Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time (30 page)

“Like I said to you in that interview room yesterday . . . I took a chance on asking a beautiful lady fo’ a date. I left my particulars with her. She never rang, wrote or stood on my front doorstep to take me up on the offer. I never saw her again after I walked outta that public house and I never took her life.”

I stared up into inspector’s eyes, my glare hard, filming over with tears.

“What my police file says and everyting else you just said ’bout my past is the truth, except fo’ one ting.”

“Yeah . . . and what’s that, Joseph?” Fletcher asked. The uncertainty in his voice crackled as he waited for my reply.

“I once pulled my service revolver and used it in my defence. I shot and killed a young kid who was attempting to rob the takings out of a cash register in a liquor store. He was no more than seventeen years old and was high on dope and booze; he had a knife to the shopkeeper’s throat and I knew he was going to cut him up. I blew a hole in that kid’s face the size of a cricket ball. I regretted having to fire my pistol then and I still do to this day.”

I looked back down at the floor and bit at a hangnail on my thumb. The same feeling of emptiness now gnawed at my gut in exactly the same way that it had on the night I’d taken another human being’s life. I heard the cell door open as the laces from my shoes and the belt from my trousers fell at my feet.

“I’m going to be keeping a real keen eye on you, Joseph Ellington . . . Now get the hell out of here.”

When I looked up, the scar-faced detective was gone. I sat staring out of the opened door as I listened to the studs on Fletcher’s soles clip down the corridor and was about to call out “thanks, man”, but my lips would not open nor my tongue form the words to speak. Did I really want to offer up my gratitude to a man who had just taken the darkest moments from my past and spilled them out in front of me so that their cruel memory could inhabit my sentient and leaden soul? I picked up the meagre belongings that my earnest inquisitor had just thrown down in front of me, got up off of the solid bench and followed after his footsteps, leaving my unwanted and haunting reminiscences in the bleak cell behind me.

*

It was after two in the afternoon by the time I was finally released and I walked out of the main doors of Bridewell police station. A heavy fog had dropped outside, making it difficult to see more than six feet in front of me. I walked down the granite-flagged steps into the smog, which smelt of gasoline fumes and chimney smoke, and inhaled the first kind of fresh air I had breathed in over twenty-four hours. I didn’t care about the filthy pollution I was drawing into my lungs, I was just grateful to be out of the clutches of the police.

I rubbed at my face with the flat of my hands in a desperate attempt to shake off the fatigue as the harsh chill of the winter’s day blew right through my cotton shirt and trousers to the goose-pimpled skin of my upper body and legs. The burning-cold gusts nipped at my sockless feet and I began to shiver from head to toe.

“Vic said you’d be needing this; that boy was sure right.”

The familiar, lyrical voice of my uncle Gabe emanated from the murkiness before his physical presence became visible to me. He slowly walked towards me through the pea-souper; his left arm was outstretched and in his hand he held the old navy-blue duffle coat that the kindly reverend had given to me.

“He said someting ’bout you saying to him that it was lucky. Shit, brother, from the look o’ this old cagoule it don’t look like it can offer you much good fortune. Maybe you shoulda been wearing it in bed yesterday morning, then the police might not a’ been beating in on that gate door o’ yours wanting to sling your ass in the slammer.”

He laughed as he hooked the battered old coat over my shoulders, drawing me towards him in a protective hug.

“Come on, let’s git you back to your aunt Pearl, git some of her chicken and rice and peas inside your belly. I got Carnell Harris round the corner in that flash jalopy he’s gone and lent you, he’ll git us home real quick. That man, he ain’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he cares ’bout you and he’s been worrying his guts since he found out you’d been lifted yesterday. Friends like that are hard to come by, Joseph, real hard to come by.”

We walked together in the heavy, impure mist. The profound gratitude I felt inside at that moment for those who so clearly cared for me was truly indescribable.

Exhausted and cold, I sat on the back seat of the Cortina trying to stay awake. The only thing that kept me from nodding off on the short journey back to my aunt Pearl and uncle Gabe’s place was Carnell’s bad driving. In less than two miles he’d managed to find every pothole in the road so that each time I closed my eyes and surrendered to my desperate need to sleep, my weary head would either crack against the window or be thrown back and forth as we hit another rut in the tarmac.

“Damn it, Carnell, you ain’t motoring down no dirt-track road. Who the hell taught you to drive a car, boy, your blind grandmama?” Gabe snapped at our hapless but well-meaning chauffeur, who was by now gripping at the steering wheel of the Ford for dear life. His body was rooted to the edge of his seat as he nervously peered forward through the windscreen out into the dense murkiness of the smog. Carnell glanced across at Gabe in the passenger seat, my uncle’s face raw with irritability.

“Sorry, Gabe . . . You know how I hate having to drive in this shitty weather. Gits me all worked up, and this fog’s sure making it hard to git a handle of where I’m headin’.”

“Just keep your stupid, squinty eyes on the damn road befo’ you run this heap into the side of a wall and git the t’ree of us killed, you fool!”

Gabe frantically rubbed at his balding scalp and shook his head slowly, mouthing further insulting obscenities to Carnell before swinging around to brusquely speak to me.

“You been kicking up a shit storm from the look o’ tings. Vic says to tell you that he’s got Leroy Granger, the joiner on Gatton Road, to go see to those busted doors back at your place; he’s putting you a couple o’ new locks on and all. Your aunt Pearl, she’s already been round to your place with Loretta and cleaned up what the police t’rew about while they was pulling your digs to bits. You really gone and upset somebody with your busybodying, boy. Time you thought ’bout a different kinda work, Joseph.”

It was the second time in less than twenty-four hours I’d been told that my prying was making me enemies. It was sounding like old news to me and I switched off from any further exchange with my elderly relation by not making further eye contact with him, instead looking out of the side window into the mist-filled street as we drove back into St Pauls.

Gabe turned back to face Carnell and disapprovingly shook his head at him again before removing his ill-tempered gaze from my good friend and staring down at his feet in the foot well of the car, the awkward silence a cruel companion until we pulled up outside my relatives’ house on Banner Road.

The first thing that hit me when I walked through the front door and into the hall of my aging kin’s home was the delicious smell of the pepperpot beef stew that was cooking on the range in the kitchen. I took off the old duffle coat and hooked the hood over the wooden ball of the banister post at the foot of the stairs and followed the warming aromas through to the scullery. Aunt Pearl was standing in the centre of the room, topping up an ancient tin bathtub, carefully pouring scalding-hot water from a brass kettle that she had already half-filled. A pile of fresh, clean towels sat on top of a kitchen dining chair next to it with an amber bar of Wright’s coal tar soap sitting squarely in the centre of the fluffy bath sheets. She looked up at me and smiled before decanting the remainder of the boiling liquid into the bath, then turned to the sink to refill the kettle and sat it back onto the waiting blazing gas flame on the hob of the stove.

“I thought you’d be needing to git yo’self scrubbed up after spending a night in that pokey the police been holding you in. Joseph, take those filthy rags of yo’ back and I’ll see they git washed. I brought you back some of your tings to wear. I ironed ’em up and they hanging on the back o’ that door fo’ you.”

She pointed past me to where my freshly pressed clothes were hung with her long, time-worn finger before setting her knowing eyes on her husband and Carnell, who stood close by at the entrance to the cramped kitchen door.

“That pepperpot cook-up sure does smell fine, Mrs Pearl!” Carnell piped up hungrily from behind me.

“Oh, I know it does. You ain’t never gonna change, are you, boy? Food and cards only tings that stupid head o’ yours has ever been interested in. I don’t know why Loretta puts up with your gluttonous and gambling ways; she must be witless! Yo’ know, I could hear those guts o’ yours rumbling after that chow I got bubbling away on that oven no soon as yo’ came strolling t’ru my front gate door.”

She laughed to herself as she lifted the kettle off the hob again and tipped it into the bathtub, then came over to me and gently kissed me on the forehead before leaving the room and turning her attention again to the audience at her kitchen door.

“Now you two let this man git himself cleaned up; then we can all sit and eat.”

“Lord have mercy!” I heard Carnell call out with ravenous joy, and he clapped his hands together as he and my uncle Gabe followed Pearl back down the hallway towards the sitting room. “Hey, Gabe, you wouldn’t happen to have a bottle o’ stout hanging round that we could open up, celebrate old JT’s return to the fold?”

The three of them broke out laughing as I closed the door behind me and began to undress, the warmth of their continuing laughter from the other room a welcome respite from the twenty-four hours of misery that I’d just endured.

I didn’t mess around getting myself clean. After I’d scrubbed off the stink of the police cell from my skin, I quickly dressed and called Carnell to come and give me a hand to lift the heavy tin bath filled with my grimy water and suds. He joined me in the kitchen, took a hold of one of the looped handles at the edge of the bath, and we carried it outside, then threw the mucky bathwater into the yard. I took the old metal tub back into the outhouse, where it was normally kept, and hung it on a large nail that was hammered into the red-brick wall. When I came out, Carnell was still standing at the kitchen door looking at me with a witless smile on his fat face, which usually meant that he was about to say something stupid. I was freezing standing out in Gabe’s tiny garden and couldn’t be bothered to wait for one of my friend’s senseless observations, so I cut to the chase.

“What the hell are you smiling fo’, Carnell . . . You won yourself some cash at the dog track today or someting?”

Carnell laughed out loud at me before answering, his voice soft and reflective.

“You gotta be kidding, no such luck, brother . . . I just got to thinking how pleased I am that you’re OK. Say, you free to meet me later in the Star and Garter, say around nine o’clock? I got someting I need to talk to you about, it’s . . .” He paused for a moment, thinking to himself before finishing what he was about to say to me. “It’s kinda important, JT.”

The inane smile then returned back to his face as he waited for my reply. I again began to feel my body and mind aching for sleep and I rubbed the weariness out of my brow before answering him.

“I’ll see you in the Star at nine, and you’re buying the damn beer!”

It was the first time Carnell had ever asked to speak to me about something that he regarded as important, and despite his mindless and childish ways sometimes, I knew he would not have made the request unless it was something significant that he had on his mind, and despite how much I longed to lay my dog-tired carcass down on that bed of mine, I just didn’t have the heart to refuse him.

“Thanks, man.” He slapped the wall with the flat of his hand and turned and ambled back through the kitchen, calling back to me as he did, “C’mon, let’s go and git some o’ that pepperpot stew in our bellies, I’m starving!”

The four of us sat and ate at the kitchen table. I was listening to my aunt Pearl and Carnell yakking on enthusiastically about the kinds of food we used to eat back home, plantain, yams, mango, and how much they missed them and why it was a shame that they couldn’t get them here in England. I remained mostly quiet during their colourful conversation, chipping in occasionally and enjoying the cheerful banter between the pair of them.

But Gabe’s mood had changed and he sat in silence, picking at the food in front of him, his discontent seeping across the table towards me. After we had finished, Gabe got up and without speaking picked up his paper from the arm of the chair that sat besides the range and returned to the sitting room. Carnell rose from his seat shortly afterwards, sensing the awkwardness in the air, and leant down and put his muscular arm around aunt Pearl’s slight frame and hugged her. She brushed him off, dismissing his affectionate embrace of gratitude with the back of her hand.

“Git on wid you, boy, I don’t want you soft-soaping me!” She smiled at him as his bulky frame stood over her.

“That was some fine pepperpot stew you served up there, Mrs Pearl . . . surely fine.”

Carnell rested his hand on my shoulder and looked down at me. “JT, I’ll see you at nine then?”

“You sure will, Carnell . . . See you later, brother,” I replied keenly as I got up and collected each of our plates from the table and took them over to the sink, which was already filled with hot, foamy water. I heard Carnell bid farewell to Pearl and Gabe, but their genial guest did not receive a reply from my uncle.

I stared down into the dishwater, aware that Gabe’s taciturnity was of my doing and my mind pondered on how I could approach my disgruntled relative. Pearl spoke, breaking into my troubled thoughts and bringing me promptly back to the then and now of the matter.

“Your uncle Gabe, he means well and he’s been worried sick ’bout you, Joseph. Whatever trouble you got yourself messed up in has got him all riled up and you know he tinks the world o’ you. You’re more than just flesh and blood to him, JT, he treats you like you was his own son. And he knows you ain’t like your cousin Vic. He was so proud when you made the police. You always been on the right side o’ the law; he’s always respected that, took pride in it. Now you go in there and speak to him, you hear me, boy?”