Chapter Fifteen

In a cold winter, on a Saturday, when Daniel was five and Elizabeth twelve, he had taken them to the Planetarium, for which his son was a little too young, but his daughter had enjoyed it. Afterwards, after lunch at a place in Baker Street, the sun had come out and they had walked to St. John's Wood tube station through the Park. Frost still lingered on the grass and there were patches of snow in shady places. The lake was frozen over. Elizabeth, who was a skater and had received a new pair of skates for Christmas, wanted to know why no one was on the ice and Roman had told them, not going into too many details because Daniel was so young, of the disaster on the ice of February 1867, since which time no one had been allowed to skate there. Several hundred people had been on the ice when it began to break, for they had persisted in spite of warnings from the man from the Humane Society who cried to them, "For God's sake get off, or there will be a great calamity!" "Were they drowned?" Daniel asked. "Some were." Roman didn't say how many; he didn't say forty. He didn't say that a hundred and fifty people went into the water and forty died. "The lake was deeper then. It was twelve feet deep between the islands, and the ice was never thick enough. The Tyburn river flowed through it and a fast current stops thick ice forming." The children had looked across the lake to the great house called The Holme and at the islands lying below it. Swans and geese and ducks congregated on their banks. Elizabeth wanted to know how the people were got out of the water. "They sent down divers. Afterwards the lake was drained and remade and now it's no more than four feet deep anywhere." "Are there ghosts?" said Daniel. "In the night do the ghosts of drowned people come out of the water?" "Ghosts don't exist, Daniel," said Roman. But now he wondered, for in his winter dreams he had sometimes seen the people from the ice disaster rising from the black water and the ice floes, as in that Pre Raphaelite painting of the sea giving up it's dead, and once among the faces had been his children's, wan in death, and his wife's. Often, while the children were still alive, he had regretted even the expurgated version of events he had given Daniel, for the boy would revert to it in cold weather and Roman thought he too had dreamed about it. The bombing of the bandstand, another horror, had taken place within Elizabeth's lifetime, though she had been only about three and had known nothing of the IRA bomb that killed and injured so many bandsmen. At least, he had never told them that. They had never in their Park walks passed the spot where the bandstand stood on the northern bank of the lake, flanked now by memorial willows. Was this what was happening now, another Park tragedy? Yet he had noticed, and wondered if others had, that the two murders, very obviously linked, had both taken place outside the Park, if on it's perimeter. It was on a news board opposite Baker Street Station and outside the Globe that he first read of the second one. Typically, the news on it was couched in ambiguous terms. You had to buy the paper to know the true facts. "Second Homeless Man Horror", said the news board "Horror" could mean many things. The ice disaster and the bandstand bombing were both horrors. Roman should have bought the paper but he didn't, not then. He was on his way to the launderette in Paddington Street to wash his clothes, after which he would return to the men's toilets just off the Broad Walk, wash himself all over and put on clean T-shirt, denims and sweater. Forty minutes in front of the rotating machines, another ten in the second-hand bookshop swapping _Dead _Souls for _Kim, and he was resolved on buying the _Standard on his way back. It was on sale outside the station. Roman bought a copy and sat down on the low wall to read it. The dead man had not yet been named. His body, like John Dominic Cahill's, was found impaled on railings near Regent's Park, but as in Decker's case death was not thought to be due to impalement. He had been stabbed first by a knife with a six-inch long blade. He was found in the early hours of the morning by a man returning to his home in Primrose Hill from an eighteenth birthday party. This man wasn't named either. Roman hoped the body wasn't Dill's. He folded up the paper, put it in his pocket, and walked up past Madame Tussaud's under the scaffolding. They had been refurbishing, decorating, renovating the building for months. He found he had been holding his breath and now he expelled it thankfully. Dill was siting on the pavement with his beagle beside him and a paper bag of dog biscuits that the animal was busily eating. Roman sat beside him and showed him the _Standard. Dill said he'd seen it on the telly. They had an old black and white television set in the shelter where he sometimes slept. "They never said railings," Dill said. "They said broken glass on top of a wall." "Where was it?" "Primrose Hill somewhere. They never said. It scared me." Dill had a thin pale face and eyes whose swollen lids seemed pulled down by the epicanthic fold, but he was too white and his sparse hair too fair to be oriental. Roman had never known him to drink. He often seemed afraid and now his fear had intensified to the point of straining and shrivelling the skin of his face. His age, Roman thought, was probably no more than twenty-five. "I don't like the sound of that glass," he said. "Glass going into you, lace-, lacer-, lacernating you. That's what they said." A woman dropped a fifty pee coin into the hat on the pavement. "Thank you very much," Dill said. The dog sniffed the coin and wagged his tail. "It's us he's after," said Dill. "Our sortdd0 He offered no definition, used none of the many descriptive words, but Roman understood. The newspaper had said much the same and as cagily. The two men, murdered within a month of each other, had both been homeless... "You go to St. Anthony's don't you?" St. Anthony's was the shelter in Lisson Grove. "Better stay there every night. You'll be safe then. Till he's been caught" Roman could see in Dill's wistful look that in the summer he preferred the open air. If it wasn't wet or too cold he would rather sleep under the stars, or what passed for them, the reddish milky way of reflected light. But he nodded, somewhat comforted, and he put out his arms to pull the dog on to his lap. Making his way into the Park to the York Gate, Roman turned to follow the southern shore of the lake. An old woman in a tracksuit was feeding a black swan and her cygnets with broken biscuits. A heron took flight from a tree on the island and flew westwards, its wings wide, its neck in an S-bend. The sun had brought the people out. They strolled desultorily along the lake shore or sat on the seats. No fear showed in their faces. There was nothing to indicate the violent death that had taken place half a mile from here the night before. It was warmer, hotter even, than it had been all year. Real summer had come, you would say if you were a visitor or a tourist and unaware that real summer may never come, nor real winter for that matter, and that the weather is fickle, arbitrary -hot today and cold tomorrow, dry now and wet later. The Park was a pattern of green light and shade, not much other colour. Men and women wear bright colours in hot climates, but blue and grey here, brown and black and gravel beige. The water of the lake was a gleaming grey, glassy and calm. Roman asked himself if he shared Dill's fear. As vulnerable as Dill (or Pharaoh or Effie or the jacks men was he afraid to die, stabbed through the heart and the lungs and the great vessels round the heart, then impaled on a fence? He found himself unable to answer. Once he could have answered, once he would have welcomed death meted out by someone else. Was he afraid to die? It frightened him that he had changed, that he could no longer give an unqualified no, that he must give half a yes. Because surely the opposite of saying no was, "I want to live..." In the men's toilets he washed himself all over. He waited until the sun was setting and most of the visitors had gone and then he washed himself at a basin, the top half first, then, discreetly, the lower half, with his towel clean from the launderette wrapped round his waist. Two men came in but he knew from experience they would ignore him. They would fear him. He was a dosser who might beg from them, gibber and wave his arms or shout imprecations. When they had gone he washed his hair and part-dried it under the hand dryer. Being clean brought an unprecedented sense of well-being. He emerged, dirty clothes rolled up in his barrow, and sat on a seat at the top of the Broad Walk by the Parsee's fountain, looking at the weathered carvings of birds and animals, and at the worn pink marble pillars. He drank the pint of milk he had bought, wished it were wine, and read _Kim. The police came round and shooed him out at nine-thirty, by which time it was too dark to read. He had no idea where to sleep the night, thought of but rejected the Irene Adler's porch as being too near the site of the first murder, and Regent's Park Road as being too near (presumably) the second. Leaving the Park by the Gloucester Gate and the deserted children's playground, he paused as he always did on this spot to look at Joseph Durham's figure in bronze of a pretty young girl, winsome, sweet-faced, standing on an artistic arrangement of rocks. Shading her eyes with one hand, she seemed to be gazing at Gloucester terrace. Hers was precisely the face of a girlfriend he had once had, long before he met Sally. To look at this girl, set upon her rocky perch a hundred and twenty years ago, was to see his girlfriend again, to remember and feel a trace of nostalgia. Once or twice, while looking, he had wondered what his reaction would have been if that were Sally's face or Elizabeth's. Would he linger in front of the statue or shun it, dreading to look it full in the eye? He crossed the road and peered down into the leafy dale, once perhaps an ornamental garden, known as the Grotto. The low wall of the bridge over a defunct arm of the canal bore a bronze has-relief commemorating the martyrdom of St. Pancras, the saint with uplifted radiant face attacked by a lioness that looked mild and friendly and who jumped up at him like a dog. There were rocks down there and a stone-coped pool, figure eight-shaped, its water brown and coated with a network of scum. Among the laurels and rhododendrons litter lay or was caught on branches- shreds of plastic, newspaper soaked and dried and soaked again, beer bottles, torn dark rags. Tangles of barbed wire and chain-link fencing muddled together seemed to serve no purpose. Roman looked about for a way in. He walked along past the has-relief and turned a little way into Park Village East where a big Victorian villa was in the process of renovation. Builders' skips, ladders, concrete mixer and timber stood about. He pushed open a gate in the wall and made his way into the derelict garden which overlooked the Grotto. From this direction it was possible to avoid most of the wire entanglements. He had long since discovered that barbed wire does a poor job of keeping out intruders if the intruders don't mind getting their clothes torn. It was a neglected, decaying, private place that he found himself in. He plucked a couple of drinking straws or a drinking straw unaccountably cut in half, from between the leaves of a bush. His ground sheet spread out on leaf mould, he prepared his bed, sheltered from the bridge by rhododendrons, from the night sky by the branches of a taller tree. In the damp leafy shade it was cold and he pulled on a sweater before he climbed into his sleeping bag. At this time of the year the dawn came before four thirty He saw the brilliance of a sunrise between leaves, a white dazzlement behind a tracery of black, but the first thing he thought of was the death of one of "our sort", and it surprised him that he had been able to sleep so peacefully. It was as if he had only just lain down, had this minute closed his eyes, and the whole night had passed in seconds. Often he had no morning meal but today he went into one of the early-opening cafes in Camden Town and, like the condemned man he was, ate a hearty breakfast, eggs and bacon, sausages and fried bread. A glass of something bitter and thin he had learned to call orange juice came with it and strong henna-coloured tea. He would have felt self-conscious in there once, but no longer. Most of the customers looked like him. At least he had had a wash and changed his clothes the afternoon before. At the Talisman Press they had published a book about the old farmlands of North London. He remembered it now as he walked along Albert Road, recalling the engravings of Chalk Farm and Primrose Hill. The only thing that looked remotely the same was the hill itself, rising out of the level ground more like a man-made tumulus than a natural formation. Once he had looked up and seen a figure standing on the summit, his hands upraised to the sky. Suddenly the figure flung itself down, waving its arms and kicking its legs, before rising again and once more seeming to implore help from heaven. Roman had guessed it was Pharaoh, but he was too far away to see the blue on his hair or the glint of his keys. The old farmland trees must have gone sometime in the nineteenth century. It was all planes now and a few horn beams ornamental trees that looked incongruous to him with lush tall grass growing close to their trunks. He took the paths along the eastern side, recalling the account of a murder from the same book. Sir Edmund Godfrey's body had been found in a ditch on the south side of Primrose Hill one day at the end of the seventeenth century. Though his sword was thrust through his body, strangulation had caused his death. Nothing had been taken from him, his money was in his pocket, but he was all over bruises and his neck was broken. Medals were struck to commemorate his death, on one of which he was shown as walking with a broken neck and a sword running him through. Roman thought he remembered reading of several people being executed for the murder and reading too of duels fought on the hill. He told himself he had come in there to find somewhere pleasant and peaceful to sit and read his Kipling but he knew he had another reason. That accounted for his dwelling on the violent deaths of the past. There was no one on the summit today. It was windy, the planes' thready branches blowing and the horn beams ruffled. He walked along the northern perimeter and saw the blue and white crime tape on the railings far ahead of him. Long before reaching the place he went out into Primrose Hill Road. A row of cars were parked, obvious police cars and probable police cars. On the opposite side of the road a small crowd stood, waiting, watching, though there was nothing to watch. The tape cordoned off severaal yards of pavement but the railing itself was swathed in sheeting. A bunch of flowers, wrapped in clear film, lay on the pavement outside the cordon. Someone, then, had cared for this derelict and Roman wondered who. He looked about him and saw railing everywhere. There must be miles of it in the Park's vicinity, the spiked kind like this and the kind with blunted spikes. Here railings separated gardens from pavements and gardens from other gardens, skirted churches, made confining barriers along paths. Where in other places fences might be or hedges or walls, here were iron railings, straight, plain, usually painted black, crossed with two horizontal bars at foot and top, crowned with spikes. This murderer could have no difficulty in finding a site for a crime. Sites proliferated. If all he needed was a homeless man and a stretch of railings, his activities could be infinite. Roman stood with the crowd, watching faces, but these gave nothing away. They were blank, apathetic, patient. A policeman who had been doing something to the tape, adjusting it or shortening it or pulling it in some different direction, got into his car and drove away. The red and white van of Express Tikka and Pizza slowed a little as the driver passed the spot but quickly moved on. A woman in the crowd lit a cigarette. Roman turned back on the hill and sat on a seat that was sunny and sheltered from the wind. He tried to read but his concentration was poor and his thoughts wandered back to Sir Edmund Godfrey, whose murder seemed as pointless as these, whose apparent killers had protested their innocence to the last and whose ghost was believed to haunt the Hill. That reminded him of his son, brought Daniel before him, Daniel who half-believed in the ghosts of the drowned rising through the broken ice. After a while he was on the move again, in quest as he had been on the previous day of a newspaper. It was not much after ten but the _Standard was already on the `:0<1' streets. He bought a copy and, leaning against a long sweep of railings, read that the second victim of the man they were calling the Impaler had been identified. He was James Victor Clancy, aged thirty-six, of no fixed address, known to some as the key man and to others as Pharaoh.

Chapter 16

The American tourist asked for a list of items to be shipped to Cincinnati for himself and his wife: Irene Adler's best tea service, the framed picture that looked like a Klimt, the photograph she had given to Holmes, two lace tablecloths and a heap of wax fruit under a glass dome. Mary was making sure he understood they were all replicas, not antiques, all the _kind of thing a woman such as Irene might have possessed in 1885, when Stacey came in to tell her a man had called for her. "To take you home," Stacey said. "Well, it's gone five." "What's his name? Didn't he give his name?" "I never asked." It must be Leo. He was taking two days off to settle into his new flat and on a fine afternoon, might walk from Edis Street to Charles Lane without too much exertion. The colour came up into her face and from the way the American smiled she thought he had noticed and drawn his own conclusions. "I'll come as soon as I've finished here." She wrote the things down in the order book. The man from Cincinnati gave her his card. Just as he was leaving - he had asked her where she thought the next murder would be located. Someone on their tour favoured the zoo and they were laying bets. "I say in back of the theatre and my wife she's all for those big kinda gates by the rose garden." Mary didn't know what to say so she only smiled, or tried to. Dorothea had already gone. Mary turned the notice on the shop door to "closed" and hoped Stacey had done the same for the museum. She and Leo might go out to eat this evening and perhaps he would stay overnight with her. He had never yet done this, he had never made love to her, but it would come soon. This slow approach tantalised her, enhancement of a mounting sexual excitement. Three times now they had lain side by side in her bed at Charlotte Cottage and at last he had begun to caress her very softly and gently, with an interest that seemed more like pleasure than patience. She had whispered to him not to stop, that all would be well, he had nothing to fear. "Next time," he had said. Next time was this time. She was a little aware of her seniority and more than a little of the gratitude he owed her, but she managed at least for the time to dismiss all that. She had looked in one of Irene Adler's mirrors, gilt-framed with cherubs and curlicues, and thought that she looked better, younger, prettier, than at any time since she heard of her grandmother's death. The sun had turned her hair from straw to gold. She came out into the hall to greet Leo with a smile and her hands oust retched The man waiting was Alistair. The smile that was not for him encouraged him to throw his arms round her. He would have kissed her mouth if she hadn't turned it quickly away and presented her cheek. Stacey watched avidly. "Surprise?" he said. "I didn't expect you, Alistair." "Until they catch this man. I don't want you walking to and fro on your own." She shrugged, could think of nothing to say that hadn't already been said. "I'm thinking of you. Of your safety. While you're still coming here, if I can't be here you get a taxi, is that understood?" Some women, presumably, were flattered by this sort of hectoring manner, by being told what to do and then asked if a simple command wasn't beyond their comprehension. No one, not her grandfather, nor from what she could remember, her father, had ever talked to her like this. Impossible to imagine Leo capable of the words or the tone without breaking down into helpless laughter. "Oddly enough, Alistair," She said, trying to keep her voice light, "I can look after myself." "I wonder how many foolhardy women have said that before coming to grief? Now why wouldn't you dine with me last week, Mary? I think I deserve an explanation." "I'm sorry," she said. "I haven't got one. I haven't got an explanation." She walked ahead of him out of the museum, thinking fast, making up her mind how to handle his presence and the plans he had no doubt made for the evening to come. Go out with him to eat somewhere she would not, nor take him back with her to Charlotte Cottage. Somehow she must shake him off. He was hastening to the corner of St. John's Wood Terrace, his right arm already upraised for a taxi. He said over his shoulder, "We have to talk about this, but of course you'll give up the-" He was seeking a polite word, "-the shop, museum, whatever you call it. You won't _need to work." "Alistair," she said. There must have been something in her tone he had never heard before. She was aiming at that and it looked as if she had succeeded. He said, "Yes, what?" "I'm not going in a taxi with you. I'm not going back to Park Village. I'm on my way to see a friend." "What friend?" He spoke abstractedly, watching the departing taxi with disappointment. She took a deep breath. "The man who had my transplant." she tried again, not looking at him. "The man who received my bone marrow donation." "You are not serious." His voice was cold and smooth as water. It was a strange voice to emerge from those thick lips, that flushed hot face. He can't shake me out here, she thought. He can't hit me in the street. "I am perfectly serious. I have met him and I - - I like him and we are-" How to say it? What words to choose? "-seeing each other." He came close up to her. She saw his hands move to take hold of her and fall again as his sense of the conventions inhibited him. He trembled with impotence. "You're not fit to be left alone if that's what happens when you're alone." "And you're not my judge, Alistair." She spoke bravely but her voice was small. "I don't want you toto pronounce on what I do, who I see." He was shrill with indignation. "Someone must. You're not fit to do it yourself." She shook her head, trying to be dismissive. "I don't want to see you again, Alistair." "I am not hearing this," he said. "We said our goodbyes before I left. We went through everything. We decided - we _both _decided - it was best. It was all over. Don't you remember? You were happy to see me go, you said. And then you came back. It wasn't my wish and it isn't now. I hope we can be friends one day but it can't be yet. I don't want to see you - can't you understand that?" "I think it's generally true of you, Mary, that you don't know what you want." "We shouldn't be having this - this discussion out here in public." "Then why are we? You began it." She hesitated. "I would be afraid to have it indoors, that's why. Do you understand? I'd be afraid of you." He made an impatient gesture. "Where does he live?" Again she shook her head. "You said you were going to him, so I ask you, where does he live?" Had his manner always been so hectoring? Not when he got his own way. Of course not then. And he had nearly always, then always, got his way when they were together. If he had never raised his hand to her she would be meekly married to him by now. She felt a dread of being captured by him, forced into a cab, taken home, browbeaten there, perhaps struck. Turning away, she began to walk, rather aimlessly, down Charlbert Street towards the Park. Alistair came after her, taking bold purposeful strides. He grabbed hold of her arm with a hard hand and started to march her along. It was the way she had sometimes seen, and deeply disliked seeing, a parent manhandle a child of perhaps eight years old that was misbehaving in a shopping centre. Like that parent, Alistair jerked her arm while keeping it pressed by his own hand close against her side. His voice had become abrupt, clipped. "Tell me where he lives, this con man of yours." "Why do you call him that?" "Please. Be your age. How long have you been here? How long is it since you told that Harvest Trust place this Oliver could be told who you were? Six weeks? Seven? And in that time he hasn't just made himself known to you, he's got to the point of - what's your phrase" seeing you". Does that mean sleeping with? I sincerely hope not, Mary, I sincerely do, for your sake and his. In that time your grandmother died and made you a rich woman. Doesn't that tell you what he's after?" "It tells me what you are, Alistair," she said quietly. "Perhaps what you've always been after. Oliver - - I don't want to tell you his name- would prefer me poor, only I'm not and he has to put up with me as I am. Now will you please let go of my arm?" For a moment she stood frozen, then pulled herself away from him and began to run. The gesture was so sudden that he was startled and briefly incapable of movement, stunned by her unaccustomed decisiveness and rejection of him. She ran across the road and he was unable to follow her for the traffic from the Park end, three cars coming along almost nose to tail. One of them started to double-park, holding the rest up. Mary ran without aim westwards along Allitsen Road. When she had told Alistair she was going to Leo, this had been no more than an escape ploy and as she now saw, an unwise one. There had been no real intention of visiting Leo's new flat and there was none now. She wanted only to elude Alistair and somehow hide herself from him until he grew tired and went home. But as she ran across Avenue Road - he was pursuing her but once again had been held up and frustrated by traffic, this time a stream of rush hour cars pouring towards the Park and the Macclesfield Bridge - she asked herself why not go to Leo, why not shake off Alistair and go to Leo? It was a long time since she and her grandmother had been to call for that friend in Primrose Hill and she had no clear idea how to find her way to Edis Street, only a notion that it might be a turning off Gloucester Avenue. Since the second murder the thought of the open greens of Primrose Hill frightened her, but it was light, the broadest daylight, and bright and sunny too. If she had ever been in there before, perhaps twenty years ago, she had forgotten the place. The man with the beard that she had come upon reading _Dead _Souls was crossing the green towards the Ormonde Terrace Gate. He smiled at her. She said a breathless, "Hallo", wanted to tell him, if he saw Alistair, to send him off in the opposite direction. But of course she couldn't do that. There was no time to pause and read the map at the gate. She looked back once, then rushed into Primrose Hill and hid herself behind the plane trees in the long grass. It was quite unlike Regent's Park, wilder, nearer to Hampstead Heath. The hill rose up, a pronounced green peak, out of green slopes and planes, and all around its borders were tall trees and grass and cow parsley gone to seed. The grass where she squatted smelt like the country. she could see a cricket on a dandelion leaf. If Alistair had come on to the Hill it wasn't through that gate. She gave him ten minutes and when he still hadn't appeared began to walk along the path that runs parallel to Albert Road. Her pale cream shoes were streaked with green smears and threads on the hem of her skirt had been pulled by brambles. It didn't seem important. There must be no chance of meeting Alistair headon, so Regent's Park Road should be avoided. She began to run again, lightly, not too fast, because running made her feel free. It came to her that she had actually told Alistair she didn't want to see him again. She had told him things were over between them and told him why, and this pleased her; she felt it had been brave of her. Lately she had been thinking a lot about her own passive gentle temperament, her inability to say no, her politeness and her acquiescence, and she had wondered if she was one of those said to be born to be victims. Those people were attracted to the strong and aggressive and they to the victims. But perhaps, to coincide with her meeting Leo, she was changing, asserting herself, leaving victimhood behind. It was frightening to think of oneself as doomed to be used and maltreated by others, not a free agent and master of one's fate. Avoiding Regent's Park Road was impossible, but she crossed it quickly, into Fitzroy Road. Wherever Alistair might be, he wouldn't come into these streets - she was sure he was even more ignorant of the place than she - and slackening her pace, she slowed to a walk until she came to Chalcot Road, which forms the spine of Primrose Hill. She had read somewhere that there was once an old manor house of Chalcot here and that Chalk Farm itself was a corruption of the name. Alistair would be lost here; he would have turned back by now. As Mary walked along the pretty, shabby, dusty street the thought came to her that perhaps it was unwise to visit Leo out of the blue. She did not know him well enough yet to drop in on him. The unkind and prejudiced things Alistair had said had given rise to these misgivings. Surely she should discard them, forget them. These allegations sprang from his jealousy and unaccountable hatred of "Oliver" that had started long before she met him. But even so might she not be doing a risky thing? She imagined Leo not alone. Not necessarily with another girl, not that, but with the brother he was so close to or even their mother or some friend to whom he would be reluctant to introduce her, or just- since he had only yesterday moved in -surrounded by disorder and chaos, in a panic of failure to cope. The prospect of turning back, going back to Charlotte Cottage and spending a lonely evening with Gushi, kept her walking on. Suddenly she was at Edis Street. There it was, a left-hand turning of mid-Victorian terraced villas, more stucco, plaster, scrollwork, untidy flowery front gardens, bicycles chained to fences. Three steps led up to a dark green front door. But first, dividing the small front garden from the pavement, black-painted, spiked, iron railings. She shivered inwardly. Did everybody in North-West One see railings where they had never noticed them before? There was still time to turn back. In spite of herself, she imagined walking into his room and seeing a woman her own age sitting there, her shoes kicked off, a glass of wine in her hand. A dark woman, she thought, quite unlike herself, with a tangled bush of hair and a bright sparkling face. The idea of it caused a surge of anguish. But she pressed the bell marked with a newly printed card: L. Nash. No voice came out of the grille. He must have seen her from a window. The door trembled and growled, came open as she pushed it. She started to walk up the stairs, more quickly when he called her from above. "Come up. How wonderful of you to come!" He was standing in the open doorway. She was learning that he didn't want to kiss or even touch her when first they met. It was just that they stood close together for an instant, looking into each other's faces. They did this now and she felt her own expression echoing his with a small conspiratorial smile. It was an ordinary little room that he had, two open doors off it disclosing the whole of his small domain. A very tidy man might have been living there for six months, the kind of man with a place for everything and everything in that place. Roses from a garden not a florist's filled a blue vase on the windowsill. He had been hanging curtains. One was up and the other, half its rings inserted, lay draped across the back of his single armchair. "I was about to phone you and ask you to come," he said, "but I didn't need to. You read my mind." She looked about her and a warm joy flooded her, filling her body and her head, until it seemed it must break out of her in happy laughter. "I was afraid - well, a bit apprehensive about coming. I thought you might not be pleased." He put his arms round her and laid his cheek against hers. She was aware as he held her of the peculiar feeling she had when with him of twin ship of being uncannily like him, older certainly, but physically so similar and with the same tentativeness, caution, shyness, gentleness and fingertip-feeling sensitivity. "I will always be too pleased," he said. "I will be too pleased for words, for anything. I can't tell you how pleased." He saw her arm and frowned at the angry red marks. "Who has hurt you?" "It doesn't matter," she said. "It really doesn't matter now, Leo."

Chapter 17

From force of habit Bean had continued to take delivery of a newspaper after Maurice Clitheroe died and one day he had come upon an article about sixteen homosexual men convicted of assault for practising particularly violent sadomasochism. In spite of the participants' admitted consent all had been sent to prison. Bean heartily agreed with this verdict. In his view, consent or not consent, people needed protection from others' perversions, and he, he told himself, should know. But he was disgusted to find this sort of thing in a newspaper, reminding him of what he hoped to have put behind him for ever. Anyone might read it and get ideas that otherwise wouldn't have crossed their minds. That was the last time he was going to read that paper, or indeed any paper. What after all, was the telly for but to provide a pleas anter and easier-on-the-eye alternative to all these _Times and _Daily thises and th ats Concentration wasn't required to nearly the same extent. You could get up and make yourself a cup of tea, or fetch in a cress and Marmite sandwich and when you got back it was still merrily spilling out the news, same faces, same music, and if the pictures were different you hardly noticed - you couldn't remember what the last ones had been. Thus it was that, although Bean saw all about the murder on Primrose Hill, knew the victim was another vagrant, once again impaled on railing spikes, he had been out in the kitchen making mug of Earl Grey when the man was identified. He hadn't been much interested. If he thought about it at all it was to reflect that the police hadn't caught Cahill's killer and that the chances were they didn't try all that hard, weren't bothered when the victim was one of those beggars. He had breakfast television on while he ate his breakfast. It was orange juice, muesli, a Danish pastry and a cup of tea, and in the mornings the news was the BBC's offering, all those teenagers and cartoon bears and dinosaurs being a bit too much to stomach at seven-fifteen am. Nothing on it about the second dead man on the railings, that had been a flash in the pan, and he only kept the set on because he hadn't quite finished his tea. Bean already had his new baseball cap on and his Marks and Spencer's bottle green cardigan, for the early mornings were chilly, and he was thinking about switching off and setting forth to Mrs. Morosini's, his first port of call when the doorbell rang. Nobody ever called at this hour. Mystified, on his way out with his key in his pocket, he went to answer the door. Two men were there, both young. Bean thought the older one had a hatchet face and pitted cheeks, the way it was quite fashionable to have if you were a pop star or in cowboy films. They didn't look to him like police officers but they said they were, an inspector and a sergeant, and they flashed warrant cards at him while they told him names he didn't catch. Bean always thought of sadomasochism, even now, after all this time. They had caught up with him, even though he had done nothing more than he was told. "What do you want?" he said, his voice squeaky. "May we come in?" "I was just going off to my work." They seemed to know all about his work and for some reason it amused them. The older one said he could give his work a miss that morning because, on second thoughts, instead of coming in they'd like him to accompany them to the police station. Then the younger one said there would be no harm in his phoning a client - one phone call only, mind -to say he was cancelling the morning's walk. Bean hardly knew whom to phone, who would be the best bet. He had to make up his mind fast and settled on Valerie Conway, back from holiday the day before, and in his estimation the closest to him of all of them in class and calling. The two policemen stood there watching him in a very laid back sort of way. "I'm not well," he said when she answered. He didn't know what he would have done if Mr. or Mrs. Cornell had answered. "I was wondering if you'd give the others a ring and let them know." "What all five of them?" "It wouldn't take a minute. There's Mrs. Morosini and her number is..." "I'll phone her," said Valerie. "She can phone the others. What's wrong with you, anyway? Laryngitis? It sounds like you've lost your voice." The policemen escorted Bean to their car. He told them he had never had anything to do with those perverts, only opened the door to them and looked after Mr. Clitheroe when he was hurt and handed over payment when he was unconscious. They were amused but seemed not to know what he was talking about. He was inside the station and in an interview room before he got an inkling and then it was slow in coming. "You drew fifty pounds out of your bank account at the end of last week," said the inspector, now understood by Bean to be called Marnock. How did then know? How could they know? He nodded and his head went on nodding like one of those toy dogs people used to have in the rear windows of cars. "What would that have been for then?" A phrase came to Bean from out of somewhere. "Day-to-day general running expenses," he said and he tried to clear his throat. "Got a cough, have you?" said the young one. "Must be all that dog walking in the damp," said Marnock. "Funny you've never drawn anything before for these day-to-day running expenses. Not for, let's see-" he looked at a notebook on the table" -"seven months. That's right, seven months since you last made a erwithdrawal from that account." Now he was pretty sure none of it had anything to do with Clitheroe and his practices, Bean was gaining courage. He effected a final throat clearing "I don't know what right you've got to go poking about in my private bank account," he said. "What's all this about?" "Now he asks," said the young one. "Who's Mussolini, Leslie? I can call you Leslie, can't I? Or do you prefer Les?" If he hadn't been so shocked at hearing the name of Mussolini uttered like that, Bean would have reacted violently to being called by his given name. He had hated it ever since his schooldays in that Hampshire village and since then no one had used it. He was always Bean. Bean, as far as everyone knew, was what he might have been christened. But hearing himself called Leslie was nothing to hearing the name he personally, he alone, had given to the anonymous hit man encountered once on the Hanover Gate Bridge. He tried playing the innocent. "He was Italian, like the leader of Italy in the war. Like Hitler." The change in Marnock was shocking. He seemed galvanised. He leapt to his feet and stood over Bean, shouting. "Don't give me that. Don't you play games with me. Who's the man you called Mussolini when you were shooting your mouth off in the Globe?" "I don't know his name." Bean's voice was was still strong but he had started to shake. He tried to stop his knees knocking together. "I don't know what he's called. I called him Mussolini because he looks like him. The spitting image of him, only young like." They had this nasty way of changing the subject, just when you thought you were getting somewhere. "You don't like homeless people, do you, Les?" Bean picked what he thought was the politically correct thing to say. "It's not right for a great nation like ours to have beggars on its streets." Marnock laughed. It was as if he couldn't help laughing, though he would have liked to. "So you'd solve the problem in Hitler's way, would you? Couldn't quite call it ethnic cleansing - the Final Solution, is that it?" Maybe the young one could tell Bean hadn't the least idea what Marnock meant, for he reverted to an earlier tack. "What did you draw the money out for, Les." "It was for Mussolini, wasn't it?" said Marnock. "What was he going to do for it?" "Nothing. I don't know. I never saw him." You _what?" Marnock was standing over him again. "I mean, I saw him once - he never came back. I never saw him _again. I went back but he never turned up. He never did, I swear it." "What was he going to do," said Marnock, "for this princely sum?" "I said I never saw him again." "Kill Clancy, that was it, wasn't it?" "Not kill him," Bean protested. "Not that. I never wanted that. Rough him up a bit - and why not? He'd mugged me. He'd taken a good bit more than fifty quid off me, I can tell you. Mussolini, whatever his name is, him, he was going to do the same, that's all, he..." A gradual, awful, realisation was dawning. The railings, the second vagrant, the vital part of the news he'd missed to make his tea. "I want a lawyer," he said. "I can have a lawyer, can't I." "Of course you can, Leslie," said Marnock. "I think that's a very good idea." Their natures and ways were uncannily the same. And this was wonderful to discover, each shared emotion, reaction, approach, a relief to find. It was not just that he kept his home precisely as she kept hers- clean, neat, airy - that he dressed simply, got up early, was as good tempered and warm first thing in the morning as when then at last put out the lights, but that they seemed to like and need and want all the same things. She had only to mention a taste or preference for him to confess a similar leaning. He even had the same sort of food in his fridge as she had in hers. In his bathroom, when she went to take her shower, was the brand of soap she used. It was almost as if he had set out to make himself the same kind of person. When his phone rang, he answered by giving the number, as she did, he said, "Goodbye", not "Bye-bye", and when someone downstairs slammed the front door he winced and smiled at his wincing, which would have been just her own reaction. Their lovemaking, when it finally happened, was what she had wistfully envisaged but never before quite known. With Alistair, she had tried to achieve the ideal she had made for herself long before. But, reluctantly she had faced what seemed a universal truth, that her particular wish and need were not acceptable to men. They might not be violent or aggressive but they were urgent, demanding, determined to make the rules, certain of what was right. If they acceded to her -and from time to time they did - there was always a feeling she had that they were keeping her sweet, being "patient", giving in so that they might get their own way next time. She had been called frigid by each of them, when they lost their tempers. Until Leo, she had almost reached a point of seeing herself as wrong and the Alistairs of this world as right. She had almost resolved that next time, whenever that was and with whomever, she would accept the male attitude and try somehow to teach herself to like it. No doubt, that, like anything else, could be learned. But with Leo there had been nothing to learn or unlearn or make decisions about. She needed to ask him nothing, nor direct his hands, nor resist his urgency, nor pull away from the hardness of lips and teeth. He was as gentle as she, as languid, and until the end, when she, for once, was imperative and demanding, as slow and delicate with his caresses. But at that end she had cried out as those others had always expected her to cry and held him in an embrace she was fearful of afterwards, in case her strength was greater than his. That had been three nights before, the time of her flight from Alistair. The next evening, Leo came to her and though she worried that Alistair might arrive, might turn up on the doorstep at any moment, she forgot him after a while. Discovering Leo, she forgot everything, lying in his arms, talking to him, _caring for him. For it was inescapable, that feeling she must look after him, that he needed her as much to watch over his health, his fragile body, as for a lover. Side by side in the warm evening, they were each as white as a marble statue, not a mark, a flaw, a flush of colour on their milky paleness. She could scarcely see in the dusk where the skin of his thigh ended and hers began. Only his face, in repose, the bluish eyelids closed, looked more tired than hers, looked, she fancied, older than hers. But that perhaps was the fantasy of a woman of thirty, wishing to be nearer her young lover's age. Their hair was nearly the same colour, hers of a slightly finer texture, a clearer gold. The down on her arms was the same thistledown stuff as his. Each had the same kind of freckle sprinkling, pale gold, sparse on the bridges of their noses. If their features were quite different, it was only as a brother and a sister's may be, each taking genes from a different parent. Their skin was the same matt fine white, skin that perhaps lined early, though hers, in spite of her seniority, had fewer lines than his. She looked at those lines tenderly, touching them with a warm fingertip. They had talked earlier, of this similarity and Leo had pointed out what should have occurred to her but for some reason had not, that in people whose blood and tissue types matched so perfectly, resemblance was more likely than not. Wouldn't it have been far stranger if one of them had been dark and the other fair, or one heavy and big-boned and the other slight? She had searched among the Trust's literature and found one of its leaflets, the one with a happy smiling photograph of two young men, donor and recipient, and yes, Leo was right, they were much the same height, with the same colouring, the same smile. "We may even be distantly related," she said. "I'm your lover," Leo said. "I don't want to be your cousin." He stayed all night with her. She slept better than she had since coming to Charlotte Cottage. Gushi came upstairs in the small hours and snuggled into the space between their feet. Leo didn't mind. He got up first and made her tea. It was gone eight and she was still in bed when the phone rang. He took the receiver off and handed it to her. The voice said it was Edwina Goldsworthy and Bean wouldn't be taking the dogs out. Maybe he wouldn't be taking them out for a couple of days. He was ill. Some sort of inflammation of the throat, Lisl Pring had said. So she and Leo had taken Gushi into the Park and in a way she had been glad of Bean's bad throat because it meant she could spend the next night with Leo, of course taking the dog with her. For the first time she was feeling the constriction imposed by becoming a house-sitter. She was bound to remain at Charlotte Cottage until September, and once Bean was back, remain there every night because of Gushi. Alistair, in Leo's place, would have told her not to be bound to the Blackburn-Norrises, there had been no formal contract, but Leo did not. In his eyes the agreement was just as binding as if it had been drawn up by a solicitor and witnessed. In short, he felt the same as she did. "And I don't think I could quite move in with you," he said. She hadn't suggested it - they had known each other only a few weeks -but it was what she wanted. "There would be something - not sordid exactly, but not what I want for us, if they were to come back and -well, find us, it will be better for us to be forced to wait until September." He spoke very seriously. "I would like everything to be above board." She said softly, "What is it that you want for us, Leo?" "At the moment," he said. "I'm still teaching myself to believe what's happened. That you're who you are, the woman who saved my life, that I've met you, and that you're-" he hesitated and his face flushed the way hers did "The other half of me." "Yes," she said, "Yes." "I'm falling in love with you, of course I am, but it's almost as if I was in love with you before we met; I'd made an ideal image of you and by a kind of miracle you are that image come to life." He smiled at her, took her in his arms. "It's not easy getting used to that," he said. "I don't want us to have any secrets, Mary. May we tell each other everything about ourselves, tell our whole lives." So they had begun doing that. He told her about his childhood with ambitious failures for parents: a father whose career as an athlete had been ruined by a ruptured Achilles tendon while training to run in the Olympic team and a mother who had twice failed to acquire through correspondence courses and evening classes the degree she longed for. The result had been for them to see him and his brother as fulfilling hopes which in their cases had been dashed. They must be great sportsmen or great scholars, preferably both. His brother Carl had gone to drama school, incurring their father's anger and disgust. Acting wasn't a man's job. The only work Carl could get for a long time was modelling, more cause for outrage. Their father had died. That was when he discovered that all these years his mother had had a lover. Once her husband was dead, she had gone to Scotland to join him, leaving her sons with scarcely a goodbye. It had hurt Leo, for she had seemed never to take his illness seriously and refused outright to be tested for tissue compatibility. Without Carl's devotion, he hardly knew what would have become of hm... "And the rest is history. That was where you came in." "Yes. That was where I came in" "I'm afraid my mother never forgave me for failing to run a three-minute mile and get a double first. Leukaemia's not hereditary, you see. That's known for sure now." She looked at him. "I'm not sure that I understand." "If it were, she might be able to blame herself and my father. I mean, it wouldn't be their fault if one of them carried a faulty gene, of course it wouldn't, but people blame themselves for handing on to their children a poor genetic inheritance. Conversely as I've discovered, they like not having to blame themselves, not having the grounds for it." He spoke not bitterly but with amused resignation. "There's always the suggestion there - it's not explicit but it's there- that somehow I must have caught it or done some ding I shouldn't have to bring it on. My mother actually said once that nothing like that had ever happened to Carl." His rueful laughter took the sting away. "Still, grown-up people shouldn't live at home with their parents, do you think?" "It's not something I know much about," she said, "but, no, you're right." She was appalled by what he had told her. The mother he had not much wanted her to meet - though he had not exactly discouraged her, either- she now wanted to keep away from until the time came when she and Leo... "As soon as your time is up at Charlotte Cottage," he said, "I'm going to want you to come and live with me. I'm giving you advance notice. Will you, in this tiny place?" "But Leo, we won't have to. I'm rich -had you forgotten?" His face so ardent and eager, changed. "I'm afraid I had," he said. "I wish I could." In the post next morning came two letters. One she could see by the handwriting on the envelope was from Alistair. She opened the other first. It was from Mr. Edwards, asking her if she was in need of "funds", as there would be no difficulty in advancing to her from her grandmother's estate any reasonable sum. Bean arrived while she was reading the letter. He looked tired. She could see he had been ill. For the first time - perhaps she had previously not taken much notice- it was apparent to her that he was an old man, vigorous, well preserved but old. He launched into an involved apology. It was all due to circumstances beyond his control; it wouldn't happen again. Mary hardly understood how you could guarantee you wouldn't get a throat infection a second time, but Bean didn't mention his throat. He said, to her astonishment, that he hoped Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris would "never have to know." "What, that you were ill?" "That I missed taking the little chap out, miss. I'd feel easier in my mind if they didn't know." Pathetic, the sadness of age. "I shan't tell them," Mary said warmly. "I shall have forgotten it by the time they get back." She told Leo and they laughed about it. He had stayed the night but waited until Bean was gone before coming downstairs. Formerly, she would have waited until she was alone before opening Alistair's letter but no longer, not now that she and Leo were so close. She said, "Here," and held it up. He put his arm round her and read it over her shoulder. Alistair wanted to know why she had run away from him the previous week. What was she afraid of? He wondered if she should be undergoing therapy, she was so strange, so unbalanced. Did she realise that in an hysterical outburst she had ac tally said she didn't want to see him again? He was treating that with the indulgence he was sure she now wanted. In other words, he would forget it. Could he arrange a therapist for her? He would be happy to do that. Meanwhile, they should meet and talk about money. Where did she want to live and what would she think a reasonable sum to spend on a blat or house, given their changed circustances? "I'd like to throw it away and not answer it." "But you won't do that," he said. "You're much like me. Too polite and reasonable. You'll answer it and be firm but nice and repeat what you said about not seeing him again." His voice took a stronger note. "You won't see him again will you, Mary?" "I won't if I can help it." He held her. "Please, Mary. For me." The police had given him the phone book to look up solicitors. He knew the names of the man who had acted for Maurice Clitheroe, but the last thing he wanted was Marnock's attention drawn to his late employers. He found a firm to phone in Melcombe Street and after a little while a young woman turned up. Bean began to feel a whole lot better when she started telling them they couldn't hold her client for more than twenty-four hours without arresting him. Did they intend to arrest him? She told them firmly that they had no evidence against him. But even Bean could see that they had. By the time that the solicitor came he had already told them everything they wanted to know - all about the mugging, about Mussolini and his offer, the money and his failed attempt to meet Mussolini again. He had admitted he wanted some injury done to Clancy and, when pressed, that he hadn't been particular as to whether this injury was serious or, indeed, fatal. He hadn't meant to say any of those things but they fetched it all out of him, and once begun there seemed no point in holding anything back. What saved him, he thought afterwards, was that he still had the money. He actually had it on him. Of course they could hardly know that it was the same money, but possession of it helped his cause. He was with them for a total of fourteen hours and could, in fact, have taken the dogs out next day, was preparing to do his afternoon's duty, only they came back for him. They had found Mussolini. Another day had passed, a day of questions, mockery, teasing, taunting and, from Marnock, outbursts of serious anger. Mussolini had told them all sorts of things about Bean, they said, that Bean was sure was untrue, for Mussolini, real name Harvey Bennett, couldn't possibly have known them, could only have invented them. For instance, he had never said - never in his wildest dreams would have said - that he wanted Clancy killed. He had never boasted to Bennett about having killed a man once but was now a bit past it at his age. When he was told this, the deathbed of Anthony Maddox flashed awfully across his mind, but he had never talked of it, had spoken no word of it to anyone. It was all in Bennett's imagination. He had never, as they insinuated, offered Bennett fifty pounds to kill Clancy, with another fifty to come when the deed was done. Nor had he sought Bennet out, enquiring indiscreetly in the Globe for someone to do a job for him. His solicitor came back and got nasty with Marnock, reminding him of something called Judges' Rules. After he'd spent hours there in a cell they let him go. He never knew why. He wasn't going to ask, the relief of being free was enough for him, but he felt very shaken. Still, he had his fifty pounds and he knew what he was going to do with that. Buy a new amera. The shop where the first one had come from, purchased by Maurice Clitheroe some ten years before, was in Spring Street, Paddington. It was still there. He found it in the new Phone book, gave them a ring, asked what they'd got and their prices. The shop stayed open till all hours, being bang in the middle of tourist country, so he went over there on the tube after he'd walked his dogs. It was only two stops. The camera, being second-hand, came to less than he'd thought. The shop manager threw in a film and Bean doubly departing from custom, bought himself a bottle of whisky and the evening paper. Even if it was only a piece about the release of a man who'd been "helping police with their enquiries", he wanted to read about himself. Paddington was a lot shabbier, dirtier and more litter strewn than the Marylebone Road and it gratified him that he didn't have to live there. He was coming out of the wine shop when he saw the girl again, the one who used to come to the house in Maurice Clitheroe's time that he'd made a face at in Baker Street. She was standing in the doorway of a dingy looking video shop. He nearly missed seeing what happened and would have missed it if for some reason he hadn't turned round from taking a photo of a Highland Collie -a really smashing looking dog - an old woman had out with her on a lead. A red Mercedes had pulled into the kerb and the girl was bending down to talk to the driver. Her clothes were a whole lot more up market than the previous time he'd seen her: red sequined top, tight white mini, white stilettos. Whore's gear, but not cheap. Then Bean saw the driver. It was James Barker-Pryce MP and his red whiskery face, for once without the clamped-in cigar, was framed in the window. Bean took a photograph. He took two shots. The car door was pushed open from the inside and the girl got in. Bean went home and read the paper. There was nothing in it about him, only a long piece by a psychiatrist the paper called famous, though Bean had never heard of him, about crazy street people and Clancy in particular. The psychiatrist said theories had been put forward as to why the dead man collected keys, some suggesting this was for the purposes of robbery, others that they constituted an armour against possible attack. The truth was that in Clancy's disturbed mind these were the keys to dream homes. Having no home, he had collected keys to the homes of others, keys being the symbol of home-ownership, of possession and of the privacy he he could no longer enjoy. Bean had never read such rubbish. While looking through his collection of dog photographs and selecting negatives for enlargement, he drank rather too much of his whisky and woke with a hangover. Putting on his baseball cap and a T-shirt patterned all over with pictures of endangered species, he was on tenterhooks lest the police come back for him. After all, they had been two days running, why not today? But no one came and he got to Erna Morosini's five minutes ahead of time. She was rather short with him, not asking if he was better but moaning about how exhausted she was, having to walk Ruby herself. It was easy to see the beagle hadn't been using up enough energy. Like a team of sprightly carriage horses, she pulled Bean up to Park Crescent, puffing and lunging. He exchanged a glance with the Duke of Kent, who didn't look the kind of man to be intimidated by policemen, before Ruby pulled him on. Valerie Conway appeared at the area door with Boris. "A Mr. Barker-Something phoned me yesterday to ask what I thought you were playing at. He said he hadn't had a word out of you and not to put yourself out to come when you did get back. He's making other arrangements." "What's that supposed to mean?" "He says there's school-leavers round here panting to do the job for a fraction of what you charge. There was one girl said she'd take Charlie out for free, he's so lovely." Boris padded up the steps, his claws making a patter like the sound of hailstones on the metal treads. Waiting at the top, tied to the railings, Ruby fell amorously upon him, not much deterred by Boris's low growl and lips peeled back to show yellow teeth. Pity there was no market for dog pornography, Bean thought. He took them into the gardens and through the tunnel under the Marylebone Road. Now Pharaoh was dead, he could do that, and never again feel that trepidation, that tightening of the muscles and tensing of the nerves. In the Park Marietta was uneasy, missing Charlie, not inclined to run by herself, but wandering aimlessly and stopping for a scratch. Bean got a shot of her standing on the rings of cobblestones round the Parsee's fountain, looking soulful. It would be a good picture and it somewhat calmed him. He had been boiling with anger and the injustice of it ever since Valerie Conway told him of Barker-Pryce's decision. The nerve, after what he'd seen in Paddington! Two can play at that game, thought Bean. ----------- Chapter 18 The police coming took Hob by surprise. Not their coming - he expected that - but their reason. He must be getting soft in his old age. He'd had a birthday the day before, his thirty-second, or he thought it was his thirty-second, but he couldn't be sure; it might have been his thirty-third. He'd asked his mum and she didn't know either. All she'd said was that he was a few years younger than her but not all that many because she'd been just a kid when he was born. But he was old enough to be losing his grip because he thought the police came on account of the riot. He thought they'd come to _apologise for all his windows getting knocked out in the mini-riot of the night before. That came of living on the first floor - he'd have been safe higher up. He still didn't know the cause but there'd been these boys, kids of thirteen or fourteen, running up and down the walkways armed with car jacks and milk bottles, and then it had turned nasty, one of their dads coming out with a crossbow and someone else with what looked like a shotgun. Hob watched from his window. He'd got some yellow tabs from Lew but he knew he'd get so excited if he took one now he'd be down there with the rioters. They were shouting out something about a boy they said the police had beaten up in his cell, some mate of theirs accused of dropping a concrete block off the top floor on to an old man's head. Hob didn't want to get involved. The first of his windows went while he was out in the kitchen getting himself a vodka as a starter before his main meal of the blow he'd got for the weekend. It was bricks they were throwing now. Hob picked the brick up off the floor and thought about throwing it back but didn't. It must have come off that pile the council builders left behind when they built a wall round that raised flowerbed at the entrance to the car park. Pointless, really, because all the flowers had been torn out overnight and someone had started dismantling the wall. He took a swig of his vodka and wandered towards the settee. Before he'd even sat down he heard a brick or bottle go through the bedroom window. Someone must have dialled 999, for two police cars screamed in while he was pushing broken glass about with his toe and kicking it into the corner. The police had riot shields. Hob could hardly believe it. Riot shields for a crossbow and a few bricks! He wasn't in a state but the vodka made him a bit rocky. He smiled at his pun, his joke, and went to his jacket pocket for the red velvet bag. There was a terible noise going on out there now. All his windows at the front had gone - good thing the weather was getting so warm. He didn't care much. He set to work on his ritual, cutting the straws in half, crumbling up the jumbo, screwing on the Imperial Russian Court cap, drawing in at last the life-giving smoke. It might have been an hour after that that the police came or a lot longer. He couldn't tell. He'd danced about the room a bit, done some Power Ranger exercises, air punching and karate kicks, and then he'd built a pyramid out of the three bricks that had come through the windows and the broken glass and cut himself in the process but not so's you'd notice. He must have gone to sleep at one point, for the scratching woke him up. Mice. He lay there listening to the mice and thinking it was a nice sound, nice and peaceful, not like rats, he'd never heard of any disease you could catch from mice, when there came a sound that wasn't nice at all, a great pounding on the front door. He looked out of the broken window and saw their car down there. Unmarked, of course, but still recognisable to him as a police car. They knocked again and he let them in, all smiles, certain this was a routine visit, nothing to worry about, sir, all cleared up now, sorry you've been inconvenienced. They didn't say any of that, but pushed past him into the flat, looking about them with their noses pinched as if it was a sewer they'd come into. They asked him if he was Harvey Owen Bennett and where had he been on June the something, the night Cahill was killed? "Here," said Hob. "On me tod. Where else?" They pressed him for more than that and he tried to think. A Thursday it was. It was years since he'd had much of a memory. Maybe that was the day he'd talked to his mum on Leo's phone and asked how old he was and she'd said that about him being younger than her and she'd have to go on account of her and his stepfather going down the boozer for this party they were having for her silver wedding. What silver wedding, he'd said, on account of her only being married for about five minutes, and she'd said, so what, it would have been her silver wedding if she'd not got divorced and the whole family was coming including his dad. "No, I tell a lie," he said. "I was at my mum and dad's silver wedding." He hadn't a scrap of faith in it as an alibi but he had to say something. They weren't going to leave him alone to get to a phone; they took him with them. On the way out he saw that the flowerbed was entirely gone, not a brick left, not a handful of earth. Maybe they'd learn now. It was like a miracle what happened. People who knocked families ought to think before they spoke. His family was one in a million, solid as a rock, supportive was the word he was looking for. He didn't have to ask them, he didn't have to say a word - well he couldn't, he was in that police car with the driver glaring at him - they came out with it all without hesitation, his stepfather told him on the phone afterwards. Of course Hob had been at the party, there from nine till they packed in when the extension ended at one-thirty, and he slept the night at their place. Two of his half-brothers and his stepsisters's ex who had an imagination said he'd done a beautiful rendering of "I'll be Your Sweetheart" while they were cutting the cake. "Any time, Hob, you know that," his stepfather said. "You don't have to ask." He saw that he didn't. Effie was up on the Hill, drinking nun's tea, and so were Dill and Teddy and the man called Nello. Last time Roman had been up there all the talk had been of Pharaoh and his terrible end, of Pharaoh and of Decker. Who would be next? Would it be one of them? No one talked of it any more. They were as they had been before, or almost. Roman fancied they were more subdued than usual, more wary. They who had never been afraid of what people with roofs over their heads feared, the streets, the dark, were afraid of them now. He had taken to leaving his barrow under the arch at the Grotto. Sooner or later it would be stolen, he knew that, but he didn't much care. It was a relief not to have to lug it around with him. Every time he saw Nello, who had all the marks of the amiable natural, the village idiot, almost the holy fool, the man would remind him of the risks he ran. "They'll nick it off you, Rome," he said. "Don't you know not to leave it about? They'd have it if you chained it up, they would. Don't you know to keep it with you?" And Effie grinned and nodded and pointed to the empty space, the area four feet in front of him, where she thought the barrow should be. "You want to go back and fetch your barrow, Rome," said Nello. "You'll be lucky if it's still there. There's plenty z'd pay good money for that barrow." Someone was killing the street people but he was to worry about the possible loss of a gimcrack box barrow. Psychologists, he thought, called that displacement. They all walked down the hill together, Effie and he, Nello and Dill and the beagle. Dill had told him that when he got a new uncle, when the old one had left and his auntie had found a replacement, the new one had turned him out of the house -well it was a flat at Woodberry Down, but it came to the same thing. He had given him twenty-four hours to go and told him to take the dog with him. It had been his auntie's dog but she'd seemed glad to see the back of it, so Dill and the beagle had set off together. "Like Dick Whittington and his cat," Dill had said unexpectedly, crinkling up his oriental eyes. But the streets hadn't been paved with gold and the beagle didn't even have a name. They just called it Beagle. Instead of a lead, Dill had a length of rope, but he let the dog off when they were in the Park. Roman saw the fair-haired girl in the distance, walking towards the Broad Walk, and a man with her, as fair and slight as she, not the dark burly one he had sent off in the wrong direction. The memory made him smile. A couple of weeks ago it had been, and just about this time of day. Then, too, he had been up on the Hill partaking of the nuns' tea and wondering, he remembered, if those charitable sisters were connected in any way with a church he often passed that was dedicated to the Handmaidens of the Sacred Heart. It was a name he loved and that stuck in his memory, and he was thinking of it and of those nuns who were handmaidens to the poor and dispossessed, when the fair girl came running along as if pursued and called out to him a breathless hallo. That set off another train of thought, this time Russell's contention- that at certain times and in certain situations to lie is moral. If, for instance, one should see a man running as if in fear of his life, and within moments his pursuers arrive and ask which way he went, then it is permissible to lie and tell them the left-hand fork when, in fact the man fled to the right. This reflection had come into his mind just as he came out at the bottom of Ormonde Terrace and the dark and burly chap appeared, running, red-faced, obviously as mad as hell. Roman nearly laughed aloud at the opportunity that had been sent him or he, coincidentally, had found. Would the man have asked him? Probably not. He pointed down the terrace towards Primrose Hill Bridge and the Park. "She went that way." "_What?" "The lady you are chasing went down there into the Park." The man stopped and stood, indecisive. He had gone even redder. "Fuck you." he said to Roman. "Mind your own bloody business." But he turned and ran down the terrace just the same. Roman watched him, laughing. He hadn't laughed so much for ages, not since before it happened, not since his loss. For a moment or two he had awaited further developments - the man's reappearance perhaps, the fair girl herself to come creeping back -but nothing happened. And since that afternoon he had twice seen her with a new man, this straw haired pale-eyed one, who looked nice enough, who held her hand and once put an arm tenderly about her shoulders. This relieved him of a burden, for he had thought, after amusement at the incident gave place to reflective ness that she was in distress, and he had come close to constituting himself her guardian or protector. He saw her so often, their paths were always crossing, that he felt he could easily keep an eye on her, see that she was safe. But safe from what? If the railings murderer, the impaler as the papers called him, sought out young women for his victims, Roman would have made himself at once her watchdog. But she could hardly be further from the type that had so far been his victims. She had a home, probably a nice one, and she was female. Did her femaleness exclude her? He gave Effie a glance, Effie with her bandaged legs and the men's suit trousers she wore and her green bundles, and wondered. When they came to the Inner Circle he told them that this area, this ring enclosing a few acres, had once been designated by Nash who was the Prince Regent's architect, as the site for the Prince's summer palace. He meant to say no more, for he had no wish to be their didact, but Nello said to go on, to tell them, and Dill said to sit on a seat and tell them a story. Effie only stared, her eyes as empty and as desperate as they always were. So he had told them how the Prince who became George IV had laid out this park, or rather Nash had under his instructions, and how Nash and Decimus Burton had built the villas and the terraces for the Prince's courtiers. He talked about the great road that was to be built all the way from this inner circle down to Trafalgar Square, that it had been begun and Portland Place was the start of it, but the plan had to be abandoned through lack of money. They could appreciate that; they knew about governments' thriftless ness and abandoned schemes. Dill put the beagle back on its lead, or tied the rope to its collar, and they made their way through the Rose Garden that was in full bloom, that was at the glorious zenith of its blooming. The sun was hot and the air perfumed, Roman thought, like those famous gardens of the East, the Shalimar perhaps. They were a rag, tag and bobtail crew, shuffling along these immaculate paths, and people gave them glances but no stares. The respectable were afraid of the retorts or oaths that stares might evoke. Though dogs were strictly not allowed, no one said a word even when the beagle lifted its leg against a rose called Sexy Rexy. But effie knelt down by the finest rose bed of all and buried her face in the full brilliant blossoms of Royal William, inhaling and lifting her head and burrowing once more in the rich scented petals. Roman couldn't think of much more to tell them, though they asked. The summer palace had never been built - what would it have been like? The Pavilion at Brighton? -and the great road had been spoilt by intersections, Regent Street having later been quite destroyed and rebuilt. The Inner Circle had been the province for a while of the Royal Botanical Society before becoming Queen Mary's Rose Garden. He left them then, Effie and Nello seated side by side on a bench near the bandstand, Dill and the beagle on their way to their pitch outside Tussaud's. It was time to buy his supper, make his way back to the Grotto. The evening sun awoke in him memories of warm London nights. They were few, it nearly always grew cold, but sometimes, when they had a sitter for the children, he and Sally had gone to a restaurant in Bayswater or Notting Hill and eaten their dinner at a table outside. He was no longer able, when he envisaged these events, to see Sally's face clearly. There were parts of it, a curve, a feature, that whatever constructed such things in his mind failed to build accurately. It was not that she or the children receded from him but rather that a mist or veil had come down between them and himself. A curious thing was happening: he was able to remember with less pain, with something more like a sweet nostalgia. Something he had believed would never come was coming, a kind of resignation. It was not exactly hope he had, certainly not recovery, but he could, in connection with what he had suffered repeat to himself Winston Churchill's dictum, that this was not the end nor the beginning of the end, but it was the end of the beginning. Had he set forth on his pilgrimage then with the aim of being cured? He thought not. It had been escape, not therapy, but perhaps therapy had come just the same. His fate he had begun to see not as something to be fought against with rage and anguish (Why me? Why me?), but as marking him out simply to be a member of that rare band of people - not so rare in many places - whose whole family has been destroyed at a stroke. He could see himself calmly now as one of them, different from the rest of mankind as a dwarf is different or an amputee, destined to live with that difference for ever and to accept. He went into a shop in Camden High Street, bought a sandwich, an apple and a banana, and because he had wanted it the other day when he only had milk, a bottle of wine. There was a corkscrew in his barrow if no one had come and stolen it and all it contained, as Nello had forecast. He stopped for his usual contemplation of Durham's figure in bronze. She gazed towards Gloucester Terrace with his old girlfriend's eyes, making him ask himself where she was now, what had become of her. Would he know her if they met? Did she still look like this maiden drawing water from the spring? She was not in the least like the fair girl he had fancied needed protection. He was not ambitious to become one of those men who haunt and harass women, following them, dogging their footsteps, but still he thought as he climbed down into the Grotto, that he would try to watch over her from a distance. For all that, he was unable to tell himself why he felt she needed a guardian angel. She had the man who looked so uncannily like her. Her brother perhaps? The burly dark one was just a fool who surely constituted no real threat. As he opened his wine, he began to make a little scenario. Her brother had come back from abroad, expected to share her home with her, but found the dark one in residence and they had fallen out... He couldn't finish the story, couldn't see where it might go next nor account for her being chased to the gates of Primrose Hill. But he thought he would "look out" for her, and begin in the morning, for he was sure she always entered the Park just here, at the Gloucester Gate, and walked past that sculpted tower of silence. There came back to Bean a conversation he had once had with Clitheroe. His employer was in bed recovering from a particularly serious beating. When he dressed it Clitheroe's back reminded Bean of James Fox's in the film _Performance that he had seen while working for Anthony Maddox, only Fox was an actor and the weals and cuts on his back were make-up while Clitheroe's were real. He had said something like that, something about Chas in the film, and Clitheroe said, talking of acting, he's a pretty good actor, that chap. What did he mean, actor, Bean had asked. And Clitheroe said The Beater's name, which Bean couldn't remember, and then he said, he's made himself into what he thinks I want him to be, and he's right, I do want him to be that. I want a savage, Bean. I want someone who enjoys beating someone else more than anything in this world, who gets all his pleasures from it, who wants it better than sex and drugs and money, because to him it _is sex and drugs and money. Do you understand?" "Sure," said Bean, "of course I understand." Understanding made him feel sick but he didn't say that. "I love his excitement, Bean. Do you know, I think I love _him, and why not? It's just what a crazy pervert like me would do. I'd like to do something for him, set him up for life, show him after I'm gone that I had real feelings for him." "Turn over," Bean said, "And let me have a dekko." He had stopped calling Clitheroe "sir" about the time The Beater first began coming. "Christ," he said, "I just hope this lot's not turning septic." "It'd better heal up because (The name again) is dropping in for a drink and fifty lashes on Saturday." "He'll kill you," said Bean, not knowing how near the truth he was. "I can see it in his eyes that he's acting," said Clitheroe, wriggling- with pain or pleas ure, or were they the same? "There's something dead in his eyes. And I'm glad of it, Bean, because it would be too much for me if it was real. It would be too beautiful to bear." He shivered and goose pimples came up between the wounds. "He could act at anything. I wonder why he doesn't? Make his living at it, I mean. Maybe he's never had the chance. Or maybe he only wants to act in life, not on the stage. He wants to be, you could say, not to act." That was all too deep for Bean. He hated that kind of high-blown meaningless speculation. The Beater _had dropped in for the drink and whatever and again the following Saturday and it was after he had gone that Maurice Clitheroe had his stroke. Sometimes Bean thought himself lucky to have got the apartment under Clitheroe's will, for he might easily have left it to The Beater. It was satisfying to have remembered, but not much use. Every morning, about this time, Bean still expected the police to come back for him, though it was over a week now since they had hauled him in for a second going-over. While he dressed and had his breakfast he kept running to the front to look out of the window and check. "Testimonials? I've never heard of such a thing," said Bean, annoyed, when Valerie Conway told him Mrs. Sellers wanted two independent references on top of Valerie's own recommendation before she would surrender her dalmatian to his keeping. "Suit yourself," said Valerie. "But don't expect me to put myself out another time." Bean said he'd ask Mrs. Goldworthy and Miss Pring but he wasn't promising anything. This Mrs. Sellers should realise she wasn't doing him any favours. A reliable dog-walker was like gold dust, never mind Barker-Pryce and his school-leavers. "Oh, get a life!" said Valerie, slamming the area door. Lisl Pring was off on location somewhere so Bean had to use his key to pick up Marietta. He asked Mrs. Goldworthy about the reference and she said, Oh, sure, no trouble, she'd do it later and to remind her if she forgot. Bean knew she'd never do it. She was the sort who had so much money she never bothered to do anything. He tied the dogs to the gate post at Charlotte Cottage and pretended to ignore what Ruby was trying to do to Mcbride. Let them get on with it. He asked Miss Jago for a reference. Something like that would have looked better coming from Sir Stewart Blackburn Norris but it couldn't be helped. She said, yes, of course, and she'd give it to him next morning, and somehow he thought it likely she'd actually do it. It was a warm sultry morning, the kind of July day that threatens a storm to come. Swarms of gnats rose and fell above the surface of the lake, and from the bridge over the island the water had a foetid smell. The grass in the open areas was worn and bleached by the sun. Bean walked the dogs over the bridge and almost to the Hanover Gate. This morning the roof of the Mosque was dull as an old copper pot. Watching the gambols of Boris and Marietta, he asked himself if he really wanted another big dog, a dalmatian. Big dogs were unruly and easily got out of hand. Pity they couldn't all be like that little Gushi, who stuck close beside him and only occasionally ran off for some puppyish adventure with Mc Bride. A man was walking down the Broad Walk from the zoo end. Bean was quite a long way away from him. Flowerbeds and ornamental trees and fountains and urns spilling out more flowers separated them. But he would have known The Beater anywhere, at any distance, by his slouching walk, the lift of his chin, the way his arms hung loosely by his sides. Bean had all the dogs on their leash by now and he approached nearer. He had no objection to being seen by The Beater and in the daylight and the warmth had lost the fears of the night. When their eyes met The Beater's showed not a flicker of recognition. But he was an actor, wasn't he? Bean stared at him before turning abruptly away. How old was he? That had always been a mystery, but he must be all of thirty-five now. He turned round when he was sure The Beater wasn't looking and took in the jeans, the denim jacket, the longish hair. Was it possible..." He had seemed clean enough but some of them _were clean. There were hostels now where they could get showers, wash their hair. So could The Beater have come so low as to be on the street? Bean had no real reason to think so except that _they did come in here and loaf about and The Beater seemed to have been wandering aimlessly. Where after all, could he have come from and be going to? If he really was one of them maybe the Impaler would find him and he'd end up murdered and stuck on railings somewhere. Things would have been very different for The Beater if he hadn't beaten Clitheroe quite so hard and Clitheroe had lived a little longer and changed his w... Marnock and the sergeant were waiting for him when he got back to York Terrace, sitting outside in their car on a double yellow line. They were a lot more polite than on previous occasions which made Bean cocky and say in a testy tone: "What is it this time?" They wanted him to tell them all about the man who had mugged him in the Nursemaids' Tunnel. There was no need to go down to the station if he'd be good enough to ask them in. Was he sure the mugger had been Clancy? Was there any room for doubt over the identity of his attacker? Bean had to rethink the whole thing. Maybe it hadn't been Clancy. He wondered if he dared give them a description of The Beater but he thought better of this as too dangerous and said he couldn't remember. They stayed for nearly two hours, their politeness unflagging, and when they left they said nothing about seeing him again. He had a Bird's Eye Lean Cuisine for his lunch and watched "Emmerdale" on television. After that, feeling cheerful, he told himself that nothing venture, nothing have. All his clients' phone numbers were written down in the accounts book he kept. As he dialled Barker-Pryce's number he thought, if she answers or some secretary or whatever I'll just put the phone down. When he heard Barker-Pryce speak his throat dried. "Yes? Who is it?" He managed to speak. "It's Bean, sir. The one who walks the dogs." "What d'you want? Speak up." "I was wondering," said Bean, his rising anger strengthening his voice, "if you'd like to see some really beautiful photographs I've taken of Charlie. They're smashing, sir, I think you'd like them." He was well named Barker. The noise he made, a laugh presumably, was much the same sound as that coming from Mc Bride when he put up a mandarin duck. "That's rich. Coming from you. You walked the animal right? When did I give you permission to use it as a model?" Bean drew a deep breath, expelled it, said, "Talking of models, sir, I nearly mentioned these pix the other evening when I saw you in Paddington with the young lady." Silence. Bean seemed to smell cigar smoke. "I'd been buying a paper, Mr. Barker Pryce. A newspaper. It was to read that article about the gentleman from the government and the lady in the hotel. I expect you know him, don't you, sir?" The voice was quieter this time, the tone more polite. "What exactly do you want?" "Among other things, a reference, if you please, sir. For a lady with a dalmatian. I wondered if I might drop in after I've taken my _other dogs for their walk. Say about five thirty :::::::::::: Chapter 19 It took Roman a while to find out where she lived. He felt a natural aversion to spying on her. But one Saturday, he saw her in Primrose Hill and with the utmost discretion followed her home. He had been in a second-hand bookshop in Regent's Park Road and there found an old work, published in 1840, called __Colburn's Calendar of _Amusements. The bookseller only wanted two pounds for it, for it was in a ragged battered state. Roman stood in the shop doorway, reading a passage from it that touched him, that seemed to parallel in a zany awkward way, his own state. __The lion in the collection of the Zoological gardens was brought, with his lioness, from Tunis, and as the keeper informed us, they lived most lovingly together. Their dens were separated only by an iron railing, sufficiently low to allow of their jumping over. One day, as the lioness was amusing herself leaping from one den to the other, while her lord looked on, apparently highly delighted with her gaiety, she unfortunately struck her foot against the top of the railing, and was precipitated backwards; the fall proved fatal, for, upon examination, it was found she had broken her spine. The grief of her partner was excessive, and, although it did not show itself with the same violence as in a previous instance, it proved equally fatal: a deep melancholy took possession of him, and he pined to death in a few _weeks. Deep melancholy may kill lions, but not human beings. Not even the deepest grief kills them, for men have died from time to time, but not for love... He was remembering incongruously, how when he was a boy the zoo's telephone exchange was called Primrose and remembering too a joke about dialling Primrose one, two, three, four, and asking for Mr. Lion, when he looked up and saw her pass by on the opposite pavement. She might not have been walking home but somehow he fancied she was. He put the book in his pocket and began to walk in the direction she was going. If she looked back, he thought he would abandon his pursuit of her. He would give it up at once, for she must on no account be made afraid of him. How much, how infinitely much, he would have liked to read that account of the poor lion's fate to Sally, for there seemed no one else in the world to whom he could read it or tell it and who would react with the same tender sympathy. But she was not in the world; She was nowhere, ageless, lost, with her dead children. The fair-haired girl, the Irene Adler girl, crossed the road ahead of him and then Albert Road and made her way into the Park by way of St. Mark's Bridge, over the outer Circle and into the Broad Walk. She hadn't once looked back. But why would she? She wasn't Lot's Wife, leaving the Cities of the Plain, or Orpheus hoping Eurydice followed on behind. The Walk was shady here, much overhung by trees, chestnuts and planes in heavy leaf. The two wolves, penned behind double wire fences, explored and sniffed their territory like dogs. He saw her turn to look at them but not pause. She took the first of the two left-hand paths that led to the Gloucester Gate. He had been making his nightly home in the Grotto for nearly three weeks now, the longest time he had spent in any one place. And all the while, it seemed, she had been quite near him, for she had crossed the outer Circle and was leading him along Albany Street. Park Village West. If she went in there she must live there, for it was a crescent, leading nowhere but back to that Northbound artery. It was quiet, a bower of trees and flowers, green, scented, but the leaves a little dusty, for this after all was near the heart of London. She hadn't once looked back, but she did so at the gate of a pretty Italian ate house, and seeing him, not knowing that he had been behind her all the way from Primrose Hill, lifted up her hand and waved. Only a woman in a million, he thought, would say hallo to me, smile at me, and when there had been some hallos and smiles, wave to me. And he wondered if he should stay a while to see if her brother came home - but it might be hours, or the brother might be in there now. He turned away, opening his book and reading it as he walked along. Someone had come and boarded up his windows. Hob didn't know who because he had been out most of the day, trying to get what he wanted out of the bunch of stony-hearted people he knew or was related to. He got home late, spaced out and low on the paediatric Valium syrup which was all he'd been able to get out of his half-sister. It didn't do much for him beyond making him sleepy so that at least he was too tired to feel all the intensity of a state. He'd first gone for help to his half-sister's boy-friend. This man, the father of her youngest child, made crack himself by mixing cocaine and bicarbonate of soda and baking the resultant paste in a microwave. He offered it to Hob at ten per cent less than its street value - or he said it was ten per cent; Hob couldn't work it out. But Hob had already handed over all his giro money to Lew under the Chinese trees and he was skint. The boyfriend shrugged and said too bad. His half-sister took pity on him, or more likely wanted him out of the house, and said she'd got a bottle of the kid's Valium he could have. They were supposed to have it in their bottles but she and the boyfriend found whisky more effective. After that he proceeded to his cousin's place in one of the blocks off Lisson Grove. The cousin and two of his mates were sitting in front of a hardcore video smoking weed. They passed the joint to Hob more or less as a matter of course but none of them would give him any money or even lend him any. The cousin said he knew a man he'd met in a pub that might want a job done and he told Hob where he might find this man, giving him a funny look when he saw him swigging out of a kid's medicine bottle. The paediatric Valium tasted very sweet and of something that brought back Hob's childhood. He couldn't think what it was and he was too sleepy to think much anyway. He hung about the news agent the man used for a long while, bought a couple of scratch cards, getting nothing up of course but a couple of Walker's crisps and two diet Cokes. Then he sat on a seat outside on the pavement, but no one came along who remotely fitted his cousin's description. Fruit drops, that was what it was. It came back to him suddenly as he was trudging home -fruit drops that syrup tasted of, what his mother's nan called boiled sugars. His first stepfather used to buy them for him after he'd given him a harder clout than usual. He was looking up high, to the top of the next block, Blackwater House, to see where the kid had stood when he'd dropped the rock on the old man, which was why he didn't notice the windows till he was almost at the door. Raw planks of wood were nailed up over all his front windows, the two in the living room and the one in the bedroom. It was a warm night and inside the flat it was hot like an oven. He sat on the settee and laid his head on one of the Mickey Mouse scatter cushions. When the lights in the flats opposite and the lights in the car park went out it would be black as pitch in here. As it was, only thin lines of light, orange-coloured, slipped through the cracks between the boards. It would be as bad in the bedroom. Hob drank more Valium syrup to put himself out and he must have spilt some on the floor, for he was aware in his sleep and his half-sleep of the mice at his feet licking it up. \020"We could live here," Mary said, "When the time comes for me to leave Charlotte Cottage." She and Leo were in Frederica Jago's house, big, turreted, late-Victorian red brick, set in an overgrown rather dark garden. Mary had not visited it since her grandmother's funeral and the meeting there with Alistair and Mr. Edwards. It was stuffy and airless. She felt she should go about opening windows, but as soon as she came through the front door she had been lethargic and reluctant to take any positive steps. The place was filled with her grandmother. It was not a new feeling, it was how everyone felt in her circumstances, but all the time she expected the dead woman to walk in, to smile, to speak, to hold out her arms. "I grew up here. It seems forbidding now but it didn't then, I remember being proud of living in such a _distinguished house and I think I used to boast about it at school. I must have been a horrid child." Leo had been silent ever since they came through the front door. Normally, he would have reacted to that last statement of hers, refuted it at once, and she even wondered if she had said it for that reason: to hear him tell her she could never have been horrid. She was growing hungry for praise from him. But he said nothing, only shrugged lightly. She took him upstairs, going from room to room. In one she opened a dressing table drawer but the scent that came from it, vanilla and roses, was so much the essence of her grandmother that she drew back with a little cry. In the big bay window of the master bedroom she turned to him and laid her head against his shoulder. "Leo, what is it? What's wrong?" "Nothing," he said. "There's nothing wrong." "I'm sure there is. Do you hate the place? We don't have to live here. I don't even know that I want to. There's something retrograde about choosing to live in the house where one was brought up." He screwed up his eyes. He said, as if with an effort, "Your wealth, I suppose it's only now that I'm realising how rich you are. This place has brought it home to me." "I told you." "I know. Now I'm seeing for myself." She had no heart for the rest of the house and led him downstairs and back into Frederica's drawing room. He was looking all the while warily about him. She saw his eyes take in the pictures, the glass, the Porcelain, and linger on a tall French clock in a case of brass and glass that began at that moment to strike four. "If you'd known," she said fearfully, "when we first met, would you have still wanted to know me? I mean, would you have pursued it? Or would you just have said thanks and maybe we'll run into each other again one day?" He paused. It was a long pause. "I don't know." he said. "I can't answer that." Her heart seemed to fall through her body, sliding down in a sluice of coldness. "But you thought at first Charlotte Cottage was mine. When you first heard from me you had my address as Charlotte Cottage." "Yes, and I was mightily relieved, I can tell you, when I found out it wasn't yours." "But what can I do? I can't give it all away. And, Leo, I don't want to. I want somewhere nice for us to live. I want us to live as we please and you not necessarily to have to go on working for your brother - unless you want to, I mean, I want to buy a car; I haven't even got a car and nor have you." She found she was talking wildly, "I can buy us a smaller place, a flat, a little house." She put out her hand to touch his but it remained unresponsive. The memory that came back to her was always there but usually suppressed, buried under layers of pleas anter things. "Why did you leave me that day in Covent Garden?" He turned uncomprehending eyes. "What?" "We were out together. It was the second, no, the third, time we went out together, and you suddenly said you had to go, you had to meet your brother, and you said goodbye and walked away." "I suppose I had to meet my brother." Some inner cautious voice told her not to pursue it. She stood up. "Let's go." Outside it was very dark. Clouds had been gathering all afternoon and now thunder rumbled from beyond Hampstead and Highgate like distant explosions. Coming here, he had held her hand, but now he walked apart from her, his head down, sullen as she had never seen him. After a moment or two he said lifelessly, almost regretfully: "I love you." Until then he had never quite said it. The words themselves were gratifying. Perhaps they always were, no matter who said them. Suddenly she was uncertain. She thought she loved him, she loved being with him, she loved their lovemaking, but could she answer him in the way he would want her to? What made her suddenly doubt? A certain sulky childishness because he had difficulty in coping with a difference in their incomes? They were in a taxi, silent again, and home in Charlote Cottage before he said another word. By then the storm was full-blown, the lightning splitting a sky of huge black thunderclouds, the rain beating down all the flowers in Park Village gardens. She had put the lights on, it was like a winter evening, Gushi, terrified, hid under the sofa, his cold nose pressed against her ankles. It was the kind of weather when you could take it for granted Bean wasn't coming. Leo said suddenly, in an uncharacteristic outburst: "I can't bear that man, whatshisname, Alistair, writing to you that you're going to live together, you're going to buy a place together." "But we're not. I've told you, all that's over." "He wants to marry you, doesn't he?" "Perhaps. I don't want to marry him." A thunder crash seemed to rock the house. Gushi whimpered. She got down on her knees and did her best to stroke his chrysanthemum head, reaching under the sofa. "Will you marry _me?" She turned her head. It was ridiculous to be on all fours. "Did you really say that?" "I really did." He looked almost shamefaced. His face was her face when she was awkward or embarrassed. "Leo, I'm older than you. We've known each other for less than two months. And--" she couldn't resist "- - I'm rich." She saw him wince. "We can live together; we're going to do that. We can get to know each other." "We do know each other." He got down on to the floor beside her and held her shoulders. His eyes were very near hers. "We are part of each other's bodies, and not just in the way all lovers are, but in a special way. You are my bones, Mary. You are my blood. Who else could we marry? Don't you see that after what we've been to each other, it would be wrong for us ever to marry anyone else?" She felt a little faint. She shook her head, on and on. "Marry me, Mary before he can marry you. Marry me now." "Leo you know we see eye to eye in most things, but this is - isn't it a bit ridiculous? I do want to be with you, I do want to live with you as soon as I can leave here, but why does it have to be marriage? One day, yes. Maybe in two or three years' time. When we know what we both really want." He said very quietly, "There may not be two or three years." "What do you mean?" "I don't think I'm going to live very long." It was as if she had put out her hand, expecting to encounter warmth, and had felt, instead, ice. She had been practical, prudent, and she could see he was deadly serious. "What do you mean?" There was fear in his voice now. "Just what I say." The ice was touching her spine sliding down. "Have they told you that? Have they told you at the hospital?" "Let's say," he said, "They won't answer when I ask. I had a check-up on Wednesday." "You didn't tell me." "I would have if there'd been a - - a favourable outcome. I shall be all right for a while. They talked about a while." She said breathlessly, "Another transplant?" "You would do that for me a second time?" "If necessary. Of course I would." There was a wild look in his eyes she had never seen before. "I never thought you'd do that. I never considered it." He seemed disproportionately distressed. It was as if she had said something that might change his life and his plans - as indeed this might - but not pleasurably, not in a way to be entirely desired. "I wish I'd known," he said, half to himself and then, "You'd do that?" "I've just said so. Leo, it's nothing to the donor, nothing but an anaesthetic, and that's quite safe if you're strong and healthy." She put her arms round him. She felt a pulse drumming in his neck, his heart beating steadily but fast. Her mind wasn't made up but she knew she was about to act as if it was. "If you need another transplant, who better to have it from than your wife?"

Chapter 20

Before going to St. Andrew's Place Bean called in at the chemist and picked up the ten enlargements he had had made. Expensive but worth it. The dog photographs - Charlie sniffing noses with Mc Bride, Charlie in pursuit of a goose. Charlie reclining elegantly on sunlit grass -he had in a cardboard folder and he slipped one of the enlargements in with them. The others he locked up in Maurice Clitheroe's safe. His new-found power led him to ask James Barker-Pryce not to light another cigar while talking to him. It was bringing on the asthma he thought he had left behind him twenty years ago. They had gone into a small office or study with a view from its long window of the Royal college of Physicians. On the desk was a stack of writing paper with House of Commons printed on it in green and a picture of a gridiron thing that Bean thought meant it was the property of the government. The cigar was left behind, smouldering in an ashtray in the hall. He opened the cardboard folder, displayed two photographs of Charlie and then the enlargement. Barker-Pryce snatched it up. "I have others, sir," Bean said. Barker-Pryce didn't even look at the shots of Charlie. Some of these people weren't fit to keep a dog. He picked up his dark green Mont Blanc fountain pen in khaki-stained fingers and wrote a reference on that same crested writing paper. His handwriting was not what Bean would have expected, being small and clear and perfectly legible. Over his shoulder, Bean could read desirable words: "reliable", "a true animal lover "unfailingly punctual". "I've made other arrangements for Charlie." Barker-Pryce said in almost the tone he would have used to a neighbour or an honourable friend in the Commons. "I can't see my way revoking those, if you understand me. But I'd like these pictures of my retriever." The money was there, all ready and prepared. It was placed in his hand, the notes lined up against the edges of the envelope with the reference in it. Bean didn't count them, he could tell it was a hundred pounds. With an awful attempt at a conspiratorial grin, a squeezing shut of the eyes, a lifting of that thick hairy upper lip to expose teeth of the same shade and shape as the mahogany beading on the desk, Barker-Pryce said. "Buy yourself a few videos instead of the newspaper, eh?" Bean did speak then. "I'll call again in a week's time." He'd dropped the "sir". He left the pictures where they were, the one of Charlie and the goose uppermost. The expression on Barker-Pryce's face was frightening, so he stopped looking at it. What those girls went through! No wonder they'd never let a John kiss them. Charlie burst out of one of the rooms at the back and came boisterously up to him in the hall. Poor innocent creature, thought Bean. He touched the retriever perfunctorily on the head the way queen Victoria's dad might have patted one of the dogs at Sidmouth. Barker-Pryce didn't say another word but stood in the study doorway, looking at him. Bean pulled the front door closed. Mrs. Sellers and her dalmatian lived in Park square, which would be convenient, being more or less on the way from the Cornells' to Lisl Pring's. The dalmatian (called Spots, "not Spot, please," said Mrs. sellers) was obedient and docile and she took a fancy to Bean from the moment he entered the flat. The interview went well and it looked as if Bean would soon add another dog to his charges. The reference on House of Commons paper made an awesome impression on her but didn't stop her from asking for a second one. Miss Jago at Charlotte Cottage was the sort who when she said she'd do a thing, did it. Except that she hadn't. And he'd already twice reminded her of her promise. He noticed most things about his clients and it didn't escape him that Miss Jago had an engagement ring on her left hand. Not much of a ring - Victorian rubbish of nine carat gold and tour malines you could pick up for forty quid at Camden Lock. One of the numerous men she entertained was presumably going to make an honest woman of her. He wondered -for he was always on the lookout for a means of money-making -if Sir Stewart and Lady Blaackburn-Norris knew, if they would mind, if she had told them. Would she be marrying soon? Would she bring hubby to live _here? Was there anything in it for him? More pressing was the matter of his reference. Having hesitated as to whether or not he wanted another dog and a big dog at that, he now desperately wanted Spots. He told himself he needed the increase to his income walking Spots would bring. Besides, it irked him, Mrs. Sellers doubtless believing by this time that no one else was willing to vouch for him. Twenty-three days had elapsed between the first murder and the second and now, it was just twenty-three days since the second murder. Bean expected a third at any minute. He believed in psychopaths ruled by the phases of the moon, cycles of madness, bloodlust regulated by multiples of seven, give or take a little. So there should be another one at any time. He was sure the police believed in it too. That was why they were so jumpy and so polite. He had stopped reading the papers, but the television had a programme about fixated killers, killers with a mission or an obsession, and there was a psychiatrist on it - probably the one who analysed Pharaoh's madness -talking about murderers who killed prostitutes or nuns or almost anyone so long as they could be put into a category. The twenty-third day went by and the twenty-fourth, and none of the homeless or the jacks men or the beggars got killed. Whoever was doing it had probably gone off somewhere else, Bean thought, gone up north- they always went up north for some reason. He often speculated about The Beater and wondered if he ought to say something to the police next time they paid him a visit. They had been back twice since asking him about the mugger in the tunnel and he had begun seriously thinking of himself as their adviser, as genuinely helping them with their enquiries. But what could he say? That The Beater could act anything, pretend to be anything he wanted? A sadist or, doubtless, a respectable citizen? Instead of leaving wet weather in its wake, the storm had just made things hot. Summer had come at last. All the rain had made the grass in the Park very green and fed the roses so that they grew lush with dark shiny foliage. The sun shone on velvet lawns and sparkling dewdrops; by noon the temperature had climbed to twenty-five and higher and in the evenings people watched performances at the Open Air Theatre in sleeveless dresses and Tshirts. Calling for Gushi on the first really hot morning, the sky cloudless, the air clear, he asked Miss Jago for the third time about that reference. She looked genuinely aghast, he had to give her that. "I _am sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll have it done for you by this afternoon." "I don't see you in the afternoons, miss," Bean said in his most respectful tone. "I'll try to be home by the time you bring the dogs back. Or else you can be sure it will be here when you come in the morning." The woman who walked ten dogs was out with her troop. It was all right for her; she wasn't a day over thirty-five. She had given up waving at Bean since the day he returned her greeting with one of his looks. But nothing could stop their dogs fraternising. Ruby made the Cavalier King Charles spaniel her prey. It was a lot smaller than she was and those dogs always had poor sight. Bean had to rescue it from gang rape, for Mc Bride and Boris had followed Ruby's lead. The woman watched his efforts without offering to help. Then Mc Bride found a heap of horse dung - how did a horse get in here? Under a mounted policeman? -and rolled his fat wet body in it, shaking smelly brown liquid all over Bean's trousers. It was no way to make a living, he told himself - he'd be seventy-one in September. But he had to have an income. He couldn't live on the pension, especially in a luxury maisonette designed for a fifty thousand a year man. Valerie Conway was waiting in the area doorway, well out of the rain of course. Boris would never go down the stairs alone. Bean had to take him, otherwise the borzoi would lie down on the top step and refuse to budge. "You got the dalmatian on your books yet?" Valerie said as he descended. "Why do you ask?" "Just being friendly. As a matter of fact I'd like to think business was good because Mr. Cornell has given me a message for you." "What message?" "He's giving you two weeks' notice. Your services won't be required after the twenty eighth Bean stared at her. He took his hand slowly from Boris's collar and the dog slunk through the doorway, drawing its body to one side so as not to touch Valerie as it passed her. "What's brought this on?" Valerie could hardly contain her pleasure and triumph, he could tell that. "They're going to live permanently at their place in the country. And I'm moving in with my boyfriend." "Well, thanks very much. Thanks very much for the courtesy of _two week's notice." "I consider I've done very well by you, Leslie Bean or whatever your name is. Why d'you think I found you a new customer? You ought to be down on your bended knees thanking me." He looked hard at her. He would have liked to say she could keep her two weeks' notice and she needn't think he'd ever have another thing to do with that foul-tempered dog, that cold-hearted, evil Russian, the animal that hadn't even attempted to defend him when he'd been mugged. But he couldn't; he needed the money. "Thank you, Valerie," he said, and was about to add that he'd see her later, but she had slammed the door. The sun grew almost unpleasantly hot by three-thirty. Bean never thought he'd be complaining about the heat but he would gladly have missed out on that afternoon walk. Marietta, always the least controllable of the dogs, the liveliest, the bounciest, went too near a family of cygnets and got a peck on the chest from the swan. She screamed as if she'd been stabbed with a knife, but Bean couldn't see a mark. Little Gushi was too hot under his thick shaggy coat, puffing and whimpering until at last Bean picked him up and carried him. He was heavy for his size and he panted, his tongue hanging out. All this made Bean late getting back to Charlotte Cottage. He rang the bell, hoping Miss Jago was home as she had said she would be. But there was no answer, so he let himself and Gushi in with his key. She kept it very clean, he always noticed. What he would really have liked was to have taken Marietta in there and left her to run about shaking and splashing the pale walls and silk chair covers with muddy water. But, thinking of his reference, he left the other dogs at the gate, carried Gushi into the kitchen and refilled his water bowl. Taken all in all, it had not been a pleasant day. Bean had still not been back to the Globe. It was not that he was any longer afraid to go there, but he saw himself as punishing the place by ostracising it. All the trouble he had been in was due to the Globe and the Glober's clientele telling tales. Bean had an obscure feeling that a well-run pub wouldn't have those sorts of customers. So, for the past three Fridays, he had been going to the Queen's Head and Artichoke. He knew no one there but that bothered him very little. He went there to drink and this evening he felt particularly in need. Someone in the pub the previous week had buttonholed him and started giving him a history of the place - how the original house that had stood here had been built by one of Elizabeth;1's gardeners, hence its name. Bean wasn't interested and he looked cautiously about him so that he could give the historian a wide berth, but the man wasn't there this evening. He asked for a double whisky, Bell's, and ginger ale, and took it to a table in the corner. Without the whisky he would probably never have thought of going up to Park Village. A second double emboldened him. After all, he was already in Alsobany Street, and it was a beautiful evening. At just after nine-thirty, the sky was clear and cloudless, violet-coloured and still stained red in the west. So near the Park, the air smelt of the scents distilled by the sun from grass and leaves and roses. Twenty to ten, which was the time he would get there, was not too late to pay an evening call. He remembered Anthony Maddox's rules about that -he was talking of the phone but it came to the same thing" nothing before nine am or after ten pm." Besides, she couldn't complain; she had promised him that reference over and over again. On the spot he could stand over her till it was done. Well stand there and perhaps be offered a drink while she wrote it. When she said she was going to be married, Dorothea assumed it was Alistair. "It's Leo I'm marrying." Dorothea had to think who that was. "How awfully romantic," she said. "It is, isn't it? But I'm so glad you think so. I'd athought you'd disapprove. We haven't known each other very long." Knowing the person very long isn't necessarily important. You can have an instinct about someone being right for you." "That's exactly it. I have an instinct about it. But I do wish my grandmother was alive to see us, to see _him." "You thought I wouldn't approve but she would?" "Oh, maybe it's that her generation expected marriage, they thought in the terms of marriage, whereas ours doesn't. I suppose I'm getting married to make, as they say, a public commitment." And, she thought, but didn't say, because he may not live long. "I'm older than he is. Why should I wait?" "Do you know what I'd really like, Mary? I'd love you to wear one of Irene's dresses. Why not _the wedding dress?" They looked at it in its glass case. Irene Adler had never existed and nor had Godfrey Norton; so never had a wedding dress. This one had been worn by some Edwardian bride, long dead. It was white lace with a high boned collar and long embroidered train. Mary laughed. "I'm getting married at Camden Register Office. Can you imagine _this? I shan't even have anything new for it. We don't care for things like that - he doesn't any more than I do. And we shan't have a honeymoon. We can't; I have to stay at Charlotte Cottage for another five weeks. He'll go back to his place and I to mine, I expect - and then, I don't know. But I think we'll be happy, Dorrie." "And what about Alistair?" Said Dorothea. Since she had run away from him and hidden herself among the trees on Primrose Hill she had seen and heard nothing of him apart from the letter. She had not yet been able to face replying to it. "He wants me to let him invest my grandmother's money. He says I'll never find anyone more competent and more cautious. But I haven't got the money yet and shan't have it for ages." "You sound as if you don't much want it." "That would be silly, wouldn't it? We all want money. Now I'm going to marry Leo I want somewhere nice to live." She said goodbye to Dorothea and took the path straight across the Park but their talk had delayed her and it was only when she reached the gate of Charlotte Cottage that she remembered telling Bean she would be home early, that she would be home before he came back and would give him his reference. He couldn't have long gone. Gushi, with fresh water brimming his bowl, was lying exhausted on the kitchen floor. Mary sat down to write Bean's reference, the little dog on her lap. It took her a long time because she had never done it before and had no idea what was requisite to say. And to whom did you address it? She had written __To whom it may _concern and "Mr. Bean" -should she try to find out his first name? -when Leo arrived. He looked white and tired, said he had had a hard day, he would have to lie down for a while. The reference finished, she decided to write to Alistair. She would tell him she was getting married in three weeks' time to Leo, and she had begun, had rejected "My dear Alistair" for plain "Dear Alistair", when Leo called her from upstairs. She came into the bedroom and he started to say rather peevishly that she had promised to look after him, to care for him, but although she knew he was exhausted she had virtually ignored him since he got home And then, suddenly, he was laughing at himself, apologising, saying how absurd he was; he was only making excuses for wanting her. So she went into his arms and after a while he began his gentle delicate lovemaking, his fingers with the soft gossamer touch of a moth's wing, his lips as cool as petals, so that it was like being in bed with a phantom. She closed her eyes and thought when I open them there will be no one there but a shadow. And then his movements strengthened and his body grew real and seemed infused with a sudden great heat. The sound wrenched out of him was like a groan of pain. They slept and woke to see a red sunset behind the trees of the village and the double spires of St. Katharine's. The red dimmed and the sky was blue covered with tiny pink feathers. Mary got up, had a shower, put on loose cotton trousers and a T-shirt, and began to make their supper. But Leo came down while she was tearing lettuce for a salad and gently shepherded her away - he would do it. He was fine now, he wasn't ill. He laid the table, opened the bottle of wine he had brought. She finished her letter to Alistair. Everything she intended to say had presented itself clearly, she had had no difficulties with it, and what had seemed an insurmountable problem resolved itself into a simple telling of the plain facts, kindly, precisely, without emotion. It was nine before they sat down to eat, his pasta dish with black olives having taken detailed preparation. She ate and was glad to see him eating so heartily, a second helping and another slice of _ciabatta. Remembering Alistair's suggestion, she asked him if they should start house hunting this weekend. They would be bound to like the same things, they always did, so it should be a delightful exercise. If he agreed, she had quite decided to sell the house in Belsize Park. The idea seemed to appeal to him and he speculated about houses. Buying a house, buying any property, had never come in his way before, he confessed. It was something that the grown-ups did. And she laughed because she felt just the same. It was not for them, they were children to whom such businesslike adult stuff had never occurred, but now it must, they must be serious, they must realise that, give or take a little, they could have whatever they wanted. He had got up and come round the table, put his arms round her and was holding her close in a bear hug, when the front doorbell rang. Mary said, "It's Alistair." "Yes, I expect it is." Leo hesitated only infinitesimally. "I'll go. It's time we met." She jumped up. "I don't want him to hit you!" Leo laughed. "He won't hit me." She wondered how they would look together, side by side, the one so slight and fair and with the unearthly pallor, the other dark and heavy-set and choleric. Leo came back. The man with him was Bean. "Not wanting to put pressure on you, miss, but I shall be going on my holidays in a couple of weeks' time" "Your reference," Mary said, stammering. "Your - yes, I -yes, I have it here. I'll just get an envelope." When she came back into the room Bean was sitting on a chair at one end of it and Leo at the table facing him. She handed over the reference. "It's for a dalmatian," Bean said. That made Leo laugh. He laughed almost crazily, throwing back his head, and when Bean had gone, he shouted the words, still laughing. "It's for a dalmatian! A dalmatian! A reference for a dalmatian! What'll it do with it, d'you think? Eat it? Bury it?" She had never known him so noisy, so wild. She laid her hand on his shoulders but he still shouted, his face convulsed, "A dalmatian? Can you imagine it reading it? Does it wear glasses? A dalmatian?" And then suddenly he was weeping, tears streaming down his face. He clutched her and pulled her down to him and knelt with her on the floor. His arms held her so tightly she wanted to cry out. "Mary, Mary, I don't want to die. I want to live, I want to live with you. Why can't I live to be old like others will? I don't want to die!" At some point in his pilgrimage Roman had made up his mind to settle nowhere for more than a few nights at a time, to be always on the move so as to distance himself as far as he could from an approximation to domestic life. And now he had been at the Grotto for three weeks, had even turned it into a kind of home, storing his barrow under the lee of the archway, sleeping there on his ground sheet keeping, in a cave of bushes, a store of food. The litter had irritated him and he had gradually tidied the place up, picking drinking straws out of branches, stuffing broken bottles and packaging into carriers they gave him at the grocery. And the rain had washed the place clean, scouring the coped edges of the little pool, filling it with fresher water. When the sun came out, a hot sun at seven in the morning, he sat with his back to the ironwork of the bridge, looking at his garden, the rhodondendrons, the elder trees. The water in the nearer pool was now so clear that he could see his thin bearded face and gaunt figure reflected in its glassy surface and use it as a washbasin for splashing face and hands. He could wash the mug he used for drinking milk and wine and the knife that was his only utensil. But this domesticity brought home to him an unwelcome thought. Homelessness could not be artificially contrived but must come about through real need and real deprivation. And again he called himself a phony and a fake, one who had partaken of other's misery because it was _there and available. He should go now. He should move on. His reluctance to leave the home he had made - he would be rigging up curtains next, building partitions from cardboard boxes -brought him a wry amusement and taught him that he could be amused, he could even laugh. Hadn't he laughed with pure glee at the plight of the man, _her boyfriend, he had sent off in the wrong direction? If he left he could less easily keep an eye on her. But she had her brother now; he had several times seen them together. Her brother would protect her from the dark, red-faced pursuer. Perhaps, then, he would stay just a week longer. He knew where she lived and where she worked, that she had a little dog the old man in the baseball cap took out with the rest, that her brother visited her every day, that she was harassed by a dark-haired man with, to say the least, an aggressive manner. His daughter, he sometimes thought, might have grown up to look rather like her. Elizabeth had that same very slender fairness, the fairy face, that look of being often startled by events. He remembered a camping holiday they had once had, he and Sally and Elizabeth. Daniel was not yet born. It had been in the Highlands, a place not in the least like this Grotto, this spoilt London garden, yet there had been a cave there and a little pool. Mountains soared beyond and there was a beach of silver sand on the loch. Elizabeth, with a child's passion for place, had wanted to stay there for ever. It was impossible to make her understand that they had to go back, that livings had to be earned, the house maintained, she had to return to school. One night he had let her have her heart's desire and sleep, not in their tent or hired trailer, but in the cave itself. But anxious parent that he had been, he had worried and, unable to sleep, had moved himself into the mouth of this hole in the mountainside and mounted guard there all night. Now he was doing the same thing in another place, for someone else. He closed his eyes and saw his daughter, his wife, his son, and though their faces were less clear than they had been, their identities remained, his eternal companions. And he thought in a paraphrase, __for ever wilt thou love and then be _fair. Time could not change them or take them away again and however he became reconciled, however able to find a kind of contentment coming, closing in on him, like fate -they would never be lost or further from him than now or their lives forgotten. He wept for himself and them, sitting by the pool, his head on his knees, quiet accepting tears. Then he got up and stationed himself below the wall to see her when she came up the street and entered the Park.

Chapter 21

"Your father was a doctor," Leo said. "And yours was a civil servant." They were reading each other's birth certificates sitting in the registrar's drab foyer. "That's a polite way of saying he worked behind the counter at what was then the Labour Exchange." "Mine was a GP, nothing grand." Mary found herself often reassuring him. She was bent on establishing an equality between them. Leo she saw had been born in 1971 and she pointed out to him bravely her own birth date of 1965. "You were only a baby when my parents died." The date of their own marriage was fixed for 17 August, a Thursday. After the formalities were completed Mary asked Leo if his brother would come to their weddding. "I don't think so. He's not much of a one for weddings." "We shall have to have two witnesses and he's an obvious one. I thought I'd ask my cousin Judith and my friend Anne, and Dorothea and Gordon will come. Will you ask your brother?" "If you want me to." "And I should like to meet him first, Leo. Can I meet him?" They sat down at a table outside a caf in Marylebone High Street and ordered coffee. Leo looked as if the long walk had been too much for him and Mary made up her mind to take a taxi home. He had rested his head back against the chair and now he closed his eyes momentarily. "Can I meet your brother, Leo?" "Why do you want to?" "Because he is your brother. I've hardly any relatives of my own." He said nothing. She watched him ruefully, his tired face, his spent look. "Am I nagging you?" He touched her hand. "You couldn't nag anyone." "It's just that you're so fond of your brother, you're always talking about him. If he's such an important person in your life, won't he be important in mine?" The coffee came, black for her, a cappuccino for him. "When I'm married I shall break with my brother," he said, and he looked away. "I don't want you to meet him. There, I've said it. I don't want that." "But you love him so much. He's done so much for you. I don't understand, Leo." Leo said stonily. "I loved him once. That's all in the past. He won't come to our wedding." On one of the hills in Kemptown in Brighton, Bean's sister owned a small two-bed roomed terrace house. From the back garden, if you stood on a chair, you could see between two high-rise buildings a segment of sea. Every August she went to stay with her ex-husband's sister-in-law in the Peak District and while she was away Bean stayed in her house. For years they didn't even meet. Not since their mother died had he spoken to her except briefly, on the phone. He made careful arrangements for his holiday. His clients were assured, not once, but again and again, that he would be back one week from his departure. "I shall be in harness again on Friday the eleventh," he told them, one after the other. Erna Morosini said she had seen a young woman exercising a bunch of dogs. The woman wore jodhpurs and had long dark hair. She looked young and strong. Her name was Walker. Didn't Bean think that was funny, her being called Walker and walking dogs? Did Bean know anything about her? Did he think she would take on Ruby while he was away? "Would you really entrust your much loved beagle to her, madam?" Bean asked. "She obviously takes charge of far too many dogs. You can see they're out of control." "Well if you put it like that..." Mrs. Goldsworthy caused him even more disquiet by telling him that the school-leaver who had taken on Barker-Pryce's Charlie would be exercising Mc Bride "as a temporary measure". "I can't do it. Not with my knee." It was the first Bean had heard of Mrs. Golds worthy's knee. Giggling and showing off her ribcage, Lisl Pring said she had made the perfect arrangement. She didn't need the exercise but her boyfriend did and he was going to ride his bicycle round the Outer Circle dragging Marietta behind him. Bean was shocked. "That's against the law, miss." "The cops are going to bother about that, are they? When they've got this murderer to catch?" Mrs. Sellers said she would simply go back to what she had been doing before Bean was engaged, walking the dalmatian herself. But she looked aggrieved. Perhaps she thought there should have been something in the references about him having holidays. Lunchtime or late morning were good times to catch Barker-Pryce, before he went down to the House. Bean encountered the school-leaver on the doorstep, about to exercise Charlie. He had a low opinion of anyone who didn't take a dog out before noon and he gave the tall sixteen-year-old one of his looks, baring his teeth. This time Barker-Pryce said absolutely nothing. He opened the door, stood aside to let Bean in, closed the front door, opened the door to the study, stood aside to let Bean in, closed the door. Where was his wife? His servant? The cleaner? Bean had brought more photographs but when offered them, Barker-Pryce shook his head in silence. He had the money ready, five twenty-pound notes in a stack on the desk next to the headed paper. Bean held out his hand and Barker-Pryce put the money into it, saying not a word. He opened the study door, stood back for Bean to go through and left him to let himself out of the house. As he closed the front door, Bean heard the rasp of a lighter struck by a thumb and the leap of a flame as a cigar was lit. Dealing with The Beater would be less straightforward. Or so he believed. He had no knowledge of where The Beater lived, or of his real name, and it was no use seeking him out where they had previously met, for that would defeat the purpose of his enterprise. He could of course wait for him in a likely place and make his demand, but as he walked back to York Terrace he asked himself whether it was necessary at this stage to do anything at all. They had looked at each other and they had done so speechlessly. The silence, though, had been eloquent and Bean was certain each had read the other's mind. The Beater would know that he had taken in the whole situation and appreciated exactly what the position was. The Beater would need nothing put into words. He would be more silent than Barker Pryce. Even now, at this moment, he would be thinking of everything Bean knew and just how disastrously Bean could if he chose ruin his life and his prospects. Bean went home and opened all the windows. In weather like this he wished Maurice Clitheroe had put in air conditioning before he died. He put a pack of frozen Bombay potatoes and another of pilau rice into the microwave. Tucking Barker Pryce's hundred pounds into the suitcase he'd be taking away with him, he thought that if he went on at this rate he'd soon be able to send out for stuff from Express Tikka and Pizza. With BBC's News at One turned on, sipping at a can of Diet Sprite, he started wondering about The Beater once more. It was becoming clear to him that he need do nothing. The Beater would seek him out. He knew where he lived, for he might well have expected to inherit Maurice Clitheroe's house himself and would have watched closely to see who would occupy it after Clitheroe's death. The Beater might come at any time. The thought was vaguely unpleasant. Seated in the very room where so many unsavoury happenings had taken place, Bean seemed to hear again his employer's screams, the swish of the switch and slap of the cane. The Beater was not only an accomplished actor but strong too. Thinness didn't mean much, it was the muscles that counted. Bean fancied he would be quite ruthless. It might be wise not to let him into the house but to suggest, for instance, that they meet in a pub or even talk in the street. He would do that. When The Beater surfaced - and Bean was sure now that this would happen before his departure for Brighton on Saturday - he would be prepared, leave nothing to chance, above all never be alone with The Beater where there were no other people, no lights, no life. He set off as usual at a quarter to four, Ruby didn't want to be walked and dragged her feet all the way up Portland Place, only showing some interest in life when they came to the parking meter where she conducted a desultory love affair. Passing the Cornells, former home, Bean noticed that the Venetian blinds were pulled down at all the windows and three black plastic bags of rubbish had been left in the area. A stink of something spicy and decaying wafted up to the pavement. The afternoon was hot and he was wearing his red baseball cap with the perforated crown, his jeans and a short-sleeved T-shirt with a herd of elephants marching across it, but he was sweating. When he was in Brighton he might invest in a pair of shorts. More and more people were wearing them, even men of his age. Into the gardens of Park Crescent where the lawns, green and springy the previous week, were fast drying and turning yellow. Ideally, he ought to find another dog in this area so that he didn't have to walk the solitary one on her own all the way from Devonshire Street to Park Square. That prompted him to ask Mrs. Sellers if she knew of anyone but she stared vaguely at him as if she didn't know what he was talking about. Spots started panting as soon as they were out in the street. A hot wind blew the trees and raised litter on dust clouds. Mc Bride came sleepily out of the house in Albany Street, disinclined to walk, stopping every thirty second ds to scratch himself, but Marietta was quite sprightly, her chocolate skin looking as if it had been shaved, and perhaps it had. He didn't even have to ask Lisl Pring. She seemed to have forgotten his reproof or never to have taken it in. She said she'd just had a phone call from a friend who'd been ill. The friend had a lively young spaniel and was at her wits' end to know how to get it exercised. "Where would she be living, miss, this friend of yours?" Bean said. "Not too far away, I hope." "I'll have to think. I mean, I've never been to her place. Gloucester Avenue? Or was it Gloucester Place? Same difference, you know what I mean?" Bean didn't. He thought there was all the difference in the world, about half a mile's difference. "I don't mind asking her to give you a ring." "Thank you very much indeed, miss," said Bean, but she didn't notice the sarcasm. She wouldn't. Miss Jago was out at work. He let himself into Charlotte Cottage and with Gushi runing about him, jumping up his legs, had a quick look round. A postcard from Lady Blackburn-Norris, all about the weather in some far-off place and saying nothing of interest, a bunch of junk mail, fliers from a dry cleaner's. Bean tucked Gushi under his arm and went out, back to the other dogs. Once in the Park, he took a photograph of Spots and Mc Bride, looking sweet side by side. A beggar materialised from nowhere, the way they did, an oldish man with brown teeth and stubble on his face. He held out a hand that was more like one of those toadstools that grow on tree trunks than part of a human being. "Change for a cup of tea, guy?" "Bugger off," said Bean. He'd have liked to kill them all. Whatever they said about that Impaler, his was a mentality he could understand. It was the hottest day of the year. No one would have chosen to walk across the open centre of the Park, treeless and exposed to the heat of that sun. Walking home, she kept to the shady Outer Circle. Two men were running on the oval track by the Primrose Hill Bridge but they were darkskinned and perhaps interpreted the heat as pleasant warmth. She crossed the Circle at the Gloucester Gate and glanced down over the low wall. The man with the beard was lying asleep on a ground sheet spread between the two round shallow pools, a book open, and face-down beside him, a bottle of something standing in the water to keep it cool. Next time they encountered each other, should she give him money? She had always given to beggars but since her accession of wealth, had carried five and ten-pound notes to distribute. Was he the kind of man who would welcome alms? He seemed to be sleeping in total peace, as if he had no cares, or had discovered some secret of life. She walked home and she must have been early, for Gushi was still out. He trotted in, panting, clearly affected by the heat, five minutes afterwards. Bean's face was glistening and beaded with sweat. He was an old man to be walking so far in temperatures in the upper eighties. She paid him for his week's dog walking Gushi in the kitchen noisily lapped water. Mary went with Bean to the gate and was introduced to the dalmatian, a docile dog who licked her hand. "A member of the company due to your good offices, miss," said Bean. "Your reference went down a treat with Mrs. Sellers." His obsequious manner always embarrassed her. But now it was accompanied by the kind of leer only to be expected from a much younger man. He looked her up and down, as if making some kind of assessment or calculation. She went quickly into the house. It was too hot to eat, or too hot for human beings. Gushi had recovered enough to wolf down a can of Cesar and she picked at bread and cheese and salad. When the time came to leave she would miss the little dog. Perhaps she and Leo could have a Shih Tzu of their own. She wrote a letter to Judith in Guildford, inviting her to the wedding, and another to Anne Symonds that she had been at college with, and with Gushi on the lead went out to post her letters. The pillar box on the corner was out of use, the two slots sealed up. The only other one she knew of was under the main arch of Cumberland Terrace. It was still very warm at nearly nine, the kind of evening that comes only after a day of exceptional heat. A few days before, in a sudden high wind there had been a premature falling of leaves, plane leaves turning yellow and dropping on to the pavements. Or perhaps it was not premature but a normal happening that occurred always at this time of the year, an early warning of autumn. The leaves dried and shrivelled, crackled under her feet. She walked through the passage at the Cumberland Terrace. A haze hung over the Park, soft and mysterious. The trees had become purplish-grey shapes, utterly still. The air smelt of diesel and lavender, a curious combination. Few people were about. They would all be at caf tables on pavements, in the gardens of pubs. She posted her letters, watched the locking of the Park gates. The Park police went in, it was said, and rounded up the dossers who tried to spend the night in the shelter of the restaurants and pavilions, but some always escaped their vigilance, sleeping among the bushes or under the lee of the zoo. That reminded her of the man she had seen asleep that afternoon, and carrying Gushi now" You are just a baby," she murmured into his fur - she made her way back into Albany Street at the Gloucester Bridge. Mosquitos danced in swarms above the water of the pools. The air was crowded with wheeling insects, moths with dusty wings, gnats, blue flies. They seemed not to bother him. He sat among the rocks, resting on a rolled-up sleeping bag, reading his book. It came back to her that once, to herself, she had called him Nikolai, because she had seen him reading Gogol. When he saw her he got up, just as a man might when a woman comes into the room. "Good evening," she said. He smiled. "Good evening." It was an opportunity. He had come a little way up the slope and was looking at her with what she interpreted as concern, though it couldn't be. She could go down there and sit with him and talk. But Leo was coming, would be there in ten minutes. Even more absurd was what she said, in the light of what she had just said. "Goodnight." He nodded, as if confirming something he had suspected. He had very blue eyes, intelligent and kind. "Goodnight," he said. She remembered as she walked away that she had intended to give him money but she had none on her and now, anyway, it seemed an absurd idea, insensitive and wrong. It was a man's voice on the phone and somehow he had expected a woman. Well, he hadn't really expected ever to hear another word about it. Not from that Lisl Pring, that butterfly brain. The funny thing was that he'd been watching her on television. Eas t Enders was a favourite programme of his and he never missed an episode. Lisl Pring had been doing her stuff, looking quite different from in the flesh, if that was the term for someone as bony as her, looking fatter for one thing, quite well-covered and shapely, and the credit titles were coming up, when the phone rang. If the programme hadn't been more or less over he wouldn't have answered it. The voice said what its owner was called, or he supposed it did, and then something about a dog. "Are you a friend of Miss Pring?" he had said because he hadn't caught the name. "I just said. It's really urgent. I'd like to see you as soon as possible." Bean hadn't cared for the tone. "I shall want to see _you," he had said, "and the dog. I'm not sure I'm prepared to take on a lively young spaniel. It _is a spaniel, right, and a puppy?" "Not a puppy. He's two years old and he's been to dog-training with me." "Well, I'll see," Bean said grudgingly. "She said Gloucester Avenue." Or had she said Gloucester Terrace? "That's seriously out of my way, you know." "As a matter of fact, it's Gloucester Place, the top end." Maybe the top end wouldn't be so bad. He was starting to say so, not sounding too enthusiastic, when the voice said: "But I'm moving. I'm moving to Upper Harley Street in a month's time." Just exactly where he wanted another dog, half-way between Ruby and Spots. "I could look in tomorrow," Bean said. "About this time tomorrow?" "Make it half an hour later." He'd enjoy himself all the more in Brighton if he knew he'd got six dogs to come back to. Six was a good round number, a number he should make a point of sticking with. "Say nine o'clock then?" "Nine will do very well." Bean switched off the television and went back to his packing. He always packed a little bit every night for a week before he went away and so made sure of not forgetting anything. But he left out the red baseball cap and the elephant T-shirt. He'd travel in those.

Chapter 22

Another job for the old dog man. Putting it like that made Hob laugh. It didn't take much to make him laugh these days. And this would be the biggest job ever. The money on offer made him feel dizzy just to contemplate it. He saw it as putting an end for ever to all states; with such a huge sum states could be kept at bay indefinitely. He would always be as he had until now hardly ever been - the happy dancing joker, the Power Ranger, the laid-back man, the laughing man. He'd come down very low: waited outside the women's toilet at Chester Road and when he'd seen a woman go in and had made sure she was alone in there, gone after her, found her washing her hands and while she screamed taken her handbag. Seventy pounds in cash. Everything else he'd left in the bag, and he'd put the bag on one of the seats so she'd be sure to find it. Coming home, the cash converted into crack, he'd unlocked his front door then stumbled into the hot darkness. Strips of light lay across the floorboards looking as if someone had drawn on them with orange chalk. At first he hadn't seen the note. It was a folded piece of paper, lying on the floor just inside the front door. An envelope was with it. Hob wasn't much good at reading. Somehow he'd never got the hang of it and he was worse when in a state, as now. The note and the envelope on the floor beside him, he crumbled up one of his rocks and dropped it through the mouth of the watering can rose, then came the cap, the straws, the tin lid, finally the lighter applied to the perforations. He breathed in a long hauling breath, as if his lungs were engines for dragging and hugging. The smoke in his windpipe felt like the first time he'd tasted ice cream. Happy as the day is long, he was at his reading best. The envelope had a letter in it from the council, something about putting new windows in at nine am on the fifteenth and to be sure to be in to admit the operatives. Or that's what he thought it said. The note was from Carl, harder to read because it was in handwriting. He was to go up that evening and Carl might have something for him. It was a long time since Hob had seen either Carl or Leo. He thought Leo had left and he wouldn't have been surprised if Carl had gone too, though where he couldn't begin to guess. No doubt he came back from time to time. Leo was going to die. You didn't have to be a doctor or have Carl's brains to know that. Hob got up and did a little dance, punched the air, sang one of his mum's nan's funny old songs and then he sang "I'll be Your Sweetheart" and "Night train to Memphis" because he wasn't going to die, whatever might happen to Leo. The mice must sleep in the daytime. He pictured them asleep behind the skirting board, looking like Jerry in the Tom and Jerry cartoon, or Mickey Mouse on his cushions, but furry and soft too. Maybe there were hundreds of them, curled up and cuddling each other. All that boarding up made the place airless but the kitchen smelt fresher than the rest of the flat. He took two Weetabix out of the packet and crumbled them up on the living room floor in front of the telly. The crumbling made him giggle because maybe the Weetabix was for the mice like crack was for him. Then he went upstairs. It would have been too much to expect the lift to be working still. It wasn't. The stairs were nothing to him when he was well and he pranced lightly up the fourteen flights, making a noise about it presumably, because Carl must have heard him. He was standing there, holding the door open, looking as miserable as sin and his face as pale as Leo's. "How's Leo doing, then?" Hob said, which he never would have if he hadn't been fit and raring to go. Carl didn't answer, just shrugged and looked away. "I'm going out," he said. "This won't take long, You can make two K out of it, which is the entire extent of my resources, all I've got till the week after next, rather." "Two K? You mean, two _grand?" "It's no use haggling because, as I said, it's all I've got." "I'm not haggling," said Hob. "And five hundred grams of E, so long as you'll take the yellows." "That's fine by me, Carl." Sweat was pouring off him. The medical book he'd been reading told him your sweat didn't smell so much when you got older, but Bean wasn't taking any chance. He'd had a horror of it all his life but his repugnance had increased after those beating sessions, when the house had been filled with the meaty, oniony stench, the result of wildly expended energy. He had a shower, his second of the day, sprayed himself with deodorant and put on clean clothes: nicely pressed jeans, the elephant T-shirt and his red baseball cap. The T-shirt he'd give a quick rinse to when he got back and it would be dry by the morning, ready for the train. They closed the Park at nine in August. That would just about allow him to walk to the top of Gloucester Place by way of the lake and the Kent Gate. He left home at eight-thirty. It was as warm and as humid as Florida, thought Bean, who had never been there. The other route would have been shorter but there would have been all those roads to cross and all that traffic. The Park was peaceful and quiet, the lake glassy and the air thickening. When he looked up the darkening blue of the sky was fading under a veil of mist. A moon had risen, a pale oval, blurred and fuzzy, like the corpse of something that had long lain in muddy water. All the birds had gone to roost. From a distance a black swan, sleeping on one leg the other and its neck tucked into the plumage of its back, looked like a monstrous mushroom. Green - and chestnut feathered ducks curled themselves up into silk cushions at the water's edge. But the coming dusk was robbing everything of colour, the grass, the trees shapes and shadows rather than living things. A beggar wandered towards him. He fancied it was the one who had asked him for money the day before, but now there was no one else about, they were alone, passing each other on the lake path, Bean looked the other way, pretending not to see him. You could never tell these days, who would turn out violent. Most vehicles were banned from the Park but a Royal Parks Constabulary police car went slowly past, the kind they called a lettuce sandwich because it was white with a dark green and light green stripe along its side. To the left of him the Turkish domes of Sussex Place gleamed like an encampment of tents at dawn. The boats were all tied up to the island in the middle of the Hanover pond, bobbing gently on the water. He glanced up that way because he could never pass it without remembering Mussolini, so when he turned back and began to cross the grass towards the gate and saw Mussolini approaching him under the trees he refused to believe his eyes, as if stimulating them to see straight. It was as if Mussolini had been waiting for him. He wasn't going anywhere; he'd just been standing there, what the police called loitering. Bean could see the street lamps in the Outer Circle. There were people walking up there, traffic heading up to the Macclesfield Bridge. He turned his eyes on Mussolini, making out his pudgy features, skinny body and filthy old clothes in the warm gloom. "You took your time," Bean said. Mussolini was wrapped up for such a hot night, wearing the sort of layers, dark matted rags, favoured by the beggars. He was chewing something and Bean didn't think it was gum. Whatever it was he eased it into the corner of his mouth, pushing it with his tongue. "You was late," he said. "You dropped me in the shit." "That may be but it's you that's too late now. The job I wanted, someone else did it. And a bit more thoroughly than what I bargained for." "Could be another job," said Mussolini. "There's always jobs folks want doing." Bean shrugged. He had lingered for a moment but now he began walking on towards the gate, a wide gate with maybe twenty-five spikes on its railings. Mussolini had got into step beside him and Bean was quickly aware of his smell. Not the cooking smell of fresh sweat but of dirt ingrained, unwashed clothes, the excrement of vermin, the acrid coldness of chemicals. He tried to draw himself aside, but Mussolini was close now, his head bent down to Bean's lesser height, peering at Bean's chest. "Dig your elephants," he said, and then he said, "Jumbo, jumbo," and started laughing. "Jumbo, jumbo." His laughter made an eerie manic sound in the silence of the Park.

Chapter 23

Park Road runs northwards on the western side of the Park from the top of Baker Street to the junction of St. John's Wood Road and Prince Albert Road and communicates with the Outer Circle by means of the Hanover Gate and Kent Passage. The London Mosque is in Park Road. So are the Rudolph Steiner House, a defunct pub called the Windsor Castle, Dillon's Business Bookshop and a number of Indian restaurants. There are sandwich bars and a wine bar and a fur shop where no one ever seems to buy anything. The bookshop is so situated for its proximity to the London School of Business Studies, a graduate school housed in Decimus Burton's most spectacular of all the Park terraces, at Sussex Place. This is on the Outer Circle, an amazing range of Corinthian columns, polygon al bays and cuboid domes, so light and airy that they might be tents of silk rather than towers of stone. Graduate students in need of books need not walk all the way down Baker Street and up Park Road to reach the shop but may turn left out of the terrace and, once past the College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, find the opening to an alley called Kent Passage. The passage is narrow and long and absolutely straight, tree-shaded and confined by high hedges behind chain-link fencing, not railings. On the southern side it is overshadowed by the pale brick walls of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. The trees and shrubs which grow along its length are planes and sumachs, strawberries and the Rose of Sharon. Near the Park Road end the passage opens out into an oval shape, closes again, and the pavement of the wider thoroughfare is reached. The bookshop is a few paces to the left while on the right lies the Kent Terrace. This is the only terrace not to face on to the Outer Circle, a plain range of buildings with Ionic columns. Anthony Maddox once told Bean that the terrace had been built in 1827 and name ad for George IV's brother, the Duke of Kent, but the Duke, as well as being the parent of the Heir Presumptive to the throne, was long dead by then, so there was no need for too much grandeur or originality. Bean thought this was said spitefully, for his resemblance to the Duke's statue had already been pointed out, but he never passed the terrace without thinking of what had been said and wondering if malice was intended. The Kent Terrace, however, has one peculiarity. As well as the usual black iron railings, a feature of the place is the spikes adorning the tops of the pillars in its grounds. A pair of these pillars flank the gate that leads into Kent Passage and the steps down into Kent Passage. These are man height, cuboid and very solid, and from the tops of both spout five iron branches in a cluster, each one terminating in five spikes. They look rather like bunches of thorn twigs, but ugly and menacing too, and it would be hard to say what purpose they were intended for or what was in the designer's mind. A man's body was impaled on these iron thorns. It was so arranged as to be invisible from Kent Passage unless you happened to be looking at the sky, and visible from the terrace only if you peered behind the pillar. Besides, a heavy mist had hung over the Park and its environs since dawn, obscuring even those objects that were near at hand in swathes of white vapour. The body was supported in its position by the splayed spikes penetrating its chest, head lolling forward, arms dangling, legs hanging. Barefot, dressed in jeans with ragged hems and missing knees, torn grey T-shirt with washed out black logo and a dark red cardigan that was stiff with food stains and blood, it had once been a smallish man. No doubt its total weight amounted to no more than nine stone. Even so, to lift it up so high must have taken considerable strength. A great many people passed it during the morning. None of them looked up to the height of the pillar. Even after the mist had gone and the sun come out, the body was not discovered until noon. A police officer on the beat entered the passage from the Outer Circle. First he had walked round the pond where the pleasure boats were moored, crossed the yellowing balding grass and left the Park by the Hanover Gate. His eye had been on a dosser in camouflage pants and grey vest who was fumbling in a litter bin suspiciously close to a parked car whose windows had been left open. The policeman lingered, watching until the dosser, having found the remains of a take away in the bin, shambled off northwards towards the Macclesfield Bridge. Then he stepped into the passage and strolled slowly along it. Someone shook a duster out of one of the high windows in the building on the left. The passage was in deep shade for three-quarters of its length and there the sun came through the leaves, making a dappled pattern, before there were no more leaves but only a sunlit space. On to this space fell a shadow. It was like a crab or part of a crab or perhaps it was like a paw, the extended limb of a frog. He looked up. The body hung like a sack in clothes or a guy, limp and slack, and its hanging hand had a trail of blood dried between the fingers.

Chapter 24

Dill and the beagle were sitting on one of the seats on the southwest side of the lake, watching an old woman in a tracksuit feeding the geese. There were not so many geese as a year ago and the story was that the street sleepers were catching them to kill and roast over fires on the canal bank. Dill always talked to the beagle as if it were a person. He said that much as he'd like to taste roast goose, for he never had tasted it, he wouldn't know how to go about catching a goose, let alone killing it. And how would you get the feathers out? And the innards? He was talking like this about a goose to stop himself shaking with fear about the dead man. The beagle's tail started to wag, thumping on the slats of the seat. Roman patted its head, stroked it, sat down next to Dill and Dill told him the goose story just as he had told it to the beagle a moment before. But it no longer had the power to stop Dill shivering. "What's wrong?" Roman said. "There's been another, hasn't there? Is that it?" "The fuzz had me in, mate. They had me look at him." "To identify him?" Dill nodded. He held on to the beagle's collar to steady his hands. "They said they'd seen me with him but they never had." He looked up, turning his head in a crooked cautious way. His oriental eyes were puffy as if he had been crying. "They was OK," he said. "They didn't hurt me." "What happened?" "I went in this place." He wrinkled up his nose. "There was this geyser lifted up a sheet and showed me what was under. It was just a dead face, mate, you couldn't see no cuts. I didn't know him. I'd never seen him before. They said was I sure and then the geyser put the sheet back. They was OK. There was one geyser give the beagle a bun." "Maybe it was one of the jacks men," said Roman. "I don't reckon. I don't know what to think, mate. I reckoned I knew every geyser up here. You ever seen a dead person, Rome?" "My mother." Sally and his children, but he didn't mention them. Daniel's face had been cut to pieces. "I saw my mother." "Do they always look like they're made of wax? Like they've never been alive?" "I don't know. You're sleeping at St. Anthony's aren't you, Dill?" "They won't let me take the beagle. What am I supposed to do about the beagle?" Roman walked on towards the Clarence Gate. The flowerbeds and the grass here were covered in a soft grey quilt of goose down. Goose feathers floated on to the petals of flowers. He bought a paper at a news agent at the top of Baker Street. The front page was a four-column spread photograph of a stretch of railings, purporting to be but perhaps not those on which the body had been found; black spiked railings with grass behind and trees shapeless in the thinning mist. Inside were more photographs: Cahill's and Clancy's, more pictures of Park railings and one of a group of jacks men sitting or standing about on the canal bank. The body was understood to be that of a man in "late middle age", whatever that meant, of no fixed address. He had not yet been identified. The pockets of his jeans and cardigan were empty. His feet had been bare. The police wanted help from the public in their enquiries... Roman decided not to go away this time. He would stay and sooner or later they would question every dosser in the vicinity of the Park, in the whole of London probably. He would stay, do his best to answer their questions, like a good citizen. It was all part of the way his life was changing, turning back on itself, turning him back into something like what he once was. Blue and white tape printed with the words __Police Do Not _Cross made a flimsy but deterrent boundary around the sturdy column and its crest of spikes. The Kent Terrace looked livelier than usual, most of its windows wide open and from time to time heads poking out. But if there had ever been a crowd waiting and hoping for new sights as when Pharoah's body was found, there was none here. A uniformed policeman strolled about on the forecourt. In Park Road the traffic kept up its customary steady roar. Veiled women, men in pairs, snowy-shirted, chatting animatedly to each other, never to the women, made their way up to the Mosque. Roman had come up there because he was interested by descriptions of the column he kept hearing about but which he had never yet seen. A dark trickle, the colour of burnt umber, ran tear-like down the cream stucco from the roots of the spikes. "It's not what you're thinking," the policeman said. "It's rust." "Some strength was needed to hoist a body up there. Was he on the top?" "It's all been in the papers, mate," said the policeman, and he turned away, discreet or perhaps only bored. Next day, by chance, they asked him to come to the police station and talked to him exhaustively about the inhabitants of the Park environs, growing more and more mystified, he thought, by his manner and his accent. When they asked him if he would accompany them to the mortuary and attempt to identify the latest murder victim, he said, "Certainly. If you wish it." The sergeant - he didn't merit an officer of higher rank - gave him a look and the detective constable with him a look, and if he didn't quite cast up his eyes sketched the gesture. Roman was taken to the mortuary by car. He could tell the two policemen expected him to smell, were all prepared to go through pantomimes of flinching, shifting their seats and opening windows, and when they found him inoffensive were almost disappointed. The body was covered by a green plastic sheet. Roman remembered what Dill had said about waxiness. He thought of carvings he had seen out of soapstone or white jade. The face could have belonged to a man of any age over, say, forty. It was somewhat Hanoverian with small mouth and full cheeks and although he could not identify it, he thought he had seen this man somewhere before. That was all he could tell the sergeant. "You know him but you don't know who he is?" "I wouldn't say I knew him but I've seen him before." "Where would that be?" "In the Park, I expect. I spend my life in the Park." The sergeant finally asked him what a man like him was doing on the street. "I prefer it," Roman said, not wanting to go into the events of his private life. "It suits me." "Some sort of eccentric, are you?" "Perhaps." He resisted asking permission to go but sat in the open-plan office waiting while the sergeant fiddled with papers, giving him from time to time meaningful looks. Once, in such a place, Roman would have been tense and self-conscious, searching his mind for minor motoring of fences he might have committed, but now he felt nothing beyond a mild boredom. The sergeant said, "That's it then. You can go," and he added, perhaps unable to resist, "You want to get yourself together, pull your socks up, put a roof over your head. The street's no place for your sort, as you must know." Roman nodded. He walked out and no one tried to stop him. The Grotto, where he returned, had been scoured clean of litter by the police. They had done a better job than he had ever been able to do, taking away every scrap of paper and shred of rag in their search for evidence. His barrow had gone, stolen probably, not taken by them. It was hot and close, the abode of flying insects. They swarmed above the pool in which the water was no longer clear and fresh but coated in scum. He sat down on the dry ground in the dusty shade. Soon he would have to go out, up into Camden Town, and replace the contents of the barrow. Buy second-hand clothes, another ground sheet more blankets, a water bottle, and a host of other things. It seemed to him a foolish exercise, absurd, because he _could buy them - he could within reason buy anything he wanted. The sergeant's commments only reiterated what he had himself been thinking. What he had done had served its purpose but had now become artificial, a quixotic slumming, and to continue it was self-indulgence. The real courage would lie in returning to the world. Leo spent every evening with her but not the nights. He gave as his reason the one they had used before, that Charlotte Cottage was the Blackburn Norrisses' home. So in the mornings she was alone and she took Gushi out alone. He missed his companions and, spoilt baby that he was, often plumped down on the grass like a cushion of chrysanthemums and refused to move. She carried him home, a furry muff in the August heat. But in the evenings, when Leo came, they walked him together. Leo's mood alternated between a kind of sorrowful brooding and an almost manic brightness. He was going to turn these obligatory walks into adventures, he said, and announced his intention of runing to earth Mrs. Sellers and Spots. He even went up to one woman exercising a spotted dog of dubious provenance. "Did my fiance give your dalmation a reference?" he asked her. She looked panic-stricken and backed away. Another dog-owner, faced with the same enquiry, pointed towards the Inner Circle and asked Leo if he knew there was a police station down there. Mary was amused, then embarrassed. On their way back to Park Village she again asked him what was wrong. "Are you worried about getting married?" "That's the last thing I'm worried about. Marrying you is what I want more than anything in the world." "Then what is the first thing you're worried about?" she asked him gently. "Death," he said and burst into shrill laughter. Once they were in the house he began kissing her. He kissed her mouth and her throat and drawing open her shirt, kissed her breasts. She was not used to passion from Leo, rather to something more controlled and gentle, but she responded eagerly. It was as if this was what had always been missing between them. He whispered, "Not upstairs, in here." and pulling her into the living room, kicked the door shut behind him. Once before, in here, he had held her, both of them kneeling, and asked her to marry him. Now he began to make love to her as if it was the first time. Her whole body seemed to melt into a warm languid liquefaction. He was no longer light and phantom-like but strong and urgent, his mouth holding hers and his arms wound tightly round her. The phone ringing made her cry out in protest at a cruel interruption. Leo cursed. "Leave it. Don't answer it." She simply shook her head, unable to speak. The ringing went on interminably. They listened to it, stilled and motionless. When it stopped, Leo stroked her hair, her shoulders, turned her on her side and entered her like that, a hand clasping each breast. She gave a clear cry of pleasure, arching her back as he let out a long sigh. A little before ten he left her to go home to Primrose Hill. They had sat for the rest of the evening with their arms round each other, talking about the future, where they would live. His earlier wildness had been displaced by calm and, she thought, hope. After he had gone she took Gushi on to her lap and fondled him, doing her best not to resent the little dog whose presence stopped her returning with Leo. Bean would be back from his holiday and in the morning would be at the door as usual at eight-fifteen. The phone rang again as she was watching ITN's ten o'clock news. She turned off the television and picked up the receiver. Alistair's baritone sounded deeper and smoother than usual. The sound of it made her brace herself, her body tensing after the long relaxation of the evening. "I phoned you earlier," he said and his tone was accusing, admonitory. She and Leo had sometimes laughed together about those people who apparently expect you to be sitting close by the phone all day, waiting for their call. She decided not to placate him. "Yes, I heard it ring. I didn't answer it. I was - occupied." "Don't you think it rather irresponsible not to answer the phone? It could be something serious. It could be an accident to someone close to you." "Now my grandmother is dead," she said quietly, "I have no one close to me except Leo and he was with me." It was true and her solitariness struck her forcibly as she said it. Dorothea and her cousin she was fond of but really there was only Leo. She breathed in, "You got my letter, Alistair?" "That of course was why I am phoning. At last, you might say. I've taken my time, haven't I? It was a blow, Mary, it was a heavy blow." What could she say? Not that she was sorry, certainly not that. "Sooner or later there was bound to be someone. There will be for you." He didn't like that. "In your case it was rather sooner than later, wasn't it? As to someone for me, as you put it in your romantic way, don't imagine I've been celibate since you left. I'm hardly that kind of man." She didn't believe him. She didn't care. He made it impossible to resist some kind of apology. "I'm sorry if I've hurt you." It was as if she hadn't spoken. "I had better get to my reason for phoning. You've rather distracted me from the point. As a civilised man, I wanted to congratulate you. I hope you'll be very happy." "Thank you. That's very nice of you, Alistair." "And to tell you that I've got something for you. A wedding present." She was astonished. "You're giving me a wedding present?" "Is that so strange? Didn't you san to me a few weeks ago before you so inexplicably ran away from me that in the time-honoured cliche you hoped we could be friends?" "Of course I hope that. I didn't think you wanted it." "Mary," he said, "I have a wedding present for you. Don't tell me to send it, please. I want to put it into your hands." She found herself passionately not wanting to see him, have him come there, spoil her weekend with Leo. Just waiting for his arrival, fearing what he might do, would make her apprehensive for hours. She remembered that evening when Bean had arrived unexpectedly and before Leo answered the door she had assumed it was Alistair. "Monday," she said reluctantly. "Would Monday be all right?" Not here though. "Would you come to the museum on your way home from work? We could have tea or a drink." "You won't run away from me again, will you?" It was chilling the amount of venom he could put into those innocuous words. Her usual urge to be conciliatory came, departed, driven away by rising anger. "I've said I'll meet you, Alistair. It will be the last time." His barrow gone, the Grotto trampled by police and no longer a desirable home, Roman set off to find another place in which to spend the night. All his possessions were in a rucksack he had bought, blue plastic, very cheap, but still plainly new and costing money. Every step he now took seemed to be leading him inexorably back into the world. Some people were having a party on one of the houseboats in Cumberland Basin. He paused on the bridge and looked down at them. They were young. One of the men was naked to the waist; a woman was holding up a frothing bottle of champagne; another had a guitar from which she plucked dull reverberating notes. A young girl, holding her glass out to be filled, saw him and waved. Nothing could have made him so certain that his shedding of the street was apparent. St. Mark's Church in Albert Road on the fringe of Primrose Hill was a grim neo Gothic place, the kind of building that made him wonder why the Victorians wanted to revive in their places of worship the creepy and sinister elements of mediaeval architecture. Its gate and its doors were painted sky blue, an incongruous colour perhaps used to soften the grim effect. A garden rather than a graveyard surrounded it, a place of late-summer blooming shrubs and fluff-headed thistles. He crossed the road over the water for here the canal turned northwards in its passage up to Camden Lock. The place where he stood was called the Water Meeting Bridge. A green rectangle on the bridge contained a gold shield bearing the legend, __With Wisdom and _Courage. These were qualities he needed and would have liked, to have. And perhaps he had more of them now than ever in the past. On the parapet he looked along the canal to the next bridge. Between the two bridges grass and weeds reached to the edge of the tow-path and the churchyard trees overhung it. He turned into St. Mark's square, then into Regent's Park Road where the other bridge was. It was with a little thrill of dismay that he noted the spiked railings at the chancel end of the church, another set serving as balusters up the steps to what was perhaps a vestry door. Someone had tied a bunch of coloured balloons to one of the spikes. There must have been a children's party. Thinking of Daniel, who had liked balloons but hated the noise they made when they burst, he opened the gate into the garden and walked along the path. White Japanese anemones gleamed in the dusk. The place was alive with mosquitoes and all those cousins of mosquitoes that are smaller but sometimes fiercer, midges, gnats. They danced on the warm air. A bat swooped then another. He remembered Sally's fear of bats, her curious superstition, the only one she had, that bats had a predilection to get in women's hair and bite their scalps. He didn't mind bats but the mosquitoes in their dense concentration would be unbearable. There were no gravestones. He wondered why not. Where they might have been were green garden seats, enough to seat a dozen people. Nothing lay below him but the trees and snowberry bushes, the long grass descending to meet the path and the dark yellow water. Chain-link fencing made a formidable barrier between the fringes of the garden and the canal bank, but it was climbable. He scrambled over, his sights on the other bridge, a sheltered place. Street sleepers traditionally made their beds under bridges - wasn't there a song about it? A Merle Haggard song about making a kingdom under the bridges? He dropped down on to the path. It was starting to get dark, a light up on the bridge reflected in the oily water. A tubular metal rail offered some sort of security to those going too near the edge under the bridge. The light gleamed on its silvery surfaces. He was only a few yards away when he saw that the area under the brown brickwork already had an occupant. Street people, no matter what they wear, or what they started off wearing, always seem to be dressed in darkness. They are blackened, everything muted by time and dirt to the colour of shadows, so that when seen from a distance a group of them look like figures in bronze. In his early days on the street, Roman had once been no different, this man was no different. He was an incarnation of dirt, a bundling and layering on this warm night of dark greasy rags, string tied his skin much the same colour as the shred of cloth round his neck, as his cracked boots. His face peered out from between the knotted neck cloth and his battered hat, a face dark as a black man's but sickle-shaped in profile, with a long hooked nose and rough pitted skin. He might have spoken when he saw Roman, he might have recognised him as belonging to the same kind, but he didn't. Roman was very aware in that moment of his own cleanness, his washed clothes, some replaced and new, his new backpack. He wanted to laugh when the man under the bridge scowled at him and made a gesture of dismissal, shaking his fist. What did he think he was. Some tourist who had lost his way? But he understood. He looked like that tourist, he had indeed lost his way, and now had only the tourist's recourse. "OK," he said. "I won't disturb you. Goodnight." It was the final sign. He climbed up the bank again, over the fence into the churchyard, left by the blue gate, and set off to walk up to Camden Town where, in his new respectable guise, one of the cheap hotels would give him a bed for the night.

Chapter 25