Stone Cold Dead

by Roger Ormerod

  Clayton was silent as we walked down the long hill, and I had no wish to speak, not even to think if I could get by without. It was late March, but not so long ago there’d been snow on this hill, though at that time I’d been safely tucked away where it didn’t matter. There’d been a bitter driving wind that other day, when I’d coasted down it with the Volvo. Five hours before the attack on me, that had been, a dark November day with the hills beyond the town hidden in the driven squalls. Five hours! It was the earliest memory of that day that I’d so far recovered. I felt a twinge of excitement and expectancy. Perhaps a visit to the garage would unearth much more. Perhaps it would please me. That, I didn’t know.

  I did not recognise the garage. The block of six self-service petrol pumps seemed to be new, certainly they were clean and bright. There was an unfamiliar cash office and self-service shop. The name across the front had been recently repainted: Pool Street Motors.

  ‘Tarted it up a bit,’ he said with pride.

  So...what did he find wrong? Little to complain of, surely. He took me round the back, past the car wash, which I didn’t remember at all, and up an outside flight of wooden stairs, which, suddenly, I did recall. Below this was the corrugated iron structure they used for car servicing, beyond that a dreary expanse of open space scattered with wrecks (help yourself to spares – bring your own tools) and beyond that the pool, looking exactly as it had always done, dreary and opaque, and dead.

  ‘The office,’ he told me, throwing open a door from the landing at the top.

  I’d have known it for an office, but not the office, not the last one I’d visited that day. I stood, and looked round, my heart suddenly hammering.

  My brief image of him standing behind his desk and shouting had no reality in this setting. For one thing, the desk was not in front of the window, as in my memory, but skewed across a corner. It was not even the same desk. Larger, more modern. How did I know this, I wondered, and yet my general impression, still carried with me as a subliminal feeling, was of squalor, of dirty, smoke-blackened walls and tatty girlie calendars, creaky wooden filing cabinets and uncertain folding chairs. The walls were now clean, the one calendar was of birds, the two visitor’s chairs were plastic and tubular steel. The filing cabinets were grey steel.

  I was in a strange office, with a stranger. I turned to look at him, and did not recognise him in this setting.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. My only memory of this place was of stress and emotion.

  He didn’t give me a chance to change my mind, but whipped open the top drawer of the nearest filing cabinet and lifted out a pile of account books and loose-leaf files, banged them down on the desk, and stood back.

  ‘Have a look through ‘em,’ he said, beaming at me proudly.

  It was simply stupid. Even if I’d been right on top of the job, I’d have needed hours, days...‘Oh...come on!’ I said, but all the same I looked at them.

  They were new. Everything was new around there, as though something had been wiped away as cleanly as my memory. New books. I lifted a cover, and was looking at a page of neat entries. The date on the first one was December 1st, fifteen months before, a fortnight after my assault. I opened the others. The same. Tidy and immaculate. Where were the oil-dirty account books, dog-eared with loose pages, some of them hanging torn from the covers, which suddenly I recalled so clearly, lying on that very same surface? No, the desk had changed. It was not the same surface, and not the same account books.

  I looked up abruptly, and for one brief second saw a different Tony Clayton. He was staring at me dourly, shoulders hunched and his head low, a savage anticipation in his eyes.

  ‘I’ll need the old books,’ I said, as though I really intended to get down to the job.

  ‘They’re not here.’

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘The accountant’s got ‘em, I reckon.’

  ‘Reckon? You reckon? Don’t you know? You say your wife’s been looking after things. Haven’t you asked her? Where is she, anyway? What’s going on here, Clayton?’

  ‘You don’t know?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Would I ask you if I...?’

  ‘Don’t know about her?’ he asked heavily, no light now in his eyes.

  ‘How the hell would I know...’ I stopped, the loudness of my voice ringing from the walls, and suddenly I was afraid. I was a stranger to myself. This could not be me, this hot, furious and lost man, shouting my hatred–and yes, it was hatred–at Tony Clayton. I gripped the edge of the desk and stared down at those pristine books, placed there to mock me, and hung on. I had been told to relax, not to allow myself to become involved with stress. My head pounded, and for a moment the desk surface blurred. I could have sat back on to the swivel chair behind me, but somehow pride held me firm. Then I looked up.

  ‘You could ask your accountant for the old books, then maybe I’d get some sort of picture.’

  Still his voice seemed to be probing. ‘I thought you’d ask him.’

  I sighed. ‘When I was an officer of the DHSS I could’ve done that. But now I’ve got no authority at all. I don’t understand this. What does your wife say? What is it that you think is wrong?’

  He relaxed suddenly. ‘It’s a feeling.’ He shrugged, then walked across to stand glumly staring out of the window. His mood had changed. ‘All this – in only a year.’ He didn’t mean what he was looking at, the roof of the corrugated iron structure and the dreary pool. I knew what he meant.

  ‘Have you asked your wife?’

  ‘My wife isn’t here.’ His voice was dull, indistinct. ‘She’s disappeared.’

  Then, for a long minute, there was silence between us. I was aware that he had not brought me there to examine his books, but simply in order to make that statement. To me. Why me? I looked at his profile, the jaw hard now, none of the weakness I’d seen full face. I ventured:

  ‘How d’you mean, disappeared?’

  ‘What d’you think I mean?’ he snapped, glancing sideways. Then, more quietly: ‘She visited me regularly, you know, with news how things were going, the improvements she was making, how much Michael Orton was helping her, and I got not one single hint...’

  ‘Who did you say?’

  ‘Our accountant, Michael Orton.’

  ‘Oh God!’

  I was aware he had my arm, and was steadying me. I thought I was laughing at the irony of it, that Orton should intrude on me there, but apparently the sound I was making didn’t give the impression of amusement. I must have known that Orton had been his accountant, but I had completely forgotten.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ He shook my arm.

  ‘Nothing. He’s just the one accountant I wouldn’t want to approach. Not for you, not for me.’

  Michael Orton was the man who was now married to my ex-wife, Valerie.

  I looked steadily at him. ‘You were saying?’

  ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘I’m listening.’ But remembering. That damned memory, it worked well enough on the things I’d have preferred to forget, and which now came flooding back. Such as Michael Orton, who’d always managed to convey to me his contempt whilst smiling at me, and managed to condescend with every second word. I remembered the first time I’d met him – and Valerie, as it happened...’

  Clayton was saying: ‘...she was intending to pick me up at the prison, but she didn’t come. Nobody came. In the end, I had to get a taxi to the station and find my own way. And nobody here knew anything about it...about her. There was no note, no message. The last entry in the books is the day before I came out.’

  He stopped. I opened a book and checked that point. ‘Friday the seventeenth?’ I asked.

  ‘I came out on the Saturday.’

  ‘Yes.’ I didn’t know what else to say. I sat. He stood. We were silent. At last I asked the obvious.

  ‘Have you told the police?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I was in for GBH,’ he said stubbornly. �
�You know what that means? Grievous Bodily Harm.’

  ‘I know what it feels like.’ Which was a lie. I didn’t remember what it felt like.

  ‘Ha!’ he snarled in disgust. ‘You don’t have to be funny.’

  ‘Sorry. So...what if you were?’

  ‘A chap comes out of prison after a sentence of GBH, and straightaway he says his wife’s missing, and everybody knows he knows that his wife’s been having it away with her accountant...so, what’ll they think?’ He nodded out of the window. ‘The first thing they’d do would be to start dragging that pool out there.’

  ‘Don’t talk so stupid.’

  His voice had been breaking with emotion, and I had to shout at him. But really I needed silence, to absorb what he’d said.

  Michael Orton, my wife’s husband of a year, and he’d been playing around the whole of that time...Lord, but it was lovely, or tragic. I had to have silence in order to decide which.

  ‘What’s so stupid about it?’ he demanded. ‘Once you’ve been inside, they’ve got you pegged.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘The first thing they’d do...’

  ‘She’d be frightened of you,’ I told him, seeing now the man who could be capable of smashing my head in with a spanner. This Tony Clayton looked capable of anything.

  ‘You see!’ he shouted. ‘You, now!’

  ‘And why not me?’ I demanded. ‘Why should you expect sympathy and understanding from me? What the hell do I care if your wife leaves you because she’s terrified of you! She knows what you did to me. I’d be scared, in her shoes. I bet she couldn’t get away fast enough...’

  He reached forward and grabbed my arm and thrust his face close, and for one moment I thought he was going to attack me again. But it was pain I saw in his eyes. Entreaty.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said, his voice thick. ‘And you know it.’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’

  ‘I didn’t beat your head in, you fool, and if you’d just tell somebody the truth...’

  I looked down at his hand, and rather to my surprise he released me. I couldn’t see what he was getting at, what he wanted from me.

  ‘I can’t remember that last day,’ I told him. ‘Certainly nothing of the attack on me. But the police say they caught you standing over me, stuff from the briefcase scattered everywhere...’

  ‘So you think it was me?’

  ‘Yes, I think it was you.’

  ‘But you didn’t come looking for me, with a couple of hired thugs at your shoulders.’

  ‘The thought didn’t occur to me.’

  He grinned sloppily. ‘You see. It didn’t occur to you. And you know why not? Because you know. Mate, don’t shake your head at me. You know damn well it wasn’t me bashed your head in.’

  I couldn’t follow his logic, but he stood back, as though displaying himself for my consideration. It was quite true that I felt no certainty about him, but there was no memory that assisted me one way or the other. Yet his confidence was infective. He knew he was innocent. You could see it. And he was so completely guileless that I couldn’t help smiling at him.

  ‘I wish you could prove it,’ I told him.

  For some reason he sensed this as a victory, because he leaned forward and gave me a small thump on the shoulder with his fist. ‘You see.’

  What I saw was that he seemed to feel some bond between us, sealed by the assault on me. He felt us both to have been victims, and that this entitled him to my friendship and assistance.

  ‘So what do you want from me?’ I asked quietly, probing.

  ‘I want you to find my wife.’

  ‘But I can’t possibly...’

  ‘You’ve got the experience, going round asking questions, making enquiries. You could do it.’

  He was looking at me with raised eyebrows, his eyes wide with innocence. And yet he seemed to be poised, waiting on each word.

  ‘Not your books, then?’ I asked cautiously.

  ‘Those too. Find my missus, and she’ll tell you about the books...’

  And about why the garage had done so well in his absence? That must have been galling to him.

  ‘I can try.’

  ‘Good man.’

  ‘But promising nothing.’

  ‘You’ll know where to ask around.’

  But that was something he could do himself, and he’d know her haunts and habits better than me. I was not a detective. But there was a glint in his eye as he watched my indecision, and I could see it was important to him.

  It was then that I began to wonder whether in fact he had killed his wife.

  I looked away. ‘I’ll ask around.’

  After all, it would have been a good cover for him. Would a man who’d killed his wife ask the man who should be his enemy to try to find her? It would appear to be the gesture of an innocent man. His innocence glowed from his warm, open face, and I found myself completely distrusting him.

  He clasped his arm round my shoulder. ‘Let’s go and have a look at that car of yours,’ he said, his own business apparently disposed of happily.

  2

  The psychiatrists had explained that loss of memory following severe concussion was caused by the brain’s automatic desire to reject the memory of pain. Usually, only the instant of pain is lost, but in my case it was most of the day. This seemed to mean that my brain required to forget it all, so perhaps it was not a good idea to try to recall it. All the same, following Clayton down the outside staircase, I realised that what I had to do was not primarily to find his wife, but to find myself. That it might prove painful was not an encouraging thought, but I knew I could not go on as I was, with a gap that could be critically important to me. I had to reassemble that day. Perhaps I would come across Mrs Clayton on the way.

  At the foot of the staircase we turned sideways through a small door of corrugated iron, and at once I was somewhere I knew. The operative areas of garages are all much the same, the hydraulic lifts, the power tools, the electronic tuning equipment, the overall smell of petrol and stale oil and dirt. But I knew this one. I had been there.

  The sliding double doors that opened on to the yard were only partly open, and were the principal source of light. Where work was being carried out they used portable lights that confined the illumination to a square yard or so, so that the surrounding shadows were heavy. An engine suddenly burst into ragged voice, and there was a drift of burnt-oil smoke from the side until it spluttered to a stop. A spanner clinked on concrete, a voice cried from underneath a van for a five-eighths socket, and a hand-held electric drill was switched on, followed by a scream of metal. I saw Clayton’s lips moving, but heard nothing. The whine ceased raggedly, and he was shouting: ‘...over in the corner.’

  We did a circle round the hydraulic lift, which had a Marina on it, the drill operative standing underneath trying to remove the rusted remains of its exhaust system. I didn’t recognise him. He was wearing a face mask against the dust. It caught my throat as we moved past. We walked round Clayton’s air-compressor, a squat cylinder of green metal with its V pump throbbing, and there, in the far corner, was my Volvo.

  I could barely detect its colour through the accumulation of its grime. The windows were opaque. One rear tyre was completely flat, and the impression was that the springs had sagged. An illusion, I hoped. It looked sad and neglected, and resigned to sit there and rot away. Yet I nevertheless felt an upsurge of spirit, a small jerk of the heart. After all, it had been my image-maker, my uplifted two-fingered gesture to the world, mainly aimed at my wife, Valerie, who’d called it my macho symbol. Ridiculous that was. A small sports car might have been that, but not a trundling pile of Volvo. But it had been partly directed at my friends at the office, who’d seemed to place me apart from them in a way I couldn’t understand, and naturally accepted it as presumptuous that I should run such a large car and make theirs look puny beside it.

  Looking at it, settling there into senility, I recalled these attitudes cl
early, and my own reasons for burying it. My affection for it revived immediately. It was a 244 saloon, rather old, which I’d been able to buy quite cheaply because of its appetite for petrol, and which quite fulfilled my intentions following our battle over Valerie’s attempt to buy me a BMW. But I’d come to love its stolid reliability and its remarkably brisk performance for its size and age. It didn’t look particularly brisk at that time, but it was mine.

  ‘We’ll put it through the car wash,’ said Clayton, ruefully scratching his ear.

  ‘Better check the tyres, too,’ I suggested. ‘How long...’

  ‘Tomorrow. I’ll run over and tax it...owe you that much,’ he conceded, without actually admitting the assault. ‘I’ll get the battery on the charger right away.’

  I grunted. He was being effusive. Then I had a thought, and glanced at him. ‘It’s been taking up space for over a year. What about the garaging fees?’

  He laughed. ‘Oh...that!’ Then the drill chatter interrupted and he shook his head, waiting for it to stop, then turned and led the way out through the double doors. ‘All covered,’ he said, when we could hear each other. ‘It’s been paid every month.’

  ‘Has it? Has it now!’

  ‘By your ex, I understand. So the missus said.’

  ‘Val paid my storage on that car?’

  ‘So my wife told me. She thought it was funny...you know, amusing...Michael Orton seeing the cheque come in every month, from his wife, on your car. Don’t you think that’s funny, Mr Summers?’

  It was the first time he’d used my name, and he’d added the respect, as it would seem to him, of the mister. But I had no time to consider it, my mind being locked on to Valerie’s strange behaviour. She’d hated the Volvo as a childish gesture on my part, but she’d nevertheless made sure it’d be here for me. She must have had faith that I’d eventually be in a position to claim it. And she must have understood how much it meant to me.

  Troubled by this thought, I left him, walking round to the forecourt and setting off back up the hill again. This time the concern was not related to my memory, because there was no uncertainty about what I could remember of Val’s attitude. What troubled me was that I might have misread her feelings, if only in such a small matter as the Volvo. But it was in the past. The decree had come through, and she’d married Orton. Over. Finis.