Shooting in the Dark

by Baker, John

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What d’you look for in a woman?’

  ‘One thing?’

  ‘Yeah, just one.’

  ‘Someone who can get through to me, someone who doesn’t give a damn.’

  ‘That’s two.’

  ‘I’m a fussy guy; minimum requirements.’

  ‘And she fits the bill?’

  ‘I want her to.’

  ‘She’s been asking around, wants to know what your face is like.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘I said you look like a fucking turkey.’

  Back home he stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom and remembered the thing he’d heard about Austrian girls. The mirror was cracked and the face in it was cracked as well. A cracked person. Someone with a flaw.

  ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘Show me someone without a flaw and I’ll show you someone dangerous.’

  But there’s a mean somewhere. No flaws at all is way off, but how many flaws do you have to have before you go rolling down the opposite side of the hill?

  He couldn’t answer that one. Left it hanging in the air and went to use the phone. She picked up on the third ring. Said, ‘Hello, Angeles Falco.’ It was a pretty good sentence really. Didn’t waste words and got the message across. Didn’t leave any room for doubt.

  ‘Hello?’ She said it again. It was taking Sam a while to get his own words out because they had to come all the way up from his socks.

  ‘I was out of order this morning,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t have to apologize.’

  ‘Tomorrow night?’ he said. ‘If you’re free, we could talk. Maybe listen to some music?’

  ‘Sounds good. I’m free.’

  ‘Austrian girls,’ he told her. ‘Traditionally, in the country areas, they put apple slices in their armpits when they go dancing, and at the end of the evening they present them to the boy they like best.’

  ‘Ugh,’ she said down the line. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  Sam laughed. ‘Have I blown it?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But I don’t suppose it will stop you trying.’

  ‘Another thing,’ he said. ‘People tell me you’ve been asking what I look like.’

  ‘A girl needs to know what she’s getting herself into.’

  ‘And now you think you know?’

  ‘I know more than I did. Being blind makes me more focused.’

  He put the phone back on the hook and returned to the cracked face in the cracked mirror. A distinct change had taken place; he looked as rampant as a billy-goat.

  53

  Angeles was walking into things all morning. It was good to be back home, to have all her things around her, though it was quiet after Sam’s house. She rubbed her shin and remembered that the stool was there for a purpose. A short time away and she had already forgotten the layout of her own house.

  She missed his touch. When you’re blind and you live with someone else they touch you all the time. And touch means so much more when you live in the dark. It undermines loneliness.

  She switched the computer on and pushed an old Feliciano album into the CD slot. It opened with the acoustic guitar intro to ‘California Dreaming’, magically hustling Mamma Cass’s wistful song into a soulful lament. Something to play for Sam, she thought, in return for ‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’, which he’d whispered to her in the dark that night by the fire.

  The phone rang but when she picked it up there was no one there. At least there was no sound. Someone listening to her voice, to her breath? She put the handset back into its cradle and held it down with both hands. Surely they weren’t giving him access to a phone. The man was in custody. They wouldn’t let him have an outside line, wouldn’t let him harass her. Would they?

  A couple of days before they’d heard that he made a suicide attempt, slashed his wrists. So he wasn’t in prison any more, he was in a hospital somewhere. But he’d be under guard.

  She took the phone off the hook but put it back again. Don’t let him panic you, she thought. He’s been taken now, removed from the scene, don’t let him reach over the divide and dictate your movements.

  It couldn’t be him, anyway. She was letting herself be spooked over nothing. There were other explanations. A hoax call? Some fault on the line? A crossed wire? If it had been him, he would have said something. He would have made it plain that he was still around.

  Couldn’t be him.

  She watched the phone, expecting it to ring again at any moment. And then what would she do?

  She took the CD out of the player and put it back in its case. The music wasn’t working.

  She remembered the time in the garden, when he’d been there, just before he attacked her. It had felt like this, the same sense of foreboding. The silence of the house seemed to deepen and the tiny sounds that are usually buried in the everyday took on a new significance. The ticking of a clock, the cracks and creaks of expansion and contraction, the movements of water draining through the heating system, all gave cause for concern.

  Was there a footfall on the path outside or was it something else? Could her mind be playing tricks? She walked around the house, checking each door and window, locking herself away. She rang Sam at home but he didn’t answer and she was about to try his office or the police when the ringing of the front doorbell rocked the house.

  The sound seemed to take hold of the fabric of the building, to undermine the walls and the floors and penetrate through her feet and fingers up into her heart.

  Angeles felt herself sway. For a moment it was as if she could see herself objectively, look down at her own body standing in the middle of her living room. There were two of her: the blind woman standing, terrified, with her mouth open, and another being equipped with seeing eyes and who lived at some higher vantage point, way above floor level.

  The bell rang again, longer this time, causing the two aspects of Angeles to collide and merge back together. She took a step, wiped her brow, relieved that she was no longer split, fragmented. She recollected Aristotle’s doctrine of courage as the right mean between cowardice and temerity.

  She put her face close to the door and spoke. ‘Who is it?’

  Silence.

  She asked again, louder this time, so there could be no doubt that whoever rang the bell would hear her. ‘Yes, who is it?’

  There was no reply. Angeles let out a long breath and strained to hear any sound or movement from the other side of the panelled door.

  There was a rapping sound, knuckles on glass, but some way off. She thought it might be at a neighbour’s house. Whoever had rung her bell was now checking next door.

  But no, it couldn’t be that far away. The sound was coming from her own house. It was coming from the rear of the house. And she’d been right first time, it was the sound of knuckles on glass. Knuckles on the glass of her patio door.

  Angeles had no intention of going to answer it. She had no intention of going back to her sitting room. The memory of the man coming through that patio door, his hands on her throat, was too close, too vivid. She let her weight sink against the front door but kept her legs rigid, making sure she didn’t slip down to the floor. It was far too tempting to adopt a foetal position.

  The rapping came again, but this time there was an accompanying sound, not unlike the wail of a cat. Something grabbed hold of Angeles’ consciousness and twisted its focus. The cry was not a cat but a human sound.

  It was a baby.

  Echo.

  She rushed through to the sitting room and over to the window. ‘Echo?’ she said through the glass. ‘Janet, is it you?’

  ‘Open up, it’s freezing out here.’ Janet’s voice was faint through the triple-glazing. Indistinct and yet undoubtedly friendly.

  Angeles scrabbled at the lock and pulled open the door. She brushed away a hot flush of unwanted tears from her face. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said. ‘Janet, come in, I’m so glad to see you.’

  ‘Has something
happened?’ Janet asked.

  ‘No, nothing. I’m being hysterical.’

  Janet pushed Echo’s pram through the patio door and closed it behind her. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘And I’m not leaving here until you tell me to.’

  Angeles went upstairs to the lavatory. When she’d finished she flushed it and listened to the gulp as it consumed the water. She smiled; it was as if all of her portentous imaginings had been sucked into the plumbing.

  Janet answered the second knock on the door and showed Detective Superintendent Rossiter and Detective Sergeant Hardwicke through to the sitting room.

  ‘He’s free, isn’t he?’ Angeles said, not giving the police time to speak. ‘You’ve let him go.’

  ‘We’ll catch him,’ Rossiter said. ‘It’s only a matter of time.’

  Angeles took a deep breath. ‘Janet, will you ring Sam and ask him to come and get me.’

  ‘I’d prefer it if we took you into protective custody, Ms Falco,’ Rossiter said. ‘Just for a few hours. We have a safe house and you’d be under the protection of DS Hardwicke.’

  Angeles imagined Hardwicke’s professional demeanour. Janet said: ‘Sam’s not in the office, I’m trying him at home.’

  ‘I can’t believe you let him go,’ Angeles said.

  ‘He slashed his wrist,’ Hardwicke explained. ‘They took him to hospital and he broke away from the guards taking him back to the prison, put one of them in hospital with a fractured skull.’

  ‘I want to go to Sam’s house,’ Angeles said to the detectives. ‘I’ll be safe there.’

  Rossiter shook his head. ‘I’ll leave an officer at your front door. When you’re ready to move to Turner’s house he’ll accompany you and stay with you there as well.’ When they got to the door, Rossiter turned. ‘This is not the course of action I would have recommended,’ he said. ‘You’ve already made that clear,’ Angeles told him.

  54

  Sam was up all night, drinking coffee, playing halfremembered songs from a dozen different albums. He didn’t find the one he wanted, got waylaid in a street full of memories. By the time the frozen dawn threw up some light he’d had time to think about it for a while. Played some old Sonny Terry tracks, the volume turned down low, let the blind man take him into a new day.

  Slept in a chair for five hours and woke with a crick in his neck and a sluggish consciousness. There was a lassitude about him that he used to call depression. Outside the light was poor, as though the day couldn’t be bothered to make the effort.

  He browned some toast, thought about going round to Geordie and Janet’s house, play the uncle to Echo, try to recover slivers of his soul from the fragmented night. But that wouldn’t work, he wasn’t the best company with the wind of the old days blowing through his hair.

  He set off towards the office on foot, walking through a world composed of silvery frost crystals, long pale shadows cast by a frigid sun. The people of the city had found scarves and gloves and shiny noses, their faces framed in woollen hats. Sam tried to pick out the drinkers, isolate the lonely, separate the rich from the poor, but most of them had perfect masks. These days you had to dig deep for identity. Sometimes you tunnelled right through to the other side without finding anyone. Bodies without egos. Victims of millennium culture; game-show consciousness.

  At the office door he turned around and walked back along Parliament Street, past Betty’s and Debenhams, past Laura Ashley and the new facades of the banks, the stalls set out for the tourist trade. He bought a copy of the street paper off a middle-aged man with an unfortunate sales technique - Big Issue, sir; Big Issue, madam. Big Issue, sir; Big Issue, madam - and gave it away to another seller on the other side of the street. He’d abandoned reading them years back. Beggars were hustling for the prime sites, their penny whistles and mouth organs only partially effective shields against police harassment.

  The world wasn’t constructed with consciousness, it was fashioned out of fear and greed, and all of its inhabitants were in hiding. They were there on the street, in open view, but each of them was purblind to the predicament of the others. Their buzzword was ‘communication’ but the signals they gave out semaphored only their paralysis of choice. We’re all puppets, he thought, our strings being jerked this way and that by genetic and social patterning. The result was a race of fools, men and women who believed they could manipulate Satan.

  He cut through to Coney Street and walked back towards the library. Upstairs in the reference section he began ploughing through microfiches for the year which marked Angeles Falco’s fifth birthday.

  Headlines activated memories - ‘Nixon Denies All Knowledge of Watergate’; ‘Guildford Pub Bombings’; ‘Arab-Israeli War - tales of treachery and revenge, intrigue and inhumanity in the name of wealth and power. It was one of the years in which Sam Turner had obliterated himself with alcohol, a time in which he had stopped reacting to everything but crises. And more than once a crisis had gone past without him being aware of it.

  The trouble with microfiche is that it’s not a database, you can’t search for a word or a date or anything else. All you can do is plough through page after page of mainly trivial local detail. There was the occasional murder or embezzlement, a couple of mysterious disappearances and a hint of a sexual scandal involving one of the local councillors. There was an almost unbelievable report about an apotemnophiliac - someone who can only achieve sexual satisfaction or fulfilment through the amputation of a limb - who had lost faith in conventional medicine, laid his leg across a railway line and waited for a train to come. The guy had drunk himself unconscious while he waited and when he woke he was a new-born amputee with a hard-on.

  Sam let the breath come out between his teeth. Wondered what genuine amputees thought about a guy like that.

  Genuine? Who’s sitting in the judge’s chair?

  He took one fiche out and replaced it with another, rubbed his eyes, and there it was, the article he’d come here to find.

  Tragedy of Local Lifesaver Hero

  A fireman was killed today, but only after he had saved the lives of two small girls on a village pond.

  Angeles and Isabel Falco, both of them under five years old, had strayed on to the ice-covered pond in the tiny village of Whenington.

  As the ice began to break up the local fire service went into action and fireman Alan Jenkins crawled out to the girls on a ladder.

  He successfully plucked one of the children to safety but the second girl fell into the freezing water.

  Fireman Jenkins did not hesitate, he plunged into the water after her and eyewitnesses reported an agonizing wait until he returned to the surface with the child held aloft.

  Unfortunately, the fireman did not have enough strength to save himself and immediately after placing the girl on the safe haven of the ladder, he sank into the depths and drowned.

  The two girls were taken to the local hospital, where they will be detained overnight.

  Fireman Alan Jenkins leaves a wife and a young son of six years.

  Sam made a note of the date and set off for the Evening Press offices in Walmgate in the dark. While he’d been trekking through microfiches the night had tumbled in on the town. His friend Sly Beaumont, the oldest serving journalist in the north, would remember the case and be able to fill in the background. Sly, with a face as creased and worn as an old glove and the memory of an elephant. ‘You wrapped up another one, then, Sam,’ he said. ‘We got the guy out of circulation, but there’s still a couple of loose ends to tie up.’

  ‘Like why he did it?’

  ‘You don’t think that’s important?’

  ‘Not as much as you do, Sam. The most important thing was to get him off the street. Anything else is a bonus.’

  ‘Life gets miserable without the occasional bonus.’

  ‘So how can I help?’

  ‘You remember the Falco sisters being in a pond accident when they were small?’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘Ye
ah. You wrote a piece in the press about it. Village pond in winter? A fireman was drowned.’

  Sly scratched his head. ‘Jenkins,’ he said. ‘Alan Jenkins, local hero. Yeah, I do remember now, two little kids, I hadn’t put it together that they were the Falcos. And, oh my god, Rod Jenkins is his son?’

  ‘You’re getting there,’ Sam said. ‘What do you remember about the case?’

  ‘It was tragic. The fireman, Alan Jenkins; everybody knew him. The year before he’d saved a young colleague after the guy collapsed in a warehouse fire. Fie got some kind of medal for that. Went to the palace, was on television, in the papers. Good-looking guy, mop of blond hair, strong as an ox, he was. They reckoned he got cramp in the cold water, the muscles in his limbs just stopped working. It must’ve been bitter in there.’

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ Sam said, ‘Angeles Falco told me the story just like it happened, but she didn’t mention the guy drowning.’

  ‘They didn’t tell the kids,’ Sly said. ‘The parents thought they’d had enough trauma with the accident.’

  ‘And what about Jenkins’ son?’ Sam asked. ‘He must’ve grown up nursing a revenge fantasy. He killed Isabel and if we hadn’t ferreted him out, he’d have found a way to get to Angeles.’

  ‘I remember him vaguely,’ Sly said. ‘Not after his father was killed; his mother kept him out of the way after that. But we interviewed Alan Jenkins when he got the medal and the lad was there then. Rod; was he called Rod? Beaming, he was, his eyes shining like his father was Superman. Beautiful young kid, the two of them together looking like a couple of generations of Norse gods.’