Yet more from The Family Plot to tantalise you. Can you bear it? Can you? Oh. Right. Here it is anyway.
Breakfast in the middle of the solar night in an empty dining room over a nightclub would take some getting used to, thought Alistair as he blearily stirred his egg and eyed the sagging Christmas decorations – Christmas was another problem. He had begun, heretically, to long for the time when the cycle of decimal daytime once again coincided with solar daytime: he was tired of going to bed during the day and going about his business during the night. He had begun, just very recently, to imagine that some system of decimal time geared around natural daylight, with time-zones like the present system, might be a wiser idea than a worldwide system that ignored it. Certainly, a worldwide system would prevent the London businessman from losing minutes wondering whether or not his associate in Shanghai was awake or not, but if the man in Shanghai was awake in the darkness and thoroughly baffled by it all then surely more minutes would be lost to yawning and staring into space than would be lost to wondering whether people on the other side of the world were awake or asleep. He made a note of the problem on his little pad to think about it later (calling it the Yawn Factor), and also of another problem that had occurred to him: the Artificial Light Factor. The Artificial Light Factor dealt with the problem that if a system of International Decimal Time was devised that put the entire world in one time zone (which, in Alistair’s opinion, was the only sensible way to do it) then half the world would be awake when there wasn’t any sunlight. That would mean that energy consumption would almost certainly (well, pretty damn certainly, but Alistair didn’t want to face it) rise dramatically, which was a pain considering the whole plan was supposed to improve efficiency. He speculated very briefly on the feasibility of some sort of system of mirrors in space and then ate his sausages.
Over by the bar, despite it being very late (or very early, Alistair couldn’t say – it certainly seemed very dark), the desiccated reptilian form of the Hotel Atlantis’ manager Lionel Stillings kept the company of a nervous-looking squirrel-spirited man. They were talking very quietly and kept looking over at Alistair in a most disturbing way. They seemed almost to be having some sort of argument. Alistair left his remaining breakfast and went out through the shabby lobby to use the toilets. When he returned from that cold wet-smelling white-tiled room Stillings was lurking in the lobby on the wrong side of his desk, and as Alistair went to go back into the dinging room to finish his tea Stillings seized his arm and walked alongside him. To an impartial observer (not that there were any – the other man didn’t look impartial, just frightened), the scene may have appeared as though two old friends were trotting amicably into the dining room for a friendly drink, but Stillings had a tight, almost painful grip, on Alistair’s arm and he hissed into his ear in a voice that was anything but friendly.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he said through a stage smile, “but you’d better bloody well stop it. You know very well you’re not supposed to come here – if you think using a false name can fool me you’re dead wrong.” He emphasised the word dead in a way that was most disconcerting. He went on: “My friend over there – you know him by name, I think, Mr Gregory Andrews – thinks you’re up to no good. He thinks that you’re up to some sort of no good that could cock everything up for all of us. Is he right?”
They had stopped now in the middle of the dining room carpet, midway between where Andrews leaned against the bar and where Alistair’s tea waited. Stillings still had Alistair’s arm in a surprisingly strong grip. Alistair decided to respond with the truth. He had always been advised never to antagonise lunatics. “I’m here for a funeral,” he said, stating what had at least been partly true only a day or two before.
Stillings gave a snort of derision and released Alistair’s arm. “Just remember your card’s been marked,” he said, moving away; then he added, presumably as his little malevolent hotelier joke, “Enjoy your tea, sir.”
Alistair made for the sanctuary of his teapot. It was not as warm as it might have been, but he worried that a request for more hot water might elicit another outburst of mania from the old man. He eyed the pair as surreptitiously as was possible in the nocturnal gloom of the breakfast room.
Stillings, the more familiar of the two, now had his back to Alistair, displaying a tear in his tweed that had been sewn up by someone whose knowledge of needlework was scant and whose hurry was great. He seemed to be expounding some vital theory or other to Andrews, who was nodding and yet still appeared to be disagreeing. He looked a lot like a man trying to talk his way out of a bout of fisticuffs with a wino he’s inadvertently tripped.
Alistair speculated on what it was that Stillings had been talking about. Apparently he knew he was booked into the hotel under a false name – something he’d done on a whim: it was one of those idiotic ideas that he’d carried around for years; the idea that one day he would book into a hotel under a false name, a bit like Bond, and live the life of a spy for a bit. Bob Carolgees had been the first name that had popped into his head, and it was only now that he remembered who Bob Carolgees was and why Stillings had sourly enquired as to the whereabouts of Spit the Dog. Perhaps it was that that had annoyed Stillings so thoroughly. But that didn’t explain what he had said about cocking everything up for them or why Stillings would imagine that he should know the name Gregory Andrews. Alistair was developing a nasty theory that the whole thing might have something to with Andrew when a ghost appeared and startled him out of his wits.
Marie Caine, Andrew’s wife, had appeared in the dining room and, all in an instant, had crossed the room, ordered coffee, kissed Alistair distractedly on the cheek, sat down and placed her head in her hands. In his baffled mental state Alistair accepted all this without question. Marie always had been rather a difficult woman to understand (not only because she was French and her English was bad).
“It’s a long time since I’ve seen you,” said Alistair. It was true. It had been five years – they had last met at Andrew’s first funeral. He had almost wondered how she had recognised him, but then realised, of course, that she was married to his twin brother. Another symptom of a sleep deprived brain.
Marie lifted her head and Alistair saw that she looked more tired and considerably older than when last they’d met. She was in no mood for small talk. “Your brother’s in town,” she stated, unemotionally, her voice divested of the French accent that had once been so alluring. “Have you heard from Truss?”
Alistair said that he knew and that he hadn’t. He was wondering if she’d dyed her hair. He was wondering if it was to cover newly acquired greys.
“And what about them?” she asked in a low voice, indicating Stillings and Andrews with a backward roll of her eyes.
“What about them?” asked Alistair, and poured himself some more tea. He had a vague feeling that he might be able to make her divulge some more information if he was vague enough to make her explain everything.
“Have either of them recognised you?” she asked, still quietly, but insistently. A crumpled old woman clattered Marie’s coffee onto the table, making them both jump, and skulked away. Marie waited for her to go and then asked whether they’d done anything out of the ordinary.
“Stillings said he knows who I am and that I’d better not cock everything up for him,” reported Alistair, and sat back to see what sort of a reception Marie gave the information.
She gave half a laugh that was very eloquent but also completely opaque. It was a lot like listening to a lecture of the nature of Being in Norwegian, or some other language that no-one speaks: it was full of information, but Alistair did not have the knowledge to decode it. Marie qualified the enigmatic noise. “He’s a fine one to do the talking,” she said, her inept construction the first hint of her Gallic roots.
Hair dye cropped up in Alistair’s brain again, but he managed to give a knowledgeable noise of agreement.
“Has your brother arrived yet?” she asked.
“I saw him earlier, but I don’t know where he is now, though,” said Alistair.
“For heaven’s sake,” she said, suddenly exasperated, “all you had to do was keep your eye on him.”
Alistair was taken aback. A creeping suspicion that all was not well had crystallised into the definite knowledge that Marie thought she was talking to Andrew, just as Stillings and Andrews had. The dining room suddenly felt like a very threatening place. Questions crowded in on Alistair in that uncouth way that he had found them doing so very often recently. Why was Andrew supposed to be keeping an eye on him? Was it to prevent any harm coming to him or to make sure some did? And what had Andrew got into that would lead Stillings to threaten him? And, further, if Andrew wasn’t keeping an eye on him, as he was supposed to be, why wasn’t he and where was he and was he, he wondered, well?
Marie was looking at him with exasperation writ large across her tired face. “Well say something, then,” she said.
“I’ll be back in a moment,” said Alistair, and made for the door.
***
Alistair hadn’t had much of a plan when he had made his escape from the dining room; he had had a sort of vague idea that he might hide in his room until Marie went away and then, when daylight finally came, creep off to the station and escape Whorlton for good. Better to face one angry Coggs in Crakethorne than a whole herd of his brother’s mysterious faceless enemies in Whorlton.
As soon as Alistair entered his room from the darkened corridor, though, he knew that this was not what was going to happen. The television was on and the window was open, which was not how he had left them. On the television was a news programme, but far more arresting than that was the fact that there, on the bed, was the inert form of Andrew. Alistair flicked on the light and leaned over his hammering heartbeat to examine his brother, the fear of the worst a wild animal in his skull. But Andrew was not dead – he was barely conscious, scarcely breathing, but not dead.
“What the hell’s happened to you?” asked Alistair, under his breath.
“Exactly the same thing that was supposed to happen to you,” said a voice from the dark of the corridor, rich with frustrated disappointment, just before the owner of the voice pulled the door shut and turned a key from the outside. Alistair darted to the door, unlocked it using his own key and ran out into the corridor. There was nothing there but the dusty threadbare carpet, the cracked plaster and the warped panelling. A little whirl in the airborne dust suggested that Andrew’s assailant had made for the stairs; it seemed he’d (it had been a man’s voice) simply locked the door in order to give himself a head start. Alistair returned to his brother, who seemed rapidly to be returning to consciousness, and shook him by the shoulders, demanding to know whether he was quite well. He groaned and blinked and tried to sit up, and asked for a drink.
“Marie’s here,” said Alistair. “I’ll get you a drink and bring her up.”
Andrew nodded and flopped back onto the pillows. His limbs were taught with the returning life, not limp as they had been in his unconsciousness. Alistair left the room and noticed, on his way out, a leather attaché case on the floor and a series of hypodermic needles and a scalpel on the dressing table. There was also a tape-recorder and, bafflingly, what looked like an urn of the sort that ashes are kept in.
In the dining room Marie was being subjected to some sort of interrogation by Stillings under the pretence of polite and hospitable conversation. She was keeping him at arm’s length with an exemplary expression of unimpressed Gallic languor, and Stillings finally made his way back to the bar and the increasingly drunk-looking Gregory Andrews with a sour glare at Alistair when he came to the edge of the table and said to Marie that there was a taxi at the door for her. It was the first thing that came into his head that would get her out of the dining room unperturbed.
Alistair didn’t pause in his hurriedly relaxed march until he reached the half-landing and looked back to find that Marie was not following him; she was stood in the centre of the lobby, visible from the dining room, with her hands on her hips and a thunderously quizzical expression on her face. Her red painted lips were curled derisively and her scowl reminded Alistair, oddly, of one of the fibreglass Neanderthals in the museum at Crakethorne. She was, he suddenly reflected, not a very likable woman – at her and Andrew’s wedding she had had what the twins’ mother would have called a Defcon 1 tantrum about the flowers in the church – and it was only now that Alistair realised that he had thought that she was dead, too. Indeed, he wondered now why it was that he had assumed that it had been her that had called him to Whorlton. And who actually had made the call. All this ran through his head like an express train, as he slowly took two steps down the chipped marble flight towards her.
“Come on,” he urged, “we haven’t much time.”
She shook her head in exasperation, or incomprehension – it was difficult to tell which from halfway up the stairs – and turned to go out into the rain-soaked street. She marched decisively until she reached the maroon-painted double doors, where she tried to push her way out through a door marked Pull, which was locked. She pulled the other door open as though it were a chicken and she were breaking its neck and then turned to face Alistair, the rain lashing in onto the terrazzo.
“You never do change,” she shouted, “no matter what your name is,” and stormed out. She tried to slam the door but it was fitted with an ancient damper which made it jerk reproachfully and then creep obsequiously, apologetically closed. Don’t mind her, it seemed to say, she’s just had a bad day.
He went all the way down the stairs and stared blankly through the glass panel in the door at the dark street outside. He had no idea which way Marie had gone, and even if he had felt able to catch up with her he had no idea what he would have said to her. He turned to go back towards the stairs and found his way blocked by Gregory Andrews, apparently in a state of extreme drunkenness.
“You,” said Andrews, and prodded Alistair in the chest with a pudgey finger. The finger, once prodded into Alistair’s chest, seemed to take on an important role in the area of holding Andrews up and stayed prodded while Andrews’ watery eyes roved searchingly across Alistair’s face.
“Yes?” said Alistair, for want of anything else suitable.
Andrews winked a theatrical wink and retracted his finger. The fact that he was free-standing again seemed to imbue Andrews with a new confidence and he spoke loudly, confidently: “You think you can come here like some sort of Rip Van Winkle and kidnap people and take away their livelihoods? Or is it that other one – Kray, is it?”
Alistair wanted nothing to do with this man. He stepped as though to go around him, but Andrews somehow managed, despite his intoxication, to put himself in Alistair’s path. “Oh I see, you want to walk away now do you?” said Andrews, looking as though he might be about to cry. “Well you can’t. You can’t you can’t you can’t. You’re in it with us you stupid bastard, in it up to your neck and my neck and his neck.” He presumably meant Stillings’ neck, which was nowhere to be seen. “And there’s no way out for you, not like that. You just wait and see, you’ll not blackmail Truss – you wait. You’ll see. You try that and you’ll be off somewhere with Helen.”
Alistair wondered who Helen was, but his thoughts were interrupted by a peculiar hacking sound which turned out to be Andrews laughing.
Andrews recomposed himself. Or became less hysterical, at least, and said with an air of enigmatic satisfaction: “How was he to know I didn’t want her back? That one backfired on him didn’t it? Yes it did! I’m free now, free! He can’t do anything to me now – he can’t,” Andrews paused to allow himself a brief cackle, “he needs me too much. Tomorrow I’ll go on the boat, I’ll go on the boat and he’ll see just exactly how much he does need me.”
“Yes,” said Alistair again. There wasn’t much else he could say. He imagined Andrews would eventually simply run himself flat and that would be that.
“Yes,” repeated Andrews, as though he had taken Alistair’s reply as an agreement. He patted Alistair’s shoulder conciliatorily and moved to one side with an expression on his fat face that seemed to suggest that he imagined that they had reached some agreement, or at least some sort of understanding. “Yes indeed. He needs me. Everyone needs an undertaker sooner or later.”
Andrews seemed unable to stop moving sideways once he had started and continued making his little shuffling sideways steps, punctuated with little wobbly pauses during which he’d wink knowingly, until he had gone out of the door and into the street. Alistair waited a moment to see whether anything else would happen and then decided he’d better go and see whether or not his brother had been revived by the cold sea air coming through the open window.
Apparently he had. He had been revived enough to clear up the things that had been on the table and the floor and make off through the window. Alistair closed the window on the gathering dawn and sat on the edge of the bed, blankly eying the television news. His plan to simply leave Whorlton had been horribly derailed, much like the Intercity 125 that Moira Stewart was bleakly talking about; her sad eyes, thought Alistair, are exactly the right kind to relate awful news to the nation. Moira’s eyes hardened. The word hard word ‘missing’, meaning ‘murdered’ had crept into her discourse, as had the name ‘Crakethorne’ and the names ‘Alistair’ and ‘Laura Caine’. Apparently, according Moira (and who would doubt her?) the police were looking for a chap by the name of Alistair Caine. A chap who had mysteriously disappeared. A chap whose wife had also earlier mysteriously disappeared. And there on the screen was a photograph of Alistair Caine. Or at least that’s what the caption said: it was actually one of Andrew taken by Alistair on a Sealink ferry. It was about six years old and it was a bad picture – it was grainy and out of focus and it had somehow acquired a kind of orange wash of colour as though it had been taken through one of those orange plastic bottles cheap cider comes in. There was an appeal for information as to Alistair Caine’s whereabouts. There was a number to call – an incident room had been established (in Crakethorne, not Whorlton, thank God thought Alistair). There was Inspector Spectre, behind a desk in front of which was a pair of big photographs – one of Laura, one of Alistair (or Andrew, actually) – and he was droning on in his misleading Birmingham apiary noise about how he wasn’t ruling anything out but that he would like very much to speak to Alistair Caine and that he was terribly concerned for Alistair Caine’s safety.
Alistair Caine was terribly concerned for Alistair Caine’s safety too, and so he did the only thing he thought logical in a situation like this: he switched off the television and went and had a bath.
Recent comments