The Fountain in the Forest

by Tony White

  ‘Jesus!’ said DS Webster. ‘Keep your fucking hair on! It’s just a theory, Kingsy. If you don’t fucking like it, Mr fucking Political Correctness, you come up with something better.’

  ‘Alright, I will,’ said Rex, remembering again why he’d always thought Webster was a prat.

  It was nothing to do with Helen, though how she couldn’t see it, Rex had no idea. Webster was simply, first and foremost, an unreconstructed pillock of the old school: sexist, racist and homophobic. No wonder the police service couldn’t innovate or progress. Twat.

  ‘Do that,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Hang on. Did you get my email?’

  ‘What?’

  Rex took his phone out of his pocket, tapped it a few times, then held it up sideways. ‘It’s on the back of the paint frame door. None of us noticed it at the time, but the photographer caught it. What do you reckon?’

  ‘At the scene? What’s that?’ said Eddie, reaching out to steady the phone. ‘Trudi what?’

  ‘Trudi B Ventox,’ said Rex slowly. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ said Eddie. ‘Cough mixture or something?’

  Rex shrugged. ‘No idea, mate. I just saw it on one of the photos, and went back to take a closer look.’

  ‘Well, log it,’ said Eddie, ‘and let’s just keep trawling, eh.’ He drained his coffee. ‘Keep all lines of enquiry open.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said King, but he decided that, for the moment, he wouldn’t share Gertrude Bisika’s call with Webster. He would pursue it a bit more first. No sense going off half-cocked. If Webbo wanted a theory, he would fucking get one. In the meantime, Rex said, he needed to check out a few leads and track down one or two old pals regarding the whereabouts of a certain Terry Hobbs, whom he still emphatically refused to believe was a murderer. ‘It just doesn’t seem like the Terry I know. I might go back to the scene, Eddie. Dig around a bit more. See if there’s anything else we’ve missed. Okay with you?’

  ‘Be my fucking guest, Kingsy,’ was DS Webster’s considered response.

  6: MOURON (PIMPERNEL)

  Waiting for Andy half an hour or so and one beanburger later, the young King had felt dwarfed by the enormous standing stones that ranged around him, the twenty-ton lintel over his head. He’d rolled a small joint to smoke while he waited, a one-skinner with just a few tiny crumbs, this time, of sensi. It wasn’t the actual solstice but there had still been quite a crowd at the stones. Beside him a bushily bearded biker type – wearing his leather cut-off over an olive-green MA1 – had also been leaning back against the stone, gazing into the middle distance and beaming. Perhaps he had been tripping. King had taken out his Everyman and lit the small joint. At the sound of the striking flint, Beardy had turned around.

  ‘Hesperides, look!’ he’d said.

  ‘Vesper-what?’

  ‘Hesperides! Can you see them?’

  ‘Um …’

  ‘The ancient Greeks called them that. The nymphs of the golden evening light. Hesperides. Oh, you’re not tripping, then.’

  ‘Not yet, no,’ King had said.

  ‘Do you want some acid?’ Beardy’d asked.

  ‘…’

  ‘Hundred quid for a thousand?’

  King had nearly fallen over at this – a thousand tabs! – but had simply said, ‘Ah, no. Got some, thanks.’

  ‘Which ones have you got?’

  ‘Smiley Mushrooms.’

  ‘They’re okay. Pyramid are better, if you ask me.’ He’d looked at the joint in King’s hand. ‘Are you going to hog that or what?’

  ‘Not much in it, to be honest,’ King had shrugged, handing it over. ‘Just a taste. Overdid the last one.’

  ‘Well, I don’t need to get any more stoned,’ Beardy had grinned. ‘I think I’m practically immune.’ He’d drawn what turned out to be the last toke and a half, then flicked the roach on to the grass and ground it out beneath the heel of a heavy black army boot. Then he’d taken a packet of Old Holborn out of the pocket of his jacket and rolled a cigarette. ‘Want one?’ he’d offered. Then: ‘Got a match?’

  After a few puffs, he’d turned and said, ‘Don’t do the horse, though. I hear it’s pretty strong. Practically neat. Supposedly someone left a hypodermic over in the kids’ play area. Fucking evil bastards.’

  There’d been a smell of woodsmoke in the air. It had been curling out of cone-topped flues on converted ambulances, camper vans and coaches across the site, and from fire pits – even though the information sheet had clearly said not to dig them – all of it contributing to a slightly unseasonal mist.

  ‘If you ignore the people, though,’ Beardy’d said, ‘and the fucking helicopters, and just look at the landscape, you could be some – I don’t know – peasant farmer, husbandman, whatever, getting high on the rye. It wouldn’t have looked any different a thousand years ago, know what I mean?’

  King must have looked puzzled.

  ‘Ergot, mate! St Vitus’s Dance!’

  Nope, none the wiser.

  ‘Fuck’s sake. LSD! Albert Hofmann, the guy who invented acid in 1938, was researching ergot. Hallucinogenic fungus that attacked damp rye grains, weren’ it. Course, back in the Middle Ages they didn’t know that, and they must have been eating that mouldy rye all the fucking time, so they called it St Vitus’s Dance. Crazy, ain’ it? Imagine all these medieval geezers tripping off their faces.’ He had put the cigarette in his mouth, narrowed his eyes against the smoke, which now curled up his face, and placed both palms flat on the stones at around waist height.

  ‘Cogito ergot sum, mate. I think I’m tripping, therefore I am. Can you feel them vibrating?’

  King had tried it too. Not yet, he couldn’t. Maybe later.

  ‘These things were fucking ancient then,’ Beardy had continued. ‘They called them sarsens because they thought they were un-Christian, otherworldly, like Saracens, which was their name for Arab or Muslim soldiers. This was the time of the Crusades, yeah? So they called them “Saracen stones”. Go on, say it with a West Country accent!’

  King had obliged. It had sounded like ‘sarrrsen’.

  ‘See? Fuck me! As comparisons go, that was about as extreme as it got to your average medieval peasant. Saracens were the only thing in their known universe that was far-out enough to compare this place to.’ He grinned broadly. ‘I love all that shit.’

  Beardy had taken a small apple out of his jacket pocket with one hand and slid a huge curved knife out of his boot with the other. He’d used the outsized blade to carve off a slice that he’d then offered to King, held between thumb and blade.

  ‘Nice one, thanks. Fucking hell, is that knife big enough?’

  ‘It’s a kukri,’ Beardy had said, carving himself a slice. ‘Gurkha knife. Good, ain’ it. This is just a small one. Usually they’re like that—’ He could have been describing the fish that got away. ‘Got it off a mate in Belfast when I was in the Paras.’

  When they had eaten the apple, Beardy had wiped the blade on his jeans and slid it back into his boot, out of sight. That was when Andy had turned up, with a bottle of rum and coke he’d got from a stall.

  ‘Alright?’ he’d said by way of a greeting, offering around the bottle. ‘It’s flat, but it tastes okay.’

  ‘Sun’s over the yard-arm,’ Beardy had said, taking a swig before holding out his hand, which King had shaken. ‘I’m Pete, by the way. See you later. Gonna go and find my old lady. Have a good one, mush.’

  ‘Yeah, cheers, thanks, Pete. You too.’

  Pete had started walking away, but then turned as if he’d just remembered something. ‘Oh, here’s a tip for you,’ he’d said. ‘You’ll like this. You’ll be into this. If you freak out at all – I mean, I’m not saying you will, but just in case you do – ask someone where the awfully nice tea rooms are.’

  They both laughed. It had sounded funny, the way Pete said ‘awfully nice’.

  ‘No, serious! I promise you, I’m not joking.’

  ‘Tea rooms?�
��

  ‘No, not just tea rooms – the awfully nice tea rooms. Remember that. You’ll see. Cheers, lads.’

  And later they would.

  ‘Nice bloke,’ Andy had said.

  ‘Yeah,’ King had agreed. ‘Size of that fucking knife, though.’

  ‘What knife?’

  The acid had come on quite quickly, and not at all gently. The young King had been looking at some festival posters on a book-shop and handicraft stall. There were posters of the Hindu god Shiva emblazoned with the legend ‘Stonehenge Free Festival’.

  ‘What’s that?’ Andy had said.

  ‘Um, it’s like a poster of a poster, with a picture of a poster on it,’ had been the teenaged King’s enigmatic answer. There had followed a vertiginous recalibration of his visual sensoria. Everything had demanded a second look. It had no longer been possible to make assumptions based on visual sensation alone. Fits of giggles were interspersed with gutfuls of anxiety, waves of euphoria.

  Wandering around, they had come across a two-seater sofa, the incongruity of which had seemed hilarious, but ‘any port in a storm’, as the saying went. Occupying this, sitting down, had helped to anchor them for a while, but it had felt as if they were sitting on a boat. The ground beneath them seeming to rise and fall gently, or to inflate and deflate, as if the very earth had been breathing beneath them. Back at home in the days and weeks ahead, our pals would swear that later on they had found an old Bedford bus that had been converted into a mobile cinema, or perhaps been purpose-built as one. There had been what seemed like lasers firing out of a great glass dome above its cab, while inside they had found a couple of dozen actual cinema seats and a screen. It had been parked in the area of the festival known as Tibet. The young King was convinced that they had watched Carry On: Don’t Lose Your Head, laughing uproariously at Sid James cavorting around Revolutionary-era France as a Scarlet Pimpernel-type character, fighting duels and saving aristocrats from the guillotine; posing as a lisping fop for cover one minute, swashbuckling lech the next.

  Beyond ‘Let them eat cake!’ and the ‘storming of the Bastille’, whatever that was, the French Revolution per se had been about as meaningless to King at that time as more or less any other random historical event: the American War of Independence, say, or the Siege of Mafeking! He hadn’t known a flintlock from a fetlock, but lack of knowledge hadn’t seemed to impede the Carry On crew either. The whole seismic episode in French and global history was being played purely for puns and double entendres, as a vehicle for arse or tit jokes.

  Later, Andy confessed that he thought they’d been watching Zulu.

  Then it had been as if the whole thing, the bus, the air, had suddenly aged. The film had become a dusty irrelevance. The jump cuts had become too jarring and seemed to have spilled out into the world of time and space. It was as if some editor had been cutting and splicing – in those pre-Avid, analogue days – wildly contrasting levels of resolution from one second to the next: from the molecular to the global, from micro to macro, and back again; cosmic crash-edits. It had all started happening too quickly, as if time had begun to speed up. There had been hair in the gate and smoke in the beams of light. It had been suffocating, dizzying, impossible to concentrate or to sit still. King had stood up and rushed off the bus, and Andy had followed.

  Stepping outside had helped a bit; seeing the by then night-time sky and feeling the breeze against his skin. It had certainly felt something of a relief to have both feet on the ground as well, to walk around in the fresh air, dodging other people, as if this whole festival site had become nothing more than a three-dimensional game of Asteroids. But when an oncoming rock had turned to them and asked, in the nicest possible way, if they’d wanted to buy any hash, Andy had managed only to gulp and to stammer, ‘I … I … I … I … I—’

  Oh, no, a freak-out!

  There had only been one thing for it. ‘Excuse me,’ King had asked the dealer, forming the words as slowly and deliberately as he’d been able, and hoping they would be more intelligible than they sounded to him. ‘Do you know where the awfully nice tea rooms are?’

  The hash dealer hadn’t, but incredibly, some immeasurable period of time, many other requests for directions, and several UFO sightings later, they had found themselves sitting at a dining table in a 1930s living room, or amid living-room scenery at least – were they on a stage? it wasn’t entirely clear – and having their orders taken by a vicar in a panama hat.

  ‘High tea,’ Andy had said, shaking with laughter as he’d tried to sip Earl Grey from a rattling bone-china cup and saucer. Then some vestigial memory of his mother’s antique-collecting had kicked in and he’d turned the saucer over, looking, he’d said, for the ‘re-mark’.

  ‘Is that like a resit?’

  ‘No: remarque.’

  ‘…’

  ‘R-E-M-A-R-Q-whatever-whatever. Like some sort of maker’s mark or something. Fuck knows. Oh, yeah. There it is. Anyway, look—’ Andy had turned the saucer back the right way over and tipped some tea into it. He had slurped it noisily as if for comic effect, before sighing with a mixture of savour and delight. ‘That is actually really nice. Cools it down. My grandad used to do that.’

  In fact, by this time, the acid had started to level off nicely, enough that the young King had actually been able to roll a joint without the chintz tablecloth writhing around too much. ‘A drink’s too wet without one,’ he’d said, quoting the strapline from a then current McVitie’s Rich Tea biscuit television advert, while holding the resulting doobie up like a conductor’s baton. Lighting it, he had taken a drag or two before passing it to his friend. Then, as was obviously expected, if not positively encouraged, he had turned to the waiter and asked, ‘More tea, vicar?’

  7: CERFEUIL (CHERVIL)

  Detective Sergeant Rex King had certainly – to borrow one of Detective Chief Inspector Jethro Lawrence’s phrases – ‘been giving it plenty of bloody shoe leather’. He and DS Eddie Webster had drawn up a list of Terence Hobbs’s usual haunts on the whiteboard: his house by the Regent’s Canal in Hackney and his lock-up in the arches on Bocking Street, the Coach & Horses, The Rock & Sole Plaice. After a couple of uniforms had made some unsuccessful trips to Hackney, Rex had been following up, working his way down the list and gradually ticking them off, but without any joy. Added to that, mobile phone trace had drawn a big fat zilch. There was no sign of Tel.

  The curtains of Terry’s house on Andrews Road had been drawn and the windows dark. It was a handsome house looking over the Regent’s Canal, a tall and narrow-fronted Victorian terrace. Terry had once told Rex that, when he’d bought the place, it’d had no roof. The windows had been rotten, and huge buddleias were growing out of cracks in the render. Slowly renovating the place, doing it properly, had been one of the pleasures of Terence’s life, and it showed. Looking through the now gleaming brass letterbox on the beautifully restored original Victorian front door, Rex had seen post building up on the hallway floor.

  If he was going back to the paint frame, Rex figured he could tick another one off the list by dropping in at the chippy while he was in the area. And maybe squeeze in a second visit to the Coach while he was at it. See if any of the Friday-lunchtime bar staff had heard anything.

  Crossing over near a glossy redevelopment on New Oxford Street, where Museum Street joined High Holborn, Rex remembered when this place had been the West Central Royal Mail sorting office instead of this generic block of retail spaces and expensive flats. When Rex had first lived in the area it was thriving – there would be postal vans and lorries driving in and out constantly, at all times of the day and night, fluorescent lights blazing from the windows on all floors, hundreds of blue-shirted postal workers crowding the nearby pubs at break times and at the starts and ends of shifts.

  The old sorting office had closed down a couple of decades ago, and in more recent years had been the subject of occasional police visits only when it was being used as a film location, or as the venue for an illeg
al rave. Then the inevitable had happened and the developers had moved in. It was happening all over. The sorting office in Rathbone Place had been converted into flats too. Where was all that work being done now, and where were the families it had supported?

  Some parts of Covent Garden didn’t really change. People still lived in the council blocks down the side streets, the flats around Stukeley Street and Neal Street, or the tiered balconies that crowded around the Oasis swimming pool. Children still grew up around here.

  Once you got off the main drag and into the side streets, there were still glimpses too of the older two-or three-storey red-brick London. Smaller shops were somehow clinging on in the face of the unstoppable chains. The same could probably be said of almost every high street in London. And presumably for some of these smaller independents it would only be a matter of time before some faceless corporate entity flying whichever flag of fiscal convenience would find a way to acquire them, along with as many other adjacent plots as possible, to force dereliction and evict the tenants, to blag their way through planning and to leverage the larger plot into yet another multi-storey money pit that might bring thousand-fold returns, but at the cost of blocking the light in neighbouring streets and killing off another local community.

  As Rex crossed over Drury Lane towards Russell Street, he could hear the primary-school children of St Clement Danes playing high above. Terry had once told him that the school itself dated back to at least 1666, the year of the Great Fire, but this building was obviously Victorian and, like many London schools of that era, had a playground on the roof. King wasn’t entirely sure, but he wondered whether, above the otherwise undifferentiated screams and laughter, he could hear some of the children playing a clapping game: ‘A sailor went to sea, sea, sea. To see what he could see, see, see’, or something like it. Did kids still even play those games? Had Jennifer done that? Helen’s girls: Jennifer and Rachel? Weren’t they all just looking at their phones all the time now?