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  Her eyes followed his pointing. “You mean the fat controller?”

  Brian laughed, “Well I haven’t actually seen him for some time, but I do believe that he is rather rotund and he does like his railways.”

  She shielded her eyes from the evening sun and once again Brian noticed the thin claw like fingers. “Looks an interesting place.”

  “Why not come and have a look while I put the kettle on?

  She hesitated, “Sure you’re not a reporter? I’m not allowed to fraternize with reporters.”

  “Definitely a schoolteacher with no inclinations to join the reporting fraternity.”

  She gave a brief nod, “OK then.”

  She started to walk towards the house and Brian fell in beside her, unsure of just why he had invited her apart from his fascination with her face. “I’m Brian by the way, Brian Noames.”

  “Call me Bau,” she replied casually.

  He opened the leaning front gate for her and then led her into the downstairs hall. “My cousin, for reasons best known to himself, lives on the third floor, but I’ve got all my stuff down here. How about you take a look round and then I’ll bring the drinks up to the back room he uses as a lounge? Coffee or tea?”

  “White coffee please.”

  She set about exploring and Brian set about making the drinks using the tiny kettle that he’d found in the downstairs kitchen. It was one of those small low-wattage kettles and as it boiled Brian wondered if it would have been faster to use a candle under a cup of water. Eventually he carried a tray upstairs with coffee, cake and a few chocolate biscuits in their wrappers. She was in the back room listening to Eric Clapton singing Broken Down from his Reptile album. She turned to face Brian as he entered. “He makes it all seem so easy,” she said, “his playing is seamless from easy chords to difficult riffs to virtually impossible combinations.”

  He put the tray down; “Do you still play?”

  She gave a cackle, “So you’re not the mister innocent you seem. How do you know I play the guitar?”

  He held his hands up; “I got your name from Verity and looked you up on the net. Bau Didly, Rocqettes and all that.”

  She turned the music down a little and flopped into an armchair, “That was all a lifetime ago, but it was fun while it lasted.”

  She went quite, Brian repeated his question. “So did you give up the guitar?”

  She shrugged, “For a little while. You play?”

  “Piano and badly. Good enough for a school assembly, but not good enough to play solo at a concert or risk playing in church. Prefer the pipe organ, but it’s a totally different technique and I’m well out of practice.”

  He gave her a cup of coffee and proffered a piece of cake. She looked at it dubiously. “What sort?”

  “Carrot and Coconut.”

  “No nuts?”

  “Not that I know of. You allergic?”

  “No,” she replied as she reached for the cake.

  Before she took her first of many small nibbles she waved her skinny arm around, “Why do you bother to house-sit for your cousin? No one round here would raid the place and strangers stick out like a sore thumb.”

  Brian started to unwrap a biscuit, “Live over the shop and the school’s closed from end of first week of June to first week of September.”

  “Boarding school then?”

  “Yes.”

  Her tongue shot out and rescued a crumb from the top of her lips. “No state school plebs for you then.”

  He half shrugged. “Haven’t got the qualifications. Did a Post-Graduate Certificate of Education course, but never took the exams.”

  She raised an eyebrow, “Flunked out?”

  “Parents got killed in a road crash. Porsche 911 overtaking on the wrong side of a double white line on a blind bend totally destroyed their elderly Fiat 127 and them inside it.”

  She stopped nibbling, “Sorry, crass remark.”

  “You weren’t to know. I could just never face the resits. I got called out of the first exam five minutes before it was due to start. I did try for a resit, but the exam tension brought back all the memories and I couldn’t face it.”

  “What do you teach?”

  “Physics and RE,” he paused knowing what reaction he would get to the next statement, “and I’m the school chaplain.”

  She raised the other eyebrow, “Is it a Catholic school then?”

  “Thankfully no.”

  “But you are a reverend?”

  “Yes.”

  She pushed the last piece of cake into her tiny mouth and licked a crumb off of the finger before leaning back in the armchair. “I was brought up as Exclusive Brethren; guess you know what that means.”

  This was not what he had expected. “In theory. No TV, no friends outside the church, no courting outside the sect and so on. Is it really as bad as that?”

  She nodded, “Worse. Radio was permanently tuned to radio 3. Books were vetted, and I had to suffer fifteen years of private tuition by other members, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t attend any of your RE lessons.”

  Brian was intrigued. “So how do you get into rock music?”

  She grinned, “When my sister became sixteen my parents left me in her tender care while they went out to prayer meetings and suchlike. She taught me how to retune the radio with a pair of pliers – my parents had taken the knob off. We used to listen to any pop music station we could get hold of.”

  She eyed the biscuits and Brian offered her the plate, she took a red foiled square one. “Then, when I was just fifteen, the local authority decided that the private tutors were not giving me a wide enough education. Oddly enough they weren’t moaning about the religious content, just that I wasn’t being taught a second language or practical science. I ended up at the local comprehensive, believe me it was an eye-opener. I met Harriet there; she became Little Susie in the Rocqettes. We sort of gelled. I’d learnt to play the classical guitar at home and moving over to pop music was easy. When I was seventeen she contacted me out of the blue – I’d left school by then and was working as an unpaid nanny with a dreary Brethren family– with the offer of joining the Rocqettes. I never looked back.”

  Brian frowned, “What did your parents say?”

  She looked away. “The cut me off, cut me dead so to speak.” She gave a hopeless shrug, “I’ve written to my mother every month since I left home, never got a reply; not even sure she gets the letters, but she is my mum.”

  “And your sister?”

  Bau smiled, “She escaped to the states, Maine, to marry a brethren member over there, they’re a bit more lax. She writes back from time to time. She still hasn’t got e-mail, but she’d working on it.”

  She suddenly looked at the large TV screen, “Can you get MTV on that thing?”

  “Probably.”

  She shot him a pleading glance; “Eric Bibb is on their Blues show. You’ve got to see him playing an acoustic guitar to believe what you’re listening to.”

  Brian had never heard of Eric Bibb, but he dutifully got up and turned the TV on. Anything to keep this goddess of past beauty with him for just another short while. He found MTV and they settled down to watch and listen, that is her watch and listen to the TV while he listened to the TV and watch her.

  Brian turned the TV off after nearly two hours. Following Eric Bibb there had been a rerun of a Chris Rea live set of his Stony Road blues album. Bau had been riveted to the screen; he had been riveted to her. He’d realised, somewhere in the middle of Eric Bibb that her face was now different from that shown on the early fan-club gallery photograph of her. Her mouth was definitely smaller, her lips had a more pronounced heart-shape and her ears now lay flat on the side of her head. He surmised that somewhere along the line she’d had some cosmetic surgery. As he turned the TV off she looked at his watch and stood up, “Guess I’d better be going.”

  He glanced out of the window at the gentle summer rain. “I’ll give you a lift, it’s raining.”

>   She hesitated. “You might not want to do that.”

  He was surprised, “Why not?”

  “Being seen with me could ruin your career.”

  Now he was perplexed, “Why?”

  “Because,” she said softly, “I’m a convicted murderer out on licence pending a judicial review of my case and hoping for a second appeal. Around here I’m strictly persona non grata, and the last thing you’d probably want is to have your photograph alongside mine on the front of some grubby tabloid.”

  His heart didn’t miss a beat; it almost stopped.

  Chapter 3

  Not What It Seems

  He didn’t quite know what to say as it’s not every day that someone you’ve been entertaining calmly tells you that they are a murderer. He looked at her frail body, her tired and worn face, and her anxious expression and made a decision; one he hoped he wouldn’t regret. “I’ll still run you home.”

  She sat back down. “Look, I don’t want to get you into trouble. It’s been a lovely evening and believe me I’m bad news around here. I should probably never have come, but you were nice to me and I don’t get much conversation.”

  Brian frowned, “Then why stay around here?”

  A tired smile crossed her face, “Because it’s my licence conditions. I’m out on a restricted licence, which means that I’ve not only got to report to a police station once a month, but reside within a four mile radius of my last given residence. That was a country house over at Burston Tye, so I’m stuck here and the residents rather wish I wasn’t.”

  Her shoulders gave a resigned shrug, “Once the review happens and the next appeal clears the court things might change, but that could be years away.”

  “How about you tell me about it?”

  “This is chaplain mode is it?” She almost sneered.

  “No, ‘it’s I’m a bit gobsmacked’ mode.”

  She laughed, “Fine, I’ll tell you all. But only if you make me a hot chocolate.

  Ten minutes later they were back in the upstairs room, each with a mug of hot chocolate and a digestive biscuit. She dipped a fraction of her biscuit in the drink and nibbled it, holding the biscuit at the side of her mouth. “Don’t know where to start really.”

  “How about starting with the Rocqettes?”

  He face lit up. “Oh that was fun, it was really fun and not really work at all. Harriet’s father became our de facto manager and as he’s a solicitor he cut us a good deal with the record company. We enjoyed ourselves and the money just rolled in, mainly from the three tours we did. We wrote the five singles together, it was a sort of jam-session spin-off activity, so we all gained from the royalties. I still do to some extent, except that our songs rarely get airtime these days. Our sound engineer pieced the first album together so we didn’t have to do a single studio session, and that album made us famous.”

  She paused for another edge-of-mouth biscuit nibble and Brian put his head on one side, “So what went wrong? You left them didn’t you?”

  She sipped her drink, “That’s was the formal line we gave to the fan club. Truth is after just over two years our fan base was beginning to show signs of dropping off. Our first two tours had been sell-outs. But towards the end of our third the venues were only about 90% full. Pamela, she was Jeryy L’Ewis and played lead guitar, said that we should go raunchy. You know wear corsets and suspenders and sing music that was more suggestive. Her target was to gain young male fans. Personally I already felt dreadfully exposed wearing the gym slips and full bikini tops we’d always used. I never could get used to appearing like that, suppose it was my secluded childhood. Anyway I thought it was a bad move and would lose us our loyal fan base of mainly female early-teenagers. Pamela insisted on a vote and Harriet and I lost two to three. Harriet decided to stay and I decided to leave.”

  She took another nibble and another sip. Brian watched her eyes, “And you were right, they bombed out.”

  “In spectacular fashion; they started a fourth tour to promote their new album, Rocqettes Away!, and had to pull out after the third of sixteen venues due to low ticket sales. Harriet went onto have a solo career in Holland, her mother is Dutch, the rest of them disappeared into obscurity.”

  “So what did you do?”

  She finished her biscuit. “I had no idea what I wanted. I already had more money than I believed possible, but hadn’t thought about my future. Salvation came in the form of The Buffalo Boys, an all-male singing and dancing boy band. Their bass guitarist, Johnny Albro, managed to break both his arms and twist his spine in a quad biking accident and they asked me to stand in for him on their next tour. They didn’t want a man as they didn’t want Johnny to think they were replacing him. It was good fun and they paid well, but the music was crap. The only saving grace was as we approached Christmas their manager wanted a Christmas ditty: the previous year they’d managed a Christmas number one with The Snowman Knows and he wanted a sequel. The boys weren’t keen so I wrote them one, What do you give Father Christmas’ daughter? You’ve probably seen the video, Lionel sings the ditty with the other boys wandering about showing dreadful presents and coming out with phrases like ‘Thanks Grandma, what an original jumper’ and ‘That is unusual!’ I don’t actually appear on the video, I just treble tracked all the guitar music and Dick laid down the drums. But I wrote it; therefore I get both playing and author royalties. Fortunately for me it’s become something of a Christmas standard so it’s proved to be a nice little earner, but it was a total fluke.”

  She shrugged, “Just after that Christmas Johnny came back and I got a couple of weeks work as a session guitarist on a Spanish Classical Guitar album. You know the sort sold by supermarkets labelled something like ‘The Music of Spain.’ After that I had a string of session jobs until I became pregnant.”

  She finished her chocolate. “It’s funny really, I was somewhat of a wild child with the Rocqettes doing all the things my parents had forbidden, but I never slept with anybody, unlike the others. Then I met this Greek musician and he smoothly enticed me into bed before he scampered home to his wife and family. Lucy was born five months after I stopped work and believe me it was a terrible birth. I’d wanted it to be natural, but I was well overdue and had to have her induced. The birth took hours and when she was finally born she’d was tangled in the umbilical chord and slightly starved of Oxygen. She was a fractious baby, but I loved her like I’d never loved anyone before. I suppose it’s the mother-baby bond. As she grew up she was extremely active and obviously not right. She didn’t develop according to the book and was obviously slightly brain-damaged. The doctors had warned me of that possibility a few days after she was born, but the day I accepted their diagnosis was one of the most peculiar days of my life. I was both terrible upset for her and terrible consumed with love for her.”

  She let out a long sigh. “When she was two months old I hired a live-in nanny to help me cope. By the time Lucy was two I’d not managed to get her to walk and when you fed her she’d throw up most of the food within minutes. Eventually I took her to America and paid for an operation on her gut, after that she wasn’t sick so much, but her nappies are best not described. Amy, the nanny, was marvellous and between the two of us we managed to feed her, clean her up, change her nappy and give her a fair quality of life.”

  She smiled in recollection, “She used to laugh a lot, that was the compensation, she was happy even if we were both permanently shattered.”

  She stopped and took a couple of deep breaths. Brian didn’t interrupt her flow. “One month before her fifth birthday she started to change. She became morose, grouchy, slept even less than normal and eventually started passing blood in her urine.”

  Bau swallowed as if forcing back bile, “She was diagnosed with liver cancer and by the time we got her under a MRI scanner she already had secondary tumours in her lungs and glands.”

  She turned a pair of sad eyes onto Brian and made a sort of catching noise in her throat, “There was no hope. One doctor
told me that I could spend a small fortune flying her around the world for treatment, but she was already well passed the point of no return.”

  She wrung her hands together, “Amy resigned a few months after, said she couldn’t cope. I soldiered on by myself and probably didn’t sleep for more than a couple of hours every night, then one night I did fall asleep and woke up to find Lucy dead beside me.”

  She stared at Brian, “That’s when my troubles really started. The locum GP refused to sign a death certificate and insisted on a post-mortem. The pathologist noted that Lucy had probably died from inhaled vomit and that she had bruises on her lips and other parts of her body.”

  She turned her eyes to Brian; “She bruised easily and absolutely loved playing in the bouncy castle. Towards the end it was her only real pleasure.” There was real pathos in her voice.

  She looked away, “To cut a long story short the police decided to prosecute, using my real name of Margaret Chasle, not my stage name. When it came to court the first time the prosecution produced a string of expert witnesses and my legal team found out that they were defending me not against medical facts but against emotional speculation. One expert in particular, Dr Georgette Harris, painted me into an eloquent picture of a harassed and tired mother who knew that her child as dying and so planned a swift and terrible end to their child’s life so that they could return to show-business. She described how she thought I’d held my daughter’s lips together to make her choke to death. She made such a ghastly act sound plausible, too plausible; it probably quite swung the jury. Amy didn’t help as she became flustered on the stand and the prosecution managed to get words out of her mouth that I’m sure she didn’t mean. Upshot was I was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of twenty-five years.”

  She paused, “I appealed, of course. I refused legal help from both the euthanasia society and the society of harassed mothers as I’d neither killed her nor been that distraught, just tired and negligent. Using a legal technicality my very expensive lawyers managed to keep me out of prison until the appeal was heard. I’d been led to expect an acquittal as I was still out on bail. I’d even got a job lined up. Instead the judgement was upheld, although the sentence was reduced to a minimum term of fifteen years. After that it was go directly to jail and do not collect £200.”