A Death to Remember

by Ormerod, Roger

  A Death to Remember

  Roger Ormerod

  © Roger Ormerod 2014

  Roger Ormerod has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in Great Britain 1986 by Constable & Company Ltd.

  This edition published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2014.

  Table of Contents

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  Extract from Full Fury by Roger Ormerod

  1

  I was sitting at a corner table in the lounge of the Winking Frog, nursing a half of bitter and wondering whether to eat there, when I suddenly remembered I’d had a car. What provoked this thought was the sight of a large, pallid man in boots, jeans and anorak standing in front of me with his pint glass almost lost in his fist, and who was saying: ‘Mind if I join you?’

  I couldn’t have put a name to him, but the sight of him had prompted the thought: what the hell happened to my car?

  ‘What the hell happened to my car?’ I asked angrily, the anger surprising me because I had nothing on which to base it, and no clear reason to aim it at him.

  He sat opposite me. His smile was apologetic. He half reached forward with his left hand in a gesture that I realised was intended as reassuring.

  ‘It’s in a corner of the servicing bay. Only wants the battery charging and the engine turning over...’ He stopped, tilting his head. His blond hair tumbled over one ear. ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’ There was genuine anxiety in his voice.

  The mention of a servicing bay, and of turning over the engine, had provided the necessary information. The mental image was of a garage, and then of an office overlooking the yard at the back, and I had him. Clay...no, Clayton it’d been. Christian or surname? I hesitated, not sure whether I ought to be friendly or aggressive, not willing to commit myself.

  ‘Tony Clayton,’ he said, and I realised he was feeling as tentative as I was, though it had to be for a different reason. It was unlikely that he, too, suffered from a deficient memory. He would know where he stood in this world, his viewpoint firmly established, but I was still rebuilding mine. I needed any help I could get, but not from Tony Clayton.

  Other people – ones I could trust – had made sure I was not short of basic information. During the previous nine months, from the time it was decided that my mind would accept information and store it, my visitors had programmed facts into my brain in a steady stream. I knew who I was, why I’d been there in that convalescent home, what I had been before the assault (an Executive Officer in the Civil Service), and vaguely what I had been doing that day. A Welfare Officer had ex-plained that my decree absolute had gone through only four days before the incident. (Lucky, that, he’d explained. My coma might have affected the issue. He hadn’t fully explained why it was to be considered as lucky.) There had been no shortage of detail about my life and my work, but nobody had explained, or been able even to attempt to explain, what my emotional background to life had been. I didn’t know whether I’d been light-hearted or serious, introvert or extrovert, optimistic or pessimistic. I could no longer trust my emotional responses, so that there was no basis from which I could face life with any confidence. They hadn’t been able to restore my personality.

  Perhaps the psychiatrists had realised this. It would explain their reluctance to have me roaming loose in the harsh and unforgiving world. They hadn’t told me whether or not I should treat it as harsh and unforgiving, or look on it as a challenge, with hope leading the way and optimism guiding me.

  But amongst the facts I’d been fed had been the simple one that the person I had to blame for my present condition was a garage owner by the name of Tony Clayton. I stared at him, and felt nothing. He was uneasy and restless. His eyes would not hold mine. He glanced down at his glass.

  ‘I might need the car,’ I said in a neutral voice.

  He looked up eagerly. ‘I’ll tax it for you. But you’ll have to check on the insurance. You’ll have all the papers...’ He stopped, flustered. ‘But you don’t remember me, do you?’

  ‘I remember you.’

  What I remembered came as an abrupt, brilliant picture in my mind. In it, he was towering – seemed huge in my second of reconstruction – at his desk, with the window behind him. His face was in shadow. I could detect no expression, but his voice was loud and aggressive. ‘...be damned if I’ll let you take anything out of this office...’

  I smiled as the image died, and my amusement angered him again. But now his anger was tempered by time. His face, I realised, was thinner, and there was weariness and suffering behind his eyes. When he spoke he’d already controlled himself. His voice was no more than disgruntled.

  ‘I don’t see what’s funny.’

  ‘You were furious,’ I explained, taking his question seriously. ‘The way I remembered you.’

  ‘That’s funny?’

  ‘You said I wasn’t going to take anything out of your office. I’m sure I wouldn’t have done that, if you objected.’

  ‘But you bloody-well did.’

  ‘I took...what?’ I asked, keeping my eyes on his.

  ‘Wages book, bank statements, cheque stubs, petty-cash books...’

  My memory had blank spots about my previous work as a Social Security Inspector, but I was fairly clear on one point: books were not impounded unless something very serious had been discovered. I sat and stared at him. In the shadowed car park beside the Social Security office, this man had caught up with me and smashed in my head with a large adjustable spanner, apparently to recover his books. So the issue must have been serious. I could remember nothing of what the issue had been.

  ‘I’ll get you the other half,’ he said, gesturing towards my glass. Perhaps my eyes on him had made him nervous.

  ‘No. No, thanks. I’m not supposed to drink too much alcohol.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I get headaches.’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked away. ‘I suppose you would.’

  We eyed each other cautiously. There seemed nothing more to say. He raised his hand from the table, then flapped it back. There was a hopelessness about the gesture. I thought he was about to leave, but he did not.

  ‘For heaven’s sake!’ I burst out. ‘What’s this all about? What do you want with me?’

  ‘I heard you were back in town.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been wondering when I’d be coming to hunt you out.’

  ‘I’ve only been back a week, myself.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From Winson Green.’

  ‘The prison?’

  ‘I got two years. Time off for good behaviour. Got out a week ago.’

  ‘Me too. Out a bit longer, though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A month ago. From the convalescent home.’ Then I was laughing, though I wanted to cry, and couldn’t understand either emotion. All I knew was that we’d both lost fifteen months of our lives, and what I knew of the reason didn’t make sense.

  This time he could laugh with me, but only miserably. I stopped when I saw I was making him afraid. Afraid of me? But I felt nothing, no desire for retribution, no fury, no haunting cry for revenge within me.

  ‘So what is it you want?’ I asked.

  He moved his glass around on the table, looking down at it. And mumbled something.

  ‘I didn’t hear that.’

  He looked up defia
ntly. ‘I want you to come to the garage and go through my books.’

  ‘It’s not my job...’

  ‘As a favour.’

  ‘Didn’t you know? I’m retired on health grounds. I’m not in the Civil Service now. Not your local Social Security Inspector.’

  This I offered to him savagely. My job was just one of the things he’d taken from me, though not by any means as important as the loss of my memory. The job was a loss I’d become reconciled to, the resentment, if any, being directed against the Department, which had been just a little too anxious to see the back of me, I thought. I mean, they could have given me unpaid leave for a year – two years – then taken me back. All right, it could be argued that I would never be able to handle the work, but they hadn’t given me the chance to give it a try. The Welfare Officer had been persuasive. Perhaps he’d been more concerned with the welfare of the Department. My memory did at least supply the information that I had not always conformed to rules and regulations.

  So my response to Clayton was savage, though not directed at him. All the same, he flinched, but he persisted.

  ‘As a favour.’

  ‘A favour...to you? Lord – you must be crazy.’ I said this less aggressively. I was beginning to realise there had to be more behind it than his plain request. Curiosity held me.

  His smile faded, but he went on stubbornly, as though he’d rehearsed it all. ‘I’ve been out a week. I told you. My wife’s been running the place, and doing a good job of it, with a bit of a hand from the accountant. But...’ A shrug. His huge shoulders moved heavily. ‘But I don’t know. There’s something wrong.’

  ‘If you’ve got an accountant...’

  ‘All the same, if you’d just give them a look through. You must’ve had years of experience...’ He left it hanging, like a bait, and either he was very clever or he’d dropped by accident right on the words that captured me.

  Experience, yes. I’d been the local Inspector for the Department of Health and Social Security for eight solid years. Normally, in the Civil Service, you get moved around the different sections, broadening the experience, but I’d held on to the Inspector’s job. It got me out of the office, to meet new people and new situations. If you like the Inspector’s job, there’d be nobody itching to take it from you. Your average civil service is not keen to get out on his own, away from his row of instruction books and his senior officers. So I’d been allowed to build up experience on the outside job. But that didn’t make me an accountant. I’d been interested in wages books, not company accounts; in contracts of service and industrial accidents, not profit and loss.

  But it had been experience, and one of the things I bitterly regretted was the waste, all of it gone for nothing. Now I was offered the chance to re-engage my interest, yet I was facing the rather frightening knowledge that I might have lost it all from my mind.

  ‘I’ve never had any training in accountacy,’ I said, trying to make it a definite rejection.

  He shrugged that away. ‘Come and have a look. It wouldn’t hurt you.’

  Was he offering me friendship, perhaps something more? A job as a wages clerk?

  I said: ‘Why not? Come on, then.’ I got to my feet. I had nothing better to do.

  He led me outside. He had no car, and for a moment I hesitated. His glance at me was speculative. ‘It’s only just down the road.’

  And yes, I had forgotten. Heavens, it was possible I’d had lunch at The Winking Frog that morning, before I went on to check his books, or whatever had taken me to his garage premises, Pool Street Motors. Ah, you see, let the subconscious do it, and the name came to me easily and smoothly.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I remember now.’

  Remembered driving down Pool Street from the pub in my Volvo, past the flower pot factory that was the cause of Pool Street. Or at least, was the cause of its name. More recently they’d switched to plastic pots, but I could remember the days when the kilns spread their special tangy fumes along this street, could remember it because it was way back, twenty years before the assault. Go back far enough, and everything was quite clear in my mind. The pool was where they’d taken their clay, and it was still there, nobody having troubled to fill it in. Pool Street Motors backed on to the pool. It was possible they shoved their useless old wrecks in there.

  Clayton was silent as we walked down the long hill, and I had no wish to speak, not even to think if I could get by without. It was late March, but not so long ago there’d been snow on this hill, though at that time I’d been safely tucked away where it didn’t matter. There’d been a bitter driving wind that other day, when I’d coasted down it with the Volvo. Five hours before the attack on me, that had been, a dark November day with the hills beyond the town hidden in the driven squalls. Five hours! It was the earliest memory of that day that I’d so far recovered. I felt a twinge of excitement and expectancy. Perhaps a visit to the garage would unearth much more. Perhaps it would please me. That, I didn’t know.

  I did not recognise the garage. The block of six self-service petrol pumps seemed to be new, certainly they were clean and bright. There was an unfamiliar cash office and self-service shop. The name across the front had been recently repainted: Pool Street Motors.

  ‘Tarted it up a bit,’ he said with pride.

  So...what did he find wrong? Little to complain of, surely. He took me round the back, past the car wash, which I didn’t remember at all, and up an outside flight of wooden stairs, which, suddenly, I did recall. Below this was the corrugated iron structure they used for car servicing, beyond that a dreary expanse of open space scattered with wrecks (help yourself to spares – bring your own tools) and beyond that the pool, looking exactly as it had always done, dreary and opaque, and dead.

  ‘The office,’ he told me, throwing open a door from the landing at the top.

  I’d have known it for an office, but not the office, not the last one I’d visited that day. I stood, and looked round, my heart suddenly hammering.

  My brief image of him standing behind his desk and shouting had no reality in this setting. For one thing, the desk was not in front of the window, as in my memory, but skewed across a corner. It was not even the same desk. Larger, more modern. How did I know this, I wondered, and yet my general impression, still carried with me as a subliminal feeling, was of squalor, of dirty, smoke-blackened walls and tatty girlie calendars, creaky wooden filing cabinets and uncertain folding chairs. The walls were now clean, the one calendar was of birds, the two visitor’s chairs were plastic and tubular steel. The filing cabinets were grey steel.

  I was in a strange office, with a stranger. I turned to look at him, and did not recognise him in this setting.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. My only memory of this place was of stress and emotion.

  He didn’t give me a chance to change my mind, but whipped open the top drawer of the nearest filing cabinet and lifted out a pile of account books and loose-leaf files, banged them down on the desk, and stood back.

  ‘Have a look through ‘em,’ he said, beaming at me proudly.

  It was simply stupid. Even if I’d been right on top of the job, I’d have needed hours, days...‘Oh...come on!’ I said, but all the same I looked at them.

  They were new. Everything was new around there, as though something had been wiped away as cleanly as my memory. New books. I lifted a cover, and was looking at a page of neat entries. The date on the first one was December 1st, fifteen months before, a fortnight after my assault. I opened the others. The same. Tidy and immaculate. Where were the oil-dirty account books, dog-eared with loose pages, some of them hanging torn from the covers, which suddenly I recalled so clearly, lying on that very same surface? No, the desk had changed. It was not the same surface, and not the same account books.

  I looked up abruptly, and for one brief second saw a different Tony Clayton. He was staring at me dourly, shoulders hunched and his head low, a savage anticipation in his eyes.

  ‘I’ll need the old books,
’ I said, as though I really intended to get down to the job.

  ‘They’re not here.’

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘The accountant’s got ‘em, I reckon.’

  ‘Reckon? You reckon? Don’t you know? You say your wife’s been looking after things. Haven’t you asked her? Where is she, anyway? What’s going on here, Clayton?’

  ‘You don’t know?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Would I ask you if I...?’

  ‘Don’t know about her?’ he asked heavily, no light now in his eyes.

  ‘How the hell would I know...’ I stopped, the loudness of my voice ringing from the walls, and suddenly I was afraid. I was a stranger to myself. This could not be me, this hot, furious and lost man, shouting my hatred–and yes, it was hatred–at Tony Clayton. I gripped the edge of the desk and stared down at those pristine books, placed there to mock me, and hung on. I had been told to relax, not to allow myself to become involved with stress. My head pounded, and for a moment the desk surface blurred. I could have sat back on to the swivel chair behind me, but somehow pride held me firm. Then I looked up.

  ‘You could ask your accountant for the old books, then maybe I’d get some sort of picture.’

  Still his voice seemed to be probing. ‘I thought you’d ask him.’

  I sighed. ‘When I was an officer of the DHSS I could’ve done that. But now I’ve got no authority at all. I don’t understand this. What does your wife say? What is it that you think is wrong?’

  He relaxed suddenly. ‘It’s a feeling.’ He shrugged, then walked across to stand glumly staring out of the window. His mood had changed. ‘All this – in only a year.’ He didn’t mean what he was looking at, the roof of the corrugated iron structure and the dreary pool. I knew what he meant.

  ‘Have you asked your wife?’

  ‘My wife isn’t here.’ His voice was dull, indistinct. ‘She’s disappeared.’

  Then, for a long minute, there was silence between us. I was aware that he had not brought me there to examine his books, but simply in order to make that statement. To me. Why me? I looked at his profile, the jaw hard now, none of the weakness I’d seen full face. I ventured: