That was when I punched him. Blood flew out from his mouth and he fell backwards on to the floor, looking up at me but keeping very still. His lips had burst on his teeth.
There wasn’t anywhere you could hide from history, even when that was what you had settled for.
In the morning, I wakened with a stiff neck. I had slept with my head on the table. The room was empty, but as I climbed up the steps from the basement to the street I heard a noise and, looking down, saw Donald Baxter swaying with a glass in his hand.
‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘Stories end in corruption. Everybody’s does. But you’re like me. One of the sad ones. The worm gets to us early.’
He wept a single tear of malice.
It wasn’t far to the Kennedy’s house. Even walking slowly, it didn’t take me long to get there. I let myself in and went through all the downstairs apartments. I opened the door of one room and had such a vivid memory of the night I was ill that I expected Jackie to be there and Kennedy at the end of a shaft of light watching us. On the carpet in the parlour there was an overturned Guinness bottle and a tumbler.
As I came back into the hall, a man rushed downstairs at me in a jiggle of gold glasses, plump waistcoat, a squeal of ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I live here.’
‘Not now, you don’t;’ a fat man settling, as he worked it out, into a merely professional wariness. ‘Were you one of the lodgers? Haven’t you heard? Mr Kennedy and his wife are selling up.’
‘You’ve seen him—’
He would say yes and Kennedy would be alive.
‘There’s no doubt the property is for sale. We have authorisation from their agent. They are going abroad.’
I did not have to ask for a description of that agent. I had seen those smooth young men of Brond’s. Perhaps it had been the one who took Jackie to Edinburgh, talking softly to her in the car.
‘I’d like to wash,’ I said.
‘I should really ask for some proof of identity.’
‘Just to wash. I’ll collect my stuff later.’
He looked at the blood on my outheld arm and stood back from the stairs.
Sometimes you need to wash more than to eat. I stripped to the waist and took my time, pouring cool water over the dirt and sweat. In my room I put on a clean shirt. Someone had piled my clothes and books in the middle of the floor.
When I came down, the man said, ‘I’m not sure that you should still have a key.’
He did not manage to sound like a man who would insist.
In the garden outside there was a ‘For Sale’ board. Perhaps it had been put up while I was inside.
‘I’d like a lift.’
‘A lift?’
‘I’ve no money. If you give me a lift, it would save me walking. I have a weak ankle and it’s too hot to walk.’
To my surprise, he let me into his car and when I told him where I wanted to go he had to pass it on the way to his next desirable property. Ten minutes brought us outside Margaret Briody’s house. As I opened her gate, she was coming out of the front door.
‘I didn’t kill Peter.’
Till I heard the words leaving my mouth, I had not known that was what I had come to tell her. She didn’t shut the door but waited as I came along the path. If she was grieving for Kilpatrick, grief wasn’t good for her. She was very pale and pimples at various stages cropped out round her mouth and on her left cheek. As I walked closer, instead of her beauty I saw the yellow sores of squeezed acne.
‘The police wouldn’t have let me go if I’d killed Peter.’ Because of those stupid unexpected pimples, I was quite calm. I coaxed her. ‘That stands to reason, doesn’t it?’
‘Can’t you see I’ve had enough?’
Her tone was dull and tired but in spite of herself the separate notes chimed like water over pebbles. She didn’t try to stop me as I went past her into the house. I thought she would follow me into the front room, but her steps crossed the hall. A door closed.
This was the room where I had surprised Muldoon the night he broke into Margaret’s house: a pair of burglars. I wondered where Muldoon was now. On the table where Margaret had left the note for her parents, a newspaper lay open in a patch of sunlight. I remembered pale fingers of torchlight probing the darkness. Margaret was speaking to someone. I looked at the picture on the front of the newspaper: crowds lining a street, soldiers on horseback, carriages. More than ever, murmuring in the distance her voice was like music.
‘You’d better not be here when Dada gets back,’ she said behind me.
‘Who were you talking to then? Somebody’s here. Your Uncle Liam?’
‘No – I mean yes. My uncle’s here – you’d better go.’
She was a bad liar. I realised there was no one except us in the house.
‘Of course, I’d forgotten the phone. You were using the phone in the bedroom.’
‘Please go away. There’s nothing for you here. I can only ask you.’
‘Do you know what I’d like? I’d like to wait here until your father comes back, and if he has anything to say to me that would be all right, too. You know what happened. He can ask me anything. And when he’s finished I’ll tell him I want to marry you. I’m a university student, I’ll say, and I want to marry your daughter.’
‘You frighten me.’
‘Is that a reason for not getting married?’
‘You’re trying to frighten me,’ she said.
I had not meant it as a threat or a joke. While I spoke I had seen two respectable young people walking up the aisle to get married.
‘I am a university student.’ I held out the idea like a talisman.
‘Have some pity. Don’t you know how I felt about Peter?’
‘I’m not a policeman.’ Kilpatrick had been a policeman, which after all was also one of the professions and respectable. ‘I’m just – My father works on a farm.’ Why did I never tell the whole truth about him? ‘He’s just a labourer. He’s a farm labourer. But you might like him. He’s a kind man. He’d be very impressed by you.’
But not as impressed as he would have been if I could have brought home my expensive whore in her Pringle sweater and soft wool skirt to patronise him in the voice of the gentry. From the beaches of the south and sunlight off ski slopes, the whore’s skin (and what did it matter if it had been a sunlamp in a stinking sauna and massage parlour?) had burnished brown and pure.
‘What’s wrong? If you’re ill, won’t you go?’
‘Everything’s spoiled,’ I said.
We faced one another across the little table. I could have reached out and touched her. In the shop we had slept together and I had touched her then; but afterwards I had held my whore’s little naked breast between my hands, fucked her, watched with her as Brond knelt under the rain of the fat woman’s sweat.
The doorbell rang. After a pause, it started again and did not stop.
‘It doesn’t sound like your father,’ I said. I knew who it was.
‘I asked you to go. I said please go.’
Pretty please.
‘Did he give you a number to ring, just in case I came? He likes to play games, you know. It’s because he gets bored.’
‘Leave me in peace,’ she said.
As I waited for her to let him in, I looked at the high black headline above the newspaper picture. He had been an old man, and whatever he had done probably he had thought it was right. He had been born to it, as my father would say; but, then, hadn’t we all? He hadn’t deserved to be beaten to death in an hotel room, because no one deserved that death. They had given him a fine funeral, though, and he would have appreciated that since it was the kind of thing he valued.
‘Don’t you understand I just want to be left in peace now?’ Margaret Briody said.
Somebody else who wanted to opt out of history.