Himself(19)

‘It happens. I read about some kid found in a woodshed.’

‘You think that’s possible? A live wire like Orla in a woodshed?’ Mrs Cauley speaks evenly. ‘You think your mother was murdered and so do I. Now I thought we’d established that?’

Johnnie strolls through the French doors, throws his faint hat down on the end of the bed and disappears. In a moment Mahony sees a plume of spectral pipe smoke coming from behind a large stack of encyclopaedias in the far corner.

Mahony nods. ‘So what’s next?’

‘We play to our strengths, isn’t that how the best detectives work? With my mind and your unnatural talents we’ll have this case cracked in no time.’

Mahony gets up, takes her cup and his and puts them on the bedside table. He pours another measure into each and wonders if he’ll ever feel his feet again. ‘All right, Miss Marple, but, first of all, how do you know so much about my unnatural talents?’

She grins. ‘Husband number four was an eminent clairvoyant.’

‘Four, is it? Jesus. So that would be the dead fella with the moustache?’

She shakes her head and smiles. ‘No, Johnnie was my fiancé. We never married, although he was the most beloved.’

Mahony puts a drink into her hand. ‘He was the one that got away?’

‘Something like that,’ says Mrs Cauley. She frowns. ‘I want to try something, Mahony.’ She takes off her visor and reaches for a headscarf hung over the bedpost. ‘Is there a breeze tonight?’

Mahony looks at her. ‘God knows. The night is still.’

‘We’ll give it a go anyways, although it’s better with a drop of wind to get it started.’

Mrs Cauley sidles to the edge of the bed. ‘Help me to get standing.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Did you know, Mahony, that literature can be very illuminating?’

Mrs Cauley reaches for her walking frame and with Mahony’s help moves her legs off the bed and puts on her slippers. With great effort she stands and Mahony sees how small she is, not quite five feet tall and the weight of dry hide and honeycombed bone alone.

She sways, curved and calcified by time, smiling up at him. ‘Open the doors, Mahony.’

The French doors are stuck fast and blossoming with mould but eventually they give and the night air falls in around Mahony as if it’s been waiting with its face pressed against the glass.

‘That’s it. Throw them wide.’

The night air stalks into the room and starts to tease the dust along the skirting boards.

Mrs Cauley takes a step forward, stumbling a little in her carpet slippers. ‘Look around you,’ she whispers. ‘The room is changing. See? The lights are burning brighter? Can’t you feel it? The books want to tell you something. They want to help.’

And then Mahony feels it.

The books, the papers and the magazines: all of them pulsing with a faint heartbeat. They’re watching him, holding their breath. Mahony suddenly wants to shout against the pressure of all of these waiting words.

Mrs Cauley turns to Mahony and lowers her voice. ‘I last did this when Shauna’s mother left for England. I knew exactly what she was up to when Lady Chatterley’s Lover started snapping at my ankles. To say nothing of the fact that Ibsen flew across the room and nearly took the head off me.’ She knots her headscarf grimly. ‘It was A Doll’s House, so I know she won’t be back.’

Johnnie emerges from a dark corner. The ghost of a smile teases the ragged curtains of his dim moustache; with a nod to Mahony he lies down on the floor and glides under the bed.

The breeze whisks a flurry of play scripts up into the air where they drift in graceful arcs. As Mahony watches, their movements begin to change. They start to circle the room, slowly at first, then picking up speed until they whirr past with the dedication of Wall of Death bikers. Soon light pamphlets of philosophical thought start to join them, skidding across the floor and fluttering up into the whirling cloud of paper. Slim volumes of difficult poems come next, scuttling out from dark corners and flapping headlong into the swirling gyre. Even the most aloof classics join in, shedding their covers and flinging themselves, one after the other, into the vortex.

In the middle stands Mrs Cauley, clinging to her walking frame.

Then all at once the cyclone stops and the wind rushes out of the French doors.

And everything falls down to the ground.

Johnnie springs out from under the bed and, with a look of profound effort on his face, blows a sheet of paper through the air and into the outstretched hands of Mrs Cauley.

‘Close the window, Mahony,’ she says. ‘We’ve got something.’

Johnnie collapses, flickering.

Mrs Cauley studies the sheet of paper. ‘Now that’s some class of a hint.’

Johnnie curls up at her feet like a dying beetle. Sometimes twitching out one long limb, sometimes moaning soundlessly.

‘What is it?’ Mahony wades through drifts of papers.

‘It’s a playbill, Mahony.’

He reads her name on it. ‘You were in this play?’

‘I’m right there.’

Mahony looks at the playbill. In the photograph a dark-haired girl stands smiling with her head tilted and her hands on her hips. Johnnie stops twitching and gets up off the floor. He straightens his waistcoat and tries to put his arm around her.