As George waited to cross Peach Street, a truck swept past trailing yards of blue smoke. Stacked upright behind the tailboard and lashed into position with ropes stood an entire platoon of dummy policemen. These were not the dummies he was used to (blue uniforms stuffed with old rags, foam rubber or straw). These were professional dummies, the kind you see in shop windows. They had eyes, noses, hands, hair. They were uncannily lifelike. Even at a distance he recognised a Peach, two Hazards and a Dolphin. He shuddered. Alice’s words came back to him like a prophecy. Look at their faces!
He stumbled across the road and climbed over a stile into the allotments. He sank on to a bench, breathed in the bitter fleshy smell of cabbages. Ranks of bean-canes sharp as lances. A guarded peace. Over by the tin shed where the gardening tools were housed he could make out the squat figure of Mrs Latter, the woman who ran the post office and a keen grower of marrows. He raised a hand to her, a salute rather than a wave, but she didn’t respond. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed him. He slid his hand back into his coat pocket like a useless weapon.
After picking his way through the rows of vegetables, he crossed the road again and set out across the village green. Passing the pond on his right (a squabbling of ducks, the plop of a frog), he turned left into Magnolia Close. The church rose at the end of the street, an obstacle, solid, adamant. George suddenly realised that the route he had chosen would lead him past the Chief Inspector’s house. Normally he steered clear of Magnolia Close, but, then again, normally he didn’t go out twice in a single day. He considered turning round, but his feet ached, and if he carried on past the church he would be home in five minutes.
Peach’s house stood at right-angles to the church on the corner of the village green. It had once been the vicarage. Peach had evicted the priest shortly after the war claiming that, as Chief Inspector, he needed the house because it had such a commanding view of the village. (It also had an eighteenth-century wood-panelled staircase and an unusual parterre with triangular flower-beds enclosed by low box hedges, not to mention a topiary in yew dating, supposedly, from 1841. Enthusiasts would sometimes stop outside the house and enquire if they might look over the gardens. Mrs Peach was always most gracious.) But he hadn’t won the house without a fight.
‘What about the spiritual welfare of the village?’ the then priest had argued. ‘Is not my rightful place at the heart of the community?’
‘It’ll take you precisely three minutes to walk from the church to your new house,’ Peach told him. ‘I’ve timed it myself.’
‘But symbolically?’ the priest persisted.
No mean philosopher himself and as brutally secular as any medieval emperor, Peach had quashed the priest’s arguments. Truth to tell, with his army of policemen behind him, his victory had never been in doubt. What did the hapless priest have to call upon but the assistance of his sexton (a widower with cataracts) and the wrath of God?
‘But I need a big house – my family – ’ he had pleaded, honest at last, and grovelling too.
Peach had quoted Colossians. ‘Set your affection on things above, not on things of the earth.’
Touché, priest.
‘My children,’ the priest whimpered, ‘I have to provide for my children.’
‘And what makes you think that I’m not going to have children?’ Peach had countered. ‘I’m only thirty-six.’
The priest could hardly tell Peach that he had it on very good authority (from the doctor himself, in fact) that the Chief Inspector’s wife was incapable of having children. He gave way, and was moved (the police transported his furniture) to a pleasant if characterless house on the far side of the village green. The roles of church and state were set for Peach’s reign.
George had slackened his pace. He now stood at the entrance of Peach’s driveway. Lights showed in all the windows. A murmur of voices reached George’s ears. Some kind of party, it seemed, was in progress.
In order to peer through the living-room window, George had to part the sticky tentacles of a rose-bush and clamber up on to an ornamental stone mushroom. Inch by inch, he raised his face to the level of the sill.
The entire police force of New Egypt had assembled inside the room. Peach stood with his back to a log fire, his lower lip glistening, possibly with sherry. His wife moved among the officers with a tray of cocktail sausages and canapés. Firelight flickered on thick blue cloth. As George watched, Peach raised a hand.
‘Gentlemen, your attention, please.’ He took a pace forwards, hands clasped behind his back. ‘Before we proceed any further, I’d like to make sure that we’re all here. Sergeant Dolphin?’
Dolphin, with his schoolboy’s face and his bully’s torso, flush from his recent triumph over the greengrocer, took up position beside Peach and produced a clipboard and pen. He began to call out names, the names George knew off by heart.
‘Arson?’
‘Present.’
‘Blashford?’
‘Yes.’
‘Caution?’
‘On duty,’ somebody said. ‘In the station.’
Dolphin noted the information down. Then he proceeded. ‘Damage?’
‘Here, sergeant.’
George was gazing, mesmerised. He had never suspected Peach of using roll-calls. A small detail, granted, but one that might have found its way into the book, had he known about it.
Dolphin, meanwhile, had reached F.
‘Fisher?’
‘Night patrol,’ a voice called out.
‘Fox?’
‘Present.’
Now laughter erupted as PC Grape said, ‘Here, sergeant,’ before Dolphin had time to call his name. Grape had something of Peach about him. He was reputed to possess a sixth sense that meant he could hear what people were thinking. George had the feeling that Grape would one day play an important part in thwarting some poor villager’s dream of escape.
‘Hawk-Sniper?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hazard?’
‘Here.’
The collar of George’s coat suddenly lifted in the wind. He glanced over his shoulder. He hoped to God that he couldn’t be seen from the road.
Dolphin’s voice droned on. ‘Marlpit?’
‘– esh. I mean, yes, sergeant.’
George whinnied. Marlpit had been caught with a mouthful of sausage.
‘Peach?’
‘I’m here, sergeant.’
A ripple of amusement. Sycophants, George thought.
‘Pork?’
‘Yes.’
‘Savage?’
‘He’s still sick, sergeant,’ Marlpit said, his mouth now cleared of sausage.
Furtive grins. Savage had shot himself in the foot during rifle-practice earlier in the week.
‘Twinn, C?’
‘Present.’
‘Twinn, D?’
‘He’s on night patrol,’ came the nasal whine of Colin, Twinn D’s brother.
‘Thank you, Twinn. Ulcer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Vassall?’
‘Here, sergeant.’
‘Voltage?’
‘Here.’
In listening to this roll-call, George began to realise just how many police officers New Egypt employed. Of course, he knew. But it was the difference between knowing there’s a lot of sand on the beach and counting the individual grains one by one. So far there had been six absentees and still the room heaved with blue cloth. A claustrophobia of truncheons and boots. And the names seemed to go on for ever.
‘Wilmott?’
‘Yes, sergeant.’
‘Wragge?’
‘Night patrol,’ somebody called out.
Dolphin tucked his clipboard under his arm. Thanking his second-in-command, Peach moved forward again. He pushed his lower lip out and back, a signal that he was about to speak.
‘We’re here, as you know, to celebrate the arrival of a consignment of new APRs,a one of which,’ and he stepped across to the shrouded figure by the bookcase and with a conjuror
’s flourish snatched off the dustsheet, ‘we’re lucky enough to have with us tonight.’
A muted roar of surprise and approval, for the figure was an exact replica of the Chief Inspector. Right down to the drooping eyelids and the jutting lower lip.
Peach laid a fond hand on his double’s shoulder. ‘I thought we’d put him outside the priest’s bedroom window.’
A burst of raucous laughter. Everybody knew that the priest was terrified of Peach.
‘Now, as I said,’ Peach moved on, ‘we have something to celebrate here tonight. And celebrate we will. But first, if you’ll bear with me, there are one or two – ’
George suddenly found himself lying on his back in the flower-bed. An undignified position, and one that he was, for a moment, at a loss to explain. Then he looked up and saw four policemen outlined against a sky of weak and distant stars. The night patrol. Fisher, Twinn (Daniel), Hack and, closer than the rest, the sickly leering face of Wragge.
‘Well, well.’ Wragge drew his pale ridged lips back over his teeth. They looked like anchovies, his lips. His breath, as if by association, stank of fish. ‘Mr Highness.’
George lay motionless, the wind knocked out of his body. His cheek stung where it had torn on a rose-bush as he fell. Wragge removed his foot from George’s wrist and, stepping backwards, jerked his head. George, shakily, stood up.
They led him, arms pinioned, through the front door, past Mrs Peach’s fluttering hands, and into the room where her husband was making his speech. George would never forget the quality of the silence that greeted him. The silence of policemen. Wall to wall. Tight as a rack.
‘Mr Highness, sir,’ Wragge announced. ‘We found him spying.’
Peach lifted his heavy eyelids. ‘Spying, Wragge?’
‘Looking through the window, sir.’
The silence tightened a notch. George hung his head. A tic pulsed in the delicate skin under his left eye.
Something quieter than outrage or contempt had taken possession of Peach’s features. Something quieter, but equally threatening.
‘I think, Mr Highness,’ he said, ‘that you had better come to my study.’
A snigger from Hazard.
‘If you’ll excuse me.’ Peach was addressing his officers now. ‘This won’t take long.’
‘I ought to be getting home,’ George said. His voice cracked in mid-sentence; it had broken by the end.
Soft exhalations from many of the policemen moved like a draught through the warm room.
‘Not just yet,’ Peach said, almost kindly. Pressing a firm hand into the small of George’s back, he guided him towards the door.
George had never set foot in the Chief Inspector’s house before – it was a privilege usually reserved for police officers – but in his utter humiliation he noticed nothing.
Peach closed the study door behind them. ‘The police are very excited,’ he remarked.
George touched his cheek with the sleeve of his coat. ‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘New security measures.’
Peach beamed. Taking the leather armchair on the left of the fireplace, he waved George to the one on the right.
‘Yes, well,’ he said, ‘it’s an important occasion. A milestone of sorts. I thought I’d give a small party. There’s nothing like a party to lift morale – ’
George let him talk. His mind drifted.
When he began to listen again, Peach’s voice seemed to have moved closer, though the distance between them hadn’t changed.
‘– but one of the reasons I asked you in here was to say how sorry I was to hear the news. About your wife, I mean. Alice, wasn’t it?’
George nodded. ‘I suppose I’d been expecting it for years, really.’ He touched his cheek again.
‘You’re bleeding,’ Peach exclaimed. He offered George a clean handkerchief. George accepted it in silence.
Peach leaned back and crossed his legs. An inch of white and slightly dimpled ankle showed above his regulation grey sock.
George dabbed at the cut on his face, and waited.
Peach shifted his weight on to the other buttock. ‘Even so,’ he resumed, ‘it must have come as something of a shock.’
George confirmed this, then added, ‘But perhaps she’ll be happier now.’
‘Like your son?’ Peach’s voice had sharpened. He held it, like a knife, to George’s throat.
‘Yes,’ George stammered, ‘I suppose so.’
‘By happier,’ Peach pressed on, ‘I take it you mean out of the village.’
‘By happier,’ George said, ‘I mean dead.’
‘But we don’t know that, do we?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Peach slowed down, so George would miss none of his meaning. ‘We don’t know that your son is dead. Or do we?’
George blinked. ‘We must presume so.’
He began to understand why Peach had insisted on the privacy of his study. But why now? After all these years?
‘Or do we?’ Peach repeated.
‘I’m sorry, Chief Inspector. I don’t know what you’re driving at.’
‘Don’t put that act on with me,’ Peach bellowed. Suddenly his teeth seemed very close to the front of his mouth.
Then his voice dropped into its lowest register. ‘I’d like you to come clean with me, Mr Highness. Get the whole thing off your chest. Once and for all. You’ll probably feel much better for it.’
Panic rose in George. The room swam.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t.’
Peach braced his hands on his knees. He stood up. ‘My handkerchief, please.’
‘What?’
‘My handkerchief.’
‘Oh yes.’ George opened his hand. The handkerchief lay crushed into a tight ball on his palm like a confession.
‘Give it to me.’
George did as he was told.
‘Now,’ Peach said, ‘stand up.’
George stood. And though he wanted to look away he couldn’t. The Chief Inspector’s face filled the field of his vision. He saw things he had never seen before: the tiny pinpricks in the wings of Peach’s nose; the diagonal lines stretching from Peach’s temples to the place where his eyebrows almost met; the figures-of-eight in the irises of Peach’s cold grey eyes.
‘You see,’ Peach said, ‘I know.’
The breath powering these words pushed into and across George’s face. He smelt triumph in that breath. He smelt domination. Peach knew.
He knew whether Moses was alive or dead. He knew the truth. And that meant that he, George, would never know. Peach would never tell him. Peach would only taunt him, torment him. Play on his uncertainty. The fragility of his hopes.
He let his eyes close.
Peach had won.
*
George took to his bed, partly to rest his twisted ankle (sustained when Wragge pulled him backwards off the stone mushroom) and partly out of a deep sense of demoralisation.
He didn’t answer the doorbell when it rang. From his bedroom window, he watched the priest creep away down the garden path, his curved back sheathed in the black shell of his cassock. Another of the crushed ones.
Nor did he attend Alice’s funeral. Too upset was the story that went round – initiated by Peach, no doubt. Well, it was as good a story as any other.
During his second week in bed he wrote a poem. The first and last poem that he would ever write. He called it ‘Epitaph’.
I lie in bed
I lie in bed
I lie in bed all day
’Cause maybe then
’Cause maybe then
My life will go away.
I do not move
I do not move
I do not move one bit
Life’s too greedy
Life’s too sad
I want no part of it.
See, I’m no good
I’m just no good
At anything at all
I’d rather lie
In bed than bang
&nb
sp; My head against the wall.
So why am I
So why am I
So why am I alive?
That’s the question
I’ll be asking
Till the day I die.
Meanwhile I’ll lie
I’II lie in bed
I’ll lie in bed all day
’Cause maybe then
Eventually
My life will go away.
Self-pitying?
Yes.
Defeatist?
Yes.
Morbid?
Yes, yes, yes.
Had he stood accused of any or all of these charges, he would readily have pleaded guilty.
What else was there to look forward to now except death?
The final – the only – escape.
The Bond Street Mandarin
It was one of those terraced houses in Holland Park, white as icing and set back at a discreet distance from the road. The façade showed only as a few luminous holes in a high black screen of trees. The front garden had been allowed to run wild; a mass of shrubs and bushes, it sloped down to the railings which, like a row of policemen, held it back from the pavement. Gloria led the way up the flagstone path, chipped, uneven, lethal in the dark. One of her stiletto heels stuck in a crack and she nearly fell.
‘Bit early for that,’ Louise laughed, catching her from behind.
Gloria made a face. They were in different moods tonight, but maybe the party would even things out. The front door stood ajar. Music pulsed out of the gap. She paused on the bottom step.
‘What’re you doing?’ Louise’s blonde hair was a magnet for what little light there was.
‘Cigarette,’ Gloria said.
She fumbled in her bag. They both lit cigarettes. Just then the gate at the end of the garden creaked. More people arriving.
Dreams of Leaving Page 16