Assassins and Victims Read online

  The wall dividing the yards looked about ten feet high. Nasty blades of broken glass stuck up from the brick. I wouldn’t have wanted to climb it in any circumstances. But then, I didn’t intend to try.

  4

  I’ve had to lie low at other times in my life. Once I was holed up in a dingy room in Brighton for two weeks, while the local police were searching for a well-dressed, glibly-spoken man of about thirty-five, wearing a moustache and an RAF tie. They had even constructed an identikit picture that bore a remarkable resemblance to the Frankenstein monster. I shaved off the moustache and flushed the tie down a lav, and hid myself from the world for a full two weeks. Going out in the street in such circumstances is a risky business, because they can haul you in for an identity parade at which some hysterical old woman can easily lay the finger. The great enemy, at such times when disappearance is essential to survival, is boredom. It springs up between you and four blank walls. It spits out of the cheap paperback you’ve already read three times and despised on the first reading. It attacks you from the grubby pack of cards that you can only use for solitaire or poker, with imaginary partners. It lingers in every line of the view you continually see from your window, every sickening, unchanging line.

  Boredom is the killer. Conquer that and you more or less conquer all. The problem is how. Waiting that first day for Eric to come back I read through a pile of letters I found in his suitcase and a diary he had kept at the age of twenty-one. ‘I’m twenty-one today. I can vote if I like. I’m a man. And suddenly my childhood is over.’ Heady stuff indeed. But whether it was better than the emptiness of boredom is debatable. Then there were the letters, mainly from an aunt in Canada. ‘Today we saw our first rodeo and it was really exciting. You would have loved it Eric, what a pity you weren’t here to see it, but we thought about you when one of the cowboys fell off his horse.’ Absolutely hilarious, I thought. I searched through the rest of his papers: one cutting from an insert in a Deaths column (‘gone to the everlasting sleep, now at peace’); one birth certificate (Eric Shootler Billings – Shootler?); one old wrapper from a Wall’s Pork Pie, the sentimental value of which I couldn’t even begin to guess; and two or three photographs of women crudely cut from a nude magazine. Well, well.

  I had the feeling that I had sifted through his entire life, and that there was nothing else to discover. Add all that lot to the golliwog, the school photograph, and the half-dozen or so cigarette cards that litter the mantelpiece and what have you? Eric Shootler Billings, a man.

  When he came in at six o’clock I was lying on the bed. He went at once to the window and looked down into the yard.

  ‘He isn’t dead,’ he said. ‘You were going to kill him, you were going to –’

  ‘Relax, relax,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t it be the height of nonsense to kill the animal in broad daylight? Think of the consequences if I’d been discovered doing that.’

  He paused for a second, before unscrewing the cloth cap from his skull and unbuttoning the raincoat.

  ‘I’m too eager,’ he said. ‘That’s always been –’

  ‘We’ve got to make plans, Eric,’ I said. ‘Planning is the essence of every success. Ask any successful man – Sir, was your success an accident? What do you think he’ll say?’

  Eric put the kettle on the gas, shaking his head back and forward.

  ‘The bald fact of the matter is that everything has to be gone into, step by step. Blundering is useless. Think of the charge of the Light Brigade, Eric. If only that had been well planned, who knows what would have happened to the course of history?’

  ‘Like Cleopatra’s nose,’ he said. He was watching the gas flame, his mouth open in a kind of grin.

  ‘We could quite easily go down there and stick a knife in the animal’s neck. All right. It would bleed to death. So what? That would be a fine example of blundering because we’d be discovered almost at once.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. He began to make tea. He brought me a cup and a digestive biscuit.

  ‘That last dog I killed was a borzoi in Hampstead Garden Suburb –’

  ‘You said it was in Clapham.’

  Memory like a bloody limpet. ‘That was the last but one,’ I said. ‘With the borzoi I sneaked into the garden during a snowstorm dressed in white PVC from head to toe. Camouflage, you see. I dragged the dog under my coat, got into my car, drove out the North Circular and choked it to death in a lay-by near North Finchley. It went like clockwork. And why did it go like clockwork, Eric? Because I’d planned every last detail, right down to the average circumference of the animal’s turds. You’ve asked me to do a job. I’m a perfectionist. You’ll get a perfect job. But I’ve got to have some time.’

  Eric sat down on the couch.

  He chewed his biscuit and said, ‘They warned me to watch my timekeeping, you know. The foreman took me into his office and said that I’d lost nearly three hours work over the last two weeks. It can’t go on, he said. Well, I explained to him about the dog and everything but he wasn’t interested. I’m interested in corrugated packing, he said. Your corrugated packing. So watch it.’

  I lit my last cigarette and listened to his monotonous voice.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Things will improve.’

  He sat in silence for a time. There were crumbs on his chin. I stared up at the ceiling. I thought about my boredom and wondered how it might be dissolved.

  ‘I’ve been at King’s for twelve years,’ Eric said. ‘That’s a lot of water under the bridge.’

  ‘Yes, well, you don’t want to get yourself sacked now,’ I said.

  He held up his hand. His fingers were crossed. He accompanied this gesture with a smile at me, and there was something of trust, even faith, in the smile, that was utterly pathetic. Clearly he relied on me to flush this noise, this nuisance, out of his life; to restore the status quo, to enable him to return to his undisturbed, humdrum existence. And my services were to cost him twenty pounds.

  I thought about the three thousand quid that lay in my raincoat pocket, wrapped inside the Daily Express. It was more money than I’d ever had at any one time in my life. It was my strike, my passport to a better elsewhere – and yet here I was, holed up in this dump with a nut.

  ‘When will you start making plans?’ Eric asked.

  ‘I can’t make any plans until I get materials, can I?’

  ‘Materials?’

  ‘First of all, I’ll need a measuring tape –’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I want to size up that wall, don’t I? You don’t expect me to climb it if I don’t know how high it is, do you?’

  ‘Well, I climbed it,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want to do this job yourself?’

  He shook his head, his eyes staring.

  ‘Fine. Then I need a measuring tape.’

  ‘Why do you want to know how high it is?’ he asked.

  ‘Mine is an exact science,’ I said. ‘What’s the point in my having mastered trigonometry at Eton if I can’t put it to practical use? I also need a flashlight, since most of the work will have to be done after dark.’

  He shifted round on the sofa, that constipated look of concentration on his face.

  ‘In addition, I’ll need to have some form of protective clothing, because of the glass on the wall. When I go over, I don’t want to carve myself up like you did.’

  ‘Protective clothing?’ he asked.

  ‘Padded trousers, padded jacket, and several pairs of leather gloves.’

  ‘Where will I get padded clothes from?’

  ‘That’s your affair,’ I said. ‘I only do the job. You supply the materials. Apart from that, I must have a yard of nylon reel. String isn’t any good because it might break at the crucial moment. So I must have unbreakable nylon if I’m going to strangle the dog properly.’

  He found a piece of scrap paper and the end of a pencil and was writing these items down.

  ‘If I need anything else I’ll let you know.’
/>   He got up, looking thoughtful, and took a packet of sausages from his raincoat. He opened the packet and began to fry the sausages on the stove.

  When we had eaten, he washed up the dishes, dried them, and stacked them away neatly. Watching him, I was almost stricken by a sense of pity. It was an uncomfortable feeling that I only managed to suppress at the last moment. Analysing it, I suppose it was caused by the sight of him grubbing around at the sink, the sound of him whistling tunelessly, and the realisation that all his trust and hope had been placed (or misplaced) in me.

  ‘Will you go out and buy me a bottle of whisky?’ I asked.

  Almost at once he put on his coat. I gave him some money and watched him go.

  When he came back he gave me the whisky and returned the money.

  ‘A present from me,’ he said. ‘I never have the chance to give presents.’

  I went downstairs with the whisky and found Agnes in her kitchen, seated at the table, drinking gin from a cracked cup. I placed the bottle on the table and winked at her.

  She looked at me blearily.

  ‘You invited me for a drink,’ I said.

  She was wearing a black dress and had her red hair piled up untidily on the top of her head. Hairpins and wisps of hair protruded. I sat down and opened the whisky.

  ‘We were disturbed this morning,’ I said.

  ‘By Roderick,’ she said, as if remembering something in the distant past.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. I found myself a cup and poured some whisky. ‘But we won’t be disturbed this time.’ I swallowed some of the alcohol and slipped my hand across the table, gripping her fingers. She was drunk. She knocked the bottle over while reaching for it with her free hand. I caught it, but not before some of the whisky had been spilled.

  If there is one thing that cancels my desire, it is a drunken woman. Possibly there’s an ingrained puritanism in this reaction. Who knows? But I tried to forget her drunkenness, because I couldn’t afford to be choosy. It was all of three months since I’d last had a bit and that had been brief and unsatisfactory – a widow with a penchant for toes and fingers, a kind of trickery that doesn’t enthral me.

  Agnes laughed and coughed, a spluttering, smoky cough that sounded decidedly bronchial.

  ‘So you’ve come down, have you?’

  ‘That’s right. Now that I am here, what are we going to do about it?’

  I moved my hands over her breasts and she tossed her head back, laughing still.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ I asked. She wasn’t responding as I had anticipated.

  ‘God I want you,’ she said. ‘You know that I want you, don’t you?’

  ‘There’s nothing to stop us,’ I said.

  She pushed my hands away. ‘There is, lovy, there is. My monthlies have just started and I make it a firm rule never to go with a man while they’re on. You’ll have to wait a bit.’

  And she laughed a little longer.

  5

  I didn’t wake next morning until after Eric had gone to work. The sun was shining on the window and the outside world seemed silent and deceptively peaceful: deceptive, since I knew that the streets weren’t safe for me. I got out of bed and made a cup of coffee. I stood drinking it by the window.

  In the yard, Rex was eating meat from a tin bowl. Sometimes he would raise his neck, chewing absently, staring upwards at the sky or along the walls of his prison. After a time, a woman came out of the house and watched him. I guessed that she was Mrs Peluzzi. She was small and plump with massive breasts – breasts, as the cheap novelists say, like melons – and she was dressed in the faded black of a Latin widow. When the dog had finished eating and had dragged a bloody bone to the far comer of the yard, she went down on her knees and threw her arms around the creature’s neck. She caressed the dog. Caressed may be odd in this context, but there is no other word. She pushed her fingers through the thick black fur and smoothed them down the animal’s flanks.

  This little scene lasted perhaps for about thirty seconds, certainly no longer than a minute, but even so there was something in it, a certain element of perverse sexuality that appalled and excited me simultaneously. I’m not keen on extreme deviations, being an advocate of straight-up-and-down sex with minimal variations, but I sensed something of the sheer excitement in what was taking place. When Mrs Peluzzi had gone indoors the dog yapped for a bit and then slumped down on his belly as if prematurely abandoned.

  This interested and intrigued me. Did she miss her husband to the extent that she had transferred her affections to the animal? Did the dog have the late Peluzzi’s face in her mind? Did she – I wondered, I wondered – have illicit relations with the beast?

  I watched the dog for a time, but the pulse had gone out of the scene and I was left to wonder if I’d only imagined what had taken place. But I’m not given to illusions or to hallucinations: for me the external world is real enough, and everything in it is either true or false. I don’t believe in fairies or in God (since both come from the same stable anyway) but I believe up to the hilt in the things I can see. Mrs Peluzzi had caressed the dog in a way that went far beyond the normal sickening embraces given to pets by their owners.

  I poured myself a glass of whisky and sat down on the bed. When I reached for a cigarette I discovered that I had none left. I dressed and went downstairs to borrow one from Agnes, but she was nowhere to be found. I stood for a moment in the hallway. There was a dreadful conflict between my craving for tobacco and my reluctance to venture on to the streets. I stood there, undecided.

  After a moment, I opened the front door and looked along the street. Apart from a few parked cars and a streetsweeper, sleeping propped against his broom, I could see nothing dangerous. Nothing ostensively dangerous, that is. But vengeance has an odd habit of dropping out of the sky. I was once arrested in Chester for something I had done three years before in Southend, simply because someone recognised me at the self-service counter in a Woolworth’s cafeteria. I hesitated. Besides, I didn’t know where the nearest tobacconist’s was.

  My craving won; or to put the matter another way, my weakness did. I went down the steps, turned right, and walked to the end of the street. It led nowhere. I turned back and went to the other end of the street. On the corner was a newsagent’s shop. It was filled with chattering women and an indolent assistant, an old man who must have passed his prime with Kitchener. When my turn came I asked for two one hundred boxes of Players.

  ‘Hundred boxes, oh dear,’ the old man said. ‘We only have them at Christmas, unless there’s some in the back.’

  Before I could say anything he had disappeared. I looked through the window and on to the street. Were my fears groundless? This was just a quiet suburban street: nothing wild and violent could happen here, in the strong sunshine, in the very ordinariness of things. Some five minutes later the old man came back with two boxes of cigarettes.

  ‘Last of the Christmas stock,’ he said. He was peering at the coloured wrappers; S. Claus with reindeers, flurry of snow. ‘Thought we didn’t have any left. But there you are. Two hundred coffin nails for you.’

  I paid with a five pound note and waited an age for him to count out the change. And then I stepped out of the shop and on to the sunlit street.

  I saw the black Ford coming up on my left. I don’t know why I was suddenly struck by fear. The licence-plate number was faintly familiar, but I couldn’t really place the car itself. For a moment I couldn’t move. And then I turned and walked quickly along the street. There were three, perhaps four, men inside the Ford and it was moving with the slowness of a very patient patrol car. As I walked I heard it come up behind me.

  All I could think, rightly or wrongly, was that the car had something to do with Ed Sharp. Because of this connection, I had the strong, almost overpowering feeling, that my survival hung by the thinnest of thin threads at that moment.

  I ran up the steps of the nearest house and pressed the first bell I saw.

  That was how I first
met Bella Peluzzi.

  6

  I stepped into the darkened hallway and said,

  ‘Carson of the RSPCA. I believe you have a dog.’

  ‘A dog?’

  I saw that, in spite of the almost inevitable moustache, she had a plump, pretty face. Her skin was a pale yellowy colour, but the secret of her appeal lay in the eyes. They were dark brown, perhaps black, the colour of burned wood.

  ‘Rex,’ I said. I was almost out of breath. I listened for the sound of the car, but the street seemed silent.

  ‘Yes, I have a dog and his name is Rex,’ she said. ‘What is your purpose?’

  In spite of the drabness of the threadbare black dress, the breasts were magnificent. I contrasted them with the scrawny items that Agnes sported so freely. There was really no comparison, none whatsoever.

  ‘RSPCA,’ I said, my inventiveness having been stalled a little by the appearance of the car.

  ‘Maybe you’d better come in.’

  I followed her into her sitting-room. I have never seen a room so full of photographs. Some were early and brown, some black and white, one or two were coloured.

  ‘You must have a great many relatives,’ I said.

  ‘A big family, yes,’ she said.

  ‘You aren’t English?’

  ‘Italian,’ she said.

  I sat down. The furniture was massive and hard.

  ‘Why have you come to see my Rex? He isn’t ill.’

  ‘No, he isn’t ill,’ I said. ‘But you may have heard of the new government legislation, the Dog Owners’ Bill. Under the provisions of the DOB – as we call it in the trade – a census has to be taken every five years and the total number of dogs in the country computed. You do understand, don’t you? It’s all tied in with the restriction of the canine population by birth control methods.’

  She looked at me oddly. ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘I’ve got a job to do, madam. If you want to complain, you must utilise the proper channels.’

  She shrugged and threw her hands in the air.