Brond

by Frederic Lindsay

  Passed it too often. Drunk on an empty stomach, I ended up in Baxter’s room intent upon getting drunker. At some moment during what followed, he made the old silly jibe of calling me the Homicidal Pacifist and, when I objected as before, reminding him that he had been a conscientious objector during the war, he cried, ‘Not a bloody pacifist! Not then or now. Like Young, I held to the articles of the Treaty of Union. I would join no army but the army of an independent Scotland.’ That seemed so silly to me, I began to laugh, but then when I thought of what I had read about the Nazi horrors and remembered that poor devil of a farmer I had met in the morning, I grew angry and told him that he might not be a bloody pacifist but he was certainly either a bloody coward or a lunatic.

  ‘I understand why people get irritated when Scots go on about independence,’ Baxter said in a tone of disinterested kindliness. ‘I feel the same about Shetlanders – or about the Orkneys. Little piss-pot islands. Whining, “We’re Orcadians. We’re not Scotch.” Bugger them, I think. Let’s send a gunboat. A wee gunboat. A wee wee particularly wee gunboat,’ and collapsed laughing at his own joke.

  Later we were bottle friends and comrades and I heard myself telling him about Brond; about Kilpatrick; about Muldoon being tortured; but not about how Kennedy died. In the still centre of my drunken brain, an ape congratulated itself upon being too cunning to tell him how Kennedy died.

  ‘That’s not real,’ he said, his great dish face pouring sweat. ‘That stuff you’re telling me. Don’t try to kid a kidder. That stuff doesn’t happen in never-never land. I don’t believe you. Nobody here would believe you. We know real things happen on television and always somewhere else. Not here. If you want to pretend something that matters is happening here, you’ll have to tell it in dreams and parables. Dreams and—’

  That was when I punched him. Blood flew out from his mouth and he fell backwards on to the floor, looking up at me but keeping very still. His lips had burst on his teeth.

  There wasn’t anywhere you could hide from history, even when that was what you had settled for.

  In the morning, I wakened with a stiff neck. I had slept with my head on the table. The room was empty, but as I climbed up the steps from the basement to the street I heard a noise and, looking down, saw Donald Baxter swaying with a glass in his hand.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘Stories end in corruption. Everybody’s does. But you’re like me. One of the sad ones. The worm gets to us early.’

  He wept a single tear of malice.

  It wasn’t far to the Kennedy’s house. Even walking slowly, it didn’t take me long to get there. I let myself in and went through all the downstairs apartments. I opened the door of one room and had such a vivid memory of the night I was ill that I expected Jackie to be there and Kennedy at the end of a shaft of light watching us. On the carpet in the parlour there was an overturned Guinness bottle and a tumbler.

  As I came back into the hall, a man rushed downstairs at me in a jiggle of gold glasses, plump waistcoat, a squeal of ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I live here.’

  ‘Not now, you don’t;’ a fat man settling, as he worked it out, into a merely professional wariness. ‘Were you one of the lodgers? Haven’t you heard? Mr Kennedy and his wife are selling up.’

  ‘You’ve seen him—’

  He would say yes and Kennedy would be alive.

  ‘There’s no doubt the property is for sale. We have authorisation from their agent. They are going abroad.’

  I did not have to ask for a description of that agent. I had seen those smooth young men of Brond’s. Perhaps it had been the one who took Jackie to Edinburgh, talking softly to her in the car.

  ‘I’d like to wash,’ I said.

  ‘I should really ask for some proof of identity.’

  ‘Just to wash. I’ll collect my stuff later.’

  He looked at the blood on my outheld arm and stood back from the stairs.

  Sometimes you need to wash more than to eat. I stripped to the waist and took my time, pouring cool water over the dirt and sweat. In my room I put on a clean shirt. Someone had piled my clothes and books in the middle of the floor.

  When I came down, the man said, ‘I’m not sure that you should still have a key.’

  He did not manage to sound like a man who would insist.

  In the garden outside there was a ‘For Sale’ board. Perhaps it had been put up while I was inside.

  ‘I’d like a lift.’

  ‘A lift?’

  ‘I’ve no money. If you give me a lift, it would save me walking. I have a weak ankle and it’s too hot to walk.’

  To my surprise, he let me into his car and when I told him where I wanted to go he had to pass it on the way to his next desirable property. Ten minutes brought us outside Margaret Briody’s house. As I opened her gate, she was coming out of the front door.

  ‘I didn’t kill Peter.’

  Till I heard the words leaving my mouth, I had not known that was what I had come to tell her. She didn’t shut the door but waited as I came along the path. If she was grieving for Kilpatrick, grief wasn’t good for her. She was very pale and pimples at various stages cropped out round her mouth and on her left cheek. As I walked closer, instead of her beauty I saw the yellow sores of squeezed acne.

  ‘The police wouldn’t have let me go if I’d killed Peter.’ Because of those stupid unexpected pimples, I was quite calm. I coaxed her. ‘That stands to reason, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Can’t you see I’ve had enough?’

  Her tone was dull and tired but in spite of herself the separate notes chimed like water over pebbles. She didn’t try to stop me as I went past her into the house. I thought she would follow me into the front room, but her steps crossed the hall. A door closed.

  This was the room where I had surprised Muldoon the night he broke into Margaret’s house: a pair of burglars. I wondered where Muldoon was now. On the table where Margaret had left the note for her parents, a newspaper lay open in a patch of sunlight. I remembered pale fingers of torchlight probing the darkness. Margaret was speaking to someone. I looked at the picture on the front of the newspaper: crowds lining a street, soldiers on horseback, carriages. More than ever, murmuring in the distance her voice was like music.

  ‘You’d better not be here when Dada gets back,’ she said behind me.

  ‘Who were you talking to then? Somebody’s here. Your Uncle Liam?’

  ‘No – I mean yes. My uncle’s here – you’d better go.’

  She was a bad liar. I realised there was no one except us in the house.

  ‘Of course, I’d forgotten the phone. You were using the phone in the bedroom.’

  ‘Please go away. There’s nothing for you here. I can only ask you.’

  ‘Do you know what I’d like? I’d like to wait here until your father comes back, and if he has anything to say to me that would be all right, too. You know what happened. He can ask me anything. And when he’s finished I’ll tell him I want to marry you. I’m a university student, I’ll say, and I want to marry your daughter.’

  ‘You frighten me.’

  ‘Is that a reason for not getting married?’

  ‘You’re trying to frighten me,’ she said.

  I had not meant it as a threat or a joke. While I spoke I had seen two respectable young people walking up the aisle to get married.

  ‘I am a university student.’ I held out the idea like a talisman.

  ‘Have some pity. Don’t you know how I felt about Peter?’

  ‘I’m not a policeman.’ Kilpatrick had been a policeman, which after all was also one of the professions and respectable. ‘I’m just – My father works on a farm.’ Why did I never tell the whole truth about him? ‘He’s just a labourer. He’s a farm labourer. But you might like him. He’s a kind man. He’d be very impressed by you.’

  But not as impressed as he would have been if I could have brought home my expensive whore in her Pringle sweater and soft wool skirt to p
atronise him in the voice of the gentry. From the beaches of the south and sunlight off ski slopes, the whore’s skin (and what did it matter if it had been a sunlamp in a stinking sauna and massage parlour?) had burnished brown and pure.

  ‘What’s wrong? If you’re ill, won’t you go?’

  ‘Everything’s spoiled,’ I said.

  We faced one another across the little table. I could have reached out and touched her. In the shop we had slept together and I had touched her then; but afterwards I had held my whore’s little naked breast between my hands, fucked her, watched with her as Brond knelt under the rain of the fat woman’s sweat.

  The doorbell rang. After a pause, it started again and did not stop.

  ‘It doesn’t sound like your father,’ I said. I knew who it was.

  ‘I asked you to go. I said please go.’

  Pretty please.

  ‘Did he give you a number to ring, just in case I came? He likes to play games, you know. It’s because he gets bored.’

  ‘Leave me in peace,’ she said.

  As I waited for her to let him in, I looked at the high black headline above the newspaper picture. He had been an old man, and whatever he had done probably he had thought it was right. He had been born to it, as my father would say; but, then, hadn’t we all? He hadn’t deserved to be beaten to death in an hotel room, because no one deserved that death. They had given him a fine funeral, though, and he would have appreciated that since it was the kind of thing he valued.

  ‘Don’t you understand I just want to be left in peace now?’ Margaret Briody said.

  Somebody else who wanted to opt out of history.

  NINETEEN

  Of the rooms Brond had filled with his presence, this was the shabbiest. Wearing a black overcoat that seemed too big for him, he sat in a tangle of blankets on a narrow bed. The room looked worse because of the neat respectability of the rest of the apartment. Primo had led me through past a woman and a young girl busy folding clothes into two open suitcases. As the woman looked up – pale round face, too tired to be any longer pretty – Primo said, ‘It’ll be all right Beth,’ and I knew she was his wife and the girl must be his daughter.

  Once, hitchhiking, I had slept overnight in a doss house, which should have been an adventure but had left me feeling desolate. This room was like that, despite being neat enough and clean; it was a bleakness of the spirit. The only decoration was a photograph in a cheap wood frame hung over Brond’s head on the wall behind the bed. The photograph seemed to have been torn from a magazine and was deeply creased as if at one time it might have been carried folded in a wallet. Putting stuff like that on the wall was the kind of thing children did or what my parents would have called ‘the lowest of the low’, meaning those who were poorer than we were and feckless in their poverty.

  ‘Notice how human they are,’ Brond said, following my gaze to the photograph. ‘The little scrubbed sac naked between their legs like innocent testicles. Very human, helpless and detestable.’

  ‘Like Kilpatrick,’ I said, ‘or him.’ The newspaper on the bed lay open to display stately carriages in procession.

  Primo made a sudden gesture at the corner of my vision and my mouth dried with fear. It had been he who had fetched me from Margaret Briody’s but we had travelled in the car in silence. I could have taken my chance to tell him what he had to be told, but I had thought first I wanted to confront Brond.

  ‘Or Muldoon,’ Brond said. ‘He was human enough surely.’

  He got up and went over to the window. A restlessness flowed out of him I had not sensed before. Staring down as if watching something below, he asked, ‘You like Irish jokes? I remember. What about this one?’ He put a finger to his forehead in a parody of recollection and then tapped it on the air like a schoolmaster. ‘What do you call a man who sticks his finger up an Irishman’s arse? . . . No? A brain surgeon.’

  He turned and came back to the bed.

  ‘Isn’t that the kind of joke you like?’

  I picked up the newspaper.

  ‘Primo killed him – or you did,’ I said. ‘Primo was there though. He had to be to pull open the safety door. I’ve never met anyone else who could do that.’

  Brond, not at all upset, looked on kindly.

  ‘You know, it’s silly to make yourself unhappy about that woman – the not so young woman – you called her . . .’

  ‘Jackie.’ Primo rumbled the single word.

  ‘We’ve all been foolish about some woman. It’s of no significance. Be grateful that you’re normal.’ His mesmerist’s hands formed a circle from which the abnormal were excluded. His hands made a language more absolute than speech. ‘It’s good to have feelings like that. You’re at a lucky age. It’s sad that she has to think of you as her husband’s murderer.’

  I winced from the ugly word.

  ‘It was an accident.’

  Brond smiled his kind smile and waited.

  ‘I want to see her. I could make her understand.’ The same fatal urge to accuse them came over me more recklessly. ‘If you won’t let me explain to her, I can explain to the police.’

  ‘An odd choice of a Lonely Hearts Bureau.’ Brond’s laughter sounded easy and genuine. I had felt that kind of release into laughter after finishing a diet of examinations or coming to the end of a visit home.

  ‘It was Primo and you at Riggs Lodge. You killed the old man there. You killed him and tied him with the same rope you used on Peter Kilpatrick.’

  ‘We never touched the boy Kilpatrick. Not when he was alive.’ It was Primo who thought that was worth denying. ‘Leaving him in that shed was a right Fenian trick.’

  ‘It was Kennedy who did it, don’t doubt that,’ Brond added. ‘And for the same motive that made him attack you. Unfairly in your case, of course – you don’t seem ever to have succeeded in getting his wife to bed.’

  He dirtied the pity I felt for Jackie. I wanted to tell him what I felt for her – that I had never wanted to – he made everything confused.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They were tied with the same rope. The police told me that. Why use the same rope on the old man?’

  ‘The people I work for,’ Brond said, sounding unctuous, ‘wanted an act of terrorism that would make the public detest those who were accused of it. In any case, the old party in question,’ he tapped the newspaper with its images of a hearse and dignitaries and nodding plumes, ‘had become a confounded nuisance. Rash committments to business friends in Africa that were threatening to find their way out into the light . . . There’s an economy in such matters. His death solved one problem, and if it could be made to forestall another – the risk, however remote, of the natives here getting restless – so much the better.’

  What was it the Canadian strategist at Professor Gracemount’s party had called Scotland? A valuable piece of real estate . . .

  ‘I understand,’ I said, but then I looked at Primo who was listening, and I didn’t understand at all. How could he accept this?

  ‘Do you?’ Brond asked. ‘I wonder if you really do. Those people I work for wanted a mischief, you know. If I hadn’t arranged it, there are others who would have managed something . . . not so elegant, perhaps. But that length of rope which worries you so much cleared away all our difficulties. I saw it at once, and Sawney agreed with me.’ He nodded at the big man, and, as late as that, I learned Primo’s real name. ‘We would give them the assasination they were demanding. We would let them break their scandal. We would even let them produce some poor misguided devils of dupes for a trial. But then, when all three rings of the circus are performing beyond recall, the defence will receive evidence which ties their murder case to that of a young man called Kilpatrick.’ He smiled disquietingly. ‘It’s possible at that point you might find yourself briefly the centre of attention. But don’t worry – the next stir of the pot will be to provide the defence with proof that both murders were committed by an obscure bookie’s clerk and lodging-house keeper called Kennedy. They’ll search f
or him – but he’s hidden where they’ll never dig to find him.’

  I could see it all falling out as he described. He made it so easy to believe in him, even for me who knew better.

  ‘The damage then will be entirely the other way. All kinds of questions – about the preparation of the trial, about the prosecution’s carefully marshalled evidence – come next.’ But then I heard his tone alter, the subtlest of changes, as he said, ‘We could even provide the information that he was really Michael Dart – an Irish terrorist. A sleeper. This man who has disappeared – presumably gone on the run again. Sawney thinks that information wouldn’t help what we want to do. He’s right, but it’s there to be used. Anyway, the result is going to be very different from what my employers anticipated. Sawney and I see a little victory coming.’

  As Sawney-Primo’s breath sighed in the silence, I heard that false note in Brond’s voice so clearly, like a secret he wanted me to share. He stood up, buttoning the black coat to his throat. I realised he intended to leave and that I would be alone with Primo.

  ‘As far as you are concerned, it’s over,’ he said smiling. ‘I make you that promise.’

  No prison, no trial, no disgrace; not again that desolate time of going through bright streets as a prisoner? Had he that power? It came into my head that when a piece was taken en passant in the game of chess, the piece that took it was only another pawn like itself. In the old black overcoat, hesitating at the door, Brond dwindled. I would have passed him in the street without a glance as an elderly man down on his luck.

  ‘All good things come to an end. I’ve been a long time in this place,’ he said. ‘I stayed in Chicago once. I went to the airport to meet professional contacts from Sweden. They came off the plane jittering with nerves for they had seen too many movies about tommy guns and Al Capone and gangland killings. I laughed and told them I’d never heard a gun fired in anger in that city. People I knew who had been born there had never heard one. We walked out the front entrance and a car hurtled towards us, police units followed on both sides blocking its escape, men piled out firing from behind walls and opened car doors. Screams, yells, curses, everyone running for shelter, throwing themselves down. I stood there alone among the bullets, too astonished to react. My Swedes stayed in their hotel room doing business until it was time for their plane home . . . They didn’t believe a word I said after that.’