Slow Poison - Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

The last sunbeam lightly falls from the finished Sabbath,

On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking.

Down a new-made double grave,

Lo, the moon ascending,

Up from the east the silvery round moon,

Beautiful over the house-tops ghastly, phantom moon,

Immense and silent moon. 

Walt Whitman – Dirge For Two Veterans

Amsterdam. January 15th

“Mister Koning.”

The receptionist held out a small piece of memo paper, folded in four.

Kramer. Victoria. Six.

The bar was as quiet as ever at six.  Koning was there first. He knew Kramer by sight, had not dealt with him in court. Kramer arrived, puffing and perspiring. He was a large man in his late fifties, red faced and with a voice that was unexpectedly soft. The two men shook hands across the table.

“No don’t get up.”

Almost a whisper.

“Why are we here?”

“You don’t waste time, do you?”

More whispers.

“You defended the four boys. There has been a new development. Some fresh evidence. Interested?”

“Of course. Shall we order something? What can I get you?”

“Just a mineral water. Ulcers.”

Kramer patted his stomach. He began to unbutton his coat. He was sweating profusely.

“Warm in here, isn’t it.”

“Hmmm?”

A waitress came to take their order. A mineral water and a beer. They both watched her go.  Koning looked around him at the bar. Nothing had changed. The Bechstein stood shiny and black near the window, the fretwork screens and velvet roses still in their place. The waitress returned with their drinks.

“Cheers.”

“Good health.”

A sip of mineral water, a sip of beer.

A tall thin boy of about twenty approached the table, his eyes dark rings smudged with Kohl, or nightmares. In this light it was hard to tell. The candles flickered, casting ominous shadows.

“Sit down. What are you drinking?”

The waitress was summoned. She nodded at the boy. He looked down at the table.

“Mister Kamphuis, this is Mister Koning. You might remember him from the trial.”

The boy shook hands with Koning. Kramer went on.

“Now, I would like you to tell Mister Koning exactly what you told me yesterday. In your own time.”

The waitress arrived with a Campari and Orange. Blood red and bitter. The boy took a long draught and composed himself. He began to talk. Quietly and slowly at first, with a faint trace of a lilting lisp. His story held Koning riveted with horror.

“Well, it was after the murder, you see. I was in an awful state. Not right away, you understand. It started a few days later. Well, the whole thing had been frightful, I mean, all that blood and those awful boys and the whole business. Well, suddenly I couldn’t sleep. Normally nothing shifts me, but there I was, lying awake for hours. Night after night. Every time I closed my eyes I would have these terrible nightmares. Oh, it was awful. Anyway, my friend Raoul couldn’t stand it any more. I mean I was hysterical most nights. Well, Raoul said that I’d better go over all the things that had happened. He’d done Esalen, you know, and hypnotherapy - anyway, we went back over everything that happened that night and suddenly I realised that I’d been wrong about something. There was someone else in the bar. There was a man. He was sitting where you are, Mister Koning.”

Koning started, spilling beer.

“I had noticed him when he first came in. He’d been in for two or three nights. Always came in at the same time. Same time as the boys. Always sat here in the shadows like an invisible man, drank Spa like you. Well, he didn’t say much, froze me out, you know. Well, when Raoul and I went over the evening, I suddenly realised that he had been there all the time. He had gone though to the stairwell when all the fuss began, I’m sure of that.”

“We have no record of him.” Kramer agreed.

“Would you recognise him again?” Koning asked.

“Well, yes, I think so.”

“And?”

“Well, he was tallish, about thirty-five, maybe a little older, shortish mousy hair, well cut, he wore a beige coat, black leather gloves, and he walked with a limp. I remembered the limp right away. He spoke Dutch.”

“Might he have been English?”

“He didn’t say enough. He could have been Belgian, or from the South.”

Koning turned to Kramer.

“Do you think we can find him? Might help us clear up once and for all which of the bastards did the killing.”

Kramer turned to Kamphuis. “Would you be prepared to help us out with a photofit?”

A shudder of excitement ran through Kamphuis.

“Yes, I think I could do that.”

Koning looked around the bar once more. He had not been here since the night of the reconstruction, Den sobbing and pleading his innocence up and down the wrought iron stair.

“Can you remember the order of events as they happened on the night of the killing. I know we’ve been through them before, but you didn’t remember this other man before.”

Kamphuis looked around too. He concentrated hard, searching the four corners with a waiter’s eye.

“The couples were sitting over there. The dead man and his wife, backs to the entrance, some Americans came in later on. He was sitting where you’re sitting.”

“Did you see the man do anything unusual?”  Kramer asked.

“I was chatting to one of the girls in the kitchen. We were talking when I saw the two English men go down to the Gents’. They were down there for ages. Anyway, the smaller one came up first, and then a few seconds later the skinheads came through making a right old noise. I ducked back into the kitchen. They looked really mean. Then, I saw the other man come through from the bar. And that’s it. I went on talking to the girl and the next thing I know there’s screaming and shouting and people rushing about everywhere.”

“What about the man?”

“I don’t know where he went. I just saw him coming out of the bar, just behind the four lads. Then there was all the to-do, and everybody was out there then.”

“Would you recognise him again, say we did locate him?”

“I think so.”

“You didn’t see him again?”

“Well no. I came in for work as usual the next day. THEY were here - the wife and her friends. I just couldn’t believe it. The three of them just sitting. I didn’t know where to put myself. They just sat all morning. It was after the reconstruction I reported sick. It was all too much. But no, I didn’t see him again.”

“What do you think?” Koning asked Kramer.

“Well, it might make a difference.”

“Thanks for the chat.” Koning said to Kamphuis.

“We’ll be in touch.” Kramer added.

Kamphuis rose from his seat and tottered away toward the foyer, heels clicking out his staccato rhythm upon the tiles at the edge of the carpet. The two men watched him go, sitting in thought. Koning finished his beer and signalled to the waitress for a refill.

“You too?”

“Give me a scotch. No water. No ice.”

“Celebration?”

“Let’s find Trim first. This is just to frighten the ulcer.”

“Is there much chance. Of finding him?”

He shrugged.

“How are your lads taking prison?”

“They’re doing okay.” 

The waitress brought their drinks.

“There’ll be hell to pay if it comes out that one of the others did the killing. Not much honour among thieves.”

“Well, one thing’s for sure. One of them did it. Doesn’t make much difference to me which of them gets put away. They’re all bastards, the lot of them!” The voice rose above the whisper. “You know I’ve still got three of my men in hospital? Bottle wounds. Those bastards!”

Koning cast around for a suitable reply, but nothing came to mind. Kramer downed his scotch and belched uncomfortably. He stood up and began buttoning his coat.

“I’m off.”

“I’m going too. Look - will you keep me up to date with any developments? I’d appreciate it.”

“I’ll be in touch. Thanks for the drinks.”

Kramer turned and walked through into the foyer, belching softly as he went. Koning saw him speak to Kamphuis. More whispers. The waitress came and by the time Koning had settled the bill, the foyer was empty. He put his hand on the wrought iron banister. He needed to urinate, but he decided to wait until he was home. He always had been afraid of lightning.

Stonehouse, January 16th

“I had a strange dream last night. I was with Fred. I don’t know where we were, but I could smell lilac blossom. We kept bumping into one another, then floating away, like we were weightless or something, like that bit in 2001. There was a lot more, but that’s what I remember.”

Janet listened quietly, sipping her tea, as Becky talked.

“It’s the first time that I’ve dreamed about him since he was killed. Can you believe that?”

Yes. Janet could believe that. She was angry. No, not really angry. She felt more of a sense of betrayal. Becky seemed to be able to carry on with her life without any apparent grief. Almost as though the horrible business had never happened. Alan Bellamy upset her even more. The very thought of him. Years of unspoken suspicion welled up inside her, stretching her lips into thin red wounds. Becky went on oblivious.

“You said Sarah’s been having dreams too. She won’t talk to me about them, poor mite. It’s strange how it all comes out. People look at me so strangely sometimes. At least the papers have left us alone, and those phone calls have stopped.”

Janet said nothing. Sipped her tea. Waited.

“Jan. Is something wrong? You seem a bit quiet this morning.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me, Becky.” She almost called her Rebecca, but she would not go quite that far.

“Come on, Jan. I know when something is upsetting you. We’ve been friends for far too long. Is it Glyn?”

“How dare you!”

Becky was startled by her reaction. She replaced her coffee cup in its saucer with a loud clatter.

“Is it something I’ve done, then? Look - if I’ve done something to upset you, I’d rather know. I can’t stand an atmosphere. Is it Sarah?”

“Alright, if you must know, Glyn and I have been rather upset at the way you seem to have written Fred out of your life so quickly. He’s only been gone a month and you’re all over that chap at work, out until all hours, up to god knows what. It’s not like you, Becky. It’s not good for Sarah, either. I don’t know how long I can go on doing what I do.”

Janet sat tight as her parting shot took hold. Becky had not been so near to tears for a long while. She had suspected that grief might break through when the time was right, but she had been totally unprepared for this flank attack. She felt herself lose grip of the slippery walls of solitude. She began the fall.

“Jan, I don’t understand. I don’t know what you mean.”

She could not continue. With tears stinging her eyes, she stood up, spilling coffee. She staggered out of the Woods’ semi. Coatless, she stumbled across the road to her own front door, leaving Janet tight-lipped and righteous behind her picture window. Becky knew nothing more until she hit the fresh duvet cover laid across the double bed. She sobbed into Daz fragrance, gulping in deep satisfying lungfulls of sorrow. Now there was no one.

Becky cried herself out, until there was nothing left. It was true that she had pushed the hurt as far away as she was able. What was so wrong in that? Was she to sit at home with the curtains drawn across, listening to the morning service and ‘Thought for the Day’, until some fragment of insight shone before her, showing her the path to widowhood? Sarah and the job filled her days with life. There was no room for misery, no room for the long face she felt expected of her along the snowy roads of Little Australia. Sarah was sunshine. Alan and his job gave her sanity. Janet and Glyn were the link with her loss. How could they give so much, only to take it away? Becky lay back on the wide double bed feeling frightened and confused. The doorbell rang. Near noon. Sarah. Home already. Janet was picking her up. Or was she. Becky stumbled down the stairs trailing a scent of Anais Anais from the bedroom to the front door. Janet was there, sobbing against the doorpost.

Cheltenham, January 16th

The full moon was on the wane. It hung low over the hill, the lost edge barely noticeable. Smoke rose lazily from the rubble of the Georgian row. The police had roped the area off, but several children, grubby from the soot, red nosed and snotty, had clambered through the cordon and were playing happily among the smoking debris.

“OI! You Lot! Clear off! It’s bloody dangerous!” A passer-by, an old woman in a second-hand coat, shouted at them. The children poked their tongues out at her and continued rooting in the embers with their sticks. The woman spat into the slush and carried on along the road.

In the Mews cottage Trim lay stretched out along his settee, a cognac in his hand. The television was on and he tuned to the local news. More items about the ‘Big Freeze’. And then the news item he was waiting for. The fire. No known cause. A gas leak suspected. No casualties. On with the show.

Trim was left with an unpleasant feeling of dissatisfaction. He slammed his fist into the gunmetal blue of the settee, scattering atoms of dust that hovered in the diffused light of the spelter lamp. Damn Lenny. He had planned more days of play. Damn him. He imagined the alloy heart in the ashes of the fire. Steadfast and true. He saw the folded newspaper boat sail downstream toward Peebles, dislodging the gnats. 

“Let’s go back to the hotel now. I want you.” 

“Come on then, love” 

“I’ll race you.” 

“I’ve got the keys.”

Had it all been hate? Probably.

The diary lay open on the coffee table. He picked it up and read the open page. 

Babworth July 12th 1947. In those moments of sweet ancient melody, every cell of your soul returns to shimmer before me and now I see; now I see you and now I can stretch my fingers and the vision will not yield and vaporise, to leave tear stains on my shirt front. Now I can smooth the gloss of chignon wisps, breath in your soap-scrubbed aura, feel the warmth of your shoulder, your neck as you turn, hear once more your soft padding footfalls. The tallow shadows scatter cascades of light around the room. Here with me, in the scratched memories that flow, you dance for me.

“Oh, Lenny. Oh, my love.” 

Stonehouse. January 21st

“Tea?”

“No, coffee.”

He regretted his choice when he saw the woman scoop a spoonful of granules from an uncovered Tupperware dish. The resultant brew tasted like canal water, bubbles floating like pondweed upon the surface. He sat uncomfortably on a deflated plastic cushion tied helplessly to his chair. Through the steamy windows he could see the little ballet school. The day was already dark and the bright lights of the High Street shops cast cosy reflections across the slick roads.

The little girls lined up along a bar level with the window, along a white painted wall. At one end of the large high room the wall was covered with mirror. The ballerinas, fives and sixes, fidgeted in their tight chignons and pink pumps, post toddler tummies filling out their tutus. The school was situated above Doreen’s, the ladies’ hairdresser, in the street that ran up to and under the railway bridge. Very close. The trains often drowned out the cassette recorded piano and the under-drier chat. The bridge divided the town neatly into the Wycliffe half and the Maisonette half. Wycliffe, with its Bursar and Bradley’s, the Maisonettes with its peroxide and Reddings. And the buried summer fields of Little Australia.

The teashop offered a good, if sporadic, view of the tiny dancers. A fleeting glimpse of dying cygnets, podgy hands fluttering to the unheard accompaniment. Here, in the sultry room, the mothers waited. Half an hour of shopping and the last fifteen minutes of watching from across the road. The mothers talked in their Stonehouse burr. Janet sat there too, posing as a Mum, enjoying herself. She had not noticed Trim. Not then. Not now.

He had watched them at the door sending the little ones up the stairs to the cramped changing room. They scattered, the Mums, to all the far corners of Stonehouse; to the Co-op, Wilcox the Chemist, the Post Office, to the Turf Accountant and the Card Shop. Half an hour later they would return, straggling back, laden with shopping bags, fags dangling. He had timed them all. He had been there before. They were always on time, the Mums.

And as the last of the chignons disappeared from the mirrored room, the Mums buttoned their coats and stubbed out their cigarettes. As the lights went out in the windows opposite they made their way across the black shiny road, to huddle near the door to Miss Butt’s. Five minutes and the little girls appeared in the open doorway in their navy duffel coats and waterproof cycle suits, chignons hidden under woolly winter hats.

There she was - Sarah - among the crowd, a smile igniting at the first sight of Janet. He read the silent mouthed words through the steamy window. And then the doorway was deserted, the flightless cygnets bound for hot sweet tea and beans on toast.

He watched Becky close the door of Bellamy’s premises behind her and walk along the pavement toward the railway bridge. He watched her as far as the War Memorial green, bent against the biting snowy wind. He watched her disappear under the bridge and then he opened the door of the estate agent, his fingerprints touching hers.

“Oh, good afternoon, sir.” said the receptionist. “We’re just about to close you know.” She adjusted her rayon headscarf to drive home the point.

“I know. I’m sorry. I was hoping to catch Mister Bellamy before he leaves.”

“Oh, I’m sorry again. He’s still out with a buyer. He’ll be here tomorrow after nine, though. Try then if you can.”

“And Mrs Farthing?”

“Oh, Mrs Farthing won’t be in until after one tomorrow. Thursday’s her late day.”

“I’ll be in first thing, then.”

He closed the door behind him and made his way toward the bridge, turning off at the War Memorial green, heading past the old school, past the library and through the archway of the shopping arcade that led to Severn Road, Midland Road and the railway line.

He stood before a block of flats looking up at the pale lit curtained windows. Old men and old women lived there. He could not face tonight, or any night, with the old man. They had shared too much already to be sure of keeping secrets safe. Who knew what dreams might spill over into the tiny rooms?

Tomorrow. He would see him tomorrow. In the light of day. He turned and walked stiffly, retracing his steps. The walk back to the Woolpack car park left him cold and wet with snow. The Gucci were blemished. He shed his coat and lay it along the plastic covered back seat. He shared nothing. No one drove with him. Not even Lenny. Then, in another life, another car, but not since. ‘Get her up to a hundred! Go on! I want you to do the ton while I’m blowin’ you.’

He slipped off his shoes and allowed the floor heater to blow life back into his chilled feet. He would drive back home tonight, come in first thing in the morning. There would be no joy in the hill climb tonight, so he turned out of the car park and took the road toward Standish. The Moreton Valence corner had taken prisoners. Two cars, steaming and buckled, lay locked together surrounded by the oscillating fire engine lights. The police were there too. He slowed at the church, two hundred yards before. He had seen the telltale glow, he knew the corner well. Blood stained the snow. He tempered his speed and glided past, watching three stretchers make the news. He felt suddenly grateful for the motorway a mile up ahead. Then the idea of supper in the New Inn deflected him and he pushed the Mercedes on into Gloucester. The shoes were dry but ringed with a jagged edge of white. The damp coat had left a cloud of condensation clinging to the plastic covering on the back seat.

“Damn!”

Before too much damage could be done, he pulled the plastic film free from the upholstery, crushing it into a resilient ball that would not lie still. Like so many of the memories.

He spent the evening that followed his meal running back over decades of those memories, doodling on damp beer mats in between cigarettes and vodka. A fitting requiem for a lost soul. There was live music. An organist. He found that he could blend without trouble into the indifferent onlookers. The music might have been muzak from a Debenhams lift, the standards trotted out and paraded tastelessly behind a smoke-screen of forced bonhomie. ‘Thank you Ladies and Gentlemen. And now a request for Beryl and Howard - Feelings.’

He faced the white night ahead with the wrong music playing. Sleep would elude him. The drone of the radio comfortless in the dark. Insomnia was still infinitely preferable to sharing space with the spectres that haunted the old man’s mind. He held away the craving for the solace of the drug until four. He unclenched his teeth and rubbed his aching jaw. He wiped away the sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand. He felt the fevered ache of influenza tugging at his muscles and tendons, hitting away at the back of his knees, pulling at the hairs in his armpits. He waded through the quicksand of the small hours, numb fingers unscrewing the base of the spelter lamp in nightmarish slow-motion. The drug washed through him with the healing power of a cool shower after love. Only his hairline felt as though it were stretched across his skull. Now there was nothing warm about him. His skin shimmered with the bloom of ice crystals, Michelangelo in the Fortress of Solitude, the air fixed with invisible sequins, with the lost kisses of angels, with the rarefied clouds of Olympus, with thoughts of death.

He came in a brilliant scream of lightning, smearing his body with the balm, sharing nothing. He came to in a fleeting breath of street noise, sirens wailing. He was suddenly aware of the room, the time, the silence. A day lay ahead. The first waking moments of the final days of vengeance.