”

“The man behind our image. One of that mob. The tourism organiser. The character who decides what the city’s going to support, and that doesn’t include me after your people complained to him.”

“Gavin, I’m sorry. I didn’t know they meant to.”

“What did you think they wanted, to send me a get well card?”

My retort is too close to suggesting one might have been appropriate, an idea Lucinda exacerbates by saying “I just tried to tell them how you are.”

“Which is what?”

“How much you’re adding to the city and how Deryck has to be preying on your mind.”

“So which vindictive sod called Waterworth?”

“I couldn’t say. I can’t talk any more now. Let’s wait till we can go to our place by the river.” When I mutter less than a word she says “Don’t you want to see me later?”

“Just not there for a change.”

“I’ll see you soon,” she says and is gone before I can ask where. Presumably she means to come to the apartment. I take both phones into the hall and hobble along it on my knees. I could imagine that, like some spectacularly malleable circus performer, I’ve turned into a dwarf, but I’m scrutinising
the blurred documents. None of them looks like the remains of verse, and I didn’t see the poem in any of the cartons. Could it be online?

I stumble to my feet and into the workroom to disconnect my father’s computer. I substitute mine and watch the icons float up from the blackness. Having logged on, I send the Frugoget search engine after William Colquitt. It seems Lucinda didn’t exaggerate his unpopularity, because there isn’t a single reference to him.

Staring at his name in the search box won’t dredge him up, and I’m about to quit Frugonet when I think of something else to look for. While it isn’t urgent, I wouldn’t mind a few moments’ break from emptying and loading cartons. I type “mermaids down below” in the box and start the search engine. I’ve hardly drawn a breath when I have the source, and the breath comes out loud and harsh.

Of course I knew it was unlikely that the name in the song Lucinda sang could originally have been Gav. Perhaps I should have guessed the name it supplanted. “…For all the landsmen lovers are nothing after Jack…” The song is called “They All Love Jack,” set to music by Stephen Adams. I could think he was trying to dissociate himself from some aspect of his family, because his real name was Michael Maybrick. He was James’s brother.

The site is called James
Maybrick Is Jack the Ripper.
As I stare at the lyrics, which first saw publication three years before the Ripper made his name, an accompaniment on a piano more tinny than tuneful starts up. It sounds like the kind of enthusiastic amateur performance you might hear in a pub, and I imagine drinkers chanting the song and swaying in time with the waltz. The notion isn’t too appealing. No pub would be so dark that the figures reeling back and forth like underwater vegetation appeared to lose and then regain their indistinct shapes with each reiterated movement while they sang so lustily that their mouths opened far too wide. I’m striving to expel the image from my mind—perhaps I need to turn off the computer, since the tune I first heard Lucinda sing feels as though it’s acting like an uninvited lullaby—when my reverie is punctured by a bell.

I shove the chair backwards so fast that it ends up in the hall. The waltz continues tinkling as I poke the button of the intercom, to be told “Police.”

The voice is all too familiar, even if I don’t know which name to give it. I hold down the button to admit the caller and am heading back to silence the waltz when there’s a knock or at least a thump at the door. The fist sounds not just large but unexpectedly soft, and he must have pretty well leapt upstairs. I open the door to see the policeman with the dented nose—Maddock, if I’m not mistaken. His face does look damp, but there’s no other evidence of his exertions unless I count his scowl. In a bid to lighten the mood I remark “On your own today?”

“He went to the bog.”

I suspect they feel entitled to use whichever toilet is convenient, and I’m glad his partner didn’t choose mine. As I shut the door behind us he says “Got visitors?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Don’t want anybody wet, is that it?”

It takes me an uneasy moment to recall the bag of umbrellas beside me. “They’re for my tours,” I tell him.

“Having a singsong?”

Perhaps I’m supposed to acknowledge his attempts at jokes, but the shrill piano is picking my thoughts to bits. “Just the computer,” I say and make for it. Before I can quell the waltz he comes into rather too much of my workroom. “Let’s have a look,” he says as I grab the mouse.

I feel suspect for stepping back and furious as a result. He flattens one large leathery hand on the desk and lowers his head, swelling the ridged stump of his neck. “Research for your job, is it?” he says and begins to sing to the accompaniment. “The mermaids down below…”

His singing voice is a sepulchral croak. I remember Lucinda murmuring the lullaby, and find I’m reluctant to learn what name Maddock might substitute for Jack. Of course that’s absurd to the point of grotesqueness, but I cut off the music by closing the page. “Anyway, that isn’t why you’re here.”

As he steps into the corridor a bathroom tap delivers a gout of water that it must have been storing up. He frowns along the corridor before heading for the main room. “He’s not, is he?”

“Who?” I have to ask, and “What?”

“Here.” With as little patience Maddock adds “Your old man’s not come back.”

“If he had I wouldn’t have called you.”

“Could have since. This looks like his mess.”

I take a deep breath that keeps in quite a few words and say “Would you mind showing a little more respect for my family?”

He turns among the cartons to stare at me. “We’ll be doing our job. Anyone complaining?”

“Not without a reason.” I cross the room and sit in a chair to demonstrate whose home this is—whose castle. I won’t have it invaded by threats that can’t even own up to their nature. “Be careful there,” I tell him.

He takes a hefty step towards me, and I wonder how much he and his partner are creatures of the night, used to dealing with the kind of violence that takes place after dark and with the breed of people responsible. It seems I’m less courageous than I would like to dream. As my forehead begins to feel like an omen of an injury I realise how disinclined the authorities will be to take my word against the one of even this policeman. “Would you want anyone to talk about your family like that?” I try asking.

“What are you saying about my family?”

“Nothing. That’s what I said.”

“Don’t be fucking clever. You’ve got no audience now. What are you thinking about them?”

“Still nothing. I don’t know the first thing about them. All I—”

“I’ll tell you the first thing,” he says, and a grimace that may conceal some kind of humour widens his mouth. “They lived beneath you.”

Does he mean socially? His hostility suggests it. The safest response I can find is “Who?”

“Weren’t you listening? The first ones. The sort you and your old man are supposed to be interested in.”

“Then I am if you want me to be,” I say in the hope of placating Maddock. “Tell me about them.”

“Like I say, they lived down below.”

It isn’t just the echo of the song that disconcerts me. “Where?”

“Not in your basement. That’d be a laugh,” Maddock says without demonstrating what kind. “Some cellar round here, though.”

“How long ago are we talking about?”

“When the old bitch was on the throne who didn’t want to know what women had to do to feed their kids.”

I hope his fury is directed at the past, not at me. “Victoria,” I risk saying.

“That’s the twat. Long as they stayed underground the city pretended they didn’t exist. That’s except for the sods that used them, like your mate Maybrick.”

“He’s not my anything.” I’m suspicious enough to add “What makes you say he is?”