A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  “No, but do you really know?” George narrowed his eyes. “Queen’s Counsel are barristers so masterful and of such unimpeachable integrity that they’re qualified to advise Her Majesty herself on all matters pertaining to the laws of Great Britain.” He looked at me, eyebrows raised.

  “That was true a hundred and fifty years ago,” I said. “Nowadays Her Majesty tends to prefer slick solicitors and two-hundred-pound-an-hour public relations consultants. Q.C.’s take whatever work they can get, just like everyone else.”

  George shook his head. “The top of the greasy pole, king of the heap, eh? Well, well! Now I understand. It’s not just a question of being clean—you’ve got to smell of roses, old son.”

  He handed back the transparent cover, folded the statement carefully into quarters, and slid it into a pocket. He fumbled for his pipe, asked me with his eyes if I objected, proceeded to scrape and stuff.

  “No missus, I take it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Long time to be carrying a torch, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve been busy, George—you know that. It’s difficult to go courting when you work till eleven every night and all day Sunday.”

  “Must be. I wouldn’t know. I married two weeks after I finished training at the old police cadet school in Hendon. It was a different city then, of course. I lived on my own beat and had all the time in the world—went home for lunch and tea breaks. Kept an eye on my two girls in the school playground.”

  He paused in his musings, as if suddenly catching on to something.

  “I remember the day you changed sides, James. The best example of poacher turned gamekeeper I ever saw. I flatter myself that I had something to do with it during our little chat on a train to Sheffield—remember? Within weeks, it seems to me, you were gaoling the same hard cases you’d spent your career defending. Very understandable in the circumstances. Every detective inspector with a weak case wanted to have you instructed. There was a notice up in the D.P.P.’s office: James Knight bites legs. You had quite a following in the force after you adopted the lonely life of a prosecutor. The very blokes who’d been after your guts fell head over heels in love with you. And there were all those cases you did for me. I daresay you did get busy.”

  I nodded. “It’s still there—the note, I mean. I had to see the director the other day, and she showed it to me.”

  George jerked his chin at Vincent. “See, every time he speaks he reveals how far he’s come. Nowadays he just walks straight into the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and she grovels.” His smile was tobacco-stained. “You must be right proud, James.”

  “No, George—that’s what I was about to say. Only madmen are proud of putting people in jail—even though it has to be done.”

  He lit his pipe with a solid-gold lighter I remembered because it seemed so out of character, then began delving in his pocket. “Well, back to the case in hand and just to make sure we’re talking about the same bloke…”

  A clumsy cue from a subtle man. Was George losing his touch? I took the slim pack of color photographs he handed to me. How could we not be talking about the same bloke?

  His eyes studied me while I examined the pictures. If he entertained the old-fashioned notion that the sight of the victim would unnerve the culprit, I must have passed the test with distinction. After the first corpse, nothing is more ordinary than death.

  In the pictures, a man no longer young, with features no longer capable of expressing anger, lay with a small neat hole in his forehead. If I was surprised at all, it was at how harmless he looked. The pictures showed the same scene from different angles. Some revealed that the body lay in a London street. A wide-angled version took in a shocked passerby and one quarter of a Ford Cortina. After a quick glance, I placed each one at the back of the pack.

  Only the last was of a living person. The sound I uttered—I think something between a sob and a gasp—seemed to me to have come from someone else. I handed the pictures back and took a long swallow of brandy.

  “Sorry, old son,” George murmured.

  I turned to see Vincent scribbling something in his notebook.

  “Sit down,” George said. I found myself obeying. “You’re a sensitive man. Highly strung, brilliant even. A spell inside that would just be a drag for the likes of the late Oliver Thirst, for James Knight would be torture. I want to be kind, but I need some answers. And if it wasn’t us it would be someone else—you know that.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  He relit his pipe with the gold lighter, eyed it fondly for a second before replacing it in his pocket.

  “It’s a funny thing with your high achievers. I once knew a boxer—amateur flyweight champion—could hardly say boo to a goose out of the ring. Everything he had went into his boxing. Inside the ring he was a wicked machine. Could have turned pro, but his wife wouldn’t let him. Then the minute he gave up boxing, she went off with another bloke. Great men have great weaknesses, James. Tell me about the Yank.”

  “There’s nothing to tell, I’ve not seen her for over a decade. You must know that—I’m sure you’ve spoken to her.”

  “But never an hour passes…?”

  “I haven’t thought of her in years.”

  He looked relieved.

  “I’m not going to say any more, George. You’ll have to do it properly, or not at all.”

  “It’s my guess that you must hate her guts—when you think about her, I mean.”

  “No comment.”

  Vincent, whose bladder had always been conveniently weak, asked where the bathroom was. George took the pipe out of his mouth and stared at me long and hard. I felt awkward, and I suppose he did, too, as if our power to speak had been inexplicably cut off.

  “Want to see the garden?”

  “Good idea,” he said.

  Vincent was diplomatically long in the bathroom. I led George out of the study and down the hall to the kitchen, past the pile of dirty plates and mugs waiting to be washed, a couple of empty wine bottles.

  The back garden was the length Edwardians thought necessary for privacy and the proper exercise of children: about seventy feet. Too many when you had no interest in gardening. I had put in a rock pool with goldfish near the house, and left the rest to run wild.

  “Never figured you for a goldfish man,” George said.

  “Actually, I’m not. I’m a wildcat man. A big tom that runs wild on the Heath comes along every now and then and eats them. Sometimes I watch. I think of the pond as his larder. I replenish it once a month.”

  It was one of my standard gambits, intended to amuse or shock, depending on the guest. George simply nodded absently. Once again we found ourselves staring at each other as if struck dumb.

  Vincent reappeared.

  “Ready to go, George?”

  A somber nod. “Ready when you are.”

  George paused at the front door to put on his trilby. In the parking place that he could have taken was a battered van of the commercial, windowless variety. I suppose my eyes rested on it for a moment longer than was natural.

  “You haven’t changed, James. You know, there’s something I’ve always admired about you blokes, and it’s not your cleverness. Prisons are full of clever people who weren’t clever enough when it came down to it. It’s detail. Your amazing capacity for detail. I’d hate to see that wasted. If there’s anything I can do, anything at all…”

  “Actually—yes. I seem to have lo-lo-lo-” A childhood stammer, the very defect I had cured by choice of profession and unrelenting will, had suddenly returned. I tried again. “I seem to have lo-lo-lost all the photographs of her.” I looked away, avoiding his eyes.

  He fished out the thin pack of photographs and took the last one off the back.

  “If you promise not to kill her, I’ll give you her phone number.”

  “I promise.”

  He scribbled a number on the back of the picture and handed it to me.

  “I’d be inte
rested in anything she has to say.”

  “You don’t think I’m going to…?”

  He raised a finger. “You need time to think it over. You’ve spent half your life building a career, you’re taking silk this year. We don’t want anything to interfere with that.”

  I took the photograph and watched George crunch back down my little path. There was no skip of victory in him. He seemed suddenly tired again.

  Vincent carefully closed the gate behind them.

  2

  I had not, of course, lost any photographs. I had destroyed them, for what I considered at the time to be reasons of mental health. And now, like an addict, I had sold my pride for the chance once more to be sick.

  It was not a good photograph, although it was a startling one. I guessed that it had been taken with a powerful telephoto lens from some invisible hideout. Photographers sensitive to the finer points of portraiture tend not to find themselves on the payroll of the Metropolitan Police. But it was enough. As I gazed greedily at it, I felt the resolution of years start to crumble. The gray barricade of files, documents, feverish hard work, cynical humor, melted as if the sun itself had turned a corner and was marching relentlessly back toward me. I poured myself another Armagnac, lifted the phone, dialed the number George Holmes had given me.

  Over the telephone lines, that voice tantalized like a song from a distant shore. I knew it so well I could place the origin of every vowel and consonant as if I had been responsible for teaching her the language, which in a way I had. It took an expert—or a lover—to recognize the washed-out tones of New England.

  “The police came,” I said. “I suppose they’ve already spoken to you?”

  “Mm. Yesterday. It’s been a long time, James.”

  “Eleven years, five months, and a few days.”

  “You shouldn’t have phoned—they’ll be expecting us to talk. They could hurt you. You’re a big man now.”

  “I’m also a suspect.”

  She laughed at such absurdity. And when I asked her if she wouldn’t like to come round and talk about it, she agreed in her friendly American way, forgetting immediately that I was a big man who could be hurt. We talked around his death for a few minutes; the last thing she said was, “I keep remembering that night you came home and told me about him. It all started then.”

  My training in pedantry protested into the silence that this was not quite accurate. It had all started a number of hours earlier, when, after I had won his case for him, he invited me for a drink. This was theoretically against the rules: a barrister did not, in those days, meet with a criminal client unless in the presence of a solicitor. But there was even then a compulsion about him that would not be denied, and a weakness in me that had to do with that beautiful summer’s morning and what was left of my youth. It had to do with her, too, in an oblique way. Then, as now, conventional success in my profession generated zero sex appeal. The fight for love and glory required a little cheating and a little protesting, or so it seemed to me.

  We happened to be in an historic area crowded with pubs boasting unique views over the Thames and American professors searching for the site of the bench where Shakespeare last sat, but it would not have occurred to him to take me to one of them. “Having a drink” to him meant standing at the bar in some grim hole south of the river where the ashtrays are not heavy enough to be turned into weapons and there are few tables and chairs and the windows are dim with crime. I accepted a pint of flat beer, knowing that I should not have been there and waiting for the moment to break. He avoided my eyes, which enabled me to study his face: a strong jaw, an aquiline nose, and pale skin on which the grayness of incarceration still hung.

  He took a long draught of beer and began his summation of the morning’s events, as he began most sentences, with “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, you did me grand, James. I ain’t saying you didn’t. Gave the Old Bill some real stick—went white when you asked all that about his notebook.”

  “Old Bill?”

  He stared at me. “You know what that means. Cops. Fuzz. Rozers. Old Bill.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know what it means. It’s been a while since I last heard it.” I smiled.

  “But while I was watching you and listening, do you know what I was thinking? I was thinking I could have done that—I could have been up there where you are—if I’d only had the chance.”

  It was a version of the I’m-as-good-as-you-are mind-set, except that in his case he seemed convinced that by some grotesque accident he was living the wrong life. As if he was, in his own way, like those people who claim to have been born into the wrong sex and eventually undergo drastic surgery.

  It was on the point of leaving him that I took the step, like a blind man walking along a cliff edge, which secured my fate. In an absurd moment of weakness I said, “We must meet again,” and immediately averted my eyes from the terrifying gratitude that filled his face.

  —

  After George and Vincent had driven away, and I had watched the commercial vehicle slink off a quarter of an hour later, I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, holding the lumbar region of my back with the palms of both hands. It was an old injury, which always made me think of Thirst. When I was nervous or exhausted, it ached most.

  In the bedroom, I kept my private library. It had started off with the Golden Treasury of English Verse that my mother won as a school prize at her orphanage, and a small glass-and-walnut bookcase of obscure eighteenth-century origin. Now there were three walls of books that I’m proud to say had nothing to do with law. My mother died when I was in my early teens, and the collection began as a kind of guilt reflex. Having had a boy’s contempt for her books of poetry, after she died I started by forcing myself to read it, and by the time I was twenty I had become addicted. My lawyer’s mind, when it failed to create a compelling phrase of its own, would call one up from a past master. On the whole, judges and juries enjoyed this quirk, although friends sometimes found it pretentious. It marked me out as an eccentric, a cross I bore cheerfully for the sake of a mother who had not lived long enough to disillusion me.

  I stroked the bookcase. “Daisy,” I said.

  Ever since my mother died there have been only two kinds of women for me: those worthy of undying faithfulness—and the rest. It’s a poor thing, I can report, to be a living cliché out of Freud and Jung.

  When the doorbell sounded for the second time on that eventful Sunday, it was as if a clock that had stopped eleven years earlier had restarted. I ran to the door, overjoyed that one man had died and I was a fool again.

  3

  Her entrance was all grace and irony.

  It would not be true to say that she looked as young as ever (she was at an age when women’s bodies and faces change), but she stepped as lightly as ever, as if she intended to proceed through life with no more baggage than she was born with. Her hair was the same unmanageable blond, her wit as wicked. The ponderous edifice of wealth, eminence, and ego I trundled about with me lasted no longer than half an hour in her presence. She delved into her selection of New York voices to make some joke—hilarious at the time, impossible to recall—about my van Gogh reproduction, which I caught in a delayed way because I was opening a bottle of wine. When its meaning hit me, I had to lean against the fridge to avoid spilling the wine while my poor thin body shook with laughter and relief. By the time she saw what she had done, tears were streaming down my face and she had to brush them away, just as softly as I remembered.

  I said: “I’d forgotten how good you are with accents.”

  “I used to have an American one, darling—surely you remember?”

  “Never Bronx, though. Say tomato.”

  “T’maydoe der you, bud.”

  There’s nothing like an old joke to test for vital signs in an equally old relationship. I laughed, she smiled warmly.

  It was my best wine, a Chassagne-Montrachet I knew she would love, for all her principles. We got through it nibbling cheese and talk
ing about everything except what had brought us together again. She still taught English at a polytechnic, still believed passionately in unilateral nuclear disarmament. Still kept up with the latest trends in feminism and hated the police.

  “Were they hard on you?”

  “Harder than they were on you, I bet. They managed to make me feel like a whore, a murder suspect, and a gangster’s groupie in the space of about ten minutes. They make you feel dirty, don’t they? As if you have no privacy, after all.”

  With her eyes she challenged me to agree.

  “They’re only doing their job—I know, I know, like Eichmann. Let’s not get into that.”

  Old programming had made me steel myself for a fight, but she let it go with a shrug and a smile.

  “Do you still have all those Hitchcock videos?”

  The second Montrachet disappeared while we watched Rear Window. By the time it finished, an evening chill had forced us to snuggle up close.

  “Are we going to talk about it?”

  “Not yet, James—let’s not.”

  I coughed. “You haven’t seen the rest of the house.”

  I held my breath. She smiled wryly but allowed me to take her hand and lead her to the stairs. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to take her into my bedroom as if eleven years had been telescoped into five minutes. She stood by the window looking out on the street, her back to me. I buried my lips in her neck.

  “I’m in shock, James—you know?”

  “Yes, I know. That’s why you came round, and that’s why we drank so much, and that’s why we’re doing this now. It’s natural.”

  “Are we doing this now?”

  “You mean, is this really happening? You feel realer than anything else in my world.”

  “Do I? Realer than law?”

  “Much.”

  “Realer than God?”

  “I’d trade him for you anytime.”

  “Realer than your career?”

  I sighed. “I’m actually rather tired of my career.”