by J M Gregson
Alex glanced automatically behind him, then at the faces set in vicious hatred on the other side of the narrow street. They were outnumbered by approximately two to one. But there was nowhere to flee. They’d have to fight, have to reach the end of the street before there was any escape. He calculated the odds. It would depend how much real hatred was here, how far this went back. If there was the kind of psychotic violence which surrounded some of the Celtic–Rangers clashes, there’d be serious damage done to flesh and bone here.
Not to Alex Fraser, if he could help it. His hand flew to his pocket. The fingers of his right hand slid into the knuckleduster he had put there at the beginning of the evening. Soft as shit, these southern Sassenachs. They wouldn’t know what a real battle was about. His face set in hard, thin lines. The time for shouting was past: he wouldn’t waste breath on shouting.
He was partly right about the Sassenachs. The charge when it came was not as coordinated as many he’d met in Glasgow. But this was a gang fight all right. Most of the people beside and behind him were members of the Garton and Bracey families and they had fought this opposition before. This wasn’t his fight. But no one on either side was going to recognize that. He’d involved himself by attending the party, by his very presence in this narrow, hate-filled street.
As if to confirm the fact, he heard one phrase among the multitude that were being flung across the narrowing space between the sides. ‘Get the fucking carrot-head!’ a squat youth with tattooed arms yelled. Alex fastened upon this man as the sides fell upon each other, dodging a clumsy blow from the muscled forearm, driving his own fist hard into the side of the stubbled jaw. He felt the crunch of metal on bone, saw the blood spurt. Then the scream came, later than expected, and the body went down.
There was no time to relish individual victories. Arms were flying all round him, friend and foe merging as men caught each other round the throat and reeled about the street. He registered a couple more blows, driving his armoured right fist this time into the bodies of his adversaries, hearing with delight the sounds of the pain he was inflicting. It was primeval stuff, with survival the only aim and staying on your feet the only victory. He had no idea how his side was doing, though he saw a couple of other small victories which gave him hope.
Then he saw what he had feared from the first. A flash of metal in the dim lights of the street. Knives! One at least, and there would surely now be others. The blade he’d seen was within two yards of him. Then the man beside him went down, the breath rasping from him with the sound of a bursting tyre, and Alex knew that he must be next.
Alex faced the man, saw eyes wide with bloodlust within a foot of his own, saw the fillings in a mouth yelling words he did not hear, saw the hand with the knife in it rising to strike, as clearly as if he was watching a film in slow motion. And in that moment, when the action seemed to be arrested, he saw his chance. He drove the knuckleduster on his right hand hard into the man’s belly button, then into his face as the body doubled in agony and the knife clattered on the tarmac beneath them.
The noise was deafening now, crashing about their ears like a physical, hostile force. Alex shut it out. The din was a distraction, when you needed your concentration to be at its sharpest. You didn’t know where the next challenge would come from, but you had to be ready for it, if you wanted to survive. He didn’t know if they were winning, but he had hope now. He’d downed two of them, hadn’t he?
It was because he’d shut out the noise that he didn’t hear the urgent wailing of the sirens. The police vehicles were at the end of the short street, cutting off all escape, before Alex Fraser realized they were there. He was fighting furiously, with eyes only for his physical survival, so that he went on a little while after others had ceased and begun sliding sideways to try to evade arrest.
He heard a man shout, ‘Get the redheaded sod!’, saw the sergeant’s stripes upon the blue of his arm, wondered furiously if he would ever be marked by anything other than the colour of his hair. He dropped his hands in time to avoid the charge of resisting arrest. Don’t give the bastards the excuse to hit you. The old code was back with him, as if he’d never left it. He flinched now, where he had not done in the fury of the contest, anticipating police blows to his body and arms as they shouted the words of arrest in his ear.
But there were no blows. Just rough hands on his arms, then the crowded inside of the police van, the journey which flung you hard against the others in there with you, the sudden dumb horror of charges and detention. They set his possessions on the desk and made him sign. He stared for a moment at the money, the little package in its plastic supermarket wrapping, the unused handkerchief, the knuckleduster with blood thickening darkly upon it.
The cell with its windowless walls looked depressingly familiar. As the small hours of the night dragged through, Alex Fraser felt stone cold sober and very depressed. He couldn’t quite work out how he had come to be here. Hadn’t he vowed that he was finished with all of this?
SIX
At the same time as Alex Fraser was partying and fighting, Hugo Wilkinson was attending an altogether quieter and more cautious gathering.
He couldn’t make his mind up until the last minute whether to go. He was still shaken by his interview with Dennis Cooper. He wasn’t used to being carpeted and threatened with dismissal; in fact he couldn’t think it had ever happened to him before, even in his younger and wilder days. What made it worse was that he had deserved every word of it. However humiliated he felt now, he had brought it all upon himself when he had yelled his racialist words at that dim Asian boy.
He’d felt all right immediately after the interview with Cooper, because he’d been working; busy kitchens didn’t allow you much time for reflection. But as soon as he’d returned to his own room, gloom had overtaken him again. He wasn’t pleased with life in general, and he certainly wasn’t pleased with himself.
He played cricket with Jim Hartley and his kids until their bedtime approached and stumps were drawn. When young Oliver missed with his final extravagant swipe and saw the bowler, his brother Sam, leap joyously into the air, all four of them trooped indoors. But after the sunlit innocence of their play with the tennis ball on the Theatre Lawn, Hugo couldn’t settle in his room. When it was almost too late, he drove swiftly out of Westbourne Park and set his course for Bristol.
The depressing Victorian house had high, narrow windows and high, shabby rooms. He was almost the last to arrive. Their host waited in the hall, gruffly greeting each of his visitors. For the second time that day, Hugo Wilkinson made to shake hands, when that was not the gesture expected. This man and the one who stood silently behind him in the sombre hallway were vetting guests, not welcoming them. This was not the sort of gathering where you fussed over visitors; here, any newcomer had to be announced in advance, with an existing member of the group to vouch for him.
Hugo put his tenner in the dish by the door and went into the big room at the front of the house. There was still daylight outside, but the long velvet curtains were carefully drawn and the lights were on. Fourteen men conversed in low tones. There were no women here; the only woman who entered this house came once a week to clean. Three or four of the men acknowledged Hugo, but there was little warmth in their greeting and just as little in his acknowledgement. Everyone was trying to behave as if this were a normal gathering, yet everyone knew it was no such thing.
‘It’s like Freemasonry without the joy and the laughter,’ said Hugo’s neighbour dejectedly. He made it sound as if he’d been exiled here for some transgression.
Hugo could think of no rejoinder save, ‘I’ve never been a Mason. I’ve always had to work in the evenings.’ Until now, he thought. Until I got the chef’s job at Westbourne Park. I wonder how much longer I shall be there. He wondered why he told that small, unimportant lie about never being a Mason. Perhaps dishonesty came naturally here.
His neighbour didn’t react to the remark. The natural follow-up would have been to ask what sort of w
ork Hugo did, but you didn’t pry into people’s lives here. That made conversation stilted and difficult, as was evidenced all over the room. Everyone held a glass of wine, but most of the men sipped cautiously, as if they feared a loss of control. They talked about having to drive home, but their real fear was that they might reveal more of themselves than they wished to do whilst they were here.
Hugo had been told that the group numbered a circuit judge and a senior civil servant in line for a knighthood among its members, but he had no idea who they might be. Nor could he identify them as he glanced surreptitiously about him and sipped his wine. Everyone wore a suit and a tie, everyone seemed to carry a muted air about him, despite the effects of the wine and the eventual attempts of the man who lived here to introduce a little bonhomie into the proceedings.
Another man, the one who had stood behind the householder in the hall, took over what might have been termed the business section of the meeting. Whether he was the natural leader or merely the man who knew more about the workings and the secrecies of computers than anyone else was not clear to Hugo, who was still a fairly new member of this strange company.
The man said he hoped they’d all received their latest ‘instalment’, the word he used for the material Hugo had inspected and enjoyed on his laptop a week earlier. There were murmurs of assent and approval, but no real congratulations. The speaker promised them more and better in a fortnight or so, then asked if they would be interested in material from abroad. It was a vague word, ‘abroad’, but everyone in the room knew the countries which were the likely sources of this material.
One man said he liked more local stuff, preferred to support home industries, and there was a tiny rumble of amusement at this sour little joke. The man who had offered them the foreign material pointed out that it was cheaper and safer than the home-produced product. He did not take a vote on the matter – they never did that – but he sensed he had the approval of the majority and passed on. They would receive their next ‘instalments’ in three or four weeks. Their funds were adequate at the moment, but they might in due course need bigger contributions to take advantage of the opportunities which were increasingly available to them.
It was like a bleak version of a sports club meeting, Hugo thought. He’d known reports like this at the cricket club he’d belonged to years ago, though there’d been laughter and jokes and teasing there as well. There were one or two embarrassed murmurs of thanks and a relaxation of tension when the man finished speaking. This was the time when the conversation should have livened up and the decibel level risen, but neither happened.
It wasn’t long before men began to glance at their watches and make their excuses to leave. Hugo waited until six people had left, then spoke briefly to the householder and slipped out himself. He walked the two hundred yards to where he had parked his car without meeting a soul. They were asked to leave their transport at a distance. It was all designed to preserve the anonymity they craved, to avoid drawing attention to themselves and their common interest.
Hugo Wilkinson drove very quietly, so that his journey back to Westbourne might occupy quite a long time. He wondered how many others dispersing from that meeting felt the self-disgust which was now seeping like a noxious gas around the inside of his car.
Alison Cooper reversed her car into the parking space outside the hotel in Broadway. She knew she was already late, but she had an obscure feeling she might want to get away quickly. Extramarital affairs made you like that. You felt vaguely guilty, even during the days when you were not together. You also felt you had to be prepared to move quickly in any emergency.
Peter Nayland was already here. She paused for a moment beside his red Jaguar, setting her hand briefly upon its warm bonnet. Then she turned and went into the hotel.
Peter was sitting at a table in the reception lounge. He had a whisky in front of him and a gin and tonic lined up for her. He struggled to his feet as he saw her, but she motioned him immediately to sit. You didn’t draw attention to yourselves, when you were meeting like this. She gave him a brief, nervous smile, then sat down and sipped her gin and tonic. For a moment, it was as if they were meeting for the first time.
‘You look as lovely as ever.’
She gave him a brief, impatient smile. ‘You didn’t bring me here to tell me that.’
‘No.’ Peter Nayland didn’t know how to go about this. He’d never done it before, never expected that he would ever do it. ‘Thanks for coming.’ He flicked his forefinger automatically across his neatly trimmed moustache, resisted the impulse to run his hands over the hair he had combed forward so carefully in the cloakroom when he had arrived here.
‘I can’t stay the night. It was difficult enough to get away.’
‘No, I understand that. Not that I wouldn’t want you to, my darling.’ He reached out and ran his fingers down her forearm when he used the endearment. It was cheap and tired, but most of their tensions dropped away with the touch and the word.
She felt the stirrings of sexual desire, of the wish to live the life this man represented for her. She said more tenderly, ‘What is it, Peter?’
This was the moment, Peter Nayland thought. She’d asked the question which would determine the rest of his life. It must be the fear of rejection which was making him uncharacteristically awkward. He could suddenly see himself and Ally from the edge of the room. Was what he was planning ridiculous? He said abruptly, with the words tumbling from him in a rush, ‘I want to make this permanent. I want to live the rest of my life with you and with no one else. I never thought of it like that when we started, but now I do. I want to know if you feel the same. I want to know if there’s any chance for me.’
He was staring at the small round table with the drinks upon it, concentrating on delivering his message, unwilling to look into her face and see rejection there. Peter Nayland, controller of a business empire, a man who dealt smoothly and contemptuously with dangerous rivals and the threats of the law, reduced by the love of a woman to uncertainties he had not felt since his adolescence.
Alison Cooper understood a little of his discomfort, but not all. She was too shocked to think clearly. She said stupidly, ‘I never expected this. I need time to think.’
‘Of course you do, my darling.’ He reached out, put his hand on top of hers. He could look at her, now that he’d stated his ridiculous desire. ‘I’ve sprung it upon you. I’ve had time to get used to the idea, and yet it still seems strange to me. But I mean it. The one thing I’m certain of is that I mean it.’
She could feel him looking at her as she sipped her drink, uncrossed her legs, searched for any movement which could postpone a decision on this. Eventually she gave him a small smile and said, ‘It’s flattering, isn’t it? To have a man like you say he wants to pair up with me for the rest of our lives.’
‘It doesn’t feel like that. You could pick and choose among men.’
And so could you among women, she thought. You treat me decently and you have all the money any woman could want. I’m forty-nine and I’m not stupid enough to think money and having whatever you want aren’t important. She started to her feet and said irrationally, ‘I’ll get us some more drinks.’
She refused his attempt to pay; it was suddenly important to her that she asserted this small independence. The two minutes at the bar were useful to her; she gathered her resources and her thoughts together. She gave him a small, grateful smile as she set the drinks down carefully on their table.
He said, ‘Sherlock Holmes used to speak of two-pipe problems. This one is obviously a two-drink one!’
She reached across and put a hand on his. ‘I’m not opposed to the idea, Peter. At the moment, I’m bowled over by it! I’m very flattered and very pleased. And I think I love you. I haven’t allowed myself to think long term until now, that’s all.’
‘I haven’t any ties. I’ve been divorced for years.’
The implications were obvious; she had to consider her marriage. She nodded slo
wly, trying to pick her words carefully, to say nothing which she might later regret. But eventually she said slowly, almost reluctantly, ‘My marriage to Dennis is dead, really. We’ve both been preserving the forms of it, for the last few years. It was convenient, for him in particular, to be married. The National Trust is a very conventional organization.’
‘Then leave him. Come and live with me. That’s the only decision that really matters. We can sort out all the details of where and how once we’ve decided that.’
‘Dennis won’t like it.’
She’d said ‘won’t’, not ‘wouldn’t’. He felt his experienced heart leap a little at that, and this time he was glad that he could still feel like a teenager. He said quietly, ‘What Dennis Cooper wants doesn’t matter, if the marriage is dead.’
‘He won’t agree to a divorce. He’ll fight us all the way.’
‘He’s the least of our problems. If you agree to live with me, I can handle Dennis.’
‘I must get back.’ There was no reason for that, if she was going to finish with Dennis. But she needed desperately to be on her own.
In the car park, she was glad she’d reversed the Fiat into its space. They embraced beside it, holding each other hard, for the first time not caring how publicly they displayed their love. Then she leapt into the small white car and drove swiftly away, not trusting herself to look again at him.
She was almost back at Westbourne before she wondered quite how Peter Nayland proposed to deal with Dennis.
Alex Fraser didn’t have a watch. After the early summer dawn, the hours stretched slowly as he sat in his cell, contemplating the bleak facts of what had happened to him. Twice the small flap near the top of the door was slammed aside and a dispassionate eye assessed him. The noises and shouts from other parts of the station grew in number as the morning advanced. After what seemed to him many hours of daylight, he was given toast and a mug of hot, sweet tea. Then he was left alone for at least another hour to meditate upon the error of his ways.
