Queen's Pawn Page 15

  A few minutes later they were at Mount Street. Berners went in carrying the cane basket and the brief case and with Raikes’s key let himself into the flat. Raikes drove the car to his lock-up and caught a late roving taxi back. Sarling’s gloves, the rope and the bindings were left in the car in the lock-up.

  Berners was sitting in a chair, a drink in his hand. Raikes poured himself a whisky, neat, a half tumblerful, and sat opposite him. He raised the glass to Berners, nodded and then drank. They sat silently, the union of their interests, the thick cord of their unspoken communion firm. They just sat, the knowledge of each other’s presence all they needed, until after a long while Berners said, ‘ I don’t know what he paid for that desk at Meon. From the photographs I thought it was Chippendale. But it’s a fake. Good, but a fake.’

  Back at Park Street in her bed, Belle was staring wide-eyed into the darkness, knowing that the sleeping pills were not going to work.

  Chapter Nine

  Sunday morning, eight o’clock, and Berners sitting in an easy chair, his feet up on a stool fully dressed, wanting no bed for the night that was past, content, insisting on just sitting, waiting for the time of an early train back to Brighton. Outside, the noises of a London Sunday morning … high and thick heels tapping the pavement with a slower rhythm, people coming back from early mass and service, a man whistling, the sudden hoot of a ship in the Pool carrying clean across the crowded acres, a woman calling to a dog, the clear rattle of an electric milk float and the clank of bottles jostled up steps in a wire basket, the sharp ringing of a bicycle bell … sounds which were drowned all week, but coming into their own today.

  From the bathroom came the sound of Raikes moving and dressing. He came into the room fresh-bathed, clean-shaved, alert, strong, all confidence, no elation from pride or vanity, four hours’ sleep washed over him like a tide to recede and leave no mark of the past day. Raikes, standing for a moment looking down at him, fresh-laundered sports shirt and a white foulard, dark blue flannel trousers, brogues with a polish that was like old mahogany, blue eyes lustred with health, the fair brown hair darkened over his ears with damp from his bath; Raikes knowing and he knowing that no matter their appearance, the difference in wombs, they were brothers, knowing that between them there was an accord stronger than love and void of all petty demands.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘If there’s some going.’

  ‘You’ve got time?’

  ‘My train doesn’t go for an hour, and anyway there’s always another.’

  Raikes went into the kitchen, leaving the door open and began to set things going for the coffee.

  Through the open door Raikes said, ‘Coming up in the car, he told Belle that he was leaving her fifty thousand pounds. Think he has?’

  ‘No. What are we going to do about her?’

  ‘Nothing yet. There’s got to be a decent interval. Employer and then secretary in a short space of time might raise questions. Also, there’s a certain amount of clearing up here and elsewhere for which I shall need her.’

  ‘Well, when the time comes let me know.’

  ‘I can handle it.’

  ‘No. We’ve always done things together.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have liked what Sarling wanted us to do together.’

  ‘I might have five years ago.’

  Raikes came to the door and looked at him, surprised. Berners nodded at the table beside him. The two halves of the Cunard brochure lay on it.

  ‘I found it in the wastepaper basket last night. Some of his notes are very interesting.’

  ‘I never read them. He wanted us to take over a million in gold bullion from her. Just two people, he said, could do it with the minimum of fuss. Don’t tell me you really would have gone for that?’

  ‘I said five years ago. I was thinking about it while you slept. I’d have bought myself an estate like his—only in France. A great wall all around the park, one of those châteaux with slate roofs, full of the right furniture, a room of my own with leather-covered walls, velvety brown with gold tooling. I’ve always wanted that since I saw one somewhere.’ He smiled. ‘I’d have walled myself up with all I wanted.’

  Raikes grinned and went back into the kitchen, saying, ‘With you, it’s things, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Good things.’

  ‘What’s the answer to human beings?’

  ‘We all have a private madness. Happy the man who can afford his own luxuriously appointed asylum.’

  ‘You’d better have some coffee.’

  Raikes came in with the tray, everything set out neatly, cream, sugar, silver spoons, coffee jug and cups and saucers in matching china.

  Berners said, ‘You’d have done it, too.’

  ‘Not me, not even five years, ten years ago. Not in my line.’

  ‘I think you would have done. The trouble is it came from him. With you, it would have had to have been your idea, your challenge. You don’t like things second-hand. With Frampton, it has to spring unique from within.’

  ‘It’s Raikes, not Frampton.’

  ‘Frampton and Berners. Those are the real people. This is the first time you’ve ever made coffee for me.’

  ‘I hope it’s good.’

  ‘Not as good as Angers makes. However …’ He reached out and picked up the two halves of the brochure. ‘You want this?’

  ‘No.’

  Berners dropped the halves into the wastepaper basket.

  Half an hour later Berners left. At the door, he said, ‘Get in touch with me about Miss Vickers.’

  Belle arrived at half-past six that evening. He took her hat and coat, fixed her a drink and lit a cigarette for her, handling her with a gentle fuss, each move deliberately designed because he knew the nervousness in her and was physician to her needless fears.

  ‘I didn’t like to phone or anything.… You know, it mightn’t have been wise. Actually, of course’—she gave a quick laugh—‘it wasn’t anything like as bad as I thought it would be. You know, when you know what’s happened, you kind of expect that it must be there for everyone to see. Even in your face. But they don’t, do they?’

  ‘If the label on the bottle says gin, you don’t ask to taste it in the shop. Just relax and tell me.’

  He sat down opposite her, close, putting out a hand and holding her knee. She bent forward, wanting more contact, hair falling across the side of her face, the rough graining of her eyebrow make-up clumsy and crude at close quarters as though he saw it through a magnifying glass. He kissed her, knowing that this was the peak of her twenty-four-hour strain, that by tomorrow morning she would have begun to absorb and make commonplace what had been routine for him and Berners from the moment they had stepped through the window at Meon.

  She pulled back from him and said, ‘Thank you, Andy.’

  ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘Well, Baines found him. He came to me. I hadn’t slept, you know. Well, I suppose I did, but not properly, and I was a bit doped with the pills. Anyway, I called his doctor. That was awful, waiting for him, and then waiting while he was in the room. He came out and I had coffee ready for him and—God I can hear him now—he just said it was heart failure. Not unexpected. He’d had trouble with his heart a few years ago. I told him about his changing his mind and coming back late and he just nodded.… He said he’d look after all the arrangements, and would I get in touch with Sarling’s solicitor and let him know and some of his co-directors.’

  ‘No talk about a post mortem or anything like that?’

  ‘No. He just sat down and wrote out a certificate of death and told me to let the solicitors have it. He didn’t even ask about relatives or anything. In a way I could have been angry. He’s had hundreds out of Sarling, but he just didn’t care, and it was almost as though he took it for granted that I didn’t care, either.’

  ‘You’d probably mucked up his morning round of golf at Wentworth.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why he felt my bottom as he went out. Some kind of compensat
ion. Yes, he did. Just stared straight ahead of him at the door and then put his hand behind me and had a good feel. Christ!’

  She began to laugh and he let her.

  She stopped, took some of her drink and said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I can let go with you. But I haven’t let you down anywhere else, I swear. I did it all all right, didn’t I? Even in the car when he started to offer me things?’

  ‘You did everything beautifully.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  He got up and gave her another drink. Standing beside her, he said, ‘Forget Sarling. Just think of him as a nothing. A great zero mark. You’ll be out of that place soon. In the meantime we’ve got things to do, things to clear up. First of all, forget you even heard of Berners.’ He dropped her pink file into her lap. ‘Take that and get rid of it with your photostat. I haven’t read it and I don’t want to.’

  ‘There’s nothing in there about me. Not the me I am now. Not the me you know, Andy.’

  It was hard to take but he showed no sign of his distaste. Waiting for her to come he had known that their shared experience over Sarling would give her a feeling of closer, warmer identification with him. The last thing he had to do was to let her feel or see that he wanted her far from him as soon as possible, obliterated from his thoughts and his life.

  ‘How much longer has the lease got to run on this flat?’

  ‘It’s paid up until the end of May.’

  ‘There’s no need to do anything about that yet. I’ll stay up here until after the funeral. Then I’ve just got to go back to Devon. But I’ll be up again. I’ve got to find a way of getting rid of those canisters. I can’t just dump them, they’re too dangerous. But I don’t want them in that garage a moment longer than is necessary. Still, that’s my problem. What about you being here, sleeping here I mean?’

  ‘Well, not tonight or for a few nights. Not until I see what’s happening around at Park Street. But, of course, I can always come and see you, Andy.’

  ‘You’d better.’ He gave her a smile, his hand reaching for the nape of her neck below him, caressing her. ‘ Then there’s the car. We’d better hang on to that until I’ve got rid of the canisters. Then we can pack it in with the garage. Pack in everything that has any connection with him. God, am I glad to be free of him.’

  He went to the sideboard for a drink. Turning he saw her watching him and he knew it was coming, the thing which from the first cold light of this morning when she had wakened from drugged half-sleep would have been stranded in her mind only shallowly submerged among her fears and now, the fears abating, would have surfaced, demanding attention. Knowing it had to be dealt with, he invited it.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘You know what’s the matter.’

  ‘Do I?’ He was offering no help now that it had started.

  ‘Yes. You’re free of him. Glad to be free of him. But what about me, Andy? Are you going to be free of me, and glad of it?’

  He shook his head, smiling, his understanding and sympathy big, broad and warming, embracing her, and then, an amalgam of memories of other soft sells kaleidoscoping through his mind, he said quietly, moving to her, ‘ Two people don’t go through this kind of thing together and then just politely say goodbye. No matter what our individual circumstances … no matter what obligations we may have to other people, no matter how difficult it may be in the future, you and I can’t escape what we feel for one another, what we’ve done together. We don’t even have to use words about it—’ But he was, stringing them like beads and amulets, charms against all her fears, bestowing them on her like a cheap trading gift, taking from her in return the rich bounty, valued exactly, weighed in his favour on the rigged scales. ‘—We know what we are to one another. For the moment that’s all that matters.’

  He pulled her up to him, giving her now no chance to speak, moving himself genuinely beyond words, because the trade between man and woman must finish with the silent ritual love ceremony of touch and caress. He kissed her, held her, her weight dropping in his arms and he carried her to the bedroom, undressed her without a word, stripped himself and loved her; so much part of his own deceit that he himself was deceived while it lasted, and when she lay spent in his arms, cradled to him, he still went on following his deceit, enchanted by it, out of a sudden wonder in him that love could—though for ever out of his reach—come to some men and women without thought, without design.

  The Times on the following Tuesday carried a half-page two-column obituary of Joseph Sarling. It was the day on which Raikes went to his lock-up garage and transferred the canisters from the crate into a large cardboard carton. There were thirty-eight of them. He wrapped the crate in a blanket and drove to Epping Forest and dumped it behind some bushes where it was found four days later by two boys who took it home and made a rabbit hutch from it. It was the day that Belle came to the flat while he was out and tidied up for him, putting clean sheets on his bed and stocking up the larder with fresh supplies. In the half-full wastepaper basket she found the torn Cunard brochure. Pulling it out she found two pages of Sarling’s notes torn in half inside. Because Sarling now was beginning to become a comfortable nothing in her mind, his death accepted at Park Street, in the City and the Press, his cremation only two days away, there was a sudden genuine curiosity in her about this brochure. She repaired the torn brochure and Sarling’s notes with transparent tape and put them by her bedside, under some magazines, to read later. Half an hour later, when Raikes came in, she had forgotten them. It was the day, the first day since Sarling’s death, when she stayed the full night in the flat with Raikes.

  The next morning Raikes caught an early train down to Taunton, picked up his car and drove back to London, arriving in the late evening. The following day was Sarling’s funeral and Belle went to it. He stayed in the flat all day, phoned Berners with the little news he had and told him that for the next couple of weeks he could always get in touch with him through Belle at the flat. He packed a suitcase with his stuff, and another with Sarling’s files and photostats. The central heating in Devon was run from an old-fashioned coke boiler and he would burn them in it.

  Belle came back at six. She was wearing a black costume and a small white and black hat, her lipstick, out of some shadowy respect for the dead, pale against her pale face. Her hair was drawn back, caught up behind her head with a severity that changed her and made almost a stranger of her, and he found that he liked it. Cut out all her ‘ supposes’, ‘ I thinks’, and ‘sort ofs’, refashion her like this and in a few weeks she would pass easily with Mary’s crowd. She had something, the trouble was that she seldom showed it. He kissed her and gave her a hug. On the drive down tomorrow he would have to think about her. She knew far too much about him. Making a plan for her would be less difficult than for Sarling. But the actual moment of execution would be harder. Sarling he had hated. This girl discovered moments in him when he liked her … almost needed her.

  She said, ‘One of the executors spoke to me afterwards. About the will, I mean. What do you think?’

  ‘I think that in the car Sarling exaggerated.’

  ‘Not by much. Twenty thousand, he left me. But, you know, I was thinking. I didn’t really ought to take it.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool. It wasn’t a gift. You’ve earned every penny of it from him.’

  ‘They want me to stay on for a month or two to clear things up … apparently it’s going to take ages. There was some family there. I met one of the brothers. He wasn’t a bit like him, a big, healthy-looking sort of farmery type.’

  ‘He would be. That was Sarling’s beef. He was just the pitman.’

  ‘Pitman?’

  He laughed, holding her, one hand on her breast. ‘The weakest piglet in the litter. Always getting kicked to the end of the row where the milk was in short supply.’

  He went to the sideboard to get drinks and from behind him, out of the blue, she said, ‘ Funerals do things to you, don’t they? It’s funny, I keep
thinking I ought to feel guilty about it … kind of shocked just at the thought of what we did. I did do for a bit that first night. But not now. I just can’t feel anything.’

  He turned. ‘ You don’t have to feel anything. Sarling is just a handful of ashes.’

  He drove down to Devon the next day. Before he got to Salisbury, he had worked out, except for a few small details, a way to get rid of Belle. The details could wait. It would have to be some weeks before anything could be done. At his house he put the carton of canisters in his wine cellar and locked the door. Nobody but himself ever went in there. After dinner, when Mrs Hamilton had gone, he got out the pink files and went through them. Once or twice while reading he was tempted to keep them, put them away in his safe against some vague, future moment of need. But in the end he carried them down to the boiler house and burnt them, raking about in the flames with a draw iron until they were all cinders and ash. All he had to do now was to get rid of the canisters. That meant a trip up on the moors to find a place which was safe.

  The next day he put six of the canisters in his coat pockets and drove up on to the moors. He was not going to risk having the full carton of canisters in his car. Other people make accidents … canisters spilled all over the road … no matter how many in a thousand the chance was he was not taking it. Any more than he was going to take the chance of going to the same place each time to explode the canisters. Farm labourers, shepherds, river bailiffs, hunt people returning late from a meet, they all had sharp eyes, and many of them knew him, and any of them would be curious for this was January and the moors were empty of tourists. Over the weeks he would find different places and get rid of the canisters in batches. He picked a wide stretch of empty hillside, checked the country around through his glasses, and then exploded the six canisters, backing up into the wind fifty yards between each one. It was late afternoon, the light just beginning to go from a high, cloudless sky, the strong profile of the moors rounded against the pomegranate red and yellow flush of the western horizon. A sparrowhawk came low down the hillside, rose, and hovered, shrew-observing, between him and his last canister. He waited, canister in hand, watching the pulse of its wings, head swinging low until it tipped sideways and slid away across the wind. He threw the canister, walked away, and heard the soft explosion, a gentle plock faint against the wind over the heather.