Connery (Part 11)

A Speculative Novel

Everybody knows about the Enigma machine and how fundamental it was to the Allied victory in the Second World War. Alan Turing. Bletchley Park. The Ultra Project. They would make a movie about it with Benedict Cumberbatch. What few people remember or know about is the fact that the code machine that the Germans used, the machines whose code we had hacked were rounded up, captured, collected during the German retreat and shipped back to England. The breaking of the code was so secret that even Britain’s allies knew nothing of it. Sometimes secret information of attacks had been kept hidden and the attacks had been allowed to take place because any evidence of foreknowledge would have tipped the Germans off to the vulnerability of their machines. To have broken the code was one thing, maintaining the secret was as big an effort and one which involved morally complex decisions. How many lives do you sacrifice? So, the Germans didn’t know and neither did the allies. And following the war, the British were keen to offer their allies the ground-breaking technology they had captured from the Germans. The unbreakable code machines. So they then could take them back to their capitals or place in their embassies and use for their most secret communications. All the while the British continued to listen in and decode and benefit from the knowledge of what their allies were thinking as trade deals were negotiated and diplomatic incidents resolved, and the Cold War began. This was a story I was told by Captain Plimsol. The point was to illustrate that intelligence work didn’t necessarily engage the enemy. That certainly was part of it. But it just as readily engaged our friends.

‘Ultimately as the Duke of Wellington once said: we need to know what is on the other side of the hill,’ I was told as the rain rattled the windows of the Sussex farmhouse where yet another course in unarmed combat, interrogation techniques, cypher and encryption was rolling to an end like an under hit ball across the felt of a billiard table. ‘It is as vital to understand if our allies are as strong as they claim to be and are as trustworthy as they have promised. Will they keep their promises? Can we trust them? And the only way of ever really knowing this, is to spy on them. Do you get my picture?’

‘Yes sir,’ I said.

‘Drop the sir nonsense, Coleridge,’ Plimsol said.

‘Sorry …’

‘Malcolm.’

‘Sorry, Malcolm.’

Captain Plimsol nodded and smiled, slowly. We were to be chums. It was club. We were learning something from the world of business. Open plan offices, team building exercises, blue sky thinking, shirt sleeves and innovation.

This was all to explain that my initial posting would not be to Moscow or Beijing or some godforsaken Middle Eastern barrack where the smell of burning tyres hung low in the hot windless sky. But rather I would be going to the United States, to Washington DC to be precise, as a low ranked member of the ambassador’s staff. This was my cover. I would fulfil menial tasks. Load the photocopier. Write reports. Escort high ranking dignitaries around town, show them the sights. Organise the Christmas party and similar social gatherings. Lots of wining and dining. I had to handle the caterers a good deal. In reality, I would be part of a small team gathering intelligence about our most powerful ally. Some of that intelligence would come from human sources but there was also some lightweight bugging and general surveillance to be done. It was not the James Bond days, I was told again and again, but all the people I had met since I had begun training in the secret service were avid fans of spy literature and movies. If it wasn’t James Bond, it was John LeCarré or Robert Ludlum. I was told quite seriously that I should prepare for my posting by reading Tom Clancy who was then at the peak of his powers. In fact, I went to see Hunt for Red October with my old pal Sean Connery as a Russian submarine captain who might or might not be stealing his nuclear submarine and defecting to the Americans.

It was interesting to see Connery again. I wouldn’t say my interest in the actor had become an obsession, but I had followed his career with something like a proprietorial interest.

Of course, this had started after my first meeting so even as a kid I had gone to see a number of films of varying quality. He came back to play James Bond in Never Say Never Again and I have to admit it was fairly dreadful. Even as a kid. In fact, the film was the first time I remember that I actually noticed that a film could be bad. As a kid you go to the cinema and whatever is there you like. Why would it be bad? They filmed it and released it and now you’re watching it with your dad and a carton of popcorn and him sipping his Bacardi and coke. So how could it be allowed to even be here if it wasn’t great? Everything I saw I loved. Until I saw Never Say Never Again. Maybe it was because there was another James Bond to compare it to, the Roger Moore film Octopussy. Maybe it was because I had built it up in my head. My dad knew I loved Sean Connery. I had even read a book about his life, a biography. I read about how he was a milkman and how he had three different wigs fitted when he filmed Dr No, one was for fighting, one was for normalness and the last was for underwater scenes. Larry thought my interest was funny and had told me I was an idiot. He sometimes liked snatching a book out of my hands and slapping me in the face with it. I think he thought this was funny, funny, funny. Once it made my nose bleed and the blood ran down a page like a thin crimson bookmark. So, as I sat watching the movie with him, I was aware that he was sitting beside me and I knew he would be criticising it. I was anticipating his criticisms in my head. Halfway through the film I caught myself thinking, this isn’t any good and wondering how that could be.

Highlander I liked very much. It just felt like such a wonderful and imaginative story. Immortals who fight through the centuries towards one big unnameable prize. They can only be killed via decapitation, all other wounds proving less than fatal. I was also drawn to this idea. This small group of individuals carrying the secret that binds them through life even as they must hunt and kill each other. There can only be one. I didn’t really understand why Sean Connery – or Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez as he is named in the film – would bother to train to McCloud if in the end he would have to kill him.

Other films were less interesting. I only saw the trailer for Medicine Man. It looked fairly drab. Connery discovers the cure for cancer in the Amazonian rain forest and then promptly loses it. He got angry when he was reprimanded for this by a woman. ‘Haven’t you ever lost something?’ he shouts at her. She had been in Highlander. ‘Your car keys?’ He was wonderful in The Untouchables as well as Malone, the Irish cop who mentors Kevin Costner as Elliot Ness in the ways to fight the Chicago mob. This role seemed familiar to me and I enjoyed watching it. He starred as Indiana Jones’ father. He was a medieval monk in a kind of Agatha Christie style story. I saw that he was playing out in the movies the role he very much occupied in my life. Of course, he wasn’t steering me through every moment, a constant presence, or anything like that, but I had met him that once when I was a child and it had inspired me in ways that were very significant. And then I had met him again when I was 21. And again, the impact of his words on my life had been hugely important. I didn’t tell anyone obviously about the second meeting but even the first I held off telling people about for a long time. I found as I was working in intelligence and people were talking James Bond, I could get an appreciative moment, a look of impressed faces, if I dropped my story about meeting him when I was a kid. I changed the story subtly. I made myself a caddy for a celebrity golf competition. But I kept the bit about my dad doing an impression of him as the punchline. That always went down well because my impression was pretty good. ‘Shounds like an ash-hole,’ I would say to an appreciative chuckle from the boardroom or the lounge bar, the table by the window or at the gate waiting to board.

I stabbed Kirkby in the neck with a screwdriver and I hit the jugular, even though I wasn’t aiming for it. I wasn’t aiming at all. A happy accident. The blood sprayed out so powerfully it hit me in the eye like a flicked finger, almost knocking me backwards, and for a second, I couldn’t see anything but a red glare. Blood was spraying everywhere as if from a hose; and it was in my mouth as well. I shook my head and blinked but it wasn’t working. I still couldn’t see.

Kirkby was flailing and grabbing at his throat, but I still had the screwdriver in my hand, and I stabbed at him again this time in the face and again in the eye. Here: the screwdriver lodged, and I let go and wiped my sopping face with my hands. The pain distracted him from the only thing he should have been worrying about – staunching the blood that was flowing from the open artery in his throat – but he couldn’t do a thing to stop it. Even if he hadn’t been distracted. The blood was sheeting down his front like a scarlet bib and splashing on the floor where it was proving slippery underfoot, having already formed a puddle with ambitions to be a pond. He was screaming or shouting but because of his throat he gurgled and slurped and squealed and the volume was lowering as if someone had a remote control with their finger on the down button. He was weakening from the loss of blood.

He hit the ground heavily on his hip, his hands grabbing weakly at my trousers as I pulled away, stepping backwards. It was too late to worry about staying clean, but I didn’t want to fall on top of him. Even here there was a matter of degrees. I took another step backwards and looked at Kirkby on the floor, his fingers were twitching; and his foot jerked spasmodically, kicking at the parquet. I breathed deeply though I could feel a sensation of panic rising in me. Something was seriously wrong here. All of my rules were broken. Broken, broken, broken. I needed to think. And I needed to think quickly.

First, I had to establish an alibi. I phoned Angela. Kirkby’s breathing was now very shallow, and the blood pumped in drooping arcs at less regular intervals. I took another step back. Angela was in, so I asked her how she was and then began by arranging an appointment with Kirkby for the next day.

That would prove difficult she said. ‘He’s up on the Hill for the hearings and his calendar is pretty packed.’

‘Oh okay.’

‘There’s no daylight at all.’

‘The end of the week would be fine, it isn’t urgent,’ I assured her, switching to speaker phone and balancing the phone on the back of the sofa as I talked and surveyed the damage. The rug would have to go obviously, but the floorboards could be cleaned. I’d have to check if there was a chance that it had seeped below which would mean going into the cellar which I did not relish. It was draped in cobwebs from floor to ceiling.

All right. Let’s go through my rules and understand how I can begin to rectify this by understanding just how wrong this was. First, the victim wasn’t random. Bart Kirkby was a known associate of mine so his violent death, or his protracted absence would be just as suspicious – ‘So, how are you?’ I asked Angela to keep her on the line. We had a gossipy relationship. Although Kirkby was supposed to be my source, I got most of the hot stuff from Angela – though I should make a decision very quickly whether to get rid of the body or leave it somewhere it could be found. I decided straightaway it had to disappear, or at least be found a way away. I would have to move it anyway so I might as well go the whole hog and make sure it was never found. The murder weapon belonged to me. And the site of the crime was my house. This was no random encounter miles from anywhere. But panicking and crying over this wasn’t going to help anything at all. I laughed at my own thoughts. Heart rate up a smidge perhaps, but I wasn’t exactly crying.

‘Wait,’ Angela said. ‘Bart said he was coming over to see you this evening. You can talk to him then.’

Phone records. Think carefully. It didn’t help that I was stripping off all my clothes as I spoke, pulling at my shirt cuff with my teeth.

‘Yeah, that’s why I’m calling. He was supposed to come over, but he didn’t show. You know how he can be. And he isn’t answering his phone.’

‘Okay. That doesn’t sound like him. Wait, a sec. Let me try and I’ll get back to you.’

She hung up which gave me a moment to run into the bathroom and shower very quickly just to get the worst off. I’d be having a few showers tonight. Kirkby’s car was parked out front. There was nothing I could do about it now. This was going to have to be my story. I could hear Kirkby’s phone ringing dully from his coat pocket.

Kirkby didn’t come. I was expecting him to come and he didn’t. The car was a run of the mill Plymouth town car. Even if someone could identify it from across the street, it would be difficult to prove it was actually his car. Dark blue. Black under the sodium lights. Every other car in Washington looked like his. It would have to disappear. He would have to disappear.

Not wet, but still moist, I put on shorts and a t-shirt as my phone rang. Kirkby’s phone had stopped ringing. Moist is the most disliked word in the English language. I don’t know why.

Angela had tried Kirkby’s number and no dice.

‘Huh!’ I said, like this was taking me aback somewhat. A puzzler. A headscratcher. A tiny, tiny, tiny inkling of concern. ‘Right!’

I went into the kitchen and got an apron, the chopping block – the butcher’s block it was called in the catalogue – and my steak knives. The smaller the pieces; the easier to remove; the more flexible the bagging options. As I was talking to Angela, I went into the garage, the neon strips did their epilepsy inducing lightshow, and took the rainproof cover off the barbecue. Back in the living room, I put this on the floor and then rolled Kirkby onto it. It would collect the blood. I was suggesting places for Angela to try and I was also registering concern and perhaps alarm. I wanted it to be immediately on the record that I had encouraged her to go to the police at the earliest opportunity. That would have been overkill, but I certainly wasn’t brushing it off. I wanted her to say in her statement that I had expressed concern and wondered if we should get the authorities involved.

‘It’s probably nothing,’ she kept saying.

I chopped his fingers off and then his hands at the wrists and worked my way up the arm to the shoulder, using the meat tenderizing mallet to break the bones when they proved stubborn. Angela wanted to try Kirkby’s home number and see if he had gone back there. Maybe he left his phone in the office.

‘It’s weird that he would stand me up though,’ I said. ‘I’m worried. It’s not like Bart.’

Angela started to dismiss my concerns as I unlaced his shoes, took them off, then his chequered socks, with that elasticated tug, then started on his toes, feet and ankles. I told her I would try his home number and see.

I hung up on Angela; found Kirkby’s home number and his wife answered on the first ring. I didn’t know Mrs. Kirkby very well. We had met at one of the Ambassador’s parties, but not in any way that had encouraged intimacy and this phone call was unusual enough for her to sound worried and put off before I’d even started asking if Kirkby was there and might I speak to him and explaining about the appointment that he had missed.

‘Maybe you got confused,’ she said, with this frigid hauteur that I now remembered as her defining feature. It was supposed to be withering in an entertaining way, but I just found it rude. ‘My husband never misses appointments. Ever.’

The thigh bone is a hard one, but I had my technique down now. I was beginning to see some progress. I won’t lie: the challenges that the problem was presenting were exciting, stimulating even. Okay. I had never wanted to do this. This was not any part of any larger plan. I had been putting a clock on the wall in the kitchen when he showed up. And we had talked in pauses between the drilling and then the screwing of the hook that would hold it. Once it looked straight, we carried on our conversation as we moved into the living room, batting the screwdriver against my palm as I listened to Kirkby’s nonsense. Very little of it was credible. None of it useable. And it all came down to wanting more money.

‘Well, when he gets in could you have him call me,’ I said. ‘Samuel Coleridge.’

‘Oh, like the…?’

‘Yes, exactly. The poet.’

‘Certainly Mr. Coleridge.’

I hung up the phone, satisfied I had established myself as a concerned bystander: someone who had done his best, but was as mystified as anyone. A citizen. I turned my attention fully to the rest of Kirkby. The blood was puddling in the folds of the plastic rain cover. I folded up the edges to keep it from spilling out. His head was easy enough. The tenderizer helped once I got it detached. I wanted it flatter. I went to the garage again and came back with bin bags and a mop and a tub of salt I used to deice the pathway. I used the salt to soak up the blood on the floor and on the barbecue rain cover like it was red wine, shovelled it and bagged it with the body parts and then mopped up what was left.

I put Kirkby in smallish bags that I then double bagged and taped them tightly closed. I used the vacuum cleaner to reduce the air in the bags the way I do when I pack my suitcase or put clothes away for the winter. The torso proved the most troublesome, but I had watched animals being slaughtered at the farm and had even had a go myself on a lamb when I was a kid. I knew the knack was to be decisive, but always careful not to puncture the gut. The last thing I need was the house filling with the smell of Kirkby’s excrement. I washed the floors down once more and checked the place for stray splashes. They were everywhere. The jugular is not to be stabbed lightly. There were even some on the ceiling.

This would take a while. All night perhaps. Maybe a few days. Who knew? I shook my head at my own impulsive stupidity but at the same time smiled wryly. After all, without that would I be really me?

I needed to get rid of the remains of Kirkby and his dark blue Plymouth Dodge. I rolled the rug up and put it across the back seat, then I put the remains of Kirkby in the boot, (or the trunk as the Americans call it) along with the apron, my clothes – I had another shower and changed once more – the butcher’s block, the rain cover, the screwdriver and the knives. Now was probably the most dangerous time. I had all the evidence in one place with me, the perpetrator, driving without a destination in mind. I needed a plan. This plan must have three parts. A place to go, something to do while I was there and a way of getting back. Yet, though this moment was full of risk, it was also the most exciting part. It didn’t make much sense to take lots of small risks. One big risk would probably pay off. And the catastrophic result of any failure was the same anyway. I’ll be honest, though. I had no clue where I was going or what I was going to do. I headed for the ocean. The river was tempting but it was a busy waterway and there were plenty of places bags could snag and be discovered. The ocean offered cleansing enormity. There was a place I liked to go that was nice and secluded and this time of year wouldn’t have many people around. Beverly Beach it was called. About an hour’s drive. Maybe more if there was traffic. I could go north. It would be slightly long. It was now just after eight o clock. From arrival to dispatch, Kirkby had been in my custody for about an hour and a half.

I drove through Rockway and onto the I-495, skirting Washington. I put on a nostalgia station and they played Power of Love from the first Back to the Future movie. A classic. This way we were lost in late homecoming traffic. I wore a baseball cap so my face wouldn’t be too visible, should anyone spot the car. I drove at the speed limit. I decided to savour the moment. No. I had not wanted to kill Kirkby, until at a certain point I obviously had. I began to think back to the argument to try and see how it had escalated so dramatically, but I couldn’t pinpoint the moment and anyway it was useless and was only beginning to upset me all over again so I put it completely out of my mind. There were no solutions there. Simply more problems. So far, I had done everything – bar the original murder – right. I wanted to preserve my freedom. That was the top priority. I had plenty of thinking time while I was driving so a plan began to formulate. There was the long stay car park at the airport. There was Beverly Beach. But what then? I drive the car into the water. I set the car on fire. I could get a boat and take it out and dump the bags overboard. And then there was always the problem of what to do to get home. I pulled off the highway and into the city and I found a carpark and then pulled out the map in the glove compartment and started to study it.

There was nothing for it. There was a risk no matter what I did. I found a gas station and bought a cannister and filled it with gas as well as filling up the gas tank. I also bought some cigarettes. I paid in cash. I dropped the knives and the screwdriver in some rubbish containers behind a restaurant. I parked on the street and walked back to a movie theatre where the show had only just started. I bought a ticket with my credit card. The film was called Seven Years in Tibet and had some beautiful cinematography. It starred Brad Pitt adopting an unconvincing accent. When I came out of the cinema, I got some money from a nearby ATM and then I phoned Angela and asked after Kirkby. She had not managed to reach him and now his phone wasn’t even going to voicemail. I told her in passing that I had just seen her boyfriend Brad Pitt, and she laughed, and we talked about the film, which she had already seen. I told her about Kirkby’s wife, we agreed she was a bitch, and then I hung up. I got in the car and drove to Beverly Beach. It was late, dark and a weeknight so my hope was that the park by the beach would be empty by now.

I turned the headlights off and drove the car off the road and into the bush a little way, so it was out of sight. Careful not to splash any on myself, I doused the car in petrol and especially the contents of the boot. I broke off some branches nearby and created a bonfire around the car. I stood for a moment listening as a car approached. It drove into the carpark by the beach, sat for a moment with the engine idling and then described an arc, the headlights cutting the night up into twig shaped pieces, and drove back up the lane and away. I wondered if it was a police cruiser doing a sweep. But I had lain flat on my face away from the car ready to run into the trees if the car had been discovered. It was getting cold and I shivered. The ground was damp and not ideal to lie on. Not cosy. Twigs stuck up into me and there was sand in my sleeve. I really needed to go to the toilet. With the car gone, I waited a few minutes. Despite the remoteness, there were houses around and people walked their dogs, but it was now after midnight and Americans – I had learned – were early to bed, early to rise types. Mostly. I unscrewed the cap of the petrol tank and stuffed pages from the road atlas in it. I inspected my work and wondered if there was anything I had not taken into account. Satisfied, I lit a cigarette and left it propped lying on the ground burning towards a small mound of twigs drenched in petrol. This should give me about five minutes to get out of the area before the car ignited and another few minutes before the fire reached the petrol tank and there was an explosion.

I set off at a run with the page from the road atlas covering the area in my track suit pocket. I looked like a runner, so I didn’t mind if someone saw me on the road. Unusual but not impossible that I should be running at this hour. Again, Americans had their fair share of fitness freaks. I got into my rhythm and my breathing and I was back at training camp in North Yorkshire running across the dales, or on the beach at home. I knew I could do five miles in about thirty-five minutes. I must have done the first mile already when I heard a distant boom and turning to jog backwards, I saw an orange glow above the trees in the distance and a pillowy plume of unfolding smoke underlit rise into the night sky.

There were some cars parked on the gravel outside a white store. I broke the window of an old enough station wagon with a rock and hotwired the ignition. I drove to the airport and left the station wagon in the long stay carpark. I caught a taxi from outside the Arrivals gate into downtown Washington. Ditching my baseball cap, I walked to a bar and had a drink. Paid with my credit card. It wasn’t too far from the cinema where I had seen Seven Years in Tibet.

A narrative was building in my head.

At a loss what to do with myself after Kirkby didn’t show up, I went to the cinema.

‘You often go to the cinema on your own?’

‘Yes, I prefer to be on my own when I see a film actually. I find I concentrate better. Don’t you?’

‘Then what?’

‘Then, erm. I think I phoned Angela. Just to see if she had any news.’

‘You were concerned?’

‘Absolutely yes. I mean, it was so out of character for Bart.’

‘Then what?’

‘I decided to have a few drinks.’

‘Where?’

‘A couple of places. It gets a bit hazy. I finished up at Lou’s.’

‘The sports bar?’

‘That’s right. I realized I was over the limit, so I got a cab home.’

‘This is all great Mr Coleridge, but I see a large gap here where you have no one who can account for your movements. How do you explain that?’

‘I don’t know what to say. Where else would I be other than where I say I am?’

I remembered Sean Connery in The Untouchables: ‘Why would someone claim to be that which he is not?’ 

It was such a confounding sentence: in its simplicity and wrongness.   

That would be the moment that the woman would put something in a zip lock plastic evidence bag on the table. And then sit back.

The screwdriver: scorched but printable. Or a finger. A burned and twisted license plate. They would have interrupted me while I was painting. Redecorating the living room. I would answer the door wiping my hands on a rag.

‘A handyman,’ the FBI agent would nod, approvingly for now. Establishing a rapport.

But that would be before the photograph of me somewhere incriminating, the freezeframe of a CCTV image, or some witness statement or something. Something conclusive. Something damning.

The fat man with the moustache would look out of the window with an expression on his face that was a response to all the sadness in the world, the violence perpetrated by man on man and this being only the latest example in a long line of crimes of which he had witnessed the aftermath.

The woman more officious and, it must be said, steelier and more efficient – a better detective – would begin to read me my rights from a small laminated card she kept in her purse.

I would put my head in my hands for a moment, not because I was close to tears, but because I was calculating whether or not I could overpower and kill one of them before the other drew their weapon and killed me.

Did I mind dying? Wouldn’t that be the best way out of this? Certainly, the shortest.

But it never happened. They never came. I was free.