Close

by Bill James

  ‘I’ll gladly accept that on his behalf, sir. I’m sure he’d wish me to.’

  ‘It’s all the more disrespectful and patronizing because he is in some ways the truly important “item” of the three of us, isn’t he, Harpur?’

  ‘In what sense, sir?’

  ‘He can tell us why he is here, in the close.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Oh, but you’ll say he can’t tell us this or anything else because he’s dead as a result of coming into the close. That much we do know.’

  ‘He can’t tell us this or anything else because he’s dead as a result of coming into the close. That much we do know.’

  ‘Sharp of you, Col.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘When I speak of reaching in, what am I getting at, Col?’

  ‘This is quite a question, sir, not rhetorical, but you’ll know the answer to it.’

  ‘Pockets, Harpur.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Why I mentioned “fruitful”. Perhaps, though, I should have said, “potentially fruitful”. I like exactness, Col. I appreciate nuances.’

  ‘You’re famed for it, sir. Many’s the time I’ve heard folk who’ve just talked with you say, “That Mr Iles, was there ever such a one for exactness and nuances?” (Answer, “No” – rhetorical).’

  ‘Do you see what I’m getting at, Harpur?’

  ‘In which respect?’

  ‘“Potentially”. Why I amended to that.’

  ‘There’ll definitely be a reason.’

  ‘I referred to the fruitfulness of his garments, meaning pockets. But, obviously, Col, we cannot know what will be in those pockets until we’ve got our hands into them and discovered their contents.’

  ‘Undeniable,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘And if we do not – cannot – know what is in them it is presumptuous to say the pockets will be “fruitful” in the sense I intended originally. Therefore a caveat type word is required – “potentially”. His pockets might or might not provide us with helpful information. An imponderable at present.’

  ‘I think I understand.’

  ‘Some people, coming on an exploit of this kind, the Cairn Close kind, would empty their pockets before starting so that, should things go wrong – as in this case one might admit they rather have gone wrong – there will be nothing that gives a clue as to the details and purpose of the operation. Although Hart seems to have ignored some of the elementary precautions when entering the close, this does not mean he has ignored all precautions. And so we need “potentially”, Col, and why I feel entitled to do a little tour of his pockets now as a priority, skirting all those well-intentioned but footling rules about what is and isn’t permissible at the scene of a crime. I amuse myself now and then by thinking that the initials of my rank, Assistant Chief Constable – ACC – could also stand for “Attention: Cut the Crap”.’

  ‘There’s no reason why an assistant chief shouldn’t play with his initials in private, I’d say.’

  ‘Thank you, Col. I’d like you to notice alignment.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Hart’s. He’s bent forward but also a little in the direction of this side. He might have been trying to get to somewhere less exposed when the shooting started. The result is that when I open this door so as to get at his pockets, he might fall out on to the road. I will be unable to stop that because I’ll have to be on the other side of the door, if you can visualize this situation, Harpur. For the body to tumble higgledy-piggledy in such fashion would be deeply undignified and even grotesque, also conspicuous. He could come to rest across my feet, which is a sensation I can do without, thank you, Harpur.

  ‘And suppose I’ve, in fact, partly opened the door and sense that he’s about to slide out. I might feel compelled to prevent this by attempting to re-close the door. I would most likely jam him between the door and its frame. No matter how well-meaning this reaction might be, Col, it would have considerable ghastliness about it – clamping him in this manner, particularly if it were his head and face pincered. And then what would be the next move? If I opened the door to relieve the pressure he would probably continue his fall towards the road, out of focus, some might say. But if I didn’t do that I’d be stuck in a rather unpleasant tableau keeping the squeeze on a deado, unable to return to normal because you, in your miserably, timorous pedantic style would refuse to help by coming around to this side of the Focus and humping Hart back in.

  ‘So what I’m going to do is lean in now without opening my door and shove the sod hard towards yours. You will keep that closed, please. It will support him, keep him in the sitting position. Then I’ll get my door properly opened and can climb in alongside Hart and do a quick frisk. Do you know that scene in The Godfather where the corrupt cop has to search Michael Corleone for a weapon as they drive to a restaurant? It will be something akin to that, though the car won’t be moving, of course, and Hart is dead. We’ll beat rigor OK or some of his pockets will be hard to get at.’

  Iles disappeared. There was suddenly no face at the broken window. When he rose back into view Harpur saw the ACC must have bent down to take a shoe off. He had a left foot, black, lace-up in his right hand now, probably his customary Charles Laity at about £350 a pair. Using seven or eight short-arm jabs with the heel he knocked out all the glass spikes in the low part of the window frame, then dropped the shoe into the Focus cabin. He leaned through the window gap and grasped Hart’s jacket on each shoulder, pulled him back from the wheel, lifted him a couple of inches and pushed him across the car into the passenger seat and against that door. Iles was slight in build but very forceful when using his arms, or in head-butting.

  Because of the violence, Hart’s face swung around as if seeking Harpur’s in the destroyed window and wanting to give and get a farewell kiss. Harpur felt proud that he had not instinctively pulled back from this faux affectionate approach by Hart. It would have been squeamish, disrespectful, even cruel. Hart had a square, strong-jawed, normally lively face, but it had been part dismantled by at least one bullet which had taken away part of his right nostril and right cheekbone. His left shoulder rested on the passenger door now after Iles’s powerful guidance and, as the ACC had forecast, he stayed sitting, did not slip to the floor. His eyes were dark blue and open.

  Iles climbed in and sat behind the wheel. He bent forward and recovered his Charles Laity, put it on and re-tied the lace. Harpur thought the ACC might be sitting in blood and more of it would probably stain his uniform when he began the search of Hart’s pockets. But Harpur knew that, having prioritized his trawl, Iles would accept the rough conditions. He’d said he created his own circumstances, and if one of the circumstances involved getting mucked up in blood, he’d get mucked up in blood.

  Iles believed fiercely in logic when it chimed with what he wanted. He’d told Harpur a while ago that his favourite letters in the alphabet were Q E D. Naturally, Iles had assumed that Harpur didn’t know what this combination meant, though Harpur, in fact, did. ‘They’re Latin, Col, quod erat demonstrandum, and are used when a mathematical problem has been satisfactorily solved, signifying, “Which was to be proved”.’ Tonight in Cairn Close what was to be proved was whether Hart had some give-away information in his pockets. Iles wouldn’t let a bit of blood prevent this.

  Hart had on a very superior looking brown jacket in soft leather and khaki chino trousers. Access to the jacket pocket nearest to Iles was simple and to the top and inside pockets. But for the coat pocket on the far side, Iles had to nestle in hard against Hart to cut distance. Half of the ACC’s right upper body overlapped half of Hart’s right upper body. This pressure on Hart caused a brief, rasping outgoing of air from his mouth. ‘Speak up, old son,’ Iles replied. To delve into the right and rear pockets of the trousers, Iles had to draw back a little, then resume his position part covering Hart for the left chino pocket. As he worked, Iles hummed what Harpur recognized as a rousing hymn, ‘Hills of the North, Rejoice!’

  Hart
was obviously one of those people mentioned by the ACC who emptied their pockets at home before a possibly difficult operation. Iles found nothing. QED did apply, but unfavourably: it had been proved that Hart’s clothes were not, in fact, ‘fruitful’.

  Iles disconnected himself from Hart and got out of the car. Then, with the door still open, leant in again, gripped the shoulders of the leather jacket once more and yanked the body back into the driver’s seat. With gentle care Iles arranged him in a very authentic looking slouch over the wheel, his eyes towards Harpur across the car and seeming to ask, ‘Pray who is this person settling me down with such gentle care?’

  ‘Assistant Chief Iles,’ Harpur answered.

  ‘What, Col? Why suddenly so formal, you spectating poltroon?’

  ELEVEN

  Among members of my trade, and probably of some others – say, policing, fire fighting, bum-bailiffing – a very basic piece of folk wisdom preached caution: ‘cherish your exit’. It meant, make sure before you move into what might become a dicey situation, that you know a way out; make sure, too, that this exit is not obstructed. To me, it always sounded defeatist: you’d be thinking of retreat even though you hadn’t advanced one step.

  And so the disaster at Cairn Close. I had it coming, and it came. Not a bad gravestone inscription that.

  I don’t want to turn heavy and psychological, but there has to be some attempt to explain how I decided it would be OK to drive into a dead-end. Yes, a very dead-end. It will be worth describing at some length, I’m afraid. Here goes, then: my trouble was that things up until Cairn had worked much too sweetly and easily for me. Ever since that tailing episode in the supermarket I’d grown to put absolute trust in my instincts. At that time, I’d had no training, no experience, of counter-surveillance and yet I’d spotted a way to lose Rory Mitchell who, I found out later, had been at that kind of activity for years; plus owning a first in anthropology from Cambridge.

  As to education, my parents had gone more or less berserk when I told them I intended to quit school and take Bainbridge Williamson’s offer of a job with Righton Private Inquiries. They had expected me to do what they had done, and what my brother and sisters had done – go to university, Oxbridge if possible, but somewhere else if not – and then start on a safe and progressive career. Part of my difficulty with them was that they didn’t understand how I could have come to know the head of a private investigation firm. I’d thought it best not to tell them about Judith. She seemed to have lost interest in me when I left school, anyway. I think she’d got a special kick out of the maverick mischievousness of an affair with a pupil and didn’t want to continue once I’d turned adult enough to join the work force. A pity. She’d married not long after all that business with me and herself left the school to go and teach with her new husband in Wales somewhere.

  For what he termed ‘professional confidentiality considerations’ Bainbridge wouldn’t disclose to me who’d hired his firm to do the checks on Judith and me, but said he’d informed whoever it was that the agency had nothing conclusive to report about us, which in some ways was true: Rory had never been able to sneak up with a camera while we were in the back of the Honda.

  A lot of my early work for Righton was fairly banal: missing person inquiries, divorce evidence, industrial espionage and/or vandalism, but the pay was fine and I reckoned to be earning more than my father after a year or so. This is what I’m getting at when I say I’d developed a trust in my own judgement and impulses. They seemed to get things right. Then came the partnership and even better money via a share of the profits. Rory resented being passed over and resigned. I did feel a quota of sympathy for him, but, of course, I also felt some triumph in seeing off the opposition.

  The firm began to take on bigger and more complicated assignments. I thought I deserved some of the credit for that. I believed I could handle almost any commission, with or without Bainbridge. This might sound vain and if so, I’m sorry, but he and the private dick course had taught me brilliantly well how to analyze a situation on my own and deal with it on my own. I called it confidence, rather than vanity, but, then, I would, wouldn’t I – to adapt a famous phrase from a London sex and politics trial years ago?

  Above all I liked fine arts cases. There were plenty of these. It was estimated that about £300 million paintings and sculptures were thieved in a year in the UK alone. Expert firms ran elaborate databases that tried to keep track of great works, and offered their services to auction houses and insurance companies. We could be involved in several ways. For instance, collectors sometimes needed discreet, urgent help in tracing and getting back intact works stolen from them, though, for private reasons, they didn’t want the police involved. Very private reasons. We never pressed to know them. Bainbridge said they were not relevant. Our task was to search and find. If the client told us how the work had been acquired and it sounded credible we’d accept his/her version unless and until something showed it to be bullshit. And if the client didn’t tell us how the work had been acquired we assumed crookedness at some point or points in the purchase and/or in the run-up to the purchase.

  Galleries and museums might ask for similarly discreet investigation of the provenance – the history – of a work or works they were thinking of bidding for. We could manage that. The constant brisk climb in picture valuations caused extremely learned and extremely snotty disagreements between experts about the authenticity, or not, of some works, especially the ‘or not’ sort. Between the allegedly fake and the allegedly jonnock piece there could be a cost gap of millions sterling: grounds for merciless ding-dong dog-fighting. In this kind of dispute, we might be hired to help one side or the other with deep, not always scrupulous, digging. There’d been quite an amount of dubious developments in the city lately centred on a prominent dealer in pictures, Jack Lamb.1 And some aspects of that brought us interesting and very profitable work.

  Money-lust and genuine artistic appreciation overlapped in this career, and the absence of clean-cut dividing lines tickled me. Some pictures might be famed for their vivid colouring, but, at the same time, might inhabit that foggy, grey area between lasting loveliness and an extremely meaty cash asking price. Weird. Great for a thinking-guy’s mental playground.

  This intriguing double nature of the firm’s activities was what drew me, so up-beat and determined and big-hearted, to Cairn Close that evening. Maybe ‘cockalorum’ is another word that should feature somehow on my headstone: pride close to stupid, self-destructive arrogance.

  TWELVE

  Iles said, ‘Contradictions, Col.’

  ‘What type, sir?’

  ‘Psychological.’

  ‘A wide area.’

  ‘To do with humans only.’

  ‘Well, yes, I think I’d have expected that, given the circumstances.’

  ‘Which circumstances?’

  ‘These,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Col, we have someone careful enough, savvy enough, professional enough, to clear his person of everything that might give away his purpose in coming here, but who then drives himself to a spot where he is exposed to an enfilade attack on both flanks via Focus side windows with no hope of striking back or, in fact, of surviving; he carried no armament. How do we reconcile these conflicting attitudes: the cagey, the crazy? It’s what I mean by “contradictions”. This is a psychology at, as it were, war with itself, one decision countering another.’

  ‘My mother used to sing a number called “Undecided Now”.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a singing mother.’

  ‘Singing at home, privately, while, say, cooking a fry-up. Not a diva in a hall.’

  ‘Mothers unquestionably have their own roles to play in a household, Col.’

  ‘Few would deny this.’

  ‘Which idiotic, sectionable few?’

  ‘My mother went on to more rousing songs: “Drake he’s in his hammock”,’ Harpur replied. ‘That kind of thing. “John Brown’s Body”. If you’re interested I could put a
list of her titles on paper for you.’

  ‘I see hubris, Col.’

  ‘Where, sir?’

  ‘Hubris prompted him to come here.’

  ‘Hubris was wrong to do that. It’s irresponsible.’

  ‘Hubris is not a person. I’m sorry, Col; clearly, I shouldn’t have expected you to know this word. Let’s phrase it differently, shall we?’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘I see a kind of foolish, headstrong arrogance. It’s as though he said to himself, “OK, I’ll do the routine preparatory bit – vacuum cleaning my pockets – because this shows I’m aware of hazard, am not naïve and/or blind. But I don’t allow this awareness to scare me so much that I fail to act.’

  They talked near the Focus and watched detectives knocking doors in a search for witnesses. ‘Of course, you, exercising your, in some ways, admirable feet-on-the-ground style, Harpur, will reply that if he’d prepared himself for something by pocket clearance – namely, the Cairn Close visit – it’s surely not a contradiction to go and carry out the something which he’d prepared himself for. In fact, it was rather the logical result of the preparation, or we have to ask why was he carrying out the preparation for this something at all?’

  ‘If he’d prepared himself for something by pocket clearance – namely, the Cairn Close visit – it’s surely not a contradiction to go and carry out the something which he’d prepared himself for. In fact, it was rather the logical result of the preparation, or we have to ask why was he carrying out the preparation for this something at all?’

  ‘Shrewd, Col. Subtle. I couldn’t have put this matter better myself. But it isn’t the whole picture, is it?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘At my rank, Harpur, I have to take a more general, a more over-arching view. Because he saw the need for those crisis preparations we can deduce he sensed something might turn extremely rough and deleterious in his visit to the close, otherwise there would be no reason for him to foresee a situation where someone searches his clothes: this implies death or at least unconsciousness. Why didn’t he decide, therefore, that the whole project was too risky? It would have been entirely possible for him, entirely reasonable, to get hit by second thoughts and systematically, accurately, replace in their various correct pockets the items he had previously removed as preparation. These might have included material – notes, for instance – which referred to Cairn Close and disclosed his reason for going there.