Beggars Banquet (collection)

by Ian Rankin

  And found instead a body.

  Not any old body, but that of the card player, Jack Grover. Chick stumbled backwards and turned his head to be sick on the verge. Trembling, approaching the boot again, he took a handkerchief out to wipe his mouth. The bundle of notes came with it, floating into the boot. He reached in for them… beginning to wonder now. Cash in hand, untraceable… Gently, he patted the dead man’s pockets and reached a hand into one, bringing out a wallet. He thought he could hear a siren in the distance. There were credit cards in the wallet, and the same name on all of them: James Gemmell. The JG on the numberplate stood for James Gemmell, not Jack Grover.

  He saw it in a flash: there was no Jack Grover; no stolen Lexus. There was just Jacqueline Gemmell’s husband, who had gone home and told his wife about some drunk in the casino who’d been steamed up at him, a private detective of all things…

  The sirens were closer now. Chick rubbed his jaw, feeling the rasp of his beard, seeing himself dishevelled and dirty, recalling all the witnesses who would say he’d been looking for a man in a Lexus. And the witnesses at the casino – he’d told them to remember his name…

  Seeing, with absolute clarity, the way he’d been used by Gemmell’s wife, who had found for herself the perfect way to get rid of an unwanted spouse. Chick had been wrong: you didn’t need an unbreakable alibi or some obscure hiding-place. All you needed was someone like him, unlucky in love, unlucky at cards. Someone you could put in the frame…

  Video, Nasty

  You know the videos I mean. They get passed around, brought back from trips to Germany or France or the United States. A case of beer and a few mates round while the ladies are elsewhere. You won’t see ladies in these videos, except on the covers. Oh yes, the models on the covers are dolls, but on the tape itself… well. Once inside, we are talking gynaecology, and the rougher it gets the rougher the women begin to look. When one of the men suggests anal sex, you can be sure a new woman is about to enter the scene, her eyes as tired and heavy as her flesh, all pucker and tattoo and bruise. I wonder about those bruises sometimes, about coercion and persuasion behind the scenes.

  I’m always invited to watch these videos. For two reasons: my working knowledge of French and German, and my technical ability with video recorders. These films aren’t always compatible with the British VHS players. You can lose colour, sound, or even the picture. But with a few home-made cables and boxes of tricks everything’s made hunky-dory, which pleases my friend Maxwell no end.

  ‘What’s that he’s saying, Kenny?’

  ‘Which one?’ I can see at least three men.

  ‘The one who’s talking, idiot.’

  ‘He’s saying “faster, faster”.’

  And Maxwell nods. He looks like he’s watching a Buñuel film, my translation crucial to his understanding and appreciation of the director’s intent. But the film we’re watching, along with Andrew, Mark and Jimmy, has the same dénouement as the dozen or so others in Maxwell’s mews flat. Despite being a bachelor, he keeps these videos tucked away in the wardrobe in his bedroom. I think for him the furtiveness is part of the fun; perhaps even all the fun. I look around at my friends’ faces. They are like kids at a birthday party watching Goofy cartoons. They say you can choose your friends, but that’s a lie. My life, I am sure, is a closed loop, like the eight-track cartridges you still find at car boot sales, along with Betamax video recorders and broken Rolf Harris Stylophones.

  Look at Maxwell. I didn’t choose him. On our first day at school we just happened to sit together. The next day, it seemed polite to do the same (and besides, the other desks and chairs were already occupied). We never had much in common. More, certainly, when at school than at university. And more at university than since. Maxwell is still single, has a fabulous job (with attendant car and home in the right part of town), and sees life as a series of challenges. I am married, in a dead-end career, with an ailing automobile and a tenement flat. My life too is a series of challenges. But where Maxwell spends his time trying to work out which gorgeous woman to date next, or where next to go for a sun-drenched holiday, I spend my time worrying over mortgage, overdraft, car insurance and council tax.

  One night a week, I slip out from Alice’s clutches for the euphemistic ‘pint with the lads’. We meet up in the same pub, then visit a new pub where Maxwell will chat up the barmaid, and take carry-out food back to his place where we might watch a video or play cards. Since the videos are all basically the same video, Maxwell attempts variety by trying to freeze-frame the come shot, fast-forward through the humping, or slo-mo the oral sex. I think this irritates the others, not just me. And at the end of it all, Maxwell has the same comment ready for me. A comment whose surface envy disguises a deeper sense of superiority.

  ‘Of course,’ he’ll say, ‘Kenny’s the lucky one. He spends all day surrounded by teenage lovelies.’

  Of course I do. It’s one of the schoolteacher’s few perks.

  You’re asking yourself: what does all this have to do with the fact that Alice was eventually put away for murder? And I answer that it’s all to do with a video. Because the barmaid reminded me of a model on the cover of one of Maxwell’s videos. The video was called ‘Asian Brothel Orgy’. No vagueness there. Video titles are seldom open to misinterpretation. You don’t look at them and ask yourself, Hm, wonder what that one’s about? ‘Teenage Dog Orgy’ would mean just that, I’m afraid.

  Of course, none of ‘Asian Brothel Orgy’ took place in Asia, and only one model bore any resemblance to someone from that part of the globe. The cover showed a perky blonde and blue-eyed teenager (American, I suppose, like the movie) looking coy and positioned so that, nude, she still showed little of interest to the regular porno customer. She was the tease, the promise of interior revelation.

  The back cover of course was a different matter: medical close-ups of penetration and ingestion. The front cover model naturally did not appear in the film. It took me a while to place her. I’m not suggesting that the new lunchtime barmaid did spare-time modelling for porno cassettes, but the two were distinctly similar. I went to the pub most lunchtimes, but seldom paid attention to the staff, being more interested in my beer and the all too occasional presence of Jennie Muir, our French teacher. Actually, it was Jennie’s more frequent absences from the pub which put blinkers on me. I’d sit eating crisps, staring into the bag as it emptied, wondering what she’d make of my Friday night translations for Maxwell and the others. ‘What’s she saying now, Kenny?’ ‘She’s saying “harder harder, faster faster”.’ When I wanted to watch a video in my own home, I’d try to rent something French, despite Alice’s protests that subtitles were too much like hard work. She preferred Steve Martin or Michael Caine over the latest Gallic smash, and had actually unplugged the machine halfway through Delicatessen.

  ‘It’s anything but delicate,’ she’d fumed.

  In my short reverie, prior to two crushing hours with the sixth years or an hour of Shakespeare or poetry, I’d stare into the crisp packet and see it as the interior of a nice flat by the river, a small balcony leading to the living-room where Jennie sat on a white leather sofa, sipping Chablis and chuckling at Delicatessen. I proffered more wine, which she accepted. We chinked glasses. Then I folded the crisp packet, tied a knot in it, and tossed it into the ashtray.

  It was Frank Marsh who noticed her.

  ‘New barmaid’s a smasher,’ he said, placing a pint in front of me.

  ‘Really?’ Frank taught woodwork. His working knowledge was of planes and drill bits rather than women. He’d been fifty-six years a single man, never having ‘seen the point of getting bogged down’. I was a little envious of him. I glanced over my shoulder anyway. ‘Christ,’ I said, causing Frank to chuckle. She was chatting to a customer, fresh-faced and with a hand resting on one of the beer pumps, slender arms appearing from a baggy white T-shirt. I imagined Jennie Muir having depths of passion and provocation. But there was nothing submerged about the vision in front of me;
all was glorious surface.

  Inside a few days the lunchtime clientele of our unassuming pub had doubled. Word was getting around. Only later did I equate Donna the barmaid’s years, blonde hair and blue eyes with ‘Asian Brothel Orgy’. Then I happened to mention it to Maxwell. The biggest mistake of my life, just about.

  He turned up one lunchtime with a slap on my shoulder. Startled, I tipped some beer on to my trousers.

  ‘Sorry, Kenny,’ he said. ‘Here, I’ll fetch a cloth.’

  When he returned, he already knew her name and her age. ‘You were absolutely right,’ he told me, watching as I wiped stains from my crotch, ‘she’s great. And she does look like the bird off the front of the vid.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I knew Maxwell worked three miles away from the school and regarded lunch-hours as an anachronism. He shrugged.

  ‘Just passing. My name’s Maxwell, by the way.’ He shoved a hand out towards Frank Marsh. ‘Since Kenny’s not going to introduce us.’

  Frank blinked towards me. Maxwell was the only one who called me ‘Kenny’. At school I was Ken, and to Alice I was always Kenneth. (She managed to make it sound like a rebuke.) I hated ‘Kenny’, and Maxwell knew it. Once or twice I’d responded in kind with Max or even Maxie, but he just smiled fondly and eventually I came back to Maxwell. He’d managed somehow to avoid abbreviations and nicknames at school, while I was (thanks to my parents) already a Kenny when I arrived there. The nearest I got to niggling him was to attempt what I call the ‘reverse pun’, opening our conversations with the line ‘How’s Maxwell?’ making the ‘How’s’ sound like ‘House’. Get it?

  ‘Can I get anyone a drink?’ Maxwell asked now. Frank rapidly finished his pint. ‘And tell me, do they do food here?’ Maxwell stood up. ‘No, don’t bother. I’ll just go ask Donna.’

  By this time, you see, Donna had replaced Jennie Muir in my fantasies. Instead of the riverside apartment, there was a stuffy blanketed room, walls painted black and hung with animal skins. Candles flickered on every surface, and in the middle of the floor was a mattress sans bedstead. Blood-red wine replaced the chilled Chablis, and there was a frenzy of music on the hi-fi. For nearly two weeks I’d been looking forward to lunchtimes and then going over them again during the subsequent afternoons. I’d broken the ice with Donna, had ascertained that she liked rock and a little bit of jazz, didn’t go to watch films but liked ‘clubbing’ at weekends.

  ‘That’s why I work lunchtimes whenever I can, keeps the nights free.’ Her pale face surrounded crimson lips. She wore two gold studs in either earlobe. I started to drink a whisky with my beer, just so she’d turn around towards the row of optics, giving me the chance to stare. Her shape seemed near perfect, set off by short hugging skirts and thick black tights. Surface. Everything was there. Not like in the videos where the nakedness was so naked that it became clothing in itself.

  ‘I don’t know how you can teach in the afternoons,’ she said one day. She meant, how could I teach after a couple of pints and a couple of shorts. The answer was: by remote control, literally. I used videos more and more in the classroom, hogging the TV set, showing whatever was vaguely relevant and available. Shakespeare was easy, poetry not. I’d even take a class to the school’s video lab – we have some excellent facilities, due to a go-ahead rector who realises that technology is where future jobs lie. (What he doesn’t realise is that after hours I often use the video lab’s facilities for copying Maxwell’s tapes.) I could fill an hour showing the class how to edit films, why the cameraman is so important, and how an editor can make a movie work where the director has failed.

  I could do all of this, and still have room in my head for candles and music and animal skins.

  Until Maxwell came along. Within a week, he’d fixed a date with Donna, and the first date was followed by a second. One day, I hurried to the pub only to find the manager on reluctant duty.

  ‘She’s buggered off,’ he informed me. ‘Took another job.’

  A job Maxwell had found for her, convenient to his own office. When he told me this on the phone that evening, told me while Alice played TV roulette with the remote and ate another packet of crisps, I knew I had to do something. The living-room seemed stuffier than ever, chip fat and salt, blue noise from the television and a sofa full of wife. My life felt horribly scripted, badly acted, its scenes decided long before I’d been cast for the role.

  Splice and edit, I thought. Splice and edit. I might not be the director, but I could still save the movie…

  Just one of those things, I thought to myself. Just one of those crazy things. I couldn’t get those two lines out of my head as I stood there over Maxwell’s body. I was reassuring myself that I’d only come to his place to talk. To talk about what? That’s what the police would ask. To talk about Donna, whom he was dating and I fancied. So you were jealous then, sir?

  Officer, I spend most of my life in a state of jealousy.

  He’d only fallen down the stairs of course. I’d been apologising as I walked down after him. But he’d lain there very still, and when I hauled him up by the shoulders his head swivelled wildly, neck obviously broken. I checked his pulse anyway, and found nothing.

  Only a fall down the stairs… except that I pushed him. Oh yes, we’d been arguing. Or rather, I’d been arguing and Maxwell had been laughing at me. We hadn’t even got as far as his living-room. I’d been arguing on my way up the stairs, arguing ever since he’d let me in the door. In the hall at the top of the stairs I fairly vented my spleen, until I could feel myself emptying, the anger lessening. Catharsis, I suppose. Or exorcism. But he was still laughing, rocking back on his heels. So I stood there and blinked and then gave him a mighty shove. I only just managed to stop myself tumbling after him. Gripping the banister rail, I watched him sail backwards and begin the thumping descent. It’s a steep staircase, uncarpeted, the wood stripped and varnished. I remember the varnish was expensive, but it meant the wood only had to be redone every five years or so.

  Just one of those things, I thought to myself. It was lucky Maxwell lived in a mews. Those places are like morgues at the best of times. This one even boasted a dead end, no through traffic. Ground level was all doors and garages, with living-room windows above. Nobody was looking as I dragged Maxwell out of his own door and into the boot of my car. His keys slipped from his trouser pocket, along with some loose change. I scooped it all up and pocketed it.

  I was supposed to be fetching fish and chips for our supper. My excuse to Alice for taking so long was car trouble. I used Maxwell’s change to buy the food, parked outside my own flat, and checked the boot was locked. Over supper I’d have a think what to do with Maxwell. Since Alice slept like a horse, I’d have no trouble sneaking out in the dead of night to get rid of the poor bugger. I’d seen enough crime movies to know that I mustn’t panic and I must take care. Each take had to be a perfect take, had to be what directors called ‘a wrap’. On the way upstairs I unwrapped a hot package and pulled out a chip, dropping it into my mouth. It had a new and vivid flavour.

  Not that Alice noticed. If a thing wasn’t behind glass and wrapped in Japanese plastic and changeable with one press of the remote, she tended not to see it. She didn’t see my heightened colour, or the way I stared at my smeared plate. So passive was she, I almost wanted to blurt out a confession. Just once to surprise her. I resisted the temptation of course. As soon as it’s out of your mouth, it’s in the public domain, and this had to be kept strictly private, strictly between me and God.

  It would be interesting, too, to see if I possessed such a thing as a conscience.

  By the time we got to bed, I felt I’d explode. I wasn’t much nearer working out a plan, my head full of sitcoms and advertising jingles. I cleared my throat.

  ‘Alice, what do you really think of Maxwell?’

  She was lying on her side, her back to me, one hand supporting her head and the other holding a paperback book.

  ‘Maxwell’s all right.’ I di
dn’t say anything. ‘I feel sorry for him actually.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I was startled. She felt sorry for him? She couldn’t have surprised me more if she’d said she was carrying his child.

  ‘All that bravado of his, the macho stuff.’ She left the explanation at that and returned to her book.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘That, Kenneth, is because you never see things. You and the rest of your cronies.’

  ‘What don’t we see?’

  ‘You don’t see anything, you don’t see anything at all. Now shut up and go to sleep.’

  I lay on my back compliantly, wondering whether it was best to feign sleep and wait it out till the wee small hours, or try to get some sleep and trust to my internal alarm clock. I needed to be clear-headed, which suggested sleep. So I closed my eyes and dreamed of a long beach on which I walked for hours and hours, while friends kept swimming ashore as though from some shipwreck.

  Alice woke me with a mug of tea and a couple of biscuits. I sat up sluggishly. It had been a long, exhausting night. I looked at the clock: five minutes to eight. My body was stiff, arms aching.

  ‘You look rough,’ Alice agreed, starting to dress. I planted my feet on the cold floor and ran fingers through my hair. It took me a while to admit that I’d done nothing about the body in my car-boot.

  I’d slept the whole night away.

  Over breakfast, I pressed Alice about what she’d said in bed. Her face was grey and puffy like an inmate’s. She’d given up looking for a job a year or so ago, and filled her days with shopping, gossip and TV. She gossiped at the shops, often discussing the doings in one or other daytime soap. Her life too was an eight-track cartridge. The sofa had taken her shape, so that I no longer felt comfortable sitting on it. Usually I sat on a beanbag on the floor, reminding myself to get it refilled one of these days. I even ate breakfast (a bowl of cereal) on the beanbag, while Alice sat on the sofa, both of us staring towards breakfast TV with its little onscreen clock in the corner, telling us it would soon be time for work or, in Alice’s case, for yet more television.