Play Dead

by Bill James

  He bent double and stepped over the sill into the room. He was wearing a brown leather jacket and he took this off now, folded it and placed it where it would hold the two planks slightly apart. From burglars over the years he had learned always to leave yourself a quick and obvious exit from a property. It had become for him a more or less automatic drill when entering a problem building, perhaps illicitly, perhaps illegally now and then. Although he had the torch to help him find his way back, he still felt compelled to follow the rigmarole. The ground floor was woodblock, scattered with a lot of brick and timber debris.

  Harpur kept the torch on and picked his way across the room, out into the hall and stood at the foot of the stairs. He called Hill-Brandon again, but without any answer. Harpur began to climb the stairs. He took them quickly, another ingrained habit. Police training taught that you were at your most vulnerable when on stairs. Gunfire could get you from below or above, so don’t loiter. True, Hill-Brandon wasn’t likely to be armed, wasn’t a gangster but an ex-shopkeeper, wiped out by the Coalition’s ‘we’re all in this together’ policy, though government ministers seemed to keep their heads above water OK. Hill-Brandon might be harmless, but Harpur still moved fast on the stairs.

  There were six doorways off the first-floor landing, with as yet no doors. They opened on to what in due though uncertain course would be bedrooms and bathrooms. He gave priority with the torch beam to the two front bedrooms, the biggest. In time, one or other of these might be known as ‘the master bedroom’ and Harpur had the notion this would appeal to Hill-Brandon who had been used to some status as a home and shop owner, particularly as the floors of these two main bedrooms were in place and would very adequately provide a base for one’s sleeping bag. It was in the nature of floors to give support.

  Hill-Brandon was not in either bedroom, however. Harpur saw traces of previous use in each. Rats and mice would have seen off any food remnants but in one room the torch lit up wrapping paper that might have held bread or cold meat, and a couple of Heinz soup cans, the contents presumably taken cold, beef broth and tomato. The sight of these tins heartened Harpur. They would bring sustenance. Heinz used to boast of 57 varieties of their soup flavours, and perhaps there were more now, so anyone living on them could have a change of daily diet for at least eight weeks and then revert to the beginning.

  He was also pleased to find no ciggy ends, though he didn’t have any special views about smoking. Denise got through what might be half a twenty pack a day and he enjoyed seeing her jet the fumes from her nose after they had done a good, swift inner tour of her chest. But for someone like Hill-Brandon, reduced to a comparatively deprived kind of life, tobacco smoke might do extra-swift damage, especially if he’d unhygienically picked up the butts in the gutter and reclaimed the remaining half centimetre to the very last of the possibly infected tip. So far Denise had no cough and didn’t gasp, except when she should be gasping. She probably had a spliff now and then, but mainly she went for tobacco. He didn’t like to think of her having a fag with some male acquaintance - say another student - and their outgoing smoke mingling damn intimately in the air around them. He didn’t like to think of it but he did think of it, and it niggled him. He saw this as only a step away from merging their bodily fluids.

  Harpur was taking big, self-righteous pleasure from his session of sympathy and large-mindedness towards Hill-Brandon when he thought he heard movement behind him downstairs. He couldn’t place it exactly. He switched off the torch. He considered calling out to Hill-Brandon again, but then reconsidered and didn’t. Harpur reasoned that if Hill-Brandon came here for the night he would, as he’d said, arrive early to get his spot on reliable floorboards. This was not early by the standards of someone looking for an untroubled and secure kip. Harpur needed a minute in the dark to adjust to the possibility of meeting someone else - most probably someone he didn’t know, and whose behaviour he couldn’t foretell.

  A woman said in a chatty, jaunty tone, ‘Ivan, Ivan, dear, what is it with your coat?’

  ‘How do you mean, my coat?’ Harpur said, aiming his voice down the stairs and trying to keep the same genial intonation. The woman must have entered the house deftly, quietly, through the adjusted planks. She seemed to be standing at the bottom of the stairs. Harpur had the impression of someone in, maybe, her late twenties and possibly wearing a navy or black jogging suit.

  ‘You’re not Ivan,’ the woman said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But it’s your coat - the brown leather job?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘I come back to the original question, then: what is it with the coat? I saw it folded and carefully placed, and decided somebody must be in here. Ivan might have been in any of the houses, except that tainted one, “the bullets house”, as he titles it. When I saw the coat, it sort of narrowed things down, though, clearly, I didn’t know he had a leather coat, which, in the event, turns out to be accurate, because the coat’s yours.’

  ‘Right. It’s to signal an exit. Luckily it’s not cold tonight or I’d miss it, obviously.’

  ‘Alternatively, I took it as signalling an entrance,’ she replied.

  ‘It’s the polar opposites in the very same article. This can happen in life. Think of two sides of the same coin, or that saying, “My enemy’s enemy is my friend”.’

  ‘I’m not certain either of those is a match,’ she said.

  ‘This is not the kind of setting for mere verbal quibbles, surely - a half finished house in the dark.’

  ‘Who are you?’ she replied. ‘I seem to remember your face - in so far as I can see it.’

  ‘Like you, I was looking for Ivan Hill-Brandon.’

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  ‘We could each ask the other that, I suppose,’ Harpur said.

  ‘We could, and I’m asking you,’ she said. ‘Do you think he might be in some sort of danger?’

  ‘Is that why you’re here?’ Harpur replied.

  ‘I saw the folded coat there, holding the two planks apart, and this was bound to prove a kind of pointer.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Which what?’ she replied.

  ‘Which kind of pointer?’

  ‘Some planning has gone into your visit,’ she said. ‘There’s a purpose to it.’

  ‘To find him.’

  ‘For all I know, that might mean to do him some harm. This whole area has a disturbing reputation.’

  ‘And yet Ivan liked to bivouac here.’

  ‘Not much choice.’

  ‘How about you?’ Harpur said.

  ‘How about me in what sense?’

  ‘You might have been here to do him harm. In that case, the folded coat would have been a mistake. A big one. It would draw you into the house and if he were here you would have found him, possibly surprised him.’

  ‘But he isn’t here, is he?’ she said.

  ‘No. My name’s Harpur, spelled with a u. It’s Scottish, I think.’

  ‘Well, I noticed this name in the Press when that killing took place near here. And a photograph. Ah! It’s why I thought I recognized you. You’re police, yes? That means you think he might be in some peril.’

  ‘He might be.’

  ‘Well, not from me,’ she said.

  ‘No, I don’t imagine from you. I think you, also, fear he might be in peril and have come to try to help.’

  ‘Are we both here for that?’

  ‘Probably. Who are you then?’

  ‘It scares me,’ she replied.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The fact that both of us, quite independently, feel he’s got possible trouble. We’ve each picked up what I’ve referred to in connection with the folded coat as pointers. Occasionally, he’ll stay with me.’

  ‘Yes, I understand that.’

  ‘He’s a good person. He shouldn’t get pitched into an evil situation without in any way choosing that kind of involvement.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘I’ve been away
working and I come back and hear about the killing of this journalist now. We already had that other death a while ago. I think of Ivan, living the way he does, and exposed.’

  ‘Yes, that’s how it could be.’

  ‘And you’re here for the same matter, aren’t you? This is frightening. We endorse each other.’

  As if to underline that idea, the doubling of the message, this house gave an echo to the words, ‘We endorse each other.’ No doors had been fitted anywhere so the echo had plenty of routes to chase itself on. He let the beam bounce off the stairwell walls and take her in. Auburn hair to just below ear level, perhaps its natural colour. About twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and in a dark jogging outfit, as he’d thought. Good, considerate/worried face, fresh skin, small, inquiring nose, rounded, nice chin which would fit very comfortably between Hill-Brandon’s thighs. He would do all right here when she was available, which would be less often than he wanted, but, to his credit, he’d made himself adaptable in at least a couple of fall-back pads. He didn’t get all distressed and shattered when she was absent. He had mental resources and notable creativity, which enabled him to see opportunity in a Tesco bin. She obviously valued him, and he might deserve it. Harpur kept the torch on and went downstairs. ‘I’m Veronica,’ she said, though without holding her hand out to be shaken or offering her cheek to be kissed.

  ‘Colin, Col.’

  ‘I feel as if I’ve let him down twice,’ she said. ‘Once, obviously, when the undercover man died. Ivan set out to come here because I wasn’t around in Kitchener Street and couldn’t give him a place to sleep and so on.’

  ‘Well, you have to go to work.’

  She shrugged, as if the obvious was the obvious, but it still didn’t excuse her. ‘He might have been seen and noted by cops on the path. That gaudy cravat. You’d be interested more in what he saw than in whether he’d been seen, wouldn’t you? But it’s a clear possibility, isn’t it, that he was spotted? He wouldn’t speak of it. He’d regard that as alarmist.’

  ‘You’ll see office blocks with notices on declaring, “This building is alarmed”. Sometimes it’s right to get alarmed.’

  ‘Of course it is, but Ivan isn’t the sort who’d want to cause worry by suggesting he might be living under a threat. He told me about giving up on the path because of what he’d seen. I personally worked out that he, himself, might have been seen. And then I come back this time and hear a journalist who possibly knew something about the real situation here had been killed. Silenced? A reporter who’d only recently arrived, but with a reputation for digging out stuff. Well, Ivan knows something about the situation here, too, doesn’t he? He must, or why would you be stalking him? And, I’m not on hand to keep him off the streets, where he’s so damn conspicuous with that holdall for his alternative costume.’

  Harpur found this term ‘costume’ strange as a means of describing a man’s clothes. He wondered whether it told something about her work. He could imagine her running karaoke on a holiday ship and switching costumes for each show. That pleasantly rounded, friendly, multi-purpose chin would help get passengers into a party mood.

  ‘In the Tesco bin - I mean, what chance would he have, shrouded with newspaper, if someone came looking?’ she said. ‘Lift the lid, and there he is, like a prisoner in a dungeon. A gunman speaks the Tesco discount vouchers motto down at him, “Every little helps” and adds, “So here are a couple of rounds for you, Ivan, neither bigger than point-thirty-eight inches wide but able to tear suitable holes in you at very short range, anyway.”’

  ‘I’ve thought about that Tesco slogan myself. We should go over there,’ Harpur replied. ‘We could knock gently on the lid so as not to shock and terrify him.’

  ‘I’ve been earlier. It’s on my way. He’s not there, either.’

  This area where they talked would justifiably be called a hall when the house was finished. It would be about twelve metres square. The squareness mattered. Harpur’s mother would always refer to the equivalent feature in the house he was brought up in as ‘the hall’, spoken with a mild clang of pride; whereas most of the neighbours called that section of their homes ‘the passage’.

  As a child, he used to think this description about right. It wasn’t square but like a thin corridor with doors off to the living room and sitting room and reaching the kitchen finally. But his mother considered that to dub it ‘the passage’ was humiliatingly basic and low class. There’d been a barometer in their hall and every day his father used to tap the glass with his knuckles, not hard but persuasively, to get the latest atmospheric pressure reading and forecast. His mother and father obviously thought that such a relationship with Nature’s workings needed the proper kind of setting: a hall. In other words, that hall had a climate function. It was not just an indoor alleyway and rat-run. Halls set the tone of a house. His mother would undoubtedly have regarded this potential hall on the Elms development as brilliantly suitable for the discussion of something perhaps extremely serious, such as the disappearance of Ivan Hill-Brandon. Harpur continued with the torch beam, not directly and offensively on Veronica but to the side, fixed now on a patch of wall that would be ideal for a barometer. ‘Are you to do with karaoke at sea, such as on a cross-Channel ferry?’ he asked.

  She held up a hand as though about to begin some sort of performance in witty answer. But after a moment he realized her signal meant they should be quiet. He heard what she might have already heard, footsteps on the dirt outside, nimble but less than assured footsteps, like someone pretty certain he or she was in the right general area, but not exactly, absolutely, where he or she wanted to be. That was the thing about Elms: it offered quite a degree of choice. Harpur sensed movement near the coat fender. He shifted slightly and put the torch ray on to the gap in the front room. They saw Iles, crouched and squinting into the property. It was not the squint of someone examining the house because he might one day want to buy it; no, this squint showed he thought an individual or individuals might be in there and he wanted to know who and why.

  The focused beam made his Biro wound glow reddish, like a level-crossing warning light. He had on civilian clothes, of course, and no hat. To Harpur, the ACC looked like somebody who’d been having a fine and educational time with fiction lately, such as The Revenger’s Tragedy, but now demanded the real, and would examine it ruthlessly. ‘Is that you behind the glare, Col?’ he said. ‘I recognized the coat, bought cheap when they were putting down many cattle diseased by badgers, so oodles of leather available. I thought you’d be around here - a secret carry-on that you’d prefer to the theatre.’

  ‘How was The Revenger’s Tragedy, sir?’ Harpur replied. ‘You’re the sort who would pick up the theme of a drama, whether you were in the stalls or the dress circle. Did they have intervals - to cater for your quite manageable complaint?’

  ‘I’m Veronica Pastor,’ she said. ‘You must be the other one.’

  ‘That depends on your starting point,’ Iles said. ‘But, in principle, no. Harpur is the other one. I’m more towards the supremo position.’

  ‘Do come in. We mustn’t keep you on the doorstep, must we, Col?’ she replied. Iles climbed through. ‘Two police officers from a different force came to examine the situation here after the undercover murder and now, bingo, you both seem to have come back,’ she said.

  ‘It’s necessary, Veronica,’ Iles said. ‘Not only Harpur and I realized this, but a girl called Maud, very ready to put out for Col, in my opinion. Reading all that ancient Greek soft porn at Oxford makes them exceptionally questing and inventive sexually. Maud didn’t like what she saw here, and what she still sees. How are you connected with the killings, Veronica?’

  ‘She frequently accommodated someone named Hill-Brandon,’ Harpur said, ‘but in a catch-as-catch-can mode. To her he’s Ivan, skint, and implicated oddly, interestingly, in the Mallen narrative.’

  ‘How did you find that out?’ Iles said.

  ‘I’d have given Ivan a key,’ she said, ‘so he could u
se the flat when I’m not at home, but my sister lives with me and was afraid that if I wasn’t there neighbours would think Ivan was fucking both of us on a turn-and-turn about schedule. If it’s Tuesday it must be Veronica. I should have ignored her prissy objections. Ivan’s safety should be prime. A really urgent need, this. My sister isn’t the sort he’d fancy, anyway - those thick legs, like a larder in her stocking.’

  ‘This Hill-Brandon is involved how, Harpur? I don’t recall the name,’ Iles said.

  ‘In mainly a negative sense,’ Harpur said. ‘He wasn’t here on the night, but almost here. This is crucial.’

  ‘How?’ Iles said.

  ‘I’ve got nothing against theatre,’ Harpur replied, ‘old or current. But this evening I felt a yen to get down here to the Elms, even though this yen was founded mainly on the negative aspect I’ve mentioned.’

  ‘You felt a yen, did you, Col?’ Iles said. ‘He felt a yen, Veronica. Did you feel a yen, also? Were plenty of yens getting felt around here?’

  ‘A yen like that comes unexpectedly out of nowhere but is very compulsive,’ Harpur said. ‘Clearly, I might have had a yen to see The Revenger’s Tragedy, which would have been more positive, I admit. But this was not the yen that took hold of me.’

  ‘The thing about leather in a coat like that, although folded and set down in a packet on ground hardly spruce, is that once it’s been uncrumpled by wearing, or hung up in a wardrobe, it will soon recover its proper shape and smoothness,’ Veronica said.

  They left the house. Harpur recovered his jacket and put it on. The planks fell back into place, seeming to shut off the prospective dwelling, yet providing an entry method if you knew where to look and how to operate the movable panels. Veronica said: ‘I can’t help noticing that facial lesion, Mr Iles, which is definitely not leprosy. Did Col Harpur organize the wound?’