‘I suppose my old man’s worried to death,’ Lance said. ‘When I first got a motorbike he never went to bed till I was in. He used to sit all night by the phone in case I’d had a spill, so he told me. He still does, I expect, though I’m not such a madhead any more.’
‘Phone him,’ Jenny said, ‘as soon as you can.’
‘You think I won’t? I’d send a carrier pigeon if I could. He’d love that. He’d think he was back in Libya.’
‘My old man’s counting his blessings,’ Wayne said. ‘He’s in bliss when I’m not there. Or he’s totting up his matches. He don’t trust me, not since he opened my cupboard and saw enough matches to start the Great Fire of London. I was smoking in bed last year and the eiderdown caught fire. It weren’t my fault, though. I nearly bloody choked on the smoke.’ He stood, on seeing Fred come out of the shadow with Garry’s tea. ‘I’ll take it to him. A cup and saucer, eh? He’ll think he’s at the Ritz. It’s too good for him.’
‘I suppose you think we’re a rough lot?’ Lance moved his chair closer. ‘We don’t mean anything by it.’
‘I know.’ Jenny envied him, that they were so easy with each other, and seemed to enjoy their lives. Nobody could fault them for that. The pain of existence would overtake them soon enough.
He kissed her. ‘I think you’re marvellous. I’d like to live with you. I’ll bet you could teach me a lot.’
‘I don’t know about that.’ She would ruin him in no time, as she would any man, though the hope of possible happiness wouldn’t leave her alone.
‘We’ve been to bed together, but I don’t know you yet.’
What a quaint notion, that you could get to know someone at all by going to bed with them. ‘And when you do know me, you won’t want to know me.’ She regretted what she had said, on seeing his eyes wince.
‘How do you know?’ he asked. ‘How can you be so sure? Even somebody like you. I wish you wouldn’t say it.’
Wayne still held the cup and saucer. ‘Come over here’ — tea splashing over his boots. Then he skimmed the saucer, lethal fragments ricocheting from the back of the fireplace.
‘What’s going on?’ Alfred shouted.
Wayne wanted a suitable target for the cup as well but, seeing nothing worthy of the effort, and no person whose possible injury would lessen the shock, sent it skittling among bottles above the bar. Then he caught hold of a table, and beat the floor with it till all legs were smashed, his bull-like grunts sounding out even the whining bandsaw moaning of the wind. Lance did not know whether to tell him to pack it in, or himself join in a last celebratory bursting to pieces of the hotel. ‘Come and see.’ Wayne pulled him close. ‘I’m sure he’s dead.’
Fred pushed broken bottles from the bar with a piece of folded cardboard. ‘Even doctors that cost hundreds of pounds a visit have people die on them,’ he murmured to Keith, ‘and as for me, I did my best.’
‘He died some time ago,’ Jenny said, ‘but what was the point of telling anyone?’
Keith was glad she hadn’t, since it would have disturbed their work. But he was responsible, for having encouraged them to attack a madman. He should have let Daniel starve in the cold, put off attacking him for a few hours and left him too weak to throw slates. His instinct had told him to go up himself, but he had played God and unleashed the bikers: ‘All right, lads, take him out. One in front, one in support, and one in reserve.’ No, that wasn’t it. ‘You go left, you to the right, and you in the middle.’ Not that, either. His heart had never been one for breaking, but you didn’t like losses. Call them together. Give them a talk: ‘Sorry, lads. The fault is mine.’ Another death that can’t be made good. Time punishes, because once a crime has been done there’s no calling back the good days, the score only wiped out when you die yourself. They wouldn’t understand that, either.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Jenny said.
‘No, but something else is.’ Even one death added up to too much. You lived with whatever you had done, existed with the insupportable. A week ago he was one sort of man, and today he was another. It happened to untold numbers, but they became the kind of people incapable of ever meeting each other. A killer lived with his internal injuries, never able to atone by bringing back the one whose life had been wasted.
‘Eileen told me. Is it true?’
One way of getting back to conventional simplicity was to give in to anger, but he curbed the temptation, such a distasteful route leading to mindlessness and defeat. ‘I’d give my life for it not to be.’
‘What a world.’ Nothing more to say, she left him to his breakfast, and looked at Lance moving the blankets one by one, as if not to cause pain to a corpse, until he came to two white legs streaked with blood, all below the waist awash. He had seen no more blood than that of a cut finger. They say you faint at the sight of blood, but I won’t. He flopped the blankets aside like enormous floorcloths, knowing it was the stench that put you in danger of throwing up. ‘It would have been better to go off the road doing a ton than peg out like this. He was dying while we were outside.’
‘We should have let the snow alone, and then we might have gone together.’ Wayne groaned. ‘His mam will go off her head when she knows.’
‘No, she won’t. Everybody hated him, except us.’ Lance shivered, out of control, legs melting under him, drew a chair close and sat down to cry. ‘It’s all that teacher’s fault. After Garry’s death, with my last breath. But it won’t work.’
‘Ferret’s dead,’ Wayne said. ‘But if he ain’t now, he will be. If it thawed we could track him down. I’ll get him. Even if he’s put inside for life I’ll be waiting to top him when he comes out. He deserves to be roasted over a slow fire. But if Keith hadn’t got us on snowshifting we could have stayed with Garry, and then maybe he would have been all right.’
‘The ifs don’t do any good,’ Lance said.
‘I know, but somebody’s done it, and it wasn’t us. Keith stopped us killing him when we was up in the attic, didn’t he? And then he wouldn’t let us hang him, like Garry wanted to.’
‘He’d been hit by that slate already,’ Lance said. ‘He should have gone straight to hospital, and he would have if the snow hadn’t blocked everything off. Another if, though.’
‘They’re right,’ Keith said to Eileen. ‘Five dead, and I’m still here.’
‘Take no notice,’ she told him. ‘They don’t know what they’re saying. You can’t blame ’em, though.’
One more push, another fifty yards. He would draw the van back, take it at a rush, up the well-prepared slope, then it would be far enough away not to kill anyone, a last effort before coming back to sleep till the storm was over and the police arrived.
Wayne and Lance sat silent, with heads down, settled by misery, flashes of the good times going by. Keith touched Lance’s shoulder, and said when he looked up: ‘I’m sorry about this.’
‘It ain’t your fault.’
If there was work to be done it would be easy to get them out, even kindness in it, and they would toil as never before, giving no sign of exhaustion or grief. ‘I’d like to thank you for all you did.’
Lance smiled, on hearing his own dead voice: ‘Any time.’
‘Just let us know,’ Wayne said.
He walked to Eileen, wondering what there was to say. Killing puts you beyond redemption, the solution always too late. He kissed her out of sleep. Her hands had gone cold, but she was warm and young. ‘I must just go to the toilet.’
‘Love you, love you, love you,’ she murmured, then smiled and closed her eyes, sure of him at last.