‘All good things come to an end. I’ve been a long time in this place,’ he said. ‘I stayed in Chicago once. I went to the airport to meet professional contacts from Sweden. They came off the plane jittering with nerves for they had seen too many movies about tommy guns and Al Capone and gangland killings. I laughed and told them I’d never heard a gun fired in anger in that city. People I knew who had been born there had never heard one. We walked out the front entrance and a car hurtled towards us, police units followed on both sides blocking its escape, men piled out firing from behind walls and opened car doors. Screams, yells, curses, everyone running for shelter, throwing themselves down. I stood there alone among the bullets, too astonished to react. My Swedes stayed in their hotel room doing business until it was time for their plane home . . . They didn’t believe a word I said after that.’
It was a story you would tell to make people laugh, but he went out without a backward glance. His steps limped away through the flat’s stillness.
‘I don’t hear your wife,’ I said. ‘Your little girl is very quiet.’
He would not look at me and that frightened me. To avoid me he went to the picture over the bed. The photograph had been taken in a battery chicken factory. The chickens hung upside down, stripped and obscene, a line of them hooked by the feet to a moving belt. Two large smiling women stood behind them, their hands reaching out. Very human, naked and detestable.
‘Beth’s always hated coming in here.’ He put out a massive hand and tried to straighten the picture. It resisted and the bottom splintered off under his fingers. The magazine photograph had been stuck on the wall and four strips of wood glued round it to give the appearance of a frame. ‘I’ve broken it.’
‘Primo . . . Primo? Are you going to kill me?
‘I took you back to the farm to your mammy,’ he said bitterly, looking at the broken picture. ‘I decided that myself. But you couldn’t stay there.’
‘You should’ve let that wardrobe kill me. It would have been easier.’
‘Ya poor bloody clown,’ he said without anger.
‘Brond was lying. He’ll let them have their trial. Just the way they want it. Couldn’t you hear that he was lying?’
‘Don’t whine,’ he said. ‘Keep your dignity. That way it’ll be easier for both of us.’
I crossed to the closed window, though I knew we were too high for that escape to be possible. From so high, it took a moment to realise what I was seeing. This room must be at the front of the building we had entered from the rear. I looked down on a curve of river and a bridge. Sodden heavy rain was threshing down after the days of heat. Primo had learned to kill in Malaya, giant hands choking tiny men in blue pyjamas. ‘If you had information we needed – that might save a mate’s life, like – sure Ah’d torture ye,’ an uncle said one night, reminiscing. A man you could rely on, like Primo. Little men like children in pyjamas. A child might be killed for seeing something he was not meant to see, for overhearing something he should not have heard.
‘I saw Brond murder a boy down there.’ I knew I was talking of Primo’s son. ‘I can give you the day and the date. I was down there and saw the boy pull himself up on the rail. Brond – but I didn’t know his name then – came over the bridge.’ I spoke slowly and clearly, giving evidence in a matter of life and death. ‘Brond put his hand under the boy and lifted him over. I can still hear the noise he made when he fell on the platform underneath.’
Behind me was utterly still. Why should a man not kill someone who had even seen such a thing?
‘I’ll never forget it. I looked over – I could see he was dead. There was nothing I could do. And then afterwards I was ill.’
When I found the courage to turn, the room was empty. I went through the deserted flat. Just after I had seen them the woman and child must have left taking the suitcases with them. In the tiny living room the ornaments still sat on the sideboard; a child’s schoolbag was on the couch with books and an open jotter scattered beside it. I wondered where the family would go now; I wondered what organisation claimed Primo as a member, how Brond had infiltrated them, how he had become accepted. That he would come to dominate them I accepted as natural. I wondered how much the little girl understood and if she had liked the man who visited and stayed with them in their home.
A noise faint but persistent crept into my attention. I walked out of the open front door of the flat and stepped on to the factory’s upper gallery. More clearly the sound came, drumming, rattling, going on without a pause as I came down the iron stair. After the second landing, the entire factory came in view as the stair carried me back and forward in front of three windows that went down from ceiling to floor. The floor was in shadow and the light was stained yellow by some chemical that had eaten into the glass. I moved cautiously across aisles of metal pillars until I saw Primo. In his fist the handle disappeared and as he shook the little door helplessly to and fro the whole frame of the exit trembled. He looked at me without seeming to know or care who I was. ‘It won’t open,’ he said and stepped aside as if it was natural for me to try. When the handle did not turn normally, I reversed the direction and the lock released at once so that the door swung back on us letting Primo pass through the opening I had so easily accomplished.
Rain fell on the cobbled yard. Stepping under its drenched heaviness, sweat broke out on my sides. I walked through an echoing pend into a street of blank shopfronts and boarded windows that led me round two sides of the factory to the main road. When I stopped in the middle of the bridge, I could see high on the wall of the tenement opposite a row of windows. One of them must belong to the apartment. Behind me the downpour smoked on the river and beat against the crooked ladder on the gable wall.
I had turned Primo loose and it was time to search for what I had done.
Twice I passed the place. Just inside the park near a gate a column of undressed stone rose like a maned lion into the head of Carlyle: the second time I saw the body lying inside the low railing that surrounded the statue. Sprawled on the grass, it could have been an old man drunk on cheap wine or meths; but I recognised the long overcoat and he lay too still for bad dreams. Remembering Kilpatrick and the horror of Kennedy’s death, I felt it unfair that he should lie so peacefully. I heard him saying: We see a victory coming. I couldn’t stop the words, they ran over and over like a tune that drives you mad. There was no one in sight to help and I was afraid to touch him.
A long time later, a policeman came. I tried but I could not understand what he was asking. He was young like me but he stepped over the railing and touched what lay there. As the body was turned, the black coat which had only been thrown across it slipped off.
I thought it was a trick. I thought it was Brond but that he had put on a last disguise. I stepped over the rail and went down on my knees.
Nothing about him was certain.
Above me, the policeman prayed to the machine he held in his hand. I looked up at him from where I knelt. Watchfully, as he spoke, he took a careful step back.
What do you call someone who sticks his finger up a Scotsman’s arse?
Wi the wig-wig-waggle o the kilt: another crazy tune.
‘What do you call a man who sticks his finger up an Englishman’s arse?’ I asked aloud, but the constable stared back in dismay.
He did not realise that it was a joke. He was right, of course. You always spoiled a joke if you changed the ending.
Ah’ve been hurt masel.
Now the rain was heavy. It soaked the ground and turned it black. It streamed down the policeman’s face. It ran in stone tears down the lion face of the prophet.
It fell like a judgement not on Brond but on Primo, the Scottish soldier, dead in the mud. But then when had it ever been Brond?