Matlock's System

by Reginald Hill

  “Thank you very much for a splendid evening.”

  Out of the mists a figure moved. But no female this. It was a troll, a mountain- troll with his face patched leprous white.

  Ossian. Bandaged but not soothed.

  I hope he’s not my protection, thought Matlock sleepily. Protection.

  He began to laugh.

  All those who are not protecting me are trying to kill me. And all those who are not trying to kill me are protecting me.

  Laughing still, he fell asleep as the fiddles struck up a slow, lilting melancholy waltz and the kilted men moved silently off the polished wooden floor.

  He awoke in his own bed feeling remarkably fresh. Someone had obviously been kind enough to pop a Cleerhed capsule into his mouth last night before bedding him down. He had no recollection of his return.

  He stretched luxuriously and his right hand came in contact with something soft and warm. For a moment puzzled, he let his hand stray this way and that. Then he turned round.

  “Lizzie,” he said.

  She was leaning on her elbow looking down at him. She smiled and made a slight movement forward so that her right breast brushed his shoulder.

  “Good morning,” she said. “I came at my usual time and when I found you here I thought that what’s good enough for the boss is good enough for the secretary.”

  He sat up and looked round the room. The window had been repaired he noticed. Quick work by someone. Though the blast marks still remained in the wall.

  His clothes he noticed were neatly arranged on a hanger in the open wardrobe. Lizzie’s on the other hand were strewn over the floor in uncharacteristic disarray. She followed his glance and said, “I was in a hurry. In case you woke up and stopped me. It seemed the best opportunity I’d had in ages. Matt, what’s the matter? Why have you been putting me off?”

  “Lizzie,” he began despairingly, but she did not let him continue.

  “No; wait, Matt. Explanations after. Let’s remind ourselves what we’ve been missing.”

  She put her arms round his neck and drew him back down beside her. He tried to speak once more, but her mouth pressed hard against his. After that he didn’t try again.

  Later she lay on top of him like a wrestler who has just made a pin-fall.

  “Now,” she said, “talk.”

  He could find nothing to say. Lizzie, Lizzie, he thought in anguish, I cannot believe you false. Or at least I cannot bear to find you false.

  He crushed her to him with unconscious violence so that she gasped and struggled free.

  “Who’d have thought the old man had so much blood in him?” she asked, twisting round to massage her back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said and ran her finger gently down the scar on his chest. “Is it this, Matt? Is it wondering what to do? Wondering when a man can say ‘to hell with it’ and start living for himself instead of others?”

  She paused a second, but when he still didn’t speak, she went on.

  “Listen, Matt, I don’t care what you do. Take Browning’s offer. Go for Op. Or just sit it out. But whether you live one year or forty, make a place in it for me, Matt. I’m not saying you owe me it. I’m not an old woman debt-collecting. I don’t need to, Matt, do I?”

  She flung the sheet back and knelt upright so he could see her mature but beautifully firm nakedness.

  “But I believe that there’s a place for me with you, Matt. I won’t try to persuade you what to do, but don’t shut me out. I’m in. I’ve been in for twenty years. I won’t go now.”

  “I don’t ask you to, Lizzie.”

  Matlock felt a happy calm spread through his being. He had made up his mind. He got out of bed, caressing her long flank as he did so. Then he moved purposefully and unselfconsciously across the room and opened a panel on the wall. Reaching in he pressed a button and looked closely at a couple of dials. This little toy was known as his bugswatter. Any electronic eavesdropping device within a range of fifteen yards was now jammed. He knew his flat was well bugged. Indeed he knew the location of several of the mini-mikes. But how many more there were he could never be sure, so it was pointless digging them out. Instead he jammed them.

  He paused in front of the long mirror on his way back to the bed, drew his stomach in and puffed his chest out.

  “I’m really not so very old, you know,” he said.

  Lizzie watched him with delight and was obviously eager to start all over again when he got back to bed, but he held her at arm’s length.

  “Later,” he said. “Listen to what I want to tell you.”

  Then coolly, dispassionately, he proceeded to recount the events of the previous thirty-six hours.

  She listened as a good secretary should, attentively, without interruption. Her silence stretched into his own when he was finished.

  Finally she asked, “What made you make up your mind about me, Matt?”

  He grinned widely and made a gesture which encompassed her breasts and belly.

  “This, of course.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Seriously I never doubted you for a moment. Oh, I know I didn’t fall over you when I got back yesterday, but do you blame me?”

  “Yes.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her face.

  “Lizzie, what I believe in is based on individual faith and trust and hope. If I lost that in you, then I lose my worth, my purpose. I’d have taken Browning’s offer if I had believed the Abbot.”

  “I still don’t understand why he told you those lies.”

  “Simple. According to his logic, it negated the power of Browning’s threat against you and Ernst through the forged documents. He didn’t realize what dangerous ground he was treading on.”

  “What happens next, Matt?”

  In Matlock’s mind things were beginning to sort themselves out with crystal clarity. He recognized that the doubts and selfsearching of the past day had been much graver than he had told Lizzie. He knew that deep down inside him, in the caverns of his mind, was an area where his surface certainties were shifting, shadowy. But he knew himself well enough to recognize how unfitted he was to deal with any change of personal loyalties. He had done it once. Old friends had felt themselves betrayed and turned from him with disgust which he himself had felt like treachery. His wife had moved out of their bedroom, then out of their house. A few months later a burst spleen had moved her out of his life. (It had been an irony of fate that an anti-Matlock protest strike by one of the big Unirad-controlled Unions had cut off the power supply to her flat and prevented her from summoning help.) Her father who outlived her by five years, when he was replaced by Browning, always said she died of a broken heart. Adding, “As I shall too.”

  Matlock knew he could not take this again. Even if my beliefs change, I cannot change my friends, those I love.

  “First,” he said, “call Ernst and Colin.”

  Lizzie looked surprised.

  “Matt, are you sure?”

  He raised her gently from the bed and pushed her towards the door.

  “As sure as I am of you, Lizzie. They do not give me the same pleasure, but I love them too.”

  He dressed swiftly while Lizzie was on the ’phone and joined her in the living-room as she hung up.

  “My, are we finished then?” she said. He smacked her behind vigorously.

  “Get dressed. There’s work to do. First, breakfast.”

  Thirty minutes later as he sipped a mugful of black coffee, Ernst arrived. Matlock waved aside his questions till Colin had appeared also. Then as swiftly and accurately as he had talked to Lizzie, he revealed the course of recent events to them. When he had finished he looked from one to the other.

  “How surprised are you? Did either of you have any knowledge, suspicion even of the situation? I have to ask. There’ve been too many false assumptions, concealments, deceptions already.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Ernst. />
  “Not a whisper of my own plots and schemes in the North has reached me in any of our lecture trips. But our contacts must have known. They must have been supremely well drilled not to show any awareness of what was going on.”

  Colin shook his head. “Surely, the thing is, Matt, that even if they had done, you wouldn’t have recognized it as such.”

  “My God!” Ernst again. “Matt, Percy. Percy said something when he was dying, something like ‘till the Day’. Then he smiled. It seemed a happy thought somehow.”

  Matlock remembered his friend’s peaceful face on that dingy stage. The Day. Budget Day.

  “But Percy would have spoken. Must have spoken to me about something like this. He was the closest of all our Northern Contacts.”

  “And therefore likeliest to obey absolutely any injunction to silence he thought came from you,” said Ernst.

  “Anyway, that’s immaterial now,” replied Lizzie. “The thing is, where do we go from here?”

  “Look,” broke in Ernst, “what I don’t understand is the Scottish situation. I don’t see why they should need you, Matt, if they’re in as close contact with the Organization as McDonwald claims.”

  “They are in contact, Ernst. Get that straight. The Abbot told me. He also told me a little more in what he termed our private chat. I haven’t mentioned this before because it was immaterial to the main drift of events, but central perhaps to our choice of action. With Browning controlling the papers, it’s as difficult to get a true picture of the state of affairs in Scotland as it is anywhere else. McDonwald tries to give the impression of a happy, stable, democratic, agricultural community. Arcadia, so to speak.”

  “Couldn’t you have got more out of him?” asked Ernst.

  Matlock grimly rubbed his ribs and winced. He hadn’t noticed the pain when with Lizzie but now it came back.

  “No. He had a rather touching sensitivity about his country. The other side of the coin was shown me by the Abbot and it’s rather more in line with the kind of anti-Scottish propaganda Browning’s been pumping at us for years. Though it has slackened off, of late.”

  “A deal?” asked Lizzie thoughtfully.

  “Who knows? Anyway, Scotland according to the Revised Version is indeed almost a self-supporting agricultural economy. But it’s full of cracks. On a local level, the people have reverted to the old clan system with its tight-knit code of loyalties. On a national level, the old urban rivalry between Glasgow and Edinburgh has become a desperate political struggle between opposing clan-based factions for national domination, with a third smaller but very militant group up in Inverness waiting for its chance.”

  “Yes, but how is it that they’ve managed to get by without Age Laws for nearly thirty years? Their problems must have been as grave as ours when all this started.”

  “Not quite. There was more room for one thing. But yes, of course they had basically the same population problem as us. Worse perhaps. But the Abbot assured me yesterday, that the population of Scotland is smaller today than it was thirty years ago.”

  Ernst whistled.

  “But how?”

  “Two things. They had no Age Law. But in those early days there were many things they didn’t have. Among them was an efficient Health Service. We’d cut off its head. It’s so hard to die in England that we had to invent a new way to do it. But Nature provided ways in plenty for the Scots. There were no outbreaks of plague or anything like that, you understand. It was just that people began dying from things no one here has died of in years. Infant mortality rate shot up, expectation of life dropped down.”

  “But that alone can’t have accounted for a total drop after thirty years!”

  “No. I said there were two things. The second was the struggle for survival before central, or bi-central government was effectively established. The new clan wars.”

  “You mean, they fought?” asked Ernst incredulously.

  “Oh yes, they fought. And died. Many thousands. There are still outbreaks. The Central government which is Glasgow-based at this moment doesn’t discourage it. It keeps the population down. Keeps the people on the alert. The Border Scots in particular have reverted to type and foraging raids into Cumberland and Northumberland are fairly common. They act as a cover for the full-scale smuggling organization which is almost certainly run by McDonwald’s mates, if the Abbot is to be believed. There are crippling tariffs on all imports from England. But a constant stream of stuff is crossing illegally by helicopter and boat.”

  “But why doesn’t Browning just move in? Why play at shots across the Border when you could wipe the Lowlands half off the earth in a couple of rocket attacks?”

  “The Scots have got sentimental friends all over the world. America in particular. There are lots of other countries from France up who would welcome the chance to walk into England. We must not appear the aggressor. In any case, you can’t raze a mountainous country with ordinary missiles. And that’s where they’d be, up in the mountains. And you don’t drop nuclear bombs on your own doorstep.”

  “Anyway,” said Lizzie impatiently, “we’re wasting time talking about what Browning can or cannot do. The point is, what are we going to do? What are you going to do, Matt. You’re the man in demand.”

  Matlock looked round the tiny circle. Lizzie, her eyes fixed on him, her face full of life and hope. Ernst, relaxed in his chair, regarding him rather quizzically. Colin, seated a little further back than the others, his thin face shadowed and brooding.

  “This is what I’ve called you here to decide. I’m faced with a set of rather curious alternatives.”

  “There’s only one choice, Matt,” interjected Ernst leaning forward in his eagerness to talk. But Matlock held his hand up, a strangely rhetorical gesture for him.

  “Wait a moment, Ernst. Colin, you haven’t said a word since we started. What’s on your mind?”

  Colin slowly shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m wondering if any of us have really faced what we’re talking about,” he said. “I mean, really faced it?”

  He was very agitated and stood up now as if to brace himself more firmly to hurl out his words.

  “Matt, listen to me. This country of ours is in a mess, we all know that. There’s something rotten in the way it’s governed, in some of those who govern it. And we’ve opposed them together for a score of years. We’ve worked hard, all of us, in that time. We’ve used every means possible. But we’ve always worked within the law. But this thing you’re talking about now, Matt, talking about as if you accept it without qualm, this situation which has suddenly sprung up overnight, this has nothing to do with persuasion, and education, nothing to do even with political scheming and chicanery. This is open revolution you’re talking about, Matt. This is civil war.”

  There followed a long silence. Colin, as though his words had been the strings which pulled him upright, slumped back into his chair and looked stonily at the carpet. Ernst turned away in mock exasperation and pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. Lizzie half leaned over to Colin, then turned back to Matt, then leaned back over to Colin and placed her hand on his forearm.

  “Thank you, Colin,” said Matlock. “Now, Ernst.”

  The words came tumbling out, bumping together in their eagerness to take to the air.

  “There’s no question what we must do, Matt. For Godsake what’s the matter with you, Colin? This is an opportunity to do something meaningful. This is heaven-sent. Here on a plate is being handed to us the power and authority we’ve been striving for for years. We’ve got to take it.”

  In his turn he subsided, slight beads of sweat along the one deep furrow in his forehead. Looking at it, Matlock was reminded of the quiet Scot with the pale hollow in his temple.

  “Lizzie,” he said.

  “I could argue and debate,” she said quietly. “I could throw accusations of disloyalty at Colin. I could ask Ernst if power and authority are really what we’ve been striving for. But what’s the point? I cannot help you make
up your mind, Matt. In fact I don’t think any of us have ever really been able to do that despite what you might have let us think. All I will say is that when you’ve made up your mind what to do and start counting the heads of your followers, you should always start at two. I’ll be there.”

  “Thank you, Lizzie,” said Matlock without any reciprocal show of emotion. “You’re quite right, of course. I have made up my mind. Colin, I respect you for what you say. I could reply that this civil war is going to take place anyway and that I must do what I can to make gentle its course. But that would be Jesuitical. No, I embrace this chance without reservation. We have moved beyond the realm of political action. We moved beyond it when I resigned all those years ago though I never realized it till yesterday. And once we move out of the area of political possibilities, we have moved out of the realm of democratic government. As for you Ernst, I wish to give you no offence but this I must say. You are very dear to me and you are my legally appointed successor. But the laws under which you are so appointed are the laws we will fight to overthrow. What I may become and what you may inherit will then be in no way connected other than by my own feeling for you, which not all may share.”

  Ernst rose angrily.

  “Is this what you think of me?”

  “No, it is not. But I am speaking publicly now. I have not been a public man for many years despite my campaigns. You may not find me always to your taste.”

  “Can you speak publicly to me, Matt?” asked Lizzie challengingly.

  “Yes, I can. I will make you in public what you have long been in private. My wife. We will make at least one of Browning’s forgeries true.”

  “Matt!” cried Lizzie, her face a-gleam.

  He took her in his arms.

  “Perhaps we can adopt Ernst and make the other true also.”

  Ernst looked as though he were going to resent this for a moment, then his face reluctantly unfolded into smiles and eventually laughter.

  “You do that,” he said, “that way at least I’ll get your money.”

  The three of them now all looked at Colin who got to his feet and moved away. For a heart-jolting moment, Matlock thought he was going to leave. But he only went as far as the drink cupboard and started to fill four glasses.