Riptide

§ 70

Cal thought about handing Dixon’s coat straight over to the cabbie who dropped him at Claridge’s, but the idea of crossing the lobby in the rotting remains of his Lippschitz Bros, suit was intolerable. He needed, and there was no better word for it, camouflage.

As he picked up his key the desk clerk said, ‘You left this the other night, sir.’

‘What?’

The man already had his back to Cal, his hand flashing across the rows of pigeonholed guest mail. When he turned he was clutching the torn envelope containing Walter’s note.

‘We weren’t at all sure you had finished with it, sir.’

Cal was almost dumbstruck. All, well most, of the evidence he’d needed to shove in front of Nailer and it had been here all the time-he’d simply dashed out and left it on the counter.

‘I’m afraid I lost your map,’ he said softly.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ the clerk replied.

In the elevator going up to the sixth floor Cal quietly, almost reverently, took out Stilton’s note and unfolded it.

‘Wot larx!’ He was always saying that. He’d never say it again, and Cal still hadn’t got the foggiest idea what he meant by it.

He rang room service, ordered a large Scotch, and ran a bath.

Then he rang room service back.

‘Could you make that a fifth of Scotch?’

‘Do you mean a half bottle, sir?’

‘Sure. Whatever. Just tell the maid to let herself in and leave it. I’ll be in the bath. Oh-and ice. I need ice.’

The English never thought of ice, or if they did, as with so many things, they thought small.

A quarter of an hour later he was lying back in the suds and heard the door click. Only innate, unshakeable modesty stopped him yelling ‘Bring it in here’ to the maid-he felt far too tired to move even for a glass of Scotch. He closed his eyes, listening for the second click of the door as the girl left. It didn’t. She was taking a long time about it. He opened his eyes and found himself gazing at Kitty, Kitty clutching a tray, a bottle and a glass of ice.

‘Bumped into the maid in the corridor. Relieved her of this. Only one glass though.’

She set the tray down in front of the mirror, shook his toothbrush out of the bathroom tumbler and poured for them both.

As she handed him the glass she said, ‘Calvin, where the bleedin’ ‘ell you been?’

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘Yeah, I know-I just enjoy wastin’ me breath. ‘Course I don’t bloody know! Now-tell me. For God’s sake tell me, where have you been? Just when I need you and you vanish off the face of the earth!’

Need-bet she didn’t mean that. Bet she doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

‘You really don’t know? The Yard didn’t tell you? OK. I’ve spent the last…’ He couldn’t remember-it felt like days but it could only be two or three at the most… ‘I’ve spent the last few days in jail. Courtesy of Scotland Yard.’

‘Wot?’

‘They… they thought I did it. They thought I killed your father.’

Kitty sat down on the lavatory.

‘The bastards. The complete bloody bastards. They knew all along and they didn’t tell us. They told Mum they had a suspect, and they wouldn’t tell her who. I got on to that old sod Nailer, tried the old pals act on him. Still wouldn’t tell me. Just kept saying “a man found at the scene is helping us with our enquiries”-just like he was talking to Joe Public. Like I wasn’t a copper too. Fobbed me off with copperspeak. The bastard. The total bloody bastard.’

She sipped at her Scotch. Gulped and gasped. Cal wondered if the tears now forming in the corners of her eyes were grief or misery or the instant effect of neat whisky. He knocked his back in one, felt the delicious cool-burn down his throat, and stuck out the glass for more.

‘Why did they let you go? I mean they ain’t caught the bloke, have they?’

‘No… no, they haven’t. But somebody vouched for me. Another policeman, someone who’d seen me working with Walter. I got lucky, my own people didn’t want to know me.’

Kitty sniffed loudly as though burying a fountain full of tears and took off her jacket-the same formal, plain black two-piece outfit she’d worn when her brothers had died-maybe the only formal clothes she had. Cal sipped at his second glassful and watched in disbelief as the shoes, skirt, stockings and underclothes followed.

‘Kitty, what are you doing?’

‘Wossit look like, stupid? You don’t expect me to get in the bath with me togs on, do you?’

In seconds, it seemed, she was naked. It was, he realised, his abiding image of Kitty-either naked or getting naked, red hair bobbing, eyes flashing.

‘Shift up. I don’t want a tap stuck up me jacksey, now do I?’

He’d no idea what she meant. That was another reason he’d miss Walter-who else would translate the English for him?

Shift up or not, the bath was huge-she glided the length of it to settle on his chest, her hair just below his chin, an ear pressed to his heart, fingers lingering on the bruises at his midriff.

‘They knock you about, did they?’

‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Nothing I couldn’t handle.’

The memory of nausea brought back the taste. He washed it away in whisky. Her hand drifted automatically to play with his cock. At least he assumed it was automatic-he could not see it as a gesture driven by either lust or affection, just the sheer familiarity of it. And he could not respond to it. She played with a limp dick.

‘How’s your mother taking it?’

The hand didn’t stop. There was no magic to be invoked by words.

‘Bad,’ she said, twirling it like some toy she’d found. ‘I don’t know that she’ll get through it. She rallied after Kev and Trev. All front, mind, but a good one. After this? I dunno. She ain’t spoken for more’n a day. I really don’t know. Vera’s like a tank. Bristling with armour, angry as hell. The girls just cry all the time. And Tel’s clueless, hasn’t the faintest idea what to do or say. Tries jokes, but nobody laughs. He’s shut up about the Navy though. He knows he’ll never get away. He’s there for ever now. I know how he feels.’

‘And how do you feel?’

‘How do I feel?’

‘I’ve never lost a father-in fact I’ve never lost a relative that close. Both my parents are still alive. I have two younger sisters. My grandfather ticks over fairly well at damn near a hundred…’

‘Grandma?’

‘Ah… she died before I was born.’

She’d diverted him neatly. He wasn’t about to give up.

‘So. How do you feel?’

She prised herself up, out of the water, eye to eye, nipple to nipple-the touch of them on his chest brought him up in goosebumps-drew breath and spoke softly.

‘There’s a hole in my life I’ll never be able to fill. All I ask is fill the hole in me.’

He knew it could not possibly be as crude a notion as her phrasing made it seem. All the same, he would never understand it. Sex-that which had been her ravenous hunger had become her consolation, and he could not tell the two apart, could not grasp the shifts of mind that drove her from pillar to post and called both sex.

‘Just fuck me.’

He had never heard her use this word before-but then she had never used it, not since first acquiring its meaning on the edge of adolescence twenty years before.

‘Just fuck me and I’ll kid myself everything’s OK.’