Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time (42 page)

Both Cut Man Perry and Elrod Haddon disappeared: the word on the street was that the pair of them packed up all that they could fit into a suitcase and then both boarded some ship or other and set sail for sunnier climes. They wouldn’t be missed.

Alice Linney was arrested and charged with her involvement in the conspiracy to kidnap and subsequent kidnapping of Stella Hopkins. I heard that when the Bristol and Avon police turned up to slap the cuffs on her, she started to scream the place down and had to be removed from her home in a straightjacket. Unable to be questioned, the police had a doctor examine her and she was diagnosed as delusional and mentally unsound, and in an apt twist of fate was transferred to Stoke Park psychiatric hospital, the same place that Stella’s mother, Victoria, had been sent to.

I was released without charge and told to keep my nose clean, and in an unexpected token of DI Fletcher’s appreciation was given a lift back to St Pauls in a panda car. I returned back to my digs to the smell of fresh paint and found that in the short time I had been locked up, Gabe, my aunt Pearl and Mrs Pearce had let themselves in and made the place look as fresh as a daisy. A new bedroom door had been fitted and venetian blinds were now where the old curtains and rail had been. But I knew that no matter how much cosmetic rejigging had been done to the place, the tragic presences of both Stella and Earl would continue to linger within its walls.

I walked into my lounge and sitting on the lid of my Dansette record player was a note that had been left for me, handwritten in black ink in a copperplate style. I picked it up and read the simple message.

Dear Mr Ellington,

I hope you didn’t mind
me coming into your home and helping your family spruce
the place up. I have to say, it needed it.
I know we have not seen eye to eye since
you first arrived, but I think that people sometimes come
together for the strangest reasons, as I believe we have.
Getting old and being alone is not easy, so knowing
that you are close by is a comforting feeling. I
hope that in the future you will think of me
as somebody who is more than just a neighbour, and
as you have insisted that I should address you in
the future in a less formal manner, I trust that
you will oblige in doing the same to me, as
friends should.

My sincerest best wishes,

Marjorie Pearce

After I’d finished reading the note, I grabbed my coat and took a short walk in the afternoon winter sunshine to the Star and Garter pub. I ordered myself a pint of Dragon Stout and sat at the very same table where Earl Linney had first introduced himself to me those few short weeks ago. I thought of our meeting and how so much had changed since then. I reached for my glass, took a long draught of my beer and kept drinking for the rest of the day in the hope I could forget the past, which for me seemed only ever to bring sadness and pain.

In my heart, though, I had always known the excesses of drink only let you forget for a fleeting moment. Once it wears off, you’re left with the hard fact that all bad memories never go away; they just hide out of sight in the backs of our minds, then return to gnaw at your conscience when you least expect them to. My mama had once told me that ‘tears are the words that the heart cannot express’, and she had been right.

During the following weeks I attended the funerals of Virginia Landry, Earl Linney, Stella Hopkins and my dear friend Carnell Harris. I’d shed my fair share of tears at each one of their interments and now chose to spend my time alone in my digs, struggling to sleep at night.

*

A week after we had buried Carnell, Vic unexpectedly called on me. It was just after seven in the evening when he rapped on my door and strolled down my hall in a good mood, wearing a big smile on his face, a new bespoke Moss Brothers’ grey tweed suit and a pair of spit-shine black leather brogues. In one hand was a bottle of Mount Gay rum and in his other a Fine Fare paper carrier bag. He walked into the kitchen, put the bag and bottle onto the table, then turned to me and opened his jacket to show off a flash pure-white cotton shirt and navy-blue silk tie.

“Well, whaddaya think?”

“You’re looking sharp, brother, real sharp.”

I stared down at myself and wondered what my relation would think of me. I was dressed in the same clothes I’d been wearing for the last two days, and was unshaven and tired. I sat at the table as Vic cracked open the rum and gulped back a couple of mouthfuls. He handed the bottle to me and I took a sip, then set the booze in front of the two of us. My cousin put both his hands on the table and tapped out a beat in front of me, smiling, his excitement barely contained.

“What’s with you . . . You gotta date?”

“No . . . not tonight, JT, I got someting hotter than that going down, my man!”

“Yeah . . . and what’s that?”

“I gotta bidness proposition and you included in it!”

“Oh no, no way, Vic . . . You ain’t dragging me into your bootlegging and knocked-off white-goods rackets. I’ll find me some honest work, if you don’t mind?”

I sat back in my chair as I looked at him. His face clearly showed he was hurt by my comments.

“I ain’t talkin’ ’bout no bootlegging bullshit . . . I’m going legit! Now listen up, you smartass.”

He sat down in front of me and opened his arms like a dodgy politician about to make a speech that nobody wanted to hear.

“I got myself this new direction I’m going in . . . boxing promotion! Now befo’ you git on your high horse, start shootin’ me down in flames, I want you to hear me out. I got Cut Man’s old office: I ain’t using it, ain’t stupid enough to either! Now it’s a little ripe in there at the minute an’ I need to git the piss and puke scrubbed outta the shagpile, but I got to thinkin’ it would make a great place fo’ you to keep your ting going.”

“Ting . . . what damn ‘ting’ are you going on ’bout?”

“You know! You checking tings out fo’ folks, sniffing ’bout in other people’s dirty linen, all that shit! You is perfect fo’ it, brother, git it in that thick head o’ yours, you’re the real McCoy now . . . a proper shamus. Think ’bout it, you don’t have be tellin’ the world what you be doin’ fo’ a livin’, just git yourself a brass plate put up outside a the front door o’ the gym. I can see it now: ‘Joseph T. Ellington, Enquiry Agent’. Now that’s got real sweet ring to it, ain’t no mistake.”

He nodded to himself and took another shot of rum from the bottle, then reached into the carrier bag that he’d brought with him. He pulled out the teak box that he normally kept for me and which had once been the home of my police service revolver. He slid it over to me and smiled.

“I thought you’d best have this back. I been hangin’ onto it fo’ way too long now.”

I looked down at it for a moment, then wiped the dust from the lid. I flicked up the two brass catches and opened it. Inside was the money that Earl Linney had given to me and the notebook that I had taken from Clarence Mayfield’s place after finding him dead. I stacked them on top of each other and placed them next to me on the table, then reached into the box and took out a small black leather-bound Bible. I opened it up and thumbed through the pages until I came to where I had put a small black and white photograph. I lifted it carefully out and stared down at it.

The snapshot had been taken about three years ago. In it I was sitting outside of my house in an old wicker chair that had belonged to my mama. I held a glass of mango juice in my hand and both my wife, Ellie, and daughter, Amelia, were sitting at my feet smiling for the camera. The photograph had been taken by Vic when he’d made his last visit to us. It had been a Sunday, and my girls and I had just got back from the morning service at our local church. That afternoon I remember we ate salt fish and rice ’n’ peas and we laughed at the jokes Vic had told us until our faces hurt. We drank rum punch until the sun fell out of the sky and my child fell asleep in her mother’s arms. I stroked the faces of Ellie and my beautiful little girl with the tip of my finger. In my wife’s hand was the Bible I now kept the photograph in. I returned it to the page where it now lived and closed it. I looked over at Vic and smiled.

“Thanks, brother.”

I rose out of my chair and put my hand on my cousin’s shoulder.

“If you don’t mind, I’m gonna take a nap. I’m beat. We’ll talk ’bout that bidness proposition of yours another time, yeah?”

“That sounds real good to me. Look, I’m gonna sit and finish a touch more o’ this rum, perhaps put one o’ your Ray Charles LPs on; I’ll keep the sound turned down real low, don’t you worry, I won’t disturb ya. I’ll see ya in a while.”

I lay on my bed and took the photograph out of the Bible and put it under my pillow. I then placed the open book on my bedside to keep the unwelcome spirit of the duppy away, just as my mama had done for me when I was a small boy. I pulled the blanket over my body and curled myself up tight into a ball, then closed my eyes and slowly let my mind travel back to a time when I knew true love. I slowly embraced sleep, then once again felt the warmth of the sun on my face, the tender touch of two hands holding onto mine, and the waves roll over my feet as my girls walked me along an endless, beautiful golden shore towards the place that we called home.

The origins of
Heartman
and my detective Joseph Tremaine Ellington can be traced back to a single day back in the autumn of 2003. I was sitting in the Abbey Bar on Decatur Street in the French Quarter in New Orleans drinking an ice-cold, long-necked bottle of Dixie beer and listening to the blues singer Brownie McGhee, who was being piped through an old sound system from the corner of the dimly lit drinking den. Outside a storm had just broken and the rain was bouncing off of the hot pavement, causing steam to rise up in the street; everywhere smelt of a humid damp and it felt as if I’d been transported back to the “Deep South” of a hundred years previous.

On the table in front of me sat a battered copy of
The Neon Rain
by the wonderful American crime writer James Lee Burke. It was a book that always seemed to make it into my suitcase on my travels (it still does) and I must have read it a good dozen times, along with the other Burke books that featured his Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux. For some time I’d struggled to find other writers that drew me in as Burke did. Yes, I had other literary heroes – Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Walter Mosley, to name but a few – but there was something about Burke’s writing style that kept calling me back to him, as all good writers do. The books were not just about crime or those who fought it, but bigger things: family, friendship and issues of integrity and honour. They were so much more than just crime novels. And so, unable to find that kind of book, I decided to have a go at writing one myself . . . Ten years later,
Heartman
was finally a reality and had found itself a wonderful home with my publishers, Black & White.

The journey of a book from first words to completed manuscript and hopeful publication can be a long one, and
Heartman
’s has not been an exception to that rule. Luck plays a part and I have been lucky. There are many people who have played a big part in seeing the book you hold in your hands become the finished article it is today.

Part of my luck was to meet my literary agent, Philip Patterson of Marjacq Scripts. Phil took a chance on
Heartman
and has stood solidly behind it ever since. ‘Mr P’, as I like to refer to him, has suffered my constant emails of enquiry and has been through the lows of the rejection letters during the submission process and the ultimate high of finally brokering the deal with my publishing house. Always grumpy, but always right, his belief in me as a writer and in the material never wavered and I will be eternally grateful to him. Thanks must also go to the wonderful Marjacq Scripts team, Luke Speed, Isabella Floris and Guy Herbert, each of whom have played a very special part in bringing
Heartman
to fruition.

Thanks also to my miracle worker editor, Karyn Millar, and the brilliant team at Black & White Publishing, Alison McBride, Campbell Brown and Janne Moller, each of who had the same vision for
Heartman
as I did and ran with it wholeheartedly. Cheers, guys.

A special thanks to some great writers, the wonderful Mari Hannah and Anne Zouroudi, who both held my hand through good and bad times throughout the submission process. Thanks also to Damien G. Walter of
The
Guardian
and Emlyn Rees, who first picked up on
Heartman
and pointed me in the right direction. I’m indebted, you are both gentlemen of the first order, and the beers are at the bar.

Gratitude and love also to the fantastic Julie P. Noble for affording me her time and wit for those first read-throughs: you are a real rock and sounding board. A special shout of thanks to all the creative-writing students at Leicester University who critiqued my early work, and to Steve Jackman and June Watson of the Salmon Free House here in Leicester for inviting me to become their first Writer in Residence and for brewing the great ‘Ellington’s Ale’.

I tip my cap towards my old boss and dear friend, William Cheetham Fletcher. You may be in the book in name only, but your influence, guidance and wisdom will be with me forever.

Thank you to my family, sister Sally and to my parents, Ann and Pat, who have believed in their son these past forty-nine years and continue to do so, despite not really believing that being a writer is a “proper job”.

Lastly, to my partner, Jen, whose love and care knows no bounds and who told me things would work out during the dark times . . . Guess what, they did. I could not have done it without you and my two little princesses, Enya and Neve, who keep their daddy young and on his toes. We make a great team.