Chapter 32

    There was a police post at the main turn-off to the lake, but we didn't reach it. We turned off left down a bumpy track which joined a smoother one and we began to circle the lake. Clifford wasn't in a hurry. I was thinking of ways to keep him occupied for three or four hours but none of them were as interesting as what he had in mind.

    It was hot work. Four pounds of fear soaked into the duvets, just leaving the salt in all the cuts and grazes on my body to remind me how uncomfortable being alive could be. By the time we arrived at a gate, which Clifford opened, I was rebreathing the boot air for the seventh time and it had lost a lot of its flavour.

    The boot opened and the hot air that flooded into my black hole felt like a fresh breeze whipping off the lake. Clifford unloaded a few crates, pulled me out, stripped off the tape and pulled the handkerchief out. The pressure was high. Over the tops of the tall dark trees around the lake, the black sky flickered like newsreel of the Blitz. We crossed a mud courtyard with high walls around with shards of broken bottles set in cement on top. The house was a single storey fronting on to the lake. We walked in between two semicircles of lawn to the front door.

    'Why did you want me to follow your wife, Clifford?' I asked, because nothing else came to mind.

    'Forget it,' he said. 'You're dead. I got nothin' to say to you.'

    'You didn't like Steve's private million-dollar deal, did you, Clifford? Thought it might jeopardize the big one. It has. I called the big man before I left Nina's, left a message for him to come and look you up.' If Clifford's life had just fallen to pieces with that bland statement, you wouldn't have known it.

    'It'll cost me a million and a half, but I can handle that,' he said, calmer now. He motioned me forward with the gun and told me to kick in the door so that it looked like breaking and entering. I took two steps back.

    'What's the name of the Yoruba god of medicine, Clifford?'

    'The fuck are you talking about now?' he asked, suddenly dog-tired.

    'Osanyin,' I said, and kicked the door just below the lock and a pane of glass shattered as the handle hit the wall and the top hinge popped out. A four-foot splinter of wood flik-flakked across the hall and down a few steps to the living room whose shuttered windows would have given us a view of the lake. Clifford hadn't moved. He held the gun on me and blinked only twice in a minute.

    'It's over, Clifford,' I said. 'You don't want to go adding double murder to your problems.'

    He didn't answer for some time. If I could have seen inside his head, I might have been damned scared, as it was from my side, he looked old and tired. When he did finally speak I almost missed it he said it so quietly and with an odd squeak in his voice that distorted the sound. It let me know, if I still had any doubts, that under the handmade shirt, the Italian tie, the pleated slacks, the buffed black Oxfords on his feet, Clifford Harvey was as mad as a split-gowned maximum- security headcase.

    'Cut,' was the word he used.

    With a new and disturbing energy he steered me to the left and opened the door in front of me. He flicked the light on with a surgically gloved hand and leaned something up against the wall behind me.

    To my right, Heike was lying on her front on the bed, her wrists and ankles tied to each corner with a sheet over her. Her head moved as if she'd been sleeping and then stilled. The calico curtains were drawn and dusty. There was an air-conditioner in the corner of the window frame and the curtain had been cut round it. It hadn't been turned on and there was no fan. The only smell was of the mustiness of the infrequently used bed linen. Clifford threw the bag over to the bed, took the cuffs off and told me to strip. He stood in front of me, holding the gun waist-high, his elbow tight against his body.

    When I was down to my underpants he unzipped the bag, took out a pair of lycra shorts and told me to strip and put them on. Heike's head moved again; I looked, Clifford didn't. He positioned a chair three feet from the bottom right-hand corner of the bed. He wanted it just right and was nudging the front legs with his foot when I lunged at him. He didn't bother to shoot but side-swiped my head with the barrel which hit me across the cheekbone and temple and the room spun on the wrong axis.

    He pulled me up by the hair and fitted the barrel under my ear. I sat in the chair and he cuffed my wrists under the seat so that my chin was on my knees and tied my feet together at the ankles with some nylon rope.

    He drew out a floor-length brown plastic apron from the bag, put it over his head and tied it around himself. He took his glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. There was a long, low table for a suitcase by the window and he positioned that in front of me. He picked up what he had leaned against the wall, which was a long plastic case like a gun cover. Out of it, he pulled a three-foot long rhino hide sjambok. From the case, he took a length of smooth metal tubing with two wires attached, a switch and a two-point plug, two crocodile clips attached to wires, again with a switch and a two-point plug, a gang socket with an extension, a length of hard plastic with two holes in it and a loop of rope through the holes, a packet of cigarettes, a lighter and some lighter fuel, a ball of rags, a scalpel, a box of chilli powder, a rusty coat hanger, some gaffer tape, a pair of long-nosed pliers, a plastic bag and from the side pocket, a clean slab of fresh money.

    'What's the game, Clifford?'

    'There's no game.'

    'You take the tray away and I have to remember what's on it?'

    'I said, it's not a game.'

    'Bankers don't do this kind of thing, Clifford.'

    'We have other instruments.'

    He put each of the instruments in my hands and I printed them up for him. He moved the table over to the bed and looked down at Heike, swallowing hard.

    He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. His neck was shaking. He took a corner of the sheet and walked off with it behind me, leaving Heike naked on the bed. I kicked my fear back down the basement stairs when I saw Heike's white vulnerable nudity next to Clifford's terrible implements.

    The air-conditioner came on, roared and smoothed out to a steely hum. The cool air chilled the sweat on my back and Clifford's voice raised the atavistic hairs up my neck. The sprawling, relaxed business drawl had gone and a constricted throat said: 'You've wet the bed.'

    He strode past me. I roared at him. He took Heike's shoulders and shook them, her head lolled. He dropped her and stood back, his neck and cheeks red. Heike opened her mouth which was dry and clogged with a thick, sticky saliva. Her eyes opened and I watched the memory and the terror worm in. I called her name and she looked at me with black, shiny eyes. She put everything she could into her scream, her whole body dipped into the bed but nothing came out.

    Clifford picked up the slab of money, pulled a few notes out and screwed them into balls.

    'Why the money, Clifford?'

    'Everybody's gotta get paid.'

    'Why her?'

    'You get paid for everything.'

    'What do you mean?'

    'Life's all about moving money around.'

    'You only get paid for doing something.'

    'She's going to. She's going to suffer.'

    'What for?'

    'Because she gets paid. They all get paid.'

    'What did you pay Cassie Mills for?'

    Clifford stopped screwing up the money, his head clicked up and his eyes bolted on to mine.

    'Cassie Mills, Rockford, Illinois, 23rd September 1954,' I said, and time crawled forward on its elbows while Clifford's face lost all expression.

    'I paid her back,' he said, only moving his lips, the slab of money cocked stiff in his hand.

    'You paid her back for making you suffer.'

    'Yes, I did.'

    'What did she do?'

    Clifford's mouth clamped shut. His eyes stared through me.

    'What didn't she do?' I asked.

    'She didn't mean anything.'

    'To you?'

    'She didn't mean anything.'

    'She lied to you.'

    'They all lied to me.'

    White deposits had gathered at the corner of Clifford's mouth. His tongue tried to lick them away but they were tacky like glue and they stuck his mouth together. He was swallowing a lot but nothing was going down.

    'They all lied to you?'

    'Cassie, Bob, Whitey, Doug, Lena…'

    'Your friends?'

    'My friends,' he said, with matte black eyes. His body was still, his breathing shallow. There was a long pause filled by the cool air rushing from the air-conditioner. Clifford seemed to have dropped below some horizon. He was out in an open boat again, surviving a childhood trauma that had never fitted into the way he was told things should be.

    'She paid them,' he said from a long way off.

    'Cassie?'

    'Mom.'

    'Mom paid Cassie?'

    'Thirty bucks a week.'

    'She told you?'

    'She told me. She got a five-buck bonus for kissing. She told me.'

    'When did she tell you?'

    'We were doing it. She got double for doing it. She told me.'

    'What about Bob?'

    'Ten bucks. Whitey ten. Doug twelve, he was on the Softball team. They showed me the money. They all showed it me. They all showed me they got paid to be my friends.'

    'What did your mom say?'

    'I found the cheque book. Hundred bucks every Friday. Pay day. They always had money at the weekend.'

    'You paid Cassie back?'

    'I paid her back.'

    'It's quits.'

    'Uh huh. They all have to pay.'

    'Where's Mom?'

    'They all have to pay.'

    He looked at the money in his hand and peeled notes off and screwed them up and dropped them to the floor. He went down on his knees and pulled Heike's head back and pushed the balls of money into her mouth.

    He filled her cheeks and then taped her mouth over. He picked up the sjambok.

    'It didn't happen, Clifford. Your mom didn't pay them. She took a hundred bucks out on Fridays for weekend shopping. They were just kids haying a sick joke like kids do. Listen to me. You killed Cassie Mills. Did they come looking for you? They would have linked you to her. They would have found out about the money if your mom had paid them. They didn't. You never went down for her killing. You weren't even a suspect. Clifford!' I roared. 'CLIFFORD!'

    He stood both feet apart and brought the sjambok above his head. I threw myself forward and hit him in the leg with my head. Clifford went down hard, the sjambok toppled out of his hand and sprang off one end into the corner of the room. Clifford clawed away from me in a panic before he realized I had turned turtle. I could see he had a cut on his head and his glasses hung over his mouth. He pushed himself up on his good leg, straightened his glasses and hobbled over to the sjambok.

    He brought the sjambok down across my face and chest, across my shoulder, then the stomach, the legs, the arms and ribs. Blood ran, pain opened in lines across my body with junctions of agony. Warm blood pooled in my eye and ran over my forehead. The sjambok slashed the cool air and white hot welts swelled. New pain stopped. The chair lifted and fell on its side, my wrist trapped underneath. Heike thrashed about on the bed, her head whipping from side to side. The sjambok thumped across my ear and I felt an eyebrow split. I swung round, using my wrist as a pivot, and caught

    Clifford below the knee with my bound feet and he went down again. I heard the glasses fall off his face.

    'Fuck…,' he said. 'You fuck

    Across the floor, the door opened.

    'Clifford!' a voice said.

    'Mom?' he said, in a voice so strange my scalp tightened over my cranium.

    Two thin legs in flat black shoes appeared. I turned to Clifford, who stood over me, his hands empty. His glasses crunched underfoot. Kate Kershaw put three bullets into his chest and a fourth into the wall. Clifford fell back with three black holes in the bib of his apron. His body crashed through the table of instruments and his head bounced off the bedside table, dislodging the lamp which shattered on the floor. The white deposits at the corners of his mouth frothed in small bubbles like boiled milk, blood appeared in the foam which turned pink and darkened to a thick red. He ended on his back, his head crooked up against the blood-smeared wall, a surgically gloved hand across himself and the other arm twisted behind him.