Blind Needle (20 page)

I came to a T-junction, empty corridors left and right marked off in light and shade by the globes. No signs or directions of any kind; but a door, directly in front of me, half open, gave a glimpse of a tiled room with rows of metal lockers with stencilled yellow numbers. I went in and walked the length of it, stepping gingerly so as not to slip on the wet floor. At the far end, round a corner, there was a shower-room with lead pipes and copper fittings, and beyond that lapping green water, steam curling and drifting from its surface. It was very quiet. Too quiet for a swimming baths, in which every sound is amplified. Even without children, who were in school, you would have expected to hear the splash of divers and an occasional shout echoing up to the vaulted roof. From where I stood, the segment of the pool in view was placid and undisturbed, its glittering reflections dimmed to a hazy dazzle by the drifting curtain of steam.

‘Oy!'

The bald-headed man in the singlet was standing inside the door with his hands on his hips, the shadowy dimple of his belly-button like an empty eye socket in the centre of his hanging paunch.

‘I tout you say Turkish.'

‘Yes. Is this—'

‘Dis not it.' He jerked his thumb. ‘Here. Come on. Dis way.' His accent was eastern-European, possibly Polish. Now that I looked at him properly I saw that his features were Slavic, the broad pale skull and large-lobed ears, a heavy brow overhanging pale slitted eyes. ‘Dis way,' he repeated, wagging his thumb.

He pushed the door farther open with his foot, a bare hairless ankle, white as chalk, exposed between the blue track-suit bottoms and laceless black plimsolls. ‘If you want Turkish, go dis way.' He pointed. ‘See?'

I thanked him and heard him squeaking off into some other part of the building. The corridor led to a flight of steps down into the basement. The air became suddenly humid, moist against my forehead, and I started to sweat under my suit and heavy overcoat.

The locker room at the bottom of the stairs was smaller and darker than the one above, its low ceiling lined with pipes from which the heat seemed to throb in waves. I took off my overcoat and hung it in a locker, then stripped down to my underpants. Of course I couldn't wear them in the steam room, so I took them off and wrapped the towel round my waist. The key to the locker was embedded in a cylinder of pink plastic, attached to a large brass safety-pin. Steam hissed and water gurgled through the pipes overhead, and I followed the pipes to where they twisted downwards in the corner and writhed through the wall.

In the first and coolest of the steam rooms, two figures, one naked, the other wrapped in a towel, sat on a low bench like wilting pink Buddhas. I sat down on the bench at right-angles to theirs, slumping forward with my elbows on my knees. Perspiration started to pop out all over me and I felt my pulse-rate quicken; for a minute I had to concentrate on breathing, taking short shallow breaths for fear of scalding my lungs.

One of the men, with white hair, seemed familiar. I couldn't see his face clearly, though there was something about him that sparked a memory.

‘It's a worthy cause, we mustn't forget that,' he was saying in a bluff, assertive voice, in the strident timbre that carries across noisy, crowded rooms and turns a whisper into a declamation. ‘They do grand work. They sent me a list of their beneficiaries. It makes impressive reading.'

‘Are they registered?'

‘How do you mean?'

‘As a charity.' The other sounded shrill by comparison, an elderly whine. ‘I think I'm right in saying that it's a stipulation that they have to be registered. There's some rule or other.'

‘What rule? What bloody rule is that?'

The words shot back from the tiled walls, seeking and finding no means of escape, and then I placed him. It was the white hair, I remembered now, spiky and luxuriant when I'd seen him last, with his chain of office, strutting from group to group of councillors at the town hall, a beefy hand hitting colleagues on the back and bouncing on his toes as he swapped jokes.

‘You mean if I decide I want to support the Disabled Trawlermen and Inshore Fishermen Benevolent Fund I'm not allowed? It's my bloody choice, isn't it? Why the hell not?'

‘No … well, yes it is, but not as the mayor's officially sponsored charity appeal. It has to be registered, you see, Norman. That's the rule.'

‘There would be a bloody rule, wouldn't there?' the mayor said darkly. ‘What the hell's it matter if it's a good cause? You know – and I know – blokes who've devoted their lives and health to fishing in this town. We owe them something. The industry's gone but that doesn't mean the men who served it should be forgotten.' He raised his head and squinted at me through the eddying steam, perhaps only now aware they were not alone.

‘That's the way it is, I'm afraid. It's a stipulation of the mayoral office,' the other said, and as he too glanced towards me I realised it was the chairman of the Recreation and Entertainments Sub-Committee, the man with the pipe and the gavel and the officious, if ineffectual, manner.

The close-set eyes in the narrow face sharpened. Was it a sudden flaring of recognition, or the inquisitive stare of the short-sighted? He seemed to be pondering, sucking in his cheeks and blinking rapidly – myopically, I hoped.

The mayor said, ‘It's a bugger when you can't pick and choose your own bloody cause. It's in my name – it'll go down as the Norman Wilson Charity Appeal for my year in office.' His grumbling had
reclaimed the other's attention, who wagged his thin grey head.

‘Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. But what's to be done? It's a standing rule, Norman, and there it is.' He was the kind of man who thanked God for rules, because the alternative was chaotic free choice and painful original thought. He mumbled, ‘I fear you'll have to consult the list. I'll drop a memo' (he pronounced it ‘meemo') ‘to Broughton and have one sent up.'

I left them, the one grumbling, the other placating, and moved on.

The steam got hotter and more dense. Other vague white shapes lurked in the rooms beyond, standing, sitting on benches, some lying full length like corpses. There seemed no end to the rooms: in one a man was dousing himself under a cold shower, feet spread apart, head held back, a fine network of veins like blue lace on his abdomen and upper thighs. I plunged further on, encountering dryer heat that exhausted the oxygen content of the air so that each breath was a painful gasp, as if I were labouring with a seventy-pound pack halfway up a mountain. It was a bloody efficient system they had installed; the boiler necessary to produce so much steam must be of gargantuan size, I reckoned.

After a while I had to sit down and rest. It was the hottest room so far – too hot, perhaps, because I slumped down just before I collapsed, blinded by sweat, my heart knocking in my chest as if an anvil were being struck rapidly and repeatedly. If there was anyone there in the room with me I couldn't see them in the suffocating fog.

It was two nightmares combined: the regression into nothingness, the white womb, cut off from the ordinariness of pavements, shops, buses, crowds of people, sky, trees, buildings; and the other common dreaming phobia of suddenly finding yourself naked and vulnerable in an exposed place, with only a flimsy garment for protection. The moist whiteness pressing itself against me and swirling in front of my eyes was the physical manifestation of my own fear – the appalling dead blankness at the epicentre of my mind.

It was just the place, the perfect place, I thought, that S – would choose to commit one of his sick atrocities. Could he have actually done the things he boasted about? It didn't matter whether he had or not. What mattered was that I believed him. Maybe he hadn't murdered his wife in the way he described, it was all bravado, pure delusion, but even
so his vile fantasies struck me witless, left me weak and gasping.

And of course, thinking this, I immediately started to panic, imagining him there, circling round me in the steam, eyes wide and bright, silent laughing mouth agape.

Murdering Bastard

You killed

My wife

Killed–

I staggered to my feet, slithered on the damp tiles, almost fell. My God, was I imagining his voice as well? The words whispered hoarsely through my brain, spoken in exactly the same gasping, guttural tone I remembered. Or were they not imagined, remembered, but actually spoken aloud, here and now? Was it possible that S – had followed me here, accepting with gratitude this golden opportunity? What better place than the shrouded white of a steam-room, misty shapes in a swirling, shifting limbo?

But I was wrong. I had to be wrong. For the simple reason that he didn't know where to find me. He couldn't have followed me to Brickton because I'd never once mentioned it to him (had I?). I was almost certain I hadn't. Almost certain. Perhaps I had, and forgotten. And he'd come after me, roaming the town for a sight of me, lurking in doorways, watching and waiting, knowing that sooner or later an opportunity would present itself. And now it had: stupidly, crazily, suicidally, I had presented it to him.

Turning, hands outstretched in front of me like a sleepwalker, I glimpsed a moving shape, and heard very clearly – no mistaking it this time – the voice I hated and feared:

Two can play

At that game

I've a good mind

To bite

Your balls

Clean off

The shape of a man stood before me, his features blurred and rudimentary, his hands reaching out. I clenched my fist and drew it back to strike first, but he was just as quick, and as I lunged forward he did too, the two of us colliding as my fist struck a flat, clammy
surface and skidded off. His face loomed suddenly close, inches away, to reveal itself as my own, staring in terror into my own terrified eyes.

I stepped back and his familiar features dissolved. His outline became the misty shape of my own reflection in the steam-room wall mirror. I closed my eyes and turned away, unwrapped the towel from around my waist, mopped my face and neck.

Wiped my forehead with the towel and when I opened my eyes there was a real hand in front of me, holding a real syringe.

On the pale flabby forearm, a dagger dripping blood.

The rest of him in this shifting white world was a steamy blur, without substance, a ghost that you might clutch at and encounter no resistance. But ghosts are silent, they do not pant for breath.

The point of the needle hovered and suddenly jabbed. I parried it with a fistful of damp towel, swiftly moving backwards out of range. Clouds of steam scurried in to fill the place where I'd been standing. I could no longer see him, we were lost to one another, but I could hear the loose wet sounds of Wayne's garbled breathing. Placing one soft bare foot behind the other, I edged further away, the towel wrapped around my hand like an outsize boxing glove. Somewhere in the mist he would be standing with one arm raised, needle poised, moisture running down his hanging breasts and over the pendulous dome of his belly. It was not Wayne's natural element; he carried too much flab and exercised too little to withstand such heat. But it was not really mine either, and he had the loaded syringe.

‘This isn't going to hurt, squire,' came the wheezing voice. ‘Uncle Nev would like ter see ya. He told me go easy …'

I put my hand in front of my mouth to muffle my breathing.

‘Know it was you, dead certain,' Wayne panted. ‘You borrowed his briefcase, didn't you? The nice one with the gold twiddley bits. I knew it was you, I told him.' He became wheedling, almost friendly. ‘Give it him back. Go
on
. He knows you've spent some of the money, but
what's a few quid?' From the sound of his voice he was starting to circle. ‘Uncle Nev won't mind, squire. Whatever you've spent we'll call it quits.'

‘I threw it away,' I said. I took my hand from my mouth and felt behind me for the wall. I didn't want him circling round, coming for my exposed back.

‘No, no. Don't think so,' he said softly, chidingly. Now he was to my left. ‘You wun't do that. Come on, squire, play the game. You're in enough trouble with the police already …'

‘All right,' I said, ‘I'll take the chance. Let the police deal with it. Let's call them in. We'll tell them about the body in the harbour.'

A shape moved in the steam and I stepped sharply backwards, colliding with something, feeling a wooden bench scrape against my calves. I held the towel in front of me, anticipating a lunging arm.

There was a hoarse explosion of breath, and Wayne muttered angrily, ‘Listen – don't be fucking stupid, squire. I'm not in the mood. I don't know what you're on about—'

‘He was a customer of yours. You gave him a tattoo.'

‘I'll tell you something,' Wayne said. ‘Listen to this. You're my next customer. For free.'

‘Not while I've got the briefcase—'

Foolishly I hadn't covered my mouth, to baffle the sound, which enabled him to home in, and he struck blindly but accurately in the direction of my voice. He was aiming low, at belly height, and not expecting it I brought the wadded towel down and across at the last possible moment, missing the needle and hitting his forearm and deflecting it. I think he slipped – he might have fallen – because he was doing a lot of grunting and cursing under his ragged breathing.

He said, ‘Fuck this for a lark,' and the steam billowed as he thrashed about, striking out in a rage, jabbing furiously in all directions. He was panting hoarsely and I could smell the rot of dental decay. ‘I'll pin your knackers to the floor, squire. They'll come up like purple balloons. They'll have to carry you out on two stretchers. Then I'll find some nice deep mud to cool you off.'

I swayed back from the waist as he came again and I felt a searing pain as my shoulder brushed against scalding metal. He jabbed towards the sound of my yell and his lunge sent him blundering past.
My shoulder was on fire – I had touched the pipe feeding in steam. I could feel its heat inches away from my elbow.