by John Harvey
Somewhere I thought I could recall reading that we were in the middle of a serious paper shortage. I’d even known a girl once called Lynette who used to get abusive when assistants in shops tried to stick what she bought into paper bags. The last I saw of her she was heading for this commune in the middle of East Anglia surrounded by massive tanks in which they were going to recycle their own waste and turn it into power for fuel and light.
Knowing her, she probably had a scheme for recycling the toilet tissue too.
I sat behind my desk and waited for inspiration to strike. Or luck. Coincidence. Something. I’d been out doing all the routine leg work I knew how and it had brought me the usual rewards. I guessed it was okay if you had a hell of a lot of men and you saturated somewhere with them, asked a few thousand questions, then asked them again; checked and rechecked every bit of information you’d received. That way, sure, you could get results.
But that way wasn’t my way. Partly because I didn’t have a lot of other guys to walk their feet off for me. Mainly because I didn’t like to work that way. I didn’t see things that way. I didn’t believe life was like that. Life was luck, a little of it good, most bad. It was coincidence. It was . . . something.
I sat there for another ten minutes. Through the window the sky still looked grey. So did the inside of my head. It had to be time to get up, stretch my legs, get down to the coffee shop and see what was brewing.
I was half-way down the stairs when I heard the phone ringing.
I ran back as fast as I could. I knew what would happen. It did. As soon as my hand lifted the receiver I heard it go dead. Great! Still, I reassured myself, if it was important they’ll ring again. I told my stomach to hang on and sat down.
This time it was five minutes. Precisely. The phone was in my hand half-way through the first ring. At first I thought it was a wrong number, then that someone was kidding around and doing the handkerchief over the mouthpiece bit for a laugh. It wasn’t either of those things. It was Gerry Locke. What was left of him. He sounded as if someone had done their best to take his mouth off. He wasn’t making a lot of sense but I got something about Anna and an address.
I checked where he was and said I’d be round. There was a first aid box in one of the drawers of the desk. I grabbed it and left the office fast.
Gerry Locke had tried to get back up the tall flight of stairs to his room. He hadn’t made it. He was stranded half-way up, his right leg pulled in underneath his body, both arms stretched high, reaching for something they hadn’t been able to grasp.
I leaned down next to him and checked that he still had a pulse. I couldn’t find it straight away. Then, as I moved the tips of my fingers over the side of his head, something fluttered against them like a frightened bird.
It wasn’t easy, but I managed to get him up the rest of the stairs and on to his bed. I went over to the window and opened it; you could almost see the foul air slink out through the gap. Then I went back to the bed.
I wished I hadn’t had that thought about his mouth: it was too close to being the truth. What had been his lips certainly couldn’t be called that any more. Instead there were traces of purplish pulp which fell back shapelessly against his face. His mouth was open. I watched fascinated as a bubble formed from nowhere; swelled; burst, scattering tiny specks of pink in its wake.
Where the bubble had been an instant before I could see his gums. The last time I had visited Gerry Locke there had been teeth there as well. Not now. Not at the front, at the top. Someone, something had wrenched them out. They hadn’t been very careful about how they had gone about it. One tooth had obviously snapped across the root, leaving a single fragment behind. The rest was raw and bloody: blisters of red had formed over the empty sockets.
He wouldn’t be able to bite down on a reed for a long time.
Not that it mattered. He wasn’t going to be playing for a long time anyway.
They hadn’t only worked on his face: there’d been his hands as well.
The little finger on his right hand stuck out obscenely at right angles to the palm. The others were not quite so obviously broken. Until you looked at the knuckles more closely. They hadn’t just been pulled out of joint, bent and twisted by other hands. Someone had used something heavier, nastier; it could have been the edge of the heel of a hard boot which had been raised a long way into the air; it could have been a length of piping; simply a hammer. Whatever it was had been systematically smashed down on finger after finger until the fourth one on the right hand. The thumb remained intact.
It must have been at that point that he had told them what they wanted to know.
I looked at the mouth, then back at the hands. No: Gerry Locke wouldn’t be blowing sax for a long time to come.
I hunted around for something clean enough to wipe his face without smothering him with germs. Finally I came across a half-way decent shirt that he must have used when he was depping in the pit at the Palladium.
I ripped this into strips and fetched some water in a pan from the kitchen. I wasn’t a trained nurse and I’d never got my badge for first aid from the boy scouts, but I did as good a job on him as I was able.
Then I tried to get him to talk. There was some whisky left in the bottom of a half bottle that had got shoved under the bed. I lifted his head a little and tried to pour some down his throat without touching what used to be his lips.
He started and gagged, and when the Scotch ran back down on to the blanket it was stained red. But there had been a reaction. I poured him some more. This time he made an attempt at a swallow and promptly choked on it.
It was doing him good, though. His eyes opened. I gave him a dribble more. This time he spoke. He didn’t say much, just, ‘Mitchell’ and I don’t think I would have recognised that if it hadn’t been my own name.
I got my face right down close to his and started to ask some questions. I wanted to know why he’d phoned. I wanted to know what had happened before he’d done that. Most of all I wanted to know about Anna’s address.
It came slowly and painfully: but it came.
Two guys had come to see him. They’d come early when he was still asleep. They’d let themselves in just the way I had done. He couldn’t tell me much about them, except that one had been big and the other hadn’t. They’d both been strong. They’d woken him up and pulled him out of bed and told him that they wanted to know where Anna Vaughan might be. He’d told them what he told me: he didn’t know. It could even have been the truth. But what they did sent things back to the surface of his mind that had lain forgotten for a long time.
Anna had talked to him once about a cottage in Hampshire. Some artist she knew owned it, but he was usually wandering about all over the place catching butterflies and things like that, sticking a pin through them, then painting them. It was a living, much like any other.
Locke had been down there with her once. A village outside Andover. He couldn’t dredge up the name. You drove out of the town through these new council estates and kept on going. The road seemed to be disappearing into nowhere until suddenly you were in a village. The cottage was on the right of a crossroads, behind a high hedge.
I didn’t like it. He’d remembered too well. Though I could understand why. After they’d gone he’d lain there and thought about them doing the same to Anna as they had done to him. That was when he’d crawled downstairs to phone me. He hadn’t fancied the police. They would have come round and probably turned the place over and found some things he didn’t want them to find.
So it was down to good old reliable Mitchell! Once a knight errant, always a knight errant.
I phoned a man I knew who really was in the used car business: I needed to borrow a charger: mine had laid down and died a long time ago. Not only that, but my lance had been impounded.
A fine knight I made! The nearest I would have got to the Round Table would have been a stoo
l in the corner.
Barrie agreed to lend me a car for a couple of days. He also promised that the wheels wouldn’t fall off … at least, not all at once.
After that I phoned for the ambulance.
All the way down I was trying to work out what was likely to have happened. If Gerry Locke’s guess about the cottage had been right—and it seemed reasonable to think that she would have wanted to get out of London, then certainly the other two would have got to her first. Presuming they went straight there without reporting back for instructions.
Then, supposing it was Blagden they were working for, would he have done as I’d told him and warned them off? I tried to console myself with the thought that he might, but there was no way I could make it come out convincing.
His kind didn’t allow themselves to get warned off. Not with the amount of cash at stake that I reckoned there to be.
I increased the pressure on the accelerator and did whatever my personal equivalent of praying might be called. Hoping against hope?
Andover had been a sleepy country town for as long as it could remember, until some planners from London decided it would be a good idea to move out a few thousand people, build a lot of instant homes and make it into a larger sleepy country town, only now it was overflowing with disorientated people from the city.
No, I haven’t been doing a quick course in social history. I knew somebody from Andover once: a few hundred years ago.
I turned away from the town centre and found the road Locke had spoken of. Found the crossroads. Parked the car along a lane and walked back. Found the cottage.
Habit forced my hand into my pocket, feeling for my Smith and Wesson. Of course, it wasn’t there. I pushed open the lopsided gate and stood at the end of the path.
There wasn’t a sound. There should at least have been a bird singing, somewhere, but there wasn’t. The door was back a foot or so under a porch that someone had tried to coax a couple of rose bushes to twine themselves around. I listened again for any sound from inside the cottage.
Dead.
The evening seemed to darken perceptibly as I stood there. Then … the faintest of noises. From inside. A loop of light curled out from under the door.
I moved away from the porch and round the solid wall of the cottage which faced the hedge. At the back there was a window. There was just enough space to squeeze myself up to it. I bent down and peered through years of cobwebs and dust that had been allowed to accumulate on the outside.
I could see a tiny kitchen with a stone floor; a deep sink into which a tap dripped noiselessly. I looked beyond and into the next room.
The door was half open and I could see a wooden table by the far wall. A couple of chairs, one of them in the centre of the room, the other pulled up to the table itself. Someone was sitting at the table, arms resting on it, head resting on hands that I guessed were cupped round it. Her hair looked duller, but that was probably the light. A part of it had got caught up in the high neck of the jumper she was wearing, breaking the otherwise even line of its fall. I don’t know why, but I liked that.
I stayed there a while longer, watching her, telling myself that I was waiting to make sure there was no one else in the room. When I could fool myself no longer I moved back to the door and knocked twice with my knuckles.
A voice said, ‘Go away!’
The response was instant, as though she had been waiting for my knock—somebody’s knock.
I tried again.
This time she said, ‘Who is it?’
The voice sounded edgy, tired.
‘It’s me,’ I told her. ‘The guy who goes round picking up books after you.’
She opened the door. She stood in the dim light of the room looking at me. She said, ‘Hello.’
I didn’t know what to say. I stepped into the room and closed the door. She walked round me quickly and slid the bolt back across. She was on the way back when I caught hold of her. She stiffened for a second, tensing herself against me, but then she let herself fall forwards and I was holding her and she was crying. I held her for a long time.
Eventually, she pushed herself away and sniffed a few times, then went wandering off to find a tissue. She couldn’t wander far. I looked around the room; there wasn’t much more than I had seen already. A small armchair. A low table with a candle on it that was providing all of the light. In the fireplace a fire was laid but not lit. I lit it.
Anna came back down from upstairs and she was obviously making an effort.
‘Would you like some tea?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘It’s herb tea.’
‘What?’
‘Herb tea. It’s what I always have.’
‘Isn’t there anything else?’
She shook her head and her eyes gleamed in the candlelight. ‘There’s only herbs because I brought them with me.’ She smiled. ‘I take them everywhere I go. Those and my nightie and my toothbrush.’
I said I’d try anything once and she went into the kitchen.
I nearly told her what it looked like, but I thought I’d better not. But it didn’t taste like that … not that I’d ever tasted that either.
‘See!’ she said triumphantly. ‘You like it!’
I wouldn’t have gone that far but at least I was drinking it.
‘How did you find out I was here?’
‘Would you believe me if … ?’
‘No,’ she interrupted.
‘Okay, then. It was Gerry Locke. He told them as well.’
‘Them?’
‘Don’t bother lying. They’ve been here haven’t they? They’ve been and they’re coming back. You can’t afford to buy them off and you can’t afford to run.’
She stared at me, then sipped at her tea. There was no need for her to answer.
‘I think you’d better tell me about it.’
She drank some more of her tea. In front of us the fire was catching and starting to throw its first shadows around the room. Anna got up and put out the candle with her fingertips. Then she came back and sat down and started to talk.
‘I was in India. I’d started out the usual way, on a transit van overloaded with passengers and baggage, and the usual thing happened. We broke down. I got there by hitching and making the occasional bargain. It was incredible. I felt so … it’s difficult to explain … calm and peaceful and yet at the same time I was alive to everything that was going on around me. I really have an affinity with India.’
If anybody else had said that it would have sounded empty, pretentious, but from her it didn’t. She believed it: for her it was true.
‘One day I met this American. The place is full of them. Young hippies who’ve finally made the biggest trip of all. He fascinated me because he was so typical, so full of things that I resented, hated almost. Yet there was something about him I liked, I don’t think I’ll ever forget him. That David. That summer.
‘We came back to England together on the plane. David had been doing a little dealing out there and when he’d scored enough he bought two tickets. Said he wanted to see the Changing of the Guard. Anyway, he had this sitar thing that he’d bought and he asked me to take it through customs for him. He had a lot of other stuff anyway and they’d reckon he was overweight for the flight and … well, it doesn’t matter now, does it? I took the thing on the plane and then hauled it through customs. They searched David, but not me. I thought it was just the long hair thing, you know.
‘When we got to London and found this room for him in Bayswater, he opened up the case. The instrument had been specially made in lightweight wood so that no one would notice a difference in how it felt when they picked it up. He prised off the back: it was full: clear bags the size of a man’s wallet: inside each bag it was packed tight; pure, white.
‘I just thought it was clever. I didn’t even
mind that he’d taken me for a ride. Especially when he paid me. About a month later this man came round to see me. He wanted to know if I’d like to go on another holiday—all expenses paid.’
She stopped abruptly and stood up.
I said, ‘Why?’
‘Why not? I liked the money, the freedom it got me. The excitement. I met people I would never have met otherwise. Saw places I would never have visited. People would phone me up from the South of France and say we’re having a party, hop on a plane and join us. I stayed on yachts with millionaires and in chateaux with pop groups.’
Her voice was defiant, daring me to contradict the rightness of what she had done. She had had her young life to the full, and now …
‘And now?’ I asked her.
‘Well?’
‘Now you’re hiding away in a tiny cottage scared half out of your mind that someone’s going to walk through that door and force you to get back on the treadmill again or do some very nasty things to you if you refuse. And they won’t want you to refuse because in their eyes that’s turning your back on them which is the next best thing to betrayal. Close enough to it for you to become a risk.’
I stood up and put my left hand on her arm, just above the elbow. She wouldn’t look at me.
‘You know what they do with people they consider risks, Blagden and his friends, don’t you?’
Still she wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t answer.
‘They send a couple of guys after them, one short and the other tall.’ I felt a twitch underneath my fingers as something inside her responded. It still wasn’t enough.
‘They might be kind and kill you. They might be nasty and leave you to face the rest of your life with a very ugly face indeed.’
She turned away. I let her get a couple of paces. I gripped her by the shoulders, hard. Then I moved myself up against her. My hands moved down her jumper and found her breasts. After a few minutes she turned back into me. She lifted her face and I thought it looked great and then I couldn’t see it at all because my eyes were closed and I was kissing her and it was as good as I had thought it would be.