‘Don’t answer…’ she started to say, but he wasn’t taking any notice of her. Why should he?
She got on all fours to try and push herself upright as he opened the door.
Then for about two and a half seconds, everything happened in single-frame audio-visual flashes.
The young female cop in the doorway wearing the kind of phoney smile Fleur had tried for earlier.
Vince behind her swinging a short metal cylinder against the side of her head.
The girl falling into the room.
The man taking two steps back and standing on Fleur’s hand.
Fleur hearing herself scream.
Vince raising the cylinder that was the sawn-off barrel of a shotgun.
The flash.
The bang.
The man falling backwards.
‘For God’s sake, shut that door!’ grated Fleur.
One thing she’d trained Vince up for was instant obedience. He kicked the door shut. Still on her knees, she swung round to the TV set and turned the volume up.
Then she sat and waited, counting up to twenty.
Nothing happened.
The TV set was showing a night scene. She studied herself in the darkened glass. The streak of blood down her face was dramatic but its source was a lesion the size of a peanut.
She adjusted her wig, turned the TV sound up higher, and got to her feet. Vince opened his mouth and she quietened him with a look.
She went to the door and listened.
She heard a door opening, a male voice saying, ‘Don’t be silly, it’s the television. Come on, we’re half an hour late already. Ma will be furious.’ To which the shrill female replied, ‘So what? Can’t we be an hour late, or better still two hours? In my condition, how can I hurry?’
The voices faded away down the corridor.
Now Fleur turned and took in the room.
The man who might be Wolfe was gone beyond recall. The shotgun blast had all but removed his face. There was no way they were going to identify him by comparing him to a photo.
The female cop had fallen on her left side. Blood oozed from a long contusion on the right temple where Vince had struck her. A shallow bubble of saliva formed at her lips, sank, then formed again very slowly, so for the time being at least she was still alive.
Vince stood there, weapon in hand, regarding her with an expression she was all too familiar with, the look of a small boy who suspects he has done wrong but isn’t yet sure if his actions merit mild reproof, stern reproach, or severe punishment. She had to bite back the angry invective forming in her throat.
Then he said, ‘I thought he was hurting you, sis,’ and her anger dissolved.
He is what he is, she thought, and for better or worse she loved him. In fact he was the only person on the face of the earth that she had any positive feeling for, and his need to be protected was matched by her need to protect him. These two, the dead man and the probably dying woman, were so much collateral damage, the high but necessary price that had to be paid for the love between her and her brother. Everything came second to that. Love was a harder taskmaster than even The Man, promising small reward at the end of the day. But you knew when you entered his service that you signed all your rights away.
She said wearily, ‘We’ll talk about it later, Vince. For now, let’s get things sorted in here then be on our way.’
THREE
misterioso
She says I’m pregnant.
The words bring such an explosion of joy that it shatters the barriers his mind had built against pain.
She sees only the pain and turns away.
But he turns with her, and now she sees the joy, and it’s so great that in a moment she thinks she must have imagined the pain.
He knows once more who he is…no, not is…he knows who he was, for now the nowhere existence in which he had felt himself shadowy, insubstantial, has sent out roots and will grow like the seed in her belly, while that other existence in that other world of pain proves to be the world of shades, inhabited by ghosts, himself nothing more than ghost when he visits it.
He knows he has to visit it, for that ghost of himself needs to be laid. So he descends into the shadowland to seek his old love, and when he sees her there, safe and secure in another shade’s arms, he turns away and climbs back to the light, not fearing to look over his shoulder because he knows she will not be following.
His new love waits for him, radiant to see him return, not questioning where he has been for no doubt lies between them, and he tells her no lies for how can a man lie about a world that no longer exists?
He feels the new world of her ripening belly under his hands.
Lucinda, he says.
What did you say?
Lucinda. That’s her name.
But we don’t even know that we’ll have a girl!
Yes we do, he says with the smiling certainty of one who knows that that other existence had been but a dress rehearsal whose disasters were a necessary prelude to a triumphant and lengthy run. And her name will be Lucinda. And from the moment she is born, she shall have nothing but the best.
So easily in joy and love a man plots his own betrayal.
13.45-14.50
Gwyn Jones left the community centre without troubling the buffet. When he had the scent of a story in his nose, he lost all other appetite. Also his unexpected presence had aroused unwelcome curiosity from some other journalists. Bumping Gem Huntley off the assignment hadn’t been a problem. Not long up from the provinces, she was still eager to please. Very eager. He’d taken advantage of her eagerness in the traditional style only last week when Beanie was out of town for a couple of nights. She wasn’t bad looking, in a peasant kind of way; carrying a bit too much flesh perhaps, but it was young flesh, and while a man might grow tired of such a plain diet every night, she was touchingly eager to learn. It had made a pleasant change from the Bitch’s cordon bleu menu. So a squeeze of her buttock and a promise that he would meet up with her later to explain everything had been enough to get her out of the way.
The others were more of a problem, the trouble being that his antipathy for Gidman was so well known that his presence at such a bland public relations affair was bound to spark interest.
The groundwork for his dislike had been laid on his first arrival in London six years before. His mother, the one person from whom he’d hidden his delight at leaving Llufwwadog, had been worried that her eldest son might not survive the inevitable pangs of homesickness he must feel alone in a great foreign city. So before parting she extracted a solemn oath from him that, as soon as he settled in, he would make contact with her cousin (twice removed) Owen Mathias. Owen, she averred, being a recently retired policeman, would be able to provide good sound advice as well as a reminder of his beloved home country.
When, after much maternal cajoling, Jones finally travelled out to Ealing to pay his respects, he saw at a
