‘Never do what?’ Moses asked.
Lady Batley stared at him. ‘Die,’ she said.
She sat there chewing in the cold light. He could see straight through her skin to the tangle of veins beneath. One coiled on her left temple as if squeezed from a tube of pale-blue oil-paint.
He stood up.
Walking back across the pub, he stopped to look at a picture on the wall. It was a drawing of a policeman. Cut from a magazine, by the look of it. Two darts pinned it to the flock wallpaper. One through each eye.
Moses frowned, looked around. A woman had just appeared behind the bar. She was washing glasses. A little routine, she had. Into the water, on to the brush, into the water and out. Nice rhythm. All right, he thought. One last attempt.
‘Do you know where I could find Mr and Mrs Highness?’ he asked her.
It was the drunk, surprisingly, who reacted. ‘What about Highness?’
Moses held up a picture of his parents standing outside their house. ‘Do Mr and Mrs Highness still live here?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘You mean they’ve moved?’
The drunk seemed to find this extremely funny. ‘Moved? Did you hear that, Brenda? “Have they moved?” he says.’
The woman behind the bar allowed herself a sour smile.
‘Where are they then?’ Moses asked.
‘Only one of them’s moved.’ The drunk released this information with a sly glance.
‘Which one?’
‘Mrs Highness.’
‘So she’s left her husband?’
The drunk cackled. ‘In a way, yes.’
Suddenly Moses understood. ‘She’s dead?’
‘Yeeaahh. Wa-hay.’ The drunk banged the bar with his red hand. ‘What a clever boy. Yeah, died in the home, she did.’
‘In the home?’
‘The loony-bin, the nuthouse, the funny-farm. Where anyone with any sense round here ends up.’ He sucked down the last of his beer. ‘Are you a detective?’
Moses smiled. ‘Not a detective, no.’
‘Not a policeman, are you? Not a bloody copper?’
‘No.’
‘Thank Christ for that.’ The drunk slung his glass across the bar. ‘Give us another, Brenda.’
‘You’ve had enough,’ Brenda said. ‘Time you went home, Joel.’
‘Ah, come off it, Brenda. Give us a pint.’
Turning her back on him, Brenda reached up and rang a bell. ‘Drink up, please. We’re closing now.’
‘Brenda, it’s not even two o’clock yet,’ Joel protested.
Brenda ignored him.
He rolled his eyes, shook his head. ‘All right then, give us a half.’
Still Brenda said nothing.
Joel cuffed his empty glass aside and lurched towards the door.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ Moses said to Brenda, ‘but could you just tell me where this house is?’
She took one look at the picture and gave him a set of simple directions. The house, she told him, was no more than two hundred yards away.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’
Brenda’s hard face softened a touch. ‘You don’t come from around here, do you?’
He hesitated, then shook his head.
‘Count your blessings,’ she said. She rang the bell again. ‘Come on, you lot. Let’s have your glasses now.’
People began to rise from their chairs as if from the dead.
Outside the pub Moses bumped into the drunk, almost knocked him over.
‘You’re a bloody policeman, you are,’ the drunk shouted. He grabbed at Moses’s sleeve with a scaly hand. ‘I know a policeman when I see one. You’re a bloody policeman.’
Moses shook himself free. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.
He turned and walked back to the car.
‘Bloody policeman,’ the drunk jeered after him.
Moses opened the door of the Volvo and climbed in. Mary was smoking. Blue veils swirled around her face. She watched him through them.
‘Looks like you made a new friend,’ she said.
*
She started the engine. ‘You were ages. I thought you’d made a run for it.’
‘I almost did,’ he said.
They drove past the drunk. He was still standing on the pavement, waving his fist and shouting obscenities.
‘Why’s he calling you a policeman?’ she asked.
Moses shrugged. ‘Because I was asking questions, I suppose.’
‘So what did you find out?’ She slowed down, weaved in and out of the potholes in the road.
‘My mother’s dead. She died in a mental home or something. I couldn’t really understand everything. Turn right here.’
They passed a row of terraced houses. Paint had dropped from the façades, lay on the ground like old leaves. Scrap metal sprawled on unmown lawns. A car with no wheels stood in a driveway. They saw no people. Not even any children.
‘My father’s still alive though,’ he added. ‘Apparently.’
He lit a cigarette, inhaled. The smoke came out with a sigh. ‘It should be down here somewhere on the left. On the corner. That’s what the woman said.’
‘Are you all right?’ Mary asked him.
He nodded. ‘I think so.’
They both recognised the house at the same time.
It had aged since the photographs. The front lawn had lost grass as old men lose hair. Bleached grey wood showed through the paintwork round the windows. A section of guttering lay on the garden path. A shattered roof-tile too. No parasol, of course. When Moses peered through a downstairs window he saw a sofa with no cushions and a fireplace stuffed with crumpled newspaper, no real signs of life.
They stood on the porch. The doorbell didn’t seem to work (Mary had listened through the letter-box), so they tried the brass knocker instead. Solid thuds echoed through the house like hammerblows. Nobody came.
‘Doesn’t look like there’s anybody there.’ Moses couldn’t keep the relief out of his voice. Now they could drive back to London with clear consciences, he was thinking. At least they had tried.
‘Let’s go round the back,’ Mary said.
He followed her, dread rising suddenly in him like floodwater.
Mildew grew on the side wall of the house. A drainpipe had come away; it stretched across the concrete path, a spindly fallen tree. The back door was green. Somebody had nailed a piece of hardboard over one of the glass panels.
‘After you,’ Mary said.
Moses turned the handle. The door grated open. He glanced over his shoulder at Mary, saw encouragement in her smile.
He found himself in a corridor. He picked his way over the scattered bones of a bicycle. Several massive cardboard boxes had been stacked against the wall. There was scarcely enough room to squeeze by. He tilted his head sideways to read one of the labels. THREE-PIECE SUITE, it said. ARMCHAIR He moved on, passed an open doorway. The kitchen. A fridge gaped at him, nothing in its mouth. The house smelt unused, unlived-in. But a queer sourness hung around the edge of that smell, a sourness he couldn’t quite identify: something like fish, something like sweat, something like margarine.
At the bottom of the stairs, he hesitated.
‘Hello?’ he called out.
But too softly. He cleared his throat.
‘Is anybody there?’
Something shifted overhead. Something creaked.
‘Bugger off,’ came a hoarse voice. ‘Bugger off and leave me alone.’
Moses stepped backwards.
Mary touched him lightly on the wrist. ‘Go on,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’
He began to tiptoe up the stairs. The higher he went, the sourer the smell became. More like rotten fish now, old sweat, rancid margarine. And tinged with the reek of stale cigarettes. The fifth step from the top groaned under his weight.