The Suspect

10

A bell tinkles above my head as I enter the shop. The aromas of scented oils, perfumed candles and herbal poultices curl into my nostrils. Narrow shelves made of dark wood stretch from the floor to the ceiling. These are crammed with incense, soap, oils and bell jars full of everything from pumice stones to seaweed.

A large woman emerges from behind a partition. She wears a brightly colored caftan that starts at her throat and billows outward over huge breasts. Strings of beads sprout from her skull and clack as she walks.

“Come, come, don’t be shy,” she says, waving me toward her. This is Louise Elwood. I recognize her voice from the phone. Some people look like their voices. She is one of them— deep, low and loud. Bangles clink on her arms as she shakes my hand. At the center of her forehead is a pasted red dot.

“Oh my, oh my, oh my,” she says, holding her hand beneath my chin. “You are just in time. Look at those eyes. Dull. Dry. You haven’t been sleeping well, have you? Toxins in the blood. Too much red meat. Maybe a wheat allergy. What happened to your ear?”

“An overzealous hairdresser.”

She raises an eyebrow.

“We spoke on the phone,” I explain. “I’m Professor O’Loughlin.”

“Typical! Look at the state of you! Doctors and academics make the worst patients. They never take their own advice.”

She pirouettes with remarkable agility and bustles deeper into the shop. At the same time she keeps talking. There are no obvious signs of a man in her life. Photographs of children on the noticeboard are probably nieces and nephews. She is self-conscious about her size, but makes it part of her personality. She has a Burmese (cat hair), a drawer full of chocolates (tinsel on the floor) and a taste for romance writers (The Silent Lady by Catherine Cookson).

Behind the partition is a small back room with just enough space for a table, three chairs and a bench containing a small sink. An electric kettle and a radio are plugged into the lone socket. The center of the table has a women’s magazine open at the crossword.

“Herbal tea?”

“Do you have coffee?”

“No.”

“Tea will be fine.”

She rattles off a list of a dozen different blends. By the time she’s finished I’ve forgotten the first few.

“Chamomile.”

“Excellent choice. Good for relieving stress and tension.” She pauses. “You’re not a believer are you?”

“I have never been able to work out why herbal tea smells so wonderful, but tastes so bland.”

She laughs. Her whole body shakes. “The taste is subtle. It works in harmony with the body. Smell is the most immediate of all our senses. Touch might develop earlier and be the last to fade, but smell is hot-wired directly into our brains.”

She sets out two small china cups and fills a ceramic teapot with steaming water. The tea leaves are filtered twice through a silver sieve before she pushes a cup toward me.

“You don’t read tea leaves then?”

“I think you’re making fun of me, Professor.” She’s not offended.

“Fifteen years ago you were a teacher at St. Mary’s.”

“For my sins.”

“Do you remember a boy called Bobby Morgan?”

“Of course I do.”

“What do you remember about him?”

“He was quite bright, although a little self-conscious about his size. Some of the other boys used to tease him because he wasn’t very good at sports, but he had a lovely singing voice.”

“You taught the choir?”

“Yes.”

“I once suggested singing lessons, but his mother wasn’t the most approachable of women. I only saw her once at the school. She came to complain about Bobby stealing money from her purse to pay for an excursion to the Liverpool Museum.”

“What about his father?”

She looks at me quizzically. Clearly, I’m expected to know something. Now she is trying to decide whether to continue.

“Bobby’s father wasn’t allowed at the school,” she says. “He had a court order taken out against him when Bobby was in the second grade. Didn’t Bobby tell you any of this?”

“No.”

She shakes her head. Beads swing from side to side. “I raised the alarm. Bobby had wet himself in class twice in a few weeks. Then he soiled his pants and spent most of the afternoon hiding in the boys’ toilets. He was upset. When I asked him what was wrong he wouldn’t say. I took him to the school nurse. She found him another pair of trousers. That’s when she noticed the welts on his legs. It looked as though he’d been beaten.”

The school nurse followed the normal procedure and informed the deputy headmistress who, in turn, notified the Department of Social Services. I know the process by heart. A duty social worker would have taken the referral. It was then discussed with an area manager. The dominoes started falling— medical examinations, interviews, allegations, denials, case conferences, “at risk” findings, interim care orders, appeals— each tumbling into the next.

“Tell me about the court order,” I ask.

She recalls only scant details. Allegations of sexual abuse, which the father denied. A restraining order. Chaperoning Bobby between classes.

“The police investigated but I don’t know the outcome. The deputy headmistress dealt with the social workers and police.”

“Is she still around?”

“No. She resigned eighteen months ago; family reasons.”

“What happened to Bobby?”

“He changed. He had a stillness about him that you don’t see in most children. A lot of the teachers found it very unnerving.” She stares into her teacup, tilting it gently back and forth. “When his father died he became even more isolated. It was as though he was on the outside, with his face pressed against the glass.”

“Do you think Bobby was abused?”

“St. Mary’s is in a very poor area, Dr. O’Loughlin. In some households just waking up in the morning is a form of abuse.”

I know almost nothing about cars. I can fill them with petrol, put air in the tires and water in the radiator, but I have no interest in makes, models or the dynamics of the modern combustion engine. Usually I take no notice of other vehicles on the road but today it’s different. I keep seeing a white van. I noticed it first this morning when I left the Albion Hotel. It was parked opposite. The other cars were covered in frost, but not the van. The windshield and back window had ragged circles of clear glass.

The same white van— or another one just like it— is parked on a delivery ramp opposite Louise Elwood’s shop. The back doors are open. I can see Hessian sacks inside, lining the floor. There must be hundreds of white vans in Liverpool: perhaps a whole fleet of them belonging to a courier company.

After last night I’m seeing phantoms lurking in every doorway and sitting in cars. I walk across the market square, stopping at a department store window. Studying the reflection, I can see the square behind me. Nobody is following.

I haven’t eaten. Seeking out warmth, I find a café on the first floor of a shopping arcade, overlooking the atrium. From my table I can watch the escalators.

H. L. Mencken— journalist, beer drinker and sage— said that for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong. I share his mistrust for the obvious.

At university I drove my lecturers to distraction by constantly questioning straightforward assumptions. “Why can’t you just accept things as they are?” they asked. “Why can’t the easy answer be right?”

Nature isn’t like that. If evolution had been about simple answers we would all have bigger brains and not watch You’ve Been Framed, or smaller brains and not invent weapons of mass destruction. Mothers would have four arms and babies would leave home after six weeks. We would all have titanium bones, UV-resistant skin, X-ray vision and the ability to have permanent erections and multiple orgasms.

Bobby Morgan— I’ll call him by his real name now— had many of the hallmarks of sexual abuse. Even so, I don’t want it to be true. I have grown to like Lenny Morgan. He did a lot of things right when he raised Bobby. People warmed to him. Bobby adored him.

Perhaps Lenny had two sides to his personality. There is nothing to stop an abuser being a safe, loving figure. It would certainly explain his suicide. It could also be the reason why Bobby needed two personalities to survive.