Shut Eye

by Adam Baron

  We got to Sadler’s Wells fifteen minutes early, bought a programme and had a quick drink at the bar. The flamenco show lasted two hours, during which I was able to pull out all the thoughts which were nagging at me and stretch them in different directions. There were a lot of directions but none was any easier to move the events along than any other. Lloyd. Was he rattled because he had something to hide, or just because he didn’t want his political career to take a nosedive before it was more than ten feet off the ground? I didn’t know. I thought about it and paid some attention to the show, and when it was finished Sharon and I walked over to the pub opposite. The Shakespeare, or something.

  ‘Well?’ Sharon asked, after she had set the drinks on the table and sat down beside me. I took a sip of whiskey.

  ‘I can see why you wanted to see that,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she replied, smiling. ‘Can you now?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You appreciate the beauty of space and movement.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Yes. Especially when enacted by a man wearing nothing but baby oil, and trousers so tight you are immediately made aware of a certain decision made by his parents soon after he was born.’

  Sharon laughed. ‘He’s a dancer,’ she said. She shrugged her shoulders, doing a good impression of one of those earnest women on the Late Review. ‘It has to be easy to see his body. It’s his medium of expression.’

  ‘I don’t think medium would be the word I’d use,’ I said.

  ‘He really was brilliant though,’ Sharon said. ‘Wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was. And just the man to have around when you’ve got problems with cockroaches.’

  As we hunched over our little table, Sharon asked me how the case was coming. I thought of an angry MP and a man with a moustache.

  ‘Developments,’ I said.

  ‘Really? That’s great.’

  ‘Developments which probably don’t mean anything,’ I was sorry to add.

  Above the hubbub of a busy Friday night I told Sharon about Charlotte Morgan and Graham Lloyd, and about how I had met up with the MP. I didn’t tell her about the man outside The Colt though; I didn’t want her to worry about me. Or burst out laughing at my paranoia.

  ‘Do you think Lloyd did it?’ Sharon asked.

  ‘I know he didn’t,’ I said. ‘He told me that he was in America at the time it happened. I’m going to check that out but I don’t think he’d have come up with it if it was an out and out lie.’

  ‘Then he’s in the clear?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. He could have had it done. Paid someone.’

  Sharon looked doubtful. ‘Do you really think so? How would an MP know how to hire a hit man? How would he know where to go?’

  I laughed, ‘It’s not as hard as you’d think. Or as expensive.’

  ‘So he might have hired someone, and told them exactly how to do it, to make it look like those other ones?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he could have. I was very dubious about that when Morgan told me that’s what he thought had happened. You see, the police don’t release all the details. It would be too horrifying to read over the cornflakes. There are things which happened in Teddy’s killing which also happened when the lorry driver and the schoolboy were killed, but which very few people would have known about.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, the police told the press that a bottle had been used in each case, but they didn’t tell them that, both times, it had been deliberately left inside the body. Thrust in so it would stay there. That happened the third time too which made me think it had to be the same man.’

  ‘And doesn’t it still have to be?’

  ‘Probably,’ I admitted. ‘But a well-placed MP could find out about the details of a case if he wanted to.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘If he pretended he wasn’t looking, sure.’ I had a thought. ‘And if he knew someone high up in the Metropolitan Police then that would make it even easier.’

  ‘OK,’ Sharon said, ‘he could have done it. Or paid someone to do it. But why would he? I mean, it is a bit extreme, isn’t it?’

  ‘More than a bit. But there are millions of reasons why people kill each other. In this case there’s the obvious. Jealousy. He couldn’t stand the fact that his mistress was sleeping with another man, even if that man was her husband.’

  ‘Except she wasn’t sleeping with him, was she? Not in the biblical sense.’

  ‘No, but he wasn’t to know that. And if he was an obsessive, a real whacko, he might have been compelled to have Teddy killed.’

  ‘Sounds plausible. I mean that he should be a whacko.’

  ‘Mmm. Not sure I buy it though. Charlotte told me they were both getting divorced. Divorce would be an easier way of keeping her away from her husband.’

  ‘Yes, but we all know what middle-aged men say about divorces when they fancy someone.’

  ‘Good point,’ I said. ‘But I’m still doubtful. Killers possessed by jealousy tend to do the job themselves, in fits of heightened rage which outweigh any rational sense. They don’t plan it meticulously like that, getting someone else to do it in a specific way.’

  ‘So why else would he kill him?’ Sharon asked.

  ‘The most obvious reason of all,’ I said. ‘Money. But I don’t know anything about that yet. He might need money, or he could be as flush as the Duke of Westminster for all I know.’

  ‘Please,’ Sharon said, holding her hands out towards me. ‘Don’t get me on the subject of the Duke of Westminster.’

  Sharon sat back in her chair and smiled.

  ‘Teddy,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You called him Teddy.’

  ‘That’s what his brother knew him as,’ I said.

  ‘It sounded like you knew him. Like you cared about him.’

  I thought about Teddy and I nodded. ‘I do feel like I knew him. At least a little. It’s strange. Speaking to his wife, his brother and his colleague, I’ve picked up things about him. I can tell what a good guy he was. That he had a sense of humour and was generous and thoughtful. And I see his face, every day. I have this picture of him smiling into the camera. I look at the picture and can almost see him talking to me. He looks very confident in it. Empowered, you might say. I can imagine going out for a drink with him, like his co-pilot used to do. Then I try and figure out who left him carved to pieces with his face smashed in and then rammed a broken champagne bottle in his guts.’

  The pub shut, and the bar staff went from quite friendly to extremely objectionable in the space of just twenty minutes. Only in England. After the stools had been taken from under us I could just as well have called it a night but Sharon said she didn’t want to go home yet and she asked me to take her to the Old Ludensian, Nicky’s bar, where she had never been. I agreed without much enthusiasm and we walked down there. Friday night is never a good time to go; the place is full of suits with foghorn voices barging their way to the bar as though they’re still on the floor of the Stock Exchange. Nicky was out and we couldn’t find a seat and a bull-necked rugby type with a red face and his tie pulled open decided that it would be a good idea to spill half his pint down my jacket and not feel any need to apologize. Sharon told me not to do anything about it. I became irritable, and was just waiting for the next idiot to fuck me off. I should have realized that it just wasn’t right for me to be out that night, and gone home. I was tired and I had too much to think about. But then Nicky came in and got us a table and flirted with Sharon so we had to stay. I compensated for my tiredness and my increasingly foul mood by drinking too much of my friend’s vodka.

  The upshot was that when Nicky went to help out the barmen, Sharon and I got into a fight. Sharon asked me if I’d read Luke’s poems and when I said I hadn’t had time she looked at me like a schoolteacher. She said she wanted to send all the poems to a publisher and the suggestion really shocked me. Automatically, I didn’t like the idea. She’d gone t
hrough all his private papers to find them and now she wanted to spread his private thoughts out for all the world to see. I told her that I knew what would happen, that the papers would get into it, Luke being in a coma and all that, and then Esther fucking Rantzen would be on the phone. The whole idea was mawkish. The publishing companies would only want to do it for the publicity, not the poems, and anyway we didn’t have Luke’s consent.

  ‘Maybe one day he’ll do it himself,’ I told her, ‘but until then I just don’t think we have the right.’

  When I said this to her, Sharon just shook her head and looked away from me. I could tell that she had something which she wanted to say but whatever it was she thought better of it. She looked upset for a minute and it pissed me off that she should be like that just because she wasn’t getting her way. I was reminded of the feelings I used to have for her, my distrust of her motives concerning my brother. I was suspicious of her again, of the way she seemed to take everything upon herself. She tried to persuade me again but I just said that I didn’t like the idea. Sharon said I was being irrational, that Luke had always intended publishing a book, that it was one of his real ambitions. I didn’t listen to her. If you can’t understand why not, I said, then there’s no use me telling you. We were on the verge of shouting at each other when Nicky came back and the subject was changed. Sharon smiled brightly and told him all about the show we’d seen. I concentrated on the vodka, each shot of which seemed to harden me inside like a varnish.

  After a while Sharon went home. I managed a smile but she didn’t kiss me goodnight, telling me that I didn’t have to wait outside for the cab with her. She said she would call me and I nodded. When she’d gone Nicky asked me what I was so pissed off about but I told him it was nothing. He said he really liked Sharon and I was surprised by my own reaction; it was an almost physical sensation of threat. I may have taken my brother’s youth away from him but I didn’t have to let one of my friends take his girlfriend. Now I knew I was being irrational, but I couldn’t help it.

  ’Not this one, Nicky,’ I slurred. ‘OK?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, holding his hands up. ‘I get it. Sorry. No wonder you didn’t call Trish back. She liked you by the way.’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ I said, ‘you don’t understand.’

  Puzzled, Nicky didn’t pursue it.

  I stayed late, propping up the bar long after Nicky had locked the door. I was still there when the kitchen staff left and the barmen, and when Jamie said goodnight too. I sat there feeling pissed and tired and fucked off with Sharon and not really knowing why, but getting more so with each glass of smooth clear vodka. Carla, the waitress I always flirt with, saw me sitting there and asked me if I needed a lift home. I sat up a bit and said yes. Nicky interrupted to say that he’d drive me if I wanted, giving me a serious look as he did so, but I said no, it was OK. I walked outside with Carla. I said something funny and she laughed and said something funnier back. I laughed. Then, as we got into her Beetle, Carla asked me where I lived. I told her but I needn’t have bothered because we didn’t go there.

  Chapter Twelve

  The journey out to the hospital usually takes about an hour and a half but I made good time because it was Sunday. It was another overcast day, a little warmer than it had been of late, though the forecast had predicted rain for later. It was good to drive through the quiet streets, usually so jammed with angry people in their hermetically sealed shells. The city looked strangely vulnerable. It was about two thirty when I turned into the entrance of the hospital, and parked where I usually do, over in the corner near the artificial lake. I locked up the Mazda, and then Sharon and I walked towards the forbidding Victorian building where my brother had been living for the last three years.

  On Saturday I’d woken up at around ten, exhausted from high resolution dreams, in a bed that I wasn’t familiar with. After the inevitable brittle goodbyes I walked out on to the street, which was in Hackney, and found a minicab office. I felt like shit, and the way the guy drove the cab didn’t make me feel any better. When I got home I sat in Fred’s for a while, seeing if I could spot anyone taking an undue interest in the street that led to my flat. There was no one. I went upstairs and I dialled the airport, and this time managed to get through to the barman. I was oddly relieved, having had the thought that the man in the hat may have wanted to cut down on any potential witnesses against him. Alex answered the phone and said yeah, of course he remembered me. He wanted to know how he could help. I asked him if he had seen the man in the hat any time prior to the night of the murder. He said he hadn’t. He did remember that the man had been there a while before Edward had shown up. I got him to estimate the time and he guessed at around three-quarters of an hour. He asked if that was important and I told him that I wasn’t sure whether it was or not. It could mean that he went there on purpose to find someone. He agreed. He told me that in an airport the passengers don’t normally stay at the bar for too long unless they were early for their flights. And he wasn’t taking one, was he? No, I said. I asked him if he was sure that Edward and the man had sat at the bar for a long time, and explained what the clock on the security video had said. Alex laughed.

  ‘Jesus,’ he protested, ‘I didn’t really remember all that much. It was you guys who all told me how much I remembered. Maybe they were there for twenty minutes not forty. How the fuck should I know? If I’d known he was going to waste the guy I’d have paid more attention, but I didn’t, did I? I’d have put a stopwatch on him.’

  Alex had a point. I apologized for bothering him again.

  There was nothing I could find out about Graham Lloyd’s financial status until Monday. I wrote the rest of the morning off and gazed out the window at the dome of St Paul’s, a stranger on the skyline. I spent the afternoon mooching around, unable to focus on anything. At four I went for a long walk into Soho and bought some Levis from a place in Seven Dials. I sat in a gay pub on Argyle Street and handed out a few photographs, but everyone seemed to be a tourist. I’d do better during the week, when the regulars were in. It meant that the weekend was dead as far as my current assignment was concerned. I took the bus home and then went down to the gym to work out. I couldn’t put much enthusiasm into it and left early, blaming a headache which later on turned out to be a prophesy. I ate fish and chips from the Golden Fry, drank half a bottle of a cheap Chilean, and fell asleep on the sofa.

  Sharon and I hadn’t said too much on the journey. Sharon seemed wary of me, and I was a little nervous too. Neither of us mentioned Friday night. I turned Radio 3 on and got some very grave organ music which really underlined the heaviness of the season. Sharon was wearing jeans and an enormous sweater, with her shortish hair pulled back in a ponytail. She’d brought along some exotic-looking flowers which lay in their paper on the back seat, their sweet powerful scent like another presence in the car with us. Sharon always takes along the most pungent flowers in the shop when she goes to the hospital, reasoning that though he can’t see them, Luke must be able to breathe in their aroma.

  Luke lay where he always lay, in the same position, with the same expression on his face. He is in a small ward with a curtain on two sides of his bed, the foot facing the door through which we had walked. His bed is really a big, electronic lilo, which inflates and deflates automatically in given areas. It does this to prevent pressure sores, critical occlusions of the blood vessels closest to the surface of the skin, by rotating the weight on any given part of Luke’s body. Luke lay with his limbs in a pronounced contraction. Due to the lack of exercise, and in spite of the daily massages he receives, Luke’s body has gradually taken on more and more of a spastic appearance, his legs, arms and hands drawing closer into him as his muscles lose the habit of stretching out. It looks as though he is afraid, and is constantly trying to protect himself from something awful, but I have been assured that the position of his limbs is simply a physical reaction to his muscles’ inertia. It is completely separate from his mental state.

 
Sharon and I took chairs either side of his bed and Hazel, one of the nurses who looks after my brother, went to find a vase for Sharon’s flowers. I had actually brought along a vase a couple of years ago, one which was a lot nicer than the hospital ones, but the nurses didn’t realize it was Luke’s and gave it to other patients as well as him. I’d noticed it today when we’d walked in, above the bed of a frail old lady. I never saw the point of saying anything about it.

  Hazel came back with a vase and asked us how we were. We both said we were fine. Hazel is a tall, very thin black woman in her early thirties. I am always pleased to see that it is her on duty when I come because I can tell that she cares a great deal about Luke. The other nurses are very good as well, but Hazel has a special quality which is hard to define. I like the way she talks to Luke, without sounding patronizing, and the filthy jokes she makes under her breath about the doctors and the ward sister. Luke would have liked that if he could have heard her. Maybe he could hear her.

  Hazel put the flowers on the windowsill at the head of the bed and left us alone. Sharon smiled at Luke and took hold of his right hand which, needless to say, rested in hers without making any sort of response. Slowly, she stretched out his fingers one by one, and gradually straightened out his wrist. Luke was wearing his blue pyjamas, with the rounded collars and black piping, which I had bought for him last Christmas. The top and bottom buttons were done up, the rest open to give room to Luke’s gastrostomy tube, the artificial umbilical cord which has been inserted into his stomach through an opening made a couple of inches below his breastbone. The tube feeds Luke a constant supply of amino acids in liquid form, and is preferable to a drip because a drip would send nourishment straight into his bloodstream. Luke’s gut is in perfect working order and the gastrostomy tube means that it has work to do, and so doesn’t suffer the wastage inflicted on other parts of his body.