But what happens when the contemplation becomes dominant, and all there is to contemplate is a mess of darkness? When reality is no haven to which you can awaken with relief and hope? Reality was a cold seat, a draught round my ankles, a splitting pain in my head.
I raised my eyes, the focus slow in adjusting.
A man in a green uniform was standing in front of me, looking down at me with concern, one of the precinct guards the council had regrettably had to take on in case of trouble. I was trouble. I turned my head and looked around. I was his only trouble. At closing time, barriers at each end of the complex were shut and locked. Another recent happy innovation. Now the place was empty, except for me.
‘Can’t stay here,’ he said, shaking his head, his radio in his hand just in case I disputed it.
‘No,’ I agreed.
‘Got anywhere to go?’ He was concerned.
‘Yes. Somewhere to go.’
A hundred places there were to go, but would I want to be there when I arrived?
‘Got to lock up,’ he said, watching me as I forced myself to my feet. Probably he had this every day, the job of clearing out the vagrants who really did have no place to go. He was kind about it.
I found myself the wrong side of the barrier, the guard still at my elbow. I need help, I thought, but didn’t know in what way.
I need Nicola, I thought.
It seemed like a blinding flash of inspiration, but Nicola was in the present of my life, and I’d been watching George Peters writing out the statement that he hadn’t written, and I’d seen Tessa Clayton offering me money in an envelope that she hadn’t offered. They would continue to do that until I found the magic word to silence them. It was a miracle that Nicola had been able to intrude.
I had no idea of the time. Twice I raised my wrist and stared at my watch, but the information didn’t register. All I knew was that I had to reach Nicola. Hadn’t she said something about her place? Wasn’t I going there for some reason? Books entered into it. Office records. I was supposed to be going to Nicola’s place...but I couldn’t remember where it was.
The only possibility was to go to the Social Security office and hope she was there. My legs led me there. So many times I’d found my way to that office, from all directions, that I simply allowed instinct to take over, whilst in my mind Graham was again charging at me and attacking me, and I was sliding on my back into that oily black corner...
I realised that I now knew where my green Harris tweed jacket was. Soaked in grease and black oil, it was hanging amongst all those equally black overalls along the back wall of the foreman’s office at Pool Street Motors. In that office I must have emptied my pockets – why else had my wallet been in the briefcase? – and hung it up out of the way. One ruined jacket. And hung my keys on the rack of hooks there? No, no! That image was false. As false as all my other images? No...wait, my brain shouted. My images were real, even if distorted and inaccurate.
I stood in the empty and dark parking patch of the Social Security office, realising that I had made a logical thought. It might have been wrong, but I’d used my brain. When I raised my eyes to the dark, blank windows, I could barely see them for the tears in my eyes.
And then I could again see Tessa offering me a piece of brown paper, or an old envelope, with a number on it...and my self-congratulation collapsed. I needed Nicola, and her window was as dark as the others.
My hand fumbled the key into the side door and I opened it, went inside, made my way up the stairs. I was putting on lights as I went. It seemed to me that I was making signals in the darkness, signals that might bring her to me. I made no attempt to be silent. All was long past the point where I might worry what was right and what was wrong.
She had been working there. The briefcase was on the floor, open, beside her chair...our chair. On the desk was spread half a dozen books, one of them open. She had been sitting there, working, and had got to her feet and walked out.
I sat in the chair. These books I recognised. I’d seen them before, battered, corners dog-eared, oily and fingered, with no titles on their covers. Oh yes, I’d seen them before, in a pile on Clayton’s desk in his main office. They were the poorly-kept, even pitiful, office records with which he’d managed to run his business. Bank statements. Cheque book stubs. Petty-cash. Invoices. Work sheets. MOT records. Wages book.
Wages book?
Wages meant that he’d paid wages. Deep, that, but relevant. I opened it. Yes, this was his wages book. Barely readable because of the illiterate writing and the childish figures, smeared with oil, in places dissolved by oil, but nevertheless there were gross amounts, deductions for income tax and insurance and sundries, and weekly payments. C. Graham. G. Tranter. A. Pitt.
This meant that he had employed these three men, that he had kept the correct records and made the correct payments. There had therefore been nothing wrong. I’d have made no fuss about that aspect of the work. It was no more than confirmation that there could have been no official demand or request from me for money.
I got up from the chair abruptly, rubbing my face with my palms. Then I sat again. My whole afternoon at the garage must have been spent on the entirely different aspect of the accident to George Peters, which hadn’t happened.
The terrible thing was that I knew I had never seen inside the covers of those books. There would have been no need to take them away, except as a favour for Tessa, as an excuse to smuggle out an envelope of money for her...but she had had no envelope of money to slide between the pages of that wages book, because Clayton had slipped it into his pocket.
What I should have done at that point was get up and walk away from that desk. But the desk was my only contact with Nicola. I sat, eyes shut, and concentrated. Her address – she’d given it to me. Nothing came. I could phone – but I didn’t even know her surname. Nicola...what? But I’d heard it once. Only once. My former manager had used her surname. Hadn’t he said: ‘I thought I heard Miss So-and-so...’
Miss Waldron!
I opened my eyes and reached for the phone book. Waldron, Waldron. Nancy, Neville...Nicola!
The phone had been left connected through. My finger shook as I dialled. It rang, and at once a voice answered.
‘Nicky! Thank heaven, I was...’
‘It’s not Nicola,’ I said, already feeling rattled.
Silence. It was a woman who had answered. Now it was agony to keep torturing my memory for facts.
‘Is that Marsha?’ I asked.
‘Yes...Who...’
‘My name’s Cliff Summers.’
‘Oh...yes.’
‘I must reach her.’
‘I don’t know...’ Then Marsha’s own worry came tumbling free. ‘She was at the office. I was expecting her home. Was cooking something special, because you were coming.’
‘Yes.’
‘She phoned. Said she’d come across something. You know what she’s like. Simply had to check it, not a moment to lose. She said she might be late, and I was to keep you entertained, but you haven’t come, and it’s all spoiling...’
‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice had been climbing into hysteria. ‘Marsha, did she say what she’d come across?’
‘No.’
‘Or where she was going?’
‘What’re we going to do?’
‘Or anything at all?’ I pleaded.
‘She said something about a Day Work Book.’
‘Day Work Book?’ What the hell was that?
‘Yes.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Oh, where could she have gone?’ Marsha wailed.
‘I’ll find out,’ I promised emptily. ‘What exactly did she say about this Day Work Book?’
A pause. A clicking sound of a tongue expressing annoyance. ‘I know,’ she burst out. ‘She said it wasn’t with the rest, and she was going to chase it up.’
‘Thank you,’ I managed to say.
I hung up, stared at the books, then sorted through them frantically. W
hat on earth could Nicola have meant? There was certainly nothing to record the daily input of work and its clearance. The words Day Work Book would have described it. But where...
It should have been simple to work out. Nicola had said she’d be late. The person she would have to approach would be Michael Orton. She had jumped from her seat and dashed out to see him. But surely not at his office. Orton never stayed late. So...at his home? Had she really gone dashing along to see him at his home? My previous home! Oh...surely not. But I had told her he’d taken the books home.
I was already dialling the number. It rang. The same thing happened.
‘Michael?’ she asked. ‘Where are you?’
‘It’s Cliff, Val.’
‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing, phoning me now...’
‘Heh! Val, it’s me. Take it easy, will you.’
I heard her take a deep breath. ‘Sorry Cliff. But I’m so worried. He hasn’t come home.’
Another one! It didn’t take even the tattered remnants of my brain to put two and two together. The question now was where. Holding fiercely to panic, I said:
‘Have you had a visitor?’
‘Who? Oh, I see. A young lady.’
‘Nicola...’
‘She didn’t give her name.’
‘But she came to see Michael?’
‘How do you know this?’
‘What time, Val?’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she demanded. ‘You’ve never used that tone with me.’
‘What time?’
‘Around seven.’
I stared at my watch. Eight-thirty. ‘Did she say what she wanted?’
‘I don’t know. Get off the line. He might be trying to get through.’
‘Don’t you dare hang up,’ I snapped. ‘Val, do you hear me?’
‘I hear you.’ Her voice was very small.
‘Did she say what she wanted?’
‘She was strange. You obviously know her. Don’t you find her strange?’
‘What did...’
‘All right. All right. Something about a book, an accounting book, I suppose. As though Michael would have it here! Really!’
‘Did she say why...’
‘No, she didn’t. We chatted. She said how much she liked my car. You know, the BMW.’
‘But he didn’t arrive?’
‘No.’
Then where had she gone? I moaned to myself.
‘He rang while she was here,’ said Val.
‘Then why in God’s name...’
‘Kindly moderate your voice.’
‘Sorry.’ The top of my head lifted to accommodate the effort.
‘Go on.’
‘He’d phoned to say he’d be late. I told him your young lady was here, and he spoke to her on the phone.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. She simply said she’d see him there, and hung up.’
‘See him where?’
‘He was calling from his office.’
‘But where did they arrange to meet?’
‘Heaven knows, Cliff, and if he’s having it off with your woman friend at this very minute, I tell you, Cliff...’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Val,’ I said angrily, and I hung up.
Michael Orton Associates! My fingers flicked and fumbled through the phone book. His phone rang on and on. I hung up, defeated.
She was missing. It had been for too long for any simple explanation to cover it. Orton was missing, but I wasn’t going to worry about him. What I had to fear was that they were missing together. And where.
I groaned in frustration. Nicola had been sitting there, and had suddenly gone to look at a Day Work Book. Therefore, she had seen something. I drew towards me the account book that had been open on her desk when I arrived.
It was a book of invoices, or rather, of copy invoices. The carbon paper used had served out its life, and the copy I was staring at was barely legible. Date: 10 Nov. 1984. That was six days before my visit there, four days after the death of Colin Rampton.
Vehicle: BMW 525
Registration Number: CWS 73 P
Description of Work Completed:
To realigning steering, checking tyre pressures, checking brakes, test on road. Pull to right now corrected. To checking and topping-up of battery, oil-level, gearbox level, brake fluid level.
Signature: T. Clayton.
Accepted as above: M. Orton.
I saw now what had attracted Nicola’s attention. The registration number. It had my initials: CWS. But she couldn’t have known why.
This was just before I bought the Volvo. It had been the reason I’d bought the Volvo. We’d been married three months, and Val was still trying. One day she drove me into town. She’d been using her old Jag at that time, and had taken me to the showroom where they had ready for the road, taxed, insured, and all checks completed: one BMW 525. Somebody had gone to extensive trouble to locate the district using the registration prefix: CWS. Edinburgh, it turned out to be. At Val’s instructions. It was a rather laboured gesture of personal consideration, and my instinct was to reject it. But her kind thought had been there. I’d accepted the car with gratitude and driven it home, and there, gently but firmly, I’d told her I just could not use it. A BMW 525 with a personalised number plate was simply too ostentatious for a Social Security Inspector to use, but of course Val hadn’t wanted me to go on with the job, anyway. The car was intended, really, to persuade me not to go on with it. Because of this, I’d had to reject it, and because of it, as a gesture of independence – which I now realised to have been infantile – I’d bought the Volvo. Only fractionally less ostentatious, but mine.
So she’d parted with her Jag, which had begun to drink oil, and used the BMW herself.
But Nicola could not have known this. The initials must have caught her attention. Yet she’d gone to my former home.
Perhaps she had gone there because of the registration number, and had discovered it was now Val’s car. And then she had made an appointment to see the Day Work Book.
Why? What could that have told her? The day the work was done?
Oh dear Lord! I thought. What had Nicola seen? What had she realised, from having seen it?
The fact that I couldn’t see anything in it didn’t mean that she hadn’t. She was bright. She would’ve used feminine logic, jumping barriers and associating impressions. Whatever she’d done, it had been for me, in order to rationalise my missing day and put my mind at rest.
But where else but to Orton’s office could it have taken her?
I set my elbows on the table and buried my face in my hands, and tried to think. To find her, and quickly, I needed to make sense out of all my conflicting images. I’d needed her help, but now, I believed, she needed mine. My poor, faltering and battered mind would not work. Every time I had approached a new avenue of information, I’d been presented with a fresh contradiction. Only one item of information remained to be explored.
I knew where to find my Harris tweed jacket.
But that way, I was certain, lay insanity. I knew what I’d find in that jacket. There’d be a black fountain pen, with which George Peters had written a withdrawal of his claim, so that I’d have had no reason to go to Pool Street Motors. And there’d be a piece of brown paper, or a brown envelope, on which Tessa had written a phone number for me to call, in order to deliver money she couldn’t have handed me, because Tony had had it in his pocket – although I’d seen her doing it.
In those two items I would have to recognise the collapse of all reason.
Yet I had nowhere else to turn. I had to go to my jacket, in the hope that truth, however frightening, would take me to Nicola.
And if that, I thought grimly, was a logical idea, then surely I was already climbing the wall.
I thought this with a sour, internal humour that surprised me. But I was busy steeling myself to an action that terrified me through and through. Didn’t one traditionally face terror with
humour? Wasn’t that the way to go down – laughing?
I wasn’t aware that the door behind me had opened until Bill Porter spoke.
‘I guessed it was you.’ He stood in the doorway, with two uniformed men behind him. ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’ he asked.
I groaned. Another minute and I’d have persuaded myself I could face the Harris tweed jacket.
‘Doing what you should be,’ I told him, angry that he’d disturbed my thoughts. ‘Trying to make sense of it.’
‘We’re making sense. It’s you who’s not. Come along, Cliff, let’s have you out of here. You’re trespassing on Government property. I could take you in...’
‘I’m finished here.’
‘And what you expect to achieve here, I don’t know.’
‘How many more people have got to die before you take action?’ I demanded. ‘Colin Rampton, Arthur Pitt, George Peters, Tessa Clayton...how many more?’
‘I’ll run you home. You need some sleep. Look at you, for God’s sake!’
I flung away his arm. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘And you’re talking nonsense.’
‘It’s Orton you ought to be talking to. Haven’t you realised that, yet?’
The two constables glanced at each other. Bill came to the desk and stared down at the books. ‘Is that where it says it? That I ought to speak to Michael Orton.’
‘Nicola saw something...’
‘You’re obsessed, Cliff. If you don’t leave voluntarily, and now, I’m taking you into custody.’
He wasn’t real, poor old Bill. Not with it, as they say. Reality was a Harris tweed jacket hanging in the foreman’s office. Now it was beckoning me, like a spectre’s finger.
‘Don’t worry, I’m going.’
Then, out in the car park, I calmly waited for them to leave before I pocketed the key and walked away. For some reason, dignity seemed to be called for. I watched them drive away, then I went to catch a bus.
When every nerve strained for action and called for speed, when my heart cried out for Nicola, in danger I was certain, when time was an enemy that might erode my resolution...I caught a bus. This seemed logical to me. On the reverse face of the urgency there was trepidation. I wanted to run just as fast, but in the other direction. Cowardice demanded this. I thought I’d done rather well to climb on a bus at all. I was still on the right side of doing nothing; I was moving towards Pool Street Motors.
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