The Suburbs of Hell (4 page)

His eyes are on the one eye of the rifle. His mouth splits open his brown beard. He throws up a hand, palm outward, in an unwilled, futile gesture to ward off death.

At half-past six on a black Sunday evening, with the sound of bells being blown from the high spire over sea and estuary, Harry Ufford came wandering, hands in pockets, down the street, and at last stamped his cold feet to a halt at the edge of the quay. A light, biting breeze was up, but the black water was glossy, reflecting the lights of buoys in the channel. At one point on the other shore was a cluster of yellow-lit buildings, but otherwise a darkness of wood and field loomed unbroken against a navy-blue sky striped with ragged black cloud.

A slight man with a stick, standing in the same attitude further along the quay, turned to look at the heavy figure in the donkey-jacket, then began to move towards it. From a distance, he said quietly: ‘Harry.’

‘What?’ growled Harry, staring with lowered head into the water. Then, with a wrench of his neck: ‘Oh. How do, Commander.’

In the hard light from the streetlamps the Commander’s pink face was grimly sober.

‘This is a terrible business, Harry,’ he said. ‘Frightful.’

‘Yeh,’ muttered Harry.

‘I can’t take it in. Such a quiet, harmless chap—’

‘Thass not much to say for a man,’ Harry said. ‘But yes, he was a quiet, harmless chap. Mild as milk, as they say.’

‘The poor boy,’ the Commander said, ‘the brother, he was in a hell of a state. He found him, of course, as I suppose you know. He had his own key. Came running across the street and beat on my door, asking to use my telephone. There was a telephone in the room, but—he wasn’t thinking very well, needless to say.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ Harry said, clenching and unclenching his dangling hands.

A pilot launch glided by, almost soundlessly, on the smoothly swelling water mirroring its red and white lights.

‘If I knoo who that was,’ Harry said, in a low voice, ‘I should tear his fuckin head off with my bare hands. That int just talk, neither.’

The Commander moved a little nearer and, leaning on his stick, of which he had no real need but which he took for walks like a dog, looked at him with a sort of respect. ‘You knew him better than I did, of course.’

‘I dunno that I did,’ said Harry, brooding. ‘Just used to pass the time of day. I used to tease him, like. He was that serious. But he could laugh at himself. He was a good lad.’

‘He was,’ said the Commander sincerely. ‘When my wife was near the end, and I sometimes thought that things were getting on top of me, he and Diana were very good, wonderfully good.’

‘He would be,’ Harry said, but sounding absent. ‘Oh Christ, Commander, what
is
gooin on? If ever a man would have wanted to slide out of the world with no fuss, Paul was that kind. But the mess—the rumours. Do you know what the rumours are sayin? They’re pointin the finger at young Greg—his own brother.’

The Commander, giving a slight start, muttered: ‘The sods,’ in a voice quiet with anger. Then, more loudly: ‘But that’s utterly ridiculous. He didn’t arrive here from London until eleven o’clock that morning, and I suppose he can prove that.’

‘I hope he can,’ Harry said. ‘But if he want to convince Old Tornwich, he might have to goo into a dozen pubs and argue his case in each one.’

‘Oh, that’s foul,’ the Commander burst out. ‘Vicious. Don’t forget, I saw that youngster that morning. He was shattered, utterly shattered, and crying like an hysterical child. My God, if that’s a sample of the mind of Old Tornwich—’

‘There is,’ Harry said slowly, turning to look the Commander in the eye at last, ‘someone else I overheard a rumour about.’

‘Oh?’ said the Commander, though clearly not anxious to learn. ‘Who?’

‘Me,’ said Harry.

‘I suppose that’s a joke you’ll explain,’ the Commander hoped.

‘What give rise to it,’ Harry said, ‘was something you told the police. That you heard someone knockin on Paul’s door about half-twelve.’

‘Well, yes, I did,’ the Commander confirmed. ‘Are you saying that was you?’

‘As it happen,’ Harry said. ‘Oh, don’t worry, the police know about it. So do everybody else. What it was, Ena and me told him we’d drop in on him for a nightcap about that time, but when Ena got to her own door she decided she dint fancy it. So I went on alone and give him a knock. Which you heard.’

‘Well, dammit, Harry,’ said the Commander, ‘there’s not much food for rumour in that. I was in bed, I heard a couple of knocks on the door across the way, that’s all there was to it.’

‘You dint hear the door open?’

‘No. Well, it
didn’t
open, did it?’

‘No; but can you swear to that?’

The Commander shifted his stick, uneasily. ‘Of course I can’t. I didn’t even hear your footsteps, either coming or going. I can’t swear to a thing, except the knocks.’

‘You see,’ said Harry moodily, ‘what it’s goonna be like.’

The train of the conversation was restoring to the Commander his normal uncertain temper. ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous. If people are really saying this sort of thing (which, if you’ll forgive me, I take leave to doubt) then their fascination with other people’s affairs has driven them over the edge at last. They might as well suspect
me.
Perhaps they do.’

‘P’rhaps,’ said Harry, noncommittal. ‘Or Ena, less say.’

‘
Ena
? Good heavens, man.’

‘I’m just puttin the case. Paul was expectin her. He dint hear me knock—he was in the bathroom or something—but he hear Ena, later, and let her in. There’s a bell as well as a knocker. You wouldn’t have heard that.’

‘And—don’t tell me—she was carrying a .22 rifle in a rather large piece of knitting, which she easily explained away.’

‘Thass funny you should think of something like that,’ Harry said, giving a sidelong look, ‘because I hear a mention of something similar. Not knittin, but a roll of old charts or something that you took over there for him to look at when he was daydreamin about bein a yachtsman in the sun.’

The Commander’s face became fierce and still. ‘You have heard a mention of that? To the police?’

‘Whether to the police or not,’ said Harry, ‘I couldn’t say, but I did hear it crop up in a conversation, among the other theories. But I’m sure there’s nothing for you to worry about, Commander. There’s a suspect whass a much hotter favourite than you, or even me, and I feel sorry for that boy. I’m talkin about Black Sam, the taxi-driver.’

‘Black,’ said the Commander. ‘Yes, I see.’

‘You get the picture. Paul has a bottle of whisky with him, Black Sam makes a remark on it, Paul invite him in for a bit of a warm that cold night—’

‘And, only pausing to stuff a rifle down his trousers, in Sam goes, I suppose.’

‘No, think it out, Commander, like some of your fellow-citizens. Sam goo in, knock back a whisky, and say to Paul, he say: “Right, boy, thanks for the drink, I must now be gooin. Don’t you get up, I shall slam the door on myself.” And he make a sound as if he do slam it, but what really happen is, he goo to his taxi, get the rifle out of the boot and creep back in again.’

The Commander made an exasperated sound, and demanded: ‘Is anyone idiot enough to believe that? What conceivable motive could he have?’

‘No motive. His motive is, he’s black. Mau Mau in the blood, or something like that. Thass the thinkin.’

‘I am speechless,’ said the Commander, dealing a blow at his own leg with his stick. ‘I’ve spoken to that young chap, more than once. He was born and bred in Ipswich, and his parents came from Antigua. “Mau Mau in the blood”, indeed.’

A few quarrelsome gulls rose from the water near the brightly lit
St Felix
and wheeled screaming overhead. Harry put back his head to look at them. When he spoke again, it was in a mourning tone.

‘He was very quiet all his life,’ he said, ‘and he did no one in the world a bad turn. He was good to his brother and good to his wife, except in some way we can’t know. P’rhaps we shall know now; everything’s open now, for everyone to pass judgement on. All his things that he put together to make a home for himself in the world, all that’s open for everyone to finger or blow fingerprint-dust over. When he was alive he dint do nobody no harm; and now he’s dead, he’s goonna tear this place apart.’

He drew the back of his hand across his mouth and sniffed against it.

‘I must now be gooin. Sorry if I talked too much, Commander. I’m a bit upset, and a bit—murderous, like, today. It was listenin to the bells and thinkin: “This is the second Sunday he’s been dead.”’

The Commander came closer and laid a hand on his arm. ‘I’m sorry too, Harry, if I sounded impatient with some of the kites you were flying.’

‘That int me whass flyin ’em,’ said Harry, turning away. ‘You’ll find that out for yourself at the first pub you goo into. Commander, this little old town of ours is in the buggeredest muddle.’

Eddystone Ena came bustling out of the smart new kitchen, which delighted and overawed her, with a tray clutched beneath her pouting little bosom, and went into the panelled dining-room at the front of the house. She set down the tray on the large shining table, then went out again into the passage, where a door stood ajar. She knocked softly before pushing it open.

‘Greg,’ she said, tentatively.

The head of a young man who was stretched out on a sofa inside a blue sleeping-bag turned on a pillow to look at her. ‘Yes, Ena?’

‘I ignored you, and cooked some supper for you. Be a good boy and come straight away, before it’s cold.’

‘Right,’ Greg Ramsey said. ‘Thanks.’ He worked his legs out of the sleeping-bag and stood up, thin in denim jeans and jacket and a tee-shirt with a conservationist slogan. His general cut was hippyish and his sandy hair long, but he was cleanshaven except for a heavy blondish moustache curving around a mouth with a childish fullness of the lips.

‘Did you sleep?’ Ena asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘But I will. I do. I’ve got some pills to take.’

He followed her into the dining-room and let her edge him towards a chair, and watched her place in front of him a large plate of scrambled eggs on toast. ‘Just light,’ she said. ‘Now I’ll bring mine in, and the tea. I thought it would be nicer if I kept you company.’

While she was out of the room he rested his head on one hand and fingered the stains of weariness under his eyes. But he had dropped his arm, and brightened, by the time she returned.

Attending to her own meal she exclaimed, with an innocent pleasure she would not have dreamed of concealing: ‘Oh, isn’t this nice.’ The niceness was in the furniture of the room and the objects on the table: relics, for the most part, of the Ramsey parents, modest members of the upper bourgeoisie. ‘If you could have seen this house when old Fred Heath owned it.’

‘I did see,’ Greg said. ‘Well, I saw it soon afterwards. It was a mess. Ena, why do you live in a lighthouse?’

‘Well, I didn’t have very much choice,’ said Ena, pouring tea. ‘Things were so difficult after the war, what with bombing and floods and these old, old places simply falling down into the streets. Elizabethan houses, and even houses from the Middle Ages, like Commander Pryke’s, over there. Oh, should I have drawn the curtains?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Greg said. ‘By now I feel I’ve been living in the market-place for ever.’

‘The streets are very quiet,’ Ena said, ‘except for the High Street. What was I saying? Well, I had an uncle who lived in the lighthouse. He leased it, you know, from the Borough Council; had been there for donkey’s years, but was quite old and needed a different sort of place. So, I found him one, and I moved into the lighthouse with my boy Winston. He loved it, poor lamb. It made him interesting to the other lads at school. They were always coming to call.’

‘He’s grown-up now,’ Greg supposed. ‘Well, of course.’

‘Oh, how time does fly,’ said Ena. ‘He would be thirty-seven this year. I can hardly believe it. But he passed away, poor little love, when he was ten. Polio.’

The young man pushed his plate away, and emptied his cup. ‘I’m sorry I brought it up. Really I am, Ena.’

‘Now I’ve made you feel awkward,’ Ena said, a sincere apology. ‘After all these years I talk about him without thinking that other people won’t know what to say. I suppose I’ve never taken it in. Oh, you’ve eaten everything, you good boy.’

He was brooding over what she had said, hands gripping the table’s edge, eyes staring into the shining wood of it. He said, with wonder: ‘Someone has murdered my big brother. Someone carefully aimed a gun at him and made a hole in the middle of his forehead. It’s incredible. I don’t believe a word of it.’

‘Now, Greg,’ Ena said. Years of earning her living behind bar-counters had given her a sort of facility in soothing men who felt disgruntled or hardly used; but the light touch she had cultivated then could not be called on here. She came beside the young man and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s always so hard to credit, at first, but in the end you do. In the end, you remember the best things.’

‘He was more like,’ Greg said, ‘more like a young uncle than a brother, because of the age-difference. Our parents were killed in a car accident, I suppose you’ve heard that, when he was eighteen and I was eleven. He’s always made everything easy for me. I wonder if there were money worries. I wonder if it was for my sake that he took on such a boring career.’

‘Oh, you mustn’t say that,’ Ena protested. ‘It’s not fair to him. He loved being a schoolteacher. It’s what he was made for.’

‘Yes,’ he said, while she stroked his head. ‘I beg his pardon. He knew what he was doing.’

‘Your hair’s so rough,’ said Ena critically. ‘I think I shall bring you some of that new conditioner that I use myself.’

He gave a little choking laugh, and looked round at her. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘It’s okay now, Ena. I’m believing it again.’

She went back to her chair, sipped at her tea, and found it cold. ‘Greg, I don’t like to think of you being alone here. I’d even rather you went on staying at the Speedwell, though it must be so noisy.’

‘I didn’t mind,’ he said. ‘I liked the noise. I hope I didn’t hurt the feelings of all the kind people, like the Commander, who wanted to put me up. But I really felt better upstairs in a noisy pub.’