When it was eight-thirty and still Bean hadn't come, she took Gushi into the Park herself. It was already very warm. The grass was soaked and beaded with dew. Not a breath of wind stirred the trees, their foliage pendulous and dripping off the branches as if composed of some thick viscous fluid. The sun that was turning lawns and flowerbeds and greensward into a desert seemed burning on her arms and face. She walked across the Broad Walk, past the restaurant and over the long Bridge. Gnats had already begun their dance above the scummy brown water. Once, when she first came here, the uneven juxtaposition of the Outer and Inner Circles had confused her and she had been inclined to lose herself in the flower gardens. But now she could have drawn a plan of the Park with her eyes shut. She turned left along the path opposite the back of the theatre, meeting and passing a woman she had never seen before but whose dog Gushi evidently knew owe ll The scottie and he encountered each other nose to-nose, tails, wagging, then noses were inserted under tails. The two of them began a play fight, growling, rolling over in the grass. The woman turned back, smiling tentatively. Mary remembered that she had seen this jaunty little black dog among the others tied to the gate post of Charlotte Cottage. The woman didn't introduce herself even when Mary said who she was. "That bloody Bean has let us all down again." "I thought perhaps I'd got the date wrong," Mary said. "Oh no. He was due this morning. Too nice down by the seaside, I expect. He'll be back tomorrow with his tail between his legs." The metaphor was so unconsciously appropriate that Mary wanted to giggle but she controlled herself. She called Gushi, eventually had to drag him away and passed on along the path without learning Mc Bride's owner's name. Back in the Park, on her way to the Irene Adler, it was far hotter. The blue sky was already whitening and the air thick with humidity. The zoo animals she passed seemed to feel the heat no more than the cold but to lumber and munch placidly, bent solely on the getting of food. Up in Albert Road there was a smell of diesel and exhaust, a hot bitter stench. She could see a bevy of street people stretched out on the grass in the church gardens. They could have been taken for sunbathers except for the rags that still covered every inch of them but for stricken faces and coarsened hands. Dorothea said to take the whole of next week off - why not? Gordon would take over. She should have a whole free week for her wedding. But Mary remembered that Alistair was coming on Monday to bring his mysterious wedding present and she could see that changing this arrangement might lead to terrible difficulties. And she didn't exactly have a lot of preparations to make for the wedding, anyway. So she said she would take from Wednesday morning off if that was all right with Dorothea and Gordon. "Go home early this afternoon then," Dorothea said. "Nobody's going to come looking at corsets and crinolines on a day like this." And remarkably few did. Mary was home again by four, in time for Bean's arrival at a quarter past. But again Bean didn't come. She waited for half an hour and then she dialled his number in York Terrace. No reply. Leo arrived just after five and they sat outside in the shade, drinking tea and then sharing a bottle of wine. The garden was full of brown and orange butterflies and little coppery-winged moths. Gushi lay under a lilac bush, puffing showily, his tongue hanging out. Leo remembered the name of Spots's owner and they found her in the phone book. But Mrs. Sellers hadn't seen Bean for a week or heard from him. Mary and Leo took Gushi out themselves when it was cooler, though it was not very cool. As they walked back, arms round each other's waists, he asked her to come back to Edis Street with him for the night. But if she did that she wouldn't be here for Bean in the morning, and she was sure Bean would be here in the morning. Leo didn't argue. He kissed her and said he would be back in Charlotte Gottage before she woke up. He would come quietly into the house and if she would like that, to bed with her. "I'd like that," she said, smiling. She overslept. She was lying sleepily in Leo's arms, having made leisurely, half awake love with him, their bodies naked and damp, cooled by sweat, when at last she looked at the clock. It was almost nine. Bean hadn't come. He had a way of thrusting his fist at the bell and pushing with all his body weight behind it, keeping it there until someone answered. She would have heard. He would have seen to it that she had heard. She put on a robe and went downstairs. Leo had picked the post up from the doormat when he came in and left it on the hall table for her. The letter postmarked Cape Cod was from the Blackburn-Norrises and announced their return rather earlier than expected. They would arrive back in London on 19 August. She made Leo tea, took it up and showed him the letter. "The order of release." "I thought it might be," Leo said. "You can come and live with your husband a mere two days after we're married." For an hour it distracted her from the problem of Bean. But at ten-thirty she phoned Mrs. Sellers, who hadn't seen him, and then, on the number Mrs. Sellers gave her, the actress Lisl Pring. Lisl wasn't just annoyed, she was worried. The chocolate Poodle Marietta was all right - Lisl's boyfriend took her out twice a day trotting behind his bicycle. It was doing wonders for his figure and he didn't mind how long it went on. But what had happened to Bean? He would never absent himself like this unless he was at death's door. She gave Mary the names of Bean's other clients. Mary and Leo took Gushi out. It was too hot to go far. Gushi drank nearly a pint of water when he got back and returned to lie under the lilac bush. After she had called Express Tikka and ordered a _thali each for their lunch with pickles and _nan she phoned Tina Morosini. No, it wasn't her that Mary had encountered in the Park the previous morning. Her dog wasn't a scottie. "Mine's the sexy beagle," said Mrs. Morosini. "You must know the one. My partner says I ought to have her doctored but I'm still hoping for pups one day." "Bean..." Mary began but Mrs. Morosini cut her short. "Oh, yes, he's disappeared, hasn't he. He left me his Brighton number, I insisted, and I've called it and talked to his sister. She hasn't seen hair or hide of him. Well, she only came back herself yesterday but there's not a sniff of him in the place." As if Bean was a terrier that had turned himself into a stray, as if he had run off and would turn up without his collar and with his ear bleeding. Their lunch came just before one, brought in the red and white van by the man who had removed his chef's hat and was wearing nothing but shorts and a red and white vest. Their _thalis were eaten, outside in the shade of the laburnum and the Japanese cherry and all was peaceful until Leo produced their dessert of raspberries and nectarines. Then wasps drove them indoors. They put Gushi in the coolest place, on a window-seat in the north-facing bedroom. Mary hadn't asked how they should spend the afternoon but Leo anticipated the question. He pulled her down on to the bed. "Let's not go downstairs again." When the gates had only been open for an hour and before the heat mounted, they took the dog into the Park. A marathon was being run. Round the Outer Circle, in at Chester Road, round a segment of the Inner Circle, out at York Bridge and round the Outer Circle again. Then repeat -twice? Three times? The runners were all male, all thin, their faces contorted with effort or agony. Their T-shirts, clinging to bony chests, were as wet as when taken dripping from the wash. Leo said they made him feel tired. They made him feel ill. She looked anxiously into his face. "You're all right, aren't you? All this walking isn't too much for you?" "It's vicarious," he laughed. "I'm feeling it for _them." But as they walked back, arms round each other, hip to hip, she thought back to the transplant and had the strange feeling that it was ongoing, continuous, that when they were together like this or in bed side by side, the flow of strength from her still proceeded into him, like an injection of some serum into a permanently open vein. She leant across and kissed his cheek and felt the arm around her tighten and his hand caress her waist. "If Bean comes now we shall have to send him away empty-heded," Leo said when they were back in the house and Gushi was stretched out exhausted on the kitchen floor. "But I don't think he will come do you?" "No, I don't. You know, Leo, he could be in that house of his, collapsed, dead. I don't suppose anyone has gone to see. He's an old man, older than he looks." "He's a bit over seventy." Mary stared at him. "How do you know?" "How do I know? Let's see - he must have told me that night he came here for the reference. Look at me, Mary. Do you like Bean?" "Like him? I haven't thought about it. No, as a matter of fact I don't. I don't like him a bit." "That's all right then. You can stop worrying about him. Forget him." Leo went out to buy the Sunday papers. They looked through the property pages for likely houses in St. John's Wood and Hampstead and Leo even called one of the numbers given in the small ads but no one answered the phone. Bean hadn't come. Just before lunch Lisl Pring phoned, enthusing about a new dog-walker she had found. A woman called Amelia Walker Walker the walker, wasn't that hilarious? Mary thanked her but said she could hardly entrust Gushi to the care of someone unknown to his owners. For the time being she would go on taking him out herself. Leo said it was too hot to do anything but rest and the bed was more comfortable than the Blackburn Norrises' sofa. The temperature climbed to ninety degrees. "Why do they always give shade temperatures?" he wanted to know. "It's so cautious and petty. Why not what it is in the sun? It'll but a hundred and five in the sun." "I suppose because the sun isn't always shining." "My love, you sound so sad - don't be sad." "All right," she said. "All right, I won't." They made slippery love, their bodies closing together and withdrawing from each other with soft sucking sounds. Sweat became another amorous secretion, thinner and colder, strongly saline. She tasted his salt on her tongue and felt the faint sting of it in her eyes. They fell lightly asleep, wet palms clasped against the wet skin of belly and shoulder. A river flowed between her breasts. The windows were wide open but no wind moved the heavily hanging drawn curtains. A bumble bee's throbbing buzz, alternately terrified and reassured, awoke her. She lay watching it until at last it found a way to freedom through where the curtains met. Leo slept on. She got up, had a shower, and came back into the bedroom wrapped in a bath towel What she saw made her gasp. Tears were running down Leo's sleeping face. They were not perspiration but real tears. He was crying in his sleep. She knew she must tell him about this, must ask him, but she postponed asking him. He seemed so happy when he got up, suggesting they go out to eat somewhere when it was late, when the warm dusk was giving way to dark. What about that little Italian restaurant they had gone to the first time, the day after they first met? In the meantime Gushi must be walked. It was too hot to go far. The people in the Park were mostly prone, sprawled on the yellowed grass. "They look dead," said Loo. "They look like bodies after the battle is over." It was an opportunity. She spoke gently, lovingly. "Why do you cry in your sleep, Leo? Your face was wet with tears." "Wet with sweat," he said lightly and quickly. If he had been a frightened child her voice could hardly have been more tender. "It was tears, my love. You were crying. Really." "I had a bad dream. We all do sometimes." "It must have been a very unhappy dream." He refused to say any more but began instead to talk about people who lay in the sun, about sunbathing being a mid-twentieth century fad that would disappear as fast as it had become fashionable. They put Gushi on the lead and walked back, past the children's playground to the Gloucester Gate. A police car was parked outside Charlotte Cottage. The officers had left the car and sought the shade of the porch. When Mary and Leo came up to the door the elder of them produced a warrant card. "Detective Inspector Marnock." The other man, the sergeant, muttered a name Mary couldn't catch. "May we come in?" It was Leo who said, "What's this about?" "And who are you, sir?" "Leo Nash." "Well, Mr. Nash, it's about Leslie Bean. You know a man called Leslie Bean?" Mary's hand tightened on Leo's arm. "What's happened to him?" They were all in the living room. Gushi, a hot bundle of fur, jumped for the sergeant's lap and lay there, gazing into a not very prepossessing face with slavish worship. "Can you tell us what's happened to him?" Leo said. "Perhaps. With your help. And yours, Miss Jago. I understand you knew him. He walked your dog. You saw him frequently?" "Yes. Every day." "So you would recognise him?" "Of course I would." She had the feeling that Marnock was struggling with an inhibition on saying too much to the public. It would be ingrained in him to say, "That I am not at liberty to tell you" or "We can't answer that", but he was plainly making up his mind how much he could reveal without total indiscretion and how much he must reveal in order to gain their compliance. "A Miss Bean has contacted us to report her brother as a missing person. He has not been seen since the evening of Friday the fourth." "And?" Leo said sharply. "On Saturday the fifth the body of an unidentified man was found in the vicinity of the Kent Terrace." "But that was one of the street people," Mary said. "We thought so at first. We haven't for some days. You don't want to believe everything you read in the papers. Nor do we think this was the work of the man the tabloid press calls the Impaler." "But why not?" "That," said the sergeant when Marnock hesitated, "We are not at liberty to tell you." Evidently a dog lover, he fondled Gushi's ears. "The clothes on the body weren't his own. They were put on after he was dead." "As some sort of joke, no doubt," said Marnock. "Psychopaths can have an unfortunate sense of humour. Now, Miss Jago, Mr. Nash, we've been unprecedentedly frank and open with you. For a reason, of course. We want you to do us a favour. Mr. Bean's other lady clients feel a natural distaste..." "For what?" said Leo. "For identifying the body, sir." Horrified, Mary said, "Surely his sister could do that!" "She's eighty years old," said the sergeant. Besides, she hasn't seen him in twenty five years." Suddenly more confiding, he gave a little laugh. "Oh, yes, we know it's peculiar. It's that all right. He stopped in her house while she was away and left before she got back. Every year. Year in and year out. They'd not set eyes on each other for as you might say a quarter of a century." They both went. Inside the mortuary it was cold and there was a strong icy smell. Mary thought it must be the smell of death, of decomposition impossible to mask, but Leo told her it was formaldehyde. She was there to identify, if she could, the body, Leo to support and comfort her. He had only once seen Bean" and that briefly, in the evening, by artificial light. The bodies were in drawers, green metal, like filing cabinets. It seemed to her a dreadful depository of a man's life, even though it was not a final resting place. One of the drawers was pulled open and a plastic sheet lifted. She had expected to feel violent shock and revulsion and had tried to prepare herself all the way here, but when she looked on the face it was calmly and with no particular feeling. The dead man was Bean, there could be no doubt, but it looked more like a waxwork of Bean from Madame Tussaud's. This sculpted head and rigid face seemed as if they had never been alive but had been cast in this shape and turned out of a mould. "Yes," she said. "That isis Mr. Bean." "Quite sure, Miss Jago?" Had she sounded dubious? Impossible to explain to this policeman the awe death induced in this pitiful place, the wonder she felt at what man came to at the last, an effigy in a metal drawer. "I am quite sure," she said. It had shaken them both. She and Leo were subdued, refusing the policeman's offer of a lift home, needing to be away from the police and talk of dead Bean. They would make their own way back. All ideas of revisiting that little Italian restaurant were abandoned, for Mary didn't feel like eating. They walked, hand-in-hand, sometimes giving each other rueful glances until Leo said: "Smile. Please. For me. You were wonderful in there. Cool as a cucuuber. Why are cucumbers cool, anyway? They are. We all know that. But why are they, when marrows aren't and melons aren't?" "You'll have to ask a botanist or a vegetable gardener." "The tiresome thing about all this for me is that I have to go to a funeral tomorrow." She turned to him, distracted by this flat statement where none of his attempts at distraction could succeed. "You didn't tell me." "No. It's an old friend of my family's. A bore - I mean the funeral is, not the friend was." He said no more until they were in the house. She noticed that his eyes were puffy as if he had been suppressing tears. His voice had a ragged sound. "Leo, if your mother is in London, can't I meet her? And wouldn't she come to our wedding?" He beckoned her to him, took her face gently in his hands. "You're so beautiful. I shall never tire of looking at your face. Never a day goes when I don't want to gaze and gaze at you." She smiled. "I asked you about your mother." "I'm leaving my family behind after tomorrow. I'll say goodbye to them then. They won't know it's for the last time but it will be." She knelt down in front of his chair and he bent forward to put his arms round her. "So I'm not going home tonight. Wild horses couldn't drag me home." "We won't let the wild horses try," she said.

Chapter 26

That night he again cried in his sleep. He made no sound but when he turned his face to meet hers the wetness touched her cheek. It was dawn and she could just see. The tears glistened. In the morning he was up before her, bringing her tea in bed and the post, the newspaper, more fliers, a tax demand for Sir Stewart Blackburn-Norris, hire car cards. He was so cheerful, pulling rueful faces but making light of the ordeal ahead, that she decided to say nothing. His intention to wear a dark suit for the funeral pleased her, for it was in accordance with her own ideas of what was decorous and civilised. Still he was unwilling to talk about the funeral, who this family friend was, why his mother would be there. It made her wonder if it was for this dead friend that Leo's nightly tears were shed. She felt she couldn't ask. Perhaps one day he would tell her. He held her hand at the breakfast table. Together they took Gushi into the Park and there, by the Parsee's fountain, Leo left her and went off towards St. Mark's bridge and Primrose Hill. His parting from her brought back that afternoon in Covent Garden. She watched his receding figure as she had on that previous occasion. He had never satisfactorily explained why he had gone after apparently intending to spend the day with her. Did it any longer matter? This time he had kissed her tendforly, held her in his arms and whispered that he loved her. A party of eleven children came into the museum at four. They were Scots from Lanark on a school trip to London who, having done the Sherlock Holmes house, had come up here in their minibus. Mary showed them round and gave them the guided tour because their harassed teacher preferred that to a Walkman and a tape for each child. It was the kind of day when she longed for air conditioning, wholly impractical for this little house of small rooms in a climate where the heat would endure for only a short time. The street door stood open, and the window in the shop, but it was still insufferably hot. The sun blazed and the air was motionless. In the shop, where the children, like so many visitors, showed more interest in the artefacts for sale than in the museum exhibits, papers and prints on the counters had begun to curl in the heat. By five it was no cooler and Alistair still hadn't come. Mary supposed she would just have to wait. Running away from him was something she was now ashamed of. There was a childishness about it she wanted to eradicate from her character but knew that Alistair, though censorious, rather liked. Weakness and folly in women made him feel more powerful and in control, more able to justify a superior stance. Once Stacey had gone home, Mary went outside and sat in the shade on the low wall that bounded the courtyard. On such warm summer evenings London acquired a pavement life. Restaurateurs were putting out tables and chairs and striped umbrellas in preparation for those who preferred to dine outdoors. Shopkeepers, in the half-hour before their shops closed, sat on their doorsteps. Every sun blind was down and at the caf opposite in St. John's Wood Terrace someone was casting bucketfuls of water over the flagainstones. She watched steam rise from the wet pavement. Her thoughts were full of Leo as they had been for most of the day. She sensed that being in the company of his mother and brother might be as troublesome and painful as the funeral itself. The relationship he had with his brother became each day more mysterious. If he loved him so much why break with him? She was resolving never again to ask Leo if she might meet his mother or brother when she looked up and saw Alistair coming down Ordinance Hill from the direction of the tube station. The present must be very small. He wore no jacket and carried only the thin flat briefcase she had once given him but had thought even at the time too small to accommodate more than a few sheets of paper and a diary. He waved when he saw her but did not quicken his pace. It was too hot to rush. She couldn't fail to remember how once, seeing him approach from a distance, her heart had leapt and a thrill run through her body. She felt nothing for him now, no faint lingering regret. He looked uncomfortably hot, His face red and beaded with sweat, his hair wet with it and sticking to his scalp. His hot hand felt wet through the thin stuff of her blouse as he laid it on her shoulder. She freed herself and began walking back towards the museum. Then she thought, as she had not thought before, this may be the last time we shall ever meet. We shall very likely never see each other again. We were lovers; we once thought we loved each other, perhaps truly did though impermanently. How sad and awful to terminate it like this... "Alistair, let's go over to the caf and have a drink." His eyebrows went up. She hadn't noticed till then but now she saw how unpleasant his expression was, how grim. "Sure," he said, "And while I'm inside ordering two Perriers you'll do another of your famous flits." "No. I promise I won't." They had turned back and were crossing the road, he somewhat reluctantly. "I don't think we ought to part," she said, "Without some..." "Ceremony?" "I was going to say, without saying goodbye properly, and without saying perhaps that we have no hard feelings for each other." He laughed. A waitress came up and he ordered without asking Mary what she wanted. "You seem to think," he said carefully, "that I still feel for you what I used to. I suppose it pleases your vanity. Well I don't. I'm over you. As for hard feelings, I've plenty of those. You could say, those are all I have. And now I want, frankly, to get shot of you." She could find nothing to say. Perrier came, a large bottle of it, with ice and lemon in two glasses. He poured their drinks. She had a sudden dreadful feeling he would fill another glass with water and throw it in her face. She even edged her chair back a little. Her life, she realised, had been shot through for a long time with imaginings of what Alistair might do, fantasies far exceeding what he actually ever did. He drank the last drops in his glass, reached down, opened the briefcase and took out a small flat parcel. It was about the size of a video cassette, rectangular, less than an inch thick. The gift-wrapping, pink and silver paper, narrow silver ribbon falling from its knot in curlicues, looked nevertheless as if he had done it himself. The corners were clumsily folded, the ribbon twisted. On a card he had printed her name "Mary" in rather large but uneven capital letters. "Thank you," she said faintly. "I want to say something, one last thing. It's this. Don't think you can come back to me. When things go wrong, I mean." She said, with a spark of spirit she didn't feel but forced to flash out, "Don't you mean, _if things go wrong?" "No, Mary, that's what _you mean. As long as you know. I won't be available. I won't be carrying any torches. I shall have found someone else." Thinking of this meeting, she had planned all kinds of things to say: charitable wishes for his future, even the expression of some impossible hope that they might go on knowing each other. But now she had no words, she simply felt a kind of despair in his presence that she knew would disappear entirely once he had gone. He was the kind of man, she thought, that she would always run away from and she wondered that she had not done so before, long ago. He paid the bill. He jumped up and struck an attitude. She watched him, appalled, already nervous. "And whether we shall meet again I know not," he declaimed. "Therefore let us our everlasting farewells take. Forever and forever farewell, Mary!" A group of tourists approaching the next table turned and stared. He said it again. "Forever and forever farewell, Mary!" He pushed back his chair and sent it skidding across the pavement where it toppled and fell over. Then he walked rapidly away. Someone laughed. Mary was embarrassed and rather shaken. She picked up the parcel but it was too big to go into the small bag she was carrying. She would have to carry it in her hand. It was too hot to walk far but she would walk. She would keep to the shady side of the street, and hope it was true what they said about endorphins being released by exercise to calm you down, to create a sense of well-being. More than endorphins she wanted someone to comfort her. Leo, of course. But she knew she really wanted her grandmother. Her grandmother would hold her as she had done when she was a little girl, hug her in warm silence - but her grandmother was dead, was ash, was dust. Leo would be there, eventually he would, though he was spending the evening with his family. When Leo came in at the front door she would go quietly up to him and he would take her in his arms. The man she called Nikolai came into her mind and she thought, strangely, that he was one of the few people she could think of that she would like to talk to, to have listen to her, to receive from her confidences whose nature she hardly understood. But when she came to the Gloucester Gate and crossing the road by the bronze maiden, looked down into the Grotto, there was no one there and no evidence of his occupancy. A cigarette packet, discarded over the wall, floated on the surface of the pool. Otherwise the place was as neat as a suburban garden. She put the parcel down on the hall table. Gushi was too hot to run out to meet her. He lay panting on the cold kitchen floor, his tongue hanging out. There was no point in taking him out for hours yet. Perhaps she would wait until Leo came home and they would walk him together. She stroked Gushi's head, gave him fresh water, then went upstairs to shower and put on trousers and a T-shirt. It was at this point that the telephone rang. It was Leo. Once, several years before, she had spoken on the phone to Dorothea's husband Gordon just after he had come round from an anaesthetic. Leo's voice sounded like Gordon's had then, thick, throaty, half-choked, aged by many years. "I can't get away this evening," he said. "I don't know when I will. Things, haven't been too - too good. I'll see you tomorrow." There was a pause in which she fancied she heard sounds like sobs suppressed. "Is that all right?" "Leo, of course it is. But can't I...?" "No, I don't know what you were going to say but you can't do anything. No one can. I shall be fine. Did you see Alistair?" "For the last time, I'm sure. He's given us a wedding present." "What is it?" "I don't know. I haven't opened it yet." "Perhaps you'd better not open it. Perhaps there's a bomb inside." There was an hysterical edge to his voice. Had she imagined a sob. "Mary, I'm sorry I can't come back tonight." "It doesn't matter," she said. "I understand." But she was not at all sure that she did. She was aware of bitter disappointment. Why is it worse to be alone on fine summer evenings than when it is cold or wet? The food in the fridge looked uninviting. She drank some sparkling water, ate a peach, and settled down to put the final touches to the Irene Adler brochure. It was due to go to the printer by the end of the week. By the time it came out she would no longer be Mary Jago but Mary Nash. Did she want that or would she keep her maiden name? She hadn't thought of that before. Somewhere on the brochure there should be a line saying "designed by Mary Jago" or "designed by Mary Nash". She wrote her new name to see how it looked, how it felt. Many people would say it was unlucky for a woman to write her new name before it was hers, before she was married. She tried her new signature, disliked it and almost decided to keep the name Jago. From the hall Gushi gave a sharp yap. She went out to see what had alarmed him and found another flier from Express Tikka and Pizza on the doormat. Alistair's present was on the hall table where she had left it, pink and silver paper, curlicues of ribbon, clumsily bunched corners. She took it back into the living room. Gushi jumped on to her lap and curled up like a cat. Sticky tape held the parcel together under the ribbon. It was surprisingly hard to get off. She had to disturb the dog to fetch scissors. Leo's words came back to her then, about the present being a bomb. That was absurd, of course, he hadn't been serious, but she held the package up to her ear as if to hear something ticking. She shook it. There was nothing loose inside, nothing to rattle. It was a strange choice for Alistair to have made. That was her first thought as she looked at the picture of a bride and groom, doll-like figures, the man in a top hat and morning coat, the woman in white crinoline and bridal veil, the pair of them standing on the carved and scrolled icing of a beribboned cake. Underneath the legend read: __Wishing you Joy on Your Wedding _Day. Was this his present? Was this all? Inside the card was an enclosure; evidently a letter, the paper folded twice. He had written nothing on the card, not even his name. For a moment she thought of not reading the letter, of throwing it away unread, apprehensive of his insults and reproaches. But it was cowardly not to read it. It could do her no harm. It was only words and from someone who now meant nothing to her. She was holding it between thumb and forefinger, still unfolded, when the phone rang again, and as she picked up the receiver it was still with her, just a sheet of A10 size paper, folded twice. Leo's voice said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for that - that display just now. I'm at my brother's but he's gone out for a moment and I'm ringing back as soon as I could. Forgive?" "Nothing to forgive. Are you all right?" "I'm fine." She said wistfully, "I wish you could come home now." "Mary, my mother wants me to stay the night. She's here. I may not see her again for years, if ever. You know what I said about that. That this was the final meeting." "That's all right," she said. "Of course you must stay. Don't worry about it. I shall be fine." Afterwards she didn't know why she had told him. "I've opened the present. It wasn't a bomb. Just a card and a letter and a lot of padding." "I love you," he said. "I just wanted to ring you and say that. On Thursday you'll be my wife. It's too good to be true." "It's true," she said. His brother must have come back into the room. He said goodbye, he would see her on the following evening, and put the receiver down. That reminder that he was with his family for the last time was disquieting. It suddenly seemed unnatural, unnecessary. She wished she had asked his reasons, simply asked to know more about it. Anyway, it wasn't too late. Tomorrow she would ask him. She unfolded the sheet of paper she was still holding in her hand. The logo of the Harvest Trust, the scarlet mushroom shape, the Battersea address, and opposite this the direction to herself, Ms Mary Jago in Chatsworth Road NW10. Below it was a line that this was from Deborah Cox, donor Welfare Officer. The date was six days before. Her first thought was that the letter shouldn't have gone to her old address. Then she remembered she had never given the Trust a firm change of address, only asked for one letter, the last she thought she would receive from them, to be sent to her care of her grandmother. She read: __Dear Ms Jago, It is probable I am bringing you news you know already since I believe you have been in correspondence with Mr. Nash and have met him. This is confirmed by our receiving no replies from you to our recent letters informing you of his decline and illness. Therefore I hope it will not be a shock to you, though certainly giving distress, to know that Mr. Nash died yesterday. He passed away quite peacefully in the night at the hospice where he had been for the previous two weeks. His mother and brother were with him. While this must be a cause of great sadness to you, you will know that by your generous donation succeeded in giving him a longer life, and of higher quality, than he would _otherwise... Mary laid the letter down in her lap. She was simply confused. How could Leo's death be a shock when she had spoken to him five minutes before? They had made a mistake. They were confusing her with someone else and Leo with someone else, they had their files mixed. She picked it up and read it again. __This is confirmed by our receiving no replies from you to our recent _letters... What recent letters? Transplant updates that Alistair had received and opened? She was suddenly very cold and she moved into the sunshine of the open windows, feeling the heat touch her. __Mr. nash died _yesterday... Now, at seven, it was too late to phone them and ask for an explanation. Anger and indignation started to replace the initial shock. Alistair was as much to blame as the Trust in perpetuating their mistake, and surely out of malice. He had sent her this letter as a wedding present, the most vindictive act he had ever committed against her. The phone rang and rang. At last he picked it up and said, "Alistair Winter." "Alistair, Mary. You must know why I'm phoning..." He put the phone down. The dialling tone began. She looked at the receiver in disbelief. Blood rose into her cheek where he had struck her and she put up a cold finger to feel the heat. After a moment or two she poured herself a measure of brandy and drank it down neat. The brandy made her choke but filled her with warmth as if some heating agent had got inside her and sent its rays to travel outwards to her skin. She told herself to take deep breaths. Alistair's malice had shaken her profoundly. She fancied that in his silence at the other end of the phone she had heard satisfaction and glee. But she reminded herself that it wasn't he who had written that letter. He had only sent it on. It was a real letter, from a real place, not something Alistair had forged. He had only been the instrument that ensured she received it. This was no time for those old hesitations. Avoiding thought she dialled Leo's brother's number in Redferry Road. It rang and rang; there was going to be no answer. Leo had said he would be there but he wasn't there. That meant very little. He and his brother might have gone out for a drink, or he might have gone back with their mother to wherever he was staying. It just seemed strange - she felt it suddenly as suspicious and odd - that he should have talked to her about breaking with his brother, never seeing his mother again, yet be going out with them, staying the night with them... Mny neded someone to be with her, to bring to this letter, to these events, a detached and dispassionate mind. After a while she phoned Dorothea but instead of coming that with all of it, found herself asking if it would be all right not to come in tomorrow. She had arranged to take a week off from Wednesday but could she start her holiday tomorrow instead? "Sure. Why not?" Dorothea said. "Gordon will cope. Are you OK? You sound a bit shaky. Pre-wedding nerves?" "I expect so," Mary said, and for some reason tried to smile into the receiver as if Dorothea could see her. "Thanks, Dorrie." "It's your wedding, not your funeral." "Yes." It had been impossible, would have been grotesque, to have read or quoted the letter to Dorothea. To anyone? She picked it up again, read it again and this time saw something that she had not previously noticed. Under the Harvest Trust address was Deborah Cox's own home number. Mary had begun to feel sick. The brandy, perhaps, or not having eaten for so long. She wondered why she had told Dorothea she wouldn't go to the museum tomorrow. What was she anticipating? What spectre awaited her? The fear of knowing was starting to overcome the fear of not knowing. Suppose she were to destroy the letter now, tear it into pieces and burn the pieces in an ashtray? Or make a little bonfire outside? Then she could pretend it had never come, that Alistair's parcel had contained only a card, say nothing of it to Leo... She dialled Deborah Cox's number. It was answered after the second ring. Scarcely waiting for Mary to say what she wanted, Deborah Cox asked her if she needed counselling. The Trust would be happy to provide counselling. She would advise it, particularly as Mary had written to Leo Nash, had even got to know him. "You did actually meet?" Mary hesitated. She had begun to tremble, her knees shaking. How she could tell so blatant a lie she didn't know. "No," she said. "No, we never met." "But you had contact? By letter?" "Yes. We had contact." Mary had to clear her throat. "What did he look like?" "I'm sorry?" "What did he look like? Leo Nash." Her voice was hoarse but the lying got easier. "I asked him for a photograph but he didn't send one." "Fair, short, about five feet six, dark eyes. It's probably just as well you didn't meet. A donor can get emotionally involved with a recipient. It's to do with the nature of the transplant, and that makes it all the worse when the recipient dies." "You said he had a brother..." "That's right. Ten years older. They shared a flat. But I wouldn't advise contact, if that's what you're asking. Now, as to arranging counselling..." Mary said no, thank you, and that wouldn't be necessary. She put the phone down very quietly.

Chapter 27

Hob was well. For more than a week now there had been no states. He was fast forgetting what being in a state was like, or even feeling low was like, for he never let himself decline far enough from being well to find out. He was rich enough to stay well for months, maybe a year, nor did he need to work. The irony was that more work came in than had done for years beforehand, and with it, necessarily, more money to keep him well. He wondered why this should be and one day he asked Lew. There was no one else he dared ask since Carl had disappeared. Lew was old and weird and had been into all that stuff when he was young in the Seventies and he said it was because of Hob's positive attitude. He was positive and in touch with his inner self. People sensed this and came looking for him when they wanted a job done. He'd done three jobs just since the big one - the biggest of all big ones -and one of them, funnily enough had been a second roughing up of that git who hadn't the sense he was born with, the one who lived in St. Mark's Crescent. Hob hadn't stayed at home much. Home was a dump, anyway. For all their promises, the council hadn't come to mend the windows. Maybe he hadn't read the letter right, so maybe they'd never said they were coming. Whatever the way of it, he couldn't live in a boarded-up box no different from being inside a microwave, not in this heat he couldn't. So he'd more or less taken to the outdoors and it had been lovely, like a holiday, better than Corfu really. He'd never been much for going in water. He wandered the Park and Primrose Hill and St. John's Church Gardens, sitting on the seats, lying on the grass. By day he'd sit at a table outside one of the refreshment places and he'd drink but he seldom ate more than a Magnum or a packet of kettle chips. Mostly he drank vodka or sometimes tequila for a change. After the first few days he bought a bottle of each and carried them with him, but in a proper rucksack, not plastic carriers like those beggars. The rucksack also held his gear, the watering can rose, the lighter, a batch of drinking straws -he helped himself from the counter when he paid for his drink - and reserve supplies. He never let himself get low, let alone run out. The thought of a state even looming on the horizon made him shudder. Drinking straws ended up all over the Park. Sometimes he wondered, giggling to himself, if anyone noticed, remarked on it, wondered what the hell was going on; straws caught up on rosebushes, littering flowerbeds, floating on the scummy water under the bridges. Because he was a joker he stuck one in the mouth of the bronze maiden and made a woven crown of six others for Sir Cowasjee Jehangir's drinking fountain. He was happy. One day he bought a postcard of the lake with boats on it and sent it to himself. He had to go home sometimes, for a change of clothes and to catch a bit of the athletics from Trent Bridge on telly, and when he crept into that furnace of a flat he found his postcard on the mat, "Great whether, wish you was heer" on it and "luv from Hob". That made him laugh a lot. It was the funniest thing he could think of, getting a postcard from himself, wishing he was somewhere else. He fell about laughing and got so excited he needed a shot of vodka to calm him down. He had started to lose weight. Not on his head or face - those bits of him were as big and heavy as ever - but his body was thin and the skin sagged round his middle like an old sock when the leg has been pulled out of it. Leo had once told him about a girl he knew who'd been fat, obese he called it, and for some reason she turned anorexic. Her skin hung on her skeleton like draped material and they'd operated on her, cut bits out and stitched her up, and all on the NHS. He'd started wondering if he could have the same thing, only he couldn't because in hospital he'd never be well but would get into a state the first day. Now he was rich he'd been buying all the rocks he wanted, and E too and angel dust when there was any about. Big H was no use to him because he couldn't face needles, which was why the coming of crack had been such a godsend. The only time he'd tried the needle he'd fainted dead away. God knows what had happened when he was a kid and they'd tried giving him those shots for polio and whatever. He'd never asked his mother, but the answer probably was she was too shellacked to take him or too bone idle. He never cared to think about the time, a year or two back, when he'd been reduced to sniffing ozone unfriendly aerosol stain remover. He thought instead about the other two jobs; breaking a geyser's leg in Chalk Farm and a straightforward beating up round the back of Lisson Grove. He got a Hawaii for each of those, though he reckoned he was underpaid for his Chalk Farm effort, as fracturing a leg wasn't the simple task it was cracked up to be. He enjoyed the pun he'd made and had another good laugh. Most evenings he went through his ritual by the pond in the Grotto. The beggar with the fancy voice had moved out. The people who owned the house that builders were doing up - and months they'd been at it - had put up more barbed wire and more fencing in their inexplicable efforts to keep intruders out. He couldn't understand it. It wouldn't keep him out, or any streetwise person. He sat on the coping of the pool in the insect-infested half-dark, dropped his rock into the watering can rose, screwed on the top, inserted two fresh straws, applied the lighter to the rock and set the apparatus in the tin lid. The crystalline lump fizzed and crackled. Though he'd been some way off being in a state, his condition took a dizzying upturn when the smooth sweet smoke drew into his lungs. Later on he'd take a tablet of E or maybe smoke some PCP and if he got too excited bring himself down with a couple of cycles - cyclobarbitone calcium to you ignorant buggers, he thought. It takes an alcoholic to be an expert on alcoholism and a junkie to understand the journey to oblivion. He began giggling uncontrollably. The laughter he allowed full rein, he let it rip, and he lay down there rolling on the flagainstones and the dusty earth among the dry crackling leaves. A face looked over the parapet of the bridge. He could just mkke it out in the dusk, a thin face with pitted skin that watched him for a long moment, fascinated by the sight of this man rolling on his back like a dog in a pile of shit. When he was ready to stop laughing and rolling he stopped. He was in perfect control. He started putting his gear back into the rucksack, took a swallow of vodka, noticed what he'd been carrying about with him for more than a week now: a red baseball cap and a T-shirt with elephants marching across it. The funniest thing in the world, it seemed to him, would be to take them up to the Oxfam shop in Camden High Street tomorrow, hand them in and make sure they put them on show in the window. As he clambered out of the Grotto and crossed on the lights at the top of Albany Street he began giggling again at the thought of that. Making sure he was unobserved but still giggling, he climbed over the spiked railings of the Gloucester Gate and disappeared into the soft still darkness of the Park. Her loneliness left her exposed and vulnerable. She was like someone put ashore on a desert island who watches the boat recede across an empty sea; there is no one left in the world who knows or cares where one is or what has happened. She held Gushi. Afterwards, long afterwards, she sometimes said that the little dog, snuggling in her arms, licking her fingers, had saved her sanity. Holding him, his warmth necessary in spite of the heat of the day, she understood that some monstrous fraud had been perpetrated against her but not how or why. Even who it was that had done what had been done she didn't know, for she had no means of knowing Leo's identity. Trying to solve this enigma brought on fits of shivering as if it were cold out there, as if snow covered the Park. She must have sat there for more than an hour, still, scarcely thinking, in a state of shock, for when next she looked at the clock it was nine and dark outside. She switched on a table-lamp and a flock of moths came in, brown and yellow and a black and white one, spotted like a dalmatian. They made for the light, circling the lampshade. She thought of his laughter, of "A reference for a dalmatian", and gave a little cry of pain. The light off, the room in darkness to let the moths escape, she dialled Redferry House number again, her throat dry and constricted. There was no reply. She didn't phone again. She was resolved on that. For one thing, absurdly, she had no idea what she would say. The idea of the night was horrible. It would be so long, so lonely, and the small hours unbearable. She went upstairs and in the medicine cabinet in the Blackburn-Norrises' bathroom found a phial of capsules with _Lady _Blackburn Norris printed on its label, _For _the _sleeplessness, and the name of the drug with instructions to take one or two at bedtime. She put Gushi out into the garden. The night was warm and soft and above her in a velvety violet sky a few stars were visible, a rare thing in London. Gushi started yapping at the bats that swooped overhead, so she brought him in again. When she had locked up and settled him on the foot of her bed, she opened the bedroom windows wide, took her clothes off, fetched a glass of water and swallowed one capsule, then a second. She scarcely had time to lie down. Sleep came at her like a black walking spectre, cloaked and hooded, seizing and absorbing her into itself and its wide wing-like arms. In the early hours, five or six, she awoke, ponderously limp and weak from the drug, but remembering him beside her and making love to him. Over and over, he whoever he was had made love to her, with sweet gentle touches and strong unstoppable passion and mumrured loving words. She got up and just made it to the bathroom. She was sick, the retching painful, tearing at her throat. On and on she vomited until she had collapsed on to the floor, drained dry. After a while she slept again - until Gushi came asking to be let out, his nose like an ice cube against hsh naked shoulder. She got off the floor, put a robe round her, another splendid day was out there, blue sky, sunshine unhindered but the sun itself an invissble fire. The phone started ringing just as she had come in from the garden. No one knew this number but for Leo, the man who said he was Leo. Alistair knew it, but she was certain, as if it were a law of nature, that Alistair would never phone her again, that she and Alistair would never speak to each other again. She let it ring and ring, watching the instrument. She picked up the receiver. It was Deborah Cox. The question of least importance was the one she asked. "How did you know this number? I didn't give it to you." "I dialled the number that gets you the voice to tell you who made the last phone call." "Yes. Oh, yes. Of course. What was it you wanted?" She had never before spoken so rudely to anyone. "I'm sorry. I mean, what can I do for you?" "There's something I wanted to tell you. You seemed so interested in Leo Nash, the sort of person he was, what he looked like and all that. I'm not sure I ought to tell you, it's just between you and me, but I know you're discreet." The woman knew virtually nothing about her... "What is it then?" "Leo," Deborah Cox said, "When he began to get ill again he refused to ask you to make a second donation. You were the only possible donor but he expressly forbade us to ask you." Mary said stonily, "I don't understand." "He said he wouldn't put you through the process again - going into hospital, having a general anaesthetic which is always a risk, the convalescence afterwards, all that. He wouldn't. We did everything in our power to persuade him but it was no use. I thought you'd like to know." "You mean he was a hero," said Mary. "A knight in shining armour, a selfless saint - is that what you're saying? Someone who laid down his life so that I shouldn't have a week's discomfort?" There was a silence in which, somehow, outrage was apparent. "Frankly, Mary," Deborah Cox said at last, "I didn't realise you were quite so disturbed. You're undoubtedly in need of therapy, so about that counselling..." Asking herself if all this would turn her from a well-mannered courteous woman into a rude one, Mary quietly replaced the receiver in its rest. The man, whoever he was, the con man, the man who had deceived her, would come to the house as he always was closing in as if a giant lid were held over the steam from a pan. From the comparative cool of Charlotte Cottage, Mary came out into a heat that enveloped her like a blanket. She left Gushi behind. It was too hot for him to walk and he must be content with escape into the garden twice a day. She was leaving the house to avoid the man who had been her lover but whom she dared not think of in those terms in case she was sick again. It was a matter for regret now that she had asked Dorothea for the day off. The museum would at least have sheltered her, given her a place to be where he wouldn't find her. There seemed nowhere to go but the Park, but even as she entered it, going in by the Chester Gate- further north, nearer the zoo, she might meet him - she told herself this running away couldn't be prolonged. They would meet, they were bound to. He couldn't know Alistair had exposed him and she had found him out. Probably today, sometime today, they must encounter each other. She began to shake again. She felt weak, enfeebled, the sleeping capsules still taking effect, and she sat down on a seat under the trees in the Broad Walk. The day after tomorrow was to have been her wedding day. He would have married her, of course he would. That had been the purpose of the project, to marry her for her money and that vast barrack of a house up in Belsize Avenue. Tears came into her eyes and ran down her cheeks. He had been so plausible, so _nice, so gentle, a wonderful actor. But who was he that he could show the registrar Leo Nash's birth certificate and have Carl Nash for a brother and receive her bone marrow and _die, yet be alive? The man she had once named Nikolai had come to sit on the other end of the bench. She hadn't heard his arrival; he might have been there for five minutes, ten. Her tears, her thoughts, had cut her off from the external world. "Don't cry" " he said, and then, "What is it?" She lifted her head, turned her eyes. Her sight was blurred by tears but still she was sure he looked different. The change was subtle, not definable, for he still had his beard, he still wore his jeans, his denim jacket, the threadbare Tshirt, the battered trainers. But he was a man now, not a dosser. Whatever it was must be in those blue eyes or in the more confident set of his shoulders. The classic response, but what else could she say to a stranger? "It's nothing." "You're very unhappy," he said. "Shall I go away? I expect you'd like me to go away." Her new-found rudeness had its limits. "No. No, of course not." She turned her face away. "I am unhappy. No one can do anything about that." He was very hesitant. "Do you want to tell me? I mean, just to tell someone?" It came to him then how he had told no one about his wife and children. He had talked of them only to that other self inside his head. If the other street people knew, it was only that a tragedy figured in his life just as tragedies figured in all their separate lives. "The cliche is true," he said. "Sometimes it's best to talk to a stranger." She shook her head. She got up and when he protested - he would go, the last thing he meant was to drive her away - shook her head again, made a gesture with her right hand indicating he should stay where he was. "I can't talk," she said. "It's not just -well, inhibition. I wouldn't know what to say. I don't _know, you see, I don't _know." He looked at her neutrally, trying not to encourage or discouraage. "I don't know what's been done to me, only that it's bad and cruel, I think." "Sometimes," he said, "It helps to get angry. You could try anger." She nodded abstractedly. He watched her walk away. He was convinced that something terrible had happened to her and with that thought came a sense of failure. By his presence, near her, he had absurdly thought he could save her from suffering, protect her from life. Who did he think he was? He hadn't been able to save himself, so how could he hope to save another? But now, while she was out of doors, he would never let her out of his sight.

Chapter 28

Walking down from St. Barbara's House in Camden High Street, the women's hostel where she sometimes slept, Effie turned her eyes to the window of the Oxfam shop. She looked at it as another woman might look at the windows of Selfridges or D. H. Evans. Oxfam prices were usually beyond Effie but they were a possibility - they weren't ludicrous; they weren't that other woman's Harrod's. She needed a Tshirt, it was so bloody hot. The only one in the window had elephants on it, a married couple of elephants they were supposed to be, with a couple of babies. Vanity had gone out of Effie's life ages ago - but her with four elephants on her front? Do me a favour. Anyway, it was about sixteen sizes too small. A baseball cap she could live without. A pimple on an egg that would be on her Humpty Dumpty face. Maybe she'd try the Sue Ryder place for her T-shirt if she could remember where it was. She wandered on, shifting the heavier bundles she carried from her left to her right hand, heading for the Gloucester Gate. Dill went up there later to cash his giro but he didn't look in the Oxfam window because he never bought clothes. The nuns who had a soup and bun stall in Eversholt Street five nights a week handed out cast-off clothing for free. He was more interested in food for the beagle, which he'd run out of, so he tied the dog up to a parking meter and went into the Indian mini-market. There he bought five cans of Cesar, gourmet stuff but light to carry in those little foil-cans. The beagle would wolf it down. Roman passed by on his way from the Hawley Hotel to Lisson Grove, where the Benefit Office and Job Centre is, a long walk but nothing much to one who had walked miles every day for the best part of two years. A slight embarrassment stopped him looking at the Oxfam shop as he passed it. He consciously kept his eyes averted. The previous day he had handed over to them all the clothes -those that survived and were in a reasonably decent condition -he had worn while on the street, having washed them first and worked on them with the hotel's ancient iron. They would very likely be in the window. Naturally, he had not been offered any money for them but it troubled him vaguely that there were people out there prepared to pay for and wear his cast-offs. So he didn't look. Nor did Nello, also on his way to cash his giro and spend a half of it in the Red Lion. The school-leaver who had inherited Bean's dogs (even managing to poach Marietta from Amelia Walker) dragged his charges past the window, heading for the pharmacy where his mother's repeat prescription for barbs was regularly dispensed. As often as not, the dogs never saw the grass of the Park these days. The school-leaver was too busy shopping or playing the fruit machines. It had taken him only two days to time the early walk for two hours later. Outside the pharmacy he tied the dogs up so tightly that Ruby couldn't get over or Spots catch a sniff of Charlie's chuff. Another hundred chlormesomething or others, please, and this prescription for his baby brother who never gave any of them a wink of sleep. It was for paediatric Valium in syrup form. The school-leaver was going to divide it up and sell it in forty-milli litre phials. There was a good market among the buffs for coming down from a speed hang-up. Cough mixture would go into the Vallergan bottle and his brother no doubt keep on screaming half the night. It had to be one of Bean's regulars who spotted the T-shirt and baseball cap, but few of them ever looked in charity shop windows, let alone went inside. In any case, Camden High Street was too down-market or just bohemian for the Barker-Pryces, Erna Morosini, Mrs. Sellers and Edwina Goldsworthy, and not sufficiently recherch for Lisl Pring. Just as well for the school-leaver, or they might have seen their dogs lashed to lampposts outside the pinball arcade. The one who looked but saw no need to go inside was Valerie Conway. She was living with her boyfriend just off Camden High Street and was walking down to her new job as receptionist in the Peugeot showrooms. The neighbours in Jamestown Road had been all agog when they found out she'd known Bean quite well, seen him every day and talked to him. It was a wonder it wasn't she the police had hauled in to identify his body. "I was like Bo-Peep's sheep," Valerie said. "They didn't know where to find me." But she wasn't without public spirit. And wasn't too posh for Oxfam shops. Her sister had bought a really nice boob tube from one of them and worn it on her honeymoon in Bodrum. Valerie was on the lookout for a halter top. A red one was in the very centre of the window and the idea apparently was that you wore it with the red baseball cap they'd stuck on the plaster model's head. Valerie went inside, her heart thudding uncomfortably. "D'you know where you got that from?" "If you mean who brought it in," said the sour faced middle-aged volunteer, "I do remember the man, but we're not in the habit of asking donors to divulge their names." "Suit yourself," said Valerie. "I'll have the red halter. I just wanted to know about the baseball cap because the last time I saw it it was on the head of one of those blokes that got themselves impaled on railings." The day came and went. The wedding day. He hadn't come, so Mary understood that he must somehow know he was discovered. The scam was over. If he was close to the real Leo Nash, and he must have been, perhaps the Harvest Trust had let him know they had informed her. After all, she would have received that letter much sooner if Alistair hadn't delayed sending it on. His failure to come was at the same time a relief and a disappointment. A relief because of her shame at the things she had said, her confidings in him, her confessions of love, the relative speed with which she had let him make love to her and, later, her revelling in that lovemaking. The disappointment was because she was angry. Although she had appeared indifferent to it at the time, she had taken to heart Nikolai's advice. __You could try _anger. She had tried, perhaps for the first time in her life. Anger had come and begun to grow and as it grew brought with it a kind of liberation. Why hadn't she previously let herself be angry? With Alistair, for instance? But the anger she now nourished needed expression and it could only express itself to _him. And he didn't come, would never come. The police came instead. They wanted more identification, this time to tell them if a red baseball cap and T-shirt with elephants on it had belonged to Bean. Had she ever seen Bean wearing them? "Many times," she said. "He wore the hat every day in hot weather. I only saw the T-shirt once but it was his." There must have been, a new firmness about her, a decisiveness, which she fancied made Marnock give her one or two surprised glances. Had she ever seen Bean with anyone? Had he, for instance, ever been accompanied when he came to fetch or return Gushi? She answered no without hesitation to both questions and the policemen thanked her and left. Dorothea was coming round in the evening. Mary had phoned her the night before to tell her the wedding was off but giving no further explanation. She had been similarly un forthcoming with her cousin in Guildford. After all, if she didn't understand herself, how could she explain? She found a bottle of wine, the Chardonnay Leo had been so fond of, and dialled Expres Tikka and Pizza for Chicken Korma with pilau rice and Bombay potatoes for eight o'clock. One of the qualities for which she liked Dorothea was her willingness to accept a refusal to explain, her submission without protest to silence on a particular subject. She was discreet, could keep a secret, and understood about other people having private places they wanted to keep inviolate. "Don't ask," Mary said. "I say that because I don't really know that myself. Perhaps I'll have an explanation one day and then I'll tell you. And maybe you won't want to know, you won't care." Dorothea had brought a basket of peaches and a carton of clotted cream. "Better put this in your fridge till it's time to eat it." In the same tone she said, "Are you very unhappy?" "I don't know. That's a peculiar answer but I really don't know. I'm angry. I've never been so angry with anyone and it feels so strange and new. But I can't be angry _with him because I don't know where he is." They sat on the terrace and drank Campari with ice and orange juice and lime slices. Gushi lay half under the lilac bush and half on the grass, snapping at any moth that came his way. The sky was very pale blue as if long exposure to the fierce sun had faded it. There was a smell of smoke. Not illegal smoke from an illicit bonfire, Mary thought, but a fire somewhere, perhaps on the embankment of the railway line coming out of Euston. Fires kept breaking out from cigarette ends tossed on to under-dry grass. "I brought you a paper," Dorothea said, "for distraction. Well, a rag, a tabloid. Have you ever heard of an MP called Barker-Pryce?" "I don't think so." "That man Bean that was murdered used to take his dog out. The dog must have gone out with Gushi. A golden retriever called Charlie." "I remember the dog." Dorothea passed her the front page. There was not much text. It was mostly photographs and headline: __The MP and his _Toy, with beneath it, __What was the link with Murdered _Man? One photograph was of a choleric-looking elderly man with bristly whiskers and badly cut hair, sitting at a table in what looked like a drinking club but might have been in a private house, next to a young, heavily made-up girl with waist-length hair. A cigar with a pendulous head of ash pulled down one corner of his mouth. Fingers fat as sausages could be seen gripping the girl's shoulder from behind. Her head rested on his shoulder. The caption read, __A Toy is only a toy but a good cigar is a smoke. James Barker-Pryce, Conservatve Member for Somers Town and South Hampstead, parties with a _friend. The other photograph, snapped on a beach somewhere, was of Bean. It was hard for Mary to take much in. Distraction does not always distract. She seemed to have no concentration. The lines of print danced. "Here you read it to me." "All right. I like reading aloud. "The missing link. The time has come for the public to be told. What was the connection between James Barker-Pryce MP and Leslie Arthur Bean, the murdered dog-walker?" "It is several days since the police revealed that Bean was not the Impaler's latest victim but that this was a copy-cat killing. Leslie Bean was well-known to Mr. Barker Pryce's friend Miss Toy Townsende, twenty-three, who has told police. "I knew Les when he was a butler. That was three or four years ago at my friend Mr. Maurice Clitheroe's home. Les was employed by my friend James Barker-Pryce to walk his beautiful retriever dog Charlie but I think there must have been some disagreement between them as the dog-walking ceased, though Les still paid visits to Mr. Barker-Pryce's Regent's Park home..." "Can you imagine anyone actually talking like that?" "It sounds libellous to me. How do they hope to get away with it?" "Perhaps they don't care. "On the phone today Mr. Barker-Pryce, sixty-eight, said he had no memory of any photograph of himself and Miss Townsende. It was possible she was the young lady who made a suggestion to him while he was parking his Bentley in Paddington Street, London W1 two months ago. Mrs. Julia Barker - Pryce, sixty-two, Mr. Barker Pryce's wife of thirty-three years, was not available for comment. She and her husband are... Turn to page two." "Here's a shot of the girl in a G-string. She can't really be called Toy, can she? "She and her husband are spending the weekend at their country retreat at Upper Slaughter, Gloucestershire..." Upper Slaughter? I don't believe it." "There really is a place called that. Dorrie, did you hear the front doorbell?" "I don't think so. Listen. It goes on, "Mr. Barker-Pryce later told our reporter" - - I suppose they're all bar racking him outside his country house" "There was no quarrel between me and Mr. Bean. That would be impossible. He was a working man and I believe former servant. I dismissed him for incompetence and there is no truth in rumours that he visited my house or that I continued to pay him a remuneration." " Oh, that must have been the bell!" The tikka man had come round the side of the house in search of them. He was wearing his red and white T-shirt with red jeans and carrying a tray laden with covered dishes, fastened to his torso with straps like a rucksack. "I'm so sorry," Mary said. "We weren't sure if we heard the bell." "Shall I put it in the kitchen for you." "Thank you." He went indoors, came back, giving Dorothea a doubtful look, then a smile and a, "I'm not mistaken am I, madam?" "No, no. You used to drive the dry cleaner's van, didn't you. Oh, it must be five years back." "That's right. Spot on. And you live in Charles Lane up in St. John's Wood." They began reminiscing. Mary went indoors, turned the oven on low and put the Korma, rice and vegetables inside. Leo's engagement ring that he had bought her in a shop in Camden Passage was still on her finger. She took it off and wondered what would happen if she put it down the waste disposal unit and pressed the switch. It might break the unit. Better give it to some poor dosser to sell. She took it off and dropped it inside the cutlery drawer. Then she peeled two peaches, sliced them and looked for a liqueur to pour over them. The Amaretto Leo had brought the previous week... Even in her mind she had better stop calling him that. Leo wasn't his name. He wasn't Oliver either; he couldn't even be called by the pseudonym under which she had so long known the recipient of her donation, for he wasn't that recipient. It wasn't into his bones that her marrow had been induced, but an unknown dead man's. She took the wine out of the refrigerator, found a corkscrew and put it with two glasses on a tray. Dorothea was lying back in the lounging chair, gazing up at the pale sky, now covered with a network of vapour trails. Gushi had climbed on to her lap. The tikka man had gone. "That poor man," Dorothea said, sitting up. "He went to prison for running someone over when he was driving a laundry van. Of course I didn't mention any of that. But I remembered. I don't think you ought to go to prison if you didn't mean to kill someone, do you?" "Sometimes I think no one ought to go to prison for anything," said Mary. "But that's not very practical. Was he on drugs or drunk or what?" "He'd been drinking," said Dorothea. "Talking of which, do you want me to open that for you?" The traffic in the Marylebone Road speeds up at the weekends. There is less of it, less to slow it down or bring it to frequent stops. On the Sundays of mid-Augchst less traffic uses the road than perhaps on any other day of the year and it seems like some highway in the Fifties or Sixties when driving was pleasurable and the air relatively pure. But on Mid-August Saturdays, with so many people away on holiday and so many tourists and car-less pedestrians, the traffic speeds along, three lanes of it, roaring up to Euston and the underpass or tearing down to Chapel Street, the Marylebone Flyover and the M40. Sometimes brakes shriek when a stop is enforced at Baker Street lights or those at Park Crescent. In the week it is a slow, lumbering battering ram that plods at fifteen miles an hour, but on a late summer Saturday it becomes a swift juggernaut and therefore far more dangerous. Mary thought all these things as she came back from buying bread in Marylebone High Street on Saturday morning. Gushi was tucked under her arm. She had brought him with her on a supernumerary walk but he was frightened by the traffic noise and buried his face in the palm of her hand. They crossed quickly and she brought him into the friendly green of the Park. He ran down the bank and drank thirstily from the lake. Already a hot vapour hung over the broad expanses of grass, bleached yellow and in places entirely bared by the drought. The water with which the flowerbeds were sprayed first thing each morning had dried by now and some plants hung their heads. She kept to the shady side of the path. A man on a seat was reading a paperback of __The Catcher in the _Rye, the woman at the other end of the bench a broadsheet newspaper with the front page headline: __MP to Sue over Murder and Sex _Allegations. Mary tried to think about her future, where she would live, what she would do. Leo, Oliver, that man whoever he was, had said, __Two days after we're married my wife will be able to come and live with _me... She remembered then. Today the Blackburn Norrises were coming home. He had said that because the Blackburn-Norrises were coming home and she would be free. She looked round for Gushi. He was making friends with a Jack Russell, touching noses, wagging tails. She went back for him, put him on the lead, gently shooed the other dog away. "They're coming home today," she said to him. "Your master and mistress, your people, owners whatever you call them. Come on, let's get back fast." So that's what I've come to, she thought, talking aloud to a dog in public. Gushi licked her fingers. No, he's not sorry for you, he doesn't understand she said to herself. He's a nice dog but he's just a dog. They went out into Albany Street by the Cumberland Gate and Cumberland Terrace. As they came into Park Village West the Blackburn-Norrises' taxi was just pulling away from the gates of Charlotte Cottage. He had slept that Friday night in his own flat for the sake of seeing the horror movie, __How to Make a _Monster. The boards of raw beech that gave off a strong resinous smell, encased the broken windows and made of the interior a dusty kiln. There was no way of ventilating the place except by leaving the front door open and no one did that; no one dared. He'd gone through his ritual and used two rocks before the film started, then gone on to Vodka, neat but with a spot of tabasco and a sprinkling of mustard. He didn't need excuses but if he did he'd have said it was to take his mind off the stink in the flat and the heat. For his health's sake, he nibbled at a Duchy Original, the gingered sort, with his drink. The telly was still on when he woke up. His watch had stopped and he didn't know what time it was. Dark or light, it was all the same in here, or almost. A strong sun high in the sky penetrated the cracks in the beech boards and laid bright bars across the bit of filthy carpet on the floor. The smell, he realised now, was himself. He smelt like the hamburger stall outside Madame Tussaud's that the people in the mews between the waxworks and the Park complained filled their places with the reek of onions and fatty beef. He wondered if it mattered or if he should do something about it. In the pitch dark something ran over his foot. Hob yelled. He jumped up, smashed the light on with the flat of his hand and saw the mice flee, scurrying for the honeycombed skirting board. It was only mice, that was all it was. They had been feasting on Duchy Original crumbs. He staggered to the bathroom and urinated copiously. His half-brother had told him blow made you pee a lot and he was right. The bath was full of dirty dishes, the washing-up of weeks. He had long used up every piece of crockery he had, and it lay piled there, dusty by this time, coated with the little waxy white pellets like seeds that were fly eggs. Hob thought he saw things moving between a plate and a glass and he turned away. That was funny, because he'd never hallucinated. He'd never been interested in acid, micro dot mushrooms or any of that stuff. He decided against a bath. Where would he put the dishes? He went back and turned the telly off. He turned the light off too and lay on the settee. For some reason he started thinking about his brother-in-law that used to be before his sister divorced him. Hob had rather liked him, had felt sorry for him because when he was a teenager he'd done acid, just the once, and he'd been left years later with these visions of rats. They'd come at any time and crawl all over him. Hob's ex-brother-in-law had been dead scared of rats, had a phobia about them, so it was a miserable existence he led. Shame, Hob thought. But he never thought about anything or anyone for long. Like alcoholics with drink, he thought about, talked to himself about, considered, wondered at, the substances he used. He would have talked to others about them, only there was no one to talk to. The mice were back. He could hear them scuttering. Someone on the floor below had told him she'd woken up in the night and heard this trundling noise and when she shone her torch under the bed she'd seen this mouse rolling a Smartie she'd dropped towards a hole in the wall, pushing it with its nose. You had to laugh. He saw a thread of light appear on the floor, then another. It must be morning. Sometime today he was due to work over a bloke in Agar Grove who'd done something that got up Lew's nose - though not what he liked up there. Promised to take a bag of smack along with his dope and then reneged (Lew's word) on the deal. Hob was getting a hundred for putting the shyster out of action for a couple of weeks and four rocks over the odds. His thoughts drifted to those rocks but he'd only got two left in the flat, so when thinking instead of _using got too much, he wandered off looking for what he'd brought in the evening before. The red velvet bag - the stuff was with the bag. Maybe in the kitchen... He found it and poured the powder into a foil bag that had once held some adjunct, sensitive to light, of a photocopier. Like much of his paraphernalia, Hob had found it in a waste bing in one of the more prosperous parts. He slit open the bottom of the bag and held it over the powder in one of the saucers from the bath, screwed up the open top and put his mouth over the resulting aperture. It wasn't as clever or as satisfying as his watering can rose but it would do for now. Better than one of your ordinary stems, anyway. He lit the powder with a match. It was angel dust or phencyclidine, out of fashion and therefore relatively cheap. Hob had seen on telly that it was basically the stuff they shot into rhinos and elephants on darts to put them under when they moved them away from ivory hunters or whatever. PCP was a change and, anyway, he liked it because it made him feel unreal, like he was a person in that __How to Make a _Monster movie, living inside the telly and watched by millions, or else invisible and not watched at all. Both sensations were pleasant enough. Sweat began to break out all over him. That was the effect of the dust as was this floating sensation. He got up and walked about, took a few dancing steps, feeling suddenly like a tall thin man with a small head and ballet dancer's feet. Maybe he'd get out of here and go and do the shyster over before the day had really begun. He could feel his heart beating. The idea that you couldn't always feel your heart beating amused him and he laughed as he danced about the flat, picking up what he needed. Unthinkable to go out without the red velvet bag, without something to keep him well, without something else to bring him down if the heartbeat got so strong it was painful. All ideas of having a bath or changing his clothes had receded. Who needed that shit? His heart had stopped. For a moment he was transfixed with terror, for he had forgotten, what had just made him laugh, that a beating heart cannot normally be felt. He pranced again, punching the air, and into his ears, squeezing up through his body came the tick-tick-tick of his heart. Laughing again, he thumped himself on the chest, on the place where, under the skin and ribs, the ticking clock pumped. The red velvet bag in his jacket pocket, he left the flat and came out on to the concrete walkway. A cannibalised van stood tyre less on what was left of the grass, and broken glass littered the empty aisles of the car park, thick as flints on a beach. Round here they used spray paint for the graffiti and the kind they used was red, like blood. For all that, the morning was beautiful, the sky translucent like a blue pearl, the air as yet cool and almost fresh, as if some breath of it had wafted this way from the Park in the night. Hob noticed only the emptiness, the absence of anyone. This was only so in the very early hours and his watch told him it was not quite half-past six. He went down the concrete stairs and tried to think about getting to Agar Grove, but for some reason his inner eye could only see the railway line running across the Euston wasteland, the visual part of his mind throwing up bridges and fly overs and cranes with necks like Meccano dinosaurs. He'd have to come down. He needed something to bring him down. Yellow Jackets or Vs - what had he got? He palmed two Nembutal, swallowing them in his own saliva. The place still had an appearance of emptiness when the police came looking for him half an hour later. It was still only seven. The police car crunched over the broken glass and stopped by the mutilated van. Marnock had a sergeant with him and a man in uniform, the one who was driving. They saw the boarded-up windows, looked at each other and shrugged. There was no doorbell. The sergeant banged on the knocker. He did that twice, then they shouted through the letter box, "Police, open up!" No one did, so they broke the door down, no difficult task. It yielded after two shoulder charges and a thump from the driver's boot. The smell that came out to meet them was so bad that at first they thought there must be a dead body inside.

Chapter 29

They had taken a Camcorder with them and had recorded every minute happening, it seemed to Mary, of their long holiday. She agreed to watch the video and they were childishly pleased. They were astonished too, perhaps expecting excuses for avoiding the experience. But Mary was glad of the chance to sit still and speechless in the living room with the curtains drawn. While her eyes focused on Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris in bright unsuitable swim wear beside a hotel pool, in ponchos on donkey back, viewing Inca remains and eating lobster in revolving tower-top restaurants, she could give her mind to her future: what she was going to do and where she was going. Thankful that she had neither said nor written anything to the Blackburn-Norrises about her impending marriage, she had been spared enquiries and possible condolence. They treated her sweetly, charmingly, but at the same time only as the recipient of all their news, a willing ear for their holiday reminiscences and the most wonderful housekeeper and dog-minder they could possibly have hoped to find. It wasn't until the video was over that they mentioned her grandmother's death and then it was to deplore the loss of a friend rather than sympathise with her, whose only close relative in the world was dead. But she tried to avoid self-pity and quickly changed the subject to tell them about Bean. They were old and both appeared, in spite of a dark tan that gave their faces a look of distressed leather: more fragile than before they went away. News of a violent death should be broken gently to them and this she tried to do, first by saying that Bean would be unable to continue dog-walking. But when, in response to Sir Stewart's angry bark of, Why the hell not, for God's sake, she said quietly that Bean was dead, adding that he had met his death by violence, fragility was replaced by expressions of avid interest. "You mean he was murdered?" "Yes, that's what I mean." "By that Impaler fellow?" The news must have reached them somehow. Possibly in American newspapers. Had they made an exception to their unwritten rule and considered three murders in Regent's Park just important enough for their pages? "Apparently not," she said. "They haven't caught anyone for Bean's murder but they know it wasn't the same one as killed the other two." "Bean," said Lady Blackburn Norris, who had until then been speechless with the wonder of it. "Bean,", she said again. "What had he done to get himself killed, Mny dear? Does anyone know?" The other implications of the death took a while to reach them but did so at last. Sir Stewart, pouring a pre-lunch sherry for his wife and Mary and a stiff whisky for himself, said, enunciating slowly as if the full horror of his words came clear only as he uttered them: "Then who's been walking the bloody dog?" "Well, I have." "Oh, Mary darling, how awful for you? And you had your work and heaven knows what. We would never have asked you if we'd known you'd have to walk the little beast." Their lack of enthusiasm at seeing Gushi again had been matched by his apathy at the sight of them. Lady Blackburn-Norris had patted his head and remarked only that at least he hadn't put on weight while Sir Stewart had ignored him altogether. "I didn't mind walking him. He's a dear little dog. It was only for a couple of weeks. There's a boy, a teenager, who seems to have taken over Bean's job, but I didn't -well, you must see what you think of him." "But who can we trust?" Lady Blackburn-Norris threw out her hands. For a moment Mary thought she meant trust with the Shih Tzu. To have a key? To come into the house? Sir Stewart topped up his glass. "It's that of the question having some bloody youth know one knows in here." "I can't walk him," said his wife. "Not at my age. Not with my arthritis." "The bloody dog's more trouble than he's worth." They asked Mary to stay to lunch. It was that, that invitation to a meal, which, because it specified, brought home to her the fact that she was going to have to leave Charlotte Cottage and leave today. She had had plenty of warning. They had told her well in advance of their return. She could hardly complain of the unfairness of it. Upstairs, in the handbag she hardly ever used, was the key to Lamballe House, Belsize Avenue, a big dark dusty house that no one had visited for weeks. But she had somewhere to go, a far cry from so many out there with nothing and nowhere... The man in Agar Grove made an attempt at fighting back and in the process cut Hob's lip and blacked one of his eyes. His struggles didn't avail him much. It would have been better for him to have given in and let his assailant get on with it. Hob took his revenge for the eye and the lip, kicking the shyster in the stomach and chest but calling it a day when he heard a rib crack. He had used the tube to get up there but now he was walking. He had gone quite a long way before he noticed there was blood on the toes of his shoes. Perhaps he was even leaving bloody footprints. Suddenly a host of lorries enclosed him and he felt like a marked man. Everyone was looking at him. There was a man close behind him - he kept looking round to see - who must be following him, following the trail of his footprints. It wouldn't matter which way he went. If he doubled back into the hinterland of Kentish Town, the man would be there. Much more of this and he'd have to kill him. H'd have to lead him somewhere quiet, into some narrow tree sheltered street, and kill him. But when he next looked round the man had gone. The betting shop on the corner had swallowed him up. Hob remembered it was Saturday, Lottery day. If he won the Lottery he could buy up the world's stock of cocaine and enough PCP to stun a safari park. But he didn't buy a ticket. Buying a ticket meant talking to someone, getting out the money, being _among people. The idea was vaguely unpleasant. He went into a shop, a corner supermarket, empty but for its Indian proprietor and a young Indian girl, helped himself to a Coke from the drinks fridge, paid for it, all in silence. They asked him if he wanted a scratch card and he nodded, scratched away and of course it was a dud. The usual two Walker's crisps and two weekend breaks in Tenerife. He opened the Coke can. It wasn't that he wanted a drink. He wanted something with which to wash down two black beauties and a crystal methedrine. He needed pepping up. The drink made him need to pee. There was never anywhere and he couldn't wait till he got to the Men's in the Broad Walk. He went into an alley and, like a dog, let forth a flood over someone's dustbin. In the Park he tried to wipe the blood off his shoes on to the grass but by then it was dry. Nothing mattered, though, and anyway you couldn't see the blood in the strong blinding sunlight. By the St. Mark's Square Bridge he dropped down on to the tow-path. A boat was coming down from Camden Lock, under Albert Road, and a woman on deck waved to him. Her face was lobster red from the sun. Hob didn't wave back. He was looking for Lew or Carl. Gupta never showed himself in daylight. There was no one on the canal bank but three or four of the jacks men, and they didn't count. They were scarcely human. One of them was lying on his back with a hand hanging down, trailing in the water, an empty bottle just fallen from his slack lips but kept upright in the crook of his arm. So might a baby lie, its feed sucked dry, sleep overtaking it before its mouth quite relinquished the teat. Hob resisted the temptation to kick him in the groin as he passed. enough was enough. He found himself a secluded spot, sat among the trees and went through his ritual with the contents of the velvet bag. Two rocks - why not? But they were all he had. A rare moment of lucidity came and he understood that no matter how many he had, how many little zip-lock packages, he wouldn't be able to save them up and keep them in reserve. He would smoke any given number any _bought number. There could be no end to it and no satisfying the craving. But this knowledge passed as the smoke from the two rocks took hold. It passed and was lost as the smoke itself was lost in the diesel air and the canal stink and the serene blue sky. He felt his heart beat and he heard it. On the move again, no longer bored or uneasy, paranoia past, he danced along the canal bank. The jacks men didn't give him a glance. They saw funnier sights most days than a prancing man with a skinny body and a big head. Gradually he forgot everything but his energy, his happiness and the drug that brought those things. He would go to Lew's place. He wasn't supposed to, but he would. On his doorstep on the estate Lew didn't let him in - he had a wife and kids and it was Saturday - but he sold him all the rocks he had: fifteen. He'd collect a fresh supply in the afternoon. Hob got a cut rate, especially as he was happy to take some Tueys as part of the deal. He took a taxi back, ignoring the taxi driver's loud sniffs and requests to have the windows opened in the back, but just before the turn-off from Albert Road he asked the driver to drop him there. He didn't want to go home -what was there at home, for God's sake? "That's a verbal contract, you know, what we had," said the driver. "You what?" "A gentlemen's agreement that I take you to Plangent Road -that's like Euston." "I'm getting out at the lights," said Hob. Too bad if you don't like it." He started laughing. "I don't have to pay you, it's down to you." He got out. The driver muttered something about one pound sixty and Hob handed it over. No tip. "Wash yourself, why don't you," the driver called after him. "I'm going to have to have this cab detoxed." It was all hugely amusing to Hob. The funniest thing he could think of was him going round to people's houses and sitting in people's cars and them having to spend good money on getting rid of the smell of him. He crossed the road at the lights, spitting on to the bonnet of the waiting Jaguar. The driver couldn't leave his luxury vehicle and come after him that was the beauty of it. If the builders were working on the reconstructed house, as it seemed from their materials lying around, they weren't on Saturdays. He was amazed to see it was already two in the afternoon. Where had the day gone? Where did all the days go? He pushed open the garden gate and climbed down in the Grotto, avoiding the barbed wire, ducking and dipping and worming his way, catching his clothes on the sharp barbs. A condom, half-full of water, floated on the figure of eight pool. He picked it out and threw it into the bushes. Suddenly he was very tired. He knew that feeling. It happened all the time. It was part of withdrawal, the beginnings of a state. But he continued to sit there, taking no action, staring into the water which, though with green bits floating on it, was nevertheless quite clear and through which he could see the brick fragments and broken glass that covered the bottom of the pool. The sensation he had in his head was not precisely pain. It was more as if someone had put a cap on him and was drawing tight a string threaded through the rim of it. That was how it was for some minutes. During those minutes he sat looking into the pool and beginning to tremble. Then the pain came, a headache which started quite mildly but increased very fast, becoming enormous, as if a metal helmet was clamped over the cap, a helmet that was too small for his huge cranium, but that his head was being forcibly squeezed into, while levers on its sides and doors and bolts were clamped and screwed into place. With shaking hands he opened the red velvet bag and set to work. Only half a straw was left. He had meant to get replacements but had forgotten. It was impossible to block off one of and holes in the vodka top, so he put his mouth over the whole thing, lit the crumbled rock through the perforation and drew in the white smoke. It seemed more acrid than usual, less delicious. He began to cough but thrust the bottle top back into his mouth just the same. Something happened then. His hands had stilled, the headache was leaving him, but he felt a sensation in his head like nothing he had previously known. It was like hearing a train come very fast out of a tunnel or even a car hitting the back of another car. It was a clang and a rushing and a long-drawn explosion all at the same time. He felt his body undergo some change. It frightened him because he had no idea what that change was. It was just that he was not the same as he had been a minute before. A little while before he had been something and now he was something else. He tried to put out his hands but the left hand was dead. It was like those times when you wake up in the morning and your arm is numb, only when you rub it and squeeze it the feeling slowly comes back. The feeling wasn't coming back this time. And he couldn't see shapes. He could only see brightness, and as his legs slid into the water, the rainbow flash of an arc of spray. I have no pain, dear Mother, now, But oh, I am so dry. Attach me to a brewery And leave me there to die... * The time change and their advanced age caught up with the Blackburn-Norrises by mid-afternoon. Sir Stewart's eyelids drooped and he angrily forced them open. His wife said, "You won't go just yet, will you? You won't leave us?" Mary said hesitantly, "Do you mean, stay the night?" "Oh, darling, I'd like you to stay for ever!" She quickly spoiled the effect. "What are we going to do about the wretched dog? We only took the dog on because its owner died. I can't walk it." she pointed at her sleeping husband. "He _won't." "I'll stay till tomorrow if you're sure. And then perhaps I could find this woman who exercises the dogs, or the boy, and you could interview one of them - what do you think?" "I wish i didn't have to think," said Lady Blackburn-Norris. "I'm so tired I'm sure my time-clock's spring has worn out." Mary watched her fall asleep. She drew the curtains against the afternoon sunlight. In the hall Gushi lay panting. She picked him up and carried him into the kitchen, gave him water and laid him on the cool tiles. He licked her fingers. In the short time of their acquaintance she had learnt to read Lady Blackburn-Norris's thoughts and to predict what turn they would take. If the offer were made that she was sure would be made, she would say yes. One more night in Charlotte Cottage and then she would go. Whatever her fate might be it was not to spend the next months or years of her life as companion to a rich old couple. She went upstairs and put clothes into one of the suitcases. It was nearly six, long past the time for Gushi's walk. The Blackburn-Norrises slept on. Gushi slept. She filled a glass from the cold water tap, drank half of it, listened to the drone of an aircraft passing overhead, the nearer, more vibrant buzz of a wasp at the window pane. There seemed nothing in the world left to do, to read, to see, to care about; no one to talk to or be with. If I stay here, she thought, I will start to weep. She put the house key into her jeans pocket, glanced once more at the sleeping old people - Sir Stewart had begun a stertorous snoring - went out of Charlotte Cottage and into Albany Street. The day had begun to cool, the shadows to lengthen. She crossed on the lights by the St. Pancras fresco, looked back and saw that Nikolai had crossed behind her. A tour bus, crammed with visitors, went past up to Primrose Hill. A Union Jack on a cyclist's handlebars reminded her it was the day of VJ celebrations. National events had passed her by these last few days. She managed a half-hearted wave to Nikolai. The children's playground at the Gloucester Gate was still crowded. Old men in khaki, covered with medals, wandered ahead of her, looking as if they had strayed from a procession. She asked herself why she had come in here and where she was going. Then someone called her name, a familiar voice, a voice that made a wave break inside her body. "Mary!" The man she had known as Leo was sitting on the grey granite steps of the Parsee's fountain.

Chapter 30

It was Marnock himself who found Hob. They had been searching for him since morning in all his known haunts. The latest sighting came from a man in Agar Grove who, from his hospital bed, was able to name his assailant. He had lost four teeth, had two cracked ribs and a broken collarbone, but he was anxious to talk about Harvey Owen Bennett. It was his opinion that Bennett was the Impaler. Bennett was guilty of both the street people killings. Marnock disagreed but didn't say so. He thought the Agar Grove man entitled to sling mud and wild accusations. For the time being. He was no angel, had a string of convictions as long as the Broad Walk which Marnock would later make longer. It was his belief the Agar Grove man was responsible for the mugging of Bean in the Nursemaid's Tunnel. He was always made happy by villains gras sing It gave him hope for the future. Harvey Owen Bennett, for instance. Bennett had killed Bean and stuck him on that five-pointed iron tree but someone had paid him to do it and Marnock now hoped Bennett would tell them. The Agar Grove man had created a happy precedent. Marnock called that day on every member of Bennett's extended family. They weren't truthful people but this time, with misgivings, he believed them when they said they hadn't seen him. His mother said she hadn't seen him for six months and this amused Marnock in the light of what she had told him back in June: that at the time of Pharaoh's murder Hob had been among guests in an all night party in the Holloway Road. They scoured the Park for him. Marnock thought of the Grotto as the abode, more or less reserved, of the toffee-nosed dosser with the Oxbridge accent, and he nearly didn't look. It was a drinking straw, spiralled with red like a barber's pole and stuck up in the branches of a tree, that caught his eye from his seat in the back of the car. The ritual that served Harvey Bennett's habit required drinking straws... He was lying half in, half out of the dirty little pond. They heard his breathing long before they reached him and that was how they knew he was alive. Marnock's sergeant was on his mobile calling an ambulance before they had laid a finger on Hob. "He's young," Marnock's sergeant said. "Well youngish. But I reckon he's had a stroke." The ambulance man, getting Hob on to a stretcher, said superfluously that he wasn't a doctor. Then he said that in his opinion Hob had had a stroke. "Or several'" said Marnock. "I once knew a bloke, only a year or two older than him, same taste for substances, had twenty strokes in quick succession." "Bloody hell," said the ambulance driver. "Did it kill him?" "In a manner of speaking," said Marnock. "After a couple of weeks they switched off the machine." Be angry, Mary said to herself, you must be angry. You must walk on past him, pretend he's not there. Or stand your ground and tell him what you think of him. She held her fists tightly clenched. He was in front of her now. "I've been here since eight this morning," he said, "waiting for you." "I didn't come into the Park this morning," she said. "It was so hot. I brought a bottle of water but it got warm. I tried to keep awake but I fell asleep and when I woke up I thought I'd missed you." She knew he had never heard that note in her voice before. "What do you want?" "I suppose that's how you think of me, as always wanting something, as doing everything I do for what I can get out of it." "Wouldn't that be a true picture?" "Not entirely." She walked into the shade of the trees, put her hands against the rough cool bark of a tree and bowed her head. "I thought I'd never see you again. I hoped not. I know what you did. I've thought about it these past days - I haven't had anything else to think about - and there can't be anything you can say to me in extenuation." She turned to look at him, half look at him, and remembered then what she hadn't thought of for perhaps an hour or two, their lovemaking. It came back and brought hot angry blood into her face. He could see that burning colour and know. "It won't mean anything to you if I say it was the worst betrayal I've ever known." Alistair's small misdemeanours, what were they compared with his offence? "Would you - could we - is it possible to ask you if we could go back to the house?" "The Blackburn-Norrises have come home." "Then will you sit down here with me or on a seat or somewhere and talk to me?" Her head bowed again. She found she was shaking it from side to side. The words came out hoarsely. "What is your name?" "_What?" "I asked you what your name is. I can't call you Leo. You aren't called Leo." "My name is Carl," he said. "Carl Nash. Leo was my brother." She sat down. He dropped on the grass beside her but moved when she indicated by a pushing movement with her hands that he was too close. She looked at him properly for the first time, a gaze of deepest scorn, and saw that his eyes were full of tears. "I brought Leo up. He was more than ten years younger than I. Oh, yes, of course I'm not twenty-four, I'm older than you, Mary, not younger. I'm thirty-five." "We believe what people tell us," Mary said. "Or I do. I believed what you told me. And I saw your birth certificate." "You saw his. When the leukaemia was diagnosed and they said he needed a transplant I thought there wouldn't be a problem. There was our mother -not that she'd taken a scrap of notice of Leo since he was ten, she'd left that to me - and there was myself, a couple of half-sisters somewhere about. None of us was compatible. Can you imagine that?" "You've already told me. Except that you suggested it was you not your brother who needed the transplant. If you're going to explain you should... " "Tell you why I posed as Leo?" "It was for my money," she said bitterly. He lifted his shoulders, not denying. "I was an actor once. Only there was no work. Then I was a schoolteacher. Funny, isn't it? Then I made a bit of money," he said. "Dealing, mostly." She knew she was innocent but not what she was innocent of. The look in his eyes told her he wasn't talking about scrap metal or antiques. "Drugs," he said impatiently. "I'd needed funds to find a donor for Leo. That was before the Harvest Trust. I thought maybe I'd have to go to some Third World country and buy a donor. Then you came along." "I wasn't rich then," she said. "I'd been living in a one-bedroom flat in Willesden and earning twelve thousand a year. What made you think I was rich?" He said simply "The heading on your writing paper. The address. Charlotte Cottage, Park Village West." Briefly she closed her eyes. Unseeing, she sensed he had come closer to her and she drew away. She looked at him. "And when you found out I didn't live there you dropped me. You meant never to see me again. That was what happened. You weren't ill, you were never ill." "True," he said. "It was a bitter disappointment." She looked incredulously at his wry smile. He had aged in the past few minutes. He might be forty, forty-five. The smile creased his pale face into lines and ridges. "I did need money, you see. I knew Leo would get ill again. I could see the signs; I'd made myself an expert in his illness." All the ironic amusement died out of his face. "I loved him so much. Believe me, if you can believe anything I say, believe me, I'm not trying for your sympathy, your compassion, but I'd like you not to think me a total monster. I loved him as if he was my own child. Or I think so - I've never had a child." "So that was all right? Using me was all right because you loved your brother?" "No, Mary, it wasn't all right. But it was all I could think of. Your grandmother died and when I heard that I came back. You told me what she'd left you and it was more than I'd imagined in my wildest dreams." She had become curious in spite of herself. The sheer suicidal nerve of it compelled a question. "I might have found out at any time. The Trust might have told me Leo- your brother - they might have told me he was becoming ill again. What would you have done?" "What I did when they did," he said. "Disappeared. But I used to scrutinise your post. I was - I was usually up first." He had turned away his eyes. "So that's why you stayed with me," she said bitterly, unable to bring herself to use the words. "That's why you stayed those nights, so that you could get to the post in the morning." The words were hard for her because she had never used them before. "That's why you screwed me, _fucked me." He said with a simplicity she had to believe at last was honest, "It was at first. I came to love you. Couldn't you tell?" For half an hour she had been unaware of anyone else in the Park but themselves. A child's shriek, a blue and white lightweight ball bouncing across the grass, coming to rest at their feet, reminded her they were not alone. She stood up, brushed dried shreds of grass off her jeans and lobbed the ball back. He watched her, anxiously waiting. "What do you want me to say?" she asked him wearily. "Only that you believe me." She supposed that she had noticed. It was when the lovemaking changed from a sick man's, effete attempts to enthusiasm, when acquiescence became passion, that she had been aware of it without asking why. He had been ill and now he was getting better, that was all. "I believe you." She said it dully, for it was a few moments before relief came and she understood that she need no longer feel humiliation and shame. He had wanted her, he had not had to force himself. "I wanted to marry you by then," he said. "I'd never wanted that before." He squeezed his eyes shut and sprang to his feet. "Will you do one last thing for me? Will you walk a little way with me?" "I don't know." She nearly called him Leo. "I don't know, Carl." He flushed at the sound of his own name. It seemed to confirm him as its true possessor. "Do you remember that place we went to for dinner? That first time? The Italian place?" "When you pretended to be ill?" He winced at that. "I'm sorry. I had to. I thought I had to. Mary, I've done worse things than that to get money." "I don't want to hear," she said. "I thought - I wondered - if you'd let me take you there now, tonight. If we could - it would be the last time, wouldn't it?" She nodded. She still wanted answers. "I'll walk with you." "And you'll come to the restaurant"0 "Perhaps." He got to his feet, held out a hand to help her, but she shook her head. They walked across the grass in silence, across Chester Road and down the Broad Walk. "Leo knew all about it," he said. "He thought it was funny at first. We both thought it was funny at first. He used to want all the details but I - - I stopped telling him things after a while." "Just as a matter of interest-" Mary knew she was no good at the ironic tone. She found it hard to be scathing, but she tried - - "Just as a matter of interest why didn't Leo meet me himself, or isn't there anything amusing about being honest?" "Oh, Mary, he was just a boy, undersized, not educated, never quite well. I loved him and perhaps you'd have come to love him if you'd known him, but not like that, not in that way. You'd never have said you'd marry the real Leo." Suddenly, as they came down the path and reached the lake, she stopped thinking about herself and, reluctantly, almost fearfully, began to think about him. The anger had evaporated. It had never been thriving. She put her hand on his arm and looked into his face. "You must be very unhappy." "Thank you for that," he said. "Oh, Carl. It was like losing your own child." "I suppose so. But it was worse. I killed him, you see." "_What?" "Oh, I don't mean that. Not actually. Not like that Impaler kills people. I mean I killed him by taking away his only chance of getting well." "I don't understand." "You would have given another donation, wouldn't you? If it had been asked for you'd have done it?" "Yes, but..." "You said so. When we'd been to your grandmother's house, the day I asked you to marry me. You'd have given it to me, to your husband, but it wasn't I that wanted it, it was the real Leo Nash." "Leo was dying by then. Perhaps you could have saved him but I couldn't ask, could I? I couldn't let the Harvest Trust ask. I thought maybe if once we were married and I said I had to have money - I had to have, say fifteen thousand - you'd have given it to me and I'd have gone to India and bought the right sort of bone marrow for Leo. But Leo died." She thought about it. She had withdrawn her hand from his arm when he spoke of killing his brother, but now she replaced it and let it lie there lightly. They had come out of the Park at the York Gate and the clock on Marylebone Church ahead of them began to chime the hour. Perhaps because of the VJ Day commemorations the traffic was dense and swift. "It was a monstrous irony," he said. "That I who loved Leo, who would have done anything for Leo, who did do anything, spoiled his chances of life by what I did. By choosing this way to make a fortune for Leo, I blew it. So I killed him. If by killing someone we mean that but for us he'd be alive. But for me, Leo would be alive." They had come to the pavement edge and begun to walk towards the lights at Harley Street. The traffic noise was so loud that he had to shout. "The old dog man," he began. "Bean," she said. "Bean - what about him?" "He tried to blackmail me. He was going to tell you - things about me." He smiled. "Not the things I've told you. Other things you'd have liked even less. I couldn't allow that." "I can't hear you," she said. "I can't hear you for the traffic." "Just as well," Carl said softly now and half to himself. "I know you won't forgive me, anyway, but you'd never have overlooked paying someone to - deal with Bean." He turned to look at her, seized her by the shoulders. "Mary!" It was very nearly a shout. "Can you hear me now? I've blown it with you too. I know that. Just for the record, how did you get the Harvest Trust's letter?" She also had to raise her voice. "Alistair sent it me. As a wedding present." "The bastard." She never once looked behind her. Roman saw her put her hand on the man's arm and for a moment he thought things were all right, and then he knew they were far from that. A sense of foreboding filled him. He had been about to turn back but now he wouldn't; he would stick with it. The charge of emotion between them was so powerful it tensed their bodies. He marvelled at it, walking a dozen yards behind them. She withdrew her hand, recoiled, spoke a name, "Carl" loud enough for him to hear. So it was Carl. But what was her name? Strange that after so long, so many brief chance encounters, he still didn't know. "What?" he heard her cry. "What?" Carl was explaining something. She shook her head vehemently, but after a moment or two the hand was back, resting on Carl's arm but distantly somehow as if placed there out of pity rather than affection. You are imagining too much, Roman told himself, and you are spying too much. They can take care of themselves. It's no more than a lover's quarrel being made up. But he followed them down York Gate. The clock on St. Marylebone was chiming seven. The pavements of the Marylebone Road were choked with crowds, the traffic pouring fast down towards the Euston underpass. He was very close behind them now, so close that if she turned round and saw him he would have had to make an excuse for his presence and he had no explanation. But she didn't turn round. She was looking into Carl's face, not with love, not with passion, but still as if no one else in the world existed. Her voice she kept low, drowned by the traffic's roar, but the man called Carl shouted above it. He shouted as if he didn't care who heard him. "I don't want to live without him, you see. I can't face life without him." For a brief while Roman had been so near her that by putting out his hand he could have touched her, then, as happens in crowds, two people pushed in front of him, squeezing between him and her and forcing him to step back. They were part of the goo up at the pavement edge, waiting to cross when the lights changed. You could wait ages here for the lights to change then when they did they were red almost too short a time to allow for crossing. Seven or eight people stood poised to cross and she and Carl were at the head of them, waiting while the traffic pounded down its three lanes. Things happened very quickly then. Roman, craning his neck, but taller than those in front of him, saw Carl give her a little push back from the kerb. A little saving, protecting push into those waiting behind. He put his head down and plunged into the road, threw out his arms and ran into the traffic, in front of a car, a taxi, into the path of a container, running at bonnets, under wheels. A woman was screaming from the moment he leapt from the kerb. Roman heard his own rough gasp as he clenched his hands. Brakes screamed and horns brayed. Carl was flung into the air, his body describing an arc in the blue air against the setting sun, splintered by flashes of light from sun-glinting chrome, the sudden full beam of a headlight blazing on him as he fell under wheels and was ground between tangling metal. There was blood somewhere. Roman thought he saw a long splash of it fly against white enamel. He was struggling to reach her, catch her as she fell, but the crowd made a wall around her, leaning over her, kneeling beside her. He stepped aside, let it go, and stood holding his bowed head in his hands in the suddenly emptied street. Sirens were already wailing.

Chapter 31

For quite a long time Marnock sat by Harvey Owen Bennett's bed, hoping for a name, hoping he would come round sufficiently to tell them who had paid him to kill Bean. One or other member of his large extended family was usually there, a half-brother or sister, a stepsister, his mother, stepfathers and men who said they were his uncles. Some of them touched his lifeless hand. He never moved. He was fed intravenously and a machine kept his heart beating and his lungs breathing. Sweat occasionally broke out on his large forehead and slab-like cheeks. Three weeks after he had been brought in the doctor in charge of his case told Marnock that Harvey Bennett would never speak again. His eyes were open and he would never close them. It was unlikely he could think or remember or speculate or even suffer. Large areas of his brain had been destroyed. James Barker-Pryce sued the tabloid newspaper and was awarded substantial damages. These were not on account of their allegations that he had been consorting with a known prostitute; he had admitted that and there was some question whether his constituency party would readopt him at the next General Election. He had brought the action because the journalist alleged he had been involved in a conspiracy to murder. The school-leaver went back to school, or rather to a sixth form college to take some A Levels, and all Bean's dog's except for Gushi were walked by Amelia Walker, who seemed to find no difficulty in handling seventeen animals at once. Mary Jago had always meant to sell her grandmother's house and buy another but having gone there to live after Carl Nash's death, there she remained. She had builders in to convert the upper floors into self-contained flats and her friend Anne Symonds had moved into one of them. The Harvest Trust asked her if she would be willing to remain on their books and in December she gave another bone marrow donation, this time to a girl of sixteen she knew as "Susan" and who knew her as "Barbara". Roman Ashton rented two rooms in a house in Princess Road, Primrose Hill, where he was not particularly comfortable. All the money derived from the sale of his house he had sunk into a precarious venture with Tom Outram, the Talisman Press having been taken over and absorbed into a massive conglomerate. With some American backing they had started a publishing house that produced only historical novels in paperback originals. So far it had been startlingly successful but how long would such success last? Their headquarters were in the Marylebone Road and when it wasn't raining Roman walked to work through the Park. He never saw the fair-haired girl. She no longer walked through the Gloucester Gate and south of the zoo to the Charlbert Bridge. She no longer crossed Chester Road or ran through the rose garden. And then one day he saw her. He was going to work, crossing the Outer Circle, and she and her little dog were getting out of a car she had just parked by the Monkey Gate. "Hallo," she said. "Hallo." "Do you know, I've often looked for you in here but I've never seen you. I thought you must have -well, moved away." "I've looked for you too," he said. They passed through the gateway into the Broad Walk and across on to the grass. She unclipped the lead from the dog's collar, let him go, stood up and held out her hand. "Mary Jago," she said. "Roman Ashton." "I was house-sitting for some people when I last saw you. They gave me their dog. They didn't like him much, you see, and I did. I live in Belsize Park now and I've got a car, so I can still bring him into the Park, but I'm rather late today." "That's why we've never met," he said. "You stopped being a street person?" "Last August." He saw her wince at those words and said quickly, "I did it to get over something. It's something I'll never get over and I don't really want to but I'm glad of the two years I spent sleeping rough. It gave me -something else to think about. I've got a job now and I'm looking for a place to live." "When we last met," she said, "You advised me to be angry." "Did I? I don't remember that. And were you?" "There was no one to be angry with," she said, and she looked down at her shoes. "Except myself. I think I've got a bit stronger. I don't placate people so much. I'm not so trusting. Oh, I don't know why I'm telling you all this. You can't want to know." she started calling the dog. "Gushi, Gushi, where are you?" "I'll tell you something," he said. "When you lived in Park Village I appointed myself your guardian. I thought I could watch over you. I told myself you needed protecting. Once when there was a man running after you I sent him the other way." She was looking at him, incredulously at first, then with a smile dawning. "But I didn't do much, did I? I didn't do a thing. I couldn't save you from whatever it was." Her face suddenly grave again, "You couldn't save me from that," she said. `:0<1' "I fell into something because I was lonely, something awful. It's over now." I know, he thought. I saw. The Shih Tzu came running up, sat at her feet quivering, looking up into her face. "He always wants to be carried. He's such a baby." She picked up the dog. "You said -you said something about looking for a place to live. Only - well, I've got this big house and I've had some conversions done, and I thought if it was a flat you were - but perhaps..." she hesitated, as if putting a restraint upon herself, reminding herself of past indiscretion perhaps we ought to get to know each other a bit better first." "That seems a very good idea," Roman said. The man on the canal bank had been there for weeks, months, ever since high summer. Not all the time - he had his occupation - but by night, three nights a week at least, watching and waiting. He had been there since before the body of David George Kneller that they called Nello had been found on the railings outside the zoo. He blamed himself for that. If he had been more vigilant, done what he had started doing in August two months before, Nello would be alighe now. No use asking whether the life Nello lived had been worth living- the life he now lived - for that wasn't the point. The first evening he had come down here the man with the beard they called Rome had also come down, looking for a place to kip. But he had got him to leave with a shake of his fist and a scowl on his ugly face. It _was ugly so - so what? There were things they could do for acne now, drugs and whatever - medication was cleaner word - but there hadn't been when he was fourteen. The scars hadn't stopped him getting a wife and promotion or the right to do what he was doing. For the fiftieth time or maybe not quite so many as that, he scrambled down through the churchyard and the brambles and stinging nettles on to the canal bank. The clothes he wore, black, ancient, stained rags, were dead men's clothes from the rotting boots to the greasy cloth cap. Sometimes he wondered what he would do if he found someone else on his pitch, settling down for the night. But he never had and he didn't now. Once he'd sat down he always listened to the traffic passing overhead, fancying but doubtless mistaken that he'd know the sound of the van, the diesel noise that was somehow bigger and more of a gargle than that made by a taxi. The bridge throbbed when cars went over it, boom-boomed when it was something bigger like a truck. It had been dark for hours, since five in the afternoon, but it wasn't cold. Under the bridge it was always damp, the brickwork oozing moisture, the ground sticky, the canal waters dark, more shiny than he ever expected and with rainbow streaks of oil. There was something uncanny about a river that didn't flow but where the water was stagnant, just water put into a ditch really, and the ditch had been dug by men. He'd never thought of any of that until he came to sit nightly by the canal. He always tried not to fall asleep but often he couldn't help himself. If what he was waiting for happened that would wake him up all right. When he woke, usually a bit before dawn, his legs ached and his back ached from lying on damp concrete and he felt filthy, as if some sticky substance had been pasted on him in the night, to make a coat between his skin and his clothes. Tonight he thought it unlikely he'd sleep. It had been his day off and he'd slept away the afternoon. Since that first evening when he'd forgotten, he'd never come down here without food, plenty of it. A pizza -ironical that, really - a couple of mini pork pies or a samosa, cold sausages, a bag of crisps, bananas. His wife called bananas the junk food of fruit and he saw what she meant - not that they weren't good for you but that they were so easy to eat. He ate one. He drank some coffee out of the flask he'd brought. The barrow he had with him he'd found dumped in the Grotto. God knows who had put it there or had used it. It was his now and he filled it up with ground sheet sleeping bag, cushions, torch, the cigarettes he shouldn't smoke but probably would before the night was out, food, the coffee flask, a bottle of water, _Today, the latest Stephen King - when was Stephen King going to write about canals, the horrible way they just lay there, not moving, just waiting, still or lightly rocking? Maybe he already had. Up in Camden Town a dog started barking. It barked for a bit, then began howling like a wolf. The wolves in the zoo never seemed to howl. He tore the pizza in half and each half in half and started eating. You couldn't tell from the state of the darkness but it was after eleven, nearly midnight. Overhead the traffic was a lot lighter. For a long while there wasn't any traffic, and then the bridge would thump and rattle. It was too dark to read his book or his paper and he wasn't keen enough on either to bother with his torch. He contemplated the slightly rocking black water with the skins of light lying on patches of it. He started counting the seconds between one rattle of the bridge and the next, calculating that enumeration at a medium-fast rate was counting seconds. A hundred and ten, next time a hundred and eighty. It was when he was counting for the third time, reaching two hundred and seventeen, that he had this crawling sensation that someone was looking at him from the parapet of the bridge. He couldn't see the parapet from where he sat, only the underside of the arch, greenish with algae, a single drop of water falling from between two redder bricks. Grubbing with his fingers in the grassy earth, he picked out a flat pebble and first holding it parallel to the ground, sent it skimming across the surface of the water. It made a trail of spray as a toy speedboat might. He thought he heard footfalls on the bridge above his head. He belonged to a profession whose members are not supposed to feel afraid. It was the same with the armed forces. But these days it is no longer necessary to pretend you don't feel fear, only not to show it. He was afraid and he knew all the ways of not showing it. At least, the hand didn't shake that reached for the cigarette packet, took out a cigarette and brought it to his mouth. He struck a match and watched the blaze of light under the bridge, the glitter on the tubular rail, and the black shadows fleeing into the water. Which way would the man come? He listened, heard something crushed underfoot, a piece of litter, plastic and hard. It cracked under the pressure of a shoe descending. He looked towards the sound, preparing to act his part, raising a fist to ward off an intruder, the way he had when the Oxbridge dosser came down. It was over now. For good or ill, for himself or the impaler, this must be the end. No more waiting and watching. Before he he saw anything else he saw the glint of the knife. He started to get up. Act naturally. The dosser on the canal bank would get to his feet, would start back, drop his cigarette into the dark water. He had his back to the underside of the bridge. It struck cold through the padding of his clothes. The man came down, revealed himself in the dark that is never quite darkness - tall, youngish, a dark combat jacket over that red and white vest, camouflage pants over the red jeans. His lips curled back like a dog's. The way he hurled himself on to the dosser with his back against the wall was sudden, a violent reflex, but not unexpected. The knife sank into something soft and thick, but not into flesh. There was no blood. It was pulled out to strike again but never reached its target. The poised arm was seized, brought up at an unnatural angle; a leg came out from the bundle of black rags, kicked with practised aim and the man in the combat jacket gave a soft groan. His upraised hand trembled, opened and the knife fell clattering on to the concrete. It was then that the kick came again, harder, more assured. Arms went up and for a moment the figure was poised on the coping, just a foot away from the guard rail, mouth open to scream. The booted foot slammed in just below the ribcage, a flat ram, and he went in backwards, the scream released, making a huge splash as he struck the water. The spray flew up to the height of the bridge and drenched the man on the bank who cursed and shook himself. He lay down flat in the wet. He was checking if his quarry could swim. Not well, but enough, enough to flounder down there in a doggy paddle, treading cold water, spluttering and coughing. One of the other objects in the barrow was a mobile phone. He fished it out and made his call. As he was speaking, telling them where he was, where to find him, he thought how everyone had speculated as to why the Impaler avoided the Park. What was sacred about the Park, or dangerous about it? What placed an embargo on the Park? But it was simple. The answer was simple. There was no traffic in the Park. It was closed to all but Park Police and Park Administration vehicles -closed to a red and white take away van. The man in the water could hold out for five minutes and that was all it would take. They would be here to help him in five minutes, less than that now. He watched the struggles, the inefficient battling towards the canal rim and feeble grasping of the stone. His eye on his watch, he waited another two minutes. Then he scrambled up the bank, searching till he found a six-foot long stick, a branch with dead leaves still clinging to it. Down on to the puddled path again, the branch extended for its life saving purpose. White, water-bleached hands grasped the wood. He pulled, bracing his feet against the place where the brickwork met the concrete path. He spoke the form of the caution and the man's name and said: I'm arresting you for the murders of John Dominic Cahill, James Victor Clancy, David George Kneller and the attempted murder of Detective Inspector William Marnock..."

The End

FROM THE COVER

Ruth Rendell is crime fiction at its very best. Her first novel, __From Doon With _Death, appeared in 1964, and since then her reputation and readership have grown with each new book. She has now received ten major awards for her work: three Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America; the Crime Writers' Gold Dagger Award for 1976's best crime novel for __A Demon in My _View; The Arts Council National Book Award for Genre Fiction in 1981 for __The Lake of _Darkness; the Crime Writers' Gold Dagger Award for 1986's best crime novel for _Live _Flesh; in 1987 the Crime Writers' Gold Dagger award for __A Fatal _Invasion and in 1991 the same award for _King _Solomon's _Carpet, both written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine; The _Sunday _Times Literary Award in 1990; and in 1991 the Crime Writers' Cartier Diamond Award for outstanding contribution to the genre. In 1996 Ruth Rendell was awarded a CBE. Her books are translated into 22 languages.