Unraveled Visions (A Shaman Mystery) (23 page)

“But they did make me try not to forget. The social workers and that. If you’d like me to find out more about my mother’s death for you, Mrs. Mitchell—well, I suppose I could do so.”

Maybe that was what this was all about. Finding out might put my past to rest. I was so deep in thought that I didn’t notice at first that Lettice was giggling helplessly, despite the icicle stares her mother was giving her.

“What’s funny?” I was a bit irked.

“You can’t call her Mrs. Mitchell.” Lettice shook her head with mirth. “That’s not right at all. You’ll have to call her Aunt Peers.”

Mrs. Peers Mitchell and I locked glances. I’m not sure which of us was more appalled.

_____

I left Costa’s as soon as I could, using work as my excuse. Lettice wanted to exchange further details, and I’d ended up swapping Facebook friend requests with her.

I scooted back to Papa for my final round of deliveries (and the usual telling off for the time I’d taken over the last round). The kitchen was drenched in its dire atmosphere. Petar ignored me, Jimmy scuttled around like a cockroach, and Max had taken to cracking obscene jokes as a way to cover his deeper feelings. Whenever there weren’t customers to serve, Stanislaus let out long streams of what sounded like very offensive Bulgarian.

I was bursting to yell at someone after meeting Mrs. Mitchell (I refused to call her Aunt Peers) and Stan seemed a good choice. I was fed up with his silence on the subject of my pay. I’d started to worry that part of the Papa scam was not paying anyone anything at all.

“I want last month’s wages. A cheque with a payslip.”

Stan’s face hardened down. “New workers are paid twenty-eight days from when they start.”

“Play the game, Stan, it’ll be Christmas by then.”

“You need a loan? My father can arrange one.”

“Let me get this right,” I said. “You’re prepared to lend me money, but not pay me a fair wage. I don’t believe you pay anyone a fair wage, actually.”

“Each employee’s treated like an individual. We’re a caring employer.”

“Good. In that case, you’ll stop your staff moaning about the DNA tests.”

Stan gave a curt nod. “The sooner this guy’s caught, the better for business. People aren’t keen coming out after dark anymore.”

“Stan … you’ve never had another worker go missing like Kizzy, have you? I mean in the past.”

“No. We’ve never lost a worker before, never.” He eyed me carefully. “Unless we sack them.”

I thought about Mr. Papazov, sitting upstairs every Wednesday, playing ancient music. He didn’t feel rich, but I bet he lived in some massive house, like Grandma Dare, with a pot of money dirtier even than his greasy tape recorder. No doubt his son hoped to inherit, so Stan stayed right under his father’s thumb. Behind his cocktail stick, he often looked over-burdened with the state of things, worn down, snappy when the orders got behind and as jittery as a bad acid trip when his father turned up in the shop, like he’d prefer to be inheriting that pot right now, thank you.

I’d become trapped in this shitty world. I was not leaving without my pay, but, even when I finally got it, a hefty deduction would come out for the hire of the bike I’d be leaving behind, which meant, ostensibly, that I was paying to deliver takeaways. In the meantime,
the work constantly reminded me about the grim deal the Brouviche
sisters had got from their visit to Britain.

I went into the changing room and surrendered to a bombardment of feelings. The back of my eyes burnt and I covered them with my hands. I wanted to cry for my mother, but I couldn’t quite do it. I’d invested all my filial energy into hating her and it was uncomfortable to discover she had a story I’d ignored my whole life.

And Rey had not called. I’d left his flat on loving terms. He kissed me a deep goodbye, but more than twenty-four hours had passed and all I’d got was silence. No texts. No emails. No phone call. No flowers by Interflora—well, I’d never been that hopeful. His words rang in my ears. I was terrified that
we can’t be lovers
had already turned into
we are not lovers
.

One night of passion. My entire frame yearned for more. My entire soul.

twenty-two

That evening I booted
up my laptop and connected it to the printer. I played around with designing an A5-sized simple advert. It was time I followed Rey’s advice about selling my therapy skills.

Enjoy a Pre-Christmas wind-down with Therapist Sabbie Dare.
Chose from Aromatherapy, Reflexology & Reiki.
Two-for-one offer …have a therapy session and get the next one free.
Ask about a Seasonal Gift Voucher
The most relaxing present you could choose to give.
Healing Shamanic Therapy sessions also available.

Not sensational, but certainly functional. I found an image of holly and placed it at one side.

From my backpack I pulled a fat handful of Papa Bulgaria flyers, which I’d shamelessly filched from the shop counter, glossy A5 paper, each with its garish orange photograph of savoury dishes. Foolishly, they’d left the backs of the flyers plain white. I tidied the pile and fed it into my printer. I’d done thirty or so before my printer ran out of juice. I examined one. Amateurish, but effective. And it was not the least dishonest, honestly. Every time I put one through a letter box, I’d be delivering the Papa flyer at the same time.

I pulled the unused flyers from the printer. On the back of the
first one, I wrote a single word in pen at the top: MIRELA. Before I knew it, I’d scribbled bullet points of everything I knew about her. I put the flyer to one side and started another. KIZZY. The flyers were the perfect size
for noting down salient points and this focused my mind. I documented brief accounts of everyone connected with the Brouviche sisters.

I took four more flyers and spread them, white side up, over the coffee table. I wanted to make some sense of the spirit wolf’s insistence on directions, the places he’d told me to look. Was it all mist and mirrors meant to baffle and bewilder? I headed the first one THE PLACE OF BLAME. From the start, this had been Papa Bulgaria. Even Mirela believed that, but it still wasn’t clear to me if Kizzy had left the takeaway and fallen into trouble, or left the takeaway because it
was
trouble. With my new information about the
Mutri
and Mirela’s half-suspicion that they couriered drugs as well as food, I was becoming convinced that Papa Bulgaria was to blame for an awful lot of things. I bullet-pointed everything I knew.

THE PLACE OF ABSOLUTION. I was sure this was the Agency of Change. If anything, Fergus had known Kizzy better than I ever had. He’d sat through an interview with her and her sister. I chewed my pen. Absolution. The only good place, so far, on my list, although, when I thought about it, Fergus had not actually been of any real help to the Brouviches.

THE DARK PLACE. I wrote a short description of our experience at Belinda’s Bunnies. It was a guess, that the massage parlour was the dark place.
You will find little in some, and nothing in others
, the wolf had said, but Belinda’s had been more a total curveball.

THE PLACE OF NO ESCAPE. Reading the translation of Kizzy’s letter had made me wonder all the more what Kizzy had meant by telling Mirela she was not to trust the man with the snake. Was that anything to do with Anaconda, or was I becoming obsessed with journey images?

The greeter at CORE had quoted words from the Bible:
the place of no escape
. I’d recalled how I’d met Drea for the first time only hours after I’d met Kizzy, and even though this connection seemed tenuous, it could be important. Connections in the otherworld were as crazy as that child’s game where you join random dots without crossing previously drawn lines—I only had to think of Lettice to demonstrate that.

I headed a fresh flyer DREA COMER and put her story into bullet points. I’d written about her in my shamanic diary, and in the letter that had had such dire consequences, but now I tried to encapsulate what I knew about her life and the misapprehensions I’d made, before taking a new flyer and summarizing my relationship with Andy. Finally, I started on everything I knew, or guessed I knew, about CORE leader Eric Atkinson.

I was creating an index of possibilities. I chewed the end of my pen, wondering if there was anyone I’d forgotten. But before I was able to think any more, the door bell chimed. Rey slid into the hall and wrapped me in his arms.

Writing down my thoughts had made me actually forget about Rey for an hour or so. Shock passed through me, a gasping weakness that left me as helpless as a newborn.

“Hi,” was all he said.

I wanted to reply with something clever or funny, but I was struck dumb. All I could do was kiss him. It was glorious to do that; to kiss him
back
.

He passed me a bottle of something Australian. “Just for an evening, I want to forget all about work.”

“Brilliant. D’you want food with this? Only I don’t have much above bread and cheese …”

“Er … maybe later?”

It’s funny what a couple of words can do to your flesh. One thought of Rey in my bed and I was as squidgy as the dough that goes round and round in my bread machine. You could’ve moulded me into any shape. We wound our way up the stairs and around each other at the same time, flinging ourselves onto the bed, tugging at buttons and wriggling out of underwear. We kissed every bit of flesh as it was uncovered. I could feel Rey’s heart thudding against mine. I could smell his spicy aftershave. He’d showered right before he’d set out. But I didn’t care about scent. What delighted me was that he’d come, unbidden, to my door.

“God,” he grunted. “You are so bad for me.”

“Bad girl, that’s what I am.” I wrapped my legs around him. “Deserve a spanking.” I needed to wipe his words away before they could be added to a growing list.

I’m not going to be good for you
. W
e can’t be lovers
.
You are so bad for me
.

To Hades with work ethics. I just wanted Rey, no complications, no strings. His hands were all over me, his lips following their course. He wanted this as much as I did. I put my mouth hard over his and tried to forget.

_____

It was late when we finally made it downstairs, and we’d both worked up an appetite. Rey uncorked the wine and I put some cheddar and what was left of a loaf onto a wooden board. There were last year’s pickled onions and a half tub of olives from the back of the fridge.

“At last! You’re taking some action.”

I turned to him. While I was finding clean glasses (all right, I confess, while I was
cleaning
clean glasses), Rey, being the detective he was, had unearthed my back-to-front therapy flyers.

“Yep, I’ll be shooting them through doors as I proceed.”

“Well done.” Rey dug deeper. “And what’re these?”

“Mmm? Oh, just some stuff I was jotting down. Always re-use paper, is my motto.”

“So, is it okay if I read them?”

“Well, I guess so. Grab a stool, let’s eat.”

We sat opposite each other at the breakfast bar. Rey used one hand to stuff bread into his mouth while the other flicked through my index of possibilities. I tried not to be annoyed. There was no reason to hide the things I’d written, but the silence was disconcerting. Rey was absorbing material as if he was at work.

“Talk to me, Rey,” I muttered.

He looked up, not the least fazed. “These look like the Sabbie Dare answer to Avon and Somerset central computer files.”

“Is that a criticism?”

“Not one bit. See, I don’t know all of it, do I? It’s a fresh perspective. Your—sort of—shamanic perspective.” He tapped a finger on a page. “You write a lot about blokes.”

“What? I do not!” I could feel my cheeks warming.

“Okay, I can see you don’t have the hots for Mr. Papazov. Great record of him, though. The team’s already got their beady eyes on him, et cetera.”

“Is he up on your board?”

“Sorry?”

“Like on telly. They have a whiteboard, and they pin pictures of suspects on it. Do you do that?”

He raised his eyes in despair. “There’s a lot on our Mr. Quigg. I see he gave you a translation of Kizzy’s letter.”

I mentally kicked myself for writing that down. “What it proved to me was that Mirela didn’t needlessly lie to me. I’d been worrying about that.”

“Tell me more about this Jimmy Browne. Your gut feelings.”

“He’s sweet. He’s a cook. Well, he’d like to be a chef one day. He knew both the girls, but …” It was stupid to point out that he could surely not be a killer. Most probably, no one I knew was Kizzy’s killer, except perhaps Petar the lanky slime-ball who I’d already clocked as a thief. I’d happily see him taken in for questioning.

Rey took a slow swallow of wine. “How is he with a knife?”

“What?”

“This Browne. He’s a chef. Wants to be. Is he good with a knife?”

The room suddenly felt depleted of oxygen. The police had been keeping very quiet about the killing, and the news sites had been going ballistic in search of information. Some wild rumours had been circulating.

“They’re saying …” I took a deep breath. “That she was slashed. Ripped.”

“Yes, they are. But we’re not going to jeopardise our enquiry by filling the heads of the public with unnecessary hypotheses. We’ve got lines to pursue and things are coming together with solid indications. Best start of all, your ID, which gave a name to the victim. But there’s also a good basic forensic report because we found Kizzy while she was still caught on the cooling tower.”

“Cooling tower?”

“Yeah. Part of the Hinkley Point nuclear power station, but slightly out to sea. It’s where the witness spotted her. If she hadn’t, the body would have been lifted on the following high tide.”

A stunned feeling was creeping through me, as if someone had injected me with curare poison. “How did the witness find the body?”

“She walked out there. She was a complete idiot. The tides are treacherous and the mudflats can give way.”

“This woman …” I was thinking as I spoke. “Could I talk to her?”

“She’s told us everything she knows.”

“It’s just … you mentioned the shamanic perspective.”

“True.” Rey crunched down on an olive. “I can’t pass on her details, but I could explain to her about you. How you’ve helped us before. Give her your number.”

“Tell her about me, Rey. Tell her I’m free most of Thursday. I’d want to meet her near this cooling tower.”

“You can’t do anything conventionally, can you? I mean, you could chat to this woman on the phone. But no, you want to go all the way to Hinkley.”

“That’s my
method
, okay? I work through the spirit world, and the spirits are as much in the land as they are in more subtle spaces.”

“I’ve always wanted to ask,” said Rey. “Where
is
the spirit world.”

I took a breath. I was not going to get rumpled. “It’s beyond the dimensions we can perceive.” I watched him smirk and ploughed on. “Solid things … material things … exist on the slowest level of vibratory life. But not everything vibrates like a block of wood. Sound and colour vibrations are faster. We can’t hear ultrasounds or see ultraviolet. I believe some things vibrate so fast, people are not keen to admit they exist at all. Our physical body is solid; it vibrates quite slowly, but it has subtle parts that are like light and vibrate at such a rate, we don’t know they’re there. Not by looking or touching. That’s the part that tells us we feel wretched, or great, or whatever.”

Rey grinned at me. “Hunches?”

“Yeah, why not? Working with these extra dimensions can help us think laterally. Feelings move through your subtle body. Sensations that transmute into intuition, even into premonitions. The more you link with the subtle planes of existence by meditating, journeying, Tai Chi, chakra work … the more it happens.”

“But how does it work?”

“In an often perplexing way! Things get twisted round, mixed up. Spirit connects the paths of every journey I take. The links I follow are on the landscape of the spirit world. And in the Tides of the World of Spirit,” I added, hardly meaning to. “But when things feel clear in that world, they often become snarled up in this one. Or vice versa. Say, the spirits tell me something, but I don’t interpret it right.”

“Wonderful back-out clause, Sabbie.”

I laughed. We found each other’s feet under the table. Rey’s were bare. Mine were in sloppy slippers; I kicked them off and we made love with our toes.

“Remind me, who is Andy?” he asked, all casual, flapping the flyer.

“I’ll give you the full story, shall I?”

His toes squeezed mine. “Can you make it a bedtime story? When I was a kid, my mum would always tell me a fairy tale as she tucked me in.”

Aw, the man was a romantic after all. “Fairy tale? Andy and Drea’s is the bad witch kind, I’m afraid.”

“They’re all like that,” said Rey. “Fairy tales. They’re all somewhat Grimm.”