by Dan Kavanagh
In fact, Taffy was the opposite of on the run: he was holed up with a bit of female company and a crate of his favourite beer, both of which he’d been badly missing in prison, and like any other loyal citizen he watched the royal wedding on the telly and reckoned we did these things better than anyone else. He guessed he’d get another five for braining the warder, and get beaten up a bit by the other screws, which was fair enough; but, when he turned himself in, he did it cleverly, by claiming the newspaper’s reward for his own recapture, and arranging for what the newspaper imagined was a secret rendezvous in a public place to be covered by several other papers, and even by television. He didn’t get the reward, of course; but he copped a lot of publicity, some of which hinted that here was a human being who, though evil, might be reclaimable for society. So he went back to prison, and he got beaten up a bit when nobody was looking, and he got the five he’d anticipated; whereupon he began attending chapel regularly, and started taking an Open University course in sociology, both of which activities eventually impressed the parole board. He was released quietly, at dawn, with a damp mist in the air, and he never went to church again.
Taffy was very quiet over dinner, not saying much and laughing at other people’s remarks. His neck and shoulders were enormous. Duffy had seen that sort of muscular development before in ex-cons. The ones who didn’t go all apathetic in prison often took to furious keep-fit activity; but since the opportunities for this were usually a bit limited — especially if you were doing a spell in solitary — it often ended up with you doing pull-ups and push-ups in your cell. You could easily get a bit obsessive about this, and the obsession eventually showed itself in the shape of your body.
‘You’re a bit of a chancer,’ said Duffy when he got Vic on one side after dinner.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Taffy.’
‘Taffy? Don’t you like him?’
‘You know who he is, Vic?’
‘You mean, do I know who he was? Of course I know who he was.’ Vic shook his head a little sorrowfully. ‘Don’t you believe in rehabilitation, Duffy? Society offering a helping hand to the offender? “Come unto me, all ye who have done more than five years inside.” Don’t you believe in any of that?’
Duffy couldn’t tell how far Vic was taking the piss, so he ducked the question. ‘I notice he kills wild animals,’ he said neutrally.
‘A pigeon is not an animal, Duffy. It’s a bird. You’re in the country now. And if you want to lock up fellows who kill birds you may as well begin with all the dukes and marquises and whatsit.’
‘That’d make a good start.’
At this moment Mrs Hardcastle came up to them. ‘I know this sounds silly, Mr Crowther, but I thought I should mention it. Some of the cutlery has gone missing.’
4. Billiard Room
DUFFY PUSHED OPEN THE kitchen door and edged cautiously out on to the terrace. He sniffed the air apprehensively. He knew what Vic meant about wanting to light a cigarette to make the place smell proper. Country smells were all a mixture of you didn’t know what: flowers and trees and grass and stuff. People in the country put their heads back and gargled with their noses; they stopped beneath trees for a snort of pong; they held blind tastings of roses. Flowers were all right to look at in Duffy’s book, but he thought it a bit degenerate to go sniffing them. Already he felt nostalgic for the smells of the city: the dieselly reek of a hot bus engine; a dense noseful of fried onions escaping from a burger bar; the monoxide of stalled traffic.
Vic had told Duffy to give him ten minutes or so and then to join him in the billiard room for a chat with Angela. Duffy wrinkled his nose. That was another thing about the country he didn’t like: it was full of dead animals. Someone had put a dead bird on Angela’s doorstep; someone had tossed her pet dog through the french windows; a well-known ex-con walks in with three dead pigeons. In Duffy’s experience, all work involving dead animals was likely to be messy. There’d been that case of his in Soho some years back, which had started with something very nasty being done to a cat down in Surrey. Something to do with the spit-roast attachment on the cooker. Duffy didn’t like to think about it even now.
Braunscombe Hall looked to the distant or ignorant observer as if it might be an Elizabethan manor, but in fact it was built in the 1880s for a banker who didn’t quite make it to Lord Mayor of London. In the normal way, one section of the ground floor had been tacitly reserved for men: smoking-room, gun room, billiard room; and beneath all three lay a large vault where the not-quite Lord Mayor cellared vintages which he did not live to enjoy. There was no longer a gun room, only a gun cupboard, to which Vic kept the key; the smoking-room had long since fallen victim to female emancipation; while Vic’s idea of cellaring a vintage was to get enough Vinho Verde from the supermarket to see them through the weekend. Only the billiard room retained its original function, and even that had seen some renovation when Izzy Dunn, who played keyboard in the Filth with a feather sticking out of his bottom, had owned the house. Izzy had got a bit paranoid about a stretch of green baize, twelve feet by six, and he’d got even more paranoid about his inability to get the fucking balls in the fucking holes, man, so he’d swapped it for a pool table; while into the square divisions of the barrel-vaulted white plaster ceiling he’d stuck twelve by eights of his favourite brothers-in-arms of the music business, and that made it all a lot jollier, didn’t it? Vic, who had known a time when the temperance billiard hall above Burton the Tailor’s was the best place to spend a wet afternoon, had reverted to tradition and got a mate to knock him out a reconditioned table for not much more than four figures, with a set of super-crystallate balls and half a dozen cues thrown in. Belinda had insisted on smartening the room up a bit, so instead of that awful heavy shade coming right down over the table there was a set of spotlights recessed in the ceiling; she put a pink chintzy sofa at one end in case anyone wanted to watch, and she took down Izzy’s photos of rock stars and picked out the cross-bars of the barrel-vaulting in a matching pink. But, all in all, and even though they tended to call it the snooker room rather than the billiard room, it was pretty much like old times in there.
Vic yielded his place on the chintzy sofa to Duffy. Angela didn’t seem to register the substitution. As Vic headed for the door, casually rolling a ball up the snooker table as he went past, Duffy examined her profile. Squarish jaw, fullish around the cheeks, a little pouchy under the eyes, brown eyes, pale cheeks which emphasized the glow of hennaed hair and made it seem more artificial. She was a good-looking woman in need of a ten-thousand-mile service.
‘Vic tells me you’ve a spot of bother.’
She looked up brightly. In full face her jaw became less square, her nose slimmer, her large brown eyes even larger. A brief crackle of current buzzed through them, and she seemed animated, laughing, sexy; definitely not one of your green-wellies brigade. Then she clouded over again as the question seemed to get through to her. ‘Everything’s absolutely fine,’ she replied in a monotone.
‘Sorry about the dog. Who could have done such a thing?’
‘There are a lot of perverts around nowadays,’ she said vaguely.
‘But don’t you want to find out who did it?’
Angela shrugged. ‘What’s the point in finding some pervert who likes to kill dogs?’
‘So that he won’t do it again. So that he’ll be punished.’
‘We all punish ourselves, don’t we?’ said Angela, giving him a lethargic half-smile which may or may not have been intended to appear mysterious.
‘Do we? Look, I know it’s none of my business …’
‘No, it isn’t any of your business. Everything’s fine, I’ve told you.’
‘Someone’s blackmailing you.’
‘No they’re not. Everything’s fine. I’m getting married soon. Do you smoke?’
‘No. Yes, I heard. Congratulations. Vic told me you were getting blackmailed.’
‘Wherever did he get that idea? He is sweet, old Vic. Must have
misunderstood something I said.’
‘He’s not stupid, old Vic.’
‘No, he’s not stupid, he’s sweet. But he doesn’t always understand things.’
‘But he did understand that you needed looking after? That’s why you moved in here, after all.’
Angela continued looking away from him, her hair shimmering a little in the spotlights. ‘Well, we all get nerves before the Big Event, don’t we? Nerves, that’s what I had.’
This isn’t getting us anywhere, Duffy thought. At the same time he didn’t know how hard he could push her. Going on this way was exhausting; it was like bump-starting a hearse. That first sparkle of animation seemed gone for ever.
‘About your dog. It was you that stole him, wasn’t it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You stole him out of the cloakroom so that you could take him off and bury him. Properly, you know.’
‘That’s a very stupid suggestion.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, it’s very stupid.’ If it was very stupid Duffy would have expected her to be cross with him. But she didn’t seem to be. She was just reacting as if his interest in her life was completely irrelevant, which from her point of view maybe it was. There was a click as the door opened.
‘So there you are. Little tête-à-tête? Do let me play gooseberry.’
‘We’ve finished, Damian,’ said Angela, getting up and slowly leaving the room.
‘Chatting up brides-to-be,’ said Damian. ‘Naughty. I’ll have to report you to big Henry.’
‘Is she all right?’
‘Angela? In the pink, don’t you find?’
‘I don’t know her. Where’s Henry?’
‘At home, I should think. In his house,’ Damian added, as if Duffy were too dense to understand the term ‘home’.
‘Where’s that?’
‘About three miles away.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘What do you mean, what’s he doing? Rogering livestock for all I know. Actually, he’s probably playing Scrabble with his mum.’
‘No, I mean, why isn’t he here with Angela?’
‘Old English tradition. Probably doesn’t apply where you come from. Husband and wife in the weeks before marriage see less of one another so that their transports of delight may be the fiercer after the nuptials. Fancy a quick frame?’
‘I think I see,’ said Duffy. Damian was rattling the reds into the triangle; he closed one eye to line them up, then topped off the pyramid with the pink. ‘No, I’m a bit tired.’
‘Oh well, poor little Damian will have to play with himself. Story of my life,’ he added mournfully. If Sally had been there, she would have probably found this the funniest thing she’d heard since the last funniest thing she’d heard. Duffy disappointed Damian by not responding. ‘Go on, you break off for me at least.’ Duffy placed the white ball in the D and decided to show him some fancy stuff. Off two cushions, miss the black, and roll gently into the back wall of reds. That was the plan, anyway, but something about the cue, or the lighting, or the cloth, or most probably Duffy’s state of mind, sent the cue ball scuttling sweetly into the black.
‘Seven away,’ cried Damian mockingly.
‘I think I’m a bit tired,’ said Duffy. ‘Perhaps tomorrow.’
‘Promises, promises,’ murmured Damian, pinging the cue ball off the corner of the pack and taking it safely back into baulk.
As Duffy closed the billiard-room door he thought, ‘You’re the sort who gives my sort a bad name.’ Quite what Damian’s sexual orientation might be wasn’t clear, and there were frequent occasions when Duffy wasn’t sure about his own; but he’d seen enough of Damian to know that if he, Duffy, had been just a regular up-and-down bloke he’d have put this velvety fellow with the wiggly nose down for a screaming faggot. Duffy, of course, was far from being a straight up-and-down bloke; indeed, he had enjoyed what Damian archly termed transports of delight on both sides of the street. Still, this very tendency to cover the waterfront meant that he was impatient with coyness, with not saying what you are; and if he’d run into Damian down at the Alligator or even the Caramel Club, and found him sitting on a bar-stool with a laundry-bag of handkerchieves in his back pocket and a car-thief’s clump of keys dangling to his groin, he’d still have had the same reaction. Duffy wasn’t keen on camp, and when clever fellows who’d been to university were camp, he was even less keen. People who know long words had a duty to be straightforward, that’s what Duffy thought.
He strolled along a dark corridor past what had once been the butler’s pantry but which was now a garage for various types of Hoover, and felt a bit lost. He’d never been in a house this big, and one of the disorienting things about it was that you never knew where anyone was. Where was Angela? (Gulping down something that was bad for her?) Where was Taffy? (Stripping the lead off the roof?) Where was Belinda? (Practising her accent with a Sony Walkman and a set of Teach Yourself Posh tapes?) You couldn’t keep track of them all, and it bothered Duffy. Where he came from, if anyone left the room and they weren’t in the kitchen then they must be in the toilet, so there was no problem. Braunscombe Hall had more lavatories, as he’d heard even Vic calling them, than there were rooms in where Duffy came from.
In what the estate agents had designated as the family room, but which Vic tended to call the lounge, Duffy found Lucretia. She was leaning half-sideways on a sofa, smoking and reading a copy of the Tatler. A tumbler of watered whisky stood on a small brass table which Belinda might have picked up in Burma but more probably in Marbella.
‘Where are the others?’
Lucretia waved a hand in the air, presumably signifying that they were looking after themselves quite happily just as she was.
‘What are you doing?’
Lucretia glanced up and gazed at him levelly. She seemed very smart to him, as if a coachload of tailors and crimpers and grooms had left only a moment ago. He still didn’t know what she looked like when she smiled. ‘I’m reading a fairly good restaurant critic called Basil Seal in a magazine called the Tatler. I don’t suppose that’s part of your regular culture.’
‘No.’
‘He’s writing about a restaurant called L’Escargot. What do you think of the food at L’Escargot?’
Duffy paused. He wondered if it was a catch question. Finally, he said, as casually as he could manage, ‘Very nice last time I was there.’ Lucretia smiled, just a little. He wondered what she was like when she smiled a lot more.
‘Only you see, if in your feeble way you are attempting to chat me up, you ought to be vaguely aware of what field you’re operating in.’
‘Check. Actually, I think I’ll turn in.’
Lucretia returned to Basil Berk writing about the Golden Sausage in the Wankers’ Monthly. Oh well, thought Duffy. The funny thing was, she was being pretty frosty with him and he didn’t mind. At least it was a change after Damian. And if she liked restaurants, why didn’t he take her down Sam Widges while they waited for his laundry to get stolen over the road? Double fried bread, Sam. Righty-ho-coming-up.
Duffy retreated to his bedroom. Despite his fears of what Belinda might inflict upon him, it was quite a nice room: carpet, comfortable bed, curtains, pile of magazines, only about a quarter of a mile to the nearest bathroom. But perhaps this was Belinda’s point: she gave him the worst room, and he still thought it was very nice — which confirmed what she thought about him. Oh well, Belinda was probably the least of his worries. He went to the window, which didn’t have any broken panes, opened it a few inches and sniffed. No, he’d had enough of that stuff already, he thought, and closed the leaded casement firmly.
He lay down on his bed in the cast-off shortie dressing-gown that Vic had loaned him and read a copy of Country Life in about forty-five seconds. He didn’t like the smell of that either: a photo of a posh girl in pearls about to undergo Damian’s transports of nuptial delight, lots of pictures of posh furniture, then a letters page with people wr
iting in to ask how they could stop their hedgehog running away. The magazine might as well have been written in a foreign language for all that Duffy could understand it.
He lay on his back and tried to work out what he thought of Angela. Apart from the fact that she obviously wasn’t telling the truth, he didn’t work out much. Why would anyone want to kill her dog? Was it connected with the blackmail she wasn’t admitting? But why should the corpse go missing? Was the dog-killer the same person as the body-snatcher? Was it something to do with the illegal substances that were presumably being consumed on the premises, though he hadn’t actually seen any direct evidence of this, your Honour, it was only hearsay so far. Why had someone let his tyres down? That was pretty needless, wasn’t it; it might even be construed as provocative, as if someone was saying, ‘Fuck you, Duffy, with your silly white van and your alarm system that doesn’t work.’ And now the cutlery was going for a stroll as well.
It was one o’clock on Duffy’s digital by the time he decided to call it a day. He’d better hitchhike down to the nearest toilet first. He’d told Vic to isolate the pressure plates and only alarm the external doors so that he could, if he wanted, creep around the house and spy on people; but even so, he walked along the corridor’s paisley-patterned carpet as if there were pressure plates every yard. He felt a bit of a wally in his shortie dressing-gown; it was royal-blue silk and flapping its wings on the back was some big gold bird which looked like an eagle, only fancier. He’d have to ask Vic what it was. The dressing-gown was also more obviously short than he’d initially reckoned: if this was where it came down to on him, then where the hell did it come down to on Vic, who was three or four inches taller than Duffy? Perhaps there were some trousers to go with it that he hadn’t been loaned.
When he came out of what was obviously a lavatory as it was a lot posher than any of the toilets he’d ever used, he felt wide awake. The house appeared silent, though an occasional light placed here and there meant that you could see your way round if you wanted to. Perhaps they left the lamps on all night as a sign that they were rich. You woke up in the middle of the night, saw a strip of yellow shining underneath your door, thought, well that’s a relief we’ve still got money to burn, and went happily back to sleep. Or perhaps they left the lights on for the convenience of bed-hoppers.