by Gavin Black
“You … killed him for that?”
“It isn’t nothing. My God, it isn’t nothing. Yes, I killed him because I hated him. I always had. Trash can hate, you know, it can build up. He had you whole. There wasn’t much for me. Someone else might have taken more, Kate maybe. But I couldn’t. Kate would have got on with him. He liked a woman who could do things, better than most women, that is. His Chinese floosies! That was his solution. A man’s solution. Don’t tie yourself down with kindness, like you. Pay them off. I killed him. And I was able to stay on in that flat, searching for that paper. And I didn’t find it. He must have been lying. He hadn’t got around to drafting it out, to figuring out how little he could pay me off with. I hated him, do you hear?”
“Stop it, Ruth!”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Poor Paul. You loved him. You’ll never understand.”
“How could I?”
Her voice went low.
“No, how could you? And I tried to kill you. That’s simple enough, but you won’t see it. With you dead I’d have had something whole, it wouldn’t have been taken away from me. Kate wouldn’t have got it. I wouldn’t have minded Chinese floosies, Paul, but not Kate. That was going to be complete. And you were going back to her, I knew.”
“I wasn’t!”
“Oh, don’t lie. Don’t try it. Maybe I am a little mad. Maybe the Goldfish was right. Maybe when you hold a thing a long time and let it eat at you, something happens. It puts you right outside. That’s what I am, right outside. Maybe mad people feel like this, a kind of wall, you can see through, but it’s like thick glass. Terribly thick, Paul. What are you feeling, standing there on your side?”
“I wish I was dead!”
“Oh, Paul! Don’t …”
She began to cry, bent over, hunched, her arms hugged in to her breast. I stood watching her.
“Think I’m mad,” she said. “That’ll help. Think I’m mad.”
“Kang will be coming soon. Ruth! What are we going to do? I can’t see anything, I can’t.”
She looked up then. The tears were on her cheeks.
“There isn’t anything. I tell you … I’m way outside. But I won’t have to go back there.”
“Back where?”
“Back to the States, back home, with nothing. They can’t make me do that now. Jeff could have, but he’s dead. But I won’t have to go now, not when I’m outside, it doesn’t matter any more. Don’t you see?”
She looked at me.
“You’re frightened, Paul. Go away.”
“I can’t go away!”
“Yes, you can. Downstairs. Wait for Kang. He’s coming. I know that. He guessed. He came through the Botanics on a line to this house and found my gun in the pond. That’s when he guessed.”
“Where did you get that Colt, Ruth?”
“You gave it to me in Switzerland.”
“But you threw it out of a port-hole as we were coming in to New York.”
“I said I did. But I hid it and kept it. Maybe I needed the feel of having a gun nobody knew about. Maybe people like me need to feel that. Paul, Booney would have been all right.”
“What are you saying?”
“He’d have been like you, he’d have been all right.”
“Stop it, please!”
“Yes, yes. You go. Just leave me.”
“I can’t leave you!”
“I’m not going to take anything, I swear it. Not anything from that drawer. I’ll just wait here for Kang. I want to, Paul. By myself. You don’t do any good. Not now. You can’t. Poor Goldfish, he keeps coming back. I wonder if I really did it, how could I?”
“He was your spy?”
“He watched you … and Kate. If it had been a Chinese floosie nothing would have happened, nothing. Jeff would have been alive. Though I’m not sorry.” Her voice grated. “I’m not sorry I killed your brother. I took my time searching that flat and I didn’t mind at all. Now will you get out? I’m mad, aren’t I?”
I did go out. It was weakness, but I had to. I shut the door and went across the hall to my own room. I think in my heart I was hoping she would use one of those bottles in the drawer by her bed and that Kang would come to an ending.
I sat down. And when her door opened I wasn’t quick enough. I saw her running down the hall, then on the stairs. She was out of the front door before I reached a half landing. The engine of the Bristol started before I was under the portico. It snorted away.
“Ruth! You can’t drive that, you …”
It was true she couldn’t drive it. She wasn’t a good driver. In a Bristol you have to be. They almost test you for it before they let you have one.
The low black shape slithered down through the trees, the engine making a lot more noise than it should have.
The Daimler! It was in the garages somewhere. I ran out into the dark, then into a courtyard. Liu was washing the black bodywork with a hose. He stared.
“Tuan …?”
“Get out of my way!”
There was no sign of the Bristol when I got out into the street, but suddenly I knew, as though she had told me. Changi! Where she had chosen the stones for the fireplace this morning. She must have known all along that it was a dream, something that could never be made real. But she had been there watching them peg out a house we would never live in.
I’d had no guilt while she talked to me, it hadn’t come. But now it did, as I drove, jumping a traffic light, hearing a police whistle.
The guilt was there, of a love never made firm enough for her to feel and know it was solid. I’m outside, she had said, I’m outside. It wasn’t new, it had been like that from the beginning. She took the gun I gave her because I thought she should have one in Singapore and hid it, telling me she’d thrown it away. The evil mightn’t have come at all, it needn’t have come.
You can think bitterly of the dead, it doesn’t serve you, but you can do it. I thought of Jeff. The Chinese floosies. She wouldn’t have minded that with me, it wouldn’t have been a threat at all.
When it has left the city, the road to Changi straightens, it runs through rubber and kampongs, climbing only a little to sink again quickly. I was doing eighty on a rise when I saw the smashed fence. I was well past it before I could stop the car. I had to use reverse.
The Bristol was down there in an irrigation ditch, its wheels in the air. One side had been almost torn off by the concrete stanchion holding the steel wires of the fence. Ruth was under the twisted wreckage of that and I found her in the faint glow from the Daimler’s headlights.
I didn’t know whether she was alive or not until there were other lights, cars stopping, then a white beam staring down.
Ruth’s red hair, never cut short, was fanned out against the dull green of dank ditch grass. Her eyes were open.
“Paul, I wanted to get to …”
“I know. Don’t talk, honey, don’t talk.”
“Paul. I never made anything.”
I looked up.
“Can’t you get down here? Help me lift this stuff.”
People came down. There was moving about.
“Lift. Over there!”
Someone touched me. It was Kang.
“It won’t do any good,” he said.
I looked again at Ruth in the white glare of that light Kang held. Her eyes were shut. Her colour seemed to change, as though in that moment her life just drained away.
Later I stood by the Daimler, leaning against the open driver’s door. Kang came up to me.
“Mr. Harris, I’m very sorry. I’m truly very sorry.”
“I think you are, Kang,” I said. “I think you are.”
It was dawn when I got back to the house which had been too big for two. The lights were still on and the second houseboy waited, looking scared, the skin of his face drawn back on to bone.
“Coffee, tuan?”
“No thanks.”
“Something, tuan?”
“No. Just put out the lights. All of them. I�
�ll stay here for a while.”
You couldn’t call it Ruth’s room, the one I stayed in, or mine, it wasn’t. The success symbol. The chairs were comfortable to sit on, well sprung and well ventilated. And out there on the lawn where the Christmas tree had been was a faint dusting of grey light.
Ruth had said I could make something new to-morrow. She was probably right, but I wondered how.
After a time a car came up the drive and stopped under the portico. I heard Kate say:
“He must be here. Look, everything’s open. They said at the police station he’d come home.”
“All right, we’ll go in and have a look around.”
It was Russell.
“I think it’s terrible,” Kate said. “That he had to make a statement to-night. Why on earth couldn’t they have left him alone?”
“Maybe he didn’t want to be left alone.”
I reached out a hand, switching on a table lamp, and they were drawn to it, but didn’t come right up to me.
“Sit down,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”
“Oh, Paul, we had to see you.”
Russell didn’t say anything. His face was blotched-looking with weariness, as though he had been around all night, trying to do things for me, and drinking to keep him at it. But he had never actually come into a room where I was, at the police station or the mortuary.
Russell and Kate sat down side by side. He was lighting a cigar and I didn’t think he wanted it, just something to do. Kate leaned forward, her hands together. She looked as though the light by my chair bothered her a little, harder on her than on me.
“Paul, I’ve been talking to Russell. There’s something I had to say. I hope you won’t think I’m butting in at a time I shouldn’t be?”
“I won’t think that.”
She looked at her hands.
“You ought to get out of this life, right out. Isn’t that obvious? You oughtn’t to live in this country any more.”
“Because of what’s happened, you mean? I can’t see that, Kate. This is still my home.”
“Oh, don’t give me that! I don’t want to hear it again. I thought all this might have shaken your obsession. But it hasn’t?”
“No.”
She moistened her lips.
“Paul, I have my story for Day now. About the gun running. I’ve been working on it ever since I got back from Kuantan. It’s documented and you couldn’t do a thing about it. There’s even eye-witness stuff, for I was there for a bit, wasn’t I? That story would do me a lot of good back in the States.”
“Then why don’t you go ahead and use it?”
She looked at me.
“I can’t. I was going to, right until to-night. But now I can’t. I can’t have you put up for people to throw things at. It’s what I’ve always said about a woman in this kind of job. She’s not any good really. She can’t be ruthless enough. A man would just send it in. But I can’t. I’m flying out of here. I know the agent of a big airline. He’s got me a seat for to-morrow. I’m going back to America.”
“For good?” I asked.
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“I’m sorry, Kate.”
“Are you? You wouldn’t think of coming to the States to live?”
“No.”
“I see. I guess that’s all I had to say. Russell, will you take me back to my hotel?”
I didn’t want Russell to go just then.
“I’ll send you in the Daimler. Liu is still up.”
“Would you? Thanks.”
I went out to the portico with her, switching on all the lights again. Liu, looking sleepy, got out from behind the wheel and opened the door for Kate. She turned to me on the steps.
“Day, New York, would always get me, even if I’ve left them.”
“I’ll remember that, Kate. And a lot else, too.”
“I wonder? I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry.”
I reached out to touch her arm, but she turned away, running down the steps and getting into the car. Liu shut the door. I stood there watching Kate drive away in Ruth’s car, down through the trees. Then I switched out the lights and went back to Russell.
He had found himself a drink and was sitting with it, not wanting it any more than the cigar. I suddenly saw the unbearable loneliness that waited when he left, which he would soon. He looked up.
“Well, you’ve sent Kate off in the Daimler. What now?”
“I don’t know.”
Russell put his drink on to the floor and threw his cigar out across the veranda into the garden. He stood.
“I do,” he said. “You’re coming home with me. You can live there. Plenty of room. I’m taking you out of this.”
“You do that, Russell,” I said. “You do that.”
THE END
A PAUL HARRIS NOVEL
‘Good fast thriller’
Daily Express
‘Very intelligent thriller...smooth and strong
on background’
The Sunday Times
‘Paul Harris is up there in the major league’
The New York Times
A TALE OF MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE SET IN SINGAPORE
Paul Harris is an outsider – an unconventional businessman attempting to assimilate into Asian culture. His operations in the Far East bring him wealth and adventure, but not without risk. For while opportunities are plentiful, so too are a number of ruthless opponents, and more often than not Paul Harris finds himself a man on the run, pursued by a violent and dangerous enemy.
It is rare to find, in a novel of suspense, pictures of a distant country that are as vivid, authentic, colourful and moving as Gavin Black gives us here: or characters so distinctive and mysterious.
T H E L A N G T A I L P R E S S
w w w . l a n g t a i l p r e s s . c o m
