Peter Corris - Matrimonial Causes

Wilton lifted his glass in a sort of toast. ‘How many women have you fucked since you were married?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Be quite a few in my case and some names I wouldn’t want known. Do you get my drift?’

‘Blackmail. You’ve got hold of some discretion statements…’

‘A stack of ‘em.’

‘That sounds like real money.’

‘Believe me, it is.’

‘And some people got greedy, like Juliet Farquhar?’

Wilton shook his head. ‘Silly girl. She was very cooperative and very useful for a time, working from Andrew Perkins’ office. She helped with the documentation, you might say.’

‘She sicked Chalky onto me, too.’

‘She didn’t know what she was doing,’ Wilton said. ‘When she put a few things together she wasn’t so cooperative and…’ He spread his hands. He wore a broad gold wedding ring. His hands were well cared-for and very clean.

I held out my paper cup in Mario’s direction but he ignored me. ‘Who performed that little service?’

I caught a twitch from Mario.

‘Which brings us to Virginia Shaw,’ I said.

‘That bitch! She just threw you in it, mate. She knew the score. Whose name’s in half those discretion statements, d’you reckon?’

‘What was the problem?’

‘Gave her a grip, didn’t it? Now you’re really talking greedy. We’d like you to help us with her whereabouts.’

I shook my head.

Gallagher slammed his empty glass down on the table. ‘That’s enough, Henry! I helped you set up this fucking thing, steered you through it. Now I’m saying that’s enough running off at the mouth to this joker. Ask him the question.’

Henry Wilton wasn’t a stupid man. He knew when he’d had his own way long enough and how to give ground graciously. ‘I think you’re right, Ian. Our cards are on the table, Hardy. Who gave you Chalky’s name?’

No-one was pretending to be polite any more and negotiation wasn’t in the air. Wilton had enjoyed telling his story but it hadn’t given me any room to manoeuvre. Perhaps more had come out than he’d intended. The upshot was that I was transformed from a captive audience into something disposable and we both knew it.

I took out the makings and rolled a cigarette. ‘I think it was Bob Askin,’ I said, ‘but it might have been Tiny Tim.’

Chalky Teacher hit me high and low, very hard. I didn’t see either of the punches coming and after they landed I didn’t see or hear anything at all.

Pain and fear are good companions. They go together well. Back each other up like a good doubles pair at tennis. I had both of them with me when I regained consciousness after Chalky Teacher’s scientific assault. The pain was in my head, hands and feet and just about everywhere else in between. I tried to move to ease it and found out the main cause-I was tied at the wrists and ankles with my hands behind my back and my legs drawn up. Spasms of cramp shot through me as I tried to move. I lay still, waiting for the agony to settle back into ordinary pain. The fear was internal and external. I was sweating; there was a foul taste in my mouth which was taped shut, and my bowels were agitating fitfully like an off-balance washing machine.

I opened my eyes and experienced a surge of panic. I couldn’t see anything. Had Chalky blinded me? Then I realised I was in an enclosed, lightless space. Or almost lightless. I blinked and let my eyes adapt. Inside the blackness were patches of grey, some paler than others. I felt rather than saw the confinement, but I knew it was very close. A big box? A cupboard? I tried not to think of a coffin-it was bigger than that. Then an engine started and the prison began to move. I felt the wheels under me bumping along. I was in the back of some kind of vehicle, a small truck, a van or a station wagon. The windows were blacked out and the doors or hatch were a tight fit.

Trussed up like that, I felt like a thing, a non-person, an object being transported to some unknown destination. After a while I could move slightly without bringing on the cramp, but there was no point to it. I couldn’t move enough to gauge the dimensions of the space, and what the hell difference did it make anyway? I was tied so tightly I couldn’t get leverage of any kind. There was no possibility of rolling over or sitting up without dislocating several joints. Suddenly, I was aware of another sensation-cold. I was naked apart from my jockettes and small draughts were blowing over me and making me shiver.

At first I couldn’t understand that. It was a warm day, wasn’t it? Then I realised I had no idea of the time. Warm days change to cool nights. How long had I been unconscious? In a way that lost time, and not knowing its duration, was the most frightening thing of all. It gave me the feeling that I was already dead. I closed my eyes again and concentrated on trying to get some movement in the lashings around my ankles and wrists.

Nothing, not the fraction of an inch. I probed with my tongue against the tape across my mouth, but it was wide, heavy-duty stuff, generously applied. I panicked again, almost choked, and forced myself to breathe regularly through my nose. I was pretty sure I was experiencing the hard way another one of Chalky Teacher’s great talents.

I eventually decided I was in a panel van. The engine noise was muffled, meaning that there was a solid barrier between me and the front of the vehicle. Not a station wagon therefore, and some branches brushing the roof overhead gave me an idea of its height. Too low for a truck. I settled on the van-a matter of the quality of the ride and the pitch of the rattles and squeaks. I tried to listen to the traffic outside to get an idea of time and place, but wheels on roads sound much the same. The vehicle stopped and started, turned left and right, rode rough and smooth. I heard an occasional truck rumble and air brakes like those on a tourist bus. I heard no train noises or jet engines. I didn’t have a clue where I was.

Then I did in a very general way. The road got rougher and narrower to judge from the way the left side wheels dipped off the bitumen from time to time, and the traffic was definitely lighter. The country. I’m a city man who prefers pavements to paddocks, and I never preferred them more strongly than at that moment. It’s too easy to lose things and citizens in the country. There’s too much space and not enough people to notice. Another opinion is that everybody knows everybody else out there and nothing goes unremarked. A nice debating point, but I couldn’t see that it was going to make much difference to me one way or the other.

All this mental activity diverted me from my aches and pains, if not from my terrors. I doubted that they’d torture me to extract the name of the person who’d tipped me off about Teacher or to get a line on Virginia Shaw. It takes a special kind of nastiness to do that. I’d seen it in Malaya in Australians, Brits, Malays and Chinese-I didn’t see it in Teacher or Gallagher. Mario was a possible candidate. It was more likely that they were just tidying up and that was quite frightening enough. I tried to think of something I might bargain with, some threat to worry them. There was nothing. Fear of dying is ignominious. Life itself becomes precious, whatever its quality. I just wanted the impossible-for the painful, cold, humiliating ride to go on and on.

A jolting stop and I knew it was the final one. Doors opening and closing. Voices, and then the sound of something being taken down from a roof rack. A rustling noise and then the clank of metal. It wasn’t a surfboard. The opening of the back of my box confirmed my guess about the sort of vehicle I’d been travelling in. A strong torch beam lit up the interior, danced around and hit me, blindingly, in the face. I shut my eyes against it and it moved away. I blinked and looked past it, out at the dark shapes of trees outlined against a starlit night sky.