by John Harvey
He was uncertain. He hadn’t even expected to see me again—at least, not alive. As a mention in the newspaper of passing interest, maybe. Something inconvenient to be swept out of the way like an offending piece of dirt that had no rights to life.
He couldn’t understand what had gone wrong with the two hoods he had sent round to get rid of me for good. But the fact remained he was playing it well: no chips in the veneer as yet. Perhaps it was time to make some.
This I was about to enjoy;
‘Tell me, Mr Mitchell, only the other day you said you had not achieved anything. Now you say you know where dear Buffy is. How did you manage to move so smartly?’
I sat down. I was going to relax for this one.
‘In my job you have to move smartly. Take this morning for instance. You’ll never guess what happened to me at ten minutes past five this morning … ?’
I let it hang on the morning air, but that was so flat the water in the ornamental pond didn’t crack its face into a smile.
He asked, ‘At ten past five this morning?’
‘At ten past five my house was broken into by two guys with guns who wanted to choke me off. They’d tried before but their arguments weren’t persuasive enough, so this time they were told to finish me off period.’ I paused long enough for his eyes to drop away from mine and flicker back. ‘That was what you told them, Mr Thurley?’
He looked as if he had been hit full in the face and when he had wiped away the shock he protested.
‘You are either joking in rather poor taste, or else there is something more sinister behind that absurd accusation.’
‘Cut the crap, Thurley. You wanted my nose out of things all along and when I turned up at the scene of one of your prize drops last night that was more than you could take.’
‘Really, Mr Mitchell, I have no idea what would constitute a prize drop as you term it and have no idea where you might have been last night. Nor would I be interested to know. My sole concern with you is that you find my daughter—which you claim to have done. If I wanted you “out of the way”, then why, pray, would I hire you in the first place?’
I stood up. I sensed that we were getting near the climax. And I didn’t want to miss the best view.
‘Okay, Thurley. Just listen. You hired me because you half-realised that you wouldn’t be able to scare or buy me off, though you kept trying that too. But you thought that if I was working for you that would give you a reason to be near me, so that if I found anything out that looked as if it might endanger your operation you would be in a good position to shut me up. Fast.’
I looked at him. Still not a hair out of place. He stood there looking for all the world like an advertisement for England in an American magazine.
‘You said something about an operation, Mr Mitchell?’
‘A nice clean line in drug peddling, Mr Thurley.’
He was still smiling. He still looked unruffled. The gun that nestled in his hand was small but deadly enough from that range: it was a shiny .32.
I stared down the end of it.
‘I always thought of them as ladies’ guns—or are you just being genteel?’
‘Under the new set of circumstances, Mr Mitchell, I think we can dispense with the witty remarks, don’t you? Now, before we do anything about your absurd allegations I believe that you have some information about my daughter. I think you should let me have that now.’
I started, my eyes on the finger that rested against the trigger.
‘I saw her last night. You know that I was at a certain party, of course. Well, she was there.’
He didn’t believe me and he said so. I told him that I had proof. I reached in my pocket and handed him a number of frames from the film I had taken with me when I left.
He took them and held them up to the morning light. There he was in the garden of his country house, surrounded by all that natural life, staring at tiny pictures of his sixteen-year-old daughter in a blue movie.
His chin drooped, the hand holding the frames faltered, that with the gun moved slightly away from its target. I jumped and the gun went off. I don’t know where the bullet went but it didn’t hit me. I wrenched the little gun from his grasp and he hardly struggled at all: he was numbed by the images he held in his hand.
‘You asked me if I had found her. Well, there she is. Served up as dessert for the jaded sexual appetites of a group of people half out of their minds on the dope that they got from you in the first place.
‘And why do you think she ended up in that film? I’ll tell you why. Because you drove her there. Because you knew she was smoking dope when she was still at home but you thought it was smart not to bother about such trivialities. And when she got on to bigger things she left home and looked for ways of paying for it. She found them all right. Thanks to you. You really were a provident father, weren’t you?’
Thurley was a different man; all the starch had wilted, had been washed out of him.
‘Mitchell, you can’t believe that I …’
‘That you knew she was making movies for people to jerk off to? No. I don’t think you knew that. But it was the market you were into and it was probably peddled by the same organisation. You were in dirt up to your arsehole, Thurley, and you know it.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to get the money that’s coming to me, then I’m going to have a word with your friend, John. Then I’ll see.’
He called John from the house, where of course he had been listening all along. I couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t interfered before, but I guess he was well house-trained. He came out on to the terrace.
‘John, fetch Mr Mitchell the money.’
He disappeared and we stood there, two men with nothing between them but a few torn dreams and a little. 32 with a silvery barrel and a pearl handle. While we were waiting for John to return I thought a lot of things about the gun. From the looks on his face, Thurley was thinking about less pleasant things than even I was.
The moustache reappeared with a package wrapped in plain white paper and tied neatly with string. He had been busy!
I told him to open it on the table and count it. It was all there. Now all I had to do was get out—after I had asked friend John some questions. He was standing across the table and he still hadn’t made a move. The .32 was still in my hand and now I pointed it at him.
‘The gun. Take it out nice and slow.’
What happened next was fast enough to deceive the eye so I’ll take it gently.
While I had been so intent on watching the one I knew had the gun I lost track of Thurley; I thought he was too wrapped up in his own worries, anyway. It goes to show that you should never underestimate the ruling classes. He had got round behind me and moved up on me quietly enough to grab me by the gun arm at just the right moment.
As he did that John went for the gun: like I had told him. The only difference was that he drew it and fired …
I had begun to swing round towards Thurley as he pulled at my arm. It was enough. The bullet that was meant for me caught Thurley low in the neck and flung him back across the lawn and into the pond.
With my free arm I brought up the .32 and fired before John could get off another shot. I hit him in the right shoulder and he dropped his own weapon on to the terrace. I picked it up, but quickly.
‘Right, now talk fast. You slugged me outside Candi’s flat. Is that right?’
He winced with pain but nodded, agreement.
‘But you hadn’t been in there before that evening?’
I took hold of his injured arm and gave it a little twist, just to make sure he couldn’t concentrate on lying.
‘You don’t know, who was in there before me?’
He moaned but didn’t answer. I twisted the arm a little further back. The moan became a shriek of pain, but at le
ast he nodded his head. We were getting somewhere.
‘Don’t nod. That could mean anything. I want words, nice clear words and lots of them. Now!’ The arm went back one more time. ‘Who was in there?’
‘I don’t know! Honest I don’t! I went along there from that fat sod, Howard. They were getting fed up with the way she was holding out on payments, making excuses all the time. So they said would I go over and see what I could do to frighten her into finding some money fast. Maybe rough her up a little, but that was all. Honest. That was all. Then when I got there, the light was on so I waited outside. Then I guess you come out. I let you have it and then took a look to see who you were.’
I interrupted. He was talking well now but I wanted to stay in charge of the direction.
‘Who did you tell you’d left me there?’
‘I told Thurley when Į got back, and … oh, Jesus, can’t you do something about this arm … and I told Howard that night. After I left the girl’s place.’
I asked if there were any bandages around. He said there were so I told him to get some. I pulled away the sleeve of his shirt and helped him to patch up the wound enough to stop the bleeding for a while longer. By then I would be finished and he would be able to phone a doctor or take his chances as he wished.
‘Neither of them knew that I was going to be there?’
‘Of course not, or else what would have been the point in letting me go for barging in?’
I set to thinking fast. That meant that neither Thurley nor Howard had tipped off the cops it might be worth hanging around and turning me over when I emerged. But someone had to know that I was going to be there that evening; and it had to be someone who knew that I would have a better than average motive for killing Candi myself.
If you were down—nearly all the way down and all of your usual friends had turned their backs, then who did you turn to? Candi had tried me that previous evening when she had sounded near to despair. I wondered who else she might have spoken to, and whether in her conversation she had mentioned that I was going up to see her and when?
My thoughts were interrupted by another moan from John. The blood was rapidly draining from his face, and it was also starting to seep through the bandage round his arm.
I left him and walked outside to the back of the house. I took a few steps towards the pond. The body was floating upside down and the little eddies of blood were moving out slowly over the still water.
I went back into the house and made sure I had my money and my gun. John had disappeared and I didn’t particularly care where.
14
There was a weak sun in the sky for a change and I thought at last we were in for something better. The wind had disappeared and the stillness of the air made it seem like walking behind glass. The law had taken Moustache back to the station and were holding him for Candi’s murder. They weren’t certain but at least he was a better suspect than I had ever been. He was loudly shouting his innocence and when Leake got down to talk to him I thought he might be believed. But in the process they would find enough on him to put him away for a good long stretch.
As for me, I believed him too. At least, I believed that he hadn’t finished Candi with a .32 in the centre of her back. It didn’t seem like his style. At the moment I had one or two ideas whose style it might have suited better.
I thought I would walk back to the office, so I left the car parked outside the flat and did a little thinking on the way. But the ideas wouldn’t go straight: they were as stubborn as pigs when you try to drive them through a gate. After a while I stopped trying to organise them and watched them snuffling and snorting around inside my head.
The man I had called to fix the door and the lock had evidently been for the office was shut up tight and he had left a nice neat bill tucked inside the letter flap.
I tossed it on to the desk, unopened, and put my feet up. I didn’t have to wait long for the phone to ring. I picked it up and it wasn’t the voice I was expecting. Instead it was Sandy’s and her normal throaty tone was choked and shredded with pain. She didn’t have the strength to say much but before she was finished I was on my feet and the phone was lying on the desk croaking away to an empty office.
I ran the length of three blocks before I found an empty cab and shouted the directions in the driver’s startled ear. But speed he did and I paid him well and took the stairs three at a time.
When Sandy opened the door, though, I was stopped dead in my tracks.
She was standing in her robe and her face was drained of every sign of life. Her eyes were dead, flat: the eyes of a fish that had lost its fight for survival. For a split second I thought of the faces of women I had seen in photographs of the last war. Then I reached out gently and slid away the brown towel she was holding round her head.
The scalp had been savaged, brutalised: where there had been a luxuriance of red life there was now nothing but a stubble. A stubble that had been hacked and torn as the hair had been cut and pulled from its roots. Blisters of blood rose up in between the jagged ends of hair.
I wanted to speak but no words would come. I wanted to take her in my arms but her deadness forbade it. So I stood there. I stood there and she raised her hand and slapped me across the face with what strength she had left. Then she slapped me again and again, the blows staggering on and on, becoming less and less powerful until finally they were the merest caresses of my cheeks. Then when she could lift her arm no longer the tears welled up in her eyes and broke down her face.
And still I wanted to hold her and still something held me back.
‘Who?’
One word and in that room I did not recognise my own voice.
In response she found the strength to hit me again and to scream.
‘That’s it, isn’t it? Who? That’s always the question from you. That’s why I ended up like this, because I asked too many questions on your behalf. Too many questions of the wrong people. There are places where it doesn’t pay to be nosey. Oh, but you know that. You know it even though you say, “It will be all right, all you need to do is to show a photograph, ask around. It will be all right!”
‘Well this time it wasn’t all right, was it. And I’m not going to tell you one thing more. I’m not even going to tell you who it was that did this. Because if I do and they find out—and they will find out, then they’ll come back and next time they’ll kill me.’ Her voice was like broken glass and what it was saying rubbed against the inside of my brain.
‘I’ve said my last thing to you, Scott Mitchell. I’ve run my last errand, done the last dirty job for you I’m going to!’
I couldn’t just stand there. I had to say something or turn round and walk away. I tried. I said: ‘Sandy, your hair will grow. It will grow and you will be all right …’
The look in her eyes stopped my voice like a stopper shut tight.
‘Yes, Scott, the hair will grow. And I could wear a wig until it does and carry on making a living. My living. Making it the only way I know how. But what people pay for is my body, Scott. My body. That’s what they pay for—to see it or to sleep with it. And who’s going to pay for this?’
She pulled aside the edges of her robe, then let it fall around her feet. She stood there in the middle of that room quite naked and with two giant lines carved down her body, from the space between her breasts to the bottom of her stomach. She looked as though someone had ridden a tractor across her and ploughed out a bloody furrow. Not deep enough to raise too much blood, but deep enough to turn aside the edges of the skin, deep enough to scar. To scar so well that make-up would not cover its effects.
‘Who’s going to pay for this body now!’
She screamed it in my face with her last available burst of energy.
I didn’t need to ask who any more: I knew.
I could do nothing else. Maybe somebody else could have done, but that somebody els
e was not there. I was. Scott Mitchell.
I turned around and walked away, the lines through her body etched behind my eyes.
I asked Gilmour one question. When he gave me the answer I checked my gun and got the keys to the Saab.
The approach was flat, the narrow road leading through a wasteland of rubble and brick. The houses had been pulled down and a new industrial area was going up. Across the emptiness of the landscape I could see the cranes reaching up off the river to a sky that still held a watery sun.
I drove past a collection of smashed and rusting cars and thought I was getting nowhere. Then, suddenly, I swung round a corner behind a corrugated building and there it was. The words ‘Billiards and Snooker’ showed on a sign at the side, although the glass had been smashed and the light was not working. I drove the car round the gravel area that was used as a car park, trying to avoid the holes full with water. There were seven other cars there already. I put the Saab at the end of the park, beside the edge of the building and facing back the way I had come. Also blocking the exit of anyone else.
I slid out to the gravel and walked round the building. The main door was on the far side; I ignored this and went on round. There was a small window quite high off the ground. I pulled myself up and looked inside. It was dimly lit except for where lights were switched on over tables in play. Four of them. At the far side of the hall, facing the entrance, sat a man in a wooden arm-chair. He was holding something across his knees, but I couldn’t make out what it was. I looked from table to table and saw what I was looking for at last. On a table in the centre, just breaking off into the reds, a massive Negro leaned over a cue that looked like a toy in his grip. I dropped down to the ground and continued to walk round the building.
There was another door. Of course, there had to be. I was slowly easing it open, unsure of what was behind it, when a voice spoke quietly into my ear.
‘Oh, no, sweetheart. Let’s go in the right way, shall we?’
I turned slowly and looked down the barrel of a Luger: it looked old and nasty and as though it might go off at any minute. On the other end of it was a grinning guy of about twenty with the two front teeth clean out of his head. That’s what you get for smiling so much—sooner or later someone takes it the wrong way and punches your face in. Not that that was one of my problems: smiling, I mean.