Death Comes for the Fat Man

6

Adolphus Hector woke up.

They say Fortune picks its favorites, but it also picks its fools. Hector had been on its hit list ever since his premature birth and instant christening.

What caused his mother to pick the name Adolphus is not known. Perhaps some passing imp of mischief whispered it in her ear as the hospital chaplain asked her what she would like to call her son. Certainly the newborn had seemed such a weak and ailing child that no one present felt the name had other than a soteriological significance.

Perhaps the child’s early arrival had caught his fairy godmother out too. Arriving at the christening too late to dispense the traditional baptismal presents, all she’d managed to slip under his pillow was the one gift without which all the others are useless anyway.

The instinct for survival.

Despite all pessimistic prognoses, Adolphus refused to die. When against all the odds he reached school age, he rapidly discovered the disadvantages of being called Adolphus. So when the first of many moves took him to a new school where his second name was assumed to be his first, he bore the mockery of its silliness with equanimity. At least Hector, as one kind teacher pointed out, was a hero and could be shortened to the very acceptable Hec, while Adolphus shrank only to the even less desirable Adolf.

If these bailiff-inspired moves were bad for his education, they did at least mean he was able to carry the lessons taught by peer persecution from one institution to the next. He even learned to hide the only skill he had that got within spitting distance of a talent, which was making recognizable portrait sketches in pencil. A child psychologist might have identified this as being associated with a relatively mild form of autism, but he rarely stayed anywhere long enough to be more than a flicker on a psychologist’s laptop screen. Resenting equally his fellow pupils’ efforts to involve him in producing caricature or pornography, and his teachers’ efforts to persuade him to sketch subjects of their choice, he soon learned to conceal this tiny talent also. So it remained hidden and unexplored, personal, private, and a comfort only to himself.

Perhaps this ability to catch significant detail on paper was part of his equally hidden talent for survival. Like his pencil, it was a blunt instrument, consisting of little more than the capacity to select what was useful from what anyone said to him and ignore the rest. His choice of career arose from the baffled flippancy of a careers master who’d said, “I don’t know what to recommend, Hector. A life of petty crime perhaps, only you’re not qualified. Maybe you should try for the police!”

So he did. And his application, coming at a low point in recruitment figures, was accepted even though his academic qualifications were at the stretch mark of minimal, his verbal skills were risible, and his self-presentation swung between the ridiculous and the pathetic. Marked down as a certain failure the instant most instructors set eyes on him, this certainty in fact protected him. Being convinced that the rigors of the course would by themselves cause him to drop out, they took no positive steps to get rid of him. This showed that they missed the essence of Hector. Show him the door and he would have gone. But not being shown the door he took as a positive, and not even being knocked back to redo most of his courses with the following intake could make him relent his first avowed intent to be a policeman. Eventually, in a prefiguration of his subsequent career, like a persistent mouse who survives both trap and poison, he ceased to be a pest in the college and became something of a pet. No one wanted to be known as the man who gave the coup de grace to Hector.

And so, to everyone’s amazement except his own, eventually he passed out of the training course and into Mid-Yorkshire legend.

That morning, as always after waking, Hector lay in bed for five minutes precisely. Then he arose. He did not need an alarm clock any more than did a bird. He was on early turn this week, and this was the time he got up on earlies, and he would have been bewildered by any suggestion that he might awake earlier or later than he did.

Thirty minutes later, washed, fed, and clothed, he opened the front door of the terrace in which he rented a bed-sitter with kitchenette and shared bathroom, and stepped out onto the pavement of the narrow suburban street which some civic ironist had christened Shady Grove. Despite the absence of trees, birds were singing, as yet unchallenged by traffic noise, and at the end of the long terrace the tail of an urban fox, on its way home after a pretty successful night scavenging the discarded take-away trail from the Chinese chippie half a mile away, flounced round the corner.

The air held promise of another glorious summer day and Hector, not insensitive to natural impulses, had a Monsieur Hulot spring in his step as he strode along the pavement.

At some point he heard a car behind him, some distance away and traveling slowly, but unusual enough at this hour for Hector’s well-tuned ear to detect it. Ahead at a T-junction, Shady Grove joined a slightly busier street with the equally unlikely name of Park Lane. At the junction, Hector turned as always to cross the Grove and proceed along the Lane. Normally this did not involve a pause, just a right turn of almost military precision, but today, aware of the car, he halted on the pavement to check its position.

It was a black Jaguar, only about twenty yards away now, but as it had come to a halt, it offered no danger. Indeed, he saw the driver behind the tinted glass smile at him and with a gloved hand gesture him to cross.

He nodded acknowledgment and stepped out onto the roadway.

The car engine roared, the wheels spun, rubber burned, and in a moment far too short for even a mind far sharper than Hector’s to register alarm, the Jaguar had covered the twenty yards and flipped him so high into the air, it passed beneath him before he came crashing to the ground.

The car braked, slewing to a halt across Park Lane. The driver looked back at the inert figure through his rear window. It twitched. He engaged reverse gear. But before he could start reversing, a milk float came into view at the far end of Shady Grove.

Banging it into first, he sent the Jag racing away down Park Lane.