Beggars Banquet

She made a pout with her lips. ‘I thought you didn’t know any French.’

He was stuck for a moment. ‘There’s a picture of the sun right there on the card,’ he said finally.

She nodded slowly. His breathing had quickened again.

‘Second card,’ she said. ‘Death himself. La mort. Interesting that the French give it the feminine gender.’

He looked at the picture of the skeleton. It was gri

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t always portend a death.’

‘That’s a relief,’ he said with a smile.

‘The final card is intriguing – the hanged man. It can signify many things.’ She lifted it up so he could see it.

‘And the three together?’ he asked, curious now.

She held her hands as if in prayer. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said at last. ‘An unusual conjunction, to be sure.’

‘Death and the hanged man: a suicide maybe?’

She shrugged.

‘Is the sex important? I mean, the fact that it is a man?’

She shook her head.

He licked his lips. ‘Maybe the ball would help,’ he suggested.

She looked at him, her eyes reflecting light from the candles. ‘You might be right.’ And she smiled. ‘Shall we?’ As if they were not prospective lovers now but children, and the crystal ball little more than an illicit dare.

As she pulled the small glass globe towards them, he shifted again. The pistol barrel was chafing his thigh. He rubbed his jacket pocket, the one containing the silencer. He would have to hit her first, just to quiet her while he fitted the silencer to the gun.

Slowly, she lifted the handkerchief from the ball, as if raising the curtain on some miniaturised stage-show. She leaned forward, peering into the glass, giving him a view of crêped cleavage. Her hands flitted over the ball, not quite touching it. Had he been a gerontophile, there would have been a hint of the erotic to the act.

‘Don’t you go thinking that!’ she snapped. Then, seeing the startled look on his face, she winked. ‘The ball often makes things clearer.’

‘What was I thinking?’ he blurted out.

‘You want me to say it out loud?’

He shook his head, looked into the ball, saw her face reflected there, stretched and distorted. And floating somewhere within was his own face, too, surrounded by licking flames.

‘What do you see?’ he asked, needing to know now.

‘I see a man who is asking why he is here. One person has the answer, but he has yet to ask this person. He is worried about the thing he must do – rightly worried, in my opinion.’

She looked up at him again. Her eyes were the colour of polished oak. Tiny veins of blood seemed to pulse in the whites. He jerked back in his seat.

‘You know, don’t you?’

‘Of course I know, Mort.’

He nearly overturned the table as he got to his feet, pulling the gun from his waistband. ‘How?’ he asked. ‘Who told you?’

She shook her head, not looking at the gun, apparently not interested in it. ‘It would happen one day. The moment you walked in, I felt it was you.’

‘You’re not afraid.’ It was a statement rather than a question.

‘Of course I’m afraid.’ But she didn’t look it. ‘And a little sad, too.’

He had the silencer out of his pocket, but was having trouble coordinating his hands. He’d practised a hundred times in the dark, and had never had this trouble before. He’d had victims like her, though: the ones who accepted, who were maybe even a little grateful.

‘You know who wants you dead?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘I think so. I may have gotten the odd fortune wrong, but I’ve made precious few enemies in my life.’

‘He’s a rich man.’

‘Very rich,’ she conceded. ‘Not all of it honest money. And I’m sure he’s well used to getting what he wants.’ She slid the ball away, brought out the cards again and began shuffling them. ‘So ask me your question.’

He was screwing the silencer on to the end of the barrel. The pistol was loaded, he only had to slide the safety off. He licked his lips again. So hot in here, so dry…

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why does he want a fortune-teller dead?’

She got up, made to open the curtains.

‘No,’ he commanded, pointing the gun at her, sliding off the safety. ‘Keep them closed.’

‘Afraid to shoot me in daylight?’ When he didn’t answer, she pulled open one curtain, then blew out the candles. He kept the pistol trained on her: a head shot, quick and always fatal. ‘I’ll tell you,’ she said, sliding into her seat again. She motioned for him to sit. After a moment’s hesitation, he did so, the pistol steady in his right hand. Wisps of smoke from the extinguished candles rose either side of her.

‘We were young when we met,’ she began. ‘I was already working in a fairground – not this one. One night, he decided there had been enough of a courtship.’ She looked deep into his eyes, his own oak-coloured eyes. ‘Oh yes, he’s used to getting what he wants. You know what I’m saying?’ she went on quietly. ‘There was no question of consent. I tried to have the baby in secret, but it’s hard to keep secrets from a man like him, a man with money, someone people fear. My baby was stolen from me. I began travelling then, and I’ve been travelling ever since. But always with my ear to the ground, always hearing things.’ Her eyes were liquid now. ‘You see, I knew a time would come when my baby would grow old enough to begin asking questions. And I knew the baby’s father would not want the truth to come out.’ She reached out a shaking hand, reached past the gun to touch his cheek. ‘I just didn’t think he’d be so cruel.’

‘Cruel?’

‘So cruel as to send his own son – our son – to do his killing.’

He shot to his feet again, banged his fists against the wall of the caravan. Rested his head there and screwed shut his eyes, the oak-coloured eyes – mirrors of her own – which had told her all she’d needed to know. He’d left the pistol on the table. She lifted it, surprised by its weight, and turned it in her hand.

‘I’ll kill him,’ he groaned. ‘I swear, I’ll kill him for this.’

With a smile, she slid the safety catch on, placed the gun back on the table. When he turned back to her, blinking away tears, she looked quite calm, almost serene, as if her faith in him had been rewarded at last. In her hand, she was holding a Tarot card.

The hanged man.

‘It will need to look like an accident,’ she said. ‘Either that or suicide.’

Outside, the screams of frightened children: waltzers and big wheel and ghost train. One of his hands fell lightly on hers, the other reaching for his pistol.

‘Mother,’ he said, with all the tenderness his parched soul could muster.

Window of Opportunity – AN INSPECTOR REBUS STORY

Bernie Few’s jailbreaks were an art.

And over the years he had honed his art. His escapes from prison, his shrugging off of guards and prison officers, his vanishing acts were the stuff of lights-out stories in jails the length and breadth of Scotland. He was called ‘The Grease-Man’, ‘The Blink’, and many other names, including the obvious ‘Houdini’ and the not-so-obvious ‘Claude’ (Claude Rains having starred as the original Invisible Man).

Bernie Few was beautiful. As a petty thief he was hopeless, but after capture he started to show his real prowess. He wasn’t made for being a housebreaker; but he surely did shine as a jailbreaker. He’d stuffed himself into rubbish bags and mail sacks, taken the place of a corpse from one prison hospital, squeezed his wiry frame out of impossibly small windows (sometimes buttering his naked torso in preparation), and crammed himself into ventilation shafts and heating ducts.

But Bernie Few had a problem. Once he’d scaled the high walls, waded through sewers, sprinted from the prison bus, or cracked his guard across the head, once he’d done all this and was outside again, breathing free air and melting into the crowd… his movements were like clockwork. All his ingenuity seemed to be exhausted. The prison psychologists put it differently. They said he wanted to be caught, really. It was a game to him.