29

It was Marnock himself who found Hob.

They had been searching for him since morning in all his known haunts. The latest sighting came from a man in Agar Grove who, from his hospital bed, was able to name his assailant. He had lost four teeth, had two cracked ribs and a broken collarbone, but he was anxious to talk about Harvey Owen Bennett.

It was his opinion that Bennett was the Impaler, Bennett was guilty of the street people killings. Marnock disagreed but didn’t say so. He thought the Agar Grove man entitled to sling mud and make wild accusations. For the time being. He was no angel, had a string of convictions as long as the Broad Walk, which Marnock would later make longer. It was his belief the Agar Grove man was responsible for the mugging of Bean in the Nursemaids’ Tunnel.

He was always made happy by villains gassing. It gave him hope for the future. Harvey Owen Bennett, for instance. Bennett had killed Bean and stuck him on that five-pointed iron tree, but someone had paid him to do it and Marnock now hoped Bennett would tell him who. The Agar Grove man had created a happy precedent.

Marnock called that day on every member of Bennett’s extended family. They weren’t truthful people, but this time, with misgivings, he believed them when they said they hadn’t seen him. His mother said she hadn’t seen him for six months and this amused Marnock in the light of what she had told him back in June—that at the time of Pharaoh’s murder Hob had been among guests at an all-night silver wedding party in the Holloway Road.

They scoured the park for him. Marnock thought of the Grotto as the abode, more or less reserved, of the toffee-nosed dosser with the Oxbridge accent, and he nearly didn’t look. It was a drinking straw, spiraled with red like a barber’s pole and stuck up in the branches of a tree, that caught his eye from his seat in the back of the car. The ritual that served Harvey Bennett’s habit required drinking straws.…

He was lying half in, half out of the dirty little pond. They heard his breathing long before they reached him and that was how they knew he was alive. Marnock’s sergeant was on his mobile calling an ambulance before they had laid a finger on Hob.

“He’s young,” Marnock’s sergeant said. “Well, youngish. But I reckon he’s had a stroke.”

The ambulance man, getting Hob onto a stretcher, said superfluously that he wasn’t a doctor. Then he said that in his opinion Hob had had a stroke.

“Or several,” said Marnock. “I once knew a bloke, only a year or two older than him, same taste for substances, had twenty strokes in quick succession.”

“Bloody hell,” said the ambulance driver. “Did it kill him?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Marnock. “After a couple of weeks they switched off the machine.”

•   •   •

Be angry, Mary said to herself, you must be angry. You must walk on past him, pretend he’s not there. Or stand your ground and tell him what you think of him. She held her fists tightly clenched. He was in front of her now.

“I’ve been here since eight this morning,” he said, “waiting for you.”

“I didn’t come into the park this morning,” she said.

“It was so hot. I brought a bottle of water, but it got warm. I tried to keep awake but I fell asleep and when I woke up I thought I’d missed you.”

“What do you want?” She knew he had never heard that note in her voice before.

“I suppose that’s how you think of me, as always wanting something, as doing everything I do for what I can get out of it.”

“Wouldn’t that be a true picture?”

“Not entirely.”

She walked into the shade of the trees, put her hands against the rough cool bark of a tree, and bowed her head. “I thought I’d never see you again. I hoped not. I know what you did, I’ve thought about it these past days, I haven’t had anything else to think about, and there can’t be anything you can say to me in extenuation.” She turned to look at him, half look at him, and remembered then what she hadn’t thought of for perhaps an hour or two: their lovemaking. It came back and brought hot angry blood into her face. He must see that burning color and know. “It won’t mean anything to you if I say it was the worst betrayal I’ve ever known.”

Alistair’s small misdemeanors, what were they compared with his offense?

“Would you—could we—is it possible to ask you if we could go back to the house?”

“The Blackburn-Norrises have come home.”

“Then will you sit down here with me or on a seat or somewhere and talk to me?”

Her head bowed again. She found she was shaking it from side to side. The words came out hoarsely.

“What is your name?”

“What?”

“I asked you what your name is. I can’t call you Leo. You aren’t called Leo.”

“My name is Carl,” he said. “Carl Nash. Leo was my brother.”

She sat down. He dropped onto the grass beside her but moved when she indicated by a pushing movement with her hands that he was too close. She looked at him properly for the first time, a gaze of deepest scorn, and saw that his eyes were full of tears.

•   •   •

“I brought Leo up. He was more than ten years younger than I. Oh, yes, of course I’m not twenty-four, I’m older than you, Mary, not younger, I’m thirty-five.”

“We believe what people tell us,” Mary said. “Or I do. I believed what you told me. And I saw your birth certificate.”

“You saw his. When the leukemia was diagnosed and they said he needed a transplant I thought there wouldn’t be a problem. There was our mother—not that she’d taken a scrap of notice of Leo since he was ten, she’d left that to me—and there was myself, a couple of half-sisters somewhere about. None of us was compatible. Can you imagine that?”

“You’ve already told me. Except that you suggested it was you and not your brother who needed the transplant. If you’re going to explain you should …”

“Tell you why I posed as Leo?”

“It was for my money,” she said bitterly.

He lifted his shoulders, not denying. “I was an actor once. Only there was no work. Then I was a schoolteacher. Funny, isn’t it? Then I made a bit of money,” he said. “Dealing, mostly.”

She knew she was innocent but not what she was innocent of. The look in his eyes told her he wasn’t talking about scrap metal or antiques.

“Drugs,” he said impatiently. “I’d needed funds to find a donor for Leo. That was before the Harvest Trust. I thought maybe I’d have to go to some Third World country and buy a donor. Then you came along.”

“I wasn’t rich then,” she said. “I’d been living in a one-bedroom flat in Willesden and earning twelve thousand a year. What made you think I was rich?”

He said simply, “The heading on your writing paper. The address. Charlotte Cottage, Park Village West.”

Briefly she closed her eyes. Unseeing, she sensed he had come closer to her and she drew away. She looked at him.

“And when you found out I didn’t live there you dropped me, you meant never to see me again. That was what happened. You weren’t ill, you were never ill.”

“True,” he said. “It was a bitter disappointment.” She looked incredulously at his wry smile. He had aged in the past few minutes. He might be forty, forty-five. The smile creased his pale face into lines and ridges. “I did need money, you see. I knew Leo would get ill again, I could see the signs, I’d made myself an expert in his illness.” All the ironic amusement died out of his face. “I loved him so much. Believe me, if you can believe anything I say, believe me, I’m not trying for your sympathy, your compassion, but I’d like you not to think me a total monster. I loved him as if he were my own child. Or I think so, I’ve never had a child.”

“So that was all right? Using me was all right because you loved your brother?”

“No, Mary, it wasn’t all right. But it was all I could think of. Your grandmother died and when I heard that I came back. You told me what she’d left you and it was more than I’d imagined in my wildest dreams.”

She had become curious in spite of herself. The sheer suicidal nerve of it compelled a question.

“I might have found out at any time. The trust might have told me Leo—your brother—they might have told me he was becoming ill again. What would you have done?”

“What I did when they did,” he said. “Disappeared. But I used to scrutinize your post. I was—I was usually up first.” He had turned away his eyes.

“So that’s why you stayed with me,” she said bitterly, unable to bring herself to use the words. “That’s why you stayed those nights, so that you could get to the post in the morning.” The words were hard for her because she had never used them before. “That’s why you screwed me, fucked me.”

He said with a simplicity she had to believe at last was honest, “It was at first. I came to love you. Couldn’t you tell?”

•   •   •

For half an hour she had been unaware of anyone else in the park but themselves. A child’s shriek, a blue and white lightweight ball bouncing across the grass, coming to rest at their feet, reminded her they were not alone. She stood up, brushed dried shreds of grass off her jeans, and lobbed the ball back. He watched her, anxiously waiting.

“What do you want me to say?” she asked him wearily.

“Only that you believe me.”

She supposed that she had noticed. It was when the lovemaking changed from a sick man’s effete attempts to enthusiasm, when acquiescence became passion, that she had been aware of it without asking why. He had been ill and now he was getting better, that was all.

“I believe you.”

She said it dully, for it was a few moments before relief came and she understood that she need no longer feel humiliation and shame. He had wanted her, he had not had to force himself.

“I wanted to marry you by then,” he said. “I’d never wanted that before.” He squeezed his eyes shut and sprang to his feet. “Will you do one last thing for me? Will you walk a little way with me?”

“I don’t know.” She nearly called him Leo. “I don’t know, Carl.”

He flushed at the sound of his own name. It seemed to confirm him as its true possessor. “Do you remember that place we went to for dinner? That first time? The Italian place?”

“When you pretended to be ill?”

He winced at that. “I’m sorry. I had to. I thought I had to. Mary, I’ve done worse things than that to get money.”

“I don’t want to hear,” she said.

“I thought—I wondered—if you’d let me take you there now, tonight. If we could—it would be the last time, wouldn’t it?”

She nodded. She still wanted answers. “I’ll walk with you.”

“And you’ll come to the restaurant?”

“Perhaps.”

He got to his feet and held out a hand to help her, but she shook her head. They walked across the grass in silence, across Chester Road and down the Broad Walk.

“Leo knew all about it,” he said. “He thought it was funny at first. We both thought it was funny at first. He used to want all the details but I—I stopped telling him things after a while.”

“Just as a matter of interest—” Mary knew she was no good at the ironic tone, she found it hard to be scathing, but she tried “—just as a matter of interest, why didn’t Leo meet me himself, or isn’t there anything amusing about being honest?”

“Oh, Mary, he was just a boy, undersized, not educated, never quite well. I loved him and perhaps you’d have come to love him if you’d known him, but not like that, not in that way. You’d never have said you’d marry the real Leo.”

Suddenly, as they came down the path and reached the lake, she stopped thinking about herself and reluctantly, almost fearfully, began to think about him. The anger had evaporated. It had never been thriving. She put her hand on his arm and looked into his face.

“You must be very unhappy.”

“Thank you for that,” he said.

“Oh, Carl. It was like losing your own child.”

“I suppose so. But it was worse. I killed him, you see.”

“What?”

“Oh, I don’t mean that. Not actually. Not like that Impaler kills people. I mean I killed him by taking away his only chance of getting well.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You would have given another donation, wouldn’t you? If it had been asked for you’d have done it?”

“Yes, but …”

“You said so. When we’d been to your grandmother’s house, the day I asked you to marry me. You’d have given it to me, to your husband, but it wasn’t I that wanted it, it was the real Leo Nash.

“Leo was dying by then. Perhaps you could have saved him, but I couldn’t ask, could I? I couldn’t let the Harvest Trust ask. I thought maybe if once we were married and I said I had to have money, I had to have, say, fifty thousand, you’d have given it to me and I’d have gone to India and bought the right sort of bone marrow for Leo. But Leo died.”

She thought about it. She had withdrawn her hand from his arm when he spoke of killing his brother, but now she replaced it and let it lie there lightly. They had come out of the park at the York Gate and the clock on Marylebone Church ahead of them began to chime the hour. Perhaps because of the VJ Day commemorations the traffic was dense and swift.

“It was a monstrous irony,” he said. “That I, who loved Leo, who would have done anything for Leo, who did do anything, spoiled his chances of life by what I did. By choosing this way to make a fortune for Leo, I blew it. So I killed him. If by killing someone we mean that but for us he’d be alive. But for me, Leo would be alive.”

They had come to the pavement edge and begun to walk toward the lights at Harley Street. The traffic noise was so loud that he had to shout.

“The old dog man,” he began.

“Bean,” she said. “Bean—what about him?”

“He tried to blackmail me. He was going to tell you—things about me.” He smiled. “Not the things I’ve told you. Other things you’d have liked even less. I couldn’t allow that.”

“I can’t hear you,” she said. “I can’t hear you for the traffic.”

“Just as well,” Carl said, softly now and half to himself. “I know you won’t forgive me, anyway, but you’d never have overlooked paying someone to—deal with Bean.” He turned to look at her, seized her by the shoulders. “Mary!” It was very nearly a shout. “Can you hear me now? I’ve blown it with you too, I know that. Just for the record, how did you get the Harvest Trust’s letter?”

She also had to raise her voice. “Alistair sent it to me. As a wedding present.”

“The bastard.”

•   •   •

She never once looked behind her. Roman saw her put her hand on her brother’s arm and for a moment he thought things were all right, and then he knew they were far from that. He knew too that it wasn’t her brother. A sense of foreboding filled him. He had been about to turn back, but now he wouldn’t, he would stick with it.

The charge of emotion between them was so powerful it tensed their bodies. He marveled at it, walking a dozen yards behind them. She withdrew her hand, recoiled, spoke a name, “Carl …,” loud enough for him to hear. So it was Carl. But what was her name? Strange that after so long, so many brief chance encounters, he still didn’t know.

“What?” he heard her cry.

Carl was explaining something. She shook her head vehemently, but after a moment or two the hand was back, resting on Carl’s arm but distantly somehow as if placed there out of pity rather than affection. You are imagining too much, Roman told himself, and you are spying too much, they can take care of themselves. It’s no more than a lovers’ quarrel being made up.

But he followed them down York Gate. The clock on St. Marylebone was chiming seven. The pavement of the Marylebone Road was choked with crowds, the traffic pouring fast down toward the Euston underpass. He was very close behind them now, so close that if she turned round and saw him he would have had to make an excuse for his presence and he had no explanation. But she didn’t turn round. She was looking into Carl’s face, not with love, not with passion, but still as if no one else in the world existed.

Her voice she kept low, drowned by the traffic’s roar, but the man called Carl shouted above it. He shouted as if he didn’t care who heard him.

“I don’t want to live without him, you see. I can’t face life without him.”

For a brief while Roman had been so near her that by putting out his hand he could have touched her; then, as happens in crowds, two people pushed in front of him, squeezing between him and her and forcing him to step back. They were part of the group at the pavement edge, waiting to cross when the lights changed. You could wait ages here for the lights to change, they were red almost too short a time to allow for crossing. Seven or eight people stood poised to cross and she and Carl were at the head of them, waiting while the traffic pounded down its three lanes.

Things happened very quickly then. Roman, craning his neck, but taller than those in front of him, saw Carl give her a little push back from the curb. A little saving, protecting push into those waiting behind. He put his head down and plunged into the road, threw out his arms, and ran into the traffic, in front of a car, a taxi, into the path of a container, running at bonnets, under wheels.

A woman was screaming from the moment he leapt from the curb. Roman heard his own rough gasp as he clenched his hands. Brakes screamed and horns brayed. Carl was flung into the air, his body describing an arc in the blue air against the setting sun, splintered by flashes of light from sun-glinting chrome, the sudden full beam of a headlight blazing on him as he fell under wheels and was ground between tangling metal.

There was blood somewhere. Roman thought he saw a long splash of it fly against white enamel. He was struggling to reach her, catch her as she fell, but the crowd made a wall around her, leaning over her, kneeling beside her. He stepped aside, let it go, and stood holding his bowed head in his hands in the suddenly emptied street.

Sirens were already wailing.