The Boat House

by Stephen Gallagher

  He didn't pretend that it was any kind of justice, but it did feel better than plain thieving. Although it didn't always work as well as it might; two teeth on one side were still feeling loose after a kicking he'd received behind a small-town nightclub a couple of weeks before, and the bruises had taken most of that time to fade. But it was worth the occasional risk because the approach had the advantage of causing no official complaints, so that he continued to sail onward and stay invisible. Methods and the local territory might have changed, but there was so much here that he could recognise from his other life.

  The car turned another corner. He seemed to see nothing but failed businesses and boarded up shops, with occasional empty lots as if an entire structure had been sucked into the ground and the hole quickly screened-in with sheets of ply. The plywood had been fly posted with ads for rock groups and poll tax protest meetings, and the posters had been oversprayed with layers of graffiti.

  But wait.

  There ahead of him, a little way on from a defunct carpet warehouse and a place that sold tiles in job lots, a young man was bending over a car that had pulled in by the side of the road. Its engine was running, and its brake lights were on. The side window was open and the young man was talking to the driver. As Pavel moved to draw in behind he saw the young man abruptly straighten and look his way, waving the driver on with a slight but definite gesture as he watched this new approaching vehicle with suspicion.

  As he came level, Pavel dropped the electric window halfway. The boy stooped and peered in through the opening, still on his guard.

  "How're you doing?" he said. His breath was like dogfood.

  "I'm doing fine," Pavel said. "Are you in business?"

  "Just hanging around."

  "I need to clear my head," Pavel said. "Is there anything you could suggest?"

  "Let's stop fucking about," the boy said wearily. "It's twenty a packet, take it or leave it but make it quick."

  Pavel pulled out a twenty. It was his last. He glanced around before he held it out, but the rest of the street was empty.

  The boy reached for the money. Pavel hit the button by his seat and the electric window rolled up, trapping the boy's hand at the wrist. The hand was filthy, with rims of dirt under the nails. The boy tried to pull back, but his wristbones were clamped tight and there was no give in the window. He screamed.

  "Not so loud," Pavel said. "Now come with me."

  And he let out the clutch.

  The boy staggered and stumbled backward, drawn with the car as Pavel rolled along in low gear. At the next corner he turned, and pulled the boy along with him into an alleyway between two rows of buildings. The boy was cursing and trying to break the window, but he couldn't do it one handed and off balance. Under the grime, the fingers of his trapped hand had turned white.

  Pavel stopped the car, and clambered across the seats to get out on the passenger side. The boy was calling him names now, many of which he'd never heard before.

  Broken glass crunched underfoot on the stone cobbles. The alley was about three, no more than four metres across, and as sleazy a piece of territory as he'd ever seen. To either side were the rear yards of buildings. Some of them had been roofed over and converted into garages, although with some the walls had simply been pulled down to make a small parking area. All of the yard doors looked as if they'd seen long, hard service in some other place before ending up here; they were various styles and painted in various colours, all of them blasted and peeling. On some of them, street numbers had been daubed in a giant hand.

  Pavel winced as he picked his way around the car. An open box of trash had been dumped out behind one of the buildings, and the alley was strewn with soiled disposable nappies. This was no self respecting way to make a living. The boy tried to claw at him with his free hand, and Pavel hit him once in the middle to double him over and disable him.

  The boy's pockets were empty. His drugs and his money were all in his underpants. He was gasping and trying to speak, but he couldn't take a breath.

  "Take it slowly," Pavel suggested. "Don't struggle for it so much, just relax."

  He took the cash. He left the drugs. He opened the driver's door, and the boy swung back with it; but then Pavel reached in and lowered the window, and the boy fell back heavily to sit on the ground.

  He nursed his deadened hand.

  "Rub it," Pavel suggested. "When the circulation comes back, it's going to hurt quite a lot."

  The boy was still trying to speak. Pavel paused before he got in behind the wheel; it seemed only courteous to give him a hearing.

  Gasping like a fish, the boy finally managed to get out a few words.

  "You're dead," the boy spat.

  Pavel looked down at him for a moment.

  "I know it," he said.

  And then he got back into the car, reversed out of the alley, and drove away.

  THIRTY

  It was about a week later when Diane dropped in at the yard; she'd been putting it off for as long as she could, but she couldn't put it off any longer. Ever since the day that she'd taken Ross Aldridge out to look at the six dead deer, she'd been troubled by a persistent squeaking from somewhere at the back of the Toyota. What Diane knew about motor vehicles could be tattooed on a gnat's left buttock and still leave space for Mother; it might need a penny's worth of grease, it might be halfway to losing a wheel. But she knew when she needed qualified advice, and she needed it now.

  The two dogs bounded out to meet her, looking happy and stupid. One of them lost interest almost immediately and went snuffling away along the ground, the other followed her in. There was a radio playing in the car workshop and a Mercedes on the hoist, but nobody around. She called out, "Hello?" and then she went through to take a look in the marine section.

  She stood in the yard, but still could see nobody.

  "Hey," a voice called from somewhere above her. "Hey, how's it going?"

  It was Pete McCarthy. He was up on the deck of one of the landlocked craft, looking down over the rail. Then he disappeared for half a minute before coming around to her from the other side, this time at ground level. He looked rough and dusty and hardworking, and he was wiping his hands on a paint-stained rag.

  "Ignore the mess," he said, balling the rag and then tossing it with some brushed together debris in the shadow of the hull. "What is this, business or social?"

  "Call it both," she said, and explained about her worry.

  "Sounds like a brake shoe," Pete said, and they went out to where she'd parked so that he could take a look.

  There wasn't much that he could tell with a superficial inspection; he crouched down and took hold of the wheel and tried to rock it on the axle, but there was no undue play. She said, "Look, if it's going to be a problem, I can do some phoning around. I know how busy you are."

  "It's no problem," Pete told her. "Ted's back in action, and the marina's back on its feet now we've got the Wilson boys in. If you can leave it with us, I'll fit it in as soon as I can."

  "How soon is that likely to be?"

  "Maybe tonight. Shouldn't be any later than in the next couple of days."

  "Fine," Diane said uncertainly. And then she said, "Listen, you wouldn't have anything I could borrow until it's fixed, would you?"

  She was thinking of the only two estate vehicles that she had to fall back on; Dizzy's huge and expensive limo, and the lumbering, wire mesh-windowed Land Rover that the gamekeeper had been using until his ignominious departure. There was a little Morgan sports job that she'd discovered in one of the stables, but after thirty years' use as a byre it was somewhat in need of restoration.

  "Depends how proud you are," Pete said, and he reached into his pocket and handed her a set of keys.

  "What are these for?" she said.

  "James Bond's Aston Martin," he said, and nodded toward a car behind her. She turned, and found herself facing his own black Zodiac.

  He said, "I know it's the ugliest thing on four wheels, but it runs
. I can use the breakdown wagon to get around in, if I need to."

  She looked at it, flaking paint, taped headlight, and all. If it hadn't been for Jed, she wouldn't have been in a corner. School holidays meant that she couldn't even fall back on the school bus, and she had to get him to Mrs Neary's somehow; the alternative was to drag him around with her like a piece of luggage as she worked. The job would suffer, Jed would suffer without protest, and Diane would feel guilty for a week.

  But even so… this car?

  "Well, if you're sure," she said, smiling what she hoped was a bright smile.

  "I'm sure," Pete said.

  "Thanks."

  When she was behind the wheel, he showed her how to close the door so that it would stay closed. When the engine started, she found herself sitting in the middle of a racket that put her modest little squeak into a complete new perspective.

  She tried to wind down the window. Nothing happened for a moment and then the glass dropped, all at once. Pete smiled encouragingly.

  "Looks good on you," he said.

  "You're kidding me," she said. "I feel like something out of Wacky Races. How do you keep it on the road?"

  "Most people don't ask how, they ask why."

  "Why?"

  "It depends on me in its twilight years. If I didn't look after it, who would?"

  She blipped the accelerator and then, after a moment, the engine responded.

  And although she hadn't meant to raise the subject at all, she heard herself saying, "It's been some time since I saw you last. How's everything?"

  His face turned serious.

  She was immediately sorry that she'd spoken, but it was already too late. Something seemed to go out of him, like a man who'd managed to forget a grief for a while only to find it reclaiming him in some unexpected and unguarded moment.

  And he said, "I don't know."

  "You don't know?"

  "Yeah. Makes no sense at all, does it?"

  "Has something else happened?"

  "No, nothing. Alina's moving out. She says. I don't know where she's going to go or when, but she's doing it."

  "So what's wrong with that?" she said. "Isn't it what you wanted?"

  He nodded, slowly. But then he seemed make an effort, and to shake the feeling off.

  "Hey," he said. "You want to hear something funny?" And he told her about Alina's proposal for getting the two of them together.

  Diane's jaw dropped. "They're actually saying that?" she said. "They're saying I was a battered wife?"

  Pete was obviously trying to show an adult kind of concern. But he couldn't quite hide his curiosity, as well.

  "Were you?" he said.

  "No!" Diane said. "I'd have killed him."

  "Not with a shotgun, you wouldn't," Pete said.

  She was shaking her head. "I can't believe it," she said. "I can't believe people around here."

  "So then, you're not going to believe all that stuff that some of them were saying about me?"

  There was one of those moments of perfect balance.

  And then she said, "Right," and she wondered why she felt as if she'd walked into the carefully engineered of traps, even though she knew that it hadn't been planned.

  At least, she thought she knew.

  "Pay no attention to me," Pete said. "There's something about her that worries me, that's all, and I don't know what it is. And it won't matter anyway, because pretty soon she's going to stop being my problem."

  "And become somebody else's?"

  He smiled faintly, as if in concession. "Who knows?"

  She thanked him again for the loan of the car.

  And then, feeling pretty buoyant, she drove away.

  She went down the track, around the turn, and past the trees before the iron bridge. The air blower didn't seem to work but she wound the window the rest of the way down to get the breeze, and after she'd left the village behind she turned on the radio. It was strange, but on the way out she didn't seem to have noticed how downright pleasant the day really was. She tried all of the radio's preset buttons, but the only signal coming through with any clarity was that of the local station down on the coast. It was the wrap-up for the eleven o'clock news.

  It wasn't this, but the message that came in on the tail end of the bulletin that almost caused her to swerve and bang up the Zodiac's other headlight as she was turning into the narrow dirt road leading to the Hall.

  She parked messily, and ran inside to her office. Wednesday was the day that the rugs were taken out and the hall tiles washed down in the morning, and she almost skidded on the wet marble and arrived in the former library in a heap. Luckily, Jed wasn't here to see her breaking almost all of the rules that she'd laid down for him. She pulled open the desk drawer where she vaguely remembered that she'd put the Auto-Marine's business card, and then when she'd found it she picked up the phone to call Pete.

  But she couldn't, because there was already someone on the line.

  She recognised the voice immediately. No one else that she'd ever known had spoken with an accent quite like it.

  "All right," the Peterson woman was saying. "But you come along and you tell nobody where you're going. I wouldn't want this to get out…"

  And then her voice tailed away, as if she'd become aware that someone was listening.

  As silently as she could, Diane replaced the receiver. She winced as it clicked down the last quarter-inch. And then she sat back from her desk and waited.

  It had to have been Dizzy on the other end; this line was shared with an extension up in his private suite, and nobody else could use it. When Bob Ivie or Tony Marinello wanted to make a call, they had to come down and borrow Diane's. The household staff had a pay phone in what had once been the pantry. Dizzy's Women sometimes called out, but there were none of them around and hadn't been for several weeks now; so Dizzy himself it was.

  Dizzy and the Peterson woman, arranging a private meeting? Diane had known about the two of them going up to his private apartments on the night of the party, but then she'd seen Dizzy coming down alone only a few minutes later. Whatever he'd been planning, it clearly hadn't happened. But it was equally clear now that this hadn't been the end of it.

  Her door was open, and she could hear Dizzy as he came down the stairs. She was expecting him to come in, either to explain or to make a complaint about her cutting in on the call, but he did neither; instead he went down the hallway and on out of the main door, and when Diane went over to look out of one of the windows she saw his limousine, the big black monster with the tinted glass, swinging around to head out of the estate.

  Slowly, she walked back to her desk. She stood there, thinking for a few moments. And then she sat down, picked up the phone, and began to dial.

  Her first impulse had been to call Pete at the yard. The item that she'd heard on the Zodiac's scratchy radio had a direct relevance to him, after all, and if she hadn't been so close to home she'd probably have swung right around and gone back to tell him about it.

  But something about the situation troubled her.

  There's something about her that worries me, he'd said, and I don't know what it is.

  Me, too, Diane was thinking.

  She finished dialling, not the Auto-Marine's code but a number that was still running through her mind in the mnemonic of the radio station's jingle.

  And when she finally got through, she said, "I'm calling about the emergency message that you broadcast at the end of the news…"

  THIRTY-ONE

  Dizzy Liston tended not to do much of his own driving; this had seemed like a good idea ever since a Marylebone magistrate had taken his license away, some eleven months before. Caution wasn't uppermost in his mind now, however, as he turned the big shadow silent car out onto the valley road. His mind was on the directions that he was now repeating, over and over, fixing them in his memory with continuous rehearsal. Even though he was technically the major landowner at this end of the valley, he knew his way around no better
than the average visitor; most of his life so far had been spent at Winchester school, a minor Oxford college, and a series of Mayfair addresses all taken on short leasehold. It was said that the Liston males had stopped taking much of an interest in their home territory around the time that the custom of droit de seigneur had fallen out of use. Most of the land was now in hock, anyway, and the house was halfway to a ruin; Dizzy's plan had been to kick around here for a few months obeying doctor's orders and getting his topspin back, and then head once more for the bright lights leaving Diane in command for good. She'd be charged with the duty of keeping the estate staff in mortal terror and liaising with the forestry people so that Dizzy's cash float would be regularly renewed.

  That had been the idea; but the waitress had changed everything.

  He saw a gated track just before the village, marked by a boulder painted white at the edge of the road; he took the limo up as far as he could go, and then he left it to walk the rest of the way. What if he was in the wrong place? What if he was in the right place, and she didn't come?

  The first question was settled when he came to a slate-built stile, which was exactly as she'd described it to him. The second remained unanswered, because when he scrambled over and walked out into the wooded clearing on the other side of the wall, she wasn't there.

  It was part of an estate forest — one of his own, he supposed. The gate and the KEEP OUT notices that he'd left behind ought to be enough to ensure privacy, even so close to the village and at this time of the year. But he didn't want solitude, he wanted to see Alina. She'd promised, so where was she? What was he supposed to do, go down to her tatty little cafe like one of the herd and try to bid for a minute of her distracted attention?

  Never, he thought.

  But underneath the thought, he knew that if it proved to be the only way, he'd probably do it.