Talking to Strange Men (18 page)

It was incongruous that his father, whose daughter had been murdered, should have taken to detective stories. But they were the classic kind that he became addicted to, and perhaps bore little relation to reality. They were his kind of escape.
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Innocence of Father Brown, The Hollow Man, The Face on the Cutting Room Floor
. . . His father had devoured all this without savouring it, without pause, skipping, John had suspected, as soon as he had begun one, longing for it to end so that he could begin on the next. And when he had got through half a dozen, re-reading them all.

They had all taken their wounds to different springs of healing but none had been completely healed. Did I look for my lost dead sister in my wife? John asked himself. But a pretty, daintier, more charming version? The court dwarf transformed to the queen of the gods? He was suddenly quite sober. His head ached a little but all euphoria was gone, all irresponsibility, all carefreeness. He went back into the living room to find Mark fast asleep. The wine bottle had fallen over and wine poured out over the bookcase with his father's books in it. John heaved Mark's legs up on to the settee, went upstairs and fetched a blanket to cover him. He got a cloth from the kitchen and set about wiping the books. They would reek of wine. The room seemed very hot and stuffy and he kicked off the bars of the electric fire. He had to wring out the cloth in the sink and this time he fetched a bucket back with him. The Conan Doyle books were in the worst state and one of them would have its pages permanently corrugated. John started on the Sherlock Holmes collection,
The Memoirs, His Last Bow
. Opening this volume, he began to wipe the pages and his eye was caught
by the title at the beginning of one of the stories, ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans'.

I've found it, he thought. Not a man, not an author, but the name of a story. And a story about spies, I shouldn't wonder. And then he understood that it was too late anyway. Half an hour past midnight, his watch told him. It was May the first. A new month had begun.

LIGHTS-OUT FOR THE
Lower Fourth was nine-fifteen. When Fiona Ralston heard that flexi-prep didn't end till nine but her Nicholas was still expected to be in bed and composing himself for sleep by a quarter past, she said it sounded like
Tom Brown's Schooldays.
Mr Lindsay had done his best to explain that a boy was not obliged to be still doing prep at nine, he could get it all done by seven if he chose, this was why it was flexi, but Mrs Ralston was unconvinced. She didn't care for the names of the houses either. If there was a Churchill why wasn't there a Lloyd George? If a Gladstone, why not a Disraeli? She had to be content with her Nicholas being put into Pitt, a statesman who had lived so long ago as hardly to have been, in today's terms at any rate, of any particular political persuasion.

Her elder son, nearly ten years his brother's senior, had been at a comprehensive school. That was in the days before the Ralstons made money. Ralston the elder had come to fetch Nicholas on the last day of the spring term, taken him into the city for tea, and while they had been eating cream pastries in the Fevergate Café, someone had backed his or her car into Ralston's parked car, smashing the headlamp, breaking off the wing mirror and denting in the wing. The cost of repairing the damage was estimated at six hundred pounds. Witnesses there had certainly been but no witness came forward. The police weren't interested, for no injury
to anyone had occurred. Ralston would either pay up himself or, if his insurance company paid, lose his no-claim bonus. Autoprox was what Mungo called the investigation. A significant fact was that a flat in the building overlooking the car park was said to be occupied by the sister of Mrs Whittaker, Rosie Whittaker's mother.

Of all this Angus Cameron knew very little. Spookside interested him now only insofar as it affected his brother Mungo. He very much wanted Mungo kept out of trouble until he grew out of this obsession of his. Passing along the second-floor corridor on his way upstairs – as you ascended the ladder of seniority at Rossingham so you descended the stairs for your study accommodation – Angus glanced through the glass panel in Mungo's door. Graham O'Neill was there, drawing some sort of diagram on a sheet of file paper, but Mungo was not. There was no reason why Mungo should be there at nine in the evening, Angus reassured himself. His prep was very likely done. He could be at the drama society of which he was a member or the chess club or even in the common room watching television. Lights-out for the Upper Fourth wasn't till nine forty-five. I get all these guilt feelings, Angus told himself, because I started it all. I and Guy Parker were responsible for it.

He went up the last flight. All but ten members of the Lower Fourth had by now received their first summer term pep talk from a prefect and only those in the study at the far end remained. Angus made a noise on purpose as he approached, walking more than usually heavily and clearing his throat. There were scuffling sounds from behind the door. They were all in bed, sitting up breathless and rumpled, when he entered the room. Or all but Charles Mabledene whose bunk, for some reason, always looked cleaner than anyone else's, the top sheet as if it had just been ironed, the pillow plump and uncreased. Charles's bunk had no poster over it, no mobile hanging from the bunk above, no snowstorm paperweight or china pigs or polythene monster on the bedside shelf. It was odd, reflected Angus, how when you thought about Charles Mabledene you somehow pictured him as looking Chinese. In fact he didn't look in the least Chinese, for he was fair of hair and light of eye,
and his cheekbones were not high nor his face broad. Was this illusion perhaps founded on the smooth blankness of his features and the inscrutability of his expression?

Nicholas RaIston was in the bunk above, a photograph of himself and his golden retriever puppy on the shelf beside him. He was big for his age and unfortunately spotty. The Harper twins, younger brothers of that Harper who was Hydra, the double agent, were in the next pair of bunks, then Robert Cook, then Patrick Crashaw . . . Angus was a conscientious prefect and knew the names of everyone in Pitt. He frowned mildly at the disorder, an overturned wastepaper bin, a drift of pencil sharpenings, dirty tee-shirts, shorts and socks dropped where they had been taken off.

‘The linen lady's going to have something to say to you lot,' he said.

‘Crashaw,' said Charles Mabledene who always called everyone by his surname, ‘will clear it up in the morning.'

‘You'll all clear it up in the morning,' Angus said, severely for him. ‘You know very well nobody's to be turned into the study servant. Right?' He sat down straddling a chair, his arms along the back of it. They sat waiting for him to begin, knowing what to expect, wanting only to defer the moment of lights-out. ‘Well, you're coming up to the end of your first year at Rossingham,' Angus began, ‘and I think you've all settled in pretty well, don't you, and found your feet? I'd like to think you were enjoying the place too and that's what I . . .'

Downstairs, in his study on the second floor, Mungo stood looking down at Graham who still sat with felt-tipped pen in his hand.

‘Are you saying we've got a leak in the department?' Graham said.

‘What other explanation is there? I smelt a rat first when Rosie Whittaker never took up that dead letter at the Mabledene garage drop. I sent her there but she never went. And no one knew I'd sent her outside the firm. Even Angus didn't know.'

‘We've got a mole in London Central, is that what you're saying?'

‘This is what every departmental head dreads, Graham,' said Mungo. ‘You know what I'm afraid of, don't you?'

‘That when you get home at half-term you'll find planning permission for that extension was refused, not granted.'

‘Absolutely,' Mungo said.

THE KING CAT
had a carcase of something half-hidden under the bushes. It was meat or fish and it emitted a pungent reek. As John approached the king cat began a threatening singsong noise. There were half-grown kittens everywhere in the long grass, thin and leggy, with pointed faces and hungry eyes. It was all too much for John who began to sneeze. The king cat picked up his carcase and fled across the road with it. John came to the central pillar and looked up inside it but there was nothing there. There had been no message, either in the Bruce-Partington code or whatever might have succeeded Bruce-Partington, for five weeks.

He would have to resign himself to the likelihood that it was all over. It might very well be that the moving spirit behind it had been the man Chambers who had been charged with possessing heroin. And certainly the last message, which with the help of the short story in
His Last Bow
, John had been able to decipher, seemed to point to some drugs connection. ‘Dragon to Leviathan: No news on bang. Awaiting developments.' John had a vague idea ‘bang' might be a slang term for heroin. When he went to the library in Lucerne Road and looked it up in the appropriate dictionary he found the word defined as meaning narcotics in general or an injection of a narcotic or a marijuana cigarette.

He was on his way to work. They were coming up to one of the busiest times of the year. In the garden centre Gavin was trying to teach the mynah bird to talk.

‘I'm a basket case,' he said. ‘I'm a basket case.'

John hadn't the least idea what he meant. The mynah said, ‘Ha ha ha, damn!' which was all it ever did say. It was a handsome bird, about ten inches long, with glossy black feathers and white wing patches. Its beak and legs were yellow and its wattles the orange of marigolds.

‘I'm a basket case,' said Gavin, his face up to the bars of the cage. ‘I'm an empty nester.'

John told the boy called Les to open the front doors and hook them back. A woman came in and went straight to Sharon's counter asking for plant-food spikes. In the houseplant house there was a subtle fresh scent that arose from the damp foliage of begonias and ivy-leaved geraniums. John walked along the central isle, plucking out from the fibre pots an occasional tiny weed. It was Thursday and his halfday. He and Mark Simms were supposed to be going out into the country in Mark's car to a village where there was quite a famous pottery. There Mark meant to buy two large ceramic pots to stand in his large window and which he would fill with an oleander and a
Ficus benjamina
from the garden centre.

‘I hope you don't mind my saying so,' Colin Goodman had said when they encountered each other by chance at lunchtime the day before, ‘but it's a bit peculiar, isn't it, spending all your time together, the way you and Mark do? I mean I don't want to imply anything, but it seems a bit strange, you both being men if you see what I mean.'

John saw what he meant. He also thought it absurd coming from Colin whose remarks suggested he himself took women about when in fact he led a celibate existence, living in his mother's bungalow.

‘You know me better than that,' was all John said.

It wasn't as if he wanted to spend all this time with Mark. But he had begun to be afraid to say no, afraid, that is, about Mark's mental state if he said no. He thought Mark might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Besides, though he had felt angry on the previous Saturday night, his feelings had been much softened by Mark's subsequent behaviour. He reminded himself too that it was Mark who, though unwittingly, had twice provided him with clues to the mini-Mafia codes. In the morning the apologies had been
unexpectedly profuse. Mark said he didn't know what had come over him, what was the matter with him these days. Or, rather, he did know but John was the last man he could confide in.

‘Though, frankly, you've been my lifeline these past few weeks, John. I don't actually know how I'd have got by without your support.' He added rather pathetically, ‘I'm all right when I'm not drinking, aren't I?'

He was even more carping and critical when he wasn't drinking, John thought, but he didn't say so. And on the Monday evening Mark had made restitution by coming round to Geneva Road with a magnificent leather-bound copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories and all the volumes of Father Brown in paperback. After that John couldn't very well refuse the invitation to go out to Rossingham St Clare and the pottery place even though this would entail a meal out afterwards and the inevitable bottles of wine taken home. Mark's hands had started shaking again after he had handed over the books and sometimes John saw an awful expression on his face. He would be staring at the wall or the window with his eyes very wide and that frown very deep as if he could see something abominable, but of course there was nothing there to see.

A stout white-haired man with his elderly wife and an infant who was probably a grandchild was asking Gavin about the mynah. How old was it? Would it bite? How much was it? Gavin looked alarmed.

‘You wouldn't want him around kids. There's a disease you can get from mynahs. Newcastle's Disease, it's called. How about a budgie?'

Later he told John with an air of guile that this was an illness to which only birds were subject. He led them off to look at budgerigars. John put his hand into the pocket of his jacket under the canvas work coat and felt the letter he had put there after he had read it that morning. Jennifer was trying again for a meeting between him and her and Peter Moran. They should all talk about this divorce like reasonable people. John thought that a funny way of putting it, as if they weren't reasonable people but should try to behave as
if they were. Perhaps there was no such thing as a reasonable person.

Could he bear to see her in the company of Peter Moran? Suppose they touched each other in his presence? If he saw Peter Moran even touch her hand or look at her in a certain way he could not answer for what he might do. Why then was he even considering the possibility of seeing them? There was no question of his divorcing Jennifer, for he knew that if he waited Peter Moran would eventually behave as he had done before and leave her. Or go back to whatever it was he really preferred doing to making love to Jennifer. John asked himself if he was contemplating agreeing to meet them because in this way, and only in this way, he would have a chance of seeing Jennifer again. If this were true it was pathetic and humiliating.