The meanest Flood (44 page)

‘So soon? Is Geordie OK to travel?’

‘They’re sending a nurse with us. He’ll be all right. But he wants to know about the boss, have you heard anything?’

Marie shook her head. ‘Nothing. I don’t know where he is. But the case is beginning to crack. Tell Geordie not to worry.’

When Marie put the phone down it rang again before she had a chance to let go of it.

‘Marie? Celia?’ It was Sam’s voice.

‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’

‘Market Weighton. I can’t get through because of the floods. No buses.’

‘I’ll pick you up,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way.’

‘What about Geordie? You heard anything?’

‘He’s doing fine. Coming home tomorrow.’

‘Good. And the case? You know who it is who’s setting me up?’

‘I’ve got a good lead,’ she told him. ‘You know anyone called Danny Mann? A magician?’

Sam was silent for a moment. ‘Danny Mann?’ he said. ‘Rings a distant bell, but that’s all. It’s not a name I can put a face to.’

‘Keep thinking,’ Marie told him. ‘I’ll be with you in half an hour.’

37

Marilyn was feeling good at the wheel of the magician’s car. There was the more or less constant thumping sound from the boot but she tried to filter that out as she headed for Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast.

This was all she had wanted, to be involved with the man. To be a part of his life. The other men, the ones who had decided to live their lives without her, they were the losers. She wished her mother had been at home when Danny called, that Ellen could have been there when she met him, and now, while she was driving Danny’s car, Marilyn smiled. Ellen’s face would be a picture when she heard about this. There’d be no more talk of medication.

There’d be no need for medication. Because what Marilyn’s medication was about, it was about the lack of love in her life. Her medication was a substitute for a real and proper partner, someone who wanted to share his life with her.

‘I need you,’ Danny had said on the phone.

He needed her because she was his other half. He needed her because he couldn’t function as a single entity without the love of his natural partner. Perhaps he’d been a little slow in recognizing the fact, in coming around to the realization of his limitations. But he’d got there in the end. He was a man, after all, not a gender best known for self-insight.

‘I need you to help me with something,’ he’d said. ‘Can we meet?’

It wouldn’t have mattered to Marilyn what it was he needed help with. It was enough that he needed her. As a woman you have to be prepared to do whatever your man desires. Marilyn wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t looking for an easy life. She fully understood that a relationship with Diamond Danny Mann or with any powerful man would mean a certain sacrifice on her part. How could it not?

He was the man. He was the magician. She was the hand-maiden. He performed the miracles, and he was capable of performing the miracles because she was there to do his bidding. This was the way of the world, it had always been like that and it always would be. The man got the glory, the adulation, because that was what he needed, his life blood. But the woman knew that his strength, what others saw in him, was the result of her input. There was a power behind the throne, and behind the throne of the magician there was Marilyn Eccles.

And what did it cost, this abasement? This unselfish acceptance of her role? Not a lot, really. In this instance it cost her a day at home with her mother. It meant that she had to drive Danny’s car to Whitby and wait there until the evening when they would meet back at his house in York.

That’s all. Nothing else. The occasional knocking from the boot, or not so occasional as it was now, constant thumping in fact, she had to ignore.

Marilyn couldn’t ignore it, though she wasn’t going to open the boot to see what was in there. Are you kidding? She remembered the fairy stories about people who opened the forbidden box. In one the box was filled with deadly diseases that immediately flew out and attacked her and the rest of the world. In another, when the girl opened the box, she became old and died and fell to dust because it had been three hundred years since her love had given her the box.

So, no, she would not open the boot of the car whatever happened. But that didn’t stop her wondering what was in there. It was something alive, an animal perhaps, or even a human being. Or maybe it wasn’t alive but something mechanical, a robot or an engine. But if it was something as obvious as that why had Danny warned her against taking a look? What could be the harm in seeing a robot, or a cat?

She fixed her eyes on the road and tried to put the sound of the thumping out of her mind. Marilyn knew how psychology could lead you astray. As soon as you start to think of what it might be in the boot, you have a desire to open it. She knew that she was capable of talking herself into opening the boot, she would convince herself that Danny actually wanted her to open the boot and that the injunction not to open it was a perverse way of telling her she had to.

The mind isn’t always on our side.

It can lead us home and it can lead us astray.

It wasn’t an engine, nothing mechanical. If it had been something inanimate like that there would have been a pattern to the thumping, a rhythm. But there was no pattern. First there was a kind of frantic kicking sound, then silence. A little later there would be a loud bang, then a series of smaller ones. From time to time there would appear to be a pattern, a solid and regular beat like the drums behind a rock song or the insistent tapping of a code, but just when Marilyn had convinced herself of the regularity it would fall quiet again or the banging would increase in tempo dramatically, turning into a scuffling sound.

Marilyn made up a story. In the story she was travelling from York to Whitby in Diamond Danny Mann’s car and there was a constant racket coming from the boot which Danny had told her to ignore. She wasn’t, under any circumstances, to open the boot.

But in the story Marilyn stopped the car and pulled off the road at Boggle Hole. She got out of the car and went around the rear. The thumping was wild, it was as if the boot was packed with wild animals struggling for freedom. She grasped the handle and pulled it open.

Inside there was nothing. There was no interior flooring, no spare-wheel. Nothing. And there was complete silence. She looked up at the sky and the moors around her and there was a vast emptiness, not a bird or a cloud, no whistling of the wind or the hum of traffic on the country road.

When she blinked and looked again into the boot there was no car. There was only Marilyn alone in the universe. The sound in the boot would never return, the car would not be seen again and Diamond Danny Mann would have disappeared into the fastness of space.

There would be no past and no future, no pain and no joy. There would be Marilyn Eccles and an endless empty landscape.

But it was only a story.

As she approached Boggle Hole Marilyn wondered if she would be able to stop herself making the story come true. She played with the idea that because she had invented the story then she would be captured by it, forced to play it out within the parameters she had allowed it.

And the thing, whatever it was in the back of the car, it was as if it knew the story too, and as Boggle Hole loomed into view the banging and thumping in the rear of the vehicle rose to a tumult of sound. Not just impact sounds now, there was breath in there as well, small cries like the whimpering of a child.

38

Alice Richardson looked at her daughter. Hannah was at the school gate with her skirt hitched up, chewing gum and practising flashing her black eyes. She’s a tart already and only ten years old, said a voice in Alice’s head. It was the voice of Hannah’s Irish grandmother, Alice’s mother, dead now for five years but still as garrulous as ever. Alice would never be able to shut her up. The gates of Heaven weren’t thick enough to keep out all that gossip, composed as it was of magic, gassy, blathering prose.

Dominic was over by the tennis courts head to head with Rafiq and Lauren, all of them laughing uproariously at the latest dirty joke.

‘Where’s Conn?’ Alice asked.

‘Dunno,’ said Hannah. ‘Haven’t seen him since this morning.’

‘You don’t keep an eye on him, then? Your little brother?’

‘Oh, Mam,’ Hannah said, glancing round to check if anyone had heard. It seemed to Alice that her children could be severely embarrassed by the fact that she drew breath. Hannah had reached the stage where she wouldn’t go out with the family unless there was no alternative. Never to the cinema or the theatre and only to a restaurant if there was a wedding or a wake in the family. Unless it was McDonald’s, of course, but it never was because Alice refused to eat in a place where they threw the plates away after every customer.

Alice spoke to a couple of the other mothers about the floods while Hannah continued to preen herself and show off her pre-pubescent body to the world. When Hannah had been growing in her womb Alice had spent the whole nine months bonding with her. Since then she had spent another ten years perfecting the bond. So nearly eleven years, all in all, and here she was watching someone who was a stranger. During the same period, Alex, Alice’s husband and Hannah’s father, had spent his time bonding with himself and a few cronies down at the pub and his relationship with Hannah was really no worse than Alice’s. Alice sometimes felt that everything going on around her might have meaning. It was simply a matter of cracking the code.

‘You seen Conn?’ she asked Dominic and Rafiq as they passed by on the road, Lauren in a sandwich between them.

‘I saw him this morning,’ Dominic said.

‘I haven’t seen him, no, Mrs Richardson,’ Rafiq said.

Lauren smiled through her eye-shadow and sucked her lip ring.

When everyone else had gone Alice marched over to the school office, only to find it closed. ‘He must’ve gone home by himself,’ Hannah said. ‘We can’t stand here all day. I’m cold.’

They walked back towards the river. Hannah trudging along in her wellingtons, unable to pick her feet up in spite of her mother’s nagging.

In the streets sloping down to the river the hexagonal STOP signs were almost totally submerged by river water. It was as if they were floating there instead of being fixed on the top of three-metre posts.

I’m not going to worry about this
, Alice told herself. Hannah was right. Conn had walked home alone. He knew Alice would worry when he wasn’t there, at the school gate, but knowing that had not stopped him.
Well, I’m not going to give him the satisfaction,
Alice told herself crossly.

Nevertheless, she found herself walking faster than usual and by the time she entered their street Hannah was fifteen or twenty paces behind her. She waded through the flood waters and stepped over the sandbags at the front door. Alex was standing halfway up the stairs.

‘Is Conn here?’ she asked.

‘No. I thought you were picking them up.’

‘Conn wasn’t there. I thought he’d be here.’

‘Don’t worry. He’ll be on his way.’

‘I am worried,’ Alice said. ‘He
always
waits for me.’ Hannah came through the front door. She walked up the stairs without speaking, squeezing past her father.

Alice followed her and Alex came last. ‘What happened this morning?’ Alice asked her husband. ‘You left them both at the school gate as normal?’

Hannah and Alex exchanged a glance.

‘You did, didn’t you?’

‘Not exactly at the gate, no. I haven’t done that for a while now.’

‘Not exactly at the gate,’ Alice said, hearing her voice grow shrill, unable to keep it down. ‘Then where exactly is it you leave my children in the morning?’

‘I leave them at the bus stop,’ Alex said. ‘They’re not babies. There’s loads of kids there at that time. He’d be straight to the school with Hannah.’

Alice turned to her daughter. ‘You went straight to school?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Conn?’

‘He follows behind,’ Hannah said. ‘I was talking to Rachel and Sarah. But he was tagging along.’

‘You saw him go into school?’

Hannah played with a wisp of her hair.

‘You saw him go into school, Hannah?’

Hannah opened her mouth and closed it again. She shook her head from side to side.

Alice sat down heavily on the arm of the couch. Alex reached for his coat. ‘I’ll go and find him,’ he said. ‘He can’t be far away.’ She listened to his footsteps on the stairs. She heard the door close as he pulled it to behind him. Hannah turned away and went to her room.

Alice let herself fall from the arm of the couch on to the cushion. She splayed her legs in front of her and searched the cracks on the ceiling. This was the place she’d never let her imagination visit. From time to time with each of her children she’d come to the brink of this place and always managed to pull back, knowing that if she gave it space in her head there might be a corresponding space in the world.

This was one of those times that happened to other people. Unfortunate people. People quite unlike Alice and her family. It was a statistically untenable event. The chance of its happening to her was so remote that it was impossible. If someone somewhere in England was going to snatch a child today, the odds against it being her own child were enormous. Astronomical. It couldn’t happen.