A Murder in Mayfair (27 page)

“Yes, I did. Very good parents.”

“It's not fair. You don't know what it's like. The nagging and the shouting and the—the
scorn!
Them wishing you'd never been born, wishing they'd never taken you on.”

“No, I don't know what it's like, Tony.”

His mood changed. He smiled hesitantly.

“I like you calling me Tony. Not like her calling me Pits. ‘Give me your chips, Pits,' she would say. ‘Food's wasted on a lump of idiocy like you.' She was horrible. . . . I'd been quite happy there till she came.”

There was definitely something there I was failing to understand. I decided I needed to go at things obliquely.

“Tell me about your home life when you were growing up. It's difficult for me to imagine, coming from a good home.”

He struggled with his memories, and also I think with an undercurrent of resentment at our different fates that went against his basically gentle disposition. In the end he could only come up with his former protest:

“It's not fair! She shouldn't have given me to people like that!”

“No, she shouldn't,” I said, and waited.

“He was as bad as her, or worse. Day in, day out they were screaming at each other, or sniping, or really fighting. They enjoyed it, you see.”

“I expect you're right.”

“Of course they did, or they wouldn't have stayed together,” he said, with a child's logic that nevertheless rang true. “They enjoyed it, and they enjoyed having me there, to use as a weapon, or so they could turn on me together. They always said I was stupid, but I understood.”

“Children always do, I think.”

“
I
did,” he said, with an odd sort of pride. “They often talked about putting me into care. Often I wished they would. It couldn't have been worse than living with them. Care could have been
nice.
It got worse when
he
died. I thought it might be better, but it wasn't. She didn't have him to scream and shout at anymore, only me. After a few weeks I couldn't take it anymore, all the shouting, the frustration, the drink. I got out.”

“Did you manage to get a job?”

“A job? No, I've never had a job. Who'd employ someone like me? I never had any friends who might get me one. And it was just when unemployment was beginning. . . . Sometimes I had a room to myself.”

His eyes lit up briefly. I couldn't doubt for a moment how much he had needed a haven.

“That must have been nice. Peaceful,” I said.

“It was. Peaceful—that's the word. That was in places where they'd accept people on Social Security. But there weren't many of those. In between I slept rough, went to one of the hostels, begged a bit. It wasn't so bad. You get friends when you're sleeping rough. People get to know you, get used to having you around, help you. . . . But you sort of lose control. Of yourself. You don't care anymore. You get involved in things. . . .”

The picture was beginning to take shape in my mind.

“Was this when you were sent to the place where you were happy at first?” I asked gently.

“Sort of.” He thought. Retrieving that part of his past was obviously a problem. “There was a big fight—half the dossers under the bridge against the other half. I wasn't involved! I was frightened! But the police took me in with a lot of others, and then someone went into my history, contacted
her,
and then I was sent to this place. And it was good. I felt secure—you know? You know how that feels, don't you? Like nothing bad could happen to me.”

The very way he said it showed it had been an illusion.

“But it did.”

“Yes, it did. She came.”

“The one who called you the Pits?”

“Yes. My mother.” He looked at me and I saw naked, unashamed fear in his eyes. “Our mother,” he said distinctly.

Slowly the face crumpled, and he began crying, his whole body shivering. I sat with him on the bare bed and put my arms around his shoulders, hugging him to me.

It took time after that, and closeness, and encouragement, before he began to recover himself, and more time still before he could begin to talk about it. “You need to know,” he said. So gradually the details came out. When his mother had come in and had found out his name—he was calling himself Tony Gryce then—she had immediately been interested. When she had begun probing, asking about his background and his parents, she had gradually realized who he was.

“I'm your mother!” she had suddenly announced one day. “I'm the one who gave you away. And you're the sod who ruined my life.”

When he had said that Tony looked up at me, his mouth screwed up as if he was about to cry.

“And then it started up all over again,” he said.

“What did?”

“The picking on me. The scorn. Just like
her.
It was like she had it in for me—though it was
her
who gave
me
away. She kept saying I ruined her life. She'd expected to marry our father, but he disappeared, and after we were born—I don't know, she never really told me, but things must have gone all right for a time, because she often said, ‘When I had my own business,' so it couldn't really have been us who ruined her life, could it?”

“No, it couldn't.”

“But she thought so. Thinks so. The story's never quite the same, nor the story of why she got sent there, but it's never her fault. While we were in there together she made me her slave. ‘You owe me that,' she kept saying. She liked humiliating me, liked making me do . . . really nasty things for her. Everyone was too busy to notice for a long time. It got so bad, so unbearable, that I—”

“Tell me. Then we can forget it.”

“I tried to—you know—do away with myself.” Something in my face must have suggested I didn't take his suicide attempt seriously, because his voice took on a tone of protest. “I did try, really, not for show. But they didn't allow us any of the things I could have done it with properly. So they found out about what she was doing and separated us, and after a time they decided I'd be better off outside. They had medicines, drugs, that they said could control what was wrong with me. They found me a room with some others—others like me, and they said I would have a social worker I could go to, and I had to go to hospital regularly to make sure I was taking the drugs. It was all right for a time.”

“What happened to make it go wrong?”

He frowned, trying to remember.

“They sort of lost interest. I don't think they had the time,
and they had worse cases than me. The place I was in broke up. Then I was back on the streets, odd nights in hostels . . .”

“And that was when she found you again, I suppose?” I hazarded.

“Yes. It wasn't difficult. We'd talked in there, and she knew the sort of places I'd go to.”

“I don't quite understand,” I said, “why she would want to make contact again, if she said you—we—had ruined her life.”

He shook his head in a shared bewilderment, as if at some fathomless wickedness.

“She liked having a slave, someone to scream at, abuse. She
enjoys
it! And then after a time . . . she started talking about you. She was obsessed with you.”

“When was this?”

“Earlier this year. I think she'd lost interest in me, got all the fun she could think of out of me, and I often got away from her. But eventually she'd find me again, and she'd go on about you. It was when the election was on, and she'd pick newspapers out of the bins and read all about it, and it used to drive her mad. She'd go on about how you'd got it made, you were going to the top, you'd ruined her life, and wasn't I jealous that you should have everything so good when I had nothing. I felt sure she wanted to use me against you. She's
mad,
you know. Not like me, confused. But
mad.
And dangerous.”

“I think you're right.”

“She said you were away fighting the election. I knew you were an MP—she'd gone on about that often enough. I think our father was a politician sometime long ago. She said when you came back she was going to start having fun. She and I, she said. She'd begun to be interested in me again.”

“Did she know where I lived?”

He looked at me.

“You don't know?”

“Know what?”

“She lives there, too.”

 • • • 

Suddenly several things became clear. She knew my habits because she had had every opportunity to observe them.

“She badgered them in the housing department,” Tony said. “She was released into the community like me, and she was living in a hostel. But she went on and on, back and forth to their offices. There was a man there, someone in charge, that she said she'd got something on. Something in his past. Finally they gave her a tiny flat in your block. It's the floor above you. And the flat immediately above you is vacant, and she can get in—she can get in anywhere, it's like magic—and she listens to you. She can't hear what you say or anything, but she listens to the music you're playing, knows when you're in, and follows you when you go out. She's been in your flat, too.”

“I know. But she can't any longer.”

“Yes, she swears about that. But she still listens from the flat above. She laughs and chuckles about what she's doing to you. And she uses me. She talks about ‘our' plans, and how you've got it coming to you from ‘us.' That's why I'm frightened. That's why I've been trying to talk to you. But you're an important man and I didn't know if you'd listen, and she
scares
me so, and in the end I've tried to get up courage but—”

“So when you've been watching outside the Department or my flat, when you've followed me, you've really been wanting to talk to me, to warn me.”

His expression became beseeching and earnest.

“Yes! Plucking up the courage. I don't talk to people easily, you see. If someone talks to me first it's all right, but to go up to someone I don't know and start talking to them . . .” He shook his head sadly. “And I did want to warn you. I wanted to like you because you're my brother, someone I never knew I had, my
twin, but I didn't see how you could like—someone like me. Most of all I wanted to warn you about
her.”

“What would you have said if I'd come over in the park and talked to you?”

“I don't know.” He looked down, shamefaced. “Maybe I'd have run away. Like I did when I saw you in that shop. But if I'd stayed I would have said that our mother is mad and is trying to kill you. I'd have said she's spinning it out because she enjoys it so much, and wants to—to savor it. She loves power, you see, and new experiences. She says she's a connoisseur of sensations, but I don't really understand what she means. ‘I like trying out new thrills,' she said to me the other day. I'm afraid she's planning to kill you, as something new, and doing it slowly. Or—”

“Or what?”

He thought, seeming to cringe slightly.

“It was after I watched you in the park. It was last week or maybe the week before. Time doesn't mean much to me. She'd forced me to be with her, and we were watching your flat from a distance. She said on a Sunday you often walked along Millbank to your office, or one of the galleries. She'd watched you, you see, for months.”

“She was right. I do.”

“And when you came out of the flats we ran on ahead to that building site and stood on the scaffolding—just round the corner from your path, out of sight of you coming down the road. And then she put the brick that she'd left there in my hand, and said I had to throw it. She wanted it to hit you on the body, but not on the head. I was terrified. How could I be sure not to hit your head and kill you? I didn't want to hurt you at all.”

“So you threw it well before I got there, to be sure.”

“Yes. There was nothing she could do—we both had to run
for it as soon as I'd thrown it, and I got away from her. But she was livid, and she's made me pay since. And I'm afraid—”

“Yes.”

“I'm afraid she's going to make me do the killing.”

 • • • 

When I'd said what I could to comfort and reassure him, I slipped out into the passageway where DS Porter had been listening. We agreed that his story was convincing, that it hung together, and that there was in any case nothing to charge him with even if we'd wanted to. But what to do with him was a problem.

“We can't just turn him out on the streets,” I said.

“It's the only home he has,” Porter pointed out.

“I've suddenly found a brother, and I'm not leaving him with the dossers, or having her make him her instrument against me. It would be a lot easier if you'd taken her in.”

“We'll get on to that now. Do you know her name?”

“Her name, her birth name, is Lucy Mariotti. I don't think she's ever been married, but I can't be sure. And I wouldn't think that her birth name is the name she goes by. I know that at some stage she went by the name of Mrs. Labelle, but that was at a time when she was running a high-class knocking shop with all tastes catered for. I rather think she'll have put that persona behind her.” I poked my head back around the door. “What name does our mother go by these days?” I asked the man I had to try to think of as Tony.

He looked up at me eagerly.

“Mrs. Flanders. Didn't you know?”

I raised my eyebrows.

“We've never met.” I turned back to Porter. “Right. Mrs. Flanders, on the fourth floor of Ruskin Terrace, Fairwater Flats. Let's get that under way while I think about Tony.”

It was quickly done. Two cars went round, but there was nobody in the flat. A neighbor who kept a weather eye through her spy-hole on comings and goings said she'd gone out that afternoon and hadn't come back. That left the problem of Tony still acute. Only one solution occurred to me. When we took him back to the custody sergeant to get him discharged, I said: