“I understand.”
He seemed to feel that she didn’t sufficiently. He spent the rest of the meal in acquainting her with his domestic life, not least by showing her several folders of photographs he had apparently collected from the developers on his way to the restaurant. By the time he called for the bill and left an impressive tip she felt as if she’d attended the most recent birthdays of both his young daughters; she had certainly had to exclaim at dozens of pictures of them in party hats. She was feeling full of lunch but empty of information she could publish as she thanked him for the meal. “My treat in every sense,” he said, patting his stomach and then her arm.
Outside the restaurant the sunlight smelled of all three lanes of traffic jammed into one-way Dale Street. Had she been too anxious to compensate for Dudley’s setbacks at the launch while she was interviewing Eamonn Moore? At least Valerie had edited out Shell’s comments that might have identified him; there were no references to his writing. Was Patricia his publicist or a reporter? Perhaps soon she would know.
She turned off Dale Street up Moorfields and climbed an escalator to the ticket barrier so as to descend to the trains. As the passages and sluggish stairs led her deeper she realised that she was retracing Greta’s route in the tale. She looked behind her only once while she waited for a train that carried her around the loop under Liverpool to Birkenhead. Beyond Hamilton Square the newest station, Conway Park, was open to the sunlight for the length of its platforms, after which the tunnel closed down again all the way to Birkenhead Park.
She ran up stairs that boxed in her clatter, she hurried along the narrow street packed with small cheap shops. As she reached the intersection with the road that linked Bidston with downtown Birkenhead, she saw children already at the bus stop outside the school that backed onto the extensive Victorian park. Before the lights allowed her to cross she had time to observe that the children were stoning the traffic. “Stop that,” she shouted as she set foot on the pavement within a stone’s throw of them, and they jerked up fingers to acknowledge her in advance of running off.
Many more children were swarming out of both ends of Park Comprehensive. Patricia couldn’t see a single adult in the concrete schoolyard. She tried addressing three teenage girls who had halted to stare at her inside the gates. “Could you tell me where the office is?”
“Are you police?” said a girl with a heart tattooed on her forearm.
“Is it ’cos Denzil stabbed someone again?” a pregnant girl with yellowed fingers said.
“I’m here for a chat with one of your teachers. Mr Fender, if you know where he is.”
“Wouldn’t want to. Boring English,” the third girl said and spat. “It’s through them doors, the office.”
Patricia made for the stout oak double doors in the middle of the elongated two-storey red brick building. Beyond the doors a wide hallway led almost at once to a window in the left-hand wall. A plump secretary with her linen jacket drooping on the back of her chair directed her to the second of the imposing doors in the opposite wall. Patricia tapped on the muntin under a plaque that said STAFF. Having waited several seconds, she was about to knock once more when a thin sharp male voice called “Come.”
He sounded bent on instilling nervousness in the listener. When she opened the door, that was how he looked too: eyes as fierce as the red moustache that bristled wider than his bony balding head, arms folded so tightly across his chest that the leather elbows of his tweed sports jacket pointed straight at her. He was alone in the barely decorated room full of unmatched chairs surrounding two low tables strewn with newspapers. “You are?” he said.
“I am.” Since this earned her no more than a single impatient blink and a thinning of his pale lips, she was quick to add “Mr Fender? Patricia Martingale from the Mersey Mouth. We spoke at the beginning of the week. You wanted me to give you time to think.”
“I’ve had precious little of that. Thinking isn’t required in this job these days, just filling in forms while you try to hold back the flood of illiteracy. Half these nitwits believe their computers will do all their spelling for them and whatever their wretched toys tell them is right,” Mr Fender said and twitched his disappointed face at her. “Can you spell ‘It’s unacceptable’?”
“I should imagine so,” Patricia said, and demonstrated.
“You’re one of a shrinking minority. Perhaps you’d like to interview me about the state of affairs that has been allowed to develop.”
“Maybe we can talk about it later if there’s time. You must be pleased that one of your old pupils is keeping literacy alive.”
“I won’t ask you to sit down.” The beginnings of interest had drained back into the teacher’s face. “I’ve plenty of marking before I can call the day my own. I know the kind of marks I’d like to award most of them,” he said, and almost as severely “What were you saying Smith is doing now?”
“At the moment, working in a job centre.”
“And having to read out the information to half the wastrels, no doubt. At least he’ll be putting his skills to some use,” Mr Fender said and leaned his elbows on the back of a lumpily upholstered chair. “But that isn’t why you requested this meeting.”
“As I said, he’s written a series of stories and we’re about to publish one.”
“You also said it was going to be filmed, did you not? That won’t help anybody read. More likely the reverse.”
“It won’t make his story go away, though, will it?”
“Perhaps you ought to be wishing it could. Is he still up to his old tricks?”
“I don’t think I know which those are.” When Mr Fender let his eyelids slump with ostentatious weariness, Patricia said “He seems to feel you encouraged him to write.”
“He already had a good idea what he was doing by the time his year came up to me.”
“Doing in the sense of . . .”
“Grammar. Punctuation. Syntax. Spelling. All the particulars we aren’t supposed to think worth taking care of any more. He was a rarity even then.”
“I think he meant you gave him a reason to write his stories.”
“I was asked to set him work when he was excused gym. There was no point in testing skills I knew he had, so I had him write essays. I was hoping they might help him develop.” The teacher’s lips pressed each other bloodless and parted a slit before he said “He offered me stories instead, and I was lax enough to accept them. I’ve wondered since if his real skill wasn’t manipulation, if he exaggerated his nervous complaint so as to dodge any physical education.”
“Why do you think he would have done that?”
“Shyness is often the motive if it isn’t sloth. In my view and that of my colleague who took his year for gym, that kind of over-sensitivity means the boy bears watching closely.”
“You’re saying that’s what you both did.”
“In Smith’s case I suspect it may not have been closely enough.”
“Is there something you feel responsible for?”
“I think no one can accuse me of shirking any responsibility we in the profession are still allowed to observe.” Once his eyes had finished daring her to contradict him, the teacher said “In retrospect I think I might have taken Smith to task about his stories sooner than I did.”
“What didn’t you like?”
“There was never anything to like. Monsters, violence, all the rot teenagers think they have the right to watch these days. Well written, which is why I let it pass for far too long. What is he writing now?”
“Stories about murders around Merseyside.”
“I was all too correct, then. He’s up to his tricks again and you’re paying him to do it.”
“You haven’t told me which those are yet.”
Mr Fender straightened up behind the chair, and she was afraid he was about to terminate the interview until he said “I take it Smith hasn’t told you why I eventually objected to one of his effusions.”
“His mother did
. You thought it was too real, didn’t you? I’d say that was a compliment, not a criticism.”
“I fear she didn’t understand, or perhaps she prefers not to. Of course she’s a modern parent. They can’t bear any criticism of their offspring, let alone the slightest attempt to correct them.” By now he was gripping the back of the chair like a lectern. “It was real because it was based on fact,” he said. “The entire case had been in the papers. All Smith did was to change the names and the places and work out details the press had the good taste in those days not to print. The man is still in jail. I wish I’d sent him the story. He might have contacted Smith to give him a taste of what real killers are like.”
Patricia thought this improbable but said only “He’s writing fiction now.”
“If I were your editor I would take care what I published.”
Patricia felt protective of her mother. “Why do you say that?” she less asked than objected.
“I should want to ascertain how fictitious the stories are.” Mr Fender seized a briefcase from the chair, and it was clear that he was ending the interview. “I said his work was correctly written, and so it was,” he told her. “That’s all that one could say for it. I’m of the very strong belief, and you may quote me if you have the stomach for it, that Smith was wholly devoid of imagination.”
“Thank you for your time,” Patricia said as he turned his back and stooped to gather a heap of red exercise books. She didn’t feel inclined to thank him for anything else. As she left the staffroom and then the school she had the unwelcome impression that he’d left her sense of Dudley Smith more incomplete than it had been before she’d visited the school. She was crossing the empty schoolyard when her phone rang.
She hoped the call wasn’t urgent. She had to attend a Weegee exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery and then the first night of Playing at Murder at the Playhouse. She disentangled the mobile from the keys in her handbag and halted on the baked concrete that smelled of dust. “Patricia Martingale.”
“Patricia, it’s Kathy Smith. I wanted to thank you for reading Dudley’s story to the audience last week.”
“Think nothing of it, Kathy. Part of the job.”
“I’m sure it was a great deal more than that. I could hear it in your voice.” Dudley’s mother cleared her throat hard enough to twinge Patricia’s ear and said “I meant I really wanted to thank you. We’d very much like it if you’d come to dinner.”
FOURTEEN
As his latest client left the window Dudley saw two men staring at him from the front row of bucket seats. “That’s not himself, is it?” said the thinner of the pair.
“I think it is, you know,” said his squat and even sweatier friend.
Dudley’s crotch gave a reminiscent twinge until he realised they were members of his audience. When the lanky man approached, blinking rapidly and jerking his long angular head higher as if it had been tugged back by the corners of his grin, Dudley was sorry that he had nothing to autograph. “You’re the writer, right?” the man said. “The one that’s in the paper.”
“The only one,” Dudley said while he considered standing up to shake hands across the glass. “This is what I do as well for now.”
“Can you get us a job writing books?”
Dudley wasn’t sure how appreciated he should feel. “Both of you, do you mean?”
“May as well,” the squat man called, “if there’s enough to go round.”
“There’s meant to be a book in everybody, isn’t there,” the man at the window informed Dudley. “You just write about your life.”
“No I don’t. Nothing like it,” Dudley said and then grasped that the comment hadn’t been about him.
“All right, keep the top of your head on. What makes you write your stuff if it’s not real?”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t. Things like that happen, just not the ones I write.”
“Give us some tips, then. Do you think what you’re going to write first or just sit down and do it?”
Dudley wished Patricia could be there to record him. “It’s not that simple,” he said.
“We aren’t either,” the squat man retorted, “so teach us.”
“Research for a start.”
“How do you do that?” the lanky customer said. “Creep after people and think how you can kill them?”
“They’re stories. I write stories,” Dudley said, perhaps louder than was necessary. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what I do. You wanted me to tell you what you should.”
“That’s it then, is it? We’ve got the job.”
“There’s more to it than that. You need to have the talent, which most people don’t, even some that are published. And then you have to work at it to get it right. It can take years.”
“I thought this was meant to be where we get jobs,” the man at the window said with another outburst of blinking.
“We never have any writing books.”
“What are you scared of?” the squat man raised his voice to ask.
“Nothing,” Dudley shouted, though he felt as though his interrogators had wished their sweat on him.
“Competition, it sounds like.”
“You’re wrong and you know it,” Dudley said, managing to laugh. “If you read the paper you should know I won one.”
“Still sounds like you want to keep all the writing for yourself,” the lanky man said. “It can’t take much doing or you wouldn’t have this job as well.”
“Greedy if you ask me,” the squat man called. “There’s not that many jobs to go round. You should do one and let somebody else have the other. Watch your back, Reg, the heavy’s on his way.”
“Don’t bother. We’re going,” Reg told Lionel, who had left the doorway. He blinked faster as he stood up and then leaned towards Dudley’s window. “Better remember lots of people know about you now,” he warned.
Dudley was struggling not to take this as more of a threat than it had any right to be while the pair sauntered out, followed to the door by Lionel, when heat and perfume seemed to blotch the glass in front of him. “What was it about this time?” Mrs Wimbourne enquired.
“Dudley can’t be blamed for being in the paper,” Vera said.
“Can’t he?” With no more of the respect he deserved Mrs Wimbourne said “Does it mention this office?”
“It’s about his story and his film. I can show you if you like.”
“I think you’d better,” Mrs Wimbourne said.
At the mention of the film Dudley hid his grin behind his hand. Vincent’s idea would help conceal him. The last person anybody would suspect was a crime writer who’d invented one who was a killer. The character was his, and it had been presumptuous of Vincent to change it, but didn’t his doing so in that way prove Dudley was perfectly camouflaged? He drew his finger across his lips to erase some of the grin as he swivelled his chair. “I haven’t seen it either yet,” he said.
Mrs Wimbourne parted her lips with a sound like a truncated tut at the copy of the local weekly and lowered her frown towards the page Vera had folded open. With very little delay she said “I thought you weren’t supposed to have mentioned where you worked.”
Dudley jumped up to stand by her. MURDER’S MY MEAT, SAYS COMPETITION WINNER. He wasn’t sure the headline was entirely adequate, but at least they had printed the photograph of him fingering the keyboard at his desk, despite his mother’s protests about the tidiness of his room. The report said that he worked in a local employment agency, but why should Mrs Wimbourne complain about that? He was enjoying how she was continuing to hold the paper as if she was his servant when a line of print was suddenly all he could see. “I never said that,” he blurted.
“Don’t worry, anybody looking at your picture can see you aren’t thirty-eight,” Vera assured him. “They’ll know the paper’s put ten years on you.”
“Unless it’s working here,” Trevor said to nobody in particular.
Dudley felt as if their voices were crowding into
his skull. “I didn’t say my stories were based on reality,” he said loud enough, he hoped, to bring the senseless chatter to an end.
“What did you say?” Mrs Wimbourne accused more than asked.
“I write about real places.”
“I can’t imagine what else anyone would think that read the paper. I don’t understand what you’re so worried about,” Mrs Wimbourne said and stared at him.
“Nothing. I’m not worried. I never said I was. The paper ought to tell the truth, that’s all.”
“At least they didn’t put that you were in the first issue of the magazine,” Colette said.
“Pardon?” Mrs Wimbourne said. “Please explain.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dudley had to lie as he resumed his seat. “It isn’t worth talking about.”
“It looks as if it is to me. Colette?”
“Dudley’s story won’t be in till the next one. I expect that’s because Shell Garridge died and they did a special section about her. I still bought it, Dudley, because it had part of your story to get people interested. I was.”
“There you are, Colette’s interested,” Vera apparently believed he needed to be told.
Mrs Wimbourne took a heavy pace towards him. “I think you owe me an explanation.”
For the first time ever he could have wished that the office were busier, but there wasn’t a single client to distract her. “Why?” he pretended not to know.
“You went to a good deal of trouble to convince me it would be prohibitive for the magazine to drop your story, and that’s what I told London. Now it’s obvious these people weren’t bothered about losing it.”
“They haven’t lost it, they’ve just delayed it.”
“Don’t be so sure of that. We’ve had a taste of the kind of attention you’re bringing us. I don’t know what that noise is meant to mean, Trevor, but I’d advise you to keep it to yourself. I’ll be having another word with London, Dudley, and when they hear what I have to tell them I doubt they’ll be so accommodating.”
He mustn’t leave the chair, Dudley thought with an effort that made his skull feel brittle and shrunken. He was at the office. There were witnesses. He was reduced to mutely urging them to intervene on his behalf. He’d begun to hate them almost as much as he hated Mrs Wimbourne’s gaze, which she appeared to be resting on him in the belief that it would force him to capitulate in some way, when the mobile in his jacket went off like a tuneful alarm. As he laid the mobile on the counter he recognised the displayed number. “It’s my magazine.”
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