Singleton's Law

by Reginald Hill

  Slowly the Strikers began to force a way through the still tightly packed throng, closely followed by the two men carrying Hydrangea. The Supporters were now working themselves up into a frenzy of hatred, swearing obscenity at the girl while those who were near enough spat at the still body and aimed blows at it. The surge of bodies suddenly brought King alongside Whitey once more. The young man’s face was working with a fury it was difficult not to believe genuine. Whitey seized his arm so they should not be separated.

  “What happens now?” he bawled in his ear. There was no danger of being overheard. The din was so tremendous that it was difficult to hear King’s reply even though delivered at top volume from a distance of about six inches.

  “They take her out. Show her the fire. Terrify the guts out of her. Then she’s shoved back inside with just the Committee. No one else. Complete quiet. Gentle questions. That’s when they break.”

  Hydrangea’s still body passed quite close on its way to the door. Whitey thought she might be dead but her eyes flickered open for a moment and seemed to focus on his face. But there was no recognition there.

  Then she was carried out of sight through the mob who were now fighting their way out of the exits at such a rate that the air-locks could not function properly and the high dome began to collapse on to its metal frame.

  “Not to worry,” said King, sensing Whitey’s concern. “It always happens.”

  Still clinging together they made their way outside.

  The crowd of Supporters, joined by many others who had not been at the Hearing, now centred on the huge bonfire on which the campus rubbish was burnt. Even at a distance of a hundred metres, its flames were clearly visible above the heads of the spectators and the plume of black smoke which drifted on the wind must have been observable from the centre of the city.

  Varied images rose up in Whitey’s mind. Red Indian torture, primitive sacrifice, medieval witch-burning. He turned to King again, needing reassurance.

  “They won’t hurt her? Burn her, I mean?”

  “Unlikely. Though they have been carried away in the past. No, the point is to break not destroy. She’s done well. Usually an eight or nine hours Hearing itself is enough.”

  Whitey relaxed his grip on King and began to force himself through the crowd. Something of his emotion must have showed on his face as no-one offered more than a token protest at his brutal pushing.

  The inner circle of the crowd had been pushed by the weight of spectators behind closer to the fire than was comfortable. Hydrangea made fully conscious by fear, was contained in a tight pen of Strikers the only gap in which led towards the flames. She pressed herself back against the human wall to escape the heat, but they thrust her away violently towards the edge of the fire, repeating the manoeuvre with increasing force each time she tried to escape. At each thrust, the crowd shrieked rhythmically, like the audience at a bull-fight. The Strikers seemed to be in the grip of a self-induced hypnosis, pushing and waiting, pushing and waiting. Whitey looked desperately around for some sign that there would soon be an end to this, some indication that authority was still present. But the Disciplinary Committee must still be sitting at their table, patiently awaiting the return of their prisoner.

  She would never get back, Whitey could see that now. The ring of Strikers had moved slowly forward till now their thrusts were sending her almost into the flames. The emotional blankness had fled from her face and been replaced by desperate, unreasoning fear.

  Another thrust. She staggered forward, made a huge effort to stop short of the flames, and fell. The crowd roared its approval. Slowly she pushed herself upright, the patterning of heat on her face and bare forearms clearly visible. Then she turned to the fire and ran quickly forward. For a second Whitey thought she had decided on self-immolation, but she retreated instantly from the flames.

  And when she turned to face the semi-circle of strikers, she held a fiercely burning length of wood in her hand.

  For a moment she looked like Defiance personified and the crowd was silenced and moved uneasily backwards. The Strikers too were momentarily taken aback, but quickly recovered, drew their truncheons and spread out to give themselves room for action. Suddenly Hydrangea was just a girl again, ludicrously threatening a thousand men with a stick. The crowd began to laugh and jeer. The sound seemed to get to Hydrangea as nothing the Committee had said had been able to. With a high-pitched scream of terror and fury she flung herself forward, swinging the brand above her head so that a stream of sparks followed close behind.

  The Strikers scattered to avoid the onslaught. One tried to counter, swinging a blow with his truncheon at her head, but she ducked beneath it and rammed the burning billet into his face. He fell, screaming.

  But success could only be shortlived. The crowd was too densely packed to be scattered by a single-pronged attack and Hydrangea realized it. She halted, swinging the brand round and round to keep the Strikers at a distance. But there was no way out. All they had to do was wait till she tired. Or till the burning stick went out.

  Desperately she stared around. Yet again her gaze fell on Whitey. This time he met it full on. And this time incredulous recognition dawned in her eyes.

  The Strikers, sensing her distraction, tried to move in, but she countered with wild blows from her weapon. One of the Strikers parried with his truncheon, the stick snapped and the burning end fell to the ground.

  Seeing her defenceless the whole crowd surged forward. There seemed to be some alternative activity at the rear which was causing some heads to turn, but those at the front were clearly bent on destroying the girl. With what looked like the last effort of her exhausted frame, she flung herself at Whitey, locked her arms around his neck and sobbed, “Help me. Please help me.”

  “I can’t,” he said wretchedly. “I can’t.”

  A Striker seized her shoulders and tried to wrench her clear, but her grip was strong. Whitey knew that at the moment it must appear that she had picked on him purely by chance. He ought to be thrusting her from him, expressing his fury and hate like a good Supporter.

  “Watch yourself, friend,” said the Striker raising his truncheon above Hydrangea’s head. “This’ll make the reffing bitch move!”

  The blow began to fall, Whitey swung his knee into the man’s groin and he doubled up with a shriek compounded of pain and amazement. For a second no one was sure what had happened, but when he swung his fist into the face of the next Striker to approach, all doubt fled.

  Whitey sought desperately for something to do, something to say, which could save him. But looking round the ring of murderous faces, he knew that there was no way to stop them killing him.

  A man can rarely pick the place of his death, he recalled saying in a sententiously elegiac piece composed during the Formosan war. He certainly would not have chosen, nor even guessed at, this. By a mound of burning garbage on an English University campus.

  The Strikers advanced. The crowd seethed, shouted, swayed. And parted.

  “Wait,” said a voice.

  No single voice had the power to stop these men. Not even if the heavens had opened and the voice come from above. But this voice had something very persuasive about it. The something was a squad of First Team Strikers each armed with a hand-gun. Suddenly the local Strikers looked young, gauche boys, their movements uncertain, their track-suits ill-fitting, shoddy cheap imitations of the real thing. There was no chance of confusion. The owner of the voice stepped into the circle of heat round the fire and stared speculatively at Whitey.

  It was Chaucer, the Wanderers’ Assistant Manager.

  “Who’s your Captain?” he demanded.

  One of the Strikers came awkwardly forward.

  “You know me? Good. The Management wants these two. I’ll take them now.”

  “But,” protested the Captain, “she’s before the Committee, I mean, and this wanker, we don’t know who …”

  “I’ll take them,” repeated Chaucer.

  Whitey waited a
nxiously for the Captain’s response. He had no reason to like Chaucer, but at least he offered an alternative to immediate death. In the crowd held back now by the First Team, he caught a glimpse of King. Perhaps he could arrange something. He had promised, “We won’t let you be captured.”

  The Captain looked round at the row of armed men and came to the only decision.

  “Of course, Mr. Chaucer. Blest.”

  “Blest.”

  Everyone relaxed visibly. The crowd began chattering among themselves and the First Team moved forward to carve a path through them once more.

  Again Whitey glimpsed King, very close now. The crowd opened for a second and he saw that the young Jay was holding something low down, close to his hip. A gun. It was absurd. To try a rescue by frontal assault in these circumstances was suicidal.

  Again he remembered the promise. “We won’t let you be captured.”

  And suddenly it no longer sounded like a reassurance, but a threat. He dropped to the ground with Hydrangea as the gun went off. Something whistled so close to his head he felt its passage. Automatically he put his hand up to seek for damage. It came down red and sticky. He felt ill. Then something fell across him and when he pushed it aside, he saw the source of the blood.

  The Captain of the local Strikers had taken the bullet in the throat.

  The First Team were among the crowd. There was confusion and panic everywhere.

  Someone seized him by the arm. It was Chaucer.

  “Come on,” he snapped. “It’s a good time to go.”

  Nixon Lectures: Fifth Series

  Statistical Material

  4(p) Extract from Annual Abstract of Statistics No. 121, 1985 published by the Central Statistical Office of Great Britain.

  TABLE 75 : Persons found guilty: Analysis by type of offence. England and Wales.

  Chapter 10

  “You saved my life, I saved yours,” said Chaucer. I stole your clothes, now I give you new ones. The score’s level between us.”

  “Rubbish,” answered Whitey made bold by the excellent wine they were drinking. “I took a risk to save your life, you took none to save mine. And in addition, your predicament had nothing to do with me, whereas mine was contributed to indirectly by your theft of my clothes.”

  He nodded emphatically and refilled his glass. They were sitting at a table which bore the remnants of a superbly cooked and stylishly served meal of a kind whose existence in present day England he would seriously have doubted. The surroundings matched the meal. He had expected to be taken to the local version of the Scrubs. Or at best to Wanderers Heights, the Birmingham equivalent (though, as the PR men never failed to point out, two hundred feet higher) of Athletic House in London.

  Instead they had come to this mid-nineteenth century industrialist’s manor house, solidly constructed, but fortunately designed by an architect who had not forgotten the Regency’s sense of proportion. The furnishings were in perfect harmony with the room and, if genuine, would be worth a fortune anywhere in the world except England, where art and the artist were regarded as suspiciously as they had been in Hitler’s Germany or Plato’s Republic.

  “So you think I still owe you?” asked Chaucer amiably.

  Whitey regarded him speculatively. But the motives behind Chaucer’s friendliness were too obscure for his wine-clouded brain to work out. In any case he was finding that experience was making a philosopher out of him, a kind of pragmatic, stoic, cynical hedonist. He reached for the decanter again.

  “I’ve got to believe you still owe me,” he said. “Once you stop owing me, then it’s good-bye to this.”

  His gesture included the table, the dining room, the comfortable bedroom in which he had changed into his well-cut suit, the whole house with its well defended grounds.

  “Perhaps one night of this pays off the score,” said Chaucer. He sounded as if he might mean it and Whitey sobered up slightly. It seemed a good subject to change.

  “Any news of King?” he asked. He had seen no reason not to answer Chaucer’s questions about the course of events which had brought him to Coventry. What happened in Athletic territory could hardly concern him. In any case the Jesuits were scattered—most of them probably captured or dead by now, he thought, remembering the purple dye.

  And the presence of subversive cells in the Coventry campus clearly came as no news to Chaucer. Whitey could honestly claim he knew next to nothing. He could not even have found the residential block in which he had been kept with any certainty, and the only people he knew by sight were King and perhaps the pretty girl who’d scrubbed the dye off him.

  “No, he got clean away,” grunted Chaucer. “Stuck the gun into some poor reffer’s hand then just faded into the crowd. My Strikers got the fellow holding the gun, of course. Took them two hours to realize their mistake.”

  “What then? Apologize, pat him on the back and let him go?” asked Whitey ironically.

  “What? There’s not much to let go after two hours with the First Team,” said Chaucer. “Interesting little wanker he sounds, this King. What I really want to know is why he took such a risk just to try to silence you.”

  “Obvious. Because I could identify him,” answered Whitey triumphantly, but aware even as he spoke of the flaw in his reasoning.

  “Shooting off a gun with twenty Strikers a few yards away is as good a way of drawing attention to yourself as any I know,” said Chaucer. “No, there’s something more to it. Either something you’re not telling. Or something you don’t know you know. I haven’t made up my mind which yet.”

  Fortunately for Whitey’s peace of mind, Chaucer was prevented from coming to any immediate decision by an interruption. A door opened and into the long dining-room came Hydrangea. She had disappeared as soon as they had reached the house; for medical care and rest, Chaucer had said and refused to answer any more questions about the girl’s status or role.

  Her hands were bandaged where she had burnt them in wielding the flaming stick and she had experienced some difficulty in knotting the belt of the loose bedrobe she wore. During the past twenty years at some stage in most countries fashion had permitted the ostentatious display of nearly every part of the human anatomy, male and female. For his part, Whitey still found the most provoking of garments were those which, as now, gave brief and unpremeditated glimpses of shapely breasts. At least, he guessed they were unpremeditated though it was hard to be sure of anything nowadays.

  “Feeling better?” asked Chaucer. “Ready for something to eat?”

  “I’ll have a drink,” she said.

  Whitey had risen to his feet. Good manners were very much the in-thing in American society at the moment. Chaucer had not moved and now the girl sat down without a glance in Whitey’s direction, leaving him feeling absurd and stranded. He collapsed heavily into his chair, feeling a pulse of anger beginning to beat somewhere in his head.

  “You took your time in coming,” said Hydrangea casually, grasping with some difficulty the glass Chaucer offered her.

  “You cocked it up a damn sight quicker than I expected. Even though I warned you.”

  “I’m sorry. That shooting at the end, I wasn’t taking much in …”

  “Someone tried to put Mr. Singleton out of his misery. He got away.”

  “Yes. Still you got him.”

  They both examined Whitey with an emotional detachment which he found infuriating, and also rather frightening.

  Chaucer shrugged.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can we talk?” asked the girl.

  Chaucer clapped his hands and a Striker came in immediately.

  “Mr. Singleton,” said Chaucer, “You must be tired after your exertions. Perhaps you’d like to retire.”

  There wasn’t much choice. In fact, none. Whitey emptied his glass and rose, swaying slightly. He leaned forward resting his left hand on the table and wagging the index finger of the right at the girl.

  “Next time,” he said rather thickly, “next time you b
urn.”

  Then, nodding emphatically and still wagging his finger he backed away till the Striker took him gently by the arm and led him from the room.

  He was awoken by the sound of his bedroom door opening. It was pitch black and felt like three or four in the morning, the unholy hour when even lovers are asleep and the only nightcallers are those with a truncheon in their hands, and an unmarked truck in the street. The perfect time to start psychoyuss, thought Whitey, the sickness of too-early-waking and too-late-fearing rising in his throat.

  He sensed someone standing at the bedside, tried to prepare his muscles for counter-attack, felt the bedclothes pulled slowly off him, managed to lift his head from the pillow, but could manage no more.

  Then his visitor was in the bed with him, the clothes were pulled over them and Hydrangea’s voice whispered, “I’ve come to thank you.”

  He began to shake with nervous relief and could only hope it felt like uncontrollable passion.

  “My mother told me to find a nice polite girl,” he said with an attempt at lightness which sounded an octave higher than usual.

  “You’ll have to do the grafting,” she said.

  “What?”

  “My hands. I’m not very good with clothes and things.” They managed very well.

  Afterwards he wanted to switch on the light but she wouldn’t let him, saying it might draw the attention of the guardian Strikers.

  “Don’t they ever sleep?” asked Whitey.

  “This place is a fortress,” she answered. “Constant patrols.”

  “But why did Chaucer come to somewhere so isolated? He must be very vulnerable?”

  “On the contrary. He knows that it’s the commando raid he has to worry about, not the frontal attack. And nearly all those who fight against the Clubs are trained in urban guerrilla tactics. Outside here it’s like a jungle. Thorn hedges, briar, gorse; swamps and ponds; trip-wires everywhere; flood-lights that come on at irregular intervals, and a pack of guard-dogs like the Wild Hunt. The Strikers know it like the back of their hands. But anybody else …”