An Air That Kills (27 page)

‘There's a copper in the other bar,' she said quietly.

His pleasure vanished. He lowered his voice to match hers: ‘Working, is he?'

‘I don't know. He's a detective sergeant, name of Kirby. Comes in here for his dinner sometimes. He's with a girl, but that doesn't mean anything.'

‘Not that it matters, of course. I've done nothing wrong.'

Charlie was aware that Gloria's eyes were anxious; her concern irritated him because it implied that he was vulnerable. He wanted admiration, not help. He heard a door opening behind him and sensed that her attention had switched away from him. His irritation increased: it seemed that any passing customer took precedence over him.

‘There's your friend again,' Gloria said coldly. ‘I expect you'd like to buy him a drink. It's usually that way round, isn't it?'

Charlie turned. Genghis Carn was standing a couple of feet away from him. He smiled impartially at the space between Gloria and Charlie.

‘How kind. A pint of best please and a large Scotch.'

Gloria's lips tightened into a bright red line. She shrugged and picked up a clean pint mug.

‘And how's Mrs Meague today?' Carn enquired.

‘Better, they say,' Charlie said shortly.

‘Glad to hear that. Takes a man's mind off his work when there's sickness in the family – in my experience, anyway.'

Gloria banged the mug down on the counter. A little of the beer slopped over the rim. Carn thanked her and lifted the mug to his lips. ‘Here's to you.'

Automatically Charlie drank. Gloria brought the whisky. While Charlie was paying for both sets of drinks, Carn wandered across the bar to a table in the corner furthest away from the dartboard. Charlie followed him, and they sat down with their backs to the wall.

‘Gloria says there's a copper in the other bar,' Charlie muttered. ‘A detective sergeant – I don't know whether he's on duty or not.'

‘And why should that concern me?'

‘Listen, Jimmy, I didn't mean—'

‘When's your mother coming out of hospital?'

Charlie hesitated, rubbing the stubble on his jaw. ‘I don't know. It could be some time yet.'

‘I imagine she'll be in a delicate state of health for some time. You must be careful not to let anything upset her.'

Charlie drank in silence.

‘Rather an attractive young woman,' Carn went on, flicking his eyes towards the bar and then back to Charlie's face. ‘If you like that sort of thing. Known her long?'

‘Since we were kids.'

The silence lengthened between them. Charlie began to roll a cigarette to give himself something to do. His fingers were clumsier than usual.

Carn picked up the matchbox beside Charlie's tobacco tin and took out a fresh match. He broke it in two, ensuring that the wood splintered into a long, diagonal fracture. Breathing heavily, he used half of the match as a toothpick. He deposited a pale shred of meat on the side of the ashtray.

‘She's the landlady?' he asked.

‘Husband manages the pub for the brewery. Well, it's his name over the door, but I reckon she runs it.'

‘Responsible job. Shouldn't care for it myself, the licensed trade. So many things can go wrong, can't they?' There was a pause while Carn dug out another scrap of his supper and placed it next to the first. ‘And, let's face it, when a man's had a few drinks, he doesn't always behave very rationally.'

Charlie's fingers were damp with sweat and the cigarette paper clung to them unexpectedly. Tobacco cascaded on to the table. ‘Why don't you just say it straight out?' he said. ‘What do you want?'

‘I want what's mine.'

‘You'll have it, Jimmy. I promise. I've got it all arranged, I—'

‘I was going to tell you last night,' Carn cut in, his voice soft and nasal, ‘but you were too drunk to remember your own name. I can't wait, you see – I want it now.'

Chapter Twelve

Antonia made their supper with bad grace – undercooked boiled eggs and burned toast. She refilled her father's glass twice during the meal.

‘You're a good girl, Tony,' he said after the second time, sounding surprised.

Had he forgotten everything, she wondered? Or was he able to pretend to himself that none of it had happened? She could not understand how anyone, least of all her father, could be so stupid. She kept her head down as she chewed the charred toast. She knew he was looking at her.

‘Tony? I want to go to the service tomorrow. You'll come too, won't you? Hate to ask, but the thing is, I may need a bit of help.'

Still chewing, she nodded. She did not want to speak to him.

‘Well, that's all right then. Knew you would. I won't be able to march with the chaps beforehand, of course. If we had a wheelchair, you could push me. But there it is, eh? So you'll phone for a taxi, then? First thing in the morning.'

His voice trailed away. She had forgotten his graceless way of demanding and receiving favours as though they were his of right. It had always made giving him anything a difficult and unpleasant process. Thank God for small mercies: none of the busybodies had thought to provide them with a wheelchair. The local Legion headquarters was at least a quarter-mile from the church: she would have had to push his dead weight uphill, and it would probably have been raining.

After the meal, he smoked a cigarette and stared at the hissing flames of the gas fire while she cleared away. She washed up in the kitchen, which felt like a haven because he wasn't there. The meal had done little to warm her – she felt cold, physically and emotionally.

When she had been a child and her mother was still alive, Antonia had been convinced that there must be more to her father than met the eye. She had made up stories about him – little fantasies, designed with love and crafted with care, the sole purpose of which had been to permit him to reveal his love for her. ‘Love', of course, in those days, had been a word with many shades of meaning, all of them innocent. In the hypothetical case of her father, love had manifested itself in many, deeply gratifying ways, such as sensitivity towards her feelings, appreciation of her latent qualities and admiration for her achievements (which were, as even she had been forced to admit, as yet unachieved).

The trouble with life, Antonia thought as she dumped the crockery into the sink, was not that dreams didn't come true, but that they came true in such unexpected and bloody awful ways. She chipped an egg cup and, with a gratifying sensation of wickedness, tossed it into the dustbin outside the back door where it joined the remains of the clock her father had broken earlier in the day.

Leaving the plates to drain, she went quietly back to the living room. Her father was slumped in his chair with his eyelids closed and the air whispering and rustling through his nostrils. She stared at him, cataloguing the features of his ugliness to feed her hatred.

It was, she thought, as good an opportunity as she was likely to get. After all, he slept in this room and since the accident he had only left it to use the lavatory down the hall. ‘Father,' she said quietly. She could not bring herself to call him Daddy. ‘Father?' she repeated, this time more loudly.

He didn't stir in his chair and the rhythm of his breathing continued undisturbed.

She raised her voice almost to a shout: ‘Father!'

Nothing happened. Antonia glanced round the room and decided to move in a clockwise direction, reserving the bureau until last. She worked her way steadily round the walls. She opened drawers, peered into cupboards, rifled through the piles of papers, opened files and sorted through files of ancient accounts.

One of the sideboard cupboards was devoted to the affairs of the local branch of the British Legion which took up so much space that the door would no longer close. There were many letters from all over the world, including a bundle from Aunt Maud in South Africa during the war; Antonia glanced at one or two of these and found references to herself: ‘Antonia is enjoying the typing course more than the shorthand. She's too busy to write but sends her love . . .'

While she worked, she listened continuously to the breathing that struggled along her father's congested airways and kept him alive. Oh, yes, she thought, now that one had seen the possibility, it all fitted together and it all made sense: it was all of a piece with his sly and ruthless devotion to his own interests. At the fireplace, she paused to look at the photograph of her parents and herself. She picked up the frame and studied her mother's face.

The longer Antonia searched, the more frantic and fevered she became. Finally she came to the bureau which she had saved until last as a child saves the most desirable morsel on the plate until the end. Her father's medals were lying on the blotter beside the tray containing the rest of the poppies. She went through the contents of the drawers and she rummaged through the pigeon holes. She found the whisky bottle and the spare whisky bottle and two used glasses. She found her father's wallet, his cheque book and his will, which, she was interested to discover, left everything to her mother, ‘my beloved wife'.

At last Antonia was forced to admit defeat, though in a sense it was a kind of victory since it was a confirmation of what she had suspected; at least she was no longer deceived. She stared at the little row of medals which her father had taken out in preparation for the Armistice service. He had laid them in a neat row across the cream blotter, their ribbons precisely parallel and the metal newly burnished. Most of them, she knew, were campaign medals or war medals – the sort of decorations which so many men had, which signified nothing apart from the fact that they had been in uniform at a particular time and in a particular place.

The decoration in the centre of the line, however, belonged in a different category. The ribbon was white watered silk with a purple stripe down the centre. From it depended a silver cross on each arm of which was an imperial crown, and in the middle was the imperial cipher GRI. Her father had won the Military Cross in 1917 for an act of valour under enemy fire. He had told Antonia when she was a girl that it had involved shooting a lot of damned Huns in a trench. He referred to the decoration in an offhand manner, but Antonia suspected that its award was perhaps the one unequivocally satisfactory achievement of his entire life.

She lifted the blotter and with a flick of a wrist sent the medals cascading in a chinking, brightly coloured stream to the bottom of the wastepaper basket.

For an instant the breathing stopped. Harcutt stirred in his chair. ‘What was that?'

‘Nothing, Father.'

Chapter Thirteen

Mr Quale stared at Thornhill with moist eyes and ran a forefinger round the substantial gap between his collar and his wrinkled neck.

‘You're in luck, Inspector. He came back on the 7.29. He's having his dinner.' Quale pursed his lips and nodded knowingly. ‘Lamb cutlets, I fancy. I understand he's partial to a bit of lamb.'

‘I'll go and have a word with him,' Thornhill said, shying away from Quale's evident enjoyment of his role as the policeman's friend. ‘Is he alone?'

‘Oh, yes, Mr Thornhill. I made sure of that. I took the liberty of having a word with Mr Forbin, our head waiter. Only too glad to oblige.'

And his face made it only too obvious that such obligations had to be discharged in hard cash. Thornhill put a half-crown on the desk.

‘Thank you, Mr Quale.'

‘Thank
you
, sir.' The gratitude was faintly tinged with sarcasm, which implied that half-a-crown had been too little. ‘The door opposite the lounge.'

Neither Mr Quale nor Mr Forbin had needed to exercise much ingenuity to keep Genghis Carn away from the other diners. The dining room was as large as the lounge, and despite the fact that it was Saturday night, most of the tables were empty. Carn was sitting by himself near the huge sideboard which dominated one wall.

The head waiter hurried over to Thornhill as he hesitated in the doorway. Forbin was a small, slovenly man of a similar age to Mr Quale. He swerved to make an apparently unnecessary diversion round a table. Thornhill guessed that the man wanted to angle his approach to the doorway so Mr Quale was in his line of vision, and that a signal must have passed between the two men.

‘Mr Thornhill,' said the head waiter, beaming; his waistcoat strained across his potbelly and had lost one of its buttons. ‘I hope we shall have the honour of seeing you here for pleasure, as well as for business. This way, sir.'

Thornhill followed Forbin's swaying coat tails across the room to Carn's table. He thought it probable that Carn had caught a glimpse of them in the big mirror above the sideboard. One of the diners glanced up at Thornhill as he passed. It was the man who had been with Jill Francis in the lounge and who had later come into the bar for a dry martini. His face was flushed and he was working his way through a bottle of Burgundy.

Forbin drew up beside Carn's table. ‘A visitor for you, sir,' he announced.

Carn looked up from his book. He dropped his spoon into his spotted dick and pushed the bowl away.

With a flourish, Forbin pulled back a chair. Thornhill sat down and declined the head waiter's offer to bring him some refreshment. Carn's pale, protuberant blue eyes stared at Inspector Thornhill, while one hand rested on the open pages of the book as if marking the place. At close quarters, the pallor of his complexion made him seem a little less than human.

‘Mr James Carn?' Thornhill said quietly, once Forbin had reluctantly withdrawn.