by Jon Teckman
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. All of a sudden, I wasn’t feeling very hungry.
‘I think you know exactly what I mean,’ said Bennett, taking the upper slice of bread off his sandwich and slathering tomato ketchup all over the bacon. ‘You know me, West. You must have known I wouldn’t take a thing like this lying down. Have my whole career ruined by some miserable little slapper? So, you know what I did?’ His eyes darted like mayflies over a pond as he recalled the details. ‘I hired a private eye. I got this guy to go over to LA and follow Madame Finch around for a couple of weeks. Followed her all over the place, he did. Restaurants, bars, the lot. He even managed to get into that fat bastard Guttenberg’s party disguised as a waiter. Bloody good tracker, I must say.’
I stared into the steamy black contents of my mug, wishing I could dive in. Weighed down by a plethora of heavy emotions, I’d have had no trouble sinking to the bottom.
‘Unfortunately, he was a bloody lousy photographer,’ Bennett continued through a mouthful of sandwich, ‘but he got a few half-decent shots.’ He reached inside his jacket and produced a manila envelope. He tore it open, slid about a dozen 6 x 4-inch photographs onto the table and pushed them towards me. ‘I think you’ll find these interesting.’ Bennett was smiling now, watching me, monitoring my reaction. He finished his sandwich and took a long sip of his whisky.
I looked at the first print, then turned it over to check the other side. As far as I could make out it was completely blank. The next two were the same. Bennett grabbed them, and a couple more from the pile, ripped them in half and threw them to the floor. ‘Not those! That was when the stupid sod kept snapping away with the camera under his apron. They get better.’
Gradually, the quality of the photographs, and the clarity of the tale they were telling, improved. First, there was a picture of my shoes talking to Olivia’s shoes. Then our knees locked in earnest conversation – not that anyone could have recognised them as belonging to us. Then one of our thighs, followed by our groins, both of which would have been far more interesting had they been taken in New York rather than Los Angeles. The next picture was of two champagne glasses which might have been held by us – or someone else, or sitting on a table. The next one did make me start – if you knew what you were looking for, you might have recognised our hands: her long, elegant fingers outstretched to meet my short, stubby digits, and touching almost like lovers. Without that knowledge, though, the picture could have been of any two acquaintances about to shake hands. Then there was one of our chests, perfectly properly a few feet apart. Finally, I saw the dome of a balding head similar to mine, bending to put a glass down on a tray, while the more shadowy figure of a slim and elegant woman (who might possibly be identified as Olivia Finch with the application of advanced forensic techniques) looked on in the background.
When I looked up from the last of the pictures, Bennett was staring at me.
Well?’ I asked, fighting to keep my voice steady.
‘Well,’ Bennett bellowed, ‘that’s you, isn’t it? That’s you and Finch at Fatty Gutbucket’s party, chatting away like old friends, isn’t it? Old friends who’ve just carried out the perfect crime: to stitch me up so you could take my job. That’s right, isn’t it? Somehow you managed to get her to make the whole thing up, hassle me, then smack me right under the nose of the world’s press. And bingo! No more Joseph Bennett. I should commend you on your excellent plan, West. But I think I’d rather smash the rest of your teeth out.’
Bennett sounded controlled as he said this, but I could see he was getting more and more agitated. He emptied the contents of a hip flask into his whisky glass and sank the lot in one effortless swig. I feared he would hit me despite the number of witnesses in the bar.
‘No, it wasn’t like that Joseph, I swear,’ I said, hoping I didn’t look as hot as I felt. ‘We were just talking. I was only at the party about an hour and I only spent a small part of that time chatting to Olivia Finch.’
‘My man tells me you were hardly away from her from the moment she came in to the moment you left. He says you even went to the loo with her. I suppose you were paying her and didn’t want anyone to see. So, how much did it cost to wreck my life, you stinking little worm?’
Backed into a corner, I had no option but to fight – the meerkat desperate to avoid being trampled under the stallion’s hooves. ‘Do you have any idea how much Olivia Finch earns in a year?’ I asked. ‘She makes $10 million a movie. Do you really think she’d get involved in some ridiculous plot for a few quid? This is crazy. I did not go into the toilet with her.’ (Liberated by the private eye’s incompetence, I risked an outright lie.) ‘I bumped into her when she was coming out and we chatted about how the film was doing. I didn’t cook up any plan with Olivia Finch. The whole idea’s absurd.’
Bennett looked at me for a long, long time, really looked at me. Stared at me and forced me to hold his gaze as he tried to unpick the locked entrance into my innermost secrets. I gave him my version of the look that Matthew always did when he was swearing blind he hadn’t drawn on the wall when he still had the smoking crayon in his hand. Then I raised my hands in something approaching a papal gesture and shook my head slowly from side to side. I chose my next words very carefully: ‘I swear to you, Joseph. I never planned any of this with Olivia Finch – on my children’s lives.’
I watched him closely as he assessed what I’d said. I was teetering on the edge of the abyss. If I failed, I would be lucky to get away with just a hell of a beating. At worst, I faced total ruination. Bennett looked at me as if he knew I was lying but couldn’t quite put his finger on it. After what seemed like an eternity, he picked up his glass and turned it upside down to let the last few drops drain into his mouth. Then he leant forward, scooped the remaining photographs off the table and put them back in the envelope. He went to put it back inside his jacket, but then let out a strangled, involuntary cry and ripped the whole package into a hundred tiny pieces and threw them down, like confetti, onto the sticky, threadbare carpet. ‘Oh fucking hell!’ he yelled, causing everyone to look round again. His eyes were sprinkled with tears of despair as he stood up, sending his chair somersaulting across the room. Without another word, he turned and walked out of the door. I hadn’t been acquitted, but at least the case had been adjourned due to insufficient evidence. For now.
Leaving my sandwich untouched, I followed him out into the car park. It was starting to rain. ‘I’ve lost everything, West,’ he said as he folded himself into his car. ‘My job. The house. My pension. The kids. Sandra. Everything. This car’s got to go back tomorrow. And there’s you, happy as Larry, doing my job, earning my money. I haven’t even done anything wrong. You know that and I honestly think Bill Davis and that little Welsh cunt Dai Wainwright know it too. I never laid a hand on Olivia Finch. I just provided a face for her to hit. What was it? Prearranged publicity for the film? We certainly made all the front pages, didn’t we?’ He was ranting now, his words slurred by the combination of anger and alcohol. ‘If I had actually done something wrong, I’d think “OK, fair cop” – but I haven’t. I didn’t even mean to hit you, you know. If I had, I promise you, you would never have got up again.’
‘I’m sorry, Joseph, I really am,’ I said, hoping Bennett would interpret this as a conversational platitude rather than an indication of guilt. ‘If there’s anything I can ever do for you, please call me. Here’s my new card with all my contact details on.’ He had one hand on the steering wheel, while the other held the key in the ignition as he prepared to leave, so I pushed the card into the breast pocket of his blazer.
Bennett looked down at the pocket, then back at me. His eyes were knotted in concentration and his mouth fixed, a thin line underscoring his patrician nose. It was as if the hourglass icon you see when a computer is processing something had been transposed onto his face, spinning slowly around, crossing and uncrossing his eyes. Three times he looked down at his pocket, then back up at me. The third time, his expression had chan
ged – his eyes opened wide in realisation as he slowly raised his head. The hourglass had changed back to an arrow: the processing completed. The riddle solved.
‘It was you, wasn’t it? Oh my God! It really was you.’
I started to repeat my often rehearsed denial of any involvement in any kind of a plot, but he talked straight through me.
‘I don’t believe it! You screwed Olivia Finch, then pretended to be me and gave her my card so she’d pester me, not you. And while my whole life gets flushed down the toilet, you calmly take my job and carry on playing happy families. Un-fucking-believable. I have no home, West. Because of you, I have no home. My wife’s kicked me out. My boys won’t speak to me. The captain of my golf club – who happens to be my ex-father-in-law – is having me blackballed. Askett Brown have fired me and I’m a laughing stock throughout the City. Every useful contact I had came from Sandra’s old man, so my chances of future employment are pretty well zero.
‘My own family are no bloody help because none of them has spoken to me since my father died. OK, so I didn’t go to his funeral. He was dead, for Christ’s sake! He wasn’t going to miss me, was he? It wasn’t cheap sending that wreath from Klosters, I can tell you, but for all the thanks I got I might as well not have bothered.
‘So I’m screwed and you’re sitting pretty – your secret safe as long as I’m taking all the blame. Very neat, West. I never thought you had it in you.’
He stared at me as if he was waiting for me to say something – to deny it all, perhaps. When I remained silent, unable to think of anything to say, he rambled on with the eerie calm of a lunatic wandering the streets, telling total strangers about Jesus.
‘Do you know what I’m going to do now, West?’ he asked, but I understood this to be even more rhetorical than his usual questions and kept quiet. My stomach flipped and knotted and I was glad I hadn’t eaten that greasy sandwich or I might well have thrown up. ‘I’m going to drive round to your house and I’m going to tell your lovely wife – what’s her name? – what you’ve done. Or should I let you tell her? What do you think? Would that be better, seeing as you know all the details? I’d love to know exactly what went on that night. How a little piece of shit like you got Olivia Finch into bed. Did you get her so drunk that she was powerless to resist your advances? Or drug her? Fair play, though, you must have given her a fair old seeing-to to make her react like she has.’ He was warming to his theme now, genuine enjoyment infiltrating his voice, all his hideous self-confidence returning.
‘Then, after she’s kicked you out of the house and locked the kids safely indoors to stop them saying goodbye – don’t worry, you’ll see them again at the custody hearing – I’ll call Bill Davis and tell him what you’ve done. I’ll ask if I can watch him fire you before he begs me to take my old job back. He owes me that at least. And then do you know what I’ll do?’ Again, he expected no reply and I obliged. ‘Then, when I’ve fucked up your marriage and lost you your job, I’m going to take you somewhere nice and quiet – just the two of us – and kick your fucking lying, conniving head in.’
Bennett smiled, like a catless Blofeld. ‘You’ve gone very quiet, Mr West. All out of answers?’
I had no doubt he would carry out each element of his plan. My life was over. Before I could even begin to beg for mercy, he turned the ignition key and the powerful engine roared into life. His right foot stamped on the accelerator and he screeched out of the car park, flinging loose stones into the air and forcing a couple of middle-aged ladies to take evasive action as they wheeled their trolleys towards the first tee.
The two ladies glowered as they walked past me, as if Bennett and his inconsiderate actions were my responsibility. Perhaps they had a point. I stood and watched the departing car, kicking up dust as it sped away, paralysed into inaction. There was a throbbing in my brain that felt like a whole battery farm of chickens coming home to roost. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. For a fleeting moment, the comforting thought that Bennett didn’t know where I lived lodged itself in my mind, but just as fleetingly it was gone: he had called round to pick Sandra up from Natasha’s book group several times over the years, and men like Bennett never forgot an address or a set of directions.
THE NORTH CIRCULAR ROAD, NORTH LONDON
I got into my car and sat for a while, contemplating my fate. I considered every possible angle before reaching the obvious conclusion: I was fucked. Bennett had a head-start on me and would be driving much quicker than I would ever dare around London’s crowded roads. Then it struck me – my one chance. Bennett might know where I lived, but he might not know the quickest route to get him there. If I turned off the North Circular Road and cut down through the back streets, I might still be able to get home before him. What I would do when I got there was still not clear, but at least that gave me a chance. I fired up the ignition and roared out of the car park like a latter-day Starsky or Hutch.
As I drove, I began to formulate a plan. I would ring Natasha and tell her to get the kids ready so we could all go out to lunch – somewhere with decent food but plenty for the kids to do. Once we were safely away from the house, I would tell her that Bennett had gone crazy and I feared for our safety. I’d persuade her to take Helen and Matthew to her mother’s for a few days while I dealt with the situation. This was starting to sound almost heroic – ‘a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do’ kind of stuff. It was starting to feel like a movie. And it could still have a happy ending.
I had been making good progress for a couple of miles and wasn’t far from the junction where I would turn off the main road to weave my way, London cabbie-like, through the intricate network of residential streets, when the traffic started to slow and then ground to a complete halt.
‘Bollocks!’ I yelled over the radio’s attempts to calm my soul with gentle Sunday tunes. I looked behind me to see if there was any way I could turn around and find a different route, but I was already hemmed in on all sides. It was possible, of course, that if I was caught in this then so was Bennett, but people like him didn’t get caught in traffic jams. His car probably turned into a helicopter to fly above the melee of ordinary folk. Or perhaps he had arranged to have the traffic stopped for him by one of his mates in the Masons to make sure he could get to my house as quickly as possible.
A traffic bulletin came on the radio and I turned up the volume to listen as it made its leisurely way down from the northernmost tip of Scotland to the part of the country where all the people actually lived. There was no mention of my hold-up – this was just normal London congestion, even on a Sunday. Not as newsworthy as a tractor driving slowly towards Pitlochry. I turned off the radio and tried to think.
Bennett had left a couple of minutes ahead of me and would have been driving faster to this point. If he had got through here before the traffic became impassable, then he would be arriving at my house any time now and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I rested my head on the steering wheel, inadvertently sounding my horn. The thickset, bald-headed man in the car in front of me made an obscene gesture into his rear-view mirror and for a moment I feared he might get out of his car and attempt to pull me out of mine. Actually, at that moment, being beaten to death by an irate motorist didn’t seem such a bad way to end my day.
Still not sure what I would say, I picked up my mobile and speed-dialled home. Natasha answered after three rings. Except that it wasn’t Natasha but a digitally remastered, electronic version of my wife’s voice telling me she wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t there. She’d already be on her way to her mother’s, having paused only to slice up all my suits with her dressmaking scissors and flush my treasured stamp collection down the toilet. Or she was there but was still listening to Bennett ruining my life – her life. Or perhaps he’d started to tell her his story, she’d tried to throw him out and he’d beaten her and the kids to death with one of his top of the range golf clubs.
I was starting to hyperventilate. I wound down my window to let some
fresh air into the car and into my lungs and was immediately deafened by the wail of a siren as a police car flew past, travelling the wrong way down the opposite carriageway. The noise receded and then stopped altogether, suggesting that the car itself had come to a halt not too far ahead. A few moments later, another, even louder siren signalled the arrival of an ambulance. The traffic was still at a complete standstill and people had started to get out of their cars to see what was going on. I stumbled out of my car and pulled my jacket around me against the insistent drizzle.
The flashing lights of the emergency vehicles were no more than two hundred yards ahead, competing for attention with the red, amber and green of the traffic lights that marked the junction. It looked like a macabre seventies disco. I overheard one van driver explaining to the man in the Range Rover in front of him that it looked as if ‘some twat had gone straight through the lights into the path of a bus’. As I walked a few yards further forward, his account was corroborated by the sight of a red double-decker leaning drunkenly against some badly damaged parked cars. Most of the windows in the front half of the bus – on both the upper and lower decks – were smashed and glass was strewn all around. A huddle of smartly dressed ladies, perhaps on their way home from church, stood nearby, shaking their heads or gently weeping. This wasn’t what they’d spent their morning praying for.
A few yards further on I saw the shattered remains of a midnight-blue sports car, littering the road like a child’s toy on Boxing Day. Police officers and paramedics were huddled around the wreckage, shielding its contents from the growing crowd as they worked out what had to be done. As I moved closer, drawn inexorably to the scene, I felt a sickness start in the pit of my stomach and then work its way down my legs until I could hardly propel myself forward. Somehow I knew, even before I saw the four interlocked rings on the grille, that the car was an Audi. Bennett’s Audi.
