M R Bowen. BSc.
As Lucy Mitchell and Hector Jones emptied the teapot between them in the kitchen of Ravenstone Hall, the elderly congregation at St Mary’s Church in Burton Minster milled around their sidesman James Benn at the end of morning service, congratulating him on his newly-published biography.
‘How is dear Elizabeth?’ someone pressed as he finally tried to leave. ‘It’s been so long since we’ve seen her here.’
‘She’s fine, Mrs Clipper. Just needs a lot of rest at the moment. I’ll tell her you’ve asked.’
‘Yes, please do. We’ve our monthly supper party next Friday, remember. It would be so good if she could attend.’
‘I’ll tell her that as well, of course. Thank you.’
He was aware of the woman’s eyes on his back as he made his way down the path to the road, too preoccupied by what the rest of the day might have in store to worry about her busybodying.
After cooking his own Sunday lunch without much appetite to eat it, he changed his cord jacket and cavalry twill slacks for a Savile Row summer suit, teaming it with a discreetly striped shirt and a Hellebore tie. He at least had to look the successful author, he reasoned, checking his greying hair for strands which were too white, aware of his stomach churning beneath his pigskin belt. After all, how could some wretched local reporter hold a candle to what he’d achieved? A successful army career with medals to boot plus an appreciative pension. Tribe tipped for next month’s Booker shortlist, and ‘the biography’ – because just then he couldn’t even think of his wife’s name, let alone speak it – currently at no.3 in the non-fiction charts and already snapped up by six foreign publishers.
And yet, as he buttoned up his jacket and inserted a V of handkerchief in its top pocket, he knew that courtesy of Manda Jeffery, his defences were down. Down and bloody out, in fact. He checked the time on his Gucci watch, already his skin sweating under its strap.
Forty minutes to go. His bowels felt heavy, still on the move. He needed the lavatory. Better here than in the pub he thought, locking himself in and settling down to stare at the rave reviews stuck to the inside of the door and which he knew off by heart.
My God, he thought, careful not to strain too hard. This little collection would have been one in the eye for his old folks, had they lived to see it. Father on the railways, mother a char. Here was success in black and white with the adjective ‘stupendous’ repeated a dozen times . . . Yes, the Secondary Modern lad from Bournville had confounded the lot of his wretched family and the rest of the lowlife who’d crawled around its mean streets. That back-alley background was his big secret. Even the wife had no idea he’d been born in a flat above a turf accountants. Hardly surprising then, he thought, snatching a length of quilted tissue from the roll, that his fiction possessed veracity. That he gorged on approval like a wolf with a fresh carcass and on too many occasions had let his cock rule his head.
He flushed the chain and having washed his hands, stopped at the foot of the short flight of stairs to the box room. She’d been in there too long, he knew it. Better be careful, he warned himself, listening out for any tell-tale sounds, or smells, for that matter.
Another check of his watch. Twenty minutes to get to Wimborne. Certainly no time to sort her out.
‘You stay there till I get back,’ he ordered the silence. ‘And no more fucking tricks.’
With that, he removed his costly fedora from the hat-stand and pressed it down on to his head. It gave him stature. A suitable degree of mystery, and to him, represented the furthest distance possible from number 521A, North Road, Bournville.
Not a single glance at his now triple-locked study wherein lay his abandoned manuscript and Manda Jeffery’s New York number. He’d tried it of course, only to be told by the operator that it no longer existed.
He parked his new Jaguar some hundred yards away from The Pilgrim and as he walked towards this rendezvous, fancied that several of the townsfolk recognised him. Hardly surprising since photos of his face and Tribe’s hardback cover still had pride of place in the county’s bookshops. Their nudges and smiles briefly improved his mood, but only until he spotted a short casually dressed young man standing on the pavement outside the pub, and realised with another twist of his bowels that this insignificant-looking jerk represented his ruin.
‘Hi. James Benn, yeah?’ he asked. ‘I’m Guy Roper. Glad you could make it.’
A girlish hand extended in greeting, which Benn declined. The upstart’s clothes were a disgrace with oil smears on his shell-suit top and trainers more grey than white. He wasn’t going to last five minutes . . .
The reporter led the way into a gloomy stale-smelling interior where the deserted tables in front of the bar still bore last night’s detritus. However, Benn held his ground.
‘I’m not going in here,’ he announced, fedora still in place on his head. ‘It’s a junk heap.’
‘I don’t think where is relevant, do you?’ The younger man removed a full ashtray and soiled beer mats off a table by a small leaded window, swept his lower arm over its surface and pulled out two wooden chairs. ‘All I know is Miss Dyson’s a helluvan angry young woman.’
Benn remained standing, his face in shadow under his hat brim, aware of someone washing glasses at the bar stopping her labours to stare.
‘Keep your voice down,’ he snarled at Roper. ‘That peasant’s ears are flapping.’
‘Be more than hers doing that if you don’t give me your side of the story. Sir.’ He looked at his watch. Argos probably, Benn thought, finally lowering his big frame into the chair opposite and trying, privately and futilely, he knew, to conjure up some kind of plausible statement. But now, in his hour of need, his usual flair had deserted him.
‘Beer?’ Roper asked, extracting a small pad and Lottery pen from his jeans pocket. ‘I’m having one.’
‘I never drink on the Sabbath.’ He was surprised not to see a mini laptop instead.
‘So, you’re a believer?’
‘Read my wife’s biography.’
‘I have. Pretty impressive. Yes, as I recall, you’re an official at your local church.’ He got up and ordered a pint of bitter at the bar. ‘They say nothing’s wasted if you’re a novelist.’
‘I do it because society today is on the point of collapse. It’s a lawless free-for-all and I’m telling you that in ten years’ time most of middle England will be cluttering up France and South Africa while we’ll be full of bloody Kosovans. Instead of church bells, it’ll be the muezzin beating us into submission . . .’
‘Pretty strong views there, I’d say,’ Roper collected his frothing beer and set it down on the table. Benn eyed it enviously.
‘I’ve never been politically correct. I’m a writer. I concern myself with what’s really going on. Especially in Albion.’
‘And what about being personally correct, sir?’ He took a sip which left him a comical white moustache. ‘Miss Dyson claimed she underwent an abortion shortly afterwards. She may not be able to have any more children.’
‘I told you,’ he tried to keep his voice even. ‘I’d just settled up for my Paris trip when up she gets from her desk and touches me down there, if you please.’ He glanced at his crotch.
‘And then?’ The reporter took a large gulp of drink as if for fortification.
‘She asked if I was in a hurry. Of course I bloody was. I’d got a book to work on, another to edit . . .
‘You made that clear?’
The bugger was writing in shorthand, he noticed.
‘Look. I wasn’t interested in a little trollop like that. I adore my wife. Why would I want to hurt her?’
Roper stopped writing and looked up. Bum fluff, thought Benn, unnerved nevertheless by the frankness of his gaze.
‘You tell me.’
‘That’s enough from you.’ He stood up, nearly knocking his fedora against the one huge ceiling beam which straddled both saloons. ‘I don’t have to listen to a prick like yourself rubbish me with in
nuendos . . . As I informed you on Friday, I’ll be contacting my solicitor.’
‘Great,’ the clever-dick was still scribbling. ‘But he’d better get his skates on. This is hot . . .’
‘It’s a woman,’ Benn corrected him.
‘Thought it might be.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Next issue’s out on Wednesday.’
Roper returned his writing gear to his pocket and moved his now empty glass in a liquid arc across the table. Rhythmically, backwards and forwards. ‘I think we’ve got a good photo too.’
‘Listen,’ Benn eyed the distant door to the Gents, wondering when he might need to make a dash for it. ‘I’ll do a deal. Anything to stop this getting out.’
‘Sorry mate. This isn’t London. We’re clean down here in Dorset.’ Roper got up.
‘Five grand. Come on.’
‘Christ Jesus!’ Roper laughed out loud until Benn poked him in his ribby chest.
‘Who’s put this tart up to it, eh?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’
‘Five C’s then? To you. Personally.’ Roper grimaced.
‘The adored wife,’ he said suddenly.
Benn gulped, steadied himself against the nearest table.
‘You mean . . .?’
‘Very smart lady is Mrs Benn. No wonder you hold her in such high esteem.’
He didn’t give the runt a chance to finish. Despite his Pulsar X toned legs feeling like jelly, he strode out of the pub’s door into the stabbing sunlight. For a moment, in his rage, he turned the wrong way and collided with a crowded pushchair.
‘Charming,’ shouted the outraged mother at his retreating figure. ‘Call yourself an effing toff?’
He reached his hot car and drove over the speed limit to Shaftesbury where he screeched to a halt on double yellow lines outside the Kingsdown Travel Agency in the High Street.
With demand for holiday flights still buoyant, this firm now opened on Sundays until 4 p.m., and sure enough, when he glanced in the poster-stickered window two employees were sitting behind PCs at their desks. Despite a spinning overhead fan, perfumed air met his nose once he’d pushed open the door. He had nothing now to lose. There were no other clients, nor any sign of the girl he wanted.
‘Good afternoon ladies,’ he doffed his hat and forced a smile on his disappointed mouth. Normally, he’d have carried out a swift appraisal of their breasts but not today. Today was different.
‘Miss Dyson’s been handling my recent travel arrangements,’ he began in his most beguiling voice. ‘Is she around by any chance?’
‘Your name sir?’ one asked.
‘Graham Hammond. Wimborne.’
‘Is everything alright, sir? I mean, we can check things for you. It’s all here.’ She tapped the top of her PC as he shook his head.
‘No, no, thank you. I just needed to confirm with her some advice she gave me. From the Foreign Office, actually.’
‘Oh, right. Well, I’m afraid she’s left. Been gone a couple of days now. Bit sudden mind, wasn’t it?’ she turned to her colleague.
‘Yeah, and she seemed really upset.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, but is there somewhere I can contact her?’ he asked, then immediately regretted it, because both now seemed suspicious.
‘Sorry sir, but where she is is her private business, isn’t it, Joely?’
‘Yeah.’
He beat a retreat out of the premises, his normally clear analytical mind a scrambled mess. He could try and trace Dyson’s family for a pay-off. After all, she’d mentioned parents while he’d been chatting her up, just like Lucy Mitchell had done. But where would that lead? The damage had been done.
Fuck.
He turned on the ignition then noticed a traffic warden beetling up the High Street towards him and before the noxious official reached his car, had executed a nifty U-turn and sped off towards Burton Minster. His fedora askew on his head, his cheeks like hot coals, but that was nothing compared to his hatred for the woman he’d tried to drown all those years ago. The woman who’d survived to watch him now sink without trace.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Truth is the Word? Bollocks. The main thing is, my spear’s now sharp as a raven’s beak . . .
Without any of the recent misty preamble, Monday the 27th of August dawned fine and clear with just a fuzzy line of clouds out over Cardigan Bay. Anyone microlighting over the Garreg Ddu reservoir in the Elan Valley would have clearly spotted human activity below the woods on its western side. However, only a solitary red kite was winging its way against the blue as Robert Barker boiled up enough water in a billy can over a small primus, not only for shaving off his stubble but to shift the grass stains off his brand new jeans. He could have taken them to a launderette somewhere, but that would have meant hanging around. And hanging around wasn’t on his agenda. Especially since meeting Lucy Mitchell.
He’d dumped his Vuitton suitcase with some happy cruds in a Mind charity shop in Builth Wells then purchased these hardware items at a camping store. So far so good, he told himself, so why the sudden shiver even though the sun was up over Corngafallt, the highest peak above Elan Village? Was it because he’d been careless yesterday afternoon? Too impatient to show his hand? Possibly, he thought, watching the bubbles form on the surface of the water. There were always lessons to be learnt and never enough time to learn them.
And what about this camping lark? he asked himself, glancing at the small camouflaged tent which he’d used since Thursday night. He’d loathed those trips with his parents in Howard Springs Nature Park near Darwin. The bogs, the mozzies, all those loose bitzers roaming around. Camping was either for the dumb or the hard-up. But he was neither, so what the hell was he doing here, kipping amongst the ferns and the skinny old jumbucks, losing the battle to keep his gear clean?
He supposed some dipstick New-Ager would have a word for it. A kind of bonding with nature to shift all the shit which others had dumped on him. But that was just more crap. He, Robert Francis Barker, was here through necessity. Quite a different matter. And it wasn’t just Liza Docherty who’d triggered him into abandoning one life and re-starting another. Oh no, he thought, dipping his disposable razor into the water. And by Samhain, which, given his circumstances, wasn’t an unreasonable deadline, his mission would be accomplished.
As he plied the razor over his stubble, then rinsed out its clogged-up head, he could already imagine how that would feel. The end of looking over his shoulder, of interrupted sleep.
Of knowing that the three who still breathed would no longer be an impediment to his future, but a Threefold Death. Yes, he smiled up at the morning. Fair dinkum, that. His peace of mind, after all he’d suffered, would be no more then he deserved.
Suddenly, as he was about to dry his face in a hand towel nicked from the B&B in Hay, he heard the rustle of bracken and instinctively ducked down to hide.
‘Hey, you there!’ called out a woman’s voice. A crone more like, he thought, taking a peep. He was right. It was some old crud pushing a bike. The one he’d spotted yesterday. She looked the sort who’d snap in two like a dried twig if she wasn’t careful. ‘Fires aren’t allowed anywhere here. It’s totally irresponsible of you,’ she brayed on. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to report this.’
She began to remount her bike to leave, but he was quicker and, before she could utter another word, had placed a strong tanned hand around her throat. That shut her up. Old sticky beak was so rigid with fear that when he pulled down her cord breeches and her baggy grundies so he could touch her grey old muff, she offered no resistance. Nor when he unzipped his jeans and pressed himself close.
He closed his eyes. It wasn’t desire driving him on but memory. Before his cop-out with that freckled sheila on Thursday afternoon, and the other times way back when he’d failed to crack a fat. Now there was just the whiff of death. This one wasn’t going to tell him how far he could go. He was in control this time. He had the p
ower, not like during those two Samhain sessions in that steamy green-tiled bathroom with the hot shower running, disguising the sounds of sex . . .
Okay, so she wasn’t a red-head like the Morrigan. More the old granny, still, she was up for it alright and he could always pretend. His grip on her pulsing neck tightened as he forced himself inside her, feeling so close, so fucking close that after so long, there might finally, be some toothpaste in the tube . . .
Morrigan Morrigan, into your cauldron here we come . . .
Suddenly the woman’s mouth stretched open and she screamed so hard into the silent morning that his balls contracted, forcing a spasm of such power through from the tops of his thighs.
‘Shut your face,’ he slapped her while withdrawing, suddenly unsteady on his feet, and in that unguarded moment, the old woman scrambled bare-arsed up the slope away from him. He watched, powerless to follow as she pulled up her clothes, retrieved her bike and careered off along the higher track and into the edge of trees. ‘You said yesterday there were no more Dagdans here,’ he yelled after her. ‘I heard you. Well let me tell you something, I’m no fucking cling-on like the rest of them who used to be here. I’m He. I’m The One.’
That felt better, just saying it. But he was sore. He was half-fucking dead. He’d not come for fourteen years and to think he’d broken that torturing fast with some old granny.
Jesus . . .
‘Time to go, old son,’ he urged himself, turning off the primus flame and flinging the billy can’s hot water into the foliage. If she’d ended up as a stiff, she’d have gone in the sleeping bag and then into the nice deep water. No worries. But she’d got away, hadn’t she? Would soon be meeting up with someone and that dry old mouth of hers would start yabbing . . .
His breath came in short gasps as he lugged his camping bundle further down the slope to where the Maverick lay not far from the shore. But there was no time to muse on such a sacred place where wisdom, knowledge and poetry are always revealed, because every second spent there was a second too long. Within five minutes he was driving towards the one exit – which of course Lucy Mitchell and her companion had also used – too preoccupied to notice that the promising expanse of new sky had been encroached upon by a widening belt of black cloud which changed half the land around him into darkness.
A Night With No Stars Page 23