(2013) Collateral Damage (6 page)
He was astonished at his objectivity. At first he had been consumed
with grief, unable to sleep, unwilling to shave or eat or take the simplest decision.
He had not noticed the passing days. A week might have been an afternoon.
Perhaps this is what happened, he thought, as they filed out
of the chapel of rest into a rain-shower. You only had so much grief to give this
side of sanity and afterwards the mind froze, the senses anaesthetized so that you
could prod and probe, bludgeon memories and, in the end, even observe the final
rites without pain. But there was something else too, something which cut him off
from the other mourners, for he had emerged from the pain and uncertainty having
made an important decision. He was going to kill the man who had deprived him of
Emma.
The first person he saw outside was Toby. He was struggling into
a trench-coat. Dove walked over and helped him on with it. Toby seemed to flinch
and Dove put it down to the disturbing effect of the service. The last time he had
seen him had been at the coroner's court where they all sat on hard wooden benches,
crushed in between reporters and the relatives of the principal in the next case,
and heard the coroner intone: 'Murder by person or persons unknown.'
Funny, he thought now, how Emma should have begun and ended with
Toby. That it should have been Toby's flat they were going to spend the weekend
in.
'How are you feeling?' asked the advertising man.
'Better,' said Dove. 'And you?'
'I think I'll be all right in a minute,' said Toby, his nervousness
fading a little. 'When do you go back to work?' It was all he could think of saying.
'I don't,' said Dove. 'Not immediately.'
'Oh?'
'I've taken some leave of absence.
Having a
bit of a holiday.'
'Good idea,' said Toby. 'Help you get over it.' He almost added
that Emma would have approved, but decided this was not the occasion to appear to
have any sort of intimate knowledge of her. Instead he asked: 'Where you going?'
'I'm not sure ... Middle East probably.'
'Terrible cuisine,' said Toby automatically, 'but the weather
should be good.
Lots of ruins and things.'
'Yes, modern and ancient. Well, thanks for coming.'
Toby saw with immense relief that Dove was holding out his big
right hand and grabbed it like a drowning man. The teacher was mildly surprised
at the passion in his grip.
'Not at all ...
least I could
do ...
keep in touch,' Toby was muttering. Then he turned and fled, striding out towards
his car, never looking back.
There was a kind of wake at the Brigadier's home afterwards at
which a few selected 'chums' gathered to offer the Brig. and his lady their final
condolences for the loss of their daughter over a glass or two of sherry or Scotch.
A lifetime of foreign postings had thoroughly deracinated the
Brigadier, and the old house in the West Country, with the crowded family vault
in the village church, had long since gone. They had bought a home in Kent because
friends and contemporaries had settled there. You could usually get a foursome together
for bridge and find a chum to walk out with a gun, if you didn't mind wood-pigeon
and rabbits. Only foreigners and jumped-up scrap-metal merchants could afford pheasants
nowadays.
'I hear you're taking a holiday,' the Brigadier was saying. He
was a tall man with close-cut, iron-grey hair who had a habit of swaying backwards
and forwards on his heels, as if he had been caught in a gentle breeze. He was speaking
in the nearest he could get to his normal voice, gruff and dipped, in a quite unnecessary
attempt to soothe Emma's mother, whom tranquillizers had already reduced to a state
of cow-like docility.
'Yes. I don't feel much like work at the moment,' said Dove.
'Well, if you take my advice you will,' said the Brigadier. 'I
intend to plunge straight back into it.
Takes your mind off it.'
Since he left the army he had done something in the city. Dove
was never sure what. He dropped his voice to a whisper. 'Don't brood, Stephen. Emma
wouldn't have wanted that.'
'You're probably right. It's just that I don't feel like plunging
back into teaching at the moment. Perhaps I'll plunge into something else.'
Damn, thought Dove. That was rude.
All those
plunges.
He hadn't intended it to come out like that. In fact, he would have
preferred to tell the old soldier exactly what he had in mind, win his approval
for once. But it was impossible to do this if he was serious about it, and Dove
was very serious indeed. Apart from any other considerations, it would undoubtedly
interfere with the theft he was going to commit in the next few minutes. So all
he said was: 'No, I'm not going to brood. I'm just going to have a quiet little
think about things.'
The Brigadier wasn't at all put out by Dove's outburst. He felt
rather sorry for him. He had never been brought up to cope with these things, coping
was the thing, and therefore was going to pieces. Otherwise, as far as the Brigadier
was concerned, Dove remained a totally incomprehensible human being because he was
entirely foreign to his experience.
He strongly suspected that the social stratum Dove sprang from
spent the years from 1939 to 1945 either in 'reserved occupations' or served in
some earth-bound capacity in the Royal Air Force, probably as wireless mechanics.
He also had the feeling that he might never see Dove again and he was not particularly
sorry about it. Desperately he signalled for a chum to come over and rescue him
from this painful conversation. After a preliminary reconnaissance the chum told
Dove that it was his duty to go back to work, an act he equated with advancing towards
your objective after your best friend has been shot beside you. The Brigadier said
he could not have put it better himself. After a little more of this Dove excused
himself
and went upstairs, leaving the two old men to talk
about him.
He went directly to the master bedroom with absolutely no excuse
worked out to explain his presence there if he was caught in the act. The first
thing he saw was innocuous enough, but it surprised him, heightened his sense of
being an intruder. On their large double bed they had a pale blue duvet, German
style, and not the blankets and eiderdown he would have expected. The duvet indicated
approval of at least one small contemporary development in the British scene that
seemed completely out of character. It made him wonder what other incongruous things
he might find there. He began to feel as if his mere presence in the room was a
terrible violation, as if he had somehow desecrated the place as soon as he crossed
the threshold. For a moment he was sorely tempted to run away, return to the chums
down stairs, make his goodbyes,
flee
. But he knew that
if he could not do this he might as well forget the whole project, take chummy's
advice and go back to the firing line, try to lose himself in a long summer's campaign
against the guerrillas in 4C.
He went to the nearest bedside table, which was obviously the
Brigadier's because it had some cuff-links and collar-studs on it in a little velvet-lined
leather box. There was also an unreadlooking copy of last weekend's
Sunday Telegraph
. On the other table there
was a photograph of thirteen-year-old Emma in a riding-hat, sitting on a pony with
a rosette in its bridle.
This was all exactly as it should be and made him feel better.
He held his breath. He didn't think he had the nerve really to search the place,
pull it apart.lt had to be where he thought it would be. He pulled the drawer in
the Brigadier's table open slowly, as if it might be booby-trapped. It seemed to
make an incredible amount of noise. It was full of papers. Panic-stricken, he pulled
at the papers and the whole drawer came out of the table and crashed to the floor
like a landslide. He
stood,
rock still, listening to the
murmur of voices from downstairs. A door opened; he waited; the door closed. The
murmur continued as before. He looked down at the floor and there, smaller than
he remembered it, was the revolver and two lidded cardboard boxes containing the
ammunition.
He had last seen it shortly after he and Emma got married, a
civil wedding in a crowded registrar's office and a ceremony which Emma said afterwards
reminded her of getting stuck in a queue at the post office. They were spending
a long weekend with her parents in an attempt to help them get over the shock. It
was not very successful therapy. Her mother wept, Emma sulked and then saddled up
her sister's hunter and went galloping off without a hardhat on. The Brigadier drank
too much port after lunch while casting conversational flies, trying to find out
what sort of waters his new son-in-law swam in. It was soon established that he
did not shoot. Nor did he fish, and when Emma asked him to hold the hunter while
she was tightening the girth he was obviously terrified of the beast. His hair was
too long, his accent too short and, from one or two things he had let drop, he also
appeared to be a sight too liberal in his ways: everybody knew that these comprehensive
schools were staffed by red cadres. The only thing the Brigadier approved of was
his build. He looked like he could stop a tank attack.
Later, the Brigadier blamed it on the port. It started when,
during his interrogation, Dove revealed that he not only had no interest in killing
anything, but had never actually touched a firearm in his life, never in fact pooped
off at anything.
Shortly afterwards they were standing boulder to shoulder on
the ample lawn, blasting to pieces cans and cardboard boxes, first with the double-barrelled
12-bore and then with the revolver. When she came back Emma thought it was the funniest
thing she had seen for ages. Dove was quite good with the shotgun and seemed to
have something of a natural eye. With the pistol, like most people firing one for
the first time, he was utterly hopeless.
In any case, the piece was not designed for accuracy. It was
a short barrelled Webley.38 revolver made under licence in Calcutta in the 1930s
by an Indian gunsmith who sold them to officers and their wives as a weapon small
enough, unlike the issue service revolver which in those days was till the cumbersome
.45, to conceal easily about their persons. The short barrel brought the range down
to about twenty-five yards and this particular weapon tended to throw a bit to the
left. Its blueing had worn away in places, and the ring on the butt, designed to
take a lanyard should the owner ever wish to wear it with uniform, had been removed.
Like most revolvers it did not have a safety catch. A long time ago the Brigadier
had simply wedged a large headed screw into one of its chambers, thus reducing its
load to five bullets, and let the hammer rest on that.
Dove pocketed the pistol and the ammunition, over forty rounds
in all, replaced the drawer and went back downstairs. Shortly after that he left.
As it happened the Brigadier did not open the drawer to his bedside
table from one week to the next. It was almost three weeks before he missed the
revolver and when he did so his primary suspect was his wife. She was still heavily
sedated most of the time and he feared that either she was suicidal or had somehow
convinced herself that he was. 'You must tell me where you've put it, dear,' he
was likely to snap just as the drugs were about to transport her across the frontiers
of some Shangri La where Emma was always thirteen and won all the gymkhanas. Over
a month went by before he realised who had taken it. By that time it was much too
late.
Stephen Dove had more cash in hand than he had ever had in his
life before. By the time he had withdrawn his life savings from the building society
- almost two thousand pounds, sold his books, record-player, tape-recorder, cassette
deck, and the few possessions he and Emma had acquired in their short married life,
excluding her jewellery which he was loath to part with, he was able to spread a
total of £2,556 across the top of his new Samsonite suitcase. The suitcase had cost
almost sixty pounds which he regarded as something of an indulgence, but had excused
on the grounds that he was going to be living out of it for some time to come. The
Webley was in it under his shirts. Hardly a satisfactory hiding-place, but the best
he could do for the time being.
He arranged the money in neat little piles according to denomination.
That, he thought, is what I have garnered in thirtytwo years on this planet: just
about enough to buy one standard medium-sized car.
His last night in the Midlands was being spent at the home of
his friend, Roger Day. This was an overcrowded semi in a culde-sac with children's
bicycles and dismembered dolls in the hall, and book-shelves jammed with paperbacks.
In the lounge there was a baby grand piano and underneath it a small portable television
set which Roger had bought in order to be able to communicate with his pupils. Roger's
wife, a slightly overweight young Welsh woman with black curly hair, taught music.
Between pupils, when she was bored, she baked chocolate cakes. The whole house exuded
that warm, self-satisfied, superficially friendly yet basically xenophobic smell
of successful domesticity. Its very comfiness made most visitors dismally aware
of their intrusion.
Until Emma's death Dove had been one of the exceptions. Now he
too felt suffocated by its homeliness and was anxious to be gone. His headmaster
had allowed him to take the summer term off as unpaid leave of absence which, even
in the circumstances, was a flattering concession granted the unemployment level
among teachers. He would not have to report back to work until the start of the
new school year in September - almost five months away. 'If you're not back then
I'm afraid we'll have to replace you,' the headmaster had said, trying to keep his
voice friendly. 'Until then we'll try and make do with a supply teacher.'
