During his lifetime Peach had seen various people abuse the spirit of Pelting Day. Tommy Dane, for one. Teeth vengefully pinned to his bottom lip, arm springy as a whip, Tommy had pelted PC Bonefield with hard-boiled eggs, light-bulbs and lumps of coal. ‘You little devil,’ Peach could still hear Bonefield screaming, ‘I’ll get you.’ ‘Come on then,’ Tommy had said, cool as you please. And let fly with a handful of manure. Poor Bonefield had trailed home that evening with two black eyes and a chipped incisor (for which he was reimbursed from the New Egypt Police Fund). As always, Tommy Dane had taken things a little too far. In recent years, however, things had gone to the other extreme. Pelting Day had lost its appeal, its popularity. Hardly anyone bothered to come any more. 1979 had been a fiasco. When the three chosen policemen had arrived at the bottom of the hill they found the place deserted. No jeering crowd. Nobody at all, in fact. They were placed in the stocks as usual. And then they waited. After a while two small boys appeared. One of them had an orange in his hand but, instead of hurling it at a policeman, he peeled it and ate it. ‘I don’t like that game,’ the boy had told the inquisitive Peach. ‘It’s boring.’ Shortly afterwards they left.
1980 could well be just as laughable. With Dinwoodie dead (he had always pelted with extraordinary vigour), Highness still confined to his bed and Mustoe an alcoholic, the village had shrunk further into itself. The members of the younger generation, from whom a little spunk might have been expected, seemed even more listless than their parents. They watched TV. They slept a lot. They behaved like old people. The eighties promised nothing but bleakness.
Now Peach disliked Pelting Day intensely — the whole idea of an organised and legitimate assault on police dignity was offensive to him — and he longed to abolish it but, at the same time, he understood its value. It allowed the villagers to let off steam in a relatively harmless way. It helped to create order in the community. And it was good PR. He couldn’t afford to let the tradition die out. So, this year, he found himself in the curious and uncomfortable position of having to breathe life into something that he would much rather have seen dead.
He proposed two innovations: firstly, that one of the three policemen to be pelted would now be selected by a special committee of people from the village, and secondly, that Pelting Day would become the setting for a winter fair with the ritual of pelting as its jewel. He set up a sort of think-tank to generate ideas. It comprised PC Wilmott, Brenda Gunn, Joel Mustoe Junior and, of course, himself. The meetings went surprisingly well considering. In part this may have stemmed from Peach’s preoccupation with other matters (he wasn’t his usual acid domineering self, he was too busy trying to think of ways to kill Moses). In part, too, this may simply have reflected the wisdom and judgment he had shown in selecting the members of the committee. The only moments of friction occurred during the third meeting. Not, as you might expect, between the police and the villagers, but between Mustoe and Brenda Gunn. Mustoe had challenged Brenda’s suggestion that the police should finance the mulled-wine stall.
Mustoe said, ‘Why should the police pay for it?’
‘Why shouldn’t they?’ Brenda snapped. ‘Pelting Day is organised by the police. It’s a police tradition. It’s obvious they should pay for it,’ each point accompanied by a brisk emphatic slap on the table.
Peach could only hear them dimly. There was a chainsaw in his mind. A deafening howl as it bit into the black side-door of The Bunker.
‘Exactly,’ Mustoe was saying. ‘They organise it. They’ve done their bit. Now it’s our turn.’
‘Oh, don’t be a ninny.’
‘They organise it,’ Mustoe went on, ‘because we can’t. Or won’t. Nobody here does anything except complain, get drunk and kill themselves. Sometimes this village really makes me sick.’
‘Welcome to the club,’ Brenda sneered.
‘And that includes you, Mrs Gunn. Why don’t you kill yourself too? Might as well, really, mightn’t you?’
Brenda leaned back, hands flat on the table. ‘Strikes me,’ she said, ‘that we’ve got three police officers sitting at this table.’
Mustoe bridled. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean that you, Mr bloody Mustoe Junior, are behaving like a bloody policeman.’
‘Brenda,’ PC Wilmott was attempting conciliation, ‘I don’t think you’re being very constructive.’
‘Constructive? Who the hell’re you to talk? All you’ve been doing all week is polishing Peach’s boots with your face.’ Brenda leaned over the table on her man’s forearms — solid marble pillars resting on the twin plinths of her fists.
Wilmott’s shiny face reddened.
Up until that point Peach had been plunged deep into a world of nightclubs and murder. He had been doodling on his notepad. Sketches of nooses, knives, garottes, guillotines, machine-guns. A rack here, a bazooka there (if only he could get hold of one of those!). Injunctions printed in hostile black block capitals: KILL, THROTTLE, GAS, ANNIHILATE And several onomatopoeic representations of the noises people make when they’re dying. AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH, for instance. MMMPPPFFFF And GLOPGLOPGLOPGLOPGLOP (blood pumping out of a slashed throat). But, despite the carnage going on in his mind, he had been listening with one ear. When Brenda turned on Wilmott, he heaved himself into the fray.
‘The police will pay for the mulled wine,’ he declared. (At that moment he couldn’t have cared less who paid for the bloody mulled wine. If this year was anything like last year it wouldn’t cost much anyway. How much mulled wine could half a dozen New Egyptians drink?) ‘Happy, Brenda?’
Brenda was breathing hard through her nostrils. Still glaring at Wilmott, she sat down.
The meeting concluded with a discussion of the feasibility of donkey-rides. Peach returned to his own rather more violent speculations.
By the end of the first week in December they had come up with a sufficient number of ideas. Peach disbanded the committee. Brenda Gunn and Mustoe Junior, working in conjunction with Sergeant Dolphin and a handful of constables, were put in charge of implementation.
‘Leave it to me, sir,’ Dolphin said. ‘There’ll be no fiasco this year, I promise you.’
‘That,’ Peach sighed, ‘remains to be seen.’
*
‘Are you ready, dear?’
The gilt mirror on the hall wall showed Hilda in the foreground tying her headscarf and Peach waiting in the shadows by the front door, where the coats hung.
‘I’m ready,’ he said.
She dabbed her nose, her cheeks, her chin — final nervous touches with the powder-puff — then snapped her compact shut. She was wearing the wool suit she kept for special occasions. A muted shade of burgundy. It brings my colour out, she was fond of saying.
They walked down Magnolia Close towards the village green.
‘Pelting Day,’ she sighed. ‘It only seems like yesterday — ’ Since the last one, she meant.
He murmured agreement.
When they reached the grass, he gave her his arm. He looked about him. A cool clear afternoon. A bone-china sky, the most fragile of blues. Wood-smoke in the air. The damp turf blackening the tips of Hilda’s shoes. She held herself very upright as she walked, braced almost, as if she was facing into a stiff breeze, as if she expected life to jostle her. But it wasn’t that, Peach knew. It was anticipation.