My life was lived half in a dream anyway, and so I might well have dreamt the events of the previous night except for the fact that my boots were mired with dried black mud. I sat on the edge of the bed staring at them for several minutes. I could see the young man’s face in the light of the candle, creased and ravaged, the flashing gleam of his eyes. And the pale sack of lacerated flesh oozing down beneath the bubbling surface. All this might have been the product of my imagination, but the mud on my boots was real and refused to disappear, even though I stared and stared.
Benson a murderer. The fact of it hadn’t sunk in.
I went to the tap along the passage for some water and glanced up at the ceiling, thinking of the attaché case in the attic above. I could blackmail Benson – except of course I didn’t want his money. But I could destroy his rich, comfortable, well-rounded life. His pretty dark-eyed daughter, his large house, his business: all were legitimate targets. Leave Benson till last and then destroy him …
The cold water washed the sleep from my eyes. I dressed quickly, thinking as I did so that I ought to eat something. It was a mechanical decision: hunger seemed to have left me. But if I didn’t eat I wouldn’t be able to think straight, and it was important now not to act stupidly.
At the top of the stairs I paused, buttoning up my overcoat, hearing voices in the shop. Mr Patundi was being shouted at, but not, this time, by his wife. There was a scuffling of feet, angry words were exchanged. I retreated quickly along the landing as footsteps approached the bottom of the stairs and kept moving backwards until I reached the narrow door leading to the attic. As the footsteps came up I nipped inside and pressed my ear to the door.
Somebody went directly into my room, as if they knew what they were looking for, and walked about. A voice said something I couldn’t make out and Mr Patundi, who must have been standing in the doorway, stammered, ‘He tells me his name is Holford. This is true, I swear—’
The footsteps came out and the voice, which I now recognised, said with incredulity, ‘Holford? You lying wog. Come on, sambo, out with it, where is he? He hasn’t gone out, has he, or you’d have seen him, wun’t yer? Going through the shop?’
‘He might go when I was not there,’ Mr Patundi said. ‘Or the back door.’ I could almost see his shrug and the roll of his yellow eyes. ‘He goes, he comes, I don’t know always.’
‘What about the bell?’
‘Bell?’
‘The bell in the shop, diarrhoea-face,’ Wayne said. ‘If he went out through the shop you’d hear the fucking bell. Wun’t yer?’
‘Perhaps yes—’
‘No perhaps. You’d hear it, turd-brain. So he must still be here.’
‘You see the room …’
‘I see the room, yeh. What else is there?’
‘Nothing—’
‘What’s along here?’
There was the agitated flap of Mr Patundi’s sandals.
‘Empty – all empty. Locked.’
‘Why locked if they’re empty? Shift. Move.’ Mr Patundi gasped as he was thrust aside, and the heavy footsteps came along the landing. I leaned my weight against the door. It creaked. The door opposite was thumped with a fist but the padlock clinked as it held fast. The other doors were tried, their padlocks shaken, and the footsteps came up to the door I was pushing against with all my strength.
‘This in’t locked. What’s in here, squire?’
The brass knob squeaked as it was turned and I felt the door strain as pressure was applied. I pushed back as hard as I could, squeezing the blood out of my shoulder. My toes were curled inside my boots, trying to grip the floorboards. The door shuddered as a fist thumped it. I could picture the small, close-together eyes in the round smooth face, the shirt pulled taut, buttons straining, over the sagging stomach, the little square teeth brown at the roots. Again the knob was turned, rattled back and forth, and there was a grunt of exertion as Wayne tried again.
‘Where’s the key?’ He was breathing hard. ‘Come on, nig-nog, where’s the fucking key?’
‘No key when I come here. I tell you – which is true – everything locked. Your friend Holford has gone. He will come back, you see him then perhaps.’
‘Yeh,’ Wayne murmured, ‘I will see him then. No perhaps. Definitely.’ He moved towards the stairs. ‘If you’re telling me fibs Abdul, I’ll make sure you never tell fibs again.’
‘Figs?’ Mr Patundi said.
‘Fibs, you ignorant wog.’ Wayne’s voice suddenly rose: ‘Lies! Lies! If you’re lying you’ll be on yer way to see the Prophet. Yeh? Goddit? Comprendez?’
I waited until I heard the hollow tinkling of the shop bell before I stood upright in the dark cramped space, working my right shoulder and bicep to get the blood circulating again. When had Wayne seen me enter the shop? I had been careful to use the back door during daylight hours. And there was no one to betray me except Mr Patundi, even supposing he had a reason to.
Carefully, hands outstretched in the darkness, I ascended the narrow staircase to the attic. The only signs of disturbance were the ones I had made myself. I pulled the attaché case free from the rusty springs and horsehair stuffing. There were raw scratches in the deeply gleaming alligator skin binding.
I searched around for something to put the case in, or at least camouflage it. There was a pair of faded floral curtains with tarnished rings – more than enough material to wrap the case in, but to carry an object wrapped in a curtain would be almost as bad as flaunting it openly on the street.
Eventually I tore open the seam of the armchair’s square cushion, shook out the stuffing, and slid the case inside the moquette cover. It would have to do.
Wayne had turned over my few belongings and left them scattered on the bed. Was he looking for the attaché case, or was it mere curiosity? I started to gather them together, and then the absurdity of it struck me, and I rolled them into a bundle and wedged it out of sight under the wardrobe. And then I thought, to hell with the risk. Why not check into a decent hotel and throw £20 notes about like confetti? Probably no one would turn a hair. Live it up at Benson’s expense.
I went down, stopping just where the stairs angled ninety degrees so that by craning forward I could see across the passage into Mr Patundi’s dank little cave. A wisp of steam rose from the spout of the kettle but his chair was empty. There was silence from the shop. Was he in the basement?
I stepped down into the passage. The silence was unnerving. It seemed to hum in the pungent air like a scream. Was it a trap – the fat boy waiting patiently for me to re-emerge, a rat poking its nose out of the hole? A tremor started in my calves and spread up into my thighs so that I had to lean against the wall. I waited, gathering my strength, thinking I would kick my way through the heaped sacks and flimsy wooden crates and charge out into the street and run like a madman.
A sound made me jerk my head round – something had moved in the gloomy depths of the passage. I stared but could see nothing. My gaze drifted downwards and I saw that I was being observed by a pair of wide unblinking eyes, slumberously brown and burning with fever. I swallowed and cleared my throat.
‘Where’s your father?’
The child didn’t move, the hot eyes didn’t blink.
His skull was completely smooth, and the ligatures of his neck, supporting the little brown head, stood out like piano wires. Now I could see that he was clutching a stuffed brown elephant to his chest with a wrinkled trunk that curled back on itself. It was an Indian elephant, with two tiny scraps of soft brown fabric for ears.
‘Are you a robber?’ he asked out of mild interest.
The words rattled out thinly, as if it was a painful struggle to get past the larynx inside that scrawny neck.
Despite his grotesque appearance he had a child’s normal, fantastic curiosity. ‘I’m your lodger. I live upstairs,’ and I even smiled, knowing that robbers and lodgers can co-exist with equal validity and without contradiction in a child’s world. ‘You’re … Kamal? Where’s your Dad? Has he gone out?’
He shrugged, an old man’s listless twitch, and retreated as I moved towards him. His eyes were heavy-lidded, like his father’s, and glittering with illness. I wondered if what he had was contagious.
‘Did he go out with the other man? The fat one?’
He gazed at me in silence.
‘Did you see the fat man go out?’
His thin brown hand tightened round the elephant. ‘He called my father,’ the thin squealing words came, ‘what the boys called me when I went to school.’
‘What was that?’
‘Wog.’ He blinked in slow-motion, and the taut flesh puckered in a frown. ‘What’s a wog? I asked my mother but she won’t tell me. And she said I mustn’t ask my father. What is it?’
I edged past him, holding the attaché case in its moquette bag under my arm, containing the tapes, the recorder, Benson’s private notebooks, the money, S – ’s diary – the total sum of my worldly possessions – and sidled along the passage to the back door.
‘Is it like nig-nog?’ – the child’s voice floated down like a rusty sigh as I withdrew the bolts and unfastened the chain. ‘Wog, nig-nog, black bastard, fucking twat. Are they all the same or different?’
I forced the door over the lumpy linoleum and went out.
It was the first time I had seen the harbour in daylight. It contained the remnants of what had been Brickton’s fishing fleet, a couple of larger cargo vessels, and sundry smaller craft down to wooden rowing boats, with only the rims of their gunwales breaking the black surface, like the outline of giant footprints that had filled in. It was impossible to tell which of the vessels Trafford had made his home.
Across the mud stretched the spidery fretwork of a conveyor system: enormous square steel buckets suspended on chains, strung far out to sea. Part of a dredging operation, I supposed.
From the vantage point of the harbour wall I thought I might see a pale humped shape, a fish-white puckered hand groping through. But the thick dark mud concealed all, sucked everything away, including our footprints from the night before. Perhaps the basin of mud contained other bodies: a graveyard of putrefying lacerated corpses held in liquid suspension. Trafford had known about the body, gone straight to it. Supposing he, and not Benson, was the murderer? What if he were so proud of his handiwork that he had to show it off? There could be little satisfaction – could there? – in committing the act and not getting the credit for it. Imagine walking about with that dreadful thrilling secret and the agony of not divulging it to anyone! But Trafford hadn’t taken the credit; he had given it to Benson, had said That’s what he does to people who get in his way.
Next to a chain-link fence I came upon a new wooden signboard, freshly painted in large black letters, which read:
SITE ACQUIRED FOR
BENSON DEVELOPMENTS
(HOLDINGS) PLC
A footbridge connected one arm of the harbour wall to a spur of the mainland, leading to a path of cindery red earth which ran along-side a collection of old buildings which at first I took to be derelict. The windows were boarded over. Doors hung ajar on musty interiors piled with rubbish. But some of the buildings were still in use: right at the end next to an open door there were three wooden trays of paperbacks with a hand-lettered notice: ‘25p each – five for £1,’ and crudely painted on the wall above: ‘Hank’s Book Exchange’. Parked round the corner was a rusty silver Datsun with a piece of bent wire for a radio aerial.
Stone steps led down past bright green gloss walls sweating with condensation. The basement reeked of decay and damp paper, of mouldy bindings and bundles of crumbling religious tracts. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see green seawater rising through the spongy carpet and swilling between the metal racks like a scummy tide.
Diane Locke was standing near a desk talking to a young man with a blond beard and thinning, baby-fine hair.
Neither one glanced up. I rested the moquette bag against the leg of a trestle-table and pretended to browse. The sound of her voice was like a snatch of a popular song that reconstitutes a vanished past. It was pathetic that Diane Locke’s voice was the only nostalgia I had to cling to.
‘Don’t you need a prodigious memory?’ she was saying. ‘All those precedents and Crown versus Hathaway 1863 cases to remember?’
‘No, no—’ the young man protested gently, blushing, flattered by her praise. ‘It’s a general grasp of principles that’s important. You require a mind that works in a certain systematic way, I suppose.’
‘Well then, it wouldn’t suit me.’ From her profile I could see that she was smiling. ‘What are you in now, your second year?’
The young man nodded. He said eagerly, ‘I want to specialise in tax law, that’s where the opportunities are. Set up my own consultancy and hire myself out to the big corporations. Whatever you save them, you take twenty-five per cent.’
‘By “save” you mean “avoid”, don’t you?’
‘Only in the legal sense.’
‘Ah yes, the legal sense.’ Diane Locke kept her smile. She said, ‘That’s where you lawyers come in, keeping everything nice and legal.’
The young man took her words at face value; in any case her gentle smile would have dispelled any doubts. I thought about how some people can insult you to your face and you almost thank them for it, whereas others (I meant myself) could rile people with the most benign, well-meaning phrases. Something to do with the eyes, perhaps, or the tone of voice or the shape of the mouth.
Diane Locke turned her head and saw me. My spectacle frames were in my pocket, so it was only the dark hair and thickening beard that were different. She turned back to the young man without acknowledging me and said, ‘Tell Hank I’ve been. I’ll ring him in a day or so.’
‘Yes I will – I’ll write it down,’ shaping his wispy blond beard to a point with his other hand as he did so.
She picked up her shoulder-bag and went up the stairs.
Diane Locke was standing next to the car, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a dark-blue hip-length reefer jacket, collar turned up, gazing across the harbour to the horizon – or what would have been the horizon had it been possible to spot the demarcation of flat grey sea from grey blank sky.
She frowned as if concentrating furiously on something. As I came up to her she said with a tremor in her voice, ‘In heaven’s name what have you done to your hair?’
‘You don’t think it’s an improvement?’
‘I never imagined you as the vain type. There’s proper stuff you can buy, you know, to hide the grey. And why the beard?’
‘It’s supposed to be a disguise.’
She put a hand over her face and trembled violently.
‘I’ve got glasses too.’
‘Don’t,’ she was shaking now, ‘don’t put them on. Please.’ She was quivering helplessly like a schoolgirl. ‘Do you have a red nose and plastic ears to go with them?’
I felt childishly happy. I liked having her laugh at me. I said, ‘Let’s drive out somewhere. Let me buy you a meal. I’d like to very much.’
‘My God, what’s this?’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Come into the family inheritance?’
‘It’s some money that was owed me. Will you come?’ I knew I sounded like a teenager and couldn’t help it. ‘I’m really glad to see you again.’
‘Well,’ Diane Locke said, putting her handkerchief away. ‘I’m not sure I’m glad to see you. Not with that hair.’
‘I could have dyed it orange,’ I said.
‘It might have been better if you had,’ she said, opening the car door, her eyes still moist.
Leaving Brickton for the open countryside was like being released from a dark cobwebbed cupboard under the stairs. The rear window of the Datsun had been mended, and I opened the window on my side a couple of inches and took in a few good lungfuls of air. The attaché case in its moquette cover rested on my knees, with both hands holding it. I began to feel less afraid, almost light-headed with what I supposed was happiness.
After about twenty minutes we turned off the main road and followed a sign pointing the way to a place called Gilcrux. The narrow road dipped like a rut between high hedges, shutting off the view of mountains with their smooth bare crowns supporting the unbroken overcast.
‘Who’s the disguise supposed to fool anyway?’ Diane Locke asked. ‘Benson or Smith?’
I suddenly felt cold, and shut the window. I didn’t want to think or be reminded about S –. I’d shut him off. The smell of the clinic clung to him.
‘It wouldn’t fool either of them.’
‘Damn right it wouldn’t,’ Diane Locke said. ‘So why bother?’
I had no answer.
‘You haven’t seen him have you, this man who’s supposed to be following you?’
‘No.’
‘He hasn’t shown up in Brickton?’
‘No.’
‘Then you’ve nothing to worry about, have you?’
She drove over a hump-backed bridge that spanned rough water tumbling over rocks. We passed through a stone gateway wreathed in dark green moss and stopped by a low wall of yellowish brick with a sunken formal garden beyond. The house was very old, crumbling at the edges, with narrow leaded mullion windows and a roof that was all steep angles and tall thin chimneys of carved stone. There was no sign I had seen for a restaurant or a hotel.
‘Do you have to take that everywhere you go?’ Diane Locke asked as I got out of the car still clutching the moquette bag.
‘It’s valuable.’
‘Valuable!’ she mocked me. ‘You have come up in the world.’ She opened the boot and I put the case in amongst what looked like a stall at a jumble sale. I slammed the boot shut and heaved at it to make sure it was properly locked.
A large Rover saloon, bottle-green body and black mudguards, at least thirty years old but in beautiful condition, pulled in as we went up the semi-circular flight of steps to the entrance. I said with a wry grin, ‘You took me at my word about buying you a meal. This place looks expensive.’
Inside, the antiquity was genuine. No modern craftsman could have simulated the warped and slanting floor. Like the caulked deck of a sailing ship, waxed and polished to a brilliant gleam, it seemed to rear up and subside so that walking on it gave you a sailor’s gait. The furniture looked as if it was about to topple over. A stone fireplace in which twenty people could have sheltered took up the whole of one wall. At its apex there was a family crest, at least three feet wide, blurred with age under a patina of Jacobean soot.
We walked the length of the wood-panelled room and came through into a small carpeted bar. The barman wore a dark coat and striped trousers, the image of a manservant from a pre-war British film. He was pouring green liquid from a cocktail shaker into two slender frosted glasses. He added two precise drops of creme de menthe to each glass and twirled them with a long silver spoon and set them on a silver tray. He looked up and smiled. ‘Good day, Miss Locke. How nice to see you. I shan’t be a moment.’
He paid no attention to my shabbiness and scrubby growth of beard: anyone with Miss Locke, had they been dressed in a sack and covered in blue woad, would have been perfectly acceptable.
We sat down. A stained glass window made coloured patterns on the beaten copper table. The chairs were upholstered in plum velvet. I felt quietly amazed that this was how life could be. That there could exist a whole other world of people doing this every day. They got up in the morning, bathed, put on fresh clothes, and over breakfast decided where they were going to go for lunch. They read the Telegraph, did some light gardening to work up an appetite, and drove off to places like this in old, beautifully maintained and expertly serviced bottle-green Rovers with black mudguards. There they were greeted by a manservant who mixed them an aperitif, which they sipped while browsing through the menu. In this world there was ample time to sit at ease and cross your legs, adjusting the crease in your trousers, and pass remarks about this and that. From the comfort of a plum velvet chair next to a stained glass window, everything assumed sensible proportions. The world functioned as it was supposed to. There was no point getting fussed – about what, for heaven’s sake? Money came in and money went out, the wine was chilled, the car topped up with petrol, and later on, if the weather holds, how about a few holes of golf or a run out to that National Trust place?
But which was real – this or the room above Mr Patundi’s shop? I couldn’t hold them together in my mind. I found it impossible to believe that I had stepped into a car in Brickton and twenty minutes later I was sitting opposite Diane Locke in a baronial country house sipping something from a fluted glass that stung my tongue with cold fire. Somewhere along the road we had crossed the dividing-line. We had arrived in the land of Oz. On this side there was a sufficiency of everything, not on vulgar display, but there, simply and unquestionably there. Your table was reserved, as was your share of the plunder, and you had every right to it. While on the other side of the dividing-line, over there – beyond the invisible boundary we had crossed without noticing it – there were sickly children with burning eyes, tattooed thugs who dealt in drugs, and pale bodies curled up in the harbour mud.
‘Have you found somewhere to stay? A hotel or something?’ Diane Locke had taken off her coat. She wore a pale grey silk blouse gathered in by a black leather belt and a long woollen skirt of small checks which fell in graceful folds over black soft leather boots. She was perfectly at home in these surroundings, dressed for the part, even to the single strand of pearls at her throat.
‘Nothing as grand as that,’ I said. ‘It’s just a room above an Indian’s shop.’ But not a room I could return to – not after Wayne’s social call.
‘Why there? I thought you’d come into your inheritance.’
‘Yes, well … probably I will move. I’ve been thinking about it.’
‘And did you find what you were looking for in Brickton?’
‘I found who I was looking for.’
‘Ah, of course!’ She nodded and smiled. ‘The mythical Benson.’
‘Is that what you think – that I invented him? The mad in pursuit of the imaginary.’
‘You’re a curious case, aren’t you?’ Diane Locke said. ‘At least I think so.’
‘It takes one to know one.’
She laughed. It was a warm, full laugh, not the nasal tittering you usually get from so many women.
‘Is that why you’re interested in me?’ I asked.
‘Who says I’m interested in you?’
She sipped her drink, and then said, ‘Well yes, I have to admit … dammit, why am I being so coy? I’m curious about what happened to you, yes, and about your wife. You told me she was dead.’ I just nodded at this, and she went on, ‘Was it that that caused your … why you went into the clinic?’
‘No. That started before then. Months before. She was unfaithful and I found out about it.’
‘You didn’t want to lose her,’ Diane Locke said. She went on rather wistfully, ‘When you love someone you’d do anything to keep them.’
‘I did something all right,’ I said.
‘What did you do?’
‘I went to pieces.’
‘You must have loved her very much.’
‘Yes I loved her, and I hated her.’
‘But not enough to harm her.’
I grinned at her transparency. ‘You think I killed my wife and they had me put away?’
‘Did you?’
‘Whatever I say you won’t believe me.’
‘Yes I will.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘for what it’s worth, I didn’t kill her. Benson did.’
An elderly couple had entered and sat down – he looked like a regulation-issue retired colonel, with a toothbrush moustache startlingly white against a florid complexion, she was bent and concave-chested, a bird of prey wrapped in a shawl, with a long, wizened, prune-like face. I assumed they had driven up in the bottle-green Rover. Distantly knives and forks clinked on plates and I could smell rich food. I began to feel faintly nauseous.
Diane Locke sipped her drink and put the glass down without a tremor. ‘This man Benson killed your wife. How?’
‘They called it an accident but it wasn’t.’
‘What happened?’
I said quickly, to get it over with, ‘She went off with him, left me, and three months later she was dead, drowned.’
I drained the last drop of liquid and held the glass tightly in my hand. ‘They didn’t tell me straight away. Or they might have told me – it didn’t sink in. I was having treatment for clinical depression and the stuff they give you, the medication and shock therapy make you forget. You can remember your childhood, it brings all that back, the red bike you got on your eighth birthday, the time you fell off the garden swing and cut your knee. But it wipes out recent events. You exist in the past, in distant memories.’
Diane Locke said slowly, ‘So you were in the clinic when it happened? You’d had the breakdown before she died …’
A grin came to my face. I said, ‘That makes you happier, does it? Clears your mind of any lingering doubt.’
The elderly man looked up at the sound of my voice, and then he blinked and decided urgently he had to look at his watch.
I put the glass down and wiped my hand on my knee.
‘No, I was only thinking, Peter … your mind was confused at the time. You’ve admitted that. And it must have come as a shock when you learned about your wife’s death. Perhaps it didn’t happen in quite the way you think it did.’
‘Oh?’ I laughed shakily. ‘She drowned herself because she couldn’t bear the happiness – is that your theory? Is that what you have your characters do? They throw themselves off cliffs in a lovers’ pact because life is unbearably sweet? In that case Susan kept to her side of the bargain and Benson didn’t. He carried on living. He’s alive now.’
‘But you’re assuming rather a lot. How do you know that your wife – I mean, perhaps she came to realise she’d made a terrible mistake and couldn’t live with it? By leaving you, I mean. That’s possible, isn’t it?’
‘It’s convenient,’ I said. ‘It lets Benson off the hook. He’s innocent, right? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I don’t know if he is or he isn’t.’
‘No, but I do.’
She kept her eyes downcast, fiddling with her glass on the beaten copper table. ‘You must have loved your wife very much – even though you say you hated her – to come here looking for him.’ Now she looked at me directly. ‘Why did you come?’
‘Benson owes me a life,’ I said giddily. ‘Wouldn’t you say? I spent over two years in that place thinking about it. You can build up a lot of hate in two years. But taking his life, straight off, wouldn’t get rid of it.’ I grinned at her. ‘Think I still belong in there? Locked away in my little cubicle, pumped full of drugs, eating mush with a plastic knife and fork, a happy vegetable? That’s how they like to keep you, like children, as if you don’t know what’s going on. Of course you do know. Your mind never stops. You have nothing else to do all day long. All the time in the world to think, and think, nothing else but think …’
A man in a white jacket appeared at my elbow and spoke across me. ‘Miss Locke – when you’re ready your table is waiting.’
She smiled and finished her drink.
I said, ‘Why do you call yourself Locke? You told me you were married.’
‘I was married. I’m now divorced. Why should I keep the man’s name when I’ve got rid of the man?’
We stood up. To my surprise she slipped her arm through mine and clasped my hand. My heart was beating fast. Close to, inches away, her eyes looked into mine, and we walked from the bar into the dining-room holding hands.