The traffic along the A3 thinned noticeably, the road darkened. He felt more and more angry. Wild goose-chase or not, he would cheat them and beat them. This is what he was doing: he was cheating them, beating them!
Then rain came in gusts through the headlight beams and splattered against the windscreen as if bucketfuls were being flung at him. He could not go fast. South of Guildford he stopped at a roadside self-service station. It was after eight. Out of the corner of his eye as he replaced the nozzle of the pump hose on its bracket he noticed through the curtain of rain a car travelling by at a slower speed than the rest. He paid in the service station’s neon-lit interior among shelves of products, only one other customer in the place. A blurry kind of muzak pervaded the atmosphere like a taste of cough sweets. The girl at the till dispensed a momentary smile as her emerald fingernails ripped out the receipt, handed it to him, yawned and endowed him with a chill sense of the loneliness of life. Once outside again he peered through the rainy darkness. No car apparently waiting, just oncoming headlights, just vehicles going both ways.
When he rejoined the traffic, there were red taillights ahead. For a couple of miles at least he remained deliberately behind them, not altering his speed to escape from vehicles that overtook with a petulant flashing of lights. Then the taillights disappeared for a short while as another vehicle intervened. He supposed he had been wrong to imagine he was being shadowed and increased his speed to the limit.
He would beat them, he repeated to himself, just as he drove on as fast as possible against the upswinging searchlight beams of oncoming traffic shooting out of far darkness, the dazzle as they came towards him, the explosion of lights as they passed. The actuality of his own doubts and fears was signalled by the to-and-fro sweeps of the wipers, the stars of raindrops, the universal silvery glisten of wetness against a teeming darkness. The logic of what he was doing, despite his angry determination, was as scant and recondite as that wet glitter. The night seemed to consume him deeper and deeper within its thick black shell.
Feeling disorientated by the rain and darkness and the inadequacy of road signs, he stopped by a lighted suburban pub sign and parked next to another half-dozen cars in the forecourt. He extracted his father’s road map from the glove compartment, locked the car and ran through the rain to the pub entrance. The door to the lounge bar made a banging and creaking sound as he entered but no one seemed to notice.
Some people left almost as soon as he came in, pushing past him on their way out and leaving a party of young men with several loudly laughing girls at one end with a sprinkling of couples at small tables elsewhere and two solitary men seated at the bar watching a virtually silent soccer match on a television screen. Apart from some sedate talk and the laughing girls, the noise of snooker balls and voices came from an adjacent room. He ordered a non-alcoholic beer and a couple of sandwiches in plastic cartons and sat down at a table facing the door. Anyone entering or leaving by that door would be bound to advertise the fact.
There were certain things about which his memory was usually infallible. One of these was his geographical sense. Once he had been to a place, he could recall the details of the journey to it with considerable accuracy if he tried hard enough. The car journey, for instance, from where ‘she’ and Dolly had picked him up remained quite clearly imprinted on his memory save for the point of departure. He knew they had travelled along the M27 but where they had joined it did not become traceable until he opened the road map and guessed where it must have been. The sat-nav had identified roughly where the pub was, so he could plan his onward journey with reasonable exactitude. He ate fast and hungrily, knowing he’d not much time. Then he debated which way might be quicker, with or without the sat-nav, because he planned to get the car back to London before morning.
If he were really open with himself, it was not someone called ‘she’ who attracted him, it was Gloria Billington. She attracted him because she mystified him. Rich, smart, cool, inscrutable, Ben’s… Ben’s what? Mistress? Hardly. Though she and Ben were clearly linked and Dolly treated him as a kind of father, presumably with her mother’s full approval. The link seemed quite explicit in the phrasing of her voice mail, even if the tone had been characteristically deadpan. His wondering ceased. He would do whatever Gloria wanted. Yes, he would do whatever Gloria wanted.
He found his way to a smelly WC down some stairs. No one was about. Glancing at himself in a spotted mirror, he wondered how many second-hand cars his face could sell. Five-o-clock shadow left a muddy discoloration to his chin and cheeks. He washed the look away with splashes from a basin tap. An electric drier dispersed it with an upward jet of hot air, but through the roar of the fan he failed to notice a man who had come in behind him. Their eyes met, the man’s shaded by the peak of a baseball cap over a thin face. They scrutinised each other expressionlessly for one protracted instant and then, with the automatic ending of the jet of air, the man’s eyes withdrew. Vague, uneasy recognition came. Maybe. And maybe not. Joe stepped out of the WC and ran up the stairs.
On re-entering the lounge bar he bought a bottle of water from the young bartender in shirtsleeves, heard the distant click of snooker balls and let himself out into the forecourt through the banging, creaking door. It had stopped raining. After the stale air of the pub the outdoor freshness had both a strong smell and an echoing clarity. It accentuated the noise of passing traffic on the busy road nearby. He walked across the darkly gleaming tarmac. Two or three cars were at that moment leaving the forecourt and the number of white lines for parking spaces showed the emptiness of the place. His own car was now virtually by itself in a darkened area. He pressed the button on the ignition key, opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat where he was temporarily bathed in the dull white glow of interior lighting.
He inserted the key in the ignition and switched on the sat-nav. Suddenly the car door was re-opened. A man leaned in. He saw the face, the thin features illumined whitely by the interior light though the eyes were darkened both by the peak of the baseball cap and the angle at which he leaned. He knew him now. Not only from the WC but from Courtier Street. One of his attackers. He opened his mouth to shout and was gulping in breath when the man’s face was quickly withdrawn and like lightning a fist thudded into his cheek. The blow so exploded his senses he was instantly blinded and sickened. His whole jawbone and teeth reeled from the impact with a reverberating pain.
Suddenly limp as a rag doll, all resistance left him as he was hauled in one swift movement out of the car. Instinctively protecting his cheek, fearful that a tooth had been broken, he bent forward. Another blow came. It would have hit him in the pit of the stomach if he had not been bent forward. Instead it struck against his rib cage and winded him and another blow buckled him. He found himself agonisingly slithering down the side of his car, his raincoat riding up his back. He was then jerked to his feet. He leant back limply against the side of the car. The man in the peaked baseball cap came close and he felt his left sleeve drawn back. His watchstrap was unclipped. It slipped off his wrist and fell to the tarmac surface beside the car door with a faint tinkle.
‘See! You won’t need it!’ It was the baseball cap who whispered this with a menacing confidentiality. He stamped on the watch, cracking its crystal. ‘We know who you are, don’t we? And we know all your nasty tricks. We know, you see…’
The man’s face now came close. Enlarged by proximity, it seemed fuller and much younger, with thickly protuberant lips and recognisable voice. The accent matched the sourness of his breath. It identified him at once. He had been there at the branding! The lips moved slowly and deliberately with a slight moist relish as the whispering continued, this time reinforced by the flash of a raised knife blade.
‘We know you have something and we want it. Tell us where you hide it. Is it simple, like in pockets, yes? Tell us and we find it and we let you go.’
The request seemed so reasonable Joe almost replied, except his mouth was so sore he couldn’t utter a
word. Baseball cap twisted the raised knife blade to make it flash again.
‘Papers. Documents.’ He held the knife blade against Joe’s cheek. ‘All lies. Lies manufactured by agents of international bourgeoisie. Nothing important.’ He moved the blade closer to Joe’s mouth and Joe winced. ‘See! What if we mark you, Mr bloody cheat? What if we mark you so everyone can see it? What if we do that, eh? You got nothing now…’ he snatched the folded map, shook it out and flung it on the tarmac ‘… nothing to look forward to! Oh, we have been bloody watching you! You are bourgeois shit, that’s what you are! You are cheating our international working class movement by dealing in lies! It is what you are doing, so just tell me where! Where is it? Is it here?’
He thrust gloved hands in Joe’s raincoat pockets, in his trouser and jacket pockets, muttering to his companion to hold Joe tight. Throughout the little speech Joe himself had been more concerned with his cheek and jaw and watching the knife blade. He had let himself be kept pressed against the side of the car by baseball cap’s accomplice. Then the blade disappeared, a chill gust of night air swept across the tarmac. The car doors were being flung open and baseball cap flashed a pocket torch into the interior. The boot was opened. All the time baseball cap called out softly ‘Where? Where?’
The car was empty. After all, it was going to be sold. The muttered queries and bangings of doors left Joe still holding his right hand to his jaw, but his eyes stared into the shining, watery, colourless gaze of the one who had punched him and now pinned him back against the car. His face was so close that his flattened nose and thin, thuggish lips seemed as intimately offered to him out of the surrounding wimple of a black balaclava as if they were pressing forward to be kissed. It was in the man’s eyes, though, that he caught the momentary assurance of recognition. He was back in the Waterloo hotel.
‘Svoloch!’ he whispered through aching jaws, trying to free himself of the man’s pressure against him.
The youngish features screwed themselves into a furious glower. This had been intended. Joe jerked his knee up. It caught the man where he intended. A shriek of indrawn breath led to a sudden backward stagger. Crouching, he pressed his hands to his groin. Joe then delivered the kind of blow he had used on The Kiss. It landed hard against the man’s ribs and made him stagger again, but this man was younger and fitter than The Kiss and he did not collapse in agony. Instead he squealed again and somehow tried to retaliate. Flinging an arm out, he must have struck baseball cap at the moment the latter appeared behind him with the blade of the knife raised to strike. Dislodged, it shot out of baseball cap’s hand and skittered onto the tarmac and under the car.
Baseball cap retaliated. He hit Joe exactly where the other two blows had landed, but the thick woollen sweater he was wearing lessened the impact. He was flung back against the car and his head hit some protuberance, very likely the side of the still open door. A wave of nausea burst over him. As he fell, the knuckles of his right hand were grazed on the tarmac. He anticipated a kick and was about to scramble to his feet when sirens began wailing out of the traffic passing along the road and two vehicles approached with blue beacons flashing. They went by, but the very noise and flashing lights had the effect of sending both men scrambling towards a car on the far side of the forecourt, baseball cap supporting the black balaclava. Through quickly blinking, watering eyes Joe saw the car move away fast, brake lights glowing orange at the exit on to the road before accelerating away beneath street lamps.
He raised himself upright. One hand clasped to his ribcage, he breathed in spasmodic, short gasps, very slightly bending backwards and forwards in a swaying motion as if he were following the beat of some languid music. In a mixture of pain and anger he found his gasps turning into tears. He struggled into the driver’s seat. The interior roof light died when he closed the door. Suddenly he was crying like a child, abjectly, angered as much by the clumsiness of the attack on him and the shock of it as by the still ringing pain in his jaw and the sharp ache in his ribs. He pressed the button to ensure automatic locking. It took him five minutes to recover his senses. Then he drew the back of his hand over his wet eyes and turned the key in the ignition.
14
Through renewed heavy rain the beams of the headlights picked out the tall metal gates and the fence in sharp white skeletal silhouette against the black trees. It looked like a dead end, except a bright light flashed on and a sign beside his car window urged him to give his name. He lowered the window, blinking in the sudden brightness, and spoke his name into a small aperture. In the cold outside air the engine noise matched in its soft drilling sound the steady echoing of rainfall on foliage and fallen leaf. The gates opened. He drove through. Another barrier halted him while the rear-view mirror showed the gates closing silently behind him. He had not seen this barrier on the first visit, but its purpose was obviously to corral all visitors into an enclosure of tall fencing before they were admitted. Another bright light flashed on, almost blinding him. Then the barrier was lifted.
He nudged the car forward into grey darkness. He remembered the drive to the house being hardly better than a track and was not surprised when his headlight beams climbed up and down pillars of tree trunks and the car’s nose rose and fell as if encountering oncoming waves, the tyres slithering from side to side in the muddy ruts and leaf mould. He thought for a while he had misjudged the distance between the gates and the house. His progress became extremely slow because he kept the window lowered in order to listen as well as see through the darkness. Bespattered though he was by rain, in a while he caught sight of a building in silhouette. He stopped the car opposite what he supposed was the front door, at the edge of the driveway, closed the window and switched off.
Complete blackness descended momentarily. From where he was parked he gradually began to make out the line of the roof, some chimneys, treetops beyond, but no light in the house itself. Only somewhere to the left was an illumination. He guessed it must be to do with outbuildings. The rain pouring down all around him, especially among the trees and on the gravel forecourt, created a soft, hissing din. It was loud enough to mask the sound of the car door closing and the crackle of his footsteps as he walked warily and stiffly towards what looked like a porch in the hope that, this way, he would find out how to reach Ben.
He remembered the silence and mystery of the place at the time of his first visit. Now, in the rain, it was noisy and menacing. The smell of the surrounding damp woodland was as strong as smoke, except that it burned in his nostrils with an intense damp freshness. His hair became soaked and drips ran down his neck in the half-minute it took him to cross to the house and gain the protection of the porch. There, after groping in the darkness, he found an old-fashioned bell-pull and tugged it. Dammit, he thought, after all the gadgetry by the gates someone must be expecting me. The effect of the tugging was instantaneous. A light switched on above his head and a woman’s voice near his right ear asked:
‘Who is it?’
He jumped at the sound of the voice, shocked by its closeness, only to see what looked like a camera lens resting on him its dead gun-barrel of an eye and a light beside a small microphone emitting a steady winking.
‘Frankenstein. I’d like to see the monster.’
It had been hard to speak because of the pain in his jaw and maybe his words had been indistinct. A long pause. Then the woman’s voice said slowly:
‘Oh, yes. Come in.’
So at least I’m recognised. Presumably welcome. Still nothing happened behind the front door, no one came, so he pushed it and it yielded. The overhead light went out. He was in blinding darkness once inside and the door closed firmly behind him. Gingerly he stepped forward on to what felt like a large mat. Beyond that, after straining his eyes and saying ‘Hello! Hello!’ as politely as possible, he made out the vague shape of a further doorway. He went towards it. It seemed that Gloria Billington’s reclusive lifestyle left little to chance. She clearly had a cautious nature. The implications of this had har
dly begun to take shape in his mind before he found himself in a spacious hall with black beams, an apparently old staircase and right ahead of him, beyond the staircase, a lighted doorway leading into a room at the back. The air was filled with the sweet aroma of a wood fire. Standing in the doorway was Gloria Billington herself. She had a glass in her hand.
‘Joe, er, Frankenstein? May I call you Joe?’
‘Yes.’
‘You found your way all right?’
‘I have a sixth sense.’
‘But you don’t know, do you?’
He waited for his supposed ignorance to be quickly dealt with. Speech was becoming easier despite the stiffness in his jaw. She simply stood there without saying another word, outlined by the backlighting of the room behind her. He could not tell from her expression what she may have intended, so he added by way of reasonable explanation:
‘I came to see how Ben was. I had your message.’
‘Then you don’t know, do you?’
‘What?’
‘Ben’s not here,’ she said rather severely as if he should have known.
‘You mean he’s…’
She took a sip from her glass. ‘Yes, Ben’s gone.’
‘Where?’
‘Yesterday morning I got some news. I’ll explain in a moment.’
‘Your message said protection or something…’
‘That’s sure what he needs!’ The remark, nearly an exclamation, seemed to be the equivalent of another rebuke for ignorance. She turned her head as if to avoid his querying stare and her tone changed. ‘No, he simply insisted he had to get there by midday yesterday. Was it yesterday or the day before? Oh, I can’t remember! It’s just his behaviour, his Russian behaviour. You’re the one who made him, Mr Frankenstein, so you should know. So abrupt, so uncaring, not very, you know… English.’ She seemed ready to elaborate but, stepping towards him, instantly refrained. ‘Oh, what am I doing! God, you’re wet! Aren’t you wet! Is it raining that hard?’
Mr Frankenstein Page 17