The Game

by Gerald Hammond

  Keith pressed the switch on the machine beside him. The reels began to turn in the recorder, and on the big monitor the interior of Chalet Sixteen appeared in full colour, as seen from above the fireplace.

  ‘This is a copy,’ Mrs Heller said. ‘The original’s at the bank.’

  The tape had already been turned to the arrival of Foster. His image stood at the left of the picture, just inside the chalet door, a corpulent man but hard-looking. The shirt which hung open over his hairy body was marked with sweat. ‘How you doing, friend of my youth?’ His voice was rough and heavily accented with a near-Glasgow twang.

  Close to the camera, only the top of Illingworth’s head was visible, in poor focus. ‘I’m about knackered,’ he said thickly.

  ‘But you enjoyed yourself?’ Foster walked over to take the other chair. The picture was of an almost empty room, but the voices came over loudly and clearly. ‘The girl was good?’

  ‘The best. If there’s any trick she didn’t know, I don’t know it either. I’m grateful for the introduction.’

  ‘More than an introduction.’

  ‘No.’ From the movement of his head, Illingworth seemed to be struggling to get to his feet. He gave up the effort. ‘I’ll pay my whack,’ he said. ‘I don’t accept that sort of hospitality.’

  ‘Suit yourself, chiel. But Humbert Brown can afford it.’

  ‘Who?’ From a slurred croak Illingworth’s voice rose to a squawk.

  ‘Humbert Brown. I work for them now. Didn’t you know? They want you to shut up about the Firth Bay job. You going to do that?’

  ‘No way,’ Illingworth said. ‘I’m not changing. Anywhere I think there’s been backhanders, I’ll speak out. It’s the on’y thing in the world I feel strongly about.’

  ‘Is it by God?’ Foster’s voice became ominous. ‘I wonder who’ll listen to you when it’s known you screwed your own sister.’ When the other man remained silent, Foster spoke on, apparently answering some gesture or expression. ‘Yes. Quite true. That hen’s your long-lost baby sister.’

  Illingworth dragged up a faint whisper. ‘Not true.’

  ‘Aye it is. And I’ve the whole thing on video-tape. I’ll play it over to you if you want. It’s good viewing. It’ll go great on stag nights. And that’s where it’ll go if we have any more trouble from you. There’s no mistaking your faces – it’s good that you both faced the same way. You’re ours now, chiel, and don’t you forget it.’

  Illingworth got to his feet with an effort. Expecting an attack, Foster got up quickly, but Illingworth made a rush for the bathroom door. The sound of vomiting came through, ‘Aye,’ said Foster. ‘Just you have a chat wi’ God on the big white phone. But he’ll not help you now. Sorry, and all that, but I had too much to lose. I had my head in a sling with the firm, and this’ll get me out. It was you or me, pal, and you got my vote.’ He yawned and scratched himself ‘I’m going back to my chalet to flake out for a bit. Pick me up whenever you’re fit to drive. No hurry. If she comes back again, well, it’s paid for. No hard feelings, eh?’

  He walked out, leaving the door ajar. Illingworth staggered out of the bathroom and looked around him. He seemed surprised to find the room empty. The colour recording showed the whiteness around his lips and ears, and the cold sweat on his forehead. He stood, swaying, in the centre of the floor. Keith thought that he had never seen a man so destroyed and yet still ready to fight. As the recording ended, he was staring to the side of the picture in the direction of the wall with the guns.

  *

  ‘Small wonder,’ Debbie Heller said, ‘that the poor sod lost his head and killed Foster.’

  If Howarth was moved at all, it was not by compunction. There was a cold glitter in his eye. ‘How did he kill him? Do you know?’

  ‘We know. Mr Calder figured it out for us. But we’re not saying. This is what they call a need-to-know operation.’

  Howarth nodded towards Keith. ‘He knows.’

  ‘He already knew. And I needed a man with me.’ She smiled maliciously. ‘I’m only a poor, weak woman.’

  To Keith’s surprise, Howarth smiled back. ‘You’re a poor, weak carton of dynamite,’ he said. ‘Well, how he did it is immaterial. The question is, can you prove it?’

  ‘We could if we wanted to.’

  ‘Let’s get together on this,’ Howarth said. He lit another cigarette. ‘With the capital at your command, the facilities of this establishment, my organisation and now that tape to keep Illingworth out of our hair, we’d have a license to print money. We could get our hands into almost every speculative commercial development in the country.’

  ‘It’s an interesting proposition,’ Mrs Heller said. (Keith felt the hairs prickle up the back of his neck.)

  ‘You’re on, then?’

  ‘No, Mr Howarth, we’re not on. I thought you’d have known by now that we don’t play that sort of game. We sell bodies, but bodies that want to be sold. We deal squarely with everybody and give value for money. There’s not many businesses can make that boast.’

  ‘A high moral tone’s all very well, but I never thought to hear a tart turn down a few million pounds.’

  ‘An ex-tart. And you’ve heard it now.’

  Howarth stubbed his cigarette out violently. He only wished that it could have been on one of the more sensitive parts of Mrs Heller’s delicate body. ‘You’re in no position to refuse. All that my firm has at risk is that one of its members, now missing, tried a bit of blackmail on his own account. He may have got killed for it – I wouldn’t know about that. And if he got killed he got killed for it here. And you know it. You’ve failed to report it to the police. Duty, I think, requires me to go to the police. So does elementary prudence. It’s unfortunate that your best-heeled clients will shy away the minute you get involved in that kind of an investigation. I’m afraid you’ll be ruined.’

  Debbie Heller gave a small snort of laughter. ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity,’ she said.

  ‘Full-page advertisements in Penthouse won’t keep you laughing in the jail,’ Howarth retorted. ‘You’ve suppressed evidence, conspired to pervert the course of justice . . . I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes after I’ve told my tale to the Regional Crime Squad. I know Superintendant Meikle well.’

  ‘I dare say that I know him better,’ Mrs Heller said, ‘and I don’t think my shoes would suit you at all. I’ve listened to your ultimatum, now you’d better hear mine.

  ‘I told you that I’d stopped a few mouths. Now you’d better do the same, including your own and those two shamuses you hired. All they want is money. Provide it.

  ‘Foster left a widow. See that she gets her pension. He was killed at work.

  ‘If you agree to my conditions, I’ll agree to you being allowed to tender, competitively, for the Firth Bay project. Oh yes, I know you’ve got three of the committee in your pocket with lucrative consultancies to your allied companies; but without my financing the project won’t go ahead at all.’

  Howarth’s face was openly sneering. ‘With tendering as fierce as it is just now, a winning tender won’t show any profit worth a damn. Would ten grand to you personally change your attitude?’

  ‘Only to the extent that if you dare suggest such a thing again I’ll have you barred from tendering at all.’ She paused and moistened her lips. A tiny flash of light pulsed at an ornament on her bracelet, from a tremor of tension that ran through her slight frame. Then it disappeared as she lifted her hand to see her watch. ‘In a little over two hours, your men are due to arrive and pour concrete in the bottom of the new pool.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Unfortunately for you, Mr Howarth, you can trust me but I’d be a fool to trust you. You said that I could shut mouths. I shut the mouth of my porter by making him lift a panel of reinforcement, dig a grave and carry the body down to it. He thought that he was doing it for money, but he was recorded on video-tape every inch of the way. Your man Foster taught us the trick and it’s a good one. That should shut
his mouth for keeps.

  ‘Beside the grave are two bags of quicklime. My proposition, Mr Howarth, is that you go down to the bottom of the pool. You cover the body with lime, and then with clay. Then you replace the reinforcement. You do all this before your men get here. If you don’t –’

  ‘I’ll see you in hell first!’

  Mrs Heller’s hand went out to the console on her desk. ‘Very possible,’ she said. The door opened. Three porters came in, one of them incongruously wheeling a trolley of bottles. There were no glasses. The porters ranged themselves in a line, two boxers and a wrestler. They did not look formidable unless you knew their background. Howarth knew it, and he lost colour.

  ‘If he interrupts me again,’ Mrs Heller said, ‘hit him. Don’t knock him out and don’t mark him, but hurt him.’

  Howarth opened his mouth to protest, and shut it again. For the first time he lost his air of being in command of the discussion. He was used to power but not to violence. The volcano of his ulcer was spewing hot lava. He fumbled for a bismuth tablet.

  Mrs Heller spoke again, and the undercurrent of Glasgow was stronger in her voice. ‘If you don’t do what I tell you,’ she said, ‘you’ll be found in your car in a few hours time, drunk to the world. Your car will be damaged, and your boot will have sprung open in the accident. In it will be Foster’s body. You can make what allegations you like. If they concern us, there will be no evidence whatever to support them. On the other hand, you will be amazed to find what evidence turns up against you. I’ll not tell you what it’ll be, because forewarned is forearmed; but a lot of thought went into it and, as you said, if I want my staff to jump through hoops, through hoops they jump.’

  She looked up at her porters. She was still totally in command, but over her pretty face was a great sadness. She got to her feet as if she was tired to death. ‘I don’t even want to know his answer,’ she said ‘I’ll leave him to think it over. If he says yes, see that he gets on with it and then hold him incommunicado until the concreting’s done. Mr Calder will make the recording. If he says no, let him choose his tipple, fill him full of it and then you know what to do.

  ‘You see, Mr Howarth, I don’t believe that you knew nothing of what Foster was going to do. Your agents were here too soon. And Foster had too easy access to too much money. And you heard him on the recording. It was as near as he could come to an apology. He didn’t say “I’ve too much to gain”; he said “I’ve too much to lose”. Those things between them drop you right in the clag, Mr Howarth.’

  She walked out of the room.

  *

  Keith Calder came back slowly into the reality of the hotel room, and of Donald Illingworth sitting apathetically. The image of that scene in Debbie Heller’s office overlaid it like a scene reflected in the glass over a painting. Even while he was remembering the tussle between the hard-headed businessman and the harder-headed ex-whore, something had been needling at the fringes of his consciousness. Something that he had seen or heard. Something in the recording. Something that he had noticed without noticing until his memory threw it up. Suddenly, it was clear in his mind.

  ‘You stupid, quixotic, hare-brained cunt!’ he said, and if the words were harsh there was more than a little admiration in his tone. ‘You didn’t shoot him at all.’

  Illingworth sat up straight, and Keith recognised the nervous intensity which had been lacking before. ‘I shot him,’ he said. ‘I’ve already admitted it.’

  ‘Admitting is one thing, doing’s another,’ Keith said. ‘I thought your manner didn’t quite add up right. It was evasive without being guilty.’

  Illingworth bunched his fists and started to get up, but Keith reached out and pushed him gently back into the chair. ‘Damn you!’ Illingworth said. ‘I’ve admitted it. Can’t you leave it alone? What business is it of yours?’

  ‘You said you weren’t a fighter. Don’t make me prove it. Business? You made it the business of Personal Service when you buried a body on their land They asked me to look into it for them. So that makes it my business.’ Keith shook his head. ‘You looked as guilty as hell. But still, I should have known better. A dozen wee contradictions have been niggling away at me, but I was so sure I knew it all that I ignored them or explained them away to myself Just for starters, you’re just the type to do every bit of it – except pull the trigger.’ Keith stared into Illingworth’s face, remembering other men whose cast of feature held the same racial and glandular imprints. One thing that he had learned in life was that if two men looked alike they reacted similarly. ‘You could plan and reason and theorise about death, but you lack the kind of ruthlessness that could take the final step.’

  Illingworth opened his mouth to protest and closed it without speaking. He shook his head, but mechanically and without any attempt to be convincing.

  ‘Another thing that nagged at me,’ Keith went on, ‘was that Hilary took a hell of a time to fetch up at her next appointment. But I pushed it into the back of my mind, because I long since gave up wondering how a woman can take so long to do anything. Then again, I wondered how a client, and on his first visit, would know enough about the audiovisual system to be able to shoot a man without being rumbled by the porter on duty. But a girl with a husky voice, deliberately pitching it lower, could get away with it.

  ‘I remember telling my wife that this wasn’t a woman’s act. But I hadn’t bargained for your sister – a girl brought up in a house hung with old guns, so much a part of her childhood that it gave her a sense of homeliness to have the Millmont House collection hanging in her chalet. And I hadn’t allowed for her having a brother to load it for her.

  ‘Your story of going along to Chalet Fifteen and confronting Henry Foster is too convincing and circumstantial to be a lie. I think it was true as far as it went.

  ‘But now, something else has come back to me. When I first went and looked at Hilary’s chalet, Number Sixteen, I was taken with her cassette-radio on the bedside table. It’s an expensive one, in an alligator case. Then, when I met your sister, I never saw her but she was lugging about an alligator-skin handbag of the same size and shape. At a guess, they were made and bought as a matching pair. I never looked inside it, but I suppose that, over and above the things women carry in handbags, the girls at Millmont House would have certain specialised items of . . . toiletry.’

  ‘You don’t have to pussyfoot around the subject,’ Illingworth said gruffly. ‘I’ve faced up to it. They’d have pills or contraceptives, deodorants, lubricants, disinfectants and God knows what-all.’

  ‘That’s what I supposed,’ Keith said. ‘And all personal to the individual. But on the videotape of Foster giving you the blackmail treatment, it was the handbag on the bedside table, not the radio. I remember seeing the clasp, without noticing it at the time. And she was away to keep another appointment. She must have picked up the wrong one. And she certainly wouldn’t do business without its contents. So she . . . came . . . back! Tell me what happened,’ Keith finished gently.

  Illingworth started to shake his head again, but in mid-shake he sighed and then the dam burst. ‘You know so much,’ he said. ‘You may as well know the rest . . . off the record. I can always leave a note, giving my official version. Hilary came back for her bag. When she was approaching the place where you turn off for Chalet Fifteen she saw me going that way and carrying the pistol. Well, even a man would have been curious enough to follow. She heard the whole thing and when I went outside I found her waiting for me. You were right, when it came to the point I just didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger. Behind me, Foster was laughing his head off, I could still hear him.

  ‘It must have been a hell of a shock for her, finding out like that that I was her brother. I was shattered. I could have collapsed on the spot. My brain seemed to have ground to a halt, and I was thinking through a layer of cotton wool. But she was absolutely calm. She didn’t say a word, just took the pistol out of my hand and walked in through the door. I heard Foster start to say someth
ing. There was a shot and I heard a voice speaking to the porter. It was more like a man’s voice, and for a moment I thought that he’d shot her. Then she came out and handed me the videotape. She led, almost carried, me back to Number Sixteen and she spelled out exactly what we were going to do. She’s all there is Hilary – even as a child she could stay calm and use her loaf when I was all of a dither. She stayed with me until she was sure that I’d got it. Then she gave me a quick kiss, a sisterly one, and went off to her next appointment.’

  They fell silent. Keith thought of the girl, brave and decisive. He wondered whether her motives had been selfish or noble. She sounded like a useful girl to have around in time of crisis. He wondered how Molly would have reacted to similar circumstances.

  While these speculations were flickering over the surface of his mind, at a deeper level he was sifting and sorting the known facts. The new story, as told by Illingworth, hung together; but if it ironed out a few blemishes in the story it introduced some fresh ones. He wondered whether this was the truth at last. Well, while Illingworth was talking it might be the time to find out. ‘Why were you carrying all your gear in the car,’ he asked, ‘almost a week before the Game Fair?’

  Illingworth looked at him vaguely and made a visible effort to think back to less haunted days. ‘It seems so long ago,’ he said. ‘I was heading for Newcastle to inspect some site-works. I’ve a pal lives near Catterick, an old class-mate; sometimes we shoot targets together. But with this on my mind I decided I couldn’t face it. He wasn’t expecting me.’

  ‘And that’s why you had a ball with you, of course. Why did Foster come in your car?’

  ‘He seemed to think that I might cry off unless he stayed close and egged me on. He said he might visit the Newcastle office of his firm and go back on the train.’ Illingworth sighed, shudderingly. ‘Do you have to ask all these bloody questions?’

  ‘Just tying up loose ends.’ Keith scoured his mind for more questions, to keep Illingworth’s thoughts on hard facts and away from dangerous abstractions. ‘Your sister could have made investigation much more difficult if she’d delayed finding the bullet-hole for a few months. Why didn’t she? That was one of the things that steered me away from her.’