Full Dark House

∨ Full Dark House ∧

11

FORGOTTEN PEOPLE

…A duty to the innocent, thought John May, as he paid the miserable landlord of the Seventh Engineer and made his way back to rainswept London, the London of the new millennium, a place that bore only a superficial resemblance to the dark city of the Blitz. He felt old and tired, because Bryant was no longer alive to keep him young. Throughout his career he had been treated like the junior member of the team, even though there was only a three-year age gap between them. Now he was finally alone, and so bitterly miserable that there seemed little point in going on. But he had to, he decided, at least until he knew how his partner had died.

He stared through the train window at the cumuliform dullness blurring the horizon of the city, and tried to imagine what had been going through his partner’s mind. Second-guessing Arthur Bryant had never been easy. A few days before his death, Bryant had returned to the site of their first case. The memoir’s addendum suggested that he had been hoping to shed further light on the events of the past. Could he have upset someone so badly that he had placed his life in danger? Surely there was no one left to upset. The case had been solved and sealed. The characters it involved were as deeply buried as London’s bomb rubble, and just as forgotten.

In 1940 the pair of them had been little more than precocious children. They had stumbled through their first investigation, and had somehow discovered a murderer. It had been a very different world then, more private, more certain. Nearly everyone they knew from that time was dead. Who was there left to question? Who would even remember? He knew he could expect no help from the unit; they were too busy confiscating Chinese-made assault rifles from the hands of drug-addled teenagers.

May’s taxi pulled up outside his flat in a spray of effervescent drizzle. He had recently sold his house and moved to St John’s Wood, to a small apartment with bare cream walls and a marble balcony that very nearly overlooked Regent’s Park, if you stood on a chair. The old house had become hard for him to manage. Now he had a lift and a porter, and invisible neighbours who arrived and left without so much as a shoe squeak or latch click. Here he could sit and dream, and wait for death. Without Bryant, there seemed to be no alternative. It was as if the future had suddenly been walled off. He had always known that his partner would die first. Dreams of loss had disturbed his sleep for more than a decade. Bryant had laughed when he had described his nightly fears. Arthur had always been the stronger one. There was something callous in his nature that protected him from pain. Now the nightmare had sprung to life, and with it a new enemy. He wondered how he would cope alone.

May paused in the hall and sifted through the pizza deals on the mat. Beneath them he found a folded sheet of plain paper posted from the flat next door.

Dear Mr May,

I thought you ought to know that someone has been looking for you.

—Mrs R. Mamoulian

May rang the doorbell of number 7, and it was answered by a tiny old lady with unruly grey hair knotted in a bun as big as her head. She beckoned him inside with a wave of her noodle ladle. Around her slippered feet scampered a kickable dog with bug eyes. May inched his way through a blue corridor lined with fragile china animals, into an obstacle course of a sitting room. Every available inch of space was taken up with occasional tables covered in doilies, glass ducks, ceramic fish, glazed birds, antelopes, tiny gilt cups and, above the fireplace, a large porcelain bear in the coils of a snake. He wondered how the dog managed not to smash anything.

“I wouldn’t have put a note through – we keep ourselves to ourselves,” explained Mrs Mamoulian, “but he was loitering in the corridor with the lights out, and frightened the life out of Beaumont” – the dog yipped at the sound of his name – “so I called my husband. Maurice spoke to him, but the man refused to give a name or explain what he was doing outside your door.”

“What did he look like?” asked May, carefully unsnagging himself from a china okapi.

“Creepy, with these awful glaring eyes and huge fangs, like a werewolf.”

“Oh, really?” May’s assessment of his neighbour expanded to include the option that she might be insane.

“My eyesight’s not that good but I’m sure he was trying to force open the latch. I wanted to call the police but, well,” she eyed the neat arrangements of china ornaments as if they contained secret mysteries, “you don’t want everyone to know your business, do you?”

May opened up his flat, leaving his wet bags in the hall, and seated himself in the lounge to make some calls. Ringing the Wetherby clinic, he managed to locate the doctor Bryant had seen the day before he had been blown up, and explained the situation.

“Of course I remember him, he walked straight through into the private ward without stopping to get permission from our duty officer.” Dr Leigh sounded distracted. He was trying to talk to someone else in his office while fielding the police call. “At first I thought he was one of the patients.”

That sounds like Arthur, thought May. “Did he tell you what he was looking for?”

“Yes, eventually. He seemed to be in a great hurry. He wanted to check our files for long-term residents, but he wanted records going back sixty years. I told him we didn’t keep them for such a length of time, and anyway, they were incomplete because we’d had a fire here a few years ago, so he left.”

“Did he give you the name of the person he was looking for?”

“You’ll have to hold on.” The receiver was dropped, to be picked up half a minute later. “That was the odd thing. He told me the patient was male, probably suffering from deep trauma, and would have been admitted without a name. I tried to help him but didn’t know where to begin looking. What could I say? Those who enter the clinic as residents usually have a history of treatment. Their cases are heavily documented. Mr Bryant seemed to think that we might have taken in war victims who’d lost their memories, or at least their identification documents. I told him if we had, they’d be deceased by now. I’m afraid he became rather abusive.”

“Yes, he does that,” May sympathized. “But were you able to help him?”

“Look, I’m really not sure. We’re very busy here.” Dr Leigh was not prepared to admit that one of their patients had set fire to the ladies’ toilets and was now locked in a cubicle, threatening to swallow his tongue if his demands weren’t met, and as these demands included the reinstatement of the Great Hedge of India and a meeting with the late singer Freddie Mercury to discuss the hidden meanings in his lyrics, they were all in for a long day.

“He was going around questioning the nurses,” said the doctor impatiently. “Wanted to know when various patients had arrived, how long they were staying, that sort of thing. But I don’t think we were able to help him.”

“Why not?” asked May.

“Well, when my staff tried to answer his questions, he ignored them and went off to talk to someone in the day room.”

“Do you know who?”

“I have no idea. But he was making notes on some kind of a list.”

♦

Alma Sorrowbridge put down her squeegee and gave him an odd look. She was the only woman in the Battersea street who still washed her front step, and was proud of the fact. “What sort of a list?” she asked.

“Names of people – patients. Something from the Wetherby clinic. In his room, perhaps.”

“I’ve disinfected his floor but I left everything where it was,” she said dolefully. “I couldn’t bring myself to throw nothing away. There’s a lot of boxes.”

“Fine, then that’s where I’ll look,” said May.

Alma folded her arms across her chest. “There is seventy-two of them.”

“Good God, where have you put them all?”

“I’m an old woman, Mr May, I got no strength left to start moving stuff about. They’re where he kept them, in the basement. Besides, I been Mr Bryant’s landlady on and off since the war. I’m not going to start touching his things now, just ‘cos he’s with God.”

“Would it be all right if I had a quick look through?” asked May.

“I suppose so,” Alma sniffed, “but remember,” she raised a fat finger at the ceiling, “he can still see you.”

“He always did like watching me work. Take me to the boxes.”

May spent several fruitless hours wading through the files and papers in the cartons, but they were arranged according to the workings of Bryant’s disordered mind. The human male possesses a powerful urge to collect things; Bryant had collected books, papers and magazines that revealed a lifetime of idiosyncratic behaviour. As May rummaged through the photographs of forgotten faces, the absurd news clippings, the abstruse monographs of disbarred lawyers, maverick scientists and mentally unstable professors, he knew he would find little of use. Sixty years of tangled memories; there was simply too much to decipher.

A papery cloud of moths fluttered out of a carton containing nothing but old razor blades. One box contained several hundred keys, another held only seed packets and raffle tickets.

May raised himself from his knees and dusted down his trousers. Perhaps Bryant had thrown the list away. His partner had, to his certain knowledge, visited one other place in his final days. The archive room of the Palace Theatre.

He dug out his mobile and rang ahead for an appointment. It felt good to be doing something, however uncertain. Positive action was the only way to keep his mind from sinking back.