Secret Story (27 page)

The policewoman’s face grew more officially stern. “I asked what you’re all doing here.”

“Research,” said Mr Killogram.

“For what?”

“A film. As he said, he’s Dudley Smith, our writer. You’re going to be basing your script on real murders, aren’t you, Dudley? It’ll just be the man who commits them that’s out of your head.”

Dudley was starting to regret Mr Killogram’s enthusiasm. “It’s not like that. The murders will be too.”

“That’s not how I understood it. Sorry if I’m talking out of turn.”

Had Dudley disappointed him in some way? The policewoman gave Dudley no chance to ponder. “If it’s fiction you’ve no reason to be here,” she said.

“We want to make it as real as we can,” said Vincent.

She treated him to an unimpressed stare that she then dared to transfer to Dudley. “How real are you kidding yourselves that can be?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“If you ever saw the real thing you wouldn’t want to make your kind of film about it. We’ve heard about you and this film. I’m going to have to ask all of you to move on.”

“You can’t do that. Tell us what we’ve done that’s against the law.”

“Obstructing the police if you carry on. We need this area to pull cars over.”

Though he was sure the policewoman had concocted the excuse to oust him, he had no reason to linger; the reconstruction had simply put the original girl back in his head. “I’m going, but only because it’s my choice to.”

He would have liked to watch the policewoman try to make that into an offence, but Vincent was calling him. “Let’s have a word.”

He was strolling away from the police and the mechanically pacing actress. As Dudley and the others caught up with him, the scene began to replay itself in Dudley’s mind: the girl flailing the air with her legs as she vanished over the rail, the frustrating moment as he’d straightened up too late to watch her fall, the soft flat thud that had made him expect to see her body spread wide and enormous. “I’d be working if I wasn’t here,” he protested.

“Sorry if you feel you didn’t have to come.” Vincent reached to push his glasses high but instead gazed over them as if this might render his comments more amiable. “I’d like to start filming next week,” he said.

“I don’t know if I’ll have enough for you by then.”

“Let’s be honest, I’m pretty happy with my script.”

“You need me to get it right. You said so.”

“I wouldn’t have put it like that.” Vincent seemed in danger of forgetting how important Dudley was. “Walt’s anxious for us to get started as well,” he said. “He doesn’t want any more people
trying to stop the film. Better keep the controversy for after it’s released, he says.”

“Can’t you stand being misunderstood?”

“You’ve given us nothing to understand yet.” Rather more gently Vincent said “Walt did point out your contract doesn’t give you a say in the film, but I’d at least like you to tag along so I can ask your advice if I need to.”

“I’d like you there as well,” Mr Killogram said.

The repetitions of the girl’s fall reverberated like drumbeats in Dudley’s skull, pounding his thoughts into less than words. “I’ve got the weekend to come up with something,” he managed not quite to plead.

“If you have any ideas you can always email them.” Vincent seemed more at ease with saying “My car’s five minutes along here if anybody wants a lift.”

“Mine’s up there too,” said Mr Killogram.

Dudley would have liked to spend time with him, but just now it was crucial to stay with his source of inspiration. “Don’t get yourselves tangled up in the rush hour,” she said. “I don’t mind walking.”

“I don’t either,” Dudley said at once.

He was just as quick to turn his back on the men. If they thought he intended to do whatever they would have done with Patricia, that was another reason why they could never imagine the truth, but he didn’t want her glimpsing any winks they sent him. In a few seconds they were out of earshot, and the policewoman had rejoined her colleagues. Not even the actress was watching him. “Patricia?” he said.

“Are you upset?” She halted by the police cars and blinked at him. “You’re upset,” she said.

“Don’t you think I should be? He’s mine. I thought of everything about him.”

“Nobody’s trying to steal him from you. You heard Vincent, he’d still like you to be involved.”

Dudley had to risk seeming inadequate; nobody else would know he had. “I’ve got no ideas for him.”

“He’s given you the weekend. Maybe you’ll have some by then.”

“I will if you help.”

Patricia raised the eyebrow that was closer to him. “What are you asking?”

Below the rail behind her a car sounded its horn like a warning or a fanfare. She was almost close enough to the wall to be thrown over it if the police hadn’t been there, but in any case he wasn’t about to repeat himself—quite the opposite. “I want you to help me research,” he said.

“Research,” Patricia repeated and saw a frown twitch Dudley’s eyes to indicate the police behind him. He mustn’t want to antagonise them further. “Let’s talk about it,” she said and started past the marked cars.

He overtook her at once. She had to hurry to keep up with him alongside the slope planted with saplings and littered grass. He didn’t slow until they were beside the university and well out of sight of the police. “What did you have in mind?” she said.

“Explore a bit and then we could have dinner if you like.”

“Explore where?”

“Just walk and see if anywhere gives us ideas.” Somewhat less impatiently he said “I want you to say if you get any. You don’t know how helpful you could be.”

“I don’t think I’m very likely to have your kind of idea.”

“You never know what’ll happen. You could inspire me.” Before she had time to demur he said “I wouldn’t be having so much trouble thinking of ideas now if you’d published the story you said you would.”

That was scarcely her fault, but by aiding him she would be helping the magazine. “Why don’t we walk along to James Street and then we’ll see,” she said.

They had reached the six-way racetrack of an intersection. Several hundred yards away, traffic lights were releasing the competitors for the nearest lanes. Patricia made to outstrip them, but Dudley caught her arm. “Not yet,” he blurted and let go at once.

She dealt with the intersection when it was safer and used the crossing by the museum. Above the Kingsway Tunnel, which was swallowing cars with the left side of its mouth and regurgitating as many with the other, Dale Street led towards the river. The sandwich shops on the ground floors of office buildings tall as houses piled on houses were shut now, and the traffic in the one-way street was slackening. Since the setting appeared not to enliven Dudley, she said “Can I talk?”

“Don’t let me stop you if you’ve anything to say.”

“I wondered why you took a dislike to that girl back there.”

“Didn’t you? She was trying to make it harder for us.”

“Not the policewoman, the girl in the reconstruction.”

“She wasn’t in much.”

“What more would you have expected her to do? Or are you criticising how she was dressed?”

“It’s no wonder someone threw her over when she looked like that, is it?”

“I’m sorry, no, actually I’m not, but I find that offensive.” This earned Patricia such a blank stare that she had to ask “Am I missing the point? Are you trying to be your character?”

“I don’t need to try.” He stared up one of the alleys that squeezed between or, in this case, through the buildings. Five
secretaries were chattering and clattering along it to a pub that had grown drunken with age. “No use,” he said.

“I won’t talk if it stops you concentrating.”

“Don’t worry. It’ll help.”

“You go into your role when you work on a story, is that it?”

“That’s me.” As though to demonstrate he said “You saw that girl. That’s not how they described her in the paper.”

“So what are you objecting to?”

“They always make out like whoever gets killed is a terrible loss to the world, this person that’s so good and so important they’re better than anyone could ever be, well, almost anyone. It isn’t fair.”

Patricia thought he was trying rather too hard to convince her as his character. “People want to think as well of them as they can when they’re the victims. Or do you think the killers are somehow?”

“I don’t know any killer that’s a victim.”

They had reached the Town Hall on the brow of a hill, beyond which the rest of the business district sloped down to the dock road and the Pier Head. She was turning towards James Street when the sight of the river set off a thought. “Have you ever used the ferry?”

“Not since my dad took me on it,” he said, and then his eyes glinted. “I see what you mean. That could work, couldn’t it? Only if you come on it with me.”

She could catch the train on the far side of the river. “All right, let’s try and make sure you’ve got a story,” she said and started downhill.

All six lanes of the dock road were still racing. The sketch of a man as red as a wound healed at last, and she dashed across into a huge distorted shadow, the silhouette of one of the metal birds on top of the Liver Building. She didn’t know what kind of bird the shadow reminded her of. She could almost have imagined
Dudley’s were its footfalls as she hurried past the lengthy grey eight-storey façade and across the flagstoned open space to the ticket office above the river.

A boxed-in ramp flattened their footsteps thin while a ferry bumped the tyres at the edge of the landing-stage and a man in a luminous orange tunic tossed a rope to another. A further member of the gang rode a gangplank on its chains until it struck the deck to let the passengers board: Patricia, Dudley, a helmeted cyclist who lingered on the lowest deck. An enclosed staircase climbed to a section of open deck beside a deserted saloon. Patricia was making for one of the pairs of wooden benches that occupied the deck, their backs pinched together, when Dudley said “There’s a diagram.”

He was gazing at a picture inside the saloon. It showed the workings of the boat, displaying a side view of the innards above an overhead illustration of each of the three decks. It reminded Patricia of the instructions for a boy’s model kit, but she suspected it meant something else to Dudley. “What are you thinking?” she said.

“What are you?”

“Someone could fall overboard, I suppose.”

“Drowning’s not that interesting.”

She couldn’t help being annoyed by the remark. “You couldn’t get caught up in the propellers,” she found she was actually disappointed to observe. “They’re underneath. If you fell off the stern you’d end up in the wake.”

“What about if you fell over the side?”

“I suppose you might be dragged under.”

The gangplank rose with a rattle of its chains, and a metal barrier rumbled into place on the bottom deck. “Let’s see what we can see,” Dudley said.

As they made for the rail beside the stern the ferry swung towards the peninsula. Having lined up parallel with it, the boat
began to cruise along the middle of the river past Birkenhead to Seacombe. Patricia gripped the rail and craned over a lifebelt attached to the outside. Fluid tubes of neon streamed past the weathered flank of the boat to merge with the churning wake. “What can you see?” Dudley was anxious to learn.

“Nothing you can’t, I should think.”

“Can you make out the propeller at all? Anything to do with it, even?”

“Such as what?”

“I don’t know. You’re better placed than me. It was your idea.”

Patricia stood on tiptoe and leaned over. All at once her foothold felt unsteady with the muted throbbing of the engine through the deck. The neon ripples were trying to snag her vision and bear it away. The lifebelt shifted under her fingers as if she was losing her grip on the rail. Perhaps all this was why she fancied Dudley was about to seize her by the shoulders; he was no longer beside her. Why should he expect her to strain like this for him? He was taller than she was—most people were. She lurched backwards and aside before she turned, one hand clutching the rail. “I still can’t see anything,” she said. “You look if you like.”

His fingers were covering his mouth in a shape suggesting prayer. He seemed to be having difficulty in keeping his feet still, as if the sensations of the engine were troubling them. He darted to the rail and leaned over more precariously than she had. Was this meant to demonstrate her lack of daring? Far more quickly than she had, he stepped back. “I can’t either. I’ll need to bring Vincent, anyway.”

“That’s a point. Would he be able to film that kind of scene here?”

“He’ll have to. It’s his job.”

As the ferry veered towards Seacombe, Patricia caught sight of a pub half a mile along the promenade. For longer than she
was proud of she didn’t know why the Egremont Ferry sounded familiar. “Isn’t that where Shell . . .”

“Where she what? You can say it. It’s not going to bother me.”

“All the same, I wish I hadn’t gone on about falling overboard just now.”

“She only drowned. Your idea’s better.”

Patricia didn’t care much for the praise. She watched the cyclist disembark at Seacombe, where nobody boarded. When the ferry set off for Birkenhead she was unable to stifle a question. “What do you mean, better?”

“More interesting. More spectacular.”

“What kind of spectacle are you thinking of? A girl’s body being shredded under there? Her bones being ground up and splintered and broken? All her blood?”

“That sounds good.”

Her attempt to shock him had merely succeeded in making Patricia feel uneasy about her own depths. At least she’d silenced him. He’d said nothing more by the time they disembarked at Woodside and tramped up the ramp. He hurried past a gathering of dormant buses to Hamilton Square, and she wondered if an idea was driving him.

The chatter of two girls who followed them into the station’s capacious lift appeared to distract him. She rather hoped he would recapture his idea, since it seemed to have chased the notion of dining with her out of his mind. He didn’t meet her eyes until he’d sat opposite her in an otherwise empty carriage, and he looked so preoccupied that she was inclined to leave him alone wherever he was. Then he stretched his upturned hands towards her as though indicating her to somebody unseen. “Let me know when anything develops if you like,” she said. “If my phone’s switched off you can always leave a message.”