Rough Treatment

Twenty-nine

“There’ve got to be other ways,” said Grabianski, a touch wistfully.

“Of getting inside?”

“Of earning a living.”

Grice looked up from the rear window-catch in disbelief. Until he saw Grabianski’s face clearly, it wasn’t possible to tell if he was being serious or just winding him up.

“Funny,” Grice said. “Can’t see her hand, but it must be there.”

“Where? What hand? What are you on about?”

“Her. The one who’s got you by the balls.”

“Nobody’s got me by the balls.”

Grice’s attention was back on the window. “What’s she after? Round-the-world cruise, is it? Then half a lifetime of happiness in Saffron Walden?”

“She isn’t after anything. She’s nothing to do with this.”

“Just your regular cold feet, then?”

Grabianski shook his head, “Considering the options, that’s all.”

The catch yielded enough for Grice to gain some real purchase. “We did that a long time back, the pair of us.”

“No reason we can’t think again.”

Grice smiled. “When we’re doing so well?” The window slowly lifted, only the slightest of squeaks from the sash.

“We can’t go on getting dressed up and turning over other people’s places for ever.”

Grice hoisted himself on to the sill. Inside the room he could see the outlines of heavy furniture, recently bought in sale-room auctions; hear the monotone of a grandfather clock. Small fortune passed over trying to reinvent an upstairs, downstairs sort of past. Stupid bastards!

He took a firm grip of Grabianski’s hand and helped him through the open window, pushing it down behind them. “You’re right,” he said.

“About what?”

“We can’t go on forever.”

Knowing Grice was being facetious, Grabianski waited for what was to follow.

“Every hundred extra we pay into those pension schemes now becomes around a thousand at sixty-five. Is that attractive or what?”

“Who’ve you been talking to?”

Grice grinned. “You know very well. What’s the point of having your own tame broker if you don’t take advantage of professional advice?”

Grabianski was moving stealthily between two high-backed chairs with rolled arms. “I’m going to check the other rooms before we start.”

“Don’t worry,” said Grice, happier now they were inside. “You’re not about to strike lucky twice.”

High against the back of his skull, Grabianski was getting a headache. He went into each and every room, expecting to find someone sleeping, sitting up, insomniac, with cheese biscuits and a book. If he had found somebody, he might almost have felt easier. It would have explained this feeling he was getting, not just the one beginning to throb inside his head.

Grice whispered gleefully from the bathroom. In a plastic bag pushed back beneath a cluster of towels, close to £1,300 in twenties and tens. Mad money? Money to pay the interior decorator, cash in hand and forget about the VAT? Either way, it didn’t matter: now it was their money, his and Grabianski’s. Already, in a decorated cigar-box on the dressing table of the master bedroom, they had found Eurochecks, sterling traveler’s checks, Spanish, US and German currency. Gold rings wrapped inside pink tissue and stuffed down inside a pair of tights. Grice did appreciate people who were careful-it made their task so much the easier.

“What’s the story here?” asked Grabianski.

“Story?”

“The owners.”

“Moving up from Kent. House they had was going to be left standing, but the orchard and four acres were being plowed under for the Channel Tunnel rail link. They’ve got a flat in the Barbican and now this. When he’s not abroad, the bloke spends most of his time in London. Wife and kids’ll move in up here when they’ve got prep schools sorted out. Till then, nobody here save for the occasional weekend. Satisfied?”

Grabianski didn’t answer.

“Relax.”

“I am relaxed.”

“You won’t be relaxed till we’re back in that cozy little flat of ours and you’re whisking up your Horlicks.”

“Think that picture’s worth anything?” Grabianski asked, nodding in the direction of a dusky portrait on the wall, a sallow-faced woman with her hands folded across her lap and eyes that seemed to be staring out of another painting altogether.

“Search me,” said Grice. “You’re the one with culture.”

“You make it sound like an incurable disease.”

Grice laughed, more a hiss than a real laugh, and before the sound faded they heard the key turn in the downstairs lock. As if by magic the throbbing in Grabianski’s head ceased, to be replaced by a keen, knife-like pain. The front door opened and closed; one light went on, then another.

Neither Grice nor Grabianski moved, not as much as a muscle.

A radio was switched on and tuned between stations, voices, some low-grade pop music, more voices, a snatch of Haydn, silence again. Grice knew, in the semi-darkness of the upstairs landing, that Grabianski was staring at him. Knew that he was thinking whatever else, no way you could call this the occasional weekend.

What if, Grice wondered, it’s another burglary? Someone with a copied set of keys, a skeleton? But then the man-the weight of his steps suggested that, yes, it was a man-went into where they knew the kitchen to be and they heard the faint click of a cupboard being closed.

Grabianski signaled towards Grice: while whoever had come in was making whatever it was in the kitchen, there was time for them to descend the stairs, get out the way they’d come in.

Now it was Grice who was indecisive, but a hand to his shoulder propelled him forwards and down. They were three rises from the foot of the stairs when Hugo Furlong, his plane rerouted to East Midlands Airport and within easy reach of a friendly bed for the night, wandered through from the kitchen. He was spooning raspberry jam from a jar, just about the only edible thing he’d been able to fancy and find.

All three stared at one another.

Hugo Furlong stared at the two intruders, who, after looking hard and quizzically at each other, stared back at him.

“Don’t …” Grabianski began to say.

The jar slid between Furlong’s fingers and crashed on the parquet floor, raspberry juice and shattered glass. For some seconds the spoon stuck out from Furlong’s mouth; anything less than silver, he would have bitten it right through.

Grice made a move towards him and Hugo Furlong turned fast and smacked his head against a raised wooden pillar, hard. He cried out and rocked on his heels, clutching at the pillar as he slid towards the ground.

“Move!” Grice shouted, grabbing at Grabianski’s arm.

But Grabianski was leaning towards Hugo Furlong, drawn by the muffled sounds emerging from the crumpled body.

“Now!”

Grabianski shrugged him off. Down on one knee beside Furlong, careful not to kneel in raspberry jam, he took hold of him by the arms and turned him over. Blood ran freely from a cut alongside the right eyebrow, but it wasn’t the blood that Grabianski was concerned with. More worrying was the sudden paleness of his face, his lack of consciousness.

“We’re out!” called Grice. “As of now.”

Grabianski struggled with the knot of Hugo Furlong’s tie, fingers too fast and fumbling, forced himself to slow down, prise his fingernail beneath the silk.

“What the hell d’you think you’re playing at?”

“He needs help,” Grabianski said. Even though his hands were less than steady, his voice was strangely calm.

“Help? We’ll be the ones who need help.”

“He seems to be having some kind of heart attack.” Grice pushed his arms around Grabianski from behind and hauled him to his feet, not easy with such a big man. “Listen,” Grice said, the manner of explaining to a recalcitrant child, “we are getting out of here this minute. We do not want to take any more risk than necessary. No fault of our own, we’re already in trouble enough. Right?”

Grabianski seemed to nod.

“Good. We’re going.”

“What about him?” Grabianski was glancing back over his shoulder.

“He’s no concern of ours.”

“I think he’s stopped breathing,” Grabianski said.

That morning, the fourth morning in a row, Hugo had sat down to what some restaurants still described as a traditional English breakfast. Right up to and including the fried bread. He had spent the previous two days-and most of the evenings-attending a sales conference in Glasgow. All the reasoning that dictated orange juice, bran flakes, at most a couple of slices of wholemeal toast, went out of the window as soon as he caught the familiar smell of bacon crisping at the edges, the spit and splutter of frying eggs. Besides, wasn’t that what everyone else was having?

What Hugo Furlong was having, right now, on the polished wooden flooring of his not-yet-fully-occupied new house, was a heart attack.

“Come on,” said Grice.

Grabianski continued to unbutton the man’s shirt, the pain in his head gone now, disappeared as he struggled to remember what he had read one damp afternoon, a magazine he had been leafing through while waiting to have a new exhaust fitted in a quick-fit garage in Walsall.

“Leave him.”

Clothes loosened, Grabianski began to search for a pulse; pressed his thumb as hard against the inside of the wrist as he dared and there was nothing. He shifted his position and felt alongside the neck. No pulse. Not even a whisper.

Grabianski got up and moved around the body, straightening the legs, pulling the arms back down to the sides.

“Call an ambulance,” he said.

“You’re joking!”

Grabianski pointed down. “Does this look like a joke?”

“Sure. It looks like a fucking joke to me. That’s exactly what it looks like.”

“You’re not going to call an ambulance,” Grabianski said, back on his knees, “then get over here and give a hand.”

Grice watched as Grabianski took hold of the man’s head-as carefully as if it were some vase that might crack, never mind the blood that was collecting there, smudging his hand-took hold of the head and tilted it back.

“A cushion!” Grabianski sang out.

“What about it?”

“Get me a cushion.” He wasn’t sure if that was right, but took the one that Grice almost reluctantly handed him and squeezed it behind Hugo Furlong’s shoulder blades, the back of his neck.

“Now what’re you doing?” said Grice with a strange sort of fascination. Grabianski was opening the man’s mouth like he was a dentist.

“Clearing the airway.”

To Grice it sounded like something to do with pirate radio.

“Shit!” Grabianski exclaimed.

“What’s up?”

“He’s got false teeth.”

“His age, what else d’you expect? Forty-five, fifty, you expect it. I’ve got an upper set, none of them mine. Don’t you?”

There were a lot of fillings in Grabianski’s head, but every tooth was his own. Brush with salt his grandmother had told him, salt and warm water, every day. These lower dentures had been jolted loose by Hugo’s fall and were sideways across his mouth, pushing up against the palate. Finger and thumb, Grabianski eased them out and shook them a little before laying them aside.

“Jesus!” Grice complained. “That’s disgusting.”

“You’d rather he died?”

“Of course, I’d rather he died. He saw us, didn’t he? He’s not another one you can talk into calling us a couple of niggers. He’s going to pull through this, help some police artist with a photofit, there we are flashed up all over the country on Crimewatch. He’s dying, let him die.”

Grabianski wasn’t listening.

Still on his knees, he straightened the rest of his body, brought both hands level with his face, the left locked around the wrist of the right, which was shaped into a fist.

“What the hell …?” Grice began. He was wondering if what he was watching was some kind of primitive Polish prayer.

Grabianski brought his fist down into the center of Hugo’s chest with all the force he could muster, striking a couple of inches to the left of the sacrum.

“Jesus!” Grice shouted again. “I didn’t mean to kill him.”

Hugo’s body, the upper half of it, had lifted forward with the impact of the blow, a bolt of air expelled from the lungs. But when Grabianski checked for a pulse, there was still nothing. He shifted closer to the head, pinched the nose tight and lowered his lips over Hugo’s mouth.

“I’m going to throw up,” said Grice, as much to himself as either of them. The one on his back wasn’t hearing too well, anyway.

“Pump his chest,” said Grabianski urgently.

“What?”

“Pump his chest.”

“Hey, you’re Dr. Kildare here, not me.”

“Okay,” Grabianski swiveled on his knees, pushed himself to his feet, one hand going in that damned jam and picking up a splinter of glass for his troubles. “Get round there, give him some mouth to mouth.”

“No way!”

Grabianski had his hands locked, one over the other, arms tensed straight; he leaned forward and began to pump hard against the man’s heart. One, two, three, four … Glancing at Grice, threatening him with his eyes. Five, six, seven … Allowing himself a breather. There, eight, nine, ten and one for luck. Grice was still hovering, holding himself back. “Are you going to do this or not?”

“Give myself a mouthful of whatever he’s been chucking down all day? Forget it!”

“Give him mouth to nose, then?”

Grice looked disgusted. For a moment he thought, genuinely, that he was going to be sick. Grabianski elbowed him aside and repeated the mouth to mouth, twice, remembering to let the chest fall.

Move fast, more bumps to the heart. He could only keep this up so long, and without help what was the point? He would be losing him.

Grice was thinking the same things. “Look,” he said, “Jerry, I know what you’re trying to do. Other circumstances, you know, it’s the right thing to do. But here … we got to leave him.”

Grabianski jumped up from a couple more mouth-to-mouths and hit Grice across the face, more of a slap than a punch, not too hard but hard enough. “You don’t give a shit what happens to him, fine. Just think what kind of charge they’ll give us if they find out. Eh? Think about that and get to the phone. Call emergency, tell them they’ve got about five minutes.” He glanced round at Hugo Furlong. “Less.”

There wasn’t time to see that Grice was doing as he was told. Grabianski checked the pulse again. Shit! Already his arms were beginning to weaken, muscles aching; his own breathing was becoming ragged. He thought it possible Grice might have left the house without phoning, left them both where they were. But then he heard the receiver being replaced. The hospital, the ambulance station, both were less than a mile away.

“Come on,” Grabianski yelled at the body below him, “whoever the hell you are. Don’t die on me now.”

As he pumped his mind continued to race. From somewhere he pulled the fact that the brain could last out three minutes after the blood had stopped flowing from it. He hoped that was right, fact and not fiction. He had no thought of still being there when the ambulance crew came barging in, all hi-tech trained, armed to the teeth with electric paddles, their-what was the word for it? — defibrillator.

In less than two minutes he heard the siren.

He covered Hugo Furlong’s mouth with his own for the last time. Exhaled. Watched the chest rise and fall. “Good luck,” he called, heading not for the rear window, but the front door, sliding the catch down on the lock so there was no way it could slam shut. The siren seemed to be only in the next street and as he ran he caught sight, reflecting off the buildings, of the swirl of blue light.