Blackstone's Pursuits (25 page)

A slow, wicked, leering smile, spread across his face. ‘Right, to the performance. Oh, how I love live theatre!

‘Let’s see. Who goes first?’ He looked at us, from me, to Prim, and back again. ‘You, Oz, you’ve drawn the lucky bag. Primavera and I will be your audience. But worry not; it will be only a short time, before you are together again.

‘Come here, both of you.’ We stepped towards him. Fear was beginning to conquer anger, after all. Death is helluva final, when you look at it up close. He held the box out to Prim, keeping the gun on me.

‘Take it,’ he said, smoothly. ‘Dawn told me that you are a nurse, so find a vein and give him half of the barrel.’

Prim looked mesmerised as she took the syringe from its cottonwool bed. She stared at it as she held it up. She gave it a wee squeeze, like they do in the movies, sending some of the juice spraying upwards. She beckoned me. ‘Come here darling,’ she said, softly, hypnotically. I felt myself drawn to her. The ice was melted, the hamster had gone. I sensed rather than saw Brooks looking at me, anticipating.

And then, quick as a cat, she jammed the syringe into the fleshy base of his right hand, and started to depress the plunger.

He screamed in pain, and dropped the gun. He stared down in horror as the syringe began to empty. Suddenly he unfroze. He tore his wounded hand away from her and yanked the needle out, throwing it as far from him as he could.

I remember once reading an article by some journalist on the tender topic of male sterilisation. Arguing in favour, he wrote that the after-effects of the procedure were no longer-lasting and no worse than a sharp blow in the stones from a soccer ball. Clearly this was a man who had never played football.

I remember my Dad once saying of an infamous serial killer, ‘Hanging’s too good for that bastard. It’s a good kick in the balls he needs.’

And that, right there in the heart of the Geneva woods, was what I gave Rawdon Brooks, as he stood staring at his hand. Only it wasn’t; it was worse than that. I gave him, left, right and centre, the legendary Oz Blackstone toe-poke, which may not look elegant, but when perfectly delivered, as this one was, can send the ball, plural in this case, flying further, straighter and faster than the finest instep delivery. I’ll never know for sure, but I like to think that I tore them clean off.

He didn’t scream. He howled. It was a primal sound, like a bear with its paw caught in a man-trap. I saw Prim staring at him, her mouth wide open in awe at the depths of his agony.

For good measure, as he stood there, clutching his person, knees turned in in the classic manner, I stuck the head on him. I’m not as good at that as I am at the toe-poke, but this was a pretty fair example. My forehead caught him on the left cheekbone, stunning me slightly and rocking him backwards.

I waited for him to go down, as reason told me he must. I stood back and waited for him to crumple. I mean he was a man, and I’d just nailed him with a blow from which not even the strongest guy can recover.

Yet he was still on his feet, the great bastard. His eyes were rolling, his cheek was swelling, his chest was heaving, but he was still on his feet. He reminded me bizarrely of Charles Laughton after his flogging in
Hunchback,
only Esmeralda was nowhere in sight. As I stood there watching him, I became transfixed. When his hand shot out and caught me round the throat, I didn’t move. It wasn’t until he began to squeeze that I realised how strong he was. Within a second or two my eyes began to swim. My hands went to his wrist, but his grip was locked on tight.

I was thinking about nothing other than him, and dying. The two muffled plops from my left hardly registered. What
did
register was Brooks’ hand loosening its grip as he straightened up and fell backwards. His blazer had fallen open, and I saw the sudden bloom of red on his chest.

I looked behind me. Primavera stood there, as I had never seen her before. Her hands were locked together around the run in a markswoman’s grip. Her eyes were cold and hard. And then all at once, they softened, and she started to shake.

I grabbed the gun from her and jammed it into a side pocket of the satchel. On the ground, Brooks rolled over, scrambling around, trying to get to his feet. Christ, was there no stopping this guy!

‘Come on!’ I yelled at Primavera, dragging her back to the real world. ‘Let’s go!’ I grabbed the satchel, and realised for the first time that I still had that stupid duffel bag slung over my shoulder. I threw it away and grabbed her hand, pulling her behind me as we plunged out of the wood, back towards the green space of the park. For a while I thought we were lost, but at last we saw light ahead. As we cleared the woods, we looked at each other. Behind us we could hear the crashing of pursuit.

‘Come on!’ said Prim this time. ‘Let’s get back to the car. He doesn’t know where that is, or what it looks like.’

‘Can you remember the way?’

‘I think so. Come on. Run!’ We raced off across the grass, towards the gates. Handicapped as I was by the weight of the bag, I could still keep pace with Prim. Or maybe she was hanging back for me; I didn’t have the breath to ask her.

We had turned into the street and were racing along the pavement when I looked back over the fence into the park and saw our pursuer break out of the woods. It wasn’t a run as much as a shamble, more like Quasimodo than ever. His left eye was closed tight, and his shirt front was soaked in blood. He was loping along, almost doubled over, but he was loping helluva fast.

‘Leg it, for Christ’s sake,’ I gasped. ‘Here comes the Devil and he is pissed off!’

We sprinted through the pedestrians, knocking the wee ones aside, excusing ourselves around others. From the sounds of outrage behind us, I guessed that Brooks was clearing everyone out of his way. ‘Why isn’t the heroin stopping him, if it was meant to kill us?’ I gasped.

‘Because I just stuck it in his hand, not in a vein. Just shut up and run!’

When we reached the traffic lights, the pedestrian crossing was showing the red man sign, and the vehicles were flowing fast and freely. I grabbed Prim’s hand and tugged her along the pavement, off towards the next corner and Rue Berner, looking, searching as we ran, for a gap in the traffic. At last, a chance appeared. We darted out between two cars, did a frantic shimmy in the middle of the road and made it to the other side.

We stopped, and looked back. Brooks was glaring at us across the street. His good eye looked wild, and his chest was heaving, but his eyes were still dead set on us. ‘God, the heroin must be fuelling him,’ gasped Prim.

If it was, it made him start straight across the road after us, looking neither right nor left.

If you’ve ever heard a dog, a big dog, being hit by a vehicle, you never forget the sound. But if you’ve ever heard the noise of a human being run over by a big vehicle, that’s something that will give you nightmares for weeks afterwards.

There’s the squeal of brakes and the awful thump, but then there’s a tearing, dragging, cracking, crushing sound, and an awful last gasp. We were legging it up the pavement, when we heard it all. Gradually we slowed to a halt, like we were in a film and the camera was breaking down, until, reluctantly, we turned around.

It was a tourist bus, from Bathgate, of all places. When we saw him, Brooks was still moving under its wheels, his head and bloody chest sticking out. The rest of him was hidden, fortunately, under the bus, but around him, a crimson pool was starting to spread.

Instinctively, Primavera started towards him, but I took her hand, holding her back. ‘No, honey,’ I said, as gently as I could. ‘You’re not a nurse any more, remember. We’ve won. Now let’s just get ourselves out of here.

‘You and I are going home. I don’t know about you, but I am absolutely knackered.’

In which the boat sails and our ship comes in.

We almost melted the wee Peugeot, but we made it to St Malo just in time to catch the night crossing. And this time there was a cabin available; a tiny cabin, but one of our very own, with a shower and two berths.

A Grand Prix circuit: small, but very definitely Formula One.

‘Primavera, Primavera ...’ I moaned her name in the dim glow of the emergency light. She leaned her head towards me, kissing my chest, biting my nipples gently, responding to my touch and moving her self against my hands.

‘Where have you come from?’ I asked, wallowing at last in the perfection of her body, in her firm, full, big-nippled breasts, in the amazing narrowness of her waist, in the rounded curve of her hips, in the flatness of her belly, in the thick nest of wiry blonde hair at her centre, shining and sparkling as she moved.

‘I’ve always been here,’ she said, and she kissed me with her lips of velvet, as she had never kissed me before. ‘I believe in destiny. You’re part of mine, I’m part of yours. We were set on a course towards each other.’

‘And will we go on together, we two, Springtime and Oz?’

‘Who knows?
Right now
we’re together, and that’s what counts.’

I crouched above her, burying my face in her belly. As I flicked my tongue in and out of her navel, she gasped and arched her back. ‘I want you now. I need you now. Come into me now.’

I placed a finger across her lips. ‘Time enough,’ I said, although she could feel that I was more than ready. I bent and kissed the inside of her thighs as she spread them wide, licking my way towards her. She moaned again. ‘Now, Oz, now.’

‘Yes, Primavera, yes!’ I covered her and she took me into herself with a supple movement, into the sweetest embrace I had ever known. We lay entwined, barely moving. Her tongue was in my mouth again, her fingers wound through my crinkly hair. She pulled my head back and looked at me with smouldering eyes. ‘You pass the audition. The job’s yours!’ she hissed.

Then her eyelids flickered and she began to shudder, gripping me tight, inside, tighter than I had ever imagined. Her fingers dug into my back, and she cried out, once, twice, again, again, again, again. And then I realised that two voices were calling out and that one of them was mine. I was lost. As I thrust into her and as she grasped me with her thighs and held me there, we were washed, on the high seas, by wave upon wave of sensation, by a feeling that every nerve-ending in our bodies was being bathed in soothing oil.

At last, we lay still. Her eyes were closed, and there was a sheen of sweat on her face. I licked it off; she tasted salty and sublime on my tongue. I felt myself start to subside, but she held me inside her. ‘No, don’t go,’ she sighed. ‘I want to keep you there for ever.’

‘That’s all right with me,’ I said. ‘I can’t think of a better place to be. Primavera Phillips, you are the most beautiful, wonderful woman I have ever met, and I love you.’

She smiled up at me in the darkness, and smoothed damp hair away from my forehead. ‘And I love you too, Oz Blackstone,’ she murmured. ‘It’s been a crazy week, but this ... this is like a dream.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘like a dream I’ve had before.’

In which we find another stiff in Prim’s bed, a sort of justice is done and there is a twist in the tale.

We made it back to Edinburgh on Sunday, via Portsmouth and points north, including Peter’s hotel in Middleton-One-Row, where the three of us got completely stupid drunk, and, as I recall, Prim and I did something even stupider involving the absence of condoms.

The last few hours of the weekend, we spent tidying up the loft, before we enjoyed the unimaginable luxury of making love and sleeping together in our own bed, even if we did have a clearly contented iguana for company.

Next morning I phoned Archer, got through to him personally and in the most solemn voice I could manage, made an appointment to see him at three-thirty. Then I called Jan, and, putting aside my aversion to pubs at lunchtime, arranged to meet her, and Ellen, and the kids, who were all still at her place, in Whighams at one o’clock. That gave us some time to kill.

‘Oz,’ said Prim, as we lay in bed, under the light from the belvedere, ‘sooner rather than later, I’ve got to go back to my flat, to pick up the rest of my things.’ I didn’t want to go back there, and neither did she, but she was right. It had to be done.

It felt strange parking in Ebeneezer Street. It was the place where I’d met Prim, yet I felt uncomfortable, still a stranger. It was her turf, not ours.

She must have read my mind. ‘Oz, love,’ she said as we climbed the dusty stair. ‘Would you mind if I sold this place? Or would you think I was rushing things?’

I looked over solemnly. ‘Maybe you should hold off,’ I said, and then I kissed her. ‘Until tomorrow. We’ve got a few things to do today.’

She unlocked the door and went to step inside, but I held her back. ‘Hold on,’ I said, laughing. ‘Let me check the bed. Just in case there’s a body in there.’ She grinned as I looked round the bedroom door.

There was a body in the bed. It was Miles Grayson. But it was a brand new bed, and fortunately, he was very much alive. Dawn lay on his far side, hunched down as if she was trying to hide. I don’t know which of us went pinker faster. ‘I see you took our advice,’ I said to her.

‘Oz!’ said Miles, the sound of his voice bringing Prim bursting into the room. ‘Where the hell have you two been? Dawn’s been worried about you.’

‘So I see,’ said Prim, archly, but with a smile.

‘We just nipped over to France for a few days. To sort of, get to know each other, like.’ A sudden thought struck me. ‘Here, while we were away, we had this terrific idea for a film script. Come for dinner tonight and we’ll tell you about it. We owe you a beer anyway.’

‘Yes,’ said Prim to her sister. ‘And bring the rest of my clothes while you’re at it.’

I flipped a card from the breast pocket of my Savoy Tailors’ Guild suit on to the bed. ‘That’s where we live. See you tonight. You be bad now!’

 

The whole team was gathered in Whighams when we got there, filling one of the low alcoves. There was a glass of draught Coke waiting for me, and a glass of white wine for Primavera. She jammed herself into a corner, on the far side of Jan. I sat down between my nephews and my sister and gave them all hugs. ‘Everything all right, Ellie?’