Blind Needle Read online

  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.

  3

  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.

  He’d lost his bearings – he was creating a cyclone in miniature as he swung left, then right – and I said low and distinct, ‘Over here, you tub of lard,’ and he winnied a laugh.

  ‘Over here,’ I repeated, ‘Can’t you find me?’

  ‘Yeh,’ he gasped. ‘I’ll find you.’

  ‘You’re going the wrong way.’

  ‘Oh no I’m not, squire,’ Wayne said, lurching through the wall of white, a ghostly apparition made solid flesh, his wide pale sweating face suddenly in front of mine, sucking in air through a grin.

  As his face came nearer his grin kept on getting broader. It kept on widening and widening until it took up the entire lower half of his face. Very gradually, as in slow-motion, the grin transformed itself into a rictus of agony because I had gripped his forearm and was using all my weight to hold it against the blistering pipe. He was actually, I realised, screaming without sound. I could see the square brown teeth right back to the innermost one, the arched red roof of his mouth and the gaping oesophagus, observing every detail as I increased the pressure, holding his forearm trapped between the towel and the scalding pipe. He sank to his knees, slobbering at me to let go. I thought, Why the hell should I? The fat slob had no qualms about sticking me with the needle (twice now, here and in the pub lavatory) so I didn’t see why I should let him off easy. I pushed harder, and could even feel the heat seeping through the towel, so it must have been unbearable against naked flesh.

  The syringe had fallen from his hand: I didn’t hear it due to his strangled scream, which eventually came, obliterating the tinkle of metal and glass. By this time he was moaning and gibbering, so I let go, leaving him curled in on himself like the man in the harbour, banging his head on the tiled floor to relieve the agony.

  I moved away and the mist billowed over the heaving form like a shower of soft fresh snow. I turned and groped for the door.

  The flight back – each successive room brighter, cooler, less opaque – was like swimming upwards to light and air from the crushing depths of a primordial ocean. I shivered, the air like ice-water in my lungs, tightly wrapping the towel around me. The man with the lace – work of blue veins was under the cold shower once more, or perhaps he had never moved. Other figures, sitting or standing motionless, I avoided – I remembered Wayne’s accomplice, the thin youth named Ray with the chicken-claw birthmark.

  In the locker room the Polish-sounding attendant was pushing a rubber squeegee along the floor. He looked past me into the first of the steam rooms, as if expecting to see someone. When no one appeared he turned his back on me, and worked his way quickly and perfunctorily towards the door.

  He wasn’t in the corridor when I came out, still damp under my clothes, buttoning up my overcoat. Perhaps he wasn’t the one who had informed on me. He’d never seen me before, had he, so why should he? Then how had Wayne known where to find me? It was too coincidental; in other words not a coincidence at all – it had to be the Polish man – I discounted the mayor and the finicky chairman. They didn’t possess the imagination to be involved in a thing like this. Benson’s ring of spies and informers, it seemed, covered the town like a sticky spider’s web.

  I went past the bored girl in the glass-walled cubicle, lips miming to dreams of seduction, and down the steps, wondering too if she was as innocent as she seemed. Brickton couldn’t be trusted; its streets reeked of deceit, its people infected by a kind of vicious indifference.

  I walked quickly up the street past the chain-link fence of the cleansing department to the corner and glanced back. There was no one following. Long cast-iron pipes, painted black and stencilled ‘Stanton & Stavely’, were stacked on wooden trestles inside the council compound. They were of the type used for sewerage systems, or to carry water. Under these pavements the Victori
an pipes, like the rest of the country’s antique plumbing, would be crumbling to rust – then how, I wondered, could a town like Brickton possibly afford to replace them? The disposal of sewage, out of sight and out of mind, was the least of its problems. Yet the council had managed to invest several hundred thousands of pounds in cast-iron pipework. Mr Patundi, had he been alive and known about it, would have strenuously objected to his rates and taxes being spent on such a project. In its place he would have demanded more Panda cars, bobbies on the beat, detention centres, birching frames.

  4

  What the fuck did I care, I asked myself, as I went up the steep cobbled hill to the high street, if this area of the map was made blank? It was only, as Trafford had said, what we deserved. The rats, or the ants – or better still the cockroaches – might make a better go of it. Brickton could be the site of a hope-filled renaissance once we’d cleared out and sterilised the ground, scorched the earth clean.

  And in the meantime, what did I want? Not justice (such a puny, milk-and-water, bloodless and pious aspiration). I wanted to see others suffer for what had been done to me. I wanted recompense for the two years I had spent going quietly and politely insane. I wanted someone else to scream for every time the needle had entered my flesh.

  Unsurprisingly, it had started to rain. I was glad of the excuse to keep my head bowed as I moved through the afternoon shoppers, though I still felt vulnerable, aware of my shabbiness even here. I walked several yards past two flimsy perspex and aluminium space modules, not realising what they were, preoccupied with the search for the call boxes I remembered, bright red flags in a monotone world. Then the old-fashioned penny dropped; I went back and shut myself inside.

  I don’t know what I expected to hear in Diane Locke’s voice – anger perhaps, outrage, maybe disappointment – but what I got instead was brittle and tight-lipped, as if the bakelite receiver had altered her voice, giving it a priggish 1930s aloofness.

  ‘Most considerate of you, under the circumstances. Where the hell are you, if I might ask?’

  I told her and she said, ‘You’re a bloody fool, you know, even to think of going back there. And never mind that you promised to stay.’

  Long spits of water appeared on the perspex sides as the rain began to fall heavily. There was a subdued steady patter on the aluminium roof. ‘I know I broke my promise. I’m sorry. Is that what you want to hear?’

  ‘I listened to you,’ Diane Locke said tightly, ‘and I believed you. I even lied to the police to protect you. It seems you’re willing to accept my help only when it suits you.’

  I didn’t say anything to this, because it was true. I saw her in the dark varnished hallway, lying back on the stairs, skirt up, legs apart, a greedy, fierce, plaintive look in her half-closed eyes. The memory aroused me. What is it about those women who look and sound as though they never would and really can’t wait to do it?

  ‘And what, if anything, have you accomplished by this stupidity?’ she asked me, not prepared to concede a fraction, much less an inch.

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Then why the hell expose yourself to the risk?’

  She was adept at asking questions I couldn’t answer. ‘I am grateful for what you’ve done for me, Diane,’ I said. ‘Really.’

  ‘Don’t make me sound like a fucking charity. I did it because I wanted to do it, not for any mealy-mouthed gratitude.’

  ‘Will you pick me up?’

  She was silent for a while, just her breathing on the line, as if the issue was finely balanced, by no means decided. Then: ‘Where?’

  I looked along the rainswept street to where the road divided into two tributaries running either side of the town hall. There was a Safeways on the corner, with a dry strip of pavement under a glass canopy. When I suggested this as a place, she said, ‘All right. It’ll take about thirty minutes. Wait inside the shop till you see me. I’ll be in the van.’

  A sudden flash of fear made me blurt out, ‘Don’t leave the briefcase where someone might see it. Hide it away, somewhere safe.’

  ‘Everything’s perfectly all right. Graham’s here.’

  ‘Do you think they’d hesitate for a minute just because your father’s there?’ I slipped in another coin as the beeps sounded. ‘I’m serious about this, Diane. They’ll kill to get it – anyone who’s in their way. And after they get it they’ll kill anyway, because they’ve nothing to lose.’ This was hopeless. It was the kind of cheap melodrama to make her look to heaven and shake her head. She was a writer, and things like this never happened to writers, except to read about in other writers’ books.

  ‘They don’t know where I live,’ Diane Locke said, which was eminently sensible, practical, and true, but which failed to calm me.

  ‘You don’t know Benson. He has spies everywhere.’

  ‘Peter …’ The weary, exasperated sigh of the decent property-owning middle class soothing foolish juvenile fears. ‘Benson may be rich and influential, a businessman and a councillor, but he doesn’t rule the county as if it were his private kingdom. This isn’t Italy. You take everything too far.’

  I agreed that I probably did. I didn’t think so, but I knew where to draw the line. I had already demanded too much of her, infiltrated her normal, quiet decency with too many dark, subversive twists and turns. By upbringing, education and temperament Diane Locke lived on the bright sunny uplands of life; it was not possible to make such a person comprehend the daily terror in which some lives are lived. Either it was there – this pervasive fear – all around, in everything, like a menacing mist that obscured the sun, or you just didn’t see it, saw only the clear, transparent, uninterrupted light.

  I was pleased about the rain because it hid me from the outside world. It was like the childhood belief that if you shut your eyes tight you couldn’t be seen. I was as safe here, on the main street, as anywhere – even if Wayne came looking for me, nursing his hand and cursing me, hypodermic at the ready. Before he got close I’d be sure to spot him: the pale blob of face, the fatty rump of his shoulders, the dripping dagger.

  It almost seemed a good omen – Safeways as a place of refuge (browsing amongst the shelves, pretending at normality, all the while keeping an eye on the street through the plate-glass window) I thought as I came out of the call box onto the wet pavement and saw the small white Panda car standing at the kerb, two pairs of eyes observing me through the windscreen. It might have been parked there for minutes: I had been too engrossed in the conversation with Diane Locke to notice, too busy fretting about Wayne.

  I turned up my collar and walked on. One of the policemen wound his window down, called out sharply, ‘Excuse me.’ It was a warning to me that he hadn’t said ‘sir,’ and I knew what was coming.

  I checked my stride.

  The policeman kept his head inside the car because of the rain. He was young, early twenties, with a short, neatly trimmed reddish-brown moustache and a shaving nick on his smooth chin. His eyes slid from my face, drifted down to my overcoat and trousers, dwelt on my muddy boots. ‘Just a minute, if you don’t mind.’ He reached for the door handle.

  The rain had emptied the street of all but a few hardy souls, which meant there were few people to dodge. I heard the young policeman shout, ‘Wait! You! I said stop!’ followed a few seconds later by the slamming of car doors.

  By then I had reached the Safeways on the corner. I turned the corner at full tilt and ran down the steep cobbled street towards the terraced maze of jerry-built properties crammed below.

  Chapter Ten

  1

  By now I was familiar enough with the geography of the town to know that the harbour lay on my left, the streets with their rows of dilapidated houses and derelict shops straight ahead and to the right, and instinct or something else made me veer in that direction. It was the desire to be hidden, no doubt; and perhaps I felt the harbour was too exposed, and I was also afraid of getting bogged down there.

  I didn’t look behind me; there was no need when
I could hear one of them clomping down the hill, getting louder, gaining. The other would be on the radio, calling for reinforcements. Block Nile Street at the junction with Aboukir Street. Send somebody to seal off Trafalgar Street, and make sure he doesn’t cross the footbridge over the river leading to the old iron foundry …

  The names didn’t matter, they were always the same in these sorts of towns. Did the police know who they were looking for? Was it a routine alert, ‘vagrant acting suspiciously – hold for questioning,’ or a jubilant ‘it’s definitely him, Super, the Asian’s killer?’ What a stroke of luck for them that I’d walked down the high street in broad daylight and accomodatingly lingered in a phone box for ten minutes so they could study me at leisure. It was a red-letter day right enough. A triumph for police vigilance, initiative, sharp thinking. Citations and commendations all around. Drinks on the chief.

  The pavement suddenly gave out and I stumbled over a scrubby patch of dirt and grass and yellowing dog turds. It was a small piece of common ground strewn with black plastic bags of rubbish, an enamel bath still with its old-fashioned taps, the stripped shell of a car, and a couple of soggy half-burnt mattresses. The end of a street and two alleys met up here, at differing angles. I made a diagonal run to get out of his line of sight, did an L-turn and dived for the nearest corner. I’d reached it and ducked into the alleyway as his footsteps came pounding up the pavement. It seemed that I’d made the right decision for once: there was dirt underfoot, not cobblestones, which muffled the thump of my boots. Now if I could only get to the next corner before he found the right alleyway there was a better than evens chance that I might shake him off. Some of the backyard gates were broken, a few hanging on one hinge; one leap and I could be inside. It was worth the risk. I hesitated, glanced behind, saw a broken gate coming up, and ran past it. The fear of being trapped, with no means of escape, between a locked back door, an outside lavatory and two walls overcame me: at least out here I could run, and keep on running, even if it killed me.