And, oh God, it was true. Who else would have followed them last night?
His own song started playing in his head:
Tuesdays on Victoria Ward,
We always hated Tuesdays.
Reminding him how that song, those opening lines, had conquered his concert-block at the Courtyard in Hereford, because of the suppressed rage behind them… the spontaneous reaction of the audience making it suddenly all right.
Someone’s got to pay
Now Dr Gascoigne’s on his way
And it’s another
Heavy medication day…
The police constable who’d been walking across to them had stopped and had begun talking into a radio or a mobile phone. Lol looked at Saltash, with the round tower behind him in the middle of the Inner Bailey, with its Norman arched doorway. The tower was roofless, hollow, a shell.
‘It’s not enough, is it?’ Lol said. ‘It wouldn’t hold water. There’s no way you can touch me, you arrogant bastard.’
The sky was low and tight and red-veined, and he was aware of his own voice, crisp and contained, like in a recording studio with acoustic panels.
‘And Gascoigne – he’s not worried about that song, because, even with the very remote possibility that the album got into the outer reaches of the charts, the song doesn’t really say anything apart from describing his fondness for handing out pills. It’s what’s not in the song that he’s worried about. And I really wasn’t going to do anything about that – not my place. Especially with him out of hands-on psychiatry… which, considering some of the places his hands went, is no bad thing—’
‘Constable!’ Saltash shouted. ‘Excuse me, Constable!’
The policeman was still talking. He looked up, lifted a hand to Saltash.
‘So I suppose, normally, I’d just have left it at that,’ Lol said, ‘glad that at least the poor sods who’d been sectioned were no longer exposed to his attentions. Especially the women. Like Helen Weeks.’
‘Because I don’t have time to deal with you now, Mr Robinson,’ Saltash said softly, ‘I might simply tell the police you’re a journalist who’s talked his way in by assuming a false identity.’
‘I used to wander around the hospital as much as I could,’ Lol said, ‘watching ordinary people – people who worked there. Just to stay familiar with normal behaviour, the outside world. Helen Weeks was schizophrenic, so nobody ever believed what she said. She was very pretty and heard voices, and sometimes what the voices were telling her to do, she needed to be protected from that. So, yes’ – in case he was wondering – ‘I did see Gascoigne giving her a special consultation that wasn’t exactly my idea of protection. I climbed on a chair to look over the horrible frosted glass of his office and through the clear glass over the top.’
‘You sad little man,’ Saltash said.
And Lol finally hated him enough to start lying.
‘Well, Nigel, I don’t think that’s how they’ll see it at the Three Counties News Service. You know them? News agency in Gloucester, serving national papers – the Sun… Mirror… News of the World? The thing about the Three Counties, it’s all about money to them. If one paper turns it down, they’ll try another and then another, until everybody knows. Or, a story like this, they’ll maybe just send it all round.’
‘Not if I obtain an injunction to prevent you—’
‘You’re too late. A friend of mine has a long e-mail that we put together, detailing the full story, including a phone number for Helen Weeks and her sister who looks after her and two former porters we contacted who knew of other cases. If this friend doesn’t hear from me by ten tonight, the e-mail goes to the Three Counties.’
Lol looked into Saltash’s eyes and felt a surprising calm in his spine, like a soft shiver.
‘Try me, Nigel. Have me thrown out. Attempt to have me detained. Sectioned. Oh, and you’re in the e-mail, too, of course, in an attachment – transcript of a recorded conversation with Jack Fyneham. I think he’s – God forbid – your godson, isn’t he?’
‘Is there a problem, Dr Saltash?’ the policeman said.
‘And the Dean of Hereford,’ Lol said to Saltash. ‘He’s quoted too. Quite extensively.’
Saltash’s smile was like glass. ‘Everything’s fine now, officer, thank you.’
‘Always knew there was something not quite right about this boy,’ George said, low-voiced, when they were in the alley at the side of the shop. ‘Someone that age just turns up in town, goes round the estate agents inquiring about flats to rent, cheap, and then he takes a shop at the kind of rent would turn me pale.’
‘How do you know that?’ Merrily asked, but he was walking up the steps with the wrought-iron lamp at the top and didn’t answer. She thought, Masons, or perhaps some Old Ludlow traders’ network that was even more mutually supportive and exchanged intelligence on outsiders.
George took the steps two at a time, and she had a picture of him not going up the steps of the church tower that overheated afternoon, but coming down, very fast, and collapsing against the wall at the bottom, blinded by shame and some forbidden, guilt-gilded exultation that he didn’t, to this day, dare acknowledge.
‘Jonathan!’ Banging the door with a knobbly fist. ‘We’d like a word, boy. Councillor Lackland and Mrs Watkins.’
No answer.
‘Try the door, George.’
Recalling how it had sprung open when she’d flipped the handle from inside, and how glad she’d been because Jonathan had been coming on to her, in the wake of his apparent rejection of Bell’s advances. She’s all over me. Hot and… you know. Anybody could see she were burnin’ up…
‘It’s open!’ George went in. ‘Jonathan? It’s Councillor Lackland!’
She heard him tramping around, a door opening inside. A muffled ‘Jonathan?’ A silence. By the time she was halfway up the stairs, he was out again.
‘Let’s go,’ he said hoarsely.
‘George?’
He gripped the iron rail and then breathed in sharply and let go of the rail as though it were white-hot. He drove her down the steps, waving both arms as if he was herding ewes.
‘Go down.’
Her first thought was that he must have walked into something of a sexual nature, but then, when he began to step carefully down himself, keeping close to the wall, away from the rail, she saw the blood on the hand that had touched it.
There was a bulge like a knuckle in the Mayor’s forehead, and it was pulsing.
‘Some things a woman shouldn’t see,’ he said.
45
Marion
‘LOOK, SIÂN,’ SALTASH said. ‘Martin’s here.’
They were in a high but roofless space, some one-time great hall, with the remains of huge fireplaces, one above the other, time-blurred stone heads projecting from the walls along with the weeds. The sergeant, Steve Britton was there, too, as Siân Callaghan-Clarke’s pewter-eyed gaze flicked across to Lol and then back to Saltash, where she must have caught a warning look.
‘Hello, Martin,’ she said, finally.
A woman with presence and authority, Lol thought, but not comfortable here, in her dark grey business suit over the clerical shirt and collar. Not at home in ruins.
‘Look.’ Saltash jangled keys or something in a trouser pocket. ‘I’m afraid I shall have to leave you for a short while. I need to make some phone calls.’
This time Siân didn’t need a signal; she followed him out. Saltash’s calls would be to Lord Shipston, the Fynehams, his friend the Dean. Plans to make, defences to erect. Only the jittery keys expressing nerves.