Blind Needle (10 page)

It was so quick I nearly slipped up and gave it to her. I coughed to disguise my hesitation. ‘Morduch.' I had to spell it for her. Benson would have recognised my real name at once, and so I'd blurted out the first thing that came into my head.

‘Age?'

‘Forty-three.'

‘Previous employment?'

‘Nothing – well not permanent – for the past two years. A few days here and there.' I wanted to get off this. ‘Does Mr Benson live a long way out of town? I was wondering about transport.'

‘Near Parsonby,' Mrs Crompton said shortly. ‘There's a bus.'

The inner door opened and a head leaned in; it was the girl in the headscarf and Burberry raincoat. She looked a bit windswept. She didn't pay any attention to me, and it didn't seem to matter that she might be interrupting a conversation.

‘Has my father rung in, Mrs Crompton?'

Close to she was even prettier than I had thought, large dark eyes with long curling lashes, a bloom in her cheeks, a natural beauty.

‘No, Miss Ruth,' said Mrs Crompton, all dimpling smiles. ‘Can I help at all?' Her pencilled eyebrows went up and stayed there.

The girl frowned and shook her head. ‘It doesn't matter.' She tossed a bunch of car-keys onto the desk. ‘I've finished with the car, I'm off to lunch. When you see him say I won't need a lift home.' She withdrew and had almost shut the door when Mrs Crompton called her back.

‘This man came in looking for work, Miss Ruth, and it occurred to me that your father might need someone at The Glebe. Any odd jobs that need doing – sweeping up the leaves, clearing dead branches, anything at all would do. Of course I haven't promised anything …'

‘I should hope not, Mrs Crompton. This isn't a refuge for waifs and strays.'

Ruth Benson didn't even bother to acknowledge my existence. She was as indifferent to my presence as to a piece of furniture. Other people to her were mere moving shadows, without solidity or substance. Their lives were less than a mystery, because a mystery depends at the very least on curiosity, which she didn't possess.

‘Very well, Miss Ruth, I thought I'd just inquire, that's all,' Mrs Crompton said, crumpling the piece of paper and throwing it in the bin.

It was as if it had been me she had crumpled into a ball and thrown away. That's all my life amounted to, a scrap of paper carelessly discarded.

I said, ‘Thanks. For the tea,' and went past the girl without looking at her and along a carpeted corridor and down some stairs into a small foyer and out into the street. A pale sun like a dim silver coin burned through the mist. On the way down I had resolved something. It was only natural justice. A wife and a daughter … more and more possibilities, more and more ways he could be grievously hurt before the final blow. One of them I visualised vividly, intensely. Ruth Benson naked under the Burberry raincoat, my hands pressing her down on a grassy bank, forcing her legs open, taking my time and relishing the pain in her dark, lovely eyes as I put my full, uncouth weight on her, making her acknowledge me as a real living person and not just a flitting shadow on the edge of her superior consciousness.

My anger was on a slow-burning fuse. I wanted to exact a retribution that was painfully, agonisingly prolonged. Longer, far longer, than the long dark time I'd had to dwell on it.

The Mercedes was dulled under a fine coating of drizzle. Without giving it a single moment's thought I reached for the handle of the rear door and pressed the button. The door clicked – in fact pushed itself open under pressure of a hidden spring. On the seat next to an umbrella there was a slim attaché case bound in what looked like
crocodile skin: large irregular mottled squares burnished a brilliant blue-black.

I slid the attaché case inside my overcoat and wedged it under my arm. I pushed the door shut and heard it clunk. It was only then that I thought to look round. Nothing moved in the pall of mist that was gradually brightening under the bloodless sun – no faces in the lighted windows above me, smeared with outrage, fists beating the glass, muffled shouts and running feet. No one had seen or heard a thing. It remained that way, dead as the grave, silent as a tomb, as I crossed the street and walked down the hill towards the town.

I pressed the sliding catches with my thumbs and the clasps sprang open. I hadn't been prepared for that – that it would open at a touch, and for a moment I paused, trying to calm myself. My hands were clammy. I hadn't stolen anything since I was a kid: it brought back that dreadful excitement, that hollow hammering of the heart, when you've slipped the chocolate bar into your pocket while the shopkeeper's back was turned and you're drifting ever so casually to the door, step by dragging step, seeming to take an eternity.

I wet my lips and raised the lid.

The case was lined with dark-blue silk, monogrammed in the top right-hand corner in delicate gold thread: ‘N.D.B.' There were two rows of silk-lined compartments containing several small fat books, edged in gold-leaf. There was also a chequebook in a leather folder, a pocket calculator, and a micro-cassette recorder with spare tapes in two clear plastic cases. One by one I took the contents out and laid them on the bed, like a child on Christmas morning.

Behind one of the books I found a thick brown envelope secured with rubber bands. It had the feel of money. It had the smell of money. Yet I didn't dare believe it.

I rolled off the rubber bands, tipped the envelope and out it slid in a solid crisp block of £20 notes. I had never held so much money in my hand. They were so new they were difficult to count. When I had stacked them, fifty notes to a pile, five piles lay on the grey wrinkled blanket.

Five thousand pounds in brand-new notes. It was such a neat sum, a perfectly rounded sum, that it bothered me, and I must have sat there for three or four minutes worrying at it like a dog with a bone.
Then I put the money back in the envelope and replaced the rubber bands. The freedom it offered me hadn't quite registered yet.

The fat little books with their gold embossed initials yielded up less than I had hoped. There was a business diary with dates and times of appointments, written in what appeared to be Benson's own cryptic shorthand: ‘PL Mgr. – Site – 3pm.' ‘Check Disp. rota – night shift?' ‘Ring W. re info leak.' ‘Baths sched.' and so on.

There were perhaps a dozen references to ‘Baths sched', which made me wonder about it. What kind of baths was Benson referring to? Swimming baths? Then it occurred to me that this might be council business – something to do with the public swimming pool in Brickton.

I read every entry, for what little sense it made, right up to today's date – the 19th – in which he had written: ‘Rec. & Ent. Cmtee, 8pm, Crabtree agenda.' So there was to be a council meeting tonight at eight o'clock. Some meetings, I knew, were open to members of the public. I would ask Mr Patundi where the council met.

A woman's voice, low, excited, drifted up from below. I went to the door and eased it open. For a minute I thought I'd lost the powers of comprehension, until I realised she was speaking to Mr Patundi in his own tongue. His answer was brief and non-committal, in tones I recognised as those of a husband being badgered by his wife who sensibly takes the line of least resistance.

Until now there had been no sign or indication of a wife, a family. They must live in the warren of rooms in the basement, a separate subterranean existence, engaged in strange domestic rituals they had transposed from Asia to this cold, rainy corner of England. I'd been told, or read somewhere, that Indian men shielded their womenfolk from the temptations and depravities of Western civilisation. I couldn't conceive of the kind of life Mrs Patundi led, unless it was to pad about in stuffy, overheated rooms, spending hours at the stove sprinkling spices into simmering ochre mixtures, watching video films of technicolour Indian epics from a reclining position.

I shut the door and on the way back my distorted reflection caught my eye, leering at me from the wardrobe mirror. With the money I could do something about my shabbiness. New clothes. A complete change of appearance. Moreover, it was now absolutely vital: too
many people had seen me on the premises at B-H Haulage – the mechanic working on the lorry, Mrs Crompton in the office. Even Benson's own daughter. They would give the police a detailed description. Middle-aged, thickening about the waist, pale, drawn features, short hair greying at the sides. The only immediate change I could think of was to get rid of the grey – dye my hair black or dark brown.

I recalled seeing a barber's along the street. I would slip out later and buy hair dye. I had a three-day growth of beard which I had intended to shave off, but now I changed my mind.

I smiled to myself. Together we used to laugh, Susan and me, at these little pretensions of vanity; except that this wasn't vanity, this was self-protective camouflage. Not the same as when she refused to wear glasses and suffered agonies with contact lenses, always losing them, down the bathroom sink, in the washing-up bowl, inevitably when we went away on holiday. I smiled, remembering those happy times, and to my surprise felt moisture trickling down my face. It rather shook me. To feel an emotion other than hatred was to experience once again a lost pleasure, distant as childhood, like remembering those bright summer mornings filled with acres of blue sky and limitless possibilities that had happened in another age to a person different from yourself.

I dried my face. Susan was dead and gone. I couldn't afford these other redundant emotions.

After a while I played the tape in the micro-cassette machine, which was no bigger than an electric shaver, and looked expensive. I listened to it twice. Benson was talking to a man named Russell. At first I assumed that was his surname, until glancing through the business diary I came across an entry which mentioned somebody called Russell Rhodes.

There was something odd about the tape – the actual sound quality – that I couldn't work out. Behind the conversation I could hear a steady throbbing hum, industrial machinery perhaps, but that wasn't the odd thing. It was as if something kept scraping across the built-in
microphone in a harsh explosion of noise, and the sound level was erratic, the two voices fading away and then becoming loud and clear for no apparent reason.

It wasn't until I'd listened a second time that I realised what it was.

RHODES: If the contract comes through we might have to come to some new arrangement. That's fair, isn't it, in view of the risk?

BENSON: It all depends.
(Cough. Throat clearing.)
There's a limit to what the traffic will bear.

RHODES: I don't think I'm being unreasonable, Neville. I stand to lose everything, and I don't just mean my job.

BENSON: It has to go through committee first. It has to be approved.
(Click of lighter. Indrawn breath.)
I know they're a bunch of old women but they're not complete fools. Potter in particular. Sums of five and ten grand can't vanish into thin air. They have to be accounted for on the balance sheet.

RHODES: You told me you could lose them as a consultancy fee. Isn't that what you said?
(Nervously)
Look, you're not supposed to smoke in here. If the smoke detector activates—

BENSON: Calm down, Russell, for God's sake. You take your job too seriously. If the place goes up it won't be because some body lit a cigarette.
(Silence. Scrape of clothing.)

RHODES: I don't see why you can't arrange something direct. On a personal basis. When the EC coughs up you're going to be rolling in it.

BENSON: They haven't coughed up yet.

RHODES: Not yet. But soon.

BENSON: Maybe, Russell. The big maybe. It isn't in the bag. And in the meantime if I make funds available out of my personal resources, how do I recoup them? I can't charge myself a consultancy fee. The council treasurer would smell a rat straight away.
(Laughs)
That would be grist to Potter's mill. He'd drop on me like a ton of bricks.

RHODES: Is there no way you could get it in cash?

BENSON: It's in cash now, so where's the difference?
(Heavy sigh.)
What's the point in paying money into the firm's account only to withdraw it to give to you? I've thought this through,
Russell, and it's the only way.

RHODES: There's nothing on paper to link it to me?

BENSON: Don't be stupid. With neither of us. No names, no pack drill. Let's just leave the arrangement as it stands. It's safer all round.
(Silence)

RHODES: I still think I deserve more.

BENSON: Do you now? On top of the five thousand a month? I call that greedy—

RHODES: How much is that sludge disposal contract worth to you? Quarter of a million? I helped arrange that too, you know.

BENSON: I haven't forgotten.

RHODES: And the provision of free hot water for the swimming baths. You got a bloody good deal it seems to me.

BENSON:
(Scrape of clothing.)
The hire of tankers and the disposal of waste material is a straightforward business contract, signed and sealed and totally above board. The provision of hot water is a separate issue.

RHODES: Just as long as we don't land in it.

BENSON: What? Land in what?

RHODES: Hot water.

BENSON: Very good, Russell. I didn't know you had a sense of humour.

RHODES:
(Pause)
And as long as nobody realises what it is you're dumping and where you're dumping it.

BENSON: That's an odd tone to use. I don't think I like it. If you've got something to say, spit it out.

RHODES: All right … all right. I'm talking about Holford. What's he after? What's he want?

BENSON: Don't worry about Holford. I'll see he's taken care of.