Still hunched over, one hand on the cabby's gullet, The Fat Controller used the other to free the knot of his green mohair tie. This he then looped around the cabby's neck. Substituting a knee for his other hand, he tied a slip knot in it and settling back in his seat said, ‘Now, my good man, I think you are probably in a better position than formerly to judge what manner of personage you have for a passenger. No, no, don't trouble yourself to apologise’ — the cabby was gurgling for breath — ‘it isn't necessary. I am not a vindictive man, sir, I have no place for such feelings in my nature and indeed I resist such impulses whenever they arise. However, that being said, I engaged you to drive me to Brown's Hotel and that is what I want you to do. In a moment I will release you and we shall resume our journey. But make no mistake about it, should you prove fractious again, I shall not hesitate to utilise this neckwear in garrotting you. Got that?’
The cabby coughed assent. He wasn't a particularly observant man, but one thing he had noticed during the sickening shock of the last few minutes was a peculiarity of The Fat Controller's fingertips. They had no whorls or indentations and, therefore, they would leave no prints.
Released, the cabby worked his way back to the front of the cab and got in. The Fat Controller fed the woollen garrotte through the sliding window and they set off again. The Fat Controller reclined, smoked and read the paper. The cabby, on the end of his lead, drove.
They had the run of the traffic and within thirty minutes the cab was rounding Berkeley Square. The Fat Controller sat forward and, siting a girder-sized arm over the cabby's shoulder, said, ‘Pull down into that underground car-park.’ The cabby did as he was told. The entrance was a long, choking, oily shaft that ran down into the earth at a forty-five-degree angle. At the bottom the attendant's kiosk was empty. Even so, The Fat Controller dropped down in his seat by way of a precaution.
‘Take the ticket.’ Once again, the cabby did as he was told. ‘And pull over to the far side of the level.’ The cab stopped in the concrete corner, which was dark, quite hidden from the kiosk's view by a panel truck. The Fat Controller garrotted the cabby, quickly and with merciful efficiency. ‘I would wager, sir’ — The Fat Controller addressed the cabby's slumped corpse, whilst pulling his suitcase from the back of the cab — ‘that that was as good a death as you could reasonably have expected to have.’ His huge palm essayed an expressive flutter, as he leant in through the driver-door window and contemplated the deflated face. ‘Granted that I can have no idea of what your prospects might have been, but on the sound principle that every man is responsible for the nature of his own countenance, I would wager, sir, that you would never have become a creature capable of those nice distinctions, the contrivance of which serves, as it were, to define refinement.’
With this euphonious eulogy The Fat Controller set off back across the oil-stained floor of the underground car-park, towards the lift. The brown Sansomite suitcase went with him.
Someone had once told The Fat Controller that he bore a distinct resemblance to the character of Gutman, as played by Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. This he relished. The truth is that the similarity was quite superficial. Like the Fat Man, The Fat Controller had an interesting bulk, an unusual kind of fatness. However, while it could conceivably be said of Greenstreet, as it is often said of the fat in general, that he was ‘amazingly graceful’, or ‘surprisingly light on his feet'; and indeed that those feet were ‘really quite elegant’, none of these descriptions could have been applied to The Fat Controller, who really was fat. Fat in a heavy and unrelenting manner. Programmatically fat. Fat as if his mammoth aspect were the result of several, consecutively successful five-year eating plans. Wherever he went The Fat Controller's fat surrounded him and marched with him, like a tight huddle of violent men wearing overcoats.
Another point of dissimilarity; unlike Gutman, The Fat Controller was not a true connoisseur — ultimately he gained no more joy from things than he did from people. Whereas Gutman was prepared to spend a lifetime recovering the black bird, The Fat Controller would have eliminated the entire cast within the first half-reel of the film. The Fat Controller's attitudes were born of an uncompromising pragmatism, which those who met him felt as a peculiar sort of emanation. Whilst Gutman had a magnetic quality that he bolstered with rhetorical flair, The Fat Controller was banal. And if you allowed him the chance to get going in his affected way, he became downright boring very quickly.
The desk clerk at Brown's Hotel was certain that he had seen The Fat Controller somewhere before. There was something familiar but unplaceable about the big man's face. He waited, pen poised over register, while The Fat Controller moved towards him in his gang of flesh.
‘By Jove!’ he exclaimed. ‘Such weather, and in England of all places.’ For an instant, the desk clerk tried to imagine The Fat Controller in still sunnier climes — for some reason he couldn't manage it.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ The desk clerk was easy, consummately so.
‘Oh yes, oh yes indeed.’ He paused, clearly trying to remember some important fact, like his name, for example. He ran the five-pack of wieners that constituted his hand around his collar. ‘I have a reservation.’
‘In what name, sir?’
‘Northcliffe, my man, Samuel Northcliffe. Take a look in your little book.’
Jane Carter was crying in her West Hampstead flat. Crying as the evening sunlight fell in gay bars across the flat's bright patterned interior. She breathed heavily and the mucal reeds lining the wet passages of her head gave off little clarinet cries of loneliness. The tears were prompted by an indigestible bubble of self-pity, which had been swelling up in her all afternoon. Now they had started, the tears steadily gained fresh impetus. Like boulders being pushed down a mountainside, they came rolling and tumbling out from her ducts, each one powered by a different slight, a different hurt, failed relationships and relationships that never were but might have been.
At her feet a mess of knitting fell out from the lip of a plastic bag; blue, green and yellow threads forming a soft circuitry. Thrusting out from amongst them, a wooden knitting needle caught her attention. She snatched it up, losing several hundred careful stitches as she freed it from its fluffy embrasure. Taking the knitting needle in her right hand, like a dagger she pulled up the hem of her black denim dress. Her thighs appeared monstrous to her, damning evidence of her failure to achieve sylph-hood. ‘You're fat! Fat! Fat!’ she exclaimed, with each ‘fat’ digging the sharp tip of the knitting needle into the horrible stuff. The final dig drew blood — and enough pain to stop her crying.
She stood up abruptly and began to dance around the flat, singing discordantly, ‘Oh, I'm so a-lone, so a-lone, so bloody fat and a-lone,’ and as she sang, she wished. Wished for a lover, any lover, a daemon or an incubus — the presence could take her now come what may. She didn't care any more. What do I matter? she concluded. I'm a zero, another poor cow in the herd. I wear certain clothes and certain shoes, I put on certain make-up and use certain sanitary towels and I go to a certain dentist and a certain doctor, because of my bloody certain daddy and certain mummy. That's for sure! With this bleak summation she began to dance, kicking out first one fat (according to her) leg and then the other. In this pitiful self-absorption, she felt herself to be just one amongst a multitude of Janes. All of them standing on their oval crocheted rugs, in their recently converted flats. They all looked the same, they all faced in the same direction and they all threw up their arms. They formed the most highly dispersed Busby Berkeley-style chorus line ever — this phantom army of high-kicking Janes.