Lonie24

Audrey was standing outside the café, sheltering as best she could under the eaves of the building, her hair getting increasingly wet and rainwater dripping off the edge of her nose. She didn’t know whether it would be best to go back to work and not mention the incident with Lonie's girlfriend again, or not go back to work, simply drive home and deal with him and work later. Tears began to pool in her eyes and she scuttled along the pavement, with her head down, glad it was torrential rain because passers-by were too busy looking at their own feet, water on the pavement and scrutinising their own misery, to take any notice of a red-nosed ninny. The cavernous yells of the porters in the Glasownian building going about their business, made her straighten up. She stood inside the shelter of the stairwell, her hand on the railing. One of the night- shift editors was carefully making his way down the stairs. She racked her brain. His name didn't jump out at her, but knew him as one of the few men that didn’t ogle her as she walked past as if she was a temporary amusement sticking her chest out and clucking for them. She thought him an essentially decent man, but then, she’d thought that of Lonie.

‘You alright?’ Davy Brown stopped at the bottom of the stairs, one foot on the step and the other on the pavement, half in and half out of the rain.

‘Yes.’ Audrey sniffed and turned her head away to wipe at her eye. ‘Just got a bit of a head cold.’

Davy said nothing. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out an unopened packet of Silk Cut, tearing the cellophane off with his uneven teeth. ‘You want one?’ He let the plastic wrapping fall into the street to be swept away by the strong winds and tentatively held out a cigarette for her.

‘No. I don’t smoke.’ Audrey looked up into the muted darkness of the stairwell in case anybody came down and she was caught slacking at work.

‘Filthy habit.’ Davy put the cigarette in his mouth. His thumb flicked the flint of a hooded silver lighter with an etching of a dragon on its thick rectangular body. ‘Wish I could stop.’

‘Why don’t you?’

Davy kissed his cigarette to his lip as he thought about it. ‘I’ve tried.’ He breathed fag smoke out with his answer. ‘but I’ve always been doomed to failure. You ever smoke?’

‘No.’ Audrey shook her head at such a thought.'When I was younger my mother used to smell my breath to make sure.’

Davy laughed. ‘There’s always Murray mints.’

‘No,’ said Audrey. ‘My mother was a headmistress. Very firm about these kinds of things.’

Davy stepped in out of the rain. ‘Polygraphs and bamboo under the fingertips?’

To Audrey his grey eyes were small, but full of light. He seemed to be incapable of stupidity, or such cruelty. But it was his large white hands that caught her, fluttering like a great moth when he said something, adorning his words with meaning and understanding and she liked his attempts at humour.

‘She might like that,’ Audrey replied rather wispily.

‘How is your work going?’ Davy asked, his fingers tapping on the bannister next to Audrey’s.

Audrey’s face was filled with animated attention as she talked Davy through what had happened at the hospital and the problems they faced. Whenever she mentioned Lonie her face took on a flickering anger around her mouth and eyes.

Davy let his fag drop to the ground. He was careful not to mention Lonie. ‘Why don’t you start in the archives, look for reports about Carol Peters? It’s all back copies of print, I’m afraid. We’re trying to get it micro-fiched, but that will take years.’ He smiled at her in encouragement. ‘Which is a good thing! I’m not very good with all this modern technology.’

‘Oh, neither am I.’ Audrey patted his moth-like hand.

‘I could show you.’ He stepped up beside Audrey his face full of an eager energy.

‘Oh, don’t trouble yourself with that. You were just going home. And you’ve got your own interests.’

‘Rubbish.’ Davy unbuttoned the top button of his coat, as he climbed the stairs back up to the office. ‘I’ve only got an old-tabby cat. We get on best when we spend time apart. As long as I'm there to feed her.’

Audrey followed him up the stairs. They took a right and went downstairs to the basement where the walls vibrated with the coming and goings of truck and the accelerated, stop-and-start whine of forklifts drive- belts trying to break free from their moorings. Davy flicked the light on, a bare sixty-watt bulb which illuminated all but the back wall and corners. The archive was a little red-bricked storeroom with shelves from floor to ceiling. A single plastic seat stood, next to a mop and bucket and a broken down desk.

‘Are there rats in here?’ Audrey asked.

Davy’s tongue slipped out and wet his top lip. ‘I’d imagine so.’ He slid out of his coat and folded it neatly over the chair as if he’d rehearsed such an action countless number of times. ‘Rats, mice, spiders and god knows what else,’ he said, with some relish.

Audrey thought she heard a rustling, but it was difficult to tell with the banging sounds of the printing press and men shouting at each other through one of the other walls. Her thoughts jumped to tucking her dress into her knickers. She shivered, and vaguely remembered some advice about ways to stop a rat running up your leg. She shut her eyes and she tried not to think about what was meant to happen next.

Davy seemed at home. He glided along, his hands running down the shelving of one row and caresseing the paper in another. ‘Carol Peters,’ he mouthed her name as a newspaper morsel. ‘We’ve got nothing complicated. No Dewey Decimal Index,’ he explained to Audrey who was shadowing behind him. ‘It’s simple stacked in terms of time. ‘Yesterday’s print near the door.’ He pointed to the halo of light where the door stood open. ‘And.’ His fingers stopped and he leaned over to have a look at the musty spelling corpse of a headline. Then his fingers travelled on. He stopped, and started a few times, until he tugged out a paper from the rough copy of a batch near the darkness of the back wall. He slapped at it as he tugged and pulled, his feet slipping and sliding in the grey dust. ‘I was at her trial you know?’

‘No!’ Audrey leaned down close to him, as if she too could make out the newspaper headline, but she was more concerned with her feet and keeping her knees together in case anything made a leap. ‘What was she like?’

‘Oh, very beautiful.’ He added archly, ‘if you like that kind of thing,’ and handed her a newspaper with the headline: “North Vietnamese begin infiltration of the South,” with a grey pictures of equally grey- faced Asian soldiers.

Audrey flipped through page after page. ‘I don’t see?’

‘Oh,’ said Davy, with a jolt, ‘my mistake.’ He took the paper off her and quickly handed her another, he’d placed on top of the same pile.

Audrey knew she’d the right copy now. She’d been little more than a girl and had heard vague stories about Carol Peters, but the headline, “Duchess of Death,” and below it “death toll rises to twelve,” with a picture, made her seem more real.

Carol Peters was, even allowing for the sludge of a pixelated photograph, freakishly glamorous. Black, well-spaced, eyes looked away from the camera. Black hair that flowed down her back past her shoulders, a heart shaped face, bow shaped mouth and a simple black dress. The black and white photograph could barely contain a luminescence around the hint of décolletage at her neck and her skin in general. She was glowing with health, which seemed a bit strange for a murder trial.

Audrey quickly scanned through the story. When she looked up Davy was watching her with a twisted smile on his face. ‘What was she really like?’

‘Well,’ Davy lit a fag. ‘I shouldn’t really be smoking in here.’ He laughed, waving the fag smoke away. ‘I was a young reporter and she was like...’ His face fell into a reverie and he stepped backwards into the shadows of another pile of newsprint. ‘Did you ever see that film “Joan of Arc,” with Ingrid Bergman?’ His voice rose, with the excitement of the film, or the Carol Peter’s trial, Audrey wasn’t sure.

‘No,’ she admitted.

‘Well, she was a bit like that.’ Davy'y voice carried on undettered, as he disappeared into the stack of shelves. ‘Strange. Beautiful. Guilty as hell.’

Audrey looked down at the print of the newspaper in her hands, but it was an early copy of the trial and she quickly realized it wouldn’t give her the information she was looking for. ‘But didn’t she get off? Found Not Proven?’ Her voice dropped in confusion. ‘Or something?’

Davy worked his way around the stack, his fag jemmied to his upper lip, pulling out copy, pulling out headlines, pulling out the trial of Carol Peters. ‘Yeh.’ He flipped through one front page and then onto another, ordering his thoughts and memories. ‘It went to a retrial. The jury couldn’t decide. For one thing there were no bodies. She said the devil had taken them after they had sex with her. Completely loopy of course.’

‘How did they know they had sex with her then?’ The murky darkness of the room Audrey hoped would cover the colour flushing her cheeks.

‘They didn’t.’ Davy flipped a newspaper over towards her feet and he was away searching for another. ‘Said they’d raped her, but she also had a hissy fit at the trial, saying a desk Sergeant had raped her in her cell. That pretty much blew it for her.’

Audrey looked at the headline calling for Carol Peters to be hanged, even though the last woman to be hanged was ten years before, and the law had been changed. She heard Davy rustling around the stacks on the other side of the pile and felt safe to ask. ‘Did they?’

‘Did they what?’ echoed round the room.

‘Did they rape her?’

Davy’s head appeared around the corner of the stack of shelves closest to her. He was no longer smoking. Audrey looked at the overhanging cliffs of print and hoped, for their sake, he’d stamped it out and not left any dying embers.

‘No.’ Davy stepped into the corridor beside her carrying a bundle of papers under his arm.

‘You’ve seen her,’ he offered as an explanation.

Audrey was so angry she could have spat. ‘Because she was beautiful doesn’t mean that she wasn’t raped.’

‘I’m not saying that.’ Davy voice was well modulated and unhurried. ‘All the boys were between fourteen and sixteen. As far as I could determine from court room testimonials they were all virgins.’ His head fell to one side, as if in fairness he had to present the other side of the argument. ‘I’m not saying that boys of that age, and boys of that type, can’t and don’t rape. I’m not saying that virgins don’t either. What I am saying is if they did rape someone it would be a little floozy that they already knew…someone they went to school with or worked with. Not…’

‘Floozy is an ugly word,’ cut in Audrey. ‘What about the policeman would he only rape floozies too?’

‘Ah, that’s quite interesting.’ Davy held up his hand in acknowledgement, as if Audrey had pointed out a crustacean in a tide pool. ‘Floozy is an ugly word. But it’s a word we understand. Sex sells newspapers. We don’t want to read about some straight-laced God fearing woman with a face like a lump of wood. Our bread and butter is floozies. And if I know boys-’ and for a second Audrey thought that he might ‘-then Carol Peters was so far above them she’d be like a movie star on the screen. She’d be like on another planet. And I suppose that was part of her problem.’

Davy’s lip buckled as he reconsidered. ‘The policeman? He was sore different. Quite a big fleshy man if I remember rightly. He was at the trial but was never brought into the witness box. But much was made of the number of boys that disappeared. Twelve, which Carol Peters suggested was something to do with the twelve disciples. And, of course, Seargent Hastings, was the thirteenth, a prime number and a replacement Judas.

‘I’m not sure I follow you.’ said Audrey.

Davy stood for a few seconds and shook his head. ‘I’m not sure I get it either.’ He patted the material under his arm. ‘Let’s take a look at this in the daylight upstairs? Or perhaps you’d want to look at it yourself?’ He looked at his black shoes as he tentatively suggested, ‘Or maybe with Lonie?’