GBH

by Ted Lewis

  The figure is familiar. It begins, slowly, to raise the shotgun it’s carrying, taking hold in both hands, pointing the shotgun towards me.

  The figure is one I know very well.

  It’s Ray Warren.

  I hurl myself across the face of the garage and I’m rounding the corner of the house as the first blast shatters into the brickwork.

  “Take it easy,” I hear James call out. “Take your time. Don’t make a pig’s ear of it.”

  I run down the side of the house and turn the other corner and take off through the trees for the gorse, in the direction of the beach.

  Once I’m out of the trees and into the gorse all I can do is to keep on running. I can hear them, crashing through the gorse behind me, not firing until they’ve got a target they’re certain of hitting.

  Ray Warren. I can’t believe it. Ray’s dead. Mickey topped him. Mickey topped Ray. And James. I—

  A shotgun booms out behind me. One of them has tried a shot. I throw myself down into the gorse and roll over and over and then I reach the beginning of the sand dunes. Just one small dune and I’ll be out of sight.

  I scramble up the small hillock and roll over the top.

  Another blast screams above my head. I get to my feet and run along the depression of the interlocking dunes until I reach the track that leads on to the beach.

  I turn on to the track and suddenly, beside me, as if she’s been waiting for me round the corner of one of the dunes, there’s Lesley, running alongside me.

  “Don’t stop,” she says. “Hurry. You’ll be safe with me.”

  She takes my hand, still running, towards the gap that opens on to the broad beach.

  “Hurry,” she says, “it’s getting light.”

  Now we’re on the beach, running towards the tank, a just-discernible blot against the early-morning blueness of the sea and the sky.

  “Hurry,” she says, “you’ve got to hide. You know where to hide, don’t you? You’ll be safe there.”

  The tank is getting closer.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll help you. You’ve got to hide first.”

  We reach the tank.

  “Quickly,” she says. “Inside. You’ll be safe inside.”

  I clamber into the turret; she follows me down. There’s just room for the two of us.

  Silence.

  I look at her.

  She smiles at me, knees up against her chest.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “I won’t leave you. Not now.”

  Outside, on the beach, there are sounds.

  I look through the observation slit.

  I can only see one of them.

  I squeeze the Browning through the gap and fire but I’m a mile wide. The figure runs out of sight, to my blind side.

  All I can do is to listen to them discussing what they’re going to do. I can’t hear the words, just the voices, soft, thoughtful.

  Then, when they’ve come to a decision, I can hear some of the words.

  “Right,” Ray’s voice says. “I’ll wait here. If he sticks his nut out I’ll take it off for him. But don’t be long. It’ll soon be daylight.”

  I look through the slit again. The other one is running back down the beach.

  I loose off another shot but I can’t get a proper aim.

  “Leave it out, George,” Ray calls. “That won’t get you anywhere.”

  I look at Lesley.

  But she’s not there any more.

  “Lesley!” I scream. “Don’t leave me!”

  Silence.

  I look up at the sky through the turret top.

  “Lesley!”

  I stick my head through the gap. All I can see is Ray Warren, thirty feet away, levelling his shotgun.

  I hit the bottom of the tank as the blast slams the turret with a sound of thunder.

  Then there is another sound, a small scrambling. Lesley reappears through the hole in the turret, squats down opposite me. She smiles.

  I stare at her.

  “Ssh,” she says. “It won’t be long now.”

  I open my mouth.

  “Don’t,” she says. “I won’t leave you.”

  The sound of a car at the gap that opens on to the beach. I look through the observation slit again.

  Headlights made golden by the deep blue of dawn.

  A door slams.

  The other man comes running back along the beach.

  Carrying something. Something flat, rectangular.

  As the figure gets closer, the flat rectangular shape makes a swishing swilling sound.

  As if there’s liquid inside it.

  “Hurry up,” Ray calls to the running figure.

  I look at Lesley.

  She’s still there.

  Still smiling.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “You’ll be all right with me.”

  She stretches out a hand and touches me on my wrist.

  “Stay,” she says. “You’ll be safe here. Honestly.”

  There’s somebody on the roof of the tank. Crawling. Something clanks against the blackened iron. Metal against metal. Something swills.

  Something is unscrewed, slowly.

  I look at Lesley.

  She smiles at me.

  “Don’t go,” she says. “Not now.”

  She touches my wrist again.

  “Don’t leave me now,” she says.

  Suddenly, drifting in from outside, there is the smell of petrol.

  Then it’s filling the inside of the tank, raining down on our heads in its liquid form, splashing all over us.

  I scream.

  Lesley smiles.

  I look up at the turret. There is a great blossoming whooshing noise and beyond the turret lid the dawn blue sky turns orange, and then the inside of the tank turns the same colour and I can’t stop screaming; can’t stop looking at Lesley, a mirror image to myself, as her skin and her flesh burn brightly away, burning off her, beginning here and there to reveal the bone underneath. The dark glasses melt and fuse into her eyeless sockets and the last of her flesh falls away from her as she smiles her final smile at me.

  THE SMOKE

  STANDING IN FRONT OF the plate-glass window of the Penthouse, James raised his glass and said, “To your continuing good health.”

  “Cheers,” Ray said. “Here’s luck.”

  They both drank.

  James smiled to himself.

  Luck was right. A lot had depended on luck, on chance. But that was the way it had to be; informal, flexible. So as not to have tipped their hand. It had been a hand played with a lot of wild cards, of necessity. And playing them against Fowler, the risks had been extremely high.

  But it had worked.

  Not entirely as expected, but it had worked.

  It had had to work. Fowler had had to be stopped; the Force could wear so much, but the torturings and the killings had been in danger of becoming too public. Justice would have to be seen to be done. And if that had happened, the Force itself would have come out of it extremely badly.

  So, of course, James thought, would his good self.

  The trouble was, his association with Fowler’s organisation had been extremely valuable. Too valuable to terminate.

  So. The association with Fowler had to be terminated. But not with his organisation.

  Terminate Fowler. Not his organisation.

  Otherwise the torturings and the killings would have continued and Fowler would have gone down and taken James with him. Fowler had enough on file to see to that. And Collins, and perhaps Farlow, if the Shepherdsons were involved.

  Parsons had been particularly concerned about that. Parsons hadn’t wanted any more Law in the headlines.

  James smiled again.

  “What’s tickling you?” Ray said. “Got a feather in your Y-fronts?”

  James shook his head and sat down at the glass-topped desk.

  “I was just thinking about Parsons,” James said.

  “Yeah,” Ray s
aid. “How about him?”

  “Amazing, really,” James said. “When he first approached me, I’d expected dark warnings concerning the wages of sin.”

  “Yeah,” Ray said, “instead of just wages.”

  “Well, now, be fair,” James said. “His seat on the board isn’t purely due to that particular kind of self-interest. After all, he’s extremely well placed to make sure there isn’t the kind of surface activity that would lead to the Force being brought into any further disrepute. He was very concerned about that.”

  “Like Collins and Farlow were concerned,” Ray said.

  “For totally different reasons,” James said. “Be fair.”

  “The Filth’s the Filth,” Ray said.

  James shrugged.

  “They all helped, in their own ways. All three of them.”

  Which, to an extent, was true. But without Parsons, of course, the other two could never have been rowed in.

  Together, he and Parsons had reached an agreement.

  The agreement being, irrespective of method, remove the Fowlers. Continue the running of the business, so that its dissolution wouldn’t lead the press into further pastures of police corruption.

  A more stable figurehead, maintaining a lower profile.

  And a seat on the board for Parsons, to ensure the maintaining of the organisation’s low profile. Which would keep the Commissioner happy.

  What he didn’t know always kept the Commissioner happy.

  “You have to remember,” James said, “if it hadn’t been for Farlow, we’d never have discovered your arrangements with the Shepherdsons before Fowler got to you.”

  “There is that, I suppose.”

  “Certainly there is. And your new status, as surrogate figurehead.”

  “I have to admit,” Ray said. “It certainly worked out a treat.”

  A treat, James thought. Not only Fowler, but the Shepherdsons as well.

  Parsons had been particularly pleased about that.

  The trick had been that neither Fowler nor the Shepherdsons had known what was going on.

  Fowler had had to think that Mickey had been involved with Ray; it had had to look as if he’d killed Ray before Fowler could get to him and make him talk. Killing Glenda had been a stroke of genius. It had made Mickey look more like the candidate they’d wanted him to seem, more as if the Sheps were trying to fit Fowler up.

  And all the Shepherdsons had thought was that Fowler had tumbled to Ray. They genuinely hadn’t understood about Glenda, and their supposed association with Mickey.

  And Fowler had swallowed. To him, it looked as if Mickey and the Sheps were combining together in a takeover bid.

  And when Collins had fed Fowler the pack of lies about what Johnny was supposed to have said, that had been the clincher.

  Ironic—Collins’s reward was the money for the lies. Paid for by Fowler.

  Farlow’s reward came from Parsons; not to point AIO in his direction.

  When the inevitable explosion had arrived, James hadn’t counted on the way the Shepherdsons had retaliated for Johnny, with Jean.

  But that couldn’t have worked out better, either.

  The only trouble had been, Fowler had got out alive.

  And he hadn’t gone to Wales, where James could have had him seen to.

  But at least for the time being, he’d been out of the picture; business since the aftermath had been got under way.

  It was going to take a miracle to find out where he’d gone to ground; Parsons hadn’t wanted the Law to find him. He’d wanted the legend printed in the press to be preserved, missing believed dead.

  And it had made a good press. O’Connell had been very helpful in that respect. The Law had come out of it looking as if they’d just been about to collar the lot of them before they topped each other.

  But it was going to take a miracle to find him.

  A miracle, apparently, had happened.

  It had taken the shape of madness.

  Hardly surprising, after what the Shepherdsons had done to Jean Fowler, brooding on it in his isolation.

  Ray picked up the copy of the Grimsby Evening Telegraph and looked at the news item again. The headline read:

  ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF MAN ON BOMBING RANGE:

  TRAGEDY AS MAN TRIES TO AVOID MISSILES

  The story went on to describe how the body of a Mr. Roy Carson, an occasional visitor to the area, had been discovered in a tank used as a target in RAF rocket manoeuvres on a beach near Mablethorpe. It was assumed Mr. Carson had ignored the red warning flag and had taken cover in the tank when the manœuvres had begun.

  “Handy,” Ray said, indicating the newspaper.

  “Not if we hadn’t cleared the house it wouldn’t have been.”

  “No,” Ray said.

  He lit a cigarette.

  “What I can’t understand,” he said, “was all that business at the end; all that screaming and shouting for some bloke called Lesley.”

  “It wasn’t,” James said.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “It wasn’t a he. It was a she. On the phone, he kept saying she, Lesley. She’s here. All that.”

  “At the time, Gerry and I thought he’d got some assistance who’d hopped it as soon as we turned up.”

  “No, it was definitely female, whoever he was referring to.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Ray said. “But he was on his own when we done him. But it didn’t stop him screeching his head off as if she was in the immediate vicinity.”

  James stood up and picked up his and Ray’s glasses and took them over to where the drinks were.

  “Maybe she was female company he’d got hold of. Could even have sent down for her,” Ray said.

  James shook his head.

  “He wouldn’t. Whoever she was, he’d picked her up up there. He wouldn’t risk it.”

  Ray thought about it. With his track record, he knew a lot of the girls on Fowler’s books.

  “Lesley,” he said. “Lesley.”

  James came back to the table and set the brandies down on the glass top.

  Ray picked up his glass, shook his head.

  “Lesley,” he said.

  He swilled the brandy round in his glass.

  “No,” he said. “No; the only Lesley I can think of who we ever had was a bird called Lesley Murray.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Used to be a fair piece. A singer. Good, as I recall. Sang at the Moulin for a while.”

  “What happened to her?” James said.

  “I remember Mickey pulled her out one time, told her to meet this particular bloke in a pub. Just pull him, get a lift home. Nothing else. ’Course, the fellow she was pulling was only Jean’s old man, wasn’t he? And she naturally didn’t know the steering had been fixed, did she? Or she wouldn’t have gone, would she? So, what happened to him, happened to her.”

  “I remember,” James said. “A casualty, so to speak.”

  “Yeah,” Ray said. “Anyway, that’s the only Lesley I can call to mind, in my experience of the firm. I mean, he didn’t even know her name. She was just somebody Mickey fixed up for him.”

  James took a sip of his brandy.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ll say one thing for him.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He kept an extremely acceptable brandy.”

  “Yeah,” Ray said, drinking. “Very nice. Very warming.”

  THE SEA

  EDDIE WALKED INTO THE Dunes, holding the rolled-up newspaper, but this time there was no thigh-slapping, no three-chord mental harmony to add a spring to his step.

  Howard had his pint ready, as usual, by the time he reached the bar.

  Eddie put his change down, took a deep drink.

  “Better?” Howard said.

  Eddie took another drink, dropped the newspaper on the bar’s surface.

  “Seen this?” Eddie said.

  “I’ve seen it.”

  Eddie shook his head.

  “Luc
ky for some,” Howard said.

  All right, Eddie thought. Make your remarks, you stupid old puff. You don’t have to think about the extra you’re now no longer going to get.

  “Still,” Howard said. “Not surprising, really.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Howard mimed tippling a glass.

  “Yeah,” said Eddie. “Well.”

  He took another drink.

  “You haven’t seen Lesley about, have you?”

  “Not today.”

  “Only we’re playing the Kings Arms at Tealby tonight. Haven’t made the arrangements. About the time.”

  “Been in the South?”

  “Yeah. No sign.”

  “Probably be in later on.”

  “Yeah.”

  Eddie drank the remains of his pint.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’ll go and have another look.”

  Leaving the newspaper on the counter, Eddie walked out of the Dunes and along the mini-promenade until he came to the row of bollards at the top of the ramp. The sky was clear and blue and the beach was almost golden in the morning sunshine.

  The fellows on the funfair were testing the ferris wheel again. Eddie watched them for a few moments, the black shadows of the circle and the struts revolving over him like a spool from some giant film projector.

  Then, after a few moments, he walked down the ramp, towards the street and the South, in search of Lesley.

  Afterword

  Derek Raymond on Ted Lewis

  GBH IS A NOVEL as direct as it is stunning. The impact of the opening scene, in which a group of villains, led by its psychopathic leader, tortures another villain, suspected of grassing, to death—indeed the tracking down of grasses and inside traitors, whether inside the mob or inside the police—underlines the author’s loathing of all denunciation; and the book as a whole, which never relaxes its grip for a paragraph, has as shattering an impact on the reader as did its famous predecessor, Jack’s Return Home [also published as Get Carter].

  Ted Lewis died of alcohol in 1982 while he was still in his forties; and his death was a major loss. For, as the contemporary black novel in Britain is concerned, he was the prototype, the first in the field of my generation anyway, of the rebirth of black writing, so much so that, in GBH, the hallucinating effect that his portrait of the killer, described in the first person, has on the reader is one that the latter is unlikely to forget for some time—if, indeed, he ever succeeds in forgetting it.