by William Paul
‘I’m fine.’
‘Are you sure? Let’s have a look.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘How bad is the car?’
‘A little out of shape but I’ll probably get it back tomorrow.’
He rubbed his neck. It was a little stiff. When he bent over to pat Jill’s head he had to think twice before straightening up. Too sudden a movement caused a bristling of needlepoint warning pains. He wanted sympathy. He wanted uncritical physical contact. He wanted Sally’s fingers to knead his joints and knotted muscles, but he didn’t want the bother of explaining all that had gone on. Sally obviously didn’t know about Sapalski and he knew that, even if she did, she wouldn’t ask many questions. She never did, he thought gratefully, as she inspected him for signs of injury.
‘Hungry?’ she said when she was satisfied there was nothing too badly bent or broken.
‘No. I’ll survive.’
‘Coming to bed then?’
‘That sounds an attractive proposition.’
Sally watched as Fyfe undressed and climbed in beside her, moulding himself to her shape and her warmth, an arm round her stomach, knees tucked into the back of her legs. He kissed her neck and her sweet-smelling hair and held her tightly to him with one arm round her breasts and the other round her stomach. She fell asleep quickly.
He loved her madly, he thought, thinking back reluctantly to the ashen faces of Wilma Sapalski and Maureen Gilliland’s mother when they learned the news of the deaths of their loved ones. He couldn’t imagine how he would react if it was his turn to answer the door and find some sad-eyed policeman saying how sorry he was but . . . He and Sally had come a long way since their schooldays when they used to hold hands and snatch kisses between sessions of maths and geography. A teenage bust-up separated them for a few years but it seemed inevitable they would marry. Then came a beautiful baby, followed years later by an adult bust-up, divorce, rival lovers to taunt one another with, and back together again as if they had never parted. It seemed so natural, a process that had to be gone through to reach a certain point in time. This point. He had asked her to marry him again a dozen times. It was her who was reluctant, not him. He didn’t understand women.
Fyfe squeezed Sally against him, enjoying the feminine warmth of her along the full length of his body. He loved her. Whatever he did, he would always be in love with her. If it was always like this, he would happily stay and be safe here with Sally. But it couldn’t always be like this. Things changed. People changed. Times changed. Angela upset the balance of his hormones and his reason. Now Hilary was about to do the same thing to him. He believed in predestination as a good excuse for explaining his inability to stay on the right side of the line. Life, his life, was a relentless process of constant change. The process was continuing.
The dogs lay at the bottom of the bed, heavy weights pinning his feet down. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep but kept seeing John Sapalski’s lifeless body contained inside an oval of luridly green grass on the lawn in front of the big house. And all around Sapalski in their own exclusive little patches of green were other dead bodies he had seen, images of death stretching back down the years like stepping stones across a vast expanse of water. And when Fyfe looked up again there was Angela standing in among the bodies in her fur coat, smiling at him so suggestively and holding out her arms to invite him into the refuge of her intimate embrace. It was an offer he knew he was powerless to refuse.
He turned on his back, and then on his side away from Sally. He found a position for his head that relieved the mild stiffness in his neck. Then he turned on to his back again. At the foot of the bed, almost invisible, Jill raised her head and looked at him. For a long time he tossed and turned, moving in slow motion lest he do himself an injury, unable to keep his eyes closed for more than a few seconds at a time. Dead people closed their eyes and never opened them again.
He slipped out from under the covers, careful not to disturb Sally. She didn’t wake. He put on the same clothes he had just taken off and tiptoed out of the bedroom with his shoes in his hand like a thief in the night. Jill and Number Five followed him downstairs, obediently quiet, rib cages rubbing against his legs. He put on his shoes and tied his laces. He found a torch in the kitchen and, carving a pathway through solid black with the sharp-edged cone of light, walked out to the wooden shed at the bottom of the garden.
The floorboards were old and warped under the clutter of boxes, garden tools, and an old tumble drier wedged into the corner that appeared in the torchlight. He locked the door behind him and shifted the drier out of the way. Going down on his knees in the space he had created, he prised a section of shortcut boards up with the help of a paint-spattered screwdriver. The dogs sat beside him watching as the boards gave way reluctantly, edges sticking in the channels and holding them stiffly at a sixty-degree angle. The torch, balanced on a wooden strap on the side wall, showed a huddle of more than a dozen tin boxes. They lay like makeshift coffins about a foot under the surface, all different sizes and shapes. Some were faded tartan with pictures of castles and men in tall wigs, others were plain, one was long and narrow with a picture of a rose-fringed cottage among a riot of flowers on the lid. He picked it out and eased it open with his thumbs. The banknotes that were exposed seemed to swell out of the confines of the box. There were purple twenties, rusty brown tens, and blue fivers all piled on top of each other. The dogs leaned their heads forward to sniff inquisitively at the incriminating evidence.
Fyfe took out a handful until the pile subsided below the box’s rim. He counted what he had in his hand, three hundred pounds’ worth, and slipped the notes into his pocket. He sat looking down for a long time, ignoring the cold that crept over him, recalling the moment when he had taken the money from Angela and turned criminal. No turning back now. That was the problem with predestination. Once it had run its course, it was impossible to correct the mistakes that were made along the way.
He had been so calm about it, driving home with the cash in the boot, leaving it there overnight and only panicking in the morning when he realised just how easily he could be found out. He had found the tin boxes in a cupboard in the cellar, mostly the legacy of Christmas and New Year gifts of shortbread and chocolates, and packed the banknotes into them. He had agonised for ages over where to hide them. The shed was so obvious, yet so convenient and there was no reason whatsoever for anyone to suspect he had the money anyway. So he lifted the floorboards and scraped out a hole and buried his ill-gotten loot with the same sense of guilt as if he had been secretly burying a dead body.
Several times Fyfe had considered doing a Lady Macbeth and washing his hands of the crime by burning the notes and getting rid of all trace of them. He had never done it, of course. The very idea was obscene to him, closely followed by the alternative of packaging it all up and sending it to a deserving charity. Money wasn’t flesh and blood, it didn’t scream when it burned, but it had rights too. It existed in its own right and it had within it so much potential. It was, after all, better than any insurance policy or pension plan. If it ever proved necessary, it could easily keep Fyfe for the rest of his life. That was the beauty of it. That was why he kept the cash and couldn’t get rid of it. That was why he had to risk it. If, one day, he was to be found out, so be it. That was why Angela was able to order him to come to her, and he had no choice but to obey.
Fyfe took a single note and examined it carefully. It was a Royal Bank of Scotland twenty with a picture of Brodick Castle on one side and an eighteenth-century guy with a big nose and a curly wig on the other. It was old and creased and dirty and faded from passing through thousands of different hands.
‘What do you think, my dogs?’ he said. ‘Will we carry out a small experiment under carefully controlled laboratory conditions?’
Jill and Number Five sat panting quietly. Fyfe held the note by a corner between finger and thumb and took the cheap gas lighter he used for lighting other people’s cigarettes. He turned it to high
and produced a tall flame that created huge shadows and was reflected deep inside the dogs’ eyes. The flame jumped on to the hanging corner of the note and rapidly grew fatter and wider as it blackened and consumed it. Fyfe waited until the flame was at his fingertips, a pinprick of heat in the shed’s block of cold, and dropped the final piece. The flame was snuffed out in mid-air when it ran out of usable fuel to burn. The dogs’ bright eyes vanished. The light from the torch was pale and watery. The remaining thin strip of black ash drifted down, twisting and rocking from side to side in tantalising slow motion until it reached the floor. There Fyfe ground it to an unrecognisable powder under the heel of his hand.
‘One’s enough,’ he said. ‘Don’t you agree?’
Fyfe replaced the biscuit boxes in the hole, pulled the floorboards down and stamped them firmly back into position. He pulled the tumble drier back into the corner and scattered other stuff around to restore the appearance of dusty disorder.
The torch batteries were running out fast, the beam waning and narrowing. By the time Fyfe reached the back door of the house it was virtually useless. He went into the new conservatory to sit in one of the wide armchairs, inviting Jill and Number Five to lie on him to keep him warm. He sat looking up through the glass ceiling at the stars beyond a diaphanous veil of cloud and played his favourite game of trying to predict the near future. What would happen with Hilary? What did Angela want? But, like the torch batteries, his energy was fast running out.
The next thing he knew Sally was shaking him awake and the dogs were jumping to the floor. He shook his head to clear the fuzziness and flexed leaden muscles.
‘Are you deaf?’ Sally was saying, holding out his phone. ‘It’s been ringing red hot for ages.’
In the chair Fyfe looked at his watch but couldn’t focus. He had no idea what time it was but noticed the sky through the glass ceiling was definitely lightening. Threads of cloud straggled across his field of vision like broken veins across an eyeball. It was McInnes at the hospital, Fyfe’s dulled brain realised at the second attempt. Things must be moving.
‘Don’t you ever sleep?’ Fyfe said.
‘I can’t. My contract of employment expressly forbids it.’
‘What do you want?’
‘You asked me to call if there was any change in John Doe’s condition.’
Fyfe’s brain struggled to think who John Doe was. It came to him slowly. For McInnes, John Doe was the original anonymity of Valentine Randolph. His balaclava man must have regained consciousness. Now they would be able to get the full story, to explain away all the niggling inconsistencies and discover what was really going on when the meat mallet connected with the side of poor old Zena’s eggshell skull. Randolph would provide the truth.
‘What’s the change? Has he come round? Can he talk?’
‘He has just undergone emergency surgery.’
‘And?’
‘Remember I told you I wouldn’t bet on him recovering?’
‘I remember.’
‘Well, it looks like I won the bet.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s a non-runner.’
‘Dead?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘He won’t be talking then.’
‘That was my diagnosis too. You should have been a doctor.’
Sally was standing over Fyfe holding out a mug of coffee. Her hair was a designer mess. There was a red mark on her cheek where something must have been pressing against it. She was wearing her floppy bunny slippers and her legs needed shaving. She looked highly desirable. Fyfe decided he had two options, the more appealing of which was to go back to bed with Sally.
‘What is it, David?’ she said. ‘What are you doing down here?’
‘Business. What else?’
‘A big case?’
‘Yes. The murder.’
‘You’re not coming back to bed then?’
‘I’ve got to go back in.’
‘What? Now?’
‘Afraid so. Can you call me a taxi?’
Chapter Thirty-Two
Monday, 06.38
Sandy Ramensky came round slowly, viewing the yellow-painted walls and scrawled graffiti with detached inquisitiveness. A single light bulb burned above his head, hurting his eyes when he looked at it, making the aluminium toilet and wash-hand basin in the corner flicker and blink as if they didn’t really exist. Ramensky was fully clothed and lying on his side on top of a thin mattress that gave little or no cushioning from the unyielding surface underneath, and covered by a coarse blanket that smelled of stale urine and worse. He couldn’t feel the shoulder that was taking his weight. His toes inside his socks were very cold. He had the impression each was frozen solid and hanging off the end of his body like icicles on the edge of a cliff.
Ramensky moaned despairingly. The alcohol was still in his blood, narrowing the veins, restricting the oxygen supply to his limbs and his brain, causing a pulsing pain to beat behind his eyes like the thumping beat of a bass guitar. He knew he was in a police cell but he had no memory of what he had done or what had happened to him the night before to get him there. With his free hand he patted the tender bruises on his face, discovering that it was swollen and out of shape. The last thing he remembered was leaving home; a kiss for Marianne, a loving glance at sleeping Lorna, and out into the night. It had been quite a while since he had gone on a drinking binge seeking the utopian state of oblivion.
‘How’s the head, chum?’
A policeman in a white shirt was leaning over Ramensky. A smoothly featureless face like a ball of putty looked down, split at the bottom by a grinning crescent mouth. Keys jangled loudly. Distant laughter trickled in through the open cell door. Ramensky put his hand over his eyes and squeezed. The shock of fresh exterior pain briefly cancelled out the aching inside, then merged with it. He tried to open his mouth but found his tongue was uncomfortably large and tender. His dry lips were stuck together, so the only sound that emerged was an unintelligible grunt.
‘Have a good night then?’ asked the jolly jailer. ‘Want to tell us any more about your personal problems?’
Ramensky hid behind his hand. A frigid coldness spread along the length of his body as he desperately tried to recall what he might have said. Was it possible he had let slip the secret that might condemn him? Had he poured out the content of his troubled soul? Had he revealed his guilt? It was the kind of thing he tended to do. Was another putty-faced policeman called Fyfe on his way to this very cell to check the confession he had made overnight? Fyfe didn’t know he was wrong in his assumption, couldn’t be told. Who would believe a drunken madman who knew he was doomed as soon as he saw Mrs McElhose stretched out dead? He could tell his version of the story but no one would believe it. He didn’t know if he believed it himself. Perhaps his conscience had invented an alternative version of the truth so that he could live with what he had done?
‘How about beginning simply? How about a name?’
Ramensky moved his hand and the harsh electric light stimulated the pain buzzing round his head. He put the hand back over his eyes and tried to speak. A flashback came to him of a mouth with perfect teeth, hands grabbing for his wallet, the sickly taste of sweet dark rum. All three things overwhelmed him and were impossibly real for an instant, then they were gone. He was back in the cell, wrapped in muscle-tightening cold, his head pounding as though he was beating it against the wall. He moaned again and tried to sit up. It was a difficult manoeuvre. He reached out for support, swinging his feet down off the platform bed. His shoes were already on the floor. The laces had been removed. The policeman took his arm and steadied him in a sitting position. Ramensky held the blanket over his shoulders.
‘Come on. Tell us your name. There must be somebody worried about the state you’ve got yourself into.’
Lorna’s pale face with its huge innocent eyes appeared in his mind. She might be dead already, gasping for her last breath in this world to be taken while her hopeless father was
snoring off the drink. The doctors had said the final relapse could come at any time. He and Marianne had sworn she would never be left alone. At least Marianne would have been with her at the end.
‘What did I do?’ Ramensky managed to say, not recognising the thick sibilant voice that produced the words.
‘A little bit too much to drink,’ the policeman said. ‘A small disagreement with the management of the drinking establishment you were patronising and an assault upon their persons.’
‘Did I do that?’
‘By the look of you they gave at least as good as they got.’ He had opened a notebook and was waiting with a pencil held against the blank page. ‘So are you going to end the mystery and tell me your name?’
‘Will I be charged?’
‘The boss reckons you’ve had enough punishment. The pub doesn’t want to cause a fuss. I don’t want more paperwork. We’ve checked your prints and they don’t match any outstanding warrants. Looks like it’s your lucky day.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Half an hour before the end of my shift.’
Ramensky breathed deeply through his mouth. His secret was probably known to the murder investigation team by now. Fyfe was aware of it anyway and the rest were bound to have found out. When he hadn’t turned up for work, that would be the clincher. They would be out now hunting him on the streets; tracker dogs and helicopters and ‘Wanted’ posters showing the face of the dangerous murderer. They probably wouldn’t think to look in their own cells. As soon as he gave his name it would be all over. They would have their man.
‘Go on. There’s nothing in your wallet to say who you are. Give us your name and you’ll be on your way home inside an hour.’
‘Ramensky,’ he said, feeling as if invisible thumbs were squeezing a deep-seated splinter from his brain. ‘Alexander Ramensky.’
The policeman regarded him without rancour or even curiosity. He began to write in his notebook. Ramensky bowed his head in resignation.
‘I bet they call you Sandy.’