Creatures of the Pool Read online

  The front doors fly open, ejecting officers who resemble bouncers in a different uniform. The driver’s broad nose is dented in the middle, and his colleague looks quite as ready for the fight the driver must have had. “In the car,” he grunts.

  Is that how he usually speaks to the driver? I share his urgency but am shy of aping his brusqueness. “I’m sure they’ve gone in there,” I say under my breath. “Have they got a car, do you think? Maybe one of you should—”

  “In the car.”

  This time it’s the driver, and I grasp that he’s addressing me. “Let me just show you—”

  “Car.”

  It’s the turn of the man whose nose has yet to be broken. “They’ve left tracks,” I protest. “Hadn’t you better, I mean, in case—”

  “Car.”

  Both guardians of the law have said it now. Each repetition feels like a flare of pain in my head, and the latest goads me to say “You don’t seem to understand. Suppose—”

  There’s only one way for them to use fewer words. The man with the unbroken nose steps around the car, and they close in on me. They’ve moved just two weighty paces in unison before their wide faces, which look flattened and blanched by the glare of the streetlamps, break out in drops that trickle over their skin, and their uniforms begin to glisten. As if they’ve brought it with them, the black sky is releasing a cloudburst. “This is what I was afraid of,” the drumming of rain on my skull drives me to object. “Can’t you see—”

  “Car.”

  Do they mean to overcome me by speaking in chorus? I suspect it was inadvertent, and the scowls they’re training on me are designed to pretend it didn’t happen. My mouth struggles to contain a giggle that may border on hysteria. As my face works like a schoolboy’s, the men stretch out large hands that drip luridly illuminated water. The hands look like a threat of bruising if not worse, and all at once I’ve had enough of the downpour and the men’s monolithic refusal to listen. Before they can grab me I make for the vehicle. “Fair enough, car. As you say, car. Right you are, car. Where would you like me? Up front or behind?”

  The dentless officer lunges at me—no, past me—and throws open the door behind the driver’s. As I duck under the roof spiked with raindrops he finds it necessary to give me a hand, which revives the pounding of my head and presses me down into more of a crouch. He slams the door after me, and his unstable dim misshapen blur appears on the other side of the car. He and his colleague regain their bulky shapes as he climbs in beside me while the driver sits at the wheel, and then there’s silence apart from the metallic thunder of rain overhead. “You’re keeping watch,” I say. “There isn’t any other way out.”

  Perhaps this sounds insufficiently questioning to deserve an answer, and I raise my voice. “Shouldn’t you put the wipers on?”

  “We’ve been watching,” says the driver.

  “You’ll have seen what happened, then.” Apparently this too is unworthy of a response, and so I try “You’ll have seen where they went.”

  My seatmate turns so that his knees crowd me against the locked door. “Anything you want to tell us?”

  “I saw someone killed. Worse than killed.” The policemen look as if they know this isn’t true, and I say hastily “I don’t mean I saw it happen. I saw them.”

  “Saw what?” the driver insists.

  “They’d been cut open and things put in.” The memory lights up in my head like a glaring slide projected on a screen, and I wish I could extinguish it. “Frogs,” I say. “Live frogs.”

  The staccato metallic barrage above my head is slackening, but I’m reminded that the rain must have washed away the trail. The policemen are staring at my words with no expression I can read. “What did you see?” I demand.

  The rain pats the roof a few times and streams soundlessly down the windows. The driver might have been waiting for quiet before he says “You.”

  “We’ve been watching you,” his colleague finds it necessary to add.

  “Did you see who attacked me? Why didn’t you—” Perhaps it’s inadvisable to accuse them, and I interrupt myself. “How long was I out?”

  “Depends what you mean by out of it,” says my bulky seatmate.

  “You haven’t told us what we want to hear yet.”

  “Been having yourself some fun, have you?”

  My head throbs with mingled pain and anger as I blurt “Maybe violence is your idea of fun. It’s certainly not mine.”

  Have I invited some? My seatmate hasn’t finished watching me as though he’s daring me to make a move when the driver says “Sounds like he still is.”

  “Had a bit to drink, have you?”

  “I haven’t even had dinner.”

  “Had a bit more than a drink?”

  “Certainly not. Nothing of the kind. That’s not my scene at all.” Perhaps I should have appeared not to understand, and I fundamentally don’t, which is why I protest “Just what are you accusing me of?”

  The driver scowls at me out of his mirrored strip of face. “Wasting our time.”

  “If anybody’s doing that, it’s you. Why aren’t you finding the body and the people who did it?”

  The man beside me sits towards me, and I’ve nowhere to retreat. As my head throbs as if to warn me that I’ve gone too far he says “There’s nobody. Just you.”

  My shoulders thump the window. The windscreen squirms with rain dislodged from the roof, and I feel as though the world has shifted too. “What are you trying to say? I—”

  “The camera saw you fall down all by your own self,” says the driver.

  Another trickle traces a random path down the windscreen, but it seems more like a fissure in my reality. “Where did you come from?” the driver says. “Got anywhere to live?”

  “I live right here in the city. I own my apartment. I’m Pool of Life Tours and a whole lot more. If you mean how I look, I was in bed when I heard what was happening. I put on the first things I could lay my hands on. Give me a breath test if you want. I’ll take a drug test too.”

  “No need for that,” my seatmate says, though ominously. “Where do you live?”

  “Trident Street. It’s off—”

  “We know it,” says the driver. “Long way to hear whatever you’re saying you did.”

  “There wasn’t anything else to hear, and for God’s sake, they were screaming.”

  “Funny nobody else heard,” says my seatmate.

  “Someone did. I still can’t believe he was shouting at them to be quiet.”

  “Maybe they meant you,” the driver says.

  “Maybe you were sleepwalking and making a row in your sleep.”

  “Looked like you were,” the driver says and starts the engine. “We’ll get you home.”

  “You’re not just going to drive off without—”

  His colleague plants a fist on the narrow gap between us on the seat, displaying scabbed knuckles. “Count yourself lucky as fuck that’s all we’re doing.”

  The car swerves up the sloping road, throwing me against the door as if I’ve flinched from him. We’re speeding into Whitechapel when a small wet shape leaps into the headlamp beams. The driver yanks at the wheel, and I think he’s avoiding the creature until his intentions become clear. Though I scarcely feel the impact, his eyes in the mirror express satisfaction. “What was that?” I almost shout.

  “Bloody nothing,” says the driver.

  His stare and his colleague’s could be applying the description to me or anticipating its appropriateness. I’m silent while the car veers uphill through a red light into Dale Street. As we race past Waterworth’s office I’m able to reflect that I did at least email him the information, even if simultaneously listening to the phone-in made me add Lucinda Wade as a recipient by mistake. Cheapside and the neighbouring lanes appear to be reaching underwater for their inverted selves. A sweep of the windscreen wipers reveals a vista of the black river before the car plunges downhill and swings into Trident Street, pinnin
g a shadow against the wall opposite the apartments. The shadow of the lamppost flees towards the entrance to the offices and vanishes as I say “Here. I’m here.”

  The car halts not quite violently enough to thump my head against the back of the driver’s seat. As my skull celebrates the revival of pain, the driver says “That’s where I’d stay if I was you.”

  When he releases the locks I clamber out of the vehicle and fumble for my keys while the policemen watch as if they suspect me of only pretending I’m home. For several seconds the key doesn’t turn in the door, and I’ve begun to wonder if it’s the wrong one by the time it works. I ease the door shut behind me and hear the car disappear none too swiftly into the distance.

  The pen in its pot on the antique desk emits a faint rattle as I cross the lobby. Otherwise the building is quiet except for my padded footfalls. My head feels like a raw lump embedded with incomplete bewildered thoughts. Has my father phoned while I was out? I only just remember not to slam my door as I hurry to the answering machine, where the blind eye of a zero meets my gaze. I’m unzipping my jacket and trudging to the bathroom when, as though in response to my hopes or fears, the mobile wriggles against my hip. It’s halfway through its undersea verse before I see that the caller’s number is withheld. I’m dismayed to have to nerve myself to say “Hello?”

  “Mr Meadows?”

  “Gavin Meadows, yes.” It’s the Lancashire policeman, and I’m nervous of learning why. “What’s…” I say, and eventually “What’s the news?”

  At first he doesn’t answer, and I switch on the bathroom light in case that provides any reassurance. A large drop of water plummets from the tap into the sink as though the light has drawn it out of hiding. I’m reluctantly opening my mouth to urge him to tell me the worst when he says “Where were you?”

  This is one more bewilderment to add to the mass in my aching skull. “Where—”

  “You weren’t where you called us to,” he says, and with even less patience “I’d advise you to tell me where you were and why.”

  Chapter Eleven

  HERE WE ARE AGAIN

  How long does it take to convince the police that I was with the police? It feels like the rest of the night as surreptitious hints of dawn creep into the street outside the windows, under cover of the light from the lamp at the intersection. No, I don’t know the names of the policemen or their numbers or where they came from. All I know is that they said they saw me and nothing else. They didn’t see a murder or any evidence of one, but they didn’t arrest me for wasting police time because (I tell him, having discovered some craftiness in the midst of the pain in my head) they said they saw me sleepwalking. I must have tripped over a broken section of pavement and knocked myself unconscious, which surely gives me grounds to sue the council. My not entirely fake display of rage seems to impress him with my truthfulness, perhaps even when I suggest that, having regained some kind of consciousness, I mistook imagination for a memory and called him in a panic. My increasingly genuine anger, or the pain it exacerbates, almost goads me to point out that if whoever he sent had treated my call as more of an emergency, there wouldn’t be all this confusion. Eventually he warns me that I may be hearing further from the police.

  I hope so—about my father. I say as much before ending the call and stumbling to the bathroom for a drink of water and a handful splashed in my face. It’s too soon to add to the pair of painkillers I swallowed while suffering the interrogation. I have to shut my eyes and plant a hand against the corridor wall in order to retrieve the mobile from the floor. I grope my way into the bedroom and subside on the bed. My thoughts have already started to clamour. Do I really believe I could have imagined the murder? It wouldn’t be the first or the hundredth time that a security camera missed an incident. Shouldn’t I go back and look for any evidence I could photograph with my mobile? I need to rest my head first. It’s not yet five o’clock, but it’s more than twice that when the mobile brings me back into the world.

  I feel as if I’ve hardly slept. Too often when I tried I was confronted by a supine body from which objects appeared to be hatching and swarming under a glare as white as moonlight but less natural. I force my eyes open a second time despite the painful glow through the curtains and read my parents’ number. “Yes,” I say far too sharply out of nervousness. “Sorry, I mean hello.”

  “It’s only me,” my mother says. “Am I interrupting? Isn’t this a good time?”

  I hope it is, especially for her. At least I seem to have left patches of my headache somewhere in my sleep. “I was just dozing,” I say and shut my eyes.

  “I wish I hadn’t woken you. You’ve got enough to keep you busy without me bothering you.”

  “You know I’m always here if you need me. You call whenever you’ve a reason, and don’t think twice.”

  “I haven’t much.”

  “You haven’t…”

  “Heard from your father, no. You won’t have either, will you?”

  “I haven’t.” Part of my brain must still be asleep for me to add “Well, except—”

  “What, Gavin? When did you speak to him? What did he say?”

  “He didn’t. That is, I didn’t. He left messages before I got home.” My head revives its ache as I concentrate on not betraying that he was loath to worry her, though now of course he has. “He wanted to talk and that’s pretty well all I can tell you,” I say. “He seemed to be ringing from different places but I don’t know where.”

  “Do you think the police should have a listen?”

  I’m dismayed to realise that I didn’t store the messages, which could be erased by more recent ones. I open my eyes and dash into my workroom to find the zero glaring sightlessly at me. The quickest way to protect the messages is by turning off the machine, and I flick the switch at the foot of the wall. “I’ll give them a ring,” I say as I straighten up, none too steadily. “Did they contact you?”

  “They did.”

  Her tone is so much more tentative than her words that I say “Was there a problem?”

  “They came when I was asleep. I just hope I gave them everything they need. They took a photo, took one away, I mean. And one of them had a good look at the computer.” As if she’s anxious to prove she wasn’t wholly passive she says “I told them to listen to the phone-in to see if that’s any use.”

  This prompts me to ask “Did you ever meet Beverley from Everton?”

  “I don’t know the woman. Your father used to go on about her. She sounded like she made things up to get attention.” With barely a pause my mother says “Had you better call, then?”

  “The police.”

  “That’s right, Gavin. Not that woman. I know your father loved the past, but there are limits.”

  We murmur reassurances and goodbyes, and eventually my mother brings the routine to an end. I give the occurrence number to a woman whose briskness sounds like a caution against wasting police time, and then I’m wary of hearing the familiar Lancashire voice. She connects me with another woman, however, who undertakes to send someone to listen to the messages. “I don’t suppose you could say when,” I wonder, and her silence makes me add “If you could call this mobile that would be a help.”

  At least I should have time to use the bathroom. Once I’ve shaved, having been put in mind of an identikit sketch of my father’s face, I leave the mobile and the landline receiver outside the door. I’ve turned down the shower so that its onslaught doesn’t fall too vigorously on my tender head, which is decorated with a large painterly bruise that I’m glad my mother can’t see, when a bell sounds in the corridor.

  I quell the shower and run to thumb the intercom. I’m only beginning to speak when a voice announces “Police.”

  “Well, that was quick. Pretty superheroic.” I don’t mean him to hear this; it’s more the kind of comment my father would relish. I hold down the button to release the street door and am blurring my wet footprints with another trail when the bell peals again. I trudge ba
ck to the intercom. “Hello?” I say. “Problem?”

  “Something’s blocking your door. You’ll need to come down.”

  I dash to the bathroom and grab my robe. Donning it and stuffing phones into the pockets restart my headache. My bare feet find a chill through the carpet as I run down the marble stairs. Has someone moved the obstruction? There’s nothing in front of the door except a dark stain on the carpet. It’s water—it must be from outside—and chills my feet further as I open the door.

  A police car is parked on the pavement less than two feet beyond it. A voice is croaking inside the vehicle, and it takes me a moment to identify it as a message on a radio, because I’m distracted by the sight of the pair of policemen in front of the car. Their closeness isn’t the only reason why I retreat a soggy inadvertent step. “Good God, it’s you again,” the man with the dented nose says, or I would.

  Chapter Twelve

  GETTING THE MESSAGE

  It must have been raining while I was in the bathroom. The roadway still glistens, and as he follows his brokennosed colleague the other policeman shakes spray doglike from his hair. He shuts the door hard, and they stare at the carpet in front of it. “Looks like somebody wanted to get in our way,” he says.

  “Scared of us too by the looks.”

  Once they’ve surveyed the lobby with particular attention to the desk, the dented man remarks “Rickety old item.”

  “Wants getting rid of.” They gaze at me, and the dented fellow enquires “Fond of museums?”