Blind Needle Page 5

  For these reasons it now struck me as odd that Benson, of all people, should choose to live here. If not exactly rich, he was, as far as I knew, comfortably off. But of course he wouldn’t live ‘here’ – not in the town itself. Instead I imagined a large house in its own grounds with a curving gravel drive, sloping lawns, several greenhouses, and with views of cornfields perhaps, a pale road winding aimlessly into the distance, a glimpse of the sea in the cleft of hazy blue hills.

  Eventually I came to a busy main road, dust and diesel smoke billowing up in gritty blue clouds from tankers and articulated lorries. The trailers clanked and rattled emptily and it occurred to me that their purpose was not to transport goods but to grind and clank endlessly through the streets in a parody of industrial busyness, maintaining the illusion in their desperate noise and hurry that schedules were tight, deadlines had to be met, time was money, export or die. There would be a depot somewhere with empty trailers going in one door and empty trailers coming out of another. Men in brown coats with spectacles stuck together with adhesive tape scurried about clutching clipboards and waving sheaves of dockets. Drivers clocked on and off. Managers in glass-walled offices looked down frowningly on the frantic bustle and consulted wall-charts, riffled through desk diaries, picked up the phone and asked to be put through to Maintenance Supplies. The charade kept everyone happy. The lorries and tankers trundled through the streets in circles, taking different routes to vary the monotony. Everyone complained of the noise and the dirt and the smoke – but then that was industry for you. Where there’s muck there’s brass.

  This was the final bitter conundrum: there was plenty of muck all right – floating in the air, lying in the gutters – but where was the brass?

  The streetlights came on. The display lights in the shops flickered into life, laying bare for scrutiny their paltry contents: cheap shoes, reconditioned washers and fridges, second-hand clothes, a dusty jumble of broken television sets, heaps of yellowing paperbacks and warped LPs, a row of coloured plastic toilet seats. These were the few traders that were still in business; the rest were silent behind rusty iron grillework or battened over with raw timber covered in fly-posters shiny with glue … St Thomas’s Jumble Sale, Admission 10p … New Orleans Trad Jazz Night … Be Born Again – Join the Eternal Flame! … AIDS Helpline at Your Service … We Do House Clearances – Best Prices Paid …

  I turned a corner into a narrower, gloomier street. There was a row of flyblown shops, most of them empty and ransacked, one with colour photographs from magazines taped to the window which might have been a gent’s hairdressers. Halfway down the street, above a window blurred with condensation, a sign said: E GA FOO S ORE.

  There was a ‘Room to Let’ card in the window, propped amongst the haricot beans, chickpeas, sacks of roots and jars of chutney.

  A bell jangled but no one came. The air was dense with the smell of spices and the mingled odours of an Asian bazaar. Motheaten fans of dried leaves hung from the ceiling, masking the single flourescent tube. Vibrant green vegetable shoots, fastened with rubber bands like bunches of daffodils, and dark purple fruits, shiny as bowling balls, lay in splintered boxes, peeped out through shredded tissue paper.

  I could supply the missing ‘D’ and ‘T’ to make ‘FOO S ORE into ‘FOOD STORE’ but I couldn’t work out the ‘E GA’ part of it. A man appeared with heavy, sad, sleepy eyes and a thick white stubble extending into the open neck of a collarless cotton garment.

  I nodded to the card in the window. ‘Is it still free, the room? Available to rent?’

  He blinked slowly, heavy eyelids coming down and going up again like wrinkled blinds. ‘You would like this room?’ His expression didn’t alter, though he sounded faintly incredulous.

  ‘How much?’

  He rubbed the white stubble; his fingernails were long and curved and rimmed with dirt. ‘Twenty pounds. One week,’ he said abruptly. He pointed above his head. ‘Up there.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t have that much.’ He frowned at me, the blinds closed and slowly opened. ‘It’s too much money,’ I said. ‘I don’t have enough.’

  ‘Fifteen pounds.’

  ‘I can give you twelve.’

  ‘Twelve pounds,’ he said, and he nodded. ‘In front.’

  He motioned me to come forward. ‘Come through please.’

  He came out from behind the boxes and sacks and squirmed sideways to get through a half-open door. The passage was crammed with produce which was why the door couldn’t be fully opened. We mounted some dark stairs. The Indian was labouring, his chest wheezing: the smell of garlic enveloped me like a pungent gas. He wore loose slippers over thick white socks, flap-flapping ahead of me across the landing and into a room directly above the shop.

  He switched on the light and beckoned me inside.

  There was an iron bedstead and a bare flock mattress with broad blue stripes, a bolster without a cover, a few grey blankets on a chair. On the marble top of the washstand, as if to justify that this genuinely was a ‘Room To Let’, some thoughtful soul had placed an enamel bowl inside which was a plastic jug of the type that garages give away in exchange for tokens. The wardrobe had a mirror with a bevelled edge set into the door, and my distorted reflection shimmered across its surface as I went to the window and looked down into the darkened street through lace curtains sagging under their burden of grime. I was safe here. No one lurking in the doorway of the abandoned shop opposite. S – wouldn’t have a hope in hell of ever finding me in this godforsaken rat-hole.

  ‘Where are your luggages?’ the Indian asked me.

  I turned and held up my bundle.

  ‘What time do you stay?’ He stretched his arms wide as though measuring a fish.

  ‘A week,’ I shrugged. ‘Not longer.’

  The heavy eyes studied me.

  ‘I hope to find work.’

  ‘Here?’ A long slow blink. Stupendous incredulity.

  I suddenly found the missing letters to complete the name of his shop. BENGAL. I said rashly, ‘I have a friend – here, in the town – he promised me a job. I’ll see him tomorrow.’

  ‘No money back,’ he said sullenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Twelve pounds for one week or less. No refusal.’

  ‘No refund,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

  He flapped across to the washstand and looked inside the jug. Then a thumb with a vicious curved nail jerked towards the landing. ‘Toilet next door.’ He twirled an invisible tap. ‘Water – if you need.’

  He went to the door, flap-flap-flap, and the sight of the light switch must have reminded him. ‘Lights finish twelve o’clock,’ he said, pointing at the bulb in its furred shade. He jabbed down at his feet. ‘I turn box off twelve o’clock. Lights finish,’ he swiped the air with his vicious claws.

  ‘That’s okay. I won’t need it.’

  ‘Your friend a businessman?’

  ‘Sort of, yes.’ I dropped my bundle on the floor. ‘A man called Benson.’

  He stared at me, eyes dark and liquid, suddenly alert. ‘Councillor Benson is your friend?’

  I leant over the bed, testing it with my outstretched hands. I hadn’t expected the name to mean anything, it was just something to reassure him. I said, ‘You know him?’

  ‘I meet him twice. I make complaints. These yobboes break my window and the police do nothing.’ He became agitated. ‘I am respectable. But when the police come they laugh and make’ – he swayed to and fro, waving his hands – ‘I dunno the word. Riddles. No, no …’

  ‘Jokes?’

  He nodded vigorously. ‘They make jokes. And do this –’ He stood in the doorway, shrugging elaborately under the shapeless garment that hung to his knees. ‘I make complaint to Councillor Benson. He is a businessman like me. B-H Haulage Company Limited. Mr Benson understands.’

  The bell tinkled below. He seemed reluctant to leave, as if he had found an ally in the enemy camp, a friend of the powerful. He knew the way the world worked. Business
looked after its own. Policemen were untrustworthy, they had the prejudice of their kind. But businessmen didn’t let prejudice get in the way of making money. I closed the door, hearing him flap softly down the stairs.

  I spread the blankets out, took off my boots, and lay down on the bed. The overhead light, dim as it was, was shining in my eyes. I turned it off and stretched out. I wasn’t tired, a little foot-weary that was all, but I needed to think. There was a stacatto babble going on in the shop directly below, faint yet distinct. Now that I had a roof over my head, and a short breathing space, I began to consider more carefully what I had to do and how it should be done.

  I hadn’t known Benson was a councillor, nor that he owned a haulage firm. That knowledge could be useful – point me in certain directions. Yet how could a haulage company, or any kind of company, I wondered, survive and remain profitable in a place like this? It was blighted, a black spot, an industrial no-man’s land. The fishing industry had gone. Tourists didn’t come here. There were few, if any, natural resources.

  How and where and under what circumstances had Susan come to know Benson? It was infuriating that such details were so vague in my patchwork quilt of a mind. But shock treatment does that to you, robs you of essentials and leaves you with trivia. Perhaps it wasn’t important – the tiresome details, the logistics – whether they had met by chance in the street, in the park, or even an instant naked glance of desire from car to car at the traffic lights. The fact was that they had met, and become lovers, and then Benson had been the cause of her death by ‘misadventure’, which in this case was another name for suicide.

  Looking back, I now realised that I must have had my suspicions while this liaison was going on. But it’s very difficult to catch a woman out in this way, unless the evidence is there in front of your eyes. A man carries incriminating traces with him: lipstick smears, strange perfume in his hair, pins and odd bits of jewellery down the back seat of his car. With a woman, such clues are absent. She has her own female smell, far stronger than any lingering whiff of musk-ox aftershave. She leaves the house neat and groomed and comes back the same. She attends to the laundry, disposing of any soiled garment that might lead a husband to speculate. So the clues are absent, nonexistent. All that remains are discrepancies in times and dates and places. In a court of law none of it would stand up, not even as circumstantial evidence.

  Yet I did know. More exactly, I had my doubts. It was, I suppose, what you might call her ‘attitude’. She was more attentive. She was jolly for no apparent reason. She performed little acts of kindness, went out of her way to be pleasant. In bed she was more, not less, eager. All these signs and portents I absorbed without really understanding what they meant: like a necromancer sifting through the ashes, stirring the dead bones, pondering the tale they had to tell.

  It was only after her death that I fully realised the truth. Her unfaithfulness, as much as her death, caused my mental blackout. The world caved in, became thick with shadows, hung like cobwebs. Sometimes I couldn’t even remember my own name. And neither, ridiculously, could I bring to mind Susan’s face. I could picture her walking towards me in sunlight, long straight dark hair framing a perfectly blank oval, like a badly developed photograph, as if my memory had chosen deliberately to obliterate this one spot.

  Susan had suffered for her sins; I was still suffering, perhaps for sins I didn’t know I had committed. It was only natural justice, surely to God, that Benson should have his share. He had a business. He was a councillor. He probably had a wife, children perhaps. There were several ways he could be grievously hurt before the final blow.

  For the first time in many, many months my mind began to clear, to see daylight instead of being stifled in the hot suffocating darkness of blind futility. Now my anger had cooled and hardened, become tempered into cold, tensile, unforgiving purpose. I would have my revenge.

  2

  There was a cold wind blowing from the sea. It was full of the raw, primordial smells, stinging to the nostrils, of ocean depths and the creatures that move in them. After the stale odours of closed overheated rooms and supine comatose bodies it was crude and invigorating, making me feel light-headed. I realised I was hungry.

  Keeping to the backstreets and guided by the wind in my face I found a small pub down by the granite wall of the old harbour. I had done my best to make myself presentable, and was sure I had when the people in the saloon bar turned back to their conversations and drinks and the large woman behind the bar with rings and burnished blue hair served me without so much as a disinterested glance through her diamante spectacles, which looked as if at any moment they might take off and fly round the room.

  I ordered food – some kind of reconstituted offal and fat pressed into a flat cake, with fried onions, inside a white spongy muffin that looked and tasted like cotton wool, served on a bed of thin chips in a congealed basket – and ate it beneath a varnished ship’s wheel and a brass lantern with a pink bulb.

  The place was dimly lit, with more shadow than light, the people mostly middle-aged, neither prosperous nor poor. As usual I felt that I didn’t fit in, that everyone here was engaged in some monstrous conspiracy from which I alone was excluded. But this didn’t matter. I was used to the feeling. Dr Morduch’s bit of medical jargon for it was ‘externality’.

  We had often talked about ‘externality’, though I never fully understood what he meant – something about renouncing the self, I think. I’d made the fatal mistake of discussing it with S –. That’s all there was to do at the clinic, talk and watch TV, and S – was very easy to talk to, understanding and sympathetic. He would quietly listen for hours, nodding, stroking his beard with a rather delicate hand, taking it all in, absorbing everything – ‘imprinting’ it (more jargon) so that in the end he seemed to know more about me than I did myself.

  His large, bright, slightly bulbous eyes were fixed on my lips, as if he wanted to see the shape of the words as they issued out. I told him everything. Childhood. Parents. School. Jobs. Friends. Marriage. And then doubts. Suspicion. Anger. Panic. Blankness. Breakdown. I talked it all out of me, and he took it all in. Morduch ought to have warned me – I knew nothing about S –, his background, the things he had done. I assumed – quite wrongly as it turned out – that he had undergone a similar trauma – that his life, like mine, had been smashed by a cataclysmic emotional shock. From time to time I asked him about his past life, but at first he wouldn’t talk about it. The hurt was too great. That’s what I thought.

  The truth, when I learned it, was the complete reverse of what I had imagined.

  One day, out of the blue, he told me with a faint smirk on his lips that he had committed the Perfect Murder. He had killed his wife, he confided, and got away with it.

  Was he amused by the fact of having killed her or because no one, not even Dr Morduch and Dr Pitt-Rivers, knew about it? I think he relished the notion of having fooled everyone and got off scot-free. He’d put one over on them, the useless pathetic cretins, and he loved that. I didn’t believe him, of course, I thought it was just empty boasting, something to build himself up in my eyes. He wanted me to think of him as somebody powerful, who mattered, whose opinion others sought, whose wise words people hung on, rapt and fascinated. They didn’t, so he had to invent fantastic stories about what he had achieved, the more fantastic and grotesque and horrifying the better. That way he built himself up, impressed them with the force and depth of his exotic personality, which in truth was non-existent. He was actually, I came to think, a zero, a non-person, a vacuum waiting to be filled.

  It didn’t help his credibility that he gave more than one version of how he had got rid of his wife. That’s why at first I didn’t take him seriously. He had devised, so he said, an elaborate scheme, worked it out in every tiny, precise detail. What he would do was this: he would follow her to an isolated spot on the moors near where they lived, knowing she was going there to meet her lover. Once there, he surmised, she would leave her car and get into his
and drive off somewhere. S – ’s plan was devious and yet simple, relying on the steepness of the moorland roads. While they were gone he would loosen the brake linkage on her car and drain off all the fluid. He admitted that he knew nothing about cars or mechanical gadgets in general, but he was prepared to study the manual and familiarise himself with what had to be done while the car was in the garage at home. An hour’s concentration, a little patience, he was capable of that.

  Would they stay in his (the lover’s) car for sex or drive off to a pub to sit over drinks, priming themselves with alcohol and breathless titillation, sneaking kisses in a darkened corner? The plan would have to allow for either eventuality. It really didn’t matter to him either way, he said, except for the different margin of risk. I think he would have preferred them to stay – coupled together in the lover’s gently rocking steamed up car while S – worked just a few yards away with torch and spanner. But if they did go to the pub first he would smile as he drained off the brake fluid, thinking of them sitting (he told me this giggling) cosy and breathless, generating sexual heat, with him smiling, anticipating, in the black bitter night.

  In his mind’s eye he could see the plan working, and its triumphant conclusion: the headlong brakeless skid over the edge. By that time he would be back at home, or better still with a friend somewhere, as an alibi. He even practised contortions of grief. The shock of her death, the period of mourning … then bearing up bravely and managing a wan smile now and then. Life must go on.