Dreams of Leaving (6 page)

Towards the end of the month things began to escalate. Dinwoodie founded a secret revolutionary organisation. He called it the New Egypt Liberation Front. It was dedicated, he said, to one simple political goal: freedom from oppression. He was just hours away from distributing the first copies of his manifesto when Peach led a dawn raid on his house. Hazard broke Dinwoodie's arm in a scuffle by the garage door. The greengrocer, who had stayed overnight to assist with the printing, escaped unseen over the garden wall. The police confiscated (and subsequently burned) all the political material they could find and Dinwoodie, clutching his useless arm below the elbow, was arrested and hauled off to the station for questioning. The NELF was officially disbanded. It had lasted slightly less than twenty-four hours.

But the unrest spread. Several crimes were committed. A police officer was attacked by an unknown assailant in the dark alley that ran behind the post office. Dinwoodie's repeated cries of
Fascists
carried from his cell in the police station to the road outside where his mother and his sister waited with blank faces and nervous hands for his release. Even more disturbing, perhaps, PC Fox reported the existence of ‘a number of wreaths and assorted bunches of flowers' on Tommy Dane's grave in the churchyard. The story of that desperate bid for freedom in the forties had been revived and was being retold in graphic and inflammatory detail through the village. They were witnessing, Fox suggested, the first stirrings of a Tommy Dane cult.

Once again Peach reacted with speed and efficiency. He imposed a curfew. Anybody found on the streets of New Egypt after nine p.m. would be arrested immediately. The offender would be liable to the severest
penalties. Peach called an emergency meeting in the church hall to explain his decision. He had introduced the curfew, he maintained, in order to safeguard ‘our future', the children of the village.

‘We cannot risk another tragedy,' he declared in his most sombre voice.

George wasn't fooled.

Two days later the discovery of the white toy dog beside the river became common knowledge and people began to talk of a drowning. George smiled to himself at this shift in public opinion. Rumours of escape were dangerous, subversive. Rumours of death, on the other hand, were quite harmless and acceptable. Peach must have leaked the information with that specific end in mind. George shook his head. How gullible, how fickle people were. How shrewd Peach was.

At the beginning of July a heatwave hit the area. The sky burned white and the clouds hissed like steam. The sun beat down on the drum of the land. People retreated indoors complaining of headaches. Volunteers for the search-parties dwindled. The gossip withered and died away. Now everybody had forgotten about him – even his mother and his sister had given up their vigil – Dinwoodie was quietly released. As apathy descended with a vengeance on the population, so the pressure on the police department began to lift – a perfect example of what Peach liked to call
the scissor effect.
The grass on the village green turned brown. The leaves on the trees were so dry that they clicked as if they too were made of wood. Rain became a memory. Peach declared a drought. He issued a comprehensive list of instructions pertaining to the use of water: no washing of cars, no lawn sprinklers, no baths. Now people really had something to moan about, something nice and trivial. The search-parties continued, consisting entirely of police officers. Lines of sweat-drenched uniforms could be seen combing the long grasses and the bramble-patches in the vicinity of the river. Peach ordered Dolphin, a powerful swimmer, to drag several hundred feet of the river-bed. No new clues turned up. No fresh evidence. One white toy dog. That was all that remained of Moses Highness. It was a strange time to talk of a drowning but no other conclusion could be drawn.

Towards the middle of the month, almost five weeks after Moses's disappearance, George was summoned to Peach's office, alone this time. A far less combative, far wearier meeting. One look at Peach's face and George guessed.

‘Nothing new, then.'

‘Nothing new,' Peach admitted. ‘We've tried everything, exhausted every possibility.' He sighed. ‘I can only conclude that Moses, your boy, drowned in the river. We shall never know exactly how.'

George hung his head for an appropriate length of time. When he looked
up, the necessary tears filled his eyes. ‘There's really no hope?'

‘I'm afraid not.'

‘Of course I knew there was a possibility that Moses might have, might have drowned. I just never – ' His voice faltered and he looked away. His acting had definitely improved.

‘Well,' Peach said, ‘I'm making it official, as from today,' and he consulted his calendar, ‘July the fourteenth. We can't have any loose ends, you understand. Not in a matter like this.' He paused. ‘There will be the funeral to take care of.'

‘I know.'

‘If there's anything I can do – '

George scanned the Chief Inspector's face for its usual irony. Not a trace. Genuine compassion then. Peach could be almost likeable at times. That was what made him so dangerous.

‘Thank you,' George said.

Any elation he might have felt as he walked to the door of Peach's office had been dismantled by the preceding weeks of pressure and suspense. And, for all he knew, Moses might really have drowned in the river.

That would have been the cruellest irony of all.

*

The priest sprinkled a handful of token soil on to the coffin lid. The grave gaped. A mouth in the ground not saying anything. Soon the sexton would arrive. Stop it up with spadeloads of earth. Stop it up for ever. Eternal silence.

George wondered.

His grandfather and his father were buried here. Now his son. In a way. He had a sudden urge to laugh, to screech with laughter, to guffaw. He coughed instead.

He glanced round. So few mourners. A dozen, if that. And half of them policemen. Things were definitely back to normal. Even now he was being watched. Perhaps he would always be. He caught Dinwoodie's eye and felt the tug of the man's curiosity. He would like to have let Dinwoodie into the secret (imagine his face!) but Dinwoodie had a mouth on him, everyone knew that. If it wasn't his escape plans, it was his revolutionary party. No, he would never be able to tell Dinwoodie. Or anyone else, for that matter. He turned back in time to see the priest close his prayer-book. The priest's sacred words were already evaporating in the heat.

The service over, there was a general adjusting of collars and veils, a general shuffling and clearing of throats. As George steered Alice away
from the grave, Peach loomed, a mass of blue curves, vacuum-packed into his dress uniform.

‘Please accept my condolences,' he said, ‘my sincere condolences,' and rested a heavy hand on George's shoulder.

The resonance of this gesture was not lost on George. So devious this Peach. Even now his mind would be on the move, bristling with suspicions as an army bristles with spears.

‘Thank you,' George said. The briefness grief allows you.

But Peach was unwilling to let go just yet. ‘We did everything we could,' he said. ‘As I'm sure you know.'

‘Oh, we know that, Chief Inspector. We know that.' George considered the sky, its empty unblemished blue, Peach's face a pale blur in the foreground. And he smiled. ‘If you could've found him, you would've done. I can only thank you for all you did on our behalf.' Overdoing it a bit, perhaps, but in a kind of trance. He had climbed, it seemed, into thin exhilarating air.

Peach shielded his eyes and fell back on convention. ‘Not at all, Mr Highness,' he said, and pleasantly enough, ‘not at all.' Tugging at the front of his tunic he turned away to rejoin his colleagues.

Relief drifted upwards through George's body, the faintest of breezes, cooling him, refreshing him, but not visibly disturbing his outer surfaces. He couldn't allow relief to register. He would always be careful.

He turned to Alice, took her arm.

‘Let's go,' he said, ‘shall we?' Secretly rejoicing that his plan, against all odds, had worked.

The sun falling across the tables of the Delphi Café that afternoon was pure and white, as dazzling as a vision. The proprietor leaned against the back wall, his legs crossed at the ankles. He was leafing through a paper. A fly described an unearned halo in the air above his head. It was a Sunday.

His only customer was an old woman dressed in a crumpled mackintosh. Her mane of grey hair, so long that it tickled the small of her back when she unpinned it, wound in a chaotic bun beneath her transparent plastic headscarf. A bag, also plastic, nestled against her left foot. Her wrinkled fingers held a cup of tea as settings hold precious stones. Her name was Madame Zola and she had printed cards to prove it. MADAME ZOLA, the cards said. FAMOUS CLAIRVOYANT AND PSYCHIC CONSULTANT. APPOINTMENTS ONLY. Never mind that the cards were twenty years old. She could still touch somebody and feel sadness or ambition or fear, the tremors of a life as it ran along its own unique track towards an unknown destination. Sometimes, too, she got flashes. She would never forget the night when she felt the death of Christos, the man she worshipped, her religion.

Rain on the windows and she had trickled fingers down his face, his neck, his arm, and she had felt death like a fine powder on his skin, she had felt his life speeding towards some collision, and she had drawn back, biting her wrist, it seemed so strange, this strong Greek, he looked more like a wrestler than a pianist, and he had stared at her across the black curls on his chest, his eyes had reeled her in, fish-hook eyes, and he had said
What is it?
and she had pretended to be thinking of her sister, the one who had just lost her baby, and he had believed her because she was a woman and women are sentimental, and he had pulled her towards him, one of his piano hands playing in her hair.

How she wished she hadn't touched him that night – but how could she not touch him?

In any case, he had believed her lie and one year later, in the same room, he had died. His head resting in her hands, his hands still for ever. Fifteen years ago now, but she still returned once a year, sometimes twice, sometimes with flowers and nowhere to leave them, because she thought of Kennington as his cemetery and the building where he had died as his mausoleum, and when she stood in front of the building she could still hear the music pouring from his fingers, running up her spine and into
her hair, every note a shiver, and when darkness fell she would turn away and travel home, this frost around her heart, an old woman on the bus with flowers.

Yes, she could predict the future. Her husband's death was proof of that. She could also make a cup of tea last a very long time. The proprietor had already sent one or two unpleasant glances in her direction. She had ignored him, of course. And even as she sat at her table in the shadows, her various powers combined to produce a vision of the café in ruins. There was no malice in this. Visions came unsolicited; they appeared out of thin air, as poems do. It was unmistakably the Delphi Café, though. She recognised the strawberry formica and the concrete stump where the pillar had been. And there, perched high on the rubble and miraculously intact, stood her cup of tea, filled to the brim with twigs, cobwebs, the bones of small animals, wood-splinters, fragments of plaster and brick, the remnants of a nest, and an unidentifiable grey dust (had bombs fallen?). With fingers that were nimble for their age, she unearthed about 0.02 cl. of petrified tea, scarcely more than a stain really, but proof none the less that she could make a cup of tea last almost indefinitely (whether the proprietor liked it or not), prolonging it into a future which, it had to be admitted, she had herself predicted, but which all the same seemed real enough. For one nasty moment she took this vision as a warning – the destruction of the café might occur this afternoon, her life was in danger – but when she searched the wreckage she could find no trace of her body. She could only assume that she had already left the café and would die (had died?) peacefully somewhere else.

Some minutes later she passed a hand across her forehead. Another vision intruded. Time had wound back into the present. She saw a man standing beside a phone-box somewhere in the immediate vicinity. A tall dark man. She recognised the phone-box, but she didn't recognise the man.

A tall dark stranger?

Madame Zola frowned. All her basic instincts told her this was nonsense. Worse than that – a cliché. She adjusted her plastic headscarf, a nervous fluttering of her left hand, then peered down into her cup as if to extract some guidance or advice from the few tea-leaves floating on the surface. They told her nothing. She glanced up at the proprietor. His paper closed then opened again with a loud rustle of its intricately marked wings. She shuddered at the vision of a giant butterfly alighting on his face.

Tall dark stranger indeed.

When you worked on such a vast scale, when your materials were the past, the present and the future, you often fell victim to vivid but random
images, maverick phenomena. Pieces of fantasy, dream, or memory would break loose, float free, generate their own electricity, their own atmosphere, as stars do. Madame Zola had a word for this kind of thing when it happened. She called it
interference.
This tall dark stranger, she decided, lips twisting as if she had just bitten into a lemon, almost certainly fell into that category. Lifting her cup, she sipped at her cold tea. She was getting old. Her gift was breaking up. She felt herself crossing the fine line between clairvoyance and hallucination.

All the same, as the minutes passed, she was unable to dismiss an obscure feeling of excitement, not unlike moths brushing against her stomach walls. Interference or not, she was becoming increasingly convinced of two things: one, that the tall dark stranger was going to walk into the café, and two, that she would be able to make her cup of tea last until he did.