Ripped by Frederic Lindsay Page A

fish and chip shop round the corner and bought a supper. As an afterthought, he got them to add a meat pie on top.
    The phone was ringing when he opened the door of the flat. He listened to a Mr Foley complain in his ear while he unpicked the newspaper parcel one-handed and extracted the pie. Mr Foley was voluble concerning the importance of finding his ex-partner Beddowes, his embezzled money, even his wife – though this last sounded most like an attempt to enlist sympathy. He had a lot to say and Murray bit into the pie and gazed bleakly at the desk with the phone and the old Adler portable, the pair of chairs for clients, the filing cabinet with the reference books on top.
    'We're making progress. I've no doubt we'll find Beddowes – and your wife.' Not to mention the money. He cleaned a piece of pie out of a back tooth as the voice got excited, 'I'll be submitting a written report … tomorrow. No, I can't be more definite … That's your privilege . . . '
    In the back room, he turned on the water heater. He managed half the fish but the chips had waited too long. Slippery and lukewarm, they were wadded into the paper and dropped in the bucket under the sink. His prejudice where tea was concerned, favoured Chinese and he drank the first of too many cups, its perfume tickling his nostrils, and wondered how he could keep Mr Foley going, and thought about Merchant, and the man in the lane and the bad joke played on him in death by the van driver's wheel. Merchant's story of the butcher who did not know the meaning of circumcision came into his head and ran there like an offensive tune which would not be dislodged. Eddy Stewart had a sociable memory for jokes; he wondered if he had heard the one about the butcher . Every day was an anniversary of something. For Merchant there would be a day in every year which was the anniversary of the guard from the camp: 'I saw worse things later but because it was the first I never forgot him.' And now Merchant was claiming to have seen the man again, in a different time, a different place, a different world. Crazy. He thought about how too many anniversaries might make you crazy. He wondered what had driven his neighbour Miss Timmey crazy. 'It wasn't what he did to the boy,' Merchant had said. 'It was the noise. There's a noise a baby makes crying.' He thought about Miss Timmey and why her madness should take the form of accusing the young couple across the landing, who were so crazy for one another, and might now be lying entwined on the bed –
    And it was time then to stop thinking. Solitary is not lonely. Loneliness, as much as water on stone, will wear away the hardest substance.
    He set up the chess board with a problem he had worked before. It was a conversation with a familiar acquaintance. After a time, he moved a piece, but as he reflected on the responses that made possible, the unwanted image came to him of a couple entwined on a bed. How could a woman, a woman on her own, kill a man? Even if the pain had been unexpected and terrible, would he not have defended himself by instinct? How could she have been sure, a woman on her own, that she could kill him? Crazy. The woman – crazy idea – carried the man's hand to her mouth and bit at the soft webbing beside the thumb. Perhaps he was expecting to be fondled; perhaps he was smiling. Like an animal, she tore out his flesh. Murray stared at a ruined face given one hard edge by the inspection lamp and at the hand thrown out under its glare and at the half moon of blackened flesh torn from the root of the thumb, and remembering drove away the maggot ideas silence bred sometimes until the room darkened and the pieces on the board withdrew into the shadows.
     

 
    7 Clients
     
    SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 ST 1988
     
    'I'm a busy man,' Superintendent Standers said .
    'I'm sorry your time's being wasted like this,' Murray said . 'It was stupid of me going into the lane. I did it on impulse and I can't apologise any more than I have