Shooting in the Dark

by Baker, John

  ‘Imagine if somebody kidnapped her,’ said Geordie. ‘I’d go out of my skull. Plus Janet’d kill me for being so careless.’ He looked out of the window, make sure the pram was still there. ‘Before you have kids,’ he said, ‘you don’t think like that. You’re just free. You don’t have to think about things at all, let your mind drift. Know what I mean?’

  Sam nodded. ‘Not sure if I agree with you, though. People who don’t have kids have their worries.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Geordie. ‘Before I started worrying about Echo I was worrying about Janet. Before Janet it was Barney. There’s plenty of times I was worried about you. I’ve been worried all my life. Hell, I worried about Ralph for years. Even when I wasn’t thinking about him, there was a part of me that was worrying away in the dark.’

  ‘Who’s Ralph?’

  ‘Ralph’s my brother. He’s come back.’ Geordie told Sam about Ralph, about how Ralph had been watching him, making sure that Geordie was Geordie. He told about their meeting outside the Banana Warehouse.

  ‘That’s great,’ Sam said. ‘Where’s he living?’

  ‘He’s at our place at the moment,’ Geordie said. ‘Until he gets somewhere of his own.’

  ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘What could I do, Sam? Turn away my brother? I couldn’t let him sleep in his cab.’

  ‘What does Janet think?’

  ‘She’s glad for me. It’ll be fine, Sam. Ralph isn’t gonna stay for ever. Just a few days.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Sam picked up a CD case with a picture of Dean Martin on the front, Borsalino on his head. He walked towards the stereo stack. ‘So you’re only marginally worried about it?’ he said.

  Geordie laughed. ‘You think you know me, Sam. You think you can read me like a book. But there’s parts of me you’ll never reach. I worry because I’ve got an active imagination, that’s what Janet says. And Janet should know, she’s there even when I’m asleep, talking in my sleep, in dreams. There was this time before Echo was born, and I saw that Alien movie on the TV and I thought Echo might be born like that. I didn’t really believe it, but when you think it, and then you start to build it up, you get to thinking it could happen. It just could. Like there’s me and the midwife and Janet all waiting for something to happen, waters to break or whatever. And suddenly there’s this cracking sound and Echo comes bursting out of Janet’s chest.’

  ‘You tell Janet about this, when she was pregnant?’

  ‘What d’you think I am, stupid? I mean, if I’d told her about it, she’d’ve gone up the wall. Probably had a miscarriage or something. No, I only told her about it a couple of days ago. And I only told her about it then because I knew that she was ready to hear it. That’s another thing about being a nuclear family. You get to know when you can say things, even things that you can’t normally say. You feel how the other person’s gonna react even before you say the thing that normally they’d react differently to.’

  ‘You been reading those psychology books again?’

  ‘No, but I’ve been to pre-natal classes, and the ones on breast-feeding and ante-natal and how they respond to the spoken word. Natural Childbirth Trust, all those. You got any questions on that stuff, just ask.’

  Sam pushed Lou Reed’s New York into the CD deck and nodded to himself as the first strains of‘Romeo and Juliet’ came through the speakers.

  ‘I need to go into town,’ Geordie said. ‘Wondered if I could leave Echo here for a while?’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Sam said. ‘You go do your errands and I’ll walk her back to your place. Is Janet in?’

  ‘Yeah, and Ralph.’

  ‘Kill three birds with one stone, then. I’ll meet your brother, get to see Janet, whom I haven’t seen for weeks, and me and Echo’ll start to get acquainted. She’ll need to know who I am, get to know my little ways.’

  Geordie did a double-take. ‘You mean you’re gonna push her in the pram?’

  ‘No,’ Sam said. ‘I thought I’d take her on the bike, give her a croggy, leave the pram in the garden shed.’

  Opera North had brought their production of Carmen to town and Angeles Falco would be going to that evening’s performance. When Sam tried to buy a ticket, the woman in the booking office told him it’d be easier to get knighted.

  He asked her to repeat it, and she said the same thing again, which was a change.

  At five o’clock he relieved JD and sat in the Montego fifty metres down the road from Angeles’ house. His injured hand was playing up this evening. He flexed his fingers repeatedly, but couldn’t stop them cramping up.

  There it was again, that irrational effect of a strange woman walking into his life. You could probably narrow it down to a physical effect, the result of mixing a few chemicals and hormones together. The attraction of opposites. Sexual tension. But somewhere deep down Sam believed in miracles. He strung days together into weeks, and the weeks became months and there was no sign of a woman. There were always females around, other people’s women or friends or colleagues; but after a while you forgot the absurd effect of being knocked sideways, ceased to believe in it as a possibility.

  Then she walks into your office. You’re the oldest and the greyest guy in town; you’ve been celibate so long you’re beginning to philosophize. You’re so sad you don’t bother brushing the dandruff off your collar any more. You slap at it but it’s building up, beginning to make you stoop. You watch her, you listen and smell, and the feel of her when your hands touched lingers on. You feel foolish and you like it. You remember worlds you inhabited which were crazy, and the world you’re living in now suddenly seems unstable.

  It was quiet. At 5.12 a new BMW arrived at the large white house two doors down from the Falco residence. One of the Stepford wives got out and carried her shopping into the house. At 5.17 a maroon Daimler with white-walled tyres juddered to a stop outside a substantial, gabled mansion, and a stereotypical drunken lord rolled out of it. He wove his way up the path to his front door, leaving the motor almost parked.

  5.48: Canary-yellow Peugeot 306 Cabriolet playing a Bjork CD louder than the tone of the neighbourhood dictated. Drove at speed, the engine booming, into the garage of a bungalow called ‘Home’. Rustling of white bond paper as the other residents of the street prepared to write letters of complaint.

  A minute or two before six, Sam walked down to Angeles Falco’s house. Before he turned into the gate he noted that the street was deserted apart from a paper-girl with a green mountain bike who was delivering the Evening Press. She used the bike like a scooter, with one foot on a pedal, and at every stop she let it fall to the ground with a crash.

  Sam rang the doorbell and waited for Angeles to let him in. She’d been to the hairdresser during the afternoon and her dark curls were stiff from the tension. She wore a thin housecoat over a three-quarter-length silk slip. Bare legs with fine hairs on the shins, silvered in the lamplight.

  He followed her to the lounge and let himself sink into the luxury of the sofa. There was a game of Scrabble set out on the table, Braille version. A cut-glass tumbler with two rocks of ice swimming in Laphroaig. But Angeles was more interesting. You could watch her all the time. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t aware she was being watched, or if she was she didn’t find anything wrong with that. Maybe blind people didn’t know that it wasn’t socially acceptable to stare? Why should they know that? Or even think about it? It wasn’t their problem.

  ‘I’m getting dressed,’ she said, heading for the stairs. ‘You can come up if you like, help me choose.’

  ‘This is not the kind of offer I get every day,’ Sam said, as he followed her up to her bedroom. ‘There’s usually a little more work involved before I get into a lady’s boudoir.’

  ‘Bedroom, not boudoir,’ she said.

  ‘Poetic licence?’

  ‘A boudoir is a small room, somewhere a girl can sit and sulk. My bedroom is rather large.’

  The bedroom was enormous, taking up three-quarters of the upper
floor of the house. The wall opposite the windows was lined with cupboards from floor to ceiling. Two walk-in wardrobes were open and Sam followed Angeles into one of them.

  ‘This could be a boudoir,’ she said. ‘If it wasn’t a wardrobe.’

  ‘I don’t think you need a boudoir,’ Sam told her. ‘Can’t imagine you sulking.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, waving her arm histrionically. ‘It’s not unknown for me to have a long face. When I was small I had fits of pique.’

  There was no indication that she couldn’t ‘see’ her surroundings. She must have penetrated this room, this house, with her fingers, with every living sense in her body. She inhabited it completely, in a way that a sighted person rarely could.

  She took down a hanger with a full-length skirt and jacket in black silk. She loosened the skirt, which had a Turkish feel to it, from the hanger, and held both garments against her. ‘Dior?’ she asked rhetorically. Sam didn’t bother answering. She wasn’t going to wear it. ‘This one’s fun,’ she said. It was a mini dress with a feather boa at the hem and a white lace jacket. ‘But not for the theatre. Difficult to sit in.’

  ‘How can you remember what these clothes look like?’ Sam asked. There was a line of twenty, twenty-five outfits on the rack. But every time she reached for one she knew exactly what it was.

  ‘They’re special labels,’ she said. ‘I can tell by touch what each outfit looks like. More important is what it feels like to wear. I can usually remember that. Or when I get it out of the wardrobe it comes back to me.’

  Sam got into helping her. No, he didn’t like the yellow one. Yeah, maybe the midnight-blue cocktail dress wouldn’t be suitable. Pity, though. She settled for a wool crepe creation with satin ribbons hanging from the waist. There was a naive part of Sam Turner that believed he was going to watch her slip into the thing. A few seconds ticked away when he didn’t know if he’d manage to stop himself chewing a hole in the Persian rug.

  She didn’t ask him to leave the room. At least he didn’t hear her. But she stopped talking, stopped moving, and she raised her eyebrows. It was a signal passing aircraft might’ve picked up with these modern instruments they have, and it got to Sam as well, only a few seconds later, because he didn’t have the technology.

  ‘Right,’ he said, reality catching at the back of his throat. ‘You get yourself dressed. I’ll wait downstairs.’

  He couldn’t read her face. Didn’t know if it was relief or disappointment.

  Neat trick, the thing about Braille labels on her clothes. Obvious when you knew, but before then it seemed like magic. There must be other things going on with her that he didn’t see. Little tricks she was using to find her way through the world, but that were hidden from him because he could only think with his eyes.

  Did she know what he looked like, for example? Once or twice he’d wondered if he should offer up his face to her fingers, but he couldn’t find the courage. He wasn’t sure she’d want to feel his face, anyway. Felt like too intimate an act for the current state of their relationship. Maybe later?

  He sank into the sofa and closed his eyes, used the tips of fingers to feel around his forehead, his eyes and nose, the line of his lips. There was the rough edge of stubble as four hours’ growth of beard pushed its way through. The flesh was cool and puffy, sagging a little round the jowls. If the woman ever got her hands on it, she’d think she’d run up against a monster. He’d have to try and explain it to her beforehand, somehow hint that he didn’t look a lot unlike Gene Hackman.

  She’d understand about the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, she was an intelligent woman. The nose on its own, hey, laughable, you know what I mean? The ears without any context, just stuck on each side of the head. The eyes, the chin, the lips, all these parts don’t mean anything by themselves. But when they are seen as a whole there takes place a transformation, a metamorphosis. Something magical happens, what could have been a disaster turns out to be, well, not compelling exactly, maybe the right word is intriguing.

  He listened as she left the bedroom and came to the head of the stairs. He opened his eyes, expecting to see her descend. But she didn’t appear.

  ‘Sam?’

  She spoke quietly, trepidation in her voice. He got up from the sofa and crossed over to the foot of the stairs. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s someone in the garden.’

  ‘Go back to the bedroom,’ he said. ‘Lock the door.’ Sam stood in the shadow of the back porch and cocked his ears. He scanned the garden. It was dark with a light breeze; clouds almost obscured the moon. There was a grey slate paved area, flat and recently constructed, and there was the oblong patch that represented the swimming pool. Then the land began to rise. A path of limestone slabs led a winding way through shrubs and ferns towards a stone wall and a quaint shed with a shingle roof. In the foreground there were three mature trees, a sumach, an ash and a stunted beech. Between the beech and the swimming pool there was a long, low bench which could have been carved from a single stone. Nothing moved. There was no sound.

  The stars, the constellations in the sky winked and fluttered in a silent void.

  Sam waited for two, three minutes, all his senses straining before taking one step forward and down on to the paved area. Immediately there was the sound of an intake of breath and the silhouette of a figure appeared from behind the ash. Sam moved quickly, but the man was already in full flight, legging it along the limestone path. He stepped up on to a pile of bricks and was over the wall and out of sight before Sam was half-way along the path. By the time Sam got over the wall and ran along the back passage round to the street, the man was already disappearing around the corner on a bicycle.

  There was the possibility of getting the car and giving chase, but Sam thought he should check on Angeles, make sure there wasn’t an accomplice walking up the stairs to her bedroom.

  He tapped on her door and she asked, ‘Did you get him?’

  ‘No.’ He wanted her to open the bedroom door, wanted to engage with her eyes. Wanted to see her face framed in that wreath of dark hair. Talking through a closed door, you couldn’t see what she was thinking, assess her reactions.

  ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s dark out there. I got some idea of him, his height, build, age, but I wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a line-up.’

  ‘I would,’ she said quietly. He heard her move away from the door. The next time she spoke her words came from the other side of the room: ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’

  He went downstairs and found a perch by the kitchen table. The guy had been six feet tall, slim and fast, no more than thirty years old. He’d been playing cat and mouse with Sam in the garden, hiding behind that tree. Maybe had some kind of military training, to remain quiet and hidden for that long. You couldn’t be sure, though, some people simply had a talent for concealing themselves.

  The bike was a stroke of genius. No number plates, nothing to distinguish it from other bicycles. Except it was a mountain bike. Blue? Green? Hard to tell in the dark. In the dark you were blind.

  Not a lot to go on, then. More than before, but it was all as vague as the mayor’s morals.

  He heard her bedroom door close and listened to her steps on the upper landing.

  When she came down she was wearing a rainbow-striped shiver of a dress, which was not one of the ones she’d shown him upstairs. It was so simple and fitted so well you could’ve cried.

  ‘Changed my mind,’ she said, as if there was a way to explain it.

  *

  When Angeles was at the opera and Sam was in the bar outside not drinking alcohol, Quintin Reeves stood up in his living room and switched off the television after watching an episode of EastEnders.

  The news of Isabel’s death had not really penetrated his consciousness. He knew she was dead, but the plethora of causes and effects, the multiplicity of the event as it ricocheted around his settled life had not been given space enough
to alter his routine.

  He kept it at bay, instinctively knowing that once he gave it credence and began to accept its implications, he would be swamped by it.

  His body, however, coped with the shock and horror of Isabel’s death in its own chaotic way. The ability to see with his left eye disappeared. He blinked several times and it returned. But a few moments later he lost it again. A thrombus formed in one of the large arteries in his neck and was sent spinning along in the white-water river of his bloodstream.

  As he pressed the off button on the remote control the thrombus hit his brain at the speed of a very fast car. The impact took out the mechanisms whereby his brain communicated with the motor nerves on one side of his body.

  It was a stroke which was to leave his right arm and leg paralysed and force him into a premature retirement from the world of high finance.

  15

  Marie had been at Russell Harvey’s house for a few minutes when the police arrived. She’d got past Emperor, the old dog, and settled herself in a high-backed chair in front of the solid-fuel stove. Isabel Reeves’ boyfriend was much the same as the last time they’d met, except his eyes were red and puffy from a constant stream of tears.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he’d said. ‘I can’t take it in. I know she’s dead, that I’m never gonna see her again. I tell myself, “It’s just you, Russell, you and the dog. That’s all there is from here on.” And then I hear her coming through the front door. I hear her voice when I’m lying in bed, when I wake up in the morning. It’s like she’s haunting me. I get a whiff of her perfume. There’s no reason for it. I’m sitting here thinking, wondering if I should kill myself, and suddenly I’ll smell it, sweet and real strong, like she’s sitting there next to me.’

  ‘You’re not allowed to kill yourself,’ Marie told him. ‘It seems like there’s nothing to live for at the moment, but there will be later. When you’ve passed the grieving stage. Isabel would’ve wanted you to carry on. She’d have wanted you to live out your life.’ Her words sounded hollow, even to herself. Looking at Russell Harvey and his dog, at the poverty of his life in this greasy hell-hole of a house, she could understand that suicide was a real option for him. Still, you had to try. Attempt to bring some comfort even when you could see that there was no place the comfort could get lodged.