Hugh Laurie - The Gun Seller

‘Right,’ I said.

‘And who was it offered you the job?’

‘Never seen him before or since.’

She stooped for the glass, took a sip of Calvados and grimaced at the taste of it.

‘And I’m supposed to believe this?’

‘Well…’

‘I mean, help me out here,’ she said, starting to get louder again. She nodded towards Rayner. ‘We have a guy here, who isn’t going to back up your story, I wouldn’t say, and I’m supposed to believe you because of what? Because you have a nice face?’

I couldn’t help myself. I should have helped myself, I know, but I just couldn’t.

‘Why not?’ I said, and tried to look charming. ‘I’d believeanything you said.’

Terrible mistake. Really terrible. One of the crassest, most ridiculous remarks I’ve ever made, in a long, ridiculous-remark-packed life.

She turned to me, suddenly very angry. ‘You can drop that shit right now.’

‘All I meant…’ I said, but I was glad when she cut me off, because I honestly didn’t know what I’d meant.

‘I said drop it. There’s a guy dying in here.’

I nodded, guiltily, and we both bowed our heads at Rayner, as if paying our respects. And then she seemed to snap the hymn book shut and move on. Her shoulders relaxed, and she held out the glass to me.

‘I’m Sarah,’ she said. ‘See if you can get me a Coke.’

She did ring the police eventually, and they turned up just as the ambulance crew were scooping Rayner, apparently still breathing, on to a collapsible stretcher. They hummed and barred, and picked things up off the mantelpiece and looked at the underneath, and generally had that air of wanting to be somewhere else.

Policemen, as a rule, don’t like to hear of new cases. Not because they’re lazy, but because they want, like everyone else, to find a meaning, a connectedness, in the great mess of random unhappiness in which they work. If, in the middle of trying to catch some teenager who’s been nicking hub-caps, they’re called to the scene of a mass murder, they just can’t stop themselves from checking under the sofa to see if there are any hub-caps there. They want to find something that connects to what they’ve already seen, that will make sense out of the chaos. So they can say to themselves, this happened because that happened. When they don’t find it - when all they see is another lot of stuff that has to be written about, and filed, and lost, and found in someone’s bottom drawer, and lost again, and eventually chalked up against no one’s name - they get, well, disappointed.

They were particularly disappointed by our story. Sarah and I had rehearsed what we thought was a reasonable scenario, and we played three performances of it to officers of ascending rank, finishing up with an appallingly young inspector who said his name was Brock.

Brock sat on the sofa, occasionally glancing at his fingernails, and nodded his youthful way through the story of the intrepid James Fincham, friend of the family, staying in the spare-room on the first floor. Heard noises, crept downstairs to investigate, nasty man in leather jacket and black polo-neck, no never seen him before, fight, fall over, oh my god, hit head. Sarah Woolf, d.o.b.29th August, 1964, heard sounds of struggle, came down, saw the whole thing. Drink, Inspector? Tea? Ribena?

Yes, of course, the setting helped. If we’d tried the same story in a council flat in Deptford, we’d have been on the floor of the van in seconds, asking fit young men with short hair if they wouldn’t mind getting off our heads for a moment while we got comfortable. But in leafy, stuccoedBelgravia, the police are more inclined to believe you than not. I think it’s included in the rates.

As we signed our statements, they asked us not to do anything silly like leave the country without informing the local station, and generally encouraged us to abide at every opportunity.

Two hours after he’d tried to break my arm, all that was left of Rayner, first name unknown, was a smell.

I let myself out of the house, and felt the pain creep back to centre stage as I walked. I lit a cigarette and smoked my way down to the corner, where I turned left into a cobbled mews that had once housed horses. It’d have to be an extremely rich horse who could afford to live here now, obviously, but the stabling character of the mews had hung about the place, and that’s why it had felt right to tether the bike there. With a bucket of oats and some straw under the back wheel.

The bike was where I’d left it, which sounds like a dull remark, but isn’t these days. Among bikers, leaving yourmachine in a dark place for more than an hour, even with padlock and alarm, and finding it still there when you come back, is something of a talking point. Particularly when the bike is a Kawasaki ZZR 1100.

Now I won’t deny that the Japanese were well off-side atPearl Harbor, and that their ideas on preparing fish for the table are undoubtedly poor - but by golly, they do know some things about making motorcycles. Twist the throttle wide open in any gear on this machine, and it’d push your eyeballs through the back of your head. All right, so maybe that’s not a sensation most people are looking for in their choice of personal transport, but since I’d won the bike in a game of backgammon, getting home with an outrageously flukey only-throw 4-1 and three consecutive double sixes, I enjoyed it a lot. It was black, and big, and it allowed even the average rider to visit other galaxies.

I started the motor, revved it loud enough to wake a few fat Belgravian financiers, and set off for Notting Hill. I had to take it easy in the rain, so there was plenty of time for reflection on the night’s business.

The one thing that stayed in my mind, as I jinked the bike along the slick, yellow-lit streets, was Sarah telling me to drop ‘that shit’. And the reason I had to drop it was because there was a dying man in the room.

Newtonian Conversation, I thought to myself. The implication was that I could have kept on holding that shit, if the room hadn’t had a dying man in it.

That cheered me up. I started to think that if I couldn’t work things so that one day she and I would be together in a room with no dying men in it at all, then my name isn’t James Fincham.

Which, of course, it isn’t.

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

I arrived back at the flat and went through the usual answerphone routine. Two meaningless bleeps, one wrong number, one call from a friend interrupted in the first sentence, followed by three people I didn’t want to hear from who I now had to ring back.

God, I hated that machine.

I sat down at my desk and went through the day’s mail. I threw some bills into the bin, and then remembered that I’d moved the bin into the kitchen - so I got annoyed, stuffed the rest of the post into a drawer, and gave up on the idea that doing chores would help me to get things straight in my mind.

It was too late to start playing loud music, and the only other entertainment I could find in the flat was whisky, so I picked up a glass and a bottle of The Famous Grouse, poured myself a couple of fingers, and went into the kitchen. I added enough water to turn it into just a Vaguely Familiar Grouse, and then sat down at the table with a pocket dictaphone, because someone had once told me that talking out loud helps clarify things. I’d said would it work with butter? and they’d said no, but it would work with whatever is troubling your spirit.

I put a tape in the machine and flicked the record switch.‘Dramatis Personae,’ Isaid. ‘Alexander Woolf, father of Sarah Woolf, owner of dinky Georgian house in Lyall Street, Belgravia, employer of blind and vindictive interior designers, and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Gaine Parker. Unknown male Caucasian, American or Canadian, fiftyish. Rayner. Large, violent, hospitalised. Thomas Lang, thirty-six, Flat D, 42 Westbourne Close, late of the Scots Guards, honourable discharge with rank of Captain. The facts, insofar as they are known, are these.’