Ventriloquists (40 page)

Forcing himself to focus, Chris was made aware of all the gaps that he had in his comprehension; not all of these gaps could be explained by the attack either. It was like trying to catch up with a film’s plot, thirty minutes in.

‘So what do
you
have to say for yourself?’ Chris asked Maggie while Benny strolled away (presumably for privacy). Chris took a seat on one of the benches.

Maggie shrugged.

‘You don’t know, eh? What’s to stop me calling the police?’

Maggie shrugged again. ‘You don’t mean anything to him, in case you haven’t realised. You can do what you like.’

Wishing that he didn’t have to hear that all the time, Chris rebounded. ‘Well, maybe the fucking
law
means something to him. Have you thought of that?’

There was that shrug once more! (Chris would have taken pleasure from slapping her one!) ‘You don’t understand,’ Maggie told him, sitting down beside him. ‘He drops hints all the time. I have to expect he
wants
to get caught… but no one challenges anything he does. No one
sees
… For Christ’s sake, we’re sitting in someone’s back garden – why are none of the
neighbours
calling the police? Because they’re just like you and me – or like we were until recently. They don’t want to watch the show. To watch is… to watch is to get involved.’

Chris waited. While he couldn’t query the commonsense nature of what Maggie had told him, the big picture remained cloudy and stormy.
The only way to converse with madness,
Bernadette had once told him,
is to learn its language.

As her face filled his mind once again (smiling this time), Chris knew that he had to find her, and in order to find her he had to learn the language of madness. After all, she was smiling now; she was aware that he knew that she hadn’t left him deliberately. She hadn’t run off with another man. She hadn’t blown a top-secret Lottery win on a ticket to Barbados. She’d been taken by Benny.

How many others were with her?

‘Where does he keep them?’ Chris asked.

‘A big house near Ashridge Forest.’

Twenty minutes away, Chris calculated. ‘Couple of minutes to get back to my car,’ he said aloud.

‘What?’ Maggie asked. ‘Are you
going
there?’

Not exactly answering the question, Chris went on: ‘There’s lots of big houses near Ashridge. Do you have an address?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘You can’t make it in your condition! You’re two minutes from a bloody coma!’

‘My Bernadette is there. Please, Maggie… At least
explain
it to me.’

Maggie glanced towards the end of the garden. ‘He’s coming back,’ she said quietly.

‘Are you a prisoner too?’ Chris pressed.

‘Do I
look
like a prisoner?’ Maggie smiled. ‘The man’s me
salvation
. Got shot of some rats in me life… now I’m free.’

‘Some rats?’

Benny was five metres from them, and Maggie said, ‘He did for me da, the rapist bastard. And Tommy’s with your girl Bernadette in Benny’s dreamworld… I hope she doesn’t get friendly with
that
wanker.’

Maggie stood up, sending a riffle of petrol perfume through the air. ‘All done?’ she asked Benny.

‘Done and done,’ the man answered. ‘Some new boys – father and son. They’ll be here in five… What’ve you two lovebirds been discussing?’

‘Whether he dies here or at home.’

Benny sniffed. ‘Fair enough. What did you decide, son?’

Surely there would be a point at which Chris ceased to feel sick and would begin to feel anger; at which the jungle drums in his head would beat an alternative rhythm. Small waves of darkness splashed at the edges of his vision.

Chris lifted a finger and pointed at Benny’s chest. ‘If I die here, you’ll be implicated. It’s your house, you said.’

‘Indeed it is, mate, but you’re not dealing from a full deck. I’ve got some boys on their way and they’re picking up the spoils to deposit elsewhere. They’ll be making two deliveries. One to dispose of the dead ones – her old man and you, if you hurry up – and one to my labs, where I’ll work on them in due course. So it’s up to you, mate – only shit or get off the pot, okay?’

Benny started to walk away, towards the path that would lead around the side of the house. A second later, Maggie moved off after him… and Chris was wrenched between feeling abandoned again – emotionally hurt, indeed – and feeling that he’d crawled out of the worst nightmare known in the history of the superego.

His thoughts were sloppy and ill-formed, he knew they were; but he also knew that when his attackers were gone, they were gone forever, more than likely. And with them, his only hope of getting back to Bernadette.

‘Wait!’

They had only walked a few metres, and there was no night noise to spoil his word, but Benny carried on as if he’d heard nothing. On the other hand, Maggie sopped in her tracks; she turned.

‘Take me with you,’ Chris pleaded. ‘I’ll be part of it – whatever it is. But don’t leave me to freeze.’

Now Benny stopped as well. He was too far away for Chris to read his features, but the angry tone of his voice was unambiguous.

‘What part of this don’t you understand?’ he asked sarcastically.

‘All of it!’

‘Then listen up, for the last time.
You are absolutely no use to me, twat.
You are weak; you are a piss-ant penny-max stakes fucking gambler. Is
that
clear enough? You have no imagination and you mean nothing to evolution. So die here or crawl home like a damaged cat.
Nobody will care.
’

With which Benny resumed his exit stage left… and Maggie was certain to tail him, Chris knew. However, when he looked at her he saw something that he had not expected. With Maggie being that little bit closer to where Chris was sitting, the fact that she was mouthing words was hard to deny. Chris squinted. And Maggie did it one more time: her silent adieu. And then she was off on her heels, leaving Chris atremble.

Follow us,
she had mouthed.

4.

Branston struggled to think of the place that this bashed-up dude would fit in.

The guy was bleeding to death, Branston was certain of it.

Blood was pouring, Virginia.

No.

Not the interview with Virginia, this was the real stamp. This was
it.

The man was dying.

Ignoring the lolling hulk of Chris’s body, Branston drove as fast as he dared. To spin too quickly, left or right, he imagined, would result in Chris being catapulted out of the passenger side window, in a waterfall of smithereened glass. And killed.

Thud.

Sound of the wanker, bouncing on the tarmac.

Thud.

No, not really, it was the sound of Chris as he rammed his temple against the side window, once again.

If the tumble doesn’t kill him, I will.

Branston paused to wonder (waiting at a roundabout) if he himself would be the reason for Chris feeling rough with bruises in the morning. It amused him (briefly) that he might be held responsible. If Chris survived this evening, he would be well within his rights to complain about the quality of the chauffeuring service he’d received.

So let him complain,
thought Branston.

Never were the Chiltern Hills more luscious than at night. The hills were tipped with dunkings of magnesium light (or was it manganese?). Entrance to the forest wrapped sleeves of darkness around Branston’s nippy car. A bare ten metres on, and these sleeves were tied securely. The vehicle felt airlocked. It was lifeless and drained – drained of energy and force: the inside of the car was no different from pernicious anaemia… or so Branston though as he formulated his account of the journey. By this point he was all but damn it alone in the vehicle. Chris’s consciousness had slipped away, light as a breeze. Loneliness and anger rattled together in Branston’s skull. As a result of these emotions, he summoned up Virginia, in the way that an only child might summon up an imaginary friend.

If he dies,
said Virginia –
what then? What’s the plan?

In the interview, Branston smiled in the style more often described as
indulgently.

If he dies, Virginia, then I’ve done nothing wrong. Not a thing. I was a Good Samaritan, in the wrong place at the wrong…

Again, no; this wasn’t good enough – this was not a film magazine interview.

So what
was
it? A police interrogation?

Seriously, Tim – what
is
it?
asked Virginia, dipping her head low to consult the pad of notes that she’d made in preparation.

Up ahead, the vehicle that he was following made a perfectly well-indicated left-hand turn… One thing that Branston had noticed: the driver in the lead was no roadhog – no bitumen prick – and furthermore, he seemed not to give a damn who happened to be following him.

Almost like he was courting the dance…

Well exactly, Virginia… like he wants me there…
wherever ‘there’ might end up being.

The road beneath the car’s wheels was stiff and ragged with mud dried into lunar puddles and ravines; the vehicle shook like a cocktail-maker, the red tail-lights ahead describing the ECG reading on a patient’s electronic equipment… The road angled left. It decreased in professionalism and became a path. In Branston’s vision, the vehicle in the lead bounced manically, the tail-lights sprinkling daubs of illumination.

The house reared up from behind a buttress of hedges. They had arrived, it seemed, at their destination; and although no lights were on within (or none that Branston could detect), this didn’t mean that no one was home. Indeed, already parked on the driveway was the white van that Branston had seen reverse into the house’s garage, back in Edlesborough. The workmen – the delivery men? the collection men? – had made good time.

Branston tensed at the wheel… and followed the older man and the Traveller girl onto the property. Now was no time to act coy, he reasoned; surely to God they would have discussed the fact that they were being tailed, at
some
point during the drive over. There was no sense in pretending to be invisible now. Apart from anything else, Branston had a series of questions on the subject of Yasser to pose; and he also had a man bleeding to death on his passenger seat… and he wanted to know why.

Wondering where the nearest hospital was for when the time came to drop off his passenger, Branston exited his car. The driveway was awash with a fawn-coloured light (the old man’s car had turned on the security beam), which meant that Branston could see fairly clearly – with far greater clarity than he’d been able to in Edlesborough, at any rate. The man’s face, in the light, was deepened with shadow; very briefly a comparison with a Halloween pumpkin entered Branston’s mind. Then the image fused and shorted out.

‘Can I help you, friend?’ the old man asked from over the roof of his car. Neither he nor the Traveller woman had moved more than a step from the doors that they’d climbed out of.

Almost as if they’re waiting,
said Virginia.

They’ve got nothing to be wary of, Branston told himself (ignoring his interviewer for a second). You’ve got it all wrong, Tim! They’re innocent! And you’re on private property in the middle of the night.

Maybe. Or like I say… they’re waiting for you, Branston. At the very least they’re waiting for you to make the first move.

Branston wondered if he was in a film, right now; wondered if this guy took his security seriously.

‘You left a man for dead, back in Edlesborough,’ Branston answered. He had not moved from his own driver’s door either. There was righteous and there was foolish.

‘Is that a fact?’ The old man appeared neither perturbed nor put out by the allegation. For all his breezy manner it might have been mid-morning; he might have been asked the time.

‘Yeah, that’s a fact. He’s bleeding in my car.’

‘I’d say that makes him
your
problem – and not mine – wouldn’t you? Come on, Maggie.’

Benny moved towards the house, prompting Branston to think quickly. A glimpse of Maggie’s expression – as flat as pummelled dough – was all it took to recognise the weaker link in Benny’s chain. Had something disturbed her? Maybe something the old man had said on the ride over?

Something to do with Yasser?

‘
Stolen any more infants recently?’ Branston called to Maggie.

The woman said nothing in return, but Benny did. Turning quickly to face them, he said, ‘Have you
what?
’

‘It’s nothing, Benny,’ Maggie protested.

‘Stolen an
infant?
’

It took Branston a beat to understand that beneath Benny’s anger was something else: something disbelieving.

Maggie tried to make Benny approve. ‘I did it for you. I was going to… donate him to you.’

A
donation?
What horror show had Branston stumbled into?

‘…for your project.’

Benny had returned to his side of the car; he and Maggie were conversing across the roof – they might have been in a supermarket car park, discussing price rises or fish fingers.

The word
project
sounded eerie to Branston’s ears. Indignation was the fuel in his engine. ‘That’s not what you told Yasser,’ he said to Maggie.

She spat at him: ‘Keep your nose out of it… Who
are
you anyway?’