Tree of Hands (33 page)

Probably, instead of coming here, they had gone down to the West End. Go home, the sensible voice inside him said, go back to where you were before you met her. Sooner or later you'll have to, so why not now? A solitary bus appeared over the crest of the hill, rounded the curve in the road with its lumbering galleon-like motion, a red double-decker bus going up to Hornsey that passed the end of his parents' street.

He let the bus go. They might be in a pub instead. They might be down there in the Java Head. Barry didn't approach it from the mews but from around the block, walking round the square formed by Lordship Avenue and the three small streets, looking into parked cars.

It was dark with lamps only at the corners. He wasn't in danger here, no one knew him here, but the two boys waiting under a corner lamp looked too much like Hoopoe, were too much in Hoopoe's style, for comfort. He held the gun and felt a quickening, strengthening surge into his blood. The boys didn't even look at him.

He was almost at the pub, he was entering the pool of light under the saloon bar window, when he heard the first shot. He was still grasping the gun through the lining of his jacket and for a wild moment he fancied it was he who had made the shot, fired the gun. Then there came a volley of shots and a scream that split the cold thick air. Barry began to run. The pub doors opened behind him and people poured out. He ran up the mews, not knowing whether he was running away from the shots or towards them.

There was one more shot. He saw Dennis Gordon on the pavement ahead of him, a blind, staggering, King Kong shape, a silhouette as black as a gorilla. The little gun half the size of Barry's was in his paw of a hand and he flung it in an arc away from him.

Barry didn't know where all the people had come from. The cold had kept them in and blood and screams and the heat of violence had brought them out as if melting their doors. The mews was full of people and their noise.

He saw the bullet hole in the wing of the car before it registered with him whose car it was. He pushed his way through, he elbowed the crowd out of his way. The passenger door he had seen opened for Carol stood open again, and thin threads of blood came out over the edge of the seat and in winding narrow rivulets over the rim of the door.

There was a lot of blood on the floor of the car, a lake of it forming. Barry had often wondered how he would feel, what he would do, if he saw Carol in another man's arms, in, say, Terence Wand's arms. He witnessed that sight now and knew the total negation of feeling shock brings. Impossible to say whether they had been embracing before they were shot or had fallen into each other's arms in death. There was no blood on Carol's golden baby curls. The shot that had killed her had made a round hole just below the lobe of her left ear where the clotting blood formed an earring like a cluster of dark jewels.

Barry turned away and elbowed through the people to the end of the mews. He walked up the hill like an automaton or a contestant in a walking race. Police cars with sirens blasting and a useless ambulance came past him through red traffic lights. The night was suddenly filled with the howls of sirens. Barry felt nothing, but all the time he could see Carol's face with that red jewel just below her ear and he fancied he could smell limes as he had smelled them in the mortuary. Mechanically he walked, the gun moving rhythmically like a fifth limb.

At the top of the hill he leaned over the bridge and dropped the gun over the parapet into the canal. The water rings from the splash were still widening when he got on to the Hornsey bus.

THE TAXI SET
him down in Golders Green. That was far enough, he could get a tube from there. He felt curiously carefree and light of heart. Light of body he was too. He had weighed himself before leaving and found he had lost eleven pounds since Christmas. All his troubles seemed left behind with his discarded past. He was so relaxed that he bought an evening paper in the station for something to read in the train.

Going down the steps to the platform, he glanced at the front-page lead. Glanced, then stopped and read. The shock gripped and twisted his insides. If he hadn't phoned Carol yesterday afternoon to say he couldn't make it, it might have been him with her in what the paper called the ‘death car'. So his nerves had come in useful and saved his life. If his nerves hadn't told him that the only way he was going to get through his last night in Spring Close was alone and on a stupefying mixture of tranquillizers, alcohol and sedatives, it might have been him! He and she would certainly have spent part of their time together in the wine bar. One always did with Carol. He hardly took in the name of the murdered man, Edward Greenwood, whoever he might be. His hand was trembling so much that the one good clasp on the brown suitcase shook undone.

Rather late in the day, he spared a thought for Carol. Poor old Carol. Suppose he had taken her out last night as they had originally planned? Even if he hadn't got shot, he would doubtless have been involved in some unpleasant way in all the fracas that went on between her and this jealous guy with whom she'd apparently been living on and off. The one he'd spoken to on the phone yesterday
perhaps. The result would have been all the business of Freda's house coming out and his getaway with the money prevented. Terence decided he must have a guardian angel after all.

He got out of the train at Euston and walked to the small hotel where he had booked a room for the night in order to have the use of it during this afternoon and evening. There he counted the money. Two thousand or so fifty-pound notes wouldn't have taken up all that much room, but the bank manager hadn't been able to let him have it all in fifties, and so at least half was in twenties and tens. In fact the case was hardly big enough to contain it. That was why the clasps kept coming undone.

He dared not leave the money in his room. He took the case with him and walked along Tottenham Court Road. There in a shop that sold leather goods and souvenirs, he bought a canvas strap to put round the suitcase and – as an afterthought when he was leaving the shop – a nylon fold-away bag.

Back at the hotel, he surprised himself by the amount of intense anxiety he seemed to find it necessary to devote to the packing of these bags and the disposal of the money. He had packed them both and re-packed them over and over and finally got all the money in the nylon bag and the few clothes he was taking and his toilet things in the other, when it occurred to him he might very likely be permitted only a single item of hand baggage. The nylon bag only, then. It was the kind on which the zip goes almost all the way round so that when empty the bag could be opened out flat, folded into its own pocket and reduced to handkerchief size. It weighed practically nothing and was more capacious than he had at first supposed.

He realized as he emptied both bags once more that his nerves were screwing up again. Carol, he thought, Carol, trying to feel sad and upset but succeeding only in thinking about 5 Spring Close and the Goldschmidts' removal van arriving to find it full of furniture and Freda's car in the garage. That would have happened by now. What would
they do? Go to Steiner & Wildwood and get Mr Phipps's forwarding address from Sawyer. That would be care of Wand in Brownswood Common Lane, Tottenham, and Terence knew for a fact his mother would be out all day visiting her sister in Palmers Green as she always was on a Tuesday.

But even if the Goldschmidts were at this moment trying to trace him to get his furniture moved out, that wouldn't make them suspect him of never having owned the house in the first place. That and its implications would very likely not dawn on them for a week or more. Just the same, he was on tenterhooks as he re-packed the bag and watched the time creep very slowly towards seven-thirty, and it was an enormous relief to be in the tube at last with the nylon bag on his knee and a single ticket to Heathrow Central in his pocket.

Detective Inspector Tony Leatham had a rather smart overnight bag, not leather but as good as, a dark cream fake pigskin. He'd wangled it so that he'd be stopping two nights in Melbourne. Monty Driscoll had been there three months anyway so a couple more days wouldn't do him any harm, while a brief twenty-four-hour stopover would have been cruel on the jet lag, Leatham thought. Not that he knew anything about jet lag. He had never been further abroad before than the Costa Del Sol.

He was going to enjoy himself. No tube for him. They let him have a car to take him right up to Terminal Three. Like all tyro travellers, Leatham was early and one of the first to check in on the Qantas flight that went out at 21.45. He had a cup of coffee and bought a paperback. Not
The Marriage Knot
you saw on display everywhere, he didn't think that was quite his line, but a new collection of twelve horror stories. Then, because there seemed nothing left to do, he presented his passport, and went through the gate from which there was no returning this side of the air.

The girl was his type, with a little round face and blond
curls, though hers were permed. She was surrounded by stacks of luggage. He didn't know how on her own – for the little kid with her would have been more hindrance than help – she had managed to hump it into the train. She was wearing jeans and a brown fur jacket, coney probably, and at first he thought she must have an enormous bust, unnaturally huge on so small girl. It was only after he had been talking to her for a few minutes – or she had been talking to him, she had cottoned on to him fast the way they did – and told him her name was Jane that he realized it was a baby in a sling she was carrying strapped to her chest. She bent forward and he saw its round nearly bald head where he expected her cleavage to be.

Two kids and all that baggage! Terence didn't want to get involved but it was too late. She had already read the label on Jessica's suitcase that said Singapore and the name of the hotel he was going to. He could see in her eyes the greedy relief that she had found herself an escort and a porter for the next twenty hours. It would distract his mind, there was that to it. Talking to her would stop him dwelling on the Goldschmidts. And when they got to Singapore . . .

‘Bill's going to be stuck in Penang till April,' she was saying, ‘but he's got an ayah all lined up for me.'

Terence understood vaguely that she meant some sort of nurse for the kids. He thought he could do worse than enjoy her undivided companionship for a day or two if that was what fate had in store for him. The older child, sexless in velour dungarees and crew cut, though called Miranda, climbed on to his knee and began fiddling with the zip of the nylon bag. Terence hoped the ayah would be waiting at the airport, preferably on the tarmac.

He carried three cases, pushed one that was on wheels, the nylon bag hooked over his left wrist. Jane carried the baby and two more cases while Miranda hung on to the hem of her jacket, grizzling. There were no policemen loitering around the check-in desks – one of Terence's fears. Relief at getting rid of the cases was succeeded by
anxiety at going through baggage scrutiny. And for Terence it was a literal scrutiny. He thought it was all up with him when they said they wanted the nylon bag opened and then opened it so that half the contents fell out. But no one said anything. They turned over the wads of notes with the same indifference as that with which they had handled Jane's package of disposable napkins. He saw Jane looking at the money but she didn't say anything.

They all went into the duty-free shop where Jane bought perfume. Terence didn't buy anything. One hour to go and he wouldn't need whisky any more, he had never really liked the taste. They had coffee and Miranda had a packet of crisps, and while they were sitting at the table wondering whether to have a sandwich or wait for food on the plane, Qantas announced that boarding was about to begin on their flight QF2 for Bahrain, Singapore and Sydney. It was only the first call, there was a long time to go yet.

Jane said she thought she ought to go to the loo, or rather to the mothers' room if they had one, and change the baby's napkin. She might not have another chance for hours. Everyone knew what it was like queuing up on those flights. Terence thought she would take Miranda with her but she didn't, and as soon as her mother was out of sight, Miranda knocked over a nearly full cup of coffee. The coffee flooded over Terence's nylon bag. He ripped open the bag through which coffee had begun to seep and as he did so, Miranda, contrite perhaps or merely frightened, jumped on to him and locked her arms round his neck.

Passengers were now getting up all round Terence and flocking towards the gates. He decided to go too and to hell with Jane and her kids and her bags and her ayah. He struggled to his feet, still holding or being held by Miranda, and as he tried to prise her off found himself looking into the face of Detective Inspector Leatham. Recognition was mutual, immediate. Terence experienced the same sick, dizzy feeling of faintness he had had when Leatham called on him in Spring Close.

Leatham had been sitting at a table three or four yards
away. He got up and came slowly towards Terence, looked at Terence and at Miranda and said:

‘Jason Stratford, I presume?'

The words were audible to Terence but they didn't register as more than sounds, as an unknown foreign language might. His nerve burst and frayed open like a too tightly stretched string. He let out a low inarticulate cry. He thrust Miranda off him, grabbed the open bag and ran. The bag peeled itself inside out and the contents tumbled out behind him like the laying of a paper chase: razor, newspaper, underclothes, toothpaste, tranquillizers, a hundred and thirty-two thousand pounds . . .

THEY WERE TAKING
the book back. Holding Jay's hand, Benet went into the Winterside library on a March morning, handed the book across the counter and tried to explain how she happened to have it. Though not a member, she had happened to be in the library some months before, her little boy had picked it up and inadvertently . . .