Singleton's Law

by Reginald Hill

  Whitey was persuaded and followed King forward without further words.

  The back of the shop at first sight seemed impenetrable. The windows were boarded up and the single door presented a smooth solid face to the yard, uninterrupted even by handle or key-hole. Obviously no-one was ever expected to make a legitimate entry by this route.

  The first floor windows looked more promising. Two weren’t shuttered, and of these one even had a small upper casement ajar.

  “Can you climb?” asked King.

  “If the incentive’s right,” said Whitey.

  The answer was bold, but he recognized that his sadly ill-used body was nearing a point beyond reaction to even the strongest incentive. He looked up at the sun. Late afternoon. Could it possibly still be only yesterday that he had been sitting in the Jap-Line airbus on his way to the Sudan?

  “Come on!” hissed King.

  Using the boards hammered across the lower windows as a rough ladder, he was now some fifteen feet off the ground and had a handhold on the first floor windowsill.

  Whitey joined him, exercising a great deal of care, partly because of his own weakened state and partly because the planks on which they were both standing seemed very resentful of this unexpected weight.

  “Grab the sill,” ordered King. Whitey obeyed and without further ado King began to scramble upwards, using Whitey’s body indiscriminately for toe and knee-holds.

  Once on the sill, he hooked one arm through the open casement and reached the other hand down to Whitey.

  It was as well he did. Suddenly Whitey felt the board he was standing on begin to give. His grip on the sill was nowhere near strong enough to support him for more than a couple of seconds. Panic-stricken, he flailed out with his left hand, felt King grasp his wrist, felt also the board slip away from beneath his feet and heard it clatter into the yard below. Then with unsuspected strength, the frail figure of King drew him upwards till he was able to get a leg athwart the narrow sill and contribute once more to his own support.

  As soon as he saw Whitey was all right, King released him, leaned through the small casement and unlatched the main window. He jumped through and pulled Whitey after him.

  They found themselves in a small stock room. Whitey saw he had been right and that it was a clothes shop they had entered. Stiffly he rose to his feet and began to investigate.

  King meanwhile had moved to the door where he crouched, gun in hand, listening intently.

  “We’re in…” began Whitey excitedly but tailed off as King hushed him to silence with a viciousness he had not believed a ‘shush!’ could contain. The youth beckoned him closer and whispered in his ear.

  “They’ve probably got a Sec-man,” he said. “If someone heard that plank fall …”

  He didn’t need to say more. Most sizeable shops now employed a Sec-man to stand by the main entrance and watch for trouble. It was a popular employment with ex-Strikers.

  “Do you hear anything?” whispered Whitey.

  “No.”

  “Perhaps they’re closed?”

  “Possibly. With the First Team about, there won’t be many people shopping. OK. Let’s give it a try.”

  “Hang on,” said Whitey. “We’re in luck.”

  He went to a rack of new coats standing against a wall, picked one of the right size and put it on. It was of an antique style and cut compared with the American clothing he had become used to, but it provided an excellent cover for the purple-splashed brown suit he had borrowed from John Caldercote.

  King nodded approval and joined him, quickly making his choice. They were mostly in shades of Athletic red, but to Whitey’s surprise King followed his own example and chose a light brown shade, one of the few non-significant colours left since red, blue, green and yellow had been appropriated by the Four Clubs. He put his gun down to get his arms through the sleeves which were rather narrow. At precisely the moment when both his hands were jammed halfway down their respective sleeves, the door opened.

  It was a woman. She opened her mouth to scream as she spotted them, but the shock of their appearance, particularly the monstrous purple of most of Whitey’s face, constricted her throat just too long, and Whitey’s fingers were there, redoubling the pressure.

  “Not a word,” he snarled, dragging her into the room and shutting the door. “Not a word or you’re dead!”

  He was not going to repeat his error of over-gentleness with Nancy. King raised his eyebrows at him, smiling slightly, and finished putting on his coat.

  “Better,” he said looking down at himself. “It’s a pity masks aren’t in fashion, though.”

  “Hang on,” said Whitey. He turned to the terrified woman and started going through the pockets of the red over-all she was wearing, finding what he wanted almost instantly. Triumphantly he held it up. Again an anachronism in American terms, but still to be found in plenty over here.

  A powder compact.

  When he’d finished using it, he and King still looked distinctly odd, but it was a different kind of oddness from being purple-faced.

  “We might pass for a couple of glibs,” said Whitey.

  “Or reluctant lepers,” said King, examining himself in the compact mirror. “Now all we want are hats to cover our bonny purple hair.”

  The woman suddenly made a move and the gun was in King’s hand in an instant. But she ignored it, pulling open a drawer to reveal an assortment of Athletic headgear.

  “Thanks,” said King choosing a floppy cap, while Whitey opted for a kind of woollen night-cap which he pulled down over his ears, thus affording him maximum coverage.

  “Doesn’t he look nice,” said King to the woman who obediently turned to look at Whitey. The barrel of the gun took her just above the ear and she fell senseless with hardly a noise.

  “Why the hell did you do that?” demanded Whitey furiously. “She was helping us.”

  “With the hats? No. That was just reaction. She’d realized we weren’t going to rape her. They’re always so relieved when they realize that, haven’t you noticed? But she’d have shrieked her head off the minute we left. Come on!”

  The storeroom door opened on to a small alcove at the back of the first floor sales area. There was no-one in sight. King had been right. The presence of the First Team in town sent people heading for home. Even good local Supporters knew better than to risk being yussed by accident.

  Downstairs Whitey realized King had been right again. A Sec-man stood by the door, complete with black crash-helmet and truncheon. Worse, he was chatting with a couple of First Team Strikers. Obviously he was a retired member himself and they were discussing common acquaintances. Happily the shop was not too brightly lit and they were able to pause unseen on a small landing till the Strikers went on their way, though their farewell exchange, spoken in rather louder voices as they moved off, was not very comforting.

  “Watch out for any of these wankers,” said one of the men.

  “And we want them alive,” warned the other; rather spoiling things by adding, “So they can talk, that is; not necessarily so they can walk!”

  They disappeared and King murmured, “No point in waiting. He’s not going anywhere.”

  Swiftly they descended the remaining stairs. Whitey caught a glimpse of himself in a full length mirror as they crossed the shop floor and his heart sank. Even if the Sec-man decided he just hadn’t noticed these two customers enter (unlikely, in the case of a well-trained forward as this one seemed to be) he would have to be half blind and totally incurious not to take note of their exiting.

  He was neither half-blind nor totally incurious and he stood across the door as they approached, effectively blocking their exit.

  “Excuse me,” said King. “Do you own a car?”

  The question clearly surprised the Sec-man as much as it did Whitey. His hand which had been moving easily down to his truncheon paused now.

  “What?” he said “Yes.”

  “That’s good. We’d like to borrow it. I
s it parked close?”

  As he spoke King took his hand out of his pocket for a moment and showed the man his gun. The man licked his lips, more pensively than in fear, and looked from King to Whitey who had the wit to thrust his own right hand deeper into his newly stolen coat’s pocket and make a menacing movement.

  “Let’s go find it, shall we?” said King. “Nice and easy now. Nothing sudden. We don’t want to have to take your name.”

  A good Striker knows when to drop back in defence, as the proverb says, and the Sec-man turned without argument and led them into the almost deserted street. They walked for half a minute toward the Martyrs’ Memorial. As they approached it, King said conversationally, “If we don’t reach your car in another thirty seconds, there’s going to be another martyr.”

  They were at it in fifteen.

  “Keys,” said King. As the Sec-man handed them over, Whitey wondered gloomily what they were going to do with him. He had less objection to King’s method of disposal in this case, but the wide open spaces of the Corn with a couple of red-suited Strikers still visible in the distance was not the best of places to flatten somebody.

  Suddenly the Sec-man arranged things for them. He did it all by the book. The keys slipped through his fingers. King involuntarily stooped to catch them, the truncheon leapt into the Sec-man’s hand and flailed round against the top of Whitey’s right arm with numbing force. If he had been grasping a gun in his pocket, he wouldn’t have been able to use it, which was of course the Sec-man’s intention. It was certainly all very much by the book, but it killed the Sec-man. For Whitey had no gun, so could have been ignored. And King was of first team quality in a higher league than any known to the Sec-man. His move for the keys had been but the shadow of a reflex, just enough to anger him at his own weakness, and the gun in his pocket had spoken twice before the truncheon could be cocked for a second blow.

  Whitey thought he had become used to pain but discovered that it takes a lot to wear the fine edge off a man’s appreciation. He staggered against the car, clutching his arm and once more had to be dragged to safety by King, who was already inside.

  The reason for his haste quickly became clear. The two distant Strikers had turned, even at a distance of a quartermile recognizing the report of King’s gun. Now they were sprinting towards them, whistles blowing, and even as King flung the car into a tyre-rending U-turn and headed north, a pursuit vehicle came nosing out of the Broad to rendezvous briefly with the two Strikers, then take up the chase.

  For the next half-hour Whitey stopped thinking. At first he stared in terror out of the rear window, then in even greater terror out of the front. King was bent on thrusting the road into the car’s bonnet like an Italian eating spaghetti. Finally he closed his eyes and let his mind go blank.

  Even then some impressions of the chase forced themselves in. The pursuit vehicle had the greater speed, but King knew the roads better. He had very rapidly turned off the main Banbury Road and squeezed the car violently down a series of minor roads twisting and turning, but always ultimately getting the declining sun shining through the passenger window. Whitey needed the warmth, but did not suspect his chauffeur of mere solicitude. They were making north and when after forty-five minutes of this nightmarish journey, the car slowed down to a pleasantly sedate pace he did not need the explanation his companion offered him.

  “They won’t follow us here,” said King with a laugh. “We’ve crossed the line. We’re in Wanderers territory now.”

  It was a small enough relief. One danger had merely been exchanged for a lesser. But Whitey felt as relieved as a drowning man hauled into a leaking boat. Anything was better than nothing.

  Also he now had time to feel very ill.

  Nixon Lectures: Fifth Series

  Audio-Visual Material

  I (m) Extract from tape of Reith Lecture No. 4 (The Law is An Ass) 1984, given by Professor Arthur Drake, Department of Social Studies, Coventry University.

  Hitherto my approach has been historical. I have tried to trace the serpentine path by which our modern concept of the law has moved from the Mosaic to the Democratic. I have tried to show how law as the voice of god was turned by an act of political ventriloquism into law as the voice of the people. And I have tried to look objectively at the often violent and bloody means whereby in our own century, this deception has been unmasked.

  But objectivity itself is a concept under heavy philosophical challenge. Like the concept of the rule of law, that last resort of desperate politicians in the sixties and seventies, objectivity must be viewed with grave suspicion. It goes hand in hand with that other old favourite, rationality, though a rationality which somehow arrives at the conclusion that all men are equal is hardly objective. And when it fails to recognize the absurdity of having laws to enforce this alleged equality, it becomes itself merely absurd.

  And a rationality which expects men to submit to laws laid down by other men in other times for other purposes is more than absurd. It is irrational.

  The Trade Unions are showing us the way. First by opposing management, then by opposing government and finally and most significantly by opposing and destroying their own controlling bodies.

  At last we are on the verge of a free society where man’s individual voice can once more be heard and where the old anodyne of the single vote is rejected with scorn! So-called objectivity and rationality have been the chains by which we have been bound to a dying civilization.

  Thank God we are shaking them off! Thank God all the old stupid petty reffing rules and restrictions are being revealed as the crap they are, crap we’ve been wallowing in for centuries.

  Thank God, or thank the Lord of the reffing Flies for that matter, that we’re getting a glimpse of a world where men can be themselves and speak what they mean not what they ought to say.

  I work in a University and I tell you this, friends; our universities and colleges are full of crap-merchants, sterile minds, streaks of old dried dung, men with their eyes in their arseholes and their brains in a specimen bottle, oh I could name names, taking years to do reff all in the name of rational thought or objective research. Thank Christ it’ll soon be over and we can spew the wankers out, yes, I can see it coming and this little shit of a producer what the hell are you waving your arms for you stupid prick why don’t you

  End of tape.

  Chapter 9

  For the next three days Whitey left himself completely in the care of King. How or where the youth made contact with the local Jays he did not know. In his waking moments he was quite lucid, but felt quite incapable either physically or mentally of making any self-originated effort. He accepted without question the shelter, food and medication given him. Even when a very presentable young woman, bikini-clad, led him into a shower and began coating him with some oily substance which under the stinging jets carried away the purple dye, it was not until she turned her attention from his head to those spots where the dye had soaked through to his body, that he began to react.

  “Feeling better?” she asked amiably. But that was as far as it went. He returned to his bed and spent a restless, uncomfortable night, from which surprisingly he awoke feeling much more like his old self.

  “Feeling better,” repeated King when he arrived with a breakfast tray next morning. He made it a statement, not a question.

  “Where are we?” asked Whitey. “And why are you taking such good care of someone you consider as worthless as me?” “You are feeling better,” said King. He had obtained for himself a rather smart cat-suit in Wanderers blue with a white buckskin fringe down the sleeves and round the ankles. His pale, round face, smiling now, looked even younger than the nineteen or twenty years Whitey had estimated.

  “It’s much the same set-up as at Oxford,” he said. “This time we’re on the old Coventry University campus. It’s a historical place this in a way. At most of the Universities and Colleges in the country when the dissolution started there was a strong body of student resistance. Sheffield
for instance was almost completely gutted in the ensuing struggle. But here the students unanimously passed a resolution welcoming the move, hurled out all the teaching and admin staff who were less than one hundred per cent enthusiastic, and re-constituted themselves as a Supporters Club.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” said Whitey waspishly. “I was alive and well and working for my living when all this happened. But how did your lot get a footing here?”

  “Easy. Even in those dim and distant days when you were alive and well and working, there were people here who were very anti, but went along for the ride. Because there was no fight, they were never weeded out. They passed the torch on. As you’ll know, being so old and knowledgeable, people generally move out of these residential Clubs in their midtwenties. Get married, work for a living, that sort of thing. This suits us well. We recruit from the new intake of young Supporters. Very carefully. Very slowly. We have their active support and help while they’re at their fittest, physically and mentally—late teens, early twenties. Then off they go and become norms. Waiting for the day.”

  “I know,” said Whitey cynically. “The cemeteries of the world are full of people who died of old age waiting for the day.”

  “We haven’t been going that long,” observed King. “Your generation was all wind and words. It’s only in the last half dozen years that the ball’s really started rolling.”

  “That’s more like it!” said Whitey. He pushed aside the breakfast tray whose contents he had been enthusiastically wolfing down while King talked, clambered out of bed and explored his body with the seismometer of his mind. The tremors of pain were still there, but distant now and receding further and further into the deep core.

  “More like what?”

  “Like the attitude I expect from you. You’ve avoided the second part of my question. Why are you looking after me so well?”