by Bill James
‘Plainly, he didn’t do that. If he’d grown scared as he contemplated the dangers, and abandoned any intention to come to the close, there would be no occasion for me to meet him tonight, alive or dead, let alone go through his pockets and feel around his body for a holstered pistol. Neither he, nor I, nor you, Col, would have been at Cairn Close now. And if, as it appears, out of a kind of daft dauntlessness and pride, he opted to visit the close, regardless of the recognized perils, he would empty his pockets and keep them empty, particularly making sure he left nothing in them that indicated why he had come to the close, such as, say, notes as previously mentioned.
‘So, whatever his response to the Cairn Close project, there will be an unbridgeable gap in our information which we must acknowledge and accept. We can only guess that he was driven by some inane belief that bad fortune couldn’t touch him. Where would that fatal thought come from? Why?’
‘This is where the hubris kicks in, is it, sir?’ Harpur replied. ‘As we know, he’d risen fast in his career. Perhaps it made him over-bold, reckless, foolhardy. Hubris had been lurking around, waiting for a likely customer and now Thomas Wells Hart arrives.’
‘Brinkmanship, Col.’
‘Brinkmanstiff.’
An elderly couple had emerged from one of the houses, number 8, and stood in their driveway observing the police at work. Officers hadn’t reached number 8 yet. Iles stepped towards them and very amiably showed his blood-covered hands and wrists. ‘I wonder if I might come in and do a bit of sprucing of these in your cloakroom?’ he said. ‘I’m sure such fine dwellings must possess cloakrooms. As you’ll probably realize we have something of a blip to deal with tonight and I felt it right to do a standard rummage around in the Ford. Thus the inconvenient consequence, however.’ He nodded down at the blood. ‘Additionally, I feel a dampness on my left buttock, which I don’t believe to be self-produced; also, as you can see, there’s a Tasmania-shaped stain on the left chest region of my uniform. But I don’t need to bother you about those extra problems. They are by-the-way only.
‘I dislike walking around with my hands in such a gaudy state, though. A little water clears me of this bleed, as Lady Macbeth almost said. Should a towel be involved, Harpur here will see it is properly laundered and returned to you, plus a note of thanks from the chief constable, within twenty-four hours. Harpur is great at ablutions-related problems. Washing-day skills are referred to resoundingly on his personnel records at headquarters. If he ever got to Staff College, which, naturally, he won’t, his nickname would be “Mr Clean”. Nicknames are very much a feature of Staff College. They will amusingly encapsulate people’s major characteristics, acute, yet playful, and, admittedly, sometimes hostile; an unpleasant chaplain to the college when I was there had the cognomen “Mission Creep”.’
‘This occurrence is extremely unusual for the close,’ the man said. He was in a green and white kimono type robe with a chunky necklace of wooden beige and brown beads, suede desert boots, and a red woollen bobble hat on a very good head of grey hair, nicely brushed back over his ears. He was mid-height, burly, long-faced, his cheeks very thick and heavy looking. Harpur wondered if their weight would cause him to bend forward in a stoop as bodily strength lessened with further ageing. Apparently to show big disapproval he double-twitched the kimono on his shoulders and said, ‘One doesn’t expect this category of incident in such a normally tranquil setting.’
‘You know, I can certainly believe that,’ Iles replied. ‘Probably rare, perhaps unique. If Ford Focuses regularly drove into the close and got a great blast of murderous gunfire aimed at them, we’d all have heard about it, not just people in the close, but throughout the city, even nationally, perhaps through mentions in the media. Property values could be affected. People would ask estate agents trying to flog one of the houses, “But isn’t that the venue where Ford Focuses get repeatedly, ferociously fucked-up? Would our children be safe playing on the pavement? Isn’t there bound to be unseemly noise?”.’
‘The gunfire you refer to is what I have in mind,’ the man said.
‘It’s because of the gunfire that my hands are stained,’ Iles replied in a mild, QED tone, showing them again. ‘My hands would be in their normal condition if there had been no gunfire. There is a definite causal link between the shooting and the present state of my hands. And although now there’s a very, very breathless hush in the close tonight over at the Focus, we know it wasn’t like that only a short time ago.’
‘There might be some parts of the city where gunfire is customary – gangdom, pimp disputes, people caught in flagrante, turf battles etcetera – but not so Cairn Close,’ the man said. ‘It’s hard to think of a reason for shooting in the close. “Who, but who, Felix, would wish to bring fusillades to Cairn?” Veronica asked me during the onslaught. I could give no satisfactory answer. No answer at all. Ironic that the vehicle should be a Focus. We focus on it yet learn nothing of its backstory.’
‘If somebody had told me shots would be heard in the city tonight, I wouldn’t have assumed Cairn Close was the most probable location,’ Iles said. ‘I don’t know whether Harpur might think differently. He strikes out alone sometimes. You’ll most likely find this hard to credit, but, yes, he can and does. I feel he’s entitled to his own view of things, however obtuse, and it’s good for his morale if he can think for a while that people respect his opinions.’
‘We seek to preserve calm and to practise good neighbourliness in the close, though this doesn’t mean nosying into one another’s confidentialities,’ Felix said.
‘The point about this blood on my hands is that it’s liable to get spread. Suppose, for instance, I push a lock of hair back from my forehead in an instinctive, automatic gesture,’ Iles replied. He lifted his right hand to make a slightly mannered, though graceful, move illustrating the possible sequence, but did not actually touch himself. ‘This might leave a disturbing crimson smudge on my brow.’
Felix said, ‘Of the two of us, it was my wife who first noticed the violence in the close and spoke of it to me. I immediately dialled 999.’ She was taller than her husband, hair cut very short and dyed auburn, strong straight nose, inquisitive brown eyes under thin brows, black leather bomber jacket, knee-length, roomy, orange shorts; Harpur thought they’d both be in their eighties.
He said, ‘We have three names of emergency callers from Cairn: Aspen, Nape, Imperio.’
‘Nape,’ Nape said.
‘Could you describe what you saw when the shooting began outside, Mrs Nape?’ Harpur said. ‘Did you notice people leaving the second car, possibly at a rush, and possibly holding handguns? We are assuming, I think, that there were at least two people carrying out the attack, one for each side of the Focus. They might have had balaclavas on, though, of course, that would signal to anyone who spotted them before the actual shooting that they had some illegality in mind.’
‘Are you going to let me wash off this sodding stuff?’ Iles said.
‘That’s all very well, but we don’t want to get drawn into anything,’ Felix said. ‘I think I speak for Veronica as well as myself. It would look as if we were taking sides, providing facilities.’
‘I don’t ask that the water should be warm,’ Iles replied.
‘We would object, Veronica and I, to find our home described in the press as a kind of staging post offering relief to one of the factions. And then a possible letter from the chief constable. Word of this might get out, branding us collaborators.’
‘I’ll draft a letter for him to send you, Felix,’ Iles replied. ‘It will say you’re the arsehole of all arseholes, congratulate you on the supreme arseholeness of your arseholeness. You can show it to reporters as happy proof that you are not on our side, or we are not on yours, anyway.’
THIRTEEN
I would have liked the chance to tell Judy Vasonne that she mustn’t blame herself for those moments of acute devilishness in Cairn Close. But no, things happened too fast and too terminally. The acute devilishn
ess was so acute that it offered me no opening to send a comforting dispatch. She would certainly have heard about the ambush and might feel responsible. After all, wasn’t it because of her that I’d taken this PI job and its risks; risks most probably absent from a career in feet? I would almost certainly never have encountered Bainbridge Williamson and the Righton agency if Rory hadn’t tried to tail me on my way home after being with Judith. She was a kind of midwife in all this, but one bringing death not new life.
Judith had led me towards that close catastrophe in another much more obvious and direct way, too. I don’t mean she did this deliberately. Of course she didn’t. Although she liked japes and merry ruses, that would be beyond. She did help create the Cairn situation, however, no question. And she was sure to know she did. She’d have big regrets and reproach herself mercilessly. Judith could be like that. There was the wild side, as with the zoom-zoom chiropody papers, and the special sex requirements – ‘Pray shag the arse off me, you school kid’– but she also slid into gloom now and then, her sparky, aggressive confidence temporarily gone. That seemed natural to me for someone who had to live with all the Old Testament grief, pain and blame as a religious education teacher. Think of Job and the plague of boils; or King Belshazzar, Neb’s son, told by a mysterious finger writing on the walls of the banqueting hall in the middle of a knees-up that he had been weighed in the balances and found wanting, but not through anorexia.
It was a surprise to hear from Judy again. How long would it be since I’d seen her? Six, getting on for seven, years? Now, she called on my office phone and said, ‘Tom, how are you, my dear?’ This I didn’t much go for. I reckoned the ‘my dear’ had been carefully picked and deployed to set an altered tone between her and me: not a soulmate’s hot phrase but an old-pal-to-old-pal’s greeting, anti-hormonal. In fact, she spoke it as ‘m’dear’ rather than ‘my dear’, as if to downplay any idea of loving possession, her of me, I of her. She said, ‘I’m glad you’re still with the firm that changed everything back then. I resented it at the time – took you away, didn’t it, kiboshed unilaterally one of my sweet naughtinesses? I’m all right with it now. And, what’s more, I might have some business for you.’
The call reached me via the Righton switchboard and if the operator listened in I wondered what she’d make of ‘kiboshed unilaterally one of my sweet naughtinesses’. I had a secure, direct, private line, of course, It came with the directorship, years after I had lost contact with Judith and she couldn’t know the number. She did know the name of the company I’d quit school to join and must have found Righton in a directory or ad describing our services. I said, ‘Judith! Lovely to hear your voice. Where are you?’
‘Not far off. Did I ever mention my brother?’
‘Big modern house out towards Rastelle Major on the edge of the city? A sister-in-law, nephews and nieces?’
‘I visit now and then.’
‘Oh! You’ve been often hereabouts but never got in touch until today? Why so?’
‘At times I wanted to. But it didn’t seem right.’
‘Not right how?’
‘Like trying to bring the past back. Unwise. Sad. Tempting. But too much has intervened. I’m extremely married. And what about you, Tom? Married, too? Or, at least, I expect there’s someone el … Or at least I expect there’s someone.’
She’d obviously been going to say ‘someone else’, but had stopped herself. The ‘else’ would mean that although she, Judith, was still the major woman in my life there was, also, this ‘someone else’.
‘No, not married,’ I said. ‘But, yes, there’s someone.’
‘Of course. Natural.’
I saw she meant to keep the conversation terse, unemotional, detached, breezy. She wouldn’t ask the someone’s name, let alone details about her personality, age and/or appearance. I had the idea she was ferociously interested in all of that and therefore made sure she didn’t show it.
‘Things are different, aren’t they, Tom?’ she said. ‘As I explained, this is a business call. It’s about him – Keith, my brother.’
‘He’s doing all right, isn’t he? Wasn’t his business design, décor, that kind of thing?’
‘I think he’s moving into some dark realms. Or has moved there already.’
‘Which dark realms?’
‘This could leave him and his family very exposed and vulnerable. Very unsafe. We’re talking about three children as well as him and his wife.’
‘“Exposed and vulnerable” how?’
‘Can we meet? This needs some face-to-face,’ she replied.
‘Delighted. How about The Knoll eatery opposite the station? I’ll buy you lunch.’
‘No need for that.’
‘If it’s business it’ll be on expenses. Proves I’m working. Entertaining prospective client.’
‘Oh, right. Proves who to?’
‘Me. I’m a partner-director here now.’
‘Yes. Congrats.’ Thirty seconds’ silence. Then she seemed to reach the guts of what she wanted to say. ‘You’ll be used to some … well, some danger, I imagine.’
Her tone said she hoped so, and that this was the only reason she’d phoned me. ‘Limited,’ I said. ‘I’m not Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.’
What the fuck had Keith been up to, might still be up to? The little pause before ‘well, some danger,’ signalled, didn’t it, that if I agreed to take on this job I would probably again run into ‘some danger’.
She fixed the meeting for next day. We could never have gone like this, openly, to a local restaurant in our previous time together. That wouldn’t have qualified as Judith’s ‘sensibly discreet’. To be seen walking the street together needn’t have been a give-away: it could be that pupil and teacher bumped into each other and out of normal social ease had strolled a little distance in company. But a meal in a restaurant, with cosy menu discussions, forked morsel swapping and wine, maybe, was sure to have signalled something deeper. In any case, I couldn’t have afforded restaurant treats then and would have felt damn lowly and pitiable if I’d let her pay. I was a schoolboy, but a schoolboy who preferred not to be reminded of it when doing lunch with a lover.
Now I could stand her the meal, or Righton could, and not worry on her behalf at being noticed. Oddly, though, I found I didn’t altogether care for this. I’d enjoyed the thrill that came with secrecy with furtiveness, even if these had kept us out of The Knoll. Immature, really. Just the same, I think I half wished it could still be like that. It couldn’t. As she’d said, ‘Unwise.’ Nostalgia stayed nostalgia. Six years plus brought changes. Six years plus crushed juvenile romantic excitement. Yes, I regretted it. Business lunches at The Knoll were routine, were workaday.
Not that she looked workaday now, unless being splendidly elegant, splendidly beautiful, was work. Other customers glanced up when she walked into The Knoll, then glanced down to their plates in case their gazing seemed rude, then glanced back again, having obviously decided that what was on the plates, no matter how tastefully arranged, couldn’t come close to matching Judith for loveliness. And they turned this second glance into a stare, rude or not.
As host, I was already at a table. I got to my feet, honoured to claim her and monopolize her, even if it were only business. She had on a navy textured blazer with revere collar and horn-effect buttons. She wore this over a white, cotton, round-necked tunic. Her thigh-hug trousers had a jacquarded dense floral pattern worked into the dark-blue background weave. She carried a sizeable brown leather handbag. Fashion, I knew a fair whack about by now. As part of the private investigator course Bainbridge sent me on soon after I joined the firm, there’d been a module devoted to clothing and its descriptive terms, men’s and women’s, for use in tracing and missing person cases. Bainbridge would be easy to trace if he stuck with those long, flapping jackets.
Not many of the tracing and missing person cases involved people with features like Judith’s though, nor with jacquarded trousers cosseting longish, flawless legs.
I gave her a kiss on the cheek. Well, she’d spoken of a ‘face-to-face’ occasion. This should sodding-well suit, shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t it??? That formal, sexlesss peck defined how things were now.
I realized that behind the vapid politesse and whiff of Allure – from her – each of us would be scrutinizing the other for signs of change; hoping with disgustingly egomaniac cruelty to seem better preserved. Most probably I was the one who’d altered most. Last time we met I’d been a youth. Now, I was a man, wearing one of a dozen made-to-measure shirts from my wardrobe, and in a career impressive enough for her to come asking for support. Some family crisis had forced her to end the stand-off between her and me and decide that ‘m’dear’ Tom might be able to sort it. Well, ‘m’dear Tom’ had dealt with other crises, some family, some not, so I might know how to oblige effectively now. I’d put on about ten or twelve pounds since we last met, but that was OK. I’d needed a little extra weight. I stood 5’ 11” and it was evenly spread.
And Judith? She must be twenty-seven or eight now, her skin as fresh and lineless as before, her brunette hair thick and glossy, down in plentiful mass to her shoulders, her eyes brown, full of curiosity and challenge, her nose neat, snubwards but not altogether. She’d moved with easy, big strides across the restaurant to join me. She was around 5’ 7” on moderate heels, slim, her breasts as I remembered them, and certain today, as much as in the past, to buck me up. The meal with her and perhaps some wine would also do this, but they were accessories only.