Mezzanine and Other Curiously Dark Tales Read online

  With that I was dismissed and I left his office wondering if I’d made a big mistake seeking help from Allander in the first place. The pills he gave me were successful, sending me into a deep sleep and for the first time in weeks my dreams did not rouse me in the small hours. In the morning I reported to Ted Cob who seemed rather disgruntled I’d been foisted upon him. Most likely he saw the basement as his own private kingdom where he ruled over the poor, disturbed souls with a rod of iron. Ted showed me the security procedures and fail-safes that kept the inmates from escaping their subterranean gaol.

  And if Ted Cob perhaps thought himself king of this gloomy, badly-lit domain, then there was also a grim queen. Her name was MacKenzie, the only nurse on this level. She was a short, squat Scots woman, with a face that could frighten horses. I never once saw a smile appear on her dour, northern visage, and her tone of voice demanded the same instant respect I was conditioned to show to any parade-ground sergeant major.

  It was part of my job to accompany MacKenzie on her rounds to feed and clean the patients. Some of them were confused and wept continually. Others cowered from MacKenzie’s ministrations with the sponge and screamed blood-curdling profanities while flailing with their spindly arms and legs. At times I was forced to use leather restraints, an act of violence in itself that made me feel soiled and laid a further dark blemish on my spirit.

  There was one woman who fascinated me. Her name was Lady Jane Crawford-Smith and she lay in quiet repose upon her bed, barely moving or speaking. At one time she must have been a ravishing beauty, but now she looked more wasted than the consumptives upstairs, her fine cheek bones as prominent as a skull’s, her blonde hair lank and lifeless.

  ‘A tragic story this one,’ said MacKenzie in her Scottish burr. ‘She’s the wife of Lord Henry Crawford-Smith. Lost a child before it came to term and found herself rendered barren afterwards. The burden of providing an heir is a terrible thing within the upper classes. Poor Lady Jane, distressed beyond measure, tried to take her own life, leaving Lord Henry no choice but to have his wife placed into care until such times as her state of mind can be revived.’

  ‘Does that look likely?’ I asked, casting my gaze upon the matchstick figure in the bed.

  MacKenzie gave me a queer look. ‘I’m no doctor, laddie, but even I can see this poor woman is fading faster than an autumn rose. She mostly sleeps all the time. It’s as if she’s given up completely.’

  MacKenzie then surprised me by taking the linen cloth off a metal tray I’d assumed was for the personal cleaning rituals. To my surprise the tray was filled with ripe cherries nestling amongst slivers of crushed ice.

  ‘This will be your job, Jenkins. Lord Crawford-Smith told us how much his wife loves cherries and he pays to have them delivered daily in the hope it will restore her spirits. Dr Allander himself inspects the fruit to see that it’s fit for eating before sending it down. Feed them to her and make sure she spits out the stones.’

  I took the tray of cherries from MacKenzie and gently brushed one across Lady Jane’s colourless lips. Automatically the woman opened her mouth just enough to let the cherry slip inside. When she was done, she used her tongue to push out the stone which I placed in the tray and then repeated the process until they were all gone. At one point Lady Jane opened her eyes - and looking into those murky depths was like gazing across a fog-covered lake where a tiny light burned dimly on a far island. In my heart I knew it wouldn’t be long before that small light was extinguished forever.

  At the end of my first week in the basement asylum, I gave into temptation and stole a few of Lady Jane’s cherries. I’d always had a fondness for those luscious, glazed globes of sweetness. When I was sure MacKenzie wasn’t looking I simply popped them into my mouth, swallowing the fleshy fruit and then making a pretence of coughing so I could spit the stones into my hand and hide them amongst the ones already gathered on the tray. The cherries were not as sweet as I’d hoped; in fact they left a bitter, oily aftertaste on my palate. At the time I told myself it served me right to steal from another’s plate, but as MacKenzie and I prepared to leave the room, I was overtaken by a bout of dizziness, disorientation and extreme lethargy, and found myself staggering a little. MacKenzie suggested I might be coming down with something and instructed me to return to my room for a lie-down.

  Once there I immediately fell into a deep sleep and was once more in the corpse-lined trench where Rachael waited for me in her stained shroud, smiling through red-smeared lips. No matter how hard I tried I could not prevent my feet from moving me forward through the gauntlet of dead soldiers standing to attention like an honour guard as I passed. I expected them to fall upon me as usual and grind my face into the mud, but this time they allowed me to reach Rachael. Her pale, dead face looked upon me and her ruby-stained lips moved as if to speak, but what came out was not words; instead there emerged a pulpy paste of red mush. I recoiled in horror thinking it was a piece of diseased lung tissue, but when she let the small globule of crimson mush drop into her palm, I spied a brown cherry stone.

  I awoke with a start and found it was already dark. Slipping stiffly off the bed, I tried to locate my shoes only to yell in pain as I trod on something hard and unyielding that dug deeply into the sole of my foot. When I finally found the light-switch I discovered on the floor a cherry stone. The dream was still fresh in my mind as I scooped the stone into my hand and stared at it. There was still a numb quality to my thoughts from that afternoon’s dizzy spell, but suddenly I knew exactly why I’d been taken unwell, and what the import of Rachael’s dream-message was.

  I used the cold water pitcher beside my bed to force myself into a better degree of wakefulness. I had to save Lady Jane. But how? Unable to formulate even a basic plan of rescue that might actually prove effective, I simply made my way to the basement. If Ted Cob tried to stop me I was still capable of knocking him out and locking him in one of the empty rooms. As it turned out I had no need of subduing Cob. He was snoring loudly, an empty whisky bottle on his desk. Taking the keys from the wall behind him, I made my way to Lady Jane’s room and unlocked the door. Inside a small night-light burned as Lady Jane lay peacefully on the bed. I lifted her from the bed, surprised at how little she weighed. When I turned I found the doorway blocked by the stocky, intimidating form of MacKenzie.

  ‘And exactly what do you think you’re doing, Jenkins?’ Her tone was cold and hard. MacKenzie wasn’t about to let me run off with her patient without a fight. Even if I tried to knock her down she would scream loudly enough to raise the alarm. Gently, I placed Lady Jane back down on the bed.

  ‘Allander’s been poisoning the cherries,’ I said. ‘Probably injected them with opium or laudanum.’ I explained about eating a few of the cherries which had caused me to become unwell and fall into a drugged stupor. Then I told her about my dream, but didn’t really expect MacKenzie to believe a word of it.

  MacKenzie still blocked the doorway but her posture had now changed somewhat, her broad shoulders sagging. ‘But why would Dr Allander do such a wicked thing?’

  I could only shake my head. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps Lady Jane’s husband wants her out the picture for good and is paying Allander to carry out his foul work.’

  ‘Even if this was true, are you going to run off with the woman slung across your shoulder like a sack of potatoes? Then what? Stick her in the truck and drive away? You think Lady Jane is in any state to give you directions? All that would happen is they’d call the police and have you charged with kidnapping. Most likely claim you were interfering with a helpless woman. You’d spend the rest of your life in prison.’

  I sat on the bed and dropped my head into my hands feeling defeated. ‘So what can I possibly do to save her?’

  MacKenzie walked over and laid her hand on my head. ‘Why, laddie, isn’t it obvious? Tomorrow you go into town and send a telegram to her family. After that? We’ll all be looking for new jobs I fear.’

  The following morning MacKenzie slipped me a not
e of paper with the address of Lady Jane’s family which she had got from the office. I asked Ted if I could borrow the truck to go into town and make some personal purchases and he seemed pleased to get me out of his way. And in that manner the telegram was sent. Things happened very quickly after that. Later that evening two large cars drove into the hospital grounds. Inside was Lady Jane’s father, Lord Farquhar, and her three brothers. They’d brought along a renowned Harley Street doctor and a lawyer. Allander met them at the front doors where Lord Farquhar waved my telegram in his face and demanded to be taken to his daughter. Allander threatened to call the police but the visitors laughed in his face and pushed past. It was I who led her family down into the basement where the Harley Street doctor quickly examined Lady Jane and suggested her removal from the sanatorium forthwith.

  Naturally I was fired on the spot by an enraged Dr Allander, but one of Lady Jane’s brothers kindly offered me a lift to the train station where I slept on a bench before catching a train back to London at first light. Having saved my wages I would at least be able to afford new lodgings for a time. Later that week the newspapers were full of the scandal. Lady Jane’s husband, Lord Henry, was arrested for attempted murder which caused something of a sensation. Dr Allander, his good name ruined by the allegations, escaped the clutches of the police by hanging himself in the sanatorium grounds. They found him swinging from a cherry tree. He left no suicide note.

  The trial was a terrible affair for me, having to stand in the witness box and have my facial injuries scrutinised by a courtroom packed to the rafters with boisterous members of the public. The QC grilling Lord Henry suggested he had paid Allander to arrange his wife’s death in order for him to marry a second wife and procure an heir to his title and vast estate. Lord Henry haughtily denied everything to the very end. The trial lasted a full week and the jury found him not guilty through lack of direct evidence. All the blame was being heaped upon the late Dr Allander.

  Now, six months later I am back in a sanatorium. Not as comfortable and airy as the one I was fired from. This small hospital is tucked away down a side street of east London and financed by charitable donations. The walls are shabby with peeling paint and damp stains. And I no longer do porter’s work, instead I am a patient confined to an iron bed with rough blankets. I am still glad in my heart that Rachael had made a difference to this world after all, returning from the grave to help save another’s life. The last I heard, Lady Jane had fully recovered from her ordeal and divorced Lord Henry, who these days is shunned by his peers over the scandal. He still vehemently denies any wrong doing.

  But Rachael had also made an unexpected difference to my life, something that couldn’t have been foreseen at the time. Some months after the trial, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of consumption and have since grown steadily ill. The doctors say I might have only weeks to live. I fear, however, that day shall come sooner than they predict, for only today a young nurse brought to me a bowl of ripe cherries. She told me the new head-nurse had recommended them to help me sleep more easily. When I looked up there was a familiar face staring grimly at me from the other end of the hospital ward.

  It was MacKenzie. And as our eyes met, she began to smile.

  Memphis Belle

  As the escalator shuddered on its steep ascent from the depths of the Turbine Hall, Bloomsbury glanced back at his boss a few steps below. ‘So, Guv, you think we’ve finally got our man?’

  John Stent bared his teeth like an old seasoned wolf about to feast on fresh meat. ‘If Lily Weisler’s sister is telling the truth, then Christian Haran will be leaving here tonight in handcuffs.’

  Bloomsbury gave a low whistle. ‘Nicking Haran in the Tate Modern at his own opening night? You do realise it’s going to be teeming with media monkeys?’

  ‘Poetic justice. Let’s see how he enjoys being the prize exhibit in the dock of the Old Bailey, charged with first-degree murder.’

  This would be Stent’s last murder case before retiring and Bloomsbury knew the old warrior wanted to go out with a bang. He just hoped Stent wasn’t so desperate to end his career on high note that he’d overlooked some vital detail that would leave him with egg on his face. Fucking up in front of a celebrity-strewn guest list with the press in close attendance wasn’t the best way to bring the curtain down on a distinguished and unblemished career.

  A month ago, a design student, Lily Weisler, from Memphis, Tennessee, was reported missing to the police. They discovered Lily had been working for the shock-tactic visual artist Christian Haran. Her co-workers claimed Lily Weisler had been in love with Haran and it was an open secret the artist had rebuffed her advances. Perhaps a valid reason for her dropping off the radar? As far as the police were concerned Weisler was a responsible adult, and unless new evidence came to light, they wouldn’t be pursuing the case any further.

  Everything changed when Lily’s blood-soaked handbag and clothing were found in a waste bin near the Tate Modern. Suddenly the police were falling over themselves to crack the case. Haran’s design team were re-interviewed and Christian Haran himself was hauled in and grilled by DCI Stent.

  Haran was a controversial figure in the art world, having been short-listed the previous year in the Turner Prize for his work entitled ‘Dead Heads’. This entailed posing a dozen freeze-dried human heads inside glass boxes. The heads were fitted with mechanical hinges allowing the jaws to move, giving the impression of speech. Concealed speakers completed the illusion by broadcasting monologues of actors reading passages from pornographic magazines.

  Haran had been branded obscene and godless by the British public, but he’d also become wealthy as a natural by-product of such notoriety. His latest exhibition was guaranteed to cause yet another uproar. Using a revolutionary new embalming process, Haran intended posing corpses in a display of carefully constructed tableaux to recreate iconic movie scenes.

  The artist naturally denied any knowledge of how Lily Weisler might have come to harm, and in the absence of a body, even raised the possibility that Weisler herself had planted the blood-soaked clothing as a means of generating negative publicity for his latest exhibition. Without any solid incriminating evidence, Haran was released without charge, and with no other obvious suspects, the investigation quickly ran out of steam. It looked destined to be filed away as a cold case until things took an unexpected twist that very afternoon. The missing girl’s sister, Zelda Weisler, had turned up at the police station crying hysterically and claiming she had proof Christian Haran had murdered her sibling.

  Zelda told Stent and Bloomsbury she had flown in that morning from Memphis, making the Tate Modern her first port of call knowing that Haran would be putting the finishing touches to his macabre exhibits. Not surprisingly he’d stuck to his tale of innocence, but when a gallery electrician had taken the artist aside to inspect a lighting problem, Zelda had noticed one of the cadavers in his collection not only closely resembled her missing sister, but also had a tattoo of a rosebud decorating its left ankle, the very same tattoo her sister had inscribed for her 18th birthday. Without waiting to confront Haran directly, she had fled the art gallery, called the police switchboard and was directed to John Stent.

  Leaving the escalator, the detectives followed the signs towards the Tate Modern’s new star attraction. Stent was still shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Hiding the victim in full view of the public and the press? Even the title of the tableau takes the piss. Memphis Belle? Can you credit the arrogance of the man?’

  Bloomsbury still had a niggling feeling they had overlooked something important in the excitement of pinning the murder on Haran. But there was no more time to think about it as they arrived at the large doors emblazoned with ‘A Night at the Movies’. Two security guards held the doors open as the detectives approached and both policemen were momentarily speechless at what their eyes beheld within.

  The walls and ceiling of the darkened room were criss-crossed with blue and green neon tubes giving an unhealthy pallor to
the milling crowd of people inside, the only islands of brightness in this neon gloom emanating from the half dozen flood-lit set pieces. These were what the crowd had come to gawp at and Tweet their friends about. The finishing touches to the eerie ambience included the cinematic whirr of a film projector running at high speed and the smell of buttered popcorn wafting strongly over the combined secondary scents of perfume, after-shave and human sweat.

  Stent scanned the room, taking in the assorted tableaux dedicated to famous movie scenes. On the far side of the room a very dead Forrest Gump sat on a park bench, probably contemplating that death was a box of chocolates. Nearby, a necrotic Marilyn Monroe preened above an air vent that gusted her skirt above her cold, dead hips. He also spotted a macabre cross-dressing Tootsie, a bowler-hatted Clockwork Orange Alex leering through a triangular opening, and a female corpse posed on its stomach, crossed legs behind her and smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Pulp Fiction,’ prompted Bloomsbury seeing Stern struggle to place the reference. ‘I think the one we’re looking for is over there.’

  Both men approached a low platform that featured a full sized nose-cone and cock-pit from a B17 Flying Fortress. Suspended by wires from the side of the cock-pit was a dead woman with long blonde hair wearing a bright red swimming costume, one thigh upraised to emulate the famous pin-up emblem of the US Air Force. Stent removed a photograph from his jacket and compared the likeness between the missing and the dead. It was difficult to be a hundred per cent certain, but if Zelda Weisler’s claims accusations were true…

  Stent moved closer to inspect the cadaver’s left ankle, experiencing a rush of blood to the head as he spotted the incriminating rosebud tattoo. It was half obscured as if a crude attempt had been made to disguise the tattoo with flesh-tone make-up.

  ‘It’s her, Bloomsbury. We’ve got the bastard cold.’