Snowstop (35 page)

Fred doled out refills from an enamel jug as long as his arm. ‘To the top,' Wayne said. ‘If we get out of this place in one piece we'll always call here for a drink on our way to somewhere else. We're pals now, aren't we?'

‘I reckon so. You'll be very welcome.' Like hell you will, he told himself.

‘Fill a mug for our mate Garry,' Lance said. ‘It's time we woke him up from his long night's sleep.'

Fred walked away saying he would make a fresh pot. ‘He's sure to appreciate it' – wanting to be out of range because too many people in the world were insane, the sort who overtook on the inside lane of the motorway, or walked into plate-glass windows on coming out of a pub at afternoon closing, or hit their wives if the home team lost or only drew – such types as you had to avoid for your own good by staying in the kitchen which in any case was the best place to be alone in.

‘I hope he'll bring plenty of sugar,' Wayne shouted to the others. ‘If Garry's tea ain't sweet he'll be cross, and I've never seen anybody as happy as Garry when he's cross. Even I get frightened.'

Keith touched Eileen's hand before beginning to eat. An old scar fanning from his left eye had whitened out of the grime. She hadn't noticed it before, normally so blind she needed years to take in what another person looked like, and as for knowing them after forty-eight hours, well, she hoped Keith wouldn't mind if she went on staring, wanting to remember him whether she saw him again or not, because if he got sent down for twenty years that's how it would be, unless he gave her a photo. ‘I don't want you to leave me. I couldn't stand it. I never want us to be apart. I love you.'

Words failed at her lips. She hated tears but couldn't stop them.

‘I love you.' He did, whether or not she would always remain a mystery. ‘Don't worry.'

She was satisfied with that, would have to be, but she would also expect him to let her make up later for her silence, how much later she didn't know, an uncertainty that kept her tongue still. She wouldn't worry either about both of them being blown to bits, or getting carried to the hospital. She couldn't think about it because it was impossible to imagine.

‘There's no problem,' he said. ‘We'll be together, no matter how long we're apart. Forget the circumstances. They won't kill either of us. Now you're crying again. Please don't do that.'

She was crying for him, in inexplicable rage, about something lacking all significance, crying out of an agony of spirit meant for him alone, and because of what he had told her about Gwen. ‘I'm just so fucking happy,' she sobbed.

‘So am I. But you'll have to stop swearing if you want to convince me.' He held her warm fingers. ‘It's not necessary to swear. I believe you, without you swearing every time.' He thought he would do her a favour, so that she might have some kind of chance in life.

‘I'll try never to swear again.' She leaned forward to kiss him, and knocked over an empty glass. ‘But it often comes without me knowing.'

‘I can't believe it,' Alfred said. ‘The signatures are still in the books, whether they're true or false. So what are they complaining about? They aren't going to disappear. They'll give you a slap on the wrist and tell you not to do it again. Nobody gets sent down for a thing like that.' He lit a cigar and passed it across, then ignited his own. ‘In two years, maybe less, you'll be back on course, wondering what the fuss was all about. Mind you, a chap like you should never have left that chemistry job. There's too many temptations for people who set up on their own. Don't I just bloody well know it?'

During the snow-shifting his toothache hadn't much bothered Aaron, when it surely ought to have done, but now his whole mouth ached so that he didn't know where the bad tooth was. ‘It's my sister I'm most concerned about.'

‘Never worry about a woman.' Alfred leaned closer, pale at the idea that Eileen or Jenny might hear and take him up on such views. His married life had been one long time-and-emotion study, which was why he still lived in the usually happy home. ‘Women are always all right. Society takes more care of them nowadays than it does a man, which is fine by me, because I'm old-fashioned. Your sister will let it flow over her without too much harm. Anyway, when we get out of here I'll keep an eye open for your case, to see if it gets in the papers. I can follow it up, now that I've met you.'

Parsons was dead, though she wasn't convinced there was any need to feel either guilty or bereft. You can't save anyone from their folly, and to assume any responsibility for it is unjustified pride. She could have helped him more than she had, made it easier for him to cope, but only if she had been another person. If they had put the body out of the room and not left it under blankets she wouldn't expect any moment to see an arm move, a head rise and a mouth call for champagne. The dead weren't dead till they were buried or cremated, and then you couldn't always be sure. She thought of him as he had been when alive, weak and good-natured (unless gerrymandering Union meetings), often kind to her. After Raymond left she had moved into a smaller house, and Tom got a friend's lorry to shift her stuff, all for the price of the petrol and a few drinks. He even made two journeys in his own car to transport the fragile items.

‘I suppose my old man's worried to death,' Lance said. ‘When I first got a motorbike he never went to bed till I was in. He used to sit all night by the phone in case I'd had a spill, so he told me. He still does, I expect, though I'm not such a madhead any more.'

‘Phone him,' Jenny said, ‘as soon as you can.'

‘You think I won't? I'd send a carrier pigeon if I could. He'd love that. He'd think he was back in Libya.'

‘My old man's counting his blessings,' Wayne said. ‘He's in bliss when I'm not there. Or he's totting up his matches. He don't trust me, not since he opened my cupboard and saw enough matches to start the Great Fire of London. I was smoking in bed last year and the eiderdown caught fire. It weren't my fault, though. I nearly bloody choked on the smoke.' He stood, on seeing Fred come out of the shadow with Garry's tea. ‘I'll take it to him. A cup and saucer, eh? He'll think he's at the Ritz. It's too good for him.'

‘I suppose you think we're a rough lot?' Lance moved his chair closer. ‘We don't mean anything by it.'

‘I know.' Jenny envied him, that they were so easy with each other, and seemed to enjoy their lives. Nobody could fault them for that. The pain of existence would overtake them soon enough.

He kissed her. ‘I think you're marvellous. I'd like to live with you. I'll bet you could teach me a lot.'

‘I don't know about that.' She would ruin him in no time, as she would any man, though the hope of possible happiness wouldn't leave her alone.

‘We've been to bed together, but I don't know you yet.'

What a quaint notion, that you could get to know someone at all by going to bed with them. ‘And when you do know me, you won't want to know me.' She regretted what she had said, on seeing his eyes wince.

‘How do you know?' he asked. ‘How can you be so sure? Even somebody like you. I wish you wouldn't say it.'

Wayne still held the cup and saucer. ‘Come over here' – tea splashing over his boots. Then he skimmed the saucer, lethal fragments ricocheting from the back of the fireplace.

‘What's going on?' Alfred shouted.

Wayne wanted a suitable target for the cup as well but, seeing nothing worthy of the effort, and no person whose possible injury would lessen the shock, sent it skittling among bottles above the bar. Then he caught hold of a table, and beat the floor with it till all legs were smashed, his bull-like grunts sounding out even the whining bandsaw moaning of the wind. Lance did not know whether to tell him to pack it in, or himself join in a last celebratory bursting to pieces of the hotel. ‘Come and see.' Wayne pulled him close. ‘I'm sure he's dead.'

Fred pushed broken bottles from the bar with a piece of folded cardboard. ‘Even doctors that cost hundreds of pounds a visit have people die on them,' he murmured to Keith, ‘and as for me, I did my best.'

‘He died some time ago,' Jenny said, ‘but what was the point of telling anyone?'

Keith was glad she hadn't, since it would have disturbed their work. But he was responsible, for having encouraged them to attack a madman. He should have let Daniel starve in the cold, put off attacking him for a few hours and left him too weak to throw slates. His instinct had told him to go up himself, but he had played God and unleashed the bikers: ‘All right, lads, take him out. One in front, one in support, and one in reserve.' No, that wasn't it. ‘You go left, you to the right, and you in the middle.' Not that, either. His heart had never been one for breaking, but you didn't like losses. Call them together. Give them a talk: ‘Sorry, lads. The fault is mine.' Another death that can't be made good. Time punishes, because once a crime has been done there's no calling back the good days, the score only wiped out when you die yourself. They wouldn't understand that, either.

‘It's not your fault,' Jenny said.

‘No, but something else is.' Even one death added up to too much. You lived with whatever you had done, existed with the insupportable. A week ago he was one sort of man, and today he was another. It happened to untold numbers, but they became the kind of people incapable of ever meeting each other. A killer lived with his internal injuries, never able to atone by bringing back the one whose life had been wasted.

‘Eileen told me. Is it true?'

One way of getting back to conventional simplicity was to give in to anger, but he curbed the temptation, such a distasteful route leading to mindlessness and defeat. ‘I'd give my life for it not to be.'

‘What a world.' Nothing more to say, she left him to his breakfast, and looked at Lance moving the blankets one by one, as if not to cause pain to a corpse, until he came to two white legs streaked with blood, all below the waist awash. He had seen no more blood than that of a cut finger. They say you faint at the sight of blood, but I won't. He flopped the blankets aside like enormous floorcloths, knowing it was the stench that put you in danger of throwing up. ‘It would have been better to go off the road doing a ton than peg out like this. He was dying while we were outside.'

‘We should have let the snow alone, and then we might have gone together.' Wayne groaned. ‘His mam will go off her head when she knows.'

‘No, she won't. Everybody hated him, except us.' Lance shivered, out of control, legs melting under him, drew a chair close and sat down to cry. ‘It's all that teacher's fault. After Garry's death, with my last breath. But it won't work.'

‘Ferret's dead,' Wayne said. ‘But if he ain't now, he will be. If it thawed we could track him down. I'll get him. Even if he's put inside for life I'll be waiting to top him when he comes out. He deserves to be roasted over a slow fire. But if Keith hadn't got us on snowshifting we could have stayed with Garry, and then maybe he would have been all right.'

‘The ifs don't do any good,' Lance said.

‘I know, but somebody's done it, and it wasn't us. Keith stopped us killing him when we was up in the attic, didn't he? And then he wouldn't let us hang him, like Garry wanted to.'

‘He'd been hit by that slate already,' Lance said. ‘He should have gone straight to hospital, and he would have if the snow hadn't blocked everything off. Another if, though.'

‘They're right,' Keith said to Eileen. ‘Five dead, and I'm still here.'

‘Take no notice,' she told him. ‘They don't know what they're saying. You can't blame 'em, though.'

One more push, another fifty yards. He would draw the van back, take it at a rush, up the well-prepared slope, then it would be far enough away not to kill anyone, a last effort before coming back to sleep till the storm was over and the police arrived.

Wayne and Lance sat silent, with heads down, settled by misery, flashes of the good times going by. Keith touched Lance's shoulder, and said when he looked up: ‘I'm sorry about this.'

‘It ain't your fault.'

If there was work to be done it would be easy to get them out, even kindness in it, and they would toil as never before, giving no sign of exhaustion or grief. ‘I'd like to thank you for all you did.'

Lance smiled, on hearing his own dead voice: ‘Any time.'

‘Just let us know,' Wayne said.

He walked to Eileen, wondering what there was to say. Killing puts you beyond redemption, the solution always too late. He kissed her out of sleep. Her hands had gone cold, but she was warm and young. ‘I must just go to the toilet.'

‘Love you, love you, love you,' she murmured, then smiled and closed her eyes, sure of him at last.

They were frozen and blocked, but he used one. Washing his hands in the kitchen, he turned to Fred. ‘Get all of them to safety. I don't care how you do it.'

‘I hope you know what you're up to.'

‘Another few yards, and then we'll be safe.'

He went with head lowered towards the van, the blizzard come to life again and trying to beat him back.

Eileen waved. ‘Love you!' she called, joy in her heart.

THIRTY-FIVE

‘We should have landed at Portsmouth,' Charlie said, ‘and cut up through Oxford, then we wouldn't have been two hours tangling with the Blackwall Tunnel. And if that CB radio hadn't packed in we wouldn't have copped all this and driven round in circles till we got stuck. So give that wireless a fucking good kick and call international rescue.'

Bill, never lucky at cards, threw his hand in. ‘I was trying all the way out. The gremlins must have crawled in it for a rave-up.'