by Hugh Laurie
I reprised the roguish smile, to no better effect.
'Wait a second,' she said.
She looked at Rayner, then suddenly sat up a little straighter, as if a thought had just struck her.
'You didn't call anybody, did you?'
Come to think of it, all things considered, she must have been nearer twenty-four.
'You mean ...' I was floundering now.
I mean,' she said, 'there's no ambulance coming here.
Jesus.'
She put the glass down on the carpet by her feet, got up and walked towards the phone.
'Look,' I said, 'before you do anything silly ....,'
I started to move towards her, but the way she spun round made me realise that staying still was probably the better plan. I didn't want to be pulling bits of telephone receiver out of my face for the next few weeks.
'You stay right there, Mr James Fincham,' she hissed at me. 'There's nothing silly about this. I'm calling an ambulance, and I'm calling the police. This is an internationally approved procedure. Men come round with big sticks and take you away. Nothing silly about it at all.'
'Look,' I said, 'I haven't been entirely straight with you.'
She turned towards me and narrowed her eyes. If you know what I mean by that. Narrowed them horizontally, not vertically. I suppose one should say she shortened her eyes, but nobody ever does.
She narrowed her eyes.
'What the hell do you mean "not entirely straight"? You only told me two things. You mean one of them was a lie?'
She had me on the ropes, there's no question about that. I was in trouble. But then again, she'd only dialled the first nine.
'My name is Fincham,' I said, 'and I do know your father.'
'Yeah, what brand of cigarette does he smoke?'
'Dunhill.'
'Never smoked a cigarette in his life.'
She was late-twenties, possibly. Thirty at a pinch. I took a deep breath while she dialled the second nine.
'All right, I don't know him. But I am trying to help.'
'Right. You've come to fix the shower.'
Third nine. Play the big card.
'Someone is trying to kill him,' I said.
There was a faint click and I could hear somebody, somewhere, asking which service we wanted. Very slowly she turned towards me, holding the receiver away from her face.
'What did you say?'
'Someone is trying to kill your father,' I repeated. T don't know who, and I don't know why. But I'm trying to stop them. That's who I am, and that's what I'm doing here.'
She looked at me long and hard. A clock ticked somewhere, hideously.
This man,' I pointed at Rayner, 'had something to do with it.'
I could see that she thought this unfair, as Rayner was hardly in a position to contradict me; so I softened my tone a little, looking around anxiously as if I was every bit as mystified and fretted-up as she was.
'I can't say he came here to kill,' I said, 'because we didn't get a chance to talk much. But it's not impossible.' She carried on staring at me. The operator was squeaking hellos down the line and probably trying to trace the call.
She waited. For what, I'm not sure.
'Ambulance,' she said at last, still looking at me, and then turned away slightly and gave the address. She nodded, and then slowly, very slowly, put the receiver back on its cradle and turned to me. There was one of those pauses that you know is going to be long as soon as it starts, so I shook out another cigarette and offered her the packet.
She came towards me and stopped. She was shorter than she'd looked on the other side of the room. I smiled again, and she took a cigarette from the packet, but didn't light it. She just played with it slowly, and then pointed a pair of grey eyes at me.
I say a pair. I mean her pair. She didn't get a pair of someone else's out from a drawer and point them at me. She pointed her own pair of huge, pale, grey, pale, huge eyes at me. The sort of eyes that can make a grown man talk gibberish to himself. Get a grip, for Christ's sake.
'You're a liar,' she said.
Not angry. Not scared. Just matter-of-fact. You're a liar.
'Well, yes,' I said, 'generally speaking, I am. But at this particular moment, I happen to be telling the truth.'
She kept on staring at my face, the way I sometimes do when I've finished shaving, but she didn't seem to get any more answers than I ever have. Then she blinked once, and the blink seemed to change things somehow. Something had been released, or switched off, or at least turned down a bit. I started to relax.
'Why would anyone want to kill my father?' Her voice was softer now.
'I honestly don't know,' I said. 'I've only just found out he doesn't smoke.'
She pressed straight on, as if she hadn't heard me.
'And tell me Mr Fincham,' she said, 'how you came by all this?'
This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit. Trickiness cubed.
'Because I was offered the job,' I said.
She stopped breathing. I mean, she actually stopped breathing. And didn't look as if she had any plans to start again in the near future.
I carried on, as calmly as I could.
'Someone offered me a lot of money to kill your father,' I said, and she frowned in disbelief. 'I turned it down.'
I shouldn't have added that. I really shouldn't.
Newton's Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. To say that I'd turned the offer down raised the possibility that I might not have done. Which was not a thing I wanted floating round the room at this moment. But she started breathing again, so maybe she hadn't noticed.
'Why?'
'Why what?'
Her left eye had a tiny streak of green that went off from the pupil in a north-easterly direction. I stood there, looking into her eyes and trying not to, because I was in terrible trouble at this moment. In lots of ways.
'Why'd you turn it down?'
'Because . . .' I began, then stopped, because I had to get this absolutely right.
'Yes?'
'Because I don't kill people.'
There was a pause while she took this in and swilled it round her mouth a few times. Then she glanced over at Rayner's body.
'I told you,' I said. 'He started it.'
She stared into me for another three hundred years and then, still turning the cigarette slowly between her fingers, moved away towards the sofa, apparently deep in thought.
'Honestly,' I said, trying to get a hold of myself and the situation. 'I'm nice. I give to Oxfam, I recycle newspapers, everything.'
She reached Rayner's body and stopped.
'So when did all this happen?'
'Well... just now,' I stammered, like an idiot.
She closed her eyes for a moment. 'I mean you getting asked.'
'Right,' I said. 'Ten days ago.'
'Where?'
'Amsterdam.'
'Holland, right?'
That was a relief. That made me feel a lot better. It's nice to be looked up to by the young every now and then. You don't want it all the time, just every now and then.
'Right,' I said.
'And who was it offered you the job?'
'Never seen him before or since.'
She stooped for the glass, took a sip of Calvados and grimaced at the taste of it.
'And I'm supposed to believe this?'
'Well
'I mean, help me out here,' she said, starting to get louder again. She nodded towards Rayner. 'We have a guy here, who isn't going to back up your story, I wouldn't say, and I'm supposed to believe you because of what? Because you have a nice face?'
I couldn't help myself. I should have helped myself, I know, but I just couldn't.
'Why not?' I said, and tried to look charming. 'I'd believe anything you said.'
Terrible mistake. Really terrible. One of the crassest, most ridiculous remarks I've ever made, in a long, ridiculous-remark
-packed life.
She turned to me, suddenly very angry.
'You can drop that shit right now.'
'All I meant...' I said, but I was glad when she cut me off, because I honestly didn't know what I'd meant.
'I said drop it. There's a guy dying in here.'
I nodded, guiltily, and we both bowed our heads at Rayner, as if paying our respects. And then she seemed to snap the hymn book shut and move on. Her shoulders relaxed, and she held out the glass to me.
'I'm Sarah,' she said. 'See if you can get me a Coke.'
She did ring the police eventually, and they turned up just as the ambulance crew were scooping Rayner, apparently still breathing, on to a collapsible stretcher. They hummed and harred, and picked things up off the mantelpiece and looked at the underneath, and generally had that air of wanting to be somewhere else.
Policemen, as a rule, don't like to hear of new cases. Not because they're lazy, but because they want, like everyone else, to find a meaning, a connectedness, in the great mess of random unhappiness in which they work. If, in the middle of trying to catch some teenager who's been nicking hub-caps, they're called to the scene of a mass murder, they just can't stop themselves from checking under the sofa to see if there are any hub-caps there. They want to find something that connects to what they've already seen, that will make sense out of the chaos. So they can say to themselves, this happened because that happened. When they don't find it - when all they see is another lot of stuff that has to be written about, and filed, and lost, and found in someone's bottom drawer, and lost again, and eventually chalked up against no one's name - they get, well, disappointed.
They were particularly disappointed by our story. Sarah and I had rehearsed what we thought was a reasonable scenario, and we played three performances of it to officers of ascending rank, finishing up with an appallingly young inspector who said his name was Brock.
Brock sat on the sofa, occasionally glancing at his fingernails, and nodded his youthful way through the story of the intrepid James Fincham, friend of the family, staying in the spare-room on the first floor. Heard noises, crept downstairs to investigate, nasty man in leather jacket and black polo-neck, no never seen him before, fight, fall over, oh my god, hit head. Sarah Woolf, d.o.b. 29th August, 1964, heard sounds of struggle, came down, saw the whole thing. Drink, Inspector? Tea? Ribena?
Yes, of course, the setting helped. If we'd tried the same story in a council flat in Deptford, we'd have been on the floor of the van in seconds, asking fit young men with short hair if they wouldn't mind getting off our heads for a moment while we got comfortable. But in leafy, stuccoed Belgravia, the police are more inclined to believe you than not. I think it's included in the rates.
As we signed our statements, they asked us not to do anything silly like leave the country without informing the local station, and generally encouraged us to abide at every opportunity.
Two hours after he'd tried to break my arm, all that was left of Rayner, first name unknown, was a smell.
I let myself out of the house, and felt the pain creep back to centre stage as I walked. I lit a cigarette and smoked my way down to the corner, where I turned left into a cobbled mews that had once housed horses. It'd have to be an extremely rich horse who could afford to live here now, obviously, but the stabling character of the mews had hung about the place, and that's why it had felt right to tether the bike there. With a bucket of oats and some straw under the back wheel.
The bike was where I'd left it, which sounds like a dull remark, but isn't these days. Among bikers, leaving your machine in a dark place for more than an hour, even with padlock and alarm, and finding it still there when you come back, is something of a talking point. Particularly when the bike is a Kawasaki ZZR 1100.
Now I won't deny that the Japanese were well off-side at Pearl Harbor, and that their ideas on preparing fish for the table are undoubtedly poor - but by golly, they do know some things about making motorcycles. Twist the throttle wide open in any gear on this machine, and it'd push your eyeballs through the back of your head. All right, so maybe that's not a sensation most people are looking for in their choice of personal transport, but since I'd won the bike in a game of backgammon, getting home with an outrageously flukey only-throw 4-1 and three consecutive double sixes, I enjoyed it a lot. It was black, and big, and it allowed even the average rider to visit other galaxies.
I started the motor, revved it loud enough to wake a few fat Belgravian financiers, and set off for Notting Hill. I had to take it easy in the rain, so there was plenty of time for reflection on the night's business.
The one thing that stayed in my mind, as I jinked the bike along the slick, yellow-lit streets, was Sarah telling me to drop 'that shit'. And the reason I had to drop it was because there was a dying man in the room.
Newtonian Conversation, I thought to myself. The implication was that I could have kept on holding that shit, if the room hadn't had a dying man in it.
That cheered me up. I started to think that if I couldn't work things so that one day she and I would be together in a room with no dying men in it at all, then my name isn't James Fincham.
Which, of course, it isn't.
Two
For a long time I used to go to bed early.
MARCEL PROUST
I arrived back at the flat and went through the usual answerphone routine. Two meaningless bleeps, one wrong number, one call from a friend interrupted in the first sentence, followed by three people I didn't want to hear from who I now had to ring back.
God, I hated that machine.
I sat down at my desk and went through the day's mail. I threw some bills into the bin, and then remembered that I'd moved the bin into the kitchen — so I got annoyed, stuffed the rest of the post into a drawer, and gave up on the idea that doing chores would help me to get things straight in my mind.
It was too late to start playing loud music, and the only other entertainment I could find in the flat was whisky, so I picked up a glass and a bottle of The Famous Grouse, poured myself a couple of fingers, and went into the kitchen. I added enough water to turn it into just a Vaguely Familiar Grouse, and then sat down at the table with a pocket dictaphone, because someone had once told me that talking out loud helps clarify things. I'd said would it work with butter? and they'd said no, but it would work with whatever is troubling your spirit.
I put a tape in the machine and flicked the record switch.
'Dramatis personae,' I said. 'Alexander Woolf, father of Sarah Woolf, owner of dinky Georgian house in Lyall Street, Belgravia, employer of blind and vindictive interior designers, and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Gaine Parker. Unknown male Caucasian, American or Canadian, fiftyish. Rayner. Large, violent, hospitalised. Thomas Lang, thirty-six, Flat D, 42 Westbourne Close, late of the Scots Guards, honourable discharge with rank of Captain. The facts, insofar as they are known, are these.'
I don't know why tape recorders make me talk like this, but they do.
'Unknown male attempts to secure employment of T. Lang for the purpose of committing unlawful killing of A. Woolf. Lang declines position on grounds of being nice. Principled. Decent. A gentleman.'
I took a mouthful of whisky and looked at the dictaphone, wondering if I was ever going to play this soliloquy back to anyone. An accountant had told me it was a sensible thing to buy because I could get the tax back on it. But as I didn't pay any tax, have any need for a dictaphone, or trust the accountant as far as I could spit him, I looked upon this machine as one of my less sensible purchases.
Heigh ho.
'Lang goes to Woolf's house, with the intention of warning him against possible assassination attempt. Woolf absent. Lang decides to instigate enquiries.'
I paused for a while, and the while turned into a long while, so I sipped some more whisky and laid aside the dictaphone while I did some thinking.
The only enquiry I had instigated had been the word 'what' - and I'd barely managed to get that out of m
y mouth before Rayner had hit me with a chair. Beyond that, all I'd done was half-kill a man and leave, wishing, pretty fervently, that I'd other-half-killed him too. And you don't really want that sort of thing lying around on magnetic tape unless you know what you're doing. Which, amazingly enough, I didn't.
However, I'd just about known enough to recognise Rayner, even before I knew his name. I couldn't say he'd been following me exactly, but I've a good memory for faces -which makes up for being utterly pathetic with names - and Rayner's was not a difficult face. Heathrow airport, the public bar of some Devonshire Arms on the King's Road, and the entrance to Leicester Square tube had been enough of an advertisement, even for an idiot like me.
I'd had the feeling that we were going to meet eventually, so I'd prepared myself for the rainy day by visiting Blitz Electronics on the Tottenham Court Road, where I'd shelled out two pounds eighty for a foot of large-diameter electrical cable. Flexible, heavy, and, when it comes to beating off brigands and footpads, better than any purpose-built cosh. The only time it doesn't work as a weapon is when you leave it in the kitchen drawer, still in its wrapping. Then it's really not very effective at all.
As for the unknown male Caucasian who'd offered me a killing job, well, I didn't hold out much hope of ever tracing him. Two weeks ago I'd been in Amsterdam, escorting a Manchester bookmaker who desperately wanted to believe that he had violent enemies. He'd hired me to bolster the fantasy. So I'd held car doors open for him, and checked buildings for snipers that I knew weren't there, and then spent a gruelling forty-eight hours sitting with him in night-clubs, watching him throw money in every direction but mine. When he'd finally wilted, I'd ended up loafing about my hotel room watching blue movies on television. The phone had rung - during a particularly good bit, as I remember - and a male voice had asked me to the bar for a drink.
I'd checked to make sure that the bookmaker was safely tucked up in bed with a nice warm prostitute, then sidled downstairs in the hope of saving myself forty quid by wringing a couple of drinks out of some old army friend.
But, as it turned out, the voice on the phone belonged to a short fat body in an expensive suit who I definitely didn't know. And didn't particularly want to know either, until he reached into his jacket and pulled out a roll of bank notes about as thick as I am.
