Dreams of Leaving

Sudden Death

As soon as Peach saw Moses standing in his office he knew that he would have to kill him. There was no agonising involved. He wasn’t even conscious of arriving at a decision. The thought came to him so complete, so ineluctable, that it almost seemed premeditated. It was as if it had been there all along, waiting for the right moment to reveal itself.

It was winter now, and winter was a good time to think about killing. Peach’s favourite season, winter. The merciless cold. The crisp precise air. The trees stripped of all that dressy foliage, reduced to their essentials. No vagueness, no hesitation there.

Moses had to be killed. Fact. The question was, how?

Problems of accessibility. On the one hand Peach could wait until Moses returned to the village as he was bound to do now that he had, presumably, found his father. Do the job on home ground, so to speak. Delegate even. Hazard would take care of it. On the other hand a second visit from Moses might have dangerous repercussions. Say he talked. Say the truth of his identity leaked out. There was no telling what might happen then. And what if Moses brought that rather vulgar woman with him again? What would Peach do then? Kill her too?

No. He would have to act before Moses returned. And that meant another trip to the city. He didn’t relish the prospect, but he had no choice. And even then it wouldn’t be easy. People knew his face now. That black fellow. Moses too. For obvious reasons he couldn’t afford to be seen by either of them. This thought struck him: he wouldn’t be able to get close enough to Moses to kill him in any one of the usual ways.

Problems.

If only he had reacted more efficiently when Moses appeared in his office. What an opportunity that had been. What a gift. But he had been caught napping. Ah, the slow brains of an old man. Alertness draining out of him like blood. There had even been a moment when he had doubted the reality of what he was seeing. Some kind of optical illusion, he had thought. A mirage, a ghost, the spirit of the pink file. Some such nonsense. But Moses hadn’t vanished. No shimmer in the air, no puff of smoke. Moses had been real. And Peach had made a quick recovery.

But still.

He had let him go.

He wished he could talk to Dolphin. He needed a younger mind, a sounding-board. He wanted to share the burden. Unthinkable, though. How could he tell Dolphin that he had broken the very rules that they were supposed to be enforcing? It would shake Dolphin’s faith in him. It would undermine the infrastructure that he had spent so much time and energy building. He couldn’t do it. He would have to work in isolation. Well, perhaps that was nothing new.

But as the days went by he made little progress.

The idea of a letter-bomb excited him briefly. It failed to stand up to close examination, however. Firstly, it could be detected by the post office and traced back to him. Secondly, it was unreliable. Moses might only lose his eyesight or a hand. And Peach wasn’t interested in anything less than death. One hundred per cent guaranteed death.

November became December. His deadline (Christmas Day) was less than a month away. He found his attention wandering and couldn’t call it back.

‘You look tired,’ Hilda gently observed.

As if he didn’t know! He had looked in the mirror. The pressure showed in the marshy grey terrain of his face, the soft yellow pits under his eyes.

Another time she asked him, ‘Is everything all right?’

Stupid bloody question.

‘Yes,’ he snapped. ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

*

And then, as if he didn’t have enough on his mind already, Pelting Day loomed.

Pelting Day — a village custom, supposedly dating back to the Middle Ages. Every year, at the beginning of December, the police of New Egypt held a lottery to determine which of them were to be subjected to the rigours of pelting. Only the Chief Inspector could claim exemption. Three days before Christmas the three officers who had drawn the unlucky numbers were marched down the hill to the village green. Tradition demanded that they looked impeccable: full dress uniform, combed hair, boots polished to a high gloss. A jeering crowd assembled at the foot of the hill to greet them. Children capered around in masks, chanting rhymes. Then the serious business of the day began. A fourth policeman secured his three colleagues in the stocks. And there they remained for at least an hour while they were pelted with ripe tomatoes, raw eggs, rotten fruit, anything that came to hand, provided, of course, that it was soft and unpleasant.

During his lifetime Peach had seen various people abuse the spirit of Pelting Day. Tommy Dane, for one. Teeth vengefully pinned to his bottom lip, arm springy as a whip, Tommy had pelted PC Bonefield with hard-boiled eggs, light-bulbs and lumps of coal. ‘You little devil,’ Peach could still hear Bonefield screaming, ‘I’ll get you.’ ‘Come on then,’ Tommy had said, cool as you please. And let fly with a handful of manure. Poor Bonefield had trailed home that evening with two black eyes and a chipped incisor (for which he was reimbursed from the New Egypt Police Fund). As always, Tommy Dane had taken things a little too far. In recent years, however, things had gone to the other extreme. Pelting Day had lost its appeal, its popularity. Hardly anyone bothered to come any more. 1979 had been a fiasco. When the three chosen policemen had arrived at the bottom of the hill they found the place deserted. No jeering crowd. Nobody at all, in fact. They were placed in the stocks as usual. And then they waited. After a while two small boys appeared. One of them had an orange in his hand but, instead of hurling it at a policeman, he peeled it and ate it. ‘I don’t like that game,’ the boy had told the inquisitive Peach. ‘It’s boring.’ Shortly afterwards they left.

1980 could well be just as laughable. With Dinwoodie dead (he had always pelted with extraordinary vigour), Highness still confined to his bed and Mustoe an alcoholic, the village had shrunk further into itself. The members of the younger generation, from whom a little spunk might have been expected, seemed even more listless than their parents. They watched TV. They slept a lot. They behaved like old people. The eighties promised nothing but bleakness.

Now Peach disliked Pelting Day intensely — the whole idea of an organised and legitimate assault on police dignity was offensive to him — and he longed to abolish it but, at the same time, he understood its value. It allowed the villagers to let off steam in a relatively harmless way. It helped to create order in the community. And it was good PR. He couldn’t afford to let the tradition die out. So, this year, he found himself in the curious and uncomfortable position of having to breathe life into something that he would much rather have seen dead.

He proposed two innovations: firstly, that one of the three policemen to be pelted would now be selected by a special committee of people from the village, and secondly, that Pelting Day would become the setting for a winter fair with the ritual of pelting as its jewel. He set up a sort of think-tank to generate ideas. It comprised PC Wilmott, Brenda Gunn, Joel Mustoe Junior and, of course, himself. The meetings went surprisingly well considering. In part this may have stemmed from Peach’s preoccupation with other matters (he wasn’t his usual acid domineering self, he was too busy trying to think of ways to kill Moses). In part, too, this may simply have reflected the wisdom and judgment he had shown in selecting the members of the committee. The only moments of friction occurred during the third meeting. Not, as you might expect, between the police and the villagers, but between Mustoe and Brenda Gunn. Mustoe had challenged Brenda’s suggestion that the police should finance the mulled-wine stall.

Mustoe said, ‘Why should the police pay for it?’

‘Why shouldn’t they?’ Brenda snapped. ‘Pelting Day is organised by the police. It’s a police tradition. It’s obvious they should pay for it,’ each point accompanied by a brisk emphatic slap on the table.

Peach could only hear them dimly. There was a chainsaw in his mind. A deafening howl as it bit into the black side-door of The Bunker.

‘Exactly,’ Mustoe was saying. ‘They organise it. They’ve done their bit. Now it’s our turn.’

‘Oh, don’t be a ninny.’

‘They organise it,’ Mustoe went on, ‘because we can’t. Or won’t. Nobody here does anything except complain, get drunk and kill themselves. Sometimes this village really makes me sick.’

‘Welcome to the club,’ Brenda sneered.

‘And that includes you, Mrs Gunn. Why don’t you kill yourself too? Might as well, really, mightn’t you?’

Brenda leaned back, hands flat on the table. ‘Strikes me,’ she said, ‘that we’ve got three police officers sitting at this table.’

Mustoe bridled. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I mean that you, Mr bloody Mustoe Junior, are behaving like a bloody policeman.’

‘Brenda,’ PC Wilmott was attempting conciliation, ‘I don’t think you’re being very constructive.’

‘Constructive? Who the hell’re you to talk? All you’ve been doing all week is polishing Peach’s boots with your face.’ Brenda leaned over the table on her man’s forearms — solid marble pillars resting on the twin plinths of her fists.

Wilmott’s shiny face reddened.

Up until that point Peach had been plunged deep into a world of nightclubs and murder. He had been doodling on his notepad. Sketches of nooses, knives, garottes, guillotines, machine-guns. A rack here, a bazooka there (if only he could get hold of one of those!). Injunctions printed in hostile black block capitals: KILL, THROTTLE, GAS, ANNIHILATE And several onomatopoeic representations of the noises people make when they’re dying. AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH, for instance. MMMPPPFFFF And GLOPGLOPGLOPGLOPGLOP (blood pumping out of a slashed throat). But, despite the carnage going on in his mind, he had been listening with one ear. When Brenda turned on Wilmott, he heaved himself into the fray.

‘The police will pay for the mulled wine,’ he declared. (At that moment he couldn’t have cared less who paid for the bloody mulled wine. If this year was anything like last year it wouldn’t cost much anyway. How much mulled wine could half a dozen New Egyptians drink?) ‘Happy, Brenda?’

Brenda was breathing hard through her nostrils. Still glaring at Wilmott, she sat down.

The meeting concluded with a discussion of the feasibility of donkey-rides. Peach returned to his own rather more violent speculations.

By the end of the first week in December they had come up with a sufficient number of ideas. Peach disbanded the committee. Brenda Gunn and Mustoe Junior, working in conjunction with Sergeant Dolphin and a handful of constables, were put in charge of implementation.

‘Leave it to me, sir,’ Dolphin said. ‘There’ll be no fiasco this year, I promise you.’

‘That,’ Peach sighed, ‘remains to be seen.’

*

‘Are you ready, dear?’

The gilt mirror on the hall wall showed Hilda in the foreground tying her headscarf and Peach waiting in the shadows by the front door, where the coats hung.

‘I’m ready,’ he said.

She dabbed her nose, her cheeks, her chin — final nervous touches with the powder-puff — then snapped her compact shut. She was wearing the wool suit she kept for special occasions. A muted shade of burgundy. It brings my colour out, she was fond of saying.

They walked down Magnolia Close towards the village green.

‘Pelting Day,’ she sighed. ‘It only seems like yesterday — ’ Since the last one, she meant.

He murmured agreement.

When they reached the grass, he gave her his arm. He looked about him. A cool clear afternoon. A bone-china sky, the most fragile of blues. Wood-smoke in the air. The damp turf blackening the tips of Hilda’s shoes. She held herself very upright as she walked, braced almost, as if she was facing into a stiff breeze, as if she expected life to jostle her. But it wasn’t that, Peach knew. It was anticipation.

‘Oh, look,’ she cried. ‘A bonfire.’

He had told her nothing of the plans for Pelting Day this year. Had he wanted to surprise her, or had he simply not bothered? He so rarely surprised her with anything these days. He could blame it on his age or the pressures of work. Other men did. But he knew that wasn’t it. If he was honest he had to admit that it was pure negligence. A scaling down of gifts and attention. And Hilda’s expectations falling too, settling. Like dust after a building’s been razed to the ground. He turned to look at her. His vision dissected her. He saw wide eyes, a parted mouth, the struts in her neck. An almost girlish excitement. A brittle pitiful delight. He thought her reactions exaggerated, and felt guilty for thinking so. Once it would have seemed natural. Now it bordered on the grotesque. His fault, really. He did so little for her. He felt so little. At times he had to cajole himself into feeling anything at all. His love for her seemed to have fallen to bits like one of those joke cars. Touch the door and the door drops off. Whoops, there goes a wheel. Ha ha ha. He wanted suddenly to reassemble it. But that would take time. Time spent together. After he had killed Moses, perhaps he would retire.

A child scuttled out of the shadows, scattered his thoughts. The child wore a mask. An old man’s wrinkled face, a bald head, wisps of stiff white hair. Young eyes glittering beneath. This travesty pointed a finger at him and chanted:

Peach, Peach,

Down to the beach,

Drown in the sea,

Then we’ll be free.

Then ran away sniggering.

Peach stood still. His lower lip moved in and out.

‘You mustn’t take it so seriously, dear,’ Hilda said. ‘It’s only Pelting Day.’

Her voice, intended as a balm, had no effect.

The bonfire threw great pleading arms into the darkening sky. The damp wood hawked and spat. Strapped to a chair on the peak of the fire sat the effigy of a policeman. One of the old APRs. They watched the straw face catch. It blazed, turned black. They moved on.

The area between the fire and the eastern edge of the green bustled with stalls and sideshows. There were coconut-shies (the coconuts wore tiny blue helmets), bran tubs, dart-throwing contests, donkey-rides, hoop-la (very difficult to ring the policemen on account of the size of their boots), trestle-tables loaded with homemade pickles and preserves, a mulled-wine tent (run by Mustoe Junior), a GUESS THE WEIGHT OF THE CHIEF INSPECTOR AND WIN A SURPRISE GIFT competition (‘Thirty-five stone,’ Peach heard somebody say as he went by. Very funny), and a palm-reader (Mrs Latter from the post office, her face caked in lurid make-up).

‘It’s marvellous,’ Hilda cried. ‘You have done well, darling.’

He nodded. The unstable orange light of the fire made everyone look predatory, fiendish, medieval. The laughter, the smoke, the gaiety, exhausted him. He hated surrendering control like this.

They had reached the clearing in front of the pub. The stocks stood there as they had stood for centuries. Lanterns hung from poles. Garlands of coloured bulbs had been draped around the trees. The Pelting Day Illuminations.

‘So who’s in for it this year?’ Hilda asked in a whisper.

He had no time to answer. A roar went up. Somebody had glimpsed a movement on the hill. A suggestion of blue in the darkness. A wink of a silver button.

‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’

People pressed towards the stocks from all directions. The Peaches were jostled, pinned from behind by the expanding crowd. Three policemen, accompanied by Sergeant Caution, arrived in the lit arena. Wolf-whistles, cat-calls, applause. Marlpit had drawn one of the unlucky numbers. Poor Marlpit. His eyes twitched in their sockets and dribble glistened on his quivering chin. Wragge trailed behind him, skin white like the inside of potatoes. Peach was rather glad that Wragge was going to be pelted; the boy needed taking down a peg or two. When invited to choose a third policeman, the villagers had settled on Sergeant Hazard. Unanimous decision, apparently. And a popular one, too. Everybody feared and hated Sergeant Hazard. He had terrorised the village for years. Only a month ago he had carried out another of his infamous (and unauthorised) dawn raids, this time on Mr Cawthorne, the postman.

Peach remembered Hazard’s report, delivered with brutal frankness and meticulous attention to detail in the privacy of Peach’s office:

‘I kicked Cawthorne’s door down at precisely five a.m. on the morning of November 19th,’ Hazard began. ‘Cawthorne appeared at the top of the stairs in his dressing-gown and slippers. He seemed frightened. “Who’s that?” he called out. “Come down here and find out,” I replied.’ Hazard chuckled, scratched the side of his great dented face. He enjoyed his work, no question of that. ‘I stamped on his radiogram, just to hurry him up a bit. Cawthorne shuffled downstairs. His face was greenish-grey, the colour of guilt, if you know what I mean, sir. “What are you doing in my house?” he asked me. I hit him in the mouth. Then, on second thoughts, I felled him with a chopped right hand to the kidneys.’ Hazard repeated the punch for Peach’s benefit. The air gasped. ‘I watched him groaning for a while. He had resoled his slippers with pieces of green carpet, I noticed. The cheap bastard. I went and stood over him. I pointed at him. “I suspect you,” I shouted, “of harbouring plans to escape.” “On what grounds?” the bastard said. “On what grounds?” I said. “I’ll give you on what grounds.” I stepped on his hand and twisted my boot. Like I was crushing out a cigarette, sir. He screamed. “That’s confidential,” I said, “isn’t it, Mr Cawthorne?” “Yes,” he whimpered. “That’s better,” I said. “Now then, I think I’ll just have a quick look round, if you don’t mind.”’ The ‘quick look round’ had lasted almost two hours, resulting in further damage both to the postman and to the postman’s house.

After listening to this report Peach leaned forwards and threaded his fingers together on the surface of his desk. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but why Cawthorne?’

Hazard seemed surprised by the question. Then he said, ‘He’s the postman, sir.’

‘The postman? I still don’t follow.’

‘So was Collingwood, sir.’

‘Ah, I see.’ And Peach nodded slowly, smiled to himself. A little farfetched, perhaps. A rather flimsy pretext, some might say, for such a violent attack. Still, there was no accounting for the mysterious workings of precedent, especially in a place like New Egypt. And he had been pleased to see an element of rationale creeping into Hazard’s brutalities. ‘Very good, sergeant. Very good.’

But now, of course, Hazard was paying for it.

Peach watched Sergeant Caution bolt the struggling Hazard into the stocks. Hazard was muttering. Curses, presumably. Obscenities. Death-threats. When all three policemen had been secured in position, Caution stepped aside and gave the signal for the pelting to begin. Pandemonium. A hail of soft missiles. The crowd broke into a raucous version of the famous ‘Pelting Day Song’:

Throw tomatoes

Throw a pear

At a policeman

If you dare

Throw some peaches (laughter)

From a tin

Watch them trickle

Down his chin —

A cabbage bounced off Hazard’s forehead. His face shook with volcanic fury. His eyes, bloodshot, scanned the crowd and noted names. There would be violence, Peach realised. There would be reprisals. He knew his Hazard.

He waited long enough to see a ripe tomato burst on Wragge’s cheek, he watched Wragge wriggle as a clot of seeds and juice slid down inside his tunic collar, then he turned away. He didn’t want to witness another second of his men’s humiliation.

Throw some apples

Throw some eggs

Hazard’s had it

Stop, he begs.

Just keep throwing

More and more

That’s what Pelting

Day is for —

Taking Hilda by the hand, he began to push his way through the crowd. Cheers scored the air as if to celebrate his departure. He found that he was trembling.

‘You look cold, John,’ Hilda said. ‘Perhaps a glass of mulled wine?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’ He tucked his double chin into his collar.

‘A pretty good turn-out, wouldn’t you say, sir?’

He turned round to see Dolphin standing beside him. In Dolphin’s arms, the most enormous pink bear that he had ever seen.

‘Better than I expected.’ Peach’s eyes shuttled between Dolphin’s face and the monstrous bear. He had known all along that this winter fair was a mistake. Look at the effect it was having on his men.

‘I won it, sir. In the hoop-la.’ Dolphin bounced the bear in the crook of his arm. ‘My daughter’s going to love it.’

That may well be, Peach thought, but for Christ’s sake stop carrying it around like that. It’s bad for credibility.

Hilda tiptoed back with two glasses of mulled wine. ‘Oh, Sergeant Dolphin. If I’d known you were here I would’ve brought you a glass too. It’s very good.’

Dolphin sketched a bow. ‘Very kind of you, Mrs Peach. But I’m on duty.’

‘And that, I suppose,’ Hilda scintillated, ‘is your new partner.’

Dolphin became foolish. ‘My new partner? Oh yes. I see. Haha.’ He grinned down at his bear.

Peach now took his deputy aside. ‘Any trouble?’

‘Not really, sir. Mustoe’s in the pub. Pretty far gone, as usual. Telling everybody what he thinks of Pelting Day. Says it’s a put-up job. The police just pretending to be human for a few hours. That kind of thing.’

Peach tutted. Though Mustoe was right, of course.

‘Apart from that — ’ bugger all. Dolphin finished the sentence in his head out of respect for the Chief Inspector’s wife who was standing beside them. He turned his mouth down at the corners to indicate that there was nothing he couldn’t handle. ‘Most people seem to be here.’ He looked left and right as if about to cross a road. ‘Amazing turn-out. Never seen anything like it.’

‘Yes. I suppose so.’ Peach was only making minimal contact. He was wondering whether this new lease of life, these new high spirits, could have anything to do with Moses Highness’s recent visit. Had word got out? ‘You haven’t heard any rumours, have you, Dolphin?’

‘Rumours, sir?’

‘Rumours that might — might be subversive?’

Dolphin frowned. ‘I don’t quite understand you.’

‘Never mind.’

Another roar from the stocks. Hazard had just opened his mouth to swear at Cawthorne and promptly had it filled by a lump of bread soaked in sour milk.

‘All I can say is, I’m glad it’s not me,’ Dolphin said.

‘Quite,’ Peach said. ‘Well, I should be getting along.’ He took one step then, confidentially, over his shoulder, whispered, ‘I should leave that toy somewhere until you come off duty, Dolphin. Otherwise people might not take you seriously.’

Dolphin knew him well enough to detect the presence of a command beneath that quiet suggestion. Nodding, he moved away with Hilda. They stopped by the fire for a moment to warm their hands.

He gazed at the charred effigy crouching at the centre of the fire. Of its own accord and sparked by something he couldn’t yet identify, his mind began to slip forwards, incisive, remorseless, as if unleashed. It had picked up some kind of trail or scent. Something in the atmosphere (the fairy lights? the jangling music? the clamour of voices?) had reminded him of the twenty-four hours he had spent in London. Something buried in those twenty-four hours, he now knew, could help him solve the problem of how to kill Moses.

He began to scrabble at the loose earth of his memories. The blonde girl on the train? No. That Asian boy in the middle of the night? No, not there. His meeting with Madame Zola? Not there either. Then he remembered the enigmatic landlord of that pub on Kennington Road. Terence, wasn’t it? Somewhere in that conversation, perhaps.

He sifted more carefully now. Words, gestures, nuances. Bit shady, by all accounts. No, it had come later. During the second drink. When Terence opened up a bit. When Peach asked him, ‘What else do you know about the place?’

‘Well, there’ve been some pretty mysterious goings-on — ’ The landlord liked to leave his sentences hanging. At times he had reminded Peach of people in the village.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Vandalism, for a start.’

‘Vandalism?’

‘There’s been a series of break-ins.’ Terence ran the tip of his tongue along his moustache to signify the delicacy of the subject. ‘Too many for it to be a coincidence, if you know what I mean — ’

‘What kind of break-ins, Terence?’

‘Oh, I don’t know exactly. Let’s just say there’s been talk of a vendetta, though.’

Peach was still staring deep into the fire. His eyes were smouldering now. Everything had clicked.

He handed his glass to Hilda. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Home.’ He was already ten yards away, walking backwards. ‘Something very important, dear.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No, no. It’s all right. You stay here. Enjoy yourself.’ The fire threw black streamers of shadow across his face. ‘I’ll see you when you get back.’

Then he was running away over the grass, leaving Hilda standing by the fire in her burgundy suit with a glass of mulled wine in each hand.

When he reached his study he unlocked his bureau and pulled out the pink file. His heart was hammering against the bars of his ribs. He sat down, unfastened the top button of his tunic. He shuffled through his papers until he found the plans he had drawn up a few weeks before. Plans of The Bunker.

‘Yes,’ he breathed. ‘Just as I thought.’

The Bunker had no fire-escapes. The only way out of the fourth floor, so far as he could see, was down the stairs and through the black side-door. So if a fire started on the ground floor …

He smiled.

There would be a fire at The Bunker. A tragic fire. He could see the headlines now:

Nightclub Blaze Leaves One Dead

Or perhaps:

Man, 25, Dies in Mystery Inferno

(And if that black bastard got killed too, so much the better.)

There would be nothing to connect Peach with the fire. Nothing to implicate him. He would burn the pink file beforehand, though. Just to be on the safe side. It would have served its purpose, after all. There was a nice symmetry about that. The file. The nightclub. Both pink. Both burning.

A sudden blast of heat passed across his face.

Why wait?

Why not do it now? Leave tonight. Return first thing in the morning. Nobody would miss him. It was Pelting Day. Turn the chaos to his advantage. Leave now. No time to tell Hilda. Tell her tomorrow. Explain the whole thing then. He would think of something. He was Peach.

He leered. Yes, why not?

A Christmas gift for Moses.

Death.

Hands trembling with strange electricity, he hurried from the room.

*

‘Pelting Day,’ Mustoe sneered. ‘What a bloody fiasco.’

He had been sitting in The Legs and Arms all day. He had drunk himself into a stupor at lunch-time and slept it off during the afternoon. Now he was drinking again. Pints of beer and whisky chasers. He was alone except for Lady Batley, who hadn’t moved for hours, who never did, and Brenda Gunn, the bitch who ran the place. Brenda usually ignored him but on this occasion, perhaps because she had been on the Pelting Day committee herself, he seemed to have touched a nerve.

‘Oh and I suppose your life isn’t,’ she muttered.

‘Isn’t what?’ he grinned.

‘A fiasco.’

‘Oh,’ and he threw up his hands, pretended to cower, ‘oh, Mrs Gunn.’

‘It’s a success this year, actually.’ Brenda folded her arms. ‘A real success.’

‘Success.’ Mustoe snorted into his glass, then raised it ceilingwards. ‘To the success of Pelting Day.’ He swallowed his double whisky in a single gulp. ‘My arse,’ he added, and slipped sideways off his stool, very slowly, like a ship going down. Waves closed over his head.

Brenda took away his glass and wiped the bar.

‘Fiasco?’ Lady Batley quavered suddenly. ‘What fiasco?’

Then he heard a voice calling him, calling from somewhere far above.

‘Dad? Dad?’

He peered over his anorak collar. Managed to fit his flaccid lips around the words, ‘Piss off.’

‘Come on, Dad,’ the voice said. ‘It’s time to go home.’

‘There’s no such thing.’ As time? As home? Both, he thought, sweeping them savagely aside like empty glasses.

‘Something’s happened, Dad,’ came the voice again. ‘Something strange.’

He rolled over and sat up. Bracing a hand on his knee, he clambered to his feet. He stared down with revulsion at his eight-year-old son. Conceived during the preparations for escape in 1972. Conceived as a result of those bloody stomach exercises. A living reminder of his own failure. How he loathed the child who he had, in his own tortured bitterness, insisted on calling Job.

‘What’s strange?’ he snarled.

The boy looked up at his father with eyes the colour of ploughed fields. ‘They’re saying Peach has disappeared.’

Mustoe lowered himself on to his stool. His son’s words seemed to tap some hidden reserve of sobriety.

‘What did you say?’ he said.

*

It was three in the morning. Elliot sprawled on his grey dralon sofa. A glass of Remy balanced on the fourth button of his waistcoat. He was drinking in the liquid harmonies of Manhattan Transfer. To somebody walking into the office at that moment Elliot might have looked the picture of relaxation, but that somebody wouldn’t have heard, as Elliot heard, the whirr of brain-wires, or felt, as Elliot felt, the chafing of one layer of skin against another. Elliot had said good-night to Ridley half an hour before in the foyer. He had been intending to lock up straight away and go home. But when he searched his pockets he realised that he had left his keys upstairs and when he found his keys on his desk he saw the pile of letters and when he thought about the letters he poured himself a stiff brandy, put a record on the stereo and lay down on the sofa.

Now he shook the sofa off, stood up. He walked over to the pool-table and set up the balls. He broke, put a stripe down. He played himself, and the physics of the game slowly altered his frame of mind. He could concentrate now. His cool pool-brain began to plan strategies.

When the music stopped — that five-second gap between tracks — he thought he heard something downstairs. The three-syllable creak of the double-doors. And remembered now that he had left them unlocked. He leapt across the room and killed the volume on the stereo. And stood motionless, lips ajar. Not a sound now, but the kind of silence that follows sound. This had been happening slowly for a long time. He felt a curious relief as he reached for the short pool-cue.

Half a dozen steps (executed so lightly and smoothly that they all ran together) took him to the door of the office. He pushed on the wood with spread fingers. An unmistakable smell drifted into his nostrils. Petrol.

He ran down the stairs, turned the corner into the last flight, and stopped, three steps above the foyer. A policeman stood by the double-doors. He held a pink paraffin can in his hands. There was something gluttonous about the way he was splashing petrol against the walls, as if the petrol was sauce and the walls were a meal he could hardly wait to eat.

‘So,’ Elliot breathed, ‘it’s you.’

A casual tilt of Peach’s brutal head. The quills of his crewcut glinting. His grey eyes grinned from the cover of their heavy lids and his bottom lip slid unceasingly against his top one, in and out, in and out. And Elliot realised. The bloke was mad. Stark fucking mad. And would do anything.

‘You’re going to burn,’ Peach said.

Elliot sprang across the foyer. His pool-cue hissed through the air and cracked Peach on the side of the head. Peach tottered sideways, dropped the pink can. Then he began to laugh. Before Elliot could hit him again, he brought out a box of matches, struck one, and tossed it on to the floor. Elliot jumped back. Fire grew up the wall like a fast orange plant.

‘Goodbye,’ Peach whispered. Blood ran a red hand down the side of his face.

Elliot backed towards the door. But he wanted one question answered.

‘It’s not me you’re after, is it?’

Peach was still laughing.

‘It’s Moses you want,’ Elliot said, ‘isn’t it?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Peach leered, ‘he’s going to burn too.’

‘No, he isn’t. Because he isn’t here.’ Now it was Elliot’s turn to laugh. ‘You’ve fucked it, fat man. You’ve really fucked it this time.’

Peach sucked air in through his gritted teeth. Then he shook his head from side to side and let out a guttural howl of rage. He lunged at Elliot, clubbed him on the forehead. Elliot staggered backwards through the double-doors.

Snow was falling outside. Snow, of all things. White on the white of his Mercedes. He unlocked the door and scrambled in. Through the smudged windscreen he saw Peach collapse on the pavement. Smoke poured from the door of the club. A window screeched open somewhere above.

He started the engine, crashed the gears, stamped on the accelerator. He spun the car round the corner. The lights were green on the main road. They had to be. He wasn’t going to stop for anything. He wasn’t going to stop for a long time. And when he did he would probably be somebody else.

*

A tightening in Peach’s chest. Blackness pulsing along the edges of his vision. Something lurched inside him. Slack not being taken up. He wiped at his forehead and his fingers came away wet. Blood or sweat, he didn’t know.

Tightening, tightening.

Arms over his face, he crashed through the air as if it was glass. He thought he felt snow on his face. Soft cold petals settling.

One reeling upward glance. Some sort of wedding in the sky.

Snow.

He could hear the blood rushing through his body. Or. Trees moving. Darkness advancing. Some kind of second night falling.

The pain, when it came, split his body in two as an axe splits wood.

Then he was lying on something cold. His palm flat on — was it stone? He couldn’t understand why the floor of his study had suddenly turned to stone. Then he remembered, and wanted to forget again.

The moisture from the pavement soaked up into his uniform. A welcome enveloping coolness.

Thoughts would not start. Sentences buckled while under construction. Words floated out of context.

He knew, though, that something final was happening. The metallic taste of something final on his tongue.

His left arm hurt. A massive invisible weight pinned him to the cool ground. He could no more move than he could have flown. Snow nursed his wounded face.

He felt the presence of fire on his skin and in his memory. He saw a crouching figure wrapped in sheets of flame. He had to burn the evidence. Had to. Had he?

He tried to get up but felt he was standing already. Leaning against a cold wall. If he stood up he would fall over. Logic. Somebody had been playing with the world.

Buildings, trees, leaned over him.

Someone appeared. Pressed against the warped shape of everything. Corn and husk. Hands closed in prayer. Flowing upwards and inwards in sickening curves. A woman. Her head blending with the tops of — or perhaps just the sky. Was that Hilda?

‘Hilda?’

He couldn’t hear his voice, couldn’t tell if he had spoken. Only this rushing sound as if the night, the whole night with him inside it, was travelling somewhere very fast.

Now she was speaking. He strained to hear. Her mouth opened and closed like the mouth of a fish. Stretched at the corners sometimes. Painful. Water spilled out of his ears.

Her head moved closer, liquid at the edges. Was it Hilda?

He had to talk. He could see the words, but couldn’t get a grip on them. Slippery as fish and his lips like clumsy hands.

‘Tell Dolphin,’ he wanted to say. ‘Tell him Moses is alive.’

Simple.

Had he said it then?

Had Hilda understood?

Ah, so many pieces missing from this jigsaw.

He tried again. The same words. And something else.

‘And tell him — ’

Everything was caving in above him. The pain, the weight of the sky, the woman’s face, came crashing down through the darkness. He only had seconds.

‘— to kill Moses,’ he cried.

The woman held his head in her cool papery fingers.

She watched his lips turn the colour of his uniform.

She knelt there until she could no longer feel her legs, until the fire-engines blared round the corner.

The snow in her hair melted and ran down her face.

‘Christos,’ she whispered.

The man was dead.

*

Still clutching his giant pink teddy-bear, Dolphin swayed up the garden path. He was singing.

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

Oh I do like to be beside the sea —

Policemen weren’t supposed to sing songs about being beside the seaside (or being anywhere, for that matter — apart from New Egypt, that is), but seven pints of homebrew with Hazard and the boys had washed away his usual circumspection. They had been celebrating the end of Pelting Day. A triumph, it had been. His triumph, in many ways. The most well attended Pelting Day in living memory. And if that didn’t deserve a celebration, what did? So they had celebrated. And now he was drunk. And when he was drunk he liked to sing songs about water. Sea-water, preferably. The ocean. Those expanses of water where his namesakes swam, expanses so vast that they filled his somewhat limited imagination many times over. Ocean. What a wonderful watery word.

‘Ocean,’ he said. ‘Ohhhhsssshhhun.’

His wife, Laura, opened the door. ‘Ssshhh,’ she said.

‘Ohhhhsssshhhh — ’ he began again. Thought she was joining in, you see.

‘Roger, please. Mrs Peach has phoned three times. Where’ve you been?’

‘Who?’

‘Mrs Peach.’

‘What’s she want?’

‘She’s worried. The Chief Inspector’s disappeared.’ She scraped a few strands of hair away from her creased white forehead.

‘Disappeared? Where?’

‘If she knew that,’ Laura said, ‘he wouldn’t have disappeared, would he?’

Dolphin let this piece of sophistry sink without trace in the swirling waters of his drunkenness. He lifted his right wrist. ‘Laura, it’s two-thirty in the morning, for Christ’s sake.’

‘The Chief Inspector’s been missing since nine o’clock, Roger, and you can leave Christ out of it,’ said Laura, who was religious.

Dolphin sighed.

‘Where’ve you been all this time anyway?’ she went on. ‘And what’s that thing?’

He pushed past her and walked into the dining-room. Then he wondered why he had walked into the dining-room. Peach had disappeared. Peach had been missing for almost six hours. Peach never went missing. Nobody ever went missing. This was bad. Very bad.

He had stopped in front of the mirror. When he looked up he suddenly saw the new Chief Inspector of New Egypt standing there. The new Chief Inspector of New Egypt was holding a giant pink teddy-bear. He would have to get rid of it, he decided. Otherwise nobody would take him seriously. Putting the teddy-bear down, he walked back into the hall. Then he picked up the phone and dialled Peach’s number.

In future fluffy animals would always remind him of death.