Orchestrated Death (25 page)

Who looked after the baby? – Denise’s mum, who lived in the council flats in North Pole Road. That’s why they met at The Dog
and Sportsman. A bloke from the Dairies dropped Denise off there, Paul picked her up, and they drove round to collect the
baby and then home to Latimer Road.

That particular evening he had got there a bit early, so he was just sitting in his car watching the traffic for Denise to
turn up, when the roadster had come along. The girl was driving it very fast and flashily, screaming her tyres as she whipped
into the car park, breaking hard, and backing into the space opposite him in one movement. When she got out of the car, he’d
thought to himself that she was a pretty girl playing tough. She was dressed in a donkey jacket and jeans and short boots,
which with a girl as pretty as that made you look twice all right.

What time was that? – About twenty to ten, more or less. He hadn’t looked at his watch, but Denise usually got there about
a quarter to, and it wasn’t more than five minutes before she arrived. Maybe less.

Well, so this girl got out of the car and went towards the
pub, and then this man appeared in front of her. No, he didn’t see where he came from – he’d been looking at the car. He just
sort of stepped out of the shadows between the parked cars. She stopped at once and they spoke a few words, and then they
went back to her car and got in and drove away. That was all.

What did the man look like? – Well, he didn’t get a close look at him. He was tall, and wearing an overcoat, a scarf, and
one of those brown hats like Lord Oaksey wears on the television. What do you call them, trilbies? Not a young man. How did
he know? Well, it was just a sort of impression. Besides, young men didn’t wear hats, did they? He didn’t see his face, because
the hat and scarf sort of overshadowed it. He didn’t think he’d recognise him again. Just a well-to-do, middle-aged man in
a dark coat and hat.

Did she seem to know the man? What was her reaction to him?

The young man frowned in thought.

Yes, she knew him. She didn’t seem to be surprised to see him there. Wait a minute, though – when she first saw him, she turned
her head and looked quickly round the car park as if to check if anyone were watching. No, he was sure neither of them saw
him. His lights were off and they didn’t even glance his way. Just for the first minute he’d thought the man had stepped out
to rob her, snatch her handbag or something, and that she’d looked around for help. But that wasn’t it. And it was all over
in a second. The man said something; she answered; he said something else; and they went back to her car and got in and drove
back the way she had come, down Wood Lane towards Shepherd’s Bush.

Atherton closed his notebook. ‘Thank you very much Mr Ringham. You’ve been very helpful. Now if you should remember anything
else, anything at all, no matter how trivial it seems to you, you will be sure to let me know, won’t you. You can reach me
on this number.’

‘Yes, okay – but look here, I won’t be involved in anything, will I? I mean, I can’t identify this man or anything, and I’ve
got Denise and the kid to think about.’

Well, all witnesses have their limitations, Atherton thought, and reassured him with some vaguenesses and long
words. In his own powder-blue Sierra, driving home to the sanctuary of his civilised little house, cat, real fire and elegant
supper, he wondered how far this had got them. Enter Mr X in sinister trilby. He never trusted men who wore hats like that.
So they now knew that she met the murderer at The Dog and Scrotum, and though the description was not promising, it might
just as well have been Thompson. He was just the kind of jerk who would attempt to disguise himself by wearing a very obvious
hat and muffler.

Anyway, at least they knew that she went to the White City in her own car. It would be worth interviewing the residents of
Barry House again and asking about a red MGB. Surely someone must have noticed such a speciality car?

The atmosphere in the house was as icy as Slider had expected it to be.

Irene gave him a boiled stare and said, ‘There’s nothing for supper, except what’s in the fridge. I wasn’t to know you’d be
home, and I’m not endlessly cooking meals to throw them away.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Slider patient under insult. ‘I can get myself something.’ Even as he said it, he wondered what. Irene
was not the sort of person to tolerate leftovers. The fridge would most likely be as innocent of food as an operating-table
of germs – and for much the same reason. Atherton had long ago pointed out to him – in a different context of course – the
correlation between lack of sexual outlet and an obsession with hygiene.

Both the children were home and had friends in, and Slider was able to use them, as so often before, as a screen. He asked
Matthew about his football match, and sat through an interminable verbal action-replay. Matthew’s friend, a pinch-nosed, adenoidal
boy called Sibod, with such flamingly red hair that it looked like a deliberate insult, repeated everything half a beat behind,
so that Slider got it all, or rather failed to get it at all, in an unsynchronised, faulty stereophony.

‘So you won, then, did you?’ Slider asked at last, groping for comprehension.

‘Well, yes, we did win,’ Matthew said with an anxious frown, ‘and if we win again next Saturday against Beverley’s, we win
the Shield. Only they’re very good, and if we only draw, it goes on goals, and we didn’t do very well on goals.’ From his
worried expression, it was plain that the whole responsibility for their goal-less state rested on his shoulders. Like father,
like son.

‘Well, even if you don’t win, it doesn’t matter, as long as you do your best,’ Slider said, as parents have said throughout
the ages. Simon and Matthew both looked uncomprehending of his stupidity.

‘But it’s the Shield!’ Matthew began, desperate to get this point across to unfeeling parenthood.

Slider forestalled him hastily. ‘Matthew, is that bubble gum you’re eating? I’ve told you again and again, I won’t have you
eating that disgusting stuff. Take it out and throw it away.’

‘But you let me eat chewing gum,’ Matthew protested. ‘Only you can’t make decent bubbles with chewing gum.’

‘Chewing gum’s different,’ Slider said. The next question would be why. And since he didn’t know, other than that it was personal
prejudice, because the smell of bubble gum reminded him of the smell of the rubber mask they used to put over your face to
give you gas in the dental hospital back in the dark ages of his childhood, he took refuge in authority.

‘Please don’t argue with me. Just do as I say. Take it out and throw it away, please – and wrap it in something first,’ he
added as Matthew, sighing heavily, stumped off towards the kitchen. Simon followed him, and he felt Irene’s eye on him, saying
as clearly as words, My how you love to play the heavy father, don’t you? It’s all Action Man, as long as it’s only a couple
of kids you have to stand up to.

He postponed being alone with her and her eye by going upstairs to see Kate, who was locked into one of her intensely private
and uncomfortably ritualised games with Slider’s least favourite of her best friends – a fat child called Emma who was so
relentlessly sentimental and feminine that it made him squirm with embarrassment. When he pushed open the bedroom door, they
were engaged in being schoolteachers to a class of six dolls, including a bald and one-legged
Barbie of hideous aspect, a toy monkey and a bear. Emma’s part at the point of his entry was confined to watching admiringly
and breathing heavily through her mouth, but Kate was haranguing her victims in such tones of hectoring sarcasm that Slider
wondered afresh if that was the way adults really appeared to children.

‘I think I’ve told you before never, never to do that, haven’t I?’ Kate was saying to the teddy bear. Slider had long ago
named it Gladly, because its eyes were sewn on asymmetrically, and there had been a hymn he had sung in Sunday school when
he was a child called ‘Gladly my Cross I’d Bear’. Kate had accepted the name unquestioningly as she accepted all the incomprehensibilities
of the grown-up world, as if they were nothing to do with her. Slider remembered being as young as that, with a mind gloriously
untrammelled by a knowledge of the probabilities. When he was very small, he’d thought God’s name was Harold, because of the
second line of the Lord’s Prayer, and it had not seemed at all surprising. Similarly he had believed for a very long time
that there was a senior government official called The Lord Priwy, whose rod of office was an eel.

The thing, he thought, that marked him apart from his own children was that when he learned the truth of these matters it
struck him as interesting and memorable. Nothing, he felt, would ever interest Kate beyond her own immediate sensations. She
had already created herself in what she considered an acceptable image, and while that image would undergo subtle alterations
year by year, the primary purpose of her life would always be the maintenance of whatever was the current version.

He regarded her sadly as she broke off her diatribe and looked at him with disfavour, minute fists on hips, lips narrowed
in an uncomfortably familiar way. How was it, he thought, that without ever in the least intending to, we recreate our idiosyncrasies
in our children? Already Matthew was exhibiting signs of Slider’s overdeveloped sense of responsibility, his indecisiveness
and tendency to worry about what he could not change. And Kate was turning day by day into a grotesque caricature of her mother.
How could it have happened? For in sad truth, he had spent horribly
little time with either of them since they were babies. Once they had settled into regular bedtimes, they had been lost to
him. It must be Original Sin, he thought sadly.

He had intended asking his daughter about her fête, but she said, ‘Go away Daddy. We don’t want you now,’ and self-respect
and a sense of duty obliged him instead to deliver a lecture on good manners. Kate listened to it with indifferent eyes and
the patience of one who knows that resistance will only prolong the interruption. She was so different in that respect from
Matthew, who would have flung himself into the situation with the burning conviction of a martyr, and ended in tears. Kate,
Slider thought, had been born aged well over forty. Having finished with his bit of rôle-play, he left the room, and before
he had shut the door behind him he heard Kate’s instant resumption of hers: ‘Now I’m sure you don’t want me to have to smack
you again, do you?’ Even from his limited knowledge of Kate’s games, he didn’t think Gladly had much chance of talking himself
out of that one.

And now there was no alternative but to descend to the realm of snow and ice, and face up to his other responsibility; his
other, he supposed, creation – for Irene had not always been like this, and what could have shaped her apart from the interaction
of his influence on her basic matter? She was sitting on the sofa staring at the television, though he knew she wasn’t watching
it. It was, however, The News, and one of the rules Irene had made for herself was that The News was important and mustn’t
be disturbed or talked during.

As far as he could see the news was itself and always the same: on the screen now was a battered street in some hot part of
the world where houses are made of concrete filled with steel rods, like motorway bridges. An intermittent brattle of machine-gun
fire was punctuating the urgent, segmented commentary, and interchangeable men in identical drab battledress were running
and ducking and, presumably, dying. It struck him as odd how news of war, though it was repetitive and completely unsurprising,
should be regarded as ‘real’ news, whereas anything which exemplified the kindness or inventiveness or compassion of human
beings was included, if at all, only at the end of the bulletin as a sop
to old ladies and housewives – the ‘And finally’ item.

All the same he was glad for the moment of the flickering images of death and suffering as a way to avoid talking to his wife.
How many marriages were kept intact that way, he wondered wearily. His mind felt numb and exhausted with the effort of guilt
and anxiety, and the frustration of being in the middle of a maze with no idea which was the way out, or even if there was
one. Irene; the children; Anne-Marie; Thompson; Atherton; the Supér: all revolved like Macbeth’s witches, indistinct, dangerous,
clamouring for his attention – all expecting answers from him, who had no idea even of the questions. O’Flaherty’s voice waxed
and waned like the sea, warning him of some danger in a booming, portentous voice; and far, far away, small and clear like
something seen through crystal, was Joanna – almost out of reach, too far, and fading, fading …

‘If you’re going to fall asleep, you might as well go to bed,’ Irene said, jerking him back out of a doze. The news had finished,
to be replaced by that witless sitcom about a couple who had reversed their traditional rôles, she going out to work while
he stayed home and minded the house. The laughs were presumably generated by the sight of a man wearing an apron and not knowing
how to operate the dishwasher. It was depressingly 1950s.

‘Eh?’ he said, trying to look interested in the programme. The man was holding a nappy and looking at the baby with a puzzled
expression. Any minute now he would say ‘Now which end does this go on?’

‘It’s useless sitting there pretending you’re watching when you were snoring a minute ago,’ Irene went on, and then, with
an excess of vicious irritation, ‘I hate it when your head slips over, and you keep jerking it up every three seconds!’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said humbly, meaning it, and she just looked at him with a resentment so chronic, so weary, that he was filled
with a sense of helplessness. It was so vast that for a moment it seemed to blot out his personality entirely. He ought to
take her hand, ask her what was wrong, try to reach her and comfort her, this woman whom he daily hurt and saddened; and yet
how could he help her, when it was the simple fact of his existence which made her unhappy? He
couldn’t ask what was wrong, when there was nothing he could do to put it right, and the pity he felt was as useless, as unuseable,
as that which he felt for the crumpled bodies on the television news film. That was the intractable, daily dilemma of married
life, and it blocked the flow of tenderness, and finally even killed the desire for it.