The Natural Law

by Steve Attridge

  “Kettle’s boiled. Sugar?”

  “No thanks,” I said. I noticed two mugs already on the table. A little Toby jug of milk. It was as if he had been expecting me. He was.

  “My name’s...”

  “Paul Rook. Private Investigator. Bit of a philosopher too.”

  It’s not often I’m surprised. How the hell did he know who I was and that I was going to visit? I didn’t know myself until half an hour ago. He looked at my confusion. A pretty translucent green bird perched on the biscuit barrel he was about to open.

  “You rang, Mister Rook. Or rather, it was a landline phone message. About twenty minutes ago and told me you were coming. I wouldn’t forget, not with a name like yours. Rook – or Corvus frugilegus, member of the Corvidae family in the passerine order of birds. Named by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. Intelligent. Ka-ah Ka-ah. Distinctive call. Good at working things out, solving problems to get what it wants. You know, in an experiment, a rook was put near a tube of water, with a worm floating on the water surface, and some stones next to the tube. The water level was too low for the rook to reach the worm, so it placed stones in the tube until the level was high enough to get the worm. Is something wrong?”

  Yes. Everything was wrong.

  Chapter III

  ‘It is the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit.’

  Joseph Joubert

  Jimmy reiterated that I had telephoned him. Unless I was going the way of my mother and each second was a fresh universe of unmeaning and mystery without memory or arrangement, someone was toying with me, and showing me they were in control. The text, and now this. I let it go for the moment. Jimmy was surprisingly open; usually criminals tell me nothing until they know I’m not a threat, but he chatted amiably as a smallish green parrot with an orange beak and a whitish grey ringed breast, as if he was wearing a vest, scuttled along his perch and screeched lines from The Charge of the Light Brigade:

  “Half a league, half a league,

  Half a league onward,

  All in the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.”

  Jimmy smiled indulgently; I realised these birds were all his sons and daughters in the odd brew of his imagination. He wore a black leather glove where a right hand should be.

  “Loves Tennyson, so I called him Alfred. Knows every line. Amazing little fellow. A quaker parrot. Smart talkers. Fertile brains, parrots. Need constant stimulation otherwise they get restless and bored. Always liked the quaker. He’s got a vocab of over five hundred words. Now, Andy King. Nice lad but shall we say incautious. Breezy. Thought everything would turn out right as nine pence if he kept smiling. Bit of a peacock – all feathers and no brain. He’d be the one who wouldn’t see the cat coming.”

  The parrot was unstoppable:

  “Cannon to right of them,

  Cannon to left of them,

  Cannon in front of them

  Volleyed and thundered;”

  I finished the verse for him:

  “Stormed at with shot and shell,

  Boldly they rode and well,

  Into the jaws of Death,

  Into the mouth of hell

  Rode the six hundred.”

  The parrot stopped and eyed me, his head moving to one side. Then he flew from his perch and sat on my shoulder. He started to nibble my ear lobe, clucking softly, one dark intelligent eye a bite away from mine. Jimmy beamed.

  “You stole his thunder. Alfred likes an educated person. Not many of those come round here. Remember this about parrots. If they go still and pin you with an eye they’re getting ready to bite.”

  “Andy King,” I reminded him.

  “Andy King,” echoed Alfred the parrot.

  “I was sorry to hear. He’d got involved in something and he was dying to tell me, but was afraid to. I had a phone call a while back asking if I’d vouch for him. I did and got five hundred quid for it. I don’t know what it was but it was a step up. I got the feeling he was watching his back.”

  “Who phoned you?”

  “Never got a name.”

  “What do you think he was into?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “He was killed in Istanbul, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think he was doing in Istanbul?”

  “I think it was a stopover.”

  “Right. Could be India.”

  “Or it could be Afghanistan. Andy wasn’t political?”

  Jimmy smiled.

  “If you mentioned right or left wing he’d think you were talking football.”

  “Security?”

  “Didn’t have the background. Listen, I’ll ask around. Andy was liked. He had a good mate called Rod…what is it? Whyley or Riley. It’ll come. Ring me tomorrow and I’ll let you know what I’ve found out.”

  At least I knew a little more about Andy King than I had when I arrived.

  *

  I went for a coffee and thought about death. We rarely see it coming, but what if we could, as when you know you have a fatal illness? Did Andy King see it coming? What had he done to bring it about? Montaigne wrote an essay: ‘That to Philosophise is to Learn to Die’. He considers Cicero’s idea that to study philosophy is to learn to die, because quiet thought and contemplation create stillness, a movement away from the world, which is a simulacrum of death, but in doing that we learn not to fear death, and in turn may learn to appreciate life more. By knowing death we can live better. It quietens something in us.

  I walked to Regents Park, just stepping onto the train when I got a text: You have pulled the lever. Will you take responsibility? Gladiator. Number Unknown. What the hell? Somebody was still watching, and playing games. Two stops later the message thundered home. How could I be so slow? Pulling the lever is a reference to the trolley problem – an ethical philosophical dilemma. There are five people tied to a railway track and a trolley is thundering towards them. You are standing next to a lever and can divert the trolley to another line where one person is tied. What do you do? A utilitarian would say you choose the one person to die. An alternative view is that by doing anything you are actively participating in a situation where moral crimes are already in place. It gets more convoluted than that, but you get the point. What had I done? I’d just been to see Jimmy and perhaps merely by doing that I’d pulled a lever in events. It seemed to take an age before the train stopped. I ran upstairs and couldn’t find my oyster card, so hurdled the barrier, nearly broke my ankle and ran up the steps with a station guard running behind me and shouting. In the road I jumped in a taxi, next to an elderly woman wearing a white leather coat, a black hat and enough perfume to furnish a brothel.

  “Emergency,” I said.

  “How delightful. Where are we going?” she said, smiling through a landslide of pan make-up.

  “To see if a family of birds is intact,” I said.

  “Marvellous,” she said.

  Ten minutes later we pulled up outside the block. How long was it since I was there? Fifty minutes? What could have happened? I got out of the cab and ran across the road. A little boy was looking up and pointing and laughing. Way up a window was open and a cascade of birds were flying out, painting the dull brickwork, slate roof and grey sky with alarming colour. Blues, greens, reds, yellows, fluttering wings. Cries and squawks. A line of budgerigars perched on the sill. Another line on the roof, bobbing their heads and chattering in their new and shocking freedom. A pigeon sat fatly on a window ledge and watched this exotic exodus. Damn damn damn, I kept ringing Jimmy’s number on the brass plate but no answer. I rang the flat below. A woman answered.

  “Police. We suspect an intruder. Please buzz me in and stay inside with your door locked.” The door buzzed. The lift was on the fifth so I took the stairs three at a time. A breathless twenty seconds later Jimmy’s door wasn’t locked and I ran in. I knew before I saw him. He lay on the floor, his face swollen and the colour of putty, clusters of tiny veins broken on hi
s cheeks. He’d been garrotted. In the Middle Ages, garrotting was a means of execution for someone who was to be burned at the stake, but who had ‘confessed’ their heresy and so was spared the long agony of the flames. Then the lifeless body was burned.

  There was also a horrible sponge like wound on his head the shape of a crescent moon where he’d presumably cracked his head as he fell, or tried to struggle. Blood oozed thickly and was already congealing and darkening. It’s not easy to garrotte someone and this person knew what they were doing, probably a thin wire one to judge by the wound. One handless arm was across his chest, the other on a chair as if he’d tried to lever himself up while he was dying.

  A pretty lemon coloured canary, bright as a small sun, sat on his chest and cheeped quizzically. A blue and green budgerigar sat by his head, gently pecking his chin as if trying to awaken him. I put my ear to his chest. Felt his pulse. Nothing. He was gone. A pandemonium of birds were all around, though many had flown out. I wondered if something of Jimmy had flown with them. Cages were upturned and most had been opened. Why would someone who had just killed Jimmy let all these birds go? Presumably he’d been killed because he’d talked to me, and might have more to say, but the birds had played no part in it.

  I closed the windows and sat until the thought came – the cages and windows were opened before Jimmy died. This made sense. Jimmy loved them more than he did himself, so what better way to make him confess what he’d told me than to release into an uncertain world and probable death the things he loved? The little he’d told me was not worth this death, not worth something that came creeping sly and malevolent, a dark thing in a corner waiting to happen and work its grubby purpose. Much as I hated their imprisonment, the birds had endeared him to me. I liked the incongruity of it, of him. I was sorry.

  I put on gloves and made a quick search of the room. A mock antique roll top desk revealed only bills and correspondence with various bird organizations. I pocketed his address book. I checked his telephone to get the last number rang and copied it. I froze with the receiver in my hand. A sound. A muffled word. Someone was in the flat with me. It could only be the killer. I looked around for a weapon and picked up a long silver paper knife. My hand was already clammy. Then again. A breath. A murmur. From the kitchen. I stepped up and slowly started to open the door. Much to my annoyance I was excited. It was one of many things warped in my little inner world. Some piece of machinery gone askew. Then a voice.

  “Don’t hit me, please, don’t hit me. I haven’t said anything. I don’t know anything. Just go away. Please.”

  I looked down at Jimmy, growing colder by the minute, yet there was his voice coming from the kitchen. And I knew. It could only be. I opened the door further and there was Alfred, sitting on the kitchen table. He took a grape from a bowl and nibbled it, then swallowed, did a little jig to a chair back and looked at me, head cocked to one side.

  “I haven’t said anything. I don’t know anything. Just go away. Please. No, no,” he said in a perfect and ridiculously moving simulation of Jimmy’s voice.

  I would have to revise my ideas about death. The dead may be gone but their voices live on, albeit in a parrot, himself perhaps a reincarnation of Alfred Lord Tennyson.

  “What else do you know, Alfred? What else did you hear?” I asked.

  He threw back his head and gave an ear piercing shriek. Then a groan. Silence.

  Chapter IV

  ‘Friendship is the greatest of all.’

  Seneca

  I stopped and telephoned the police anonymously from a public phone, and said they would also need someone to take care of a lot of birds. As I drove back I planned my next move: to trace Andy King’s bank payments, because if you follow the money it sometimes starts to tell a story. I’d also go to see Jamaican Loz. Presumably Andy King’s killer also murdered Jimmy, but what or who was he protecting? I tried the last number Jimmy rang and got an anonymous answerphone, so stopped the call. I looked at the passenger seat. Alfred sat in a cage looking solemnly and curiously at the road ahead. I assumed he hadn’t been out in a while and had a lot of new sensory input to process. He’d obviously heard and seen all that happened in the flat and might tell me more. Besides, I liked him. I went to the university to put up some ‘seminar cancelled’ notices. I put Alfred on my desk and suddenly realised he was a big responsibility. What did he eat – grapes apart? Could I let him out of the cage at all? How often did his cage need cleaning? What other needs did he have?

  Mrs Simpson, one of the few people in the university I can tolerate, entered with her mop and bucket. In the bucket was a chilled bottle of Sancerre; she’d obviously seen me arriving. She gave a little gasp.

  “Oh my blimey, it’s a quaker. Hello there,” she said smiling and approached the cage.

  Alfred eyed her, then did a little jig. She put her hand to the cage and he nibbled her finger very gently and rolled an eye at her. I swear he was flirting.

  “You know about parrots?” I asked.

  “My old dad kept a few. Intelligent things they are.”

  “Into the valley of death rode the six hundred,” said Alfred, and followed it with an ear shredding wolf whistle.

  Within ten minutes we’d done a deal. I gave her some money to buy food for Alfred. She’d check on him whenever I wasn’t here, which was most of the time, and she’d spend her breaks and lunch times with him and change his water. I had no doubt that within a few days he’d have a juicy gossip map of the whole campus. Jez, a night security guard friend of hers, would keep an eye on him overnight. He’d probably be better off than in my tiny flat with long periods of being alone. I didn’t know what a Pandora’s Box Alfred would open during the next week.

  When Mrs Simpson left I started to trace Andy King’s bank statements. He had been getting heavy duty payments from a company called Ocean Investments. It had associations of health, fresh air, new horizons. It wasn’t registered at Companies House. There was a box number in London, another in Prague, and nothing else.

  I had an email from the ghastly Audrey Pritchard, reminding me that tomorrow was Friday and I was to chair the first PDP meeting. I hacked into the Staff Counsellor’s hard drive to see if there was any useful information on Audrey – any psychological tics, personal problems, emotional baggage, that I could use as leverage if needs must, but there was nothing. Unless Audrey was hiding something, she was inanely, annoyingly normal. Tomorrow could take care of itself.

  I looked at Alfred and he stared back, his head to one side.

  “There was another name. Rod Whyley or Riley. I wonder if Jimmy ever remembered,” I said.

  “The name’s Whiteley. Rod Whiteley. Must give that Rook fella a bell later,” said Alfred in Jimmy’s voice. So he had remembered.

  I smiled.

  “Good lad. See you tomorrow, Alfred.”

  He bobbed his head up and down, eyes like black stars.

  “Forward, the Light Brigade!"

  Was there a man dismay'd?

  Not tho’ the soldier knew

  Some one had blunder’d.”

  I finished the verse.

  “Theirs not to make reply,

  Theirs not to reason why,

  Theirs but to do and die.

  Into the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.”

  I was starting to really like Alfred.

  *

  I don’t go in for close friendships, apart from Cass, and Lizzie at one time; I prefer my own company. Given that my best friend David had been slyly shafting my wife while still being my best friend, allow me a few barbs of cynicism. One day I will probably kill him. In 301 BC Epicurus maintained that wisdom tells us that the greatest facilitator of happiness is the possession of friendship. The argument runs that others who care for us confirm our identities, and are more likely to understand what we say. I say that happiness is vastly overrated and a logical impossibility to attain as a permanent state. I concur with Paul
Valéry’s dictum that “God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.” Aloneness is authentic. It’s where our real work is done in the crucible of the human.

  However, when I was in my teens and early twenties I did have a soul mate, Symon Crace, a fellow renegade soul who, like me, spent all his spare time chasing his own demons, only for them to return sturdier. We were the brothers neither of us had, both smart, self-destructive and contradictory. We each loved philosophy but, after university, he joined the civil service, then left to start his own business. We kept in touch but after a few years I was married, entrenched in academia and he was a globetrotting executive with a successful trading company, mostly minerals and gold. I hadn’t seen him in ten years, but when I opened the door to my flat, there was the familiar lopsided smile, the flick of blonde hair flecked with grey now, his body a little heavier, cradling a glass of my Rioja, and making Cass laugh.

  “Paul. God you look terrible. Much older than I do. What on earth has life done to you?”

  “And you. Look how enormous you are. Elephantine. Business lunches and no angst to thin you. I thought you were Oliver Hardy in a blonde wig.”