Blind Needle (18 page)

In the twilight of the hallway the bakelite telephone crouched on the little table beneath the varnished banister like a shiny black toad. The wall of books and periodicals mounted the stairs in dusty disorder. Diane Locke motioned me to put the attaché case in its moquette cover next to the hallstand, in which jostled together a collection of walking sticks and two large black umbrellas, like unfurled bats. I straightened up and felt her cold face against mine and her warm lips impress themselves upon me.

She pushed my overcoat off my shoulders. As I struggled to free myself she was loosening my clothing and unfastening my belt. She
unzipped the front of my trousers, then held my hardening penis through my underpants. I tried to kiss her, holding her awkwardly by the shoulders, but she turned away from me, and bent forward, slipping both hands underneath her long skirt, rolling her tights over her thighs, and holding the sausage of material in her hands kicked off her shoes and extricated one foot and then the other. She lifted her skirts and pulled her pants off.

She sat down on the stairs and lifted her skirt to her waist. Her head was thrown back, elbows close to her sides resting on the thin carpet, her long white legs, tapering from heavy thighs, bent slightly at the knees, spread apart.

I slid my underpants down and my penis sprang erect. I knelt down and she hitched forward on her bottom, holding her skirt bunched in both hands. I held onto the banister to steady myself, my elbow jammed against the wall of books for leverage, and there was no point of contact between us other than where I entered her.

She thrust at me, each time drawing her lips back, sucking in short sibilant implosions of breath between her clenched teeth as I moved easily and smoothly back and forth, without impediment.

All the while, as we fucked, she was watching me, her head hung back, her eyes heavy-lidded and almost shut, the top of her head striking the step immediately above with each thrusting movement. She kept on saying, ‘Christ yes that's it. Christ yes,' as I swelled inside her and came, feeling the energy discharge itself, passing from my body into hers.

Diane Locke closed her eyes, and for a minute or two we did nothing. Then she drew her legs up, pulling her skirt over her knees, not looking at me, and at that moment the fat black toad of the telephone rang, as loud and peremptory as an alarm bell, each jangling echo dying into an eternity of silence.

I thought she wasn't going to answer it, but she smoothed her skirt and reached through the rails of the banister and put the receiver to her ear, stroking her forehead with the tips of her fingers. ‘Hello? Yes. Yes. He's not here. I'm not sure.' She looked at her watch, and gave a small sigh. ‘After six, I should say. Yes. All right, I'll tell him. Bye.'

Her tights were rolled up on the floor, like the shed skin of a brown snake. Her pants were caught in the spokes of one of the umbrellas.
She gathered them up and said, ‘I'm going upstairs for a minute. Go into the kitchen, I'll make some tea.'

I picked up my overcoat, and hung it on the hallstand and went into the kitchen. I stood at the sink and washed my hands. The back garden was on a gradual slope, falling away from the house, laid out in damp empty rectangles for summer vegetables. There was a new, freshly creosoted garden shed with a black tarpaulin roof, rows of gleaming galvanised nail heads like neatly drilled bullet holes. Behind it a rickety wooden fence, and beyond that the fir trees descending into the valley towards the lake, glimpsed through the branches as a flat oval of dulled pewter.

I dried my hands, thinking I could make a home in that shed with its view of the lake through the trees … a trestle bed, a chair, a lamp, a paraffin heater, plenty of books in the house to read. I didn't need much, wanted even less. I was used to small bare spaces. I would forget about Benson and his schemes. I would live off the money I had stolen from him – lead a quiet life away from doctors, watching the lake change colour and traipsing into the house for sex whenever I needed it. More likely whenever Diane Locke needed it, for she seemed to more than I did.

She came briskly into the kitchen, dressed in the same skirt and blouse. She had washed her face and brushed her hair but not applied fresh make-up. She pressed a button on the tiny portable radio on her way to the stove, and a thirties orchestra with soaring trumpet spilled out of the plastic grille. I stood at the sink, watching her light the gas. She unhooked two beakers from several which hung along the shelf.

‘I can see that you're shocked.'

‘Really? Does it show?' Secretly I supposed I was. I wasn't used to women demanding sex whenever they felt like it. There was perhaps ten years' difference in our ages, plus the class thing, factors which might explain the gulf between us in social behaviour. Or I could be wrong, age and class had nothing to do with it, and Diane Locke was simply that kind of woman.

I said, ‘All right, I admit it, I am shocked. Making love to a man who murdered his wife.'

‘We didn't make love, we had sex. And I don't think you did.'

‘I'm sorry, I thought that was the conclusion you'd come to. That I
blamed Benson for what I'd done myself out of insane jealousy. That fits the facts very neatly, doesn't it?'

‘I don't know the facts. I wonder if you do.'

She opened the huge white door of the fridge and took out a jug of milk. A voice on the radio was singing, ‘I've flown around the world in a plane … I've settled revolutions in Spain …'

I went on, ‘A man who doesn't know his own mind is liable to do anything. He might commit a foolish act with the best of intentions, simply because it seems the right thing to do at the time. Stupid, wouldn't you say, to trust a man like that?'

Diane Locke poured hot water into the teapot and sat down at the table. She raised her dark eyebrows, a half-smile tugging at her unpainted lips. ‘It's quite safe to relax, Peter. I shan't attack you again for another twenty minutes.'

Sitting across the kitchen table from her made me certain of one thing: I didn't want to go back to Brickton. But I knew I had to go back. There was nothing else for it. I wanted to tell her everything – about the wild young man, the body in the harbour, everything. More evidence of insanity. This man has murder on the brain, now he invents lacerated torsos. Then my heart started thumping as I suddenly realised what those lacerations were. In the dark, and obscured by mud, I had taken them to be random slashes, done by a razor or sharp knife. It was now blindingly obvious what they were. Tattoo marks. Wayne's handiwork with the needle.

‘You're going back there, aren't you?'

‘Yes.' I nodded. ‘I have to. Problem is, I can't go back to my room above the Indian's shop.'

‘Why not?'

I blinked at her. ‘Well, it would be a bit awkward. People know I was staying there.'

‘Which people?' She poured the tea and put the beaker in front of me. ‘Benson you mean?'

‘Somebody else was looking for me, making inquiries … a boy called Wayne. But I'm pretty sure he's with Benson. Everybody seems to be. He's Mr Brickton.'

I sipped the hot tea. The record ended and a screech of synthesisers and electronic drumbeats announced the hourly news. It was the local
station, BBC Radio Cumbria.

Diane Locke said, ‘Then don't go. Stay here.' She put out her hand and covered mine. ‘Stay here, Peter.'

‘… identified the man as Rakesh Patundi, forty-three, an Indian shopkeeper, whose body was discovered in the back room of his shop in Brickton earlier today.' We listened, her hand touching mine, as the newsreader went on: ‘Police have issued a description of the person they wish to interview, who was seen in the shop by one of Mr Patundi's children. The man is white, above average height, possibly in his late thirties or early forties, and when last seen was wearing a hat and dark overcoat and heavy, workmans' boots. The police have warned the public not to approach …'

I was looking down at our hands, at Diane Locke's long pale fingers which slowly curled up and crept away like a plant withdrawing from the frost.

‘Thus there is a creature within me against whom I struggle in order that I may rise superior to myself.'

Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Flight to Arras

There was a greenish gloom outside the window from the massed pine trees, which filtered in and transformed the kitchen into a dim undersea cave. The brass-rimmed walnut clock on the shelf beat on.

Diane Locke was frowning down at the cassette recorder – at the tiny tape that a moment ago had clicked to a stop. The attaché case, a bit scratched and dusty now, was in the middle of the table, lid yawning wide.

‘Neville is Benson I take it.' She kept her eyes downcast, still with the same perplexed frown.

‘Yes.'

‘Russell?'

‘Russell Rhodes. He's mentioned in the appointments diary. Benson had a meeting with him a few days ago.'

‘It doesn't tell us an awful lot,' Diane Locke said, ‘except for one thing.' She looked up at me. ‘The money you took, the five thousand pounds. It was intended for Russell.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Hard luck on poor Russell.'

‘Did you have any idea that Benson was involved in something like this? Some shady pay-off deal?'

‘Not until I went to the council meeting. They discussed a scheme to develop the harbour with a grant from the EC, and it was obvious that Benson was unhappy about this being brought out in public. At least the tape explains why – he's giving Russell a backhander to keep his mouth shut.'

‘But why tape the conversation at all – in secret – if they're both on the same side? It doesn't make sense.'

‘It does if Benson is afraid that Russell will get cold feet and starts
to backslide or cause trouble. It's insurance. Benson has a hold on him, he's got Russell's voice on tape, agreeing to all this.'

‘Blackmail.'

‘Only if it comes to the pinch. I don't think Benson ever intended to tell Russell about the tape, providing he behaved himself.'

Diane Locke thought about this, and then said slowly, as if the realisation was dawning even as she spoke, ‘I see it now, why Benson must be desperate to find you, knowing you've got all this …' She indicated the tapes and the monogrammed notebooks edged in gold-leaf and the silk-lined attaché case. ‘Is this what he was after, then, the man who came to the shop looking for you?'

‘I imagine so. The boy with the needle.'

‘What needle?'

‘The fat boy, Wayne. He's a pusher, and a junkie too. “You call that fat junkie a friend?” was how Russell referred to him on the tape.'

‘So that was Wayne, the one who came looking for you?' Her face was pale and taut. It was as if a stone had been lifted and she was seeing for the first time the mess squirming beneath. ‘He's the one Benson said would deal with you. But then … when he came after you he found the Indian shopkeeper instead. Is that what happened?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Of course it is. Why only suppose?' She was staring hard at me. ‘Benson wants the tapes and the notebooks back. He's desperate to have them. He must have told Wayne to find you and get them back, and not let anything or anyone stand in his way. It's plain to me, Peter. Why can't you see it, accept it?'

Diane Locke wanted a simple, rational explanation that would absolve me of the crime. She wanted to believe that Wayne had assumed, wrongly, that Mr Patundi was shielding me, and had flown into a rage. Various substances circulating through the fat boy's arteries drove him to strike a blow, then to grip the puffy brown neck in both hands and gently squeeze the air and blood and life out of it; for who could say what someone under the influence of drugs might or might not do?

I looked out of the window. The twilight was a deepening murky green. I turned back and said, ‘There's another explanation. Smith killed him.'

Diane Locke made a quick, impatient, dismissive gesture.

‘Why bring him into it? It's simple enough isn't it? Why complicate things for God's sake?'

‘You don't believe that such a person exists, do you?' I said, smiling crookedly at her.

‘I don't know if he exists or not, and I don't care. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that he
was
there, in the shop. Why should he kill the Indian? For what reason?'

‘You're right, Diane. It must have been Wayne.'

‘Of course it was. You had no reason to kill Mr Patundi, had you?'

I shook my head, and immediately remembered the square black safe in the claustrophobic back room, the choking smell of spices. I did have a reason, but I hadn't done it. I was certain I hadn't.

She sat back and seemed to relax, her hands pressed flat on the bare wooden table, fingers splayed. ‘Well – you've done it. You've got what you wanted.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘The power to destroy him.' When I didn't respond she picked up one of the notebooks. ‘This is more than enough to wreck his business, his entire career. All you have to do is hand it over to the police and let them get on with it.'

I wanted to laugh at her naivety but kept a straight face.

‘That would never work, Diane. Benson would slither off the hook as easy as winking, his kind always do. They have the right friends in all the right places to make sure of that. He might just get – if he was dead unlucky – a slap on the wrists from a government department and told not to be such a naughty boy in future. They protect their own, you must know that. And I'm hardly in a position to have any dealings with the police,' I reminded her. ‘You're forgetting Mr Patundi.'

‘But that wasn't you.'