Robbie's Wife

  Raves For the Work of

  RUSSELL HILL!

  “Russell Hill is such a sharp observer of the human scene, such an astute commentator on life in its joys and miseries, that you will find yourself turning the pages quickly to find out what new perception he will pass on to us next.”

  —Los Angeles Daily News

  “The images... are sharp and real and the characterizations finely tuned.”

  —Library Journal

  “Vividly rendered... Russell Hill is a fine writer.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A sublime piece of writing, atmospheric and touching... A brilliant sense of literary balance... Fantastic.”

  —Mike Hodges, director of Get Carter and Pulp

  “An inventive vision.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Rollicking, tender, hard to forget... Should be required reading for anyone aspiring to write.”

  —Cosmopolitan

  “A gem of a book... Hill has a knack for description and an eye for detail.”

  —Chicago Daily Herald

  “Vividly drawn... insightful characterization and effective evocation of atmosphere give the novel substantial power.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A masterpiece. Once again Russell Hill has hit the mark.”

  —Garry Sayer

  “Leaving this spellbinding novel, readers will not be able to reduce its effect to easy themes. Russell Hill is tougher than that. But readers will know that they have been changed.”

  —The Denver Post

  The pub was crowded, thick with cigarette smoke, music from a jukebox, the room filled with shouting voices.

  Maggie rose and reached out toward me. “Dance, Jack Stone?” She took my hand and pulled me to my feet.

  “Where?”

  She turned her head toward the far end of the room and towed me through the crowd. I looked back at Robbie and he raised his pint toward me, grinning.

  Maggie slipped into my arms and we danced to a Frank Sinatra song, Frankie crooning strangers in the night, and it was as if Maggie weren’t there, she moved so gracefully. She flowed with me, her body touching mine, and I could hear her singing along, her voice buried in my shoulder. The record stopped and she continued to dance, and I felt self-conscious, as if the whole village must be watching us, but nobody was paying any attention and the next record came on and we worked our way back to where Robbie was sitting.

  “She’s not half bad, is she?” Robbie said.

  “She dances beautifully.”

  “You play a tango and you watch her and it’s like watching fucking with clothes on. Oh my, my Maggie can dance, right, love?” He leaned across me toward her.

  “What’s right?”

  “That you can dance.”

  “You want to dance, Robbie?”

  “Not now, love. Maybe when we get back to the farm we’ll do a bit of dancing.” He nudged me in the ribs.

  “Don’t be too sure of yourself, you cheeky bugger,” she said. “Come on, Jack Stone. Dance with me again.” The jukebox was playing another Sinatra song.

  “Go ahead, Jack,” Robbie said, “warm her up for me.”

  I think, at that moment, I could have killed the bastard...

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  ROBBIE’S

  WIFE

  by Russell Hill

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-029)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: March 2007

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 2007 by Russell Hill; lines from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats used with permission of A.P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael B. Yeats.

  Cover painting copyright © 2007 by R.B. Farrell

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print edition ISBN 978-0-85768-353-3

  E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-765-4

  Cover design by Cooley Design Lab

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

  W. B. Yeats

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50
>
  1.

  She asked me if I would have fallen in love with her even if she hadn’t spoken so openly in the hallway of the farmhouse that morning. I didn’t know how to explain it. Up until that moment I don’t think I ever thought about the expression “falling in love.” But when I examine it, it’s never getting in love or becoming in love, like getting drunk or becoming pregnant — it’s falling in love, as if in the darkness I came to the edge of a precipice and fell into something quite unexpectedly. I didn’t step off or jump off, I fell. Sometimes I think it’s like those falling dreams I’ve had where I keep falling and it never ends, I never land, have no idea when the impact will be but it never comes. It’s exhilarating and terrifying at the same moment. Falling in love with Robbie’s wife was like that — dangerous and erotic and I didn’t know how to stop the fall. In the end I didn’t want to.

  2.

  Heathrow hadn’t changed. It was still the slightly dumpy maze of endless corridors and I wondered if there were any places a plane could park that wouldn’t be at least a mile from the terminal exit. I felt washed out, the way I always feel after a trans-Atlantic flight. Just ahead of me an Indian couple with four children, obviously coming home to England, were trying to keep the children from running ahead, struggling with so much carry-on luggage that I wondered how they had been able to board the plane.

  Down two more flights of stairs and into the customs hall I found the line for non-EU passengers and waited while it moved slowly toward the lecterns where customs officers stamped documents, made inquiries. Everyone looked drugged.

  “Visiting us on business or pleasure, Mr. Stone?”

  “Business.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’m a screenwriter. I’m working on a new project that takes place in England.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “That sounds interesting, sir. I hope you have a profitable stay with us.” He stamped the passport, slid it back.

  I went down the long corridor toward the baggage claim, waited as the bags came up until my battered duffel came around, and went out through the green line. Nothing to declare, the sign said. Well, as far as I was concerned I had nothing to say and nobody to say it to. Lately nobody listened anyway.

  There was the usual audience at the exit, rows of relatives and friends, limo drivers holding up cards with names on them, people hugging and scooping up grandchildren and kissing.

  It would have been easy to hail a taxi but there was the money thing so I went down to the tube, struggled through the crowd and in a few minutes was rocketing in to Central London and the cheap hotel I’d booked before leaving Los Angeles.

  I changed trains at King’s Cross and when I came up onto the street near Euston Station it was raining, the kind of gray English rain that always seems to greet my arrival in London.

  Two nuns in black habit wearing black raincoats stood under an umbrella at the bus stop. It was a bright red and yellow golfer’s umbrella, wide enough to easily cover both of them, and I thought, great scene in a Woody Allen movie, but of course Woody writes his own scripts. Nobody else paid any attention to them. It was a steady parade of heads down, umbrellas up, Upper Woburn Place filled with black taxis shiny in the rain, those huge red buses lumbering along, and I wanted desperately to find a bed.

  The desk clerk at the hotel waited while I found my credit card, ran it through the machine and waited again, wordlessly, while I signed. He slid a key across the counter and I went up the narrow stairs to the second floor, found room 22 and opened the door. It was a small room, barely wider than the bed, and it smelled musty. The window wouldn’t open and I pulled the shade, darkening the room, stripped off my clothes and slid into the bed. Rain drummed on the window but I was almost instantly asleep. The last thing I remembered was the insistent whine of jet engines, a constant noise that still filled my head, shutting out everything else.

  3.

  I awoke to an insistent knocking and was briefly panic-stricken, as if the noise came from outside the plane, perhaps an engine falling off or someone outside the plane trying to get in, banging on the window next to me, and I was momentarily confused until the room began to focus and I realized I was in the hotel. The banging came from the wall next to my head, an erratic thumping as if someone were softly knocking on the wall from the other side, and then I heard the woman’s voice squeaking out something and a man saying something over and over again and I had the urge to pound on the wall and yell shut the fuck up in there! For Christ’s sake, somebody was getting screwed a foot from my head. I looked at my watch. It was too dark to see the dial so I got out of bed and went to the window, pulling back the shade, but it was dark outside, not raining anymore, the street nearly empty of traffic, and I realized I had slept through the day. On the opposite side of the wall it was quiet. I turned on the light and it was 2:30. I had slept for twelve hours. There was, of course, nothing to do at that hour except wait for daylight. I thought briefly about thumping on the wall and making moaning noises. It was cold in the room, and the handle on the steam radiator was as stuck as the window had been so I dressed and sat on the bed with a blanket around my shoulders going over my notes.

  Today I would see Nigel. He was a friend of Richard, my Los Angeles agent, and Richard insisted that I see him, let him know I was in England. “He’s a nice guy,” Richard said. “If you have a problem, you can rely on him.” That was when he slid the treatment for Pale Horse back across the desk. “You need to move on,” he said. Then came his little speech about how Hollywood is peopled by teenagers who are frightened at the idea of an original story — they want something that looks like Son of Titanic or the sequel to the last thing Tom Hanks made. But the Pale Horse idea was dead in the water and maybe I could get going again. He still didn’t see why I insisted on going to England

  Six months ago, when I turned sixty, my wife — actually my second wife, but she’d been around a long time — gave up on me, said she was tired of watching me disintegrate, which seemed like an apt metaphor to me. For a long time I’d felt that my life was dissolving, and there were periods when I wondered if writing anything else down was worth the effort. I read something about Wright Morris — he stopped taking photographs and somebody asked him why and he said there wasn’t anything left he wanted to photograph. And then he stopped writing. Same reason.

  So I hit on the idea of closing off my life in Los Angeles, taking what little I had left in my bank account and going off someplace where there was nothing to remind me of my impending sense of failure. I had a long talk with Richard who, bless him, had stuck with me through it all, suffering my whining and self-doubts, and I told him I was going to sell off everything I had, take all of my money and change it into English pounds and rent a cottage on the edge of nowhere and write non-stop until I had finished something that would satisfy the jackals and we would all make a piss-pot full of money and I would charter a yacht in the Aegean and we would all lie naked on the deck in the sun and give the finger to the rest of the world.

  Richard didn’t say much. Why England? he asked.

  It’s an ocean away, I told him, and they speak English. He countered with, why not San Francisco or New Orleans or Hawaii where there was sun? They speak English there, too. But he agreed that maybe a change of scene would help to jump-start me.

  That was the actual word he used. Jump-start. And I had, for an instant, an image of a yellow tow truck backing up to me and attaching those red and black cables to my nose and tongue and starting the engine. There was this tremendous jolt that ran through my brain and suddenly I was writing at a furious pace, words appearing on pages, brilliant words, and there were lines of people waiting anxiously to snatch them as the pages filled.

  Richard said he would let Nigel know I was coming. If I needed anything, Nigel would help. I could tell that he thought I was doing something stupid. I closed my apartment, sold my car, gave away my clothes and books to Goodwill, and now here I was, in a grotty English hotel waiting for daylig
ht. The rain had started again. I had enough money to last six months, the receipt for the car rental, and a letter from the farmer at White Church Farm on the coast of Dorset where I’d rented a cottage telling me how to get there and boasting that the cottage had “all the amenities including an en suite toilet.”

  It had turned gray outside the window and suddenly there was more thumping beyond the wall and I thought, Oh Christ, the rabbits are at it again and I banged on the wall with the heel of my hand, counterpoint to their rhythm, and I put my mouth next to the wall and began to chant, “Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop, Oh shit, I’m coming!” and then I stopped and it was quiet on the other side of the wall, too. Not nice, Jack, I said to myself.

  Finally, unable to stay shivering in the room any longer, I dressed and went down through the narrow lobby, let myself out into the slackening rain and walked toward Russell Square. There was early morning traffic, the white noise of tires on the wet street, and I looked for some place where I could get coffee or, more likely, tea, and maybe something to eat since I was suddenly ravenous.

  The cafe had tables with a plastic surface that felt slightly sticky and behind the counter was a black woman with an enormous turban and a rich Caribbean voice who had a tiny grill. The menu on a chalkboard read “Full English breakfast” and I ordered one at the counter and sat at a table looking out at the wet street, more pedestrians now, buses full of people. It was nearly six o’clock. The woman called out to me and I picked up the thick white plate. On it were two greasy fried eggs, some bacon that looked more like fatty ham, two pieces of toast burned hard as rock, and a soggy slice of fried tomato. The tea was in a big mug, almost chocolate in color, rich with cream, and it was the only part of the meal that was good but I ate everything. I knew I’d pay dearly for the experience in another hour.