An Air That Kills (14 page)

‘So what's he doing down here?'

Kirby dropped the match in the ashtray, picked up his glass and swallowed the last of his beer. ‘Either he wanted to spend more time with dear old Mumsie or he was too scared to stay in the Smoke.'

‘Or both.'

‘How about this, sir? Meague owes Carn money, which he hasn't got. Carn comes out of prison. Meague comes down here to lie low. Carn comes after him.'

‘Sheer speculation,' Thornhill said. ‘But it's very tempting. Then you'd have some sort of a motive for the break-ins, too.' He nodded towards Kirby's empty glass. ‘Want the other half?'

Thornhill took their glasses into the bar. A small crowd of men was waiting to be served. He found himself humming as he stood there, idly reading the list of darts fixtures pinned to the wall, and he recognised the tune as one he and Edith had danced to when they were courting. He felt more cheerful than he had for several days. The change of mood wasn't due to the food and drink he had consumed, which lay heavily in his stomach, but to the conversation with Kirby. He didn't yet know if he liked the man, let alone trusted him – it was too early to tell. But at least they could discuss a case like colleagues.

A man who had just been served pushed his way back to his seat. The crowd broke up and reformed. Thornhill smelled a familiar perfume.

‘Yes, dear?' Gloria said, leaning the upper half of her body across the bar counter towards him. ‘What can I get you?'

His cheerfulness vanished. Suddenly his mouth was dry and he had to swallow. She made him feel like a sweaty little schoolboy desperate to relieve a need he hardly understood. He forced himself to look away from the straining blouse poised so invitingly near to him. Lust was a cuckoo among emotions: it tried to elbow all the others out of its way.

It wasn't his turn to be served. He was about to point this out but, when he opened his mouth to do so, his nerve deserted him. The rational part of him pointed out that Gloria was giving him preferential treatment not because she liked him but because she knew or at least guessed that he was a police officer. He didn't like her, he told himself firmly, and he didn't want her to like him.

‘Same again?' she said, smiling as though there were a shared secret between them.

‘Yes, please. Best bitter, I think it was.'

He put the glasses on the counter and pretended to be absorbed in finding his money. He was aware of her looking at him as she drew the first pint and aware too that he desperately wanted to look at her.

‘Enjoy your lunch?'

‘Yes, thanks.'

‘We do a special on Saturday. A lovely roast and two veg. Mr Kirby used to come in with his old boss sometimes.'

So Gloria knew who he was. Thornhill felt disappointed – and immediately angry with himself for the disappointment. She put the glasses on the bar and he held out a ten-shilling note.

‘I can put it on the slate if you want.'

‘No, thanks.' Thornhill took a deep breath. ‘I like to pay as I go.'

Chapter Nine

Seen in silhouette at dusk, the roofs, chimneys and gables of the Rose in Hand resembled an enormous crouching animal, a magnified insect. As he passed the inn on his way home after work, Charlie Meague averted his eyes. He turned right towards Minching Lane and put the Rose behind him.

His route took him through a cluster of small factories, garages and workshops; next there were terraces of tiny cottages built of red brick, several pubs and two chapels, one with boarded-up windows. Soon he came to an older part of the Templefields where there were fewer people.

Before the war, this network of cobbled lanes and stone-flagged courts had been teeming with life. But it had not been much of a life, Charlie reminded himself, because he automatically distrusted the way memory made a paradise out of the past. Here you'd seen children with rickets, with lice running through their hair. Most of the men had been out of work and they gambled for pennies on street corners, with one of their children acting as a lookout for the copper. The women were squat, muscular and almost always angry; they were more formidable than their men. On Friday and Saturday nights, there were fights – big ones involving dozens of men whose desperation was fuelled by alcohol, and the fights had often ended with blood on the cobbles and sometimes a body or two as well.

Among the poor there were gradations, just as there were among the rich. Charlie's mother had taught him that the people who lived in Minching Lane could look down, metaphorically as well as literally, on those who lived, whole families to a single room, in these decaying courts. They were rough. They were dirty. They were vulgar. The mothers weren't married to the fathers.

It was true that Charlie didn't have a father. Mr Meague had gone to look for work in 1929, probably to Birmingham, and he'd never come back – much to his wife's relief. Still, at least Charlie had known who his father was, and he'd had the reassuring knowledge during childhood that his parents had been married – and in chapel, too; he'd seen their marriage certificate which proved it. Moreover, although the Meagues had been poor, Mrs Meague was rarely short of work as a cleaner; in those days, she'd been a strong, vigorous woman who tackled the work given her if not with enthusiasm then at least with a grim determination.

Charlie entered a narrow, winding alley which led steeply uphill to Minching Lane. Halfway along, he paused and listened. He could hear nothing but the occasional car or lorry in the distance. It was strange to feel so alone in the middle of Lydmouth. Since the war, most of the inhabitants had moved out, either to Nissen huts in the former army camp on the outskirts of town or to the new housing estates. This part of Templefields was a ghost of its old self; it had reached the end of one part of its life and had yet to begin the next.

He turned right into a small yard. Tall, narrow buildings reared up in front of him and to either side. He knew from experience that the alley he had turned off magnified sound. If anyone came along it, he would hear the footsteps – unless, perhaps, the person was trying to be quiet.

Immediately to his left was a doorway. Charlie ducked under a low lintel and went down three steps into a semibasement. The room smelt of damp stones and soot. He struck a match. The floor was littered with broken glass, old newspapers and cigarette ends. Teenagers had used the place in the summer, but it was too cold for them now.

Charlie moved across the room to the fireplace. The iron range it had once contained had been ripped out. The opening itself was large and very old. He stood inside it and looked upwards, but he could not see the sky. Stretching to his full height, he felt the lip of a ledge at the back of the chimney. His fingers touched hessian.

The sack was still there. It wasn't worth getting it down. If he tried to sell the contents, he would have to do it outside Lydmouth, preferably in a city large enough to guarantee anonymity. He went back to the alley and continued on his way to Minching Lane.

The proceeds from all this danger and effort had been disappointingly meagre. A bottle of whisky, a few packets of cigarettes, a few cheap trinkets: he doubted that he could get more than twenty pounds for the lot, even if he found the right buyers. He dared not drink the spirits or smoke the cigarettes in public. Even taking them home would be asking for trouble.

Beside, twenty pounds was a drop in the ocean. Carn claimed that Charlie owed him nearly nine hundred, and Carn, for all his soft-spoken ways and his bookish tastes, was not a man to let debts slide.

Charlie wasn't afraid just for himself. If that were the case, he could emigrate – he could even make sure the police discovered that he was behind the two robberies, and so be transferred to the relative security of prison. But it wasn't that easy.

‘Always concentrate on the family,' Carn had said to Charlie in the days of their partnership before he had gone to prison. ‘It's much more sensible. Psychology, see? That's how you make a man really do his best. After all, if you take it out on
him
, you've written off all hope of that money for ever. You can get a lot of leverage with a child, you know.'

At that moment, just as Charlie emerged into Miching Lane, the revelation came at last – and from a completely unexpected direction. One memory, of Carn's dry, overprecise voice laying down his rules of conduct, acted as a bait to draw another from the shadows.

Charlie remembered Tony as a child, poor kid, and how sometimes they met in the summerhouse. That was where he had seen a box like the one they had found at the Rose in Hand: in the summerhouse.

The shock of remembering was immediately overlaid by different, stronger emotions. His mother's house was just beyond the King's Head. Its single ground-floor window was dark, and that was all wrong for this time of day, at this time of year. Panic gripped him and he broke into a run.

The door was unlocked. Charlie pushed it open gently, as though there were a possibility that it might hit something breakable.

‘And there's another thing,' Carn used to say, ‘you've got to look at the wider picture. It really doesn't do to get a reputation for being soft. Gives people quite the wrong idea. If you let Tom get away with murder, then Dick and Harry will want to, too.'

The door opened straight into the kitchen which was also the living room. The first thing that struck Charlie was the chill in the air. He switched on the light and kicked the door shut with his foot. He was sweating and his heart was trying to leap into his mouth.

His mother was sitting in the armchair by the range. She was shrouded with blankets. Her head was resting on one shoulder, as if the neck could no longer take the weight. Wisps of grey hair twitched in the draught from the door.

The guilt and the anger rushed over him. She was dead. That bastard Carn had found her.

Then she moved her head. ‘Charlie,' she croaked.

‘Mam? What's wrong?'

He crossed the room and took her hands. They were very cold. He felt her forehead which was burning hot. She looked at him with dull, puzzled eyes in a blue, bloated face.

‘Just one of my turns,' she wheezed. ‘You'll have to get your own tea.'

‘You let the fire go out, you silly woman. Why ever did you do that?'

He touched the side of the kettle and found that it was as cold as the room. She couldn't have had a warm drink since the tea she'd made before he went to work. He ran upstairs and fetched more blankets from his mother's bed.

Quickly, he riddled the grate and laid a fire. Luckily there was plenty of kindling because he'd chopped a batch the previous evening. He threw it on the fire with a reckless abandon. Yellow flames licked up the dry wood but they gave off very little heat.

‘There's bread and dripping in the larder,' his mother mumbled. ‘You'll need to buy some milk for your tea.'

‘You need a doctor,' he said, still speaking loudly and angrily. ‘I'll phone from the pub.'

‘But you have your tea first.'

‘Just shut up, will you?'

‘No need for a doctor. Anyway, it will cost.'

‘Not any longer,' Charlie said.

‘I don't like Dr Bayswater,' his mother whined. ‘He's got a cold heart.'

Chapter Ten

When Jane unbolted the door, the usual four men were waiting outside. They pushed past her and filed into the public bar of the Bathurst Arms.

There was a fifth man outside tonight: a little chap with a beard. He was carrying a book under his arm, and he wasn't in such a hurry as the regulars. He smiled at her and went into the lounge bar.

She served him first because lounge prices were higher than the ones in the public bar. It was one of her stepmother's rules, accepted as fair and reasonable by all her regular customers, that the lounge took precedence over the public. Jane suspected that most of them would have accepted it if her stepmother had said the moon was made of green cheese.

The man laid a pound note on the counter. ‘A large whisky, my dear.'

While she was filling the glass, her stepmother came into the serving area. By the smell of her, Jane thought, she'd emptied an entire bottle of perfume over herself.

‘Evening, Gloria,' chorused the regulars, leaning as one man across the counter to get a better view of her.

Gloria began to take their orders. The same counter, divided in the middle by a wooden partition, served both bars.

Jane put down the whisky. ‘Soda, sir? Water?'

‘Soda, please.'

She was surprised to see that the man was looking at her, not at her stepmother. She passed him the siphon and made to take the pound note. The man put his hand on it. Startled, Jane looked up at his face and saw that he was smiling.

‘I wonder if you can help me – I'm looking for a friend of mine. A man named Charlie Meague.'

‘Who?'

‘Charlie Meague.'

Suddenly her stepmother was standing beside her. ‘It's all right, Jane,' she said grimly. ‘Sort them out over there. I'll deal with this gentleman.'

Chapter Eleven

Major Harcutt thought of himself, with some justification, as a man of iron routine. After supper, he would sit and work for a couple of hours; sometimes he listened to the radio or read a biography, but such indulgences were exceptional. He thought of these hours as his writing time. He had always worked best after dinner.

It was in fact some time since he had actually written any of his book. He had finished the introduction several years before and revised it twice since then. He had also mapped out the framework of the chapters. But, given the complexity of the subject, the wealth of material available and the constant stream of new discoveries, he found it necessary to devote most of his time to research.