Talking to Strange Men (26 page)

A minute or two and Perch came trotting up. Without hesitation he turned down the alley and Mungo heard him start to run, his trainers making a soft thumping on the tarmac. Mungo didn't waste time. He got up, brushed off his jeans, and ran the last bit down into Fontaine Road. A chained bicycle fastened to one of the meters told him that Charybdis was already there. He needed to be more discreet, Mungo thought, making a mental note to tell him so. At this time of the year the long garden of the central house in Pentecost Villas was like a piece of savannah. You wouldn't have been surprised to see some wild beast stalking through the long grass, pushing aside metre-tall thistles, man-high grass. Not Mungo-high though, not quite. Like some old-time explorer – like, perhaps, Mungo Park himself – he strode through the wilderness, his head just above the stinging nettle tops, the thistle sword blades, while bramble tendrils caught at his legs.

They were all there, on the top floor. It was lightest up there, the electricity in the house having long ago been cut off. It was also hottest. Reasoning that it would be quite safe, Mungo pushed up the sashes on a couple of windows but it didn't make much difference. The temperature on the digital clock still stood at twenty-four. It winked away up in the jewel-blue sky. Charles Mabledene sat cross-legged on the floor up against the far wall, his pretty infant's face a little flushed from the heat, his fair silky hair longish the way his mother liked it. Spotty Patrick Crashaw who was called Basilisk was the first to deliver his report. There was a battle of wills going on at Moscow Centre, a vying for supremacy between Ivan Stern and Rosie Whittaker, and Rosie had Guy Parker, that
éminence grise
, on her side.

‘Stern's not thinking of resigning, is he?' Mungo asked.

‘Not yet. He may not. But there's a split coming.'

Nigel Hobhouse, or Charybdis, reported entry by way of a family chain to the Conservative Association Headquarters at Chamney where his sister's boyfriend's sister, temping secretary to the Secretary, an Utting teacher, had added the names of Mr Mungo Cameron and Mr Graham O'Neill to the wine and cheese party guest list. Their invitations should arrive in course of time. Mungo, anticipating cocktails, was disappointed. Nicholas Ralston reported the successful outcome of Autoprox. His brother had written to the Whittakers, visited the Whittakers and produced Dragon's photograph, and they had finally agreed to meet the first four hundred pounds of the repair bill. Mungo congratulated Dragon in the rather austere way he had, receiving in response a modest inclination of the fair head. Almost immediately a dozen balloons which no one had noticed before, though they must have been there, floated down from the ceiling to brush the floor and bounce lightly. Mungo felt annoyed. He tried to ignore the balloons and talked about the new projects, finding out when building was to start on this house, reviewing the new Rossingham intake – would anyone, for instance, be coming from Utting Junior as Charles Mabledene once had? – and the breaking of Stern's code, the task that was always with them, the unalterable
goal, their
delenda est Carthago
, as Mr Lindsay might have said.

Mungo talked on, his eyes resting longer on the impassive face of Charles Mabledene than on any other. Was he Stern's mole? Mungo's conviction that he was had been a little shaken by the photographs. The yachting books meant nothing, the merest sop they were, but those photographs, especially the shot of Philip Perch's brother's room, gloomy and obscure though it was, with all the books about and the posters on the wall and the poised telescope on the windowsill – would Stern's mole have taken that? Of course the argument was that Stern's mole with access to almost any corner of Utting would be the most likely to have taken it . . .

Basilisk, Unicorn, Charybdis, their attentive faces watching him – it might be any of them. It might be Empusa who lived down in Cornwall but wasn't out of the running in term time. It might – unpleasant thought – even be Keith O'Neill, called Scylla, who was at this moment probably crossing the North Sea, bound for Gothenburg. He would subject Charles Mabledene to a test, think up a task for him which no mole of Stein's could creditably carry out, only at the moment he had no idea what such a thing could be. He could merely set Dragon, along with Basilisk, the job of inquiring into building plans for 53 Ruxeter Road. And while using the flyover drop for fairly innocuous messages, see how quickly Stern learned the current code was based on another story from
Armadillo Army
.

The light was fading. If they stayed much longer they would need to get out the candles that were kept in a drawer in the basement. Mungo closed the windows and they began to leave, going separately, remembering Philip Perch the tail who would not have disappeared, who would be about somewhere, hoping for something, fearing Stern's wrath. Only Graham and Mungo left together. They left last, Graham remarking that the rope which held up the stepladder to the roof was badly frayed at the point where it first wound round the cleat.

‘That would make a hell of a crash if it came down,' said Graham.

‘We'll see if the builders are coming. If they're not for six months, say, we'll renew the rope.'

They made their way down the staircase which at the top here was very steep. It had grown suddenly quite dark.

Twenty-two steep stairs led down to the landing where the shallower flight began. Mungo counted them. Light from the street lamps outside Fontaine Park, shed through a long window in the stairwell, made orange-coloured geometric patterns on the dusty broken floor. And above the light which lay like a bright mist, the sky was a dark mysterious blue, full of stars.

THE CASE AGAINST
the men running the protection racket ended on Wednesday, both were found guilty and given prison sentences. Among the witnesses was a shopkeeper who claimed to have been beaten up and another who said he had been in fear of his life. John read all this in the copies of the
Free Press
he went out specially to buy. What surprised him was that the messages had begun again. The gang had apparently been undeterred by retribution striking two of its members.

He copied down the message he found inside the cats' green pillar, though its meaning, of course, eluded him. A yellow kitten, its sire's double, came rubbing itself against his trouser leg. John didn't dare bend down to stroke it. He thought ruefully of how he had discovered the source of the Bruce-Partington code at the very hour at which its usefulness was over. He must try again with this one but it was already the nineteenth of the month . . .

The meeting with Jennifer loomed ahead of him. After collecting her from Albright–Craven, he must of course take her out to lunch. That would be fine in one way, but to impart such a piece of news in a restaurant, across a table?
In the newspaper library he had asked if he might make a copy of the page with the story about Peter Moran on it. They hadn't allowed this but said that they would do it for him and ten minutes afterwards a Xerox had been handed to him. This sheet of paper, his lodestone, he would almost certainly have to produce to confirm his story. Passing it across the tablecloth seemed grotesque. But perhaps she wouldn't want to eat. John was sure that once he had told her, if he did this immediately after they met, she wouldn't want to eat at all. If he had had a car they might have sat in it. All the city centre pubs were very crowded at lunchtime. She wouldn't come home here alone with him. It was necessary to be realistic, to face facts, and he was grimly sure of that fact.

The phone rang in the middle of the afternoon as he was coming in from cutting the lawn. He had a premonition it was Jennifer phoning to cancel their meeting, but he was wrong. It was Gavin. The mynah was off its food, had eaten nothing since the previous morning, and its feathers looked dull and ruffled. Should Gavin take it to the vet? John had never really thought of vets as being bird doctors, but why not? He told Gavin to wait another day and then if the mynah was no better to take it to the vet after Trowbridge's closed at lunchtime. How coincidences happened, he thought as he picked up
Armadillo Army
which he had left face-downwards on the settee and saw it was open at the story called ‘Mynah Magnum'. He remembered how he had tried the June code against the first lines of some of the stories in this book and tried them in vain. That had been before he started to read it. Now he saw the book was nearly a week overdue.

The espionage genre was perhaps not well suited to the short story. At any rate he hadn't enjoyed the three stories he had read in this collection nearly as much as Yves Yugall's novels and had no inclination to finish it. The library was closed all day Wednesdays. He would take
Armadillo Army
and the other two books back in the morning, but first why not try the coded message in his notebook against the first lines of these short stories?

The first lines of the stories yielded only a jumble of
nonsense. He tried ‘Armadillo Army', ‘Mynah Magnum', ‘Gila Haunt', ‘Rodent', ‘Strontium Strain'. The seventh story was called ‘Brontosaur'. John wrote the letters of the alphabet under the letters in its first lines and tried it against the message. Immediately he knew that once more he had broken the code.

It was extraordinary the feeling of triumph he had. Nothing in his personal life had changed, his two tragedies were still with him, the momentous events that were to take place on the following day still hung over him, but he felt suddenly euphoric, bubbling with excitement almost. He felt on top of the world. For not only had he done it, had he broken the July code, but he now had the key to every future coded message, since instructions as to the source of the next one must of necessity appear in the current one at the end of each month.

John read the message he had deciphered: ‘Leviathan to Dragon and Basilisk: Thursday p.m. find Whittakers' fisherman. Remove and eliminate.'

It was mysterious, not quite meaningless, but you had to be in the know, you had to be privy to the gang's secret knowledge. For the first time he was aware of an element of menace, even of violence, in one of the messages. Of course he had long known that the gang itself indulged in violence but this was the first message with anything sinister in it. The tiny sensation of alarm he had was like a splash of water from a fountain on to warm skin. What did that last bit mean? What did ‘remove and eliminate' mean?

THE WHITTAKERS LIVED
half-way between Utting and Chamney in a red-brick house of such size, proportions and general appearance as can be found in the wealthier suburbs all over England. Its front garden was an extensive rockery through which a stream trickled over slabs of limestone. The stream, Charles Mabledene remarked to Patrick Crashaw, must be pumped electrically. It wouldn't be a natural spring. They had been keeping the house under observation for most of the morning. A cricket field opposite was divided from the road by a fence of wide wire mesh along which trees and lengths of hawthorn hedge grew. Charles and Patrick were in the field, walking up and down, sometimes sitting on a bench.

‘What do you reckon he wants it done for?' Patrick said.

‘Ours not to reason why.'

‘OK, but don't you want to know? I mean it's only an old gnome. What's he want it smashed for?'

‘For a start he never said he wanted it smashed. He says “eliminate”. If he wanted it smashed I'd think it was like the heads of Napoleon in the Sherlock Holmes story.'

Patrick gave him a puzzled stare.

‘One of them had diamonds inside,' Charles said.

‘Do you reckon Rosie Whittaker's old gnome's got diamonds inside?'

‘No,' said Charles coldly. ‘No, Crashaw, I don't.'

He turned his head to look once more across the road. The object of his attention was a plaster figure in red cap and green jerkin which, seated on a stone that jutted out above one of the small waterfalls, trailed a fishing line in the water.

‘How do you eliminate a gnome except by smashing it?' Patrick asked.

Charles ignored him. He was watching the rising and folding of a door on the garage opposite. The car he had photographed at the ‘works', now repaired and resprayed, began slowly to emerge. From the other side of that garage he had long ago seen Rosie's father's Mercedes come out. That had been just before nine, Charles having been brought into town by his mother and dropped off on her way to the salon. Rosie and her mother were still inside. Or had been. He saw Rosie get out of the passenger side of the car, close the garage door and return to sit beside her mother. She had all the gear on, he observed, black footless tights, black tee-shirt, black jacket and her black hair standing up in spikes and streaked with green.

Then something curious happened. The car stopped in the middle of the drive, Mrs Whittaker jumped out and ran back into the house. Within seconds the stream, which had been quite a rushing torrent, slowed up, became a trickle and ceased. Charles started laughing, he couldn't help himself. For reasons of economy, no doubt, the Whittakers switched the pump off while they were out.

Literal-minded, very logical, Charles took Leviathan's command precisely to the letter. If he said p.m. he meant after twelve and it was still only ten to according to his watch, which, admittedly, had been losing lately. He was getting a new watch for his fourteenth birthday, along with a
tregetour
's special outfit made with twelve secret pockets. You couldn't see the CitWest tower from here, or not from the ground. You probably could from upstairs in the Whittakers' house.

Mrs Whittaker came back and she and Rosie drove off. The fisherman looked rather ridiculous now, trailing his line on a drying river bed. Was he going to smash it? The alternative way of eliminating would presumably be to drown it, drop it off Alexandra, say. Moving off towards the gate in the cricket field fence with Basilisk by his side, Charles came to a decision. He would very slightly disobey the command he had been given.