Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time (17 page)

But tonight in the reverend’s home, comforted by the smouldering warmth of his fire, with whisky masking some of the pain and driving its calming influence through my bloodstream, I had permitted myself a brief moment of remembrance and thought again of what I had lost and how much I missed her. By the time I pulled up outside of my digs on Gwyn Street it was after 5 a.m. and I was beat. I walked into the brittle chill of my rooms inside the terraced house, dropped the rucksack with my wet clothing by the door to my bedroom and walked in without turning the light on. I kicked off my sodden brogues and undressed out of the mismatched clothes I been given, leaving them in a heap on the floor, and crawled into a cold bed, lying on my side and pulling the sheet and blankets across my bare shoulders. I closed my eyes and felt the angry sting of fatigue burn into them beneath my heavy lids, then reached out my arm underneath the bedclothes in the futile hope that for once I would find Ellie there again waiting to draw me close into the safe warmth of her body. My palm skimmed the icy material that covered the hard mattress and found nothing. I whispered her name, withdrew my hand and placed it against my chest, and let the release of sleep finally guide me into the darkness towards the shadowy places I only inhabited during my nocturnal respite.

*

It was after 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon by the time I woke and I cursed myself for wasting the better part of a day by sleeping in for as long as I had. I hauled myself out of bed and pulled back the curtains. Outside, the gentle afternoon sun shone and a slow thaw had set to turning the pavement and gutters in the street into a thick, grey slush.

After making myself a black coffee, I let the immersion heater warm up and drew myself a hot bath, had a shave and dressed. My arm was not as bad as I had first thought, Reverend Southerington had been right. The swelling around the puncture holes of the bite had reduced a little, and a heavy blue-yellow bruise was starting to take shape and was about to join the other shades of the many contusions that covered the various parts of my now-battered body.

I sat on one of the rickety dining chairs in my kitchen, thinking and going over in my mind what I’d achieved in the last twenty-four hours. I still knew so little about the disappearance of Stella Hopkins and why she had gone missing in the first place. It seemed I was only any good at scrambling around in the dark and getting nowhere. Somebody out there had the answers; I just needed to find that somebody. And from where I was sitting at the minute, that was turning out to be no mean feat. The St Pauls community was as tight as a drum: either they knew nothing or didn’t want to talk to me. If Stella had been involved with the pimp Papa Anansi and was turning tricks for him then how come none of the local call girls recognised her as being on the game?

The murdered prostitute Jocelyn Charles had seen her at a party, so Stella had been with Papa that night at the shebeen then walked out with a white guy . . . But where had she gone next: to his house or had she gone all the way out to the Blanchard Estate? If so, what was a young black girl, deaf and mute, doing with a bunch of country toffs in the small hours of the morning in the middle of the Somerset countryside? What connected her to the girl I had followed last night? The one new thing that I’d come away with was the name Terrence Blanchard, an apparent mover and shaker in the world of British law, well known and respected in his field. And from the look of his home and the motors parked at the rear of his house, he and his associates were well heeled too.

I’d known men like Blanchard all my life, whether they were running local businesses back home on Barbados or the political affairs of state from the High Commission building in Bridgetown, or my superiors when I was a sergeant on the force. They had one thing in common: power and a deep desire to keep it close to them.

As far as I was concerned they were all cut from the same cloth: they were egotistical and cash motivated with a generally pretty low regard for the black workers who toiled for them. I didn’t trust any of ’em and saw no reason to think Blanchard would be any different, and I’d as yet never even set eyes on him, let alone met the man.

Despite finding out where the girl who got into the car outside of the shebeen last night had been taken, I still had no idea who she was or why she’d been driven all those miles out to that big house. I could have hung around and hoped to have tailed her and the white guys back to Bristol, but I knew I’d have been spotted by the occupiers of the car I’d been following, especially if they were cops. I had been lucky tailing the car to Blanchard’s; now I needed to locate the girl in the car, and quickly. She could tell me what the hell was going on down there, which could possibly lead me to Stella. There was only one person I knew who could point me towards her . . . the bulky paedophilic doorman at the shebeen on Richmond Road: Clarence Maynard.

I also needed Vic. He was sure to know of Maynard’s address and, if not, a man who did or could easily put his feelers out to his contacts on the streets to find it quickly. I certainly didn’t fancy going toe to toe with the bouncer on the street, my business with him needed to be out of the public eye, but none of that mattered for now.

My hardest task at the moment was finding my itinerant cousin on a Sunday. At best he was likely to be still shacked up in the bed of any one of a number of the countless floozies he hung around with or at worst he may be sleeping off a night of hard drinking and weed smoking at one of his many business associates’ joints in either St Pauls, Montpelier or further across town. I decided to take a ride over to Carnell Harris’s house and see if he could point me in the right direction before I started going door to door around the area in search of Vic. If anybody could pinpoint Vic for me quickly, it was sure to be Carnell.

As I pulled up outside of Carnell and Loretta’s basement flat on Brunswick Street I could hear the dull thumping of music outside through the closed windows of the Cortina. By the time I’d gotten outta my car and was walking towards the front door of their home, I had no doubt where the sound of James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” was coming from. I stood and hammered repeatedly at Carnell’s door with my fist in the hope that somebody would hear me inside and come and open up. Finally, after around two or three minutes of continual heavy knocking, Carnell’s wife, Loretta, opened up.

“Hey . . . if it isn’t Joseph Tremaine Ellington hanging on my gate door . . . What you doin’ here, baby?” she shouted at me over James’s frantic wailing.

“Is Carnell in, Loretta?” I shouted back.

“Sure is, honey . . . Step on inside.”

I stamped the wet snow off of my feet on the hessian mat and walked in, kissing Loretta on the cheek as she closed the door behind me. She moved in closer towards me, raising her voice over the heavy volume of the music

“Is that little peck on the cheek the best you got fo’ your old friend, lover boy?”

As she spoke, she ran her fingers teasingly along the inside of my left thigh and groin. I drew my arm around her curvy ass and snatched her closer towards me, taking her by surprise, seeing a look of sudden shock on her face as I did so and smelling the scent of marijuana in her hair and clothes, which would explained the reason for her teasingly cavalier behaviour towards me.

I took her chin in my hand and drew the side of her head towards my lips, gently kissed her ear and spoke into it.

“Now you’re too much woman fo’ me, baby . . . I’ll leave keeping you sweet to that man o’ yours.”

I let go, then winked at her playfully.

“So where is the old fool?” I bellowed over the music.

Loretta straightened her dress, then smiled back and called for me to follow her with the silent curling motion of her index finger down the hall towards where the music was coming from in her living room. She threw open the door and strode in, and I followed. Loretta stood staring across the room at Carnell, who was fast asleep, lying outstretched on the sofa in front of the electric fire, which was knocking out all three bars of heavy heat. The room reeked of the heady whiff of dope and Carnell’s sweaty feet. He lay dead to the world, hands rested on top of his enormous belly, head flopped to one side perched on a red cord cushion, his chin covered in a thin layer of dribble that was leaking from his partially opened mouth, from which his slightly bucked, yellowing teeth protruded.

Loretta walked over to the record player and turned the volume right down until James Brown was only a murmur in the room and the sound of her husband’s heavy snoring was the major noise to be heard. She stood over her sleeping man, hands on her hips, head shaking disapprovingly from side to side before deciding to announce my arrival to him.

“Carnell, git your fat ass up offa that sofa, you lazy muthafucka . . . You gots somebody here wants to see you.”

Carnell shot bolt upright on the sofa, rubbing his sweaty face and scalp frantically with his big hands, confused and sleepy.

“Loretta, honeybunch, what the hell you doin’ scaring me like that? I nearly gone and messed myself, you shouting so loud down at me.”

“Mess yo’self . . . You could lie in your own shit fo’ a month and not wake up unless you needed to stuff that big ole face o’ yours!”

Carnell, still rubbing his eyes, peered across the room towards where I was standing, his face breaking out into a big smile once he recognised me.

“JT . . . Hey, it’s real good to see you. How’s everyting going, brother?”

“Everyting’s cool, Carnell . . . Yo’self?”

Carnell didn’t get the chance to reply to me, with Loretta quickly answering for him.

“That idle bastard’s always good. He gits t’ree square meals a day and my pussy to pound . . . He ain’t got no reason to complain, that’s straight.”

“Honeybunch, you know how grateful I a—”

Loretta cut her sluggish husband off in mid sentence.

“Don’t you honeybunch me, and never mind how grateful you think you are, mister. You need to haul all that blubber you got stored round your gut off that foam-covered bench once in a while and help me out. Shit . . . that settee got an imprint o’ your fat ass so big on it that I couldn’t knock the damn ting out with the back end of a grave digger’s spade!”

Loretta turned away from Carnell and faced me, all sweetness and light on her face, and smiled. I laughed under my breath at her bad-tempered berating, then sniffed enthusiastically.

“Loretta . . . What’s cooking, girl? Whatever you got going on back there smells so fine.”

“We having ourselves some brown down chicken and rice . . . You wanna stop and eat with us, honey? You most welcome to.”

“Yeah, JT, do you wanna stop and . . .”

Again, Loretta viciously interrupted Carnell before he could finish what he was saying to me.

“Shut your shit, Carnell . . . I’m doin’ the cooking and I’ll be doin’ the inviting. You keep your big fuckin’ nose out of it.”

“Loretta girl, I ain’t refusing your cooking, baby . . . but I’ll only stop if you got enough to go round. I don’t wanna deprive Carnell of his evening meal. That boy, he needs to be keeping his strength up to be taking you on.”

“Keep his strength up . . . that fat fucker been chewing down on my food all weekend. It’ll do him good to share it around a little.”

She laughed at her slothful spouse, then leant forward and kissed him gently on his balding head while rubbing the edge of his perspiring temple with the back of her hand and whispering to him.

“I’ll go set the table fo’ our friend, honey . . . Dinner be ready in ten minutes.”

The smile on Carnell’s face was a picture of contented happiness as his wife walked out of the room, leaving us alone together, and in that brief moment I envied the love that they shared. And somewhere in my own carefully locked-away memories, the similar feelings I had once known with Ellie returned to my recall and would haunt the remainder of my waking day.

We sat and ate at the kitchen table, and my belly ached after consuming three bowlfuls of Loretta’s wonderful brown down chicken, a rich, spicy stew that reminded me of my late mama’s fine cooking. During the meal Carnell and I each drank Guinness stout from bottles, and by the time I’d finished eating my stomach was bloated up like a farmyard hog’s. Carnell raised his big bulk off of his chair, the end crust of the loaf of bread in his hand, and peered into the duchy cooking pot that stood in the centre of the table. Loretta sat and watched her man with a beady eye, her arms folded across her shapely breasts, as her ever-hungry man checked for any leftovers before snapping her disapproval at him, making him jump back into his seat.

“What the hell you staring down into that bowl fo’, Carnell, damn it. Ain’t your guts ever filled?”

“I was just gonna mop out the gravy with this piece o’ bread, Loretta honey.”

“Mop it out . . . If you try and wipe anyting else outta that pan I’m gonna pick it off the table and crack the fuckin’ ting across your big, fat, greedy head. And if you think I’m doing those damn dishes sat in front o’ you then you stupider than you look!”

“Ain’t no need to be speaking to me like that, Loretta, with JT here; you know I’ll sort the dishes and tidy round.”

Carnell tried to placate his wife with his best patter, stroking the back of her hand with his stubby fingers. She quickly snatched it away from him, leaving Carnell to tap the table playfully. He was fooling nobody, least of all Loretta.

“Carnell, I know you too well where you and washing dishes is concerned. You told me the other night you’d scrub that old copper pot I use to braise plantain in. Fuckin’ ting still sat in the sink fo’ four days and I had to chip all that shit outta it with a chisel, took me near on a half-hour to git it clean. Now I’m gonna take my VP sherry wine, put my feet up fo’ a change and paint my nails while you see to that lot.” Loretta pointed at the dirty plates with an outstretched finger. “JT, just you make sure he starts on those pots befo’ my ass hits that armchair out there, you hear me?”

“Oh, you got it, Loretta . . . Carnell here’s gonna be scrubbing them plates and pans and have this kitchen clean as a new pin in the hour. I give you my word.”