by Sarah Dunant
Behind his head a streak of blue sky was sandwiched between rain clouds. Silver linings. Important to keep looking for them. It was my turn to speak. It would be dishonest to say I was not frightened. But I was not going to show it. Not to him. “So, what should I do, Lenny? What would you do in my place?”
“That’s a tough one, Marla. I suppose it depends on what you want. If I were you …? Well, I guess it might go through my head that I could use the spoils to get back at those I thought were responsible. Me, for example. Yeah, if I were you I might consider that as a course of action. But I would discard it pretty quickly. It’s a house of cards, Marla. The whole thing. Pull one out and they all come tumbling down. On you as well as me. You’ve been honest with me. Now I’ll do you the same courtesy. If you ever tried to use the cocaine to undermine me in any way whatsoever, I wouldn’t hesitate to incriminate others. You and Elly. And that would destroy us all. But then, of course, you know that. Which is why you won’t do it. So, what other options are open to you? Well, you could try selling it yourself. I wouldn’t advise it though. You’re a clever woman, Marla, but I have to tell you you wouldn’t make it as a dealer. The first whiff of business and they’d be down on you so hard you wouldn’t know what hit you. Of course, you could always just invite them in, offer it back to them. That’s a possibility. Although I should warn you you’d be a lousy insurance risk for a long time to come. In this business tidiness is next to godliness, and you’d be one hell of an eyesore. So, what does that leave us with? Well, you can always get rid of it. Destroy it. In fact, that might even be the morally correct thing to do. But I can’t see you doing it. It would achieve nothing. And anyway, somehow I don’t figure you for a moralist. You have too much imagination for that.
“So, what’s left? Well, as it happens I do have a suggestion. I expect you knew I would. You see, when I asked Elly to take that flight for me, she didn’t agree to do it totally for love. Neither did I ask her to. I offered her money. I hope that doesn’t shock you. After all, it was only fair. I owed her. Not just for the shop but for other things, other favors done. You may think me a bastard, Marla, and you may be right, but among my many faults meanness is not high on the list. When you have as much money as I do it would be an ungracious, not to say dangerous, failing. I offered her a share of my profits. And the profits, had the deal gone through, were high. I told her I would give her thirty thousand dollars. Not a fortune, I admit, but enough to ease her passage home. Thirty thousand to carry a set of juggling balls across the Atlantic. Except, of course, she never took them. You did. So, by rights, the money belongs to you anyway. Part of the deal.
“What I am suggesting, Marla, is that I buy them from you. No bribery, just business. I, you see, could find a use for them. Revenge, as you well know, is not a pleasure limited to one party only. I am not offering you charity. I’m simply offering you what you have earned. As for me—well, I’d be getting them cheap. Half the market price. Then when they come looking for you, you can simply tell them the truth. They will, I promise, believe you. But I’ll promise you something else. If you agree to the arrangement, I will make sure they never come for you at all. Ever. That’s part of the deal. On that you have my word. And then it really will be over. You and I need never see each other again. I figure Elly would have approved of it too. You were more her next of kin than I was. If it had been her money, it would be yours now. So what do you say, Marla? I didn’t want it to be like this. And I know that money won’t, can’t ease your sorrow. But it might save you from other kinds of pain. Well … do you want some time to think it over?”
But I had already done my thinking. Thirty thousand dollars. The amount it took to buy my silence, to pay for Elly’s death. Except it wasn’t that simple. There were set rates for such things. Payments for death. Blood money. And I knew all of them. Wergeld. One of the foundation stones of Anglo-Saxon justice. If you killed a man, you paid a tithe to his kinfolk. The law upheld it. “You were more her next of kin than I.” As kin I could demand the going rate. People were valued according to their status. Serf, freeman, noble. There were documents to prove it. As much as twelve shillings for a noble, a fortune befitting their importance. Translate that into contemporary wealth and thirty thousand was an insult. Elly was worth much more than Lenny could ever pay. And there were other rules. If you didn’t have the money or if, for instance, you tried to deny your guilt, then there were alternative forms of justice. I knew the laws. Who better to enforce them? And what of my own safety? What of his stories of vengeful visitations? Well, there were only two people in the world who knew what I had in my possession. Lenny and J.T. Would J.T. tell and allow me to be destroyed, or would he perhaps stay silent and use the knowledge to spin another web to catch his prey? If the cocaine was missing, why shouldn’t they assume it was in Lenny’s hands rather than mine? J.T. and Lenny. Once again I was faced with the choice of villain and hero. Black and white. Or maybe it was more a choice of shades of gray. It didn’t matter anymore. I had decided. I took a breath, mighty and strong. Beowulf approaching Grendel—“from whose eyes there came a weird light.” Strange I hadn’t noticed the resemblance before.
“Lenny, I don’t know how to tell you this. But there isn’t anything to discuss. I would love to take your money. Elly’s inheritance. But I can’t. Because I don’t have anything to sell.”
His face didn’t change. I looked into the same expression of sympathetic patience. Even the voice was still persuasive. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
“I mean I don’t have your cocaine. I never did. Or at least only for a couple of hours. You were right to underestimate me. I don’t have that kind of courage. I destroyed it.”
“When?” Now it began to show. A tight, icy word, its buttocks pinned together.
“Right after I saw Elly off on her plane. I went straight to the nearest airport loo and flushed the whole lot down the toilet.”
A flurry of sand danced its way across Lenny’s feet, across his pale cream Italian shoes, luscious and expensive. Behind him the sliver of blue sky had been squashed by thickening cloud. Unless the wind changed, it would rain soon. All this I noticed in the split second it took Lenny to respond. And he was, I must tell you, a little less serene now. We were getting through to something. And it felt like anger.
“I think you’d better tell me more, Marla. Explain to me exactly how you did it.”
I felt my throat constrict, and my voice when it came was a little thinner, a little more anxious. Lenny had boasted that he had X-ray vision of my soul. And certainly he had proved himself adept at lie detecting. But lies sometimes cause the same tremors as guilt and fear. Even Lenny might be hard-pressed to recognize the difference. Everyone else had told their stories. Now it was my turn. Short but sweet. “You know it anyway. Indigo was there. She must have told you. From her seat she had a perfect view of the loo door. She could tell you when I went in. And how long I spent there. You of all people, Lenny, must know that I am hardly one of the world’s vainest women. I’m not in the habit of wasting time in ladies’ powder rooms. I went through the door, locked myself into one of the cubicles, took out the balls, and split them open one by one …”
“What did you use to cut the leather?”
“A Swiss Army knife. I’ve had it for years. Normally I keep it in my suitcase, but I had transferred it to my handbag that morning.” I paused, in case of further questions, but he said nothing. He was looking at me very hard. “Inside the balls were plastic bags, tightly packed. I pulled them out. It wasn’t hard. Then I broke them open and emptied the contents down the loo. I flushed the toilet twice to make sure it was all gone, wiped off any powder I had spilled with a tissue, flushed that away too, then packed the empty leather containers into the bottom of my holdall.”
The need to convince brought pictures to my mind, giving substance to the fiction. I watched myself, hands shaking slightly, digging my way through the soft leather, scooping out the bags, and staring in
awful fascination as the stream of crystalline powder tumbled into the water and sank slowly to the bottom. Afterward, as I stood by the washbasin, my face looked one hundred years old in the strip lighting. A mixture of triumph and fear. After all, I had almost done it.
“I left the cubicle, washed my face and hands, brushed my hair, and went out, pushing the plastic bags into the tampon incinerator. Oh, and one more thing. I threw away the Swiss Army knife just before I went through the departure gates. I was worried they might find it in the security check and confiscate it as an offensive weapon. I suspect Indigo might have missed that little detail in her report. She was awfully busy checking timetables to Zurich.”
“And how long did you say all of this took you?” He ignored the jibe.
I thought fast. “Not long. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes at most.” Assuming Indigo could read a watch, we could not be so far out in our estimations. In which case it would at least give him pause for thought.
“What did you do with the leather casings?” He didn’t miss a trick.
“Dumped them in three different litter bins in Charles de Gaulle airport. I had time to spare, waiting for Elly to arrive at her hotel. There was no point in going into Paris. I knew I would have to go to London. As soon as the receptionist told me she’d checked in, I took the first plane to Heathrow. The rest you know from her.”
I felt a spot of rain on my hand. Not the fine Scottish drizzle of yesterday, misting the landscape, but a fat, heavy droplet. We would get wet. Lenny was still looking at me, not a trace of emotion on his face. He doesn’t believe me, I thought. But he can’t know for sure.
“If it makes you feel any better, you were right,” I said quietly. “It had nothing to do with morality. I just wasn’t willing to risk getting busted for you. Maybe because your fear quota is so small, you assume the same in others. That was never my kind of bravery. Elly’s perhaps, but not mine. I would have taken your money, Lenny. With pleasure. I’m sorry I can’t.”
“Oh, don’t be sorry, Marla. I don’t blame you. I just don’t know whether I believe you.”
“Why should you doubt me?” Good return. Calm and steady.
“Because we’re both historians, Marla. And we both know the tricks of our trade. Don’t you remember our first real conversation? The problems of fact and fiction. Do you ever believe anything until it’s proved? Either by fact or by corroboration through at least one other source. So, you see, I do have a problem. Because the only other source I have is contradictory. It’s very simple, Marla. You tell me one thing. Elly told me another. You say you destroyed the balls. She said you brought them with you. ‘They’re safe. Safe and nearby.’ Those, according to Elly, were your very words. You were obviously lying to one of us. And somehow I don’t think it was her.”
In my mind church bells of victory chimed. I had won. If that was the only thing Lenny knew, then he knew nothing. I laughed, hoping that it sounded incredulous. “Oh, Lenny, you didn’t expect me to tell Elly the truth about it, did you? Last night you accused me of making mistakes, of underestimating the power of your relationship. I hadn’t realized, you said, that she would come to you to find out the final truth. You almost got it right. I did underestimate it. At first. But not by then. By then she’d made it clear exactly how much you meant to her. Even I could see that. I told her I still had the cocaine because I thought she—we—might need protecting against you. I knew you would be angry. And I thought the cocaine might be a kind of revenge for you. After all, you were in my brain, weren’t you? Didn’t it ever occur to you that I had crawled into yours too?
“Yes, I expected you to want it. And if you thought I had it, then you would have to bargain with me. With us. And whatever you felt, that meant you couldn’t hurt her …” I hit the last words harder than I had intended. We both registered the splinters in my voice. But I couldn’t stop now. The story wasn’t finished. “The cocaine was my guarantee that you would look after her. It didn’t work out that way. But at least I tried. I told Elly a lie because I knew she would repeat that lie to you. And I knew you’d believe her. And that way I could be sure of her safety. All right? Makes sense, doesn’t it? So don’t make me out to be more stupid than I am, Lenny. That would be your mistake.”
The rain was falling harder now. But neither of us moved. He shook his head. “You still think I killed her, don’t you?” And his voice was hushed.
“Well, didn’t you?” I heard the words coming out of my mouth. I had not given permission for their release. Somewhere inside my head there had been a revolution, and the extremists had taken over. So be it. You can’t stand in the way of history. I blinked the rain out of my eyes. Behind his frozen gaze something stirred. He made a small gesture of hopelessness with his hands.
“I can’t talk to you, Marla. You’re a madwoman. You’re so eaten up with hating me that you can’t see straight. Or maybe it’s not just me. Maybe it’s all men. I don’t know.”
“Don’t be coy, Lenny. Why don’t you just come out and say it? You’d really like to cast me as the raving lesbian, wouldn’t you? Loathing anyone who dared to touch her, punishing them in any way I could. It would make the story so simple. Well, I hate to disappoint you, but it’s a little more complex than that.”
I felt my voice break. Damn and blast. I did not want it to be like this. Not with him. I turned away. All I could see was rain.
“Look at me.” And his voice was so quiet I could hardly hear it. Sorrow or fury? “Look at me.” This time I felt raw nerves. I looked.
“I’ll say this one more time and one more time only. I did not kill her. Sure, I was in part responsible for her death. But then so were we all. You as well as J.T. Every single act that led her to the edge of that ravine in some way killed her. And if we were to be honest, then you figured pretty large in that action. Do you understand that, Marla? If there is blame, we all share it. You are as guilty as I am. But the difference is that I’ll get over it. And you never will. There’ll always be another Elly for me. To soothe the ache if not to heal it. Somebody willing to love me. But what about you, Marla? Who’s waiting for you?
“And I’ll tell you something else. You’d better not be lying about the cocaine. Because if I find out—and I will find out—and if I’m the man you think I am, then what’s another body more or less? Didn’t Elly tell me how you once made a suicide attempt? What’s on your medical record now? Unstable personality. You were devastated by her death. Everyone knows that. Sorrow sometimes drives people to desperate ends. Like walking into the sea, perhaps? I’d be very careful if I were you, Marla. Not believing me makes your life very dangerous.”
He took a step forward. A bolt of panic ran through me. Surely not even Lenny could afford a trail of bodies in his wake? I stuffed my hands into my jacket pockets to stop them shaking. The world was dark in his shadow. “I’m going back to the hotel,” I said in a loud voice. “Let me pass.”
For a moment he didn’t move. Then, with a slight smile, as if my fear amused him, he stepped to one side. I walked past him, heart thumping, eyes straight ahead. I was facing into the rain, water driving against me, soaking my clothes and plastering my hair close to my head. Above me the sky groaned thunder. It was Lenny’s storm: his black magic. I did not look back. Only when I had reached the protection of the hotel on my left did I turn. He was nowhere to be seen. I went in through the French windows, past an astonished waiter drying glasses behind the bar. In my room I called the Ullapool police. Did they need me for anything further? No, I was free to go. I took a shower and dressed quickly, stuffing the wet clothes in my bag. At reception I avoided the eye of the youth princess as I paid my bill. As she bent down to find me a piece of writing paper, I saw that Lenny’s key was no longer on its hook. At the desk I composed a hurried note to Dorothy: a stupid scrawled message of condolence explaining that I had to be back in London to mark exam papers, but I would call her from there. I gave it to the girl and left.
The drive to Inverness took hour
s, crawling behind caravans, through horizontal rain. I just made the 7:30 night train. Once again there was no sleep. Only this time the words wrapped round the wheels of the train were Lenny’s.
It was early morning when I arrived home, humping my bag up the hill from the tube. The trees along Parkson Road were ragged with late summer growth, the houses neat and brightly painted: a little like toy town after the Scottish wilds. The scale was comforting. Lace curtains and milk bills. I was glad to be back. Too tired to worry. Too tired to notice. Not as I came through the main door of the house, nor as I climbed the stairs. Even as I fumbled for the right keys, there was safety in the musty smell of the stair carpet. It was not until I put out a hand toward the lock and felt the door swing open in front of me, inviting me into the devastation of what had once been my home, that I understood how naïve I had been, and how, when someone wants something badly enough, there are all manner of ways in which they can go out to get it.
