Hitmen I Have Known

by Bill James

  There was no movement by the man prone there. His arms still stretched out in front of him, as they’d been when he held the mirror. He didn’t hold it any longer. His hands were empty. This had been an execution: quick, very capable, perfectly adapted to the situation and the chance it gave. There couldn’t have been a rehearsal in detail because nobody would have known he’d make for the mirror, maybe not even himself. That had surely been last-resort desperation.

  Surely. Yes, surely. Or, surely? It was a guess by Ralph Ember, but, he believed, a very reasonable guess. In the television room at his manor house, Low Pastures, he was watching ‘The Forgotten Murders’, what listings billed as a ‘reconstruction of events that would eventually lead to three murders, beginning with the death of undercover police officer, Detective Constable Raymond Street. Tactfully, the camera had trailed the naked figure from behind when he was walking across the room. Bare arses were OK on the main channels, though only briefly and not a lot of them.

  In some ways the programme was a documentary and carefully factual. But not all the facts were known and available for this ‘reconstruction’, and ‘in some parts of the programme, fictional material has been introduced to help make the course of events easier to follow.’

  This meant that now and then the broadcast was more like a dramatic play than a documentary. ‘But these additions have been fashioned with a strict and responsible attention to likelihood,’ according to a programme note. So, the mirror and the bullet and the almost certainly hotel-quality light blue carpet were fact and, of course, figured in the trial. But the motive for taking the mirror off the wall, and the boom-boom, woolly thoughts about actuality and non-actuality were not fact and Ralph had to do some imagining.

  So did the TV programme-makers. Now and then a voiceover supplied commentary to what was happening on screen, but couldn’t always help. ‘It is possible that if Raymond Street was holding the mirror in front of him, having just lifted it from the wall, that he would have seen the face of his murderer in the glass. We cannot tell whether Street knew the assailant who must have been standing close behind him to inflict that head wound.’

  The camera focused hard on the pistol, and the gun-arm, but showed nothing that might reveal what the owner of that gun-arm looked like, face and physique, nor of which sex. The arm was of middling width and could have been a man or woman’s; likewise the trigger finger.

  Two men had been accused of Street’s death, but had been acquitted. This left the identity and gender of the killer or killers unknown. The TV writer and director had to be careful here. Accuracy was impossible because they didn’t have the facts to be accurate with. All they could offer was enigma, blankness, discretion.

  Ralph reckoned that some people watching would ask why – why after so long – only enigma, blankness, discretion, especially as they were going to get another helping of enigma, blankness and discretion when the TV ‘reconstruction’ reached another couple of related, unsolved murders.

  Among those asking the questions might be powerful figures in, say, the Home Office and/or the Crown Prosecution Service, whose job was to see that law and order functioned as they ought to function. Rumours said, didn’t they, that there was already big dissatisfaction in the authorities, even suspicion, about how these crimes had been dealt with? Most probably the television show would sharpen that dissatisfaction, give it extra drive. Perhaps – a grim, very chilling ‘perhaps’ – it would lead to the kind of renewed investigations and unpredictable results that Ralph feared as a grave business threat, and had called at the ex-rectory to discuss with Mansel Shale. The outcome of that meeting remained uncertain. Mansel had shown off the pistols but Ralph thought the situation might be a bit more complex than Mansel realized. Shale didn’t go in much for complexity.

  ELEVEN

  ‘“The mirror crack’d from side to side”,’ Denise said.

  ‘Yes,’ Harpur replied. At 126 Arthur Street, he, Denise and his daughters were also watching ‘The Forgotten Murders’ on television. Denise would be going to the gym when the programme had finished and was in a navy blue jogging outfit. Harpur thought she looked very competitive. She could always win him.

  ‘“The mirror crack’d from side to side,

  ‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried,

  The Lady of Shalott”,’ Hazel said. ‘It’s a poem, Dad. Tennyson.’

  ‘James Thurber, a sort of funny writer, joked it was to do with feminine hygiene,’ Denise said.

  ‘Is that really how it happened?’ Jill said.

  ‘The body was found with the broken mirror under it, yes,’ Harpur said. Their conversation paused while the television camera lingered on the posed death scene. When it switched to décor shots suggesting a large bedroom, the talk picked up again.

  ‘Was it, like, kinky,’ Hazel said. ‘Naked, a mirror – narcissistic?’

  ‘What’s that?’ Jill said. ‘It sounds horrible.’

  ‘Fancying himself,’ Hazel said. ‘Narcissus in love with his reflection in a pool. Classical tale. We did some of them at school.’

  ‘But he could have looked at himself in the mirror if it was still on the wall,’ Jill said. ‘That’s what mirrors on walls are for: to be stared at by people and show them how they look.’

  ‘Perhaps he wanted full-body length,’ Hazel said. ‘He could stand one end of the mirror on the ground and hold it in front of him.’

  ‘But why?’ Jill said.

  ‘Perhaps that was his special thing,’ Hazel replied. ‘Everyone to their taste. Heard of “full frontal”?’

  ‘We don’t know why,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Maybe he needed some kind of weapon, any kind of weapon, and nothing but the mirror was available,’ Denise said.

  ‘Why would he need a weapon?’ Jill said.

  ‘Somebody in the room wanted to kill him,’ Hazel replied.

  ‘You mean he knew that?’ Jill said.

  The voiceover gave a sort of answer to this and they stopped talking again to listen: ‘It’s possible that if he was holding the mirror in front of him when he’d just lifted it from the wall, that he would have seen the face of his murderer in the glass. We cannot tell whether he knew the assailant, who must have been standing close behind him to inflict that head wound.’

  ‘We thought we did know,’ Harpur said. ‘The jury wouldn’t have it, though, and acquitted those two.’

  ‘And then the two were killed themselves, weren’t they?’ Jill said.

  ‘They were, they were,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘It looks sort of … well … sort of neat, doesn’t it?’ Jill said.

  ‘Neat how?’ Hazel said.

  ‘Like tidying up,’ Jill replied.

  ‘Tidying what up?’ Hazel said.

  ‘Those two,’ Jill said.

  ‘Which two?’ Hazel replied.

  ‘The two who killed Mirror Man,’ Jill said. ‘One pulling the trigger, the other helping in some way, known as “an accessory”.’

  ‘You haven’t been paying attention, have you?’ Hazel said.

  ‘To what?’ Jill said.

  ‘To what the court decided,’ Hazel said.

  ‘You mean that it found them not guilty?’ Jill said.

  ‘Of course I mean the court found them not guilty,’ Hazel said.

  ‘Oh, that!’ Jill said.

  ‘It could be important,’ Hazel said.

  ‘Yes, it could be, but is it?’ Jill replied. ‘That’s why I said “tidying up”.’

  ‘You think that killing two innocent people tidies things up, do you, Jill?’ Hazel asked.

  ‘Oh, innocent?’ Jill said.

  ‘There was a proper trial and that was the verdict,’ Hazel said.

  ‘Oh, verdict,’ Jill said. ‘I know what you’re afraid of, Haze.’

  ‘Afraid?’ Hazel replied.

  ‘It’s loyalty,’ Jill said.

  ‘Loyalty? Who to?’ Hazel said.

  ‘I think it’s really, really nice of you,
Haze.’

  ‘What is really, really nice of me?’ Hazel said.

  ‘You don’t want those two innocent ones to seem guilty,’ Jill said.

  ‘Why don’t I want those two innocent ones to seem guilty?’

  ‘Because then it would look like they were killed as vengeance,’ Jill said.

  ‘Why would it?’ Hazel said.

  ‘Vengeance would be needed, wouldn’t it, because the court made such a rotten mistake? Otherwise, those two would get away with it. And they mustn’t be allowed to get away with it.’

  ‘“Mustn’t”? Who says they mustn’t?’ Hazel replied.

  ‘Ah! If it’s vengeance, we have to ask who would want vengeance and would be clever and brave enough to get it? We all know the answer, don’t we? But you would hate that answer, Haze.’

  ‘Not “look like they were killed”, Jill, but “look as though they were killed”, and so on,’ Harpur said. ‘Grammar.’

  ‘Haze worries about Desy,’ Jill replied.

  ‘Why does TV have to go into all this in a pretend programme, Dad?’ Hazel said. ‘Don’t they know it might cause bad trouble?’

  ‘They like causing bad trouble,’ Jill said. ‘They’re failures if they don’t cause bad trouble. It’s what they call relevance, meaning about what’s known as issues, real issues, now issues, today issues.’

  TWELVE

  At Low Pastures, Ralph’s wife, Margaret, had come and sat with him in the TV room for a while but didn’t seem gripped by ‘The Forgotten Murders’ and left after a quarter of an hour. Margaret was clever, very clever, but he wasn’t sure she’d grasped why this screen version of events mattered so much to him, mattered as a dire fucking pest and peril.

  But, whether she grasped this or not, Margaret stood, raised two hands in a surrender gesture, gave a little apologetic smile, and stepped to the door. Ralph considered there was something special about doors at Low Pastures. They had been part of the house from its very beginnings, centuries ago, most probably. At various times the Spanish consul and a lord lieutenant of the county had lived here and passed through these doorways. As anyone would expect, they were old-style solid timber, not some three-ply sandwich like today’s flimsy sort. Ralph always felt that to go out of or enter a room, or out of or into the house, via one of these on its massive, cooperative hinges was a very definite statement, not just a move in or out or out or in. Absolute bloody boredom – was that Margaret’s statement? Maybe. But foolish if so. Margaret was occasionally a disappointment to Ralph, though he would try not to show it and would certainly never speak of it. There were quite a few pluses about Margaret. He’d often remind himself of this. Ralph believed in being fair to her, and she probably deserved that.

  In any case, though, he thought, she’d want to quit before telly did its screen version of the garrotting. That death had appalled her when she’d originally read of the two killings in the press. She’d know now that the episode was certain to come up in this staging. Didn’t the programme’s title more or less promise that? TV producers had scouted around for a sensational, public-interest topic and decided that ‘The Forgotten Murders’ needed to be made unforgotten. A network showing would fix that, stir the publicity, perhaps interest some members of Parliament and investigative teams on national newspapers.

  Yes, and Ralph feared this might lead to dangerous questions about where the assistant chief constable (Operations) featured in those historic events. After all, investigating a double murder ought to be a major operation And if, as a result of the renewed nosing and disclosures, things went disastrously for Iles, things might go disastrously for Ralph, and for Margaret and for the Low Pastures family home, and Ralph’s juicy niche businesses.

  He had explained some of this to Margaret but did she realize the full gravity? At any rate, she couldn’t watch ‘The Forgotten Murders’ to the end, regardless of the blight this programme might bring to Ralph’s and Mansel Shale’s gloriously sturdy but multi-risk companies. She seemed unable to appreciate completely that Shale’s and Ralph’s fine firms existed mainly because Iles let them exist for the sake of peace on the streets, and, if he was removed from his job, this ducky helpfulness would also be removed: Iles couldn’t see to that from jail. He’d be too busy guarding his back from those he’d put there earlier.

  Ralph considered himself a long-term thinker. He planned. He tried to cope today with what the future might come up with for him next week. He regarded this skill as a precious, inborn flair, but also the result of experience in the roughhouse world of advanced commerce. Margaret didn’t have that experience. It would be wrongheaded to expect her to see things as sharply as he did. Ember would not totally blame her for skipping away like that and shutting one of those meaningful doors on him.

  Ralph couldn’t slip away. He felt compelled to seek out everything to do with the murders. He believed any revival of interest in them could bring big trouble. Vigilance, he must not let this fade. Duty, he must obey its insistent call. Duty was almost always a strong impulse in Ralph. What he’d describe as humble, but unconquerable, doggedness showed in his face and general manner. He knew that many spotted a remarkable physical resemblance between him and a youngish Charlton Heston when Heston was supreme: the Ben Hur and El Cid periods. Ralph didn’t object to this comparison. He’d seen some of the star’s films on one of the movie channels and admired the craggy boldness of Heston’s features. It seemed to tell of determination, grit, confidence and integrity. These were qualities Ralph personally fancied, too; above all, integrity. He liked to whistle up a very notable display of them himself when doing substances deals with some of the mix-prone, two-timing, brazen, wholesaling sods he had to bulk-buy his trade commodities from. Integrity they’d probably heard of, but wouldn’t ever let it get in the way.

  Ralph had a glass of Kressmann Armagnac near and he took a good, uplifting sip now. This was the kind of distinguished tot a Spanish consul or lord lieutenant might have downed while thinking about consular or lord lieutenant-type problems. Ralph enjoyed feeling he was in the company of those past eminent high-fliers.

  He thought that, in fact, the programme did its garrotting scene very skilfully. Maybe the most important part was the choice of background music during the build-up to it, and the actual unrushed throttling. Although Ralph was fond of a pleasant tune, especially marches and tangos, he did not really know very much about music, but he’d make a guess that the piece selected was something playful by Mozart, or one of those other flibbertigibbety composers of his era. A woodwind instrument such as flute or clarinet or oboe dominated, with mellow little spurts that made it sound as though life was OK, even jolly.

  Ralph regarded this as very powerful, inventive irony because of the undeniable enormous difference in tones. The music was light and cheerful, seemingly not at all a parallel with the garrotting. Probably no composer of any period would turn out a work specifically designed to accompany garrottings. It wouldn’t be a plus to have his or her ‘Choke Anthem’ listed among her or his works. The script could have asked the actor playing the victim to drown the music with a shout or scream. Ralph realized that would have been crude and obvious, though. Instead, TV wanted the audience to sense that the man getting strangled would most likely decide life was not, in fact, OK and/or jolly, but fucking last-gasp painful as the ligature dug in, and the oxygen went missing, his life unlikely to go on much longer.

  Ralph thought that at the TV headquarters they’d have true experts in music and when garrotting was mentioned as a tasty dramatic factor in ‘The Forgotten Murders’, one of them would perhaps say at once, ‘I know just the sonata or rondo to tinkle a contrasting, cheeky partner to the dedicated neck squeeze.’

  Of course, the cameras had to be very tactful and discreet again – even more so now. This was a public television channel. It must not horrify viewers by mocking up too exactly the supposed circumstances of the killings. There were no face shots in the death scenes, particularly not of the garrotted m
an’s.

  A deliberately very blurred, markedly out-of-focus figure carried out the garrotting and other killing. Obviously, this was what Ralph considered to be the Iles character, though he hoped he had that wrong. And if it wasn’t wrong, he hoped it wouldn’t be proved beyond any reasonable doubt right. There was quite a difference between what people regarded as true and what a court decided was true. Occasionally, Ralph wondered whether Iles might plead guilty, just for the kind of stuff-you laugh he loved, the malevolent bastard.

  Ralph thought the television writer and director and those above them wanted people to assume this mysterious, almost spectral male was Iles, though that could never be told straight, either in pictures or voiceover. There was a law of libel, and an assistant chief constable (Operations) would know how to use it. Television executives aimed to bring to the present-day details of those forgotten murders, but without landing themselves in a present-day trial for staining someone’s present-day reputation. No, not just someone’s – an assistant chief constable’s (Operations); and possibly an assistant chief constable (Operations) of sufficient clout, fight, and ample natural venom to perform a revenge attack with two murders, one a garrotting, though this could not be said or shown in case the assistant chief constable (Operations) sued for plenty. Ralph, in fact, believed Iles would never sue, whatever was said and shown. He would regard any behaviour of that sort as disgustingly bourgeois and prim. But that was not a view TV executives would be able to take.

  They’d picked an actor of about Iles’s age and slight build, but that was as near as they went. The garrotting seemed carried out with imperturbable style and easy flow, and Ralph would agree that if Iles did it, this was how he would do it. Iles had developed persecution into a junior art.