by Bill James
‘Where did you get the gun?’ Iles asked. ‘You couldn’t have brought it through airport screening.’
‘In the States, many households keep a gun. To kill a burglar is often regarded as justified,’ Alice said. ‘One thing my second husband taught me – be on guard. For him, that meant buy off the threat. For me, it meant legitimate gunfire.’
‘I don’t think she was a burglar,’ Harpur said.
‘She breaks a window. There are valuables here,’ Alice said.
‘I believe Col thinks a display of some sort,’ Iles said.
‘Which sort?’ Lamb asked.
‘Maybe Col’s not clear on that,’ Iles said. ‘But I wonder if she was protecting someone.’
‘“Protecting someone”?’ Jack Lamb said. ‘How, for God’s sake? Whom?’
‘Think of the clumsiness, the obviousness,’ Iles said.
‘I don’t understand,’ Jack replied.
‘Yes, the clumsiness, the obviousness,’ Iles replied. ‘They negate the possibility of any future raid. Make a din, cause some breakages, then disappear. Word gets around there’s been a foray into the grounds and property, meaning extra vigilance by the Lambs, Helen and staff in case of a future attempt. In these circumstances any outfit considering an attempt would drop the idea. Perhaps that’s what she wanted. Of course, she wouldn’t have expected there to be a gun here and someone ready to use it. She wouldn’t be allowed to carry out her little incursion and then buzz off, unidentified.’
‘Protect a lover, do you mean?’ Alice Lamb said. ‘Oh, God, and I’ve killed her.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
The ten o’clock evening news was on one of The Monty’s television screens. Sitting at his accounting desk behind the bar, Ralph Ember watched now and then but mainly gave his mind to some personal deep thinking. He believed ardently in regular periods of personal deep thinking. They helped him get a steady hold on life and annulled the rotten slurs contained in those vicious nicknames ‘Panicking Ralph’ and ‘Panicking Ralphy’.
He’d decided to keep The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell after all and not go for Sparta and baby exposure. Ralph felt a kind of bond, a fellowship, with that Blake figure. Together, they’d gone through plenty, some of it damn dire. There was comradeship across the centuries, the millennia, even. Someone on the radio not long ago had said life on earth started four billion years ago, so Blake would have plenty of space to niche his Marriage Of Heaven And Hell. Abandonment of the shot male because of someone like Enz would be pathetic, a cultural collapse. Ember hadn’t read the full Blake work yet, but he was pretty certain the figure would be on the Heaven side of the Marriage. Ralph had come to accept that the slight evidence of patching up of the illustration could surely be regarded as a noble sign of hardships encountered jointly by the white bearded man and Ralph – yes, hardships encountered, endured and eventually dispelled. Ralph no longer considered that the restored picture reflected poorly on Monty standards.
For the present, Ralph couldn’t face any more upheavals. The death of that woman, Rossol, at Lamb’s place had badly shaken him. He realized now it had been a crazy error to let Jack’s mother have the .38, though an error based in some ways on kindness. He’d tried something of a gamble, and it hadn’t worked; it had come near to working, but, crucially, not on the right person.
A few days ago Enzyme had turned up looking for the return of that Smith and Wesson, and Ralph had apologized unstintingly and told him he’d got rid of it in the river: said he didn’t like having an unlicensed gun on Monty premises. This had seemed to Ralph a totally reasonable explanation for the gun’s absence, no matter how symbolic and semi-holy the .38 had become for Enz. A court wouldn’t have listened to any of that crap if Ralph was hauled up for illegal possession of a firearm. Most probably Enz had been somewhere trying to get a replacement weapon and, because of his aura of madness, had been refused. So, he’d thought, Must get back to Ralph and say the surrendering of the .38 has adequately symbolized my regrets, and now I’d like the gun back, please. Get stuffed, Enz.
But, in fact, the gun had not been absent when Loam arrived so damn pleaful and slimy. It was still nestling there, a sacrificial emblem in the chiffonier drawer. Ralph had an idea that Enz would consider the word ‘chiffonier’ highfalutin’ and showy when used by Ralph. Well, fair enough, Enz, let’s not upset you further. Ember hadn’t spoken of the chiffonier when Loam returned, no, because if the gun was in the river it couldn’t be in the chiffonier, could it? Although, in fact, it was, of course. Loam had actually said he’d considered calling at Low Pastures to get ‘a more conducive atmosphere’ for gun discussions! He seemed to imagine this was some sort of compliment! God, the crudity of such an attitude – the foul presumption and insensitivity. Low Pastures was Ralph’s home, a family home, his wife and children and their ponies were there. Would secret firearms be a suitable topic in this innocent, prestige setting? ‘Conducive’!
Enz said he’d revised that plan, though, after a talk with his wife, and he’d arrived once more at the club, despite the continuing absolute ban. And so it had been, ‘Awfully sorry, Enz.’
Ralph did get rid of the pistol, however, when Alice Lamb came a little later looking for armament. She was pleaful, then, too, but not slimy pleaful: practical pleaful, sturdily pleaful, worried about security, or non-security at Darien. It had been Ember’s very hearty, and very genuine, wish that Enz, still profoundly eager to redeem himself with Ralph, would try and lift those paintings he’d promised for the club from Lamb’s place one night, Lamb being deliciously unable to report a theft, because so much of his stock had come lawlessly. And Alice Lamb, wisely belligerent and alert to possible break-ins – taught by her ex-husband to expect menace and stand ready to dispose of it – would hear Enz and, in her view justifiably, put a defensive bullet or two into his head from what had once been his own weapon. From what had once been his own weapon! The cosy neatness of that had delighted Ralph, the inspiring circular nature of it. You couldn’t get a better instance of someone hoist with his own petard – blown apart by his own weapon – a phrase he’d run into during his university Foundation Year. Things hadn’t taken that direction, however. A pity about Rossol, the shot Londoner. Also in his Foundation Year, students had read a novel called Nostromo where there was a terrible shooting of the wrong person by mistake. Ditto. What the hell had Rossol been up to, blundering about like that at Darien? How did she manage to collect the bullets very specifically intended for someone else? But this wasn’t a question he needed to trouble himself with now.
No, he could enjoy a spell of relaxation, even if acute gloom clearly affected several club members tonight. Alec (Leitmotif) Wagstaff, a regular of The Monty in its present, very transitional social state, bought a triple Jameson’s whisky, perhaps to soothe himself. For a while his grief was such that he seemed unable to speak and explain it. But then he said there’d been a police raid on Silver Bells And Cockleshells nursery and an armoury of true, positive repute arbitrarily and permanently shut down, with very, very worrying implications for what he called ‘the dear little kiddie section of the business’. Leitmotif shook his head in dejection and gave himself a second gulp of Jameson’s. ‘I always think of guns as sort of in their own, particular way, clean, Ralph. Whereas, look and listen.’ He pointed a skinny, accusing finger at the TV News.
The camera showed the frontage of the famous Oss Gallery in Piccadilly, London. A reporter’s voice-over said Mr George Dinnick, part owner of the gallery, with rumoured connections to the ‘seedy side of international art trafficking’, had been murdered by at least three blows to the head with an axe in what police assumed was an attack connected with the trade. They were urgently seeking information from Mr Justin Benoit, aged twenty-six a long-time colleague of the dead man in the ‘facilitator’ firm, Cog, who had not been at his normal address for some while. Mr Benoit’s partner, Elizabeth May Rossol, another Cog staff member, was herself recently murdered in what might also have be
en an art-related dispute. Police could not say at this stage whether they’d found a link between the two deaths, though a revenge killing was one possibility they would investigate. ‘Three bonce chops or more with an axe!’ Leitmotif said. ‘So comparatively fucking unkempt, Ralph.’
Footnotes
Chapter Two
1 See Roses, Roses.
Chapter Five
1 See Disclosures.
2 See Disclosures
Chapter Eight
1 See Pay Days
Chapter Nineteen
1 See Disclosures.