“Listen. Dudley’s up in London at some pompous meeting so you can forget the sun being over the yardarm, or whatever that crap is he always booms out.” Patricia again felt embarrassed, a not uncommon occurrence in this house, perhaps because, as often, there was some justification for the other’s malicious comments. She wished she had the forceful personality to stop Hermione’s talking as she did — but it would have taken a second Hermione to succeed at that.
Hermione stood up. “Will you have your usual?”
“Yes, please, but only a small one.”
“My father always told me never to trust the person who asked for only a small drink. Either he’s lying or he’s got acid on the stomach.” She crossed to the beautifully inlaid cocktail cabinet, opened the right-hand door, and poured out a large Cinzano and an even larger gin for herself. “What have you been doing since I last saw you — anything interesting?”
“Not really. Just the usual routine.”
“At being at Dudley’s every beck and call?”
Once again, Patricia made no answer. Why did Hermione always jeer at her so for trying to do what Dudley liked? And why had she bothered to come here today? Even if they had been at school together — in the days before her father’s illness had brought an end to private schooling — they’d next to nothing in common. Yet Hermione, who disliked so many people and made this clear, was always suggesting they meet…only to behave as she had today.
Hermione drank. “D’you remember telling me you’d met a local author — George Armitage?”
“Yes,” Patricia answered briefly. She began to fidget with the pleat of her dress.
“I went to a cocktail party the night before last and met him and his wife. I can’t begin to do her, but he struck me as being a welcome breath of fresh air — quite unlike the usual stuffy people you meet at such dos. He’s a good eye for the absurd. We had a laugh together, especially over that Mills woman who never goes anywhere without that stinking poodle.”
It was unusual for Hermione to take a liking to anyone she’d just met, thought Patricia. Usually, a new acquaintance was good for only savage criticism.
“We talked books and so yesterday I went to the library to get out one of his to see what sort of stuff he wrote. You know, despite the way he talks, he’s trying hard not to be a hack writer.”
Patricia’s voice inadvertently expressed her surprise. “Yes, but how…” She hastily stopped.
Hermione appeared not to guess at the uncomplimentary inference in the unspoken words. “Before I left the party I asked him and his wife to a meal tomorrow evening: pity about the wife, but she’ll get lost. Of course, you’re coming.”
“I? No, I don’t think I can, thanks, Hermione.” Patricia put her glass down on the small pie-crust table.
“Nonsense. Just because Dudley’s away? Lift your skirts up and show a leg. Stop going into purdah every time that husband of yours goes off. You’ve got to come because someone must have the patience to talk to that stupid bitch of a wife of his.”
*
Weir parked his Mercedes — for him, a car was the ultimate status symbol — off the High Street in Ethington. Farnes at last relaxed: during the long drive down the motorways they should have had at least three accidents, but the other drivers had given way just in time. When he was annoyed or worried Weir became a crash waiting to happen.
“You stay here in the car,” Weir ordered. “Then no one won’t see us together.”
Farnes, who’d been about to open his door, sank back into his seat. He watched Weir leave and walk away, a small bobbing figure who was remarkable without being memorable. Farnes lit a cigarette. He wondered what the hell was eating Lofty, even whilst he really knew the answer. The bank. Three million quid. The kind of mark every villain dreamed of. Yet the plans they’d stolen had shown them this job was impossible — or, at least, impossible in terms of reasonable risk.
So why had Lofty come all the way down here to look at an impossible mark? Maybe for once Lofty wasn’t thinking as straight as usual? Still, thinking crooked, Lofty was twice the genius that anyone else was. Farnes shrugged his shoulders and his mind moved on to other things.
Weir would have had difficulty in answering Farnes’ questions had they been put to him. A man of keen intelligence, he had the ability to face facts and see them exactly as they were, untwisted by how he’d like them to be. Yet, although he acknowledged this job was impossible, he’d driven over three hundred miles just to study the bank and see for himself its situation.
He walked past two estate agents’, solicitors’ and accountants’ offices, and several small shops and turned into the High Street. To his right was a large island on which was a triangular building with shops below and offices above, with the main road on the far side and a small feed road on the near side. He went up the feed road and this brought him back to the High Street by the cinema and a built-up flower-bed in which massed tulips would not be long in showing colour. A hundred yards down on the other side of the road was the bank.
He stood with his back to a butcher’s and studied the bank. The building was oldish and vaguely Georgian in style, with mellow red bricks and red/blue tiles and on the left was a furniture store, on the right a car accessory and electrical appliances shop, with above it a flat. Underneath the bank was the strong-room, reinforced to the point where it could almost survive an atomic explosion, containing up to three million pounds.
Three million quid — that were going to stay there under that pleasant Georgian-style building. Even though Healey had been able to tell them nothing about the alarm system, it was necessary to assume that the conduit which ran through the floor of the strong-room carried out direct alarm lines to the nearest police station. So nothing could be done until the conduit was broken open and the incoming mains electricity, and the outgoing alarm wires, were cut. But there was no way of getting at the conduit.
He lit a cigarette. If only the job were possible, it would really make the name of the man who carried it out. He’d become respected — by the people who mattered — even if he were only knee high to a grasshopper and some incorrectly labelled him a queer…He silently cursed because for once he was unrealistic enough to long for the unobtainable.
He walked on, down towards the cross-roads and the traffic lights. When he drew abreast of the bank he once more looked across and now he stared at the building with hatred because it was denying him something for which he so fervently longed.
That was when he first realised that since the next door had a cellar it might be possible to tunnel under the floor of the bank’s strong-room and cut through the concrete to the conduit.
He walked on, more quickly now. Soil could be a problem. Local geological records should show what type to expect. What else didn’t he know? The actual construction and strength of the strong-room door and whether it could be burned or blown or whether they should break through the concrete wall? The alarm systems and whether all of them would be immobilised by cutting the wires in the conduit? So much, all vital. But information which could surely be ferreted out since the specifications for the strong-room gave the names of subcontractors and suppliers.
Before anything else, they needed money. So they had to do a small job to get some.
CHAPTER VI
Detective Inspector French stared down at the leg which had on grey flannels and cheap shoes, stained yellow by the clay, and he wondered why the body couldn’t have been planted under the other carriage-way-to-be of the motorway when it would have been in C division’s territory?
“Is it all right to dig out now?” asked his detective sergeant, Ippolit.
He didn’t answer immediately. Ippolit — the name really didn’t seem to go with being a detective — was always rushing things, unconvinced there could be any value in ever taking things slowly, soaking up the atmosphere of a situation.
Ippolit spoke again. “I’ve got the blokes waiting.”
French turned and stare
d at the four constables, in overalls and wellingtons, who were reluctantly standing by to begin the odious task of digging out the body. He then looked back at the inspection pit, dug by a worker to check on subsoil at this point, and wondered how the laws of chance had decided that the contractors would need to know the nature of the subsoil at that point, what negligence there must have been for them not to have had the information a long time before, and why the men digging hadn’t been just three inches further to the north when the body would have remained hidden for all time, or at least until the motorway was broken up. Ippolit was looking more and more annoyed and scornful. He was young, thought French with comforting superiority, and one day he might just slow down enough to learn. Had he studied the scene long enough to see the point in the barbed-wire fence where the two posts had been snapped so that it would be relatively easy to climb over and therefore the ground should be examined very thoroughly for footprints?
He gave the order to start work. For a certainty, he thought, Detective Superintendent Connell would come down from county H.Q. He and Connell had joined the force within weeks of each other and for a time their careers had run parallel, but over the last few years the other had climbed up the promotion ladder and he’d stayed put. He knew, to a large degree, why. He was too involved in his job, putting its true object — crime prevention by crime detection — above everything else: the really successful policeman had to remember that his was a job, not a vocation, to know when and how emphasis should be shifted sufficiently to make the facts appear as seniors would prefer them to appear, to be ever tactful because promotion never depended exclusively on ability…The pathologist, tall, thin, nearly bald, irascible, arrived, dressed in smart green overalls. He changed from shoes into plastic orange wellingtons, spoke briefly to French to learn the salient features, and then went over to the hole to make the final excavation. From time to time he dictated notes to his secretary, a middle-aged woman who accepted bodies and bits of bodies with far more equanimity than many policemen. Photographs were taken to the pathologist’s orders, the photographer, a police sergeant, cursing every time a gust of wind shook the camera’s tripod.
The body was lifted out on to a large plastic sheet.
The pathologist called French across. “Throttled,” he said, tracing out the puckered indentation round the man’s neck.
Poor devil, thought French. Even after twenty-eight years in the force he still knew compassion.
*
Hermione Grant, a pathetically shy person, covered up and compensated for that shyness with a manner so forceful that she repeatedly said things others wouldn’t, from a sense of discretion, sympathy, or just plain good common sense. She leaned forward against the table and spoke loudly. “You know the real trouble with your books, don’t you?”
Armitage swallowed his mouthful of delicious ham mousse. “Of course,” he answered, in a manner that blunted her remark, “they don’t sell.”
“If they did,” said Gwen, “we wouldn’t be having to live in our present hovel.” She’d had too many gin and tonics before the meal, not realising the strength with which they’d been mixed. Her face was flushed and she was sweating very slightly. Her dislike of Hermione had been growing from the moment she’d entered the house.
Hermione might not have heard her. She propped her elbows on the oval, inlaid dining-table, beautiful with the warm patina of two centuries of care, and stared at Armitage who sat immediately opposite. “I’ll tell you. The beginning’s fine. It makes me want to keep turning the pages to find out what’s going to happen and that’s rare today, with all the tripe that’s published. You build the characters up and they’re real and believable. And then, when you’ve really got the reader, you introduce violence and ruin everything by destroying reality.” Armitage was about to speak when Gwen forestalled him. Her sense of antagonism had grown and now she saw a way of expressing it in argument. “Well — what’s wrong with that? Isn’t there plenty of violence in life?” Hermione didn’t even bother to look at her. “Did I say there wasn’t?”
“Of course you did…”
“Rubbish! What I said was, reality in George’s books ends the moment he introduces violence.”
The tone of voice had been so scornful that Gwen was bewildered anyone could address her like that.
Armitage hurried to speak, to try to draw attention away from Gwen. “You know what you’re calling for, Hermione? The reality of fiction.”
“You know what I mean,” she replied tartly, “but typically you look for the nearest paradox.”
Armitage smiled. “So much for my streets in Bombay,” he said, speaking to Patricia.
“What on earth do you mean?” demanded Gwen. He didn’t answer her.
Patricia felt distressed, and looked it, as if she were somehow responsible for Hermione. Why, she wondered annoyedly, couldn’t Hermione for once keep her tongue in check? Surely she could realise George wasn’t very successful in financial terms and therefore it was in appalling taste to talk like this?
Hermione picked up a silver dessert-spoon — George the Third, with her family’s crest on the handle — and waved it in the air. “An ironic detachment to life is all right if you’re writing satire. But that’s not what you’re trying to do. You’re dealing with life as it is, yet your books don’t recognise that a dead body stinks. It’s obvious you know nothing about the colour of violence.”
“Is it?” asked Armitage, at first upset despite his flippant attitude, but then intrigued by what she said and especially by her use of the word “colour” in such a context.
She put the spoon down, helped herself to the last piece of mousse in the bowl, and resumed talking with a mouthful. “Just tell me. Have you ever seen real violence?…And I don’t mean on the box which turns it merely into a grisly entertainment.”
He thought back. “I remember a fight at school that had us all…”
“School!” she said contemptuously. “The author of your books just would have to go back to school to remember a fight. You’ve never been terrified in adult life? You’ve never been so wild from fear, blood-lust, revenge, that you’ve longed to club someone to the ground and kick him unconscious?”
“Of course he hasn’t!” cried Gwen.
Hermione half turned to face Gwen, visibly recognising her presence almost for the first time. “Why d’you say “of course” like that?”
“George would never hit a man when he’s down.”
“Shades of Eton and Harrow,” sneered Hermione.
Gwen was shocked. “But what you’re suggesting is barbaric.”
“What else is violence? And it’s because George has been insulated from it all his life, and doesn’t recognise it as barbaric, that he can’t write convincingly about it.”
Armitage tried to support Gwen, who was now staring at Hermione with bewildered fury. “You’re really only putting forward a proposition that’s as old as fiction — an author can’t write about something he hasn’t personally experienced. If that were true, we authors would have a hell of a life! Just think. Every time I wanted to describe an adulterous association, I’d have to rush off and commit adultery…”
“Not every time — only the first. And you can’t tell me that most authors wouldn’t welcome that kind of research.” By chance, Armitage had raised one of Hermione’s favourite topics of conversation and she forgot the theme of her previous argument. “Provided only that he’s not called on to pay the price, there isn’t a man alive who won’t rush off and commit adultery if he can find a woman fool enough.”
An observation properly based on personal knowledge? wondered Armitage. It was difficult to imagine any man had ever pursued her and far more likely that her belligerence was based on resentment. She was an intriguing character, intelligent yet carrying arguments through to absurdity. Or perhaps she did this deliberately, as an extension of her perverse eccentricity? She’d set the table with hand-embroidered place mats and crystal glass, lit beautiful
candles in very handsome candelabra, and taken great trouble over the flower arrangements, yet she had not bothered to change out of a shapeless and dirty sweater and a pair of slacks which emphasised the unfortunate size of her buttocks.
“Has everyone finished, then?” demanded Hermione suddenly, bringing to an end her views on the iniquities of men. She stood up. “Shove your plates along up here.”
Anyone else would have treated the Doulton plates, on which stood the small Axton crystal bowls, with more respect.
*
Armitage had expected a row because Gwen couldn’t stand being either ignored or criticised by another woman, more especially a woman she loathed. He sympathised with her, even though a little more intelligence and a sense of humour on her part would have avoided much of her bitter embarrassment. But he had imagined the row would not break until they reached home. Instead, it started as they drove out past the large ornamental wrought-iron gates of Broughton House.
She said fiercely: “If I hadn’t been a guest…” She tailed off into silence, as if to suggest that but for being a guest she’d have verbally wiped the floor with Hermione.
He drew out on to the road. Guest or no guest, Gwen could never be a match for the other woman.
“She’s utterly…utterly terrible.”
“She is a bit of a cough-drop,” he agreed, in conciliatory tones. “But I thought you managed very well”
“It’s all your fault.”
He sighed as he changed gear.
The Colour of Violence Page 4