The Long Kill

by Reginald Hill

  That night Anya came openly to his room, only insisting that her alarm clock be set for six AM so that she could be back in her own bed before Jimmy awoke.

  The news she had brought from the hospital had been good. Bryant was mending well, there were no complications, the prognosis was a full recovery in a matter of months. Bryant himself claimed that this was merely confirmation of what he had been saying all along, but even he was visibly lightened by the news. As for Anya, her delight was manifest in her every word and movement during the evening, and the promise of pleasure she gave him whenever their eyes met or hands brushed was paid in triple measure from the moment the bedroom door closed. They shared roles, each in turn accepting the mastery and driving the other to the limits of ecstasy; and it was almost as if they exchanged bodies too, for Jaysmith at times felt himself a willing victim in the grip of Anya’s undeniable power and strength, yet when she sensed that finally his long stamina was failing, she relaxed instantly and, curling up against him, seemed to shrink to a kitten’s weight and softness, and he folded her tenderly to him, fearful lest he should crush her.

  They slept. Soon he dreamt the old dream, or a combination of many old dreams, labyrinthing from the heat of Saigon through many countries, many deaths, to a high place in the Cumbrian fells where he raised his gun sight to his eye and saw Anya magnified in that lethal circle.

  He awoke. She was lying across him, her arms spread wide, her legs coiled round his splayed right leg, like a wrestler who has his opponent pinned in a fall. Yet she felt no weight at all.

  He lay in the darkness and recalled their mutual pleasure. If news of her father’s expected progress towards recovery could bring her to such a pitch of joy, into what depths of pain and despair would his death plunge her? The previous evening he had responded so readily to Anya’s joyous mood that he had once more been able to push the agony of decision out of his mind. But the point of no return was close. Ford’s visit the previous day had told him as much as he was likely to find out about Bryant’s ‘crime'. He had to act on what he knew now, and the alternatives were few and unattractive.

  ‘Are you awake?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you thinking of?’

  ‘The future.’

  ‘Our future?’

  ‘Is there another?’

  She laughed and gripped him tightly.

  ‘You’ll take care of me, and Jimmy, and pappy, won’t you Jay?’ she whispered. It was only marginally a question.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ he asked, uneasy at the way she had intersected his own thought.

  ‘Nothing. Pure selfishness. Pappy’s been taking care of me for a long time now, and recently I’ve been taking care of him, and we’ve both been taking care of Jimmy, and suddenly, you’re here, and I feel as if we can all relax at last and somehow, with no effort at all, you’ll take care of everything! Like I say, pure selfishness. Ignore it!’

  The anguish her words caused him must have made itself felt in some tensing of the body for she pushed herself up off him slightly and said, ‘Am I too heavy?’

  He pulled her back down and said, ‘No. A feather, you’re no more than a feather.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, pressing against him. ‘You’re right. Hold me close. Tonight I feel so light that a cold draught from the fells could easily blow me away.’

  Again her choice of words cut across his heart like angina, but this time he gave no sign and after a while he heard her breath slip into the shallow rhythms of sleep, but sleep did not return to him that night and when the alarm began to shrill at six o’clock, his hand had muffled it in a moment. But she was awake already, and stretching sensuously, letting her hands run the whole length of his body.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ she said. ‘I’m so happy.’

  Then she slipped out of his arms and bed, picked up her discarded wrap from the floor and pulled it with coquettish slowness around her shoulders, laughing at his expression.

  ‘There’ll come a time when you’d prefer a cup of tea and the morning paper!’ she said. ‘See you at breakfast.’

  After the door had closed behind her, he rose and went and stood by the window. The sky was blue, but pale as a marsh forget-me-not fast fading in the summer’s drought. That drought was long past here, and the wind which was taking shape in the beeches and scouring the colour from the sky would before long be summoning clouds to glut the streams once more. For the present though the fell tops were clear. He raised his eyes to them and felt a surge of longing, almost sexual in its intensity, to be up there, to be walking with the wind on his face and his mind clear of all past guilt and future care.

  He had fallen in love with more than a woman, he told himself, wonderingly. He had fallen in love with a landscape too. The two were linked in a way he did not attempt to analyse further than saying that the woman he wanted was here, and the place he wanted to be with that woman was here also.

  He turned from the window and sat on the bed. Looking out on the fells was about as helpful to a logical assessment of the courses open to him as looking down at Anya’s naked body would have been.

  The courses were few and unattractive. He could either concentrate on getting Bryant out of harm’s way or persuading Jacob to de-target him. To get Bryant out of the way would mean revealing himself to the man. Hitherto he had shied away from this because it would have almost certainly meant revealing himself to Anya also, for, however Bryant might feel about entrusting his own safety to the hands of a self-confessed professional assassin, he was certainly not going to trust his daughter’s future to those same polluted hands.

  But now things had changed. Anton Ford had done more than give the background of why Bryant should be a security target. He had incidentally and unconsciously dropped into Jaysmith’s lap a weapon to make the solicitor malleable and keep him silent. And yet it was a weapon that Jaysmith felt the strongest revulsion against using.

  He had not consciously and logically worked his way to his conclusions but his subconscious must have been burrowing away all night for now they rose clear and unmistakable to the surface of his mind.

  Anya had revealed to him two nights earlier her guilty certainty that Edward Wilson had deliberately missed his insulin injection before going out on the fells that fatal Saturday.

  Now there was another explanation, neither accident nor suicide.

  Stefan Bryant a few weeks before Edward Wilson’s death had obtained a pack of insulin ampoules from Anton Ford.

  Suppose he had doctored them so that their contents were diluted or completely useless.

  Suppose, driven by rage at Anya’s unhappiness, guilt at his own imagined neglect at letting it happen, and despair at her inability to break out of it, he had substituted this dud pack for a real one when he collected Anya to host his Christmas party.

  Did Bryant have it in him to be so ruthless? It was Jaysmith’s reading of the man that he did. His wartime experience proved he had the nerve and the stomach for it, if the cause were right. And how much righter a cause can a man have than his child’s happiness?

  Besides it was an ambiguously indirect form of killing, fatalistic almost. Wilson may not have gone climbing. He may have collapsed in company or near a telephone. He may have been found in time.

  These variables were just the kind of tackle men use to shift a heavy weight of direct responsibility. Even when the corpse lies at the other end of a straight line of fire, a man can easily find mental pulleys to help him take the strain. Patriotism; justice; or when all else fails, simple distance will sometimes do the trick.

  For not the first time recently it came to Jaysmith that his own preference for the long kill was not simply a factor of his physical safety, but, even more important, of his mental stability.

  He shrugged the introspective mood away. The dark of night was the place for such thoughts. Here in bright morning he must concern himself with practicalities and action.

  If Bryant had set out to kill hi
s son-in-law, then the threat of having this revealed to Anya would make him completely malleable. The fact, if it were fact, was simply a weapon. Ethical judgements were not apt for this situation, nor, Jaysmith admitted bitterly, from this source.

  Yet he did not want to use the weapon and he knew the reason why. At the moment all he had was the strongest suspicion. Confront Bryant, and he guessed that the man might readily acknowledge his guilt. And the prospect of having the weight of this knowledge added to all the other heavy secrets he kept hidden from Anya was more than he could bear.

  No; it would be a last resort. His mind was made up. Somehow or other he would contact Jacob and ask for a parley.

  But he would not go empty handed to the conference table.

  He had a writing case with him. He took out some sheets of paper and spent the next half-hour covering them with his small, neat handwriting. By the time he’d finished, there were sounds of life in the house: taps running, Anya’s voice urging Jimmy to haste, the boy’s footsteps, sluggish at first, but soon accelerating to their normal breakneck pace.

  On his way downstairs, Jaysmith looked in on Bryant. He was sitting up in bed with a hardly touched breakfast tray pushed to one side and a cigarette between bloodless lips. The trip to the hospital for his check-up seemed to have produced a reaction at odds with the up-beat prognosis. He complained of feeling tired and certainly looked rather pale and drawn. As he looked down at him, Jaysmith wondered again about his guilt with regard to the Polish betrayals. Did his new suspicions about Wilson’s death make this alleged treachery more or less probable? In point of ruthlessness, more; but not in point of motive. Not unless a threat to Urszula had been the lever to treachery. That did make some kind of sense. If so, this man had enough on his mind and his conscience to make a Tartar haggard.

  ‘Are you measuring me for my coffin?’ growled Bryant.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You’re studying me with a very professional eye,’ said the older man sourly.

  ‘Was I? I was thinking of something else. By the way, can I use your copier? I noticed you had one in your study.’

  ‘Did you? Quite the lynx-eyed detective, aren’t you? Well, what you didn’t notice was that since Friday when Anya used it to run some things off for Jimmy’s party, it’s not been working. You want to watch that girl, Hutton. What she touches often seems to fall apart.’

  ‘Does it? She must have had her hands on your temper this morning then,’ said Jaysmith with a smile. ‘Is there a photocopying shop in Keswick, do you know?’

  ‘No idea,’ grunted Bryant and then, as if to make amends for his surliness, added, ‘But there’s a machine in my office. Use that if you like.’

  ‘That’s kind of you. I will,’ said Jaysmith. ‘Are you finished with your tray? You’ve hardly touched it.’

  ‘Yes, I’m finished. And one nagging nurse in the house is quite enough, Hutton.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Jaysmith, picking up the tray. ‘I’d better go and get my breakfast, I think. Any message for your office?’

  ‘No. But you can get me some cigarettes in town. I’m running low and Anya will just accidentally forget. Caporals!’

  ‘I know, I know,’ called Jaysmith as he descended the stairs.

  He left for Keswick straight after breakfast. It had been a comfortably domestic meal with the pair of them very much at ease with one another.

  ‘We’re like an old married couple,’ he said as she accompanied him to the door. ‘Little wife seeing hardworking hubby off to the City.’

  He accompanied his remark with a satirical peck on the cheek, but she fastened her arms round his neck and forced her mouth against his so hard that he tasted blood when they broke apart.

  ‘You did that like it was the last time,’ he said. ‘Much harder, and it might have been.’

  She didn’t respond to his smile but said seriously, ‘There’s something about you, Jay, which makes every time feel like the last time. You’re not going to run out on me, are you?’

  ‘Jilt you, you mean?’ he said, still aiming at lightness. ‘You can always do me for breach-of-promise!’

  ‘Seriously, Jay,’ she said steadily. ‘This is for real, isn’t it? We’re going to last.’

  ‘It’s for real,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens, never doubt that, my love. I haven’t loved anyone for twenty years. She was the first and she died. Now there’s you. You’re the last, Anya. After you, no one, nothing. This is for ever.’

  He kissed her again passionately. Suddenly he too felt her sense of finality, as if it had been contagious. But it was absurd. He was only going to Keswick.

  ‘See you later,’ he said, smiling. And left.

  Chapter 26

  Jaysmith did not drive direct to the solicitor’s office. There was something else he had to do first and it was best to do it as quickly as possible before the tourists got on the move.

  He skirted Keswick on the road which took him down towards Derwentwater and then turned south on the road into Borrowdale. After a couple of miles he turned left and began to climb, crossing the picturesque hump of Ashness Bridge on the narrow road to Watendlath and turning off into the trees which began to crowd both sides half a mile further along. The wind was here already, using the branches as its vocal chords to sing and sough its growing strength, but there were no other cars yet and no sign of anyone on foot.

  He opened the boot, unclipped the false bottom and took out the rucksack which contained the M21. It took him longer than usual to assemble it, a matter of seconds only, but he felt the difference, then he found the target he was looking for, the rotten trunk of a fallen tree resting against a grassy bank. He began to pump shots into the decaying wood. The Sionics noise suppressor and the tree-loud wind combined to dissipate the sound of the shots, but he was still aware of the risk he was taking. But the time had come for risks.

  It took just a few seconds, then he began to dig into the bank with the short-handled spade he had brought from the car.

  Ten minutes later he was crossing Ashness Bridge once more on his descent to the lakeside road. He parked in Keswick not far from where he’d left Adam’s mini. On his way to the solicitors’ office he stopped at a stationer’s, and bought several small padded envelopes and a couple of large ones.

  Donald Grose was not in, but the pretty young secretary smiled at him and said, ‘There you are, Mr Hutton. Mr Bryant phoned to say you’d be coming in to use the copier.’

  And probably thus told Jacob too. Not that it mattered. By the time the message got to London and its significance was analysed, even if they guessed at the truth, it would be far too late. And in any case Jacob would know soon enough.

  The copying did not take long. With the girl’s permission, he then went into Bryant’s little-used office and prepared his packages, filling them and printing the address neatly on in black ink. Finally he put half the small packages in one of the large padded envelopes, and the rest in the other. As he finished, the door opened and Donald Grose looked in.

  ‘Hello there,’ he said. ‘How’s the invalid?’

  ‘Cantankerous,’ said Jaysmith. The telephone rang in the outer office and a moment later the girl appeared.

  ‘It’s Miss Wilson for you, Mr Hutton. I’ll put it through here, shall I?’

  ‘Do that,’ said Grose. ‘I’m not sure if I like this direct contact between client and customer. I don’t see how I can charge you for it!’

  Why do lawyers joke about extorting money? wondered Jaysmith. It’s like doctors joking about killing patients!

  He waited till Grose had closed the door and lifted the phone.

  ‘Mr Hutton?’ said Miss Wilson’s unmistakable voice. ‘I rang you at Naddle Foot and Annie said I’d catch you here. It’s about furniture. I’ve worked out what I can fit into Betty Craik’s old house, but there’s a lot less space there and I don’t want to end up cluttered like a junk shop. There’s a couple of pieces I want Annie to have, and my brother wants one or tw
o things, but that still leaves quite a lot of stuff I can’t take with me, large items mainly. There’s the kitchen dresser, for instance, and a big chest of drawers in me bedroom. I thought I’d give you first refusal before going to the trouble of getting them shifted to a saleroom. Are you interested?’

  She was as abrupt and direct as ever.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jaysmith, knowing he was really saying yes to a dream of normality, yes to the hope of a settled future.

  ‘Well, I’ll not be contacting the saleroom till this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I’ll be here all morning.’

  The phone went dead. Jaysmith smiled admiringly. The art of the hard sell was far older than modern marketing!

  He jiggled the rest till he got a dialling tone. From his wallet he took Anton Ford’s card and dialled the number. He intended telling Ford that he had decided to confront Jacob. If the man could contribute anything else in support of his contention of Bryant’s innocence, this was his chance. Also, if he were agreeable, he could provide Jaysmith with a London link via his control to Jacob. The man might not care to have his own involvement thus publicized, but Jaysmith doubted if his amateurish efforts at concealment had not been easily penetrated already.

  The phone was answered by a woman.

  ‘Mrs Ford?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could I speak to your husband please.’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s not at home.’

  ‘Could you tell me where I might be able to get hold of him? At his office perhaps?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, he won’t be there today either.’

  Something in her voice made Jaysmith probe a little further.

  ‘I’m a business acquaintance of his, Mrs Ford,’ he said. ‘He assured me he’d be at home if I phoned this morning.’

  ‘I think he expected to be,’ she said. ‘But he rang last night to say he’d been detained and would be spending the night away.’

  ‘I see. Did he mention the hotel? Perhaps I can contact him there.’

  ‘No, he didn’t. He didn’t give any details.’ Suddenly the anxiety came through unmistakably in her tone as its cause was expressed in her words.