When they got out of the taxi, it was a street of tenements. The impression was shabby only, not of a slum, nothing degraded. Yet he was disturbed.
'I don't know where we are,' he said. 'My flat's on the first floor. It's nice.' 'What district is this? What street is it?'
'It's quiet here.' She was fumbling in her bag. 'That big place over there belongs to a builder. And here – look – I have to unlock this gate. That's how safe it is.'
The close entrance was shut off by a tall structure of bars. 'What would you do if you forgot the key for the gate?'
She closed it behind them and went in front of him without answering. The passage was brightly lit and the walls were tiled to shoulder height, blue tiles with a single white flower on each. As he climbed behind her, he asked again, 'If you hadn't your key, would you be able to attract a neighbour's attention? Would someone come down and let you in?'
'No chance of that.' They were on the first landing and as she opened her door she nodded at the one opposite. 'That's a jewellery repair workshop. And upstairs it's a dental mechanic's and I don't know what else. There's no one but me here at night.'
In the flat, he asked, 'Doesn't it frighten you being alone in the building?' Embarrassed, he took only a vague impression of the room. Decoration, carpet, furniture, all of it seemed new. He had the feeling he disliked in a hotel room or a guesthouse, that it could belong to no one, since it was made for strangers. He was by nature a home-loving man. The one exception to this impersonality was a painting on the wall opposite where he was standing. It showed a brown and orange landscape of low hills with a pale fragment of moon or sun low in the sky. The frame was wide and painted gold, and the picture seemed to have come there by accident from a different life.
'What makes you think I live alone?' she asked.
The question startled him with a queasy vision of a husband appearing from the next room.
'It's all right,' she said, 'my friend doesn't live here. Never mind him.'
He followed her into the inner room. It was tiny and the bed seemed enormous, but she went past it and opened a second door. 'See?' she said. But he didn't until she pointed. 'There's a mirror on the ceiling over the bath.' As he looked up, puzzled by it, she laughed at him. 'What good would it be covered in steam? Doesn't it make you wonder what kind of people they were?'
'People?' he repeated in bewilderment.
'Oh, this place doesn't belong to him. We're fairly sure of that.
We think it's one of the little presents he's picked up for being co-operative.'
'I don't understand.'
'Why should you? Don't you think I know why you came here?' She took his hand and laid it upon her breast. 'Like this?' she asked softly. 'Isn't this what you wanted?'
At the touch of her separate flesh, a shock ran through him. Trembling, he brought his face close to hers.
She pulled back.
'I don't allow that,' she said. 'Anything else, but I don't let people kiss me on the mouth.'
It had been too long. As they lay together naked on the bed in the tiny room, he knew that he would fail. He had thought his manhood was gone, but he responded and, even when with a sudden shuddering he lost control, she made him respond again and he entered her and she moved under him as if he was a man. When it was over, he was weeping and it did not matter that perhaps he had not emptied his seed for a second time.
'Who is Clare?' she whispered warm against his ear. Appalled, he kept silence. 'Is that your wife's name? You kept saying it all the time.'
He turned his head from her. 'Why did you – why did you let me? You can't have found me attractive. I'm an old man. I shouldn't be in bed with you.'
'Because you wanted it so badly.' She stretched like a cat. 'It was the way you looked at me. You were so frightened.'
He caressed her shoulder with his lips. 'I'm not frightened anymore.' Hearing his own words, he believed them. It was true that fear had become a habit, faint and unacknowledged as a fluttering in the blood. Sometimes a sound can go on for so long that you only realise it is gone when suddenly you feel the silence like a presence. He was full of gratitude.
'You don't have to worry. We won't see one another again,' she said. 'You can go home to your wife.'
'My wife's gone away,' he reminded her. 'To Shreveport – in Louisiana.'
Hadn't he explained that to her earlier? Like an impulse of disloyalty, he put aside the idea that she might be stupid. 'I'm going out there to join her.' To the New World. 'I don't think I'll ever come back. Why should I – why should we come back?' If Clare would not have him, he would find a place to live; he would find a job. It was not as if he had no skills or was a man with nothing to offer. 'A man wants to be where he has ties – and my daughter lives there.'
'Ties?'
'To someone you love.' Tentatively, he murmured, 'Like you perhaps and the friend who comes here.'
'Last night, lying where you are.' He felt the warmth of her pressed along his side. 'He told me this joke. It was about a butcher who was asked to circumcise a little Jewish boy on a desert island – only he didn't know what “circumcise” meant, and he did something else. You can imagine.'
He did not want to. 'I don't know why someone would want to tell a joke like that.'
'It saved his life. He was in a concentration camp and a lot of them broke through the wire. This was in the winter, he says, and in the middle of a forest. At first he could hear the others moving all round him and then it was quiet. He fell into a hole full of snow and thought he wasn't going to be able to crawl out. They hadn't been given much to eat – that's what he said. In the morning some peasants found him, an old father and three sons. They had been going about all night hunting for the prisoners and killing them. They didn't like Jews. Lying on the ground the first thing he saw, when they came out from among the trees, was the blood on their boots. They would have kicked him to death too, but he remembered this joke and it made them laugh. He said it was the only joke he ever remembered, and that was because the boy who had told it to him when he was at school had made fun of him for not understanding it. He isn't Jewish, you see.'
Had he thought he was charming her into taking him into her home? A word came into his head – seduction – an old word – and tears of humiliation threatened him.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I need – I'm not –'
He stumbled over saying that he was unwell.
'You know where it is,' she said. 'Would you like me to come with you? Would you like me to wash it for you?'
He sat on the furred cover of the lavatory and spat a curd of vomit, all that he could manage, into the basin. He told himself that when he felt better he would leave with dignity. The brown-yellow smear slipped down the smooth porcelain. He turned on the tap gently so there would be no noise and the water slid down and took most of it away. With the edge of his finger he pushed the last of it into the stream. He wished that he could go home and that Clare would be there. He stood up and pressed a towel against his face. It was warm from the rail and he took comfort from it. He wanted his wife and she had left him alone. From the round mirror above the rail, circled by its single coil of fluorescent light, his face stared back at him. Clare had gone away. No one could blame him. Whatever happened now, the stranger watching with a white circle in each eye told him, nobody could blame you.
When he came out the small bedroom was in darkness. From the passage beyond came the sound of voices. A voice which he recognised as that of the woman who called herself Frances said something and then another voice spoke.
'You take such chances,' the second woman said. It sounded very different to him from the voice of Frances , more, educated, not a country accent, one from a town or a city, southern English, perhaps London?
'I needed company.'
'Company! That's another name for it. What happened last night anyway?'
'That's why I sent for you,' Frances said. 'He was in a funny mood from the minute he got here.' She low
ered her voice and he moved by an ordinary impulse of curiosity nearer to the narrow crack of the door's opening. 'Soldavo, one of the guards.'
'Do you think it can be true?'
'He saw him!
There wasn't any chance of a mistake – that's what he said.'
'What name? Didn't he give you a name?'
'I tried to get it out of him. You know what he's like – he didn't think it would be right to tell me – he didn't think it would be safe for –'
She stopped speaking suddenly as if at a signal.
When the light came on, the room appeared momentarily not small but vast. Turning acres of light pinned him alone and isolated in the centre of an enormous room. Conscious of his nakedness, he covered himself with his hands.
'I'm sorry,' he said.
There were two women. Frances was naked like himself but without shame. The other woman was clothed and had dark hair, and it was to her he spoke as if she had come to judge him. 'I didn't mean any harm. I couldn't help hearing what you were saying. But Frances told me about her friend. I know what a terrible thing happened to him.' She was young and beautiful and passed judgement on him.
'My sister doesn't fuck,' the dark haired woman said. 'But you can come to bed with me. And she'll help. You'll be surprised at the way she can help.'
He wished that he could go home and Clare would be there, but she had abandoned him.
Whatever happened now would be her fault.
6 A Sense of Vocation
FRIDAY, AUGUST 31ST 1988
There had been giants on the earth in those days, and two of them had been set naked on either side of the marble staircase. Approaching them, it annoyed Murray that he couldn't any longer remember which of them Purity was and which Honour. As he put his foot on the first step, a hand caught him by the shoulder. Turning, the movement with which he knocked the grip loose was instinctive.
'Don't be a mug, ' Eddy Stewart said. 'I'm not here as a friend, they've made you a Councillor, it's not a joke. There's been a complaint.'
They had to move aside as a group of visitors, smiling and jostling, white teeth in black faces, one or two of them in national costume, came towards the staircase.
'I'm listening.'
'You've been making a nuisance of yourself trying to see John Merchant.'
'And he got in touch with the police?' Murray was puzzled.
Stewart hesitated. 'There was a complaint.'
'Heathers call you? What does that make you, Eddy?' As long ago as their time together on the beat, Murray had judged Stewart could be bought by someone some day when the price was right. Perhaps, it was possible; he had known that before Stewart did. 'Just another hard man for hire. I don't think you could stop me if I wanted to go up and try to see Merchant again.'
'You're not an easy bloody man to help.' Stewart's heavy face flushed an ugly red. 'I'm trying to mark your card for you before you see Peerse.’ Which made it a different proposition altogether.
'He's here?'
'You know Peerse. He makes it his business to hear anything about you. He takes a personal interest.' Stewart began to cross the hall to the entrance and Murray fell into step beside him. 'You want to watch that mouth of yours. One day it'll get you into trouble.'
As they approached the car, the door swung open and a voice complained genteelly, 'Hurry it up.' Stewart went in front beside the driver, a pale fat man Murray did not recognise. Peerse was so tall that he had to bend his head slightly to avoid the roof. He sat in the farthest corner of the bench seat with his back very straight although he had to bend his head. A Detective Inspector, he had not finished climbing the promotion ladder. He had too much talent not to be a man with a future. Murray found that hard to accept. When they had been young policemen, he had regarded Peerse, beaten up twice in the early months, so ludicrously tall and thin, as a joke. He had been like one of those daddy-long-legs, appalling and fragile, that shed legs at a touch. Now, expensively suited, authoritative, with silver wings of hair that made him look more like an ambassador than a policeman, it was their shared misfortune that more than anyone else in the world, apparently, the sight of Murray reminded him of what he disliked about that past. He leaned across Murray and pulled the door closed. At once the car moved away accompanied by the urgent double note of the siren.
'What's the hurry?' Stewart asked, but Murray caught only a few words of the driver's reply.
Stewart turned in his seat. 'Should we drop him?' He nodded at Murray. Instead of answering, Peerse flicked the middle finger of his right hand as if gesturing away a servant. Stewart faced to the front and Murray watched with interest the vivid stain that rose and ebbed on the side of his neck. Eddy was not having a good day. Had the driver said something about a body?
Faҫades of mean dullness flowed past, pubs, betting shops, gap sites and boarded windows. Out of the driver's words Murray had picked a name – Deacon Street. That meant Moirhill; a tougher district now than when Blair Heathers had left it; more derelict, without the sense of community there had been then among the poverty. If there had been a killing, Peerse would want to get there fast, before the Northern shop boys.
'Explain,' Peerse broke his silence suddenly. He had small eyes, very blue like splinters of ice. Murray yawned. 'Waiting,' Peerse said.
'I used to know you when you could talk in sentences, Ian.'
'Last warning. Cut out the first name – that's cheeky. You don't want to cross the line.'
It was Murray's turn to look out of the window and let a flare of temper come under control. 'I don't believe John Merchant complained. Maybe someone else did.'
'Who would that be?'
Murray cursed his own stupidity. Peerse was the last policeman in the world he would want to take an interest in the connection between Malcolm and Heathers. If Peerse was targeting Blair Heathers, he would be as honest as a salt scoured bone; there was no way of corrupting that arrogance.
'Nobody. Maybe Merchant did – but I only saw him once. He didn't seem bothered.'
'You tried to see him again yesterday – and you were back again today.'
'He's a busy man. It's not easy to catch him, Why? Did you want to see him?'
'There were a couple of details I wanted to clear up.'
'That's not an answer.'
'It's the only one you're going to get,' Murray said. 'I was working for a client. That makes it confidential’.
Peerse leaned forward and tapped Stewart, waiting till he faced right about before saying, 'He thinks he's still in America. No – it's better than that. He thinks he's on television in America;' and whickered air through that long narrow nose, the sound that passed with him for amusement.
Avoiding Murray's eye, Stewart made a show of joining in the joke.
Satisfied, Peerse sat back as the driver brought the car to a halt. They had drawn into a side street and ahead of them a crowd was gathered round the entrance to a lane. Beyond that police cars were already parked.
'I don't think we can take the car right in, sir,' the driver volunteered. His voice was surprisingly light and hasty for such a big man.
'Obviously,' Peerse said sourly. He opened the door and unfolded his length from the car. Bending, he warned Murray, 'I haven't finished with you.' Left with the fat driver, Murray watched as Peerse cut through the crowd with Stewart in his wake. Erect, immaculate, towering so far above the slatternly women and gaunt unshaven men, he appeared like a representative of some different species.
'Here!' the fat driver shrilled. 'Where the hell do you think you're going?'
'Don't give yourself a hard time,' Murray said quietly. 'Don't you know when your gaffer's kidding an old friend?'
As he got out, he saw across the crowd the young constable who was stationed at the mouth of the lane watching him. He heard the fat driver fumbling with the handle of his door. On impulse, he crossed towards the lane. The crowd opened a path. 'Is it a lassie?', 'Is it right she was raped?', 'You lot are no bloody use –'
>
'Keep back,' the Constable cried. His eyes were bright and his face flushed and sweating. 'They're right at the end, sir. Round the corner.'
Out of the sun, it was unexpectedly cold in the alley. Brick walls on either side, the dusty cobbles, even the blank line of barred windows, soaked up the light. Whoever had died in here seemed already buried. He put back his head and there high above was a stripe of afternoon sky, summer blue and chilled. A deep grave open to the sky. When he looked down, it seemed darker and the man had popped out from beyond the corner abruptly as a conjuring trick. 'This one's going to be a bugger.'
'Aren't they all?'
'Wait till you see this joker.'
'Was she raped?'
'Eh?'
The man's grunt was more puzzled than suspicious, but Murray knew he was on the edge of pushing his luck too far. Having no choice, he went round the corner. In front of him the alley ended in a turning circle and a service platform below which a group of men were gathered. Inspection lamps had been set up and under their white unsparing glare a man knelt over a shape on the ground. By some accident, the watching men were perfectly silent. The police examiner moved to one side and he saw that where the head of the shape should be there was a ruin of pulp drawn away from the body in a brief stripe of red. It was so quiet that from behind a barred window to the right someone could be heard whistling 'The Blue Danube'. There was a hollow echo to it as if it came from an empty room. The way the body had been turned, one arm lay out to the side under the bright light of the lamp.
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