Dorian (24 page)

‘I said, the jiggling man seems bloody pleased with himself. I expect he’s just had a fix of Largactil, or whatever it is they give him so as to stop the poor bugger abandoning ship altogether.’

‘Ship?’ queried Batface. She’d taken to randomly sampling her husband’s dialogue; they had, after all, been married for well over a decade. ‘He isn’t
on
a ship.’

‘No, no, I meant it as a metaphor for his mind, his sanity. You can see that he’s completely overawed by some sense of responsibility.
I
think that his delusion is the same as mine – that he also believes himself to be meting out the seconds until we all expire, like a human pendulum.’ Wotton took a slug of his morning tea, a pungent infusion Nanny Claire had been brewing from a small bale of Chinese herbs for the past one and a half hours.

‘Responsibility?’ Batface remained inquisitive. ‘I don’t know about the jiggling man, but I must sort out the aftermath of last night’s party. There’s still absolutely
masses
of clearing up to do; the caterers haven’t even taken their stuff away yet and it’s far too much for Consuela to handle. What’re you doing today, Henry?’ She seldom stuttered when they were speaking alone.

‘Back into the bloody hospital – they wouldn’t do my tubes yesterday.’

‘And who will drive you? I can’t, and Nanny Claire has to pick up Phoebe from school early and take her to ballet – will Basil, perhaps?’

‘I don’t know; he went off with Dorian, didn’t he – so much for all his fine words about friendship and caring and –’

Wotton was forestalled by the clamour of the telephone ringing. It was Dorian calling to discuss last night’s fun.

Alan Campbell had made it over to Dorian’s mews house in about twenty minutes. Since being struck off the medical register in the mid-eighties, the erstwhile practitioner of chicanery had slid straight down the property ladder. When his symptoms had become too flagrant for him even to perform illegal abortions, or administer vitamin shots laced with Methedrine, he had withdrawn to a furnished bedsit in Earls Court. There, surrounded by a few cardboard boxes stuffed with mouldering papers, Campbell eked out his remaining days, listening to commercial radio while suppurating in the sweat of his own sinfulness.
De temps en temps
he phoned a call-in show simply to hear his own Strine whine complaining over the ether. So when the ring-back came to do something truly wrong, he savoured it.

They stood looking down at the corpse, which had adopted a relaxed if gory pose in the Eames chair. Why’d ya do it? Campbell croaked, and despite his own extensive appetite for gore, his guts turned over at the sight of such a large helping of person purée.

—Oh, I dunno… Dorian kicked Baz’s corpse in the upper thigh region and it pivoted in its leather and rosewood frame like a marionette of inferior design. It was only a question of
when
, Alan, not why. He was a bore – a fucking tedious bore. He’d been threatening to blackmail me for years over some – he chose his words with care –
excesses
he was privy to in New York.

—Oh yairs?

—Yes. Dorian softly punched the mush that was Baz’s face and, taking his knuckles to his mouth, licked the red stuff.

Campbell winced. This place is in an awful fucking mess, Dorian, he said.

—Isn’t it.

—Are those the monitors for that piece of his?

—That’s right.

—This doesn’t have anything to do with it, does it?

—Of course not! Dorian guffawed. Art thefts happen all the time – but an art murder? Don’t be ridiculous.

—Whatever. You want me to deal with this, right?

—That’s the general idea.

—It’ll cost ya.

—Of course.

—I don’t s’pose you’ve got any of the right stuff for this kind of job… plastic sheeting or bin-liners, rubber gloves, some heavy cord or rope and a fucking spade – a good one?

—What’re you going to do? Dorian’s eyes were bright. Cut him into pieces? Dissolve his flesh with acid?

—Nah, don’t be mad, dissolving a corpse needs a plunge bath and a drum of sulphuric fucking acid. As for chopping him up, I haven’t the strength and you’d make a hash of it. Nah… He looked down at Baz with a smear of pity on his snide face. We’ll bury the poor bastard. So, if you’ve got any of that stuff – get it. I’ll start stripping him.

Campbell had heard all about a good burial ground over dinner at the Wottons’. He loved to do that: pump for information a stupid and oblivious companion who’d been thrust upon him, in the process transforming them into an unwitting accomplice of a crime yet to be committed. In this case it was Chloë Lambert who’d been his mark, although he hadn’t thought that her vacuous wittering about this isolated folly in the grounds of a Wiltshire estate would prove so useful so soon.

They drove down the M3 towards Andover in Dorian’s MG. Dorian said, What if stupid squad stop us?

But Campbell was dismissive: Yeah, like they’re looking for a corpse and not some pissed exec heading home to the commuter belt. Stay under the limit, and if we’re stopped, be cool – you can do that. He could do it too; he looped an arm around the polythene-barked human log that was planted in the ditch behind the seats. A few hours before, Baz’s bag had been there; now he himself was the baggage. Will anyone miss him? Just as Campbell’s small talk was potential conspiracy, so he never sounded more casual than when he was actually conspiring.

—I dunno.

—I mean, does he have family?

—Family? Dorian snorted. It’s difficult to imagine, isn’t it? I think there was a brother somewhere ludicrous and inexistent like
Nottingham
.

—Were they in touch?

—Hardly – Baz had been abroad on and off for nearly twenty years. He was a queer, he was a junky; it’s hard to picture him playing horsey with nieces and nephews climbing on his shoulders, hmm?

—Well, what about Wotton?

—Henry? Oh, don’t worry about Henry; I’ll take care of him.

Following Chloë’s unwitting instructions, as the A303 mounted towards the escarpment of Salisbury Plain, they turned off on to a lane heading down into a valley. Within yards there was a gateway into woods. Dorian took it and killed the headlights. By the light of a sickle moon the little car crackled over old leaves and fallen boughs. Why here? he asked, and Campbell replied, Because it’s remote, it isn’t farmland so we won’t have to rely on the silence of the fucking lambs, there’s no gamekeeper so we won’t be disturbed, and there’s nothing much to connect us with the place if his remains are ever found. Also, according to my information we can go in by this track, do the business, then come out on a main road five miles off, without going near any human habitation.

They buried him deep and they sweated a lot. It took three hours. Dorian stripped to his trousers and hacked out the grave; when his spade hit a root too thick to be sliced, Campbell would get in and hacksaw through it. They buried Baz in a thicket of rhododendron in the middle of the wood. They buried him naked, with his jaw shattered and his fingertips bubbled with a blowtorch. They buried him so that even if he ever were found, he wouldn’t be a he, merely an it. And when the killer and his accomplice were done, Dorian backed the car out of the undergrowth, while Campbell used the birch-twig broom he’d thoughtfully brought along, to sweep the leaves and humus into tracklessness.

It was dawn by the time they jolted back on to the metalled road. Campbell winced, a hand travelling involuntarily to his ribs. Anything wrong? Dorian said. No, the struck-off doc replied, I’m just not feeling too well.

At seven a.m. Dorian dropped Campbell in Boscombe, a suburb of Bournemouth where the sinister Australian had an old friend.

—Peter’s a character, Campbell said, spent years doing this routine where he ponced old silver amalgam from dentists.

—What the fuck’re you on about? Dorian snapped. He was gunning the engine, keen to escape this tawdry suburban strand.

—Y’know, amalgam, stuff they use for fillings. Anyway, Peter’d go round the country, collecting up all the scrapings the tooth-pullers’d put on a bit of glass.

—I don’t know what a fucking filling even
is
, you idiot. Dorian groaned with exasperation.

—It all added up to something for nothing. He made enough to set up shylocking down here. Bloke’s bloody loaded. You should come up and say hello –

—No. I’ve got to deal with Wotton. I thought we were covering our tracks – why’re you holding me up?

—I’ve got a little present here, said Campbell, smiting the breast pocket of his alpaca jacket with a closed fist. It made a hollow, plastic ‘thwock’.

—What!? What!?

—Not for
you
, for Peter. Campbell got up out of the little skateboard of a car, then bent back towards Dorian while unclasping his fist. In the palm of his hand were a dozen or so bloody molars, each with a silvery filling. Peter likes to keep his hand in, said Campbell. I’ll be needing fifteen large, old notes please, Dorian – old tender for a tender old queen, yeah?

—
Hasta la vista
, baby! Dorian sang out, as he terminated the conversation by driving off. Once he was on the bypass, he let rip with a Bohemian rhapsody: I’m just a poor boy, nobody loves me / He’s just a poor boy from a poor family…

By ten o’clock that morning Dorian was at the Fleet Services on the M3, standing in a phone booth outside a Happy Eater. It was a miserable, grey day, and the way the service centre had been bulldozed out of the surrounding coniferous plantation gave it the air of an extermination camp for drivers. ‘Henry?’ he said. ‘It’s Dorian. I need to talk to you.’

‘Talk for chauffeuring,’ Wotton oozed down the line. ‘I need to go back to the bloody hospital this morning.’

‘Talk first?’ Dorian wheedled.

‘You’ve got to be joking, you insolent young pup, get over here now.’ Wotton crashed the receiver back down.

‘It’s Dorian,’ he called over to Batface. ‘He’ll take me.’

‘There.’ She perked up. ‘
He
cares about you.’

‘My dear Batface’ – Wotton smiled as he adopted a paterfamilias’s posture, one hand sunk deep in his dressing-gown pocket, the other caressing the prepuce of his cigar – ‘Dorian cares for me the way an Eskimo tribe cares for its old folk – with deep respect, yes, but with an equally steely preparedness to abandon me in the frozen wastes without so much as a backward glance.’ He fell silent, staring up through the bay window at the jiggling man. As he watched him, Wotton also became the captain of his own ship, swaying at first gently from side to side, but then more vigorously, until he too was mastering the motion of a force 7 gale. Batface came and went, preparing to quit the house, but recognising the intensity of her husband’s reverie she merely brushed his gelid cheek with her dry lips, before leaving him to commune with his insane nemesis.

It wasn’t until they reached the Middlesex that Wotton vouchsafed he would be in overnight. ‘It’s a general-anaesthetic job,’ he explained; ‘doing it when I was awake would be like changing this car’s transmission while the engine was still running.’ Then he fobbed Dorian off with the car, telling him to come back the following morning.

The next day there was no parking to be had and, given the complexity of the Fitzrovian one-way system, Dorian ended up piloting the Jag around an awkward, irregular polygon of a block twenty-odd times before his passenger re-emerged from the Middlesex Hospital. It was as if he were constructing a Mandelbrot set composed of many fractals of his own frustration.

Wotton stood squinting up Mortimer Street for his ride. With his empty nappy of corduroy flat on his deflated posterior, his squamous face, and his gaunt frame barely parting the front from the back of his hacking jacket, he resembled some squirearchal horseman of the apocalypse – the Honourable Pestilence Famine-War, perhaps. Dorian screeched up, leapt out, scurried round and admitted him to the Jag. He slammed the door and ran back to the driver’s side, only to be greeted with the imperious complaint ‘You haven’t tucked me in properly – my jacket is caught in the door.’

When at last they were both properly ensconced, Dorian asked him, ‘Where’s the nearest place we can sit out on the pavement and get a decent cup of coffee?’

‘Paris,’ Wotton snapped, and set fire to a Turkish State Monopoly.

‘You know what I mean, Henry,’ Dorian sighed heavily. ‘Somewhere we can
talk
properly.’

‘I can talk properly anywhere.’ Wotton’s brown exhalations staggered in the slipstream before being sucked out of the window. ‘But aren’t you going to ask me how my trip to the hospital went?’

‘Um, yeah, right… how was it?’

‘Fucking painful. There’s something exquisitely unpleasant about having a needle inserted into your body and connected to a plastic tube which is tunnelled through the skin in your upper chest wall.’ He squirmed in the car seat and adjusted his moleskin shirt so that Dorian could see the plastic plug of the Hickman line. ‘As soon as I get home I’m going to link this up to my morphine pump.’

‘Is that what it’s meant for?’ Dorian’s fine brow arced like a gull’s wing as he hovered on a thermal of curiosity. How was it that Wotton was still alive?