"I suppose you're wondering. .?" he began, hands gripping the wheel, hunching forward to bring his face nearer the windscreen.
"Yes?"
He decided-the idea appeared full and lustrous in his imagination as if tipped in by an artful hand-to tell the old man that he was on his way to London to attend a synod, entirely fictitious, of the Anglican clergy of southeastern England. This would account for the grip on the rear bench, beside the cans of precious petrol, packed for a journey of some two or three days. Yes, a synod at Church House. He would be staying at the Crampton, with its more than adequate restaurant. There was to be a series of thoughtful discussions, in the morning, of questions of liturgy, followed by lunch, and then in the afternoon a series of more practical seminars devoted to preparing the ministry to enter the postwar period. The Right Reverend Stackhouse-Hall, Archdeacon of Bromley, would address, with his usual learned good humor, the unexpected stresses that would naturally present themselves to families as they welcomed soldier fathers and husbands home. As Mr. Panicker continued to burnish and amplify his excuse, its appeal to him increased, and he found himself strangely cheered by its prospect.
"I perceive that I have intruded on you in a difficult time, Mr. Panicker," the old man said.
With a wistful gesture Mr. Panicker swept the conference hall, hotel, restaurant, a set of matchstick towers, from the tabletop of his fancy. He was a faithless middle-aged minister, drunk and in flight from the ruin of his life.
"Oh, no, I. ." Mr. Panicker began, but then found that he was unable to continue, his throat constricted and his eyes stung with the imminence of tears. There are times, as he well knew, when merely having our sorrow guessed at could itself be a kind of rude consolation.
"It's really quite remarkable that I should so literally have crossed your path this morning. For the business that brings me to London is intimately connected with your own household, sir."
So that was it. Though the police had exonerated, or at least called off their investigation of his son in the murder of that chair-straddling traveler in teat-yanking machinery, the shadow of doubt had not been lifted from Mr. Pan-icker's own consideration of the crime. The possibility of Reggie's guilt was a matter of shame to Mr. Panicker, as was nearly everything that touched in some way or another on his son, but this time his shame was compounded by the intimate knowledge that Richard Shane's brutal murder in the road behind the vicarage had echoed, in outline and particulars, the secret trend of his own darkest imaginings. When the detective inspector, Bellows, had called last week, the implication of the visit, couched though the questions were in terms of utmost circumspection, had been unmistakable. He himself, Kumbhampoika Thomas Panicker, public proponent and living symbol of the gentle but unyielding love of the Lord, stood credibly under suspicion of having killed a man-out of jealousy. And he could not help feeling that his desire to do so-that anger which set his hands trembling whenever a word of Shane's induced the stunning miracle of a smile on his wife's face-had somehow escaped his heart, like a gas, and fatally poisoned his son's, already diseased.
"It was my understanding. . Reggie. . the police said. ."
It struck him now that the old man and he had not "crossed paths" at all. He was still under investigation, and now the police had enlisted this ancient veteran; or perhaps the fantastical coot had put himself, half dementedly, on the case.
"Tell me," the old man said, and the prosecutorial lilt in his voice confirmed all of Mr. Panicker's fears. "Have you remarked, or encountered personally, any strangers around the vicarage of late?"
"Strangers? I don't-"
"This would be a chap from London, likely I should say an older man, perhaps a Jew. Man by the name of Black."
"The dealer in birds," Mr. Panicker said. "They found his card in Reggie's pocket."
"I have reason to believe that he has recently paid a visit to your young lodger, Master Steinman."
"Paid a visit?" The boy of course received no visitors at all, apart from Martin Kalb. "Not so far as I-"
"Clearly, as I have suspected from the beginning, Mr. Black is indeed aware of our Bruno's existence, and of his remarkable abilities. This recent attempt directly to contact Master Steinman suggests that Black had received no communication from any of his alleged agents in this affair, and knew nothing of the bird's disappearance. Perhaps, indeed, it was in despair of ever receiving such a communication that he paid a clandestine visit to the boy, seeking to arrange for its sale, or perhaps to steal it himself. In any event, I intend to put some rather direct questions to Mr. Joseph Black of Club Row. Otherwise I shall never arrive at a final disposition of the bird's whereabouts."
"The bird," Mr. Panicker repeated, slowing the car. They were approaching East Grinstead, where the police had set up a checkpoint, and the traffic had already begun to back up. The old man had been correct then, in his surmise about increased military activity; security had been tightened. "You are looking for the bird."
The old man turned to him, an eyebrow raised, as if something about Mr. Panicker struck him as unfortunate or reproachable.
"Aren't you?" he said. "It seems to me that anyone charged with acting in loco parentis would view the disappearance of such a beloved and remarkable animal. ."
"Yes, yes of course," Mr. Panicker said. "We are all very. . the boy has been. . inconsolable."
In fact the bird had entered Mr. Panicker's thoughts in the two weeks since its disappearance only as a kind of grim mental aftereffect of the scenes of violence and bloodshed, of cuckoldry revenged and indignity repaid, that had characterized his imaginings during the brief tenancy at the vicarage of the damned Mr. Shane. For Mr. Panicker was certain that Bruno the parrot was dead, and dead furthermore in some particularly gruesome or violent manner. Despite its wild origin in, as his consultation of the "P" volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica had informed him, the tropical regions of Africa, Bruno was a house bird, cultivated and tamed. In the open country, in the hands of ruffians, surely it would come to grief. He envisioned the bird's staring ink-pool eye as its neck was wrung; saw its body tossed, broken, trailing feathers and fluff, into a dustbin or gutter; saw it torn apart by stoats; tangled in telegraph wires. The horror of these visions came somewhat as a surprise to Mr. Panicker, given that-as was not the case with the late Dick Shane, whom his imagination had consigned to similar fates-he had always esteemed the bird very highly. In all the turmoil of the murder investigation, the foul tide of neighborhood gossip, and the drawing, at long last, of the final synthesis in the lifelong syllogism of disappointment that was his marriage to Ginny Stallard, these irruptions of blood-bright avian mayhem were the sole intrusions of the matter of the missing bird into his consciousness. Now for the first time (and here the sense of shame he felt was deeper and more searing than anything his marriage, his career, or the misbehavior of his unfortunate son had ever or could ever have inspired in him) he spared a thought-a small, frail, sober-eyed, wordless, Linus Steinman-sized thought-for the boy who had lost his only friend.
"In all the recent confusion. ." the old man offered helpfully. And then, "No doubt your pastoral duties and obligations. ."
"No," Mr. Panicker said. All at once he felt himself sober and calm, and, at the same time a spasm of absurd gratitude seized him. "Of course not."