The Colour of Violence

by Jeffries, Roderic

  “Well — admit it.”

  “Gwen, darling, if you…”

  “Don’t you darling me after subjecting me to such an insulting time just because you wanted a chance to make sheep’s eyes at that Patricia woman. You want something, so it doesn’t matter what happens to me. You fixed to see her there, knowing her husband wouldn’t be around.”

  “I’d no idea she was going to be present.”

  Gwen said, with bitter sarcasm: “You must think I’m really simple to try to feed me that sort of an unlikely story.”

  “I promise you, I…”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll not believe you.”

  He struggled to remain pleasant. “Hermione just said it would be a simple dinner. I took that to mean we’d be the only guests.”

  “Then why were you so eager to go?”

  “I wasn’t eager in the sense you mean, but she’s an intriguing character and…”

  “Intriguing? Is that what you call someone who insults me like she did? Or didn’t you even notice because you were too busy staring into that woman’s lovely brown eyes?”

  “They’re blue,” he corrected automatically.

  “So you noticed that?” she retorted very quickly.

  “I could hardly…”

  “You could hardly! Yet normally you’re so dreamy-minded you’ve no idea. And what was all that about Bombay?”

  He tried to work out what she was now talking about. “Bombay?”

  “You said something about the streets of Bombay and then laughed. Trying to set up a dirty week-end?”

  “It would have to be potentially very dirty to want to go there.”

  He should have forgone the pleasure of a smart answer. She became wilder in her accusations and eventually he lost his calm and they had a really bitter row that lasted the rest of the way home.

  It had not, he thought as he parked the car, been a successful evening. And yet he had enjoyed it until almost the end.

  *

  Burner Aaron was a small man — except when compared to Weir — with a mobile face which made it very difficult to judge his age. He raised his glass in which was beer. “Here’s the skin off your middle elbow, Lofty.” His appearance might be insignificant, but his skill as a safe-breaker was very high.

  Weir didn’t bother to return the salutation. He left his own drink untouched. “The job’s worth between one and three million.”

  Aaron’s expression changed, but strangely he now looked sad. He sucked on his lower lip. “What’s the mark — a bank?”

  “Yeah. A central cash-holding bank.”

  Aaron rolled himself a thin cigarette, no thicker than he’d have rolled in prison. When he lit it, half an inch vanished in a burst of flame. “You’ll need a strong crew.”

  “I’ll get it…D’you know the firm called Yelting what make strong-room doors?”

  “They’re good. If that’s what you’ve got, you’ve got trouble.”

  “How much trouble?”

  “It’ll ‘ave a time lock what no one’s going to force. Outside plates of special steel with reinforced fireproof insulation, more special plates, a cast-iron plate what’s as thick as they can make it and ‘as been copperplated to lead off ‘eat, and right dead centre maybe thick copper plates reinforced with manganese steel.”

  “But you could burn through the lot?”

  “Maybe I could, and maybe I couldn’t, all depending.”

  “What would you need?”

  “Something like forty cylinders of high-pressure oxygen, eight of acetylene, and twenty-four ‘ours’ actual burning time.”

  Weir hadn’t realised how big a task even the supply of equipment would be. “Blowing would be easier, then?”

  “Sure. Only you ain’t going to blow a Yelting door.”

  “Maybe we’d better think of going through the walls.”

  “How thick are they?”

  “Three-feet special-mix concrete and double one-inch reinforcing.”

  “Then you won’t get through them in under three, four days since you can’t make much noise.”

  “Come away! If I get a real team…”

  “Lofty, you talk to someone what knows, but ‘e’ll give you the same story. It sounds like a job to forget.”

  “Forget three million quid?” Weir spoke angrily. He’d persuaded himself the news from Aaron would be far more encouraging.

  *

  Armitage first heard about the finding of the body when he was in the stationer’s at the upper end of the High Street.

  “A man with his head chopped right off,” said the young assistant. “Just imagine! They say the face looks real terrifying.”

  “You might say it had some cause,” he replied. “May I have two…”

  “But fancy it happening here!”

  He sighed. It was obvious he wouldn’t get served until he’d heard all the details. “Where’s this body turned up?”

  “Out where they’re building the new stretch of motorway. They say he was down in the mud with his head tucked under his arm.”

  “Following the precedent set by Anne Boleyn.”

  The assistant looked at him with perplexity. “What’s that?”

  “The wife of Henry the Eighth. She walks around the Tower of London with her head tucked under her arm.”

  “She didn’t do that on telly.”

  “Then maybe I’ve got it all wrong. D’you think I could have two reams of quarto typing paper — thick, and not that flimsy stuff?”

  She finally served him and he returned to his car. As he sat down behind the wheel and reached over to put the key in the dashboard to start the engine, he suddenly remembered Hermione’s words of the night before. He didn’t know the colour of violence. She’d been right, even though he didn’t agree that it was necessary to know it to be able to write about violence with authority. Even his acquaintance with death had always been second-hand. Did violence colour a scene? People claimed, when visiting places of known past horror, to be able to sense the violence there’d been. Did they, or were they merely reacting to what they’d learned? He had no idea what the answer was. But two miles out of town, presumably not very far from the roundabout which marked the end of the existing stretch of motorway, there was said to be a hole in which a murdered man had lain. For the first time in his life he could observe the colour of murder. He started the engine and drove out of town.

  A few cars were parked near the roundabout and some thirty onlookers were as close to the bare levelled earth of the new carriageway-to-be as a uniformed policeman would allow them to get. He joined them.

  There was little to see. There was a hole, barely discernible but clearly marked by the excavated clods of earth which were carefully piled on a sheet of plastic, and there were three men, in civvies, who were presumably searching the ground, although from a distance they seemed to be moving without any discernible search pattern.

  He lit a cigarette, having to turn his head away from the keen wind to do so, and wished he’d put on a thicker sweater. The scene was bleak, mainly as the result of ripping a new road out of a still generally wintry landscape. But bleakness was different from a sinister impression. Hermione said he didn’t know the colour of violence. Here was an occasion when no “colour” was discernible, even to the most receptive imagination.

  He waited, wondering what would happen. In the event, virtually nothing did. One of the searchers left in a car and a quarter of an hour after that the remaining two did the same. There remained the hole, the clods of earth, and the uniformed constable on guard who tramped up and down and from time to time beat his arms against his chest.

  *

  When Armitage arrived back at the cottage and drove the car into the garage he looked at his watch and saw the time was nearly a quarter to three. He swore. Almost two hours late for lunch. Gwen had real cause to be bitchy.

  He went into the house and immediately called out: “Darling, I’m terribly sorry to be so late.”


  There was no answer, but he wasn’t surprised because sometimes she used silence as a weapon, as a child would. He went into the sitting-room, but that was empty, and soon he found she was out. He sighed. When she came back, life was going to be difficult. Then he checked on food and found the nearly cold leg of lamb in the larder and he knew that life was going to be very difficult indeed — by sheer misfortune, he’d chosen to be this late on a day when she’d cooked a joint.

  He carried the lamb and four soggy roast potatoes on a glass dish into the kitchen and carved himself three slices of meat and took two of the potatoes. There was some mint sauce, made from dried mint, in a cup in the china cupboard, and he spooned some on to the meat.

  As he ate, he thought that she’d probably walked up the road the half-mile to Amy Walters — Amy was the kind of miserable woman who loved hearing about other people’s troubles and exacerbating them under the guise of giving consolation. How, he wondered, had the relationship between Gwen and himself reached the low stage it had? If only she could have had a little more sympathy…He smiled bitterly. How many hundreds of thousands of husbands had said that?…But she’d see his being late as a personal insult, not as the result of artistic temperament searching for background material and becoming careless of time. Yet, had he been successful and made a lot of money, he was certain she would and could have sympathised with, and understood, the undisciplined manner of an artistic mind. Success was the key word.

  He checked his thoughts because they were useless. He and Gwen were what they were, not what they might have been. To continue to criticise her for not understanding him was as futile as criticising himself for not writing best-sellers.

  He finished eating, took the plate, knife, fork, and glass out to the kitchen and washed them up, then went upstairs to his workroom. He sat down at the typewriter and tried to resume writing, after reading through the last two pages to regain the thread of the story, but his mind refused to click into gear and instead wondered if friends had to make as many concessions to keep their marriages reasonably stable? What would have happened if he hadn’t been able mostly to see the humorous side of things? But once again that was profitless conjecture. All that was certain was that things would have been different.

  He stared at the typewriter with dislike. Even at this stage, halfway through the book, he knew it would be no better than any of his others. It would sell roughly the same number of copies, gain the same lukewarm reviews, and perhaps be bought by two low-paying foreign publishers.

  Yet he put as much thought, as much mental sweat and agony, into his books as any best-selling novelist, so why should he sell so much less?…He grinned wryly.

  Equality. There must be equality in inspiration! Laughing at himself restored a sense of mental balance and soon he was able to resume work.

  *

  Gwen didn’t return until almost eleven-thirty and by then Armitage’s sharp imagination had pictured horrifying accidents of various natures. Then he heard a car stop and a door slam and he hurried to the window and pulled back the curtain, but all he saw were the red tail lights of the departing vehicle. He went into the hall, switched on the outside light, and opened the door for her. It wasn’t until she’d pushed past him and had gone into the sitting-room, taken off her leather coat and dropped it carelessly on to a chair, that he realised she was slightly drunk.

  “So you’re back?” she said, slurring the words.

  That had been going to be his line, he thought.

  “It’s nice of you to bother to return.” She stood, nearly under the main beam.

  “I’ve been very worried,” he said quietly.

  She crossed to one of the chairs and slumped down into it.

  “So where have you been?” A touch of anger tightened his voice.

  “Why should you bloody care?”

  “I’ve been sitting here wondering if you’d met with some terrible accident.”

  “I’ll bet — and hoping like hell I had.” She opened her handbag and brought out a pack of cigarettes: as she tried to take out a cigarette, she spilled several on to the floor.

  “Where have you been all this time?” he demanded again.

  “Listen to him! The man who had a special meal cooked for him, but who just couldn’t be bothered to turn up for it.” She might have been addressing a third person. “Full of questions, now, but he couldn’t have cared less about me or the meal earlier on. And why? Because he’d got himself something much more interesting.” She suddenly spoke directly to him in tones of fury. “How could you, in the middle of the day?”

  “How could I what?”

  “When you didn’t come back I telephoned. You see, I’m not as stupid as you’d like to think.” She began to pick up the cigarettes, at times having difficulty in judging distances.

  “You telephoned who?”

  “Your tart.”

  “Tart? For God’s sake. Or are you talking about Patricia?”

  “We’re not discussing Boadicea, are we?”

  “And you think I’ve been with her?”

  “I know so. I saw the way you looked at her last night. When you didn’t bother to turn up for lunch I rang her house and the daily woman said Mrs. Broadbent had had a telephone call and had to leave suddenly. Rushing to meet you. She’s like a bitch on heat.”

  He felt sorry for her. Underneath her crude, drunken anger, he could see hurt. Because of her ridiculous jealousy, she really did believe he was having an affair with Patricia. He spoke softly. “Gwen, I haven’t seen Patricia since I was with you, last night. What happened this morning was that when I was in town a girl in the shop told me a murdered man had been found buried where the new motorway is going. I went out there to see the place, because of what Hermione had said last night about my not knowing the colour of violence…”

  She laughed with wild bitterness. “No wonder everyone thinks you write lousy fiction.”

  His patience came to a sudden end. “So where the hell have you been, coming back tight this late at night? Boozing gin with that Walters woman, moaning your head off about me?”

  “Gin? Knowing you’ve been sweating away with that tart of yours? I’ve been drinking champagne.”

  Strangely, he didn’t believe her. Which, in retrospect, made him look a fool.

  When they went to bed they slept in separate rooms.

  CHAPTER VII

  Gwen came down from upstairs as he put the two boiled eggs on the breakfast table. He saw the lines under her eyes and the way her forehead kept creasing and merely thought she was suffering a hang-over. But when she was seated she kept fidgeting and then she said, “I’m leaving you.”

  He sat down opposite her.

  “I…I was going to slip away, but decided I must tell you to your face.” She began to break the shell of her egg.

  “But…” For a moment he could find no words.

  “If only…” Her voice quickened and sharpened, as she deliberately remembered all the past hurts. “If only you’d had the decency not to chase after her so blatantly, I…I might have been able to stand it. But to clear off like you did yesterday and just not bother to say…”

  “I’ve told you what happened.”

  “Lies,” she said violently.

  How could two people speak the same language and yet so completely fail to understand each other? he wondered despairingly. “All right, then. Get on to Patricia and ask her where she went at lunchtime.”

  “D’you think I’d lower myself to ask her anything?”

  “For Christ’s sake, stop being so stupid. I went to the new motorway to see the site of a murder. Where Patricia was, I’ve no idea.” She pushed the egg away from her, making no further attempt to eat it.

  He stood up. “I’ll get on to Patricia and…”

  “It doesn’t matter what lies you’ve arranged between you. I’m leaving you.”

  “It won’t be lies…”

  “Why can’t you at least have the courage to admit
the truth?”

  As she looked at him, he understood that there could be no proof strong enough to convince her he was telling the truth. She was determined to believe he had committed adultery. He slumped back in the chair and wondered if other couples reached the end of their marriage road in so pedestrian a manner: casually, over the breakfast table, as if discussing the weather?

  She spooned sugar into her coffee, stirred it, and then didn’t drink it. She looked at her wristwatch.

  “Where the hell d’you think you’re going to stay?” he asked. “What are you going to do for money?”

  “I’m going away with someone.”

  He knew immediate disbelief. “You don’t mean with a man?”

  She nodded.

  “Who?” His voice was thick.

  “Fred.”

  “Fred Letts? You’re going away with him? That creep?”

  “Just because you don’t like him.”

  “Am I supposed to like the man my wife says she’s running away with?” His voice rose. “If that little prick sets foot inside this house, I’ll smash him.”

  “He won’t.” She suddenly stood up, moved back the chair, and left. He heard her go up the stairs and across to their bedroom, immediately overhead. He stared at his egg. What did twentieth-century, civilised man do when his wife said she was going off with another man? Have a punch-up? Argue? How could you have a reasoned argument over who was to have your wife? Convince her he’d been telling the truth? But all she wanted was justification for the course of action she was determined to take, so there could be no convincing her. In any case, was she worth the trouble?

  He heard a car approach and stop. She crossed the bedroom and descended the stairs. A car horn sounded twice. He went to the door of the dining-room and opened it as she stepped down into the hall, handbag in one hand, white suitcase — which he remembered he’d bought for her honeymoon — in the other.

  “You fixed up all this last night, before you came back here,” he said.

  She put the suitcase down and opened the front door.

  “Yet you hadn’t the guts to say a word until just now?”

  She walked out. Fred Letts was behind the wheel of his Rolls-Royce and he was staring at the house. When he saw Gwen he leaned across and opened the passenger door, but did not leave the car. She got in and for a brief moment there was confusion because of the suitcase, then Letts lifted it over on to the back seat. The Rolls moved away, quietly, silently, luxuriously.