by Sam Taylor
Sighing, he skim-read the story one more time, and did the same to the newspaper reports. Halfway through the second report, he gasped. There it was, in black and white.
The coroner read a series of statements about Dayton from his professors and friends. The head of the Psychology department, Dr Lanark, described him as a ‘very bright student’ who had ‘seemed increasingly distracted’ during his final term.
So that was where he had seen the name before. He put the story back in the box, and took the newspaper reports and the second envelope with him to the kitchen. He put the kettle on and read through the longer newspaper report more carefully. He copied each name into his green notebook. This is what he wrote:
Ian Dayton (dead student)
John Morton (coroner)
Dr Lanark (head of psychology dept)
Lisa Silverton (ID’s friend, room opposite)
Anna Valere (reputed to be ID’s girlfriend)
Graham Oliver (ID’s room-mate)
anonymous friend (Malcolm Trewvey?)
Catherine Dayton (ID’s sister)
The first time he had read this report, in the computer room at the university library, the names had meant nothing to him. Now, of the eight names, five had associations in his mind: not meanings, exactly, but they were no longer merely combinations of letters. ‘Ian Dayton’ was a dead person, commemorated by a stone carved with his initials in the garden of the house where James lived; he was the sum of all the words with which other people had described him after his death; he was also, by a peculiar extension of James’s imagination, a young, blond detective in nineteenth-century London. ‘Anna Valere’ was a thin, dark-haired girl who haunted his dreams, and she was also a young Victorian gentlewoman dressed in black underwear who haunted his dreams. ‘Graham Oliver’ was a fat, bearded man with whom James had shared a house for four weeks, and who had, quite recently, beaten James up in a toilet cubicle for no apparent reason. ‘Malcolm Trewvey’ was, thought James, the anonymous client and the pseudonymous writer; his enemy, and the man he wished himself to be; he was the enigma at the centre of this mystery, and James strongly suspected he was guilty of murder. As for ‘Dr Lanark’ . . . well, it appeared that he lived next door to James and had something to hide.
James wrote all of this in his notebook and then, seeing that there was steam pouring from the spout of the kettle, he turned off the gas. He took a deep breath and picked up the second envelope. As he held it over the kettle, the glue softened and he was able, as before, to open the envelope without damaging the paper. He shook the contents of the envelope on to the kitchen table. Nine little squares of paper. First he counted them and then he turned them over so he could see each letter. Randomly he arranged them on the wooden surface. They said:
S T E V M A G O L
After staring at them suspiciously for a while, James consulted his notebook and discovered that these were the exact same letters that he had found in the first envelope. At first he was disappointed. What was the point of sending two letters containing exactly the same thing? And then he noticed the word URGENT on the envelope. Of course! They had been sent again because Malcolm Trewvey had not responded to them, or acknowledged them, or acted upon them. The sender was not merely passing on information; he was expecting some kind of consequence. This led James to wonder who the sender could be. And, in the same moment, his mind supplied the answer.
He made a cup of tea and told himself to calm down. There was, after all, no logical reason to suppose he was right. It was only a hunch. But hunches, he knew, were what detectives had; and when they had them, they always followed them; and, more often than not, the hunch turned out to be correct. James’s hunch was this: the sender of the letters of letters must be . . . Dr Lanark.
An hour later, James was sitting in the computer room of the university library, typing names into a search engine. It was night-time - the library would close in less than an hour - and, with the exception of a bored security guard who wandered in now and again, James was alone. As before, the room smelled of new carpet tiles. The only noises were the buzzing of the neon lamps on the ceiling, the hum of the computer, and the tap-tap-tap of James’s fingers on the keyboard.
He worked his way methodically through the list of names. The results were somewhat mixed. ‘Ian Dayton’ yielded no other results than the newspaper reports on his death. ‘Lisa Silverton’ he discovered through a schools website: according to her entry, which was written in an ebullient, oddly condescending tone, she was a partner in a London accountancy firm and was engaged to someone called Piers. ‘Graham Oliver’ was also listed on this website, but there were no details next to his name, and ‘Anna Valere’ and ‘Malcolm Trewvey’ were not to be found anywhere on the web. There were several ‘Catherine Dayton’s, but only one with the right age and nationality: she was working for an IT company in Geneva. As for ‘Dr Lanark’, it appeared that he had changed jobs. He was no longer listed on the university’s staff page, but his name occurred several times at the head of scientific papers sponsored by a company called Tomas Ryal Associates, which had offices in three cities in the UK: Belfast, Edinburgh and H. The company’s website declared it was ‘at the frontline of memory research’.
At five to ten the security guard came in and told him it was time to leave. James collected the printouts he had made, put them all in his rucksack, and walked outside. It was a bitterly cold night. He decided to go to the union bar, where he bought a pint of bitter and sat alone in a corner. The bar was crowded and noisy. He had not been here since the night he was attacked, and the memory of that incident made him nervous. James stared at the faces around him: laughing faces, earnest faces, drunken faces. Hundreds of people, and he didn’t know any of them. Here I am, he thought, surrounded by nameless faces, in pursuit of a few faceless names. For a moment he wondered whether this was ironic or merely sad. Then, sighing, he finished his pint and walked home.
At five o’clock the next morning, James was in the cab of his van. It had been an effort to leave his warm bed after so little sleep. Now he was wrapped in a blanket, remembering those September days when he had sat in the cab of this van and stared at the façade of number 21, waiting for Malcolm Trewvey to emerge. James’s heart ached as he thought of that time. There had, he thought, been something pure about it . . . something innocent . . . something he had lost and would never find again.
Undoubtedly his nostalgia was influenced by the weather. Back then it had been cold but bright, the leaves on the trees just starting to yellow. Now dark clouds hung low in the sky and the branches were mostly bare, the pavements slippery with brownish leaves. The effect was almost unbearably bleak. And, if he was honest with himself, James was less than thrilled by the identity of his new quarry. Dr Lanark, though it was easy to believe him capable of evil, did not inspire the same level of emotion as Malcolm Trewvey; or, as he had been then, the nameless man in the dark coat.
He found himself wondering what had become of that man. Where was Malcolm Trewvey now? James cast his mind back. He had no memory of having seen him since the day when the two of them had stood outside the sex shop and their eyes had met in the mirrored glass. How long ago that seemed! Of course James had heard of Trewvey since then: he had dreamed about him; he had opened two letters addressed to him; and Harrison had told him that ‘the client’ was pleased with his progress in the house. But that was all. No sight nor sound since the day he got the keys to the house. Either Malcolm Trewvey is a very good spy, James thought, or he has lost interest in me. The latter possibility struck him as more likely. Well, if that were true, then there was only one way to regain his attention: by uncovering his guilty secret.
James looked through the windscreen again at the street scene which was beginning to emerge from the dark. It was a scene he knew well. Like the back of his hand - that was the cliché - but James knew this street better than the back of his hand. In fact, now he thought about it, he wasn’t sure he knew the back of his hand a
t all well. He looked at it: the tendons, veins, hairs and knuckles; the squarish shape; the irregular gaps between fingers; the bulging egg-shaped muscle below the knuckle of his index finger and above the knuckle of his thumb. Had he been asked to draw this hand from memory, he doubted he would have accurately replicated any of these details.
Lough Street, however, that was different. Naturally there were vague and missing elements in his recollection, but if he closed his eyes he felt confident that he could remember almost all of it, from the view of it narrowing before him, framed by the van’s windscreen, to individual weeds that grew near particular trees and the look of the brickwork on certain walls in the golden moment before sunset. It felt much more his than did the back of his hand.
And why was this? Not merely because he had learned it by heart during the days of spying. No, he had known it - loved it - felt himself a part of it and it of him - long, long before that. His memories of Lough Street went back much further than six weeks. Something had happened to him in this street: something that had burned it into his memory; something that, even after it had somehow been forgotten, had flashed the memory into his consciousness over and over again, in daydreams and in night-dreams, during the years that had followed his leaving of it. And as he thought all of this, the song came back to him, those sad chords and words - ‘Part of my heart / Will always beat . . .’ - and the image that always accompanied this fragment of music: the image of a long street of terraced houses, seen from above, and a couple walking, hand in hand, along the pavement, everything stained blue. As James replayed the image in his mind - her head on his shoulder, the policemen under a streetlamp; the tenderness and ephemerality of it all - it suddenly occurred to him that the long street in the image was this street.
Of course it was. The moment he realised this, all the vaguenesses in the image were replaced by details, just as the street now, before his eyes, was being revealed by daylight. And, as the memory of the street coalesced with the current reality, the missing chords and words came suddenly to James’s mind.
Part of my heart
Will always beat . . .
In 21 Love Street
James froze, as the sad, triumphant chorus echoed in his head. Was it Love Street . . . or was it Lough Street? Had the song been written about this place? If so, who could have written it? Whose voice was it that he could hear singing in his head? He recalled Mrs Quigley’s words when he first came to H. and she told him about the man who owned the house: ‘An artist or a writer or a singer’ . . . Malcolm Trewvey?
For one glorious moment, James seemed to be floating above the labyrinth, to see the whole mystery, and its solution, clear on the ground below him, the walls of the labyrinth spelling out a word or the lineaments of a face . . . and then exhaustion clouded the image, like breath on glass, and he was back down on the ground, back inside the maze, lost in its blind alleys and twisting corridors, clueless and alone. After all, he still didn’t know the identity of the couple in his vision, nor what connected them to the song, nor what all this had to do with himself.
A light came on in the front room of number 19 and he put the binoculars to his eyes. The curtains were drawn so he could not make out any details, but there was no doubt that someone was there: the curtains, which were beige, glowed dully and a silhouetted figure moved behind them. James looked at his watch: it was 6.36. He wrote this down in the green notebook and resumed his vigil.
At 6.54 the front door opened and the short, pale-skinned man came out, carrying a briefcase. As before, he squinted - even this murky twilight was too bright for his sensitive eyes - and then walked quickly away. After counting to twenty, James opened the door of the van and followed him. The man, whom James thought of as Dr Lanark, was dressed in a grey overcoat and scarf and walked at quite a furious pace, considering the shortness of his legs. He crossed Green Avenue and cut through to Newland Road. James felt nervous as he passed number 14, remembering Graham’s fists, but the street was empty, the house unlit. Dr Lanark turned left up Pool Drive and waited at a bus stop. James hid in a doorway, two houses behind. A number 63 bus arrived; Dr Lanark got on and so did James.
James watched Dr Lanark step from the bus and walk into what looked like a park. It was a grey morning and the park had a quietly desolate air. James got off and paused by the bus stop for a while, trying to work out where he was. Somewhere on the northern outskirts, he guessed. He had nodded off during the bus journey, so the precise location was unknown. The sign said ‘Lethe Park’, and James felt a flash of recognition as he read these words, though he couldn’t think why. When his quarry was far enough away that his whole body would have fitted into the palm of James’s hand, James began to follow. It was a wide, flat, open park and there was no one else about. There was no danger of Dr Lanark disappearing.
They walked briskly across the grass until a large white building came into view. Dr Lanark was heading towards it. There were no signs anywhere, and only one door, which looked like a fire exit; James guessed this must be the rear of the building. He was about twenty metres behind Dr Lanark when the latter went through the door. But when James reached the same place and pushed, nothing happened. The door did not open. Angrily James banged on the wire-strengthened glass. He slammed his shoulder against the door. After a while he noticed a metal grille with a button on the wall beside the door. He pushed the button and a robotic voice spoke from the grille. ‘Authorisation please.’ ‘I’m here to see Dr Lanark,’ James said. There was silence, and then the robotic voice repeated, ‘Authorisation please.’ Defeated, James began the long walk around the perimeter of the building.
It was larger than he imagined, however, and by the time he found a sign saying ‘RECEPTION’, he had lost all desire to speak to Dr Lanark. The glass double doors parted silently as he approached them and James entered a spacious but functional-looking lobby. He went to the desk, intending to ask the woman who sat behind it where he was and how he might get back to the city centre, but before he could speak, she said in an emotionless voice, ‘Name please?’
‘Erm . . .’
‘Could you spell that please?’
‘No, sorry, what I mean . . .’
‘Name please?’
‘James Purdew. But . . .’
‘Ten o’clock appointment with Dr Lewis? Go through now please, Mr Purdew.’
Dr Lewis. At the mention of her name, James thought: Of course, I am here for my appointment. This is the Lethe Park health centre and I am here to see Dr Lewis. He felt inside his coat pocket and there was the letter that Dr Norton had given him. Reassured, and pleased with himself for having remembered the appointment, he walked in the direction that the woman behind the desk had indicated.
‘Please take a seat,’ said the doctor. She spoke in a clipped Australian accent, wore glasses, had greying hair tied in a bun, and a thin, hard face; upon seeing her, James quickly repented all his dreams of black underwear. He handed her the letter from Dr Norton and, as she read it, he looked around her office. It was just a normal doctor’s office: computer, desk lamp, framed photographs of husband and children, posters of brains and body parts. It was impossible to tell from the décor what kind of specialist she was. When she had finished reading the letter, James asked, in a voice he wanted to sound unconcerned, ‘Is this about my allergy?’
‘Your allergy?’ Dr Lewis seemed surprised. ‘What is it you’re allergic to, James?’
‘I don’t know. I thought you were going to tell me that.’ She looked at him curiously. ‘Those pills that you gave Dr Norton, were they for your allergy?’
James nodded.
‘Do you remember the name of the doctor who gave them to you?’
James shook his head.
‘I see. Could you tell me your date of birth, James?’
‘Eight, seven, seventy-three.’
She wrote this down. ‘Your parents’ names?’
‘George and Penelope.’
‘Uh-huh. Do you remember where
you were when you heard that Princess Diana was dead?’
James was somewhat nonplussed by this question, but he knew the answer and felt an instinctive desire to appear confident and unworried in front of the doctor. ‘Yes. I woke up and went to the kitchen to make breakfast. It was about 8 a.m. I switched on the radio and they were doing a report on her life. I thought that was a bit strange. Then it went back to the news studio and the announcer said she’d been killed. I felt quite shocked. I’d seen her so often, in newspapers and on television, that I felt like I knew her. I’d even dreamed about her a few times.’
‘Very good,’ said Dr Lewis. ‘And do you happen to recall what you ate for dinner yesterday evening?’
‘Yesterday evening? Yes, of course. Chilli con carne with rice, and half a bottle of white wine.’
‘Fine. Now, I’m going to say a few words and for each one I’d like you to tell me the first memory that comes to mind. It doesn’t matter whether it’s recent or from a long time ago, just whatever comes to your mind first. Is that all right?’
James nodded.
‘Rain.’
‘Staring out of my bedroom window when I was young and watching the raindrops turn to silver worms on the glass. In my memory, the air beyond is always blue-grey and I feel miserable. I must have spent half my childhood staring at rain. Like everyone in England, I suppose.’
She wrote something down in her notebook. ‘Pain.’
‘I broke my ankle in the summer. I was running upstairs and I felt it crack. It really hurt. I was in a plastercast for six weeks afterwards, in the middle of the heatwave.’
‘Stain.’
After a second or two of panic, he said, ‘Oh, when I was young, my mum gave me a new shirt. It was white and I wore it to school. She didn’t want to let me because it was new and I might ruin it, but I promised I would be careful. Then, when I was in the playground, I forgot all about it and started messing around with the other boys. One of them had a nosebleed and I got red stains on my shirt. I must have been about seven or eight. My mum was sad when she saw the shirt. I felt really guilty.’