A Death to Remember Read Free Page B

my indecision, and I could see it was important to him.
    It was then that I began to wonder whether in fact he had killed his wife.
    I looked away. ‘I’ll ask around.’
    After all, it would have been a good cover for him. Would a man who’d killed his wife ask the man who should be his enemy to try to find her? It would appear to be the gesture of an innocent man. His innocence glowed from his warm, open face, and I found myself completely distrusting him.
    He clasped his arm round my shoulder. ‘Let’s go and have a look at that car of yours,’ he said, his own business apparently disposed of happily.

 
    2
     
    The psychiatrists had explained that loss of memory following severe concussion was caused by the brain’s automatic desire to reject the memory of pain. Usually, only the instant of pain is lost, but in my case it was most of the day. This seemed to mean that my brain required to forget it all, so perhaps it was not a good idea to try to recall it. All the same, following Clayton down the outside staircase, I realised that what I had to do was not primarily to find his wife, but to find myself. That it might prove painful was not an encouraging thought, but I knew I could not go on as I was, with a gap that could be critically important to me. I had to reassemble that day. Perhaps I would come across Mrs Clayton on the way.
    At the foot of the staircase we turned sideways through a small door of corrugated iron, and at once I was somewhere I knew. The operative areas of garages are all much the same, the hydraulic lifts, the power tools, the electronic tuning equipment, the overall smell of petrol and stale oil and dirt. But I knew this one. I had been there.
    The sliding double doors that opened on to the yard were only partly open, and were the principal source of light. Where work was being carried out they used portable lights that confined the illumination to a square yard or so, so that the surrounding shadows were heavy. An engine suddenly burst into ragged voice, and there was a drift of burnt-oil smoke from the side until it spluttered to a stop. A spanner clinked on concrete, a voice cried from underneath a van for a five-eighths socket, and a hand-held electric drill was switched on, followed by a scream of metal. I saw Clayton’s lips moving, but heard nothing. The whine ceased raggedly, and he was shouting: ‘...over in the corner.’
    We did a circle round the hydraulic lift, which had a Marina on it, the drill operative standing underneath trying to remove the rusted remains of its exhaust system. I didn’t recognise him. He was wearing a face mask against the dust. It caught my throat as we moved past. We walked round Clayton’s air-compressor, a squat cylinder of green metal with its V pump throbbing, and there, in the far corner, was my Volvo.
    I could barely detect its colour through the accumulation of its grime. The windows were opaque. One rear tyre was completely flat, and the impression was that the springs had sagged. An illusion, I hoped. It looked sad and neglected, and resigned to sit there and rot away. Yet I nevertheless felt an upsurge of spirit, a small jerk of the heart. After all, it had been my image-maker, my uplifted two-fingered gesture to the world, mainly aimed at my wife, Valerie, who’d called it my macho symbol. Ridiculous that was. A small sports car might have been that, but not a trundling pile of Volvo. But it had been partly directed at my friends at the office, who’d seemed to place me apart from them in a way I couldn’t understand, and naturally accepted it as presumptuous that I should run such a large car and make theirs look puny beside it.
    Looking at it, settling there into senility, I recalled these attitudes clearly, and my own reasons for burying it. My affection for it revived immediately. It was a 244 saloon, rather old, which I’d been able to buy quite cheaply because of its appetite for petrol, and which quite fulfilled my intentions