Blind Needle (4 page)

I kept my feet together, hiding my boots with the knotted laces behind a barricade of square brown paper parcels. The room was warm and stuffy. I felt myself start to slide away. Graham Locke's red, rather fleshy lips were moving and I made a supreme effort to listen, or at least seem as if I was listening.

‘I'm in the middle of cataloguing.' He brushed a hand through his wild hair, scratched the back of his neck and looked round vaguely. ‘But then I always am. Like painting the Forth Bridge.' He smiled in my direction, the flesh crinkling round the dead eye that went on staring regardless, blandly and shamelessly.

‘You're a collector?'

‘No. Good heavens, no. I buy and sell. Local history,' he gestured at the pile on the coffee table in front of him.
‘Sketch of Cumberland Manners and Customs 1811, Millom People and Places, The Ruskin Linen Industry of Keswick, Tales of a Tent
. Dialect poetry. Railways. The history of the Herdwick.'

‘What's that?'

‘A breed of sheep.'

‘People collect books on sheep?'

‘Oh yes, they collect them on any subject you care to name.' He picked out a volume at random and held it to his good side so that he could read the faded gold lettering on the spine.
‘British Criminal Cases 1890 to 1910
. I don't deal much in crime but this should complete someone's set. I'll take it along to the Carlisle Book Fair and see if I can find a dealer who specialises.'

‘You do a lot of book fairs?' I asked politely.

‘Three, four, sometimes five a month. Chester, Harrogate, even down to Birmingham. Edinburgh's a good place but it's a bit too far. You can spend all your time on the road for not much return if you're not careful.'

‘Pity about the car then,' I said. ‘You'll be stuck.' I clenched my
jaw to stop myself yawning and a splinter of tooth broke away.

‘I don't use the Datsun, even if it was reliable. Not enough room. I have a small van.' All at once he frowned and tilted his head, his good eye showing concern. ‘Excuse me, is that blood on your chin? Your mouth looks bruised.'

I spat the bit of tooth into my handkerchief. ‘A man in the pub didn't like my face and thought he'd alter it.'

‘You mean he – hit you?'

I nodded.

‘Was it a rough place?'

‘Rough enough for me.'

‘Come on,' he said, getting up. ‘Go and have a wash in the bathroom. Tidy yourself up, you'll feel better.'

I nodded gratefully and stood up. He shuffled round the cardboard boxes and piles of books and opened the door for me. Diane Locke came in with a tray.

‘Peter's having a wash and brush-up,' her father said. She moved aside to let me pass. I remember very clearly her steady gaze fixed on me, and suddenly I felt pitiful and wretched, acutely conscious of my poor clothes and cropped greying hair and graveyard pallor, and my pathetic bundle of belongings next to the carved wooden umbrella stand in the small dark hall. I heard her call out – a warning? – and then heard and felt nothing more, not even the floor, and went down into blessed peace and darkness.

I was lying in a narrow channel: the soft warm bed seemed to suck me down. My mouth felt sore. I touched it gingerly but there was no dried blood. Someone had washed it off – perhaps the same person who had stripped me down to vest and underpants.

The bed was so luxurious that I never wanted to leave it.

No early-morning bell, no thump of feet in the corridor. Just the muted twitter of birdsong and the sun shining through the thin curtains. My clothes lay neatly folded on a chair in the corner. I dressed and pulled on my boots. The room was tiny and bare, just the bed, upright chair, a small varnished dressing-table with an oval mirror, a bedside lamp with a fringed shade and a carpet faded in patches by sunlight.

For a minute the view from the window held me. Green and glittering light from the regimented ranks of conifers marching down to the lake. Beyond the lake a purple and gold hillside rose in a gentle curve, sinuous as a woman's shoulder. A small plane droned out of sight somewhere, and from downstairs I heard a man's voice.

I eased the door open and stood on the landing with its single strip of carpet, wedged in by a wall of books that came shoulder-high. I glanced at the top row of titles.
Sex Energy
by Robert S DeRopp.
Body Has a Head
by Gustav Eckstein.
A Guide to the Nervous System: Altered States of Awareness
. Graham Locke was speaking on the telephone in the hallway below. Distinctly I caught the word ‘police' and my hand tightened on the banister rail. I thought: he's older than I am, weaker, there's no need for anything drastic. A quick sharp blow to the back of the neck.

I edged forward to look down on his wild grey head and tested the top step with my weight. It was awkward. The space was taken up with books. I felt hemmed in. I moved down a step and my eye drew level with a bundle of magazines tied with string. On the tattered, flaking spines I read:
Police Gazette Vol IV Nos 16, 17, 18, 19
 …

‘I'll certainly do what I can but I can't promise anything,' Graham Locke was saying into the big black bakelite receiver. He must have heard the stairs creak because he turned and smiled, the dead eye knowing more than he did, staring up with cold accusation, his expression split in two.

‘–Yes, I will, if at all possible. But pre-1919 are the rarest, I suppose you realise that. And they're very reluctant to break up a set.'

He flapped his hand as I came down, waving me through to the kitchen, nodding at what the other person was saying, and I went past him and along a short passage to an open door. Diane Locke was sitting at a long rectangular wooden table, wearing a blue towel dressing-gown and reading the
Spectator
, licking crumbs of toast from her fingers.

Her face was clean of make-up, though she hadn't worn much the previous evening. Her eyelashes were naturally dark, they didn't require mascara. Her lips were pale and faintly cracked, shiny with butter.

I said, ‘That must have been some struggle, getting me up those stairs. There's hardly room enough for one person.'

‘You helped.'

‘I did? Really?'

‘I'm not surprised you don't remember. You were rambling.'

I watched her get up from the table and move to a cupboard next to the square pot sink. Like the rest of the house the kitchen had a dated, careworn look to it: cupboards of stained dark wood, floor covered in linoleum of indeterminate colour with rugs scattered here and there, a huge upright fridge with rounded corners and a flashy chromium handle with the manufacturer's name stamped in it like a fifties American convertible. There was even an Ascot water heater I hadn't seen in twenty years.

People like Graham and Diane Locke, I supposed, didn't set much store in material possessions. Providing an object or artifact continued to function and give reasonable service – car, fridge, water heater, telephone – why bother to change it?

‘I couldn't have made much sense last night,' I said, watching her face as she set down a bowl and spoon and a packet of crunchy wholewheat cereal in front of me.

‘There's orange juice or apple juice too if you like,' she said. ‘No, you didn't, not much. A couple of names you seemed obsessed with.'

I poured cereal – too much – into the bowl and held the spoon clenched in my fist as a child might waiting for its dinner.

‘Whose names? What names?'

‘Don't you want milk with that?'

The phone tinkled and Graham Locke came in. He walked with a slight limp, leaning to his left, the same side as the false eye. His lopsided appearance was real, not due to his cardigan being askew.

‘Gilbert, as you might have gathered,' he said to his daughter. He ran a hand through his hair and smiled at me in an abstracted fashion, as though he'd seen me somewhere and couldn't remember. ‘Right. I'm ready to go.' He finished off a mug of coffee. ‘It's going to be fairly late, seven or eight, I should think, allowing for traffic. What will you do about the car?'

‘They did say they'd ring me when it's ready. But I wasn't really planning on going anywhere. Listen. Please try and sell more than you buy, will you?' Diane Locke sounded almost plaintive. Her forehead wrinkled in mock anguish as she said to me, ‘We have to park in the drive because the garage is full to the rafters. The attic is full. There's only the bathroom left, and I refuse to climb over boxes to have a pee.'

Graham Locke didn't appear to have any qualms about leaving his daughter alone in the house with a stranger. I must have seemed to him trustworthy – or harmless. Did living isolated in the depths of the countryside, with no television, shield a person from the creeping paranoia that infected everyone else like fever? The house and its inhabitants were in a time-warp: could be that pre-war bakelite telephones and ancient fridges and worn linoleum lulled them into a torpor in which it was still possible to believe in a world that was innocent. A stable, compassionate, well-meaning world free from muggers and football hooligans and drug-crazed youths who battered old ladies to a pulp for their pittance of a pension.

Graham Locke departed. I heard the van drive away and sucked at my broken tooth, where the hot coffee had found a sensitive nerve. ‘How far is it to the nearest town?'

‘Four miles. Turn right at the bottom of the lane and straight on past the quarry. Just keep going. It'll be muddy, after all the rain.'

‘A bit of mud won't bother me.' I said.

‘You can get a bus from Granthelme. Where exactly does your brother live?'

I dabbed my mouth and said, ‘The truth is – Diane – I haven't got a brother.' It was the first time I had spoken her name aloud, and though normally I would have said Die-anne she had pronounced it
Dee-anne
, and so did I. ‘I made it up. Him up.'

She gave me her steady gaze and then a faint, almost provocative smile. ‘I know you did. You're going to Brickton, aren't you? To see Benson.'

I felt cold, chilled right through to the marrow. As if her calm gaze had penetrated my brain. Visions of betrayal and conspiracy flooded over me, the usual suffocating paranoia that was always there, waiting for any excuse. ‘How do you know that?'

‘I told you you were babbling – names, places.' She lit a cigarette and raised one eyebrow through the drifting smoke. ‘Is the other man made up too?'

‘What other man?' I said, more sharply than I intended.

‘Smith you called him. The man who's supposed to be following you.'

I fiddled with the spoon, trying to make time to think. Had I babbled
everything!
‘No,' I said at last. ‘I only wish he was.'

‘What about your wife?'

‘I told you. She was killed in an accident.' I swallowed hard. ‘I wouldn't lie about that.'

‘Okay, okay. I believe you.'

She smoked as I ate the cereal. It was peaceful here in the kitchen with the sunshine streaming in and the walnut clock with its round brass-rimmed glass cover ticking sedately on the shelf. How lovely if we were sitting here waiting for Hitler to invade, I thought. Turn on the wireless and listen to Alvar Liddell soothing us with that doom-laden officious drone: ‘The War Office has announced that at ten o'clock last night, Greenwich Mean Time, two hundred aircraft of Bomber Command carried out sorties over Holland and the Low Countries …'