It was cold on the hill leading out of town, though unusually for Brickton the day had kept fine. It was possible to look directly at the sun: a bland orange balloon hanging motionless above the flat misty sea. In the soft, even twilight the harbour wall was clearly visible, enclosing an area of deepest black touched here and there with crimson streaks, the sunken hulls and rusty superstructures glowing dull red.
I turned my back on the town and went on up the hill. It occurred to me that I was leaving Brickton with even less than I’d arrived with – a borrowed suit, a few pounds, no belongings, no destination. I walked on shivering. The road levelled out and dipped over the crown of the hill, hiding the town from view, then slid down between hedgerows into the countryside. There wasn’t much traffic, a few cars, a bread van, a tanker going the opposite way, air-brakes gasping as it slowed for the descent. They were a menace on these narrow winding roads.
The pavement had given out before I came over the hill, and I kept close to the grass verge, facing the oncoming traffic. Brickton, it seemed to me already, had ceased to exist. I had the notion that if I turned round and went back there would be no tattoo parlour along the narrow shuttered street, no E GA FOO S ORE halfway down the hill, no bare dusty room above it (I’d never been there: the fingerprints proved it), no town hall, no swimming baths, no harbour.
The place was evaporating in my mind, had less substance than a distant fading memory. It had no basis in reality; either that or I had none, but I couldn’t decide at the moment which.
A car slowed behind me and automatically I moved onto the grass verge. Its engine idled, and when I turned my head I saw a silvery metallic bonnet, rusting at the edges, with a wire coat-hanger bent into a square for a radio aerial.
The Datsun drew level. Diane Locke wound the window down. She was wearing the bulky shapeless anorak, the hood pulled back, her hair a dark tangle, her eyes large with concern in her pale face.
‘I didn’t want to pick you up outside the police station. They might have been watching.’
I stepped back onto the road and walked on. The car crept after me.
‘Get in. Please.’
I kept on walking.
‘Stop for a minute and listen to me!’
Part of me wanted to stop and another part of me wanted to walk on. I walked on.
‘Where are you going?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Away from here.’
‘I’m heading in that direction. Get in.’
Go on
Get in
‘No,’ I said savagely, feeling the sultry throb of a headache. I was chilled to the bone and yet my head felt hot. The pain drove down through the base of my skull and all at once I felt nauseous. I thought of Trafford’s scaly hand pointing at the harbour through the lopsided window of the hulk.
‘Peter, what’s the matter? What’s wrong? Come on, get in the car, please—’
She had to pause as a large black car came up behind, slowed, overtook the Datsun, and went on. It wasn’t a Mercedes, thank God. It was starting to get dark. The hedgerows on either side shut out the light like thick, impenetrable walls. I crossed over and got in beside her.
Diane Locke glanced at me and in the fading light I saw that there were blue shadows under her eyes. Her unmade-up lips had tiny faint cracks in them.
A few miles further on we came round a wide bend into Granthelme and went over a granite bridge with a river flowing underneath. After Brickton this seemed like civilization. We stopped at the traffic lights. People were bustling along the pavements, trailing out of brilliantly-lit supermarkets with three, four, five plastic carrier bags strung from their arms, smeary toddlers in a state of temporary truce trotting to heel, pacified with sweets and weirdly-shaped incandescent potato snacks. It was remarkably like real, normal life.
We drove on through the town and into the countryside once more. Neither of us spoke. My throat was burning dry and I felt sick again, but probably nothing would come. I saw Trafford, clawlike hand raised, grinning at me. ‘Wipe ’em off the map. That’s the spirit!’
The road was familiar: we had come this way when we drove out to the restaurant. Somewhere along here was the line that separated the dispossessed from those who led fruitful, well-ordered, well-heeled lives. I was back in the Land of Oz. After another mile or two the car slowed and turned off the main road into a narrow lane which curled and dipped and then climbed a steep bare hillside. There was a view to our right, or what would have been a view had the light been good, and on the left a pallid sunset – a damp streaky watercolour of a thing like a forty-watt light-bulb swathed in pink muslin.
We passed several huge rambling places, set securely in their own grounds behind wrought ironwork, and I was inspired to come up with the idea that just as shopkeepers proclaim above their premises how they earn their living, owners of large houses in the country should be compelled by law to have signs erected on their rooftops, saying precisely who they were and how they had acquired their wealth: ‘Userer’ – ‘Extortionist’ – ‘Drug Racketeer’ – ‘Land Speculator’ – ‘Sweatshop Owner’ – ‘Slum Landlord’ – ‘Accountant.’
Diane Locke lit a cigarette and opened the window to let the smoke out. ‘The police cleared you,’ she said after a long pause: a statement, not a question.
‘Yes. They had no proof.’
‘What about Benson?’
‘What about him?’
‘Did you tell them about the tape and the notebooks?’
‘I tried.’
‘What happened?’
‘They didn’t believe me.’
‘Did you say that I had them – they were in my possession?’
‘No. I kept your name out of it.’
‘But why, for heaven’s sake? You should have told them.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I didn’t. End of story.’
There was a change in her I detected but couldn’t account for. Before, it seemed, she had suspected that much of what I had told her was a product of my own fancifully embroidered paranoia. She didn’t think so now, I sensed. Something had happened to change her mind. Benson, she finally realised, was up to his neck in something crooked that involved murder, and now he was scared and therefore he was dangerous. How he must be sweating, I thought – wondering what I had revealed to the police!
Let the bastard sweat. That was my philosophy. I saw Trafford wink in agreement as he wiped some greyish sticky stuff from the corner of his mouth.
Diane Locke said, ‘We ought to be celebrating. It isn’t every day a person is cleared of a murder charge.’
‘So you’re convinced now.’
‘Of course.’
‘Of course?’ I mocked her. ‘You thought I had done it.’
‘I didn’t – I mean, I wasn’t sure.’ She sucked in a lungful of smoke. ‘I admit, I wasn’t sure at first.’
I smiled to myself in the darkness.
‘Do you know who did?’ I asked.
‘Wasn’t it Wayne?’ Diane Locke said.
‘The police think it was Smith.’
‘What? What do you mean?’ Diane Locke said quickly, as though I had startled her out of a dreamy reverie.
‘Oh yes,’ I said, enjoying this. ‘They think it was Smith. Poor guy.’ Her eyes flicked from the road to my face, twin ridges marking a deep shadow between her eyebrows.
‘They’ve got him?’ she said incredulously.
‘Yes.’
‘At the police station?’
‘In the mortuary. Poor old Smith’s dead. I was shown a photograph. No doubt about it.’
‘And did he murder the shopkeeper?’
‘We’ll never know,’ I said. ‘He’s taken the secret with him.’
I gripped the door-handle, and she said with alarm, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘Stop the car …’
I stumbled onto the grass verge and fell to my knees, bent over, retching, bringing up nothing but strings of spittle. My throat burned and my insides felt as if they were being wrenched apart. Moisture from the damp grass soaked through my trousers. When the retching finally stopped I started to shiver uncontrollably.
‘You’re in no fit state to go anywhere,’ Diane Locke said, crouching at my side, her arm around my shoulders.
‘That’s all right then,’ I said, wiping my mouth. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘You’re coming with me.’
Yes!
Go on
‘No,’ I said, and repeated, ‘No.’ I tried to rise but my legs were filled with sponge rubber. ‘I can’t.’
‘What on earth did they do to you?’ she asked, frightened and angry.
I didn’t get her drift straight away. ‘At the clinic?’
‘The police.’
‘Nothing.’
‘You’re ill. You’re covered in sweat. What have they done to you?’
‘I’ve told you, they didn’t do anything.’
Diane Locke went on talking in a soothing voice, but I wasn’t listening; I wasn’t aware of anything until I felt warm air circulating around my ankles, and when I opened my eyes I was in the passenger seat and we were driving along the dark road. The headlights swept across a dry stone wall as the car turned off and started to labour up a gradient.
There was a lake to the right with a dark mass of mountains behind it, and I had the idea it was the lake I had seen through the trees from the window of Diane Locke’s house. When I had seen it before, in what now seemed another life, it had sparkled with sunlight. If I had been given the chance to go back and change the past, to re-invent it, my past would have begun at that precise moment: standing at the bedroom window looking down at the lake sparkling through the trees. Then I had never set eyes on Brickton, and Susan’s memory was very dear to me.
‘Not far now,’ Diane Locke said. ‘Nearly there.’
The house was in darkness. When I asked about Graham she said, ‘Haydock Park,’ which I took to mean he had gone to the races, but apparently it was a two-day antiquarian book fair, held there every year. We sat in the dusty living-room amongst the piles of books and cardboard boxes, the gas fire hissing and spluttering in the old-fashioned tiled fireplace, drinking coffee and then whisky. Another sound competed with the gas fire – a thin persistent drone – that set my nerves on edge. It was the wind sweeping up from the lake and playing a dirge in the branches of the fir trees. Raindrops smacked against the window-panes; the sound was gritty, as though there were flecks of ice mixed in with the squall.
Diane Locke asked me why I had been so reluctant to come back to the house with her, and I fiddled with my glass, lost for an answer.
‘How come you knew the police had picked me up?’ I asked her instead. It hadn’t occurred to me till now.
‘When I got to Brickton I waited for you outside Safeways, as you’d said. Then I saw you being driven away in a police car. I came back this morning and parked down the hill.’.
‘You waited all day?’
Diane Locke nodded. ‘I followed when they took you to the hospital and brought you back.’
‘What if they hadn’t let me go?’
‘I knew they would. You didn’t kill the Indian shopkeeper, I was certain. I told you that, and it’s true.’
She was doing her best to comfort and reassure me, so why did I still feel trapped and frightened, filled with gnawing panic – even with a woman who had helped me and wanted to go on helping me? Why was I suspicious of her? Why did I feel that to trust her was somehow a betrayal of myself? Perhaps, I thought, it was because I felt unworthy of her. If she only knew what was inside me, deep inside, that no one else knew, she would be revolted and have nothing further to do with me. I was saving her the trouble of finding out. Saving her the disappointment and, ultimately, the disgust.
Looked at in that light, I was doing her a favour. So why couldn’t the stupid bitch understand that and leave me alone?
I said abruptly, ‘Thanks for your help. I’ll leave tomorrow.’
‘Why? There’s no need to.’
‘I have to leave.’
‘Where? You’ve nowhere to go. You can’t go back to Brickton. The only other place is … where you came from.’
‘Do you think that’s where I belong?’ I asked, and knew there was a snide grin I couldn’t control on my lips, and didn’t want to.
‘No.’ Diane Locke shook her head. ‘I don’t.’
‘Maybe I do belong there,’ I said, as nastily as I could. ‘I’m not fit for the world outside. Lock me up and throw away the key.’
‘Oh yes?’ she said quietly. ‘Crawl off into a hole and hide away? We’ve all wanted to do that at one time or another. I have. My husband was having an affair – several affairs, in fact – and in-between drinking himself to death and using his fists on me. I wanted to disappear, just vanish, become non-existent, and the only reason I didn’t was because I had two young children who depended on me.’
I shrugged and said, ‘Good for you. Well done. But I don’t have any kids who depend on me.’
‘No,’ Diane Locke said thoughtfully. ‘Just you.’
There was a sudden noise outside, a creaking and wrenching, that made us both jump. We both went still, listening, and heard it again as the wind strengthened, blowing up the valley from the lake and bending the branches of the pine trees and making them clash together.
‘It was a wild and stormy night,’ Diane Locke said with a mock shudder, pouring whisky into my glass. ‘Let’s drink to it.’
She raised her glass and drank, smiling.
The whisky and the heat of the fire were having an effect; I began to feel muzzy and drowsy. Only a few days ago I had sat on this same settee, blood in my mouth, listening to Graham Locke saying something about breeds of sheep. Then soon after I passed out. It seemed that history was about to repeat itself, because I could feel my senses sliding away and my mind becoming duller and dimmer, shrinking to a single point of light as my consciousness dwindled.
I fought against this. It seemed vitally important that I had to – that if I didn’t something terrible might happen. As in dreams, however, it was a sense of foreboding, of something awful and ghastly, that never reveals to the dreamer the object of his horror. The unknown, unspecified thing is out there in the darkness, vague and formless, shifting like smoke, never going away and yet never coming nearer, while the dreamer has to struggle on alone with the reality of his own dreadful stomach-churning fear.
‘Don’t pass out on me again, will you?’
I snapped my eyelids open. With an effort I pushed myself up from my slumped position on the settee.
‘I have to go, Diane. I never should have come.’ The words were thick in my mouth.
‘There’s nowhere to go at this hour, for heaven’s sake. I’ll make up the bed in the spare room. After a good night’s sleep you’ll be able to think straight.’ Diane Locke shook her head, her expression half-smiling, half-rueful. ‘My fault for giving you too much whisky.’
It was true. It was all her fucking fault. I was sick to death of people interfering in my life. They were always telling me what to do. Forcing me to do things. Getting in my way. Why couldn’t they leave me alone?
I could feel the sultry headache I’d had earlier on starting its throbbing drumbeat again. And the nausea too – a sour, burning sensation at the back of my throat, as if I was about to regurgitate some corrosive bodily fluid.
Then it hit me. With an icy shock I thought: I’ve got Trafford’s disease. I’ve been infected – contaminated – by the sludge Benson dumped in the harbour. I’ve been there twice, traipsing ankle-deep through the mud. I had to smile, bitterly, to myself. I thought I had escaped from Benson but the bastard had got me in th end.
I clutched at my scalp – trying to drag out a handful of hair – but my hand came away empty. I wasn’t as far gone as Trafford, apparently. The wasting, flaking, hair-falling-out stage would come later.
‘What’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?’
‘I need to … sleep.’
‘Wait here while I get the bed ready, I won’t be a minute.’
When she had gone I sat listening to the wind buffeting the house and pelting the windows with sleet. The branches of the pines clashed in a frenzy. Listening, staring into space, I suddenly discovered that I was looking at the shiny mottled leather of the attaché case, peeping out from the far side of the chair in which Diane Locke had been sitting. It astounded me that she hadn’t bothered to hide it. She must have felt so safely tucked away in this 1930s timewarp that nothing, not even Benson and the dregs of Brickton he had recruited, could possibly harm her.
I remembered the difficulty I had had before in finding a suitable hiding-place for such a bulky object. But the case itself, and most of its contents, weren’t important. The only thing that really mattered was the one tiny cassette tape. I snapped open the catches, took it out, and went over to the corner bookcase next to the fireplace. The shelves were packed tight, and none of the titles were familiar. My eye caught the name of a foreign author, the title of the book in English; I prised it out, slid the tape to the back of the shelf, and replaced the book. I knew I wouldn’t remember the name of the author, but I was confident I could remember the title. Flight to Arras. The ‘flight’ definitely …
There was movement on the stairs. I closed the lid, then stood for a moment staring at it before I finally pressed the catches home. When Diane Locke came in she found me sitting on the settee with a frown on my face.
‘Come on, you’ll feel much better in the morning.’ She helped me up, her manner brisk, a nurse quite certain she knows what’s best for her patient. ‘I’ve even put a hot-water bottle in.’
As I mounted the stairs, hemmed in by the wall of books, I was still perplexed, and a twinge uneasy too, wondering what could have happened to the black shiny-backed book, conspicuous by its absence from the silk-lined compartment.
She’s read it, I thought, and not told me. The sly deceitful calculating bitch has read S –’s diary.
Thought you’d got away with it
Didn’t you my friend?
No such luck
And now you have to pay
For what you did
(Murdering bastard!)
Because here I come
Getting nearer every step
Dragging one foot
After the other
Plodding steadily on
Head bent
Eyes screwed tight
Against the icy blast
Face frozen in a mask
Of hate
Trees bend and thrash
In the biting wind
Branches clash and jostle
Pine cones clatter
Like rattlers’ tails
Closer now
Seeing through the trees
The house sharp and black
Against the sky
Like a ship thrusting hard
Into a whirling white storm
And on I come
Nearer now
And ever nearer
Smiling into the teeth
Of the wind
Knowing the end is nigh
For you Holford
(Murdering Bastard!)
And for the bitch in heat
Who helped you
Sheltered and fed you
And fucked you
Together one last time
Forever and ever
Amen
Is it my footsteps you hear
Or your plodding heart?
Hard to tell eh?
So hard hard hard
To tell the difference
I lay drowsily half-awake in the warm, soft furrow of the bed, not knowing whether I had slept for hours or ten minutes.
Not knowing either what had awakened me. Unless it was the racket the wind was making in the trees, or the brittle staccato peppering of icy rain gusting at the window. Had there been anything else? I seemed to recall the dragging sound of heavy footsteps slowly approaching, though there was nothing now, nothing at all, and in any case I couldn’t possibly have heard them above the noise outside.
Stretching out, my feet encountered the hot-water bottle, like the flaccid, cooling, yet still-warm body of a reptile that had recently died, so I knew I had been asleep for at least half-an-hour. But I couldn’t work out what had disturbed me.
I switched on the bedside lamp with its tiny pink tasselled shade and the unadorned walls of faded blue patterned wallpaper reared up and sprang at me. A pale disc trembled on the ceiling: the light reflected by the small oval mirror, tilted on its axis, between the varnished posts of the dressing-table. Diane Locke hadn’t bothered, or forgotten, to pull the curtains to; the window was a black square dissected by a wooden cross, each separate pane of glass as black and shiny as the cover of the missing diary. Not that it really mattered, I told myself, that she had read it. It didn’t matter at all. Nothing mattered now.
I closed my eyes and immediately the sounds started up again. But I couldn’t decide whether it was the sultry drumbeat inside my head or the slow, steady approach of heavy footsteps. Were they inside or outside? Why could I hear them only when I shut out the light?
The house creaked under the onslaught of the wind howling mournfully in the eaves. Behind the sound, or underneath it, the footsteps approached, steady and measured, in no desperate hurry because their destination was fixed and they would arrive all in good time.
I jerked upright and swung my legs out of bed. It was cold but I didn’t mind the sudden draught of cold air. I welcomed it. It would keep me awake, and alert. I needed the cold, hard immediacy of the moment to stand as a wall between me and the fear of whatever the unnameable thing was that was approaching with patient, unhurried tread.
My eyes were open now – wide open – I made sure of that, and yet the footsteps came on. They were no longer inside but outside my head. I sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the inky-black window directly in front of me. If the window was real, and the cold air circulating round my legs was real, then the footsteps were real. The house creaked again … or perhaps it was the stairs?
With my breath locked tight in my chest I strained to listen.
No, I wasn’t imagining or hallucinating.
I definitely, distinctly heard it.
There it was again. No mistake.
A muffled thudding footfall.
Huddled and shivering, my arms wrapped around my body, I sat on the bed staring into the black window, and heard the stairs creak.
Grasping the banister
Up we go!
To the door
With the slit of light
Spilling across the landing
Easing my weight down
Very very carefully
On each tread …
The old timber protests
Groans and creaks under my foot
As slowly and surely
I rise step by careful step
With the banister on one side
The piled books on the other
Hemmed in between the banister
And the wall of books
Until at last
I reach the landing
And I can hear
Holford’s heart hammering
Inside the room
Loud enough to shake the house
To pieces
And here I stand
Silent in the darkness
With my frozen smile
Of triumph
Knowing my journey
Is nearly done
Because nothing stands in my way
Nothing in heaven or earth
Can stop me now