Serial Killer Part 1: Chapter 12
Alive or dead, she always knew how to make an entrance.
That night, he relaxed in an armchair in his comfortable quarters in the attics of Fleetpit House. Why pay rent when he could live in a hotel in central London for free? He had to keep the lights low and the blinds drawn in case the police thought there was a break-in, but otherwise it was perfect. Better than Greg, who had to commute back to Colchester every night, except when he was staying at Joy’s in Marble Arch.
A fur boa, symbolising his mother, was draped over the armchair opposite. It was a bit moth-eaten; he’d bought it from a thrift shop, but it was all he could afford at the time. The glass eyes would stare beadily back at him from the darkness as he told her about his work, his adventures and now how he was falling for Joy, as well as her fur coat. The kind of thing that any boy might talk to his mother about.
And they weren’t always one-sided conversations; she would respond and, all too often, disagree with his opinions. Like her insistence that, one day soon, he was going to make it with Joy.
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The boa triggered one of his last memories of Jean Maudling. As he chewed on his liquorice pipe, he could almost smell her Sirocco perfume, her face powder, her bright red smile, her long blonde hair cascading in waves onto her shoulders. They had been going to see Blue Murder at Saint Trinian’s. The flicks was the only time he ever got to spend any real time with her. She checked herself in the dressing table mirror and asked him if she looked okay and he replied, tugging at her coat, ‘Yeah, yeah. Come on. Or we’ll miss the start, mum.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she smiled. ‘We can always sit through and watch it again.’ They often did this. The year before, they’d sat and watched Reach For the Sky three times from the afternoon right through to the evening performance that ended with the cinema-goers’ stampede for the exit before the national anthem.
Ronald Searle’s creations were already creating blue murder as they followed the usherette’s torch down to the front stalls and were shone to their seats. For a moment, his young mother’s beauty was inadvertently caught in the spotlight of the torch: her movie-star looks, fur jacket, high heels and platinum blonde hair. There was a sharp and collective intake of breath from the male members of the audience, momentarily distracted from the deranged schoolgirls on the screen by this apparition of loveliness in her early thirties. His mother always knew how to make an entrance.
A man who hadn’t mastered the useful art of looking at other women out of the corner of his eye without moving his head, was elbowed in the ribs by his wife. ‘Stop staring, you. She’s all fur coat and no knickers, that one.’
And now, for the first time, it seemed to Dave she was actually sitting opposite him in the darkness of his room. The beady-eyed, moth-eaten boa was now new and lustrous and draped around the bare shoulders of her tight-fitting black dress. He’d always seen her in his imagination, but this was different. Her figure was more sharply defined, her scent richer, her looks more lustrous.
‘Mum!’ he gasped.
She was real.
Even though she was dead.
He knew she must be dead. It was one thing for her to go off with a lover and not be in touch. She had disappeared before, usually for a few days. Then that terrible day when she disappeared forever. At the time, he believed his father when he told his anxious young son she must have found someone else.
But it was quite another thing for her not to have been in touch with her family for nearly twenty years. Something awful had to have happened to her. It was a question he had asked her, of course, when he heard her voice in his head, but she had never given him an answer.
Alive or dead, she always knew how to make an entrance. Not a day older than the day she vanished, she smiled across at him. A femme noir in her tight-fitting black dress. A femme fatale who had surely met a terrible fate. He chewed hard on his noir pipe. There had to be a reason why she was appearing to him now.
‘What’s happened, mum? Why are you back? What is it you want?’
The smile left Jean Maudling’s beautiful lips.
‘I want you to find out who murdered me.’
Serial Killer by Pat Mills & Kevin O’Neill is the first book in the Read Em And Weep series and is on sale digitally or as paperback.
Nice evocation of the period.