Blind Needle Page 26

  Startled, I shied away from the window as a white fist appeared and rapped hard on the glass. Outside I could vaguely make out a pale smudge of face inside a hood. It took me a moment to locate the right button on the panel to wind the window down.

  ‘They’re coming this way – I’ve just passed them on the street!’

  When I didn’t immediately respond Diane Locke said even more urgently, ‘Get out of there, they’ll be here any minute now! Come on, my car’s down the track. Move!’

  The interior light came on as I opened the door and she saw the state of my clothes. She said faintly, ‘Oh my God, what happened? What have you done? Where’s the woman?’

  I got out, wearily shaking my head. ‘I don’t know. She might be dead …’

  Diane Locke made as if to grab me by the shoulders and shake me. She checked herself instead, and backed away with both fists clenched. ‘You bloody fool. Didn’t anything I say sink in? Everything I told you about your wife and her illness was true – you loved her, you bloody fool. That woman isn’t your wife. She was never your wife. She means nothing to you. Oh God what have you done?’

  Her face became ugly, as if she was about to cry.

  ‘You couldn’t have harmed her, could you? You couldn’t do it, I just know—’

  ‘No you don’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t know myself. Part of me went through with it. I stuck the needle in her throat and saw her die, curled up in the mud – but another part of me was carrying her in my arms, and she was safe.’ I heard my voice trembling. ‘I thought she was my wife, come back at last. But she wasn’t. My wife is dead.’

  I felt oddly at peace saying this. It was the immensely relieved sensation of at last letting go, of relaxing a stranglehold grip, and allowing yourself to drift with the current. The tide swept you in, swept you out, and given time, with luck, would sweep you back again.

  The interior spotlight stayed on for a moment or two after I shut the car door. It went off, leaving us in complete darkness. The moon struggled to free itself of entangling grey clouds. As it did so, and its thin watery light washed over us, we both turned at the sound of footsteps and saw figures coming towards us along the track.

  Diane Locke grabbed my sleeve and started pulling me to where the Datsun was parked, twenty yards away next to the chain-link fence. We had covered about half the distance before the realisation dawned that the figures were nearer to the car than we were. I started to retreat, but by then it was too late, and we dithered halfway, caught stupidly in no-man’s land between the Datsun and the Mercedes.

  The figure in front – obviously Wayne from his squat bulk – saw us and broke into a waddling run. Gaz easily overtook him and raced on ahead.

  I kicked at the torn, sagging fence and scrambled through, holding aside the sharp ends of broken wire. As she ducked to follow me, Diane Locke said breathlessly, ‘There must be another way out – mustn’t there?’ She sounded hopeless, as if she already knew the answer.

  We kept as close to the fence as we could, where a thin crust of cinders lay over the mud, and worked our way towards the black shapes of the half-submerged hulks. Soon there was more mud than cinders, and then it was all mud, so that each step became a torturous effort, the age-old nightmare of floundering with leaden limbs and aching muscles as you flee from the dreadful spectre of your worst imaginings. I thought of Trafford in his slanting home, himself and all his possessions heaped in a corner. Now it seemed very inviting, a private lair like Trafford’s. Wayne and the others couldn’t search every hulk in the harbour before daybreak, and it was physically impossible for us to go on much further: we desperately needed a corner, a hole to hide away in. Trafford had found refuge here, and so might we.

  In the shifting waves of moonlight I saw a square black shape a few yards in front of us. It looked too small to be a ship or even a fishing boat, but it didn’t matter and we didn’t care. We slithered towards it in near total exhaustion. The sides were steep and pitted with rust. It was too steep to climb, I thought, straining up to my full height and reach. My fingers curled over a projecting rim, and I hung on until I got another handhold. Diane Locke shoved from below, and I hauled myself up and hooked my leg over, sitting astride the scaly rim of what I now saw was a massive iron dredging bucket. I pulled Diane Locke up after me. We couldn’t speak, we just barely had the strength to cling there, perched uneasily on the rim, and it was then – as if a magician had waved his wand – that the vapid moonlight vanished and the entire dark sky was instantly transformed into bright, dazzling daylight. In a trice the harbour and the flat basin of mud with the corroding wrecks stuck in it was brutally exposed under a football stadium glare of floodlights.

  As were we, perched up there, for the few seconds it took the shock to register, before we skidded down to the slimy bottom, half-blinded by the raw sodium-yellow light pouring down from the gantries.

  ‘They can’t – can’t have seen …’ Gasping for breath, Diane Locke ran out of words with the sentence unfinished. Her eyes, luminous with fear, stared out at me from the deep shadow of the hood. She hadn’t truly believed, until tonight, how casually and dispassionately violence can be inflicted upon others; that to those of a certain mentality it is nothing more nor less than a natural form of self-expression.

  Something clicked in my head when I saw the look in her eyes. A memory swam up to the surface of Diane Locke in the cold bare back bedroom, my hands around her throat. Had I killed her then, as the voice insisted, half-convinced me, I had killed Susan? Obviously not. She was here, palpably alive and scared stiff. If Diane Locke was alive, maybe Susan was alive too. Maybe.

  ‘They must have found her by now,’ Diane Locke said, picking up the thread of my unspoken thought. ‘You didn’t hurt the woman, did you? I can’t believe you did. The only thing they want from you is that damn tape. Forget all the rest.’

  This was a feeble attempt at reason and logic, trying to impose sensible middle-class order on the world’s crazy chaos. A few soothing words in the right quarter, a polite explanation here and there, and you could avert World War III.

  ‘Why didn’t you give it back to them when they asked for it? What the hell does it matter? You hid it away in the house somewhere, didn’t you? Can’t you remember where?’

  Was she really so naïve as to believe that if I handed over the tape, everything would be forgiven and forgotten?

  ‘Here.’ I fumbled in my pocket for the folded torn-out page and my fingers touched something smooth and round. I gave her the paper. ‘In the bookcase in the front room. I don’t really care what you do with it.’

  I put my hand in my pocket and the smooth hard shape was still there. I took it out and held it up in the brilliant light so that we could both see, Diane Locke and me, that it was still loaded with its pretty rose-coloured cocktail.

  She gave a thin smile. ‘Dr Morduch would be proud of you.’

  I flung the syringe away with all the strength I had left.

  From above our heads came a clanking and grinding, followed by the rattle of chain links taking up slack. The iron bucket shuddered, groaned, and a shock-wave ran down the sides and into our spines as the bucket was sucked free and began to move, swaying ponderously like a giant cradle. The rattling increased in tempo, and we felt ourselves lifted up, higher and yet higher, towards the harbour mouth. It struck me that Benson was economical with his ideas: he had got rid of the toxic sludge by dumping it, so why not dispose of one more tiresome problem in the same way? And who could say he was wrong? Out there was a liquid sea of mud, deep as the harbour bottom. Dropped from this height we would plunge into its depths and find ourselves (as in a dreamscape of exquisite horror) swimming in slow-motion through icy black treacle.

  I didn’t honestly know, couldn’t decide, whether this was to be feared or welcomed. Blackness everywhere, total as blindness, followed by a slow, lingering subsiding as the senses dulled, and finally death. It might even be peaceful. I knew someone who had died like that, and s
he had died peacefully – so I believed, hoped and prayed. Above our heads the chain clanked and rattled, tautening as it tilted the iron bucket; Diane Locke grabbed for me and hung on as we slithered down the sides to the open mouth.

  2

  The fall seemed to take forever. I had oceans of never-ending time in which to see the harbour and its fleet of wrecks, the encircling arms of Victorian stone jetties, and the smooth inky surface of the vast dark pool which sucked in the blaze of floodlights and swallowed it without a single reflecting gleam. Each detail was sharp and exact, down to the knot of figures beneath one of the gantries on the harbour wall, clustered next to the signboard which said: ‘Site Acquired for Benson Developments (Holdings) Plc’ – everything laid out as clear as day under the curtain of light.

  But – where was Diane Locke? I couldn’t even see her. She had slipped from my grasp and disappeared, as if she had ceased to exist, or had never existed and I had invented her.

  The fall lasted a lifetime and was over in seconds. The daylight brightness was extinguished and the world turned into blackest night. I had anticipated the blackness and the cold, had prepared myself, but not the intense pressure, which wrapped itself around me in a tight clammy compress, squeezing my head in a freezing vice and crushing my chest with a weight like lead. My eardrums felt as if they were about to implode.

  Worst of all, my body didn’t rise, as it would have done in a watery medium, it stayed motionless, held in viscous suspension. I realised with dread that I might swim with all my strength, and yet be swimming deeper towards the bottom instead of up to the surface, and never realise my mistake. I just had to hope and pray that blind instinct would guide me upwards. There was a burning sensation in my lungs, my chest heaved, and it took all the willpower I had left to resist opening my mouth and gulping in great draughts of cold liquid mud as if it was fresh air.

  I struck out – upwards, sideways or downwards I didn’t know – with the last few shreds of strength I possessed, the oxygen in my lungs nearly exhausted, clawing towards what I thought was the light.

  I was wrong. But it wasn’t the mud, it wasn’t the light, it was the darkness that deceived me. I had been clawing towards the light, and when no light appeared I continued to thrash about, even when my hands encountered no resistance, not realising that in order to conceal his murderous act under the cloak of darkness, Benson had turned off the lights. Through the drumbeat of blood pounding in my ears I could hear hushed, angry voices, arguing over the exact spot where the bodies had disappeared under the featureless black crust between the stone jetties. When I cleared my eyes I saw the beams of flashlights raking the harbour mouth.

  More than anything I wanted to rest and ease the burning pain in my lungs, but I had to keep moving to stop myself sinking. In an awkward half-swimming, half-crawling fashion I dragged myself towards the harbour wall, and reaching out I recoiled with disgust as my groping hand touched human flesh. It had the consistency of cold, stiff putty. The body lay on its side, one arm carelessly flung out, its face half-submerged, the nostrils clogged. It could only be Diane Locke. I was convinced it must be her until I realised by its rigidity that rigor mortis had set in, which meant that it had been there for twelve hours at least. The corpse was Trafford’s. It was a grisly coincidence and the kind of ironic twist he would have appreciated, that Trafford, who had first shown me the body in the mud, should have ended up the same way, as if he had foreseen the predestined manner of his own death.

  The harbour wall was close enough for me to hear them talking, even to discern the nervous tremor in Benson’s voice as he directed the beams of flashlights. Possibly he would be happy if the black basin of mud lay undisturbed and unbroken, happier still if he could spy a body, and he got his wish. Somebody called out as the beams skimmed the surface, and they converged in a glowing cone of light on the half-submerged body resting on its side, an arm flung stiffly out in a gesture of appeal.

  ‘That’s him,’ I heard Wayne say, with gloating satisfaction. ‘That bastard won’t bother you no more. He’s a stiff ‘un.’

  ‘What if he – doesn’t sink?’ asked Benson agitatedly, almost pitifully.

  It was the woman who answered, still doing his thinking for him. ‘So what?’ she said calmly. ‘There’s another load due at seven this morning, and that’s as good a place as any to dump it.’

  I held on with frozen fingers to a corroding iron ring, listening to the scuffle of footsteps on stone as they departed. The beams of the flashlights swung away and the harbour with its derelict fleet of mud-bound hulks was returned to the night. I waited until all was silent, my head aching from the cold, needles of ice piercing the soft tissue of my brain, and tried to haul myself up. I hadn’t the strength. I tried again and my dead fingers slipped from the iron ring. How many more corpses would the mud finally conceal, along with mine and Trafford’s? At least one, unless Diane Locke had the strength and the will to live, and the amazing good luck to survive. I lay on my back and drifted a little way with my eyes open until at last I went under.

  Epilogue

  Graham Locke came into the kitchen and dropped the mid-week edition of the Cumbrian Courier on the table. At the top a small heading, ‘EC Decision “Any Day Now” predicts Councillor,’ preceded the main headline: ‘MARINA GETS GREEN LIGHT.’ There was a photograph showing spidery gantry towers against a skyline, with the caption ‘Before’, and an artist’s impression of the finished marina – ‘After’.

  ‘That’s the last time I do Edinburgh,’ Graham Locke said, putting the kettle on the gas-flame and reaching for the tea caddy. ‘I stayed with Michael, which saved on hotel bills, but I’m still out of pocket, what with petrol and meals.’

  ‘Why, didn’t you sell much?’

  ‘About two hundred quids’ worth,’ he said gloomily. ‘Which works out at less than seventy clear profit for three days’ work.’

  He craned his head round to read the title of the book next to his daughter’s coffee cup. ‘Flight to Arras. Is that one of ours?’

  ‘It was on the shelf in the living-room.’

  ‘Don’t think I’ve read it. Any good?’

  ‘I haven’t started it yet,’ Diane Locke said, finishing her coffee and getting up from the table.

  Her father poured hot water into the teapot, scratching the back of his head at the same time, making tufts of white hair stand awry. He glanced towards the kitchen window, boarded up with plywood. ‘Must get that fixed today, and put a new catch on,’ he said, nodding sternly as if to remind himself. He brought the teapot to the table. ‘Though what they expected to find is beyond me. Nothing’s safe nowadays, is it? Lucky you were here at the time.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it was. Very lucky.’

  ‘Driving into Granthelme, are you?’

  ‘To the post office,’ she said, picking up the book and the tiny cassette tape. ‘Anything to post?’

  ‘No thanks. I’ll see you at lunch?’

  ‘Yes. I shan’t be more than an hour.’

  Diane Locke went through into the hallway and came back a minute later wearing a long tweed double-breasted coat, arranging a pale blue chiffon scarf at her throat. She smiled and said, ‘Right. See you later then.’

  ‘Did you find that address?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes, it was in the phone book, as you said. Potter J. W. Those are the right initials, aren’t they?’

  Her father nodded. ‘Councillor James Walter Potter. I’ve sold him one or two books on industrial archaeology. Cantankerous old cove.’

  Diane Locke kissed her father and ruffled his hair, and went out into the crisp bright day, which seemed to promise the first touch of spring. She got into the car and drove off down the muddy lane.

 

 

 
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