By some sleight of hand Jack managed to make it seem as though it had been Richard’s idea to come to Brittany.
‘We should have gone to Iceland, then he’d have been really at home,’ Jack said.
The weather made them all irritable and the banter became more pointed and there was a sharp edge to Jack’s sarcasm.
‘It’s only a few hundred quid,’ Jack said, when they were discussing again the idea of abandoning the house and moving south. ‘It can’t matter that much.’
‘It’s not the money,’ Richard had said, with irritation.
‘What is it, then?’
‘Look, it’s August. Everything’ll be booked out. The roads’ll be packed. The whole of France takes its holiday now. We’ll spend half our time trying to find somewhere to stay. And the other half trying to get away from people. The beaches will be awful. It’ll be like a package deal without the security of the package.’
‘But we will have sun,’ Birgit said. ‘Do you not like the sun?’
‘You could always wear a hat,’ Jack said.
‘I think we should give it a few more days,’ Richard said. ‘The weather might clear.’
That evening they decided to go into St Malo for dinner and then on to the casino in Dinard. By midnight Jack had lost over three hundred pounds and when Richard suggested they leave, Jack said, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t be so wet.’
They stayed another two hours during which time Jack lost another fifty pounds. He left in a sullen mood. Suddenly in the car park he said to Richard, ‘I’ll race you back. Birgit can come with me.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Richard said. ‘If we’re picked up and breathalysed we’ve had it.’
But Birgit was already getting into Jack’s car. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Get your finger out.’ He took off in a shower of loose gravel.
The night was misty and Richard drove with exaggerated care. Maria sat hunched up at the door, angry and bewildered. She took it out on Richard. ‘Can’t you go any faster?’
‘No, I can’t.’ It was like a slap in the face.
Jack’s car was not at the house when they got back.
Maria wasn’t sure how to react, everything had happened so fast.
‘Would you like some coffee?’ Richard said.
‘No.’
She went to her room and got into bed. The minutes ticked by. There was no question of sleeping. Every sense was alert to the noise of Jack’s tyres on the drive. What if they had had an accident? It was just the sort of thing that might happen with Jack in that mood and after the amount he had drunk.
She got up at first light. The clouds had rolled away, the fog was gone, the sea was calm and the sun was beginning to rise on a perfect day.
She found Richard in the sitting-room. ‘We should go and look for them,’ he said.
Just then Jack’s car pulled up outside the house and Jack and Birgit got out. They were laughing and he put his arm about her shoulders.
‘Where were you?’ Richard said. ‘What the hell happened?’
Jack seemed rather drunk and so did Birgit.
‘We stopped to see the sunrise,’ Jack said.
Birgit gave a low, gurgling laugh, and went to her room.
At breakfast Jack said, ‘What about it? What about going south?’
‘What for?’ Richard said, pointing to the window and the bright yellow sunshine.
‘Birgit wants to and so do I.’
The tension was almost palpable. Maria had wanted to talk to Jack in private but he had avoided her and now suddenly it all boiled over.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ she said. ‘We came for a holiday! There’s been nothing but fighting and bad feeling! And now you and Birgit . . .’
‘Don’t say anything you’ll regret, liebchen.’
Birgit was looking at her with a small smile on her lips and suddenly Maria knew it was all over.
She gathered what she could of her dignity and went to the door. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said. ‘You go where you like.’
She walked right out to the Pointe du Grouin. The tiredness had all gone and she was stiff with anger. When she came back only Richard was there.
In her bitterness she turned on him. ‘It’s your bloody fault,’ she said. ‘Why did you bring someone like her?’
He nodded slowly and then said, ‘As the man said, it seemed like a good idea at the time.’
She went to her room and began to pack. Richard stood at the door watching her. ‘If you’ll take me down to St Malo, I’ll get the ferry,’ she said.
‘Look, we’ve nearly two weeks of the holiday left. Are we going to let them ruin it?’
She turned and lashed out at him. ‘What do you think, that I’m going to leave his bed and get into yours?’
‘No. I didn’t think that for a moment. But we’re in France. We’ve paid for the house. The sun’s shining. There are restaurants and drives and things to see. Couldn’t we just do it on that basis?’
She said, ‘I don’t know how you could even—’
‘For Christ’s sake!’ he said harshly. ‘You aren’t the only one with dented pride. I’ve been humiliated too. What I’m suggesting is a salvage operation.’
He walked to the window and looked at the sea. ‘I should never have brought her. He can’t keep his hands off. Never could. You just have to accept that with Jack. It’s like living with a drunk and hoping he won’t find the cooking sherry. Either you accept it, or you don’t have anything to do with him.’
Suddenly she felt completely drained. Her love for Jack sat like a lump in her stomach. What should she do? Go back and sit in her small London flat and cry her eyes out? Or take the plane to Berlin and sit in her parents’ flat in Charlottenberg and cry her eyes out there?
As if reading her mind Richard said, ‘You’ll get over it and so will I. People always do. Look, the ferry sails every day. You can go any time you like. Why don’t you leave it until tomorrow and see how you feel then?’
The thought of sitting up all night in a ferry made her flinch. What she wanted was to be by herself. She crawled into bed and cried herself to sleep and didn’t wake until the afternoon.
Now, wandering unseeingly through Hampstead she remembered those two weeks with an intensity she had not felt before.
What she remembered most was Richard’s kindness when she was going through her withdrawal from Jack. What made it special was the fact that he was raw himself.
They spent the remainder of the holiday doing the things they should have done all along: going for drives and finding little restaurants and bars off the beaten track, going to Finisterre and standing in the wind by the old lighthouse and taking photographs, walking round the ramparts of St Malo, lying in the sun, just sitting and reading.
He had suggested a salvage operation and that’s what it was. They lived in the house like brother and sister.
She saw him in London. But it was a bad time for him. His father was not expected to recover although no one could tell how long it would take. Richard spent hours each day by his bedside and Maria was filled with admiration for his selflessness.
Jack turned up like the proverbial bad penny. His idea was to kiss and make up and for the first time Maria saw him as he really was. He was one of those men who proposition every attractive woman they meet and when they are refused, proposition the next one that comes along.
Maria had taken a long time to get over Jack and had no intention of being sucked back into a repeat performance. When she said she wasn’t interested, Jack at first could not understand the reason. She had to explain that you don’t leave your mistress flat and go off with another woman and expect things to be just the same.
‘Are you seeing much of Richard?’
There was no use lying. ‘Yes.’
‘He’s a good bloke is Richard, a hell of a lot better than me.’
A good bloke.
Yes, he was a good bloke. She had grown to love him in a differ
ent way, with a depth she had never felt for Jack. Jack had been her first lover and she knew there was always a special place for first lovers. But Richard was more than a lover: he had been, for a time, all things to her.
And they’d had such a wonderful time! Sure the work was hard, but that’s what made the rewards so sweet.
Then she had wanted the icing on the cake. She had talked him into selling the house he loved so much. The move to the country. The ultimate happiness.
But it didn’t happen.
And she was to blame.
The thought came like an electric shock. Up to now she had blamed circumstances, she had blamed outside factors, she had blamed Richard. But it was her fault. She knew that now. Her fault that he was having an affair, her fault that he did not want to come home, her fault that he was spending the Easter weekend with someone else.
She was standing in the middle of the pavement. Passers-by were looking at her oddly. She was right down at the bottom of the Heath but had no memory of having got there.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jack Benson lay in the bath, his head nestling between the taps, a glass of wine in his hand. He had had a late lunch of Dover sole off the bone – there was nothing like it in Hong Kong – and now he was sipping the last of a bottle of Pouilly Fumé and thinking of Maria.
He wondered if she had ever had a real debauch. When they had been lovers she had been innocent, not much more than a schoolgirl. She used to tell him how much in love with him she was but he supposed it was not much more than a crush. Well, now she was grown up.
His thoughts touched briefly on Richard. He felt no sense of guilt at what he was going to do. Any man who left his wife alone on the Easter weekend deserved all he got.
He wondered if the situation between Richard and Maria was serious. If it was he foresaw many such pleasant meetings.
He also wondered what would have happened if they hadn’t gone for that disastrous holiday in France where he’d ended up with the Swedish bird. What a bloody nuisance she’d become.
He had handed Maria on a plate to Richard. It had been a stupid thing to do. She was like a little puppy in those days. You only had to snap your fingers and she’d come running. It was just a pity that she had been serious about things. Ah, liebchen, you had a lot to learn.
There was a knock at the door. Benson remembered the chambermaid. The bathroom door was ajar and he pulled the shower curtain along the bath so that he was hidden.
‘Yes?’ he called.
A man’s voice said, ‘Your clothes, sir.’
‘OK, bring them in.’ He heard the door open. ‘Hang them in the wardrobe, please.’ Then, ‘I thought this was women’s work.’
From the bath he could look into the mirror above the handbasin. In it was reflected part of the interior of his room. The waiter passed close to the bathroom door. He was carrying the clothes over one arm. His other hand was held behind his back. Light from the bathroom streamed out into the bedroom at that point and for one split second only Benson saw what the waiter was holding in that hand, something he was not meant to see. It was a piece of brass wire shaped into a loop and at either end there were two small wooden handles.
He had seen such a thing twice before in his life. In Hong Kong a police acquaintance had shown him one in their ‘Black Museum’, and told him it was a weapon used by the Triads. The second time had been very early one morning in Manila. It had been lying on the pavement next to a dead body. They were called death loops or killing wires. They strangled in a matter of seconds.
The waiter dropped the clothes on the bed and turned towards the bathroom door.
Benson’s mind was still in shock but moving at the speed of a mainframe computer. He saw the man’s features for the first time. He had never seen him before but he was unmistakably Chinese.
Two thoughts crashed together. The first was that he had never seen a Chinese waiter in a British hotel; the second was that he was looking at the long arm of Mr Shao.
The Chinese did not realise he could be seen in the mirror and he stood in the doorway holding the wire loop in his hands. He spoke to the shower curtain. ‘I put ’em away,’ he said.
Benson had begun to move slowly down through the hot soapy water to the bottom of the bath. ‘Put it on the bill,’ he said, hearing his voice crack. ‘I’ll sign for it later.’
He looked round desperately for a defensive weapon but there was only a piece of soap.
In the mirror, he watched the man come forward to the tap end of the bath. The Chinese had his hand on the shower curtain to pull it back when Benson reared up, grabbed the curtain rail, and brought the whole thing down.
The Chinese was not a big man and Benson’s weight and the enveloping shower curtain threw him off balance. His foot slipped on the wet tiled floor and in a second he had fallen forward into the bath.
Benson, with the strength that comes from terror, fell on top of the writhing mass, pushing him down into the water. There was a splashing and thrashing, but his arms and legs were entangled in the curtain. His head was covered. He could not see. Now, with Benson’s weight on top of him, he sank beneath the surface.
He fought and kicked but Benson pressed down with all his power.
The kicks and jerks gradually lessened. There was a noise of a blocked pipe unblocking as he coughed great gouts of air into the water, then gradually he grew limp.
Benson did not relax. He’d seen the movies of bodies suddenly rearing out of bath water. He lay on top of the man for fully five minutes until he was sure, absolutely sure, that no life remained.
Then he slowly pulled away and stood in the middle of the bathroom floor, shaking like a jelly.
The room was a complete mess. The shower curtain hid the man’s body except for his feet which stuck out in the air. Benson backed away, terrified, but something made him stop and gather himself. He pushed the feet into the water. Now the curtain hid the body completely.
He ran across the bedroom and locked and chained the door. Then, still naked and dripping, he stood in the centre of the room and tried to think.
He had not the slightest doubt that Mr Shao had organised this little reception for him. If he had taken a little longer over his lunch, if he had not been in the bath . . . If . . .
He had a bottle of duty-free whisky and gave himself a large measure. Then he lit a cigarette and drew on it heavily. He had to think! But the computer was freewheeling. He tried to get it under control.
The first thing he had to do was get away from the hotel. But where? Did the trains run on a holiday? He could hire a car. But if Mr Shao’s friends had already traced him to the Ambassador why wouldn’t they have contacts in the car hire business? That was the first place they’d check.
Maria.
She had a car. She could pick him up and take him to the airport or to one of the Channel ports and he could be out of the country by evening.
He dialled her home. He let the phone ring and ring but there was no answer. She must have left already. He phoned the house in Bayswater. Again the phone rang and rang. She must be on her way, he thought.
There was only one thing to do, get to the Bayswater house, wait for her there, and the moment she arrived, take off.
But how the hell could he tell her what had happened? How would she react? I’m sorry I can’t have dinner tonight I’ve just killed a man. Oh, and by the way, I want to leave the country NOW!
Christ! What a mess!
He’d been running and running ever since the golf game with Mr Shao. He thought of him, cool in his brown tropical kit, cool in his air-conditioned house, cool in his bloody swimming pool. Cool and laid back, reaching for the phone and issuing a few orders and then sitting down and counting his bloody money until one of his boys came in and said, ‘It is done,’ or Chinese words to that effect.
And while Mr Cool was counting his money he, Benson, was running for his life all over South-East Asia.
They hadn’t bothered! That
was the bloody point. He’d thought he was so clever covering his tracks and they hadn’t even bothered to try to follow him. They’d just organised the reception at the other end.
Mr Shao had probably figured it would be either New York or London. Both had large Chinese communities which meant that they also had Triads who, for a fee, or just for Auld Lang Syne, would erase anyone with whom Mr Shao had lost patience. All he had to do was pick up the phone. Even now, Benson imagined, there would be someone alerted and waiting in New York. And there might be others in Paris and Amsterdam and Rome – and Timbuktu for all he knew. The mills of Mr Shao ground exceeding fine.
Well, who the hell was Mr Shao anyway? He was only a bloody Chinaman after all. He, Benson, also had a brain.
First of all he had to get clear of the hotel. He began to dress hurriedly in his newly pressed clothes.
No one must suspect anything.
What about the body?
What the hell could he do?
What if the real chambermaid came back to turn down the bed? Did they still turn down beds in good hotels? They did in Hong Kong. But here?
And where could he hide the drowned man? He looked at the bed but there was no space beneath it. He opened the wardrobe door. But the man was sopping wet and the water was bound to run out on to the floor. He could hear the woman’s scream ringing in his ears.
He opened the bathroom door. He could leave him in the bath but only if he put back the shower curtain.
He examined the rail. Several plugs had come away from the wall with the screws still in them. He untangled the curtain from the corpse and tried, at the same time, not to look at the man’s face. He pressed the plugs back into the holes in the wall. The rail held.
The body lay on its back, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Benson carefully pulled the curtain along the bath and stepped back. It was of a heavy plastic material with London scenes printed on it. It hid the body completely.
He dressed quickly.
The money? He didn’t want to be seen leaving the hotel with a suitcase. All he could see was the bag from the duty-free shop in Karachi. He stuffed the money into it. On top he placed pieces of French bread which had come with his lunch.
Dirty Weekend Page 17