He returned to street-level. It seemed colder than it was before. He began to run.
Day . . . lee . . . Day . . . lee . . .
Left . . . right . . . left . . . right . . .
But the ghosts of the past did not run with him, no Arthur Wint, no McDonald Bailey, no Harrison Dillard, no Garner Maitland . . . not even Huntsman Collins. There was only Terry, running all the way back to the house he thought of now as home.
Chapter Eighteen
It was just before two o’clock in the morning when Macrae and Silver left the Goodwood. They had been talking about the case and Macrae had reached a somewhat drunken conclusion.
‘The deed was done by a person or persons unknown, one of whom was wearing a green hat. Not hat. Woollen cap. He used a sharp instrument, probably a knife. Motive? Unknown.’
‘Anyway, we’ve got a suspect,’ Silver said, the whisky swimming in his brain.
‘Oh, yes, a fourteen-year-old who burns down classrooms. Who’s been seen everywhere from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.’
Macrae stopped at his car and fumbled for his keys.
‘Remember Hockley, guv’nor?’
Macrae paused. Over the years dozens of London cops had managed to get out of drunken driving offences. But recently an edict had come down from the top that there was to be no, repeat no, drinking and driving. The next day a Sergeant Hockley of the CID chased a wanted robber half way across London at speeds of over eighty and killed a mother and child on a pedestrian crossing.
When they tested Hockley they found twice the permitted limit of alcohol in his blood and this time no one had tried to save him and he was now serving two years for manslaughter.
‘Don’t be bloody silly,’ Macrae said. ‘Course I can drive.’
But at that moment a taxi turned up towards Charing Cross and Silver stopped it.
‘You’re like a bloody woman,’ Macrae said, but got in without any fuss.
He had the whisky bottle in his coat pocket and Silver knew what would happen when they reached Battersea: Macrae would insist on them having one last drink, and then another, and finally he’d end up by putting Macrae to bed. It had happened before and it would happen again. It was the holidays that did it. He could understand that. Easter was a special time, like Christmas, times when families got together and when you didn’t have a family to get together with you felt bloody awful.
Sometimes, when Silver complained about him, Zoe would say, ‘Well, ask for a transfer, then.’
But a transfer to where? The point about Macrae was that things always seemed to happen around him and he had the best informants in London. And if you wanted to get on you started off by hanging on to his coat tails and finally leapt upwards from his shoulders. That’s how Silver had written the scenario. Except that he wasn’t certain now whether Macrae was worth hanging on to. The top brass didn’t like him, which meant that some of that dislike might rub off on Silver. He’d have to be careful.
In a way, Silver had been surprised when Macrae had got into the cab so meekly. He’d fully expected him to argue. Was he going soft in his old age?
There was a no smoking sign in the cab but Macrae ignored it and lit a slim panatella as though challenging the driver.
‘Well, what’s next?’ he said thickly, not expecting an answer, simply thinking out loud. ‘What’s after Mrs Rose-Mary-bloody-Foster? Christ, what a bitch! You see the way she treated that kid? She only let him watch the TV because we were there. It’s tough enough in this world being a half-caste without having a mother like her. Poor wee sod.’
‘There’s the physical education teacher,’ Silver said.
‘Right. The physical jerks bloke. We’ll have a word with him.’
The taxi crossed Albert Bridge with the river glittering coldly in the moonlight. The traffic was down to a trickle, the city was dead to the world. Soon they entered a little enclave of mean streets and warehouses and old Victorian factory buildings now grime-covered and boarded up, waiting for the developers to raze them and make up their minds what sort of London the citizens were going to be landed with for the next few hundred years.
The cab stopped outside Macrae’s house. Silver was paying when they heard a car door slam only a few feet away. A woman’s voice said, ‘Macrae, you bastard! Where were you?’
Macrae was leaning against his garden wall. He turned. ‘Who the hell’s that?’
‘Who d’you think it is?’
Silver saw a woman come across the street towards them. She was in her mid thirties and her coat, opening as she moved, showed a heavy, earthy body. Her face was plump and her breasts large. Once she might have been described as Junoesque.
‘You said—’
‘Oh, it’s you,’ Macrae said.
‘Mandy!’ A voice called from the car and a second door slammed as a man came after her. ‘Mandy, you said you wouldn’t—’
‘Oh, fuck off, Joe!’
Silver stepped to one side as the second Mrs Macrae, now Mrs Joe Parrish, stormed on to the pavement.
‘You promised! You said you’d be there with the money!’
‘For Christ’s sake!’ Macrae said, as lights began to come on in neighbouring houses.
‘Sorry about this, George,’ Joe Parrish said. He was slightly shorter than his wife and although about her age was already bald. ‘She said she was only going to—’
‘Shut up!’ his wife said, turning on him. Then she turned back to Macrae. ‘You promised you’d have the money last week. Then at the weekend. Then you said tonight, for sure. Well, I’m not putting up with this. You’ve got two kids to maintain and maintain them you will or I’ll go to your DI and you’ll be up to your neck in it!’
Macrae moved away from the taxi. The driver, who had been watching the scene in some alarm, now put his foot down, causing Joe Parrish to jump for the pavement.
‘Where the hell are you going?’ Mandy said, trying to hold Macrae by his coat.
He shook her off and stood in the gutter some little distance away, being sick.
‘God, what a pig you are!’
Silver planted himself in front of her. Of all the things cops hated most, ‘domestics’ – rows between husband and wife – were the worst.
‘Take it easy!’ Silver said.
She turned towards him. She had long dark hair and a heavy, sensual face. He had first known her just before the divorce. At that time she was going over the side with anything in pants. She’d tried it on with Silver himself but failed.
‘Still trouble-shooting for him, Leo?’ The sounds from up the street were distressing. ‘Listen to him. You think he’s worth it?’
‘Would fifty pounds do? I could give you a cheque.’
‘Be your age! Fifty quid!’
‘Mandy, you said—’ Joe Parrish began.
‘I can’t make it any more.’
She thought about it for a moment. ‘All right. If you think you can get it back from him. But you tell him I want the lot by next week or I’ll put the boot in. And then he can forget promotion. That’s if it was ever on.’
In the bitter wind Silver wrote her a cheque. She took it, folded it, and put it in her pocket. Then she looked at him more closely. ‘I wouldn’t expect any favours, if I was you, Leo. He’s a genuine bastard. One hundred per cent kosher. You remember that. Come on, Joe.’
They got back in the car and as they were driving off she called from the window, ‘And I want my curtains, George! You hear me!’
Macrae had come back to his house and was leaning against the front door, his big head hanging forward as though his neck was unable to support it.
He opened his mouth to ask Silver in for a drink, changed his mind, and said harshly, ‘Pick me up at ten.’ Abruptly he went in and Silver was left on the icy pavement. He stood looking at the house for some seconds then he turned up his collar and walked up to Battersea Park Road where he picked up a lonely cab on its way back to the West End from Wandsworth.
*
As usual the door to their apartment was locked and barred and Silver started his own version of what, in the Tower of London, is called the Ceremony of the Keys. Only this time something was wrong. He opened the lock at the base of the door but couldn’t get his key into the one in the middle. It was jammed. Then he realised that the key had been left in the lock on the other side. He’d have to go back into the street, ring the bell and hope it woke Zoe and then she could let him in. He looked at his watch, it was a little after three.
He heard a faint noise, so faint he wasn’t sure what it was. Then it came again. ‘Leo? Is that you?’
‘Of course it’s me.’
There was a rattling of keys and the door swung open. Zoe was sitting just inside the door wrapped in a duvet.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Silver said. He was tired, cold, irritable and had a headache from lack of food and too much drink.
She rose. ‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘I told you on the phone.’
‘Oh yes, the phone. Everything’s OK if you use the phone.’
‘It’s the mark of civilised man,’ he said, hoping to head off what he knew was coming.
He bent and kissed her. ‘You reek,’ she said.
‘I was with Macrae.’
‘That’s your answer to everything!’
She turned and went back into the bedroom, threw herself down on the bed and pulled the duvet up.
‘What’s with the locking?’
‘Never mind!’
‘OK, never mind.’ He began to take off his clothes.
‘We were supposed to have the evening together, remember?’
‘And something came up. I phoned you about it. Remember?’
‘I’ve been sitting here for hours waiting while you’ve been toping with Macrae.’
‘Toping. I like that. You must use it sometime in one of your ads. Tope a glass of Guinness a day.’
‘Leo! You arsehole!’
‘So now it’s flattery.’ He tried to keep his voice light.
She sat up. ‘You bastard!’
‘Everybody keeps calling everybody that tonight. OK, you’re angry with me. I can understand that. So just to punish me you decided to stay awake, sit in the cold hall and put the key in the lock.’
‘Don’t you understand anything?’
He paused and looked at her. She seemed so small in the big bed. ‘Again?’ he said.
She nodded.
‘When?’
‘It must have been just after midnight.’
‘Where?’
‘At the door.’
‘What did you hear?’
‘Footsteps.’
‘Could have been the Chalmers.’ They had the apartment below.
‘They were out. I heard them come back about one.’ He sat on the bed and took her hand. ‘Oh God, Leo, I was frightened!’
‘Footsteps. And?’
‘I went to the door. I thought it might be you.’
‘And?’
‘Well, I thought I heard breathing. As though someone was standing with his head to the door.’
‘And?’
‘And, so I put the key in the lock and sat there waiting for you.’
Noises in the street. Someone on the roof. On the stairs. At the windows. She heard them all. He understood.
‘How many locks are there on the door?’
‘Three. Three deadlocks.’
‘And a chain. And two bolts. You think anyone could get in?’
‘They take the doors off these days!’
‘Not if there’re steel plates. They can’t if there’re steel plates.’
‘Leo, are you sure?’
It was the same question he answered each time and it wasn’t about the efficacy of steel reinforcing plates on the door. It was about the man in the garden. The man who had cut the thin line on her belly. And the question meant, was he still locked up? Was she safe?
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
She let him take her in his arms then. She was frozen and shivering. This happened once every few weeks. The intervals between the incidents were growing longer.
‘Had you been asleep?’ he said.
‘Yes. I was waiting for you. I dozed off.’
‘Did you dream?’
‘I can’t remember.’
He thought she probably had. Then she’d woken up and been frightened.
‘Can’t you get days?’ she said. Each time she became frightened she asked him this.
He said, ‘People get murdered at night. They get raped at night. And mugged and robbed. It’s not a nine-to-five business.’
She nodded bleakly, then said, ‘Would you like some coffee? I bought some de-caf.’
‘OK. You stay here. I’ll get it.’
When he came back with two steaming mugs he saw her nightdress on the floor. She was leaning back against the bedhead with the duvet up to her waist. Her two sharp little upturned breasts were aiming their hard little nipples directly at his face. He put the coffee down on the bedside table and her thin arms twined round him like vines.
At these times her need for him, for his protection and the security he offered, manifested itself in a voracious sexual hunger. She gave herself to him with an abandon that always shook him. She was all over him like a monkey. Her muscles were like bowstrings and he felt that if he pulled one it would twang.
She fumbled at his trousers and roughly undid the top, then unzipped them. She took out his penis and began to fondle it. As it hardened she moved on top of him, pushing it into herself and grinding down on his pelvis. It had nothing to do with gentleness or marriage, love or children. It was a physical act like wrestling. His face was wet from her saliva. It was as though she wanted to eat his lips and swallow his tongue.
And then in a series of jerks she came to a violent climax and slowly her body softened and she grew calmer.
He felt her muscles slacken. She turned from a bundle of stringy, fibrous tendons, to a soft dough. Then she slipped off and lay in the cradle of his right arm.
After a while he said, lying, ‘That was marvellous. And you?’
She did not reply. She was asleep.
She could do that. Go out instantly like a candle. He wished he could do the same. He lay there on his back in the darkness with a tight band round his forehead, his mind racing like the fast-forward on a video.
It had been an incredibly long day. He thought of Mrs Collins and Sharlene and the grotty teacher in the grotty school. He thought of the house lost in the South Downs and the little boy with the wide serious eyes. He thought of Macrae in the Goodwood and Mandy and what she had said about Macrae.
A genuine bastard. One hundred per cent kosher.
Kosher.
His mind flipped. ‘Hey! Kosher!’
It was a childhood memory. No one had called him that for years. But the picture in his brain was suddenly sharp. He could see himself in the young boy walking along the leafy avenues of Finchley with a little blue suitcase in his hand.
The nickname had been earned when he started taking his own food to school. That had been his father’s idea. It was because of dirt.
‘So where have their hands been? You tell me?’ he had said to Lottie.
‘Whose hands?’
‘The luncheon ladies.’
‘Dinner ladies,’ she had corrected him.
Leo’s father had meant the women in the school canteen. The women who made the school lunches and served them. They weren’t clean enough for Leo so he had to take his own food.
Ever since he could remember, his father had been washing his hands. Before every pupil and after every pupil. He had a washbasin in the music room and used to wash his hands like a doctor.
‘Don’t touch it!’ His father would say, meaning the Bosendorfer that still stood in the corner of the music room. And the boy or girl would start back nervously.
‘That pianoforte comes all the way from Vienna. Those keys are
faced with ivory coming all the way from Africa. And you want to touch it with dirty fingernails!’
Washing hands, Leo knew, was supposed to be a symptom of Freudian guilt but if his father ever felt guilty about anything he never showed it.
‘You think dinner ladies are dirty?’ his mother had said. ‘I tell you who is dirty. Men are dirty. They stand in urinals. Then they put their feet on the chairs!’
‘Not ur-eye-nals. Learn to speak English.’
Neither spoke it brilliantly. Even after all these years in London they both still had strong accents and every now and then, especially under stress – which, it seemed to Leo, happened a lot more than just now and then – they inverted phrases, fractured sentences and mispronounced words.
This question of the purity of speech was only one of many areas which Lottie and Manfred Silver found to be filled with fertile soil for argument.
There was the question of their backgrounds. Manfred always described his early life as, ‘When I was a boy in Vienna,’ which Lottie would instantly challenge.
‘Not Vienna! Mödling is not Vienna!’
Mödling is a small town on the road between Vienna and Baden. Manfred did not like being pinned to small-town Austria.
‘Tell me, where are the Vienna woods? Near Mödling, yes?’
‘I don’t care where are the woods.’ Sometimes in her heated state she would pronounce it ‘voods’. ‘Vienna it is not.’
Lottie was unassailable in this. Her father had been an abdominal physician with his offices just off the Graben and they had lived in the leafy suburb of Sievering. She was Viennese to the core and from a professional family.
This could not be said of Manfred. He always described his father as a publisher and, if Lottie was in a good mood, she might let him get away with it. But, if she was irritated with him for some reason (and, God knew, Leo thought, there were many reasons, for his father was not an easy man to live with) then she would say, ‘Not publisher, translator.’
Which was true enough.
And then there was Manfred’s obvious lack of success as a composer. The fact that he was a brilliant teacher, that his pupils not only comprised young girls and boys but also students from Goldsmith’s College and the Royal College who came to him for master classes, and sometimes even performing pianists who needed to listen to Bach or Schubert with Manfred’s ears, all this made no difference to Lottie. He described himself as a composer and she judged him by his own self-delusions. If he was a composer, she would say, then he should compose and have his music played and be paid for it like Mozart, who had lived in Vienna, not Mödling.
Dirty Weekend (Macrae and Silver Book 1) Page 13