What struck him about Camus was a phrase about ‘the benign indifference of the world’. Aside from the fact Parker didn’t see it as particularly benign it struck a chord with him. All he’d ever known was indifference.
He looked into the kitchen at the chef, Eddie Hopper, hoping he could have a chance to talk with him. Hopper was a tall, clean shaven man, his long black hair tucked under a cook’s cap.
Parker had made a deliberate decision to use Luke Hanson’s former names, looking for reactions. He wanted Hanson to be freaked knowing the Grim Reaper was here, scythe sharp.
Today he was checking out a few men who might be his man. Tomorrow he was going for a talk with the Sheriff. See what he could get out of him the easy way. The hard way, just as good.
The chef came out of the kitchen and walked behind the counter.
‘Hey, Todd, can that be you?’ Parker called to him. ‘Todd Clearing?’
Ruth knew David was in town, probably in a bar, so she went back to the house to make herself a salad for lunch. After lunch she went across the yard and splashed through the shallow creek onto the beach.
It was hot and she stayed in the shelter of the palmetto fronds. Strange animal grunts and scitterings all around her. Tiny creatures showing off with big sounds. Warnings and wooings.
She cried out when she bumped into a man standing in the trees behind Tom Haddon’s house next door.
He put his finger to his lips. He smiled and, taking her arm, drew her near before she could resist. He pointed up into a tree.
‘Egret chicks,’ he whispered. ‘Mom is off getting food and the bigger one is taking the opportunity to get rid of the scrawny one.’
Ruth looked up and saw the flat nest of twigs. A chick with a long beak was pecking viciously at a smaller one. The smaller chick was wriggling and trying to get out of the way.
She watched appalled as the bigger chick forced the other to the edge of the nest then toppled it out. The chick fell through the feathery branches to the water below. Ruth jumped when, just as it was about to hit the water, an alligator’s snout broke the surface. The jaws opened, the alligator snatched the bird from the air and sank back under the water.
Ruth put her hand to her mouth.
‘My God! Did you see that?’
The man nodded.
‘Survival of the fittest right before our eyes,’ he murmured.
‘Are you a naturalist?’ Ruth said.
‘Something like that,’ he said.
Only then did she realise the man was still holding her arm. He realised it too and dropped his hand. She took a step away.
‘Hope I didn’t startle you,’ he said. ‘Coming on me like that lurking in the undergrowth.’
‘I did wonder what you were doing.’ She looked over at Tom Haddon’s house. ‘Thought maybe you were casing the joint.’
The man laughed.
‘If you don’t mind me saying, that sounds odd in an English accent. You are English, right?’
‘Guilty,’ she said.
‘Don’t be,’ he said. ‘Wasteful emotion.’ He gestured at the beach. ‘I was just enjoying a walk when I heard the racket in the trees.’
‘Should we be worried about that alligator?’ she said, looking nervously at the water. ‘He could be looking for a main course after his starter.’
‘We’re fine,’ he said. ‘I think. You live here?’
‘Just visiting.’
‘Me too.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m Bob.’
‘Ruth.’
He gestured down the beach.
‘I was walking that way if you’d care to join me?’
Ruth examined his face. He had a pleasant smile. She could smell a little sweat and a thin waft of aftershave.
‘Sure,’ she said.
‘Let’s go then,’ he said, putting his panama hat on his head.
David was in free fall. He didn’t know what was happening in his life. He was drinking far more than Beth knew, too much for him to keep track of. He doubted he’d be capable of making love to her even if she wanted him. Which she clearly didn’t.
He felt guilty as hell about that night. And humiliated. But mostly he just felt trapped.
He insisted on a glass for his beer – didn’t get this drinking from the bottle the Yanks went in for. He took a swig and looked around the almost empty bar. It’s afternoon gloom reminded him of the basement bar of the BBC’s Bush House, where he had spent too many afternoons in the past few months.
His life had started to go askew when he’d been sitting there after a long morning producing the coverage of another boring soccer match. He was hoping to remain unnoticed in a corner. Instead he was spotted by his wife’s best friend.
‘What are you doing here, Barbara?’
‘Same as you, clearly,’ she said, plonking herself beside him and chinking her gin and tonic against his beer glass.
‘I’m on a break,’ David said, trying to keep the defensive tone out of his voice.
It didn’t work anyway.
‘No, you’re not,’ Barbara said, leaning in to give him a kiss on his cheek. ‘You’re skiving like me.’
‘Guilty,’ he said, trying not to look at her nipple poking through her silk skirt. He failed. She noticed but didn’t say anything.
‘But why are you in Bush House at all?’ he said.
‘World service gig – yes, my career has come to this. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for transmission to Czechoslovakia.’
‘Which one are you?’
‘Ha – that was the Sixties, love. I’m Gertrude.’
David nodded. She nudged him.
‘You’re supposed to say that I’m not old enough to be playing the mother.’
‘I don’t know the play. I’m more a Star Wars than a Shakespeare person.’
They had another couple of drinks. Swapped BBC stories. About an hour in David realised she hadn’t once asked about Ruth. Not that he had mentioned her either.
Four drinks in she took him back to her flat in Covent Garden. She tottered on her high heels on the cobbles so took his arm.
She went to the bathroom as he was wrestling with the cork on a bottle of wine. When she came into the kitchen she was naked.
‘I thought we’d skip the foreplay,’ she said, one hand on her hip, the other on her breast.
That was a year ago. After that they met three or four times a week in the afternoons.
David had been unfaithful before. He knew how it worked with mistresses. At first they don’t want anything but if it lasts they want more. Then everything.
David’s work suffered. His contract wasn’t renewed. Barbara suggested he move in with her.
‘I thought this was just a casual thing – for fun,’ David said uneasily.
‘So did I,’ she said.
‘What about Ruth?’
‘You and her aren’t getting on that well anyway, are you?’
‘Are you getting that from me or from her?’
‘Both.’
A couple of days later David drove Barbara over to Oxford for the day. Sex in a punt required coordination and balance but they managed it, hidden by a weeping willow. Almost hidden. A group of students got boisterous as they punted past.
They had a bottle of champagne and smoked a couple of joints, the sun through the willow fronds dappling the green water and their bodies in the boat.
That night, long after he’d dropped her off, he stopped his car half a mile from home and rooted round under the passenger seat, in the glove box and in the storage space in the door. Barbara had accidentally left lipstick, a hair brush and a vanity case.
David sighed and dumped them on the side of the road.
Barbara invited herself down to stay at the cottage. David was nervous, Barbara was gung-ho.
‘I don’t want to upset Ruth,’ David said.
‘You think I do?’ Barbara said.
I don’t think you care, David thought. You’re in that space where you want wh
at you want and nothing else matters.
That was one of the longest weekends of his life. Barbara giving him looks, him trying not to respond, Ruth sensing something. Barbara touching him a lot over dinner. Being moody when he didn’t reciprocate.
‘You okay?’ Ruth asking her friend.
‘I’m fine,’ Barbara said, staring at David. David looking into his glass. Aching for it to end.
Barbara wanting to kiss him on the lips as they said goodnight at the bottom of the staircase. Ruth watching. David ducking the kiss. Barbara looking sullen. In bed, Ruth cold with him.
He saw Barbara at her flat the following Tuesday.
‘What was all that about?’ he said.
‘What was what?’
‘Why didn’t you just say: hi, Ruth, I’m having an affair with your husband and have done with it.’
‘Why haven’t you told her yet?’
‘I’m trying to find the right time.’
‘You’re trying to have your cake and eat it.’
He rolled away and reached for his cigarettes.
He didn’t know if he wanted to leave Ruth. She was indifferent to him but they got on pretty well. Barbara was a handful, that was for sure. Passionate and fiery – the qualities that enflamed him – but also the flip-side of that. He thought she might be the Ruth Ellis kind. They’d gone to the pub at South End Green once where Ruth Ellis had shot her lover. There were pock-marks in an outside wall where supposedly she’d missed a couple of times.
‘I can’t imagine getting so het up by someone I’d want to kill them,’ David said.
Barbara looked at him over the rim of her glass.
‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’
‘Not at all.’ He looked at her again. ‘Are you?’
‘Could I imagine killing someone who’d wronged me?’ She smiled. ‘Of course not.’
Did David believe her? Of course not.
Two weeks later the burglars broke in to the cottage and everything changed.
Ruth was sitting in the large living area flicking jerkily through a magazine without taking any of it in. David was stacking a month’s supply of booze from the supermarket behind the long wooden bar that separated kitchen from living area. She was thinking about Bob, the man in the panama hat. They’d walked a little then sat on the beach, watching the waves roll in and break against the rocks about fifty yards out.
‘I’ve had a rough time,’ she said, looking at the side of his face.
He looked at her.
‘Freedom is what you do with the hand you’ve been dealt.’
She snorted.
‘Sorry but that sounds like something from a Christmas cracker.’
‘It isn’t.’
She gave a little shrug.
‘Then I’ll have to think about it for a while.’
He looked back out at the water.
‘Take your time.’
‘What hand have you been dealt?’ she said.
He smiled but stayed facing forward.
‘I’m still trying to figure out a way to stack the deck.’
He turned and gazed at her and she could tell he was going to make a move on her. But instead, he said:
‘Ever read Sartre?’
She shook her head.
‘I’m more of a Far Pavilions kind of woman.’
‘Don’t know it.’
‘But you know Sartre?’
‘That’s who I was quoting. Frenchman I met told me about him and Camus. In Camus’s The Outsider a man kills an Arab on the beach on impulse.’
Ruth looked startled. He saw her look.
‘The point is the impulsive act not that it was a killing,’ he said.
‘Acting on impulse,’ she said.
‘On a beach.’
He seemed to see the wariness still in her eyes.
‘I was thinking of your impulses, not mine,’ he said.
She swallowed.
‘I read the book about that man who threw dice to decide how he was going to act.’
‘What did you think?’ he said.
‘I thought it was wish-fulfilment fantasy for older men. It took away personal responsibility.’
He smiled but not in his eyes. There was something predatory about them. She knew she was the prey but her shiver was of anticipation not fear.
‘You think we have to take personal responsibility faced with the benign indifference of the world?’ he said, watching her lift her hair off her neck.
He was looking at her long fingers.
‘Do you play the piano?’
‘What? No. What has that got to do with personal responsibility?’
‘Nothing. Sorry. I suppose the Dice Man was reacting to the meaninglessness of life.’
‘Do you always talk like this?’
He shrugged.
‘I’m not good at small talk.’
She gave a little smile.
‘I guessed.’
She made a decision. She tucked her hair back behind her ears and leaned towards him. She looked up into his face.
‘Just be careful with me.’
She was jolted from her thoughts by footsteps in the yard. She jumped when she heard a man’s voice.
‘Ahoy in the house – permission to come aboard.’
David looked across at Ruth. She reddened.
Tom Haddon strode into the room and straight over to David. Ruth looked at her watch and saw that it was almost seven, an hour after the time she had agreed she would bring David over to the yoga teacher’s house for drinks.
Haddon said to David:
‘I’m guessing you’re David. You and your lovely wife are due at my place around now.’
When he held out his hand David paused then took it.
‘And I’m guessing you’ve met my wife but not me and made arrangements that I didn’t know about.’
‘Sorry –’ Ruth said.
Haddon smiled. He looked at Ruth.
‘No problem – we can do it another day. There’s only a handful of people at my house tonight anyway.’
Ruth was conscious of David looking from one to the other of them.
‘No, no –’ Ruth started.
‘Tell you what,’ David said, waving at the booze piled up on the bar. ‘Why don’t you all come over and we can put the show on right here.’
Haddon scarcely hesitated.
‘You’re on.’
‘But David,’ Ruth said, ‘we don’t know where anything is.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Haddon said. ‘We do. Barbara has pretty much open house here.’
‘I bet she does,’ Ruth murmured and immediately felt disloyal.
When Haddon had gone back out through the yard, Ruth started tidying.
‘Why did you do that?’ she asked.
‘Why did you accept an invitation you didn’t tell me about?’
‘It wasn’t exactly an invitation.’
‘So why didn’t you tell me about this not-exactly-an invitation?’
Ruth rounded on him.
‘I forgot, that’s all,’ she shouted. ‘I’m terribly fucking sorry.’
A moment later she heard a babble of voices coming into the yard. She flashed David a wild-eyed look then hurried down the corridor into the bedroom.
Chapter Eight
Harry Wilson sat on the couch on his rear porch staring up at the sky. He could hear the faint noise of the party down the street at Barbara’s house. He should go down but he was enjoying this quiet moment with his bottle of bourbon. Not that it was ever quiet here: the rush of the waves on the shore, the drag back across the shingle; the insects rattling and zithering; the night birds; the night creatures.
These days Sheriff Harry Wilson lived every hour as if it was going to be his last. But not in a good way. He hadn’t always been like that. He’d grown up in Missoula, Montana. Cowpoke country, although he was a football player not a cowboy. Back then he was fearless. Foolish. Got a college scholarship on the back of
it. He got drawn to police work at college, he couldn’t say why. Nothing to do with avoiding the draft. He always made a point of saying that. Maybe too much of a point.
He went straight into city work. Memphis first. Then, the Big Apple. Influenced, he had to admit, by Eastwood riding into town as a cowboy cop in Coogan’s Bluff. Well, okay: some of the cowpoke stuff had rubbed off on him. You could get the boy out of Missoula but you couldn’t get Missoula out of the boy.
New York at the end of the sixties was losing its struggle with the bad guys. Crime ruled. The city was going broke. Potholes on 5th Avenue. Times Square a drug-dealing, hustling, pimping mass of degraded humanity.
Every day, Wilson went out there and every day he came back more depressed than when he’d started the day. He concluded quickly that New York bred a particular kind of criminal. One that lacked any known human emotions. And then the thing had happened and he began to question his own courage.
He’d come to Paradise Island to get away from all that. But from the moment Luke Hanson had come on to the island Wilson had known it was only a matter of time before it came here. And he feared he wouldn’t be able to cope.
‘You should come to one of our yoga sessions,’ Tom Haddon said, chinking wine glasses with Ruth and David. ‘The early morning one is popular.’
‘How early morning?’ Ruth said.
‘Well, the sun’s almost up.’ Haddon laughed. ‘No - eight a.m. Civilised.’
‘I’m not very supple,’ Ruth said.
‘It’s not a hard class. Kind of a wake-up-and-stretch thing.’
He looked at David. David shrugged.
‘I don’t much like waking up and when I do I’ll take coffee over stretching anytime.’
‘You’re not into exercise?’
‘I’m more of a jogger,’ David said, slurping his wine.
Ruth’s laugh was almost jeering.
‘Since when?’
‘Hey, well, jogging’s good,’ Haddon said quickly. ‘There’s some good running along the beaches. Just watch out for the mudflats – and the alligators. You know they can outrun any jogger?’
Paradise Island Page 7