Play Dead

by Bill James

  Iles morphed into a man: ‘Watch your step, Jane.’

  ‘Something very wrong,’ Iles-Jane said. ‘I feel it.’

  ‘Pissed out of his mind?’ Gerald asked. Iles put plenty of male harshness and extreme non-empathy into his words for this. Gerald thought drunks were dross, anyone could tell that. He believed in orderly, probably routine, weekly shopping trips to the Ritson, part of a decently regular life, even if it did take in a bit of trespassing. ‘Ill-met by fucking moonlight, and not much of it,’ he said in more of the clangy Gerald voice. Harpur reckoned some of that must be quotation, which could help extend Gerald’s personality further: he knew books and that kind of carry-on.

  ‘Whether or not, we must try to help,’ Jane told him.

  Harpur shut his eyes, scared it would put Iles off if he felt he and his figment duo were being watched by a figment corpse, though an actual body. The suck-sound of the ACC’s Bowpark-Linden black lace-ups on mud came very near again. It brought class to this dump.

  ‘There’s a blood trail, as if he crawled,’ Jane said. ‘More blood than from a simple fall, surely. And his clothes, so filthy.’

  ‘That suit - bad enough when it was clean. A charity shop reject, I’d guess. Or joke garb for a clown. Is there a circus around? I’d be ashamed to lie here in a suit like that, dead or alive. It would put a blight on the housing, if it weren’t already blighted.’

  ‘The poor dear,’ Jane replied. Iles gave her a tenderness missing in Gerald - avoided, even despised, by Gerald.

  ‘We should phone for an ambulance,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps in a moment,’ Jane said. ‘We must find what is the damage. I’ll try for a pulse, shall I?’

  As far as Harpur could remember, some of these exchanges were fairly accurately taken by Iles from their trial evidence. Iles would read something once and, if he thought it important, remembered it verbatim; though when the verbatim didn’t suit him he’d jiggle it, of course.

  ‘To me he looks a goner,’ Gerald replied.

  Harpur felt Iles’s hand on his wrist, a tender, lingering, ladylike, hope-shorn pressure. ‘I don’t think there’s anything,’ Jane said sadly. ‘Let’s turn him over so we can see what’s what.’

  ‘Should we?’ Gerald replied. ‘Interference? This is a job for the paramedics. We don’t know what we’re letting ourselves in for.’ Cagey Gerald, full of street savvy?

  ‘It will be all right,’ Jane said - a chancer, driven by human feeling and curiosity? Iles’s acting could run the gamut. Move over, the shade of Alec Guinness.

  ‘Wait, I’ll put the bags on the ground,’ Gerald said.

  ‘Carefully. Remember the eggs,’ Jane said. Iles would be proud of chucking in a background detail like that. It gave the scene workaday depth and authenticity. Fantasy eggs could get fantasy cracked and make a fantasy mess in the fantasy bag and so be unavailable for fantasy omelettes.

  Harpur opened one eye for a second and saw Iles as if setting down the shopping so as to free his hands and arms. After a minute, he reached under Harpur and took a hold on the right lapel and surrounding material of his suit, regardless now of the mud. Gerald wouldn’t be fussy: Gerald wasn’t Iles, although, for the moment, Iles was Gerald. The narrative needed this flipping over of the body. It had actually happened on the night. Iles pulled with some gentleness but firmly and rolled Harpur on to his back. His hair as well as his clothes would need sprucing. Harpur had reclosed his eye. ‘My God, what’s happened to his face, Jane?’ Gerald said, the horror intonation brilliant, of Gielgud standard. ‘A ruin. This is all very strange, possibly very dangerous.’

  It felt as though Jane came nearer and looked over Gerald’s shoulder at Tom stretched out. If only Iles could have in fact been two people they’d have fallen into this configuration now. ‘Shot?’ she said, shrewdly.

  ‘At least twice - nose area and chest. See?’

  Harpur couldn’t help them with any actuality for this, but kept his face blank.

  ‘Feel for a heartbeat, Gerry,’ Jane said. ‘Sometimes the pulse is hard to read.’

  ‘I tell you he’s finished, Jane.’

  ‘Please, just try once more.’

  Iles’s hand went under the lapel this time and rested on Harpur’s chest. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Utterly still - stilled. But, hello. Hello! What’s this?’

  ‘What?’ Jane said.

  ‘Things get worse,’ Gerald said. Iles unbuttoned the shoulder holster he’d given Harpur, took the Walther from under Harpur’s jacket and must have held it out as if for examination by Jane, following the transcript.

  ‘Heavens! Tooled up?’ she cried. This was true amazement, almost.

  ‘A Browning,’ Gerald said. ‘We use them in the Territorials. Excellent stopping power.’

  ‘But why?’ Jane said.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why should he have a gun on him?’ Jane said.

  ‘Part of his normal gear, I expect, like shoes or a watch. He’ll be carrying no ID, though. I told you, love - we’re caught up in something very dubious. It’s an innocent bystander situation,’ Gerald said. Harpur opened an eye again. Iles was standing near, chatting very naturally into darkness as the two.

  ‘What? You think a turf war - something like that?’ Jane said.

  ‘Something exactly like that,’ Gerald said.

  ‘But why here on such a dud bit of ground?’

  ‘He might have been duped into choosing this route,’ Gerald said. ‘It’s the chosen killing field. Ideal for that.’

  ‘Duped how?’

  ‘I don’t really know, Jane. Set up by apparent friends? Some internal dispute in the firm? These people don’t fool about. Or might he be a cop?’

  ‘A cop?’

  ‘Undercover.’

  ‘But exposed?’

  ‘They don’t forgive what they see as treachery,’ Gerald said.

  ‘My God!’

  ‘More important now, though, is the matter of where did the shots come from?’ Gerald replied. ‘The upstairs of one of the houses? We might be vulnerable here ourselves. Let’s get clear and call emergency services. We’ve done our bit.’

  ‘We can’t leave him, Gerald.’ Love of fellow humankind, regardless, was in her tone, possibly difficult for Iles to catch.

  ‘We can’t do anything for him,’ Gerald replied. Male - practical, alert to hazard, icily logical.

  ‘The BBC have been showing a public information film on how to help if someone has a heart attack,’ Jane said. ‘It’s not kiss of life, but a hard pumping massage of his upper body. Useful here?’

  ‘His chest’s a mess,’ Gerald said, ‘and it’s no heart-attack.’

  ‘Just the same,’ Jane said.

  ‘All right, all right.’ In fact, as Harpur recalled the trial transcript, the real Gerald had tried kiss of life on Mallen. Iles obviously couldn’t face lips-to-lips with Harpur, and Harpur felt immeasurably grateful. Iles didn’t have a monopoly on squeamishness. In any case, Harpur discovered that Iles wanted his lips free so he could talk abuse.

  Harpur sensed Iles get down near him. He began to hammer on Harpur’s chest. If someone else were crossing the site and saw them they might think a fight or a mugging. Iles must have put the gun away in his pocket. For a while, Harpur lay as if far-gone but possibly savable. He had the impression, though, that Iles wasn’t following the BBC resuscitation method absolutely. The hands should be out flat on the victim’s chest, surely, to provide a good area of pressure. Iles seemed to be using his fists and was giving short-arm jab punches rather than forceful massage: an attack, not a therapy. Harpur felt something, some things, damp and glutinous fall one-by-one in a small shower on to his face.

  ‘Any response?’ Iles asked in the Jane voice, but slightly winded from effort.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ Gerald said.

  ‘Keep trying,’ Jane replied.

  ‘Yes,’ Gerald said. The punching grew heavier, maybe of rib-cracking intent. Yes, it did make Iles bre
athless, and Harpur, as well, but Iles had big reserves of hate, malice and cuckoldry-resentment to keep him going OK. He was Des Iles now, not Gerald, and the blows were Des-Ilesian, unforgiving and deft. He stood for a few seconds so he could kick Harpur twice in the balls with the expensive black lace-ups. That, too, differed from the original Gerald’s behaviour. Then Iles lowered himself and lay close again. The ACC grunted contentedly: ‘Got you, you immoral, amoral, scruffy, smirking, lecherous sod, Harpur. Gotcha! I could see you off here - you realize that, do you? Crime passionel, recognized as just cause by the law. Terminate you. Why fucking not? No witnesses.’

  ‘What about Jane?’ Harpur replied. The punching abated for conversation.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘One of the shoppers - Jane and Gerald.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Jane’s watching She’s a witness.’

  ‘I’m Jane - and Gerald, you prat.’

  ‘You, sir?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You in person?’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘You personally, sir, are Gerald?’

  ‘Certainly. And Jane.’

  ‘Both?’

  ‘As agreed.’

  ‘Agreed with them?’

  ‘Agreed between us,’ Iles replied.

  ‘Which us?’

  ‘Us.’

  ‘You and me, sir?’

  ‘Obviously, you and me. Have you gone nuts, Harpur? This is a performance.’

  ‘Harpur? No, I’m Parry/Mallen, and dead.’

  ‘Soon, yes,’ Iles replied. He let his hands play on and around Harpur’s neck, a possible garrotter’s hands, governed by a possible garrotter’s mind. He could probably amend to a simple throttle. ‘Did you think when you were banging my wife on the quiet in fourth-rate rooming joints, under evergreen hedgerows, in marly fields, on river banks, in cars - including police vehicles - and, most probably, my own bed, that I’d get a lovely, heaven-sent opportunity to deal with you like this? Of course you fucking didn’t, Col. You were driven by disgusting, traitorous, uncontrolled, uncontrollable fleshly compulsion. You had no time or inclination for thoughts about me, your superior officer and, in some senses, friend. “Think dick” was your mantra, which meant don’t think at all, just have it away.’

  Harpur realized that the droplets hitting his face were lip-foam from the ACC, often accessories to his frantic but well-structured rage episodes about Harpur and Iles’s wife. ‘Did you plan this, sir, just as it was planned to get Tom Parry/Mallen out here on a cooked-up mission? God, I’ve lost track of what’s thesp and what’s real, what’s flashback and what’s now. Have you, too, sir? If you kill me they’ll get you from the type of construction site mud on your coat. The forensic people are good at that these days. Headline: “Did top cop murder love-rat pal in revenge spasm?” We’re visible from the street and by anyone using the site.’

  ‘Do I care? I’ll have put things right, restored my pride in being who I am and was, Col - husband, father, law-officer of the Queen, guest at city hall functions, wholly unbribable rugby ref always up with the play.’

  ‘And you’re the two shoppers on their way home from Ritson. Very, very few would dispute your perpetual right to such pride in yourself, sir,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Which very, very fucking few, Harpur?’

  ‘Well, never your mother among the very, very few, we can be sure of that,’ Harpur said, with a warm chuckle of congratulation.

  ‘Leave my sodding mother out of it,’ the Assistant Chief replied. ‘This wasteland is no place for someone’s mother.’

  ‘Sorry, sir. But you sometimes bring her into things.’

  ‘I’m entitled to bring her into things. That’s what being a son means. But not here where the dead properties give no shelter.’

  ‘I don’t do it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bring my mother in,’ Harpur said.

  ‘I don’t blame you.’

  ‘Why, sir?’

  ‘I don’t. That’s all,’ Iles said.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think she’d want to be associated with you. Even mothers have to show some taste and discrimination.’

  ‘Mothers have a lot to do - stair carpets to Hoover, measuring up for new curtains, feeding the goldfish. That kind of thing.’

  ‘True,’ Iles replied.

  Harpur felt safer when they talked, even if it was mainly family and domestic topics. The conversation seemed to preserve a degree of normality, a tiny degree, but enough to give Harpur time to think of how to neutralize Iles quickly - how to bring him back to rational behaviour. No question, the ACC could manage rational behaviour for quite long, though unpredictable spells. Frequently Harpur had seen Iles more or less mentally normal, even for hours. Harpur wished he still had the Walther/Browning. Failing that, though, he moved his right palm in a sensitive, arcing sweep over the ground near him. He had come to think of it as his terrain. The Harpur writ ran here uncontested. These objects owed him dirty fealty.

  His questing fingers homed in on the old, topless Biro, once able to write green. Almost certainly it could then have done something very lively and even vivid-looking on good white paper. Green was life - for a while. It said ‘Go’ at traffic lights. It showed in springtime’s new shoots. There was a Green Party, concerned with looking after the environment and, therefore, the health of the planet and its future. But Iles would most likely locate different symbolism in that green Biro - its decline into a cast-off, of no more use than the ring-pull from the can without the can. Iles tended to see many aspects of life as in decline. This pen could sum it up, not through what it wrote - nothing now - but merely through being a pen, a defunct pen, lying undegradable in soil that one day might be a road. Not yet, though.

  But Harpur, still capable of thought despite the body blows and throat threat, would give the Biro a job, a positive job, not so much symbolic as plain, up-to-the-minute, potentially life-saving, and also thuggish. He took a good grip on it. Iles’s hands went prospecting around Harpur’s neck once more and felt increasingly committed and tempted. Harpur reached up and rammed the nicely pointed former writing end of the pen hard into the Assistant Chief’s left cheek just below the eye, jolting against bone, as was only to be expected, given the skull’s construction.

  The Biro seemed to stay OK, didn’t snap off leaving a section poking out of Iles like a tyre valve, although not made for this kind of work. Iles gasped. It might be a reaction to sudden bad pain from getting roughly pierced, or hot admiration for Harpur’s smart improvising with local rubbish. The military said time spent on reconnaissance was never wasted, and it had been close reconnaissance of that square metre or so in front of the house that led Harpur to recruit the Biro now, and bring it into bonny, offensive-defensive play.

  Harpur pulled it out, causing a gurgling sound he was not keen on, and didn’t repeat the move as yet. The throat danger had passed, at least temporarily: Iles needed one hand to get up to the side of his face and investigate the wound. Harpur wanted the ACC to realize there were his eyes themselves to be dug into, as well as plenty of room in that cheek or the other, for more and maybe deeper inserts, if he didn’t get back to sanity. And get back also to being the true Gerald and Jane of tonight’s story, not his het-up, betrayed self. He had a duty to the shoppers, a duty he’d formulated himself. This early puncture of the ACC’s chops was like the bomb on Hiroshima he’d mentioned. It promised more and worse from the same source if he didn’t turn sensible: someone his mother would have been willing to acknowledge as her son.

  As well as the wrath froth, blood now also trickled on to Harpur’s skin and clothes from the nibbed nook in Iles’s flesh. The blood felt warmer and more runny. If the Biro had still contained liquid ink, and some got released into the wound, Harpur thought there would have been an interesting red and green mix in the outflow, recalling colour use in some David Hockney exhibition pictures
recently featured on TV. The shaft of the Biro had green traces, but long ago dried out.

  Harpur’s unusual role for the Biro now did cause him some worry. Pens were certainly not made for this. It would be mad for Biro manufacturers to advertise such secondary use in an emergency, say when getting strangled. Lately, he’d begun to have a sort of expanding respect for words and writing. He’d picked up that attitude from his daughters. They did a lot of reading - actual traditional books, as well as Kindle. They could get transfixed. Their mother had been the same. Megan was dead now, murdered in the station car park, off the last train one night,3 but her influence might still reach the children. Harpur had disliked Megan’s bookishness - used to feel excluded. But he’d come to recognize it must be a kind of worthwhile art to put ideas down on a page that people would want to read - not just instructions and manuals, but tales and descriptions of scenes and so on.

  As a result, it troubled him to be adapting something intended to spell out stuff pleasantly via words and paragraphs etcetera - such as the Biro - yes, adapting it into a savage little combat item that could give the ACC a very timely, fuck-you-Iles spearing, possibly turning septic, and in quite a noticeable spot on his frontage. Iles liked to think of himself as refined-looking, polished and vigorous, and this would be difficult to maintain if he had a hacked-out concavity in his cheek, or possibly several. Harpur did suffer moments when he felt barbaric for changing the pen from its usual fine, communicating role into a lance-type weapon for use on a stalled building project. His daughters would be upset if they ever found out about it.