Blind Needle

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PART ONE

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  PART TWO

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  BLIND NEEDLE

  Trevor Hoyle

  First published in Great Britain in 1994 by Calder Publications Limited,

  and in the United States of America in 1994 by Riverrun Press Inc

  This ebook edition published in 2014 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 1984 by Trevor Hoyle

  The moral right of Trevor Hoyle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84866 929 1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  By the same author

  The Relatively Constant Copyrighter

  Rule of Night

  The “Q” Series:

  Seeking the Mythical Future (Book 1)

  Through the Eyes of Time (Book 2)

  The Gods Look Down (Book 3)

  The Man who Travelled on Motorways

  The Last Gasp

  Vail

  To Ray and Mary.

  We’ll always have Paris.

  A note to the reader:

  There are two Chapter Fifteens, which

  should be read concurrently.

  TH

  PART ONE

  ‘Human anguish is the product of the loss by man of his true identity.’

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Flight to Arras

  Prologue

  Positively his last thought is of bodies floating face down in the cold Irish Sea, their buttocks like white stepping-stones straggling away to the rim of the liquid world. When he tries to walk on them they sink sluggishly, soundlessly, under his foot and he has to keep moving, leaping from one to the next – sinking, leaping on, sinking again, leaping on – while the bodies he has disturbed bob gently up and down, submerged except for their white buttocks, their eyes wide open and staring with vacuous curiosity into the cold grey depths …

  After switching off the current Fat Boy unscrewed the needle, taking extreme care not to touch the tip. There was blood on it. He really ought to wear gloves (the skin-tight flesh-coloured kind surgeons wore) because nowadays you couldn’t be sure of anybody. He wrapped the soiled needle in cotton wool and dropped it into a plastic bucket with a broken handle under the workbench.

  The dark-bearded man in the chair was slumped forward, the leather straps round his naked waist and bare arms preventing him from falling. His back was a fiery red bubble, seething with puncture holes. There was no design, no pattern – just an aimless, mindless scribble. Not that Fat Boy couldn’t have done something tasteful (he prided himself on his artistry) but of course that would have given the game away. As good as leaving a trade mark.

  He had the talent right enough. Had the fancy taken him he could have done something decorative in purple and green: a hawk about to land with feathered wings, or a skull with diamonds for eyes. Or maybe a dagger like the one on his own freckled hairless forearm, three pearls of crimson blood dripping from its point.

  His gross shadow undulated across the frosted glass partition separating his workroom from the waiting area in the front of the shop as he made everything shipshape. He was expecting Victor in a little while, to help him dispose of the body.

  But there was one last job to do first.

  He removed the ground-glass stopper from the small bottle and poured clear fluid into a saucer – just sufficient to cover it, but not enough to spill – he wasn’t that daft. With great care he brought the saucer to the chair and raised the limp left wrist and dabbled the finger ends in the solution. He leaned away as he did this, squinting his eyes, but still caught a pungent whiff that stung his nostrils. He then did the same with the right hand.

  Finally, the saucer washed in the sink, his instruments tidied away, Fat Boy unwrapped a chocolate bar and broke off a chunk between his small brown teeth and chewed slowly and luxuriously, squelching the sweet milk chocolate against the roof of his mouth. He leaned against the workbench, staring at nothing.

  The bare room with its dusty light bulb and scarred wooden benches and cracked linoleum wasn’t up to much. But he had his art gallery-pictures torn from Sunday colour supplements and fashion magazines – taped to the yellow gloss walls. They brightened up the place, and sometimes gave him inspiration: an upright classic sports car with huge cowled mudguards, chromium headlights and exposed plumbing; a fashion model under a black dinner-plate hat, all angled shoulders and thrusting hip-bones; the futuristic globes and gleaming organ pipes of a nuclear power plant at night; a sepia child starving in the ochre dust clutching a clean bowl, with eyes bigger than the world.

  The street outside was deathly quiet, except for the rain. It pattered against the shop window, the refraction of the trickling drops smearing the starving child’s face and making its scabbed lips twitch in a sneer or a smile. It was a ghost town all right. The fishing had gone years ago. Nothing had replaced it – no industry, no tourists, nothing. People only came here, ended up here, when there was nowhere else to go: washed up on the beach of black sand, swirling with the rest of the flotsam round the timber pilings of the crumbling Victorian jetties, stuck in the carpet of green sludge that lapped the walls of the old harbour. All that was left were the rusted hulks leaking oil and the skeletons of the fishing boats with their exposed wooden ribs.

  Eventually, as darkness was falling, Victor arrived by the back door. Fat Boy crumpled the wrapper and tossed it in the bucket, sucking the chocolate from the gaps between his teeth. Victor came in from the passage, wrinkling his broad, flat, Slavic nose. The air was stale and dry and reeked of ozone. ‘Bloody awful stink,’ he complained in his polyglot accent of north of England and Polish. ‘He give you any trouble?’

  ‘Naw …’ Fat Boy whinnied. ‘Good as fucking gold. I gave him enough to stun a fucking carthorse before he knew what had fucking hit him.’

  ‘What ’ – Victor stared with narrow slanting eyes – ‘to his back, for God Almighty’s sake.’

  ‘Doodling.’

  ‘Huh? What?’

  ‘Scribbling. Messing about. To pass the time.’ Fat Boy rounded his eyes, grinning broadly. ‘Old Pete here didn’t seem to mind.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know, I don’t know …’ Victor shook his balding head mournfully. ‘What’s the man going to say?’

 
; ‘What the man doesn’t fucking know won’t fucking hurt him, will it?’

  Victor lifted the head back by the hair and ripped off the adhesive plaster covering the mouth. It came away impregnated with the dead man’s beard. He screwed it up, and after two attempts, when it stuck to his fingers, threw it into the plastic bucket.

  ‘Let’s move him now. I got the van.’

  ‘Wait your sweat,’ Fat Boy said. ‘Give it ten minutes till it’s dark. There’s no rush.’

  He unwrapped another chocolate bar with fruit and nuts, broke it in half, and crammed it into his mouth.

  Chapter One

  1

  The driver was going up to Dumfries, and the nearest point on the motorway to my destination was Penrith, where he dropped me. It was a cold day, with a blustery wind, and rain in the air. I got down with my bundle and shouted my thanks as I slammed the door. He was already revving the engine, and I don’t think he heard me, blue diesel fumes swirling as he pulled away down the slip road onto the M6. After the warmth of the cab and the friendly roar of the engine I felt lonely and exposed, as if I had shed a protective layer of skin.

  I shivered, buttoned up my overcoat, and set off at a steady trudge.

  I didn’t know this part of the country. To me – remembering the old maps of my childhood – it was still Cumberland, though I believed it had been renamed Cumbria. Not that I’d been away all those years; it was more that I preferred to think of things as they once were, not to change. Any disruption tends to unsettle me.

  There wasn’t much traffic, and what there was ignored my thumb. I suppose the sight of me was too forbidding, and I could hardly blame them. My long dark overcoat, reaching nearly to the ground, was shabby, and I had a soft felt hat jammed over my ears. My boots were dulled and scratched and held on with knotted laces. Also it was growing dark, and I could understand people not wanting to stop and give me a lift. Probably I would have done the same. Much safer to look straight ahead through the windscreen, frowning a little as if in concentration, and zoom on, pretending you hadn’t noticed the plodding exclamation mark in the margin of the wide empty road …

  But somebody did stop. I must have been thumbing as a reflex action, whenever my wandering, scattered senses picked up the sound of an approaching vehicle, and a car drew in about twenty yards ahead of me. It was a silvery-coloured Datsun with rust patches on the wings and a wire coat-hanger bent into a rough circle as a makeshift radio aerial. The driver, crouched over the wheel, was wearing an anorak with the hood up, the face hidden in shadow.

  The door wasn’t too clever on its hinges and it took three tries to slam it shut before it caught on the catch. I realised, then, why the driver was shrouded in an anorak: one of the rear windows was missing and a blast of icy air swirled inside, sucking at the back of my neck. But I didn’t care; I was glad to be moving. Large drops of rain were smacking the windscreen and there were plenty more in the low dark clouds whipping overhead.

  I glanced back over my shoulder. The road was dark and empty. If S – was following me the trail must have grown cold by now. It was ridiculous. Even in my mind I couldn’t bring myself to articulate his name. I had at least thirty-six hours start on him, and he didn’t even know which direction I had taken, so there was no need to get in a panic.

  The driver flicked on the wiper (there was only one, the driver’s – my side stayed bleary with rain) and I saw that it was a woman’s hand, pale, slender, the nails painted with clear varnish. I sat hunched in my seat, my hands clasped between my knees, my lumpy bundle of possessions, including S – ’s diary, at my feet. My head kept bumping on the roof.

  ‘Where are you heading for? Keswick?’

  Her voice, muffled by the hood, was barely audible above the slip-stream snapping round my ears. I said, ‘Yes, that’s fine. Thanks for stopping. I was prepared for a long walk.’

  ‘Just as well you were. It’s twenty miles.’

  ‘Is that how far it is?’

  ‘You could have caught a bus.’ This seemed to amuse her, and she laughed. ‘That’s if you can find one.’

  There was a low yet persistent rattling noise coming from the engine which bothered me but didn’t seem to bother her. We drove along the wide empty road, the darkness coming down by the minute, the black branches of the trees swaying in the wind. There was a range of mountains in the distance – a thin undulating line against the sky – and nearer, but to our right, shallow wooded slopes steepened and rolled abruptly into mist. I tried to picture the scene in summer, with leaves on the trees and sheep in the fields, a fathomless blue sky overhead and a beaming yellow sun. But my imagination wasn’t up to it; this coldness and darkness and rolling mist would go on forever and ever.

  ‘You don’t live round here, do you?’ she asked me.

  She must have known, of course, because I hadn’t known Keswick was twenty miles away. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve just come up the motorway. I’ve been staying down in – in Cheshire.’

  The hood turned towards me and I saw a single dark eye peering at me, for a moment glimpsed its flat expressionless stare. Then she was watching the road again, and after a silence she said, ‘This place is dead out of season, as you can see, but it’s the best time. Not a good time to look for work though. Are you?’

  I more or less stammered, ‘Oh no. No. I’m here on a visit. My brother. I haven’t seen him in over a year. I hope he still lives here—’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ She gave a short little laugh. ‘Suppose it’s a wasted journey, coming all this way?’

  ‘Then I’ll have to go back,’ I said feebly.

  ‘You could have phoned first, or written to him.’

  She took one hand off the wheel to shake out a cigarette, and offered me the packet without looking. I said, ‘No thanks,’ and she used the dashboard lighter. Smoke eddied in front of her face and then shot away over her shoulder in a thin blue veil through the missing back window. I liked her hands. There were long shallow depressions on the backs of them between the ligatures, and soft hollows below the thumbs.

  I cleared my throat. ‘I think he’d have written me – if he’d moved. I’m pretty sure he would.’

  ‘You don’t sound very close.’

  I’d forgotten how the simplest conversation is like a minefield. Confidently you stride out, with hardly a care, and then you step on a piece of innocent grass and feel something metallic and treacherous underfoot. It doesn’t matter either if you’re careful, watching your step every inch of the way; oh no, you can be trapped, caught, just as easily by a stray bland remark as by malicious curiosity.

  She had switched on the headlights, which through my side of the windscreen made a blank white glare. The world had turned into hazy splintered light and varying shades of grey: the vague splash of headlights, the road streaking by through the side window, the dark clouds overhead I could just about see through the clear arc of the single wipe. We might have been driving headlong towards the edge of the world – the sudden blind plunge into nothingness. She seemed very calm about it, which calmed me, and I put my trust in her; or rather, it was her hands I trusted. Yes I did. I was used to hands doing things calmly and capably, and her hands reminded me of the wings of doves fluttering in slow-motion.

  I didn’t believe we would really plunge over the edge, and I forced myself to relax.

  Just then a white car with an orange stripe along its side went past us at speed, throwing up spray. I caught a glimpse of a checkered cap. The white car went racing ahead, and then it slowed and moved over into our lane. A sign glared redly through the rain-smeared windscreen in front of me, and next to it another sign flashed on and off, saying STOP … STOP … STOP …

  I sat with my hat pulled low over my eyes, my hands clasped between my knees, as the flashing STOP grew bigger, reddening the entire windscreen, as we pulled in behind the white car.

  She said with a sigh, ‘Hell and damnation, what now?’, wrenching at the handbrake. ‘I bet my tail-light isn�
�t working. Either that,’ the hood turned as she looked at me, ‘or you’ve robbed a bank.’

  Two glistening yellow day-glo figures approached. One stayed just outside the edge of the splay of headlights while the other came right up to the car window and leaned down and twirled his finger. She opened the window a couple of inches. Rain scurried in through the gap. The policeman’s hat was swathed in plastic, the raindrops pattering and bouncing off it with a noise like a shower of rice.

  ‘Sorry to stop you, s –.’ He nearly said ‘sir,’ and caught himself, peering in through the gap. ‘Madam. We’re warning all motorists not to pick up hitch-hikers.’ His eyes flicked past her to rest on me.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘What? Beg your pardon, madam?’

  ‘How many shouldn’t I pick up? Three? Ten? Fifty?’

  ‘We advise you not to pick up any, singly or in packs. This is a serious warning.’

  ‘Thank you, officer. I’ll take it seriously.’

  ‘Can I ask, madam,’ he said, looking at me, ‘if you know this person?’

  The hood was turned away, so her facial expression was hidden from me. She didn’t pause or hesitate, but said lightly, ‘Oh I think so, officer. I ought to know my own brother.’

  ‘And where are you going?’

  ‘We’re on our way home. As quickly as possible, to get out of this foul night. I should think you’re sorry you can’t do the same, aren’t you?’

  She wound up the window as the smeared yellow figures faded into the rain sweeping through the headlights. The STOP sign went out, the car signalled and shot off. She put the car in gear, grinding it over the beating of my heart, and pulled out.

  2

  Something was being ground metallically and with great persistence – a bearing perhaps – it might have been anything, I knew nothing about cars. She was crouched forward, as if staring intently ahead at something, muttering under her breath; but it was inaudible with the rush of air and complaining engine.