by Simon Mason
Garvie said, “And he’s from here?”
“Yes.”
“And this is his place?”
“His brother-in-law’s. He remembered telling Magee about it, how his brother-in-law died and his will was challenged, and the house was just rotting away, empty, while the lawyer’s fees ate it up. Magee would have remembered it as a useful safe house.”
Garvie nodded. “Smart of you,” he said. “I love how methodical you are. But you can stop patting me now.”
Singh stopped. “You’ve been very lucky. Nothing broken.” He looked at Garvie. “And now, you tell me what you’re doing here.”
“Me? I just came to meet Magee.”
“You came to do what?”
“Have a chat.” He gingerly felt the back of his head.
“A chat? On your own? My God! About what?”
“He gave me a call. Had something to tell me, he said. Like who killed Pyotor.”
“It wasn’t him?”
Garvie shook his head, realized it was a mistake, and stopped shaking it. He gave a groan. “No.”
“How do you know?”
Garvie thought. “I knew I could trust him,” he said at last.
“Trust him! Look at you.”
“Believe me, he didn’t do it. But something must have gone wrong here.” Garvie felt his face, groaned. “He changed his mind, maybe. Maybe he just loves being on the run.”
Singh looked at him for several seconds. Shook his head. “He’s not on the run,” he said quietly.
Garvie followed his eyes to the doorway in the far wall. Through it he could see a man’s legs sprawled on the floor.
“Is that … ?”
Singh gave a nod.
“Is he … ?”
Singh nodded again.
“Well, don’t look at me, man,” Garvie said. “I didn’t do it. I’d only just got here. I came down the stairs and the light went out, and then … ”
“Then somebody hit you,” Singh said.
“Yeah. I realize that bit.”
“With that thing, probably,” Singh said, pointing to a two-by-four lying on the ground nearby.
Garvie looked at the plank with distaste.
“Magee’s killer,” Singh said. “You must have disturbed him.”
“Whoever he is.”
“Yes, whoever he … ” Singh interrupted himself and fixed Garvie with a suspicious stare. “Do you know who he is, Garvie?”
“Course not. Don’t you think I’d tell you if I knew?”
“No.”
Garvie shrugged. “Whoever he is, how did he get away?”
“There’s an exit through the other basement room. A scramble hole up to the garden.”
“He must have heard you arrive. You weren’t exactly quiet.”
“The point was to be quick, not quiet. In any case, it was lucky for you I made a noise.”
They glared at each other.
“Thanks and all that,” Garvie said, “if that’s what you’re fishing for.”
Singh almost smiled. Not quite. “Listen to me now. We haven’t got much time. We have to leave as soon as we can. Stay there. Don’t touch anything.” He got up and went into the other room where Magee’s body lay and began to examine the area with a small metal instrument he took from his tunic.
“What’s it look like in there?” Garvie said.
“I’d rather not say.” Singh continued to work around the body, moving out of sight. “The person who did this must have been very desperate.”
“That’s what you said about the person who ripped apart Pyotor’s room trying to find his violin.”
Singh’s face reappeared in the doorway and looked at Garvie thoughtfully and disappeared again.
Garvie sat thinking. Magee hadn’t known exactly who killed Pyotor, but he’d said he had a good idea. Garvie remembered his words: “It’s going to get bad. Not for you. For someone you know.” In the end that’s why he, Garvie, had come here. But it had got bad for Magee instead.
Garvie sat perfectly still, alone with his headache among the debris of the room, things spilled across the floor around him from the fallen shelving: tools, nails and screws, spare lightbulbs in their cardboard boxes, fuses, coils of electric cable; and the rubbish scattered around the mattress where Magee had been sleeping: tin cans, plastic bottles, cellophane wrapping. Ignoring it all, he retired into the privacy of his mind. Someone he knew, Magee had said. Someone desperate, someone violent. Someone out of control. His eyes glazed over.
When he focused again his attention was caught by something lying on the floor by his foot, a small thing, something ordinary and odd among the debris of Magee’s food, something that shouldn’t have been there. It was so small and ordinary he’d stared at it for several seconds before he realized what he was gazing at.
Wiping his hands, Singh came back briskly into the room, and Garvie casually stretched out a leg and put his foot over it.
“Tell me about the corner shops,” he said.
“What about them?”
“Stanislaw’s.”
“The shop at Strawberry Hill is an anomaly. It doesn’t fit the pattern.”
“What pattern?”
“Fourteen shops in the city targeted over a period of six months with increasing violence. This is not random. It is not a pattern of burglary at all.”
“What is it?”
“It is the classic pattern of extortion. A protection racket. Organized, widespread. Increasing violence to intimidate.”
“And the shopkeepers receive demands?”
“They pay to protect themselves against further violence. They are too frightened to report it to the police. The perpetrators are very aggressive. Also clever. They work with intermediaries. They too are frightened.”
“When did it start?”
“January.”
“When Magee arrived.”
Singh nodded. “I had made the same connection.”
“It’s the wrong connection,” Garvie said. “I was just mentioning it.”
Singh shook his head, exasperated. “It is time to go.”
“Okay.”
Singh went around the room rearranging things he had moved, putting them back where they had been. He wiped the handle of the door.
Garvie looked at him curiously. “You going to call it in?”
“I will contact the appropriate authorities.” Singh hesitated. “From a pay phone.”
Garvie grinned. “You really have gone rogue, haven’t you?”
He shook his head. “There is no question of ‘going rogue,’ as you put it. It is a question of commitment. As usual.” He hesitated again. “But it’s best if we leave things exactly as they were.”
“I won’t tell anyone we were here if you won’t. Do we need to swear an oath in blood or something?”
Singh scowled. “You need to see a doctor about the injuries to your shoulder. You’ll have to explain what happened.” He looked at him and Garvie shrugged. “In the meantime you should contact your mother and uncle to let them know you’re safe.”
Garvie shrugged again. “They won’t have missed me. They think I’m in an exam.”
“You have an exam?”
“Not till eleven.” He looked at his watch. “But I’d better get going. Seeing as it’s eleven now.”
Singh rolled his eyes.
They parted in the street without speaking again, Singh going down the hill toward the Brickhouse shops, Garvie putting through a call to Abdul. He waited outside the empty garages. There was still no one about. After a while he took something out of his pocket and looked at it. It was a yellow-and-green sweet wrapper. He had to admit he’d been surprised to find it in the basement. For a moment it had disoriented him, given him the eerie feeling that Pyotor had been there before him. But Pyotor wasn’t the only one who bought those sweets, he remembered. There was someone else—someone else who had gone to visit Magee in his hideaway, someone else who knew that Magee hadn’t k
illed Pyotor.
Abdul’s cab came climbing up the hill toward him, and he put the wrapper back in his pocket and got in.
“My Garvie man! Is good? Your ami nouveau is please to see you?”
“Unfortunately he wasn’t there. Not anymore.”
“Ah.” Abdul’s expressive face crumpled in disappointment.
“Doesn’t matter,” Garvie said. “I’ve got an exam to get to. And I’m a bit late already.”
“Is okay, Garvie man. We go quick quick.”
And the cab swung around in the road and headed briskly down the hill.
In the kitchen at Eastwick Gardens they sat eating salt fish and macaroni. The last of the afternoon sun came in through the window and slicked their faces.
“I know you made it in the end,” Uncle Len said. “It just seems strange that I drive you to school at nine o’clock for an exam that turns out to be at eleven after all, for which you’re still half an hour late.”
“I told you,” Garvie said. “I got held up in the nurse’s office. After I hit my head.”
“That doesn’t make it any less strange.”
Garvie’s mother said, “At least you took the exam. For that I must be grateful.”
“I wasn’t going to let you down. Even though I’d more or less knocked myself out on those playground steps.” He looked at Uncle Len. “Don’t suppose we could claim compensation, could we?”
Uncle Len ignored him. “And how did the exam go, when you finally got there?”
“Pretty well. Very well, actually. Really, really well.”
“You think you passed?”
“I’m not sure I’d go that far. But I’ve still got two to go.”
His mother was looking at his shoulder and the side of his face. “What were you doing on those steps anyway?” she asked. “To fall like that.”
“I don’t really remember how it happened, to be honest. It all went dark.”
Garvie’s mother and Uncle Len exchanged glances.
“Okay,” Uncle Len said. “Two exams to go. It’s almost certain you have to pass them both.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad.”
“Chemistry in a week’s time. Have you done any studying for that at all?
“Got a week to do it in.”
“And tomorrow: Advanced Math.”
“I can do math. Math is the thing I do.”
Garvie’s mother said, “It’s not the ordinary exam, Garvie. And I wish now we’d never agreed to let Miss Perkins enter you for it. She was only thinking of the prestige of the school. No doubt,” she added, “she’s regretting it now.”
“Sounds like the sort of thing I could probably wing, to be honest.”
Garvie’s mother looked at Uncle Len, who said, “Listen to me, Garvie. I know you’re clever. That’s not the point. Do you have a plan?”
“I have a plan. Bit of studying. Turn up on time.”
“Okay. Do you care?”
“I care. I really care.”
“Okay. Listen to me. You really care. You’ve got a plan. You’re really clever. It’s not enough.”
Garvie looked at him.
“Even clever people can do stupid things,” Uncle Len said. “Sometimes,” he said, “even clever people can’t see what’s right in front of their noses.”
Garvie seemed about to make one of his usual slippery comments—and then he didn’t. Instead, he seemed utterly dumbfounded, as if, all at once, he had woken up to a reality he had never suspected.
“Garvie?”
“That’s it!” Garvie whispered, as if to himself. “I’ve been so stupid.”
Uncle Len exchanged puzzled looks with Garvie’s mother.
“Well,” he said awkwardly. “Let this be a lesson to you.”
“What have I been thinking of all this time?” Garvie said with bitterness.
“It’s all right, Garvie. There’s no need to get upset. It’s enough that you’ve taken it on board now.”
Garvie said nothing else. He seemed scarcely aware of the others. He got up from the table in a daze and made his way to his room and closed the door behind him.
“Do you know,” Uncle Len said after a moment. “I think I finally got through to him.”
Garvie’s mother looked at him skeptically.
In his room, lying on his bed, Garvie was on the phone, listening to the ringing tone. “Come on, come on,” he said under his breath. “Pick up.”
He didn’t. Frowning, Garvie listened to the same old message. “Alex,” he said when it had finished, “whatever you’re doing, whatever it is you’ve done, you got to call me now.”
He sat there thinking for a moment. He thought of a sweet wrapper dropped in a house where a murder was committed. He thought of someone trying to break his head open in the dark.
Then he dialed another number.
She picked up straightaway as if waiting for a call.
“Zuza,” he said in a whisper, “it’s me. Sorry I couldn’t talk earlier. Has Alex come back?”
“No,” she said after a pause.
Garvie hesitated. “Okay. Soon as he does, will you give me a call?”
“If he does.”
“Listen, that other thing—did you get a chance to go up to Stanislaw’s?”
“Yes. It was very strange.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know how you knew this, but the man who robbed the shop, he did just what you said. He gave Stanislaw some of the money back.”
Garvie permitted himself a grin. “Tell me what he did exactly.”
“He came into the shop very late, after Stanislaw had closed. Stanislaw still does not know how he got in. He appeared disguised with a hood and a mask, and he pointed his gun at Stanislaw and told him to hand over all the money in the till. It was a big amount because Stanislaw had just got a lottery license. But when the man had the money he did not go. He stood there counting it. And when he had finished counting he gave some of it back to Stanislaw. It’s crazy. Why would he do this?”
“’Cause it would have been wrong to take more than he needed.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He needed a specific amount.”
There was a silence. Zuzana said slowly, “Wait. What are you saying?”
“That clever people can’t see what’s right in front of their noses.”
From the living room came the sound of footsteps, and Garvie said quickly, “Listen, got to go. But there’s something I’ve got to talk to you about. I need your help tonight. I’ll give you a ding.”
When his mother appeared in the doorway he was busy scribbling calculations in an exercise book.
He looked up and she held his gaze. “I see you’re trying,” she said. “I see that. But I don’t see everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“You might fool your uncle,” she said, “but you don’t fool me. The lesson you need to learn, and quickly, is that it’s not about fooling me.” She didn’t smile, and Garvie didn’t smile, either; they looked at each other inscrutably for several seconds before she withdrew.
For some time Garvie considered the equation he’d just written, as if thinking through the problem. Then he reached for his phone again.
At two o’clock in the morning East Field industrial estate was still and quiet and dark. It was a warm night, the sky quilted with cloud, the moon a muffled bedside glow. In the shut-up buildings, in the deserted crossroads, in the waste margins of grass and weeds, there was silence.
The only noise, faint and erratic, came from a patch of darkness in the lee of a former fish warehouse: a flimsy muttering, half singing, half cursing, a shuffling of irrelevant words, isolated expressions of quiet indignation and surprise. They came from Vinnie. He lay beadily in layers of cardboard, huffing to himself, tilting his face alertly east and west along the access road in front of him as though following the shifting progress of night breezes with his red-rimmed gaze. From time to time he picked some
thing out of his beard and nibbled at it and muttered something. Occasionally a word could be made out. “Fubbers” was one. Others sounded like “cow-fluck,” “fish-ass,” “shipper-tit”—not so much words as incantations against sanity.
Abruptly he fell silent, his head cocked manically to the west, his gaze enlarged as he peered through the darkness. From the warehouse at the end of the road, out of the silence, came a noise of footsteps. Vinnie slid farther under his cardboard and pressed his mouth deeper into his beard to guard against involuntary utterances.
As he watched, a movement grew out of the shadows, a puzzling shape, halting and contradictory, struggling against itself, coming slowly nearer and clearer, turning eventually into two figures grappling together in a strangely stumbling walk. Vinnie stifled a gurgle. One of the figures was a man wearing a black hooded top, the other a boy wearing navy shorts and white T-shirt, and they lurched down the road together, the man heaving the boy upright with his arms, the boy limping along painfully, holding his neck, moaning aloud in a language Vinnie had heard once before. It was all exactly, spectacularly as it had been the first time, uncanny, almost eerie. He couldn’t help himself. He rose out of his cardboard like an apparition of ancient prophecy and flung his arm toward the pair, who stopped at once, as if he had pulled them out of his dream into reality.
“The same!” he cried. “I seen it all the same!” He clutched his head and shook his fists in astonishment at them. “I told you!” he shouted. “I know that jabber anywhere. Same words, all of them. Try fool me, eh, cod-sucker? Bring the money. Think I don’t know Polish when I see it?” And he laughed till he was sick on the ground.
“That’s excellent, Vinnie,” Garvie said. “We thought it would jog your memory. You got it exactly right. Except for one thing.”
“Eh?”
“It wasn’t Polish.”
Silence returned to the industrial estate as they walked through darkness back to their bags, which they had left against the warehouse wall.