by Tony White
‘Nifty!’ said Rex, impressed by his friend’s footwork. ‘Where did you learn to do that? Got some chalk, Tel?’
When he’d come round, Couvoir found himself facing his own gun, a ligature around his neck.
Terence marched him across the room, where Rex forced him to write a date across the black-painted double doors. Not today’s date, but the date that they had met for the first time; a date in the old French Republican Calendar.
The day after the miners had been defeated.
The day that Rex had arrived in La Fontaine-en-Forêt.
The day when everything changed.
Tridi 13 Ventôse CXCIII.
Rex was thinking on his feet. If this was Couvoir’s suicide note, it was also a puzzle that there would be nobody left alive to understand: not Pythag, Béatrice or Élise, not Victor or Sylvie, and certainly not Couvoir himself.
Not even JJ, technically speaking.
JJ died in June 1985, on the day that he got a passport back in the name of his dead twin, Rex. Although, as far as anyone else knew, JJ had already been killed in the ETA blast at La Fontaine-en-Forêt. Nothing left of him to bury, poor thing. Locals had spoken of an English student who’d been staying in the village, who had been learning to bake, after all. There were no border records of JJ entering the UK because Milo’s van had simply been nodded through the barrier: a French undercover colleague entering the country ‘off the books’ to be an active observer at some European security-services training exercise.
The only person who knew that JJ had come back to the UK was his grandmother, and when he’d told her that he was being chased by French gangsters who dressed as policemen – which was not too wide of the mark – it had played to her protective nature and to the xenophobia of her generation, and she had said nothing, even or especially when a local policeman had come knocking at the door with the sad news of her grandson’s death in France. Broken as she had been in spite of appearances by the death of her daughter, Daisy had already suffered a series of small strokes and quickly succumbed to ill health. So when she’d told neighbours that she had seen JJ that same night, or said that he had phoned, they’d put it down to a visitation or the dementia, bless her. They’d read the papers, after all.
As soon as the new passport had come through, Rex – now – had got up under cover of darkness and hitched a ride to London. Started over, in the days when you could still do that. Started over like his life depended on it.
And now my song is almost done,
I can no longer stay,
God bless you all both great and small,
I wish you a joyful May …
‘Right you are, skip.’
‘But listen,’ said Rex, going through the man’s trouser pockets, ‘he never said anything about asthma, right?’
There it was. He took the inhaler out and put it in the pocket of his Harrington.
Bill and Ben looked at him for a second, before understanding dawned on their faces.
‘He didn’t mention it, right?’ said Rex. ‘Have you all got that? Who was the booking officer?’
‘Jinksy, skip.’
‘Okay, recovery position now!’ said Rex, running past the Custody Sergeant and up the stairs, two at a time, back to the desk.
‘Interpreter’s on the way,’ said Jinksy, without looking up.
‘Thanks, mate,’ said Rex. ‘You still doing Gnat’s Piss on that Occupy arrest that Jimmy and Binder just took down?
‘Yeah,’ said Jinksy, ‘doing it now. Nearly finished.’
‘Hang on.’
Rex quickly scanned the screen over Jinksy’s shoulder, and in passing he saw the name Trevor Tennyson, but – poet namesake aside – it didn’t mean anything. No more than might a random name taken from the phonebook. ‘Has it gone through yet, Jinksy?’
‘Fucking Gnat’s Piss, what do you think?’
‘Scroll back up,’ said Rex.
‘Eh?’
‘Scroll back up. Existing medical conditions. They made a mistake, we need to correct it.’
I’ve been a-rambling all the night,
And the best part of the day …
JJ watched from his vantage point as ambulance crews tended to the injured. How many ambulances: thirty? forty?
Dozens of men and women with fractured skulls and other serious injuries were stretchered off to hospital, while van after vanload of others, the lucky ones, those less badly injured, five hundred and thirty-odd, were driven off to who knew where. Families separated and sent to Basingstoke, Andover, Salisbury and more. And still the waltz of the last few vehicles: Bedford camper vans and buses, cars and army trucks, driving around the field.
Off his tree and up one, JJ could see everything. It was like a medieval battlefield. Policemen were wandering around in a daze with their shields and batons, or with axes hung loose in their hands. People – men and women – were still jumping out of buses and trying to make a run for it, still trying to get away. There were dogs running around, barking their confusion. There were pile-ups, and the smoke of the vehicles that had been set on fire cast long flickering shadows in the golden light of the low sun. And suddenly there they were: the Hesperides. The golden-skinned nymphs of the golden evening light. He could see them now!
But then JJ saw something else.
Something that he wasn’t meant to see.
Someone standing behind the police lines with the press photographers.
Hadn’t he been one of the first to be arrested? So how could he be standing there in a black boiler suit, helmet under his arm, chatting to one of the coppers? Was it just the acid? Surely it was just the acid! But then the black-clad figure turned so that JJ had a clear sight of his profile.
Distinguishing features? Not much. Just a nose like bloody Concorde!
From the safety of his tree, JJ watched as Milo – it was definitely Milo – took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one; offered them around. Feeling conspicuous on his perch, JJ reached over to try to pull a nearby branch across his face, but as he did so he could have shat himself right there on the spot, because suddenly Milo turned and seemed to be looking right at him. He didn’t know whether to try to stay perfectly still and hope that Milo was simply looking in this general direction or to run.
Surely he was too far away, too obscured by foliage.
Surely it was the acid.
But no, the Frenchman narrowed his eyes and looked directly at him.
Milo had seen him.
Their eyes met across the intervening space, and JJ’s blood ran cold.
Now he knew what to do. He had to run.
Milo took a drag from the cigarette, then lifted his chin and squinted down his nose at JJ as if he was taking aim.
And now I am returning back again,
I have brought you a branch of May …
Kilroy. A man with a big nose peering over a wall. The cartoon image that had circumnavigated the globe during the Second World War. The face that had been drawn on to every surface, every tank and landing craft, every gun emplacement and shell casing across the European and Pacific Theatres and around the world, appearing everywhere that US armed forces personnel had set foot, from Greenham Common to Iwo Jima.
Now Rex made Couvoir draw another one, here in the paint frame, on the wall behind the sofa.
‘For Pythag!’ he said, remembering that day when they had cleared the brambles in front of the bakehouse and found the rats’ nest.
Or one of them, anyway.
Little had they known.
Pointing out the fading Kilroy that had been painted on the bakehouse door, Pythag had gleefully commandeered the device as the revolutionary commune’s regicidal mascot: ‘Kill roi!’ he’d said, enjoying the simple franglais pun. ‘Kill the king!’
A branch of May, my dear, I say,
Before your door I stand,
It’s nothing but a sprout, but it’s well budded out,
By the work of our Lord’s hand …
After that it didn’t take the two of them long to tie Couvoir to one of the cross-struts of the paint frame by the ligature around his neck, to make it look like a knot that he could have tied himself. Without his SIG Pro, Couvoir was a pussycat, pleading and begging like a teenager. The frame wobbled at his weight, and as if suddenly seeing the huge contraption and the drop behind and beneath him for the first time, as if seeing what this was, the Frenchman panicked, standing on tiptoe with his back arched and trying to throw as much of his weight forward as he could; anything to try to hold the enormous wooden structure steady.
Now it was time for Rex to reach into his own pocket, but it was not a gun that he pulled out.
‘I’ve been meaning to give you this back,’ he said.
Wrapped in cling-film, it was a wooden-handled knife with an odd curved blade. Terence held Couvoir’s arm immobile as Rex put the knife into his hand and wrapped the Frenchman’s fingers around it, then loosened them and wrapped the handle back up in the cling-film.
While Terence held the frame steady, Rex pinched Couvoir’s nose closed with his left hand, holding the billhook beneath it like a steel moustache, and looking straight into the Frenchman’s eyes. Sharp side up, it was beginning to draw blood. With tears in his eyes, the Frenchman opened his mouth to breathe, and as he did so Rex wondered how it had happened all those years ago. Had it been Béatrice who, wanting to surprise him, had experimentally fired up the oven to test it out before they got back from Stonehenge? Certainly the two of them had been looking at the Conforti’s panel of three big aluminium switches, which were more or less the same as the ones in the bakery in La Fontaine-lès-Vence, and based on what he had learned from Monsieur Previn, JJ had explained what he thought the various settings might be.
Whatever it was, this fucker had known it would happen.
This fucker, who had poked his big nose in, and dared to call a bunch of harmless punks and hippies terrorists, etarras, in order to save his own skin. To cover his own tracks, his liaison role with the DGSE out of Fréjus – the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure – in Opération Satanique, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, New Zealand, just a month later. Who had cynically used La Fontaine-en-Forêt and the young Rex for cover, and who dared to crawl out of the woodwork now!
Without breaking Milo’s gaze, Rex nodded, then, at exactly the same moment his friend sent the great oak frame hurtling down, Rex pulled the blade up sharply, enjoying the terrified and agonised expression in Couvoir’s eyes in the split second before he flipped and was dragged headfirst into the void.
Rex was left holding what had been Couvoir’s most prominent and distinguishing feature.
Drained of blood it looked fake, like a costumier’s prop.
If the Frenchman’s neck wasn’t broken the instant his body got dragged roughly through the slot, the drop into the void below would certainly have done it.
Rex bent down and dropped the severed nose on the floor, for long enough that he could be sure it would make a potato-print-like mark. Then he picked it up and wrapped it in a spare end of the cling-film that he was using to hold the knife. Thinking on his feet.
‘Rats must have had it,’ said Rex, matter-of-factly. Then he let the still opened knife fall to the floor to produce some localised spatter before using the cling-film to push it into the shadows beneath the lower shelf of the nearest workbench. ‘First place I’d look,’ he said. ‘Could easily have fallen there.’
Meanwhile, in the huge dark space beneath where they were standing, as deep again as the paint frame was high, the now dead and noseless Frenchman’s anal and urethral sphincters relaxed and the contents of his bowel and bladder began to leak out, soaking first into his clothing and then, once the fabric was saturated, dripping down on to the cobbled floor far below.
29: PERVENCHE (PERIWINKLE)
‘Shall we go out and celebrate?’ Susan asked. Her niece had been discharged and was now recovering well at home.
‘That’s good enough for me,’ said Rex. He was standing and talking to Susan on his mobile in the station canteen. Looking down from the window, he could see an abandoned Croc – a child’s rubber sandal – and a broken umbrella on top of the bus shelter on the other side of Theobalds Road. ‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked. ‘Somewhere posh with a doorman; no riff-raff? Or the kind of place where your drink comes with a straw?’
It was great news, and the relief showed in her voice. But that wasn’t all this was about.
They were both aware of what wasn’t being said. They’d seen it coming: that Susan would with Ashley released from hospital ship out. That if her niece had gone home, Susan would be going home too, and in her case that meant going back to York. That this wasn’t just a celebration.
Perhaps they had moved too fast. He hadn’t expected to fall for someone quite so quickly, quite so easily, but he had. ‘Hook, line and sinker’, as they used to say. Part of him had hoped that she wouldn’t need to leave quite so quickly, but obviously she had to go back to work. They were luckier than most, of course. Even to the extent that they had discussed their respective personal lives, which was not much, he knew that they both had good jobs and neither of them was particularly in debt, but even then neither of them could afford to run away, much as he might have liked to.
‘I don’t know, Rex,’ she said. ‘I fancy something simple—’
‘Who are you calling simple?’ he said, with mock indignation.
Susan ignored the useless joke. ‘Remember that Pizza Express along the road from you? Where you used to live?’
‘Coptic Street?’ said Rex. ‘Good idea. Yeah, why not?’
He decided not to bore her with his usual story about the Coptic Street Pizza Express being only the second branch that the chain ever opened, way back in 1967, fascinating though he found this fact, for some reason. In the 1980s, when he’d lived over the road, Pizza Express had been quite posh. A simpler menu than it was now, perhaps, but whose idea was it that the dessert menu would be improved by getting rid of the chocolate bombe? Or Rex’s old usual – now long disappeared – the chilled glass of Vin Santo with cantuccini alla mandorla for dunking. Now that’s what Rex called a dessert!
These days, although he still ate there occasionally, partly for convenience but also for old times’ sake, it often seemed that Pizza Express had become a place for the nannies of upper-middle-class London families to take their charges for a kind of mass high tea. Rex wondered if it was the introduction of the UK smoking ban in 2007 that had cemented this transformation, turning the chain from a place of sophisticated adult conversation to a series of echoing playgrounds full of screaming brats.
He’d once made the mistake of bringing a date here and only then finding out that she was vegan. How had he missed that? ‘Do their bases contain whey powder, do you know?’ she’d asked him at one point. If romance was a sport, that one had been an air shot: missing the ball, much less the goal. Talk about killing the moment. He’d cried off mid-meal, in the end, feigned sickness. Unable to face the forensic examination of the dessert menu that he felt sure was coming. Unsure how to seduce someone who was that obsessed with food.
He wished he’d bought stocks in Pizza Express, though. He had read about it in the paper a few years ago, that when they’d first floated in 1993 you could get shares for 40p, and by 1998 they were worth an incredible 987p! It had struck Rex, though, that after that high-water mark, the sequence of franchise buybacks, international mergers and takeovers, the pre-crash real-estate expansion by franchise holders, the buyouts and disposals – culminating in a recent purchase of the Pizza Express chain by some Chinese private-equity firm – was probably a lesson in contemporary international finance.
He could have said all that – and perhaps at another time, to another date, he might have – but he didn’t. ‘Shall we say eight thirty, when all the kids will have gone?’
London trivia was good for some things, he’d long ago discover
ed, but it was not on the whole conducive to romance. Unless you got off with someone at a pub quiz. A few years back, Rex had been a regular at the quiz in his local, and an enthusiastic member of the inter-station quiz circuit to boot – group-captain, if you could call it that, of all the Holborn Police Station teams, no less – but he’d quickly found that you could have too much of a good thing.
Whereas romance, on the other hand … This beautiful woman, for instance, met by chance just a week or so ago and who’d been sharing his bed most nights since? He could never get enough of that. Normally he’d play it a bit careful like, take his time, make sure they check out. But Susan was different, classy, and he’d just thought ‘What the hell?’ and grabbed it – her – with both hands. The truth was that she had found a shortcut to his heart, and he couldn’t get enough of her. From her choice of hooch – the off-dry Rieslings that she liked to drink – to the way that, at the end of a hard day, she liked to have both feet massaged at the same time and symmetrically – working out from instep to sole, then flexing her painted toes – to the way she dressed: no fashion plate, but ‘chic as fuck’, as he once put it when asked. She knew what suited her, alright, and Rex hoped that extended to him too, because she certainly suited him. His appetite for her was limitless.
‘My thoughts exactly,’ said Susan. ‘I’ve had enough of kids for a while, being in that place every day.’
‘I should think so. You’ve been a real star,’ said Rex.
‘Bless her heart, it was the least I could do for her,’ said Susan, ‘but thanks, hon. That’s nice of you to say. I’ll see you at eight thirty, yeah. Oh, by the way, I’ve been shopping.’
‘Oh, yeah? Where?’
‘Your favourite,’ she said. ‘Bye, darling.’