Close Read online

  I didn’t recognize the man. He’d be about forty. He wore a dark-blue, double-breasted, buttoned-up, three-piece suit, collar and tie, no hat, black shoes. He had what looked to me a full head of fair hair worn quite long. There was a kind of doggedness to his movements around the van and then on to the terrace. As far as I could make out, the vehicle had no lettering on the body, nothing to tell me what this visitor’s trade might be. Even with the field glasses I was too far away to be certain of the registration number. I believed I could distinguish a T and an L and a figure 6: but very maybe.

  I imagined I might have a long wait if there was a lot of stuff in the case to be displayed and talked up. His formal clothes suggested he dealt in serious, expensive goods. In fact, though, he reappeared from the porch after only four or five minutes. Some of that doggedness seemed to have gone. He pushed the case on its castors ahead of him. His head was half turned back, as if he were talking to someone or listening. I saw a tenseness about him now, his thin frame crouched over the extended handle to the case.

  A tall, heavily-made, middle-aged man in shirt sleeves and khaki, calf-length, Bridge on the River Kwai shorts took a few steps out from the porch after the newcomer and appeared to say something to him. I assumed this second man must be Jack Lamb. I’d never met him but had heard about Lamb, of course, at the time of the Darien gallery shooting. He watched while the stranger returned to the van and put the case into the back. He moved around to open the driver’s door. Before he got in he stood facing Lamb and seemed to stare at him for several seconds then shook his head a couple of times as if in disbelief or regret. Or threat? He climbed into the van, did a three-point turn and left. Lamb stared after the vehicle until it must have cleared the grounds: I couldn’t see that far because of trees bordering the drive.

  Lamb went back into the house. I decided I’d just watched someone being kicked off the property, regardless of whether he smoked. And what about the suitcase, then? It had seemed central to this little episode, but I’d no notion what was in it. At least, I’d no notion what was in it when the episode began. I’d wondered, hadn’t I, about samples: van man trying some doorstepping on a grand, historic manor house scale?

  I began to doubt this. Could that loving embrace of the case signify not a spiritual, sacred item but an all-powerful, irresistible, very tangible force? In other words, I thought cash. And, thinking of cash, my mind went back somehow to what Judith had spoken about at The Knoll. Well, no, it wasn’t just ‘somehow’. I could trace a definite sequence. She was perturbed in case her brother had been drawn into shady, cheapo art dealing at Darien following the gallery shoot-out. Was I wrong to dismiss her worries? Had I just watched a big-timer – or a courier for a big-timer – bring luggaged money to trade with in a discount market? Had Jack Lamb ejected him because it wasn’t enough; amounted to an insult even in cut-price circumstances?

  Or there could be some other reason: possibly Lamb saw he had been chosen to provide a loot laundering service via art, so fashionable among new-age hoodlums, and refused this invitation as too risky. I wished I’d asked Judith for a description of her brother. Did he favour sombre, waist-coated suits? Did he keep his fair hair long? Did he do stare sessions aimed at scaring whoever got one of them?

  I returned through the wood to my car and drove down the hill a little way and turned left, so I would pass the entrance to the Darien grounds. The Google remarks about the house had also mentioned that in the style of the period when the mansion was built a stone tablet had been fixed to one of the main gates bearing a Latin inscription. It had survived through the centuries. The words came from Horace and said: Omnes Eodem Cogimur, (We are all herded to the same place).

  And there it still was. I wondered why the succession of occupants must have bothered to look after for centuries such a thumping slice of triteness. Answer: ‘Yea, but it’s Latin triteness.’ Just the same, not many people were herded into a splendid manor house like Darien as their home. And at least one who turned up there with his venerated, loaded suitcase was apparently told to fuck off back to wherever pronto. I drove on. Timewise, of course, I was driving on towards that very rough bit of rough house at Cairn Close and my subsequent, notable funeral.

  TWENTY

  Harpur said – and he’s entitled to some wordage now, perhaps – ‘The Hart funeral, sir?’ He and Iles were talking in Harpur’s room at headquarters, the ACC looking out of a window on to the busy afternoon city scene, probably feeling solely responsible for everyone’s safety, and glad to feel responsible for it. He’d be thinking the populace didn’t know how lucky they were to have him. Iles would have been very unwilling to tell them for fear of seeming a braggart; but he’d seethe that they didn’t spot it spontaneously. ‘The coroner has released the body,’ Harpur said.

  ‘I shall go to the service, of course, Col,’ Iles replied.

  This Harpur had expected, though he’d idiotically hoped to hear the opposite. Iles had form at funerals. If he attended one, Harpur had to go, also, in case the assistant chief needed restraining at some crux point. Because Iles decided for himself, in his own super-cryptic style, what were crux points, Harpur had to be non-stop vigilant.

  No police training course covered how to reduce an ACC to harmlessness in a place of worship or crematorium chapel, and Harpur had been forced to work out a method for himself. He had made notes of successful tactics during previous disturbances and he kept the file headed ‘Observations On Religion Sited Obsequies’ in his triple-locked safe at headquarters. Harpur’s wife, Megan, used to have a volume called The Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying on the shelves at home, but she had died in deeply unholy conditions and her library was taken away except for two titles Jill wanted kept, a book on boxing, The Sweet Science, and The Joe Orton Diaries. It was customary for a senior officer to attend the funeral of innocent victims of crime, to show sympathy and demonstrate that police had this death in mind.

  Meaning well, and missing it by a fucking country mile, the ACC would sometimes try to take over the service. A coffin really gingered him up, regardless of quality, valid timber or cardboard. Several times he’d explained to Harpur that he totally and absolutely loathed discrimination, except where it was useful. He liked to give certain funerals a personal slant, his, rather than the corpse’s. Harpur believed that to Iles this seemed a duty: the funeral would be a lesser funeral without his pro-active management; scarcely a funeral at all, in fact. He would see only shortcomings and skimping in the way the thing was being run before his kindly, reassuring intervention. Aura was what he found some funerals short of, and he would try to remedy this deficit by supplying plentiful aura of his own. He probably believed he had so much he could easily afford to dole some around. He’d always be superbly dressed and coiffured for the ceremony. He had told Harpur he felt he owed a first-class, faultless appearance to the congregation, no matter what a crowd of oiks and shitbags they might preponderantly be. When perfectly turned out he felt he lent – unstintingly lent – yes, lent a distinction to the event, and therefore to the ex.

  He craved prominence, for himself and for his special spiel of the day. Once he had successfully beaten off opposition and entrenched himself in a pulpit it could be very difficult removing the assistant chief, particularly if the pulpit were up steps. In Anglican churches and cathedrals many were. Iles would trick or scare or manhandle the proper occupant out, and so gain a position reasonably simple to defend, just as the hilltop abbey at Monte Cassino had been in the Second World War, apparently. Iles could punch or kick down at a vicar or priest or undertaker or Harpur attempting to retake the fastness, and/or unhook a microphone, if there was one fitted there, and use this as a knobkerrie.

  Obviously, it would be highly untoward for Harpur to come to a funeral wearing a helmet and/or body armour and Iles knew this, deftly exploited it. Although some of these unconventional interludes certainly brought a vigour and passion to what might otherwise have been a dreary religious rigmarole, on the whol
e Harpur felt the scrapping lacked dignity and was very untidy. Weddings often produced violence among the guests, yes, but Harpur thought it definitely inappropriate for funerals. Admittedly, the mayhem proved the presence of life in the mourners, as against the nicely behaved stillness of death in the box. But Harpur would argue that there were more suitable ways of highlighting this important difference.

  The shoes Iles used in his attempt to kick unconscious anyone on the steps impertinently trying to get at him were undoubtedly the magnificent, custom-made Charles Laity black lace-ups costing hundreds, but, even so, Harpur considered this could not make the ACC’s behaviour any more dainty. To somebody getting an Iles toe-cap in the face, given added force by its downward trajectory and possibly breaking a nose or cheekbone, this would rate simply as a shoe, its special qualities and position in the footwear league table, irrelevant; not that the Laity firm advertised the shoes as designed for this kind of unfriendly exchange, anyway, whether lace-up or slip-on.

  Naturally, the assistant chief’s careful smartness would be undone if Harpur had to grab a handful of his hair to drag him from a pulpit, usually down the steps, though occasionally over the side of it, his exquisitely shod feet threshing in the air now and perhaps knocking a big, hardback Bible from its perch, with obvious risk to the binding. Harpur would try to get Iles into a neutral aisle and struggle to hold him there, though humanely guarding against stoppage of air to his lungs. This pause would allow the priest, or whatever, to regain control and proceed to the eulogies. Blood on the fine material of the ACC’s dress uniform would come out OK at the cleaners but it didn’t look good during the actual rites. However, Harpur did judge it very creditable that although Iles might yell and froth a lot when delivering his commentary in this kind of melee, he hardly ever swore much. Never at a funeral, as far as Harpur could recall, had Iles howled the worst curse words. He’d declared that to do so would be unforgivably disrespectful, not just to the dead person, of whichever gender or none, but to decorum and religion in general ‘throughout what we must now refer to, Col, as “the global village”, meaning everywhere.’ Iles was a firm fan of decorum, though he did take breaks.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Omnes Eodem Cogimur. (We are all herded to the same place.)

  About three miles along the road from Darien’s gates I spotted the blue van a few hundred yards ahead of me, stopped in a layby. A black Audi saloon was parked very tightly in at its tail. There appeared to be nobody in the car. From behind I couldn’t see whether the front seat, seats, of the van were occupied.

  I cut my speed, though not too noticeably, I hoped. I wasn’t sure how to cope. Should I drive past, observing as much as I could, including the reg numbers of both vehicles? Or should I choose to get herded by luck and opportunity into the same place as the two vehicles and perhaps meet some of their personnel and try to work out what their game was? I might credibly be a driver in need of a few minutes to make a mobile phone call; or for a pee-pause behind one of the bushes alongside the layby.

  I decided it would be timorous and pathetically negative to keep going. And unprofessional: that private dick course had preached the towering importance of what were called ‘sudden breakthrough moments’ – the need to recognize them quickly, and get what could be got from them. There might be a double bounty here: two vehicles, one of which I knew to be part of that baffling encounter at Darien, and the other apparently involved in a layby rendezvous, most likely pre-arranged. I pulled in and switched off, I didn’t copy the Audi and get in close but left a decent gap, so as not to seem aggressive or half-witted or both. I stayed in my car for a while. Nothing changed.

  I climbed out and took cover among the foliage for a genuine piss with genuine male, from-a-height splash sounds: authentic detail in this kind of ploy was crucial. When I returned to the Focus I found a dumpy, fair-skinned woman in her twenties, mousy hair top-knotted, denim jacket, khaki chinos trousers, blue and white plimsolls, standing near the driver’s door and looking away down the road, perhaps to save me from embarrassment. Tact. I checked my zip. ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘anything wrong here or hereabouts?’

  She turned towards me and gave a really thorough, expertly prepared smile, taking a good half of her face, possibly more like two thirds, and lasting four or five seconds. ‘I don’t think we’ve met before,’ she replied, her voice warm and wistful, as if touched by regret that we’d negligently let so much time pass with no contact. ‘Certainly, we haven’t previously run across each other in this type of situation,’ she added.

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Is that your impression, too?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Not having already met.’

  ‘That’s the thing about laybys,’ I replied.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No knowing who’ll be in one. Or whether anyone at all will be there. Laybys have no settled agenda. It’s not like booking a couple of orchestra stalls for The Flying Dutchman.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about them.’

  ‘I haven’t made a systematic Phd study. It’s just what I’ve noticed. Some have an information board saying they are laybys, but with others the drivers have to work it out for themselves, using instinct and experience. I reckon that’s reasonable enough. If there’s a convenient but limited area just off the road what else could it be but a layby.’

  ‘I wonder whether we’re on your usual route,’ she replied.

  ‘I have a choice. I can take this road or a couple of others. The destination would be the same. “We are all herded to the same place,” as someone said.’

  ‘Horace. And if you ask me “Horace Who?” I’ll throw up.’

  ‘A lot of these people come out with sayings,’ I replied. ‘If they didn’t produce such chewy snippets we’d most probably never have heard of them.’

  ‘Which people?’

  ‘Horace’s sort. He’s most likely a good way back in history.’

  ‘BC.’

  ‘There you are then. Yet his ideas are still with us. That’s how he is remembered, despite the centuries.’

  ‘Odes.’

  ‘Exactly. We all have thoughts, but with someone like Horace a thought arrives and he gives a little whoop, or whatever they did BC when deliciously surprised, and decides immediately that this has Ode qualities. Probably friends look in on him and ask, “Any new Odes for us, Hor?” and he wouldn’t want to let them down.’

  ‘Where are you making for?’ she said. ‘Just out of curiosity.’

  ‘This general forward direction. I’m a believer in that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Going to where the front of the car seems to be pointing. How about you?’

  ‘What I’m getting at,’ she replied, ‘is, if you’re near wherever it is you’re going, it would seem odd to have to delay here.’

  ‘I’ll push on shortly,’ I replied. ‘You too? Are you with the van or the Audi?’

  ‘That interests you, does it?’ she replied.

  ‘I see two vehicles so I have to assume two drivers, plus possible passengers,’ I said. ‘There’s nobody in the Audi. I’m going to deduce, therefore, that you drove that one but have left it momentarily, and so are available to come and discuss matters with me. This would obviously mean the Audi is temporarily empty. The van? There must be at least one person in the cab – the driver – but he hasn’t appeared.’

  ‘It does interest you, does it?’

  ‘I take it these two vehicles are a unit in some way,’ I replied. ‘The calculated nearness.’

  ‘How do you mean “in some way”?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, in some way. This I would maintain is a reasonable deduction. The calculated nearness. The extreme proximity. Anyone who viewed the positioning of those two vehicles would suppose a connection.’

  ‘Is that why you decided to pop into the layby?’

  ‘Why would two vehicles with very considerable togetherness cause me to, as you put it, “pop into the layby”?’ I s
aid with a gentle, ribbing type of chuckle.

  ‘Yes, why would they?’ she asked.

  ‘We agreed early on that we’d probably never met before,’ I replied. ‘I’d certainly remember any previous conversation of this rather disjointed, anti-linear nature. I expect you’d agree. Are you concerned with art at all? I don’t mean, necessarily, are you a painter or sculptor, but having to do with art in some quite meaningful fashion. This is a notion that jumped into my head from who knows where when I first saw you near the Focus just now? Random. Unexpected.’

  ‘Which of the two vehicles interests you more?’ she replied. ‘As I imagine it, you’re driving along, the front of your Focus, as you said, pointing in the direction you’re going, and suddenly notice the car and the van in the layby and you exclaim to yourself silently or even, perhaps, aloud, “Hello, there’s an Audi in the layby, not a vehicle I recognize.” I put that one first because it would be the nearest to you as your Focus approached. But it might easily have been, instead, “Hello, there’s a blue van in the layby, not a vehicle I recognize.” And another possibility, of course, is, “Hello, there’s an Audi and a van in the layby, not vehicles I recognize.” Which of these might it have been? Can you recall?’

  ‘Your questions seem to suggest that I probably know very well not simply laybys in general but this layby particularly, and would therefore be alert to any unusual visitors there,’ I replied.