by John Harvey
After a lot more of that, she pulled herself away and tried to make it to the stairs. I didn’t know if she was making a getaway or leading me on, but either way I didn’t want to know. I grabbed her wrist and held on tight.
She grinned and made as if I was hurting her something terrible.
‘You’re a brute!’ she laughed. ‘You’re nothing but a brute and you’re only taking advantage of me because underneath this old pair of jeans I haven’t got any knickers on.’
And she wasn’t lying: she hadn’t.
It had been a long time since I had lain with a woman and known that the only thing between us was the firelight.
We were still like that when I heard the car draw up on the road outside.
I wanted Anna to go upstairs but she’d only sit on the chair across from the door. I slid back the bolt and let them in. Locke had been right. One of them was pretty big and the other was a lot smaller … that hadn’t stopped him holding the gun that had poked round that other door and sent Trevor Warren off on the big sleep.
They didn’t like me being there. I could tell that from the way they scowled and pushed past me on their way into the room.
The big guy stood over Anna and jerked his thumb in my direction. ‘Who’s this monkey?’
His accent was Anglo Italian with a strong overtone of New York nasal. He’d seen The Godfather at least twice. The second time to try and understand the plot.
His buddy had his hair slicked back from his forehead by half a hundredweight of grease. His skin and the set of his face suggested that he was Maltese. Not that it mattered.
‘I said, who is he?’ The thumb jerked again. I thought of the sax player’s broken hands.
‘The name’s Mitchell,’ I told him. ‘What’s yours?’
If he meant me to take what he said seriously, his father had a very strange sense of humour. The priest would have gone the colour of his robes and dropped the baby head first into the font. That could account for a lot.
‘Get lost!’ he said next.
I noticed that the little one wasn’t saying much, but with a partner who’s got that kind of touch with dialogue who needs to go shooting off at the mouth every minute?
I looked at him and wondered where he kept his gun. I presumed that he’d replaced my Smith and Wesson with a little something of his own.
I finally figured it was clipped to his belt in front of his left hip. I hoped so. It was a hell of a place to have a hernia.
‘You heard me. I said to beat it!’ He came over the room to where I was standing. In that room it didn’t take him long. From close up he really was fascinating. I could see his muscles rippling under his suit.
Somehow I wasn’t worried about him; my eyes kept shifting to the other guy’s right hand. Whenever it hovered close to the front of his jacket my stomach began to tighten.
I kept watching his hand and talked to the big fellow. ‘Don’t start pushing me around, pal. I’m here and I’m going to stay where I am. Anything else you’ve got to say to the lady you can say in front of me. Only say it fast and then be on your way.’
I thought if I put it like that there was a good chance he’d pick up most of what I was meaning. I think he did.
‘Look, scum! I’d like nothing better than to pull you to pieces with these.’ He lifted up his hands for me to inspect: sausages with bone. ‘And if you don’t shift your arse through that door I’ll do it right here. In front of the lady.’
He was a simple-minded soul. He needed to look at Anna when he mentioned her. His head didn’t turn far, but it was enough.
I slammed my head straight into his and hit him in the side of the temple. He was still falling while I was diving to the side. I did my best to grab the gun hand but somehow I didn’t make it. I landed my shoulder into his body okay, though, and he dropped like a body through a trap door. Only this time the floor met him half-way and hammered the rest of the wind out of him.
But still he didn’t let go of the gun. I was reaching for it when something lifted me into the air and slung me in the general direction of the kitchen. At that angle there was no way I was going to make it through the gap.
My head chipped some plaster down to the edge of the carpet. I used my hands and feet to lever myself backwards off the wall as though I was starting back stroke in the pool.
He tripped over my back as he rushed in and somersaulted into the kitchen. There was an odd slapping sound as his face made contact with the stone floor.
When I got focused on the Maltese guy he was sitting in a strange cross-legged pose near to the fire. His eyes looked very small; tiny black points. They weren’t looking at me. They were fixed on the gun.
The gun was in Anna’s hand. She was holding it very steady. She was standing in the middle of the room. A sudden flare of flame lit her face. It was very pale and very, very calm.
I didn’t move. The big guy behind me wasn’t moving either; not for some time to come.
I watched the little man as he sat on the floor, gazing up the barrel of his own gun, trying desperately to figure the odds.
Desperation never helps judgement.
I thought I saw his mind click into place a split second before it happened. His hands pushed downwards and he hurled himself at the gun. He was quick. Agile.
In the middle of his leap the gun went off.
The room was filled with the sound and when the echoes finally died away he died with them.
12
He lay back against the edge of the fireplace and there was a hole at the front of his chest that went through his clothes and looked as though it kept on going.
There was a lot of blood. Some of it was coming from his mouth but mostly it came from that hole in his chest.
There was a smell of scorching in the room and it wasn’t from the firing of the gun. His arm had fallen close to the fire and the sleeve of his jacket was beginning to smoulder. I got up and went across and moved it over in front of him.
Anna was still holding the gun. Her arm had dropped to her side. When I moved towards her, she lifted it again. The gun was still at the end of it. The arm, the gun: both were pointing at my stomach.
I looked into her face. It should have been looking back, seeing me. She wasn’t seeing anything. Not anything that was there, in that room.
I took another step towards her and took the gun from her hand. Her fingers were cold.
There was a movement in the kitchen. I went over and hit him on the back of the head a couple of times with the butt of the gun. Then I found a towel and wiped away any prints that might have been on the gun and slipped it into my pocket.
When I got back to Anna she was sitting in one of the chairs, staring at the body by the fireplace. I stood her up and swung my arms under the backs of her legs and carried her up the narrow stairs. I laid her on the bed.
There was a candle beside it in a chipped white enamel holder with a blue ring running around its edge. I went back downstairs and got a box of matches.
I lit the candle and she closed her eyes. Something fluttered against one of the squares of window pane. It was dark outside now: totally dark.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Anna. There are things that have got to be done and done fast. Do you understand?’
She opened her eyes and looked at me.
Her mouth formed the word, yes.
‘We’ve got two problems downstairs. One of them isn’t going to move out of there without a couple of other guys carrying him. That’s the first problem. The other one is going to be coming round and moving out of his own free will before very long. That’s our second problem.’
Anna pushed herself up on the bed until she was sitting up. I was sitting facing her. I didn’t need the spread of wax around the top of the candle to tell me that time was running out.
‘I’ve got to let the
cops have those two. Unless I do that there’s no way I’m going to get off the hook. If I can let them have a couple of names to throw a few murders at, then they just might agree to forget about the corners I’ve been cutting. Not that I’ve stopped yet.’
I could see what she was thinking.
I carried on: ‘Nobody needs to know what happened downstairs. Not exactly. But you never went near that gun. D’you understand that?’
I reached out for her hand: it was still cold.
‘You never touched the gun!’
I stopped. I realised that I’d been shouting.
‘Get your things. We’re driving to London. I’ll stop on the way and phone the police. I still want to keep a jump ahead of them. For now.’
I helped her off the bed and down the stairs. I gave the guy in the kitchen another little pat on the head and before we drove off I let his tyres down and pulled a few bits and pieces out of his engine and threw them in the bushes … just in case.
I drove the car to my flat. Anna needed to sleep and I wanted to know where she was. I showed her the bedroom and the bed and left her to it.
Then I got hold of the telephone directory and looked up Blagden under Hugh Barnard, which had been the name on his office door. The address was in Highgate and it sounded pretty impressive when I tried it over once or twice inside my head.
By the time I got back into the bedroom Anna was sitting on the side of the bed. Her face was still white and, although I didn’t touch them I knew that her hands were still cold. She was wearing a pink nightdress that looked as though it didn’t belong to her.
It might have belonged to somebody she once had been—but that was a long time ago.
She looked like a child.
I told her that I was going out. That I’d be back before morning. That I would phone before I did so and wake her up so that she could let me in. That she should bolt the door as soon as I had gone. That if anyone knocked without ringing first, on no account was she to unlock the door. That she should trust me and not worry.
Then I went quickly. I heard the bolts slide home behind me.
The house was along what was little more than a lane that led off a steep hill. I parked the car and walked. The houses were large and set well back behind high brick walls and wrought iron gates. There were lights still on in some of them, mostly in the upstairs rooms.
In one of them a telephone rang. When I had passed almost out of earshot it was still ringing.
Suddenly there were no more houses on the left. Behind a white railing, grass sloped down to a thicket of trees. Further over, to the right of those trees something shone in what little moonlight had escaped through the cover of clouds.
It was a pond. I was walking on the edge of Parliament Hill Fields. On a different night I thought it could have been pleasant. Now it didn’t matter.
There were things which did.
I recrossed the narrow strip of road and began to look more closely at the names at the entrances to the houses. It was the fourth one along. The brick had been covered with a kind of pebble dash effect and painted white so that it showed up clearly even in that light. I lifted the latch on the double gate and stepped on to the gravel path.
There was a light on in one of the downstairs windows at the side. I made for it carefully, not wanting to make too much noise with the tiny stones under my feet.
I must have been successful. No dogs started barking, no raised voices of enquiry were heard. I suppose I could have triggered off some anti-intruder device simply by being there, however silent, but Blagden obviously didn’t feel the need for that style of protection,
No, I thought, as I looked around the edge of the window frame. He’s sitting much too comfortably for that.
He was at the far end of a long room, leaning back against the arm of a leather settee. He was reading. On the table in front of him there was a half-filled glass and a decanter of what might have been port. A large glass ashtray held the inevitable cigar. It seemed to be out again.
It was time I went in.
I wondered if he’d put out the cat yet and locked the back door. I went round to see. The door was locked, but the kitchen window wasn’t. Living in an area like that he should have known better. It took me a couple of minutes to get inside. I looked quickly around the kitchen.
There was a pin board over one of the work tops. I went over and looked at it. There was a shopping pad with detachable sheets of paper, each of which had a cute little picture of a vegetable along the top. Written on the uppermost sheet, neatly in red ink, were: aubergines, fennel, garlic, sweet potatoes. To the right of that hung a diary with a page for every week. There was only one entry for this week: Mark, dentist, 10 a.m.
Arranged in precise random order around these two central items were an assortment of postcards from friends who’d been to Spain for Christmas or skiing in the Swiss Alps, the stubs of a couple of theatre tickets and a leaflet advertising a school jumble sale.
It was nice to see that Blagden enjoyed a full and normal family life. I walked across the tiles to the kitchen door, wondering how much longer he would be able to enjoy it.
I stepped inside the long room. Blagden looked up from the settee and as he did so he let go of his book. It slid down his lap, then tumbled to the floor. A leather marker flew out before the book finally fell shut. I didn’t think he’d worry overmuch about losing his place.
He started to get up but I told him to sit down. Partly to my surprise he did. I pulled a chair from against the wall and stuck it on the carpet about six feet in front of him.
If it had been a movie I would have set the chair down backwards and straddled it, but I preferred to be comfortable. I sat down and crossed one leg over the other. So far so good. I even found myself smiling. Only a little smile … and it was for me, not for him. Not at all for him.
‘You didn’t, did you?’
‘What?’ His voice was pitched higher than it should have been, as though he was remembering what had happened in his office.
Which was good … only I wanted him to remember what had been said as well.
‘You didn’t take any notice of what I said.’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘Those men. You went ahead and sent them after her anyway.’
He sat forwards and moved his arm away from where it had been resting. A vein had started to throb immediately over the edge of his left eyebrow. When he spoke it was with the desperation of a man who knows his back is up against a very shaky wall and that the bricks are starting to crumble away even as he speaks.
‘Look, Mitchell. I don’t know how you got into my house, but I imagine it was by some illegal means or other. You have no right to be here and absolutely no right to cross-question me. As for what passed between us this morning, of course I forgot it. That was the best thing to do with the totally unsubstantiated allegations you were making. Luckily for you, they were made without witnesses being present, otherwise my lawyers …’
I could take so much and then no more. Right at that moment I was stuffed up to the top of my gullet with Hugh Blagden and the diseased crap that he’d been sending in my direction ever since our first meeting. I didn’t want another lie, another posture, another minute of deceit.
I reached down and pushed the table out of the way as hard as I could. The cut glass decanter bounced twice on the rim and then landed on its side, the rich looking liquid lapping out into the carpet.
Blagden had flinched as though I had hit him. I was standing in front of him, my hands back by my sides. When he thought I’d calmed down I sensed him relax. Then I did hit him. Only once and I didn’t give it any backswing. But I wanted it to hurt.
From the way he slapped against the back of the settee and the sound that came out of his suddenly opened mouth, I thought I’d succeeded.
In the silen
ce that followed I heard a quiet tapping at the door to the room. I pointed to Blagden and he said, ‘Come in.’
We both watched as the door opened and the little boy came in. His hair was tousled from sleep and he was wearing striped pyjamas and blue slippers with pictures of Mickey Mouse on them. He stood there, looking from one to the other of us.
Then Blagden said, ‘What is it, Mark?’
The boy said, ‘I had a dream.’
His bottom lip started to quiver and tears formed in the corners of his eyes. His father put out his arms and the boy ran past me and into them.
‘What sort of a dream, Mark?’
‘A nasty dream. There was a monster thing and it was eating us up.’
Blagden hugged him tight and then released him a little.
‘But you know there aren’t really monsters, don’t you? Only in stories …’
‘And films, Daddy,’ the boy interrupted, suddenly sounding very serious.
‘Yes, Mark, and in films.’
He bent down and lightly kissed his son on top of his head. The child looked at his father’s face, at the trickle of blood that was running still down from the split in his lip.
‘What’s that, Daddy?’ he asked, pointing.
Blagden touched his face and seemed surprised to feel, then to see the blood. ‘Oh, nothing. There was an accident. Look, see what happened to the table.’
The boy looked. ‘You fell over it, Daddy,’ he said.
‘That’s right.’ He reached for him and kissed him again, this time on the cheek. ‘Do you think you can get back to sleep now? It’s school in the morning, remember.’
‘Yes, daddy, all right.’ He walked backwards out of the room, watching his father all the while he did so. He hadn’t given me more than a couple of hasty glances all the time he had been there.
‘He’s six …’ Blagden began.
‘Shut it!’ I shouted. ‘I don’t want to know. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t matter. Not to me. Not to what I’m doing here.’