But surely it was too fantastic, too far-fetched. Highness could never plan anything so complex, so ingenious. Not that moocher, that drone, that bonehead. Only he, Peach, could produce ideas of that calibre. He could run rings round that bloody layabout. He had covered every angle. He was the Chief Inspector.
He slept.
*
You can never be certain what it is that wakes you in the middle of the night.
When Peach woke, he heard shouting in the corridor outside his room. He tried to pick out words, but the language meant nothing to him.
He had been dreaming.
The dream hung eerily in his head like the hush after a bomb’s dropped. He had been enveloped in darkness, a darkness that stretched infinitely in all directions. A sort of outer space. He had been surrounded on all four sides by bright orange ropes. He could see nothing but the darkness and the ropes. It was as if he was standing in a boxing-ring. A boxing-ring in outer space.
Not so much standing, perhaps, as floundering. He couldn’t see a floor beneath his feet. At times whatever was supporting him seemed firm. At other times it tilted sharply, slid out from under him, gave way. And he would lunge for the ropes, wanting something solid, something tangible, to cling to. But his hands kept passing straight through the ropes as if the ropes weren’t there. And he would try again and watch in astonishment, despairing, as the same thing happened.
There had been voices in the dream. Murmurings. Invisible spectators. They hadn’t taken sides. They were neither for nor against him. They were simply there. Watching.
Then he had woken in the badly-sprung bed, his pyjamas damp, the darkness tinted orange by the street-lights, and he had heard voices in the corridor. Real voices.
Now somebody was running past his room. A door slammed. That foreign language again. What the devil was going on? He switched on the light and peered at his watch. 3.28. He got out of bed. As he pulled his beige jacket on over his pyjamas, some instinct persuaded him to slip his police badge into the pocket. He opened the door of his room just in time to see the door of the room opposite slam shut. He crossed the corridor and knocked.
He knocked again.
The door opened a few inches. A face appeared in the gap. Jet-black hair, olive skin, the pencil-shading of a moustache. An adolescent. Indian or Pakistani. Stale cigarette smoke in the room. The rustling of bedclothes.
‘You’re making an incredible amount of noise,’ Peach said.
The boy offered him a blank face. Peach read a single word there. Stupidity.
‘It is very late – ’ he pronounced each word distinctly and gestured with his watch – ‘and I want to sleep.’
The boy shrugged. Perhaps he really didn’t understand. But Peach thought he detected a sly mockery in that blank face. He felt like seizing the boy by his stringy chicken neck and –
He checked himself. He wasn’t in New Egypt now. All right, he thought.
‘I am a policeman,’ he said. And, reaching into his jacket pocket, pulled out his badge. Held it up next to his face like a third eye. ‘Po-lice-man. Understand?’
The boy’s eyes scattered. He poured some anxious language over his shoulder into the room. A girl’s voice answered. She seemed to be giving the boy advice.
The boy turned back. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Very sorry.’
‘Just shut up and go to sleep,’ Peach snapped.
He stamped back into his room and closed the door. Instead of going to bed, he sat by the window. There was no darkness to speak of in this city. All night long a gaseous orange glow hung over the buildings. An ominous light. Like an emergency, a war, the end of something. No wonder people ran up and down corridors. How could you sleep with that fire burning in the sky?
He had only been gone a few hours, but he already longed for the muffled black night of the village, the air of secrecy, the cover of darkness. He didn’t sleep for almost an hour and his sleep, when it took him, proved fitful and thin, disrupted by sirens, cat-fights, and the dreadful silence of orange ropes.
*
He was awake again at 6.30. The orange night had withdrawn. Through a window fogged with dust and fumes and breath, the sky glittered silver-grey. Sheer, streamlined, a colossal machine.
He threw the covers aside and with them all his paralysing thoughts of the night before. Wearing only his twill trousers, he shaped up in front of the mirror like a boxer. He lowered his head and shuffled his feet. He threw a few right jabs. Fff, fff. It felt good.
Even his face – heavy, collapsing, punished by time – couldn’t dismay him this morning. He surveyed the folds and creases, the bulging, the sagging, almost with satisfaction. How perfectly they disguised those agile wits of his! He was conscious that he was approaching the day the way he approached a day in the village: optimistic, determined, supremely confident.
By 7.15 he had paid the bill (exorbitant! that was the last time he would ever leave the village!) and was making for Queensway on foot. He decided to breakfast at the Blue Sky Café, blue being a colour of which he was particularly fond. He found a table by the window, took in his surroundings. Teak veneer panelling to shoulder height. Matt yellow paint beyond. Sticky-looking ventilation-grilles. Cacti on the mantelpiece. He watched the door opening and closing on a succession of workmen who wanted cups of tea and bacon sandwiches. When he ordered, the waitress called him love.
Smiling, he arranged his A–Z, his bus-map and his diary on the table in front of him. He began to outline a strategy for his assault on The Bunker. The military side – reconnaissance, briefing, manoeuvres – appealed to him. In his mind, he wore a uniform.
‘Excuse me.’
He looked up and saw an old woman sitting at the next table. He could tell from her accent that she wasn’t English. Something about her face, too, didn’t belong. Not another bloody foreigner. He sighed visibly.
‘Were you addressing me, madam?’
The old woman reached across and touched him on the shoulder. Her hand descended so lightly that it might have reflected either awe on her part or fragility on his. The former seemed more likely.
‘You’re a man of great power,’ she said. ‘I can feel it.’
He glanced round. Nobody had noticed. The last thing he wanted, even this far from The Bunker, was to start attracting attention. He faced the old woman again. Her smile, almost coquettish, somehow avoided being grotesque. But he was brisk this morning, not easily charmed. He was too conscious of the ground he had to cover, of the red second-hand on the clock above the glass display-case of rolls and buns. His first thought translated rapidly into speech.
‘What do you want?’
The woman placed the same light yet curiously restraining hand on his arm. ‘What do you want, sir?’
Really, this was an impossible conversation. Quite impossible. He began to gather up his maps and notebooks. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have some rather important business to – ’
The woman’s face broke up into a network of creases and lines in whose intricate web he suddenly, and unaccountably, felt himself to be a fly.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ she said.
Frightened? Him? Outrageous. And yet –
This world. So very different. The cloth of the night dyed orange, embroidered with voices, torn by screams and the screech of brakes – had it frightened him?
The woman’s words pricked his skin like needles. Doubts began to run in his bloodstream.
‘You’re not comfortable,’ she was telling him. ‘You’re a long way from home, maybe that’s the reason. Yes, I think that’s the reason.’
Her voice scraped like dry leaves blowing over the surface of a road. Her dark eyes turned up stones. His scrambled eggs arrived, but he watched them congeal on the plate.
‘Give me your hand,’ she said.
He held out his hand, and she wrapped it in her cool papery fingers. She began to murmur to herself. This seemed to be taking place in a vacuum. Or not taking place at all. He was thankfu
l nobody in the village could see him now. He observed his own submissiveness as if it was happening to somebody else.
‘Who are you exactly?’ he asked her.
‘Oh, you can speak!’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought maybe you lost your voice. My name is Madame Zola. I’m a clairvoyant. Famous clairvoyant.’
He stared at his hand lying in hers.
‘I can see,’ she said, ‘that you are, how shall I say, curious.’
He recovered. ‘Where can you see that? On the palm of my hand?’ But his sarcasm drifted past her. She seemed not to have noticed it. Beneath notice, perhaps. ‘I am an old man,’ he began again. ‘One thing I’m not particularly curious about is the future.’
‘You’re also human.’
He didn’t follow.
‘You may be old,’ Madame Zola said, ‘but I’m older and I have to tell you one thing that maybe you don’t know. People are always curious about the future. It’s human character. They can be on the death bed. Still they have to know. Will I die? Will I live? How long will I live? What will happen when I die? All these questions. Always questions. Don’t tell me you’re not curious about the future.’ She waggled a hand, almost in admonition, under Peach’s nose. ‘And that – ’ one of her fingers stabbed the air triumphantly before curling up and rejoining the others – ‘is why I’ll never, never go out of business.’
Peach was thinking about Lord Batley. Batley had tried to escape at the age of seventy-nine. He had obviously believed in some kind of future. And wasn’t he, Peach, desperately curious as to what the outcome of today’s investigations would be?
Sighing, he admitted, ‘You’re right.’
‘I know I’m right.’ Her mouth curved downwards. ‘Do you want to know what I see in your hand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah, you become simple now, you see? That’s my effect. I see it happen. Everywhere I see it.’ She waved a hand to include not just the café, but the city, the country too, the earth even, and the planets in attendance. ‘That’s my power.’
Her eyes drifted away from his, drifted beyond the yellow café walls and the steamy plate-glass, into a world that he couldn’t imagine. A smile spread like water through all the cracks and crevices in her face until it was irrigated with a look of pure contentment.
‘You’re going on a journey,’ she told him. ‘An important journey. A difficult journey. It will happen very soon, this journey.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m right?’
‘Yes.’
Her eyes misted over again. ‘You’re looking for something.’
He stared at her. She spoke in cliches, but the clichés were true. Her simple, almost facile, statements lodged under the mind’s skin.
‘But you feel lost,’ she was saying. ‘Among strangers. Alone.’
Her eyes refocused, seeking confirmation. He gave it to her.
‘There’s some danger – ’
He remained calm. ‘What danger?’
‘That I cannot see.’
He glanced down at his untouched plate.
‘You must forgive me, I didn’t wish to stop you eating,’ Madame Zola said (she had a foot in both worlds, it seemed, and could move from one to the other like someone playing two games of chess at the same time), ‘but sometimes I feel something and when I feel something I cannot keep it inside. It has to come out. If I keep it inside I burst. Pif. Like a balloon.’
Peach suddenly found that he was hungry. He slid a forkload of cold scrambled egg into his mouth, then reached for a slice of toast. The butter had melted clean through. The toast sagged in his hand. He shrugged, ate it anyway.
‘Anything else?’ His briskness had returned with his appetite. They might both have been restored to him by Madame Zola.
She examined his left hand again. With his right, he gulped cold milky tea.
‘I see only your strength, your power. You remember I said that you have power?’
‘I thought you meant a different kind of power.’
‘You have both,’ and her smile, like a fishing-net, caught all possible meanings.
He withdrew his hand and wiped his mouth on a paper napkin. He began to gather his possessions together.
‘You have to go now,’ Madame Zola said. As if it was her idea, as if she was dismissing him.
‘If you’ll forgive me. I have an extremely testing day ahead of me.’
‘I think I’ll stay here a little longer.’ She indicated the unfinished cup of tea in front of her. ‘I wish you luck with your – ’ and she paused, dark eyes glittering – ‘business.’
‘Thank you, Madame Zola.’ Peach even bowed slightly.
He paid the waitress and left the café. It was 8.45. The sun pressed against the inside of a thin layer of cloud. He unbuttoned his jacket as he hurried down Queensway. His mind, unleashed, sprang forwards.
That woman had slowed him down with her mumbo-jumbo. You’re looking for something, she had said. But they all said things like that, didn’t they, fortune-tellers? She couldn’t have told him what he was looking for or whether he was going to find it, could she? Of course she couldn’t.
Free of the Blue Sky Café, out in the open air, he welcomed his scepticism back like a friend whom he hadn’t seen for a long time.
*
By the time he reached Bayswater Road the sun had broken through. It landed in a million places at once: a car windscreen, the catches of a briefcase, a man’s gold tooth. He watched the city organise itself around him. He had his bearings now. Marble Arch stood to his left, half a mile away, solid as muscle. Hyde Park lay in front of him, a stretch of green beyond severe black railings. And somewhere to the south, approximately seven miles away, The Bunker waited. He leaned against the bus-shelter, his jacket draped over his arm.
After ten minutes the bus came. It dropped him at Oxford Circus. He caught another going south on Regent Street. The route he had selected took him past many of the famous sights of the city – the statue of Eros, Trafalgar Square, Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament – but he only absorbed them subliminally. It was the action that interested him, not the scenery. His mind moved in another dimension, juggling possibilities, shaping initiatives. He wasn’t a tourist. He was a policeman.
The bus swung left over a bridge and he knew, without looking at the map, which bridge it was. A barge loaded with machinery forged downriver, shouldering the water aside. Gulls fluttered above. They reminded him of the greengrocer’s story. The gulls in the air above the ploughed field: symbols of freedom. How far he seemed from that closed world. How far he was.
When the bus turned into Kennington Road, he stepped out. His head swivelled. He used the gleaming dome of the Imperial War Museum (how appropriate, he thought) to orientate himself. One problem. Kennington Road ran north and south from the crossroads where he was standing. Which way should he go?
A police car pulled up at the lights. Peach approached the window on the passenger’s side.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I wonder if you could tell me where The Bunker is?’
The policeman he was talking to had an unusually pale face. It was so pale that it was almost transparent. Even the policeman’s eyelashes were pale. Peach’s first albino.
‘Never heard of it.’ Not only an albino, but arrogant with it.
‘It’s a nightclub,’ Peach explained.
The policeman pushed his hat back on his head, revealing a strand of colourless hair. ‘Don’t know it.’
His colleague, the driver, was muttering something.
‘Try down there.’ The policeman pointed south with his chin. ‘Can’t help you otherwise, mate.’
‘Much obliged,’ Peach said. ‘Thanks very much.’
Mate, he thought. Bloody albino. Take his uniform away and he’d probably disappear altogether.
He set off down the road. The traffic lights had already changed, but several seconds passed before he heard the police car move away. He understo
od. If he had been approached by an old man in a sports jacket who was looking for a nightclub, he would have been suspicious too. Especially if he happened to be an albino. Axe to grind. Revenge on the world. He didn’t look back, though. He kept walking. Basic psychology. Only the guilty look back. The guilty and the stupid.
He walked for five or ten minutes and saw nothing that even remotely resembled a nightclub (not that he was any too sure what nightclubs looked like in the daylight). Kennington Road ran south into a glitter of bicycle-shops and pub-signs. Council-blocks the colour of dog-meat. A green and white striped bingo-hall. Trees so dusty that their leaves looked plastic. He began to have doubts. What if Eddie had lied? Could Moses have covered his tracks?
He sat down on a bench and mopped his forehead and the back of his neck with a large white handkerchief. He opened his suitcase and examined his notes. He took those anxious questions of his and crumpled them like so much waste-paper. He began again, with a fresh blank sheet, as it were. Outlined his mission to himself. Stated the priorities.
1) Establish the exact whereabouts of the nightclub.
2) Establish whether or not Moses Highness is living at said nightclub.
3) If so, establish visual contact.
4) If not, start again – with Eddie.
Incisive now, Peach walked across the pavement and into a newsagent’s. He asked the Indian behind the counter whether he knew of a place called The Bunker. The Indian didn’t.
He asked a teenager at a bus-stop. The teenager didn’t know either.
Peach walked on, undeterred, a pear-shaped man with a jutting lower lip. Sooner or later, he thought. Sooner or later.
Reaching another set of traffic lights, he noticed a pub on the corner. They would know. Surely. He consulted his watch. Half an hour to opening-time. He sat down on a low brick wall. And waited.
As soon as the bolts were drawn (11.32), he was through the double-doors.
‘You must be desperate,’ the landlord said. ‘You nearly knocked the place over.’ His eyes creased at the corners; he was making a joke, but the joke included as one of its ingredients a sense of wariness.
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