GBH (3 page)

I walk between the dunes, over the slight hillock made by the concrete path, then I descend the mild gradient and now the dunes are behind me and beyond there is only the sea and the beach.

About half a mile to my left one of the rocket-blasted tanks squats like a fly on the edge of a table. I begin to walk across the flat sand towards it. Here there are no ripples in the sand left by the sea’s retreat; they don’t even begin until a couple of hundred yards from where I am, approximately where the carcass of an old transporter stands, the only object to give scale against the low line made by the joining of the sea and the sky.

As I walk towards the tank, I walk alongside the undisturbed footprints of my journey of the previous day, and the day before that, and as I walk the thoughts I have are the ones that also remain from the previous journeys, and will continue to haunt me.

One of my interests was office equipment. I’d got four shops,
and a couple of warehouses. Not one inch of the business smelt. Not one filing cabinet, not one fifty-pence piece. If anybody working in that particular branch of the business had walked in carrying a box of bent carbon paper, he’d have been out on his arse and his cards slung out into the street after him one and a half seconds later. I had two or three businesses like that one.

It was in the London Bridge branch I met Jean. She was one of the workers. Harris was leaving. Paul Edmonds was in charge of the overall business and he promoted Jean and not only because her promotion was strictly in order. It didn’t do him any good though because in due course I met Jean and after that he walked around with pennies in his eyes so nobody’d tell me he’d even looked at her.

Of course, it’s not like they’d have you believe in the programmes on the box. You don’t go down to the nearest watering hole after you’ve made your first million and tell the first clippie you set eyes on how you got it. Nor do you talk before you make it … otherwise you don’t. Witness all those sad stories you read about in the newspapers where they were dead unlucky not to hang on to their wages for more than five minutes between stretches.

When I met her, Jean was living in Orpington. She had a house there. The divorce was under way and the house was to be part of the settlement. At the time he was in California wearing flowered shirts and rediscovering his misspent youth in singles bars. He’d said he wanted to be free. He’d played the field before, of course, but that wasn’t the same as freedom. They’d married too young, he’d said. When I met her, when we got to talking that way, she told me that she’d never get over him, not ever. They’d loved each other so much it hadn’t seemed possible it could have happened, she told me.

Well, that was all right. I wasn’t in any particular hurry. She was thirty-three, and time was on my side, not hers. I took her out, the way bosses take out their employees, not
giving her the Kilburn Rush. Other more highly paid employees of mine could satisfy my transitory urges, and on office time. As it happened it was three months before I discovered her hair was not its natural colour, and it was two years before she discovered who I was. That was a week before we got married and by that time it didn’t matter any more. There had been other difficulties, though.

THE SMOKE

C
OLLINS CAME ROUND A
couple of hours later and he didn’t like it. But how could he do the other thing?

He sat down on the sofa, his fat backside causing ripples of contained displacement on the hide’s surface. I poured him some of the champagne that was left, then I sat down on the sofa opposite and looked at him. He was as neat and well dressed as ever.

We both drank.

“How’s Jean?” Collins asked.

“Fuck that,” I replied.

Collins drank some more champagne.

“Why didn’t you get in touch before?” I said. “Before all that shit started going down at the station?”

“It was difficult. There was nothing I could do without drawing attention to our relationship.”

“Don’t do a number on me, Dennis. Everybody down there knows what our relationship is. That’s what you’re there for.”

“That’s the point. After Arthur spoke to Farlow they just stood around waiting to see what I’d do. Collar Terry or phone you. They were running a book on it. Whatever they
know
, I had to collar Terry so that justice was seen to be done. Otherwise it would have given Farlow the opportunity to talk to the Commissioner.”

I had a few thoughts about Farlow.

“Ever thought about squaring Farlow with us?”

Collins shook his head.

“I don’t trust him.”

“We could offer him more than the Shepherdsons do.”

“He wouldn’t. It’s a matter of principle. Besides …”

“Besides?”

“If he worked for you, either you or him or the both of you might conclude that I was superfluous.”

“How could I ever arrive at that conclusion, Dennis? If I ever gave you to the papers you wouldn’t leave me out of your memoirs just for old times’ sake.”

I poured some more champagne.

“When was Farlow expecting Arthur to write it all down and have it Morocco-bound?”

“I don’t know. The good thing for us was that they had me fetch Terry in before he got the statements from Arthur and the other two. He was so excited he came before he got his trousers off.”

I drank some champagne.

“How is Arthur?” said Collins.

“Well, there didn’t seem any point in hanging about.”

“And the other two?”

I looked at my watch.

“They should have gone missing about now.”

“Mickey?”

I nodded.

“That’s all right, then.”

He took a sip of his champagne and eyed the food.

“Well,” he said, “as you plucked me away from mine, what about some of yours?”

“Dig in.”

Collins picked up my unused plate and began to unload some of the beef on to it.

“Even so, Dennis,” I said. “I’m still not happy about the time element.”

“I told you,” he said, excavating some stuff from the salad bowl, “there wasn’t an awful lot I could do.”

THE SEA

T
HE TANK, LIKE IN
dreams, doesn’t seem to get any closer. As the morning has lengthened the wind has dropped, its absence somehow seeming to lengthen the perspectives.

Consider a man like me and love. A butcher loves. He slits an animal’s throat and dismembers it and washes the blood from his skin and goes home and goes to bed with his wife and makes her cry out in passion. The man who made it necessary to rebuild Hiroshima loved and was loved back, and I don’t necessarily mean the pilot or the man who activated the bomb doors. Whoever left the bomb at the Abercorn rooms would comfort his child if it came into the house with a grazed knee. Everybody loves. Everybody considers things, considers themselves. And I considered why it came to be that Jean should be the one, as opposed to anyone else. And like everyone else, I could compile a list of things that added up to my obsession, and as with everyone else, it just remained a list; the final total defied the simple process of addition.

Her husband couldn’t have timed his return from California any better. A couple of days after we’d made love for the first time. For a week I didn’t see her; I waited for her to get in touch with me. When she did, she suggested we have lunch together; it was going to be one of those meetings.

We met in Al Caninos. For some reason, it was a place she liked.

She told me that everything was going to work out. What I had to understand was that he’d had to do what he’d done. It was wrong and he’d regretted it almost as soon as he’d gone. Now he was back and he’d been to see his old firm. They could still use salesmen of his calibre. There was no longer any need to progress with the divorce. There would be no more playing around, no recurrence of the freedom urge; home was now where his heart would be.

“Well,” I said, “what can I say? That’s the way things go. There’s nothing I can do. Other than to wish you all you wish yourself.” She thanked me for being so understanding. Few men would have the grace to be like that, she said.

THE SMOKE

M
ICKEY DIDN
’
T COME IN
to see me before ten o’clock. He never did. Not even in a situation like this, when he had yet to report the success or otherwise of locating Wally Carpenter and Michael Butcher and getting rid of their bodies along with the one that used to belong to Arthur Philips. There was no need for Mickey to phone me in the middle of the night. That’s how much I trusted him, and he knew it. A matter of delegation.

By the time he’d arrived both Jean and myself had bathed and breakfasted and she had gone through into the office to do a weekly check on various returns. I was sitting at the Swedish glass-topped desk with my back to the window, drinking coffee and reading the
Express
’s report on the match between QPR and Spurs. There wasn’t a great deal of doubt about it; Spurs were going to go down, whichever way you looked at it.

During breakfast Jean and I hadn’t spoken much. The topics had been restricted to pass the toast and more coffee. But there would be time to talk after the day’s business had been attended to.

“Well, Mickey?” I asked.

“Clockwork,” he said, pouring coffee into the extra cup I’d made ready for him.

He drank and sat down on the opposite side of the window.

“Although,” he said, “it was lucky for us it all went down so quickly.”

“That’s what Collins said,” I said.

“They were all arse about front. The arrangements came second. Beyond me, really.”

“Where were they?”

“At what Carpenter used to laughingly call his
pied-à-terre
in Brighton. I really believe he’d convinced himself there was only him knew about it.”

“How did it go?” I asked, out of interest.

“I phoned him up. An anonymous well-wisher. Then I waited in Wally’s motor. They came out on rollerskates. Then I sat up and told Wally where to drive to. After that I drove back to town and put the bodies with Arthur’s. When I’d done that I drove the motor round to Cliff Wray’s.”

That meant that the car would have been done over from plates to bodywork and by now it would be nice and shiny and on sale on the forecourt of a particular Ealing garage. I didn’t insult Mickey by asking him whether the bodies would also be recoverable.

“Thanks, Mickey.”

Mickey just made a vague gesture with his hand, causing his identity bracelet to jingle slightly. If you ever got close enough to read it, all that was inscribed on the metal was the single word, K
ISMET
. It wasn’t there just because he’d enjoyed the movie.

He clocked the
Express
’s back page and swivelled the paper round on the glass surface so he could read the result of the match.

“Jesus!” he said.

“Well, there you go. You could see it coming last season.”

“They should never have elbowed Billy Nick. He was a governor.”

“Well …”

Mickey studied the paper a little longer, then swivelled it back so that the print was again readable from my position. Then, for a little while, the sky beyond the window behind me appeared to occupy his attention.

“What is it?” I asked him.

He focused his eyes on the edge of the desk, and began to run his thumbs along it.

“I was thinking,” he said.

I waited.

“Last night,” he said. “You never been there before. What I mean is, not since a couple of months since I joined the firm.”

I waited some more.

“And Mrs. Fowler. I know how you and her, you know, sort of come to joint decisions, in many things.”

I smiled.

“No need to worry about that, Mickey,” I said to him. “You should know by now, anything like that, it’s just not on, is it? I mean, you’re a major shareholder. That, if nothing else, proves my confidence in you.”

Mickey sniffed.

“Well, I shouldn’t have mentioned it, really,” he said.

“Well, there was no need to.”

“No.”

Mickey sniffed again, then stood up.

“Anyway,” he said. “I’m on my way over to see Maurice Ford. Just a check. Anything you want me to say to him?”

“Not that I can think of. Of course, any unforeseen eventualities, it’s up to you what you say to him.”

“Right,” said Mickey. “I’ll be off then.”

He tapped the edge of the table once with his knuckles, then walked around the sunken area and opened the doors and closed them behind him.

I looked at the newspaper in front of me. The photographs showed Stan Bowles thrusting his fist up into the air as he turned away from the goal seconds after he’d scored the clincher.

A very clever fellow, Mickey was.

THE SEA

T
HE TANK ISN
’
T GETTING
any closer.

I didn’t go to the funeral. As I said to her later, it would have seemed like an intrusion into her private grief.

Afterwards, of course, she’d had to admit, those months between his return and his final farewell, so to speak, those months had been a strain. It hadn’t been the same, whatever she’d told herself. Oddly, she said, a lot of the strain came from him, trying to show her how sincere he was in his declarations. She should have realised, of course,
why
he’d tried to impress her. Ironic, she said. She wouldn’t have found out if it hadn’t been for the crash. Who the girl was, the police had never been able to discover. Both bodies had been burnt beyond recognition, but you would have thought
someone
would have come forward, somewhere, to report a girl of her age gone missing. She hadn’t been from his head office, or from any of the branches. She could have been from one of the firms he called at, but, as Jean said, if she had been,
someone
would have connected the two of them some time. The only evidence of her existence, apart from her remains, came from the publican who ran the pub near his head office, where he often used to drop in for a drink. All the publican could say was that on that particular night, the night of the crash, Jean’s husband had been having a quiet drink at the bar when this girl had come in, on her own … nothing unusual in that these days. The two of them had got
talking. Nothing unusual in that, either. The publican did hear something, when they left, about could he drop her anywhere? Jean had been particularly cynical about that bit: he’d been so careful, even in a place they never went together.