“I shouldn’t think he’ll quite be that,” Patricia said.
“The centre of it, then. The person everybody’s going to want to come back.” Mostly to her son she said “I know the one that frightened me the most—when he meets the girl out walking in the country on a day like this and gives her the water with all the ecstasy in it. How he watches her dance herself to death, that’s horrible enough, but someone giving you a drug like that when you don’t know, that’s worse.”
“Could that be what trips him up?” Patricia suggested. “The drugs could be traced back to him.”
“No they couldn’t. He was out walking like she said and he found them where someone had hidden them, and right then he put them in the water in the bottle. They weren’t ever his.”
“How about his prints on the bottle?”
“He got it back from her after she drank all the water while she was getting hot from jigging about. He didn’t throw it away there, he took it home and put it in the dustbin because he knew nobody would think of looking there.”
“That isn’t in the story,” Kathy said.
“So I didn’t write it down. So who cares? I know what happened. I don’t have to tell everything.”
“No need to take it personally. Don’t let it put you off your sweet,” Kathy urged, and when he only glowered at his plate “Anyway, which is your favourite story?”
“I don’t want any of them published. I’m writing something new.”
“Will there be time for that, Patricia?”
“Not very much. I’ll find out, but I shouldn’t think more than a week.”
“How long are you expecting to take, Dudley? Wouldn’t you be better letting them have one of the others and then they can use the new one another time?”
He shoved his chair backwards and sprang to his feet. “I’m not doing that. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to write. Longer if you go on about it,” he shouted from the hall and stamped upstairs.
“Excuse him, Patricia. That must be what artists are meant to be like,” Kathy said, but didn’t look at her until the contents of his untouched dessert plate were binned. “Would you like a coffee?”
“I’m fine, thanks,” Patricia said, meaning rather that she felt hot and edgy enough. “Let me help you wash up.”
“Why, you’re already like one of the family, but you mustn’t waste any more of your visit on me. Have you seen our hill?”
“I did as I came along.”
“You haven’t been up on it.” When Patricia had to agree, Kathy called “Dudley, I know you can hear us. You didn’t shut your door. Won’t you take your guest for a walk on the hill?”
As Patricia turned to face him he descended considerably fewer stairs than he’d made the sound of climbing. “Might help,” he muttered.
“Thanks for dinner, Kathy. I enjoyed it.”
“I’m sure it can’t be what you’re used to, but I’m just a simple person in some ways.”
Kathy hurried to lug the front door wide for them. The sun had gone to ground behind the ridge, and the mass of greenery across the road was steeped in twilight. As Patricia followed Dudley up a narrow path between trees and tall weeds she heard the door shut with a discreet thud. She ducked under the lowest branches of a tree and felt as if the stealthy gloom was taking hold of her, especially since Dudley had halted, blocking her way. “What’s that?” he whispered.
In a moment she heard a rustle vanishing into the undergrowth. Perhaps he wasn’t attempting to play on her nerves, but she said “What would you like it to be?”
“I’m asking a question for once.”
“Mr Killogram’s victims coming back to find him.”
Darkness seemed to gather in his eyes. “They don’t do that,” he said and turned his back as though grinding an object beneath his heel.
“He must think about what he’s done sometimes though, mustn’t he? He ought to in the film.”
“Why must he?”
“Unless he’s got absolutely no imagination.”
“He’s got plenty.”
“Then oughtn’t he to show it?”
“Oh, he will.”
Did he really think a stare like that could frighten her? Identifying with one’s character was all very well, but he was starting to look capable of taking it rather too far. “Carry on,” she said and walked at him until he couldn’t avoid moving.
In less than a minute they emerged into a stony open space hemmed in by trees that fluttered and chattered with magpies under a blue sky turning pale. “I hope you aren’t going to mind,” Patricia said. “I’ve been talking to a couple of people about you.”
She had to raise her voice to compete with the jagged racket, and so it was hardly surprising that he glanced about to check there was nobody to overhear. “Who?” he said so loud that the magpies clattered into the sky.
“Mr Fender from your old school.”
“Why would I mind him? Kathy used to say he was jealous because I knew more about writing than he did.” Dudley tramped to the start of a path that led to the disused observatory above them on the ridge and then swung to confront her. “What did you tell him about me?”
“Do let’s keep moving if we’re going to walk.” Once Dudley began to climb towards the squat blind one-eyed tower beside the dome she said “He did most of the talking. Didn’t he object to your story because it was based on an actual case?”
“So what if it was? Writers have to start somewhere.”
The noise like bones snapping came from a bush against which he had abruptly pressed himself. “You go ahead,” he urged, and didn’t speak again until he was behind her. “What else did he say about me?”
“That’s pretty well it. The interview wasn’t terribly productive.”
“Then you should have stayed away from him like you knew I wanted.” All at once Dudley’s voice was lower but felt closer. “Did you tell him about her?”
“You mean the girl at Moorfields.”
“Her, yes. The one that’s causing all the trouble. Angela whatever her name was. I’ll bet he had plenty to say about her.”
“Actually, he didn’t. Nor did I.”
“Do I believe that?”
She wasn’t sure if she was meant to hear that or even if it was addressed to her. She didn’t acknowledge it until she had stepped onto the deserted ridge, and then she turned to look down at him. “You do if you have any sense,” she said without retreating, though his tight grin was only inches from her breasts. “I hadn’t heard about her when I went to see him.”
“I’ve got plenty of sense. There’s quite a few people who’ve found out how much. Maybe you ought to meet them.”
Patricia was amused by the threatening manner he seemed unable to relinquish, but she stopped short of laughing. “By all means tell me anyone else you want me to interview,” she said. “I had lunch with Eamonn Moore.”
“How’d you manage to get in touch with him? I invited him to my story reading but he never came.”
“He asked me to pass on his apologies. He had a family occasion. He’s a walking picture galley of his little daughters.”
“I should have found out where he lives and not sent his invitation to the office. I’ll bet he told his boss about it and they put him off.”
“Why would they do that?”
“They won’t like imagination where he works any more than where I do. You know why, don’t you? Because it makes them feel inferior. It should.”
Though Patricia merely lifted an eyebrow, this was enough to provoke him. “Who are you going to believe, Eamonn or me?”
“Whoever’s telling the truth.” She wasn’t even certain what his question was supposed to refer to, but it enabled her to add “I wouldn’t mind knowing which of you did about one thing.”
“Me,” Dudley said and stared at her as if he’d resolved to force any disagreement too deep into her brain to be grasped. “What?”
“You probably won’t even
remember it. It was just a nasty anecdote about a dog.”
His gaze retreated inwards, apparently in search of an expression. “What did he tell you?”
“That you gave him nightmares with it.”
The left side of Dudley’s mouth tried on a smirk. “I expect that’s true.”
“The story wasn’t, though, was it?”
“Why shouldn’t it be?”
“You don’t want me to think you never make up stories.”
His mouth worked without settling on which half of its expression it ought to extend. “Why not that one? Too real for you?”
“No, I just think you were being like little boys are. If you’ll forgive me, you’re doing it now.”
“I never was. You could have asked Kathy.” He crossed the ridge to a gap in the low wall alongside the observatory. “This is the best bit. Let’s go down here,” he said.
Patricia ventured close enough to distinguish through the canopy of foliage a series of worn steps descending through the twilit woods. “Actually, I think I should be heading for the train.”
“We can go this way.”
“I’ll stay up here, I think. No need to walk me to the station. Thank Kathy again for me, and thank you for an interesting evening.”
Might he suspect her of being ironic? When she glanced back to catch how he looked, he’d advanced several yards but was standing still. “I used to play that game when I was little,” she let him know. “Shouldn’t you be going home to write?”
“I’m thinking about it right now.”
“Then I’ll stop interrupting you,” Patricia said and turned away from his unblinking gaze. She didn’t look behind her until she’d walked at least a hundred yards along the wide uneven ridge. There was no sign of him, nor indeed of anybody all the way to the opposite end, where an obsolete windmill guarded a bridge forty feet above a road. A wiry hound as grey as the name of its breed was tugging a woman across the bridge. “Good evening,” she panted at Patricia.
“It is.”
Perhaps the woman was dissatisfied with the answer. “Good evening,” she said more loudly as she reached the mill.
Patricia peered at her before stepping onto the bridge. Nobody else was visible, but wasn’t the woman a little too distant to have been addressing her? The bulk of the windmill, against which the greyhound was lifting an elegant leg, was enough to conceal half a dozen people, but no shadow betrayed that anyone was hiding. Perhaps the twilight was too dim to cast a shadow. For a moment Patricia was tempted to seek company, except that she didn’t fancy discovering how else the woman might behave if in fact she had been talking to herself. Instead she crossed the bridge, staying clear of both sets of railings, which struck her as rather too flimsy and low, and hurried downhill.
It was clear that she’d chosen the long way to the station. The weathered path of slippery plates of rock led to a pinewood in which she kept hearing twigs snap and pine cones crunch beneath the tread of an otherwise silent walker somewhere close. When she emerged into a field of rank grass bordered by a dense stretch of pines she was hoping the other might stray into view, but the noises stayed among the trees. Beyond the field a rubbly track brought her to a section of the Smiths’ road alongside an abandoned churchyard. This struck her as such a cliché that as she marched past it and down a side road she grew furious with herself for even noticing the clinks of stone or glass or both that seemed to pace her under cover of the high wall.
Behind the graveyard a broad road sloped down towards the station. There was still a main road to be followed to a five-way junction surrounding a church. By the time she took the route that led past a chain-link cage jangling with football to the station she’d had more than enough of the heat that her nerves and the speed they’d urged on her had stoked up. At least her train was almost due. Alone on the platform, she calmed her breath and sighed aloud, and then she had nothing to distract her from the station entrance that yawned at her back. Nobody could have crept so close that she wouldn’t have heard them, and yet as the train drew into the station she couldn’t help retreating a step. She stalked in a fury to the nearest doors and glared through the windows as she made for a seat with its back to the wall. Of course she hadn’t glimpsed anyone dodging out of sight beyond the exit to the street, but what if she had? The doors shut and the train set off, and she deliberately looked away from the platform. “End of story,” she said.
SIXTEEN
When the dawn made the tips of the highest branches on the hillside flare like matches, Dudley lurched out of bed. The edge of the quilt captured his feet, and as a toenail scraped the slippery fabric he almost fell across the chair in front of his desk. He might have screamed at the hindrance if that wouldn’t have been likely to waken his mother. He kicked the quilt away so hard that the nail on his big toe twinged, and then he switched on the computer. He had to write. It was all the more urgent now that he’d found he couldn’t produce a new story for the magazine until he had dislodged Shell Garridge from his head.
How much more was going to be her fault? If she hadn’t stolen his place in the magazine his story would have been published by now, before anybody could prevent it. She was to blame for the night he’d just had, and so was Patricia Martingale. Not only had she added to the pressure in his brain, she had also made him waste more of the evening by tracking her all the way to the station from the hill. Sometimes simply tracking and imagining what could happen was enough, but this had left him so frustrated that once he’d watched the train bear her out of reach, he had dashed home to try and write, only to be waylaid by his mother. Did he think Patricia had enjoyed herself? Would he like to invite her again? She was a nice intelligent girl, wasn’t she? Had they discovered anything in common besides the magazine? At last, having muttered noncommittally in response to these questions and several more, he’d escaped to his room, where he’d found that the interrogation had robbed him of the impulse to write. He’d watched a disc of Vincent’s films in the hope that they might revive his genius, whether by making him eager to contribute to the collaboration or merely helping him relax. He’d felt less than revived by the documentary about Lez and the Keks, a mop-headed female Beatles tribute band, and the award-winning short film in which a young black prostitute had dreams or perhaps more than dreams of acting as a costumed vigilante. At least the latter had left him impatient to encourage Vincent to film a more realistic story—one of Dudley’s—but that had brought him nothing but a brittle headache. He couldn’t think of a single tale that didn’t involve Shell.
He’d thrown himself on the bed at last and dragged the quilt over him, only to continue straining his brain. Whenever sleep succeeded in closing over him, his mind clawed its way back to the surface. He didn’t know how often he’d returned to an idea before he had accepted that it was the solitary answer: if he couldn’t write for publication as long as Shell was wedged in his brain, he would have to write about her first. Nobody could ever read the story if he didn’t print it out; perhaps he wouldn’t even keep it once it was finished. The computer awoke as sunlight inched like syrup down the trees, and he tried to blink grittiness out of his eyes while he waited to start typing.
“Murdered by the Mersey”, “Mumbling by the Mersey”, “Mumbling in the Mersey” . . . “Put Down for Good”. Each title brought more of a grin to his lips, and his choice of a name for her stretched them so wide that they stung almost as much as his eyes.
“You’d think a pack of men was weeing out there,” Mish shouted, peering at the rain that slashed at the pub window. “They can’t even do that proper, can they, girls? Have to do it standing up like the dogs they all are. Like they can’t bear to sit down for a moment because they’re too anxious to get some more lager in them or go and look at some porn or kick a ball about or whatever else is the poor little pathetic best they can do. Weeing’s all they’d better use their peepees for when they’re anywhere near us. And even that’s an insult. Next time any of us find a man weein
g on a wall I reckon we should chop their peepees off.”
She was still shouting at the window. She hoped anybody outside in the storm could hear her and the women laughing. She had a gulp of her pint of lager, because women were allowed to drink pints now and it wasn’t the same as when a man did, and
As Dudley’s finger loitered on the final key, the word extended itself to the tune of half a dozen consonants before he snatched his hand away. His mother had come out of her bedroom. Of course she knew not to invade his room without permission, but if she heard him typing she might ask to see, and he could do without the distraction of having to respond. He didn’t realise that her very presence upstairs was distracting until he heard the noises she started to make in the bathroom. Perhaps the dialogue he’d put in Mish’s mouth had left him unduly sensitive, but he had to bung his ears with his fingers to ward off the sounds and the images they threatened to conjure up. He barely heard Kathy reopen the bathroom door, and then he had to keep uselessly still while she plodded down stair after stair. Once he heard her carpeted footsteps grow flatter on the kitchen linoleum he swept away the proliferating letters and did his best to type more quietly as well as faster.
shouted, “Any men listening? You’d better keep your hands over your peepees if you are. Not you behind the bar, you’re safe because you’re our slave for tonight. Just do everything we tell you and you’ll leave in one piece. Any other men, this is Mish Mash talking to you, specially if you’re hiding outside. Come in and face us if you dare. It’ll be you that ends up weeing yourself.”
Some of the women looked puzzled by now. Maybe they thought she’d had too much to drink, even if she was a woman. “Keep on laughing. It’s still funny,” she snarled at them and started to shout again. “There’s a man you’d all hate even more than the rest of them if you read his stories. Don’t worry, I’ve got them stopped so nobody can ever read them. Only I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s hanging round outside because I did. If he is I hope he drowns out there. I expect he feels like someone’s weeeeee
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