The Swap

  'Ow. Fuck.' He put both hands on the top and gasped for air. 'Shit.'

  'Mr Briscow?' The voice made him jump so high that he almost cleared the counter, then, in terror, he peered over it to find a small, bald, disapproving man sitting behind it holding his key.

  'Er, yeah, thanks.' Harvey took it in trembling fingers and prepared to push himself off from the counter in the direction of the stairs.

  'There was a message left for you earlier, sir.' The man said 'sir' as he might say 'bastard' and Harvey bristled.

  'Yes, what is it?' He spoke not unlike James Bond: Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan definitely. Without a word, the man held out a piece of paper and Harvey took it with the air of one who often receives messages in hotels. He might have said 'Ah, this will be from M' or he might not, afterwards he couldn't remember. What he did do was make it to the stairs and up them out of sight before he tore the folded paper open and read the message.

  Dear Harvey,

  I have had a very long think about things and I have decided I must go to Jeff. Everything Mr Simes and Charles Odd have said only makes me think that I may have completely misunderstood so much that has happened to him – and to you. I need to talk it through with Jeff and find out how this affects us. So much has happened. So much seems different from how it was in London. I don't know what happened in the past, I don't know, but you do and you must work it through with Charles. I would stay with you if I could and try to help, but I really need to think too. The last few days have been amazing. Everything about them feels unreal, dream-like. I think you must go and talk to the police now. Jarvin will listen to you and he will believe you as I believe you. I will ring you soon: back at your shop perhaps. Please don't think too harshly of me, I'm just so confused. I'll speak to you very soon, my dear. Love Maisie.

  It was a long time that Harvey stood in the dim light of the hallway staring at the neat swirls of girlish script in his hand, grunting audibly to himself, before stumbling, half blind, up into the massing intestines of the hotel to his room and falling into a dead and painful rest.

  He read the note again in the morning but still it made no sort of sense. He'd told her what happened in the past. And what had he done since? What had Charles said? Harvey lingered over a breakfast, identical to the one the day before in all but his companion. It somehow didn't taste as good, nor when he patted the drum of his belly did it feel nearly as satisfying. She had gone to Jeff. That was the only salient point as far as he could see, it was certainly the one that he could most immediately understand. She had gone to Jeff.

  Did that mean that she had gone back to Jeff? Or did it mean she was meeting him for a coffee and a chat about old times: 'I hear you got whipped', 'Yeah', 'Right, see you later' sort of thing. Harvey tried this on in his mind but was unhappy with it. Why go right now? Why not wait so they could leave together today? Why not do it by phone? Why do it at all? He shook his head over the coffee and observed specks of dandruff settle on its surface. His hair was growing, he hadn't had time to get it shaved for two weeks. He needed to consider his position. It would mean him paying for the room, of course, and he'd sort of hoped they'd go Dutch. But that, he insisted firmly to himself, was the least of the issues. It was seventy pound a night, mind, but that was unimportant. He did the sigh. Maybe she'd be sitting swinging her legs on the counter of his shop when he got home. Maybe she'd be standing outside Inaction Comix waiting in the rain, her eyes filled with tears of remorse. Maybe. He took himself out onto the the headland for a breath of fresh air and smoked a cigarette while he did it. His mind ran over the events of yesterday. Had something changed? How had a completely spontaneous shag on the rocks transformed into that note? For all the thinking he did he could not find the point of change, the moment of reverse alchemy that turned gold into base rubbish. With heavy heart he returned to his room – that had been their room – packed his bags and paid the extortionate bill: more than he'd anticipated because he'd forgotten that breakfast wasn't included. On the walk to the station he was just passing Sainsbury's when his mother came out carrying two plastic bags of shopping and it was only by dropping to his knees behind a parked car and lying on his side in the public thoroughfare that he avoided being seen. Then stealthily – shocked into a vivid attention by the closeness of this encounter – he slunk to the station and boarded the 10.47to Penzance and from there a direct connection back to London.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Maisie stood outside the house she had lived in for eight years, and looked at it for the first time. Often, in the past, her sight had been edged with a bitterness that she saw now as having a reddish hue. But the redness was gone and she was almost surprised to find that it was actually a rather pretty blonde house, built of the local white stone. She did know it: it had so much of her in it, yet she was looking for the first time with the option of not entering, of turning and walking away. She thought for a moment of the mole in The Wind in the Willows hearing the call of home and his whole body trembling with the awareness of it. This was her home and she felt it recognise her and send out its tendrils of welcome. Turning would be hard now, the betrayal greater than it had been before. With a sigh that Harvey would have admired, she hoisted her neat travel case and walked up to the front door. How odd to ring this bell, how odd not to know if anyone was home, and, if they were, how they might receive this particular guest. Her finger paused for a moment over the button and then with an almost impetuous flourish gave two sharp rings.

  The pause was the worst bit. She could still run. If he was upstairs, or down in the kitchen, she would be away behind the bushes before he got to the door; he probably wouldn't come out down the front garden and into the street. He would think it was a joke or an error and she would be away, off to London, off to anonymity and limitless potential and strange new boyfriends and weird shop assistants and all the little encounters with all the lives she could have lived, and could still if she ran. She heard a movement inside, still time, still time. But then the latch was turning with a sound that she hadn't known she knew in her soul, until she heard it again. The way this door opened, the squeaky Yale and the way you had to sort of yank it a bit so it scraped away from the jamb. That sound was as familiar to her as her own name. And as the door opened to a crack another face equally familiar gazed out at her.

  'Oh.' Jeff stood for a long moment in complete surprise. 'Maisie.' And his voice was so known and yet so strange that she needed suddenly and unexpectedly to reestablish contact at once. She dropped her bag on the ground and stepping forward took his face in her hands and he, as if instantly and irresistibly galvanised, pulled her to him so together they stumbled backwards into the generous embrace of the house.

  'Yes, well, that is interesting. Yes, it interests us very much. No, I think you have done exactly the right thing, sir. No I don't, these things have a habit of coming out at some point in my experience, sir. I would see it as your duty really, sir, as simple as that. Yes, we'll come at once.' Inspector Allen watched his superior officer's face as he responded to the caller's concerns. Jarvin put the telephone down with a look of great unease and Allen put down the pad on which he had been writing.

  'We must go at once to Old Street,' Jarvin said slowly in just the sort of voice you wouldn't use if you had to go somewhere at once. 'Something has come up. I am unsure about this. As unsure as I have been for a very long time.' He let his eyes rest on his desk and the scribbled notes he had taken of the call. 'I can't believe I am going down the road that seems to beckon me . . .' He looked up and caught Allen's eye. 'Well, we must do what we must do. A road can only lead where it leads. Come along, Allen, let us go to see what we can do. I think that warrant you've been preparing may be unnecessary, but bring it along anyway, there's a good chap; you can never be too sure, can you?'

  'No, sir.' Allen, unfazed by the riddles in which his superior spoke, picked up the envelope that lay on the very top of the pile of papers on his desk and then followed Jarvin to the car.


  'It was just there.' Josh was hopping from foot to foot as if needing the toilet. 'I saw it on Monday, before Harvey left, but I had bought some Pokemon cards and I didn't want to make him any angrier so I didn't mention it. He chased me out of the shop, you know. He can be quite violent actually.'

  'Really?' Jarvin nodded without raising his eyes from the Superman One that lay before him on the desk in Harvey's office.

  'Well, not violent as in a killer, yeah? I mean, not a murderer or anything like that, but rough. He had a fight in Cornwall, actually, and he threw me on the ground the other day for no reason: just for a laugh. I'm sure he wouldn't kill anyone, but there it is, there's the comic. When you rang me yesterday to ask about the meeting you arranged with Harvey and why he hadn't come I just had a long think about what I should do, you know? And, like you said, I saw it as my duty.'

  'Yes. Thank you, Mr Wylde. You have handled this I presume?' Jarvin indicated the plastic sleeve.

  'Er, yes, a bit, and I took the comic out. I mean, I had a look at it. It's the genuine article, actually. Really rare, total privilege even to see one. Total thrill, yeah? So I had a look. So fingerprints, yeah? That's what you're thinking. So mine are there too, don't get confused and lock me up.' Josh giggled and fidgeted the more.

  'Do you have any idea how this came to be here? Was it wrapped in anything or in an envelope?'

  'Er, yes, it was in that white envelope on the desk, no address or anything. I'm not sure Harvey was going to send it anywhere, I think he just put it in there to keep it safe and stop me finding it.'

  Jarvin, thinking briefly that the force hadn't suffered too great a loss when Josh ignored the possibilities of a career in the police, nodded and said: 'But you did find it.'

  'Well, I needed to get some money out to pay the Pokemon man and there was nothing to show that it was private.'

  'No, no indeed. But you see there is an issue here. If it was brought here by Mr Briscow then that points in one direction. But if it arrived by post then that points in another. But you don't know of any other envelope of any kind apart from the blank white one we found with it?'

  'Nope. I haven't seen anything like that.' Josh's voice took on a slightly sulky tone. He hadn't thought to look for another envelope.

  'Well, we will need to search these premises to check for that and to ensure that there is nothing else that might be considered material evidence in the case. Do you have any problem with that, Mr Wylde?'

  'Shit, yes I do.' Josh looked genuinely alarmed for the first time since they had arrived. 'Harvey will kill me if I let you mess up the shop.'

  'We do have a warrant, sir.' Allen, who had been standing quietly in the office doorway, reached into his pocket and extracted the paper. 'But we will do everything we can to avoid any mess or disturbance. I do think it might be better if you close the shop though, sir. It would be unhelpful to have members of the public intruding on the search.'

  'Close the shop?' Josh's concern was multiplied. 'I can't close the shop, not without Harvey's permission. It's all right, we never get any customers.'

  But Allen was insistent and Josh was forced, complaining bitterly as he went, to go to the front door and turn the picture of Thor around. He timed this motion perfectly so that he could also let in the four uniformed officers that Allen had summoned to the shop and who would provide the manual labour in the search. He led them back into the office and offered them to Jarvin who was looking at Allen with sadness.

  'We do now need to find Mr Briscow,' he said.

  There was a telephone on the train. This struck Harvey as extraordinary but also potentially sinister. He had bought a mobile phone when they first appeared, but, after a long bank-holiday weekend when he watched all the episodes of The Prisoner back-to-back, he had decided that they were the work of a totalitarian system and that they inhibited the essential liberty of the individual; also he was concerned he didn't know enough people to put in his address book. In an act of reckless radicalism he had put his Nokia at the bottom of his sock drawer and forgotten about it. Now it seemed that even after taking this revolutionary stand he was still not free of the potential oppression of monitorable communications. These thoughts crossed his mind as he sipped his third can of Watneys and fumbled for a pound coin. When he had put it in the slot he dialled – not an easy thing to do on a train moving at 120miles an hour with a full can of beer in your hand – but he did it and then waited for Maisie or Jeff to answer. The number he had found in his old address book – Jeff Cooper alongside all those dear old friends, just like he was one of them. He had spent most of the journey as far as Exeter planning the dialogue with Maisie. If Jeff answered it would be less difficult as it just involved slamming the phone down so hard that it might hurt Jeff 's ear a little bit. Harvey wasn't sure which he would prefer.

  He got Maisie. 'Hello?' And didn't she sound like the lady of the house? Surely her voice should sound a little less sure and comfortable on her first morning back. What if it was Jeff 's mother or someone?

  'Er, yeah, all right, Mais?' Off-script already, Harvey gave himself a shake.

  'Harvey!' He was rather thrilled to hear her voice drop to a sort of husky whisper.

  'Yeah. I just wondered if you were OK? Didn't see you this morning sort of thing and I got your note but it didn't make a lot of sense to be honest, but hey, not a problem.'

  'Oh, Harvey, you shouldn't be ringing me. I need time to think, remember? I need time away just to think. I ran away from here to try and make sense of things and now I've had to run back for the same reason. You shouldn't be ringing me. I really think I said everything I could say in my note.'

  'No, right. Fair enough. But I need to talk to you, actually. A lot's happened, yeah?'

  'Oh God, I know. What Simes said and then Charles . . . it just made me feel as if perhaps I'd misread everything. I don't think I understand anything that has happened really. Jeff and I sat up most of last night talking. He's asleep now, but we said more to each other than I think we've ever said. He told me everything, about the past, about that terrible day at the Odds' house. I know everything about that now, Harvey. Charles told me the facts and Jeff has filled in the detail. It is so terrible. What happened to you – it could make you . . . Well, I just wonder . . . I do understand, I really do.'

  'Er, OK. But look, I need to see you. Bleeder had a lot of interesting information to pass on, and I mean a lot. I mean job done. Mission accomplished. We went down there to sleuth and we sleuthed, you know what I mean? So look, I need to talk to you today, before I go to Jarvin, I need to talk it through with you. In fact, you should come with me to see Jarvin, I mean, you are as much a part of this as I am.' Credit where credit's due.

  'Oh Christ, Harvey, I've just come home. If this is my home. Well, I'm here, and I've just got here. I need to think about what I'm going to do. Maybe I'll go back to Croydon. Maybe I'll just go away for a bit. I feel like I'm in limbo, like I'm cut off and floating. Did you ever feel that, Harvey, like you are just drifting?'

  'Yeah, tricky. But I need to see you now.' Harvey was watching the little screen on the telephone telling him how much money he had used. It seemed to be reducing at an extraordinary rate. 'I need to, Maisie, I need your help.' He heard his voice getting plaintive and pleading, which was one of the things he'd decided wasn't going to happen.

  'I know you do. I do understand that.' There was a long silence and Harvey watched the little screen with horror before fumbling for more change.

  'All right.' She spoke as the screen reached critical point and he unhappily fed in another pound. 'I'll come. I can't leave you to do that on your own. I'll come and be with you. We'll go to Jarvin together. Just so long as everything we say is the truth. No more secrets, OK, Harvey? Whatever you did: the cleaning up, hoping to steal the comic . . . well, anything that you did . . . you need to tell him. He'll listen, Harvey. He'll understand, all right? But you must tell him everything.'

  'Um, right, yeah, nice one. But I n
eed you there, Mais, I can't do it on my own.' Even to Harvey that sounded a tad melodramatic, obviously he could take all the credit if he wanted to, but hey, his moment of moral goodness on the clifftop had opened up a new and better Harvey, that's how it felt. 'I need to see you tonight. I'm on the train to London; I'll be at the shop by about five. I need to check on Josh, you could come and meet me and we could have a talk and then we could go and see Jarvin, yeah? We could get it all done today. And then it will be over, Maisie. I also have something else I need to show you at the shop. I think I will call it our future.'

  The line was silent for a moment and Harvey wondered if they had been cut off. Rising righteous indignation concerning his lost money was replaced by the consideration that perhaps the phone didn't work in tunnels. If it didn't this might be vital information in the battle between free men and the system that he had always felt was somehow one day inevitable. But they weren't in a tunnel and she came back on the line after a moment.

  'All right, I'll come, Harvey. I'll come because you ask me to. But I don't know about this, and I don't know what you want to show me and I don't know about the future. You must understand that I am only coming now, at this moment, because I feel it is perhaps a duty I should perform.'

  'Er, yeah, OK then, see you at five.' He put the phone down with a sigh of satisfaction. No problem. He returned to the Watneys and a seat within easy reach of the bar.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Paddington looks different when you're rich. The possibilities, always inherent in any railway station, are expanded and brought closer. Yes, you could go home to your small, anonymous flat in Deptford, or to your one-assistant comic shop in Old Street. But you could also go to Mayfair and find the prettiest prostitute in Shepherd's Market and rent a room at the Ritz, or go to Heathrow and fly to Bangkok. Harvey found he had sex on his mind since the incident in the rocks. Another option was to slump in a pathetic and slightly malodorous heap on a bench, nurse an insipid erection, and gaze up at the arches of the roof as if they were the very buttresses of heaven. Harvey selected the last of these choices and lay for a while, breathing heavily and letting salacious thoughts about Maisie drift across his inner vision. She was gone but she might be back. That still seemed, in his mildly inebriated state, a better position to be in than many. And it was the end of this strange journey he had been on. It seemed to have been going on for weeks, although, in fact, it was only a few short days since he found Mrs Odd in the basement. Most of it seemed to have been spent on trains, experienced through the haze of warm ale. Through that same haze he now considered his immediate future. He would talk to Maisie and make her see that Jeff was the past, and he was the future; and they would go to Jarvin and tell him everything Bleeder had said, and Jarvin would smile that slightly unnerving smile that never really went away; and Harvey would sell the Superman One for a world-record price at the Toronto comic fair in August; and they would go and live in New York, maybe after a few weeks on an island somewhere. Was Maisie ready to see his stomach in broad daylight? Maybe straight to New York, but the point was that everything was going to be fabulous. It would be hard in some ways to leave his little shop for ever. That was Harvey's thought as he rolled off the bench and fell heavily on the cold tiles of the floor. And Josh, of course, he'd miss Josh, he thought as he got up, rubbing his elbow. But he'd survive. He staggered a little as he made his way towards the tube. He'd go to the shop this time, but from now on the magical possibilities that stations held were going to be explored. The easy options of poverty were coming to an end.