The two men were both shuffling on the path now. Their eyes darted here and there as if following minnows in a pond.
‘If you’re going out,’ Dinwoodie ventured finally, ‘perhaps I could join you?’
‘All right,’ George said, but it was not too grudging. ‘I’m going to the cemetery to put these — ’ he held the flowers up as if they were slightly ridiculous — ’on my son’s grave.’
Dinwoodie murmured, bowed; he might have been giving permission.
Side by side, they walked up Caution Lane. When they reached Church Street they turned right and began to climb the hill. Spring was late this year. Rain hung in the trees like pieces of broken glass. The branches, grey, spindly, arthritic, seemed to be resisting growth. Dinwoodie could hear George’s knees cracking in the silence.
‘A lot of tragedies recently.’ Dinwoodie threw out the remark, then turned eagerly to George as if he had lit a fuse that might cause George to explode with some kind of revelation.
But George had withdrawn into himself. ‘Yes,’ he said. He fitted the word between gasps for breath. It was a steep hill.
A dark horse, Dinwoodie thought. Really a very dark horse.
He increased the pressure marginally. ‘Your wife, of course. And then Joel — ’ He scanned George’s face, but George still seemed more interested in the surface of the road, so he added, a little unnecessarily, perhaps, ‘The greengrocer.’
‘I heard,’ George said. And just as Dinwoodie was about to prompt him again, George added, ‘An extravagant plan, but doomed. Doomed from the very beginning.’
Dinwoodie, the fire that he was, kindled. Fingers spread in a primitive comb, he dragged a hand through his tangle of hair.
‘Too extravagant, you think?’
George settled for the conventional response. ‘Nobody’s ever escaped. Why should an extravagant idea be more likely to succeed than a simple one?’
‘You may be right,’ Dinwoodie said. George’s gloom didn’t dismay him too much; at least they were talking now. ‘But a simple plan,’ he went on, ‘might stand a better chance, you think?’
George gave Dinwoodie a look that Dinwoodie couldn’t decipher: he saw a gloating first, then condescension, then sadness — then all three merged until he couldn’t be sure what he had seen. He decided to risk it anyway. ‘I have a plan,’ he said.
‘Really? You surprise me. What is it this time, Dinwoodie?’
‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’
George sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not myself at the moment.’
Crap, Dinwoodie thought. You’re yourself all right. He gave the churchyard gate a shove. It banged against the wall. Two crows, scared, broke away from the top of a yew tree. Black shrapnel against a lowering grey sky. George followed Dinwoodie up the path. He held his flowers upright in his hand and level with his face, the way you might hold an umbrella. As they climbed up through the cemetery, Dinwoodie’s head rang with unvoiced arguments. He wanted to believe that it was only a matter of time before George heard. But they reached the grave in silence, with Dinwoodie still uncertain how to reopen the subject. He read the inscription on the stone.
MOSES GEORGE HIGHNESS ONLY SON OF GEORGE AND ALICE
BORN MAY 22ND 1955
DIED JULY 14TH 1956
HE LIVES IN OUR THOUGHTS
Lines of scepticism showed on either side of Dinwoodie’s mouth. It was a charade. He knew, he just knew that George had pulled it off somehow. Patience failing, he struck out.
‘Your wife’s dead,’ he said, and then, with a sly weakening of emphasis that George, he felt, would detect and understand, ‘and so is your son. There’s nothing to keep you here now, George. Why don’t we join forces, collaborate, and get out of this place? What do you say?’
George squatted on his haunches, arranged the flowers in a small rusty urn. ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘Now they’re,’ and he didn’t hesitate, ‘both dead, there’s everything to keep me here.’
‘I don’t understand. What is there to keep you here?’ Dinwoodie’s hand ransacked his hair for a reason.
‘Memories, I suppose,’ George said. ‘These graves. The graves of the people I love.’ It must have sounded sententious to him because he added, almost defiantly, ‘Besides, what’s out there, anyway?’
‘Freedom,’ escaped from Dinwoodie’s lips before he knew it.
Still meddling with the flowers, George shook his head. ‘Freedom isn’t out there any more than it’s in here.’ He glanced round at the rows of damp tombstones.
‘How do you know,’ Dinwoodie cried, his hands clutching at the air, ‘until you’ve tried?’
In a quiet voice George said, ‘Dinwoodie, when are you going to grow up?’
Dinwoodie’s face reddened as if he had been slapped on both cheeks. ‘You know,’ he said, trying to keep his voice under control, ‘I used to think you had something, George. Guts, maybe. A bit of initiative. I don’t know. That’s what I thought. But you haven’t. You haven’t got anything. You’re just a shell. I–I pity you.’
George rose to his feet. He stood at an angle to Dinwoodie. A remote smile on his face, he watched smoke drift from a chimney, fade into the sky. He had nothing to say, it seemed. Or if he had, he wasn’t going to say it.
‘Well, I’m going to try, anyway,’ Dinwoodie said. ‘And I’ll do it alone if I have to.’
George looked Dinwoodie square in the face for the first time that afternoon. ‘You haven’t got a chance, Dinwoodie. You’ll fail. You’ll end up in that police museum.’
‘Fuck you,’ Dinwoodie said.
And he whirled away down the slope, trampling on the graves of his forefathers. His mouth, thin-lipped, chapped, set in a grim smile. It felt good to be walking on the dead.
Fuck him, he thought. Fuck them all. I’m not dying here.
He didn’t look back at George Highness. They had parted in anger. He doubted they would ever speak to each other again.
*
At home that evening George couldn’t settle. He kept seeing Dinwoodie’s white impassioned face. He kept seeing Dinwoodie stride away across the graveyard, grey hair, grey raincoat flapping. With his gaunt frame and his square shoulders lifted, he had made George think of a cross. He knew in his heart, in his bones (wherever it is that you truly know), that Dinwoodie was dead.
As dusk fell, he left his house for the second time that day. Unprecedented, this. But perhaps he had some dim foreknowledge of the consequences and courted them as expiation for the way he had treated Dinwoodie. In any case, he could no longer stay indoors.
Where they had turned left out of the garden gate, he turned right and walked towards Peach Street. He could have given Dinwoodie some encouragement, he was thinking. He could have explained his theories about escape. He could even have told him about Moses. But George had kept the secret for so long that secrecy had become a habit. He saw secrecy as his plan’s foundation, its strength, a guarantee, if you like, of its success. Superstitious of him, true, but impossible now to shake off. So he had been harsh with Dinwoodie, as you might be harsh with a pestering child. And in many ways Dinwoodie was a child. His tantrums, his enthusiasms, marked him out — even from a Tommy Dane or a Joel Mustoe. Tommy Dane’s escape-attempt had been an act of violence, thoroughly in character, an integral part of his fight against authority. Joel’s, on the other hand, had been a sly private affair; the greengrocer had turned to escape, George felt, because he sought tangible proof of his superiority — out of arrogance, in other words. Only Dinwoodie had pure motives. He had said it himself. He wanted freedom. Simple as that. It would have been noble if it hadn’t been so naïve.