Good Bait

Only the smaller of the two chapels was in use today, Maxine’s friends a staunch but motley crew: some who’d known her from the streets, the squats and sleeping rough, those who’d survived; others she’d known from the Churches Breakfast Project or Addaction Community Support; a few neighbours from the street where latterly she’d lived, one of whom had invited mourners back to her house after the ceremony for sandwiches and tea.

Of Maxine’s immediate family, there was no sign.

No Clifford Carlin.

No fostered children.

No Letitia: no Rose.

Seated on hard wood, knees pressed against the pew in front, Cordon struggled to concentrate on the clergyman’s words, the benign platitudes, the elisions that skated over a misplaced life. An irregular death.

Behind him, an elderly man’s suit exuded an almost overpowering smell of mothballs. Heads bowed, tears here and there were sniffed or coughed away.

When the organist wheezed out the introduction to the 23rd Psalm, ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, Cordon turned smartly and pushed his way outside.

She was standing immediately opposite the double doors, pale raincoat unbuttoned over a black dress, her mouth a dark red gash across her bloodless face.

Startled, Cordon stopped in his tracks.

‘Not a ghost,’ Letitia said. ‘See.’ She plucked at the skin tight on her cheek. ‘It’s real.’

The lines, the gauntness made her somehow more attractive, Cordon thought, not less. Then banished the thought as quickly as it came.

‘Been a while,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘How long?’

‘I don’t know. Years.’

‘Too long, that’s what you’re meant to say.’ Mocking him with her eyes. ‘You don’t look any different — that too.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Is it, bollocks.’

‘We all get a bit older.’

‘Not you. You were always fucking old.’ She reached into her bag for a cigarette.

‘Now you’re ru

‘Anything wrong with that?’

‘Bit slow for the likes of you, I’d’ve thought.’

‘Gets too quiet we go down the Pencil Museum for a bit of a laugh.’

‘We?’

‘Me an’ anyone else who’s around.’ She glanced towards the doors. ‘Let’s shift before we get knocked down by the crowd.’

They stood by a section of stone wall, yew trees to either side. Car headlights hollowed yellow and amber along the road at their backs. Fifty metres away, the upturned earth of a freshly dug grave.

‘She came to see you,’ Cordon said, ‘in London. Maxine.’

‘Silly cow.’

‘She was worried.’

‘Because I didn’t want to spend time listening to my dad’s old records while he tells me what I could’ve done with my life?’ She flicked ash towards the ground. ‘I changed my mind, didn’t I? No fuckin’ crime.’

‘But you did see her? In London?’

‘Jesus, what’s with all the questions?’

‘Did you see her?’

‘No, I never saw her. Didn’t know she was there, did I?’

‘She had an address, Finsbury Park.’

‘So?’

‘She would have gone looking for you there.’

‘And not found me.’ Letitia turned towards the doors. ‘They’re coming out now, we better move. See her — what is it? — committed to the earth.’

Cordon fell in step beside her, rested his hand on the crook of her arm. ‘Maxine. The train. You really think she fell?’

She knocked him angrily away. ‘She’s dead, right? Inside that soddin’ box. A closed bloody coffin ’cause of what the train …’

She ran an arm across her face, her eyes.

‘You want to play the fucking policeman, don’t do it with me. We understood?’

Fragments of earth showered against the coffin lid, small stones bounced once and slid off to the sides. The trowel passed from hand to hand. Ignoring it, Letitia reached down and scooped up raw dirt from the ground, then, leaning out over the graveside, let it fall between her fingers till there was nothing but air.

There should have been rooks cawing at the sky, Cordon thought, but instead there was silence, a moment of almost true silence, and then the awkward shuffling of feet, a few mourners already, hands in pockets, moving away. He had been thinking of his father, the meticulous way he would plan each step, each journey, each and every trip they made to this or that bird sanctuary or wildlife refuge; the small notebooks in which he would record everything they had seen. A meticulousness that had driven the young Cordon close to distraction.

If a thing’s worth doing …

He did hear a bird then, rook, crow or jackdaw — his father would have known in an instant — but when he raised his eyes to look the bird was not there but in the past.

Shoulders brushed by him as he stood unmoving, remembering the last time he had bent to kiss his father’s cheek, the roughness of the older man’s unshaven face, the smell of something slowly rotting on his breath. Leaving, he had stepped out into a failing light much like this.

Gradually, he realised someone was standing beside him.

‘Are you all right, love?’ A woman, round faced, bundled in black. He didn’t know who she was.

‘Yes, thanks. I’m fine.’

‘Sometimes it takes a while.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘You’ll come back to the house? No sense letting all that good food go to waste.’

When he looked for her, Letitia had already gone. Taken one of the taxis, doubtless, that hung, like carrion, around the cemetery gates. From there to the station. The early evening train. Plymouth, then Bristol. Where then? East to London, north to the Lakes?

Back home, Cordon slapped some music on the stereo, splashed whisky into a glass. You want to play the fucking policeman, don’t do it with me. We understood?And, underneath that, his father’s patient tones: If a thing’s worth doing …

He jacked up the volume, stared out across rooftops to the bay.

Eric Dolphy in Champaign, Illinois, March 1953. ‘Something Sweet, Something Tender’.

Who did he think he was trying to kid?

26

One of these mornings, Karen thought, she’d step outside and not feel the bite of frost on her face and know winter was finally over. But not yet. She tightened the scarf at her neck and fastened the last button on her coat. Her breath curled like pale smoke on the air.

Carla had returned to her own flat and would be back at the National that evening, treading the boards. ‘The show,’ as she’d said, ‘had best go bloody on. And I do mean bloody. More bodies per minute with these Jacobeans than Camden can come up with in a year.’

Karen had expressed her concern.

‘Best thing for me,’ Carla had assured her. ‘After this week there’s a break and then we’re off on tour. Milton Keynes, Woking and points west. Bringing Middleton to the masses.’

But when Karen had clasped her arms round her in a farewell hug, she had felt Carla’s body shake and read the residue of fear in her eyes. She wished there was more she could do for her, more to help, but didn’t know what it was. Maybe, in time, the impact of what had happened would lessen, though she would never fully forget. Maybe, Karen thought, Carla would find a way to use it in her work.

She was crossing the street when her mobile rang. Tim Costello. Reports of a drug-related shooting in Camberwell had come in, a seventeen-year-old youth with known drug co

‘Some link with Walthamstow, that’s what you’re thinking?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘On your bike, then, sunshine.’ Karen felt herself gri

She snapped the co

Mike Ramsden was waiting in her office, cigarette smoke acrid on his breath, skin loose and baggy around his eyes. Karen found herself wondering, not for the first time, where he’d slept, his bed or someone else’s, a couch, the floor.