Blind Needle (28 page)

‘What's up?' Ray asks unnecessarily. ‘Isn't it there?'

The fat boy shoulders him aside and drops on one knee. He crouches over until his face is less then an inch from the woman's face.

He says thickly, ‘You knew where the briefcase was so you must know where the tape is. And don't ask which fucking tape. Where is it?'

The woman's eyes cloud over, whether in pain or bewilderment it is impossible to know. She answers in the same weak, wincing voice, little gasping explosions in-between every sentence: ‘The tape was there. It
was
there. In the case. It must be there now.'

‘It isn't.'

‘It must be.'

‘You've hidden it.'

‘No – no, I haven't. I don't want the damn thing. Take it.'

‘How can I take it when it's gone?'

‘It was
there
. For God's sake … I swear to you. In the
case!
'

‘It isn't there now.'

The woman closes her eyes. She swallows and shakes her head.

The fat boy slowly gets up, just as slowly moving his head left and right to take in the dusty, cluttered room. He turns round and his eyes swivel back and forth along the rows of crowded bookshelves.

‘We've got all night,' Ray says optimistically.

‘All night?' the fat boy snarls. ‘We'd need a month of fucking Sundays to find anything in this pigsty. I think dickhead here knows where the tape is but he's forgotten. He wouldn't let this bitch get the shit kicked out of her and not spill it. But I'm going to make him. Oh yeh …'

‘I could break his arm,' Gaz offers helpfully.

‘No. We'll take him with us. I've got some prime stuff that'll make him spill the lot. Everything right down to the crapstains on his underpants. Bring him. Move.'

‘What about her?' Ray asks worriedly. ‘Are we leaving her?'

‘Yeh,' the fat boy says softly, looking at his bandaged hand. ‘It's him I want. Just him on his tod.'

I remembered raising my hand (that much I did remember) and looking at my reflection in the oval mirror of the varnished dresser, and then – nothing. The cold, bare room simply vanished, and Diane Locke vanished with it. Instead of standing in front of the mirror in the bare back room of Diane Locke's house I was suddenly surrounded by a rushing, roaring blackness. For a panicky minute I thought I'd gone blind – but the blackness turned out to be countryside rushing past the windows, the roaring the noise of a car's engine.

I was sitting in the back seat, wedged between Wayne's gross bulk and a man with a thick neck and black sideburns, whose solid arm I could feel against the nape of my neck. I didn't at first recognise the sharp profile of the man behind the wheel, until he glanced in the rearview mirror and I saw his eyes, the pupils black pinpricks, and realised it was Ray, the fat boy's fellow junkie and hanger-about in men's lavatories.

On the illuminated dashboard clock I could see that it was ten minutes to midnight. It had been no later than ten-thirty when I had gone upstairs to bed, and then sometime afterwards Diane Locke had come into the room. That's when the blank patch occurred, a black hole in my memory, which left one hour unaccounted for. During that dead blank period Wayne and his chums had appeared – but that was the only thing I could be certain of.

What had happened to Diane Locke? Had they killed her? Then ransacked the house and found the tape, hidden behind
Flight to Arras?
I wasn't sure about Diane Locke, but I guessed they hadn't found the tape – in fact I knew it – because if they had I wouldn't be here now, sitting in the back of a car speeding through the dark countryside,
being taken to see Benson. That's where they were taking me of course; there wasn't any doubt in my mind.

I had mentally visualised Benson as having barricaded himself behind high walls fringed, with broken glass, and with extra barbed wire strung between iron stanchions leaning outwards at forty-five degrees. Foolish on my part – unnecessary on his. There was a full moon rising when we arrived and I saw the silhouette of a Norman church, square and solid against the pale wash of moonlight, and across the churchyard and a low flint wall, the house itself, craggy and grey and, if not ancient, then quite old. Benson had every reason to feel perfectly safe, tucked away in his old craggy house. He was rich, respected, a family man, businessman, councillor, a pillar of the community, and on top of all that living next door to God: what was there to fear?

The house was three storeys high, with miniature turrets on the two front corners, and some of the windows were of stained glass. To one side a single-storey annexe, possibly the kitchen, had been added later, built of the same rough grey stone or granite. There was a light in one of the upper windows, and as the car turned into the drive I saw a shadow pass across floral wallpaper.

Ray avoided the front door and stopped in the darkened lee of the house. Apparently this kind of nefarious business was relegated strictly to the tradesmens' entrance. Murder, mayhem, coercion, blackmail, chicanery were on a par with the three black rubber dustbins and miscellany of cardboard boxes filled with empties lined up outside the kitchen annexe.

‘We'll wait,' Wayne said, ‘Check if it's okay.' There was just the faintest tremor of unease in Wayne's voice, as if it had just occurred to him that he might have made a terrible blunder by bringing me here; but now it was too late, the deed was done.

Ray was gone for a couple of minutes. He appeared through the side door wearing a fretful expression on his narrow face and fluttering his fingers, beckoning urgently. He led the way inside, with the short, thick-set man close behind me, holding my arm to show who was in control, and Wayne following behind. In single file, like a prisoner under military escort on his way to a court martial, we marched through a large kitchen across an expanse of red quarry tiles between
island units, everything white and stainless steel and clinical. The refrigerator was like a small garage, with double doors. An aluminium hood swooped down from the ceiling over the cooking range, ready to snatch away any disagreeable odours. Somewhere an electric motor hummed, discreet and well-behaved.

As we came along a carpeted passage and through a carved mahogany door into the front hall, music suddenly swelled into the soaring strings and syrupy soprano of a West End musical triumph, coming from a room above. The door opposite the wide curving staircase was standing open a bare inch. Ray swung the door wider and stood aside like a flunkey, while the short thick-set man (his name, I now remembered was Gaz, on whose muscular forearm I'd seen Wayne tattooing a dagger and three drops of blood) pressed his broad hand between my shoulder-blades and gave me a shove, and I staggered in.

It seemed as though I had intruded upon a cosy family evening at home. I stayed near the door, on the polished parquet flooring where the carpet ended, the boorish stranger who has blundered in and created an atmosphere which everyone is too polite to remark on.

The room was shadowy and dim, a single small table-lamp in the corner with a tasselled shade casting light along the gold embossed wallpaper, bringing gleams from the expensive reproduction furniture. There were several oil paintings of lakeland scenes in ornate gilt frames – ‘originals' by local tenth-rate artists – and a couple of tall narrow cabinets with diamond-shaped panes in which were displayed Victorian dinner plates, condiment sets, and a collection of cut-glass animals with glowing pink and green crystals for eyes.

Benson was standing next to the black marble fireplace, casually dressed in slacks and beige cardigan, but still with collar and tie. He passed his hand over his bow wave of wavy greying hair, the ring on his fleshy hand winking in the dim light.

Seated in a winged velvet armchair was the older woman I had seen in the restaurant with Ruth Benson, her face smooth and implacable
under its glaze of carefully applied make-up. Her hair was cropped above the ears and brushed back so that it looked burnished, a few artful silvery wisps drooping over her forehead and pencilled eyebrows. She wore a loose cashmere sweater with the sleeves pushed up to show thin suntanned arms.

‘Give me the case,' Benson said in a voice that was under almost too perfect control, as if the effort cost him a great deal. He twitched his neck inside his collar, snapping his fingers impatiently.

‘The tape in't here,' Wayne said, handing it to him. ‘I had a sken before. The bastard's hidden it.' He went to stand behind the brocade settee, his bandaged hand stuck out in front of him like a challenge. ‘I'll get it out of him though,' Wayne promised, glancing at me, his voice quivering with greedy anticipation. ‘Settle a couple of old scores as well …'

‘I hope that hurts like hell,' I said calmly.

Wayne reared up. ‘You, squire, have pissed on your chips.'

‘Shut up,' Benson said.

‘How about a nice tattoo?' Wayne grinned maliciously in my direction, his teeth brown square stumps with detritus in the gaps between. ‘Cut price.'

‘Bringing him here, for God's sake,' Benson murmered to no one in particular, and caught the woman's eye. ‘They haven't the brains of a baboon.'

A blank moment followed during which Wayne twigged that the description applied to him and the others.

‘What d'yer fucking expect us to do? I've just told yer, the tape weren't there—'

‘All right, it's done now, forget it.' Benson put the case down beside the woman's chair. When he straightened up and turned towards me there was something deeply troubling him, a shadow lurking in his eyes. His usual bluff, confident manner was anything but; he looked uncharacteristically worried, like an insurance salesman faced with a massive claim. ‘Just who the hell are you and what do you want?' he asked me, his breathing audible in his broad nostrils.

‘Bin going around telling everybody his name's Peter Holford,' Wayne said, grinning round the room as if at some private joke. Nobody else seemed to find it funny. Benson especially didn't. His
face had broken out in patches of mottled red.

‘What are you after? What the hell do you want?'

I just stared at him.

‘You stole this briefcase from my car,' Benson went on stolidly, ‘which contained £5000 and some business documents and other confidential material. Then you show up at a council meeting, trying to stir up trouble. Would you mind telling me why?'

I tried and failed to frame an answer that would encompass all my rage and grief and hatred, and gave up trying. So I just said, ‘I want to destroy you.'

He seemed genuinely astonished. His mouth sagged open. ‘But what for?'

‘For what you did to my wife.'

‘Your
wife?
What are you talking about?'

‘For what you did' – I swallowed hard, choked the bile down – ‘to my wife Susan. You killed her.'

It was as if the room and its occupants had frozen into a tableau: several people standing silent and bereft like mourners round a coffin, except the coffin was missing.

‘The guy's a pure loony,' Wayne muttered, shaking his head. ‘Anybody know what he's gibbering about?'

The blonde woman in the armchair was leaning forward and staring at me with cloudy grey eyes. She clasped her hands together, setting her gold bracelets jangling, and spoke for the first time.

‘We have a lot in common. Your name, so you say, is Peter Holford, and your wife's name is Susan. My name happens to be Susan Holford too. Quite a coincidence.' She gave the faintest of smiles, cold and fleeting. ‘Unless
I'm
your wife, Peter, and you've forgotten me.'

Was it possible that I had? It was true that I couldn't recall Susan's face, couldn't get a clear picture of her in my mind … but this woman wasn't Susan because my Susan was dead. I was positive about that. And what was it that Trafford had told me? That Benson was living with the wife of his ex-partner? If this was the woman, then the only explanation I could think of was that she was lying – that her name wasn't really Susan Holford. But why should she lie? Why say her name was Susan Holford when it wasn't?

‘Confusing, isn't it?' the blonde woman (Susan?) said.

‘You're not my wife.'

‘Of course I'm not. Your wife is dead, Peter. Or so you tell us. Your Susan is dead and Neville here is to blame, is that right?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you want revenge.'

‘They had an affair. She went off with him.

‘That's precisely what happened to me,' the blonde woman calling herself Susan said. ‘Small world.'

‘But you're not
Susan
,' I said, grinding it out.

‘No, certainly not,' she agreed with me. ‘I'm not dead.'

‘This is a waste of time,' Benson said, his self-control cracking. ‘I don't give a damn who he is, or says he is, or thinks he is. I just want the tape. Forget all the rest—'

He glanced towards Wayne, who levered himself up from the back of the settee and came towards me.

I stepped back instinctively, though there was nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. Gaz was planted solidly behind me, like a boulder that a stick of dynamite wouldn't have budged. The very worst I could do was to smash some furniture, wreck the glass cabinets and generally make a mess, as if that would do any good. Ray was lurking near the door, thin and edgy, a one-dimensional shadow.

Wayne said in a hoarse, reasonable voice, ‘Come on, squire, where is it? What have you done with it? Just you tell us where the tape is and we'll call it quits. I'll even forget about this.' He waved his injured arm. ‘No hard feelings, eh?'

‘Yes,' I nodded. ‘Plenty.'

‘That's not the right attitude.'