‘It’s been there ages,’ shrugged Hayley. ‘And there’s an elastic band on it.’
‘I know,’ said Felix doubtfully, because somehow the elastic band did make it seem like more than a brick, so he left it on the coffee table and carried on cleaning.
They took two bags of waste out of the room before Felix felt they’d broken the back of the mess.
Hayley smiled at him. ‘Thank you. That’s so nice of you!’
‘Not at all,’ said Felix. ‘Happy to help.’
‘It looks so much better already!’
‘A place for everything,’ he nodded, ‘and everything in its place.’
She looked at him wide-eyed. ‘Oh my God, that’s totally true! You’re, like, the Yoda of tidying up.’
Felix wasn’t sure what a yoda was so he just smiled vaguely, then rubbed his hands together. ‘Better get to work.’
‘Do you need any tools or anything? Reggie has some in the shed.’
‘Who’s Reggie?’
‘You know,’ she said, and lowered her voice, ‘Albert’s son.’
‘Of course,’ he said, as if he’d only forgotten. That must be the young man with the red car.
He told Hayley he had his own tools, and then left her with her crisps and her painfully loud TV, and went to get them from the car. He carried them around the side of the house and down the back garden.
Everything was just as it had been two days ago, except now Felix had more time to look around him. He glanced up at the window that he presumed belonged to the bedroom where Albert Cann had died, and thought of the desperation, and the panic, and the shock of opening the other door—
‘Come on, Mabel,’ he said briskly.
The garden was full of shrubs and flower beds, but all submerged by huge sprays of wild brambles that fountained fifteen feet into the air and narrowed the garden by the same margin on both sides. The shrubbery was still there – somewhere underneath. Felix could tell because here and there a rhododendron poked a desperate blossom through the undergrowth, or a rose waved while drowning in thorns, but most of the shrubs had long since become mere trellis for the well-armed invaders.
Mabel was excited by the newness of it all. She found notices to read on an old wooden ladder and more on a cluster of flowerpots. She chased a wren under the ramshackle shed and a pigeon up the greengage tree, then she led the snuffling way through the long grass and past an old cold frame with broken windows to where the gap in the fence beckoned like a portal to another – much better kempt – existence.
Felix got to work repairing the breach. The stakes at the bottom of the broken panel were rotten – as he’d expected they would be. He hadn’t had any stakes handy in the garage or in his shed, but he did have several lengths of two-by-four, and now sawed one end of each into a rough point that might be more easily driven into the ground. These he set about attaching to the existing posts with plentiful screws, having first sawn off the rotten ends flush with the bottom of the panel.
It didn’t take long to improvise four new stakes and to screw them sturdily to the posts, and when the panel was ready to be fixed in place, he levered it upright and leaned it against its neighbour, then stepped into the field holding a plastic garden chair and a mallet, and pulled the panel into place behind him, tilting the chair to wedge it upright while he worked. He hammered the new stakes into the ground with such ease and accuracy that he was sorry there was nobody there to witness his skill. By the time the stakes were properly seated so that the panel sat flush against the grass and perfectly square to its neighbours, Felix was so warm that he had to hang his beige jacket over the fence.
It took him nearly an hour, and when he had finished he wiped his brow on the sleeve of his jumper and surveyed his handiwork.
Not bad! And he hadn’t enjoyed anything so much for ages.
Then he realized he’d fenced himself out of the garden.
‘Ha!’ he snorted. ‘Old fool!’ And was pleased that nobody but Mabel was watching after all.
He’d been this side of the fence before, of course, but on that occasion he had just hobbled blindly across the field until he’d reached a random hedge and then a gate and then a lane and then a bus stop. It was all a bit of a blur. But now he wanted to get back into the garden, not away from it. He looked around him. The neighbours had a similar high wooden fence along the bottom of their property, interrupted only by a gnarled apple tree next door that leaned over it, hung with half a dozen bird feeders and nesting boxes. Scores of sparrows and tits and chaffinches fluttered and swooped around them, arguing furiously over this nut or that sunflower seed.
Despite his predicament, Felix took a moment to enjoy the sight. He’d always liked birds. He should get a feeder. He would get a feeder – as soon as he’d caught Buttons and taken him safely home to Geoffrey. That reminded him of why he was here and what he was doing and that he still needed to get back into the Canns’ garden.
He peered back over the fence but it was too high to climb, and so he stood on the chair, but even then it only raised him chest-high against the fence. If he’d been fifty, he might have managed it, but at seventy-five, even the small optimistic hop he tried made the garden chair wobble precariously and he clutched at the fence, and Mabel barked furiously at him, as if they’d never met. It made Felix wonder if she really only knew him from the knees down.
‘Don’t be a silly old dog,’ he chided her, but she was determined to alert the planet to his presence, so he clambered off the chair and looked around. The front of the Cann house faced the neighbours and – beyond them – the sky that hung over the grassland that led to the sea, but the views from the back were much prettier: small, bright green fields dotted with sheep, sloping gently down into a shallow coombe and up the other side towards Bideford.
Felix’s sense of smell had been declining for years but there was enough nature here even for him to draw in the scent of all-purpose greenery and the soil below it, while – now that he wasn’t bumbling about on the fence and the chair – the birds had returned to the apple tree en masse, and filled the air with their cheerful squabbling.
Felix wiped his hands on his trousers. He would just have to walk around the end of the row of houses and hope to find a gate he could climb over.
He lifted the plastic chair back over the fence and was about to drop it into the garden when the cleaner threw open the back door, ran as far as the shed and shouted at him, ‘Hey! Skipper’s fallen over!’
Felix froze.
‘Oh dear,’ he called, non-committally.
But she yelled, ‘I can’t get him up alone!’ And then waved her arm at him and disappeared back inside – apparently expecting him to follow post-haste.
Felix didn’t move. Just stared at the house through the brambles and didn’t know what to do. It was in his nature to help, but he’d imagined things would happen at his own pace. This was too fast. Too soon – and he felt panicky at the prospect of seeing the old man again. How could he look him in the eye and admit what he’d done? He just wasn’t prepared for it.
In his head, Margaret said crossly, I thought you’d come to help.
Felix sighed. With a horrible sense of foreboding, he pulled the chair back to his side of the fence and looked around him with a more urgent eye.
A branch of the apple tree curved gracefully down over next door’s fence. Felix placed the plastic chair underneath the lowest point of the curve. He climbed up carefully and gripped the branch – and was instantly transported through time. When had he last touched a tree? When had he last climbed a tree? My goodness, it must be sixty years! And yet it felt so familiar. That rough, dry bark, the creak of the wood as he tested his weight, and the flurry of birds rushing to leave as he rocked their world.
Felix pulled the branch as low as he could and lifted one leg towards it. The chair wobbled precariously and he quickly
put his foot down again, quaking inside.
This was never going to work!
But Mr Cann needed help. And Felix had come here with the express purpose of helping him, so it would be a very poor show if he let something as simple as a tree get in his way.
He tried again. He threw one arm over the branch and then his right leg. It wasn’t easy: he hadn’t lifted his leg this high for years. Something creaked and he couldn’t tell if it was the tree or his hip. But he wedged his right knee on to the branch. And then over the branch. And suddenly the branch shifted and his left foot was no longer in contact with the garden chair and he was definitely in the tree, with his cheek and chin pressed against the bark. He moved his head minutely and looked down. From the ground the branch had been head-high but from the branch the ground looked a dizzying distance away, and Felix clung on for dear life, scared to move for fear of unbalancing himself and dropping to earth like a floppy monkey pierced by a poisoned dart.
But the whole point was to move . . .
Slowly he inched forward and didn’t fall. So he took a deep breath and did it again. Hurry up! said Margaret, and Felix finally accepted his fate and hurried up. If he made it, good. If he didn’t, well, the girl knew where to look for his body, and Mabel was microchipped and so somehow she’d find her way to Miss Knott, he was sure.
Actually it wasn’t so hard. The further he went, the more confident he felt. He’d done this before – a long time ago, of course – but his brain knew that was true, and reminded his hands and his arms and his legs and his feet that this was all perfectly possible, and then waited patiently for them to catch up.
Before he knew it, Felix was watching the top of the fence edge beneath him, and impending triumph strengthened his grip. There was a small wobble when he banged his head on a nesting box and another when a nut feeder swung into his ear, but other than that all went quite smoothly and less than five minutes after starting this latest adventure, Felix shuffled his hips sideways and let his legs drop from the branch. He had planned to dangle by his arms, judge his distance and land on his feet, but as soon as his legs left the branch, they just yanked the rest of him out of the tree and he fell.
Six inches.
The ground surprised him so early that his knees buckled and he staggered into the trunk, and threw his arms around it to steady himself.
I’m OK. I’m OK!
Nobody cared, of course.
Slowly Felix released the tree from his embrace and brushed himself down and clapped his hands on his thighs to rid himself of bits of moss and bark and bird poo, and then straightened up and hurried up the neighbour’s garden with a new sense of purpose. If anyone confronted him now, he’d tell them firmly that he was on a rescue mission and to stand by in case they were needed. If they tried to stop him . . . Well, he would simply brush them aside.
Felix Pink had climbed a tree, and nothing was beyond him.
‘Up here!’
The stairwell was much brighter than the last time Felix had been here. As he got to the landing he realized it was because all the doors upstairs were open. At the door to Albert Cann’s bedroom he stopped as if struck, and felt a cold shiver run down his back.
There was an oxygen cylinder. Not a small one either, but a large black tank like an aqualung, with big industrial-looking valves and loops of tubing and a mask, all on a sturdy metal trolley so the user could wheel it about from room to room. Exactly the kind of thing a man who suffered from emphysema might need.
It had not been there before. Felix was sure of it.
Wasn’t he?
‘Hello?’ the girl called. ‘In here!’
Slowly Felix moved past the room where he’d killed the wrong man and went into the front bedroom, where the right man was sitting on the rug beside the bed with his back to the door. Hayley was supporting him – her knees braced against his back.
‘What were you even doing out of bed, Skip?’ she grumbled. ‘You shouldn’t be up without help. You’ve got cancer!’
‘Bollocks to cancer,’ the old man grunted defiantly. ‘Day I can’t get to the head alone . . .’
The girl looked over her shoulder at Felix. ‘We’ll take an arm each. You’re lucky Felix is here, Skip. I couldn’t do it by myself.’
‘Who?’ Skipper squinted around, dazed, but Felix edged sideways to stay behind him.
‘From social services,’ she said. ‘Come to fix the fence.’
‘What fence?’ said Skipper.
‘The garden fence!’ She rolled her eyes at Felix. ‘Can you get his other arm?’
Felix approached cautiously from the rear, and helped Skipper off the floor and to his feet. It wasn’t too hard; he weighed nothing, and Felix could feel his sharp ribs against his arm, right through his pyjamas.
‘Where’s my stick?’
‘It’s broke,’ said Hayley. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you a new one. We’ll just get you back in bed for now, all right?’
With arms linked, they all started towards the bed. Then Skipper stopped and said he still needed to go, and so the three of them performed a bumbling U-turn in the middle of the room, like a badly rehearsed chorus line.
‘Thanks,’ said Hayley as they reached the door, and smiled at Felix to let him know she could take it from here, so he disengaged from the old man’s elbow and watched them make their way slowly out of the room together.
Felix looked around.
Charles Cann.
Skipper.
He had knocked stuff off the dresser as he fell. Holding on to the edge of the old oak furniture, Felix creaked down and picked up a pair of reading glasses and a pill bottle. The spectacle lenses were very thick and he held them up to read the label. They made the print huge and distorted.
MORPHINE SULFATE ER
It took him back with a sad jolt. Jamie had been prescribed the same painkillers near the end. Thank God. He set the bottle and the glasses on the dresser and bent again to pick the walking stick off the rug. It was L-shaped now. Poor old chap could have broken a hip. Or worse.
Fresh from his triumph with the fence, Felix wondered whether the stick might be repaired, so when he left Abbotsham, he took it with him.
Felix sat in a traffic jam. He craned to see what the hold-up was, but there was nothing to see apart from a line of cars that wound down the hill from Old Town, around the Pannier Market and continued down Bridge Street towards the Quay.
Two cars ahead he could see a little red coupé. A lean and a squint told him it was the same one he’d seen outside the Cann house earlier today. With the same young man at the wheel. Reggie Cann.
Felix immediately felt panicky.
Don’t be daft, he told himself firmly. He doesn’t know you.
Even so, two cars’ lengths seemed very close, and he glanced about, in case he might be able to swing out of the queue of traffic and get away from the red car. But he’d already passed the only available turn into Buttgarden Street and they were all now edging down Bridge Street, which was one-way and narrow, and so steep that there were handrails for pedestrians to cling to during an ascent. He was forced to stay behind the car. He watched it warily. In a book – a spy thriller – the driver’s door would open and the young man would get out and walk towards him.
With a gun!
Felix shivered and told himself that this was Bideford, and so that was impossible.
But then, hadn’t he killed the wrong man when everything had pointed to it being the right man? That hadn’t seemed possible either . . .
He swallowed a little lump in his throat as they edged downhill in convoy. When the red car reached the foot of the hill, it turned left into the car park opposite the Town Hall. When he reached the same spot, Felix would drive straight ahead – over the old bridge and home to Barnstaple.
Except that he didn’t.
Inste
ad he followed the red car into the car park. Found a space and parked. He watched the young man get out of his car and walk to the ticket machine – then got out of the Rover and did the same. Even queued a few yards behind Reggie Cann at the machine but couldn’t think of how to introduce himself, or even whether he should. Felix didn’t really know what he was doing. Was he going to apologize? Or demand answers? The idea of revealing who he was and what he’d done made him feel all fluttery inside. Who knew what he was getting into? He should watch the young man for a little while. Try to get a sense of who he was and what he was like, before making a move.
But this time he would make a move. He felt more in control than he had earlier. More resolute. If he wasn’t going to at least try to find out what had gone wrong in the Cann house, then he had no excuse not to turn himself in immediately and hand that responsibility over to the police, whatever Geoffrey said.
So Felix put the ticket on his dashboard and cracked a window for Mabel, then hurried after the young man with a little thrill at his own derring-do.
It must be the tree, he thought, making me brave.
Allhalland Street was only a car’s width wide, and filled with quaint little shops. But the young man didn’t look in the windows. He knew where he was going and walked briskly enough so that Felix grimaced with every stride. They crossed the High Street and went on to Mill Street, past the supermarket, and then down an even narrower street on to the quay. Felix wished they could stop. He was out of breath and his hip tweaked constantly. He didn’t know what he was going to say, even if he had the guts to say it, so this might all be a big waste of time.
But he persisted, and fifty yards along the quay Reggie Cann slowed as he came to a little pavement café. Despite the breezy weather, plenty of hardy customers were prepared to dine al fresco in their coats and scarves, and he picked his way between the tables and chairs dotted about under the trees.
Felix stopped under a tree at the perimeter. He had caught up with his quarry, and now had no excuse not to approach him. He must simply introduce himself, apologize and take it from there. If things went well, he might discover valuable information. If they went badly . . . well, there were plenty of people around who would probably come to an old man’s aid if things got out of hand.
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