by Bill James
The wine was a Sauvignon Blanc and Ralph recognized what the trade called the ‘gunflint’ smoky smell off it. Maybe the pistols nearby added something to the gunflint bouquet. A classy drink. He’d want to get at least ninety pounds a bottle for it if served by the glass at the Monty. Manse really tried hard not to be a peasant. Maybe he knew something about wine as well as art.
‘I notice you noticing the weaponry, Ralph.’
‘It’s very open, very much on view.’
‘I wanted to display a selection like, properly arranged.’
‘Nobody could fail to see the guns.’
‘Ah, you’re thinking of Matty, I expect, wondering if she might spot them, be shocked, upset.’
‘But perhaps the drawing room is out of bounds to her,’ Ember replied.
‘This is a family home, Ralph. The family is reduced as to numbers, yes, but those who survive got to have a total run of the property or the family home wouldn’t be a family home, would it?’
‘That’s certainly a point, Manse.’
‘Matilda got an attitude to firearms which is what you’d expect when someone’s been on the end of a salvo, with a stepmother and brother riddled and slumped in a damaged top-of-the-range car on account of that same blundering salvo. She knows that salvo should of taken her daddy, not shared out between Naomi and Laurent who got no roles as targets. Them bullets had Daddy’s name on them but they got misdelivered. She knows her daddy is still alive and totally unriddled, ditto herself, and there might be another try on him. So, she figures if there’s more gunfire ready for her daddy any day, then her daddy got to have his own gunfire ready to stop that other gunfire getting at him. There’s a kind of pattern to it, isn’t there, Ralph?
‘She got to think that if her daddy gets salvoed next time she’ll be on her own, not in this much-loved rectory with all its fine memories of her life here, but forced to go off to some municipal general home for orphans where there’d be no art to speak of. Or her mother, Sybil, might say, OK, Matty could come to her and her partner, but we already seen what Sybil thinks about children – that it’s smart to get a lot of distance between her and them, if possible into a different country. And then, in any case, what’s this partner like? Is he thinking he’d better offer this pretty girl child plentiful regular attention and comfort because of what she been through and having to live in North Wales? You know what I mean? This could be a traffic warden or a surgeon. Do you think we can trust that sort? I heard there’s a movie and a book about this type of thing – the man getting to the young daughter by joining up with the mother.’
‘Lolita,’ Ember replied, ‘by Nabokov.’
‘Probably he’d need a foreign name to write about such shabby sex.’
‘He was born in Russia but became American.’
‘There you are then,’ Shale said. ‘I would of bet on that. And then them municipal homes. What do we hear about what goes on in some of them? Matty reads the papers, watches the news, and she knows the best answer re keeping things as they are now and as they should be, is armament. It’s only logical, isn’t it, Ralph? Maybe you already got your own armament at home or in the club. This would be absolutely understandable. You got a very considerable person to safeguard – you! I think of them letters in the press, by Ralph W. Ember, to do with heavy topics, especially the environment.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘But such a personal gun don’t fit the pattern, as referred to previous. It don’t fit the S.O.A.T., the strangers on a train, policy. There got to be no traceability of a weapon, and no possibility of traceability of a weapon, so newness and purchase from an experienced and trusted dealer is the absolute requirement.’
‘But there are four guns, Manse. That’s a lot for self-defence, isn’t it?’
‘Four, are there?’
‘Well, you can see them there – four. As you said, a selection.’
‘Yes, it could be four. Matty’s a very practical child.’
‘In which regard, Manse?’
‘If she saw them four there she’d realize guns can jam sometimes. A reserve might be needed.’
‘Yes, but four, Manse?’
‘Matilda knows I’m someone who gets moods – like preferring this to that one day, and then not much later preferring that to this. No real reason for it, just inclinations. Whims. Perhaps everyone’s a bit like this – temperamental. That’s how it was with them girls she might of mentioned to you in the den, Lowri, Patricia, Carmel. All very lovely in their ways, and Carmel extremely well up on the porcelain and Adolf’s struggle, but me getting a special satisfaction from one of them for anything up to six weeks or even a couple of months, really settled, steady. Then somehow a change needed. Imposs to explain. The particular girl might of been behaving like always, sweet, kindly, warm, ever-ready, yet along comes this urge – this unbelievably powerful urge – this urgent urge, you might call it – this comes along and I have to put her aside for a while and move on to one of the others. As I hope Matty said, strictly never more than one at a time. I got no interest in multi-romps, threesomes, foursomes, Ralph, a tit-and-arse glut. That would be deeply immoderate and an insult to the girls concerned. I wouldn’t call myself a feminist, Ralph, but they got to have a certain quantity of respect or where are we? Anyway, it could be the same with the weaponry. I might take a strong fancy to, say, a Smith and Wesson one day, an excellent pistol, but, then, not long after a Walther, or a Browning. They all got their special features, Ralph, like them girls.’
‘But they are laid out for me, aren’t they, Manse, not you, The guns, I mean, not the girls,’ Ember replied.
‘Matty might not realize that. But who can tell? She speaks about friendship, wants a true friendship between you and me. Underneath that word, “friendship”, though might be a more serious thought than what she calls “a chat”. She could mean a gun friendship, so she’d decide I must be taking care of your tastes as well as mine re the small arms.
‘Or then again, Ralph, if grave trouble started here, in the rectory – an attack by follow-up bastards to the jinxed Jag event, Matty might – Matty would – yes, she would want a piece for herself, I think. She’s young for an automatic, yes, but we’re talking about a hellish crisis – no time for birth certificates. That’s how she is, she don’t like weakness. She was first one down on the floor in the Jag. Why? Not fear, but because she got a kind of soldier’s instinct. She can smell the battle before it happens and so she’s ready to take cover and then fight back, if only she’d had something to fight back with, but simply a haversack for her school books on that terrible occasion.’
Ralph was conscious of some very elegant, sneaky salesmanship under way. The fact that verbs and other fiddly bits of sentence-making gave Manse chronic, merciless trouble didn’t signify Manse lacked brain-power: Matilda got at least some of her sharpness from her daddyo. There even seemed to be a kind of telepathic link between their minds. Manse Shale knew how to manage a situation.
Consider the guns, for instance, nicely presented by him like nouveau cuisine. Ralph knew he was supposed to make his choice, one or two, in case of the jamming possibility already mentioned. But never mind the various attributes of the weapons, Ralph felt it was the timing of the choice that really mattered. He was being asked to pick his gun, or guns, before the need to kill Waverton had been proved, or fractionally proved.
Ralph had come here tonight to discuss the murder script in a balanced, thorough style and, most important, to be offered good evidence that it was Waverton from inside Manse’s firm who gave the geography for a school-run interception. There’d been no talk along those lines so far, only a case history of Matilda as to guns: her wise, juvenile, hard-headed respect for them.
Wrapped up in that was the unspoken invitation for Ralph to follow his tastes, his ‘moods’, and act on this school kid’s very practical endorsement of firearms, as reported by Daddyo, and kit himself out with one he fancied. Or two he fancied. If, or when, he did th
at he would be committing himself to the SOAT programme, of course. Yes, timing. Get the gun/guns first and then decide, like one of those urgent urges, that this gun, these guns, ought to be used, or what the hell was a gun, or guns, for?
Ralph guessed that a leap of phoney logic, non-logic, in fact, was sure to arrive next. It would suggest that since the gun or guns had to be put to work, put it or them to work on Waverton. And if Ralph had the cheek to ask whether Waverton definitely deserved it, Manse would probably reply, with a pitying smile at Ember’s blindness and stupidity, that, obviously, the bastard, Waverton, had flagrantly danced close to him and Ralph at the Agincourt, hoping to show he had no reason to feel any guilt over the Jaguar tragedy because he did, in fact, have a very solid reason to feel guilt over the Jaguar tragedy, namely, he’d supplied the itinerary. Manse would see the invasive dancing as a brazen, disgraceful bluff, but not a bluff with the least chance of convincing him. Most likely he would consider the dancing as not only an insult to himself but also to the Agincourt Hotel and to the glorious British history typified in that name, Agincourt, and to longbows.
Manse spoke off-handedly now, matter-of-factly, lolling back slightly with his drink on the settee: ‘Naturally, Ralph, I had to realize that you might think this … this … this, well, what’s the word … you might think this concept … yes, concept – it’s an unusual word for me, admitted, but yes, this concept, you might consider this concept a total trap.’
‘Which concept, Manse?’
‘The Waverton death concept.’
‘But a trap, how?’
‘We’re business people, Ralph,’ Shale replied.
‘Certainly.’
‘I think of Karl Marx.’
‘In which aspect, Manse?’
‘I believe Karl Marx said one capitalist company would always try to destroy any rival. It had to. It was its nature; capitalism’s absolute, basic rule. This is why I said a trap.’
‘I don’t understand, Manse.’
‘You’re a business, Ralph. I’m a business. Marx would say we were bound to try to trample each other under, although in some way we’re mates, but that matiness nothing like as strong as the pressures of business sink-or-swim.’
‘Oh, Marx, we don’t take much notice of him, not since the Wall came down, surely, Manse,’ Ember said.
‘I got to think of things like you think of things, Ralph.’
This was something else to piss Ember off vastly – Shale talking as though he had a mind capable of the same level of thought as Ralph. Manse might be smart and clever, but that was different from intellect and Ralph considered Manse couldn’t get anywhere near him for intellect. He must be too self-obsessed to realize what an insult he’d just delivered. But Ralph considered Shale ought at least to have the sense not to speak such a slur aloud, even if in his profound vanity he believed it.
Good God, didn’t this twirp realize that a plaque had been fixed to one of the perimeter gates at Low Pasture, by a previous owner – definitely not ‘Caring’– with an unquestionably genuine Latin inscription on it. Ralph often gave the plaque a rub-over and checked it was still securely attached. Classical languages he doted on. He didn’t understand them but delighted in their durability and survival, despite other lingoes coming along and trying to push them under with slang such as ‘fit’ and ‘leg-over’. Most probably in one of those far-back periods most of the conversation in Low Pastures would have been in Latin, to prove the residents had education and refinement, though not the servants. If Ralph had been around then, he would have made certain he spoke Latin more or less always.
This rectory wouldn’t have such a learned plaque. He’d described it to himself just now as ‘ordinary’ and he still believed that. Ralph guessed there wouldn’t be more than seven bedrooms to the Old Rectory, perhaps only six, and you could hardly think of its little areas of garden as grounds – no paddocks or stables as at Low Pastures. The rectory stood in a city suburb and so had only a restricted setting: no vistas that took in great slabs of countryside and, eventually, the sea, as at Low Pastures. There was the rectory’s tree-lined, curved, gravelled drive which admittedly gave the rectory some distance from the busy road – Ralph wanted to be fair – but nothing could quell traffic noise. At Low Pastures you might hear a fox bark or rooks cawing but that would be all – nature. Ember was enthusiastically in favour of nature, but he knew Manse regarded it as a menace, liable to take over everything if not severely and constantly hacked back. Although the sea might not be visible from the Old Rectory, Manse went pretty often to the coast to check on possible beach-creep by the waves, and he worried constantly about erosion of cliffs.
‘As I think of things? In which regard, Manse?’ Ember replied.
‘In which regard as to what?’
‘My thinking and you sort of attempting to re-run it.’
‘I have to imagine if I was you, Ralph, and you came along – you being me in this sort of changed situation – yes, if you being me came along to me, being you, and said you’d like me, being you, to do a kill for me, being you, I might have to wonder – I being you, of course – I’d have to wonder whether you – that is actually me – whether you was scheming to get me into a situation where I – that is, you – could be scuppered.’
Shale put this forward in a slow, gentle voice, as if to recognize it might be difficult for someone like Ralph to follow the flow of what was being said; and so Manse would considerately keep the demands on Ember’s attention at a minimum. Ralph’s anger swelled, in his view, justified anger, ‘righteous anger’, as it might be termed in some religions. He would have loved to take a serrated knife to this fucking stately fat brown leather fucking furniture, and take a not necessarily very big hammer to some of the art on the walls in here, and possibly genuine originals; or not just some of it, all of it. They talked of pictures going ‘under the hammer’ at auctions, didn’t they? No need for an auction. But why was he short of a hammer?
‘And what’s the answer when you do your fantasy reversal of roles, Manse?’ Ember replied, showing a warm, good-humoured smile at the Shale tangled gibberish. Ralph secretly clawed away at the cushion under him with the fingers of his free hand to assess the thickness of the leather and estimate the degree of maddened knife force needed to shred this cow pelt. Why the hell had he come here? What was he doing, staying on meekly in this dud property?
Ralph regarded the rectory as a totally adequate depot for one of the big Victorian families before satisfactory condoms or the pill, or TV as a distraction, but that was as much as you could say about it. In fact, Ralph wouldn’t say anything about it to Manse – wouldn’t ever indicate in words or behaviour that Ember regarded it as a step down to come to the Old Rectory. When Ralph considered what a half-educated entity Manse basically was, it had to be seen as splendid, as marvellous, that he’d created a business able to supply him with the cost, even for a ‘home’ like this. Shale and Matilda lived here on their own now.
As Matilda had reminded him, there was a flat on the top storey, occupied for a while by Denzil Lake, Manse’s former chauffeur and bodyguard, whose face became permanently slightly aslant through talking to Shale in the back of the Jag while looking ahead. But Denz had been executed in very necessary circumstances lately1 and although after some time Manse had taken on a replacement driver/minder, this one had a family house and didn’t require the flat. Obviously, it was during the spell between chauffeurs that Naomi, Manse’s second wife, did the school run that bad day. Shale’s first wife, Sybil, was shacked up somewhere in North Wales, Manse had said, with a partner he thought was ‘a heart surgeon, or roofer or traffic warden or broker’, and he’d earnestly prefer she stayed there.
‘What I mean, then, to put it straight as straight, Ralph, which I always aim to do, but especially in my own accommodation, it being of a religious pedigree – what I mean is, I come to you, Ralph Ember, and ask you to see off someone I think is an enemy of mine, a traitor, and I promise to do th
e same for you if you need an enemy took out in the future. But suppose I see the chance to get rid of two problem people, not one – Waverton and you, Ralph, you not being an enemy in the Waverton fashion, clearly, but an enemy in the Karl Marx sense just as clearly – someone who is bound to try to destroy me because that’s something built in to business, into capitalism: annihilate all competition, or it will annihilate you. So, you goes ahead and does Waverton and I’m one of the first the police want to see following discovery of the body because we was close business colleagues and might have had, say, a money squabble, or a woman squabble, or a leadership squabble. But me, knowing where and when Waverton would be done, is a long way off at that precise juncture accompanied by plenty of pure-as-pure people who can honestly, uncontradictably, say I was with them in a restaurant or a regatta or a Buckingham Palace garden party. The police – stymied.
‘But you might worry, Ralph, that when I’m in their question-and-answer room, I might mention that Waverton, an esteemed staffer, had told me in super-confidence that he was afraid Ralph Ember had some kind of serious territory dispute with him and seemed very threatening. You might also, Ralph, worry that I would scatter some clues here and there and findable by the police to get you in the frame for this death. As I said, scuppered.
‘I want to describe this with the full twists and turns now because I got to admit you could be thinking like this, Ralph, and I want to say that, although I could understand them feelings and doubts it would never be like this in reality.’
‘Some big thinker declared humankind cannot bear very much reality,’ Ralph said. He needed a break from the stifling monologue.
‘But there’s a hell of a lot of it about,’ Shale replied.
‘What?’