Farewell Gesture
Roger Ormerod
© Roger Ormerod 1990
Roger Ormerod has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 2001, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in the U.S. in 1990 by Doubleday
This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Extract from Full Fury by Roger Ormerod
One
The first thing to do when I got out was obviously to settle my affairs with the family solicitor. Easy enough to decide but so very difficult to execute, I discovered. There was the question of persistence. A dozen times in the first week I pointed my nose in that direction and couldn’t carry it through, unable to shake off a hollow feeling of disorientation and even a hint of fear. Although this was only a small market town, it seemed to me to have become a teeming metropolis. Traffic was confusing, and uniforms still repressed me. I found myself crossing the road to avoid traffic wardens. Hilliard, himself, was another aspect of authority, old and dusty, and an officer of the law. I didn’t want to confront him.
It was getting along to the end of September, which was a bad time to come out, as there’s no greenery in Gartree Prison and seasons mean nothing. Now I was in the middle of leaf-fall, and the trees were sad with their loss. I didn’t need that. New life, that was what I was aching for, and I couldn’t resurrect my past delight in the sun-shot red and gold.
I’d booked into a small hotel, and after a week my money was running short. Like it or not, I now had to nerve myself to face Hilliard, senior partner in Hilliard, Pouncey, and Pierce, family solicitors.
He wasn’t pleased to see me, though he faked something of a crackly parchment smile. There was no offer of his brittle hand, and he called me Mr. Manson, not Paul, as it had always been before. I sat. He made a protracted performance of explaining the legal point, which I already knew, that I was fortunate in that my father had died before my mother, who’d lingered on for a fortnight.
“I trust you realise you could not have inherited from your father,” he said heavily, his face creaking. “From your mother…” He cleared his throat. “…yes.”
I nodded, not giving him anything, no self-justification and no explanations. Definitely no explanations.
The will had long ago been probated and the house sold, the money sleeping in a bank and acquiring interest. Drily, he explained about the availability of credit cards, as though I’d been out of touch for forty years instead of four.
As I left he roused himself so far as to extend his arthritic hand. “And what do you intend to do now, Mr. Manson? I understand you were in America at the time…” He allowed that to fade away, clearing his throat, obviously hoping I would return there.
I could have explained that I had a lot of catching up to do, but he wouldn’t have understood. In Gartree, you fared best if you suppressed most of your awareness, and allowed your emotions to slumber down almost to the level of coma. I hadn’t yet risked a laugh, afraid of how it might emerge.
So I smiled. I said I would look around. This was not really as vague as it sounded. There was a life I might be able to save. I didn’t know whether I’d be able to find her, or what I might do to intervene, but I had to try. It was at least an objective.
A young woman called Philomena Wise was due to die.
All I knew was that she had lived in a town called Killingham. I had never heard of it. I travelled there by train, my few bits in a kitbag, and found myself another dusty hotel, which wasn’t going to frown at my old jeans and anorak, then I went out to explore the town.
My confidence was growing. I had now a definite intention, and I could dare to venture into my memory. Hadn’t there been a sense of humour? That, surely, was worth digging deeply for.
Unfortunately, Killingham presented nothing to laugh at. It was a black Midlands town, dull and uninspiring, nursing its wounds from the dissolution of its industrial heart and putting on a brave front with a shining shopping area, where one in four shop fronts exhibited “for rent” signs. I scoured the pubs. Philomena. Surely the name would ring out, though people were more likely to call her Phil, I realised. There was nothing to go on, as I didn’t know her social standing, whether backstreet dives would more likely attract her than clubhouses and hotel lounges. Or even no night life at all.
Carl Packer had done no more than approach me. Once I’d impressed on him that I wasn’t interested in the contract, he’d said not another word. Stupid of me. I’d been appalled that he’d seen me as a possible hired killer. It would’ve been impossible to explain moral niceties to a lout such as Packer, but there’s a big difference between a professional killing and a domestic one. I’d felt offended, and I’d made that clear, so he’d backed off.
Yet Carl Packer wanted her dead, and the Carl Packers of this world usually get what they want. I didn’t know what he had against her. It didn’t matter. He approached me a month before my release, and someone else, someone better equipped to do what he wanted, might be out at any time. Might already be out.
I spent a month on it, the impetus gradually dying. Now I was spending more time on considering my own motivation in this, and into a corner of my mind was edging the thought that I had uncompleted business in the U.S.A.
I decided to give it one more week, and, as fate usually decrees, I found her on the Tuesday.
This was in the Four Aces, a dim gambling club with no membership fee but a large entrance one. No black jackets and bow ties were on display, but suits and ties were, and that first evening I felt conspicuous in my jeans. All the same, they accepted my money. I was sitting at the roulette table, venturing an occasional one-pound chip on number seven, this being my lucky number—the sentence I’d been given. Then I heard her name. The croupier said, “…Ms. Wise.”
I looked up. The young woman who smiled at him would have been in her mid-twenties, I thought, not much younger than me. She was wearing a severe black jacket over a white shirt, and a straggly black tie. That was all I could see across the table. She was older than I’d expected (though I couldn’t recall how I’d got the impression she would be young), with dark hair and dark eyes, a thin, determined face, except when she smiled, and straight eyebrows that almost met above a long nose. She caught my eye, the smile still hovering there, and I inclined my head.
Then an older woman, sitting beside her, called her Phil. I played on, but seven didn’t seem to want to come up. After half an hour I heard Phil Wise murmur to her companion, “I’ve had enough.” So I rose to my feet as she did and was standing at her shoulder when she cashed in her chips. She was very much aware of this manoeuvre.
Now I could see that she was five feet eight inches or so, so that I topped her by five inches. She was wearing a skirt and semi-high heels, and hoisting a heavy shoulder-bag.
“May I get you a drink?” I asked. My social confidence was expanding.
I had not expected her response. Not acceptance nor rejection, it was at first a flickered grimace, then a calm consideration of me, as though I had to be measured. In her eyes there was certainly suspicion, then she tossed her head, dismissing it.
“Why not?” she said. “There’s a bar in the back.”
“Good. I didn’t know that.”
In this way we became acquainted. There was no more to it than that, at first. I didn’t understand enough of the background to be able to complete my business with the passing of a warning and leave it at that. I was tentative, and perhaps she sensed it. But I could hardly plunge in. She told me her name was Philomena Wise, and I told her mine was Paul Manson. She began to relax a little. I asked if I could meet her again, and if she’d backed off I’d have had to follow her home in order to keep in touch, but she simply told me she would be at the Four Aces every night.
“For a while, anyway.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that. We parted on the street. I assumed she had a car parked somewhere.
The following evening I was there again. After a week it became almost routine. We sat together at the tables, and we went for a drink or two afterwards. Phil and I could laugh together. I was finding it possible to laugh now, and she could be amusing, in a dry, cynical way. Sometimes she joined the woman I’d seen her with that first evening. Sometimes not, but she was never far from her.
By this time I’d been taken to her flat for a final drink. That was all. Friendly—no more. Emotionally, she was keeping me at a distance. She had one of four flats in a converted Georgian house four miles out of town, its rear overlooking a lake. The house was quiet and secluded, wrapped in subdued dignity. The door into the hall was inset with a stained-glass panel, the hall itself was floored with oak, and there was always a smell of furniture polish. The three other occupants were retired couples. Phil’s flat was upstairs, Number 3. It was quiet and relaxing, and she seemed to become another person, softer and less on edge, once she was beyond her door. But there was no hint as to why her life should be threatened, and I was feeling that I’d be making a fool of myself by bringing it up.
“Nice place,” I said, looking round, that first time.
She loved colour. The sitting room was light and airy, all pastels and scatter-cushioned, everything in a disarray. Tidy it for her, and she would never find anything again.
She made me welcome. But strangely I could not relax there. I felt the urge to tell her why I was there, if only to watch her expression change. But that was an impulsive thought, and I felt she would laugh at warnings.
She did not easily respond to implications, but between us I felt a growing awareness. We were very much alike in one respect; we were both loners. This seemed a strange reason to be drawn together.
For five evenings I visited, and left again. She seemed to realise our relationship was becoming unusual, because, on that fifth evening, she was restless.
“I work alone, Paul,” she said suddenly, right in the middle of Dvořák’s Sixth on her stereo. She said it as though that explained something.
I grinned at her. “Want a partner?”
“Not in this.”
We listened for a while, then she got up and switched it off. She had come to a decision.
“Paul,” she told me, “I’m an enquiry agent. I work alone, from here and from a little office I use. I’m good at it, but it’s dreary work. I used to be in the police—detective sergeant—but I left after a disagreement. Don’t ask me what it was. The fact is, I’ve been keeping an eye on a certain Mrs. Eugenie Thompson, whose husband thought she was out every evening with a man, but it’s not so. She’s at the gaming tables. So the job’s coming to an end.”
“I see.” What I saw was just a hint of what might be behind any vague threats on her life.
“Do you, though?”
Or of course I could be getting my marching orders. No, it wasn’t that—or so my ego said. I thought I understood her, being a loner too. But whereas I’d always been contented with my own company, she was alone in the sense of being withdrawn. Something had happened—a disagreement, she’d called it—but perhaps it’d been something much more important to her. Her career had been destroyed. If she’d been dedicated—and she seemed the sort of single-minded person who would be dedicated to the upholding of the law as a sacred trust—then the removal of it would have left her bereft and lost. To go private might have seemed a solution, and yet, the sense of aloneness would then have gone with the job, whereas in the force she’d been one of a team.
“I’m trying to tell you,” she was saying, “that I shall be on an entirely different job next week. Surveillance. A factory, pilfering and the like. Night work. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Paul, I’m a working woman.”
Was she asking me to be patient, saying that she couldn’t at that time fit me into her life? Now she watched me with her head tilted and her eyes huge, and in her expression something I couldn’t understand, almost a tearful appeal. And perhaps distrust.
To dispel this, and remembering that I’d not been very open with her, I decided to tell her more about myself. But not all.
“I know what it’s like,” I assured her, “working on your own. I spent two years researching in the foothills and deserts to the west of the Rockies. From Montana to Idaho, through Wyoming and Utah and Colorado, down into Arizona and New Mexico. Living in a tent or the back of the big Cherokee I used, or in a shack on some Indian reservation. I was studying the history of the Indians.”
“But surely, the Americans will’ve drained it dry!”
“A fresh approach. An outsider’s view. I was working for a Ph.D. in history. But it was interrupted.”
“Oh? How’s that?”
I could feel her interest. It was almost as though I was offering her something she was pleased to hear, and which gave her hope. “A death in the family. I had to come home.”
I had deliberately changed the sequence. My married sister had managed to contact me at the home of a friend in the university at Palo Alto, where I’d taken a break to bring my notes up-to-date. She had asked me to come home urgently. My father, who was something not quite legal in the city, had taken a wrong step, had gone half crazy with the pressure of his failure and his fears for the future, and had been making my mother’s life hell. My sister feared for her safety, so I’d flown home at once, and arrived at the house at the climax of his outburst of frustration. He’d gone completely wild, was beating her in a blind fury, and I had to drag him off with my hands. I…well, I could match him, it seemed, in his fury. Certainly in his strength. Before I knew it, I’d got his throat in my fingers, and then he was falling to the floor, dead. My mother was very close to death when I turned to her, and died a fortnight later.
So I could honestly say that my studies had been interrupted, by four years in Gartree. I was not going to tell her the details, though.
“And you never got your Ph.D.?” she asked in sympathy.
“I might go back and take it up again.”
“Might?”
“It’s been a four-year gap. Too much, perhaps.”
“Four years?”
“I’ve been otherwise occupied.”
She said nothing, looking down at the drink in her hands. I couldn’t read her expression. There was a distancing, though. She could, having been a policewoman, have been able to fill in a few gaps.
“When?” she asked suddenly, looking up. “When did you think you might go back?”
“Nothing’s settled in my mind.”
She was silent again. I wondered whether she’d have been more pleased if I’d said: at once.
But that could not be so. My plans were becoming entangled with my emotions. I had not faced them squarely, yet sometime or other I had to sort them out. This encounter with her had been prompted partly by impulse, but subconsciously, I now realised, by something more powerful. It had seemed imperative to take some action to help Philomena Wise—but behind it there was something I didn’t wish to face—my father’s death. I had taken a life. Perhaps I would feel better about it if I could balance the slate by saving one.
And yet, I could not feel remorse for his death. I’d hated how he’d made his money and what he stood for, and he had despised my scholarly pretentions, as he called them. And I’d loved my mother. No, I did not regret his
death. What appalled me—still did, and I couldn’t shake it off—was the fact that for two or three minutes I, who had always prided myself on my control, had gone completely berserk. That was what I regretted, and I was desperately afraid that that feeling could return.
Yet already it was clear that I’d plunged into this like a white knight to the rescue of his flaxen-haired damsel, when in fact she had turned out to be more like the damsel’s self-confident minder, with her own Ph.D. in unarmed combat.
I’d waited too long, and she had begun to venture into a new topic. Seized once more by one of the impulses I’ve never been able to control, I plunged in, afraid I’d never be able to recapture the mood between us.
“If I decide to go, would you like to come with me?”
Frowning, half laughing, she said, “What?”
“To America. I’ll need another year there, at least. No strings. No commitments. Just come along for the ride.”
This was a welcome sign that I was getting back to my former self. I’d always enjoyed slapping fate in the kisser. It was something to do with challenging; the white knight syndrome, if you like. And how better to remove her from the orbit of Carl Packer’s enmity? This thought leapt at me, taking me by surprise.
“But I can’t do that!” she burst out, her dark eyes wide and startled.
“Why not?”
“I’ve got”—she waved a hand vaguely—“ongoing investigations all over the place. And I couldn’t afford—”
“As my guest. Share the driving, if you like.”
“You’re a big, damned fool, Paul Manson. You know nothing about me.”
“We’d find out—in Arizona, say.”
She gave a short laugh. “It’s ridiculous.”
I shrugged. It would’ve been quicker simply to tell her that I’d been in Gartree, and knew that Packer was trying to arrange her death. But something stopped me. It was too late for that—or too soon. It would explain my interest in her in an ambivalent way.
Farewell Gesture Page 1