The Only Game

by Reginald Hill

  She awoke. Four hours had passed, the luminous face of her watch told her. There was no movement from the other bed but she sensed he was awake too. She lay tense and waiting, till she thought, ‘What the hell century do I think I’m living in?’, rolled out of bed, crossed the couple of feet between them and slipped in under his duvet.

  He was ready for her, almost too ready. She felt his effort of will as he held back to synchronize his passion with her needs and it wasn’t till she dug her nails into his shoulder and cried ‘Yes!’ in his ear that she felt his lean and wiry body relinquish its control and thrust uninhibitedly into hers. She felt her mind, her spirit, her flesh dissolving into a nebula of pure ecstasy burning across the blackness of outer space. For the first time since Noll’s disappearance she was completely beyond the reach of pain. And even when the blackness began to flow back, gobbling up her light till she was reduced to one single burnt-out planet again, there was comfort to be found in wrapping herself round this man and feeling his sunlike warmth.

  She said, ‘Tell me what happened in Ireland?’

  ‘You read it.’

  ‘No, you tell me.’

  So he told her.

  She said, ‘So you don’t know if …’

  ‘If Maeve was working for them and died by accident?’ he interrupted fiercely. ‘Of course I know. I loved her.’

  ‘Then it’s better not to know,’ she said almost inaudibly. ‘Tell me about your father. He sounds an interesting man.’

  ‘He was. He came to England in the thirties to get away from the fascisti. They wanted to intern him when the war started but he actually talked them out of it and joined up instead. After the war he stayed in England. He thought that this was where the future shape of Europe would be decided. He thought there’d be a socialist democratic state here for evermore. By the time he realized how wrong he’d been, he’d got married and established the family business, a café and fish and chip shop in Romchurch. My mother was a local girl. Her family didn’t much care for her marrying an Italian so she told them all to go to hell. She died seven years ago. Car accident. After that Papa just collapsed. Cancer. He was eaten away by it, as if the cells had just been biding their time till his grasp on life weakened. He died in Romchurch Hospital, where I first saw you. I smuggled him in Strega and tobacco. He wasn’t supposed to, of course, but he said, what the hell was he supposed to do with the few extra minutes he might save by giving them up?’

  ‘No brothers? Sisters? How about your mother’s family?’

  ‘They never made up the quarrel after she married Papa. Funny. In that at least, they turned out more Italian than the Italians.’

  ‘And on your father’s side? Didn’t you once mention an uncle?’

  She felt him chuckle in the dark.

  ‘Endo. Yes. Papa’s elder brother. He left Italy at the same time but not for the same reasons. He just wanted a different kind of life. He headed for America, did all kinds of things. But mainly he settled for gambling. He used to visit, not often, every two, three years maybe. I first remember him when I was very ill, age four or five. That’s when he started teaching me to play cards. Papa didn’t approve, but Endo was the elder brother and that carried weight in Italian families. And also Endo loved us all, and that carried even more weight. Last time I saw him was at Papa’s funeral. He said, “Next time you’ll have to come to see me, Dog. I’m getting old and besides, your friends, the fuzz, ain’t keen on letting me in for anything but funerals, and there ain’t nobody left to die.” I said there was me and he laughed and said, “No, you’ll live for ever, Dog. Didn’t I always say so?” Then he went to catch his plane.’

  ‘Why did he say the police weren’t keen?’

  ‘I didn’t enquire too closely, but he’s got his own hotel and casino in Vegas and I don’t doubt he’s had to run with some pretty heavy people in his time.’

  It was good to lie here in the sealing dark, her head against his chest, the warmth of his body against hers, its scent in her nostrils, its taste on her tongue. It was good to be sharing his memories just as she had shared his senses.

  He felt it too for now he said lazily, no hint of anything more than a lover’s curiosity, ‘Your turn. You’re an only child too, right?’

  ‘Yes. But not spoilt like you. Ouch.’

  He pulled her hair with his teeth.

  ‘The truth,’ he said sternly.

  ‘All right, Daddy did spoil me. But he needed to. My mother made up for it, with interest.’

  Slap! The hand across the leg …

  ‘So. A typical little daddy’s girl,’ he mocked.

  ‘Till there was no daddy.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to …’ His arms tightened round her.

  ‘It’s OK. Really.’

  ‘Everyone says you were a great athlete. I talked to someone called Denver, his daughter knew you, seemed to think you were England’s answer to Superwoman.’

  ‘Denver? Sally Denver! I haven’t seen her for years. We used to … well, we were best friends for a long time.’

  ‘Best,’ he echoed. ‘Funny how temporary an absolute can be. So you ran …?’

  ‘Hurdled, long jumped, even threw things when the fancy took me.’

  He felt her muscles flex and relax as though they were remembering too.

  He said, ‘Which is why you opted for a PE course.’

  He hadn’t intended for this to become even a gentle probing, let alone anything like an interrogation. But though by no means as strong, as urgent as once they had been, his doubts and uncertainties, like her darkness, had returned.

  She said, ‘Yes. We don’t all make the right choices. Look at you, going for a soldier.’

  He said, ‘That choice was unmade for me. Yours too, I gather.’

  ‘Yes. I changed direction.’

  She was stiff in his arms now.

  ‘What happened?’ he said casually.

  Mist on Ingleborough …

  She said flatly, ‘You know what happened.’

  ‘You knew what happened to me in Ireland, but you wanted to hear me tell it,’ he reminded her.

  ‘It was misty. These two had dropped back to have a smoke. I told them not to lose contact with the rest of the party. They were cheeky. One of them said … well, it doesn’t matter. But she took another drag at her cigarette. And I tried to knock it out of her mouth. That was all. But she must have swayed forward … I hit her … and she ran. It was misty, there’s a lot of old shafts up there … she was badly injured and she said … and the other girl said … I never meant to hit her!’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said soothingly. ‘And you were exonerated, weren’t you?’

  ‘You mean I got away with it? That’s what everyone said … I got away with it. That finished me for teaching. I ended up on the liner and that’s where I met …’

  Suddenly the blackness was racing back and his questions were rearing up strong and irresistible. They moved apart, only a few inches in the narrow bed, but it felt like a ravine.

  She said, ‘Is there anything else you want to ask, Inspector?’

  He wanted to reach out and pull her close again and spin around them once more that warm, dark and timeless cocoon.

  But, check to the dealer as much as you like, the moment comes when you’ve got to make your play.

  He said, ‘When Beck faked his drowning, there was a body. You identified it as Beck’s. Where did that body come from?’

  There was a long silence, then she sighed deeply. He felt her breath warm on his face, like a breeze in the desert.

  ‘From the sea,’ she said in the lifeless voice of a child reciting a rote-learned lesson. ‘It came from the sea.’

  ‘Just like that? Gift wrapped?’ he said.

  ‘Just like that,’ she agreed. ‘The evening before Oliver was going to disappear. He was down at the boathouse checking the yacht. Then he came running up to the house calling for me. I went out. He said a man had been washed up on the beach. I
went to look. He’d been in the sea long enough to get roughed up but I could see he was a man of Oliver’s build and colouring. I said that we’d better call the coastguard or the police or someone, but Oliver said no, he didn’t want to focus attention on himself so close to his own disappearance. He said it would look very odd if, the day after finding a drowned man, he went out alone in lousy weather and got wrecked. I said, what then? And he said at first we should just dump the body back in the water. Then he got this idea. Why not take it out with him the next day, put some identification on it, rings, watch, that sort of thing, and if it washed up again after they’d found the wreckage of the boat, it would confirm his death.’

  ‘And you went along with this?’

  ‘It wasn’t difficult,’ she said dully. ‘What is it they said about that Frenchman who walked three miles after his head had been chopped off? It’s the first step that counts.’

  He knew what she meant. He wanted with all his being to believe her. There were other questions demanding to be asked but he forced them back down and reached out and laid his hands on her unresponsive body.

  ‘What’s this?’ she said. ‘Interrogation broken off for refreshments?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said helplessly. ‘I didn’t mean to … Sometimes we have to act as if …’

  ‘As if we don’t belong to ourselves? Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I know that.’

  Her tone was still harsh and mocking, but she rolled close to him once more, only this time when he made to lay her on her back, she resisted and forced him supine, and, straddling him, brought them both to a climax which did not so much blot out the darkness and doubt as intensify them, like a distant storm’s lightnings making lurid a hot tropical night.

  Afterwards he fell into an uneasy sleep and when he woke she had returned to the other bed. He lay with his eyes open, but their focus was inward and he hardly noticed as a feeble wintry dawn struggled to dilute his darkness to a paler shade of grey.

  8

  A few miles away, Billy Flynn too was staring into the darkness of a strange bedroom.

  He had no idea where he was, only the certainty he was not where he ought to be. As his eyes tried to form shapes from the lumpy greyness and his furred tongue sought dampness in his dried-up mouth, his mind teetered uncertainly back to the previous night.

  He had been restless from the moment they arrived. He was a man who needed the buzz of action. The switch had given him a bit of a charge but it had gone almost too smoothly. Down into the quarry, straight out of the car into a truck with its engine revving, and while a man, woman and child dressed like them transferred cases from the Granada to a caravan, they were bucketing up the track past the Branch car at the top while its occupants were probably still reporting their safe arrival.

  Thrale might get up his nose with his Mr Wonderful act but, credit where it was due, he was a great orchestrator. Only he hadn’t orchestrated this lumpy bed in this frowsty room, and, as Billy knew to his cost, he didn’t care for unrehearsed variations on his careful themes.

  He reached out his hand. He was alone, but by the warm hollow at his side, he hadn’t been alone for long.

  It was coming back to him now. Playing with the kid in the small garden of the cottage they’d been dropped at, hearing on the radio that his little dripping tap trick had burnt a pig … that had cheered him up a lot, but it had also made him feel more restless. He fancied a few bevvies, a bit of company, a celebration. It wouldn’t have been so bad if there’d been any booze in the cottage, or if My Lady bloody Heighway had shown any sign of being willing to pass the time profitably. He’d taken a shower and wandered out naked to give her a chance to size up the goods. She’d taken a long cool look and said, ‘OK, Billy, I’ve seen it. Next time I see it, I’ll chop it off.’

  He’d almost hit her then and forced her head down between his legs … even the thought excited him, but the remembrance of Jonty Thrale played across his mind like a cold jet and he’d got dressed and sat in a sulking silence till approaching ten o’clock, she’d closed her book and stood up, saying, ‘I’m off to bed, Billy. I’d advise you to do the same. Jonty should turn up tomorrow and he’ll look to find us wide awake and ready to go. Goodnight.’

  It was the kindly voice that did it, like a schoolmarm talking to a child. Seething with resentment, he followed her upstairs and banged his door. His window was open. He went to shut out the cold night air but found himself hesitating with his hand on the latch. Right outside, its branches touching the sill, was an old wych-elm. Almost without conscious thought, he slid out of the window, grasped a branch and swung himself through the whippy boughs to the ground.

  They had no car and in any case he wouldn’t have dared risk starting one. But in a tumbledown garden shed, he and the boy had found an ancient sit-up-and-beg bike whose wheels still managed to turn. He carried it on his shoulder up the long rutted track which ran through a stretch of unkempt woodland to a narrow country road. Here he mounted the cycle and began to pedal. He had no lights but the earlier mist had risen and the road flowed like a river before him, all silvered by a frosty moon.

  They’d skirted a substantial village as they were driven here from the quarry, the kind where the old centre was being swallowed up by new estates. There should be real pubs here, not just ancient ale houses where you banged your head on wormy beams and got clocked by a load of nosy yokels.

  He was right. He heard it before he saw it, a brand new road house called the Snooty Fox, with loud music beating out of misted windows across a GTi-crammed car park.

  He hesitated on the threshold. A pair of cold eyes seemed to be fixed on him and a soft level voice to speak in his ear. Then a group of late arrivals swept him forward and drove him through the crush up to the bar.

  He drank hard and fast, partly because of the late hour, partly to make sure Jonty Thrale didn’t gain admittance to his mind again. At some point he got talking to Yvonne. She was a type his louche expertise thought it recognized. Mid-forties dressed like mid-twenties. Not yet paying for it but not wanting to be paid for it either. And best of all, with a place of her own. No parents or husband to make the evening end with a contortionist’s act in the back of a car or a cold-arsed knee-trembler up against a tree.

  A room. A bed. That’s where he was now. His eyes strained against the dark, but his mind welcomed it. Waking up to daylight would have been disaster, but there was probably still time to get back to the cottage without the slag Heighway knowing he’d been out.

  And now the gloom was giving up its secrets to his adjusting sight. A wardrobe, a dressing table, an open door, its space lined with a very faint difference of light … He sniffed the air. Tobacco smoke. Someone was smoking a cigarette in there.

  Silently he slipped from the bed and approached the doorway. Through it he could make out the gleam of a washstand. It was a bathroom. He stepped inside, his hand brushed a light pull, he caught it and jerked.

  Sitting on the lavatory bowl, cigarette in mouth, was a naked woman. She looked startled by his sudden appearance. But it wasn’t just the shock of the light that brought alarm to her eyes. In her hand was a leather wallet, its contents spread neatly on the bath ledge at her side.

  She said, ‘It’s all right, lovey, I wasn’t taking anything, just curious, you know, a good-looking boy like you, a girl wants to keep in touch …’

  ‘Girl!’ he said viciously. ‘I’ve got a granny who looks younger than you, you stinking slag.’

  ‘Is that right?’ she said, rising. ‘Then I’m surprised you couldn’t get it up last night, ’cos you Micks spend most of your time fucking your grannies, don’t you? There, take your bloody wallet and sod off!’

  She flung it at him. He let it bounce off his chest, then moved towards her.

  ‘Come on,’ she said in renewed fear. ‘No rough stuff, eh? Not with your granny.’

  He hit her with all his strength and felt something break in her jaw. She shrieked and began to fall back into the bat
h. He caught her on the side of her head with his other fist. The back of her head cracked against the tiled wall. Her shriek died to a long bubbling groan, but he kept on hitting her till there was no sound at all.

  Then he stood there and looked down at her in a growing horror which derived partly from the deed itself but mostly from the fearful prospect of Jonty Thrale’s reaction if he found out.

  He turned on the tap in the wash basin and let the water run over his bloodstained hands. Then he went back into the bedroom and pulled on his clothes which lay strewn over the floor. Once more he had to go into the bathroom to gather up his wallet and stuff the contents back into it. But he kept his eyes averted from the woman in the bath who had still not moved and was making no noise.

  He opened a window and looked out. He was in a ground floor maisonette and was able to drop out of the window onto a concrete pathway. The moon was still up and by its corpse-light he could see that the block of maisonettes lay on the fringe of a new estate. Over the road were the foundations of more buildings and beyond them, trees.

  He set off towards them at a run.

  It was more by luck than any judgement that he found himself on the road that he’d cycled along earlier. As he jogged along he glanced at his watch. It was later than he thought, after six A.M. The midwinter darkness had deceived him, and though the sun was not yet up, the east was a paler shade of grey and there was already traffic on the road. Each approaching headlight sent him into the hedgerow until at last, scratched and exhausted, he reached the lane to the cottage. Another set of headlights was approaching. He dropped into the ditch till they should pass, but to his horror he realized the car was slowing down.

  He couldn’t have been spotted, he tried to assure himself. But the car was down to a crawl now, and his mind was already trying to cope with the greater problem of what to do about the driver. The cottage was too close for mere evasion to be enough. Now, the man might be merely curious, but when news of the attack on Yvonne became public, the memory of a dishevelled figure hiding on the roadside would rise strong in his mind, and the first place the police would look at was the nearest habitation.