‘Yes, he can,’ said Hobbes. ‘It would only go to waste otherwise. It’s not like you’re going to be in business for a while.’
Eric nodded unhappily and, oblivious to the rain, sitting on the kerb, sobbed like a broken man. Since I can’t bear to see a grown man crying, I turned away and rummaged, finding several bags of white sliced bread, a bunch of browning bananas, a pile of cabbages and a crate filled with carrots, quite surprised to discover Eric could, apparently, have served vegetables with his stodge. Having piled a selection into a box, I hurried towards Hobbes, who was still holding the elephant’s tail.
‘Well done,’ he said, ‘but I believe that lot will do more good at the front end. He’s quite calm now, but be careful.’
Plonking the box down in front of the elephant, I backed away, although I didn’t feel in any danger. Picking up a carrot, it stuffed it into his mouth and, though I wasn’t an expert, the way it tucked in suggested it hadn’t been fed for far too long. As soon as it was absorbed in feeding, Hobbes released his grip, strolled round and patted its head. I noticed his thick, hairy toes were jutting from the ruins of his boots.
He followed my glance and shrugged. ‘I appear to have worn out my boots. It takes a lot of leather to stop an elephant.’
The rain was still falling, Hobbes was soaked and splattered with mud – at least, I hoped it was mud – and I was nearly as wet, having, in all the confusion, never got round to donning my mac. We stood around, waiting until the elephant had eaten its fill, and the back of the trailer was nice and clean. Then Hobbes led it inside.
The stout little man, who answered to the name of ’arry, seemed a decent sort of bloke, who’d just been trying to earn a living and wasn’t responsible for what had happened. Unfortunately, he couldn’t give a detailed description of the man who’d employed him. All he could say was that his employer was young and fit, that he’d worn a dark suit and a blue tie emblazoned with a golden emblem. No one fitting the description could be seen, which didn’t surprise me, for I wouldn’t have wanted to take the blame had my elephant demolished a café.
It was one of those extremely rare occasions when I almost wished I was still working for the Bugle, for I couldn’t yet see any reporters in the burgeoning crowd and wondered, for a moment, whether I might knock off a few hundred words to see how much Editorsaurus Rex Witcherley would pay for it. Yet, the prospect of having to face him again giving me the willies, I abandoned the idea.
Although Hobbes had the situation well under control, several police cars, two fire engines and an ambulance had rushed up, lights flashing. I couldn’t blame them for wanting to be there, for it’s not every day an elephant creates havoc in Sorenchester. With so many police officers attending, and the elephant happy and under control, there was no longer any reason for Hobbes to be there. So, leaving things in their hands, we left. I was glad to go, for I was shivering, dripping, sodden, and the rain was showing no signs of abating. As we walked towards the car, Dregs shook himself all over me and I was too wet to care. Even so, I was in a better state than Hobbes, for being dragged through a river by a rampaging elephant is one of the most effective ways of ruffling an individual’s attire; his clothes had suffered almost as much as his boots.
For once, I didn’t much mind his maniac driving, since it got us home quicker. When safely in the warmth, throwing off my soaked clothes, I wrapped myself in a dressing gown and drank hot tea, while he took first go in the bathroom, his roars suggesting he was enjoying his shower. When he’d finished, I took a long, hot and, as far as I was concerned, well-deserved bath. Afterwards, as if by magic, clean, fresh, dry clothes, nicely pressed and neatly folded, had appeared on my dressing table, while my soggy, dripping relics had vanished. Mrs G, I thought, was a marvel.
Going downstairs, I found Hobbes at the kitchen table, looking as clean and fresh as I felt. Dregs, on the other hand, having picked up on the idea of bath time, had wedged himself in the cupboard beneath the sink, and was resisting any attempts to remove him, until undone by Mrs G’s low cunning. She dropped a scrap of meat into his bowl and, unable to control his hunger, he emerged, sealing his fate. Seizing him round the middle with her skinny arms, she carried him off to the bathtub of doom. To be honest, I didn’t feel sorry for him, despite his hangdog appearance, having become convinced that he only exhibited token resistance for pride’s sake and that, secretly, he rather enjoyed it.
I poured a fresh mug of tea and sat opposite Hobbes, who was staring out of the window in a manner suggestive of deep thought, or total paralysis. The rain having finally stopped, a glint of sunlight hinting the clouds were breaking up, a bird singing, I felt warm, relaxed and at peace with the world.
‘Do you find it strange,’ asked Hobbes, ‘that someone would go to the bother and expense of transporting an elephant as far as Eric’s café only to abandon it?’
I nodded. ‘He must be bonkers – especially if he’d stopped there because he thought it was good. No one thinks the Greasy Pole is good.’
‘Yet, according to Harry, the man had not acted at all strangely, other than being in possession of an elephant just outside Birmingham. And there’s another thing, why would anyone come this way to get to Brighton? It’s miles out of the way.’
‘It just proves he’s bonkers,’ I said and shrugged. It didn’t seem important.
‘Maybe he is, as you say, bonkers. Yet the combination of events is striking. A mysterious young man offers to pay five hundred pounds, a generous sum for a few hours of work, to transport an elephant from Birmingham to Brighton. He then chooses a route taking them miles out of the way, stops at the Greasy Pole and steps outside for a minute, during which, the elephant, which is ravenous and bad-tempered, somehow escapes from a locked trailer and demolishes the café. By then our man is no longer to be seen. The whole scenario seems most unlikely.’
‘Are you suggesting it wasn’t an accident?’
‘I think so. I asked one of the lads at the station to check who was supposed to be transporting an elephant to Brighton Zoo. He phoned back to say there isn’t a zoo in Brighton. What’s more, he’d checked round all the zoos within fifty miles of there and none of them was expecting an elephant.’
‘That’s very strange indeed, unless Harry got muddled up about where he was going.’
‘Harry didn’t strike me as a man who’d get muddled but, you’re right, it is very strange, unless the man had a reason for letting an elephant loose at that particular spot. Perhaps, I’d better have a word with Eric and see if he’s got any enemies.’
‘He must have – anyone who’s ever eaten there.’
Hobbes chuckled. ‘I take your point but, really, I think a bad meal is unlikely to make anyone resort to such a bizarre scheme to get revenge, unless, of course, it killed someone. Mind you, that’s unlikely. People are surprisingly resilient.’
‘Isn’t it weird,’ I said, ‘that this was another incident with a dangerous animal? It’s like we’ve become infested with them.’
He nodded. ‘It is unusual, even for Sorenchester, and I wonder if there might be a connection. I can’t see any obvious link, but it’s worth a little investigation.
‘Right,’ he said, standing up, ‘I’d better go and see Eric. He’s in hospital with shock so I’ll go on my own; I don’t want to alarm him. One more thing, Mr Catt at the Wildlife Park has agreed to look after Jumbo until things are sorted out. He’s rather pleased.’
He walked away with a slight hobble. Even Hobbes wasn’t entirely immune to elephants.
I sat at the kitchen table, staring into space, until Dregs, frenzied and exuberant, burst in on me. It was a hard job keeping him at a safe distance as he shook himself, trying his damnedest to rub his damp fur against my legs. Ending up in a sort of obstacle race round the kitchen, I found I was enjoying the chase almost as much as he was, and a cackling laugh from Mrs G, who’d appeared with a couple of grubby towels, suggested she appreciated the spectacle.
‘Well, dear,’ she said when we
’d quietened down, ‘have you any preferences for your picnic tomorrow?’
That was a poser. My memory stretched back to the rare occasions when mother had packed a picnic for a day on the beach or in the park. It had usually rained, or hailed, forcing us to spend long, gloomy hours in the steamy car, its plastic seats sticking to the backs of my bare legs, a faint aroma of vomit in the air. I’d been sick on the way to Great Aunt Molly’s funeral and, although I’d only been sick on that one occasion, if repeatedly and profusely and, over the years, we’d had several cars, some with leather seats, the brain insisted on plastic seats and vomit. It also insisted on white bread and fish-paste sandwiches in greaseproof paper, packets of salt and vinegar crisps, which I didn’t much like, and packets of cupcakes, which I loved, the whole lot being washed down with stewed, lukewarm tea from a tartan flask, a flask matching the rug on which we’d planned to sit.
In fairness to the past, I did recall an occasion when the sun had shone for us in a flower-strewn meadow beside a lazy river. I remembered the satisfying, rich, earthy aroma of the water, watching fish splash and jump, the way it all started to go wrong when father, smiling for once, biting down on a chocolate cup cake, was stung by a wasp. His tongue swelling up as big and purple as an aubergine, we had to pack everything away as quickly as possible and get him, groaning, back to the car, which had, in the meantime, been thickly plastered in pungent slurry by a careless farmer. I would never forget father’s incoherent grunts of rage and pain as we rushed him to casualty. Since, so far as I could remember, that had been the Caplet family’s most successful picnic ever, I began to panic about subjecting Violet to a similar fiasco and fretted, wondering if I should call the whole thing off, before any harm was done.
‘Are you alright, dear?’
The old girl, interrupting my pondering, made me jump. ‘Umm … yes. I’m alright, but I’m not sure what’s best for a picnic.’
‘Well, dear,’ she said, her face crinkling with thought, ‘how about a nice bit of cold beef? And there’s some chicken in the fridge. I’ll make a nice salad to go with it, and I could bake a veal and ham pie.’
‘That sounds pretty good,’ I said, my mouth beginning to water.
‘That’ll do for a start. Then I’ll put in a crusty loaf and some biscuits, and I was thinking of baking a fruit cake.’
‘Fantastic.’
‘And some ginger beer and wine. How about hard-boiled eggs?’
‘It sounds rather a lot,’ I said, intending to impose some mild restraint, starting to worry about carrying it all. ‘And that’s without any fish-paste sandwiches.’
‘I can do you some fish-paste sandwiches, if you really want.’
‘No, please don’t, but everything else sounds great!’
‘Good,’ she said, smiling. ‘I haven’t made a picnic since my old man went away and there’s a nice hamper just gathering dust in the attic. I’ll get it down after supper and make sure the mice haven’t eaten it.’
‘I can do that.’
‘That’s very kind of you, dear.’
‘Not at all.’ Since Hobbes had, at last, got round to fixing the loose planks in the attic, I was glad of any opportunity to look around up there, being half convinced that great treasures nestled among the piles of junk. ‘I’ll do it now, while I think about it.’
‘Very good, dear. I think you’ll find the hamper behind the trunk, the elephant’s trunk that is, not the wooden one. That reminds me, Mr Goodfellow’s old summer blazer is in the wooden one and you’ll look really smart in it.’
‘OK, then,’ I said, turning away, heading towards the stairs.
The phone rang as I passed it. Hoping it might be Violet, I lifted the receiver, my heart pounding.
‘Congratulations,’ said a disembodied voice, ‘you have won a guaranteed major prize in the Lithuanian State Lottery.’
I slammed the phone down, muttering a curse under my breath as I walked upstairs. They’d got me once. Never again.
11
I stood at the top of the loft-ladder besides the enormous stuffed bear, which was either a former resident or something salvaged from a skip, depending on whether you believed Hobbes or Mrs Goodfellow. The stiletto beam of sunlight stabbing through a crack in the grimy window added little to the feeble glow of a naked light bulb; I waited as my eyes adjusted. Since Mrs Goodfellow, regarding the attic as Hobbes’s space, rarely visited, there was a sprinkling of dust and dirt everywhere. Most of the floor was covered in tatty piles of clothes, bits of old bikes, nameless junk and a rusty steel rack, concealing dozens of Hobbes’s paintings. In my uneducated opinion, he had genuine talent, yet it seemed to embarrass him and he didn’t like to talk about it. I found his work oddly beautiful and deeply disturbing in equal measure. Besides the paintings, something else about the attic made me a little uneasy, yet, since he’d never said I shouldn’t go up, at least since he’d made the flooring safe, I reckoned I was reasonably safe.
Spotting the old wooden trunk I wanted beneath a large cardboard box, I went towards it. As I moved the box aside, the bottom dropped out and hundreds of photographs fell to the floor. Kneeling down, annoyed, intending to pick them up, to put them back, I made the mistake of looking.
They were in rough chronological order, the early ones showing sepia or faded black and white images of Sorenchester, and it was strange to see horses and carts on streets that had otherwise changed little over the years. Hobbes appeared in some, usually in his police constable’s uniform, a splendid moustache obliterating most of his mouth. After I’d shuffled through a few dozen, Mrs Goodfellow made her first appearance, though she wasn’t Mrs Goodfellow then, but a small, solemn-faced girl. She’d once told me how Hobbes pulled her from the smouldering wreck of a house after a bomb had killed the rest of her family during the war. I wondered about her family, what her name had been then, where she’d lived, realising how little I knew about her, feeling guilty that I’d never bothered to ask.
Still, time was passing so I pressed on, carrying out a botched repair on the box, placing it on a crate, apparently one containing a magic lantern, and began piling everything back, dropping a large, brittle brown envelope, spilling a pile of colour prints. They were holiday snaps, a little out of focus, faded in the way excessive washing fades summer clothes. Hobbes had barely changed, except that he was sporting a magnificent pair of sideburns and looked very casual in jeans and a t-shirt. Mrs Goodfellow, looking disturbingly young and attractive, wearing a variety of scandalously short skirts and huge straw hats, was with a man in flared scarlet trousers and a paisley-patterned waistcoat, whose shoulder-length dark hair was tied to his forehead with a beaded band. I guessed, although it was hard to make out any distinguishing features behind the mass of facial foliage, that he was Mr Goodfellow. A youngish woman I couldn’t identify, with protuberant eyes and a long pigtail, wearing a loose brown kaftan, appeared in many of the prints.
On the back of one, Mrs Goodfellow had written The old fellow, Robin, Froggy and me – Monterey, California, 1967. Remembering something about the famous festival there, I giggled at the idea of Hobbes and Mrs G hanging out with hippies. It seemed so wrong.
As I flicked through them, I noticed how Froggy – I assumed that was the young woman’s nickname – was usually by Hobbes’s side, often with a hand on his shoulder, making him look rather nervous, and couldn’t help wondering what sort of relationship they’d had. He’d never mentioned her, being reluctant to talk about his past; I had an idea this was more because he lived his life in the present than because of any reticence. Still, I could ask Mrs G, who was always happy to talk about him; the problem was shutting her up once she’d started.
As I began putting the photos back, I noticed one of Hobbes, messing around in the woods, shirt off, exposing a chest as hairy as a gorilla’s. The image, being vaguely familiar, I wished I could remember where I’d seen it before.
I must have been up there for over an hour before I actually got a move on, puttin
g all the photos back, starting the search for the picnic hamper, which, though it wasn’t difficult to spot, was a pain to reach because of all the boxes and piles of old-fashioned police uniforms and other obsolete clothing in the way. Hobbes might have made a decent living as a theatrical supplier, if any actors matched his girth and shape. I dug through, shifting wooden boxes overflowing with cups and shields, suggesting he’d been some sort of sportsman in his day and, though he didn’t have the physique of a typical athlete, I’d never come across anyone as healthy or so strong.
I struggled with a musty, old canvas tent in my way, hauling it aside, revealing a rusty crate, bound with heavy chains and padlocks. A wave of horror pulsed through me, the hairs on the back of my neck stiffening, my heart racing, because, for some reason, an idea that I’d stumbled across the last resting place of Arthur Crud burst into my head, making me realise I still didn’t entirely trust Hobbes. The thought wouldn’t go away, even though I was probably being ridiculous, the crate looking as if it hadn’t been disturbed for decades. Grabbing the hamper, I turned around, wanting to be downstairs as quickly as possible, nearly forgetting the blazer.
I hurried back towards the trunk and opened it, finding the blazer neatly rolled on top. It turned out to be one of those red, white and blue striped affairs, not my style at all, yet possessing a certain je ne sais quoi, though I wasn’t sure quite what it was. Grabbing it, I shut the lid and hastened towards the ladder.
‘Hurry up, Andy,’ Hobbes yelled from below, ‘supper’s ready.’
Catching my foot on something, overbalancing, I fell headfirst through the hatch, dropping my cargo. He caught me by the ankles.
‘Thank you,’ I said, grateful and uncomfortable if not especially shocked.
‘I take it,’ he said, flipping me the right way up, ‘that you’re hungry?’ He set me down on the carpet and picked up the hamper and blazer.
‘I am rather,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realise I’d been up there so long.’
Inspector Hobbes and the Curse - a fast-paced comedy crime fantasy (unhuman) Page 16