The Suburbs of Hell

by Randolph Stow

  ‘You take that job,’ Frank said, ‘for a start.’

  ‘Thass a fuckin awful job,’ Dave complained. ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘Don’t whinge,’ Frank said. ‘You’ll do what you’re told. It’s not just Harry who’s blackmailing you; I am too. Now, there’s something I want to show you. Where’s Harry now? Not working, obviously.’

  ‘It’s Sunday,’ Dave pointed out. ‘He’s in the New Moon. He won’t be back before half-two.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Frank. He opened a drawer and took out something small which he dropped in the pocket of his jeans. ‘Let’s go round to yours.’

  When he looked in on Linda he was wearing his coat and a cap. ‘Oh no,’ she groaned.

  ‘Going out, darl. Not for long.’

  ‘We’re ready to eat in half an hour.’

  ‘I may make it,’ he said. ‘If not, use a bit of housewifely initiative, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘If you’re not back in time,’ she said, ‘your dinner will be on the doorstep in the snow. You and your bird-dog can sit and gnaw it out there.’

  ‘If you burn it,’ he said, ‘I’m going to make a shepherd’s pie with your ears in it. Jesus, Dave, either open the door or get out of the frigging way.’

  Outside Harry’s front door Dave stopped, blinking against the snow, and fumbled in the pocket of his coat.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Frank said. He fitted a key into the Yale lock and turned it.

  ‘Hey,’ said slow-witted Dave.

  ‘I’ll explain,’ said Frank. He pushed the door, stamping on the snowy step, and went into Harry’s living-room, where the little dog, sprawled before a dying fire, roused itself with a few yaps, but sank back again on recognizing Dave.

  ‘How did you come by that key?’ Dave wanted to know, with a censorious note in his voice.

  ‘I was living here once,’ Frank said. ‘I forgot to give it back. When Harry remembered to ask me for it, it’d gone missing. But it surfaced again when it wasn’t wanted.’

  ‘What did you fink you’d use it for?’ Dave demanded. ‘You was up to somefing.’

  ‘I’m about to tell you,’ Frank said. ‘First of all, make sure he’s not indoors.’

  But Harry was not in his bedroom or the bathroom, nor in Dave’s room. ‘Like I told you,’ Dave said, coming downstairs again, ‘he’s always in the New Moon Sunday lunch-times.’

  Frank had gone into the kitchen, and by the back door he said: ‘When we go out, don’t you say a word. Understand? There’s half a dozen yards we could be heard from. Even with the snow, someone might have a reason to be out.’

  Uncertainties made Dave particularly tractable. ‘Okay.’

  In the high-walled yard, hardly bigger than a room, one corner was taken up by an old brick privy, now a shed for coal and wood. Otherwise, it was bare, except for some massive and inconvenient lengths of driftwood which had been piled on the flagstones against a wall.

  Gesturing at the snow-coated timbers, Frank instructed Dave to help him move them aside. They were lifted without a sound on to unbroken snow.

  Squatted over the paving, Frank brushed away the cold powder which had sifted through the wood. Then he took off one glove, and dug from his jeans a complicated pocket-knife with which he began to dig around the edge of a slab.

  When he raised it, Dave saw a narrow parcel wrapped in black plastic lying in a shallow trench just wide enough to hold it.

  When a second flag had been lifted, he saw what the parcel must contain.

  Alarm and bewilderment made him stare. Frank was grinning up at him, enjoying his face. Frank was replacing his glove. He was sliding the bundle out from beneath a third flag which partly covered it, and standing up.

  The black plastic was revealed as a dustbin-liner. It fell to the snow. Underneath it was a wrapping of oily rags which, when he had removed them, were seen to be old towels.

  He was weighing in his gloved hands, familiarly, with enjoyment, a .22 rifle.

  Quietly he slid back the bolt and removed it, tucking it inside his belt. He reversed the rifle and put his eye to the muzzle, manoeuvring to get down the barrel a gleam of white light from the snow. After a moment he lowered and reversed it again, and replaced the bolt.

  If Dave had been allowed to speak, he would not have known what to say.

  Suddenly Frank bared his teeth in a grin of menace, and lunged at him, the rifle to his shoulder. Dave dodged back, but tripped on the driftwood and fell against a wall, scattering snow.

  The icy muzzle was on the skin of his throat. Frank was smiling straight into his eyes. After a moment, the firing-pin clicked.

  He stayed where he was, half slumped against the wall, looking on as the rifle was bound up again in its oily towels and sheathed in its dustbin-liner. He watched as it was laid again in its runnel of earth, and the flagstones fitted over it. When Frank gestured at him, irritably, to help replace the timbers, he stooped to oblige.

  At the kitchen door, following on Frank’s heels, he looked back and saw the fat snowflakes settling over the signs of their intrusion.

  Once in the living-room, Frank threw a couple of birch logs on the fire and sank into a chair. Finding his voice: ‘Thass Harry’s chair,’ said Dave, somehow objecting to this freedom.

  ‘Don’t let your mind stray, boy,’ said Frank. ‘We’ve got things to talk about.’

  But Dave did not want to talk, and sat down on the floor and fondled the dog, which paid little attention.

  ‘Well?’ said Frank.

  ‘Okay,’ said Dave, sounding resigned. ‘Tell me how that got there.’

  ‘I put it there,’ said Frank. ‘It’s mine.’ He looked with satisfaction at the downturned face, where conflicting emotions had arrived at a stalemate, and did not hurry with his reassurance. ‘But it’s not what you think. I’m not the Tornwich Monster.’

  Dave muttered: ‘I dint fink you was. Not for more than a minute or two, I dint fink so. But why did you put that there?’

  ‘When I was living here,’ Frank said, ‘I thought I needed a little hiding-place, for certain private things. I don’t think he’s nosy by nature, but he’s likely to happen on things by accident in a house this size. As you know. So that was the hiding-place I made for myself. Not as long as that, then; I had to extend it when I used it again.’

  ‘Why did you have it, the .22 ? Why did you hide it?’

  ‘I had it to shoot rabbits,’ Frank said reasonably, ‘and maybe the odd pheasant. It lived under the seat in my van. Then, a bossy little PC hardly old enough to shave got it into his head that I was the type to have all sorts of illegal weapons stashed away. I kid you not, he was seriously interested in the fact that my old folks were Irish. So I thought the rifle had better go into hiding for a while. It’s not licensed. I bought it from someone in Ipswich who’d obviously nicked it.’

  Dave’s slow mind was at work. ‘Well, then, that don’t have nofing to do wif the shootins.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ Frank asked. And as Dave looked up from the dog, he demanded to know: ‘How could anyone be sure that Harry didn’t find it?’

  ‘Ah, no,’ Dave breathed. ‘No, not Harry.’

  ‘People have wondered about him,’ Frank said. ‘The fuzz seemed to think he was as good a candidate as any?’

  But Dave had a sort of horror of the idea. ‘Harry—ah, you know Harry, friend of all the world. Or wants to be. He really liked Paul Ramsey, you know he did. And then there was Ena. Ah, no, mate—thass stoopid.’

  ‘If I accept that,’ Frank said, ‘then we’re talking about two weapons, exactly the same.’

  ‘Well, why not?’ Dave asked. ‘They int so very uncommon or hard to get. If somebody stole one and flogged it to you, that sort of prove that, don’t it?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Frank said, shrugging. ‘But if it was found, out there in his yard, Harry would have a hard time selling that idea.’

  ‘I dunno,’ Dave said, rubbing at his forehead with his fist. ‘Yes—yes, I do know
. You’re goonna have to come clean about it, so they can make their tests, like, to see if that is the one, and if there’s any fingerprints on it. I mean, thass what we got to do, even if that land you right in it. I mean, thass a dooty, mate.’

  ‘He—whoever he is—would have worn gloves,’ Frank said, ‘that’s for sure. They found nothing in Paul Ramsey’s house. I don’t think my prints would be on it—I made a good job of cleaning it before I put it there—but I can’t be sure.’

  ‘Oh my Christ,’ Dave said. ‘I never fought of that.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ said Frank; ‘I’m used to you.’

  But Dave ignored him, and pressed on. ‘If you really believe that—if you really do—I can’t understand why you dint sneak in here with your key and take that away, frow it in the sea or somefing, where nobody could get at it. Just s’ppoosin that you int havin me on about this, well, then, you could have disarmed him, like, after Paul Ramsey, and them uvver two could be alive now.’

  ‘Do you think,’ Frank asked, ‘that would have been a good time to go strolling through the streets with a rifle in my hand? Besides, you see, I didn’t believe it at first. After Paul Ramsey, I thought: “Well, that’s about the most unlikely idea that ever came into my head—but he had the means.” I was just sort of playing with the idea, amusing myself. And then he threatened me. Threatened,’ Frank said, jabbing at his chest with his thumb, ‘me.’

  ‘How?’ Dave asked, looking sceptical. ‘Freatened you how?’

  ‘Someone came into our house while we were sleeping,’ Frank said. ‘Someone wrote a note on a window, in Linda’s lipstick. It said: Not tonight—soon. She thought she recognized my brand of humour. I let her think so: in the end, I told her it was me, getting at her for leaving the back door unlocked. But as soon as I saw it, as soon as she showed it to me, I knew who had written it. God, I can’t tell you, it was like being hit in the wind. I felt him saying to me: “Look, boy, I’ve killed two people with a weapon that belongs to you, that probably has your prints on it, that might turn up anywhere with these prints on when I feel like parting with it. In the meantime, don’t think you’re safe yourself.”’

  Dave, painfully mulling over so many new ideas, was clicking his fingers to attract the big old cat, and when it approached began to stroke it.

  ‘You don’t believe that?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ Dave said. ‘Maybe. When you come into the Galley that night when we was there, people were sayin you looked upset, like. And then—well, like I told you the time when you was askin—he finish up his supper quick and say he have to goo hoom to watch somefing on the telly. I went to the Moon. I dint see him again till the next day.’

  ‘I reckon he came straight back to the quay,’ Frank said. ‘I think he had it under his arm and down the leg of his jeans. I mean, who’d look twice at Harry Ufford, in a big old donkey-jacket, walking a bit stiff? They’d just think he was half pissed again.’

  ‘But you weren’t shot,’ Dave said. ‘The Commander was shot.’

  ‘Just after I’d been talking to him. I’m not sure he hadn’t meant to fire a round at me, as a warning. Or an experiment, to see what I’d do. But the poor old Commander offered himself, so to speak, and he served the purpose. Which was to scare me half crazy.’

  Dave took that as a lightening of the conversation, and smiled. ‘Did it?’

  ‘I think,’ Frank said, ‘I was pretty nearly crazy for a week after that. When I came out of it, everything in that week seemed to have happened while I was drunk. Once I was sober again, I decided I’d do nothing at all, just wait and see. And everything stopped, nothing happened. I wonder why that should be.’

  A sudden thought made Dave scowl. ‘That was your idea that we should talk him into puttin me up here. That was you what persuaded me to stay when I was finkin of movin on.’

  ‘I wanted an eye kept on him,’ explained Frank, offhand.

  ‘If I could believe he was a murderer,’ Dave growled, ‘I should fuckin well murder you for that.’

  ‘Look, it’s been like a war,’ Frank said. ‘I’m not particular about how I fight it. I let him see, a few times too often, that I thought he was a thick old swede. So, instead of knockin the shit out me, which has always been his way when he takes offence, he’s set out to show me that he’s cunning, and dangerous. Fatally dangerous.’

  ‘I can’t credit it,’ Dave said, shaking his head. ‘Not my dad’s best mate, not Harry. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, unless that drank his beer or took the micky.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ Frank said, ‘have a dig around in that great brain and come up with a better theory.’

  ‘I already did,’ said Dave, glowering. ‘I don’t believe Harry know whass under that wood in the yard. Why should he know? I don’t believe thass been moved since you moved it, until today. My feory is, somebody else see you doin that. These walls are high, but not all that high. My feory is, someone was lookin out of an attic, or p’rhaps a barfroom window, and he get very interested in what you’re doin down here. My feory is, this person is a nut-case, and the excitement of this big secret he’s suddenly got is too much for him, and he finks he’s just got to fire a foo shots. Thass my feory, and that make a bit more sense to me than what yours do.’

  The little dog on the hearthrug woke and shook itself, and wandered over to sniff at Frank’s hand, dangling over the side of the chair. Frank fondled its ears, automatically.

  ‘Well, we don’t agree,’ he said. ‘But if anything should happen to me, someone knows where to find the weapon.’

  ‘There int nofing goonna happen to you,’ said Dave, with a trace of contempt. ‘Thass all over, monfs agoo.’

  ‘Even so,’ said Frank, meditating; ‘even so.’

  ‘Even so, what?’

  ‘He thinks he’s got a new complaint against me. He thinks I’ve got you mixed up in something he disapproves of, in his simple old country way. He’s put pressure on you.’

  ‘Oh, well, that,’ Dave said, ‘thass just doin the old family friend bit. He int goonna pass the deaf sentence ’cos of that. What we got to watch for is that he don’t start whisperin in the ear of someone like Taffy Hughes.’

  ‘Well, there you’ve a weapon,’ Frank said. ‘He’s got a weapon, and you’ve got a weapon: the same one. But be bloody careful how you use it. Just a hint, no details. Nothing about the hole in the yard.’

  ‘You’re,’ Dave said, gaping at him, ‘you’re so hard to suss out you int normal, you can’t be. First you do everyfing you can to make me believe that the chap what sleep in the room downstairs from me is a murderer, then you tell me to let him know I fink so. If I believed all your bullshit, I wouldn’t never goo to sleep again.’

  ‘There’s a lock on your door,’ Frank said. ‘But you haven’t understood me, anyway. I wasn’t meaning that you should come across to him as if you were condemning him or threatening to turn him in. You’d have to sound like a friend. Puzzled, but wanting to protect him. Get him to talk about it. That’d be—oh, that’d be fascinating.’

  Dave had been following intently, and suddenly slapped his drawn-up knees and got to his feet. ‘Now I understand,’ he said. ‘We’re slow, but we get there. Mrs Yorkshire Ripper, right? Brother Yorkshire Ripper, right? That’s it, innit, boy? You fink we might make a fortune out of sellin our memoirs to the papers.’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit of a pipe-dream,’ Frank said, ‘but you make your own opportunities in this life.’

  ‘You know,’ Dave said, looking down at him with extreme dislike, ‘at last you got me believin that you believe what you say. And it follow from that that you’re ready to put my life on the line for the sake of a foo quid. You believe my life’s in danger, or will be if I listen to you, and you don’t give a stuff, do you?’

  The sound of a key turning in the door made the partners start and turn in its direction.

  ‘Frank,’ said Harry, nodding at him. ‘I knoo you was here. Linda was lookin out of her front window when I com
e by, and she tap on the glass and say, if you don’t come soon, she say, you shall find her in a drunken stoopor.’

  *

  The snow had grown thick, blotting out the roofs of the houses across the way, and an updraught from the street tossed the flakes about crazily. They dashed themselves against the windowpane with the faintest of sounds of impact, leaving behind fuzzy stars.

  Dave sat on the edge of his bed with the rifle across his thighs. He loved the slight, businesslike weight of it. Lovingly he stroked it, its slick, oil-gleaming wood.

  On the floor beside the wrapping lay the grooming aids he meant to employ on it: the rags, the oil, the cord pull-through. It would gleam and become faultless from his love.

  In the room below Harry was sleeping off his midday beer. When he went out again, to drink some more before his early bedtime, Dave would have to return the wonderful thing to its shroud and hide it away under the snow.

  But for the time being it was his. And beside him on the bed lay two boxes of cartridges which he had found in a corner of the plastic bag. He picked up one of them and weighed it in his hand. It was full; the other was half empty. There was a satisfaction in its weight which he could not explain to himself. He opened the box, and felt again his awe at the workmanship of the marvellous little contrivances inside, jewellery in brass and lead.

  The roar of a motorbike in the street roused him from a sort of trance. He bent and reached down for his rags and oil.

  When Frank came home through the snowy night Linda was sitting in front of the television set. He leaned in the doorway, waiting a greeting, but she did not turn. He was very used to that pale profile, paler than ever in the light from the set.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘How about Black Sam, then?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, not looking at him. ‘You know.’

  ‘And you know, too. How?’

  ‘Ken Heath came,’ she said, apathetically. ‘He took me to see Donna. Then he drove her to her sister in Stourford.’

  He came in and took a chair across the room from her. ‘What have you heard? They don’t know a lot in the pubs.’

  ‘He gassed himself in his car,’ she said. ‘That’s all there is to tell, really. In a field near Birkness. There were some kids out enjoying the snow this afternoon, and eventually they got curious and looked in.’