Beth, or The Missing Girl. Part 3

A strange meeting.

I hovered about. I lit a cigarette. The 'phone was on a console table in the hall. A picture hung on th e wss, the image of a bowl of Longhi lilies. The picture was painted by Fantin -Latour and was inherited from a great aunt. For a moment I just stood there smoking and losing myself in the darkness of the painting.

There was an ashtray on the table next to the phone. The ashtray featured the face of the pope milling and waving. I squashed out my cigarette on his nose.

I dialled 1471, then the number the automated service gave me.

"Hello," I said. "Is that Cath?"

"Yes," said the voice.

"This is Clancy Smiles."

"Hello Clancy"."

"What do you mean, Beth is dead?" I asked.

"I mean, she has died," she replied.

"How?" I asked.

"I think you should come here," said the voice.

"My God," Is said, "who are you? Why are you being so...so damn...mysterious?"

There was a pause. I lit another cigarette.

"Clancy." The voice was slow and quiet. "I think you may be taking this badly."

She gave me her address. I wrote it down on the pad.

Before I left the apartment I looked over to the dining room. The dinner things were still sitting there on the table. The light from the windows behind caught them, bouncing off their hard surfaces sharply. I could see the sombre facades of the buildings across the road, huge caryatid orders flanking tiny, feminine balconies.

Then I put on my overcoat. I turned to a mirror. I saw my face. It was wet: I had been crying.

I shivered even with my overcoat on outside. I held the address In my pink hands and read it: 11 Silesia Road, Hackney. Too far to walk.

What was Beth doing living in East London. It did not seem to be the right sort of place for her; too harsh.

I travelled to Islington, where I crossed over to the platform to wait on the North London Line. There were bits of litter blowing about outside on the platform. Someone had torn the timetable off the wall. A bearded man wrapped in innumerable layers of clothes like a huge ragged pupae shuffled about, then drawing a bottle form those wrappings, poured a coppery liquid into his tiny red orifice. Three teenagers, all pubic moustaches and menace eyed us as we waited. The train came in slowly: I got in: thankfully the teenagers stayed behind.

I felt a kind of shock when I came out of the station: the place was in a terrible state. All the buildings needed renovation and there was an aura of collapse everywhere, An old woman, head down, bumped me, then turned and apologised with a dreadful cringing.

"Can you tell me the way to Empire Road?" I asked her.

"Empire Road?" said the lady, "down there on the left." She scuttled off.

Did she think I was going to beat her up?

I walked on down the hill. The sky became suddenly bright with a silvery pallor. Then clouds blustered across, all gormless again.

I reached a giant Victorian block. I pressed the buzzer. Presently, a voice came from the speaker: Cath's voice.

"Come on up. First floor, right hand side."

I climbed a huge, steep staircase up the dingy interior. The door was slightly open: I knocked on it, then went in.

I arrived in a hall with marble floors, hung with green wallpaper: a motif of vines.

"You've arrived" I head a voice from my left,

"Yes," I said. "Good afternoon. Are you Cath?"

She was not taller than me; her posture was good. There was something austere about her. Hs e had dark hair which was put up and held in place with a golden clasp, in a style better suited to a much older woman. Her dress was green with a paisley print. She wore a black choker round her neck.

"Yes, "said the woman. "I am. You are Clancy, " she added.

"Yes. I am, " I answered. "I am Clancy Smiles".

"Come this way." She spoke as we walked down the corridor to a room overlooking the street. "You know, Clancy, we have met before."

"You said," I said. "But I can't place when for some reason."

"We attended the same lectures," she said. "We both studied at Vale's."

I did not mention that I still did not recognise her.

I was led to a room with a sofa, a chaise longue and some easy chairs. There was a music system too. But the most impressive thing about theroom as giant stuffed pig on a mahogany case on a giant sideboard.

"Yes," she said.

"How did she die?" I asked.

"She drank vodka and took some paracetamol."

"I'm sorry, " I said, uselessly.

Cath stood up. "Let me get you something. A gin and tonic?"

"Thanks."

She went over to the sideboard; she came back with the drinks.

"suicide?"

"Probably, " said Cath.

I drank the gin.

Cath sat down opposite me again. " I do not know how close you were to Beth. We were not close. She did not tell me about what she did or how she felt. She did leave this note, however."

The note read: "No-one should feel beholden to me. I cannot live with the burden of myself. I am no stranger to myself, and the knowledge that I have is too troubling to bear. I shall not go on."

"Is that is?" I said.

"Yes," said Cath.

"How did you know to contact me?"

"She told me about you."

"Did she?"

"She was in love with you."

"If she was in love with me then why didn't she contact me before?"

"I cannot answer that," said Cath. "We were not that close.

I stared at the pig.

"The funeral is on Saturday," added Cath.

I returned home.

There was a riddle to be solved. It was the riddle of Beth's demise.

Beth, or The Missing Girl. Part 2

I set out the dinner things in my dining room before leaving for work that morning in anticipation of our returning there. The day passed quickly. I worked in a travel agency which specialised in tours for elderly people. Often their tours had a cultural element: I was responsible for setting these elements up; finding guides and organising itineraries. I had spent the day in discussion with the Austrian Board of Tourism. They were going to find a guide who spoke English for a day in Vienna. That day would be concerned with the Secession in Austria.

My desk was at the back of the hop. At the close of day I heard the door open.

I looked across: it was a woman. But it was not Beth.

She turned to me: hello

Hello, I said

Do you do any trips to Russia, she asked.

Madam, I said, I strongly advise you against visiting Russia. It's government is scarcely legal and the whole place is awash with cannibals.

She broke into a laugh. I've been to Russia many times. I want to know about going to St Petersburg. My mother wishes to go to see the Hermitage.

I went to get her the brochures.

She left. Ten past six. No-one.

Perhaps Beth was late. I decided to wait. I went through he racks straightening things. I went into the kitchen and tidied the mugs. I got a cloth from there and a can of furniture polish and I sprayed it on the surface of the desks. Then I polished them with a cloth.

I got sick of waiting. I dialled her number. No reply.

I went out of the shop. There was no-one standing outside.

Then I got a call at home some days later in the morning at 9am.

"Is that Clancy?"

"Yes," I said

"Maybe you don't remember me. Its Cath."

"O."

"I'm Beth's sister."

"Ah," I said

-Well," she said, "You should know something."

"What," I said

"Beth is dead," said the voice.

"O," I said.

"Yes," she said.

She put down the phone.

*

That can't be right, I thought.

A True Story

The tragic story of something that happened to me in 1998 when I was living in London.

I was in a taxi. I was a lawyer. It was 1998, and it must have been when I was working on the D. fraud case. I can't remember where I told the taxi to go, but it must have been to collect some documents, I was forever going to collect documents from offices suspected by the investigating team, of which I was a member.

He drove, I looked about me: on the floor of the cab I found a small white envelope. I picked it up.

Inside it a piece of white "Basildon Bond" paper, folded. I opened it. A handwritten note said, "When you get this I will be dead".

I read the date on the note, it was yesterday's. I looked again at the envelope: there was a sender's address on the back. I told the cab to go there.

He drove. The address was in Camden. I remember the cab turning from the original destination, along Regent's Park, past the mosque. I remember September trees and sharp sunlight. Autumn, the air was fresh and clean. We stopped to allow some children with a teacher in a crocodile going over a zebra crossing, their little legs pink in the cool day, perhaps they were going to the zoo. We passed a woman in sunglasses with two whippets, brightly dressed tourists turning a map around, two tramps smoking on a bench.

The driver went north through some residential streets to a large house, a villa. The garden was muddy, there was barely grass where a lawn should have been, the tree in the front was a threadbare hawthorn. The house needed painting, the stucco was coming off in slabs, raw brick beneath. The door was painted green, faded, there was a white piece of paper stuck on it somehow.

I gave the driver a bank note, he drove away. I ran to the door. I became aware then of another man rushing up to the door too, he was in a dark coat. The paper on the door was a sign, it said, "do not come in if you are squeamish". We looked at each other: I saw his sallow complexion, his unshaven face, his dark hair. I wonder what he thought of me. We banged on the door with our fists and he cried, "Open up! Open up!", but there was no response. Simultaneously, we threw our shoulders hard against the door. It gave little, but I heard a creaking. We launched ourselves at it again, the hinge burst from the frame with a crack.

Then we kicked at the door until it fell. We ran into the hall. There was a strange silence there. We looked at each other. He was a cautious man like me. With an instinct we lurched into the kitchen.

There was a kitchen stool lying on the ground; there was the man who had written the note, hanging from a rope attached to the light flex. He swayed gently to and fro. I did not see his face.

I looked over to the other man but he was not there, he was gone. I ran into the hall, I saw a door ajar, I pushed it open, there obscured by piles of books and papers, a table. On it, a computer and an open telephone. I picked up the phone; I could get a tone. I called an ambulance.

I stood there for a moment looking at all the books everywhere I remember one title, "Bacteria and their Destruction". Perhaps the man was a microbiologist.

An ambulance arrived, the police too. I told them what I knew, then I left.

What divine sensibility could allow such awful grief? I wondered.