The Long Kill

by Reginald Hill

  Full of self-contempt, he pushed the thought out of sight. Love that looked for profit in a lover’s pain was too despicable to deserve the name.

  It occurred to him that in any case a tête-à-tête over muffins this afternoon was out. Anya had told him that she would be taking Jimmy for his Sunday visit to Aunt Muriel’s. He suspected Jimmy would not be wildly enthusiastic and smiled at the thought that Sundays still brought their problems even in the most liberal of circles.

  The thought that Anya was going to be so close, however, brought him to a determination to get away from the Crag Hotel at least. Until he could get to a Polish dictionary and translate the letters, he only had one possible clue to the nature of Bryant’s culpability, and that was the name of his courier, Anton Ford, who lived in Manchester.

  He got out his road map and checked. A hundred miles, only a couple of hours’ drive. He doubted if anything productive could come out of the trip, but if this weather kept up, anything was better than hanging around the hotel.

  By lunchtime the weather was, if anything, getting worse. True daylight had never managed to break through and cars were crawling around with their headlights on. He had a sandwich and a beer in the bar and listened to Parker’s cheerfully stoic acceptance of the unremitting drizzle.

  In the end he said rather sourly, ‘You’ve got a hotel, you’ve got to stay in it. Me, I’ve got a car. I think I’ll try to drive out of it.’

  ‘Won’t be long before you’ve got a house too, Mr Hutton,’ chortled Parker. ‘What will you do then?’

  Sit in front of a log fire and eat muffins, was his unspoken reply.

  He waved a hand and went out into the rain.

  It was slow driving at first on winding roads in the drizzling rain. But when he hit the motorway he was able to speed up, and eventually as the mountains fell behind so the weather began to improve, at least relatively, and he was able to drive on automatic pilot, his mind wandering aimlessly over the landscape of his life till suddenly distant past and immediate present were united in the shape of an exit sign.

  It read, BLACKBURN 7 MILES.

  His home town. Where he’d been brought up. Which he’d never returned to after that last conversation with his stepfather twenty-five years ago.

  He had made a decision without thought and already the BMW was cutting off the motorway up the sliproad.

  Things had changed. He got lost. There were new roads, new buildings. It was like a dream. There were flashes of the familiar, the comfortable, immediately swallowed by the strange and intrusive. The old house was still there, a tiny thirties semi with rounded half-bay windows, with yellowish brick below and greying pebbledash above, the whole topped by buff tiles whose central ridge reminded him now, as then, of a Grecian nose seen on a museum statue. The statue had been naked, he recalled, probably a cast of some well-known Venus. He had stolen a postcard of it and used to stare longingly at those marble breasts in the uncertain privacy of the bedroom he was forced to share with his loutish stepbrother.

  That was a really deprived childhood, he told himself. I couldn’t even afford real dirty pictures!

  It occurred to him that perhaps his stepbrother still lived in the house. Or even his stepfather. He would only be in his seventies, after all.

  He had no desire to find out. This had been a mistake. Plunging into the past should only be done in company. It was too dangerous a dive to be undertaken alone. Perhaps one day, in company, with someone to keep an eye on his air-line … perhaps …

  He put the car into gear and drove on till he found a sign saying MANCHESTER. Soon his past was behind him again.

  Manchester he had known too vaguely for the changes to strike him, so oddly it was more familiar than Blackburn. He stopped at an open-all-hours corner shop on his way in and bought a street map. The address he was after proved to be in the southern suburbs, but even in the eighties a wet Northern Sunday afternoon was a street-emptier and he had no difficulty in making his way through the city centre. Eventually he found himself in an expensive-looking suburb, consisting mainly of substantial Edwardian villas each standing foursquare in the middle of its half-acre plot and advertising brass as clearly as if the owners had written their incomes on the front gate.

  Debtors’ retreat, thought Jaysmith, slipping back into the conditioned response of his childhood, and smiling in surprise at the remembered reaction.

  He found the street he was looking for without difficulty. It was a long crescent, with several ‘For Sale’ signs on display, including one in the garden of the house next to Anton Ford’s. Uncertain before what he might do on arrival, Jaysmith now saw a course of action. He parked the car and walked up the drive of the house with the ‘For Sale’ sign, taking in the neighbouring house as he did so. There was no sign of life, but a pale green Granada was parked in the drive, and he had a sense of being observed.

  He reached the door and rang the bell. After a long while and a second ring, a middle-aged woman answered the summons. She was running to fat, had silver-rinsed hair, looked rather bleary-eyed, and carried a tumblerful of well-iced colourless liquor. She didn’t speak but just looked at him.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve been looking at a couple of houses in the area and I saw your sign,’ said Jaysmith.

  ‘It says appointments only,’ said the woman, gesturing at the board and slopping some of the liquid out of her glass.

  ‘I know and I’m sorry, but the agent’s office is closed, and I’m only in the district today. However, if it’s really inconvenient …’

  She looked him up and down, and then beyond him to the BMW parked at the gate.

  ‘As long as you don’t expect apple-pie order,’ she said, turning away.

  Taking this as an invitation he followed her into the house. It occurred to him that the last time he had gone through this masquerade, he had ended up buying the place. An expensive habit to get into.

  The woman began to show him round. She seemed to be under some strain and the reason for this and the drink was soon made clear as her description of the house gradually became more and more autobiographical. Her name was Wendy Denver. She was selling the house because her husband had died of a heart attack two months before and the house was too big for her and too full of memories and she could go to live with her son in Ireland, only she hated Ireland and her Irish daughter-in-law hated her, so she thought she would buy a flat in the town centre and not lose contact with her friends and neighbours …

  It was becoming stream-of-consciousness stuff and, as much out of pity for the woman as self-interest, Jaysmith cut in brutally and said, ‘Yes, the neighbours. They are important, aren’t they? I always like to know about the neighbours when I buy a house. How are they? Easy to get on with?’

  The woman considered.

  ‘Well, on this side I don’t have much to do with them, not since we had the row about the dog doing its business outside my gate. They’ve got a gate of their own, I told them …’

  Her gesture had seemed to indicate the other side to Ford’s house and Jaysmith cut in again, ‘And the other side?’

  But before the woman could answer the door bell rang. Jaysmith could see why she had been so long opening the door to him. She stood stock still as if the source of this strange noise was completely unknown to her and it wasn’t till the third ring that she seemed to get her bearings.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said and left the room.

  Jaysmith followed her to make sure she reached her destination.

  When she opened the door, a couple stood there, she a rather faded woman in a floral smock, he a brawny suntanned man who might have been a docker or a road labourer except that the silk sports shirt straining against his solid chest was by Gucci as were the slacks similarly stressed by his broad thighs; and the three rings on his spatulate fingers together with the embossed gold medallion resting in a nest of gingery hair beneath his open collar must have cost a couple of thousand pounds.

  ‘We th
ought we’d drop in and see if there was a cup of tea going,’ said the woman.

  ‘Come in, come in do. This is handy,’ cried Mrs Denver. ‘We were just talking about you! Or rather this gentleman here was asking questions about you and I was just about to fill him in!’

  She turned back to Jaysmith.

  ‘You wanted to know all about my neighbours, and here are two of the very best you could find anywhere. Anton and Sally Ford from next door, meet Mr …?’

  ‘Wainwright,’ said Jaysmith extending his hand. Whether this was good or bad luck, he didn’t know. It ought to be good, but there was something unpleasantly speculative about the way Ford regarded him as he shook his hand.

  ‘We didn’t know you had any appointments to view arranged for this afternoon,’ said the faded woman.

  ‘Didn’t have. Mr Wainwright was just passing,’ said Mrs Denver indifferently.

  Jaysmith relaxed a little. This could be the simple explanation of the man’s scrutiny. Good neighbours, and knowing that this vulnerable woman had had no viewing appointments made for that day, they had come over to make sure he wasn’t the local Raffles.

  ‘If you moved here, Mr Wainwright, you’d be the luckiest man in the world to have neighbours like these. What I’d have done without them …’

  She had begun with a perfect control which made its sudden loss all the more disturbing. Suddenly everything seemed to go, speech, movement, awareness. She simply stood before them, puppet-slack, with tears streaming down her face. Sally Ford put her arm around her and led her unresisting out of the entrance hall into the lounge, closing the door behind her.

  Jaysmith shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realize …’

  ‘You’re not much acquainted with grief then, Mr Wainwright?’

  The biblical turn of phrase rang oddly. The man’s voice matched his clothes rather than his physique. It was light, well educated, with just a distant hint of accent, the voice of a pre-mumble-film romantic hero, or romantic rogue.

  ‘Enough. I meant, I didn’t realize how close to the edge she was.’

  ‘Bereavement can be a wasting disease if it gets a hold,’ said Ford, moving easily from a scriptural to a medical idiom. ‘The broken heart is not a clinical reality, but the eroded heart, now that’s something else. Grief wears away the will to live. Which other properties are you interested in?’

  ‘Properties of grief, you mean?’ said Jaysmith, puzzled.

  Ford smiled. He had two gold-filled teeth.

  ‘You said you were looking at other properties in the area. I wondered if you’d been visiting anyone else in our crescent. There are plenty for sale.’

  ‘No, not in this crescent. A bit further south, in fact, closer to the airport. Nothing I saw took my fancy, so I just drove around and thought I’d try pot luck here. I’m sorry I picked on Mrs Denver. What’s she asking, by the way? We hadn’t got onto prices.’

  His attempt at diversion seemed to work. Ford mentioned a figure, then went on to sing the virtues of the house and the district.

  ‘And you needn’t worry about the airport. It’s twenty minutes at the most, fifteen if you’re late.’

  ‘You sound expert. Do you use it a lot?’

  ‘All the time. Domestic flights, the Continent. It’s very handy. Hang on a moment.’

  He gently opened the lounge door and stepped inside. A few moments later he emerged and said, ‘I don’t think Mrs Denver’s going to be fit to resume her sales-talk for some time. The drink doesn’t help. They think it perks them up, but alcohol’s basically a depressant. Look, I’ve got to pop across to my place. Why don’t you come with me, and anything more I can tell you about the area, I’ll be happy to. Basically the houses are the same too. You could even look around our shack if you liked.’

  It was so precisely the kind of invitation Jaysmith had been desperately seeking a means of eliciting that he was taken aback, as if his mind had been read.

  ‘That would be fine,’ he said.

  Ford’s house was decorated and furnished in an expensive modern style which Jaysmith did not care for. This surprised him. Or rather, it wasn’t the judgement that surprised him but the fact that he was making it. After two decades of almost total indifference to the style of his surroundings, he was suddenly developing a critical taste. There was in the lounge a huge artificial log fire with real gas flames but it was not, he decided, looking at the modern sculpture lines of the pure white armchairs, a room to toast muffins in.

  Ford had unlocked a cabinet and taken out a flat black leather case from which he removed a small bottle.

  ‘I’ll just take these over to Wendy,’ he said. ‘Make yourself at home. Have a look around if you like.’

  He went out whistling ‘A Wandering Minstrel I’ from the Mikado. This was getting to be too good to be true. Jaysmith went over to the black case which was still lying open. It was full of pill bottles, capsules, ampoules, all neatly stored in separate compartments. He looked in the cabinet from which Ford had removed the case, but there was nothing there. Indeed the rest of the lounge promised little, so he went out into the entrance hall and after trying a couple of doors found a small room used as an office.

  Quickly he went through the drawers of the stainless steel desk. The mystery of the black case was solved. The man’s business notepaper revealed he was the sales head of a large drug retailing company. His desk diary showed he was a busy man, travelling all over Europe. There had been three visits to Poland in the last twelve months. And three letters had been received by Bryant from Ota. But this was just confirmation of facts already known. It didn’t open up new avenues.

  A filing cabinet contained nothing but business files. There was a wall safe but this was locked, and though he tried the same approach that had worked at Naddle Foot, Ford’s telephone book contained nothing that looked like a hidden number. He checked that Bryant’s number was in it, then he heard the noise of Ford’s cheerful whistling returning.

  Quickly he glanced around the office to make sure he had left no sign of his presence and returned to the lounge.

  Ford looked in a moment later, said, ‘All right? With you in a sec. Pour yourself a drink,’ then ran lightly up the stairs.

  When he returned, Jaysmith was sipping a gin and tonic.

  ‘I think I’ll have a little one too,’ he said. ‘Nothing like an alcoholic depressant for picking you up, as long as you’re not suffering from anything serious, that is.’

  ‘How is Mrs Denver?’

  ‘Fine. I’ve given her something that’ll see her right.’

  Suddenly he smiled and the gold teeth flashed again.

  ‘By the way, in case you’re wondering, I do have an MD. Not practising, but fully qualified. Couldn’t stand the hours. No, I went into research with a drug company at first, but that was a bit of a dead end, I decided, unless you had real flair, which I didn’t. But I discovered I could sell things; and medical people are much more likely to buy from someone in the sacred circle, so to speak, than unqualified outsiders, so I went onward and upward. Now I work as hard and as long as most GPS, so perhaps I wasn’t so clever after all. Another drink? Look, try some of this stuff. Plum brandy. It’s really smooth. Best thing to come out of Poland, though perhaps it’s a bit disloyal of me to say so.’

  ‘How disloyal?’ asked Jaysmith, refusing the brandy.

  ‘My parents were Polish,’ he explained. ‘My father was a doctor. He didn’t like the way things were going and decided to get his family out in 1938. I wasn’t born then but I was six months on the way. Three months later I entered the world in London.’

  He talked easily, readily, with hardly any prompting. It was curiously like listening to Bryant’s account of his escape from Poland, except for one essential difference. Bryant’s tone had been harsh and tragic; with Ford, Jaysmith had a faint sense much of the time of being gently mocked.

  The Ford family, consisting of the parents, an elder brother
and sister, and Anton himself, settled down in England with varying senses of permanency.

  ‘My mother was very ill after I was born. I was a very late child. My brother was thirteen years older than I, and my sister seven. Mother was in her forties when she had me. She recovered, but I guess that she’d had enough trial and tribulation in her life by the time the war ended. My brother had joined the army when he was eighteen you see, and got killed during the Normandy landings. So mother wanted no more change. She wanted to stay quietly in England; there was rationing, of course, and all kinds of shortage and deprivation, but she knew that here there would be no secret police, no occupying army.

  ‘Father on the other hand always planned to go back. They argued and argued. Finally they had to agree to differ. And in 1948, father went back. My sister Urszula, who was sixteen by then and old enough to make her own choice, went with him. She thought the sun shone out of his stethoscope and had managed to grow steadily more Polish despite her ten years in England. Me, I was bilingual, but I was British. And I wasn’t going to leave mother. To tell the truth, at ten years old, father scared the hell out of me, and I wasn’t crazy about my bossy sister either.’

  He laughed ruefully.

  ‘But I’m long over that. My parents are both dead, but I go to Poland on business sometimes and I visit Urszula when I can. She’s got five kids and two grandchildren. Good Catholic! I’m both a bad Catholic and also we never hit it lucky with kids, so it’s nice to have a ready-made family at a safe distance. And they all seem to like their rich capitalist uncle!’

  They talked on for another quarter of an hour; for the most part Ford talked, Jaysmith listened.

  ‘Did you change your name?’ he asked. ‘Or Anglicize it?’

  ‘No. Ford was the family name. Like the film director. Aleksander, the Pole, I mean, not John, the Yankee. That made it handy. No Ws and Zs and Ys to puzzle the natives!’