Blind Needle (15 page)

‘I do,' Trafford said. He jabbed his scaly finger at the slanting doorway, as if pointing to a picture in a lopsided frame. I frowned at him, shaking my head. ‘The marina,' Trafford said, as if to a mental defective. ‘That's what they're planning to build out there.'

‘But it's a radioactive sewer …'

‘Don't tell the EEC that, they're forking out twenty-two million quid to help build it. Your mate Benson has his sticky fingers in that too. You've seen the sign, haven't you? “Benson Developments (Holdings) Plc?” You've got to admire him. He's the shining entrepreneurial spirit of the age. The man's a fucking financial genius. Probably get a knighthood for it. They ought to make him chancellor.'

The Brickton Marina and Yacht Club. Sleek white yachts with cutting prows and three-tier cabin cruisers like hunks of wedding cake bobbing at anchor above a hotbed of radioactive sludge … I could see a floating population of the new leisured overclass – fast-food franchisers, mail-order tycoons, DIY magnates, video distributors, real estate speculators, satellite TV executives, scrap metal merchants and investment analysts – the whole sordid rag-bag – lying at ease on their expensive craft and, like Trafford, decaying from the inside, weeping patches showing through their artificial tans, hanks of hair missing from their coiffures, manicured fingernails flaking like bits of tissue paper from their gold-spangled hands.

Benson's ‘shining spirit,' I began to realise, represented the egalitarian ideal: his kind were not in the least class conscious, were prepared to exploit the rich as well as the poor, maintained no loyalties to breeding or tradition, had no misplaced sense of deference to their ‘betters'. They would steal off anyone and everyone without a twinge of conscience, feel not the slightest tug of guilt provided the deal could show a healthy profit margin after tax avoidance.

Trafford was guzzling milk. It occurred to me that he might be increasing his becquerel count even as he did so. But then that applied to us all – even the brown rice and organic vegetable brigade.

‘I don't know what your grouse is,' he said, wiping his mouth, ‘but it's too late to do anything. The bastards have taken over. We're pissing into the wind.' He held up his hand, clawlike, the ligatures showing though like the transparent anatomical models medical students use. ‘They'll kill us all in the end. Consume their own young.'

‘Better let ‘em get on with it,' I said.

‘That's the spirit.'

‘But not before I deal with Benson,' I said.

‘Won't do any good.'

‘It'll do me some good.'

‘They'll still win.'

I shrugged. ‘Is there anything I can do for you?

‘Stay out of that little fat swine's way – him with the brown grin and the dagger on his arm. They breed very nasty these days. It's the climate. Don't end up bare-arsed in the mud with a purple number tattooed on your foreskin. In fact,' Trafford said, ‘if you get half a chance, finish the bugger off before he does for you.'

‘He won't kill me,' I said uncertainly. I went on, making my voice confident, ‘I've got something his boss needs. It could land them all in – hot water.'

Trafford laughed his empty, gasping laugh. He farted softly at the same time, an equal and opposite reaction. ‘I had a beautiful idea,' he said, ‘but it didn't come off. I was going to do a Chernobyl on them, make a volcano and boil the sea. That would have upset their plans for half-a-million years. Underwrite my own what you might call long-term investment in the future. I started tampering with the fuel rods and gave myself, stupid bugger, a dose instead. They drummed me
out. That's when I went to the council meeting. I knew it wouldn't do any good, and it didn't. That's the trouble with the layman: he's taken in by a man with a moustache and pipe and smart suit sitting behind a clean desk with two telephones. Clever bastards, you know. Squeaky-clean PR. They could prove you're a single-parent Mongolian lesbian and you'd believe them.' He scraped some white mucus from the corner of his mouth and said without rancour:

‘They always win, it's written in the rules, because if nothing goes wrong they're proved right, and if something does go wrong there'll be nobody around to point the finger, just a glowing core and a blank space on the map.'

I said, ‘Perhaps that's the best thing' – smiling at him – ‘that could happen to Brickton.'

‘My sentiments entirely,' said Trafford, coughing blood.

My life was lived half in a dream anyway, and so I might well have dreamt the events of the previous night except for the fact that my boots were mired with dried black mud. I sat on the edge of the bed staring at them for several minutes. I could see the young man's face in the light of the candle, creased and ravaged, the flashing gleam of his eyes. And the pale sack of lacerated flesh oozing down beneath the bubbling surface. All this might have been the product of my imagination, but the mud on my boots was real and refused to disappear, even though I stared and stared.

Benson a murderer. The fact of it hadn't sunk in.

I went to the tap along the passage for some water and glanced up at the ceiling, thinking of the attaché case in the attic above. I could blackmail Benson – except of course I didn't want his money. But I could destroy his rich, comfortable, well-rounded life. His pretty dark-eyed daughter, his large house, his business: all were legitimate targets. Leave Benson till last and then destroy him …

The cold water washed the sleep from my eyes. I dressed quickly, thinking as I did so that I ought to eat something. It was a mechanical decision: hunger seemed to have left me. But if I didn't eat I wouldn't be able to think straight, and it was important now not to act stupidly.

At the top of the stairs I paused, buttoning up my overcoat, hearing voices in the shop. Mr Patundi was being shouted at, but not, this time, by his wife. There was a scuffling of feet, angry words were exchanged. I retreated quickly along the landing as footsteps approached the bottom of the stairs and kept moving backwards until
I reached the narrow door leading to the attic. As the footsteps came up I nipped inside and pressed my ear to the door.

Somebody went directly into my room, as if they knew what they were looking for, and walked about. A voice said something I couldn't make out and Mr Patundi, who must have been standing in the doorway, stammered, ‘He tells me his name is Holford. This is true, I swear—'

The footsteps came out and the voice, which I now recognised, said with incredulity, ‘Holford? You lying wog. Come on, sambo, out with it, where is he? He hasn't gone out, has he, or you'd have seen him, wun't yer? Going through the shop?'

‘He might go when I was not there,' Mr Patundi said. ‘Or the back door.' I could almost see his shrug and the roll of his yellow eyes. ‘He goes, he comes, I don't know always.'

‘What about the bell?'

‘Bell?'

‘The bell in the shop, diarrhoea-face,' Wayne said. ‘If he went out through the shop you'd hear the fucking bell.
Wun't yer?'

‘Perhaps yes—'

‘No perhaps. You'd hear it, turd-brain. So he must still be here.'

‘You see the room …'

‘I see the room, yeh. What else is there?'

‘Nothing—'

‘What's along here?'

There was the agitated flap of Mr Patundi's sandals.

‘Empty – all empty. Locked.'

‘Why locked if they're empty? Shift. Move.' Mr Patundi gasped as he was thrust aside, and the heavy footsteps came along the landing. I leaned my weight against the door. It creaked. The door opposite was thumped with a fist but the padlock clinked as it held fast. The other doors were tried, their padlocks shaken, and the footsteps came up to the door I was pushing against with all my strength.

‘This in't locked. What's in here, squire?'

The brass knob squeaked as it was turned and I felt the door strain as pressure was applied. I pushed back as hard as I could, squeezing the blood out of my shoulder. My toes were curled inside my boots, trying to grip the floorboards. The door shuddered as a fist thumped it.
I could picture the small, close-together eyes in the round smooth face, the shirt pulled taut, buttons straining, over the sagging stomach, the little square teeth brown at the roots. Again the knob was turned, rattled back and forth, and there was a grunt of exertion as Wayne tried again.

‘Where's the key?' He was breathing hard. ‘Come on, nig-nog,
where's the fucking key?'

‘No key when I come here. I tell you – which is true – everything locked. Your friend Holford has gone. He will come back, you see him then perhaps.'

‘Yeh,' Wayne murmured, ‘I will see him then. No perhaps. Definitely.' He moved towards the stairs. ‘If you're telling me fibs Abdul, I'll make sure you never tell fibs again.'

‘Figs?' Mr Patundi said.

‘Fibs, you ignorant wog.' Wayne's voice suddenly rose: ‘Lies! Lies! If you're lying you'll be on yer way to see the Prophet. Yeh? Goddit? Comprendez?'

I waited until I heard the hollow tinkling of the shop bell before I stood upright in the dark cramped space, working my right shoulder and bicep to get the blood circulating again. When had Wayne seen me enter the shop? I had been careful to use the back door during daylight hours. And there was no one to betray me except Mr Patundi, even supposing he had a reason to.

Carefully, hands outstretched in the darkness, I ascended the narrow staircase to the attic. The only signs of disturbance were the ones I had made myself. I pulled the attaché case free from the rusty springs and horsehair stuffing. There were raw scratches in the deeply gleaming alligator skin binding.

I searched around for something to put the case in, or at least camouflage it. There was a pair of faded floral curtains with tarnished rings – more than enough material to wrap the case in, but to carry an object wrapped in a curtain would be almost as bad as flaunting it openly on the street.

Eventually I tore open the seam of the armchair's square cushion, shook out the stuffing, and slid the case inside the moquette cover. It would have to do.

Wayne had turned over my few belongings and left them scattered
on the bed. Was he looking for the attaché case, or was it mere curiosity? I started to gather them together, and then the absurdity of it struck me, and I rolled them into a bundle and wedged it out of sight under the wardrobe. And then I thought, to hell with the risk. Why not check into a decent hotel and throw £20 notes about like confetti? Probably no one would turn a hair. Live it up at Benson's expense.

I went down, stopping just where the stairs angled ninety degrees so that by craning forward I could see across the passage into Mr Patundi's dank little cave. A wisp of steam rose from the spout of the kettle but his chair was empty. There was silence from the shop. Was he in the basement?

I stepped down into the passage. The silence was unnerving. It seemed to hum in the pungent air like a scream. Was it a trap – the fat boy waiting patiently for me to re-emerge, a rat poking its nose out of the hole? A tremor started in my calves and spread up into my thighs so that I had to lean against the wall. I waited, gathering my strength, thinking I would kick my way through the heaped sacks and flimsy wooden crates and charge out into the street and run like a madman.

A sound made me jerk my head round – something had moved in the gloomy depths of the passage. I stared but could see nothing. My gaze drifted downwards and I saw that I was being observed by a pair of wide unblinking eyes, slumberously brown and burning with fever. I swallowed and cleared my throat.

‘Where's your father?'

The child didn't move, the hot eyes didn't blink.

His skull was completely smooth, and the ligatures of his neck, supporting the little brown head, stood out like piano wires. Now I could see that he was clutching a stuffed brown elephant to his chest with a wrinkled trunk that curled back on itself. It was an Indian elephant, with two tiny scraps of soft brown fabric for ears.

‘Are you a robber?' he asked out of mild interest.

The words rattled out thinly, as if it was a painful struggle to get past the larynx inside that scrawny neck.

Despite his grotesque appearance he had a child's normal, fantastic curiosity. ‘I'm your lodger. I live upstairs,' and I even smiled, knowing that robbers and lodgers can co-exist with equal validity and without contradiction in a child's world. ‘You're … Kamal? Where's your Dad?
Has he gone out?'

He shrugged, an old man's listless twitch, and retreated as I moved towards him. His eyes were heavy-lidded, like his father's, and glittering with illness. I wondered if what he had was contagious.

‘Did he go out with the other man? The fat one?'

He gazed at me in silence.

‘Did you see the fat man go out?'

His thin brown hand tightened round the elephant. ‘He called my father,' the thin squealing words came, ‘what the boys called me when I went to school.'

‘What was that?'

‘Wog.' He blinked in slow-motion, and the taut flesh puckered in a frown. ‘What's a wog? I asked my mother but she won't tell me. And she said I mustn't ask my father. What is it?'

I edged past him, holding the attaché case in its moquette bag under my arm, containing the tapes, the recorder, Benson's private notebooks, the money, S – 's diary – the total sum of my worldly possessions – and sidled along the passage to the back door.

‘Is it like nig-nog?' – the child's voice floated down like a rusty sigh as I withdrew the bolts and unfastened the chain. ‘Wog, nig-nog, black bastard, fucking twat. Are they all the same or different?'

I forced the door over the lumpy linoleum and went out.