Neon Madman

by John Harvey

  She let the sentence trail off into visions of hard-earned luxury that made my heart break into a hundred pieces, each of them gilt-edged.

  ‘You’re hiring me?’ I wanted to be sure she didn’t think I was going to find her old man for a favour.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘All right. I shall want a nice cheque for a retainer and something to cover expenses. Then you’d better give me a list of places your husband might be, as far as you know them. I can’t promise to turn up too much, but I’ll try. And one other thing …’

  ‘Yes?’ She hadn’t really believed I was going to let her off that easily.

  ‘I had a friend asking questions about your husband’s business interests. For reasons of my own. When he came across the Mancor connection he also came across a line in brick walls that makes the Great Wall of China look like something you might have at the bottom of your garden. Come to think of it, you probably have. Then when I mentioned the name to you on the phone this morning it was as though I’d suddenly said a very dirty word in the nursery.’

  ‘So?’ The ice was back with a vengeance. It hadn’t done anything about the line of sweat that was chasing down my back and threatening to stick me to the settee. It hadn’t done anything about that but it was wreaking havoc with what little composure I might have had left.

  ‘So,’ I managed, ‘before I’ll agree to act for you I want you to know something about what Mancor is and how your old man came to be mixed up in it. Remember, you didn’t say disappeared, you said murdered.’

  She closed her eyes and allowed me to stare at the perfection of her face. For a sickening instant I was gazing at a mask, a death mask. Whoever she had been, whatever living, breathing woman had once existed beneath that exterior didn’t seem to exist any more.

  Then she sighed and stood up; walked over towards the door and pressed a discreet bell alongside the frame. Almost immediately the little Chinaman appeared like a character out of pantomime.

  ‘I want a drink. What would you like?’

  I realised she was talking to me and said a Scotch and ice would be fine. She relayed the order and asked for a Campari soda for herself. We both filled in the time before the drinks appeared by pretending we were characters in a play who had suddenly found ourselves between acts and with the curtain down. Only it was between us.

  When she’d finally downed half of the contents of the glass, she went back to her black statuette. It seemed to be some kind of a familiar and I didn’t like what that suggested about her.

  I took a swig at the Scotch. It was good. I said, ‘You were going to tell me about Mancor.’

  She gave that beautiful sigh again and began. ‘Before he took over his present position, James worked abroad. He got involved in the wrong company—he loves gambling you know, with cards as well as women. Somehow, some rather unscrupulous characters got their hooks into him. At first they were content to bleed him for money. But when he returned to this country and became a comparatively big name in the city, they realised that there was something more they could take from him. His name. They were anxious to set themselves up a legitimate business front and James’ name on their board of directors would give them a respectability they could not hope to achieve otherwise.’

  ‘And he agreed to compromise himself like that?’ It didn’t sound too likely.

  ‘Scott, he was already compromised in ways it is best not to consider. My husband’s sexual appetites are not always what might be considered normal.’ She gave a look that was a mixture of distaste and pain.

  I nodded. ‘But what happened six months ago?’

  She stared back at me blankly.

  ‘Your husband’s name was taken off the Mancor letter heads. Apparently he resigned all connections with them.’

  Again the hand made as if to move towards my own, then thought better of it. I wished she would stop practising her self control. I had the feeling that if she ever let go the results would be spectacular.

  ‘There was a scare at Mancor. Someone tipped the police off about some irregularities in their finance. James resigned before the Fraud Squad moved in.’

  ‘They allowed him to? The Mancor people, I mean.’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Nothing. Either it was a false alarm or someone managed to effect a cover up in time. Certainly there was no talk of any prosecution.’

  ‘Possibly someone was reached.’

  She gave me a look which was meant to suggest that she didn’t understand. Maybe she really didn’t.

  ‘A little cash in the right hands can work miracles.’

  ‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t know about that.’

  ‘Is he still paying them money?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. We have quite separate accounts now and James no longer discusses such things with me.’

  ‘And you don’t go through his cheque stubs like a good wife?’

  She put down her empty glass and stood up. ‘I believe you wanted a cheque from me, Mr Mitchell. And a list of names and places. If you will excuse me for a few moments.’

  She turned and walked out of the room. It was some sight. While I waited for her to return I tried to think but it wasn’t easy. I’d made some progress with Caroline Murdoch even if we were finishing the interview back on last name terms. I could always work on that one another time.

  Ten minutes later the Chinese servant was smiling and holding open the front door. I had a substantial cheque in my pocket and I reckoned I was lucky to be leaving having lost nothing more than a few pounds of weight. I said goodbye and stepped out into the sunlight. It was approaching its strongest and I reached for a pair of sunglasses and slipped them on.

  In a way they helped, but overall they only added to the darkness I was wandering around in. Every time a few more facts got added the number of possibilities grew so large that there didn’t seem to be any direction to take.

  I looked at my watch and wondered what sort of plans Marcia Pollard had for lunch—like who was she eating today?

  Hell! It was too damned hot and after sitting that close to Caroline Murdoch I couldn’t rouse more than a nicker of interest. I got into the car and headed for Covent Garden and my office.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The garden was one of those places that had been declared dead but refused to lie down. The authorities had moved the fruit and vegetable market out to a new and more hygienic home and set out to organise the demolition of what was left behind. They wanted to knock all the old buildings down and erect a lot of new blocks of offices and flats in their place. They smashed down a whole street and the next time they looked a landscaped garden had appeared amongst the rubble. They put up ugly bare fencing and overnight it was covered with multi-coloured murals. They ordered tradesmen and shopkeepers to quit and when they came back to check found that they were still there.

  I held fast along with them. Partly it was because I didn’t take any too kindly to being pushed around; partly I was lazy. I liked it where I was and I didn’t fancy setting up office somewhere else.

  It was a good office. When you didn’t look too closely at the cracks in the plaster or the dust between the floorboards; when you didn’t notice that it was too cold in the winter and that at times like this the only way you could stop yourself withering up was to leave all the windows open and take off most of your clothes.

  Whoever had got there before me must have found that out pretty quickly. I’d left the windows shut last night but now, looking up to the first floor, I could see that they were open wide. I wondered idly if whoever it was had taken their clothes off. I parked the car across the street and decided that I might as well find out.

  It might be good news. It might be another client. It might be a couple of sixteen-year-old girls who wanted nothing less than to have their wicked w
ay with me and to hell with the heat.

  Only half a dozen steps up from the entrance I knew that it wouldn’t be any of those things. The kind of fantasies that came true in my life were usually other people’s and seldom my own.

  The outer office was wide open and through it I could see the other door had been left ajar. A curl of bluish smoke moved lazily through the air in the inner room. I could see the edge of my desk and I wasted a few thoughts about the Smith and Wesson .38 that was nestling down in the drawer along with a handful of old letters and a few packets of photographs.

  I shut the first door behind me and held my breath. Nothing happened. They weren’t going to come to me. I shrugged my shoulders and flicked some of the sweat away from my eyebrows. Wiped my finger along my trousers and went on in.

  The West Indian was making an attempt to sit on one of the office chairs and looking decidedly uncomfortable about it. He might as well have tried to get his feet into a pair of size fives. He looked up at me and opened his mouth as if to say something. I caught a quick flash of gold-filled teeth before he changed his mind and remained silent.

  By then I was looking elsewhere. And with good reason.

  The second man was standing in front of the window, both hands behind his back. He took a little looking at; he wasn’t the kind of guy you saw every day. Every other day perhaps.

  He was the same height as me. Around an inch over six feet. That was where the similarities ended. He was thin and wiry; his patterned mauve and yellow shirt was open to the waist and it was possible to count the ribs from across the room. He had on a pair of light blue jeans that he could only have got into by using a shoe horn. A pair of open buffalo sandals showed bony and dirty feet. None of that mattered.

  What did were his hair and face. The hair was dark brown except for a broad streak of white which began behind his head on the right and swept across it diagonally until it fell across his left temple. The face was as thin and gaunt as the rest of him, with two high cheekbones threatening to break through the stretched skin. His right eyebrow didn’t exist and the dull roundness of the eye beneath it looked out oddly on the world. On my office. On me standing in the middle of it.

  Or did it?

  He reached upwards with the middle finger of his right hand and slowly, slowly, so that I could not miss what was happening, he pushed the edge of the finger hard into the socket. The eye plopped out and down, to nestle in the open palm of his other hand. The space that remained was deep pink.

  As I watched the other eye winked.

  ‘’Ello, Mr Mitchell. I can see we’ll ’ave to keep an eye on you.’

  The laugh that followed his own joke was strange and high-pitched; it didn’t seem to come from inside his body at all, rather from some hideous mechanism hidden inside that weird head. It was mechanical, jarring—yet as hollow as the empty eye socket I was trying unsuccessfully not to stare into.

  ‘You’ve met my friend, Big G, before. My name’s Charlie. You won’t go and forget that, Mr Mitchell, will you? You wouldn’t forget a nice lookin’ feller like Charlie?’

  I didn’t answer. The trouble with characters like Charlie is that you never knew the best way to talk to them; whatever you said was almost bound to be wrong. If there was one thing I couldn’t cope with it was a nutter. And take it from me that’s what Charlie was: a nutter. A down-and-out head case. Only his best friends wouldn’t commit him.

  In that heat his fake eye had to be getting pretty hot inside his hand. It was probably sticking to it right now. I don’t know why, but the thought bothered me. I think I just wanted him to cover up the obscene pink space on the right side of his face.

  ‘You see, Mr Mitchell, I thought Big G and I ought to come over and see you, like, and make a few things clear. After all, that was what you said, wasn’t it? If we wanted to say anything to you, come over to your office. So that’s what we’ve done. I ’ope it proves to you ’ow we’re reasonable men. Reasonable men, Mr Mitchell.’

  He lobbed the glass eye up into the air a few inches and caught it without looking what he was doing.

  ‘Though I do think as ’ow you might ’ave treated our two friends with a little more consideration last night. Real bad, they looked. Real bad, Mr Mitchell. They was only put on you to let you know we was watchin’ what you was up to. They wasn’t told to fix you nor nothin’.’ He grinned a lopsided grin. ‘If we’d wanted to do that, we’d ’ave got Big G to settle you earlier. I mean, that stands to reason, don’t it?’

  He smiled and I sensed the big West Indian get off the chair and move close up behind me. I thought I knew what was going to happen and I wasn’t sure if I could prevent it.

  ‘Maybe,’ I tried, ‘we could do a deal.’

  Charlie liked that. You could tell by that high laugh that cut through the heat of the room. I could smell the perspiration of the West Indian’s body and the stink of the cigar he had been smoking.

  ‘Sure,’ Charlie sniggered, ‘we’ll do a deal with you, Mitchell. Only it’ll ’ave to be afterwards.’

  He threw the eyeball upwards from his left hand, caught it with his right and jammed it back into place. I hoped that the one behind me was watching it too. That would give me a split second’s start. Even then it probably wouldn’t be enough; but at least I would know I’d tried.

  I feinted to my left and rammed my elbow back into what I hoped was his gut. It was like hitting an orthopaedic mattress. The looping left I threw next was a little more successful. But success hitting a guy like that could only be relative. At least it turned his head to one side long enough for me to be encouraged to take a sock at his unguarded chin. My right fist got as far as an open palm that caught it as easy as Pat Jennings making a one-handed save. Then throwing it back out.

  I went back against the side wall and fell heavily on one knee. With a shout and a scramble I headed towards the desk. He came after me. He wasn’t trying awful hard and that should have worried me a whole lot more than it did.

  Behind him I could see the freak show standing patiently watching what was going on. Perhaps it was nice to be the audience for once. I hurled a few things off the top of the desk in Big G’s face and followed that up by trying to ram the desk itself into the top of his legs.

  The impact jarred my wrists. But so what: I had the right hand drawer open fast and my hand went in for the gun.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ No wonder the big black bastard wasn’t in a hurry. And no wonder one-eyed Charlie thought he could stand back and let it all happen. Nothing much was going to happen. Not from me, it wasn’t. They’d taken the fucking gun!

  Charlie’s high-pitched laugh cut through the atmosphere and I was reminded of a film I’d seen about hyenas in the African bush. His friend pushed the desk out of the way without the least effort and came for me. There didn’t seem to be much future in trading punches with him, but then again I couldn’t figure out an alternative. As it was he swopped one combination shot of his own for a flurry of mine and it was all over. As far as I was concerned.

  If there’d been a towel around I might have tried throwing it in, though there might not have been time even for that. The last thing I saw was Big G turning his back on me and walking away towards Charlie, who was scratching at his cheek with the barrel of a Smith and Wesson. My Smith and Wesson.

  But I wasn’t about to complain. I was about to take a little sleep.

  Something was pushing itself between my teeth. Op at the top on the left hand side, forcing itself between a gap that I couldn’t remember having been there before. I sat there and tried very hard to concentrate on it. I wasn’t certain why, but it seemed important. What right had it to be messing around with my mouth? The gap didn’t feel even; there were jagged little edges and a crevice that seemed much deeper than I hoped it could possibly be.

  I started to hear voices in the background and somehow they seemed to bring my m
outh into perspective. The hole in my teeth got smaller and I realised that the probing thing was my tongue. I told it to stay still and then listened to the voices.

  It should have been the two guys who had waylaid me in the office, but it wasn’t. One deepish voice, talking fairly constantly with another, colder and more authoritative cutting across at intervals. I kept picking up the word snow and wondered if there’d been a sudden change in the weather. Then I tuned in on the fact that it was a commentary on the Test Match.

  My mind clicked slowly into gear. Second day from Lords. It sounded as though the West Indies were batting and not doing all that well. I opened an eye and risked a quick look out. I was still in my office and it appeared to be empty of anyone else but me. Perhaps they’d nipped out for something to eat.

  I tried the other eye and made to move my arms. I couldn’t. They were tied to the chair with red flex. I tested the strength of the knots. They were tied tight. But no one had bothered about my feet.

  The window across the room was still half open.

  Without being too sure what I was going to do when I got there, I began to rock and hop over the room. It wasn’t easy progress and half-way there I almost toppled right over backwards. I had another delve between my newly broken teeth just as a means of reassuring myself of what was going on, then headed for the window once more.

  I was five feet away when I heard them coming through the outer office.

  There wasn’t anything else for it: I looked round my shoulder and prepared to give them my best smile.

  The huge shape of Big G filled the doorway and from the expression on his face smiling wasn’t going to do me any good. The West Indians must have been more wickets down than I had thought. Maybe they were playing the wrong men. If they had this fellow out there in front of the stumps the ball wouldn’t get past him all day. And if he hit it, it would lift right out of the ground.

  He grunted and moved aside to let Charlie into the room, looking just as cute as ever.