Play Dead

by Bill James

  ‘So she doesn’t, as yet, know about these strange fits?’

  ‘I couldn’t say whether she does or doesn’t, sir. What I—’

  ‘Perhaps she should. And the wound on his face, for instance. There’s never been a proper explanation of that,’ the Chief said. ‘A sculpted hole. It looks as though it was inflicted by a Biro. Does he go in for self-harm, grabbing anything near as a weapon? This “fret” he picked up on: perhaps he deliberately seeks causes to fret, such as prominent injury? Was he going for his eye, the fret magnified into frenzy?’

  ‘It’s healing well,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Yes, yes, but where, how - all right, he, you, choose to be unfrank about that. It’s the past, anyway. I’m more concerned about tonight.’

  Oh, God. ‘Once he was into the swing of the play he’d be fine, I think, sir.’

  ‘We need to get over there, Harpur.’

  ‘To the theatre?’

  ‘You’re familiar to him. That could be important - a sort of liaison function. I don’t think it would be wise for me, on my own, to confront him. Too de haut en bas.’

  Oh, God, but a Harpur-hate must be what set Iles off. Harpur was the one he’d accuse of abusing his heart strings into fret. He wouldn’t be yearning for liaison with Harpur.

  ‘I’ve a car outside,’ Dathan said. ‘This is something I want settled internally - not the Press, and not an official call-out to us, the police, or an ambulance.’

  Oh, God. ‘An ambulance?’

  ‘Later in the play he seemed to find something totally unbearable. He stood again but this time didn’t contribute dialogue. He forced his way urgently out to the aisle. My friend, Liversidge, the manager, thought he must be ill and, with another of the staff, took him to the theatre bar, sat him down and gave him some water. That’s as far as my information goes. Liversidge doesn’t want the fuss of a nine-nine-nine call either. I said we’d come at once.’

  Harpur switched off the computer and locked the room behind them. The Chief drove him in an unmarked Audi to The King’s. Harpur said: ‘Sometimes I think Mr Iles should give up drama, as some people give up drink or smoking. He’s a victim of his own empathy with the cast and their supposed emotional agonies.’

  ‘Don’t talk shit,’ Dathan replied.

  Iles, very pale, was still in the bar, seated on a stool and occasionally sipping from a glass of water. His hand trembled. A couple of barmaids waited for the next interval. An elderly, bald, paunchy man in denim stood close to the ACC. Dathan introduced him as Paul Liversidge. Iles pointed the index finger of his free hand at Harpur and chuckled with very deep wryness: ‘You’re responsible for this, you inveterate bastard, aren’t you?’

  ‘What?’ Harpur said.

  ‘This play.’

  ‘Tourneur with two U’s wrote it,’ Harpur replied. ‘Or possibly Middleton. You can check authorship on the Internet.’

  ‘I don’t mean you wrote it,’ Iles said.

  ‘Right,’ Harpur said.

  ‘You could hardly write a laundry list,’ Iles said.

  ‘What laundry list? Are you OK in that respect?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Getting me here,’ Iles replied.

  ‘Where?’ Harpur said.

  ‘To this fucking play,’ Iles said.

  ‘You said you wanted to go back because of possibly missed or under-appreciated nuances,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘I can confirm that Harpur mentioned the nuances to me,’ Dathan said.

  ‘I dare say he did,’ Iles said. ‘He’s using nuances as a smoke screen. It’s a blatant trick of his. Show him a nuance and he’ll turn it into a smokescreen. I’ve seen it happen frequently. Why I said “inveterate”.’

  ‘A smokescreen to disguise what, Desmond?’ Dathan said.

  Liversidge said: ‘He seems . . . he seems . . . well, I suppose the word is obsessed . . . he seems obsessed about a line in the play.’

  ‘Yes, you spoke of that - the fret,’ Dathan said.

  ‘I’m glad someone’s spoken of it,’ Iles said. ‘These people on the stage act as if they’re the only ones who’ve got frets, poncing about with their moans and threats. They’re probably at it in there now.’

  ‘Yes, the play’s still running,’ Liversidge said.

  ‘I’m not going back,’ Iles said.

  ‘That’s understandable,’ Harpur said. ‘You’ve probably nailed all the nuances.’ He hated to see Iles like this, malevolent and diminished. Malevolence on its own would have been OK. Malevolence came naturally to him. That was Iles. But to see him shaking, ministered to by this old denimed twerp, and sipping water as if he’d just been rescued from the desert frightened Harpur, made him feel the whole proper order of things had come adrift.

  ‘No, I’m not talking about the fret line,’ Iles said.

  ‘Oh?’ Dathan said.

  ‘Harpur knows the line,’ Iles said.

  Oh, God. ‘Which?’ Harpur asked.

  ‘Don’t play the fucking innocent with me,’ Iles said. ‘It’s why you sent me here, to suffer and cringe and despair at that line while you are somewhere laughing full out and uncontrollably at the pain and humiliation you’ve fixed for me in the stalls.’

  ‘Which line, Desmond?’ Dathan said.

  ‘He knows,’ Iles said.

  ‘I’m not very up on The Revenger’s Tragedy,’ Harpur said. ‘Never heard of it until a couple of days ago.’

  ‘And I suppose you’re going to tell us - tell the Chief, the manager, other members of the staff here - tell us, them, without compunction, that you’ve never, either, come across the line that sums up so exactly your rotten behaviour in a certain quarter?’

  ‘Which quarter, Desmond?’ Dathan asked.

  Harpur said: ‘I think what Mr Iles is getting at in his discreet way is that—’

  ‘Which quarter? Which quarter?’ Iles semi-shrieked. ‘Well, my wife, of course.’

  Liversidge looked at his watch. ‘There’s the final interval in five minutes and the bar will get crowded. We ought to try and clear this up soon.’

  Harpur said: ‘I don’t think there is anything to clear up. Mr Iles has suffered some stress brought on by the forcefulness of the drama, that’s all.’

  ‘Listen to him, listen to him!’ Iles yelled. ‘“Nothing to clear up!” The effrontery! The callousness. Are these the words of a colleague and, yes, of a friend, a kind of friend?’

  ‘Why did you return for a second viewing, sir, if the play upsets you so much?’ Harpur said.

  One of the barmaids, small, sharp-featured, mild-voiced, a little apologetic, said: ‘Lust.’

  ‘Yes,’ Liversidge said.

  ‘I don’t follow,’ Dathan said.

  ‘The line,’ the girl said. ‘Mr Liversidge and I were watching him because of the previous, and we both thought it was lust. It’s a harsh term, but this is a play with some very adult material in it. If they do a DVD there’ll have to be parental warning.’

  ‘Adult?’ Dathan said.

  ‘Like adult mags. Top shelf. Explicitness. Private areas. That kind of adult,’ she said.

  ‘Lust, yes,’ Liversidge said.

  ‘“The insurrection of his lust,”’ Iles replied in a snarling, hissing, very audible whisper. ‘“The insurrection of his lust.” Can you feel the filthy, intransigent heat?’ He looked all around the bar, as if quizzing everyone present - could they feel the filthy, intransigent heat?

  ‘Is that the line?’ Dathan asked.

  ‘Isn’t that enough?’ Iles said, normal voiced. ‘“Insurrection.” So entirely the word, isn’t it? I, Desmond Iles, am an Assistant Chief (Operations) and therefore, clearly, Harpur’s superior in rank and much else. I have been put above him by those who know what there is to know about command requirements, schooling, degree, sheer social class. And yet he gets his furtive, soiled paws and other working parts in contact with my wife. I won’t list the kind of locations. They are hardly believable and I don’t wish to sicken you with disgust. Ye
s, perhaps I could tolerate it once - that first visit to the theatre. But the second time, I am nearer the stage, better placed, and what I heard was not insurrection. A twitch of the tongue and what did it become? I believe it was spoken of as insur-erection.’

  ‘No, no,’ Liversidge said.

  ‘As, of course, Harpur knew I would. Has he got some sort of arrangement with the actor? Money passed? You forced me back to experience that, didn’t you, Col?’

  ‘As I’ve said, you wanted to re-run nuances,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘And you doctored one of them,’ Iles said. ‘Turned it to your own vindictive use.’

  There was the sound of applause from the auditorium. The Act had finished. A rush of people appeared and Liversidge went behind the bar to help the two girls. A woman summing up her impressions of the play so far, said to her companion as they waited to be served, ‘Such malice, such mercilessness, such utter rawness.’

  ‘Yes!’ Iles cried out. ‘Yes, but I, Desmond Iles, can take them all - malice, mercilessness, rawness - can undergo them, yet not, as it were, go under.’

  ‘So true of you, sir, so true,’ Harpur said. ‘Those who have your services are, indeed, fortunate.’

  ‘Thank you, Col,’ Iles said.

  SEVENTEEN

  Emily Young left home an hour early for an evening session of the museum committee. She wanted time to fit in first the Elms visit she’d promised herself, to take a quick look at what she thought of as ‘the Jaminel property’, and what others would probably think of as ‘the sniper’s nest’ or ‘the gun emplacement’. Those conversations not long ago with Noreen at the committee, and then with Leo, still troubled her. In Emily’s head that area of the Elms had lately come to assume a depressing, frightening symbolism. She aimed to put a once-for-all stop on that, demystify it, prune away all the symbolic nonsense, by going there and viewing, in their useful, banal reality, bricks, tiles, walls, windows or window gaps, downpipes, gables, mortar, guttering, doors, ‘Keep Out’ notices, security boarding, garden gates, fencing. She usually thought of herself as businesslike and practical, a born chairperson. How she felt now, though, didn’t square with that, not at all. The change scared her - panicked her?

  The fact that she kept this little detour secret from Leo, and lied about the museum committee start time, showed why the mere notion of the Elms could worry her so much - could bring her such awful uneasiness, could, yes, symbolize. Could symbolize what? Could symbolize the gap, the distance, that seemed to have developed between her and Leo: an information gap, a moral gap, a right and wrong gap. In an attempt to stay businesslike and practical she continually put a harsh question very bluntly to herself: did he have some connection with the death of the police undercover detective? She felt proud of this plain, brave thinking. Boldly she’d refuse to blind-eye. She wasn’t Kay Corleone or Mrs Bin Laden, tactfully cocooned against the full, difficult truth.

  But the plain, brave thinking, the bluntness, the boldness, went no further. She knew she should have followed up and asked, OK, if there’s a connection, what is it? Never mind the fancy, inflated woolliness of symbolism. What actually, factually, literally is it? The possible actual, factual, literal answer, answers, crash-balled her, made her doubt she remained as nitty-gritty capable as she claimed. She shied away from this spiky question, her bravery ditched, the boldness punctured and chucked. She’d decided, instead, to get along to Elms and see it for what it was and nothing more: a cash-strapped dump, waiting, and waiting and waiting, to be an executive spread.

  But nothing more? Of course it was something more. The mighty caveats got at her again. She’d been shoved off her perch. An appalling murder had occurred on the Elms; absurd to hope she could forget it. What she’d try to forget, though, or ignore, or cancel, or expel was the intolerable, badgering notion that Leo might have had a part in it. Might have organized, initiated it to safeguard himself and the firm? Oh, God. She realized that a curt, psychobabble, mind-state term could define her attitude: ‘in denial’. That wasn’t a state she would have considered remotely feasible for herself, until now. It meant there were possibilities you didn’t much like the look of, so you simply didn’t look, or not properly. You self-deluded. You acted as if they didn’t exist, although you suspected they did; maybe more than suspected, because self-delusion had limits. You regretfully, ashamedly, opted for blackout, for ignorance, for a kind of peace, quite probably a phoney kind: back to blind-eyeing, perhaps. How else to handle the notion that her husband accessorized a killing in the cause of continuing trade profits, and continuing avoidance of clink? Hi Kay! Hi Mrs B.L!

  She left her Mini in a Ritson Mall supermarket car park and took the short-cut path across Elms towards Guild Square. This was the beginning of the murdered policeman’s route, an area pictured by the media many times just after the death and during the trial. At some point she knew she must branch off towards the Jaminel villa. As far as she could remember, none of the reports had explained why he made this diversion but, obviously, he did. She took a torch although for now it was a clear evening with a good moon.

  The house was one of two or three nearest completion when the money ran out, and banks took against lending. That would be in the first dip of the recession. The second confirmed it. Once she could see their roofs clearly she switched course and made her way towards them. If Noreen and Noreen’s pals had things correct, this section of the Elms was becoming a sort of pilgrimage venue. Emily had turned groupie. The track grew muddier and was littered with debris. She had to be careful not to trip. These hindrances pleased and comforted her. This was how a building site ought to be, carpeted with lumpy bits, jagged bits, soil, furls of discarded, rusting barbed wire, muck, stones, half bricks, wood fragments, glass fragments, all of it real and ordinary, not part of a horrifying nightmare fantasy. Occasionally, on some particularly rough stretch of ground, a piece of rubble would jab at her shoes and hurt one of her feet. Good. In fact, excellent. The pain confirmed the reality and told her she should have put on hiking boots. What had Tom Mallen, the dead detective, been wearing on his feet? Well, not three-quarter heels.

  Following his footsteps, she tried also to follow his thinking. What made him divert? Had he seen something, somebody, on the path he didn’t want to confront - didn’t want to get spotted by? Or had he simply made a mistake, taken the wrong direction? He wasn’t a local officer and might not be familiar with the geography. This seemed an unlikely answer, though. The short-cut had been so well-trodden that anyone could see the usual direct trail. Even if he were half asleep or half drunk he should surely have felt the change of terrain underfoot.

  Had he, perhaps, glimpsed something in or near the Jaminel house that made him curious? She thought the distance from the property to where Mallen had probably left the path too great for that. It had been dark at the time, of course, as it was now. Had someone called out to him from the house? But surely he wouldn’t respond - would suspect some trickery, some hazard. He was an undercover cop and no doubt alert always to hints he’d been rumbled. He’d interpret a shout from one of the houses as a possible invitation to catastrophe and, of course, he’d have been right, dead right.

  Ahead of her now, and very near the Courtenay Jaminel property, Emily made out a woman - navy anorak, jeans, short green wellington boots - not moving much but crouched forward, as if searching for something on the ground. Another Elms pilgrim? She must have heard Emily’s footsteps and straightened suddenly, then turned towards her. She’d be in her late thirties, Emily thought, a longish, wary, but not unfriendly face, short fair to mousy hair cut short, the anorak hood not in use.

  ‘I suppose one day they’ll finish all these and there’ll be a nice, tidy estate, instead of this no-man’s land,’ Emily said.

  ‘Oh, are you thinking of buying here, then?’ The accent was not local.

  ‘No, no, we’re very settled. But I find it so sad to see properties like this. Well, hardly properties at all, yet.’

  ‘On
the news they said the economy is picking up slowly. Soon, there might be activity here again.’

  Emily thought she didn’t seem to favour the idea. ‘You’re wise to put on wellies,’ Emily said. ‘I’m foolishly unprepared.’

  ‘This isn’t the first time I’ve been here,’ she said, ‘so I know the conditions.’

  ‘The place has a hold on you?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you could call it that.’

  ‘In a weird fashion I can’t explain, it has a hold on me, too,’ Emily said.

  ‘Oh, I think I could explain why I come here,’ she said. It was spoken in a cut-and-dried, statement-of-the-obvious, no-choice tone, a tone Emily herself, the natural chairperson, could often take.

  ‘Yes? You have some special reason for visiting?’ Emily replied.

  ‘Certainly.’

  Nothing came, though. She seemed to think Emily should be able to work out the answer for herself. And perhaps she could. Her brain was whirring. What would bring a woman repeatedly to a grim place like this and give her the habit of wellingtons? Emily could think of one answer. Only one. She would go gingerly, though. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘and excuse me particularly if I’ve got this wrong, but are you . . .?’

  ‘Iris Mallen,’ she said. ‘My husband, sometimes Tom Parry, was shot here. Two bullets, one in the face, one in the chest.’ That same clipped, almost offhand style.

  ‘Oh, God, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s a while now.’ She pointed up to a front bedroom. ‘From there. A widow-making window. But I expect you know the story. Tom had what Andy Warhol would term his fifteen minutes of fame, the bulk of them posthumous.’

  ‘Well, yes - the Press and TV.’ Emily reckoned Iris Mallen had deliberately toughened herself, at least in conversation, as a way of making things tolerable. Her plain speaking was of a different sort from Emily’s.

  ‘He had an “I love Torremolinos” T-shirt on, except the word “love” was represented by a heart, in that way you see stickers on car windows,’ Iris replied. ‘One of the rounds, the second, went through that red picture to his actual heart, a neat merging of the figurative and the real. Of course, he’d never been to Torremolinos - not our type of resort: Blackpool with sunshine. This was part of his assumed character - the Parry aspect of him, not the Mallen.’