Vail Read online

‘How goes it, old sport? Still making a fortune at Thames, I see. Fancy meeting you here!’

  ‘You’re not supposed to recognise me.’

  Pete Rarity frowns. ‘Why not?’ Then his face clears. ‘Oh, you mean the beard and specs? Spot you a mile off, John, with ‘em or without ‘em. What are you frightened of, being followed in the underground again?’

  Vail straightens up and gazes at him narrowly. ‘How do you know about that? Have you been following me?’

  ‘It was all over the papers, John. Centre-spread in the Sun, beard, glasses, the lot. Wearing that get-up is like carrying a placard with your name on it. They even had an interview with the guy following you, what was his name, – ?’

  ‘You mean it was all set up?’ He is sweating under the beard and there are bits of hair stuck to his lips.

  ‘Wouldn’t put it past them; everything is nowadays. You know what the tabloids are like, anything for a giggle.’

  Vail has heard of the conspiracy theory of history but can he really accept this as true? Why, it would mean that every person is suspect, that no actions are innocent. Even Pete Rarity being here, in this light, could be interpreted as due to ulterior motives, for nefarious purposes, instead of mere happenstance.

  Together they crunch through broken glass into white goods and look at the freezers, roomy enough to take an ox. Vail tries not to think of the meat locker, and, by association, Fully Olbin: for all he knows the bug in his balls might be attuned to picking up his thought-waves as well.

  ‘I hear there’s to be a presentation,’ Pete Rarity smiles. ‘By no less a person than the PM. You have come up in the world since that lukewarm cup of coffee in the Soho porn theatre.’

  ‘What presentation?’

  ‘Of the award, old man. Your TV show. ‘Best Current Affairs Entertainment Programme.’ You’ve been told, haven’t you? I thought Ed Flesh, – ’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been told,’ Vail says shortly.

  ‘It’s very well thought of in Govt circles. They like its attitude, its philosophy. Make the spassies sweat for their leg-irons and wheelchairs instead of getting them on a silver platter. There are no free lunches any more, not in this day and age.’

  Vail is distracted by something and can’t think what. Something is niggling at him.

  Pete Rarity goes on, ‘You swim by your own efforts or sink in your own waste products. Homo sapiens crawled out of the primordial slime and that is the true human condition. Anyone who thinks otherwise is living in a fool’s paradise and is in for a rude awakening.’

  What the hell is it?

  ‘I have to be going,’ Vail announces abruptly. ‘There’s a technical run-through at three o’clock.’

  ‘What about a freezer? Aren’t you going to buy one?’

  ‘No, I was just browsing. Freezers don’t interest me.’

  ‘If you’re going I may as well come with you.’

  They pass the mounds of blackened debris and enter the lift and glide downwards in silence except for the subdued whine of hydraulics. The operator is a big strapping fellow in a dark blue uniform with triangular shoulder flashes picked out in silver thread. The lift continues past the ground floor and descends to the basement. The doors open on a cavernous concrete emptiness stretching dimly away. Vail hesitates.

  ‘This isn’t the way I came in.’

  ‘Alternative exit, sir. Security precautions for our better-known customers.’

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘To your left. Follow the green arrows.’

  Vail steps out followed by Pete Rarity in his shabby suit and broken shoes. The green arrows on the walls are very faint, barely discernible. Easy to mistake your way, take a wrong turning, and find yourself lost. Where does this come out, Vail wonders, if they’re below street level? Harrods’ consideration for its clientele has certainly taken a turn for the worse.

  After a while he realises that there are two sets of footsteps behind him, Pete Rarity’s and the lift operator’s. He is about to say something, – suggest the lift operator lead the way as presumably, being an employee, he is familiar with the layout of the place, – when the man says:

  ‘Nearly there. Through the door to your left.’

  It is warm down here in the basement, close to the boiler room, the air dense and humid, and Vail feels itchy and uncomfortable under the beard. He goes through the door into a long passage no more than three feet wide, lined with silver-clad pipes, and at once the heat is suffocating.

  He gasps. ‘Are you sure we can get out this way?’

  ‘This’ll do,’ says Pete Rarity to the lift operator, who touches his cap and stands four-square in the doorway. ‘Stop here.’

  Vail turns round. ‘Are you talking to me?’

  ‘This doesn’t lead anywhere so there’s no point in going on.’ Pete Rarity’s hand dips inside his threadbare jacket and pulls out a small plastic card which he holds up for Vail to see in the dingy light: a serial number, some fine print which Vail can’t read, and in large black capitals the letters UCP.

  ‘Heard of us?’ Pete Rarity asks, raising his eyebrows so that vee-shaped wrinkles ruffle his narrow unattractive forehead.

  Vail has. ‘Though I must say I’m surprised. I always thought they were a northern delicacy and hadn’t caught on down south.’

  ‘What hadn’t?’

  ‘Tripe, pigs’ trotters, cow heel and black puddings.’

  ‘Tripe, – ?’ Pete Rarity says. ‘Not with you, John.’

  ‘You’re a rep for United Cattle Products, am I right? I hadn’t realised they were so popular down here.’

  ‘Look. Under-Cover Police. Nothing to do with tripe or that other stuff you mentioned.’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ Vail says. It was a genuine mistake. Does this mean that Pete Rarity is more important than he has hitherto assumed? He tries to recall if in the past he has been actually openly nasty to Pete Rarity and doesn’t think he has: just as well, because in this day and age people bear grudges, sometimes for years, just waiting for the opportunity to get their own back, stick the knife in, twist it.

  ‘I’d like to ask you one or two questions.’

  ‘Great. Sure. Go ahead.’ Vail shrugs. ‘Why not?’

  Pete Rarity smiles. ‘Why don’t you take the beard off, you look hot.’

  ‘I am a bit,’ Vail says. He takes most of it off, leaving straggly wisps on his chin and upper lip. ‘Phew, that’s better. Anyway, I don’t suppose anyone will recognise me down here will they?’

  ‘Only me and Special Constable MUTCH,’ Pete Rarity says, which makes Vail realise where he’s seen the lift operator before. Until now he hasn’t looked at him properly, which is the usual thing with lift operators. ‘We, – I’m speaking now for the UCP, – have been keeping a friendly eye on you, John. You’ve attained a position of considerable power and influence in the media and we don’t want to see you getting embroiled with the wrong sort of people. You know who I mean.’

  ‘Television producers?’

  ‘Not television producers. They’re fine, politically and morally okay, providing they’re kept in their place. We’re referring to undesirable elements in society at large who may be tempted to use you for their own purposes. I’m sure you know the types I mean.’ He arches one eyebrow.

  ‘Not really,’ Vail says, playing dumb.

  ‘No one’s contacted you then and asked you to do them a small ‘favour’?’

  Vail gives a wide-eyed shake of the head.

  ‘You see,’ Pete Rarity goes on thoughtfully, ‘we are naturally somewhat concerned about those missing hours when your bug stopped transmitting and we lost you on the screen. Any idea what happened?’

  ‘As far as I can recall I was at home in bed fast asleep.’

  ‘Were you screwing?’

  Vail pretends to try to remember, then pretends to give it up as a bad job. ‘I can’t honestly say. Could have been. I screw most nights but that particular night I might not have been. You think if I had been it
might have affected the bug, sent it haywire?’

  ‘Shouldn’t have, it’s the latest model. Who might you have been screwing, do you think?’

  Vail mops his brow. Why Harrods consider it necessary to maintain their basement at this unholy temperature he can’t imagine. ‘Various people. I don’t keep track. Being a famous media personality I have ample scope and opportunity. How long have you been with the UCP?’

  ‘Seven years.’

  Vail shows surprise. ‘And all along I thought you were a down-and-out fringer like me. You kept up the pretence well,’ he says flatteringly. ‘And still do.’

  ‘Part and parcel of the training. If I hadn’t been a member of the UCP you’d never have got the job. I dropped a word here and there in the right quarter. Don’t you remember who it was rang you up to tell you of Bryce Ransom’s interest and who introduced you to him in the first place?’ Pete Rarity wears a fat smug smile.

  Vail is properly nonplussed.

  ‘We set you up with Angie, of course,’ Pete Rarity says, compounding Vail’s frozen incredulity.

  ‘You mean she works for you?’

  ‘On a part-time basis. We spotted you as a likely candidate right from the start but it would have been foolhardy to put all that your way without keeping a close watch on you. Angie updates us on your social contacts and political affiliations and so on.’

  ‘You mean she spies on me?’

  ‘Not spies exactly, that’s putting it too strong. She reports all your movements, who you see, and tells us what you say and think. More a kind of friendly surveillance.’

  ‘And I thought when I met her at Bryce Ransom’s party that she fancied me.’

  Pete Rarity casts a sidelong smirk at SC MUTCH standing stolidly in the doorway, dripping. ‘Hardly, John. You stank. I had one hell of a job persuading her to take you home.’ He sniggers, – ‘You really thought she was attracted to you?’, – and shakes his head pityingly.

  It is something of a struggle for Vail to come to terms with this newly revealed aspect of a situation he thought he had assimilated and thoroughly understood, – rather like learning your name isn’t your name and you’re not the person you thought yourself to be. It opens up chasms of doubt. All along he had seen himself as the victim of arbitrary circumstances, whereas it now appeared that the entire affair had been rigged, stage-managed, from the start. This posed the question, did he prefer the chaotic sway of random forces, – God playing dice, – or these devious backstage machinations as arbiters and directors of his fate? Both were equally chilling. One proposed (a proposition he had accepted unthinkingly) that events were acausal and had little or no relationship one with another, that the world functioned by a series of happy coincidences; while the other had it that we are all locked into an iron grid dictatorship, a totalitarian state of circumstance which directs our moves with cold clinical passion …

  Either way Vail is unhappy, and made uneasier still by the sudden switch from one to the other: he was content to stand on shifting sand and is disturbed to find bedrock underneath his feet. Is this why Pete Rarity brought him down to Harrods’ basement, to impress upon him that the surface world has architectural as well as metaphysical foundations?

  Symbolism, for God’s sake?

  ‘You’re probably wondering why I brought you down here? Yes? Do I see you nod? I thought so. I’m a pretty astute judge of character. The reason is, John, that we’ve received a report from beyond the wire that the bodies of your wife and child have been discovered in shallow graves. One had been strangled, the other smothered in a tartan blanket, within two to three days of each other according to forensic evidence. SC MUTCH and his colleague SC HUCK have testified that both these persons were alive and well when they inspected your vehicle on the M6. Have you anything to say?’

  ‘My daughter wasn’t at all well, she was suffering from some disease or other, toxic waste poisoning or radiation sickness.’

  ‘Even so, she didn’t die of natural causes, and neither did your wife. Have you anything to say on this matter? Can you offer an explanation, convincing or otherwise?’

  Vail moves as far away as possible from the blisteringly hot pipes in their silvery cladding, though due to the narrowness of the passage this isn’t very far. All three of them are perspiring heavily. Droplets are gathering under SC MUTCH’s chin.

  ‘My superiors have instructed me not to return without an answer of some sort,’ Pete Rarity warns. ‘Murder outside the wire isn’t an indictable offence, but nevertheless records have to be completed, files collated and kept up to date. In any case you wouldn’t be charged, being who you are.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be held against me if I said I’d murdered them?’

  ‘Not if you had good reason and didn’t step out of line. After all, two less mouths to feed. You would be tried and executed only if it was felt to be in the public interest.’

  Vail is curious to know how he could be executed. ‘We abolished the death penalty years ago.’

  Pete Rarity gives a little smile. ‘On paper yes. It makes us look libertarian and progressive. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.’

  ‘You mean to say people are actually killed outside the law?’ Vail asks naively. ‘By the state?’

  ‘To all intents and purposes their useful lives are terminated,’ Pete Rarity concedes. ‘It’s all perfectly humane and needn’t concern you.’

  ‘On whose orders?’

  Pete Rarity’s smile hardens into a mask. ‘I must repeat: it’s none of your business. What needs to be done is done. Trust Forte.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with those murders,’ Vail says.

  ‘You must have had something to do with them, John,’ Pete Rarity insists gently. ‘It was your wife and your child and they were last seen in your company. Who else could it have been?’

  ‘It wasn’t me, couldn’t have been, I was on this side of the wire. I’d gone for help.’

  ‘You didn’t come through the wire until after they were dead. The forensic evidence and the record of your entry together confirm that. Why not tell us the truth? It’s a mere detail, nothing more. It would be far better off your conscience, and you wouldn’t be required to pay for it unless, as I say, you did something that displeased us such as fraternising with undesirable elements in society at large, television producers aside. Get it off your chest, you’ll feel cleansed.’

  ‘I didn’t do it.’

  Pete Rarity looks sad. A sigh escapes his lips. He grips Vail’s genitalia through his clothing, though not hard enough to hurt.

  ‘I could order SC MUTCH to press you against these steam pipes and hold you there till they swell up into a blister too big to put back inside your trousers. But really I’m averse to that. And yet there again I have to submit a satisfactory report to my superiors. So I find myself facing something of a dilemma.’

  When Vail doesn’t reply he unzips his trousers and delves soft fingers inside and exposes Vail to the humid air. Vail is yielding and pulpy in his warm hand, sluglike.

  ‘What’s it to be, ladies’ pride and joy or second degree burns and permanent scar tissue?’

  Vail doesn’t entertain the slightest doubt that SC MUTCH will carry out the order. There will be a struggle, a few grunts, an ineffectual scuffle on the concrete floor, but in the end Vail knows he will succumb.

  His tongue rasps like leather in his parched mouth. He says:

  ‘I killed Bev, my daughter.’

  ‘You’ve saved your cock,’ Pete Rarity says, separating the member in question and pushing it aside. ‘Now what about your cookies?’

  ‘I killed Mira, my wife.’

  ‘How did you do it?’ Pete Rarity asks, still holding him.

  ‘Strangled one, smothered the other, buried them both.’

  ‘That’s splendid,’ Pete Rarity says, releasing him. ‘All your problems are over. Well done.’

  ‘What happens now?’

  ‘Nothing. You make yourself decent and go
to your technical run-through with a clear conscience, secure in the knowledge that we’re watching you every minute day and night.’

  [15]

  With the exception of the terrorists everyone was at the presentation ceremony held in the PM’s bunker underneath Horse Guards Parade on the second Saturday in December. This venue was made necessary by the sudden sharp escalation of recent events involving the INLA-Libyan Popular Front and their threat, taken seriously by the authorities, to detonate a nuclear device within the environs of London.

  Fully Olbin, as he confided to Vail, was none too pleased. ‘They’re just trying to grab the limelight and make themselves a household name like Bovril. Underground terrorist cells all over the country are furious.’

  ‘I would have thought they’d have been pleased to see the seat of power blown to smithereens,’ Vail said, puzzled. ‘Isn’t that the object of the exercise?’

  ‘There was no joint consultative meeting,’ Fully Olbin explained sulkily. ‘And anyway, they simply want to rupture the fabric of society whereas we want to replace it with a Neo-Trotskyist fabric. It’s nothing but downright selfish.’

  ‘Have they really got the Bomb or are they bluffing?’

  ‘They’ve got it all right. The question is, can they deliver it?’

  ‘Can they?’

  ‘With a combination of Arabs and Micks, what do you think?’

  After passing through the metal detector arch, which gave Vail a nasty twitch in the scrotum, he and Angie are given a brisk and expert frisking by the guards on the door before being finally allowed to enter. The hall reminds him of the interior of a large silage barn, ceiling and walls one continuous sloping piece supported by curved metal girders reaching to the floor. The floor is concrete, which makes the scuffling of feet sound hollow, like in a railway station.

  However, being eighty feet below ground makes everyone feel reasonably safe and quite jolly.

  As is usual at such gatherings, cliques have already formed. Vail’s clique is at the bar: Laine Vere Jumper, Mrs Stretcher, Bryce Ransom, Virgie Hance, Suze, the director, with Ed Flesh and Wayde Dake making up the party. Tonight, Vail is the star attraction. Passers-by smile at him familiarly, even though he doesn’t know them from Adam, and important people like Ministers and Under-Secretaries nod and smirk in his direction so that he feels naked and exposed to the elements. Such is the price of media fame.