Blind Needle (19 page)

‘They think it was me. They have a witness who saw me in the shop.'

‘That doesn't prove anything.'

‘It proves I was there.'

Diane Locke riffled through the pages with her thumb, snapped the notebook shut and tossed it onto the table. She got up and switched
the light on. She leaned against the dresser, frowning at me and twisting her lip in thought. It felt strange, placing my trust in someone, as I had in her. I wondered what I would have done – was going to do – without her. She thought that because I had Benson where I wanted him it was the end, my revenge was complete, while for me it was only the beginning.

It had never happened in the clinic: all the time I was in their hands I had never trusted their judgement, their medication, or their shock therapy. What they did for me was for the best because they didn't know any better. Muddled as I was, in deep despair, physically drained and spiritually weak because I'd lost the confidence to live, I still knew far better than they did what was the matter with me; I just didn't know what to do about it. I was suffering from cancer of the will, a condition that defeats its own cure. So I submitted myself to them, pathetically, like a child, as if a white coat could answer my prayers.

I collected the tapes and notebooks together. As I put them back in the attaché case she spotted something that I'd tried to push deep into one of the pockets, only it was too large to be concealed. The cheap black plastic cover reflected the overhead light and screamed out it didn't belong there.

‘What's that?'

‘This? It's the diary I told you about.'

‘You seem to make a habit of stealing other people's diaries. May I see?'

‘If you like. But it would be better if you didn't.'

‘It can't be as bad as all that.'

‘It's worse.'

‘Why keep it then?'

‘I don't know … I should've dumped the thing or burned it.' I closed the case and snapped the clasps shut.

She surprised me then by saying, ‘I asked you if you wanted to stay. You didn't give me an answer.'

‘That was before you knew about Mr Patundi's murder,' I said.

‘The offer still holds. Or do you still have this crazy idea that you want to kill Benson? Is there really nothing else worth living for?'

‘I won't hang for it,' I said. ‘They've done away with the death
penalty. Besides, there are extenuating circumstances: I'm mentally unbalanced.'

She ignored that, shaking her head irritably. ‘You don't mind if they put you back in that place and keep you there for the rest of your life? That's really what I meant – having something worth living for, so you wouldn't have to go back.'

I said, ‘It's a point of view. It might even mean something if I knew who I was.'

‘You're Peter Holford.'

‘What is that?'

‘It's a person. You.'

‘Me,' I said, testing the validity of the word. ‘It wouldn't get by under the trades descriptions act. Now if you said “clock”, or “radio”, or “chair”, I'd know straight away what those are. They're solid objects with shapes and functions. I'm happier with those; they are what they are and can't be anything else.'

She said angrily, ‘Suppose you achieve it, it happens, and Benson is dead, what then? Your wife won't come back. It won't help her. Nothing will be changed.'

‘It will for Benson,' I said. ‘Drastically.'

She folded her arms, her fists white and knotted against her chest. ‘How senseless! Stupid! And – and …' She ground her teeth.

‘Crazy?'

‘You're not crazy, don't flatter yourself. That's just a coward's way of evading the issue.'

‘No it isn't,' I said. I was certain about this if nothing else. ‘I'm not a coward about evading the issue, Diane, because I don't know what the issue is. But if you can provide me with one I'll be only too happy to evade it.'

‘What if I went to the police?'

I said mildly, ‘Well, you could do that, of course you could. Would that be for Benson's benefit or to save me from myself?' The way the conversation was going reminded me of Dr Morduch, who, when he didn't have a syringe in his hand, was always keen to get his patients to ‘articulate', in order to release the log-jam in the psyche. It's an accepted belief amongst doctors that to unburden oneself of morbid fears and fancies is to relieve them, rob them of their destructive
potency. This wasn't my experience. Talking with Dr Morduch, and now with Diane Locke, was like two passengers cruising serenely on the Titanic, one of whom knows, while the other doesn't, that catastrophe lies in wait. In fact ‘articulating' drove the wedge deeper, widened the chasm; the abyss yawned yet more blackly. To hang on to the pretence that such a thing as normality existed was to collude in the fraud. The more one talked – or ‘articulated', as Dr Morduch would say – the further any hope of ever achieving this absurd condition receded and became unattainable. One was trapped in the mute airless vacuum of the unsayable.

Diane Locke said bitterly, ‘Perhaps they ought to lock you up and throw away the key. That's the best thing that could happen.'

‘For me or for Benson?'

‘Don't be a bloody fool. I couldn't care less about Benson or what happens to him, whether he's destroyed or not. Go ahead – I mean it – destroy him if you have to, but don't sacrifice yourself in the process—' Her voice suddenly gave out, and her long pale face, usually calm, showing little emotion, was fierce and almost ugly in its rigid lines of resolution. I stared at her, unable to believe I was seeing the glint of tears in her eyes, but I was.

This wasn't a game after all. She was actually feeling something, and suffering for it. I felt shocked.

I said, or rather stammered, ‘Diane …' and she turned her back on me, moving to the cupboard.

‘I have to prepare a meal for Graham, he'll be home soon.'

‘Diane—'

‘What?' she said irritably, her voice under control again, taking things from the cupboard.

‘It isn't worth it,' I said feebly, not knowing what else to say.

‘I know
that
. It's never worth it.' She kept her back to me. ‘None of us are worth it. But I'm not going to stand around and let you destroy yourself because of some tin-pot councillor and crooked businessman who runs a clapped-out haulage firm. I know how you feel about your wife and what happened to her, and how you must hate him for it, and want him dead. But I won't let you do it, Peter. I'll stop you.'

‘How will you stop me?'

‘Any way I can.'

‘I believe you would.'

‘I mean it.'

‘What about Benson?'

‘To hell with Benson.' She was opening a tin. ‘Send all that stuff to the police and wash your hands of the whole affair. Have done with it. It's that simple.'

Diane Locke was right. I could be rid of the whole thing, just forget about it. Why let Benson ruin my life a second time? I could start again, this time with a woman who seemed to care about me (I was still in shock that she had
cried)
and obliterate the past. Let Benson get on with his crooked marina scheme, what did it matter to me? Let him dump bodies in the harbour, so what?

So what if Benson actually had done the deed, or arranged for it to be done (tattoo marks meant Wayne); then it occurred to me that he could be made to pay a far higher price than a gentle chiding from someone in Whitehall. The question was, how to prove it? Where to find the evidence? There was one way, it now struck me …

Tracing the body back from the harbour led to the discharge pipe, and from the discharge pipe to the public swimming baths, and from the swimming baths to whoever had been an accomplice to the crime. Of course Benson himself wouldn't have sullied his hands, I was certain of that. Not when he had Wayne to do it for him. And Wayne must have had help. Somebody who had access to the public swimming baths, who knew how the equipment worked – who knew, in fact, how to do a neat job of disposal without fouling up the system while squirting the corpse into the Irish Sea.

Into the silence the brass-rimmed clock dropped five melodious chimes. Clasping the attaché case in both hands, I let my shoulders slump. ‘All right, I'll stay.'

Diane Locke didn't say anything, just carried on preparing the meal.

The green single-decker bus took me from Granthelme and dropped me in the centre of town just after midday. I looked for the line of demarcation as the bus twisted through the narrow country lanes but
couldn't locate the exact spot. Once in Brickton, however, there was no mistaking that we had crossed it.

I was wearing one of Graham's old suits – grey with a faint chalk-stripe, double-breasted, with turn-ups on the trousers – that I'd rooted out of his wardrobe. I ought to have felt guilty about it, borrowing his clothing without permission, but I didn't. But I did feel guilty about betraying Diane's trust. We had come to a tacit understanding, Diane Locke and me, that my pursuit of Benson was over and done with – a foolish, aberrant urge for revenge that could only lead to my own destruction. There was no question that I had convinced her, because she had gone off in the Datsun on some errand or other, leaving me alone in the house. There I had waited fifteen minutes and then set off on foot down the muddy lane, having left a scribbled note that I hoped to return later for the attaché case; if I didn't she was free to do with it as she pleased. If I didn't return, I thought, it wouldn't matter to me what she did with it.

I was glad to be still wearing my overcoat: it was damp and windy, cold air swooping down from the north with the stinging touch of real winter. Just the kind of day to shut out the world in the steamy warmth of a Turkish bath.

At the traffic lights (B-H Haulage was up the hill on the opposite side) I turned left to get quickly off the main street; it was the reflex action of somebody used to being hit who ducks and shies away from every imagined blow. Possibly it was rather pointless: I might have been recognised just as easily on the backstreets. But I felt safer and more at home here, among the crumbling brick buildings and the peeling facades of empty shops. There was a newsagent's on the corner, with plastic toys made in Taiwan and dusty trays of penny sweets, the colour of neon signs, in the window. The man serving behind the counter had on a shapeless brown tweed jacket with black plastic patches on the elbows and thin strips crudely stitched round the cuffs. He was sucking on an empty pipe, which drooped down dead-centre onto his chin, gripped between dentures like yellow tombstones.

He attended to a woman customer while I pretended to glance over the layered piles of tabloids. The counter was a hotbed of Rape, Scandal, Child Abuse, Beast and Check Your Lucky Number! I slid one (Sex Romp) off the nearest pile. He held out a thin grubby hand
for money, fingers blackened with newsprint.

I asked him where the public baths was. The pipe swivelled, resting on his chin, as he dropped the coins in the till.

‘Aboukir Street.'

‘Is that near here?'

‘Left in the street, straight down, then one … two …' he weighed it up, sucking, his breath hollow in the empty bowl ‘… third on the right, next to the cleansing department.'

‘Suitable place for it,' I remarked, smiling. He stared at me incomprehendingly as if I'd said something in Serbo-Croat.

Brickton Public Baths was a smaller, sootier version of the town hall, built in the same age and with the same prosperity. There was a small portico and an arched entrance flanked by pillars that would have admitted giants. The doors, a muddy council blue painted over gouged initials and obscenities, let the tone down. My footsteps echoed in the hallway, tiled from floor to ceiling in green and yellow and lit by frosted globes submerged in the walls. A girl sat in a glass-fronted cubicle, staring at nothing, her lips moving as she listened to a tape on a Japanese stereo deck that was all chrome fretwork and silver dials and flickering needles. The smell of chlorine and bleach stung like anaesthetic.

‘One Turkish, please, and a towel.'

‘Two pound fifty.'

I sorted through my coins. I was over a pound short. She watched me vacantly with eyes stickily rimmed in purple, lips moving to, ‘You're my fantasy-dream, gotta have that drivin' beat, poundin' through my heart and spleen, turn your key in my lock, you sex-machine.'

‘Can you change this?' She accepted the stiff £20 note and pushed the change and a perforated ticket through the shallow brass depression under the glass, polished by generations of copper pennies and threepenny bits. With her other hand she reached down and tossed a towel onto a ledge at the side of the cubicle, and slid back a glass partition. I went round and picked up the towel.

There were no signs. Frosted globes illuminated the length of the tiled tunnel leading nowhere.

It was the unlikeliest of places in which to find conspiracy, or even
the lowest form of petty financial chicanery – a Victorian bathhouse! Sharp businessmen and asset-stripping entrepreneurs at the cutting edge of the System wouldn't have detected the barest shift of a percentage point on their sonar; not even worth a grubby lawyer's deal to buy it up, raze it to the ground and build a car park or a superstore. You didn't plan on building anything in Brickton: it was a dumping ground, a spot of coastal blight on the edge of the known universe, a place better left to the slag merchants and scrap dealers. Benson was in on that, ferrying sludge in his tanker fleet. He had found a smart way to make it pay. He even operated night shifts, loading up and squirting the stuff out at night – where? In the harbour? I had assumed the conveyor chain of buckets was for dredging, but it could have had the opposite purpose.

A bald-headed man with a paunch, in a singlet and baggy blue track-suit bottoms, passed along the tunnel, rubber soles squeaking on the tiles. When I asked for the Turkish he nodded once, over his shoulder, and went on.