by George Friel
He strode like a conqueror to the corner where he had hidden his briefcase, checked his pyjamas and shaving tackle, and advanced boldly on the tea-chests. He pushed the first two aside and attacked the third, the one he had always kept in reserve. First he broke one bundle of twenty fivers and stuffed the notes into his wallet so as to have plenty of money easy to get at on his journey. Then he began to fill the briefcase. It was only when he had stowed away a couple of dozen bundles that it struck him the chest wasn’t as full as it ought to be. He was nearly at the bottom already. He stopped, frowned, and brooded.
‘Somebody’s been here,’ he decided cautiously. ‘There should be a lot more than this.’
It gave an extra push to his eagerness to pack up and go. Things weren’t right. He had felt it for a long time.
He speeded up filling his briefcase. Two thousand five hundred, two thousand six hundred, two thousand seven hundred. And he still had room for as much more. If need be, he would fill up from the other chests. Meanwhile, he went on trying to empty the one he was at. At two thousand nine hundred he heard a rustle. He wasn’t sure where it came from. He froze, his hand halted between the chest and the briefcase, a large hand holding a bundle of five-pound notes in an elastic band. He stayed frozen, listening and counting. He had never heard his heart beat before, and the sound frightened him. It didn’t seem right that his life should depend on that sound going on and on. He was in a panic, poised between time and eternity. A creak, and then another rustle.
Was it a draught? There was no wind in the cellar, there couldn’t be, the summer night was airless. A rat? But there were no rats.
He shoved the bundle of fivers into his case, covered what was left in the chest with handfuls of old clothes and paper chains and pushed the chest back into its corner. Then turning suddenly like a cowboy quick on the draw firing six rounds rapid from his trusty forty-five he raked the cellar with his torch. Bang at one wall, crack at another, swift shots into the corners. His messengers of light swept the cellar clean. They caught something – a foot, a leg. He raised his aim and dazzled the eyes of a familiar face.
‘It’s you!’ he cried, nearly foaming with fury. ‘I might have known!’
‘Hello, Perse, old boy,’ said Savage pleasantly, coming out into the open from the jungle of broken chairs and Sunshine Readers, wearing his black jacket and jeans and putting on his comic English accent to disarm his enemy. ‘Robbed any good banks lately, me old cock sparra?’
He had a torch too and he flashed it into Percy’s eyes, an insolent retaliation that made Percy really mad. Oh, he was angry now all right. He was ripe for murder. Miss Elginbrod wouldn’t have been surprised. She would have said it was all in his medical record: enuresis and hysteria in the infant department, treatment at the Child Guidance Clinic for anti-social behaviour when he was in the juniors, proposals to commit to a special school when he was in the seniors. What could you expect, she would have asked. But a youth doesn’t need to have a medical history to be capable of murder.
Savage flashed Percy up and down, teasing him. Percy shoved his torch in his pocket and barged at him. He hit him on the wrist with the edge of his palm and Savage’s torch clattered to the stone floor.
‘You little rat!’ he screamed, wrestling with him in darkness. ‘You’ve been stealing the money, that’s what you’ve been doing! You think I don’t know!’
‘And what were you doing there?’ Savage croaked weakly with Percy’s claws at his throat. ‘Just taking it out to give it an airing?’
He fought back wildly and brought his knee up hard against Percy’s crutch. Percy yelped in an extremity of agony and fell on the floor. Savage jumped on him and kept punching him on the nose and mouth. But for all his height and strength he was only a boy trying to fight a young man twice his size. His defeat was only a matter of time.
Percy took the punches woodenly till the sickness brought on by that knee bashed in between his legs left him. He bided his time deliberately. He knew he was bigger and stronger. He heaved Savage off, scrambled up, and while Savage still rolled on the floor he kicked him in the legs, on the ribs, on the arms, and when Savage squirmed over he kicked him hard on the bottom and between his shoulder blades. He was beginning to enjoy it.
‘Yuh big bastard!’ Savage screamed, sprawled out like a frog.
He wriggled along the floor and got to his feet clear of Percy’s size ten shoes with the thick crepe soles.
‘I’ll get ye for that,’ he said, fierce in the darkness, whipped off his Army webbing-belt and swung it. The brass clasp came viciously down, just missed Percy’s face and hit him where his neck joined his shoulder. Percy sagged with a new pain, and now there was hate in the darkness, a lust of hate between them. They were both panting with eagerness for the ultimate violence, as inflamed as two lovers in darkness. Percy rushed in close to get under the range of the flailing belt and Savage wrapped it round his neck and tried to throttle him. Percy groaned, pulled at it, and heaved. Then he used his knee the way Savage had done to him and Savage fell writhing and cursing on top of a fallen column of Sunshine Readers, his belt lost, both hands at his crutch. Percy knelt over, clasping him between his thighs and grabbed him by the ears.
‘I wasted months ower you, tae try and teach you for tae be decent,’ he cried bitterly. ‘Months, and months, and months!’ He banged Savage’s head on the floor.
‘But ye had nae idea!’
He banged it twice again, and some Sunshine Readers slid under Savage’s head.
‘Ye’re nae use, to anybody!’
He had lathered himself into a fury and went on pulling Savage’s skull up by the ears and then bashing it down to the rhythm of his words.
‘Savage by name and Savage by nature. You spoiled my gang, you ruined my plans, you’d take the good out a bad egg, so you would, you rotten little bugger. And you’ve been raiding the money. Admit it, admit it, admit it!’
Savage moaned, and a sound like a death rattle came up from his bared quivering throat. Then he was quiet.
Until then Percy wanted to do what he was doing and he didn’t care what happened to Savage. He was living entirely in the present moment, giving Savage no more than Savage had asked for. He was the righteous man punishing wickedness. But the moment Savage stopped struggling and lay silent, he overflowed with regret for what he had done. He was sorry, truly sorry. He slapped Savage’s face, a pale flower in the darkness, once on each cheek. There was something almost tender in those two little slaps.
‘Come on, stop acting it,’ he said severely. ‘You’re all right. Quit the kidding. Don’t come it, Hughie!’
Savage said nothing.
Percy shook him by the shoulders instead of by the ears, wheedling at him as if he was just trying to waken a heavy sleeper. The body stayed limp, let itself be shaken, gave no answer.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Percy.
He thought he had killed him. He was willing to admit he had gone too far after all. Whatever his faults, Savage hardly deserved to be murdered for them. Anyway, murder would be an awkward business. It might mean he would never get to his cottage at Land’s End.
That was enough to make him move, and move quickly. He groped for his torch and sent the yellow line ahead of him across the cellar to the chute. He was halfway up when he remembered.
‘My briefcase!’ he cried. ‘My cottage.’
He scampered down again, stepped over Savage, grabbed his case, and locked it, standing on one leg, supporting the case on the thigh of the other leg. He was too anxious to get away to think of taking any more money. Up the chute once more he went, his key at the ready. He was just going to put it into the lock and open the door when the door moved in towards him. He was paralysed for a second, then he stepped to one side so that he would be hidden behind the door when it was opened.
A little man in a belted raincoat and cloth cap came through the doorway, stood at the top of the chute and jabbed a flash down into the cellar. It was the inquisitive st
ranger. Percy recognized the way one foot was turned in a little. It was a time for action, and Percy had never believed that a poet was incapable of action. He swung his briefcase hard against the nape of the stranger’s neck, rammed his knee into the small of his back, and pushed him down the chute with every ounce of his strength. The stranger stumbled, tripped, crumpled, and rolled down like a sack of potatoes, crashed at the foot and lay there. Percy dived through the doorway, brought the door to behind him and locked it swiftly.
‘He never got a glimpse of me,’ he assured himself as he ran down Tulip Place. ‘He hasn’t a clue what hit him. They can lie there, the pair of them. A couple of rogues. Money, money, money, that’s all they could think of They’d no respect for it, nothing they needed it for like me. They just wanted it. Sheer greed!’
He didn’t go home. He loped far away from Tulip Place and Bethel Street, crossed the river and remembering he was a poet he stopped on the bridge for a moment to admire the beauty of the neon ads reflected in the night- dark water. At an open-all-night public convenience near Glasgow Cross he washed his face and combed his hair, removing all signs of his fight with Savage, but he couldn’t do much about a dark blue bruise under his eye. Returning to the upper world he struck over towards Charing Cross.
‘It’s rotten with wee hotels over there,’ he told himself. He liked talking to himself, it helped him to work out his plans. ‘I’ll get a room there for tonight and my breakfast tomorrow and get the ten o’clock to London and I’ll find out where to get a train to Land’s End. I’m no short of money, that’s one good thing.’
He had never slept a night out of his own bed before, and when he stood at the desk in the Kelvin Hotel near Clairmont Gardens he chattered compulsively to hide his nervousness.
‘I’m just up from Leeds,’ he said. ‘Down at my grandmother’s funeral. Eighty-seven she was. Going back to Aberdeen first thing the morrow. That’s where I live, you see. My train was late getting in. Missed my connexion. Lucky I’ve got enough money on me to pay for bed and breakfast.’
The night-manager looked at him with weary heavy-lidded eyes. A good look. You never knew when the police would be in the next day asking for a description. There was something odd about this big fellow. Very odd.
‘Yes, sir, quite so,’ he murmured neutrally, and pushed the register over.
Percy took the offered pen and hesitated. He hadn’t thought of this. The manager saw the hesitation, slight as it was, and made a note of Percy’s height, colour of his hair and eyes, suit and briefcase, and the big bruise on the right cheek. Percy put the pen to the page.
‘Percy Bysshe,’ he wrote in the ugly back-hand that used to madden Miss Elginbrod.
The night-manager swivelled the book round with a movement that had all the deftness of routine and glanced at the name.
‘And your address in Aberdeen, please,’ he said suavely. Bysshe. Who ever heard of such a name? Obviously made up. ‘We have to have it in the register, you see. By law. Just in case.’
He stopped, quite enjoying intimidating this lout with the black eye who had given him a lot of gratuitous nonsense about his granny in Leeds and a home in Aberdeen in a voice of the purest Glasgow.
‘Oh aye,’ said Percy. ‘Of course.’
Once more he hesitated. But no dapper little twerp in a dark suit and grey tie, with sleepy eyes and a Kelvinside accent, was going to frighten him. He was no ignorant teddy-boy from a housing-scheme. He was a poet on his way to a poet’s cottage. And he had read a bit in his time too. He knew that the motto on the Aberdeen coat of arms was Bon Accord.
‘27 Bon Accord Street,’ he wrote. Maybe there wasn’t actually a Bon Accord Street in Aberdeen, but Bon Accord was Aberdonian enough to serve his turn.
He had done quite well. But then he spoiled it. He read out the address and stressed all the syllables of Bon Accord equally.
‘Is that how you say it?’ said the manager from somewhere up in the ceiling, far above Percy. ‘I thought Aberdonians pronounced it Bunnaccurred.’
He made a dactyl of it. Percy struggled mentally with the two rhythms. He liked the manager’s way of saying it. It flowed.
‘Oh aye, they do, of course they do,’ he said, grinning like a friendly collie. ‘I just said it the other way so you’d recognize it, cause you see these names in print and you never know how to say them till somebody tells you and my writing’s not very good. You see I write a lot and it’s kind of spoiled my writing. Bunnaccurred of course. Bunnacurred. It’s the town motto, you know. It means good accord.’
‘Really?’ said the night-manager.
The night-porter came up to the desk to take Percy’s case and show him to a room.
‘Oh no, no thank you,’ said Percy, holding the briefcase up and away. ‘I’ll hang on to this if you don’t mind. It’s got my grandmother’s jewellery in it.’
He couldn’t sleep. The bed was too good, it was too clean and comfortable, he felt himself in too strange a world to settle to sleep. Then in the darkness of the strange room he couldn’t help thinking of Savage again, and he tossed and turned anxiously. He couldn’t believe he had actually killed him, for that was the kind of thing that happened to other people. But even if Savage was lying dead it could never be proved he had murdered him, and since it couldn’t be proved then he wasn’t guilty. All he had to do was get up sharp in the morning and get away. He had come where life had taken him, and he had still farther to go, he had to get to Land’s End and live in exile. When at last he fell over he dreamed of the river all in black running silently through a deserted city, and he was floating down the river in a little boat that wasn’t seaworthy, stalked by a stranger who was dead and alive, harmless and dangerous, cunning and stupid. And he was frightened.
The hotel was wrapped in silence like an old woman in a shawl. Only the light in the entrance hall and another in the little office still burned. The night-manager and the night-porter stood on either side of the desk, conversing in whispers.
‘There’s something funny about him,’ said the porter, exbatman to a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Scots Fusiliers.
‘Odd,’ said the manager, whilom major in the Army Catering Corps during the Second World War.
‘You remember that couple last month,’ said the porter.
‘I’m not likely to forget them,’ said the manager.
‘Honeymoon couple, all the way from Brighton. Only it was them that did the smash and grab in Romford.’
‘The mistake these people make,’ said the manager, ‘it’s a simple one, but they all make it. They think if they come to a quiet little hotel in a backwater like this they’ll never be noticed. Whereas of course it’s just in a small place like this that we do notice them. That insurance manager last year, the minister and his church organist before that, and that fellow from Ipswich that did in his wife the year before that, and all the rest of them, they all come slinking in here as if they’d come to the end of the line where nobody would ever find them. And an hour after their case is in the papers we’re on to them and on to the police.’
‘I wonder what he’s been up to,’ the porter whispered, jerking his thinly thatched dome to the staircase where he had led Percy. ‘He doesn’t look the violent type, mind you.’
‘You never can tell,’ said the manager. ‘We had a cook once in the Middle East, he looked like a cut-down Mr Pickwick and he put a butcher’s chopper through the skull of a mess waiter that was always trying to kid him. He got fed up being kidded, that was all he would say.’
‘Well, some of these blokes that are aye at the kidding would get on your nerves,’ the porter commented, condoning the murder. ‘We had a captain once in my regiment and he was always trying to take the mickey out the RSM. He couldn’t ha’ done a stupider thing. The upshot was—’
‘Yes, I know,’ said the manager smoothly. ‘You told me. He was beat up in the Schipperstraat in Antwerp and he never knew who did it but he never cracked another joke till he was demobbed.�
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The manager withdrew to his little office, and the porter ambled to his corner for a snooze.
And while Percy in the storey above them rose and fell in troubled waves of shallow sleep, like a cork bobbing on the Clyde, Savage still lay still on the stone floor of the cellar. Abandoned by Percy, never missed by his family, he just lay there, a couple of Sunshine Readers for his pillow. No comfortable room in a hotel for him, no snow- white sheets and a soft bed, and yet he had just as much money stashed away in an air-raid shelter as Percy had in his briefcase.
Even the stranger hadn’t stayed to help him. One look frightened him away. He was only winded when he fell down the chute and he got on his pins cursing and swearing, determined to turn this damned cellar upside down. For all his watching he had never seen anybody go in by the door in Tulip Place, but he had never believed the Phinns’ story that the door was only a blind. A locksmith friend made half a dozen keys for him, one of which was almost bound to fit the conventional lock on such a door as he had described. He had got the keys that morning, and waited till it was quite dark before trying them. The third one was the lucky one. When it opened the door he felt he was Aladdin entering the cave. The way he was shoved down the chute the moment he put a foot across the threshold convinced him someone was trying to keep him out of the cellar. Which in turn proved that the cellar was the right place, as he had suspected all along.
He too had come furnished with a torch, a bigger and better one than Percy’s or Savage’s, and he used it to probe the extent of the cellar when he staggered to his feet. He was ready and willing to take all night to searching it. But when he saw a schoolboy in a black leather jacket and jeans lying huddled against a pile of rubbish his heart came up to his gullet, turned over, and fell to the pit of his stomach.
Whether the boy was dead or dying was no concern of his. It was enough there was a body lying there. He had his own pride in his intelligence, and his guess was that two other folk had found the money before him and one of them had done in the other.