Dispossession (11 page)

He nodded, frustrated but accepting. “Don’t rush things, on
my behalf or Lindsey’s. Take your time. He’s got all the time we need,”
bitterly, cryptically. “We can keep him where he is a long time yet. So get
well first, before you jump back into this. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” I said without irony, surprising myself as he
had just surprised me. I hadn’t expected such a seemingly-genuine solicitude
from Deverill; that was not his reputation with his employees, and it seemed
that he was employing me, though for what I still had barely a notion.

He needed me, I guessed, he must need me badly; and his next
words seemed to confirm that.

“Anything you want,” he said, “the money’s there. You know
that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, and no lie that. If he’d paid already for a
smart car and private treatment, then demonstrably Vernon Deverill’s
purse-strings were open to me, his wealth was mine to call on. Which was a
deeply uncomfortable position for me, though I did my best to hide it.

“Good, then.” Another grunt that seemed to say the
conversation was over, or his part in it; and it was picked up smoothly by the
lackey on my left, asking if there was anything I needed or needed doing right
now, anything I couldn’t manage from my hospital bed?

I shook my head, hoping he’d read a simple message: that
Deverill wasn’t the only one who found it hard to delegate, that what I had to
do I’d do myself, as soon as I was fit.

“Fair enough,” he said, and his voice too was friendly, as
the minder’s wink had been, confirming my status as friend of the family, part
of the team. And oh, I didn’t like that one bit, and I wanted to resign, but my
need to know wouldn’t let me.

“There’s been some more interest in the press,” he went on,
balancing his briefcase on the edge of my bed, flicking up the latches and
lifting the lid. “Only in the extradition, they’ve not made any connections
beyond that, but I thought you’d be interested to see it.”

“Yes, right. Thanks...” I was interested in anything that
could give me clues without yielding up my ignorance as a hostage to fortune. I
was too vulnerable just now to take any chances with a man like Vernon
Deverill.

Four photocopied sheets came out of the briefcase; at the
angle the man held it, I couldn’t see anything else that was in there, though I
did try. My need against his training, the echo no doubt of his master’s voice,
don’t flash my secrets around
; that time he
won, but there’d be other chances, I reckoned. Accepted by these men, maybe
even welcomed, what access I couldn’t claim I could try to steal.

Which might be, very likely was what underlay all this.
Doing some job for Deverill, though I knew not what, I could penetrate his
innermost circles and learn more than any outsider would have a chance at. I
could be a spy, a fifth column, an undercover agent digging for victory...

But why in the world would I want to? I wasn’t CID or a
private investigator, I was a solicitor with an established practice and no
ambition to look beyond that, very content with what I was doing. Why change
that?

Because something or someone else had changed it for me,
obviously. I’d been reacting, perhaps, to a change forced upon me; and Sue was
right in the frame there, as the only known agent of change in my recent life.
Though she’d at least given me the impression that she knew little of my work
and nothing of my connection with Deverill beyond the fact that it existed and
she didn’t like it, none of that was necessarily true. Maybe she was the
undercover spy here, exploiting my memory loss now as she might have exploited
an infatuation earlier, feeding me disinformation to have me up and dancing to
her tune...

What tune that might be, I didn’t know and couldn’t guess.
Nor who would be paying her to pipe it. There were no reasons that I could see,
nothing was reasonable; wheels turned within wheels, and all perspectives were
awry. I felt as though I were living in an Escher engraving, where impossible
relationships appeared true and things sat side by side that could never have
shared the same space.

But Escher only works, he only gets away with it because
people are content to play to his own rules, the accepted conventions of
pictorial art. Our eyes are lazy, and hence easily deceived; there’s less work
in labelling a paradox than there is in unravelling it.

And this was not a print to be admired for its technical
ingenuity or its psychological acuity, this was my life. If one perspective
could show me nothing but paradox and incongruity, I was in no position simply
to throw my arms up in wonder or surrender or despair. I had to analyse and
explore, to shift my own position and examine other people’s until I found
another perspective, from where things would fall into place and make sense. It
had to exist somewhere, I was sure of that. I might be floundering, even in
danger of foundering at the moment, but there must be solid ground out there if
I could only discover it. People no less than particles have distinct patterns
of behaviour. Nothing is truly random or chaotic, it only ever seems that way
because we lack information or insight, or we’re trying to force what facts we
know into a false interpretation.

If I’d been playing detective for or against Deverill—or
both?—then I could do the same on my own account. Though it would be my own
recent life, my own forgotten motives that I needed above all to detect...

I took the stapled sheets with a nod of thanks, perhaps my
first material clue; and was glancing through them, trying to look intelligent
under Deverill’s assessing eyes, when the minder took two or three quick paces,
across the room to the window. Something was odd there, that took me a moment
to figure: it had been darkening outside as it ought this time of night, this
time of year, but the minder was moving into light, seemingly, brighter than
the rest of us.

“Jesus!” he yelled, staring. “Get out, Vern! Out
now
!”

Vern, I thought, must have taken a course, How To Be
Protected. By the time I’d turned my head to find him, he was already at the
door and yanking it open. No hesitation, no questions asked.

Not so the lackey on my left, who was fumbling to close his
briefcase before his feet dared move. Graduate of a different course, perhaps,
How To Protect Vern’s Secrets.

Not so me, either. I didn’t want to linger, though I didn’t
understand; but my body simply wasn’t up to speed here.
Out of bed
, my head was crying;
wait
was the message that came back from my legs.

Crisis-time: and like Luke coming out of his tree, I could
respond only in slow motion, and what had been a maximum benefit to him was
disastrous to me.

Would have been disastrous, if I’d been left alone. If the
minder had been doing his job, looking after his principal.

He was fast in his head and fast on his feet both, he had
time to dive out of there and save himself to save Deverill later, from
whatever threat came next. He might even have had time to hustle his colleague
the lackey out of the room, and save them both. But his head snapped round and
he saw me struggling, too weak even to throw the bedclothes back with any
decision; and he made his own decision in that moment, and with one bound he
was by my bed.

Not reaching to lift me out, no time for that. Though I
couldn’t see what was coming, I could see its light burning beyond the window,
throwing strange shadows.
Get the fuck out of here
I wanted to say, I wanted to be a hero, but before I could find the voice for
it he’d gripped the bed-frame below my line of sight and was heaving massively.
The bed tilted beneath me, toppled, went smashing onto its side; and I fell
out, of course, and the mattress fell heavily on top of me. And then a greater
weight, a bonecrushing thud on top of the mattress on top of me, and I thought
that was probably the minder vaulting over the top for what little protection a
hospital bed-frame could offer him—unless he was laying his own body there as
another barrier to protect me, and what the hell were his priorities, why
me?—against the room-shaking rumble and crash of what came then through the
window and through the wall.

The room did more than shake, the room came down. I was
blanketed in darkness and stupid with shock, half-crushed and fighting to
squeeze air into my lungs against the weight atop me, but even so I could still
put names to some of what I heard and felt around me.

The snapping, sliding, thundering sounds were the ceiling
and the roof above, I thought: above no more, but beams, bricks, tiles and
gutters all slipping down to join us.

The sudden blow against my side and the brief inhuman
screaming, that was the buckling of the bed-turned-safety-cage doing its new
job, taking heavy punishment that would otherwise have come slamming unhindered
into me.

The implosive
whuff!
that followed, the sound that sucked—yes, indeed. I knew what that was also, I
had a name for that, and I was starting to scrabble under my mattress, trying
to dig a way out through lino and solid concrete when much of the weight was
lifted off my back, and then the rest of it as my unknown friend, my minder who
I didn’t have a name for yanked the mattress up and joined me behind its
temporary shelter.

The air was full of dust and filth and first fingers of
smoke, reaching around the mattress; but he held it across his back and
shoulders, and I could see a path through rubble to where clean light still
shone, beyond the twisted doorway. Then I couldn’t see it so clearly because a
figure stood there, a man bellowing, naming the three of us, “Dean? Jonty?
Oliver, can you hear me?”

And that was Deverill, probably seeing nothing through the
muck and the murk and the flaring light; and not one of us tried to answer him.
I was too busy breathing, and trying to crawl; his minder, my new friend, my
new hero Dean or possibly Oliver was too busy grunting encouragement as he
inched along beside me, above me, between me and the catastrophe, hanging over
me with the mattress spread like protective wings, like a shield; and the other
in the room, the lackey Oliver or possibly Dean, he was too busy screaming.

I crawled across broken brick and splintered wood,
blundering towards the light until at last I was grabbed at, I was seized and
dragged out into the corridor, and Dean or Oliver came after. They tried to
haul me immediately away, but I fought their hands off for a second, with more
strength than I’d found to save myself; and I turned to look back into the
room, just a moment I had to do that before someone stepped between it and me;
and I saw a fiery hell in there, I saw a crumpled lorry parked in my bedroom
and ablaze.

And I saw Oliver, unless he was Dean, trapped in his corner
and dancing, a figure sewn entirely of flame.

o0o

He wasn’t screaming any more, but I think I screamed for
him. I’m not certain; they gave me an injection and took me away, and things
were very muddled in my head for a while after.

I woke up or came round in another room, another part of the
hospital. By the light that found its way around and between and through the
curtains, it was also the beginning of another day.

There was a policewoman sitting beside my bed. Protecting me
or waiting for me, I couldn’t tell which. Both at once, perhaps. When she saw
that I was awake, she put her head outside the door and spoke to someone in the
corridor.

A senior officer came at her summoning, a man whose name and
rank I forgot as soon as he mentioned them, because I was too busy looking to
listen. He smelled of smoke and wet ash, he’d had a wash but his clothes were
rank with it; and he looked achingly, up-all-night-with-a-bad-job weary.

He asked politely if I felt up to answering a few questions;
behind him, the nurse Simon pulled faces at me,
say
no if you feel like it, I’ll get a doctor in to back you up...

But I wanted rid of this, all I wanted was escape and that
clearly wouldn’t be allowed until the questions had been asked and answered. So
I shrugged an acceptance and he started in, with the WPC staying as note-taker
and Simon fading out with more unspoken messages,
just
buzz if you need me, I’ll come and scare them away.

Questions, questions. I told him everything I thought he’d
need to know, about what happened last night; then he made me tell him again,
everything I could remember. Nothing changed the bones of it, though: that
Vernon Deverill had stood recklessly exposed in a lighted window; that his
minder Dean had warned him away, and at the time I’d wondered how much risk
there was, whether his ego actually stood in more danger than his physical self
if he went unwarned, unguarded; that I was answered a minute later, when a
truck came crashing through the window, right where he’d been standing.

That I didn’t think it a coincidence, no, not at all.

The policeman nodded, scratched his nose, finally admitted
that I might possibly be right about that. The truck had been legitimately
parked on hospital grounds; it belonged to a contractor working on the new
wing, and he’d been in the habit of leaving it on site for the last few weeks.
Indeed, he had definitely left it at the top of the slope that ran down towards
my former room. But he maintained that he had left it in reverse gear and with
the handbrake full on, no chance of its running away; and there were other
factors, the policeman said, that suggested it had been deliberately aimed at
my window.

“Such as?” I asked.

“Well, the contractor didn’t leave the lights on, for a
start. Says he didn’t, at any rate, and why would he? But someone steering that
truck down the hill in the dark, got to bump it up over the kerb and then hit
one window out of a dozen, he might well want the lights on, yes?”

I nodded, remembering. “They were on, for sure. Everything
looked strange...”