Tree of Hands (32 page)

‘You don't look well, Benet.'

She shrugged. She said nothing.

‘There's nothing to worry about.' He tried to put his arms round her. She stood stiffly in his arms. ‘If she says yes, we're in business, and if she says no, you're no worse off than before.'

‘If she says no, she'll also tell the police.'

‘People like her are very loath to tell the police anything, Benet. I've read the newspaper stories, remember. It was
a day and a night after he'd disappeared before she went to the police.'

‘I don't want you to see her, Edward,' Benet said. ‘I want you to go away and leave us alone. If I was prepared to give her money . . .'

He let her go. ‘Don't turn me into a blackmailer.'

She went into the living room, took out two glasses and the whisky bottle. She poured one for him and one for herself. Her hands were shaking. Jay was upstairs asleep, two floors away at the top of the house, yet she sensed all around her his even, tranquil breathing.

I will take him away, she thought. I'll take him away where no one can find us. Edward's plan would never work, his reasoning was faulty, for if Carol said no, the police would trace Jay through Edward, and if Carol said yes, Jay would inevitably have to be produced and for a time returned to her. If for a time, why not for good, since the buying of a child was illegal? Edward would offer her a sum of money to agree to the adoption, and the balance when the adoption was completed. She would take the first payment, Benet thought, and then go to the police. I will take him away to avoid that happening, I will take him out of the country, a long long way, to the Far East perhaps. I'll use my money to hide him, not to buy him.

She handed Edward his glass. ‘You must do as you please,' she said. ‘Do whatever you like.'

After he had gone, she marvelled that she, who was a middle-class, law-abiding person, who until a few months ago had envisaged her only possible brushes with the police as being the outcome of traffic offences, should have become – and so easily and inevitably – a kidnapper, a felon and a fugitive. She went upstairs and into Jay's room and looked at him. He had tossed and turned in his sleep, thrown off the covers and slipped his pyjama top off one shoulder. Even in the half-dark she could see the burn hole the cigarette had made, an inch away from his spine. She overcame an hysterical need to pick him up and clutch
him. Gently she covered him up. She began in a haphazard feverish sort of way to pack clothes into suitcases.

By the first post, next morning, Jay's passport came. She had forgotten about that, she had forgotten they couldn't leave the country without it. Still she hadn't decided where to go. The suitcases had been packed in a panic without thought as to whether their destination would have a hot or cold climate. Impossible, in the here and now, to imagine sunshine, warmth, clear skies! A light dry powdery snow had begun to fall. She found her own passport and put it in her handbag with Jay's new one. Jay woke up late. She dressed him and gave him his breakfast.

‘Snow,' he said, pressing his face against the window. ‘Make a snowman.'

‘We're going a long way from the snow, Jay.'

She wrapped him up in his duffel coat, put his boots on, wool hat, warm scarf. While she loaded the car, he played with snow, throwing handfuls into the air. The cold reddened his cheeks and the tip of his nose and she remembered its similar effect on Edward's face. An idea came to her that was suddenly appalling and she thrust it away with a violent act of inhibition.

By Monday morning Carol still hadn't come back. It was St Valentine's Day. Buying a birthday card for Carol soon after they had first met, Barry had thought about this day, had looked forward to it and even made a mental note of the particular Valentine's card he would buy to send her. A card did come for her by the morning's post in a large pale pink envelope. Barry opened it, looking for Terence Wand's name, but it was signed only with a row of crosses.

Snow was falling in a steady fine mist. By midday Winterside Down was white once more and the house filled with pale, radiant, reflected light. Carol had been gone since Saturday. Round and round in his mind went the things she had said. That there had been a hundred, a thousand, men in her past no longer really mattered. He could bear that. But that she too could accuse him of being
Jason's killer, she who had met him on the afternoon Jason disappeared and run to him and kissed him and pirouetted in her new dress!

He hated her for that. Nothing mattered, not the men, not the lies, not her using him as if he were her servant, but that mattered. While she believed in him, he hadn't cared about the rest who didn't. He sat in the living room that glowed with snow light and thought of what she had said about not marrying the man who had murdered her Jason. An overwhelming desire took hold of him to be away from her, never to see her again, to be away for ever from Winterside Down and back in the comfort and caring of his parents' house. It was childish, it was immature, he knew that, but he didn't care, that was what he wanted.

But at the same time he didn't. At the same time he loved her. He was learning on St Valentine's Day something that had never hinted itself to him before, that it is possible to hate fiercely and love fiercely at the same time. When he made this discovery he made a sound. He heard himself groan aloud and at once, though there was no one to see or hear, he clapped his hand over his mouth.

What he had to do was see her, be with her again. He had to get her to retract what she had said, to admit she had said it in the heat of the moment, that it was false, false as hell. A snowball slapped against the window and he jumped up, sure it must have been vindictively thrown. But it was only little kids out there, Isadoros and Kupars and O'Haras, and their snowballs were simply handfuls of snow that contained no stones or pieces of glass.

The sun had come out and a thaw already begun,
drip-drip-drip
off the gutterings. She would come back if he waited long enough, she would have to, but he couldn't bear the inactivity. He was putting on his jacket and slipping the gun inside it when the phone began to ring.

Barry answered it. He thought it might be Carol and he held his breath. A man's voice asked cautiously if Carol was there.

‘No, she's not.'

‘Will she be at Bacchus?'

It was so long since Barry had heard it called this that he had almost forgotten the wine bar's proper name. ‘Is your name Wand?' he said.

There was a silence, whispered into by the sound of indrawn breath. Then the receiver was replaced.

Carol would of course be at the wine bar on a Monday at lunchtime, Barry thought. She would be there until three.

The Channel had been icily calm. Benet wondered if Jay had ever seen the sea before. He stared at the sea with a long concentrated gaze, then turned his face to hers and laughed. It was only during those few early years, she thought, that we laugh with delight at what pleases us. After that, laughter is strictly for amusement only.

They were coming into the harbour at Calais, in a chill grey mist, when she understood where it was she was going. Down to the tip of Spain to Mopsa and her father. She was their daughter and she had a son. Their neighbours, their circle, would know that now. What could be more natural and acceptable than if she and their grandson came to stay with them?

Britain had no extradition treaty with Spain. Or from there she could easily go on to North Africa. She saw herself fleeing with Jay to infinite distances. He was too small for a piggy-back, he sat astride her shoulders, shouting, ‘I like the sea, I like the sea!'

When she got to Paris, she would phone her parents and tell them she was coming. Or perhaps, when she got to Paris, she would abandon the car and take a flight to Malaga.

The house was in darkness. Coming in under the arch, Barry could have sworn he had seen a light in one of the narrow slit windows on the left-hand side but now he thought that what he had seen had probably been no more than the reflected image of one of the streetlamps.

He was going to ring boldly at Terence Wand's door. If she was there with him and they tried to beat him up between them, he didn't care. He had to find her and see her and have his confrontation. If need be, he would use the gun to threaten. For Terence Wand he no longer had any feelings. The man might be Jason's father and he might not. Barry wondered why he had ever cared who Jason's father was. He rang the doorbell, once, twice, then insistently. It might only be his imagination that there was someone in there lying low, refusing to answer. How could you tell? There was no sound, the silence was total. Trying to see into one of the windows showed him nothing but the filtered light from a lamp in the close striking silky dark carpet and the bronze limbs of a statue. He went round to the back and looked through the window of the garage. The car was there. He tried the garage doors but they were locked.

Piles of snow, yellowish or rimmed with grit, were stacked against fences. It had become very cold. Ice glittered where before there had been black wetness. Barry went down to the station. He would try Maureen, he thought, and, if he had to, Iris.

As he came off the Chinese bridge on to the crusty remains of snow that lay in islands on the sea of grass, he saw lights on in Carol's house. His heart jumped as it always did but heavily this time, with pain. Although he knew it was her house he counted from the end to make sure: two, four, six, eight . . .

He had the gun so he wasn't even apprehensive about going through the passage in the dark. Before he entered the black tunnel, slippery underfoot tonight and the fences on either side of it silvered, he got out the gun and held it clutched in both hands the way Paddy Jones had shown him. But he met no one and no one followed him in. He came out into the street at the other end and from there he could see the light from her living-room window shining on to the little bit of front garden. Then the light went
out. He couldn't be sure if all the lights in the house went out, he couldn't see from there.

A woman came out of Carol's house. For a moment he thought it was Iris, the way she clutched her coat round her, the quick, almost scuttling walk. The light from a street lamp showed him her hair, the pale gleaming natural curls. It was Carol herself. She was wearing Mrs Fylemon's fake fur and sandals with very high heels. Sometimes, he remembered, she would come home with her feet blue with cold.

She darted quick glances about her as if she were afraid of something or someone, afraid perhaps that someone might be following her. He didn't flatter himself that she might ever be afraid of him, but he followed her. There seemed nothing else in the world to do, no other occupation for him. Looking about her but never directly behind her, she came into Bevan Square. Black Beauty and Blue Hair were up at the top end of the square, on the corner of the row of shops, draped negligently over their bikes as if the saddles were bar stools.

Barry had replaced the gun inside his jacket. He held on to the butt of it but he didn't get it out. One of them said something, a muttered, indistinct, probably obscene word he didn't catch. Carol thought it was directed at her. She turned, quick as a flash, and shouted at them to piss off. He admired her nerve. The two of them sniggered. Carol was heading for Lordship Avenue.

He slackened his pace, uncertain what to do. It occurred to him that she might merely be going to Iris's. But she too was walking less quickly, and at the corner where the entrance road ran in between the two blocks of flats, she stopped and waited. Or, rather, she paced on one spot, turning round and round on those nearly bare feet, her arms folded and wrapped round her. A little snow, fine as dust, stingingly cold, needled on to his face and the backs of his hands. He pushed his hands inside his jacket. The cold was biting yet the sky was the colour of smoke from a burning rubbish heap.

The car turned in from Lordship Avenue. It turned in, looped round and stopped at the left-hand kerb. Barry couldn't see the driver but he thought the car was the one he had seen an hour before in Terence Wand's garage.

Carol darted across the road as the passenger door swung open. She jumped in – she almost dived in to escape from the intense cold – and the door slammed. The car slid out into Lordship Avenue once more and moved off down the hill.

It had disappeared by the time Barry came out into the main road but he thought he knew where it had gone. There were people standing round something by the kerb, looking at something that lay there. A woman stepped back and began to walk away, leaving a gap in the crowd. Barry saw that a van had run over an animal and its driver was arguing with one of those bystanders who mysteriously spring out of the ground when an accident happens. The thing in the road, black, lean, sleek, apparently unmarked, dead, was the greengrocer's Dobermann. The sight of it made him feel slightly sick.

He meant to walk but a bus came as he reached the stop outside the pub. The gun was sticking out, pushing out the front of his jacket as if he had a deformed breastbone. The woman in the seat opposite stared. He pushed the gun down and held on to it.

They weren't in the bar. He could see that, he didn't have to ask. Alkmini was serving. Kostas sat at a table with a group of middle-aged Greeks like himself. Dennis Gordon, three parts drunk, his face dark and swollen, hung slouched against the black curvy counter. He looked at Barry and their eyes met but neither of them said a word. Then Barry saw the other man's eyes move. Glazed and bloodshot, they strayed back to where they had previously been fixed – on Kostas's black glass clock whose hands pointed to five minutes to nine.

Barry had the bare price of a drink on him but he didn't spend it. He went back outside. In Java Mews, Dennis Gordon's silver-blue Rolls was parked as it had been the
other night. Barry heard the side door of the wine bar swing open and shut with a slam but he didn't look behind him. His instinct had been wrong and she wasn't there and he wondered where to look for her.