“We forgot Dolphus,” I said suddenly, stricken.
Her eyes moved sharply to me, to the mirror, to the road; she pulled in to the kerb and said, “Do you want to go back?”
And would have done, no question, if I’d said yes.
“No,” I said. “Not now. Doesn’t matter.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll look after him,” she said, doubting my assurance. “I do. Women and teddy bears first, if there’s a fire. And I’ll bring him tomorrow, early. Promise. Okay?”
“Okay. Thanks.”
o0o
At the hospital she walked me to my room, supervised my undressing and presented me with the threatened pyjamas, from a carrier bag she’d brought in from the car. Black silk they were, and tying with soft cords, no buttons: more like the gi, karate kit, than Marks and Spencer’s best. Also they had Chinese dragons embroidered on the back and legs, which made me giggle and feel foolish. But they felt cool and delightful on my sore skin, slitheringly luxurious slipping between clean sheets, and well deserving of the kiss she claimed.
“Listen, about tonight,” she said then, “would it be all right if I didn’t come? I always used to see my parents, Thursdays, and I’d really like to go tonight. It gives Mum a break...”
“And you want to tell them how I’m doing, yes?”
“Well, why not? You’re their son-in-law, they’ve been worried.”
“I don’t mind,” I said truthfully. “Of course I don’t. Why would I? I’m knackered anyway, I’ll probably just sleep.”
“Okay, then. Good. I’ll be in tomorrow, early as they let me...”
And she kissed me again, and went away; and I lay quietly, drifting towards dozing, shuffling realities in my head until a nurse looked in to check that I was back. I’d opened my eyes at the sound of the door’s opening, so she gave me a message to ponder: told me that Vernon Deverill had come calling while I was out, and would return this evening.
Four: Chariot of Fire
When he came I was ready for him, or as ready as I could be with my head so full of holes, drained empty of everything I needed.
At any rate I was sitting up in bed and wearing the black pyjamas, glad of the warning and glad of the gift, not to be taken at a double disadvantage. I didn’t know the man (or at least what was left of me didn’t know the man, my old and seemingly-reduced, though hitherto satisfactory, self), but everything I’d heard about him said that Deverill would be rapid to exploit any advantage he could see, even among his friends. And whatever Sue said—and whatever money he’d been spending on me, for whatever reason—no way could I see myself ever being counted in the number, the small number of Vernon Deverill’s friends.
The nurse wouldn’t let me out of bed again, even just to sit in my clothes in a chair by the window; and truth to tell I was half glad of the prohibition, because my body definitely didn’t want to move. But pyjamas were at least better than a hospital robe, and forewarned was one hell of a lot better than being surprised, as I would have been if Sue hadn’t taken me out that afternoon. He’d have caught me napping, and God only knew what mess I’d have found myself in thereafter.
God only knew what mess I was in already; or maybe God and Vernon Deverill shared that particular secret between them.
Maybe I could find out, if I was clever tonight.
Trouble was, I didn’t feel clever. I felt stupid and hurt, exhausted and unprepared and no way ready, not big enough for this; and it seemed as though I waited in that tense and useless state for hours before there were footsteps in the corridor, someone opening the door, big male figures filing through.
Deverill, a minder and a lackey, as best as I could tag them. Even the lackey looked hard, despite his spectacles and briefcase. I wouldn’t want to tangle with any one of them, even at my fittest and with all the protection of a courtroom around us. The three of them crowding my bed was pretty much the last thing that I wanted right now.
That I didn’t even know why they were there made it worse, but not appreciably. It couldn’t possibly have got appreciably worse.
“Jonty. How are you?” Big heavy voice for a big heavy man, and not just metaphorically: Deverill was a burly six-footer with cropped grey hair and fleshy features, the smell of cigars on his clothes and the smell of power all about him. Not much of his weight was fat, I thought. In a rumble, no way would this man stand back and let his minders sort it out.
I just shrugged, in answer to his question. Insofar as I had a strategy for this, I meant to say as little as possible. The less I told them, I thought, the more I’d learn.
Maybe.
“Totalled that nice motor I bought you, yes?”
Score one to me. I’d guessed this already, that he’d paid for that impossible, that ridiculous car; but now I knew.
“Seems so,” I said. “Sorry.”
He grunted and moved over to the table by the window, where all the bouquets stood in their ranks of vases. “One of these from me, is it?”
“The big one,” I said, winning another grunt from him, this one approving. He fingered the flowers proprietorially, and I thought yes, that was absolutely right behaviour for this man, in this situation. He’d paid for the car, he’d paid for the flowers, they were his.
He was paying for me, I remembered bleakly; and why the hell had I ever let that happen? I didn’t want to be in thrall to this man...
The lackey had come to the far side of my bed, where he could stand in the corner, out of everyone’s way; the minder had taken a position classically by the door, wearing his suit about as easily as professional footballers wear theirs, I thought, looking totally misdressed. Briefly, I wondered if he had a gun concealed under the jacket. Then my eyes met his and I saw him grin, I saw him wink at me.
Christ. Neither did I want to be on winking terms with one of Deverill’s bully-boys. A client of mine, a hard and dangerous man in his own right, had once crossed Deverill on a deal; smuggling drugs, I’d heard, when he wasn’t supposed to. The following night a tip-off had brought the police to a bonded warehouse, where they found the alarm disabled, a sealed door jemmied open and my client unconscious, trapped beneath the tines of a fork-lift truck with cases of brandy tumbled all about him. No fingerprints anywhere other than his own, though the set-up was deliberately ridiculous, not intended to be taken seriously. He had multiple internal injuries, besides what harm the fork-lift had done to his ribs; and he wouldn’t say a word, to the police or to me. No one doubted Deverill’s involvement. Chances were he’d been there himself, his own boot doing a share of the damage, he was known not to delegate what seemed to him important; but he wouldn’t have been alone, and he didn’t keep a private army, only a small team of loyal hard men. Not unlikely then that this cheerful winker, this seeming buddy of mine had been there also.
“Vern.” That was him now, showing me another aspect of his work: glancing quickly away from me and interrupting his boss’s private train of thought, unfolding his arms to make a little sideways gesture with his hand.
Deverill had a wide vocabulary of grunts. This one presumably was an acknowledgement, good, you’re doing your job, lad, because he stepped immediately away from the window, coming all the way around to the near side of my bed. Paranoia or just common sense, not to make a target of himself? I couldn’t say, I didn’t know how much actual danger he lived in. There were many people, surely, who’d be glad to see him dead; but most of them wouldn’t be out there tracking him with a twelve-bore, nor hiring professional assassins. I assumed. On the other hand, it would only take one...
Yes. Knowing what I knew of Vernon Deverill—and that was only the common knowledge, little enough compared to what there must be to know, a thin stream flowing from a lake—I thought perhaps that if I were he, I wouldn’t stand framed in too many lighted windows either.
“Well now,” he said, turning suddenly to me and striking his hands together, “I don’t suppose you’ll have anything new to tell me, wi
ll you, Jonty?”
And though he tried to sound bullish, I thought there was something urgent and unhappy in his voice, I don’t suppose you will, but please surprise me...
Almost a disappointment to me, that I couldn’t; but at the same time a major relief that he’d phrased the question that way, that I could respond, “No. I’m sorry, not a thing. Not yet.”
“No. Well, I hadn’t expected... You said it would take time. And I suppose this’ll hold you up longer, yes?”
“I’m afraid that’s inevitable,” I agreed, fighting not to grin at my own private subtext there, all the extra meaning that he hadn’t cottoned on to yet. And might very well not, on this visit at least: so long as he didn’t question the staff here about my condition, or didn’t find them forthcoming...
He nodded, frustrated but accepting. “Don’t rush things, on my behalf or Lindsey’s. Take your time. He’s got all the time we need,” bitterly, cryptically. “We can keep him where he is a long time yet. So get well first, before you jump back into this. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” I said without irony, surprising myself as he had just surprised me. I hadn’t expected such a seemingly-genuine solicitude from Deverill; that was not his reputation with his employees, and it seemed that he was employing me, though for what I still had barely a notion.
He needed me, I guessed, he must need me badly; and his next words seemed to confirm that.
“Anything you want,” he said, “the money’s there. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, and no lie that. If he’d paid already for a smart car and private treatment, then demonstrably Vernon Deverill’s purse-strings were open to me, his wealth was mine to call on. Which was a deeply uncomfortable position for me, though I did my best to hide it.
“Good, then.” Another grunt that seemed to say the conversation was over, or his part in it; and it was picked up smoothly by the lackey on my left, asking if there was anything I needed or needed doing right now, anything I couldn’t manage from my hospital bed?
I shook my head, hoping he’d read a simple message: that Deverill wasn’t the only one who found it hard to delegate, that what I had to do I’d do myself, as soon as I was fit.
“Fair enough,” he said, and his voice too was friendly, as the minder’s wink had been, confirming my status as friend of the family, part of the team. And oh, I didn’t like that one bit, and I wanted to resign, but my need to know wouldn’t let me.
“There’s been some more interest in the press,” he went on, balancing his briefcase on the edge of my bed, flicking up the latches and lifting the lid. “Only in the extradition, they’ve not made any connections beyond that, but I thought you’d be interested to see it.”
“Yes, right. Thanks...” I was interested in anything that could give me clues without yielding up my ignorance as a hostage to fortune. I was too vulnerable just now to take any chances with a man like Vernon Deverill.
Four photocopied sheets came out of the briefcase; at the angle the man held it, I couldn’t see anything else that was in there, though I did try. My need against his training, the echo no doubt of his master’s voice, don’t flash my secrets around; that time he won, but there’d be other chances, I reckoned. Accepted by these men, maybe even welcomed, what access I couldn’t claim I could try to steal.
Which might be, very likely was what underlay all this. Doing some job for Deverill, though I knew not what, I could penetrate his innermost circles and learn more than any outsider would have a chance at. I could be a spy, a fifth column, an undercover agent digging for victory...
But why in the world would I want to? I wasn’t CID or a private investigator, I was a solicitor with an established practice and no ambition to look beyond that, very content with what I was doing. Why change that?
Because something or someone else had changed it for me, obviously. I’d been reacting, perhaps, to a change forced upon me; and Sue was right in the frame there, as the only known agent of change in my recent life. Though she’d at least given me the impression that she knew little of my work and nothing of my connection with Deverill beyond the fact that it existed and she didn’t like it, none of that was necessarily true. Maybe she was the undercover spy here, exploiting my memory loss now as she might have exploited an infatuation earlier, feeding me disinformation to have me up and dancing to her tune...
What tune that might be, I didn’t know and couldn’t guess. Nor who would be paying her to pipe it. There were no reasons that I could see, nothing was reasonable; wheels turned within wheels, and all perspectives were awry. I felt as though I were living in an Escher engraving, where impossible relationships appeared true and things sat side by side that could never have shared the same space.
But Escher only works, he only gets away with it because people are content to play to his own rules, the accepted conventions of pictorial art. Our eyes are lazy, and hence easily deceived; there’s less work in labelling a paradox than there is in unravelling it.
And this was not a print to be admired for its technical ingenuity or its psychological acuity, this was my life. If one perspective could show me nothing but paradox and incongruity, I was in no position simply to throw my arms up in wonder or surrender or despair. I had to analyse and explore, to shift my own position and examine other people’s until I found another perspective, from where things would fall into place and make sense. It had to exist somewhere, I was sure of that. I might be floundering, even in danger of foundering at the moment, but there must be solid ground out there if I could only discover it. People no less than particles have distinct patterns of behaviour. Nothing is truly random or chaotic, it only ever seems that way because we lack information or insight, or we’re trying to force what facts we know into a false interpretation.
If I’d been playing detective for or against Deverill—or both?—then I could do the same on my own account. Though it would be my own recent life, my own forgotten motives that I needed above all to detect...
I took the stapled sheets with a nod of thanks, perhaps my first material clue; and was glancing through them, trying to look intelligent under Deverill’s assessing eyes, when the minder took two or three quick paces, across the room to the window. Something was odd there, that took me a moment to figure: it had been darkening outside as it ought this time of night, this time of year, but the minder was moving into light, seemingly, brighter than the rest of us.
“Jesus!” he yelled, staring. “Get out, Vern! Out now!”
Vern, I thought, must have taken a course, How To Be Protected. By the time I’d turned my head to find him, he was already at the door and yanking it open. No hesitation, no questions asked.
Not so the lackey on my left, who was fumbling to close his briefcase before his feet dared move. Graduate of a different course, perhaps, How To Protect Vern’s Secrets.
Not so me, either. I didn’t want to linger, though I didn’t understand; but my body simply wasn’t up to speed here. Out of bed, my head was crying; wait was the message that came back from my legs.
Crisis-time: and like Luke coming out of his tree, I could respond only in slow motion, and what had been a maximum benefit to him was disastrous to me.
Would have been disastrous, if I’d been left alone. If the minder had been doing his job, looking after his principal.
He was fast in his head and fast on his feet both, he had time to dive out of there and save himself to save Deverill later, from whatever threat came next. He might even have had time to hustle his colleague the lackey out of the room, and save them both. But his head snapped round and he saw me struggling, too weak even to throw the bedclothes back with any decision; and he made his own decision in that moment, and with one bound he was by my bed.
Not reaching to lift me out, no time for that. Though I couldn’t see what was coming, I could see its light burning beyond the window, throwing strange shadows. Get the fuck out of here I wanted to say, I wanted to be a hero, but before I cou
ld find the voice for it he’d gripped the bed-frame below my line of sight and was heaving massively. The bed tilted beneath me, toppled, went smashing onto its side; and I fell out, of course, and the mattress fell heavily on top of me. And then a greater weight, a bonecrushing thud on top of the mattress on top of me, and I thought that was probably the minder vaulting over the top for what little protection a hospital bed-frame could offer him—unless he was laying his own body there as another barrier to protect me, and what the hell were his priorities, why me?—against the room-shaking rumble and crash of what came then through the window and through the wall.
The room did more than shake, the room came down. I was blanketed in darkness and stupid with shock, half-crushed and fighting to squeeze air into my lungs against the weight atop me, but even so I could still put names to some of what I heard and felt around me.
The snapping, sliding, thundering sounds were the ceiling and the roof above, I thought: above no more, but beams, bricks, tiles and gutters all slipping down to join us.
The sudden blow against my side and the brief inhuman screaming, that was the buckling of the bed-turned-safety-cage doing its new job, taking heavy punishment that would otherwise have come slamming unhindered into me.
The implosive whuff! that followed, the sound that sucked—yes, indeed. I knew what that was also, I had a name for that, and I was starting to scrabble under my mattress, trying to dig a way out through lino and solid concrete when much of the weight was lifted off my back, and then the rest of it as my unknown friend, my minder who I didn’t have a name for yanked the mattress up and joined me behind its temporary shelter.
The air was full of dust and filth and first fingers of smoke, reaching around the mattress; but he held it across his back and shoulders, and I could see a path through rubble to where clean light still shone, beyond the twisted doorway. Then I couldn’t see it so clearly because a figure stood there, a man bellowing, naming the three of us, “Dean? Jonty? Oliver, can you hear me?”
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