I wonder what can be going on,' said Jessica anxiously. 'It sounds as if someone is dying. Hadn't you better go and investigate? I mean perhaps you could do something.'
Lockhart shook his head. 'Strong fences make good neighbours,' he said complacently, a maxim that was in some dispute at the far end of the Crescent. There Mr Simplon's screams and Mr Grabble's denunciations and Mrs Grabble's absurd denials had been joined by the siren of a police car. The Pettigrews, already in communication with the police following the loss of Little Willie, had phoned again. This time the police took their complaint more seriously and, with that fine discrimination for anything vaguely homosexual, had taken both the Rev. Truster and Mr Simplon into custody, the former on the grounds that he was soliciting and the latter for indecent exposure, a charge Mr Simplon, who had been playing the garden sprinkler rather erratically on his inflamed penis when they arrived, was incapable of finding words to deny. It was left to the Rev. Truster to explain as best he could that far from soliciting Mr Simplon's sexual favours, such as they remained, he was simply doing his utmost to prevent him actually castrating himself with the revolving sprinkler. It didn't sound a likely explanation to the
Duty Sergeant, and Mr Simplon's inability to specify with any precision what he had got on his private parts to cause him to act in this peculiar manner didn't help matters.
'Put the sods in separate cells,' said the Duty Sergeant, and the Rev. Truster and Mr Simplon were dragged away.
With their going Sandicott Crescent resumed its interrupted routine. Mrs Simplon went unrepentantly to bed alone. Mr and Mrs Grabble went to bed separately and shouted abuse at one another. The Misses Musgrove did their best to console Mrs Truster who kept repeating hysterically that her husband wasn't queer.
'No, dear, of course he isn't,' they said in unison and without the slightest notion what Mrs Truster actually meant. 'He was taken queer when the policemen came but then who wouldn't be.'
Mrs Truster's attempt to explain by saying he wasn't gay either brought them no nearer to understanding what she was talking about.
But there were other less innocent reactions to the events of the evening. Mr and Mrs Raceme had been exhilarated by the sound of beating and for once forgetful of the curtains in the bedroom had allowed Lockhart a full view of their particular perversion. He had watched with interest first Mr Raceme tying his wife to the bed and beating her lightly with a cane and then allowing her to repeat the performance on himself. He went home and added the details to their dossier and finally to round the evening off had gone into the garage and promised the Wilsons next door an imminent death to such effect that once again their lights remained on all night. All in all, he thought, as he climbed into bed beside his radiant angel, Jessica, it had been a most rewarding and informative day, and if he could keep the impetus of his campaign up the For Sale boards would shortly be in evidence in Sandicott Crescent. He cuddled up to Jessica and presently they were engaged in that chaste lovemaking that characterized their marriage.
Chapter eleven
It was Jessica, returning from her work as a temporary typist next day, who brought a further development.
'You'll never guess who lives in Green End,' she said excitedly.
'I never will,' Lockhart agreed with that apparent and literal frankness that masked the devious depths of his mind. Green End was not his concern, and lay a mile away beyond the golf course in West Pursley, an even more substantial suburb with larger houses, larger gardens and older trees.
'Genevieve Goldring,' said Jessica.
'Never heard of her,' said Lockhart swishing the air with a riding crop he had constructed out of a length of garden hose bound with twine and thonged at the end with a number of leather strips.
'You must have,' said Jessica, 'she's just the most wonderful writer there ever was. I've got dozens of her books and they're ever so interesting.'
But Lockhart had his mind on other things, and whether or not to splice the leather strips with lead shot.
'A girl in our office had been working for her and she says she's really weird,' Jessica continued. 'She walks up and down the room and talks and Patsy just has to sit at the typewriter and write down everything she says.'
'Must be boring work,' said Lockhart, who had decided lead shot would be overdoing things a bit.
'And do you know what? Patsy's going to let me go and work over there in her place tomorrow. She wants the day off and they haven't found a job for me. Isn't that wonderful?'
'I suppose so,' said Lockhart.
'It's marvellous. I've always wanted to meet a real live author.'
'Won't this Goldring woman want to know why Patsy hasn't come?' asked Lockhart.
'She doesn't even know Patsy's name. She's so inspired she just starts talking as soon as Patsy comes and they work in a garden shed that revolves to catch the sun. I'm so excited. I can't wait.'
Nor could Mr Simplon and the Rev. Truster. Their appearance in court had been brief and they had been released on bail to await trial. Mr Simplon returned home in clothes borrowed from the body of a tramp who had died the previous week. He was almost unrecognizable and certainly not by Mrs Simplon, who not only refused him entry to her house but had locked the garage. Mr Simplon's subsequent action of breaking a back window in his own house had been met by the contents of a bottle of ammonia and a further visit to the police station on a charge of making a public nuisance of himself. The Rev. Truster's reception had been more gentle and understanding, Mrs Truster's understanding being that her husband was a homosexual and that far from being a crime homosexuality was simply a freak of nature. The Rev. Truster resented the imputation and said so. Mrs Truster pointed out that she was merely repeating his own words in a sermon on the subject. The Rev. Truster retorted that he wished to God he'd never given that damned sermon. Mrs Truster had asked why, if he felt so strongly on the matter of being a fag, he had ever… The Rev. Truster told her to shut up. Mrs Truster didn't. In short, discord reigned almost as cruelly as it did in the Grabble household, where Mrs Grabble finally packed her bags and took a taxi to the station to go to her mother in Hendon. Next door the Misses Musgrove shook their heads sadly and spoke softly of the wickedness of the modern world while speculating separately on the size, shape and subsequent colour change of Mr Simplon's geni-talia. It was the first glimpse they had ever had of a naked man and those parts which played so large a role, they understood, in marital happiness. And having glimpsed, their appetite, though too late in life to lead them to hope it would be satisfied, was whetted. They need not have been so pessimistic. It was soon to be sated.
Lockhart, intrigued by what he had seen in the Racemes' bedroom, had decided to acquaint himself more fully with the sexual peccadilloes of the human race and, while Jessica went joyfully off next day to her rendezvous with literary fame in Miss Genevieve Goldring's garden hut, Lockhart took the train to London, spent several hours in Soho leafing through magazines and returned with a catalogue from a sex shop. It was full of the most alarming devices which buzzed, vibrated, bounced and ejaculated ad nauseam. Lockhart began to understand more fully the nature of sex and to recognize his own ignorance. He took the magazines and the catalogue up to the attic and hid them for future reference. The Wilsons next door were a more immediate target for his campaign of eviction and it had occurred to him that something more than the sound of a voice from beyond the grave might add urgency to their departure. He decided to include smell and taking a spade he dug up the putrefying body of Little Willie, dismembered it in the garage, and distributed its portions in the Wilsons' coal cellar while they were out drowning their memories of the previous night at the local pub. The effect, on their return later and drunker that evening to a house that not only prophesied death but now stank of it more eloquently than words, was immediate. Mrs Wilson had hysterics and was sick and Mr Wilson, invoking the curse of the ouija board and table-knocking, threatened to fulfil the prophecy that there would soon be a death in the house by strangling her if she didn't shut up. But the smell was too strong even for him and rather than spend another night in the house of death they drove to a motel.