by Ted Lewis
Now, from this new elevation, you would be able to glimpse, beneath the soaring eastern light, the sea, made narrow by the preceding breadth of flatness of gorse and beach. And having gained the room’s higher level, at the room’s far end, you would be faced by brickwork, wall to wall, ceiling to floor and, in this wall, a small open fireplace, aluminium trimmed. The only other break in this wall’s deliberate monotony is a four-foot-by-three-foot painting by Allan Jones and a narrow cupboard door beyond which is a trolley that supports two movie projectors, a sixteen-millimetre and an eight-millimetre. Ranged close to this wall, almost huddled around the fireplace in deference to the impression of coldness caused by the room’s lengthy perspectives, is most of the room’s limited furniture, low and comfortable. The wall on the right of the room is covered by a shelving unit, which extends from the brick wall to the edge of the drop down into the room’s lower level. Apart from a couple of hundred books which, despite the central heating, provide the room’s only impression of concentrated warmth, this shelving also supports the drinks supply, the TV and the stereo unit with all its records and tapes. Just in front of this shelving unit is a jet-black grand piano parked almost at the brink of the drop into the lower level and directly beneath the room’s raised level is the bungalow’s garage, at present housing an unostentatious Marina.
On the brick wall, close to where it converges with the shelving unit, is a small panel of switches, one of which operates the movie screen that slides down from the ceiling if you want it to.
At the moment, I don’t want it to.
I climb the open-tread stairs and go over to where the drinks are and pour myself a scotch and look at Jean’s photograph, which I’d forced myself to take from my briefcase and place on the piano a couple of days before.
Up until now, I’ve avoided looking at it, just as I’d put off taking it out of the briefcase.
The photograph is one I’d taken a few years ago, on our honeymoon, the first time she’d seen the villa in Minorca. She’d been standing by the edge of the pool naked, poised for diving in, and I’d called her name, causing her to turn, but she had already too much momentum from the intended dive and I’d snapped the shutter just as she was going into the point of no return between the edge of the pool and the water. Her laugh is frozen in the warmth of the Spanish sunlight.
I take a drink of my scotch and then stop looking at the picture and walk over to the window and look at sunshine of a different kind as the March wind blusters across the broadness of the sky and the sea beneath.
THE SMOKE
IN THE LIFT UP to the Penthouse, Jean was quiet and tense. She held on to me as if I provided some kind of stabilising quality, as though I was supporting her against some form of vertigo. Although there was no longer any need to discuss what Arthur had told us, the course of action cut and dried and needing only implementation, the silence was not for lack of subject matter; in fact just the opposite. Perhaps the expression of our mutual thoughts could not be achieved fully by mere conversation.
The lift stopped, the doors slid softly apart and we stepped out on to the private landing. Below, very faintly, the sounds of the club murmured upwards like the sound of very well-oiled, precision-engineered machinery. Jean still clung on to my arm as we crossed the landing.
Gerry Hatch rose from the landing’s only piece of furniture, a sand-coloured hide armchair. He left the copy of The Ring behind him on the dimpled seat.
“Mr. Fowler,” he said. “Mrs. Fowler.”
He took out his own set of keys and unlocked the double doors that opened directly on to the main room of the Penthouse. He closed them behind us and went back to wait for Ernie Hildreth, the night shift.
I stood just inside the doorway and took off my overcoat. Jean had halted at the top of the steps that led down into the sunken central area of the room, her coat still draped round her shoulders, a negative silhouette against the blackness of the picture window that composed the entire wall opposite her, a window that always seemed a carpark’s length away. Lights decorated the rain-speckled glass like paint splashes on an abstract. I joined her at the top of the steps and draped my overcoat over the retaining rail. On the low glass table in the centre of the sunken area, Harold had left salad and a choice of rare beef or chicken, and also champagne.
“You all right?” I asked.
Jean didn’t answer. Instead she walked down the steps and sat down in the deepness of one of the long hide sofas that were fitted flush to the area’s sides. She sat crouched forward a little as if she had stomach ache, or was cold. The coat was still draped round her shoulders and she stared at the food on the table in front of her.
I walked down the steps and took the champagne from the bucket, flipped the cork and poured some of it into the glasses.
“Your very good health,” I said to her.
No response.
“Or should I say to our continuing good health, in view of information received?”
Instead of picking up her glass and drinking, Jean tore one of the legs off the chicken, studying it for a moment before beginning to eat.
I drank my champagne and poured some more. Then I walked over to the phone and lifted the receiver.
“What are you doing?” Jean said.
“Calling Collins. Why?”
“Do it later.”
“You what?”
Jean put the chicken leg down on the table, stood up and walked over to me. Her coat was still round her shoulders and her lips shone with grease from the chicken. She put her hand between my legs.
“Now,” she said.
“I don’t want to miss him.”
Her grip tightened on me.
“No. Do it to me now.”
She was still chewing and a sliver of chicken spilled from the corner of her mouth but neither stopped her from kissing me and putting her arms round my neck and bending her legs so that her dead weight began to overbalance me and tug me down to the floor. I fell on top of her and her legs closed tightly together and then began to slither against me frantically in expectant ecstasy. Her hands almost ripped my zip apart.
“Do it now,” she said. “For Christ’s sake.”
THE SEA
I COME TO THE end of the lane that leads through the gorse to the sand dunes. Then the lane becomes a concrete path that the Ministry of Defence has laid to give access between the dunes to the beach beyond. I automatically read again the sign that warns that if the red flag is flying so is the RAF, strafing the shells of old tanks and army lorries that are dotted around on the beach’s vastness. Today the flag is not being flown.
I walk between the dunes, over the slight hillock made by the concrete path, then I descend the mild gradient and now the dunes are behind me and beyond there is only the sea and the beach.
About half a mile to my left one of the rocket-blasted tanks squats like a fly on the edge of a table. I begin to walk across the flat sand towards it. Here there are no ripples in the sand left by the sea’s retreat; they don’t even begin until a couple of hundred yards from where I am, approximately where the carcass of an old transporter stands, the only object to give scale against the low line made by the joining of the sea and the sky.
As I walk towards the tank, I walk alongside the undisturbed footprints of my journey of the previous day, and the day before that, and as I walk the thoughts I have are the ones that also remain from the previous journeys, and will continue to haunt me.
One of my interests was office equipment. I’d got four shops, and a couple of warehouses. Not one inch of the business smelt. Not one filing cabinet, not one fifty-pence piece. If anybody working in that particular branch of the business had walked in carrying a box of bent carbon paper, he’d have been out on his arse and his cards slung out into the street after him one and a half seconds later. I had two or three businesses like that one.
It was in the London Bridge branch I met Jean. She was one of the workers. Harris was leaving. Paul Edmonds was in charge of the overall
business and he promoted Jean and not only because her promotion was strictly in order. It didn’t do him any good though because in due course I met Jean and after that he walked around with pennies in his eyes so nobody’d tell me he’d even looked at her.
Of course, it’s not like they’d have you believe in the programmes on the box. You don’t go down to the nearest watering hole after you’ve made your first million and tell the first clippie you set eyes on how you got it. Nor do you talk before you make it … otherwise you don’t. Witness all those sad stories you read about in the newspapers where they were dead unlucky not to hang on to their wages for more than five minutes between stretches.
When I met her, Jean was living in Orpington. She had a house there. The divorce was under way and the house was to be part of the settlement. At the time he was in California wearing flowered shirts and rediscovering his misspent youth in singles bars. He’d said he wanted to be free. He’d played the field before, of course, but that wasn’t the same as freedom. They’d married too young, he’d said. When I met her, when we got to talking that way, she told me that she’d never get over him, not ever. They’d loved each other so much it hadn’t seemed possible it could have happened, she told me.
Well, that was all right. I wasn’t in any particular hurry. She was thirty-three, and time was on my side, not hers. I took her out, the way bosses take out their employees, not giving her the Kilburn Rush. Other more highly paid employees of mine could satisfy my transitory urges, and on office time. As it happened it was three months before I discovered her hair was not its natural colour, and it was two years before she discovered who I was. That was a week before we got married and by that time it didn’t matter any more. There had been other difficulties, though.
THE SMOKE
COLLINS CAME ROUND A couple of hours later and he didn’t like it. But how could he do the other thing?
He sat down on the sofa, his fat backside causing ripples of contained displacement on the hide’s surface. I poured him some of the champagne that was left, then I sat down on the sofa opposite and looked at him. He was as neat and well dressed as ever.
We both drank.
“How’s Jean?” Collins asked.
“Fuck that,” I replied.
Collins drank some more champagne.
“Why didn’t you get in touch before?” I said. “Before all that shit started going down at the station?”
“It was difficult. There was nothing I could do without drawing attention to our relationship.”
“Don’t do a number on me, Dennis. Everybody down there knows what our relationship is. That’s what you’re there for.”
“That’s the point. After Arthur spoke to Farlow they just stood around waiting to see what I’d do. Collar Terry or phone you. They were running a book on it. Whatever they know, I had to collar Terry so that justice was seen to be done. Otherwise it would have given Farlow the opportunity to talk to the Commissioner.”
I had a few thoughts about Farlow.
“Ever thought about squaring Farlow with us?”
Collins shook his head.
“I don’t trust him.”
“We could offer him more than the Shepherdsons do.”
“He wouldn’t. It’s a matter of principle. Besides …”
“Besides?”
“If he worked for you, either you or him or the both of you might conclude that I was superfluous.”
“How could I ever arrive at that conclusion, Dennis? If I ever gave you to the papers you wouldn’t leave me out of your memoirs just for old times’ sake.”
I poured some more champagne.
“When was Farlow expecting Arthur to write it all down and have it Morocco-bound?”
“I don’t know. The good thing for us was that they had me fetch Terry in before he got the statements from Arthur and the other two. He was so excited he came before he got his trousers off.”
I drank some champagne.
“How is Arthur?” said Collins.
“Well, there didn’t seem any point in hanging about.”
“And the other two?”
I looked at my watch.
“They should have gone missing about now.”
“Mickey?”
I nodded.
“That’s all right, then.”
He took a sip of his champagne and eyed the food.
“Well,” he said, “as you plucked me away from mine, what about some of yours?”
“Dig in.”
Collins picked up my unused plate and began to unload some of the beef on to it.
“Even so, Dennis,” I said. “I’m still not happy about the time element.”
“I told you,” he said, excavating some stuff from the salad bowl, “there wasn’t an awful lot I could do.”
THE SEA
THE TANK, LIKE IN dreams, doesn’t seem to get any closer. As the morning has lengthened the wind has dropped, its absence somehow seeming to lengthen the perspectives.
Consider a man like me and love. A butcher loves. He slits an animal’s throat and dismembers it and washes the blood from his skin and goes home and goes to bed with his wife and makes her cry out in passion. The man who made it necessary to rebuild Hiroshima loved and was loved back, and I don’t necessarily mean the pilot or the man who activated the bomb doors. Whoever left the bomb at the Abercorn rooms would comfort his child if it came into the house with a grazed knee. Everybody loves. Everybody considers things, considers themselves. And I considered why it came to be that Jean should be the one, as opposed to anyone else. And like everyone else, I could compile a list of things that added up to my obsession, and as with everyone else, it just remained a list; the final total defied the simple process of addition.
Her husband couldn’t have timed his return from California any better. A couple of days after we’d made love for the first time. For a week I didn’t see her; I waited for her to get in touch with me. When she did, she suggested we have lunch together; it was going to be one of those meetings.
We met in Al Caninos. For some reason, it was a place she liked.
She told me that everything was going to work out. What I had to understand was that he’d had to do what he’d done. It was wrong and he’d regretted it almost as soon as he’d gone. Now he was back and he’d been to see his old firm. They could still use salesmen of his calibre. There was no longer any need to progress with the divorce. There would be no more playing around, no recurrence of the freedom urge; home was now where his heart would be.
“Well,” I said, “what can I say? That’s the way things go. There’s nothing I can do. Other than to wish you all you wish yourself.” She thanked me for being so understanding. Few men would have the grace to be like that, she said.
THE SMOKE
MICKEY DIDN’T COME IN to see me before ten o’clock. He never did. Not even in a situation like this, when he had yet to report the success or otherwise of locating Wally Carpenter and Michael Butcher and getting rid of their bodies along with the one that used to belong to Arthur Philips. There was no need for Mickey to phone me in the middle of the night. That’s how much I trusted him, and he knew it. A matter of delegation.
By the time he’d arrived both Jean and myself had bathed and breakfasted and she had gone through into the office to do a weekly check on various returns. I was sitting at the Swedish glass-topped desk with my back to the window, drinking coffee and reading the Express’s report on the match between QPR and Spurs. There wasn’t a great deal of doubt about it; Spurs were going to go down, whichever way you looked at it.
During breakfast Jean and I hadn’t spoken much. The topics had been restricted to pass the toast and more coffee. But there would be time to talk after the day’s business had been attended to.
“Well, Mickey?” I asked.
“Clockwork,” he said, pouring coffee into the extra cup I’d made ready for him.
He drank and sat down on the opposite side of the window.
/> “Although,” he said, “it was lucky for us it all went down so quickly.”
“That’s what Collins said,” I said.
“They were all arse about front. The arrangements came second. Beyond me, really.”
“Where were they?”
“At what Carpenter used to laughingly call his pied-à-terre in Brighton. I really believe he’d convinced himself there was only him knew about it.”
“How did it go?” I asked, out of interest.
“I phoned him up. An anonymous well-wisher. Then I waited in Wally’s motor. They came out on rollerskates. Then I sat up and told Wally where to drive to. After that I drove back to town and put the bodies with Arthur’s. When I’d done that I drove the motor round to Cliff Wray’s.”
That meant that the car would have been done over from plates to bodywork and by now it would be nice and shiny and on sale on the forecourt of a particular Ealing garage. I didn’t insult Mickey by asking him whether the bodies would also be recoverable.
“Thanks, Mickey.”
Mickey just made a vague gesture with his hand, causing his identity bracelet to jingle slightly. If you ever got close enough to read it, all that was inscribed on the metal was the single word, KISMET. It wasn’t there just because he’d enjoyed the movie.
He clocked the Express’s back page and swivelled the paper round on the glass surface so he could read the result of the match.
“Jesus!” he said.
“Well, there you go. You could see it coming last season.”
“They should never have elbowed Billy Nick. He was a governor.”
“Well …”
Mickey studied the paper a little longer, then swivelled it back so that the print was again readable from my position. Then, for a little while, the sky beyond the window behind me appeared to occupy his attention.
“What is it?” I asked him.
He focused his eyes on the edge of the desk, and began to run his thumbs along it.
“I was thinking,” he said.
