Elliot steered clear of him, perhaps out of respect for his grief, perhaps because he had more pressing problems of his own. Whichever it was, Moses was grateful. Some kind of natural understanding existed between them. Their interiors, he felt, had been constructed along similar lines, by the same architect, you might almost have said, and when certain doors closed they didn’t open again, not for anyone, not until the right time came. Visitors would be greeted by a DO NOT DISTURB sign and three or four bottles of rotten milk. Some days Ridley’s whistling floated up past his window. Haunting, authentic, so he could imagine himself in Africa or Norfolk — somewhere else, at any rate. He listened and he travelled. Comforting, he found it. That illusion of distance from things. When his friends rang he used one of Eddie’s old lines: ‘I’m having a couple of weeks off.’ It meant you’d been overdoing it. They accepted that. It was language they understood.
How he ached, though. Nothing like the way he had ached when Gloria told him about sleeping with Eddie or when those two policemen beat him up. No, he ached as if he had been emptied out, emptied of everything. A real disembowelling, this time. Nothing theatrical about it. No tourists. The loss of Mary, the loss of those Sundays. Bargains had been struck behind his back, he found himself thinking, and wondered if Mary was thinking the same way. He had had no say. He wanted say. In future, anyway.
And always in the attic of his head this long silence. Then a scurrying, a gnawing, a scurrying. Then long silence again.
Peach.
Peach with some sinister idea in mind.
Peach who would stop at nothing.
He remembered something Mary had said to him that night in Bagwash. ‘You,’ she had said, levelling a finger, ‘you floated out of the village and you floated back again. That’s what you do, Moses. You float. You know what I call you?’ She had laughed. Her silver fillings flashing in the candlelight. ‘I call you the lilo man. You’d better be careful someone doesn’t come along and puncture you.’
And he had said, ‘Mary, that’s what I’m afraid of.’
She was right. He could see the dangers of sitting tight and waiting. Only the bad things came. He had to take action. Evasive action. Now.
Ten days before Christmas he called Leicester.
‘Auntie B,’ he said, ‘can I come and stay for a while?’
Sudden Death
As soon as Peach saw Moses standing in his office he knew that he would have to kill him. There was no agonising involved. He wasn’t even conscious of arriving at a decision. The thought came to him so complete, so ineluctable, that it almost seemed premeditated. It was as if it had been there all along, waiting for the right moment to reveal itself.
It was winter now, and winter was a good time to think about killing. Peach’s favourite season, winter. The merciless cold. The crisp precise air. The trees stripped of all that dressy foliage, reduced to their essentials. No vagueness, no hesitation there.
Moses had to be killed. Fact. The question was, how?
Problems of accessibility. On the one hand Peach could wait until Moses returned to the village as he was bound to do now that he had, presumably, found his father. Do the job on home ground, so to speak. Delegate even. Hazard would take care of it. On the other hand a second visit from Moses might have dangerous repercussions. Say he talked. Say the truth of his identity leaked out. There was no telling what might happen then. And what if Moses brought that rather vulgar woman with him again? What would Peach do then? Kill her too?
No. He would have to act before Moses returned. And that meant another trip to the city. He didn’t relish the prospect, but he had no choice. And even then it wouldn’t be easy. People knew his face now. That black fellow. Moses too. For obvious reasons he couldn’t afford to be seen by either of them. This thought struck him: he wouldn’t be able to get close enough to Moses to kill him in any one of the usual ways.
Problems.
If only he had reacted more efficiently when Moses appeared in his office. What an opportunity that had been. What a gift. But he had been caught napping. Ah, the slow brains of an old man. Alertness draining out of him like blood. There had even been a moment when he had doubted the reality of what he was seeing. Some kind of optical illusion, he had thought. A mirage, a ghost, the spirit of the pink file. Some such nonsense. But Moses hadn’t vanished. No shimmer in the air, no puff of smoke. Moses had been real. And Peach had made a quick recovery.
But still.
He had let him go.
He wished he could talk to Dolphin. He needed a younger mind, a sounding-board. He wanted to share the burden. Unthinkable, though. How could he tell Dolphin that he had broken the very rules that they were supposed to be enforcing? It would shake Dolphin’s faith in him. It would undermine the infrastructure that he had spent so much time and energy building. He couldn’t do it. He would have to work in isolation. Well, perhaps that was nothing new.
But as the days went by he made little progress.
The idea of a letter-bomb excited him briefly. It failed to stand up to close examination, however. Firstly, it could be detected by the post office and traced back to him. Secondly, it was unreliable. Moses might only lose his eyesight or a hand. And Peach wasn’t interested in anything less than death. One hundred per cent guaranteed death.
November became December. His deadline (Christmas Day) was less than a month away. He found his attention wandering and couldn’t call it back.
‘You look tired,’ Hilda gently observed.
As if he didn’t know! He had looked in the mirror. The pressure showed in the marshy grey terrain of his face, the soft yellow pits under his eyes.
Another time she asked him, ‘Is everything all right?’
Stupid bloody question.
‘Yes,’ he snapped. ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’
*
And then, as if he didn’t have enough on his mind already, Pelting Day loomed.
Pelting Day — a village custom, supposedly dating back to the Middle Ages. Every year, at the beginning of December, the police of New Egypt held a lottery to determine which of them were to be subjected to the rigours of pelting. Only the Chief Inspector could claim exemption. Three days before Christmas the three officers who had drawn the unlucky numbers were marched down the hill to the village green. Tradition demanded that they looked impeccable: full dress uniform, combed hair, boots polished to a high gloss. A jeering crowd assembled at the foot of the hill to greet them. Children capered around in masks, chanting rhymes. Then the serious business of the day began. A fourth policeman secured his three colleagues in the stocks. And there they remained for at least an hour while they were pelted with ripe tomatoes, raw eggs, rotten fruit, anything that came to hand, provided, of course, that it was soft and unpleasant.