Blind Needle (16 page)

It was the first time I had seen the harbour in daylight. It contained the remnants of what had been Brickton's fishing fleet, a couple of larger cargo vessels, and sundry smaller craft down to wooden rowing boats, with only the rims of their gunwales breaking the black surface, like the outline of giant footprints that had filled in. It was impossible to tell which of the vessels Trafford had made his home.

Across the mud stretched the spidery fretwork of a conveyor system: enormous square steel buckets suspended on chains, strung far out to sea. Part of a dredging operation, I supposed.

From the vantage point of the harbour wall I thought I might see a pale humped shape, a fish-white puckered hand groping through. But
the thick dark mud concealed all, sucked everything away, including our footprints from the night before. Perhaps the basin of mud contained other bodies: a graveyard of putrefying lacerated corpses held in liquid suspension. Trafford had known about the body, gone straight to it. Supposing he, and not Benson, was the murderer? What if he were so proud of his handiwork that he had to show it off? There could be little satisfaction – could there? – in committing the act and not getting the credit for it. Imagine walking about with that dreadful thrilling secret and the agony of not divulging it to anyone! But Trafford hadn't taken the credit; he had given it to Benson, had said
That's what he does to people who get in his way
.

Next to a chain-link fence I came upon a new wooden signboard, freshly painted in large black letters, which read:

SITE ACQUIRED FOR
 BENSON DEVELOPMENTS
 (HOLDINGS) PLC

A footbridge connected one arm of the harbour wall to a spur of the mainland, leading to a path of cindery red earth which ran along-side a collection of old buildings which at first I took to be derelict. The windows were boarded over. Doors hung ajar on musty interiors piled with rubbish. But some of the buildings were still in use: right at the end next to an open door there were three wooden trays of paperbacks with a hand-lettered notice: ‘25p each – five for £1,' and crudely painted on the wall above: ‘Hank's Book Exchange'. Parked round the corner was a rusty silver Datsun with a piece of bent wire for a radio aerial.

Stone steps led down past bright green gloss walls sweating with condensation. The basement reeked of decay and damp paper, of mouldy bindings and bundles of crumbling religious tracts. It wouldn't have surprised me to see green seawater rising through the spongy carpet and swilling between the metal racks like a scummy tide.

Diane Locke was standing near a desk talking to a young man with a blond beard and thinning, baby-fine hair.

Neither one glanced up. I rested the moquette bag against the leg of a trestle-table and pretended to browse. The sound of her voice was
like a snatch of a popular song that reconstitutes a vanished past. It was pathetic that Diane Locke's voice was the only nostalgia I had to cling to.

‘Don't you need a prodigious memory?' she was saying. ‘All those precedents and
Crown versus Hathaway 1863
cases to remember?'

‘No, no—' the young man protested gently, blushing, flattered by her praise. ‘It's a general grasp of principles that's important. You require a mind that works in a certain systematic way, I suppose.'

‘Well then, it wouldn't suit me.' From her profile I could see that she was smiling. ‘What are you in now, your second year?'

The young man nodded. He said eagerly, ‘I want to specialise in tax law, that's where the opportunities are. Set up my own consultancy and hire myself out to the big corporations. Whatever you save them, you take twenty-five per cent.'

‘By “save” you mean “avoid”, don't you?'

‘Only in the legal sense.'

‘Ah yes, the legal sense.' Diane Locke kept her smile. She said, ‘That's where you lawyers come in, keeping everything nice and legal.'

The young man took her words at face value; in any case her gentle smile would have dispelled any doubts. I thought about how some people can insult you to your face and you almost thank them for it, whereas others (I meant myself) could rile people with the most benign, well-meaning phrases. Something to do with the eyes, perhaps, or the tone of voice or the shape of the mouth.

Diane Locke turned her head and saw me. My spectacle frames were in my pocket, so it was only the dark hair and thickening beard that were different. She turned back to the young man without acknowledging me and said, ‘Tell Hank I've been. I'll ring him in a day or so.'

‘Yes I will – I'll write it down,' shaping his wispy blond beard to a point with his other hand as he did so.

She picked up her shoulder-bag and went up the stairs.

Diane Locke was standing next to the car, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a dark-blue hip-length reefer jacket, collar turned up, gazing across the harbour to the horizon – or what would have been the horizon had it been possible to spot the demarcation of flat grey sea from grey blank sky.

She frowned as if concentrating furiously on something. As I came up to her she said with a tremor in her voice, ‘In heaven's name what have you done to your hair?'

‘You don't think it's an improvement?'

‘I never imagined you as the vain type. There's proper stuff you can buy, you know, to hide the grey. And why the beard?'

‘It's supposed to be a disguise.'

She put a hand over her face and trembled violently.

‘I've got glasses too.'

‘Don't,' she was shaking now, ‘don't put them on. Please.' She was quivering helplessly like a schoolgirl. ‘Do you have a red nose and plastic ears to go with them?'

I felt childishly happy. I liked having her laugh at me. I said, ‘Let's drive out somewhere. Let me buy you a meal. I'd like to very much.'

‘My God, what's this?' she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Come into the family inheritance?'

‘It's some money that was owed me. Will you come?' I knew I sounded like a teenager and couldn't help it. ‘I'm really glad to see you again.'

‘Well,' Diane Locke said, putting her handkerchief away. ‘I'm not sure I'm glad to see you. Not with that hair.'

‘I could have dyed it orange,' I said.

‘It might have been better if you had,' she said, opening the car door, her eyes still moist.

Leaving Brickton for the open countryside was like being released from a dark cobwebbed cupboard under the stairs. The rear window of the Datsun had been mended, and I opened the window on my side a couple of inches and took in a few good lungfuls of air. The attaché case in its moquette cover rested on my knees, with both hands holding it. I began to feel less afraid, almost light-headed with what I supposed was happiness.

After about twenty minutes we turned off the main road and followed a sign pointing the way to a place called Gilcrux. The narrow
road dipped like a rut between high hedges, shutting off the view of mountains with their smooth bare crowns supporting the unbroken overcast.

‘Who's the disguise supposed to fool anyway?' Diane Locke asked. ‘Benson or Smith?'

I suddenly felt cold, and shut the window. I didn't want to think or be reminded about S –. I'd shut him off. The smell of the clinic clung to him.

‘It wouldn't fool either of them.'

‘Damn right it wouldn't,' Diane Locke said. ‘So why bother?'

I had no answer.

‘You haven't seen him have you, this man who's supposed to be following you?'

‘No.'

‘He hasn't shown up in Brickton?'

‘No.'

‘Then you've nothing to worry about, have you?'

She drove over a hump-backed bridge that spanned rough water tumbling over rocks. We passed through a stone gateway wreathed in dark green moss and stopped by a low wall of yellowish brick with a sunken formal garden beyond. The house was very old, crumbling at the edges, with narrow leaded mullion windows and a roof that was all steep angles and tall thin chimneys of carved stone. There was no sign I had seen for a restaurant or a hotel.

‘Do you have to take that everywhere you go?' Diane Locke asked as I got out of the car still clutching the moquette bag.

‘It's valuable.'

‘Valuable!' she mocked me. ‘You have come up in the world.' She opened the boot and I put the case in amongst what looked like a stall at a jumble sale. I slammed the boot shut and heaved at it to make sure it was properly locked.

A large Rover saloon, bottle-green body and black mudguards, at least thirty years old but in beautiful condition, pulled in as we went up the semi-circular flight of steps to the entrance. I said with a wry grin, ‘You took me at my word about buying you a meal. This place looks expensive.'

Inside, the antiquity was genuine. No modern craftsman could have
simulated the warped and slanting floor. Like the caulked deck of a sailing ship, waxed and polished to a brilliant gleam, it seemed to rear up and subside so that walking on it gave you a sailor's gait. The furniture looked as if it was about to topple over. A stone fireplace in which twenty people could have sheltered took up the whole of one wall. At its apex there was a family crest, at least three feet wide, blurred with age under a patina of Jacobean soot.

We walked the length of the wood-panelled room and came through into a small carpeted bar. The barman wore a dark coat and striped trousers, the image of a manservant from a pre-war British film. He was pouring green liquid from a cocktail shaker into two slender frosted glasses. He added two precise drops of creme de menthe to each glass and twirled them with a long silver spoon and set them on a silver tray. He looked up and smiled. ‘Good day, Miss Locke. How nice to see you. I shan't be a moment.'

He paid no attention to my shabbiness and scrubby growth of beard: anyone with Miss Locke, had they been dressed in a sack and covered in blue woad, would have been perfectly acceptable.

We sat down. A stained glass window made coloured patterns on the beaten copper table. The chairs were upholstered in plum velvet. I felt quietly amazed that this was how life could be. That there could exist a whole other world of people doing this every day. They got up in the morning, bathed, put on fresh clothes, and over breakfast decided where they were going to go for lunch. They read the
Telegraph
, did some light gardening to work up an appetite, and drove off to places like this in old, beautifully maintained and expertly serviced bottle-green Rovers with black mudguards. There they were greeted by a manservant who mixed them an aperitif, which they sipped while browsing through the menu. In this world there was ample time to sit at ease and cross your legs, adjusting the crease in your trousers, and pass remarks about this and that. From the comfort of a plum velvet chair next to a stained glass window, everything assumed sensible proportions. The world functioned as it was supposed to. There was no point getting fussed – about what, for heaven's sake? Money came in and money went out, the wine was chilled, the car topped up with petrol, and later on, if the weather holds, how about a few holes of golf or a run out to that National Trust place?

But which was real – this or the room above Mr Patundi's shop? I couldn't hold them together in my mind. I found it impossible to believe that I had stepped into a car in Brickton and twenty minutes later I was sitting opposite Diane Locke in a baronial country house sipping something from a fluted glass that stung my tongue with cold fire. Somewhere along the road we had crossed the dividing-line. We had arrived in the land of Oz. On this side there was a sufficiency of everything, not on vulgar display, but there, simply and unquestionably there. Your table was reserved, as was your share of the plunder, and you had every right to it. While on the other side of the dividing-line, over there – beyond the invisible boundary we had crossed without noticing it – there were sickly children with burning eyes, tattooed thugs who dealt in drugs, and pale bodies curled up in the harbour mud.

‘Have you found somewhere to stay? A hotel or something?' Diane Locke had taken off her coat. She wore a pale grey silk blouse gathered in by a black leather belt and a long woollen skirt of small checks which fell in graceful folds over black soft leather boots. She was perfectly at home in these surroundings, dressed for the part, even to the single strand of pearls at her throat.

‘Nothing as grand as that,' I said. ‘It's just a room above an Indian's shop.' But not a room I could return to – not after Wayne's social call.

‘Why there? I thought you'd come into your inheritance.'

‘Yes, well … probably I will move. I've been thinking about it.'

‘And did you find what you were looking for in Brickton?'

‘I found who I was looking for.'

‘Ah, of course!' She nodded and smiled. ‘The mythical Benson.'

‘Is that what you think – that I invented him? The mad in pursuit of the imaginary.'

‘You're a curious case, aren't you?' Diane Locke said. ‘At least I think so.'

‘It takes one to know one.'

She laughed. It was a warm, full laugh, not the nasal tittering you usually get from so many women.

‘Is that why you're interested in me?' I asked.

‘Who says I'm interested in you?'

‘I think you are.'

She sipped her drink, and then said, ‘Well yes, I have to admit … dammit, why am I being so coy? I'm curious about what happened to you, yes, and about your wife. You told me she was dead.' I just nodded at this, and she went on, ‘Was it that that caused your … why you went into the clinic?'

‘No. That started before then. Months before. She was unfaithful and I found out about it.'

‘You didn't want to lose her,' Diane Locke said. She went on rather wistfully, ‘When you love someone you'd do anything to keep them.'