by Neil Cross
Or perhaps it would be easier to go abroad, using the name he was born with and the qualifications he had already been awarded. He could teach English in Japan, perhaps China. Conceivably, he supposed, a charitable organization of some kind might appoint him to a school in central Africa.
This had always been a kind of idle ambition but now the idea took root and became an intention. He began to investigate organizations that might employ him. He appraised the risk of returning to his original name. Surely any charitable database would not be linked to any missing persons register or other police catalogue? He considered asking Lenny. Then he thought better of it. He would need to shave the beard, grow his hair a little. To look like a teacher again. Like Andrew.
He applied for a job as a council refuse collector. Meanwhile, he began weekly to set some money aside towards the deposit on a flat of his own. He wondered how he would break this news to Lenny and Eloise.
When Caroline Holloway phoned him, he told her to hang on and took the cordless handset to his room.
He told Caroline it was nice of her to call.
She told him she’d not stopped thinking about him. She thanked God every day that someone in the world wanted to help her dad.
Shepherd gathered that she and Robert had ended their relationship. Caroline had found a new love: she had been Born Again. She was living in an evangelical Anglican commune in Cornwall.
She made it sound like a pastoral idyll: Shepherd imagined the wide-eyed, damaged young people gathering at breakfast to butter their rolls and offer praise to Jesus for their daily bread. The spirited literalism of the newly fervent.
He took the cordless phone and sat heavily upon the bed. Not for the first time, he considered the monasticism of his own surroundings.
‘I’m happy for you,’ he told her. ‘I’m happy you’ve found some peace.’
‘And what about you? Have you?’
‘Me? Goodness no. I’m far too old for that. But I am reconciled.’
He heard her smiling down the line.
‘You remind me of dad,’ she said.
Shepherd was familiar with such projection. Classrooms were full of children who longed for paternal attention and approval. Not just those whose fathers were absent.
‘Do I?’
‘Yes. He’s funny, too. That’s the kind of thing he’d say. When he was depressed.’
He smiled for her acuity.
‘Has he been in touch?’
‘No,’ she said.
She hesitated.
‘But I think I know where he is.’
He tried not to ask. The silence between them hung heavy on the wire.
Somehow, he knew she had closed her eyes and crossed her fingers, maybe even her legs, like she was desperate to pee. She was offering a silent prayer to her new Lord, Jesus, that Shepherd would put the question to her.
He said: ‘Is he in New Zealand?’
The phrasing of the question amazed her and she let loose a kind of scream. Then she cupped the receiver in her hand and said: ‘How did you know that?’
He made a Zen face and said: ‘Just go on, tell me what you were going to say.’
‘That’s amazing,’ she said. ‘There’s no way you could have known that.’
He said: ‘Go on.’
In an exultant rush, she said: ‘Well—mum spoke to Dan …’
‘Slow down. Dan?’
‘Weatherell. He was mum’s boyfriend. He lives in New Zealand. We lived with him for a while, when mum and dad first split up.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Did she mention him?’
He waited.
‘Not to my recollection,’ he said.
‘Right. Well, anyway, Dan told her that he’s been getting calls—’
‘What kind of calls?’
‘The kind where someone hangs up when you answer. He’s pretty freaked by it. He doesn’t know what to do.’
‘Has he called the police?’
‘Apparently not. What would he say? He called mum, instead.’
‘Does he know about—’
‘Joanne?’
‘Yes.’
‘Kind of. Yes. I mean, mum told him and everything. But I don’t think it’s a big deal in New Zealand.’
He smiled. That William Holloway was not, by default, a big deal somewhere in the world did not seem natural to her.
He said: ‘Has your mother called the police?’
‘Not yet. She doesn’t know what to do. She never told them about the call Dad made to Dan before—he left. She said she didn’t think it was important. She said she didn’t want more of the past being dragged through the dirt …’
He could hear the exact phrasing and intonation of those words on Kate’s lips.
‘So she hasn’t called them?’
‘She doesn’t know what to say if she did. She told Dan it might well be some call centre stuck on automatic redial. It happens, apparently. All these lonely old people think they’re getting anonymous calls, and it turns out to be British Gas, or something. Some call centre in the Midlands stuck on redial. Or whatever. She’s worried she’s jumping at shadows.’
‘And is she?’
‘No. I think he’s there. He never liked Dan—well, he wouldn’t.’ She paused again. He heard the bassy rumble as she shifted the phone in her hand. ‘He always sort of blamed Dan for—’
‘Everything,’ said Shepherd.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Pretty much.’
‘Well,’ said Shepherd, ‘he would, wouldn’t he?’
Two days later, he knocked on the door of Lenny’s office. He’d never dared to do so before.
After a brief, almost managerial hesitation, Lenny bid him enter.
The office was small and square and its many shelves were jammed in every plane with hardback and paperback books on demonology, numerology, alternative theology, magic, alternative history, para-politics, para-psychology, SAS evasion and survival techniques and—perhaps strangely—P. G. Wodehouse. Books that could not be shelved teetered and tottered in heaps and piles on the floor. Lenny sat at a second-hand writing desk, tapping with two rigid fingers at the keyboard of his PowerBook. He was online.
He looked up.
‘What can I do you for?’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Make yourself at home.’
He said this in the full knowledge that it was not possible for Shepherd to do so. Shepherd felt like Alice after she had drunk the wrong potion.
Lenny span to face him on the blue Office World swivel chair. His expression suggested this had better be good.
Shepherd was keenly aware that he was intruding. So he reached into his breast pocket and on to the table he slapped two return tickets to Wellington, New Zealand.
Before they left, en route and after their arrival, they differed on how best to proceed. But Lenny’s assessment of Weatherell’s crisis psychology proved about right.
Dan Weatherell was scared. He thought a bad man was after him and he thought there wasn’t much anybody could do about it.
Lacking any evidence to authenticate his anxiety that he was being stalked by an English psychopath, he was embarrassed about calling the police. He hated to think he might be thought neurotic, perhaps worse, a paranoid crazy, one of the loony tunes who called the police every five minutes with crackpot theories about this, that and the other. He could almost hear the gags about the crazy, jealous ex-husband, because—in the end, and stupid as it sounded—wasn’t that what it all amounted to?
He longed for a higher power to take the problem out of his hands, to absolve him of his doubt and uncertainty and inability to take definite action.
‘He is, after all,’ said Lenny, ‘an academic.’
After a calculated and allusive introductory ph
one call (‘I’m a friend of Caroline and Kate Holloway’), Lenny went alone to visit Weatherell at the university. He wore the suit he’d found bunched in a sportsbag beneath his bed. He hadn’t cleaned it or pressed it. It was rumpled beyond belief and gone in the crotch, in addition to which his hair stuck up like a madman’s and he wore skateboarding trainers. But he didn’t seem to care and it didn’t seem to matter. In the end, he made none of the false claims he had prepared, and he didn’t use any of the bogus IDs he’d brought along with him.
He simply said: ‘We’ve come to find William Holloway,’ and it was enough, because Weatherell wanted to hear that more than he wanted to hear anything else in the world.
Weatherell and Lenny spoke at least once a day for two weeks. They met several times at the university. On the second occasion, Lenny glimpsed a figure he thought might be Holloway outside the English faculty. Not wishing to startle him, he said nothing until they were out of sight. By the time he was in a position to ask Weatherell, the man had gone. On other visits, Lenny twice noticed a grey Subaru idling on the corner of Kelburn Parade, close to where Weatherell parked his car. He couldn’t be certain the driver was the man he had seen outside the Von Zedlitz building because he wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. But he was pretty sure.
When Weatherell suspected burglary, he called Lenny rather than the police. Nothing had been taken, but certain items—books and trinkets, some photographs—had been minutely repositioned. You could tell by the dust on the shelves. And he’d found a crumpled candy wrapper behind the sofa. Neither he nor Liz ate Cherry Ripes.
Lenny counselled him not to worry.
Holloway had not been in his house.
‘What makes you say that?’ said Dan. ‘What would he have done, if he had been?’
Lenny changed the subject. He told him the wrapper had probably blown in from the garden. Wellington was a pretty windy town.
When Weatherell told him they were going away for the weekend, Lenny suggested they drive rather than fly. By now Weatherell seemed willing to do exactly as Lenny told him, so long as it protected him from any possibility of encountering William Holloway.
Lenny told Weatherell he’d know if Holloway tried to follow him over 500 km of open road. He suggested they keep an eye open for a little grey Japanese hatchback. Dan did as instructed and, as Lenny promised, saw nothing unusual. Once they got to Rotorua, he and Liz began to relax. But over breakfast in the Sheraton restaurant, Lenny thought a slight, tanned figure across the room might be Holloway. He wanted to confront the man right there, but Shepherd insisted they consult with Weatherell, who (after all) was the only one present who’d ever actually met him.
In Reception, Lenny and Dan argued about it for half an hour. Weatherell said it could not have been Holloway. Shepherd agreed with him. Shepherd would have known. He would have known by the energies in the air.
Weatherell admitted he’d seen the man for the briefest of seconds, but whoever it was, he was too tanned, too relaxed to be Holloway. He was too casually dressed, for Christ’s sake. It just wasn’t in William Holloway’s nature to go about on serious business dressed like Brian fucking Wilson.
‘Will Holloway,’ he said. ‘He’s not what you’d call relaxed. You know what I mean? He’s kind of an uptight guy.’
But Weatherell looked scared. He might have been repeating a mantra. The magic words, if repeated often enough, would make the man in the restaurant not be the bad man who wanted to hurt him. The idea that it might have been Holloway was somehow more frightening than waking up to find him at the foot of the bed.
Although he didn’t think the man was Holloway, Weatherell was eager to pack up and go home. Lenny promised him again that Holloway had no intention of hurting him. It wasn’t in his psychology. Probably all he wanted was to talk. Holloway’s rational mind knew that Weatherell was not responsible for the circumstances he found himself in. But he needed something, somebody to hold responsible. If he actually confronted Weatherell, he would also confront his own carefully constructed delusional framework—and he couldn’t afford to let that happen.
Eventually, Lenny said, he’d just go away. It was a form of depression, and it would probably lift. And anyway, he and Shepherd would be there. They wouldn’t let Weatherell out of their sight for a minute. Not one minute.
‘You’re going to have to promise me, now,’ said Weatherell. ‘I don’t mind telling you, I’m pretty spooked here.’
Lenny promised. Weatherell deflated. He jammed a floppy sunhat on his head and stomped from the lobby.
Later, while they were illegally parked opposite the hotel, Lenny was convinced of the familiarity of a Subaru hatchback that pulled out of the Sheraton car park.
That was a moment.
He turned to Shepherd.
They looked at each other.
Lenny said: ‘Fuck me. I think it’s actually him.’
He was so excited he stalled the car three times and pulled into the traffic with a banshee shriek that made it feel like a real pursuit. They caught sight of the Subaru three blocks ahead. As Lenny had predicted, it seemed to be tailing Weatherell’s 4 x 4.
Without talking, they followed the Subaru to the edge of town. Under his breath, Lenny sang songs from the Clash’s first album. They followed the man who might be William Holloway through the turnstile into Whakawerawera thermal park and Maori cultural centre and Lenny, who was marginally the less conspicuous of the pair, shadowed him through the souvenir shop and cafeteria.
He rejoined Shepherd outside the souvenir shop. Shepherd was pretending to select postcards from a wire spinner that threatened to topple each time he so much as brushed it.
Still they doubted it could actually be him.
In a way, they both hoped it wasn’t.
Later, after Lenny had led the Weatherells away, Shepherd leaned on the railing and told Holloway his name. It was a curiously flat moment.
He had not cried for many years, not even when his father died, so he couldn’t guess at the source of the sudden, unexpected grief that made him grip the railing as if he were on the deck of a liner. The sadness seemed unconnected to the stranger before him, the little man in the baseball cap to whom he felt no bond or affiliation, no relationship of any kind. He was just a stranger in a Hawaiian shirt, at the first sight of whom the William Holloway in Shepherd’s mind tapered and dissolved, like the picture on an old TV screen. It left an absence whose parameters he could not, already, quite recall.
II
On a wet November afternoon, they touched down at Manchester airport.
At the passport control desk, Holloway couldn’t feel his legs. He was certain that customs would search him. If they did, they could hardly miss in excess of £100,000, in various currencies, taped up in a bin-liner in his capacious hand luggage. But the passport officer waved him past and he moved unhindered through the Nothing to Declare channel.
Shepherd experienced a similar anxiety. He was travelling on Andrew Taylor’s passport. But nobody was interested in him either.
Of the three of them, only Lenny arrived in the UK with a passport that might stand up to full and close scrutiny. But the sight of uniforms made him nervous. He walked past Manchester customs and excise like a man trying hard to look casual and unconcerned. So they singled him out and went through his luggage. Because this always happened to Lenny, he refused to carry the most innocuous contraband through customs. He had incinerated his fake IDs in New Zealand.
About twenty minutes later, he joined Holloway and Shepherd in Arrivals.
Holloway had never thought to see England again. While they waited for Lenny, he went to buy a newspaper. Everything he saw spoke of the whole: the lettering on the W. H. Smith sign: The Times, the Daily Mirror. Werther’s Originals. Mars bars. Walker’s cheese-and-onion crisps. The near-identical accent of the staff, despite the variety of
their ethnicity. The old couple who stood together in the queue to buy a pack of mints.
When Lenny arrived, glad at least to have been spared what he cheerfully called the old rubber glove, they went to the Avis desk and hired a car.
Outside, the air was cold and wet and smelled of aviation fuel. Whining planes broke the low cloud, encased in shafts of light. Holloway shivered in his summer clothing as they struggled to locate and identify the right vehicle in the hire compound. Then he threw his bag into the boot and huddled, quivering, on the back seat. Lenny took his place at the wheel and familiarized himself with the dashboard layout. Shepherd slid back the passenger seat as far as it would go. None of them spoke. They were too tired and it was too cold.
Concerned that her phone or indeed her person might be bugged, Lenny hadn’t spoken to Eloise for nearly three weeks. Holloway assured him this probably wasn’t necessary, but it didn’t seem to matter. Neither did the fact that Holloway was still technically a serving British police officer. You couldn’t be too careful where possible surveillance was concerned, Lenny told him. What with one thing and another, Holloway was inclined to agree.
Lenny was not a good driver; he was erratic and impulsive and he weaved between lanes like a speeding bumblebee, but he made good time and he got them there alive. He was eager to get home. He slowed down only when they hit a snarl of traffic on the North Circular.
They unpacked the car. The luggage seemed heavy. The freezing drizzle had soaked to their joints.
Lenny put the key in the door.
He called out: ‘Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig. Anybody home?’
Eloise ran barefoot from the sitting room. She threw her arms round Lenny’s neck. She planted a kiss on his cheek. She said: ‘I missed you, John Dillinger.’