Others (2 page)

‘It can take a while,’ I commiserated, ‘maybe a couple of years to get over the loss of a loved one, and even then you’re not really over it. You just learn to cope.’

‘You’ve been through it too?’ She seemed almost hopeful.

‘Uh, no. No, it’s only what I hear.’

‘Oh.’ She wiped the dampness from her cheeks, then squared her shoulders as if determined to get a grip on herself. ‘It was so hard to accept that Gerald was gone at first. I think I went a little bit crazy with grief. I locked myself away, saw no one, talked to no one, wouldn’t even answer the telephone for a while. And then a feeling came over me - I don’t know how to describe it. I just woke one day and felt there was something I could do about my loss, that if there really was something called the “soul”, as the Church tells us, then perhaps I could contact Gerald again. I didn’t have to be entirely on my own.’

Uh-oh, I thought.

‘I hadn’t really believed in spiritualism before, you know, contacting the dead? But at the same time, I’d never disbelieved in it. I just hadn’t given it much thought. D’you understand?’

‘Sure,’ I answered. ‘Most people don’t like to think about death until it comes close in some way or other. So that was when you decided to approach a medium?’

‘Not at first. It wasn’t a sudden urge, anything like that. It just come on gradually, a sort of feeling I should contact Gerald. And I wanted to find a good clairvoyant, a genuine one, not one of them phonies.’ Estuary kept breaking out despite her efforts to contain it. ‘Lucky for -
luckily
for me, one of my friends knew of someone who didn’t live too far away.’

‘You wouldn’t have to look far in Brighton.’

Well, this one lived in Kemp Town.’

(Kemp Town is an adjunct of Brighton, although it likes to keep a separate identity.)

‘Her name’s Louise Broomfield,’ Shelly Ripstone continued. You’ve heard of her?’

I shook my head.

‘She’s quite well-known. In those sort of circles, I mean.’

You went to see her.’ I tried not to let my impatience show.

‘I got her phone number and I rang. Apparently she doesn’t just see anybody, she has to talk to them first. She knew I was distressed right away.’

There’s a surprise, I thought.

‘And she could feel there was something to tell me. She knew just by our conversation on the telephone.’

A light tap on the door just then. It opened a little way and Philo, my youngest employee, and Sam Spade wannabe albeit a brown one, poked his head round.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said cheerfully, his short black hair glistening with gel. You wanted to know about the writ this morning.’

I used Philo a lot for process serving, especially if there might be some running after the recipient to do (and as process serving took up half the agency’s business, on some days there was a
lot
of running to do).

‘Any problems?’ I asked, looking past Shelly Ripstone. The particular debt dodger Philo had had to confront was more slippery than most - I’d had dealings with this character before - but the kid had to learn some time, and the hard way was often the best.

Well, he pretended to be his own brother, but I recognized him from the Polaroid you gave me. He wouldn’t touch the papers, so I dropped them at his feet in the hallway, then did a fade.’

You’re sure you got the right man?’

‘Definite.’

I gave him a lop-sided grin. ‘Okay, make out your notes for the affidavit right now so you don’t forget the details. Then Henry’s got a trace for you to work on, only telephone stuff, but it might be complicated. I’ll catch up with you later.’

He took a last look at the back of Shelly Ripstone, appraised her ash-blonde hair, raised his eyebrows a couple of times at me, then disappeared from the doorway. The door closed quietly behind him.

I apologized for the interruption before prompting my prospective client once more. You went to see this, er, Louise…’

‘Broomfield,’ she finished for me and I wrote the name down on the pad.

‘Okay.’ I waited for her to continue.

‘She was wonderful. And she’s a faith healer too. There was something about her, a sort of…’ she searched for the appropriate word ‘… a
goodness,
a sort of…’ she struggled for another description.

‘Compassion?’ I suggested.

‘Yes, that’s it. I sensed it as soon as she opened the front door. You know she hugged me right there on the doorstep, before either one of us had said a word. That broke me.’ Tears were brimming again at the memory and she swiftly dabbed at her eyes with the soggy hanky. ‘I’m sorry. I’m an emotional person.’ She sniffed a couple of times as evidence.

‘It’s all right. Take your time.’

A snuffle to end the sniffs, then she regained control. ‘Louise took me into a room at the back of the house, a bright little room, walls and ceiling painted pale blue. I felt at peace as soon as I entered it.’

With most prospective clients you learned to cut to the chase pretty fast, getting to the facts without too much embellishment. Some, though, I’d learned to let tell their story in their own way, guiding them with the odd soft prod here and there. Shelly Ripstone fell into the latter category; she’d get to it at her own speed.

What was she like, this medium?’ Medium or clairvoyant, it made little difference to me. What I think I wanted to know at this point was whether or not Louise Broomfield was genuine, and any information about her might help me decide. I would naturally distrust anyone who adorned themselves with pendants or crucifixes and dressed in black as symbols of office. That was showbiz, artifacts of illusion, and not for the serious-minded. There were quite a few hucksters around town and, I had to admit, some of them I liked; in general, though, I had an aversion to robes and regalia of any kind, especially when they were to do with the Church.

‘Louise is very ordinary. More like a kindly counsellor than a clairvoyant. She makes you feel… well, good inside. She understood what 1 was going through right away and she let me have a good cry before asking me anything.’

‘You told her about the death of your husband?’

‘She already knew.’

I didn’t push her. It would have been easy enough to conclude Shelly Ripstone was grieving, inevitably for someone she’d recently lost. Guessing it was for her late husband would have been easy enough by minimum probing.

‘So she contacted Gerald for you?’

The question from me was genuine enough, despite an inbuilt cynicism towards anyone who claimed they could communicate with ‘the other side’. Even if I didn’t believe it, it was evident that this woman across the desk did.

‘No. She contacted my son.’

‘But you said you thought your son was still alive.’

‘It’s how I now
know
he is. I’d always had that feeling my baby hadn’t died. Intuition, a mother’s instinct - I don’t know what it was, but it was always there, always with me. And Louise said I’d been right to believe it all this time.’

‘I thought clairvoyants could only communicate with spirits, not with the living.’

‘Like lots of people, you’re mistaken. Louise can pick up the thoughts of people who might even be thousands of miles away. Living people, I mean. She can heal just by thinking of a sick person who could be on the other side of the world. She can “see” the auras of people she talks to. She told me she had communicated with a little boy who’d been in a coma for two years and who still showed no signs of recovering. Sometimes she can tell if a person is going to die soon, even if that person doesn’t know they’re sick. Her mind reached my son, through me, just by my being there. She picked up his presence.’

Shelly Ripstone leaned close across the desk, her anguish overriding her nerves of me. Her eyes were pleading, regarding me purely as someone who could help her and not as some misshapen thing to be pitied, or repulsed by. ‘Louise fainted away in front of me, Mr Dismas. Whatever it was she sensed, whatever it was she saw in her mind, it caused her to collapse. And when she came round she wouldn’t -couldn’t - speak of it. She just kept telling me over and over again that I had to find my son before it was too late. That if I didn’t, something terrible -
something awful
- was going to happen. And it would happen very soon.’

3

It was at least another half-hour before I finally showed Shelly Ripstone out. Earlier, her loud weeping had brought Henry to the door, enquiring if he could be of any assistance, his real motive just plain nosiness, and I’d shooed him away. In private again, I rose from my desk and patted the distressed woman’s shoulder (was that the slightest shudder I felt run through her, or just a sob-spasm?) and offered her my own dry handkerchief. She took it gratefully and eventually stifled the tears.

I think it was sympathy rather than the fee I’d charge that made me agree to take on her case. Truth is, I thought an investigation wouldn’t amount to much anyway, that the search for her lost son would be a wild goose chase -hospitals just didn’t lie about newly-born babies, even if there was no supporting father involved. I explained this to Shelly Ripstone,
nee
Shelly Teasdale, but she insisted my personal view wasn’t important as long as I did my job properly. Fair enough, I told her, and promised that all the agency’s professional skills would be put into force to resolve the matter one way or the other; it was her money, so it was her shout. A little cynical, I know, but it cheered her up considerably.

We talked some more, with me taking notes and my new client still snuffling as she supplied the details: address at the time of her pregnancy all those years back, the address of the Dartford General Hospital where she’d given birth (together with some unfortunate news concerning that particular place), Louise Broomfield’s contact address and phone number. We also agreed on my fee and expenses. When she left she was in better shape, although not much better: those smudged eyes were still anxious and her fist clenched the borrowed handkerchief as if to wring it dry. Nevertheless, there was a glimmer of hope in those eyes when I promised to call her the moment I had anything to report.

On the way downstairs to the ground floor she had to edge past the large frame of Ida Lampton, my third and last employee, who was ascending the creaky staircase with heavy breaths and even heavier steps. Standing at the office door I watched Ida turn her head and stare after our attractive client as she descended the next flight of stairs; no chance, I thought, and Ida looked up to catch me grinning. She smiled back and shrugged her meaty shoulders, then came all the way up, bringing her plastic bags full of light shopping with her, for all the world looking like a favourite maiden aunt returning from her morning’s shop. It was a great guise, especially for someone hired as store detective for the week.

I stepped aside to let her through, then closed the door marked Dismas Investigations behind us. When I turned, three sets of interested eyes were focused on me.

So. I’m Nick (Nicholas) Dismas and I run the Dismas Investigations agency, a two-room office with leaning walls and crooked door frames a couple of floors above a charity shop a few doors along from Brighton’s Theatre Royal. In the heart of the seaside town, we’re close to the train station, shops, seafront, and more importantly, a crush of solicitors’ offices, from which we get most of our business. Note it’s an investigations agency, not a detective agency: we don’t ‘detect’ anything - that’s for the big boys, who have more contacts, generally richer clients (in particular, companies and financial institutions) and who earn a whole lot more from a higher scale of fees than we humble investigators. Also - unlike us - they quite often get involved in criminal cases. The one thing we do have in common, though, is that neither party has any real power or authority: we’re ordinary citizens with no official status whatsoever.

The private investigator’s job generally involves process serving (handling writs and summonses and the like), tracing (tracking down certain people who had decided to go ‘missing’, usually because of financial or domestic difficulties), status and credit reports, accident and insurance enquiries, repossessions, debt collecting, surveillance (which includes anything from watching individuals or premises, to joining a company as an employee in order to catch out pilferers or industrial spies, to following errant husbands or wives). Mostly mundane, even boring, work that requires patience, care and an eye for detail. A sense of humour sometimes helps, too.

Henry Solomon was the agency bookkeeper and administrator, who occasionally took on fieldwork. He was tall, hooknosed, bespectacled (in fact, he was one of those types whose glasses seemed to be built into their heads - you couldn’t imagine the face without the attachment), balding, with a midriff bulge that mocked his overall leanness. He dressed neatly and conservatively, although when the mood took him he sported colourful braces and socks, or a flashy bow-tie, sometimes - when the mood
really
took him - all three. Henry was mad on old movies (in fact he looked a bit like the dead actor Henry Fonda) and ballroom dancing (watching, not partaking of) and lived with his elderly mother in the Kemp Town. He enjoyed a gin and tonic, although never to excess, and loved to try and catch me out on movie trivia. His downside was that he hated blacks, Asians, the French and Chinese, and socialists; to be honest, he was the only Jewish Nazi I’d ever met. His sense of humour was waspish-acerbic, but his basic nature -
despite
those imperfections mentioned - was benign (folks are complicated, right?).

Ida Lampton, the big woman who’d just climbed the stairs and who looked like that maiden aunt with her short greying hair and plump face, was my main asset. Equally good at serving summonses and injunctions or repossessing unpaid-for goods, she also made a great store detective, especially when dressed as she was that day in light summer frock and cardigan, with sensible brogues for walking. Six-foot one, big-boned and broad of girth (more than fifteen but less than seventeen stone was her last admission regarding weight), Ida could play the heavy - in trousers, neck scarf and reefer jacket you could be forgiven for taking her for a man - or the sweetheart (useful for debt counselling and collecting). In the latter guise she could be pleasantly persuasive, in the former she was goddamn intimidating.

I’d first clapped eye on Ida in a Brighton gay club called the Greased Zipper (no subtlety there, then), where she was serving behind the well-packed bar and I was searching for a runaway youth who was known to frequent such haunts, despite his tender age. His parents, my clients, were frantic and only too willing to accept his burgeoning lifestyle if only he would return to the nest, and I was showing his photograph around to either uninterested or excitable, mock-eager male clubbers, some of whom snatched the picture to show their giggling clique. As in any other city or big town club, straight or gay, there are many variations in type among members - the quiet, the flamboyant, the drunks, the troublemakers, the hard men and women - and in this particular one (I’d done the rounds that night) a combination of the last two types, all leathers and glory moustaches and naked arms (and that was just the women - joke), had decided I was an affront to their delicate (despite their muscles and blue jaws) sensitivities. If they’d stuck to verbals everything would have been okay - I could always handle that - but they’d become physical, shoving me around, giving me no chance to back off either with wit or reason before things turned any nastier.

Now I’m no pushover, despite my problems, but before I could retaliate, aware I’d come off worse and not giving a damn anyway, lovely big Ida stepped in. Five minutes before she’d given the photo I carried time and attention, even though she was mobbed at the bar, genuinely sorry she wasn’t able to provide me with a lead on the missing kid (she was only too aware of the predators that stalked the streets here for fresh, inexperienced meat), and now she’d noticed the trouble I was in. A swift knee into one bully-boy’s leathered crotch and a sharp big-boned elbow into another’s powdered nose settled the matter quickly enough (I learned later that Ida was also engaged as club bouncer as well as barmaid). One of the boy-bitches had screamed blue hell and Ida grabbed my arm to steer me towards the door. Outside I’d jabbered my gratitude and given her my card in case she happened to see the youth I was searching for. Two days later she’d called in with a sighting of the runaway selling copies of the
Big Issue
outside a Virgin record store, which led to my taking his parents directly to him (the record store had become his regular pitch). After contact he was their problem, but I had become interested in Ida herself. That she could take care of herself there was no doubt; that she had many contacts all over town soon became evident. I offered her a job with the firm and, after she’d consulted her live-in partner of twenty years, a sweet, gentle woman who taught pre-school infants in a small village eight miles outside Brighton and to whom I was soon introduced over a Little Harvester Sunday lunch, Ida agreed to give it a try. That was six years ago and she’d been with me ever since.

Young Philo Churchill was the newcomer to the agency, the sometimes hopeless but ever-enthusiastic novice. It’s usually a mistake to take on young apprentices in this game - in fact, most agencies won’t touch them - because once they’ve learned everything from you, every trick in the book, every procedure to be followed, often making themselves a pain-in-the-butt in the process by asking too many questions and fouling up too many times, they strike out on their own, setting up their own agency and taking some of your clients with them, promising a cheaper deal and more (ha!) care. But what the hell, Philo had left school at seventeen with seven GCSEs and two A levels and had vainly been searching for work for two-and-a-half years before turning up on my doorstep. Yep, I felt sorry for him. A little ashamed too, because I knew the fact that he was black - a light brown tone actually - hadn’t helped him in the job market. Besides, I needed an extra hand - the workload was good at that time - and he was willing to accept low wages. Almost twenty, he was a good-looking kid whose grandparents had arrived in Southampton shortly after the Second World War, when the country was in desperate need of young, manual labourers. They’d done their bit, and so had their offspring son, who eventually had married a Greek girl; now Philo, English bred and born - as English as his surname might suggest, in fact - wanted to do his bit, if only that residual prejudice, rump of a sorry past but still rampant in certain low quarters, would so allow. Philo hadn’t sought work to prove himself worthy as an Englishman; no, he’d never suffered from that foolish kind of race-paranoia. He simply wanted to work because that was the normal thing to do. Besides, he was ambitious.

Philo dressed smartly, despite his meagre earnings, and he looked good. Even Henry was impressed by his keenness, and working together, Henry, Ida and Philo, well, they made a good team.

So that just leaves me, Nicholas Dismas.

I was found, thirty-two years ago, among the dustbins behind a nuns’ convent in a poorer part of London. Found by the convent’s caretaker/handyman when he took out the trash early one cold winter’s morning. God knows what he thought of the misshapen little gnome lying there among the bins, barely a few hours old and not even wrapped in a blanket but swaddled in yesterday’s newspaper, although without doubt it must have given him one hell of a shock. Perhaps he even crossed himself, while muttering a prayer and wondering what demon had had the temerity to leave its hideous spawn on holy ground.

I was born a monster, you see.

I’m not shamed by the term, nor embarrassed. Saddened, of course. Made desperately bloody miserable by it. But that’s the way it goes. It’s
what
I am in most people’s terms.

Doctors told me in later life that my physical condition was probably due to
birth trauma.
I’m not diseased at all, there was never any sign of spina bifida or any form of deficiency: I was just bon| malformed. And as I grew older, the deformities augmented, became more defined and ever more distorted. The infant monster ripened into a grotesque.

My forehead overlapped my eyes, a Neanderthal protuberance that frightened children and dogs; my jaw grew more pointed, my mouth more leering, lips more twisted. The curve of my spine increased and veered to the right so that my shoulder was huge, the blade amalgamating with the hump of my back. I crouched further and further forward until crooked was my normal walking, sitting, resting stance, and my right leg was slightly - oh thank
You
God, only
slightly
- withered, so that I walked with a hobbling lurch. Even my chest was disfigured, breastbone and upper ribs on one side overlapping their neighbours, and hair spread down my back to form a tail between my buttocks, one that I kept shorn regularly, a DIY job because I’d have hated for anyone else to see my naked body.

Would the hair on my head were that thick, but no, His torment - did I
thank
God a moment ago, albeit ironically? -was far too comprehensive to allow such favour; it hung in loose drab strands over my scalp and forehead, the bushi-ness of my eyebrows mocking its very sparsity. My ears, too large even for this large cranium, looked as though they’d been chewed by a couple of unfriendly Rottweilers.

But there was nothing wrong with my brain, no lumps or dents in the bone had damaged its fibres; no, only bitterness bent my thoughts. My nose was flattened, but its shape was no worse than the nose of an incompetent pugilist’s, and my hearing, despite the gnarled receivers, was keen, as was the vision in my one grey/brown-speckled eye (its twin, the left one, was useless, mutilated in an incident which occurred in my younger years). I wasn’t tall, but was by no means a dwarf; somewhat below average height, I suppose, which was hardly surprising considering how crooked I was. So on the plus side, I was smart, could see and hear comparatively well, had an acute sense of smell, and my arms and left leg were exceptionally strong (nature compensates, right? Hah!). Despite these small compensations, it was difficult for me to believe that life was God’s precious gift. In fact, was my wretched body an indictment of His will? Did He issue some of us with faulty meat-machines on purpose? Or was it a mistake, an oversight? Or truly deliberate, all part of His Master Plan? Who knows? I only knew my
mistake
- if
mistake
it was - was worse than most, not as bad as some. I hardly felt grateful for that.