Brond (24 page)

‘I think you must be mad.’

He clicked his tongue disapprovingly.

‘Oh, come now. It’s not so bad as that. I imagine the country’s full of clergymen and retired lieutenant-colonels and bus conductors all doing or daydreaming along roughly
similar lines.’

‘You killed her.’

I became conscious that he was speaking normally while I was furiously whispering as if the fear of discovery were mine alone.

‘We’ve a busy night ahead of us,’ he said, ‘but let’s spare a moment. Come along!’

He crooked his finger and I followed him like a schoolboy. The big front room had people in it now, two or three groups of them, and a piano was being played softly and some of the girls were
handing out drinks. It might have been the party at the University earlier. The only differences at a first glance were that the girls were younger, the men rather older and looking conspicuously
more successful.

‘Recognise anyone?’ Brond asked.

Before I could answer, we were approached by the bouncy silver-haired little man who had come with us into the house; smaller than Brond, he did not come up to my shoulder.

‘She let you stay then,’ he said jocularly.

‘Thanks to your good influence,’ Brond said.

‘Ah, influence.’ He seemed to be at the stage of drink where one mood passed easily into its opposite for now he became solemn. ‘I suppose we’re both exerting as much of
that as we can – not that anything seems able to help much. Dear old William Roughhead’s world of Pritchard and Slater and Jessie McLachlan is very small beer now. Endless vandalism.
Crimes against the person . . . There’s a rot in the body social. What? Oh, it’s you.’

One of the girls had brushed her fingers, decorously, along the back of his neck and he followed, head bobbing like a lecherous sparrow.

‘I doubt if a reporter,’ Brond said watching him go, ‘or a blackmailer would last long if he interfered with these nice people.’

And he smiled benevolently on the room like a widdershins archbishop.

‘Why did you say that Jackie— that Mrs Kennedy was here?’

‘Did I?’

‘Is she here?’

He turned his head from the crowd and looked at me; his lips still smiled.

‘Perhaps. That murderous animal her husband certainly is.’

‘He’s not the only murderer – and his murders were long ago.’

‘You have an odd sense of humour,’ Brond said contemptuously. ‘Who do you imagine killed Peter Kilpatrick?’

But before I could answer, the silver-haired man rejoined us. He was shadowed by a gaunt anxious man whose shoulders were spotted with scruffs of white dandruff.

‘Alex here tells me,’ the silver-haired man gestured towards his companion, ‘that E.M. Forster used to worry because his bum was full of hair.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Brond said. ‘It’s one of those evenings where everybody learns something new.’

‘It certainly gives “only connect” a new connotation,’ the silver-haired man reflected.

‘You already made that joke.’ The anxious man was not amused.

‘I know – that’s why I came over here to get a chance to repeat it.’

‘It’s a joke in bad taste,’ his friend said. ‘I believe in the virtues of liberalism. I’m even willing to believe that Forster was a thoroughly nice man.’

‘Nice people.’ The voice was high and uncontrolled. It didn’t sound like me at all. ‘Dachau must have been surrounded by nice people.’

The two men stared, lingering on the edge of being offended with me until Brond took up the idea smoothly: ‘Nice farmers, nice schoolteachers, nice lawyers too, taking the children on nice
family picnics – chorusing with Brunnhilde, “
O Heil der Mutter, die dich gebar!
” – and never one to notice there was a stench of burning flesh on the air. But then a
defective sense of smell is a medical condition not a moral one.’

‘You’re young,’ the anxious man said to me. ‘You have a lot to learn. You’ll learn.’

The silver-haired man affected a transition to the combative. ‘That’s not an argument, Alex. The matter has still to be taken to avizandum. Just you suppose some wretched dictator
builds and fills a camp at Swanston – and you wake up one morning with a smell greasing the air – “
Wer ist der Held, der mich erweckt?
” eh, Brond? – What on earth
could you do, Alex?’

The anxious man hesitated. ‘We-ell . . . I shouldn’t stay there. I should certainly move. I’d even be willing to take a loss on the house.’

And suddenly not looking at all anxious, he began to giggle and they moved off together, well pleased with one another.

‘No question of it,’ Brond went on as if there had been no interruption, ‘Kilpatrick had been sleeping with that charming married woman you call Jackie. That was something no
one had foreseen. You see how I resist the temptation to impress you with my omniscience? I didn’t foresee it. I might claim to have improvised rather well once it did happen.’

‘Improvisation,’ I said, ‘– the mark of the artist.’ The words weren’t mine. It was a favourite phrase of Donald Baxter’s. Brond blinked at me. It may
have been the only thing I ever said which surprised him.

‘No matter how wonderful our policemen are,’ he said, ‘a woman of that sort always offers a temptation. I shouldn’t imagine she put up much resistance, and Kilpatrick
seems to have had a weakness for women. We all have our weaknesses.’

‘You want me to believe that Kennedy killed him for sleeping with his wife?’

‘He killed him twice over – and why not for that? Kennedy isn’t a citizen of the permissive society. A violent man – jealous of that neat little wife of his. That gun you
delivered to me was Kennedy’s and it was Kennedy who used it.’

Not Kennedy. Not that sanctimonious keeper of a lodging house. Michael Dart had killed poor loud-mouthed Kilpatrick. And despite anything Brond said or thought about Jackie Kennedy, I
didn’t believe she had ever betrayed her husband before she met Kilpatrick. Poor Jackie had forgotten to be afraid of the man she married; and he had hidden all there was of him to love.

‘Twice over,’ I said stupidly. ‘How could he kill him twice over?’

‘According to the helpful Mr Muldoon, they traced him to where the Briody girl had hidden him. It was inevitable after the stupid girl chose you as her saviour and brought the gun back to
Kennedy’s own house. That was a joke, but an unfortunate one for the amorous Kilpatrick. While the girl was fetching you, he was tied up and carried outside to that dirty shed to die of
exposure. Muldoon helped with that. I’m afraid Kennedy was a touch vicious there; being cuckolded does that to a man. The slowest way to die is the hardest way.’

It was possible that Kennedy-Dart had done that; but Brond had known where to find the body. And the old politician who had been beaten to death in the Riggs Lodge hotel (‘of ancient
Scottish family’ – ‘a man of honour’ – ‘much loved’: the newspapers said so; how else would my father know what to believe?) he had died that same night
while I shared a narrow bed with Margaret Briody. But before he died he had been tied up with a piece cut from the same cord that had bound Kilpatrick. Whether it was Kennedy or Brond himself who
had carried Kilpatrick out and hidden him under the sacks to die, I had no way of knowing. The only evidence from my own five unsure senses was a hotel door wrecked by a strength like
Primo’s.

The silver-haired man wandered through the idle groups to confront us again.

‘Remembered a funny story,’ he said. ‘Maisie had heard it.’

He was perceptibly less sober.

‘Excellent,’ Brond said. ‘My friend here loves a good story. He’s amused me a number of times.’

And he caught my arm and turned me so that I blocked the way for a woman who was moving past us out of the room. I knew her. Some kind of social apologetic foolishness came to my lips. I knew
her—

It was the prostitute I had watched Brond strangle to death. The look on my face alarmed her and she stepped back, directing beyond me a conciliatory grimace.

‘So simple.’ Brond patted my arm. ‘It’s all so simple. Why did you think people came here if it wasn’t to buy illusions?’

He followed her out, but when I started after him the little man took me by the sleeve, a full handful with his weight behind it.

‘Don’t be a boor. I’ve to tell you this story.’

‘Let go!’ I gave a jerk that tore my sleeve free, but he snatched again.

‘Listen!’ he shouted.

There was silence and then people hurried back into talk. Side glances policed us. The room was too full of portly, prosperous, guilty men. I stood still and fixed a smile on the little man.

‘It’s about this chap who’s on the bench for the first time. It’s his first time – local government kind of chap. Knows nothing about the law. First case –
drunk and disorderly. Ten a penny sort of thing. Thirty shillings or thirty days’ imprisonment – usual sort of nonsense.’

Shillings? He must have retold his joke on years of occasions like this.

‘Chap listens to the evidence. Then – worst case in my experience; this kind of thing will not be tolerated; I was born and bred in this town; stamp it out – fourteen
years’ penal servitude. Consternation in court! All gather round him – psst psst psst. Whisper whisper whisper. Chap clears his throat – hum – heh – hum. On further
consideration, I will commute that sentence to thirty shillings or thirty days. Bring in the next criminal.’

Bring in the next criminal.

‘It’s supposed to be funny.’ He released my sleeve. ‘No one tonight has any blasted sense of humour.’

In the hall, Primo was near the front door. He had a glass in his hand, but standing there alone it looked like a disguise, something put there to pretend it was only by accident that he could
watch anyone coming in or trying to leave. Brond was nowhere in sight, but the woman was in front of a mirror tidying her hair.

‘The gentleman says you’ve to see him in the room up the stair.’

She had a broad Glasgow accent nothing like my golden girl’s. She smelled of stale sweat; her cheeks were scarred with acne pits; on a corner of Bath Street she would have been in place
any wintry Saturday night.

‘What gentleman? The gentleman you were performing with up— the stair?’

She dangled her disgusting udders at me, belching bad air and bewilderment.

‘You were seen. I was watching – and I wasn’t the only one. We were watching you earn your money.’

I hated her bovine corruption.

‘Ah didnae know.’ She was not resentful. She wanted to explain ‘He wis angry wi me. He had tae keep tellan me what to do. Every damnt thing, he said he’d to tell me. But
ah’ve been hurt masel. One morning ah tried tae get oot o bed and ah was stuck. Ah had weeks o pain after that, doctors an jags an operations. Since then ah don’t know why people would
want to be hurtit. Ah know ah wis wrang. Ah didnae mean tae make him angry. It just slipped out – ah tellt him – ah’ve been hurt masel. And that’s when he lost the rag. But,
ken, it was just that ah’ve been hurt masel.’

In the upstairs corridor, the Hindu faithful still danced on the rim of the brass gong. I looked in the room where I had stopped being a virgin, but it was empty. I ran from one room into
another and found Jackie Kennedy sitting on the bed. She stared at me in horror.

‘In the Name of God!’ she cried, like an Ulster cleric preaching of Hell, ‘where did you come from?’

‘Get up! We’ve got to get out of here. Get up!’ I reached out as if to pull her up from the bed. ‘Don’t you know the kind of place this is?’

‘Get away from me!’ She pushed at the air between us. ‘It’s you that shouldn’t be here. The young fellow didn’t say anything about you.’

‘Tell me when we’re out of here. I don’t—’

‘Listen to me!’ she cried. ‘He came to the house. Just a young fellow, well dressed and nicely spoken. Listen! It was him I came here with. Somebody has to listen! He said
terrible things to me.’

She was wearing her best coat, brown cloth with some kind of fur at the collar that I had seen her put on to go visiting on a Sunday. I had a picture of one of Brond’s smooth young men
talking quietly at her as she sat beside him in a car, very upright in her best coat for visiting. I wondered what smooth words he had found for telling her that in their eyes she was
Kilpatrick’s whore and that her husband had killed him for it.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Please!’ and I held out my hand to her again.

‘Why didn’t he trust me?’ she asked, and I didn’t know whether she was talking of her lover or her husband.

‘Please, come!’ Stinging tears of frustration; I pitied her and I was afraid. ‘It’ll be all right if you come. I won’t let them hurt you.’

‘You’re only a boy,’ she said. ‘What could you do? I have to wait here. He’s going away tonight – out of the country. Oh, God, I’m so frightened.’
She swung her head from side to side. I had seen a fox caught in a trap doing that. ‘I feel he’s watching me.’

If the lie Kennedy had lived for so long was unimaginable to me, how strange a judgement she must feel he had passed on her. Yet this play-actor had killed for her.

‘I don’t know how he would come to know a place like this,’ Jackie said so quietly I had to strain to hear. ‘I won’t believe that he sleeps with that woman. I
don’t know why they tell me such terrible things. She put me here and told me to wait.’

I sat beside her on the bed and put my arm around her shoulders.

‘Her name’s Maisie,’ I said. ‘An older woman with an Irish accent.’ And trying to help, ‘Maybe it’s just that he knew her a long time ago – in
Ireland. She’ll be a friend.’

Jackie shook her head.

‘No. She was young. Just a girl. And very nicely spoken.’

My golden girl. I had lain with her on the bed in the next room. In an hotel room, I had sat on a bed – and they had yelled at me that a man had died in it – too suddenly for me to
evade it, Kilpatrick’s poor dirtied corpse lolled out from under the sacks.

‘I’m so frightened,’ Jackie said. ‘I’m supposed to go away with him tonight.’

‘You don’t have to go anywhere with him. If we can just get out of here, I’ll look after you.’

I meant it. Sitting on the whore’s bed, I could have been in love with her. I touched her cheek with my lips and she did not move away.