The room was long and narrow and panelled in dark wood, and not much wider than the dining-car in a train, with a minstrels’ gallery at the far end. We were seated about halfway along, on the window side. Fewer than half of the tables were occupied; it was early and the expense-account crowd hadn’t arrived. None of the people eating paid the slightest attention to us. They were of the class, I presumed, which pretends to take no interest in anything outside of themselves. Or perhaps it was a genuine, unfaked disinterest: they truly believed theirs to be the central axis around which the world, indeed the whole universe, spins, and anything beyond is shadow play, a trifling distraction.
I ate sparingly. The food was in small portions but very rich, and I knew what would happen if I gorged myself. There was salad of smoked chicken with avocado to start, and then Roulade of Dover sole with a winter salad of fresh vegetables. Diane Locke drank a heavy red wine with the meal. I had just the one glass and then went on to mineral water. I felt light-headed enough, as if I were swaying on a sea. I had ‘confessed’ to her: she now knew as much about me as anyone did. I had listened to the words coming from my mouth as if from an actor’s. But then this was the land of Oz, where such things could be said – the most shameful secrets revealed – and it was perfectly okay, because the surroundings reduced everything to inconsequential chatter. At the next table they were admitting incest, over there in the corner discussing a tax swindle, behind us paedophilia; the colonel with the toothbrush moustache was holding his wife enthralled as he described to her how he had sodomised half the regiment. The conventions held. The starched linen tablecloths and the silver cruet sets and the white-jacketed waiters moving silently and attentively to and fro kept everything in the correct proportion. You could plot political assassinations here, the subversion of democracy by the secret services, the infiltration by hired lackeys into the BBC’s board of governors – providing of course that you modulated your voice and knew which dessert fork to use.
We were drinking our coffee when a pretty dark-haired young woman came in with an older woman, smartly dressed, with short silvery-blonde hair. I felt in my pocket for my spectacle frames and put them on, in the fatuous hope that Benson’s daughter wouldn’t recognise me. She and the older woman, who was also quite attractive in a hard, intractable way, were seated near the door. Diane Locke choked and dribbled coffee down her chin. ‘You might have got a pair with lenses in them.’ She dabbed her mouth and looked round over her shoulder. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I have to leave right away.’
‘What’s wrong?’
I pushed the crisp, stiff notes across. ‘Settle the bill, I’ll see you outside.’
‘It’s all right, don’t get worried. I’ll pay my share—’
‘Take it,’ I said. The hoarseness in my voice made her blink. The notes lay on the white cloth, screaming out their newness, as if I’d minted them myself that morning. I walked stiffly between the two rows of tables, consciously keeping my spine straight to stop myself hunching into a dwarf.
I had to halt and edge round the waiter who was handing a menu to Ruth Benson. She might have glanced up with a smile to thank him, and if so would have seen me, but she wasn’t the type to thank waiters. I went on and out through the bar, belching up fumes of Roulade of Dover sole.
It was starting to rain. I sat on the low brick wall, the Datsun between me and the windows. There wasn’t a black Mercedes in the car park; Ruth Benson must have arrived in her companion’s car.
After a few minutes Diane Locke appeared and saw me sitting, or rather crouching, on the wall. She raised one eyebrow. ‘You’d better get in, Peter, before your glasses get smeared.’
We drove out through the stone gateway and turned left away from the hump-backed bridge, in the opposite direction to Brickton. Closed ranks of pine trees surrounded us, rising in tiers to the bare smooth contours of the mountains in the middle distance.
‘Which one were you trying to avoid – the woman or the girl?’
I tried to think of an evasive lie, but my head ached. ‘The girl,’ I said. ‘Benson’s daughter.’
‘Would she know you?’
‘She might recognise me.’
‘How?’
‘I stole something from her car. Well, her father’s car, actually.’
‘And she saw you do it?’
‘As good as. I was the only one there – the only stranger – so it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.’
‘You bloody idiot, Peter,’ Diane Locke said wearily. ‘What a web you weave. What was it you stole?’
After I’d told her she said faintly, shaking her head, ‘I don’t believe this. I don’t believe it. Are you telling me that the meal was paid for with stolen money?’
‘You’re not involved, so it doesn’t—’
She cut me short with a harsh, cynical laugh. ‘I’m not involved? Not involved? Listen, you dummy. They know me at the restaurant. I’ve been going there for years. And if you remember I’m the one who paid the bill. Those notes were brand-new, they’ll be easy to trace. Did you never think of that?’ She gave me a hard searching look. ‘Are there any more cute little tricks I ought to know about? Any more skeletons rattling in the closet?’
‘Nothing that I remember,’ I said.
‘That’s something I’ve noticed about you, Peter. You have a very convenient memory.’
‘Doesn’t everybody?’
Suddenly Diane Locke thumped the wheel with her fist. ‘Oh my God. You put something in the boot of the car, the family heirloom, wrapped in a cushion cover. Was that … ?’
I nodded.
‘Did someone actually see you take it?’
‘No, there was nobody around. But they must know it was me. I was in the office at B-H Haulage, asking about a job.’
‘Wonderful. Did you give them your name?’
‘Ah, now I understand.’ Diane Locke’s voice was heavy with irony. ‘Hence the disguise. The man of a thousand faces. For God’s sake don’t take to crime seriously, Peter, you’re not cut out for it.’ She lit a cigarette, her movements tense and fretful. ‘One thing you haven’t told me, and I want to know. Why the police are looking for you.’
‘I’m armed and highly dangerous.’
‘You released yourself from the clinic, presumably against medical advice,’ Diane Locke went on, ignoring me. ‘All right, I can accept that, and you’ve told me why you had to do it. But why should they alert the police? Is it you they’re looking for or someone else? You haven’t done anything, have you?’
I sat and stared ahead through the streaky windscreen: the wiper on the passenger side hadn’t been mended. The road twisted through the hedgerows, giving glimpses of flat furrowed fields swept by misty curtains of rain.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘I’ve already told you about the treatment and what it does … you forget your own history.’
‘So you had to invent one. I see.’ She drew deeply on her cigarette. ‘If you don’t know what you’ve done, I wonder who does?’
We stopped at a main road, crossed over the gleaming tarmac and entered once more the spider’s web of half-submerged lanes which dipped and curved through the sodden countryside. The light was drab, pearl-grey, exhausted after straining through the thick blanket of cloud.
‘I don’t know what to believe and what not to believe,’ she went on. ‘All that about your wife, and her affair with Benson, and why she killed herself. Maybe it’s all invented. Maybe I’m sitting next to a man who …’ She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray, sending up a cloud of ash.
‘Murdered his wife?’ When she stayed silent I said, ‘There is one way to find out the truth, Diane. Ring Dr Morduch at the Clinic. You’ll believe him won’t you? Ask him what happened. And while you’re about it ask him about Smith too, since you don’t believe he exists.’
I could feel myself building up into a rage. It shouldn’t have mattered one iota that Diane Locke doubted me – what was she to me? – but it did matter. I wanted her to believe me and to trust me, as she had done, without the slightest justification, that first night when we met on the highway. To receive someone’s unqualified trust had renewed my faith and belief in myself, and I didn’t want to lose them; so I suppose that was why I felt angry.
‘You’re thinking I had a motive for killing her,’ I went on, trying to make myself sound reasonable, ‘and that’s true, I did have a motive. No one likes to be deceived.’
‘My husband deceived me and I didn’t kill him.’ Diane Locke paused, then said in a low voice, ‘Though if I’d met her, wonder-woman, and had a knife in my hand, I would have pushed it into her.’
‘We’re not so very different then,’ I said.
We turned off the narrow lane and stopped in front of the house. Diane Locke opened the boot and I took out the attaché case. I had told her about the money but said nothing about the notebooks and tapes. This would have only led to more fantastic tales – the comic opera in the council chamber, the wild young man with the bloodshot eyes and the dumping of bodies through the public baths’ discharge pipe which ended up in the harbour mud. Such absurdities would have confirmed what she was halfway to believing: not only an invented past but an imagination at the end of its tether.
In the twilight of the hallway the bakelite telephone crouched on the little table beneath the varnished banister like a shiny black toad. The wall of books and periodicals mounted the stairs in dusty disorder. Diane Locke motioned me to put the attaché case in its moquette cover next to the hallstand, in which jostled together a collection of walking sticks and two large black umbrellas, like unfurled bats. I straightened up and felt her cold face against mine and her warm lips impress themselves upon me.
She pushed my overcoat off my shoulders. As I struggled to free myself she was loosening my clothing and unfastening my belt. She unzipped the front of my trousers, then held my hardening penis through my underpants. I tried to kiss her, holding her awkwardly by the shoulders, but she turned away from me, and bent forward, slipping both hands underneath her long skirt, rolling her tights over her thighs, and holding the sausage of material in her hands kicked off her shoes and extricated one foot and then the other. She lifted her skirts and pulled her pants off.
She sat down on the stairs and lifted her skirt to her waist. Her head was thrown back, elbows close to her sides resting on the thin carpet, her long white legs, tapering from heavy thighs, bent slightly at the knees, spread apart.
I slid my underpants down and my penis sprang erect. I knelt down and she hitched forward on her bottom, holding her skirt bunched in both hands. I held onto the banister to steady myself, my elbow jammed against the wall of books for leverage, and there was no point of contact between us other than where I entered her.
She thrust at me, each time drawing her lips back, sucking in short sibilant implosions of breath between her clenched teeth as I moved easily and smoothly back and forth, without impediment.
All the while, as we fucked, she was watching me, her head hung back, her eyes heavy-lidded and almost shut, the top of her head striking the step immediately above with each thrusting movement. She kept on saying, ‘Christ yes that’s it. Christ yes,’ as I swelled inside her and came, feeling the energy discharge itself, passing from my body into hers.
Diane Locke closed her eyes, and for a minute or two we did nothing. Then she drew her legs up, pulling her skirt over her knees, not looking at me, and at that moment the fat black toad of the telephone rang, as loud and peremptory as an alarm bell, each jangling echo dying into an eternity of silence.
I thought she wasn’t going to answer it, but she smoothed her skirt and reached through the rails of the banister and put the receiver to her ear, stroking her forehead with the tips of her fingers. ‘Hello? Yes. Yes. He’s not here. I’m not sure.’ She looked at her watch, and gave a small sigh. ‘After six, I should say. Yes. All right, I’ll tell him. Bye.’
Her tights were rolled up on the floor, like the shed skin of a brown snake. Her pants were caught in the spokes of one of the umbrellas. She gathered them up and said, ‘I’m going upstairs for a minute. Go into the kitchen, I’ll make some tea.’
I picked up my overcoat, and hung it on the hallstand and went into the kitchen. I stood at the sink and washed my hands. The back garden was on a gradual slope, falling away from the house, laid out in damp empty rectangles for summer vegetables. There was a new, freshly creosoted garden shed with a black tarpaulin roof, rows of gleaming galvanised nail heads like neatly drilled bullet holes. Behind it a rickety wooden fence, and beyond that the fir trees descending into the valley towards the lake, glimpsed through the branches as a flat oval of dulled pewter.
I dried my hands, thinking I could make a home in that shed with its view of the lake through the trees … a trestle bed, a chair, a lamp, a paraffin heater, plenty of books in the house to read. I didn’t need much, wanted even less. I was used to small bare spaces. I would forget about Benson and his schemes. I would live off the money I had stolen from him – lead a quiet life away from doctors, watching the lake change colour and traipsing into the house for sex whenever I needed it. More likely whenever Diane Locke needed it, for she seemed to more than I did.
She came briskly into the kitchen, dressed in the same skirt and blouse. She had washed her face and brushed her hair but not applied fresh make-up. She pressed a button on the tiny portable radio on her way to the stove, and a thirties orchestra with soaring trumpet spilled out of the plastic grille. I stood at the sink, watching her light the gas. She unhooked two beakers from several which hung along the shelf.
‘I can see that you’re shocked.’
‘Really? Does it show?’ Secretly I supposed I was. I wasn’t used to women demanding sex whenever they felt like it. There was perhaps ten years’ difference in our ages, plus the class thing, factors which might explain the gulf between us in social behaviour. Or I could be wrong, age and class had nothing to do with it, and Diane Locke was simply that kind of woman.
I said, ‘All right, I admit it, I am shocked. Making love to a man who murdered his wife.’
‘We didn’t make love, we had sex. And I don’t think you did.’
‘I’m sorry, I thought that was the conclusion you’d come to. That I blamed Benson for what I’d done myself out of insane jealousy. That fits the facts very neatly, doesn’t it?’
‘I don’t know the facts. I wonder if you do.’
She opened the huge white door of the fridge and took out a jug of milk. A voice on the radio was singing, ‘I’ve flown around the world in a plane … I’ve settled revolutions in Spain …’
I went on, ‘A man who doesn’t know his own mind is liable to do anything. He might commit a foolish act with the best of intentions, simply because it seems the right thing to do at the time. Stupid, wouldn’t you say, to trust a man like that?’
Diane Locke poured hot water into the teapot and sat down at the table. She raised her dark eyebrows, a half-smile tugging at her unpainted lips. ‘It’s quite safe to relax, Peter. I shan’t attack you again for another twenty minutes.’
Sitting across the kitchen table from her made me certain of one thing: I didn’t want to go back to Brickton. But I knew I had to go back. There was nothing else for it. I wanted to tell her everything – about the wild young man, the body in the harbour, everything. More evidence of insanity. This man has murder on the brain, now he invents lacerated torsos. Then my heart started thumping as I suddenly realised what those lacerations were. In the dark, and obscured by mud, I had taken them to be random slashes, done by a razor or sharp knife. It was now blindingly obvious what they were. Tattoo marks. Wayne’s handiwork with the needle.
‘You’re going back there, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘I have to. Problem is, I can’t go back to my room above the Indian’s shop.’
‘Why not?’
I blinked at her. ‘Well, it would be a bit awkward. People know I was staying there.’
‘Which people?’ She poured the tea and put the beaker in front of me. ‘Benson you mean?’
‘Somebody else was looking for me, making inquiries … a boy called Wayne. But I’m pretty sure he’s with Benson. Everybody seems to be. He’s Mr Brickton.’
I sipped the hot tea. The record ended and a screech of synthesisers and electronic drumbeats announced the hourly news. It was the local station, BBC Radio Cumbria.
Diane Locke said, ‘Then don’t go. Stay here.’ She put out her hand and covered mine. ‘Stay here, Peter.’
‘… identified the man as Rakesh Patundi, forty-three, an Indian shopkeeper, whose body was discovered in the back room of his shop in Brickton earlier today.’ We listened, her hand touching mine, as the newsreader went on: ‘Police have issued a description of the person they wish to interview, who was seen in the shop by one of Mr Patundi’s children. The man is white, above average height, possibly in his late thirties or early forties, and when last seen was wearing a hat and dark overcoat and heavy, workmans’ boots. The police have warned the public not to approach …’
I was looking down at our hands, at Diane Locke’s long pale fingers which slowly curled up and crept away like a plant withdrawing from the frost.