He woke to utter exhaustion. It seemed to him that he was sacrificing his sanity for a game. It was all he lived for, night and day, day after night.
The phone rang, and he stumbled through the cold hallway.
‘Hello?’
‘Is that Peter Saville?’
‘Speaking.’
‘Peter, some of the security chaps would like a word.’
Pete felt his life crumbling like a crashed computer program. He held on to the telephone with both hands, his voice becoming a whisper.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Nothing very important, I daresay. They’ll be along about eleven.’
‘What, here?’
‘Of course not.’ The voice seemed amused. ‘They’ll send for you at your office. You are going in today?’
‘Yes, oh yes.’
‘Good.’
And the telephone went dead. Only then did it occur to Pete that he had not asked who was calling; had not the faintest idea whose voice had brought him to this standstill. One movement, he felt, and he would flake away to nothing but dust, like a wall with dry rot. He was worried now all right, worried and mentally exhausted. It was a bad combination.
Miles and Jack made a weekend of it. On Saturday they watched Chelsea playing in a friendly. It was years since Miles had been to watch a football match, and he yelled with gusto, enjoying the catharsis. Jack watched in amazement as his father swapped banter with the fans next to them and gave vent to raucous indignation when Chelsea’s penalty claim was refused.
On Sunday, they visited the zoo. It was wet, and not many people were about. A nice change, thought Jack, from football. He had taken along a couple of apples and some old vegetables from the kitchen, which he fed to the pigs in the children’s area.
Later, following his father into the underpass, Jack thought about how the years had brought them closer together. He understood nowadays, as he had not when he was younger, that his father had achieved the right temperament for his own lines of work and life. Friends in Edinburgh might have attributed some Zen-like quality to Miles’s attitude. And Sheila? Well, too much yin, they would have said, too, too much.
‘Not brought any excreta for your offspring, Dad?’
Miles had smiled, but seemed preoccupied. He was thinking not of beetles, but of moles. Moles and bugs, to be precise. A zoo seemed the perfect setting for his metaphors.
‘I would think there would be enough of that lying around here already, wouldn’t you?’
Jack, sniffing the air, his nose wrinkled, nodded agreement.
Miles had made two visits to the hotel, and had not happened to meet the girl, which seemed to point to her complicity. His investigation was proceeding slowly — when it was proceeding at all — and he was becoming less sure of his suspicions. The smile had all but vanished now, as had the Latchkey case. He had been interviewed three times, Phillips and Sinclair twice. Miles, of course, was more suspect than they, for he had had no reason to be there, and it was he who had let Latchkey slip out into the night. There had been another meeting with Partridge and the old boy. The investigation’s findings had been read out, and, while pointing out that human negligence had resulted in a death, there were no recommendations regarding further action or reprimands. Even the media had walked over the whole thing without seeing it.
And that had been that. So why didn’t he just let the whole thing drop? Because his own trust in his intuition was at stake. It was as simple as that.
On a wall in the insect house was posted a list of adopters and their adopted, and there was his name. Jack chuckled, patting his shoulder, and then they made for the glass case itself. There were around four thousand species of beetle in Britain alone, and this specimen was all his. The dung beetle, or dor beetle, dor being Anglo-Saxon for drone — the noise the beetle made in flight. Miles took off his glasses to study the case. Well, a ball of dung was there all right, but there was no sign of life. Miles knew that the beetle would be in there. No one would see it until it wanted to be seen. He nodded thoughtfully and turned away, while Jack tapped at the glass, attempting to coax the creature out of its darkness.
Back home, two messages awaited Miles on the answering machine. Sheila had gone out for the day with Moira. They were visiting an exhibition. Miles traced Sheila’s likes and dislikes by going around after her, examining what she had just been reading or otherwise studying. She had taken an interest in Francis Bacon, birdwatching, and Marxism, and in all these things she was aided and abetted by Moira, her old school friend. Moira was actually cleverer than Sheila, as well as being the more attractive. She was a bit of a splendor beetle, and whenever he was in her company, Miles felt like some old museum beetle again, bedded down in stuffed animals and relics of the past.
Sheila visited exhibitions often when Jack was at home. It was no coincidence. She did not shun him physically, but placed a sort of veil over herself when he was around, treating him like the son of an acquaintance rather than her own. She would give him everything except the acknowledgment of kinship. They had fallen out once five years ago when he had been in the midst of an adolescent fit. They hadn’t spoken to one another for days afterward, and their relationship had never really recovered.
‘This is Partridge here, Miles. We’d like to see you tomorrow if that’s convenient. King’s Cross, platform four. Get yourself a platform ticket. See you at ten-thirty sharp.’
Partridge: that meant trouble, but of what sort? And why King’s Cross? Was Partridge going somewhere? And who might that ‘we’ include within its wide parameters? It was all very mysterious, very cloak and dagger.
The second message was from a less than sober Billy, asking if they might meet for lunch tomorrow. Jack, entering from the kitchen with two mugs of coffee, a packet of biscuits between his teeth, was motioned to listen.
‘Billy here, Miles. Hate these bloody machines. Inhuman. Can’t talk to them.’
Technology worried Miles, too. It used to be the case that when someone died, for example, all that was left were memories and perhaps a few faded photographs. But now there were tape recordings and video recordings, and so memory became less important to the process. That was a dangerous phenomenon, for machines could be manipulated, could go wrong, could forget.
Just as the Arab’s smile was slipping away from him forever.
His private line, the messages always came by way of his private line. Ever more regularly, and despite two changes of number, they came. A trace had been put on the calls, but they were always too succinct.
‘I’m going to have you, Sizewell, really I am.’
Partridge had sent some fool around to interview him. Did he know who could be responsible for the calls? No, of course he didn’t. Did he know why someone should want to ‘get him’? Oh yes, he knew that all right, but he wasn’t about to say anything to anyone about it. Except perhaps to Partridge himself.
The telephone rang again, and was answered by the man whose job it now was to do so. Harry Sizewell was no coward. He had brought in Partridge and his men not out of weakness, but as part of his strategy. He was trying to show his tormentor that he would not give in to threats, that he would be strong. But what if the man wouldn’t play any longer? What if he did have something from Sizewell’s past? Everyone had skeletons in their closet, didn’t they? Everyone had something which would be best left to rot away in secrecy and in darkness.