I Am Gold (24 page)

He had let all of them know by many a sign that this definitely could not happen. He would hate to have to threaten them now and hoped the money managed to keep them friendly and far away – happy to recall lovely moments with him, but also to accept them moments was over, over, over, and not coming back. After all, there was plenty of other men about for them, though, admittedly, hardly any would have an ex-rectory with genuine Pre-Raphs on the walls.

If one of them, or more than one, became a nuisance, he'd ask Hubert V.L. Camborne, with, possibly, Quentin Noss, another promising lad from the firm, to go and have a helpful conversation with her, or them – definitely only a conversation at first, but a conversation heavier than he would feel right for him, personally, to start. They had been sweet and very considerate partners on a temporary basis, and he would never be able to forget that, or not for a while. He knew he owed the three a lot and he would like to return this to them in what was known as liquidity, on top of the will mentions, owing to important shifts that was happening. Patricia came from a rough, violent, jaily tribe. Manse would have to be alert. God, families could be such a sodding trouble.

Today, Manse and Naomi were in bed after he returned from the school run. They would often take their breakfasts upstairs and either leave the meals and percolator on side tables while they made love, or have the breakfast first and then make love. He didn't mind at all which order things came in. Some might of been fussy in this matter but Manse, no. The coffee would still be warm, even if not taken till later, and the food was not of the cooked type. If she had Marmite on her breath or streaking a couple of her teeth black-brown, so what? In fact, it could excite him more, reminding of that first time they had it off in Ealing and he could taste and smell some of that fine restaurant lunch still toning up her mouth. And probably his own mouth had also contained a hint or two of that feast on expenses – hers. All right, so they was being watched at their table then, but he didn't know, so that couldn't spoil the feed nor the later full intimacy.

He didn't like Marmite, so she wouldn't get traces of that from him now. But he loved houmous on toast, especially the roasted red pepper kind, and she'd definitely feel some extra garlicky heat and spiciness on her tongue when she prodded it down towards his tonsils. Obviously, she couldn't deep-throat him the way he could deep-throat her, but she wasn't the sort to sulk because of this, so she made the best of it by deep-throating him with her tongue instead. And a tongue could bring back flavours, but a deep-throating dick couldn't, of course. Dicks were very necessary, but they had their limits.

Manse and Naomi made great and long-lasting love this morning and were now into the breakfasts. He said, when his mouth was empty for a spell: ‘There's a jeweller in Nash Street who gets a very nice range of stuff in, Naomi. All sorts. You might think a town like this wouldn't have a jeweller's with the kind of top category items that might be usual for jewellers in London, but this jeweller in Nash Street is really pretty OK.'

‘Ah', she replied.

‘Luckily, I know him quite well, as a matter of fact. He wouldn't never try to sell me phoney items, or dodgy pieces he might be fencing for associates, which could lead to a trace and police bother later, and even to pulling a ring off of someone's finger, to be returned to where it was stolen from, although the ring might be the sign of a lovely relationship.'

‘There's hardly any business where the scrupulousness of the proprietor is more crucial than a jeweller's.'

‘I'll certainly accept that view,' Shale said. ‘Do you feel like a trip there, I wonder? His name's Percy Ardoyne. People giggle at the name Percy now, but it used to be very noble. That's what I mean about him being reliable.'

‘Hotspur in Shakespeare was a Percy.'

‘Exactly,' Shale replied.

‘When would you like to go there?'

‘Soon.'

‘Today?'

‘Today or tomorrow.'

‘I'm away tomorrow,' she said.

‘Oh?'

‘It's a nuisance but I have to pop up to the smoke.'

‘Something wrong? A crisis?'

‘I wouldn't put it as strongly as that, but I need to be there.'

‘To do with the paper?'

‘Of course.'

‘But not a crisis?'

‘Not a full-out crisis.'

‘You're needed, though. You personally? To do with one of your contacts? That's what newspaper people call them, isn't it – contacts?'

‘It's in my sort of area, yes.'

‘These contacts will only deal with you as you? Only you can handle it?'

‘Along those lines.'

‘There must be all sorts of … of aspects to a paper like that,' he said.

‘Yes, some.'

‘I suppose it reaches out to quite a few in many different kinds of life.'

‘Well, we hope so. It's what these papers depend on.'

‘I can see that.' He waited for anything more. That was it, though. ‘Well, we can go and see Percy later today.'

‘Yes, later,' she said. She put her empty coffee cup back on the table and slid down in the bed. To Shale she seemed such a damn mystery, and he loved it – the unknown aspects. She was definitely more than just someone who had to buy poster-prints, and whose eyes rolled back into her head when she fucked. She wouldn't do anal but Manse considered this was only a quirk and would pass. It seemed not natural for someone who loved the Pre-Raphaelites.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

2009

Harpur loathed walking on broken glass. Through his soles these fragments on the street or the floor of a building brought a deeply hellish message. He got one now at the charity shop. To Harpur, the splintering din from such trodden-on bits proclaimed the collapse of order. Windows were civilization. They'd helped man quit the cave and climb to domesticity. They made palaces, conservatories and hospitals possible and banks. They had a kind of flat or curved useful beauty. They let in light and barred weather, dust, smoke, fog, moths, bats, seagulls and some noise. Windows separated inside from outside but also allowed those snug and corporate inside to see outside while remaining inside, and vice versa – a lovely, simple, sophisticated invention. But they were also hopelessly fragile. A sudden smack at any spot on their surface could make the whole translucent caboodle fall to bits, as if the total windowly structure had been a harebrained gamble or con. This shop window had fallen to bits. Civilization and its required orderliness could fall to bits.

Harpur didn't normally go in for such highest-high-flyer philosophizing. He left that to the supremos. Mark Lane, the previous Chief Constable, used to regard any major local crime as the start of universal catastrophe, catastrophe that would be blamed exclusively on him, because it began here, thanks to his slackness and all-round incompetence. In those days, Iles would mock this obsession – claim that Lane frantically studied the final Bible book, Revelation, to see if he appeared there in some disguise as the prime cause of the world's end. I am Apocalypse. Lane was gone from this patch now, but, very strangely, Iles had turned into that same kind of broad field worryguts himself. Lately, he'd shown classic symptoms of dread that some bad situation on the manor proved general rot was setting in, and by general he meant worldwide. The shooting and the siege could be classed as bad situations, or very bad.

And now Harpur found he, too, had begun this kind of woolly, cosmic theorizing. Perhaps he was due for promotion. He had found the sight of Iles running, in that imperturbable, designated way, a sign that goodness on a universal scale might survive regardless. ‘I am not only Gold. I am alchemy – can by my skill and magic
create
gold. I will put things to rights.' But these brittle, ruined glass segments, articulate under Harpur's shoes, said something so different, didn't they? They said that windows were weakness, and that this weakness might be symbolic of untreatable social weakness everywhere. He'd heard of Kristallnacht 1938 – Crystal Night, as it was prettily, callously, called – when the Nazis went on a spree smashing the glass fronts of Jewish-owned German shops in a storm of organized, authorized terror. There would have been a lot of it underfoot that day. It had signified. It had signified chaos. Yes. Yes.

Harpur stepped into the shop, as Iles had, and as much an easy target as Iles would have been. The sun hadn't gone down yet and in any case all the shop lights were on. Harpur had heard no further shots, though. Out of sight behind racked display garments the ACC said: ‘Good evening, folks. I'm Iles. Is he dead?', his tone slightly muffled by all the shop's hanging, worthy gear

‘He might be dead,' a woman said.

‘He hasn't moved, not for a couple of minutes,' a man said.

‘There was a struggle,' another, older-voiced woman said. ‘The pistol went off.'

‘We have it,' the man said.

‘Put it on the floor and stand away,' Iles said.

‘Stand away?' the man said.

‘A contingent of my people will be here in a minute,' Iles said. ‘They'll be excited and gun-happy. I know these folk. They are admirable and home-loving, but it's best they don't see a man unknown to them with a firearm just now.'

‘Right,' he said.

Harpur pushed aside the castored show stand of used jackets and suits and went to stand near Iles. Over by the bric-a-brac display a fair-haired man lay half-curled on the floor. He'd be late twenties or a little older, in a good suit, newer and smarter than any for sale here. He wore brown cowboy boots. A pool of blood had formed on the carpet near his chest and was spreading.

Rockmain arrived, gunless, at the shop. He came in through the front door. A warning bell jangled when he opened it. The sound seemed to Harpur absurdly normal, given how things were here now. Iles said: ‘You shouldn't have come, Andrew, dear. You're much too valuable to be put at risk. The country needs your brain and general, measured aplomb. No siege is complete without you.'

‘Was this necessary, Gold, really necessary?' Rockmain said.

‘Was what necessary?' Iles said.

‘The intervention, the potential violence.'

‘Ask the people here,' Iles said.

‘With respect, they could not see the full picture,' Rockmain said.

‘Could you?' Iles said.

‘There is a great deal of proven, handed-down wisdom on the conduct of sieges,' Rockmain said.

‘This one will be added to it,' Iles said. ‘My canter and Doddy-neutralizing will become part of that proven, handed-down wisdom, perhaps a necessary, amending contribution, to demonstrate that wisdom and waiting are not the same.' He turned slightly. ‘Ah, here come the boys and girls in bulk and bristling with armament.' Ten officers wearing plain navy dungarees and grey, big-peaked baseball caps rushed into the shop through the window gap and the door. They moved with astonishing quietness. Some carried pistols, others Heckler and Koch sniper rifles or semi-automatic carbines. They fanned out quickly around the shop. White capitals on the caps said POLICE.

Iles raised his voice: ‘No shooting, please, my brave and timely ladies and gentlemen. You'll all know me. I am, unmistakably, Iles and Gold. With me is Commander Rockmain, a tactician and discard, short-arsed and runtish but nonetheless on our side. And then we have DCS Harpur, also almost certainly known to all of you as someone occasionally well-intentioned but' – the ACC's voice began to escalate from shouting towards screaming – ‘but who, prick-driven, is always ready to get at other men's wives, even, I have to tell you, the wife of someone superior to him in rank, education, taste and breeding, and who had always treated him with the kindness and unpatronizing generosity that I, Iles, am justly known for and –'

Harpur said to the attack group: ‘All other personnel standing are hostages and of no danger. Four individuals, three female, one male.'

‘That's one of his damn tricks,' Iles said. ‘Did you notice it? Of course you noticed it.' He spat in rage on to the carpet twice, dredging hard inside himself to get stuff for the second go. He spoke to the hostages, who stood grouped among the chock-a-block display stands. ‘He'll cut into my very reasonable statements, about his obnoxious, sickening, lech behaviour, with some unnecessary, diverting banality to do with the work scene.' Iles did a smarmy, sing-song, contemptuous imitation. ‘“Four individuals, three female, one male.” A brilliant piece of sexing, wouldn't you agree? Does the bugger think you can't see or count? Deviousness? He'll get a bleeding Nobel Prize for it.'

People in the police party had probably heard Iles carry on like this at other times in public, often featuring more vehemence and phlegm, and they listened and watched now without their features under the baseball caps showing much interest. The hostages stared at him, perhaps already disorientated by their hours kept captive here, now subjected to extra rough shock and strain, maybe a slice of that chaos Harpur had forecast to himself. Iles, this time addressing the whole mixed gathering, said with a resounding, loony chuckle: ‘I can assure you all, though, that when my wife, Sarah Iles, and I discuss those degrading episodes now – what we refer to jointly, entirely jointly and in total accord, as “the Harpur blip”, that's it, “the Harpur blip”, an appropriate phrase, isn't it? – yes, when we discuss them now Sarah Iles is amazed that she could ever have regarded him, Harpur, as someone entitled to any kind of relationship with her, and certainly not service-lane knee tremblers or activities in fleapit hotels, municipal parks and bandstands, and backs of cars, no, certainly not any of those. Recalling that time, Sarah Iles and I laugh together in our home at the obvious, hindsight preposterousness of it and –'

‘Why do you keep calling her Sarah Iles?' the older woman said. ‘If her name is Sarah and she's your wife we would know she must be Sarah Iles.'