Neon Madman

by John Harvey

  ‘Hello, Charlie,’ I said, still doing my best to be pleasant.

  After all, when two guys break into your office, knock a couple of teeth out of your head, bruise your jaw and send you unconscious for an hour or so, steal your gun, tie you so tight to the office chair that your circulation is seriously threatened, and thoughtfully leave the cricket commentary on when they step out for lunch, the very least you can do is be nice to them.

  Well, isn’t it?

  There just isn’t any pleasing some people. The thin one came over to where I was sitting and held out his right hand towards me. I would have shaken it, but on account of all that red flex it was more than I could manage. Then the hand moved up towards his face and I thought we were going to get the eye-popping routine again. In a way I was right, only it was my eyes he was going to try it with, not his own.

  The thin hand lashed around the upper part of my face like a whip and by the fourth stroke I was stinging like all hell and I opened my mouth and called him a nasty name. A very nasty name.

  It wasn’t a very politic thing to do in the circumstances, but at times like that your instincts take over. And my instinct had been to make one or two slightly outrageous suggestions about the possible causes of his rather strange appearance.

  I should have known better.

  The bony back of his hand struck me once more, at the side of the mouth this time. I hardly had the opportunity to lick at the trail of blood before he stepped away—far enough so that he could take a kick in my direction. I gasped as the toecap dug in underneath my ribs and the chair shifted backwards a couple of feet. He wasn’t about to finish there. The same leg sprang back at me, the toe going into the centre of my stomach this time and the heel missing my balls by a miracle and less than an inch. This time the chair overbalanced and I went with it.

  I shouted out as my wrists clashed with the floor awkwardly and rolled over sideways.

  ‘Stand the pig up!’ Charlie ordered.

  Big G reached down and lifted the chair with me in it off the floor as though it was empty. He held us aloft in the humid silence of the office. I hadn’t noticed earlier that the radio had been switched off. Not that I thought it mattered. The West Indian brought the chair back down to the floor with a force that broke two of its legs and almost did the same for mine.

  I wondered if they were intending to play with me for the rest of the afternoon, or whether they had anything more serious in mind. Big G must have been thinking the same thing. He said something I couldn’t catch to Charlie and as a result of that the two of them came and stood in front of me, blocking out the window and increasing the almost claustrophobic feeling of heat.

  But at least they might be going to talk to me for a while instead of making as though I was some kind of oversize rag doll.

  They stood there like that for several minutes and all I could do was wait and see what would come next. There didn’t even seem to be any point in smiling. By now they’d made it clear it wasn’t a friendly visit

  Eventually they got fed up with the silent intimidation bit and Charlie went and fetched another chair. The other chair. He placed it down a few feet away from me with its back towards me. Then he sat astride it and glared with his one good eye. I tried to remember which movie I’d seen that in first. It was probably some hard-boiled New York cop movie, something like ‘Detective Story.’ Only they wouldn’t have cast Charlie in a movie: no one would have believed him.

  As if to prove me right, he did the popping thing with his glass eye again, only this time he rested it on the top of one of the legs of the chair.

  I hoped it would pick up enough dirt and dust either to infect his goddamned socket or else to mage him itch to death. He didn’t seem any too worried. His attention was on other things. Like the knife that had appeared in his right hand.

  It was a cute little thing with a black shiny hilt and a curved blade that was about four inches long. Little but very, very sharp.

  He proved this by making a few simple cuts into the top of the chair. It was like carving butter someone had forgotten to put back in the fridge. I thought that if he started on me the result might be the same.

  Maybe he didn’t have anything like that in mind. Maybe all that he wanted was a chance to put the frighteners on. If that was so, he was doing a pretty good job.

  ‘Mitchell, I don’t know ’ow to say this, but you’re a fool. You’re so fuckin’ stupid that if someone showed you a fieldful of shit you’d dive into it headfirst. An’ if that didn’t bleedin’ suffocate you the first time, you’d get up and try again.’

  He started to make patterns on the back of the chair with the edge of the knife. I was conscious of the way the line of sweat down the centre of my back was running twice as fast; the palms of my hands were dry and starting to itch; at the side of my temple a pulse was flickering crazily. I looked from the empty pink socket to his one good eye. It leered back at me in a way that I couldn’t at first understand.

  Then I did. I’d seen that expression before. In a kid of seventeen I’d come face to face with on the landing of a block of flats in south London. He’d had a knife, too; only his had been taken from the butcher’s shop where he worked. It was nine inches in length and was used for carving joints of raw meat away from the bone. Usually. Nine inches long and the blood close to the hilt still hadn’t dried. That kid hadn’t been carving dead meat.

  I knew. I’d just come out of the ninth floor flat where he lived. There was blood there, too, but that was splashed up on to the walls and clogging the pile of the carpet. Some was still left in the bodies of his parents and his twelve-year-old sister, but it couldn’t have been much. Nobody has that much blood in them.

  The kid was wearing plimsols and they’d left a ribbed pattern of dark red on the stone stairs. He stood there with the knife in his right hand, the left one open, extended, waving me forwards, wanting to feel the juddering impact of the blade entering flesh and forcing against bone. He looked at me and the look had been the same as that which now came from Charlie. Except that Charlie only had one eye.

  I knew what had happened with the kid because it was over—except on long hot nights when it was impossible to sleep and he stepped carefully down the steps from my dreams. What happened was that there’d been a shout from below and I’d looked round to see Tom Gilmour standing four steps down. There were two uniformed men behind him, but it was Tom who held the gun.

  After three weeks on remand awaiting trial the kid had got hold of a razor. Nobody had ever worked out how. It wasn’t a new blade and it hadn’t been easy to slash his wrists and his neck the way he had. It had been too blunt and rusty to make a clean job of it. He’d had to make a lot of strokes before it had been enough.

  Charlie’s one eye was still staring at me hard and he still looked as crazy as anyone I’d ever seen: as crazy as a seventeen-year-old with a butcher’s knife.

  He moved the short blade away from the chair and passed it across in front of my face. I didn’t want to blink but I couldn’t help myself. And then the point pressed against the bone at the centre of my forehead. Pressed in until it had pierced the skin. Charlie drew a line across the front of my head and pulled the knife away.

  Back in focus, I could see a single bubble of blood at the knife’s point. It was surprisingly scarlet, bright. I watched as he lifted the blade to his lips and licked the blood away.

  Then he opened his mouth and gave out with another of his high-pitched hyena laughs.

  The big West Indian moved closer to him and put a hand down on his shoulder.

  ‘Charlie,’ he said. ‘Charlie.’ The voice was low and deep and there was a lot more feeling in it than there might have been.

  The knife rested against the back of the chair; the eye blinked. Along my forehead blood mingled with sweat and ran round the ridge of my eyebrow and down the side of my cheek.

 
Charlie said, ‘See, Mitchell, you just don’t want to learn.’ He carried on as though the last few silent minutes had never happened. Perhaps they hadn’t. ‘Big G ’ere came round to see you and listened to the little story you told ’im. Almost believed you, ’e did. We sent a couple of the boys out to let you know we was watching and what do you do? Attack ’em for no reason at all. It wasn’t a clever move, Mitchell. Especially since you’d been seeing that little Irishman who writes about all them money things. Now, I don’t see as ’ow that could be to do with divorce. That was what you said you were workin’ on, wasn’t it, sweetheart, divorce?’

  My tongue against the roof of my mouth was sand against sand.

  ‘He’s just a friend, it had nothing to …’

  A hand flashed at my head but fortunately it was the other hand. It slapped my face hard.

  Charlie’s voice was getting higher, closer to losing control. ‘You stupid, fuckin’ liar! Who d’you think we are? Mugs? Fools you can unload your crap on? You were asking questions about Murdoch, weren’t you? Same as you were creeping about down the river after Murdoch. We know, Mitchell, we know!’

  He stood up and a hand came for me and it was the one with the knife and my eyes closed themselves and I waited. Nothing happened. I opened my eyes again. The knife was inches away from my throat. The veins bulged from the wrist beyond it. Behind that a huge brown hand was clamped across the wiry arm, holding it fast

  ‘No, Charlie. No. Not now.’

  I watched as the veins relaxed, the fingers around the handle became less white; the intervening hand opened and loosed its hold. I breathed for the first time in a lot of uncountable seconds.

  Charlie reached out his left hand and retrieved the glass eye. The knife disappeared from sight. Big G moved the now empty chair away from in front of me.

  ‘That’s telling it to you, man. There won’t be no more warnings. You got yourself mixed up in things that don’t concern you. Stay clear. Whatever it is you think you got hold of, let go. If you don’t, it’s going to turn right around and bite your head off. If you don’t, then Charlie’s going to come and see you again. And next time, he’ll come alone.’

  I think I nodded my head. I can’t be sure. I watched as the two of them walked out of the inner office; listened as the footsteps moved out of earshot.

  Now it was just me in a hot sweaty room with red flex round my arms and a line of steadily congealing blood across my face. For a long time I sat there, thinking; then for an even longer time I tried to get myself untied.

  By the time I managed that the first West Indian innings, against all possible expectations, had almost totally collapsed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  There was usually a bottle of Southern Comfort in the office to console me during those hours when I thought I was the only human being left on earth. Some weeks it got emptied pretty fast. The week before this had been one of those. And I’d only been able to replace it with a bottle of Scotch. It was good Scotch, but to a Southern Comfort man that isn’t any excuse.

  Right then, though, it didn’t seem to matter. I could have lit up at the thought of a bottle of Vimto and a straw.

  Whatever happened to Vimto?

  After the second shot, I had sufficient circulation back in my arms to be able to hold the bottle aloft for long periods at a time. Which was fine. It meant I could dispense with the glass and to hell with good manners.

  I didn’t see anyone around who was about to object.

  I didn’t want to see anyone around.

  Most especially I didn’t want to see a tall skinny one-eyed cockney freak with a penchant for knives and a big West Indian who could have doubled for any three good heavyweights you could care to mention—or any five British ones. I didn’t want to see any worried, suspicious little husbands or randy, bored housewives from the upper mortgage belt. I didn’t want to see any master financiers with murky pasts who might or might not be inhabiting a murky present. Nor did I want to see any elegant doe-eyed brunettes who could have me eating out of their hand just as easily as they could get me mixed up in murder.

  To hell with all of them!

  Why should I care?

  I hit the bottle to my lips one more time and with a perfect sense of occasion the phone rang. I carried on drinking and listened to it. It may have only been Scotch but it sure tasted good. It had blood and sweat beat by a long, long margin.

  I lowered the bottle just as the phone stopped. We should go into partnership.

  It could ring again for all I cared. I was strictly out. Why should I get any further involved in the whole business? All I was supposed to do was to find out if one guy’s wife had been doing a little cheating on him and find this woman’s husband after he’d been missing for all of one night. That was all. Only it had been pointed out to me no less than twice that there was more to it than that and that if I persisted in making my enquiries I would end up in a rather nasty predicament, or, to put it another way, dead.

  All right. So I’d do the sensible thing and opt out right now. Wouldn’t I? I mean, the fact that I’d taken a couple of retainers didn’t count for much. Whoever heard of an honest private eye outside of a book or a movie?

  Like, who the fuck do you think I am? Philip Marlowe?

  I was just drinking to that when the phone did it again. I picked it up and got half-way through telling the party at the other end that I was the answering service and that Scott Mitchell had been called away from town for an indefinite period when I recognised her voice.

  ‘What is it, Mrs Murdoch?’ I asked.

  I didn’t remember that I was supposed to be calling her Caroline and she didn’t remind me. She must have been thinking of other things. I also managed to forget that she was one of the last people on the world I wanted anything to do with. It’s amazing how forgetful you can be when you’re listening to a voice as smooth as that and you’re a quarter of a bottle into some Scotch.

  Besides, underneath that smoothness, she sounded frightened. And I didn’t think she was acting.

  ‘I … I’ve had a telephone call. A short while ago. I tried phoning you but there wasn’t any reply.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I’ve been sort of tied up all afternoon.’

  ‘Can you come to the house?’

  ‘Can’t you tell me about it now?’

  ‘I’d rather not, if that’s possible.’

  ‘Was it from your husband?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I hesitated and she tried saying please. She said it very nicely. It took me a while to make up my mind. All of five seconds.

  ‘I’ve got one or two things to do first, but I’ll get over there as soon as I can.’

  I thought about telling her not to answer the door to anyone except me, but I thought that might get her more worried than ever. So I contented myself with saying, take care. It was only after I’d put the phone down that I realised it was a long time since I’d said that to anyone. And meant it.

  I checked my watch and dialled Robert Pollard’s office number. All I raised was the cleaning lady. I thought about ringing him at home but decided against it. He’d either have to catch me himself or endure the wait until the weekend was over.

  Next I called the guy who did my photo work for me. He was still hard at it—probably yet another set of blue prints for the tired-eyed raincoat trade. Prints to be held in the left hand only.

  He wasn’t too pleased that I hadn’t collected them sooner. After all a rush job was a rush job. I told him I’d been busy and apologised. I didn’t waste my tied up line on him. There wasn’t much point in sharing a joke with someone who wasn’t going to be able to see the point.

  I told him I’d be round inside half an hour and made the third call.

  Frances McGaven answered the phone and when she heard who it was she became as distant as the farthest star. She went an
d fetched Patrick anyway but God knows she didn’t like doing it.

  Patrick had rather an abstracted air, as though I’d dragged him away from the middle of yet another chess problem. I asked him if he knew who at the Fraud Squad had investigated the Mancor group and produced the whitewash.

  He thought a little, as though contemplating shifting one of his pawns into a position of some danger. It gave me time to think about chess: the most powerful figure was the queen.

  ‘Is that what it was? A whitewash?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘But you obviously think so.’

  ‘Well, Murdoch got his name out of the limelight as soon as they started sniffing round which suggests that he, at least, thought there would be some dirt flying about and didn’t want too much of it to get stuck to him. Then nothing happened.’

  ‘He could have been wrong.’

  It didn’t sound probable and it didn’t really need me to say so. It wasn’t likely that Murdoch would be involved in a company without knowing something about the way they were operating. And with the information I’d had from his wife about the sort of people they were, it seemed pretty conclusive. I said as much to Patrick. It brought on another spell of thinking. He did a lot of that, Patrick, thinking. I’d never gone in for it much myself. Not unless you include self-pity.

  ‘You think someone was bribed, then?’

  ‘It’s possible. A nice little bundle of unsequenced fivers wrapped in newspaper and left on the table in the quiet corner of the pub before the evening trade picks up.’

  ‘You sound as though you were there.’

  ‘I was,’ I told him. ‘I’ve been there dozens of times. Policemen are as honest as the next man and he’s probably fancying your wife, envying your car, and he’s got his left hand in your wallet pocket while he shakes hands with you with his right.’

  ‘You’re a cynical bastard, aren’t you?’

  ‘Only since I woke up.’

  ‘When was that?’