Talking to Strange Men (25 page)

JENNIFER'S LETTER CAME
on the first day of John's holiday. Of course he wouldn't be going away. He would have a go at the garden, maybe redecorate a room, spend a day with Colin and his mother, visit his aunt. How dull it sounds, he thought. In spite of the world-changing pieces of knowledge he held in his mind, he felt himself lapsing back into the old John. Outwardly, there had been no alteration in the way he lived. But he knew he was waiting for a sign and perhaps that sign was contained in the letter. He opened it slowly, not at all in a feverish anxious way.

Dear John,

You said you would think about what we asked you when Peter and I came to see you. That is over a month ago now and we haven't heard from you. You said you would think about a divorce, if you wouldn't divorce me for adultery that you might at any rate let us have a mutual consent divorce after two years apart. We have been talking to a solicitor and he has told me that I would have a right to a share in the house, even possibly as much as a third of its value. This may sound a bit outrageous seeing that the house is basically yours and I didn't pay for it or anything. But the law works like that and of course I have nothing of my own, as you know, except what I got from selling my flat which had a big mortgage on it anyway. Peter has nothing, absolutely no assets at all. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say we are on the breadline.

But what I want to say is this, that if you will let me have a divorce so that we can get married I won't ask for anything from you. I mean that I promise I won't ask for any alimony and I won't demand any share in the house. I think that is quite a fair bargain to make.

Please do think about this. I am not going to threaten you, John, but you must understand that if I have to wait five years I would have to have some support during that time and some sort of capital sum at the end of it.

Yours ever,

Jennifer

Peter Moran had put her up to that, John thought. So that he wouldn't have to get a job, or rather, so as to reconcile himself to being unable to get a job. Could a woman who had only lived with her husband for two years, a childless woman, claim a share in his house? John didn't know and he didn't want to ask a solicitor. He would never do that, he wouldn't need to. It was only just nine in the morning. They might not be up, but he didn't want to think about that. He gave Peter Moran's address to directory inquiries and they found the number for him. Thought, consideration, might have given him pause but he didn't think. He lifted the receiver and dialled the number.

The spare economical voice with the beautiful accent answered. John nearly put the receiver back. He said hesitantly:

‘This is John Creevey.'

As if he had never been to his house, drunk his wine, stolen his wife, ‘Yes?'

‘I'd like to speak to Jennifer.'

No request for him to wait, hold the line. Silence and then the sound of footsteps going away. It seemed a long time before Jennifer came.

‘Hallo, John.'

‘I had your letter,' he said. ‘It's just come.'

‘Don't say no just like that, John. Think about it. You don't have to give me an answer now.'

‘I wasn't giving you an answer. I want to see you. I've got something to tell you.'

‘Can't you tell me now?'

What did she think it was? That he was moving? Changing his job? Had even found another woman?

‘I can't tell you on the phone. When can we meet?' He
added quickly, ‘Just the two of us, mind. I don't want him there.'

He heard her sigh, a sad troubled sound. ‘I've got a job,' she said. ‘Only part-time but it's better than nothing. It's secretarial, with a firm in Feverton. How about Thursday afternoon? I stop at lunchtime on Thursdays and you do too, don't you?'

‘I'm on holiday,' he said.

She told him where she worked and agreed to meet him on Thursday at one o'clock. After he put the phone down, the enormity of it hit him. It wasn't long enough for the thinking he needed to do, four days wasn't long enough. Then he reflected on how readily she had said she would meet him. She had even seemed to want to meet him. Was the boorishness of Peter Moran proving too much even for her? He looked again at the letter, convinced anew that Jennifer hadn't written that unaided.

Newspapers had never been delivered to the house in Geneva Road after Cherry's death. When John wanted a paper he went out and bought one – the
Free Press
usually. Paying for his paper and taking a copy from the top of the pile, he wondered if perhaps the story of Peter Moran's conviction and sentence had in fact appeared in the
Free Press
. How would he have known whether it had or not? If it had, Jennifer might already know. She might always have known . . .

A heatwave had begun. Funny that you could always tell, that you always knew when a fine day was going to be isolated, a flash in the pan, and when it was the start of a hot spell. He walked along the embankment and over Randolph Bridge into Feverton. Jennifer had told him she was working for Albright–Craven in the Feverton Square complex. They were a building firm about fifty times larger in scale than Maitland had been, yet the analogy with Cherry couldn't be ignored. His life seemed full of parallels and omens.

She would be there now. Mondays, Tuesday mornings, Wednesdays and Thursday mornings, she had told him, and he looked up at the windows, wondering which was her office, as in days gone by he had stood opposite Peter Moran's cottage, watching for her. The sky was a strong
dark blue, the sun on all that glass and silver metal making a blaze that seared the eyes. He thought of walking, or more likely taking a bus, over Rostock to cats' green but he had been there several times in the past weeks and there had been nothing inside the central upright. It seemed that his mini-Mafia had once more gone into retreat.

Nevin Square was full of people. Like a piazza in some foreign city, he thought, milling with tourists. The sun had brought them out. The council had done the flowerbeds with coleus in brilliant variegated oranges, browns and sharp green, alternating with cockscombs, red and gold silken plumes, and
Amaranthus caudatus
that was called love-lies-bleeding. John sat on the low wall that surrounded the statue of Lysander Douglas, looking at the trailing crimson tails of blossom, and beyond them to the fountains in whose vaporous spray the sun made rainbows. Once, one hot day, when he was a big child and she a small one, Cherry had dared him to jump into the basin under the fountain, but he hadn't been adventurous and he hadn't dared. Now he opened the paper for something else to look at and his eye fell at once on a story about the court appearance of members of a protection racket.

Two of them had been charged with demanding money with menaces. It was an old story, though more familiar to John from the pages of thrillers than from his experience of life. The gang, if gang it was, had promised various shopkeepers and publicans freedom from vandalism in return for a weekly tariff. One of the witnesses was the licensee of the Beckgate and there was a photograph of the Beckgate in the text, showing that very hanging basket over the saloon-bar doorway which had come from Trowbridge's and which John had himself chosen and recommended.

The licensee said in evidence that when, after paying for week after week the rather paltry sum which had been demanded, he finally refused, the telephone in the passage at the back of the building was smashed and the chair seats in the small lounge bar ripped open. Half a dozen more witnesses were lined up and the case was expected to continue for several days. John turned back to the front page and saw that the missing schoolboy James Harvill's drowned
body had been found in a lake somewhere in the Midlands. it was more than two months since he disappeared. John shivered a little in the heat.

‘
LORD, DISMISS US
with Thy blessing,' Mungo sang, ‘Fill our hearts with joy and peace; Let us each, Thy love possessing, Triumph in redeeming grace . . .'

When the whole school was assembled in the chapel at Rossingham it was so crowded you had to keep your elbows tucked in not to prod the next man. Most days they had to hold staggered services, third and fourth forms first, fifth and sixth second, but it was different on the last day of term, the last of the school year. There was talk of extending the chapel, the Rossingham intake had increased so much. It was rather hard to see how this could he done without ruining what his father said was a monument to Pre-Raphaelitism. Mungo glanced round at the blue and crimson windows, moneychangers and bird-sellers, lilies of the field, fowls of the air, loaves, and fishes, and back along the neighbouring pews.

‘O refresh us, Travelling through this wilderness.'

It was extremely hot, the shafts of sunlight stained azure and vermilion holding a suspension of dust motes. Graham O'Neill stood next to him, mouthing the words only because he was tone-deaf and forbidden to sing, while his twin, three men down the pew, sought refreshment in the wilderness in a fine true baritone. The Lower Fourth were in front, Patrick Crashaw and Charles Mabledene piping in yet unbroken voices, Robert Cook braying in a near-tenor, Nicholas Ralston a little bit flat as always.

‘Let us pray.'

Not for the first time Mungo thought it a bit odd asking to depart in peace, as if they were all going to die. But there
probably wasn't a suitable bit in the Bible about a school breaking up. Graham was coming home with him for part of the holidays and accompanying the Camerons to Corfu while Keith went with his aunt and uncle camping in Sweden. And when they came back next term they would be in the Fifth, O Levels ahead, private studies, greater freedom. But first I'll break Stern's code, said Mungo to himself.

He had got permission on the previous afternoon to go down into Rossingham St Mary but there was nothing from Charybdis under the horse trough. Next year he wouldn't need permission. Signing the book would be sufficient. Strange really that Angus had given up the directorship just at the point when he attained the freedom essential to the head of London Central. As they filed out Mungo could see Angus ahead of him and for a moment he was aware of something he seldom felt even when Angus was mildly admonishing him, the gulf in ages between his brother and himself. It was an abyss that he too must leap one day, the girlfriend and the applications to medical schools waiting on the other side.

But now no more school for eight weeks, the formal goodbyes to Mr and Mrs Lindsay, the obligatory word of thanks to the linen lady, the final survey and clear-up of the study one was quitting for next year's larger room and lower floor. He seemed to have more baggage than anyone else. The London Central ‘most secret' files, and various books associated with what Angus persisted in calling Spookside, took up a whole case.

‘Have you seen my
Armadillo Army
? I need it for the code.'

‘It's already in with the files.' Graham said. ‘I thought you'd changed when Stern got wise to it.'

‘Only from Three to Eight. I reckoned that was rather subtle.'

They got Robert Cook to help them down with the cases. In Fergus's day he would have been obliged to do it and had a beating with a hairbrush if he had refused. In the present liberal climate with fagging the dirtiest word, they had to pay him.

‘Those were the days,' said Mungo.

Mr Lindsay shook hands all round. He looked as if he couldn't wait to get to his health farm.

‘Send me a postcard from Corcyra,' he said.

Angus sat in the front seat, Mungo and Graham behind. Fergus, remarking on the discovery of James Harvill's body, said to Mungo that he hoped he was aware of the dangers to people of his age from unknown men who might make overtures.

‘Dad,' said Mungo patiently, ‘I'm taller than you.' And he was – just. ‘They'd be scared of me.'

The so-called climate control on the car failed to work and circulated hot air. They opened the windows instead. Fergus said worriedly that Mabledene's had promised to fix the air conditioning but had let him down.

‘I'm not surprised,' said Mungo and he and Graham exchanged glances.

Later that day, from the audacious drop Stern used in the very heart of Mungo's empire, the narrow space between the bronze hand of Lysander Douglas and the book he held open, Mungo extracted a piece of cardboard six centimetres by ten with a message on it in the indecipherable code. As always, he copied it and replaced the card between hand and book.

It was still extremely hot. Indeed, looking up at the CitWest tower, Mungo couldn't remember ever seeing this particular combination of figures before: eight-thirty-one and twenty-six degrees. He remarked on it to Graham who sat waiting for him in the Laughing Burger where they had eaten their evening meal. They walked up Nevin Street into Ruxeter Road. It was at the point where the street widened and the shops began that Mungo realized they were being followed. He slowed down and dawdled at a window full of fishing gear.

He said to Graham, ‘Don't look but Stern's put a tail on us. I think I recognize him. His name's Philip Perch.'

‘Carrot-haired kid with a prosthesis?'

‘That's one way of putting it. I'd call it a brace.'

They separated, Mungo to take Howland Road, Graham
to continue northwards along Ruxeter but on the left-hand pavement. How Graham could possibly have seen from that distance and without even looking back that Philip Perch wore a brace on his teeth, Mungo couldn't fathom. He must have amazing eyesight. It was he, Mungo, whom Perch had decided to follow. Presumably he thought Western Intelligence's goal more likely to be in a back street than on a main road. Through the dusty streets Mungo led him and round the back of Fontaine Park, any area he was sure he knew a lot better than Perch would. The gates to the park were locked and on this side a high wall surrounded the green lawns and shady avenues. Mungo walked alongside the wall, knowing Perch wouldn't dare follow until he had reached the end where trees grew out of the pavement and big houses began and at this evening time there were areas of deep shadow. The air was hot and windless, full of flying insects. Where the wall ended and before the first garden, a narrow alley went down. Mungo stepped over the low railing into the garden instead, an extensive shrubbery of laurels and hollies and bushes he didn't know the name of. There he lay down on the ground, on leaf mould creeping with insect life, feeling against his skin the prickle of dried holly leaves.