Only The Ruthless Can Play

by John Burke

  ‘It was an accident. We’ll never know.’

  ‘That’s what they say. They’re great at that — “don’t know” and “no comment”.’

  ‘Andrew,’ she said, ‘did you invite me out just to harangue me about Western’s death?’

  ‘Western’s death plus old man Marsh’s death.’

  ‘It’s old man Marsh who interests you?’ she said recklessly. ‘The old one — not the young one?’

  He slammed his hand down on the table, and beer splashed up out of his glass and spattered across the red plastic top. Keeping his voice down he said:

  ‘Look, Jess, I don’t like that sort of talk. It’s cheap. It’s not like you. Anyone would think you’d got something to be proud of in … well, anyway … ’

  ‘Or is it just so that you won’t look too conspicuous? A double game — the calculation of the really promising Course member. If you avoid me too much it will show, won’t it? All the other men on the Course talk to me and ask me out, so you think you’d better do it. Is that what you’ve decided?’

  It was true that at this stage the men usually relaxed slightly. Feeling schoolboyish because they were so far from their normal haunts they would try their luck with Jessica. She allowed some of them to take her out. Some escorts talked shop as though suspecting her of being still on duty and liable to report back on their behaviour and conversation. Others tried to show their scorn for such tactics but nevertheless proved that they felt precisely the same by employing another technique: they did not mention the Company at all. It was a great strain when they were like that.

  Jessica was rarely asked to go to bed with any of them. They were too wary.

  Andrew leaned forward, his sleeve resting against the edge of a puddle of beer. Jessica watched the cloth darkening but could not bring herself to draw his attention to it.

  He said: ‘Jess, this Course is just something that’s got to be lived through. It’s got to be got out of the way. And when it is — couldn’t we manage a holiday together?’

  She looked at his hand around the beer glass. She hardly dared to meet his eyes. In a second he had conjured up a picture that was too beautiful and too painful. Trust Andrew! He had only to say something like that, and she was right back in the world he had created for her. She remembered the long weekend they had managed together last year — and the incredible week the year before that, the week that she had known even then could never be repeated. Now, when she had felt herself drifting carefully and silently away from him, hoping he would not notice until the distance between them was too great for him even to call after her, he had reached out and pulled her back.

  ‘Once it’s over,’ he said, ‘we’ll know where we are. We can make plans.’

  Once it was over. He was making it plain that the Course still had top priority in his thoughts. He was going to go through with it.

  ‘Plans?’ she said despondently. ‘What plans?’

  She knew that she was a fool to be so expectant. However weary she might allow herself to feel, she was waiting for him to prove to her that everything could somehow be made right. There were a dozen ways in which he might say it if he wanted to say it.

  Andrew drank deeply and sighed. ‘You know what this infernal rat race is like.’

  He tried to sound as though he hated the whole thing but it was the pose that all of them adopted. He still intended to emerge at the head of the pack. And when he had succeeded, what promises would he make? What thoughts would he have of her? Second thoughts, no doubt.

  ‘A drink?’ he said, finishing his glass.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘I think we ought to be getting back.’

  ‘You’ve got a date?’

  ‘No,’ said Jessica, ‘I haven’t got a date.’

  They walked back to the hostel in silence. The towers and chimneys of the plant stood up against the sky like a cluster of harsh spires and towers above a severely functional city. Few people moved in the streets. In the daytime the men worked in the plant, the women did their shopping; in the evening they were at home watching television.

  Andrew and Jessica walked below the long, curving wall that shielded the secrets of Intersyn from the outside world. It was blank for a couple of hundred yards save for a number of small metal doors and one unexpectedly ornamental iron gate which allowed a view into the twinkling heart of the place — sparkling with lights although nobody was in sight.

  Andrew moved abruptly away from Jessica towards the wall and said: ‘Hold it. Isn’t that … ?’

  He stood against the wall, dissociating himself from her. She watched the heavy, dark shape of Bill Crowther cross the road some way ahead of them. He glanced quickly in their direction but she could not be sure that he had seen them. Then he seemed to vanish into the wall.

  ‘It was Crowther?’ said Andrew.

  ‘Yes. It was Crowther.’

  They walked slowly on, and found another door in the wall. Andrew pushed it gently, but it would not open.

  ‘He must have let himself out that way, and then let himself in and locked it again,’ he said. ‘But why? What’s he up to?’

  Jessica stood back and looked up at the surface of the wall. She tried to visualise the interior of the factory, working out its layout step by step. The main gate was in the imposing frontage, on the far side from here. The laboratories … admin offices … she paced her way mentally over the site. Then she said:

  ‘This entrance could be a useful short cut to the hostel.’

  ‘But why should Crowther want his own special exit and entrance? And how does he come to be using it?’

  ‘He used to work here. Probably knows every side door in the place. And’ — Jessica tried to laugh it off, wondering why she was so uneasy about Crowther’s oddly furtive dash across the road — ‘I expect he gets a kick out of showing off, even if only to himself.’

  Andrew came to the edge of the pavement beside her and looked up at the wall.

  ‘Yes. He spent a long time here — belongs up here, really, doesn’t he? Maybe he’s got an old girl-friend in the town.’

  ‘An old flame,’ Jessica agreed. It robbed the incident of importance if you made a conventional joke out of it.

  ‘A bit far away for normal use. Up here, the embers can’t get breathed on all that often.’

  ‘Not only up here,’ said Jessica involuntarily.

  Beside her, Andrew stiffened and went on staring up at the barrier of brick.

  ‘She’s not the only one,’ said Jessica. ‘Further south, it’s just the same.’

  Andrew said, ‘What else is there over this wall — on the other side, right opposite?’

  ‘I can’t be absolutely sure.’

  He heard the betraying note in her voice. ‘You can,’ he accused her.

  ‘The extrusion plant, I think.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘You’re sure,’ he said. ‘Then what the hell … ’

  ‘There are plenty of doors. Plenty of ways in and out of the plant.’

  ‘All locked from the inside,’ said Andrew, ‘unless you know how to operate them. Crowther … how often do you suppose he comes this way? And does he go right through the extrusion plant shed, or round it, and does he meet anyone on the way — and if so, what happens to them?’

  Jessica walked on. He caught up with her. They went in through the main gate and under an archway of gleaming pipes and reached the hostel. They said good night with such bleak formality that any casual witness might have supposed that Andrew had made a pass at her and been slapped down.

  Jessica went to her room and lay down on the bed. She longed for sleep but for a few minutes could not summon up the energy to undress.

  Her room was painted in an austere pink. The lamp shade was a deeper, restful red. She turned away from the light and looked at the picture on the wall. It was an enlargement of a black and white photograph of Intersyn’s
main German subsidiary, the gleaming new plant set against a background of hills and what looked like steeply sloping vineyards.

  There was a tap at her door.

  Jessica swung her legs off the bed.

  ‘Hello?’

  It could only be Dampier, fussing over some little detail which must be changed. The recent tragedy would have had no great effect on the feud between himself and Schroeder.

  It was not until her hand was on the door knob that she wondered, startlingly yet dispassionately, if Dampier had pushed Western.

  She opened the door, hoping her face would not give her away.

  David stood outside. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘David — you oughtn’t to be here.’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘We could have a drink downstairs, or sit in the lounge.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you alone. There’s nobody else I can talk to.’

  She stood back and he came in. She expected him to kiss her but he walked straight past. When she closed the door he sat on the bed and stared at her. She waved at a chair. He paid no attention. Her room had a desk, a table, several chairs and a couch; but he sat on the bed and looked at her until she came and sat beside him. She waited for him to put his arm round her.

  He said, ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Western’s death,’ he said keenly, probingly.

  Jessica sighed. Partridge and Dampier might lecture as much as they liked, there would be only one topic of conversation now until the Course was ended — and perhaps beyond it.

  ‘It was an accident. I thought that had been established.’

  ‘Established?’ he said. ‘By whom?’

  ‘Do we have to talk about it?’ said Jessica. A few minutes ago she had been sprawling on the bed, longing for peace. Now she wanted even more to sleep. If he wanted to make love to her before she went to sleep, she wouldn’t resist — she didn’t really want him tonight, but at the same time she was hurt that for him too there was only one thing to talk about, only one topic he wanted to discuss with her. Let him come into bed with her and then let there be sleep. She said: ‘Is that all you can talk about?’

  ‘It’s not surprising. My father died in the same place. It didn’t strike you as odd?’

  ‘Well — ’

  ‘It strikes everyone else as odd,’ said David. ‘I can see by the way they look at me.’

  ‘I think they’re probably embarrassed. Not wanting to mention it, but finding it awkward to skate round. You must know how it feels.’

  ‘I ought to,’ he said: ‘it’s a subject I’ve had to spend half my life skating round.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised it meant so much to you.’ She was stricken by that faraway expression of his as he sat there and waited, it seemed, for her verdict. Her verdict on what? He was a small boy again, waiting. It was difficult to tell whether he waited for punishment or solace. She thought of his mother, and his mother’s only compelling subject of conversation. She said: ‘I suppose that accident altered so many things for you. It must have had a terrible effect on your life … your way of life. One doesn’t think.’

  ‘Accident?’ he said. ‘My father was murdered.’

  *

  This was the story he had come to tell her. ‘There’s nobody else I can talk to.’ So he talked to Jessica. He told her a story with a frightening inner logic and a surface of frightening fantasy. It had to be fantasy.

  At first he had been grateful to Intersyn for their generosity following his father’s death. It had been made subtly apparent to him that he had cause for gratitude. He owed his education to Intersyn and in due course he was offered an excellent position in the firm. Things were made easy for him. His mother was the only person who didn’t tell him repeatedly how lucky he was.

  His mother’s cryptic remarks about its being a lot less than he deserved were restrained at first. She was perhaps stunned by the loss of her husband. While the teachers and friends and the Intersyn Welfare Officer told David how fortunate he was, his mother told him what a wonderful man his father had been; and this tied in with David’s memories well enough. Then his mother began to speak more freely — only to him, of course. She saved the long explanations until he was old enough to grasp them. At the end of his first year with Intersyn she told him that the new development which was making a fortune for the Company had been his father’s. Richard Marsh had originated the early experiments, carried them through … and then been robbed of victory. Mrs Marsh remembered his exultation, remembered him scribbling in that notebook of his, and remembered his declaration that he had solved it — had made the final definitive step. He was a Company employee, he wouldn’t get any more money for it — not in cash, not paid over just like that — but the prestige of having achieved what they had been struggling to synthesise for so long, and the eventual promotion that this must mean, were a glowing promise for him.

  Then he died. His notebook disappeared. Partridge, the Departmental Head who had been working with him and with Dr Schroeder, got the main credit. In due course he also got a Directorship. Partridge was that kind of man. And Partridge must have killed Richard Marsh.

  ‘My father didn’t fall off that catwalk by accident,’ David said to Jessica. ‘He knew everything about that plant — the inside and outside of every vessel, every little thing that could happen. He must have been killed.’

  Jessica’s mouth was dry. All she could say was, ‘It couldn’t happen.’

  ‘It did happen.’

  ‘You’ve no proof.’

  ‘No,’ said David, ‘but I’m going to get it. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m on this Course.’

  For a wild moment, trapped in the lurid nightmare of his aberration, she thought he meant that he had been given a place on this Course by the management solely on the grounds that he wished to unearth evidence of their own treachery.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘They must have put you on it because they thought you were good. You’re on it because

  ‘Because I dropped some unpleasant hints,’ he said.

  ‘Hints?’

  ‘I told them that they weren’t treating me fairly,’ said David. And then, very earnestly, very anxious that he should see this was still straightforward and above reproach, he added: ‘And it was true. I wouldn’t have tackled it that way if I hadn’t felt absolutely right about it. I said I wasn’t getting a fair deal — I was just a charity case. I wanted to get on the Executive Course — mainly to get close to these people, of course, but also because I deserved it as much as anyone did. And they had to let me come on it.’

  Jessica, steeped in the ethics of personnel procedure in Intersyn, said: ‘They don’t usually let candidates tell them about their own suitability.’

  ‘Not usually,’ David agreed. ‘But in this case they felt it would be a good thing to send me on the Course … so that charity was not only done but could be seen to be done.’

  ‘But why did you think the Course was so important? So important to your theory about your father, I mean.’

  David had felt that he would have to get close before he could prove anything. He wanted to mix with the people in power, to listen to Schroeder and try to catch him out, to see Partridge and see if he could be made to falter; to come to Belby and check.

  ‘Check?’ said Jessica. ‘On what?’

  He knew when the patent for the new resin had been taken out. He knew that its development was blurred over as a communal enterprise in the official booklets issued to staff. He knew, because his mother had told him over and over again, that his father’s black notebook had disappeared — a notebook so well known to his colleagues and everyone else that it was a standing joke, as Schroeder himself had made clear on this very Course. David wanted to find out. He wanted to catch somebody out. He wanted to see somebody frightened, and then to go after him.

  David’s voice rose as he talked. There was a stage at which Jessica tri
ed to stop him, afraid of people hearing and of sly stories going around; but then the whole impossible story that David was telling became more real and overpowering than all other conceivable stories added together, and she listened to him and forgot about anyone outside.

  ‘Somebody,’ he said, ‘must have been scared stiff when he learnt I was on this Course. That’s what I’ve been banking on. Partridge, I think. Or someone very close to him. Partridge or Schroeder? They never expected me to get this far. Charity was all right — a nice little sinecure somewhere, provided by the Company so that a few consciences could be eased — but I wasn’t expected to work so hard that I could force my way on to the Executive Course. It must have been a shock. A shock … for somebody.’

  And that somebody, thought Jessica, appointed a spy to keep watch on David Marsh and see that he didn’t get too close. She was conscious of a queasy feeling. If anything was sure in these shifting sands of speculation, it was that Philip Western had been Partridge’s man, Partridge’s appointed spy.

  Philip Western was dead. He had died at the same spot as that where David’s father died.

  Because he knew too much?

  David, still sitting on the bed, pressing his feet very lightly against the floor every now and then so that he swayed backwards and downwards into the softness of the bed, knew what was in her mind. She was suddenly aware of this. He said:

  ‘Which brings us to Mr Western, doesn’t it?’

  ‘David … you didn’t, did you?’

  ‘I didn’t what?’ He looked rather amused, and much more adult than the little boy who had been sitting there a few minutes ago.

  She forced herself to say it. ‘You didn’t push Philip Western over the rail in order to provide a … well, a sort of vengeful parallel to what happened … what you think happened to your father?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I didn’t do that.’