He handed his glass to Hilda. ‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Home.’ He was already ten yards away, walking backwards. ‘Something very important, dear.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No, no. It’s all right. You stay here. Enjoy yourself.’ The fire threw black streamers of shadow across his face. ‘I’ll see you when you get back.’
Then he was running away over the grass, leaving Hilda standing by the fire in her burgundy suit with a glass of mulled wine in each hand.
When he reached his study he unlocked his bureau and pulled out the pink file. His heart was hammering against the bars of his ribs. He sat down, unfastened the top button of his tunic. He shuffled through his papers until he found the plans he had drawn up a few weeks before. Plans of The Bunker.
‘Yes,’ he breathed. ‘Just as I thought.’
The Bunker had no fire-escapes. The only way out of the fourth floor, so far as he could see, was down the stairs and through the black side-door. So if a fire started on the ground floor …
He smiled.
There would be a fire at The Bunker. A tragic fire. He could see the headlines now:
Nightclub Blaze Leaves One Dead
Or perhaps:
Man, 25, Dies in Mystery Inferno
(And if that black bastard got killed too, so much the better.)
There would be nothing to connect Peach with the fire. Nothing to implicate him. He would burn the pink file beforehand, though. Just to be on the safe side. It would have served its purpose, after all. There was a nice symmetry about that. The file. The nightclub. Both pink. Both burning.
A sudden blast of heat passed across his face.
Why wait?
Why not do it now? Leave tonight. Return first thing in the morning. Nobody would miss him. It was Pelting Day. Turn the chaos to his advantage. Leave now. No time to tell Hilda. Tell her tomorrow. Explain the whole thing then. He would think of something. He was Peach.
He leered. Yes, why not?
A Christmas gift for Moses.
Death.
Hands trembling with strange electricity, he hurried from the room.
*
‘Pelting Day,’ Mustoe sneered. ‘What a bloody fiasco.’
He had been sitting in The Legs and Arms all day. He had drunk himself into a stupor at lunch-time and slept it off during the afternoon. Now he was drinking again. Pints of beer and whisky chasers. He was alone except for Lady Batley, who hadn’t moved for hours, who never did, and Brenda Gunn, the bitch who ran the place. Brenda usually ignored him but on this occasion, perhaps because she had been on the Pelting Day committee herself, he seemed to have touched a nerve.
‘Oh and I suppose your life isn’t,’ she muttered.
‘Isn’t what?’ he grinned.
‘A fiasco.’
‘Oh,’ and he threw up his hands, pretended to cower, ‘oh, Mrs Gunn.’
‘It’s a success this year, actually.’ Brenda folded her arms. ‘A real success.’
‘Success.’ Mustoe snorted into his glass, then raised it ceilingwards. ‘To the success of Pelting Day.’ He swallowed his double whisky in a single gulp. ‘My arse,’ he added, and slipped sideways off his stool, very slowly, like a ship going down. Waves closed over his head.
Brenda took away his glass and wiped the bar.
‘Fiasco?’ Lady Batley quavered suddenly. ‘What fiasco?’
Then he heard a voice calling him, calling from somewhere far above.
‘Dad? Dad?’
He peered over his anorak collar. Managed to fit his flaccid lips around the words, ‘Piss off.’
‘Come on, Dad,’ the voice said. ‘It’s time to go home.’
‘There’s no such thing.’ As time? As home? Both, he thought, sweeping them savagely aside like empty glasses.
‘Something’s happened, Dad,’ came the voice again. ‘Something strange.’
He rolled over and sat up. Bracing a hand on his knee, he clambered to his feet. He stared down with revulsion at his eight-year-old son. Conceived during the preparations for escape in 1972. Conceived as a result of those bloody stomach exercises. A living reminder of his own failure. How he loathed the child who he had, in his own tortured bitterness, insisted on calling Job.
‘What’s strange?’ he snarled.
The boy looked up at his father with eyes the colour of ploughed fields. ‘They’re saying Peach has disappeared.’
Mustoe lowered himself on to his stool. His son’s words seemed to tap some hidden reserve of sobriety.
‘What did you say?’ he said.
*
It was three in the morning. Elliot sprawled on his grey dralon sofa. A glass of Remy balanced on the fourth button of his waistcoat. He was drinking in the liquid harmonies of Manhattan Transfer. To somebody walking into the office at that moment Elliot might have looked the picture of relaxation, but that somebody wouldn’t have heard, as Elliot heard, the whirr of brain-wires, or felt, as Elliot felt, the chafing of one layer of skin against another. Elliot had said good-night to Ridley half an hour before in the foyer. He had been intending to lock up straight away and go home. But when he searched his pockets he realised that he had left his keys upstairs and when he found his keys on his desk he saw the pile of letters and when he thought about the letters he poured himself a stiff brandy, put a record on the stereo and lay down on the sofa.
Now he shook the sofa off, stood up. He walked over to the pool-table and set up the balls. He broke, put a stripe down. He played himself, and the physics of the game slowly altered his frame of mind. He could concentrate now. His cool pool-brain began to plan strategies.
When the music stopped – that five-second gap between tracks – he thought he heard something downstairs. The three-syllable creak of the double-doors. And remembered now that he had left them unlocked. He leapt across the room and killed the volume on the stereo. And stood motionless, lips ajar. Not a sound now, but the kind of silence that follows sound. This had been happening slowly for a long time. He felt a curious relief as he reached for the short pool-cue.
Half a dozen steps (executed so lightly and smoothly that they all ran together) took him to the door of the office. He pushed on the wood with spread fingers. An unmistakable smell drifted into his nostrils. Petrol.
He ran down the stairs, turned the corner into the last flight, and stopped, three steps above the foyer. A policeman stood by the double-doors. He held a pink paraffin can in his hands. There was something gluttonous about the way he was splashing petrol against the walls, as if the petrol was sauce and the walls were a meal he could hardly wait to eat.
‘So,’ Elliot breathed, ‘it’s you.’
A casual tilt of Peach’s brutal head. The quills of his crewcut glinting. His grey eyes grinned from the cover of their heavy lids and his bottom lip slid unceasingly against his top one, in and out, in and out. And Elliot realised. The bloke was mad. Stark fucking mad. And would do anything.
‘You’re going to burn,’ Peach said.
Elliot sprang across the foyer. His pool-cue hissed through the air and cracked Peach on the side of the head. Peach tottered sideways, dropped the pink can. Then he began to laugh. Before Elliot could hit him again, he brought out a box of matches, struck one, and tossed it on to the floor. Elliot jumped back. Fire grew up the wall like a fast orange plant.
‘Goodbye,’ Peach whispered. Blood ran a red hand down the side of his face.
Elliot backed towards the door. But he wanted one question answered.
‘It’s not me you’re after, is it?’
Peach was still laughing.
‘It’s Moses you want,’ Elliot said, ‘isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Peach leered, ‘he’s going to burn too.’
‘No, he isn’t. Because he isn’t here.’ Now it was Elliot’s turn to laugh. ‘You’ve fucked it, fat man. You’ve really fucked it this time.’
Peach sucked
air in through his gritted teeth. Then he shook his head from side to side and let out a guttural howl of rage. He lunged at Elliot, clubbed him on the forehead. Elliot staggered backwards through the double-doors.
Snow was falling outside. Snow, of all things. White on the white of his Mercedes. He unlocked the door and scrambled in. Through the smudged windscreen he saw Peach collapse on the pavement. Smoke poured from the door of the club. A window screeched open somewhere above.
He started the engine, crashed the gears, stamped on the accelerator. He spun the car round the corner. The lights were green on the main road. They had to be. He wasn’t going to stop for anything. He wasn’t going to stop for a long time. And when he did he would probably be somebody else.
*
A tightening in Peach’s chest. Blackness pulsing along the edges of his vision. Something lurched inside him. Slack not being taken up. He wiped at his forehead and his fingers came away wet. Blood or sweat, he didn’t know.
Tightening, tightening.
Arms over his face, he crashed through the air as if it was glass. He thought he felt snow on his face. Soft cold petals settling.
One reeling upward glance. Some sort of wedding in the sky.
Snow.
He could hear the blood rushing through his body. Or. Trees moving. Darkness advancing. Some kind of second night falling.
The pain, when it came, split his body in two as an axe splits wood.
Then he was lying on something cold. His palm flat on – was it stone? He couldn’t understand why the floor of his study had suddenly turned to stone. Then he remembered, and wanted to forget again.
The moisture from the pavement soaked up into his uniform. A welcome enveloping coolness.
Thoughts would not start. Sentences buckled while under construction. Words floated out of context.
He knew, though, that something final was happening. The metallic taste of something final on his tongue.
His left arm hurt. A massive invisible weight pinned him to the cool ground. He could no more move than he could have flown. Snow nursed his wounded face.
He felt the presence of fire on his skin and in his memory. He saw a crouching figure wrapped in sheets of flame. He had to burn the evidence. Had to. Had he?
He tried to get up but felt he was standing already. Leaning against a cold wall. If he stood up he would fall over. Logic. Somebody had been playing with the world.
Buildings, trees, leaned over him.
Someone appeared. Pressed against the warped shape of everything. Corn and husk. Hands closed in prayer. Flowing upwards and inwards in sickening curves. A woman. Her head blending with the tops of – or perhaps just the sky. Was that Hilda?
‘Hilda?’
He couldn’t hear his voice, couldn’t tell if he had spoken. Only this rushing sound as if the night, the whole night with him inside it, was travelling somewhere very fast.
Now she was speaking. He strained to hear. Her mouth opened and closed like the mouth of a fish. Stretched at the corners sometimes. Painful. Water spilled out of his ears.
Her head moved closer, liquid at the edges. Was it Hilda?
He had to talk. He could see the words, but couldn’t get a grip on them. Slippery as fish and his lips like clumsy hands.
‘Tell Dolphin,’ he wanted to say. ‘Tell him Moses is alive.’
Simple.
Had he said it then?
Had Hilda understood?
Ah, so many pieces missing from this jigsaw.
He tried again. The same words. And something else.
‘And tell him – ’
Everything was caving in above him. The pain, the weight of the sky, the woman’s face, came crashing down through the darkness. He only had seconds.
‘– to kill Moses,’ he cried.
The woman held his head in her cool papery fingers.
She watched his lips turn the colour of his uniform.
She knelt there until she could no longer feel her legs, until the fire-engines blared round the corner.
The snow in her hair melted and ran down her face.
‘Christos,’ she whispered.
The man was dead.
*
Still clutching his giant pink teddy-bear, Dolphin swayed up the garden path. He was singing.
Oh I do like to be beside the seaside
Oh I do like to be beside the sea –
Policemen weren’t supposed to sing songs about being beside the seaside (or being anywhere, for that matter – apart from New Egypt, that is), but seven pints of homebrew with Hazard and the boys had washed away his usual circumspection. They had been celebrating the end of Pelting Day. A triumph, it had been. His triumph, in many ways. The most well attended Pelting Day in living memory. And if that didn’t deserve a celebration, what did? So they had celebrated. And now he was drunk. And when he was drunk he liked to sing songs about water. Sea-water, preferably. The ocean. Those expanses of water where his namesakes swam, expanses so vast that they filled his somewhat limited imagination many times over. Ocean. What a wonderful watery word.
‘Ocean,’ he said. ‘Ohhhhsssshhhun.’
His wife, Laura, opened the door. ‘Ssshhh,’ she said.
‘Ohhhhsssshhhh – ’ he began again. Thought she was joining in, you see.
‘Roger, please. Mrs Peach has phoned three times. Where’ve you been?’
‘Who?’
‘Mrs Peach.’
‘What’s she want?’
‘She’s worried. The Chief Inspector’s disappeared.’ She scraped a few strands of hair away from her creased white forehead.
‘Disappeared? Where?’
‘If she knew that,’ Laura said, ‘he wouldn’t have disappeared, would he?’
Dolphin let this piece of sophistry sink without trace in the swirling waters of his drunkenness. He lifted his right wrist. ‘Laura, it’s two-thirty in the morning, for Christ’s sake.’
‘The Chief Inspector’s been missing since nine o’clock, Roger, and you can leave Christ out of it,’ said Laura, who was religious.
Dolphin sighed.
‘Where’ve you been all this time anyway?’ she went on. ‘And what’s that thing?’
He pushed past her and walked into the dining-room. Then he wondered why he had walked into the dining-room. Peach had disappeared. Peach had been missing for almost six hours. Peach never went missing. Nobody ever went missing. This was bad. Very bad.
He had stopped in front of the mirror. When he looked up he suddenly saw the new Chief Inspector of New Egypt standing there. The new Chief Inspector of New Egypt was holding a giant pink teddy-bear. He would have to get rid of it, he decided. Otherwise nobody would take him seriously. Putting the teddy-bear down, he walked back into the hall. Then he picked up the phone and dialled Peach’s number.
In future fluffy animals would always remind him of death.
The Wooden Triangle
‘Thank you for driving me to the station like this.’
‘Don’t be silly, Moses.’ Auntie B’s face never lost its china stillness, its placidity, even when she chided him. ‘It’s been lovely to see you. You’ll come and see us again, won’t you?’
Now she was being silly. That hint of uncertainty (the legacy of his having discovered his real father?). He dismissed it with, ‘Of course I will.’
He had spent Christmas in Leicester – he had stayed over two weeks, in fact – grateful for the warmth, the soft ticking of clocks in the hallway, the small-scale dramas (the cat moulting, a blocked drain, a wine-stain on the dining-room table). He had eaten three meals a day and slept ten hours a night. Uncle Stan and Auntie B knew nothing and in their ignorance he found relief. His unease dissolved in their everyday routines. He left London behind, as he had once left the orphanage behind, and felt a great calmness settle. He told them about the contents of the suitcase, the trip down to New Egypt, the meeting with his father. He described his father as a sort of eccentric invalid and the village a
s one of those dull places in the middle of nowhere that nobody ever leaves, and was surprised at how much truth his carefully censored version of the facts contained (he only hid what might have worried them; about Peach, for instance, he said nothing). They listened and nodded, made all the right noises. They asked very few questions, thinking it no business of theirs, perhaps, or simply content with the parameters he had set. They had never tried to expand their role into areas where it didn’t belong, and they didn’t now. Their occasional references to the subject, though oblique, told him all he needed to know about the way they were thinking. For instance: ‘Well,’ Auntie B had said one night (and her eyes never once wandered from the TV screen), ‘you know you can always come here, Moses. You’ll always have a home here.’ He knew. Or as now: ‘You’ll come and see us again, won’t you.’ Of course he would.
‘Thank you for everything, Auntie B.’ He leaned over, kissed her on the cheek. ‘See you soon.’
He walked through the damp acidic air of the station – its draughty arches and its stained dripping brick had always reminded him of urinals – and boarded the train to London. His eyelids prickled. It was nine in the morning.
He was looking forward to late nights again. He wanted to sit at his fourth-floor window and feel the music ride up from below and gaze at those golden zips of light that ran down the slim dark buildings of the city. He wanted to thrash Elliot at pool, drink Eddie into oblivion, drive Vince to hospital, tease Jackson about the weather. He longed to be back. Where things happened. Among friends. He had even invented one or two strategies for dealing with the Peach threat (he would park his car further away, fit extra locks on the doors, buy a toy periscope for the kitchen window), and if they were a bit frivolous it was only his new confidence asserting itself.
Sensing his impatience, perhaps, the train left several seconds early. The magic rhythm of its wheels on the tracks soon made misty Leicester disappear and a pale-blue sky unveiled itself. A pocket-torch sun clicked on, pointed out neat lawns, a car glazed with dew, the red slant of a rooftop. It was like somebody big looking for somebody small, he thought. Ridley looking for Gloria, for instance.
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