Brond (11 page)

‘Nothing . . . I was wondering. Is it far?’

The taxi swung into the side and stopped.

‘Are we there?’ I asked.

He got out and opened the door beside me.

‘Are we there?’ I asked again.

‘What’s all this about – money? If you’ve no bloody money you shouldn’t be in the motor.’

‘I’ve got money.’

I named the amount down to the smallest coin and held it out towards him on the palm of my hand.

‘Take me that much.’ I said. ‘Just go on till that’s used up. Then if you tell me where it is I’ll walk the rest.’

He peered at me. He was in his fifties with a scarf across his chest and vanishing round the back to where the ends would be tied. After a moment he shook his head.

‘As far as it’ll go . . .’

I could hear him laughing even over the sound of the motor once we’d started again.

‘Tell you, son.’ I leaned forward to hear. ‘It’s funny game. Young guys getting off their marks without paying. Bad enough this game without being taken for a
mug.’

‘Not much chance of me running anywhere.’

‘That right?’

He groped under the dash and held up a big spanner.

‘I’m getting on a bit,’ he said. ‘But I’ve surprised one or two with the speed I can move.’

I sat back. My foot throbbed in pace with the engine. I had banged it again going down those hellish stairs in the dark.

‘It’s a scunner,’ the driver said. ‘You know what they call this time of night in any other job? Unsocial bloody hours.’

The taxi stopped. Looking out, I saw a wall covered with names and threats. All the paint looked black in the light from the sulphur lamps.

‘This it?’

He didn’t answer. I opened the door and then sat back deliberately.

‘What’s up?’ he asked turning to look at me.

‘I didn’t want to worry you.’

‘Eh?’

I climbed out and limped forward to pay him.

‘You have an honest face, pal,’ he said.

Now I wanted him to say the wrong thing. I wanted him to get out of his safe little cabin. I didn’t think his spanner would do him much good.

‘I have a bloody sore foot,’ I said. ‘Is that not more like it?’

‘Don’t be that way, son.’

‘Here. Take the money. That’s my lot. Call it a tip for your conversation.’

It was awkward for him. I dropped the money a little at a time into his hand.

‘You’re okay, son,’ he said. ‘It’s just that you’re a big fellow and I wasn’t sure of that stick. All the best.’

‘Thanks and fuck you too,’ I said but he had pulled away.

I went into the close that had the right number and climbed the first stairs. With the effort of favouring the bad foot, the muscle of the calf cramped. I crouched kneading it until the knots
came out. At every door I hoped to see her name so that I could rest. I got to the top and then I came down again checking all the way. She might be a lodger. She might not have her name on any of
the doors. My name was not on the door of the Kennedys’ house. I could knock at a door and ask. I thought how pleased someone would be to have me knocking at his door in the middle of the
night.

I sat on the bottom step. I had no money and no idea what district this was. At the back of the entry there was a scurrying like the light tapping of fingernails. Even respectable tenements drew
rats. There was a door beside me, one of the two on the ground floor. I pressed the bell. In the stillness I heard the dull burring from inside. I leaned on the tiny dull square of light three
times; nobody came and I limped past the second door into the street.

The name of the street was on a plate on the tenement wall. It was the right name, but it was a ‘Street’. I checked the piece of paper and the name was right, only it was not
‘Street’ but ‘Gardens’. I went round the corner and there was another plate and it had what I wanted. I was back in business.

The Gardens began with one block of tenements. After that there were hedges with neat bungalows tucked behind them. I searched for some clue about the numbering until I was frustrated, exhausted
and ready to give up if there had been anywhere else to go. When I got the right house, I found in the middle of the gate the number trickily worked in iron.

It was a house like the others; if you were absent-minded, or hungry enough, you might have rushed by mistake into either of its neighbours and sat down to someone else’s dinner. No lights
showed, but then it was late. Nothing but the inertia of all the little decisions since I had fished out the fold of paper in the taxi made me open the gate.

There was a bell and it had a little light so that you could find it in the dark. I could not bring myself to ring it. Maybe if I went round the house I would come on Margaret standing at a
window. We would get into bed and every time the springs creaked a woman’s voice, her mother’s, would call out: ‘Are you all right dear?’

I tucked the stick under my arm and leaned on the roughcast wall for support as I went round the house. The side window was open. There was no sound from inside and nothing to make out but
shapes. I hesitated with my hands on the ledge for what felt like hours then turned back to the front door.

I made a pointless little rapping, too quiet to waken anybody. I rang the bell. I banged with my fist; I rattled the box. At the height of the din, an insomniac stopped at the gate. I turned to
look at him. He went away. Under a lamp, he emerged as a fat little man with a white dog at heel. If he was a good neighbour, he had changed his mind.

With a soft rub of wood on wood the window rose. I reached in with the stick and swept it in an arc without touching anything. Please God, I thought, don’t make it her parents’ room.
At least there was no sound of creaking springs. I bent in over the ledge till my hands touched the floor, gathered the good foot under me and hit the floor crouching. Silence.

I had got to my feet and started to edge forward when the door opened. A pencil beam of light crept forward just ahead of the new arrival. If the torch beam had swung about it would have caught
me playing statues. The light crept across the surface of the table. There was a vase with white papery discs of honesty standing up out of it and a piece of paper propped against it. The paper was
held so it could be read then was taken behind the beam out of sight. The light moved and there was a bump.

‘Bloody hell!’ a man’s voice said. I knew the voice. No name came with it, but I had heard that voice before.

A man’s shape spread cruciform against the lighter dark of the window and vanished as the curtains were drawn. The beam wound back across the carpet, a switch clicked and there was a
dazzling brightness from overhead.

‘Muldoon!’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you knew Margaret.’

His foxy mask gaped in shock, the torch still lit and waving in his hand. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times before he could speak.

‘Was that you hammering at the door?’ he asked.

‘Nobody else, but why didn’t you open the door? Is Margaret here?’

But at the first question his tiny eyes scuttled to the drawn curtains and I remembered the window opened behind it. I turned my back on him and went over to pull back the curtains. The glass
underneath the catch had been cut out in a half circle. I put my fist up beside it as a measure.

‘I don’t think you came in by the front door either,’ I said. The neat hole was just larger than my fist. ‘That’s professional. I couldn’t have done it. Was
that one of the optional extras in the seminary?’

‘Never mind me,’ Muldoon said. ‘Is burglary a new course at the University?’

‘I’m a friend of Margaret.’ I leered at him like a bad comedian. ‘She’s expecting me.’

As he didn’t answer, my own words put another thought in my head.

‘Are you breaking your vows with her?’

He put the torch out at last.

‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘You and Margaret. Nothing sinful. Only trying to make little Muldoons together.’

He didn’t rise to the bait. There are people who ask to be needled; Muldoon had taken me that way since the day I met him. Sometimes I had the feeling that I did not really care for him.
With remarks like that, I could usually drive him into a miniature puritan frenzy.

‘You’d better sit down,’ he said. ‘Before you fall down.’

‘You first.’

He shook his head as if he was patronising me – it was very strange – and sat down himself beside the table with the flowers. When he was down, I let myself sit. Every muscle in my
body sighed. For the first time I took in the room – a sofa, chairs, a gas fire set into the hearth with a fuss of ornaments on the shelf above it.

‘There’s nobody else in the house. Is there?’

‘Just you and me,’ he said.

‘Cosy.’

I knew I should be questioning, getting things out of him. My mind was foundering in pillows of weariness. When I tried to get him in sharp focus, bolsters of flesh pressed from below and above
to close my eyes.

‘The question is,’ Muldoon said, ‘how you found this house? I was told you’d no idea where the girl lived.’

I tried to think who could have told Muldoon anything like that, but I was too tired. Who had I told? Whose business would it be?

‘But you did,’ I said, out of simplicity not cunning. ‘You knew her house all right.’

‘Cut out the dirty talk!’ When I meant nothing he decided to have his outburst of temper. ‘I’ve never liked you and that’s the truth. That come as a shaker to you?
You’re one of those fellows think they’re great. Everybody has to like them. Not me, friend. Not one little bit – and if you’ve got it coming, I’ll be there to
cheer.’

I had been amazed before by someone telling me what I was like – and they never came anywhere near being right.

‘If you’re ever there when I get something coming, Muldoon, don’t cheer. Not unless you want your jaw broken.’

‘You’re a right bastard!’

He moved as if to go for me, and changed his mind.

‘Come and give us a kiss!’ I said.

The minutes in the chair or the surge of adrenalin unthawed me.

‘Better still,’ I said, ‘tell me why you’re here. Did big Peter Kilpatrick send you?’

Muldoon went quiet in his seat.

‘Well Peter’s a good friend of mine,’ he said. ‘It would be possible he sent me. He might be wanting something back.’

‘He might be wanting something back,’ I mimicked him.

He made an ugly face and leaned forward.

‘Peter’s sorry he gave the girl the parcel. He wants it back.’

‘So?’

‘So let me have it and I’ll give it back to him.’

‘Did you think it was here?’ I needed some leverage to make him explain. ‘You haven’t told me why you came here.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with anything.’

‘I think it does. You tell me why you’re here and then we can talk about the parcel.’

He sat back like a man deliberately relaxing.

‘If it’ll make you happy. I thought Peter would be here.’

‘What would he be doing here?’

‘What would he not?’ Muldoon said. ‘Isn’t he thick with the girl?’

I thought about that. I had to be stupid to have taken it for granted Margaret would be running errands for someone she knew only casually. He might be a friend of hers; because you did someone
a favour it did not mean you went to bed with him.

‘I can’t imagine Margaret’s parents having Kilpatrick here as a house guest,’ I said.

Muldoon put his hand in his side pocket and drew out a piece of paper. I remembered the paper he’d lifted from the table.

‘Her folks are away on holiday. She’s left this note for them – they’re due back, but they’ve been away.’

‘Let me see.’

He folded it in his hand. I considered getting up fast but, whatever he saw in my eyes, he eased to the front of his chair. I didn’t think I was in condition to catch him before he made it
out of the door.

‘Why has she left them a note? Has she gone away with Kilpatrick?’

‘With Peter?’ He looked as if he hadn’t thought of that. ‘It’s possible. He’d want out of here when she—’

‘What – when she what?’ My brain was too tired; I let the possibilities spill out. ‘When she gave me the parcel? Or when she came back and told him she’d given it
to me? Why would that upset him? He told her to give it to me – that’s what she said. And I was to keep it for Brond.’

‘For who?’ I had never pictured what they meant when they said a man’s jaw dropped – that’s what happened, like a box lid on a hinge his jaw fell open. ‘For
Brond?’

‘All I know is I was asked to give him the parcel – and now he’s got it.’

Muldoon stood up.

‘You’ve given it to Brond,’ he said colourlessly.

I straightened in the chair and took a grip on the stick. It had never occurred to me that there might be something in Muldoon to be afraid of – not till now.

‘I gave him a box,’ I said slowly, ‘and it was wrapped in brown paper tied with string – the hairy kind of string—’

‘Are you working for Brond?’

I ignored the question.

‘And there was tape, lots of tape. And we took off the tape and the string and the box opened. And there were two things inside.’ This was the moment when his face should tell me if
he knew what had been in the parcel. He looked worried, tired suddenly – as always, red foxy. I could not tell. ‘A cloth and a gun. The cloth had stains on it – maybe ketchup off
a fish supper. Somebody had fired the gun.’

Muldoon’s face was closed and secret.

‘I’ve been thinking Kilpatrick must have been the one who fired it and that was why he wanted to get rid of it. But now you say he wants it back and I’ve been wondering why he
would change his mind. Has Kilpatrick killed someone?’

Muldoon grinned at me.

‘You want to give your head a rest,’ he said. ‘You’re too old for fairy stories.’

I got the stick under both hands and lurched to my feet. Muldoon came back into proportion. He was a little weed of a fellow.

‘How would you like me to rest the back of my hand across your mouth?’

‘There’s no need for that,’ he said. ‘Listen, Peter’ll explain. He’s the man that’s worrying you – let him do the explaining. I didn’t want
to tell you he was here until I was sure everything was all right.’