Blind Needle (25 page)

‘Peter, what's the matter? What's wrong? Come on, get in the car, please—'

She had to pause as a large black car came up behind, slowed, overtook the Datsun, and went on. It wasn't a Mercedes, thank God. It was starting to get dark. The hedgerows on either side shut out the light like thick, impenetrable walls. I crossed over and got in beside her.

Diane Locke glanced at me and in the fading light I saw that there were blue shadows under her eyes. Her unmade-up lips had tiny faint cracks in them.

A few miles further on we came round a wide bend into Granthelme and went over a granite bridge with a river flowing underneath. After Brickton this seemed like civilization. We stopped at the traffic lights. People were bustling along the pavements, trailing out of
brilliantly-lit supermarkets with three, four, five plastic carrier bags strung from their arms, smeary toddlers in a state of temporary truce trotting to heel, pacified with sweets and weirdly-shaped incandescent potato snacks. It was remarkably like real, normal life.

We drove on through the town and into the countryside once more. Neither of us spoke. My throat was burning dry and I felt sick again, but probably nothing would come. I saw Trafford, clawlike hand raised, grinning at me. ‘Wipe 'em off the map. That's the spirit!'

The road was familiar: we had come this way when we drove out to the restaurant. Somewhere along here was the line that separated the dispossessed from those who led fruitful, well-ordered, well-heeled lives. I was back in the Land of Oz. After another mile or two the car slowed and turned off the main road into a narrow lane which curled and dipped and then climbed a steep bare hillside. There was a view to our right, or what would have been a view had the light been good, and on the left a pallid sunset – a damp streaky watercolour of a thing like a forty-watt light-bulb swathed in pink muslin.

We passed several huge rambling places, set securely in their own grounds behind wrought ironwork, and I was inspired to come up with the idea that just as shopkeepers proclaim above their premises how they earn their living, owners of large houses in the country should be compelled by law to have signs erected on their rooftops, saying precisely who they were and how they had acquired their wealth: ‘Userer' – ‘Extortionist' – ‘Drug Racketeer' – ‘Land Speculator' – ‘Sweatshop Owner' – ‘Slum Landlord' – ‘Accountant.'

Diane Locke lit a cigarette and opened the window to let the smoke out. ‘The police cleared you,' she said after a long pause: a statement, not a question.

‘Yes. They had no proof.'

‘What about Benson?'

‘What about him?'

‘Did you tell them about the tape and the notebooks?'

‘I tried.'

‘What happened?'

‘They didn't believe me.'

‘Did you say that I had them – they were in my possession?'

‘No. I kept your name out of it.'

‘But why, for heaven's sake? You should have told them.'

‘Well,' I said, ‘I didn't. End of story.'

There was a change in her I detected but couldn't account for. Before, it seemed, she had suspected that much of what I had told her was a product of my own fancifully embroidered paranoia. She didn't think so now, I sensed. Something had happened to change her mind. Benson, she finally realised, was up to his neck in something crooked that involved murder, and now he was scared and therefore he was dangerous. How he must be sweating, I thought – wondering what I had revealed to the police!

Let the bastard sweat. That was my philosophy. I saw Trafford wink in agreement as he wiped some greyish sticky stuff from the corner of his mouth.

Diane Locke said, ‘We ought to be celebrating. It isn't every day a person is cleared of a murder charge.'

‘So you're convinced now.'

‘Of course.'

‘Of course?' I mocked her. ‘You thought I had done it.'

‘I didn't – I mean, I wasn't sure.' She sucked in a lungful of smoke. ‘I admit, I wasn't sure at first.'

I smiled to myself in the darkness.

‘Do you know who did?' I asked.

‘Wasn't it Wayne?' Diane Locke said.

‘The police think it was Smith.'

‘What? What do you mean?' Diane Locke said quickly, as though I had startled her out of a dreamy reverie.

‘Oh yes,' I said, enjoying this. ‘They think it was Smith. Poor guy.' Her eyes flicked from the road to my face, twin ridges marking a deep shadow between her eyebrows.

‘They've got him?' she said incredulously.

‘Yes.'

‘At the police station?'

‘In the mortuary. Poor old Smith's dead. I was shown a photograph. No doubt about it.'

‘And did he murder the shopkeeper?'

‘We'll never know,' I said. ‘He's taken the secret with him.'

I gripped the door-handle, and she said with alarm, ‘What the hell
do you think you're doing?'

‘Stop the car …'

I stumbled onto the grass verge and fell to my knees, bent over, retching, bringing up nothing but strings of spittle. My throat burned and my insides felt as if they were being wrenched apart. Moisture from the damp grass soaked through my trousers. When the retching finally stopped I started to shiver uncontrollably.

‘You're in no fit state to go anywhere,' Diane Locke said, crouching at my side, her arm around my shoulders.

‘That's all right then,' I said, wiping my mouth. ‘I'm not going anywhere.'

‘You're coming with me.'

Yes!

Go on

‘No,' I said, and repeated, ‘No.' I tried to rise but my legs were filled with sponge rubber. ‘I can't.'

‘What on earth did they do to you?' she asked, frightened and angry.

I didn't get her drift straight away. ‘At the clinic?'

‘The police.'

‘Nothing.'

‘You're ill. You're covered in sweat. What have they done to you?'

‘I've told you, they didn't do anything.'

Diane Locke went on talking in a soothing voice, but I wasn't listening; I wasn't aware of anything until I felt warm air circulating around my ankles, and when I opened my eyes I was in the passenger seat and we were driving along the dark road. The headlights swept across a dry stone wall as the car turned off and started to labour up a gradient.

There was a lake to the right with a dark mass of mountains behind it, and I had the idea it was the lake I had seen through the trees from the window of Diane Locke's house. When I had seen it before, in what now seemed another life, it had sparkled with sunlight. If I had been given the chance to go back and change the past, to re-invent it, my past would have begun at that precise moment: standing at the bedroom window looking down at the lake sparkling through the trees. Then I had never set eyes on Brickton, and Susan's memory was very dear to me.

‘Not far now,' Diane Locke said. ‘Nearly there.'

The house was in darkness. When I asked about Graham she said, ‘Haydock Park,' which I took to mean he had gone to the races, but apparently it was a two-day antiquarian book fair, held there every year. We sat in the dusty living-room amongst the piles of books and cardboard boxes, the gas fire hissing and spluttering in the old-fashioned tiled fireplace, drinking coffee and then whisky. Another sound competed with the gas fire – a thin persistent drone – that set my nerves on edge. It was the wind sweeping up from the lake and playing a dirge in the branches of the fir trees. Raindrops smacked against the window-panes; the sound was gritty, as though there were flecks of ice mixed in with the squall.

Diane Locke asked me why I had been so reluctant to come back to the house with her, and I fiddled with my glass, lost for an answer.

‘How come you knew the police had picked me up?' I asked her instead. It hadn't occurred to me till now.

‘When I got to Brickton I waited for you outside Safeways, as you'd said. Then I saw you being driven away in a police car. I came back this morning and parked down the hill.'.

‘You waited all day?'

Diane Locke nodded. ‘I followed when they took you to the hospital and brought you back.'

‘What if they hadn't let me go?'

‘I knew they would. You didn't kill the Indian shopkeeper, I was certain. I told you that, and it's true.'

She was doing her best to comfort and reassure me, so why did I still feel trapped and frightened, filled with gnawing panic – even with a woman who had helped me and wanted to go on helping me? Why was I suspicious of her? Why did I feel that to trust her was somehow a betrayal of myself? Perhaps, I thought, it was because I felt unworthy of her. If she only knew what was inside me, deep inside, that no one else knew, she would be revolted and have nothing further to do with me. I was saving her the trouble of finding out. Saving her the disappointment and, ultimately, the disgust.

Looked at in that light, I was doing her a favour. So why couldn't the stupid bitch understand that and leave me alone?

I said abruptly, ‘Thanks for your help. I'll leave tomorrow.'

‘Why? There's no need to.'

‘I have to leave.'

‘Where? You've nowhere to go. You can't go back to Brickton. The only other place is … where you came from.'

‘Do you think that's where I belong?' I asked, and knew there was a snide grin I couldn't control on my lips, and didn't want to.

‘No.' Diane Locke shook her head. ‘I don't.'

‘Maybe I do belong there,' I said, as nastily as I could. ‘I'm not fit for the world outside. Lock me up and throw away the key.'

‘Oh yes?' she said quietly. ‘Crawl off into a hole and hide away? We've all wanted to do that at one time or another. I have. My husband was having an affair – several affairs, in fact – and in-between drinking himself to death and using his fists on me. I wanted to disappear, just vanish, become non-existent, and the only reason I didn't was because I had two young children who depended on me.'

I shrugged and said, ‘Good for you. Well done. But I don't have any kids who depend on me.'

‘No,' Diane Locke said thoughtfully. ‘Just you.'

There was a sudden noise outside, a creaking and wrenching, that made us both jump. We both went still, listening, and heard it again as the wind strengthened, blowing up the valley from the lake and bending the branches of the pine trees and making them clash together.

‘It was a wild and stormy night,' Diane Locke said with a mock shudder, pouring whisky into my glass. ‘Let's drink to it.'

She raised her glass and drank, smiling.

The whisky and the heat of the fire were having an effect; I began to feel muzzy and drowsy. Only a few days ago I had sat on this same settee, blood in my mouth, listening to Graham Locke saying something about breeds of sheep. Then soon after I passed out. It seemed that history was about to repeat itself, because I could feel my senses sliding away and my mind becoming duller and dimmer, shrinking to a single point of light as my consciousness dwindled.

I fought against this. It seemed vitally important that I had to –
that if I didn't something terrible might happen. As in dreams, however, it was a sense of foreboding, of something awful and ghastly, that never reveals to the dreamer the object of his horror. The unknown, unspecified
thing
is out there in the darkness, vague and formless, shifting like smoke, never going away and yet never coming nearer, while the dreamer has to struggle on alone with the reality of his own dreadful stomach-churning fear.

‘Don't pass out on me again, will you?'

I snapped my eyelids open. With an effort I pushed myself up from my slumped position on the settee.

‘I have to go, Diane. I never should have come.' The words were thick in my mouth.

‘There's nowhere
to
go at this hour, for heaven's sake. I'll make up the bed in the spare room. After a good night's sleep you'll be able to think straight.' Diane Locke shook her head, her expression half-smiling, half-rueful. ‘My fault for giving you too much whisky.'

It was true. It was all her fucking fault. I was sick to death of people interfering in my life. They were always telling me what to do. Forcing me to do things. Getting in my way. Why couldn't they leave me
alone?

I could feel the sultry headache I'd had earlier on starting its throbbing drumbeat again. And the nausea too – a sour, burning sensation at the back of my throat, as if I was about to regurgitate some corrosive bodily fluid.

Then it hit me. With an icy shock I thought: I've got Trafford's disease. I've been infected – contaminated – by the sludge Benson dumped in the harbour. I've been there twice, traipsing ankle-deep through the mud. I had to smile, bitterly, to myself. I thought I had escaped from Benson but the bastard had got me in th end.

I clutched at my scalp – trying to drag out a handful of hair – but my hand came away empty. I wasn't as far gone as Trafford, apparently. The wasting, flaking, hair-falling-out stage would come later.

‘What's the matter? Don't you feel well?'

‘I need to … sleep.'

‘Wait here while I get the bed ready, I won't be a minute.'

When she had gone I sat listening to the wind buffeting the house and pelting the windows with sleet. The branches of the pines clashed
in a frenzy. Listening, staring into space, I suddenly discovered that I was looking at the shiny mottled leather of the attaché case, peeping out from the far side of the chair in which Diane Locke had been sitting. It astounded me that she hadn't bothered to hide it. She must have felt so safely tucked away in this 1930s timewarp that nothing, not even Benson and the dregs of Brickton he had recruited, could possibly harm her.

I remembered the difficulty I had had before in finding a suitable hiding-place for such a bulky object. But the case itself, and most of its contents, weren't important. The only thing that really mattered was the one tiny cassette tape. I snapped open the catches, took it out, and went over to the corner bookcase next to the fireplace. The shelves were packed tight, and none of the titles were familiar. My eye caught the name of a foreign author, the title of the book in English; I prised it out, slid the tape to the back of the shelf, and replaced the book. I knew I wouldn't remember the name of the author, but I was confident I could remember the title.
Flight to Arras
. The ‘flight' definitely …