Mercury Falling

by Robert Edric

  One of the cows came closer to where Devlin stood and butted its head against his arm. Devlin slapped it hard on its bony cheek and the animal snorted and shied away from him, causing all the creatures to run a few paces over the frozen ground before coming to a standstill.

  Devlin had no clear plan, other than to break into the house and find whatever was there for him to steal. He’d hoped the woman might have gone with her husband again, taking pleasure in some other poor bastard’s sudden misery. He was uncertain now what to do. But as he considered his options, the back door opened and the woman came back out, in her coat and scarf this time and carrying a bag, and stood by the roadside. In the distance, Devlin heard and then saw a small green bus coming towards her. The woman raised her hand to it and crossed the road to the embankment side.

  Devlin watched her board and talk to the driver. Other early passengers already sat at the windows and Devlin saw her go and sit beside one of these.

  ‘Bye,’ he said. ‘Good riddance.’

  He checked the few houses further along the road, and, certain he had not been seen, he left the paddock and went into the yard, where he was again hidden from sight.

  He peered through the window. A fire burned in the small, cluttered room. Meaning what? That either the woman or the man or both would soon return?

  He pushed at the locked door and then picked up a brick and swung it at the lock and handle. The door gave after only two blows and Devlin went inside.

  After warming himself at the fire, he went upstairs. The bed was unmade and the wardrobe door open. A dressing table at the window lay spread with the woman’s things.

  He took an Army-issue kitbag from the top of the wardrobe and tipped her jewellery box into this. He doubted there would be anything of real value, but it was something. A burglary. He took off one of the pairs of gloves he wore.

  Back downstairs, he searched drawers and cupboards and took whatever might be of any value: fishing trophies, silver picture frames, a cutlery set, service medals in their cases. He found a tin full of change, and beside it another stuffed tight with pound- and five-pound notes. A glass-fronted cabinet was filled with spirits and crystal glasses. More than he’d hoped for. In one drawer he found Skelton’s ledgers and he took these out and threw their torn pages on to the fire, where they burned quickly, a few of them drifting back out into the hearth and settling on the rug there. Serve the pair of them right if he burned the place down. The rug scorched in places, but no fire started. Lucky them.

  On the mantel above the fire he saw a photograph of the man and woman standing together, smartly dressed – something formal, a celebration. He took this down and smashed the glass on the edge of the table. There were two plates containing the remains of the couple’s cooked breakfast, a third piled with buttered bread. He ate all this and then smashed the plates in the hearth. He took the photograph from its frame and tore it into small pieces, careful to scatter these away from the flames. Another frame held a picture of the couple with their children, and a third showed the woman holding two babies, grandchildren. More smashed glass and scattered pieces. He dropped the silver frames into the kitbag.

  He wiped shelves clear of books and cheap porcelain ornaments, stamping on the few bits and pieces which fell but didn’t break. He tipped every plate and cup and serving dish from the dresser beside the sink. Everywhere he walked in the house, the ground crunched beneath his feet.

  A further ledger, hidden at the back of a cupboard, revealed its treasure of notes, almost ninety pounds. Devlin tore the pages from the book and threw these, too, on to the fire. Where would the man be without his records? Whose bidding and dirty work would he be able to do now? How could he even work without knowing for certain who owed him what and when? Everything now was a bonus to Devlin. There might be a hundred others out there, all living in fear of the man, who would be only too happy to do what he was doing now. Another bonus, he realized, was that Skelton – and perhaps even his wife – would already have plenty of enemies, any one of whom might have broken into their home. So where would the police even start looking? And to cap it all, no one had yet come looking for him, Devlin, not even the police, and so how on God’s earth were they ever going to connect him to this?

  The kitbag was full and as much as Devlin could carry. A satisfying weight. The money filled his pockets.

  He went back upstairs and searched through Skelton’s clothes, taking pieces for himself. He still only owned what he stood up in. He took a bottle of scent from the dressing table and poured its contents on to the floor. Another photo of the children and grandchildren, more broken glass and scattered pieces. He doubted he’d even been in the house ten minutes.

  Back downstairs, he pulled open the door to a cupboard beneath the stairs he hadn’t seen before. Shoes and boots, umbrellas and walking sticks. And at the very back, against the wall and hidden beneath a sack, was a shotgun. He took this out and opened it. A search of the dark space revealed a full box of cartridges. He wrapped the gun back in the sack and put the cartridges in the bag.

  After searching the pantry for more food – provisions to last him at least a week – he returned to the back door.

  As he let himself out, he heard the noise of an engine and recognized the sound of Skelton’s lorry approaching. The man had returned.

  Devlin went to the gate and waited beside the low wall to see which way Skelton went. With a bit of luck he’d stay parked up on the road and let himself into the house at the front. More than enough time for Devlin to make himself scarce along the far side of the embankment.

  He waited, listening for the gear changes as the lorry drew up, and then heard Skelton as he climbed down, the engine still running. The bastard was singing to himself. You sing, mate, Devlin thought, because you’re not going to have anything to sing about for much longer or for a long time to come. Other people’s worlds fell apart in an instant. Now it was Skelton’s turn.

  Skelton let himself into the house by the front door.

  The instant the door closed, Devlin crossed the path, rose over the lip of the bank and dropped to the far side. Another track led away from the road and the houses to a path running through empty fields. Within a minute he was beyond all sight and sound of the house.

  When he was safe, he stopped beside a tyreless, rusted tractor overgrown with brambles and looked back in the direction of the road. He neither saw nor heard anything. He imagined the man inside, running from room to room, unable to believe what had happened during his short absence. He imagined him grabbing and staring into the empty tins, scooping up the torn and scorched pages and the tiny black and white pieces of the scattered photographs. He imagined him pulling open the door to the cupboard under the stairs and finding the gun gone.

  He waited for the tiny figure to climb the bank and come running towards him, but there was nothing. He could easily plan a route back to the prefab without anyone recognizing him.

  An hour later, beyond Wigtoft, his new home only thirty minutes away, he stopped and counted the money in his pockets. A bit of good luck come his way at last. The couple had got all they deserved. He imagined Skelton’s wife trying to piece back together all the smiling faces. He wondered what Skelton might be doing now, while he waited for the woman to return. Perhaps he might have hours alone with his misery. And perhaps then that misery would increase tenfold. He hoped so. Perhaps the woman hadn’t even told her husband about her encounter with Devlin three weeks earlier. Perhaps the pair of them would sit down together in the sudden small ruins of their life and grow more and more anxious at the realization of just how many people might have taken pleasure in doing all this to them.

  Devlin hid the jewellery and picture frames at the edge of one of the Drainage Board’s abandoned work sites. Apart from the money, he took only the clothes and the food and the gun and cartridges with him back to the prefab.

  Once there, he pushed the notes into a tin of his own and hid this beneath the raised floor.

>   Then he sat with the gun for an hour before taking it to one of the other buildings and hiding it inside an earthenware pipe that had been laid but never connected. He pushed earth into the pipe, pulling brambles over the open end.

  Back inside, he poured himself a drink and toasted his success. He toasted Skelton and his fat, grasping wife and all they had just lost and would never retrieve for as long as the pair of them lived.

  35

  AS EVER, HIS sister held the door open a few inches and spoke to him through the gap. The same old pantomime.

  ‘Now what do you want?’ And, as usual, her eyes flickered in every direction behind him but never once fixed on his own.

  ‘You make it sound as though I turn up every other day,’ he said.

  ‘God forbid.’

  ‘I just wanted to see you, that’s all,’ he said. A month had passed since their encounter in Lynn. He’d owed her money for years. Perhaps now was the time, in light of his recent windfall, to pay some of it back. Buy himself a bit of credit, so to speak. ‘I know Morris isn’t in,’ he said. He’d waited until Morris had gone back to work after his dinner. A grown man going home to his wife every day. ‘Smells nice.’ Whatever it was.

  ‘It’s all gone. Pork chop. Morris knows a man – a farmer, a pig farmer.’

  Of course he did. ‘He’s doing all right for himself,’ he said. He put the tips of his fingers into the narrow space. Five hours until Morris returned. Six o’clock on the dot. ‘You going to keep me standing out here all day? Besides, you’re letting all the warmth out.’

  The door closed, the chain rattled and then the door opened again, wider.

  ‘How have you been keeping?’ Devlin said. He cupped his hands together and blew into them.

  ‘I don’t see you for four years, longer, and then it’s three times in as many months,’ Ellen said suspiciously. ‘Now I know you’re after something.’

  ‘What I’m after is paying you back some of what I owe you,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a good winter so far, better than usual. I’m renting a nice little place over Kirton way.’

  ‘You look all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you that.’ Skelton’s clothes.

  ‘This old rubbish? You should see me on Sundays.’

  She led him to the kitchen. It was warmer in there. Morris didn’t appreciate her lighting a fire in the parlour until just before he got home. Waste of fuel, just for one. And Morris, Devlin guessed, no doubt knew a man who knew a man who had a contact at the coal jetty at Sutton.

  The only thing different in the kitchen since his last visit was a television set standing on the table.

  ‘That’s new,’ he said.

  ‘Came yesterday. I was going to polish it before Morris wired it into the parlour. Not good for it in here – condensation, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ he said. At least he was warming up. He went to the set and turned it on and then spun the two dials.

  ‘It’s not plugged in,’ she said. ‘We need to get an aerial fitted to the chimney.’

  ‘A length of wire up the back wall and run to one of the stacks should do it. Save yourselves a bit of money.’

  ‘Morris likes to have things done properly. It’s a Murphy, best there is. You can ask anyone.’

  The name was spelled out in curling cream letters across the front of the cabinet.

  ‘Morris says you can count the number of sets in a ten-mile radius on the fingers of one hand.’

  ‘He always was ahead of the game.’

  Ellen smiled at this. ‘Once it’s up and running we’ll be entertained every night of the week. Films, variety performances, sport, you name it.’

  ‘What’s “tone”?’ Devlin said.

  ‘Morris explained that one.’ She watched him closely, relieved when he came away from the set. ‘I’ll give it another polish,’ she said. ‘Before Morris gets home. Mahogany. When the aerial’s fitted we’ll save a small fortune on newspapers and magazines. Morris says that in ten years’ time, the wireless will be a thing of the past.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you read a newspaper,’ Devlin said.

  ‘No need now. That’s what I’m saying.’ She sighed, as though he hadn’t grasped a word of what she’d just told him. ‘We’re thinking of a twin tub next, separate washer and spin drier.’

  ‘Woman over Grantham way had her arm broke in a drier. Stuck it in while the thing was still going round. Broke the bone in two places, lost a finger.’

  ‘Morris said they had built-in safety.’

  ‘What’s that when it’s at home? I could kill a hot drink.’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t heard that particular story,’ she said, and he felt suddenly sorry for the lie.

  ‘I’m pulling your leg,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t shift many if they kept breaking women’s arms, now would they?’

  She went to the sink and filled the kettle. A radio played on the shelf – voices, occasional music, applause.

  ‘I only keep it on for the company,’ she said.

  Devlin tried to remember if she was thirty-one or thirty-two.

  ‘You said something about the money you owed,’ she said, her back to him. Money would be Morris’s department. ‘Only, I’m sure it would help, you know, if you showed a bit of willing in that direction.’

  ‘Help what?’ Devlin said.

  ‘With Morris. You and him would get on better. You need to give yourself a chance to get to know him, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ll try a bit harder,’ Devlin said. He changed his mind about the money.

  And because she thought he was being serious, she came back to him and put her hand on his arm.

  ‘I saw Mother,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Last week. I called in on her. She said she might get over this way one day soon.’

  It would never happen. Besides, she was only two miles away.

  ‘She seen anything of him?’ Devlin said.

  ‘Not that she said. I doubt it. She’d probably keep it to herself if she had.’

  ‘If she’d any sense she would.’

  Ellen lit a gas ring and put the kettle on it. ‘I’ve got a sort of coffee,’ she said. ‘Not the real thing, but not far off it by all accounts.’

  ‘I never really got a taste for the stuff,’ Devlin said. ‘Besides, what’s the point when you’ve got tea?’

  As usual, there would be nothing stronger in the house.

  ‘I should have thought and brought a bottle of something,’ he said. ‘A nice bottle of British sherry, something like that.’

  ‘I used to like a drop of sherry. Port and lemon, that was me.’ She smiled at the distant memory. ‘Morris says that women who keep drink around the house – even respectable drinks like port and sherry – he says they’re prey to temptation, that they let other things go. Keeping yourself busy, that’s the thing, especially this time of year. I suppose most women my age—’ She stopped abruptly and Devlin wondered if she ever drew breath without in some way thinking of her lost child. She might have been another woman completely by now.

  Breaking the silence, Devlin said, ‘I can’t think of anything better. Television, a nice relaxing programme that’d cost you five guineas up the West End, your feet up and a little drink in your hand.’ As though he knew what a West End show cost these days, as though he’d even been back there since the weekend before his arrest ten years earlier.

  His sister took the kettle from the ring and put it back on the drainer.

  ‘So things are on the up?’ she said.

  He changed his mind again and took the folded notes from the inside pocket of Skelton’s jacket and laid four on the table.

  ‘Shall we say twenty? To be going on with. The rest won’t be far behind.’ He couldn’t remember what he owed her, but it was considerably more than twenty.

  She picked the money up and unfolded it.

  ‘Hold them up to the light if you like,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t—’
<
br />   ‘I’m joking. Good as gold, that little lot.’

  She watched him fold up what remained of the money and push it back into his pocket.

  ‘What sort of work are you at now that the drainage has finished?’

  It was a week until Christmas, a fortnight until New Year, and it would all come towards him and then pass him by without him participating in either event. It was beyond him to ask her what she and Morris had got planned. His family, most likely, over in Leicester, everything out of her hands, nothing left to chance.

  ‘Bit of this, bit of that,’ he said. ‘I met some useful contacts on the drainage. Tell Morris I’m following his example. You know me – I can take an engine apart blindfold. Take it apart and put it back together.’

  ‘I doubt if one would be any good without the other,’ she said.

  Devlin forced a laugh at the remark. ‘Now you just made a joke,’ he said. ‘You should try it more often.’

  ‘I don’t really—’

  ‘Don’t tell me – not very ladylike.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t.’

  ‘That what you’re turning yourself into then, is it – a lady?’

  She smiled again at this. ‘No sense in not trying to improve yourself, is there? Besides, what’s the alternative?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Improve yourself, improve your chances. That’s what—’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said again.

  An hour and three cups of tea later, the chill gone from his bones, Devlin said, ‘I suppose I ought to make tracks. Don’t want to outstay my welcome.’

  And as usual, she stood up immediately and started the process of ushering him towards the door and back out into the world beyond.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was … you know … to see you.’

  ‘My sentiments entirely,’ Devlin said. Because – and he’d said it before – that’s what proper families did – they saw each other. Jesus fucking Christ. ‘You tell Morris I’ll be back with the rest of what I owe when I’ve earned a bit more. Don’t want to leave myself short. Not with Christmas and everything.’