Holloway Falls (26 page)

On Tuesday the weather was worse. Over breakfast, Holloway talked Lenny out of going back. Rain drummed on the kitchen windows and wind thumped at the ancient frames.

They could not afford to have somebody call the police, Holloway said. If they kept going back, it would happen sooner or later. They would think of another way to speak to Henry Lincoln. There was plenty of time.

Holloway had an idea.

He said: ‘Give me one of those matchbooks.’

While making arrangements for later that week, Lenny had lifted a generous handful of white matchbooks from a glass crystal ashtray set on the reception desk of the Caliburn Hotel. Now he passed Holloway a half-empty, dog-eared example. Matt black on glossy white, its legend read: The Caliburn Hotel, London.

Inside the lid flap, Holloway scribbled Thursday’s date and a time. Then he addressed an envelope to Henry Lincoln and argued with Lenny about who should go out in the rain and post it.

On Thursday they confronted Rex Dryden.

21

I

There had been many opportunities to do so. Dryden’s travelling side show, the
Hot Zombie Revue
, had been touring the country. At the same time he was promoting his autobiography on local television and radio. The book was called
The Nature of My Game
, and he grinned on the dust jacket like the kind of man you wouldn’t want near your sister.

The tour ended with three consecutive nights at a north London venue called Papa Doc’s. Papa Doc’s stood directly opposite the phone box from which Shepherd made his anonymous call to the Avon and Somerset Constabulary. Its address was 128, Holloway Road.

‘You just can’t argue with symbolism like that,’ said Lenny. ‘Think of the book rights.’

Lenny had become what he called ‘interested’ in making money from what he now called
the story
. Candidly, he told Holloway that, long term, he was thinking of a two-part television drama to be broadcast on BBC1 over the Easter weekend.

‘Who would play me?’ said Holloway.

‘Oh,’ said Lenny. ‘I don’t know. Let’s think about that when we’ve sold the rights.’

‘David Caruso,’ said Holloway.

‘David who? David
Caruso
? He’s
American
.’

‘He’s got the right hair.’

‘Duh,’ said Lenny. ‘They can
dye
hair, Magnus Magnusson.’

‘OK,’ said Holloway. ‘Jude Law.’

Lenny laughed.

Then he saw that Holloway did not seem to be joking.

He scanned a short newspaper paragraph. Thoughtfully, he said: ‘Don’t you think Jude Law might be a bit—youthful?’

‘Duh,’ said Holloway. ‘Make-up.’

Lenny made a show of turning the newspaper page.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘He’s too tall, as a matter of fact.’

‘That won’t matter,’ said Holloway. ‘It’s not like it’ll be a
documentary
or anything.’

Lenny closed the newspaper.

‘You are not going to be played by arseing Jude Law,’ he said. ‘So live with it. Move on.’

‘Sorry,’ said Holloway. ‘I didn’t know Jude Law was taken.’

‘Well, fuck you—Columbo.’

‘
Columbo?
’

‘Yeah. Columbo. We’ll get Peter Falk to play you. Let’s see how you like that.’

‘He’s too old.’

‘Duh. Make-up. And he’s about the right height.’

‘He’s
American
.’

‘You need an American,’ said Lenny primly, and opened the newspaper again. ‘For the international markets. It’s a well-known fact.’

‘All right,’ said Holloway. ‘We’ll talk about it later. What about Jack?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lenny. ‘I haven’t made up my mind. I was thinking Terry Waite.’

‘I was thinking Bette Midler,’ said Holloway.

‘Bette would be better,’ said Lenny.

II

Henry Lincoln had told the London office that he was suffering from flu.

They had no reason not to believe him. He was a reliable salesman who often met his monthly targets. His mileage was high, his diary was meticulous, his expenses modest. For all that jokes were told about his habit of retiring early during the annual sales conference (Henry was not what you might call a drinker), he was popular with buyers and colleagues alike.

In the five years since he had first taken the name Henry Lincoln, he had yet to take a single day’s sick leave. He had even taken as holiday those far-off, dead days spent waiting for the end of the world at the ex-public-school building in Sussex, when he was a follower of and deputy to Rex Dryden.

Perhaps it was by virtue of some unconscious prudence that Henry didn’t inform his boss that he wouldn’t be coming back in the new year (because there wasn’t going to be one). After all, he’d been let down before. For his part, the sales director dimly understood that behind Henry’s request for special leave lay some obscure religious practice. Religion was a tricky area where employee rights were concerned, and there was little for a publisher’s sales department to do between Christmas Day and 2 January.

At the time, Henry was the truest of true believers in Rex Dryden’s apocalyptic vision. Or so he had long accepted. Of late, that very prudence—taking the end of the world as holiday—had given him cause to question the depth of his erstwhile faith.

For many years, Henry had been seeking a doctrine to adopt and live by. Many times he had been disappointed. If he were to be honest, Rex Dryden was last in a long line of higher beings, religions, political movements, women and public institutions in which he had attempted to make the ultimate spiritual investment.

He had long despaired of finding something to live for. He’d tried the police force, the army, the Catholic Church, the Conservative Party, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Buddhism, five wives, the National Front, the Green Party and many others.

Each had rejected him, or had been found wanting. Usually both.

Humiliation was not something that he took to. More than one of those five ex-wives was beneath a patio as a result. And Rex Dryden had humiliated him when no further humiliation could be endured.

His call to the office was taken by Miriam, the occasionally fearsome departmental office manager. She was sympathetic, and asked if there was anything she could do.

He told her: ‘You’re very kind. But no thank you, Fiona.’

When the call was finished, he wiped his hands on the fluffy white towel that hung over a rail in the downstairs lavatory. Then he made himself a cup of tea and took a seat at the kitchen table in his mock-Tudor home. He referred to the fat A5 Filofax, which he usually kept in his briefcase. Its edges were dark with grease. Henry’s hands were plump and soft, the square fingernails manicured and opalescent, like mother-of-pearl. He used his mobile telephone to cancel his week’s appointments.

He spent that week inside his mock-Tudor walls. For many lonely hours he stared at the long strip of his back garden. It was dripping and melancholy against the English winter sky: mulchy greens and leafless twigs against muddy, grey cloud.

Henry didn’t forget to eat, or forget to drink or sleep. But to remember was an exercise in discipline.

Once again, it was self-respect that kept him going. Pride had seen him through so many difficult times, even the conflux of marital and other events that had led him to change his identity. For Henry Lincoln was not the name his parents had given him.

That name was Derek Bliss.

Several years before, as Derek Bliss, he had owned a private detective agency in Bradford. Bliss had created Henry Lincoln as an alias, and listed him as sleeping partner. Possibly he had done so with exactly the contingency in mind of fleshing out a fraudulent identity he could adopt at a later date. He no longer remembered.

He did remember that there had come a time (shortly after the death of his fifth, bigamously married wife) when a dangerous man called Holloway finally made it no longer convenient for him to be Derek Bliss. Henry Lincoln’s empty skin had been hanging there, waiting for him to step inside. He had flown to Australia as one man and flown back another.

Henry’s skin fitted so perfectly and he’d worn it so long, he barely remembered the man he’d been.

He had been surprised, therefore, to see William Holloway and an unfamiliar associate ringing his doorbell. And he had been horrified when, two days later, they came back. Holloway’s companion had called Henry’s name from the front garden, while waving about a tyre-iron like a chimpanzee.

Two days later there arrived in the post a mishandled match-book, upon the inside flap of which a date and time had been inscribed in ballpoint ink. Henry had no doubt the matchbook was an invitation to join William Holloway on the given date.

At first, Henry was angry. Holloway’s role in his retribution was intended to be utilitarian, of essentially secondary and emblematic importance. It was the police force he intended to publically degrade, by way of recompense for the iniquity with which it had treated him.

There was no better instrument than Holloway, a corrupted exemplar.

Henry regretted that it had gone so badly awry.

He had overplayed that particular hand, but it hardly mattered now. He was no longer angry. Quite the contrary. He was buoyed by Holloway’s providential invitation; it seemed to be a kind of blessing granted to his own long-standing plans to visit the Caliburn Hotel.

He was so nervous and excited that his appetite had deserted him. But nevertheless he sat down to a balanced breakfast at 7.30, lunch at 12.30 and supper at 8.00.

Any good soldier would have done the same.

Twice a day for five days, he had read and reread Rex Dryden’s autobiography, if it could be so called. Ten times, he searched for his own name in the index, or in the acknowledgements. Ten times, he was perplexed by its absence.

When he set the book down on the coffee table next to the sofa, it seemed to taunt him with his absence, his lack of import. He covered it with a clean tea towel, a souvenir of Cornwall. Even then, he could feel the scorch of the book’s derision. He put it, still protectively wrapped in a tea towel, in the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink.

His private things were all over the house. There were private things in books and in cupboards; on computer hard drives; under floorboards; in the chest freezer in the garage. It took some time to gather about him those items he could. He drew great comfort from their proximity. There were other items he would have liked to add to the assembly, but they were larger and less accessible.

He went upstairs to his office, where he had installed a home network of five computers, desktop and portable. From each of these machines he disconnected the peripherals: printers, keyboards, scanners. Then, with a Swiss army knife and various degrees of difficulty, he disassembled each computer and removed their internal hard drives. Each of these he laid on a double-page spread from the
Sunday Telegraph
. He smashed each hard drive with several accurate blows from a ball-pin hammer.

He removed these shattered components to the bathroom sink. Over them, he emptied a tin of lighter fluid. He threw in a match. A flame erupted with a woof like a curious guard dog. Henry took a step back. The flames scorched the ceiling and threatened to set light to the transparent plastic shower curtain with the goldfish motif. Henry drew the curtain to one side and examined it to make sure it wasn’t burning. It wasn’t, although there arose from it a heady plasticky odour. When the flames had lowered somewhat, to dance on a bubbling mass of plastic and wire, Henry went back to his office.

It made him sad to see the spaces where his computers had been.

From various drawers and cupboards he removed handfuls of paperwork. They included some glossy 8 x 10 black-and-white photographs, some legal documents that related to the sale of Executive Solutions Ltd, carbon copies of repeatedly rejected job applications. These papers and others he stuffed into shoe boxes and Sainsbury’s carrier bags, which he then taped closed. From other cupboards in other rooms he found and bagged several strips of photographic negatives, a large number of handwritten notebooks, some items of clothing, some jewellery. He went to the chest freezer in the garage and took from it a medallion of frozen, pale meat. The cutlet was wrapped in a heavily frosted zip-lock freezer bag. He gathered a small pile of VHS video cassettes, and from a drawer in the hallway table he removed a consumer model Motorola walkie-talkie.

All of these things, including the heavy computer monitors and eviscerated CPU units, he dumped in a pile on the tiled kitchen floor.

By then it was late in the evening and Henry was tired. He made a cup of cocoa and went to bed.

But in bed he thought about the book in the kitchen cupboard under the sink, and he couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned in his clean pyjamas.

In the morning, he took a chisel to the bathroom and tried to remove the melted remnants of the hard drives from the bathroom sink. He added what he could to the pile in the kitchen, but bits of plastic casing had sealed to the bowl, so that morning he shaved in the shower. He stood in the hot steam for many minutes until his stubble had softened. Then he washed his round face with Johnson’s baby soap. He rinsed his cheeks and throat under the hot jet. Then he applied three drops of shaving oil to his palms and massaged the oil into his beard. He shaved his cheeks and upper lip and chin and throat until there was not a trace of bristle on his round, slightly jowly face, even when he ran his soft palms all over it.

That morning, he read the book again. This time he skipped straight to the section that covered Rex Dryden’s experiences as leader of the Temple of Light. He trembled with rejection and rage. He was filled with the extravagant urge to punish.

After lunch, Henry gathered up armful after armful of his private things and carried them to the far end of the long garden. The medallion of meat had defrosted and the zip-lock freezer bag had gone damp and flaccid like a used prophylactic. He dropped everything in a pile. When the pile was complete, he tidied the edges of it with a garden rake. By then he was sweating, although the day was cold. He went back inside and treated himself to a long soak in a hot bath. When he had dried himself, he combed his hair into a neat side parting, with the help of a dollop of Brylcreem. Then he selected some clothes: pressed blue jeans; a checked shirt; a crew-neck, navy-blue sweater; a reversible beige windcheater. Hush Puppies.

He went to the garage for the eight-gallon petrol canister, which he lugged to the bottom of the garden. He glugged the petrol on to the pile of private materials, raising the canister higher as it emptied.

He watched the bonfire for several minutes, shielding his eyes from the spiralling embers that batted his head like moths. Then he turned and hurried back inside the house. He saw the neighbours’ curtain twitch.

Inside, Henry looked around his house. It still smelled of new carpet, with a sharp undercurrent of burned plastic.

He dropped Dryden’s book in the pedal bin. Then he went to the cupboard beneath the stairs and found the toolbox. Beneath the tenon saw and the hacksaw with the broken blade, the screwdrivers, the carpet knife, he found an oiled rag. He took out the rag and opened it. In the middle of it lay a 9-mm semi-automatic pistol. He wrapped the gun in a clean handkerchief and slipped it into the pocket of his windcheater.