Close

by Bill James

  I’m ashamed – a bit too late – of letting myself get sat-navved into what I knew was a close. Some stupidity! Some lapse of vigilance! I wouldn’t say that was typical of me. Suicidal of me? More like it. Cairn was a narrow-mouthed close, capable of letting in from or letting out to Joel Street, the main drag, one car at a time. It culminated in a little circular area around which the higher-numbered houses stood. I think I’d already sensed it was disastrous, naïve foolishness for me to take the Focus into this noose, even before I heard the vehicle behind. I was supposed to be an expert on tailing techniques, but there might be even better ones around. Perhaps I’d grown smug and over-confident. Maybe I was only good at being the tail, not at realizing when I had a tail myself – in fact, two tails. The first followed me into Cairn Close, I looked in the mirror and saw a Mazda 6 saloon immediately behind me, and behind the Mazda some sort of estate car had pulled across the entrance to Cairn so there would be no entrances or exits for, say, a minute; vehicle as moveable barrier, a trick possibly learned from The Godfather 1 film.

  I stopped as soon as I felt something might be wrong, which was probably another bit of lame-brain. It gave them – the occupants of the Mazda – a stationary, easy to hit, objective: me, immobile behind the wheel, my head and upper chest encouragingly framed by the door window. The ‘them’ – the cul-de-sac artists – would be two, possibly three. Blasts came from both sides, plus a lot of glass splinters, the heavier barrage from the right. This would figure, because they’d know I’d be in the driving perch on that side, but it’s difficult to be precise in such a het-up, terminal situation.

  It’s interesting to recall that Captain Scott was buried under a cairn near the South Pole.

  FIVE

  In her own, rather roundabout and flamboyant way, Judith Vasonne, the sweetly built Careers teacher at school, was very influential in setting me off in the private investigator profession. She had real, true insight, as well as all the rest of it. When I went to see her during my last year in the sixth form it didn’t really mean very much. I was thinking of trying for a place at university and only went to consult Judy because she looked the way she did, and because she might know of some recruitment openings which were so brilliantly attractive that I’d forget about university and the fees burden and get out there and start earning pay and promotion.

  In fact, Judith had recommended a college course in chiropody, which she gleefully pointed out could lead either to a post in the National Health Service or in a private practice, with the possibility of an eventual partnership and even to the establishment of my own foot business.

  Careers was only one section of her work. She taught Religious Studies.

  Apparently as a chiropody selling-point she’d said, ‘There’ll always be feet, Tom. You’ll remember Isaiah: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.” The mountains are not crucial to this thought, and it’s a flagrant non-sequitur to think that because the feet are upon a mountain they will be beautiful. Some feet are ugly and no amount of mountaineering will make them beautiful. This is the chiropodist’s function and his/her consulting room will be just as effective at sea level as on the Eiger. Yes, there’ll always be feet, and there’ll always be trouble with feet – in-growing toenails, fallen arches, corns, gout, bunions, callused soles, deformities from cruelly high heels. There is opportunity in feet. ‘The logic and thoroughness of this topic, backed up by the Old Testament, had seemed powerful, irresistible. Isaiah had always struck me as a prophet you shouldn’t short-change. I felt half trapped by her glowing patter. I wanted to run from her – take the good tidings and peace to somewhere else, not necessarily mountains. As a matter of fact, my feet were OK and would have got me away fast. But out of politeness, and because she had encouraging breasts, today under a sketchy mauve bra and insubstantial silk blouse, I stayed a while, did some good nodding bordering on keenness, asked a few intelligent chiropody-type questions, such as the growth rate of toenails at the differing ages of a patient, and took a stack of literature from her: employment pamphlets and brochures, not the Old Testament.

  I was shuffling with showy vim through this lot, my face, I’m pretty sure, bright with interest, when she grabbed it all back from me with her long, varnish-free, elegant fingers, plainly custom-made for pouncing, and flung it up in the air, like an explosion in a magazines and journals store.

  She said, ‘This bores you speechless, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not speechless. Just bores me, scares me.’

  ‘Good. I wouldn’t want to think of you as thrilled by foot care.’

  ‘I don’t understand. It’s part of your job, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To guide us towards satisfying, secure work, regardless of the undeniable non sequitur, “How beautiful upon the mountains,”.’

  ‘Stuff Isaiah,’ she replied.

  I was still only a teenager but I felt the tone of things between us had begun to change.

  SIX

  So, the feet bumf flew and floated and nose-dived. It takes quite an effort to regard this quaint episode as the start of something darkly serious; and more than darkly serious for me, pardon the personal moment.

  I want to speculate a little further about the programme of events in Cairn Close that night. Consider the estate car, their moveable bulwark, immediately placed across the entrance-exit once I’d committed the Focus to Cairn, followed by the Mazda. It was a sophisticated touch, wasn’t it? It wasn’t there to stop me getting out. I’d have had to turn the Ford Focus and knock the Mazda out of the way first. No, the estate car’s main task was to prevent any other vehicle getting in – say someone returning home or simply visiting. It seemed to me a procedure the driver had swiftly improvised: one car enters to carry out the mission, the other to ensure there were no accidental interruptions. These people were flexible quick thinkers.

  So the Focus would have to sit there and take whatever came, and what came was sure to come very capably. Then the estate car would move away, allowing the Mazda to back out, and both vehicles could exit the area at a legal speed so as to remain unnoticeable by any police vehicle or some public spirited pest with a mobile phone.

  In Cairn there must have been at least two sharpshooters. Both Focus front side windows were smashed. As we’ve seen, because the bullets were almost certainly dumdum they would lodge at the first substantial point of contact, e.g. a flesh-and-bone body. They wouldn’t pass through it, possibly breaking, say, the left window, already having smashed the right at the onset, or vice-versa. Two shattered windows meant two weapons minimum.

  Clearly, these gunmen knew their trade well. In this kind of operation – blitzing a car from opposite points – there would be a danger that if one or both missed the target the colleague, colleagues, on the other side would get hit by friendly fire, whether the bullets were dumdum or not. An absolute miss, or more than one absolute miss, would mean that the bullet, bullets, of whatever type, had found nowhere to nestle until it, they, got to the mate, mates, over there, left or right. The attack party must have been very sure they would make a neat job of it, and that rounds with my name and price on them would go to the correct destination: upper-body me.

  I wondered whether they did any checks to make sure I was dead. I could have assured them on this, but, of course, the dead don’t declare themselves dead; it would be self-obsession. Handguns, even when used by high quality marksmen, are not always totally accurate: they kick, they veer. Those two or more would be able to see I’d certainly taken hits, but not that I’d taken hits in exactly the right spot or spots to end life. I refer to The Godfather again: Don Corleone gets struck by five close-range pistol rounds from the Turk’s gang while buying fruit at a stall but still survives until halfway through the film and a massive, natural causes, flowers-aplenty, crook funeral.

  The contingent in Cairn would probably feel reluctant to open a car door and get close enough to do a puls
e test. It would slow down their getaway. There’d be blood everywhere inside the Focus. Permit another film mention, please: remember that scene in Pulp Fiction where a car passenger is accidentally shot causing a terrific, inconvenient mess. The Cairn team would want to make sure they didn’t get mucked up by my blood and fragments, wouldn’t they? This wasn’t squeamishness or insult but a basic, sensible precaution. I can sympathize with that attitude. Blood is all very admirable when carrying out its true, useful function, freighting oxygen around the physical frame, including, of course, the happy production of stiffies in males. But spattered and on the loose it’s an entirely different commodity. I’ll vouch for that.

  And yet, if these were people hired to do a killing for a good fee, half in advance, half on completion, and managed only something less than a killing, mere woundings and/or disablements, they wouldn’t qualify for the full payment, so it was possible they did satisfy themselves I was an indisputable goner. They’d certainly get no argument from me in this regard. Death has its own decorum, or should.

  Before setting out on this trip to 12B Cairn Close I’d naturally checked via the electoral register and so on who lived thereabouts. Immediate neighbours included a couple called Nape – Felix and Veronica, not people known to me or to any of my usual sources. Maybe Bait would have been a more suitable name, though they probably wouldn’t realize why.

  ‘Felix, there’s a fucking Ford Focus getting shot up in the close, love.’

  ‘Really, darling?’

  SEVEN

  So, yes, the feet bumf had flown and floated and nose-dived. This was a significant sixth-form day, a day to shape, re-shape lives, Judith Vasonne’s as well as mine. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say the situation had one or two unusual aspects. After all, it featured a religious education teacher contemptuously flinging everywhere very well-meant, illustrated career guidance booklets about toes and feet generally and, in the same couple of moments, bellowing, ‘Stuff Isaiah,’ her voice likely to carry to other class rooms in this ersatz, breeze-block building, and even as far as the headmaster’s study. He might not care one way or the other about Isaiah, but most likely he would find her din inappropriate. And ‘inappropriate’ in that kind of world meant fucking outrageous.

  Would it be wrong to say a kind of alliance, even a kind of intimacy, between us had been built by this behaviour? Would she have allowed herself to show such disregard for honest chiropody material and for the scriptures in front of anyone else? True, some others might have heard her brash Isaiah put-down through these flimsy walls, but that was only part of the performance. The full unscholastic show had been reserved for me, her chosen audience, hadn’t it, right up there at epiphany standard? That’s how I saw things at the time and, of course, subsequently.

  She obviously thought she was only bringing into open view what I really felt about a future in feet, but was too timid and/or polite to disclose. My prophet quote – choked off by her – Judith would probably regard as a ruse to charm and flatter by parading something I’d just learned from her. True, we were still teacher and pupil, but this couldn’t be the complete picture any longer, surely. My guess was she disliked the isolation of her job. She looked for someone who could help her escape now and again and picked me. I didn’t mind this one bit.

  She’d be about twenty-two or three. I was seventeen. Perhaps she’d deliberately shortened the small age difference by acting like a steamed-up kid – making paper planes of the brochures, yelling her silly, disrespectful snarl at Isaiah. There are more than sixty chapters in that book: a lot to stuff. And to stuff Isaiah is to stuff also Handel’s oratorio, The Messiah, which is largely based on it, especially the start.

  It made me feel quite adult to analyze her behaviour like this, unscramble her motives and aims. Roles reversed? But maybe she had counted on that. It might be a two-pronged ploy. What do I mean by this? It’s complicated, but possible just the same: did Judy want to make herself seem younger by her infantile, wild carry-on, and, contrariwise, did she want to make me seem older by giving me the chance cleverly to spot why she wanted to seem younger? Convergence. This is the reason I said she put me on the way to the investigator career, and ultimately to Cairn Close closure, though I would never blame her for that – supposing I was in a position to blame anyone. As Andrew Marvell, a poet I studied at A-level, almost said, ‘The grave’s a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there retrace/The hows and whys that put them there.’

  Judith had a one-bedroom, second-floor flat quite sanely decorated in a private block a couple of miles from the school, and an old red Honda saloon given her by her father, so we were able to meet without much trouble. She wanted us to be what she called ‘sensibly discreet’. It seemed a weird phrase to come from someone who could get so noisily haywire. But I thought I understood the change.

  Affairs between teachers and pupils were not generally approved of even when the pupil was over the age of consent such as me then. Teachers could get sacked and blacklisted for that kind of saucy liaison. The censure was probably stronger when the affair involved a female teacher and a male pupil rather than a male teacher and a girl pupil. This arose from a kind of compliment to women. It assumed them to be steadier, more controlled, less lustful than men. The shock hit harder when one of them junked this decorous recipe. Judy said we should be as careful as we could be. I agreed with this. Most probably my parents wouldn’t think it nice for me to be having it off with a school mistress three times a week, and occasionally four or five, especially when the school mistress’s special area of interest other than their son was the holy Bible. They’d think chaos loomed. And, another reason for caution: Judy had an older brother and sister-in-law living in what I gathered was a big place just outside the city, towards Rastelle Major, She probably wouldn’t want them to know about her special kind of love life.

  Judith mentioned a novel, adapted as a film, called An Untimely Romance, by someone named D.B. Nailsea, dealing with this kind of education-based sexual hotchpotch and trying to portray sensitively the emotions involved. Judith did seem set on a romance and if there were people who knew of it or suspected it they would probably agree with the reproach in that book’s title, ‘untimely’. In fact, some might find this a bit mild. The school had several rancid old cows on the staff who might want to expose and punish Judith, so I made myself watchful when on my way to and from her flat, or when she drove me back to near my parents’ house in Gowter Avenue after a jaunt. She said she’d always hated the Honda because of its lines and garish colour, but now she’d become fond of it, grateful for it and to it. She mentioned an editor of the New Yorker magazine who struggled to keep all traces of smut out of its pages but failed to see the suggestiveness in a cartoon that showed a couple leaving their parked car and walking towards some dense woodland, the man carrying the vehicle’s back seat. Judith did a lot of reading and could refer to all sorts. So, we could both make references. I enjoyed this. It meant we had more together than just sex.

  My vigilance around the two locations paid off. During several days I began to notice a recurring figure, sometimes near Judith’s place and sometimes near where I lived. This was a slight, nimble-looking, middle-height Caucasian man, usually in a black anorak worn open over a dark blue T-shirt, jeans, suede boots, woollen bobble hat. He’d be about twenty-three or four. Most people know from TV drama about the techniques of secret surveillance and tailing. One of the tricks is never to meet the target’s eyes. This character never met mine. But I sensed that when I wasn’t watching him he’d be watching me.

  From Judy’s flat to where I, my parents and brother and sisters, lived was about a mile and a half, walkable, most of it through busy streets full of multi-cultured shops and restaurants. This geography made the surveillance quite easy. There were plenty of people about all day and well into the evenings. He wouldn’t stand out as he might have if trying to shadow me on an empty stretch of pavement. He could pretend to do some occasional windo
w shopping, to pass the time. In extreme crisis – that is, if he feared he might have been spotted – he could even go into one of the shops briefly, or take a couple of minutes in the foyer of Moviemad, a multi-screen cinema.

  I think it must have been the consistency day-by-day of his clothes that made me fix attention on him. Ironic this. Most probably he’d done what the snoop’s training manual laid down as mandatory and adopted such a dark, anti-flamboyant outfit so as to merge easily with other pedestrians, and remain more or less entirely anonymous. But eventually this attempt to stay unnoticed grew noticeable because of the flagrant effort to be unnoticed.

  Perhaps I failed to pick him out on the first couple of times he did one of his lurks. He and his dreary gear must have been unintentionally recorded in my waste-not-want-not subconscious, though. Repetition piled up these inadvertent memories until my sluggish workaday mind began to get nudged into awareness of them. And then the self-effacing garb became the opposite. I asked myself why was he so continually there, apparently without a change of clothes?

  I didn’t get an answer immediately. It took me a while to connect this dogged, drab-looking spy with Judy’s dread of a spiteful, malign colleague. Had one of the school staff, driven by jealousy, envy, moral primness, hired a professional nose to fashion a case against her? It wasn’t just his uniform that made him seem experienced in this kind of work. There was the eye-contact avoidance. There was the scrupulously preserved distance between him and me: generally about twenty-five metres, and swiftly readjusted to that after a temporary forced change. There was, too, the occasional use of a mobile phone, as if he were cooperating with another gumshoe – though I couldn’t see one – or perhaps with a controller in an office somewhere.