Open Writing

When I woke up the next morning I hadn't been shot. That was the first surprise.

The second was when Victoria, fully dressed I regret to say, shook me awake armed with nothing more lethal than a tray of coffee and scrambled eggs.

'I need you fighting fit,' she said. 'Eat this.'

I ran a quick check over the holy temple of my body. My head felt as though it had been out all night, otherwise I was ready for another day of Blitzkrieg.

When I'd refuelled, I told Victoria I was going to see Hands again. Now that I'd seen the police magazines myself, perhaps he'd tell me why they were so significant.

'In the first place you can't because you're not supposed to leave the hotel,' Victoria said. 'And in the second place you can't because he won't be working. Today's Sunday.'

I'd forgotten about things like weekends. Still, I had my own ideas about how far I should walk, so I began to get dressed, with some complicated manouevres designed to save blushes. I'm not sure whose. I looked up to see her laughing.

'Don't be shy,' she said. 'Who do you think put you to bed in the first place?'

I did fish mouths for a while. It's not that I'm particularly modest but if there's any action of that sort going on, I usually try to stay awake.

'You know all my darkest secrets,' I said.

She dropped her hand to one jutting hip and stood there rocking by the window.

'Yes. And frankly darling I don't know what all the fuss is about.'

'If you're trying to keep up the troops' morale, that is definitely not. ..'

'And,' her voice was stripped of the teasing, 'I saw the bullet wounds too. How did you get those?'

I stood up. By now I'd got my pants on.

'It was confetti that did that. I get to some rough weddings.'

After five minutes of You can't, I will, she decided to let me go walkies. Just around the square. I felt light-headed and every once in a while white lightning screamed across my brain. Apart from that I was okay.

I kept one hand on her shoulder but that was just because it was that sort of shoulder. She was wearing a light cotton skirt and a top so soft and floaty that it seemed to soak up some of the light so that she looked Pre-Raphaelite.

All the young life-is-for-living lot would still be in bed from Saturday night, so we shared the main square with elderly couples playing truant from church. And several of them overtook us.

When we stopped for a breather, I asked her when she'd decided I was a rat.

'That was your last thought before you went to sleep,' I reminded her.
'After you'd offered to shoot me.'

'The second I saw you,' she said, without hesitating. She raised her perfect eyebrows at me. 'It's lucky my rat resistance is pretty high these days.'

I was just about to say she didn't have to rely on personal virtue when she had an automatic in her hand, when I saw a figure running towards us, swerving in and out of the ambling pedestrians.

'Mr Hussy, Mr Hussy,' he shouted, and I realised it was Jack Pickles. 'Mr Hussy!' He rocked to a halt in front of us, gasping, and with his fists clenched.

'What's the problem, Jack?'

'It's Mr Hands,' he panted, and then I could see that his face was awash with tears. 'He's dead. You won't believe what they've done to him.'

Cracked skull or not, I was across the square and up the stairs in seconds, and I'd got halfway across the editorial room before I stopped.

It was enough to stop anyone.

And it was still half a minute before I could lift the window and tell Jack to keep Victoria down in the street. Then I dialled 999 and asked for the police. There was no point in asking for a doctor: when I touched his face with my knuckles it was as cold as a coffin handle on a January morning.

I sat and looked at him while I waited. There are a lot of ways of dying, but not many worse that that.

Tom Hands was much as I'd left him. Lying back in his bentwood chair with his feet on the desk.

Only now the bottle of Bell's had been rammed down his throat. It was still jammed there, between his stretched jaws, with his blue eyes staring up at it, wide open.

No. It wasn't a death you'd choose.

He needn't have told me anything. He could've kept out of it and stayed alive. He died of his own integrity which even booze couldn't drown.

But he deserved a better death in a damned better town than this one.