'Mrs Waggs.' 'Thank you. Would you take a seat?' She sat down, riffled the pages of a glossy magazine unseeingly. The girl murmured into a phone. A door opened and a woman came towards her. She was middle-aged, dressed in a smart black business suit. She said, 'Mrs Waggs? I'm Ms Amalfi, the Clinic's Executive Officer. How may we help you?' 'I'd like to see Mr Bellmain. I'm an old friend. I was in the area so I thought, why not call?' 'I understand. Unfortunately we have strict rules at the Allerdale, Mrs Waggs. In the interests of our patients, visitors are restricted to a list prepared by the family.
I'm sure if you are an old friend you'll have no difficulty getting your name added to the Bellmain list.' 'Yes, of course, but as I'm here anyway…' 'I'm sorry,' said Ms Amalfi, standing to one side so that Cissy could rise. There was no contact but she felt herself drawn up and urged out. She was long accustomed to obedience to people with such authority. Only once during those slow years had she lost the control which let them keep theirs. Only once, and a woman had lain there dead. The rain had slackened off, though the lowering sky promised only a temporary relief. She set off walking without any attempt to choose a direction. When a cab came towards her after four blocks, she hailed it, meaning to direct it back to the apartment. But she found she wasn't ready yet to step back into that particular cell and instead said, 'Macy's.' 'You always walk away from where you're heading?' inquired the driver. 'If I can manage it,' she said. Her acquaintance with New York was restricted to half a dozen shortish visits with the Westropps, but Macy's was what she remembered best.
For a while as she stepped once more into that world of hustling, bustling, commercial colour, she felt the years between slip away. But soon she began to feel fatigued and confused. Finally she took refuge in the coffee shop, sat down thankfully and rolled a cigarette. She didn't have time to inhale before two women on the next table told her she was in a non- smoking zone. It wasn't done with any of the diffident politeness she'd have expected thirty years ago, but with a mordant savagery, as though she were committing an act of public indecency. She dunked her cigarette in her coffee and left. Outside the rain was now bouncing off the tarmac and suddenly cabs were rarer than unicorns. She started walking up Broadway, old memory struggling against new panic. There had been changes here, new buildings for old, old vices dressed up as new. She struggled to keep her observation at an assessing, objective level, but darkness kept washing in on the flurries of rain turning the Great White Way into a tunnel of night along which the untimely car headlamps smeared light like the spoor of snails. She tried a trick she had learnt in prison. When you can't fight your fears any more, run with them, steering them into ever more gothic regions of your subconscious till finally you tumble over into such grotesqueries that even blind panic has to pause and smile. She was Snow White in the storm, she told herself, with malicious laughter screeching from the foul black air, skeletal arms stretching to trip her, evil eyes watching for her to stumble. But beneath it all she sought the assurance that it was only the harmless owl gliding through the storm-tossed trees under which sheltered a myriad tiny creatures, all as frightened as she. It might have worked in a forest. But here were no trees, only concrete and glass, and the bright-eyed creatures sheltering in these doorways looked far from harmless. She was moving faster and faster. Now she was running, crashing into other pedestrians with force enough to draw attention even in rainy New York. At an intersection the Don't Walk sign lit as she approached.
She saw it but her mind was beyond obedience and she would have plunged straight into the speeding traffic if a hand had not grasped at her arm. She spun round, ready to strike out, to scream. She found herself looking at an elderly man wearing the black clothes, broad-brimmed hat and benevolent smile of an old-fashioned preacher.
'Lady, you want to die?' he said. 'It's the best offer I've had all morning,' she gasped hysterically. 'Business that bad, huh?' He examined her sympathetically. 'Lady, you sure are wet. How much you charge for fucking you dry?' He thought she was a hooker. Somehow this snapped her self-control back into place. She said, 'Twenty-seven.'
'Dollars?' he said in surprise. 'Years,' she said. 'I don't think you can afford it.' She walked all the way back to the apartment, driving her limbs at a pace which created enough heat to drive out the damp from her flesh, if not from her clothes. She felt a tremor of something like triumph as she approached the entrance to the building.
She hadn't achieved anything concrete but she'd ventured out alone, taken risks, and was returning unscathed, ready to fight another day.
As she pushed open the street door a hand grasped her elbow, a touch light as a feather, tight as a vice. 'Well, Cissy Kohler! Here's a stroke of luck! I were just on my way to see you.' She felt herself guided across the vestibule, past the questing gaze of the concierge, up to the elevator. Its doors only opened if the man at the desk pressed a switch. The grip on her arm relaxed. She looked up into a face she had only seen this close once before in her life. Then too her hair had been dripping water down her brow and her cheeks. The man had not been smiling then as he was now, but his eyes had been the same. He said, 'Smile nicely at the man, Cissy. Then we'll go up and have a little chat about the old days.' All she had to do was shout.
She looked into those hard condemning eyes. Then she turned towards the concierge and smiled.
SIX
'What do you make, madame?' 'Many things.' 'For instance -‘ 'For instance… shrouds.' Dalziel hadn't made a conscious decision to dump Linda Steele. What happened was, it started raining as they came out of the deli. Steele waved at a cab which came to a halt some fifteen yards beyond them. A young man in a business suit immediately jumped in and the cab pulled away. 'Cheeky sod!' exclaimed Dalziel.
'Happens all the time,' said the woman philosophically. 'Not to me.'
He saw the cab was balked by the lights at the next intersection.
Suddenly he was off running. The jails of Mid-Yorkshire were full of people who'd been surprised to discover how fast a man of his bulk could move if properly motivated. He reached the cab, wrenched open the door and fell in. 'What the hell!' exclaimed the passenger angrily. Dalziel, too out of breath to speak, put his huge mouth close to the man's ear and bellowed, 'AAArrgh!' Terrified, the man opened the other door and fell out on to the damp tarmac. 'Hey, what the fuck's happening back there?' demanded the driver. 'You've just been hijacked, sunshine,' gasped Dalziel. The lights changed. The traffic started to move. He looked back and saw Linda Steele, slow in her high heels, coming gamely up behind them. 'So where to?' said the driver, beginning to edge forward with the traffic. 'Libya,' said Dalziel, smiling apologetically out of the rear window. 'But there's somewhere I'd like you to stop off first.' Perhaps eager to be rid of his unexpected passenger, the driver drove in a manner which made the trip from the airport seem like a cortege. It turned out to be counter-productive. As he started to pull up outside the apartment building Dalziel said, 'No. The next one.' 'Jesus! Make up your mind, fella!' Dalziel wasn't listening. He was watching Cissy Kohler standing on the sidewalk. For an uncharacteristic moment he vacillated. Confront her now, or watch and follow? Then the decision was taken out of his hands. Another cab pulled in, Linda Steele got out and Kohler got in. It would have been easy to hail Steele but this time Dalziel did make a conscious decision. 'Right, Ben Hur,' he said.