Now he was suggesting going abroad — a decision they should have made months ago.
“It’s worth thinking about,” she replied tentatively, “but what about the money?” And where is it coming from, she wondered.
“We’ll have enough for a while.”
“I’d like to go,” Carla said woodenly.
Joe gazed out at the misty river again, watching a barge silently plough the leaden water. Then he turned back to her with an artificial smile and a mock Australian accent. “Reckon you can handle kangaroo country, Sheila?”
Neither of them had the incentive to laugh.
Anne drove through Kingston-on-Thames towards Richmond, her anger returning as she sped up the hill and saw the broad sweep of the Thames. Once she and Paul had rowed on this part of the river in a skiff. They had been married a year, were living on Spindrift and had decided to explore the Thames for a couple of days, taking with them a tent, a stove and enough provisions to last a week. They camped illegally and made little progress, but their happiness had been unmarred. At that time, as far as Anne could remember, they had lived for each other, lived for the day, lived for the all-embracing world they had created, a protective shell that had showed not the slightest sign of melt-down. The sea wall had been breached when she had least expected it.
It would have to be an accident, Anne decided as she drove on, once again barely able to contain her rage.
* * *
“You threatened me last night,” she told Coyd, as they sat facing each other over his little walnut desk at the back of the shop. He had bolted the door and put up the CLOSED sign directly she arrived. “I won’t have you threatening me.”
“Is that all you’ve come to say?” He was betraying himself now, his anxiety overriding his need to dominate her.
“No.” Anne paused, letting him sweat, enjoying his discomfort. Was he capable of this, she wondered.
There was a long silence. “Well?” Coyd was eventually forced to ask.
“It’s got to look like an accident.”
“Yes.” He didn’t seem surprised that she had changed her mind, and Anne didn’t know whether she found this reassuring or not.
“Next time I’ll have my own cassette recorder, Mr Coyd.” She knew she sounded childish.
“You’re quite certain that you want to go ahead?” he asked, ignoring her attempted threat.
“I wouldn’t have come if I wasn’t.”
He met her eyes for the first time. “Once you commit yourself, Mrs Lucas, there’s no going back.”
“Are you trying to warn me off?” she asked.
“I’m trying to get you to be realistic. To understand the enormous step you’re taking.”
“Don’t patronize me, Mr Coyd.”
The dazzling orb of the wintry afternoon sun exuded little warmth, and an icy wind sent the dead leaves rustling around him. As he left the car, Joe Barrington found difficulty in resisting the notion that he was being watched, although he was quite sure that he wasn’t.
He strode through the woods towards the sandpit he had discovered with Carla and Tim a few weeks ago when they had driven out to Surrey for a rare walk in the country, following a path through the trees, the sunlight flooding the silver birches and the grass a verdant green. The wind moaned in the damp skeletal trees and the bushes rattled as if they were made of thin metal.
“Nice and simple,” Leslie Ryland had told him. “The name’s Weston and he’s a courier for Sears. He’ll be coming in on the last train from Glasgow at King’s Cross tomorrow night.” Ryland went on to explain what Joe had to do.
“How do you know all this is going to work?” Joe had asked eventually.
“Weston’s been doing this run for a long time, but that’s not for you to bother your pretty head about.” Ryland had passed him a Marks and Spencer’s carrier bag. “Here’s your shooter. Get some practice and don’t fuck up.” He paused. “If you do, then it’s going to be raspberry-jam time. Just like the Candy Man said.”
Joe was sure he would have no hesitation in carrying out the threat.
He remembered driving past Hell’s Gate, in Glasgow, wondering about the dilapidated two-storey building, once part of a long-abandoned railway works. Were the activities of the club really as vile as they were supposed to be? It didn’t seem to matter now. All he could think of was the inescapable fact that he had been run to earth and Timothy’s life was at stake. Even now Ryland was gazing at him quizzically, as hungry as a young wolf Joe had once seen caged in a third-rate zoo.
His army life had been spent in the Engineers and Joe had left as a qualified mechanic, but although he was not work-shy, the criminal life beckoned. He had met McMarn through an army friend, who had driven for him before but had broken his right hand so badly in a pub fight that he could no longer even swing the wheel.
“The Candy Man’s finished,” he had told Joe, “but he’s too paranoid to get the message.”
Joe would always remember the night of the raid. He and Carla had moved to Glasgow a few months previously for a live-in chauffeur and housekeeper job which had lasted barely a week until his employer discovered his criminal record. Sacked without any notice, they were forced to move into DHSS accommodation. She was already heavily pregnant.
The hijack of the payroll delivery truck had gone smoothly until the very last moment, when a member of the public inconveniently had a go — and was shot in the chest for his pains, giving the security guards the chance to hit back. In the ensuing mêlée, Joe had seized his opportunity and driven off, dumping the getaway car and stealing another, getting neatly away with his windfall.
Both he and Carla changed their appearances as best they could. Joe grew a moustache and a rather distinguished-looking beard, changing his name from Coyd to Barrington. On impulse he also had a couple of tattoos done, one of a lute-playing mermaid on his right wrist and another, a small but distinctive anchor, on his left arm.
Carla had cut and dyed her hair, as well as having her nose straightened — cosmetic surgery she had always yearned for. Moving to the flat in the Docklands and buying the Volvo had been additional luxuries and they didn’t start thinking about the consequences for a long time. “It was like taking sweets from a child,” Joe had told her, but the fact that he had taken candy from the Candy Man was unlikely to be forgotten for long.
As he loaded the automatic, Joe thought about Eamonn’s proposition. His brother had been right to point out that McMarn would never let him go, but the enormity of the other option made him indecisive.
For a moment, Joe saw himself and Carla on some mythical beach in Australia, once again naively complacent until the wolfdog that was Leslie Ryland padded across the sand towards Timothy.
Pushing his way through dense undergrowth Joe paused, waiting until he was sure he was alone. Then, choosing some targets — a slender pine, a fallen larch and eventually a Coke tin — he practised with the Magnum until he was satisfied. Then he stopped firing and watched what he thought was a lark, cleaving upwards into the cloudless sky.
Joe gazed down at his stunted weapon, the tarnished silver flashing for a moment in the weakening sunlight, and remembered how he had come upon the body of a young soldier who had been unmercifully bullied by the other squaddies in the barracks. He had put the barrel of his gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger, blowing away the entire lower part of his face, and Joe recalled the horror of gazing down on the bloodied pulp.
“How would you like to invest in a time-share project in the Algarve, Mrs Lucas? Only thirty thousand pounds.”
“Are you sure the bank will wear that?” Anne asked tentatively.
“I’m not sure of anything.”
“That’s not encouraging.”
He shrugged. “All you have to do is to transfer the money to the account number I’ve given you, and you can tell your bank manager what a good investment you’ve made.” Eamonn paused. “Providing you are sure about the choice you’ve made.”
“Yes, I’m sure.” Anne spoke with a determined confidence, for she had made up her mind now.
“Does your husband drive to his office?”
“Mostly.”
“Does he go out alone?”
“He jogs.”
“Regularly?”
“On a Friday —” She paused. “But it’s basically a slow walk to the pub.”
“Which pub?”
“The Lord of the Manor. Near the school on Wimbledon Common.”
“Can I have the address of his flat?”
She gave it to him and Eamonn Coyd stood up.
“That’s it?” she asked, surprised that he didn’t want to know a lot more, that the discussion had been so brief.
“I’m sure we don’t need to labour the situation, Mrs Lucas,” he said. “You won’t be hearing from me again unless you fail to keep your part of the bargain. And that would be stupid.”
“You’re really going to pull this off? To make it look like an accident?”
“I’m going to try,” he said. “Like medicine, murder isn’t an exact science.”
Anne drove back through heavy traffic feeling considerably distanced from the conversation she had just had. She read advertising hoardings with comforting and reassuring messages, focused on a fuzzy toy dog that nodded on the back ledge of the car in front of her, heard a burst of someone’s radio. Christmas trees decorated Richmond Bridge and a little further on a giant Father Christmas, made of some kind of hideous red plastic, lurked on the fringes of a park, collecting for charity. “Ho, ho, ho,” went the slit of a mechanical mouth. “Ho, ho, ho!”
Chapter 7
Rain that had begun in the early evening lashed King’s Cross Station and the Euston Road, the wind driving the freezing spray in great gusts over the traffic and into the concourse. The queue for taxis was already soaked and the pavements glistened, the water running down the gutters, spreading out towards the centre of the road.
The traffic drove the torrent out in sheets, like a dark, encroaching tide, and then the rain stopped as suddenly as it had started, water roaring into drains until there was only a continuous dripping from both sky and buildings.
Joe got off the bus, glanced at his watch and strode into the station, his stomach churning. He kept wanting to pee; he had already been twice since arriving in central London. The Magnum felt incredibly heavy, its shape seeming to take increasing substance through his overcoat, and Joe felt an intense foreboding.
Kings Cross was at the dog-end of its day, with the last trains pulling in and a sleeper being prepared for the night journey to Edinburgh.
Joe checked his watch yet again. He had, of course, arrived too early and the buffet was closed. Eventually he found a machine and drank the thin, acrid liquid, standing beside a closed bookstall, listening to renewed rain beating a tattoo on the roof. As it died away again, the silence seemed to envelop him, leaving him dry mouthed and with a strong desire to run, but then, in his mind’s eye, Joe saw Leslie Ryland cradling Timothy in his arms, taking him slowly out on to the balcony. Again he heard McMarn say, “Rock-a-bye, baby,” and he imagined the long fall down to the concrete below. Timothy’s skull would crack like an egg.
The minutes passed with excruciating slowness as Joe watched an electric clock, hearing its hollow click as it crawled ponderously from second to second.
Dear God, make the fucking thing go faster, he pleaded, but it seemed to move even slower as a result of his unaccustomed prayers.
Joe threw away the rest of the coffee and watched the stain spread, dark as blood.
Then he saw the train arriving, ten minutes early, sliding towards the buffers almost silently, hissing to a halt, doors opening.
Anne took a sip of Scotch, her mind numb. Several times she had gone to the phone and stood staring down at it, willing herself to pick up the receiver and put a stop to it all, but every time she got near to making the attempt, an inexplicable apathy took over.
Peter had gone to a friend’s and she had been wandering round the house that she had shared for so many years with Paul, astonished yet again by the stamp he had put on the place. She had never quarrelled with his style and taste and the house was far more his than hers, which was why she still found his new departure so disorientating. He had always led when it came to furnishings, to pictures, even to the kitchen that had been built by a craftsman to his own design, and Anne had changed nothing since he left.
She wandered about, looking at the photographs that seemed to litter every surface. Skiing in Bulgaria, summer holidays in St Raphael, Estartit, Majorca, she and Paul and Peter, sometimes alone and at other times with a gaggle of friends. A winter trip to Barcelona, just the two of them, and another to Ypres, looking at the battlefields. A little cluster of photographs of Spindrift and the creek, faithfully recording the pain.
Anne poured another Scotch. “Death is nothing at all.” The half-forgotten quotation drifted into her head. She would be in bed before Peter came home and he mustn’t see her drunk, although he might guess. She reminded herself to put the whisky bottle in the shed behind the old rabbit hutch, and then wondered if it would fit, for the pile was growing.
Occupational hazard, Anne reminded herself, and laughed, the sound raw and stupid. She got up, switched on the television, flipped channels and then sat down to watch a sitcom which she usually dismissed as unfunny. Now she found herself laughing appreciatively throughout.
“Got any change?”
Joe started as the boy strolled up to him. He gave him fifty pence and he smiled, his white face obsequiously warm.
He watched the passengers coming through the barrier, his heart pounding, his tongue almost cleaving to the roof of his mouth. Maybe Weston wouldn’t be on the train. Please, God, let him have missed it — or changed his plans, or dropped dead of his own accord.
For a while Joe’s hopes grew and then an empty feeling engulfed him as he recognized his quarry, trim and orderly looking, the overcoat he carried over his arm as well made as his narrow pinstriped suit. Weston’s shirt had a cut-away collar and his tie was widely knotted. He had a small head, a dapper moustache and sparse but wavy hair. Walking briskly across the concourse, his briefcase swinging, the black shoes glowing with a deep lustre, he looked assured and expectant.
Joe casually followed Weston towards the public toilets. You have a few minutes left on this fucking planet, you little cunt of a stick insect. But however hard he tried to psych himself up, Joe could only feel abject fear and a growing sense of disbelief at what he was going to do. At what he had to do.
Anne switched off the television and went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of cocoa, but once she had boiled the milk and smelt the sickly sweetness she went back into the living-room and poured herself a very large Scotch. She drank half and topped it up.
Slowly she went upstairs and lay on the bed without undressing, finishing the Scotch and closing her eyes, but then, like an old but untrustworthy friend, her anger returned, fuelled by the alcohol, and she saw herself again as the abandoned daughter, the rejected wife, the plucky little mother, the sweet martyr. She remembered Penelope pulling up her skirt and dragging down her knickers and Anne laughed aloud.
Weston pushed through the turnstile, heading towards the stalls, and after he had placed the slim briefcase between his feet and unzipped his trousers, he urinated for a very long time before a man emerged from a lock-up and stood beside him with the identical briefcase.
The piped music played “Dancing in the Dark”, and the chemical scent of cheap rosewater failed to override the thick smell of the day’s excrement.
Hurrying past, unzipping his own trousers, Joe saw them exchanging briefcases, ludicrously discreet, like cold-war spies in East Berlin. For a moment, the analogy actually amused him. Did real life follow fiction, or was it the other way about? It was all too cheaply melodramatic to really believe in.
The swap having been completed, the dealer strolled unhurriedly through
the exit turnstile, yawning, leaving Weston to zip up his trousers, pick up the briefcase and turn towards the exit.
Reality struck him and Joe felt the feverish panic surging through him as all hope of postponement vanished. Now was the time. Now is the hour. Time, gentlemen, please. The insane voice gabbled in his head and his whole body went icy cold, heavy as lead. For a moment he froze, the panic finally swamping him. I can’t do it, he told himself. I can’t do it.
Anne woke, her head aching, the whisky sour on her breath. Had she left the lights on downstairs? What the hell did it matter if she had?
But the thought beat in her mind, refusing to go away until, with a groan, she got up and moved towards the door, her head pounding and her mouth dry. When she reached the top of the stairs, Anne paused and swore. Not only was the living-room light on but so was the one in the kitchen.
“Sod it!” she muttered and promptly fell down the stairs, not head first but sideways, rolled up in a womb-like ball, the drink making her relaxed enough not to hurt herself.
“Mum?” Peter clambered down the stairs after her, trying to pull up his cordless pyjama trousers.
Why does he look such a mess, she wondered guiltily. Why don’t I look after him properly?
“What are you doing?”
“Only falling down the stairs.” Anne sat up. “I normally do it twice a night.”
“You could have killed yourself.” He tried to help her up, but there seemed to be no strength in his pudgy wrists and she pushed him away irritably, pulling herself up by the banister and descending the last few steps to the hall.
“I’m fine.”
“Why don’t you stop?”
“Falling?”
“Drinking.” Peter was staring disapprovingly at her, just like her mother. It made her want to hit him.
“It’s not that easy,” she said sourly. He was standing in front of her now, impeding her journey to the kitchen for another Scotch with irritating ponderousness.
I Want Him Dead Page 8