Butler’s lip curled.
‘Then perhaps I am one, Mr Mitchell.’
‘But you don’t intend to tell me?’
‘Our business is official, not personal - will that do?’
Emerson would curse him, thought Mitchell impotently, but there was no point in refusing. Anyone who could penetrate the Institute would make short work of tracing someone.
‘His telephone number is Parley Green 21242.’
‘You mean he’s at his home?’ The colonel’s eyes were as devoid of expression as his voice. ‘You’re sure? ‘
‘There’s a call-box in the entrance hall…’
The hell with it, though; he was tired of being interrogated.
‘He was at home this morning. He said he was going to work there all day.’
‘Thank you, Mr Mitchell.’ Butler half-turned, and then stopped just as Audley had done. ‘Your grandfather commanded the West Mercians in 1918 … What did your father do in the last war?’
Again an abrupt change in the direction of the question. Only this time Mitchell had the feeling it wasn’t accidental; indeed, that none of the questions had been unplanned, but that the whole script had been planned with some obscure objective of their own in mind. And how many of the answers had they known in advance?
‘He worked on a farm in Wiltshire,’ he replied evenly, trying to match Butler’s tone.
‘He was a conscientious objector - a pacifist.’
He stood for a time, staring at nothing. Then he picked up the phone on the windowsill.
‘Can you get me Parley Green 21242, please?’
There had been a question on Butler’s face at the end, but he hadn’t turned it into words, so there was no telling whether it was the right one. But then when he thought about his grandfather, a colonel at twenty-six and a dead hero at twenty-seven, and his father, who’d reached the rank of under-cowman at the same age, he wasn’t sure what the right question was. Or that the answer would be in any book, even the one he was writing.
The phone rang.
‘Your call, Mr Mitchell - there’s no answer. It sounds as though the phone’s out of order. The line’s dead as a doornail, sir.’
2
AS HE INVARIABLY did when he came home by train, Mitchell finished the last lap of his journey by the short-cut along the towpath.
Actually it was no longer a short-cut, because he had outgrown his schoolboy habit of cutting through the goods yard, squeezing between the last line of hoarding and the beginning of the iron railings, and sliding down directly on to the path by way of the river bridge embankment. But it was still the coolest and most pleasant route in summer and the quietest and most relaxing one in winter, giving him an undisturbed quarter of an hour in which to consider the day’s events and the evening’s possibilities.
This evening was ideal for short-cutting: dark, but not too dark, with the towpath lamps catching the mist as it rose from the dark river like steam and picking out the puddles ahead; in fact just light enough to walk and think without fear of stepping off into the water, just dark enough to discourage casual walkers, and just chilly enough to drive courting couples under cover.
Only for once he regretted the reflexes which had automatically taken him along it, rather than among the bright lights and distractions of the town, because the day’s events had been disturbing and the evening, like all evenings since his arrangement with Valeric had broken up, was very likely to be a drag.
And the bloody inescapable thing about this was that the drag was neither his nor Valerie’s, but entirely in Mother’s mind, probably because her married life had been such a succession of contrived tragedies that she was no longer able to identify a happy ending when she met one. For Mother, boy meets girl had to be one extreme or the other - happy ever after or paradise lost. She just couldn’t accept that rather than get married, girl wanted to become a publishing tycoon and boy wanted to write a book on the Hindenburg Line.
But that was not what was worrying him now - in fact it was not even important, only irritating. What was important was his failure so far to raise Professor Emerson at Parley Green in order to warn him about the afternoon’s mystery men, and to apologise in advance for his big mouth. It might not matter at all, because Emerson wasn’t the sort of man to take offence so easily, but that only made him feel more guilty. So if the phone was still dead he’d just have to get the car out and drive over there himself after supper, no matter how much it offended Mother.
As it undoubtedly would offend her. And as he’d now reached the first of the weir bridges he had only another five minutes in which to frame an explanation …
He moved to one side to allow a wide berth to two men he could see approaching from the other side of the bridge, the first he had seen since he had come down to the riverside. The water, he noticed, was not quite as high as might have been expected after the previous day’s rain, with no more than half the curved weir gates raised. But then it had been a dryish autumn so far.
He needed an explanation for Mother - it would be no good telling her about the enigmatic Dr Audley and his uninformative colleague, because she’d only make a great dramatic production of it straightaway. But a mention of the professor would be like a red rag to her; she was quite irrationally jealous of the poor man.
‘Mr Mitchell?’
One of the two men checked his stride as they came alongside him.
‘Eh?’ Mitchell looked at him in surprise, fearful for an instant that he was about to be asked for the price of a cup of tea. But the educated voice and respectable overcoat reassured him. This was evidently a day for strangers.
‘It is Mr Mitchell, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. But I don’t believe - oooof’
Two hands grasped him from behind simultaneously, the first gripping his arm at the elbow and pulling him towards the railings while the other, in the small of his back, turned him sideways, face to the river. Their combined force slammed him into railings brutally. His briefcase was wrenched from his fingers.
Oh, God! he thought despairingly, terrified not for the £20 in his breast-pocket, but for the three months’ work in the briefcase, muggers - mindless thugs who would as soon empty its contents into the river as give it back to him once they had found it all to be valueless –
‘Please don’t - ‘ he gasped. But the words were cut off as the man who had spoken to him grabbed his free arm, bending him double over the top rail so that his feet almost left the ground.
The hold on each of his arms tightened, but the pressure on his back slackened as the hands there shifted down his body to the inside of his thighs. He found himself staring down uncomprehendingly at the olive-green water six feet below him, where it first rippled against the closed weir gate on his left and then slid in a smooth cataract into the open one directly beneath. The roar of the weir was deafening.
Even before the hands on his thighs betrayed his assailants’ intention the sight and sound of the water had sounded an alarm signal in his brain, tensing his body into rigidity.
Not his briefcase - oh, Christ! Not his briefcase and not muggers -
Then he was flying up and over, arms and legs released, flailing and kicking wildly against nothing, darkness and light whirling and the water and noise coming up to meet him - exploding in his face - dragging him downwards. His knees struck the concrete lip of the weir spillway and he was instantly swept over it, his shoulder striking the first leg of the bridge with a bone-cracking shock. He felt himself tumbling and rolling helplessly, and then something slammed into the pit of his stomach - one moment he had been part of the torrent, and the next it was bursting over him, battering him and filling his eyes and nose and mouth. He fought the unbearable pressure on his lungs until his chest seemed full of fire and consciousness was only pain.
Then, unbelievably, he could breathe and breathe and breathe, each breath a wonderful burning agony. He was still somehow suspended in noise and darkness and water, but in an incompr
ehenisible bubble of air.
Where am I?
There was a slimy hardness under his cheek and under his fingers. He groped slowly over the slime until he felt a solid object - a stanchion of some sort? A pillar?
God! He was still under the bridge - under the bridge and wedged in the angle of a supporting pillar and an iron cross-girder, wedged like a piece of river flotsam. The lower half of his body was held against the upright by the solid cataract of water racing through the open gate, a stream now buffeting him and cascading over him in a great arch of spray. But the upper half was lying in the protection of the closed gate, in the mere trickle coming from underneath it; it had been that diverted spray caused by his own body which had been drowning him as he struggled instinctively to raise his head above it, and only in beginning to lose consciousness had his mouth and nostrils dropped into safety below it.
Slowly he tested the pieces of his body. Each piece moved, although he was now aware that the freezing force with which he had been rammed against the pillar had been tremendous. In fact, he could feel nothing except a roaring, numbing cold spreading through him, beyond pain and fear. He had to get out of it, away from it, or it would kill him just as surely as the river itself had tried to do.
But it hadn’t been the river … a vague memory of events which had occurred seconds before he had been swept under the bridge asserted itself. Someone had deliberately thrown him into the weir, deliberately and unbelievably … casually.
No, not casually -
‘It is Mr Mitchell, isn ‘t it?
The noise all around him was so scarefying that he couldn’t hold his thoughts together.
‘It is Mr Mitchell, isn’t it?
It was Mr Mitchell, and no one else but Mr Mitchell, who was meant to be drowning now, drifting at the bottom of the Conservancy basin below the weir - or tumbling round and round in the undertow in that crashing water a few feet away. The thought of it was blurred and confused for a moment, and shot with panic as he realised that they must be standing directly above him, scanning the basin in the bright light of the lamps on the bridge. And then the panic turned to anger which was like a small fierce fire inside him, a point of spontaneous combustion in the heart of a block of ice.
He twisted his position, shrugging off a new jet of water and holding his breath as he searched for something solid to hold. He wasn’t going to drown for them, and he wasn’t going to surrender to the cold for them, and above all he wasn’t going to die for any murdering bastards, not if it was the last thing left in the world to do.
One way or another, he just wasn’t going to give them that satisfaction.
3
IT WASN’T UNTIL he reached over for the bolt on the inside of the back-garden door that Mitchell understood how frozen he was.
He could feel the outline of the metal, but his fingers wouldn’t grasp it: it was like trying to pick up a needle while wearing a thick woollen glove. In the end he abandoned the attempt and clambered over the door instead, no longer worried about his ruined suit and remembering too late as he dropped down on to the concrete path on the other side that he had only one shoe on.
As he limped towards the kitchen door he realised that there was no chance of unlocking it and getting upstairs without alerting his mother. If he couldn’t operate the bolt he certainly couldn’t turn that awkward little key, even supposing he could establish in the darkness where it was on his key-ring - supposing too that his keys were still in his pocket.
Which meant she would see him in all his glory - poor drowned Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead - upon which sight she would probably either fall into hysterics or drop instantly in a dead faint, preferably the latter. But in any case, the light was on behind the kitchen curtains, so there was positively no help for it. It was Mother or pneumonia.
He thumped with his numbed hand on the door and stood back a pace, praying for the gift of tongues. There would be a time and a place and a person for the truth, but here and now and Mother fulfilled none of the necessary conditions: now was the time for straight, quick and unashamed lying.
The door shivered and swung open, the brightness of the interior making him blink.
‘Now, Mother -‘
‘Paul, oh Paul - thank God!’ Her voice cracked with emotion. ‘Thank God!’
‘Now, Mother - I’m quite all right - I simply f-fell into the river -‘
His excuse lost impetus as he registered something very wrong with her reaction. She shouldn’t be thanking God … she should be going white with horror and surprise.
‘Oh, my darling, thank God!’
She wound her arms round his neck before he could stop her, ignoring his saturated clothes. It was as though she hadn’t heard a word he’d said.
‘M-mother - ‘ he gritted his teeth ‘ -I fell in the river, that’s all.’
It shouldn’t have sounded so completely unconvincing - it was the goddamn truth that was outlandish - but somehow his words carried no more conviction than if he’d tried to pass off his appearance as the result of his usual evening swim.
She half disengaged from the embrace suddenly, though without letting go of him, as if she still needed physical contact to reassure her that he was flesh and blood.
‘Of course you did, darling. You just fell in.’
He stared at her in absolute bewilderment, but she avoided his eyes. There was a damp patch now in the front of her dress.
‘You fell in the river, sir?’
Mitchell swivelled his head to his right, towards the door into the hallway.
A policeman.
‘You’re Mr Mitchell, sir? Mr Paul Mitchell?’
‘It is Mr Mitchell, isn’t it?
A policeman? A policeman with the same question as the thug on the bridge? Before he could think about answering, his mother broke the moment of silence.
‘That’s right. Constable. My son fell in the river.’
Just as the policeman’s voice had been disbelievingly neutral, so his mother’s tone was too emphatic to be convincing. Which could only mean that he was going crazy, that he had hit his head and was in delayed shock - or that everyone else was crazy. It had to be one or the other.
‘What’s going on? What -‘
Mitchell winced as his mother tightened her grip on his arm. That was one bit of him that had taken a knock on the bridge, and not the only bit either. His shoulder was a raw, throbbing ache.
‘Mother, what’s happened?’
The grip didn’t slacken, but her eyes were blank.
‘Now, darling, you’re soaking wet and you’ll catch your death of cold if you don’t get these wet things off. So you just run upstairs and get into a hot bath at once.’
He stared into the obstinately expressionless face for one second to confirm the suspicion within him. She was now behaving so wildly out of character, with her emotions so completely battened down, that it was obvious she was trying to protect him from something. And being Mother, she was thereby making it a cast-iron, copper-bottomed certainty that whatever it was, it would get him for sure.
He looked at the policeman: youngish, fresh-faced, but sharp-looking … for all his apparent neutrality, with a predatory glint in his eye, as though he’d maybe got his teeth into something worth chewing.
‘Constable, can you kindly tell me what’s happened?’
‘I was hoping you’d tell me that, sir, actually.’
‘Paul, darling -‘
‘Shut up. Mother.’
Without looking back at her he loosened her fingers from his arm.
‘What do you mean - I’d tell you? Tell you what?’
‘Paul -‘
‘Tell you what?’
The young policeman considered him thoughtfully.
‘You said you’d fallen in the river, sir. You mean you fell into it by accident, I presume?’
Someone must have seen something - seen it, and maybe phoned the police. But then that was maybe twenty minutes or more since, and
they’d have surely gone straight to the weir first, and when he’d finally climbed back on to the bridge there hadn’t been a soul in sight. He’d made sure of that.
It didn’t make sense, it made nonsense. But the time for lying was over - Mother would just have to take the truth on the chin. Or at least as much of the insane truth as there was.
‘What would you say, Constable, if I told you that two men tried to kill me this evening? That they grabbed me on the bridge over Godsey Weir and threw me in?’
He heard his mother’s sharp intake of breath beside him.
‘Is that what you’re saying, sir?’
‘Would you believe me?’
He was a little surprised at the young man’s reaction. From polite disbelief he should have graduated to irritation on being handed such a cock-and-bull story, but instead he now seemed remarkably understanding, almost sympathetic.
‘You were attacked on the towpath, sir? By two men?’
‘On the weir bridge.’
‘On the weir bridge - just so. They pushed you in.’
Mitchell nodded uneasily. He had expected to be disbelieved when he first told the story, not to be believed.
‘Then you’re very lucky not to have been drowned, sir. That weir’s a very dangerous place. You must be a very strong swimmer indeed.’
‘No, I - I’m not much of a swimmer at all. B-but I was lucky, you see.’
‘Lucky?’
‘I g-got caught under the bridge, on one of the pillars. They threw me in next to one of the gates that was lowered - closed -and the current pushed me to one side, where there was hardly any water coming through. It’s quite easy to climb back on to the bridge from underneath.’
He looked at the policeman pleadingly.
‘Do you know the weir?’
‘Yes, sir. I know it well. And you simply climbed back on to the bridge from underneath?’
‘Yes -‘
‘And these two men - the two men who attacked you - where were they?’
‘Where - ?’
The question caught him unprepared.
‘Ah - well, you see - I waited underneath - I waited until I thought they’d be sure I’d drowned. I m-must have waited ten minutes or quarter of an hour. I m-made sure they weren’t there before I came out.’
Other Paths to Glory Page 2