The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul

Chapter 19

Turning north was a manoeuvre which normally had the effect of restoring a sense of reason and sanity to things, but Dirk could not escape a sense of foreboding.

Furthermore it came on to rain a little, which should have helped, but it was such mean and wretched rain to come from such a heavy sky that it only increased the sense of claustrophobia and frustration which gripped the night. Dirk turned on the car wipers which grumbled because they didn't have quite enough rain to wipe away, so he turned them off again. Rain quickly speckled the windscreen.

He turned on the wipers again, but they still refused to feel that the exercise was worthwhile, and scraped and squeaked in protest. The streets turned treacherously slippery.

Dirk shook his head. He was being quite absurd, he told himself, in the worst possible way. He had allowed himself to become fanciful in a manner that he quite despised. He astounded himself at the wild fantasies he had built on the flimsiest amount of, well he would hardly call it evidence, mere conjecture.

An accident at an airport. Probably a simple explanation.

A man with a hammer. So what?

A grey van which Kate Schechter had seen at the hospital. Nothing unusual about that. Dirk had nearly collided with it, but again, that was a perfectly commonplace occurrence.

A Coca-Cola machine: he hadn't taken that into account.

Where did a Coca-Cola machine fit into these wild notions about ancient gods? The only idea he had about that was simply too ridiculous for words and he refused even to acknowledge it to himself.

At that point Dirk found himself driving past the house where, that very morning, he had encountered a client of his who had had his severed head placed on a revolving record turntable by a green-eyed devil-figure waving a scythe and a blood-signed contract who had then vanished into thin air.

He peered at it as he passed, and when a large dark-blue BMW pulled out from the kerb just ahead of him he ran straight into the back of it, and for the second time that day he had to leap out of his car, already shouting.

“For God's sake can't you look where you're going?” he exclaimed, in the hope of bagging his adversary's best lines from the outset. “Stupid people!” he continued, without pausing for breath. “Careering all over the place. Driving without due care and attention! Reckless assault!” Confuse your enemy, he thought. lt was a little like phoning somebody up, and saying “Yes? Hello?” in a testy voice when they answered, which was one of Dirk's favourite methods of whiling away long, hot summer afternoons. He bent down and examined the palpable dent in the rear of the BMW, which was quite obviously, damn it, a brand new one. Blast and bugger it, thought Dirk.

“Look what you've done to my bumper!” he cried. “I hope you have a good lawyer!”

“I am a good lawyer,” said a quiet voice which was followed by a quiet click. Dirk looked up in momentary apprehension. The quiet click was only the sound of the car door closing.

The man was wearing an Italian suit, which was also quiet. He had quiet glasses, quietly cut hair, and though a bow-tie is not, by its very nature, a quiet object, the particular bow-tie he wore was, nevertheless, a very quietly spotted example of the genre. He drew a slim wallet from his pocket and also a slim silver pencil. He walked without fuss to the rear of Dirk's Jaguar and made a note of the registration number.

“Do you have a card?” he enquired as he did so, without looking up. “Here's mine,” he added, taking one from his wallet. He made a note on the back of it. “My registration number,” he said, “and the name of my insurance company. Perhaps you would be good enough to let me have the name of yours. If you don't have it with you, I'll got my girl to call you.”

Dirk sighed, and decided there was no point in putting up a fight on this one. He fished out his wallet and leafed through the various business cards that seemed to accumulate in it as if from nowhere. He toyed for a second with the idea of being Wesley Arlott, an ocean-going yacht navigation consultant from, apparently, Arkansas, but then thought better of it. The man had, after all, taken his registration number, and although Dirk had no particular recollection of paying an insurance premium of late, he also had no particular recollection of not paying one either, which was a reasonably promising sign. He handed over a bonafide card with a wince. The man looked at it.

“Mr Gently,” he said. “Private investigator. I'm sorry, private holistic investigator. OK.”

He put the card away, taking no further interest.

Dirk had never felt so patronised in his life. At that moment there was another quiet click from the other side of the car. Dirk looked across to see a woman with red spectacles standing there giving him a frozen half smile. She was the woman he had spoken with over Geoffrey Anstey's garden wall this morning, and the man, Dirk therefore supposed, was probably her husband. He wondered for a second whether he should wrestle them to the ground and question them rigorously and violently, but he was suddenly feeling immensely tired and run down.

He acknowledged the woman in red spectacles with a minute inclination of his head.

“All done, Cynthia,” said the man and flicked a smile on and off at her. “It's all taken care of.”

She nodded faintly, and the two of them climbed back into their BMW and after a moment or two pulled away without fuss and disappeared away down the road. Dirk looked at the card in his hand. Clive Draycott. He was with a good firm of City solicitors. Dirk stuck the card away in his wallet, climbed despondently back into his car, and drove on back to his house, where he found a large golden eagle sitting patiently on his doorstep.