Reginald Hill - The Long Kill

‘Out? Trumpeted abroad, old chap! Everyone in the village knows. And they’re all dying of curiosity about you.’

Even with allowance made for Parker’s hyperbole, this news did not please Jaysmith. After a professional lifetime of not drawing attention to himself, even this very mild and local limelight was distressing. A half bottle of champagne appeared on his table at dinner with Parker’s compliments.

He said to Doris Parker who had delivered it, ‘Really, I should be paying you a commission.’

She smiled in her placid down-to-earth way and said, ‘Bring a few friends in for dinner occasionally and that will do nicely. You’d rather just have your Chablis, I suspect?’

He nodded.

She said, ‘I’ll take this off your bill,’ and went away with the champagne.

After dinner, in the bar, Parker showed a strong tendency to act as his mentor in the minutiae of Grasmere life so he escaped to the lounge and watched television for a while. The news was the usual mishmash of political piffle, royal baby rumours, sporting highlights and bloody violence. There’d been an attempt on the life of the Turkish Ambassador in Paris, a botched-up job by some idiot with a Skorpion machine-pistol leaping out from behind a potted palm and spraying the vestibule of the hotel where the Ambassador was lunching. A doorman was killed, an American tourist seriously injured, and the assassin himself cut down by a hail of security men’s bullets which also killed a lift attendant. The dead and the injured were all filmed in glorious technicolour.

Jaysmith’s disgust must have shown. The female half of an elderly couple, the only other viewers, said, ‘It’s horrifying, isn’t it? Quite, quite horrifying.’

He nodded his agreement, but did not explain that his disgust was merely at the sight of the carnage caused by amateurs. Was he himself an amateur now? No, only if he started killing people without getting paid for it and that wasn’t likely! Even then, he would still proceed in a professional way. That was what he was, a retired professional. Fully retired now. He had sent a coded telex to his Swiss bank instructing them how to pay back the last unearned fee. Jacob would not be pleased, but his displeasure would be professional not personal. He would have to find a new man to do the job, if the job still had to be done. He would not miss Jaysmith; there would be no farewell speech, no commemorative gold watch.

It was only to Jaysmith himself that his retirement was of any real moment. It was a slightly disturbing thought.

He watched the weather forecast. The Indian summer was to go on a little longer.

He said goodnight to the elderly couple and went to bed.

That night he dreamt, and the dream brought him awake. It was the first broken night he had had in more years than he could remember.

He dreamt of Jacob, or rather of Jacob’s voice. Jacob’s face he could hardly recall, except for something faintly simian about it, like one of the great apes looking with weary wisdom out of its cage at the shrill fools beyond the bars who imagined they were free. It was many years since he had seen the face, but the voice was still fresh in his ears: dry, nasal, with its irritating habit of tagging interrogative phrases onto the end of statements, like little hooks to draw the hearer in.

In his dream he picked up the phone expecting to hear Enid. Over the years one young Enid had replaced another as his route through to Jacob. What became of the old Enids? he sometimes wondered, but was never tempted to ask. In his relationship with his employer as with his targets, distance suited him best. With women too. Until now.

Instead of Enid’s voice, Jacob had come instantly on the line. He spoke without emotion, without emphasis.

‘You’re Jaysmith,’ he said. ‘I invented you, didn’t I? You’re Jaysmith now and for ever, aren’t you? There’s nothing else for you. You’re Jaysmith, Jaysmith, Jaysmith …’

Suddenly with the voice still in his ear he had been back in the gill on Wanthwaite Crags. Across the valley he could see the red roof of Naddle Foot. He brought his rifle up to his eye and the terraced garden leapt into close focus. The white metal chair was there and in it a sleeping figure. He traversed the weapon and adjusted the sight till the silvery head filled the circle, quartered by the hairline cross. Now the sleeper woke and slowly raised his head. But when the face was fully turned to the sun, Jaysmith saw to his horror that it was not the old man after all, but the woman he had just met, Anya Wilson. She smiled straight at the gun, though she could not possibly see it, and his finger continued to tighten on the trigger …

With a huge effort of will he forced himself awake. If anything the waking was worse than the dreaming. It was four o’clock. He rose and poured himself a drink and sat by the window looking out into the night. It had all been a dream: that was the childhood formula which put such things right; but now fully awake he knew that this dream was true.

He was Jaysmith. He should have been back in London days ago, packing his belongings, easing himself into one of the alternative lives he had prepared over the years. Where could it end, this lunacy of pretending to buy a house and running around after this child, Annie or Anya or whatever she liked to call herself? She was at least fifteen years his junior, recently widowed and not yet emerged from that unthinkable pain. Suppose he did worm his way into her affections? It would be as bad almost as making her a target with his rifle.

His room faced east. After a while the false dawn began to push forward the great range of fells which runs from Fairfield to Helvellyn. He felt their advance, hard and menacing; it seemed that if he sat there long enough they would rumble inexorably onward to crush the hotel and the village and all its unwitting inmates. There was strength as well as terror in the thought. It confirmed his own certainties, silenced his own debates. In the morning he would rise early and pay his bill and leave, and that would be an end to Mr William Hutton and probably the beginning of a good half-century of speculation for the trivial gossips of this unimportant crease in the coat-tail of the universe.

He went back to bed, the future resolved, and slept deep.

When he awoke it was a quarter to ten.

‘Oh Christ!’ he swore, touched by a new terror in which the great threat was that she would not wait for him at their rendezvous point. So potent was this that he forewent both breakfast and shaving in his rush to get there.

She looked at him with considerable disapproval.

‘The good burghers of Grasmere will expect a much better turnout from the new inmate of Rigg Cottage,’ she said.

‘I came out in a hurry,’ he said. ‘I had a bad night.’

‘And how did the night feel, I wonder?’

He glowered at her and the mockery faded from her eyes and she murmured almost to herself, ‘Are we always so bad-tempered in the morning, I wonder?’

He got a grip of himself and smiled ruefully and said, ‘I’m sorry. As for what I’m usually like in the morning, I don’t know. It’s been a long time since there was anyone to tell me.’

‘Anyone who dared, you mean?’

‘Or cared. And really, I did have a bad night.’

He got in the car beside her. She had arranged to pick him up at the edge of the village on the road leading up to Rigg Cottage. He hadn’t queried the arrangement but just assumed that she didn’t care for a more public rendezvous under the eye of Mr Parker or her aunt’s many acquaintances.

‘What was bothering you? Not Doris Parker’s cooking, I hope?’

‘No. That’s fine. So’s she; I like her. She doesn’t come at you like dear Phil.’