Dreams of Leaving

Peach Incognito (1980)

He had told everybody the same story.

First Hilda. On the Sunday. At breakfast. The table smelling of flowers and polish, rich and waxy, tampering with the sharp aroma of his grilled herring. Light from the garden skidding off mahogany.

‘I’m going to disappear for twenty-four hours,’ he announced, as he buttered a slice of toast.

Hilda lifted a head of fading dehydrated curls. When questioning something, she displayed her infinite tact. She said nothing; she merely waited.

‘I have some extremely important research to do,’ he said. ‘In the museum.’

‘All right, dear.’ Hilda bit delicately into the triangle of toast poised between her finger and thumb.

‘It will probably be happening next weekend.’ He spoke through the clinking of china. It made his words seem less naked. It seemed to clothe his deceit. ‘Friday and Saturday, I should think. So don’t expect me home on Friday night.’

Torn between amusement and concern, Hilda abandoned her usual discretion. ‘You’re not going to sleep in the museum, are you?’ Her eccentric husband!

He was brisk, imperious. ‘Either that or I’ll use one of the beds in the station. It depends how things go. In any case, don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right.’

Hilda touched the handle of her tea-cup, traced its outline with a single lingering finger. ‘And when will you be back, do you think?’

‘Saturday night. Midnight. No later than that.’

Hilda nodded.

Watching her through the arms of the candelabra, he felt that she had taken the news too casually. He had to impress her with the gravity of the matter. He wanted it branded on her mind.

‘I don’t want to be disturbed, Hilda. Not by anyone. Is that understood?’

Hilda pressed a fingertip to one of the crumbs on her plate. Her bottom teeth gripped her upper lip. Now he had upset her.

‘It’s very important,’ he explained, more gently. ‘It’s only for twenty-four hours.’

‘I know, dear.’ She faced him across the table, and her slightly lifted chin suggested a quaint bravery. ‘I’ll make you some sandwiches and a Thermos of hot soup.’

He didn’t want bloody soup, but he said, ‘That would be very nice.’

For the remainder of the meal, they discussed less controversial subjects: trimming the box hedges, revarnishing the table in the hall.

The conversation with Sergeant Dolphin had necessarily taken a somewhat different course.

‘I’m going to be out of circulation for about twenty-four hours,’ he told Dolphin on the Monday morning, ‘and I want you to take over the running of the village.’

‘Take over the running of the village, sir?’

Peach turned towards his office window, so as to hide his smile. The second half of his announcement had distracted Dolphin from too close or too immediate an examination of the first half. As he had known it would.

He swung round again, hearty, irrepressible. ‘Be Chief Inspector,’ he said. ‘It’ll be valuable experience for you, Dolphin. Stand you in good stead for the future.’ He felt so expansive that he almost winked. ‘It’s high time you had the feel of the reins in your hands. The reins of power, Dolphin. I won’t be here for ever, you know.’

In his eloquence Peach had ridden over the poor sergeant. He had, in fact, been quite carried away by his own oratory. ‘Yes, sir,’ were the only words Dolphin managed to get in — and those edgeways.

‘I’m going to be working on a project in the museum. It’s very confidential and I need absolute privacy. Under no circumstances do I want to be disturbed. Under no circumstances. Do I make myself clear, Dolphin?’

‘Very clear.’

‘I want you to pretend that I’m not here.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Pretend that I don’t exist. Imagine, if you like, that I’m dead.’

He saw alarm go off in Dolphin’s face. Well, perhaps that had been going a bit far. Still, it was gratifying to know that you were going to be missed. And the point, though exaggerated, was a valid one.

‘Seriously,’ he ran on, ‘it’ll make things more realistic. If a crisis occurs you won’t be tempted to consult me. You’ll be on your own, Dolphin. Just for those twenty-four hours. I’ve got a great deal of faith in you. I wouldn’t be giving you this assignment if I didn’t. But I’m sure you understand that.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Well, Peach had certainly given Dolphin something to think about. And first thing on Monday morning too, the sergeant’s eyes still foolish with sleep.

‘I’ll be briefing you on the exact timing later in the week,’ he concluded.

‘All right, sir.’ Dolphin scraped at the floor with the rim of his boot, then he looked up. ‘I appreciate the opportunity, sir. I’ll be looking forward to it.’

That’s my Dolphin, Peach thought.

*

It had all been so easy. On Friday of that week he organised the day patrols so that, for a period of precisely twenty minutes, the road that led southwest towards the village of Bunt would be left unmanned. Everything went as planned. At 6.30 on Friday evening he rode out of New Egypt on his bicycle. When he crossed the boundary he felt nothing. No hallucinations, no rush of adrenalin, not even a quickening of the pulse. Nothing. His feet pumped the pedals as before, the bicycle sped onwards. Once or twice he glanced from side to side as if the feelings he had heard about from previous escapees might be lurking in the hedgerow, waiting to spring out, infiltrate, be felt. He rode on. Still nothing happened. It was a pleasant evening in June.

Half an hour later he arrived at a small country railway station some eight miles west of New Egypt. He pedalled across the deserted car-park, his tyres silent on the tarmac. He dismounted behind a van with a shattered windscreen, and wheeled his bicycle through some bushes and down a crumbling mud bank into the copse that bordered the railway tracks. There, in the green gloom, among bleached cans of hairspray and the skeletons of motorbikes, he changed into civilian clothes. He folded his uniform and crammed it into his saddlebag. He locked the saddlebag. Then he dragged the bicycle behind a bush and camouflaged it with dead wood, brambles and leaves.

He walked into the Gents (hissing copper pipes, smells of pine and piss commingling) to check his appearance. When he saw himself in the mirror above the washbasins he thought how suspicious, how like a criminal, he looked. Partly the way he was dressed, he supposed. (He was wearing a beige check sports jacket, a green shirt, and a dark red tie which Hilda had given him for his birthday. His cavalry twill trousers had come out of a Christmas catalogue. On his feet, a pair of brogues. Respectable if somewhat characterless clothes. Deliberately so.) And partly the clandestine nature of what he was doing. His grey eyes watched him watching from beneath their heavy lids. His grey hair bristled like a bed of nails. The green shirt gave his face an unhealthy, slightly chilling pallor.

Still, he looked pretty vigorous for a man of his age.

*

If I were to die now, Peach wrote in a slightly unsteady hand, what would happen?

He sat back and considered the question. It would be a nightmare for Dolphin, of course. Though Dolphin wouldn’t think of it as a death. Not right away. He would probably call it a disappearance. Still, that was serious enough. Nobody disappeared in New Egypt. Least of all a Chief Inspector. What would he do? Check the museum first. His only lead. But he would find no trace of Peach. Not a single clue.

Absolute nightmare.

It wouldn’t be long before Dolphin began to suspect foul play. A kidnapping, for instance. Even, perhaps, a murder. (Peach’s forty-year reign as Chief Inspector, his merciless grip on the community, had always made that a possibility — though who would dare?) He would have to lift the news blackout. He would have to inform the village. And then? Instant pandemonium.

Would anyone suspect that he had (a) left the village and (b) left it of his own accord? Only the more cynical of the villagers. Highness, for instance (he could see that sardonic twisted smile). The greengrocer, too, perhaps (those puffy knowing eyes).

In the end, after the obligatory month of search-parties and questionings, Dolphin would be forced to pronounce Peach dead. He would have to fake the evidence, concoct a foolproof story, produce a satisfactory corpse.

Some, Peach supposed (and this hurt slightly), would celebrate. He could imagine Dinwoodie dancing a solitary and hysterical jig in his garage. He shook his head. Poor Dinwoodie.

Others would mourn. He pictured a fragile and ghostly Hilda huddled in a room of dark furniture. He could hear the sound of uncontrollable mass weeping issuing from the windows of the police station on the hill.

And then the funeral.

Would there be a procession through the village as there had been for Lord Batley? Would they ‘bury’ him in an empty coffin? What a vicious irony that would be. So vicious that he almost resorted to prayer right there and then, but the priest’s face rose before his eyes at the crucial moment (that pitiful jittery face, its faith built not on strength but terror) and he rapidly abandoned the idea.

He closed his notebook and tucked his pen into his breast pocket.

He would not die.

He leaned forwards, pressed his face to the window. The world beyond the streaked glass looked peaceful, almost familiar. Sunset an hour away. Evening light. The last rays reaching down through the woods, slender pale-gold arms emerging from the ruffled sleeves of clouds. Only the motion, the constant slippage of the landscape from right to left, seemed strange. A grass bank grew and grew until it hid the view. He watched as children do: as if the world was moving and he was still.

He was seventy-two years old, and it was his first time on a train.

*

Now they were swinging north into a long stretch of curved track and, simply by turning his head from right to left, he could see first the front then the back of the train. He suddenly became aware of how limited his knowledge was. From the window he had seen details of the village echoed, reproduced, enlarged — a boy spilling off his bicycle, a woman taking washing in, a flock of sheep wedged into a lane — but nothing could prepare him for the city that lay ahead. His wisdom, undisputed in the village, dissipated in this seemingly boundless world. It began and ended with the train he was travelling on. No, not even that. With the carriage he was sitting in. That was the sum of all he knew. It was daunting. He realised that he would have to rely on the qualities that had elevated him to the rank of Chief Inspector at such a comparatively tender age: vigilance, ruthlessness, intuition.

He began to see things that he had never seen before — at least not in real life: a viaduct; a white horse carved into the chalk of a hillside; an aeroplane, curiously silent and majestic, floating down over the train, almost grazing the tops of trees, its underbelly plump and vulnerable. A highly irregular thought occurred to him. Supposing he had left the village before now. Supposing he had left when he was younger, more receptive, more energetic, and returned armed with vivid first-hand experience of the outside world. Then he would really have known what he was talking about. Then he would have understood exactly what he was legislating against. And he would have been able to dispense his knowledge in tantalising fragments like some kind of oracle. A knowledge that only he (miraculously) possessed. How wise he would have seemed. Imagine the increase in prestige and credibility. Who knows, perhaps even the breakdown could have been avoided. An interesting idea, in any case. Something to mull over. He jotted a few words down in his notebook: The relationship of hypocrisy to the exercise of power. He wondered if the idea had occurred to any of his predecessors. He doubted it, somehow. After all, it had only occurred to him once he had already left the village. Surely such an idea would have been unthinkable, quite literally unthinkable, while you were actually living there? Only this extraordinary detachment, this sense of removal, made it possible. It was as if he had risen out of his body and was looking back down at himself. He could see things in a way that he couldn’t have seen them before.

The train chattered over the rails. You’ll-never-go-back, it seemed to be saying. You’ll-never-go-back-you’ll-never-go-back.

Nonsense. Of course he would. He had to. He even wanted to.

He had allowed himself a maximum of twenty-four hours. Deadline Saturday 2100 hours. If he hadn’t located Moses Highness by then, too bad. He had to be back in New Egypt by midnight. Otherwise his cover would be blown.

Once again he was struck by the enormity of the risk he was taking. Still, there was nothing for it now. Here he was, thirty miles out of the village, and moving further away with every minute that passed.

The train hurtled on towards the city, beating complicated rhythms now. Beneath the smeared glass, the landscape flowed like green weeds through water. He had never imagined such fluid speed. The percussion of wheels on rails. The flick-flick-flick of telegraph poles. Lulled him. He leaned his head back against the seat.

*

Where was he?

His eyes took in the blue and green check upholstery, the silver luggage-racks, the discarded newspaper, his own face in the window’s mirror. A blonde girl sitting across the aisle returned his glance of confusion with a smile. She hadn’t been there before.

Through the window he watched the march of strange buildings. Three tower-blocks, an office of reflecting glass, a multi-storey car-park. Semidetached houses in a row like vertebrae. He was on the train. But where was the train?

As if to answer his question, the train lurched, throwing him forwards. It was slowing down. For a station, presumably. But which station?

‘Is this London?’ he asked the blonde girl.

‘No, this is East Croydon,’ she said. ‘London’s next.’

He thanked her.

So. He must have dozed off. He wondered how long he had slept. Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes — not much more. That girl must have joined the train at Three Bridges. Everything under control again, he began to move his mind into the immediate future. They were due in at 8.23. By the time he found a hotel and registered, it would be close to ten. He doubted whether he could accomplish much that night. He had a phone-call to make, but he could do that from his room. All right, then. An early night. An early start in the morning.

The white signs of suburban stations flashed by, almost too fast to read. West something. Something Common. Clapham Junction. Houses rushed up to the railway line. He saw a woman washing her hair, the bathroom lit by one naked bulb. It embarrassed him, this glimpse into her privacy. Then he saw two people standing in a yellow kitchen. Then an empty room with the TV on. Window after window. Life after life on display. He found himself thinking of the police museum.

As the train rattled over a bridge, he looked down. Though rush-hour was over, the street pulsed with the red tail-lights of cars. Glowing, dimming, glowing again as feet touched brakes. All those cars, all those lights. He sensed a surge of electricity. Friday night. The city charged up for the weekend. Perhaps the fascination showed on his face because the blonde girl chose that moment to speak to him:

‘I love this place, don’t you?’

He turned to look at her. The thrill in her voice, the ingenuous warmth of her smile, drew him in, persuaded him to tell the truth. There was nothing to fear from her.

‘It’s the first time I’ve been here,’ he confessed.

‘The first time?’ Her voice lifted in disbelief. It was a musical voice. It resonated. It would be capable, he imagined, of wonderful laughter. ‘Where have you been hiding?’

He instantly forgave her the slight impertinence of her question. She was an attractive girl — in her early twenties, he guessed — and some part of him was charmed by her forwardness.

‘I live a very quiet life. In the country.’ He sounded appropriately sedate.

‘Oh, I’m just coming back from a week in the country — ’ the girl began.

How easily these people speak of coming and going, he thought. As if it was the most natural thing in the world.

‘— but what brings you to London,’ she was asking him, ‘for the first time?’

The phrase had become their theme, linking them privately. When she got home she would tell her mother, or her boyfriend, or whoever she lived with, that she had met a man on the train who had never been to London before. It was his first time, she would say. Can you imagine?

While they had been talking, the train had crossed another bridge, over the Thames this time (he caught a glimpse of the water, glinting black, sluggish as oil), and everybody was standing up, pulling on coats, hauling down cases. All this gave him time to frame a suitably vague answer to what had been, potentially at least, a rather awkward question.

‘Business,’ he said. ‘I’m here on business.’

The girl, adjusting the belt on her raincoat, gave him a quick smile. Brisk rituals of arrival were beginning to override their conversation. Soon they were walking side by side down the platform. Gritty irritable light. The station, with its high arching roof, hollow and draughty, echoed with footsteps, voices, the whisper of clothes. Somehow the sound reminded him of birds — thousands of birds folding their wings. Once they had passed through the ticket barrier, the girl swung away from him.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I hope your business goes well.’

Her tiny downward smile intrigued him, as the beginning of a story does, but this, he realised, was already the end.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Good luck to you, too.’

‘It’s been nice talking to you. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

He watched her walk away. She walked energetically. Her blonde hair rose and fell with the energy of her walking. He put his case down. He was acting very strangely. Really very strangely indeed. What on earth had prompted him to wish her good luck like that? He went back over the encounter in some detail and shook his head. He almost didn’t recognise himself.

Suddenly a crowd of people spilled towards him across the concourse. Though startled, he stood his ground. They flowed round him as if he was part of the station. He had never seen so many people in one place. And every face lifted anxiously to the departures board as if they expected to read the news of some personal tragedy there. So many people and yet they all had different noses, eyes, hair. It seemed extraordinary to him that no two people looked the same. And another thing. He didn’t recognise anyone. He had never seen so many strangers. For a moment he, too, looked anxious. Then he became exhilarated. The turmoil. The din. The anonymity. He could blend with the crowds, he could move about unobserved, no eyebrows raised, no questions asked. It suited him perfectly.

Outside the station he flagged down a taxi. The driver took him to a dark street lined with stunted trees. Somewhere between Queensway and Notting Hill Gate, it was (Peach had been following the route in his A — Z). He paid the driver, and the taxi rattled away again towards the main road. He stood on the pavement, his suitcase in his hand. He looked up. The Hotel Ravello. It’s not exactly The Ritz, the driver had told him, but Peach had imagined worse places.

He climbed the steps and pushed the door open. A bell tingled. He found himself in a narrow hallway. A rectangle of plastic-coated card had been tacked to the wall. RECEPTION, it said. The arrow underneath indicated a doorway to the left.

‘Hello?’ he called out.

He walked up a short passage and peered into an office. Beyond the office lay another, darker room, separated from the first by a frosted-glass partition.

‘Hello?’ he called out again.

An Arab appeared. He had the watery strained eyes of somebody who watches too much television. His complexion was yellow on the surface, grey underneath. A few buttons on his shirt had popped undone, revealing the wrinkled socket of his navel.

‘Yes?’

‘I would like a single room,’ Peach said.

‘How many night?’ The Arab spoke in a monotone. The words came automatically. He probably said them in his sleep.

‘Just the one.’

The Arab produced a register. ‘Sign here.’

Peach stooped and wrote George Highness in a confident scrawl. A merciless smile passed over his lips. That’s the closest he will ever get to leaving the village, he thought.

He pushed the register back across the counter, received a key in exchange.

‘Third floor,’ the Arab said. ‘Check out before midday.’

Peach nodded. He would be gone long before then.

As he climbed the stairs the décor deteriorated. Handprints on the walls. Scratches, patches of damp, graffiti. It certainly wasn’t The Ritz.

His room had a flimsy hardboard door. The number, chipped gilt, dangled on a single screw. He turned the handle and walked in. Green carpet. Faded orange bedspread. Massive dark wardrobe. Chair. Gas-ring. Ashtray. He closed the door, put his case on the bed, and walked into the bathroom. He ran the cold tap and splashed some water on to his face. He dried on a threadbare towel that said, incongruously, GOOD MORNING. Stepping back into the bedroom, he took off his jacket, loosened his tie, and unlocked his case. He was travelling light: a pair of striped pyjamas, a washing-bag, a diary, a bus-map, binoculars, a Thermos of Hilda’s homemade minestrone soup and half a dozen ham sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. He crossed to the window and raised the sash. Then he settled on the chair and ate four of the sandwiches one after another. Even though the sandwiches were very good indeed (nobody made ham sandwiches like Hilda), his face registered nothing. He was thinking. The city made a sound like distant applause.

After gulping down a cup of minestrone, he reached for his diary. He thumbed through the pages until he found the number he was looking for. He moved to the bed and picked up the telephone. He dialled with nimble precise rotations of his index-finger. The number began to ring.

Somebody answered. A voice said, ‘Eddie here.’

Peach blinked once, iguana-like. His lidded eyes fixed on the wall opposite. ‘Eddie, this is Mr Pole speaking. Moses’s foster-father.’

‘Mr Pole. What can I do for you?’

What indeed, Peach gloated. He wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. An orange smear: minestrone.

‘I’m sorry to bother you, Eddie, but I seem to have mislaid Moses’s new address. I wondered if you could possibly — ’

‘No problem, Mr Pole. Hang on a moment.’

Because, until today, the world had always been inaccessible, Peach had always listened to telephone voices very carefully. He found he could often construct a picture of the person he was talking to. Sometimes a face. Sometimes a body too. Sometimes the room they happened to be in. He tried to picture Eddie now, but saw a dog instead. A white toy dog. He gritted his teeth.

‘Mr Pole?’

‘Yes?’

‘You can reach him on 735–8020.’

Peach pulled his pen out of his breast pocket. ‘735 — ’

‘8020,’ Eddie said.

‘I see. And do you have his address by any chance?’

‘I don’t know his proper address, but the name of the club where he lives is The Bunker. He probably told you that, didn’t he?’

‘The Bunker. That’s right, I remember now,’ Peach lied.

‘If you address a letter to The Bunker, Kennington Road, London SEII, I’m sure it’ll get there.’

Peach scribbled frantically.

‘OK, Mr Pole?’

‘Thank you very much, Eddie,’ Peach oozed, as only Peach could. ‘You’ve been extremely helpful.’

Good old Eddie, he sneered as he rang off. What a fool. What a dupe.

He walked to the window. Anticipation started the motor in his lower lip. It began to slide in and out, a smooth action, almost hydraulic. This city was putty in his hands. He could shape it at will.

He was developing a knack for these phone-calls. Only a few weeks before, he had called the Poles in Leicestershire. A woman had answered.

‘Yes?’ Her voice had stretched the word out, making it sag comfortably in the middle like a hammock. He saw a plump woman with fussy hands. A roast in the oven. A couple of spoilt cats.

‘My name’s John,’ he had said. ‘I’m an old friend of Moses’s. I haven’t seen him for years, and I’ve been trying to track him down.’ A bit of truth makes a better lie.

‘Well — ’ and Mrs Pole had given the word two syllables when one would have sufficed — ‘the last we heard he was moving to some sort of discothèque, but I’m afraid he hasn’t given us the exact address yet. I’m terribly sorry.’

Faced with her vagueness, he had become doubly precise. ‘Could you tell me where Moses was living before? Perhaps they’ll know.’

‘That’s right,’ Mrs Pole had said, as if he was participating in a quiz-game of which she was the mindless compère.

Eventually she had given Peach Eddie’s address and telephone number. She explained who Eddie was. A nice boy, she called him, even though she had only spoken to him once. The woman was plainly a nincompoop.

‘I do hope you find Moses,’ she had finished up. ‘An old friend, are you?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Well — goodbye, John.’

‘Goodbye, Mrs Pole.’ And good riddance.

He unscrewed the Thermos and poured himself a second cup of minestrone. Then he reached for another ham sandwich. He checked his watch. 10.15. Too late to make any further progress tonight. By 10.30 he was lying in bed, his A — Z propped on the mound of his stomach, half-moon spectacles resting on his fleshy belligerent nose. Shortly afterwards he leaned over and switched off the light.

One thought creeping up on him in the darkness threatened to sabotage his hopes of sleep. Suppose Highness had sent his son into the outside world with precisely this aim in mind: to tempt Peach to leave the village, to tempt him into a betrayal of everything he stood for. Suppose Highness now planned to exploit his absence. To expose him. To start an insurrection. This thought was so unpleasant that sweat began to accumulate behind Peach’s knees.

But surely it was too fantastic, too far-fetched. Highness could never plan anything so complex, so ingenious. Not that moocher, that drone, that bonehead. Only he, Peach, could produce ideas of that calibre. He could run rings round that bloody layabout. He had covered every angle. He was the Chief Inspector.

He slept.

*

You can never be certain what it is that wakes you in the middle of the night.

When Peach woke, he heard shouting in the corridor outside his room. He tried to pick out words, but the language meant nothing to him.

He had been dreaming.

The dream hung eerily in his head like the hush after a bomb’s dropped. He had been enveloped in darkness, a darkness that stretched infinitely in all directions. A sort of outer space. He had been surrounded on all four sides by bright orange ropes. He could see nothing but the darkness and the ropes. It was as if he was standing in a boxing-ring. A boxing-ring in outer space.

Not so much standing, perhaps, as floundering. He couldn’t see a floor beneath his feet. At times whatever was supporting him seemed firm. At other times it tilted sharply, slid out from under him, gave way. And he would lunge for the ropes, wanting something solid, something tangible, to cling to. But his hands kept passing straight through the ropes as if the ropes weren’t there. And he would try again and watch in astonishment, despairing, as the same thing happened.

There had been voices in the dream. Murmurings. Invisible spectators. They hadn’t taken sides. They were neither for nor against him. They were simply there. Watching.

Then he had woken in the badly-sprung bed, his pyjamas damp, the darkness tinted orange by the street-lights, and he had heard voices in the corridor. Real voices.

Now somebody was running past his room. A door slammed. That foreign language again. What the devil was going on? He switched on the light and peered at his watch. 3.28. He got out of bed. As he pulled his beige jacket on over his pyjamas, some instinct persuaded him to slip his police badge into the pocket. He opened the door of his room just in time to see the door of the room opposite slam shut. He crossed the corridor and knocked.

He knocked again.

The door opened a few inches. A face appeared in the gap. Jet-black hair, olive skin, the pencil-shading of a moustache. An adolescent. Indian or Pakistani. Stale cigarette smoke in the room. The rustling of bedclothes.

‘You’re making an incredible amount of noise,’ Peach said.

The boy offered him a blank face. Peach read a single word there. Stupidity.

‘It is very late — ’ he pronounced each word distinctly and gestured with his watch — ‘and I want to sleep.’

The boy shrugged. Perhaps he really didn’t understand. But Peach thought he detected a sly mockery in that blank face. He felt like seizing the boy by his stringy chicken neck and –

He checked himself. He wasn’t in New Egypt now. All right, he thought.

‘I am a policeman,’ he said. And, reaching into his jacket pocket, pulled out his badge. Held it up next to his face like a third eye. ‘Po-lice-man. Understand?’

The boy’s eyes scattered. He poured some anxious language over his shoulder into the room. A girl’s voice answered. She seemed to be giving the boy advice.

The boy turned back. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Very sorry.’

‘Just shut up and go to sleep,’ Peach snapped.

He stamped back into his room and closed the door. Instead of going to bed, he sat by the window. There was no darkness to speak of in this city. All night long a gaseous orange glow hung over the buildings. An ominous light. Like an emergency, a war, the end of something. No wonder people ran up and down corridors. How could you sleep with that fire burning in the sky?

He had only been gone a few hours, but he already longed for the muffled black night of the village, the air of secrecy, the cover of darkness. He didn’t sleep for almost an hour and his sleep, when it took him, proved fitful and thin, disrupted by sirens, cat-fights, and the dreadful silence of orange ropes.

*

He was awake again at 6.30. The orange night had withdrawn. Through a window fogged with dust and fumes and breath, the sky glittered silver-grey. Sheer, streamlined, a colossal machine.

He threw the covers aside and with them all his paralysing thoughts of the night before. Wearing only his twill trousers, he shaped up in front of the mirror like a boxer. He lowered his head and shuffled his feet. He threw a few right jabs. Fff, fff. It felt good.

Even his face — heavy, collapsing, punished by time — couldn’t dismay him this morning. He surveyed the folds and creases, the bulging, the sagging, almost with satisfaction. How perfectly they disguised those agile wits of his! He was conscious that he was approaching the day the way he approached a day in the village: optimistic, determined, supremely confident.

By 7.15 he had paid the bill (exorbitant! that was the last time he would ever leave the village!) and was making for Queensway on foot. He decided to breakfast at the Blue Sky Café, blue being a colour of which he was particularly fond. He found a table by the window, took in his surroundings. Teak veneer panelling to shoulder height. Matt yellow paint beyond. Sticky-looking ventilation-grilles. Cacti on the mantelpiece. He watched the door opening and closing on a succession of workmen who wanted cups of tea and bacon sandwiches. When he ordered, the waitress called him love.

Smiling, he arranged his A — Z, his bus-map and his diary on the table in front of him. He began to outline a strategy for his assault on The Bunker. The military side — reconnaissance, briefing, manoeuvres — appealed to him. In his mind, he wore a uniform.

‘Excuse me.’

He looked up and saw an old woman sitting at the next table. He could tell from her accent that she wasn’t English. Something about her face, too, didn’t belong. Not another bloody foreigner. He sighed visibly.

‘Were you addressing me, madam?’

The old woman reached across and touched him on the shoulder. Her hand descended so lightly that it might have reflected either awe on her part or fragility on his. The former seemed more likely.

‘You’re a man of great power,’ she said. ‘I can feel it.’

He glanced round. Nobody had noticed. The last thing he wanted, even this far from The Bunker, was to start attracting attention. He faced the old woman again. Her smile, almost coquettish, somehow avoided being grotesque. But he was brisk this morning, not easily charmed. He was too conscious of the ground he had to cover, of the red second-hand on the clock above the glass display-case of rolls and buns. His first thought translated rapidly into speech.

‘What do you want?’

The woman placed the same light yet curiously restraining hand on his arm. ‘What do you want, sir?’

Really, this was an impossible conversation. Quite impossible. He began to gather up his maps and notebooks. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have some rather important business to — ’

The woman’s face broke up into a network of creases and lines in whose intricate web he suddenly, and unaccountably, felt himself to be a fly.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ she said.

Frightened? Him? Outrageous. And yet –

This world. So very different. The cloth of the night dyed orange, embroidered with voices, torn by screams and the screech of brakes — had it frightened him?

The woman’s words pricked his skin like needles. Doubts began to run in his bloodstream.

‘You’re not comfortable,’ she was telling him. ‘You’re a long way from home, maybe that’s the reason. Yes, I think that’s the reason.’

Her voice scraped like dry leaves blowing over the surface of a road. Her dark eyes turned up stones. His scrambled eggs arrived, but he watched them congeal on the plate.

‘Give me your hand,’ she said.

He held out his hand, and she wrapped it in her cool papery fingers. She began to murmur to herself. This seemed to be taking place in a vacuum. Or not taking place at all. He was thankful nobody in the village could see him now. He observed his own submissiveness as if it was happening to somebody else.

‘Who are you exactly?’ he asked her.

‘Oh, you can speak!’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought maybe you lost your voice. My name is Madame Zola. I’m a clairvoyant. Famous clairvoyant.’

He stared at his hand lying in hers.

‘I can see,’ she said, ‘that you are, how shall I say, curious.’

He recovered. ‘Where can you see that? On the palm of my hand?’ But his sarcasm drifted past her. She seemed not to have noticed it. Beneath notice, perhaps. ‘I am an old man,’ he began again. ‘One thing I’m not particularly curious about is the future.’

‘You’re also human.’

He didn’t follow.

‘You may be old,’ Madame Zola said, ‘but I’m older and I have to tell you one thing that maybe you don’t know. People are always curious about the future. It’s human character. They can be on the death bed. Still they have to know. Will I die? Will I live? How long will I live? What will happen when I die? All these questions. Always questions. Don’t tell me you’re not curious about the future.’ She waggled a hand, almost in admonition, under Peach’s nose. ‘And that — ’ one of her fingers stabbed the air triumphantly before curling up and rejoining the others — ‘is why I’ll never, never go out of business.’

Peach was thinking about Lord Batley. Batley had tried to escape at the age of seventy-nine. He had obviously believed in some kind of future. And wasn’t he, Peach, desperately curious as to what the outcome of today’s investigations would be?

Sighing, he admitted, ‘You’re right.’

‘I know I’m right.’ Her mouth curved downwards. ‘Do you want to know what I see in your hand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah, you become simple now, you see? That’s my effect. I see it happen. Everywhere I see it.’ She waved a hand to include not just the café, but the city, the country too, the earth even, and the planets in attendance. ‘That’s my power.’

Her eyes drifted away from his, drifted beyond the yellow café walls and the steamy plate-glass, into a world that he couldn’t imagine. A smile spread like water through all the cracks and crevices in her face until it was irrigated with a look of pure contentment.

‘You’re going on a journey,’ she told him. ‘An important journey. A difficult journey. It will happen very soon, this journey.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m right?’

‘Yes.’

Her eyes misted over again. ‘You’re looking for something.’

He stared at her. She spoke in cliches, but the clichés were true. Her simple, almost facile, statements lodged under the mind’s skin.

‘But you feel lost,’ she was saying. ‘Among strangers. Alone.’

Her eyes refocused, seeking confirmation. He gave it to her.

‘There’s some danger — ’

He remained calm. ‘What danger?’

‘That I cannot see.’

He glanced down at his untouched plate.

‘You must forgive me, I didn’t wish to stop you eating,’ Madame Zola said (she had a foot in both worlds, it seemed, and could move from one to the other like someone playing two games of chess at the same time), ‘but sometimes I feel something and when I feel something I cannot keep it inside. It has to come out. If I keep it inside I burst. Pif. Like a balloon.’

Peach suddenly found that he was hungry. He slid a forkload of cold scrambled egg into his mouth, then reached for a slice of toast. The butter had melted clean through. The toast sagged in his hand. He shrugged, ate it anyway.

‘Anything else?’ His briskness had returned with his appetite. They might both have been restored to him by Madame Zola.

She examined his left hand again. With his right, he gulped cold milky tea.

‘I see only your strength, your power. You remember I said that you have power?’

‘I thought you meant a different kind of power.’

‘You have both,’ and her smile, like a fishing-net, caught all possible meanings.

He withdrew his hand and wiped his mouth on a paper napkin. He began to gather his possessions together.

‘You have to go now,’ Madame Zola said. As if it was her idea, as if she was dismissing him.

‘If you’ll forgive me. I have an extremely testing day ahead of me.’

‘I think I’ll stay here a little longer.’ She indicated the unfinished cup of tea in front of her. ‘I wish you luck with your — ’ and she paused, dark eyes glittering — ‘business.’

‘Thank you, Madame Zola.’ Peach even bowed slightly.

He paid the waitress and left the café. It was 8.45. The sun pressed against the inside of a thin layer of cloud. He unbuttoned his jacket as he hurried down Queensway. His mind, unleashed, sprang forwards.

That woman had slowed him down with her mumbo-jumbo. You’re looking for something, she had said. But they all said things like that, didn’t they, fortune-tellers? She couldn’t have told him what he was looking for or whether he was going to find it, could she? Of course she couldn’t.

Free of the Blue Sky Café, out in the open air, he welcomed his scepticism back like a friend whom he hadn’t seen for a long time.

*

By the time he reached Bayswater Road the sun had broken through. It landed in a million places at once: a car windscreen, the catches of a briefcase, a man’s gold tooth. He watched the city organise itself around him. He had his bearings now. Marble Arch stood to his left, half a mile away, solid as muscle. Hyde Park lay in front of him, a stretch of green beyond severe black railings. And somewhere to the south, approximately seven miles away, The Bunker waited. He leaned against the bus-shelter, his jacket draped over his arm.

After ten minutes the bus came. It dropped him at Oxford Circus. He caught another going south on Regent Street. The route he had selected took him past many of the famous sights of the city — the statue of Eros, Trafalgar Square, Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament — but he only absorbed them subliminally. It was the action that interested him, not the scenery. His mind moved in another dimension, juggling possibilities, shaping initiatives. He wasn’t a tourist. He was a policeman.

The bus swung left over a bridge and he knew, without looking at the map, which bridge it was. A barge loaded with machinery forged downriver, shouldering the water aside. Gulls fluttered above. They reminded him of the greengrocer’s story. The gulls in the air above the ploughed field: symbols of freedom. How far he seemed from that closed world. How far he was.

When the bus turned into Kennington Road, he stepped out. His head swivelled. He used the gleaming dome of the Imperial War Museum (how appropriate, he thought) to orientate himself. One problem. Kennington Road ran north and south from the crossroads where he was standing. Which way should he go?

A police car pulled up at the lights. Peach approached the window on the passenger’s side.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I wonder if you could tell me where The Bunker is?’

The policeman he was talking to had an unusually pale face. It was so pale that it was almost transparent. Even the policeman’s eyelashes were pale. Peach’s first albino.

‘Never heard of it.’ Not only an albino, but arrogant with it.

‘It’s a nightclub,’ Peach explained.

The policeman pushed his hat back on his head, revealing a strand of colourless hair. ‘Don’t know it.’

His colleague, the driver, was muttering something.

‘Try down there.’ The policeman pointed south with his chin. ‘Can’t help you otherwise, mate.’

‘Much obliged,’ Peach said. ‘Thanks very much.’

Mate, he thought. Bloody albino. Take his uniform away and he’d probably disappear altogether.

He set off down the road. The traffic lights had already changed, but several seconds passed before he heard the police car move away. He understood. If he had been approached by an old man in a sports jacket who was looking for a nightclub, he would have been suspicious too. Especially if he happened to be an albino. Axe to grind. Revenge on the world. He didn’t look back, though. He kept walking. Basic psychology. Only the guilty look back. The guilty and the stupid.

He walked for five or ten minutes and saw nothing that even remotely resembled a nightclub (not that he was any too sure what nightclubs looked like in the daylight). Kennington Road ran south into a glitter of bicycle-shops and pub-signs. Council-blocks the colour of dog-meat. A green and white striped bingo-hall. Trees so dusty that their leaves looked plastic. He began to have doubts. What if Eddie had lied? Could Moses have covered his tracks?

He sat down on a bench and mopped his forehead and the back of his neck with a large white handkerchief. He opened his suitcase and examined his notes. He took those anxious questions of his and crumpled them like so much waste-paper. He began again, with a fresh blank sheet, as it were. Outlined his mission to himself. Stated the priorities.

1) Establish the exact whereabouts of the nightclub.

2) Establish whether or not Moses Highness is living at said nightclub.

3) If so, establish visual contact.

4) If not, start again — with Eddie.

Incisive now, Peach walked across the pavement and into a newsagent’s. He asked the Indian behind the counter whether he knew of a place called The Bunker. The Indian didn’t.

He asked a teenager at a bus-stop. The teenager didn’t know either.

Peach walked on, undeterred, a pear-shaped man with a jutting lower lip. Sooner or later, he thought. Sooner or later.

Reaching another set of traffic lights, he noticed a pub on the corner. They would know. Surely. He consulted his watch. Half an hour to opening-time. He sat down on a low brick wall. And waited.

As soon as the bolts were drawn (11.32), he was through the double-doors.

‘You must be desperate,’ the landlord said. ‘You nearly knocked the place over.’ His eyes creased at the corners; he was making a joke, but the joke included as one of its ingredients a sense of wariness.

Peach eased himself on to a stool and leaned his forearms on the bar. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘has not exactly been the easiest of days.’

The landlord tipped his head back, narrowed his eyes, nodded.

Peach didn’t usually drink at lunch-time, but usually was a word that didn’t apply. Not today. ‘I’ll have a pint of bitter,’ he said. ‘Anything’for yourself?’

‘That’s very kind of you, sir. I’ll have a lager.’ The landlord pulled Peach’s bitter first, then the lager. ‘Your good health, sir.’

Peach raised his glass to his lips. ‘Cheers.’

When he spoke again he had almost drained it dry. ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘whether you could help me.’

‘Do my best, sir,’ the landlord said.

‘I’m looking for a place called The Bunker. It’s a nightclub. Somebody told me that it’s on this road.’

The landlord shook a cigarette out of a squashed packet of Benson’s. He ran the tip of his tongue along his sparse moustache, pressed his lips together, and nodded (Peach’s intuition told him this happened a lot). ‘I know the place,’ he said. ‘It’s been open less than a year. Run by a coloured chap. Bit shady by all accounts.’ He sniffed. ‘No pun intended.’ He struck a match and lit his cigarette. He put the match out by shaking it, the way a nurse shakes a thermometer.

Peach swallowed some more beer. ‘Where is it?’

‘Just down the road.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘About a hundred yards down. Right-hand side. You can’t miss it.’ The landlord smiled. ‘It’s pink.’

‘Pink?’

‘That’s right.’

They looked at each other and shook their heads in the manner of men who have seen all kinds of things come and go. There was a certain intimacy about the moment.

‘I don’t suppose,’ Peach ventured, ‘you know whether a young man by the name of Moses is living there, do you?’

The landlord arranged his features in a position of deep thought. ‘Moses? No. I don’t know anyone called Moses.’

Ah well, Peach thought. Worth a try.

‘Friend of yours?’ the landlord enquired.

‘Not exactly a friend,’ Peach said, ‘though we do go back a long way,’ and, turning aside, he strolled through the arcade of his own amusement.

The landlord nodded once or twice. Smoke from his cigarette rose up through blades of sunlight. Traffic sighed beyond the frosted glass. A clock ticked on the wall. It was a pleasant pub.

Peach drained his glass.

‘Another?’ the landlord said.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘It’s on me.’

Peach hesitated. ‘I really ought to be getting on, but,’ and he consulted his watch, ‘well, all right. Just a half, mind. Thank you very much.’

When he emerged from the pub some twenty minutes later, his head seemed to be floating on his neck as a ball floats on water. It was an unfamiliar though not unpleasing sensation. He paused outside a launderette and took out his notebook. In the pool of the village, he wrote, you know where the water ends and the land begins. In the ocean of the world, you drift beyond the sight of any shore. He read it through to himself and nodded several times. He was quite pleased with it. Really quite pleased. It had an oriental, no, a universal ring to it. Perhaps he would try it out in one of his pep-talks. He moved off down the road again. His lower lip slid in and out as he walked. He passed an Indian restaurant, a delicatessen, a vet’s. Then suddenly, on the other side of the road, he saw the building that Terence, the landlord, had described. It was pink all right. It was very pink. And Peach was grateful for its pinkness. If it hadn’t been so pink, he would probably have walked right past it.

He crossed the road. At last, he thought. The Bunker! He tried to peer in through one of the ground-floor windows, but he could see nothing. Effective stuff, smoked-glass. He tested the double-doors. Locked. He wished he knew more about nightclubs: how they operated, when they opened, what the routine was. The smoked-glass windows confronted him with his own ignorance.

He stepped back to the kerb so as to get a better view of the rest of the building. On the second floor, he could see a pair of red curtains, a red lampshade hanging from the ceiling. The next floor up looked derelict: grimy windows, one pane missing. He would have assumed that the fourth floor was unoccupied too, had he not noticed a piece of black cloth covering one of the windows. He instinctively felt that this was where Moses lived. He walked round to the side of the building. Another door, also locked. Further along he found a metal gate about the width of a truck. Sharp green spikes lined the top to stop people climbing over. The padlock securing the gate was as big as his fist. He put his eye to the crack between the upper and the lower hinges. He saw a cobbled yard, a few dustbins, a stack of yellow beer-crates. Nobody had bothered to paint the back of The Bunker pink. Only the façade mattered, it seemed.

He stood back. He dismissed any thought of trying to break in. He would be running too many risks. Besides, the place looked impregnable. Especially to a man who couldn’t even cut his own toenails any more. He would have to wait.

He looked round, noticed a café on the other side of the main road. Positioned directly opposite The Bunker, it commanded views of both entrances. He crossed the road and pushed the glass door open. No foreigners, he was relieved to see. Nobody at all, in fact. He took the table by the window and ordered a coffee.

The nightclub stood on the junction, flamboyant, still.

It was 12.52.

*

By 3.15 he had severe indigestion. He had eaten a sausage sandwich, a ham roll, two cheese rolls with pickle, a bowl of oxtail soup, and a slice of cheesecake, and he had drunk three cups of coffee and two cups of tea. And nothing had happened. He decided to go for a walk.

He paid the bill and left the café. The door jangled shut behind him. He set off down the road. He resisted the urge to glance back over his shoulder at the pink building. A truck slammed past him, flinging his shirt against his back. He followed the curve of a high brick wall and Kennington Park came into view. A nylon banner slung between two oak trees announced the opening of a fun-fair that evening. He crossed the road to investigate.

A green generator hummed in the north-east corner of the park. Long red trucks huddled under the dusty foliage. He picked his way through fierce pieces of machinery. They lay about in the grass, dismembered, sticky with grease. Parts of something called an Octopus, apparently. He couldn’t imagine how they would look when assembled. Men with hands like wrenches were tightening nuts and bolts, shouting to each other in accents he could hardly understand. He moved through smells of beer and oil and sweat. Disco music crashed out of a gaudy wooden cabin at the foot of the Big Wheel. He winced. A man in fraying denims, hair tied back in a ponytail, gave him a hard still look as he passed — a look that seemed to freeze time and silence the music. Peach avoided the man’s eyes. He didn’t want any trouble. Leaving the clutter, the noise, the knots of fascinated boys behind, he wandered off across the grass.

The next half-hour passed uneventfully. He watched a woman push a crying child on a swing. The higher the child went, the more it cried. The woman looked away, smoking. Two black youths loped past in track-suits. They shouted something at him, but again he didn’t understand. It would take a lifetime, and he only had twenty-four hours. He saw a man asleep on a bench, a pair of training-shoes for a pillow, a scar on his bald head like the lace on a football. Mostly there was nothing to look at. It was a drab park, and that beer he had drunk at lunch-time had taken the edge off things.

Then the nightclub slid into his mind — pink, triangular, a vessel carrying a cargo of mysteries — and he imagined the black cloth parting and a face appearing at the window. While he walked aimlessly in the park, the young man whose face he didn’t know left by the side-door. Slipped the net. Escaped again. Time to get back, he thought. And almost ran back up the main road.

But nothing had changed. The black cloth hanging in the fourth-floor window as before. The same cars parked on the street outside. He walked into the café and sat down at his table.

The owner shuffled over in carpet-slippers. ‘Twice in one day,’ he said. ‘You must really like it here.’ He let out a dry sarcastic chuckle.

Peach ignored him. He ordered lasagne, a side salad, vanilla ice-cream, and a cup of black coffee. ‘And make it slow,’ he said.

‘And what?’

‘And make it slow.’

The man backed away, scratching his head.

He returned half an hour later. ‘Slow enough for you?’

Peach nodded.

His lasagne stood on its plate like the model of a block of flats. The salad? A few dog-eared leaves of lettuce and a pile of carrot-shavings. He ate with no appetite, one eye on the window. He sometimes paused for minutes between mouthfuls. He was beginning to hate the pink building. He knew it off by heart, in minute detail, from the fringe of yellow weeds on the roof to the Y-shaped crack beneath one of the ground-floor windows. The pink façade had burned itself into his subconscious and would recur on sleepless nights. His eyes itched with the pinkness of it. He never wanted to look at anything pink again. Never.

Then it was 6.56. A black Rover — a Rover 90, registration PYX 520 — turned into the street that ran down the left-hand side of The Bunker. It parked. The door on the driver’s side opened. A man got out. Early to middle twenties. Leather jacket. White T-shirt. Black jeans. Tall. 6’5”, 6’6”. Big too. 220 Ibs, perhaps. Maybe more. The man was alone.

Peach had long since stopped eating. His two scoops of vanilla ice-cream subsided in their clear glass bowl. He watched the young man cross the pavement, unlock the black side-door, and vanish into the building. A minute or two later a hand parted the black cloth in the fourth-floor window. Peach’s lower lip slid out and back. Once.

While his eyes were scouring the top of the building for further developments, a white Mercedes drew up on the street below. A West Indian climbed out. Coloured chap. Bit shady by all accounts. Could this be the owner?

The West Indian looked right and left as he locked the car door. A routine scan. Then he turned and walked towards The Bunker, lifting his shoulders a couple times, dropping his chin, the moves a boxer makes as he approaches the ring. He opened the double-doors and disappeared inside. Lights came on in a second-floor window. The owner, then.

Peach stirred the thick puddle his ice-cream had become. Part of him wanted to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Moses Highness had drowned in the river, that nobody had ever escaped from the village, that the hundred per cent record was still intact. But now he had proof of his suspicions — the proof that he had, in a way, been dreading. The young man in the leather jacket was no carbon-copy of George Highness — they shared certain basic characteristics: above-average height, similar hair-colour — and yet Peach knew he had seen Moses. It shook him. To know, after twenty-four years, that the baby had survived, escaped, grown up. In the outside world. Anathema to Peach. Anathema and nightmare. He stirred and stirred at his ice-cream. The man in the carpet-slippers asked him if he had finished. ‘No,’ he said.

He had seen what he had come to see and yet he couldn’t leave. Some part of him still needed convincing. He had made inroads. He felt he understood the territory now. He might almost have been on home ground. And he had time to spare. So he waited.

After about fifteen minutes the double-doors swung open again. The West Indian appeared. He wore a dark suit (black? navy? maroon? from this distance it was difficult to tell) and a white tie. He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter and leaned against the wall. He smoked. His head moved, following cars, but he didn’t seem to be waiting for anybody, just passing the time of day. He flicked his cigarette into the road. A shower of sparks.

The black curtain still open on the fourth floor. The light still on.

Dusk came down. Lights in the café now.

Peach suddenly realised how visible he was. A fat man in a lit window. His watching had become conspicuous. He should leave. Move closer. Adopt a more strategic position.

As he paid the bill he noticed the weight of the case in his hand. An inconvenience. Removing his diary and his binoculars, he asked the owner of the café if he would mind looking after the case, just for half an hour or so. The owner said he closed at nine. ‘Fine,’ Peach said.

Outside the café he paused just to one side of the window and hung his binoculars round his neck. When the West Indian was looking the other way, he walked off down the road. He crossed about two hundred yards below the nightclub and began to work his way back. Facing the nightclub, on the same side of the road, stood a fish and chip shop. Wood-veneer tables, red plastic chairs with spindly black legs, white neon lighting that showed every crease and vein in your face. No cover there. But just this side of the fish and chip shop window, Peach found a garage doorway. A low brick wall reaching out across the pavement hid him from the waist down. Shadow did the rest.

He now stood less than forty feet from the West Indian. Even without his binoculars, he could see the built-up heels of the man’s boots. He could also see the side-door of the nightclub — Moses’s front door, in effect. It was ideal.

He checked his watch. Exactly 7.30.

He took his diary out and turned to the page where he had jotted down the times of trains. Trains left Victoria for Haywards Heath at twenty-three minutes past the hour. He had to connect with the local train which would take him to within eight miles of New Egypt. The last local train left Haywards Heath at 10.35. If he caught the 9.23 from Victoria, he would get into Haywards Heath at 10.16. The 9.23, then, was the last train he could catch. A taxi to Victoria would take half an hour, perhaps less. That left him with just under an hour and a half. It ought to be enough. It would have to be.

Twenty minutes passed.

Then the black door opened and Moses appeared. He had changed into a dark suit. Light slid off his wet hair. As he started towards his car, the West Indian called out. Moses paused, turned, walked over. The two men seemed to know each other well. They compared jackets and ties, pushed each other around. They both tilted their heads back when they laughed. They lit cigarettes, and smoke poured from their fingers like slow water. The damaged neon sign above their heads — FLOR AN’s — lit them both in the sharpest detail.

Peach raised his binoculars and focused on Moses. Neither the eyes (hooded, grey) nor the nose (long, slightly crooked) seemed familiar. The mouth, though. The smile that kept forming there. A smile he had seen too often in the past. It belonged to George Highness. The son had inherited his father’s smile.

Now the two men were separating. But when Moses had almost reached his car, he turned, ran back, embraced, smothered, all but crushed the West Indian. Peach lowered his binoculars. Curious behaviour.

Moses returned to his car. He got in, slammed the door. He turned the ignition and the Rover fired first time, engine shuddering. He roared away in a cloud of blue exhaust. Two blasts on the horn. The West Indian shook his head. He straightened his clothes, retouched his hair. Then he settled back against the wall and lit another cigarette. He seemed to be smiling to himself.

And there Peach should have left it, he realised afterwards. That smile had clinched it. No question as to the young man’s identity now. And yet he couldn’t tear himself away. He still had an hour or so and he wanted to exploit this opportunity to the full. After all, he wouldn’t have another. He left the shadows and crossed the side-street. He walked up to the West Indian.

‘Nice evening,’ he said.

The West Indian flicked his cigarette into the gutter. He dusted his jacket with a casual right hand. When he said, ‘Yeah,’ he was looking not at Peach but at his own lapel.

Peach slid his hands into his pockets, leaned back on his heels. ‘I thought you might be able to help me.’

The West Indian looked along his cheekbones at Peach. ‘Don’t know about that.’

Peach studied the tight black curls on the man’s head, sparkling and dense, he looked into the slightly yellow whites of his eyes, he noted the hint of red in the pigmentation of his skin, he saw his lips, ridged like shells, peel back to reveal gums that were pink and grey. Perhaps he stared just a fraction too long, or just a fraction too closely.

‘What’re you looking at?’ The gap between the West Indian’s two front teeth looked dangerous. Like the barrel of a gun.

‘I’m looking for a friend of mine,’ Peach began. ‘His name is Moses. Do you know him?’

‘Who are you?’

‘Me?’ jocular now, ‘I’m an old friend of the family.’

The West Indian’s top lip rolled back over his teeth. He glanced down at his hand. It curled, uncurled, against his thigh.

‘You know what I smell?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Pig.’ The West Indian smiled into Peach’s eyes. ‘I smell pig.’

Peach didn’t understand. Not right away.

‘And that’s not a smell I particularly like, you know?’

Peach could feel the evidence, his badge, cold and heavy in his shirt pocket. Still he insisted: ‘I’m a friend of the family, that’s all.’

‘Yeah,’ said the West Indian, pointing at the binoculars, ‘and those are for birdwatching.’

‘Moses lives here,’ Peach said, ‘doesn’t he?’

The West Indian lit another cigarette. Dunhill King Size. New York Paris London. The gold lighter snapped shut. ‘Does he?’

‘I’m asking you.’

‘I should clear off if I was you.’

‘Listen,’ Peach said, ‘I’m not being unreasonable. All I want to know is if Moses lives here or not.’

‘You heard what I said.’

‘Just tell me,’ Peach said. He was sounding, he realised, less and less like an old friend of the family and more and more like a policeman. Only a policeman would persist like this. And the West Indian knew it.

‘If you don’t fuck off right now,’ the West Indian said, ‘I’m going to have to mess up that nice fat face of yours — ’

Peach hit him hard in the solar plexus. It was a precision punch. It came out of nowhere. It even surprised Peach. He hadn’t hit anybody for five years. The West Indian went down gasping.

Peach looked round for a taxi. There weren’t any. He swore viciously. He only had a few seconds before the West Indian was up again and pulling a knife on him or something. He hastened off down the road. When he was fifty yards away he turned and saw the West Indian climbing to his feet. Peach began to run. In his youth he had been an exceptional dancer. He and Hilda had won the New Egypt Dancing Trophy six years in a row. The rumba, the polka, the foxtrot — they had mastered them all. And even now, at the age of seventy-two, he could still show a remarkable lightness of foot.

As he rounded the curve in the road he heard uncanny jangling music. Not one music, but many, all mixed up, mingling. The lights of the fun-fair came into view.

The fun-fair. Crowds. Safety in numbers.

He crossed the main road and plunged into the park.

Saturday night. It was packed. Children brandished candy-floss and balloons. Strings of naked light-bulbs looped from tree to tree. The Big Wheel soared overhead. A girl’s shoe landed with a slap at his feet, the strap still fastened. He looked up. Hair flew. Screams. The glint of teeth. He pushed on into the crowd.

He stopped outside a yellow tent. A crude picture of a dwarf in a jester’s cap and bells had been painted on to the canvas. Bold red letters bellowed: THE WORLD’S SMALLEST MAN! ONLY THREE FEET TALL! THE MOST AMAZING AND UNIQUE EXPERIENCE! BRING A MAGNIFYING GLASS! Somewhere to hide while he got his breath back, collected his thoughts. He paid his 50p and ducked under the canvas flap.

The world’s smallest man was watching Star Trek on TV. He was sitting in his own specially constructed lounge. All the furniture and fittings had been built to scale: a miniature sofa, a miniature lamp, a miniature clock — even the TV was miniature. Nothing separated him from his visitors — no bars, no sheets of toughened glass — and yet he didn’t seem to be aware of them. He sat in his miniature armchair with his legs crossed, watched his programme on his miniature TV, and drank from a miniature tea-cup which he replaced, gently and precisely, on its miniature saucer after each mouthful.

For a moment Peach lost touch with his surroundings. Staring down at this little man (he really was very small), he felt neither shock nor pity, only a kind of recognition. The world’s smallest man must, from time to time, have thought about escape. Perhaps he had even succeeded in escaping. But then, Peach’s fantasy ran on, he found himself in a world in which he had no place. A world that overlooked him, trampled him. A world that couldn’t help mistreating him because it was so big and he was so small. So he returned to his yellow tent and his miniature lounge. It wasn’t exactly private, but if he concentrated he could imagine that he was alone. He could train himself to ignore those prying eyes, those personal remarks. It was a life.

Peach checked his watch. 8.24. If he wasn’t in a taxi in twenty minutes he’d be done for. He used a buxom middle-aged couple to cover his exit from the tent and darted into the shadows beside the rifle-range. He saw the West Indian standing on the steps of the merry-go-round, white tie loosened, hands on hips, eyes scanning faces. He shrank against the damp green canvas. The whang! of pellets hitting metal ducks resounded in his ears. Sweat registered on his body as a series of cold patches.

He peered out again, watched the West Indian pass his fingertips almost absent-mindedly across his stomach. He smiled from his hiding-place. It had been a textbook punch. Nine inches. Pure Joe Louis. And fast, so fast the West Indian hadn’t even seen it coming. Not bad for an old man.

He began to work his way round the back of the rifle-range towards the road. As if on a parallel track, the West Indian also moved north. The next time Peach looked for him, he saw him leaning against a yellow fence, his scowling face switched on and off by sparks from the dodgems. A second man stood next to him. This second man wore a parka adorned with various military insignia. He must have been seven feet tall. His face a wasteland and cold, so cold, despite the light bleeding from a string of red bulbs above his head. Peach shivered.

8.47.

Only fifty yards now separated him from the metal fence. Beyond the fence, the road. He waited for the two men to turn away, then he lowered his head and ran. The music, the screaming, the gunfire, dwindled. He heard only the rasp of his own breathing as he struggled through the clutter of machinery and cables. Trees added to the confusion. Once he gashed his shin on the jagged head of a tent-peg, but he didn’t falter. He scaled the fence, cleared the pavement, teetered on the kerb. A truck lurched forwards with a vicious hiss as its air-brakes eased. He saw a yellow light and waved frantically. He didn’t dare look round.

The taxi curved towards him through the traffic. He scrambled in and slammed the door. ‘Victoria,’ he gasped. ‘Quick.’

The driver accelerated away. ‘In a hurry, are we?’

8.58.

The taxi turned north at the traffic lights, and Peach glanced behind him for the first time. No sign of the giant or the West Indian. He leaned back against the seat. His leg hurt. He could feel the blood trickling down into his sock.

Orange lights splashed over his face. ‘Never again,’ he murmured. ‘Never again.’

He wound the window down.

Air.

Every time the taxi stopped at a set of traffic lights, the driver pulled out a harmonica and began to play tunes that Peach remembered from the thirties and forties. Peach was suddenly overwhelmed by the sense of being somewhere strange, somewhere foreign yet magical, somewhere utterly incongruous. In his exhaustion he had become a tourist.

The driver caught his eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘Don’t mind, do you, guy?’

‘Not at all,’ Peach said. ‘It’s delightful. Very soothing.’

‘Soothing?’ The driver squinted over his shoulder. ‘First time anyone’s ever called it that.’

They both laughed.

The taxi rattled up on to the dreary skeleton of Vauxhall Bridge. It was only then that Peach realised he had left his case in that café on Kennington Road.

*

9.09.

Too late to turn round and go back. Too late, too dangerous. He took a swift inventory of the contents. Pyjamas, washing-bag, A — Z, a Thermos flask, one stale ham sandwich. Nothing that couldn’t be replaced. And, more to the point, nothing that betrayed his identity. After all, it could easily fall into the wrong hands (the West Indian’s, for instance). Thank God he had transferred his diary to his jacket pocket.

The taxi pulled up in front of Victoria Station at 9.21. Peach handed the driver a handsome tip.

‘That’s for getting me here on time,’ he said, ‘and for the music.’ And for saving my life, he added silently.

‘Cheers, guv.’ The driver leaned across and looked up at Peach. Light skated off the thick lenses of his glasses. His teeth angled back into his mouth like a shark’s. ‘You ought to slow down a bit, man your age. You’ll kill yourself. Take my word for it.’

Peach promised to take things easier in the future. It was a promise he intended to keep.

He caught the train with two minutes to spare.

He shared the carriage with a soldier, unshaven, hollow-cheeked, smoking. Just the two of them. Saturday night, Peach remembered. Not many people left the city on Saturday night.

The train shifted tracks on its way out of the station. A sound like knives being ground. Once over the bridge it gathered speed, shedding the lights of the city the way a meteor sheds sparks. The soldier slept, using his kit-bag as a pillow.

At Haywards Heath Peach climbed out. He had to wait twenty-five minutes on the draughty platform.

He sat on a bench and gazed at the initials, the messages, the obscenities, that had been carved into the thick green paint.

He stared into the darkness where the silver rails met. Sometimes the coloured lights of the fun-fair whirled through his mind like bright cars in a nightmare.

The local train stopped at every station on the line. This time he was alone in the carriage.

At 11.22 he handed his ticket to a yawning guard and walked down a long flight of wooden steps to the car-park. A breeze lifted and dropped the leaves of a tree, and he thought of the girl with the blonde hair. His bicycle lay where he had left it. He hauled it back up the mud bank, a twig twanging in the spokes. He switched on the front and rear lights, swung himself on to the saddle, and rode away.

Trees built a dark cathedral over the road. The moon slid out from behind a cloud and the gaps between branches turned into windows. Hedges rustled like a priest’s vestments. Birds mumbled in the undergrowth. The air was cool, peaceful, sharp with sap. Peach pedalled slowly, his left leg aching. It was almost as if the day had never happened. He was conscious of moving from a garish dream into calm familiar reality.

He approached the village from the south-west. He caught a glimpse of the lights of Bunt across the fields to the right. He passed the phone-box the brigadier had used in 1945 after Tommy Dane’s bomb blew up. Shortly after crossing the boundary into New Egypt he was blinded by the beam of a torch.

‘Oh, sorry, Chief Inspector,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘I didn’t realise it was you.’

When his eyes readjusted Peach recognised PC Wilmott and, behind her, helmet askew, the excitable Marlpit.

‘Not at all,’ he said, dismounting, ‘not at all. Very glad to see you operating with such efficiency at this time of night.’

Wilmott, a modest woman, ducked her head. Marlpit sucked in a string of saliva.

Peach smiled down. ‘Anything to report?’

‘Nothing, sir.’ Wilmott tilted the shallow dish of her face so that it filled with moonlight. ‘A very quiet night.’

Peach inhaled a deep lungful of village air. ‘A glorious night too, if I may say so.’

The two constables murmured their agreement.

‘Well,’ and Peach climbed astride his bicycle, ‘I should be off home. Mrs Peach will be getting worried, no doubt.’ He smiled again. ‘Good night to you both.’

‘Good night,’ the constables chorused.

Peach had hoped to slip back into the village unseen, but now he thought about it he realised it really didn’t matter. As Chief Inspector he was above the law, beyond suspicion. He explained his movements to no one. Like God he moved in mysterious ways. There were any number of reasons why he might have been riding a bicycle along the boundary at midnight. He might have been putting in a surprise appearance, as generals do, to boost morale. He might have been testing the alertness of his night patrols. He might simply have been taking the air. Rather pleased with his improvisations, he rode on into New Egypt. He forked right at the village green and in less than five minutes he was opening the front door of the old vicarage.

‘Hilda, I’m home.’

There was no reply.

‘Hilda?’

He walked into the lounge and found his wife asleep in front of a flickering television. He rested a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m back.’

Hilda’s eyelids slid upwards as if she had only pretended to be dozing. ‘I was worried about you,’ she said.

‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

‘But your trousers — ’

He glanced down. His trouser-leg had torn just below the knee. Blood had soaked through. ‘Oh, yes. I fell off my bicycle. Stupid of me.’ He looked appropriately sheepish.

‘Oh, John. But how did everything go?’

‘Very well. Very well indeed, actually. I’m feeling rather tired, though.’

‘Poor dear. I don’t know why you take it into your head to do these things. It’s quite unnecessary, I’m sure. And you know it only exhausts you.’ In humouring her husband without ever quite understanding him, in her light-hearted approach to his incomprehensibility, in her ignorance, Hilda sometimes touched on the truth.

He smiled down at her. He wished he could describe his adventures to her — the cafés and hotels, the trains, the famous buildings. He wished he could tell her about Madame Zola, the world’s smallest man, the Asian boy, the blonde girl (on second thoughts, no, not the blonde girl), Terence the landlord, the black nightclub-owner and his seven-foot sidekick. But these were stories he could share with no one. Not even his wife.

‘You’re right,’ he sighed. ‘I’m going to have a hot bath and go straight to bed.’

He kissed the top of her head where the grey curls were beginning to wear thin, then limped across the room, pausing by the door to say, ‘It’s nice to be home, dear.’