But Peach didn’t want to hear about old women. ‘This baby,’ he interrupted. ‘What was it like?’
‘About eighteen months old. Had a funny name. Something from the Bible — ’
‘Moses?’ Peach’s voice remained calm, but his heart seemed to be pushing against the inside of his uniform.
‘That’s it. And he was only found by the river, wasn’t he? Some sense of humour his parents must’ve had.’ The policeman’s mouth opened wide. His teeth were curiously pale and large, like ice-cubes.
Sense of humour? Peach was thinking. Don’t talk to me about sense of humour.
Before the policeman drove on, Peach asked for the address of the police station that had taken the baby into custody. The policeman never thought to question Peach’s interest in the case. A fool, Peach thought, and a complacent one at that. But perhaps he was being unfair. After all, the man was on holiday. And he had given Peach his first real lead in thirteen years.
Peach looked up from the file. Lightning bleached the windowpanes a faint cold blue. The thunder had moved away over the hill. He turned that autumn morning over in his head. The blades of grass plated with early frost. Hedgerows rusted by a month of rain. A random shaft of sun bringing out the ginger in Sergeant Caution’s two-day growth of beard.
And when he watched that policeman’s car disappear round a bend in the main road, how strongly he had felt the temptation to disappear himself. To verify the story. To know the truth about Moses.
Two considerations had held him back. One, his sense of responsibility (imagine a Chief Inspector defecting! the hypocrisy!). And two, the pointlessness of such a move. What good would it do? If the baby had got away, had grown up in the outside world (he would be sixteen now, Peach calculated), he would have no memories of New Egypt. He might have been born anywhere. Equally, very few of the villagers remembered Moses now, not without being prompted. He had drowned in the river, and that was that. From both points of view the case was closed. There was no foreseeable danger. Better then to forget. Let time and apathy bury the memory. Only he, Peach, would carry the burden of knowing what had really happened.
And George Highness, of course.
George Highness. Would he talk?
Somehow Peach doubted it. The man was private to the point of arrogance, and stubborn with it. Those characteristics would prevent him broadcasting what he had done, would nip any revolutionary instincts in the bud. It would be enough for George Highness to know that he had outsmarted the entire police department of New Egypt. Peach imagined that he must derive enormous satisfaction from that knowledge.
Once again he saw Highness during the closing moments of that funeral in 1956. When he walked over to offer his condolences, Highness had actually smiled. No more than a slight puckering at the corners of his mouth, but a smile none the less. The sheer brazen impertinence of it. Since then Peach had developed a theory about smiling. Why, only the other day he had delivered a lecture on the subject to a group of new recruits.
‘Now if you see somebody smiling,’ he had told them, ‘it can mean one of two things. One, that the person in question is perfectly adjusted to life in the village. Anybody who is that well adjusted should be viewed as a potential threat. Can any of you tell me why?’
Peach’s glance had swept along the row of recruits. Not one of the four had anything to offer. A pretty dull bunch. He sighed.
‘The reason is this. The person who is that well adjusted to life in the village is an exception. That person has occupied an extreme position. They are, in that sense, unbalanced, volatile. They are capable, at any moment, of veering to the other extreme, one of despising life in the village, one of plotting to escape from the life they despise — ’
Peach had seen the faces of his recruits light up in turn as the point became clear. One or two nodded seriously as if they had known all along and had simply been waiting to have their knowledge confirmed.
‘Now,’ Peach went on, ‘who can tell me what the second meaning of a smile might be?’
Again his gaze had moved along a row of blank faces. For God’s sake.
Then one of the recruits, Wragge by name, a poor specimen of a youth with a nose that dangled from his face and a pair of close-set colourless eyes, stuck his hand up in the air.
‘Yes, Wragge?’
‘Could it be because they’re harbouring a plan to escape, sir?’
Well, well. There was hope yet. Perhaps he was even looking at a future Chief Inspector. Harbouring, too. The perfect word to use in that context. Peach had studied Wragge for a moment and tried to widen the gap between those eyes, tried to invest that drooping nose with a bit of dignity, a bit of gristle. If only Wragge looked as intelligent as he obviously was.
‘Excellent, Wragge. That’s perfectly correct.’
He saw Wragge’s mouth expand a fraction. A smirk of complacency. Peach had decided there and then that he didn’t care for Wragge. But he might be useful, of course.
‘When you see somebody smiling they might be dreaming of, or planning, an escape. A smile is a danger sign, a warning, a lead. I cannot impress upon you too strongly that you should treat a smile with the utmost suspicion,’ he had concluded. Or almost concluded, because he had then experienced a moment of inspiration — wild, vivid, lateral — the kind of inspiration that made him the kind of Chief Inspector he was. ‘Think of it like this,’ he had lowered his voice for effect, ‘somebody smiling is like somebody pointing a gun. They need to be disarmed or they will cause injury, damage, loss of morale. Even, perhaps, loss of life. There are times when I think smiling should be made illegal, but obviously — ’ and he had raised a hand in the air, fingertips uppermost like a waiter with an invisible tray, to demonstrate that he was exaggerating to make a point, that he was, in fact, joking. Then he had himself smiled. There had been laughter among the recruits, but it had been serious laughter. The message had hit home.
He leaned back, pushed knuckles into his eyes. He returned to his scrutiny of the file. He turned up a sheaf of loose letters. These were answers to the barrage of enquiries he had unleashed following his encounter with that policeman in October 1969. There was one, for instance, from the policeman’s immediate superior:
Dear Chief Inspector Peach,
Thank you for your letter of October 20th. I regret to say that I do not personally recall the case to which you refer since I was only transferred to this constabulary three years ago. However, I have had recourse to our records and I can inform you that a baby was indeed admitted to this police station during June 1956. On June 16th, in fact. The baby was registered under the name Moses George Highness.
It would seem that the Detective Sergeant in charge of the case attempted to locate the baby’s parents, but without success. The only lead he had to go on was the name Highness, a name so unusual that he assumed it was an alias, a bogus name, devised to throw whoever found the child off the scent. Following the failure of these investigations, the baby in question was remitted to an orphanage in Kent, the address of which you will find attached to this letter.
I hope this has been of some help to you, and I trust your research into this most tragic of human problems continues to go well.
Yours sincerely,
Detective Sergeant Hackshaw
This most tragic of human problems. Peach’s own words, lifted from his own letter. He had written as a police officer with a social conscience, a police officer who was working on a book about missing children. Upon receiving this letter from Hackshaw, he had immediately written to the orphanage. He had received the following reply: