The Lake of Darkness (26 page)

“I haven’t come here for nothing,” he said.

“Well…” Into the glass slopped more brandy. “Not in the sense that you’ve reminded me. I can get it for you sometime next week. Cash is difficult, you know, that sort of cash. I’ll have to phone my bank first, I’ll have to …”

Finn took a step forward from the position he had taken up by the balcony door. “You can get it for me Monday morning,” he said. “And I don’t want it sent, not this time. Put it in your car on the front passenger seat and leave the car in the car park outside the palace.”

“The palace?” repeated Martin Urban, staring at him.

“Alexandra Palace.” Finn was getting impatient. “Have you got that? Put the money in a carrier on the front seat of your car and leave it there between one and two Monday, okay?”

Martin Urban had flushed a dark crimson. His eyes had become very bright, his features blurred and thickened. He set down his glass and stood up. Very deliberately he said, “No, it is not okay. It is very much not okay.” He passed a hand over his forehead, and when he took it down Finn saw that his face was working with fury. “Just who the hell d’you think you are, coming here, barging in here, telling me what I should do with my own money? You haven’t got some sort of right to it, you know. You people, you’re all the same, you think anyone with a bit more than you’ve got owes you a living. It’s purely out of the kindness of my heart I’m making it possible for your mother to have a decent place to live in. But I’m damned if I’m going to break an important appointment on Monday morning to go to the bank for you or do without my car for an hour. Why should I? Why the hell should I?”

Finn thought the man was going to fall. He watched him get hold of the back of a chair and hang on to it and draw a long breath and seem to get a grip on himself. Enough control, at any rate, to say coldly now, “You’d, better go,” and then, pushing past Finn to unlock the balcony door, “Excuse me, I must have some air.”

Martin Urban went out on to the balcony. Finn watched him standing there, looking down on London and then up at the clear, faintly starry, purplish sky. After a moment or two he came in again, appearing partially recovered, and stood staring with a curiously pained expression, like a hurt dog, at the big cactus which stood on the window sill, at its pink, waxen flowers. Without turning to Finn, he said,

“I thought I told you to go.”

Finn didn’t reply to this rhetorical question. He said, “I don’t want the money sent. Is that understood? I don’t want those delivery people knowing.”

“Knowing what, for God’s sake?” Martin Urban turned round and said sharply, “I’m sick of this. I’m tired. I’ve had a bad day. If it wasn’t that I promised and I don’t like to break my word, I’d, tell you you can forget the money. Right, so you can have a cheque or nothing.”

“Well, well,” said Finn. “Now we know.”

“Indeed we do. And when that’s over I think I’ll have done quite a favour to you and your mother.” He went to the writing desk, though none too steadily, and fumbled about inside it for a cheque-book.

“Haven’t I ever done anything for you?” said Finn.

Without looking at him, Martin Urban said, “Like what? Like making a damned nuisance of yourself. What have you ever done for me?” He began to write the cheque. Finn went up to him, laid a heavy hand on his arm and took the pen away. Martin Urban jumped to his feet, shouted, “Take your hands off me!”

Finn held him by the upper arms and looked searchingly into his face. The square, flushed, puffy face was resentful and indignant-and utterly bewildered. Finn could read faces-and minds too sometimes.

“You don’t know about it,” he said flatly. “It wasn’t in the papers. Well, it’s done. Last Saturday.”

Martin Urban struggled to free himself and Finn let him
go. “How dare you touch me! And what the hell are you talking about?”

It was a strange thing, but now that he had to do it Finn found it as hard to put the act into words as his clients had done. He looked around him, he cleared his throat.

“Last Saturday,” he said gruffly, “I did for the girl. Like you wanted.”

Martin Urban stood quite still.

“What did you say?”

“You heard.”

“Last Saturday you …”

“I did for that girl, like you’re paying me for. I’ve done it and now I want my money.”

The sound he made was a kind of ghastly groan, the like of which Finn had only previously heard from Lena, and he fell back on to the sofa, covering his face with his hands. Finn regarded him as he rocked backwards and forwards, pushing his fists into his eyes, beating them against his temples. Finn stepped away and sat down on an upright chair, understanding now that he had made a mistake. Things, details, fell gently into place like the silver balls in Lena’s Chinese puzzle dropping into their slots.

“Give me some more of that brandy.”

Finn poured some brandy and pushed the glass at Martin Urban’s mouth. The brandy was drained and there was a shuddering and a kind of sob and the thick broken voice said,

“You were-in the car-that-didn’t-stop?”

“I’ve said so.”

“What am I to do? My God, what am I going to do? You thought I’d, paid you to do that? What sort of a monster
are
you?” He got up shakily and stood with his hands pressed to his head. “I loved her,” he said. “She loved me. We were going to be married. And you …”

He turned towards modern man’s succour, lifeline, first aid-the phone. He took an uncertain step towards it. Finn
calculated how to get there first, take him by surprise, wrench the wires out of the wall. And then? There was only one way to make certain no one was ever told what Martin Urban knew.

Swaying, holding his head, he stood staring hypnotically at Finn. Finn began to get up. Sweat beads had started to prickle his face. Somehow he must get Martin Urban out of here, into a car, away from this place into some lonely place. In order to silence him he must put on an act, make promises, play along … He didn’t know how to do these things, he was powerless, bereft of energy, as if a fuse had blown in him and there was no current to power his limbs.

Martin Urban took down his hands and turned away from the phone. The attack he made on Finn was entirely unexpected. One moment he was standing there in the middle of the room, his fists clenched, his arms gradually falling to his sides, the next he had sprung upon Finn, flailing out, using his hands like hammers. Finn toppled backwards. It was the first time in his life he had ever been knocked down by another.

He rolled over on to his front, pressed himself up with a violence that sent the other man staggering back, and leapt like a panther. Martin Urban ducked and stumbled out on to the balcony. London glittered out there like the window of a tourist souvenir shop. Finn stood poised in the doorway, his arms spread, his body quivering. And the man who had given him five thousand pounds from some quixotic altruism Finn couldn’t even begin to understand, stood against the low parapet, convulsed, it seemed, with some kind of passionate need for revenge. He leapt forward again, deceived perhaps by Finn’s white thinness.

But Finn was there a split second before him, to smash with his right arm harder than he had ever smashed before. And a strange thing happened. Martin Urban raised his arms hugely above his head in some exaggerated defensive gesture. He staggered backwards in an almost comic, tip-toe
slow motion, bathed in the shining night air, against the spangled backdrop, staggered, teetered until the parapet wall, that reached lower than the tops of his thighs, was just behind him. Finn could see what would happen and he jumped to catch the man before he fell. He jumped just too late. Martin Urban made contact with the wall, doubled over backwards, and with a low cry, fell.

Forty feet into a pit of blackness. There was a concrete well down there, an area that perhaps gave access to a porter’s basement. Finn stood, looking down. No other windows opened, no one appeared, no one had been alerted by the groaning sound the man had made as he starfished to earth. Finn went in and closed and locked the balcony door. He turned off the lights and stood listening for movement in the corridor outside, for doors opening and footsteps. There was nothing.

He had been a fool to lock that door. It must look like suicide. It must look as if Martin Urban had killed himself over the death of the woman he was to have married. Finn unlocked the door again. He didn’t touch the brandy glass. A man might well drink brandy before he committed suicide. The irony of it struck Finn, though, as he moved towards the front door of the flat, the irony that now, at this moment, in this place, he was at greater risk through this man’s accidental death than he had ever been when he had done murder.

When he was satisfied that all was quiet and still he passed stealthily out of the flat and pulled the front door softly shut behind him. He went downstairs very fast, passing no one, hearing nothing. The van was waiting for him in a deserted car park. And deserted too Cromwell Court and its environs would have seemed but for the lights which shone with tranquillity in most of its broad rectangular windows.

Still, it was only a matter of time, of short time, before that body would be found. He must get away, not linger,
not yield to the temptation to steal softly around to the other side of the block and peer into that dark well, check what light must go on or which door open to reveal its occupant …

He resisted. As he was driving down Dartmouth Park Hill, coming up to the traffic lights at Tufnell Park Station, he heard the wail of a siren. But there was nothing to say it was an ambulance summoned for Martin Urban, it could just as well have been a fire engine or a police car. He put the van away in the garage at the corner of Somerset Grove and walked home along the street where the sulphurous light laid a pinchbeck gleam.

The house smelt of cannabis and wastebins. Finn went on up to the top, taking two stairs at a time with his great loping stride. He felt a surge of confidence and contentment. This time it really had been an accident, he could face Lena without dread. And there was no possibility now of anyone suspecting Martin Urban might not have been alone in the flat, not a soul who would know of any connection between himself and Martin Urban. He was sure no one had seen him or would know him if they had. Yet Martin Urban was out of harm’s way, silenced, taking the secret of Finn’s mistake with him into the dark spaces or losing it in oblivion as he began on a new cycle of life.

The green bird began a shrill twittering when he came into the room. Mrs. Gogarty, who had been making forecasts with the aid of the Tarot, got up and threw the shawl over its cage.

“Well, well,” said Finn, “we
are
cosy.”

He pulled off his gloves and put them in his pocket and took Lena’s hand. She was as transparent as an insect tonight and dusty like a moth. Her dull leaden eyes met his silver eyes and she smiled.

“The picture of devotion!” said Mrs. Gogarty with admiring sighs. She studied the cards, laid out now for Finn. “There’s a lot of death here …” she began.

Over Lena’s head Finn gave her a warning look.

“Ah!” She slid the cards together and the Death card, Scorpio’s Death card-Death cloaked and riding a pale horse-came out on top. She covered it with the Queen of Wands. In her mechanical gypsy voice she said, “There’s money here, my darling, a lot of money. But wait … no, it’s not coming your way, you’ll have a disappointment.”

The hand that held Lena’s grew cold and limp. He bent down, he looked unseeing into the soothsayer’s face.

“What? What did you say?”

“A disappointment over money … Why are you looking at me like that?”

Finn saw, not the cards which Mrs. Gogarty’s hands now covered in fear, not Lena’s face, apprehensive, growing stricken, but a cheque that lay on a writing desk, locked up in Martin Urban’s flat. The date had been written-had his name?

The women’s eyes fearfully upon him, he stood upright yet trembling in that tiny room, listening to the distant sound of a siren crying through the dark, a herald of the one that must cry for him.