With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed (15 page)

They all laughed and speeded up, heading gratefully for the back door. What a ghastly way to spend an afternoon. Thank goodness it was over.

And meanwhile the blackened hand still signalled from the debris. ‘Er, I don’t suppose you could hold on a minute?’ it said. ‘I just feel sure there is something you haven’t taken into account. If you could just – Hello? Excuse me –’

But they had gone.

The thing about Lillian’s clever choice of disguise – as travelling fluffy-bunny salesperson – was that it rather defeated her intention. In some vague indefinable way (but something to do with a tall, striking, baby-blonde woman trailing soft toys about in broad daylight) it just didn’t help her to blend into the surrounding landscape. People pointed her out; small children scoffed and jeered; and Gordon, first thing in the morning, brought up an ironical extra little breakfast tray with just a lettuce leaf on it. But if she wanted to change her cover story to something else, it was a bit late now. And besides, if she was honest, she rather liked the bunny she’d bought at the shops. He was woolly and earnest-looking, and, like all the best soft toys, he was a very good listener. Certainly he was a comfort in this ghastly unnecessary mess she had got herself into. He was her only ally. For if Michelle and Makepeace had contrived to get rid of Osborne (she was still sure of this), and if Angela Farmer and the Dunquenchin team had lent their support – well, that only left the soft toy she could trust.

But she had dropped the bunny when she saw Tim in the High Street; and now, to cap it all, she’d been robbed. Somebody had taken the letters. Those nutsy letters Michelle had written, about wanting to stake out Osborne and do horrid things to his nipples – they had been stolen from her room by somebody during the day, when she was out fruitlessly casing the Farmer house. All in all, it was no wonder she felt pretty insecure. No sign of Osborne any more; no friendly
furry helpmeet with long floppy ears; and when she got back to her room in the evening, not only were the letters gone, but there was a little drop of blood on the carpet and the room was permeated by the curious and unpleasant odour of singed hair. On top of which, an insane missive was attached to her pillow. In a mad scrawl it said: ‘Knowledge is Power, and you know nothing.’

The only person to have a fairly good day was Osborne. No sane person would choose to be cooped up in a dark, empty, paraffin-smelling garage while a legendary thriller-writer sleuths for clues twenty yards away; but on the other hand, Osborne was not slow to appreciate the chance of forty winks. Angela’s sudden and virulent arrival in his life had been cataclysmic, and the result was that a little lie-down was called for. ‘I’ll come get you as soon as I can,’ she promised as she lowered the up-and-over door, sealing out the natural light; but inwardly he begged her not to rush. He felt he had been wrenched, pushed, dragged, drawn and wrung; he felt like a weed that has forced its way through concrete. The sight of the cup cakes made him feel sick.

Most of the day he snoozed, intermittently waking up to switch on his torch and read a few more pages from Trent Carmichael’s nasty
S is for … Secateurs!
before snuggling down in a nest of old blankets, peeling a cup cake, and surrendering himself to the far from unpleasant feeling that, at present, there was precisely nothing he could do. This was true, of course. If
Come Into the Garden
had folded, there was nothing he could do. And if Makepeace had been sizzled to a crisp in the shed fire (as Angela popped in to tell him during the afternoon), well, there wasn’t much he could do about that either. Of course he felt sorry for the little chap, but it was curiously
difficult to regret his passing, or even fully to believe in it. During one of his many snoozes, he hallucinated that Makepeace was being buried, yet kept insisting on sitting up in the coffin. ‘You’re dead,’ people told him. ‘I am
not,’
he protested. ‘Come on, lie down.’ ‘I
won’t.’

Lucky that Osborne appreciated this chance to loll about; lucky that he believed in ‘sleep debt’ the way other people believed in overdrafts. In fact, he thought of his daily ten hours of nod in precisely the same balance-sheet terms: that if you draw out you must pay in; and that when you overdraw consistently, ultimately you receive a nasty letter threatening to revoke your credit facilities until further notice. So he stretched, yawned, snuggled down with his eyes closed, and let his thoughts wander across the border into Bo-Bo Land. The rabbit stirred, and unconsciously he scratched its ears. For Osborne, sleep was the constant state, the default mode to which he always returned when his attention was not demanded elsewhere. Everyday life might extend distractions to pull him out of the sack, but the moment it relaxed its grip, he sank back gladly into catalepsy. Sometimes it seemed to him that even if he slept till the millennium, he would simply never catch up. Osborne’s sleep debt was evidently of prodigious proportions, somewhere along the lines of the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement.

Turning over to get more comfortable, he thought vaguely about
S is for … Secateurs!
and wondered what everyone saw in it. The story concerned a precocious pubescent girl, physically unattractive but jailbait none the less, who blackmailed two older men after involving them in the dismemberment and disposal of a body. It seemed that, partly crazed by a youthful perusal of the works of Sigmund Freud, this West Country Lolita had killed her father over a misunderstanding at the allotments, when at the fervid height of her teenage sexual alertness she overheard him tempting a schoolfriend with a
giant marrow. ‘Do you see how it’s grown?’ he said in all innocence. ‘Tell you what, I’ll treat you to a bit later, if you’re interested.’ It was a tragic choice of words – especially for a man whose psychotic daughter not only harboured a burgeoning Electra complex, but whose favourite job was sharpening the blades of the hedge clipper.

Osborne squirmed slightly at the memory. He pictured the large garden in
S is for … Secateurs!,
extraordinarily similar to Angela’s, in which the burials took place. It disappointed him that Carmichael had modelled the topography so closely on a real locale; what a shame it was when novelists didn’t bother to make things up. In the story, the garden had the same dark poplar trees, the same ancient mulberry, the pergola, and (of course) the magnificent shed. It occurred to him suddenly that the sinister author picture he had seen on the back of
Murder, Shear Murder
actually showed the out-of-focus shape of Angela’s shed in the background. Ho hum. Another instance of lack of imagination.

But it occurred to him also, as his mind started its slow, struggling ascent out of the pit of slumber, that a line from one of the G. Clarke letters didn’t really make sense. ‘I haven’t even
met
Trent Carmichael …’ it said. There was something wrong with that. What, though? He switched on his torch, and got the letter out of his pocket: ‘I haven’t even
met
Trent Carmichael.’ He scratched his head. Well, of course the real G. Clarke
did
know Carmichael, but that wasn’t the point. It was that – oh yes, good heavens, this letter had been written
before the Carmichael piece appeared in the magazine.
He sat up so quickly that he bumped his head on a fire extinguisher. ‘Bugger,’ he said, but it was only a reflex.

This Carmichael reference was significant. How could somebody respond to a piece that wasn’t yet in print – to a piece, in fact, that had never been published at all, because the magazine had closed down in the week it was due to
appear? There was only one person who knew he had written it: Michelle. He gasped as he considered the implications. It was Michelle who wanted him to rummage in her shed. It was Michelle who wanted to dress up in a négligé and gardening gloves and flip-flops. Which was why, when the garage door flipped momentarily open, and a small figure scurried in wearing a loose frock and carrying a pitchfork, he yelled, above the boom of the closing door, ‘Michelle! Oh God, you’ve come to get me!’

‘You’re wrong there, as usual,’ said a familiar voice. And suddenly the garage reeked of burning hair.

Up in the office at Dunquenchin, Gordon was having a breakthrough. He might have shouted ‘Eureka!’ if his classical education had been better; as it was, he shouted ‘Dad!’ Twelve months of terribly advanced electronic remote-contact wizardry with teams of Californian graphics experts, combined with neurological analysis of such amazing complexity and sophistication that quite honestly you or I would never understand it –
even (ahem) if it could be described in words
– had finally culminated in that virtual reality program he had called, provisionally,
Phototropism.

It was Thursday morning, and breakfast was finished. It seemed the perfect opportunity for a test run. Hearing the footsteps of his dad coming up the stairs, Gordon strapped a custom-built Fly-Mo unit to his bonce (or that’s what it looked like), thrust his hand into a wired-up glove, adjusted quickly to the intense consuming dark, and for the very first time surrendered himself to the entirety of the finished game. Though he was a pioneer, he felt safe and confident. Earlier, his dad had commented kindly, ‘You need taking out of yourself, son’; and Gordon had promptly decided that a ‘proto-photo-trip’ was precisely the thing required. In theory, the program would trigger receptors in his brain to convince him – little by little,
and depending on the level of skill – that his entire body was growing and reaching out like a plant in sunlight. It would take him out of himself, exactly.

What Gordon seemed to have seriously miscalculated, however, was the rate of acceleration. As it now transpired, being taken out of yourself from nought to infinity in fifteen seconds is pretty terrifying, and slightly more than the normal human constitution can withstand. From the evidence of his earlier partial test runs, Gordon had expected a slow but perceptible unfurling sensation, like an exquisite lily opening gracefully on the surface of a tranquil Japanese pond: starting with warm earlobes and a tingling sensation under the skin, it would then progress to something delicate around the eyelids. Instead, however, as his whole body instantly convulsed and whiplashed in his chair, the main sensations were of being violently drawn, wrung, pushed, dragged and wrenched. It was horrific. He screamed as his fingers spread and stretched, creaking and splitting, as his arms and legs tugged fiercely at their sockets, as even his hair yanked painfully at his head.

The large Victorian bedroom he could see around him (a virtual reality black-and-white 3D drawing, based on the Tenniel illustrations from
Alice)
shrank in on him,
foop!,
like that; in two seconds flat, Gordon had his foot up the chimney, and his arm out of the window, and was just about to swell up fatally against the ceiling when –
beep!,
the machine apparently switched itself off. As the picture dimmed and Gordon felt himself dwindle to normal size, he noticed a little tray of cakes marked EAT ME, which were presumably part of his Californian designer’s homage to Lewis Carroll. Even in the throes of his peculiar ecstasy, and even at only nineteen years old, Gordon’s detumescent brain thought, Hang on, that’s a bit suggestive, I’d better work on that.

He removed the lawn-mower helmet in a state of utter shock and disbelief. His head was hot, his eyes saw patterns in the air
and his ears throbbed. When he tried to speak (just to exclaim ‘Lumme’), he vomited and started sobbing. No wonder he was upset: if this was its usual physiological effect,
Phototropism
obviously had a very limited future in the penny arcades. Gordon’s proto-photo-trip had lasted exactly six seconds and had taken about ten years off his life. If his dad had not burst into the room and taken the initiative of unplugging the machine, he might shortly have gone insane.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ his dad said later, when Gordon had stopped shaking and was sipping from a large mug of hot sugared tea.

‘I don’t think I can.’

‘Sure you can. What did it feel like? Was it anything like growing?’

Gordon yowled, nodded and suppressed a snivel.

‘Why do I get the impression that growing isn’t a pleasant experience?’ Gordon’s dad said warmly, to no one in particular, and then hugged his son again. ‘What else is worrying you, eh? Tell your old dad. What’s been going on in that brilliant loaf of yours? I suppose it’s that hand?’ (His tone suggested the hand was to blame, as if to say, ‘Just wait till I catch that hand, I’ll show it the back of my – er, hand.’)

But at the mention of the hand, Gordon, usually such an equable lad, let go of everything he’d been bottling up, with an explosive outburst rather like an accident in a compressed-air factory.

‘But he’s
dead,
Dad,’ he yelled, ‘that Makepeace is. Died in the fire on Tuesday night. Lying there all charred and it’s my fault, because I got scared of him and you locked him in and I feel so guilty now –’

‘But hang on,’ his dad interrupted, ‘I’m sure he was in here yesterday again. I –’

‘No, he’s
dead.
Definitely. I saw the
hand,
and now I’m worried because Angela let the other one go, and that creep
Trent Carmichael is here, and I know there’s something horrible going on between him and Margaret, always has been, something really nasty, and Margaret’s a cow, Dad, she’s really horrible to that ex-boyfriend, and he’s looking really
worried,
and now my
program
doesn’t work properly –’

‘Could anyone have tampered with it?’

‘What? No. I mean, well yes, but who would? Anyway, that’s not all. Now I’ve sacked a lot of innocent people I don’t even know, and what else, right, the tall woman in the pink coat keeps trying to make friends with me on the landing by talking baby talk as though I were
three – years – old!’

He paused. He wiped a tear. There was no more.

‘You’re right about Margaret, you know,’ said his dad after a bit. ‘My own brother’s daughter, God rest him, but such a rotten cow that you can hardly credit it. She had a great pile of notes on that boyfriend, you know. Loads of it. Brought it with her. Tapes as well, photos, samples of shopping lists, everything. She’s writing a book.’

‘No. What, on Tim? What’s he done?’

‘Just been himself, that’s all. But as far as Margaret’s concerned, he’s a fruitcake. All that guff about those daffodil bulbs. You know.’

‘Poor bloke, that’s awful. What a cow.’

‘Yes. Anyway, I found it this morning when I was making her bed, so I took it straight round to his room, poor bloke, and said take a butcher’s at this.’

Gordon gasped. ‘You didn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘No, I mean, it’s brilliant. I think that’s brilliant, Dad. But you realize she’ll go berserk?’

‘I don’t care.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

Gordon dropped his voice, as if to raise something delicate.

‘So she hasn’t, sort of,
got
anything on you? No secrets, you know, no nasty buried stuff?’

‘Of course not.’

Gordon was relieved. ‘It’s just she always gives the impression she knows something to your disadvantage.’

‘I know. But that’s because she’s a cow.’

‘Right.’

‘Which she is.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘What a cow!’ exclaimed Tim.

Ten minutes ago he had been lying in bed, miserable, listening with distant interest to a rather combative programme on Radio 4 called
Face the Facts,
and worrying heavily about nothing whatsoever. The things he faced were not facts, but they loomed larger than reality, and that was the trouble. This morning he had been particularly preoccupied by the vivid mental picture of his next-door neighbour in London, Mrs Lewis, carelessly leaving the front door wide open after feeding Lester. He simply
knew
it was true; he could
see
it, for goodness’ sake – open, flapping, people wandering in for a look round, while Mrs Lewis blithely packed her bags and embarked on a fortnight’s holiday without a backward glance.

When he tried to suppress this unfounded anxiety, perversely it only grew and stretched in his mind so that by the end it entailed Mrs Lewis (Oh no, was this trustless woman
Welsh?
It explained a lot) absent-mindedly placing a magnifying mirror next to a net curtain, and the low November sun reflecting off it and starting a huge fire, and then Lester rushing frantically into the street and being almost knocked down by a fire engine, which swerved to avoid him and instead ploughed
into a bus shelter packed with schoolchildren, exploding with enormous loss of life.

Tim winced miserably and wondered whether to phone his own number, just to check that the line was not ‘unobtainable’, but he had done this lots of times before, from the office, and knew it didn’t prove much. In the old days, when he and Margaret lived together, they would sometimes come out of the tube station and, walking home, address his fears in sequential order, with Margaret’s natural sarcasm reined in as tightly as it would go. ‘Phew, the neighbourhood
is
still here,’ Tim would say, amazed, as they emerged in the daylight. ‘All right so far, then,’ said Margaret. They turned a corner. ‘Wow, our
road
is still here,’ said Tim. ‘A very good sign,’ she agreed. They held their breath until the trees cleared to reveal in the distance their own abode still standing, and not a blackened shell surrounded by ambulances. ‘The
house is
still there. Look, the
house.’
‘Hallelujah.’ They moved closer, not running, but walking more urgently. ‘And thank God, I don’t believe it, I think the
flat’s
still there!’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Margaret. ‘It’s a miracle.’

But Tim now had an additional worry, and a pleasingly circular one at that. Possibly he was really bonkers – and anxiety about being bonkers was the first sign that you were mad. Certainly Margaret’s purse-lipped, arms-folded, tut-tut attitude to his repeated sightings of work colleagues in Honiton would suggest that she thought he was barking, but was too polite to say. Last night he had actually seen
Osborne,
by the way, which brought the running total to four. Looking out of the window, he thought he saw the ‘Me and My Shed’ man being ferried, trussed up, through the quiet streets of Honiton on the front of a push-bike pedalled by a small, black, hairy figure in a frock with a trident, like Britannia – possibly a child, or possibly a clever, cycling, costumed chimp escaped from a patriotic circus. Tim had accepted it, at the time. Now it seemed pretty sick.

The radio didn’t help, this
Face the Facts
stuff, especially since the reporter seemed so certain of everything. Not a flicker of doubt was present in his mind. ‘So we confronted Mr Chimneypot at his new premises in Gloucester Road,’ he announced. The soundtrack cut from the studio to the outdoor swish of passing traffic, the panting huff-puff of the reporter chasing someone up to their front door and sticking his foot in it. ‘What about your investors, Mr Chimneypot? Is Chimneypot your real name? Are there any little Chimneypots? Can you tell us anything about Kiss Me Quick PLC –’

‘Why don’t they leave him alone?’ thought Tim, as he switched it off. ‘In any case, where do they get the moral energy?’ But then Margaret’s uncle knocked on his own door and offered him this great pile of stuff about how he was a case-book nutcase; and amazingly (paradoxically, you might call it), ten minutes later he wasn’t mad any more. Except, of course, in the sense of absolutely hopping. ‘What a rotten cow,’ he exclaimed again, leaping out of bed, and pulling on some clothes. He switched the radio back on. ‘That was
Face the Facts,’
said the announcer. Yes, thought Tim, it certainly was.

‘I’m going to kill her,’ he said. ‘Look, she’s got my Post-it stickers and everything. She’s set me up.’ He read the latest notes again, scanning for the bits that annoyed him most – ’personality implodes … inevitable breakdown … nudge him off into the abyss … traumatized by displays of sexuality … hates the sight of cream’ – and let out a very uncharacteristic bellow of rage. ‘WOOOOORH!’ he went, feeling surprisingly good about it. ‘WOOOOORH!’ He had come down here to this godforsaken town to find the bastard who’d taken his job away, and been sidetracked into acting the invalid, just because of that
cow
Margaret. ‘WOORH!’ he went (slightly shorter this time). He didn’t even know what he was doing in this bloody B&B. ‘WORH!’ he went, kicking some files.

He felt quite exhausted. He needed to sit down. And the
very last ‘WRH’ he made – just before Gordon tapped on the door and came in, and they somehow got on to the subject of who’d bought
Come Into the Garden –
was actually quite quiet.