by Bill James
‘Cornered. Good, awful word. There seems to be no right decision.’ The crane still appeared to be labouring, though Sarah saw nothing yet to disturb the surface. It looked as if there was a remarkable number of police there, including some in plain clothes.
‘You think it’s time for decisions, then, Sarah? I’d agree. You’re talking about Desmond as if he were an outsider, not your husband: someone you know only through his job. “He’s a cop.” In a sense, you’ve already established a gap between the two of you.’
‘So, make it real?’
‘Doesn’t that sound like sense? Doesn’t it sound inevitable?’
For a while, Sarah said nothing, watching the crane. An ambulance stood parked not far from it, both its rear doors open. ‘Margot, I’m scared.’
‘You can’t face the thought of a break-up?’
‘I mean I’m scared about what’s going on at Young’s Dock. It’s too much fuss for a suicide.’
‘Scared? I don’t follow.’ Margot rejoined her at the window. ‘I’ll have to buy some binoculars if there’s going to be much of this sort of excitement. Can’t really make out detail – faces and so on.’
‘Scared because Ian’s missing, and is being stalked,’ Sarah said.
Margot stared out at the water in the dock. ‘I still don’t get it, I’m afraid. You’re worried that Ian might be –? What do I understand by “stalked”?’ Margot asked.
‘Like it says. Like in a jungle. People want him out of the way, formidable people. A dock’s as good as anywhere.’
‘Who on earth would do that, Sarah?’
‘They might want me out of the way; too, but Ian especially.’
Margot seemed deliberately to turn the talk away from Ian and the dock. ‘Obviously, you must take care of yourself, Sarah. What if they’re looking for you, too – are more interested in you than you realize?’
‘I don’t think so. Anyway, all those creeps daren’t mess about with me. I’m Desmond Iles’s wife.’
Margot glanced at her and Sarah saw her give a small smile: ‘Yes, you are.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘Nothing.’
‘That I’m going to stay his wife? Is that what you’re saying?’ Sarah had begun to shout and Margot’s long, plain face grew serious again and looked full of hopeless concern. ‘You think I like it, really, don’t you, Margot, need to be Mrs Assistant Chief Coristable, maybe with something on the side? Oh, look.’ Suddenly, Sarah had become aware of the sun glinting now and then on a smooth, silver rectangle just covered by the dark water.
‘Yes, a car,’ Margot muttered. The crane seemed to pause, holding the vehicle still virtually submerged. Then the lifting began again and, slowly, the full shape of it could be seen. Streaming and rotating lazily once clear, the car hung over the water for several minutes, as if they were waiting for it to drain. Margot gazed at the vehicle. ‘A Metro, I’d say. Sarah, do you recognise it?’
‘They’d use a stolen car, for heaven’s sake, if they were getting rid of somebody. No, Ian didn’t have a Metro.’
‘Sorry. I’m a bit of a child about these things. But I’m trying to see the connection.’
‘Ian’s missing and wanted. There’s a car in the dock and what could be a lot of really heavy police – not just bobbies. That’s the connection.’ She felt herself grow more agitated. ‘Margot, I ought to go there. I ought to go there, in case.’ She was whispering.
Margot held her arm for a moment. ‘I do understand but they’re not going to let you near, are they? Not near enough to see the . . . well, to identify anyone. And you might run into all sorts of people who would recognize you. Even Desmond.’
‘Yes. But I ought to go. I need to find out who it is. How can I stay here talking? I could say I was driving to bridge at one of these marina flats.’ She moved a few steps towards the door, then returned, to continue looking from the window.
Margot said: ‘Is that credible – drive across the dock?’
‘So I chose to go that way. It’s more interesting.’
‘Sarah, who’s going to –?’
‘I don’t give a shit whether they believe it or not. I have to be there, that’s all. I must know what’s happening. What do you mean, you understand? You don’t at all.’
But she knew it was all shout and show and that Margot was right: she could not go to the dock. It would be more than blatant – a beacon. Did this ultimate caution, after all the yelling, come from the part of her which liked being Mrs Assistant Chief Constable? The thought depressed her. At any rate, instead of leaving, she remained transfixed at the window with Margot.
After several minutes, the Metro was swung carefully towards the quay, still trailing some black water. The car was on its side and when it had been lowered to a couple of feet above the ground a dozen men in dungarees pushed it upright so that it came down on to the wheels. They unhooked the cables and stood back. Three men in civilian clothes hurried forward out of a waiting group and peered in through the windows. It was too far to tell whether the car contained a body, or bodies, and too far for Sarah to decide whether she recognized any of the police, if they were police. They had opened the front passenger door of the car and all three men were grouped there, gazing in, probably talking to one another occasionally. When they had finished their examination, they stood back and one of them turned and beckoned. A photographer came from the waiting group and began taking shots through the open door and afterwards from all round the car. The ambulance backed slowly towards the Metro, and when the photographer had finished four men came from it, two carrying a stretcher, one of the others with a dark sheet. They had on white coats and she thought she could make out medical face masks. They went to the car’s open door and two of them leaned in. She could not see clearly what they were doing, because of distance, and because the car was between them and her, but after a few minutes the two men with the stretcher carried it the couple of steps back to the ambulance. There was what had to be a body on it now, covered by the dark sheet.
‘Too late to go there, anyway,’ Margot said.
‘I will all the same.’
‘Sarah, there’s no point. You’ll discover nothing.’
‘Not there,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘I can’t just stay here.’
‘But where?’
She hardly knew what to answer. ‘I know one of the people looking for him.’
‘Sarah, in a couple of days the police will say in the papers who it is.’
‘A couple of days? Am I suppose to wait?’
‘Or Desmond might tell you.’
‘Yes, he might, especially if it is Ian. Do I want to hear it like that? Do you think I do, Margot?’
‘There’d be no good way of hearing it.’
‘That would be the worst.’
They closed the ambulance doors and the vehicle moved slowly away. The group on the quay-side broke up and went to their cars, and they, too, drove off the dock. Sarah recognized none of these vehicles, but that meant little: people like Desmond or Colin Harpur or other senior detectives could be driving any car from the police pool. She left the window.
Margot said: ‘Isn’t it far-fetched, Sarah? Someone you’re fond of is missing, so you assume all this?’
‘There’s somebody significant in that car.’
‘And is Ian significant?’
‘He could be.’
She could sense that Margot expected her to explain, but Sarah gave no more.
‘And what will you ask this man who’s supposedly been looking for Ian,’ Margot asked.
‘No, not supposedly.’
‘All right. But what will you ask him?’
‘If he found him, of course. If he dropped him in the fucking dock, or if he knows whether someone else did.’
‘And, naturally, he’s going to tell you. You’re only the wife of a chief policeman.’
‘I’ve got to ask him.’
; ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Not much of what’s happening does.’
Margot seemed to give up her protests. ‘Who is this you’re going to see?’
‘Oh, a sort of go-between. A half-crooked nobody, maybe like Ian himself.’
‘Yes, but his name? Just in case anything goes wrong. It might be important to know where to start looking.’
‘Nothing will go wrong. Do stop fretting. I’m used to this kind of life now. I can look after myself.’ She knew she sounded strident again and full of phoney confidence, a frail attempt to conceal her fears, and unlikely to convince a professional like Margot. Well, to hell with Margot, and her cardigan. Leave her to marriage manuals and the cats and the marina.
Sarah drove out to the Monty and, by the time she reached there, all her courage, even her false courage, had slid away. Ralph might be a nonentity, but he had the power to chill her, and to make Sarah wonder why she had ever pushed her way with such determination into his kind of world. She was as much out of place in it as he had been in Rougement Place. Why wasn’t she playing bridge somewhere, really playing bridge, or at home trying again to flog her way through Salman Rushdie? She knew there was a very simple answer: she had to discover whether Ian was safe, and he inhabited that same world as Ralph’s. The need was obsessive. Once more Margot probably had things right, and it must be morbid fancy to assume that because someone had been recovered from the dock it had to be Ian. Nothing could have stopped Sarah from trying to make sure it was not, though.
At this hour of the afternoon the club would be closed, between lunch-time and reopening in the evening. She parked a little way off and walked the last few hundred yards to the Monty’s solid front door, passing the club yard on her way. One side was open to the street and she saw that the builder’s rubble container still stood there, still as innocent as ever, no doubt, now loaded to the top. God, if she hadn’t been so foolishly and uselessly prying about that none of these anxieties would have come.
Then more anxieties arrived: standing in the porch and about to ring the bell she thought she heard from somewhere deep in the building, perhaps upstairs, a cry of pain and, immediately following, a sound like something or somebody falling heavily to the ground. The cry had been male, she felt almost certain of that, though she could not tell whether it was Ralph. While she was still trying to sort out in her head what might have happened, the sequence of sounds occurred again, though this time the cry struck her as weaker and the noise of a fall louder. Then she heard what seemed to be a few words spoken, again a male voice, and the tone harsh, even savage.
Her fears soared and she drew back from ringing the bell. For a few seconds she thought of turning around, getting back to the car and driving home. Rougement Place and its spruce safety insistently called to her, like a mother seeking a missing child, or the parable shepherd looking for the hundredth sheep. In fact, she left the porch hurriedly and had begun to walk back up to her parking spot, assuring herself that, in any case, Ralph Ember would probably have no news of Ian, when she saw two men leave the club through the rear fire doors and quickly cross the yard. She was looking from the side and from a little behind them, but she felt pretty sure she had seen both these men before, and quite certain that neither was Ralph. One seemed about thirty, dark-haired and with a very powerful-looking body, especially the shoulders. The other looked older, thin, with sparse grey hair, and possibly wearing rimless glasses. Both had on smart, grey suits. Last time she encountered the two it was inside the club, on the night the injured young man appeared, was surrounded by these two and others, and then disappeared.
Before they came out of the yard ahead of her, she turned around and walked at what she hoped was a casual, unostentatious pace, back towards the Monty’s front entrance, but did not stop there, in case the men were behind her or glanced down the street and spotted her. She felt weak and terrified. For five minutes she simply kept going, then very gratefully turned a corner and walked another few hundred yards, faster now, before entering a shop. She took her time buying some toffees and a newspaper, occasionally looking out to the street, through the window. The men did not pass. When it came to paying, she found to her shame that her hands were shaking so much she could hardly cope with the coins, and the Pakistani woman behind the counter asked her if she was all right, and whether she would like to sit down for a moment. No, she was not all right, but a chair wouldn’t change anything. It was fear of the two men and anxiety about Ian that had taken away control of her muscles, and mostly fear.
Emerging from the shop, she looked about very very carefully, if necessary ready to keep on walking away from the club. But she saw nothing to trouble her in the street and forced herself to go back up to the corner and look from there towards the Monty. The two men were still not in view and so she began to stroll in that direction again, pretending to read bits of her paper, and helping herself to a couple of toffees in the hope that chewing would ease her nerves. Almost everything continued to tell her that she could not handle this situation and should give up the visit and exit while she was able; everything except the need to find out about Ian, and the belief which would not go away, no matter how hard she tried to dispel it, that Ralph might know something after all. This hope gripped her and still fought her fear.
She entered the club yard and saw that the fire doors had been left swinging open when the men hurriedly left. Giving herself no time to develop doubts, she quickly crossed to the doors and entered the corridor where she had seen the blood trail on the tiles at the start of all this. She took a few steps inside, then went back and pulled the doors closed. That bothered her, seeming to cut off escape and commit her to going on into the building. But, if the two men returned, and especially if they returned because they had been secretly observing her, she wanted it to be as difficult as possible for them to get inside.
With the light from the yard excluded now, the corridor was dark and she went gingerly forward past the lavatories. She reached the door to the bar and opened it gently. That brought a little pale light to the corridor from outside through the bar windows, and she felt slightly comforted. Stepping into the bar she stared urgently around. Nothing seemed to have been damaged or disturbed here: the place had obviously been cleaned up after the lunch-time trade and was ready for the evening.
The sounds she heard when at the front door had seemed to come from upstairs and she decided she would have to try to look there. For a moment or two she sat on the bar bench she had last occupied with Ian, assembling her courage, and then made for a door marked Private, behind the bar counter, which she knew gave on to stairs leading to the flat above. She opened this door and stood for a few seconds on the second stair, listening. Ralph had a wife and family living here, yet there was no sound. Slowly, she moved up a few more stairs, then paused again. Although she was tempted to call out, declare her presence, she decided to keep as quiet as she could for at least a short time yet, and put her feet down very softly as she climbed the last stairs to the landing.
There was part of her that kept on saying she was behaving as stupidly and intrusively now as when she pushed herself and Ian into this business at the start: the same tiresome cockiness and stupid nonchalance. Instincts and obsession drove her on, though. Some day she might get back to being just one person again, able to run her life according to reason and consistency and intelligent fear, but that had not happened yet, and she did not really look forward to it very much. She was growing used to this battle in herself between what good sense said, and what her wishes said; knew all the ins and outs of that recurrent fight and how to work it so that her wishes always won. Anyway, were the restraints really good sense? After all, if she – or when she – went back to being one, unified, apparently contented person it would be as the worthy lady of Idylls, Rougement Place, and devoted to Des. That was sensible?
Half a dozen doors gave on to the landing and from the room behind one of them she thought now she could hear breathing, un
even, laboured breathing, occasionally broken by a snore, or perhaps it was a groan. The door stood a little open and she went forward and pushed it gradually wide. She saw an unmade double bed with nobody in it, an old-style pine dressing table littered with cosmetics and lacquers and a couple of pink, narrow, straight-backed wooden chairs with basket-work seats. If it had not been for the noise she would have assumed the room unoccupied. But the sound of someone fighting to breathe had grown louder and seemed to come from the floor on the far side of the bed. Hesitantly, she went in and looked.
Ralph lay close to the bed, his face badly marked, and with blood running from his nose and a cut over the right eye forming a small pool on the purple carpet. Fully dressed in a brown, tired, three-piece suit, he was on his back, unconscious, his eyes closed. For what seemed to her a minute or more he would appear to have stopped breathing and remain utterly still, but then his face would contort and his hand twitch as he strove to pull in air. He was a bad colour, his cheeks greyish-blue and his lips very pale. At school she had learned first aid and she realized almost at once now that Ralph had swallowed his tongue and would choke to death shortly if she did not act. All the same, she hesitated for a couple of seconds: he had always repelled her, his slippery charm, the scar, his impenetrable, high-flown talk, his lying, and she drew back from contact with him.
Again she grew ashamed of herself. Christ, this was a dying man. What did it matter that his face had been marked or that he could stifle you with verbiage? And who was she to take against anyone for lying? She knelt near him and immediately felt the blood on the carpet soak into the knees of her tights. Turning his head towards her she pulled Ralph’s mouth wide and put her finger in and tried to hook his tongue forward from out of his throat. It was something she had been shown how to do all those years ago, but shown only on diagrams. She had never needed to attempt it, and diagrams did not prepare you for the unnerving intimacy of poking about deep inside someone’s mouth.
At first now she did not succeed and felt herself begin to panic: she wanted to call somebody – a doctor, an ambulance, Desmond – anyone to rid herself of the responsibility for this life. She knew there was no time for that, though.
