Gold by Gemini

by Jonathan Gash

  I went over the possibilities on the way down. A list of named spots – nothing at any of them. The most likely spot was here, near Lady Isabella. But I’d got no vibes near the wheel herself. And in any case she was well-maintained, cleaned and painted. Obviously had plenty of vigilant engineers about and was, from what I’d seen, a popular tourist spectacle. The wheel seemed far too public. Yet some place near Lady Isabella was obviously the place a man like Bexon would remember best. Wasn’t it?

  Janie was sitting on a big flat rock near the car park chucking stones into the water. She’d taken her sandals off and her feet were wet. Her frock was up over her knees.

  ‘Hussy,’ I called down from the bank. I was still delighted about the mines. ‘I can see all up your legs.’

  ‘Cripple,’ she said angrily. ‘I heard you limping. I told you to be careful.’ She was mad again. ‘Did you fall?’

  ‘Now, don’t start, Janie lovie,’ I said. Why do women keep getting so mad when they should be all worried? I honestly don’t get it.

  ‘Don’t you lovie me, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Where’s Algernon?’

  She looked up curiously. I’d tried to sound casual.

  ‘Off on a bike. He told you.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, easy still. ‘So he did.’

  She pulled herself up the river bank and stood inspecting me.

  ‘Stop looking at me like that,’ I complained. ‘I feel for sale.’

  ‘What happened up there, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’d better have a look at it.’ She pulled my torn trouser away from my side. ‘Dear God.’ A family passing to their car exclaimed and tutted sympathetically, I moved away from Janie’s fingers.

  ‘Don’t show my bum to everybody.’

  ‘We’d better call at a chemist’s for some ointment.’

  Inside the car was hot. Janie put the air-conditioner on.

  ‘Where to, b’wana?’ she asked. I put my head on her.

  ‘Love,’ I said, ‘I just don’t know.’

  That night I couldn’t sleep. When that happens I always think, well, so what? Okay, so I’ll be a bit tired next day. All the better rest you get the night after. There’s no need to be so distressed as some people get. But Janie was tossing and turning too. Maybe it was the lingering effects of my grub.

  Fitful patches came, blurred and then left me starkly conscious. I’ve heard that people mostly worry, about work during the dark hours. With me it’s faces. They came gliding into my mind like characters from a Kabuki play. Some just wouldn’t go. Helen, for instance. Maybe I’d imagined her down at the shops yesterday, result of a subconscious longing, perhaps. We’d been very close but only briefly. The stress of competing for the same antiques had torn – well, snipped – us apart. What was she doing here? The antique shops, possibly. But ‘possibly’ also means possibly not. Then Kate the Wicked Sister, with her single-minded message not to help Nichole. Not surprising, really, because womankind occasionally has been known to be slightly tinged with the sin of jealousy, so it’s said. But how could I possibly help Nichole, when she insisted on going about with that murdering pillock Rink, instead of a lovely hunk like me? Algernon’s too thick to be anybody’s ally, I told myself, isn’t he? Isn’t he? I got up at one point and padded in my pyjamas to peer through the back-door glass towards his bungalow. No lights. Well, three in the morning. But was he in there? Or maybe he was stealing back that very second to Big Izzie, having seen something I hadn’t. I cancelled that possibility and slipped back into bed. The idea of Algernon stealing anywhere’s an absurdity. Even when he brews up it’s like a fife band. Janie stirred. I let my legs get warm before closing in on her.

  Then there was Rink the Fink. No good wondering why a rich man like him wanted to bother with a possible find of possible valuables. Greed knows no rhyme or reason. I’ve actually seen a real live millionaire cover his face and weep uncontrollably in a famous Bond Street auction for carelessly missing a Penny Black – admittedly these stamps aren’t all that common, but you can find them if you look carefully. I got up again.

  There was no light from the hillside. I sat in an armchair after pulling the curtains back. Who was actually doing the watching? Or was there nobody there at all? I had this feeling again. Supposing Rink had two watchers, twelve-hour shifts. Possible, but how the hell would they contact Rink if I made a sudden dash anywhere? Some form of field transmitter? I gazed out into the darkness. Maybe the watcher and me were looking directly at each other, unseeing. Unless he had one of those night telescopes. Was he smoking out there? You can see a match at five thousand yards. That’s what the sergeant used to say, on his belly in the mud, refusing to let the lads smoke two whole leech-ridden days before the ambush. I moved the armchair uneasily. There’s something really rather nasty about being looked at when you don’t suspect. It’s a sick feeling.

  Janie was trustworthy, though. I pondered a long time about Janie. Wealthy, lovely, attractive and humorous. Exactly what the doctor ordered. You have to trust the woman you sleep with, don’t you? I mean, if you can’t trust the woman you sleep with, whom can you trust? I mean to say.

  It was so dark outside. I could just see the skyline. There were some stars. The forecast said it might rain before dawn.

  Yet Janie never trusts me. She keeps saying so. Still, that was easily accounted for – women aren’t very trusting people by nature. They are a very unusual sex, when you think of it. I don’t think they’ll ever be the same as us, reasonable and even-tempered. What lingered unpleasantly in my mind about Janie was her husband. We’d never spoken about him, not properly. And she’d never mentioned him since that night except once to say, when I’d asked, ‘Yes, that was my husband you heard. He only stayed a minute.’ She goes back to him, though, most of the time. Whenever he returns from abroad she zooms home, the dutiful wife. And what was happening between them now was anybody’s guess. I didn’t even know where she was supposed to be this very moment, with a sick auntie at Broadstairs or what. I suspected she’d made him believe she was legitimately absent on some benevolent enterprise. But husbands get philanderers followed. They’re known for it.

  Lastly, Beck. Well, maybe the fact that I’d whittled him for the odd doubloon had filtered down through his cerebral cortex by now and he was doing his avenger thing. Most unlikely, really. Beck was a sort of positive Algernon, a mad bull compared to a gormless spaniel. He’d have crashed in here the minute the ferry docked: Lovejoy, you swine, did you whittle me?

  Something moved out in the night. A patch of darkness suddenly became cohesive and shifted slightly. I knew it had been six feet or so to the right a minute before. Dark’s solid where living things are. My hands groped about the armchair. Great. Caught without even a stone or a poker, in pyjamas. The black grew larger. Dear God, I thought, sweating, it’s coming right up to the window. The window darkened to one side. I was so tightened up I couldn’t even screech for Janie. A faint gleam on spectacles drenched me in a sweat of relief;

  It was sodding Algernon, the stupid bastard.

  I blundered to the window and scrabbled for the catch muttering I’d kill him, frightening me to death like that.

  ‘Lovejoy.’ A whisper.

  ‘What?’ I croaked back, third go.

  ‘He’s out there. Do you want my night glasses?’ He was whispering where the windows met. This was it. Dandy’s killer had finally come.

  I forced myself to push the window gently open. Cold air streamed blessedly in.

  ‘Where?’ Never mind where, Lovejoy, for God’s sake, ask who. ‘Who?’

  ‘The badger.’ He sounded surprised.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Shhh, Lovejoy!’ he hissed in anguish. ‘You’ll distract him!’

  A bloody badger.

  He got a three-minute whispered torrent of invective. Once one person whispers, everybody does it and nobody can stop. Ever noticed that? Contagious, like yawning.

  I deliberately
slammed the window and went back to bed. Once I’d got warm again and my terror had lessened a bit, I began thinking. In spite of myself Algernon’s stalking impressed me. How come that he was normally so clumsy? Maybe daylight did things to his co-ordination. I couldn’t tell Janie about the incident. She’d only laugh and tell me what I should have done.

  ‘That’s the trouble with hangers-on, I thought bitterly as I nodded off. I’m on a three-seat tandem. We all want to honk the horn but nobody wants to pedal.

  It must have been in one of those semi-conscious states that my logic did its stuff. Tandems. My dopey dawn mind saw a tandem ridden by Kate and Nichole. Then it took them away and put the diaries there. Then it put the two sketches there.

  I awoke at six stark with cold fear. All Bexon’s pointers were in twos, everything from the Roman babes on the gold coins, Romulus and Remus suckling on the she-wolf. Everything. Except for one lonely horrid decayed nightmare place, one terrible exception. So obvious. Suddenly so clear.

  Dear Jesus. The inlet.

  It had to be the seal pen.

  I rose, creeping out of bed and tiptoeing about.

  Chapter 21

  I SHOULD HAVE spotted it earlier.

  His hiding-place. had to be near Groundle Glen. Had to. Otherwise, why stay here? His diary said ‘. . . it’s convenient.’ There was only the old railway line and the seal pen. I’d walked the length of the tracks several times and seen nothing. There was one place I’d never inspected close to, though. And that was the seal pen. Courage, Lovejoy.

  I was out at first light. No signs of life from Algernon’s bungalow. Janie slept on. I hurried down towards the bridge and climbed up the path to the diminutive railway. There wasn’t another soul awake among the bungalows. I was clear away. I trotted on.

  In the dawn light the seal pen scared me more than ever before. The cleft seemed to run a thousand miles down to where the sea struggled over the stone barrier. Most of the palings on the narrow wall had rusted to jagged points with fallen pieces lying obliquely to trail nastily into the sea. I wondered if any seal had ever managed to escape. Surely they must have wanted to. It was like a bad stage set nicked from Wagner’s Teutonic worst.

  A concrete platform with a wonky railing was the only sign of civilization where the railway ended. I was frightened. The ledge was pretty dangerous even on a calm sunny day. What it looked like on a stormy night didn’t bear thinking of. I edged my way cautiously on to the platform feeling like a figurehead on a ship. I’d never seen so much sky around.

  The heather and the grass had created a bulge where the tiny rails ended. There were probably buffers under there, overgrown. A circular rim set in the concrete level looked oddly familiar, reminding me: a gun emplacement, probably anti-aircraft. They’d built the platform wider and stuck an ack-ack weapon on top, for the war. Which miserable gunner battery had snapped up this particular posting? Poor sods. They’d have had to struggle back along the railway in the dark even to fill a kettle from the leaky tap at the ruined brick hut. Well, at least they could have used the little train for hauling shells. To me they were heroes as brave as any fighter pilot. I looked down again. The nightmare cleft had deepened a few miles since my previous glance. Did it go up and down with the sea? Was its water connected underneath all that stone and rusted iron? There was a noise behind me. A sheep, rolled its mandible at me over the wire fence.

  ‘Bloody fool,’ I said. ‘Go away. I’m scared enough as it is.’

  It didn’t shift. I’ve never been able to tell people off.

  The cage on the other side of the inlet was set on a lower level than the platform where I stood. A dice-tumbler, I suddenly realized. That’s what it reminded me of. Another Bexon joke? It had been constructed on a slight prominence, giving it for all the world the appearance of an iron pulpit projecting out over the seal pen. There was no way in except through the top, where the metal staves were curved towards their common centre. You could get in but you’d have a terrible time getting out.

  I could see across into it. Some rubble. Double iron doors in the cage, one shut with a grille at eye level, the other ajar. Maybe it was a further wartime addition, which suggested there was another way in from the landward side, probably with steps cut down into a tunnel. That’s how they made entrances to dugouts in the trenches. Soldiers don’t change much.

  At one time there had been a catwalk across. I could hardly bear to look. Not that I’m scared of heights, but there’s a limit. It had deteriorated over the years to a crumbling bar of weathered concrete, spanning the sixty or so feet across the gorge. Most of the iron struts and handrail were gone. The entire thing was rust-stained, giving it a horrid toothiness I found distinctly unnerving. The inlet must be like one great mouth if you looked from the sea.

  The noise again behind me. The sheep hadn’t gone.

  ‘Can you see anywhere else it could be?’ I asked. It said nothing. You get no help.

  Getting round to the other side would be bad enough, let alone climbing down to the iron pulpit.

  ‘Shift,’ I said. The sheep stepped away from the fence.

  Intrepid ramblers obviously came along this way, along – the overgrown railway track. It was only about as wide as a small path anyway. The only safe way round the inlet was to climb up the steep hillside into the sheepfold, walk over and descend from the hillside on to the cliff-top again. I did it, clinging to the barbed wire for all I was worth and not looking down.

  I was quite calm and pleased until I glanced back at the old gun platform. Had I just stood on that? And looked down?

  The platform was as thin as a match, a little white scar marking a rising mass of jagged rocks. Below, sea waves, pretty docile until they swept casually round the headland, rose into white claws and scrabbled viciously at the volcanic rock. It made my feet tingle. And Bexon’s gang had somehow built a seal pen in this savage place. More annoying still, he’d come back to see it years later.

  I found the entrance to the tunnel cut through to the pulpit, and the steps I predicted. The hillside had slid gently into it, simply folding the passageway in the rock. There was no way through. Worse, clearing it would take a million years. Two million, on my own.

  My rope had some iron things on that the man in the ship chandler’s yesterday had said would hold on to anything. A likely tale. I latched them mistrustfully to the tunnel upright, a beautiful thick post reinforced with a metal bar for a hinge. It was set solidly into concrete top and bottom, a lovely great piece. ‘Stay there,’ I told it, ‘and don’t budge. Please.’ For extras I made a couple of knots (well, eight, actually) around the opposite post in case. I’d previously examined every inch of rope a few hundred times, peering for flaws and hidden gaps. Now I did it again, rubbing it through my hands and feeling for any old razor blades or chewing insects I’d overlooked. It seemed all right but suddenly very thin. Had I put on weight? Thoughtlessly, I’d had a glass of milk, which now made me mad. I’d have been just as strong without, at least for a few hours, and I was bound to be heavier. How stupid to eat like a horse. My school science came rushing frantically to my aid. A pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter. But it had only taken one bloody lightweight straw to break that biblical camel clean in two, and everybody knows how tough camels are. I tried spitting out to make myself lighter but my mouth was dry. I drew deep breaths to get rid of some water vapour from my soggy fluid-crammed lungs but only made myself so giddy I had to stop. I tried peeing, politely turning towards the vacant sea away from the sheep, but couldn’t wring out a drop. I’d dried up. Maybe I was so dehydrated with fright I’d faint and fall, turning over and over, towards the . . .

  ‘Now, Lovejoy,’ I said. ‘Be reasonable.’

  How reasonable is it, I heard myself begin to answer back sharply, to dangle . . .? I moved quickly to the edge and found the double bush of heather I’d picked out as a marker. With luck I’d be directly over the iron pulpit. I slithered untidily down, clinging to the rope and babbling in
coherently with fear. Not that I was really frightened, not too much. It’s daft to let yourself get too scared. I shrieked with terror when the rock surface momentarily vanished underneath me. I hung in space staring upwards. The crest was only a few feet away. I seemed to have been going down for hours.

  You mustn’t look down. That’s what they say. Then how the hell can you see where you’re going? I had to. I forced my gaze along to my elbow, then made it leap the gap to the wall of rock. It travelled down on its own from there. Down. Down. My belly seemed to leave me and vanish, falling. My legs prickled. The sea was green, so deep and green. Mad white rims poked and swirled. The concrete gums and iron teeth seemed actually to be moving, gnawing erratically at the sea’s body and running white blood back into the ocean. But the most fearsome thing of all was the iron pulpit. It was only twenty or so feet from where I swung but its very oddness and its nearness set me moaning. The hole at the top was smaller than I’d imagined. The rest of the cage was disproportionately larger. Funny, that.

  A lunatic wind whistled round the rocks from seaward, making me dangle a few degrees from the vertical. I should have looked to see how much rope I’d got. I tried to but couldn’t. How long I hung there I don’t know. What finally started me moving down again was a sudden spasm of fear. My hands were sweating. They might slip and set me falling, turning over and over, towards the . . . I edged down under my own weight inch by inch, thinking suddenly, Dear God, does sweat dissolve nylon? I might land down there in the iron pulpit, find the stuff and finish up trapped with half a ton of melted rope.

  My moaning was interrupted by a scream. It was me. I looked down. The top curled iron staves of the cage had touched my foot. I found I’d curled up on the rope, my body balled as tight as possible in a spasm of reflex clutching. Stupid sod. I forced my reluctant leg out and crooked my foot around one bar. It seemed staunch enough. I pulled myself nearer. There was enough rope to reach. I could trail the end into the cage with me. Even if it came undone from inside the cage sooner or later it would flail within reach under this huthery wind. Hanging for dear life on to the line with my left hand, I grabbed at the pulpit with my right hand and held on to the lovely strong iron. It’s extraordinary how you want to keep curling up. I tried to bring the rope and my left hand nearer but only succeeded in clinging like a sloth to the cage’s ironwork. Sweat poured down my face yet I was grinning with delight at all this success. Even the rope was miraculously behaving, having somehow looped itself over my shoulder. I needn’t look any more. The worst part was straightening both legs and dropping into the cage. I found I’d kept hold of the line, probably not trusting the concrete floor of the cage. It may sound daft but at least it’s careful.