The Suburbs of Hell

Harry said: ‘It’s like them cases you read about in the paper: like some little old cottage in a village that people walk past every day, and that look just the same as thass always looked, and nobody give it a thought. And then one day someone call, a meter-reader p’rhaps, and it come out that old Mrs Thing has been dead for a month, and everybody’s amazed. I tell you what, Arthur, I’m amazed. I dint see a thing. I say to myself, I say: Well, these stoodent types, they’re essentric, they’re happy just playin their guitars and readin books. It was just like that cottage I was talkin about, and me gooin past and givin a wave to the window every now and then, while someone inside was dyin and wouldn’t tell me.’

‘You can’t be blamed, Harry,’ Arthur said. ‘If his sister-in-law stayed there with him and didn’t notice anything, no one’s going to say that you should have seen more.’

‘She weren’t to blame, neither,’ Harry said, moodily. ‘Poor girl was kept in the dark, like. We know that now. Paul was that close, he never let on to her that he was worried about his little brother. Funny, innit, how we say “cracked” without thinkin what the word mean? You see, when Greg was a schoolboy he start foolin around with this what they call “acid”, and have what they call a “bad crossin” or something like that, and his mind was cracked, like, and in the end that just brook along the crack. And Diana never knoo, o’ny now it come out, when thass too late to do anything. Now she find that a couple of Paul’s friends knoo about it from him a long time agoo. But they dint know Greg, and anyway they thought that was a thing of the past and all cleared up now. Well, that weren’t.’

‘Dunno,’ Harry said. ‘I mean, the experts, they don’t seem to know. What I gather, Greg int with us, properly speakin, now. Diana think he might stay like that. These friends of Paul’s, they’ve told her that what used to worry Paul was there was something like that in their mother’s family, before this “acid” was even invented. But he must have thought the danger had passed, like, before he even met Diana, prob’bly, and she never heard a word about it. Well, you wouldn’t, would you, if you was courtin, tell the girl that your great-aunt Mabel finished up in a rubber room and your brother might be goonna follow.’

‘Black Sam come and got me,’ Harry said. ‘Me and Dave, he asked us both to come. And then Frank De Vere, he was drivin Donna home and he see Sam’s taxi outside my place, so he stop, and it end up with us all gooin. Christ, I wish we’d of kept Donna out of it. I dunno how much there is between her and Sam, but there’s something, and that weren’t nice, I can tell you, to be standin beside her while her fella was gettin all them, like, bigoted insults from Greg, and bein called a murderer as well. That wouldn’t have been a pretty scene, anyway, but with her takin it all in that was that much worse.’

In the other bar a fisherman began to sing, to the tune of ‘Land of My Fathers’:

Harry, cheering up, leaned towards the doorframe and bawled: ‘Hey, Beaky, you ought to sing solo. So-low we can’t fuckin hear you.’

‘Things are getting back to normal,’ Arthur remarked. ‘We even see some ladies now, and the gents have got brave enough to use the Gents again. Somehow everyone seems to have decided the shooting’s stopped.’

‘I know why that is,’ Harry said, gloomy once more. ‘The ones what weren’t already sure in their minds it was some foreign seaman have pinned it on to Greg now.’

‘You can’t blame them,’ said Arthur. ‘Well, I can’t, because it’s what I’ve been thinking myself.’

‘Then you’re wrong,’ Harry said angrily. ‘Sorry, Arthur, didn’t mean to snap at you. But talk sense, boy. You’re not thinkin who that was what got killed. You can’t believe he’d hurt them—them three particular people—or anyone else, for that matter. That poor sad kid, his trouble was he was just too harmless to survive in this world. And he int survived, poor little sod.’

‘Yes, but Harry,’ Arthur reasoned, ‘he’s out of his mind. You can’t argue like that in a case like this.’

‘I know a lot of people want to believe it,’ Harry said. ‘I’m pretty sure, and so is Diana, the police want to believe it. P’rhaps he’ll end up believin it himself, and forget about Black Sam. But I int goonna believe it: I just know that int in the boy.’

‘Why Sam?’ Arthur wondered. ‘Why him rather than me, for instance, or you?’

‘That might be my fault,’ Harry said. ‘When this thing started, people were whisperin in corners that it could be Sam, among others. You must have heard that. Well, I reckon this rumour got round to Greg and stuck in his mind. I don’t remember ever sayin anything about it to him, but—oh Jesus, Arthur, I think I must have.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Arthur said. ‘Not to him, Paul’s brother. Nobody would.’

‘I dunno,’ Harry said. ‘A lot of times people just talk without thinkin who they’re talkin to. Believe me, I know. Some nights I sit up and I think about them people—my friends—and the tears come into my eyes, I int ashamed to tell you. And then young Dave will come hoom with a foo beers in him and want to tell me some joke that I s’ppoose would crease me if I weren’t twice his age, and my hand fair itch to smack him. Thass three months nor more now he’s been livin at mine, and he show no sign of movin on. Well, thass all right, I s’ppoose—on’y I never felt I understood that boy since he got to be about fourteen. Sometimes he get my rag out, talkin about Greg. Thass all “I told you so” with Dave. I took him with me once when I give Greg a look, and now he tell me he knoo all along what was up. “I could see he was a head-banger,” he say; “why couldn’t you?” I mean, that don’t seem natural, when they’re the same age. There ought to be more fellow-feelin.’

‘I think,’ said the old man, ‘that’s something that’s in most people, but in a few it just isn’t. A kind of imagination that’s lacking. He might be better off without it. In the war, I came to the conclusion I had too much of it, myself.’

‘There’s more of it,’ Arthur said, trying to remember. ‘It goes on something like this: But each man is a part of the continent, like a promontory; and if a clod of it is washed away, the whole world is the less.’

‘In the war,’ Arthur said, ‘a lot of people like padres were very fond of quoting that, and there were reasons for it to stick in my mind. “Every man’s death diminishes me”—that I can quote you.’

‘Thass very strange,’ Harry said, ‘very strange that you tell that to me. I mean, here am I, spendin my days buildin up this sea-defence thing, to keep the clods from fallin off the promontory. And feelin the way I do about Paul and—oh Christ, poor little Ena. And you sayin that, that bring the two things together. And thass how it feels, just like that. Like clods was fallin off me, and I was gettin smaller.’

‘Therefore send not,’ Arthur explained, ‘to know for whom the bell tolls.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Harry said. ‘Crackin film.’ He looked at his watch, and scowled. ‘Shit, I’ve missed that one on the box, one of those about this good guy gooin around New York murderin all the bad guys. I like that kind of thing.’

In the late light the harbour was all of one colour: dove-grey. The bare woods of the far shore could hardly be separated from the smooth water and heavy sky which they divided. All the remaining light of the day seemed to be drawn to the white paint of a small freighter moving down the estuary to the sea.

Black Sam had got out of his taxi and was pacing up and down at the edge of the quay. His hands were deep in the pockets of a sheepskin coat and his body was tightened against the chill. He stopped to stare at the ship.

A tough-looking small boy in an anorak wandered past him, muttering: ‘How do, Sam.’ At the sound of his name the black man came down to earth suddenly, and returned: ‘How do,’ but with a look at the child that failed to recognize him.

‘Oh, sure. You keepin well, Killer. D’you know that flag, Killer? I bet you know them all.’

‘Long way from home,’ Sam said, absently, following the passing of the ship.

‘Home?’ Killer said. ‘Dunno where her home would be, but not Panama. Panama’s what they call a convenience. You ever been there, Sam?’

‘Been where?’ Sam asked. ‘Oh, Panama. Christ, no; I int never been out of England.’

‘Uh?’ said the boy, looking disbelieving. ‘I thought you come from somewhere near Panama.’

‘I come from Ipswich, boy,’ Sam said. ‘Born and bred there. I int travelled a lot in my life.’

The boy seemed disappointed, but stuck to the subject of geography. ‘My dad says thass ever so hot, like so hot it’s steamy. You can see jungle, and big birds, storks or something like that. Thass a big thing, that Canal. My dad says the first time he went through there that give him quite a proud feelin about the hooman race.’

‘Your dad’s deep-sea,’ Sam reasoned. ‘Oh, I’ve got you. Your grandad’s big Billy what has the Galley, right?’

‘Thass right,’ Killer said. ‘You know, Sam, that surprise me that you int never been to them warm countries. I mean, I stand here watchin the ships go by, and I dream about them places, and I’m English.’

‘Not a lot,’ Sam muttered. Turning away from the water, he gave the child a bleak glance. ‘I imagine you’ll see more of faraway places than I ever shall, Killer. Well, I’m off—see you around, I expect.’

But when he had closed himself into his taxi he sat for a while, hands on the steering wheel and chin on his hands, watching the white ship glide by the grey woods and fields, on its way, presumably, to colour and the sun.

He had always been one to let things pass, in the faith that difficulties and unpleasantness could be outlived. His mother, when she was in the mood to approve, had praised him for his good cheer. His father had sometimes wondered aloud whether he understood anything at all that was going on.

He did seem to live in a world which was simpler than other people’s. It was a very limited world: until he was fifteen it had consisted of a tiny house in a red-brick terrace in an arid-looking part of Ipswich, a couple of schools of similar appearance, a gentle bowery countryside for cycling and angling, and the front at Felixstowe to import, now and again, a touch of carnival. Everything had seemed predictable, and he had liked that, the ordinariness of his routines.

He had been born late and perhaps surprisingly in his mother’s life, and in the small red house was an only child. Three siblings, much older, had remained in the West Indies to be raised by relations when the parents emigrated and had not chosen to follow. His two sisters he had never seen; some visits from his brother, by that time a grown man, had not been a success. His brother had quickly found some friends of whom their father passionately disapproved, though to Sam, at about five, they had seemed glamorous and amusing. It was puzzling to him, but delightful, when they produced Bibles and declaimed passages at one another, with a curious manner in which gravity was mixed up with fooling. He could remember his brother’s arm around him while he intoned: ‘Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!’ One of the friends, a jolly but very ugly youth, was fond of reciting: ‘I am black, but comely,’ which he pronounced ‘coamly’. It was from them that Sam first heard the name ‘Ras Tafari’, and he had quickly learned not to repeat it in front of his parents.

His father was a labourer, his mother a cleaner at a hospital. A more conformist working-class couple than the Boskums could hardly have been found in England. Over the gas-fire in their front room hung a picture of the Queen. They would have liked the Queen to be Prime Minister also. In religion they were faithful Baptists: English Baptists. In their little rented house they lived out the narrow, private, decent lives of the Victorian artisans for whom it had been designed.

When Sam was about eleven a teacher called Miss Buxhall began to take an interest in him. This had puzzled him for a time, as at school he was good at nothing in particular, without being so bad at anything as to attract attention. Miss Buxhall, personally, left him with no strong impressions of herself, except that she seemed a sad old lady (she was in her forties, and single) and must watch television or read newspapers a great deal. By degrees he came to realize that she imagined him to be full of memories of some extraordinarily warm, extraordinarily colourful world: memories summed up in the print which she gave him of a painting by someone she called ‘The Douanier’, all weird trees and fantastic flowers with a glimpse here and there of black bodies, and in which she wanted to have a share. The picture did, in fact, stir something like a recollection in him, but as he had never set eyes on any such scene he supposed, and told Miss Buxhall, that he must have been remembering things described to him, when he was very young, by his parents or (this interested her) his Rastafarian brother, nowadays in Kingston.

This conversation, and the picture hung beside his bed, led somehow to contact being established between the teacher and the hospital cleaner, and to a Sunday visit by Miss Buxhall to 10 Omdurman Terrace. It was a trying experience for the boy. Miss Buxhall, normal and dull enough in her own chalky habitat, seemed downright eccentric in his. She talked a good deal of the Third World, of which Mr and Mrs Boskum, though they prayed in a general way for all in need or distress, had only the vaguest notions. She spoke of the great charge of energy which was coming into the arts from the newer lands, mentioning in particular a Barbadian poet whom she had actually met after his reading (‘electrifying’ was her adjective) of a long poem about his African roots. Mr and Mrs Boskum betrayed a little surprise at hearing such talk in their own front room, and Mr Boskum said rather gruffly that he had never heard of the poet but knew a man of the same name who was on the railways and came from St Lucia.

If Miss Buxhall did not, in Sam’s eyes, show to advantage, neither did his parents. He had never heard his mother, usually economical with her words, speak so much as she did then, in her hospitality or nervousness. And it was quite clear to him that Miss Buxhall was enjoying his mother’s flow of language with the enjoyment of a keen tourist, that she found his mother quaint. He respected his normally garrulous father the more because he chose on that occasion to be reserved.

After that their acquaintance with Miss Buxhall trailed away into civilities, and before long he left her to go to another school. But she had had her effect. His friends had always been white boys; he had always spoken like them, and thought like them, living his life in the midst of theirs. But after Miss Buxhall, he applied himself to ironing out any slight difference which might survive. He did not mean to be quaint.

Nothing about him was very noticeable: he was of middling intelligence, of middling abilities in football and cricket, presentable but middling in his looks. He was popular, in a middling way, largely because of a vein of the dry humour which goes with the Suffolk voice, and because there was nothing in him to object to. He made sure that there was not. Disharmony distressed him; he was the peacemaker among his peers.

At fifteen he left school and began work in labouring jobs. For what seemed a very long time he felt disoriented in the company in which he found himself, and rather clung to old schoolmates who clearly did not think as seriously as he did about their bond. But contentment returned when he was old enough to drive. He was not the sort of youth to delight in speed and noise and random journeys into the unknown. Instead, what delighted him was the orderliness of traffic, its civilized manoeuvres and conventions. On the roads, as in the rest of his life, he was an expert dodger of collisions.

He felt that, to be happy, he had to make the roads his life, and after some time spent on the buses achieved his ambition of becoming a taxi-driver. His father died. His mother began to talk of her native island, and of the warmth and comfort her old bones might find there, in the bosom of her large and mainly female clan. They sold the little terrace house, which by then belonged to them. One day he drove her to London Airport, and returned that night to an insufficient little flat which he had had trouble in finding, and for which he had to pay too much.

He was lonely after that. What he liked best in his work was the long runs, on which a passenger might share a little of his life with him, perhaps even ask for advice. Sam was good with advice: always very safe and comforting advice which left people feeling better.

One evening, after delivering a fare to the train ferry at Old Tornwich, he wandered into the Speedwell for a beer. It was in high summer, and still light, and the view from the window over the broad blue estuary was calm as sleep.

It was then that he met Ken Heath. The boy capitalist, flushed and already slightly bloated with drink, was unbuttoned enough to want to know more about the black man with the Suffolk voice. So Sam told him the simple story of his life, and the tycoonlet exclaimed and pressed his card upon him. He was himself, he revealed, the owner of a taxi firm in New Tornwich; if Sam should ever be interested, there was money to be made. He was touchingly friendly, and Sam, who was no drinker, was taken by surprise several times on the winding estuary road.

A few days later he got out the card and rang Ken Heath. Ken sounded surprised, and a little doubtful, at hearing from him, but took his name and a telephone number at which he could be reached. Several weeks passed before he did ring, but then it was with an offer. He needed, urgently, a man to live in the flat above the taxi office. He had formed glowing opinions of Sam’s reliability, and knew that he was a single man, which was what was needed, because of the telephone at all hours, and because the flat was, frankly, more of a pad.

‘There’s just one thing,’ he said. ‘I dunno quite how to put this. I don’t think there’s another—ah—black face, if you don’t mind me mentioning it, in this town.’

A week later he was again on the estuary road, with all his possessions on the seat and in the boot behind him.

The cafe next to the taxi office was a haunt of jobless school-leavers, whose blue shapes he could see through the steamy glass as they played their electronic games, while the blare of their jukebox choices escaped into the open air, apparently through the extractor fan, and reached him as he parked. The warm office was also a favourite spot for hanging about, and when he went in he found two of them sitting on kitchen chairs watching a portable television set on the desk. The driver behind the desk had turned it away from himself and was talking to the boss, who paced and turned in the bare little room.

‘A man who doesn’t drink,’ Sam said, ‘is always well. Did you want something with me, Ken?’

‘Nothing special,’ Ken Heath said. ‘Just to compare notes, you know. Bugger it, you can’t hear yourself speak in here. How is it all the teenagers today are deaf?’

‘So would you be,’ Sam said, ‘after ten minutes in the caff next door. Well, d’you want to come upstairs, or d’you want to go to the pub? Upstairs, you get a choice of Nescaff or Ribena.’

‘That’ll do,’ said Ken Heath, abstracted, and as Sam held open a door for him he began rather ponderously to make his way up.

The little sitting-room above had the look of a hospital, it was so white and uncluttered. The only colour was in a large print, not a very good one, of Constable’s painting of boys angling in the Stour at Stratford St Mary. The one small window had a view, by daylight, of the same river at its widest, sometimes blue, sometimes billowing like storm-tossed mushroom soup.

‘You don’t sound very fit, boy,’ Sam remarked, as he joined his landlord. ‘Out of puff after eleven stairs.’

Ken Heath’s father, a jobbing builder, had bought up a number of half-ruinous Old Tornwich houses when much of the place was half-ruinous, paying almost nothing for them. Therefore his heir, in his thirties, was running to fat.

‘I’m going to diet,’ he said. ‘Go to one of these health farms. They charge like wounded buffalo for starving you, but the sort of people who go don’t mind. Conspicuous non-consumption, Taffy Hughes calls that.’

‘Shall I?’ Ken wondered. ‘No, I won’t, thanks. You’re a very tidy bloke, aren’t you, Sam?’

Sam shrugged. ‘I’m a law-abidin citizen. I don’t want killers runnin around loose. So I don’t complain.’

‘You’re as likely to know that as what I am,’ Sam pointed out. ‘I heard they paid a call on Frank De Vere, because they know he’s a firearms nut. That’s as much as I can tell you.’

‘I should think,’ Sam said, ‘because I was on the spot just before the Commander bought it. Plus, I keep funny hours. Plus, you can’t see me in the dark.’

‘Ah, Sam,’ said Ken Heath, uneasily. ‘Lots of people keep funny hours in this town. Which is why you do.’

‘It’s awkward,’ Ken muttered, beginning to pace. ‘Bloody awkward. In a way, it’s none of my business—but in a way, it is. I mean, we’ve got competitors. If people start phoning them because they’re scared of one of our drivers—well, that much is my business.’

‘I’ve got to admit,’ Ken said, ‘that a bit of talk has come my way. It’s started again, because of that boy Ramsey.’

‘That boy is mad,’ Sam burst out. ‘For Christ’s sake, he’s in an institootion. Why should it be me? Why not him?’

‘Well,’ Ken said, ‘of course that’s the first thing that came into everybody’s head. But if the law have looked into it—and we know they have, and then some—and if they still don’t say they’ve solved it, well, we can be pretty sure it wasn’t that lad. So people start wondering: What if he knew something?’

After a moment, Sam said quietly: ‘Less get this straight, Ken. People are talkin about what he said? They know about the phone calls? They know what he said to me?’

‘There were several listening,’ Ken said, ‘and these things get out and get about.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Sam muttered. ‘And I took them there myself. I asked them to protect me—the sneaking bastards.’

‘Well, that’s human nature,’ Ken Heath explained. ‘People talk to each other.’

Sam was standing stock-still in the middle of the room with a hand up to his forehead. Abruptly he dropped his arm and turned to face the young capitalist. ‘Well, Ken?’

‘What you’re wanting is to break up our little partnership, I should imagine.’

‘Sam, you don’t understand me,’ Ken Heath protested. ‘You do not understand. I was preparing you, that’s all. If this doesn’t die down soon, perhaps you should spend more time in the office. At night, I mean—only at night.’

‘God knows,’ Sam said, ‘how many local drunks I’ve helped through their own front doors. I’ve even put some of ’em to bed. This is the thanks I get: they tell each other I want to murder them.’

‘Listen,’ Sam said, ‘tell me something. When I come in, was you talkin to Pete about this?’

‘They couldn’t have heard,’ Ken said defensively. ‘They were listening to the telly.’

‘They were listenin to you,’ Sam said. ‘What have you done, boy? That int never goonna blow over now—never.’

‘I don’t think,’ Sam said, ‘there’s no use in talkin on about it. We better sleep on it, and think over what we’ve said already. You’ve done me a foo good turns, Ken. I shan’t make your affairs more complicated than what they are.’

The fat young man paused in front of him and looked him in the eyes. ‘The good turns haven’t all been on one side,’ he said. ‘Don’t get any wrong ideas, Sam—we’re not parting from you.’

‘Funny,’ Sam said, ‘that telephone’s got a lot to answer for. Remember? I asked you if I could put my own name into the book with that number. On’y time I ever sin my name in print, until the inquests. That crazy fella might have never tracked me down if it hadn’t been for that, and he might have just forgot about me. But that seemed sort of homely, like, and settled, bein in the phone book.’

‘And you,’ Ken said. At the door he made a V-sign, then went heavily down the stairs.

Sam stood staring for a moment at the picture of the angling boys, dwarfed and at home in their leafy landscape. He was wondering what had become of them all, the school-pals with whom he had gone fishing.

In the bedroom he still preserved Miss Buxhall’s picture, her tropical fantasy. On the bedside table lay a neat packet of letters from his mother. It was hard to associate her with those foreign-looking stamps. She had lately passed into her seventies, and grown rather querulous, finding fault, in a Christian way, with daughters and grandchildren. The climate did not suit her. She dreamed sometimes of grey rainy days, of snow.

He threw himself down on the smooth counterpane, faultlessly washed and ironed. He lay staring at the spotless ceiling, painted by himself.

Listless Linda De Vere, blondely and anæmically pretty, turned down the sound of the telly so as to hear her definitely blonde friend. Definite was what Donna had always been, crisp and clear-coloured. Often she gave Linda, who was the elder by eight years, the feeling of being a little bossily jollied along and mothered.

‘I was just thinking,’ Donna said, ‘that it looks bigger, the room looks bigger. Lighter, too, without all old Dick Turpin’s ironmongery.’

‘He flogged it all,’ Linda said. ‘I’ve told you, haven’t I? He was getting the feeling that our friendly neighbourhood bobbies thought he might be kinky about shooting holes in people. Very sarky he was, about how nobody had been shot with a blunderbuss or a rapier or anything else he had. Anyway, he sold the lot, and did well out of it. I think he’s good at selling things, my man.’

‘Except himself,’ said Frank De Vere’s wife, ‘as your tone is telling me. In the days when I went into pubs with him it used to get me down, the feeling of being half of an unloved couple.’

‘That’s life,’ Linda said. ‘You’ll find out. You fall into a rut—the sort of rut you call a relationship—and the easiest thing, on the whole, seems to be to stay in it.’

‘Christ,’ Linda said, ‘has he been coaching you in his lines? Give us another one. Tell me you were raised by an army wife, and you can’t stand slatterns.’

‘Oh, there’s plenty more like that,’ Linda said. ‘He knows lots of words. Why did he marry me, I wonder. There must have been a female sergeant-major or two in Colchester who’d have had him.’

‘Really?’ said Donna, feigning belief. ‘Is he that way? You know—masterful women in uniform, and all that? Whips and bondage?’

‘No,’ Linda said. ‘No, it’s the other way about. He’d like to be masterful himself, but not in a physical way. A sort of mental bullying, that’s his bag. Hence the great buddyship with Dave Stutton, who’s as bullyable as—’

Donna giggled a little, thinking about it. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘it’s not really fair to him—to Frank—to talk about him like this. I mean, he was really worried about you, in the weeks after the murders. He offered to pay me—to pay me, for God’s sake—to come and sit with you when he was out at night. I mean, he wasn’t just edgy, he was neurotic.’

Linda took up a packet of cigarettes and made a slow business of removing one and lighting it. ‘I suppose,’ she said at last, ‘he didn’t tell you why?’

‘Why?’ Donna repeated. ‘He didn’t need to. There was someone going around blowing people away, that was why.’

‘There was more to it,’ Linda said. ‘He didn’t tell you anything else? About a window, for instance?’

‘I was almost certain of that,’ Linda said. ‘Well, the reason for all the worry about me was that one morning—the morning after poor old Ena died, but before I knew about it—there was a message written in my lipstick on the inside of that window there. It seemed to be a message from the murderer, saying that he was going to call again.’

‘I’m not kidding,’ Linda said. ‘I’ve always suspected that someone else was.’

‘That was what I thought as soon as I saw it. And in spite of all his carrying on later, I never really stopped thinking that. In spite of the fact that in the end he actually said that he wrote it; because he wasn’t even trying to be convincing. You can imagine the scene. I’d gone to bed leaving the back door unlocked—it opens on a blind yard with ten-foot walls, but so did Paul Ramsey’s—and the master of the house comes down in the morning and throws a wobbler. So he grabs a lipstick which is near his razor in the bathroom cupboard, and decides he’ll teach the slattern a lesson she’ll never forget. That’s how I read it, and if I’m unjust to him—well, I always was a mean-minded bitch.’

Donna had been staring at her, blue-eyed. ‘I’m scared for you,’ she said. ‘Whichever way it is, whether it was him or—I’m scared for you, Linda.’

‘Don’t be,’ Linda said. ‘It was a sort of joke. The actual message was jokey. Most of his jokes have a nasty streak. People like that don’t go in for physical violence, they work it out of their systems in words.’

‘Deep,’ said Donna. ‘All the same, I don’t like leaving you. But Sam will be coming for me soon. Shall I send him away again?’

‘Don’t you dare,’ Linda said. ‘Poor old Sam, faithful as—two short planks.’

‘Look, love, I’ve explained to you that my husband doesn’t shoot people, and why. So we won’t worry about that. Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about Sam.’

‘Sam’s very nice,’ Donna said. ‘He’s sweet through and through. And he’s not “poor old Sam”, either. I think he’s younger than you are.’

‘He looks older,’ Linda considered. ‘Than a white man of that age, I mean. They do, don’t they?’

‘He wasn’t invited,’ Donna said. ‘I didn’t think we were ready for that.’

‘Such caution,’ Linda said, ‘at your time of life. Oh, tell me, sister-woman, is it true about black men? I long to know.’

‘You take my breath away,’ Linda said. ‘You must be a throwback. They haven’t made girls like you since Elvis was a boy. Not even a feel of a suspender?’

‘I can’t explain,’ Linda said, ‘but it’s for his sake that I’ve left it like this. And that was him tooting then, wasn’t it? I’d better go now, if there’s no point in staying.’

‘There isn’t,’ Linda said. ‘So you and I are pretty much in the same boat, gal, sex-wise.’

‘Why don’t we run away together?’ suggested Linda. ‘Let’s go into a nunnery. I’m sure Dave Stutton would be happy to take over my household duties.’

‘Lock the back door,’ Donna said. ‘I think I’ll go and do it now, for my own peace of mind.’

‘Piss off, sister,’ said her friend. ‘Don’t keep that nice fella waiting for everything.’

In the warm taxi parked in front of Donna’s little house, Sam said: ‘You’re quiet. Something on your mind?’

‘I don’t think I can. No, I definitely can’t. Not yet. It’s just talk. We all saw with Greg Ramsey what careless talk can do.’

‘About you?’ Donna said. ‘No, of course I haven’t. Who would be talking about you?’

He laid his arm along the back of the seat and leaned against the door, watching her pale profile looking straight ahead. ‘Tell me about that. Tell me what you thought.’

‘And him calling me a jungle-bunny and that, and a killer—what did you think of that?’

‘Honestly, Sam,’ Donna said, ‘I didn’t really listen to what he said. It wasn’t his words I noticed, it was everything else about him.’

‘How did you think I coped with it?’ Sam persisted. ‘Did you think I was dignified? Did you think I handled myself like a man?’

‘You didn’t wonder, did you, if p’rhaps he knoo something about me, something about the murders?’

‘I’m going indoors,’ she said, groping for the doorhandle. ‘You’re scaring me. If it’s a joke, it’s not like one of yours.’

‘No, no, no,’ he soothed, touching her neck with his fingertips. ‘I’m sorry, little gal, I rushed into that clumsy, like. What I meant was, someone who was there has been talkin about it, and suspectin Greg Ramsey knoo something the coppers don’t know.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Donna, relaxing a little. ‘That bloody Dave. Well, it might have been Frank, but I bet it was Dave—that hairy wally.’

‘I don’t need to repeat my question,’ Sam said. ‘Just for a moment you was terrified. You thought you was sittin in a dark car with a murderer.’

‘Oh, don’t go on, Sam,’ Donna begged. ‘I’m very jittery tonight. Some day I’ll tell you why. Anyway, I want to go to bed, so goodnight.’

‘No, Sam,’ she said, a little fretfully. ‘I just want to sleep. Don’t pester, dear boy.’

‘Why do we never get anywhere? Why do I never get anywhere? Nothing moves. You string me along.’

‘That’s not fair,’ she said. ‘To put it plainly, for once, I just don’t happen to have fallen in love. I’ve been waiting—for your sake I’ve been waiting—and it hasn’t happened.’

He drew back from her, and slouched behind the wheel again. His voice when he spoke was hard. ‘It wouldn’t have been like this if I’d been white.’

She turned an indignant face on him. ‘You take that back! That’s got nothing to do with it.’

‘Oh, Sam,’ she said, softening, ‘I am so fond of you. You were sweet when you used to come into the shop and buy things you didn’t need. What did you do with all that sticky-tape and torch-batteries and stuff? You are a sweet bloke, Sam, I really mean that. And you did get me out of a hole, when you talked Ken Heath into letting me rent the house. I liked you so much, I thought it would go further. But it didn’t.’

‘It’s because I’m black,’ he said. ‘Because that crazy kid came out with what you’re all thinkin, and ole Rastus just stood there and took it. He int a man, ole Rastus, he don’t stand up for himself; he’s just a grinnin, docile animal. Except at the full moon, p’rhaps, and then his primitive jungle nature come out and he go round killin people.’

‘Well, I’m leavin,’ he said. ‘I’m leavin all of you. Ole Rastus done got tired of Tornwich. He’s gwine back home with his pocket full of tin, O doodah day.’

‘Yas, ma’am, dat am one big question. Ipswich might not be too easy, bein as I’ve got the reputation of bein a triple murderer. Thass a bit too near, Ipswich.’

‘You don’t have to go anywhere,’ she said. ‘You’re just bitter for the moment, but it’ll pass. Not that there aren’t more interesting places in the world than Tornwich. Like the Caribbean.’

‘Shit,’ Sam said, banging with both hands on the steering wheel. ‘Oh holy shit. All you Honkies want to make me believe thass where I come from. Well, I don’t. I int never been there. I don’t believe I should like it. I don’t want to be no foreigner. Why do you stop there, anyway, you Honkies: why don’t you tell me to piss off back to Africa?’

She moved towards him and put out an arm, but he pushed her aside and leaned across to open her door. ‘I don’t want no white trash in my car,’ he said. ‘Rude woman. I done hear about you white ladies, always tryin to get into the brothers’ underpants.’

She got out and slammed the door, but then appeared by his window and knocked on the glass. He wound it down, and glowered up at her.

‘Shut up, Rastus,’ she said, ‘I want to talk to Sam. Sam, you are a very sweet guy. No woman should be close to you—should be close if she can’t be—what you need. In the end, I didn’t measure up. I wish I could, but that’s the way it is, Sam.’

‘Hell, I’m going to cry,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think we can be friends, after a while?’

He lifted one hand from the steering wheel, and performed the Suffolk feint of spitting in the palm. He held out his hand without a word, and she clasped it.

He watched her unlock her door, then close it on the light. He started his engine and moved on.

At a pub on the main road he pulled up and got out and rapped on the locked door. Presently the landlord, who was washing glasses, peered out and recognized an old friend. He sold Sam a bottle of whisky.

Harry was trying to mend a lamp which the little dog, tangling itself in the cord, had brought to the floor. Nothing except the bulb had broken, but something had gone wrong with the switch. He had it in his big unhandy fingers, trying to work out how to set the fault right.

Near his chair a fire of driftwood leaped in the grate, and polished brass winked with the flames. The cat and the spaniel, long accustomed to one another, slept side by side on the mat. Close to his hand was a glass of neat whisky. He had been attempting his repairs with a sharp-pointed knife, but put it aside, and sat thinking. Presently he placed in his mind the tool he needed, and got up and climbed the two flights of stairs to Dave’s bedroom.

It was a long time since he had been in that room, and he looked around it approvingly, because it was as shipshape as he liked things to be. Dave’s possessions, which were few, were all stowed away. There was hardly a sign of him in the room, except for a framed photograph of his drowned father.

Harry gave the familiar face a melancholy smile, and then frowned slightly. The thought had occurred to him that it was there precisely so that he would see it, and feel more indulgently towards Dave as a result.

He dropped on to his haunches and peered under the bed. The toolbox was at the back, against the wall, and in front of it was a small package wrapped in newspaper. He fetched that out and left it on the floor while he dragged out the heavy box, which he lifted onto the bed.

While he was rummaging through the tools something sharp gouged his finger. He drew out his hand violently and stepped back, and the box teetered and crashed to the floor.

‘Oh, shit,’ he said, looking at Dave’s parcel in the midst of the scattered tools. Two gashes had appeared. He squatted over it. Underneath the newspaper was plastic. He poked one of the gashes with his finger, then peered in.

He rose and stood in the middle of the floor, staring at nothing. ‘My God,’ he whispered to himself. ‘My God, so that’s it. The little bastard.’

The banging on the street door two floors below, the yapping of the dog, took a while to register with him. When they did, he gave an urgent glance at the mess on the floor, but decided to do nothing. ‘Let him know I know,’ he muttered, and went out and slammed the door.

The man on the doorstep was Black Sam. ‘You, boy,’ said Harry, looking distrait. ‘Parky, innit?—but a nice clear night. You comin in, or what?’

‘Why, boy, I do believe you’re pissed,’ said Harry. ‘That’s something I int never sin before. You lose your licence and you’re in dead shtook. Well, come in to the fire.’

When he was seated opposite Harry, with the dog sniffing at his shoes, Sam said: ‘You’re bleedin, Harry. Your finger.’

‘So I am,’ Harry realized. ‘Well, here’s the medicine for that.’ He dipped his finger into the whisky beside him, then shook it in the air to dry. Little ribbons of blood hung suspended in the glass. ‘Best antiseptic I know,’ said Harry. ‘Can I give you one?’

‘What brought this on,’ Harry wondered, ‘this sudden change in your sober habits?’

‘Just—ah, the blues,’ Sam said. ‘Pissed off, therefore pissed. I saw all your lights on, and I thought I’d give you a look. Tell me to bugger off if you’re busy.’

‘You make yourself at hoom, boy. Look at that good fire. I’m glad there’s someone here to admire it.’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘He goo off roamin around in that van, I dunno where. Most of his dole money goo on petrol, I reckon.’

The fire caved in, and Harry got up to poke it and put on coal. ‘Harry,’ Sam said, to his back, ‘I’m in a hell of a state.’

‘No, I got the day off. I started drinkin last night. I know that don’t solve nothing. I know that’s all there again when you sober up.’

‘What is it, Sam?’ Harry asked. He sat down again, but on the edge of his chair, looking into Sam’s face. ‘Spit it out. Trouble with Donna?’

‘Yeh,’ Sam said. ‘That too. We int together no more, as of last night. And my job’s goin, I can feel it sort of escapin from me. Christ, Harry, I don’t know where to go, I don’t know what to do, with this hangin over me. People are sayin I killed three people, and drove one crazy. Last night, just for a moment, even Donna believed that. Just for a moment, thass all, but after that, Jesus, how could we ever be like we used to be again?’

Harry took his eyes away from Sam’s, which were slightly bloodshot, and directed them at the floor. Stony-faced, he said: ‘I’ve heard some talk like that. But that won’t last, Sam. Believe you me, boy, when they see you gooin about your daily business in the usual way, they’ll start to laugh at themselves after a while. I on’y hope it weren’t nothing I said that put that idea into young Greg’s head. Because he’s at the bottom of it, of course, but that int really his fault, bein so sick.’

‘I might have,’ Harry said. ‘In the beginnin there was some talk, some theories, about you among others. And that fair got my rag out, and I might have sounded off about it in front of Greg, I don’t remember.’

‘I told you I’m sorry,’ Harry said. ‘Anything I said was to make them laugh at the stoopid idea. How else could I deal with it, Sam, bein on your side? I thought I was doin my best for you, that’s why I spook out.’

‘Yeh,’ Sam said, noncommittally; but he did relax again. ‘Okay. Thanks.’

‘I’m a bit out of sorts tonight,’ Harry said, restlessly. ‘I’m a bit—whass the word?—occupied. I wish you’d have a drink. Or how about a coffee, that might do you a bit of good.’

‘You off already? Well, not such a bad idea. You goo and sleep it off, boy, and in the mornin things will look brighter. Like you say, the bottle never solved anything.’

Sam was at the door giving on to the street, waiting for Harry to let him out. He said: ‘Things go. Like a landslide. Suddenly there int nothing left.’

‘Thass the drink talkin,’ diagnosed Harry. ‘Very depressin stuff, if you’re depressed.’

He held the door open, and Sam went out to his taxi. The light on the roof of it was turned off.

‘Hey,’ Harry called after him, ‘smile.’ And as Sam forced a grin, he exclaimed admiringly: ‘Just look at them teeth.’

When Sam was gone and the door was closed against the cold he went to the hearth to warm himself. He stooped to pick up a dustpan and brush. Then he went upstairs.

And every moon made some or other mad.

And now and then one hang himself for grief,

Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll

How I with interest tormented him.

Barabas in The Jew of Malta

Now the moon is on the water, the silver-blue shallow valley to which black woods and frosty fields tend gently down.

An unsurfaced track, paler than the rimed grass, ends at the farmhouse. Its windows have a blue gleam. The rooms behind are dusty, the roof is unsound. Nobody has wakened there for years; no dog, for years, has barked at a crawling car.

He sits in the silent car which is beginning to grow chill. He watches the unstirred water. The moonlight lays a film of blue on his dark skin.

A pheasant, waking, honks in the nearby wood, and two more reply. The sound in that stillness is strident, violent. He shivers, and sits up straight.

He knows that now, after all, it will be done, that the revenge plotted in drunkenness, with anger and self-pity, will be carried out in a cold calm.

A light comes on for a moment as he opens the door, then vanishes as he quietly closes it. He has a small flashlight in his hand. He goes to the boot and opens it and reaches inside.

He closes the boot. Flashlight in hand, he squats in the whitened grass, fumbling stiff-fingered with the length of hose.

The light comes on again, and now his figure is stooping black against the door, winding down the window a crack, clamping in the crack the frost-hard hose. Then the dark returns.

The engine starts, and runs sweetly.

He lies along the seat, his knees drawn up. His hands press to his cheeks, for comfort, the collar of his sheepskin coat. He is attached to that coat, as single men grow attached to things.

The smell from the hose was to him, when a boy, something exhilarating, a perfume. It smelled of liberation and promise. His father, the black British working-man, never owned a car, never held a licence.

From where he lies the line of his eyes takes in the taller trees of the wood, sharply drawn against the light sky, holding in their black coral boughs black shocks of rooks’ nests.

He is very calm. He was very calm, but suddenly his body, his heart, is invaded by a terrible agitation. His body, his shaking heart, want him to move. His violent heart is leaping.

But his body is heavy, he cannot move it. Only his lips, which open on a groan. His voice is thick with trembling and affright. ‘Ah—forgive!’

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