Get Carter (29 page)

A few miles farther down the road and I was driving even more slowly. I didn’t want to miss the entrance to Sowerby aerodrome. When I found it I switched off the head lights and bumped the car over the verge and rolled along the main runway until I came to a group of old black nissen huts. I drove the car behind them out of sight of the road and switched off the engine. Then I switched the car light on, got out of the car and walked round to the passenger side. I opened the door and pulled the passenger seat
forward. I took the syringe out of my pocket and unwrapped it and placed it on the back seat. Then I leant into the back and turned Margaret over so that she was lying on her face. She thrashed about a bit but she soon gave up because there wasn’t very much she could do about anything.

I picked up the syringe. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. Her arms being tied behind her back made it just a matter of being careful.

She thrashed about some more before she went under, straight after she felt the point of the needle, but not for long. She was out in under three minutes. I hauled her over on to her back again. Her breathing was very slow and there was a line of sweat on her forehead. I lifted one of her eyelids. The pupil was a pinprick.

Then I climbed over her on to the back seat and put my feet up. I covered my legs with Margaret’s coat and pulled my own coat more tightly round me and eventually dropped off to sleep.

I dreamt that I was lying on a beach with Audrey and she was wearing a bikini and she had a handkerchief over her face to keep the sun off. But it was very cold and the wind kept rippling the edge of the handkerchief and I was panic stricken in case the wind blew the handkerchief away from her face. But I couldn’t let her know how I felt so I had to lie there propped up on my elbow looking at her saying the kinds of things to her that she used to like me to say. Finally I couldn’t take it any longer and I got up from her side and ran towards the sea and kept running until the sea was over my head.

Sunday

I
WOKE UP AT
quarter to three. Stiff as a bloody board. I unscrewed my hip flask and took a long pull then I dragged myself back into the driver’s seat and made a U-turn back on to the runway.

When I got back to the road I turned right. Towards Sowerby. Five minutes later I was in the village.

I didn’t have to look hard to find Kinnear’s place. It was an old Georgian farmhouse. Three or four acres of land. Plenty of trees. Set way back from the road. The party was still in full swing and every light in the house seemed to be on.

I drove past the gates and carried on down the road for a hundred yards or so before I stopped the car. You never could tell. There might be his own personalised little squad car tucked out of sight up the drive to keep the gatecrashers out and the drunks in.

I waited for a while before I moved. Nothing happened. So I got out and walked to where the high boundary wall ended and stuck my head round the corner to see what we’d got.

We’d got some more wall.

I swore. I’d have to take her in through the main entrance. I looked back down the road to the gates. The road inclined downwards very slightly.

I walked back to the car and let the hand brake off. Then I closed the door and stuck my shoulder through the window and took hold of the steering wheel with my left hand and began to push.

I stopped the car a few feet away from the gates and then walked over to the driveway and stood there and listened. There were no sounds of car doors slamming outside the house. There was no sound of anything approaching up the road.

So I walked back to the car and got Margaret.

I drove back to the phone box at Malton. I was a long time getting an operator. When she came on the line I asked for a London number. She asked me to insert two and six. I put in the change I’d taken from Margaret’s purse earlier on.

The phone rattled at the other end. The voice that answered was full of sleep.

“Scully. Yes?”

“It’s Jack Carter,” I said.

After that had sunk in the voice was a little less rumpled.

“Yes?”

“I’ve got a story for you.”

“Go on.”

“Involves blue films, a killing, bent cops, drugs and a friend of a couple of people you’ve been trying to wrap the fish and chips in for a long time now.”

There was a long pause.

“It sounds beautiful,” he said. “But I’m forced to wonder why it’s coming from you?”

“The man who was killed was called Carter.”

Another pause.

“Does it have to be over the phone?”

“There isn’t time for any other way.”

“All right. Go ahead.”

“There’s a condition.”

“I thought there might be.”

“You handle the story the way I tell you to.”

“I can’t guarantee that.”

“Yes you can. When you hear the story.”

“Go on.”

“Not far from where I am there’s a party going on. Wild. Cardboard dungeons and things. Right now one of the guests is lying in the grounds full of heroin. She used to be my brother’s girlfriend. Until he was killed. After he found out that this woman had pulled his daughter into a blue movie. The man who had my brother killed has enough influence with the local scuffers to make them decide it was accidental. At the same time the scuffers are having to talk to the two birds involved in the movie. One of them being my brother’s daughter. The other works for the man I’m talking about. The chances are they’ll try and keep things nice and private.”

“So what happens?”

“You get one of your local men to phone the scuffers about the bird in the grounds. He tells them he’s been tipped off. The scuffers phone the man we’re talking about and put him wise and then scream over themselves. But the trick is some of your boys are already there. With cameras and everything. Maybe even yourself if you leave the tip-off late enough. So then of course the scuffers have no choice but to put the pressure on the man we’re talking about. And everything’s all over the front pages.”

“It’s beautiful,” Scully said.

“Especially as I’ve mailed you a print of the film in question,” I said. “It’ll be at your office on Monday morning. I should go through your mail yourself just this once.”

The track was only wide enough for one car at a time. There were the occasional stretches where at one time or another they’d got some old bricks and stuck them next to each other to make a surface but the rest of the track was stony and covered with fine red brick dust. On either side of the track were reeds and beyond the reeds the flooded brick-pits stretched broadly under the faintly
lightening sky. There was no wind at all and the rain had stopped.

The house was at the end of the track. Beyond the house was the raised bank of the river and on the left four crumbling kilns shaped like Aztec architecture rose above the roofless buildings of the brickyards. Nothing had changed since I had been there last. Twenty-three years ago.

A light was burning in one of the downstairs rooms of the house, its glare deepening the surrounding blue of the dawn. A figure appeared at the window and stared down the track at the approaching noise. I drew closer and the figure disappeared. I reached the end of the track and stopped the car outside the house. I switched the engine off. I could hear the dim sound of the river rushing by beyond the bank. The light went out and the front door opened. Eric appeared, carrying a hold-all. He closed the door behind him and began to walk over to the car.

I rolled the window down. He looked me straight in the face but I was still only a pale blur in the dawn light.

He was only six feet away from the car when he saw who had come to collect him.

He gave a short high scream and dropped the hold-all. Then he began to run.

I got out of the car and leaned back in and picked up the shotgun off the back seat. I propped it up against the car while I took the bottle of scotch from my bag. I put the bottle in my coat pocket and began to walk off after Eric. I had plenty of time and there was nowhere for him to go.

He’d run up the side of the bank and was making for the brick-works, stumbling along the cycle track that the brick-yarders had worn into the bank in the old days. I walked up the side of the bank and followed him watching him disappear into the overgrown brickyard and when I couldn’t see him any more I could hear him scrambling over miniature screes of bricks that had fallen from the decaying walls. The sound had the rattle of death.

Now it was getting lighter by the second and on my right the river was changing from purple to grey and I could see the opposite bank a mile and a half away. The tide was out and the mud rippled with dawn colours and from out in the middle of the river the sound of the lightship bell travelled quickly over the vast flatness of the river and its banks.

I paused at the spot where the bank ran into the brickyard. The sound of Eric’s running had stopped. I walked forward.

The yard was square. On my right the boundary was a long low kiln so old that its top was totally covered with grass. To the left and in front of me two low broken-down walls occasionally protruded above the briar and the elderberry. On the left, facing on to the river, were the roofless shells of the tileries, half their original height due to natural decay and the erosion of the local kids. Beyond the tileries, out of sight, were the remains of the landing stage. In the centre of all this were the four main kilns, still solid, and two large vats, full of old bricks and rain water. Frank and me, we used to sit on the edge of the vats and throw bangers in and watch them fizz across the surface of the water.

I stopped again and listened. There was still no sound. I walked over to the tileries and looked in each one. He wasn’t there. I didn’t go beyond them. If he’d gone that far he’d still have been running when I’d come into the yard.

I looked in both vats. Nothing. So I laid the shotgun down on the edge of one of the vats and took out the bottle of scotch and put it next to the shotgun and began to climb up the face of the nearest kiln. The kilns were stepped at intervals of four feet and as lads the trick was to pull yourself up from step to step until you got to the top. But now I was twice the size and there was no problem.