‘She was a scrubber!’ he screamed. ‘A slag! Before I took her up she was just disco fodder. I was saving her from middle-aged swingers ready to shell out a fistful of tenners for a night’s arm candy. I was the best chance she was ever going to have. A life, a career, with a man who was going somewhere in journalism. Only she’d not stop whoring! She was very clever, oh yes, very discreet, always a little mobile tucked away in her frillies, set to vibrate, not ring, so she could go to the loo to arrange another seventy-sov jump. But she didn’t fool me, not with my experience of human trash.’ He suddenly gazed at Crane with wild, staring eyes, as if a totally different man now lived inside his head. ‘Then one night I told her, told her straight: it had to stop.’
He was visibly shaking. Crane had always sensed the rigid self-control he concealed behind the jokes, the smiles, the easy manner. But Crane had learnt to be very wary of people with too much control. It could mean they were bottling emotion that might be distilling itself the longer it found no outlet, and if the valve ever did blow it could cause disproportionate damage. Julia looked on stunned, mouth falling open, the gun forgotten and pointing once more towards the ground.
‘What happened, Geoff,’ he said quietly, ‘the night you went for a walk at Tanglewood to have it all out for once and for all?’
‘You can’t believe,’ he almost whispered, and then he shouted, ‘you can’t believe the sheer filth she could come out with someone who looked the way she did. You can’t believe the viciousness! That I didn’t earn shit and I’d never earn more than shit, not in newspapers. I bored her arse off and I was rubbish in bed, and she’d either find someone else to go to London with or she’d go on her own, and all I’d ever see of her then, if I ever got there myself, would be someone driving along Park Lane in a chauffeured limo, giving me the finger and shouting “Up yours!”’
The last words were like a scream of anguish. Comedy seemed to blend absurdly with tragedy, as it sometimes did, like the two masks that symbolized the theatre. They stood in yet another silence, both he and Julia, sharing, Crane felt, the same sense of profound shock.
‘Give yourself up, Geoff,’ Crane said finally, as calmly as he could. ‘They’ll get you now, whatever you do. It was a crime of passion. They’ll be lenient with a man of your clean record. Ten years top whack. An open prison. You’ll still be young enough to make a new start.’
He looked about him, seeming almost stupefied, as if he’d emerged from a sort of fit that had briefly blanked his mind. When he spoke again it was with the old engaging smile, which Crane now found unbearable. ‘Frank, you don’t seriously believe I’d go inside for a trick-artist like Donna Jackson? I shall clear off, vanish, give myself a new identity. I shall go to America or Australia. Big places to lose yourself in. Come back to London when the dust has settled.’
‘You’re not going to walk away, Geoff. Julia has you covered and I’m going to ring Benson.’
‘The only problem with that is that Julia’s gun isn’t loaded. When I was trying to find a way out of her mansion I stumbled over a cloakroom where the gun lives. It was the work of seconds to knock out the shells.’
Julia’s shoulders sagged, as did Crane’s spirits. It had never paid to underestimate Anderson’s resourcefulness, and he’d felt all along that he’d have one final trick up his sleeve or he’d surely not have confessed to Donna’s killing.
‘Couldn’t afford to get myself shot,’ he said, faintly contemptuous. ‘She may only be a scatty dyke, but she might just have got lucky and hit me by mistake. Should have provided yourself with a MAC10, dear. Quite small, easily concealed, get off twelve hundred rounds a minute.’
‘You’d have got the full minute’s worth, you murdering swine,’ she said in a raw, bitter voice.
‘You’ll not get away,’ Crane told him. ‘Your car lights are smashed.’
‘I’d not thought of using it. I’m a fast runner. I’ll find a car in a side street I can hotwire. You mustn’t worry about that.’
‘And if I follow you?’
‘On that leg? You can barely walk man. And I disabled your car too, when you ran off into the undergrowth.’
He was right. Crane’s leg was so swollen and painful he’d have trouble even controlling the clutch for the next two or three days. He glanced at Julia. She shrugged apathetically. ‘Give yourself up, Geoff,’ he said again. ‘I’m begging you. I’ll do everything in my power to help you. A good counsel …’
‘No chance, Frank.’ There seemed to be a genuine warmth in his eyes as they rested on Crane’s. ‘She did enough damage to my life just by living. It was good knowing you, even though you had me running shitless half the time. Sorry about your gammy leg and all that other stuff back there. Goodbye each.’
He suddenly turned then to make his dash for freedom. Equally suddenly the gun went off, with a deafening report in the silence.
THIRTEEN
Anderson lay quite still in the film-set brilliance. Crane clutched his head with both hands. It had been his worst fear, that she might shoot at random and hit him by mistake. He didn’t understand how she’d made the gun fire at all when Anderson was supposed to have knocked out the shells. Maybe he’d been bluffing, as always. He knew she’d killed him. What a mess. What a bloody mess.
But then Anderson began to move. Began writhing in agony. Began cursing and yelping. Crane limped painfully to his side, got down awkwardly on one knee, yelping softly himself. Blood was seeping through Anderson’s trousers from wound in his left thigh. Julia came up behind them. She picked up the thick stick Anderson had abandoned when he’d turned to run off. She held it by the tip, with a hand wrapped in a handkerchief, tossed it at the wounded man’s side. ‘He was attacking you with that, right? He’d have killed you if I’d not brought him down.’ She smiled thinly. ‘Just so we’re both reading from the same script. He’ll survive, unfortunately. I should have killed him. God knows, I wanted to kill him, but it’s a simple flesh wound that’ll cause no lasting damage.’ She spoke with total, clipped assurance.
‘But he’d fixed it, the gun.’
‘He had indeed, but an experienced shot, Frank, always checks the state of the gun. I’d reloaded.’
‘You could have fooled me.’
‘Quite. I wanted him to go on thinking what a superior type he was and what a silly little featherhead I was.’
‘I’ll get the emergency services. For both of you.’
‘Bring a tea towel from the kitchen and I’ll make a tourniquet. I’ll watch him. Doesn’t seem quite the big confident Jack the Lad he thought he was now, does he?’
Anderson was rolling about in agony, still yelping, his expression a mixture of pain and irritation. Crane felt he was angrier about being unable to react with any kind of stoicism than being stopped from escaping.
Crane got himself up slowly. ‘You’re an incredible shot.’
‘My father taught me. Taught me how to shoot cleanly. I’ve shot over dogs with some of the best in the land. You see, having a daughter instead of a son was the biggest disappointment of my father’s life. So he liked to pretend I was a boy. Shooting, fishing, riding, fast cars. The stiff upper lip at all times, even when you fell off your horse … or someone clonks you over the head with a priceless piece of bronze.’
She ran a hand through her tousled, blood-matted hair and gazed despondently towards her fine old house. ‘He made a jolly good job of it. I’ve had problems with my gender ever since.’
Benson shook his head, grimaced. ‘All those statements, all those public appeals, the sheer man hours. And that arsehole, on the phone every verse end: any news, any developments, has Mahon coughed? No wonder coppers end up distrusting everything that moves.’