The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(34)

“Even so,” I said, “I should get a fee for the use of my premises. It’s only fair.”

“You couldn’t put a price on this,” he said.

By his accent, he was from Liverpool. Far from Duggan, or Duggan’s son. But then he hadn’t spoken till he was in at the front door, so how could I have known? He could have been a plumber, I said to myself. I hadn’t been a total fool; for the moment, self-respect was all that concerned me. Ask for identification, people advise, before letting a stranger in. But imagine the ruckus that Duggan would have caused, if you’d held his boy up on the stairs, impeding him from getting to the next boiler on his list, and shortening his plunder opportunities.

The kitchen window looked down over Trinity Place, now seething with people. If I craned my neck I could see a new police presence to my left, trotting up from the private gardens of Clarence Crescent. “Have one of these?” The visitor had found his cigarettes.

“No. And I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Fair enough.” He crushed the pack into his pocket, and pulled out a balled-up handkerchief. He stood back from the tall window, mopping his face; face and handkerchief were both crumpled and gray. Clearly it wasn’t something he was used to, tricking himself into private houses. I was more annoyed with myself than with him. He had a living to make, and perhaps you couldn’t blame him for pushing in, when some fool of a woman held the door open. I said, “How long do you propose to stay?”

“She’s expected in an hour.”

“Right.” That accounted for it, the increased hum and buzz from the street. “How do you know?”

“We’ve a girl on the inside. A nurse.”

I handed him two sheets of kitchen roll. “Ta.” He blotted his forehead. “She’s going to come out and the doctors and nurses are lining up, so she can appreciate them. She’s going to walk along the line with her thank-you and bye-bye, then toddle round the side, duck into a limo and she’s away. Well, that’s the idea. I don’t have an exact time. So I thought if I was here early I could set up, have a look at the angles.”

“How much will you get for a good shot?”

“Life without parole,” he said.

I laughed. “It’s not a crime.”

“That’s my feeling.”

“It’s a fair distance,” I said. “I mean, I know you have special lenses, and you’re the only one up here, but don’t you want a close-up?”

“Nah,” he said. “As long as I get a clear view, the distance is a doddle.”

He crumpled up the kitchen roll and looked around for the bin. I took the paper from him, he grunted, then applied himself to unstrapping his bag, a canvas holdall that I supposed would be as suitable for a photographer as for any tradesman. But one by one he took out metal parts which, even in my ignorance, I knew were not part of a photographer’s kit. He began to assemble them; his fingertips were delicate. As he worked he sang, almost under his breath, a little song from the football terraces:

You are a scouser, a dirty scouser,

You’re only happy on giro day.

Your dad’s out stealing, your mam’s drug-dealing,

Please don’t take our hub-caps away.

“Three million unemployed,” he said. “Most of them live round our way. It wouldn’t be a problem here, would it?”

“Oh no. Plenty of gift shops to employ everybody. Have you been up to the High Street?”

I thought of the tourist scrums pushing each other off the pavements, jostling for souvenir humbugs and windup Beefeaters. It could have been another country. No voices carried from the street below. Our man was humming, absorbed. I wondered if his song had a second verse. As he lifted each component from his bag he wiped it with a cloth that was cleaner than his handkerchief, handling it with gentle reverence, like an altar boy polishing the vessels for mass.

When the mechanism was assembled he held it out for my inspection. “Folding stock,” he said. “That’s the beauty of her. Fits in a cornflakes packet. They call her the widowmaker. Though not in this case. Poor bloody Denis, eh? He’ll have to boil his own eggs from now on.”

* * *

IT FEELS, IN retrospect, as if hours stretched ahead, as we sat in the bedroom together, he on a folding chair near the sash window, his mug of tea cradled in his hands, the widowmaker at his feet; myself on the edge of the bed, over which I had hastily dragged the duvet to tidy it. He had brought his jacket from the kitchen; perhaps the pockets were crammed with assassin’s requisites. When he flung it on the bed, it slid straight off again. I tried to grab it and my palm slid across the nylon; like a reptile, it seemed to have its own life. I flumped it on the bed beside me and took a grip on it by the collar. He looked on with mild approval.

He kept glancing at his watch, though he said he had no certain time. Once he rubbed its face with his palm, as if it might be fogged and concealing a different time underneath. He would check, from the corner of his eye, that I was still where I should be, my hands in view: as, he explained, he preferred them to be. Then he would fix his gaze on the lawns, the back fences. As if to be closer to his target, he rocked his chair forward on its front legs.

I said, “It’s the fake femininity I can’t stand, and the counterfeit voice. The way she boasts about her dad the grocer and what he taught her, but you know she would change it all if she could, and be born to rich people. It’s the way she loves the rich, the way she worships them. It’s her philistinism, her ignorance, and the way she revels in her ignorance. It’s her lack of pity. Why does she need an eye operation? Is it because she can’t cry?”