Blind Needle (9 page)

From across the street I could see a name stencilled in yellow on the red brick: N.D. Benson. Mng Dir. A long glistening black Mercedes with tinted windows and fat tyres had its radiator grille up against it.

As I loitered I entertained a mad fantasy of waiting for its owner to appear, then charging forward in broad daylight and beating him to the ground, stamping my boots into his face. I could see his blood on
the white gravel. His mouth was a red gash. I must have known that I wouldn't, in reality, dash across the street and attack him. It was just a fevered dream, one of a thousand scenarios we run through our heads every day of our lives to test their validity. Anyway, he was probably stronger than me; most likely I'd be the one to end up on the gravel, stamped into a bloody pulp.

A girl came out, about twenty, dark-eyed and very pretty, a lemon-coloured chiffon scarf tied around her head, wearing a beige Burberry raincoat, loosely belted. She didn't have the look of an office worker – not a typist or a secretary who worked at B-H Haulage, anyway. I saw them as drab, pasty, stunted creatures with dyed hair and cheap clothes. The girl unlocked the door of the black Mercedes and got in.

She reversed the car and spun into the street with a squeal of tyres and vanished down the hill into the billowing mist.

Benson was old enough to have a daughter of that age – even, I grudgingly conceded, an attractive daughter. No accounting for genes. Or was she his mistress? He was the type. I could just see him fawning over some young girl, spinning a smooth line.

A tanker groaned up the hill, headlights piercing the gloom like twin lighthouse beams, and swung ponderously into the black hole of the entrance and was swallowed up, its red tail-lights flaring briefly as the driver applied the brakes. At the back of the tanker a triangular plate with symbols warned of a hazardous load.

Purposefully, as if on some errand, I crossed the street and entered the building. Using the tanker as cover I got to within a few yards of a glass-walled cabin pouring out yellow light. It was like being underwater and coming across a human colony on the sea bed. There were two men inside. Had they looked up I would have been seen at once, but they were too preoccupied. Just then a figure came round the front of the tanker and stopped in the narrow space, blocking my way. At first I thought it was a ghost – his face under the flat cap was white as a skull, and like a skull it had empty black eye-sockets and a wide bony grin. I realised it wasn't a ghost but a man wearing a mask.

‘Are you on shift?' His voice, hollow and oddly distant, came through a square metal mesh where his mouth should have been.

I shook my head and edged round him, keeping my back to the office. ‘No, not this one.'

‘There's never any-bloody-body here,' he complained. ‘They give you a bloody schedule and then there's no bugger to give you a hand so you fall behind and you get bloodywell blamed.'

The black cavities of his eyes were tinted goggles, and he wore heavy, stiff canvas gauntlets that came almost to his elbows. I was suitably shabby to convince him that I was one of the regular loading gang.

‘Where's Billy Gratton?' he asked me. ‘Is he on?'

‘I've just arrived,' I said, and saw him tense, and I got the feeling I was being stared at through the blank dark goggles. I said, ‘Billy's on earlies this week, so he should be around somewhere.'

‘What about you?' he asked hollowly.

‘I told you,' I said, letting irritation come into my voice; ‘it's not my shift. Ask in the bloody office.' I wasn't sure if the performance convinced him, or even if it convinced me, so I quickly turned away and slouched off, heading deeper into the cavernous building.

It was like being inside the belly of a whale. Already I'd lost my sense of direction. Which side were the offices on, to the left or the right? There wasn't much activity: somebody distantly hammering, a radio playing pop music.

I came round the end of a tanker and almost collided with a man in greasy overalls who reared up directly at my feet. He had been kneeling, working on the rear axle with a giant spanner two feet in length.

‘Where the hell are you wandering off to? What do you want?'

I switched on a vague, hopeful smile. ‘Looking for the office. Lost my way.'

‘Oh aye?' He stared hard at me. ‘What d'you want the office for?'

‘I thought they might need loaders or something. Sweeper-up.' I shrugged. ‘Beggars can't be choosers.'

‘I doubt it but you can ask.' He pointed with the spanner. ‘Over there. There's a woman who does personnel. Mrs Crompton.'

‘Thanks.' I started to move away. ‘There's a bloke over there with a mask and gloves. What's he need those for?' I knew I'd made a mistake even as I asked.

‘Who wants to know?'

‘No it's just that … he scared the living daylights out of me, and I was wondering—'

‘What you up to, chum? Snooping?'

‘Work, a job, that's what I'm up to.' He was gently thwacking the business end of the spanner in his open palm. I said, ‘Why should I be snooping?'

‘That I wouldn't know,' he said slowly, as though he did know and was being cagey. A gentle tap with that giant spanner would break my skull. People round here were certainly very touchy about something.

‘Mrs Compton you said …'

‘Crompton.'

‘That door over there?'

‘Aye.'

He stood looking at me, eyes narrowed, the spanner making a soft fleshy sound in his palm. I nodded and walked off. The skin on the back of my neck was tingling. I was half-prepared for him to shout me back or even chase after me with that damn brutal thing.

A short passage with plywood walls ended in a door with a pane of frosted glass in its top panel, black letters peeling away saying OFFICE. The scuffed wooden floor changed to carpet, dark blue and coarse, of a hessian-like texture.

The room contained a desk and a switchboard and a blonde middle-aged woman with what seemed like artificially high and unrealistically pointed breasts. She wore a high-necked sweater with knitted white lambs gambolling across the green hills and dales of her chest. Pendant spheres of bright orange swung from her ear-lobes. Despite her rather fierce colouring of rouged cheeks and purple eyeshadow she possessed fine, almost sensitive features.

‘I'm looking for Mrs Crompton.'

‘You've found her. Can I help you?'

‘You're in charge of personnel?'

A weary shadow perceptibly dulled her expression.

‘One of the drivers said that you might need an extra loader for a day or two. He sent me up.'

‘Who told you that?' she asked sharply, as if I'd accused her
of immoral conduct.

‘I don't know his name. He drives for you.' There was a Catherine Cookson novel on the desk, open and face-down, next to a holiday brochure for Tunisia. Like a drowning man I was searching for straws to grasp. It suddenly struck me that only the flimsy plywood wall behind her might separate me from Benson. I could take three strides, barge through the door, and confront him. The idea seized hold of me like a fever and I trembled.

‘What's the matter?' she said, her face puckering in a frown. ‘Are you unwell?'

My stomach was knotted, there was a stabbing pain in the muscles of my neck which had involuntarily tensed. From behind the plywood wall the rapid clacking of a typewriter started up. I wet my lips and said, ‘Something temporary, that's all I'm after.'

‘Sit down.' It was a command. Mrs Crompton swivelled round in her chair so that the orange globes of her earrings swung. ‘I'll make you a cup of tea.' She plugged in an electric kettle and dropped a teabag into a mug with a round yellow face like the sun on it and the exhortation ‘Smile!'

The telephone switchboard was at right-angles to her desk, two rows of plastic switches and a red receiver in a recessed cradle. Mrs Crompton would know everything that went on here, the gossip, the intrigue. She would know who Benson called and who called him.

‘You're not local, are you?' she said, pouring the boiling water. ‘No, definitely not. I can tell. Your voice for one thing, and also your manner.' She smiled at me flightily through the rising steam.

‘My manner?' I said.

‘Pig-ignorant they are round here. Layabouts, dropouts and drug pushers. The town's gone to wrack and ruin. All that's left are the dregs. Ooooh' – she pursed her red lips in a way that was sensuous and primly disapproving at the same time – ‘I could tell you some stories. The class of people has gone right down. Work? They don't want to know nowadays. Oh dear me no. A good day's work would kill most of them. Sugar?'

Mrs Crompton brought the mug to me and leaned her solid, well-rounded thigh against the desk. Her strapped and moulded breasts were thrust out like two mountain peaks, the fluffy lambs having a
struggle to scale them. ‘They're either on social or in the black economy. Grab, grab, grab. Gimme, gimme, gimme. I admire people who want to get on, stand on their own two feet, but nowadays …' She shook her head, mouth turned down in disgust.

‘I suppose there isn't much work around,' I said tentatively.

‘It's there if only they'll look for it,' she shot back. ‘You, you're looking, aren't you? Well then. You see. You've come here. You're making an effort. But you don't strike me as the labouring type, if I may say so.' She gave a half-smile, arching an eyebrow. ‘Those hands haven't seen much manual labour.'

‘You've found me out,' I said.

‘Oh, I know what's what,' she said smugly. ‘I take a bit of fooling. Let them try anything with their time sheets and I'm down on them like a ton of bricks.' She reminded me of a ton of bricks, solid, unyielding.

‘Well, yes,' I admitted. ‘It's true. I am more used to office work than manual labour.'

‘I thought so. I bet you read as well.'

I blinked up at her. ‘Yes, I like to read. Do you?'

‘People watch far too much television these days. I'm a great reader, always have been. You know what they say, reading broadens the mind.'

‘Yes, that's very true.'

‘The trouble with television, it's too visual.'

‘I suppose it is.'

‘With a book you have to exercise your imagination. It's like a muscle, the brain, it has to be—' She broke off as the panel buzzed, and went to answer it. ‘B-H Haulage,' she said, and closed her eyes while she listened, smoothing her cheek with her fingertips. ‘Just a moment, Mrs Benson, I'll see.' She flicked a switch. ‘Sheila, it's Mrs Benson for Mr Benson. He still out? Well, will you take it?' She plucked a puffball off the front of her sweater. ‘Putting you through, Mrs Benson.'

I could just picture her: a demure little thing who wouldn't say boo to a goose. Fussing and fluttering round her lord and master. Benson would like that, somebody timid and docile and – an idea lit up my brain and I nearly spilt the tea. Benson's wife. She was the soft option,
the easy target. I had thought of it before – attacking him at his most vulnerable point but now the actual existence of a wife made it seem credible and possible. She lived out in the country somewhere, she was innocent and defenceless and unprepared for calamity. Anything might happen to her. An accident perhaps. Something terrible if not terminal …

Make Benson suffer as I had suffered.

Mrs Crompton came back and leaned against the desk and folded her arms underneath her bust. The glass panel in the door vibrated as an engine suddenly revved from below.

‘Ever do any gardening?'

‘You mean – digging? Well I used to have a garden,' I said, putting the mug on the desk. She moved it onto the blotter and re-folded her arms.

‘Cutting dead branches, sweeping up leaves, tidying round generally and keeping everything neat. I know it's not what you're used to, but there might be something if you're interested.'

I pretended to look interested. What did she want me to do, turn her scrubby patch of back garden into an ancestral parkland for fifty pence an hour?

She gnawed her lip. ‘I'll have to ask first. I can't promise anything.'

‘Where exactly would this be?'

‘At The Glebe, Mr Benson's house. There isn't a lot to do at this time of year, no planting of course, but possibly there might be something – a few odds and ends.' The acid came back into her voice. ‘Say if you're not bothered. I don't want to go to the trouble of asking and then find I've wasted my time.'

‘Why – yes, I am. Definitely. I'm willing to take anything on, whatever it is …' This was too perfect, almost too good to be true.

There was a click from the switchboard as the call ended.

‘I hope you realise I wouldn't do this for everybody,' Mrs Crompton said sternly. ‘Certainly not for the deadlegs round here. But you're a cut above them, I can see that.'

I stood up. ‘Shall I come back later?'

She looked at her watch, a small encrusted thing with a tiny face so that she had to screw up her eyes. ‘Not before three I shouldn't think. Mr Benson won't be back from lunch till then. He may want to see you.
May.'

‘Do you think so?' I said, my mouth suddenly dry.

‘Mr Benson doesn't hire just anybody – would you? Especially from round here. They'd steal the fillings out of your teeth as soon as your back is turned.' She heaved a tragic sigh. ‘You know, once upon a time people were prepared to work for a living. Now it's how much they can fiddle and dodge and sponge. Sign up on social, spend the mornings in bed and the afternoons in the betting shop. Let me have my way,' she said, nodding, chin jutting out, and gave a raw, ugly laugh. ‘If only just. By God, I'd soon sort them out.'

This I could believe.

Mrs Crompton went back to her chair and picked up a pen. ‘Let me have your name.'