Assassins and Victims

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘How are the plans coming along?’ I asked.

  ‘Mind your own business,’ he said. ‘Who’s doing this job – you or me?’

  ‘You are,’ I said.

  ‘When I’m ready I’ll tell you.’

  I nodded my head. That was how it went most of the time. When I asked how things were coming on he became abusive. I gathered the cups and saucers and washed them in the sink.

  At half-past nine he said that he was going out for a bit.

  ‘For a walk?’ I asked. I felt like some fresh air.

  But he just looked at me, put on his jacket and went down the stairs. When he had gone I sat on the bed and counted his cigarette ends. There were thirty-eight in the ashtray. I emptied them out. In the space under the sink were six empty whisky bottles.

  But I had other worries apart from Matt.

  King had called me into his office only the day before. For my second warning. ‘We don’t like to sack employees,’ he said. ‘But if your timekeeping doesn’t improve you’ll get your cards.’ I felt myself tremble in front of him. I tried to explain the situation and even outlined the plan to get rid of the dog, but all he said was something I couldn’t catch about the correct solution to every problem.

  Afterwards in the canteen Benito came up and told me not to worry and Nigel and Charlie bought me a plate of fried eggs and chips. But my nerves were so bad that I couldn’t eat. I went into the lavatory, locked myself in and wept. I couldn’t stop crying. I dried my face with toilet paper and opened the window to get some fresh air. In the yard some of the men were kicking a ball about and I could hear them shout and laugh. I knew then that nobody else really cares about your problems the same way as you do yourself. It stands to reason anyway – you feel your own problems in a way that you don’t feel someone else’s.

  I was sitting on the edge of the bed when Agnes came into the room. Her face was heavily made up. I could hardly see her eyes for all the dark blue stuff that she had painted on.

  ‘Where’s Matt?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s only just gone out –’

  ‘On your lonesome, darling?’

  She sat beside me on the bed.

  ‘He’s a bit of a lad, your Matt,’ she said.

  She crossed her legs. Her knees were tight, white where the bone showed through.

  ‘Is he going to stop here much longer?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘I hope he does,’ she said. ‘He brightens the place up a bit.’

  ‘I suppose he does.’

  She turned her head round and looked at me for a time, as if she was trying to size something up.

  ‘Now then, you seem down in the dumps, Eric.’

  ‘I don’t sleep much at night –’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘My nerves,’ I said.

  She patted me on the knee.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘It can’t get any worse. I was talking to Mrs Peluzzi only yesterday, you know. She seems to have perked herself up a bit lately. She doesn’t wear that drab old black dress any more. Still, I expect she’s over the worst by this time.’

  I got up from the bed and walked to the window. It was now completely dark outside. The lamp in the lane hadn’t come on and it was impossible to see very far. But when I looked down I was sure I could just make out the dog’s shape. He was moving about. Like a great black insect.

  And then it happened again. For the second time in two days I started to cry. I couldn’t stop myself from doing it. The tears just rolled over my face. All at once it seemed as if everything had piled itself up on top of me, like a huge weight on your brain, and I had to cry.

  Agnes put her arms round my shoulders.

  ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Who’s being a big baby? Is Eric being a silly boy?’

  We sat down on the bed and she held my hand, patting it.

  Ever since I had come to this room my life seemed a mess. It was all the dog’s fault, I knew that, but it didn’t stop there. It interfered with my work, I was losing my good reputation. Only the other day I had spent a whole morning folding the cardboard back to front inside the boxes. One hundred and fifty-eight boxes, all wrong.

  ‘Feeling better now?’ Agnes said.

  There was a horrible pain, like a lump, in my chest.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’

  When she had gone I took a couple of drinks from Matt’s whisky. After that I felt a bit better. I opened the window and shouted down at the dog.

  ‘You’d better make the most of your noise, you black bastard.’

  Then I lay on the couch and closed my eyes. I opened them later when I heard the dog bark. I sat up. Matt hadn’t come back. The room seemed funnily empty.

  I took another drink of the whisky and added some water to the bottle so that he wouldn’t notice.

  He came in just before one o’clock.

  His clothes were untidy and he looked tired. Without saying anything to me he fell on top of the bed.

  ‘Did you have a nice time?’ I asked.

  But he didn’t answer. He opened his whisky and held the bottle to his mouth.

  ‘Where did you go to?’ I asked.

  ‘Stop your bloody silly questions,’ he said.

  ‘I’m only trying to be friendly,’ I said.

  I could hear the dog moan from the yard and the sound of his chain banging at the wall as if he was leaping up and down. Why didn’t he kill the animal? What was he waiting for? I mean, he could hear it just as well as me – why didn’t he destroy it?

  I covered my ears with my hands.

  ‘I’m not in a very friendly mood,’ he said.

  I watched him swallow some more whisky.

  ‘Agnes was looking for you,’ I said.

  ‘Sod Agnes.’

  I lay flat out on the couch and closed my eyes. The noise of the dog seemed somehow to be inside my brain. Matt turned out the light and I could hear him toss and turn on the bed. My bed. I had not shared a room with another person for years. The last time was when I first came up to London, before I found my first lodgings, when I had spent the night in a house in Camden Town. It was a sort of dormitory with wooden partitions and bunks. The man in the bunk below kept going through my clothes for money, but I had everything valuable under my pillow, just in case. When he hadn’t found anything he grabbed hold of my arm and started to swear. I knew I could trust Matt not to steal anything. He had been too well-educated for that.

  I listened to the dog as I always did. Then, since I couldn’t sleep, I walked quietly up and down the room. I wanted to put the light on but that would have woken him up, so I walked round in the dark.

  I felt inside my coat for a bottle of codeine tablets that I’d bought, because I’d heard that they helped you to sleep. Instead of finding the bottle, I found a package. I pulled it out and realised that I had mistaken Matt’s coat for my own in the dark.

  I know I should have put it back without looking at it. But I didn’t. I went out of the room and across the landing to the toilet and I sat down on the seat and looked at what I’d found.

  There was an old newspaper wrapped round something else. I opened it. Under the paper was a stack of money bound with an elastic band. I spread the money on the floor and counted it. There was almost three thousand pounds. I’d never seen so much in my whole life. Three thousand pounds. Once my mother had won seventy in The Spastic Society raffle. But this was three thousand. I just sat there, staring at it. And then I wrapped it all up again and weighed it in my hand. I wondered what he was doing with all that money, but I didn’t like to think about it. It was his business, nothing to do with me. I wouldn’t pry into someone else’s affairs.

  Still, it was a bit odd.

  I unlocked the door and went back to my room. I put up my hand to his coat and tried to shove the package back into his pocket.

  The next thing, the light had been turned on. He was standing there in his u
nderpants, staring at me. I was holding the money in my hand.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  He spoke very slowly, like someone in real anger.

  ‘It was a mistake,’ I said.

  ‘Did you open that paper?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I had this tight, tight feeling in my chest. Like panic, or fear.

  ‘What did you do that for, Eric?’

  He was breathing very slowly, his whole body rising and falling.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’

  He came closer. I stepped back.

  ‘I came here to do you a favour, and you repay me by rifling through my private belongings –’

  ‘It was a mistake,’ I said.

  ‘What did you see in that parcel?’ he asked.

  ‘M-money,’ I said.

  He was standing about a foot from me. I looked at his hands. The blood had run out of his fingers and his knuckles were white.

  ‘A lot of money?’

  I nodded my head. I could hardly speak.

  And then suddenly he smiled.

  ‘It isn’t my money, of course,’ he said. He fumbled around and found a cigarette. He was shaking. ‘It belongs to someone else, you see. I have to look after it for him. That’s all. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘I knew it would be something like that,’ I said. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t be here for twenty pounds, would you, if you had that much money?’

  We both laughed for a bit. And then he slapped me on the back.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry if I’ve been speaking to you a bit roughly recently. It’s just that I’ve got a lot on my mind at the present. You can understand that, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘There’s the plan for killing that wretched dog for a start.’ He had his arm round my shoulder. ‘Well, that’s a grave responsibility. Not to be treated lightly. Let’s have a drink.’

  He poured whisky into two cups and we sat together on the couch and drank it.

  ‘You mustn’t think I’m wasting time, Eric,’ he said. ‘The fact is – and I’m speaking plainly now – we don’t want to botch the job, do we? The last thing we want is a balls-up. We’ve got our backs to the wall at the moment, I’m aware of that. But we need courage, that’s all. Courage will see us through the days ahead. So you must forgive me if I’ve been a bit short with you lately. We creative people – well, we’re inclined to have short tempers.’

  ‘I understand that,’ I said.

  ‘I knew you would.’

  He filled my cup again. I was beginning to have this drowsy feeling. He talked a bit more. He mentioned Dunkirk and how the British nation had its back to the wall then and how they won through in the end. I didn’t take it all in. The whisky had gone to my head. It was a pleasant floating sort of feeling.

  When he put off the light I lay with my eyes closed.

  He said, ‘We’re killing a dog, Eric. We’re taking a life. It isn’t to be treated as a joke.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  Somehow the noise seemed less of a nuisance that night. I didn’t expect to sleep but I did. I woke from time to time, but never for very long.

  The sound came from a great distance. It was like the sea in one of those shells you hold to your ear. It must have been the whisky and the way Matt had spoken so frankly about his schemes.

  2

  In the morning I was just about to get out of bed when I remembered it was Saturday and I didn’t have to go to work. I opened my eyes and lay there staring up at the ceiling. Sharing a room with somebody when you’re used to being on your own is a funny sort of experience. At times I didn’t want him there, because I had gotten used to being on my own and he seemed to be in the way. And at other times I liked having him, especially when he was friendly as he had been last night.

  After a time I sat up and looked round the room. The clock on the mantelpiece said it was ten-thirty. Matt had made the bed, but he wasn’t in the room. I put on the kettle and boiled some water for coffee. When I was sitting down drinking Roderick came into the room.

  ‘Do I smell coffee?’ he asked.

  He went over to the stove and made himself a cup and then he came and sat down beside me.

  ‘I suppose that the dog is still alive,’ he said.

  I looked at him. With Roderick you have to be careful, because his mood changes so much. Sometimes he whistles and laughs a lot and sometimes he stands at the window tapping his fingers on the glass and says nothing.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not for much longer.’

  He shook his head. His long hair moved up and down and the white ribbon swung back and forward.

  ‘Doesn’t it strike you as rather strange that your friend hasn’t got round to doing the job yet?’

  ‘Strange? But you can’t rush a thing like this. You have to plan it very carefully. That’s what was wrong with the way I was tackling it, you see. I didn’t plan it out properly.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ he said. He was deep in thought. He got up and walked about the room. And then he said, ‘But it’s just a matter of going over the wall and doing it, isn’t it? I can’t see any need for planning anything.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Matt says that you must have a scientific approach to the problem. If you rush in, then there’s no telling what will happen –’

  ‘He could hardly be accused of rushing, could he? He’s been here – what? – for over a week, and he hasn’t really done anything, has he?’

  I looked at Roderick carefully. For someone of his intellect, he was really very slow on the uptake sometimes. I started to explain carefully and slowly but I could see that he wasn’t listening closely because he had started to tap his fingers on the table.

  ‘And your friend’s making plans, is he?’

  I got out the sheets of paper that Matt had written his calculations on and showed them to Roderick and he looked at them for a time, scratching his head.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well, well, well.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ He returned the sheets to me and then went to the window. ‘I must say that I don’t understand the figures. They’re a bit deep for me.’

  ‘They’re a bit deep for me too,’ I said.

  ‘What I don’t understand is why he visited Mrs Peluzzi the other day. I mean, you just don’t visit a woman if you’re planning to kill her dog, do you? Or do you?’

  He turned and looked at me. Mrs Peluzzi? Matt?

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ I said.

  ‘I saw it with my own two eyes, man,’ he said. ‘I was coming down the street and there he was – coming out of her house. He had on his coat and the collar was turned up. He looked like Edward G. Robinson.’

  ‘No, you must be mistaken.’

  ‘I’m not infallible, I admit. But I don’t think I’m mistaken. He came out of her house and then he hurried into this one. I’m certain.’

  I stared at the sheets of paper.

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I said.

  Roderick picked up his cup and drank some of the coffee. Then he made a face. ‘Perhaps that’s part of his plan.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That might explain it.’

  We looked at each other in silence. I thought about the mad woman next door and then about Matt, but I couldn’t picture them together, it was difficult to know what they might have talked about, or even why he had gone there.

  Roderick said, ‘Perhaps you better speak to him about it.’

  I said, ‘He knows what he’s doing.’

  After Roderick had gone I put on my clothes. When Matt had come at first he had just stayed in the room every night and even when I asked him if he wanted to go for a walk or to the café in Cricklewood Lane he’d said that he didn’t want to. And then, a few nights ago, he started to go out. He didn’t say where he went. When I asked him, he wouldn’t tell me. Mind you, I didn’t pry, and I didn’t want to push t
he matter because a person will tell you a thing only when he wants to and not before. Had Matt been visiting Mrs Peluzzi? I wondered. Had he? I wouldn’t say that I didn’t trust Roderick’s eyesight, it’s probably as good as mine, but perhaps he had imagined the whole thing.

  I went down into the street and stood outside the house. There was a bench on the other side of the street, just a little way down, and I went over and sat there. From that position I could watch Mrs Peluzzi’s.

  An old man sitting next to me said,

  ‘The weather’s breaking, I see.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘When it breaks we’ll all be better off.’

  I fidgeted about on the bench. I knew I was prying, sitting there and watching to see if Matt came out of the house, and I felt unclean. After last night, when he had spoken about his plans and his difficulties, I trusted him. After all, he had been honest with me, he had been open, he hadn’t tried to hide any of the difficulties and he hadn’t tried to say that everything was going to be easy. He had been perfectly frank, and frankness in people is very rare. Now I was sitting there spying on him.

  The old man said, ‘There used to be more sparrows about a few years back.’

  ‘Well, times change,’ I said. You’ve got to patronise old people and agree with everything they say.

  ‘Mind, we’ve got more pigeons than we ever had before.’

  I was just going to say what I thought about that when Matt appeared. He came down the steps of Mrs Peluzzi’s. He had the collar of his coat turned up just like Roderick had said. He hurried into number fourteen and closed the door behind him. I got up from the bench and walked to the house. What was I going to say to him? I didn’t know.

  When I got into the room he was washing his handkerchief at the sink. The basin was full of water and the handkerchief was floating about just under the surface, like a white, flat fish. It was covered with blood stains.

  ‘I cut my face,’ he said.

  There was a wound on his cheek, like a long scratch mark.

  ‘You’ll need some plaster.’ I got the Elastoplast box out of the cupboard and gave him a long piece which he put over his cheek.