Shape of Snakes

*14*

I took the train to London on my own the following Monday. It caused a row because I refused to tell Sam where I was going or what I was planning to do, and he drove off in a huff after dropping me at Dorchester South station at eight o'clock in the morning. His mood had been depressed since Danny's throwaway line about rats jumping ship-It wasn't like that ... I needed time to get my head together ... Jock was on my back all the time trying to persuade me to make you take those flaming tranquillizers ... He said you needed help ... he said you'd flipped ... he said ... he said-and his temper was not improved by my sour comment that if Jock was such a guru he should be talking to him and not to me.

I didn't keep tabs on him, so when I set out on Monday morning I had no idea if he'd taken my advice or not. I thought it unlikely. Sam wasn't the type to poke a sleeping dog unnecessarily, particularly when he was the most afraid of being bitten.

I found Graham Road changed beyond recognition that August morning. It had become a one-way street with speed bumps down the center. Parking was restricted to permit holders only, and trucks were banned. The houses were smarter than I remembered, the pavements wider, the sunlight brighter and more diffuse. It had lived for so long in my memory as a dark, foreboding place that I found myself wondering what else my mind had poisoned over the years. Or perhaps it wasn't my memory that was at fault? Perhaps Annie's death had actually achieved something?

I glanced at number 5 as I passed and was put to shame by its natty appearance. Someone had lavished the love and care on it that we should have done. Window boxes splashed the front with brilliant color, a new stained wood door had taken the place of our elderly blue one and the tiny front garden, barely three feet deep, boasted a neat brick wall, tubs of scarlet petunias and a semicircle of clipped green grass beside the path to the door. Nor was it alone. Here and there, untidy front gardens and peeling paintwork spoke of residents who were unable or unwilling to conform, but for the most part the road had moved decisively upmarket and made sense of Jock's statement that property prices had skyrocketed.

I guessed that some of that was due to the sale of the council-owned properties, which had stood out like sore thumbs twenty years before because of their uniform yellow doors. Now it was impossible to distinguish them from those that had always been in the private sector, and I wondered how many of them were still owned by the council tenants who had bought at rock-bottom prices. If Wendy Stanhope was to be believed, most of them had sold up within a year to achieve a 100 percent return on their investment, but the wiser ones had stayed and watched their investments grow.

I crossed the road and paused beside Sharon Percy's gate. Her house was almost as natty as ours, with Austrian blinds in the windows and a clump of Pampas grass in the front garden, but I couldn't believe she hadn't cut and run the minute she saw a profit. I knew she'd bought the house because Libby's letters had ranted on for months about how Jock's thirty quid a week had paid for Sharon's bedroom, but I found it difficult to equate the new subdued classiness of number 28 with the simpering peroxide blonde in Wendy's photograph.

I looked into her downstairs window-more curious than expectant--and was taken aback when her flour-white face, slashed red lips and heavily outlined eyes appeared briefly behind the pane. I recalled Libby's nickname for her, "the bleached vampire," but she looked more pathetic than predatory that morning. An aging woman trying to paint away the ravages of time. Was Geoffrey Spalding still with her? Or had his infatuation died along with her sex appeal? I felt an absurd desire to raise my hand in greeting before I remembered that we'd never spoken and that, if she'd known me at all twenty years ago, she certainly wouldn't recognize me now.

I barely glanced at Annie's house as I moved on to number 32. Even when I'd stood in front of her boarded-up house in the months following her death, her ghost had never troubled me, and I certainly didn't expect to be bothered by it now.

In the end, the only ghosts that lingered here were lonely mothers..

Maureen Slater opened her door before I could knock, and thrust out a miniature hand to pull me inside. "I don't want anyone to see you," she said.

"They won't know who I am."

"They'll guess. Everyone talks."

I wondered why that mattered when there was no one left who remembered Annie, and decided that by "everyone" she meant Sharon. I thought it would be counterproductive to say I'd already been seen, and followed her down the corridor to the kitchen, catching glimpses of the two ground-floor rooms as I passed their open doors.

The sitting room looked as though it was rarely used, but the dining room had been converted into a comfortable den with brightly colored bean bags littering the floor, a cushioned sofa along one wall and a wide-screen television in the corner. It was already switched on, showing a daytime magazine program, and the rumpled duvet on the sofa and the fug of smoke in the room suggested Maureen had either been watching it all night or had started early. She closed the door as we passed to deaden the volume.

Even though Maureen's was an end-of-terrace house, the layout inside was identical to ours, as indeed was every alternate house in the row: sitting room and dining room on the right with the corridor running past the stairs on the left-hand side toward the kitchen at the back. The in-between houses were built in mirror image so that corridors adjoined corridors on one side, and living space adjoined living space on the other. Upstairs, in precisely the same way, it was either the bedrooms or stairwells that adjoined. In order to allow for a window in the dining rooms, the kitchens were offset against the ends of the houses and shared a party wall with the people on the corridor side. As none of the structures was built to modern soundproof standards, the inevitable result was that we all came to know our neighbors rather better than we would have liked.

Indeed, it had been Sam's permanent complaint that we should have done some "noise" research before we bought number 5. On the corridor side, number 7-the side that acted as a sound buffer-lived an elderly couple, who rarely spoke above whispers even when they were in their kitchen. On the living-space side, number 3-the side that acted like a huge echo chamber divided by a thin vibrating wall-were the Charles children, whose nighttime screaming had kept us awake. One day, in a spirit of optimism, Sam invited both couples in for drinks and suggested they swap houses so that peace could break out all 'round, but Paul Charles took exception to some of the things Sam claimed to have heard through the wall and treated him with hostility from that moment on.

I had often wondered if a similar situation had existed with Annie, although, of the many complaints made against her, the question of noise had never been mentioned. In fact it was more likely she had been a victim of it and had suffered in silence while her life was made a misery. Certainly Michael Percy and Alan Slater had taken great pleasure from teasing her in public, and I couldn't believe they hadn't continued the sport in private by shouting insults at her through the party walls.

"Danny phoned last night," said Maureen, pulling out a chair in the kitchen and pressing me on to it. "You seem to be making quite a hit with him." She had a trace of the Midlands in her voice, which showed itself in the hard "g" she added to "ing," but whether she had been born there or whether she had learned it from her parents I didn't know.

Like everything else about her it set my teeth on edge, and I had to glue a smile to my face to mask my dislike. Whatever Wendy Stanhope may have said about her brutal treatment at the hands of her husband, I'd always thought there was something evil about Maureen Slater, perhaps because I held her responsible for the hate campaign against Annie. I'm sure she knew what my real feelings were, but for the moment she was prepared to go along with the pretense of friendship.

"The feeling's mutual," I assured her. "Danny's a nice fellow."

She busied herself with cups and saucers. I had written to her many times over the years, seeking answers, but the only response I had ever received was the one a week ago, agreeing to this meeting. I assumed it was my contact with Danny that had persuaded her to change her mind, and I wondered how far she suspected that I had sought him out deliberately and how far she was worried about what he had been telling me. There was, after all, so much that she wouldn't want me to know.

"You're the only person who thinks so," she said, filling a kettle at the sink. "Danny's been in and out of trouble since he was ten ... fighting ... stealing cars ... he started shooting heroin when he was twelve." She paused, waiting for an answer. When I didn't give one, she went on a little tartly, "Not the type most mothers want hanging around teenage boys. He says he's been out drinking with your lads."

"He has. They've met up with him on Portland a couple of times."

"You know he smokes cannabis."

"Yes."

"He's probably offering it to your kids," she said with a touch of malice, as if the idea pleased her.

"Then he isn't the first, and he won't be the last."

She eyed me suspiciously. "You're pretty laid back about it. You must have a lot of faith in your boys."

I gave a noncommittal smile. "I'd be more worried if Danny was still on heroin."

"No chance of that." She plugged in the kettle. "It's the one good thing Mr. Drury did for me ... caught the stupid little bastard at it one day and put the fear of God into him so he'd never go near a needle again."

"How did he do that?"

"He gave him a choice: punishment now, or a care order imposed by the juvenile court. Danny chose punishment now." She laughed. "I think he thought Drury was going to slap him about a bit ... didn't reckon on honest-to-God sadism." The idea seemed to amuse her.

"What did he do?"

"He broke off the needle and pressed it into Danny's arm with the edge of his handcuffs, then told him if he went to a doctor to get it removed there'd be that many questions asked he'd find himself in care so quick his legs wouldn't touch the ground. It was two days before Danny could find the courage to cut down deep enough to pull the needle out with a pair of tweezers. He's never been able to look at a syringe again without turning green."

"That sounds like Mr. Drury's style," I murmured. "Brutal but effective. Did you report him for it?"

"Did I hell!" She spooned coffee into the mugs. "In any case I was grateful. The last thing I wanted was one of my children dead of an overdose."

A silence fell while we waited for the kettle to boil. I had no idea what kind of background she came from, but Drury's parting shot to Danny-"How's that downtrodden slut of a mother of yours? Still on the booze?"-was uncomfortably close to the mark. My mother would say it was breeding (or lack of it)-a scientist would say it was genes-I would say it was poor education and low self-esteem. If she cared about anything at all, I thought, it was probably her benefit checks and whether they would buy enough smokes and alcohol to last her through the week.

Her windowsill was lined with empties, testimony to the drinking habit she hadn't been able to kick. An unopened bottle of vodka stood beside the salt and pepper on the table like an unearned reward. But if she was drunk or stoned on Prozac that day it wasn't noticeable. Indeed in some ways the sharp, assessing glances she kept flicking in my direction reminded me of Wendy Stanhope, although there was no kindness in them, only suspicion.

"Thank you," I said when she put a mug of coffee in front of me. Out of habit, she had added milk and sugar, neither of which I could stand, but I sipped enthusiastically as she sat herself in the chair opposite and lit a cigarette.

"Do you want one?" she asked.

I shook my head. "I never got hooked, thank God. If I had, I'd be a sixty-a-day woman by now."

"How do you know?"

"I have an addictive personality. Once started, I can't stop."

"Like this thing with Annie?"

"Yes."

Maureen gave a baffled shake of her head. "You wouldn't have liked her, you know. That's what makes this all so ... stupid. If anyone else had found her, there'd have been no fuss, she'd have been quietly buried and we could all have got on with our lives." She paused to draw pensively on her cigarette. "You, too," she added, watching me through the smoke.

"I haven't done badly so far."

She dropped ash into her saucer. "Except you can't let her go, and that's not healthy."

I might have answered that Annie was the least of my obsessions but I didn't want to put her on her guard. Instead I asked, "Why wouldn't I have liked her?"

"Because she wouldn't have liked you. She didn't like any white people. We were all 'white trash' to her. She used to chant it through the kitchen wall whenever Derek raised his voice. 'White trash ... white trash...' On and on for minutes on end. It used to drive him mad."

"Is that why he hated her?"

She nodded.

"Perhaps he didn't like hearing the truth?" I remarked dryly.

A wary expression crept into her eyes. "We never claimed to be anything we weren't."

The pretense at friendship began to unravel at speed. "You were known as 'the family from hell,' Maureen. When you and Derek weren't screaming at each other, your children were running riot in the street. I've never known a group of people make their presence felt so rapidly in so short a time. Alan's favorite occupation was to practice his jump kicks against other people's front fences. He flattened Annie's within a month of you being rehoused here ... and ours within three months."

She bridled immediately. "He wasn't the only one. Michael Percy was just as bad."

"I agree."

"But it was always my Alan who got the blame."

I shook my head in disagreement. "Michael faced up to what he'd done. Your son never did. Alan used to run away the minute trouble appeared and leave Michael to take the flak."

"Only because he knew his father would give him a larruping if he got caught."

"But it was all right for Michael to be given a larruping?"

Her mouth thinned immediately. "It never happened. Who was going to give it to him? Sharon? He'd have thumped her first. He was a nasty piece of work that Michael ... a bad influence on all the kids 'round here. He was the one got my lad into trouble, never the other way 'round."

I wondered if Sharon saw it that way, or if she cared. "I watched a man hurl him head first into a brick wall once," I said idly. "It all happened very quickly and I was too far away to stop it. The wretched child was only fourteen-and he wasn't very big for his age-so he went down like a sack of potatoes."

"Serves him right," said Maureen balefully. "He almost killed somebody not so long ago ... got eleven years for his troubles. That should tell you the sort of boy he was. It makes me sick the way we got dumped on all the time, when it was him and his tart of a mother caused all the problems in the street." A sly expression crept into her eyes. "Annie had their measure all right. She called Sharon a 'whore' and Michael a 'son of a bitch.' "

"Did she call her 'white trash'?"

"Nn-nn. 'Whore' ... 'ho' ... 'cunt.' Annie'd get going at the top of her voice every time she was with a client. It was pretty funny."

There was a time, I remembered, when she and Sharon had been thick as thieves, and I wondered what had happened to make them fall out. Something to do with money, I guessed, as it was the single passion they both shared. "So it was just the Slaters who were 'white trash'?" I murmured.

Maureen studied the end of her cigarette. "Think what you like," she said.

"Do you know who the man was who knocked Michael down?" I asked her.

She gave an indifferent shrug.

"It was your husband," I told her. "He was fighting drunk and caught Alan and Michael trying car doors to see if any of them were unlocked. Alan took to his heels but Michael stood his ground and ended up with a bloody face. I wanted to report Derek, but Michael said he'd take his anger out on you if we grassed him up. 'Mr. Slater's a right bastard,' he told me. 'He beats up on his missus every time his kids get the better of him.' " I watched her for a reaction, but there was none. "So I let Derek get away with it, and took Michael to my house instead of a police station. It was three hours before his nose stopped bleeding."

She stubbed out her cigarette, refusing to meet my eyes. "You can't blame me for that. Most of the time I didn't even know where Derek was, let alone what he was doing."

It sounded like the beginnings of a defense. "I'm not blaming you."

"Sure you are. You're like everyone else. It's Maureen's fault her kids were out of control. Maureen's fault she married a lousy husband. Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn't. But who the fuck ever cared about me? Tell me that."

"The vicar and his wife?"

Anger sparked briefly in her eyes. "They were more interested in the nigger than they were in me."

I looked away to hide my anger, recalling what Wendy Stanhope had said. The poor woman was always taking refuge with us... "I understood they took you in whenever Derek became violent."

"Only out of charity, never out of liking."

It was something she resented, I thought.

"The vicar knocked next door once a week. He never did that for me. I had to go looking for help."

"Perhaps he felt Annie had more to put up with."

"No more than we did. You should have heard her cursing and swearing at us through the wall."

"You said she only did it when you made a noise."

"Not always. Sometimes it was hard to say which came first ... her or us. She had a mouth like a sewer. When it wasn't 'white trash,' it was 'honkies' or 'scum.' It used to rile us up something rotten."

"She couldn't help herself," I said. "She suffered from a neuropsychiatric disorder called Tourette's syndrome. Sometimes it manifests itself as coprolalia, which is a compulsion to utter obscenities. Her mother was far more prone to it than Annie, but maybe Annie resorted to it when she was stressed."

"Then she should have been in a loony bin."

Does she believe that? I wondered. Or was it something she repeated like a mantra to excuse what she did? "A more sensible solution would have been for the council to rehouse you and your family somewhere else," I suggested. "To be honest, I never understood why they didn't. You lived entirely on benefit, had more social workers allocated to you than anyone else in the street, yet for some reason the pressure was always on Annie to move and never on you. That always seemed grossly unfair to me when she was a householder, paying rates, and you were paying nothing."

"That wasn't our fault. Derek was out of work. Would you have liked it better if we'd starved?"

I refused to be sidetracked. "Why did the council take your side against Annie's, Maureen? It must have been clear to them that she wasn't getting on with her neighbors."

"Why would it? She never complained."

"She called you 'white trash.' What's that if it's not a complaint?"

She lit another cigarette and shook her head at my stupidity. "I meant she didn't complain to the council."

I had to make a conscious effort to stop my mouth dropping open. I had imagined any number of conspiracy theories to account for why the Slaters and the Percys had been allowed to wage a terror campaign against Annie, but it had never entered my head that the explanation was so simple. "Are you saying that, despite all the complaints you and Sharon made against her, she never once retaliated?"

Maureen nodded.

"Why not?"

She didn't answer and another silence developed between us. She wore her hair in a tight ponytail and kept running the flat of her hand across her crown as if to check that the elastic was still in place. She seemed to be debating with herself whether after twenty years there was anything to be gained by telling the truth, although I guessed that her real concern-indeed the only reason we were having this conversation-was to find out how much I knew and what I was planning to do about it.

"She was too afraid of Derek," she admitted suddenly.

"To make an official complaint?"

"Yes."

"What did he do to stop her?"

Another silence, longer this time, before she gave an embarrassed shrug. "Killed one of her cats and said he'd kill the others if she ever spoke out against us. The thing is"-she wriggled her shoulders uncomfortably, knowing that nothing could excuse her husband's behavior or her complicity in it-"we'd been moved three times in three years, and we didn't want to move again. We sure as hell didn't want to go back to a high rise."

"No," I said slowly. "I don't suppose you did."

"It was only a cat."

"Mm." I paused to glance along the corridor. "It was quite a bargain when you think about it ... a cat for a house."

"There you are, then."

"Oh, no." I gave a small laugh. "Don't you dare bracket me with a sadist. If Derek had been married to me, he'd never have got near a cat. I'd have beaten his brains out with a sledgehammer the minute he lifted a finger against one of my children. Why were you such a coward? Why didn't you fight back?"

Her malice intensified. "You don't know what it was like. You didn't go in fear of your life every day. What do you think he'd have done to me and the kids if I'd tried to stop him?"

"Why didn't you go to the police?"

She shook her head scornfully as if the question weren't worth answering, and in fairness, it probably wasn't. Domestic violence was a low priority in 1978. As was harassment of black people.

"How did he kill the cat?" I asked, reverting to what interested me.

"Strangled it," she said irritably. "They kept coming into our garden, and he'd already warned her he wasn't going to stand for it. He chucked the body back over the fence with a note tied to its collar so she'd get the message."

"What did the note say?"

"I don't know, for sure. Something like he'd nail the next one to the fence. He didn't tell me about it till afterward." She watched me slyly through her lashes while she cooked up another defense. "I like cats. I'd have stopped him if I could. The children were all over them when we first came here ... they kept asking where the marmalade one was."

"When did it happen?"

"About two months before she died."

"September '78?"

"Probably."

I recalled John Hewlett's letter to Sheila Arnold. 1 made two recommendations on my first visit in March 1978: 1) that she install a cat flap in the kitchen door to allow the animals free access to and from the garden... "After you'd set the RSPCA inspector on to her then?"

Maureen tapped the glowing end of her cigarette against her saucer and watched a curl of ash deposit itself against the side. "I can't remember."

"His first visit was in March. He ordered her to put a cat flap in her door because you and Sharon kept complaining about the smell coming from her house."

She lifted a shoulder in a careless shrug.

"Weren't you worried she'd show Derek's note to him the next time he came?"

"She wouldn't have dared. She was almost as frightened of the RSPCA as she was of Derek."

"How did she let the cats out before she had the flap installed?"

"She never did. That's why the house stank."

"That's not true," I said bluntly. "You just told me how your children were all over the cats when you first came here. How could they have had any contact if there was no way for the animals to get out until the flap was installed?"

A stubborn note crept into Maureen's voice. "Maybe she didn't bother to close her back door."

"Well, did she or didn't she? You must have known. Your kitchens were next door to each other."

"Most of the time it was open." Her eyes caught mine, then slid away to hide their cunning. "That's what made us think she had chickens in there. The smell that came out of it was disgusting."

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" I said wearily. "The only stink 'round here was your family's body odor. God knows if you ever gave Alan a bath or washed his clothes, but no one wanted to sit next to him at school. Poor kid. He was always the first to be checked for head lice ... and always had them. Always the first to have his locker searched for missing games kit ... and always had it. The PE teacher asked him once what his problem was, and he said he liked things that smelled clean."

"It wasn't my fault," she said again, her voice rising to an irritating whine. "We didn't have a washing machine."

"Neither did we. I used the laundrette on the main road."

"You didn't have kids."

"Two machines take the same time as one."

"The bags were too heavy ... I couldn't abandon Danny ... In any case, I never had any money. Derek spent it all on drink."

I looked at the vodka bottle on the table. "He wasn't the only one." I rode roughshod over her attempt at a retort. "Why didn't you do the washing by hand in the bath? You weren't working. You had all day to devote to your children. The one thing you could have done was keep them clean."

"I did my best."

I'd waited so long to get this off my chest that caution gave way to honesty. "Then you should be ashamed of yourself," I said flatly. "I've seen women in Africa do better than that when all they had was a tub of cold water. You did nothing for your children, and the only reason Danny's a nice kid now is because somewhere along the line someone took an interest in him. I suspect it was Alan's wife"-I could see from her expression that I was right-"because it certainly wasn't you. You were in a drunken stupor most of the time ... like your husband."

She was surprisingly indifferent, as if she'd heard the same accusations many times before. "You do what you can to get by," she said, "and it wasn't always like that. Some days were better than others. In any case, you don't feel the pain so much when you're drunk. You should try having your face smashed into a brick wall once in a while and see how you like it."