Cooee (28 page)

‘Just some papers. They're not really urgent, only that I do need them, sooner or later, and I thought I might as well get it all done before there's any urgency.'

I don't know why it is that whenever I lie I rattle on compulsively, adding trivial details which seem to me to lend conviction to an increasingly threadbare story.

‘Well, you know,' he said, ‘now that you've called me and tackled the problem head on, you'll probably find those keys tomorrow.' He seemed to take a lot of pleasure in his forecast.

‘It always happens,' he said, grinning. ‘And you'll be saying to yourself, my goodness me, why did I bother to go and get that bugger of a locksmith, when all along the keys were right here? That's what you'll be saying to yourself.'

All the while he was working, it seemed to me, his beady eyes were glancing around the room, noting its contents, memorising the layout. I wondered if I were becoming clinically paranoiac.

‘Here we go,' he said, easing the lock out. ‘Not a hard one, this one. Here we go, nice and easy. See, I haven't had to do much damage at all: I can pop in a new lock for you and you'll never know anything happened. Good as new.'

He rolled the top drawer out. Apart from a half-dozen or so suspension files, it was completely empty. He glanced at me. ‘Nothing in this one.'

‘They're all in the bottom one,' I said, off-handedly.

He paused. ‘Will I pull it out for you, then?'

‘Yes, of course,' I said, because it seemed foolish to say anything else; I thought it would seem suspicious to prevaricate, to demand privacy. The worst that could happen was that the lower drawer, too, would be empty.

He pushed the top drawer back in and opened the lower one. I heard the intake of his breath. I glanced down and saw the revolver lying at the bottom of the drawer.

I couldn't think of anything to say. Nor could he.

‘That's what you expected?' he asked, finally.

‘It's my husband's gun,' I said, reflecting that this at least was certainly true. ‘I didn't realise he'd put it in here. He's away at the present. He's on a business trip.'

‘He's got a licence?'

‘Well, of course. He shoots with a local club.'

Amazing, how rapidly one could invent things.

Both of us were staring at the evil-looking thing.

‘It's a Smith and Wesson,' he observed.

‘Yes.'

‘The sort James Bond uses. Isn't it?'

‘I have no idea,' I said. In fact I didn't think it was. Steve was crazy about James Bond and some of it had rubbed off on me: I seemed to remember that James Bond customarily carried a Walther. But I wasn't about to engage in a debate on such matters.

‘Is it loaded?'

‘I don't know. No. No, I shouldn't think so.'

‘Well then. I'll put this new lock in for you, will I?'

‘Thank you,' I said, coolly.

When he left, he asked me for an amount I found surprising. It's not unusual, of course, for tradesmen to do this: what's unusual is for them to charge you something you think a fair amount; but it really did seem exorbitant.

It occurred to me I was being blackmailed, that he felt he could freely ask a ridiculous sum because he sensed something dodgy going on. He was right, of course. I paid him without query. I suppose it was cowardly of me, and perhaps stupid, but I so overwhelmingly wanted him out of the house, I probably would have paid him three times as much just to get rid of him.

When he had gone, I returned to the study and took out the gun. I weighed it in my hand. It wasn't bulky, but was still surprisingly heavy. I had always thought revolvers like that tucked neatly in a pocket or holster, that you wouldn't really be aware of their presence about your person until you were in need of them. This was so heavy, you couldn't possibly forget it. I examined it carefully, and wondered suddenly if it had Max's fingerprints on it, if my own fingerprints had just obliterated his. I knew so little about guns that I did not even know whether it was loaded or not.

It is a strange and frightening experience to handle a gun. The sight of a gun is so recognisable: it is familiar to us from movies and television, from gangster fiction and war documentaries; it is a part of our culture, a common pattern on the wallpaper of our lives.

Yet actually to hold one, to consider it and balance it, to stretch out your arm and point it as if you were truly threatening someone — these are foreign and bizarre actions, as alien to the comfort of our souls as anything can be. The object exerts an uncanny fascination, so that touching or stroking or gripping it forces you to recognise that it is so much more than a mere object, so replete with its potential and with the menace deriving from its function. It's unlike anything else. Its function is unmistakable and singular, and it cannot be contemplated without reference to that function.

I could not accommodate the gun to the texture of ordinary life. I felt like a character who had landed in the wrong movie. I'd been looking all my life for something along the lines of
The Princess Bride
, and instead I'd found myself deep in the latest Tarantino release. I returned the revolver to its drawer and, a deep and unfamiliar disquiet in my heart, locked the cabinet with the shiny, new key the locksmith had provided.

That evening I sat down with Borrow and a brandy and reviewed my situation.

It was plain enough, I suppose, if unpalatable. I was a widow. I was a widow of means, but it appeared to me that any of my means might be stripped from me at any point. My own income was adequate but not magnificent. Max's bequest was huge, but Max's bequest appeared to be not just a house but a house on sand. Pretty wobbly sand, too.

My marriage had been to a man I had never known. I had loved this man more dearly than I had ever loved anyone in my life, more (I was convinced) than I would ever love anyone again. Yet he had betrayed me monstrously and it seemed reasonable to assume or at least to speculate that his wealth had been accumulated by unorthodox and possibly illegal methods. If this were so, I supposed I might, as the inheritor of his possessions, face criminal charges. I might be convicted of aiding and abetting. I might in fact have aided and abetted, without realising I had done so.

And he was dead. Nobody knew this but I. Nobody else knew I was a widow. And, given the circumstances of his death, that gave me some protection.

Where did this leave me? Was I in danger? It seemed preposterous to regard myself as in danger of any kind, but I had lost my toehold on the tectonic plates of my life: they were slipping and sliding and could finish up anywhere. The gaps they left in the wake of their eruptions were alarming already, and seemed to be widening speedily. I was going to fall down one of those crevices any day now.

It was like inventing a whole new landscape and inserting myself in it. It was something of a desert, this landscape, with many thorn trees and a good deal of hot sand and not much in the way of oases.

So I had to find my way out of it. But it was hard to make my mind move. Normally I am a quick thinker, I believe: but now, stymied and shocked as I was, trying to devise strategies was slow going. I tried to force myself into a logical train of thought, imagining outcome, calculating consequence and risk.

All I could really think of was that I had known one fine, glimmering light, one unrepeatable moment of apparent perfection, one dazzling flame of passion and — yes, purity — and that I had permanently quenched it. Yet the darkness I inhabited was not my fault. It was the fault of those who had betrayed me. The dazzling flame had been treacherous.

Well, then, it must be my responsibility to discover the sunlight again. It wouldn't ever again have the brilliance that had drenched me with Max's coming, but surely I could ferret my way through the gloom that had descended; surely I could find a point from which I could start to try to refashion my life.

When Steve was trying to work something out, he used a thing he proudly called his Thought Strategy: he had been taught it at some staff development seminar or other.

SWAT. Strengths, weaknesses ...

I ran into a brick wall here. Strengths, I muttered to myself. Strengths, weaknesses. Borrow whimpered quietly in his sleep. I stared at the wall.

I had it. Not SWAT but SWOT. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.

What were my strengths? Off-hand, I could bring none to mind. Weaknesses there were aplenty. Ditto threats. Opportunities? Concentrate, concentrate. I felt my mind slipping off track. I had another brandy.

Well, if I had a strength it had to be financial stability. I had enough money. On the other hand, of course, I had now to suppose that Max's ways of making money might have been at least open to question, in which case I might have my money taken off me. Since I had been married to Max, I wondered, might I be liable for his debts? It was surely likely.

What had Max done, exactly? Photographs of young women were not in themselves incriminating items. They might have been models, actresses, applicants for respectable jobs. Because a mysterious man called Colin had burst into the house, it didn't follow that Max had been involved in illegal activities. Was I being ridiculous?

But there was the question of the name — the three names. And now there was the revolver, black and deadly in its dark drawer. And, the more I thought, the more it seemed to me I had been unforgivably stupid.

Max had never answered a straight question on the origins of his improbable wealth. I'd never asked him one. I couldn't get Bea's voice out of my head.
Tax evasion? Prostitution? Drugs? White slave traffic?
I recalled his fabulous largesse, his evidently limitless funds, his casual teasing whose function was finally always evasion. I recalled the business trips whose purpose and outcome remained cloudy. Well, murky rather than cloudy, one had to say.

But we had known each other intimately, hadn't we? We had been transparent to each other, hadn't we? There was no point in dwelling on any of that. What I had to do was focus on what I had to do.

It seemed to me that the first thing was to sell Rain. Some little time previously, the thought would have dismayed me, struck a dead chill into the roots of my soul. But I couldn't bear Rain any longer. That man Colin had invaded with such ease, such neat, irritating panache; and there would be more invaders, I was sure. I could lock them out only for a brief spell: they would find their way in and would torment me. It was up to me to evade them, to make it impossible for them to up-end my life.

And Max lay outside, under the smooth turf and flowerbeds of Rain's brand-new back garden, under the rubble of the cool and gleaming pool I had designed for him. No, I didn't want to stay.

Well, Max had given me Rain. The title was in my bank: nothing mysterious or evasive about it, thank Christ. It belonged to me outright, and there should be no difficulty in selling it. I would call an agent the next day. Max had invested enough in the house: property was booming and probably the investment would prove to have ripened speedily.

What next?

I hadn't changed my name, of course. If people wanted to find me, it would be Isabel Weaving they would have to find, not Isabel Knight. Nor Isabel Ritter, Templar, whatever. At first this seemed rather a strength, but, as I thought my way through it further, I didn't think it mattered much. If Max had mixed with the sort of pals who were likely to seek me out and (for instance) gun me down, they presumably had kept tabs on me enough to know my name and my whereabouts.

Yet why would anyone want to harm me? If they thought Max had absconded with funds; if they thought I knew Max's whereabouts ... Or, to put a different spin on it, if they thought Max had absconded but that I had access to the funds. Then I might well be a person of considerable interest to them.

Surely, however, nobody would guess the truth? Nobody would guess what had really happened to Max. Would they? The truth was so unlikely, so extraordinary and implausible, nobody could possibly guess it.

This was a strength, I thought, not a threat. If it were an opportunity of some kind, I couldn't see how.

Then I thought of the revolver. My first instinct had been to creep out at dead of night (an evocative phrase, that) and hurl it into the nearest deep-flowing river. Perhaps, however, I should keep it as protection? Yet surely that was laughable: I, who had never fired a gun in my life, to use the thing for safety. I'd be more likely to shoot myself in the foot. Or the neck. And if I didn't manage to kill myself, I'd surely kill someone else. That would make me a double murderer. On the way to serial status, in fact.

So. I'd sell Rain. I'd get rid of the gun.

I was starting to feel mildly better. Until now I'd been like a one-finned fish, swimming in circles and sinking to boot. If I could regain control — or at least the illusion of control — over my life, I might regain something more than control: I might feel that sanity and peace were possible again. For some time, now, they hadn't looked like accessible options.

The sooner I acted, the sooner I would be able to disentangle myself from a scenario whose ramifications were becoming alarming.