The Birthday Present (27 page)

I had to admit, though only to Iris, that I had been wrong when I warned Ivor, and warned him very forcefully, to have nothing to do with the Lynch family. If it wasn't directly his fault, it isn't too dramatic to say that his action had led to the
ruin of Dermot Lynch's life. But for him, Dermot would have been happily servicing cars and repairing engines and making his funny gestures. It was right for him to pay recompense to him and Philomena and Sean, especially because he could easily afford it. He could pay it and would always be able to pay it, without really noticing the loss.

But I said “more or less.” There was still the alibi lady. He never heard from her and more than three years had passed since his visit to her flat, when he had hoped she was going to hand over the pearls. I don't know if he ever thought about her. Perhaps he believed she had married and gone to live in some distant place. Beryl Palmer had worried him more. He sometimes reverted to her visit, even saying in a fretful way that he couldn't understand why Hebe hadn't told him she had met her outside his flat.

“I can understand it all right,” Iris said. “She knew what a fearful snob my brother is. She wasn't going to say she'd met Auntie Beryl with her bucket and mop.”

My noiseless laugh came into play.

T
HE GENERAL ELECTION
was still over three years away. I wouldn't say the Tories were doomed to lose that election or fated or anything like that, though that sort of language was being used. Most people could see it coming. Eighteen years is a long time for any government to be in power and it would be eighteen years by the time the election came round.

Ivor would never have made a statement like that. He never did make it. Whatever he privately thought, he always talked as if his party was invincible, would go from strength to strength, and nothing said in the media or by a muttering electorate made the least difference. What he never said
either was how he hoped for a Cabinet post. Secretary of State for Defence was what he wanted and of course he wanted it well in advance of the election—the election that he couldn't for a moment consider losing.

He was never to get it. As time went on he must from day to day have waited for the summons to Number Ten. When the corridors of the Palace of Westminster throbbed and shivered with predictions of a reshuffle, he must have told himself, alternately, that he was bound to get that call and at the same time that it would never come. But he was an optimist, always had been. He looked on the bright side. How fortunate his life had been! How good luck had followed him! Not that he hadn't worked to make that luck happen, worked like a political slave, done all the right things, been a good party man, a good minister, and the best of constituency MPs. Ever-faithful he was, dogged yet brilliant, industrious yet calm and laid-back, popular and with a throng of keen supporters. Why didn't that summons come? How long must he wait? His political clock was ticking away and so, perhaps, was Juliet's reproductive clock.

I
keep thinking of what Mummy said about people you are frightened of not being able to eat you. As if anyone ever thought they would. As if being the victim of cannibalism was a usual sort of fate for an eight-year-old. Saying that to me never made me feel any better, though I suppose she meant a kind of metaphorical eating. That's what I am afraid of.

I've been contemplating going to the Lynches' for a long time now. A slight shift in my circumstances has helped postpone it too. I'm drawing benefit. I've had to put myself down as looking for a job, but until they find me one they'll pay the interest on my mortgage repayments and give me enough for a bare living. I don't think I could take a regular job now, I'm not fit for it. This is partly because I don't sleep and when I do I dream I'm walking with Callum and his dog across a vast open space, a kind of heath or desert. It's dark or half dark and I know that when we reach a certain point in the walk, a place that's marked by an obelisk pointing up into the night sky, he is going to kill me.

Mummy doesn't understand about being on benefit— how could she, the sheltered life she's led, with all found for her?—and she goes on sending me a monthly check. So for quite a while I'd been able to put off the Lynch encounter. But now I've got to face it. I've got to find out if Ivor Tesham paid Dermot Lynch and Lloyd Freeman to drive a car and pick up Hebe on the evening of May 18, 1990, and if that was the car that did pick her up. It's the link I need to know about. So far as I am aware, Dermot Lynch is the only person alive, if he is alive, who knows the answer—apart from Tesham, of course. I have to go to William Cross Court and see Dermot Lynch or, if he's dead, anyone else he may have told. The papers said he had a mother and a brother but no paper I saw ever said if he recovered from the crash.

R
EMEMBERING THAT HELPED
me manage some of the self-confidence Mummy tried to instill in me with her “they can't eat you” talk. The Lynches weren't cannibals, they couldn't eat me, so I dialed the number in the phone book for 23 William Cross Court. A man answered.

“Is that you, Dermot?” I said.

“He can't talk now,” the man said. “Who wants him?”

I put the phone down, my heart pounding. So he was alive and he lived there. Maybe the man who answered
was
him but didn't want to admit it. I have to go there. I know that now.

First I went up to the newspaper library in Colindale. My car's been done, so at least I was able to drive. I asked to see newspapers from May 18 to 28, 1990, the more sensational ones. I didn't bother with
The Times
or the
Telegraph.
Pictures of the two men were what I wanted to see and there they were, plenty of them. None after the accident, of
course, all these must have been given to the reporters by the Lynches and perhaps, in Lloyd Freeman's case, by a theatrical agent.

He'd been a good-looking man, tall with curly black hair and the sort of Caucasian features whites admire in black people. They don't care about what a
black
person might find attractive. One picture the newspaper may have had on file. It was of Lloyd wearing a toga when he was Casca in a production
of Julius Caesar
and it came from a review of the play. But the one that really interested me was the sort of photograph that's taken by professional photographers at functions. Or so I suppose. I've never been in such a shot myself—I was never invited to anything so grand—but I remember Gerry Furnal showing me photographs taken at some reception he organized for HALT and he was in one of them, standing next to a minor royal. The one Lloyd was in wasn't very good of him, as there were too many other people trying to get in shot, but the woman next to him, her arm through his, I recognized at once. It was Carmen a.k.a. Juliet Case.

I just stopped myself giving a shout of triumph. They wouldn't like that in the newspaper library. I suddenly felt sane again, in control, my own woman.

I
HAVE BEEN
there and I wish I hadn't. Ever since I was there the name of that play Hebe and I were supposed to be going to see keeps running round in my head:
Life Threatening, Life Threatening.
I'm very frightened. All the way home I was shaking and trembling like an old person with Parkinson's disease. I sat in the tube with my right leg jumping up and down and my hands vibrating. A woman stared at me. I shut my eyes and tried taking deep breaths. I thought a walk
might do me good, so I tried walking from the nearest tube station instead of getting the bus, but I shook and shivered so much that I had to sit down in a bus shelter. Only for a moment, though. A man was in there with a dog like Callum's. I walked on and when I looked back there was no one there.

What happened at 23 William Cross Court I don't want to have to think about, but I must if I am to do the thing I went there for in the first place. If Sean Lynch frightens me so, how am I going to confront Ivor Tesham? Of course there is a difference between them. Sean Lynch is a thug and Tesham—well, he's what Mummy would call a gentleman. I had better set down my experience there and get it over. Maybe it will get it out of my mind, lay it to rest.

An old woman answered the door. She was wearing track-suit bottoms in bright purple with a flowered blouse and brown cardigan. I asked her if she was Mrs. Lynch and she nodded. She never said her own name.

“Westminster Social Services,” I said.

She shook her head, then nodded.

“All right if I come in?”

She didn't like it, but by then I was in, walking ahead of her into a living room. The first thing anyone would notice about the place was the religious icons, the statuettes, the pictures. Above the mantelpiece was a crucifix with spilled red paint bleeding from Christ's side. The room was crowded with furniture, far too much for the size of it, and in one of the chairs, hemmed in by two other chairs and a wicker table, sat a man. Somewhere in the depths of his fat face, under the lardy layers, behind his dull eyes, you could see the remains of Dermot Lynch. He wore loose corduroy trousers and a check shirt under a sleeveless pullover, his big
red hands lying slack against his big protuberant belly. He was perfectly still and silent.

“I've come about fitting some aids for the disabled in your home,” I said. “We provide a service along those lines.”

I was beginning to feel the confidence Mummy couldn't teach me. The two of them, he the epitome of apathy and incomprehension, his head hanging, she ignorant and fearful, gave an impression of utter humility, and this inspired me. I felt strong. I felt in control. It would be easy.

“This is your son, Dermot?”

She nodded. “That's right.”

I looked at some printed sheets I'd brought with me. “We don't seem to have any record of the accident which caused Dermot's injuries,” I said, pretending to read. “Exactly what was that and when did it occur?”

He spoke. It was a robotic voice, toneless, all on one note, as if generated by an electronic device. “Car crash,” he said, and again, “Car crash. Bad,” he said, “bad, bad.”

I turned to his mother. “Was he driving the car?”

Again she nodded. The two of them were like a pair of mechanical dolls, programmed to nod and shake their heads and utter mono syllables. I referred once more to my printed sheets, running my forefinger down the lines, as if looking for a particular word or name.

“Mr. Tesham's car that would be?”

I expected, I really did, uncomprehending stares. This time it was he who nodded. The robot lifted its head and made it vibrate, up and down, up and down. It was his mother who spoke and more volubly than she had done up till then, a slight flush of animation appearing on her cheeks.

“Mr. Tesham's been very good. He looks after us.”

It was the link. It was what I wanted. I got up. People with
more nous, people who had a basic idea of what the social services did, might have expected me to request a tour of the place and check on where handrails might be needed or ramps installed. They knew nothing of that.

Mrs. Lynch said, “Is that all, then?”

As she spoke there was a sound of a key turning in the front door lock, the door slammed and a man came in. He was rather good-looking in a heavy-set, thuggish way, his yellow-brown hair in long greasy curls, falling onto the shoulders of a black leather jacket. There was a lot of leather about him, the glossy, quilted sort, his jeans stuffed into thick black boots with multiple straps. What is this stuff with leather? Is it the smell or the feel or the shininess or all of that?

“Sean Lynch,” he said to me and, “Who's this?” to his mother.

“A lady from the council.”

Apart from giving me his name, I might not have been present for all the words he addressed to me. “What's she want?”

Dermot said, “Mr. Tesham.” The nodding began again, up and down, up and down.

Suspicion oozed out of Sean like sweat. At last he spoke to me. “You got any ID, have you?”

“I'm afraid not,” I said.

“You'd best be afraid. What's this, then?” He snatched the printed sheets out of my hand. It was my gas bill and two pages of the kind of literature no one ever reads that had come with it. He threw it on the floor, said, “What's Mr. Tesham to you?”

I heard my own voice, thin and hoarse as my throat dried. “Nothing. Your brother said he drove Mr. Tesham's car.”

He took hold of me by the shoulders and shook me. Not
much and not for long, but I heard my teeth click together. I tried to cry, “Stop it,” and, “Don't,” but only a strangled whisper came out. He flung me away.

“You fucking spy,” he said. “You interfering bitch.” His mother made a sound of protest but only a sound, a tiny yelp. Dermot had once more hung his head. “You should be bloody ashamed, coming here after my brother. Scaring my mother. Look at them. You've scared them stupid.”

“I'm going,” I managed to say. “I'm leaving,” and, “Let me pass.”

He filled the doorway. As well as being all those other things, leather, especially black leather, which is only after all the hide of a harmless animal, is horribly intimidating. A man in black leather, any man, is more frightening than a man in black cloth. Why did Ivor Tesham want Hebe in black leather when black silk and lace are feminine and pretty and make their wearer desirable? I don't know. Sean had a belt round his waist of thick black leather, studded with brass bosses and spikes. It reminded me of the dog collar I found among Hebe's things.

I made a sort of whimper. I said, “Please let me go.”

Mrs. Lynch had turned her back. She moved toward Dermot and laid a hand on his slack shoulder. Sean said, “You're not
going.
I'm going to put you out.”

He turned me round, joined my hands together behind my back as if he was going to handcuff me, and propelled me toward the front door. My back was pressed against the front of him, straps and buckles digging into my flesh. His breath was hot against the back of my head, moving my hair. This was somehow the worst sensation until at the closed front door he pushed me forward, banging my forehead against a wooden panel. I cried out then. He pulled me back, shaking me hard, flung the door open and pushed me
out with a great shove in the middle of my back. I stumbled and fell, spread-eagled on the concrete floor. I heard the door slam behind me.