Arthur still seemed befuddled.
‘I need you to help me,’ his companion continued, ‘I need you to… to involve yourself in some way. I’m surrounding him. I’ll need information. You’ll have to be circumspect. My ultimate ambition is to defuse the situation. I need to understand it. I need to distract Wesley. To… to debilitate him.’
He paused for a moment, then continued on again, silkily, ‘Naturally, you’re not the only person I’m involving. There will be others. They will know different things, but they won’t know everything. Overall, my intention, my need, is to distance the company from the drowned man, from the old boy, and, ultimately, from Wesley. To keep things clean.’
Arthur was silent. But his mind was working.
His companion watched him, benignly. ‘Here’s some advice for you,’ he whispered, ‘I know about the history. I also know that you’re screwing countless different sources for money. I know why. I understand. And if you help me I will ensure that nobody finds out. And I mean nobody. I will do things for you,’ he paused, ‘but if you go to the papers, if you act indiscreetly, there’s sufficient ill-feeling between you and Wesley for me to manipulate that and to use it against you. At this particular point we have no way of knowing what it is exactly that Wesley’s planning…’
Arthur’s eyebrows rose. ‘Perhaps he’s not planning anything. Perhaps he’s just… just…’ he struggled, ‘just plain mooching. Have you even considered that possibility?’
His companion nodded, unmoved by Arthur’s cynicism. ‘Of course we have. But it’s unlikely. This is Wesley, after all.’
Out of the blue, he swung himself forward and moved his two lips right up close to Arthur’s ear. ‘The air around you,’ he whispered gently, ‘it smells of death. Hospitals. Disinfectant. Why? Who is responsible? Will you tell? Will you enlighten me?’
Arthur stiffened. He struggled to stop his hands from trembling. It was just a misunderstanding, that was all. Eventually his companion pulled away again and the warmth of his breath — on Arthur’s cheek, his ear — transformed, gradually, into something quite different; a thing no less intimate, but cool now, and lingering.
Arthur sat and watched quietly as he stood up, slowly, pushing his hands onto his knees for leverage. Those strangely vocal knees, Arthur thought, and listened to them protesting. Perhaps he had room to protest himself? But he did not.
Instead, he remained mute, sucking his tongue and staring dumbly ahead of him, down the path, into the distance. He could not bring himself to speak again. It was simply not necessary. His mouth was so thick and full now with the taste of Wesley.
Three
‘What you did back then was unforgivable. It was mean, it was selfish, it was thoughtless, it was just… it was just plain wrong.’
The man who spoke these stem words — his name was Ted, and he was a fresh-faced but avuncular small town estate agent — did so without the slightest hint, the slightest note, the slightest tremble of disapproval in his voice. His absolute lack of ire was not merely striking; it teetered, it lurched, it practically tumbled head first into the realm of remarkable.
Wesley, to whom this speech had been principally directed (but who didn’t appear to have digested a word of it), acknowledged as much — internally — as he swung himself from left to right on an ancient and creaking swivel chair in Ted’s Canvey High Street office. He was inspecting property details. He was considering renting.
‘Which bad thing in particular?’ he asked idly. There were so many bad things.
‘Which thing? The Canvey thing. In the book. The Katherine Turpin thing.’
Wesley stopped swivelling and glanced up. ‘What? In the walks book? All the stuff about perimeters? That was years ago.’
He liked this man. Ted. He liked his wide mouth, his charming effervescence, his loopy sincerity, his almost-silliness. Wesley appraised Ted’s thick lips as they vibrated, like two fat, pink molluscs performing a shifty rhumba.
‘Two years ago. Twenty-seven months, if you want to be precise about it,’ Ted calculated amicably.
‘Two years? Fuck. Is that all?’
Wesley frowned — as if this was a vexatious detail that had not previously occurred to him — while Ted waved to a passerby through the agency’s large, exquisitely high-polished picture window. It was the third time he’d done so in as many minutes.
‘You seem to know everybody around here,’ Wesley observed drily, turning his head to peer outside, ‘it must be very trying.’
‘Trying? Why?’ Ted didn’t understand. ‘I find people their homes. It’s an essential… it’s a quint-essential service.’
‘I get your point,’ Wesley puckered his lips slightly, to try and stop an inadvertent grin from sneaking out and plastering itself — with unapologetic candour — all over his mouth. Then, in a bid to distract Ted’s attention, he suddenly pointed, ‘There’s a woman. Do you see her? Over in the Wimpy. Sitting in the window, directly opposite the Old Man.’
‘The sun’s in my eyes,’ Ted squinted, then moved to the left a fraction. ‘Ah… Yes. The one in the sweatshirt? Short hair? Eating a doughnut? Looks like a boy?’
‘That’s her.’
‘Who is she?’
Wesley shrugged, ‘I don’t know. That’s why I asked.’
He glanced around him, momentarily nonplussed. It was a neat office. Ted was neat. In fact he was immaculately presented. He wore a dark grey suit from Next, a spotless white shirt and a silk tie with an image of Sylvester the Cat spewed repeatedly in full technicolor onto a noxious, salmon pink background. His two shoes shone like heavily glacé’ed morello cherries.
‘So… Ted, was it?’
Ted nodded.
‘So Ted, are you the boss of this agency?’
Ted did a humourful double-take, ‘Do I look like the boss?’
‘I don’t know. How does the boss look?’
‘Different. Older. Shorter. Brown hair. Glasses. Huge moustache.’ Ted was a strawberry blond.
‘I knew a man like you once,’ Wesley observed, rather ominously, casually flipping through the sheets of property details again. ‘He looked like you, had the same cheerful… no, altruistic notions. Always beautifully turned-out. Then one day he became fascinated by pigeons’ feet, and that was the end of him.’ Ted tried to look unfazed by this strangely baroque influx of information. He almost succeeded.
‘He’d travel around,’ Wesley elucidated, ‘catching stray pigeons and giving them pedicures. He made special splints from old lolly sticks. Eventually he even began constructing his own, tiny, perfectly executed false limbs. Somebody made a documentary about his work and tried to sell it to Channel 5, but I don’t think they bought it. He was involved in radical causes. It frightened the shit out of them.’
Wesley glanced up. Ted was rubbing his clean-shaven jaw with his nimble fingers in such a way as to indicate a certain want of credulity. Wesley scowled, irritated. ‘I’m perfectly serious. He simply couldn’t abide the sight of a bird with a limp. He was mad about feet. Birds’ feet. Loathed human feet, though. If you pulled off your socks in front of him he’d break out into a sweat. It was tragic.’ Wesley gave the forefinger and thumb on his good hand a cursory lick to improve his turning power. ‘Pigeons aren’t indigenous to Britain,’ he observed, helpfully, ‘and that was his beef. His argument was that they were kept domestically, originally, but then they strayed or were abandoned. Yet somehow they were canny enough to adapt and survive. That was partly why he felt such a powerful connection with them. He was temporarily fostered himself as a kid…’