I really mean to do this. I finish dressing in a state of urgency and even snap a shoelace by pulling on it so vigorously, fired up with a sense of purpose that’s been lacking in me for weeks. It’s only when I reach out for my car keys that I remember Ollie.
I sneak another look through the curtains. Four people have joined him at the bus shelter and they’re all standing – Ollie dead centre – as if they’re forming an identity parade. Only he looks so conspicuous among them there might as well be a huge arrow above the line pointing directly down on his cartoon head. I do hope for his sake he has thermals under that tee-shirt; he must be freezing.
It’s going to be next to impossible to get out of the apartment and into the car without him spotting me. What should I do, take him along? Neville, meet Oliver Dunn, prime representative of my huge fan base. Perhaps not. In terms of a fit with Meg’s target audience profile he’s more square peg than round hole. Come to think of it, maybe there are too many of Ollie’s ramblings in my box file for it to be the killer tool in my Save Marc Niven campaign.
A double-decker comes along, once more obscuring the view between the building and the bus shelter. By the time the people in the queue get on board I could be doing a runner, gone before he knows what’s happening. But I’m still watching through the window as the bus rolls away, leaving Oliver to his solitary vigil. I couldn’t do it to him twice in one week. He’s smiling to himself down there now, as if he knows what I’m thinking, but I guess it’s just because the sudden rush of activity has relieved the monotony a little for him.
To be fair, the last time I avoided him he actually did have something important to say, so I should give him this second chance. He’s not coming up here though – he knows more than enough about me already, and I’m still harbouring a notion he might turn out be the male version of Annie Wilkes. Trouble is, I don’t really want to be seen with him in public either, not just the two of us, not round here where I’m pretty well-known.
Ollie, however, seems to have it all quite well planned. As soon as he sees me crossing the road towards him he beams broadly and immediately dives into his crumpled carrier bag. Just for a second I’m thinking John Lennon, Dakota Hotel, but what Ollie pulls out is a little red zip-up purse, the sort kids and old people keep their money in. He waves it happily at me. “Bus fares,” he announces.
Bizarrely, a couple of minutes later I find myself sitting next to Ollie on the top deck (his choice) of a bus on its way to the city centre, having had my fare paid for the first time since my mother took me through to buy my first school uniform.
“Like Rolo, Marc?” he says, offering one, though I notice his good manners don’t extend to giving me first refusal; he’s already working his mouth round a couple he popped in earlier.
“No thanks. How did you know where I live?”
“Marcmobile,” he says, using the same childish DJ-speak I’m prone to when the mike’s open. “Sure I saw it on the bus, me on the bus I mean, was… day after New Year. Not the night New Year, not with Big Ben, the day after the day after that, has that got a name? Just through the window I thought it was but I had to come all the way back and it was right. With NIV, innit, that’s how I knew for sure. Then I saw it another day, an’ another day, and I thought does Marc live round here, then I knew it cos another day was fifteenth of January, a Wednesday, and I was on the top deck and your light was on in the window, your window upstairs, and I saw you opening your curtains, and I waved, but you didn’t look like you was looking. You know the stupid thing? I knocked on the glass, like this, right…”
He demonstrates by shuffling across the aisle and along an empty double row of seats to tap on the opposite window, then turns to grin at me from there. “Cos I was sitting on this side, that’s how I saw you through the window. But fancy me tapping, eh, Marc? How stupid’s that? Like you could hear, eh?” He chuckles to himself and shakes his head, then comes lolloping back to his seat, searching my face for a reaction, like the eager puppy he so often seems to be. “How stupid’s that?”
I’m reluctant to agree that he’s stupid, even at his invitation (he must have plenty of people telling him that for free), so I nod in an ambiguous way, a nod that says something like how wise you are to recognise that temporary stupidity in yourself, then I follow up with, “What about my phone number? I’m not in the book.”
He chuckles again, and slaps the carrier bag on top of his knees. “Shouldn’t write it on people’s hands, then, should you, don’t want people to know.”
“Eh?”
“At the Arena, when you done the Christmas show, remember? When that lady came up after.”
“What lady?”
“The one what came up when you were signing my programme. The one who asked if you did charity dos. You said she could call you to talk about it and you wrote your number on the back of her hand. With my pen.”
“Oh, right. Yes, I vaguely remember.” Actually, now Ollie’s jogged my memory I can easily picture the ‘lady’ he’s on about. Busty blonde lass. Probably just out of university. I think she said she was doing some voluntary work to get PR experience. Not a stunner, but quite attractive. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not why I gave her my number. Just a get-out clause really. She never called anyway. Or hasn’t so far.
“I wrote it down as well, on my programme,” Ollie continues. “Had to keep it in my head all the time you were talking to her, cos you still had my pen. I remembered it right, anyway. It was just for having it, that was all. I wasn’t gonna ring you up, honest. Only now, which couldn’t be helped, could it? Lucky enough I keep things, eh? I’m a hoarder, Mam said. But she’s the same one always said you never know when things might come in useful, so you can’t have it both ways, that’s right, innit, Marc? You can’t have it both ways.”
That’s the first time Oliver has mentioned his mam directly. Is she still around, I wonder? If so I have to tell you, Mrs Dunn, good job in the circumstances, but maybe you could just have a word with your boy about personal hygiene. I mean, I’m not overcome by fumes or anything, but he is starting to remind me why I never use public transport these days. Fortunately there are only the two of us in the upper deck, so the embarrassment factor is not as high as it might have been. I just hope we don’t meet anybody I know when we finally get off this bus. I look out of the near window instinctively as that thought occurs, then turn to ask a question, and find Oliver with a little Sony digital pointing at me.
“Smile, Marc,” he says, squinting down at my image on the screen. I give him an offhand one that’s supposed to mean I don’t want particularly want to play but hey, if it pleases you… He shows me the result and all I can see is my face in shadow against the light from the window behind. The subtlety of the smile is lost along with all the other detail. He seems satisfied with it though and he replaces his camera carefully in a pocket of his waterproof as if he has captured a great treasure.
“Where we going, Ollie?”
“We have to look for the man in the moon.”
“Excuse me?”
“A good night guaranteed. Then count three more stops and we have to get off. You know what’s best to do? Count to twenty after two stops, just slow, then stand up and go where the man can see you in the mirror. That way you won’t miss the stop.”
“And once we get off the bus?”
“Easy after that,” he says, rubbing an itch, or maybe a snot-flake from his nose. “Walk away from the bus, not the same way. Keep walking till you see the sign pointing. Then you walk where the sign says and you’re there.”
“Where?”
“It’s called the Central Library. That’s the sign to look for. The walking sign, not the man in the moon sign. That says A good night guaranteed. Have you never been to the Central Library? It’s good. You don’t have to pay to get in or anything. It’s for Joe Public.”
It must be nearly twenty years since I’ve been in the library building. I feel strangely guilty about that, not least becaus
e one of my regular rants is about the way public services seem to be disappearing because the government’s too scared of the electorate to put taxes up to save them, and how we only start to respect what we had once they’ve gone. I’m pleased Ollie’s feeling the benefit, but I’m still not clear why he wants me to share it with him, until he drops another clue.
“You gotta have a ticket to take the books home,” he says. “You can’t keep them, though, just for a lend. Or you can read them there. They’ve got tables and chairs for it. And the papers. They’ve got all the papers for you to read if nobody else has already got it out to read before you get there. And you know what’s good? They hoard them. They’re all in the drawers so say if you missed reading one one day you could get it out of the drawer next time. Or you could get them from a long time ago. So I thought, hang on what if this date’s wrong? Or maybe they’ve got some names muddled up. So what’s the best thing for us to do, is to go and check, innit.”
“Check what?”
“Check what if it’s wrong what they say on the internet. They say all sorts sometimes. Doesn’t always make it right, does it? Well, for example, you. Say, if you type Mark Niven different from your proper Marc. You can still get things about you and sometimes Marc with a cee Niven and sometimes Mark with a kay Niven.”
I know he’s right. I might be the only person in the world to type my name in a search engine more often than Ollie does. “But you still haven’t told me what we’re supposed to be checking at the library.”
“To see if these is right,” Ollie says, lifting up his carrier bag.
“What do you have in there?” I ask, and Ollie is about to open the bag to show me when he gets his eye on the Premier Inn sign and won’t take his attention away from spotting the rest of his landmarks until we’ve left the bus and are safely inside the library building.
Nothing much looks to have changed since the days I would occasionally visit this place for the purpose of copying out large chunks of information verbatim from one huge encyclopaedia or another in the reference section to hand in later as homework. The only immediately obvious difference is the number of computer terminals ranged around the walls, each of them with either a student or an oldster sitting in front on the trail of whatever happens to be important to them, while the huge reading desks in the middle are largely deserted except for the odd semi-vagrant browsing through one of today’s papers, or just tapping a hand on top of it, possibly contemplating its value as an extra layer of underclothing if they could manage to smuggle it out.
Oliver takes me to a large empty table in the far corner, partly screened from the main section by the positioning of a couple of microfilm readers and several sets of wooden drawers where back-issues of the more recent local newspapers are kept. He takes a seat at one end, still in his yellow waterproof, his carrier bag on the table in front of him, while I hang my coat around a chair and sit to one side, waiting to have the mystery of the bag revealed.
Ollie had been jovial, excited, on the bus, earnest as he tracked his way to the library, obediently silent as we made our way through to this corner. Now, in spite of his comic appearance, he looks troubled, and he’s passing that on to me. He bobs up for a moment, checking that no-one is in the vicinity, then sits down again and bends towards me, confidentially.
“That man. Hassan Malik. He’s dead.”
“I know.” My voice is low too, matching his. “I spoke to his wife. His widow. The night before last. How did you find out?”
“Put his name in my computer. Found out about him.”
I remember my own hurried Google effort, one hundred and plenty hits, which I didn’t get the chance to refine because of Meg’s call. I have my doubts about how sophisticated Ollie’s search could be. Then again, he’d already proved himself surprisingly resourceful in uncovering all things Marc Niven, so maybe I shouldn’t judge the book by its cover. “How did he do it?” I ask.
Ollie looks at me meaningfully. “He didn’t kill himself,” he says.
“Oliver, what are you talking about? I already know he went through with it. I told you, I spoke to his… partner.”
“He didn’t kill himself,” Ollie says again. “Look.”
From his carrier bag he slowly draws out a couple of sheets of paper, printouts in black and white. They are obviously from website pages. The top one I recognise as a page from the online version of the Chronicle.
“What’s this?”
Oliver pushes it across. It looks like a typical Chronicle news story, with the headline Death driver named. I start reading the story underneath.
Police have formally confirmed the identity of the driver who died when his car left the road and hit a bridge rampart on the A191 near Townhead late last Sunday night.
The dead man has been named as Mr Hassan Malik, 31, from the Springhill area of the city. Mr Malik died at the scene after his vehicle burst into flames on impact. There were no other passengers in the car at the time of the accident, which is believed to have been caused by a tyre-burst.
I glance up at Oliver, who has been watching me intently for a reaction, and I shake my head, smiling in what I hope is a reassuring, not a patronising, way. “This isn’t our man, Ollie. Look, I’ve already found out that Hassan Malik is quite a common name. Probably more common than, say, Dunn is in… our culture. I bet you’ve come across a few people with the same name as you now and again. I know I have. And if I’d been called Mark Brown, maybe, or Mark Smith, I’d be bumping into them a lot more often.”
Ollie’s expression hasn’t changed. “This is the same man what called you, Marc. The man on the radio.”
“No, Oliver, you’re wrong. And I’ll prove it to you. You’re somebody who remembers dates, aren’t you? What date was it when Hassan called the show?”
“Fourteenth of February. Valentine’s Day.”
“Correct.” I turn the Chronicle piece towards him and point to the top of the page. “And what’s the date above this story?”
I notice his eyes don’t stray to the page, but they widen a little as he says, “Thursday twenty-first of November.”
“Right. And the accident happened the Sunday night before, so that would have been the…” I do a quick calculation on my fingers. “Something like the seventeenth, yes?”
Ollie nods, still watching my face. I’m assuming he just hasn’t thought this through. “So you see what I’m saying?” I explain as patiently as I can. “This Hassan Malik died, what, nearly three months before our Hassan Malik, if I can call him that, before the night our man rang my show.”
Instead of responding directly Oliver reaches across to the printouts in front of me and slides out the second sheet from under the Chronicle article, placing it on top for me to see. It’s another report of the police announcement – it even has the same headline – but this one is from the archives of the local BBC news site. Near the bottom of the page someone, presumably Oliver, has ringed part of the story with biro. My eyes go straight to that paragraph.
Hassan Malik’s widow Amina Begum Khan was being comforted last night by relatives and members of the close-knit Muslim community in the Springhill area where she lives with her two-year-old son, Tarik.
This time I can hardly bring myself to look up and be caught in Oliver’s gaze. He knows I had him down for a fool. “Is that the name he said, Marc?” Ollie asks, almost as if he’s signalling that he’s still prepared to put his trust in me, however dismissive I’ve been of him.
“It is, Oliver, yes.” There is really nothing else I can say for the moment. I’m dumbfounded. We sit in library silence for I don’t know how long. Everything seems suspended for me around these five separate names on one line of print. Hassan Malik Amina Begum Khan. How can this precise combination be a coincidence? How can these two couples, from the same locality, marked out by a death, not be one couple? Because to reject the coincidence is to invite in a ghost.
At last I say, more to myself than Ollie, “There must be
some explanation for this.”
Ollie replies, “Library’s the place to find out things.”
For the next half an hour the two of us busy ourselves pulling out back-copies of newspapers from the drawers, checking that the dates of the originals match with the online versions (they do) and building up a picture of the accident using a few other accounts we come across. We can’t find anything at all in the national press and even the regionals don’t have a great deal to say about the incident – another car crash, another fatality, ho-hum. Certainly it hadn’t registered with me before now. The only thing that slightly lifts it out of the ordinary is the fact that there was no-one else involved. Hassan was travelling alone in the early hours of the morning when a front tyre blew and he must have lost control, hitting the bridge. By the time the emergency services were alerted he and his car were burnt out, which is why it took a little while to come up with a positive ID.
But it’s our man, right enough. Hassan Malik. British-born Pakistani, graduated at the city university, ran his own IT business. One of the papers even has a picture of Amina, snapped in the street somewhere with one of the policemen in the case and an older man who could be her father, I suppose, or maybe Hassan’s, dressed in what I would call the full Asian. She’s half wrapped up as well, the way they often are, and obviously keeping her head down, but she seems to be a good-looking woman, early thirties maybe, attractive figure.
After we have checked all the sources we can find, Ollie and I lapse back into silence. I’m still brooding on the pages of news-sheet spread out on the large table. Ollie is watching me carefully once more, waiting, it seems, for me to somehow solve this conundrum for both of us. The perplexed look that’s scrawled onto his otherwise blank round face reminds me so much of the Charlie Brown character that in a different context I would have found it funny. At the moment it gives me a sense of melting sadness, just as I sometimes feel for Charlie, in fact, when the world or Lucy has bested him yet again.
11:59 Page 5