Alice frowned.
‘What I wanted to say was, let me do the talking. When Peach comes, I mean.’
The skin of her face seemed to stretch thin with fear. ‘Peach? Is he coming?’
‘Probably. But don’t worry. I’ll talk to him.’ He took her hand. It felt soggy. Her entire body was soaked in grief. ‘You’re upset,’ he said. ‘If he asks you anything, you’re upset. Do you see?’
‘I am,’ she said.
Too intent on his own line of thought, he didn’t grasp hers.
‘Upset,’ she added.
‘I know.’ And then, not liking himself, but seeing a necessity, ‘That should make it easier, shouldn’t it?’
The rims of her eyes, red as they were, registered a faint irony.
‘We wanted this for Moses,’ he reminded her, aware that this wasn’t the whole truth.
Her face collapsed again.
‘I don’t know,’ she wept. ‘I don’t know.’
From an upstairs window he watched Peach arriving. Peach was a burly pear-shaped man. He wore his grey hair in a crewcut. His lower lip jutted. He could look brutal or avuncular at will with scarcely an alteration in expression. His legs moved smoothly (and independently, it seemed, of his body) as he negotiated the garden path. He was flanked, as always, by two officers. Dolphin and Hazard. Both hard men.
When the bell rang George answered the door. He ushered the three policemen into the lounge. Alice shrank against one end of the sofa, her hand closing round the sodden ball of her handkerchief. Ignoring George’s offer of a seat, Peach stood in silhouette against the window. Dolphin and Hazard took the armchairs on either side of the fireplace. Peach wasted no time in coming to the point.
‘When,’ he said, ‘did you last see your son?’
‘At around eleven-thirty,’ George told him. ‘It was a sunny day and we’d left him at the bottom of the garden in his pram. Alice was upstairs cleaning. I was in the kitchen preparing some lunch. When I went out to check him the pram was still there but he was gone.’
Peach massed at the far end of the room. Absorbing information. Blotting out the light.
‘I couldn’t have been more than twenty yards away from him the whole time,’ George added, ‘but I never heard a thing.’
Don’t talk so much, he told himself.
Peach could be heard jingling a selection of keys and small change in his pocket. ‘And you, Mrs Highness, were upstairs,’ he said, ‘cleaning.’
Alice whispered, ‘Yes.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Peach said.
‘Chief Inspector, please,’ George said. ‘This has been a terrible shock for my wife. She’s very upset.’
‘And not for you?’ Peach enquired.
‘And not what?’ George asked, though he had understood.
‘Never mind.’ Peach moved from the window. Light invaded one half of his face. He seemed, unaccountably, to be smiling. ‘You have no idea who could be responsible for this?’
‘No idea.’
A long silence followed. George could hear the rustle of Dolphin’s notepad and the scratching of his fountain pen. Hazard was fidgeting in his armchair. He seemed to be trying to contain violence of the most unpleasant kind. Peach stared out of the window.
‘Unusual, don’t you think,’ Peach said eventually, ‘the disappearance of a baby?’ His voice light, almost conversational.
‘Not especially,’ George replied. ‘Babies disappear all the time.’ Only to realise that he had fallen for one of Peach’s tricks. A truly grief-stricken parent would never have answered with such apparent objectivity. ‘But,’ he rushed on, wanting now to convey courage in the face of adversity, giving himself, as it were, a stiff upper lip, ‘we haven’t given up hope, Chief Inspector.’
Peach moved across the room on extraordinarily light feet. ‘And what about you, Mrs Highness? Have you given up hope?’
Alice flinched. Eyes staring. Hands clenched. Still that girl in the woods, her head pressed into the leaves. The boots, the boots.
‘I told you,’ George stepped in, ‘she’s very upset.’
Peach said nothing. He looked at Alice, then at George, then at Alice again. His lower lip moved out and back. Once. Smoothly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’ll be all for the time being,’ and, gesturing to Dolphin and Hazard, spun like a huge lubricated top in the direction of the hallway.
George followed them out and suddenly couldn’t breathe. The three policemen packed the narrow space to suffocation point. They had arrested all the light, all the air. The coarse rasping blue of their uniforms everywhere. Even their breathing seemed blue. God, how he loathed that colour now. He couldn’t even look at the sky without thinking of policemen. Peach opened the front door and passed through. A draught flowed into the house. George gulped it down.
‘Not feeling too good,’ he muttered.
Dolphin made a note of the fact on his pad.
As George closed the door, he heard Alice run up the stairs.
*
The next day, at nine in the morning, the phone rang. The Chief Inspector would like to see them. Separately. Mr Highness at two p.m. Mrs Highness at three p.m. Was that convenient?
‘What is this?’ George cried. ‘A trial? We’ve lost our son, for Christ’s sake.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Highness,’ came the official police voice. ‘It’s the Chief Inspector’s request.’
‘Well, it’s out of the question. Absolutely out of the question. Please inform the Chief Inspector that we’ll be coming together.’
The official police voice sighed. ‘At two p.m., Mr Highness?’
‘At two p.m.’
George replaced the receiver.
Peach didn’t refer to this telephone conversation when they were shown into his office that afternoon. In his mind he had probably already turned their refusal to appear separately into an admission of weakness. Which it was, of course. Instead of taking them apart one by one, in isolation, he would now attempt to play them off, one against the other. Peach sat behind his desk, his lower lip drooping with scepticism. His eyelids looked heavy, ornately wrinkled, curtains that rose and fell on mysteries that ran for years. His fingers, plaited together on the surface of his desk, reminded George improbably of the rush basket. Peach asked them both to be seated. There was a pause while he adjusted the position of a document. Then he began.
‘You know, of course, that I’m suspicious.’
George assumed a puzzled air. Aware beforehand of just how exacting this interview was likely to be, he had been practising all morning in the bathroom mirror. He felt his eyebrows slide into position, he felt ridges forming in the skin above the bridge of his nose. Perfect.
But Peach turned away from him, making an irrelevance of his expression. ‘Mrs Highness,’ he said, ‘I think you know what I mean.’
Alice’s eyes rolled sideways in their sockets.
‘You mean,’ George rushed in, ‘that someone might have kidnapped Moses? Abduction. Is that what you suspect?’
‘Abduction?’ Peach pretended to be dealing with a possibility that hadn’t occurred to him. ‘No, not abduction.’
‘What then?’
Alice sniffed. (George had told her to sniff as often as possible. At awkward moments she should cry. But only at awkward moments. Strategy, you see. Anything to distract Peach.)
‘Deception,’ said Peach, yet to be successfully distracted, ‘might be one way of putting it – ’
George altered the angle of his head. He wanted to appear just that little bit slower than he really was.
‘Subterfuge would be another,’ Peach went on. ‘Intrigue. Finagling. Machination.’ A pause. ‘Conspiracy.’
George couldn’t resist. ‘Nice words,’ he said. ‘Roget’s Thesaurus?’
Peach’s steady gaze dropped in temperature. ‘Where’s Moses?’ he snapped.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
The two men’s eyes locked.
Alice began to cry. George silently applauded her timing then, looking at her, realised that her tears were genuine. He put an arm round her and drew her towards him.
‘If we knew where Moses was,’ he said, ‘we would hardly be sitting here, would we?’
Peach considered this. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘I thought you knew everything.’
Peach eased his chair backwards. His mouth widened in anticipation of a smile. The smile never arrived. He folded his hands across his belly. Somehow he managed to make this otherwise homely gesture look threatening. Another silence began. George stared out of the office window. To kill time he counted the thorns on a rose-bush. He had reached thirty-six when Peach spoke.
‘We found a toy dog,’ he offered casually.
George shifted in his chair. ‘Oh?’
‘By the river.’
‘By the river,’ George repeated. He wondered how Peach knew that Moses had a toy dog.
‘A white toy dog,’ Peach said. Leaning forwards, he reached into an open drawer, produced the white toy dog and stood it upright on the desk.
George gasped. It was Moses’s toy dog. Alice began to cry again. This time George didn’t notice. He couldn’t understand how the toy dog had fallen into Peach’s hands. He thought he had put it into the basket with Moses. He had certainly intended to. Did this mean that Peach had found Moses too? Was this interview just another of Peach’s sadistic charades? He reached out and picked up the toy dog. He turned it over, playing for time. He was trying to remember. He knew that he had slipped it into his coat pocket that morning. He had wanted Moses to have something to hold, something to comfort him on his lonely journey downstream. But, now he thought about it, he couldn’t actually remember handing the toy dog to Moses. It must have fallen out of his pocket then. So. Peach knew nothing.
‘Yes,’ George admitted, ‘this is my son’s toy dog.’ He put it back on the desk. His hand was shaking. The dog toppled over. He smiled. He had never been able to make the dog stand up.
‘You don’t seem particularly overwrought,’ Peach observed.
‘What do you want me to do? Break down? Would that satisfy you?’ George’s voice had lifted an octave in sudden anger.
‘Just an observation,’ Peach said. Two shelves of Pelican psychology ranged behind his head. Nasty little blue spines. Titles like The Hothouse Society and Alienation and Charisma. Something of an expert on the subject, Peach.
‘Just in case you haven’t noticed, Chief Inspector, my wife’s in a terrible state,’ George said, calmer now, ‘and the way you’re conducting this interview isn’t exactly helping matters.’
‘I know your wife’s in a terrible state.’ Peach’s tone of voice implied that, in his opinion, this ‘terrible state’ had nothing whatsoever to do with the disappearance of the baby. Implied, therefore, that he was privy to the secrets of their marriage. Implied, in fact, omniscience. Such a very cheap yet complex remark. Vintage Peach.
George said nothing.
The Chief Inspector shrugged. He stood up. Walked to the window and back, twisting one palm against the other. ‘Believe me when I say this,’ he said. ‘If there is anything irregular going on here, I shall discover it. Believe me.’
‘I believe you.’
‘Good.’
‘We’ve been here over an hour,’ George said, ‘and my wife’s exhausted. May we go now?’
Peach spread his hands. They were empty of questions.
As George guided Alice towards the door (grief had made an invalid of her), Peach appeared to relent. ‘We’ll do everything in our power,’ he assured the couple, ‘to find your son.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ George muttered.
Whichever way you looked at it, it was true.
*
Nobody could have predicted the effect that the news of the baby’s disappearance would have on New Egypt. During the last two weeks of June the apathy lifted. Rumours flew the length and breadth of the community on giant wings. At first people talked of a kidnapping, a ransom – even a child molester. But then talk of an escape crept in. Stealthily, very stealthily. The few who still harboured dreams of escape themselves gathered in obscure corners of the village – under the disused railway bridge, behind the cricket pavilion, at the back of the greengrocer’s shop – to discuss whether it was possible and, if so, how it could have been done. Dinwoodie held the floor, his bony hands marshalling facts, attacking the air, his extravagant grey hair tumbling on to his high shoulders, into his eyes. The greengrocer also advanced several interesting theories. The two men could often be seen returning through the summer dusk to the privacy of Dinwoodie’s garage. In the light of a single naked bulb, surrounded by tools and grease and the dismembered limbs of motorbikes, they would squat on fruit crates, they would whisper and gesticulate, they would rail and connive. ‘It is time,’ Dinwoodie had been heard to say, ‘to make a stand.’
Towards the end of the month things began to escalate. Dinwoodie founded a secret revolutionary organisation. He called it the New Egypt Liberation Front. It was dedicated, he said, to one simple political goal: freedom from oppression. He was just hours away from distributing the first copies of his manifesto when Peach led a dawn raid on his house. Hazard broke Dinwoodie’s arm in a scuffle by the garage door. The greengrocer, who had stayed overnight to assist with the printing, escaped unseen over the garden wall. The police confiscated (and subsequently burned) all the political material they could find and Dinwoodie, clutching his useless arm below the elbow, was arrested and hauled off to the station for questioning. The NELF was officially disbanded. It had lasted slightly less than twenty-four hours.
But the unrest spread. Several crimes were committed. A police officer was attacked by an unknown assailant in the dark alley that ran behind the post office. Dinwoodie’s repeated cries of Fascists carried from his cell in the police station to the road outside where his mother and his sister waited with blank faces and nervous hands for his release. Even more disturbing, perhaps, PC Fox reported the existence of ‘a number of wreaths and assorted bunches of flowers’ on Tommy Dane’s grave in the churchyard. The story of that desperate bid for freedom in the forties had been revived and was being retold in graphic and inflammatory detail through the village. They were witnessing, Fox suggested, the first stirrings of a Tommy Dane cult.
Once again Peach reacted with speed and efficiency. He imposed a curfew. Anybody found on the streets of New Egypt after nine p.m. would be arrested immediately. The offender would be liable to the severest penalties. Peach called an emergency meeting in the church hall to explain his decision. He had introduced the curfew, he maintained, in order to safeguard ‘our future’, the children of the village.
‘We cannot risk another tragedy,’ he declared in his most sombre voice.
George wasn’t fooled.
Two days later the discovery of the white toy dog beside the river became common knowledge and people began to talk of a drowning. George smiled to himself at this shift in public opinion. Rumours of escape were dangerous, subversive. Rumours of death, on the other hand, were quite harmless and acceptable. Peach must have leaked the information with that specific end in mind. George shook his head. How gullible, how fickle people were. How shrewd Peach was.
At the beginning of July a heatwave hit the area. The sky burned white and the clouds hissed like steam. The sun beat down on the drum of the land. People retreated indoors complaining of headaches. Volunteers for the search-parties dwindled. The gossip withered and died away. Now everybody had forgotten about him – even his mother and his sister had given up their vigil – Dinwoodie was quietly released. As apathy descended with a vengeance on the population, so the pressure on the police department began to lift – a perfect example of what Peach liked to call the scissor effect. The grass on the village green turned brown. The leaves on the trees were so dry that they clicked as if they too were made of wood. Rain became a memory. Peach declared
a drought. He issued a comprehensive list of instructions pertaining to the use of water: no washing of cars, no lawn sprinklers, no baths. Now people really had something to moan about, something nice and trivial. The search-parties continued, consisting entirely of police officers. Lines of sweat-drenched uniforms could be seen combing the long grasses and the bramble-patches in the vicinity of the river. Peach ordered Dolphin, a powerful swimmer, to drag several hundred feet of the river-bed. No new clues turned up. No fresh evidence. One white toy dog. That was all that remained of Moses Highness. It was a strange time to talk of a drowning but no other conclusion could be drawn.
Towards the middle of the month, almost five weeks after Moses’s disappearance, George was summoned to Peach’s office, alone this time. A far less combative, far wearier meeting. One look at Peach’s face and George guessed.
‘Nothing new, then.’
‘Nothing new,’ Peach admitted. ‘We’ve tried everything, exhausted every possibility.’ He sighed. ‘I can only conclude that Moses, your boy, drowned in the river. We shall never know exactly how.’
George hung his head for an appropriate length of time. When he looked up, the necessary tears filled his eyes. ‘There’s really no hope?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Of course I knew there was a possibility that Moses might have, might have drowned. I just never – ’ His voice faltered and he looked away. His acting had definitely improved.
‘Well,’ Peach said, ‘I’m making it official, as from today,’ and he consulted his calendar, ‘July the fourteenth. We can’t have any loose ends, you understand. Not in a matter like this.’ He paused. ‘There will be the funeral to take care of.’
‘I know.’
‘If there’s anything I can do – ’
George scanned the Chief Inspector’s face for its usual irony. Not a trace. Genuine compassion then. Peach could be almost likeable at times. That was what made him so dangerous.
‘Thank you,’ George said.
Any elation he might have felt as he walked to the door of Peach’s office had been dismantled by the preceding weeks of pressure and suspense. And, for all he knew, Moses might really have drowned in the river.
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