Blind Needle (14 page)

The young man pushed through, head down. ‘Make way. Press.'

They didn't seem convinced by this but hesitated just long enough for us to barge through. The marble-floored hallway was empty. We went down the steps into the street, spits of rain in the night air. Headlights came at us, and we dodged out of the way as a police Panda car stopped at the kerb. Three policemen got out and ran inside the building.

The young man yanked me roughly by the arm and we jogged along a darkened side street over pavements slick-wet and shining. I
knew we were heading away from the centre of town, but I had no real idea of our direction. We turned a corner and it became darker still. The pavement gave out and I felt bare earth and cinders under my feet; then we were running alongside a high wire-mesh fence, our feet thudding dully, exhalations of breath wheezing from out mouths. I suddenly wondered why I was still running, and stopped.

‘Bit of luck – them coming in – like that.' His words came out in hoarse bursts. I was panting but he sounded done in.

I caught my breath. ‘You don't seem too bothered about your friends.'

He wheezed a laugh, which ended in a choking cough. ‘Why should I be? I don't know them.'

‘But I thought—? Aren't you one of them?' I said.

‘You must be kidding.' He cleared his throat and spat. He was a shapeless, crumpled blur in the darkness. There was sufficient light from somewhere to make his eyes gleam. ‘You don't know what's going on around here, do you?'

When I kept silent he said slyly, ‘Neville Benson doesn't like you much, does he? What've you done – screwed his daughter?'

‘I'm old enough to be her father,' I said fatuously.

‘So what?'

‘Do you know his daughter?'

‘Not in the Biblical sense. I wouldn't mind doing though.'

This kind of talk was distasteful to me. It sounded more like male revenge on the female of the species than honest sexual desire.

The young man said suddenly, ‘We ought to team up, you and me. I've got nothing against Benson personally, apart from the fact that he's a cheat, a liar, and a greasy capitalist shit. But it wouldn't bother me in the slightest to see him get what he deserves.'

‘I never said I had anything against Benson.'

‘Then he's got something against you.'

‘You're guessing.'

‘It's a pretty good guess, otherwise you wouldn't get so worked up about it.' He took my arm and I pulled free, irritated, not liking to be handled. ‘Through here,' he said.

There was a gap, I now saw, where the fence had been partly torn down. So we hadn't been running arbitrarily in the darkness after all.
The young man knew where he was heading. He was leading me somewhere. I said, ‘What is it? What's there?'

‘The harbour.'

‘I don't want to see the harbour.'

‘You won't see it anyway in the dark.'

‘There's no point then.'

‘Come on, I want to show you something …'

I could feel flecks of rain cold on my face as we turned into the wind. Underfoot the harsh cinders became sludge, sucking at my boots like tiny glutinous mouths. If he was going to kill and rob me there was no better time or place. Dimly I saw the sheer rusted sides of old abandoned ships wedged fast in the mud, their funnels leaning over in weary attitudes. Any minute now, I thought, my shoulders tensing, getting ready for the blow. I was nearly up to my ankles in mud. If I'd tried to run I couldn't. I said, ‘That's enough. I'm going back.'

‘Not now,' he hissed. He was bending, searching for something – probably to hit me with. I wouldn't see him strike, just a blinding flash of light, and then the pit, the abyss, nothing. I would be at peace at last. It occurred to me that that was what I really wanted.

‘Hold this.' I felt a ribbed metal casing and a button. ‘Point it down there. Shield the light.' I held out my overcoat like the flap of a tent and switched on the torchbeam. It illuminated a circle of grey mud with black viscous bubbles rising to the surface. As they exploded like soft farts they released the sweet stench of decay. He was probing deep down with a broken spar, its raw end coated with clinging mud, like a witch stirring a cauldron. He struck something, and heaved. The spar had pierced a sack. As the mud drained away the sack was revealed in the beam as the torso of a man, his back criss-crossed with puffy white lacerations: a bloated meaningless scrawl that might have been an attempt at a design the artist grew tired of and gave up, or the work of a sadist.

The body sank back and gurgled as the bubbling surface closed over it, popping like liquid glugging from a bottle.

The young man threw the spar away. I switched off the torch.

My forehead was cold and wet with the night air and the drizzle and my own sweat. ‘Who is it?'

‘Benson's partner. Ex-partner. Benson was screwing his wife and he found out about it.'

‘So Benson had him killed – for that?'

‘That amongst other things.'

‘And his body dumped here?'

The young man laughed wheezily. He said, ‘There was a cock-up. He should have ended up in the Irish Sea but the outflow pipe from the baths got fouled up. The tide brought him back.'

In Benson's business diary there had been several references to ‘baths schedule.' I'd assumed they had something or other to do with his function on the council sub-committee. Now it appeared that Benson was diving into even murkier depths, which included the murder of troublesome and unnecessary people, and the local swimming baths a convenient disposal point. And it occurred to me, too, that this was how he had driven Susan to the desperate extremity of taking her own life; after his ‘fling' with her he had taken a fancy to the wife of his partner, moved swiftly on his philandering way, and dumped Susan just as he had dumped this body in the black harbour mud. Now that I had seen him in the mottled, sleekly gross flesh, with his wavy grey hair and diamond ring and overbearing arrogance, it was all too easy to fit the man to his crimes, to understand how he barged through life, as he might shoulder his way to the head of a queue, selecting, consuming, discarding at will, on a whim.

In the darkness the young man's hoarse voice said, ‘That's what he does to people who get in his way. So I'd be careful if I were you.'

Most people would have instinctively shied away from him. At any moment, you felt, he might slip, slide and plunge into wild desperate mayhem. But he seemed to be the only person who knew certain things about this place and was willing to divulge them, and so I followed as he led the way round the harbour, skirting the basin of mud until we came to a wharf that had come to resemble a graveyard. On one of the jutting stone jetties a solitary lamp illuminated a wasteland of broken ships embedded in the mud at topsy-turvy angles, entire hulls,
stripped of their superstructures, littered about like empty rusting coffins.

In answer to my question he told me his name was Trafford. I halted and said, ‘No more bodies. I don't have the stomach for it,' and he laughed – or rather made a thin, rasping sound as if emptying his lungs of air.

We traipsed on past hulks and fragments of ships and arrived at the shadowy bulk of something about the size of a trawler with an iron ladder clamped to its side. Trafford climbed up with raincoat flapping and dropped down out of sight. I went after him, swung myself over, and saw him duck through a slanting doorway. Holding onto the walls to stop myself sliding across the deck, I followed him inside.

He had made his home in this tilting world, I saw, as he lit the stub of a candle in a jam-jar.

There were open tins of food with spoons stuck in them, split packets of biscuits, a carton of milk torn to make a pouring funnel, a general litter heaped in a corner of margarine tubs, flattened soft drink cans, plastic bottles, greasy wrappers, decaying fruit cores. In the crevice formed by the steep angle of wall and floor he had wedged blankets and clothing to make a bed. Possibly this had been the crew's quarters or messroom, though it was hard to be sure because everything not of the iron fabric of the ship had been unscrewed, torn out, scavenged.

From here he must have seen everything that went on in the harbour, which explained how he had known about the body. And a good deal more besides.

Trafford propped himself in the corner, legs drawn up, and munched biscuits from the packet. I then noticed, under the long straggling hair, patches of greyish white; tufts of hair and flakes of skin lay thickly on his collar. There was a raw, dank atmosphere in the cabin, but even so his forehead was streaming with sweat. In the enclosed space I could smell the putrefaction that hovered around him like a deathly cloud.

‘Have you figured it out yet?'

‘What?'

‘You must have done. Isn't that why you went to the council meeting?' He broke the biscuits in two and crammed them into his mouth.

‘You tell me,' I said.

‘They've made a deal with the Station – all their hot water for nothing. It's piped straight in, free of charge. The town's a dump, haven't you noticed?'

Brickton was a dump all right, but perhaps that wasn't what he meant.

‘I know,' Trafford said, ‘because I used to work there.' He coughed, spitting out biscuit fragments, and wiped away something bloody on the back of his hand.

‘You worked … where?'

‘At the
Station
. Structural maintenance, F Section. How do you think I got a dose of 742 millisieverts and a white corpuscle count an HIV Positive wouldn't swap? Your msv is probably sky-high by now, it's inevitable. Have you seen the kids round here? Most of them look as if they've got a fever, grey shiny skin, hot eyes, losing their hair. It's something to do with the bone marrow not producing enough white blood cells.' He crunched some more biscuits and poured milk into his mouth, swallowing the lumpy mess.

‘Why would they deliberately contaminate their own children?' I crouched down on the sloping floor, though not too near him: he was corroding before my eyes. ‘I can't believe that. The councillors live here, they can't possibly know what's happening. If they knew, they wouldn't allow it to happen.'

‘They'll know when they start dying,' Trafford said.

‘They've got families too!' I protested.

‘Each man kills the thing he loves.'

I had no answer to that.

‘They know all right,' Trafford went on, ‘only they won't admit it, even to themselves. People are like that. Listen, I worked at the Station, I knew the risks, I saw the signs, but you close your mind to such things. We all do it. Even now I pretend I'm not dying.'

‘The water in the public baths – it comes directly from the Station?' I wanted to be sure I understood.

‘Sure! They've got a pool brimming with it, hot and rich.' He laughed weakly. ‘They don't use it much though, not often, it's too lethal. Too many warm bodies floating out to sea.'

‘This is mad,' I said. I didn't think so, but it seemed the only response that made sense. Better than anyone I knew the monstrous
deceptions human beings were capable of; I was the arch practitioner.

‘Yes it is,' Trafford agreed. ‘Completely, ‘seeming, just for the moment, very calm and rational. ‘Until you look at the balance sheet. Someone's making a packet out of it – probably your mate Benson. He dumps the sludge into the harbour, so very likely he's wangled the hot water deal as well.'

‘Just to make money?'

‘What do you mean, “just”? What other reason is there?'

‘Do you know somebody called Russell Rhodes?'

The bloodshot eyes roamed vaguely to and fro, went up to the ceiling, or bulkhead, since this was a boat. I thought he was pondering this, struggling to remember, but then he said flatly, ‘Yes, I know good old Russell. He's my ex-boss.'

‘What is he?'

‘PL manager at the Station.'

‘What's that?'

‘Processing Line Manager.'

‘Is he involved?'

He wearily closed his eyes, as if the effort of keeping them open was too much. ‘They're all involved, the pack of them. Russell, Benson, the council by turning a blind eye, the local press for not asking questions, Benson's ex-partner's wife …'

‘The wife of the man who was killed?'

He nodded, still with his eyes shut, and went on listlessly, ‘She's a grade-A bitch, ribbon and bar. It was her and Benson who got rid of hubby. The deal was too big for him, too scary – or maybe he even had a twinge of conscience about it. The pair of them drove him to a nervous breakdown, poor sod, but it wasn't enough, so they had him dumped in this dump.'

I felt a sudden shudder, as if someone had walked over my grave. The idea of a wife plotting with another man to murder her husband shot a chill right through me.

‘What about Benson's wife? She must have been in on all this.'

‘He hasn't got a wife.'

I was stunned. ‘I thought he was married.'

‘Not any more. She's been dead five years. Cancer. He's shacked up
with the grade-A bitch of the first water. Has been for over a year. They're a good match.'

Trafford opened his eyes blearily, slumped in the corner. His energy seemed to come in bursts, and just as quickly to dissipate. I said, ‘Tell me something, this is what I don't understand: how do they hope to make a profit? The council saves money but no one individual stands to gain. It's being done for the benefit of the community.'

‘You tell me something. Where does the money go?' When I looked puzzled he went on, ‘The money they save – where does it go?'

‘It doesn't go anywhere.'

‘Doesn't it? It has to be spent.'

‘I suppose so.'

‘On what?'

‘I don't know.'