Dreams of Leaving

Unfinished Histories (1972)

It was after ten o’clock at night. Arms pinned behind his back, almost as if handcuffed, Chief Inspector Peach stood at his office window. The storm was building. Staggered flashes of lightning took pictures of his massive silhouette. The trees over the road heaved, strained, testing the strength of their roots. Rain hissed down through the light of a single street-lamp, fine as silver wire. In the intervals between thunderclaps a typewriter could be heard, scratching and clicking beyond the door like an insect.

Storms made Peach think. Their explosions loosened the order in his mind. Thoughts long buried came tumbling down. He turned away from the window and crossed the room to his desk, his boots deliberate on the wooden floor. The angle of his head, lowered in thought, blurred the line of his jaw; his double chin had, with the years, almost doubled again. He sank heavily into his chair.

There were times when he saw himself as a premier surrounded by dissidents, when he saw his office as the object of endless plots and conspiracies. Deep down, he knew this was nonsense, morbid nonsense, and an injustice both to himself and his colleagues, but then the sound of thunder came to him, unfurling miles away, rolling across the countryside, breaking against the glass of his window –

He still remembered — how could he forget? — the weeks in 1959 when that feeling had washed over him, sucked him down, when no amount of struggling could bring him back to the surface. Though he had trusted nobody, he had been forced to turn the running of the village over to three of his sergeants while he retired to bed — to rest, recuperate, re-think. And there had been moments when he doubted whether he would ever return.

The breakdown –

Sheets of glass, infinite and tough, between himself and everything else. Sheets of glass thickening, thickening. Until he couldn’t hear anything any more, until he couldn’t make himself heard. He didn’t want to think about it. He had worked through it, that was the main thing. When the feeling came now, he took it for what it was — the accumulating weight of responsibility, a sign of fatigue, his mind telling him to ease off. He obeyed. At sixty-four, he couldn’t afford to go through all that again. He might really never come back this time.

A knock on the door dropped into his thoughts. Gratefully, he watched them scatter and disperse. When he spoke, his voice had its usual authority, its usual depth of tone. So much so that it blended with the retreating thunder.

‘Come in.’

Dolphin — now Sergeant Dolphin (Peach had promoted him in 1969) — steered his large face round the door. ‘I was wondering, sir, what you wanted me to do with this.’ And he shuffled backwards into the office dragging a curious structure that appeared to be made out of strips of corrugated cardboard. It was about six feet tall, four feet wide and two inches thick. It had been painted brown. Leather straps dangled from the underside.

Ah, Peach thought. Ah yes.

‘Lean it up against the wall, Dolphin,’ he said, ‘then take a seat. I want to have a word with you.’

Dolphin manoeuvred the structure into the gap between the bookshelf and a large-scale wall-map of the village. Then he closed the door and sat down. Too eagerly, perhaps, for a spring twanged somewhere beneath him. He cringed, muttered an apology.

With his moments of embarrassment, his nail-bitten fingers and his rosy outdoor face, he sometimes reminded Peach of a giant schoolboy. Peach approved of his eagerness, though. It was one of the qualities he looked for in a police officer. That, physical presence, and a shrewd mind. And Dolphin, surprisingly, had all three. That blundering physique of his concealed a wealth of deftness and tact. But Dolphin was fidgeting, tugging at his collar and rearranging his legs, and Peach finally took pity.

‘An extraordinary case, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Most unusual,’ the sergeant said. ‘Ingenious, really.’

Peach frowned. He didn’t want obsequiousness. He wanted fresh opinions, new angles: feedback. He prompted Dolphin once again. ‘Had you suspected him at all, the greengrocer?’

‘Well, no. Not exactly.’ Dolphin shifted in his chair, as if by finding a comfortable position he would also find the right words. ‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘I know he’s thought of escape before. It’s just that I never thought he’d have the — ’ he faltered for a moment then, trampling his inhibitions, came out daringly with — ‘balls.’

Peach’s lower lip curved, became succulent. ‘I must say,’ he said, ‘that it surprised me too, Dolphin.’

‘Though, God knows, he spent enough time with Dinwoodie.’ Dolphin plunged into the stream of his thoughts. ‘I suppose I should’ve suspected something, really. I just thought he was all bark, that’s all. You know, like Dinwoodie. I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, but nothing ever comes of it. And all the time he was building that — ’ but he couldn’t find the word to describe the structure that was leaning against the wall, so he pointed instead — ‘that’

A sudden flicker of lightning and the structure jumped out into the room. Peach waited for thunder, but none came.

‘Yes, well,’ he said, ‘I think there’s an important lesson to be learned there, Dolphin. We tend to overestimate ourselves sometimes. Get cocky. Complacent. That’s the biggest mistake you can make. Vigilance at all times, Dolphin. I can’t stress that strongly enough. Security must be watertight. Watertight. Not a drop of it must ever escape. Do you follow me?’

Dolphin bit down on his bottom lip. ‘Yes, sir.’

The lecture over, Peach eased back. His voice became conversational again. ‘An intriguing case, though. Quite intriguing.’

Only two nights before, the greengrocer had confessed everything. In the harsh light of the interrogation room, his robust pink features had seemed bulbous, coarse. His methodical demeanour had looked plain clumsy. A failed escape attempt — and, let’s face it, what other kind was there? — rearranged both a person’s appearance and their character. Made them ugly. Broke them. Peach had seen it happen half a dozen times during his long career, and the sight of the greengrocer slumped on that hard chair, mouth slack and hanging open, mud drying on his dishevelled clothes, had reminded him of those other triumphs.

He remembered asking the greengrocer how the idea had come to him.

On a glorious spring morning, the greengrocer replied. Through his shop window, he could see part of a field which at that particular time of year was in the process of being ploughed. He knew that, owing to its unusual shape (a long wedge tapering to a sharp point), this field stretched all the way to the village boundary, just visible as a line of trees in the distance. He saw the field every day and had become attached to it. In the spring it looked especially beautiful — the grain of the earth chiselled into furrows, the white gulls flapping in the air above the farmer’s tractor, like washing hanging out to dry –

Though he was himself a staunch advocate of the beauty of New Egypt, Peach became impatient.

‘That’s enough poetry,’ he said. ‘What about a few facts?’

After a brief wounded silence, the greengrocer continued.

On one of those spring mornings he had been unpacking a fresh delivery of apples. Granny Smiths, they were — a lovely fruit, crisp and green. (A warning glance from Peach.) He was transferring them from their crates to the window display when he noticed something extraordinary. Slowly, very slowly, so as to see everything as it really was and no other way, he stared first at the corrugated cardboard that lined the bottom of the apple-crates, then at the ploughed field beyond the window. He did this several times. Then, even though it was only eleven in the morning, he closed his shop and went upstairs.

He had spent the next two years gathering and assembling his materials. He had to work sporadically, so as not to attract attention. And, in any case, it wasn’t every day that a delivery of apples arrived, was it?

‘Do you remember how I dropped the price of my apples, Chief Inspector?’ For a moment the greengrocer had been his old self again, his head wobbling on his shoulders, a smug light in his eye. ‘I had to get rid of them, you see. So I could order some more.’

Peach nodded. ‘The cardboard.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Very clever.’ Peach’s voice was as crisp as any Granny Smiths, though sourer perhaps. ‘Go on.’

The greengrocer had worked night after night in the dusty gloom of the cellar underneath his shop, hunched over strips of cardboard, pots of brown paint and tubes of industrial glue. It had taken ages. Ages. And even when he had finished he had to wait another nine months to put his plan into action. The time of year was important, of course — but so was the weather. A moon would have been dangerous. Rain too. Snow would have been fatal.

Then, one spring evening, the conditions seemed perfect and he made his bid for freedom. Disguised as a section of ploughed field. It was so simple, a stroke of genius, really, even if he said so himself. (Again that smug look; Peach had silently prescribed further humiliation.) All he had to do was strap the corrugated cardboard on to his back, flatten himself against the ground (making sure the ridges on his back corresponded to the ridges of the field), and crawl a distance of about a mile. And crawling wouldn’t have been a problem. He had spent months working on his stomach muscles.

‘How did you do that?’ Peach asked, curious.

The greengrocer, unexpectedly, blushed. ‘I’d rather not say.’

Now Peach really wanted to know. ‘How?’ he repeated.

The greengrocer began to lower himself into his clothes as if he thought he could escape the question that way.

But Peach was relentless. ‘Come on, Mr Mustoe. How did you strengthen those stomach muscles of yours?’

‘I can’t,’ the greengrocer writhed. ‘It’s embarrassing.’

Peach almost rubbed his hands together at the prospect. ‘Joel,’ he wheedled, ‘we’re all men here.’

Joel threw a desperate glance at the ceiling, but it rebounded from the severe grey plasterwork and landed awkwardly on the floor. His resistance crumpled.

‘Well — ’ he began.

Dolphin pounced. ‘Well?’

A touch over-eager, perhaps. Peach motioned to his subordinate behind the greengrocer’s back. Not so fast.

‘— in bed,’ the greengrocer muttered.

‘In bed?’ Peach’s voice was dispassionate then, almost medical. ‘How do you mean?’

‘With the wife.’

‘Ah,’ Peach breathed. ‘I see.’

And he persisted, because degradation was part of the process. The greengrocer admitted, under duress, that he had worked on his stomach muscles in bed at night, startling his wife with a revival of sexual passion that put anything they had got up to on their honeymoon completely in the shade.

‘Is that so?’ Peach murmured. Dolphin took copious notes, the leer on his face making him look more than ever like a schoolboy.

And so, muscles toned, homemade ploughed field strapped in position, the greengrocer began to crawl. Unfortunately, he had only covered a hundred yards when a policeman trod on him — entirely by accident. Unfortunately, too, it was Sergeant Dolphin who weighed eighteen stone on an empty stomach. One yelp of surprise as the breath was crushed out of him was enough to give the greengrocer away. He was immediately apprehended and taken down to the police station. In Peach’s presence Dolphin had confirmed the basic details of the greengrocer’s story. A statement was written and signed. The greengrocer was then led away to a cell to reflect on his failure before being allowed to return home. Peach celebrated by throwing a cocktail party in his library.

‘So what are we going to do with it?’ Dolphin asked, bringing Peach back to the present.

Peach folded his hands over his stomach. ‘Put it in the museum,’ he said.

‘Of course. Good idea, sir.’

‘Yes,’ Peach said, ‘I think it will look rather splendid hanging in the museum.’

He stood up, and walked over to the section of ploughed field so lovingly, so painstakingly, constructed by the greengrocer.

‘Remarkable piece of work,’ he said. ‘Really remarkable.’ Then, touching on a pet subject of his, ‘You know, if we could only harness their determination, their creativity, somehow, if we could only persuade them to do something for the community — ’ He sighed. It would never happen. Not in his lifetime, anyway.

‘I say, Dolphin,’ and Peach became enthusiastic, ‘what about taking it over to the museum now?’

‘It’s raining, sir. Might ruin it.’

‘Nonsense. It’s only a few yards. Come on, give me a hand.’

Taking one corner each, they began to ease the unwieldy structure out of the office and down the corridor. They passed an open doorway. PC Hazard — cheekbones like knee-caps, chin the shape of a soap-dish — looked up from the report he was typing.

‘Need any help, Chief?’

Peach shook his head. ‘We can manage. If anyone calls, I’ll be in the museum.’

‘Right you are, Chief.’ Hazard turned back to the typewriter, began to stab at the keys, one finger at a time. A good man, Hazard. A bit primitive, but a good man.

Peach held the ploughed field upright while Dolphin wedged open the door to the courtyard. The rain had slackened off. The wind, a vast physical presence, threw its weight against the trees, and the trees swirled, their leaves roaring like stones dragged by the sea. The two men stood there for a while, admiring the power of the night.

‘By the way, Dolphin,’ Peach said, placing a hand on the sergeant’s arm, ‘you did well to apprehend the greengrocer. Extremely well.’

Dolphin’s face became foolish with modesty. ‘It was nothing, really. A bit of luck, that’s all.’

‘No, not luck,’ Peach said. ‘Planning. Timing.’

‘Planning?’

‘Why do you think we have night patrols, Dolphin?’

Dolphin considered this. ‘Perhaps I should be congratulating you, sir,’ he said, ‘rather than the other way round.’

Peach smiled into the wind. In exchanges like this, it could be seen that the two men shared a similar brand of natural cunning. At times Dolphin’s instincts led him, almost blind, towards perceptions and discoveries that astonished him. Like treading on the greengrocer, for example. In time, Peach thought, Dolphin would learn to be less astonished, he would learn to see these perceptions and discoveries as his reward for years of apprenticeship, as his right, as valid and innate parts of himself. Exchanges like this explained why Dolphin was, to all intents and purposes (though it had never been formalised), Peach’s deputy and, consequently, Peach’s most likely successor.

As they chuckled together over Dolphin’s remark, the wind hurled itself against the cardboard construction, threatening to whirl it away across the courtyard. Dolphin reacted with the speed of his relative youth and held it down.

‘I think we’d better get it inside,’ he yelled.

Peach nodded.

The two men struggled across the asphalt, round a tree, past a rack of rattling police bicycles. They stopped in front of a long low building with a curving corrugated-iron roof and no windows. It looked like an aircraft hangar. The New Egypt Police Museum.

Peach produced a bunch of keys, selected one, and unlocked the metal door. Once inside, he reached for the panel of light switches. Neon strips began to pop and fizzle overhead.

The museum had been founded circa 1899 by Chief Inspector Magnolia. It was a private museum, intended for the edification and amusement of the police alone. During the past fifteen years there had been moves on the part of several villagers to have the museum thrown open to all New Egyptians; it’s history, they had argued, our history, and in that sense they were right, of course, since the museum was, in fact, a comprehensive record of all the escape attempts that had ever occurred (in living memory, at least). But, naturally, Peach had quashed every request, every petition. The idea was intolerable. The museum acted as a library of information, he said, the equivalent of police archives, and, as such, must remain confidential.

He moved among the rows of exhibits. Rain tapped on the metal roof like a thousand men working with delicate hammers. He liked the fact that there were no windows. The building felt hollow, secretive. A drum, a womb, a submarine.

He paused before a lifesize reconstruction of the accident that Tommy Dane had staged on the main road outside the village in 1945. There was the actual hayrick Tommy had used (generously donated by Farmer Hallam). There, too, was Mr Dane’s bicycle, its mudguards dented, its wheel-rims sprinkled with rust. A dummy Tommy Dane, dressed in clothes that had been appropriated from his wardrobe following his death, lay on the ground in the position he had described during his confession, the head resting in a pool of simulated blood. An account of the escape attempt (written by Peach himself) hung from the roof, accompanied by detailed explanatory maps. Peach nodded as he skimmed through his own terse paragraphs.

He moved on, stopped again. Now he was looking down into a grave, a grave that contained a spotless gleaming coffin. Fashioned out of the finest cedar, the handles plated in silver and carved to resemble a family crest, the interior upholstered in a magenta silk quilt, it must have cost a small fortune. Likewise the tombstone. The tall slab of Italian marble supported an angel with outspread wings and uplifted hands. The names and dates had already been engraved:

LORD OSCAR NOBLE BATLEY 1859–1938

— a little prematurely, though. Peach couldn’t help smiling.

He walked to the far end of the museum. Here were artefacts dating back to the first recorded escape attempt. In 1899 the village postman, a man by the name of Collingwood, had devised a system of lianas stretching from his house on the western edge of the village green to the boundary a mile away. From reading the report (couched in rather fine Edwardian prose), one gathered that New Egypt had boasted a much larger number of trees in those days; one also gathered that Collingwood was a man of somewhat unusual build, being ‘exceptionally small and agile’ and possessing ‘arms of quite extraordinary length’. Collingwood had owed his downfall to the son of one of the village constables. The boy had loved climbing trees, as most boys do, and had discovered one of Collingwood’s lianas. Collingwood had collided with the boy in mid-air. He lost his grip; fell, and died instantaneously of a broken neck. The boy escaped with minor cuts and bruises. Shaking his head at this curious tale, Peach turned and, circling an ancient leather harness that had been suspended in the air by half a dozen stuffed birds, walked back to join Dolphin who was still waiting by the door.

And now the greengrocer’s ploughed field, he thought.

In his view, the museum was a gallery, housing a collection of uniquely creative acts; it represented the flowering of local genius. For, if the truth be known, he had more respect for a Collingwood or a Tommy Dane than for all the other villagers put together. They failed — their failures were inevitable and, in the end, rather pathetic — but at least, and in the face of overwhelming odds, they tried.

He rested a hand on the smooth worn shaft of the hayrick. His domain, this. The neatness, the order. Every single one of the men and women represented in the museum had been born in New Egypt and had died (or would die) in New Egypt. Birth and death closed like brackets round a single desperate theatrical escape attempt. And every attempt had been studied, documented, catalogued. Every attempt had become a case-history. It was perfection of a sort.

Suddenly something snagged on Peach’s line of thought, jerked it out of true.

The toy dog.

Blast that toy dog.

Peach swung round, hands clenched. A sour juice flooded the troughs between his cheeks and his gums. The diagonal lines on his forehead tangled, knotted. He brushed past Dolphin.

‘I want that hung from the centre beam,’ he snapped. ‘If you could arrange it, Dolphin.’

Dolphin stared at Peach without seeming to — a technique he frequently employed when on duty in the village. ‘But what about the report, sir?’

Peach waved an irritable hand. ‘Get someone to do it.’

The way Dolphin was staring at the ground, there might have been a wounded animal lying there.

Peach noticed and understood. ‘In fact, no,’ he said, gathering the remains of his former jovial mood. ‘Why don’t you do it yourself? You brought the greengrocer in. You were present at the interrogation. And it’ll be your first report on an escape. Why don’t you write this one up?’

Dolphin’s face acquired a sudden radiance. ‘Thank you, sir. I will.’

‘And don’t forget to lock the door,’ Peach added, withdrawing into the darkness. ‘We can’t have just anybody walking in here, can we?’

Dolphin agreed that they couldn’t.

A gale outside now. Wave on wave of wind washed through the courtyard. Something banged repeatedly in the rifle-range like an old-fashioned gun. A dustbin overturned, and birds made of newspaper whirled up into the loud black sky. One hand clutching his collar to his throat, Peach stood the dustbin upright and replaced the lid. The wind, swooping down, lifted his tunic at the back and with a whoop of delight investigated the Chief Inspector’s buttocks. (Like most figures in a position of authority, Peach was the butt for many scurrilous jokes, often of an anatomical nature.) This mockery touched an already exposed nerve and Peach, normally the calmest of men, felt like lashing out. At what, though? The wind? The toy dog? That empty coffin buried in the cemetery?

He stamped indoors, slamming the door. His flesh vibrated with anger under his uniform. Where was Hazard?

‘Hazard? Hazard?’ His voice boomed down the silent green corridor.

But the stuttering of the typewriter had ceased. Hazard must have gone home.

‘Skiver,’ Peach muttered.

He burst into the kitchen, put the kettle on. Then waited for it to boil, hands fidgeting in his pockets. Nobody pulled the wool over his eyes. Nobody.

A shrill whistling brought him round. He poured the boiling water into the teapot and carried it, together with a bottle of milk and a white china mug, into his office. While the tea brewed, he opened his filing-cabinet and searched for the dossier.

Ah, there it was. Filed under H. H for Highness.

He opened the pink cover. MOSES GEORGE HIGHNESS. He sat down at his desk and, sipping the strong tea, scanned the first few pages to refresh his memory.

A description of the child. The circumstances of his disappearance. Transcripts of the interviews with the parents. Certain phrases leapt out, clarified by the passage of years. Babies disappear all the time. Barefaced. Almost confessional. How could he have been fooled, even for a moment?

He turned the page. The reports of the daily search-parties. The discovery of the toy dog. Pretty slim pickings. Then a piece of paper slipped out of the file and see-sawed through the air to the floor. Bending with difficulty — these days Peach had to ask his wife to cut his toenails for him — he scooped it up. It was a cutting from the local rag. One of the most dramatic headlines they had run for years: TRAGIC DEATH OF BABY, it said. A lie, of course. A cover-up. He knew that now.

Running his hand across the stubble of his cropped grey hair, Peach turned the page again. The new entry was dated October 10th 1969. Over thirteen years after the funeral. He began to re-read the notes he had made of a conversation that had taken place on the main road that day.

He had stopped a car, he remembered, a routine check, only to discover that the driver was a policeman himself, from a town less than thirty miles away. The policeman was on holiday. On his way down to the coast to join his wife, he said. A couple of children brawled in the back of the car.

‘Fine children,’ Peach had remarked.

‘More trouble than they’re worth,’ the policeman said. ‘Got any kids yourself?’

Peach regretted that he hadn’t.

‘Just as well. I wouldn’t have any, if I was you.’

Peach, who couldn’t, winced. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you’re probably right.’ But how he longed for an heir. The things he could have taught a son, for instance. Why, he might even have taken over from his father as Chief Inspector! Peach felt the splinters of his shattered hopes lodge in his chest.

The policeman, in a brash holiday mood, didn’t notice. ‘People have ’em,’ he was saying, ‘don’t realise how much work they are, then they don’t want ’em any more. What do they do? They dump ’em, don’t they?’

A gloomy Peach nodded. But the policeman’s next sentence snapped him back, as if his fantasy had been attached to the real world by a length of elastic.

‘Talking of kids — shut up a moment you two, will you? — did you ever hear about that case a few years ago? The baby they found on the river? Happened down our way. Strange story that was, and no — ’

Peach jumped in sharply. ‘What baby?’

‘Didn’t you hear about it? These two old dears found a baby floating down the river. They brought him in to us. In ever such a tizzy, they were.’ His laughter gobbled obscenely like water running out of a bath. ‘They didn’t even — ’

But Peach didn’t want to hear about old women. ‘This baby,’ he interrupted. ‘What was it like?’

‘About eighteen months old. Had a funny name. Something from the Bible — ’

‘Moses?’ Peach’s voice remained calm, but his heart seemed to be pushing against the inside of his uniform.

‘That’s it. And he was only found by the river, wasn’t he? Some sense of humour his parents must’ve had.’ The policeman’s mouth opened wide. His teeth were curiously pale and large, like ice-cubes.

Sense of humour? Peach was thinking. Don’t talk to me about sense of humour.

Before the policeman drove on, Peach asked for the address of the police station that had taken the baby into custody. The policeman never thought to question Peach’s interest in the case. A fool, Peach thought, and a complacent one at that. But perhaps he was being unfair. After all, the man was on holiday. And he had given Peach his first real lead in thirteen years.

Peach looked up from the file. Lightning bleached the windowpanes a faint cold blue. The thunder had moved away over the hill. He turned that autumn morning over in his head. The blades of grass plated with early frost. Hedgerows rusted by a month of rain. A random shaft of sun bringing out the ginger in Sergeant Caution’s two-day growth of beard.

And when he watched that policeman’s car disappear round a bend in the main road, how strongly he had felt the temptation to disappear himself. To verify the story. To know the truth about Moses.

Two considerations had held him back. One, his sense of responsibility (imagine a Chief Inspector defecting! the hypocrisy!). And two, the pointlessness of such a move. What good would it do? If the baby had got away, had grown up in the outside world (he would be sixteen now, Peach calculated), he would have no memories of New Egypt. He might have been born anywhere. Equally, very few of the villagers remembered Moses now, not without being prompted. He had drowned in the river, and that was that. From both points of view the case was closed. There was no foreseeable danger. Better then to forget. Let time and apathy bury the memory. Only he, Peach, would carry the burden of knowing what had really happened.

And George Highness, of course.

George Highness. Would he talk?

Somehow Peach doubted it. The man was private to the point of arrogance, and stubborn with it. Those characteristics would prevent him broadcasting what he had done, would nip any revolutionary instincts in the bud. It would be enough for George Highness to know that he had outsmarted the entire police department of New Egypt. Peach imagined that he must derive enormous satisfaction from that knowledge.

Once again he saw Highness during the closing moments of that funeral in 1956. When he walked over to offer his condolences, Highness had actually smiled. No more than a slight puckering at the corners of his mouth, but a smile none the less. The sheer brazen impertinence of it. Since then Peach had developed a theory about smiling. Why, only the other day he had delivered a lecture on the subject to a group of new recruits.

‘Now if you see somebody smiling,’ he had told them, ‘it can mean one of two things. One, that the person in question is perfectly adjusted to life in the village. Anybody who is that well adjusted should be viewed as a potential threat. Can any of you tell me why?’

Peach’s glance had swept along the row of recruits. Not one of the four had anything to offer. A pretty dull bunch. He sighed.

‘The reason is this. The person who is that well adjusted to life in the village is an exception. That person has occupied an extreme position. They are, in that sense, unbalanced, volatile. They are capable, at any moment, of veering to the other extreme, one of despising life in the village, one of plotting to escape from the life they despise — ’

Peach had seen the faces of his recruits light up in turn as the point became clear. One or two nodded seriously as if they had known all along and had simply been waiting to have their knowledge confirmed.

‘Now,’ Peach went on, ‘who can tell me what the second meaning of a smile might be?’

Again his gaze had moved along a row of blank faces. For God’s sake.

Then one of the recruits, Wragge by name, a poor specimen of a youth with a nose that dangled from his face and a pair of close-set colourless eyes, stuck his hand up in the air.

‘Yes, Wragge?’

‘Could it be because they’re harbouring a plan to escape, sir?’

Well, well. There was hope yet. Perhaps he was even looking at a future Chief Inspector. Harbouring, too. The perfect word to use in that context. Peach had studied Wragge for a moment and tried to widen the gap between those eyes, tried to invest that drooping nose with a bit of dignity, a bit of gristle. If only Wragge looked as intelligent as he obviously was.

‘Excellent, Wragge. That’s perfectly correct.’

He saw Wragge’s mouth expand a fraction. A smirk of complacency. Peach had decided there and then that he didn’t care for Wragge. But he might be useful, of course.

‘When you see somebody smiling they might be dreaming of, or planning, an escape. A smile is a danger sign, a warning, a lead. I cannot impress upon you too strongly that you should treat a smile with the utmost suspicion,’ he had concluded. Or almost concluded, because he had then experienced a moment of inspiration — wild, vivid, lateral — the kind of inspiration that made him the kind of Chief Inspector he was. ‘Think of it like this,’ he had lowered his voice for effect, ‘somebody smiling is like somebody pointing a gun. They need to be disarmed or they will cause injury, damage, loss of morale. Even, perhaps, loss of life. There are times when I think smiling should be made illegal, but obviously — ’ and he had raised a hand in the air, fingertips uppermost like a waiter with an invisible tray, to demonstrate that he was exaggerating to make a point, that he was, in fact, joking. Then he had himself smiled. There had been laughter among the recruits, but it had been serious laughter. The message had hit home.

He leaned back, pushed knuckles into his eyes. He returned to his scrutiny of the file. He turned up a sheaf of loose letters. These were answers to the barrage of enquiries he had unleashed following his encounter with that policeman in October 1969. There was one, for instance, from the policeman’s immediate superior:

Dear Chief Inspector Peach,

Thank you for your letter of October 20th. I regret to say that I do not personally recall the case to which you refer since I was only transferred to this constabulary three years ago. However, I have had recourse to our records and I can inform you that a baby was indeed admitted to this police station during June 1956. On June 16th, in fact. The baby was registered under the name Moses George Highness.

It would seem that the Detective Sergeant in charge of the case attempted to locate the baby’s parents, but without success. The only lead he had to go on was the name Highness, a name so unusual that he assumed it was an alias, a bogus name, devised to throw whoever found the child off the scent. Following the failure of these investigations, the baby in question was remitted to an orphanage in Kent, the address of which you will find attached to this letter.

I hope this has been of some help to you, and I trust your research into this most tragic of human problems continues to go well.

Yours sincerely,

Detective Sergeant Hackshaw

This most tragic of human problems. Peach’s own words, lifted from his own letter. He had written as a police officer with a social conscience, a police officer who was working on a book about missing children. Upon receiving this letter from Hackshaw, he had immediately written to the orphanage. He had received the following reply:

Dear Chief Inspector Peach,

It is not our custom to supply information regarding the children in our charge; however, in this case, given your official position and your serious interest, I have taken it upon myself to waive the regulations. Moses was admitted to the Rose Hill Orphanage on June 29th 1956. I myself personally supervised the admission. He spent nine years with us — nine very happy years, I believe — and on June 1st 1965 was adopted by a couple with whom he had formed an extremely satisfactory relationship during the year previous.

Mr and Mrs Pole, formerly of 14 Chester Row, Maidstone, Kent, have now moved to Leicester. I regret to say that I do not have their new address. However, with all the resources at your disposal, I am sure that you will be able to trace them without too much trouble.

Yours sincerely,

Beatrice Hood

A third far briefer letter from a sergeant in Leicester confirmed the information supplied by Mrs Hood. The Poles had moved to the outskirts of the city, a green suburb. The sergeant had been kind enough to provide Peach with the address. And there Peach had let the matter rest.

He lay back in his chair and listened to the rain. Three years had passed since then. Three passive years.

His eyes were drawn to the corner of his office. There, propped up on a shelf, stood the toy dog, visible only as a ghostly patch of white in the shadows. Some remote ray of light had caught the black and orange glass of its left eye, so it seemed to be winking at him, mocking him. Balancing on three legs, it lifted its fourth and urinated on his career. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to throw it out. It was the only piece of evidence he had. It was a symbol of progress — what little he had made.

At least he was one up on George Highness, though. There was some solace in that. At least he knew Moses was alive. Highness could only hope he was. Perhaps he would be able to torture Highness with that knowledge. Yes, he might just be able to make the bastard squirm a little. To think that the fate of the village should have rested in that man’s hands. It was monstrous. Monstrous. Highness would pay for that. Unquestionably he would pay.

Hands folded on his desk, Peach schemed for a while.

Then the phone rang.

He lifted the receiver. ‘Peach.’

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, dear — ’

It was Peach’s wife.

‘Hilda. What is it?’

‘It’s just that it’s getting very late. I was worried about you.’

Peach glanced at his watch. Good Christ, it was almost one o’clock. He hadn’t realised.

‘I’m sorry, Hilda. I had no idea it was so late. I’ll be home in a few minutes.’

‘I’ll have some supper ready for you.’

His dear wife. ‘Thank you, Hilda. I’ll be there very soon.’

He replaced the receiver. Locking up his office, he walked out into the rain.

*

At the age of forty-five, George Highness already slept as old men do. He went to bed early, usually at around ten. He took a glass of water with him for the night and a Thermos of weak tea for the morning.

By five he was always awake again. Then he would doze with the radio on, floating halfway between consciousness and dreams. The voices of the news announcers, turned to the lowest volume, muttered distantly, drowsily, like traffic or waves. At seven he poured himself a cup of tea, and sipped it noisily, as privacy allows you to, his head propped on a heap of pillows. Sometimes he reached for his electric razor and, holding a circular mirror in his left hand, trimmed his beard.

Then he could delay no longer, even though the day offered him nothing. He levered his thin legs out of the bed and on to the floor. The opening moments of this routine never varied. On with his dressing-gown and slippers, across the landing, and into the lavatory.

On this particular morning, perhaps because of the storm that had kept him awake for half the night, he was still asleep when the phone rang in his bedroom at eight-thirty. The sound reached down into his dream like an excavator’s mechanical arm and scooped him out of the rubble of his subconscious. He rolled over groaning, pulled the phone towards his ear.

‘Hello?’

‘Could I speak to Mr Highness, please?’

George thought he could place the voice. A man’s voice — alert, efficient, nasal. If he had been asked to put a smell to it, he would have said toothpaste. The name eluded him, however.

‘Speaking.’

‘This is Doctor Frost from the Belmont Home. I’m sorry to be calling you so early — ’

Frost. Of course. ‘That’s all right, doctor. I — ’

‘I’m afraid I have some rather bad news for you, Mr Highness. It’s about your wife — ’ The doctor paused.

Like one of those puzzles, George thought. Fill in the missing words. He had already guessed the answer, but he said nothing. He closed his eyes and saw blue crosses in the darkness. He listened to the doctor’s hygienic silence. He had always suspected Frost of being a coward.

Eventually: ‘She died at seven o’clock this morning.’

George opened his eyes again. The room a watercolour in grey. A coating of dust on the lampshade above his head. Through the window, the elm tree and a triangle of glassy sky. He turned on to his side and drew his knees towards his chest.

‘Mr Highness?’

‘Yes.’

‘Somebody will be contacting you later today. About the forms. I’m sorry, Mr Highness.’

Doctor Frost hung up.

George could see him now, a pink man in a white coat. Those sparse white hairs, how obscene they looked against his raw pink skull. His quick prim steps as he strutted down the hospital corridor. Congratulating himself, no doubt. An unpleasant task, successfully accomplished. On with the day.

And Alice –

And Alice, worth five or ten of him, lying in a drawer somewhere, her mouth ajar, her eyes transfixed –

George pushed his face into the pillow. His love, dormant these twelve years, rose in his throat, acidic, scalding. He tried to swallow, couldn’t. He closed his eyes again, curled up. His last thought before falling into a deep sleep concerned the telephone. He would disconnect it. He had only had it installed in the first place so he could speak to her, or be there if she needed him. Now there was nobody to speak to any more. Cut it off. Complete the isolation.

Its brash nagging woke him again just after ten. The medical secretary from the Belmont. Wanting to know whether Mr Highness would collect the death certificates in person or whether she should post them.

‘Post them,’ George snapped, and hung up.

As he reached for his tartan dressing-gown, his body began to shake.

*

Alice, Alice, Alice.

He tried to use the sound of her name to bring her back. It had been so long. He was in danger of losing his sense of her. It would be as if she had never been.

He tried to gather solid details. To give her death, in distance, substance.

That green-blonde hair, scraped back in a denial of its beauty. Her shoes scattered, often singly, throughout the house, the insteps cracked, the heels trodden down. The time when, pregnant, she walked naked down the stairs to breakfast. And later, in the winter, the tip of her tongue on her top lip as she trickled peanuts into the miniature wire cage in the garden so the birds wouldn’t starve. And that blurred smile, almost tearful, flung his way like a handful of grain, breaking up as it arrived.

Her smiles always blurred, as if seen from a moving train.

Her eyes always creased at the edges by dreams of leaving.

And how he would come back sometimes to find the doors locked and the curtains drawn. How he had to break into his own house. And all the breakfast things still standing on the table. Immovable from hours of being there. Petrified.

The butter decomposing on a china dish.

Wasps suffocating in the marmalade.

Such padded silence.

It was summer, the hot summer of 1959, but she wouldn’t have the windows open. When he asked her why — a stupid question, but he could think of no others — she turned her smudged and punished eyes on him and said, ‘Go away.’

Him, the world, everything.

For hours, for days, she lay upstairs. Once he walked into her bedroom, sat down on the quilt. In the darkness he mistook her shoulder for her forehead. The bed shook with her crying.

‘Why are you crying, Alice?’ he asked her. ‘Tell me why you’re crying.’

‘I don’t know, I can’t help it, it just happens, I don’t know why, I’m happy really — ’ It all came flooding out until she was crying so hard her words lost their shape, became unintelligible.

She was committed in 1960. She committed herself, really. She wanted it. That was one day he didn’t have to search his memory for. Maroon ambulance, black mudguards. Big silver headlights. And Alice shuffling down the garden path, taller than the two nurses who supported her. Eyes rolling upwards in their sockets. Frightening white slits. Regal somehow. But mad. Or not mad, perhaps, but painfully, unbearably unhappy. Mauve smears on her white exhausted face. Channels worn by the passage of tears. He remembered thinking, Alice is escaping. For the Belmont Mental Home, ironically, stood some three miles beyond the village boundary.

She only came back to the house once. And talked about prisons constantly. And the prisons kept shrinking. First it was the village. Then it was their house on Caution Lane. In the end, of course, it was her own body.

Alice is escaping. Well, now she had.

Perhaps he shouldn’t cry for her. He had read somewhere that tears are like ropes: they tie a person’s soul to the earth. Now the prisons no longer existed for her she was free. And he should let her go.

He sat in the kitchen and reviewed the twelve years he had spent alone. He had sung in the choir, and his voice — a bass baritone — had performed respectably enough. He had given lectures in the church hall under the watchful eye of the Chief Inspector, lectures on the history of the region, the traditions and the crafts. He had never really socialised, but nor had he been rude when approached.

And then there had been his book.

He rose to his feet and walked into the front room. Selecting the smallest key from the bunch he kept in his pocket, he unlocked the lid of his writing-desk. He reached in and pulled out a bundle of paper. About a hundred typed pages. His secret manuscript. The title scrawled in spindly black capitals:

NEW EGYPT — AN UNFINISHED HISTORY.

He weighed the book in his hands. Not much to show for almost a year’s work, but then he had scrapped a good deal. Besides, it had served its purpose. It had got him through those first few months of living without Alice. Plunging into a personal history of the village, he had found that he lost track of time, that he could put his loneliness to good use, that he could exorcise the ghost that Alice had become. He remembered those hours, days, weeks at the writing-desk with a kind of grateful nostalgia.

Shifting a pile of old newspapers, George sank down on to the sofa. He loosened the red string that bound the manuscript and turned the title-page. He skimmed across the opening sentence with a wry smile (I was born in the most boring village in England). With Alice still in mind, he moved forwards to his chapter on escape and began to read.

Stories of escape-attempts, songs of resignation and disillusion, fantasies about the outside world abound in the village and form a unique body of local folklore. They divide into two distinct categories. On the one hand there are ballads, nursery rhymes and moral tales, all of which serve to remind people of their allegiance to the village and to persuade them, often insidiously, that the world outside is a hostile and lonely place. Great emphasis is laid on roots, the idea of a birthplace, the feeling of being among people you have grown up with. An example of this first category (which is, by the way, the official folklore of the village and is written, more often than not, by members of the police force) would be the story of the man who leaves the village in search of a better life. At the beginning he can scarcely contain his joy. The open road, the new earth beneath his feet — why, the very air smells of freedom!

Then the sky slowly darkens and rain begins to fall. The man suddenly realises that he has lost his way. The wide grey landscape is deserted. He is alone. I may be lost, he tells himself, but at least I’m free.

After walking for a while he happens across a country tavern. Soaked to the skin, he asks the landlord for shelter.

The landlord eyes him with suspicion. ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’ he says.

‘No,’ the man says.

‘Be off with you then,’ the landlord says. ‘We don’t have any dealings with strangers.’

At nightfall the man reaches a small town. His feet ache. He is chilled to the bone. He turns into an alley in search of a cheap place to eat and is set upon by a gang of local youths. They beat him senseless and steal what little money he has. He sprawls among the dustbins, big round drops of rain landing on his closed eyelids like pennies thrown to a blind man. I’m still free, he mutters.

A car drives into the alley and two policemen climb out. They arrest the man on a charge of vagrancy. They call him names and lock him in a cell for the night. The man lies shivering under a single coarse blanket. He has no home, no money, no future. As day dawns he stares out through the bars. I’m free, he thinks.

George was becoming depressed. He put the manuscript aside and went out to the kitchen. When he returned five minutes later with a pot of tea and a packet of Butter Osbornes he skipped a few pages. Then he saw the name Batley, and it opened a drawer in his memory. The Batley Affair. So long ago now. His interest awakened, he began to read again.

Oscar Batley is descended from de Barthelay who came over with William the Conqueror in 1066. He is hereditary lord of the manor and lives on the outskirts of the village in a house called Stone Hall. A man of considerable breeding, wealth and ingenuity, he has a film-star’s eternal black hair and cheeks the colour of rare roast sirloin. In 1938, at the age of seventy-nine, he tried to escape. He bribed the doctor to pronounce him dead. (He decided on a sudden and tragic heart attack; after a lifetime of rich food and vintage wines, this had the ring of plausibility.) He then bribed the undertaker, not only to co-operate in the provisions for his funeral, but to build a coffin with hidden ventilation-holes. Finally he bribed the sexton to delay filling in the grave until the day after the funeral.

Batley’s plan hinged on the fact that, according to ancient custom, he was entitled to be buried in an ancestral plot of land adjacent to his estate, the western wall of which happened to serve as part of the village boundary. Once the ceremony was over, the coffin would be lowered into the grave, the mourners would disperse, and Batley would wait in air-conditioned comfort until night fell. Then he would ease off the lid, clamber out of the open grave, and make good his escape across the wooded country to the west. Since he had died, the police would not be looking out for him. So the logic, presumably, went. An ingenious plan, but flawed in one fatal respect.

Batley died successfully enough. Death certificates were drawn up by the doctor and filed with the police. The coffin had been prepared in accordance with Batley’s detailed instructions. The sexton had agreed to play his part (his initial misgivings overcome by a twenty-five per cent increase in his pay-off). A marble headstone had even arrived, imported from Carrara in Italy. Everything might have gone smoothly had Peach not insisted on a grand funeral procession through the village. Batley was an important local figure, Peach argued, and should be treated as such.

Batley’s Victorian phaeton was wheeled out of his stables. It was repaired, oiled, and given a new coat of paint. Farmer Hallam agreed to supply two black horses for the occasion. There was a problem, however, with the plumes.

George couldn’t help smiling. He was thinking of Tabasco, the undertaker. Shortly before his death, Tabasco had sat George on his knee and told him about the week Lord Batley spent in his back parlour. Tabasco had considered Batley a snob and a fraud, and he had rather enjoyed the power that the peculiar situation had bestowed on him. How Tabasco had cackled as he recalled his whispered dialogues with Batley! One, George remembered, had gone something like this:

‘What the devil’s happening, Tabasco?’ Batley sat in his coffin like a large disgruntled baby. ‘Why all the delay?’

‘They’re going to have a special procession for you,’ Tabasco told him, ‘because you’re so important.’

‘Oh God,’ Batley groaned and ran his hands through his black hair in which, to Tabasco’s immense satisfaction, streaks of grey were beginning to show. (So it was true: the hair was dyed.) ‘How long am I going to have to wait?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. A week at least. Maybe longer. You know what this place is like.’

‘Why, for heaven’s sake? What’s holding us up?’

‘The plumes.’

‘Plumes? What plumes, man?’

‘The black plumes, your lordship. For the horses’ heads. You can’t have a funeral procession without black plumes. Not for someone of your distinction. That wouldn’t do at all, would it?’

‘Oh, damn this bloody place to hell.’

‘I think I’d better screw you down,’ Tabasco said. ‘I can hear somebody coming.’

Just an excuse, of course, to shut the bastard up.

Still smiling, George read on.

No black plumes could be found. Lord Batley grew restless in his coffin. He complained of headaches, cramps, disorientation. He moaned about the food. He cursed what he called Tabasco’s ‘inefficiency’.

Meanwhile, in Magnolia Close, Hilda Peach, the Chief Inspector’s resourceful wife, was improvising a pair of black plumes out of two old straw brooms.

The day finally came. It was December 15th 1938 –

How clearly George remembered that day. He must have been eleven. Clouds the colour of lead. Searing cold. His gloved hands. Alice on the other side of the street, standing between her parents, the wide dish of her face tilted at the sky like radar. Then the clatter of carriage wheels on the cobblestones. And what happened next.

— and the weather was bitterly cold. The route which the funeral procession was to follow had been mapped out by Peach himself. Lord Batley would lie in state in an open coffin. The people of New Egypt would line the streets. They would be wearing black. It would be a solemn but memorable conclusion to the life of a distinguished local figurehead.

Things turned out differently.

As the carriage slowed to negotiate the sharp bend that led to the church, PC Fisher noticed clouds of white smoke rising from the coffin. He broke ranks and hurried discreetly to Peach’s side. Peach was supporting the grief-stricken Lady Batley.

‘Chief Inspector, sir,’ Fisher clamoured. ‘Lord Batley’s on fire.’

‘A dead man on fire?’ Peach raised his eyebrows. ‘A little unlikely, don’t you think?’ Glancing down at Lady Batley, he seemed to be addressing the question to her. Lady Batley’s eyes floated like pale helpless fish on the surface of her face.

‘I know it sounds unlikely, sir, but look. Smoke.’

Peach looked. ‘That’s not fire,’ he said calmly, ‘that’s breath. The man is still alive.’

Lady Batley collapsed moaning against Peach’s arm. He passed her unceremoniously to Fisher.

Lord Batley was removed from his coffin in full view of the villagers who had lined the streets in his honour, and escorted, under their disbelieving gaze, to the police station. His widow followed, still weeping — though for a different reason now. The funeral cortège was quietly disbanded. The villagers returned to their houses.

As a direct result of this episode, it has become much harder to die. Inhabitants of New Egypt are subjected to a series of rigorous tests before being allowed to rest in peace. Peach inspects each corpse in person. ‘One Lazarus is enough,’ he is supposed to have said in that winter of 1938.

But what of those who had taken bribes from Batley?

The doctor was carefully beaten up by PC Hazard prior to having his licence to practise removed. Tabasco died two months after the funeral — in place of Batley, perhaps. The sexton, meanwhile, was given a lecture on greed by Peach and forcibly retired on a meagre pension.

And Batley?

Batley is still alive and well and living in New Egypt. He is one hundred and three years old now and is believed by many to have lost the ability to die –

And here the manuscript ended. George had lost his momentum, lost interest. In that moment, the moment when he pushed his pen aside, he had realised that he was no different from any other New Egyptian. The apathy had taken hold. What better comment on the nature of the village than that its self-appointed historian had failed to complete his history of the place! How typical, how archetypal that was!

It had been ten years since he had touched the manuscript, and he now knew that he would never go back to it again. What was the point? Who could he give it to? When he died, it would fall into the hands of the police and end up in that fucking museum.

Not on your life.

He would destroy it first.

*

The following day, at three in the afternoon, a man with tangled grey hair stopped outside George’s house. It was Dinwoodie, come to pay his respects.

Dinwoodie unlatched the gate. A screech of metal disturbed a silence of dripping leaves. The gate, it seemed, was rarely opened.

He paused again, and stared up at the front of the house. Another death in the family. Another, though? He wished he knew. Even after all these years. Especially after all these years.

The front door opened before he could pretend to be moving, and George Highness emerged, wrapped in a brown overcoat and a yellow scarf. In his hand, a bunch of flowers. Dinwoodie jumped backwards, as if he had been caught red-handed at something. Which, in a way, he had been. Trespassing not so much on property as on grief. He gulped a hello.

‘Good afternoon, Dinwoodie,’ George said. To Dinwoodie, his composure seemed unnatural, suspect.

‘I — ’ he began.

‘You wanted to see me?’

‘Yes,’ Dinwoodie said. ‘I was on my way to visit you.’

‘And very nearly there, by the look of it.’ With his free hand, George indicated Dinwoodie’s feet which were planted on, if not rooted in, the garden path. ‘I was on my way out,’ he continued. ‘As you see.’

Cool customer, Dinwoodie thought. He tried again.

‘I wanted to offer you my condolences,’ he said. And then, by way of explanation, ‘The death of your wife. I’m very sorry.’

At last George looked surprised. He blinked and angled an embarrassed glance into the shrubbery that divided the path from the small front lawn. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘but it seems a little like the death of someone who was already dead.’ A smile leaked from his face. ‘If you follow me.’

‘Yes,’ Dinwoodie said. ‘Yes, I think I do.’

The two men were both shuffling on the path now. Their eyes darted here and there as if following minnows in a pond.

‘If you’re going out,’ Dinwoodie ventured finally, ‘perhaps I could join you?’

‘All right,’ George said, but it was not too grudging. ‘I’m going to the cemetery to put these — ’ he held the flowers up as if they were slightly ridiculous — ’on my son’s grave.’

Dinwoodie murmured, bowed; he might have been giving permission.

Side by side, they walked up Caution Lane. When they reached Church Street they turned right and began to climb the hill. Spring was late this year. Rain hung in the trees like pieces of broken glass. The branches, grey, spindly, arthritic, seemed to be resisting growth. Dinwoodie could hear George’s knees cracking in the silence.

‘A lot of tragedies recently.’ Dinwoodie threw out the remark, then turned eagerly to George as if he had lit a fuse that might cause George to explode with some kind of revelation.

But George had withdrawn into himself. ‘Yes,’ he said. He fitted the word between gasps for breath. It was a steep hill.

A dark horse, Dinwoodie thought. Really a very dark horse.

He increased the pressure marginally. ‘Your wife, of course. And then Joel — ’ He scanned George’s face, but George still seemed more interested in the surface of the road, so he added, a little unnecessarily, perhaps, ‘The greengrocer.’

‘I heard,’ George said. And just as Dinwoodie was about to prompt him again, George added, ‘An extravagant plan, but doomed. Doomed from the very beginning.’

Dinwoodie, the fire that he was, kindled. Fingers spread in a primitive comb, he dragged a hand through his tangle of hair.

‘Too extravagant, you think?’

George settled for the conventional response. ‘Nobody’s ever escaped. Why should an extravagant idea be more likely to succeed than a simple one?’

‘You may be right,’ Dinwoodie said. George’s gloom didn’t dismay him too much; at least they were talking now. ‘But a simple plan,’ he went on, ‘might stand a better chance, you think?’

George gave Dinwoodie a look that Dinwoodie couldn’t decipher: he saw a gloating first, then condescension, then sadness — then all three merged until he couldn’t be sure what he had seen. He decided to risk it anyway. ‘I have a plan,’ he said.

‘Really? You surprise me. What is it this time, Dinwoodie?’

‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’

George sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not myself at the moment.’

Crap, Dinwoodie thought. You’re yourself all right. He gave the churchyard gate a shove. It banged against the wall. Two crows, scared, broke away from the top of a yew tree. Black shrapnel against a lowering grey sky. George followed Dinwoodie up the path. He held his flowers upright in his hand and level with his face, the way you might hold an umbrella. As they climbed up through the cemetery, Dinwoodie’s head rang with unvoiced arguments. He wanted to believe that it was only a matter of time before George heard. But they reached the grave in silence, with Dinwoodie still uncertain how to reopen the subject. He read the inscription on the stone.

MOSES GEORGE HIGHNESS ONLY SON OF GEORGE AND ALICE

BORN MAY 22ND 1955

DIED JULY 14TH 1956

HE LIVES IN OUR THOUGHTS

Lines of scepticism showed on either side of Dinwoodie’s mouth. It was a charade. He knew, he just knew that George had pulled it off somehow. Patience failing, he struck out.

‘Your wife’s dead,’ he said, and then, with a sly weakening of emphasis that George, he felt, would detect and understand, ‘and so is your son. There’s nothing to keep you here now, George. Why don’t we join forces, collaborate, and get out of this place? What do you say?’

George squatted on his haunches, arranged the flowers in a small rusty urn. ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘Now they’re,’ and he didn’t hesitate, ‘both dead, there’s everything to keep me here.’

‘I don’t understand. What is there to keep you here?’ Dinwoodie’s hand ransacked his hair for a reason.

‘Memories, I suppose,’ George said. ‘These graves. The graves of the people I love.’ It must have sounded sententious to him because he added, almost defiantly, ‘Besides, what’s out there, anyway?’

‘Freedom,’ escaped from Dinwoodie’s lips before he knew it.

Still meddling with the flowers, George shook his head. ‘Freedom isn’t out there any more than it’s in here.’ He glanced round at the rows of damp tombstones.

‘How do you know,’ Dinwoodie cried, his hands clutching at the air, ‘until you’ve tried?’

In a quiet voice George said, ‘Dinwoodie, when are you going to grow up?’

Dinwoodie’s face reddened as if he had been slapped on both cheeks. ‘You know,’ he said, trying to keep his voice under control, ‘I used to think you had something, George. Guts, maybe. A bit of initiative. I don’t know. That’s what I thought. But you haven’t. You haven’t got anything. You’re just a shell. I–I pity you.’

George rose to his feet. He stood at an angle to Dinwoodie. A remote smile on his face, he watched smoke drift from a chimney, fade into the sky. He had nothing to say, it seemed. Or if he had, he wasn’t going to say it.

‘Well, I’m going to try, anyway,’ Dinwoodie said. ‘And I’ll do it alone if I have to.’

George looked Dinwoodie square in the face for the first time that afternoon. ‘You haven’t got a chance, Dinwoodie. You’ll fail. You’ll end up in that police museum.’

‘Fuck you,’ Dinwoodie said.

And he whirled away down the slope, trampling on the graves of his forefathers. His mouth, thin-lipped, chapped, set in a grim smile. It felt good to be walking on the dead.

Fuck him, he thought. Fuck them all. I’m not dying here.

He didn’t look back at George Highness. They had parted in anger. He doubted they would ever speak to each other again.

*

At home that evening George couldn’t settle. He kept seeing Dinwoodie’s white impassioned face. He kept seeing Dinwoodie stride away across the graveyard, grey hair, grey raincoat flapping. With his gaunt frame and his square shoulders lifted, he had made George think of a cross. He knew in his heart, in his bones (wherever it is that you truly know), that Dinwoodie was dead.

As dusk fell, he left his house for the second time that day. Unprecedented, this. But perhaps he had some dim foreknowledge of the consequences and courted them as expiation for the way he had treated Dinwoodie. In any case, he could no longer stay indoors.

Where they had turned left out of the garden gate, he turned right and walked towards Peach Street. He could have given Dinwoodie some encouragement, he was thinking. He could have explained his theories about escape. He could even have told him about Moses. But George had kept the secret for so long that secrecy had become a habit. He saw secrecy as his plan’s foundation, its strength, a guarantee, if you like, of its success. Superstitious of him, true, but impossible now to shake off. So he had been harsh with Dinwoodie, as you might be harsh with a pestering child. And in many ways Dinwoodie was a child. His tantrums, his enthusiasms, marked him out — even from a Tommy Dane or a Joel Mustoe. Tommy Dane’s escape-attempt had been an act of violence, thoroughly in character, an integral part of his fight against authority. Joel’s, on the other hand, had been a sly private affair; the greengrocer had turned to escape, George felt, because he sought tangible proof of his superiority — out of arrogance, in other words. Only Dinwoodie had pure motives. He had said it himself. He wanted freedom. Simple as that. It would have been noble if it hadn’t been so naïve.

As George waited to cross Peach Street, a truck swept past trailing yards of blue smoke. Stacked upright behind the tailboard and lashed into position with ropes stood an entire platoon of dummy policemen. These were not the dummies he was used to (blue uniforms stuffed with old rags, foam rubber or straw). These were professional dummies, the kind you see in shop windows. They had eyes, noses, hands, hair. They were uncannily lifelike. Even at a distance he recognised a Peach, two Hazards and a Dolphin. He shuddered. Alice’s words came back to him like a prophecy. Look at their faces!

He stumbled across the road and climbed over a stile into the allotments. He sank on to a bench, breathed in the bitter fleshy smell of cabbages. Ranks of bean-canes sharp as lances. A guarded peace. Over by the tin shed where the gardening tools were housed he could make out the squat figure of Mrs Latter, the woman who ran the post office and a keen grower of marrows. He raised a hand to her, a salute rather than a wave, but she didn’t respond. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed him. He slid his hand back into his coat pocket like a useless weapon.

After picking his way through the rows of vegetables, he crossed the road again and set out across the village green. Passing the pond on his right (a squabbling of ducks, the plop of a frog), he turned left into Magnolia Close. The church rose at the end of the street, an obstacle, solid, adamant. George suddenly realised that the route he had chosen would lead him past the Chief Inspector’s house. Normally he steered clear of Magnolia Close, but, then again, normally he didn’t go out twice in a single day. He considered turning round, but his feet ached, and if he carried on past the church he would be home in five minutes.

Peach’s house stood at right-angles to the church on the corner of the village green. It had once been the vicarage. Peach had evicted the priest shortly after the war claiming that, as Chief Inspector, he needed the house because it had such a commanding view of the village. (It also had an eighteenth-century wood-panelled staircase and an unusual parterre with triangular flower-beds enclosed by low box hedges, not to mention a topiary in yew dating, supposedly, from 1841. Enthusiasts would sometimes stop outside the house and enquire if they might look over the gardens. Mrs Peach was always most gracious.) But he hadn’t won the house without a fight.

‘What about the spiritual welfare of the village?’ the then priest had argued. ‘Is not my rightful place at the heart of the community?’

‘It’ll take you precisely three minutes to walk from the church to your new house,’ Peach told him. ‘I’ve timed it myself.’

‘But symbolically?’ the priest persisted.

No mean philosopher himself and as brutally secular as any medieval emperor, Peach had quashed the priest’s arguments. Truth to tell, with his army of policemen behind him, his victory had never been in doubt. What did the hapless priest have to call upon but the assistance of his sexton (a widower with cataracts) and the wrath of God?

‘But I need a big house — my family — ’ he had pleaded, honest at last, and grovelling too.

Peach had quoted Colossians. ‘Set your affection on things above, not on things of the earth.’

Touché, priest.

‘My children,’ the priest whimpered, ‘I have to provide for my children.’

‘And what makes you think that I’m not going to have children?’ Peach had countered. ‘I’m only thirty-six.’

The priest could hardly tell Peach that he had it on very good authority (from the doctor himself, in fact) that the Chief Inspector’s wife was incapable of having children. He gave way, and was moved (the police transported his furniture) to a pleasant if characterless house on the far side of the village green. The roles of church and state were set for Peach’s reign.

George had slackened his pace. He now stood at the entrance of Peach’s driveway. Lights showed in all the windows. A murmur of voices reached George’s ears. Some kind of party, it seemed, was in progress.

In order to peer through the living-room window, George had to part the sticky tentacles of a rose-bush and clamber up on to an ornamental stone mushroom. Inch by inch, he raised his face to the level of the sill.

The entire police force of New Egypt had assembled inside the room. Peach stood with his back to a log fire, his lower lip glistening, possibly with sherry. His wife moved among the officers with a tray of cocktail sausages and canapés. Firelight flickered on thick blue cloth. As George watched, Peach raised a hand.

‘Gentlemen, your attention, please.’ He took a pace forwards, hands clasped behind his back. ‘Before we proceed any further, I’d like to make sure that we’re all here. Sergeant Dolphin?’

Dolphin, with his schoolboy’s face and his bully’s torso, flush from his recent triumph over the greengrocer, took up position beside Peach and produced a clipboard and pen. He began to call out names, the names George knew off by heart.

‘Arson?’

‘Present.’

‘Blashford?’

‘Yes.’

‘Caution?’

‘On duty,’ somebody said. ‘In the station.’

Dolphin noted the information down. Then he proceeded. ‘Damage?’

‘Here, sergeant.’

George was gazing, mesmerised. He had never suspected Peach of using roll-calls. A small detail, granted, but one that might have found its way into the book, had he known about it.

Dolphin, meanwhile, had reached F.

‘Fisher?’

‘Night patrol,’ a voice called out.

‘Fox?’

‘Present.’

Now laughter erupted as PC Grape said, ‘Here, sergeant,’ before Dolphin had time to call his name. Grape had something of Peach about him. He was reputed to possess a sixth sense that meant he could hear what people were thinking. George had the feeling that Grape would one day play an important part in thwarting some poor villager’s dream of escape.

‘Hawk-Sniper?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hazard?’

‘Here.’

The collar of George’s coat suddenly lifted in the wind. He glanced over his shoulder. He hoped to God that he couldn’t be seen from the road.

Dolphin’s voice droned on. ‘Marlpit?’

‘— esh. I mean, yes, sergeant.’

George whinnied. Marlpit had been caught with a mouthful of sausage.

‘Peach?’

‘I’m here, sergeant.’

A ripple of amusement. Sycophants, George thought.

‘Pork?’

‘Yes.’

‘Savage?’

‘He’s still sick, sergeant,’ Marlpit said, his mouth now cleared of sausage.

Furtive grins. Savage had shot himself in the foot during rifle-practice earlier in the week.

‘Twinn, C?’

‘Present.’

‘Twinn, D?’

‘He’s on night patrol,’ came the nasal whine of Colin, Twinn D’s brother.

‘Thank you, Twinn. Ulcer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Vassall?’

‘Here, sergeant.’

‘Voltage?’

‘Here.’

In listening to this roll-call, George began to realise just how many police officers New Egypt employed. Of course, he knew. But it was the difference between knowing there’s a lot of sand on the beach and counting the individual grains one by one. So far there had been six absentees and still the room heaved with blue cloth. A claustrophobia of truncheons and boots. And the names seemed to go on for ever.

‘Wilmott?’

‘Yes, sergeant.’

‘Wragge?’

‘Night patrol,’ somebody called out.

Dolphin tucked his clipboard under his arm. Thanking his second-in-command, Peach moved forward again. He pushed his lower lip out and back, a signal that he was about to speak.

‘We’re here, as you know, to celebrate the arrival of a consignment of new APRs,a one of which,’ and he stepped across to the shrouded figure by the bookcase and with a conjuror’s flourish snatched off the dustsheet, ‘we’re lucky enough to have with us tonight.’

A muted roar of surprise and approval, for the figure was an exact replica of the Chief Inspector. Right down to the drooping eyelids and the jutting lower lip.

Peach laid a fond hand on his double’s shoulder. ‘I thought we’d put him outside the priest’s bedroom window.’

A burst of raucous laughter. Everybody knew that the priest was terrified of Peach.

‘Now, as I said,’ Peach moved on, ‘we have something to celebrate here tonight. And celebrate we will. But first, if you’ll bear with me, there are one or two — ’

George suddenly found himself lying on his back in the flower-bed. An undignified position, and one that he was, for a moment, at a loss to explain. Then he looked up and saw four policemen outlined against a sky of weak and distant stars. The night patrol. Fisher, Twinn (Daniel), Hack and, closer than the rest, the sickly leering face of Wragge.

‘Well, well.’ Wragge drew his pale ridged lips back over his teeth. They looked like anchovies, his lips. His breath, as if by association, stank of fish. ‘Mr Highness.’

George lay motionless, the wind knocked out of his body. His cheek stung where it had torn on a rose-bush as he fell. Wragge removed his foot from George’s wrist and, stepping backwards, jerked his head. George, shakily, stood up.

They led him, arms pinioned, through the front door, past Mrs Peach’s fluttering hands, and into the room where her husband was making his speech. George would never forget the quality of the silence that greeted him. The silence of policemen. Wall to wall. Tight as a rack.

‘Mr Highness, sir,’ Wragge announced. ‘We found him spying.’

Peach lifted his heavy eyelids. ‘Spying, Wragge?’

‘Looking through the window, sir.’

The silence tightened a notch. George hung his head. A tic pulsed in the delicate skin under his left eye.

Something quieter than outrage or contempt had taken possession of Peach’s features. Something quieter, but equally threatening.

‘I think, Mr Highness,’ he said, ‘that you had better come to my study.’

A snigger from Hazard.

‘If you’ll excuse me.’ Peach was addressing his officers now. ‘This won’t take long.’

‘I ought to be getting home,’ George said. His voice cracked in mid-sentence; it had broken by the end.

Soft exhalations from many of the policemen moved like a draught through the warm room.

‘Not just yet,’ Peach said, almost kindly. Pressing a firm hand into the small of George’s back, he guided him towards the door.

George had never set foot in the Chief Inspector’s house before — it was a privilege usually reserved for police officers — but in his utter humiliation he noticed nothing.

Peach closed the study door behind them. ‘The police are very excited,’ he remarked.

George touched his cheek with the sleeve of his coat. ‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘New security measures.’

Peach beamed. Taking the leather armchair on the left of the fireplace, he waved George to the one on the right.

‘Yes, well,’ he said, ‘it’s an important occasion. A milestone of sorts. I thought I’d give a small party. There’s nothing like a party to lift morale — ’

George let him talk. His mind drifted.

When he began to listen again, Peach’s voice seemed to have moved closer, though the distance between them hadn’t changed.

‘— but one of the reasons I asked you in here was to say how sorry I was to hear the news. About your wife, I mean. Alice, wasn’t it?’

George nodded. ‘I suppose I’d been expecting it for years, really.’ He touched his cheek again.

‘You’re bleeding,’ Peach exclaimed. He offered George a clean handkerchief. George accepted it in silence.

Peach leaned back and crossed his legs. An inch of white and slightly dimpled ankle showed above his regulation grey sock.

George dabbed at the cut on his face, and waited.

Peach shifted his weight on to the other buttock. ‘Even so,’ he resumed, ‘it must have come as something of a shock.’

George confirmed this, then added, ‘But perhaps she’ll be happier now.’

‘Like your son?’ Peach’s voice had sharpened. He held it, like a knife, to George’s throat.

‘Yes,’ George stammered, ‘I suppose so.’

‘By happier,’ Peach pressed on, ‘I take it you mean out of the village.’

‘By happier,’ George said, ‘I mean dead.’

‘But we don’t know that, do we?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Peach slowed down, so George would miss none of his meaning. ‘We don’t know that your son is dead. Or do we?’

George blinked. ‘We must presume so.’

He began to understand why Peach had insisted on the privacy of his study. But why now? After all these years?

‘Or do we?’ Peach repeated.

‘I’m sorry, Chief Inspector. I don’t know what you’re driving at.’

‘Don’t put that act on with me,’ Peach bellowed. Suddenly his teeth seemed very close to the front of his mouth.

Then his voice dropped into its lowest register. ‘I’d like you to come clean with me, Mr Highness. Get the whole thing off your chest. Once and for all. You’ll probably feel much better for it.’

Panic rose in George. The room swam.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t.’

Peach braced his hands on his knees. He stood up. ‘My handkerchief, please.’

‘What?’

‘My handkerchief.’

‘Oh yes.’ George opened his hand. The handkerchief lay crushed into a tight ball on his palm like a confession.

‘Give it to me.’

George did as he was told.

‘Now,’ Peach said, ‘stand up.’

George stood. And though he wanted to look away he couldn’t. The Chief Inspector’s face filled the field of his vision. He saw things he had never seen before: the tiny pinpricks in the wings of Peach’s nose; the diagonal lines stretching from Peach’s temples to the place where his eyebrows almost met; the figures-of-eight in the irises of Peach’s cold grey eyes.

‘You see,’ Peach said, ‘I know.’

The breath powering these words pushed into and across George’s face. He smelt triumph in that breath. He smelt domination. Peach knew.

He knew whether Moses was alive or dead. He knew the truth. And that meant that he, George, would never know. Peach would never tell him. Peach would only taunt him, torment him. Play on his uncertainty. The fragility of his hopes.

He let his eyes close.

Peach had won.

*

George took to his bed, partly to rest his twisted ankle (sustained when Wragge pulled him backwards off the stone mushroom) and partly out of a deep sense of demoralisation.

He didn’t answer the doorbell when it rang. From his bedroom window, he watched the priest creep away down the garden path, his curved back sheathed in the black shell of his cassock. Another of the crushed ones.

Nor did he attend Alice’s funeral. Too upset was the story that went round — initiated by Peach, no doubt. Well, it was as good a story as any other.

During his second week in bed he wrote a poem. The first and last poem that he would ever write. He called it ‘Epitaph’.

I lie in bed

I lie in bed

I lie in bed all day

’Cause maybe then

’Cause maybe then

My life will go away.

I do not move

I do not move

I do not move one bit

Life’s too greedy

Life’s too sad

I want no part of it.

See, I’m no good

I’m just no good

At anything at all

I’d rather lie

In bed than bang

My head against the wall.

So why am I

So why am I

So why am I alive?

That’s the question

I’ll be asking

Till the day I die.

Meanwhile I’ll lie

I’II lie in bed

I’ll lie in bed all day

’Cause maybe then

Eventually

My life will go away.

Self-pitying?

Yes.

Defeatist?

Yes.

Morbid?

Yes, yes, yes.

Had he stood accused of any or all of these charges, he would readily have pleaded guilty.

What else was there to look forward to now except death?

The final — the only — escape.