‘Children? D’you have any?’ Again I asked for no particular reason, just a way of getting her to open up, but the question stopped her dead. She glanced away and it was a relief to escape her carelessly veiled gaze at last.
‘No,’ she replied after a pause. ‘No kids. Gerald always thought it was me; y’know, that I was to blame. But it wasn’t me. I was sure of that, although I never let him know.’
‘You had tests?’
‘Didn’t need to.’
I sensed we were finally getting to the point of her visit. (Yep, I’m good at that kind of thing too.)
‘It’s the reason I’m here, Mr Dismas,’ she confirmed.
Ah, I thought. ‘I see,’ I said.
Now she looked directly into my one good eye. Oddly she didn’t proceed; she had to be prompted yet again.
‘You do have a child, then,’ I ventured.
She looked at the tip of her cigarette held in her lap and I pushed the ashtray across the desk towards her. She tapped ash into it, a hurried, jerky gesture.
‘I think so,’ she said quietly.
She thought so . . . ‘I don’t understand, Mrs Ripstone.’
‘Could we . . . could we have the office door closed?’ she asked.
‘Of course.’ I lumbered round the desk, my limp not too bad at that time of day; it’d grow worse as the day wore on, depending on how tired I got. As I was closing the door Henry looked up from his desk and raised his eyebrows; I gave a small shrug. Clients were entitled to all the confidentiality they demanded, and then some; that was the first rule in the private investigation business. Henry’s balding head was already bowed over his accounts again before the door clicked shut.
‘Okay, Mrs Ripstone, we can’t be overheard,’ I assured her as I returned to my seat. ‘This is strictly between you and me, although other members of my team will have to be brought in if I decide to take your case and if the subsequent investigation requires extra hands. Even then, any personal information will always be kept in a locked briefcase carried only by myself, or it will never leave the precincts of these offices.’ I indicated a row of four grey filing cabinets to my left. ‘While on the premises, your file will be kept under lock and key as a matter of routine. If particularly sensitive, that file can be locked away in our multi-cylinder, combination-lock Stratford Clarendon safe which, incidentally, is bolted to the floor.’ I pointed to the big metal box against the wall behind her. ‘And only myself and my first assistant know the combination.’
If she was impressed, she didn’t show it; I think her thoughts were too inward to pay attention to my blatherings. She needed another deep drag on the cigarette before she could proceed. A blue haze was beginning to fill the room, but that was okay – I enjoyed smoky atmospheres.
‘I had a baby two years before I met Gerald and I was single. A son. My name was Teasdale then. Shelly Teasdale.’ She blurted it out, as if it had to be said in a rush because she still felt some guilt, some shame even. ‘He never knew . . . I never told Gerald about the birth,’ she added. ‘I didn’t think it was necessary.’
I nodded sagely; it seemed the right thing for me to do.
‘But now I want to find my baby,’ she said, leaning forward on the desk.
‘Well, hardly a baby any more. You said eighteen years ago . . . ?’
‘He’s a young man now, I know that. But I only knew him as a baby.’
‘And you’ve had no contact with him since? Look, I have to be frank with you here. The only people who can help you find your son are the authorities who arranged the adoption or for the boy to be taken into care, whichever the case. Barnardo’s would be your best bet, although there are special agencies that deal with this sort of thing. Even then, it would be up to the boy if he wanted to see you. Eighteen years is a long time to be disowned by your own . . .’ I didn’t have the heart to finish; the poor woman was distressed enough.
She was clutching the cigarette in both hands and shaking her head, slowly, deliberately, as if she didn’t want to hear. Her eyes were liquid as she said: ‘You don’t understand. They told me he was dead. There was something wrong with the baby at birth. He didn’t survive.’
‘I’m afraid you’re right – I don’t understand. If the baby died, why would you – ?’
‘Because they lied. My baby didn’t die. They said he was born with too many abnormalities to live long. They told me he was dead within minutes of the birth.’
‘You must have seen it . . . him . . . for yourself.’
‘No. It was a difficult birth, I’d been in labour for more than twenty-four hours. I was exhausted, only half-conscious when he finally arrived. They took him from me immediately, but I heard him, I heard his cries. They were . . . different, somehow, but I definitely heard them. They were very strong.’
I tried to be gentle. ‘That may be so,’ I said softly, ‘but that doesn’t mean the child didn’t die soon afterwards. Did you see him again?’
‘I told you, I didn’t see him at all.’ The tears were beginning to spill over and ruin her mascara line.
I hoped she took my small groan for a sigh as I sat back in my chair – not a very comfortable position for me, incidentally. ‘I’m sorry, I still don’t get it. Why would they tell you the baby was dead if that wasn’t so? It doesn’t make sense. What kind of hospital was it anyway?’
‘An ordinary National Health hospital in Dartford. The Dartford General.’
‘Well, there you are, there wouldn’t be anything sinister going on in an NHS place, nor any other type of hospital for that matter. I wonder . . . uh, there’s no easy way of saying this. I wonder if the death of your husband hasn’t left you overwrought? You’ve lost a loved one unexpectedly and tragically and I assume you’re alone, so maybe now you’re reaching for another possibility, one that tells you that the son you had all those years ago and thought was dead might still be alive. You’re full of grief, remorse, and dare I say, guilt? Guilt that you never told Mr Ripstone, you kept it a secret for eighteen years, and guilt that you might have abandoned your only child.’
She stabbed the cigarette into the ashtray, her fingers trembling. ‘I’m not a neurotic widow, Mr Dismas, despite what you might think. You don’t know the full story yet.’
She took a small handkerchief with lace edges from her purse and dabbed at her eyes, now smudging the running mascara. The tears ceased though, and her voice became steady again as she looked me directly in the eye (I think she was getting used to me now that the initial shock had passed). ‘Do you believe in clairvoyancy, Mr Dismas?’ she said.
I groaned again, inwardly this time, already guessing where this was headed. I had enough problems dealing with reality without bringing hokum into my life. I didn’t want to upset her any more, though, so I replied: ‘I’ve heard a few interesting stories about such things over the years. Let’s face it, Brighton has more than its fair share of fortune tellers and psychics, not to mention New Age and alternative medicine practitioners.’ (And not to mention private enquiry agencies, which was why I wasn’t keen to lose a prospective client, no matter how off-the-wall they might be; competition was too fierce for that.)
‘Then you do believe certain people have psychic powers?’ she pressed on.
‘Telepathy, a sixth sense, that kind of thing?’ I shrugged noncommittally. ‘It’s a possibility, but I wouldn’t know for sure.’
‘But if I told you that when Gerald died I consulted a clairvoyant, you wouldn’t laugh at me and think me stupid.’
‘Of course not. Nothing unusual about that kind of thing these days. In fact, I’ve heard some of these people – clairvoyants, mediums, psychics, whatever you’d care to call them – can bring a lot of comfort to the bereaved. The one or two I know around town seem harmless enough.’
‘They can do more than just comfort. Some of them can heal the sick just by thought or touch.’
She was a believer all right.
‘You mean faith-healing? Well, I’m not too s
ure about – ’
‘Don’t dismiss it so easily.’
Tetchy about it too. ‘Many of them can look into a person’s future as well as their past. Some can know your thoughts just by looking at you and without your saying a word.’
Yeah, and some can con you into parting with cash by providing all manner of useless information. ‘Can I take it, then, that you’ve consulted such a person, Mrs Ripstone?’
‘Gerald’s death left me in a bad way,’ she replied by way of answer or an excuse, I wasn’t sure which. ‘I missed him so much and his death came so quickly and so horribly. He was an awkward man sometimes and he had his black moods. But he cared for me. I know he really cared for me, despite some of the things he said, the things he did . . .’ Her tiny handkerchief had become a scrunched-up ball in her fist. A large, diamond-cluster ring on one of her fingers caught the light from the window behind me. ‘I’m still not over it, Mr Dismas. His death, I mean.’
‘It can take a while,’ I commiserated, ‘maybe a couple of years to get over the loss of a loved one, and even then you’re not really over it. You just learn to cope.’
‘You’ve been through it too?’ She seemed almost hopeful.
‘Uh, no. No, it’s only what I hear.’
‘Oh.’ She wiped the dampness from her cheeks, then squared her shoulders as if determined to get a grip on herself. ‘It was so hard to accept that Gerald was gone at first. I think I went a little bit crazy with grief. I locked myself away, saw no one, talked to no one, wouldn’t even answer the telephone for a while. And then a feeling came over me – I don’t know how to describe it. I just woke one day and felt there was something I could do about my loss, that if there really was something called the “soul”, as the Church tells us, then perhaps I could contact Gerald again. I didn’t have to be entirely on my own.’
Uh-oh, I thought.
‘I hadn’t really believed in spiritualism before, you know, contacting the dead? But at the same time, I’d never disbelieved in it. I just hadn’t given it much thought. D’you understand?’
‘Sure,’ I answered. ‘Most people don’t like to think about death until it comes close in some way or other. So that was when you decided to approach a medium?’
‘Not at first. It wasn’t a sudden urge, anything like that. It just come on gradually, a sort of feeling I should contact Gerald. And I wanted to find a good clairvoyant, a genuine one, not one of them phonies.’ Estuary kept breaking out despite her efforts to contain it. ‘Lucky for – luckily for me, one of my friends knew of someone who didn’t live too far away.’
‘You wouldn’t have to look far in Brighton.’
‘Well, this one lived in Kemp Town.’
(Kemp Town is an adjunct of Brighton, although it likes to keep a separate identity.)
‘Her name’s Louise Broomfield,’ Shelly Ripstone continued. ‘You’ve heard of her?’
I shook my head.
‘She’s quite well-known. In those sort of circles, I mean.’
‘You went to see her.’ I tried not to let my impatience show.
‘I got her phone number and I rang. Apparently she doesn’t just see anybody, she has to talk to them first. She knew I was distressed right away.’
There’s a surprise, I thought.
‘And she could feel there was something to tell me. She knew just by our conversation on the telephone.’
A light tap on the door just then. It opened a little way and Philo, my youngest employee, and Sam Spade wannabe albeit a brown one, poked his head round.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said cheerfully, his short black hair glistening with gel. ‘You wanted to know about the writ this morning.’
I used Philo a lot for process serving, especially if there might be some running after the recipient to do (and as process serving took up half the agency’s business, on some days there was a lot of running to do).
‘Any problems?’ I asked, looking past Shelly Ripstone. The particular debt dodger Philo had had to confront was more slippery than most – I’d had dealings with this character before – but the kid had to learn some time, and the hard way was often the best.
‘Well, he pretended to be his own brother, but I recognized him from the Polaroid you gave me. He wouldn’t touch the papers, so I dropped them at his feet in the hallway, then did a fade.’
‘You’re sure you got the right man?’
‘Definite.’
I gave him a lop-sided grin. ‘Okay, make out your notes for the affidavit right now so you don’t forget the details. Then Henry’s got a trace for you to work on, only telephone stuff, but it might be complicated. I’ll catch up with you later.’
He took a last look at the back of Shelly Ripstone, appraised her ash-blonde hair, raised his eyebrows a couple of times at me, then disappeared from the doorway. The door closed quietly behind him.
I apologized for the interruption before prompting my prospective client once more. ‘You went to see this, er, Louise . . .’
‘Broomfield,’ she finished for me and I wrote the name down on the pad.
‘Okay.’ I waited for her to continue.
‘She was wonderful. And she’s a faith healer too. There was something about her, a sort of . . .’ she searched for the appropriate word ‘. . . a goodness, a sort of . . .’ she struggled for another description.
‘Compassion?’ I suggested.
‘Yes, that’s it. I sensed it as soon as she opened the front door. You know she hugged me right there on the doorstep, before either one of us had said a word. That broke me.’ Tears were brimming again at the memory and she swiftly dabbed at her eyes with the soggy hanky. ‘I’m sorry. I’m an emotional person.’ She sniffed a couple of times as evidence.
‘It’s all right. Take your time.’
A snuffle to end the sniffs, then she regained control. ‘Louise took me into a room at the back of the house, a bright little room, walls and ceiling painted pale blue. I felt at peace as soon as I entered it.’
With most prospective clients you learned to cut to the chase pretty fast, getting to the facts without too much embellishment. Some, though, I’d learned to let tell their story in their own way, guiding them with the odd soft prod here and there. Shelly Ripstone fell into the latter category; she’d get to it at her own speed.
‘What was she like, this medium?’ Medium or clairvoyant, it made little difference to me. What I think I wanted to know at this point was whether or not Louise Broomfield was genuine, and any information about her might help me decide. I would naturally distrust anyone who adorned themselves with pendants or crucifixes and dressed in black as symbols of office. That was showbiz, artifacts of illusion, and not for the serious-minded. There were quite a few hucksters around town and, I had to admit, some of them I liked; in general, though, I had an aversion to robes and regalia of any kind, especially when they were to do with the Church.
‘Louise is very ordinary. More like a kindly counsellor than a clairvoyant. She makes you feel . . . well, good inside. She understood what I was going through right away and she let me have a good cry before asking me anything.’
‘You told her about the death of your husband?’
‘She already knew.’
I didn’t push her. It would have been easy enough to conclude Shelly Ripstone was grieving, inevitably for someone she’d recently lost. Guessing it was for her late husband would have been easy enough by minimum probing.
‘So she contacted Gerald for you?’
The question from me was genuine enough, despite an inbuilt cynicism towards anyone who claimed they could communicate with ‘the other side’. Even if I didn’t believe it, it was evident that this woman across the desk did.
‘No. She contacted my son.’
‘But you said you thought your son was still alive.’
‘It’s how I now know he is. I’d always had that feeling my baby hadn’t died. Intuition, a mother’s instinct – I don’t know what it was, but it was
always there, always with me. And Louise said I’d been right to believe it all this time.’
‘I thought clairvoyants could only communicate with spirits, not with the living.’
‘Like lots of people, you’re mistaken. Louise can pick up the thoughts of people who might even be thousands of miles away. Living people, I mean. She can heal just by thinking of a sick person who could be on the other side of the world. She can “see” the auras of people she talks to. She told me she had communicated with a little boy who’d been in a coma for two years and who still showed no signs of recovering. Sometimes she can tell if a person is going to die soon, even if that person doesn’t know they’re sick. Her mind reached my son, through me, just by my being there. She picked up his presence.’
Shelly Ripstone leaned close across the desk, her anguish overriding her nerves of me. Her eyes were pleading, regarding me purely as someone who could help her and not as some misshapen thing to be pitied, or repulsed by. ‘Louise fainted away in front of me, Mr Dismas. Whatever it was she sensed, whatever it was she saw in her mind, it caused her to collapse. And when she came round she wouldn’t – couldn’t – speak of it. She just kept telling me over and over again that I had to find my son before it was too late. That if I didn’t, something terrible – something awful – was going to happen. And it would happen very soon.’
3
It was at least another half-hour before I finally showed Shelly Ripstone out. Earlier, her loud weeping had brought Henry to the door, enquiring if he could be of any assistance, his real motive just plain nosiness, and I’d shooed him away. In private again, I rose from my desk and patted the distressed woman’s shoulder (was that the slightest shudder I felt run through her, or just a sob-spasm?) and offered her my own dry handkerchief. She took it gratefully and eventually stifled the tears.
I think it was sympathy rather than the fee I’d charge that made me agree to take on her case. Truth is, I thought an investigation wouldn’t amount to much anyway, that the search for her lost son would be a wild goose chase – hospitals just didn’t lie about newly-born babies, even if there was no supporting father involved. I explained this to Shelly Ripstone, née Shelly Teasdale, but she insisted my personal view wasn’t important as long as I did my job properly. Fair enough, I told her, and promised that all the agency’s professional skills would be put into force to resolve the matter one way or the other; it was her money, so it was her shout. A little cynical, I know, but it cheered her up considerably.