The Swap (15 page)

Two customers shambled into the shop as Harvey began to dial and he frowned at them suspiciously. One thing he didn't need right now was trade. They were both familiar patrons, who he knew would spend a lot of time and very little money in his shop. He considered throwing them out but then decided it was easier simply to shut the door and leave them to it. Criminality was uncommon among comicbook fans: they all wanted to be on the side of righteousness.

The number was engaged. Which was, when he thought about it, inevitable. What was it about parents that meant they could annoy you even when you were miles away, even without knowing they were doing it, unconsciously without any premeditation? Normally, when he rang, he prayed that the number would be engaged, and it never was. There was always that long set of rings, just so long that he began to believe that they might be out or away or dead or something, and then always, just as he was about to put the handset down and beam with relief, his mother would come on the line and in her little tiny voice, the one he didn't recognise, the one she saved for other people, would say 'Hello', as if she had never spoken on the telephone before and she might be punished for it. And he would grunt, 'Hi, Mum' and she would alter into someone quite different from that all-right-sounding little person, 'Harvey darling!' and they would be off on the first game, which was her trying to find out about his life and him trying to prevent her, which segued swiftly into the second game, which was her trying to keep things going even without any information to work with and him trying to bring things to a close without actually being rude. But now, of course, when he needed to speak to her she was busy with someone else. And, of course, she continued to be for some time. (It did not occur to him that his father might be using the telephone, his father was not good with telephones.) Josh would be returning with his bananas very soon, and this was a call that demanded privacy. The way Jarvin's voice had carried from the shop made Harvey wonder if he really was alone in the back room, especially if he started shouting, which in any call to his parents was a strong possibility. And also was Jarvin telling the truth? What if he already had his parents' number? It was in the book, for Christ's sake. What if he was just playing with Harvey, testing him out? What if he was the person engaging his mother? He redialled with renewed vigour, but the most irritating woman in the world continued to say 'The number you are calling is engaged, please hang up and try again.' He had been aware of a desire to kill this woman for some time, ever since she had first appeared unannounced on the normal beep beep noise that signalled an unattainable number. He hit redial every twenty seconds or so and got her each time, then about every third minute it struck him that he might have misdialled the first time and might even now be ringing a wrong number while his mother talked things over with Jarvin, so he dialled from scratch again. He was just beginning to wonder if his memory was playing tricks with him – was this really his parents' number at all? Perhaps he had just made it up from thin air – when it rang.

'Hello?' Harvey's joy at finally getting through was instantly removed by the sound of his father's voice.

'Dad, hi.' Where was his mother?

'Harvey, don't ring us during the daytime, it costs a fortune. Ring after six o'clock.'

'Yeah, OK, Dad, but . . . look, is Mum there?'

'Why do you want her? Has there been a tragedy? Because if there hasn't I'm putting the phone down, it's sinful to waste money like this.'

'Dad, shut up and get Mum, I need to ask her something.'

'What?'

Jesus Christ. 'I need to know her plans for your funeral. Just get her, will you?'

'All right, but keep it short, boy. You can't be making that much money from that shop of yours . . .'

Harvey listened to the sound of his own breathing, heavy and ragged in the handset, then heard distantly: 'It's your son. He's presumably won the pools and rung us to celebrate . . .' and his mother's chirrup of delight, 'Is it Harvey? Oh Donald, how lovely . . .' and then at last her voice on the line, 'Hello?' all questioning and full of expectation. Harvey briefly wondered what her mind had formed for itself in the time it took her to get to the phone. He so rarely rang during the day that presumably she was optimistic: he was getting married, that was the most likely. He'd got a job in a bank maybe second.

'All right, Mum?' The impatience of ringing meant that he hadn't thought to plan the conversation. He'd just have to wing it.

'How are you, darling? Are you all right?' He could feel the worry and longing mingling in her voice. He shook his head and heard his voice take on its usual guarded tone.

'Yeah, not bad. Just wondered if you were OK.'

'I'm fine, we're both fine. It's lovely to hear from you . . .'

How could that be a question? But it seemed that it was.

'Yeah, just thought I'd give a ring to let you know I got home safe the other day, yeah?'

'Yes, dear, that's kind of you.' Harvey could hear his mother's effort not to say, 'But you've not bothered before in the last twenty years.'

'And er . . . I had the police round. Thought you'd want to know about that . . . have you spoken to them at all . . . ?' He couldn't think of any subtle way of introducing it.

'The police! Donald, Harvey's had the police round.'

'Well, there you are. Drugs, I suppose.' His father's voice came to Harvey as a distant presence, but approaching, and he pictured him moving through from the sitting room into the hall to listen in.

'Actually, I was hoping for a quiet chat with you, Mum,' he said rather desperately.

'Oh yes, dear . . . he wants a quiet chat, Donald. You'd better stay in case he needs your advice. Now, darling, what did they want? Was it about drugs? Because if it was, frankly I'm not surprised. I remember when you bought that T-shirt with a cannabis leaf on it from the beach shop. Your father took it back but we were both so worried and now, well—'

'I was eleven, Mother, for Christ's sake. I thought it was a peace symbol, and anyway it was a T-shirt, not a crack pipe. Besides, it's not about drugs.'

'It's not about drugs, Donald,' his mother translated.

'Tell him it's better to tell the truth and get it over with. No point in lying.'

Harvey literally wiggled with irritation. 'Fucking hell, Mum, how have you stood him all these years? What kind of mad world does he inhabit? Why would I ring up to lie? Why would I ring up at all? Why did I ring up at all? Jesus fucking wept.'

'Language, Harvey. He says it's not about drugs, Donald.'

'I know he does but what is it about, then? Has he been arrested for murdering Mrs Odd when he was down here? 'Cause if so he'll get no help from me.'

Mrs Briscow was giggling, 'Your father says have you been arrested for murdering Mrs Odd, Harvey? Remember the old lady who was killed when you were here. You knew her son – now what was his name? What was his name, Donald? Charles, that's it. You knew him, Harvey, you must remember . . .'

Harvey wondered if it was possible to commit suicide with a telephone handset. He attempted it by bashing it against the side of his temple several times.

'Harvey? Harvey, what's that noise?'

'Nothing, Mother, just the sound of a final nail entering a coffin . . .'

'What, dear?'

'Never mind. Look, it is sort of about the murder, yes.' He hurried on over the gasp and the sound of his mother passing on this information to his father. 'Because I knew Charles, the police wanted to know about what happened that day. It was Sunday and I remember what I did: I went for a walk in the morning and in the afternoon I was out again walking. I took the car for a bit, and then I was up in my room and then I went out for a drink, you remember?' Harvey was quite glad that he had never pursued the life of crime that he had sometimes fantasised for himself, he could sense a lack of aptitude, a certain amateurishness in his work.

'Oh, but you didn't get back until quite late, darling, and we hoped you might stay in but you went out very late with your friends.' His mother clearly remembered very well.

'OK, fine, but you remember I went for a walk that afternoon, yeah?'

'Well, I remember you went for one in the morning, dear. And you came back for lunch and then you borrowed your father's car, didn't you, in the afternoon and I remember you came back very dirty and I had to wash your clothes for you, they were under your bed where they didn't belong. But I don't remember you ever saying where you'd been . . . Donald, Harvey wants to know if we remember where he went on Sunday, the police need to know.'

'Why?' Harvey heard his father's voice close to the handset and suspected that he had been listening for himself.

'Yes, why, Harvey? Why do they want to know?'

Why do you bloody think, you stupid woman? 'It's just routine, they're checking on everyone who was at the reunion.'

'They're checking on everyone at the reunion, Donald.'

'Well, we can't give him an alibi if that's what he wants. He went out and he came back. That's all we can say. What he was doing I don't know. It seems a very long time to be out for a walk, anyone would think he didn't want to come home.'

'Yes, Harvey, you were out a long time for just a walk. I wonder what you were doing all that time.' His mother was clearly trying to guess, really just as if he hadn't told her, as if he wasn't there at the end of the phoneline to ask. He shook his head more quickly and did the wiggle again.

'Look, there's no need to wonder, I've just told you, I was walking. I just need you to tell the police that.'

'You want us to tell the police? Oh Harvey, what have you done? Why on earth would the police want to ask us?'

Oh Christ. 'I haven't done anything, that's the point, Mother. If I had done anything I wouldn't be ringing you . . .'

'Oh, but the police don't need alibis for no reason, Harvey. You must have done something, mustn't you? He does need an alibi, Donald, the police are going to ring us.'

'Well, he'll get no alibi from me. I'll not tell a lie to a policeman, nor to anyone else. He must take his medicine if he's done wrong, simple as that.'

'Yes, your father's right, Harvey. If you've done wrong you must say so and tell the truth.'

Harvey closed his eyes very tight and put his fist holding the telephone against his face for a moment. He could die here. He could die right here and then it would all go away.

'I haven't done wrong, Mum. That's the whole point. I haven't done anything. I just need you to tell the police what I'm telling you, that I went out in the car and went walking in the afternoon. It's as simple as that.'

'But why would they need to ask us unless you'd done something you shouldn't, Harvey? It doesn't make sense.' Harvey had pictured his parents in Nazi Germany more than once. He often felt that they had missed their calling.

'Just tell them that, all right? I have to give you their number.' He still held the piece of white card in his hand and he looked at it now and found that it had been twisted and bent until it had torn. He read the number into the telephone while his mother flapped about and tried to find the pen that was beside the phone in plain view, so plain, in fact, that Harvey could see it in his mind's eye and direct her to it; and then dropped it on the floor and had to put the phone down while she got it and then his father got to it first and insisted she recite the number to him rather than writing it herself, and she said it wrong and then his father got it wrong so that by the end he was bellowing the number at the top of his voice, each digit separated by either a blasphemy or an obscenity, or in many cases, both. Finally she read it back in her 'I'm rather useless, aren't I?' voice, brought on by his own and his father's critical remarks about her notetaking, and, by unexpected intervention of grace, got it right.

'Brilliant.' Harvey was literally sweating with effort. 'So ring him, his name is Chief Inspector Jarvin, J.A.R.V.I.N. No, I don't know what time he'll be there, just give him a bell and . . .' He paused for a moment. 'Look just between us, Mum, I wouldn't mention that evening, after I got back, you know me lying in my room and and you washing my clothes and stuff, I wouldn't mention all that if I was you. Just tell him I went for a walk and went up to my room and then went out for a drink. Stick to the facts, yeah?'

'Yes all right, Harvey, don't worry, we can manage.'

His mother was speaking with the forced competence she sometimes took on when she was offended at being treated like a fool. Harvey took note of this tone. 'I should ring him right away, Mother, OK? And try and get it right.'

'Yes, dear, I'm quite sure I can handle that without any problem, thank you.'

Harvey put the phone down and reopened the door to the shop. The two customers were still there, just as he had left them, and he drummed his fingers loudly on the counter until they were encouraged to go. The call hadn't gone as badly as he'd thought it would actually.

Sunday was the day of rest for Harvey, although in truth most days were fairly restful, so Sunday was really the day of more rest than usual. It meant he had the chance to lie around his flat thinking and listening to the washing machine going round and round cleaning his one set of bedclothes in preparation for another testing week for them. It also meant he could catch up with his telephoning and stay in touch with his friends. So on this particular Sunday he rang various people including several of the old crowd, of whom he asked tentative and subtle questions about the reunion and was met with ribaldry regarding Maisie and hilarious reminiscences about the fight at Steve's house. After several of these he stopped shouting, had a shower and spent some time examining his stomach in the bathroom mirror. Because the mirror was at head height this involved standing on the toilet and leaning backwards. It was, he decided, after several moments' consideration, definitely larger than the last time he did this: about three Sundays ago. A resolution to lay off beer and to eat better in future was only slightly weakened by the memory that he had made exactly the same vow the last time.

Sunday was also the day he sometimes rang his mother and the thought that he had already done it on Saturday and therefore didn't need to do it again was a warming and harmonising one. The fact that he wouldn't see Josh today was equally satisfying. Josh had returned with a large bunch of unhealthy-looking bananas and had proceeded to make custard on the gas ring; this had boiled over because the gas was set too high and the custard had spilled onto the floor. Josh had collected it carefully with a spoon and a piece of paper, returned it to the pan, and allowed the same thing to happen again. Harvey had taken the spoon from him and attempted to knock him on the head with it. Scalding custard had sprayed off the spoon and he had got some in his eye. He could still feel a slight pain in his right eye – the same one that he had been punched in – as he wandered around his flat. So not seeing Josh was all to the good.

However, Sunday did always present the challenge of how to spend his time. It seemed to reinforce and exaggerate the sense of purposelessness in the rest of his existence. Surely a man of his age and lifestyle should have a variety of things to do between lunch and dinner on his only free day of the week, but he never seemed to. There always seemed this need to do his washing or go and buy a paper because if he didn't he would just have to sit and stare out of the window. And this week the uncertainty seemed more pressing than usual. Not that he wouldn't welcome a certain amount of boredom: ennui suddenly seemed a rather desirable commodity. It was just that there seemed so many things that he should be doing, like . . . well, something surely. If you are a suspect in a murder inquiry you should be doing something. But he couldn't really think of anything. Or at least there was one thing he could do: go to the shop, get the
Superman One
and destroy it. It might stop him dreaming about drawers and red fingerprints every night. Several times he almost made it to the door to set off, but each time he sat down again. What if it was important that the comic did exist? That was the question troubling him. It was the only proof he had that someone was trying to set him up. Someone who had perhaps waited a long time for this. Harvey thought back over the reunion; someone must have been waiting for Bleeder's return just as he had been. Who else was there? Who else knew Bleeder? And into his mind came the image of Bleeder talking to someone at the reunion; that old maths teacher, what was his name? Harvey thought about him for a while. Had he too been waiting for Bleeder? Waiting for one of his star pupils to return? Was there something else there? Was there something that didn't involve the comic? But then who sent the comic to him? How was he being set up? And why? He was sitting on the bed, looking out over London, when the telephone rang.

It was his mother, which caused Harvey a certain degree of outrage: he had rung her yesterday, done his duty for the week, maybe for the month. This was against all the rules. But it turned out she had a reason for ringing, which was that she had spoken to Jarvin. He lit a cigarette while she talked about what a nice man the chief inspector seemed and he waited for her to get to the part that he needed to worry about. It didn't take all that long.

'We talked about last weekend,' she told him, 'and what a bad temper you were in most of the time, rolling home drunk and sleeping in with a hangover. And I told him how you came home filthy that Sunday. He was quite interested in that.'

Harvey was suddenly standing up and breathing hard. 'You told him that?'

'Of course I did. And Donald said that you had left a stain on the driver's seat of the car, which I didn't know about and I'm really very cross with you, Harvey, we only got that car last year. So Donald suggested that the police might like to have a look at the stain. And Mr Jarvin said one of his men would come round today if they could. Isn't that efficient? I do think the police are very efficient, don't you, Harvey? All that nonsense in the papers about them I think is just rubbish.'

'When are they coming round?'

'I don't know, sometime today, which means we have to wait in, and I must say we don't appreciate that, Harvey, we are busy people . . .'

She would probably have said more, indeed perhaps she did, but Harvey put the phone down at this point and sat quietly taking a long, penetrating look at his view. Then he rang Maisie and demanded that she come out for Sunday lunch. As it was two o'clock by this time – Harvey having followed his usual practice of rising late on the sabbath – she suggested that dinner might be a better idea and they arranged to meet at seven in Islington. This left Harvey a fair amount of time to think. He paced the floor in bare feet, leaving faint footprints in the grime of the carpet, and it was this that made him consider cleaning up. The majority of his brain was fixed on the fact that he was clearly about to be arrested – the stain had to be Mrs Odd's blood, he didn't leave stains on seats as a rule – but one small part of his thoughts did return to the subject of sex. You can't pull with a messy flat: simple fact of life. So he fetched the ageing and underemployed Hoover from the cupboard in the hall and dug out a duster and spray polish from under the sink. With a horrible feeling of familiarity he began to clean. There was no blood here but still the motions of cleaning were remembered by his body and remembered too was the revulsion of that day, one week ago, almost to the minute. In his muscles he could still feel slight twinges of familiarity, tiny points of pain from his previous exertions. As he knelt to pick up some errant fag-ends his knees recalled the movement and protested. He had cleaned away a murder and he had left a mark of it on his father's car. In his mind he pictured a huge stain across the Fling's cheap grey seats. He saw it like a map of Africa, or like Gorbachev's birthmark, some symbol of vast and various meaning. And the primary meaning was guilt. Jesus, he had taken on this murder like growing a boil, it had become attached to him. As he worked he gritted his teeth and sobbed between them. And the sobs this time were uncontained, forcing their way out of the knotted coils that had formed inside him, coils of horror and guilt and anger and fear, until he had to stop and just kneel in the dust, with all his cleaning materials around him, a pot of Mr Muscle still clutched in his hand, and watch his tears form black splashes in the grey dust of the floor.

How long he sat like that Harvey wasn't sure. It was a significant moment, definitely, he had had few enough of them to recognise one when he saw it. He didn't exactly kneel down a boy and stand up a man, although that thought did drift through his mind. But he felt sort of different afterwards, stronger and a bit less weak and hopeless. When he tried to characterise it to himself his thoughts came back to his stomach. It was as if his stomach had been making all the decisions so far, and they were therefore flabby, excessive and self-pitying. From now on, whatever else happened, he was going to think with some other part of his body. Maybe his heart could have a say, maybe his brain could work things through rationally. It was with a firm nod that he grasped this slightly obscure metaphor. But of course it wasn't really his heart or his brain that was doing the thinking. The cleaning was for Maisie and her seduction, so it was his genitals that really had the floor. But at least they were making decisions that the rest of him was happy with. And as he set off for Islington, although his fingers were shaking as he locked his flat, there was a trace of a bulge in his trousers and some difficulty in his gait as he strode down the stairs.

Chief Inspector Jarvin's smile was biologically determined and therefore unreliable as a guide to the inner world. His son, Jack, who had inherited the green eyes but not as yet the dolphin jawline, was examining his father's face for more than a genetic appearance of good will.

'I am absolutely serious, Jack. I want you to pal up with Oliver a little bit. Make him feel like he has some protection at least, if not a real friend.' Oliver was the victim of bullying in Jack's class and Jarvin had developed a protective feeling for him.

Jack shook his head in anger. 'You are interfering in the dynamics of my relationships, Dad,' – Jack was studying psychology – 'and you are letting your job influence your family life. Who I am friends with is up to me.'

'Yes it is. But who you bully isn't.' Jarvin was able to admire his son's intelligence at the same time as objecting to backchat. This was in part a product of his own background: his English mother, so gentle and liberal in his youth, opening his mind to so many possibilities, and his more traditional Finnish father imposing a variable and unpredictable restraint. How he wanted to be the best of both of them in his relations with his son, and how often he felt that he was the worst.

'I'm not a bully! Other people pick on Dawson, not me.'

'Dawson? You don't call your friends by their surnames, why do you call Oliver that?'

'Because everyone does, he's Dickie Dawson . . . He's Dawson's Freak. That's what they call him.'

'They, they, they . . . ? When did you ever learn to make choices based on what "they" think?'

'When you sent me to comprehensive school, Dad, remember? I have to take care of myself. I can't be nursemaiding anyone else.' Jack got up and made for the door, thereby declaring this father–son chat concluded. Jarvin sighed and for a moment looked almost like Harvey Briscow. He shook his head too.

'Just do your best, Jack, that's all I ask.'

'Yeah, sure. But I've got to live my own life.' And his son was gone on what was, Jarvin had to admit, a pretty un answerable exit line. He got up and did what he rarely did, which was to look in the glass cabinet in the corner of his sitting room. The room was light with a bay window opening onto a tulip tree, just beginning to bud, and the sunlight was calling him into the garden. Instead, he looked for a moment into his past. Susan, his wife, had arranged his memories for him in the cabinet. Army photos: him in desert gear and camouflage; his two medals, displayed so nicely in a frame; his trophy for winning the marksmanship contest for his year; passing out from Sandhurst; his first commission; Hendon, class of '84. What was this all about? He looked at these memories for a while with real uncertainty. What had he intended when he chose this course, this institutional, controlled, frankly authoritarian path in his life: his father's path not his mother's? If even his own son was potentially delinquent, potentially making another human being's life hell, and if he, Jarvin, didn't really care, so long as Jack was OK, so long as he survived it and made it through to the unpredictable delights of adulthood, why do this? Why not get some desk job, or go back to college and study Engineering as he'd sometimes dreamed? His thoughts turned now, as perhaps he knew they would, to the case in hand. Mrs Odd and her poor bullied son, and his strange City financier existence; Harvey Briscow and his comic shop and his unexpectedly guilty demeanour; Maisie Cooper and her deep sea-green eyes, and her distant, bitter husband. Jarvin had been to see Jeff Cooper the day before and had come away troubled. What had Allen's words been? 'Pretty near the boil, Mr Cooper.' And Jarvin had known exactly what he meant. Something was bubbling in Mr Cooper. Was it just the loss of his wife? Jarvin thought again of Maisie and had to acknowledge that the loss of her would certainly be a blow. But he thought most of Charles Odd, Bleeder Odd. Where was he today? He would like to meet him again. Being so far from Cornwall was a problem. To prevent things like Mrs Odd's murder: was that why he did it? As he straightened up from bending to peer at a picture of a younger, smiling, seemingly carefree Jarvin at the back of the cabinet, he allowed himself this one generous thought. But as he made his way outside for half an hour's weeding before lunch he was unsure that it was anything but a palliative, unsure that there was really any reason at all.