Brond (27 page)

‘Notice how human they are,’ Brond said, following my gaze to the photograph. ‘The little scrubbed sac naked between their legs like innocent testicles. Very human, helpless
and detestable.’

‘Like Kilpatrick,’ I said, ‘or him.’ The newspaper on the bed lay open to display stately carriages in procession.

Primo made a sudden gesture at the corner of my vision and my mouth dried with fear. It had been he who had fetched me from Margaret Briody’s but we had travelled in the car in silence. I
could have taken my chance to tell him what he had to be told, but I had thought first I wanted to confront Brond.

‘Or Muldoon,’ Brond said. ‘He was human enough surely.’

He got up and went over to the window. A restlessness flowed out of him I had not sensed before. Staring down as if watching something below, he asked, ‘You like Irish jokes? I remember.
What about this one?’ He put a finger to his forehead in a parody of recollection and then tapped it on the air like a schoolmaster. ‘What do you call a man who sticks his finger up an
Irishman’s arse? . . . No? A brain surgeon.’

He turned and came back to the bed.

‘Isn’t that the kind of joke you like?’

I picked up the newspaper.

‘Primo killed him – or you did,’ I said. ‘Primo was there though. He had to be to pull open the safety door. I’ve never met anyone else who could do
that.’

Brond, not at all upset, looked on kindly.

‘You know, it’s silly to make yourself unhappy about that woman – the not so young woman – you called her . . .’

‘Jackie.’ Primo rumbled the single word.

‘We’ve all been foolish about some woman. It’s of no significance. Be grateful that you’re normal.’ His mesmerist’s hands formed a circle from which the
abnormal were excluded. His hands made a language more absolute than speech. ‘It’s good to have feelings like that. You’re at a lucky age. It’s sad that she has to think of
you as her husband’s murderer.’

I winced from the ugly word.

‘It was an accident.’

Brond smiled his kind smile and waited.

‘I want to see her. I could make her understand.’ The same fatal urge to accuse them came over me more recklessly. ‘If you won’t let me explain to her, I can explain to
the police.’

‘An odd choice of a Lonely Hearts Bureau.’ Brond’s laughter sounded easy and genuine. I had felt that kind of release into laughter after finishing a diet of examinations or
coming to the end of a visit home.

‘It was Primo and you at Riggs Lodge. You killed the old man there. You killed him and tied him with the same rope you used on Peter Kilpatrick.’

‘We never touched the boy Kilpatrick. Not when he was alive.’ It was Primo who thought that was worth denying. ‘Leaving him in that shed was a right Fenian trick.’

‘It was Kennedy who did it, don’t doubt that,’ Brond added. ‘And for the same motive that made him attack you. Unfairly in your case, of course – you don’t
seem ever to have succeeded in getting his wife to bed.’

He dirtied the pity I felt for Jackie. I wanted to tell him what I felt for her – that I had never wanted to – he made everything confused.

‘No,’ I said. ‘They were tied with the same rope. The police told me that. Why use the same rope on the old man?’

‘The people I work for,’ Brond said, sounding unctuous, ‘wanted an act of terrorism that would make the public detest those who were accused of it. In any case, the old party
in question,’ he tapped the newspaper with its images of a hearse and dignitaries and nodding plumes, ‘had become a confounded nuisance. Rash committments to business friends in Africa
that were threatening to find their way out into the light . . . There’s an economy in such matters. His death solved one problem, and if it could be made to forestall another – the
risk, however remote, of the natives here getting restless – so much the better.’

What was it the Canadian strategist at Professor Gracemount’s party had called Scotland? A valuable piece of real estate . . .

‘I understand,’ I said, but then I looked at Primo who was listening, and I didn’t understand at all. How could he accept this?

‘Do you?’ Brond asked. ‘I wonder if you really do. Those people I work for wanted a mischief, you know. If I hadn’t arranged it, there are others who would have managed
something . . . not so elegant, perhaps. But that length of rope which worries you so much cleared away all our difficulties. I saw it at once, and Sawney agreed with me.’ He nodded at the
big man, and, as late as that, I learned Primo’s real name. ‘We would give them the assasination they were demanding. We would let them break their scandal. We would even let them
produce some poor misguided devils of dupes for a trial. But then, when all three rings of the circus are performing beyond recall, the defence will receive evidence which ties their murder case to
that of a young man called Kilpatrick.’ He smiled disquietingly. ‘It’s possible at that point you might find yourself briefly the centre of attention. But don’t worry
– the next stir of the pot will be to provide the defence with proof that
both
murders were committed by an obscure bookie’s clerk and lodging-house keeper called Kennedy. They’ll
search for him – but he’s hidden where they’ll never dig to find him.’

I could see it all falling out as he described. He made it so easy to believe in him, even for me who knew better.

‘The damage then will be entirely the other way. All kinds of questions – about the preparation of the trial, about the prosecution’s carefully marshalled evidence – come
next.’ But then I heard his tone alter, the subtlest of changes, as he said, ‘We could even provide the information that he was really Michael Dart – an Irish terrorist. A
sleeper. This man who has disappeared – presumably gone on the run again. Sawney thinks that information wouldn’t help what we want to do. He’s right, but it’s there to be
used. Anyway, the result is going to be very different from what my employers anticipated. Sawney and I see a little victory coming.’

As Sawney-Primo’s breath sighed in the silence, I heard that false note in Brond’s voice so clearly, like a secret he wanted me to share. He stood up, buttoning the black coat to his
throat. I realised he intended to leave and that I would be alone with Primo.

‘As far as you are concerned, it’s over,’ he said smiling. ‘I make you that promise.’

No prison, no trial, no disgrace; not again that desolate time of going through bright streets as a prisoner? Had he that power? It came into my head that when a piece was taken
en passant
in
the game of chess, the piece that took it was only another pawn like itself. In the old black overcoat, hesitating at the door, Brond dwindled. I would have passed him in the street without a
glance as an elderly man down on his luck.

‘All good things come to an end. I’ve been a long time in this place,’ he said. ‘I stayed in Chicago once. I went to the airport to meet professional contacts from
Sweden. They came off the plane jittering with nerves for they had seen too many movies about tommy guns and Al Capone and gangland killings. I laughed and told them I’d never heard a gun
fired in anger in that city. People I knew who had been born there had never heard one. We walked out the front entrance and a car hurtled towards us, police units followed on both sides blocking
its escape, men piled out firing from behind walls and opened car doors. Screams, yells, curses, everyone running for shelter, throwing themselves down. I stood there alone among the bullets, too
astonished to react. My Swedes stayed in their hotel room doing business until it was time for their plane home . . . They didn’t believe a word I said after that.’

It was a story you would tell to make people laugh, but he went out without a backward glance. His steps limped away through the flat’s stillness.

‘I don’t hear your wife,’ I said. ‘Your little girl is very quiet.’

He would not look at me and that frightened me. To avoid me he went to the picture over the bed. The photograph had been taken in a battery chicken factory. The chickens hung upside down,
stripped and obscene, a line of them hooked by the feet to a moving belt. Two large smiling women stood behind them, their hands reaching out. Very human, naked and detestable.

‘Beth’s always hated coming in here.’ He put out a massive hand and tried to straighten the picture. It resisted and the bottom splintered off under his fingers. The magazine
photograph had been stuck on the wall and four strips of wood glued round it to give the appearance of a frame. ‘I’ve broken it.’

‘Primo . . . Primo? Are you going to kill me?

‘I took you back to the farm to your mammy,’ he said bitterly, looking at the broken picture. ‘I decided that myself. But you couldn’t stay there.’

‘You should’ve let that wardrobe kill me. It would have been easier.’

‘Ya poor bloody clown,’ he said without anger.

‘Brond was lying. He’ll let them have their trial. Just the way they want it. Couldn’t you hear that he was lying?’

‘Don’t whine,’ he said. ‘Keep your dignity. That way it’ll be easier for both of us.’

I crossed to the closed window, though I knew we were too high for that escape to be possible. From so high, it took a moment to realise what I was seeing. This room must be at the front of the
building we had entered from the rear. I looked down on a curve of river and a bridge. Sodden heavy rain was threshing down after the days of heat. Primo had learned to kill in Malaya, giant hands
choking tiny men in blue pyjamas. ‘If you had information we needed – that might save a mate’s life, like – sure Ah’d torture ye,’ an uncle said one night,
reminiscing. A man you could rely on, like Primo. Little men like children in pyjamas. A child might be killed for seeing something he was not meant to see, for overhearing something he should not
have heard.

‘I saw Brond murder a boy down there.’ I knew I was talking of Primo’s son. ‘I can give you the day and the date. I was down there and saw the boy pull himself up on the
rail. Brond – but I didn’t know his name then – came over the bridge.’ I spoke slowly and clearly, giving evidence in a matter of life and death. ‘Brond put his hand
under the boy and lifted him over. I can still hear the noise he made when he fell on the platform underneath.’

Behind me was utterly still. Why should a man not kill someone who had even seen such a thing?

‘I’ll never forget it. I looked over – I could see he was dead. There was nothing I could do. And then afterwards I was ill.’

When I found the courage to turn, the room was empty. I went through the deserted flat. Just after I had seen them the woman and child must have left taking the suitcases with them. In the tiny
living room the ornaments still sat on the sideboard; a child’s schoolbag was on the couch with books and an open jotter scattered beside it. I wondered where the family would go now; I
wondered what organisation claimed Primo as a member, how Brond had infiltrated them, how he had become accepted. That he would come to dominate them I accepted as natural. I wondered how much the
little girl understood and if she had liked the man who visited and stayed with them in their home.

A noise faint but persistent crept into my attention. I walked out of the open front door of the flat and stepped on to the factory’s upper gallery. More clearly the sound came, drumming,
rattling, going on without a pause as I came down the iron stair. After the second landing, the entire factory came in view as the stair carried me back and forward in front of three windows that
went down from ceiling to floor. The floor was in shadow and the light was stained yellow by some chemical that had eaten into the glass. I moved cautiously across aisles of metal pillars until I
saw Primo. In his fist the handle disappeared and as he shook the little door helplessly to and fro the whole frame of the exit trembled. He looked at me without seeming to know or care who I was.
‘It won’t open,’ he said and stepped aside as if it was natural for me to try. When the handle did not turn normally, I reversed the direction and the lock released at once so
that the door swung back on us letting Primo pass through the opening I had so easily accomplished.

Rain fell on the cobbled yard. Stepping under its drenched heaviness, sweat broke out on my sides. I walked through an echoing pend into a street of blank shopfronts and boarded windows that led
me round two sides of the factory to the main road. When I stopped in the middle of the bridge, I could see high on the wall of the tenement opposite a row of windows. One of them must belong to
the apartment. Behind me the downpour smoked on the river and beat against the crooked ladder on the gable wall.

I had turned Primo loose and it was time to search for what I had done.

Twice I passed the place. Just inside the park near a gate a column of undressed stone rose like a maned lion into the head of Carlyle: the second time I saw the body lying inside the low
railing that surrounded the statue. Sprawled on the grass, it could have been an old man drunk on cheap wine or meths; but I recognised the long overcoat and he lay too still for bad dreams.
Remembering Kilpatrick and the horror of Kennedy’s death, I felt it unfair that he should lie so peacefully. I heard him saying: We see a victory coming. I couldn’t stop the words, they
ran over and over like a tune that drives you mad. There was no one in sight to help and I was afraid to touch him.

A long time later, a policeman came. I tried but I could not understand what he was asking. He was young like me but he stepped over the railing and touched what lay there. As the body was
turned, the black coat which had only been thrown across it slipped off.

I thought it was a trick. I thought it was Brond but that he had put on a last disguise. I stepped over the rail and went down on my knees.

Nothing about him was certain.

Above me, the policeman prayed to the machine he held in his hand. I looked up at him from where I knelt. Watchfully, as he spoke, he took a careful step back.

What do you call someone who sticks his finger up a Scotsman’s arse?

Wi the wig-wig-waggle o the kilt: another crazy tune.