Creatures of the Pool (9 page)

His colleague plants a fist on the narrow gap between us on the seat, displaying scabbed knuckles. “Count yourself lucky as fuck that’s all we’re doing.”

The car swerves up the sloping road, throwing me against the door as if I’ve flinched from him. We’re speeding into Whitechapel when a small wet shape leaps into the headlamp beams. The driver yanks at the wheel, and I think he’s avoiding the creature until his intentions become clear. Though I scarcely feel the impact, his eyes in the mirror express satisfaction. “What was that?” I almost shout.

“Bloody nothing,” says the driver.

His stare and his colleague’s could be applying the description to me or anticipating its appropriateness. I’m silent while the car veers uphill through a red light into Dale Street. As we race past Waterworth’s office I’m able to reflect that I did at least email him the information, even if simultaneously listening to the phone-in made me add Lucinda Wade as a recipient by mistake. Cheapside and the neighbouring lanes appear to be reaching underwater for their inverted selves. A sweep of the windscreen wipers reveals a vista of the black river before the car plunges downhill and swings into Trident Street, pinning a shadow against the wall opposite the apartments. The shadow of the lamppost flees towards the entrance to the offices and vanishes as I say “Here. I’m here.”

The car halts not quite violently enough to thump my head against the back of the driver’s seat. As my skull celebrates the revival of pain, the driver says “That’s where I’d stay if I was you.”

When he releases the locks I clamber out of the vehicle and fumble for my keys while the policemen watch as if they suspect me of only pretending I’m home. For several seconds the key doesn’t turn in the door, and I’ve begun to wonder if it’s the wrong one by the time it works. I ease the door shut behind me and hear the car disappear none too swiftly into the distance.

The pen in its pot on the antique desk emits a faint rattle as I cross the lobby. Otherwise the building is quiet except for my padded footfalls. My head feels like a raw lump embedded with incomplete bewildered thoughts. Has my father phoned while I was out? I only just remember not to slam my door as I hurry to the answering machine, where the blind eye of a zero meets my gaze. I’m unzipping my jacket and trudging to the bathroom when, as though in response to my hopes or fears, the mobile wriggles against my hip. It’s halfway through its undersea verse before I see that the caller’s number is withheld. I’m dismayed to have to nerve myself to say “Hello?”

“Mr Meadows?”

“Gavin Meadows, yes.” It’s the Lancashire policeman, and I’m nervous of learning why. “What’s…” I say, and eventually “What’s the news?”

At first he doesn’t answer, and I switch on the bathroom light in case that provides any reassurance. A large drop of water plummets from the tap into the sink as though the light has drawn it out of hiding. I’m reluctantly opening my mouth to urge him to tell me the worst when he says “Where were you?”

This is one more bewilderment to add to the mass in my aching skull. “Where—”

“You weren’t where you called us to,” he says, and with even less patience “I’d advise you to tell me where you were and why.”

How long does it take to convince the police that I was with the police? It feels like the rest of the night as surreptitious hints of dawn creep into the street outside the windows, under cover of the light from the lamp at the intersection. No, I don’t know the names of the policemen or their numbers or where they came from. All I know is that they said they saw me and nothing else. They didn’t see a murder or any evidence of one, but they didn’t arrest me for wasting police time because (I tell him, having discovered some craftiness in the midst of the pain in my head) they said they saw me sleepwalking. I must have tripped over a broken section of pavement and knocked myself unconscious, which surely gives me grounds to sue the council. My not entirely fake display of rage seems to impress him with my truthfulness, perhaps even when I suggest that, having regained some kind of consciousness, I mistook imagination for a memory and called him in a panic. My increasingly genuine anger, or the pain it exacerbates, almost goads me to point out that if whoever he sent had treated my call as more of an emergency, there wouldn’t be all this confusion. Eventually he warns me that I may be hearing further from the police.

I hope so—about my father. I say as much before ending the call and stumbling to the bathroom for a drink of water and a handful splashed in my face. It’s too soon to add to the pair of painkillers I swallowed while suffering the interrogation. I have to shut my eyes and plant a hand against the corridor wall in order to retrieve the mobile from the floor.
I grope my way into the bedroom and subside on the bed. My thoughts have already started to clamour. Do I really believe I could have imagined the murder? It wouldn’t be the first or the hundredth time that a security camera missed an incident. Shouldn’t I go back and look for any evidence I could photograph with my mobile? I need to rest my head first. It’s not yet five o’clock, but it’s more than twice that when the mobile brings me back into the world.

I feel as if I’ve hardly slept. Too often when I tried I was confronted by a supine body from which objects appeared to be hatching and swarming under a glare as white as moonlight but less natural. I force my eyes open a second time despite the painful glow through the curtains and read my parents’ number. “Yes,” I say far too sharply out of nervousness. “Sorry, I mean hello.”

“It’s only me,” my mother says. “Am I interrupting? Isn’t this a good time?”

I hope it is, especially for her. At least I seem to have left patches of my headache somewhere in my sleep. “I was just dozing,” I say and shut my eyes.

“I wish I hadn’t woken you. You’ve got enough to keep you busy without me bothering you.”

“You know I’m always here if you need me. You call whenever you’ve a reason, and don’t think twice.”

“I haven’t much.”

“You haven’t…”

“Heard from your father, no. You won’t have either, will you?”

“I haven’t.” Part of my brain must still be asleep for me to add “Well, except—”

“What, Gavin? When did you speak to him? What did he say?”

“He didn’t. That is, I didn’t. He left messages before I got home.” My head revives its ache as I concentrate on not betraying that he was loath to worry her, though now of course he has. “He wanted to talk and that’s pretty well all I can
tell you,” I say. “He seemed to be ringing from different places but I don’t know where.”

“Do you think the police should have a listen?”

I’m dismayed to realise that I didn’t store the messages, which could be erased by more recent ones. I open my eyes and dash into my workroom to find the zero glaring sightlessly at me. The quickest way to protect the messages is by turning off the machine, and I flick the switch at the foot of the wall. “I’ll give them a ring,” I say as I straighten up, none too steadily. “Did they contact you?”

“They did.”

Her tone is so much more tentative than her words that I say “Was there a problem?”

“They came when I was asleep. I just hope I gave them everything they need. They took a photo, took one away, I mean. And one of them had a good look at the computer.” As if she’s anxious to prove she wasn’t wholly passive she says “I told them to listen to the phone-in to see if that’s any use.”

This prompts me to ask “Did you ever meet Beverley from Everton?”

“I don’t know the woman. Your father used to go on about her. She sounded like she made things up to get attention.” With barely a pause my mother says “Had you better call, then?”

“The police.”

“That’s right, Gavin. Not that woman. I know your father loved the past, but there are limits.”

We murmur reassurances and goodbyes, and eventually my mother brings the routine to an end. I give the occurrence number to a woman whose briskness sounds like a caution against wasting police time, and then I’m wary of hearing the familiar Lancashire voice. She connects me with another woman, however, who undertakes to send someone to listen to the messages. “I don’t suppose you could say when,” I wonder, and her silence makes me add “If you could call this mobile that would be a help.”

At least I should have time to use the bathroom. Once I’ve shaved, having been put in mind of an identikit sketch of my father’s face, I leave the mobile and the landline receiver outside the door. I’ve turned down the shower so that its onslaught doesn’t fall too vigorously on my tender head, which is decorated with a large painterly bruise that I’m glad my mother can’t see, when a bell sounds in the corridor.

I quell the shower and run to thumb the intercom. I’m only beginning to speak when a voice announces “Police.”

“Well, that was quick. Pretty superheroic.” I don’t mean him to hear this; it’s more the kind of comment my father would relish. I hold down the button to release the street door and am blurring my wet footprints with another trail when the bell peals again. I trudge back to the intercom. “Hello?” I say. “Problem?”

“Something’s blocking your door. You’ll need to come down.”

I dash to the bathroom and grab my robe. Donning it and stuffing phones into the pockets restart my headache. My bare feet find a chill through the carpet as I run down the marble stairs. Has someone moved the obstruction? There’s nothing in front of the door except a dark stain on the carpet. It’s water—it must be from outside—and chills my feet further as I open the door.

A police car is parked on the pavement less than two feet beyond it. A voice is croaking inside the vehicle, and it takes me a moment to identify it as a message on a radio, because I’m distracted by the sight of the pair of policemen in front of the car. Their closeness isn’t the only reason why I retreat a soggy inadvertent step. “Good God, it’s you again,” the man with the dented nose says, or I would.

It must have been raining while I was in the bathroom. The roadway still glistens, and as he follows his brokennosed colleague the other policeman shakes spray doglike from his hair. He shuts the door hard, and they stare at the carpet in front of it. “Looks like somebody wanted to get in our way,” he says.

“Scared of us too by the looks.”

Once they’ve surveyed the lobby with particular attention to the desk, the dented man remarks “Rickety old item.”

“Wants getting rid of.” They gaze at me, and the dented fellow enquires “Fond of museums?”

“I am, as a matter of fact. My father worked for them.”

“Doesn’t now.”

“Who told you that?”

Perhaps I just did, in which case I must seem as paranoid as I feel, but the man with the uninjured nose says “His old girl when we went to see her.”

I find the thought that my mother was alone with them in the house at night—presumably before they found me in Whitechapel—so unwelcome that it feels like having failed to protect her, and I don’t need him to add “Must be lonely up there on her tod.”

“Well, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To help find my father.”

“We know why we’re here, Mr Meadows.”

I won’t be daunted where I live. “As long as you’ve got my name I should know yours, shouldn’t I?”

They consider this as if they’ve forgotten how to blink, and then the dented man says “Maddock.”

“Wrigley,” says his colleague.

“All right, let me play you the tape.”

As I follow my wet footprints, which I’m furious to realise do indeed start and finish at the wet patch by the entrance, Maddock says “Must cost a packet to live here.”

“What’s his game again?” Wrigley wants to know.

“He’s an escort.”

I carry on padding upstairs until I feel I’m trying to outdistance the sense of pursuit very close at my back, and then I swing around at the half-landing. “Who did you hear that from?”

“Try looking in the mirror,” says Maddock.

My forehead has recommenced throbbing by the time I realise what I told them in Whitechapel. “I said I give tours of Liverpool.”

“Seeing to our image, are you?” Wrigley says. “See it’s all true.”

I won’t bother to respond to this, not least because I’ve realised that in my haste I forgot to bring my keys. I feel as if the police and my headache left me unable to think. My rage is approaching the point at which it will explode into words, however carelessly selected, when I see that my door is ajar. That was thoughtless too, but at least I’m not shut out, and I follow the blurred wet tracks into the apartment.

Wrigley bumps the door shut with his bulky shoulders. The policemen stare along the corridor, at or past the old views of Liverpool, until I move to stand outside my workroom like a butler. “It’s in here.”

Maddock tramps past me, only to turn a scowl on me. “It’s not working.”

“I switched it off to save the messages.”

Wrigley adds his frown to the proceedings. “All right, give it here. We’ll take it and give it a listen.”

As Maddock stoops to unplug the answering machine I protest “You can’t take that away.”

He stays in his hulking crouch and screws his head around on its thick ridged stub of neck. “Who says we can’t?”

“My father might call.”

“He can if you don’t go out.”

“How long are you likely to be? I’ve a tour this afternoon.”

Both men glower at the prospect or at the inconvenience they apparently think I’m causing. Wholly as a ruse, and a feeble one at that, I say “Can I get you gentlemen something to drink?”

They exchange a look, and Wrigley shrugs. “I could do with some water.”

“Same here, out of the tap,” says Maddock.

“Give me a minute and I’ll play you the tape.”

As I make for the kitchen I feel more in charge, though my nakedness under the knee-length towel in the shape of a robe doesn’t help. I fill two tankards at the granite sink, and an afterthought is gurgling in the plughole when Maddock says “Can you see how this fucking thing works?”