‘Go on, choose a hand, Puck.’ I motioned towards his other hand; over it went revealing a pale blue Post-it note. I could read both sets of names and telephone numbers upside down.
‘As I’ve said, Mr Hood don’t like loose ends, and what with you being a decent, dilettante, consecrating sort of genitalman I know that you’ll make sure that these fall into the right hands.’ He held the Post-its towards me; I unpeeled them from either palm and put them into my trouser pocket. There was a trace of a smile on his face.
‘So long, Puck.’ He moved away from the door and we swapped places, him in the middle of the pavement, me opening the car door and getting into the driver’s seat. I slammed the door, wound the window down.
‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.’ I couldn’t manage a reply.
I turned the ignition, put into drive. The road was wide enough for a U turn. I could see his hand in the air, and as I passed him it went to his brow quivering in mock salute. When I reached the main road, I could see him in my mirror still standing there, still saluting.
When I got to the junction I made a spur-of-the-moment decision. Instead of indicating left and driving back to the city I turned right and drove east towards the moors. I had sufficient fuel to get to the first service station on the M1. I would return the car tomorrow, the fine – or whatever, paled into insignificance compared to what had just taken place, or what I was likely to experience when I arrived back at Lloyd Lewis Associates.
Twenty-six
The car radio – like in all hire cars – had been tuned to a local pop station. An adolescent-sounding voice was yodelling the question, what is love, and does anybody love anybody, anyway? I switched it off preferring the sound of my own thoughts even if they were troubled ones. It was 7.15pm and I was driving east, a low sun behind me. On my right was a trio of long lakes with dams, on my left moor towering above me, rocks, and the fleeting glimpse of what looked like a small boy on the horizon; vanished, lost, perhaps for ever.
A sense of open space usually accompanies a feeling of freedom, but in spite of the extraordinary events of the day I felt anything but free. Until this moment I’d been acting on my own. I’d been able to spell out my own terms to myself, clear, lucid, and realistic. I’d known I was never going to solve the whole puzzle, been aware of my limitations, but at least while I’d been doing it I’d been my own master. The moment Dickson handed me the evidence was the moment I’d lost my freedom, and in that instant, I’d become Hood’s man. Now I was under instruction, and I felt like a double agent turned by an enemy. I was like the native of an invaded country who has been forced to collaborate with the invader, and in a way, I’d been taken prisoner. Run away, disobey, and you take the consequences.
I was thinking of Lauren, and Shem – but almost entirely about Lauren. Whatever the result of their enquiries, once I’d contacted the police we’d be out of a job… so why couldn’t Lauren and I set up in business together – okay I didn’t have any money, but she did… with her contacts and my experience it could work out.
As I parked at the first service station on the motorway it dawned on me not just how exhausted I was, or how hungry; but how insecure I felt. It had been the reason I’d hung onto the car. It was a base, an anchor, something I could return to. Getting out at the service station, slamming, locking and walking into the building was a wrench.
From a payphone, I telephoned the hire car service and left a message saying I’d drop it off in North London by midday tomorrow. I decided not to try the telephone number on the blue Post-it note with Laurie Fournier written against it. Directory enquiries told me that 01-222-4386 was a Willesden number. I visited the toilets and under the blinking scrutiny of ultraviolet light, and the humid rush of a shiny metal hand dryer I attempted to make myself look normal.
I ate cheeseburger, fries, drank coffee, and hated them; but I’d wanted something fast, something easy to chew and swallow. Two hours later at my next services stop I drank more coffee, purchased a spare ballpoint pen, notepaper and envelopes – the small personal size on which children and old folk write thank-you letters. I stopped once more, contemplated taking another sleep, but I was too keyed up for what was to come. When I drew up outside Lloyd Lewis Associates it was 0200hrs – perfect. I parked in one of the residents’ parking bays, sod it! I would be away well before the traffic wardens were up.
I switched on the interior light, took out one of the envelopes and addressed it to myself at my flat in W4, adding a stamp which I already had in my bag. On the notepaper, I wrote a brief report updating the previous one I’d left in my flat – names and telephone numbers. I got out and closing as quietly as it’s possible to with a car door, I walked under a gibbous moon to the post box at the end of the next street. I posted, and walked back finding myself several paces behind a fox which was doing that funny sideways walk that dogs sometimes do. I could tell by the way it glanced over its shoulder that it knew I was there. Then it stopped, waited until I was three paces away, glanced behind once more and shimmied between the railings into the shrubs. I could have sworn it was laughing.
My selenium activities completed and back at the car I took out the notepaper and wrote.
Dear Patrick
I’m sorry that you have once again declined my request to be made an associate director of Lloyd Lewis Associates. I regret giving you notice so soon after commencing employment here – it seems no more than five minutes since I made the same request when you interviewed me!
I’ve been recently approached by two colleagues who have just set up in practice and they have asked me to join them as associate director.
I wish you and your practice all the very best.
Kind Regards
The latter statement was almost true. The answer to the question about the directorship I’d decided would be a foregone conclusion. I sealed the envelope, put it in my inside jacket pocket, got out of the car, walked up to the front door of the house, and, as quietly as I could, let myself in.
I wished I’d got a coat or pullover. It was freezing, as if I’d just slid into the water of a canal – just at the point where it passes into a tunnel. I also felt the need of an electric torch, every movement I was making was by way of street lighting spilling through the hall fan light. In spite of the iciness of the interior I removed my boots, tiptoed into the ground floor studio, and going almost by sixth sense placed them under the large white-topped table. I moved onward and up the stone stairs, through the door of the antechamber – avoiding its creaky board – and entered Patrick’s office.
For some reason, the shutters had been left open, and in the street lights the walnut desk loomed like some giant rectangular toad encrusted with amphibious grime. I stole round to its rear, squatting down – like the monkey in the tapestry just behind me – and peering into the knee space, as if I expected to see Patrick there on haunches, blazer draped around shoulders, knees drawn up to his chin, eye patch glowing palely and his arm in a sling.
What I was about to do was more daring than entering Hood’s office had been, and I knew that if I was confronted, and that if Patrick had a firearm, then in a court of law he might be considered justified in shooting me dead. By the time he’d reported the incident and the emergency services had arrived, the two Post-it notes would have been removed from the body. Why didn’t I just call the police now? That would be the sensible thing to do, but I felt as if I was in possession of a secret, some kind of obsessional jigsaw, I had to have the final piece at any cost, I was a crazy boy collector; I needed the full set.
Just for good measure I tried the third drawer down. It was locked, so I eased open the top drawer and removed the two apartment keys. Two questions were knocking away in my head; i) how sound a sleeper was Patrick? Did he lie there motionless all night like a student, or was he a tremulous insomniac? Given his age he could easily be up every hour emptying his bladder… But what about Martiniq
ue, would the faint click of Chubb waken her? Was I mad yet again risking injury or death?
Question ii) was Laurie. When had that Post-it note been written? If it was some time ago and the order had gone through, then he was a dead man walking… if he still was walking? How long did these things take? Identify target, shadow, establish habits; work out modus operandi; analysis, evaluation, synthesis… probably very like doing a design job only the client presentation would be more severe, the off-site date critical, and the handover had to be 100% fatal.
I tried to run stocking-footed up the stone stair – God I was stiff after my marathon crawl along the cable tray. I listened, nothing – no traffic noise to cover extraneous clicks and taps; not even the far off subterranean hint of a tube train, they were long closed down for the night. But my adventures of the day had made me defiant. It was as if the part of my brain which generated the emotion of fear had been in some way stratified, like garden seeds put into deep freeze or boiled to stimulate growth in spring.
Over went the Chubb, I squeezed the Yale… The jewellery-box-lid sound of the door seemed louder – like human sucking and kissing. I stepped inside and eased the door closed behind me conscious of a change in air pressure. The temperature must have been five degrees higher than out on the stone stairs. If the bedroom doors were open I was in trouble… but the master bedroom door was closed. I moved, pivoting from one foot to the other, my body like the fulcrum of a set of weighing scales. I could feel the twinge of my sciatic nerve, the aching of my calf tendons. I felt as if I was teetering on the unlikely boundary between athlete and old man.
I made it up the carpeted stairs,
‘Eehrr, eehrr!’ It wasn’t sexual, it was sleep talking, and male. A burst of monologue which increased in its sonority, and abruptly ceased. Christ, supposing he woke himself up, or both of them. I eased open the knife drawer, took the cabinet key, inserted, turned, opened… Took the knobbly key, closed, locked, returned the cabinet key… out of the kitchen, down stairs, opened door onto stairs. There was a repeat of the monologue following by a burst of male coughing. If he was coughing, then he was awake – he had to be. But I was closing the door behind me, turning key, and away down, down into the cool silent night.
Back in Patrick’s office I felt oddly calm. The worst was over, I was sure. With the long map drawer open I located the Oyez hardbacked notebook with its gorgonzola cover and found the page with the telephone numbers and… yes! There it was 01-222-4386 Omega. All I had to do now was telephone the police, once it was in their hands everything would be all right. I decided that I would hang on to the knobbly key; there was no point in risking returning it to its place in the cabinet upstairs.
Twenty-seven
It was 0645hrs and I appeared to have spent the remainder of the night sitting in one of the dried-blood-coloured leather armchairs in the ante room. I felt terrible. In the state of semi-slumber my thoughts had roamed one landscape after another, each of the terrains concealed sinister underworld figures who were pursuing me. I had found myself engaged in dialogue; negotiating, bargaining, arguing, always with me at a disadvantage, my free will running away like sand. I was being forced to believe them, and eventually coerced into accompanying them…
What woke me was the sound of someone letting themselves in at the front door downstairs. I knew who it would be. I sat resting my head against the dried-blood-coloured leather trying to put aside bad thoughts and gather good ones. The leather was dewy where I’d dribbled during my half sleep.
Through the window I could see the trees at the end of the neglected garden, at last returned to their diurnal three-dimensional state after spending the night as no more than flat dark shapes. I could hear the sound of the shutters being opened in the studio below… First the ones to the garden window; clang, bump, bump… then those overlooking the street. There was a hiatus and I guessed that the person had gone down to the basement where they would be switching on photocopier, filling kettle ready for coffee – the water jugs prepared in the tinkling fridge. I could hear the footsteps returning from below, the click, click becoming clonk, clonk, as feet carefully travelled from the stone of the basement steps onto the wood of the butler’s pantry, then back out into the hall and up the stairs towards me. Not only was I virtually paralysed after my acrobatics of yesterday, unwashed and suffering from lack of sleep, I had failed to do something. I had not telephoned the police.
I’d tried – several times during the early hours and while staring at the dark flat shapes outside the window I’d lifted the receiver, but I just couldn’t do it. It was the knowledge that as soon as I did, a shattering change would take place in my life. Even the thought that my delay might prove fatal to Laurie or become a threat to me hadn’t roused me from my fear of change.
‘Oh, it’s you.’
Lauren was standing in the doorway wearing black skirt and a closely-fitting black turtleneck. Of course, I’d not been able to let her know I’d been delayed till after she would have gone home. I decided to say nothing. Maybe Laurie would be all right, the whole thing a crazy set of coincidences, maybe the three of us could just go on together as if nothing had happened. She had some typed letters in her hand.
Without saying anything she walked past me into Patrick’s office, paused in the open doorway, looking round as if she were sensing that something wasn’t as she’d left it last night. She disappeared from view. I thought I heard the woodwind note of the third drawer down, but I had to be mistaken. Moments later she returned minus the letters. She glided towards the dried blood armchair – the one next to the window – and sat on the edge of its seat folding her legs underneath her, in that curious way she’d done in the Stag and Rifle. The dark rings around her eyes seemed darker than ever, her cheeks hollower, and there was that sensation of fidgeting you get when there’s no actual movement, just an unspoken repetitive rhythm under the skin; skin, skull, soul, skin, skull, soul…
‘What you’re born as – or into – doesn’t always help get you through life.’
What was she talking about? I looked at her, tried that humourless smile. I should have known it was no good trying to humour her. She’d been working up to this all night, had realized I’d been up to something yesterday afternoon and was going to make a speech. My mind meanwhile was straining to engage with any coherent thought, hers seemed to be racing ahead, as if she knew exactly what I’d been doing. But she couldn’t know what I was going to do next. I was conscious of the smell of the canal which I hadn’t noticed during the night. It seemed to be rising through the house.
‘I suppose so,’ my voice was weak. What was she implying? Was she referring to herself? …The closet baroness? We’d never talked about backgrounds, and – given my sketchy knowledge of the upper classes, never mind the world of drug addiction – that wasn’t surprising. But I’d spotted – and some considerable time ago – that she belonged to both of those worlds. The once ermine-clad, truffle and quail-fed body had degenerated, and the mind with it.
Whether she came from a long line of honourable shooters and jackers-up such as the sultans of smack, or whether her title was to be found in Who’s Who of the descendants of brown ale who’d socially climbed their way to the breathless heights of crystal meth I didn’t know. I’d never studied the addicts’ aristocracy, I’d been fortunate in that the journey from ‘amy’ to ecstasy had passed me by. Unlike the inhabitants of certain housing estates who had not only inherited shit, but had discovered that whatever they did, or however hard they tried, they would never be able to turn that shit into gold.
Actually, that wasn’t a view I’d ever held – at least not until my experiences over the last month. My opinion had been that since Duffy, Donovan, Bailey and The Beatles, anybody in the UK… with the right attitude and a modicum of talent could get on in life. Anybody!
Since the day I’d climbed up the wall at the end of my parents’ street – the street people refer
red to as a ‘cult-o-sack’ – I’d believed that with dedication, determination, and diligence a different and better life was obtainable for all. Lauren fixed me with her thousand-year-old eyes.
‘Everything that happens in this world is due to chance and coincidence – within the general laws of relativity.’ It was a sermon, like one of Patrick’s but incongruously deeper. She’d read my thoughts.
‘I saw you as being different… thought you’d bring something of depth to the office. You’ve been disappointingly superficial.’
I was trying to concentrate on my breathing. You’ve been disappointingly…? So, she did have some idea of what was coming. Hearing this was even worse than trying to crawl to an unknown position of safety along a metal cable tray, with a psychopath and a sociopath roaming about a few feet below you.
‘There’s no divine pattern you know,’ she rambled. ‘There’re no hidden messages, no God in the trees. There’s no “this is how it was meant to be”, no “we were meant for one another”, no “I’ve found what I was looking for”. There is no “small voice telling us what’s right”, no “everything will come right in the end”, no natural justice, no deus ex machina.
‘People lie, they equivocate, they deny; and afterwards they return to the pink and fluffy kingdom of coupledom. They use their families as an excuse, a defence. They tell you that family life is “the only way to be”. As if they knew. But they’ve never been on their own throughout their adult lives, so not only do they know nothing about other people, they haven’t even found out who they are.
‘They treat you as if as if you’ve rejected family life, as if you think you know better. Every Christmas you have to read their round robins, the inexhaustible parade of exam triumphs, the tediously written accounts of foreign holidays. Some people never find a partner. It’s not their fault…’
The Gilded Ones Page 19