There was a greenish gloom outside the window from the massed pine trees, which filtered in and transformed the kitchen into a dim undersea cave. The brass-rimmed walnut clock on the shelf beat on.
Diane Locke was frowning down at the cassette recorder – at the tiny tape that a moment ago had clicked to a stop. The attaché case, a bit scratched and dusty now, was in the middle of the table, lid yawning wide.
‘Neville is Benson I take it.’ She kept her eyes downcast, still with the same perplexed frown.
‘Yes.’
‘Russell?’
‘Russell Rhodes. He’s mentioned in the appointments diary. Benson had a meeting with him a few days ago.’
‘It doesn’t tell us an awful lot,’ Diane Locke said, ‘except for one thing.’ She looked up at me. ‘The money you took, the five thousand pounds. It was intended for Russell.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Hard luck on poor Russell.’
‘Did you have any idea that Benson was involved in something like this? Some shady pay-off deal?’
‘Not until I went to the council meeting. They discussed a scheme to develop the harbour with a grant from the EC, and it was obvious that Benson was unhappy about this being brought out in public. At least the tape explains why – he’s giving Russell a backhander to keep his mouth shut.’
‘But why tape the conversation at all – in secret – if they’re both on the same side? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘It does if Benson is afraid that Russell will get cold feet and starts to backslide or cause trouble. It’s insurance. Benson has a hold on him, he’s got Russell’s voice on tape, agreeing to all this.’
‘Blackmail.’
‘Only if it comes to the pinch. I don’t think Benson ever intended to tell Russell about the tape, providing he behaved himself.’
Diane Locke thought about this, and then said slowly, as if the realisation was dawning even as she spoke, ‘I see it now, why Benson must be desperate to find you, knowing you’ve got all this …’ She indicated the tapes and the monogrammed notebooks edged in gold-leaf and the silk-lined attaché case. ‘Is this what he was after, then, the man who came to the shop looking for you?’
‘I imagine so. The boy with the needle.’
‘What needle?’
‘The fat boy, Wayne. He’s a pusher, and a junkie too. “You call that fat junkie a friend?” was how Russell referred to him on the tape.’
‘So that was Wayne, the one who came looking for you?’ Her face was pale and taut. It was as if a stone had been lifted and she was seeing for the first time the mess squirming beneath. ‘He’s the one Benson said would deal with you. But then … when he came after you he found the Indian shopkeeper instead. Is that what happened?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Of course it is. Why only suppose?’ She was staring hard at me. ‘Benson wants the tapes and the notebooks back. He’s desperate to have them. He must have told Wayne to find you and get them back, and not let anything or anyone stand in his way. It’s plain to me, Peter. Why can’t you see it, accept it?’
Diane Locke wanted a simple, rational explanation that would absolve me of the crime. She wanted to believe that Wayne had assumed, wrongly, that Mr Patundi was shielding me, and had flown into a rage. Various substances circulating through the fat boy’s arteries drove him to strike a blow, then to grip the puffy brown neck in both hands and gently squeeze the air and blood and life out of it; for who could say what someone under the influence of drugs might or might not do?
I looked out of the window. The twilight was a deepening murky green. I turned back and said, ‘There’s another explanation. Smith killed him.’
Diane Locke made a quick, impatient, dismissive gesture.
‘Why bring him into it? It’s simple enough isn’t it? Why complicate things for God’s sake?’
‘You don’t believe that such a person exists, do you?’ I said, smiling crookedly at her.
‘I don’t know if he exists or not, and I don’t care. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that he was there, in the shop. Why should he kill the Indian? For what reason?’
‘You’re right, Diane. It must have been Wayne.’
‘Of course it was. You had no reason to kill Mr Patundi, had you?’
I shook my head, and immediately remembered the square black safe in the claustrophobic back room, the choking smell of spices. I did have a reason, but I hadn’t done it. I was certain I hadn’t.
She sat back and seemed to relax, her hands pressed flat on the bare wooden table, fingers splayed. ‘Well – you’ve done it. You’ve got what you wanted.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The power to destroy him.’ When I didn’t respond she picked up one of the notebooks. ‘This is more than enough to wreck his business, his entire career. All you have to do is hand it over to the police and let them get on with it.’
I wanted to laugh at her naivety but kept a straight face.
‘That would never work, Diane. Benson would slither off the hook as easy as winking, his kind always do. They have the right friends in all the right places to make sure of that. He might just get – if he was dead unlucky – a slap on the wrists from a government department and told not to be such a naughty boy in future. They protect their own, you must know that. And I’m hardly in a position to have any dealings with the police,’ I reminded her. ‘You’re forgetting Mr Patundi.’
‘But that wasn’t you.’
‘They think it was me. They have a witness who saw me in the shop.’
‘That doesn’t prove anything.’
‘It proves I was there.’
Diane Locke riffled through the pages with her thumb, snapped the notebook shut and tossed it onto the table. She got up and switched the light on. She leaned against the dresser, frowning at me and twisting her lip in thought. It felt strange, placing my trust in someone, as I had in her. I wondered what I would have done – was going to do – without her. She thought that because I had Benson where I wanted him it was the end, my revenge was complete, while for me it was only the beginning.
It had never happened in the clinic: all the time I was in their hands I had never trusted their judgement, their medication, or their shock therapy. What they did for me was for the best because they didn’t know any better. Muddled as I was, in deep despair, physically drained and spiritually weak because I’d lost the confidence to live, I still knew far better than they did what was the matter with me; I just didn’t know what to do about it. I was suffering from cancer of the will, a condition that defeats its own cure. So I submitted myself to them, pathetically, like a child, as if a white coat could answer my prayers.
I collected the tapes and notebooks together. As I put them back in the attaché case she spotted something that I’d tried to push deep into one of the pockets, only it was too large to be concealed. The cheap black plastic cover reflected the overhead light and screamed out it didn’t belong there.
‘What’s that?’
‘This? It’s the diary I told you about.’
‘You seem to make a habit of stealing other people’s diaries. May I see?’
‘If you like. But it would be better if you didn’t.’
‘It can’t be as bad as all that.’
‘It’s worse.’
‘Why keep it then?’
‘I don’t know … I should’ve dumped the thing or burned it.’ I closed the case and snapped the clasps shut.
She surprised me then by saying, ‘I asked you if you wanted to stay. You didn’t give me an answer.’
‘That was before you knew about Mr Patundi’s murder,’ I said.
‘The offer still holds. Or do you still have this crazy idea that you want to kill Benson? Is there really nothing else worth living for?’
‘I won’t hang for it,’ I said. ‘They’ve done away with the death penalty. Besides, there are extenuating circumstances: I’m mentally unbalanced.’
She ignored that, shaking her head irritably. ‘You don’t mind if they put you back in that place and keep you there for the rest of your life? That’s really what I meant – having something worth living for, so you wouldn’t have to go back.’
I said, ‘It’s a point of view. It might even mean something if I knew who I was.’
‘You’re Peter Holford.’
‘What is that?’
‘It’s a person. You.’
‘Me,’ I said, testing the validity of the word. ‘It wouldn’t get by under the trades descriptions act. Now if you said “clock”, or “radio”, or “chair”, I’d know straight away what those are. They’re solid objects with shapes and functions. I’m happier with those; they are what they are and can’t be anything else.’
She said angrily, ‘Suppose you achieve it, it happens, and Benson is dead, what then? Your wife won’t come back. It won’t help her. Nothing will be changed.’
‘It will for Benson,’ I said. ‘Drastically.’
She folded her arms, her fists white and knotted against her chest. ‘How senseless! Stupid! And – and …’ She ground her teeth.
‘Crazy?’
‘You’re not crazy, don’t flatter yourself. That’s just a coward’s way of evading the issue.’
‘No it isn’t,’ I said. I was certain about this if nothing else. ‘I’m not a coward about evading the issue, Diane, because I don’t know what the issue is. But if you can provide me with one I’ll be only too happy to evade it.’
‘What if I went to the police?’
I said mildly, ‘Well, you could do that, of course you could. Would that be for Benson’s benefit or to save me from myself?’ The way the conversation was going reminded me of Dr Morduch, who, when he didn’t have a syringe in his hand, was always keen to get his patients to ‘articulate’, in order to release the log-jam in the psyche. It’s an accepted belief amongst doctors that to unburden oneself of morbid fears and fancies is to relieve them, rob them of their destructive potency. This wasn’t my experience. Talking with Dr Morduch, and now with Diane Locke, was like two passengers cruising serenely on the Titanic, one of whom knows, while the other doesn’t, that catastrophe lies in wait. In fact ‘articulating’ drove the wedge deeper, widened the chasm; the abyss yawned yet more blackly. To hang on to the pretence that such a thing as normality existed was to collude in the fraud. The more one talked – or ‘articulated’, as Dr Morduch would say – the further any hope of ever achieving this absurd condition receded and became unattainable. One was trapped in the mute airless vacuum of the unsayable.
Diane Locke said bitterly, ‘Perhaps they ought to lock you up and throw away the key. That’s the best thing that could happen.’
‘For me or for Benson?’
‘Don’t be a bloody fool. I couldn’t care less about Benson or what happens to him, whether he’s destroyed or not. Go ahead – I mean it – destroy him if you have to, but don’t sacrifice yourself in the process—’ Her voice suddenly gave out, and her long pale face, usually calm, showing little emotion, was fierce and almost ugly in its rigid lines of resolution. I stared at her, unable to believe I was seeing the glint of tears in her eyes, but I was.
This wasn’t a game after all. She was actually feeling something, and suffering for it. I felt shocked.
I said, or rather stammered, ‘Diane …’ and she turned her back on me, moving to the cupboard.
‘I have to prepare a meal for Graham, he’ll be home soon.’
‘Diane—’
‘What?’ she said irritably, her voice under control again, taking things from the cupboard.
‘It isn’t worth it,’ I said feebly, not knowing what else to say.
‘I know that. It’s never worth it.’ She kept her back to me. ‘None of us are worth it. But I’m not going to stand around and let you destroy yourself because of some tin-pot councillor and crooked businessman who runs a clapped-out haulage firm. I know how you feel about your wife and what happened to her, and how you must hate him for it, and want him dead. But I won’t let you do it, Peter. I’ll stop you.’
‘How will you stop me?’
‘Any way I can.’
‘I mean it.’
‘What about Benson?’
‘To hell with Benson.’ She was opening a tin. ‘Send all that stuff to the police and wash your hands of the whole affair. Have done with it. It’s that simple.’
Diane Locke was right. I could be rid of the whole thing, just forget about it. Why let Benson ruin my life a second time? I could start again, this time with a woman who seemed to care about me (I was still in shock that she had cried) and obliterate the past. Let Benson get on with his crooked marina scheme, what did it matter to me? Let him dump bodies in the harbour, so what?
So what if Benson actually had done the deed, or arranged for it to be done (tattoo marks meant Wayne); then it occurred to me that he could be made to pay a far higher price than a gentle chiding from someone in Whitehall. The question was, how to prove it? Where to find the evidence? There was one way, it now struck me …
Tracing the body back from the harbour led to the discharge pipe, and from the discharge pipe to the public swimming baths, and from the swimming baths to whoever had been an accomplice to the crime. Of course Benson himself wouldn’t have sullied his hands, I was certain of that. Not when he had Wayne to do it for him. And Wayne must have had help. Somebody who had access to the public swimming baths, who knew how the equipment worked – who knew, in fact, how to do a neat job of disposal without fouling up the system while squirting the corpse into the Irish Sea.
Into the silence the brass-rimmed clock dropped five melodious chimes. Clasping the attaché case in both hands, I let my shoulders slump. ‘All right, I’ll stay.’
Diane Locke didn’t say anything, just carried on preparing the meal.
The green single-decker bus took me from Granthelme and dropped me in the centre of town just after midday. I looked for the line of demarcation as the bus twisted through the narrow country lanes but couldn’t locate the exact spot. Once in Brickton, however, there was no mistaking that we had crossed it.
I was wearing one of Graham’s old suits – grey with a faint chalk-stripe, double-breasted, with turn-ups on the trousers – that I’d rooted out of his wardrobe. I ought to have felt guilty about it, borrowing his clothing without permission, but I didn’t. But I did feel guilty about betraying Diane’s trust. We had come to a tacit understanding, Diane Locke and me, that my pursuit of Benson was over and done with – a foolish, aberrant urge for revenge that could only lead to my own destruction. There was no question that I had convinced her, because she had gone off in the Datsun on some errand or other, leaving me alone in the house. There I had waited fifteen minutes and then set off on foot down the muddy lane, having left a scribbled note that I hoped to return later for the attaché case; if I didn’t she was free to do with it as she pleased. If I didn’t return, I thought, it wouldn’t matter to me what she did with it.
I was glad to be still wearing my overcoat: it was damp and windy, cold air swooping down from the north with the stinging touch of real winter. Just the kind of day to shut out the world in the steamy warmth of a Turkish bath.
At the traffic lights (B-H Haulage was up the hill on the opposite side) I turned left to get quickly off the main street; it was the reflex action of somebody used to being hit who ducks and shies away from every imagined blow. Possibly it was rather pointless: I might have been recognised just as easily on the backstreets. But I felt safer and more at home here, among the crumbling brick buildings and the peeling facades of empty shops. There was a newsagent’s on the corner, with plastic toys made in Taiwan and dusty trays of penny sweets, the colour of neon signs, in the window. The man serving behind the counter had on a shapeless brown tweed jacket with black plastic patches on the elbows and thin strips crudely stitched round the cuffs. He was sucking on an empty pipe, which drooped down dead-centre onto his chin, gripped between dentures like yellow tombstones.
He attended to a woman customer while I pretended to glance over the layered piles of tabloids. The counter was a hotbed of Rape, Scandal, Child Abuse, Beast and Check Your Lucky Number! I slid one (Sex Romp) off the nearest pile. He held out a thin grubby hand for money, fingers blackened with newsprint.
I asked him where the public baths was. The pipe swivelled, resting on his chin, as he dropped the coins in the till.
‘Aboukir Street.’
‘Is that near here?’
‘Left in the street, straight down, then one … two …’ he weighed it up, sucking, his breath hollow in the empty bowl ‘… third on the right, next to the cleansing department.’
‘Suitable place for it,’ I remarked, smiling. He stared at me incomprehendingly as if I’d said something in Serbo-Croat.
Brickton Public Baths was a smaller, sootier version of the town hall, built in the same age and with the same prosperity. There was a small portico and an arched entrance flanked by pillars that would have admitted giants. The doors, a muddy council blue painted over gouged initials and obscenities, let the tone down. My footsteps echoed in the hallway, tiled from floor to ceiling in green and yellow and lit by frosted globes submerged in the walls. A girl sat in a glass-fronted cubicle, staring at nothing, her lips moving as she listened to a tape on a Japanese stereo deck that was all chrome fretwork and silver dials and flickering needles. The smell of chlorine and bleach stung like anaesthetic.
‘One Turkish, please, and a towel.’
‘Two pound fifty.’
I sorted through my coins. I was over a pound short. She watched me vacantly with eyes stickily rimmed in purple, lips moving to, ‘You’re my fantasy-dream, gotta have that drivin’ beat, poundin’ through my heart and spleen, turn your key in my lock, you sex-machine.’
‘Can you change this?’ She accepted the stiff £20 note and pushed the change and a perforated ticket through the shallow brass depression under the glass, polished by generations of copper pennies and threepenny bits. With her other hand she reached down and tossed a towel onto a ledge at the side of the cubicle, and slid back a glass partition. I went round and picked up the towel.
There were no signs. Frosted globes illuminated the length of the tiled tunnel leading nowhere.
It was the unlikeliest of places in which to find conspiracy, or even the lowest form of petty financial chicanery – a Victorian bathhouse! Sharp businessmen and asset-stripping entrepreneurs at the cutting edge of the System wouldn’t have detected the barest shift of a percentage point on their sonar; not even worth a grubby lawyer’s deal to buy it up, raze it to the ground and build a car park or a superstore. You didn’t plan on building anything in Brickton: it was a dumping ground, a spot of coastal blight on the edge of the known universe, a place better left to the slag merchants and scrap dealers. Benson was in on that, ferrying sludge in his tanker fleet. He had found a smart way to make it pay. He even operated night shifts, loading up and squirting the stuff out at night – where? In the harbour? I had assumed the conveyor chain of buckets was for dredging, but it could have had the opposite purpose.
A bald-headed man with a paunch, in a singlet and baggy blue track-suit bottoms, passed along the tunnel, rubber soles squeaking on the tiles. When I asked for the Turkish he nodded once, over his shoulder, and went on.
I came to a T-junction, empty corridors left and right marked off in light and shade by the globes. No signs or directions of any kind; but a door, directly in front of me, half open, gave a glimpse of a tiled room with rows of metal lockers with stencilled yellow numbers. I went in and walked the length of it, stepping gingerly so as not to slip on the wet floor. At the far end, round a corner, there was a shower-room with lead pipes and copper fittings, and beyond that lapping green water, steam curling and drifting from its surface. It was very quiet. Too quiet for a swimming baths, in which every sound is amplified. Even without children, who were in school, you would have expected to hear the splash of divers and an occasional shout echoing up to the vaulted roof. From where I stood, the segment of the pool in view was placid and undisturbed, its glittering reflections dimmed to a hazy dazzle by the drifting curtain of steam.
‘Oy!’
The bald-headed man in the singlet was standing inside the door with his hands on his hips, the shadowy dimple of his belly-button like an empty eye socket in the centre of his hanging paunch.
‘I tout you say Turkish.’
‘Yes. Is this—’
‘Dis not it.’ He jerked his thumb. ‘Here. Come on. Dis way.’ His accent was eastern-European, possibly Polish. Now that I looked at him properly I saw that his features were Slavic, the broad pale skull and large-lobed ears, a heavy brow overhanging pale slitted eyes. ‘Dis way,’ he repeated, wagging his thumb.
He pushed the door farther open with his foot, a bare hairless ankle, white as chalk, exposed between the blue track-suit bottoms and laceless black plimsolls. ‘If you want Turkish, go dis way.’ He pointed. ‘See?’
I thanked him and heard him squeaking off into some other part of the building. The corridor led to a flight of steps down into the basement. The air became suddenly humid, moist against my forehead, and I started to sweat under my suit and heavy overcoat.
The locker room at the bottom of the stairs was smaller and darker than the one above, its low ceiling lined with pipes from which the heat seemed to throb in waves. I took off my overcoat and hung it in a locker, then stripped down to my underpants. Of course I couldn’t wear them in the steam room, so I took them off and wrapped the towel round my waist. The key to the locker was embedded in a cylinder of pink plastic, attached to a large brass safety-pin. Steam hissed and water gurgled through the pipes overhead, and I followed the pipes to where they twisted downwards in the corner and writhed through the wall.
In the first and coolest of the steam rooms, two figures, one naked, the other wrapped in a towel, sat on a low bench like wilting pink Buddhas. I sat down on the bench at right-angles to theirs, slumping forward with my elbows on my knees. Perspiration started to pop out all over me and I felt my pulse-rate quicken; for a minute I had to concentrate on breathing, taking short shallow breaths for fear of scalding my lungs.
One of the men, with white hair, seemed familiar. I couldn’t see his face clearly, though there was something about him that sparked a memory.
‘It’s a worthy cause, we mustn’t forget that,’ he was saying in a bluff, assertive voice, in the strident timbre that carries across noisy, crowded rooms and turns a whisper into a declamation. ‘They do grand work. They sent me a list of their beneficiaries. It makes impressive reading.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘As a charity.’ The other sounded shrill by comparison, an elderly whine. ‘I think I’m right in saying that it’s a stipulation that they have to be registered. There’s some rule or other.’
‘What rule? What bloody rule is that?’
The words shot back from the tiled walls, seeking and finding no means of escape, and then I placed him. It was the white hair, I remembered now, spiky and luxuriant when I’d seen him last, with his chain of office, strutting from group to group of councillors at the town hall, a beefy hand hitting colleagues on the back and bouncing on his toes as he swapped jokes.
‘You mean if I decide I want to support the Disabled Trawlermen and Inshore Fishermen Benevolent Fund I’m not allowed? It’s my bloody choice, isn’t it? Why the hell not?’
‘No … well, yes it is, but not as the mayor’s officially sponsored charity appeal. It has to be registered, you see, Norman. That’s the rule.’
‘There would be a bloody rule, wouldn’t there?’ the mayor said darkly. ‘What the hell’s it matter if it’s a good cause? You know – and I know – blokes who’ve devoted their lives and health to fishing in this town. We owe them something. The industry’s gone but that doesn’t mean the men who served it should be forgotten.’ He raised his head and squinted at me through the eddying steam, perhaps only now aware they were not alone.
‘That’s the way it is, I’m afraid. It’s a stipulation of the mayoral office,’ the other said, and as he too glanced towards me I realised it was the chairman of the Recreation and Entertainments Sub-Committee, the man with the pipe and the gavel and the officious, if ineffectual, manner.
The close-set eyes in the narrow face sharpened. Was it a sudden flaring of recognition, or the inquisitive stare of the short-sighted? He seemed to be pondering, sucking in his cheeks and blinking rapidly – myopically, I hoped.
The mayor said, ‘It’s a bugger when you can’t pick and choose your own bloody cause. It’s in my name – it’ll go down as the Norman Wilson Charity Appeal for my year in office.’ His grumbling had reclaimed the other’s attention, who wagged his thin grey head.
‘Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more. But what’s to be done? It’s a standing rule, Norman, and there it is.’ He was the kind of man who thanked God for rules, because the alternative was chaotic free choice and painful original thought. He mumbled, ‘I fear you’ll have to consult the list. I’ll drop a memo’ (he pronounced it ‘meemo’) ‘to Broughton and have one sent up.’
I left them, the one grumbling, the other placating, and moved on.
The steam got hotter and more dense. Other vague white shapes lurked in the rooms beyond, standing, sitting on benches, some lying full length like corpses. There seemed no end to the rooms: in one a man was dousing himself under a cold shower, feet spread apart, head held back, a fine network of veins like blue lace on his abdomen and upper thighs. I plunged further on, encountering dryer heat that exhausted the oxygen content of the air so that each breath was a painful gasp, as if I were labouring with a seventy-pound pack halfway up a mountain. It was a bloody efficient system they had installed; the boiler necessary to produce so much steam must be of gargantuan size, I reckoned.
After a while I had to sit down and rest. It was the hottest room so far – too hot, perhaps, because I slumped down just before I collapsed, blinded by sweat, my heart knocking in my chest as if an anvil were being struck rapidly and repeatedly. If there was anyone there in the room with me I couldn’t see them in the suffocating fog.
It was two nightmares combined: the regression into nothingness, the white womb, cut off from the ordinariness of pavements, shops, buses, crowds of people, sky, trees, buildings; and the other common dreaming phobia of suddenly finding yourself naked and vulnerable in an exposed place, with only a flimsy garment for protection. The moist whiteness pressing itself against me and swirling in front of my eyes was the physical manifestation of my own fear – the appalling dead blankness at the epicentre of my mind.
It was just the place, the perfect place, I thought, that S – would choose to commit one of his sick atrocities. Could he have actually done the things he boasted about? It didn’t matter whether he had or not. What mattered was that I believed him. Maybe he hadn’t murdered his wife in the way he described, it was all bravado, pure delusion, but even so his vile fantasies struck me witless, left me weak and gasping.
And of course, thinking this, I immediately started to panic, imagining him there, circling round me in the steam, eyes wide and bright, silent laughing mouth agape.
Murdering Bastard
You killed
My wife
Killed–
I staggered to my feet, slithered on the damp tiles, almost fell. My God, was I imagining his voice as well? The words whispered hoarsely through my brain, spoken in exactly the same gasping, guttural tone I remembered. Or were they not imagined, remembered, but actually spoken aloud, here and now? Was it possible that S – had followed me here, accepting with gratitude this golden opportunity? What better place than the shrouded white of a steam-room, misty shapes in a swirling, shifting limbo?
But I was wrong. I had to be wrong. For the simple reason that he didn’t know where to find me. He couldn’t have followed me to Brickton because I’d never once mentioned it to him (had I?). I was almost certain I hadn’t. Almost certain. Perhaps I had, and forgotten. And he’d come after me, roaming the town for a sight of me, lurking in doorways, watching and waiting, knowing that sooner or later an opportunity would present itself. And now it had: stupidly, crazily, suicidally, I had presented it to him.
Turning, hands outstretched in front of me like a sleepwalker, I glimpsed a moving shape, and heard very clearly – no mistaking it this time – the voice I hated and feared:
Two can play
At that game
I’ve a good mind
To bite
Your balls
Clean off
The shape of a man stood before me, his features blurred and rudimentary, his hands reaching out. I clenched my fist and drew it back to strike first, but he was just as quick, and as I lunged forward he did too, the two of us colliding as my fist struck a flat, clammy surface and skidded off. His face loomed suddenly close, inches away, to reveal itself as my own, staring in terror into my own terrified eyes.
I stepped back and his familiar features dissolved. His outline became the misty shape of my own reflection in the steam-room wall mirror. I closed my eyes and turned away, unwrapped the towel from around my waist, mopped my face and neck.
Wiped my forehead with the towel and when I opened my eyes there was a real hand in front of me, holding a real syringe.
On the pale flabby forearm, a dagger dripping blood.
The rest of him in this shifting white world was a steamy blur, without substance, a ghost that you might clutch at and encounter no resistance. But ghosts are silent, they do not pant for breath.
The point of the needle hovered and suddenly jabbed. I parried it with a fistful of damp towel, swiftly moving backwards out of range. Clouds of steam scurried in to fill the place where I’d been standing. I could no longer see him, we were lost to one another, but I could hear the loose wet sounds of Wayne’s garbled breathing. Placing one soft bare foot behind the other, I edged further away, the towel wrapped around my hand like an outsize boxing glove. Somewhere in the mist he would be standing with one arm raised, needle poised, moisture running down his hanging breasts and over the pendulous dome of his belly. It was not Wayne’s natural element; he carried too much flab and exercised too little to withstand such heat. But it was not really mine either, and he had the loaded syringe.
‘This isn’t going to hurt, squire,’ came the wheezing voice. ‘Uncle Nev would like ter see ya. He told me go easy …’
I put my hand in front of my mouth to muffle my breathing.
‘Know it was you, dead certain,’ Wayne panted. ‘You borrowed his briefcase, didn’t you? The nice one with the gold twiddley bits. I knew it was you, I told him.’ He became wheedling, almost friendly. ‘Give it him back. Go on. He knows you’ve spent some of the money, but what’s a few quid?’ From the sound of his voice he was starting to circle. ‘Uncle Nev won’t mind, squire. Whatever you’ve spent we’ll call it quits.’
‘I threw it away,’ I said. I took my hand from my mouth and felt behind me for the wall. I didn’t want him circling round, coming for my exposed back.
‘No, no. Don’t think so,’ he said softly, chidingly. Now he was to my left. ‘You wun’t do that. Come on, squire, play the game. You’re in enough trouble with the police already …’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll take the chance. Let the police deal with it. Let’s call them in. We’ll tell them about the body in the harbour.’
A shape moved in the steam and I stepped sharply backwards, colliding with something, feeling a wooden bench scrape against my calves. I held the towel in front of me, anticipating a lunging arm.
There was a hoarse explosion of breath, and Wayne muttered angrily, ‘Listen – don’t be fucking stupid, squire. I’m not in the mood. I don’t know what you’re on about—’
‘He was a customer of yours. You gave him a tattoo.’
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Wayne said. ‘Listen to this. You’re my next customer. For free.’
‘Not while I’ve got the briefcase—’
Foolishly I hadn’t covered my mouth, to baffle the sound, which enabled him to home in, and he struck blindly but accurately in the direction of my voice. He was aiming low, at belly height, and not expecting it I brought the wadded towel down and across at the last possible moment, missing the needle and hitting his forearm and deflecting it. I think he slipped – he might have fallen – because he was doing a lot of grunting and cursing under his ragged breathing.
He said, ‘Fuck this for a lark,’ and the steam billowed as he thrashed about, striking out in a rage, jabbing furiously in all directions. He was panting hoarsely and I could smell the rot of dental decay. ‘I’ll pin your knackers to the floor, squire. They’ll come up like purple balloons. They’ll have to carry you out on two stretchers. Then I’ll find some nice deep mud to cool you off.’
I swayed back from the waist as he came again and I felt a searing pain as my shoulder brushed against scalding metal. He jabbed towards the sound of my yell and his lunge sent him blundering past. My shoulder was on fire – I had touched the pipe feeding in steam. I could feel its heat inches away from my elbow.
He’d lost his bearings – he was creating a cyclone in miniature as he swung left, then right – and I said low and distinct, ‘Over here, you tub of lard,’ and he winnied a laugh.
‘Over here,’ I repeated, ‘Can’t you find me?’
‘Yeh,’ he gasped. ‘I’ll find you.’
‘You’re going the wrong way.’
‘Oh no I’m not, squire,’ Wayne said, lurching through the wall of white, a ghostly apparition made solid flesh, his wide pale sweating face suddenly in front of mine, sucking in air through a grin.
As his face came nearer his grin kept on getting broader. It kept on widening and widening until it took up the entire lower half of his face. Very gradually, as in slow-motion, the grin transformed itself into a rictus of agony because I had gripped his forearm and was using all my weight to hold it against the blistering pipe. He was actually, I realised, screaming without sound. I could see the square brown teeth right back to the innermost one, the arched red roof of his mouth and the gaping oesophagus, observing every detail as I increased the pressure, holding his forearm trapped between the towel and the scalding pipe. He sank to his knees, slobbering at me to let go. I thought, Why the hell should I? The fat slob had no qualms about sticking me with the needle (twice now, here and in the pub lavatory) so I didn’t see why I should let him off easy. I pushed harder, and could even feel the heat seeping through the towel, so it must have been unbearable against naked flesh.
The syringe had fallen from his hand: I didn’t hear it due to his strangled scream, which eventually came, obliterating the tinkle of metal and glass. By this time he was moaning and gibbering, so I let go, leaving him curled in on himself like the man in the harbour, banging his head on the tiled floor to relieve the agony.
I moved away and the mist billowed over the heaving form like a shower of soft fresh snow. I turned and groped for the door.
The flight back – each successive room brighter, cooler, less opaque – was like swimming upwards to light and air from the crushing depths of a primordial ocean. I shivered, the air like ice-water in my lungs, tightly wrapping the towel around me. The man with the lace – work of blue veins was under the cold shower once more, or perhaps he had never moved. Other figures, sitting or standing motionless, I avoided – I remembered Wayne’s accomplice, the thin youth named Ray with the chicken-claw birthmark.
In the locker room the Polish-sounding attendant was pushing a rubber squeegee along the floor. He looked past me into the first of the steam rooms, as if expecting to see someone. When no one appeared he turned his back on me, and worked his way quickly and perfunctorily towards the door.
He wasn’t in the corridor when I came out, still damp under my clothes, buttoning up my overcoat. Perhaps he wasn’t the one who had informed on me. He’d never seen me before, had he, so why should he? Then how had Wayne known where to find me? It was too coincidental; in other words not a coincidence at all – it had to be the Polish man – I discounted the mayor and the finicky chairman. They didn’t possess the imagination to be involved in a thing like this. Benson’s ring of spies and informers, it seemed, covered the town like a sticky spider’s web.
I went past the bored girl in the glass-walled cubicle, lips miming to dreams of seduction, and down the steps, wondering too if she was as innocent as she seemed. Brickton couldn’t be trusted; its streets reeked of deceit, its people infected by a kind of vicious indifference.
I walked quickly up the street past the chain-link fence of the cleansing department to the corner and glanced back. There was no one following. Long cast-iron pipes, painted black and stencilled ‘Stanton & Stavely’, were stacked on wooden trestles inside the council compound. They were of the type used for sewerage systems, or to carry water. Under these pavements the Victorian pipes, like the rest of the country’s antique plumbing, would be crumbling to rust – then how, I wondered, could a town like Brickton possibly afford to replace them? The disposal of sewage, out of sight and out of mind, was the least of its problems. Yet the council had managed to invest several hundred thousands of pounds in cast-iron pipework. Mr Patundi, had he been alive and known about it, would have strenuously objected to his rates and taxes being spent on such a project. In its place he would have demanded more Panda cars, bobbies on the beat, detention centres, birching frames.
What the fuck did I care, I asked myself, as I went up the steep cobbled hill to the high street, if this area of the map was made blank? It was only, as Trafford had said, what we deserved. The rats, or the ants – or better still the cockroaches – might make a better go of it. Brickton could be the site of a hope-filled renaissance once we’d cleared out and sterilised the ground, scorched the earth clean.
And in the meantime, what did I want? Not justice (such a puny, milk-and-water, bloodless and pious aspiration). I wanted to see others suffer for what had been done to me. I wanted recompense for the two years I had spent going quietly and politely insane. I wanted someone else to scream for every time the needle had entered my flesh.
Unsurprisingly, it had started to rain. I was glad of the excuse to keep my head bowed as I moved through the afternoon shoppers, though I still felt vulnerable, aware of my shabbiness even here. I walked several yards past two flimsy perspex and aluminium space modules, not realising what they were, preoccupied with the search for the call boxes I remembered, bright red flags in a monotone world. Then the old-fashioned penny dropped; I went back and shut myself inside.
I don’t know what I expected to hear in Diane Locke’s voice – anger perhaps, outrage, maybe disappointment – but what I got instead was brittle and tight-lipped, as if the bakelite receiver had altered her voice, giving it a priggish 1930s aloofness.
‘Most considerate of you, under the circumstances. Where the hell are you, if I might ask?’
I told her and she said, ‘You’re a bloody fool, you know, even to think of going back there. And never mind that you promised to stay.’
Long spits of water appeared on the perspex sides as the rain began to fall heavily. There was a subdued steady patter on the aluminium roof. ‘I know I broke my promise. I’m sorry. Is that what you want to hear?’
‘I listened to you,’ Diane Locke said tightly, ‘and I believed you. I even lied to the police to protect you. It seems you’re willing to accept my help only when it suits you.’
I didn’t say anything to this, because it was true. I saw her in the dark varnished hallway, lying back on the stairs, skirt up, legs apart, a greedy, fierce, plaintive look in her half-closed eyes. The memory aroused me. What is it about those women who look and sound as though they never would and really can’t wait to do it?
‘And what, if anything, have you accomplished by this stupidity?’ she asked me, not prepared to concede a fraction, much less an inch.
‘Not much.’
‘Then why the hell expose yourself to the risk?’
She was adept at asking questions I couldn’t answer. ‘I am grateful for what you’ve done for me, Diane,’ I said. ‘Really.’
‘Don’t make me sound like a fucking charity. I did it because I wanted to do it, not for any mealy-mouthed gratitude.’
‘Will you pick me up?’
She was silent for a while, just her breathing on the line, as if the issue was finely balanced, by no means decided. Then: ‘Where?’
I looked along the rainswept street to where the road divided into two tributaries running either side of the town hall. There was a Safeways on the corner, with a dry strip of pavement under a glass canopy. When I suggested this as a place, she said, ‘All right. It’ll take about thirty minutes. Wait inside the shop till you see me. I’ll be in the van.’
A sudden flash of fear made me blurt out, ‘Don’t leave the briefcase where someone might see it. Hide it away, somewhere safe.’
‘Everything’s perfectly all right. Graham’s here.’
‘Do you think they’d hesitate for a minute just because your father’s there?’ I slipped in another coin as the beeps sounded. ‘I’m serious about this, Diane. They’ll kill to get it – anyone who’s in their way. And after they get it they’ll kill anyway, because they’ve nothing to lose.’ This was hopeless. It was the kind of cheap melodrama to make her look to heaven and shake her head. She was a writer, and things like this never happened to writers, except to read about in other writers’ books.
‘They don’t know where I live,’ Diane Locke said, which was eminently sensible, practical, and true, but which failed to calm me.
‘You don’t know Benson. He has spies everywhere.’
‘Peter …’ The weary, exasperated sigh of the decent property-owning middle class soothing foolish juvenile fears. ‘Benson may be rich and influential, a businessman and a councillor, but he doesn’t rule the county as if it were his private kingdom. This isn’t Italy. You take everything too far.’
I agreed that I probably did. I didn’t think so, but I knew where to draw the line. I had already demanded too much of her, infiltrated her normal, quiet decency with too many dark, subversive twists and turns. By upbringing, education and temperament Diane Locke lived on the bright sunny uplands of life; it was not possible to make such a person comprehend the daily terror in which some lives are lived. Either it was there – this pervasive fear – all around, in everything, like a menacing mist that obscured the sun, or you just didn’t see it, saw only the clear, transparent, uninterrupted light.
I was pleased about the rain because it hid me from the outside world. It was like the childhood belief that if you shut your eyes tight you couldn’t be seen. I was as safe here, on the main street, as anywhere – even if Wayne came looking for me, nursing his hand and cursing me, hypodermic at the ready. Before he got close I’d be sure to spot him: the pale blob of face, the fatty rump of his shoulders, the dripping dagger.
It almost seemed a good omen – Safeways as a place of refuge (browsing amongst the shelves, pretending at normality, all the while keeping an eye on the street through the plate-glass window) I thought as I came out of the call box onto the wet pavement and saw the small white Panda car standing at the kerb, two pairs of eyes observing me through the windscreen. It might have been parked there for minutes: I had been too engrossed in the conversation with Diane Locke to notice, too busy fretting about Wayne.
I turned up my collar and walked on. One of the policemen wound his window down, called out sharply, ‘Excuse me.’ It was a warning to me that he hadn’t said ‘sir,’ and I knew what was coming.
I checked my stride.
The policeman kept his head inside the car because of the rain. He was young, early twenties, with a short, neatly trimmed reddish-brown moustache and a shaving nick on his smooth chin. His eyes slid from my face, drifted down to my overcoat and trousers, dwelt on my muddy boots. ‘Just a minute, if you don’t mind.’ He reached for the door handle.
The rain had emptied the street of all but a few hardy souls, which meant there were few people to dodge. I heard the young policeman shout, ‘Wait! You! I said stop!’ followed a few seconds later by the slamming of car doors.
By then I had reached the Safeways on the corner. I turned the corner at full tilt and ran down the steep cobbled street towards the terraced maze of jerry-built properties crammed below.