Death of a Nobody

by J M Gregson

  It was a brave attempt to restore the lightness between them. And it succeeded, in large measure. He recognized it for what it was, and immediately felt a pig for bridling a moment earlier. He went back to the bed and took her hand. ‘You are different, you know. I didn’t expect there would be anyone like you when — when I dabbled a little with those other women. They were there and available, so I didn’t turn them away, that’s all. But you make me wish I had.’ At that moment, he almost believed himself.

  Gabrielle smiled up at him. ‘It’s nice of you to say so. But you couldn’t know you’d find me, could you? I’m just glad you did, that’s all. You mustn’t mind me being a neurotic old cow who wants her man to herself.’

  ‘But you have me all—’

  ‘Hush now!’ She put her fingers lightly, laughingly on his lips, stilling his words, enjoying that small mastery over him. ‘I know you’d like to be with me all the time. It’s just that when you’re not, strange fancies take over. I haven’t much else to occupy my tiny mind, you see.’ She beamed up at him, hoping their display of confidence would disguise the emptiness of her life without him and the desperate loneliness and insecurity which sometimes beset her in the gilded cage of the penthouse apartment at Old Mead Park. She wondered if it would be too late at forty-one to have a first baby. And how her new partner would react to that idea.

  He put on the jacket of the business suit and completed the last move back into that working world of which she knew so little. When he kissed her briefly and left, she felt he was already a stranger.

  She dressed slowly, fighting ineffectively against the bleakness which always stole over her when they had parted. Perhaps it was no more than the post-coital triste which her reading told her was common after the heights of passion. For in truth she was a novice in the emotions which are the setting for any stolen passion such as this.

  James Berridge had been his wife’s first lover. She was an attractive woman, with a suggestion of the gypsy girl beneath her well-bred, intelligent exterior, and in her two decades of unhappiness there had been many opportunities for her to take others. Yet now, after twenty years, Ian Faraday was her first excursion from the long-cold marital bed.

  At forty-one, she was thrown off balance by her first heady experience of passionate sex and the disturbing flood-tide of emotions which came with it. It was both exciting and disturbing, not least because she did not fully understand what was happening to her. She spent the days when she could not see Ian wishing that she could be with him, wishing that like him she was free to make her own domestic arrangements.

  Like all lovers in her situation, she hated the secrecy shrouding a liaison which she yearned to present to the world in all its proud beauty.

  Her resentment turned inevitably to the husband who was the unwitting obstacle to her desires. She frightened herself by the new intensity of her hatred for him. There were certainly times now when she wished him dead, and delicious intervals when she considered the vision of the simpler world in which that would leave her.

  But what she found most disturbing were the moments when she discovered herself toying with the idea of killing him herself.

  6

  It had been a good day, Charlie Pegg decided. He had completed the installation of a new boiler in an Oldford garage in the morning, tested the system, and found it working perfectly. The staff had been full of praise as the heat seeped into their hangar-like workshop. The sense of accomplishment had given him great satisfaction in itself, for this had been the biggest heating job he had so far dared to tackle.

  The fact that he had managed a revealing glimpse of a bank statement on the desk of the empty office was merely icing on the cake.

  Late in the afternoon, he called to see his friend George Lewis, the porter at Old Mead Park. There was work for him in three of the flats, it seemed. Small jobs, more bother than they were worth in themselves, but sprats which in due course could net him mackerels. That was a pattern which had become familiar: customers who tested his work and found it satisfactory usually came back in due course with more challenging assignments. And Charlie noted with some satisfaction, as George Lewis showed him what was required, that he had not been in two of the flats before.

  The third one was the luxurious penthouse of James and Gabrielle Berridge, where Mrs Berridge apparently wanted new locks on the drawers of her bureau. Charlie thought he could guess at the reason for that, but he asked Lewis to let him in for a moment to reconnoitre the work. The suggestion that they might enjoy a cup of tea and chinwag over old times in George’s cosy little office near the entrance to the building sent the porter swiftly down in the lift; portering could be lonely work. Charlie Pegg found there were three messages on the Berridges’ answerphone tape. Then he spent an interesting three minutes in James Berridge’s study.

  ***

  Amy asked him about his day as she always did, and he told her everything he thought she should know. He knew his eyes were prejudiced, but he thought her as buxom and pretty as she had ever been. It seemed to him that Amy was one of the few women who improved with age, as her angularities disappeared beneath a pleasant plumpness. Perhaps it was contentment rather than all these mudpacks and facelifts the Americans went in for that was the secret of retaining a woman’s looks, he thought.

  He went into the kitchen and put his arms round his wife’s waist, leaning his chest lightly on her well-covered shoulders. ‘Get on with you, Charlie!’ she said automatically. Her low giggle became almost a purr of pleasure in the repetition of a ritual they both knew in its every detail.

  The institution of marriage carries a multitude of ironies. It was at that very moment that Gabrielle Berridge was sitting combing her hair before the hotel mirror. She studied her abnormally bright eyes, her face still flushed with the warmth of her departed lover, and wondered whether there might be safe ways of disposing of her husband. And in her normally lucid mind, the distinction between a pleasant fantasy and a serious proposition became a little more blurred.

  Charlie Pegg enjoyed his meal, as throughout the day he had known he would. Steak and kidney pie, fashioned with care and skill by his wife’s experienced hands. Since his days in stir, Charlie could eat anything, but on his rare visits to restaurants he had never eaten anything as tasty as the meals served to him each day by the buxom Amy. There was fresh fruit salad to follow. Amy had been reading about diet in the glossy women’s magazines she collected from the lady who employed her to clean twice a week; she did not have cream on her fruit, but she watched her husband pour a copious amount over his heaped dish with the indulgence of a mother.

  She had lit a fire: it was still cold at nights, and they liked to sit by a real fire to watch the telly in the evenings, even though they could have relied on the central heating. They took their tea there now. Charlie said before they could settle too comfortably for the evening, ‘I’ll need to go out for a while later. See a man about a dog.’ He was not sure what he meant by the old cliché, but it had become part of the ritual, an assurance that nothing abnormal or dangerous was involved.

  ‘Do you have to, Charlie? You look tired. I bet you were humping heavy pipes about all morning.’ This too was part of their conventions. She would never prevent him from going wherever he wanted to go, but she wanted him to know that she cared about his welfare, even as she indulged him.

  ‘After your meals, I’m a giant refreshed.’ He stretched his thin arms and his puny torso in a parody of Tarzan, and they both laughed at the incongruity of it. ‘We’ll watch Coronation Street together before I go. And I won’t be late back.’

  Amy sat down carefully with her tea, taking care not to spill a drop on the skirt that was newly released from its covering pinafore. ‘If you are, I’ll be suspecting you of running off with a blonde, so think on.’ It was another line of their regular banter, which would have bored both of them but for the affection behind it.

  ‘I’ll just have to check, you see, that they don’t need me for the
darts team on Thursday. And I did tell George Lewis from Old Mead Park that I’d be in tonight, if he fancied a pint.’

  They were his first lies, and he wished immediately that they had remained unspoken. They were not needed, for he never had to account for his movements to Amy nowadays, and they seemed a betrayal of the cosiness of the last hour. He pretended to immerse himself in the wildlife programme which preceded the Street, and they spoke little in the forty minutes which elapsed before the brass notes of the soap’s signature tune announced the end of the episode and he rose rather reluctantly from the warm armchair.

  He reversed his little van quietly out of the drive, hoping that the blaring of the television adverts would drown the sound of the engine: he would normally have walked the half mile to his local. At the end of the little cul-de-sac, he turned the vehicle away from that worthy hostelry and made his way swiftly towards the lights of Gloucester.

  The industrial area was quiet at this time of night. He parked in the deep shade of the high brick wall of a warehouse. He had left the van in that vast cavern of darkness when he had come here before; he had no wish to advertise his presence in this place. He looked automatically around him after he had locked the car, but he was not expecting any human presence here, and he found none.

  Satisfied, he turned towards his destination, which could not be more than two hundred yards away. He moved quickly, despite the shuffling gait which remained and was now a habit, an unconscious survival of those departed years when he had been subject to the whims of violent men. He did not see the figure which emerged from the side street when he had moved halfway to his goal; it followed him at a discreet distance.

  The lights in the grubby pub were low, but the man he wanted to see was already there, waiting in the recess which they had chosen on other occasions because it was hidden from most eyes. Charlie bought two pints and set them on the small table with its rings from the bases of other glasses, its unemptied ashtray and smell of stale beer. Twenty years ago, he had done time with this man; in Charlie’s imagination, his companion had the stigma of their cell still upon him. Indeed, it was not all imagination, for the man had spent eight of the intervening years in various of Her Britannic Majesty’s prisons, and would doubtless return to at least one of them. He now had the grey face and bowed shoulders of a man who was so little in the open air that he found it an alien environment.

  Charlie could not prevent a little surge of self-satisfaction when he considered his companion, with his grubby collar, black fingernails and downtrodden air. He transferred his mental thanks as usual to Amy, and determined with the same thought that he would not linger here longer than was strictly necessary. He might even consider giving up this aspect of his income altogether; there was no doubt that it was dangerous—and his building work was going from strength to strength.

  But for the moment, he put himself out to be friendly. The man with him had had several drinks before he arrived. Charlie’s experienced eye told him that it would not need much more lubrication to loosen his tongue. And they got on well enough. Charlie had done various small pieces of joinery in the man’s council home, producing the same standard of work as he delivered to his richest clients. He had refused any financial payment and the man was absurdly grateful. He scarcely realized that he had made a different kind of payment, by means of the snippets of information he had volunteered to Charlie in his befuddled state.

  Charlie Pegg’s talent as an informer lay in fitting together scattered, apparently random scraps of information into a coherent whole. Once he had enough pieces of knowledge from his different sources and his own research, a lucid picture of what was afoot sprang out at him. The process gave him a certain intellectual satisfaction, though he would never have recognized it as that.

  Tonight was such an occasion. Between gulps of beer, the man opposite him responded to his promptings with first a name, then, a pint and a half later, with a time. Charlie already had a fair idea of place. He gave no hint of his elation, though he realized that what he now knew could bring him the biggest police payment he had ever received. Instead, he went to buy his companion another beer.

  On his way to the bar, he went briefly to the public phone, glancing swiftly around him before he dialled the number he knew by heart. He recognized the voice which answered, but did not identify either it or himself for any unauthorized listener to the line: that was the grass’s code, and Superintendent John Lambert understood it as well as he at the other end of the line. Charlie said only, ‘I have gathered now what you want to know. I’ll meet you at the usual place.’

  They were the sentences he had delivered on earlier occasions. Lambert knew the rules to protect his snout. He said simply, ‘Tomorrow evening. Seven o’clock?’

  ‘Yes.’ Nothing save a slight excitement in Pegg’s tone gave a hint that this coup might be greater than any of his previous ones. He found himself tempted to give an inkling of its importance, but his discipline held and he rang off.

  From behind a cloud of cigarette smoke ten yards away, the man who had followed him here watched Charlie’s actions with interest, but made no effort to hear what he said. That might have alerted the quarry to his danger.

  Charlie sipped the half of bitter he had contented himself with for the last half hour and concealed his impatience to be away, whilst the man on the other side of the small, round table drank his whisky and grew sentimental over old times. It would take a drunk to get nostalgic about the nick, thought Charlie. With that thought came a sudden revulsion for the man: perhaps he saw in him what he might so easily have become himself.

  He was impatient to be away to Amy, but he did not mention her name to this man, as though she might be in some way tarnished by even so distant and indirect a connection with this world he had left behind. Or very nearly left behind; as he corrected himself, he determined again that he would now sever all connections. He would take whatever Lambert offered for this last and greatest of his deliveries, and then get out with his skin intact. Perhaps there would be enough to take Amy abroad, for the first time. Somewhere in the sun perhaps, during next winter’s frosts; Amy always complained about the damp and the cold when the days were short.

  Perhaps it was that thought which made him a little careless as he left the pub. He did not see the two men who followed, and though he glanced to the streets on either side of him, he did not look to his rear until he heard the sounds of their arrival at his heels.

  It was still an hour before closing time, and the streets were quiet. The men were professionals, swift and efficient in the execution of their task. Pegg was down in an instant, falling with a cry which was scarcely more than a gasp of horror as he realized what was coming. He flung his hands behind his head and twisted into a foetal position, knees against his chest and head thrust deep into his breast, which might minimize the injuries in the beating he expected.

  They gave him a blow or two, more to stun any impulse towards screaming than to damage him. For they intended worse than mere damage. The long, slim knife they used glinted briefly in the sliver of light from the streetlamp which was a good eighty yards behind them. The first thrust had gone home, right up to the hilt, before the man on the ground twisted one terrified eye to see it. It was plunged home three more times, searching for the ventricle in the left of the chest, before his assailants paused.

  They were professionals, knowing that one thrust from a knife rarely killed, unless there was a lucky precision. They left nothing to chance. As their victim’s sweater filled swiftly with blood over his thin chest, the man who had not stabbed him felt carefully for the vein in his neck, felt the pulse there slow, then stop, and nodded at his companion.

  They left Charlie Pegg’s body in the gutter, still a hundred yards and more from his van. It was another hour before Amy began to get anxious about him. By that time, the instrument of his death was at the bottom of the Severn, dropped there unhurriedly as his killers drove out of the city.

  7

/>   It was a night watchman, coming out of the back door of his warehouse in the first grey light, who found Charlie Pegg’s body.

  The blood had run five feet down the gutter, and there was a lot of it. The man, who had been anticipating a breakfast of thick bacon sandwiches and lots of tea, was suddenly no longer hungry. His first thought was that the men who had done this might still be around, his first impulse to run. Then, looking reluctantly again at the thing in the gutter, he saw that the blood was crusted and darkening at the edges of its gruesome flow. He accepted that this attack had probably taken place many hours previously and went back into the awakening factory to ring the police.

  Lambert heard of Pegg’s death while he was waiting to go into a divisional meeting about community policing and its implications for CID work. The sergeant who brought the message was unguarded enough to say, ‘Well, I suppose he had it coming to him. Grasses always live dangerously, sir.’

  ‘They are on our side, Sergeant.’ Anyone who knew Lambert would have recognized danger in the quiet of his tone; those who worked closely with him would have known that the formal recognition of rank was often a prelude to an explosion from their superintendent. This man, preoccupied with his own concerns now that he had delivered the message from Oldford, picked up no warning.

  ‘I suppose they are a necessary evil — a part of the police system. But no one can shed many tears over a grass, surely?’

  ‘His wife will, in this case. And others too. Charlie Pegg was a good man. How many people of his background manage to go straight when they’ve done time?’ Lambert realized that he had never formulated these thoughts until now, even to himself.

  The sergeant wondered why it was always his luck to run into the eccentrics of the force. Surely this grizzled senior officer should have acquired a little professional cynicism by now. He said stiffly, ‘Sorry, sir. I didn’t know you knew the man personally.’ Lambert grunted, and the sergeant should have left it at that. Instead, he was unwise enough to venture, ‘Not much chance of catching the blokes who did for a grass, though, is there? They’ll have covered their tracks, and it won’t be easy to find witnesses. No one likes a grass, whatever he might be like when he’s not informing.’