Authors: John Baker
And it hadn’t happened; Alice tried to bully her own mind into submission.
It hasn’t happened,
she told herself. There are alternative explanations. Alex will be back in a few minutes and Conn will be with him.
But she watched those few minutes click past on the digital display on the front of the VCR and not one of them brought a grain of hope. Everything was thrown into immediate relief. The beating of her heart slowed like a clock which was winding down. The blood pumping through her veins was as if poisoned by cholesterol, it clogged rather than flowed, threatening to form curds of thrombi which would burst the vessels in her heart and head.
Alice looked at the room in which she lived through a darkening tunnel as her eyes glazed over and her mind fought the unacceptable reality which had swooped down from a relatively cloudless sky.
She thought she was dying. She believed that her vital systems were closing down, even in some way that she was complicit in this act of suicide. That the prospect of living the rest of her life without her youngest child was too much to bear. It was as if the organization of her being was split asunder, her soul and spirit flying off in fear and dread and her abandoned physical body falling into an inspiration of torpor and decay.
The alarm bell rang for a long time before she heard it. At first it was intermittent like the bell at the start and end of a round of boxing. It triggered hazy, colourless images of bruised and glistening flesh as two heavyweights in silk shorts swung at each other’s heads. The bell transformed itself into a continuous cacophony and the image in her head repeated the same few frames over and over again. A lightning fist from the shoulder connecting with and splitting an area of flesh above an eye, blood and pus spraying out in an arc like a crimson rainbow.
For an instant the bell was a single, modulated scream, tearing the vocal cords of Conn as fear and incomprehension ripped through the tenderness of his form. Alice felt her own body tilt towards spasm as she imagined the abandoned shrieking of her son.
‘Mum,’ Hannah said, handing her the telephone. ‘Are you deaf? It’s been ringing for ages.’
Alice took the phone and put it to her ear. Her hand was shaking. She didn’t want news. If it was the worst news she didn’t know how she would cope with it. Rather, she knew that she wouldn’t cope at all. She didn’t want Hannah to see her mother implode, to see her disintegrate while listening to a voice on the telephone. ‘Hello,’ she said. Her own voice seemed as though it came from elsewhere in the room. It was as if her various body parts and organs were distributed in the spaces around her. There was little cohesion to the Alice she’d thought herself to be. Her skin no longer seemed to contain her. ‘Mrs Richardson?’
‘Yes.’
‘My name’s Bonner. I’m an associate of Sam Turner.’
‘Sam,’ Alice said. ‘Is he there? Can I speak to him?’
‘No, he’s not here at the moment,’ the voice said. Croaky, hesitant. ‘It’s about your son.’
‘Yes?’ Alice’s voice was a whisper, her eyes wide open. ‘Sam wants you to go to his house. You know where that is?’ The man said something else but his voice faded as an obstruction in the airways gobbled up his words. ‘What?’ Alice said. ‘What did you say?’
‘Do you know where Sam lives?’
‘Yes, I heard that. I know where he lives, but you said something else.’
‘There’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Is Conn all right?’
‘I’m sure he is, but Sam will explain. You’re to go there right away.’
There was a click as the party at the other end switched off his mobile. ‘Wait,’ Alice said. ‘Is Conn there? Is he with Sam? What is this all about?’
The dialling tone in her ear. She looked at the phone and put it back in its cradle. She got her coat and slipped her boots on and walked towards the stairs. She turned back for an instant to talk to her daughter. ‘I’m going out.’
‘Where?’ Hannah said. ‘What’ll I tell Dad?’
‘I’ll be at Sam’s house.’
‘Sam’s house?’
‘Sam Turner. Conn’s all right. He’s with Sam.’
39
The only positive thing you could say about the house was that it was clean and tidy. The magician didn’t think much of the area. Densely populated by socio-economic class IV and V whites, net curtains everywhere, young, very young women with babies. Everyone in the street wearing trainers. There were a group of youths standing outside a video shop when Danny arrived and it had been as if someone had tapped each of them on the shoulder simultaneously. A silence fell and they turned as one to watch his approach. Danny kept going, didn’t flinch. He could see the idea of a mugging forming in one or two of their brains but his charisma kept him safe.
Sam Turner’s terraced house was at the quiet end of the street. It had a fresh coat of paint and the magician let himself in through the front door. He shook his head at the simplicity of it. His opponent was a private detective who had, apparently, never heard of a three-lever lock.
Apart from a small kitchen area the ground floor contained a table and three chairs, off in one corner was a desk with the other chair from the dining set, and a couple of easy chairs in front of a small wood-burning stove. One wall was shelved with books and videos and CDs, and a small CD player was standing at the back of the desk. The telephone was hanging on the wall next to a black and white portrait of a laughing young woman. Probably the man’s latest partner.
There were some papers on the desk but the magician collected all of these together and placed them in a drawer. He put his bag on the chair by the desk. He took out a length of green nylon rope and his shining bayonet. He removed a new face-cloth and a roll of masking tape and placed all of these articles on the desk.
He hyperventilated for a while, squatting on the floor and taking short shallow breaths, then, leaving the bayonet where it was, he took the rope, the face-cloth and the masking tape upstairs and placed them neatly on Sam Turner’s bedside table next to a paperback novel by Henning Mankell. The bed was unmade and on the floor were a discarded T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. The magician curled his upper lip in distaste.
Shortly after he rang the woman called Alice Richardson there was a knock on the door. Danny stood behind the curtain and looked out of the window. There was a big man standing on the pavement. Flamboyant. Black leather trousers and shoes and in the gap between the two a pair of sky-blue socks. When the man turned to look up and down the street Danny could see that he was wearing a black silk shirt. He had a shark’s tooth set in a gold cap on a chain around his neck. Over the shirt he wore a brown suede jacket with a belt.
The magician froze. He watched the man while he knocked again. The shark’s tooth was a talisman of some kind. Danny didn’t know what its exact significance was. The man might not know himself, he looked like a yob, but you never could tell. No one knew better than Danny Mann that things were not always what they seemed.
The man came over to the window and Danny stepped back behind the curtain. He watched the man shade his eyes and push his face close up to the glass, squinting to see through to the interior of the house. He could be a friend of Sam Turner’s, Danny thought, or someone he worked with. But there was something about the man’s body language, his sense of purpose, which gave Danny the impression that he was as much of a stranger to Sam Turner’s house as Danny was himself.
A debt collector, maybe? That seemed closer to the mark, some heavy sent over by a loan-shark to collect on Sam Turner’s debts. The magician smiled in spite of himself; the correspondence between a loan-shark and the shark’s tooth that was dangling around the man’s neck seemed momentarily ludicrous. But the world was filled with weird correspondences. Acts of magic were performed on a daily basis by people who had no knowledge whatsoever. A shark’s tooth, whatever talis-manic properties it possessed, would work as well for a loan-shark as for an initiated wizard. A schoolboy who purposefully wore odd socks to bring himself good luck and to protect himself from evil was putting himself into contact with the spiritual world in exactly the same way that a shaman or a priest does. Professionals did it with a degree of consciousness and wisdom, but the world of magic was open to all-comers. Anyone who sought esoteric or occult secrets would not be ignored by the beings who inhabited those worlds.
Under other circumstances, Danny thought, he would answer the door to this man, talk to him about the significance of his shark’s tooth, get engaged with another practitioner. Because it didn’t matter that the man dressed the way he did, that he was obviously from a different class of people. He was another magician, perhaps not a professional like Danny, but he’d heard the music, no doubt about that.
Danny Mann remained frozen until the man moved away from the window. There was another knock on the door, but it had no heart in it and a few moments later Danny heard the man’s footsteps receding along the street. The magician breathed a sigh of relief.
His heart was racing and he pulled one of the chairs away from the table and sat on it. He increased the tempo of his breathing, letting the ‘hoo-haa’ sounds come from his throat as he hyperventilated, keeping the image of what he had to do clearly before him in his mind’s eye. He squatted on the floor and continued the rapid breathing until a thin film of sweat spread over his forehead.
There was another knock on the door and Danny saw from the window that it was the woman. He took a few moments to compose himself and went to the door and pulled it open. She was pale. She had on her green wellingtons and a black duffel-coat, a long lamb’s wool scarf wrapped around her neck. She was smaller than Danny remembered. She looked vulnerable standing there on the street.
She took a step back. ‘Have I got the right house?’ she said.
Danny gave her his professional smile. ‘Are you Alice? Come in. Sam’s upstairs.’
She stepped over the threshold and removed her boots. She picked them up in one hand and placed them against the wall. ‘Will they be all right there?’
‘No one’s going to run off with them,’ Danny said. He chuckled. ‘Do you want to go up?’
The woman hesitated as some intimation of danger crossed her mind. She was already trapped and in a fleeting moment became conscious of the fact.
The magician spoke quietly and clearly. ‘He’s with Conn. I think the boy will be all right.’
Magic words.
Danny watched them work on her. All thought of danger instantly vanished. ‘Conn?’ she said. ‘He’s with Sam?’ She brought one hand to her mouth. She walked to the stairs and began the ascent. ‘Sam?’ she called. ‘It’s Alice. I’m on my way up.’
The magician took his bayonet from the desk and followed her up the stairs.
For a moment the backs of her knees whisked him away into childhood. He was a boy again following his mother up the stairs. He could smell the scent of her clothes in their ancient wardrobe, the warm dampness that constantly pervaded the upper rooms of their house.
Danny’s mother would nap during the weekends and school holidays. Danny thought she napped every day, when he was at school, but he didn’t always tell her what he thought.
I’m going to take an hour,
she’d say, and she’d go to the stairs. He would follow behind and go to his own room or sometimes stay with her in her big bedroom. He would watch her undress and he would sit on the edge of her bed while she slept. He remembered sitting there with Robert-Houdin’s book,
King of the Conjurors,
the words on the page invading his mind with a French accent while his mother muttered and whimpered in her sleep. In his fancy the sleeping woman was a link back to the dead French magician. When he touched her bare arm on the counterpane it was as if he was sitting next to a nineteenth-century legend.
When she reached the top of the stairs Alice glanced back at him, wondering which of the three rooms she should enter. Her eyes took in the shape and form of the bayonet and in a moment her countenance was endowed with the knowledge of good and evil. She hesitated long enough for Danny to throw her through the door of the bedroom. She tripped as she went over the threshold and twisted her body around to break her fall. The magician was on top of her immediately. He dropped the bayonet and pulled on both ends of the scarf watching her eyes bulge as she struggled for a breath of oxygen to soothe the fire in her lungs.
Danny choked the woman until he felt her body sag. Her eyes flickered and her lips faded to blue. Her head fell over to the right. He unwound the scarf from her neck and lifted her on to the bed. He unfastened the toggles on her duffel-coat and with the heel of his hand applied measured pressure towards the bottom of her ribcage. Her breathing was shallow but regular.
The magician passed the rope over her body and under the bed several times. He tied it tightly. He had intended to gag her but didn’t bother. She was semi-conscious and he couldn’t imagine her shouting for help after the punishment he had given her vocal cords.
Her eyes focused on him and he smiled. ‘Let me introduce myself,’ he said. ‘Diamond Danny Mann.’ He bowed, stooping low so that his fingertips brushed the carpet. ‘Welcome to the
last act
of an illusion, my dear.’ He reached for the bayonet and ran his finger along its sharpened edge. She wasn’t quite the last act. There was still Turner and the blind woman. ‘There is nothing you or anyone else can do to alter the shape of this day. The spell has been cast. We are all of us ciphers in the closing stages of a tale of woe.’