Leila exhaled sharply, with what sounded to Redpath like impatience. “Shouldn’t you be more concerned with the clinical effects of your experimental drugs? I know this isn’t my department, but John has practically lost a day out of his life, and it seems to me that almost anything could have happened to him yesterday.”
“I’m arranging for him to have a full check-up this afternoon before we go back on to the routine test procedures.”
Redpath gave a theatrical cough. “Just letting you two know I’m still here,” he said. “Don’t I get consulted about what happens next?”
“Of course, but I assumed you’d wish to press ahead with the test schedule while conditions are exceptional,” Nevison said. “How do you feel at this moment?”
“All right, I suppose.” Redpath took stock of mind and body, and discovered that he felt relaxed and confident, sustained by the knowledge that Leila was alive and that the nightmare had ended. “Actually, I feel pretty good right now. It’s as if that turn I had during the night did something to…” He broke off at the sound of the door being opened.
“Sorry I took so long,” Frank Pardey said, entering the room with the majorette’s knee-lifting gait which looked so out of place for a man of his size and build. He dropped into the chair he had vacated and checked something in his notebook before addressing himself to Redpath.
“It turns out that our friend Tennent has some form,” he said. “I’d like to talk to him.”
“What has he done?”
“It looks like gambling swindles mostly—he seems to have ripped off bookmakers in four different spots up and down the country.”
“Can’t they afford it?” Redpath said, thinking of Tennent’s jovial friendliness which was perhaps the only thing he would care to remember about the previous day. He disliked the idea of his being instrumental in the chubby gambler’s arrest.
“I daresay most of them can afford it, but there’s something else,” Pardey said in a businesslike voice. “He’s wanted for questioning in connection with the disappearance of one Reginald Adams Selvidge—otherwise known as Prince Reginald—who used to run some kind of a mind-reading act in the south coast summer theatres. Vanished about eight years ago.”
“Mind-reading act?” Redpath glanced at the others in surprise. “That’s odd.”
Pardey nodded. “That’s what I thought. I don’t suppose you ran into him yesterday?”
“Why should I?”
“No reason. I was only joking.”
Some joke, Redpath thought, divining what had been in the detective’s mind. Isee the joke, and I see the implications. That place in Raby Street is like a rest home for freaks—and 1 was welcomed into it with open arms…
Pardey closed his notebook, put it away in his pocket and stood up. “Okay, John, let’s go and pick up your bicycle.”
Redpath blinked at him. “Where is it?”
“Well, I’m hoping it’s where you told us it was—at 131 Raby Street.”
“I don’t want to go back there so soon,” Redpath said quickly.
“Why not?”
“It would be embarrassing for me. Those people thought I was moving in with them yesterday …”
“It’s a peculiar thing about that address,” Nevison put in unexpectedly, “but it seems almost familiar to me.”
“You want to get your bicycle back, don’t you?” Pardey said, watching Redpath’s face with amused interest.
“I can send somebody to collect it.”
“I wonder,” Nevison mused, “was the place ever owned by a doctor or a dentist?”
On his final word a faint but unmistakable smell of cloves stole into Redpath’s nostrils, and he knew on the instant that as a small child he had been to the house in Raby Street—perhaps only once—for dental treatment. The synaesthetic aroma of the clove oil used in mouthwashes was what had swamped his senses as he had entered the hallway with Betty York.
I was there before, damn it all!
The revelation, coming like a clear shaft of sunlight, produced an immediate if not entirely rational change in Redpath’s feelings about the tall, narrow house. It seemed to him that much of the sense of uncanniness which had oppressed him there could be put down to the unconscious turmoil caused by submerged memories trying to break through to the surface. As a child he had been terrified of dentists, and he was positive that such fear alone—suppressed, bottled up—had been sufficient to cloud his emotional reactions to the house. Many other things remained to be explained, but…
“I could enquire about the bicycle myself,” Pardey said, “but if you’re not there to claim it and take it away things’ll start getting complicated.”
“I suppose it would be better if I went with you and got it over with.” Redpath stood up and, finding himself close to Leila, impulsively took her hand. “Leila, this can’t have been much fun for you…listening to all my ramblings…I’m sorry it happened.”
She gave him a warm, direct look. “Don’t worry about that side of it. I’m glad you’re all right.”
“Not as glad as I am that you’re all right.” He turned his eyes upwards like an El Greco saint, causing her to smile, and the sight of the smile he had brought into being gave him an artist’s sense of fulfilment.
“I want you back here at two o’clock sharp for a full set of psychometric tests,” Nevison said, taking the cassette out of his tape machine. “That should give you time to go home if you want, and perhaps freshen up a little.”
“Hint taken,” Redpath replied, rasping the stubble on his chin. He left the office with Pardey amid inconsequential cross-talk and good-byes, filled with a rare conviction that life was all he could ask it to be, that it was good to pass through a dark tunnel now and again in order to appreciate properly the quality of the sunlight at the other end. The mood of euphoria was so pronounced that for a moment he had to consider the possibility that it was yet another psychotropic prelude, the deceiving sweet treachery of the falling sickness, but on analysis he decided the feeling was genuine and justified. He was an ordinary man, with no more than an ordinary man’s share of failings and problems, and that was something to be celebrated. Half-way down the stair he paused and studied the bright green-and-cream checkerboard of the hall floor spread out beneath him, and it held reassuringly steady in his vision.
“What are you going to do about Tennent?” he said to Pardey as the car began nosing its way into central Calbridge. “Do you have to arrest him on the spot?”
“You can relax on that score.” Pardey gave him a quizzical glance. “I suppose you’re another one who doesn’t want to get involved in anything?”
“I admit it—I don’t want to get involved.”
“Well, you’re already involved in this one to a small extent, but I’m going to slide you back out of it if I can—that’s why I wanted you to come with me to collect your bicycle. As far as anybody in the house is concerned, I’ll just be a friend who gave you a lift across town. With any luck I’ll be able to get a good look at our man Tennent without any fuss.”
“Then what?”
“Then I go back to the station and look at his mug shots and make sure it’s the same man. Tennent is a fairly common name, you know. If I don’t manage to see him now, I’ll want you to call at the station later and look at some photographs. Okay?”
“That’s all right,” Redpath said, feeling relieved. “I don’t mind doing that much.”