You can walk but you can’t run.
She liked it here. The quiet. All those early years in front of speakers jacked up so high she was lucky not to have permanent damage to her ears. In Glasgow once this journalist had recognized her, a stringer for the NME. Begged her to let him do her story. Not talking a magazine piece here, I mean the real thing. A book. Built around you. The history of British Rhythm and Blues.
She hadn’t told that story or any other. Not even after the trial when they’d all been round her like flies round the honeypot. The Sun. The News of the World. Money she’d been offered. My Life with a Villain. My Life with a Face. Some tart who reckoned she’d screwed him silly in her scabby little bedsit had sold this yarn about champagne and foursomes and how Prior hadn’t been able to get enough. Well, after all the years of virtual abstinence he’d practiced with her, maybe that was the only part Ruth had believed.
It was late. The dog had finished its food and was waiting, bemused, by the door. The tea was cold and stewed. Ruth changed her shoes, buttoned up her coat.
The roll of the sea as it folds back against the sand. If Prior walked up to me now, out of this long dark, Ruth thought, what would I say or do?
Returning, as she neared the sea wall, she heard the quick scratch of a match and, moments later, saw the soft glow of a cigarette. Just kids, she thought, doing some cold courting.
Resnick’s card was still in the pocket of her skirt and she dropped it onto the kitchen table as she walked through. For fifteen, twenty minutes she sat with her feet up, listening to Radio Two: Brian Matthew more relaxing than another bout of Gradgrind.
“Come on,” she said, and with its usual enthusiasm the dog trailed her up the stairs to bed.
On the outer edge of the city, nights before, traveling back, Resnick had pulled across to the side of the road and cut the engine. Lights splayed out before him like a net. A feeling, not quite pain, had caught low in his throat. His instinct had been to slip a fresh cassette into place but inside his head Lester was already playing “Ghost of a Chance.”
unseen, not quite unbidden,
someone has just slipped in.
Ruth was vaguely aware of the dog paddling off downstairs but it was such a familiar sound she never really woke: what did wake her was the sharp, sudden sound of tearing close to her head.
“What’s that?” Jumping up with a start, blinking into the near dark.
“That,” the familiar voice said, “was the sound of your dog’s throat being cut.”
“Bastard!” she sobbed, reaching sideways for the light.
Beside the bed, Rains smiled down. “Don’t worry, Ruthie. It was only this.” One of her shirts which she’d left hanging over a chair was dangling from his hand, ripped from tail to neck.
“The dog! Where’s …?”
“Downstairs sleeping, not to fret.”
“He wouldn’t …”
“Hungry. Gave him a little something to eat.”
“If you’ve …”
“Just a few hours. He’ll be right as rain.” Rains smiled. “Funny that, isn’t it? Always makes me smile. What’s so right about rain.” Never taking his eyes from her, he sat on the side of the bed. “Always when you least expect it. Forgot the umbrella, raincoat in the car.” He laughed, smiling with his eyes. “Good to see you, Ruthie. You look like shit.”
He scarcely looked older; what age there was, if anything, had made him even better-looking. Too handsome for other people’s good.
“No sense pretending we parted on the best of terms, is there? Even so-I thought some things were all agreed. No true confessions, no stories. No talking out of turn.”
“How did you get here? How did you find me?”
“Ruthie! Used to be a detective, remember?”
“I know what you used to be.”
Rains leaned one hand against the covers, close to her leg. “Followed him. Charlie. Heard he’d had the feelers out, asking questions, and I followed him.”
Ruth glanced away and when she looked back his expression had changed.
“You thought shutting yourself out here would stop people finding you; thought getting that dog would protect you if they did. Well, now you know better. And I know you won’t forget.” His hand moved fast and he had hold of her jaw, fingers pressing hard against the bone. “One thing, when he comes to see you, Prior; if he wants to know what went on between us, if I used you to fit him up, you don’t tell him a thing. Don’t as much as mention my name.” Leaning quickly forward he kissed her on the mouth. “Life’s good, Ruthie. Too much so to have it fucked up by some jealous bastard, fresh out of prison, harboring a grudge.”
She stayed there for a long time after Rains had gone, allowing the warmth gradually to seep back into her skin. Only then did she put on her dressing gown and go downstairs and kneel beside the dog, unconscious on the kitchen floor; sit, with its head resting in her lap, until it stirred with the first light glinted off the sea.
Forty-Eight
Resnick woke at two to the sound of breathing: lay there for second after second, aware of the heart pumping against his ribs, that the fevered breathing that had woken him had been his own. He was layered with sweat. The fear was not his own.
a tideswell like moving bone
Like Monk fingering “These Foolish Things”
from broken glass
He got up and didn’t switch on the light. The cat, knowing it was too early, recircled itself at the foot of the bed and closed its eyes. Because the fear was not for himself, it was no less real. He stood beneath the shower and the sound that he heard was water dragging back across the shore. He knew that Ruth had no phone: knew that he could phone the pub and rouse the landlord, call the constabulary in the nearest town. Knew, without knowing why, without questioning, that whatever had happened, that part of it, was through.
Deliberately, he dressed, made coffee, buttered toast, broke cheese. Some of the coffee he drank, the remainder he poured into a flask. If he drove fast he would beat daybreak. His headlights cut channels across brick and stone. The only fear now was what he would find.
Ruth had stayed in the kitchen with the dog, cradling it, until, at last, its eyes rolled open and, moments later, it shuffled unsteadily to its feet. Now the animal lay curled on the battered settee in the living room and Ruth sat, trying to read, with her umpteenth cup of tea.
It snagged at the back of her mind, like a hangnail, that she should slip on her shoes and find her purse, walk the few yards towards the sea shore and dial the number Resnick had left her. She was loath to admit to herself that part of the reason she didn’t do this was she was afraid to take that first step outside the house.
Yet why?
If it were Rains that she feared most he had proved to her how easy it was for him to magic himself inside her house. If he had wanted to do her physical harm he could; if he wanted to harm her in the future he could again. She had no doubt of this.
But maybe Rains was not the one she really feared.
She would call Resnick and say what? This friend of yours was here threatening me. What did he do? He tore one of my old shirts. Ruth smiled. Resnick and Rains, had they been friends? It seemed unlikely. She thought that to Rains, admitting to a friend would have been a sign of weakness, strictly to be discouraged. Friendship meant give and take and life, for Rains, was all in the taking.
She was back in the kitchen, refilling the kettle, when she heard the car approaching.
“Do you always act on your hunches?” Ruth asked. They had walked up away from the beach, on to a green knoll that never seemed to reach its peak. Off to the west woods became fields and fields became lost in hazy mist. Squinting along the shoreline into the early light they could see the silhouettes of castles, bulked against the sky.