For a few moments they turned round and round, the only noise being involuntary grunts of effort and the slither and pad of feet as they made inexpert attempts to trip or cross-buttock each other.
All Goldsmith wanted now was to get out, not merely of the room and the hotel, but out of the whole sprawling mass of bricks and stone and stench of humanity that was London. His opponent’s eyes were bright with something which might have been enjoyment of the struggle and his features were taut with the will to win. His dressing-gown belt had come undone and the garment fell away from his naked body like the skirts of a dancer in some obscene floor show. An ugly raised scar ran down from his adam’s apple then turned along his collar bone. Goldsmith felt desperately sick. His need to get outside into the fresh air had left the area of mere health and entered that of survival.
A sudden change of tactics brought Housman close up against him. The man tried to use his forehead as a batteringram and caught Goldsmith a painful blow above the right eye. In retaliation he stamped down violently on Housman’s naked foot. He screamed, his grip relaxed, Goldsmith tightened his own on the dressing-gown front, did a sharp half-turn and hurled the man from him with all his strength.
He was propelled across the room out of control straight towards the curtained window. The lower sill caught him behind the knees; involuntarily he sat down; the curtains parted behind him.
Then he was gone.
It was so stagy that Goldsmith could not take it in for a moment. Even when he parted the curtains and peered down into the dimly lit kitchen area below, the body had that carefully arranged look the cinema always produces in such vertical shots.
A door was opening below. Someone had heard the noise of the fall or perhaps was just coming out to deposit rubbish in a bin. The panel of light fell directly across Housman’s body.
Goldsmith waited no longer. He hoped that he would have gone down himself to see how badly injured the man was. But now the need was removed and only the need for flight remained. He felt quite cool.
He glanced quickly round the room. It bore surprisingly little evidence of struggle. The epic qualities of the fight had been mainly subjective. A rug needed straightening. He closed the document case and placed it by the bed.
The corridor outside was empty. He ran down the stairs, checked at the bottom, saw that the lounge still contained only the two culture-seeking teachers, walked swiftly by them and out into the night.
It was not till he reached his own hotel room that he realized his coolness had not extended to checking his own appearance. His clothes were dishevelled, one of his lapels was torn, and he had an angry contusion over his right eye.
He sat on the bed and poured himself a whisky. He felt he needed it badly, but one sip was enough to undo all Colonel Maxwell’s earlier good work and he was violently and comprehensively sick.
CHAPTER V
HE WAS AWOKEN by bells and found himself sprawled stiff and still fully clothed on top of the bed. His mind had refused to admit the possibility of even attempting sleep. And to put on pyjamas and slip between the crisp white sheets with the image of Housman, naked and bleeding among the dustbins, still clear in his mind had seemed a blasphemy. But his body had decided otherwise.
He drew back the curtains. Sunshine came in, weak but still dazzling. The bells stopped suddenly. It was Sunday morning and the first sitting at church had begun.
He stripped and went into the shower. The rush of water was sharp and refreshing, but inevitably it brought Housman back to mind. How was the man? He must surely have cracked some bones, though perhaps the stacked-up cardboard boxes might have broken his fall. He had certainly looked unconscious from the second-floor window. But it had been dark and he had not dared look for long. Not that it was much of a height, he reassured himself. You could jump out of a window like that, get up and walk away.
He dressed and went downstairs in search of a paper. The first three he looked at contained no mention of the incident. His spirits began to rise. It had been late, of course, but it would surely merit a mention if the injuries had been serious.
The fourth had a stop press column. It contained the simple statement. A man fell to his death from a second-floor room at the Kirriemuir Hotel last night. Police have not yet ruled out foul play.
He felt nothing, turned to the back page, looked at the sports news. Then he turned the paper over again. The words were still the same. He was seated in the dining-room and the waiter now approached to take his breakfast order, but he found it impossible to contemplate being still.
‘Later,’ he said, standing up and almost knocking his chair over. He headed back to his room, eager to examine what he felt. It was not guilt, or at least not guilt pure and simple. At its simplest, the business had been a dreadful accident, contributed to in no small part by Housman’s own aggression. But there was no way of keeping things at their simplest. His presence in the room had not been an accident. On one level it was the result of a drunken impulse. Motorists whose drunken impulses resulted in fatal accidents were tried on a count only one stage less than murder. But at another level, it had been an investigation, unofficial, yes, and illegal too, but necessary – an investigation into a suspected man’s identity.
But on what flimsy grounds! The only piece of real evidence, if it deserved that title, was the passport’s revelation that Housman had been in Peru. And that knowledge was a result of the search, not one of its causes.
Goldsmith found he was walking round and round his room. The daemonic urge to activity which had led him into such straits the previous night was again in possession. He picked up the telephone and asked to be connected with Templewood’s hotel. It took only a moment to get through but he was already tapping the receiver rest impatiently. Mr Templewood, he learned, was out. No, they did not know when he might be returning.
He left a message asking Templewood to ring him. Probably the man had not been back to the hotel since he left the reunion. He felt a twinge of the old teenage envy of the man’s sexual success, but also a near-puritanical distaste at the thought of its attendant indignities.
It would probably be wise to sit quietly now and wait for Templewood to call. But he acknowledged that this was beyond him. He had to get out and walk. He thought longingly of the great empty expanses of rolling countryside which lay outside his Yorkshire home. What the hell was it that had made him agree to let his name go forward on that short list? Success would mean he would have to spend much of the year down here in this ant-heap. Perhaps his initial decision to stand as a local councillor had sprung from a sense of the difference between what he had got and what so many of those he now represented lacked. Or what he lacked and what they had got. But to give up his sense of space would be a gesture so futile as to be unrecognizable.
A police-car passed him, lights flashing, siren howling, and he stopped in his tracks. Housman was dead. Housman had given everything up. His wife and child would have been roused from their beds in the early hours of this morning to be given the news. How would they live with this new situation?
How would he live with it?
He had made blunders before, bad decisions, and survived. The resilience of the human spirit was tremendous, not just in the nice safe moral areas of bearing grief or accepting sacrifice, but also in helping man to survive self-knowledge. Kipling’s ‘If’ needed a second section. A parody sprang half formed into his mind.
If you can cheat the poor and still sleep soundly,
Betray your friends and still laugh by their side,
Destroy the joy of others, swearing roundly
Nothing but good was meant to those who died …
Yes, survival was always possible. Only in some cases it came easier as the years passed. In others, not so easy.
If Housman were Hebbel, that would make it easy. It was suddenly more important now than at any stage previously to establish the man’s identity one way or another. And here in London on a Sunday morning, there was only
one place he could make a start.
Half an hour later he was walking down Wath Grove. There was only one house on the left-hand side with scaffolding outside it and Housman had come out of the house before this. Its neighbour’s face-lift accentuated its own shabbiness. The façade bore generations of London dirt and the paint was flaked and peeling from the front door. As he had surmised, the house was now divided into flats, and the yellowing slip of paper opposite the bell of the second-floor flat bore the name Sandra Phillips. He pressed it. A few seconds later the door opened and he went in.
The entrance hall was dark and smelled of fresh bacon and eggs and stale tobacco fumes. But the decoration looked new and the stairwell was in a good state of repair. The door to Sandra Phillips’s flat had been newly painted, and the decorative amelioration clearly continued beyond from the glimpse he got when the door opened on a chain and a woman scrutinized him coldly from within.
‘Yes?’ she said.
Goldsmith looked at her speculatively. The simplest explanation of Housman’s visit was that she was a prostitute. If that was the simple extent of their relationship, she could hardly help. But if their relationship were stronger than this, it was possible she might know something. The first thing was to test if she knew who Housman was.
‘I’m a friend of Neil Housman’s,’ he said.
‘Oh. You’re a bit early.’ She made no move to open the door.
‘I’m just in town this morning,’ he replied.
She continued to examine him with the same cold assessing gaze. He was being weighed in a balance and he had no idea what was in the other scale. Finally she closed the door without speaking and he thought he had failed the test. But she only wanted to unfasten the chain and when she opened the door again, her face was lit by a smile of real charm.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘The better the day, the better the deed, I suppose.’
She was about his own age, he surmised, perhaps younger; a tall rangy woman with light brown hair which hung loose over her shoulders. She wore a housecoat with tiny blue and white checks, matching the décor of the kitchen which was visible through an open door to the left. Her face was free of make-up and she might have been part of an advert for butter or milk or cheese or anything healthy, rural, familial.
‘I was just finishing breakfast,’ she said. ‘Like a coffee?’
‘Thanks,’ he answered. She went into the kitchen and he examined the room he was in. As far as Sandra Phillips went, any shabbiness in this building stopped at her front door. The floor was highly polished woodblocking, strewn with rugs whose provenance Goldsmith was not equipped to guess at, but which looked exotically expensive. The furniture was a curious mixture. A large leather-upholstered sofa was flanked by a couple of ultra-modern armchairs. The lamp which hung over the elegant oval-shaped rosewood table might have come out of a space-ship. There was no sign of any morning paper anywhere.
‘Like what you see?’ asked the woman from the kitchen door. His examination must have been blatant.
‘Yes,’ he said, taking the mug of coffee she offered him. ‘It’s nice. Some good stuff. Then, I suppose, someone in Neil’s position …’
He let his voice tail away. She smiled at him again, this time with no charm at all.
‘I hope you haven’t got the wrong impression from Neil. This stuff is mine, paid for by me. The lease of this place is in my name. And I pick and I choose and I get paid. I don’t get loaned out for the weekend.’
‘No, of course not.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘This is good. Does it come as an extra?’
She looked at him thoughtfully, then decided to laugh.
‘How long have you known Neil?’ she asked, sitting down in one of the streamlined armchairs. Goldsmith sank into the leather sofa. Despite the estimated closeness of their ages, he felt they were correctly categorized by their choice of seating.
‘A few years off and on,’ he said, grateful for this lead. ‘What about you?’
She didn’t answer his question but said, ‘You didn’t tell me your name.’
‘Maxwell,’ he said. ‘Jerry Maxwell. Has Neil ever mentioned me?’
‘He doesn’t talk about himself much,’ she said, adding with a smile, ‘not about himself now, anyway.’
‘More about his young days, you mean?’ said Goldsmith casually, trying to control his excitement.
‘That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?’ she said enigmatically. ‘More coffee?’
‘No, thanks. I get the impression that Neil spent a lot of time abroad when he was young.’
‘Do you? You’d better ask him yourself if you’re interested. I charge high because I keep confidences. Well, if you’ve finished your coffee, we might as well start.’
She stared at him evenly out of light blue eyes framed by unblemished white.
If you want to start, that is.’
Goldsmith felt uneasy. She was too astute for comfort. He momentarily considered confiding in her, but instantly dismissed the idea. Tarts with hearts of gold were as rare in his experience as virtuous women were to Solomon. He must avoid rousing her suspicions further. Eventually the news of Housman’s death would reach her and she would think hard about her Sunday visitor. But unless there were strong emotional ties with the man (which on present evidence seemed unlikely) she would surely be reluctant to go to the police. Meanwhile he suspected she knew something of Housman’s background and he wanted to find out what it was.
In any case he found that the thought of getting into bed with this woman had begun to excite him. At least there was no risk of fiasco.
‘Yes, I’d like to start,’ he said.
‘Fine. Bedroom’s through there. I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.’
He listened carefully at the bedroom door for a while, suddenly suspicious that she might be ringing the police, or perhaps the Kirriemuir to get Housman to confirm he had sent Maxwell. But she busied herself in the kitchen for a few moments, then through the crack of the door he saw her go into what looked like the bathroom.
He turned now and examined the bedroom. The bed was large and luxurious, the other furniture simple and efficient. On the dressing-table a lidless jewel box glistened and shone like a child’s treasure-chest. One of the wardrobe’s sliding doors was half-open, revealing a line of clothes in close formation. The window looked down on Wath Grove itself, still not stirred from its Sunday morning somnolence. Puritanically he pulled the curtains tightly together and began to undress.
The bed proved to be as comfortable as it looked. The sheets were still warm from the woman’s body and Goldsmith lay in a state of great physical excitement, Housman’s fate and Housman’s identity relegated to the depths of his mind for the time being. He heard the door open and closed his eyes. Footsteps approached and the bedclothes were pulled back from his body. He opened his eyes and looked up.
She was wearing a simple white blouse with puffed sleeves and a short grey skirt. Her hair had been plaited in two long pigtails which were pulled forward to hang over her breasts. In her hand she held a long bamboo cane with a split end.
She looked down at him in silence and he felt his desire failing.
‘Interesting,’ she said, raised the cane and brought it down with all her strength across his knees.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he screamed, rolling out of the bed at the side opposite to her. She came round the bed after him and caught him a stinging blow across the shoulders before he could rise.
‘There’s been a mistake,’ he cried. She swung at him again. This time he caught the cane in both hands and wrenched it from her grasp. Slowly he rose and they faced each other, only a couple of feet separating them.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’d better get dressed, I think.’
Once again the thought of confiding in her entered his mind, this time more forcibly. Then the main doorbell rang.
She went to the wardrobe, picked out a long silk dressing-gown, slipped her arms into it and without a glanc
e at Goldsmith left the room. With self-defeating haste he began to pull on his clothes. Whoever had rung would have to climb the stairs and presumably receive the same kind of scrutiny he had undergone. Unless she had a minder of some kind and this was he. Goldsmith was ignorant of such things and wanted to be fully clothed when he found out.
There was a sharp rap at the flat door and he heard Sandra open it on the chain.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Miss Phillips?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’re police officers. May we come in?’
‘What’s it about?’ She did not sound impressed.
‘We’re investigating the death of a man called Housman, Miss Phillips. I believe you knew him. He had your number in his diary. But we’d much rather talk about it inside.’
Goldsmith waited no longer. Sticking his tie in his pocket and thrusting his arms into his jacket sleeves, he moved at speed to the window and opened it. He was two stories up, about the height which had killed Housman. Parked outside the house was a blue 1300. It was empty as far as he could make out. Its occupants must all have gone into the building.
The street itself was still quiet. A car went slowly by, two children were playing about fifty yards away, a dog waited patiently on a doorstep for someone to let it in.
Down was not very attractive, up was clearly impossible. He stepped out on to the sill and launched himself sideways.
There was no real danger. The decorators’ scaffolding on the next building was only a matter of a yard or so away. But he knew that if he had waited even a second, he might have remained crouching on the sill till the policemen pulled him back in.
He swung down from one level of scaffolding to the next with an ease which reminded him of Tarzan’s exploits in the films of his childhood. Overconfidence led him to hit the pavement with more force than he intended. Winded and shaken, he pushed himself up from his knees, which still ached from the woman’s assault, and set off at a discreet trot towards the busier road on to which Wath Grove abutted.
A Very Good Hater Page 4
