Snowstop

TWENTY-SIX

‘Old Ferret, all present and correct, sir!’

They bundled him into an armchair and gave imitation salutes. Twice lucky seven were back in the same room. Huge logs burned so that it was impossible to get close. Nobody spoke, as if they were one family after the enormous dinner of a Yulish reunion, in that lull between the pious intake of calories and the explosion of distilled venom from grudges ancestral.

Fred turned out two of the lamps, and Aaron thought how much more interesting faces asleep or in repose were under candlelight. ‘We might be here for days, and that means nights as well,’ Fred told them. Keith nodded, glad to have such details taken into account. No one seemed to worry about the van outside, or they didn’t believe what it meant, or they were so disorientated that reality couldn’t get through. If no one did anything they were within hours of death. Gwen’s lifeless face stared at him in triumph, an image he prayed for his will to push aside. It would never depart, and being with her again in a few hours, even if in oblivion, did not seem strange, only horrible, and so he would do all to avoid it. He didn’t want to be whatever she was, nor where she was, because who could guarantee that she might not be waiting somewhere? He was ready to act, but the others wouldn’t help until they were as terrified and determined to stay alive as he was.

Daniel felt as if the limits of his face were several miles out. He had never been in this country before, where the flesh ached dully from collision with boot and fist, and the body no longer belonged to him. Trying to touch, he couldn’t reach, one eye covered by the blue mountain of its swelling, his right knee a nodule as if the bone had been taken away. It was all too distant, only the blur of pain transmitted from the centre of his damaged fortress, the crenellations a wavy line, the moat a rubbish ditch, portcullis crumbled. He found a patch of stiff and bloody hair from a crack in the skull, but the twinge was momentary. He told his hands not to move. His audience might see, and not like it.

He had escaped being kicked to death because the dogs’ keeper had ordered them from their fun. Another minute and they would have been impossible to hold, savages only sated when they had drunk his blood.

Old age, Percy knew, was never as old as it was supposed to be. Full of purpose because he was among people he could feel safe with, he walked in the direction of the fire, a criss-cross of heavy timbers in a white blaze hotter than Hell itself the closer he got, so, being forced back by a pain at his eyes, he swerved towards Daniel and stood over him with a hand on his chin as if wondering what he should do now. They soon knew.

After the second vicious smack Wayne leapt up and pulled him away. ‘Keep off, Dad, he’s our meat.’

‘No,’ Percy shrieked, ‘he’s not meat any more,’ and turned back to his chair, where he dozed with the assurance that when the time came his instincts would serve him as well as anybody else’s. He cat-slept, in and out of comfort, coming into noise, going back into silence or dreams. The spit of burning logs, or the anguished baby moan of the wind, brought him sometimes into the room.

Alfred’s eyes stayed as open as oysters under a rain of lemon juice. He could run into the snow as well as the next man, get as far from the van as would save his life, but the question was: how far would far be if he had to carry his father? No-bloody-where at all, should he collapse from a heart attack under the weight. Half the roof and three quarters of the main wall might crash onto his napper before he reached the gate, the sort of joke he wouldn’t be able to enjoy. The kindest thing would be to leave the old so-and-so to the explosion, and hope he would go suddenly and without pain, better than living months or years as a cabbage-brain, bossed and tormented by a pack of sadistic old bags in a cheap south-coast nursing home.

If he got clear and his father didn’t, the blessing would be on both sides. What a way to think about your own flesh and blood — but when he put a hand to his cheeks to see if there were any tears the dry flesh made him smile. Tired of jumbling the same ideas, he imagined talking the issue over with his brothers, his wife, his children, even his neighbours and friends, and knowing that everyone would call him a merciless villain.

He had read the word for it somewhere a long time ago, in a history book most likely. Parricide. Well, there would be a word for it, wouldn’t there? The fact that you couldn’t get away with anything convinced him he would never have the guts to do it, though having considered the matter at least deserved a dummy run for when the time came.

She feared to touch the red and purple bruises, but held his hands, fingers folded into the palms, and kissed his lips, which seemed the least damaged part of him. He was some person found on a raft after twenty days adrift, one man left from the many who had perished. He made a smile, but she saw pain. Only pain would come if he tried to speak and say how wrong she had been for causing his distress. Her screams from the room below had buried his own cries at the fear of death, as well as the dreadful blows drummed onto his poor body, forcing Keith up the ladder to pull them away.

She had done with shouting, hoped her insults would echo in Keith’s mind till the day he died. As for those biking goon-bullies, nothing could move them to feel regret, though if it was true that ‘vengeance was the Lord’s alone’ she hoped He would take care of it sooner rather than later, that they would find their Nemesis under the wheels of a hundred-ton juggernaut, and live only long enough to realize why it was that the Lord had done His work. As for that vile Jenny who had been to bed with one of them, and was stroking his greasy hair, and no doubt whispering praises for his part in the disgraceful riot, she would like to kill her and not let the Lord have the pleasure.

‘Everything’s going to be all right.’ She pressed his hands gently, seeking a response in his eyes, and speaking so close that no one would hear. ‘Whatever happens, I won’t leave you. I love you. We’ll always be together.’ Yet the statement was hard to believe, only her way to try and help him bear his suffering.

The room was filled with lovers, Garry saw, everyone paired off except him and his mate Wayne. There weren’t enough to go round, that’s why. His fists were his lovers, and they’d had a sufficient piece of action to last a few nights at least. He couldn’t remember yesterday, nor care less whether tomorrow came. If what that bag Sally screamed about him had been true he ought to wish it never would, but she hadn’t had a slate go into her thigh like a sabre. Without his leather trousers the leg would have been sliced off, and even then the gash was too deep to bear thinking about, though he didn’t want to bother anybody now that the job was over.

Fred wound an old sheet around him soaked in a bottle of iodine, and the bleeding seemed to have stopped, so he lay in his underpants like a wounded swaddie in the Falklands, bare legs thrust in front. Though the flesh was chilly there was the danger of getting a hard-on, and then where would he be, with everyone to see it?

He reached for his jacket, covering himself in case it happened. The fight had been more equal than Sally could have known. Lance would have been left headless if he hadn’t worn a helmet, and Wayne had a bruise as big as a headlamp from his forehead hitting a beam. They had taken enough damage between them to add up to as much if not more than Daniel had got, so he couldn’t feel bad about having put the boot in.

He had only intended getting him down after a couple of thumps to calm him, but the shock from the slate sent him a bit loco, the same with Lance and Wayne when they saw what happened. His laugh brought a glare of rank detestation from Sally, which made him laugh again. If Daniel had been killed he would have asked her to marry him, or take up with him. It must be wonderful, wedded to a woman who not only cursed like a navvy but mixed her spiel with words you hardly knew the meaning of. It would be an education listening to her, and the thought of such a future stopped pain drumming at his leg for a few minutes. Daniel, warped from birth, had still been lucky enough to shaft a nice big lovely woman with a vocabulary like a dictionary, which dirty video he’d better stop running through his brainbox or there would be more than a hard-on under his jacket.

Pity she won’t look at me, though not many of her sort would unless I chatted them up all evening and got them more than half seas over with a conveyor belt of short drinks. And where would I meet them, in the first place? The only way Fred the Landlord knew how to dress was to put on a white shirt and navy-blue suit, but even a happy walker like that must have better chances with women.

She had fallen for that schoolteacher all right, though when it started I don’t suppose she knew what she was getting into, no more than I did when I gave the lads a bell and asked them out for a spin. On a night like this! Well, I’d been sweating my bollocks off all day, and didn’t even have the tranny on to tell me the weather because the woman at the house said it interfered with her work at the word processor. You can’t win ’em all, but it would be nice now and again to win one.

Keith told himself he must look sharp, pull his finger out, do something for others’ sake as much as for his own, though it was hard to rouse his faculties or the energy. Inert in the brain, he knew he need only stand up for full power to flow back, to scratch his head and look as if in thought, able to settle every problem, for those around him to assume he was their man.

You felt more powerful after killing someone. He hated himself for it, yet could act and be strong, as long as he didn’t question. He went between sickness and wanting to live. His mother had died when he was seven, and everyone said that his father had killed her. Disease did not run in the family, but tragedy did. Every fatal illness began with someone thinking they had caught a cold. Maybe it still does. She was dead before anybody could do anything. His father had gone away with a woman, his Aunt Virginia said. His father later married the woman, who brought Keith up. ‘Your mother died from broken love,’ his aunt told him. Broken love? Did that mean suicide? He still half wondered what it meant though yes, he certainly knew. ‘She wouldn’t have done it but for your father betraying her. He was an absolute rotter. If he had only pretended to love her she might not have died.’

Keith was the age his father was when he’d had that devastating affair, killing his mother as surely as he had battered the life out of Gwen. His father still lived with the woman, because nothing can break a love affair started in such a way. At sixty-five, the old man was retired, and healthy, went to church every Sunday with his upright wife, the eternal lovers of a storybook Hertfordshire village.

His mother receded into dreams, and then was forgotten because he had grown to adore his father, the bitter injustice not striking till much later. He hadn’t even disliked Helen, who had looked after him like her own child because she couldn’t have any. Maybe that was why his father fell in love with her, never easy in body or mind with children, though when Keith was older he taught him to shoot at his rifle club, took him walking, boating and cycling, horse riding and skiing, visited the zoo and all the museums with him, and when Keith at fourteen wanted to be with his friends, his father left him to himself without the slightest fuss.

He would no doubt convince me with tears in his eyes that what happened thirty years ago hadn’t been his fault at all, Keith thought, and wondered how much his father’s life would be smashed when his only son was arrested for murder, which alone would be worth surviving any explosion for.

The click of Garry’s Zippo interrupted his speculations. ‘We’ve got to do something with that murderer. We didn’t get him down here for nothing.’

Wayne leaned across to share the flame. ‘That’s what I keep telling myself. If we’re going to be blown up in a few hours he ought to be made to pay for it.’

‘We’ll put him on trial.’ Garry was glad to turn his mind from the picture of Sally’s naked and active body, but he also wanted to torment her, as if she was responsible for the grinding pain in his thigh. ‘We’ll find him guilty, and then put him to death. Our helmets are black, so one of ’em will do for the cap. A bit of good old English justice, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I don’t want to die without somebody paying for it.’

‘How do we know we’re going to die, though, till we’re dead?’ Lance who had been listening opened his eyes to talk. ‘We might execute him, and then be alive tomorrow to tell the tale. That would put us in a fix. Not that I’m against killing him, mind you, even though he was my teacher.’

‘It’s a problem,’ Garry said, ‘and I don’t like problems. We should kill him for that alone.’

‘It’s even worse,’ Lance said. ‘It’s a moral problem. If we put him on trial, and then execute him for being a terrorist and killing us, or killing any of us, we’ll be guilty if we’re alive tomorrow. But if we don’t do him in for killing us, and we get blown to smithereens, and he doesn’t, he’ll only get twenty years in clink. He’ll be free and on the streets again in fifteen, back at school teaching kids.’

‘But what if he gets blown up as well as us?’ Wayne said.

‘Dead men tell no fucking tales,’ Garry said, ‘so we might as well top him. There’s some lovely beams in the attic, and I saw a coil of rope in that spare room.’

‘It’s still a moral problem,’ Lance said. ‘You can’t get away from it. That’s what moral problems are like. He used to talk to us at school about moral problems. Just think of it! He was shunting fucking guncotton all over the shop, and he talked about moral problems. Not that I understood a word of what he chuntered on about, so we can’t try him on that count as well.’

‘It’ll only be moral if we hang him.’ Garry made another roll-up. ‘Even if none of us die we can make him swing, just for having a load of bombs that he knew would blow people up. He might only get six months in a court of law, not twenty years, but to me it’s a hanging matter. I mean to say, I don’t have fuck-all to do with his politics. Nobody does here. We’re just innocent bystanders, aren’t we?’

‘Too fucking true,’ Wayne said solemnly.

‘We top him, then,’ Garry said. ‘Right?’

‘You can for me. He’ll swing a treat.’

‘I expect he ought to be tried first,’ Lance said.

‘Oh, we’ll try him all right,’ Garry said. ‘We aren’t fucking heathens. All square and above board. Then we’ll hang him. After all, his bomb load’s outside, ain’t it? We should know. We drove it here.’

‘That means you’re the guilty ones.’ Sally’s words were loud enough to suggest they were indisputable. Daniel shook from the icy cold that was his alone. ‘At least he left it in a place where it wouldn’t harm anyone.’

‘Except a few passing motorists,’ Garry said.

‘Or bikers,’ Wayne jeered.

‘You deserve to die, as well.’ Garry altered position to ease his leg. Ferocious ants were gnawing at it. ‘You took his part, so how do we know you aren’t one of them? You was in it from the beginning, and followed him in your car to make sure he got to where he was going.’

‘I arrived before him,’ she said coolly.

‘What difference does that make? You only went ahead to make sure the coast was clear. Terrorists use people like you because nobody would dream of suspecting you. You can’t fool me. It’s only shits like you who help terrorists to blow ordinary people like us to bits.’

‘I don’t suppose they even get paid for it,’ Wayne said, ‘apart from expenses. They’ do it for kicks. I dream all the time of making a fucking great blaze in the middle of Chesterfield, but I’d never do it. I might hurt somebody, or get put inside if I was caught.’

She couldn’t plead for Keith to hold them back, though he would be happy to hear her do so, for he was her sort after all, and would stop them sooner or later. One minute she loved Daniel, to a pitch never felt before, a melting together of temperaments that pushed tears to her eyes. She fought them, also, then became still, with a desperate uncertainty as to where such weakness would take her. A few hours ago she was driving to the airport, no one closer than dull and familiar Stanley.

Wayne pushed her aside to reach Daniel. ‘Your van’s full of explosives, eh?’

Words came thick and distorted out of his battered features. ‘It is. I wish it wasn’t, but it is.’

‘When is it due to explode?’ Keith, needing them to hear it from the Devil’s own lips, pulled him by the arm to make him sit up.

The world and everyone connected to it was meaningless, too far away from Daniel, except for Sally’s warm hand, and even that was taken from him. Sharp aches ran through his legs and head, and he smiled because his limbs were becoming real again. ‘Eight o’clock is what I heard. I’m not supposed to know.’

‘Stand up,’ Keith said.

Daniel knew an order when he heard one, helped up through the climbing frame of pain which would prevent him falling once he was at the top. He feared the three savages who had pulled him from the attic, but Keith was more dangerous, merciless grey eyes close to his face: ‘Where were you supposed to take it?’

‘Coventry.’

The fist showed a large ring with an aquamarine stone, dull in the candlelight. ‘I want an address.’

He had photocopied the town plan in his mind. ‘Fourteen Dants Street.’ Even in the dark he would have found it.

‘Then where would it go?’

‘I don’t know. Probably London.’

Keith believed him. Whoever it was meant for were safe, but they in the hotel were not. Fourteen dead would surely satisfy them for a while. Hearing the news on the radio the terrorists would be laughing and hitting each other on the back at their bloody brew-up, then arguing for the privilege of the phone call to tell the world who had done it.

‘So when do we put the rope around his neck?’ Garry scooted his cigarette stub towards the fire. Fred picked it up from the mat and put it in an ashtray. ‘You must admit he deserves it.’

‘It’s half-past one,’ Keith said, ‘which gives us a few hours to decide how to get away, but no time to think about killing anybody. He’ll be dealt with when we’re safe.’

‘We’ll get into our kit and leave at five to eight,’ Wayne said, ‘just far enough to watch the explosion. Then we can come back and sit in the ruins to keep warm.’

‘I won’t make it with this gammy leg,’ Garry said. ‘Look how it’s swollen up. I’d like to kill him just for skimming that slate. I expect he smeared poisoned pigeon shit along the edge. He would have danced a reel and two jigs if he’d killed me.’

‘We’ll rip a door off and carry you on it,’ Lance said.

‘Not my weight you won’t. I’ve put back too much ale in my life. But I’ll be all right. Nobody gets the better of me, not even a fucking snowstorm.’ Nor will they, whatever O Levels he hadn’t got. He didn’t remember his father because he was knocked arse over backwards by a concrete mixer on the motorway and killed while doing his stuff as a chainman for the surveyors. The emptiness of infancy was normal, but when he was two his mother married again, and he knew the man couldn’t be his father because Garry got a kick every time he went close. Henry was his name, and in the beginning he waited till Garry’s mother was out of the house, but later he didn’t care, and when his mother told him to stop kicking Garry he kicked her as well. In three years the man spent what was left of his father’s insurance, and then lit off, leaving his mother with two more kids.

She lived on National Assistance, and slutted after what men she could get while the kids ran around wild and half starved. Some nights they waited on the steps of pub or bingo hall hoping she would come out with lollipops or a bar of chocolate. A fancy man might chuck fifty p to get them out of the way. All men were bastards, so it paid to grow into a bastard yourself and keep them in their place. And all women were bitches who had anything to do with men like that. Only you yourself were left, and all you could do was find a couple of mates you could trust and have as good a time as you could. The rest was bullshit.

He never forgot insult or injury, and twenty years after the toe-capping Henry came to see his mother but she threw him out. A few weeks later Garry saw him in a pub on Saturday night, standing at the bar over a meagre half-pint. Garry clapped him on the back in friendly fashion and talked of the good old times when Henry had been kind to him as a three-year-old, and Henry had the gall to say: ‘I’m glad you remember. I was good to you, wasn’t I? But that’s how I am. I allus was good to little kiddies.’ The man’s face was ageing and spiteful, but a few pints even got him talking again about his mother.

Garry said goodbye but went across the road to wait, and when Henry came out swaying and swearing to himself, he followed. At the end of a dark street he pulled him from behind, and while Henry lay half stunned in the gutter Garry told him how his infancy had really been. Then he gave every kick back that he had ever got.

And now the king-sized bastard of them all had come with his clapped-out van of explosives to do you and your mates an injury, even to kill you. If there was no justice in the world you had to make it, that’s all Garry knew.

TWENTY-SEVEN

‘I’m stiff all over.’ Eileen woke from her dreams so troubled she thought they were real. ‘I suppose I should go upstairs to bed. What are we doing down here, anyway?’

‘We’ve just got to sit,’ Parsons said, ‘until the crack of doom.’

She yawned. ‘Believe that, and you’ll believe anything. He’s only saying the van’s full of bang-bangs to frighten us. He’s like one of them poxy hoaxers who phones an airport and says there’s a bomb on a plane. It makes him feel good. Then he puts the phone down and has a good wank. The dirty bastard’s the same as a flasher. There’s plenty of them around, as well. You see ’em all over the place.’

She stood, and bowed to their laughter, as if she was acting in that play again at school, only this time it looked like being real, because if that beaten-up old flasher was to be believed, the whole lovely hotel would soon be on fire, which was a shame because it was one of the nicest places she’d been in. Maybe they should have kicked him in a bit more up in the attic, though they hadn’t done a bad job, to look at him wincing and twitching. No wonder Trevor had been such a numbskull, with teachers like him knocking around. Keith must have had better schooling, not to mention the mam and dad who brought him up. He knows how to talk, and I’ll bet he’s got a good job that pays lots of money — as well as being tall and strong, and standing no fucking nonsense from anybody.

But there was a sense of violence about him that made her afraid. When he was angry, from habit it seemed more than reason, his eyes were sunken and closer together, nose almost hooked, a bit like an eagle, as if violence was mustard to his meat. Even when there was no reason for violence you could tell he was hoping for it. He had done something, or something had been done to him, or he had done something because something had been done to him, and he couldn’t get it out of his mind. He was tense in look and limbs, always ready to spring — as he had up the ladder to pull those bikers off Daniel, when, if he hadn’t got his own way, he would have killed the lot and enjoyed it.

She felt love for him but did not know whether she ought to like him, though she did because she wanted to. She wondered who his wife was and how they managed together, hard to imagine him easily in love with anybody, but she could understand women being in love with him. He was the sort who kept too much of himself secret, a man women love till they know better or get fed up with him. On the other hand he couldn’t be so rotten, because he had brought her to this hotel, so that instead of twenty-five pounds single it had cost him forty quid double. Maybe he might think it worthwhile because she had been to bed with him, but she had enjoyed it as well, so he’d still been generous.

He hadn’t done her such a favour if staying any longer meant getting blown to bits, but he wasn’t to know, because he had got himself into the trap as well, which didn’t seem to worry him all that much, and that was strange, as if something funny nagged at his mind, unless that was his way, and he was too proud to show he was upset like mad at what he had driven into. Not everybody screamed and swore if things went wrong, like her father and some of the men she had known, lashing out left, right and centre when they couldn’t think what to do, and only making things worse.

Keith seemed like a clock that could take care of anything to do with time, though sooner or later the springs would break and the whole thing split apart. There were moments when she wondered who he was, and she didn’t get very far but at least it was easier than trying to find out who she herself might be, which became impossible whenever she tried to try, though maybe that was the same for everybody, and it was easier to see other people, if that was easier at all. She thought she ought to stop thinking, because if you got ravelled up you would have a hard job starting again, which must be worse than not having started at all.

Keith liked her affectionate smile, the perfect girl friend who would never question him, because in her apparent mindlessness she thought it would be no use. And he wouldn’t ask anything of her, even though he might want to. In any case they were far from being empty-minded, but out of love and good will towards each other (that rarest of attitudes between men and women) they could become devoted because it was no effort to be so.

Such dreams were of little use, dangerous to you and others if you strove to make them real. Daniel had tried, and turned into one of those who blew limbs off people but had never cut their own finger. Without experience or imagination his ideals had been easy to maintain, though you had to curb your contempt for such types if you believed it was right or useful to understand them.

He knew he must get on his feet for what he had to say. ‘I assume you can all hear? We have to think about getting out of this place, beyond range of that van, because there’s enough stuff inside to demolish the hotel. I take it that none of us wants to die?’

Wayne pulled Daniel’s hand vertically like a railway signal. ‘Here’s one who does.’ He let it fall, which pained Daniel more than the lifting and made him cry out. ‘He ought to, anyway.’

Sally’s flat hand swung so quickly he wasn’t able to dodge, two fierce slaps chasing each other, though he hit back with equal force before she could run from what she had done. ‘No bloody woman, or anybody else, hits me and gets away with it.’ He was breathless with surprise, and holding her wrist that was hinging out for another blow.

‘He’s helpless,’ she cried. ‘Haven’t you done enough?’

‘We thought we had.’ Garry’s leg throbbed, and he wondered if he would be able to ride his bike again, saw himself sitting when the others had gone, sucking on his last fag and waiting for a flash whiter than any snow. ‘We haven’t started yet, if you don’t behave yourself.’

Her breasts were rising and falling, breath grinding in her throat with passionate loathing. The bones of her skull were ringing with pain, but she took both hands away, sat by Daniel and stroked his arm. ‘Don’t worry, everything will be all right.’

She wasn’t sure about that, in her misery, heart keening at such injustice, and at the stupidity of Daniel for involving himself in a cruel and useless cause. He was a child who had been led astray by the balloon man, with no matter what justification, dazzled by the hot air filling their plastic gewgaws.

Enid’s face was pinched with the anxiety they all felt. ‘My boy friend’s supposed to pick me up in the morning. He said so when he dropped me off in his car this afternoon, so I didn’t bring a proper coat, only this cardy and what I stand up in. I’ll freeze if I have to go outside.’

Aaron put an arm around her. ‘You can use my coat.’

Keith smiled. ‘We all want to live. That’s understandable. There are a few options, which I’ve been thinking over, so I suppose it’s time I shared them. The first is that we stay in here and don’t do anything. After all, the van might not explode.’

‘I’m not going to be a sitting duck, or play snowman’s roulette,’ Alfred said.

Nor was anyone. Daniel’s state of half-sleep dimmed his pain. He heard, but didn’t want to show that anything concerned him in case they baited him for being the cause of their peril. Tied to a chair, he wouldn’t be able to move, the only person in the hotel. The pale and leaded sky of dawn was showing. They had abandoned him, and fled to save themselves. His evil latched on to a greater evil in them, so who would be the first to suggest the fate which he pictured? What they didn’t realize was that fuses, being what they were — if there had been clumsiness, or carelessness, or any subtle fault whatever in the connections, or the timing, or the wiring — could send the van sky-high any minute. To assume all would be well until eight o’clock was optimistic.

‘So we put the kaibosh on that one,’ Keith said. ‘Still, it might have worked, to get together in a room furthest from the van, and hope for the best. The trouble is that the van’s parked halfway along the hotel wall, which would reduce our chances somewhat. So that option, such as it is, would be too much of a gamble, every life being precious, mine included. Even his, who got us into it. Though he never knew a moral twinge in his life, he’s as valuable as the rest of us, and we can’t abandon him. When we’re safe he’ll have a long enough time to think about how brave and clever he’s been.’

‘You should have been a bloody parson,’ Garry said, ‘with all this jabber.’

‘You wouldn’t know what to do with a bagful of words if they was put around your neck in a stable,’ Eileen shouted.

They were like brother and sister, Keith thought, when she laughed and sat down. Cousins, perhaps. He was amazed at how well people of that sort got on. Quarrelling was a way of them getting to know each other. They would have a set-to and then start laughing and talking about the good old times. He felt more connected to their verbal liveliness than to the glum mood of the others.

Alfred liked the way Garry wasn’t afraid to throw in remarks against big-headed Keith. He would have said the same himself, but Garry had got there first, so why waste your breath? ‘You’re a plumber by trade, then?’

‘What’s it to you?’

He glanced towards the fire to be sure his father slept, then knelt, not wanting anybody to know his business. ‘I bought a nice plot of land near Matlock, and I’m going to have a bungalow built for Janice my daughter. She’s the eldest. You understand?’

‘I’m not deaf, am I?’

‘I didn’t think so.’ Alfred smiled. ‘I’m sure there’s nobody less deaf. Nor less sharp, either. Are you all right, though? You look pale.’

‘I’ve got a bit of gyp in my leg, that’s all. Just get on with it.’

‘This bungalow’s going to have a lovely view over the Derwent. I want it to be a little gem.’ When the old man kicked off there’d be more than enough to pay for it. He would be in clover, though the death duties would drop it by plenty. ‘I’ve got to have a man of your trade to plumb the place up. A nice kitchen and bathroom. I know a plumber, but I don’t trust him, neither his prices nor his work. Could you give it a try? Make a good job, I mean?’

A house was a lot to take on, even if only a bungalow, but you have to start somewhere. ‘You mean you want an estimate?’

‘That’s right. Can you do it?’

‘Don’t keep asking me if I can do it. Do you want bloody references or something?’

‘Oh no, just an estimate. I’ve had one already, and if yours is anywhere near, you’ve got the job. You don’t get into a situation like this and not make friends you can trust. Anyway, I like to give a hand to somebody who’s up-and-coming. I was very happy at the way you sorted that bastard out upstairs. If I had been thirty years younger I would have been with the rest of you, believe me.’

Garry was laughing inside. A whole house to play with! ‘I’d have to take on extra help, but I’ll do it.’ He would go to the library and get an instruction manual, swot up a bit, take it little by little. He had already fathomed the basics, and you didn’t need A Levels to be a plumber, not a good one anyway. Apart from anything else, once he had made a start Alfred wouldn’t be able to get rid of him, though he’d be sure to do as good a job as he could because if it was known that he had fixed up one house it wouldn’t be hard to get a contract for another, and soon he would have his own firm. When things got hectic and he had more work than he could handle he would take on people to help him, and become one of the youngest big employers in the Midlands. He would do it all on the quiet, a deal with each chap so that they would pay no tax and he would buy no stamps, everyone in it for love and money. After a year or two he wouldn’t even need to get his hands dirty but would send his men out in little rainbow-coloured vans while he sat in a centrally heated office during the winter with his feet on a desk, winking at a gorgeous secretary in charge of the paperwork. The house he lived in would have the plumbing done by one of the best firms in London. There would be a Harley in one garage and a BMW state-of-the-art bike in the other. The picture built up in a few seconds, all pell-mell but vivid and desirable as a future, even to the extent of getting his old mother out of that damp rat trap in the valley and buying her a proper set of teeth.

‘Shake on it, then.’

Alfred was glad to, because though Garry was only a jobbing plumber, he had a notion that he would see better work from him than anybody else.

‘Another option’ — Keith had been some time thinking about the matter — ‘could be to wait till half-past seven in the morning, then make a run for it. The blizzard might have lessened, but at least it’ll be light enough to see where we’re going. Five hours will give us plenty of time to kit ourselves out for the elements.’

‘That might be cutting it a bit fine, because what if they put the clocks on during the night?’ Eileen joked. ‘I mean to say, it would just be our luck, wouldn’t it, not to have heard the news? All of us arsing around at half-past seven when — bang, we’re dead.’

‘They don’t alter the clocks in the middle of winter,’ Lance said.

Whether they were dazzled by his expertise or stunned by his imbecility, Keith found the simple badinage hopeful in facing whatever peril came with the blast. But the more optimistic he was, the most despondent also. He would have as much talking to do to the police as Daniel when they came. I had no intention of killing her, I just wanted to give her a good shaking because her words filled me with an agony impossible to bear. Accident it was, manslaughter if you like, but not murder.

She obsessed him more now than when she had been alive, unless he was talking. ‘To run for it would be the worst possible thing. Perhaps I do sound like a parson, but I don’t want to get you either to Heaven or Hell one minute earlier than necessary. Nor do I want to go, before my time. Even a blizzard has its charms.’

She loved him. He was a card, a comedian no less, no tension in him while addressing them. He didn’t altogether believe in his talk, you could tell (or she could), but he was thinking and at the same time trying to entertain them so that they wouldn’t be frightened.

‘If we went out now, in which direction would we go? The nearest farm, according to Fred, is half a mile or more. To struggle through twelve-foot drifts, which was what the newsflash said they were, before the batteries of the radio ran out, would mean death from exposure. And those who wouldn’t be able to keep up, what would we do with them? Leave them behind?’

‘I could climb on the roof and send an SOS with a flashlight,’ Lance said. ‘Somebody might see it, and pass it on.’

‘Yes, God,’ Garry said. ‘He knows Morse code. The only thing is, I thought He’d snuffed it.’

Daniel’s words were wrenched out because it was more than any bodily pain to keep them in. ‘He can’t be dead, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Neither would you. It could only be God who brought us to this.’ Who else had held the friable arms of the timing mechanism apart for so long? If he didn’t think that God alone was responsible he would run for the wall and bang out his brains in despair, though he felt something near terror at having broken his silence when all rights to do so had been taken away. ‘God decided, and drew us together for His higher purpose, just as He made me do what I did. Everything that happens is part of His scheme.’

His words were English, but the outlandish language grated so painfully on Aaron he wanted to get up and strangle him. Perhaps the hatred was from a déjà vu dose of his own slipshod way of expression when he was young and writing poems, something he had ceased to do when the future closed its doors. The flash of similarity blinded him to pity unless, he thought, it was pain from the rotting tooth once more on the attack, but if so what had made it reassert itself? Calm so far, enjoying the rarity of being marooned (in any case, he had problems to solve), his sudden craving for violence against Daniel was only stoppable with the greatest effort.

Not everyone bothered to hold it back. A heavy ashtray spun by Daniel’s head and hit the lintel of the fireplace. ‘You shitbag!’ Garry’s effort made him gasp at the pain in his leg, and he was even more enraged because he had missed. ‘You’ll be in jail soon, not fucking church. Or you’ll be dead, if I have owt to do with it.’

‘No, I won’t.’ When Sally tried to stop him talking he pushed her away so forcefully that her back struck the chair. ‘If anyone should try to get us out of this, it ought to be me.’

Parsons peered at the maelstrom of snow. After twenty years down the pit his ears could pick out any sound that was different, and he swore he heard the churning blades of a helicopter. Yet it couldn’t be, came from his fantasy of hope perhaps. Pressing an ear to cold glass, the uproar of the blizzard heightened the ante of cyclonic wildness.

Daniel fell from Keith’s push at his chest. ‘There’s nothing you can do to help. If you want to be safe, stay quiet.’

Sally was not part of such people, never had been. She belonged with Daniel, sat by him to be loathed as part of him, marked off from those who thought themselves much in the right but were as culpable as anyone because all they had in mind was to kill. Daniel had done what he had done out of an idealism he had never clearly understood. ‘It’s your responsibility that nothing happens to him, and I’ll hold you to it, believe me.’

‘Not a duty I take too heavily, I might tell you.’ Keith turned from her. ‘The next question is whether there are any bomb-disposal experts among us, who can fight their way across the yard and tackle that tangle of wires and fuses? Well, I knew it wasn’t on, but I had to ask. It’s the only thing that would save us, though even a bomb-disposal expert can make the wrong move.’

Parsons wished somebody would, in his lower moments, because what could he say when he got back to Ashfield? His life was finished, so he didn’t much care whether he did or not. There would be nothing but scorn from the lads, even if they didn’t have him prosecuted, and there were more than a few who would want to. I’m over the hill, rotting from the inside out, and I can feel it speeding up, doing its stuff with every minute that passes. If I had to run a hundred yards for a bus I would drop dead before grabbing the rail. Twenty years ago, when I was ripping out coal underground, and was a dedicated servant of the Union, I made up my mind I would get to the top in that set-up at least, but somewhere on the mountainside of endeavour I began donkeying around in circles. I’m bloody sure that was a helicopter, unless it was a chimney falling down in the wind, or drainpipes cracking under the weight of snow. And then what did I do? Spent the Union’s money in a Soho club, fifty quid for a bottle of stuff they called wine but tasted like the worst vinegar in England, and then off to bed with a woman who wanted to whip me because I couldn’t get it up. ‘It’s nourishment I want,’ I said, ‘not punishment.’ On my way to meet Jenny at the station I found she’d robbed me blind. Christ, I’ll tell ’em it fell out of my back pocket. ‘I was mugged,’ I’ll say. ‘Don’t kill me just for that.’

TWENTY-EIGHT

Keith stood by the fire, a hand in his pocket as if it were full of ideas and he couldn’t decide which to bring out next. ‘The question is,’ he said, ‘whether one of us can’t get to the nearest house or phone box to explain matters, and call a bomb-disposal specialist in by helicopter.’

Fred’s map, fished from what he called The Information Drawer, was an old one-inch clothbacked provisional edition hurried out for use by the Home Guard during the Second World War, a relic picked off a junk barrow in the market for ten pence. All but falling to pieces, its only use was in showing that if you went left from the hotel the road undulated for miles until it reached a valley and the nearest village. If you turned right it did the same for an equal number of miles and led right into the fangs of the gale.

‘We’re up the creek,’ Eileen said, ‘without even a soup spoon.’

Joking in face of peril, feeling no responsibility for getting out of it but waiting for someone to tell you what to do, must be paradise to them, but for Keith such a state would be torment. To them it was normal, but he had been born to show people and think for people and, when necessary, to lead people. At such times he was most alive: people trusted him, and wallowing in their dependence was like a tonic — though finally he must justify their faith.

Your secrets were your own, until you let them out. Look into people’s eyes and, however frank you appeared, they could know nothing unless you told them. In a crisis, when it mattered to conceal what you were thinking (so as to mull more effectively over your choice of what to say), you were one person hidden and for yourself alone, then another for those with whom you had to deal. So he could hope to be their saviour, while guilty of murder. Such thoughts were necessary for his strength of purpose — pausing only to seem more caring to his audience, as if to imply that a half-concealed scholarliness mixed with the man of action.

His tone was one of impatience at Eileen’s remark. ‘Not too far up it. I saw a pair of skis in the junk room. They weren’t exactly new, but the rats hadn’t eaten the straps as they did the leather of the Assyrians’ shields. The runners look straight, so the only question is who, apart from myself, is able to ski?’

The bikers couldn’t, he was sure, and Aaron would be too old to plunge through such conditions. As for Parsons and Alfred, the same for them with knobs on, even if they could ski, which he doubted.

‘I can,’ Sally said. ‘Ever since I was old enough to stand on my feet. My parents insisted I do everything: type, swim, drive, ride — and also ski. I can do it as well as anyone here, if not better. The snow must be above the hedges by now. It should be plain sailing.’

Keith remembered a white-out near Bluedale Tarn, when with all his weight and strength (and experience) he could hardly stand against the wind which was blowing from the direction he needed to go. The only way was to have the wind with him, though it pushed and buffeted, and more than doubled the distance to safety, with moments when he thought he would never reach his hotel. A local farmer lost in the same storm was found dead a month later, in spite of building himself a shelter in the lee of a wall.

The expression was eager in her offer of help, but he considered it useless to sacrifice her. ‘It’s nothing for me,’ she went on. ‘I can do it easily. It’s a brilliant idea.’

He sought a way to refuse that would not drive her to try more persuasion, which he might not be able to resist. He understood why she pleaded, and even felt envious at such a gallant way of cancelling her mistake with Daniel, but he couldn’t let her absolve herself at the cost of her life. He told them about Bluedale Tarn. ‘If the wind drops, I’ll think about it. Nobody can live in this weather, skis or not.’

‘You don’t trust me.’ She struggled not to cry or swear, or do both. Her face was dirty and bruised where Wayne had hit her. He mustn’t let that happen again. All of them looked like street cleaners in for their tea break, except for Percy and Fred. ‘You think I’ll get to safety, then leave you in the lurch,’ she said. ‘What a mind you have. As if I could leave him to your rotten schemes. You don’t know anything, however clued-up you might be in other ways.’

Gwen had come back to life in her, so to kill again would be easy. Let her have the skis, and go. Her death wouldn’t be on his conscience. But the matter was finished, and he felt better at disposing of it. Experience had scored into him that in the face of irrelevant accusations you either stayed quiet or set further talk off at a tangent. ‘The map was printed in 1942, so I wonder if any new buildings have been put up since? There could be a place closer than we think.’

‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ Fred told him, ‘and I know the area well.’

‘You can’t put me off,’ she said. ‘I still want to go.’

‘Have a dekko through the window,’ Parsons told her. The blizzard mocked their isolation, bumping around salients and inlets with the noise of despairing travellers trying to reach safety. ‘Or the back door. It’s an inferno.’

‘She wants to run the whole show,’ Garry said. ‘Keith’s the only one as could make it, but he can’t go because the gaffer’s got to stay at the controls.’

They were silent and waiting, but he hardly knew how to proceed, lit a cigarette and looked at their faces, features shifty and uncertain where they had once been clear. He assumed his to show the same puzzling blend of uncertainty.

‘It sounds like the wolves are after us,’ Lance said. ‘Eh, Ferret, what rhymes with wolf? I’m in the mood to write a song.’

‘There are no rhymes any more.’ Daniel took the cigarette that Sally had lit. ‘Neither rhyme nor reason. We’re beyond all that. Whatever he says, nothing will succeed.’

Daniel’s unwillingness to hide his glee enraged Wayne, who opened the short blade out of a Leatherman pouch and jabbed it towards him. ‘If we try, and whatever it is doesn’t work, you’ll die. I’ll make sure of that. I’ll slit your fucking throat.’

Keith, not as successful at keeping anxiety from his face as he thought, wondered how long he would be able to hold them in check and, if the final panic took the form of a blood bath, whose side he would be on. ‘Tell your boy friend to keep quiet,’ he said to her.

She smoothed her cheek over Daniel’s lips, held his hand and whispered that she loved him. His tormented features filled her with a longing to be with him where they could renew the delight of when she had known him yet not known him. He wanted to die and didn’t care, lived in a void and loved no one, which was why she would protect him even at the cost of her life, would die with him because there could be no life after him, no going back into the appalling emptiness of the past.

Percy startled them with his razor-honed pronouncement. ‘Them as can, do. Them as can’t, teach.’

‘I thought you were asleep, Father?’

‘I never sleep, you know that. A pit engineer catnaps. He can be called out any minute. When you turn the gas on, water pours out.’

He hated those who laughed. ‘Your mind’s wandering again,’ Alfred said.

‘And your brain’s zigzagging around the maypole if you think that plumber’s any good. You’d be better off getting a monkey from the zoo. He might be all right on a motorbike, but he couldn’t plumb a Wendy house.’

Keith wondered who would want to go on living with a father like that, with the chance that you would end up like him. Maybe others among them were also thinking that the effort wouldn’t be worth it. He had to persuade them otherwise by unrolling the last possible option.

Alfred seemed about to put his father into a sleep he wouldn’t wake up from. The old man’s only safe, Aaron thought, because we’re here, otherwise Alfred would have smothered him by now, though if we weren’t here he wouldn’t be so embarrassed and want to kill him. ‘I don’t need your opinion about my business,’ Alfred said, exasperated. ‘So go back to sleep.’

Garry had known it was a dream, to fix up a whole house and get himself into business. Even so, if anybody died in the snow, should they ever get that far, he hoped it would be the old man. The idea of the house had been good in hiding the pain in his thigh, which now came back as if hooked hands were inside and trying to rip a way out.

‘If you had taken my advice from the beginning you’d have been a lot richer than you are today,’ Percy went on. ‘And who was it got you started, anyway? Me. Who told you what to do and how to do it? Me. And who lent you five thousand quid to get your first lorries? Me. Without interest, as well, because I never expected to see it back.’

‘You did get it back, though, didn’t you?’ Alfred said mildly.

‘After twelve bloody years I did. You held off as long as you could. You had it in the bank making interest, because you hoped I would die, and you needn’t bother then. But I didn’t die, did I? And I won’t, either. I’ll see you out, you see if I don’t.’

Aaron stood. ‘Lay a few more bottles out, Fred. A double whisky for me.’ Not so much for conviviality as for his tooth. Tormented by draughts and chill, Hell was where you had toothache, and Paradise where you didn’t.

Fred was pleased to take orders, middle of the night or not. That was what he was here for, such action a sign of normal life, placing glasses on a tray and balancing their weights to keep it even, a tuneless whistle at the thought of the till ringing. Hidden from them at the other end of the bar, he told himself that if Doris was here to share the work, life would be fine. But she wasn’t and, considering the mess, it was just as well. If she were here she would never stop nagging — and I would never stop swearing. If only I hadn’t learned to swear! But then, I shouldn’t have been six years a sailor, because sailors swear, though when you think about it, who doesn’t? The only reason women don’t swear as much as men is that they nag and men don’t.

He flung the white towel over his arm, scrawled fingernails through his hair, took a sip of Aaron’s whisky as if to be sure it was a good brand, and strode into the lounge like one of the best waiters in the business.

TWENTY-NINE

How does a common fly get to where it is? Why does it land on any particular spot? A big black confident muff-footed specimen rested on the back of Keith’s hand, hairs for a jungle and between the veins for valleys, a summer fly that had survived the autumn in some warm cupboard and now came out sensing that there was no safe place even for a scavenging fly.

He couldn’t understand why everyone looked so cold: caps on, woolly hats donned, coats pulled together, overcoats buttoned and belted. He felt neither one nor the other, more proof (should he need it, though he forced himself not to) that he was different.

‘Our only hope is to start the van,’ he said, after they had settled with their drinks, ‘and get it as far from the hotel as possible. Fred tells me there are spades and tools in one of the stables. Two or three hundred yards should be enough. Then we shelter in the strongest room to escape the worst of the blast. I’ll drive the van myself, but I’ll need volunteers with spades and mattocks to clear the way.’

He had come to the point aimed for from the beginning, the cul-de-sac of action in which he hoped to find the dream of youth which youth had waited to spring on him like a giant well-poisoned cobra in middle age, something about to happen which would erase the significance of all that had gone before. He had wanted such an event for a long time, had sensed it was inevitable and never been unduly worried whether he won through or not, since it was hard to imagine life after the snow. A dream beyond the dream could not exist when the present was so important. He wondered if the others felt anything similar, or would object to him drawing them into his adventure of redemption. They were talking all at once, and he let them go on, because that also was part of working towards the final plan at his own circumlocutory rate.

‘I’ll drive the van,’ Aaron said.

‘Another fucker wants the George Cross.’ Wayne spat. ‘I’m willing to dig, though. I’ll dig from here to Australia to spite that bomb-carrying fuckpig. I once dug my old man’s garden over in one day. He swore I couldn’t, so I bet him five quid I could. He thought I was as soft as shit because I was a biker. I knew the cunning old bastard only wanted to get the garden dug over for a fiver, but I proved I could do it, all the same.’

‘I don’t care what I do,’ Lance said. ‘Dig, drive, dance a jig. I’m willing to get at the wheel, though, because I’m a biker. When you’re doing a ton on the motorway, every second can be your last, and who wants to live for ever?’

‘Everything in the van must be melting into a jelly,’ Daniel said. Never getting to the drop-off point was the peril of the trade, a flash, and only a few bits in a bucket were left, after a couple of days finding them. He considered himself back in the comity of cave-land society now that the last hope had been proposed. ‘You would be wiser not to listen to your guru, and try getting through the blizzard to safety. It would be better to die in the cold and be in one piece when they found you, than have your bits scattered so that they’ll never know who was who if they do.’

‘We’ll need as many spare lights as we can get for those who go in front to clear the snow,’ Keith said. ‘Also, wear every scrap of clothing you can wrap around your bodies. Are there any chains we can put on the wheels?’

Fred sat writing a list of the wanted items. ‘Not for a van. The wheels are too big. We can try them, though.’

Daniel pushed Sally’s hand from his mouth. ‘You won’t even get to the gate.’

Fingers moved among bottles in the half-dark — wine, beer and whisky — chose the solid neck of a champagne bottle and grasped it as firmly as to uproot a tree. Keith at the window tried to assess their prospects, but behind the wind there was discordant singing, like a woman wailing her heart out, calling him. At the back of the wind, a multitude of people on the moors and hillsides howled as if a terrible disaster were about to overtake them. He was hypnotized by the noise that went on and on intolerably, but he stood it out, couldn’t turn from the cold glass, forced himself to listen, moments like days, to the endless wailing of cosmic despair breaking the heart of that part of the world which thought itself safe, as if all beyond the hotel was a vast Pompeii being earthquaked out of existence. A real and immediate scream filled the room, a heavy object smashing dully against flesh.

Daniel’s blood raced him to the floor.

‘He opened his trap once too often.’ The jagged glass went again at the injured head. ‘I told you to belt up.’

Parsons and Aaron pulled him away, and Wayne sat down but kept the bottle in reach as if for another bout at the time of his choosing. Keith stood over him, staring the crazed face out, the mind behind peeled of all sense.

‘He asked for it.’ Wayne burned bright with indignation at Daniel’s gloating pessimism. ‘If he opens his mouth again, he’s had it. We don’t need him any more. I feel like a massacre. Fuck the van. Let’s have fun. We’ll fuck the place up before the van does. Let’s take a few happy walkers with us.’

‘We’ve got to stick together.’ Garry spoke softly, and Keith was appalled at his pallor when he held a light close, glad the candles had been so low on the illumination of his suffering. ‘We’ll shift that snow,’ Garry said. ‘We didn’t have so many tools when we moved the van before, did we? If we wreck the place we’re on that Daniel’s side. We got the van here, didn’t we? Well then, we’ll get it away again.’

Hands over her head, sinking to the floor, Sally knew there was nothing to be done, either for Daniel or for herself, only to go down at his scream of pain and despair. They would murder him, and then kill her, both lost if they didn’t run away, no one willing to help. The hideaway under her arms and inside her closed eyes was dark and warm, a last protectorate formed by cutting out sound and light, as the howl from someone she hoped was not herself went on and on.

Fred came in with a bowl of warm water and a pile of hand towels, busy as on a summer’s day when a kid had gone uncontrollably headfirst from one of the swings in his garden. He had been meaning to cull stones out of the playground, but then gravel was just as bad to the palms and knees of a falling child. ‘In my business you have to be a jack of all trades: plumber, carpenter, electrician, even a doctor, like now. Come on, Mr Daniel, let’s see the damage. We’ll soon have the bleeding stopped. But that screaming’s a bit of a nuisance, isn’t it? What’s got into her?’

‘Kill the bitch,’ Garry said faintly. ‘She’s getting on my wick with her racket.’

Fred pulled Sally’s arm out of her lock, the flat of his hand ringing against her face. She stared, then discovered where she was. ‘You ought to be all right now, miss. I’m sorry I had to do that, but I’m sure you’ll understand now you’re back to normal.’

Lance stretched himself and reached for his leathers. The jacket was heavy with studs and belt but Jenny held it high enough for his arms to go in, getting her amiable strong guy ready for his labours. Enid and Eileen fitted up Wayne with trousers little slimmer than his legs, boots well zipped and buckled to the knees, jacket fastened with press studs and thick belt, helmet with visor set on his head. ‘Look at that fussy old bastard dabbing at that little cut I gave Old Ferret with the bottle. He’ll still be at it when the balloon goes up.’

Fred scissored another strip off to tie the bandage, then stood back to view his work. ‘You’ll be all right now.’

‘I wish you’d stop my leg bleeding,’ Garry said, ‘instead of wasting your time on that pair, though if he’s as all right as you said I was he’ll be dead in a couple of hours. His troubles are over, if he did but know it.’

‘He’s right,’ Enid said. ‘Look at that blood on the floor.’

A pool had spread in the shadow, and when Fred took off the swabbings blood pulsed bright red from the wound. ‘We’ll do a tourniquet. I’ve seen worse at sea.’

‘I suppose you dragged the poor fuckers behind the ship in salt water,’ Garry said.

‘Only for a week.’

Keith lifted the telephone on the bar, in case it had mended itself, but there was no sound. He hammered it against the desk.

‘That’s always the first to go,’ Fred told him. ‘That, and the power. I meant to get a generator in last year.’

‘Then you would have had enough light to operate on my leg,’ Garry said. ‘No thanks.’

Fred tied the ligature, and the bleeding stopped.

Which was good, Keith thought, unless gangrene’s the result. ‘We’ll look at you when we get back.’

Percy stood up, staring ahead, clean and spruce as if he had just finished a long dolling-up for a Saturday night at the pub with his wife. ‘Aren’t you going to take me? I fancy a walk on Bournemouth’s lovely sands. The sun’s coming through the window, which is funny, with the blizzard going on. Still, I’ll bet some lovely nurses are sunbathing out there in their birthday suits.’

In one swift walk, before Alfred could get to him, he was stroking Sally’s hair, a grin on his ancient maniacal face, large immaculate teeth fixed in her sight for ever. His hand roamed her shoulders and went down to a breast, gripped so hard she cried out and pushed him away, the fall-out of his body shaking the floor.

Eileen looked at Keith, and he felt that to kiss her would be too much like saying goodbye, an impression he didn’t care to give. He smiled and touched her hand. ‘We won’t do it all at one go. We’ll have to come back for more help.’

‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve never loved anybody so much in my life, honest. I know that now.’

‘I feel the same. Don’t worry.’ And that would have to do, as he turned from a sweeter farewell than he had ever received from Gwen, or given her. But then, I never loved her — though in the beginning he had been infatuated, and eventually obsessed by her as she wove and stitched and knitted him into her possessive web, and he had gone along with it, not knowing that one day he would kill her. Or maybe I always knew, he told himself, as they went into the blizzard.