Dirty Weekend

by Alan Scholefield

  She had been working for one of the big London TV companies as producer/interviewer, making short community programmes about battered wives, child abuse, the chronically ill.

  ‘We were recording a studio discussion in Winchester,’ she said. ‘When we finished he came in to do a short piece for their own local news about widow’s pensions, which interested me. I asked him to have lunch so we could talk about it. Eventually it turned into another in my series.

  ‘The first thing I registered about Henry was that he had a good relaxed manner. It’s not easy to communicate to a camera but there are some people who can. Henry was one.

  ‘He was far too good for provincial journalism so I saw the right people in London and two months later he was taken on by the BBC. He worked there for five years.

  ‘We married and had two children which meant me giving up my job in London because I had always considered that the bringing up of children was the most important function a woman could perform. In any case, I’d become disenchanted with television. It’s hit and miss. You try to change the social fabric but it’s never possible to quantify your result. Coming to live down here and getting on to the County Council I could push forward my plans and see them come into being.’

  Silver stifled a yawn and Macrae broke in before she could continue. ‘You were telling us about your husband.’

  She looked at him sharply then said, ‘After Henry had been five years with the BBC I was able to pull some strings and get him on to Channel Four. They gave him a slot at breakfast time where he could pursue some of the social problems that I . . . that we both felt needed pursuing. One of which, I may say, is to get more people from ethnic communities into broadcasting. I want to see more blacks and Indians and Pakistanis and . . .’

  ‘And Jews?’ Silver said.

  She gave a short mirthless laugh and said, ‘Oh, I think Jews can look after themselves, don’t you?’

  ‘Were you older than your husband?’ Silver said.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Please,’ Macrae said, wearily.

  ‘Yes. Henry would have been forty-one next month.’

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘I’m forty-nine, since you ask. But it made no difference to us. That’s so much rubbish. Anyway, we were linked by common interests.’

  ‘What about the apartment in Fulham?’ Silver said. ‘How long had Mr Foster had that?’

  ‘I bought it three or four years ago. It seemed nonsense for Henry to get up at four in the morning to drive to London. Anyway, it disrupted the family.’

  ‘Did you often go up and stay in the flat?’ Silver said.

  ‘Never. I simply do not have the time to go jaunting these days.’

  ‘Mrs Foster,’ Macrae began. ‘I must ask you some rather personal questions. I wouldn’t if I didn’t think the answers might help us.’

  She drew her lips into a thin line.

  ‘Was your marriage a happy one?’

  ‘I . . . yes, it was. I told you we had common interests – in social change, in the caring side of humanity, such as it is. We had our children. A love of the country. Walking. Henry had recently taken to bird watching.’ She indicated a number of bird books on the coffee table.

  ‘Was there . . . had there ever been problems with other women?’ Macrae said.

  ‘I hope I do not understand you.’

  ‘Had Mr Foster, to your knowledge, ever had affairs? Was he that sort of person?’

  ‘Certainly not, and I find the suggestion offensive.’

  Macrae looked down at his big square hands. ‘Mrs Foster, let me repeat. A man has been killed in London. There are many motives for murder but the three most likely are money, women or drugs.’

  ‘Have you thought of a simple mugging?’ she said sarcastically.

  ‘That’s the first thing we thought of. It’s unlikely in this case.’

  ‘Did he have any other interests?’ Silver said. ‘You mentioned bird watching. Anything else he could have pursued in London?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘People collect stamps or medals or coins. Something that would have brought him into contact with a group of people with common interests.’

  ‘No. Nothing like that. He worked on his programme. Either at the flat in Fulham or at the studios.’

  ‘Did he have a secretary?’

  ‘Only for correspondence at the studios. And that’s where the researchers were, in case you’re wondering about them as well. Mostly he worked by himself. Did you see his programme?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I should have thought that would have been the first thing to do. The format was simple. I thought of it for him. A variation on the talking head. Henry would do an interview but he himself would largely be edited out, except for topping and tailing. That made it appear that the interviewee was talking straight to camera. It produced a natural “live” feel. The programme went out five mornings a week. At weekends he and I would go over the names of possible future subjects.’

  ‘Did you always agree?’

  She looked surprised. ‘Yes. We talked things through. In the end we always agreed.’

  ‘What were the ratings?’ Silver said.

  ‘You don’t expect a programme like that to make an impact on the ratings. I would have been horrified if it had. That would have meant we’d gone for the cheap option.’

  They questioned her for another half an hour and then left.

  *

  In the car going back to London Macrae said, ‘What’d you think of Mrs Foster?’

  ‘Grey.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Word association. You say, “Mrs Foster” and I say, “Grey”. That’s what comes to mind. Greyness and neatness.’

  ‘You’ve got neatness on the brain.’

  ‘I’ve never seen such neat places as his flat and his house. Can you imagine living like that, guv’nor?’

  Macrae ignored him. ‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘I thought he must be bloody pushy to get where he got. You’ve got to have something extra if you’re black. Like a woman. I mean to get on. But now I’ve seen her my guess is that’s where the push comes from. I wonder if he’d been having it off. Living most of the week in London and married to a bitch like that. I know I would.’

  *

  At the Goodwood, Macrae put a bottle of whisky down on the table in front of Silver. ‘Save us going backwards and forwards,’ he said.

  Silver looked at it. It was going to be one of those nights. It sometimes happened on a Friday, or before a public holiday. Macrae never wanted to go home.

  ‘Evening, George,’ a voice said above them.

  No one in a spieler ever called Macrae ‘George’ and he lifted his head now and glared at the speaker. Then his expression changed.

  ‘Hello, Tommy.’

  Silver looked up to see a tall, thin man, older than Macrae. His hair was grey and there were deeply incised lines on his face. He was leaning forward on a stick.

  Macrae introduced Silver and then said, ‘Have a drink?’

  ‘Can’t, George. I’m on pills.’

  They stood talking for a few moments and then Macrae said, ‘You ever hear anything about a fence called Kerman these days?’

  ‘Ronnie Kerman? The one we put away after the Hatton Garden job? Not a thing. I think he’s clean nowadays. Why?’

  ‘Just wondered.’

  When they were alone again, Macrae said, ‘That was Tommy Ballard. He was my guv’nor at West End Central until he stopped a bullet. Smashed his thigh joint. But he likes to keep his hand in. Come on, drink up, laddie. You’re not a girl.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  When Terry woke he was frightened. He lay in the dark for a long moment unable to comprehend where he was. Then memory flooded back and, like an animal that is beginning to form a territory, fear was replaced by a tenuous feeling of safety. This was his house, he told himself. He had found it. He felt like one of those c
hildren in the fairy stories his grandfather had told him; children who were lost in the forests and mountains of Jamaica and came upon sugar-cane cutters’ houses made of beaten out kerosene tins. (When he got to school they laughed at him. Children got lost in northern forests. There were no cane cutters. And the houses were made of gingerbread.)

  But, in the fairy stories, something horrible always happened to the children before they were saved. The horrible thing had already happened to him. Now he wanted someone to save him.

  His grandfather had told him there was a God who watched over everyone and who knew everyone’s secrets. And he remembered that his grandfather sometimes bargained with God, offering to do things in exchange for favours. Terry wanted to bargain himself, but what could he offer in exchange?

  He got up, straightened the counterpane and went down to the kitchen. He could not put on any lights, of course, but enough streamed through the venetian blinds to see by. He went to the window and looked along the mews. It was deserted. Most of the cars were gone, except for the Toyota. The man was working now by the light of a torch.

  He opened another tin of beans and ate them with a spoon. Then he smoked another stale cigarette. What was the point of having your own house, he thought, with a larder full of food . . . if you were all by yourself?

  When he had lain next to Gail in the den under Hungerford Bridge and when she wasn’t zonked out they would talk in soft voices and the trains would rumble over them. He had felt safe then. She would tell him about herself and where she had come from and what had happened to her and he would tell her about his grandfather and his athletics. She was the only person he ever told. Indeed, she was the only person, with the exception of Garner Maitland, that he had ever really talked to. It was just sad about the drugs.

  Then he thought of something brilliant. If she came to live in the house with him she wouldn’t be able to get any drugs. There was enough food to last them a few weeks. There was a television set they could carry upstairs, maybe put it on the little landing where there were no windows. They might be able to watch it there. He was certain that all sorts of things could be done to make them safe.

  Then there was the secret door to the stables, no one knew about that. No one had used it for years and years. And during the day he could go out and find some food and bring it back. And they could talk.

  And so, in the cold black night, Terry went through the stables and stroked the horse called Mr Garner and slipped out of the window into the mews and set off in search of Gail.

  Almost immediately he started to run. He crossed the Bayswater Road. The park was locked up tight for the night and he ran the long way round it. Running he became a different person.

  Kutz . . . Landy . . . Zatopek . . . left right, left right. Day . . . lee . . . Day . . . lee . . . Except Daley was no distance runner. He always struggled. Even in the 1500 metres, the last event – no, not event, the last ‘discipline’ – of the decathlon.

  Terry wasn’t alone. Half a dozen late exercise-takers, all dressed much the same as himself, were jogging along the wide pavement.

  Marble Arch and down Park Lane. Crossing the pain barrier now and getting his second wind. Zatopek leading in that funny head-on-one-side-this-is-my-last-agonised-step style of running. Then Kutz. Then Huntsman Collins.

  ‘In those days there wasn’t no black distance runners,’ his grandfather had said. ‘We was sprinters. Blacks have special thigh bones. Longer than whites. Always remember that. But then our brothers from Africa come along. They run the distance, we run the sprints. Between us, mon, we takes everything.’

  Kipchonge Keino . . . Mike Boit . . .

  Lapping at sixty-eight . . . Don’t get boxed . . . Eyes in the back of your head . . . Who’s going to make the break . . .? Who’s going to cut you up . . .? Bumping . . . Elbowing . . . Watch out for spikes . . .! Here’s the bell . . . Who’s got the legs . . . the finish . . .?

  Keeping to the shadows now, the dark places, the alleys. Coming into the real London. Dossers in their cardboard boxes. Past midnight and not much traffic on the streets.

  Tomorrow is Easter Friday, but Terry doesn’t know that.

  When he stopped he was less than three hundred metres from the Goodwood Sporting Club where Macrae was telling Silver to drink up. He was standing in the small garden that runs along the Embankment near the Savoy Hotel. He was hidden by a laurel bush that grew well above head height. From there he could look directly at the end of Hungerford Bridge. What he saw made him realise that Gail would not be there.

  A uniformed cop walked slowly up and down. Terry watched him for nearly twenty minutes. He would walk thirty or forty metres one way and then thirty, forty, maybe a hundred metres the next and Terry would think he was going on along the Embankment and would soon disappear. Then he would turn and walk slowly back. Time after time. Sometimes he would stand still and beat his freezing hands together and Terry would feel his own icy fingers. But there was no gainsaying it, he was there, an implacable presence.

  Terry wasn’t surprised but he’d had to make sure. He felt a bitter sadness, for now he knew he’d lost her.

  He had decided that the policeman was never going to go away, so he left the garden, crossed the Strand, and made for Leicester Square. Usually at this time of night it was jumping, the amusement arcades going, the fast food places going, the meths drinkers on the benches going. Now everything was closed and barred and freezing. Where could she be? Where could he look?

  Then he remembered the first time they had met. She had taken him to the place below a derelict block of flats. But could he ever find it again?

  Orienteering now. Running and looking and looking and running. No maps. But the mind of a city kid. Drop him down anywhere in London and like a dog he could return home.

  Find the place she’d taken him to eat. That was his starting point. It had been somewhere on the edges of Soho. Theatres around. He knew he couldn’t be far. Casting like a hound. First one way and then the next, running for a block, looking, another block, looking. Until, abruptly, he came out on Shaftesbury Avenue and there were the theatres. And there was the pizza place Gail had taken him to.

  He began to move in a south-westerly direction.

  Running again. The marathon now. The London marathon. And Abebe Bikila leading. And Huntsman Collins just behind. Three kilometres to go and the crowds thick. All he could see were Bikila’s thin legs pumping ahead of him, the thin legs that carried him over the hills and dales of Ethiopia.

  Terry had never run a marathon before. He was nearly at the end of his stamina. But the roar of the crowd lifted him, put new energy into his muscles.

  And there it was. In a deserted street. The old block of half-demolished flats and all around it paper blowing on the cold north-east wind.

  No neon in this part of London. No cars. Empty streets lined by bleak red-brick buildings some of which were occupied some not. He was behind the Tate Gallery now, not that that would have made much impact for he had never heard of it.

  Somewhere away to his left were the Houses of Parliament. He knew them because he’d taken a bearing on them, and they must have lain within his subconscious. He must have seen them when Gail was taking him along the same route.

  He paused under the orange sodium lights. Where had they entered this no man’s land of rubble and brick? A pathway led round to the rear of the building and he took it. Here were the old garages. There was something familiar about the area. He had spent a night of his life there.

  Down steps into cold concrete caverns. Some smelling of petrol and oil, some of nameless things. Moving from one roofless cavern to the next. More stairs. Underground parking corrupted by water and stained by lime, everything rusted and smashed. Nothing of value left. This was more like it.

  Then he heard a noise, a scrabbling, scratching noise, and thought of rats as big as cats. Where had that come from? A nursery rhyme? His grandfather?

  Dark and dingy now and there was no way Da
ley could help. And yet he knew he was in the right place.

  The noise again. Coming out of the dark. Then a kind of moan, a human sound. Gail?

  He pressed forward silently on rubber soles. The orange light penetrated these caverns through broken roofs. He entered a small room and saw the dented dustbins and knew he was there. He picked his way across rubble, turned the corner of a broken arch and saw the dark flapping wings of a giant crow tearing at a corpse. Not a crow. A dark figure. Crouching over something. He saw feet. They had stolen the trainers together. Above her, pulling at her clothing, her pockets, her things, the black bird of prey. He turned and Terry saw it was the Rat.

  He launched himself before he thought. The knife lay unremembered in his pocket. Arms flailing he beat at the Rat and pulled him away from her. They fell. His hand closed on a piece of broken masonry. He smashed it against his shoulder, his neck, the side of his head. The Rat broke away. Running footsteps receded. Terry was left with Gail.

  She lay on a mattress of cardboard and newspapers. The sleeping bag had been pulled from her. The light fell on her face, softening it. Saliva had come from her lips and shone on her cheek. The track suit was open where hands had rummaged for money or drugs.

  He knelt beside her and took her hand. It was cold but then so were his. He tried to warm it. But the chill was permanent although it took him a long time to realise it.

  He sat with her, trying to bring her to life, knowing that what she had said would happen had happened. ‘One day I’ll OD,’ she had said. ‘And who’ll care?’

  He cared. It was as though the other light, the proper light in his life, had gone out, and he was left with only this orange light, a half light and a half life.

  He sat with her for more than an hour. Not crying. Trying to warm a hand that would not be warmed.

  Then he buttoned up her clothes and put her back in her sleeping bag and zipped it all the way up. It had a kind of hood and he put that over her head and zipped that up too. She wasn’t very big and she fitted into the sleeping bag easily. That was the best he could do. That was her burial.