by Bill James
‘Name for a hamster, I ask you,’ the man said.
‘But, please, what about Mr Aston?’ Sarah asked.
‘We never seen nothing, did we, Trev?’
‘Nothing. How could we, that’s the point?’
‘What happened?’ Sarah asked. ‘Please.’
‘No keys needed now.’ The woman glanced down at the Yale lock and, following her eyes, Sarah saw it had been burst open. The mortice had been forced, as well.
‘When?’ Sarah said.
‘Should you be in there? I mean, whoever you are,’ the woman replied. ‘All right, knowing about Redvers is all right, but is it all right for you to be in the flat? What, well, is your connection? Don’t mind me asking, but he’s so particular.’
‘He’s not here,’ Sarah said.
‘We don’t have no responsibility for the flat, that’s admitted, only looking at the hamster now and then, but whether you should be walking around in here – We don’t know who’s here and who’s not, do we Trev?’
‘How could we?’ He was red-faced, cheerful-looking, short of a few teeth at the edges, dressed in an anorak made up of brightly coloured rectangles, so he resembled the display panel on a switched-off fruit machine. ‘People have their private lives. That has to be respected.’
‘Did you hear anything?’ Sarah asked.
The woman looked down at the locks again. ‘Them wasn’t opened with a pin.’
‘Last night?’
‘Just above,’ the man said, glancing upwards.
‘You live there?’ Sarah asked. ‘You did hear something?’
‘We stayed very put, very put indeed,’ he said. ‘Noise like that, you don’t rush out to look and utter heartfelt reproaches, not in this building, not in this area. It’s like I said, privacy. Silence is a living language.’ Suddenly, he seemed much less cheerful.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘We act discreet, always,’ he said. ‘It’s necessary – simple as that. Something go wrong, there’s nobody going to look after you. Not these days. Do you know anything about police at all, lady? I don’t suppose so, not somebody with top-drawer clothes and shoes like that. But you see, love, police, what do they care? All they want is their free pints round the back and lurking on the motorway, unsafe loads, smoky exhausts and such, clipboards and the blue light flashing. They worry theirselves about folk in a dump like this? Do me a favour. Elms Enclave, somewhere like that, they might send a crew if there’s trouble, because the money’s up there and people who can make bother if they don’t get no service, power, that sort. You see any influence here and what’s known as clout? Qualities like that never took up residence, regrettable.’
‘Others heard, likewise, when the door was smashed,’ the woman said. ‘Did they come to see what was happening? Did they, Trev?’
‘This is 1989,’ he replied.
‘But what about Ian – Mr Aston?’ Sarah said. ‘Did you hear anything from him?’
‘We know him, and yet we don’t know him, if you understand me,’ the woman said.
Yes, Sarah did, very well. ‘I must discover where he is.’ She took a couple more steps into the flat.
‘Careful,’ the man cried.
‘I must, that’s all.’
‘She must, Trev. I can see that.’
He grunted and then said, hesitantly: ‘Well, yes, we all must. Can we live with our eyes shut for ever? Even kittens do better.’
The two of them had a small discussion in the doorway. ‘We ought to come with you, dear,’ the woman told Sarah. ‘You’re from a nice, executive-style home, evident, with lawns and patio. You don’t appreciate. Not your territory.’
‘Would you? Thanks, oh, thanks.’
The woman came forward and took hold of Sarah’s hand in a fierce, brave, terrified grip. ‘Sound the advance,’ she said, her voice high and tense and weak. ‘We don’t know him but we like him.’
‘Yes, that’s Ian,’ Sarah replied.
‘We heard the noises, but didn’t help,’ the man said from behind them. ‘Do you know a certain word, namely, “recreant”? That’s the word that came to me last night. Means yellow. This was late. Now, I’m sick of myself when I think of what went on.’
‘We know the way, owing to Redvers,’ the woman said. ‘But you know the way, too? A friend?’
‘Yes,’ Sarah replied.
‘Why not?’ she said. The three of them edged forward slowly, like people in newsreel footage of a wartime food queue. The woman still clasped her hand. Sarah called his name again, as they approached the closed door to the sitting room. She remembered that other closed door, in the Monty, and felt just as fearful.
‘Maybe I should go first,’ the man said, but made no attempt to come to the front. ‘When we open that door, well –’
‘Too true,’ the woman agreed. But she was the one who reached forward and opened it. Sarah stared past her at the room. For a moment, she thought it looked only untidy, as was usual, with no sign of violence. The three of them advanced a few more cautious steps and stood inside the room, gazing around. ‘This doesn’t seem right,’ the woman said. ‘Somehow.’
‘What?’ Sarah asked, urgently. ‘You must tell me. Please. What do you see?’
‘Not right at all,’ the man said.
‘No?’ Sarah asked, her voice high.
‘No, indeed.’ He nodded towards the hamster’s cage. It was a barred circular lower area, plus a separate, solid-walled, smaller sleeping compartment on top, like two spacecraft joined. ‘Redvers always comes down when he hears us, wanting to be fed.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Sarah shouted, ‘is that all? The sodding hamster?’
‘Language, if you please,’ the man replied. ‘Leave that sort of talk at home.’
Sarah disengaged her hand from the woman’s, went to the other end of the room, and standing in the window bay that overlooked the street, stared about the room again from this new point. Behind an armchair she could now see an overturned dinner plate and around it scattered on the carpet what seemed to be almost a complete pasta meal, the kind of ready-prepared freezer food that Ian lived on in the flat. A fork and spoon were on the floor, too, and a broken wine glass, with a long, red stain nearby. It looked as if the meal had been knocked off a small table with a cloth on it that stood in the bay. Something made her put her hand on the congealed food to check the temperature, though she knew it would be stone cold.
The woman had followed her across the room. She gazed at the mess, and then glanced back towards the broken front door. ‘Poor lad,’ she said. ‘These people, whoever –’
‘The table been knocked over and then put back up, you ask me,’ the man said. ‘We heard all sorts through the ceiling. You ask me, they just went for him. Would he have a chance? There was more than one. These people, they pack hunt, and they would be quick, believe me.’
‘Ian’s strong,’ she whispered, all she could manage, and knowing it was stupid. Somehow, she had to find a fraction of hope, though.
‘That’s as maybe,’ the woman replied, ‘but numbers, love. That’s what I mean, you’re not familiar with this sort of hole. All right, he brought you here for – Well, you came here as a visitor, like, very nice, a new bit of life for you to see and have a bright little time in, and so important for you to get into his own corner for a while, be with him at home, of course it is, but you don’t know what it’s like to be here non-stop. That’s rather a different matter, what’s referred to as the nitty-gritty. Things get sorted out here private and sharp, and you’ll never read about it in the Court Column. Now, there’s very lovely people around here, plenty of them, but other assorted flavours, too, and some of them not leaders on amiability and decorum. It’s numbers, all sorts of armament, and just crushing people, finishing them.’ She bent down for the plate. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll give it all a clean-up.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Yes, where is he?’ the man said, staring at the hamster cage.
Stepping to it he drew a finger softly across the bars a couple of times, without result. Suddenly, he lost all remaining traces of his cheerfulness and looked unbelievably strained, as though this creature had become a kind of omen, and, if it were not here, or if it were dead, everything must be wrong. Sarah tried to reject the notion. Good Christ, where had such a dozy idea sprung from? Just the same, her nerves sang.
Then the man grinned. In one smooth movement, the hamster glided down a plastic chute from the boudoir, stood up on the sawdust with its paws against the bars and pushed a busy muzzle through, sniffing ardently. It was a mixture of browns, dark on top, a lighter waistcoat across the belly, plump, a little rat-like, but stupid-looking.
The woman said: ‘Here’s my beauty, then.’ She picked up a slab of the cold lasagne from the floor and offered it to Redvers through the bars, who immediately snorted and turned away, then careered temperamentally about the cage, kicking up sawdust so that some drifted down on to the carpet.
Sarah left the room and went swiftly through the whole flat alone, still moving slowly and carefully but almost certain she would not find Ian here, and unable to decide whether that was good or bad. If he was somewhere in the flat, why had he failed to answer when she called out?
She was in the kitchen when there suddenly came a high, angry, unbroken whistling from the sitting room, and, frightened again, Sarah hurried back. The couple had gone and the hamster was clinging suspended to the bars, making this piercing, enraged, unnerving din. The woman had forced the square of pasta through and it lay curled up and ignored on the floor of the cage like a discarded poultice.
‘Stop screaming,’ Sarah screamed. ‘Stop, you bastard. Redvers, please stop.’ The creature dropped from the bars for a moment, but then climbed back. Its cry grew louder and more insistent, and holding her hands over her ears Sarah ran weeping from the room and out of the flat.
The man and woman were on the landing, returning with a dust pan and brush. The woman spoke and Sarah took her hands from her ears to listen. ‘Don’t ever let that Redvers get you down, love. We know him of old. He’ll take advantage. His trouble, he don’t know when he’s lucky. Condominium cage, that’s what that sort is called, bought new by Mr Aston, like rich advertising executives in the States, Manhattan, always in condominiums. Mentioned in Dynasty. But is Redvers grateful? N.O. Don’t know the meaning of the word, you ask me.’
‘They got to express theirselves,’ the man said. ‘Grateful hardly comes into it. This is a beast. Grateful’s silly. You want a grateful hen, wasp? It’s an inconsiderate noise, yes, inconsiderate, but I wouldn’t go beyond that and the point is, who knows what our voices sound like to a hamster? Or music on Radio 1 or that Scharnhorst – no, Strindberg, Scharnhorst was a ship, Redvers got to listen to all that, if it’s on the wireless. You ever look at it like that? Live and let live.’
At the transport café, near Osborn Triangle, Sarah took a table in a corner away from the grimy window, but from which she could watch part of the street. Was coming here any more than a bleak, despairing reflex, an attempt to will him to turn up because the arrangement had been made, when all the time she knew he would never arrive, could not? Her mother used to tell her of a woman who, years after the first war finished, walked every day past their house on the way to the railway station to meet her son, long dead in the trenches. Sarah better understood now that sad refusal to accept an agonizing truth. But, just the same, wasn’t it lunacy to be waiting here? Des said the man who took Benny Loxton’s orders did not make mistakes. ‘Did not make mistakes,’ Jesus, what a feeble, clouding way of putting it. What it meant was that the man who took Benny’s orders to kill killed.
Feelings of blame savaged her: twice now she had pointed the finger at Ian, once in the Monty by forcing him to poke about with her in the builder’s rubble, and once through phoning him last night. She felt sick: the tea, the guilt and hopelessness, the heavy smell of big fry-ups and sweat and cigarettes. Trying the old deep-breathing exercises to dispel nausea only made her take in more of the smoke and grease and her head began to swim.
After an hour and a half and three mugs of tea he had not arrived and she grew distraught. Men coming in for midday dinner stared at her, and some smiled, but there was no teasing or laughing or chatting up. Perhaps she looked too bad for that, too preoccupied and too uninterested in any of them to be mistaken for road fanny.
In this state, she suddenly began to suspect that someone was watching her from outside. It was hard to be sure. She felt so anxious and ill that she knew her mind and perceptions might not be anything like perfect. Had she begun to imagine menace? In the lorry-park opposite, an ancient red van stood among the vehicles of drivers eating here. A man wearing a navy wool bobble hat sat at the wheel, right arm folded back to hide his face, but each time she peered that way through the steamed, dirty café window she thought she could make out his eyes fixed on her. It was only twenty minutes since she had noticed him and the vehicle, but how long had he been there? She tried to force her mind back to when she first arrived here. Was the van in position then? She could not remember, but neither could she recall seeing it arrive.
Again she felt the kind of deep fright that had come in the Monty and in Ian’s flat, and again, for a disgusting moment, she considered calling Desmond for help, and never mind the difficulties of explaining why she was hanging about in this place. Yes, as an institution, marriage had some steely power. Its influence seeped pretty thoroughly into every part of life: a husband was supposed to protect his wife, particularly when the husband was police. But one of the drivers had the café pay-phone and, by the time he finished, she had dismissed the notion of ringing Desmond. The logic of her second thoughts was basic, but unanswerable, she thought: could she use him when she would not let him use her?
Instead of telephoning, she tried to watch the man in the van, without making him aware of it. Had they disposed of Ian and now followed Sarah here from his flat to deal with her? What was she into? And what, in God’s name, did they imagine she and Ian knew? She would have loved to proclaim that they knew nothing worth knowing and that even if they did they would sit on it, forget it if they could and certainly never try to add to it. All her usual toughness and fight had been scared out of her. She was tempted to go outside and yell this message of surrender across the street at the man in the van, and at anyone else he had with him, Which of those two at Ian’s place had said these people moved in packs? Anyway, perhaps such assurances would be too late to save him.
Then, when she next looked up, the man had disappeared from the driving seat. Horribly shocked, she stood quickly and, carrying her tea mug, hurried across the café to get closer to the window and see out better. Standing there, staring at the vehicle, she saw she had been right and the cabin was empty now. Her eyes urgently searched the car park, but then the absurdity of this dawned on her suddenly: his face had been shielded all the time by his arm and she had no idea what he looked like, how he was built. There were plenty of people walking about between the vehicles, and any of the men could have been the one she wanted. She realized that, stupidly, she had been expecting to see someone like Benny Loxton, tall, burly, stiff-backed, with thinning red hair protruding from under the hat. Yet Benny would not handle a job like this himself. More likely it would be one of those people she had seen in the Monty. Once more she sent her mind rushing back for recollections but it came up with only the dimmest pictures of that group, useless to her now. Although she remembered there had been a greying, clerky-looking man, and another with carefully tended dark hair, she failed to summon up their faces. Had the grey man worn glasses, rimless glasses? She thought so, but that was as far as she could go.
For several minutes she remained transfixed, gazing at the vehicles, unaware of the noise of the café behind her, simply waiting for him to return to his van. In an inexplicable, almost mad way, she felt as if she had been abandoned, because, however threatening this unknown figure, somehow he connec
ted to Ian. It occurred to her that, possibly, this man had not been watching her at all, not watching anybody, only waiting for someone, or whiling away time. She and her long stay in the café might mean nothing to anybody. That thought depressed her, too, more than her fears that she had been under observation. She did not count. Even as a danger of an enemy, she failed to rate.
Then, as she stood there, someone abruptly took her arm very firmly from behind, gripping her at the elbow. She was so startled and scared that the nausea she had kept a hold on till now suddenly grew insupportable and her mouth filled with bitter, regurgitated tea, some dribbling down her chin. She brought the mug up quickly to catch the rest.
‘Sarah,’ Ian said. ‘Who’s with you? Where are they?’
As she turned, the mug was still at her mouth and she could hardly speak and hardly even smile; though, when she saw him, a rush of joy went through her as powerful as when she awoke this morning. He, too, was unsmiling. Urgently, she examined his face and head to see if he was injured, but found no wounds. ‘Please, Ian,’ she said, glancing down at her arm. He had begun to hurt her.
He slackened his grip but did not let go, ‘Who’s with you? Where are they?’ he asked again.
‘What? Who do you mean? Nobody here. Are you all right, Ian?’
‘He giving you bother, darling?’ a driver at one of the tables asked, nodding at Ian.
‘What? No, no, thank you. It’s all right.’
‘You just say,’ the man told her.
‘I’m fine.’
She led Ian back to her table and now he did let go of her arm and they sat down. ‘Ian, you’re safe. It’s wonderful.’
‘I don’t know why you’re here,’ he said.
‘But we arranged.’
‘For an age ago.’
‘I was hoping, that’s all. Of course I stayed. How else do I find you?’
‘You say you’re alone?’ He was relentlessly examining the rest of the people in the café and occasionally staring out through the window. The tension he felt seemed to have caused his skin to tighten over his cheekbones, and there were red patches on his cheeks, making him look feverish.
