‘Oh, sorry, Chief Inspector,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘I didn’t realise it was you.’
When his eyes readjusted Peach recognised PC Wilmott and, behind her, helmet askew, the excitable Marlpit.
‘Not at all,’ he said, dismounting, ‘not at all. Very glad to see you operating with such efficiency at this time of night.’
Wilmott, a modest woman, ducked her head. Marlpit sucked in a string of saliva.
Peach smiled down. ‘Anything to report?’
‘Nothing, sir.’ Wilmott tilted the shallow dish of her face so that it filled with moonlight. ‘A very quiet night.’
Peach inhaled a deep lungful of village air. ‘A glorious night too, if I may say so.’
The two constables murmured their agreement.
‘Well,’ and Peach climbed astride his bicycle, ‘I should be off home. Mrs Peach will be getting worried, no doubt.’ He smiled again. ‘Good night to you both.’
‘Good night,’ the constables chorused.
Peach had hoped to slip back into the village unseen, but now he thought about it he realised it really didn’t matter. As Chief Inspector he was above the law, beyond suspicion. He explained his movements to no one. Like God he moved in mysterious ways. There were any number of reasons why he might have been riding a bicycle along the boundary at midnight. He might have been putting in a surprise appearance, as generals do, to boost morale. He might have been testing the alertness of his night patrols. He might simply have been taking the air. Rather pleased with his improvisations, he rode on into New Egypt. He forked right at the village green and in less than five minutes he was opening the front door of the old vicarage.
‘Hilda, I’m home.’
There was no reply.
‘Hilda?’
He walked into the lounge and found his wife asleep in front of a flickering television. He rested a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m back.’
Hilda’s eyelids slid upwards as if she had only pretended to be dozing. ‘I was worried about you,’ she said.
‘There’s nothing to worry about.’
‘But your trousers — ’
He glanced down. His trouser-leg had torn just below the knee. Blood had soaked through. ‘Oh, yes. I fell off my bicycle. Stupid of me.’ He looked appropriately sheepish.
‘Oh, John. But how did everything go?’
‘Very well. Very well indeed, actually. I’m feeling rather tired, though.’
‘Poor dear. I don’t know why you take it into your head to do these things. It’s quite unnecessary, I’m sure. And you know it only exhausts you.’ In humouring her husband without ever quite understanding him, in her light-hearted approach to his incomprehensibility, in her ignorance, Hilda sometimes touched on the truth.
He smiled down at her. He wished he could describe his adventures to her — the cafés and hotels, the trains, the famous buildings. He wished he could tell her about Madame Zola, the world’s smallest man, the Asian boy, the blonde girl (on second thoughts, no, not the blonde girl), Terence the landlord, the black nightclub-owner and his seven-foot sidekick. But these were stories he could share with no one. Not even his wife.
‘You’re right,’ he sighed. ‘I’m going to have a hot bath and go straight to bed.’
He kissed the top of her head where the grey curls were beginning to wear thin, then limped across the room, pausing by the door to say, ‘It’s nice to be home, dear.’
Injury Time
The shot orange of the street-lamps bled through the fog, stained the rain on the pavement, died in the white neon arms that reached out from the nightclub as Moses walked up, but the size of the man blocking the open doorway was no trick of the light. The man had rolled the sleeves of his white shirt back to his elbows, and skulls and anacondas tangled on his forearms. Moses had never seen such big tattoos, mainly because he had never seen such big arms. And the face. Its swollen pallor stopped him cold. The man had drinker’s eyelids, puffy and hard, as if pumped full of silicon; they reduced the eyes beneath to mean glittery slits. His hair, scraped back from his forehead, slithered down over his collar in dark greasy coils. His sideburns bristled like wire wool. A giant gold hoop earring about three inches in diameter swung from his left ear. It was his one visible affectation. Moses thought it very unlikely that anyone had ever teased him about his earring. He knew from his own experience that big people sometimes get picked on by smaller people who want to prove something, but big was too small a word for this man, and nobody in their right mind would have picked on him. He was so big that there wasn’t a word big enough to describe how big he was. So when he told Moses to hold it, Moses held it.
‘I’m,’ he gulped, ‘I’m looking for Elliot. I’m a friend of his. I live up there.’
He pointed to his kitchen window on the fourth floor, but the man just stared at his hand.
Disconcerting.
After a long moment, the man’s stare shifted from his hand to his face. So heavy, this stare, that it almost had to be winched. Then the massive head tipped sideways and he bellowed, ‘Mr Frazer?’
So that was Elliot’s surname. Probably an alias, though, knowing (not knowing) Elliot. Elliot appeared in the doorway. His head barely reached the man’s shoulder.
‘Can I see you about something?’ Moses asked.
‘It’s all right, Ridley,’ Elliot said. Then, to Moses, ‘I’ve fired Belsen. This is his replacement, Ridley. Ridley, meet Moses.’
Ridley nodded.
Moses did likewise, glad to get out of shaking hands. He had already taken a look at Ridley’s hands. They were chipped and grazed and scarred, and every scar told the story of someone else’s pain.
‘What’s he doing here?’ he whispered, as he climbed the stairs behind Elliot.
Elliot looked cryptic. ‘We’ve been getting phone-calls. That’s what he’s doing here.’
‘A kind of receptionist?’ Moses ventured.
Elliot didn’t laugh. ‘You could say that.’
He sat down in his red chair, propped his feet on the desk, and lit a cigarette. He didn’t usually come in on Mondays, but Moses had seen the white Mercedes float into the mist below his window. Signs of stress littered the office: screwed-up paper on the floor, an almost empty bottle of brandy by the phone, a crowd of Dunhill butts wedged upright in the ashtray like people in a Hong Kong swimming-pool.
‘What are these phone-calls then?’ Moses asked.
Elliot flicked ash, ran his tongue along his teeth; for a moment, Moses thought he wasn’t going to answer. ‘Bad phone-calls,’ he said eventually. ‘Old ghosts from the past, you know?’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.’
‘Yeah, well,’ and Elliot allowed himself a wry grin, ‘these ones I believe in.’
Moses crossed the room and fitted his cigarette into the ashtray. On his way back to the sofa his foot caught a pool-cue that had been resting against the wall. The cue clattered to the floor.
A door opened somewhere downstairs.
‘Everything all right up there, Mr Frazer?’ The voice was huge and violent and had tattoos all over it.
Moses stooped, clipped the cue into its wooden wall-rack, and stood back.
‘Everything’s fine,’ Elliot called out. He looked across at Moses and almost grinned for the first time that evening. ‘That’s what he’s doing here,’ he said.
He stood up, stretched, strolled over to the pool-table. ‘James Ridley. He was a wrestler for a while. Had to stop. Killed someone, apparently.’