Assassins and Victims

by Campbell Armstrong

‘Can I see the dog?’ I asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I must have descriptive details.’

  I followed her into the back yard. Rex was asleep against the wall. The chain that bound him was fixed to a bracket high in the wall and was probably about twelve feet long.

  ‘Does he live in the yard?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she said, impatiently.

  ‘I assume you provide shelter.’

  ‘Of course, I am not a heartless woman.’

  We stood looking at Rex for a time and then we went indoors again.

  ‘Certain other people are heartless, but not me,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  She lowered her voice. ‘There is a man next door who would like to destroy my Rex. I know it for a fact.’

  ‘Probably he’s just a crank.’

  ‘No, he throws down poisoned meat.’

  ‘Why don’t you do something about it?’

  She didn’t answer me. She sat down on the sofa and clasped her hands together. I looked around the room. From every angle, photographed in every possible stance, sombre Italian faces stared down at me.

  ‘Can I see the licence?’ I asked.

  ‘I lost it.’

  I tutted. ‘You really must have a licence, you know.’

  ‘You aren’t going to take Rex away, are you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘But you must get a licence before long. I take it that you acquired Rex in England?’

  ‘No,’ she said, tears suddenly streaming down her face. ‘He is an Italian dog. We bring him from Naples.’

  I was beginning to get the feel of my role. ‘But you obtained permission, didn’t you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. She was howling a little now. ‘We smuggle him in a cardboard box.’

  ‘That’s very serious,’ I said.

  ‘Please, please, don’t take him away from me!’

  I sat down beside her on the sofa and put my arm around her shoulders. She stiffened a bit at first and then relaxed. After a time she became silent.

  ‘Will you report me?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ I said.

  Another stifled sob. Then she got to her feet.

  ‘Will you take a cup of tea?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Perhaps a slice of home-made cake?’

  ‘Please.’

  She went out of the room. The air was thick with the smell of her heavy perfume. In her absence, I realised that there was no longer anything to keep me there. Danger, if it had been danger, was now past. Perhaps I stayed because the alternative – Eric’s empty room – was so alarming. She returned carrying a tray. She set it down, poured two cups of tea, and handed me a plate with a slice of cream cake.

  ‘That looks appetising,’ I said.

  ‘If you don’t report me, you deserve it,’ she said.

  She looked appealing when she smiled, as she did then.

  ‘Well, we officials have hearts like anybody else,’ I said. I ate the cake, which was delicious, and then lit a cigarette. ‘How long have you been in England?’

  ‘Three years,’ she replied. ‘My husband died last month.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘His heart.’

  ‘Dear, dear. It must be lonely for you.’

  ‘I’ve only got my Rex now,’ she said. ‘He is a comfort.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  Blinds were half-drawn across the windows. The room had a certain stuffiness – not that it smelled – a certain staleness that seemed a direct result of the lack of light coming through the windows. I looked round the faces in the photographs. It was like seeing the same face, constantly repeated in an infinite series of mirrors, poised in different angles yet ageing with each reflection.

  ‘Which one is your husband?’ I asked.

  She looked at me coldly, sniffing a little.

  ‘There isn’t a picture of my husband,’ she said.

  Odd, I thought. There should have been one of the late Peluzzi, if only for the sake of sentiment.

  ‘You’d like more cake?’ she asked.

  ‘Please.’

  She cut another slice and slapped it down on my plate.

  ‘I make all my own cakes and bread,’ she said.

  She was wandering up and down the room, wringing her hands together as if to rid them of moisture. She seemed uneasy – was she worried that I might impound her beloved Rex? I thought of the scene that I had witnessed only a short time before in the back yard and absurdly there came into my mind an image of Rex dressed in waistcoat and bow-tie, standing panting on his hind legs.

  ‘We all have to die some time,’ she said.

  I stared at her. She was standing by the window, frozen in the yellow light that fell through the thick blinds. She turned round to look at me. We all have to die some time? Why had she said that?

  ‘Indeed,’ I said.

  ‘There is no escaping the fact.’

  ‘From the minute we’re born …’

  She shrugged, lifting her eyebrows.

  ‘My husband,’ she said. She looked round the photographs – there must have been hundreds of them, all of them in tin frames, all pickled behind glass – as if seeking out the one that wasn’t there. And then she stared at me. ‘Will you report me? Will you?’

  I shook my head. The whole situation was false. Her question meant nothing. Somehow I didn’t have the heart to carry on. But I said, ‘You must buy a licence as soon as you can.’

  She sat down. ‘I can see you like animals. It shows a kindness in your soul.’

  I neither like nor dislike animals. They signify nothing. I couldn’t, in cold blood, actually kill one, but that doesn’t mean that I’m an animal worshipper.

  ‘Mr Peluzzi didn’t like Rex,’ she said.

  She was silent for a moment. I waited to hear more.

  ‘Sometimes he beat Rex with a rope until blood come into the fur. Can you picture that?’

  Revelations. Was there anything more?

  She turned her palms over in her lap and stared at the lines.

  ‘But. He’s dead. No good to talk of him like he was still alive.’

  And then she began to clear away the dirty tea cups and dishes. I got to my feet.

  I said, ‘You should have reported him to us.’

  ‘My own husband?’

  She went with me to the front door. In the dim hallway my fingers, quite by accident, brushed against her bare arm. She looked as if the touch caused her immense pain.

  I went down the steps and into the sunlit street. There was no sign now of the black Ford. When I turned to wave to her she had already gone and the door was closed.

  When I got back to the room I felt listless and lay down on the bed, smoking cigarettes one after the other.

  I’m not the sort of person who gets easily depressed. By nature I’m inclined to be extrovert, resilient, even optimistic. But I recognised in my listlessness a nagging, faint sense of depression. I stared at the window and the pattern drawn by sunlight on the floor.

  What was it? What caused it?

  It was something about the Italian widow; something about her room, her life; something to do with that bloody dog. Was it the pointlessness of the picture collection, the fact that dead faces pinned under glass indicate merely a docile subservience to past things? Was it the way she had spoken of her husband? I couldn’t think. Was it the way she had thrown herself, body and soul, upon the dog?

  Or was I beginning to get a bad dose of solitude sickness?

  I found an old copy of The People, faded and six years out of date, lining the shelf of the pantry. I tore it out, read it, re-read it, and smoked more cigarettes. ‘We say to the so-called Reverend Jim Birmingham – Come off it, Jim.’

  The world is full of failed cons.

  I threw the paper down and went to the window. I could smell faint traces of Mrs Peluzzi’s scent on my clothes. Rex was asleep in the yard, curled into
an unrecognisable shape. Somehow I couldn’t stand to look at him.

  7

  When Eric returned he went straight to the window. He didn’t say anything at first. He took a packet of sausages from his coat and fried them. We had finished eating before he spoke.

  ‘I had to go and see King today. He had my timecards on his desk. They were covered in red numbers. You get stamped red every time you’re late, you see. He said that if I couldn’t improve within a week, I’d have to go. Twelve years I’ve given to the company. It’s funny when you think about it like that. It’s a lot of water under the bridge, twelve years. I was twelve years younger when I started there. Twelve. A dozen. I hadn’t thought about that. A dozen seems longer than twelve, doesn’t it?’

  He hadn’t eaten the skins of his sausages. They lay crumpled, swept to one side of the plate.

  I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, old son. These things can’t be rushed. Anyway, you can always get another job –’

  ‘I don’t want another job!’ he shouted.

  ‘All right, all right, take it easy.’

  I hadn’t seen him in a rage before, but it was amusing to witness. His face became a dark shade of pink and his ears seemed to stiffen and move up his head. The tiny mouth shook wetly, beads of spit dripping down the chin.

  ‘I’m sorry. Excuse me.’ He circled a hunk of bread round his greasy plate. ‘It’s just that I’ve got a better chance of promotion at King’s than I’d have anywhere else. If I got another job, you see, I’d have to start at the bottom of the ladder again.’

  Promotion! It was the first indication of ambition that he’d ever given. I almost laughed. Promotion for him was a matter of chasing ghosts. Did he imagine, did he dream, that you could walk straight off the conveyor belt and on to a seat in the boardroom, expense-account lunches, trips overseas, women in first-class hotels? Even if he’d had the necessary grey matter – and clearly he had little in that enormous skull – it couldn’t have happened. I could have told him, there and then, that he would spend the rest of his life packing boring little cardboard slats into boring cardboard boxes. We each have a station in life.

  ‘You see, it’s essential to kill the dog.’

  He took a length of nylon cord from his trousers and threw it down on the table.

  ‘There’s one of the things you asked for.’

  I picked it up. ‘I’ve been thinking, Eric. I wonder if strangulation is the best way after all.’

  For a moment he was silent.

  And then he said, ‘Oh mother.’

  His huge hands came across the table, spilling sauce bottles, vinegar, and salt, and he tore at the lapels of my jacket, hauling me up from my seat and pulling my face down until it was level with the surface of the table.

  ‘What are you playing at? What are you playing at?’ he asked.

  He pushed my face into the open packet of butter that lay on the table. For a second or two I was so surprised that I didn’t react. His hands were on my neck, digging into my flesh.

  ‘You’re supposed to be … killing that … bloody dog …’

  He was lifting my head and then smearing it across the butter.

  ‘Supposed to be … what are you playing at?’

  I drew my breath. I pulled myself free. I found myself staring into the ugliness, the blank stupidity of his face. His skin was red and his eyes were watering.

  I struck him on the mouth and he stepped back, staggering a bit. He didn’t know what to do. He was scared of his own strength and shocked by his own behaviour. There was bewilderment in his eyes. I struck him again and again. He fell down against the bed. I crushed my knee into his ribs and he gasped. He lifted his arms in the air. Tears streamed over his face.

  When he tried to get up I thumped him again, on the side of the neck. I can’t explain why, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed inflicting pain on him.

  ‘I’m sorry, sorry,’ he said.

  He was lying face down on the floor, his arms curled protectively around his head.

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  I jumped once on his back and he cried out.

  Shaking, I sat down and lit a cigarette. For a long time he didn’t move. I looked at him. It was pitiful. This huge object sprawled across the floor like a broken ornament, like something dropped from a great height.

  ‘Get up,’ I said. ‘Get up, you stupid bastard.’

  He lifted his head and looked at me.

  ‘Don’t ever lay a finger on me again,’ I said.

  He crawled over the floor and raised himself by pulling on the edge of the bed. He sat there, staring at me miserably, like a mournful dog.

  I poured him a cupful of whisky and he drank it.

  ‘I don’t know why I did that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to … but I … Oh mother, you’ve got to help me.’

  Poor bastard. He was relying on me: he was relying on another human being. I felt sick. There are times when I wish I had a conscience.

  He was examining himself for bruises. I turned away.

  I picked up the nylon cord from the table.

  ‘You’re really getting desperate, aren’t you?’

  He nodded his head slowly. ‘I can’t go on like this. You’ve got to do something soon. You’ve –’

  I held my hand in the air to stop him. I was still shaking from the physical effort of punishing him. I was out of shape. But then I hadn’t needed to fight crudely like that for years. He got up from the bed and stood beside me.

  ‘Shake,’ he said.

  Shake. Just like a child after a child’s fight.

  I put out my hand and he took it. And then he gathered the dirty dishes and started to wash them in the sink. As if nothing had happened. Resilience or stupidity?

  When it was dark we went down and looked at the wall. I pretended to be sizing it up, to look for the easiest part to climb. We had been there for about five minutes when there came the sound of Mrs Peluzzi’s voice from the other side of the wall. Eric and I stood silently and listened.

  She didn’t say much to Rex. In fact, she only said one thing.

  ‘My Rex, my Rex, he can’t hurt you now.’

  And then she went indoors.

  3

  Eric

  I got a letter from the Territorial Army asking me to return my uniform as soon as possible. I went round to the hall on Friday night with the uniform wrapped in a brown paper bag. They asked me to sign a paper. After that I waited to see if Bayonet would turn up but one of the men there said that he had stopped coming and that if I wrote to Wormwood Scrubs I might receive an answer.

  The reason I had to surrender my uniform was that they had to cut down on the number of men. At least, that was what they said. But the real reason was because I didn’t get on with Sergeant Dawes. When he said turn right I turned left, and when he said shoulder arms I dropped my rifle. Sergeant Dawes said that I was thicker than the thickest man he had ever met and he reported me. When I explained that my nerves were shot to pieces and tried to tell them the whole story, they didn’t listen. It was just that I couldn’t concentrate properly, I knew that. Anyway, I wasn’t going to make a fuss over something as silly as the Territorials.

  When I got home, Matt was lying on the bed. He was smoking a cigarette and looking up at the ceiling. I opened the window. It was nearly dark. The dog was lying face down on the concrete, gathering his strength for the night ahead.

  ‘It’s bloody chilly in here,’ Matt said.

  ‘It’s the smoke from your cigarettes,’ I said. ‘We must get some fresh air.’

  He didn’t argue with me. Ever since our fight he hasn’t argued very much. Ever since then he’s seemed more subdued and less energetic. I hadn’t wanted to fight, of course. But when he had looked at the nylon cord I’d bought and sneered at it in that funny way he has, then I just lost my temper. For a minute I couldn’t seem to see properly, blood rushing before my eyes, and I grabbed hold of him by the neck and banged his face into the table a couple of time
s until his nose was bleeding. After that we’d shaken hands because that was what he wanted. Since then he’s been different towards me in a kind of way.

  He turned his face to the wall. It was about nine o’clock, too early to go to bed and too late to do much else.

  I put on the kettle and made some tea and gave him a cup. It wasn’t just the way he’d sneered at the nylon that made me hit him. It was more than that. When he’d come at first I thought that all my troubles would soon be at an end. He was going to kill the dog. He was going to hide the carcass. But he didn’t do anything and seemed to be putting the whole thing off all the time and my suffering was getting worse and worse. So that was why I lost my temper.

  But people are like that. You can never really tell about a person. They’re so disappointing.

  ‘You make a stinking cup of tea,’ he said.

  ‘It tastes all right to me,’ I said.

  ‘Your taste is in your arse.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’ve been making tea for years. I never see you make a cup.’

  ‘I’ve got better things to do,’ was all he said.

  He lit another cigarette and looked about the room very restlessly, as if he would have liked to get up and smash something. I watched him carefully. He had been living with me for ten days. Ten whole days. And still the dog was alive, howling every night, moaning down there in the dark.

  He picked up an old newspaper and started to read it. He’s smaller than me by about two inches and he’s very vain. He’s always ironing his trousers and washing his shirt and once he even asked me to buy a bottle of hair tint for him. I didn’t really want him in my room, but there wasn’t much I could do without causing another scene. I had picked him up in a public house at the other end of Cricklewood and he didn’t seem to have a home of his own to go to. At least he hadn’t mentioned one. He told me one or two things about his past, but not a great deal. He was once in the RAF in India before being transferred to the Army in Malaya. He was educated at a famous school and went to Oxford afterwards.

  You can tell that he’s educated from the way he talks. He can put sentences together very well and he uses his hands a lot when he’s speaking. He’s killed dogs before. Or he says he has. But how I am supposed to know if that’s the truth? Once or twice he went down and measured the length of the wall and he’s covered sheets of paper with his calculations. But that doesn’t prove anything, does it?