Robbie's Wife (23 page)

It seemed too easy, and it was. No listing for Maggie or Margaret but there were two M. Barlows in Yorkshire villages, and I copied them down. I went to the telephone box just outside the library steps and fed coins in, but neither call produced Maggie. Mary had said that Maggie had stayed with her brother in Yorkshire. And I didn’t know the brother’s name.

Inside the library I asked the librarian how I could find a list of libraries in Yorkshire.

“Which kinds of libraries, sir?”

“Just libraries.”

“There’s all sorts. Public libraries like this one, school libraries, the university has several libraries in York, there are even some lending libraries in villages.”

“I’m doing some research for a book and I need to look for source material in Yorkshire libraries. I’m not sure where the material might be, so I’m just going to have to make a door-to-door search, I guess.”

“You could go online and look for your subject, sir.”

“I’ve tried that. No luck. What I need to do is telephone and ask. I know it sounds tedious and perhaps useless, but it’s the last hope I have.”

She looked skeptical.

“Do you know how many branches a public library has?”

“Quite a few, I imagine.”

“More than just quite a few. And there will be a good many libraries that aren’t listed under library. They’ll be part of a school. The Mechanics Institute here in Bournemouth has a library, but it’s not listed in the directory under libraries. It’s for the students enrolled there, and of course they know about it, but the general public simply doesn’t have access.”

“Could I try anyway? Get a list of those libraries in Yorkshire that are public?”

She sighed.

“You’ll be on a wild goose chase, that’s certain.”

She nodded toward the table with the computer terminals.

“Over there you’ll find access. Enter libraries and you’ll get the search for what you’re looking for. Then, when you find the names, you can print them out and take them to the directory section. You can look up the numbers in York. If you can’t find it there, you can go back to the search and go to each library.” She rolled her eyes. “I hope you have a good deal of time, sir. You’ll need it.”

I did as I was told. The list of libraries was, as she had said, a long one. I looked up the libraries in the York directory and copied them down, then went back to the terminal and began the tedious task of looking up each of the other libraries and copying out a telephone number. For many of them there was no telephone listing, just the name of the library. I spent all of that Saturday looking up telephone numbers, and when I was in my room that evening I looked at it, and realized that the plan wasn’t going to work. Each phone call would cost me at least fifty pence at the pay telephone in the downstairs hallway. I couldn’t make the calls from Precious Little. Alfie was tight enough to look at every call made and I’d get the sack. I’d have to make the calls when libraries were open and that meant I’d have to call during the week, but I worked then. Some of them would, of course, be open on Saturdays, but school libraries would be closed, and besides, they weren’t listed under libraries. I realized that the librarian had been right. If Maggie worked in a school library, I’d have to call every school in Yorkshire. Not only that, nearly half of my list had no telephone number. There had to be another way. I’d have to find Maggie’s maiden name. That’s when he showed up.

I first noticed him that night outside the fish and chips shop where I often picked up my evening meal. Seventy-five pence got me a single piece of haddock and a handful of chips in a greasy wrapper. A bottle of beer from the off-sale at the end of the street and I had a cheap supper. He was leaning against the wall as I came out of the shop with my fish and chips and as I passed him he gave me a long look and I thought nothing except that when I had gone a few yards down the street I thought to myself, I know him. He’s not just somebody who’s visited at the home or I’ve seen in a pub, I know him from someplace important and then I realized that he was the dark traveler, the gypsy who had stolen my rental car and taken my money and let me stay in his coach at the top of the hill above Sheepheaven Farm. And I realized at the same moment that he knew who I was. I turned and looked back, but he was nowhere to be seen. After that, I looked for him and two nights later when I approached the chip shop I could see him leaning against the same wall.

I turned around, headed back for my room, my heart beating rapidly. Apparently he wasn’t there by chance. The next morning, when I came into Precious Little, George was standing by his bicycle, clipping his pant leg, getting himself ready for his ride home.

“Mr. Stone Sir,” he said.

“Yes?”

“There was a bloke here last night looking for you. Said he was a mate of yours. Come just after you left. I just be coming on work and he asked if I knew an American chap and he described you spot on, and I said, yes, that be Mr. Stone, he works here but he’s gone. He asked where you lived but I don’t know that, do I, and besides, he was a bit of a spooky one, he was, black beard and all. I hope I done all right when I said you worked here.”

“No harm done, George. I think I know who he is.”

So the dark traveler had been to Precious Little. They knew me in the chip shop, and he must have asked about me there. He was looking for me and he would find me and confront me so there was no longer any point in avoiding him.

That evening he was, once again, leaning against the wall in front of the shop. As I passed him, he said, “Nice evening, mate.”

I ignored him, went in and got my usual piece of haddock. When I came out he fell into step alongside.

“Funny seeing you here, mate. A bit of a coincidence you might say.”

“How do you know me?” I asked.

“You can’t have forgotten me, mate. You come up that hill on a fierce night, all covered with muck and I’ve nicked your car and you emptied your wallet. No, I think you remember me well.”

“What do you want?”

“Well, the day you left there was coppers all over the village and it seems some poor sod got his head bashed in and at first they thought it was thieves he surprised but then they couldn’t find nothing to connect him to anybody else and they decided that he’d had an unfortunate accident, fell and bashed his skull and got his brain fried with a pair of electric shears, he did. The coppers come up to us, of course, we’re the first ones they always come to, and we had to clear out and we come on down here. Only I put two and two together and I’m thinking you wasn’t just taking a hike on the hill that night.”

I remained silent. We had walked past the street where the boarding house was, only I didn’t want him to know where I lived. I kept walking.

“I asked a few questions myself. There was a Yank, they said, name of Stone, he stayed at that farm. So I’m thinking to myself, what’s this Yank doing in the middle of the night, his car tucked into the hedge, all out of breath and willing to pay me two hundred quid to put him up and give him back his car and I’m thinking maybe he’s got something to do with the farmer who had an accident.

“So I asked around a bit and yes, there was an American staying out at that farm and he come into the pub with the two of them, the farmer and his foxy wife and he danced with the wife and I’m thinking, well isn’t that a bit of a coincidence.

“And then, there you was, wheeling some bloke in a sick chair down the promenade, just as bold as brass, and I said to myself, now there’s an opportunity.”

“Like you said, it’s a coincidence.”

“Me seeing you on the prom, that’s a coincidence. I’m thinking the other has a bit different smell to it.” He laid his hand on my arm and we stopped.

“We passed the turn to your digs, mate. I knows where you live, I knows where you work, and I’m thinking the coppers would find you on the hill that night just a bit more than coincidental.”

“What? You’d tell them you stole a car? Look, I was on my way to the farm and I stopped the car for a bit of a walk and you tried to steal it and I surprised you and you ran off and I went back to London with it and that’s it. You’ve got no proof I was ever in your coach that night.”

“I’ve got two women who saw you there.”

“You’ve got nothing. You’re all thick as thieves. Who’d believe you? Or them? You saw me when I went for a walk one day. You open this can of worms and you’ll be right in the thick of it all over again.”

“Are you a betting man?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“How much would you be willing to stake on me not going to the coppers? What kind of odds do you suppose Ladbrokes would give you?”

“Suppose they believe you? What would you get out of it?”

“It’s not a question of what I would get. It’s a question of what don’t happen to you. You see, I’m thinking that the lady at the farmhouse, she’s mixed up in this, too.”

And suddenly I was panicked. If he dragged Maggie into this, then it wouldn’t matter what the outcome was, she would know what I had done, or at least harbor suspicions, and I would never see her again.

“Suppose I told you that I work at Precious Care because I’m broke, have no money.”

“Then I’d say there must be folk in America who have some money who wouldn’t want to see you all mixed up with the English law. I’m not a greedy man. Five hundred quid and you’ll never see me again.”

His hand was still on my arm, only now the fingers had tightened and his dark face was only inches from mine. I could smell cigarettes and some strange oil and his voice came from the dark bearded face as if it were disembodied, flat, impersonal, no malice, only a simple stating of fact. As if he were saying, ‘The world is round, mate. I thought you knew that.’

“And if I tell you to bugger off?”

“Then you’ve placed your bet, haven’t you?”

I weighed my options. If I paid him, it was an admission that I had something to hide and he’d still be around, a time bomb ticking away. He wasn’t likely to be satisfied. If I refused and he went to the police and dragged Maggie into it, all would be ruined.

“Look,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to hide and I’ve got no money. But you can do real damage with your wild story and I think you know that. You can ruin that woman’s life, what she has left of it. Her husband’s a vegetable, she’s lost her farm, and she doesn’t need you to hammer a nail into her coffin.”

I could suddenly see some teeth in his dark face and I knew he was smiling.

“Give me a few days to think about it. I might be able to scrape up some money just to make sure you leave the poor woman alone.”

“Listen, you pathetic cunt.” His voice was hard now, menacing, and he gripped my arm hard enough to make it hurt. “You make up your fucking mind. I’ll give you two days. Thursday night you be at the Kings Head at the bottom of High Street. That’s where you’ll find me. And don’t get any ideas about flying the coop. If you’re not there, I’ll fucking drop a coin to the coppers and they’ll get an anonymous tip about the Yank who was lurking about that farm the night the bloke got his head bashed in.”

He released my arm.

“And don’t you forget you’re on a fucking island, mate. And I’ve got an eye on you as well.” He turned and walked off into the night and I stood there, waiting. Somewhere there was a radio playing and I could hear music, perhaps from a pub on the next street over.

What I noticed first was that his shoulders were no longer vibrating. The blanket was wrapped around his shoulders and his head so that for me, pushing from the rear, he was only a gray lump. But the shoulders weren’t moving, no motion at all, so I stopped and went around in front and his eyes were open, staring straight ahead, but there was no movement. He was still.

There was no point in taking his pulse. Robbie had given up. I took the blanket off his head so that I could see him more clearly and I pushed him slowly back to Precious Little, talking softly to him, apologizing again and again, and then I began to tell him what we were passing, there’s a girl in a pink bathing suit, Robbie, she’s a knockout, and there’s a little boy about Terry’s age, or he would be about what Terry was when I last saw him. He’s digging a pit in the sand and he’s all the way down to his waist, and his mum is reading a book and she’s got her skirt to her waist, only she’s not nearly so good as Maggie. You wouldn’t fancy her at all. I stopped at the toffee stand and bought a string of candy and offered some to Robbie. I talked to him and those passing by paid no attention, an older man talking to his crippled brother in a wheelchair and then we went on back to Precious Little and I wheeled him to the basement door by the dustbins. I went inside, looking for Ali or Joshua as I always did when I came back from a walk with a wheelchair patient. Alfie had a small lift for those who couldn’t climb stairs but it was hard to fit a wheelchair and another person into it at the same time so two of us always carried wheelchair patients in through the basement and up the stairs.

This time, I found Ali and told him that Robbie was down in the alley and he was dead.

“Sorry to hear that,” Ali said, “he was a sort of mate of yours, wasn’t he?”

We carried Robbie up to his room, laid him out on the bed and I told Maxine that Robbie had died.

“That’s a blessing,” she said. “I’ll tell Mrs. Precious.”

I knew what would happen next. Agnes would call Alfie and Alfie would call the coroner. A black van would show up, careful to park in the back by the dustbins where no one could see it. Ali or Joshua and I would carry the body back to the basement door where it would be strapped to a wheeled gurney, stowed in the van and the van driver would have tea while Alfie, who had arrived by then, would fill out the paperwork. Relatives would be notified and Joshua and I would clear out the resident’s room, box the clothes and few personal things and change the linen. With that, the dead one ceased to exist.

So it was with Robbie. I stood in the doorway and looked at his emaciated body and I tried to remember what he looked like at Sheepheaven Farm, but he had faded so that there were only snatches of remembered incidents: the night at the bottom of the stairs when he had shouted, “I have fallen and will not rise again,” his shrill whistle that sent Jack scrambling over the backs of the sheep. Hopefully, Maggie would come to Precious Little to make the final disposition of the body and collect Robbie’s few things. There was, of course, the chance that it would all be done by telephone and the post, but there were always things to sign. Whatever happened, it would happen quickly. Robbie was gone and now I would find out where Maggie was, that much was certain.