‘Sure. We’ll go now.’
I sat beside him in the van again. We were silent for a long while. At last he spoke.
‘Can’t see why you’re troubling. What’s a day? Forget it, mate.’
‘Seems like I have.’
‘I mean...’
‘It’s just that I’d like to know what really happened.’
‘I’ve told you that.’
Oh yes, I thought, have you? But it wasn’t just the memory. My confidence in myself had been growing. That was Nicola’s work. But now, undermined by this scrambling of my mind – I winced at the memory of Clayton pounding those eggs with his fork – I wasn’t sure, again and even more so, what and who I was. I was a body, carrying around an alien personality and a tortured mind.
‘You’ve told me some,’ I conceded. ‘You’ve been helpful,
Tony. Thanks.’
‘All part of the service.’
‘There’s only one lie that I can tie down.’
He shook his head. ‘Not one.’
‘You haven’t explained why you followed me to the office.’
He drove a hundred yards and slowed for an island. ‘Where d’you want to be dropped?’
‘The bus station.’
‘And I did explain. You’d taken your car keys.’
‘But we know that’s wrong.’
I said that quietly. My heart was racing. I was playing my only good card and I didn’t dare to lose this trick.
‘Do we?’ he asked.
‘The keys were in the car when I picked it up.’
‘Oh...that!’ he said casually. ‘Sure. I see what you mean. We found ‘em on a hook in the foreman’s office, and wondered what they were, then tried them in the Volvo and they fitted. Oh...this was weeks after. But they weren’t in the car on that evening.’
I felt he’d slammed me back into the seat. I tried to shrink down into it, away from the fact. Pain hammered between my eyes.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I croaked. It was too...Christ, I couldn’t find the word...too...too...facile.
‘Don’t take my word for it,’ he said easily. ‘When I went out to it, we had to push it round the back. The keys weren’t in it then.’
‘We?’ I asked, one single, narrow lane of retreat still available.
‘Me an’ Charlie Graham. Here’s your bus station. You ask him. If he hasn’t left.’
I managed to pull back my lips from my teeth. He’d stopped. I fumbled for the door. ‘How...c...convenient,’ I stammered. I slammed the door. ‘Thanks, anyway.’
But he didn’t hear me, simply took the van round in a tight lock and drove away, taking my gumboots and maps with him.
I was standing in the wide and high opening which was the entrance to the bus station. Already the light was going from the sky, and inside that high, echoing shed the few lights up in the latticed steel rafters were making heavier shadows in the gloom. I moved inside. Diesel fumes polluted the air and engines throbbed. Two buses waited, but they were locals, no use to Charlie Graham, who’d want to get as far away as possible.
Along one side was a row of booking offices, rest rooms and toilets. I walked along them quickly, verifying his absence from most by a mere glance through the smeared windows. At the end was a cafeteria. The huge complex seemed half dead, at that time nobody wanting to go anywhere. In an hour the building would be packed, the din deafening in the echoing vastness. In the cafeteria there were three people, two women facing me, one man with his back to me, a kit bag and a haversack beside his chair. He had the general dimensions of Graham. I approached, and touched his shoulder.
His nerves must have been tensed to breaking point. One touch and he was on his feet, whirling on me, eyes wild and fists clenched. Seeing who I was, he gave a short yip of anger, then he sprang past me, his chair flying, me after it as he put his hand on my shoulder and used it to boost his speed. I lay there, legs tangled in the chair, and watched him gallop out into the departure area.
An elderly woman put her hand to my shoulder and helped me up. ‘What an unpleasant person,’ she said. ‘Are you hurt?’ I said I wasn’t. Her friend asked whether I’d noticed his eyes. She was nodding, nodding. My elbow ached, but I was not displeased.
‘He forgot his luggage,’ I said. I heaved them up and took them outside. No sign of him.
There was plenty of room. I set them down on the blackened concrete, one each side of me, and waited. He hadn’t many places to hide, and I was standing guard over the sum total of his worldly possessions.
Eventually he appeared, first a head round the entrance to the Gents, then the rest of him, dragged reluctantly into the open. He approached. I made no move. If he snatched up his belongings, with them he’d not be able to run as fast as me. When he came closer I saw that even without them he wouldn’t have got far. He looked terrible, all of a twitch, face drawn and flabby, eyes blank but huge. He was wiping his hands down the seat of his jeans, and went on doing it all the time we were speaking.
‘Where’re you heading?’ I asked.
He stood in front of me. ‘What d’you want?’
‘To talk.’
‘Oh yeah. I can see it coming off.’ He gave a false snigger, looking round as though for approval. ‘What about?’
‘You know what about, Charlie. That day. The day I came to the garage.’
‘It’s gone, mate. Way back. Forget it.’
‘I can’t forget it. Want to sit down?’
‘No. Not with you.’
‘So we talk standing. How you like. But we’re going to talk. I’ll ask questions. You give answers. Is that understood?’
‘Then ask ‘em.’ He shrugged.
‘I went there. That day. You were there, with Arthur Pitt and Geoff Tranter.’ It’s always a good idea to show how much you know. He was blinking at me. ‘I asked a lot of questions. What about?’
‘Some bleedin’ accident, that’s all. Don’t you know?’
‘Some accident? What accident, Charlie?’
‘That feller Rampton.’
‘Not George Peters?’
‘What the hell’s George got to do with it?’ he yelped.
‘It was why I’d gone there. So we talked about Colin Rampton?’
‘Rampton’s accident, but you kept on about George. You crazy or somethin’?’
‘Maybe, Charlie, maybe. But all the same, an accident. Tell me about it.’
‘Well...you know...’
His attention wandered as soon as he was asked to initiate a thought pattern. I said: ‘Did Rampton have his car on a pair of jacks?’
‘Yes. Bloody stupid. The clown. We told him. Said to him, “Don’t be a prat” but he wasn’t gonna wait. Not on yer nelly, ‘cause he was working on his boss’s time.’
‘His boss. That was the accountant, Michael Orton?’
‘Dunno his name, do I?’
‘All right. So Rampton had got it on jacks.’
‘I was using the lift.’ A trace of arrogance had crept in. He was gaining confidence.
‘So I understand.’
‘Asked him to wait.’
‘Sure you did, Charlie. But he didn’t, did he! He’d got the car on two jacks – this’d be the front, would it?’
‘The front – of course. How else’d he do his track-rod ends?’
‘This was what he was doing, was it? His ball joints?’
‘You know that,’ he said pettishly, almost stamping his foot.
‘I’m asking you.’
‘You said it was. Ball joints. What you said. So you musta bleedin’ well known.’
‘Maybe I did at the time, Charlie. Don’t get excited. So...front end on jacks...any bricks chocking the wheels?’
‘Well...he would, wouldn’t he!’
‘Did he? I would, myself, though I wouldn’t lie under it like that. But he did?’
‘Lie under it? Yer.’
‘Did he have bricks chocking the rear wheels?’
‘I suppos
e,’ he agreed sullenly.
‘Do you know?’
‘He asked me to find ‘em for him.’
‘House bricks?’
‘Not quite. Breeze blocks.’ Now he was uneasy, his eyes going beyond me, sliding away.
‘A bit bigger than house bricks, then. But all the same, the car rolled off the jacks.’
‘But not his arm. His chest. Yer kept sayin’ about his arm. Wasn’t that.’
‘I know, Charlie. But the car did roll off the jacks?’
He shuffled his feet. ‘Y’ keep on and on.’
‘Yes, I do. And I’m going to keep doing it till you answer me.’
‘I clocked you one last time,’ he said darkly, lowering his head. ‘Can do it again.’
I looked up into his smeared eyes, beyond it to his pickled brain. He’d done that to himself, I thought. Dear Lord, and here I was, near frantic because mine might be the same. But he...he’d had a choice.
‘Yes, I’m sure you can,’ I said easily, sure he couldn’t. ‘Is that why you did it last time – because I went on insisting?’
‘Didn’t take no fer an answer.’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t an answer.’
‘Y’er doing it again!’ he cried feebly. ‘On and on, wavin’ your soddin’ bits of paper. You wasn’t goin’ to get me signin’ nothin’, I can tell yer.’
‘So you clocked me one, you say?’
‘Well...enough’s enough. Kept on. Somebody had to stop yer flappin’ mouth.’
Charlie coming at me with his eyes wild, and me sliding away.
‘Where was this, Charlie?’
‘In the garage, you goon. Where else?’
‘Whereabouts in the garage?’
‘That corner, by the lift. That was where I was workin’, the lift. In that corner.’
‘Where the old cans and oily rags are?’
He laughed in my face. ‘Yer. Great, that was. Brilliant. Should’ve seen your face. Flat on yer back in all that oil and yellin’ out...Shoulda seen your face...’
‘And my jacket, I bet.’
‘Well yes. A write-off, that’d be. Here...that what you’re after me for? Is that it? To pay for your mangy old jacket?’
‘No, it’s not that. It’s to get the story straight. Such as – did the car roll off the jacks?’
‘Y’ keep sayin’ that!’ he howled dismally.
‘Saying it again. Did it?’
‘Yer,’ he admitted reluctantly.
‘How...with bricks – breeze blocks – against the rear wheels?’
‘They do.’
‘No they don’t. Not without a shove, they don’t.’
‘Lay off it, will yer!’
‘So what pushed the damn thing off its jacks, Charlie?’
‘I dunno what’s the matter with you. Where d’yer get it from?’ He’d got his face close to mine. There was panic, as far as his eyes would register panic. ‘Lay off it, will yer!’ he said again.
I grabbed hold of a bunch of sweat shirt that’d really earned its name. ‘I don’t know where I got it from, damn it,’ I shouted. ‘I just know. Something nudged it off the jacks. What was it, Charlie? Come on. Give.’
‘It was a car,’ he said hoarsely.
‘Ah! A car nudged the one Rampton was lying under. Nice. What car?’
‘How the hell...’ He stopped, dragging himself free and looking round. ‘I don’t know. Came in from the yard, and it was dark. No lights. Leave it be, for God’s sake. I ain’t tellin’ you nothin’ else.’
I sighed. I nearly had something. ‘Take it easy,’ I told him. ‘Let’s have a recap. I was there. I got a statement all filled in…’
‘But I wasn’t goin’ to sign it.’
‘Why not? Seems easy enough to me.’
‘You’d put that in,’ he said, spit running down his chin.
‘I see. I’d put in the bit about a car shoving Rampton’s off its jacks...’
‘But I never said that.’
‘Not till now?’ Again he looked furtive, but he nodded agreement. ‘And that was why you wouldn’t sign it?’
‘Wasn’t gonna stick my neck out, was I!’
Then...where had I got it from? The picture was there in my mind, yet none of those three had admitted to having seen the second car. I’d known about it at that time, or I wouldn’t have written it into the statement. There was only one answer – I’d learned it from George, who’d seen the incident, and he had told me about it. Told? But I had to believe he’d put it in a written statement, whatever evidence there was against that.
‘You seen what happened to George,’ said Charlie quietly, gulping.
‘So George saw it?’
‘Musta done.’
‘And made a statement?’
‘Y’ don’t think he’d’ve been so stupid!’
‘But he did.’
‘Never.’
‘I had a statement from him...’ I stopped. No I hadn’t. I’d had a withdrawal from him, written not with my oblique nib, but with an ordinary nib. And yet...hadn’t George Peters simply used the incident he’d seen and transferred it to cover his own injury? In which case...
‘How the hell could I have known about the second car,’ I demanded in fury, ‘unless George had told me?’
‘That stupid bugger,’ he muttered.
‘Stupid or not, George told me...’
‘Not George,’ he cut in. ‘That stupid bugger, Arthur Pitt.’
‘What...about...him?’
‘He told you. I heard him at it.’
And Arthur Pitt had fallen out of a window! LSD, Clayton had suggested. It stood for: Less Said Dead.
‘There’s my bus,’ said Graham in agitation.
‘Never mind your bus.’
‘I’ve gotta get it.’
His words were rolling round and through my mind, with me trying to seize on to a thought, an idea, anything to silence the clamour.
I knew now. I’d believed that George Peters had witnessed the death of Colin Rampton, and had hijacked the story for himself. But it need not have been like that. What about the other way round? Perhaps I had heard the story of the death of Colin Rampton, pieced together from what I’d drawn from the three men word by word, and I had written it into a statement. Three statements, one for each man. But then they had refused to sign them. And at this later time, when it suited my garbled mind to play about with reality, I had taken the substance of those statements from the tangled wreck of the drawer in which my memory was filed, and had allocated it to George Peters.
My brain had needed that imaginary statement to rationalise the stirrings of a dormant conscience. Somewhere, money had come into it. I needed to believe that I would not have accepted money. So I’d invented a statement, even to the spluttering of an oblique nib as he wrote it.
‘I’ve gotta go,’ he was saying. He had my arm. ‘You’re all right, matey. All right. I gotta catch that bus.’
I reached over, clamping my hand on his wrist. ‘No...wait...please.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You didn’t sign...you said you didn’t sign?’
‘Christ man! You spent all day, wavin’ your bleedin’ pen under my nose.’
I fumbled in my breast pocket, dropped my comb, but got the pen. Waved it under his nose.
‘This pen?’
‘Lor...no. Not a gold pen. Not that’n. It was a blasted black pen. Black fountain pen. Look. Gotta run...’
He bent down and scrambled his luggage together, for one second put a hand on my shoulder, then he was running for the bus and shouting as the door began its automatic slide shut, scrambling aboard as it hissed open for him.
I was on my knees, feeling around for the fallen comb because I had difficulty seeing. My fingers played with it, until they came up with it between them. I stared at it closely until I was sure it was my comb. Then I had it in my top pocket again, and I was aware of a surge of triumph at such an achievement. But I was still on my knees, trying to
work out how a biped raised itself from that position to the vertical. One foot sideways, no...forwards, under your behind. The other. Straighten. Easy now. Turn. Head for the lights. Along the wall, there were benches along the wall.
I slowly lowered myself to a bench. It was necessary to concentrate. On a pen. A black pen. A black ink black pen. My spare pen, it’d been. Funny how I hadn’t remembered it. Nothing fancy about it. Nobody but me seemed to like an oblique nib, so I’d had to have something to offer people to write with. No ball-points for me. Hated ‘em. Good old traditionalist Cliff Summers. So I’d carried that pen. I hadn’t got it now, but I’d had it then. Charlie Graham had just told me that.
And if I’d had it then, on that day, then George Peters could have used it to write out his withdrawal. That surely proved there never had been a statement, and every damned memory I’d managed to dredge into the present was either false or distorted.
A sane man could not support such thoughts. Not and remain sane. I sat and considered that proposition for a long while, and wondered what, in my position, a sane man would do.
I went to buy a cup of coffee, very pleased that I could still manage that simple action.
16
It was a long while before I realised I had not asked Graham about the keys in my car, even longer before I remembered I should have asked him why he’d been searching George’s room. But by then it didn’t matter.
I was in the shopping complex beyond the bus station. I hadn’t got far, but I’d managed to move. My fingers were playing with a carpeted surface. For some moments I could concentrate on this, on the awareness that they’d surfaced the concrete benches with pieces of carpet to take the chill from them. There was comfort in the thought that I could sit there as long as I liked, but this was a release to my mind, which, having parked me safely, flew away again into chaos. The present slid away.
There’s nothing unusual in this. Quite often, pondering deeply, it’s possible to return to the present and realise your train’s run through two stations and you hadn’t even noticed. Worse, perhaps, when you’re driving: that four or five sets of traffic signals are behind you, and you can’t remember driving through them. Perhaps on red! But it’s all right. Nothing to worry about, because your mind’s right on the job, part of it controlling the car, observing, operating normally. The real and the present are still dominating, the contemplation in the background.
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