Fatlands

  It was her bedroom, that much was clear, only her bedroom younger than her, caught in childhood. On the bed the duvet cover was pink with frills and there was one of those rag dolls you stuff your jammies in. The wall above had a large poster of Jason Donovan (there’s no scorn like the scorn reserved for old sex symbols) and by the side a built-in desk unit with a special penholder and blotter. Other than that, it was bare and, of course, spotless. On the stereo the switch was pushed to repeat. Second time around the rap didn’t sound quite so provocative.

  I should admit to a moment of panic: a sudden vision of open windows and fire escapes, the noise of struggle enveloped by endless replays of Niggers With Attitude. Except, when I looked, the window had no fire escape and its lock was untouched. I went back out on to the landing. From the floor above I heard something, a sound of a voice maybe, but very muffled.

  I went up another flight towards another closed door, stripped and polished like all the others, with a poncy little porcelain key cover and doorknob. It was cold to the touch. I waited for a second, but although I could hear the sing-song of her voice in animated conversation through the wood, I couldn’t make out a word she was saying. I turned the doorknob silently and went in.

  The room was stunning: a serious study, every wall lined with books and files, and a large oak desk looking out over the front of the house. To one side were two tall filing cabinets, both of them pulled open with files sticking out. At first glance the place looked like a fourteenyear old cyclone had just hit it. Even the carpet was lifted half off the floor. Mattie was standing at the desk, her back to the door, folders strewn around in front of her, the phone in one hand and a bundle of papers in the other. She sounded excited and angry all at the same time.

  ‘Listen, of course I have. You think I don’t know what I’m looking for …’There was a pause. ‘Well, what shall I do?’Then another and someone told her. ‘Yes, yes. OK. Yes, I know …’But then she registered my presence and whirled round. Still, the sight of me made her jump. She let out a gasp. ‘Oh, you scared me,’she said in a bright little voice. Then back into the receiver, ‘No, not you. Listen, I have to go. I’ll see you … I mean, you won’t be late, will you? OK? Bye.’She put down the phone.

  I didn’t say a thing, just stood there, waiting for her to make the first move. ‘That was Dad,’she said aggressively.

  ‘Really?’

  She gave me an exasperated gesture with her hands. ‘Surprise, surprise. He can’t find the theatre tickets. He thinks he left them somewhere in his desk.’

  Put it this way. It wasn’t that I disbelieved her, it was just … well, maybe I’m a suspicious soul. ‘Or in his filing cabinets?’I said politely.

  She looked at the mess. ‘If it was a report, he wouldn’t have lost it.’She shook her head. ‘He’s very absentminded.’ And it was said with more affection than I’d heard all day. ‘They could be anywhere.’

  ‘But I thought he was coming back in half an hour anyway?’

  She shook her head. ‘You don’t know him. He won’t get here in time. He never does.’She stuffed the two or three files back into their folders and closed the cabinets. Then she turned to me. ‘It’s all right. I’m allowed in here, you know. Anyway, it’s the only private phone in the place. When Dad was out working, Christine used to use it all the time. That way she thought I couldn’t hear.’

  ‘And could you?’I said after a beat of a pause.

  ‘Well, wouldn’t matter much if I did. I mean children don’t really understand, do they?’

  I closed my eyes. ‘You know I don’t think that, Mattie. And I’m sorry I used the word. If it’s any help, I think you’re probably a good deal older than I ever was at your age.’

  She stared at me for a minute, then dropped her eyes and shuffl ed some papers around the desk. ‘Yes, well, I’m sorry I went for you, too … you know, downstairs.’She stopped, making a little lost gesture with her hand. ‘Helen says it’s a great way to lose friends I haven’t made yet.’

  I sighed. Was this really peace in our time or just her way of defl ecting my curiosity? So Mattie went through her father’s filing cabinets to see what was there. Maybe she was looking for a reason why he preferred work to family. Let’s just hope she didn’t find any porn magazines. Well, whatever his secrets, they were more her business than mine. ‘OK,’I said. ‘Shall we go downstairs?’

  ‘In a minute.’She glanced around the room. ‘He’s … he’s very particular about his study.’

  And so, only a fraction against my better judgement, I left her to it. She wasn’t far behind. In the living room the tea had grown cold, but she poured another cup anyway. On a ledge underneath the coffee table a copy of the Independent sat neatly folded. She pulled it out and started flicking through, as if she was looking for something. After a while she looked up. ‘I can’t find the right page.’

  ‘What you looking for?’

  ‘The theatre listings. Dad says the play’s on at the Garrick, but I don’t know where that is.’

  ‘Mattie,’I said softly. ‘He’ll be here.’

  She shook her head. ‘You don’t understand. He wasn’t last time. Last time I had to take a taxi and we missed the first half,’she said bitterly. We sat silently for a minute. Then she got up and went out into the kitchen. I heard a cupboard open and the sound of something clinking. When she came back she had a set of car keys in her hand. ‘Listen,’she said. ‘I’m just going out to Dad’s car to look up the theatre in his entertainment guide. I won’t be a minute.’

  I thought about it. Then I got up to follow her.

  ‘You don’t need to come,’she said quickly. ‘I promise no one’s going to snatch me. And I’m not going to run away.’

  I looked at her for a moment. ‘Are you sure about that, Mattie?’

  There was a pause. She shook her head. ‘Where would I run to? Anyway, I’m fourteen, remember. I don’t even know how to drive.’She frowned down at her feet, then up again at me. ‘Listen, Hannah, I’m glad it was you and not someone else looking after me. But that’s the point, don’t you see? Everywhere I go someone is always “keeping an eye” on me. The old bats at school, Mrs Dayley here. My father. And now you. I’ll go out to the car, get the book and come straight back in again. You can watch me from the window if you’re that worried, all right?’

  To be honest I still didn’t want her to go. But then I was caught. Because, of course, I also wanted her to feel I was different from all the other adults in her life. Because she needed that as much if not more than she needed a chaperone. Hannah, sweetheart, remember you’re a private detective not a social worker. Good old Frank. I do the job, he gives the advice. Maybe Mattie wasn’t the only one fed up with people keeping an eye on her.

  ‘OK,’I said. ‘I’ll wait here.’

  And after that she did something quite unexpected. She came up to me, put her arms around my neck and gave me the briefest, tightest little squeeze. Then she grabbed her jacket from the sofa and was gone. I heard the front door open, then bang shut, as if on the catch. I stood for a second without moving, then moved to the window. She was down on the pavement. She looked up, saw me, grinned and wagged a finger in mock reproach. Then she walked down the road about fifteen yards and stopped by a dark blue Rover. She opened the door and slipped into the driver’s seat.

  What happened next I never really saw. Except I think that as the door closed behind her she was leaning over towards the glove compartment. It must have been that because I don’t believe I heard the sound of the ignition. No, I really don’t think I heard that. But then there was too much other noise to be sure.

  The blast seemed to come in two waves. First there was a small one, as if something at the back of the car had caught fire. Then, almost at the same instant, thunder cracked and sky slashed open in a great wound of red and black as the car, the road, even the street lamp above, exploded upwards in a fountain of flame.

  CHAPTER FOUR After the Deluge

  It was
so foreign to me. You have to understand that. I had worked with Frank for maybe two and a half years. In that time I must have caught a dozen shoplifters, even jumped on a couple of them as they raced down the street, and I’d once been attacked by an angry husband who caught me outside his mistress’s house taking pictures. But it never felt like real violence, not the sort which changes everything. The only job where someone had died had been a missing person and, although I cared, I hadn’t known her before it happened. And she hadn’t been in my charge when it took place.

  So, you see, I wasn’t prepared. For any of it. I, like everyone else, thought car explosions were the things you saw in movies or on television, where there is a mass of fire and smoke and then you move on to the next scene. It strikes me now that since it’s usually the bad guys who get blown to hell, it doesn’t matter what happens after. No one ever kills the heroine. Especially not a child.

  Because, of course, I knew she was dead. I knew it long before I saw it for myself. It wasn’t even the force of the blast as much as the feeling in my gut, as if someone had taken out a piece of me without anaesthetic. She was dead. And suddenly I was screaming. Suddenly I was out of the house and on the pavement amid a sea of glass bellowing her name while my skin hurt from the heat and my eyes poured tears from the smoke, or from something more painful. And all the time knowing there was nothing I could do, that it wasn’t a question of bravery or cowardice, simply the irrevocable force of that wall of flame keeping me back.

  There were people around, I know that—a man in a raincoat shouted at me to get back, and windows opened all about, voices raised. And then, after a while, there was the sound of police and fire sirens, first in one ear then in the other, like a stereo drama, growing closer all the time. But by then things were clearer anyway. The plumes of black smoke had washed away and through the flames you could just make out the wreckage of the car, a flash of a curve of window frame, a distorted tangle of a bonnet. Steel and wire, misshapen, but good, tough materials, able to withstand a certain strain. Just like the adverts. Not like human flesh.

  The black shape in the seat wasn’t human flesh, either. It was just a thing, a stump, no real form at all. But that was the point. Because not all of it was there.

  I know you don’t want to hear this. But I need to tell it, anyway. Because it happened. And because everything that followed was, in one way or another, a result of it. Mattie Shepherd’s body had been ripped apart when the petrol tank blew. That was what they said at the inquest, and that was what I saw. Of course we know about such things from reports of plane crashes: how the rescuers come across bits of people scattered over an area of miles in the snow, or the woodland or the desert, or wherever it happens to be. Well, in this case it happened to be Sutherland Avenue, and in this case it wasn’t miles. I saw it as the flames died down and I moved closer to the car. And I was still seeing it as the police car screeched to a halt and two men jumped out, hauling me back while I screamed for them to let me be. It—a lump of leather jacket and a part of an arm lying in the middle of the road.

  And the only thing I do remember thinking, as they guided me back inside the house, was how terrible it must be for relatives of plane-crash victims: because whatever they find, there is never a body to hold on to, to cry over, or at the very least to believe in, only a collection of bits in a bag, a jigsaw of a person.

  And so with that bureaucracy took over. Police procedure. And I was taken over with it. It took them a while to get over their preconception of me as a hysterical female, but then, to be honest, it was a mistake easily made. After I’d stopped shaking—for the record sweet tea was useless, neat Scotch would have been much more effective—I told them who I was. From there they must have called Frank, and they or Frank must have called Tom Shepherd. Later came the third degree. But by then I had become who I was supposed to be: a private detective with a client, a brief, and a brain, not to mention one hell of a story to tell.

  I told it a number of times. First to a big curly-headed guy in plain clothes who fancied himself and whose name I instantly forgot, and then, in more detail, to someone who was obviously his assistant. Technically, of course at this point I ought to have been shipped off to the nearest station, in this case the conveniently placed Paddington Green, home of the Anti-Terrorist Squad, and had my whole statement taken down word for word. I would probably have still been there in the morning. But Frank must have put in a good word for me, because for once they let me stay where I was.

  I was good as gold. Or at least as near to gold as a girl like me ever gets. I told Detective Winter everything he thought he needed to know. And if I left anything out (which, I might as well tell you now, I did), I swear it wasn’t from a conscious desire to deceive. In the event it hardly mattered. None of it made sense, anyway. Which is what gave it away, of course. I mean since we clearly weren’t looking at a bungled custody snatch, that didn’t leave much else it could be. Admittedly, I’d never seen a car bomb detonate, so had no idea what, if anything, were its distinguishing characteristics. But from the way he looked as I described it, he obviously knew. And now, just as the second explosion ripped its way through my memory, I heard something else, something more immediate. The sound of crying, long sobbing moans more like an animal than a person. At first I panicked, thinking it might be coming from me, but as I listened I realized it was seeping up from downstairs. My interrogator hesitated too, mesmerized for a second, then calmly began to talk over it, reeling me back in to the subject in hand. From there on the sobs ebbed and flowed at intervals, but we both ignored them, pros that we were.

  At last they let me go. I refused their offer of a lift home and headed off down towards the front door. In the hall the living room door was ajar. I stopped and stared through the gap. On the sofa, where Mattie had been before, a man sat with his back to me, head deep in his hands. He wasn’t crying any more. Opposite him, sitting on the edge of my Bette Davis seat, was the big guy in plain clothes with the dark curly hair, obviously a man with a mission, and, now my brain was working, equally obviously a rank high up in the Anti-Terrorist Squad. This was, after all, bound to be their case. As for Shepherd, well, what can I say? Except it’s hard to look at anyone in that much distress and not feel pity. The copper glanced up at the door. He stared for a moment, half looking at me, half through me, then slowly got up and, giving the slightest of nods to the woman PC standing behind, closed the door in my face. Bastard, I thought. And it made me feel better to have some of my old prejudice back.

  My car was parked about forty yards down the street on the other side. The fire engines had gone, but the police cars and an ambulance were still there, although the burnt-out shell of the Rover was screened off. There were still policemen everywhere, keeping the onlookers with nothing to look at at bay. Someone said something to somebody and I was let through. I found my car keys in my bag and put them into the lock. Then I slid into the driver’s seat and closed the door, like I and a million other people had done a million times before. Except for one. I sat for a moment staring at the dashboard. I reached across to get the stereo out of the glove compartment and as I did so something went very wrong in my stomach. I tried to put the key in the ignition but it was clear I wasn’t going anywhere. I got the door open just in time to throw up on the pavement. And so it was that I left a little of myself on the street with Mattie Shepherd.

  Eventually, when there was nothing more to leave, I drove home. I was surprised by how empty the roads were, until I realized how late it was. 11.47. Five and a half hours since … But then I don’t suppose she was counting any more. I turned the corner into my street and everything looked the same but different, as if I had been away for a very long time and my memory had played tricks on me. When I got out of the car, I was so tired I could hardly stand.

  In my exhaustion I found I’d relocked the front door trying to open it. I knew I just had to get inside and then I could lie down and let it all go till morning. But as the door pushed open I
got this sudden hit of tension, almost a physical shock, as I realized that something in the flat wasn’t right.

  I stood absolutely still, trying to place the fear. And then I heard it, coming from the living room, a soft almost rhythmic clicking sound, once, twice, again, as if someone was trying to make a cigarette lighter catch in the darkness. And instantly I saw Mattie sitting there in her leather jacket, half a stubbed-out Dunhill in one hand and her cute little Bic lighter in the other, flipping down on the switch time after time waiting for the flame to jump. I was trembling so much I had to hold on to the wall. I put my hand on the handle and softly turned it.

  The room was dark apart from the street-light glow from the curtainless window and one small, green light dancing in the wall unit. The amplifier was on, and below it the pick-up of the turntable was hiccuping its way round and round an album. Repeating stereos, fast becoming a leitmotif in tonight’s drama. I turned and saw the figure laid out on the sofa, shoes off, arms in a pillow behind the head. And then, and only then, did I remember what I had forgotten so completely. That this was Nick’s Saturday for not having Josh and that we had agreed to spend the evening together.

  I walked farther into the room and looked down at him. He was sleeping noiselessly, his face caught in that slight frown I knew so well. Down by his side an empty bottle of wine sat next to a long-stemmed wine glass, half filled (Nick always picks the best glasses, says it improves the taste). The album on the turntable was Mahler’s Requiem, a cover I didn’t recognize lying near by, which no doubt made it a particularly special recording, the latest move in his continued, good-humoured campaign to drag me kicking and screaming into adult music appreciation. I put out my hand and turned the switch. The pick-up lifted smoothly off the record and Mattie put away her lighter until the next waking nightmare. I looked at Nick again and was about to wake him when I realized that I didn’t know what I would say, or if I would ever stop crying once I had begun to say it, and I couldn’t bear the idea of not being in control. So instead I took a blanket from the chest and laid it carefully over his sleeping form. He didn’t stir. I went out and closed the door. I brushed my teeth to get rid of the taste of bile in my mouth, but I left the light off so I wouldn’t have to look at my face. Then I lay down on my bed and gave myself up to the protection of sleep.