Shattered Page 6

  Victor Waltman Verity appeared quietly from along the narrow hallway and regarded me with curiosity mixed, I thought, with the possibility of alarm. He himself was as tall as his mother, as tall as Martin. He had dark hair, pale gray eyes and an air of knowing himself to be as intelligent as any adult. His voice, when he spoke, was at the cracked stage between boy and man, and his face had begun to grow from the soft lines of childhood into adult planes.

  “What’ve you been up to, young Vic?” his mother asked, and to me she said, “It’s bloody cold out here. Want to come in?”

  “Er,” I said. I was suffering more from the unexpected than the cold, but she waited for no answer and walked back past the boy until she was out of sight. I pulled the envelope sent to Martin out of a pocket and immediately set the alarm racing above the curiosity in young Victor.

  “You weren’t supposed to find me,” he exclaimed, “and in any case, you’re dead.”

  “I’m not Martin Stukely,” I said.

  “Oh.” His face went blank. “No, of course, you aren’t.” Puzzlement set in. “I mean, what do you want?”

  “First of all,” I said plainly, “I’d like to accept your mother’s invitation.”

  “Huh?”

  “To be warm.”

  “Oh! I get you. The kitchen is warmest.”

  “Lead on, then.”

  He shrugged and stretched to close the door behind me, and then led the way down beside the staircase to the heart of all such terrace houses, the space where life was lived. There was a central table covered with a patterned plastic cloth, four attendant unmatched upright chairs and a sideboard deep in clutter. A television set stood aslant on a draining board otherwise stacked with unwashed dishes, and checked vinyl tiles covered the floor.

  In spite of the disorganization there was bright new paint and nothing disturbingly sordid. I had an overall impression of yellow.

  Mrs. Verity sat in one of the chairs, rocking on its back legs and gulping smoke as if she lived on it.

  She said pleasantly enough, “We get all sorts of people here, what with Vic and his wretched Internet. We’ll get a full-sized genie one of these days, I shouldn’t wonder.” She gestured vaguely to one of the chairs, and I sat on it.

  “I was a friend of Martin Stukely,” I explained, and I asked Vic what was on the videotape that he had sent or given to Martin at Cheltenham.

  “Yes, well, there wasn’t a tape,” he said briefly. “I didn’t go to Cheltenham.”

  I pulled his letter to Martin out of the envelope and gave it to him to read.

  He shrugged again and handed it back when he’d reached the end.

  “It was just a game. I made up the tape.” He was nervous, all the same.

  “What knowledge was it that was dynamite?”

  “Look, none.” He grew impatient. “I told you. I made it up.”

  “Why did you send it to Martin Stukely?”

  I was careful not to let the questions sound too aggressive, but in some way that I didn’t understand, they raised all his defenses and colored his cheeks red.

  His mother said to me, “What’s all this about a tape? Do you mean a videotape? Vic hasn’t got any videotapes. We’re going to get a new video machine any day now, then it will be different.”

  I explained apologetically. “Someone did give Martin a videotape at Cheltenham races. Martin gave it to Ed Payne, his valet, to keep safe, and Ed gave it to me, but it was stolen before I could see what was on it. Then all the videotapes in Martin Stukely’s house and all the videotapes in my own house were stolen too.”

  “I hope you’re not suggesting that Vicstole anything, because I can promise you he wouldn’t.” Mrs Verity had grasped one suggestion wrongly and hadn’t listened clearly to the rest, so she too advanced to the edge of anger, and I did my best to retreat and placate, but her natural good humor had been dented, and her welcome had evaporated. She stubbed out a cigarette instead of lighting another from it, and stood up as a decisive signal that it was time I left.

  I said amiably to young Victor, “Call me,” and although he shook his head I wrote my mobile number on the margin of a Sunday newspaper.

  Then I stepped out of No. 19 Lorna Terrace and walked unhurriedly along the street pondering two odd unanswered questions.

  First, how did Victor happen to come to Martin’s attention ?

  Second, why had neither mother nor son asked my name?

  Lorna Terrace curved sharply to the left, taking No. 19 out of sight behind me.

  I paused there, wondering whether or not to go back. I was conscious of not having done very well. I’d set off expecting to unearth the mysteries of the videotape, if not with ease, then actually without extreme trouble. Instead I seemed to have screwed up even what I’d thought I understood.

  Irresolutely I wasted time and missed the train I’d thought of catching. I might be OK at glass, but not excellent at Sherlock Holmes. Dim Doctor Watson, that was me. It grew dark and it took me a long time to reach Broadway. Luckily, I found a willing neighbor on the train to give me a lift from the station.

  Without Martin, I reflected with depression, I was either going to spend a fortune on cabs or thumb a thousand lifts. There were still eighty-one days before I could apply to get my license-to-speed out of the freezer.

  I thanked my generous companion with a wave as he drove away, and fishing out a small bunch of keys, I plodded towards the gallery door. Sunday evening. No one about. Brilliant lights shining from Logan Glass.

  I hadn’t learned yet to beware of shadows. Figures in black materialized from the deep entrance to the antique bookshop next door and from the dark line of the trash bins put out ready for collection on Monday morning.

  I suppose there were four of them leaping about in the dark; an impression, not an accurate count. Four was profligate, anyway. Three, two, maybe only one could have done the job. I guessed they’d been waiting there for a long time and it hadn’t improved their temper.

  I hadn’t expected another physical attack. The memory of the orange cylinder of cyclopropane had faded. The cylinder, I soon found, had delivered a less painful message than the one on my doorstep. This one consisted of multiple bashes and bangs and of being slammed two or three times against the lumpy bit of Cotswold stone wall that joined the bookshop to my own place.

  Disorientated by the attack itself, I heard demands as if from a distance that I should disclose information that I knew I didn’t have. I tried to tell them. They didn’t listen.

  All that was annoying enough, but it was their additional aim that lit my own inner protection furnace and put power into half-forgotten techniques of kickboxing left over from my teens.

  It seemed that a straightforward pulping was only half their purpose, as a sharp excited voice specifically instructed over and over again, “Break his wrists. Go on. Break his wrists....” And later, out of the dark, the same voice exulting, “That got him.”

  No, it bloody didn’t. Pain screeched up my arm. My thoughts were blasphemy. Strong, whole and flexible wrists were as essential to a glassblower as to a gymnast on the Olympic high rings.

  Two of the black-clad agile figures waved baseball bats. One with heavily developed shoulders was recognizably Norman Osprey. Looking back later from a huddled sort of collapse on the sidewalk, I saw that only one of those two had the bright idea of holding my fingers tightly together in a bunch against the wall before getting his colleague to aim just below them with the bat.

  I had too much to lose and I hadn’t been aware of how desperately one could fight when it was the real thing. My wrists didn’t get broken but my watch stopped in pieces from a direct hit. There were lumps and bruised areas all over everywhere. A few cuts. Torn skin. Enough. But my fingers worked, and that was all that mattered.

  Maybe the fracas would have ended with me taking a fresh hole in the ground beside Martin, but Broadway wasn’t a ghost town in a western desert; it was somewhere that people walked their dogs on a
Sunday evening, and it was a dog-walker who yelled at my attackers, and with three toothy Dobermans barking and pulling at their leashes, got the shadowy figures to change their minds smartly and vanish as fast as they’d come.

  “Gerard Logan!” The tall dog-walker, astounded, bending to look at me, knew me by sight, as I did him.

  “Are you all right?”

  No, I wasn’t. I said, “Yes,” as one does.

  He stretched down to help me to my feet, when all I really wanted to do was lie on a soft mattress.

  “Shall I call the police?” he asked, though he wasn’t a police lover; far from it.

  “Tom... Thanks. But no police.”

  “What was it all about?” He sounded relieved. “Are you in trouble? That looked to me like payback business.”

  “Muggers.”

  Tom Pigeon, who knew a thing or two about the rocky sides of life, gave me a half-smile, half-disillusioned look, and shortened the leashes of his hungry life preservers. More bark than bite, he’d assured me once. I wasn’t certain I believed it.

  He himself looked as if he had no need to bark. Although not heavily built and without a wrestler’s neck, he had unmistakable physical power, and, at about my own age, a close-cut dark pointed beard that added years of menace.

  Tom Pigeon told me there was blood in my hair and said if I would give him my keys he would open the door for me.

  “I dropped them,” I said and leaned gingerly against the lumpy bit of wall. The dizzy world revolved. I couldn’t remember ever before feeling so pulverized or so sick, not even when I’d fallen to the bottom of the scrum in a viciously unfriendly school rugby match and had my shoulder blade broken.

  Tom Pigeon persevered until he kicked against my keys and found them by their clinking. He unlocked and opened the gallery door and with his arm around my waist got me as far as the threshold. His dogs stayed watchfully by his legs.

  “I better not bring the canines in among your glass, had I?” he said. “You’ll be all right now, OK?”

  I nodded. He more or less propped me against the door frame and made sure I could stand up before he let go.

  Tom Pigeon was known locally as “The Backlash,” chiefly on account of being as quick with his wits as his fists. He’d survived unharmed eighteen months inside for aggravated breaking and entering and had emerged as a toughened hotshot, to be spoken of in awe. Whatever his dusty reputation, he had definitely rescued me, and I felt in an extraordinary way honored by the extent of his aid.

  He waited until I could visibly control things and stared shrewdly into my eyes. It wasn’t exactly friendship that I saw in his, but it was ... in a way... recognition.

  “Get a pit bull,” he said.

  I stepped into my bright lights and locked the door against the violence outside. Pity I couldn’t as easily blot out the woes of battery. Pity I felt so stupid. So furious. So wobbly, so dangerously mystified.

  In the back reaches of the workshop there was running water for rinsing one’s face, and a relaxing chair for recovery of all kinds of balance. I sat and ached a lot, and then phoned the taxi firm, who apologized that this Saturday and Sunday had already overstretched their fleet, but they would put me on their priority list from now on ... yeah... yeah... never mind.. I could have done with a double cyclopropane, shaken, with ice. I thought of Worthington, tried for him on the phone, got Bon-Bon instead.

  “Gerard darling. I’m so lonely.” She sounded indeed in sorrowing mode, as her elder son would have put it.

  “Can’t you come over to cheer me up? Worthington will come to fetch you, and I’ll drive you home myself. I promise.”

  I said with regret that I didn’t want to give her “flu” (which I hadn’t got) and simply went on doing very little through a highly unsatisfactory evening. Worthington’s flytrap vision itched. I loved Bon-Bon as a friend, but not as a wife.

  At about ten-thirty I fell asleep in the soft chair and half an hour later was awakened again by the doorbell.

  Disorientated as I woke, I felt stiff, miserable and totally unwilling to move.

  The doorbell rang insistently. I went on feeling shivery and unwilling, but in the end I wavered upright and creaked out of the workshop to see who wanted what at such an hour. Even then, after the dire lessons I’d been given, I hadn’t enough sense to carry with me a weapon of defense.

  As it happened, my late-evening visitor looked pretty harmless. In addition, she was welcome. More than that, I thought that with a kiss or two and a hug she might prove therapeutic.

  Detective Constable Catherine Dodd took her finger off the doorbell when she saw me, and smiled with relief when I let her in.

  “We had reports from two separate Broadway residents,” she said first. “They apparently saw you being attacked outside here. But we had no complaint from yourself, even though you were hardly walking, it seemed ... so anyway, I said I would check on you on my way home.”

  She again wore motorcycle leathers, and had parked her bike at the curb. With deft speed, as before, she lifted off her helmet and shook her head to loosen her fair hair.

  “One of the reports,” she added, “said that your attacker had been Tom Pigeon, with his dogs. That man’s a damned pest.”

  “No, no. It was he who got rid of the pests. Really depressing pests.”

  “Could you identify them?”

  I made a noncommittal gesture and meandered vaguely through the showroom to the workshop, pointing to the chair for her to sit down.

  She looked at the chair and at the sweat I could feel on my forehead, and sat on the bench normally the domain of Irish, Hickory and Pamela Jane. Gratefully I sank into the soft armchair and half answered her who? and why? queries, not knowing whether they had a police basis or were ordinary curiosity.

  She said, “Gerard, I’ve seen other people in your state.”

  “Poor them.”

  “Don’t laugh, it’s hardly funny.”

  “Not tragic, either.”

  “Why haven’t you asked my colleagues for more help?”

  Well, I thought, why not?

  “Because,” I said lightly, “I don’t know who or why, and every time I think I’ve learned something, I find I haven’t. Your colleagues don’t like uncertainty.”

  She thought that over with more weight than it deserved.

  “Tell me, then,” she said.

  “Someone wants something I haven’t got. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know who wants it. How am I doing?”

  “That makes nonsense.”

  I winced and turned it into a smile. “It makes nonsense, quite right.” And in addition, I thought to myself with acid humor, I have the Dragon and Bon-Bon on my watch-it list, and policewoman Dodd on my wanted-but-can-I-catch-her list, and Tom Pigeon and Worthington on my save-my-skin list, Rose Payne/Robins on my black mask-possible list and young Victor Waltman on my can‘t-or-won’t-tell list.

  As for Lloyd Baxter and his epilepsy, Eddie Payne keeping and delivering videotapes, Norman Osprey running a book with the massive shoulders of 1894, and dear scatty Marigold, often afloat before breakfast and regularly before lunch, all of them could have tapes on their mind and know every twist in the ball of string.

  Constable Dodd frowned, faint lines crossing her smooth clear skin, and as it seemed to be question time I said abruptly, “Are you married?”

  After a few seconds, looking down at her ringless hands, she replied, “Why do you ask?”

  “You have the air of it.”

  “He’s dead.”

  She sat for a while without moving, and then asked, “And you?” in calm return.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  Silence could sometimes shout. She listened to what I would probably ask quite soon, and seemed relaxed and content.

  The workshop was warmed as always by the furnace, even though the roaring fire was held in control for nights and Sundays by a large screen of heat-resistant material.

  Looking at Catherine Dodd
’s face above the dark close-fitting leather I most clearly now saw her in terms of glass: saw her in fact so vividly that the urge and desire to work at once couldn’t be stifled. I stood and unclipped the fireproof screen and put it to one side, and fixed instead the smaller flap, which opened to allow access to the tankful of molten glass.

  I pressed extra time into the light switch, overriding the midnight cutoff, and with boringly painful movements took off my jacket and shirt, leaving only normal working gear of bare arms and singlet.

  “What are you doing?” She sounded alarmed but had no need to be..

  “A portrait,” I said. “Sit still.” I turned up the heat in the furnace and sorted out the punty blowing irons I would need, and fetched a workable amount of glass manganese powder which would give me black in color eventually.

  “But your bruises... ,” she protested. “Those marks. They’re terrible.”

  “I can’t feel them.”

  I felt nothing indeed except the rare sort of excitement that came with revelation. I’d burned myself often enough on liquid glass and not felt it. That Sunday night the concept of one detective darkly achieving insight into the sins of others, and then the possibility that good could rise above sin and fly, these drifting thoughts set up in me in effect a mental anesthesia, so that I could bleed and suffer on one level and feel it only later after the flame of imagination had done its stuff. Sometimes in the disengagement from this sort of thing, the vision had shrunk to disappointment and ash, and when that happened I would leave the no-good piece on the marver table and not handle it carefully into an annealing oven. After a while, its unresolved internal strains would cause it to self-destruct, to come to pieces dramatically with a cracking noise; to splinter, to fragment... to shatter.

  It could be for onlookers an unnerving experience, to see an apparently solid object disintegrate for no visible reason. For me the splitting apart symbolized merely the fading and insufficiency of the original thought. On that particular Sunday I had no doubts or hesitation, and I gathered glass in muscle-straining amounts that even on ordinary days would have taxed my ability.