by Simon Okotie
How did he know that this particular instance of redialling didn’t belong to another class of redialling altogether? How, more specifically, did he know that this redialling belonged to the class of ‘urgent caller wishing to speak to an actual person rather than a machine’ rather than to the class of ‘diffident caller not enjoying speaking to a machine but would do so if they had to,’ or the class of ‘indecisive caller not thinking they would leave a message but then, immediately on hanging up, deciding that they would leave a message after all’? How could he be sure that the caller in this instance didn’t, in fact, belong to both of these latter classes: that they were, in other words, a diffident and indecisive caller, even if they were not diffident and/or indecisive in non-phone-related matters, but that they had overcome their phone-related diffidence and indecisiveness sufficiently, having hung up, to decide immediately to redial and leave a message, or, if they had not overcome their phone-related diffidence and indecisiveness had at least been able to hold those qualities in abeyance, momentarily, whilst re-dialling Richard Knox’s number? And in the latter case of holding these qualities in abeyance rather than overcoming them (with the implication, in the latter case, of greater decisiveness, resolve and follow-through) how could he know that they would hold their nerve as it were on this second occasion of dialling and actually now leave a message? He had to confess, at that moment, as his right heel continued its elevation and the ball of that foot continued its reversal towards the edge of the lowest stair, that he didn’t actually know that the caller in question had redialled in order to communicate the urgency of the call to Isobel Absalon rather than redialling after initial diffidence or indecisiveness or both and it was for this reason that he would have to wait and see whether the caller actually left a message on this second occasion of dialling and, if they did leave a message, how this message pertained to the disappearance of his colleague, Marguerite, last seen on the trail of Harold Absalon, the Mayor’s transport advisor, who had been missing.
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The ball of his right foot continued its journey towards the edge of the bottom stair until it had crossed that edge leaving just his toes in contact with that step. Even these, he found, before too long, had crossed that threshold, had moved over the edge of that step. They did so one-after-the-other, rather than all at once. And the order in which they crossed that threshold, one-after-the-other, rather than all at once, was starting with the little toe, then moving on to the next largest, then the next largest; finally the big toe and the toe next to it crossed the threshold near simultaneously, so that was where his assertion that the toes had crossed that line one-after-the-other fell down, as it were. But he did not pick himself up on this slip of the mind for the simple reason that he felt it would not be of benefit to his investigation, at least not immediately; another reason why he did not pick himself up on this slip was that, as he swivelled his body, opening up his chest, his right hand moving from the finial at the top of the stair post, Isobel Absalon walked past him through the hallway towards the sound of the baby crying. Was she doing so, he wondered, out of maternal concern? Or was this manoeuvre simply designed to thwart his own efforts to move through that same hallway and down the corridor so as to enter that room, a room that he sensed contained the solution to the strange conundrum of the disappearance of Marguerite and, perhaps, the previous disappearance of Harold Absalon, the Mayor’s transport advisor? He could not wait until the next chapter to discover the answer to these and other questions; instead he acted immediately, instinctively: the way in which he acted was to change the trajectory of his right foot, mid-air, as it is known, such that, instead of that foot tracing a path towards a position adjacent to his left foot, he as it were reprogrammed the mission parameters of that right foot such that its projected landing point would be a location between Isobel and Harold Absalon on the hallway floor. Now he knew that in reprogramming the parameters relating to this part of his anatomy (and if only he could reprogramme all parts of his anatomy in this straightforward way!) that fine judgements were required if the outcome were to be as he wished: namely the right foot landing between Isobel and Harold Absalon on the hallway floor. The reason that fine judgements were required in this area was that Isobel Absalon was not stationary and he judged that even if Harold Absalon were now stationary then this situation would not pertain for long given that Isobel Absalon had just walked through that hallway towards the sound of the baby crying. He judged, in short, that his mission to unearth the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of his colleague, Marguerite, depended upon him interposing himself between Isobel and Harold Absalon in their journey towards the child. Given this moveable feast, if one can call it that, then he could not be sure that by the time his reprogrammed right foot had changed trajectory from a general backwards movement (from his viewpoint) to a more sideways movement (again, as before) before landing on the hallway floor, that the foot in question would interpose itself between Isobel and Harold Absalon. In other words, even though his right foot was now travelling at some speed through the air, albeit still, momentarily, in a generally front-to-back rather than the required left-to-right trajectory given that its reprogramming had not yet quite reached the necessary nerve endings in that peripheral location, he could not be sure that by the time it had landed in the aforementioned location, a location we could perhaps imagine as marked out on the floor of the hallway in question with the outline of a right foot with the initials ‘RF’ written within it, akin, to spell it out for the slower-witted amongst us, to the situation with the helicopter landing pad’s outline and ‘H’ symbol painted within it, that Harold Absalon would still be in the location that he was currently occupying next to the front doorway. He sensed, he hoped again in short, that, even though he had let his own right foot know that it did not have time to land in the space next to his left but would need to change its trajectory mid-air so as to avoid this adjacent stopover to the left but to move directly to a position that he hoped would intervene between Isobel and Harold Absalon, that Harold Absalon may have overtaken him before his right foot landed, in which case he – our investigator – would have lost any advantage accruing from having interposed a part of his anatomy – the right foot with its associated leg, all or part thereof – between Isobel and Harold Absalon. He felt, in essence (to express, in a different way, the brevity towards which he was aiming) that unless he – and in particular his right foot (etc) – acted swiftly, that Harold Absalon would overtake him before he could ground that right foot in a position between the latter (that is, Harold Absalon) and Isobel Absalon. That was why he had acted with the speed with which he had acted on seeing Isobel Absalon pass him through the hallway; similarly that was why his right foot was travelling so quickly through the air towards its new destination which, were the respective positions of Isobel and Harold Absalon to remain not too dissimilar to their respective positions in relation to him at that moment, would be between wife and husband, to use that shorthand.
This was not to say, he thought, as the answerphone ceased its rewinding, the phone continued to ring and the baby continued its crying in the room at the end of the corridor, that his right foot would actually need to be planted on the floor of the hallway, as it were, in advance of Harold Absalon overtaking him; no: so long as that foot, associated leg and as much, in fact, of the remainder of his anatomy was in a position to block Harold Absalon’s passage through the hallway then it was immaterial whether that foot had actually been planted, at that stage, firmly or otherwise, upon the floor of that hallway. The planting of the foot related more, he thought, to the likely subsequent action of moving the left foot in the direction of Isobel Absalon and the room containing the crying child since, without that foundation on the right hand side it would be most difficult to accomplish the subsequent manoeuvre so described.
He realised, as he noticed, he thought, the husband actually starting to move in pursuit of the wife, that he needed to clarify something from e
arlier: that in saying that the original destination of his right foot was a position adjacent to his left, that this adjacent position should be taken to be to the immediate right of that left foot. He did not want his cadets and any others following him by whatever mysterious means to think that he was suggesting any kind of contortion at this key moment in his investigation. Relieved to have made this clarification, he noticed that his right foot had finally made the switch, mid-air, that he had been hoping for some time that it would make: it moved, following the receipt of its reprogramming, from a generally front-to-back motion to a generally left-to-right motion, as he noticed, with surprise, that Isobel Absalon had disappeared from view in front of him.
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How had someone of his understanding and experience allowed Isobel Absalon to give him the slip, as he thought it was known, in this way? Granted that Isobel Absalon had only momentarily given him the slip, in that he felt sure that she must still be within the building – in the ground-floor room containing the baby. In fact he knew that, in any case, he wasn’t using the term ‘giving someone the slip’ in the textbook fashion that he had been taught: he thought, on reflection, that this expression could only effectively be applied to exterior rather than to interior pursuits. Why was this the case, he wondered, as his right foot continued its left-to-right flight through the air between husband and wife? The reason that it was only really possible to give someone the slip during an exterior pursuit, as he referred to it, related to the much greater possibilities for disappearance in the wider world outside of a building (and in referring to ‘the wider world’ he was thinking, as the phone commenced another ring-cycle such that it almost disrupted this train of thought, of the world immediately outside the building in question, that is the wider world of the city rather than the even wider world of the countryside around the city). Essentially there were many more nooks and crannies and hiding places in the city, given the higher population density and the number, height, depth and sheer complexity of design of the buildings and other structures that such a high population density necessitated. This meant that, when one was pursuing someone out in the open, which is another way of saying outside of any building, including the one that he was currently inhabiting in pursuit of the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of his colleague, Marguerite, last seen on the trail of Harold Absalon, the Mayor’s transport advisor, who had been missing, that it was easier, he thought, than in the countryside, to give someone the slip – often all that was involved was going around a corner in that densely populated city such that your pursuer lost sight of you for a sufficient duration to enable you to slip away – into a doorway, say, or down an unlikely alleyway, or over a barbed wire fence, such that, on turning the corner your pursuer would not know, out of the many and diverse options that you could have taken in your continued journey, which way you had chosen to travel – all of this on foot of course; this would leave your pursuer with little option but to guess which way you had gone, perhaps based on a hunch which was itself based, perhaps, on experience of pursuit gained over many years – or in our investigator’s case over many decades – but it would, at that stage, be no more than a hunch, and at the moment, or thereabouts, that the pursuer, having gone around that corner, continued their journey but not in the same direction as the pursued had taken then it could be said that the pursued had given the pursuer ‘the slip’.
This was not, of course, to say that you could not give a pursuer the slip in the countryside: there were ditches, hedgerows, haylofts and numerous other features that one could, of course, use to one’s advantage when one was being pursued in the countryside. However, these features were, on the whole, much thinner on the ground, as it were, than the features of the urban environment; similarly there were typically many fewer people in the countryside than in the city which meant that it was less likely that one could use others – similarly dressed, whether by coincidence or by design – as an opportunistic or prearranged decoy to divert the attention of your pursuer to these others to give yourself the opportunity of giving your pursuer the slip. Nor was it to say that the countryside was not a good place to go if you wanted to disappear: in many ways it was a superior place to go than the city under these circumstances (and the phrase ‘needle in a haystack’ came into his mind at that moment). It could be a superior place to hide than the city for numerous reasons, which included the sheer amount of countryside that there was – the sheer, that is, surface area of the countryside that one’s pursuer would need to traverse in searching for you – combined, he thought, as his right foot landed on the floor of the hallway in advance, he thought, of Harold Absalon, with the scarcity of people who lived in these more rural locations, meaning one’s pursuer would have fewer people to ask, ‘Have you seen this man/woman?’ with the concomitant likeness28 (as before). Furthermore, any response to this and other questions asked of the people local to that environment were less likely to be intelligible to the city sleuth given the unusual accents that were often current in those locales.
Leaving all that aside for now, he returned to the question of why one could not really give someone the slip during interior pursuits (and his mind, largely without his bidding, given the juxtaposition of the words ‘slip’, ‘interior’ and the plural ‘pursuits’, could not help ruing the opportunity of following Isobel Absalon into the first-floor bedroom that he’d now missed). He realised that in some circumstances it was, of course, possible to give someone the slip during interior pursuits, but that those circumstances did not pertain to the situation that he currently found himself in. The circumstances that were required to make it much more likely that one could give someone the slip during an interior pursuit related, he realised, as another telephone ring-cycle cut in, potentially, again, disrupting his on-going investigation into the disappearance of his colleague, Marguerite, to the size of the building in which one was conducting the interior pursuit: the larger the building, the easier it would be to give someone the slip, he concluded, somewhat abruptly. In other words, the more that the interior of the building in question resembled the ‘outside world’ as it were, whether in its urban or more rural manifestations, then to that extent, he thought, as he started advancing his left foot as a precursor to pursuing Isobel Absalon, one was more likely to give someone the slip, as Isobel Absalon had done, momentarily, during an interior pursuit. Given the fact that the house that he was currently located within did not resemble the outside world, even though it was quite a sizeable house, meant that he was confident that Isobel Absalon had not, in fact, given him the slip; he was confident, in short, that were he to enter the room that Isobel Absalon had entered that, given the containment naturally afforded by medium-, or even larger-sized residential buildings, he would find Isobel Absalon within that room. It was for this reason that he was confident that Isobel Absalon had not, in fact, given him the slip and that he had used that phrase in error on this occasion.