This last thought appalled him, and his jaws stopped moving. The LYF would be done for, no doubt about it. But need it be? He cast his mind back to his idea of an LYF composed of married couples. That would mean he would marry Cheryl. He stared at her, remembering her shrieks, imagining Lumpy’s rough and unregarding penetration, and felt an agonised revulsion. It turned him off, it really did, turned him right off to think of her after that…
Egan stood in the doorway as they were finishing the little snack. Then he came into the room, poised and watchful, the darting eyes taking in everything.
He said softly, ‘Corruption. You can’t get away from it, can you? Wherever you go, you find corruption stinking in your nostrils.’
Peter said, ‘Talking about yourself, are you?’
Egan ignored him.
He said, ‘Here am I, getting along with my business, but needing a helping hand, having bitten off a mite more than I can chew. So I find a few dim-witted holidaymakers and put ’em to work.’
Harry said, ‘We didn’t ask for work. You asked us.’
‘Never mind that,’ Egan said. ‘What I was entitled to expect was each side keeping themselves to themselves out of working hours.’
Simon snorted, and was about to speak, but Egan said, ‘Just you keep quiet. I’m doing the talking here. Now there’s work and there’s pleasure, and for me work is pleasure. I don’t speak for anyone else. But disgusting behaviour I will not have. I’ve heard all about it: about this girl coming and making up to my chap, who is a very fine marksman but is not to be encouraged by young women. He’s had a lot of trouble one way and another, has my chap, and I’ve tried to keep him out of it. And then, when we’re miles from anywhere, along comes a young woman and eggs him on to it! I’m sorry about that second one, I really am, but it would never have happened if that first one hadn’t chatted him up to begin with. So the best thing we can do is keep quiet, say no more about it. Do your day’s work tomorrow and that’ll be it.’
Harry said, ‘But it wasn’t that way at all. You must be right round the twist, just like those others. It was the little feller who did the egging on. You don’t believe those two, do you for heaven’s sake?’
‘My men?’ Egan said. ‘You want to look at yourself in a mirror, and then ask yourself if I believe my men. I know what you were doing up here, playing with your metal detector.’
He went over to where the detector lay in the pile of equipment, and kicked it. Then he went on:
‘You were up here with a harlot and an innocent girl, maybe two harlots or two innocent girls, I don’t know which and I don’t care. That’s what you were doing, teaching corruption to the innocent.’ He pointed to Cheryl. ‘Well, the innocent got hurt, and who’s to thank for it? I’ll tell you: it’s not my poor lad, who can’t help himself if he’s encouraged; it’s you lot with your filthy ways.’
His voice rose shrilly, and he strode round the room, stabbing a finger at each of them.
‘You!’ he shouted. ‘Messing people up when they’re only trying to get some business done! Coming up into these lovely mountains to sicken the very earth you’re lying on! Dirt, filth, festering muck! I know the tricks you were going to get up to, all the lot of you at once, I bet! I know! You were trying to make my men join in, and you got more than you bargained for, you and your whore.’
They watched him in sick fascination as rage took possession of him: a physical change, the formerly restless eyes fixed, the mouth distorted and the face suffused with blood, legs stiff as he walked as though manipulated by strings.
Spraying spittle he yelled, ‘Hanging’s too good for the likes of you lot. What you need’s the thumbscrews, the rack; burning. Burning! Getting in my way with your dirty smelly women!’
He grabbed the nearest girl, Ann, by the hair, and began to shake her back and forth; she clutched at his hands, whimpering and trying to free herself.
‘Whore!’ he bellowed. ‘Rotten whore!’
Peter had been leaning against the wall until Egan had grabbed Ann. Then he had straightened, and now he launched himself across the room. He chopped at Egan’s wrists; Egan squealed and let the girl go. Peter grasped Egan’s jacket cuff on the right with his left hand, flashing his right arm under and then over Egan’s, gripping at the shoulder and simultaneously half turning, driving his hip into Egan’s thigh as he spread his legs and Egan plunged up and over in a classic seo-enage. He landed on his back on the floor, but his feet hit the ground first and helped to break his fall. Before Peter could pin him, Egan had rolled sideways and was on his feet again, breathing hard. Peter rushed him again, feeling a sense of ecstatic release in action as he flung Egan into the corner of the room, then dived on him, his arm round Egan’s neck and his knuckles seeking the carotid. With only seconds of consciousness left to him, Egan’s fumbling fingers touched one of the rocks taken down earlier; he lifted it, and then beat it into Peter’s face and head, yelling for help to the men outside. Peter’s grip relaxed, and he fell forward over Egan, who pushed him aside and got up, panting.
‘Ju-jutsu,’ he said with contempt, as Genius hurried in with Lumpy; then he bent down over Peter, taking in for the first time the smashed nose and temple. Then he bent closer, listening, and when he straightened up his face held a kind of awesome solemnity.
‘Heaven help me,’ he said. ‘I’ve croaked him. He’s dead.’
Part Two
Consequence
1
The grouse had stopped calling, and it was twilight outside; in the hut it was already almost dark. The earlier outcry had been stilled now, Ann’s hysteria had been calmed, and she now sobbed and hiccupped gently where she sat with the other girls. Harry and Simon and Ray sat near Peter’s body, which was covered by his sleeping bag. They had remained for some minutes frozen in cataleptic despair, save for the small movements of Harry’s fingers in his anorak pocket. Egan and his two men were somewhere outside, and Harry could hear their voices without being able to distinguish any words. He raised his free hand, rubbed at his bruised face; he was recalling the inn in the Peak District, and how he had taken the group out into the car park, so that they would not be overheard while they discussed the location of the holiday to come; otherwise they might have had fifty others along. He wished he had sent out personal invitations.
Bitterly he said, ‘Poor Pete. I should have let him go and try for his black belt. That with the girls was bad enough, but this was murder, cold-blooded murder.’
Ray said, ‘Not cold-blooded. Harry, that guy was out of his mind with some sex hang-up.’
‘It makes no difference,’ Simon said tonelessly. ‘Peter’s dead. We should never have come here. I wish we never had. What’s his mother going to do? She’s a widow as it is.’
‘It’s a proper terrible, awful mess,’ Harry said. ‘More than that. I can’t find the words.’
‘Pity you didn’t bring along one of those books about lovely holidays full of nice adventures,’ Simon said viciously. ‘You might have found the words in one of them if you looked hard enough.’
‘What can I say?’ Harry said, shaking his head.
‘Just work out what you’re going to say to Pete’s mother.’
Ray said, ‘Don’t be like that, Simon.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Harry. ‘He’s got a right to be like that. I should have thought on, that’s what I should have done. If they could kill all those people in the middle of the Olympic Games that time, then I should have thought on that there’d be risks in coming up to a place like this.’
They fell silent. Ann had stopped crying, and she and the other girls were whispering together. Harry was thinking, Why can’t life just be what you want it to be? I got into my forty-first year that way: all that time, and life was what I wanted it to be. And now this. This is what life is, and two raped girls and one dead man’s the price for finding out. He slipped the ball bearings one after the other through his fingers: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, hel
p us now. There had been a golden region of the mind, once, inhabited by Coot Club people who sailed the unpolluted, uncrowded waters of the Norfolk Broads in the days when Horning was a peaceful rural spot. People like that, he thought. All gone, the magic circle shattered. You tried to help people, give them a good time, take them into the golden land, and for a while it had seemed to work. But now, this…
Then he thought, with no sense of guilt or diminution, that perhaps things wouldn’t be so bad for him now. If you came back from a holiday and two of the girls in your charge had been raped, everybody would rush to accuse you of the grossest lapse of responsibility. But then add a murder alongside the sexual element, and the whole thing assumed a different shading, if he could put it that way, a shading which would tip sympathy on to his side. In the first eventuality people would say, ‘That Harry. He took a bunch of kids on holiday and let two of the girls get raped, the rotten devil. How far can you trust a chap like that?’ But in the second they would say, ‘Terrible tragedy for poor Harry. He took those kids on holiday and they got caught by a gang of criminals, monsters who raped two of the girls and then murdered one of the men. What an awful thing to happen!’ Peter’s mother would be desolated, but he would tell her that Peter was a hero, that he had died trying to defend the girls while they all had been held at gunpoint; and, when the first agony of grief had faded, she would remember that. Harry didn’t earn all that much servicing dishwashers, but then he didn’t spend much, either. He had over a thousand pounds in the bank, and he could give Peter’s mother five hundred as the nucleus of a subscription fund for the dead hero. Well, say two hundred and fifty.
*
The girls had seen enough of Egan to realise that they, a least, were safe while he had control of his men, and their murmured conversation reflected this conviction. Peter’s death had not really come home to Ann, despite her hysteria at the event, and the covered body in the room with them. The other two girls had their own miseries, but talking gently of Peter and the times they had all enjoyed together helped to put at the back of their minds their memories of Lumpy. And none of them paused to consider that when they thought of safety, it was only the sexual aspect which concerned them. Then they talked of trite, domestic things.
Ann looked over to where the men sat hunched and silent at what looked like a vigil over Peter’s corpse.
She said softly, ‘I loved him so much.’
‘Try not to think of it,’ Linda said. ‘I thought we’d changed the subject. It does no good to dwell on things, honest it doesn’t.’
Cheryl asked, ‘What did you mean before, Lin? You said that…about, well, after that horrible man, you said it wasn’t the first time.’
‘It wasn’t,’ Linda said. ‘It’s happened to me before like that. And I was only twelve then. It was much worse then, I can tell you. Much worse.’
Ann and Cheryl looked at her in surprise.
Cheryl said, ‘I didn’t know you’d ever had anything to do with a man at all.’
‘Only in that way,’ Linda said.
Ann remembered her night with Peter, and at the same time as the fact of his death began to strike home irrevocably, she felt a lancing shaft of sympathy for Linda, who had never known love in its tenderness and ecstasy, but only the bruising experience of use. The tears streamed down her face as she held Linda close to her.
‘Poor thing,’ she breathed; and meant herself, Linda, Cheryl, and the whole suffering world.
*
Totally misjudging the mood of his prisoners, Egan said, ‘We’ll have to keep a sharp lookout tonight, or they’ll try to make a break for it.’
Genius and Lumpy sat on the flat rock, Genius’s cigarette glowing as he smoked.
Egan said, ‘It was an accident, I tell you. A sheer pure accident. He came at me like a lion. All I wanted to do was knock him out; I swear I never meant to kill him. He must have had one of those thin skulls you hear about. An unusually thin skull, I bet that was it.’
‘He’s unusually dead, isn’t he, though?’ Genius said.
‘It’s a terrible mess,’ said Egan, sighing. ‘First the women, and now this. What are we going to do?’
Genius said, ‘You’re the boss. You tell us.’
‘I’m stumped and stymied. I mean, they’d know us anywhere, wouldn’t they?’
‘Lumpy’s down for twenty years or detained during Her Majesty’s pleasure,’ Genius said. ‘It depends on the judge. Nobody’s going to believe anything about the girls giving him encouragement, not now you’ve killed that feller.’
Lumpy said, ‘I’m not doing no porridge like that. Not twenty years.’
‘Well, what about Eego?’ asked Genius. ‘He’ll get life, and when they say life that’s what they’ll mean. No remission. Inside for good. Murder. Accessary after the fact of double rape: they’ll go to town.’
‘How about yourself, then?’ Egan said. ‘You’re not in the clear, you know. Far from it.’
Genius considered.
‘Accessary after the fact in both cases. About eight years, I reckon. Say five after remission.’
And he thought, Say five, and three after remission. Because when you’ve carried out my little plan, I’m going to get shot of the pair of you, and I’m going to leap into the first police station I can find, and then I’m going to shop you, you stupid pair of steaming twits. Helpless witness of cruel ravishment and carnage, that’ll be me. No body in his right mind wants to do even three years, but the screws won’t be too hard on me in the circs, helpless witness and all that; Queen’s evidence too. Look at the two of them: a walking cash register and a walking prick.
Egan said, ‘Know what I think? I think the best thing to do is make ’em put another day in, then tie ’em up and scarper. We can flog the stuff fast, then get the hell out. Belfast, that’d be the place. We could go underground there, easy. Plenty of work for Lumpy, and we’d find something too.’
‘What about the dead man?’ Lumpy asked.
‘Stick him in the swamp,’ Egan said. ‘In one of the deep places. They’d never find him. It’s our only chance. Then off to Belfast.’
Genius said, ‘Belfast? Where every third man you meet’s a soldier or a copper, or a chap who’ll shoot you soon as look at you. That’s no good.’ He paused a moment, and then added, ‘You might have a better chance in the Smoke.’
‘No,’ Egan said, as Genius had known from previous conversations that he would. ‘London’s no good any more. There’s no protection, not enough of the big lads around. Seven or eight years ago, we’d have been well away, but not now. They’d have us in a couple of weeks.’
Genius stubbed out his cigarette, exhaling gently.
He said, ‘When it comes to the point, Eego, we can’t just tie them up and then blow. You might just as well dial 999 and send for the cops.’
‘Well, then, what else can we do?’
‘You said yourself there’s deep places in the swamp where they’d never find that feller you croaked.’
He lighted another cigarette, his face seamed and hollowed in the flare of his lighter.
Egan said, ‘Oh, no. No, we can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘That’d be awful. Terrible. Look, I’m just in business. This is just a bit of work for the Indo-Pak market, that’s all. You must see that, Genius.’
‘That’s how it started, but that side of it finished when Lumpy got his end in,’ Genius said. ‘And then you had to kill that feller. What’s that got to do with the Indo-Pak market?’
Egan said, ‘But I’m not that kind of man. I couldn’t do a thing like that.’
His voice held horror and loathing.
‘The way you got your temper up, you could do anything,’ Genius told him. ‘It’s the only way. Think about it, and you’ll realise.’
‘I couldn’t,’ said Egan falteringly.
‘Think of getting life, and no remission. You don’t want that, do you?’
Egan said, ‘It’s like
some kind of nightmare. We had it all set up: a quick turnover and a quick profit. Seems to me we’re the ones in the swamp.’
‘No, not us,’ said Genius quietly. ‘You think it over.’
‘I’m scared,’ Egan said.
You’ll be more scared yet, Genius thought. I’ll see you squirm and squiggle, you bastard.
But he said, ‘Well, there’s no rush. We’ll sleep on it and see what you think tomorrow.’
‘I’ll take the first watch. I know I’ll never sleep tonight, anyway, not after all this,’ said Egan.
‘Aren’t you tired, Egan?’ Lumpy asked. ‘I am. I’m that tired I could sleep on a clothesline.’
*
Cheryl lay awake, wondering how Ann and Linda could simply have dropped off like that, for she knew nothing of the sleep-inducing side of shock and stress. Moreover, her experiences had had an opposite effect on her: she felt sore, dirty, hungry and thirsty. She wished more than anything for a good hot bath, then a change of clothes and a filling meal, and finally, a nice cup of tea. She was wide awake, and, now that she had recovered to some extent, intensely resentful towards Harry. Peter had fought, and they had killed him. Simon couldn’t fight; she hadn’t expected him to. But Harry… Harry should have backed Peter up, and if he had, Peter might have been living at that moment, and he and Ann could have enjoyed their love together, so different in quality from what she herself had gone through with that…man. Could you call it a man? That huge beast, driving agony into her, that face above her with those ghastly white bumps all over it. He looked like something out of a horror picture. But then she thought, He’s got something wrong with him, hasn’t he? Like me and Ann, and Simon. I hate him for what he did to me. But it might have been because he couldn’t help it. What if some girl had come to him the way Ray had come to me, and told him he was the better for his disability? I hate him, but I can’t help feeling a little bit sorry for him. Not much, not after what he did. But a bit. After all. Oh, God, I’ll never sleep tonight. And then she thought, Some people have things wrong with them that you can’t see. Harry. That little devil too, the one with the happy face. He started the big one off, come to think of it. And the boss, the killer. They’ve all got a lot wrong with them, and you can’t see a thing… What I’m going to do, tomorrow I’m getting out of all this. Find a policeman. What had Linda said, long ago? ‘You and Ann, you’re in special danger’.
Harry Doing Good Page 11
