A Death to Remember (18 page)

‘
But
he
has
to
have
it
.’

‘
Not
tonight
,
surely
.’

‘
It’s
your
fault
,
coming
here
.
I’d
have
done
it
myself
.
Look
,
I’ve
written
down
the
number
...’

She
had been holding out something in her hand, but the image was flickering and dancing, and then we were in the main office, she showing me the manilla envelope before putting it inside the wages book. No...wrong image! I tried to reject it, and recapture the scene in the foreman’s office. What had she been offering me? A piece of paper...

‘
...and now you can’t think of anything to say,’ she was accusing me.

I
took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘I would just love to remember,’ I assured her. ‘Believe me, that’s all I want to do.’

‘
I should never have trusted you,’ she decided, jutting her lower lip like a child.

I
didn’t think she was completely sane. She couldn’t have been, to sneak off to her son’s bed-sitter and hide there to wait for him, when she hadn’t heard from him for over a year.

‘
I came here,’ I said, ‘
that
day. I came to make a straightforward enquiry about an accident that’d happened to your son. He’d given me a statement that it’d happened here.’

‘
No,’ she said flatly. ‘It didn’t. It couldn’t have done.’

‘
All right. I now realise it probably hadn’t happened here. But at that time I was simply making routine enquiries. There was unpleasantness. I seem to remember a fight with Charlie Graham. Do you know him?’

‘
It’s not Charlie I’m afraid of.’

‘
But you know him?’ I talked past her fear.

‘
George’s friend, yes. I know him. Hateful person.’

‘
Did we fight? Charlie and me.’

‘
George was afraid. Terrified.’

She
was nodding, maybe in agreement that Graham and I had fought, but she was not really hearing me.

‘
I didn’t promise anything, though,’ I said in agony, in case George had died because I hadn’t fulfilled my promise.

‘
You did so. You promised.’

Patiently,
I tried again. ‘I said I’d phone from the office?’

‘
You said that.’

‘
Mrs Clayton.’ I moistened my lips. ‘Tessa, listen to me. Please. Don’t you know...when I left here, my car wouldn’t start. If I was too late – doing something I don’t understand yet – then that was the reason. I was late getting back to the office.’

Her
fingers covered her mouth. From behind them she whispered: ‘But you promised.’ A veritable hell of despair danced behind her eyes.

‘
Just to phone? Is that what I promised?’

‘
To make contact,’ she said impatiently. ‘I wrote down the number for you.’

‘
A telephone number? Whose number?’ I was having to draw it out, word by word.

‘
A phone box. I told you. I don’t know where. That was the point. They might have found him. It was to pay for the consignment.’

Consignment?
And George had been on drugs!

She
was talking about money. I had been carrying money that night. So was she telling me that I’d agreed to become involved in the payment of a sum of money for drugs? And that I would phone a call box and arrange a shadowy meeting in some dark alley, to complete the transaction?

‘
We’re talking about drugs?’ I asked carefully.

‘
Yes. The consignment he lost.’

And
dear heaven, to imagine myself getting involved in drug trafficking! I didn’t want to listen to her.

‘
And did I know it involved drugs?’

‘
Of course not. I told you he had to have it. I didn’t tell you why.’

She
was trying to give me an acceptable explanation, and yet, if I was to believe her, she’d put me in a position of danger that evening. Drugs? What violence that word carried with it. But she had mentioned a ‘consignment’, so £600 began to seem inadequate in that context. It seemed inadequate, too, as justification for the fear in her eyes. All this was past, but the fear was very much in the present, a living thing between us. The simple explanation would be that she could be afraid of me.

And
she had a loaded shotgun only ten feet away. The hackles rose on my neck.

‘
I don’t believe you, Tessa,’ I said, sticking my neck out, hackles and all.

She
was indifferent to my disbelief. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to. It’d put you in rather a poor light.’

‘
In what way?’

‘
Causing George’s death.’

‘
Oh, I see. You’re saying
they
killed him, these people he owed the money to? Because they didn’t get it.’

She
sat back on the stool, one knee clasped in her hands, her mouth open for a laugh that never came. It looked like a laugh. ‘Of course not. They wanted their money. They didn’t get it that night, but I’ve paid it since.’

Her
wide, dark eyes told me what she meant, that this was not the cause of her fear.

‘
Then who’s frightening you?’ I asked carefully.

She
pouted, not accepting my ignorance. ‘I can see I’ll have to trust you again. I can’t go. Tony’ll be here for me soon, and it wouldn’t do if I’m not here. But you can go. Then you’ll see for yourself.’

‘
Go where?’

‘
To 17C Rock Street.’

I
held my breath, waiting. My brain was tossing around again.

‘
I know I’m expected,’ she told me, nodding. ‘You’re to say I haven’t got it, and that I never had it. I’ve been telling lies, you can say. But it’s got to come to an end. I can’t go on. Say I shan’t be any more trouble. It’s all over...finished. Make sure that’s understood. Finished.’

Was
she talking about George? For pity’s sake, did she still believe him to be alive, as she’d held on to the belief for the past sixteen months?

‘
Promise,’ she said.

‘
How can I promise that? There’ll be nobody at 17C Rock Street.’

‘
You haven’t been listening. You never did. Oh...why did I ever trust you!’

‘
I don’t ask to be trusted.’

‘
Go there! Go! Do what you can.’

But
she was talking to somebody whose mental stability was as rocky as her own. She might need my help in some obscure way, but I needed the backing of total recall before I dared to assist her.

It
was ‘true’ that I’d knowingly taken money from her, because that image was clear in my memory. It was also ‘true’ that I’d said I’d phone from the office. But what was not true, because I’d not yet excavated it from my memory, was that she’d written down and given me a phone number, and that it was one I’d promised to call. She was perhaps playing on my memory loss. Did she really expect me to go to 17C Rock Street on such a vague and fantastic story? And why? She spoke of her fear. If it was of me, then this could be a trick to send me there for a very different reason. I was to be lured there.

I
believed she was lying. If she’d given me a phone number...well, I knew myself in that respect. I’d have glanced at it, and carried the physical memory in my mind. And there was no such number in my mind.

It
came to me abruptly that I could be a danger to somebody. I knew something, but I must not be allowed to remember it. Dead men carry no memories. Except, perhaps, of their own death?

I
shuddered from the thought.

‘
Can I suggest,’ I said, ‘that you phone your husband now, and ask him to come and fetch you. I’ll wait until he arrives, and then you’ll be safe.’

‘
No!’ She was on her feet, her hair wild. ‘No!’ Fury, because the trick had failed?

‘
Then I can’t help you.’

I
was backing out of the office, my eyes on her. The shotgun could have been a lie, too, but I didn’t dare to bank on that. ‘I’ll go out the back way,’ I said.

Out
in the repair area I found it dark and dangerous in itself. I’d been sitting in the light of that bench lamp. Now all was dark to my pampered eyes. I stumbled. Planks of wood moved beneath my feet. I looked down. Dimly I could see I’d disturbed the covers of the old pit they’d used before the hydraulic lift was installed. My heart pounding, I swerved, and headed for the vertical patch of moonlight.

Behind
me, she was screaming.

Not
waiting to slide the massive door shut again, I fumbled round the outside of the iron building. The metal reverberated under my fingers from her screams. I found myself in the forecourt, running to the Escort, the keys in my hand.

Inside
the car it was quiet. Either she’d stopped screaming, or too much space stood between us. Suddenly, it was as though it hadn’t happened. I’d awoken from a nightmare.

I
drove away. Not fast. The instinct was to bang down on the throttle and set the tyres spinning, but I didn’t know that I was doing right to leave her. I should perhaps not have been so eager to get away, but I was terribly aware of that shotgun. I am a physical coward, I suppose. Violence is not part of my normal life-style, which was why the memory of a physical encounter with Charlie Graham was so disturbing.

So
I drove away, but slower and slower as I progressed.

It
was a damp night, the streets quiet in that breath-held pause before the pubs closed. I drifted. My mind was not on my driving. Because of this, when a bus stopped in front of me, I couldn’t make the effort to pull out round him.

I
sat there, foot holding the clutch down. Its route number was 259.

259
...259…

My
mind played with it. A flicker of memory probed it. I watched the bus roll forward, and still I couldn’t summon the necessary actions to drive away.

259
...259...2592...

My
brain fumbled. An image intervened. A larger number appeared, but darted away before I could capture it. I groaned with frustration, and the engine stalled as my legs drew up. I couldn’t stop them from doing that. I was drawing them up in self-protection, and there was Graham coming at me again, his face distorted, his fist raised. I put down my face and covered it with my hands, forcing the memory to go away. It wasn’t the image I wanted, the one I knew I had to have.

259
…259…my brain cried out. 2592...2592...2592...

Oh
God, and it wouldn’t clarify. Charlie Graham was shouting his anger – no, his fear – at me, and I knew the number was more important.

It
came up again, the number. It flickered on and off as though with a faulty switch, gone before I could capture it. No, I’d got another digit. Was it a 3? I clung to it, mentally forcing the number to hold steady.

Then
I had a stable image. A rectangle of paper. Not white. Brown. On it a number. Felt-tip pen. Blue. Blue on brown.

25923
...no, 25928. I had it that far, and yet was aware that the full number had one more digit. It was hidden from me by a crease in the paper. Fingers were creasing it, so urgent was the grip on it. But then I was taking the paper in my own hand, and looking at it squarely.

259287.

I knew then that I had to go back.

There
was a tapping sound behind my image, an insistent sound. I lowered my hands, sighing as the true picture of the number faded. As I raised my head the car door opened. A round, serious face, a peaked cap, a checkered band round it.

The
trouble was that it was the wrong time to sit in a stalled car with your head in your hands. He smiled slightly.

‘
Trouble, sir?’

‘
Two five nine two eight seven,’ I said. ‘Write it down.’

He
was not disturbed by this answer. ‘If you’d care to get out...’

‘
I’m not drunk.’

‘
No sir. Of course not. We’ll just check that, shall we.’