The Indecent Death of a Madam Page 6

  Rosemary remembered the phone call she’d received the week before. It was an author researching a new history of the asylum; that had been their slant. They’d wanted to meet old employees and former patients to get a sense of the place. They offered both a reunion and a goodbye – some sort of closure – and a chance to hear of people’s stories since. It had seemed a good idea at the time. The author spoke well; Rosemary felt she could hardly refuse. So she’d said yes and thought no more about it.

  And this evening, she’d arrived at the asylum around six to find the doors open, the lights on, music playing inside. There was some trepidation – this place had memories for her – but hope was the stronger sense as she stepped inside, looking for a friendly or familiar face. But she’d got no further than the entrance hall before . . . before what? Before being knocked to the floor. Yes, she remembered now.

  Knocked to the floor, a pain in her head. She’d heard the front door closing behind her, sensed the lights being turned out, felt the cold mosaic stone on her face. And then she was being dragged, with difficulty . . . she saw the corridor walls passing, the peeling paint, the damp matting, through open swing doors, hinges all rust and decay and into the main ward . . . she knew it was the main ward, she knew this place, the bed curtains blowing a little in the wind through the broken windows.

  And then nothing, until she was lying on the bed – though this wasn’t a bed, or not a place of comfort. It was a bare metal frame. She’d tried to move and was slapped hard, like an explosion in the brain.

  ‘Don’t make me do more,’ said the voice, its owner tying her harshly.

  And then they’d left her and Rosemary lay listening to the sea heaving on the shingle and those words came to mind: ‘Time and tide stayeth for no man.’

  But perhaps they would stay with her tonight; because she needed their company in the gutted remains of the Bybuckle Asylum.

  ‘Time and tide, please stay,’ she whispered, like a child frightened by the night.

  ‘Blessings’ all mine!’

  Martin Channing, the bad-boy editor, possessed a mischievous charm, determined to take nothing too seriously. ‘She’s not, of course; I don’t think Blessings is anybody’s.’ He smiled. ‘Although one or two brave souls have attempted ownership.’ He pondered their attempts. ‘They remind me of those pale-faced trophy hunters who stand in their stupid safari shorts next to dead lions. Only Blessings is very much alive . . . and she ate them all.’

  Tamsin and Peter were visiting Martin at his place of work, having driven the seven miles to the historic town of Lewes. ‘Everything happened here,’ Martin had said, indicating Lewes in its entirety. ‘They’re all terrible history snobs, of course. If it isn’t the battle of Lewes, it’s their famous Protestant martyrs’ bonfire narrative or Thomas Paine’s favourite hostelry. They’ve probably got the original Garden of Eden somewhere off the High Street!’

  They now sat in a side room off the airy office that housed the Sussex Silt. The newspaper had been revitalized by Martin’s happily shameless editorship, and the building was an old warehouse now renovated and gentrified. Formerly, it had been a beacon of engineering, making agricultural machinery by the tidal River Ouse. But no one made things in Lewes any more, apart from fudge brownies for the tea shops and expensive candles for the gift shops. Only the river remained the same – the eternal flow, rising and falling at the tide’s bidding.

  And they were here to see Martin Channing with a particular matter on their mind. As the founding member, he was going to tell them all about the Stormhaven Etiquette Society . . . everything.

  ‘It did surprise me,’ said Peter as they settled.

  ‘What surprised you?’ asked Martin.

  ‘Well – a man like you starting the Stormhaven Etiquette Society, when you hate Stormhaven . . . and etiquette.’

  ‘Call me a missionary, Abbot!’

  ‘I choke a little on that description.’

  ‘Civilizing the natives!’

  Tamsin joined them from the ladies’, suitably impressed by their scented cleanliness and Molton Brown hand cream. If you judged a man by his shoes and an organization by its toilets, then here at the Sussex Silt she was in the presence of greatness. Channing had very nice shoes.

  ‘And, of course, your little talk on morality and, er . . .’

  ‘Grace.’

  ‘Morality and grace, yes – it went down very well. Very well indeed. Not sure any of us philistines knew what you were talking about, mind! Too much time in the desert, Abbot! You’ve forgotten what the real world looks like.’ Peter smiled for now. ‘But you were a different voice, no question of that and novelty value with the monk’s outfit, and just what we needed. You bestowed vicarious holiness on us all! We’re a slightly odd bunch, obviously.’

  ‘Slightly?’

  ‘You can be honest, Abbot.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what the opposite of community cohesion is, Channing, but you’ve certainly managed it with that group. Together you took dysfunction to a new level.’

  ‘Marvellously modelled for us by the Church, of course.’ Martin smiled with thinly veiled aggression. ‘I mean, who has done dysfunction like God’s robed ones, Abbot? The rest of us are just a pale imitation.’

  ‘I’m not here to speak for the Church.’

  ‘No, you’d need a defence lawyer with balls of steel and a complete disregard for the truth to do that. But we’re digressing from the story.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘Because after you’d left the gathering – you were a little hasty, I felt – Rosemary actually claimed she knew you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Or thought she knew you.’

  Tamsin flinched. What did Channing know?

  ‘Well, hardly,’ said Peter.

  ‘I’m sure there’s nothing in it; nothing in it at all.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘You weren’t lovers in the desert, were you? How exotic, Abbot!’

  Peter shook his head. ‘Nothing like that.’

  ‘So what was it like? I do sniff a story here.’

  Peter wanted there to be no story. Tamsin’s body tensed.

  ‘Our paths crossed briefly a long time ago.’

  ‘Some charitable endeavour no doubt!’

  ‘You know me, Martin: always saving the world.’ It felt like he might be out of the wood. ‘Saving myself is rather harder, of course.’

  ‘You were telling us about the membership,’ said Tamsin, intervening. She didn’t want Martin sniffing around the abbot’s relationship with Rosemary. ‘Blessings, for instance.’

  ‘What of her?’

  ‘She’s your tame judge, isn’t she?’

  ‘Tame? Blessings?’ Martin played surprised. ‘Not tame in any manner at all! Cold and hard as an ice pick in Alaska . . . but who wouldn’t be, frankly, having to deal with all those lawyers, who probably confuse her with their housemaids.’

  ‘You don’t like lawyers?’

  ‘Lawyers are jackals of misery.’

  ‘So a similar profession to yours, then.’

  ‘Detective Inspector!’ He enjoyed her verbal assault no end. ‘Mind you, if you can survive the bitching at Roedean, you can survive anywhere.’

  ‘Blessings went to Roedean?’

  ‘I never did think single-sex schools were a good idea for girls. Without a few idiot boys around, girls can really be very nasty to each other. Though I think it was the incident with her father, Providence N’Dayo, that she . . . well, found rather difficult.’

  ‘What incident?’

  ‘A little interested, perhaps?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I shouldn’t say, really . . .’

  ‘It’s never stopped you before, Martin. He was a diplomat, wasn’t he?’

  ‘A Ghanaian diplomat, yes. That’s what brought them to this country; and Blessings never quite left. Her father left, but she didn’t go with him. He returned to some minor posting in Ghana – only to
be found dead by one of his sons.’

  ‘Well, it comes to us all.’

  ‘In the toilet,’ added Martin.

  They all paused. None of them wished to die in the toilet.

  ‘It’s hardly a crime,’ said Peter.

  ‘Not glorious, though, is it? I mean, there are better places to be found.’

  ‘Where like?’

  ‘Well, in a rocking chair, gazing at the setting sun, perhaps? Or reading my own editorial in the Silt? But as you say, no crime, so God knows why she’s so sensitive about it all.’

  That was probably enough about her father.

  ‘So Blessings is a force, is she?’ asked Tamsin.

  ‘She’s feared by other lawyers, this is what they tell me. And when the sharks fear you . . .’

  ‘Quite. Well, we look forward to meeting her.’

  ‘I don’t think she likes the police very much. Just a hunch.’

  ‘And you’re supposing I care?’ said Tamsin. Martin smiled. He could see a battle ahead.

  ‘I’m old and wise enough to know the police never care.’

  ‘A little harsh,’ said Peter.

  ‘But only a little.’

  Tamsin stepped in again: ‘So moving round the circle in the Stormhaven Etiquette Society, who’s the mysterious Terence Blain?’

  ‘Terence?’

  ‘Former major-general, isn’t he?’

  Terence would miss the lifts

  home in Rosemary’s car. He had taken to enjoying her curt offer of help as the Etiquette Society disbanded for another night, with Blessings moving them firmly towards the door. She didn’t encourage any hanging around at Black Cap; she liked the courtroom cleared.

  ‘Lift, Terence?’ Rosemary would say as things broke up. She asked cheerfully but without warmth; a casual enquiry that meant nothing. It was simply an offer of help from a professional helper.

  ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Terence with equal distance, though Rosemary would have made a good military wife, with her no-nonsense approach. ‘As long as it doesn’t put you out.’

  ‘I’m going your way. It would be rather odd not to offer.’

  ‘People will start talking,’ said Blessings on one occasion as she noted them leaving together.

  ‘Talking about what?’ asked Rosemary, putting on her coat.

  ‘A lift in the car today, a shared hotel room tomorrow, in some out-of-town Premier Inn. I see it all the time. In court, I mean.’

  ‘We’re not in court, Blessings, we’re in Stormhaven. And it’s a lift, believe me.’

  ‘I’m sure it is, Rosemary.’

  ‘Though why you’re quite so interested . . .’

  ‘She’s worried you might attack me,’ said Terence and that had defused the moment. It drew a chuckle from Rosemary and Blessings had never returned to the theme, though the lifts in Rosemary’s red Skoda had continued. She’d take him to the end of his road, King’s Drive, and stop there.

  ‘You can walk from here, can’t you? You probably could do with some exercise after all that sitting.’

  Parking at the end of the road ensured he never invited her in, never had to pose the question, which suited them both. And a walk from the car was no hardship for Terence. He’d close the door and be on his way, not good at farewells and the niceties of departure, feeling abrupt and awkward. He’d sat with dying comrades – gasping, choking, disappearing from existence – and he’d never said goodbye. He’d look them in the eye, hold their wild gaze . . . but never a goodbye, too final. Goodbyes were a bloody stupid nonsense for Terence; though sometimes, before his leaving, he and Rosemary would talk in the car, in a clipped manner and with an eye on the time. Perhaps Rosemary would ask him about his army days, which he spoke of as a faraway time, like one still in recovery, trying not to touch the scars.

  ‘The army is the army,’ he said. ‘It captures people, protects people, breaks people and kills people. And that’s just its soldiers.’

  ‘Do you miss it?’

  ‘I don’t miss things as a rule,’ he’d reply. Missing things was dangerous to Terence. It gave them too much value . . . as if anything had any value. ‘One must not imagine anything matters,’ he added.

  It was a bit of a bombshell. The close confines of the car intensified the nihilism.

  ‘Oh, I think some things matter, Terence,’ said Rosemary firmly. ‘Surely some things matter?’ But he sat still and unresponsive, looking out of the window down a dark street of bungalows and their endlessly well-tended gardens. He was feeling as dark as the sky. Was this retirement – endless trips to the garden centre, a relentless trimming of the borders? And retirement could last thirty years . . .

  ‘Well?’ said Rosemary. Stormhaven was quiet at night, quieter than a corpse. ‘What’s life about if nothing matters, Terence?’

  I don’t know, he thought.

  ‘I’ll be getting home,’ he’d say and get out of the car without a further word. Rosemary would watch him walk up the road towards his 1980s bungalow home – one of Stormhaven’s finest, a military man in civvies.

  But that was then and now Rosemary was gone, removed from sight, so no more lifts. The only challenge left for Terence was not to die of boredom.

  Perhaps his flying would keep him alive now Rosemary was gone.

  Sidney stopped filming.

  He put the camera down with care and went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. He moved slowly, not being as young as he once was. ‘You’re not as young as you were, Gramps,’ as his granddaughter Sally told him. ‘You should live in Eastbourne. That’s the mecca for oldies, isn’t it?’

  She wasn’t a sensitive woman, his granddaughter, and he had no affection for her, none at all. Why did he see her? Because she was his granddaughter. Would he see her if she wasn’t his granddaughter? Not in a million years; not in two million. He disliked her. But she dropped in – perhaps she was bored – and liked to see him keep up with his filming. ‘No, I think a hobby’s good for you, Gramps,’ she’d say, in her patronizing way. He hated being called Gramps. And she didn’t know what he filmed; she wasn’t that interested. This was a visit, not a relationship. He could have told her what he filmed, but she never asked. Sidney was interested, though; he’d always been interested in what he filmed.

  He’d been taking photos since the war – or just after the war. He’d been sent to Nuremberg as a young reporter for the trials of the Nazi command. Amazing he’d recovered, really, because they were dark times, heavy with the awful truth. He remembered the bleak souls in black and white print, their Führer dead, the insane bubble burst. Some chose bluster and fight; but Sidney remembered their nervous, distracted looks around the courtroom, as if waiting for their saviour to arrive. Only their saviour was dead: suicide and then incineration. They were on their own in front of the world’s cameras.

  And from then on, Sidney went wherever his editors sent him, whether it was a Caribbean island and Princess Margaret’s love life – ‘involving no love at all,’ as his colleague observed – or the starving in Ethiopia, also lacking love. He’d been there at the beginning of all that: those early scenes that shocked the world. You just recorded what you saw. Others could decide what they thought about it, what to do about it. He didn’t feed the dying, he filmed the dying. And so now he filmed Church Street where he lived, and on rather better equipment than he once held in Nuremberg.

  Though in the end, as editors told him, it was about the story, not the equipment. And the story today, from his bedroom window, was a brothel across the road. A brothel in Stormhaven; he was fairly sure of that. A special sense for scandal had been his stock-in-trade, after all. And this young man in his lens was a frequent visitor to number nine. He’d caught him on film several times, pressing the doorbell – looking around, always looking around, like a nervous war criminal, that’s what brought it all back – and the door opening but no figure in the doorway. The young man just stepped into the darkness and closed the door behind him.

&n
bsp; And there were other men, Sidney had noticed. Men arriving alone, visiting the house in Church Street, lunchtime or late, curtains always closed upstairs, lights on at odd hours. And no greeting at the door; there was never a greeting at the door. He just recorded the scene, he didn’t judge. That was for others.

  And now the rumour around town that the brothel madam had been killed.

  He went out to get a copy of the Sussex Silt. It was a terrible rag, really, but he’d worked for worse, and it did tell a good story. And this one would be right up their grubby street.

  ‘Terence is a soldier,’

  said Martin, warming to his role as the Grand Explainer of Secrets to Tamsin and Peter . . . and the Stormhaven Etiquette Society had a few. ‘And a first-rater,’ he added. ‘I mean, he’s a genuine war hero; one of those who went above and beyond in the battle zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Pulled off some crazy stunts in the desert, apparently – quite unimaginable. And his men loved him – “careless for his own life, careful for the lives of others,” as one of them said rather memorably.’

  Channing had an ear for the memorable quote, and was happy to invent one when necessary.

  ‘Not something anyone will be saying about you, Mr Channing.’

  ‘I think there’ll be more people at my funeral than yours, Detective Inspector . . . just a hunch.’

  ‘I suppose any celebration draws a crowd.’

  Channing laughed loudly. ‘Is this your way of flirting, Tamsin? You’re reminding me of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing! Every put-down to Benedick, every insult – a hidden cry of love, as warily they circle each other!’

  Tamsin’s dismissive sneer was almost that of a teenager. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.

  ‘And Terence?’ asked Peter, wishing to get back on track. His colleague’s digs were needless and disruptive. Tamsin was not in love with Martin, but she was in love with attack and belittlement and this rarely furthered the investigation.