Talking to Strange Men (3 page)

It was a village of sorts Peter Moran and she lived in, and in a cottage of sorts. Nunhouse had been half-swallowed by the expanding city, devoured by an outskirts estate of council houses, as a small pretty fish might be devoured by a predatory shark. And the cottage was a tiny thatched hovel with a shack-like extension tacked on the side. That was the best he could do for her, John thought, the best Peter Moran could offer a woman for all his university degree and his posh voice. The bus ran only every two hours and John had walked all the way back, though it was a long way and he didn't enjoy walking. But she had made him ashamed of the motorbike, the Honda. If she saw him there he didn't want her to see the Honda too. Perhaps it was true, as she had once gently said, that motorbikes were best for people under thirty. What then if you were over thirty but couldn't afford to run a car?

Walking back this way, along what had not so long before been a country lane, then on to a main road which was almost disused since the coming of the motorway, he had somehow missed the turning that would bring him to the eastern suburb where he lived and had come up under the flyover. Immediately he realized where he was he had started to retrace his steps. Another two or three minutes' walking in that direction, nearer and nearer to the East Bank, and he would have come to the place he had avoided for sixteen years. No doubt it had changed now, no doubt they had rebuilt things, pulled things down and put new ones up, but he would know it, he would recognize it, even under fresh concrete, new gleaming metal, tiles, paintwork.

He crossed the street in the direction he had come from and began taking a short cut across the green, making his way between the uprights that supported the overhead road. Why had he looked back? Had he remembered what he saw
from the bus? Had he heard something? A rare car perhaps or a footstep? Or had it been a sound made by one of the cats? Since then, on his frequent visits, he had often seen them, the yellow king cat and his many-coloured wives and offspring and rivals who lived here under the pillars, amid the grass and stunted blackthorn bushes.

Whatever it was that caused him to turn his head, he had turned it and seen, taped inside the groove of the central pillar, the first – or first to him – of the plastic-covered messages. Misery has to be very deep, has to be at suicide point, before it can quench curiosity. That thought actually came to him when he saw the little package up there. Until then he had believed his unhappiness total, swamping everything else, allowing room only for other old miseries to come in and share its ebb and flow. There was a place in its deep wide sea for his sister and her death but none, he had believed, for an island of interest and speculation. Yet here . . .

It had been about six feet up. He unpeeled the tape, took the folded sheet out of the envelope and read what was written on it – or tried to read it. He happened to have a ballpoint pen with him and he copied the six coded words, or six groups of letters, on to a piece of paper that he found in his raincoat pocket, a supermarket account print-out. Then he folded up the message once more, replaced it in its envelope and re-taped it to the inside of the pillar.

At home he had looked once more at the coded message. John knew very little about codes and what little he did know he remembered from schoolboy books he had read when he was very young, twenty-five or thirty years ago. But he was so intrigued by this unlikely message found in this unlikely place that he had shown it to Colin Goodman, though without telling Colin the circumstances in which he had discovered it. Not that he had known then that Colin was interested in codes, though he was aware that he did crossword puzzles, and no mean ones at that,
The Times
, no less, and sometimes the
Guardian.
Codes, however, it turned out were something Colin also dabbled in. He looked at the letters on the supermarket bill and quickly came up with what seemed a sound idea of the kind of code that had been
used, though that was a long way from being able to decipher the message.

No more appeared for a while after early January, then there were two in mid-February, this one now. It was a strange thing what those messages had done for him, John thought as he walked home. They had distracted his mind. In a curious sort of way, incredible as that seemed, they had consoled him. He was still deeply unhappy, his life emptied by Jennifer's desertion of everything that made it worth while, his future destroyed, but he had ceased to be obsessed, he was no longer single-mindedly wretched. It was weeks now since he had made one of those shameful vigils outside her house. And in that time he hadn't thought exclusively of her. Whole minutes, hours even, had gone by in which his mind hadn't been occupied by her. And as he visited and revisited the green with its steel pillars where the cats lived, watching for new messages, he felt that he had an interest in his life. It was absurd, of course, it was ridiculous that a man of his age should be so absorbed by this mystery but he was and he was thankful for it. Without this to sustain him, wouldn't he have broken down? Wouldn't he have abandoned himself to despair?

Twenty-five Geneva Road was a small semi-detached house in a street of small semi-detached houses, but what distinguished his was its garden. Even from the end of the street, two hundred yards away, you could make out his garden and see what set it apart from the rest. An early-flowering prunus was in full bloom in the tiny front garden, a pale shimmer in the gathering dark. The lamplight took away its rosy colour but not the gauzy delicacy of its flowers. And as he approached he could see the clusters of blue star-shaped scillas at the foot of the tree, a drift of aconites, iris stylosa, its unfolding lilac petals half hidden by its long fragile leaves, while his neighbours' gardens, though neat and trim, were barren.

Still, if he couldn't contrive a nice garden, who could? He was proud of it, though, this flowery strip under the bay window, and the longer plot at the back with the rockery
and the little pond, the two brave herbaceous borders the area of land wasn't really big enough to support, the collection of rare shrubs and the gingko tree. It was still impossible for him to understand why Jennifer hadn't appreciated the garden. He had said that to Colin in the days when he had had to open his heart to someone and Colin had been there and willing to listen.

‘I don't suppose,' Colin had said gently, ‘that having a nice garden would keep a woman from leaving her husband.'

Put like that, it did sound rather preposterous.

John let himself into the house. It was shabby inside and not very clean. When he came in like this after being out for some time he was aware of the smell. It was the smell of somewhere that hasn't been properly cleaned for a long time, where all the curtains need washing and the carpets shampooing and the windows opening. But after he had been indoors a little while the smell faded.

There was nothing to remind him particularly of Jennifer. He switched lights on, took the blue leather jacket off and laid it over the arm of a chair. Jennifer had added scarcely anything of her own to the furnishings of the house, nothing at all down here. It remained as it had been in his mother's time and she had been content with that. But it seemed peculiar to him, and had seemed strange then, that a young woman with good taste and very decided ideas had been prepared to live with fifties furniture when over and over he had suggested they have the place done up and buy new things.

He sat down, opened the notebook and looked at the latest message. SIDKCKDM AF HCRKTABIE SHIMC KD LFDAILA. This was the fourth. He had told Colin they came from a friend of his up North with whom he had been corresponding for years. As schoolboys they had been keen on codes and lately the friend had taken to sending these cipher messages. He didn't know whether Colin believed him. It wasn't a very convincing story.

‘The code is probably based on a line from a book,' Colin said.

‘What do you mean, a line from a book? What book?'

‘That's what we don't know.'

‘I wish you'd explain.'

‘Well, let's take a sentence, any sentence. For instance: now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. The first letter N would represent A, the second letter O would represent B, W would be C, I would be D, S E and so on.'

Colin was writing all this down. John looked at the paper.

‘What happens when you reach T. T is already F so it can't be I. Do you miss it out and go on to the I? But that would make I I.'

‘That doesn't matter. That's what you do. And if you get to the end of the sentence before you reach the end of the alphabet, you start a new sentence. In this case presumably: the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Do you see?'

John had objected, ‘It seems very simple.'

‘It is very simple. But if you don't know what the sentence is it's virtually indecipherable.'

‘Could it be deciphered without knowing the sentence?'

‘I expect there are some people who could do it but I couldn't.'

‘So if I don't know what the book is I haven't a hope of finding out what these messages mean?'

Colin laughed.

‘It's not as bad as that. This friend of yours, this Philip, if you and he know each other that well, presumably you know the kind of books he likes. I mean did you have a favourite book when you were kids?'

John didn't enjoy perpetuating these lies. He shrugged rather unhappily.

‘Most likely it's a first sentence or last sentence, you see. And a first is more probable that a last.'

‘Why is that?'

‘Because you could reach the end of the book before you came to the end of the alphabet,' said Colin patiently. ‘And you've got a clue in these recurring words, names probably. HCRKIABIE and SIDKCKDM and OQIUFE.'

After he had gone John had tried testing out the coded messages against the first sentences of a selection of books. His father had been a great reader of detective stories and there were a lot of these in the house as well as
nineteenth-century novels which he enjoyed because they offered him a more absolute escape from day-to-day life in this city in the eighties than any modern fiction could do. But it seemed to him quite probable that if one wanted to base a code on the first sentence of a book one might choose the Bible or Shakespeare. He was not surprised to find that the first line of Genesis was: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.' But he had not expected his Shakespeare to start with: ‘“Boatswain!” “Here, Master, what cheer?”'

Anyway the code was based on neither of them. Nor, when he tested it against the opening lines of all Dickens's novels, Jane Austen's, the Brontës' and George Eliot's, was he able to find any enlightenment. In spite of what Colin said, he tried final sentences. He moved on and tried the first and last lines of Kipling, Trollope, Hardy and Conrad. He tried John Creasey and Agatha Christie. Sometimes he found himself devoting whole evenings, and once practically a whole Sunday, to trying to discover the book that the code maker had used.

It was rather cold in the living room. There was no central heating. He would have had it put in for Jennifer but she had been indifferent when he suggested it. He reached out with his toe and switched on both bars of the electric fire. The three books he had borrowed from the library that afternoon lay on the low stool on the right-hand side of the fireplace:
She
and
Wisdom's Daughter
by H. Rider Haggard and John Le Carré's
A Small Town in Germany.
He seldom read anything but novels. One of these was as likely to have been used by the code maker as anything else, he thought. On the other hand, there was no reason to suppose the code maker had used a book at all. He might have used a sentence or paragraph from a newspaper, from a magazine. He might have used – chilling thought! – part of a page from the telephone directory.

But John refused to let himself dwell on that one. Pen and notebook in hand, he began setting the letters of the alphabet against the letters in the first line of
She:
‘In giving to the world the record of what, looked at as an adventure only, is I suppose one of the most wonderful and mysterious experiences ever undergone by mortal men . . .'

IT WAS THE
heart of the city that Mungo was bound for, specifically a tall narrow early Victorian house on the corner where Hill Street met Church Bar. From its upper windows, especially from the windows of his headquarters on the top floor, you could see everything, Fonthill Heights and the hills beyond, a segment of the gardens, a gleam of the river, a buttress of the cathedral, all but the tower whose green digits blinked. You could see the green dome of the city hall, or part of it, and a corner of the polytechnic's shabby black brickwork, and the opening in the old wall they called the Fallowgate.

The front door was approached by a flight of steep steps and it had long sash windows in which the glass seemed particularly clear and glowing. But Mungo let himself into its garden by a gate in the wall. It was a green door rather than a gate and with a curved top which fitted the arched opening in the wall of white bricks that in the summer would be thickly overgrown with a round-leaved climbing weed. On the left-hand side of the door was a brass plate on which was engraved:
Dr Fergus J. Cameron MB, FRCP
and under it,
Dr Lucy Cameron MB, MRCP
.

Mungo closed the gate behind him and entered the house by a stained-glass door in the side wall, a door which was kept locked only at night. Inside it was quite silent. Then, from high up in the house, he heard music playing very softly, the peculiarly civilized, lilting baroque music Angus liked even when he was working. Mungo began to climb the stairs. There were fifty-two to the top of the house but it was seldom that anyone but he ever went beyond the second floor. The door to Angus's room was open and Angus could be seen sitting at the table at work on his computer. He had
had the computer only a few days and was teaching himself to use it. Boccherini tinkled out of the record player.