Redpath felt a return of the raw, basic desire he had experienced earlier. You could wreck yourself there, he thought, reverting to the terminology which had been popular among his school friends. Wipe out your mind. Wipe out all trace of Listerine Leila and faces sculpted out of raw beef.
He got to his feet, smiling, committed, and walked with Betty towards the park gates. A train hooted routinely in the distance and white smoke plumed up from the steelworks. As he walked, Redpath made a mental list of three possibilities relating to the woman he was with—it could be that she was simply a prostitute, and that the line about a boarding house was a defence against the police; it could be that she was a landlady with lusty appetites and no inhibitions, who believed in combining business with pleasure; and it could also be that she was a landlady, complete with hulking great husband, who used unscrupulous methods to draw in paying tenants. He was weighing up the third possibility—after all, everything she had said had been equivocal—when they reached a line of parked vehicles.
Taking a set of keys from her jacket pocket, Betty stopped at a mud-spattered grey Ford transit. “It isn’t locked,” she said, pointing at the passenger door.
“Right.” Wondering why the van looked familiar to him, Redpath slid open the door and recoiled in shock. The man he had seen in the park, the furtive stranger with the acromegalic chin, was smiling at him from the passenger seat. Redpath stood in silence for a moment, dumbfounded.
Betty opened the door at her side and paused as she saw the front seat occupant. “What are you doing here?” she said with some exasperation, but no surprise in her voice.
“Give us a lift, Betty,” the man said in a gentle, almost-melodious voice which contrasted with his uncouth appearance. “Give us a lift home.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Albert, have you been following me around?”
“No, Betty, honest. I seen your van, that’s all.” The man made a vague gesture with enormous hands. “I just want a lift home.”
“All right, but you’ll have to go in the back.”
“Yes, Betty, yes.” The man flashed Redpath a triumphant smile and began to clamber over the back of the seat into the dark interior of the vehicle. His movements were clumsy and hampered by the lack of space and the tightness of his brown boiler suit, from a side pocket of which there projected, incongruously, a pack of American cigarettes. Redpath looked away from him and stared thoughtfully in the direction of the park. The man, Albert, had been following Betty—who was perhaps his landlady—but an even more remarkable thing about him was that, in spite of his ungainliness, he must have had the ability to cover ground unobtrusively and with the speed of an Olympic runner. The stretch of parkland between the main gate and the place where Redpath had been sitting was fairly open, so Albert must have taken a lengthy detour and yet had managed to reach the van well ahead of its driver. It was difficult to see how the feat had been achieved at all.
“Hop in, love,” Betty said, starting the engine.
Redpath frowned at the now-empty passenger seat, then got into the transit and closed the door. Betty moved the vehicle off immediately, handling the gears and steering with a rough competence. Redpath waited attentively, and several minutes passed before it dawned on him that she was neither going to introduce nor account for the extra passenger who was squatting on the layer of potato sacks, newspapers and old scraps of carpet covering the bed of the van. For his part, Albert appeared content to maintain a watchful silence.
Another searchlight on the back of my neck—this wasn’t part of the deal.
Redpath stared at the swift-changing views ahead and retreated into his thoughts. As one who had purposely made the transition from one consumer group to another—a process which used to be called going up in the world or graduating from working class to middle class—he had reckoned himself to be a man of two worlds, but there were things he had forgotten. One of his most repeated jokes was that the principal difference between the working class and the middle class was that the former felt no obligation to answer letters—now he could recall a more salient characteristic. Throughout his childhood and early youth he had never seen anybody being introduced to anybody else. Redpath himself, at the age of fifteen, had met a girl, had gone out with her on three occasions for fierce necking sessions, and had parted from her without ever learning her name. It seemed on reflection that it was only in the “higher” social orders that people felt ill at ease in the company of those who had not been formally identified and labelled for them, perhaps because they had more to lose and saw strangers as a potential menace…
That can’t be right, because I’ve got bugger all to lose and I don’t like being cooped up in a tin box with somebody I don’t know. Especially when he looks like a member of the Addams family. It’s time to bale out, chum.
The van reached Calbridge’s Woodstock Road, which was a redbrick canyon of aging dwellings, many of them—particularly those at intersections—converted into small shops and branch offices for banks and insurance companies. A short time later, after making a left turn and a right into narrower streets, Betty York halted the vehicle outside a tall, bay-windowed house which was near the end of a Victorian terrace. The building was a member of that vast and durable population of houses which had spread the length and breadth of the land in the previous century. Built to standards which in many ways were far superior to those of modern constructors, virtually identical in size and general layout, forming a major part of the corpus of every town and city, the class of house provided much of the accommodation for students, young couples and the elderly; supplied cheap and roomy premises for GPs, dentists, chiropodists, chiropractors, struggling architects, infant advertising agencies and the less affluent charities; provided the bulk of the work for jobbing plumbers and repairmen and woodworm eradicators; served as atmospheric settings for the most sordid scandals and the most sensational murders. It was a type of house Redpath had always hated.
He got out of the van and stood hesitantly on the footpath, taking in the house’s dark brown door and window frames, the tarnished numerals 131 on the transom, the mosses which clung like caterpillars between the bricks, the patch of garden with its black but infertile soil and wisps of flattened grass. Albert went by him with a scuffling of booted feet and disappeared into the house, leaving the front door ajar. Redpath looked into the. porch and experienced a strange frisson, a feather-flick of coolness, when he saw that the half-glazed inner door had a large: amber-coloured fleur-de-lis in the centre of its leaded panes.
When I go inside, he thought, there’ll be a staircase ahead of me on the right, and at the top of that stair there’ll be a long landing running through to the back of the house, with a window at the far end of it, and on that window there’ll be another fleur-de-lis just like the one on the front door.
“It’s nice around here,” Betty said, appearing at his side. “Nice and quiet. No bother, like.”
Redpath looked over her head towards the semi-antique cast iron sign which was screwed to the wall of the last house in the terrace. It said: RABY STREET. The name meant nothing to him, and yet there had been an odd quality about his vision of the house’s interior—a hint of poignancy, perhaps—which suggested recognition rather than prescience.
This isn’t my part of the town, for God’s sake. I’ve never been to this house before. It must be something more to do with that muck that 1 let Nevison and his crew shoot into me…