I sat down beside him and was about to apologize when the cell door opened. A constable popped his head round and said, ‘One more minute,’ and there was something about his manner as he did this – the sense of a token civility pared down to its absolute minimum – which, combined with the fearsome clang of the cell door when it slammed behind him, suddenly brought home all the injustice of Findlay’s predicament.
‘How can they do this to you?’ I stammered. ‘I mean, it’s crazy, putting you away like this. You’re an old man: what do they hope to achieve?’
Findlay shrugged. ‘I’ve had a lifetime of this sort of treatment, Michael. You stop asking questions. Thankfully I remain sound in mind and body, so I shall survive the ordeal, you can be sure of that. But talking of survival’ (and here his voice sank to a whisper again) ‘I hear on the grapevine that the members of a certain eminent family are steeling themselves for a tragic loss. Mortimer Winshaw is fading fast.’
‘That’s sad. He’s the only one who was ever nice to me.’
‘Well, I smell ructions, Michael. I smell upheaval. You know as well as I do the nature of Mortimer’s feelings towards his family. If he leaves a will there may be some nasty surprises for them in it; and of course, if there’s a funeral, Tabitha will be expected to attend, and it will be the first time she’s seen any of them for a very long time. You should keep your ear to the ground. It might make for an interesting chapter in your little chronicle.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I mean, thank you for all your help.’ There was a valedictory feeling in the air, suddenly, and I found myself trying to make a speech. ‘You’ve been to a lot of trouble. I – well, I hope you got something out of it, that’s alclass="underline" you know, whatever it was you wanted …’
‘Professional satisfaction, Michael. This is all that the serious detective ever asks from his work. This business has been nagging away at me for more than thirty years: but all my instincts tell me that it will be unravelled soon, very soon. I’m just sorry that the forces of law have intervened to stop me from playing an active part.’ He took my hand and held it in a fragile but determined grip. ‘For the next two months, Michael, you’re my ears and eyes. Remember that. I’m relying on you now.’
He smiled bravely, and I did my best to smile back.
3
Christmas Day dawned cloudy, dry and without character. As I stood at the window of my flat overlooking the park, I could not help thinking back, as I thought back on this day every year, to the white Christmases of my childhood, when the house would be swathed in my mother’s homemade decorations, my father would spend hours on his hands and knees trying to locate the one faulty bulb which was preventing our tree from lighting up, and on Christmas Eve I would sit by the window all afternoon, awaiting the arrival of my grandparents who invariably drove over from their neighbouring suburb to stay with us until the New Year. (I mean my mother’s parents, for we had nothing to do with my father’s; had not even heard from them, in fact, for as long as I could remember.) For a few days the atmosphere in our house, usually so quiet and contemplative, would be lively, boisterous even, and it’s perhaps because of this memory – and the memory of the fabulous whiteness which could always be relied upon, in those days, to blanket our front lawn – that there was still an air of unreality about the grey, silent Christmases to which in recent years I had become numbly resigned.
But today would be different. Neither of us could stomach the thought of eight hours’ Christmas television, and by mid-morning we were in a hired car heading down towards the South Coast. I hadn’t driven for ages. Luckily South London was more or less empty of traffic, and apart from a close shave with a red Sierra and a bruising encounter with the edge of a roundabout just outside Surbiton, we managed to get out into the countryside without serious incident. Fiona had offered to drive, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Maybe this was silly of me, because she was feeling (and looking) better than she’d done for weeks, and if anything I think I’d been more upset than she had by the absurd mix-up over the results of her tests at the hospital, when she’d turned up for her appointment only to be told that it had been cancelled, and somebody was supposed to have telephoned her about it, and the specialist who was supposed to be dealing with her case was at a protest meeting to complain about the administrator’s decision to close down four surgical wards immediately after Christmas, and could she please come back in a week’s time when everything would be sorted out. I couldn’t contain my frustration when she told me this story, and no doubt my frenzy of shouting and foot-stamping had shaken her far more badly than her nervous taxi ride and wasted three-quarters of an hour in the clammy hubbub of the outpatients’ waiting room. I suppose I was out of practice when it came to dealing with a crisis. Anyway, she’d recovered – we’d both recovered – and here we were, gazing in rapture at the barren hedgerows, the converted farmhouses, the diffident rise and fall of dun-coloured fields, like two children from an inner-city ghetto who had never been let out into the countryside before.
We arrived in Eastbourne at about twelve o’clock. Ours was the only car parked by the front, and for a few minutes we sat in silence, listening to the wash of sea against grey shingle.
‘It’s so quiet,’ said Fiona; and when we got out, the opening and shutting of the car doors seemed both to shatter and to be absorbed by the surrounding hush: making me think – I can’t imagine why – of lonely punctuation marks on a blank sheet of paper.
As we walked down to the ocean our footsteps made a pebbly crunch; you could also, if you listened closely, hear a whispered breeze, sibilant and fitful. Fiona unfolded a rug and we sat at the water’s edge, leaning into one another. It was extremely cold.
After a while she said: ‘Where are we going to eat?’
I said: ‘There’s bound to be a hotel or a pub or something.’
She said: ‘It’s Christmas Day. They might all be booked out.’
A few minutes later, the near-silence was broken by the click and whirr of an approaching bicycle. We looked round and saw an old and very corpulent man parking his bike against the wall, then descending the steps and crunching his way towards the sea, a knapsack across his shoulder and a resolute look on his face. When he was about ten yards away from us he put down his knapsack and started taking his clothes off. We tried not to watch as more and more of his huge, pink, astonishing body came into view. He was wearing bathing trunks instead of underpants and, much to our relief, he stopped at these, then folded his clothes in a neat pile, took a towel from his knapsack and shook it out. After that he started picking his way towards the water, pausing only to glance at us and say, ‘Morning.’ He was still wearing his wrist-watch, and a few steps later he stopped to look at it, turned back towards us and qualified his greeting with: ‘Afternoon, I should say.’ Then another afterthought: ‘You wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on my things, would you? If you’re going to be here a minute or two.’ His accent was Northern: Mancunian, at a guess.
Fiona said: ‘Not at all.’
‘How old do you reckon he is,’ I asked under my breath, as we saw him wade, without flinching, into the icy shallows: ‘Seventy? eighty?’
In another moment he had submerged himself and all we could see was his reddened pate bobbing up and down. He wasn’t in for long, only about five minutes or so, starting off with some easy-going breast-stroke, then switching to a vigorous crawl as he charged up and down the same stretch of water ten or twelve times, and ending up on his back for a leisurely return to the shore. When he hit the pebbles he rolled over and clambered out, rubbing his hands together and slapping his flabby upper arms to restore the circulation.
‘Bit nippy in there today,’ he said, as he walked past us. ‘Still, it wouldn’t do to miss. Couldn’t do without my constitutional.’
‘You mean you do this every day?’ asked Fiona.
‘Every day for the last thirty years,’ he said, returning to his pile of clothes and beginning to towel himself dry. ‘First thing in the morning, as a rule. Of course, today’s a bit different: it being Christmas, and so forth. We’ve a house full of grandkids and this was the earliest I could escape, what with all the presents having to be opened.’ Fiona averted her eyes as he began the tortuous business of getting his trunks off while holding the towel in place. ‘Are you from round here?’ he asked. ‘Or just down for the day?’