Plender

by Ted Lewis

  “I’ve told you,” I said. “Straight up. It’s nothing to do with me.”

  He gave me another look.

  “I hope to Christ you’re giving it me straight.”

  “I am, and that’s a novelty in here, Peggy.”

  “Because seeing her in here with that feller, and you being in here as well, well, you do see what I mean.”

  “She was with a feller?”

  “Of course she was with a feller,” he said. “You don’t think she’d come in here on her own, do you?”

  I took a drink.

  “I don’t quite follow. You saw her in here with a feller and me in here at the same time, and somehow there’s a connection?”

  Peggy raised his eyes to the ceiling.

  “My God, it’s a right little Shirley Temple we’ve got here,” he said. “Butter wouldn’t melt in her little mouth. Look, this feller comes in here quite often with his dollies. Sometimes your friend Mr. Gurney’s been in when he’s been in. Saturday you were in when he was in. I know you and your watching. So I’m not completely out of my tiny mind when I think maybe there’s a connection.”

  “Well, there isn’t,” I said.

  “Well, sorry I spoke, I’m sure.”

  I lit a cigarette.

  “So you know the feller, do you?”

  “Well, when I say I know him, only through coming in here. We always have a few words. He likes camping it up. Actually I always rather fancied him. He thinks he isn’t, but I know damn well he is.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Experience, Mr. Plender, experience.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “Yes, I do, his first name. Why, do you want to pinch him off me?”

  I ignored the remark and said, “So what do you think he’s done? Chopped her up in little pieces and fed her to the ducks.”

  “How should I know what he’s done to her,” he said. “I don’t know what fellers do to girls.” He smirked at me. “No, but seriously, you never know these days. There’s all sorts of strange people weaving in and out of life’s rich pattern, aren’t there, Mr. Plender?”

  I let that one pass too.

  “I must say though, I’m relieved to know it’s nothing to do with you. For my sake, that is.”

  “Well, it probably isn’t anything anyway. They may have gone for a dirty weekend in Scarborough and decided to make it a dirty week.”

  “Maybe. But if she goes missing much longer, I might do myself a bit of good with my friendly policeman. Now I know you’re not involved, that is.”

  “You mean Driscoll?”

  “Who else? Do you know I reckon they’d do better at recruiting if they advertised the kind of benefits that he’s knocking up instead of all this palaver about basic pay.”

  “How do you mean, do yourself a bit of good?”

  “Gawd give us strength. Tell him. About the feller. The feller with the girl. I mean, if she goes missing over the week, somebody down there’d like to know who she was seen with last, especially if it means they don’t have to move their big bottoms outside the station.”

  Another number by Harpers Bizarre began on the juke box. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Andrea and Len walk into the bar. They didn’t acknowledge me and I didn’t acknowledge them.

  “Yes,” I said. “I suppose they would.”

  “I’d smell of violets. All over.”

  “So what’ll you do?” I said. “Just wait a few more days and if she doesn’t turn up then tip the nod?”

  “Yes,” he said. “If she turns up, she turns up. If not, I’ll offer my services as a public-spirited citizen.”

  “Of course,” I said, “the feller she was with—what did you say his name was?”

  “Peter.”

  “Peter—he may not know where she is either. I mean, she may have gone missing after he’d left her.”

  “May have done,” Peggy said. “For all I know she may have gone to her grannie’s in Macclesfield but they’d still appreciate the gesture.”

  “Even if the gesture was futile?”

  “Nobody would know whether it was futile or not until they found the girl, would they?”

  “No,” I said, “you’re right there, Peggy.”

  I got up and Peggy slid himself out of the booth.

  “Anyway,” I said, “I’ve got to get a move on. Things to do.”

  “I’m sure,” said Peggy.

  “Good luck with the law,” I said. “I hope it works out to everybody’s satisfaction.”

  I walked out of the bar considering what Peggy had said.

  KNOTT

  The windscreen wipers groaned. Plender drove the Cortina quite slowly, letting anybody who wanted to overtake us. He stared straight ahead of him, his mind seeming to be considering other things than getting us where we were going.

  I didn’t say anything; the less I said the less likely I was to be drawn out of the protective cocoon I’d wound round myself. I was forcing myself to live in a vacuum, an empty universe which waited to receive events as they came, one by one, unevaluated. Consideration and prog-nosis were being kept at bay because I was afraid that the coming together of the bits of mosaic would shatter any self-control I had left with the completion of the picture. I was allowing myself to be organised and directed by Plender, trying to absorb his confidence, his certainty. Even if it was the certainty of madness, I was glad of it, because his certainty was a barrier against my own madness. I had to stay with him, go along with anything he suggested because Plender alone knew, and only he could save me, whatever his motives, whatever my feelings for him.

  I was sitting in the front seat, next to him, gripping my camera tightly on my lap. I turned my head slightly to look at him. His face was placid and empty of any expression. I knew that he was aware that I was looking at him but he gave no outward sign of it. When I pictured him as I’d known him at school, it wasn’t as the boy I’d known then, but as the man sitting beside me now, except wearing school uniform.

  Plender turned off the main road and drove through rows of pre-war council houses until we crossed another main road and came to an estate of newer semis, a recent development. Most of the gardens were still nothing more than bulldozed rubble and there were no trees or hedges or greenery of any kind, just the stark brick and uniform windows bathed in the bland healthless glow of the sodium street lights.

  Plender drove the Cortina into a cul-de-sac and parked it by the curb. He switched off the engine and leant back in his seat. Rain swept across the roof of the car.

  “Well,” he said, “here we are.”

  We got out. I stood by the car and pushed my cameras into my anorak to keep them dry and opened the rear door and took my tripod off the back seat. Plender carried on walking away from the car until he reached the corner of the cul-de-sac. He stopped and looked back to see if I was following and when he saw that I was he disappeared round the corner.

  When I rounded the corner Plender was walking up the path towards one of the houses. There were no lights on. He inserted a key in the lock and opened the front door. Then he walked inside and waited for me in the hall. When I’d got inside he closed the door behind me and switched on the hall light. The hall had a cheap fitted carpet that carried on up the stairway; the walls were painted white with no decorations at all.

  Plender opened a door and we walked into a lounge-cum-dining-room that was carpeted in the same material. The furniture was cheap H.P. stuff and I noticed there were two divans.

  “Not bad, is it?” said Plender.

  I didn’t say anything. He took my silence to mean approval.

  “I got hold of this through a friend on the council,” he said. “That’s the thing about the world today; it’s not what you know, it’s wh
o you know. I’d have to have waited donkeys years otherwise.”

  He sat down on the arm of one of the settees and took out his cigarettes and lit up without offering me one. He was obviously pleased to show off his success, his cleverness at getting things done. He was bright-eyed, like a child.

  “I know lots of people who are always ready to do me the odd favour. You get to know them in my line of business, in one way or another.”

  He blew smoke out and looked at me for a moment and then looked away and stood up and began to move around the room, inspecting the furniture and the wallpaper and the few wall fittings.

  “I expect you wonder just exactly what I’m up to?” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to know. All I wanted was to live in this moment of time with no reference to either past or future or to any events or concepts that needed any kind of consideration or evaluation.

  “Well, it’s nothing to worry about,” said Plender, having gone full circle and sitting down on the settee arm again, “but it’s a bit too complicated to explain, really. At this stage, at any rate.”

  I sat down on the settee opposite. We looked at each other.

  “Fancy a drink?” he said.

  I nodded.

  Plender went over to a small cocktail cabinet and opened the lid. Tinkling music burst on the silent room. Plender poured two drinks and closed the lid and walked back across the room. He handed me my drink and sat down again and drank his drink and looked at me.

  “Ever done any of this kind of stuff before?” he said.

  I shook my head. He smiled.

  “What do you call Saturday night, then?” he said.

  I stared at him.

  “Well, I had to see, didn’t I?” he said. “I mean, when I went back to your place and picked up the spools, I had an idea, just from the state the studio was in. That’s why I took them. Just in case my idea was right. So I developed them to see if I was right or not.”

  I opened my mouth.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I developed them myself. Christ, you don’t think . . .”

  He left the rest of the sentence unspoken.

  I knew I should be feeling sick at the thought that Plender had seen what was on the photographs but my state of mind was such that the passage of thought from brain to stomach was rigidly prevented thus precluding any translation of thought into feeling.

  “That’s why I knew you wouldn’t mind about tonight,” he said. “After seeing the pictures, I mean.”

  I took a drink.

  “Done much of that kind of thing, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I bet,” he said. He took a drink. “I expect it’s easy in your line, though, pulling the birds. Mixing with them all the time. And you always were one for the birds, weren’t you? The school Casanova.”

  He smiled and looked at his watch and then finished his drink and stood up.

  “They should be here soon,” he said. “Let’s go and get set up.”

  He walked out of the lounge. I finished my drink and got up and followed him out of the room.

  “In here,” he said.

  He opened another door farther down the hall. This time he let me go first, switching on the light after I’d entered the room.

  It was entirely different from the last room.

  On the walls there were framed photographs of Germany before the war—German leaders, rallies, soldiers, half a dozen different pictures of Hitler. There was a bookshelf and on the top of the bookshelf there was a German helmet and a toy luger.

  Plender watched me look at the pictures but he didn’t say anything about them. Instead he said, “What do you think of this?”

  At first I thought he meant the room but he went over to one of the pictures, a big blow up of the Olympics, and took it down from the wall. Behind there was a small window that revealed the room where we’d just been sitting.

  “Not bad, is it?” Plender said. “We can see them but they can’t see us. What do you think?”

  “It’s very clever,” I said.

  “See, if you set up your tripod here,” he said, indicating a spot near the window, “then you’ll get a good view of everything. And the beauty of it is nobody gets camera shy.”

  I put up my tripod and began to fix the Rollei on the top.

  “Well,” said Plender, “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

  I stared at him.

  “But you’re staying,” I said. “You can’t go.”

  “Must, me old mate,” he said. “Got some business to do.”

  “But you can’t leave me here.”

  “I’m not going to. I’ll be back to pick you up later on, when all the festivities are over.”

  Suddenly all the feeling I’d been controlling rushed out of me.

  “Listen,” I said. “Please. Don’t leave me. I can’t bear it on my own. When I’m on my own I’m frightened. I can’t stand to be on my own, not now.”

  “But it’s only for a couple of hours,” Plender said, smiling. “I’ve told you, I’ll pick you up later.”

  “Please,” I said. “Please.”

  I sank to my knees. Plender watched me, still smiling, but the smile had changed, describing something I didn’t understand. After a minute or two he said, “Here, you’d better have this.” He took his flask out of his pocket. “But don’t drink too much. I want these pictures to come out.”

  I took the flask, still kneeling.

  Plender walked over to the door, opened it, and paused for a moment.

  “Andrea and Len’ll give you a cup of tea when the others have gone,” he said.

  Then he went out.

  PLENDER

  I sat in my car and waited for Peggy.

  There were a number of places he might decide to go after he’d closed up. He might go to the Cockatoo or White’s Club or he could pop over the road to the Wimpy or go to some gay party or he could just go straight on home.

  All I hoped was that he hadn’t got a boyfriend with him.

  He came out of the bar at eleven thirty. He was alone.

  I watched him walk round to the car park at the back of the hotel. At least he wasn’t going to the Wimpy. I started the engine and waited for Peggy’s Mini to nose itself out of the alley and turn right in the direction of the square.

  I wasn’t following him for long before I realised he was going home.

  He had a flat in one of the new blocks near the football ground. It was a very nice flat, so I’d heard.

  He parked his Mini outside and walked over to the lift and pressed the button and waited. I drove by and parked my car on the other side of the road and watched him get into the lift. The doors closed behind him. I waited. The lift doors on the fourth floor opened and Peggy walked along the balcony until he came to his flat. Fourth door along.

  I got out of my car and walked across the road.

  KNOTT

  The lights were still on when I got home.

  I paid off the taxi and went into the house.

  My wife was sitting in the lounge, dressed for bed, reading a magazine. She looked up at me as I closed the door behind me. Before she looked into my face she’d been all prepared for a confrontation based on her previous suspicions, but when she saw my expression her own expression changed to a different kind of disbelief.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  I almost told her. Like the hero of Poe’s story, I wanted to pour out all my guilt, describe every small detail, encouraged by the lying perversity in my brain that told me once I’d confessed, everything would be all right. But for all my madness I was aware of the falseness of the idea. I knew that nothing could be improved by telling the truth.

  “Wrong?”
I said. “How do you mean, wrong?”

  I was getting good. The tone of my voice was just right. The wary husband, innocent, realising that he is about to be cross-questioned by a jealous wife, puts himself on guard, creates a defense with aggressiveness.

  Kate stood up.

  “You look terrible,” she said.

  “So I look terrible,” I said, walking over to the drinks and pouring one out. “I’ve been working all day. It’s gone midnight. That’s why I look terrible.”

  Kate’s concern disappeared and her own defensive mechanism took over.

  “And if you’ve been working late,” she said, “why wasn’t I told?”

  “Because I forgot,” I said, taking a drink. “Quite a simple explanation, really.”

  “You forgot.”

  “Probably because I had too much to drink yesterday,” I said. “You’ll remember that I had too much to drink.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  “You don’t believe that I had too much to drink? But my love, you kept reminding me of the fact. Surely you remember that?”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I didn’t begin the proceedings. I’ll rest my case.”

  “You’ll tell me where you’ve been.”

  I sat down in an armchair.

  “I have been,” I said, “at the studio. All day. All evening. Working . . . mucked up some prints and so I had to redo the shots and I printed them up myself this evening so that there wouldn’t be another accident. That is why it is now a quarter past twelve.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Of course.”

  “I think you’re having an affair.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just like the last time.”

  “Of course.”

  “Peter, tell me the truth.”

  “You already know the truth.”

  “I want to know.”

  The phone rang. I knew who it would be.

  I got up out of my chair and hurried into the studio, praying that Kate wouldn’t pick up the telephone in the other room.

  I lifted the receiver and said, “Yes?”

  “You left, then,” said Plender.