The German Numbers Woman (58 page)

A bow wave opened like the ill-omened wings of a giant bird, the law-enforcing vessel on its unstoppable track, the air so still he could hear the engines. No need to look at both, he turned away and settled the magnification on a Martello tower squat against the moonlight. Hardness of heart was the order of the day. Let the sky come down and the moon as well. Behind him, in Slaughterhouse Lane, Judy was raving as if to get Howard back to consciousness: ‘He isn't dead. I know he isn't. He can't be.'

Another bullet to finish the job would cost little enough in will or treasure, but the gun had been jettisoned and he wouldn't search for Waistcoat's. Nothing to be done or that he wanted to, musing as he walked away that Howard might have a chance if left alone, though if he died he ought to be buried with Waistcoat, a bit of old England in the same posh box. No doubt the blind fool would get a medal, if he pulled through, for giving away the biggest drug haul in history. Promotions all round, and twenty years in a high security jail for the rest of them.

The police and customs launches had heard the shooting, and there must be someone on board who knew first aid. They would rush up the side with dogs and axes, as the boat under his feet slowed on the last pint of fuel.

‘I'm just the cook.' Ted Killisick wrapped a red and white woolly scarf around his neck, as if going down to his local for a pint and a sling or two at darts. ‘They've got nothing on me. I was hired as a cook, that's all I know.'

And so the shopping and squealing would go on, while he would be too exhausted not to answer everything. The others would tell what lies came, though not for long. Stuck pigs would have nothing on them. ‘Where's Mr Cleaver?'

Cinnakle straightened his tie. ‘He went starkers over the side, a plastic bag with his precious sextant, and a length of rubber tube in his mouth. He must have more lives than a Siberian tomcat.'

‘I don't suppose it's the first time he's made this sort of a getaway,' Richard said. ‘But let's say he was never on the boat, right?'

‘He kept the log' – Cinnakle's hands shook – ‘didn't he?'

‘Go to the bridge then, Ted, and get shot of it. I don't care how. One of us might as well go scot free.'

Killisick was glad to do something he was told. ‘Yeh, I reckon he was the only real man among the lot of us.'

Judy's face, turned to the light as she cradled Howard, showed the tragic side of the moon. She keened like a banshee: ‘He's losing all his blood.'

It had painted much of the deck. ‘I can see that,' no help to give her, nor wanted to. Howard would be a hero if he lived, and have a good woman thrown in as a bonus.

‘We need a helicopter to get him to a hospital,' she said. ‘Send a mayday. You're a wireless man. Oh, please!'

The boats were as close as made little difference. A chopper would get lift off from the nearest base the moment they saw, because hadn't Howard always said that the RAF looked after its own?

He put cigarettes, clean shirt and underwear into his bag. Having shaved an hour ago, the smoothness would take him till midday tomorrow, and experience told him where he would be by then. It was good to look your best – and feel it – when questions came as from a pump-action shotgun. A final polish of his shoes got rid of Waistcoat's blood and, setting his cap at an angle proper to the occasion, he went out to welcome the boarding party. ‘Always do everything in style,' was another axiom from the old man.

But what to say? Nothing to do with me. The skipper hired the boat, and took me on as one of the crew. How was I to know what the trip was all about? But such lies as the rest would tell wouldn't wash, though it might give time to think up a better story. Nothing would come of that, either. They tangled you up in no time. No need to say anything, for as long as you had the gall to keep quiet. In any case they would tell you what they wanted to hear. Howard would be the prosecution's witness, blind or not, and the stuff was there to find. It wasn't brown sugar they had picked up in the Azores, though he would leave them to say that, if such was their wit, which it certainly would be, smiles at all corners of their mouths.

No need to look hangdog. Englishmen never did – or so he had heard. He put all lights on, three boats lit up like Guy Fawkes night. They were as caught as caught could be, and the bumping and shouting would start any moment. He went to welcome them aboard: ‘What's all this about, then?'

Judy pushed by, making a plain enough statement: ‘We have someone wounded here on deck. Please be quick. He needs looking after. It's serious.'

THIRTY-SIX

The stream was set apart from the village, though the map placed the small agglomeration of houses
upon
it. Even so, it wasn't a long walk to the bridge where one could look down from the parapet at weeds on either side of the water divided by a low rock further down, furrowing thereafter on its self chosen route, a rural scene in a rarely visited part of the Wolds that he could look at forever. In its infant meandering from a spring up the hill the stream's hypnotic power calmed whatever spinal shivers might disturb his peace, though there was little enough beyond the minor worries of domestic life.

He'd heard it said that old habits died hard, but those discarded due to altered times only waited to be brought out again when needed. Habits were precious because they defined you, so he carried a wolf-headed walking stick to roam the lanes and fields, sometimes as slowly as during those never forgotten decades in the dark.

He put on his cap at the first touch of rain, drops from heaven making small craters in the water, concentric circles colourless yet visible. When Arnold was a year or so older they would follow the stream as a playful friend to where another brook came sidling in, two arms of silvery water widening until they joined the Witham and flowed through Boston to the Wash.

Arnold would enjoy the stroll on a summer's day, ceaselessly asking questions which Howard answered whether true or not so as to satisfy and not discourage. The miracle of his eye and heart would chase butterflies and beetles, take handbooks from his purple rucksack to identify flowers, adjust binoculars to magnify birds in flight.

No other spot to stand on than this little humpbacked bridge and watch the stream lapping its southerly way, no traffic beyond the leisurely come and go of the village, no better place for a quiet and anonymous life. Judy had fetched him from the hospital and driven around the county saying that somewhere in it there would be a place to live. ‘For the rest of our lives, right?' She laughed. ‘I sometimes feel I've kidnapped you!'

‘Turn left here.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘At the next fork. I don't know why. It was me who inveigled you, you know that.'

‘Yes, but we fell in love, didn't we?' She had driven from Lincoln along lanes between the bare Wolds seemingly remote, and slowed for him to check the map, by a pub and a low wooden meeting hall on a curve of the village street, crows arguing in a winter tree by the churchyard.

He pointed. ‘That's a house for us.'

‘Oh, you beat me to it.' She stopped the car. ‘The garden gate's open. Let's snoop around.'

The plain brick building had a slate roof, neat and square, about a century old, a wooden porch at the front door, tidy round about from whoever had recently left. An acceptable offer was put in the same afternoon, the For Sale sign adjusted to say so. ‘Isn't it a bit sudden?' he said on their way back to the hotel in Lincoln.

‘We like it, don't we?'

‘You sound annoyed. But yes, we do.'

‘It's just what we want.'

‘When I did something quickly before it usually turned out to be the wrong decision, but it won't anymore, not now I'm with you.'

Such happiness could be worrying, whether deserved or not, yet everyone was worth the blessing when it came out of the blue, or emerged from a darkness so imperceptible that the lucky person hardly noticed. He smiled at his shivering reflection. She would scorn him if he confessed such nuances of unease, but how times had changed! What God hath wrought! Even the morse had all but died on him, such rhythmic discipline no longer necessary, though he occasionally turned on the radio so that Arnold could witness the writing down of a weather forecast from the Isles of Greece, a demonstration of more magic in the world than the boy yet knew about.

The stentorian enunciations of the German Numbers Woman had finally landed the
Flying Dutchman:
the vessel was impounded, rendered crewless and derelict. Now she was superannuated, and had more than enough to do governing her adolescent and rebellious children.

Vanya from his post in Moscow had gone up the hierarchy to administer the communications network of a whole region. Or he had emigrated to America and was halfway to making his first million. Arnold, drawing imaginary maps of the world, would have enjoyed playing ‘Spot the Bomber' – but that too had come to an end.

These days embassies and the police used foolproof equipment which made it impossible to monitor their messages. The heroic hand-sent SOS's of former decades were replaced by a global positioning system, and much of the space between earth and the heaviside layer had turned into a cobwebbed graveyard of atmospherics and dusty memorial stones. Even so, Howard didn't doubt that arcane messages and revealing chatter were still there for the assiduous to alight on.

His old Marconi, plugged into the mains, buttressed a row of large print books, in the hidey-hole Judy allowed for his study. He remembered, when they called on Laura to collect his things, how Judy took his arm on getting close to the house where he'd lived for so long. ‘You mean to say you walked up and down these steps every day?'

‘I know them so well I could do them blindfold! They look so insignificant now.'

‘Is that the house?'

‘This is the first time I've seen it, but I'm sure it is.' He also felt trepidation, and took her hand. ‘It's going to be all right.'

‘She cut me dead when she saw me that time in the hospital and realised who I was. Not that it surprised me, but I was shocked at the look on her face.'

‘That was three months ago. We're a bit older now.'

‘You're always so matter of fact and optimistic.'

‘Well, one of us has to be. Anyway, the letter was quite friendly.'

A teatime meal was set out in the living room, of fruit cake, biscuits and scones, sliced ham and boiled eggs, jam and honey, a feast of plenty which promised ease, though the meeting was cold enough at the start. She looked from Howard to Judy, as if failing to see how any man could live with such a despicable lesbian.

Passing the food she told them of going to see Richard in prison, that he was writing to her. He'd asked her to call on his father who, at her first visit, had shouted from the window that he no longer had a son. ‘As you know,' she said to Howard, ‘I'm never one to be put off, so I went up again, and this time he invited me in, and asked if it would be possible to go and see him.'

Judy wondered how Richard was.

‘Well, in my opinion he shouldn't be there. He never complains, but the conditions are absolutely barbaric. That so-called trial was a travesty.' She turned to Howard: ‘And you weren't much help to him in court.'

‘I told them everything that happened.'

‘Not enough, apparently. But I'll do all I can to get him paroled at the soonest possible moment. Fifteen years is a ridiculous sentence.' Her face was flushed, and she spoke with more passion than he'd ever heard, and he wondered why. ‘I'll harry MPs and editors, judges and lawyers – everyone I can. I'll pester them till they can't stand the sight of me.'

Ebony jumped onto his knee to be stroked, as if remembering him. He smiled, that Laura had another aim in life. ‘I hope you succeed.'

‘Oh, I shan't rest till I do.'

He hadn't thought Richard's sentence undeserved, though decided that maybe it wasn't when Judy agreed: ‘Yes, you should do all you can. He tried to save Howard, and me as well.'

Laura spoke whatever came to mind, in a way she hadn't in the days when he had been blind. ‘I loved Richard,' she went on, ‘and still do. Did you know – no, I suppose you couldn't have – that I had an affair with him before you went on the trip?'

‘Oh, brilliant!' Judy exclaimed.

The trace of shame in Laura's smile was overridden by a glint of triumph in her eyes. Shock was printed on him, all the same. He hadn't known, and admitted it. His feelings at the time should have told him, but there'd been no chance to sort them out because of his search for someone else. The three of them suddenly seemed together in an inextricable knot, and it didn't seem unpleasant.

‘I only tell you,' she laughed, ‘because it can't matter any longer. The only thing I cared about, after Richard, was that you would be all right. It's amazing how life has changed, but I suppose it had to, sooner or later,' she went on, without bitterness he was glad to note, a sly aspect to her smile he could never have noticed before. ‘Oh yes, I'm as happy as anyone can be. I go out a lot these days. There's always plenty to do.'

Judy followed her into the kitchen: ‘I couldn't help it, you know.'

Laura, who had noticed the bulge in front, held her close, and placed a hand on her stomach as if wanting to feel the baby's pulse, tears hot when they fell on her cheeks during the long kiss. ‘I'm glad about this.'

‘You'll see whatever it is one day.'

She dried her face so as to collect the rest of the tea things, then talked as if wanting to tell whatever came to mind, though felt it too early to go into the story of her uncle. One day she would, because why not? Life was good when you had autonomy. Talking always made you feel better, and you could say what you liked, no need to hide anything anymore.