The Suburbs of Hell (12 page)

One evening, after delivering a fare to the train ferry at Old Tornwich, he wandered into the Speedwell for a beer. It was in high summer, and still light, and the view from the window over the broad blue estuary was calm as sleep.

It was then that he met Ken Heath. The boy capitalist, flushed and already slightly bloated with drink, was unbuttoned enough to want to know more about the black man with the Suffolk voice. So Sam told him the simple story of his life, and the tycoonlet exclaimed and pressed his card upon him. He was himself, he revealed, the owner of a taxi firm in New Tornwich; if Sam should ever be interested, there was money to be made. He was touchingly friendly, and Sam, who was no drinker, was taken by surprise several times on the winding estuary road.

A few days later he got out the card and rang Ken Heath. Ken sounded surprised, and a little doubtful, at hearing from him, but took his name and a telephone number at which he could be reached. Several weeks passed before he did ring, but then it was with an offer. He needed, urgently, a man to live in the flat above the taxi office. He had formed glowing opinions of Sam’s reliability, and knew that he was a single man, which was what was needed, because of the telephone at all hours, and because the flat was, frankly, more of a pad.

‘There’s just one thing,’ he said. ‘I dunno quite how to put this. I don’t think there’s another—ah—black face, if you don’t mind me mentioning it, in this town.’

‘Thass fine,’ Sam said. ‘No problem, boy.’

A week later he was again on the estuary road, with all his possessions on the seat and in the boot behind him.

The cafe next to the taxi office was a haunt of jobless school-leavers, whose blue shapes he could see through the steamy glass as they played their electronic games, while the blare of their jukebox choices escaped into the open air, apparently through the extractor fan, and reached him as he parked. The warm office was also a favourite spot for hanging about, and when he went in he found two of them sitting on kitchen chairs watching a portable television set on the desk. The driver behind the desk had turned it away from himself and was talking to the boss, who paced and turned in the bare little room.

‘Ah, Sam,’ he said. ‘Hoped I’d see you. You well?’

‘A man who doesn’t drink,’ Sam said, ‘is always well. Did you want something with me, Ken?’

‘Nothing special,’ Ken Heath said. ‘Just to compare notes, you know. Bugger it, you can’t hear yourself speak in here. How is it all the teenagers today are deaf?’

‘So would you be,’ Sam said, ‘after ten minutes in the caff next door. Well, d’you want to come upstairs, or d’you want to go to the pub? Upstairs, you get a choice of Nescaff or Ribena.’

‘That’ll do,’ said Ken Heath, abstracted, and as Sam held open a door for him he began rather ponderously to make his way up.

The little sitting-room above had the look of a hospital, it was so white and uncluttered. The only colour was in a large print, not a very good one, of Constable’s painting of boys angling in the Stour at Stratford St Mary. The one small window had a view, by daylight, of the same river at its widest, sometimes blue, sometimes billowing like storm-tossed mushroom soup.

‘You don’t sound very fit, boy,’ Sam remarked, as he joined his landlord. ‘Out of puff after eleven stairs.’

Ken Heath’s father, a jobbing builder, had bought up a number of half-ruinous Old Tornwich houses when much of the place was half-ruinous, paying almost nothing for them. Therefore his heir, in his thirties, was running to fat.

‘I’m going to diet,’ he said. ‘Go to one of these health farms. They charge like wounded buffalo for starving you, but the sort of people who go don’t mind. Conspicuous non-consumption, Taffy Hughes calls that.’

‘Have a black coffee,’ Sam offered.

‘Shall I?’ Ken wondered. ‘No, I won’t, thanks. You’re a very tidy bloke, aren’t you, Sam?’

‘Drummed into me,’ Sam said. ‘My old mother was like that.’

‘They looked the place over, didn’t they? The law, I mean.’

‘Yeh,’ Sam said shortly.

‘That can’t have been very nice.’

Sam shrugged. ‘I’m a law-abidin citizen. I don’t want killers runnin around loose. So I don’t complain.’

‘Did you get any idea of what they were looking for?’

‘The gun, I suppose. But they didn’t tell me nothing.’

‘Did they go anywhere else?’

‘You’re as likely to know that as what I am,’ Sam pointed out. ‘I heard they paid a call on Frank De Vere, because they know he’s a firearms nut. That’s as much as I can tell you.’

‘Why you, though?’ Ken Heath asked. ‘You’re not a firearms nut.’

‘I should think,’ Sam said, ‘because I was on the spot just before the Commander bought it. Plus, I keep funny hours. Plus, you can’t see me in the dark.’

‘Ah, Sam,’ said Ken Heath, uneasily. ‘Lots of people keep funny hours in this town. Which is why you do.’

‘All that was months ago, Ken. So why are we talkin about it tonight?’

‘It’s awkward,’ Ken muttered, beginning to pace. ‘Bloody awkward. In a way, it’s none of my business—but in a way, it is. I mean, we’ve got competitors. If people start phoning them because they’re scared of one of our drivers—well, that much is my business.’

Sam was staring at him, out of a still face. ‘People are scared of
me
?’

‘I’ve got to admit,’ Ken said, ‘that a bit of talk has come my way. It’s started again, because of that boy Ramsey.’

‘That boy is mad,’ Sam burst out. ‘For Christ’s sake, he’s in an institootion. Why should it be me? Why not him?’

‘Well,’ Ken said, ‘of course that’s the first thing that came into everybody’s head. But if the law have looked into it—and we know they have, and then some—and if they still don’t say they’ve solved it, well, we can be pretty sure it wasn’t that lad. So people start wondering: What if he
knew
something?’

After a moment, Sam said quietly: ‘Less get this straight, Ken. People are talkin about what he said? They know about the phone calls? They know what he said to me?’

‘There were several listening,’ Ken said, ‘and these things get out and get about.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Sam muttered. ‘And I took them there myself. I asked them to protect me—the sneaking bastards.’

‘Well, that’s human nature,’ Ken Heath explained. ‘People talk to each other.’

Sam was standing stock-still in the middle of the room with a hand up to his forehead. Abruptly he dropped his arm and turned to face the young capitalist. ‘Well, Ken?’

‘Well, what?’

‘What you’re wanting is to break up our little partnership, I should imagine.’

‘Sam, you don’t understand me,’ Ken Heath protested. ‘You do not understand. I wa
s preparing
you, that’s all. If this doesn’t die down soon, perhaps you should spend more time in the office. At night, I mean—only at night.’

‘God knows,’ Sam said, ‘how many local drunks I’ve helped through their own front doors. I’ve even put some of ’em to bed. This is the thanks I get: they tell each other I want to murder them.’

‘It’ll blow over, Sam,’ soothed Ken Heath.

‘Listen,’ Sam said, ‘tell me something. When I come in, was you talkin to Pete about this?’

‘Well, yes, I touched on it, as a matter of fact.’

‘In front of them two lads.’

‘They couldn’t have heard,’ Ken said defensively. ‘They were listening to the telly.’

‘They were listenin to you,’ Sam said. ‘What have you done, boy? That int never goonna blow over now—never.’

‘Shit,’ said Ken to himself, and took to pacing again.

‘I don’t think,’ Sam said, ‘there’s no use in talkin on about it. We better sleep on it, and think over what we’ve said already. You’ve done me a foo good turns, Ken. I shan’t make your affairs more complicated than what they are.’

The fat young man paused in front of him and looked him in the eyes. ‘The good turns haven’t all been on one side,’ he said. ‘Don’t get any wrong ideas, Sam—we’re not parting from you.’

‘Funny,’ Sam said, ‘that telephone’s got a lot to answer for. Remember? I asked you if I could put my own name into the book with that number. On’y time I ever sin my name in print, until the inquests. That crazy fella might have never tracked me down if it hadn’t been for that, and he might have just forgot about me. But that seemed sort of homely, like, and settled, bein in the phone book.’

‘Time I wasn’t here,’ Ken Heath said.

‘Time you wasn’t,’ Sam agreed. ‘Like I said, sleep on it.’

‘And you,’ Ken said. At the door he made a V-sign, then went heavily down the stairs.

Sam stood staring for a moment at the picture of the angling boys, dwarfed and at home in their leafy landscape. He was wondering what had become of them all, the school-pals with whom he had gone fishing.

In the bedroom he still preserved Miss Buxhall’s picture, her tropical fantasy. On the bedside table lay a neat packet of letters from his mother. It was hard to associate her with those foreign-looking stamps. She had lately passed into her seventies, and grown rather querulous, finding fault, in a Christian way, with daughters and grandchildren. The climate did not suit her. She dreamed sometimes of grey rainy days, of snow.

He threw himself down on the smooth counterpane, faultlessly washed and ironed. He lay staring at the spotless ceiling, painted by himself.

Listless Linda De Vere, blondely and anæmically pretty, turned down the sound of the telly so as to hear her definitely blonde friend. Definite was what Donna had always been, crisp and clear-coloured. Often she gave Linda, who was the elder by eight years, the feeling of being a little bossily jollied along and mothered.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘What was that?’

‘I was just thinking,’ Donna said, ‘that it looks bigger, the room looks bigger. Lighter, too, without all old Dick Turpin’s ironmongery.’

‘He flogged it all,’ Linda said. ‘I’ve told you, haven’t I? He was getting the feeling that our friendly neighbourhood bobbies thought he might be kinky about shooting holes in people. Very sarky he was, about how nobody had been shot with a blunderbuss or a rapier or anything else he had. Anyway, he sold the lot, and did well out of it. I think he’s good at selling things, my man.’

‘I reckon,’ said Donna coolly.

‘Except himself,’ said Frank De Vere’s wife, ‘as your tone is telling me. In the days when I went into pubs with him it used to get me down, the feeling of being half of an unloved couple.’

‘Sometimes,’ Donna said, ‘you make him sound pretty unloved by you.’

‘That’s life,’ Linda said. ‘You’ll find out. You fall into a rut—the sort of rut you call a relationship—and the easiest thing, on the whole, seems to be to stay in it.’

‘Or the laziest thing,’ said Donna.

‘Christ,’ Linda said, ‘has he been coaching you in his lines? Give us another one. Tell me you were raised by an army wife, and you can’t stand slatterns.’

‘“Slattern”,’ Donna repeated. ‘The cheeky bugger.’

‘Oh, there’s plenty more like that,’ Linda said. ‘He knows lots of words. Why did he marry me, I wonder. There must have been a female sergeant-major or two in Colchester who’d have had him.’

‘Really?’ said Donna, feigning belief. ‘Is he that way? You know—masterful women in uniform, and all that? Whips and bondage?’

‘No,’ Linda said. ‘No, it’s the other way about. He’d like to be masterful himself, but not in a physical way. A sort of mental bullying, that’s his bag. Hence the great buddyship with Dave Stutton, who’s as bullyable as—’

‘Two short planks,’ Donna suggested.

‘Right on,’ said Linda.

Donna giggled a little, thinking about it. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘it’s not really fair to him—to Frank—to talk about him like this. I mean, he was really worried about you, in the weeks after the murders. He offered to pay me—to
pay
me, for God’s sake—to come and sit with you when he was out at night. I mean, he wasn’t just edgy, he was neurotic.’

Linda took up a packet of cigarettes and made a slow business of removing one and lighting it. ‘I suppose,’ she said at last, ‘he didn’t tell you why?’

‘Why?’ Donna repeated. ‘He didn’t need to. There was someone going around blowing people away, that was why.’

‘There was more to it,’ Linda said. ‘He didn’t tell you anything else? About a window, for instance?’

‘No. No windows came into it.’

‘I was almost certain of that,’ Linda said. ‘Well, the reason for all the worry about me was that one morning—the morning after poor old Ena died, but before I knew about it—there was a message written in my lipstick on the inside of that window there. It seemed to be a message from the murderer, saying that he was going to call again.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Donna breathed. ‘Oh my Christ, Linda.’

‘I
’m not kidding,’ Linda said. ‘I’ve always suspected that someone else was.’

‘You mean, Frank?’

‘That was what I thought as soon as I saw it. And in spite of all his carrying on later, I never really stopped thinking that. In spite of the fact that in the end he actually
said
that he wrote it; because he wasn’t even trying to be convincing. You can imagine the scene. I’d gone to bed leaving the back door unlocked—it opens on a blind yard with ten-foot walls, but so did Paul Ramsey’s—and the master of the house comes down in the morning and throws a wobbler. So he grabs a lipstick which is near his razor in the bathroom cupboard, and decides he’ll teach the slattern a lesson she’ll never forget. That’s how I read it, and if I’m unjust to him—well, I always was a mean-minded bitch.’

Donna had been staring at her, blue-eyed. ‘I’m scared for you,’ she said. ‘Whichever way it is, whether it was him or—I’m scared for you, Linda.’

‘Don’t be,’ Linda said. ‘It was a sort of joke. The actual message was jokey. Most of his jokes have a nasty streak. People like that don’t go in for physical violence, they work it out of their systems in words.’

‘Deep,’ said Donna. ‘All the same, I don’t like leaving you. But Sam will be coming for me soon. Shall I send him away again?’

‘Don’t you dare,’ Linda said. ‘Poor old Sam, faithful as—two short planks.’

‘You are rotten.’

‘Look, love, I’ve explained to you that my husband doesn’t shoot people, and why. So we won’t worry about that. Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about Sam.’