A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  I found myself fingering the thick sheaf of papers in my jacket pocket and was tempted to give them immediately to George Holmes and be done with the whole thing. Holmes saw me fingering the papers, and out of the corner of my eye I caught Feinberg staring at Holmes staring at me. Feinberg suspected at least one person in this trial of being more devious than himself and wanted badly to know who it was. I stood up jerkily—all my movements for the next few days would be involuntary, as if caused by an accumulation of energy in joints such as knees and elbows that could make a limb spring irrelevantly to life—and walked out into the dirty London street.

  I was restless and needed to exercise, even if it meant missing the verdict. In fact, I experienced a temptation to simply run and keep running. As it was, I walked everywhere at lightning speed, propelled by the adrenaline that was flooding my bloodstream.

  I passed a billboard for the evening newspaper that said VERDICT IN BARRISTER MURDER TIRAL TODAY. Because my mind was incapable of focusing on anything except Daisy in her cell, I did automatically things I had been doing in that part of London for half a lifetime. I went to a tiny café where you could buy espresso if you were prepared to sit on a stool with your nose almost touching the wall. I reread the papers in my pocket, despite the fact that I knew every word of them by heart. There were in fact two sets of papers: a letter addressed to George Holmes, with a copy to Nigel Monkson, Esq., Q.C., Barrister at Law. One way or another, Daisy was going to be free before nightfall. “Important trial on today, Mr. Knight?” The Italian proprietor of the café, who had a cockney accent, liked to know all the court gossip. Perhaps he had not read the papers. Perhaps he was merely being discreet.

  “Oh yes, quite important.”

  The proprietor eyed me strangely when I was leaving. It was only a few days later that I remembered with a twinge of shame that I had forgotten to pay for my coffee. If honesty is a form of social conditioning, then by and large the system succeeded in my case.

  On London Bridge, I found myself looking east toward the Tower, where it had all started. Except that it was no longer a glorious morning full of promise. It was late afternoon and beginning to drizzle. Was it me, or was there something about London that makes us tired of life? A bizarre emotion to have in the circumstances. My sudden fury was not with Thirst or Holmes or Daisy or even myself but with the whole city. Many people said it in different ways: to live in London is to live in a heavier element, as if under water. Each movement, each flexing of the muscles, requires an extra effort for which the human frame was not designed. In the end it exhausts us, and we join the other empty shadows who flit hurriedly past in the street, out of the underground and into the office, with the shadow’s shyness of the light. In the distance, Big Ben struck the three-quarter hour.

  —

  Carlford paced the corridor outside Number One Court. Feinberg seethed. Both looked ready to murder me. Only George Holmes, further down the corridor, gave me a sheepish nod. No one had expected the jury to be out that long, least of all George. Then out of nowhere Monkson appeared, with all his comic repertoire of narcissistic gestures, his anger with Carlford quite forgotten, and in spite of it all I found myself smiling. Being, like Daisy, a sucker for kindness, he walked toward me.

  “I just wanted to tell you that I hope you feel that I’ve pwosecuted this twial fairly and that there are no hard feelings.”

  “None, Nigel,” I said. “I think you’ve done a fine job.”

  He broke into a reckless smile before remembering that he was an eminent Q.C. and decided to confer with his junior. Then, all of a sudden, the usher called us back into court. This time I sat next to Feinberg as the jury trooped in. Daisy was brought back from the cells. All the women and some of the men looked her harshly in the eye as they took their seats.

  “They’ve been punishing her,” Feinberg whispered triumphantly. “They took this long just to punish her.”

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?” the chief usher asked loudly. The woman foreman said that it had.

  “And what is your verdict?”

  “Not guilty.”

  “And is that a verdict of you all?”

  “It is.”

  As she said it she gave Daisy a severe glance.

  It is a feature of the legal system in democratic countries that the defendant must be set free the moment a verdict of not guilty is delivered, for there is no longer any constitutional power to hold her against her will. The prison officers opened the gate to the barred box where she was held, and she walked away in a state of shock. The judge walked out. Ignoring Daisy, I made a bolt for the door, aware of George Holmes’s heavy tread behind me.

  He followed me down to the barristers’ changing room, where an attendant greeted me—thinking I was involved in some case of my own, no doubt. George was still lumbering breathlessly behind me.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the attendant said. “No police officers are allowed in here—only members of the bar.” George barged past him.

  I was standing by the sink, setting fire to the sheaf of papers I’d been carrying with a small gas lighter I had bought for that purpose. The sheets turned into hot flames for a moment, then into frail wisps, then, finally, into a squalid mess of black water when I turned on the tap. George stood watching.

  “They were the only copies, George. You have my word.”

  “Still, I would have liked to read them first.” He looked at me. Old age and exhaustion had crumpled his features. “It’s all over, then.”

  “Oh yes, George. All of it.”

  41

  Daisy had refused to look at my letter to George until the trial was over. She’d said she would never be able to go through with it if she knew what had really happened. On the other hand, she was entitled to some measure of security. I had hit upon the idea of letting her keep the disk whose secret bytes contained the text of my account. She took out the disk in the taxi on the way home and looked at it.

  “How do you feel?” I said.

  “Terrified. Terrified by what might have gone wrong, terrified by what I’m going to find out. I never thought I would be crazy enough to go through all that for a man. Everyone on that jury thinks I’m a murderess.”

  She seemed not so much terrified as angry, like someone who is conscious of having given too much. I touched her hand. She turned her head away from me, watching the dull wet streets go by. “I hope you’re satisfied.”

  As soon as we reached home I locked and bolted the front door, then for double measure locked the door to my study behind us. Daisy gave me back the disk, which I inserted in the computer. A quick manipulation of the keys threw up the first words on the screen.

  Dear George,

  This is the confession you hoped never to receive. As you will see from the last page, I have given a copy to Nigel Monkson, who is probably reading it at the same time as you. I know he will ensure that Daisy is set free as soon as possible and that I’m charged with Thirst’s murder. George, my purpose here is not to tell you that I killed him; you’ve known that from the start. My purpose is to set down such a mass of incriminating detail that no one will doubt that I did it.

  Poor George, you are so far gone you imagine that everyone in the world must be bent. You really did think that I would let Daisy go down in my stead. Worse than that, when you came to see me that Sunday, you expected me to welcome your mad ploy as a way of exacting revenge for what she did eleven years ago. You’re mad, George, quite mad. Of all the unsettling truths which Thirst turned up in his passage across our lives, your madness is the strangest and most frightening.

  You manipulated him, George. He was your greatest betrayal, the man you loathed and loved. You bent him in your own image.

  You knew I was the one who killed him because you had been tapping his telephone, illegally and probably for more than a decade. There was nothing in his life that you didn’t know, and you guessed that he told me all about you on the night that he died. When I pretended, on the Su
nday, to confess, you knew exactly what I was saying: charge me and I will tell all. What a twist that you thought you would be doing me a favor by charging Daisy. And then, in a panic, to see that Nigel Monkson was briefed in the hope that he would lose the case. I would be curious to know exactly when it dawned on you that I had found something more important to me than my own skin, that I would not let Daisy go down for me.

  I showed Daisy how to manipulate the keys of the computer to shift the text up and down the screen and left her to read on. What could she possibly make of it? I realized now that the letter presupposed a wealth of knowledge on the part of the reader. Only George could really understand it.

  I crossed the room to the window, half expecting to find George with his trilby and pipe standing in the front garden, staring in. But the garden and the street were empty. The drizzle had turned into a steady rain, which had cleared the pavements of people. It must have been the release of tension after Daisy’s acquittal that allowed a long-suppressed image to float, or rather jerk, to the top of my mind. In my first sober hallucination, I saw Thirst lying in the street across from my house, a small black hole in his head. The hallucination was particularly realistic because his clothes were soaked from the rain—as they had not been on the night I killed him. I closed my eyes tight, and when I opened them again he was gone. I shuddered.

  I knew what was wrong with my account, the account that Daisy was reading with such close attention. If I could, I would have produced a narrative that conveyed the texture of all that led up to his death. I would have begun by telling her about the telephone calls.

  The first took place a good twelve months before he died. Of course I had heard of him from time to time over the years, as had most people involved in the criminal law. After a long period of poverty, when he was attempting to go straight, he eventually became one of those villains who appear in every generation and are able to charm the decadent of high society. He was the purveyor of fine drugs whom every cocaine-sniffing debutante boasted of knowing. Magazines for the glitterati sometimes carried a picture of him in tuxedo at a party for wealthy rock stars and young aristocracy.

  For a period he was styled as a famous pop star’s business manager, but everyone knew what that meant. It was sometimes said that he was mountainously rich. It was also said that he was permanently broke. He loved expensive cars—Jaguars were his favorite—and seemed always to be losing his license for speeding around Knightsbridge and Kensington late at night. In many of the drug prosecutions that I undertook for George, Thirst’s name was somewhere in the background, a shadow behind the scenes.

  If I thought about him in a personal context at all, I suppose it was to assume that he wore a triumphant grin at my expense. In his own terms he had won. He was wealthier, flashier, more glamorous, drove more expensive cars. What’s more, he had got the girl. My one small consolation was that in order to succeed he had become a cliché of English society—the handsome working-class crook selling drugs and sex to fallen Brahmins.

  And then, out of the blue, he telephoned.

  It was, inevitably, in the early hours of the morning, and I assumed, at first, that it was a solicitor with some frantic message about a trial due to start the following day. What baffled me for at least five minutes was the voice. There was a queer flatness to it, such as is said to occur when people try to change their accents. I realized that even during his scholarly phase I had enjoyed his cockney vowels. The voice on the end of the line that night was a bloodless ghost of its former self. To my own surprise, when I finally realized who it was, I found that I was pleased to hear from him.

  I forgot for a moment my resentment and welcomed the exotic promise that he always managed to convey. My life had been very dull of late. And then, of all the people who might have called me, in his case there was the unusual luxury of my owing him nothing—not even courtesy. I drew my legs up under the covers and listened. It was obvious that he was under the influence of some drug; in addition to being flat, the voice had a slightly eerie quality.

  “Just thought I’d phone. Surprised, huh? Yeah, well, a lot’s happened. You know she left? Must be over four years ago. Can’t really blame her—I was a bastard. I was never cut out for marriage anyway. I suppose I only wanted her because you had her. She was the only thing of yours I could pinch that you would have cared about—your trophy. There, I’ve said it. You must have guessed it anyway. Always ten jumps ahead. Christ, I wish I was like you. I’d like to swap places with you for a week. If you knew what it was like to be me, you wouldn’t hate me—you’d pity me. I’d give up ten years just to be you for one year, but I’m finished, James—totally finito. He’s in trouble and can’t afford to cover for me this time, so he’s going to let me go down. But I’m not going to. I’m not going back to jail, James; I’d rather do myself in.”

  The voice continued in that vein for some minutes, then abruptly stopped as the receiver was replaced.

  —

  I mused dreamily on the strange mutations thrown up by each turn of the wheel, then dozed off into a light sleep full of the most pleasant dreams that I had dreamed for years. They possessed a quality of weightlessness, a feeling of total release from the prison of gravity. It was when I was shaving the next day—something to do with seeing the no longer young face in the mirror—that I remembered the call in a state of normal consciousness. There was the mysterious “he,” whose identity was not so difficult to figure out, though the implications were awesome.

  Then the night call was driven away by the remorseless business of the day. A female bank clerk had succumbed to the temptation of embezzlement, a small sum but a clever scam. She did it out of boredom and to prove she was not as unintelligent as her boss seemed to think. It was not until I was sitting in my car in a traffic jam on the Victoria Embankment about a hundred yards from Waterloo Bridge that Thirst came back to mind. It was already evening; under streetlights, people hurried to the tube. I resigned myself to a long wait while police in riding boots and helmets dealt with the traffic. My memory opened up, and I heard the voice again in my ear: “I suppose I only wanted her because you had her….There, I’ve said it.” It was not only the content, it was also the tone that was so surprising. I searched for an adjective. Impotent, I decided. The voice, against all expectations, had lost virility.

  “Daisy,” I said, “you poor sucker.” I smiled into the rearview mirror.

  —

  About a week later I was again awakened in the middle of the night. The voice was much the same, though on this occasion it possessed the harshness of sobriety.

  “Did I phone you the other night? I seem to remember doing something like that. I was stoned, of course, probably came out with a load of crap.”

  “I’m sure you’re going to deny all of it.”

  There was a pause.

  “No. It was probably true, just not worth saying. You’re going to think I’m a cunt until the day I die.”

  I endorsed this comment with silence.

  “I’m not asking for help, but I’m in trouble this time. I’m going to be sacrificed. Someone very big in the Old Bill has noticed that everyone seems to get done except me. He says I’ll have to go down just to make it look better. Reckons he can make it easy—say, four years in the library at the Scrubs. But I’m not going to. I’m never going back to gaol, James—never. Did I ever tell you that before?”

  It took me a moment to realize the question was a form of cockney irony and that the “he” was not the same as the “someone very big.” By that time Thirst had hung up.

  Those two calls established a rhythm that continued for a few months. He would telephone in a state of advanced narcotic poisoning, as the forensic scientists put it, and blurt out his heart. A week or so later he would remember the call and phone me again, this time to try to find out what he had told me when intoxicated. The theme of his being in trouble featured in each call. I never encouraged or discouraged him from calling; the mysterious monologues
in the dead of night added a fresh dimension to the dreary pattern of my bachelor life.

  Looking back, I’m struck that we were like two exceptionally coy dancers growing closer only by the tiniest increments. It was four or five months before we actually met. Again it was late at night, and he arrived on my doorstep almost incoherent from whatever drugs he was using. I have no rational explanation for the fact that I let him in without argument. Except perhaps to say that I had come to identify with the tense, incorporeal voice of the night.

  His entrance into my house was something of an anticlimax. I must have expected him to be impressed. He seemed disappointed. My furnishings, apparently, were not up to the standard to which he’d grown accustomed. Such silver and crystal as I possessed were, it seemed, substandard. And he disliked even expensive reproductions. In the midst of his ramblings—a mixture of remorse, braggadocio, and terror—he claimed to have known a man who had briefly owned the original Sunflowers by van Gogh. Four or five personalities fought for possession of his body—fatter than eleven years before but still impressive. At least one of them was a snob of the nouveau riche variety. Another claimed, as he was leaving, that I was the only person in the world he’d ever really loved.

  “I bet you say that to all the boys,” I said on the doorstep. He broke into a broad cockney chuckle and hugged me sentimentally for a moment before walking away to his car, an unexpectedly modest Mini. I wondered if he’d stolen it.

  —

  His visit to my house must have signified a high point in our dance macabre, for it was at least two months before I heard from him again. During that time I picked up with a girl who was to be the last of my transient lovers. Ironically, she might have come closer than any of the others to sharing the rest of my life, were it not for the undisguised desperation with which she longed to start a family.