The Graveyard Position (21 page)

He let Dolly down onto the pavement when he was beyond the Headingley Stadium area, and she seemed pleased to be out of the arms of someone who was clearly not skilled in the art of dog carrying. When he got to Kirkstall View he looked for the woman who had been gardening on his previous visit, but obviously the tiny apron of front garden didn't need much work on it. He was sorry, because a talk with her could have been useful. He continued on down and rang the doorbell at number eleven.

“Oh, Mr. Docherty—” began Renee, a sort of turban around her sparse hair, still not entirely ready for a new day. Merlyn switched to casual apologetic mode.

“I would have left your money yesterday if I'd known I was going to be so long,” he said. Since Renee showed no signs of standing aside he managed to let fall the dog lead as he fumbled in his pockets for the cash, and Dolly obligingly ran through the hall and into the little sitting room they had talked in before. Renee went to get her, and Merlyn followed as if he needed no invitation.

“Now, sit quietly until we've finished,” he said to Dolly, who on occasion could decide to obey him. “It was eighteen we decided on, wasn't it? Here's twenty. I could see you did a lot beyond the call of duty: the place was looking very spic-and-span.”

“Well, it only needed a going-over,” said Renee, not sitting down, “but it's very generous of you.”

“The house must have brought back memories, I suppose,” said Merlyn, sinking into a chair. Renee reluctantly sat down too. Her face was now screwed up, seemingly involuntarily.

“Not so's you'd notice. I never had any particular feeling for the house. Just for your aunt Clarissa. She was a lady there was not very many like.”

“She was. That's how I felt about the place—it was her that drew me there. Still, I've just been looking around the house as a piece of merchandise—how much will it sell for?—without an ounce of sentiment. With Clarissa gone, there isn't really any call to feel sentimental about it.”

“Pity you didn't come back and visit her, then,” said Renee, with an unusual touch of tartness. Merlyn had the notion that she did not feel strongly about his supposed neglect of his aunt, just a dislike of his presence and a desire to get rid of him.

“She didn't want it. Absolutely forbade it. Wanted people to assume that I was dead. I brought it up quite often in our weekly telephone conversations, but she was adamant.”

Renee's face had fallen. She felt she had been wrong-footed, and hastened to make amends.

“I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said what I did. It was uncalled for. I didn't know you and she had kept in touch.”

“We did. Quite enough to know she wasn't suffering from Alzheimer's, as some of the family pretend to think.”

“Oh,
them,
” said Renee disgustedly. “They think what they want to think, and pretend it's the truth.”

“I think you and I have pretty similar views of the Cantelos,” said Merlyn. “Your daughter worked for us for a time, didn't she?”

There was the tiniest of pauses. But Renee was a sharp woman, and perhaps a cunning one, and she knew a longer pause would give something away, make Merlyn suspicious where maybe he was not already. She smiled a social smile.

“Of course—that was before your time at Congreve Street, wasn't it? Before you came to stay, anyway. She worked in the shirt factory for a bit. Quite well paid, but she didn't like it much. She preferred dealing with people. She went to work in the K-Supermarket, and she's done quite well. She's a supervisor now, and one of their longest-serving employees.”

“Oh, that's very good. And having a stable marriage must help a lot. People keep chopping and changing these days, but it doesn't seem to make them any happier.”

There was no answer for a bit, then Renee said bleakly, “I only had ten years. I don't know how things would have turned out if my Norman hadn't died.”

“I get the impression Clarissa thought she was better off remaining unmarried,” Merlyn said. “But that's the sort of thing none of us can say for sure, isn't it?”

Renee nodded.

“That's right. You can never know what would have happened if you'd done something different in the first place.” There was a wistfulness in her voice. Merlyn looked at her and then stood up. It was time to be off.

“By the way, I'm thinking of buying an old car to get me back to Brussels and then get rid of it.”

“Oh yes?” There was already a trace of defensiveness in her voice, which told Merlyn a lot.

“I thought—I can be a bit of a sentimentalist about some things, you know—that I might see if Aunt Clarissa's old car is still on the market.”

Renee came back quickly: “She got rid of that a while ago. Six months maybe.”

“That's right. There was a note about that on the telephone pad, but you seem to have tidied it away yesterday.”

A tiny red spot appeared on her upper cheekbone.

“Oh no, I'd never have done that. It could have been important. A cleaner just cleans and tidies. She doesn't destroy things.”

“But the page on the top—a note by Aunt Clarissa, to ring a number and get rid of the car—was there yesterday morning but gone yesterday evening.”

Renee was not good at lying, or thinking quickly.

“Well…it seems funny. But all sorts of members of the family and others have probably had the key to the house.”

“I changed the locks.”

“Well, maybe you just tore it off yourself—absentminded-like. I know I do that sometimes.”

“But it wasn't in the wastepaper baskets or the dustbin…. Your son-in-law runs a garage, doesn't he?” There was silence. “One of your neighbors talked about his being out to a breakdown on the road to Shipley last time I came here. Could you tell me his telephone number, Renee?”

“It's 240-7658.” The voice was lifeless. Merlyn felt sure it was the number on the pad.

“That was it. So Aunt Clarissa got rid of her car through your son-in-law's garage?”

“She may have done. What does it matter?”

“Maybe not at all. Except that you didn't want any connection between them to suggest things to me. Suggest what? I wonder.” Merlyn went to the window and looked out, up toward the next house. Then he became conscious of noise. Of shouting. Of several voices raised and competing with each other in their decibels of vociferation.

“That's your daughter's house, isn't it? The next one up the road. There's some disturbance there.”

Renee sighed.

“'Appen. They don't get on, our Patsy and Sam. They have our Gina living there with her two kids. That doesn't help.”

“‘Our Gina.' But not
his
Gina, I'd guess.”

Renee looked at him viciously.

“Why can't you mind your own bleeding business?”

“I think this probably is my business.”

“And what are you, then? A fucking marriage guidance counselor?”

“Something like that, I suppose. I work for the Common Market.”

“I tell you,” Renee shrieked, “keep out of my family's business.”

“At the moment they seem to be sharing it with the whole street.”

As Renee shrank down in her chair, looking defeated, Merlyn left the little sitting room, pursued by Dolly, and went out the front door. In the open air the noise from next door seemed unbearable, a symphony of competing cacophonies. He went onto the street and along the road to the next gate. Farther on up the hill the woman he had spoken to before was back in her garden.

“I wouldn't get involved,” she shouted. “You might get hurt. They're at it regularly, just like this. They're violent people, especially him. They enjoy it.”

Merlyn shook his head and pushed open the front door. The noise was mainly coming from the room to his right: a man's voice—big, loud, and brutal. Words like
whore
and
scrubber
were being used, and being countered by shrill accusations.

“And what about that Jackie Marsden, then? Don't tell me you haven't been having it off with her!”

The subsidiary noise came from the kitchen. The young woman he had seen earlier at the bus stop had herded her two children in there, she apparently used to the family wars, they still young enough to be distressed by them.

“Stop whining, Katie. You should be used to it by now. It doesn't mean owt. Stop that whining now or you'll feel the back of my hand. And stop that, Jerry—stop clutching my legs like that. You know I don't like it. You're a big boy now. I'll set your grandad on to you, then you'll feel it. I mean it!”

Merlyn looked sadly at this latest example of the Cantelo inability to bring up children. Then he swiveled forty-five degrees and stood in the doorway, observer of a war zone.

“You just grab any opportunity to have it off with Kevin. Like bleeding goats, you are. Soon as I heard you'd invited him I knew what you were after, both of you. Silver wedding? More like plastic, and then you'd be overcharging. And then to find you'd actually booked a room for yourselves! Talk about bleeding brazen! Nothing like a bit of comfort, I suppose you thought.”

“No, there's not. We're not like you. You'll show off everything you've got in the open air—think it's manly, don't you? Brings back your youth. I bet you and Jackie were at it in the bushes around the car park. I bet some of the cars coming and going saw a few sights!”

The expression on Sam's face suggested she had scored a bull's-eye.

“Well, what if we were? I'd spent two bleeding hours listening to that dimwit Kelly saying, ‘Kevin's a long time getting the drinks,' and ‘I hope that lobster didn't disagree with my Kevin's stomach.' Stupid cow! Some women don't have the brains of a stick insect.”

“We were never gone two hours!”

“One hour fifty-two minutes, to be precise.”

“Well, we had to get our money's worth. I'd paid good money for that room.”

“
You
had! You bleeding moron. You can't think much of yourself if you had to do the paying. Women! They've lost all pride. Well, this is it. This is the end of the road. We're finished, you and I. Finito. All washed up. Hail and farewell.”

“Oh, I don't think so,” said Merlyn, coming forward. “You enjoy it too much, don't you? Can't live with each other, and can't live without each other. And it's been like this pretty much since 1978, hasn't it?”

He came forward into the room. Sam swung around and saw him for the first time. His bulging eyes and outraged expression transferred themselves from his wife to the newcomer without strain or hesitation, and he continued clenching and unclenching his fists as if to emphasize his unchanging intention to get physical.

“And who the fucking 'ell are you? And how did you get in here?”

“Through the front door. And we have met. You sold me a car a week or two ago.”

“I sell hundreds of fucking cars.”

“I think you remember me, Sam. After all, I told you my name and my address. And you had reason to know where fifteen Congreve Street was.”

“It was years ago Renee worked there.”

“Years ago. Those are the operative words, aren't they, Sam?”

Sam had stopped his grunting gestures of aggression and his fists were still. Either because the presence of a third party acted as a barrier, or because some instinct of self-preservation had become operational.

“Don't know what you mean.”

“Years ago, when all this started. Back in the late seventies, when Patsy worked for Cantelo Shirts.”

“I was only there a few months,” put in his wife, who was either being supportive or similarly self-preservational. “Didn't suit me there.”

“No, you didn't like sitting over a machine all day, did you? Preferred being with people.”

“That's right. I did. Still do.”

“Still, you got together with one person while you were at Cantelo's, didn't you? And you went right to the top.”

Patsy seemed about to say that she didn't know what he meant, but instead she locked her lips and looked away.

“Which might have been all very well, might even have been profitable, but you were—what? engaged? married? just going with?—with someone of a very combustible nature.”

“Speak bloody English,” said Sam.

“Violent. You've got a violent nature, Sam.”

“This is all old stuff,” the man said, his voice thickening in tone. “Dead as a doornail. Why come along now and rake it up?”

“Not dead as a doornail, Sam. Because the result of Cantelo's philanderings is out in the kitchen, isn't she? And I bet she knows all about her origins. She's probably used to it coming up in family rows since she was quite small and hardly understood.”