Twice Shy Page 17

  “Can you spare a tomato or two?” I said. “Those Italian ones?”

  “For your lunch?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cassie doesn’t feed you.”

  “It’s not her job.”

  He shook his head over the waywardness of our domestic arrangements, but if he had had a wife I wondered which one of them would have cooked. I paid for the beer and the tomatoes, promised to bring Cassie to admire the whiskers, and drove home.

  Life for me was good, as I’d told Cassie. Life at that moment was a long way from Bananas’ world of horrors.

  I parked in front of the cottage and walked up the path juggling radio, beer and tomatoes in one hand and fishing for keys with the other.

  One doesn’t expect people to leap out of nowhere waving baseball bats. I had merely a swift glimpse of him, turning my head toward the noise of his approach, seeing the solid figure, the savagery, the raised arm. I hadn’t even the time to think incredulously that he was going to hit me before he did it.

  The crashing blow on my moving head sent me dazed and headlong, shedding radio, beer cans, tomatoes on the way. I fell half on the path and half on a bed of pansies and lay in a pulsating semi-consciousness in which I could smell the earth but couldn’t think.

  Rough fingers twined themselves into my hair and pulled my head up from its face-down position. As if from a great distance away from my closed eyes a harsh deep voice spoke nonsensical words.

  “You’re not . . .” he said. “Fuck it.”

  He dropped my head suddenly and the small second knock finished the job. I wasn’t aware of it. In my conscious mind things simply stopped happening.

  The next thing that impinged was that someone was trying to lift me up, and that I was trying to stop him.

  “All right, lie there,” said a voice. “If that’s how you feel.”

  How I felt was like a shapeless form spinning in a lot of outer space. He tried again to pick me up and things inside the skull suddenly shook back into order.

  “Bananas,” I said weakly, recognizing him.

  “Who else? What happened?”

  I tried to stand up and staggered a bit, trampling a few more long-suffering pansies.

  “Here,” Bananas said, catching me by the arm. “Come into the house.” He semisupported me and found the door was locked.

  “Keys,” I mumbled.

  “Where are they?”

  I waved a vague arm, and he let go of me to look for them. I leaned against the doorpost and throbbed. Bananas found the keys and came toward me and said in anxiety, “You’re covered in blood.”

  I looked down at my red-stained shirt. Fingered the cloth. “That blood’s got seeds in,” I said.

  Bananas peered at my chest. “Your lunch.” He sounded relieved. “Come on.”

  We went into the cottage where I collapsed into a chair and began to sympathize with migraine sufferers. Bananas searched in random cupboards and asked plaintively for the brandy.

  “Can’t you wait until you get home?” I said without criticism.

  “It’s for you.”

  “None left.”

  He didn’t press it. He may have remembered that it had been he, a week ago, who’d emptied the bottle.

  “Can you make tea?” I said.

  He said resignedly, “I suppose so,” and did.

  While I drank the resulting ambrosia he told me that he’d seen a car driving away from the direction of the cottage at about eighty miles an hour down the country road. It was the car, he said, of the man who’d asked for me earlier. He had been at first puzzled and then disquieted, and had finally decided to amble down to see if everything was all right.

  “And there you were,” he said, “looking like a poleaxed giraffe.”

  “He hit me,” I said.

  “You don’t say.”

  “With a baseball bat.”

  “So you saw him.”

  “Yeah. Just for a second.”

  “Who was he?”

  “No idea.” I drank some tea. “Mugger.”

  “How much did he take?”

  I put down the tea and patted the hip pocket in which I carried a small notecase. The wallet was still there. I pulled it out and looked inside. Nothing much in there, but also nothing missing.

  “Pointless,” I said. “What did he want?”

  “He asked for you,” Bananas said.

  “So he did.” I shook my head, which wasn’t a good idea as it sent little daggers in all cranial directions. “What exactly did he say?”

  Bananas gave it some thought. “As far as I can remember,” he said, “it was ‘Where does Derry live?’ ”

  “Would you know him again?” I asked.

  He pensively shook his head. “I shouldn’t think so. I mean, I’ve a general impression—not young, not old, roughish accent—but I was busy, I didn’t pay all that much attention.”

  Oddly enough, though I’d seen him for only a fraction of the time Bananas had, I had a much clearer recollection of my attacker. A freeze view, like a snapshot, standing framed in my mind. A thick-set man with yellowish skin, grayish about the head, intent eyes darkly shadowed. The blur on the edge of the snapshot was the downward slash of his arm. Whether the memory was reliable, or whether I’d know him again, I couldn’t tell.

  Bananas said, “Are you all right to leave?”

  “Sure.”

  “Betty will finish those grapes and stare into space,” he said. “The old cow’s working to rule. That’s what she says. Working to rule, I ask you. She doesn’t belong to a union. She’s invented her own bloody rules. At the moment rule number one is that she doesn’t do anything I don’t directly tell her to.”

  “Why not?”

  “More pay. She wants to buy a pony to ride on the Heath. She can’t ride, and she’s damn near sixty.”

  “Go on back,” I said smiling. “I’m OK.”

  He semi-apologetically made for the door. “There’s always the doctor, if you’re worse.”

  “I guess so.”

  He opened the door and peered out into the garden. “There are beer cans in your pansies.”

  He went out saying he would pick them up, and I shoved myself off the chair and followed him. When I got to the door he was standing on the path holding three beer cans and a tomato and staring intently at the purple-and-yellow flowers.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Your radio.”

  “I’ve just had it fixed.”

  He looked up at me. “Too bad.”

  Something in his tone made me totter down the path for a look. Sure enough, my radio lay in the pansies: what was left of it. Casing, dials, circuits, speaker, all had been comprehensively smashed.

  “That’s nasty,” Bananas said.

  “Spite,” I agreed. “And a baseball bat.”

  “But why?”

  “I think,” I said slowly, “that maybe he thought I was someone else. After he’d hit me, he seemed surprised. I remember him swearing.”

  “Violent temper,” said Bananas, looking at the radio.

  “Mm.”

  “Tell the police,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  I took the beer from him and sketched a wave as he walked briskly up the road. Then I stared for a while at the shattered radio thinking slightly disturbing thoughts: like what would my head have looked like if he hadn’t stopped after one swipe.

  With a mental shiver I went back indoors and applied my concussion to writing up my weekly report sheet for Luke Houston.

  13

  I never did get around to consulting the doctor or calling the police. I couldn’t see anything productive coming from spending the time.

  Cassie took the whole affair philosophically but said that my skull must be cracked if I didn’t want to make love.

  “Double ration tomorrow,” I said.

  “You’ll be lucky.”

  I functioned on two cylinders throughout the next day and in the even
ing Jonathan rang, as he sometimes did, keeping a long-distance finger on little brother’s pulse. He had never grown out of the in loco parentis habit, nor, to be honest, did I want him to. Jonathan, six thousand miles away, was still my anchor, my most trusted friend.

  A pity about Sarah, of course. I would have seen more of Jonathan all my life if I could have got on better with Sarah. She irritated me like an allergy rash with her bossiness and her sarcasm, and I’d never been able to please her. I’d thought at one time that their marriage was on the way to the cemetery and I hadn’t grieved much, but somehow or other they’d retreated from the brink. She certainly seemed softer with Jonathan nowadays, but when I was around the old acid rose still in her voice, and I never stayed long in their house. Never staying long in one place was in fact, according to her, one of my least excusable faults. I ought to buckle down, she said, and get a proper job.

  She was looking splendid these days, slender as a girl and tawny with the sun. Many, I supposed, seeing the fair hair, the good bones, the still-tight jawline, the grace of movement, would have envied Jonathan his young-at-forty-five wife. And all, as far as I knew, without the plastic surgeon’s knife.

  “How’s Sarah?” I said automatically. I’d been asking after her religiously most of my life, and not caring a jot. The truce she and I maintained for Jonathan’s sake was fragile; a matter of social form, of empty politeness, of unfelt smiles, of asking after health.

  “She’s fine,” he said. “Just fine.” His voice after all these years had taken on a faint inflection and many of the idioms of his adopted country. “She sends you her best.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And you?” he said.

  “Well enough considering some nut hit me on the head.”

  “What nut?”

  “Some guy who came here and lay in wait, and took a bash at me.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. No worse than a racing fall.”

  “Who was he?” he asked.

  “No idea. He asked for directions from the pub, but he’d got the wrong man. Maybe he asked for Terry . . . it sounds much the same. Anyway, he blasted off when he found he’d made a slight error, so that’s that.”

  “And no harm done?” he asked insistently.

  “Not to me, but you should see my radio.”

  “What?”

  “When he found I was the wrong guy, he took it out on my radio. I wasn’t awake, mind you, at that point. But when I came around, there it was, mashed.”

  There was a silence on the other end, and I said, “Jonathan? Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Did you see the man? What did he look like?”

  I told him: fortyish, grayish, yellowish. “Like a bull,” I said.

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Something about me not being who he expected, and fuck it.”

  “How did you hear him if you were knocked out?”

  I explained. “But all that’s left is a sore spot for the hairbrush,” I said, “so don’t give it another thought.”

  We talked about this and that for the rest of our customary six minutes, and at the end he said, “Will you be in tomorrow night?”

  “Yes, I should think so.”

  “I might call you back,” he said.

  “OK.” I didn’t bother to ask him why. He had a habit of not answering straightforward questions with straightforward answers if it didn’t suit him, and his noncommittal announcement told me that this was one of those times.

  We said amicable goodbyes, and Cassie and I went to bed and renewed our normal occupation.

  “Do you think we’ll ever be tired of it?” she asked.

  “Ask me when we’re eighty.”

  “Eighty is impossible,” she said, and indeed it seemed so to us both.

  Cassie went to Cambridge every day in her little yellow car to spend eight hours behind a building society desk discussing mortgages. Cassie’s mind was full of terms like “with-profits endowment” and “early redemption charges,” and I thought it remarkable, sometimes, that she’d never suggested a twenty-five-year millstone around my own neck.

  I’d once before tried living with someone—nearly a year with a cuddly blonde who wanted marriage and nestlings. I’d felt stifled and gone off to South America and behaved abominably, according to her parents. But Cassie wasn’t like that: if she wanted the same things she didn’t say so, and maybe she realized, as I did, that I always came back to England, that the homing instinct was fairly strong. One day, I thought, one distant day . . . and maybe with Cassie . . . I might, just perhaps, and with all options open, buy a house.

  One could always sell it again, after all.

  Jonathan did telephone again the following evening and came straight to the point.

  “Do you,” he said, “remember that summer when Peter Keithly got killed in his boat?”

  “Of course I do. One doesn’t actually forget one’s own brother being tangled up in a murder.”

  “It’s fourteen years ago,” he said doubtfully.

  “Things that happen when you’re fifteen stay sharp in your mind forever.”

  “I guess you’re right. Anyway . . . you know who I mean by Angelo Gilbert.”

  “The bumper-off,” I said.

  “As you say. I think the man who hit you on the head may be Angelo Gilbert.”

  A great one, my brother, for punching the air out. On a distinctly short breath I said, “You sound very calm about it.” But then of course he would. He was always calm. In the scariest crisis it would be Jonathan who spoke and acted as if nothing unusual was happening. He’d carried me out of a fire once as a small child and I’d thought that somehow nothing was the matter, nothing was really wrong with the flames and the roaring and crashing all around us, because he’d looked down at me and smiled.

  “I checked up,” he said. “Angelo Gilbert got out of prison seventeen days ago, on parole.”

  “Out—”

  “It would take him a while to orientate himself and to find you. I mean . . . if it was him, he would have thought you were me.”

  I sorted my way through that and said, “What makes you think it was him?”

  “Your radio, really. He seemed to enjoy destroying things like that. Televisions. Stereos. And he’d be forty now . . . and his father reminded me of a bull. What you said took me right back.”

  “Good grief.”

  “Yes.”

  “You really think it was him?”

  “I’m afraid it’s possible.”

  “Well,” I said, “now that he knows he got the wrong guy, maybe he won’t bother me again.”

  “Monsters don’t go away because you don’t look at them.”

  “What?”

  “He may come back.”

  “Thanks very much.”

  “William, take it seriously. Angelo was dangerous in his twenties and it sounds as if he still is. He never did get the computer programs he killed for, and he didn’t get them because of me. So take care.”

  “It might not have been him.”

  “Act as if it was.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “So long, Professor.” The wryness in my voice must have been plain to him.

  “Keep off horses,” he said.

  I put the receiver down ruefully. Horses, to him, meant extreme risk.

  “What’s the matter?” Cassie said. “What did he say?”

  “It’s all a very long story.”

  “Tell it.”

  I told it on and off over the next few hours, remembering things in pieces and not always in the order they’d happened, much as Jonathan had told it to me all those years ago. Before going off to Canada to shoot, he had collected me straight from school at the end of that summer term and we’d gone to Cornwall, just the two of us, for a few day’s sailing. We’d had great holidays there two or three times before, but that year it blew a gale and poured with rain continuously, and to amuse me while we sat and stared t
hrough the dripping yacht club windows, waiting for the improvement which never came, he’d told me about Mrs. O’Rorke and Ted Pitts and the Gilberts, and how he’d stuck magnets in the cassettes. I’d been so fascinated that I hadn’t minded missing the sailing.

  I wasn’t sure that I’d been shown every alley of the labyrinth; my quiet schoolmasterly brother had been reticent in patches, and I’d always guessed that it was because probably in some way he’d used his guns. He never would let me touch them, and the only thing I ever knew him to be scared of was having his precious firearms certificate taken away.

  “So there you are,” I said finally. “Jonathan got Angelo tossed into the clink. And now he’s out.”

  Cassie had listened with alternating alarm and amusement, but it was doubt that remained in the end.

  “So what now?” she said.

  “So now, if Angelo’s on the rampage, hostilities may be resumed.”

  “Oh no.”

  “And there are certain disadvantages that Derry number two may have to contend with.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “One, I can’t shoot. Two, I know practically nothing about computers. And three, if Angelo’s come charging out of jail intending to track down his lost crock of gold, I’ve no idea where it is or even if it still exists.”

  She frowned. “Do you think that’s what he wants?”

  “Wouldn’t you?” I said gloomily. “You spend fourteen years in a cell brooding over what you lost and dreaming of vengeance and, yes, you’re going to come out looking for both—and a small detail like having attacked the wrong man isn’t going to put you off.”

  “Come to bed,” Cassie said.

  “I wonder if he thinks the way he used to.” I looked at her increasingly loved face. “I don’t want him busting in here to hold you hostage.”

  “With no Jonathan to cut the telephone wires and send for the posse? Come to bed.”

  “I wonder how he did it?”

  “What?”

  “Cut the wires. It isn’t that easy.”

  “Climbed the pole with a pair of scissors,” she said.