Written in Blood (47 page)

‘Yes.’ Brian wheeled around and began to hurry back, suddenly light of foot. ‘Yes, Edie - what is it?’

Edie, who had been fishing inside her Green Bay Packers jacket, now produced what looked like a piece of rag but was Brian’s underpants. She threw them on to the floor. They were inside out and a thin, brown smear was clearly visible. The idea came to Brian that he would turn and walk away. Show his contempt by leaving them. Then he wondered if the group might tell everyone. Perhaps even pass them round. He bent and picked them up.

This time he had barely reached the halfway mark when the call came. He didn’t turn round. Just stayed quite still, heart pounding with premonitory fright, stuffing his Y-fronts into his trouser pocket.

The voices started again. All of them at once. Not harsh and sneering as they had been before, but wheedling, seeming to beckon in a friendly way. Joshing him.

Brian, finding himself as he thought on the cutting edge of mass ridicule, almost ran the last few steps. Grabbing the handle, he swung the door open.

‘Don’t,’ Edie cried. ‘Brian? Don’t go.’

Now she was hurrying towards him, seizing his arm, persuading him towards her. Brian sensed rather than saw the rest of them, approaching in a clump behind her. Within seconds they were all about him too, urging him back into the centre of the room in a vigorous but jovial manner, little Bor actually tugging at his hand.

‘Whatcha think, Bri?’

‘Was it good?’

‘He really fell for it - didn’t you?’

‘He was in a recruitment mode in every sphere.’

‘In every cocking sphere.’

‘Can’t see it in the play, though. Can you, Bri?’

‘Nah. Can’t see this . . .’ Suddenly Denzil had in his hand a flat black shining case. He started throwing it up into the air, spinning it, catching it again. Winking at Brian. ‘Actually in what you might call “the play”.’

‘You’re not mad are you, love?’ Edie linked up just as she had when they were drinking the Thunderbirds Mixed and smiled into Brian’s face. An open, guileless smile, full of confidence, expecting praise. ‘It was only an impro.’

Only an impro.
Only an impro
. Brian trembled and shook in an agony of hope and bewilderment and rage. Surely it could not be so. They would never have the wit or imagination or discipline to dream up and carry through such a scenario. They were too stupid. Thick. Cretinous. Moronic. Hateful in their vacuous self-esteem. Loathsome in their self-congratulation.

‘You said we could do our own. Don’t you remember?’

‘Last week.’

‘No harm done, ay Bri?’

Christ, they’d be asking him next if he couldn’t take a joke.

‘And we put a twist in the tail - like you said.’

‘A coody theatre.’

‘To “astound and amaze”.’

‘I know what he’s worried about.’ Denzil threw the tape. Brian snatched at the air and seized the box.

‘Is this the . . . ?’

‘That’s it.’

‘The one and only.’

‘Refuse all substitutes.’

Brian unzipped his windcheater and put the tape inside. There was a long pause then, when Brian did not speak the circle around him started to break up. Denzil moved away to the parallel bars, released one of the ropes and started to swarm up it. The others, at a loose end, stared at Brian as if awaiting direction. They appeared, now that the fun was over, about to slip into their usual state of misanthropic lethargy.

‘We got half an hour yet, Bri.’

‘Don’t call me “Bri”.’

‘What shall we do, though?’

‘Do what you like.’ Brian felt the tape, the one and only, hard and safe against his concave chest. ‘Drop dead for all I care.’

He never intended to enter the gym again. All the stimulating and creative work that had taken place there was as ashes, dirty ashes, in his mouth.

‘Aren’t we rehearsing, then?’ asked little Bor.

‘I must have been mad to have ever wasted five minutes let alone five months of my life on any of you. Or to have thought that the stinking squalid sewers that pass for minds in your tiny pointed heads could ever begin to understand the first thing about literature or music or drama. I suggest you all crawl back to the gutter where you so obviously belong. And as far as I’m concerned you can stay there and rot.’

 

The briefing had been an arid business. Barnaby, having no definite lead, genuine insight or any sort of meaningful inspiration, was not a man to bluff and bluster his way towards giving the impression that he did. Nor did he blame the fact that he found himself thus high and dry on his team. That there were many officers, some far senior to himself, who would not have hesitated to do so was hardly a consolation.

Everyone had by then read the transcript of Jennings’ interview. The immediate response divided the incident room fairly cleanly down the middle. Half thought the story too far-fetched even for Brookside or EastEnders and the rest were moved and intrigued by the darkly predictive nature of the tale and the way it shed light on their previous understanding of the murder victim.

But if Barnaby had hoped for the sort of positive feedback that would shunt his inquiry on to a more fruitful and revealing track he was unlucky. True the room was full of silent support. The wish to contribute, perhaps even to brightly shine, was plain enough and the frustration at being unable to do so equally palpable. It was clearly killing Meredith.

Eventually Detective Constable Willoughby wondered aloud if Jennings might not himself be Neilson and had told the story to direct the investigation away from the successful figure he had now become. Admittedly there appeared to be an age discrepancy but he himself had established that and could well be lying.

Barnaby pointed out that the author’s CV was well documented and easily checkable and that he thought this probably made Constable Willoughby’s suggestion something of a no no. He did not put this at all forcefully - the lad was brand new and only eighteen - but Willoughby, though managing to nod calmly in response, thereafter was seen to fall quietly apart.

‘We shall have to start winding down here pretty soon if no new information emerges. We can’t have thirty people twiddling their thumbs. Some of you will have to go back to your divisions at the end of the week. Watch the board for names. We can always jack things up should the tide turn.

‘As for today, I’d like everyone who was present on the evening Hadleigh died re-interviewed. And before you do so go over their previous statements, including Hutton and Clapton’s follow-ups, until you know them inside out. Look for the smallest discrepancy or contradiction, especially self-contradiction. It’s six days since they talked to us. They’ll not only have forgotten most of what they said but they’ll have remembered things that they may well regard as irrelevant but which might be very relevant indeed to us. Don’t forget that though opinions won’t stand up in court they can sometimes point the way to stuff that will. Try and establish an atmosphere where errors can easily be admitted or minds changed. It’s often the fear of looking foolish that stops people backtracking and keeping what could be valuable information to themselves.

‘I want you to try and get behind what has been said already. Apparently straightforward remarks can often conceal something more complicated. Compare different people’s version of the same event. And easy does it. Five of the six people you’ll be talking to will have committed no offence whatsoever.’

Unnecessary to add it could well prove to be six out of six. Everyone knew how much real meat was on the plate.

‘I’d also like information about the day leading up to the meeting which, until now, has not been fully explored. Something untoward may have occurred but not been thought worth mentioning.’

At this point a uniformed sergeant asked if any decision had been reached regarding Max Jennings.

‘He’ll be released later this morning. I’ve nothing to hold him on.’

‘I was wondering, sir.’ Inspector Meredith spoke with a politeness so mannered and artificial he could have strayed in from a Restoration comedy.

‘Yes?’

‘I was going over both of Clapton’s statements last night.’ Well, bully for you, Ian. ‘Could I ask if you yourself have any ideas as to what he might have been doing between eleven and midnight on the night of the murder?’

‘Sergeant Troy seems to think he was hanging around a house in the village where a young girl, one of his pupils, lives.’

‘I see. Thank you, sir.’

Meredith had the extraordinary ability to write his thoughts across his face with absolute precision and without moving a muscle. What he was presently thinking was, ‘You should have mentioned that without being asked. Who now is hugging information to themselves?’

Troy said, almost matching the frozen politesse: ‘There is a note to that effect on the back-up file, sir.’

After the outdoor team had gone about their business Barnaby withdrew to his desk at the back of the room. No need to seek the sanctuary of his office now for peace and quiet. The telephones, so clamorous a mere seven days ago, rang only intermittently. Occasionally someone used a computer, but to check facts rather than add new information. A good two thirds of the machines were idle. A winding down of energy was visibly taking place, a procedure satisfyingly normal at the successful conclusion of a case and depressingly frustrating otherwise.

Barnaby switched on his own monitor and brought up the detailed notes from Amy Lyddiard’s interview. But he had hardly started to read when a call came in from the Garda in Dublin. This was far from being a rare occurrence. Contact was maintained almost daily, often in connection with the movements of known or suspected terrorists. But now the call was in response to Barnaby’s request for information on Liam Hanlon’s former companion and procurer.

The bottom line on Conor Neilson was about as final as you could hope to get. A man going under that name for the past twenty years, which was as long as the police had known him, had been fished out of the Liffey eighteen months previously. His feet had been jammed into paint kettles filled with cement, his throat had been cut and his ears sliced off. He was known to have links with protection rackets, drug-running and prostitution.

Barnaby, asked then if this was the man he was looking for, said he wouldn’t be at all surprised. Further details were promised by fax and the chief inspector thanked his informant, gave assurances that the matter was not urgent and rang off. It seemed to him that what he had just heard brought a dreadful symmetry to the matter under investigation. That two men, yoked together against a background of violence from their earliest years should, quite unconnectedly, end so.

Barnaby, disturbed and restless, got up and started to move about. Images proliferated in his mind. A little boy weeping through a mess of freshly bleeding offal. A man, blown apart by a shotgun, lying in an unknown grave, his mouth stopped by earth. Another standing upright, drowned, a great gash across his neck. Around him a floating stain suffused brown water and the gills of his wound, fish belly pale, gradually widened. Last and perhaps most terrible (Barnaby had fetched up opposite the Ryvita panels), were the battered remains of Gerald Hadleigh.

Old tags, quotations, half-remembered lines haunted Barnaby - thicker than water . . . who would have thought the old man . . . of coral are his bones . . . blood-boltered Banquo smiles . . . as old as Cain . . . every tear from every eye . . .

He couldn’t stop staring at the photographs.

Directly after leaving the gym Brian also left the school premises. Pleading stomach cramps, he arranged for someone to double up on the only teaching period he had that afternoon and decamped. He couldn’t put enough distance between himself and that terrible place where he had been so thoroughly eunuchised.

He was wondering if he could possibly work it so that he would never have to go back. There were barely three weeks to half term. He could fake an injury. Or develop his present supposed malady to a degree which would leave him virtually bedridden. If he could stretch this out to mid-June the little bastards would all have left. And it wasn’t as if he’d lose any pay.

On the other hand (Brian braked carefully, drawing up at a red light) was there not perhaps a more positive way of looking at this diabolical misadventure, so spitefully thrust upon him? He had more than once read interviews with well-known actors and writers who had been forced, frequently quite late in life, out of some mundane occupation by an accident of fate, then found their true vocation. Why shouldn’t this happen to him?

Of course the theatre wasn’t an easy way to make a living. There would be difficult times, no doubt. Periods when he’d be resting. But how much better to be out of work doing something you really enjoyed. All he had to do was break in. Brian saw himself directing not hulking, talentless adolescents but a group of dynamically motivated young actors in a rehearsal room at the Barbican or Stratford. A parp parp reminded him the lights had changed.