Chapter 20
I stood on the edge of a cliff so high there was nothing below except clouds. It overlooked the canyon of my own stupidity. What an imbecile I had been. How unutterably a clown. Like a fool I had allowed myself to be seduced into the preposterous belief that my mother was alive and that I should soon meet her. In allowing myself to be bought in this way I had been a dupe, exposing both myself and my dear wife to danger in pursuit of a chimera.
As I stood amid the rubble of my quest and began to comprehend the extent of my folly, I became aware of another feeling rising within me. A steely resolve began to form. There was still a prize I could salvage. Jenny. I must find her, and make myself worthy of her. I would implore her forgiveness, and with the money the Countess had given us we should go somewhere far away, a place where neither the Countess nor the man with the burned face should find us.
I walked back out into the lobby and into the path of Sugarpie, who seemed distraught. She took a look at my bruised face and said, ‘Must go hospital.’
I assured her the bruises were superficial.
‘No, must go. Madam have car accident.’
My stomach lurched. ‘Do you mean Jenny?’
‘Yes, but she OK, sir.’
We took the same rickshaw driver as I had taken the previous day. He cycled at a brisk pace through the darkness, down alleys in which the faint light of the sky glinted in the eyes of dogs watching us with suspicion. Other things scurried in the gloom and everywhere there was the smell of stagnant water, tar, rotting wood and charcoal smoke, jasmine, camphor and spices. The background hum of a Bangkok street – the tooting of horns, bark of dogs – became soothing. The choir of cicadas rose to a crescendo and then went silent as if answering the commands of an invisible orchestra conductor, before starting off again.
Before long we pulled up at a hospital. It seemed not greatly different to ones back in England: tiled floors scrupulously scrubbed; walls painted in beige and tan; swing doors opening onto long corridors, inadequately lit, and filled with the faint reek of disinfectant and lavatory smells. The nurses were smaller, but more numerous, and thronged the corridors in starched white tunics, skirts and aprons like flocks of snowbirds. Sugarpie spoke to a nurse behind a reception counter and after a phone call was made I learned that Jenny had been discharged in the company of a Mr Spaulding.
This revelation unleashed a paroxysm of fury within me. The blood rushed to my head so violently I had to reach out to a wall to avoid stumbling. When the turmoil passed it was replaced by a feeling I had never experienced before: the cold, calm certainty that I should soon kill a man.
When I returned to the hotel I was told that Roger and Spaulding were away, but Earwig was believed to be in his room. I was quite calm as I climbed the stairs. I knew with simple certainty that I should kill Earwig, but before he died he would tell me where they had taken Jenny. I had never possessed the intention to kill someone before and I was surprised at how normal it felt.
I imagined I could probably throttle him but thought maybe it would be better to go armed with something with which to club him, so I went first to my room to find a weapon. But there was nothing. Suitcases, a lamp, a chair, some shoes … nothing that would be useful for the task I had in mind. The sight of Jenny’s clothes draped over a chair filled me with a cold fury. I walked up the corridor to Webster’s room and knocked. There was no response. I opened the door. There was no one in, but I could see his semi-automatic Colt 1911 glinting on the bedside table. I picked it up and pushed it inside the waistband of my trousers.
At Earwig’s door I paused as if about to knock, but realised this was a foolish courtesy in view of the act I had in mind. I opened the door and walked in. Earwig was hanging by his neck from the ceiling. On the floor beside the bed was a knife he had used to cut up his bed sheets, and an upturned chair. I looked up at him and as he gently swivelled, our eyes met. His face was purple but the expression that entered his eyes upon seeing me showed that the pilot light inside him was still flickering.
‘Mr Earwig!’ I cried, ‘You mustn’t.’
I grabbed the knife, replaced the chair and climbed on it, embracing him with one arm and sawing at the bedsheet ligature with the knife. It tore easily and Earwig slumped into my arms and we overbalanced and toppled onto the bed. There we lay facing each other as close as a man and his wife.
‘Mr Earwig,’ I said, ‘How could you do such a terrible thing?’ I loosened the noose, my fingers pressing gently into his collar, into the soft and clammy flesh of his neck. ‘Whatever possessed you?’
He stared at me, with wide wet eyes and the tears brimmed over and streaked down his cheeks, dropping onto the counterpane, beating out a tattoo like soldiers drumming in the street outside. He opened his mouth a fraction and a squeak came out, like a bed spring or a puppy that has lost its mother.
‘I must ask you, sir, what have they done with my wife?’
He said nothing, his chest heaved with panting sobs.
‘I regret the clumsiness of my manners in asking you at such a time, but you must understand, if you do not tell me where she is, I will kill you.’
He spoke in a whisper. ‘But you just saved my life.’
I struggled to find a way to explain the paradox. ‘But only so I could question you first. In truth I would kill you with as much thought as I would crush a beetle.’
He was silent, staring at me and blinking away the forming tears. He seemed unconvinced by my words.
‘Jack, I didn’t burn the cranes.’
‘No,’ I said gently, ‘I didn’t think you did.’
We lay there staring into each other’s faces. I could feel his warm, damp breath on my face.
‘Mr Earwig, when you went for your swim … on the beach, we saw … marks on you. Did they put you in the wicker ball too?’
‘Yes, that was just larking about.’
‘Horseplay?’ I said bitterly.
‘Yes. That’s all.’
‘Why do you stay with these men?’
‘They are my friends.’
‘Mr Earwig, I believe you know where Mr Spaulding and Roger have taken my wife. You must understand there is nothing I wouldn’t do to protect Jenny.’
‘Kill me?’
‘I assure you I am serious.’
‘I would be most grateful if you would carry out this threat. I think death must be rather fine, at least compared to the life I’ve had.’
‘Mr Earwig, no! You must not say that! You must not give in to dark fears and imaginings, they work on your soul and make you see the world in a far gloomier light than the truth requires. I assure you from the bottom of my heart that things are never as bad as they seem, and one day—’
He groaned. ‘I wish you would make up your mind.’
‘If you sincerely wish to die, what reason can you have for withholding the information? Even Roger can’t hurt you in the grave.’
‘I know, but if you let me live, what then?’
He looked into my eyes and saw that I had no answer. If he were to die he could tell me, but if he were to live, he couldn’t.
‘It’s probably best if you let me die,’ he said.
‘There is no reason for such a counsel of despair.’
‘My whole life is composed of despair in one form or another.’
‘It seems to me, that … that is not necessary. I happen to believe you are a good man, Mr Earwig.’
‘Do you? Do you really?’
‘Yes, I do. A good man who has suffered terribly at the hands of two scoundrels.’
‘Thank you. That means a lot to me. I … I wish I was like you.’
‘There is nothing special about me, in that at least we are not so very different.’
‘But you have a wife … I never get the girls, even Sugarpie threw my book away. Kilmer can have her any time he wants.’
‘Are you not aware,’ I said gently, ‘that the book was probably not the most appropriate gift in the circumsta
nces?’
‘Wasn’t it?’
‘I’m not well up in the way things work out here, but I feel you would stand every chance of winning Sugarpie’s heart if … if … Tell me plainly, do you genuinely want to win her heart?’
‘Oh yes!’ A new light appeared in his eyes as he considered the prospect.
‘As opposed to a quick, seedy conquest in which you enjoy her body for a night and no more?’
‘Oh no, I would marry her at the drop of a hat!’
‘In that case I would say to you the following: if you changed your approach, if you dropped this … this act of insouciant swagger with which the men out here, it seems to me, treat the girls as some sort of easy conquest, and showed to her that you cared for her and would take care of her, that you would be willing to insulate her from the terrible future of poverty … then I suspect she would marry you too at the drop of a hat.’
‘Jack, are you serious?’
‘Very much so.’
‘But …’
‘Mr Earwig, can’t you see that a book about Winnie the Pooh is utterly meaningless to her, whereas if you had spent the same amount, or even a fraction of it, on gold … she would surely have loved you?’
‘But isn’t that terribly meretricious?’ His face was creased with confusion but his voice became clearer. It was as if the vision I dangled before him – and assured him was attainable – had restored some of his vigour.
‘Back home perhaps, but here it is otherwise. The interpretation. You would be signalling that you cared greatly for her welfare.’
‘How can you know?’
‘Mr Earwig, I know very little about affairs of the heart – I can diagnose a thousand different mechanical faults in a steam engine from the sound of the chuffs, but the workings of the human heart are largely a mystery to me. All the same, in this situation, it seems plain as a pikestaff to me.’
Earwig stared at me in wonder, the wonder that fills the heart of someone seeing something for the first time that was obvious to other people.
‘It was my fault they put Curtis in the rattan ball,’ he said. ‘When he first arrived we became friends. We got drunk and I blabbed. I told him too much.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘About the tin of syrup.’
‘What about it? It’s a movie prop, isn’t it?’
He stared at me wild-eyed. ‘Oh Jack,’ he said in the sort of whisper one might use in a haunted house. ‘Jack, it’s … it’s a bomb.’ He squeezed his eyes tight and gulped, trying to suppress another wave of sobs.
I looked at him dazed with surprise. ‘But what for?’
‘They are going to blow up the flying boat.’
Astonished horror flashed within me. ‘Are you serious, Mr Earwig?’
‘I swear, Jack.’
‘Who do you mean by “they”?’
‘Room 42.’
‘The chaps work for Room 42?’
‘Yes.’
I struggled to assimilate this revelation. ‘Why on earth? Why would they … you mean with everybody aboard?’
‘Yes. Because of the Scharnhorst Plan.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I thought you knew.’
‘I haven’t the foggiest idea of it.’
Earwig stared at me. His eyes glistened like those of a scolded dog. ‘I don’t know much, Jack. The chaps don’t trust me. It has to do with some very high-level, top-secret meetings that took place at Wisskirriel House when Curtis was a boy, in the years before the Great War. After the signing of the armistice they had to hush it all up. There was a boating accident in which all the staff who were there at the time died. The Scharnhorst Plan is mentioned in the screenplay, so anyone who has read it has to be bumped off.’
‘Are you saying Room 42 deliberately killed all the domestic staff from Wisskirriel House?’
‘Yes. That’s what they said.’
‘This is an extraordinary tale, Mr Earwig.’
‘When I told him the truth about the bomb Curtis became really crazed. He had always suspected the boating trip was no accident. That’s when he turned up wearing the necklace of human ears.’ His voice rose slightly and he swallowed as if suppressing a sob. ‘We didn’t mean it, Jack. We put him in the wicker ball, to frighten him. To shut him up. He was making a scene. He wasn’t supposed to tumble down the stairs like that.’
‘Are you saying it was an accident?’
‘We had the ball perched on the top of the stairs, with him in it. We were making it see-saw on the edge, saying, “Are you going to be a good boy now, Curtis?” We were all a bit drunk. Then we stopped with it resting on the edge. Suddenly Roger kicked it and shouted, “Goal!” Down it went. It crunched each time it hit a step, and seemed to get faster … It’s a wonder Curtis didn’t wake the hotel with his cries. We rushed down, he was in a bad way, but he wasn’t dead. There was blood seeping onto the rug, and the vase was broken. We got him out and took his jacket off to examine his wounds. He was in a lot of pain, and no one knew what to do. So Spaulding and Roger rolled him up in the rug and put him in the boot of their car. They told me to bury the jacket and the shards of broken vase, which is what I did.’
I watched with strange fascination the track of a tear on his cheek. It formed on the lid of his eye, welling up slowly like a balloon being inflated. It clung heavily to a lash like snow overburdening a tree branch, and then it fell and slid slowly down the cheek to a point where it dropped onto the taut cotton of the pillow, making a sound like the ‘tock’ of a clock.
‘Now they are really scared,’ he continued, ‘in case Curtis goes public with what he knows. That’s why they are desperate to find him. That’s why they’re worried about you, Jack. They don’t know who you are. Roger thinks you are a detective hired by somebody to find Curtis. Spaulding thinks you work for the Russians.’
I stared in disbelief at this man whose face lay inches from mine, resting on a pillow wet with his tears. He raised a hand to dab them from his cheeks, and I saw how small and pudgy his hand was, almost like the flipper of a sealion.
‘Why on earth would he think that?’
‘Lots of reasons. Do you remember telling him about that spur line on the trans-Siberian railway? He says only a Russian would know something like that.’
‘That’s preposterous, everybody in my school knew it.’
‘Why do you care about Curtis, Jack?’
‘Millie, the woman who wrote the screenplay, was my mother.’
Earwig’s eyes widened in astonishment. ‘Oh my word. Oh my word.’ He paused and stared at my face as if seeing it for the first time.
‘I have discovered that she is dead.’
‘No, why do you think that?’
‘I found a fragment of the screenplay that described her funeral.’
‘No, Jack. That was a forgery. Curtis made it. I saw him do it. When he found out they were hunting for Millie he gave Spaulding the fragment describing her funeral. But Spaulding knew straight away it was fake, it was pretty poorly done. So he screwed it up and threw it away.’ He paused and wiped away a tear. ‘I honestly don’t know where they are, but Roger said he was going to see Mr Fink tonight. He was going to make him talk. He said, if Fink knew where Curtis was hiding, he would find out. And if he didn’t, it would be all the worse for him.’
I looked into his face. The passion that caused him to make an attempt on his own life seemed to have passed. In its place was another persona, the boy with the puppyish desire to please. I knew he was telling the truth.
I sat up and indicated to him that he should do the same. ‘Mr Earwig,’ I said, ‘I feel that tonight I have finally come to understand you. I would go so far as to say I regard you as a friend. If I leave you now, will you give me your word as a gentleman that you will not attempt another desperate deed like this?’
‘I swear, Jack. I swear I won’t.’
I thanked Mr Earwig and returned to the lobby, my thoughts chasing after each other
like moths around a lamp. A few hours ago I had been grieved to come by news that my mother must be dead. Now it appeared she might still be alive. I strode through the lobby in such a passion that I nearly bumped into the blind musicians who had been playing earlier and were preparing to leave.
A girl, hearing me pass, held out her cup and raised her eyes. I looked into them and found my gaze transfixed. The affliction that had taken her sight had also erased the distinction between iris and pupil. In its place was a featureless faintly bluish translucence, the colour of milk into which the tiniest drop of blue ink had fallen.
Suddenly I understood the cause of the bad blood between Curtis and Mr Fink, the dispute over a girl with blue eyes.
‘You good heart, sir.’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. I dropped a coin into her cup and thought, Roger will not think so when I have finished with him.
Chapter 21
The desk clerk hailed a boat that was long and thin, like a pencil, and gave the boatman directions for Mr Fink’s house. The boatman stood in the stern and rowed with a single oar, like a gondolier.
We crossed the river and entered the mouth of a broad shipping canal, before turning off and entering a channel scarcely wider than the boat. The stillness was broken only by the soft plash of the oar and the tinkling – like the highest notes at the far right of the piano keyboard – of water breaking against the side of the hull. On either side of us stood low wooden houses fronted with plants and statues of the Buddha and apricot-coloured earthenware tubs. Oil lamps shone softly from each dwelling. There was no sound. Now and then the sweet scent of incense pricked the nostrils.
Smoke always carries within it memories of other times. When you thunder across a landscape on a spring dawn, and all the world still sleeps – only the footplate team and rabbits in the fields are awake – you feel a joy in your heart that you see in young lambs when they frisk and run. Or in the depths of winter when snow lies thick upon the ground, all the fields are hidden beneath its blanket and the trees spread white. Nothing moves, all is bleak and frozen, still as stone. Or perhaps you pass a lane in which a lone man plods, and wonder keenly about him and the life he leads. At such time the chuffs seem deeper, more sombre, and the whistle more forlorn, but you shovel your coal, deeply contented by the knowledge that behind lies a string of warm compartments, cut off from the cold landscape, warmed by the steam from your boiler, illuminated with dim yellow light in which travellers head towards adventures as yet undisclosed. Few things have such power to move the heart as smoke.
The Corpse in the Garden of Perfect Brightness Page 22
