In the distance the Memorial Library clock struck the half hour. Above, a drone of engines announced the arrival of further sections to the nearly complete Star Stadium.
Omally took a final drag and flicked his butt-end into the road. He had two choices: stay where he was, or go looking. He cocked a pedal; hanging about on the off chance had never been his way. Plough on.
John entered the new estate. He knew little about this area now, although it had been his home when a lad. The streets of Victorian houses had gone the way of all flesh, beneath the bulldozer’s plough and in their place up went the gaunt flatblocks, built by folk who cared little, to house strangers who cared even less. The place was now a wasteland. Poorly designed and indiffererently constructed, the dwellings were already beginning to sag and crumble and the Brentford council feared daily a disaster of Babel Tower proportions.
It is fitting, if not satisfying, to note that residences similar to those demolished were now commanding huge sums in nearby Chiswick and Eating. But is it not written in The Book of Ultimate Truths, that those who can predict the future rarely work for the town planning department?
Omally pushed foot upon pedal and entered the Twilight Zone. It was seedy and fly-blown and haunted. Graffiti covered each and every wall in indecipherable hieroglyphics, ruined cars stood upon stacked bricks and in the crepuscular glow of a single street lamp, a knot of ne’er-do-wells, clad in the style of Post-Holocaust chic, eyed him with evident hostility. Omally hunched his shoulders, shivered and cycled on, oppressed and depressed. This wasn’t Brentford; he might as well be on the moon.
John’s thoughts now turned solely to the welfare of Jennifer Naylor. What had become of her? He swung in clockwise circles about the flatblocks, weaving through the dereliction and waste, but there was no sign of her Porsche, or of the long black car which had preceded it into this hinterland of urban decay.
John halted beside the high wire fence which guarded the perimeters of the gasometer. He would have to check the underground car parks next and he did not relish the thought. Even the now legendary Mad Max himself might have his doubts in that neck of the woods.
Suddenly John heard a cry. A woman’s scream? He strained his hearing, tense and alert. Another cry and it came from beyond the fence, somewhere near the great gasometer. He leapt from his bike and thrust it against the fence, thinking to shin up from it and over. There was a crackle of blue fire and he found himself upon the ground intimately entangled in his bicycle frame. John disengaged himself and struggled to his feet, cursing, spitting and nursing his singed fingertips. His ears rang and blood pounded in his temples. There was a strange metallic taste in his mouth. The fence was electrified.
Blowing on his fingers, John mounted up and cycled on seeking an entrance. He had not travelled one hundred yards before he espied Jennifer’s Porsche through the wire, parked up close to the gasometer. The driver’s door hung open, Jennifer was nowhere to be seen.
Omally became frantic, he pedalled on and on, around and around. The fence was endless, there was no entrance to be found. Within a few brief minutes he was back where he started. “Now that,” said John Omally, “I do not like one little bit.” He cocked an ear but the night was now silent, now dark, black and silent. Logic and reason presented him with a united front. If the Porsche got in, then there had to be an entrance. That, however, was as far as logic and reason were prepared to go on the matter. “Damn,” said John. “Damn and blast.”
Now there is more than one way to skin a cat — not that John had ever seen any technique demonstrated to pleasing effect — yet it followed, somehow, that there must be more than one way to best an electrical fence some fifteen feet in height. Omally set immediately about the formulation of a plan so wildly unfeasible and unlikely to succeed that the very telling of it would tax the reader’s credibility to impossible limits. Thus, to spare the reader’s sensitivities, Omally’s method of besting the fence must remain unrecorded.
Omally dropped down inside the fence brandishing his bicycle pump. In a manner much beloved of the SAS he scuttled forward from vantage point to vantage point, cover to cover. He crept up behind Jennifer’s Porsche. It was abandoned. He skirted the outbuildings, prying into windows, keyhole peering. There was nothing. Upon numb legs he approached the great gasometer. The vast cylinder of Victorian iron, which was the borough’s most famous landmark, spread before him. John had never been so close to it before and had never realized just how large it really was. The thing was enormous. An iron stairway led up towards the catwalks and gantries which encircled it and John could think of nothing better to do than climb to a suitable height and see what might be seen. He grasped the hand-rail and learned almost at once the error of his decision. If the fence was hot, then this was cold, and impossibly cold to boot. Omally recoiled with a pained gasp, breathing warmth on to his now sub-zero palm. He knew that gas under pressure drops in temperature but this was ridiculous. Something very wrong was going on around here, and he was up to his neck in it.
Chancing that the cold might take some time to penetrate the patent air-soles of his Doctor Marten’s he thrust his hands into his pockets and stepped lightly up the staircase. He gained the first catwalk and skipped nimbly along it, surveying the landscape below and keeping a weather-eye open for trouble. All was silent, dark, unfathomable. He approached the second stairway, breathing heavily. Suddenly, without warning (for isn’t it always?) there was a rumbling sound beneath him, a grinding of gears, noises of iron in motion.
Omally flattened himself against the iron wall, cursing as the back of his head made contact with arctic metal. Below a heavy section of gasometer slid aside and a sharp white light floodlit an area of wasteland before it, spreading out in a broad fan. Omally craned forward to look, leaving a tuft of his hair fastened to the frozen iron, like an Indian trophy. Below him a figure left the iron fortress and strode into view. It was Jennifer Naylor.
Omally watched her as she walked to her car, tall, erect, magnificent. She seated herself, slammed shut the door, keyed the engine and roared away. Before her, a section of the fence momentarily dissolved as the car passed through it, to reform almost on the instant. Gears ground, metal moved and the light snapped away, leaving John in shivering darkness.
He had seen enough, much more than enough. Without a second thought he dashed back along the catwalk, down the staircase, across the compound and left the area by the same improbable method by which he had entered.
31
In a white room with white curtains there was a chair, a table and a bed, none of which merit any further mention. Upon a white wall, however, there was a great chart and before this stood Inspectre Sherringford Hovis.
The chart was a complicated affair resembling, at first glance, an underground railway map designed by an infant. At second glance it didn’t look a lot better either. The overall design was that of an uncapped pyramid, the base line crowded with newspaper cuttings, photographs, mysterious “samples” in plastic bags, numbers listed upon shop receipts, odds and bods. Red lines running variously from odd to bod traced intricate networks which occasionally converged. The pyramid was two-thirds covered by such plottings; the apex was bare but for a few pencil lines and a large black question mark which crowned the whole.
Inspectre Hovis cupped his left elbow in his right palm and dug his left forefinger into his right nostril. He sucked air through his teeth, withdrew his rooting digit and tapped at the enigmatic wall decoration. The object of his particular attention was a single charred photograph into which a great number of red lines converged, giving it the appearance of a terminus in the manic metro-system. Hovis leant forward and stared, eye to bleary eye, with the photographic image of James Arbuthnot Pooley. “I will have you, laddy,” he said, giving the red face a summary tap upon the cheek. So saying, he turned his attention towards a branch line and traced the route to a single stop. Here were what viewers of the now legendary Untouchables lovingly refer to as “mug shots”. These displayed front-face and profiles of two twins with braided hair and folded brows. Beneath were the names Paul and Barry Geronimo. Inspectre Hovis hooked a finger into his watch-chain and drew out his “Regal Chimer”, the very chiming pocket-watch featured in Pooley’s favourite Western. But shoot-outs with Mad Indio were not in the forefront of the great detective’s mind, as he perused the dial and said the single word, “Late.” As if in answer there came a rhythmic knocking at his chamber door. Hovis draped a bed sheet over his chart. “Enter,” said he.