Lost - Michael Robotham [46]
In the first few months after his conviction he received bundles of fan mail. Many of the letters were from women who fell in love with his lonely countenance and his crime. One of them, Bettina Gallagher, a legal secretary from Cardiff, is a notorious pinup among the lifers. She sends pornographic photographs of herself and has twice been engaged to death row inmates in Alabama and Oklahoma.
Howard is allowed one free postage-paid letter a week but can buy more stationery and stamps from the prison shop. Each prisoner is also given a unique PIN number he must use when using the telephone. Pedophiles and child molesters can dial only approved numbers. Letters and calls are monitored.
These details rattle in the emptiness. I can’t see Howard arranging a ransom drop—not from inside a prison cell.
“Give your eyes a chance,” my stepfather used to say when we were looking for newborn lambs on frosty nights. White on white is difficult to see. Sometimes you have to look past things before you really see them.
There used to be a really good comedian who called himself Nosmo King. I watched this guy for years and didn’t realize where the name came from. NO SMOKING. Nosmo King. That’s why you have to keep your eyes open. The answer can be right in front of you.
The Professor has opened his briefcase and pulled out a photograph album. The cover is frayed and silverfish have given it a mottled finish along the spine. I recognize it from somewhere.
“I went to see your mother,” he says.
“You did what!”
“I went to see her.”
My teeth are clenched. “You had no right.”
Ignoring me, he runs his fingers over the album cover. Here it comes—the search backward, the probing of my childhood, my family and my relationships. What does it prove? Nothing. How can another human being have any appreciation of my life and the things that shaped me?
“You don’t want to talk about this.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re poking your nose into my business—you’re screwing with my head.”
It takes me a moment to realize that I’m shouting at him. Thankfully, there’s nobody around except the barman and the sleeping drunk.
“She doesn’t seem very happy in the nursing home.”
“It’s a fucking retirement village.”
He opens the album. The first photograph is of my stepfather, John Francis Ruiz. A farmer’s son from Lancashire, he’s dressed in his RAF uniform, standing on the wing of a Lancaster bomber. Already losing his hair, his high forehead makes his eyes seem bigger and more alive.
I remember that photograph. For twenty years it stood on the mantelpiece beside a silver jubilee picture frame and one of those tacky snowballs of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
John Ruiz went missing over Belgium on July 15, 1943, while on his way to bomb a bridge in Ghent. The Lancaster was hit by German fighters and exploded in midair, dropping like a fiery comet.
“Missing in action. Presumed dead,” the telegram said. Only he wasn’t dead. He survived a German POW camp and came home to discover that the “future” he had fought so hard to protect had run off and married an American catering corps sergeant and moved to Texas. Nobody blamed her, least of all him.
And then he met Sofia Eisner (or Germile Purrum), a “Jewish” seamstress with a newborn son. She was striding down the hill from Golders Green, between two young friends, their arms locked together, laughing.
“Don’t forget now,” shouted the eldest of them. “We’re going to meet the men we’re going to marry tonight.”
At the cinema at the bottom of the hill they came across a group of young men waiting in the queue. One of them wore a single-breasted jacket with notched lapels and three buttons.
Germile whispered to her friends, “Which one’s mine?”
John Ruiz smiled at her. A year later they were married.
Joe turns another page of the album. The sepia images seem to have soaked into the paper. There is a photograph of the farm—a plowman’s cottage with small leadlight windows and doors so low my stepfather