The German Numbers Woman (23 page)

Richard knew who was meant.

The man stared at an empty cup and crumb-strewn plate, a small rucksack beside him with a woolly hat on top. ‘I said are you going far?'

‘Far enough.'

‘I've been here four fuckin' hours, and nobody'll gi' me a lift. Yer know what kind of life that is?'

He didn't, wasn't interested in finding out, finished his food and swigged off his tea. The country was full of such people, on the road for London, where they could beg and sleep rough.

‘It's nay life for a man who only wants to work. Up every fuckin' mornin', and I walk the arse off me feet looking for it.'

Richard buttoned his mackintosh: ‘I'm turning off at the next junction,' but set two pound coins on the man's table, in case he was genuine, then walked to the exit without hearing a thank-you. Only now, as the achievement of the sea trip swept over him, did he realise his life was one long bottle of champagne. He started the car, and drove to the pumps to fill the tank, check oil, water and tyre pressures, then go inside to pay, have a piss, and buy a newspaper.

The same trampish man stood by the lane when he slowed down on turning from the pumps. Richard stopped, leaned back to open the rear door. Served him right for handing out the two quid. ‘Come in, then.'

‘Ah, ye're a gentleman.'

Like hell I am. He shot off to get in front of a juggernaut and into the middle lane, already regretting his action, in that good deeds never came cheap, or did much for you. He had put him in the back because on giving someone a lift a few years ago the man had managed to purloin some earrings from the glove box which he was taking to Amanda.

‘Where the fuck are we?'

‘Cheshire.'

‘Where the fuck's that?'

No point telling him, in case it strained his vocabulary, but he passed over a cigarette, which the man lit with a brass Zippo. The face was scarred, pockmarked, veined, ruined by want and self-indulgence, a face whose movable features, even if they had been washed and cared for, would not have made him pretty. An ugly bastard, and no mistake. After a few more miles he threw the cigarette out of the window, then seemed to doze. Richard liked it that way. He pushed the button to hear more of Howard's morse.

‘You see, there is something to write about after all. That little bit of gossip in the pub made my day, but I don't really find life's real until I'm tuned into the two lovers on their yachts, one among the Isles of Greece, and the other somewhere between Corsica and Sicily. I'm particularly attracted to one of the women, but then, I would be, wouldn't I? It's the sheer mystery of her that appeals to me, and what also whiles away the time is the fantasy I spin, of one day going in search of her, to try and find out what she looks like.'

‘What the fuck's that noise?'

He switched off.

‘Sounds like fuckin' morse code or somethin'. Drive yer fuckin' mad.'

Richard slid along the wall of a bus doing seventy, and in the mirror saw his passenger rolling up his left sleeve. He took a primed needle from the side pocket of his pack, and jabbed it among the knotted veins. Services, seven miles, Richard noticed, as the man snorted, head back, struck Richard's spine with his knees and laughed: ‘Yippee! London, here I come!'

Not in my car. Against expectations, the miles went quickly, and he jinked beyond a sports car and a builder's van, onto the inner lane by two lorries, and shot up the slipway onto the car park. He didn't bother to look for a space, but stopped at the steps leading to the entrance. ‘This is as far as you go.'

The man, head back and looking with rolling eyes towards the sun roof, as if to coax it open so as to see heaven more clearly, heard nothing. Hazard lights on, Richard got out, pulled the door wide open, and took the man's arm in a twist too powerful for him to resist. He pulled him onto the tarmac. ‘You don't shoot drugs in my car.'

‘What the fuckin' hell's going on?'

A happy family group – mother, father and two children – coming from the cafeteria with chip butties instead of hands, looked on as if a piece of street theatre was being provided especially for them. The man's rucksack hit him in the stomach, Richard now knowing why he'd had to wait four hours for a lift. The scumbag even tried to get back in. ‘It's London I want, not fuckin' Cheshire.'

Richard evaded the heavy punch, and gave one back which, with the power of an angry sea built in, sent him scuffing across the steps. Very Merchant Service, as the captain once said when he'd laid out a man who had gone berserk on the bridge.

You goddamned fool, he told himself on driving away, how can you be so brain dead as to pick up a hitchhiker, and a hop head as well? He fumed for the next fifty miles, until he knew himself lucky compared to Howard and his sky-empty life, which reminded him to bring the morse rattling back:

‘There is a demon in me trying to break out, to let fly, to fragment my existence in return for I don't know what. This is the first time I've expressed myself openly as an adult, believe it or not, since the full stop put on me in March 1945. Whether the demon, or the impulse, is evil or not I wouldn't like to say, but certainly it could be destructive, though not while the thought is unable to change into action. In that sense I'm safe and can talk to you, or tap rather, freely.

‘Perhaps my ideas as to what I mean, and what might be possible, will have clarified by the next letter, though the agitation does diminish somewhat while I try to describe my feelings to you. At the most, or worst, I envy the fate of old Charlie, who was nabbed for smuggling. To sum up, I sometimes think we have to look on life as tragic because otherwise it would be too dull to be acceptable. By way of banalities, Laura and I are well, and hope that you are, too. Until next time. Signing off. Howard.'

Fringing the dereliction of the Black Country (though there were signs of resuscitation) he thought it not a long letter, though there was quite enough in it to make him sweat. Spaghetti Junction posed no fears, after the ins and outs of such a missive which, far from the old boy going off his chump, showed he was on to something bigger than he realised by having picked up Judy babbling away. Howard couldn't know what kind of tramcar he was jumping onto, in passing over such red hot gen, because if that big silly lesbian wasn't stopped she would have the Mediterranean end of the game wrapped up by Interpol. She wasn't cracked enough to blow the gaff on anything knowingly, but any slight clue could get the dogs of the law on the lot of them. Since Howard was picking them up loud and clear there was a chance others were as well. Waistcoat had always had too much affection for tenuous social connections, more than was good for him or them, having fitted her as a general slavey into the outfit to prevent her doing worse mischief to herself than she had already.

Couldn't think why, but he changed his mind about the M1, rolled around the Birmingham conurbation to the M40 turn-off, and headed southeast for London. He pressed the window button, to get rid of the beer and druggie stench of the hitchhiker, glad of the cold air to keep him awake. By-passing London, he would drop his load as arranged at Tonbridge, and keep on for the coast.

Howard couldn't know that, on the other hand, he was worth his weight in gold for his latest intelligence, that he was now part of the decision as to what should be done with it. Or when. He would ask Howard to type up a log of what exactly he had heard, or maybe only a résumé, giving black-and-white page proof, so that nothing more incriminating would be spoken by Judy or her girlfriend after it was handed in.

Stopping at the next call box to inform Waistcoat would be seen as another startling exhibition of his power, for them to marvel at. On the other hand to wait a little longer might mean getting more information which he could use in some way for himself alone. To hang on for a typed log would make the matter easier to credit, while to delay telling what he knew would give more time for Howard to play his sentimental game. You could only handle Howard with the velvet touch, because he was the sort of person who had a mind that talked to him all the time, and so had to be treated with respect.

No need to spoil Howard's life unnecessarily, though at the same time he didn't want him to spend all his listening hours on this one matter. He needed him back on day work, where he might for example find something more useful about the Afghan and central-Asian traffic. In that case it would be better to stop Judy's mouth sooner rather than later. Yet Howard seemed so besotted that if she went off the air his despondency could put him out of action for a while.

He had to be handled carefully. Being blind, he was a man of feeling, and it was strange that he had become his only friend after Amanda, a person he could talk to more or less freely – which he couldn't always even with her. It had come about because of his attraction to Laura, though how far she looked on him as friendly – apart from merely charitable – was hard to say. She was even more of an enigma than Howard, as if she knew that to become open might let slip a deadly secret gnawing inside her. If such was the case, only some kind of psychic dynamite, of the kind well packed in the back of his car, would solve her problem.

In spite of their long married life he thought Howard wasn't as aware of her secret self as he imagined. Every woman had a secret self, and that was a fact. If you thought about it few people did or could get close because if they did there would be nothing to hold them together. Such a truth struck him as bleak, but obvious. With Amanda, their most violent quarrels occurred when the final barrier before mutual revelation was about to give, but they always kept it in place, by embarking on a wonderful bout of bedroom love. Perhaps they knew each other better than they thought, an observation which was not so bleak. He enjoyed long distance driving because the monotony allowed him to think, but he only wanted to deliver the packages and get home as soon as possible, so that he could rattle off a tape letter to Howard. He didn't yet know the text but was confident that one would come as soon as he sat down at the key.

SIXTEEN

White gulls mocked him with their freedom, squealing in the unlimited blue. They concentrated on the area as if waiting for a house to break free, head for the open sea like a ship, and begin discarding choice leftovers for them to eat.

He took off his cap to feel the wind. Instead of wondering what he would do if Laura went shopping and didn't return, he thought: what if I didn't go back from my morning walk? What if I was hit by a car, was incinerated by lightning, or strolled off the breakwater and drowned? Better still, what if I took a train to London, got to the airport, and boarded a jet for Brazil? Secret preparations would be necessary so, like a prisoner of war, I would work at my escape for weeks.

On the other hand, how far can a blind man get on his travels? Hard to disguise myself as someone with sight, and clever is that man who can act blind without detection. The alarms would go off as if I really had escaped, and I would be brought home like a mental case, shackled to a triumphant social worker, a number painted on the back my jacket in case I made a run for it again. Even the gulls would become part of the search, circling the copse in which I had crawled to hide or die.

He sat on a low wall halfway down the winding steps, relishing the touch of spring breeze. A man was digging in his garden, and Howard knew that the soil was rich and black from the easy sound of the spade going in. The leaf mould of last year and the emerging leaves of this had a cool vegetable smell, reminding him of his infants' school when the teacher managed them across the road and into the hedged field for a lesson on how to recognise flowers and trees.

Before leaving he had taken a signal from his wireless telling of nine stowaways who had been arrested some miles inland. The captain of the ship they had come on, now at sea again, was disputing the fact that his company should pay for their repatriation. The local police had checked the ship before leaving Casablanca, and found no stowaways, so how could it be his responsibility?

Everyone in the world was on the move legally or without formality, and it was easy for those who had the will to get up and go. Even if the stowaways were sent back, their journeying would fill part of their lives, and the memory stay to be talked about. No doubt they would set off again, an enterprise to envy.

He walked on when the man rested from his rhythmical digging, and the sea breeze took over from the smell of earthy life on rounding the bend, counting the taps with his stick so as to know when he was about to reach level ground.

The igniting signal had lit a way through a lifetime of regrets. He would rather not have heard it, except that he could pass the message to Richard in his next morse letter. There was little to tell. Even the story about old Charlie coming back from Cherbourg with his launch full of drugs, heard supposedly in the pub, had been invented. A man must say something amusing when writing to a friend, and such items as smugglers getting caught appeared often enough in the newspapers. Still, it wasn't good to spin a lie, and he wished he hadn't done so, regarding the unease as an indication that he would not do so again.

Instead of continuing to the beach at the bottom of the hill he turned and climbed slowly back, impatiently counting the steps so as to know when he reached the house. He imagined Laura's lift of the eyelids as he opened the door. ‘What have you forgotten?'

‘I had my walk.' He put his stick in the rack and took off his cap. ‘I got to the bottom, but suddenly felt it was futile to go any further.'

‘I'll make your coffee, then.' To think of her concern as worry would be extreme, yet his breaking of habit was always done for a reason. For weeks, instead of shutting down his wireless at eleven, he had stayed as if mesmerised till well past midnight. He no longer told her stories about what he intercepted. Was what he picked up responsible for his reticence, and if not then what could be? Nothing ever received had been of the sort to chill her, or surprise her, or alarm her, but it wouldn't do to question him about a world they had agreed should be his own. A blind man needed more inviolable territory than anyone else, but what afflicted him must have something to do with what was part of him and not of her.