Amphetamines and Pearls (13 page)

‘The gun. Take it out nice and slow.'

What happened next was fast enough to deceive the eye so I'll take it gently.

While I had been so intent on watching the one I knew had the gun I lost track of Thurley; I thought he was too wrapped up in his own worries, anyway. It goes to show that you should never underestimate the ruling classes. He had got round behind me and moved up on me quietly enough to grab me by the gun arm at just the right moment.

As he did that John went for the gun: like I had told him. The only difference was that he drew it and fired …

I had begun to swing round towards Thurley as he pulled at my arm. It was enough. The bullet that was meant for me caught Thurley low in the neck and flung him back across the lawn and into the pond.

With my free arm I brought up the .32 and fired before John could get off another shot. I hit him in the right shoulder and he dropped his own weapon on to the terrace. I picked it up, but quickly.

‘Right, now talk fast. You slugged me outside Candi's flat. Is that right?'

He winced with pain but nodded, agreement.

‘But you hadn't been in there before that evening?'

I took hold of his injured arm and gave it a little twist, just to make sure he couldn't concentrate on lying.

‘You don't know, who was in there before me?'

He moaned but didn't answer. I twisted the arm a little further back. The moan became a shriek of pain, but at least he nodded his head. We were getting somewhere.

‘Don't nod. That could mean anything. I want words, nice clear words and lots of them. Now!' The arm went back one more time. ‘Who was in there?'

‘I don't know! Honest I don't! I went along there from that fat sod, Howard. They were getting fed up with the way she was holding out on payments, making excuses all the time. So they said would I go over and see what I could do to frighten her into finding some money fast. Maybe rough her up a little, but that was all. Honest. That was all. Then when I got there, the light was on so I waited outside. Then I guess you come out. I let you have it and then took a look to see who you were.'

I interrupted. He was talking well now but I wanted to stay in charge of the direction.

‘Who did you tell you'd left me there?'

‘I told Thurley when
Į got back, and …
oh, Jesus, can't you do something about this arm … and I told Howard that night. After I left the girl's place.'

I asked if there were any bandages around. He said there were so I told him to get some. I pulled away the sleeve of his shirt and helped him to patch up the wound enough to stop the bleeding for a while longer. By then I would be finished and he would be able to phone a doctor or take his chances as he wished.

‘Neither of them knew that I was going to be there?'

‘Of course not, or else what would have been the point in letting me go for barging in?'

I set to thinking fast. That meant that neither Thurley nor Howard had tipped off the
cops it might be worth hanging around and turning me over when I emerged. But someone had to know that I was going to be there that evening; and it had to be someone who knew that I would have a better than average motive for killing Candi myself.

If you were down—nearly all the way down and all of your usual friends had turned their backs, then who did you turn to? Candi had tried me that previous evening when she had sounded near to despair. I wondered who else she might have spoken to, and whether in her conversation she had mentioned that I was going up to see her and when?

My thoughts were interrupted by another moan from John. The blood was rapidly draining from his face, and it was also starting to seep through the bandage round his arm.

I left him and walked outside to the back of the house. I took a few steps towards the pond. The body was floating upside down and the little eddies of blood were moving out slowly over the still water.

I went back into the house and made sure I had my money and my gun. John had disappeared and I didn't particularly care where.

14

There was a weak sun in the sky for a change and I thought at last we were in for something better. The wind had disappeared and the stillness of the air made it seem like walking behind glass. The law had taken Moustache back to the station and were holding him for Candi's murder. They weren't certain but at least he was a better suspect than I had ever been. He was loudly shouting his innocence and when Leake got down to talk to him I thought he might be believed. But in the process they would find enough on him to put him away for a good long stretch.

As for me, I believed him too. At least, I believed that he hadn't finished Candi with a .32 in the centre of her back. It didn't seem like his style. At the moment I had one or two ideas whose style it might have suited better.

I thought I would walk back to the office, so I left the car parked outside the flat and did a little thinking on the way. But the ideas wouldn't go straight: they were as stubborn as pigs when you try to drive them through a gate. After a while I stopped trying to organise them and watched them snuffling and snorting around inside my head.

The man I had called to fix the door and the lock had evidently been for the office was shut up tight and he had left a nice neat bill tucked inside the letter flap.

I tossed it on to the desk, unopened, and put my feet up. I didn't have to wait long for the phone to ring. I picked it up and it wasn't the voice I was expecting. Instead it was Sandy's and her normal throaty tone was choked and shredded with pain. She didn't have the strength to say much but before she was finished I was on my feet and the phone was lying on the desk croaking away to an empty office.

I ran the length of three blocks before I found an empty cab and shouted the directions in the driver's startled ear. But speed he did and I paid him well and took the stairs three at a time.

When Sandy opened the door, though, I was stopped dead in my tracks.

She was standing in her robe and her face was drained of every sign of life. Her eyes were dead, flat: the eyes of a fish that had lost its fight for survival. For a split second I thought of the faces of women I had seen in photographs of the last war. Then I reached out gently and slid away the brown towel she was holding round her head.

The scalp had been savaged, brutalised: where there had been a luxuriance of red life there was now nothing but a stubble. A stubble that had been hacked and torn as the hair had been cut and pulled from its roots. Blisters of blood rose up in between the jagged ends of hair.

I wanted to speak but no words would come. I wanted to take her in my arms but her deadness forbade it. So I stood there. I stood there and she raised her hand and slapped me across the face with what strength she had left. Then she slapped me again and again, the blows staggering on and on, becoming less and less powerful until finally they were the merest caresses of my cheeks. Then when she could lift her arm no longer the tears welled up in her eyes and broke down her face.

And still I wanted to hold her and still something held me back.

‘Who?'

One word and in that room I did not recognise my own voice.

In response she found the strength to hit me again and to scream.

‘That's it, isn't it? Who? That's always the question from you. That's why I ended up like this, because I asked too many questions on your behalf. Too many questions of the wrong people. There are places where it doesn't pay to be nosey. Oh, but you know that. You know it even though you say, “It will be all right, all you need to do is to show a photograph, ask around. It will be all right!”

‘Well this time it wasn't all right, was it. And I'm not going to tell you one thing more. I'm not even going to tell you who it was that did this. Because if I do and they find out—and they will find out, then they'll come back and next time they'll kill me.' Her voice was like broken glass and what it was saying rubbed against the inside of my brain.

‘I've said my last thing to you, Scott Mitchell. I've run my last errand, done the last dirty job for you I'm going to!'

I couldn't just stand there. I had to say something or turn round and walk away. I tried. I said: ‘Sandy, your hair will grow. It will grow and you will be all right
…'

The look in her eyes stopped my voice like a stopper shut tight.

‘Yes, Scott, the hair will grow. And I could wear a wig until it does and carry on making a living. My living. Making it the only way I know how. But what people pay for is my body, Scott. My body. That's what they pay for—to see it or to sleep with it. And who's going to pay for this?'

She pulled aside the edges of her robe, then let it fall around her feet. She stood there in the middle of that room quite naked and with two giant lines carved down her body, from the space between her breasts to the bottom of her stomach. She looked as though someone had ridden a tractor across her and ploughed out a bloody furrow. Not deep enough to raise too much blood, but deep enough to turn aside the edges of the skin, deep enough to scar. To scar so well that make-up would not cover its effects.

‘Who's going to pay for this body now!'

She screamed it in my face with her last available burst of energy.

I didn't need to ask who any more: I knew.

I could do nothing else. Maybe somebody else could have done, but that somebody else was not there. I was. Scott Mitchell.

I turned around and walked away, the lines through her body etched behind my eyes.

I asked Gilmour one question. When he gave me the answer I checked my gun and got the keys to the Saab.

The approach was flat, the narrow road leading through a wasteland of rubble and brick. The houses had been pulled down and a new industrial area was going up. Across the emptiness of the landscape I could see the cranes reaching up off the river to a sky that still held a watery sun.

I drove past a collection of smashed and rusting cars and thought I was getting nowhere. Then, suddenly, I swung round a corner behind a corrugated building and there it was. The words ‘Billiards and Snooker' showed on a sign at the side, although the glass had been smashed and the light was not working. I drove the car round the gravel area that was used as a car park, trying to avoid the holes full with water. There were seven other cars there already. I put the Saab at the end of the park, beside the edge of the building and facing back the way I had come. Also blocking the exit of anyone else.

I slid out to the gravel and walked round the building. The main door was on the far side; I ignored this and went on round. There was a small window quite high off the ground. I pulled myself up and looked inside. It was dimly lit except for where lights were switched on over tables in play. Four of them. At the far side of the hall, facing the entrance, sat a man in a wooden arm-chair. He was holding something across his knees, but I couldn't make out what it was. I looked from table to table and saw what I was looking for at last. On a table in the centre, just breaking off into the reds, a massive Negro leaned over a cue that looked like a toy in his grip. I dropped down to the ground and continued to walk round the building.

There was another door. Of course, there had to be. I was slowly easing it open, unsure of what was behind it, when a voice spoke quietly into my ear.

‘Oh, no, sweetheart. Let's go in the right way, shall we?'

I turned slowly and looked down the barrel of a Luger: it looked old and nasty and as though it might go off at any minute. On the other end of it was a grinning guy of about twenty with the two front teeth clean out of his head. That's what you get for smiling so much—sooner or later someone takes it the wrong way and punches your face in. Not that that was one of my problems: smiling, I mean.

I allowed myself to be pushed back the way I had come, still, nervous about the Luger and wondering whether he was going to search me for my own gun now or later. He was pretty good. He stopped me by the door and told me to put my hands high against the wall and my feet apart. Then he frisked me as if he was enjoying it. He found the gun and eased it out of its holster.

‘Nice one,' he chuckled, ‘police issue, is it?' He chuckled again. He really was a happy little soul. ‘All right, sweetheart, open the door and through you go.'

When we entered the hall all but the most serious game stopped and looked round at us. The Luger prodded me over towards the man in the chair.

He was small and he looked old and tired. Perhaps he had taken so long to build everything up that he had lost interest by the time it had happened. It's that way sometimes. Whatever he looked like he didn't look like the boss of a crime organisation. If anything he looked like a retired docker. His neck had started to go straggly and the hands with which he nursed the thing on his lap were boney and veined. The thing was a bayonet.

He saw me looking at it and spoke: ‘My boy was in the Korean War. Brought this back as a souvenir. While he's inside I have it as a kind of keepsake. Company till he comes home. Nothing like your own flesh and blood. I never trust anyone else.'

I wasn't sure if this last remark was meant for me or for those clustered round.

The one who had brought me in showed Jupp the gun he had taken from me.

‘He had this on him, boss. He was trying to slope in the back way. Sneaky, like. Weren't you, sweetheart?' He accompanied this with a poke in the back with the Luger. I was still afraid it might go off. Maybe Jupp was too, for he told him to put it away. Then he asked me who I was and what I wanted.

I told him my name and then I turned and pointed to the Negro, who was still chasing the very last red around the cushions.

‘I want him.'

Jupp laughed—a dry crackle of a laugh, a memory of a laugh that sounded as real as ashes of roses.

‘What do you think you're going to do with him, son?'

I looked back into the old man's face: ‘I'm going to kill him.'

For a moment something flickered in the tired eyes then lay to rest.

‘I doubt it, son. Even if I was to let you try, I doubt if you could do it. But suppose you did, would you try to kill all the rest of us? Would you try to kill me? 'Cause what he did, son, he did because I told him to.'

He fingered the edge of the bayonet without looking at it, almost unconsciously.

‘I told him to, boy.'

There was no answer. I knew that I had no right being there: not if I had any sense of respect for my own life. But there I was and I wasn't expecting to get out alive. I just wanted that big spade first.

I turned my back on Jupp. I took off my jacket and holster and stood there watching the big man pot the yellow ball with a long shot down the table, then curl the cue ball back for the next colour. He was good.

‘Cut that fucking crap and come where I can take your head off your shoulders!'

It was loud, loud enough for him to hear and for him not to be able to ignore. Not in front of all these people. Not in front of Jupp. Not that he wanted to.

He turned from the table and came towards me; he hadn't put down the cue but held it in front of him, slightly raised. I began to move to my right, not too quickly. I didn't want to startle him into a move just yet. He kept coming at me and I watched as the cue got higher. Then I reached fast to the side of the nearest table and grabbed up the rest that was hooked there. I grabbed it and brought it up as the cue in the Negro's hand swung down for my head. The rest was longer and it struck him alongside his head, causing his own blow to fall short. But it didn't stop him coming. He lifted the cue again, with two hands, and brought it down on top of me. I tried to parry it with the rest, held across the path of his swing. The cue snapped through the wood of the rest and thumped down into my leg above the knee. I was aware of a blinding pain as I jumped to one side and rolled over the top of the nearest table. He followed me with another swing which broke his cue against the slate bed.

Then I jumped for him and aimed my fist at the side of his head, and in my fist was a billiard ball and the crack as it landed on his jaw bone cut clear across the room. He shrugged his head and looked at me in disbelief. I aimed up at his face a second time but got nowhere near it. His arm wiped mine aside and something equivalent to a power-shovel drove into my face and sent me into a stack of cues on the wall.

I went down hard and came up spitting out blood and bits of broken tooth. I also came up with a cue and lifted it off the floor, aiming it for his groin as he followed in his punch. I hit him full on and he let out a piercing yell and clutched at his balls. I brought back the cue fast and caught him one high on his undefended temple.

For a moment he stood there, perplexed, swaying. I was sure he must go down. Instead he reached inside my next swing and grabbed me off the ground. He hauled me high into the air, swung me once in a full circle and threw me across the room. I landed in a sprawling heap across Jupp's chair.

My fall sent the old man tumbling and when I got back up as far as my hands and knees the bayonet was close to my grasp. My fingers clutched at the end of it; I looked at the Negro. He was standing a little unsure of himself: the blow to the temple must have shaken him after all and he was confused about knocking his boss to the ground.

There wouldn't be a second chance. I pulled back the bayonet into a swing and went for his right arm. The old man must have kept the blade well-honed for it cut through his sweater right into the flesh of the upper arm. As I pulled it away and as the blood followed, he let out a high scream of wonder and grabbed at the wound. I lifted the bayonet high and aimed for the area just above the bone of his right hip. Once more the steel bit home and the giant staggered to his knees. That was where I wanted him: the bayonet was right back over my head at the beginning of an arc. My eyes were fixed on the top of his shining skull.

‘Freeze!'

The Negro's eyes clung to the blade above his head.