The White Mercedes

by Philip Pullman

  He stood astride his bike, the hot sun beating on his back, and then remembered the ice lollies, melting in the carrier bag. He tore one open automatically, so as not to waste it, and stood there gazing stupidly up at the blank wood, the blank windows.

  A little further down the road, a car door opened and a shirtsleeved policeman got out. Chris didn’t even notice when the man appeared beside him, his expression invisible under the peaked cap and sunglasses.

  ‘Looking for someone?’ he said.

  Chris had a mouthful of ice. He was conscious of the stuff melting down the stick and over his fingers, and felt at a disadvantage.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said when he’d swallowed. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Who were you looking for?’

  Then Chris remembered that the house wasn’t legally theirs, that Jenny and the others had been squatting. If he said anything about her, he might get her into trouble.

  ‘A friend,’ he said.

  ‘What’s this friend’s name?’

  ‘Why? I mean what’s going on? What’s happened here?’

  ‘Did your friend live here?’

  ‘Yeah. But—’

  ‘What’s your friend’s name?’

  The ice finally dropped off the stick on to the pavement, splashing a drop or two on to the policeman’s polished shoe.

  ‘Look, what’s going on?’ Chris said anxiously. ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s happened? Are they all right? Has there been an accident or something?’

  The policeman seemed to be sizing him up. Then he took off his sunglasses and said, ‘Look, son, I’m not trying to be difficult. Was he a good friend of yours, this feller?’

  Chris’s mind raced. It sounded as if something bad had happened—but not to Jenny, or the policeman would have said she.

  ‘No, just someone I know. His name’s Derek.’

  ‘Well, your friend was arrested yesterday and charged with selling drugs. Was that what you came here for?’

  ‘What? Drugs?’ Chris was gaping with astonishment. ‘Me? Course not!’

  ‘No, naturally,’ said the policeman, taking out a notebook. ‘Can I have your name and address?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘In case your friend needs your help. In case we need to get in touch with you.’

  Like most people of his age, Chris had had little to do with the police, but he feared and mistrusted them. On one occasion, earlier that year, he’d been cycling home late with his friend Carl, and two policemen in a car had made them stop and give their names and addresses, and insisted on checking their bicycles to see if they were marked with their postcodes. Chris remembered feeling frightened and helpless, even though he’d done nothing wrong, and he felt the same now. It simply never occurred to him to give a false name and address; and if it had, he’d have imagined that the truth would be found out and it would make things worse. So, angry and resentful, he gave his real name and address. The policeman wrote them down.

  ‘What about the others living here?’ Chris asked.

  ‘Others? What others?’

  ‘Derek’s friends.’

  ‘Who might they have been?’

  ‘You want me to give you their names, right? So you can look for them too?’

  The policeman looked at him steadily. ‘If they’re involved, and if you know anything about them, and if you withhold that from the police, then you’re involved too, sunshine.’

  ‘I just told you my bloody name, and it’s not sunshine.’

  ‘This is true,’ said the policeman. ‘It’s a good thing I know you’re telling the truth, Chris. I can always tell. Well, now, whoever was living here was doing so illegally. Squatting, in a word. They’d been warned to leave, so they were liable to arrest for trespass in any case. How helpful do you want to be to your friends?’

  The meaning was clear: I’m going to tell you nothing, but the more we talk, the more you’ll tell me. Chris found himself flushing with anger. He couldn’t ask about Jenny without incriminating her.

  ‘Where are they now?’ he said.

  ‘In St Aldate’s police station, I expect.’

  Chris turned to go. He dropped the carrier bag with Jenny’s ice-cream into the nearest litter bin, and rode away with his head thudding.

  —

  As soon as he got home, and his mother had gone into the garden so that he could do it without being overheard, he phoned the police station.

  ‘Hello—I’m trying to find someone—she’s missing…’

  He had to give his name and address. Having had time to think, he gave a false one.

  ‘And who’s the missing person?’

  ‘Her name’s Jenny. Er—this is stupid. I’m sorry, I don’t know her surname.’

  ‘Where does she live?’

  He hesitated. ‘Somewhere in east Oxford. Off the Cowley Road. I’m not sure exactly. She’s about seventeen years old, and she’s slim, and she’s got short dark hair—oh, she’s white—got a Yorkshire accent.’

  ‘How long’s she been missing?’

  ‘About…twenty-four hours.’

  ‘And what’s your connection with her? I mean, do you work with her, is she a friend, or what?’

  ‘She’s a friend.’

  ‘Girlfriend?’

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  ‘You don’t know where she lives, you don’t know her surname—what, did she not turn up for a date or something?’

  Chris felt foolish and bitter. ‘Yeah, something like that.’

  ‘She comes from Yorkshire, you say? Could she have gone home?’

  ‘Well…I suppose she could.’

  ‘Why don’t you try there, then? We haven’t got much to go on here, have we?’

  ‘No, but…I think she might have been arrested, that’s all.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘What, here in Oxford?’

  ‘Yeah. Possibly.’

  ‘Just hang on a minute.’

  The phone went quiet. A short while later it spoke again.

  ‘Nobody of that description has been arrested here, I can tell you that. Would you mind telling me what—’

  Chris stopped listening. He put the phone down.

  Eight

  That evening, Mike Fairfax was attending a meeting somewhere, so Chris and his mother had supper together on their own. Instead of eating at the big table in the kitchen as they did when Mike was there, they had pizza on their laps watching television. Chris was glad that they didn’t have to face each other and talk. There was only one thing that was occupying his mind, and he didn’t want to talk about that.

  His mother was a good-looking woman of forty, whose dark hair and skin led people to think of her as Arabian, even though she wasn’t. She worked as an art teacher in a private school, and from time to time she half-seriously took up pottery, or weaving, or some other craft, and got quite good at it before losing interest. She had feared that she was less interesting, less gifted and magnetic than Chris’s father, and she was probably right. She suspected that Chris enjoyed his company more than hers, and she was right there too. All in all, she was an unhappy woman, and only Mike Fairfax had saved her from becoming bitter; but now, in love with him, she gave off a glow of contentment that even Chris noticed.

  That evening, as they sat together in the untidy comfort of their living room, she felt that she’d been neglecting her son, and realised that they hadn’t even planned a holiday that year. In all the changes that had been taking place, it had simply been forgotten.

  ‘I’ve just thought!’ she said. ‘We haven’t got anything planned…’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘A holiday. I should have thought…It just slipped my mind. How stupid.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. I don’t want to go away in any case.’

  ‘Oh, come on, don’t be a stick in the mud. We always go away.’

  ‘With Dad, yeah.’

  ‘Well…things are different. But we
should still have a holiday.’

  ‘Everything’s different. Anyway, Barry Miller needs me full-time. He said so.’

  ‘What, for ever? It’s only a holiday job. Is he forbidding you to go away or something?’

  ‘There’s nowhere I want to go. Anyway…’

  He didn’t know how to put it. She guessed what he meant, though, and, feeling confident for once, she said: ‘Anyway what?’

  ‘Well, I mean, who would it be?’

  ‘What d’you mean, who would it be?’

  ‘Well, me and you, or what? You talking about Mike as well?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘No reason why not, I’m just saying would he be coming with us?’

  ‘I don’t know, Chris. I haven’t asked. I only this minute thought about it. I just thought that we hadn’t planned a holiday, and I thought you might like to go abroad somewhere, that’s all.’

  He shrugged. ‘Well…Normally…I don’t know, Mum. I just hadn’t sort of reckoned on it.’

  ‘Well, wouldn’t you like to?’

  ‘No, actually. If you’re asking what I want, well, what I want is to stay here and work for Barry Miller. I don’t want to go anywhere.’

  They were both watching the television rather than each other, though neither could have said what the programme was about. She took a careful sip of her wine.

  ‘Would it make a difference if Mike didn’t come?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  There was another pause.

  Then Chris said, ‘Why don’t you and Mike go off by yourselves?’

  ‘What? Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Why’s that silly?’

  ‘I’m not leaving you on your own.’

  ‘I can cope. I managed all right at Dad’s. I managed here, actually, before you met Mike.’

  ‘I know, darling, I know you can. It’s not that. But I couldn’t go off and leave you on your own, absolutely not. I just can’t understand why you want to spend all summer working at a boring little job in Cowley.’

  ‘Because I like Barry Miller, that’s why. And it’s not boring. And if you’re going to twist this round and make out it’s me preventing you from having a holiday, I’m not, OK? I can look after myself and I’m happy to look after myself so if you and Mike want to go off somewhere that’s fine, that’s OK, that’s no problem. Just go.’

  —

  The last thing Chris wanted to do for the rest of that evening was sit and watch television. Restless, unhappy, desperate to see Jenny again and hold her safe in his arms, he left the house as soon as he’d stacked the dishwasher, and cruised the warm evening streets on his bicycle, scanning every face, and finding her nowhere. Only when it was completely dark did he turn reluctantly back towards home.

  —

  The girl on whose floor Jenny spent Sunday night had left her old job and gone to work in a café which had become popular with the sort of people who liked to be seen drinking fashionable foreign beer and listening to the latest fashionable live music, which that summer was jazz. The café sold calzone and pizza and baked potatoes on cast-iron plates and salad in wooden bowls, and the staff sounded even more aggressively upper-class than the customers.

  They needed another waitress, and since Jenny had run out of money, her friend suggested that she come along and meet the manager. He was called Tommy Sanchez. He was in his thirties, stocky and husky-voiced; his long dark hair was tied back in a pony tail. He had the same public-school background as his staff and customers. Jenny wasn’t the sort of girl he normally hired, but he offered her a job starting that Monday night. She knew she was lucky to find one so quickly; she had no choice but to accept.

  She was becoming more and more aware of the effect she had on certain kinds of men. They were usually much older than she was, old enough to be her father, and they seemed to sense some quality in her which aroused them, and then they stopped being men and became something like tigers or wolves, bright-eyed, cruel-mouthed, intent not on kindness or friendship or love but on consuming her, destroying her, rending her apart.

  Boys and men she liked and trusted, on the other hand, were either those whose interests lay elsewhere, like Derek and Ollie, or those who carried a sort of innocence with them, like Chris. She’d never met anyone quite like him. He was no coward, no weakling, nor was he just ignorant or childish, but there was something clean and unknowing about him, like a pure-hearted inhabitant of some unpolluted culture a long way away. There was nothing more she wanted to do, in the time they spent together at Rose Hill, than to tell him all about her father and how he’d blasted and destroyed her childhood. But at the same time she knew it would shock him; she feared that he would come to see her as she saw herself, corrupt, poisonous, tainted.

  And when she met Tommy Sanchez, she recognised him at once for the type she knew, and made up her mind to keep clear of him as much as possible. And to spend all her spare time looking for Chris.

  —

  While she did that, he was looking for her. The city of Oxford isn’t big enough to get lost in, and it would have been possible for them to meet by chance; but bad luck kept them apart.

  For one thing, Jenny was working in the café all evening, which was the main time that Chris had to look for her, whereas during the morning and afternoon he was usually at the warehouse or out in the van. Secondly, if she’d been working in any other café he might have gone in for a coffee or something to eat, and would have come across her that way, but the year before when the place had opened Chris had gone there looking for a summer job, and Tommy Sanchez had been so unpleasant that he swore he’d never go there again. And finally, Jenny had to move. She couldn’t sleep on her friend’s floor for ever, and places in Oxford were almost impossible to find. Now that she had a steady job she could at least afford a room, even though it wasn’t in the city. She found a bed-sit in Kidlington, a bus ride to the north, the place where Barry Miller lived; so for much of the time she wasn’t even in Oxford.

  Their paths did cross. On one occasion they nearly came face to face on the pavement, but a group of foreign students walked between them and they moved on without seeing each other. And once in the late afternoon, as Jenny was sitting in the hot minibus going down the Banbury Road to work, she saw Chris riding up the other way, grim-faced, intent and withdrawn. She asked the driver to stop, and jumped out immediately, but Chris was too far away to hear her calling, and he didn’t look back.

  Finally, swallowing her misgivings, telling herself not to be stupid, Jenny went to Rose Hill and rang the bell of Chris’s father’s house. All she had to do was ask his address, after all.

  But there was no one there, and an estate agent’s sign in the front garden said SOLD. Chris’s father and Diane had moved out to their cottage near Long Hanborough, and the Rose Hill house, with vacant possession, had sold quickly. The bell resounded in the empty hallway, and no one answered, and Jenny came away defeated and unhappy.

  Nine

  About ten days after he’d last seen Jenny, Chris was sitting in the warehouse checking through some stage lights that had just come back from hire when Barry Miller came in. The two of them were alone; Dave and Tony were out on a job somewhere. Barry sat down on the bench near Chris and picked up a switch, fiddling with it absently. He looked preoccupied.

  ‘How’s the chalet?’ said Chris.

  ‘Oh, fine…That infra-red thingy hasn’t come through yet. Suppose I ought to give ’em a ring. Hey, you done any plastering?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Joinery? Carpentry?’

  ‘Well, a bit…I can saw straight, put screws and nails in, do simple joints…What sort of thing do you mean?’

  ‘In the chalet. The walls, right, they’re just concrete panelling. Well, I want to put studs in, you know, a timber frame along the inside to nail plasterboard to. And put insulation in behind it. Keep the place nice and snug.’

  ‘I could do that.’

  ‘And maybe a stud partition across
one end, with a door in it…’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Chris. ‘Easy.’

  ‘What, on your own?’

  ‘Well, it can’t be too hard, can it? Wood’s easy stuff. So’s plasterboard, probably. I couldn’t do proper plaster, I wouldn’t try. But I like wood. Yeah, I could do that.’

  ‘What about a ceiling?’

  ‘I’m trying to remember the roof…It’s corrugated iron, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. Corrugated iron over timber beams. Sloping, you know. But I thought I’d have a false ceiling, just to make it look tidier. Nothing fancy. Polystyrene tiles maybe.’

  ‘So you’d want a framework there first. I’d need help for that, I reckon. You can’t hold something above your head and work on it.’

  ‘We could do that together, maybe. But if you want to do the walls, I’ll make it worth your while.’

  ‘OK then,’ said Chris. ‘Do you know what materials you want? I mean sizes and quantities? Otherwise we’ll have to go there and measure up, work it out. And what about plumbing? You were thinking about that last time…’

  ‘Oh, I’ll get round to that sometime. No hurry for that. No, listen, the thing is not to speak about that place to anyone at all. Not even Sue or Sean.’

  ‘No, I know.’

  ‘ ’Cause, you know, I’m not exaggerating, it could be bloody dangerous.’

  ‘What was it all about then?’ Chris said. ‘This family that’s after you…What’re you supposed to have done?’

  He thought he had the right to ask, since he was being involved in the building of the chalet. Barry looked around carefully, and lowered his voice when he answered.

  ‘I mentioned Ireland, didn’t I? Northern Ireland. Belfast. I used to work there…I dunno how much I can tell you, but bugger the Official Secrets Act, the whole thing stinks. I was working for the Army, right. Special technical operations. Connected with the SAS. Not in the Army but sort of attached…It was all unofficial, you know, deniable. In case anything went wrong, we didn’t exist, kind of thing. We was involved with bomb disposal, surveillance, anything electronic.