The Complete Stories (34 page)

I should get away now, Colin told himself. This is the dangerous bit.

That other stuff was nothing. Just bluster. This is it. And almost on the thought a knife appeared in the man's hand. He stepped back, the knife flashed, and with a series of anguished cries he began slashing at the freckled, dead-white flesh of his own neck and shoulder and at the dirty singlet, which was immediately drenched with blood.

“For God's sake!” Colin shouted.

But the man was now triumphant. He stood at the edge of the pavement with his head thrown back in the light of a streetlamp and wielded the knife in slow motion while Colin, helplessly, watched. “There!" he sobbed, "There! There!"—as if what he had wanted all along was not Colin's life but his attention, and the sobs came as regular as the gushes of his blood.

Colin, without thinking, made a grab for the knife and felt himself cut.

There was blood everywhere now, some of it on the man's body, some of it on him. The knife slid away into the gutter and they were locked fiercely together on the pavement, grunting and shouting wordlessly between breaths until, with a mechanical whooping and a pulsing of blue light, a car came screaming to a halt beside them and Colin felt himself hauled skyward by a hefty cop. “Okay, feller,” he was being advised, "you just calm down, eh?” The incident was at an end.

He was covered with blood. The other man, savagely wounded, was weeping and on his knees.

It wasn't till he was in the squad car, and his heart had slackened a little, that he caught up with the enormity of the thing. The blood that covered his shirt and jacket in a sticky mess was the stranger's. He was barely scratched.

“But it doesn’ t make sense, now does it, Colin?” the larger of the two detectives told him. He was speaking gently, with tolerance for a navety that might, after all, be genuine; as one talks to a bemused and stubborn child.

The room seemed too small for the three of them. There was too much light.

“Now, tell us again, Colin. You get out of the cab. Why? What was it that upset you? In what way did this Armenian, or Yugoslav, seem threatening?”

The more often he told it the less probable it became. He saw that. A taxi-driver he had been eager to get away from, at midnight, half a mile from his hotel. A perfect stranger who first attacked and abused him and then turned the knife on himself. The only fact he could produce was his identity.

These sceptical fellows, who had never heard of him of course, were not impressed. “What sort of books, Colin?” the blond one, who was larger, enquired with a sneer. He was called Lindenmeyer, the other Creager.

After a time they allowed him to ring the Pedersens, and Coralie verified that, yes, he had been with them. They had seen him off in the taxi. The driver was dark. Greek maybe, Lebanese. “Listen, Colin,” she whispered, when they passed the phone to him, "don't tell them anything till we get hold of a lawyer. Eric will be there to bail you out. Don't say a word. And most of all, don't provoke them. You don't know what they're like.”

Looking sheepishly at the two detectives, he thanked her. They were grinning. Perfectly aware of what Coralie was telling him, they seemed amused by their own reputation—which did not mean that it was undeserved.

But Coralie was wrong, he did know these men. They were boys he had grown up with, and Lindenmeyer might even have been familiar. It was a name he knew from school.

He was very blond and bony, and must, in early adolescence, have been girlishly pretty. There was, behind his rather high voice and beefy grin, a hint of fineness savagely repressed. Only with women, Colin thought, might he feel free to reveal it. But of the two, it was Linden-meyer he was wary of. His brutality, like his coarseness, was assumed. Having no necessary cause, it would also have no limit. Creager, more obviously the bully, had no need to make a show. Red Irish and with freckles that in places had turned to open sores, he was all bluster, but too lazy to do more than put a blow in now and then to keep up his name for toughness. It was Lindenmeyer who asked the questions.

So he claimed to be local. Didn't sound it.

And had stepped out of nowhere into a situation with which he had absolutely no connection. Well, he was in the clear then.

Given the state of his clothes and the amount of blood he was covered
with, very little of which was his own, and the crusting of it in the cracks of his knuckles and under his nails, there was some justification, he saw, for Lindenmeyer's irony. Blood needs explaining. He recalled, with astonishment now, the sense of elation in which, just before he was hauled off the man, he had been aiming blow after blow at his face.

“Will he be all right?” he found himself asking, and was uncertain whether the question put him in a better light or a worse.

It was recorded, but neither Lindenmeyer nor Creager gave him an answer. The role of questioner, here, was theirs.

“All right, Colin,” Lindenmeyer said for the third or fourth time, "let's go over it again. This taxi-driver, this Armenian or Lebanese—”

L
ATER,
lying stripped on the cot of a clean cell, he considered his position.

When he was brought down here he had not been thrown into the communal cell at the end of the corridor, which was crowded and stank and from which, as they passed, came catcalls and curses against the constable who was accompanying him, followed by gobs of spit, but he was alarmed just the same. It was a low throb in him, sign of some larger unrest that he had become part of.

He wished desperately that they had allowed him to wash. More than his assailant's blood, it was the man's smell, which once it got into his head might be ineradicable, that he felt all over him; the rancidness and close animal stink of self-loathing. He began to tremble with delayed shock. Not for the danger he had been in but for how close he had stood to an anguish so intense that the only escape from it was into self-extinction. When he did fall at last into a fevered sleep he was in a place where there were no walls; his sleep was open to the communal cell opposite, he was surrounded by broken mutterings and cries whose foul breath he took into his lungs and breathed out as protests that found no sound except as echoes in his skull.

At some point he woke, or half-woke. Three or four black youths were being dragged to the door of his cell, shouting obscenities; but the constable must have thought better of it and pushed them on. There was a scuffle. Hard blows against something soft or hollow. Then a violent eruption as the cell opposite burst into a howling, and again he had
in his nostrils the odour of his assailant's sweat. It was overpowering. He started up, shouting, and his cry was immediately taken up in a renewed frenzy of catcalls and yells.

He did not sleep again. He lay stiff and still, aware of the exchange of heavy night-heat for the clearer heat of day. Light came, and with it the shrill clattering among palm fronds and fig trees of thousands of starlings.

“Right, mate,” the new duty-officer told him, "you c'n have a bit ‘v a wash. Inspector'll see yer.”

He stood in the open doorway, severely official, and let Colin pass.

The working day had begun. The cells were being unlocked. Bleary-eyed but subdued, the night's pick-ups had begun shuffling out: drunks, derelicts, young toughs, barefoot and with tattoos on their calves, who had been hauled out of fist fights just on closing time or from round the doors of discos, thin young Aborigines, one or two with dreadlocks— the agents, or victims or both, of a violence that was random but everywhere on the loose. You had only to step into the path of it to be picked up and whirled about and shattered. It was something he had always known about the place but had allowed himself to take for metaphor. He was being reminded again that it was fact.

He washed, when his turn came, at the dirty basin, and drew wet fingers through his hair.

In the metal mirror above the tap he barely recognised himself. The metal distorted, but there was also the puffed eye and thickened lip. He looked, he thought, like a dead ringer of himself who for thirty years had lived a different and coarser life—maybe even that of the man he had been mistaken for.

The interrogation room appeared different in daylight. Larger. But the real difference was that Lindenmeyer and Creager had been pushed to the edges of it, one lounging in a chair by the typewriter, the other hunched into the window frame. The younger man who occupied the centre immediately offered Colin his hand. His name was McKinley.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Lattimer,” he said, all affability, "we've finally got things sorted out. You'll be free in just a minute.”

Without being obvious he made it clear that he knew quite well who
he was dealing with, and might even, if pressed, have been able to produce a title.

Lindenmeyer and Creager watched closely, wearing faces that expressed different styles of contempt—whether for him or for their superior he could not guess.

Creager might have spent the remainder of the night in the derros’ cell. His tiny blue eyes had disappeared into the beef of his cheeks. He kept hitching his belt over the roll of his belly. Lindenmeyer, too intelligent not to feel that this writer bloke and the inspector made an oaf of him, boiled with resentment. Whatever residue of violence the room contained came from him.

“The man's out of danger,” McKinley was telling Colin. “Superficial wounds is what the report says. It wasn't a serious attempt.” He cleared his throat. “Mind you, he's still pretty convinced that he's got some grudge against you.”

The hint of a question in his voice made Colin say very firmly, for perhaps the twentieth time in the last eight hours, "I never saw the man in my life before.”

McKinley nodded.

“Well, don't concern yourself. On the evidence,” he said, as if evidence might not be the only thing to go by, "we accept that. The man doesn't, that's all. We're waiting for the psychiatrist's report.”

Lindenmeyer and Creager were grinning. McKinley paused, regarding him, Colin thought, with anticipation, as if, now that he was officially cleared, he might offer some private explanation of an affair that was still worryingly obscure. McKinley's interest at this point could be thought of as personal, literary—that was the suggestion— and Colin's obligation to explain, that of an author to a loyal but puzzled reader.

But Colin himself was in the dark. It might have helped, he thought, if he had had a name for the man he had struggled with, held close, beaten, and whose blood and sweat, mingled with his own, had discoloured the water in the dirty handbasin and gone swirling to join the rest of the city's scourings, the accumulated debris and filth of nearly a million souls.

What he had not been able to wash off was the claim that had been laid upon him. In some ward, in a hospital somewhere in the city, a man lay sedated, physically restrained perhaps, who still inwardly pursued
him, consumed with resentment for the harm done to him by a shadowy third party to whom, Colin thought, he too was connected, but in ways so dark and undeclared that they might never be known.

But if McKinley did have a name, he did not offer it, and Colin knew that he could not ask.

“I'll just call your friend in,” he said, closing what had been for a moment an open silence.

Eric was outside and immediately turned to face them, substantial looking in a suit and tie, and already preparing, Colin saw, to take charge. His face was a mixture of concern for an old friend—"Are you okay, Colin?"—and prickly disdain for the ways of local officialdom.

McKinley too saw it, but stood back, too polite to let his irritation show. His attention was not on Eric but on a woman on the bench opposite, who looked up, and as she did so, met Colin's eye.

He knew immediately who she must be, and was aware too of the inspector's awakened interest. He was on the watch. Not out of professional interest now, but with that curiosity about human behaviour and its shifts and by-ways that made him both a policeman and a reader.

She was blonde, and coarse but sexy. He took in the soiled tank-top, the feet, which were dirty, in their high-heeled, patent-leather sandals, and felt a little shameful kick of desire.

A smile, half-scornful, drew down the corner of her mouth. She had caught the spark of attraction in him that might have confirmed, to a practised onlooker like the inspector, that his assailant's suspicions had to this extent at least been entirely plausible. For a moment they made a triangle, a second one, this woman, the inspector and himself. The tension of the moment was felt by all three.

It was Eric who broke it. “Come on, Colin,” he said. “Let's get you out of here.”

So it was over—or almost. In moving too quickly away under the double gaze of the inspector and the woman, Colin stumbled, very nearly fell, and found himself caught and supported by an arm that shot out from nowhere and belonged, when he looked up, to a young man in a crash-helmet who had been waiting at the counter to report a theft.

“Hey, steady on.”

“Sorry,” Colin said as he righted himself. Then, "Thanks.”

“She's right, mate.” The young man produced a grin that was all friendliness and good humour and a frankness that knew no guile.

“Come on,” Eric said, in a tone that suggested a growing apprehension at how accident-prone his new friend might be. “I'll get you back to the hotel, we can ring Coralie from there.”

Safely back in his room at the hotel, he splashed cold water over his face, and as soon as he had recovered a little, rang London. Emma's voice was thick with sleep.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

He closed his eyes, and her breathing in his ear was so close that she might have been lying half-curled against his body in the dark.

“What is it?” she asked. “What time is it?”

“Nothing. It's nothing to worry about. Go on back to sleep.”

The closeness, the familiarity of her, collapsed the hemispheres, the vast spaces across which her voice was being projected towards him. With his eyes close-shut he could believe that the slight hissing he could hear in the gaps of her breathing came from the high-ceilinged room where she lay, their flat high up above Redcliffe Square, and felt himself settle in the stillness and order, even in its customary disorder, of their shared life: dishes left overnight in the sink, books on shelves, LPs, newspapers.