Athena (13 page)

Always it comes back. I think of it as another story altogether but it is not. I delude myself that I have sloughed it all off and that I can walk on naked and unashamed into a new name, a new life, light and gladsome as a transmigrating soul, but no, it comes back dragging its boneless limbs through the muck and rears up at me grotesquely in the unlikeliest of shapes. Such as this fellow, for instance, with his extruded head balanced perilously on top of that cylindrical trunk – all three buttons of his tweed jacket were fastened – like a stone ball set on the pillar of a gate. I have never come across another such almost perfectly spherical head. The effect was emphasised by the oiled black hair parted just above his left ear and fanned out sideways across the dome of his bald skull like a tight-fitting, patent-leather cap. His eyes, also black, were very small and set very close together and slightly out of alignment, the left one higher than the right, which gave to his expression a quizzical cast I found both comic and disturbing. His smile, which he did with lips pressed shut and turned up at right angles at the corners, seemed less a mark of pleasure than discomfort, as if he were wincing at a twinge of indigestion or the pinching of a
too-tight shoe. I had the impression of exceptional, fanatic cleanliness: he shone; he fairly glowed. I pictured him of a morning at a cracked sink in vest and drawers, vehemently ascrub, buffing himself to this high sheen. I knew straight away what, if not who, he was, and I felt a sort of soundless shock, and a shiver ran through me, as if I had been cloven clean in two from poll to fork by a blade of unimaginable fineness. Fright always has a flash of pleasure in it, for me.

He told me his name was Hackett. ‘Do you not remember me?’ he said, seeming genuinely crestfallen.

‘Of course I do,’ I said, lying.

Now, it is a curious thing, but really, I did not know him at all. My recollections of that time of crisis and disaster in my life – what is it, twelve, thirteen years ago? – have become blurred in certain aspects. No doubt memory, selective and indulgent record-keeper that it is, has seen fit to suppress this or that detail of my case, but I do not see how it could have erased entirely from the admittedly crowded picture of those fraught weeks a figure so memorable as Detective-Inspector Ambrose Hackett. Yet one of us was misremembering and it did not seem to be him. We stood in uncomfortable silence for a moment and he inserted a finger under his shirt-collar behind the fat knot of his tie and turned his head to the left with a quick little painful jerk, one of the many tics he had and which if I had already encountered them I would surely not have forgotten. Some more moments passed, marked by heartbeats. Among the few things I have learned over the years is that there is no occasion, no matter how weighty or terrible the circumstances, that is not susceptible to a merely social awkwardness. In my time I have known lawyers to go mute with embarrassment, judges to avoid my eye, jailers to blush. Surely it says something for our species, this sudden, helpless floundering when the universal code of manners fails us; surely the phenomenon bespeaks the soul’s essential authenticity?
Here we were, the detective and myself, caught in an impossible situation, me proprietorial at the door of someone else’s uninhabited and unfurnished house, with a half-naked young woman upstairs eager for my imminent return, and him coatless on the step getting rained on and waiting with a wistful demeanour to be asked in.

I said that I had been doing some work; it was all I could think of that would be vague and businesslike at once. It sounded preposterous. My voice was abnormally loud and unconvincing, as if I were speaking for the benefit of some concealed eavesdropper. Hackett nodded in a thoughtful way. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that was what I wanted to have a word about.’

This was a surprise. I had thought he was just another of the functionaries the authorities like to send periodically to remind me that I am not a free man (
life means life
: how often has that deceptively tautological-sounding caution rung in my ears).

I invited him to step into the hall and wait while I fetched my coat.

A. was gone from the room. I stood a moment gazing about the place in helpless distress, panting, then clattered down the stairs again, in a panic that Hackett would have started nosing about the place, though I’m sure I don’t know what I feared he might uncover; his kind can turn the most trivial of things into a clue to a crime you were not even aware of having committed. I need not have worried, though; he was the soul of punctiliousness. I found him standing to attention in the hall with his hands clasped behind him, blamelessly smiling, like a big gawky schoolboy waiting at the side of the stage on prize-day.

We walked in the direction of the river. Hackett turned up the collar of his jacket against the drizzle. ‘Forgot my mac,’ he said ruefully; he had a way of injecting into everything he said a note of humorous apology.

I was in a strange state, unable fully to acknowledge the alarming potentials of this encounter. On the contrary, still swollen and hazy with the thought of A., I seemed to bounce along, like a dirigible come loose from its moorings and softly, hugely adrift, puffed up on heedless bliss. And there was something else, another access of almost-pleasure, which it took me a while to identify: it was relief. To harbour a secret is to have power, says the philosopher, but it is a burden, too. I had not realised, or had forgotten, that the effort of pretending to be someone other than I was was a great, an intolerable weight, one that I was glad to be allowed to put down, if only for a brief while, and by one who claimed to have been amongst those who had loaded it on to my back in the first place. When I told him I had changed my name he smiled indulgently and nodded. ‘Oh, I know,’ he said. ‘But I don’t mind that. Leopards and spots, Mr M., leopards and spots.’

The rain was intensifying, big drops were dotted like pearls on his glossy crown.

I suggested we might go for a drink, or was he on duty? He took this for a joke and laughed appreciatively, crinkling up his eyes. ‘Still a card, I see,’ he said.

His motor car, a dented red Facade with a nodding plastic dog in the back window, was parked up a narrow street behind the cathedral close. Hackett opened the door for me and we got in. Inside it smelled of pine air-freshener, synthetic leather, sweat; I have travelled many times in the back seats of cars like this, pinned between big, tense, heavy-breathing men in blazers and blue shirts. At once the sheep-stink of our wetted clothes overpowered the tang of pine and the windows began to fog up.

‘Terrible about that murder,’ Hackett said. ‘Stabbed her through the eye and cut her diddies off. Like some sort of a ceremony. He’ll do it again, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Wouldn’t I what?’ I said.

‘Say he’ll do it again. They always do.’

‘Not always.’

‘Ah.’

After that brief skirmish something that had been standing rigidly between us sat down and folded its arms. I have nothing against the police, you know. I have always found them polite and attentive, with a couple of notable exceptions. One of the first things that struck me about them, at the time when I had to deal with them in the plural, so to speak, was their remarkable curiosity. They were like schoolgirls crowding round one of their number who has finally managed to lose her virginity. Details, they wanted all the dirty details. How they sweated, leaning over me and softly snorting, their nostrils flared, as I recklessly embroidered my squalid little tale for their delectation.
But hold on there
, they would say, laying a blunt paw softly but urgently on my arm,
the last time round you told it different
, and I would have to revise practically the entire plot in order to accommodate whatever new twist it was that my imagination, working in overdrive, had just dreamed up. And always at the end of the session there was that rustling and creaking as they sat back on their plastic chairs with a wistful, faraway look in their bruised and pouchy eyes; and then that release of breath, a soft, drawn-out
ahh
with a grace-note in it of what I can only think was envy. It is true, what has been said, that we get to know a man most intimately when he represents a threat to us. I believe I knew my interrogators better than their wives did. All the more strange, then, that I could not place Hackett. ‘I was there the first time they brought you in,’ he said. ‘Do you not remember?’ No, I did not remember, and to this day I do not know whether he was telling the truth or making it up for some shady and convoluted purpose of his own. I took him for a fool at first; it is one of my failings, that I judge people by appearance. He had, as I would discover, a way of playing with things
that made me think of a big, slow, simple-looking cat toying with a captured mouse. He would approach a subject and then take a soft jump back and turn and pretend to fix his attention elsewhere, though one restraining paw remained always extended, with its claws out.

‘Them paintings,’ he said dreamily, frowning out at the rain. ‘What do you think of them?’

The very tip of a thin blade of panic pricked my inflated consciousness and the last of the gas hissed out of the balloon of my euphoria and I came to earth with a bump.

‘What paintings?’ I said, too quickly, I’m sure, my voice quivering.

He laughed softly and shook his head and did not look at me. For a moment he said nothing, letting the silence tighten nicely.

‘Tell me this,’ he said, ‘did you recognise them, at all?’

At that he turned his head and gave me a straight look. At least, it was as near to straight as he could manage, for his nose was pushed somewhat aside (early days on the beat, perhaps, scuffle outside a pub, a punch from nowhere, stars and blood), and that, along with his mismatched, pinhead eyes, made me think of those moon-headed stick figures with combined full-face and profile that Picasso in old age drew on the walls of that château of his at Cap d’Antibes or wherever it was. I almost laughed for fright.

‘Recognise?’ I said shrilly. ‘What do you mean, recognise?’

His face took on a distant, unfocused expression, like that of a very old tortoise, and he sat for a long moment in silence tapping the rhythm of a tune with his fingertips on the steering-wheel. The light inside the fogged-up car was grainy and dense, as if the sky had descended on us. The rain ticked on the roof.

‘They say,’ Hackett said at last, pensively, ‘that lightning never strikes the same place twice. But it does. And it has.’ He chuckled. ‘You were the first flash, so to speak.’ I waited,
baffled. Inside the silence small, tinny things seemed to tinkle. He glanced at me and grinned slyly and the tip of a purplish tongue appeared between his teeth. ‘You wouldn’t have heard,’ he said softly. ‘The insurance crowd asked us to keep it quiet for a while.’ He paused, still grinning; he seemed to be enjoying himself hugely, in his quiet way. ‘Whitewater House was robbed again,’ he said.

I turned away from him as if I had been slapped. Breathe slowly. With my sleeve I wiped the window beside me. Three laughing girls with linked arms passed by in the rain. Above the street there was a tightening in the air and the great bell of the cathedral produced a single, reverberant dark stroke. I lowered my eyes in search of shadows and rest. The toes of Hackett’s shoes gleamed like chestnuts. Twill; I had not seen a pair of twill trousers in thirty years. I went to school with the likes of Hackett, farmers’ sons bent on bettering themselves, tough, shrewd, unloquacious fellows with an affecting streak of tentativeness, not my type at all. I treated them with indifference and scorn, but in secret I was made uneasy by them, daunted by their sense of themselves, the air of dogged authenticity they gave off. Real people: I am never at ease in the presence of real people.

‘Half a dozen or more this time,’ Hackett said, ‘frames and all. They backed a van up to the side of the house and handed them out through the window. Knew what they were after, too.’ He pondered the matter briefly and then glanced at me sideways and did his circus clown’s smile. ‘Must have had the help of an expert.’ I was thinking of the Three Graces laughing in the rain. ‘We know who they were, of course,’ he said, thoughtful once more. ‘They as good as left their calling card. It’s a question now of … evidence.’ He paused again, then chuckled. ‘Oh, and you’ll be interested in this,’ he said. ‘One of them gave the security guard a belt of a hammer and damn near killed him.’

A country road and a big old car weaving from side to
side and veering to a halt in the ditch. The scene is in black and white, scratched and jerky, as in an old newsreel. All is still for a moment, then the car rocks suddenly, violently, on its springs and a voice cries out in agony and anguish. Welcome to my nightmares. I am always outside the car, never in it. Is that not strange? Hackett was watching me with quiet interest. I experienced then a flash of that old malaise that seizes on me now and then in moments of stress and extremity, bringing with it a dizzying sense of dislocation, of being torn in two; for a second I was someone else, passing by and glancing in through the window of my self and recognising nothing in this other’s commonplace and yet impenetrably mysterious surroundings.

‘Has he a wife?’ Hackett said. I looked at him blankly. ‘Morden,’ he said gently and tapped me once smartly on the knee with his knuckle.

The rain stopped with a sort of swish.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. It was the truth.

Suddenly then, and inexplicably, I experienced a sort of mild, mournful elation. Very strange. Hackett brightened too. In rapid succession he passed a finger under his shirt-collar, grinned, and plucked convulsively at the knees of his trousers. Three tics in a row: somehow I had hit the jackpot.

We parted then, as if we had settled something between us and for the moment there was nothing left to say. ‘Toodle-oo now, Mr M.,’ Hackett said, ‘and good luck to you.’ As I was getting out of the car he leaned across the seat and laid a hand on my arm. ‘We’ll have a talk again,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we will.’

I walked back slowly to the house through the shining streets. A molten rip had appeared in the clouds low above the roofs but the rain had started up again and fell about me in big awkward drops like flashing spatters of steel. There are times when I feel drunk though I have not touched a drop for days; or rather, I feel as if I have been drunk and
now have begun to sober up, and that the fantasias and false perspectives due to inebriation are about to clear and leave me shocked and gulping in the face of a radically readjusted version of what I had taken the world to be. It never quite arrives, that state of pluperfect sobriety, and I stumble on baffled and deluded amidst a throng of teetotallers who turn from me coldly, tight-lipped, sweeping their skirts aside from my reeling path. As I walked through the rain now my mind raced throbbingly on a single thought. The thought was you. You had the power to push everything else aside, like an arm sweeping across a littered table-top. What did Morden and his pictures, or Hackett and his evidence, what did any of that matter, compared with the promise of all you represented? You see? – you see how I was lost already, careless even of the prospect of the dungeon once again?