The Lying Tongue (20 page)

“I’m afraid Mr. Crace has not got that luxury. Neither has he got much patience. I could call him right now and he could call off the whole deal.”

“I doubt very much he would do that,” he said.

Obviously he had just thought of something that invested him with a new sense of confidence, a horrible arrogance.

“Like I said, I’m sure he wouldn’t want the police sniffing around…sniffing around his dirty linen, would he?” As he said this, he wrinkled his nose in exaggerated disgust. “The things he got up to, really quite unbelievable. I’m sure the authorities—and the press—would find them very interesting reading indeed. And it’s all there, in black and white, so to speak.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw, next to the wood-burning stove, a basket containing a pile of logs. Behind this stood a pair of fire tongs and a sturdy looking poker. I could take hold of the poker and smash it into his skull, reduce his head to a bloody, pulpy mass. I turned, took a step in that direction and then stopped, pretending to warm my hands over the stove. I needed the journal. I couldn’t do anything until I had laid my hands on it. After that, I didn’t care what happened to him.

“Okay, let’s calm down, shall we?” I said. “First of all, let me find a cloth. We don’t want any stains. And then we can talk about this in a reasonable manner.”

As I mopped up the tea, Shaw eyed me suspiciously, watching my every move. He was obviously on edge, nervous.

“Now, let’s start again,” I said, slowly. “You’ve got the diary.”

He nodded.

“But it’s not here. Is that right?”

“Indeed, that’s right,” he said.

“Are you in a position where you can get it and bring it back here?”

“Yes, that is possible.”

“How long would it take for you to get it?”

Shaw hesitated, reluctant to reveal any more.

“Look, do you want the money or don’t you?” I snapped.

“Very well, very well. I’ll go and get it and you can wait here. But you promise to give it to me when I get back, when I give you the book?”

“I promise,” I said.

“Help yourself to more tea. I’ll only be ten minutes or so, perhaps a quarter of an hour.”

Shaw slipped an oilskin jacket over his shoulders and disappeared out the front door, leaving me alone. As I heard his footsteps fade away down the lane, I looked around the room. On top of the small old-fashioned television set stood a few faded color photographs in cheap frames. There was Shaw in younger, happier times, with a woman, presumably Chris’s mother, Maureen, a blond, apple-cheeked woman. Sun-kissed from a recent holiday, with arms around one another, they smiled into the camera. Similar pictures of the couple lined a shelf in a nearby alcove, but there was no sign of the boy.

I walked up the staircase that ran from the back of the kitchen to the first floor. I pushed open a wooden door and stepped into a darkened room, a bedroom. Cooking smells from below mingled with the stench of sweat and stale smoke. In the gloom of the curtained room, I could just make out that the linen on the bed was stained nicotine yellow and his pillowcase was circled with a halo of grease. By his bedside table there was a red plastic lighter, a glass ashtray overflowing with cigarette stubs and an asthma spray. I could just imagine him sucking in smoke with one breath and then puffing on his inhaler the next, a constant battle between the death instinct and his desire to carry on living. It was, most probably, one struggle he wouldn’t have to worry about for much longer.

I left the bedroom and walked into the bathroom. The sight of it—the basin ringed, the toilet smeared—turned my stomach. I closed the door and walked into another room at the back of the house that Shaw had filled with bags and boxes. I edged my way around what little floor space there was, easing myself past a few black bin liners. One of the bags had been slashed open, and through its tear I could see a tangle of women’s clothing: sleeves of blouses, legs of trousers and feet of American tan tights, all wrapped around one another like displaced body parts.

Squeezing past these, I pushed my way to the far side of the room, where I had spotted an old filing cabinet. Rust peppered its surface. I forced open the top drawer and, as it creaked and whined, pulled it toward me. I ran my fingers over the green files and selected one at random. Inside was a plastic folder containing a stash of documents. I pulled out a cream-colored square of paper emblazoned with red print, a birth certificate recording the entry into the world of Maureen Frake on 8 August 1927, while her wedding certificate told me that she had married John Davidson on 16 January 1946. I searched through the top drawer but found no sign of her son’s birth certificate, in fact, there was nothing to indicate that she had had a child at all.

I bent down to explore the lower drawers of the cabinet, but as I stretched out my right leg to steady myself I felt something sharp scratch against my calf. I twisted around to see a screwdriver poking through a piece of tarpaulin. I pulled back the thin fabric of my trousers and rubbed the point of impact, straining my head to see a red-rimmed puncture wound, a single red eye, in the middle of my calf. I took hold of the screwdriver and examined it, running my fingers around its bloody tip, wondering what kind of damage it could inflict. But then as I peeled back the covering over the packing case, I was faced with a range of possibilities: a loop of a plastic washing line, a chisel, a mallet, a hammer and a hacksaw. Just as I picked out the hammer, I heard footsteps outside. Shaw was back.

I concealed the hammer inside my jacket and traced my way out of the room. Knowing that Shaw would step into the house before I reached the kitchen or sitting room, I ran into the bathroom, averting my eyes from the dirt and the grime, and flushed the loo. Then I sauntered down the stairs, taking care to prolong the fastening of my fly button until the moment when I came face to face with Shaw. As he closed the door and stepped inside, the noise of the water tank continued to gurgle.

“Call of nature?” Shaw said.

In one hand, he carried a translucent supermarket bag. Through the thin sheen of the plastic, I could see the black spine of a notebook. I smiled as I walked toward him, feeling the sharp edge of the hammer underneath my jacket.

“So you have the diary?”

Shaw nodded as he took off his coat.

“Can I ask where you went to get it?”

“I’d rather not say, if you don’t mind, Mr. Woods. Please, sit down.”

He gestured for me to sit on the sofa, and as I did so, I maneuvered the hammer inside my jacket so that I could conceal its handle. Shaw sat beside me and placed the bag on his lap, slowly teasing away the sides of the plastic as if rolling down the edges of a delicate, protective sheathing.

As he revealed the contents of the bag, balancing the journal on his lap, he turned to me so I could see his unhealthy gray skin and his yellow teeth edged with black. I was also close enough to smell the stench on his breath. It didn’t seem like he was long for this world.

“I’ve shown you mine; now you show me yours,” he said, laughing.

A wave of nausea threatened to unsteady me. I felt the bitter taste of bile rise to my mouth, but I swallowed it down. I had to remain focused.

“Oh, yes, the money. Of course.”

I concentrated hard as I visualized how best to manipulate the wad of cash out of my pocket without letting the hammer fall to my feet. Drawing the fingers of my left hand under me like an inverted claw, I moved my arm crablike so that it supported the hammer inside my jacket. Then with my right hand, I reached across myself into my left pocket and removed the money, dropping it into Shaw’s lap.

“And now for the diary,” I said.

“Here. Take it,” he said, passing it over.

After flicking through the pages to make sure it was Chris’s private journal and that it did indeed include details about Crace (I noticed the writer’s name in several places picked at random), I stood up, intending to carry it over to a nearby table. After all, I didn’t want the pages to get messy.

But as I tried to hold on to the hammer with one hand and the diary with another, it felt like the tool was about to slip away from my grasp and fall to the floor. I quickly shifted my position, attempting to steady myself. As I did so, I felt the journal slipping from my grasp. Either I let it fall or I would be forced to reveal the weapon I had disguised; I knew there was no choice.

The diary fell from my hands, hitting the tiled floor. Shaw looked up, concerned. He stood up from the sofa and shuffled toward me, bending down to retrieve the book. I stared at the back of his head, noticing a patch of dry skin at the base of his hairline. I manipulated the hammer so that I had it back in my control. Now was the time.

I took the hammer out of my jacket with my right hand. A willing victim, the worthless man knelt before me. I raised the hammer up from my midriff to just above my shoulder so as to rain down as strong a blow as possible. I paused a moment and then, just as he was beginning to push himself upward, just as I was about to strike his skull and split his head open, I saw that he was holding something in his hands. It was a color photograph. I could hardly believe it possible.

I hid the hammer back under my jacket as I steadied myself on the nearby table.

“What’s that? What’s the photograph?” I asked.

Shaw supported his lower back with a hand, the pain of age creasing his face.

“Oh, it’s a picture of Chris just a year or so before he died,” he said, passing it over.

The photograph, bleached of most of its color, showed a young, handsome man with slicked-back blond hair. He was wearing an open-necked white shirt and a dark blue V-neck jumper and was standing by a group of newly budded trees. I could feel Shaw’s eyes on me as I stared at the picture. I realized then why he had looked at me in that strange way when he had first opened the door, why he had taken one step backward. For him it must have been like Chris returning from the dead. For me, it was a vision of myself.

“Are you all right? Mr. Woods?”

I could hear Shaw wheezing behind me as I sank down onto the sofa. My body felt lifeless, deflated, and it took every bit of strength I had to keep hold of the hammer to prevent it from falling out of my jacket.

“There you go; get that down you,” he said, pressing a glass full of brandy into my hands.

My hand shook as I brought the glass up to my lips. The brandy burned my mouth and throat, but I relished the sensation.

“The similarity struck me when I first saw you, couldn’t quite take it in,” said Shaw. “I must admit it gave me quite a shock when I opened the door and saw you standing there, the spitting image. Thought Chris had come back to haunt me. Punishment for what I’d done. Of course, it was silly of me to think like that, stupid really, but sometimes you can’t help having those kind of thoughts, can you?”

As Shaw continued to talk, I gazed at the photograph, running my finger around its edges in an effort to persuade myself that it was real. I brought it up to my face for closer inspection and then held it out at arm’s length, positioning it at every angle so as to try and spot even the slightest difference or inconsistency. But it was as if I was examining a photograph of myself that I could not remember ever being taken. I racked my brain to think whether I recognized the setting, but the spot with its cluster of lime trees could have been anywhere. I scanned the outer edge of the picture for clues.

“Do you know where the photograph was taken?” I asked, turning toward Shaw.

“Let me see again.”

He held out his hand.

“Difficult to say, but it looks like somewhere around here. Oh yes, here we are, you see?”

He stubbed his forefinger on a point in the far left-hand side of the photograph.

“Look.”

As he passed the picture back to me, he raised his finger up to reveal, in the background, a blurred segment that looked like terracing.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a couple of the grass steps that lead up to the old chapel, here”—he pointed to a spot an inch to the left of the frame—“on this hill, just out of the shot.”

I had never really doubted the authenticity of the photograph, but the possibility of a picture being taken of me of which I had no recollection in a setting I didn’t recognize was actually less bizarre than the one that I was now forced to face.