by William Paul
‘Same to you,’ she replied.
‘How long’s it been?’
‘A little over one year.’
‘Is that all? Can I buy you a drink?’
‘Can you afford it?’
‘I think so.’
‘You’ve not blown all our money then?’
‘Not it all.’
‘That’s useful to know.’
‘Why? Have you?’
Angela laughed, throwing back her head and exposing a not-quite smooth throat in the way women were taught by specialist articles on how to trap your man in women’s magazines. Fyfe knew he would enjoy flirting with her, had already enjoyed the look and feel of her body. She was attractive, dangerous, and forbidden. If he had to fill in a form for his ideal date those three qualities would be top of the list. And she didn’t, he noticed with a tension-easing exhalation of relief, bear the smallest resemblance to Hilary. Apart from height and womanly shape, they had nothing at all in common. It couldn’t be that Hilary was some kind of female Jekyll and Hyde, reading his mind and reviving his personal nightmare for the fun of it. They really were two separate women.
Angela looked older than he had expected, not worse just older. Like him, she would never see forty again and that personal landmark was fast receding in the distance. The face powder was thick, lines around her eyes breaking through it. The lipstick was thick too. The body was firm. Cosmetic surgery, he speculated? Breast implants? Inventively engineered underwear?
There was an air of contented sophistication about her. If he hadn’t known her, he would have marked her down as a rich bitch who had come through hard times and landed on her feet with a rich husband, probably fat and balding, and her own bank account, probably very healthily in the black. But he did know her and there was between them this unbreakable bond forged the night they took the money and hurried away from a huddle of bloody bodies. Even without the money and the sex he could not have told on Angela. He really believed she hadn’t killed anyone, and anyway he was hopelessly compromised the moment he helped her run instead of doing his duty and clamping on the handcuffs. It had been a momentary aberration, but a fatal one. Now he was stuck with bundles of banknotes under his garden shed and a woman who shared a secret that meant when she whistled he had to come running.
They went to the cocktail bar. She drank Martini, sipping from the glass delicately and leaving a transparent pink impression of her lips on the edge of the glass. He drank vodka and tonic so that it wouldn’t be noticeable on his breath later. They ordered from a menu and waited at a table to be called through to the dining-room. Angela crossed her legs and the white dress clung to her tightly. She told him about her new husband, Felippe, the Spanish Euro MP, who was indeed fat and balding but endearingly besotted. He thought she was having lunch with an old school friend.
‘Female naturally,’ she said. ‘Felippe does get very jealous.’
‘Why didn’t you tell him the truth?’ Fyfe said.
Her head went back. The throat presented itself, displaying her vulnerability while she mocked him with her laughter. Fyfe laughed himself, well aware of his talent for asking daft questions. Angela looked down her nose at him and patted his hand affectionately. When you have been married four times, she explained, it is relatively simple to lose all recollection of one of those marriages. And so Felippe had no knowledge of the first unfortunate marriage to Mad Mike Barrie, the deceased professional criminal who was directly responsible for bringing Angela and Fyfe together more than a decade ago, and who was therefore also indirectly responsible for their renewed intimate relationship, and the lunch they were about to have.
‘A funny old world, is it not?’ Angela asked rhetorically.
‘Paradox after paradox,’ Fyfe agreed. ‘I find them at every turn.’
‘And secrets that only two can share.’
Summoned to their places in the dining-room, they settled into an alcove screened by dark wood and mirrored glass. The food was good if a little scarce on the plate for Fyfe’s liking. The wine was good too, but a mistake. He could feel it combining with his lack of sleep, bubbling inside his skull to create a mad scientist’s concoction that was transforming him from rational person to absurd misfit. He was supposed to be leading a murder inquiry. Instead here he was making eyes at a former lover and partner in crime. Surely that was a disciplinary offence. If ever there was a time to have his resignation ready in his pocket this was it.
Angela was easily the best-looking woman in the room. People who passed the table tried to be casual but let their glances linger just that second too long. Fyfe was walking on broken glass, hoping desperately that there was no one around to recognise him. If he had been wearing a hat and raincoat he would have pulled the brim down over his brow, turned up the collar to slouch away. Supposing somebody did recognise him and demanded an introduction to his lunch companion. The game would be over. Her name would reveal her history. The whole story would unravel irresistibly from there, connecting them, condemning them. He would be well and truly fucked. And yet there was no one among the forty or so spread round the other private alcoves, and the collection of tables in the centre of the dining-room. There was no one at all in this small crowded city where he had lived out his entire life who really knew who he was or what he had done. There was only Angela. They were a pair.
Chapter Forty
Monday, 13.04
Ramensky looked down and saw cars passing eighty feet below him. The shock made him take a step backwards but then there was nothing beneath his foot. He bent at the knee in an awkward curtsy, instinctively whirling his arms to restore his balance, realising he was standing on a narrow stone balustrade in a gap between buildings. He was high above a busy road on one side and six feet above the ground on the other. There was an Ooh and an Ah from the uneven string of people gathered in a semicircle on the pavement close to him as he gradually gained control and his jerky movements slowed and finally stopped. A traffic warden in an overcoat and peaked cap with a yellow band stood in front of them, half crouching, reaching out. Ramensky thought he looked as if he was a lone member of a barber shop quartet about to burst into song.
‘Come on down, mate,’ he said. ‘Come on down. It can’t be as bad as that. Come on down.’
A double-decker bus swept past at pavement level. Curious faces were pressed to the windows, looking back as the bus drove on. Ramensky felt the sleet-wet slipstream brush his face. He deliberately stood on one leg and pirouetted one full revolution, slipped and had to flail his arms again to stay upright. The pavement crowd went Ooh. The traffic warden clenched his teeth and snatched his hand back.
‘Careful now, mate,’ he said, sinking back into his former position. ‘It can’t be as bad as that now. Come on down.’
Ramensky scratched his head. He had no recollection of how he came to be on top of this wall. He was in the city centre, opposite the Central Library, at the side of the National Library, on George IV Bridge with the rat-run of the Cowgate, one of the original thoroughfares of the ancient city, tunnelling underneath him. And the alcohol was bearing down on him again, rearing like a giant wave about to crash over his head and return him to the oblivion he had inhabited since he had started drinking again that morning.
He was in a lucid period, but it was closing fast. He began to cry and didn’t know why, only that he was afflicted by a huge and terrible sorrow that brooded over him like a pot-bellied vulture on his shoulder. He looked down into the Cowgate and the surface of the road seemed to slam up with sudden violence into his face. His head burred like the inside of a clanging bell. He jerked his head back and lost his balance again. Somebody grabbed hold of his arm. He snatched it free and danced a few tightrope steps away from the young bearded man in a dirty anorak who had tried to rescue him. The traffic warden was still down on one knee in front of Ramensky.
‘Easy now,’ he said. ‘Let’s not get too excited. Let’s just keep our heads here or there’s going to be a bad accident.�
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Ramensky wiped the tears from his face with his sleeve. He wanted to die. That was why he had climbed up on to the wall. He intended to swan dive on to the road below. If the impact didn’t break his neck, the next car along in the steady stream of vehicles would finish him. It was strange, he thought calmly. Suicide seemed such an attractive option for him. Death wasn’t something to be feared, but something to look forward to. He would get there before Lorna, prepare to receive her so that she was never alone. It was a simple act. All he had to do was launch himself into the air. In a few seconds it would be over.
But he was losing it. The alcoholic haze was closing around him. He had to hurry. A police car had drawn up, wheels bouncing on to the pavement, scattering the crowd, spilling dark uniforms, peaked caps with black and white bands. The traffic was held up. No more buses. People in the roadway. Horns blew impatiently, sparking off echoes that made a trail into the distance.
Ramensky turned away from the crowd. A landscape of rooftops, turrets, and church towers spread out ahead of him. He raised his arms like a bird spreading its wings, went up on his toes. The wind slapped at his face, forcing him to close his eyes. It made his coat balloon out. It filled the sleeves, infiltrated inside his shirt, froze the bare skin of his chest. It lifted him off the wall into the air. He tilted his head, kept his arms spread wide, imagined he was flying as the cold air rushed past him. But then his knee struck something solid with a gentle bump like a child’s playful kick. His arm was next, only a little harder, then the whole side of his body, and his cheek. It wasn’t painful at all. He hardly noticed it, but when he opened his eyes and looked down the angle of the cars passing far below him had changed. He was looking directly down, hanging over them like a freefall parachutist. One passenger was hanging out a window looking up, shaking his fist, shouting angry words that were whipped away on the wind. A policeman’s hat dropped past him. It bounced on the roof of a car and disappeared under the wheels of the following one.
He wasn’t falling. He was dangling like a clown on the mobile above Lorna’s cot. He twisted, turning, and saw that they had him by the ankles and were dragging him back up. His face was scraped against the rough damp stone. He searched for a grip but there were no handholds. They weren’t going to let him die, after all. They weren’t going to let him take the easy way out. He struggled half-heartedly but collectively they were too strong for him. He began to cry again, imagining his tears falling on to the cars below, a human rainstorm hammering on the metal roofs, creating a terrifying din that made the occupants cower in fear.
He wanted to die yet he was mightily relieved he was alive. The alcohol was closing over his head, drowning him once more. His head was spinning. Everything was a blur. Before they got him back to the safety of the pavement he had lost it and blacked out.
Chapter Forty-One
Monday, 14.03
‘What is it you want, Angela?’ Fyfe said.
The lunch table had been cleared. They were drinking coffee from impossibly thin, almost transparent cups and finishing a second bottle of wine. Another mistake. During the meal they had inched round on the semicircular bench seat so that there was only a gap of six inches between them. Sitting almost shoulder to shoulder they were able to talk in confidential whispers.
‘I wondered how long it would take you to ask me that.’
The coffee was strong and viscous; the handles of the cups were so delicate Fyfe could only lift his up by pinching it carefully between finger and thumb. His little finger stuck out at right angles. She smiled at him and picked up her cup. The fingernail on her pinkie was long and curved, manicured to a sharp point. Light reflected on its clear varnish, splitting the spectrum, creating a tiny rainbow that flickered in and out of existence as it arced through the air. Fyfe experienced a sympathy pain in the small of his back, feeling the point of that fingernail digging into his flesh and the hard muscles of Angela’s thighs pressed against his, and her hair falling down on either side of his face screening him from the outside world as the partition walls round their private alcove now screened them in the public arena of the hotel dining-room.
‘What are we doing here, Angela?’
‘Where would you rather be?’
‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing. I thought it would be nice to see you.’
‘Do you want money?’
An amused tinkling laugh belied the narrowing of her eyes and the tightening round her mouth. Was it pride? Disappointment? Sadness? Melancholy? Pity? Fyfe regretted his bluntness. He fiddled with the cuff of his shirt so that he could check the time. They were bound to be looking for him back at headquarters by now.
‘I don’t want your money, Dave. You know that.’
‘Just as well. I’ve blown the lot,’ he lied, guiltily suppressing the memory of the bundles of notes in the garden shed from his nocturnal musings.
‘I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted.’
‘Oh yes. What did you do with your share?’
‘I invested it then got myself a new husband to cover everyday expenses.’
‘Very wise.’
Angela looked at him in a way that made his bowels coil into a painful knot. Sexual arousal was an inappropriate response for the circumstances but he couldn’t do anything about it. He tried to cross his legs but his knee bumped the bottom of the table. Angela put down her coffee cup with aristocratic elegance. The rainbow balanced on her fingernail vanished and then reappeared as she raised her hand to her mouth. She shuffled her backside and moved even closer to him.
‘Why do you think I asked you here?’ she said softly.
‘To blackmail me.’
‘I thought you would think that.’
‘Did you?’
‘You have a poor opinion of people.’
‘It must be the company I keep.’
‘Why did you come?’
‘To convince you I wasn’t worth blackmailing.’
‘How were you going to do that?’
He shrugged helplessly. ‘Throw myself on your mercy?’
He looked down to see that Angela had laid her hand over his on the table-top. Five perfect fingernails shone above his stubby and ragged equivalents on the pristine white surface. There was a stain of blood on the side of his thumb.
‘Do you want to know the real reason I asked you here today, Dave?’
‘Yes.’
‘To confess.’
‘I’m not going to arrest you, Angela. I had my chance, remember.’
‘It’s a personal confession.’
‘Go on then.’
‘I like you, Dave.’
‘I like you too.’
‘If things had been different I could have loved you, Dave.’
Surprise clamped itself over Fyfe’s mouth. He was lost for words. This wasn’t what he had expected at all. It was getting too heavy and too weird for him. The pressure of her hand over his was becoming greater. He watched the bones ripple on the back of her hand and slowly relax. The weight on his mind was lifted. He was safe, he realised. She was fond of him and had no intention of turning him in. He would survive this in one piece. A waiter hovered, offering liqueurs. Fyfe waved him away.
‘I’ve never really loved anybody,’ Angela explained. ‘Certainly nobody I’ve married. Not even Mike. I was too young, impressionable and infatuated. I know that now. I have the wisdom of great age.’
‘You’re not that old,’ Fyfe said limply.
‘I could have loved you though, Dave. If we had met when we were younger and unattached, unencumbered by cynicism and bad life decisions, we would have clicked. I would have wanted to have your children. I would have wanted to spend my life with you.’
‘This is deep metaphysical stuff, Angela.’
‘Have you ever wondered why you put your career on the line and prevented me from going to a prison cell?’
‘I could never resist a damsel in distress.’
‘Seriously, Dave. It was such
an extreme thing to do.’
‘For the money?’
‘That wasn’t it. You didn’t even know about the money before you committed yourself.’
‘For the sex?’
‘No, not that either.’
‘What then?’
‘Because you could have loved me too.’
‘Ah, right.’
‘That was why you did it, you see.’
‘I see.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘We were a could-have-been that never was. You and I.’
‘Pretty close though.’
‘Not really. Not close at all.’
‘Seems a shame when you put it like that.’
‘Does it? There is something between us though, David.’
‘Apart from this table, you mean.’
‘A bond grows between two people like us. I don’t know how you describe it. It’s a bond, a fellow feeling that comes when a friend becomes more than that.’
‘Becomes a lover?’
‘Sex has a lot to do with it.’
‘Of course.’
‘It’s very rare. Only some people experience it.’
‘Like us?’
‘Exactly like us. Do you feel that bond with me?’
She was touching Fyfe’s forearm, lightly squeezing. There was a dreamy urgency about her manner that made him uncomfortable. He had never seen her in such a strange mood. It worried him. She seemed to age as he looked at her, suddenly becoming older, wiser, way beyond his understanding. He moved his neck from side to side to relieve the stiffness and hoped he didn’t look as if he was shaking his head.
‘It was something Billy said.’
‘Who’s Billy?’
‘My third husband. He was a major in the army, set himself up as a mercenary when he was demobbed. He had very interesting scars.’
‘Oh.’
‘I always remember what Billy told me. He said when you see action and come under fire then the unique experience turns the people you are with into special friends. They are marked out from everyone else you might know. They’re different. They’ve been with you in a life and death situation. You never forget that.’
