He knelt by the dog and freed himself. As he stood up, she was turning back through the door with a bottle in her hand. He reached out and took it from her. There was the least of noises, a soft light tap like metal on metal, as he laid it down gently on the coal bunker in the corner. She retreated before him. As she did, she wheezed in a breathy small-girl whisper, 'That dog was fucking crazy.'
'It's not the dog's fault.'
'Joe trained it.'
Since a cheque from Heathers had arrived, he had hired a car. Mary O'Bannion spread across the seats like a tide of sludge.
'You'll have to get that hand attended to,' she whispered solicitously. 'Get a jab at the hospital or it'll go bad on you.'
He grunted. The pain in his hand was something his will could control; later he would get treatment for it.
'The blood's coming through that cloth,' she said, looking at his hand where it rested on the wheel. 'You should take me back again, and then go to the hospital.'
'Later,' he said. 'We're going to have a look at somebody first and you'll tell me if you've seen her before.'
After a time of silence, working that out, she seemed to lose her fear and become talkative, almost cheerful.
'I like big cars. There's no rubbish about them. I like the smell of them.' She patted the radio with her grimy hand. 'There used to be this Dutch guy. He would take me in a Rolls-Royce. He'd come from the airport and fetch me. He was a businessman, see? Money was no problem. He could buy anything except a ride. The first time I saw his dong I nearly lost my eyesight.'
Murray was worrying about what would happen when they got to their destination. He wondered if he could get her to climb the stairs to Frances Fernie's flat; and only then, belatedly, did it occur to him that meant showing her where her mysterious visitor lived; and if she knew then Kujavia would be told. He remembered what Tommy Beltane had said, an iron bar beating down; beating down on a blonde head. But if she wasn't the visitor, it wouldn't matter, and how else could he find out but by going to the flat. The pain in his hand made it hard to think.
'I got a fright,' Mary O'Bannion was saying in her high childish voice. 'You're not putting that into me, I told him. No, he said, I can't find anybody to take it. If I could find somebody to take it, I'd make her rich. Jesus, maybe,' she said, 'If l met him now. I was awful young then. But it was terrible big. Like a bloody great length of hose and as thick as your arm. He drove up to Loch Lomond and back while I wanked him. I mean it never stopped. It just kept coming all the way.' She gave him a sideways glance. 'After him, I was ready for anything.'
'Close your dirty mouth,' he said, but casually as if she could not disturb him.
When he came to Moirhill Road, instead of turning north towards Frances Fernie's flat he swung the other way. It might not make any difference, but, despite the burning in his hand, he did his best to take a roundabout route. Still hoping to confuse her, he stopped a street away from the flat.
'This is it.'
'I've only my slippers on. You didn't give me any time to get my shoes on. I've no coat.'
'It's not far.'
She groaned and struggled to turn off the seat, her bulk sagging and catching at every obstacle. With his undamaged hand, he made a fist and struck her a blow like a stick on a cow's rump.
Out of the car, he herded her by a grey stone wall. Muted, the noise of traffic from the main road played background to her sighing and muttering and the slap of her carpet slippers on the pavement. As they rounded the corner, they came in view of a group of people standing on the pavement at the entrance to Frances Fernie's close. There were half a dozen young women, and two men, one grey haired and the other not much older than the girls. There was a workshop of some kind up there, he remembered; it was late afternoon and, finished for the day, they lingered for a moment in the sunshine talking before going home. He saw the younger man turn the round thickness of his glasses towards them and say something. The others looked and floated their surprise and amusement like a set of matched pink and white balloons. Through their eyes he saw a man in a shabby blue suit escorting an enormously fat woman, shoeless, floundering, coatless in a flowered dress too short to hide her white fish-belly thighs mottled red with sitting too close to the fire.
'Where is this fucking place?' she gasped.
'It's not far.'
She stopped and dribbled obscenities while the group stared towards them.
'I'm not making a fool of you,' Murray said, too softly.
'What? I can't fucking hear you.'
The pain in his hand was at a distance; but the pain in his skull was himself, threatened to replace himself. Street and watchers queasily spread and separated. 'Move,' he snarled.
But as they approached the entrance, he saw that the grille had been pulled shut and locked. He would have to ask for it to be opened. As they hesitated, no one in the group smiled; it hung silent around them. At close quarters, it did not find them funny. The wounded animal was dangerous. The woman something corrupt accidentally exposed to the light.
He could not bring himself to speak.
As he went on, the stillness was so absolute that all he could hear was the sigh of the woman's breath by his side. After a dozen steps, she came to a halt.
'I've had enough of this,' Mary O'Bannion said.
'Yes.'
She billowed around to stare back the way they had come. 'Was it one of them? You never fucking said. I didn't look at them right.'
Under her gaze, the group drew together as if for protection. 'I've changed my mind. Forget it,' he said. 'You can find your own way back.'
She made no pretence of not taking the point or of being shocked. On questions of humiliation and punishment, experience had sharpened her understanding. Like rancid butter melting, tears of sweat leaked out from every grey enormous fold of her cheeks. 'I knew you were a right bastard.' The words squeezed out between the little gasping suck of her lips. 'At least give me the fare for the bus.'
His will that had brought them there unclenched. Between one moment and the next, he lost any faith in the possibility that she might identify Frances Fernie. What had persuaded him was gone and seemed absurd. More importantly, in his distress, suddenly it seemed better to do nothing. Blair Heathers was paying him to do just that, to keep out of the way and quiet. Anything he did might harm Malcolm instead of helping him.
'I can't walk,' Mary O'Bannion said.
'Find a customer.'
With the rest, he spectated as she struggled away, wallowing and limping under the burden of that great weight as if already her feet had begun to bleed.
19 Double Murder
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29TH 1988
'My name? Call me John.'
He was going to die soon but he did not know that so he was able to joke. He knew that women of a certain kind spoke of their clients as Johns. And despite her refinement, her voice and clothes, he thought of her in that way; if she was an amateur, he expected her to be an expensive one. On the other hand, he was so comfortably able to pay that it complicated pleasantly the question of who was using and who was being used.
He did not expect her to give him her real name – that was part of the impression he had taken of her – and so, when she began to offer one, he stopped her and said, 'I'll call you Belle.' It was another of his private jokes.
She lingered on what he had said as if considering its possibilities. It was so exactly the reaction he might have hoped for that his jaded appetite stirred. 'I didn't expect to be given another name.'
'We're not the same person all the time,' he explained to her. 'We're all the pieces on the board. Why should they all have the same name?'
Double doors at the end of the reception area swung open releasing on a thick apostrophe of cigar smoke the fat chuckling anger of the crowd watching the fights. 'They're well pleased.'
'I didn't know it happened,' she said, 'having a boxing match in an hotel like this.'
'It's big through there. They
have the ring and all the tables set out around it. They lay on a good meal. You can drink and sit in comfort while you watch – not that everyone bothers to watch.'
'It sounds as if you would prefer to be there instead of here with me.'
'I've eaten,' he said, and with the gesture of someone sharing a joke ran the tips of his fingers down her arm with a light pressure. 'I was reaching for my wine when a spot of blood fell on the white cloth between the bottle and the glass. It put me off.'
'You must have been very close,' she said. 'I'm sure that's not supposed to happen.'
'Oh, they're quite keen,' he said, deliberately misunderstanding her, 'on them bleeding. So I came out here and saw you. And remembered you.'
'But not my name.'
'Parties are like that.'
'And, of course, I was there with my husband.'
He wondered if that was true. Seeing her alone here, he had remembered her and decided that he had missed a chance. Expensive whores were an occasional feature of old Blair Heathers' parties.
'And now you're here,' he said. 'Belle de Jour.'
They set out for her place and he took it for granted that even if there was a husband he would be somewhere else. A double life after all needed more than one roof over its head. He had indulged himself in the delights of explanation as she drove: 'I named you after a film. It's about a rich young lady who loves her husband but is fascinated by the idea of prostitution. She's afraid of it – horror-stricken really – but she can't resist it, not once the idea is there in her mind. And she does find her way to a brothel. She can only go there in the afternoon, of course. It's the only time she has free. So the madam – she's the one who christens her – gives her that name, Belle de Jour. The girl who's only available in the afternoon.'
After all that, she said, 'I'm not rich,' which made him laugh until, easing himself on the seat, he was disturbed by the musty unexpected tang of his body's secretions.
'What happened to her?' the woman asked.
Everybody enjoyed a story. Made up, it gave you a beginning, a middle and an end; quite often in the right order. In real life, on the other hand, you employed someone for years; one morning you came in on him crying at his desk and were too tactful to ask why; not long afterwards he handed in his notice and disappeared. Or Jackie, when you were boys at school together, who took every dare however rash or crazy – the schoolmaster thrashed him and, panting, grinned, 'The VC or the gallows'; but twenty, God, thirty, years later you opened a paper and read about some traveller in cosmetics dead in a car crash and recognised the name.
'Well? What happened to her?'
'She was disappointed,' he said. 'That's what usually happens, isn't it? The madame admires her because she's "a lady" – and even hints at the prospect of a partnership – a profitable business. The girls when they're not working play cards, drink tea and gossip. A lot of the men are grateful – which isn't the idea at all.' He tried to read her expression but rounds and lozenges of light tumbled across her profile like a series of carnival masks.
'And then?'
Or back there at the table while they were eating, Leo offering nudge and wink stories about poor John Merchant to his new masonic buddy; some kind of policeman, what was the name? Standers, sweating and flushed with steak and wine, full of claims about leads and hints about the state of the body. In a murder, policemen must always start its story at the end; getting back to the middle would count as one of their successes; beginnings, presumably, they would leave to do-gooders or defence lawyers. 'Everybody loves a story.' He laughed. The sound of his own voice weaving the complexities of his thought around her was pleasant to him. 'A young tough – a crook – what the Parisians called an apache – takes her one afternoon. He's a real animal – and he comes back for more. Buys her over and over again. Reality suddenly gets to be a little bit like what she had imagined.'
'And then?'
The simple insistence disappointed him. It happened that way, a woman caught his interest, appeared different, and it was all a pretence and paper thin.
'And then,' he went on, with an ironical stress, 'and then one fine day he follows her home. Attacks the husband. Cripples the husband – but gets himself killed. I think the moral for tough guys must be, don't fall in love. For wives, you shouldn't try to live out what you imagine.'
'She seems to have got off lightly though.'
While he was wondering if it was worth testing her with the point that the poor husband, paralysed and speechless, knew about his wife's infidelity, they arrived at their destination. She introduced the blonde woman who came through from what he assumed would be the bedroom as her sister, but about that he reserved his opinion. The idea of sleeping with sisters might be taken as an added inducement, something that would put up their price.
'My sister will go to bed with you. I don't do that,' the woman, Belle, said.
Standing close, smiling at one another, it seemed possible the women might after all be sisters. It was not simply that there was a certain resemblance – make up and a shared hairdresser could do that for women – it was something that stirred between them, as palpable and indeterminate as the smell of two people who have just come from the same bed. They could be sisters. Or lovers.
Naked, the second woman's body was unexpectedly fine. He was in the habit of disappointment: unclad breasts that dwindled, bums that drooped; warts, blemishes, a rash of pimples across the shoulders. The sister's skin was clean and unmarked. Her breasts were firm and pointed and, because she was not tall, they seemed large. He turned her round and ran his hands down from neck to haunches, and then knelt impulsively and stroked with his tongue the skin that covered the round clean bone at the cleft of her buttocks. Close, her skin was glossy with good feeding and youth, and even there her body smelt sweet. With his hands on her waist, he urged her forward into the bedroom attending to the swaying play of her muscles as she walked. Yet it was not this nakedness but the other woman being there and fully clothed which excited him so painfully. By the bed, one on either side, they undressed him. At last, crouching, each slipped a hand under the waist of his shorts and eased them out and down. The erection unconstrained leapt out, slick, mushroom capped; 'Ready for count down,' he whispered, grinning, but his voice trembled foolishly; and the woman, Belle, unsmiling stroked both her hands along its length. The sister lay back across the bed and, as if this was unfamiliar to him, Belle drew him forward until he lowered himself between the open legs. His erect flesh was cherished in her warmth as if by a boneless hand, but because he had felt no resistance as he entered her there was no danger of him losing his seed. Instead, he could be attentive absolutely to the sensations produced by those muscles she knew so well how to use in clasping and squeezing him. Lying on her, in such unexpected control of himself, he had a sense of power so great that it felt like happiness. Even when he felt Belle nudge his legs open, when he felt her legs and the cloth of her skirt against the insides of his thighs, when her hands rocked him, even when he felt her finger pressing into him, the ragged little pain, the indignity, even when he had surrendered and shuddered, the happiness grew. He buried his face in the woman's hair and whispered. As he did, he felt a pressure at his neck and then a sting, but before he could react the woman's body under him began to shake and he thought she was in orgasm until she gasped, 'Don't!' and 'He wants to be tied up!' and lifting himself up so that he could see her face he saw she was laughing.
He slid out of her slowly. He had not gone down at all. So enormous was he that it seemed he would slide out of her forever. 'Before anything else, I have to pee,' he said.
'We shouldn't let you,' Belle said as if considering the possibility of stopping him, but, of course, he could not allow that since it would have caused real discomfort. Anyway delayed urination could damage the bladder or the kidneys. He supposed it was even possible that urea retained in the bloodstream might adversely affect the brain. You had to be careful about such things.
In the bat
hroom he could not relieve himself in the ordinary fashion. Taking his weight on one hand, he had to lean at an angle over the pan. It intrigued him that he was so large and had kept his erection. He stood spread legged over the washbasin and ran cold water out of his hand, impressing himself with the fancy the water was turning to steam. You haven't changed since you were a boy, he whispered to the face in the mirror; but it was a lost innocence that told him, Those women are your creatures. Even if they tie you up, it's because you will them to; you invent them; what ideas would they have, left to themselves, but the tired cliches of a commercial script? They are the creatures of your fantasy. Despite all this, the face in the glass looked afraid, but he understood that an edge of fear was part of this complex of feelings, and anyway most of that clown's look of fright was because the fluorescent light around the mirror shone as a white circle in the pupil of each eye.
As he turned away, he noticed a smear of blood at the side of his neck and paused to pat it dry. Turning a corner of the towel red, he remembered the little sting as the sister cried, “don’t!” He wondered if Belle had nipped him with her teeth.
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