by Keith Dixon
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I WAS CHANGING MY clothes ten minutes later when my mobile phone rang. I took it from my jacket pocket, expecting it to be Laura with an apology. A familiar booming voice rang in my ear.‘Dyke? Eddie Hampshire here. I gather you’ve been asking some questions about me. What are you, a tosspot? If you want to know anything you can come out and ask me straight, like a man. You don’t have to go sniffing round ex-wives and so forth.’
‘You’ve talked to Suzi.’
‘She’s still my wife. I can talk to her when I like.’
‘But why should I talk to you? People tell me you’re a bit of a tosspot.’
He ignored this.
‘Come up here and see me. Can’t get away at the moment. Paying clients and all that. Got to do the social thing, eat and drink and tell rude stories.’ He began to give me complex directions to Mill Gill. I grabbed a pencil and wrote them down. ‘Eventually you’ll see waterfalls. It’s on the maps. I’ll see you later tonight, when the dust has settled.’
‘I’ll be there.’
‘Good. You didn’t strike me as a tosspot when we met—don’t let me down now.’
With all the phone calls finished, the house seemed emptier than usual. The wintry light and cold snap in each room was a deterrent to good feeling. I put on Uncle Tupelo’s Anodyne, played loud, and got my adrenaline pumping while I went upstairs and packed a bag.
When I was packed I switched on my home computer and made some notes. I e-mailed them as an attachment to myself, saved them to a floppy, labelled it, and left it standing upright on the keyboard where it wouldn’t be missed. I also made two phone calls, one of them to the hotel that Hampshire had mentioned, and booked a room for the night.
While writing I’d heated up a lasagne in the oven and I ate it standing in the living room, the music banging round the house like a flight of tin trays racketing off the walls and colliding with common-sense.
I didn’t have a gun, but I had a sap that I’d taken from a lout in Cromptons Bar in Kirkby. Its unnatural weight moved back and forth as I passed its cool leather between my hands. I lifted a trouser leg and tucked it inside the long socks that I’d put on. I also picked up my Whitby knife with the one inch curved blade. It was small and light in my hand, but comfortable. I wore a black North Face fleece and a thick Berghaus jacket over it with a zip-up neck and corded waist-band. I’d also put on my thickest pair of jeans and a heavy pair of Canadian Columbia boots with a massive tread whose grip I liked. I felt well-protected, though I’d have to turn off the heater in the car or I’d lose twenty pounds before I reached Cumbria.
It was now almost six o’clock and I had a two and a half hour drive ahead of me. I stood in the living room for a moment, staring at the walls. The blue stain where the damp-proof course had ruptured three years ago and leaked ground water into a square foot of wall. The hunting prints that I’d rescued from a charity shop, depicting eighteenth century horses leaping with their legs fore and aft over bramble hedges. The six inches of peeling wallpaper where two edges joined above a radiator and had lost their adhesion. The homely details of an unfulfilled life.
I wondered whether I’d get the chance to fulfil it.
