Then, one spring evening, the conditions seemed perfect and he made his bid for freedom. Disguised as a section of ploughed field. It was so simple, a stroke of genius, really, even if he said so himself. (Again that smug look; Peach had silently prescribed further humiliation.) All he had to do was strap the corrugated cardboard on to his back, flatten himself against the ground (making sure the ridges on his back corresponded to the ridges of the field), and crawl a distance of about a mile. And crawling wouldn’t have been a problem. He had spent months working on his stomach muscles.
‘How did you do that?’ Peach asked, curious.
The greengrocer, unexpectedly, blushed. ‘I’d rather not say.’
Now Peach really wanted to know. ‘How?’ he repeated.
The greengrocer began to lower himself into his clothes as if he thought he could escape the question that way.
But Peach was relentless. ‘Come on, Mr Mustoe. How did you strengthen those stomach muscles of yours?’
‘I can’t,’ the greengrocer writhed. ‘It’s embarrassing.’
Peach almost rubbed his hands together at the prospect. ‘Joel,’ he wheedled, ‘we’re all men here.’
Joel threw a desperate glance at the ceiling, but it rebounded from the severe grey plasterwork and landed awkwardly on the floor. His resistance crumpled.
‘Well – ’ he began.
Dolphin pounced. ‘Well?’
A touch over-eager, perhaps. Peach motioned to his subordinate behind the greengrocer’s back. Not so fast.
‘– in bed,’ the greengrocer muttered.
‘In bed?’ Peach’s voice was dispassionate then, almost medical. ‘How do you mean?’
‘With the wife.’
‘Ah,’ Peach breathed. ‘I see.’
And he persisted, because degradation was part of the process. The greengrocer admitted, under duress, that he had worked on his stomach muscles in bed at night, startling his wife with a revival of sexual passion that put anything they had got up to on their honeymoon completely in the shade.
‘Is that so?’ Peach murmured. Dolphin took copious notes, the leer on his face making him look more than ever like a schoolboy.
And so, muscles toned, homemade ploughed field strapped in position, the greengrocer began to crawl. Unfortunately, he had only covered a hundred yards when a policeman trod on him – entirely by accident. Unfortunately, too, it was Sergeant Dolphin who weighed eighteen stone on an empty stomach. One yelp of surprise as the breath was crushed out of him was enough to give the greengrocer away. He was immediately apprehended and taken down to the police station. In Peach’s presence Dolphin had confirmed the basic details of the greengrocer’s story. A statement was written and signed. The greengrocer was then led away to a cell to reflect on his failure before being allowed to return home. Peach celebrated by throwing a cocktail party in his library.
‘So what are we going to do with it?’ Dolphin asked, bringing Peach back to the present.
Peach folded his hands over his stomach. ‘Put it in the museum,’ he said.
‘Of course. Good idea, sir.’
‘Yes,’ Peach said, ‘I think it will look rather splendid hanging in the museum.’
He stood up, and walked over to the section of ploughed field so lovingly, so painstakingly, constructed by the greengrocer.
‘Remarkable piece of work,’ he said. ‘Really remarkable.’ Then, touching on a pet subject of his, ‘You know, if we could only harness their determination, their creativity, somehow, if we could only persuade them to do something for the community – ’ He sighed. It would never happen. Not in his lifetime, anyway.
‘I say, Dolphin,’ and Peach became enthusiastic, ‘what about taking it over to the museum now?’
‘It’s raining, sir. Might ruin it.’
‘Nonsense. It’s only a few yards. Come on, give me a hand.’
Taking one corner each, they began to ease the unwieldy structure out of the office and down the corridor. They passed an open doorway. PC Hazard – cheekbones like knee-caps, chin the shape of a soap-dish – looked up from the report he was typing.
‘Need any help, Chief?’
Peach shook his head. ‘We can manage. If anyone calls, I’ll be in the museum.’
‘Right you are, Chief.’ Hazard turned back to the typewriter, began to stab at the keys, one finger at a time. A good man, Hazard. A bit primitive, but a good man.
Peach held the ploughed field upright while Dolphin wedged open the door to the courtyard. The rain had slackened off. The wind, a vast physical presence, threw its weight against the trees, and the trees swirled, their leaves roaring like stones dragged by the sea. The two men stood there for a while, admiring the power of the night.
‘By the way, Dolphin,’ Peach said, placing a hand on the sergeant’s arm, ‘you did well to apprehend the greengrocer. Extremely well.’
Dolphin’s face became foolish with modesty. ‘It was nothing, really. A bit of luck, that’s all.’
‘No, not luck,’ Peach said. ‘Planning. Timing.’
‘Planning?’
‘Why do you think we have night patrols, Dolphin?’
Dolphin considered this. ‘Perhaps I should be congratulating you, sir,’ he said, ‘rather than the other way round.’
Peach smiled into the wind. In exchanges like this, it could be seen that the two men shared a similar brand of natural cunning. At times Dolphin’s instincts led him, almost blind, towards perceptions and discoveries that astonished him. Like treading on the greengrocer, for example. In time, Peach thought, Dolphin would learn to be less astonished, he would learn to see these perceptions and discoveries as his reward for years of apprenticeship, as his right, as valid and innate parts of himself. Exchanges like this explained why Dolphin was, to all intents and purposes (though it had never been formalised), Peach’s deputy and, consequently, Peach’s most likely successor.
As they chuckled together over Dolphin’s remark, the wind hurled itself against the cardboard construction, threatening to whirl it away across the courtyard. Dolphin reacted with the speed of his relative youth and held it down.
‘I think we’d better get it inside,’ he yelled.
Peach nodded.
The two men struggled across the asphalt, round a tree, past a rack of rattling police bicycles. They stopped in front of a long low building with a curving corrugated-iron roof and no windows. It looked like an aircraft hangar. The New Egypt Police Museum.
Peach produced a bunch of keys, selected one, and unlocked the metal door. Once inside, he reached for the panel of light switches. Neon strips began to pop and fizzle overhead.
The museum had been founded circa 1899 by Chief Inspector Magnolia. It was a private museum, intended for the edification and amusement of the police alone. During the past fifteen years there had been moves on the part of several villagers to have the museum thrown open to all New Egyptians; it’s history, they had argued, our history, and in that sense they were right, of course, since the museum was, in fact, a comprehensive record of all the escape attempts that had ever occurred (in living memory, at least). But, naturally, Peach had quashed every request, every petition. The idea was intolerable. The museum acted as a library of information, he said, the equivalent of police archives, and, as such, must remain confidential.
He moved among the rows of exhibits. Rain tapped on the metal roof like a thousand men working with delicate hammers. He liked the fact that there were no windows. The building felt hollow, secretive. A drum, a womb, a submarine.
He paused before a lifesize reconstruction of the accident that Tommy Dane had staged on the main road outside the village in 1945. There was the actual hayrick Tommy had used (generously donated by Farmer Hallam). There, too, was Mr Dane’s bicycle, its mudguards dented, its wheel-rims sprinkled with rust. A dummy Tommy Dane, dressed in clothes that had been appropriated from his wardrobe following his death, lay on the ground in the position he had described during his confession,
the head resting in a pool of simulated blood. An account of the escape attempt (written by Peach himself) hung from the roof, accompanied by detailed explanatory maps. Peach nodded as he skimmed through his own terse paragraphs.
He moved on, stopped again. Now he was looking down into a grave, a grave that contained a spotless gleaming coffin. Fashioned out of the finest cedar, the handles plated in silver and carved to resemble a family crest, the interior upholstered in a magenta silk quilt, it must have cost a small fortune. Likewise the tombstone. The tall slab of Italian marble supported an angel with outspread wings and uplifted hands. The names and dates had already been engraved:
LORD OSCAR NOBLE BATLEY 1859–1938
– a little prematurely, though. Peach couldn’t help smiling.
He walked to the far end of the museum. Here were artefacts dating back to the first recorded escape attempt. In 1899 the village postman, a man by the name of Collingwood, had devised a system of lianas stretching from his house on the western edge of the village green to the boundary a mile away. From reading the report (couched in rather fine Edwardian prose), one gathered that New Egypt had boasted a much larger number of trees in those days; one also gathered that Collingwood was a man of somewhat unusual build, being ‘exceptionally small and agile’ and possessing ‘arms of quite extraordinary length’. Collingwood had owed his downfall to the son of one of the village constables. The boy had loved climbing trees, as most boys do, and had discovered one of Collingwood’s lianas. Collingwood had collided with the boy in mid-air. He lost his grip; fell, and died instantaneously of a broken neck. The boy escaped with minor cuts and bruises. Shaking his head at this curious tale, Peach turned and, circling an ancient leather harness that had been suspended in the air by half a dozen stuffed birds, walked back to join Dolphin who was still waiting by the door.
And now the greengrocer’s ploughed field, he thought.
In his view, the museum was a gallery, housing a collection of uniquely creative acts; it represented the flowering of local genius. For, if the truth be known, he had more respect for a Collingwood or a Tommy Dane than for all the other villagers put together. They failed – their failures were inevitable and, in the end, rather pathetic – but at least, and in the face of overwhelming odds, they tried.
He rested a hand on the smooth worn shaft of the hayrick. His domain, this. The neatness, the order. Every single one of the men and women represented in the museum had been born in New Egypt and had died (or would die) in New Egypt. Birth and death closed like brackets round a single desperate theatrical escape attempt. And every attempt had been studied, documented, catalogued. Every attempt had become a case-history. It was perfection of a sort.
Suddenly something snagged on Peach’s line of thought, jerked it out of true.
The toy dog.
Blast that toy dog.
Peach swung round, hands clenched. A sour juice flooded the troughs between his cheeks and his gums. The diagonal lines on his forehead tangled, knotted. He brushed past Dolphin.
‘I want that hung from the centre beam,’ he snapped. ‘If you could arrange it, Dolphin.’
Dolphin stared at Peach without seeming to – a technique he frequently employed when on duty in the village. ‘But what about the report, sir?’
Peach waved an irritable hand. ‘Get someone to do it.’
The way Dolphin was staring at the ground, there might have been a wounded animal lying there.
Peach noticed and understood. ‘In fact, no,’ he said, gathering the remains of his former jovial mood. ‘Why don’t you do it yourself? You brought the greengrocer in. You were present at the interrogation. And it’ll be your first report on an escape. Why don’t you write this one up?’
Dolphin’s face acquired a sudden radiance. ‘Thank you, sir. I will.’
‘And don’t forget to lock the door,’ Peach added, withdrawing into the darkness. ‘We can’t have just anybody walking in here, can we?’
Dolphin agreed that they couldn’t.
A gale outside now. Wave on wave of wind washed through the courtyard. Something banged repeatedly in the rifle-range like an old-fashioned gun. A dustbin overturned, and birds made of newspaper whirled up into the loud black sky. One hand clutching his collar to his throat, Peach stood the dustbin upright and replaced the lid. The wind, swooping down, lifted his tunic at the back and with a whoop of delight investigated the Chief Inspector’s buttocks. (Like most figures in a position of authority, Peach was the butt for many scurrilous jokes, often of an anatomical nature.) This mockery touched an already exposed nerve and Peach, normally the calmest of men, felt like lashing out. At what, though? The wind? The toy dog? That empty coffin buried in the cemetery?
He stamped indoors, slamming the door. His flesh vibrated with anger under his uniform. Where was Hazard?
‘Hazard? Hazard?’ His voice boomed down the silent green corridor.
But the stuttering of the typewriter had ceased. Hazard must have gone home.
‘Skiver,’ Peach muttered.
He burst into the kitchen, put the kettle on. Then waited for it to boil, hands fidgeting in his pockets. Nobody pulled the wool over his eyes. Nobody.
A shrill whistling brought him round. He poured the boiling water into the teapot and carried it, together with a bottle of milk and a white china mug, into his office. While the tea brewed, he opened his filing-cabinet and searched for the dossier.
Ah, there it was. Filed under H. H for Highness.
He opened the pink cover. MOSES GEORGE HIGHNESS. He sat down at his desk and, sipping the strong tea, scanned the first few pages to refresh his memory.
A description of the child. The circumstances of his disappearance. Transcripts of the interviews with the parents. Certain phrases leapt out, clarified by the passage of years. Babies disappear all the time. Barefaced. Almost confessional. How could he have been fooled, even for a moment?
He turned the page. The reports of the daily search-parties. The discovery of the toy dog. Pretty slim pickings. Then a piece of paper slipped out of the file and see-sawed through the air to the floor. Bending with difficulty – these days Peach had to ask his wife to cut his toenails for him – he scooped it up. It was a cutting from the local rag. One of the most dramatic headlines they had run for years: TRAGIC DEATH OF BABY, it said. A lie, of course. A cover-up. He knew that now.
Running his hand across the stubble of his cropped grey hair, Peach turned the page again. The new entry was dated October 10th 1969. Over thirteen years after the funeral. He began to re-read the notes he had made of a conversation that had taken place on the main road that day.
He had stopped a car, he remembered, a routine check, only to discover that the driver was a policeman himself, from a town less than thirty miles away. The policeman was on holiday. On his way down to the coast to join his wife, he said. A couple of children brawled in the back of the car.
‘Fine children,’ Peach had remarked.
‘More trouble than they’re worth,’ the policeman said. ‘Got any kids yourself?’
Peach regretted that he hadn’t.
‘Just as well. I wouldn’t have any, if I was you.’
Peach, who couldn’t, winced. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you’re probably right.’ But how he longed for an heir. The things he could have taught a son, for instance. Why, he might even have taken over from his father as Chief Inspector! Peach felt the splinters of his shattered hopes lodge in his chest.
The policeman, in a brash holiday mood, didn’t notice. ‘People have ’em,’ he was saying, ‘don’t realise how much work they are, then they don’t want ’em any more. What do they do? They dump ’em, don’t they?’
A gloomy Peach nodded. But the policeman’s next sentence snapped him back, as if his fantasy had been attached to the real world by a length of elastic.
‘Talking of kids – shut up a moment you two, will you? – did you ever hear about that case a few years ago? The baby they found on the river? Happene
d down our way. Strange story that was, and no – ’
Peach jumped in sharply. ‘What baby?’
‘Didn’t you hear about it? These two old dears found a baby floating down the river. They brought him in to us. In ever such a tizzy, they were.’ His laughter gobbled obscenely like water running out of a bath. ‘They didn’t even – ’
But Peach didn’t want to hear about old women. ‘This baby,’ he interrupted. ‘What was it like?’
‘About eighteen months old. Had a funny name. Something from the Bible – ’
‘Moses?’ Peach’s voice remained calm, but his heart seemed to be pushing against the inside of his uniform.
‘That’s it. And he was only found by the river, wasn’t he? Some sense of humour his parents must’ve had.’ The policeman’s mouth opened wide. His teeth were curiously pale and large, like ice-cubes.
Sense of humour? Peach was thinking. Don’t talk to me about sense of humour.
Before the policeman drove on, Peach asked for the address of the police station that had taken the baby into custody. The policeman never thought to question Peach’s interest in the case. A fool, Peach thought, and a complacent one at that. But perhaps he was being unfair. After all, the man was on holiday. And he had given Peach his first real lead in thirteen years.
Peach looked up from the file. Lightning bleached the windowpanes a faint cold blue. The thunder had moved away over the hill. He turned that autumn morning over in his head. The blades of grass plated with early frost. Hedgerows rusted by a month of rain. A random shaft of sun bringing out the ginger in Sergeant Caution’s two-day growth of beard.
And when he watched that policeman’s car disappear round a bend in the main road, how strongly he had felt the temptation to disappear himself. To verify the story. To know the truth about Moses.
Two considerations had held him back. One, his sense of responsibility (imagine a Chief Inspector defecting! the hypocrisy!). And two, the pointlessness of such a move. What good would it do? If the baby had got away, had grown up in the outside world (he would be sixteen now, Peach calculated), he would have no memories of New Egypt. He might have been born anywhere. Equally, very few of the villagers remembered Moses now, not without being prompted. He had drowned in the river, and that was that. From both points of view the case was closed. There was no foreseeable danger. Better then to forget. Let time and apathy bury the memory. Only he, Peach, would carry the burden of knowing what had really happened.
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