Those Who Feel Nothing

by Peter Guttridge

  Gilchrist nodded. ‘But that market has been in decline for years. That’s why we got rid of our special antiques unit. Maybe there is more of a market for this Asian stuff, given all the New Age, Buddhist stuff around here. Every other garden seems to have a Buddha sitting underneath its wind-chimes.’

  ‘True, ma’am, but how many people could tell the difference between a twelfth-century Buddha and one cast last week? I mean, I don’t think I’m being racist when I say that with the same little smile on them, all the Buddha look the same.’

  Gilchrist laughed, watching the football supporters in her side mirror. There had been a near-riot in town the previous evening when the visiting team’s supporters had taken defeat badly. During the match one footballer had also almost bitten off the ear of another.

  ‘Ear-biting – is that a gay thing?’ she said. ‘And all that pulling on shirts and shorts. Same deal, surely?’

  ‘You’re back to football. Why would a gay person particularly ear-bite, ma’am?’

  ‘You’re right – I’m getting into deep waters there. Let’s just stay with football fans as moronic. Not as individuals but as part of crowd dynamics. They work each other up so much and are so hostile to the supporters of rival teams. Makes absolutely no bloody sense.’

  ‘Absolutely, ma’am,’ Heap said, giving her a quick glance. Gilchrist decided to shut up.

  They drove past the Volk’s railway. Both of them looked off to their right. An almost naked man was sitting with his back to a lamppost, knees up, one arm raised above his head, a large pool of vomit by his side. He was secured to the lamppost by plastic cable around his wrist.

  ‘Stag night rather than football supporter, ma’am,’ Heap said, stopping the car. He rummaged in the glove compartment and took out a pair of clippers.

  The man was half-awake, one eye open, head tilted. He watched Heap and Gilchrist approach. They stepped round the vomit, noticing he had more down his bare chest and on his underpants – those and socks the only clothes he wore.

  ‘That is some serious puke,’ Gilchrist muttered. ‘What has this man eaten?’

  ‘A horse was stolen from Lewes Stables yesterday,’ Heap murmured as he snipped the plastic cable. Gilchrist laughed. The man’s arm dropped abruptly.

  ‘What time’s the wedding?’ Heap said.

  ‘Two o’clock,’ the man mumbled.

  Heap looked at his watch. ‘You’ve missed it.’

  The man tried to focus. ‘What?’

  ‘Two o’clock today?’ Heap said.

  ‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Is today tomorrow?’

  Heap looked at Gilchrist. ‘Questions like that can only be answered by someone of a higher rank than either of us.’

  Gilchrist smiled. ‘Where are you staying?’ she said.

  ‘They’re coming back for me,’ he said.

  ‘Do you know where you’re staying?’ Heap repeated.

  The man shook his head.

  ‘Are your clothes anywhere around?’

  He shrugged. Gilchrist pointed up the road to the club under the arches. ‘You were in there last?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Your friends still there?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What’s their uniform?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What did you choose for everyone to wear on your stag night?’

  ‘Clockwork Orange.’

  ‘Arty. OK. Don’t wander off.’

  Heap and Gilchrist got back in the car and drove the twenty yards down to the club. The din of the music cascaded out of the open doors. There was a strong smell of stale booze and piss around the entrance. They walked over to the doormen and flashed their warrant cards.

  ‘You have a package for us?’ Heap said. ‘Your boss is supposed to give us a whole lot of documentation so we know you’re not operating illegally and we don’t need to close you down.’

  The biggest bouncer reached behind a counter and produced a large envelope. Heap took it.

  ‘Thanks,’ Heap said. ‘Listen – is there a gang of guys in there wearing bowler hats with black paint round one of their eyes? I mean each of them with one eye painted, not just one eye among them all.’

  Gilchrist glanced at Heap as the biggest bouncer nodded.

  Heap pointed back to the lamppost. ‘Make sure they take care of their friend when they stagger out, will you?’

  Whether his friends could even look after themselves after a night and half a day pub- and club-crawling was a moot point. They all looked back at the lamppost. The man had gone. Instead there was a small woman standing there. Something was dangling from her hand. She was swaying. She looked familiar.

  Gilchrist and Heap walked back to the car and the woman moved towards them. She was smartly dressed. Cashmere coat. She was Asian. Her mouth hung open. She had a kitchen knife in her hand. It was bloody.

  Gilchrist watched with horrified fascination as a fat globule of blood slowly separated from the knife’s tip and dropped to the concrete. She imagined she heard the splat as it landed. And the next one.

  Gilchrist gave Heap’s arm a cautionary squeeze. He glanced at her other hand sticking out of her pocket where she was tapping in the code on her mobile asking for urgent back-up.

  Gilchrist’s attention never wavered from the knife. She wasn’t scared but she didn’t intend to tackle this woman unless it was absolutely necessary. She hoped Heap felt the same.

  ‘You recognize her, don’t you?’ Heap said as they drew closer.

  ‘The mother who lost her son – the one standing at the side of the road?’

  ‘Her hands are covered in blood.’ Gilchrist looked beyond her, trying to locate the drunken groom. ‘Do you think she’s stabbed that guy?’

  ‘No. I think she’s hurt herself. That’s her blood.’

  They stopped in front of the woman.

  ‘Can we help?’ Heap said.

  Gilchrist scrutinized her face. She looked up at Gilchrist, her mouth open in a rictus of misery. There was something particularly distressing because the planes of her face were flat, the eyes expressionless. All emotion was in the silent scream of the open mouth.

  The woman said nothing. Just stood there, blood dripping slowly from the knife and off the fingers of her other hand. Heap gestured towards the knife.

  ‘Do you want to drop that?’

  The woman didn’t respond. Heap moved his hand, almost casually, to his belt. Gilchrist hoped he wasn’t going to Taser her.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ Heap said.

  The woman gave the smallest of nods.

  ‘We want to help you,’ Heap said. ‘You’re hurt.’

  The woman ignored him, her eyes on Gilchrist. Gilchrist glanced beyond the woman. Far off at the other end of the drive she could see a police car slowly approaching. She guessed there was by now another one hidden round the bend behind her.

  ‘What is your name?’ Gilchrist said.

  The woman said nothing again.

  The police car worked its way through the chicanes. It was now about two hundred yards away.

  The woman, her mouth still open, worked her jaw, as if she was trying to devour something. Heap took his phone out and ordered an ambulance.

  ‘You haven’t hurt anybody else, have you?’ Gilchrist said.

  If there was a reply Gilchrist missed it because of a sudden explosion of chanting from the entrance to the club behind her. It was the drunken repetition of a single line: ‘Who’s getting married in the morning?’

  Half-a-dozen raucous male voices. Jeering and laughter.

  ‘Where’s the bloody lamppost?’ someone shouted.

  Gilchrist didn’t take her eyes off the woman but in her peripheral vision a gang of drunken men in bowler hats staggered across the road towards the lamppost with the vomit beside it.

  ‘Where’s the bloody groom?’ someone else called as everyone sniggered.

  Gilchrist flicked a glance across. That’s what she was wondering.

  She
hoped they’d find him wandering on the beach. She looked back at the woman. The woman now seemed to be scrutinizing Gilchrist’s face as intently as Gilchrist had scrutinized hers. The knife was still pointing towards the pavement.

  The police car halted beside the woman. As a door opened, the woman nodded at Gilchrist, let the knife clatter to the pavement and said just two words: ‘My son.’

  She turned to the rear passenger door of the police car and stood as if awaiting instruction.

  There were shouts from across the road. One of the men was down on his hands and knees being sick. The others were gathered in a loose semi-circle looking down at something just out of sight over the lip of the shingle incline.

  ‘Wakey-wakey,’ they chanted in rough unison as the woman collapsed into the back seat of the car.

  EIGHT

  You’re looking at yourself in the mirror. Your ribs ache. Your ribs. You can’t get over this disjunction between what you see and what you are and what you feel. They must be your ribs but the feeling is outside you. As so much is outside you.

  Lately you have often been feeling as if you are looking down on yourself from the corner of the room. The feeling is so strong you fear you are fracturing down the middle.

  Your mobile phone rings for the first time in weeks.

  ‘Jimmy?’ your friend Bob Watts says when you answer.

  ‘Bob.’

  ‘Bloody hell. I can’t believe I’ve actually got through to the elusive Mr Tingley. I’ve been trying for an age.’

  ‘Connections have been a bit iffy,’ you say quietly. You slide open the glass door and step back out on to your veranda. ‘I read about your new job, Bob. Looks like you outmanoeuvred the bastards. But tell me you’re not going to reopen the Milldean Massacre case to go after your erstwhile friend William Simpson.’

  ‘William Simpson will get his due retribution but I have no immediate plans to facilitate that,’ Watts says. Then laughs. ‘If only.’

  You watch the water ripple in the pool, then say: ‘You joke but I know it’s not a joke for you.’

  ‘That’s as maybe.’ You can tell Watts can hear something in your voice that he can’t quite place. ‘When are you coming home, Jimmy?’

  You sit in the chair on your veranda and pick up the half-full glass of vodka on the floor beside it. ‘Home being Brighton? In due course.’

  ‘You OK, buddy mine?’ There is concern in Watts’ voice.

  ‘In the pink,’ you say.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Watts says. ‘What’s going on, Jimmy?’

  ‘I’m not myself,’ you say, standing again and looking back into your room.

  ‘Recuperation can take a long time,’ Watts says. You are distracted for a moment. ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘I mean that statement very precisely, Bob,’ you say. ‘I’m a person I don’t recognize or feel anything for. I feel as if I’ve been hijacked by somebody else.’

  Watts clearly doesn’t know how to respond to that. ‘Are you still in Italy?’ he finally says.

  ‘Cambodia.’

  ‘Cambodia? That’s a bit sudden, isn’t it? Holiday?’

  You rub your eyes. ‘Pilgrimage. Sort of. A kind of twelve step.’

  ‘You’ve given up booze?’

  ‘Far from it.’

  Watts laughs. ‘That’s a relief. I can’t imagine you without your rum and pep.’

  ‘Can’t get the peppermint over here so I’ve switched temporarily to vodka.’ You swirl the vodka round in your glass as you say this.

  ‘I hope it’s Polish,’ Watts says.

  ‘It is.’

  Another silence.

  ‘What kind of twelve step?’

  ‘People I need to apologise to. Ask their forgiveness. Things I need to apologise for.’

  Watts says nothing.

  ‘The problem is that pretty much all of them are dead.’

  Watts knows better than to pry. You are probably his best friend but he knows scarcely anything about you. You and he are both to blame. Watts is useless at asking questions and you are brilliant at not answering them.

  ‘You haven’t got religious, have you?’ Watts finally says with a chuckle that sounds forced.

  ‘I’ve always been religious in my own way,’ you say. Which is true.

  ‘Buddhist over there, aren’t they? Are you listening to the sound of the one hand clapping?’

  There is a little patch of bamboo beside the veranda. It clacks in a sudden shiver of air.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  After a moment, Watts says, ‘Revenge a factor in this?’

  You say nothing.

  He says again: ‘Come home, Jimmy.’

  ‘In due course,’ you say. ‘But first I could do with a favour.’

  ‘You know you only have to name it,’ Watts says.

  ‘Can you find out about a shop for me – discreetly though. An antiques shop in the Lanes.’

  ‘Sure. What do you want to know?’

  ‘If the owners are around in Brighton. What their circumstances are. That kind of stuff.’

  ‘Let me grab a pen,’ Watts says. ‘What’s the name?’

  ‘The shop is called Charles Windsor Antiques but I don’t know if that’s the actual owner. It’s people who might be linked to it I’m interested in. But you’ve got to be discreet. I don’t want anyone scaring off.’

  ‘What have they done?’ Watts asks.

  You lean forward. You want to say but you find it difficult to get the words out. You don’t think you have vocalised it before. Ever. You want to hang up the phone. But before you hang up, you exhale and say quietly: ‘They killed my wife.’

  Rafferty was holed up in a big house on the beach at East Preston, a posh village on the edge of Worthing. He looked little changed when he met them at the door in blazer and cravat. Gilchrist got a waft of alcohol as he ushered them into a large sitting room at the back of the house. It was ten a.m.

  His lawyer was sitting in an armchair by the window. He stood and nodded to them.

  The window looked out on a long stretch of lawn that ran to a short wall. Beyond the wall they could see high waves rushing up the beach.

  Rafferty gestured for them to be seated on a long sofa. As they both sank into it, Gilchrist doubted she would be able to get up again with any dignity.

  ‘Mr Rafferty,’ Heap began. ‘We want to talk to you about Hindu artefacts from Cambodia. Twelfth century.’

  ‘Not my area of expertise. I’m more rural England. Graveyards. I thought you knew.’

  ‘That wasn’t always the case though, was it? You’ve had a long career at the Brighton museums. Worked your way up.’

  ‘It’s the British way. I’m sure you two have done the same.’

  ‘You spent time as deputy director of the Royal Pavilion in the eighties.’

  ‘Just after a bad time for the Pavilion. A load of fucking philistines ran the council in the seventies. Medieval banquets and horse races down the corridors. Those beautiful rooms used as council offices.’

  ‘Your relationship with Cambodia?’

  ‘I have no relationship. But knowing the wankers in power in the seventies in Brighton, we were probably twinned with Phnom Penh whilst Pol Pot was massacring everyone in sight with half a brain.’

  ‘Did you buy some illicit treasures from Cambodia when the country was dying?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ the lawyer said. Rafferty waved him away.

  ‘I wish,’ Rafferty said. ‘That’s how you create a world-class collection. You think Lord Elgin paid actual price for the Marbles? You ever been to St Paul de Vence? No, don’t even answer – no way you have. There’s a restaurant there – La Colombe d’Or. The food is pretty good but not great. But people go there to see the artwork on the walls. Worth millions. You think the restaurant owner had millions to spend on it? Not at all. He gave Picasso free meals and in return Picasso gave him a couple of pictures. Same with the other artists. Braque, Miro, Fernand Leger.’ He sniffed. ‘All collections
start with someone buying cheap.’

  ‘But we’re talking about artefacts that were known to be stolen.’

  ‘You’re a few years out – Pol Pot was long gone by the time I got the Pavilion. And I don’t know what artefacts you’re talking about. But I do know that nobody gave a fuck in the seventies about Angkor Wat.’

  He turned to Heap.

  ‘Big brain – when did UNESCO register Angkor Wat as a world heritage site?’

  Heap shrugged. ‘Years ago, I guess. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I know that it wasn’t until the early nineties. One of the greatest religious and archaeological sites in the world didn’t have any kind of protection through war, civil war, the Khmer Rouge genocide and ten years of Vietnamese occupation.’

  Heap tilted his head. ‘You’re well informed about its recent history for someone who has no interest in its cultural heritage.’

  Rafferty grinned, almost wolfishly. ‘You obviously never saw me polish off my General Knowledge round on Mastermind when Magnus was still in the chair.’

  ‘Was I born then?’ Gilchrist muttered to herself.

  ‘What?’ Rafferty said.

  Gilchrist shifted, with difficulty, on the soft sofa. ‘Just thinking aloud, sir,’ she said.

  ‘So you’re saying that whoever looted these things was providing a public service?’ Heap said.

  Rafferty pressed his knees together. ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. They left Cambodia through back-door channels? So what? They were taken out of harm’s way. Elgin did the same – the Marbles would have been destroyed. The ones that remained in situ were pretty much destroyed, not least in the twentieth century by acid rain.’

  ‘Elgin was a philanthropist?’ Heap said.

  ‘Are you two saying the world hasn’t been enriched by having the Marbles on show in the British Museum for decades when they could have been destroyed entirely had they been left in situ?’ Rafferty pretended to stifle a yawn. ‘Indigenous populations don’t usually care about their heritage until they discover there are people willing to buy it. They pull down temples to use the stones to build their own houses. We’re no different in this country. Ever been to Avebury? Every house in the area is built from the stones that formed part of the original stone circle and processional route. The same around Stonehenge – a much inferior site in my view.’