The Gun Seller - Страница 3

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I could see that she thought this unfair, as Rayner was hardly in a position to contradict me; so I softened my tone a little, looking around anxiously as if I was every bit as mystified and fretted-up as she was.

‘I can’t say he came here to kill,’ I said, ‘because we didn’t get a chance to talk much. But it’s not impossible.’ She carried on staring at me. The operator was squeaking hellos down the line and probably trying to trace the call.

She waited. For what, I’m not sure.

‘Ambulance,’ she said at last, still looking at me, and then turned away slightly and gave the address. She nodded, and then slowly, very slowly, put the receiver back on its cradle and turned to me. There was one of those pauses that you know is going to be long as soon as it starts, so I shook out another cigarette and offered her the packet.

She came towards me and stopped. She was shorter than she’d looked on the other side of the room. I smiled again, and she took a cigarette from the packet, but didn’t light it. She just played with it slowly, and then pointed a pair of grey eyes at me.

I say a pair. I mean her pair. She didn’t get a pair of someone else’s out from a drawer and point them at me. She pointed her own pair of huge, pale, grey, pale, huge eyes at me. The sort of eyes that can make a grown man talk gibberish to himself. Get a grip, for Christ’s sake.

‘You’re a liar,’ she said.

Not angry. Not scared. Just matter-of-fact. You’re a liar. ‘Well, yes,’ I said, ‘generally speaking, I am. But at this particular moment, I happen to be telling the truth.’

She kept on staring at my face, the way I sometimes do when I’ve finished shaving, but she didn’t seem to get any more answers than I ever have. Then she blinked once, and the blink seemed to change things somehow. Something had been released, or switched off, or at least turned down a bit. I started to relax.

‘Why would anyone want to kill my father?’ Her voice was softer now.

‘I honestly don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve only just found out he doesn’t smoke.’

She pressed straight on, as if she hadn’t heard me.

‘And tell me Mr Fincham,’ she said, ‘how you came by all this?’

This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit. Trickiness cubed.

‘Because I was offered the job,’ I said.

She stopped breathing. I mean, she actually stopped breathing. And didn’t look as if she had any plans to start again in the near future.

I carried on, as calmly as I could.

‘Someone offered me a lot of money to kill your father,’ I said, and she frowned in disbelief. ‘I turned it down.’

I shouldn’t have added that. I really shouldn’t.

Newton’s Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. To say that I’d turned the offer down raised the possibility that I might not have done. Which was not a thing I wanted floating round the room at this moment. But she started breathing again, so maybe she hadn’t noticed.

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

Her left eye had a tiny streak of green that went off from the pupil in a north-easterly direction. I stood there, looking into her eyes and trying not to, because I was in terrible trouble at this moment. In lots of ways.

‘Why’d you turn it down?’

‘Because…’ I began, then stopped, because I had to get this absolutely right.

‘Yes?’

‘Because I don’t kill people.’

There was a pause while she took this in and swilled it round her mouth a few times. Then she glanced over at Rayner’s body.

‘I told you,’ I said. ‘He started it.’

She stared into me for another three hundred years and then, still turning the cigarette slowly between her fingers, moved away towards the sofa, apparently deep in thought.

‘Honestly,’ I said, trying to get a hold of myself and the situation. ‘I’m nice. I give to Oxfam, I recycle newspapers, everything.’

She reached Rayner’s body and stopped. ‘So when did all this happen?’

‘Well… just now,’ I stammered, like an idiot.

She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘I mean you getting asked.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Ten days ago.’

‘Where?’

‘Amsterdam.’

‘Holland, right?’

That was a relief. That made me feel a lot better. It’s nice to be looked up to by the young every now and then. You don’t want it all the time, just every now and then.

‘Right,’ I said.

‘And who was it offered you the job?’

‘Never seen him before or since.’

She stooped for the glass, took a sip of Calvados and grimaced at the taste of it.

‘And I’m supposed to believe this?’

‘Well…’

‘I mean, help me out here,’ she said, starting to get louder again. She nodded towards Rayner. ‘We have a guy here, who isn’t going to back up your story, I wouldn’t say, and I’m supposed to believe you because of what? Because you have a nice face?’

I couldn’t help myself. I should have helped myself, I know, but I just couldn’t.

‘Why not?’ I said, and tried to look charming. ‘I’d believeanything you said.’

Terrible mistake. Really terrible. One of the crassest, most ridiculous remarks I’ve ever made, in a long, ridiculous-remark-packed life.

She turned to me, suddenly very angry. ‘You can drop that shit right now.’

‘All I meant…’ I said, but I was glad when she cut me off, because I honestly didn’t know what I’d meant.

‘I said drop it. There’s a guy dying in here.’

I nodded, guiltily, and we both bowed our heads at Rayner, as if paying our respects. And then she seemed to snap the hymn book shut and move on. Her shoulders relaxed, and she held out the glass to me.

‘I’m Sarah,’ she said. ‘See if you can get me a Coke.’

She did ring the police eventually, and they turned up just as the ambulance crew were scooping Rayner, apparently still breathing, on to a collapsible stretcher. They hummed and barred, and picked things up off the mantelpiece and looked at the underneath, and generally had that air of wanting to be somewhere else.

Policemen, as a rule, don’t like to hear of new cases. Not because they’re lazy, but because they want, like everyone else, to find a meaning, a connectedness, in the great mess of random unhappiness in which they work. If, in the middle of trying to catch some teenager who’s been nicking hub-caps, they’re called to the scene of a mass murder, they just can’t stop themselves from checking under the sofa to see if there are any hub-caps there. They want to find something that connects to what they’ve already seen, that will make sense out of the chaos. So they can say to themselves, this happened because that happened. When they don’t find it - when all they see is another lot of stuff that has to be written about, and filed, and lost, and found in someone’s bottom drawer, and lost again, and eventually chalked up against no one’s name - they get, well, disappointed.

They were particularly disappointed by our story. Sarah and I had rehearsed what we thought was a reasonable scenario, and we played three performances of it to officers of ascending rank, finishing up with an appallingly young inspector who said his name was Brock.

Brock sat on the sofa, occasionally glancing at his fingernails, and nodded his youthful way through the story of the intrepid James Fincham, friend of the family, staying in the spare-room on the first floor. Heard noises, crept downstairs to investigate, nasty man in leather jacket and black polo-neck, no never seen him before, fight, fall over, oh my god, hit head. Sarah Woolf, d.o.b.29th August, 1964, heard sounds of struggle, came down, saw the whole thing. Drink, Inspector? Tea? Ribena?

Yes, of course, the setting helped. If we’d tried the same story in a council flat in Deptford, we’d have been on the floor of the van in seconds, asking fit young men with short hair if they wouldn’t mind getting off our heads for a moment while we got comfortable. But in leafy, stuccoedBelgravia, the police are more inclined to believe you than not. I think it’s included in the rates.

As we signed our statements, they asked us not to do anything silly like leave the country without informing the local station, and generally encouraged us to abide at every opportunity.

Two hours after he’d tried to break my arm, all that was left of Rayner, first name unknown, was a smell.

I let myself out of the house, and felt the pain creep back to centre stage as I walked. I lit a cigarette and smoked my way down to the corner, where I turned left into a cobbled mews that had once housed horses. It’d have to be an extremely rich horse who could afford to live here now, obviously, but the stabling character of the mews had hung about the place, and that’s why it had felt right to tether the bike there. With a bucket of oats and some straw under the back wheel.

The bike was where I’d left it, which sounds like a dull remark, but isn’t these days. Among bikers, leaving yourmachine in a dark place for more than an hour, even with padlock and alarm, and finding it still there when you come back, is something of a talking point. Particularly when the bike is a Kawasaki ZZR 1100.

Now I won’t deny that the Japanese were well off-side atPearl Harbor, and that their ideas on preparing fish for the table are undoubtedly poor - but by golly, they do know some things about making motorcycles. Twist the throttle wide open in any gear on this machine, and it’d push your eyeballs through the back of your head. All right, so maybe that’s not a sensation most people are looking for in their choice of personal transport, but since I’d won the bike in a game of backgammon, getting home with an outrageously flukey only-throw 4-1 and three consecutive double sixes, I enjoyed it a lot. It was black, and big, and it allowed even the average rider to visit other galaxies.