The Keys to the Street (42 page)

His heart had stopped. For a moment he was transfixed with terror, for he had forgotten what had just made him laugh, that a beating heart cannot normally be felt. He pranced again, punching the air, and into his ears, squeezing up through his body, came the tick-tick-tick of his heart. Laughing again, he thumped himself on the chest, on the place where, under the skin and ribs, the ticking clock pumped.

With the red velvet bag in his jacket pocket, he left the flat and came out onto the concrete walkway. A cannibalized van stood tireless on what was left of the grass and broken glass littered the empty aisles of the car park, thick as flints on a beach. Around here they used spray paint for the graffiti and the kind they used was red, like blood. For all that, the morning was beautiful, the sky translucent like a blue pearl, the air as yet cool and almost fresh, as if some breath of it had wafted this way from the park in the night. Hob noticed only the emptiness, the absence of anyone. This was only so in the very early hours and his watch told him it was not quite half past six.

He went down the concrete stairs and tried to think about getting to Agar Grove, but for some reason his inner eye could only see the railway line running across the Euston wasteland, the visual part of his mind throwing up bridges and flyovers and cranes with necks like Meccano dinosaurs. He’d have to come down, he needed something to bring him down. Yellow Jackets or V’s—what had he got?
He palmed two Nembutal, swallowing them in his own saliva.

The place still had an appearance of emptiness when the police came looking for him half an hour later. It was still only seven. The police car crunched over the broken glass and stopped by the mutilated van. Marnock had a sergeant with him and a man in uniform, the one who was driving. They saw the boarded-up windows, looked at each other and shrugged. There was no doorbell. The sergeant banged on the knocker. He did that twice, then shouted through the letter box, “Police, open up!”

No one did, so they broke the door down, no difficult task. It yielded after two shoulder charges and a thump from the driver’s boot. The smell that came out to meet them was so bad that at first they thought there must be a dead body inside.

29

I
t was Marnock himself who found Hob.

They had been searching for him since morning in all his known haunts. The latest sighting came from a man in Agar Grove who, from his hospital bed, was able to name his assailant. He had lost four teeth, had two cracked ribs and a broken collarbone, but he was anxious to talk about Harvey Owen Bennett.

It was his opinion that Bennett was the Impaler, Bennett was guilty of the street people killings. Marnock disagreed but didn’t say so. He thought the Agar Grove man entitled to sling mud and make wild accusations. For the time being. He was no angel, had a string of convictions as long as the Broad Walk, which Marnock would later make longer. It was his belief the Agar Grove man was responsible for the mugging of Bean in the Nursemaids’ Tunnel.

He was always made happy by villains gassing. It gave him hope for the future. Harvey Owen Bennett, for instance. Bennett had killed Bean and stuck him on that five-pointed iron tree, but someone had paid him to do it and Marnock now hoped Bennett would tell him who. The Agar Grove man had created a happy precedent.

Marnock called that day on every member of Bennett’s extended family. They weren’t truthful people, but this time, with misgivings, he believed them when they said they hadn’t seen him. His mother said she hadn’t seen him for six months and this amused Marnock in the light of what she had told him back in June—that at the time of Pharaoh’s murder Hob had been among guests at an all-night silver wedding party in the Holloway Road.

They scoured the park for him. Marnock thought of the Grotto as the abode, more or less reserved, of the toffee-nosed dosser with the Oxbridge accent, and he nearly didn’t look. It was a drinking straw, spiraled with red like a barber’s pole and stuck up in the branches of a tree, that caught his eye from his seat in the back of the car. The ritual that served Harvey Bennett’s habit required drinking straws.…

He was lying half in, half out of the dirty little pond. They heard his breathing long before they reached him and that was how they knew he was alive. Marnock’s sergeant was on his mobile calling an ambulance before they had laid a finger on Hob.

“He’s young,” Marnock’s sergeant said. “Well, youngish. But I reckon he’s had a stroke.”

The ambulance man, getting Hob onto a stretcher, said superfluously that he wasn’t a doctor. Then he said that in his opinion Hob had had a stroke.

“Or several,” said Marnock. “I once knew a bloke, only a year or two older than him, same taste for substances, had twenty strokes in quick succession.”

“Bloody hell,” said the ambulance driver. “Did it kill him?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Marnock. “After a couple of weeks they switched off the machine.”

•   •   •

Be angry, Mary said to herself, you must be angry. You must walk on past him, pretend he’s not there. Or stand your ground and tell him what you think of him. She held her fists tightly clenched. He was in front of her now.

“I’ve been here since eight this morning,” he said, “waiting for you.”

“I didn’t come into the park this morning,” she said.

“It was so hot. I brought a bottle of water, but it got warm. I tried
to keep awake but I fell asleep and when I woke up I thought I’d missed you.”

“What do you want?” She knew he had never heard that note in her voice before.

“I suppose that’s how you think of me, as always wanting something, as doing everything I do for what I can get out of it.”

“Wouldn’t that be a true picture?”

“Not entirely.”

She walked into the shade of the trees, put her hands against the rough cool bark of a tree, and bowed her head. “I thought I’d never see you again. I hoped not. I know what you did, I’ve thought about it these past days, I haven’t had anything else to think about, and there can’t be anything you can say to me in extenuation.” She turned to look at him, half look at him, and remembered then what she hadn’t thought of for perhaps an hour or two: their lovemaking. It came back and brought hot angry blood into her face. He must see that burning color and know. “It won’t mean anything to you if I say it was the worst betrayal I’ve ever known.”

Alistair’s small misdemeanors, what were they compared with his offense?

“Would you—could we—is it possible to ask you if we could go back to the house?”

“The Blackburn-Norrises have come home.”

“Then will you sit down here with me or on a seat or somewhere and talk to me?”

Her head bowed again. She found she was shaking it from side to side. The words came out hoarsely.

“What is your name?”

“
What
?”

“I asked you what your name is. I can’t call you Leo. You aren’t called Leo.”

“My name is Carl,” he said. “Carl Nash. Leo was my brother.”

She sat down. He dropped onto the grass beside her but moved when she indicated by a pushing movement with her hands that he was too close. She looked at him properly for the first time, a gaze of deepest scorn, and saw that his eyes were full of tears.

•   •   •

“I brought Leo up. He was more than ten years younger than I. Oh, yes, of course I’m not twenty-four, I’m older than you, Mary, not younger, I’m thirty-five.”

“We believe what people tell us,” Mary said. “Or I do. I believed what you told me. And I saw your birth certificate.”

“You saw his. When the leukemia was diagnosed and they said he needed a transplant I thought there wouldn’t be a problem. There was our mother—not that she’d taken a scrap of notice of Leo since he was ten, she’d left that to me—and there was myself, a couple of half-sisters somewhere about. None of us was compatible. Can you imagine that?”

“You’ve already told me. Except that you suggested it was you and not your brother who needed the transplant. If you’re going to explain you should …”

“Tell you why I posed as Leo?”

“It was for my money,” she said bitterly.

He lifted his shoulders, not denying. “I was an actor once. Only there was no work. Then I was a schoolteacher. Funny, isn’t it? Then I made a bit of money,” he said. “Dealing, mostly.”

She knew she was innocent but not what she was innocent of. The look in his eyes told her he wasn’t talking about scrap metal or antiques.

“Drugs,” he said impatiently. “I’d needed funds to find a donor for Leo. That was before the Harvest Trust. I thought maybe I’d have to go to some Third World country and buy a donor. Then you came along.”

“I wasn’t rich then,” she said. “I’d been living in a one-bedroom flat in Willesden and earning twelve thousand a year. What made you think I was rich?”

He said simply, “The heading on your writing paper. The address. Charlotte Cottage, Park Village West.”

Briefly she closed her eyes. Unseeing, she sensed he had come closer to her and she drew away. She looked at him.

“And when you found out I didn’t live there you dropped me, you meant never to see me again. That was what happened. You weren’t ill, you were never ill.”

“True,” he said. “It was a bitter disappointment.” She looked incredulously at his wry smile. He had aged in the past few minutes. He might be forty, forty-five. The smile creased his pale face into lines and ridges. “I did need money, you see. I knew Leo would get ill again, I could see the signs, I’d made myself an expert in his illness.” All the ironic amusement died out of his face. “I loved him so much. Believe me, if you can believe anything I say, believe me, I’m not trying for your sympathy, your compassion, but I’d like you not to think me a total monster. I loved him as if he were my own child. Or I think so, I’ve never had a child.”

“So that was all right? Using me was all right because you loved your brother?”

“No, Mary, it wasn’t all right. But it was all I could think of. Your grandmother died and when I heard that I came back. You told me what she’d left you and it was more than I’d imagined in my wildest dreams.”

She had become curious in spite of herself. The sheer suicidal nerve of it compelled a question.

“I might have found out at any time. The trust might have told me Leo—your brother—they might have told me he was becoming ill again. What would you have done?”

“What I did when they did,” he said. “Disappeared. But I used to
scrutinize your post. I was—I was usually up first.” He had turned away his eyes.

“So that’s why you stayed with me,” she said bitterly, unable to bring herself to use the words. “That’s why you stayed those nights, so that you could get to the post in the morning.” The words were hard for her because she had never used them before. “That’s why you screwed me,
fucked
me.”

He said with a simplicity she had to believe at last was honest, “It was at first. I came to love you. Couldn’t you tell?”

•   •   •

For half an hour she had been unaware of anyone else in the park but themselves. A child’s shriek, a blue and white lightweight ball bouncing across the grass, coming to rest at their feet, reminded her they were not alone. She stood up, brushed dried shreds of grass off her jeans, and lobbed the ball back. He watched her, anxiously waiting.

“What do you want me to say?” she asked him wearily.

“Only that you believe me.”

She supposed that she had noticed. It was when the lovemaking changed from a sick man’s effete attempts to enthusiasm, when acquiescence became passion, that she had been aware of it without asking why. He had been ill and now he was getting better, that was all.

“I believe you.”

She said it dully, for it was a few moments before relief came and she understood that she need no longer feel humiliation and shame. He had wanted her, he had not had to force himself.

“I wanted to marry you by then,” he said. “I’d never wanted that before.” He squeezed his eyes shut and sprang to his feet. “Will you do one last thing for me? Will you walk a little way with me?”

“I don’t know.” She nearly called him Leo. “I don’t know, Carl.”

He flushed at the sound of his own name. It seemed to confirm him as its true possessor. “Do you remember that place we went to for dinner? That first time? The Italian place?”

“When you pretended to be ill?”

He winced at that. “I’m sorry. I had to. I thought I had to. Mary, I’ve done worse things than that to get money.”

“I don’t want to hear,” she said.

“I thought—I wondered—if you’d let me take you there now, tonight. If we could—it would be the last time, wouldn’t it?”

She nodded. She still wanted answers. “I’ll walk with you.”

“And you’ll come to the restaurant?”

“Perhaps.”

He got to his feet and held out a hand to help her, but she shook her head. They walked across the grass in silence, across Chester Road and down the Broad Walk.

“Leo knew all about it,” he said. “He thought it was funny at first. We both thought it was funny at first. He used to want all the details but I—I stopped telling him things after a while.”