The Primrose Switchback

by Jo Bannister

  It was Prufrock. He’d never called her in the night before – he still thought that ten o’clock was a late enough bedtime for anyone, or ten thirty on Saturdays – so she knew something was wrong even before he’d finished apologising.

  “Arthur – Arthur, it’s all right. What’s happened?”

  He abandoned the apology, said simply, “It’s Shad.”

  By now Rosie was wide awake. Shad; and not good news. “Where is he? Is he all right?”

  “Not really,” admitted Prufrock, answering her second question first. “He’s in Crewe.”

  “Crewe?” So that was why he was calling. Shad was in Crewe and Prufrock didn’t drive. Rosie sighed. “I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.”

  “I hate to do this to you,” he said. “I know you’ve a busy day ahead. I’d have made him wait for the first train. But he sounded so odd. He hasn’t even any money on him.”

  Rosie frowned, her brows meeting like amorous caterpillars. “What’s he doing in Crewe with no money at two in the morning? No, don’t answer that. I’ll see you in a quarter of an hour, you can give me the full SP then.”

  It was a fifty-mile drive, though at that time of night they had the outside lane of the M6 to themselves. Rosie drove and Prufrock talked.

  “When the phone went, I thought at first it was a nuisance call. He didn’t say anything.”

  He didn’t say anything for second after long second. Prufrock was beginning to think it was his own personal pervert, a semi-literate heavy breather who’d misread the phone book and called at intervals in the hope of getting through to Miss Prudence Frock. He snapped waspishly, “Whoever you are, I’m sure it’s past your bedtime.” Then as the silence stretched, a kind of intuition stirred. “Shad – is that you?”

  The sound of his name wrenched a response out of Shad Lucas. “Yes.” His naturally low-pitched voice was choked with gravel.

  “Where are you? At home?”

  “No. A station …”

  “You’re at the station?”

  “No. I think …” There was a pause while he looked around, trying to get his bearings. “I think it’s Crewe.”

  Prufrock stared at the phone in astonishment. It was absurd enough that anyone was standing on Crewe station at two in the morning; it was bizarre that his gardener was; but most peculiar of all was that his gardener wasn’t sure if he was standing on Crewe station or not. “Have you been drinking?”

  Again the pause while the younger man considered. “I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  Shad tried hard to make some sense. “Arthur, I don’t know how I got here. Half an hour ago I found myself wandering through some … shunting yards or something, and there wasn’t a soul in sight, and I didn’t know where I was …” His voice began to climb with the memory of panic. He forced it down. “Finally I saw some lights, and I found this phone, and there’s a sign over there that says ‘Crewe’, and that’s all I know.”

  Prufrock’s mouth opened and closed twice before anything intelligent came out. Finally he said, “All right, Shad; don’t upset yourself, we’ll sort it out.” If he’d had a pound for every time he’d used those same words, injecting calm into chaos and buying himself time to think of an answer, he’d have had a big house up on The Brink instead of a cottage in Foxford Lane. But it always worked. He could sound authoritative, in control of events, when he was as much at sea as everyone else. “Is the Land Rover anywhere about? Did you drive there?”

  The sound of pockets being patted. “I don’t think so. No keys.”

  “All right. Have you the money to get home?”

  He already knew the answer to that. “I’ve got two pounds and fifty-seven pence.” Which wouldn’t get him to Stoke-on-Trent, let alone Skipley.

  In earlier times, if one of his charges had called in a similar dilemma Prufrock would have despatched him to the nearest police station and phoned ahead to arrange transport and funds. But Shad wasn’t eleven, he was twenty-five and unlikely to receive the same solicitude. Also, he avoided police stations whenever possible. If that was the best Prufrock could suggest he knew Shad would rather hitch, and he didn’t sound he was in any state to be doing that.

  Prufrock sucked in a deep breath and considered, but there was only one solution. “Stay where you are. I’ll call Rosie, we’ll come and get you.”

  “And he’s no idea how he got there?” Incredulity sent Rosie’s full-bodied contralto soaring operatically.

  Prufrock spread small pink hands in a rueful shrug. “Not when I spoke to him. He may have worked it out by now.”

  “Did he sound drunk?”

  “No. He sounded frightened.”

  Rosie considered. It wasn’t just that she owed Prufrock more than a lost night’s sleep. She owed Shad, too. He’d had problems enough when they first met but he’d never been shot before. “Arthur, is this about his … clairvoyance?”

  They never quite knew what to call it, this extra sense of Shad’s. ‘Clairvoyance’ made it sound like an end-of-the-pier attraction. ‘ESP’sounded like science fiction but was probably closer to the mark. He had a perception that was additional to the customary quota. He didn’t see things, didn’t know things, couldn’t see the future; but he could feel things that most people can’t. Vibrations; memories; the echoes of emotions powerful enough to go on reverberating in the stones of a place long after their causes were gone. Sometimes – not always, it was at best an imperfect perception – he could feel the presence of evil.

  Prufrock shook his head, perplexed. He was wearing the deerstalker hat Rosie had bought him in tribute to their last adventure. “I don’t know. I don’t see how.”

  “It hasn’t happened before, then?”

  “Nothing like this. You’ve seen him do it – he’s a bit shell-shocked afterwards – but as far as I know it’s never given him amnesia. Is it possible, do you think?”

  Rosie shrugged. “Arthur, I couldn’t begin to guess what’s possible. Shad is the only psychic I’ve ever met, and there’s more in the medical textbooks on the Elephant Man than there is on ESP. I don’t know. Since whatever happens must happen within his brain, I suppose it could interfere with other cerebral functions. But it’s guesswork. It’s not supposed to happen at all, so who knows what the mechanism is?”

  “If it is that,” said Prufrock slowly, “and if it is the first time it’s happened, it could be a worrying development. Perhaps there isn’t room in the human brain for everything that’s meant to happen there and ESP as well. Perhaps, the more he uses his perception, the more damage he’s going to do to himself …”

  Rosie took her eyes off the road long enough to give him a stern look. “Arthur, stop imagining the worst. I spent twenty years dissecting people’s brains: if I don’t know what’s going on in Shad’s, you sure as hell don’t. Yes, it could be the start of a neurological problem. It could also be that he got drunk last night, curled up somewhere to sleep it off and …”

  “Woke up in Crewe?” Prufrock sounded unconvinced.

  “Maybe he was sleeping it off on a train,” Rosie offered lamely. “Look, I don’t know. But it’s a long step from one lost night to brain damage, particularly for a twenty-five-year-old male. It happens all the time.”

  “It never happened to me,” said Prufrock stiffly.

  Rosie smiled. “No, Arthur, I don’t suppose it did.”

  They might have had trouble meeting. The railway yards at Crewe are enormous. But by the time his lift arrived Shad had found his way out and was waiting at the main station entrance.

  Rosie evicted Prufrock from the front seat and Shad fell in wearily beside her. Against the thick dark hair his skin had an abnormal pallor.

  “Well, that’s one mystery solved,” said Rosie, an odd ring to her voice. “We mightn’t know what you’re doing here, but at least we know why you don’t know either.” She turned on the courtesy light that had gone off when the car door closed. “Not drink, drugs or ESP. Yo
u’ve had a knock on the head.” Blood had run from behind his right ear and congealed on his collar. There was more of it on the front of his shirt.

  Prufrock switched instantly to mother-hen mode. “Good grief, boy, you look you’ve been playing Under-Thirteen rugby!” He produced an immaculate handkerchief. “Here, spit.”

  Shad fended off his well-meant attentions, felt for the damage with cautious fingers. “Ow!”

  “Oh yes,” opined Rosie, turning his head to the light to afford the injury her professional scrutiny, “somebody’s fetched you a right crack there.”

  It wasn’t a considered judgement of the kind she used to put her name to only after extensive and thorough explorations, but it was more than a guess. People who’ve seen a lot of injuries start to recognise signatures. A broken hyoid bone means manual strangulation; broken knees mean the truck that hit the deceased didn’t brake, broken shins that it did. And while people do occasionally walk sideways into head-high protrusions, they don’t often sustain concussion and a five-centimetre scalp laceration behind the ear.

  From the back Prufrock’s voice was shocked. “All right, my lad, hospital for you. We can work out what happened after we get you looked at.”

  But Shad didn’t like hospitals for the same reason he didn’t like police stations: they asked too many questions. “I’m all right. I just want to go home.”

  “It may need stitching!”

  “Then Rosie can stitch it. Can’t you?” He looked at her with expectancy and just a little desperation.

  She smiled. “I expect so.” To Prufrock she said, “I think he’s all right. Anyway, he may as well be heading home as sitting in A&E waiting for someone to see him. I’ll take a proper look when we get back; if I’m not happy with it then I’ll take him into Skipley General.”

  She hoped Shad might nod off for an hour, it would do him more good than trying to work out what had happened. But he showed no signs of sleeping. He bit his thumbnail; then he knuckled his eye; then he rubbed the side of his hand across his forehead. If there’d been room he’d have been pacing up and down. More than ever he looked like a caged bear.

  “Why Crewe?” he demanded at last, his voice thin and rough.

  “Because it’s one of the biggest railway junctions in the country,” Rosie answered mildly. “Most everything heading north from Birmingham goes through Crewe.”

  It didn’t help. “So where was I going? Why was I heading north? And why on a train when I’ve got a perfectly good Land Rover?” This was a slight exaggeration, but he certainly had a Land Rover.

  “What do you remember?”

  His hands jerked apart. “Nothing! Nothing.”

  Prufrock interceded. “You edged my lawn on Tuesday morning. Do you remember that?”

  “Of course I do!” Then conscience stabbed at him. These people had come fifty miles in the middle of the night to help him out, he had no business snapping at either of them. “Sorry. Yes, I remember. And Mrs Carstairs in the afternoon.”

  “What about Wednesday?”

  His head moved fractionally as he went to turn round then thought better of it. “Isn’t today Wednesday?”

  “Today’s Thursday,” Rosie said. “Only just” – it was half-past three now – “but Thursday. Who do you normally see on Wednesdays?”

  He normally spent the day at Foxford House up on The Brink. But he didn’t remember being there, or doing anything else instead. “I’ve been out cold for twenty-four hours?”

  Rosie shook her head firmly. “I doubt it. Twenty-four hours is a long time to be unconscious. I don’t think that injury would have done it, and I don’t think you’d be making this much sense if it had. Whatever happened to you was more recent than that, it just took a chunk of memory out with it. It may come back when you’re feeling better.”

  “I’ve lost my memory?”

  “Only a little bit,” Rosie said reassuringly. “And perhaps more mislaid than lost.”

  “Then – nobody knows what I was doing in Crewe!”

  “Well, somebody does,” said Rosie. “Whoever hit you on the head and pushed you off the train.”

  “And what was I doing on the train in the first place?”

  “We’ll ask the Thurleys,” suggested Prufrock. “If you didn’t go to Foxford House yesterday, perhaps you told them why.”

  “Or maybe you put it in your diary,” suggested Rosie. “Check it when we get you home.”

  Shad had a flat over a shoe shop in Skipley High Street. Access was up fourteen steep steps boxed into a narrow tunnel. It was too narrow for Rosie, who had to go up sideways, and too steep for Prufrock, who had to take a breather halfway. Despite his aching head, Shad managed without much difficulty. All he wanted now was for them to go away and let him go to bed. Perhaps things would make more sense in the morning.

  “Look – thanks for coming for me. I’m sorry to drag you out of your beds. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “You did the right thing,” Rosie said, pushing him into a chair under the naked bulb in the kitchen. “Now, look at me. Watch my finger …”

  A cursory examination was enough to confirm her earlier assessment. She put a couple of stitches in his scalp, her capacious handbag yielding a rudimentary medical kit – including some local anaesthetic that, in the best medical tradition, she didn’t leave quite long enough to work. When he yelped she told him not to be so soft.

  “You’ll live. Paracodol will help with the headache, otherwise it’s just a matter of time. Sleep as much as you want to. Arthur, it might be an idea if you stayed here tonight.”

  Prufrock nodded. “But shouldn’t we tell someone?”

  “The police? Tell them what? Somebody – we don’t know who – hit Shad on the head – we don’t know why – on a train going somewhere – and we don’t know where. We don’t know why he was on the train, and we don’t know where or when the attack occurred. It might have been in Crewe, or it might have been miles back and he just stumbled off the train when it stopped. Whoever hit him is long gone. We may just be glad that all it cost him is his wallet, and I don’t suppose there was much money in it.”

  Shad didn’t resent her candour. It was obvious to him that a woman who’d worked first as a doctor and now as a newspaper columnist must have more money than a jobbing gardener. Shad made enough for his needs – a modest home, a largely reliable vehicle, serviceable clothes and the occasional visit to his mother – and he made it in a way that was easy for him. He didn’t like crowds. Their emotions swamped him.

  But it was true that he didn’t have much left over at the end of the month. Little enough that he always knew the precise contents of his wallet. He said gruffly, “Twenty pounds and change.”

  “The change was in your pocket,” Rosie said brightly, “you didn’t lose that.”

  “No,” agreed Shad. “I spent it phoning Arthur.”

  “Ah. So, in fact, you’re skint.” With the same lack of either tact or reticence with which she’d drawn attention to his financial state, now she reached for her handbag again.

  “Except for this,” said Prufrock. It was the tone of his voice that made them both turn round.

  “What is it?” asked Rosie.

  “It’s a wallet,” said Prufrock. “Containing twenty pounds.”

  Beyond identifying it as his, Shad was too tired to think what it meant. Rosie sent him to bed, promising to get to the bottom of it when they’d all had some rest; but once he’d gone she found that all inclination to go home and sleep herself had vanished.

  “Could he have two wallets?”

  “Each with twenty pounds in them?” Prufrock arched a white eyebrow in disbelief.

  “Then how did it get back here?”

  Prufrock shook his head. “I don’t think it ever left.”

  “So now we’ve got him on a train going God knows where without enough money for a limp lettuce sandwich? Arthur, it makes no sense! Wherever he was going he’d need his wallet. He couldn’t
have bought a ticket without it.”

  But plainly Shad Lucas had left his wallet at home the last time he went out.

  “Maybe he didn’t have a ticket. Maybe he didn’t mean to go anywhere – just as far as the paper shop or something.”

  “He was kidnapped?” Rosie smothered her squawk of disbelief before it woke the subject of their debate. “He was shanghaied, smuggled unconscious aboard a train, and then at Crewe the white slavers changed their minds and slung him out on to the tracks? Arthur, we’re looking for a rational explanation!”

  Nettled by her tone, he scowled. “It makes more sense that whoever mugged him came back here to return his wallet with the contents intact?”

  None of it made sense. But Shad had got to Crewe somehow, apparently without the assistance of his wallet.

  “And where’s the Land Rover?” It wasn’t the sort of vehicle you could pass without noticing. Nominally green, one door was painted cream and the other orange. Usually it had a scythe or a lawn mower in the back. Rosie had parked in the High Street: she couldn’t have missed it if it had been there. “Are there garages round the back?”

  Prufrock shook his head. “The alley isn’t wide enough for cars.”

  Rosie stood up. “I’ll have a drive round, see if I can spot it. You stay here and keep an eye on him.”

  This time both Prufrock’s eyebrows soared. “Spot it? It could be anywhere between here and Crewe!”

  “I suppose it could. But it’s likely to be near the station.”

  She was back in fifteen minutes. The skewbald Land Rover had been parked – abandoned rather – slewed across the gritty end of Railwayview Street. The driver’s door was open and the keys still in the ignition; which was a tribute either to standards of honesty in Skipley, or to the fact that the local car thieves weren’t that desperate. Rosie parked the thing properly and locked it, then returned to the flat.