Angels Passing

by Hurley, Graham

  J-J was spellbound. Given half a chance, Faraday thought, and he’d be up to Scotland on the train, searching map after map for dams. No wonder Anghared had so much time for her precious thesp. This man could turn anything into a story.

  He was talking about J-J now. With his deafness and his rubber hands, he’d be priceless for the kids. Why? Because here was someone who’d had a real problem, who couldn’t hear a bus coming or a band playing, or the roar of a football crowd; someone who’d had to confront a solitude, an isolation, that no ordinary bloke could ever imagine. His kids would warm to that. They’d understand, however dimly, about solitude and isolation. And the knowledge that someone like J-J had built himself bridges to the real world would be the best possible evidence that they weren’t alone, that effort and determination would have their rewards.

  Faraday, listening, could only agree. In the shape of J-J, he could see a way these kids of Gordon’s might glimpse a future for themselves. He toyed with the remains of his wine for a moment, swilling it around the glass, then told Gordon to finish the bottle. Try as he might, he couldn’t get Scotland out of his mind.

  ‘So what happened when you got to the dam?’ he asked at last.

  Gordon passed on the wine, filling J-J’s glass instead.

  ‘We lost a guy,’ he said softly. ‘Which is what happens if you take risks like that.’

  Later, while J-J and Gordon were seeing to the washing-up, Faraday went through to the lounge. There were a couple of messages waiting for him on the answerphone, and he paused to listen. The first was from a birding friend, reporting a pectoral sandpiper on the mudflats at Thorney Island. The second was from Marta. She sounded unusually tense, almost angry. She wanted Faraday to ring her. Not on the mobile, but at home. She left him the number, repeating it twice.

  Faraday made the call from the extension upstairs in his study. He’d never before called her on her home line. Already, he had the feeling something terrible had happened.

  ‘It’s my husband,’ she said as soon as Faraday announced himself. ‘He’s left me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He found a card, a silly thing. It was for you. I left it on the kitchen table by mistake.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘It was just saying sorry for the weekend. And it said I loved you.’

  Faraday nodded. The wind was getting up again and he could hear the ‘slap-slap’ of halyards in the nearby dinghy park. He’d never met Marta’s husband, never set eyes on her kids. None of that was part of the woman he knew.

  ‘What now?’ he heard himself say.

  ‘Can you come over? Please?’

  Captain Beefy lay between a kebab bar and a launderette on a stretch of Albert Road notorious for student drunks. Winter stepped carefully round a puddle of cooling vomit and followed Sullivan to the front door. Eight in the evening was early to be throwing up but he supposed it all depended when you got that first pint in.

  The gym looked empty. A tiny bar in the lobby was stocked with five kinds of chilled fruit juice and there were a couple of low wicker chairs to take the weight off your feet. Trophy colour photos around the walls offered terrible warnings about what sustained weight training could do to your physique. One of them featured a blonde woman locked in the classic Schwarzenegger pose. She had a cheeky smile and nice eyes but the rest of her body looked like a satellite photo of the Hindu Kush: deep valleys between peaks of glistening muscle.

  ‘Gentlemen?’

  Winter and Sullivan turned to find a woman standing in the open doorway beside the bar. She was edging into middle age but a regime of exercise and fruit juice nicely filled the spray-on top. Pink wasn’t Winter’s favourite colour but he didn’t let that stand between him and a pretty woman.

  ‘Simone?’ He extended a hand. ‘Never had the pleasure.’

  Simone was studying the two men. She didn’t need lapel badges to guess their occupation.

  ‘Business, is it? Or are you guys off duty?’

  She took them through to the gym itself. Mirrors lined three walls and it was a challenge for Winter to edge his bulk between the various exercise machines. He’d come here to discuss Kenny Foster but that kind of agenda seemed lost on Simone. She’d had the gym up and running for a year now. It was already paying its way and she was proud of the fact that the bank loan was shrinking. Obviously Pompey, she had a taunting, no-nonsense attitude that spoke volumes about a girl’s potential in a man’s world.

  ‘So where is everyone?’ Winter gestured round at the empty gym.

  ‘They’ve gone. We close at eight. Our regulars know that.’

  Upstairs, past the line of potted plants and small plaster busts of ancient Greek athletes, there were more machines. To Winter, they looked almost mediaeval, devices designed to inflict a great deal of needless pain, but Sullivan was all eyes. He did a bit of working out himself, he told Simone. He’d never bothered to join a gym because he never had time to get proper value out of the subscription but the weight routines and all the stuff about progressive resistance and aerobic stamina had always fascinated him. Was it true this gear could sort you out?

  Simone was watching him with interest. Of course it was true, she said. Some places were no more than social centres – dating agencies with a couple of pec-decks attached – but her operation offered straight down the line no-bullshit fitness.

  ‘I’m the boss here,’ she said. ‘You come to me and you get the full assessment. I do a shoulder-to-calf workout. I want to know how you stand. How you breathe. What you eat. How much you sleep at night. The whole nine yards. Then we get to work. Everything’s personalised. And in a couple of months you’ll think you’re God.’

  Sullivan was definitely impressed. A particular machine across the room had caught his eye. To Winter, it was the usual combination of wires, pulleys and thickly padded contact areas but Sullivan wanted to know more.

  ‘Abductors,’ she said briefly.

  ‘Ab what?’

  ‘Here.’ She slapped her thigh. ‘We work on specific muscle groups. Abductors are on the inside.’

  ‘How does it work, then?’ Sullivan nodded at the machine. Winter looked pointedly at his watch. Any more of this and he might as well get himself a glass of cranberry juice and wait downstairs.

  ‘Give it to me.’

  Simone had her hand out. She wanted Sullivan’s jacket. Sullivan slipped it off and got onto the machine. With his bum low and his knees up, the outsides of his thighs nestled against the padded supports.

  ‘OK, now spread your legs.’

  Sullivan did it, straining against the weights. Then again. Then a third time. Watching his contorted face in the big wall mirror, Winter began to laugh.

  ‘You ought to be selling tickets,’ he told Simone. ‘You’d make a fortune.’

  Back downstairs, Winter asked her about Friday nights.

  ‘We close at eight,’ she said at once, ‘like I told you.’

  ‘And last Friday night?’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘Then what?’

  Simone had a long, stagey think.

  ‘I was with a friend,’ she said at last.

  ‘And who might that be?’

  ‘Kenny Foster.’

  ‘By yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No witnesses?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Definitely not.’ Her eyes strayed towards Sullivan. Sullivan ducked his head.

  ‘So where were you?’

  ‘Here, as it happens.’

  ‘In the gym?

  ‘That’s right. Kenny likes working out by himself. Never gets a proper chance during the week so a couple of hours on Friday nights are perfect. I open up for him special.’

  Winter acknowledged the phrase with the faintest smile.

  ‘What sort of time are we talking here?’

  ‘Late, around ten, ten-thirty. Kenny prefers that. Loosens him up before bedtime, know what I mean?’

  ‘And you?�
��

  ‘I watch. Help where I can, you know …’

  ‘Just the two of you.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Sullivan was transfixed. It was clear that Winter didn’t believe a word of what she was saying and it was equally clear that Simone didn’t care. This was cartoon dialogue cooked up by people who enjoyed these kinds of games.

  Winter was explaining that he had a problem. Colleagues of his had talked to Kenny Foster and it was really very important that some third person vouch for his movements on Friday night. They weren’t talking a parking offence here. It was a great deal more serious than that.

  Simone was looking at Sullivan again.

  ‘You were one of them, weren’t you? Round Kenny’s place?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Didn’t you believe him, then?’

  ‘It’s not that, it’s just procedure.’ He began to colour. ‘It would just help, that’s all.’

  ‘Help who?’

  ‘Kenny Foster.’

  Simone studied her fingernails for a moment or two. Then looked Sullivan in the eye. As far as she was concerned, Winter no longer existed.

  ‘You want evidence, don’t you? Of where we was on Friday night?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Can you keep a secret, then? Only some of this stuff’s pretty personal.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  She smiled at him, then disappeared into a curtained alcove behind the bar. When she re-emerged, she was holding a cassette.

  ‘We’ve got cameras upstairs,’ she said. ‘Have you got a moment?’

  Sullivan followed her back into the alcove. The space was tiny and served as a makeshift office. On the desk beside a pile of invoices was a television and a video player. Simone slipped in the cassette and fingered the play button. Winter hadn’t moved.

  ‘OK?’

  Sullivan nodded. Close like this, it was impossible not to be aware of Simone’s body. ‘Captain Beefy’ didn’t do her justice. She was seriously firm.

  A picture flickered on the screen. It showed the downstairs section of the gym with half a dozen punters pumping away on the weights. A time and date readout established it was Friday 17.34. Then the sequence came to an abrupt end and Sullivan found himself looking at the room upstairs.

  It was much later, 23.49, and the room was empty except for a lone figure on the pull-down weights in the corner. Back in his garage, wearing oil-stained jeans and a tight T-shirt, Kenny Foster had made a very definite physical impression on Sullivan. Medium height, he looked to be in his late thirties. He had a worn, bony face and eyes of the palest blue. The ponytail with its twist of red ribbon and the tiny gold peace symbol on a chain round his neck might have tagged him as a veteran from the early Glastonbury days, a chilled-out hippy with a library of Dylan CDs, but there was something in the shape of his body beneath the black T-shirt that suggested otherwise.

  Now, seeing him clad only in a pair of red satin shorts, Sullivan knew he’d been right. The bull neck. The muscled spread of his shoulders. The tight ripple of muscles across his belly. Every time he did a repetition on the machine, pulling down the weights, the tattoos danced on his chest. This was a man you wouldn’t want to mess with. Ever.

  ‘Wait …’ Sullivan felt Simone’s hand on his arm. The claustrophobic little space smelt powerfully of shower gel.

  Seconds later, she appeared on the screen. She was wearing a black dressing gown, open at the front, and she was naked underneath. She paused in front of Foster, kissed him on the lips, then sank to her knees. Easing down the satin shorts, she teased the beginnings of a huge erection, then took him in her mouth, hollow-cheeked, and began to suck. Foster didn’t miss a beat. Pull, release, pull, release. At length Simone withdrew, ran her tongue up his body, shrugged off the dressing gown, and then planted herself on the abductor machine. Naked, she began to exercise, thighs open, thighs shut, her head back against the padded rest. Foster appeared not to notice. Pull, release, pull, release. Then, with a shrug, he abandoned the machine, stepped out of his shorts and joined Simone.

  Simone reached forward, indicating the time readout on the screen before hitting the stop button. Sullivan, uncomfortably aware of his own muscle groups, shot her a look.

  ‘That could be evidence,’ he said. ‘We could seize that.’

  ‘Help yourself.’ She took a tiny step backwards and poked her head round the curtain. Winter was reading a magazine. When he glanced up, she smiled at him. ‘Second house?’

  By the time Faraday found Marta’s house, her kids had gone to bed. To his surprise, it was a bungalow in a maze of tree-lined streets in a suburb called Park Gate. This was commuter country, half an hour’s drive from Faraday’s place, serving the busy corridor between Portsmouth and Southampton. Looking out at the pulled curtains and carefully barbered hedges, Faraday couldn’t think of a worse place to live.

  Marta must have seen him arriving. She had the door open when he picked his way around her parked Alfa, and took his coat without a word. There was a bottle of wine, half empty, on the kitchen table and she’d made a plate of sandwiches. Marta neither drank much alcohol nor stooped to anything as mundane as corned beef sarnies and margarine. More surprises.

  ‘What happened?’

  Marta went through it. There hadn’t been a row. There hadn’t been anything. She’d come back to find the card propped against the teapot and a note from her husband.

  ‘What did it say?’

  Marta reached for her bag and handed Faraday a folded sheet of white paper.

  Pepita. I’d no idea you were that desperate. We’ve been here before, haven’t we? This time, I think it’s best for me to clear off for a bit. There was always a better way, you know. You could always have told me.

  There was a kiss at the end but no name. Faraday refused the proffered bottle. Pepita?

  ‘Does he always type messages like this, your husband?’

  ‘He does everything on a laptop.’

  ‘Everything? Even stuff like this?’

  Faraday read the note again, then looked around. The kitchen, while undoubtedly expensive, was bare and functional. No pictures, no little touches, no warmth, not the slightest evidence of the Marta he thought he’d known.

  ‘We’ve been here before?’ he queried. Marta nodded.

  ‘Eight years ago. Before Maria came.’

  ‘What happened? Do you want to tell me?’

  ‘Not really. I got confused. But it was me who left on that occasion.’

  ‘Confused about what?’

  ‘Another man.’

  ‘And now?’

  I told you. I love you.’

  ‘And what about your husband?’ He nodded at the note. ‘Do you love him too?’

  ‘He’s my husband,’ she said simply.

  Faraday loosened his coat. Sitting in this awful kitchen, he had an acute feeling of trespass, of straying onto other people’s turf, but it wasn’t just that. It was his own life, too. Love was an easy word. He loved Marta, and he wanted her. But her kids? And the guilt that she’d bring with her? And all the rest of the baggage? Was this the decision she was suddenly asking him to make?

  Marta sipped her wine, not saying anything, her eyes watching him over the rim of the glass, and he found himself thinking about the house by the harbour, the view from the window and the privileges of living alone. Was he seriously up for swopping all this for a wife and someone else’s kids? Was he really prepared to pick up the tab for thirteen blissful months?

  ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked her.

  I don’t know.’

  ‘What about your kids?’

  ‘I haven’t told them.’

  ‘But if you did?’

  ‘They’d hate it. They love their dad.’ She paused, and then replaced the glass very carefully on the table. ‘He’s phoned already. Twice.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He wanted to know who you were. How long all this has been going on.’
r />   ‘What did you say?’

  I told him the truth. I said I loved you.’

  ‘And your husband? What’s his line?’

  ‘He said he’d come back. But only if all this’ – she indicated the space between them – ‘stopped.’

  ‘For real, you mean.’

  ‘Yes, for real.’ She didn’t go on.

  Faraday thought about it for a moment then suggested they all ought to take a deep breath, give it a couple of days, see how they felt. But already he knew in his heart that the decision had been made. It was there in her face, there in his hesitations. They’d enjoyed a glorious fantasy, some wonderful moments, and now it was all over. Real life had stepped back in, as abruptly as ever, and now he was back where he belonged. Alone.