‘What will it research? Unexplained heart attacks among the nation’s pig-eaters?’
He shook his head. ‘Shame. I thought you might pretend you didn’t know.’
‘How could I do that when Maurice Clapton’s already been on the phone to you. I assume he got through?’ He didn’t say anything for a bit. In fact he looked quite troubled. Or as troubled as a man can look when facing a future of promotion and profit. ‘Such a corporate-spirited chap, eh? Sending you the only copy of Shepherd’s report. Which just left the problem of the original. I must say it was a great plan, Ellroy. You target Shepherd by sending incriminating evidence to animal rights, then have Mattie keep up the flow. And using your “student/infilitrator” to recruit her was a masterstroke. Sex and politics. Irresistible to a young girl. Shame she couldn’t find the one thing you were looking for. Not that it mattered that much. I mean when Shepherd threatened to cause trouble, all you had to do was to send a few death threats of your own, find the right time and place, and boom, Tom becomes a martyr to science, Mattie confesses, and the police go on a wild goose chase around school gardens and student campuses, with all roads leading back to animal rights. Nobody’s bothering much about secret reports. What were you going to do? Offer to help the police go through his papers to check for industrially sensitive material? Why not? After all, you were the good guys, weren’t you?
‘As I say, great plan. You weren’t to know that Shepherd would screw it up by spending the night in the lab and sending someone else to bring Mattie to London. And of course, she didn’t know anything about it. For her it was business as usual. Back in the house and up to Daddy’s study again, on the look-out for something tasty to take back to loverboy. Only this time she looked in the right place. For the record it was under the carpet. Well, where else would you put your dirty work? Trouble is, she was bright enough to realize what it was she’d found. To know that this time she had dynamite of a different kind—enough to blow Vandamed International clear out of the water and make her young gardener love her for ever.’
He opened his mouth to say something, but decided against it. Across the shed the outside door had opened, a long rasping noise of iron. Standing there, under the light of a single bulb, was the man of my dreams. Come back for more fun. I swallowed hard. What had Frank said about the face he wouldn’t see in hell? I wish I could have been so sure. I gave him a big, sassy smile. There are certain times in one’s life when you need to make an impression.
‘Well, hello there. I thought you’d left me for someone else. Come on down. I’m sure the price is right. It usually is with Vandamed. We were just talking about you. About how you called Mattie the night she died. Remember?’
He was walking towards me. My words were my weapons, sharp little knives slicing through the air, whistling ever closer to that smooth skin. ‘I’d like to think that it began as a humanitarian call. To make sure she didn’t get into the car by mistake. But I’m afraid when push comes to shove you’re not that interested in humanity, are you? So when she told you what she’d found, you had to do some fast thinking. Not something I suspect you have much experience of.’ I gave him a quick shy smile. ‘I mean now she’d seen it, you could hardly risk her confronting her father, could you? Or anyone else for that matter. So what did you do? Told her what a clever girl she was, and how she’d be even cleverer if she could get the car keys and drive herself to an arranged meeting place so you could share in the find? I have to hand it to you. It was a nice strategy. Appealed to both the rebel and the romantic in her. So she acted her socks off to get herself out of the house with the report tucked away in her back pocket. Very clever. So clever in fact that it’s hard to believe it was all your own work. That someone more senior wasn’t standing next to you, prompting you on.’
They were near enough to each other even to look a little like father and son. Who knows? Maybe that’s how they felt. Not quite.
‘I didn’t—’ Loverboy began.
‘Shut up.’
He did as he was told. My, when it came to imposing corporate solidarity, Marion Ellroy was the tops. Even if he didn’t look as good. I turned my attention from the pleasures of the flesh to the challenge of the brain.
‘Still, you took one hell of a risk, both of you. Killing her and leaving him. I mean if Shepherd had realized …’
Ellroy shook his head. ‘But he didn’t, did he? Or rather not until you told him. You see, Hannah, it doesn’t pay to go into these things too deeply. You saw him. He was smashed apart by her death. Too lost to cause us any trouble, for a while at least. Until you told him about Mattie and her animal rights boyfriend who used to work at Vandamed, that is. Then he went looking and found his report had gone.’
I picked up the baton. The trouble with this relay race would be what happened at the finishing line. ‘And so Shepherd called the one person he trusted. Clapton, who listened, told him he’d come over right away and then called you. And the rest is animal poison. How did you do it?’
‘You don’t get it, do you, Hannah? I’m telling you we didn’t have to do anything. What you told him made him realize that he was the one really responsible for his daughter’s death. After that there was only one way out. It would make you feel better if it had been murder, wouldn’t it? But the chain was on the door and there was no sign of a struggle.’
I shook my head stubbornly. ‘The Notting Hill rapist used to get in through the back windows. You talked yourself in through the front and just got out that way. And it takes very little to stick a needle in someone’s arm. Especially someone who thinks they deserve to die.’
He said nothing, only smiled ever so slightly, as if accepting the compliment. He was right, of course, wanting to believe was not the same as wanting it to be true. But that didn’t help me now.
He nodded. ‘Well, I think this is the moment when I tell you what a smart girl you are.’
‘Woman, please,’ I said. ‘It’s deeply patronizing to be called a girl.’
‘Woman, then. You know, Hannah. I’d dearly love to invite you to join us. The offer I’d make you would be embarrassingly generous. But then I know you’re not interested in money.’
I stood up. ‘On the contrary, I’ve just been playing hard to get. Waiting for the offer I couldn’t refuse.’ I smiled and put out my hand. ‘I accept.’
We looked at each other. And there was just a hint of hesitation. On his part. ‘And what about Frank?’ he said softly.
‘Frank need never know.’
‘How about what he knows already?’
Trick questions. The best preparation for being a private eye is the entrance exams for the Civil Service. A letter on a desk and a message on an answering machine. To have followed me to the Hortley Hotel they must have found one of them. And finding one presumably also meant finding the other. But not necessarily the root as well as the branch. ‘Thanks to you, nothing,’ I replied. ‘A tape message can mean whatever I choose it to mean, assuming, that is, you haven’t wiped it already. And you obviously have the letter, which means that Frank doesn’t. So I tell him I made a mistake. Thought I’d solved the plot when I hadn’t. It’s happened enough times before.’
Ellroy looked at me for a while and there was a kind of sadness in the gaze. Then he shook his head. ‘Porkies, Hannah,’ he said very softly. Ah well, even the villains understand technology now. ‘Nice try, though.’
And it was now that I started to feel something which I knew must be fear, but strangely felt more like sleepiness. A desire to stop, just curl up in a corner and let it all go away. I pulled myself back into the land of the living. ‘You can’t kill me,’ I said. ‘There’s such a thing as too many bodies. Shepherd you might get away with. Me, no one would believe.’
He pursed his lips. ‘Hannah, you’re obsessed with this case. Everyone knows that. Your boss, your boyfriend, the police, everybody. It’s driven you to extremes.
‘It drove you to make contacts in the animal rights movement. Through th
em you managed to track down the man who worked undercover at Vandamed and deceived Mattie into betraying her father. You were so determined to solve it alone that you didn’t even give him to the police until you were forced to. So when he contacted you and asked you to go to a playground in Holloway at 1 o’clock in the morning, you agreed, although you didn’t tell the police. You did tell Frank, though. The message is on his answering machine to prove it. And, believe me, no animals rights activist is going to come forward to contradict him. So the next evening you meet that same activist in the bar of the Hortley Hotel near Vandamed headquarters. Only this time you don’t tell Frank—you’re right, of course, that last message has gone from the machine. And this time people see you together. Recognize you both. You’re very friendly. You leave together arm in arm.
‘It’s a dangerous strategy, yours. Infiltrating the enemy camp. And in this case you have to sing for your supper. Agree to go on a little underground mission to prove your good faith. Simple enough to do. Break into Vandamed while they’re busy celebrating the news of AAR’s government bill of health, and put a fire bomb in the abattoir. A fine, poetic comment about the cost of making a profit.
‘Unfortunately, as happens with such things, something goes wrong. This time one of you doesn’t get out. I’ll leave you to work out which one it is.’
Of course, he who can make one plot work, can usually make another. In lieu of a fatal flaw I clutched at straws. Good in the myths, small beer in reality. ‘Why just me? I mean why not get rid of us both? Kill the killer and no one ever penetrates the conspiracy. His dead body would tie it all up in a big red bow. Or maybe that’s what you had in mind already.’ And there was perhaps a touch of unease between them. ‘See,’ I almost shouted at loverboy, ‘you didn’t read the small print on the contract.’
He turned to Ellroy and there was, I suppose, just a second when their attention was elsewhere. Not enough for the classic getaway but what else could I do? I was out of the pig pen and on my way to the door. He had to jump over two fences to get to me. I nearly made it. If I hadn’t been shaking off the last of the chloroform … Well, it’s academic now. I still think it was better than not trying at all. But I paid a price.
The first instalment was the feel of his hands upon me. No messing, this time. He held me by the hair, very close. We definitely had something going between us. You could feel it in the air. Even the boss recognized it.
I had moved from the man with the words to the man with the action. It would be a different kind of fun from now on. Ellroy stood and watched us in each other’s arms. Just like him, I thought. Better to do things from a distance. And I had a sudden picture of Shepherd’s living room, with Ellroy sitting watching as a man with nothing left to lose stuck a needle into his own flesh. Part of his job, really, persuading people to carry out his decisions. ‘You all right, Joe?’ A name now, although it was much too late. Joe nodded, holding me hard against him. ‘I’ll see you later, then.’
‘Don’t do it,’ I shouted out at the top of my voice, and I would like to tell you that it was just another part of the act. I would like to tell you that, but I can’t. ‘Don’t let him do it. Please.’
Ellroy stopped and seemed to think about it for a second, but in the scale opposite my life sat a six-year patent and two people’s deaths. He shook his head. ‘You’ve got three-quarters of an hour, Joe. Just make sure you get out of the building before then.’ And he turned and walked past us without giving me another look.
The door clanged shut behind him. Joe started to drag me towards the pig corral. And as we moved closer, I heard my own voice rising up to join theirs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE It’s the Famous Final Scene
We crossed to the death shed under cover of darkness, the sudden fresh air slapping me around the face. He had no hand free to clamp my mouth, but there was little point in screaming since there was no one to hear.
The next door led to another world as we both knew it would. Inside the machinery was silent now, though the pigs weren’t fooled. Behind me I could still hear them squealing out the injustice of it all. He held me close as he propelled me through a forest of hanging carcasses towards the killing floor. Travelling from their deaths towards my own. To keep my brain alert I decided to be interested in what I saw.
It was a large, bare room, the floor criss-crossed by a dozen drains, the ceiling decorated with a long, dancing line of steel hooks suspended like giant S’s from a conveyor belt that snaked its way round and out through heavy plastic doors towards … well, I would find out soon enough. I went back to the hooks, the stuff of a thousand movie images of death. At least they were honest. Show a pig a packet of bacon and it might think it stood a chance. Here, at least, it would know.
It hadn’t been long since they had been in motion. This, after all, was a champagne break, not an end of shift. I could see where water hoses had been used but not enough; there was still blood on the floor and the walls, and steam rising from a huge galvanized steel bath at one end with what looked like a large chip fryer resting above it. What it actually was I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Bloody chambers. Except by the time the pigs got here they would already be dead. You had to remember that. The business was meat, not deliberate cruelty. The only cruelty was our appetites.
Either way it made the pigs luckier than me. Our waltz across the room had made me grow restless in his arms. He had even slipped once on the messy floor. It made him nervous. Or impatient. He pushed me heavily through the plastic doors. They slapped against my face and the smell of pig closed in about us.
Inside he let me go. Why not? There was nowhere to run to. Or nowhere that you’d want to go. We were standing in a small concrete box, no bigger than a bathroom. The floor was littered with pig shit, the stench like a blanket over your head. The only way out, apart from the hooks and the plastic doors, was a heavy iron grille gate leading to the concrete corridor and at the end those sliding double doors which could be opened to a smaller or wider degree. Beyond there was only the desperate smashing of pigs’ feet. I’d cry for them later. For now I had my own death to fight against. I looked around for any help I could get, but he was nearer to it than I: on a large hook on the wall, like a monstrous pair of headphones, was a set of stunner tongs, its ends plunged in a bucket of dirty water. Electrocution in stereo.
What a nasty little place to have to die. I moved as far away from him as I could get, my back against the wall, and we stood watching each other. The power of concentration. The walls of the chamber fell away and I lifted myself out of the stench until I could almost taste the sweet night air around us: a lovely country lane with the grass and the ditch and the sheen of sweat on my skin.
At least this time I could see him. And he me. My dark glasses were long gone, and the cut above my eye throbbed gently from the memory of his attentions. So here we were, together alone at last. I had been waiting so long for this moment: the final intimacy, the shared psychopathology.
But the truth was, when it came down to it, he wasn’t that fascinating after all—simply one more man intent on violence. Maybe all that dark symmetry had just been a premonition of death. But if I was no longer attracted, he was. He stood poised on the balls of his feet, watching me with a still, intense interest. Spring and a young man’s fancy.
So all those tired old film directors were right. Men and women. Violence and sex. It comes with the territory, an inevitable function of power. Or maybe just a way to take your mind off the job. I tried to do the same. I thought of a car ride through a glistening Wiltshire morning and Mattie’s question asked so many aeons ago. ‘How many men?’ One-night stands. I used to be so good at them. But one night meant there would be a possibility of another. Eighteen men. Please, God, don’t make it nineteen. Even if it would give her and me something in common other than death. On the other hand when it came to gaining time I didn’t have a whole lot else going for me. And as any woman can tell you, a man thinking with his cock is not a man
thinking with his head. He took a step towards me. I flinched. He liked that. I sort of knew he would. I took a breath. ‘Are you sure we’ve got the time, Joe?’ I said loudly. ‘You wouldn’t want to be caught in a fire with your trousers down.’
It took him a while to work it out, but when he did, it appeared to cause him enormous mirth. He laughed out loud. ‘My. You do have a high opinion of yourself. Don’t worry, I’m not going to fuck you. You’re not my type.’
Not just death but sexual rejection. As days go this was proving one of the toughest. So it wasn’t sex. In which case what kind of desire had I been reading in his greedy looks? Come on, Hannah. Your only chance is to know him better than he knows you. And you don’t have a lot of time. Not his type. Too old, perhaps?
Then it dawned on me. ‘But she was, wasn’t she? Your type, I mean,’ I said softly.
He frowned. ‘Mattie?’ And something in the way he said it made me realize I had touched a chord. ‘Yes, Mattie was lovely,’ he said. It took my breath away. Not just because it was true, but because it was clear that whatever his pact with the devil, there had been a bit of him that had not wanted to kill her. I had been right, but for the wrong reasons. That one had been Ellroy’s decision. And that was what Joe had been trying to tell me in the pig shed when Ellroy stopped him. Another time it would have been the stuff to drive a wedge between them. But it was severely too late for that kind of subtlety.
‘You’re killing the wrong person, Joe. I liked her, too.’ But there was the tiniest crack in my voice and I knew I had lost. ‘For her sake let me go.’
He looked at me, and I watched something spark in his eyes. Mattie slid away, rubbed out by a stronger, wilder emotion. I didn’t totally understand it at first, so clung on to what we’d had. ‘Do you want me to plead?’ I whispered so that my self-respect wouldn’t have to hear it this time. And then came the smile. Big and with an inner light. Its craziness scared me. He knew it immediately, and he liked that even more. He took a step towards me.