Faces in the Pool (21 page)

For the first time in my life I felt in control, at the nearness of a world’s worth of antiques. The yacht must be bulging. An unbattened hatch showed light slits from its edges. They must be confident. Chimes made me shiver, gorge rising and my left temple throbbing.

That’s when I heard the first human sound. It was me. I’d tried to nudge some wood thing aside. For a frightened second I almost ran for it, but halted. Criminals in
mid-heist
would leave a sentinel aboard. Armed? Sure. And he’d be my favourite speechmaker. I heard his voice exclaim, ‘Listen to the noisy sods.’

And a female voice, husky with love, said, ‘Never mind them, darling. Come back here.’ And I thought another thought, except this one was even more stupid. I actually recognised her voice, until I corrected myself. It couldn’t be, never in a million years. One thing about my stupidity, it never gives up.

The man was furious. ‘Christ knows what they’re doing. If it’s my Ashanti carvings I’ll machette the bastards!’

‘You’ve your own work to finish, darling.’

The voice was sweet, charming, graceful. I’d heard it so many times, though not exactly in these circumstances. The man was tough. I’d seen that among the traffic in Head Street, and when he’d glared down at Erosa. The blighter had haunted, hunted me. And now…

‘That’s it, darling,’ the female voice purred, ‘right there.’ I’m so thick. I moved quietly forward, then reminded myself that the loaders wouldn’t tiptoe. I clumped along the deck, giving a guttural grunt, trying to sound like seven or eight vannies heaving antiques.

Passion in the cabin started again as I reached the curtained portholes. Curtains. Even then, trembling from the divvy malaise, I was still foolishly half-smiling at the sounds of lust. I couldn’t see her face, but her body I’d known well. At least so I’d assumed, the way you assume you know love. Her modulated voice urged the man on, in a growling quality I’d only heard once. Back then, I’d felt rather proud, a beast raising my own Miss Ice Maiden from her usual primness to passion.

This bloke seemed be doing all right, beyond the concealing porthole curtain. Of course, that was the sort of demure move she would make, make sure the sacking was over my cottage window in case somebody came a-peering. I hadn’t been lucky often, no, just a few times. Each was beautiful, in the relish of the moment. She was superb. Was. Past tense, if she was the one I imagined.

Then I caught myself. It couldn’t be. Some human events are beyond possibility. No question. Making sounds like that? Calling for him to do this, that, hurt her and gagging in the height of rut? Never. Then something she grunted
was
her. It was her ultimate phrase, only gasped
in
extremis
. Couldn’t be anyone else. The evidence of senses is horrible stuff. I retched on the deck outside their porthole, spewing what grub hadn’t got down far enough. A right mess.

Moments when your world ends come pretty often to me. I’ve always found that. The ground goes from under your feet, and you might as well float off in space. And not from happiness. Not horror either. A woman I knew once told me, ‘When I found my feller sleeping with my best friend, I almost smiled.’ I’d asked her why. And she smiled at me along the pillow and murmured, ‘Because it was suddenly all so simple.’ And she told me, ‘I ran her over in my car.’ The best friend, treacherous to the last, hadn’t been helpful enough to die. Doctors worked frantically, and saved her. The principle is the same, though. Think of the very worst that could happen, and the vilest punishment whispers, ‘Why not top her? She deserves it.’ Logic never fails.

Without knowing quite why, I looked over the side. The sea seemed hell of a way down. I glanced round the deck. No smaller craft nearby. On shore, to my amazement, the dark scene now seemed mad, like some old jerky film. I guessed the plod had arrived, from the swirling blue lamps and headlights trained onto the beach where blokes struggled. Who had called them? I could hear brawling sounds, reminding me of distant midges by the Stour. Ambulances were nosing through the gathering crowds up on the promenade. Where do people lurk until mayhem brings watchers out?

Down in the cabin passion stormed on. I felt giddy listening. Time had gone or not gone. It could have been
an hour or a few seconds. I wiped my sicky mouth on my sleeve. How long since I’d come aboard?

They say the woman becomes worse than the man, when sexual craziness gives utter release. What was the old saying? ‘A woman in a parlour an angel, in a kitchen a fiend, and in bed a monster.’ As here. I felt so tired. I honestly wasn’t bitter. Maybe I’d known deep down she was never mine in the first place. Dunno. I just felt weary, like when you recognise the mufty con, the scally, or the drop-drop con, and know you’ve been had. Tricked into complicity by her seeming innocence, even her love. Love, was it?

My head was pulsing from the antiques in the hold, the inaudible vibes shaking me as if I were the clapper in some psychic bell. I gathered myself. I didn’t have long. Soon I’d need to make a run for it, or be caught here with the two lovebirds. Their cries and grunts were reaching delirium. Detumescence soon, and they’d be free to have a cigarette – though she hated smokers, wouldn’t even touch tobacciana at Gimbert’s auction.

They would come up to see the last of the loading. A killer guarding his valuable sea-going yacht, his wondrous woman, and his priceless haul of antiques, would have to be armed.

And Lovejoy would be done for. Unless I scarpered? I could leave in my trusty little craft bobbing by the gangway. But…?

I almost started down as the couple below reached finality. And I thought, No. I wasn’t standing by my gun, nothing brave. And I’m not one for vengeance. Vengeance is a failure of reason. We should think of charity, find a
way where all would come right.

I’m not the most moral bloke on earth. I’ll never make Archbishop of Canterbury. But all these certifiably genuine antiques? And the people who’d killed Tansy – Christ, I thought, aghast, who
had
killed Tansy? Surely it couldn’t have been…?

No, a thousand times no. I even started humming that daft old music hall song as I went to get the thing I’d fallen over. It was a roundish bat. Long as a cricket bat, but heavier at the far end. Baseball, like bouncers carry in nightclubs? I stumbled over two more, picked up a second, and went down into the cabin. I listened at the door. The lovers were swearing undying love and lust. I decided to trap them in their love-nest by shoving a baseball bat through the handle. I honestly intended nothing vicious, and I mean that most sincerely. ’Course, it was natural to feel sad, to put it no more strongly. And didn’t the ‘holy’ (he wasn’t) Pope Innocent the Third famously say that it was no sin to kill somebody over a game of chess? He did. Look it up. He wasn’t joking. This wasn’t chess.

Then I noticed the extra door. A storm door? It would just fit. As they settled from their climax, I slotted it in place. OK, it would trap them inside, as it was for keeping the sea out in a hurricane. They were sealed.

Betrayers inside, innocent people outside. I could leave. They couldn’t.

For a second I stayed there, as their passion descended through the superstrata to sea level, so to speak. I’d never felt such sick hate. Love does it.

See how often I use the word love? ‘Love’ is today’s code word for every noble and beautiful sentiment. Yet it now
only means want. Read the glossies in any shopping mall. Simply replace the word love for want, and you have it. I knew that now. ‘I don’t love him/her any longer’ means ‘I don’t
want
him/her any longer.’ Or even more bluntly, ‘I’ve had a better offer,’ and off they go. And remember, they’ve sworn undying fidelity, and written the altar promise down. Meaning, of course, until they become bored/ disinterested etc, or find somebody younger/richer. Sorry, but I didn’t invent cynicism. It’s just how people behave. Half of marriages end in divorce in five years. You can get those odds spinning a coin, heads or tails. Gamblers call it luck.

On deck, I examined the controls. Still no chasing craft full of enemies. The riot ashore was diminishing. I was still safe. The switches were elementary, if I could believe the labels.
Anchor Aft
meant, I hoped, the chain in the water at the rear.
Forward Anchor
meant same at the front.
Lift
could only mean to hawk it up from the seabed. Now I’d fastened Hugo Hahn and his –
his
, note – eager lady in, they could share their undying love in their watertight cabin. Whatever I did with this grand sailing machine was now up to me. I wasn’t really upset. I don’t get that concerned most of the time.

The on switch was a simple button. An
electric-sounding
roar told me I’d done it. I’d been thinking of those old piston-engined steamships that they show on late-night TV. This engine meant serious business. I levered the anchor, hoping it would work. Clatters, a sudden release in the ship’s gentle rocking and she pulled free, slewing seaward. I suppose I ought to have put some headlights on, but you can’t think of everything. Anyhow,
she had lights on her mast. I was surprised when I looked up. I’d expected to see square-rigged canvas sails like in Errol Flynn pirate pictures, instead of a stumpy little stick with wires. Maybe I lived too much in films. Once I’ve seen some oldie, I can run it through my mind over and over. Fiction, though. Like love.

Not hurrying, I headed out to sea, the speed lever only halfway along its groove. I was in no hurry. Was there some law about how fast you could go?

That woman downstairs, though. I mean, how do you tell the difference between a lie and truth? You go by feel. At least I do. You listen to how a woman says things, and guess. The lie-detector test is unreliable. Or you can do that MRI scan of the brain. (A liar’s MRI lights up fourteen brain areas. The truthsayer’s brain ignites a paltry seven.) The real way is to wait and see. I’d waited, and I saw. The hard way.

The cold breeze stung my eyes. Not sorrow, because I don’t feel that emotion much. Women are women, and there’s plenty written about them and truth, right? One way to look at it is to see it as an aberration, and then forgive. Sociologists claim sixty per cent of wives forgive erring husbands, but only thirty per cent of blokes pardon wives. And employers nowadays are urged to forgive workers who abscond from work and ‘pull a sickie’ on National Sickie Day – it’s 6
^th
February. Liverpool’s our major sickie capital. Glasgow holds the world record in scamming Social Services Benefit money. Statistics are nonsense. Nothing alters. We all know it’s just counting numbers. Life is fable against feelings.

In Lancashire they used to say,
Old flame, new foe
. Was
the old saw reliable? I faced the sea, steering my stolen ship. Now she was moving, it seemed to have grown. Doing its thing, I suppose, glad it was no longer tethered in the swark.

The shore had somehow swung. I was headed slightly towards the washing-lines of promenade lights. I turned the wheel, making for the tip of North Pier. Easy as driving a car. I looked round for something to hold the wheel in place. I let go of it and picked up two of the bale hooks. They looked strong enough to do the job, but I was sorely narked. If those vannies had used these great hooks to haul any of the antiques aboard and damaged any, I’d…

The shore had gone quiet. Somebody was starting an outboard motor, the kind that powered the two small craft. They’d sussed that this big vessel was the focus of the goings-on. As long as it was only the uniformed plod and not the coastguard, I was OK for a while. This ship could really move. It was slicing through the dark waters with engines in mid-yawn. The speedo was marked up to over forty knots, whatever they were, and the digital display showed I was doing a mere six. I was still trying to lodge the wheel by a bale hook when somebody said, ‘Can I help?’

Like a fool, I said, ‘No, ta. I can manage…’ and stopped.

Behind me stood Hugo Hahn. God, but he looked tall.

‘Think I was trapped in the cabin, friend?’

He laughed, all tan and teeth, sinewy the way blokes should be and never are because we’re idle and eat the wrong grub.

‘No,’ I said, eager to placate my way out. ‘I was worried water would come in and—’

‘You barricaded the wrong cabin, hey?’

Typical of me to do right wrong. I’m pathetic. He reached, took a hook off me with such a swift motion I didn’t even notice. I’m so stupid I almost offered him my second hook. He shook his head in disbelief.

His laughter was all Hollywood, a belly roar that cowboys in Indiana use to show their contempt for greenhorns.

‘So this is the great Lovejoy in action, hey?’ I wished he’d stop saying ‘hey’. It really annoyed me. He glanced behind and beckoned, his gun held so casually. He didn’t need to point it to threaten. He knew weapons. I didn’t.

She came up the cabin steps looking demure as ever, except now she wore the look of the loved woman, her eyes puffy but exactly as I remembered her. They had betrayed all antiques, murdered my friend Tansy, sad Paltry, and poor old Smethie, who’d tried so hard to warn me, and Hahn could do almost anything, now he had all the antiques in the hold. Buy a Greek island, any political appointment, simply on the nod from a bent prime minister. International auctioneers in Bond Street, Park Lane, Manhattan, Switzerland or Austria would climb over themselves to serve him. In my daftness, I’d been the instrument of his success.

He was smiling. ‘The penny finally dropped, Lovejoy, hey?’

‘Some, not all.’

‘Watch him, Hugo.’ She stood close to her man.

‘This lettuce?’ He did his Hollywood laugh. I was reminded of Burt Lancaster in his circus performer days. ‘With one bound he leaps free?’

‘Be careful, darling. He can be dangerous.’

‘You seriously think I need to be, woman? With this dolt?’

‘So what was it?’ I asked her, coming right out with it. ‘Remember when I said there’s only three kinds of love? Which sort was mine?’