Page 44 of The Show Woman

43

Doubts

Lena sits ramrod-straight on the box next to Harry. She has said little. Not when he asked her what happened after she emerged, struck silent, from Serena’s wagon into the cold night. Not when they got back to the caravan and she went, mute and blank-faced, straight to bed, fully dressed. And not now as they travel the long road back to Glasgow on a chilly January morning. The snow is melting, turning to a dark, dirty slush, while above them a weak sun attempts to break through the clouds.

She can feel Harry’s impatience. In the way he holds the reins, speaks harshly to the horses, and gives her the occasional irritated side glance. But she simply does not know where to begin. With the sinister words about his mother? The revelation about her own mammy, and the implication that the bent-over crone in that strange wagon was an aunt, of sorts? But she owes him the truth about Violet. He was her brother. He deserves to know.

‘She says she didn’t kill Violet,’ she says quickly, blurting it out.

Harry looks at her sharply.

‘I mean, she didn’t do anything to her bar. She says it wasn’t her.’

‘And you believe her? Just like that?’

‘I do. She admitted that it was her who tried to poison Tommy, or one of her goons at any rate. Says it was them who cut the hole in the tent too, back at Blairgowrie. But she was genuinely shocked when she heard about the bar. She honestly had no idea. She thought Violet just had a fall.’

‘Well, in that case, I think it’s about time we called the police,’ says Harry. ‘Perhaps this is a matter for them.’

‘Are you kidding?’ says Lena. ‘You know what they think of us. Who we are. They think we’re all the stinking, thieving type. They’ll say it’s nothing to do with them. That we should sort it out ourselves and not bring our troubles to them. Believe me, I know.’

‘What do you mean, you know?’ Harry is staring at the road ahead, watching a cart that is coming towards them laden with bales of dried hay, but there is a muscle twitching, right by his ear.

‘That’s what happened when my daddy went to them when my mammy disappeared,’ she says. ‘The man practically laughed in his face. Told us she’d probably shacked up with a man whose house wasn’t on wheels. I wonder now if he also told them about the tree, what you’d seen, and they just dismissed it.’

She shivers at the memory, the policeman’s bored, uninterested face, the way he’d wrinkled his nose at her daddy, as though he was scum on the sole of his shoe.

‘Aye, that’d make sense,’ says Harry. ‘There’s no doubt your pa took me seriously, might even have taken a look himself. But the coppers are... well, when it comes to us, they’re bastards.’

Lena nods, thoughtfully. ‘If we had real proof about who might have greased the bar it might be different. But we don’t. Nobody saw anything. And Carmen wasn’t even there.’

A sickening, treacherous thought occurs to her. Carmen. She had been furious with Violet the night before for spilling her secret, angry and hurt, fizzing with the injustice. She could not even show her face. They’d thought she had packed up and left that night, but what if she hadn’t? What if it was her who had crept into the tent, covered the bar in oil or petroleum jelly or whatever it was that caused Violet’s hands to slip? She shivers.

Harry stiffens at the mention of Carmen’s name, but, when he opens his mouth, Lena holds her hand up.

‘Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.’

He closes his mouth, jaw set.

‘But you have to believe me, Harry. It really wasn’t Serena Linden. She’s an evil, nasty woman, she almost killed Tommy Pony and she tried to ruin our act. But she didn’t do anything to Violet.’

‘Why are you so sure?’

She hesitates, stumbles over whether or not to tell him something she hasn’t even begun to get to grips with.

‘She told me something else,’ she says. ‘She says she found something out not long before Violet had her fall, and, when she did, she decided not to mess with us any more. Anyone would think there was actually a fractured little soul in the old crone after all.’

‘Really?’ says Harry. He is interested now, waiting for more.

‘She told me she knew my mammy. That she grew up with her. Serena and my mammy shared a father. Serena’s mammy died when she was born, and her daddy took up with a woman. That was my grandmother. She and Serena’s daddy had a baby together: Maggie, my mammy. Serena Linden is my aunt.’

‘My God,’ says Harry. ‘And you never knew? Never guessed?’

‘Never. My mammy didn’t talk much about her people. I knew that her mammy had raised her alone from when she was about seven, after her daddy had died. She didn’t talk about him much, just said that he was a nice man, kind, quite old, and that they had been on the roads with a show. But after he died they were on their own and then her mammy was hard up. She never said it but I think she might have worked the streets. Then Mammy met my daddy and I think her mother died not long after that. I’m not sure what happened to her. She may have ended up in the poor house. She didn’t talk about it much. Just said that me and Daddy were her family.’

Her mother’s face rises, unbidden, into her mind. Those high, rounded cheeks. The shock of blonde hair. Her lavender scent. She was always graceful; even when she walked down the street her body would sway, as though she moved to her own internal music, a constant rhythm that thrummed in her head and only she could hear. As a child Lena had thought her mammy the most beautiful and glamorous creature she had ever seen, with long, elegant fingers and what her father always called ‘a well-turned ankle’. She could make even the plainest, dowdiest dress look as if it came from a tailor in Paris, her tiny waist sloping in and out in exactly the right places. Sometimes she would ask Lena to help dress her and Lena would stand on her tiptoes, reaching upwards to fasten the many buttons of her frock.

Oh, she thinks, as she looks out on the grubby winter landscape, the barren trees, the silent paddocks, like empty battlefields, what she would give for just one more day in her mammy’s company. One hour. One minute. She tries to remember if anything in Serena’s face reminded her of Maggie. But that greyish, yellow complexion, like a waxing moon on a dreich spring night, held no clues. Serena remained a stranger. Perhaps that meant none of it was true.

She knew it had to be, though. It would be a ridiculous story to make up. Pointless. The old woman was a nasty, callous bitch, but she was in her right mind. Lena wonders what else she might have done to them had she not found out that Lena was her niece. Perhaps Violet had been doomed anyway.

Harry briefly rests his hand on Lena’s knee. It is cold, even through his woollen mittens, but somehow, it warms her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘That’s an awful lot to take in.’

He fumbles in his jacket pocket and produces a hip flask. Lena wonders why he has not brought it out before and realises he probably didn’t want to frighten her with drink. The last time they’d sipped whisky together alone, that magical night in Ayr, things had been so different. There had been promise on the air. The show was going well. She was starting to see a future. And Violet was still alive.

‘Thank you,’ she says, and takes a long, lingering sip. She hands it back and he too takes a nip.

‘So how are we going to find out who killed Violet?’ he says.

But Lena simply shakes her head, and gazes out on to the endless, slush-filled world.