Blaze Away

by Bill James

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I was alone out there. I could count the splashes. Sad waste of a lovely piece, but necessary, I think.’

  She stayed silent a while, then gave what Gordon Loam would classify as a smirk-smile: more arrogance and cheek. She nodded a couple of times, to signal a revelation. ‘I see. So, you’re without, bereft, disarmed. Does that account for the urgency?’

  ‘The urgency was so I could reassure you as to the immediate precautions I undertook on your behalf. This wasn’t something to say over the telephone.’ He smiled himself now, a different category of smile, though: frank, wry. ‘But, yes, I’m without.’

  ‘And you imagine I’m going to produce again?’

  ‘Absolutely no delay in committing S. and W. and the bullets to the deep. I knew this would weigh with you when I asked for a replacement.’

  ‘It might weigh with me, but it doesn’t weigh enough.’

  Still more of her damn top-notchness. She could make subtle, graded points – yes, she’d admit it weighed, but it didn’t weight enough. What would she give it, B fucking +?

  Fern knocked on the door again. It sounded as though she might be using the corner of a tray. They were sitting in bamboo framed easy chairs. Judy stood. ‘Zip up, there’s a dear!’ she told Gordon Loam, in a voice loud enough to be heard outside. She opened the door. He saw a long-faced woman in her fifties wearing a beige cardigan and black trousers who gave Judy a very close examination first, probably to see whether her clothes had been disturbed, and then gazed around her towards Gordon Loam. He waved. Fern was holding a silver tray with two plain white mugs on it. Judy took the tray. ‘Thanks, Fern, we could do with a refresher after all that, I can tell you.’ She went and put the tray on her desk. Fern gazed systematically around the room, perhaps in case furniture had been broken during some threshing about. Judy went back to the door. ‘Yes, many thanks, Fern,’ she said, and closed and locked up again. She handed Gordon Loam a mug, then took the other and sat down.

  ‘I don’t want to be fussy this time,’ he said. ‘I mean, demanding a particular weapon. It would mess you about too much. If you’ve got a Smith and Wesson .38 I’ll take it, of course. But because this is the second call on you – no doubt a nuisance – I’ll settle for whatever you have to hand. Cost? You name it. I’ll get along to the hole-in-the-wall and fetch cash. It doesn’t have to be a new gun. I rather like the prickly cordite smell off a used firearm. Companionable. Mature. Been There, Done That.’

  ‘Do you think I’m fucking mad?’ she replied genially.

  ‘How do you mean, Judy?’

  ‘I made a mistake. You want me to repeat it, expect me to repeat it? You really think I would?’

  ‘But I’ve told you, I recognize that mayhem with the Blake was disgraceful. It can never occur again.’

  ‘You say so now. But I have to think about what happens the next time you’re stinko-senseless. We must be clear headed, however painful. I’m afraid you lack control and self discipline, Basil. You shouldn’t have a firearm. Now, please don’t feel hurt at my saying this. It’s well-known there is a certain cohort of people who are psychologically unsuited to guns, sort of allergic. No shame or blame: it’s simply Nature imposing an arbitrary mental flaw. It would be irresponsible, even cruel, of me to sell you another pistol.’

  His rage soared. She thought she could shove him into a ‘certain cohort’. The Gordon Loam family were not made to be members of a ‘cohort’. That suggested they were merely part of some afflicted group. The Gordon Loams existed independently of any damn cohort. They had uniqueness and their own special dignity and strength, even if these qualities were temporarily dimmed. Yet he was getting lectured to, told he had a ‘mental flaw’ by a dreary, fading, harsh old thing with no family history he’d ever heard of, or anyone else had ever heard of, most likely. She was from a backstreet or multi-storey but had somehow wangled her way to a spot where she had a vestige of power. And she would use that power against him, Basil Gordon Loam! She didn’t care that he would be left unprotected if she withheld a gun from him. He had deliberately lowered his requirement so as not to give her too much bother. He would have taken any handgun – no insistence on the S. and W. Yet she’d ignored that and shown herself totally inhuman, inflexible, uncaring.

  He stood and stepped towards the safe. He didn’t know any of the combinations for getting in at the gun hoard, of course, but he felt driven to make some sort of physical gesture, and the safe symbolized the vile brush-off treatment she used on him. He fiercely grabbed the teddy’s shoulders with two hands and yanked at it hard so the knots came adrift and the tapes fluttered out behind the bear like colourful streamers from a kite. He wanted to get at the dial and spin it. That wouldn’t open the door, and, in any case, there were two others. But it would be a protest, not just to the teddy but to her. If he’d had a gun he might have shot Judy.

  ‘No!’ she screamed. ‘Stop! I’ve told you, haven’t I – you’ve no self-control.’ She stood, too, now and came to try to pull the bear away from him. ‘Stop it, you’ve no right at all!’ She hurled herself at Gordon Loam. They fought, staggering across the room, their arms tight around each other, the bear jammed between them at about chest level, as if two boxers in the ring had turned on the referee. He found it strange, ghastly, to be embraced like this by a woman wearing a purple sweater, not with affection but hate. Would it have felt better if she were younger? They knocked to the ground a red, three-tier, stationery desk tray, scattering papers and a couple of telephone directories. But although his mind registered only revulsion from her terrible,writhing closeness, his body seemed unable to distinguish between very different kinds of intimate contact, and he started to get a hard-on. This perplexed and disgusted him.

  He needed another diversion. With his right hand he reached down between them. He took hold of the teddy by one of its ears and pulled it out. In a way, that brought them even more physically entwined, because the bear had operated like an upper-body fender. But he flung the bear across the room. It dislodged a framed picture of a puffin, half a dozen small fish clamped in its beak, which fell to the ground, smashing the glass. As he’d hoped, she wanted to go to the teddy and see it was undamaged. She broke away from him and made for it among the splinters of glass.

  ‘So you turn me down, you refuse me?’ he shouted.

  ‘Yes, yes, I refuse.’

  A double-fist hammering on the door started. Fern called: ‘What’s happening? Oh, what’s happening? The noise! Breakages! Violence! What’s he doing to you, Judy? Refuse him, yes, refuse him. I suspected he was a beast. You’re right, they’ve no self-control, none of them. They’re prick-driven. Is he seeking to ravish you on your own child-haven, silver-belled and cockle-shelled premises?’

  Gordon Loam bellowed: ‘Watch your language, Fern. There are young children out there.’

  THIRTEEN

  Liz Rossol in the green hired Peugeot had followed Gordon Loam to what she reckoned from her earlier visit would be the smart, north-east end of the town. He’d parked and, as she drew up a little distance away, she saw him leave his car and walk fast, urgently, to a big, three-storey Victorian house on a corner. In the front garden was a large display stand with a sign under glass reading Silver Bells And Cockleshells Nursery and a kind of tree house: no tree, but a small, wooden hut on top of a timber staircase, unoccupied at present. For a moment it reminded Liz of machine-gun guard towers in concentration camp films.

  Gordon Loam seemed to knock on the house door and after a couple of minutes disappeared inside. She waited and watched again. Did he have children of nursery age and had come to see them, or discuss something about them? She needed a biog card on him. And, more pressing, did the visit have anything to do with art and Darien and The Monty? How could it have anything to do with art and Darien and The Monty? Was she straying from her proper job?

  This uncertainty made Liz wonder why she was sitting here, gawping at the house and name board. She was s
upposed to be a fieldworker, for God’s sake, an ace fieldworker, and the nursery – inside the nursery – was where she should be, not sixty metres away. Or perhaps she should be elsewhere altogether, taking another look at Darien and its surrounds. ‘Get going, Liz, you prat,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Stop skiving on your arse in a safety zone.’ She often muttered to herself and was a good listener to what she said. ‘I’ll take in Darien as soon as I’ve finished here.’

  So, now, Liz concocted in her head what might do as a basic, believable bit of fiction to suit Silver Bells And Cockleshells, got out of the Peugeot and went to knock on the door. A plump, round-faced woman in her late twenties answered.

  ‘I’m trying to find a nursery place for my little daughter, Christine,’ Liz said. That ‘little’ – a mistake? A sign of phoniness in a prepared, overdone spiel? If you came looking for a spot in a nursery for your child, of course the child would be little. It was the only kind nurseries took.

  ‘Please come in,’ the woman said. ‘I’m Sue.’ She led Liz through a mosaic-tiled hall into a large, bright room with vivid, pictorial wallpaper and children’s furniture. No Gordon Loam. There were about twenty infants, some watching on a large screen television a children’s programme featuring kind-hearted, sweet-tempered alligators, others playing with dolls and plastic toys. Sue showed Liz to a straight-backed adult chair. ‘Judy is busy in the office.’ She nodded towards stairs at the far end of the room rising to a first-floor landing. ‘I don’t think she’ll be long.’

  ‘Judy?’

  ‘Mrs Judith Timmins.’

  ‘She’s in charge?’

  ‘Owner.’

  Liz saw a plumpish woman in her fifties, grey hair cropped savagely close, emerge from a shadowy part of the landing, with what seemed to be an empty tray in one hand down at her side. ‘Is that Mrs Timmins?’ she asked.

  Sue smiled. ‘No, it’s Fern. One of the staff. Like me. She’s usually entirely all right. But you know how it is; she gets ideas into her head now and then.’

  It sounded like a gentle forewarning that Fern might go ape. Maybe Sue regularly had to red-alert callers about her. ‘Gets ideas into her head? Well, I suppose we all do,’ Liz said. ‘It’s one of the things heads are for.’

  ‘Yes, but when I say gets ideas into her head I’m talking about really getting ideas into her head. Or an idea, to be accurate. One.’

  ‘Right. Which ideas, or idea?’ Liz asked.

  ‘She’s not too good today. Extra-intense? Marauding? But there’s no harm in her or, obviously, Judy wouldn’t keep her on. The last thing I’d want is for you to worry. She’ll always be fine with the children, absolutely fine. They love her. Your Christine will be very happy with Fern. You might have read about unpleasant cases in the paper involving children, even extremely young children, but that’s not the least bit like Fern. It’s only with grown-ups that she can get a trifle … well, a trifle off-balance. And, of course, the saucy way some grown-ups live is liable to trouble almost anyone. But most people, if they notice bad faults in others, don’t say anything, particularly in England, where, of course, we are. There’s a sort of tradition of politeness and hushing things up. It might be to do with what’s referred to as the “stiff upper-lip”, which this country is famed for, meaning silence, regardless. Tact, you could think of it as. Or indifference.

  ‘But Fern, you see, is not like this, and, in my view, she’s entitled not to be. There’s another phrase, “let it all hang out”, and this would cover Fern. If something is bothering her she will speak of it in what could be called a very plain fashion, and often with the volume on sodding max. She’s not one to bottle things up. Tact isn’t a favourite with Fern. She’d say, “Stuff tact.” It’s as if some notion, some thought, will take charge of her for a while, like a manacle. The focus is all on that one item. It’s not a permanent thing by any means, but during the period it has hold of her she doesn’t seem able to think about anything else. It’s too powerful.’

  ‘An obsession?’ Liz said. ‘An idée fixe?’

  ‘In that area.’

  Liz thought she heard the sound of a thump and then breaking glass from somewhere upstairs. ‘And although Mrs Timmins continues to employ her, does she mind about Fern’s fits?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call them fits. That’s too medical.’

  ‘Spasms?’

  ‘Interludes. Nobody would deny they happen here. We’ve become used to the occasional in-house difficulty. Parents are very good about it. They understand that these moods come and go. Outlandish, certainly, while they last, but nothing worse. Or not outrageously worse. Eccentric – another Brit tradition which can be almost endearing. There’s no muzzle-froth or anything similar which might get spattered over some of the children. Hygiene – so important. People regard Fern as quirky, but not in the least bit dangerous. Yes, quirky. Nobody thinks of reporting her to Health and Safety or the police. In a way, it’s a lesson to the children in kindliness and tolerance. We could and do try to teach them those qualities, but it’s much more effective for them to see it in operation with Fern. Obviously, children wouldn’t know the word “quirky”, but they can tell Fern hasn’t always got it all together, and they see that these oddities are humanely put up with by management, no finale fist in her chops.’

  As Liz watched, Fern placed the tray on the landing floor and then crouched with her ear against a closed door. It struck Liz that there was something precise and well-practised about Fern’s movements, like an actor’s in a long-run play. Her face showed the focus Sue had referred to. The right ear, hard on the mahogany, would be exceptionally focused. This was studiousness. Liz thought she heard a male voice shouting something, apparently from the room on the other side of the door, most likely the office. The tone seemed pained and desperate. Liz couldn’t make out the words, though, through the solid wood of a Victorian door. It looked as though Fern could. This would come with the focusing.

  Liz saw why Fern had put the tray down. She wanted both her hands free. Uncrouched now, she hammered on the door with two fists, like someone belting a punch bag in the gym, and at the same time began to scream-shout: ‘What’s happening? Oh, what’s happening? The noise! Breakages! Violence! What’s he doing to you, Judy? Refuse him, yes, refuse him. I suspected he was a beast. You’re right, they’ve no self-control, none of them. They’re prick-driven. Is he seeking to ravish you on your own child-haven, silver-belled and cockle-shelled premises?’

  The male voice yelled some kind of reply, but Liz still couldn’t get the words. They sounded like a reproof this time, possibly about the vocabulary.

  ‘That’s the kind of unjolly, raucous thing I mean,’ Sue said. None of the children had shown any interest in the door-battering and general din. ‘Yes, it’s vehement and vigorous, but we have to ask: how could she reasonably have made up her mind so quickly?’

  ‘About what, exactly?’

  ‘Prick-driven beastliness. Fern, it must be admitted, can be rather hasty in slapping labels on when she’s into that type of commentating spell. All right, it’s not the first time this man has called here, so she might have had opportunities to judge his personality. But what she’s saying, isn’t it, is that she could tell from the very first visit that he was a beast and prick-driven? She claims she intuited this instantly, no need for any evidence. This conviction has stayed immovably with her, has come to dominate and control her – what you suggested might be an obsession. And so she is always liable to go into one of these outbursts if remarks or events set them off. Today, it must be some sounds she may have heard coming from behind the office door. Wasn’t there the noise of breaking glass?’

  ‘Did she expect whatever it was she heard, though? She appeared to be hanging about on the landing waiting for it.’

  ‘What I mean by impressions taking control of her. Or, again, what you termed an obsession.’

  ‘How often has the man been here before?’

  ‘Twice, I think. His family used to be of si
gnificance – the Gordon Loams. If you were having a cup of tea at the beginning of last century it would almost certainly be tea shipped in by the Gordon Loams, Indian or Chinese. Mention tea to anyone, and they would automatically think “Gordon Loam”. It was that kind of trade dominance. This would be pre tea-bags. Their company didn’t adapt quickly enough to changed demands, so I believe he’s switched altogether from tea to a career in the artistic line. Some transaction takes place between Judy and him, its nature so far confidential.’

  ‘Interesting. Does he have a child in the nursery?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But is thinking of bringing a child?’ Liz said.

  ‘I suppose it’s possible.’

  ‘But you don’t believe so?’

  ‘It doesn’t usually take three visits.’

  ‘So, might Fern have it right?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘There’s a love affair? It’s illicit, perhaps, so they have to use the office?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be comfortable. No couch or bed. But, all right, there are armchairs and the floor. She does wear those very unbillowy jeans that seem to cosset certain areas, which males would regard as inviting.’

  ‘What else is in the office?’

  ‘A workstation. Bird pictures. A big safe.’

  Liz was aware of getting towards outright nosiness. Just the same, she stuck at it. ‘A safe for petty cash, perhaps?’

  ‘Perhaps. I’ve never seen it open. Three combination locks! None of the staff have ever seen it open. We’re not given the codes. Security! Plus a teddy bear.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Taped to the safe door.’

  ‘To suggest a nursery flavour?’

  ‘Like that, yes. The safe, so cold and, well, steely, as it usually is with safes. The teddy is to remind her and remind others that although the nursery is a business, the main consideration must always be the happiness and well-being of the gang of spoiled, egomaniac, uncharming kids in our care.’ She gave herself a mock slap on the mouth. ‘Oh, sorry. I’m sure your Christine’s a sweetie. Not all of them are, though. The toy bear helps create the desired atmosphere. Does Christine have a teddy?’