It was almost midnight. He should be attempting to sleep while the city outside refused to try. But he heard footsteps coming up the stairs, scuffing and deliberate like a drunk’s.
They got closer and turned along the bare wooden landing outside. Hoare felt a rush of guilt and slid his folder under the mattress. He waited for whoever was outside to pass along to the only other bed-sit on that corridor. But the footsteps stopped outside his door. Then a key was inserted into the lock.
Hoare gripped an empty wine bottle by the neck. He couldn’t figure out how this could be happening but knew he was too unfit to fight some drugged-up burglar. He’d have only one chance to strike. He was already imagining the headline in tomorrow’s Evening Standard.
Then the door was pushed open and Hoare only stopped himself braining the intruder when he recognised Benwick.
‘What the hell are you doing breaking into my flat?’
‘I didn’t break in. I’ve got a key.’
‘Where’ve you got that from?’
‘I’ve got keys to lots of places.’
‘Like hell you have. And you’re pissed, too. Why didn’t you go to a hotel?’
‘We’re colleagues, aren’t we?’
‘So what? You can’t just steal into my place like this.’
‘Do I detect some grumpiness, Mr Hoare?’
Hoare stared at his uninvited guest, angry but ashamed, too. Someone had blagged their way in to his private world and looked upon what was never intended to be seen.
‘I’m sorry,’ Benwick said. ‘Life’s a bit complicated at the minute.’
‘So is mine so I’m right out of sympathy.’
‘Sure you are… got any tooth mugs?’
The detective reached inside his leather jacket and pulled out a flat, quarter bottle of whisky. As he did, Hoare saw something heavy and darkly metallic, tucked by his left armpit.
‘For Christ’s sake! You’re half cut and running round London with a gun.’
‘No, that’s just my new portable phone.’
‘Don’t treat me like a fool. You’re carrying.’
‘You’re mistaken, old man.’
‘If it’s a phone, tell me the number.’
He gave him a tipsy grin and reeled it off. Hoare wrote it down, still shaking his head. Benwick opened a wall cupboard and found two glasses which he rinsed in the sink below then half filled each with Scotch.
‘A toast,’ he said. ‘To a good long walk down Felony Lane together.’
Hoare, too sober for his own good, knew he was in for an unforgiving session. If he thought Benwick would let his guard slip and reveal some personal secrets, he was mistaken. But as the night wore on, he learned Etta Ross had answers for everything. She kept cash in the flat because she didn’t trust banks and was saving up to pay the fees at a special school for Ruby. Any suggestion of prostitution offended her. The men - and some women - neighbours saw coming to her flat were punters paying for tarot card readings or sharing her harmless fascination with the occult.
‘What about all those French letters she had?’
‘She’s a single mother, thirty-eight years old,’ Benwick said. ‘Doesn’t want to get pregnant at her time of life.’
‘And the tart’s nursing outfit?’
‘Left over from a fancy dress party two years back.’
‘That means you’re no nearer to proving anything against her.’
‘Nope.’
‘So what are you planning next?’
‘We drag that reservoir.’
‘So you do think Ruby’s dead?’
‘Look, if she’d only fallen in, she would’ve floated to the surface by now but if she’s been weighted down - ’
‘God almighty. You can’t think that of any mother.’
‘That’s what cops do, Mr Hoare… think bad of people. Talking of which, how did the meet with your reptile friend go?’
‘McCall? Fine, but you’ll need to size him up yourself.’
‘I’ll be doing that, all right.’
‘OK, but a word to the wise - he’ll not buy any old nonsense. He’ll scratch away till he gets the story he wants.’
They finished the whisky. Benwick dozed in the flat’s only easy chair. Hoare saw inside his open jacket. It definitely wasn’t a phone in his pocket. But why would a policeman need a gun on a no-mark job like this? No doubt McCall would ask the same question. Hoare barely slept. Ruby’s disquieting little face swam in the darkness of his night. She seemed to be struggling for breath though the lungs of London rose and fell to the rhythm of the dawning day. Its clamour would soon begin again and all her cries for help be drowned out.
Ten
Nothing ever quite stays the same on a beach. Dunes move, sand shifts and cliffs fall into the sea. Yet Staithe End cottage had remained unaltered in all the years since Lexie and McCall last stayed there, a doll’s house set under an artist’s sky and remembered from days they thought gone forever. Now they walked the wind-blown beach they’d known so well, solitary figures under shelving grey clouds which might yet bring rain.
Within each was an unspoken desire to recover what time steals and seldom, if ever, returns. For them, words were not necessary. Memories were enough.
*
McCall is smoking on the empty upper deck of a bus butting its cautious way through a North Sea gale. They pass a derelict windmill, its sails gone, iron innards exposed within a domed wooden cap rotting in the salt sea air. A farmer on a blue tractor is ploughing a field. The soil glistens cold and damp as it peels before the blade and the tumbling white gulls which follow.
The bus reaches its turn-round stop by a granite war memorial in the coastal Lincolnshire village where Lexie and her troupe will stage their final show early that afternoon. They have performed at ten schools in two weeks. Eight young hopeful actors in a tin box of a Bedford van she has hired filled with props and costumes till there is no space for a passenger.
So McCall has followed on, hitch-hiking across the farmlands of East Anglia to stay close to Lexie. Not all the strolling players approve of his dog-like devotion to their female lead. He has seen the contempt in the eyes of those who know and admire Evan, the man to whom she is betrothed yet is betraying.
But McCall is young and knows everything but guilt.
He hasn’t eaten since breakfast. That was a slice of toast and an apple bought at a café in the market place at Wisbech. He’s slept in the van every chill night except one when Lexie smuggled him into her bed while the fleapit landlady immolated supper. But obsessive love has a price. He is starting a fever, feeling alternately hot then icy cold with pains in his back and limbs.
He fears college may already have written to Bea and Francis to say no tutor has seen him for three weeks. They will be worried, maybe angry. He should ring home but lacks the courage to disappoint them yet again.
McCall walks the last mile of a drovers’ road to the Thomas Newton School where Lexie will transform herself into Lady Macbeth. He can make out a complex of squat modern buildings of steel and glass within in a grove of leafless young trees.
The threatened sleet cuts across the bare thorn hedges from the open fields and stings his face. But it will be warm in the school canteen. They will give him something to eat then he will want only to sleep and not wake again unless Lexie is by his side.
*
Come, you spirits, That tend on mortal thoughts!
Unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top full, For a moment, McCall isn’t sure where he is. Then he remembers - lying on a heap of coconut matting in the wings of the school assembly hall. There’s a tightness in his chest and his head throbs. He hears Lexie’s voice from beyond the drapes.
Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse –
Other members of the cast enter and exit between the tabs in their homemade costumes, mindful only of their lines and cues, not McCall’s distress.
; Nought’s had, all’s spent, Where our desire is got without content: ‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
McCall is barely conscious during the rest of the play. He misses the scene where Lady Macbeth sleepwalks into madness, tortured by nightmare visions of the evil she has done in pursuit of her own ends.
Only as the final curtain comes down and the audience applauds does McCall stir. A teacher sees him and calls a colleague who does first aid and has a bottle of aspirin.
Lexie takes charge. She unilaterally donates all the props and scenery to the school to make space for McCall to lie in the back of the van. They drive to King’s Lynn station for the rest of the company to catch trains to London or Cambridge.
Within an hour, she and McCall are at the Ship Hotel, further up the Norfolk coast at Brancaster. She has telephoned ahead for a double room for one night as a married couple.
A doctor lives only a few streets away. Lexie persuades him to leave his supper to attend her sick husband. McCall’s given tablets and advised to rest, to eat more and take plenty of sea air.
In the hotel lobby, Lexie sees an advert on the notice board for a fisherman’s cottage to rent overlooking the beach. It’s called Staithe End and the owner lives nearby. She pays him thirty-five shillings for a week, starting next day.
McCall lies in bed, exhausted by her energy. She’d stored up all the adrenalin from fifteen performances and let it burst in a single night to bend everyone to her will.
They drive to Staithe End after breakfast. It’s built of flints and russet red bricks and is near where they say Admiral Nelson learned to sail and Roman soldiers once guarded a harbour which is no more. It has small sash windows either side of a leaf-green door reached by a path of pebbles taken from the beach. Inside, the walls and low-beamed ceiling have been newly whitewashed. The quarry tiles by the open hearth are cracked where kindling has always been split with an axe.
‘Wow, McCall… just look at it. Isn’t this a dream?’
‘A dream, absolutely… can’t argue with that.’
‘Don’t you just love it? I could stay here forever.’
McCall, still weak, sits down heavily on the sofa. Lexie unpacks their cases and takes them up to the bedroom. There is a lumpy mauve eiderdown across a brass bedstead and a chamber pot on the plank floor below because the earth closet is down at the far end of the back garden.
They go for a walk. A gathering north easterly lifts the surface sand and a fine skim of crystal grains begins to twist and turn of its own accord across the beach. Adrift in this magical, disorientating tide, each is aware of their fleeting presence within it and the need to commit the moment to memory.
Then the rain begins. They take armfuls of driftwood from the strand line and head back to the cottage. McCall sets light to the fuel they have found and Lexie heats a pan of tomato soup on the oil stove.
The rain turns to hail which cracks against the windows like grape shot. They pull the sofa closer to the fire. Lexie fetches the eiderdown to cover them and they lie together, orphaned by the storm.
‘I don’t want any of this to end.’
‘Why should it, lovely man? It’s only just started.’
‘Yes, but nothing lasts, does it?’
‘It does if you make it.’
‘But will we?’
‘Will we what?’
‘Make it last.’
‘All that matters is to live in the moment, McCall.’
But how can he? Someone else will always be between them - Banquo at McCall’s feast. Yet if he mentions Evan’s name, she puts her finger to his lips. McCall is fascinated yet scared by Evan. He doesn’t know how Lexie met him or anything about his background or why she is cheating on the man she may yet marry - still less, why he lets her.
But McCall cannot risk letting her think she has to choose between them. That he would fear like death itself. The clock on the chimneybreast above them marks each disappearing minute. Now will soon be then and he is afraid of the uncertain future.
*
They wake next morning to the pealing bells of St Mary the Virgin. McCall feels no better. He has a temperature and is breathing rapidly. Lexie leaves him in bed and goes out. McCall is sleeping fitfully when she returns. The weather has closed in and an ill-tempered sea sucks against the dunes.
‘I’ve been to ring someone, Mac.’
‘That doctor, again?’
‘No, someone else. He’ll help us.’
She wipes his forehead with a damp flannel and goes back downstairs to wait. It is lunchtime when McCall hears a car pull up outside. Lexie opens the cottage door. He struggles out of bed and kneels by the low dormer. It is Evan. It could only be him. McCall sees them through the window, embracing like the lovers they are.
‘Thanks for coming.’
‘Missed you.’
‘Me too.’
*
The sound of the sea rushing and shushing across the sands comes to McCall all through the early hours yet cannot lull him to where questions stop and confusion is laid to rest.
The rain clouds have drawn back and the night sky is lit by galaxies of uncountable stars and a quartered moon, silvering the floor by the bedroom window. There is no wind to shake the windows and the last of the logs in the hearth below pop and crack like burning bones then fall to ash and are no more.
Lexie lies warm and naked by McCall’s side. Her breathing comes and goes in little tides and her breasts rise and fall with the current. She looks as innocent and content as the child she was, till a dozen years ago.
All is still and at peace in Staithe End. But McCall’s preoccupied mind still refuses to grant his body the gift of sleep. And in the silence, he can hear Evan on the sofa downstairs, inhaling and exhaling as rhythmically as the woman who will become his bride.
Eleven
Evan gives the impression of being at odds with the vulgarity of the mid 1960s. His car is a grey, razor-edged Triumph Renown - the preferred saloon of bank managers and accountants. Yet it fits him, fits the Cambridge don that he is, goes with the sports jacket, the cavalry twill trousers and the hand-made shoes.
This is McCall’s rival, the man Lexie intends to marry… Lexie, this wilful, earthy girl who now runs barelegged and laughing through the waves that spill across the shore as both her lovers look on.
‘Quite wonderful, isn’t she?’
McCall can only nod in agreement. He has yet to grasp the basics of this three cornered arrangement. Its language and conventions are uncomfortable and new.
‘Always doing her keep-fit exercises, you know. Theatre work’s pretty punishing.’
They leave Lexie, her feet slap, slap, slapping against the wet sand, her hair damp with spray and unfurling behind her in the wind. McCall follows Evan to the cottage, half a pace behind like a younger brother.
‘We’re going to have to look after you, aren’t we? You’re run down. Lexie’s told me.’
‘I caught some infection,’ McCall says. ‘Knocked me sideways.’
Evan boils their eggs on the paraffin stove, timed at exactly four minutes by his watch, then brews tea in a big brown pot. McCall fetches a bottle of milk from the larder and reaches down two cups from hooks on the painted dresser. They sit either side of a plain scrubbed table sharing the plate of bread which Evan buttered.
‘Eat up, Mac. You’re going to need all your strength in the days ahead.’
McCall does as he is told. What else can he say to this paradoxical man? It’s been two days since Lexie summoned him. He came with pills and cough medicine and personally gave them to the boy bedding his fiancée at every opportunity.
Even in these liberated times, where is the polite conversation to cover that? And yet he seems entirely without malice, as if conceit and male affront are beneath him.
They wash and dry their plates and cutlery, standing side by side at the earthenware sink. If there is any tension in the little kitchen it is due to
McCall’s nervousness, his dread of being called to account for what he cannot help but few would excuse.
‘Lexie’s got to get the van back,’ Evan says. ‘The hire runs out tonight.’
McCall looks up, even more wrong-footed. He wants to be with her, not left with Evan. But his thoughts have been read.
‘She’ll drive back to Cambridge this afternoon and we’ll follow on tomorrow.’
His tone is kindly enough but firm. McCall is in no position to argue. He resigns himself to face a trial he cannot escape.
Lunch is dressed crab and salad. They clear away and Lexie kisses them both, throws her bags in the van then drives off. Evan and McCall stand side by side and watch till the Bedford is out of sight.
‘Come on, let’s go for a toddle,’ Evan says. ‘We’ve much to talk about, you and me.’
*
The grey-green North Sea breaks across the glistening beach, rolling its scattered pebbles ever smoother, ever smaller. Gulls hang in the louring sky and rooks lift off from fields the waves wait to reclaim.
It seems to McCall that he and Evan are the last two people alive. They keep seaward of the debris left by the last tide. Evan’s brogues leave deeper impressions than McCall’s shoes for he is bigger and heavier. The wind picks up and bends through the spiky grasses stitched across the dunes.
Evan is in his Gannex coat and wears a squire’s check cap to cover his thin fair hair. The hood of McCall’s parka keeps blowing back so he walks bareheaded in acceptance of his noviciate role.
‘You’re in big trouble, disappearing like you did,’ Evan says. ‘Your tutor’s a friend of mine. Seems there are two options. Either you find some acceptable personal reason for leaving the university or you will be sent down.’
‘I was planning to quit anyway.’
‘It’s a shame because you’re a clever young man, you write well and have insight but you lack discipline, won’t apply yourself. That’s your problem, isn’t it? Too ready to peel off and do something more immediately interesting. Bit of a butterfly.’
The Convenience of Lies Page 5