He would wait for us, he said, and we could take our time. He had brought a packed picnic lunch for all of us, as I had arranged.
Tom Pigeon’s dogs disembarked and bounded free ecstatically, sniffing with unimaginable joy around heather roots in rich dark red earth. Tom himself stepped out of the car and stretched his arms and chest wide, filling his lungs with deep breaths of clean air.
Victor’s face, transformed by the exchange of terrace-house Taunton for wide-open sky, looked almost carefree, almost happy.
Tom and his black familiars set off fast along the track and were soon swallowed into the rolling scenery. Victor and I followed him but eventually more slowly, with Victor pouring out his devastating home life and difficulties, as I guessed he’d never done before.
“Mom’s all right,” he said. “So’s Dad really, except when he comes home from the pub. Then if Mom or I get too near him he belts us one.” He swallowed. “No, I didn’t mean to say that. But last time he broke her ribs and her nose and her face was black all down one side; and when Auntie Rose saw it she went to the cops, and it was funny, really, because other times I’d seen her hit my dad. She’s got fists like a boxer when she gets going. She can deal it out until the poor buggers beg her to stop, and that’s when she laughs at them, and often when she’s clouted them once or twice more, she’ll step back a bit and smile... And then sometimes she’ll kiss them.” He glanced at me anxiously, sideways, to see what I made of his aunt Rose’s behavior.
I thought that possibly I’d got off fairly lightly at the hands of the black masks, thanks to Rose having met her equal in ferocity, my friend with his dogs ahead now on the moor.
I asked Victor, “Has Rose ever attacked you, personally?”
He was astonished. “No, of course not. She’s my aunt.”
I’d give him perhaps another two years, I thought, before his aunt looked on him as a grown man, not a child.
We walked another length of track while I thought how little I understood of the psychology of women like Rose. Men who enjoyed being beaten by women weren’t the sort that attracted Rose. For her to be fulfilled they had to hate it.
The track had narrowed until I was walking in front of Victor, which made talking difficult, but then suddenly the ground widened into a broader flat area from which one could see distant views in most directions. Tom Pigeon stood out below us, his Dobermans zigzagging around him with unfettered joy.
After watching them for several moments I gave life to an ear-splitting whistle, a skill taught me by my father and brother, who had both been able to accomplish the near-impossible of summoning taxis in London in the rain.
Tom stopped fast, turned towards me from lower down the rolling hills, waved acknowledgment, and began to return to where I stood. His dogs aimed towards me without a single degree of deviation.
“Wow,” Victor said, impressed. “How do you do that?”
“Curl your tongue.” I showed him how, and I asked him again to tell me more about Doctor Force. I needed to talk to him, I said.
“Who?”
“You know damn well who. Doctor Adam Force. The man who wrote the letter you copied and sent to Martin.”
Victor, silenced, took a while to get going again.
In the end he said, “Martin knew it was a game.”
“Yes, I’m sure he did,” I agreed. “He knew you well, he knew Adam Force, and Adam Force knows you.” I watched Tom Pigeon trudge towards us up the hill. “You may know their secret, that one that was on the tape everyone’s talking about.”
“No,” Victor said, “I don’t.”
“Don’t lie,” I told him. “You don’t like liars.”
He said indignantly, “I’m not lying. Martin knew what was on the tape, and so did Doctor Force, of course. When I sent that letter to Martin I was just pretending to be Doctor Force. I often pretend to be other people, or sometimes animals. It’s only a game. Sometimes I talk to people who don’t really exist.”
Harvey the rabbit, I thought, and I’d been engine drivers and jockeys in my time. Victor would grow out of it soon, but not soon enough for now in January 2000.
I asked him how he had obtained a copy of Doctor Force’s letter, which he had sent to Martin with his own name attached instead of Force’s.
He didn’t reply but just shrugged his shoulders.
I asked him yet again if he knew where I could find his Doctor Force, but he said dubiously that Martin had for sure written it down somewhere.
Probably he had. Victor knew where, but he still wasn’t telling that either. There had to be some way of persuading him. Some way of bringing him to the point of wanting to tell.
Tom Pigeon and his three bouncing companions reached us at the flattened viewing area, all clearly enjoying the day.
“That’s some whistle,” Tom commented admiringly, so I did it again at maximum loudness, which stunned the dogs into pointing their muzzles in my direction, their noses twitching, their eyes alert, Tom patting them, with their stumpy tails wagging excessively.
Walking back towards the car Victor did his breathy best at a whistle that would equally affect the dogs, but they remained unimpressed. Water in dishes and handfuls of dog biscuits, brought from home by their owner, suited them better as a prelude to lying down for a doze.
Tom himself, the driver, Victor and I ate sandwiches inside the car, out of the wind, and afterwards sleep came easily to the other three. I left the car and walked back slowly along the track sorting out and simplifying Victor’s muddling game of pretense and reducing the Verity-Payne videotape roundabout to probabilities. Still, the absolutely first thing to do next, I concluded, was to find Adam Force, and the path to him still lay with Victor.
What I needed was to get Victor to trust me so instinctively that his most deeply secret thoughts would pop out of him without caution. Also I needed to get him to that state fast, and I didn’t know if that sort of total brainwash were possible, let alone ethical.
When there was movement around the car I returned to tell the yawning passengers that according to my new cheap watch it was time to leave if we were to get back to Lorna Terrace in advance of the time that Victor was expecting his mom.
Tom walked off to find comfort behind bushes, and jerked his head for me to go with him.
Contingency planning was in his mind. The day had gone too smoothly. Had I considered a few “What ifs”?
We considered them together and returned to the car, where the taciturn driver had taken a liking to Victor and was deep in esoteric chat about computers.
The contentment of the day high on the moor slowly sank and evaporated as the estate car inevitably drew nearer to Lorna Terrace. Victor’s nervous tremor reasserted itself and he watched me anxiously for signs of thrusting him back into his unsatisfactory life. He knew pretty well that at fifteen he would be at the mercy of the courts, and that the courts’ mercy would undoubtedly be to consign him to the care of his mother. Gina, his mother, even a Gina chain-smoking in large pink curlers, would quite likely be seen as the badly-done-by parent of a thankless child. Gina Verity, unlike her sister Rose, who couldn’t help radiating a faint air of menace, would be seen by any court in the way that I had seen her at first, as a relaxed, tolerant and fond mother doing her best in difficult circumstances.