Seeing Red

by Roger Ormerod

  I moved to get to my feet. She spoke sharply. ‘No!’ Bit her lip. ‘What bribe?’

  ‘The way it works...it’s the offer of a car, something second-hand, on rock-bottom terms. “I can give you a good price for your old one, Harry.” And he happened to know my wife’d been worrying me to get her a car.’

  ‘Wife?’

  ‘Name of Cynthia. Two cars — on a sergeant’s pay! I ask you.’

  ‘But you refused?’

  ‘Ever tried refusing Phil anything?’

  ‘And what does that mean? I’m going to hear the truth of this, Harry, so I want a reply.’

  ‘Oh hell!’ I got to my feet anyway, but only to prowl about the room, gesturing with the pipe, looking anywhere but at Angie. ‘I got home one evening, and there it was, a nearly-new Renault 5 in my drive, and Cynthia dancing round it and waiting to throw her arms round me. I knew what I’d got to do — drive it straight back and tell Phil what he could do with it. But how could I...it would’ve been like a slap in the face to her. So I stood there like a fool, grinning, and watched her take it out for a trial run, knowing I’d have to tell her when she got back.’

  I’d stopped at the window. Nothing but reflections against the black night, my face distorted by a fault in the glass. Or maybe it wasn’t the glass. I heard her speak quietly from behind me.

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘She didn’t get back. There’s a hill, a bridge over a canal. She went through the parapet.’

  Then I turned to look at her, aware that I’d thrown it at her as a challenge. But...what could she say?

  ‘Oh...Harry!’

  I went on savagely, turning my distress to the purely professional. ‘So how could I ever prove I’d have taken it back — or hide any of it? With Cynthia dead...I’m on suspension. And that’s it.’

  ‘And...and Phil?’

  ‘It’d all been done with the best intentions, of course.’ I flapped my arms. ‘You know Phil. It’d just been a sales trick — see how the little woman liked it. That sort of thing. “If there’s anything I can do, Harry.” When I could’ve killed him.’

  She was shaking her head, hair flying. ‘Not Phil. Not dishonest. And you’re still friends.’

  ‘Sure. He took pity on me. There I was, with nothing to do. I’d put the house up for a quick sale — you know how it is. I couldn’t get away fast enough. Then I bought the Rover and the caravan, and Phil came round and said I could do him a favour...if I happened to be round this way...look you up.’

  ‘So you’re doing him a favour?’

  ‘It started like that. But Phil can look after himself. It’s you I’m trying to help, Angie.’

  ‘Are you? Asking questions and making rotten suggestions...’

  I tried to smile, but my jaw was stiff. ‘I’ve been sitting and thinking. I’d like you to do something.’

  ‘What?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘I’d like you to come out in the car,’ I said gently.

  Startled eyes. ‘Now?’

  ‘It’s not far.’

  ‘But…whatever for?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  I waited for her to get to her feet — my masterful act. She could not refuse. I had to get the talk away from myself. She shrugged, suddenly scared. I reached out a hand for her arm.

  ‘It’s rather late, and I’m tired,’ she protested feebly.

  ‘It needs to be late.’ It wasn’t a pleasure trip I had in mind. As we coasted out of the drive, I explained.

  ‘I’ve now got a lot of information about the last week before your father died,’ I said. ‘Not all of it, perhaps. I’d still like to see your brother — he’s at the Regent, by the way. But a number of unpleasant things happened in those last few days, and you ought to know about them.’

  ‘Must I?’ she asked bleakly.

  ‘If we’re going to get anywhere.’

  She gave a little shrug, and a click of her tongue from annoyance.

  ‘Your cousin, Neville, drove him to see your brother at the Regent,’ I told her. ‘That was the Saturday before he died. Your father was upset before they even started, Paul not having been to see him, perhaps. But something happened there that upset him even more, and he was in a very bad humour when they returned.’

  ‘That was a whole week before he died,’ she protested.

  ‘And things didn’t improve very much. The morning after his visit to Paul, he went to his Convention, met all his highly acclaimed friends and ex-colleagues, and later read a paper that fell flat on its face. He was very nearly accused of non-scientific investigation.’

  ‘I thought we weren’t going to use this road again,’ she complained pettishly.

  ‘You’ll see. Your father...by the time he got home — and this was half an hour before he died — by that time he was as low as he could get. His life’s work rejected!’

  ‘But his spectacles worked!’

  ‘Not in the way he wanted. Not in the minds of his peers — and it was their approval he’d want. No, he would’ve been in a really desperate mood by then.’

  We were coming up to the traffic signal at the roadworks. The lights had been flashing out at us for the past minute or two. I drew into the lay-by. She sat stiffly beside me, unresponsive and remote.

  ‘I’d like you to get out,’ I said quietly.

  ‘You’re going to tell me he committed suicide.’ Her voice was small and dangerous.

  ‘No...not that. Get out please, Angie. There’s something you must see.’

  Reluctantly, she got out. I went round and took her arm, but she shook herself free angrily. In that second I’d felt her shaking, but I had to admit that the dress, even with the little jacket she had over it, was hardly thick enough for the thin night air.

  ‘Get it over with,’ she said.

  The night was clear, but very dark. There was no moon. I had seen no traffic since we’d left the house, and it seemed safe to experiment. Ahead of us the traffic signal dutifully flashed red to green, green to red, almost blindingly bright.

  ‘I want you to look at those lights through this.’

  I thrust the disc into her cold hand. She nearly dropped it.

  ‘If you get no effect,’ I said, ‘turn it round.’

  She made a movement as though to throw it away, but I caught her wrist. ‘Please.’ Her face was almost invisible, only my sidelights throwing back palely at us.

  She raised it to her eye. I told her to close the other. She was very still for a full minute. Then she lowered her arm.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded. Then, as I tried to speak, she went on wildly. ‘You’re going to say he confused the lights. But this works — even for me, it works. His spectacles worked, and he had them with him. You think I’m a fool, don’t you! He didn’t...he couldn’t...’

  ‘It’s not what I wanted to show you,’ I told her soothingly. I turned, reaching inside the car for my motoring jacket. It was ridiculously too large for her, but she was beyond any consideration for her appearance. She huddled into it, hiding from me, but I wouldn’t allow her to escape, and walked her down the road to the signal, on until it stood at her shoulder.

  ‘I want you to stand here. Tucked in, see, where you’ll be safe, and you won’t be blinded by the signal. I’m going back to the car, and I’m going to drive past you. I want you to watch me through that piece of glass...and use a bit of imagination, Angie!’

  I paused. There was no response. She drew in on herself, motionless.

  ‘You’re all right?’

  ‘Oh, get on with it!’ she snapped.

  I turned away and walked back, and slid into the seat.

  There was no point in taking it at any speed, and I wanted her firmly in my lights before I drove past her — the clearance was only two feet. But there she was, the piece of glass to her eye as I’d asked her. I went on a further fifty yards and touched the brake, drew to a halt, then started up again and repeated the process. Then, as I was only a hundred yards past the l
ight, and there being no sign of traffic in either direction, I backed out, stopping beside her.

  I reached over and pushed open the door. ‘Jump in.’

  She did, awkwardly, taking two goes at slamming the door. I reversed up to the lay-by, used it to swing round, and drove back to Viewlands.

  ‘Well?’ I said, as soon as I’d completed the U-turn.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She sounded choked.

  ‘What did you see?’

  There was a pause. ‘Your...your tail lights were almost...almost white,’ she whispered.

  ‘And your colour sight’s normal. How d’you think they’d seem to your father, wearing his glasses?’

  There was no response. When I looked at her, she was quietly and desperately weeping.

  I drove fast, and swept into the yard. The kitchen light from the window picked out her bent head as she stumbled from the car. She’d thrown off my motoring coat and ran with head down ahead of me, to wait in the kitchen indecisively, looking round as though not recognising it. I pushed past her. Hot tea, I thought. Bang went the kettle onto the gas ring, clatter came the cups and saucers from the cupboard. Angie sat at the head of the table, her face in her hands.

  Tea, I suppose, is the quickest hot drink to prepare, but to me the time dragged. I knew what I was doing, and the realisation that I’d acted instinctively and thoughtlessly was chastening. I’d not been able to continue thinking about Cynthia, remembering, so I’d crushed the memory with a display of more present brutal reality. I couldn’t remember that any consideration for Angie had entered into it at all. Good old Harry, I thought. True to form.

  Her hands round a cup, she sipped, and raised her eyes. They were red and swollen, but there was no defeat in them. ‘I know,’ she claimed, ‘what you’re going to say.’

  ‘You keep telling me that, but you haven’t been right once. What I wanted to show you...well, you’ve seen now...just use your imagination, Angie. Your father, driving along to that traffic signal. He’s going fairly fast...no, just let me say it, please. He comes up to the signal, and he’s quite confident about his sighting. He goes through a green. But suppose there was a car ahead of him, going slower but in the same direction. Do you see it? He comes up behind it rapidly — and it brakes for some reason. By that time they’re both well past the traffic signal. Now — what would those braking lights look like to him? Remember that modern cars have large and bright braking lights, designed for motorway driving. Do you see the point I’m trying to make, Angie? They would look like white lights to him, through his glasses. Dipped headlights. Suddenly — and he’d have a split second to think about it — he’d see a vehicle that was apparently driving towards him. Logic might dispute that, but there’d be no time for logic. He’d think, in that split second, that he’d made a mistake with the signal. He’d think he was driving head on towards another car. He’d brake frantically, and skid on that slippy surface. He might even have a brief thought that from his own error he was endangering somebody else. He’d remember the pedestrian he killed — and he always believed that was his fault. So he’d deliberately turn off the road to save the other car.’

  I stopped. I’d managed to get it all out in one go. Those big, luminous eyes had not seemed to blink once during the whole of my explanation. They’d bored into me, rejecting the pain I was causing, and I’d had difficulty finishing.

  ‘Isn’t that reasonable?’ I asked. ‘There was another car — there was a telephone call.’

  She looked away, and began slapping the pockets of her jacket for cigarettes.

  ‘He had no reason to be driving fast,’ she croaked. Cleared her throat. ‘No reason.’

  ‘I think he had a very good one,’ I told her, sliding my lighter along the table top. ‘He’d just got home from a perfectly disastrous Convention. For him. In fact, he’d cut it short and come home a day early. He’d want to prove to himself the small success he’d made with the spectacles. It was all he’d got left. He’d take out the Escort, and he’d drive it fast, deliberately pushing his vision on a lousy night with sticking windscreen wipers. The more difficult the test, the more the triumph. So he’d drive fast. He would, Angie. Where’s the test if he’d drifted slowly up to that damned traffic signal?’

  She drew on her cigarette as though desperate for the smoke, and banged my lighter down on the table. Then she got up abruptly and I thought she was going to walk away from it. But she seemed to have herself in hand, and was only getting another cup of tea. The pouring of it steadied her, and when she turned back to me she’d made up her mind about something. She remained standing.

  ‘I know you’re trying to help,’ she said in a reasonable tone. ‘And I’m grateful for what you’re doing. But I should have told you more about daddy. He wasn’t like that, you see. He wasn’t a strong man, who could carry on in the face of setbacks and come up fighting. Poor daddy! I loved him so dearly, but he was easily discouraged. I didn’t mislead you deliberately. You’ll have to believe that. He was a wonderful man, but not...not resolute.’ She smiled thinly, pain compressing her lips. ‘I’ll bet — if you went through all his records at the lab — you’d find he’d started a dozen projects and abandoned them. One little setback, and that’d be it. Impatient with himself...oh, you wouldn’t believe. I’ll tell you what daddy would’ve done, if he’d really been in despair that Friday night. He’d have gone into his lab and smashed every scrap that related to his experiments, got drunk, played his Mahler, and gone to sleep on the settee. That’s what daddy would have done, with me not here to tell him he was the best and silliest...’

  She stopped abruptly, put down her cup, and said: ‘That’s what daddy would have done.’

  Then she walked steadily out of the kitchen, and the ‘good night’ that floated back must have taken all her courage.

  It’s always like that. Slap ’em in the face and they bounce right back; be kind, and they weep on your shoulder. Maybe I’d tackled it correctly. I didn’t think I could handle Angie with her head on my shoulder. There, you see, another lie. Handle myself, I meant.

  It was just another good idea down the drain, when a bit of luck would have meant it was the finish. Angie back with Phil — if that was what I wanted. Ah well, maybe — if it made her happy. But she’d loved her father, faults and all, and she had come back to Viewlands remembering only the happiest times. Gledwyn at his finest and most noble. Wreck that, Harry, and she’d never return to Phil with happiness.

  I didn’t know what I could do for her, and couldn’t bear the thought of facing her and telling her that.

  I put off the light, shut the back door after me, and let myself into the caravan. Home. That was how it was beginning to feel. I broke the blasted mantle trying to light it.

  Chapter Nine

  In the morning I made a quick call from the phone in the hall, not caring whether Angie heard. I told her I’d be away most of the day, and she must have realised I was intending to see her brother. But I was not asked to convey any loving messages.

  She stood at the side door watching me back out of the yard. The gelding snorted and tossed his head, I thought in contempt.

  There were two routes I could take to Aberystwyth, either north to pick up the A5, and through the Horseshoe Pass, or pick up the A483, south to Welshpool, and west through Powys and Machynlleth. Each looked to be around sixty miles, so I chose the northerly one, mainly because I fancied the run through the Cambrians and past Lake Bala. Given two choices, I always make the wrong one, and up in the mountains the mist closed down. I saw nothing of the lake, nothing really but the wet, black tarmac ahead and dry-stone walls each side with sheep every now and then wandering beneath my wheels. It was only when I got down to Machynlleth, with eighteen miles to go, that I came out into sunlight again. When I reached Aberystwyth I didn’t even get a sight of the sea, the hotel being well short of the town, where the road is still three miles from the coast. I’d seriously miscalculated the distance, as I registered eighty-three m
iles. I wondered how the run — either route — would have seemed to Neville in the clapped-out Escort with sticking wipers, in the dark and in the rain. No wonder he’d been dying for a smoke.

  Paul Griffiths had sounded distant and suspicious, but had agreed to a meeting. I couldn’t remember what I had to ask him.

  The Regent had more the air of a country club than a holiday hotel. It stood placidly in its own grounds, had its own tennis courts and nine-hole golf course, and the dignity of ivy crawling over its red walls. It was the end of the season. I’d been a little chary of the suggested meeting in the lounge, our business not being exactly public, but I found it was empty when I got there. They rang up from the desk to say I was there. I took one of the easy chairs that made an arc round a coal fire that was there for atmosphere rather than warmth, and waited.

  He was tall and slim, with the clean-cut, close-shaven appearance of the American male, tanned and confident, his gold-rimmed spectacles tailored to enhance his facial planes, his hair styled, his clothes draped in the loose, casual style that shouted out West Coast. I almost expected an American accent, but he’d hung on to his English, and there was even a trace of Welsh when he introduced me to his wife.

  She was a different proposition, the hard, diamond-cut elegance of the West Coast American born to money. Her tan was more a natural shade of her skin, and probably went in half an inch. I felt that there’d be no light bikini patches if you stripped her down; no warm passion either, if you got that far, more likely a polished expertise. She was dressed simply in a light two-piece that’d probably cost more than my Rover, was clutching her purse — as I believe they call them — in her right hand, and offered her left when he introduced us, holding it out palm down, probably just to put me out.

  ‘My wife,’ he said, then, to my surprise, he added: ‘Rena McGaffey.’

  They’re peculiar about their maiden names, American women, an indication, I believe, of their determination to hang on to their independence. The smile she gave me was thin and hard. Nothing personal, I thought. It was just because I was a man.