Summoning the Dead (DI Bob Valentine #3)(21)

‘This way,’ he says, and he birls me around and shoves me towards the smaller place with the bars on the window. In there he stands talking to another man, who sits down. There’s some joking, and I think they’ve forgotten about me and maybe we’re not here to stay, that maybe we’re just waiting to go somewhere else, that maybe someone is coming to get me. I don’t like the place, not one bit.

‘You, boy,’ he shouts at me. ‘You, boy, get stripped.’

I don’t know what he’s saying. He gets up, still roaring, and points me to another door. It’s a washroom. I see the other man, the one with a nose like a hawk, go out the door we just came in.

There’s great orange tiles on the floor and walls and only a small window where the light gets in from outside, but it’s up high and has bars outside in case I was planning an escape. The water comes on from above, and the shower head splutters at first, and then it breaks into great jets.

‘Strip! Strip!’ shouts the man who’s off the seat now. He’s baldy and carries a great round belly in front of him. He looks mad, angry. I don’t know at what.

‘Get the bloody clothes off, boy, and get that scabby face of yours washed before I have to look at you again.’ He hands me a bar of soap. It’s strange soap, yellow but almost transparent too. The soap smells of medicine.

‘You’ll feel the lash of my belt if I have to tell you again,’ he bawls at me.

He doesn’t have to tell me again.

I shower for maybe an hour. It seems longer. He says I can come out when the soap’s gone but there’s still a great ball of it. I think of eating it, but the smell is terrible and makes me feel sick.

When the showers stop, I stand there in the washroom, on the orange tiles, and start to shiver. I shiver for long enough. I expect a towel or something, but there’s no towel. I look for my clothes, but they’re gone.

After a while the bald man shows up with a wicker basket. There’s a pewter bottle on top. He spins me round and pours something like talc on me, but it’s not the talc I know. He lifts up my arms and throws it there and on my bits. It smells like the worst of shite. I’m glad when he leaves me, pointing at the basket and saying, ‘Dress yourself.’

They’re somebody else’s clothes; they’ve been worn before. The shirt’s too big; it’s got stains on the front. It’s kind of grey, but I think it might have been a different colour altogether once. The collars and cuffs are frayed. There’s more shorts there too, black this time, and stiff as cardboard. I hate them. I have no shoes.

‘Right, up the house.’

‘What about shoes?’

‘Up the house – there’s shoes there.’

I go outside in my bare feet and follow the black bollards with the chains. I keep standing on little stones and when I yelp the bald man tells me to shut up or he’ll give me something to yelp about.

‘This way . . . No, through here . . . In there.’

We reach the kitchen. It’s the biggest kitchen I’ve ever seen. There’s a black range with a little door on the front where a woman puts coal. She’s older than Mammy was. I wonder who she is and will she be nice, but she doesn’t say a thing, only puts down a plate of yellow mush called swede and a piece of bread. The bread is too hard to bite, but I’m famished so I find a way.

The baldy man goes now; he tells me to wait for the master. I eat every scrap of food and lick the plate clean, and the woman says don’t let the master see you doing that. She takes the plate as he appears in the door, tall and thin, a full suit of clothes and a shirt with a tie and a pin in it.

He says, ‘Feet. C’mon, show me your feet.’

I bring my feet from under the table and he looks down at them, then he disappears back through the door. In a minute he’s back, measuring a boot against my foot.

‘Try it on.’

‘It’s too big,’ I say.

‘Well that’s better than too small.’

He makes me walk up and down the kitchen and watches every step I take, his hands resting on his hips. I think of everyone I’ve seen so far he frightens me the most. He doesn’t talk much, doesn’t shout, but I think he doesn’t need to because he’s the master and he knows it.

I think of Mammy again, and the squat, and how it ended, but I still think I’d sooner be there. I want it all to have been a bad dream, so I can wake up and see Mammy and have my old clothes back and be how things used to be. But I know now that’s not going to happen, and things are going to be very different, and I don’t like any of it.





13

‘I didn’t know you could still find places like this,’ said DS McCormack.

‘They’re there – you’re just not looking hard enough,’ said Valentine, unfastening his jacket buttons as they approached the bar.

The last time they’d visited there had been an old rockabilly behind the bar; Valentine remembered the swallow tattoo on the man’s hand and the Brylcreemed hair. He had an eye for distinguishing features that he’d honed over the years.

Their server today was an elderly woman in a pink tabard. Her white hair was permed into corkscrews, a look that couldn’t have changed for decades. She wore a dirty pair of tartan slippers behind the bar and had an NHS-issue walking stick leaning against the till. Valentine found her presence soothing in its familiarity, and the mood of the bar was relaxing in its complete lack of pretension.