17

From force of habit Bean had continued to take delivery of a newspaper after Maurice Clitheroe died, and one day he had come upon an article about sixteen homosexual men convicted of assault for practicing particularly violent sadomasochism. In spite of the participants’ admitted consent all had been sent to prison.

Bean heartily agreed with this verdict. In his view, consent or no consent, people needed protection from others’ perversions, and he, he told himself, should know. But he was disgusted to find this sort of thing in a newspaper, reminding him of what he hoped to have put behind him forever. Anyone might read it and get ideas that otherwise wouldn’t have crossed their minds. That was the last time he was going to read that paper, or indeed any paper. What, after all, was the telly for but to provide a pleasanter and easier-on-the-eye alternative to all these Timeses and Daily thises and thats?

Concentration wasn’t required to nearly the same extent. You could get up and make yourself a cup of tea or fetch in a cress and Marmite sandwich and when you got back it was still merrily spilling out the news, same faces, same music, and if the pictures were different you hardly noticed, you couldn’t remember what the last ones had been. Thus it was that, although Bean saw all about the murder on Primrose Hill, knew the victim was another vagrant, once again impaled on railing spikes, he had been out in the kitchen making a mug of Earl Grey when the man was identified. He hadn’t been much interested. If he thought about it at all it was to reflect that the police hadn’t caught Cahill’s killer and that the chances were they didn’t try all that hard, weren’t bothered when the victim was one of those beggars.

He had breakfast television on while he ate his breakfast. It was orange juice, muesli, a Danish pastry, and a cup of tea, and in the mornings the news was the BBC’s offering, all those teenagers and cartoon bears and dinosaurs being a bit too much to stomach at seven-fifteen A.M. Nothing on it about the second dead man on the railings, that had been a flash in the pan, and he only kept the set on because he hadn’t quite finished his tea. Bean already had his new baseball cap on and his Marks and Spencer’s bottle-green cardigan, for the early mornings were chilly. He was thinking about switching off and setting forth to Mrs. Morosini’s, his first port of call, when the doorbell rang.

Nobody ever called at this hour. Mystified, on his way out with his key in his pocket, he went to answer the door. Two men were there, both young. Bean thought one of them looked only about seventeen. The older one had a hatchet face and pitted cheeks, the way it was quite fashionable to have if you were a pop star or in cowboy films. They didn’t look to him like police officers, but they said they were, an inspector and a sergeant, and they flashed warrant cards at him while they told him names he didn’t catch.

Bean always thought of sadomasochism, even now, after all this time. They had caught up with him, even though he had done nothing more than he was told.

“What d’you want?” he said, his voice squeaky.

“May we come in?”

“I was just going off to my work.”

They seemed to know all about his work and for some reason it amused them. The older one said he could give his work a miss that morning because, on second thought, instead of coming in they’d like him to accompany them to the police station. Then the younger one said there would be no harm in his phoning a client—one phone call only, mind—to say he was canceling this morning’s walk.

Bean hardly knew whom to phone, who would be the best bet. He had to make up his mind fast and settled on Valerie Conway, back from holiday the day before, and in his estimation the closest to him of all of them in class and calling. The two policemen stood there watching him in a very laid-back sort of way.

“I’m not well,” he said when she answered. He didn’t know what he would have done if Mr. or Mrs. Cornell had answered. “I was wondering if you’d give the others a ring and let them know.”

“What, all five of them?”

“It wouldn’t take a minute. There’s Mrs. Morosini and her number is …”

“I’ll phone her,” said Valerie. “She can phone the others. What’s wrong with you, anyway? Laryngitis? It sounds like you’ve lost your voice.”

The policemen escorted Bean to their car. He told them he had never had anything to do with those perverts, only opened the door to them and looked after Mr. Clitheroe when he was hurt and handed over payment when he was unconscious. They were amused but seemed not to know what he was talking about. He was inside the station and in an interview room before he got an inkling and then it was slow in coming.

“You drew fifty pounds out of your bank account at the end of last week,” said the inspector, now understood by Bean to be called Marnock.

How did they know? How could they know? He nodded and his head went on nodding like one of those toy dogs people used to have in the rear windows of cars.

“What would that have been for, then?”

A phrase came to Bean from out of somewhere. “Day-to-day general running expenses,” he said and he tried to clear his throat.

“Got a cough, have you?” said the young one.

“Must be all that dog-walking in the damp,” said Marnock. “Funny you’ve never drawn anything before for these day-to-day running expenses. Not for, let’s see—” he looked at a notebook on the table “—seven months. That’s right, seven months since you last made a withdrawal from that account.”

Now he was pretty sure none of it had anything to do with Clitheroe and his practices, Bean was gaining courage. He affected a final throat-clearing. “I don’t know what right you’ve got to go poking about in my private bank account,” he said. “What’s all this about?”

“Now he asks,” said the young one. “Who’s Mussolini, Leslie? I can call you Leslie, can’t I? Or do you prefer Les?”

If he hadn’t been so shocked at hearing the name of Mussolini uttered like that, Bean would have reacted violently to being called by his given name. He had hated it ever since his schooldays in that Hampshire village and since then no one had used it. He was always Bean. Bean, as far as everyone knew, was what he might have been christened. But hearing himself called Leslie was nothing to hearing the name he personally, he a one, had given to the anonymous hit man encountered once on the Hanover Gate bridge.

He tried playing the innocent. “He was Italian, like the leader of Italy in the war. Like Hitler.”

The change in Marnock was shocking. He seemed galvanized. He leapt to his feet and stood over Bean, shouting, “Don’t give me that. Don’t you play games with me. Who’s the man you called Mussolini when you were shooting your mouth off in the Globe?”

“I don’t know his name.” Bean’s voice was still strong, but he had started to shake. He tried to stop his knees knocking together. “I don’t know what he’s called. I called him Mussolini because he looks like him. The spitting image of him, only young like.”

They had this nasty way of changing the subject, just when you thought you were getting somewhere. “You don’t like homeless people, do you, Les?”

Bean picked what he thought was the politically correct thing to say. “It’s not right for a great nation like ours to have beggars on its streets.”

Marnock laughed. It was as if he couldn’t help laughing, though he would have liked to. “So you’d solve the problem in Hitler’s way, would you? Couldn’t quite call it ethnic cleansing—the Final Solution, is that it?”

Maybe the young one could tell Bean hadn’t the least idea what Marnock meant, for he reverted to an earlier tack.

“What did you draw the money out for, Les?”

“It was for Mussolini, wasn’t it?” said Marnock. “What was he going to do for it?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. I never saw him.”

“You what?” Marnock was standing over him again.

“I mean, I saw him once, he never came back, I never saw him again. I went back but he never turned up. He never did, I swear it.”

“What was he going to do,” said Marnock, “for this princely sum?”

“I said, I never saw him again.”

“Kill Clancy, that was it, wasn’t it?”

“Not kill him,” Bean protested. “Not that. I never wanted that. Rough him up a bit—and why not? He’d mugged me, he’d taken a good bit more than fifty quid off me, I can tell you. Mussolini, whatever his name is, him, he was going to do the same, that’s all, he—” A gradual, awful realization was dawning. The railings, the second vagrant, the vital part of the news he’d missed to make his tea. “I want a lawyer,” he said. “I can have a lawyer, can’t I?”

“Of course you can, Leslie,” said Marnock. “I think that’s a very good idea.”

•   •   •

Their natures and ways were uncannily the same. And this was wonderful to discover, each shared emotion, reaction, approach, a relief to find. It was not just that he kept his home precisely as she kept hers, clean, neat, airy, that he dressed simply, got up early, was as good-tempered and warm first thing in the morning as when they at last put out the lights, but that they seemed to like and need and want all the same things. She had only to mention a taste or preference for him to confess a similar leaning. He even had the same sort of food in his fridge as she had in hers. In his bathroom, when she went to take her shower, was the brand of soap she used.

It was almost as if he had set out to make himself the same kind of person. When his phone rang he answered it by giving the number, as she did; he said “good-bye,” not “bye-bye”; and when someone downstairs slammed the front door he winced and smiled at his wincing, which would have been just her own reaction.

Their lovemaking, when it finally happened, was what she had wistfully envisaged but never before quite known. With Alistair, and with a boyfriend or two before Alistair, she had tried to achieve the ideal she had made for herself long before. But, reluctantly, she had faced what seemed a universal truth, that her particular wish and need were not acceptable to men. They might not be violent or aggressive, but they were urgent, demanding, determined to make the rules, certain of what was right. If they acceded to her—and from time to time they did—there was always a feeling she had that they were keeping her sweet, being “patient,” giving in so that they might get their own way next time. She had been called frigid by each of them, when they lost their tempers. Until Leo, she had almost reached a point of seeing herself as wrong and the Alistairs of this world as right. She had almost resolved that next time, whenever that was and with whom, she would accept the male attitude and try somehow to teach herself to like it. No doubt, that, like anything else, could be learned. But with Leo there had been nothing to learn or unlearn or make decisions about. She needed to ask him nothing, nor direct his hands, nor resist his urgency, nor pull away from the hardness of lips and teeth. He was as gentle as she, as languid, and—until the end when she, for once, was imperative and demanding—as slow and delicate with his caresses. But at that end she had cried out as those others had always expected her to cry and had held him in an embrace she was fearful of afterward, in case her strength was greater than his.

That had been three nights earlier, the time of her flight from Alistair. The next evening Leo came to her and, though she worried that Alistair might arrive, might turn up on the doorstep at any moment, she forgot him after a while. Discovering Leo, she forgot everything, lying in his arms, talking to him, caring for him. For it was inescapable, that feeling she must look after him, that he needed her as much to watch over his health, his fragile body, as for a lover.

Side by side in the warm evening, they were each as white as a marble statue, not a mark, a flaw, a flush of color on their milky paleness. She could scarcely see in the dusk where the skin of his thigh ended and hers began. Only his face, in repose, the bluish eyelids closed, looked more tired than hers, looked, she fancied, older than hers. But that perhaps was the fantasy of a woman of thirty, wishing to be nearer her young lover’s age.

Their hair was nearly the same color, hers of a slightly finer texture, a clearer gold. The down on her arms was the same thistledown stuff as his. Each had the same kind of freckle sprinkling, pale gold, sparse, on the bridges of their noses. If their features were quite different, it was only as a brother and a sister’s may be, each taking genes from a different parent. Their skin was the same matte-fine white, skin that perhaps lined early, though hers, in spite of her seniority, had fewer lines than his. She looked at those lines tenderly, touching them with a warm fingertip.

They had talked, earlier, of this similarity and Leo had pointed out what should have occurred to her but for some reason had not, that in people whose blood and tissue types matched so perfectly, resemblance was more likely than not. Wouldn’t it have been far stranger if one of them had been dark and the other fair or one heavy and big-boned and the other slight? She had searched among the trust’s literature and found one of its leaflets, the one with a happy smiling photograph of two young men, donor and recipient, and yes, Leo was right, they were much the same height, with the same coloring, the same smile. “We may even be distantly related,” she said.

“I’m your lover,” Leo said. “I don’t want to be your cousin.”

He stayed all night with her. She slept better than she had since coming to Charlotte Cottage. Gushi came upstairs in the small hours and snuggled into the space between their feet. Leo didn’t mind. He got up first and made her tea. It was gone eight and she was still in bed when the phone rang. He took the receiver off and handed it to her. The voice said it was Edwina Goldsworthy and Bean wouldn’t be taking the dogs out. Maybe he wouldn’t be taking them out for a couple of days. He was ill. Some sort of inflammation of the throat, Lisl Pring had said.

So she and Leo had taken Gushi into the park and in a way she had been glad of Bean’s bad throat because it meant she could spend the next night with Leo, of course taking the dog with her. For the first time she was feeling the constriction imposed by becoming a house-sitter. She was bound to remain at Charlotte Cottage until September, and once Bean was back, remain there every night because of Gushi. Alistair, in Leo’s place, would have told her not to be bound to the Blackburn-Norrises, there had been no formal contract, but Leo did not. In his eyes the agreement was just as binding as if it had been drawn up by a solicitor and witnessed. In short, he felt the same as she did. “And I don’t think I could quite move in with you,” he said.

She hadn’t suggested it, they had known each other only a few weeks, but it was what she wanted.

“There would be something—not sordid exactly, but not what I want for us, if they were to come back and—well, find us. It will be better for us to be forced to wait until September.” He spoke very seriously. “I would like everything to be aboveboard.”

She said softly, “What is it that you want for us, Leo?”

“At the moment,” he said, “I’m still teaching myself to believe what’s happened. That you’re who you are, the woman who saved my life, that I’ve met you, and that you’re—” he hesitated and his face flushed the way hers did “—the other half of me.”

“Yes,” she said, “yes.”

“I’m falling in love with you, of course I am, but it’s almost as if I was in love with you before we met, I’d made an ideal image of you and by a kind of miracle you are that image come to life.” He smiled at her, took her in his arms. “It’s not easy getting used to that,” he said. “I don’t want us to have any secrets, Mary. May we tell each other everything about ourselves, tell our whole lives?”

So they had begun doing that. He told her about his childhood with ambitious failures for parents, a father whose career as an athlete had been ruined by a ruptured Achilles tendon while training to run in the Olympic team and a mother who had twice failed to acquire through correspondence courses and evening classes the degree she longed for.

The result had been for them to expect him and his brother to fulfill hopes that in their cases had been dashed. They must be great sportsmen or great scholars, preferably both. His brother, Carl, had gone to drama school, incurring their father’s anger and disgust. Acting wasn’t a man’s job. The only work Carl could get for a long time was modeling, more cause for outrage. Their father had died. That was when he discovered that all these years his mother had had a lover. Once her husband was dead, she had gone to Scotland to join him, leaving her sons with scarcely a good-bye. It had hurt Leo, for she had seemed never to take his illness seriously and had refused outright to be tested for tissue compatibility. Without Carl’s devotion, he hardly knew what would have become of him …

“And the rest is history. That was where you came in.”

“Yes. That was where I came in.”

“I’m afraid my mother never forgave me for failing to run a three-minute mile and get a double first. Leukemia’s not hereditary, you see. That’s known for sure now.”

She looked at him. “I’m not sure that I understand.”

“If it were, she might be able to blame herself and my father. I mean, it wouldn’t be their fault if one of them carried a faulty gene, of course it wouldn’t, but people blame themselves for handing on to their children a poor genetic inheritance. Conversely, as I’ve discovered, they like not having to blame themselves, not having the grounds for it.” He spoke not bitterly, but with amused resignation. “There’s always the suggestion there, it’s not explicit but it’s there, that somehow I must have caught it or done something I shouldn’t have to bring it on. My mother actually said once that nothing like that had ever happened to Carl.” His rueful laughter took the sting away. “Still, grown-up people shouldn’t live at home with their parents, do you think?”

“It’s not something I know much about,” she said, “but, no, you’re right.”

She was appalled by what he had told her. The mother he had not much wanted her to meet, though not much discouraged her either, she now wanted to keep away from until the time came when she and Leo …

“As soon as your time is up at Charlotte Cottage,” he said, “I’m going to want you to come and live with me. I’m giving you advance notice. Will you, in this tiny place?”

“But, Leo, we won’t have to. I’m rich—had you forgotten?”

His face, so ardent and eager, changed. “I’m afraid I had,” he said. “I wish I could.”

In the post the next morning came two letters. One, she could see by the handwriting on the envelope, was from Alistair. She opened the other first. It was from Mr. Edwards, asking her if she was in need of “funds,” as there would be no difficulty in advancing to her from her grandmother’s estate any reasonable sum. Bean arrived while she was reading the letter. He looked tired and old. She could see he had been ill. For the first time—perhaps she had previously not taken much notice—it was apparent to her that he was an old man, vigorous, well-preserved, but old.

He launched into an involved apology. It was all due to circumstances beyond his control, it wouldn’t happen again. Mary hardly understood how you could guarantee you wouldn’t get a throat infection a second time, but Bean didn’t mention his throat. He said, to her astonishment, that he hoped Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris would “never have to know.”

“What, that you were ill?”

“That I missed taking the little chap out, miss. I’d feel easier in my mind if they didn’t know.”

Pathetic, the sadness of age. “I shan’t tell them,” Mary said warmly. “I shall have forgotten it by the time they get back.”

She told Leo and they laughed about it. He had stayed the night but waited until Bean was gone before coming downstairs. Formerly, she would have waited until she was alone before opening Alistair’s letter, but no longer, not now that she and Leo were so close. She said, “Here,” and held it up. He put his arm round her and read it over her shoulder.

Alistair wanted to know why she had run away from him earlier that week. What was she afraid of? He wondered if she should be undergoing therapy, she was so strange, so unbalanced. Did she realize that in a hysterical outburst she had actually said she didn’t want to see him again? He was treating that with the indulgence he was sure she now wanted. In other words, he would forget it.

Could he arrange a therapist for her? He would be happy to do that. Meanwhile, they should meet and talk about money. Where did she want to live and what would she think a reasonable sum to spend on a flat or house, given their changed circumstances?

“I’d like to throw it away and not answer it.”

“But you won’t do that,” he said. “You’re too much like me. Too polite and reasonable. You’ll answer it and be firm but nice and repeat what you said about not seeing him again.” His voice took on a stronger note. “You won’t see him again, will you, Mary?”

“I won’t if I can help it.”

He held her. “Please, Mary. For me.”

•   •   •

The police had given him the phone book to look up solicitors. He knew the names of the man who had acted for Anthony Maddox and the man who had acted for Maurice Clitheroe, but the last thing he wanted was Marnock’s attention drawn to his late employers. He found a firm to phone in Melcombe Street and after a little while a young woman turned up. Bean began to feel a whole lot better when she started telling them they couldn’t hold his client for more than twenty-four hours without arresting him. Did they intend to arrest him? She told them firmly that they had no evidence against him.

But even Bean could see that they had. By the time the solicitor came he had already told them everything they wanted to know, all about the mugging, about Mussolini and his offer, the money and his failed attempt to meet Mussolini again. He had admitted he wanted some injury done to Clancy and, when pressed, that he hadn’t been particular as to whether this injury was serious or, indeed, fatal. He hadn’t meant to say any of those things, but they fetched it all out of him, and once begun there seemed no point in holding anything back.

What saved him, he thought afterward, was that he still had the money. He actually had it on him. Of course they could hardly know that it was the same money, but possession of it helped his cause. He was with them for a total of fourteen hours and could, in fact, have taken the dogs out the next day, was prepared to do his afternoon’s duty, only they came back for him. They had found Mussolini.

Another day passed, a day of questions, mockery, teasing, taunting and, from Marnock, outbursts of serious anger. Mussolini had told them all sorts of things about Bean, they said, which Bean was sure was untrue, for Mussolini, real name Harvey Bennett, couldn’t possibly have known them, could only have invented them. For instance, he had never said, never in his wildest dreams would have said, that he wanted Clancy killed. He had never boasted to Bennett that he had killed a man once but was now a bit past it at his age. When he was told this, the deathbed of Anthony Maddox flashed awfully across his mind, but he had never talked of it, had spoken no word of it to anyone, it was all in Bennett’s imagination.

He had never, as they insinuated, offered Bennett fifty pounds to kill Clancy with another fifty to come when the deed was done. Nor had he sought Bennett out, inquiring indiscreetly in the Globe for someone to do a job for him. His solicitor came back and got nasty with Marnock, reminding him of something called Judges’ Rules.

After he’d spent hours there in a cell they let him go. He never knew why. He wasn’t going to ask, the relief of being free was enough for him, but he felt very shaken. Still, he had his fifty pounds and he knew what he was going to do with that. Buy a new camera.

The shop where the first one had come from, purchased by Maurice Clitheroe some ten years before, was in Spring Street, Paddington. It was still there. He found it in the new phone book, gave them a ring, asked what they’d got and their prices. The shop stayed open till all hours, being bang in the middle of tourist country, so he went over there on the tube after he’d walked his dogs, it was only two stops.

The camera, being secondhand, came to less than he’d thought. The shop manager threw in a film and Bean, doubly departing from custom, bought himself a bottle of whiskey and the evening paper. Even if it was only a piece about the release of a man who’d been “helping police with their inquiries,” he wanted to read about himself. Paddington was a lot shabbier, dirtier, and more litter-strewn than the Marylebone Road and it gratified him that he didn’t live there.

He was coming out of the wineshop when he saw the girl again, the one who used to come to the house in Maurice Clitheroe’s time that he’d made a face at in Baker Street. She was standing in the doorway of a dingy-looking video shop. He nearly missed seeing what happened and would have missed it if for some reason he hadn’t turned round from taking a photo of a Highland collie, a really smashing-looking dog, that an old woman had out with her on a lead.

A red Mercedes had pulled into the curb and the girl was bending down to talk to the driver. Her clothes were a whole lot more upmarket than the previous time he’d seen her: red sequined top, tight white mini, white stilettos. Whore’s gear but not cheap. Then Bean saw the driver. It was James Barker-Pryce MP and his red whiskery face, for once without the clamped-in cigar, was framed in the window. Bean took a photograph. He took two shots. The car door was pushed open from the inside and the girl got in.

Bean went home and read the paper. There was nothing in it about him, only a long piece by a psychiatrist the paper called famous, though Bean had never heard of him, about crazy street people and Clancy in particular. The psychiatrist said theories had been put forward as to why the dead man collected keys, some suggesting this was for the purposes of robbery, others that they constituted an armor against possible attack. The truth was that in Clancy’s disturbed mind these were the keys to dream homes. Having no home, he had collected keys to the homes of others, keys being the symbol of home-ownership, of possession and of the privacy he could no longer enjoy.

Bean had never read such rubbish. While looking through his collection of dog photographs and selecting negatives for enlargement, he drank rather too much of his whiskey and woke with a hangover. Putting on his baseball cap and a T-shirt patterned all over with pictures of endangered species, he was on tenterhooks lest the police come back for him. After all, they had been two days running, why not today? But no one came and he got to Erna Morosini’s five minutes ahead of time.

She was rather short with him, not asking if he was better but moaning about how exhausted she was, having to walk Ruby herself. It was easy to see the beagle hadn’t been using up enough energy. Like a team of sprightly carriage horses, she pulled Bean up to Park Crescent, puffing and lunging. He exchanged a glance with the Duke of Kent, who didn’t look the kind of man to be intimidated by policemen, before Ruby pulled him on. Valerie Conway appeared at the area door with Boris.

“A Mr. Barker-Something phoned me yesterday to ask what I thought you were playing at. He said he hadn’t had a word out of you and not to put yourself out to come when you did get back. He’s making other arrangements.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He says there’s school-leavers round here panting to do the job for a fraction of what you charge. There was one girl said she’d take Charlie out for free, he’s so lovely.”

Boris padded up the steps, his claws making a patter like the sound of hailstones on the metal treads. Waiting at the top, tied to the railings, Ruby fell amorously upon him, not much deterred by Boris’s low growl and lips peeled back to show yellow teeth. Pity there was no market for dog pornography, Bean thought. He took them into the gardens and through the tunnel under the Marylebone Road. Now Pharaoh was dead, he could do that, and never again feel that trepidation, that tightening of the muscles and tensing of nerves.

In the park Marietta was uneasy, missing Charlie, not inclined to run by herself, but wandering aimlessly and stopping for a scratch. Bean got a shot of her standing on the rings of cobblestones round the Parsi’s fountain, looking soulful. It would be a good picture and it somewhat calmed him. He had been boiling with anger and the injustice of it ever since Valerie Conway told him of Barker-Pryce’s decision. The nerve, after what he’d seen in Paddington!

Two can play at that game, thought Bean.