[Note to proofreaders: some of the chapter headings got lost, so if you happen to own an original copy, perhaps you'd be kind enough to insert them where they belong, and then resubmit the text to TheBurgomeister AT gmail DOT com. As always, thanks.]

LIVE FLESH RUTH RENDELL

(First published in Great Britain, 1986)

For Don

Chapter 1

The gun was a replica. Spenser told Fleetwood he was ninety-nine per cent sure of that. Fleetwood knew what that meant, that he was really about forty-nine per cent sure, but he didn't attach much weight to what Spenser said anyway. For his own part he didn't believe the gun was real. Rapists don't have real guns. A replica does just as well as a means of frightening. The window that the girl had broken was a square empty hole. Once since Fleetwood arrived had the man with the gun appeared at it. He had come in answer to Fleetwood's summons but had said nothing, only standing there for perhaps thirty seconds, holding the gun in both hands. He was young, about Fleetwood's own age, with long dark hair, really long, down on his shoulders, as was the prevailing fashion. He wore dark glasses. For half a minute he stood there and then he turned abruptly round and disappeared into the shadows of the room. The girl Fleetwood hadn't seen, and for all he knew she might be dead. He sat on a garden wall on the opposite side of the street, looking up at the house. His own car and the police van were parked at the kerb. Two of the uniformed men had succeeded in clearing away the crowd which had gathered and keeping it back with an improvised barrier. Even though it had now begun to rain, dispersing the crowd altogether would have been an impossible task. Front doors stood open all the way down the street with women on the doorsteps, waiting for something to happen. It was one of them who, hearing the window break and the girl scream, had dialled 9-9-9. A district that was neither Kensal Rise nor West Kilburn nor Brondesbury, a blurred area, on the borders of nowhere in particular. Fleetwood had never really been there before, had only driven through. The street was called Solent Gardens, long and straight and flat, with terraces of two-storey houses facing one another, some Victorian, some much later, from the nineteen twenties and thirties. The house with the broken window, number 62 Solent Gardens, was one of these newer houses, the end of a terrace of eight, red brick and pebble dashing, red pantiles on the roof, black and white paintwork, a pale blue front door. All the houses had gardens at the back and gardens at the front with lonicera or privet hedges and bits of lawn, and most of them had low brick or stone walls in front of the hedges. Fleetwood, sitting on a wall in the rain, began to wonder what he should do next. None of the rapist's victims had mentioned a gun, so it would seem as if the replica had been recently acquired. Two of them - there had been five, or at any rate five who had come forward - had been able to describe him: tall, slim, twenty-seven or twenty-eight, olive skin, dark longish hair, dark eyes and very black eyebrows. A foreigner? Oriental? Greek? Perhaps, but perhaps just an Englishman with dark-skinned forbears. One of the girls had been badly hurt, for she had fought him, but he had used no weapon on her, only his hands. Fleetwood got up and walked up to the front door of number 63 opposite to have another talk with Mrs Stead, who had called the police. Mrs Stead had fetched out a kitchen stool to sit on and put on her winter coat. She had already told him that the girl's name was Rosemary Stanley and that she lived with her parents but they were away. It had been at five minutes to eight in the morning, one and a half hours ago, when Rosemary Stanley had broken the window and screamed. Fleetwood asked if Mrs Stead had seen her. 'He dragged her away before I got the chance.' 'We can't know that,' Fleetwood said. 'I suppose she goes out to work? I mean, when things are normal?' 'Yes, but she never leaves the house before nine. Ten past as often as not. I can tell you what happened, I've 6 worked it all out. He rang the doorbell and she went down in her nightie to answer it and he said he'd come to read the electric meter - they're due for this quarter, he'd know that - and she took him upstairs and he had a go at her, but in the nick of time she bashed the window out and uttered her desperate cry for help. That's the way it's got to be.' Fleetwood didn't think so. For one thing the electricity meter wouldn't be upstairs. All the houses in this part of the street were the same and Mrs Stead's meter was just inside the front door. Alone in the house on a dark winter morning, Rosemary Stanley would hardly have opened the door to a caller. She would have leaned out of the window to check on him first. Women in this district had been so frightened by tales of the rapist that not one of them would set foot outside after dark, sleep alone in a house if she could help it, or open a front door without a chain on it. A local ironmonger told Fleetwood that there had been a boom in the sale of door chains these past few weeks. Fleetwood thought it more likely the man with the gun had forced an entry into the house and made his way to Rosemary Stanley's bedroom. 'Could you do with a coffee, Inspector?' said Mrs Stead. 'Sergeant,' Fleetwood corrected her. 'No, thanks. Later maybe. Still, we must hope there won't be a later.' He crossed the road. Behind the barrier the crowd waited patiently, standing in the drizzle, coat collars turned up, hands in pockets. At the end of the street, where it turned off the main roads one of the PCs was having an argument with a driver who seemed to want to bring his lorry down here. Spenser had predicted that the man with the gun would come out and give himself up when he saw Fleetwood and the others; rapists were notorious cowards, that was a well-known fact, and what did he have to gain by holding out? It hadn't been like that, though. Fleetwood thought it might be that the rapist. still believed he had a chance of escape. If he was the rapist. They couldn't be sure he was, and Fleetwood was a stickler for accuracy, for fairness. A few minutes after the 9-9-9 call a girl called Heather Cole had come into the police station with a man called John Parr, and Heather Cole had said an attack had been made on her in Queens Park half an hour before. She was exercising her dog when a man had seized her from behind, but she had screamed and Mr Parr had come and the man had run off. Had escaped this way, Fleetwood thought, and entered 62 Solent Gardens for refuge from pursuers rather than with the intention of raping Rosemary Stanley because he had been baulked of Heather Cole. Or that was Fleetwood's guess. Fleetwood came the nearest he had yet been to the Stanley house, opening the small ornate wrought-iron gate, crossing the square of wet bright-green grass, making his way round the side. There was no sound from the interior. The exposed side wall was sheer, without drainpipes or projections, with three small windows only. At the back though, the kitchen had apparently been extended and the roof of this extension, which was no more than eight feet from the ground, could be reached by scaling the wall against which grew a sturdy thornless climber- a wisteria probably, thought Fleetwood, who in his leisure hours was fond of gardening. Above this low roof a sash window stood open. Fleetwood was proved right. He noted access to the garden from a lane at the back by a path of concrete slabs leading past a concrete garage. If all else failed, he thought, he or someone could always get into the house by climbing up the way the man with the gun had. As he came round the front again, the voice shouted at him. It was a voice full of fear but it was itself none the less frightening for that. It was unexpected and it made Fleetwood jump. He realised he was nervous, he was afraid, though he hadn't thought of this before. He made himself walk, not run, on to the front path. The man with the gun stood at the broken window, the window from which he had now knocked out all the glass into the flowerbed below, holding the gun in his right hand and the curtain back with his left. 'Are you in charge here?' he said to Fleetwood. As if he were running some sort of show. Well, perhaps he was, and a successful one to judge from the avidity of the audience, braving rain and cold. At the sound of the voice a noise came from them, a crowd-sigh, a collective murmur, not unlike wind in the treetops. Fleetwood nodded. 'That's right.' 'So it'd be you I'd have to make terms with?' 'No terms are going to be made.' The man with the gun now appeared to consider this. He said, 'What's your rank?' 'I'm Detective Sergeant Fleetwood.' Disappointment was apparent in the thin face, even though the eyes were hidden. The man seemed to think he merited a chief inspector at least. Perhaps I'd better tell Spenser his presence is required, thought Fleetwood. The gun was pointing at him now. Fleetwood wasn't going to put his hands up, of course he wasn't. This was Kensal Rise, not Los Angeles, though what real difference that made he didn't know. He looked into the black hole of the gun's mouth. 'I want a promise I can come out of here and have half an hour to get away in. I'll take the girl with me and when the half-hour's up I'll send her back here in a taxi. OK?' 'You must be joking,' said Fleetwood. 'It'll be no joke to her if you don't give me that promise. You can see the gun, can't you?' Fleetwood made no reply. 'You can have an hour to decide. Then I'll use the gun on her.' 'That will be murder. The inevitable sentence for murder is life imprisonment.' The voice, which was deep and low, yet colourless- a voice which gave Fleetwood the impression it wasn't used much or was always used economically - turned cold. It spoke of terrible things with indifference. 'I shan't kill her. I'll shoot her from the back, in the lower spine.' Fleetwood made no comment on this. What was there to say? It was a threat which could provoke only a moralistic 9 condemnation or shocked reproach. He had turned away, for he noticed out of the corner of his eye a familiar car arriving, but a gasp from the crowd, a kind of concerted indrawing of breath, made him look up at the window once more. The girl, Rosemary Stanley, had been pushed into the empty square from which the glass had gone and was being held there, her stance suggesting a slave pinioned in a market place. Her arms were grasped in other arms behind her back and her head hung forward. A hand took hold of her long hair and with it pulled her head back, the jerking movement causing her to cry out. Fleetwood expected the crowd to address her or her to speak, but neither of these things happened. She was silent and staring, statue-still with fear. The gun, he thought, was probably pressed into her back, into her lower spine. No doubt she too had heard the man's statement of intent. So intense was the crowd's indignation that Fleetwood fancied he could feel vibrations of it. He knew he ought to say words of reassurance to the girl but he could think of nothing not absolutely false and hypocritical. She was a thin little girl with long fair hair wearing a garment that might have been a dress or a dressing gown. An arm came round her waist, pulled her back, and simultaneously, for the first time, a curtain was drawn across the window. This was in fact a pair of thick-looking lined curtains that drew tightly together. Spenser was still sitting in the passenger seat of the Rover reading a sheet of paper. He was the kind of man who, when not otherwise occupied, is always to be found perusing some document. It occurred to Fleetwood how subtly he was grooming himself for future commanderhood: his abundant thick hair just silvering, his shave cleaner that ever, the skin curiously tanned for deep midwinter, his shirt ice-cream transmuted into poplin, his raincoat surely a Burberry. Fleetwood got into the back of the car and Spenser turned on him eyes the blue of gas flames. In Fleetwood's view, his reading had, as always, informed him of everything that was irrelevant while contributing nothing to the cooling of crisis. 'She's eighteen, left school last summer, works in a typing pool. Parents went to the West Country first thing this morning, left in a taxi around half-seven, a neighbour says. Mrs Stanley's father in Hereford had a coronary. They'll be informed as soon as we can reach them. We don't want them seeing it on TV.' Fleetwood immediately thought of the girl he was to marry next week. Would Diana find out he was here and worry? But no TV camera crew had appeared, no reporters of any kind yet, as far as he knew. He told Spenser what the man with the gun had said about a promise and getting away and shooting Rosemary Stanley. 'We can be ninety-nine per cent sure it's a replica,' said Spenser. 'How did he get in there? Do we know?' 'By means of a tree growing against the rear wall.' Fleetwood knew Spenser wouldn't know what he was talking about if he said wisteria. Spenser muttered something and Fleetwood had to ask him to repeat it. 'I said we'll have to go in there, Sergeant.' Spenser was thirty-seven, nearly ten years his senior. Also he was growing rotund, as perhaps was appropriate for a commander-to-be. Older than Fleetwood, less fit, two grades up in rank, Spenser meant by his 'we' that Fleetwood should go in there, maybe taking one of the young DCs with him. 'By means possibly of the tree you spoke of,' Spenser said. The window was open, waiting for him. Inside was a man with a real gun or a mock gun - who knew? - and a frightened girl. He, Fleetwood, had no weapon at all except his hands and his feet and his wits, and when he talked to Spenser about being issued with a firearm the Superintendent looked at him as if he'd asked for a nuclear warhead. The time was a quarter to ten and the man with the gun had made his ultimatum at about nine twenty. 'Are you going to talk to him at all, sir?' Spenser gave a thin smile. 'Getting cold feet, Sergeant?' Fleetwood took that in silence. Spenser got out of the car and crossed the road. Hesitating for a moment, Fleetwood followed him. The rain had stopped, and the sky, which had been uniformly grey and smooth, was now broken into grey and white and patches of blue. It seemed colder. The crowd now reached as far as the main road, Chamberlayne Road, that runs over Kensal Rise to meet Ladbroke Grove at the bottom. Fleetwood could see that the traffic in Chamberlayne Road had been halted. Up at the broken window in the Stanley house the drawn curtains moved about in the light wind. Spenser stepped on to the muddy grass from the comparative cleanness of the concrete path without a pause, without a glance at his well-polished black Italian shoes. He stood in the centre of the grass, legs apart, arms folded, and he called up to the window in the authentic voice of one who had ascended the ladder of rank in the police force, a chill clear tone without regional accent, without pretension to culture, almost uninflected, the note of a sensitively programmed robot: 'This is Detective Superintendent Ronald Spenser. Come to the window. I want to talk to you.' It seemed as if the curtains fluttered with greater violence but this might only have been the wind blowing coincidentally. 'Can you hear me? Come to the window, please.' The curtains continued to move but did not part. Fleetwood, on the pavement now with DC Bridges, saw the camera crew elbowing through the crowd- unmistakable newshounds, even if you couldn't see their van parked on the street corner. One of them began setting up a tripod. And then something happened to make all of them jump. Rosemary Stanley screamed. The scream was a dreadful sound, tearing the air. The crowd acknowledged it with a noise like an echo of that scream coming from a long way off, half gasp, half murmur of distress. Spenser, who had started like the rest of them, stood his ground, digging in his heels, positively sinking into the mud, his shoulders hunched, as if to show his firmness of purpose, his determination not to be moved. But he didn't speak again. Fleetwood thought what everyone thought, what perhaps Spenser himself thought: that his speech had caused the action that had caused the scream. If the man with the gun had done as he was bidden and come to the window, it would have provided a distraction, under cover of which Fleetwood and Bridges might have climbed up the house and gone in at the open window. No doubt the man too knew that. Fleetwood felt strangely comforted, though. There had been no detonation. Rosemary Stanley hadn't screamed because she had been shot. Spenser, having demonstrated his fearlessness and his phlegm, turned from the house and slowly walked across the soggy grass, the path, opened the gate, came out on to the pavement, gave the crowd a blank dispassionate stare. He said to Fleetwood, 'You'll have to think about going in.' Fleetwood was conscious of his photograph being taken, a shot of the side of his head and a bit of profile. It was Spenser's face they really wanted a picture of. Suddenly the curtains were flung apart and the man with the gun stood there. It was funny the way it reminded Fleetwood of the pantomime he and Diana had taken her niece to at Christmas: a pair of curtains thrown apart and a man appearing dramatically between them. The villain of the piece. The Demon King. The crowd sighed. A woman in the crowd uttered a high-pitched giggle of hysteria, which was abruptly cut off as if she had laid her hand across her mouth. 'You've got twenty minutes,' said the man with the gun. 'Where did you get the gun, John?' said Spenser. John? thought Fleetwood. Why John? Because Lesley Allan or Sheila Manners or one of the other girls had said so, or just for Spenser to have the satisfaction of hearing him say, 'My name's not John'? 'These replicas are very good, aren't they?' Spenser said conversationally. 'It takes experience to tell the difference. I wouldn't say expert knowledge, but experience, yes.' Fleetwood was part of the crowd now, caught up in it, as was Bridges. They were pushing their way through it towards the main road. How long could Spenser keep him talking? Not long, if all he could do was mock him, take the piss about that gun. From behind him he heard, 'You've got just seventeen minutes.' 'All right, Ted, let's talk.' That was better, though Fleetwood wished Spenser would stop calling the man with the gun by phony Christian names. He was out of earshot now, out beyond the crowd and in the main road, where the traffic was jammed solid. He and Bridges went down the alley, closed to vehicles by an iron bollard, that became the lane at the back of the houses. The Stanley house was easy to find, distinguished by the ugly concrete garage. By this time the man with the gun might easily have closed that sash window, but he hadn't. Of course, if the window had been closed, it would have made it virtually impossible to get into the house, at any rate to get in silently, so Fleetwood ought to have been pleased, he thought, that John or Ted or whatever his name was hadn't thought to close it. But instead it struck him with a sense of vague cold dismay. Surely if the window hadn't been closed, this was not inadvertent. It had been left open for a purpose. Now they were once more near enough to hear Spenser's voice and the voice of the man with the gun. Spenser was saying something about letting Rosemary Stanley out of the house before they could begin bargaining. Let her come down the stairs and out of the front door and then they could start making terms and conditions. Fleetwood couldn't hear the man's reply. He put his right foot up on to the wisteria where it bent at almost a right angle, his left foot a yard higher into the fork and then hauled himself on to the extension roof... Now all he had to do was swing his leg over the sill. He wished he could still hear the voices but he could hear nothing but the groaning of brakes on the main road, the mindless sporadic hooting of impatient drivers. Bridges started to climb up. It was odd the things you noticed at times of tension and of test. The last thing that mattered now was the colour the windowsill was painted. Yet Fleetwood took note of the colour, Cretan Blue, the same shade as that on the front door of the house he and Diana were buying in Chigwell. Fleetwood found himself in the bathroom. It had greentiled walls and on the floor creamy-white tiles. Footprints, made in liquid mud and now dry, crossed it, growing fainter as they reached the door. The man with the gun had come in this way. Bridges was outside the window now, bracing his weight on the sill. Fleetwood had to open the door, though he couldn't think of anything he had ever wanted to do less. He was not brave, he thought, he had too much imagination, and sometimes (though this was no time to think of it) it seemed to him that a more contemplative, scholarly life would have suited him better than police work. From here the traffic sounds were very faint in the distance. Somewhere in the house a floorboard creaked. Fleetwood could also hear or feel a regular throbbing but this, he knew, was his own heart. He swallowed and opened the door. The landing outside was not at all what he had expected. It had a thick pale cream carpet. and at the head of the stairs there was a polished wooden handrail and on the stair wall were little pictures in gilt and silver frames, drawings and engravings of birds and animals, and one of Durer's Praying Hands. This was a house where people were happy and where loving care had been expended on its furnishings and its maintenance. A surge of anger came to Fleetwood because what was happening in the house now was an assault on this quiet contentment, a desecration. He stood on the landing, holding the handrail. The three bedroom doors were all closed. He looked at the drawing of a hare and the drawing of a bat with a face that was vaguely human, vaguely pig-like, and wondered what there was about rape that made any man want to do it. For his part he couldn't really enjoy sex unless the woman wanted it just as much as he. Those poor girls, he thought. The girl and the man with the gun were behind the door to the left of where Fleetwood now stood - on the right, as far as the observers outside were concerned. The man with the gun knew what he was doing. He wasn't going to be fool enough to leave the front of the house unmanned while investigating what went on at the back. Fleetwood reasoned: if he shoots me, I can only die, or not die and get well again. His imagination had its limits. Later on he was to remember what he had thought in his innocence. He stood outside the closed door, put his hand to it and said in a bold clear voice, 'This is Detective Sergeant Fleetwood. We are in the house. Please open this door.' There had not been total silence before. Fleetwood realised this because there was total silence now. He waited and spoke again. 'Your best course is to open this door. Be sensible and give yourself up. Open the door now and come out or let me in.' It had hardly occurred to him the door might not be locked. He tried the handle and it gave. Fleetwood felt a bit of a fool - which, in a curious way, helped. He opened the door, not flinging it; it flung itself, being the kind of door that always swings open to hit with a crash the piece of furniture immediately to the right of its arc. The room burst into view before him like a stage set: a single bed with blue covers and blue bedspread thrown back, a bedside cabinet with on it a lamp, a mug, a book, a vase containing a single peacock feather, walls papered in more green and blue peacock feathers, wind blowing through the broken window, lifting high the emerald-green silk curtains. The man with the gun stood with his back to a corner wardrobe, pointing the gun at Fleetwood, the girl in front of him, his free arm round her waist. He had reached a pitch of dangerous panic. Fleetwood could tell that by the change in his face. It was scarcely the same face as that which had twice appeared at the window, having been overtaken by animal terror and by a regression to instinct. All that mattered to this man now was self preservation; he had a passion for it, but in this passion there was no wisdom, no prudence, only a need to escape by killing all who hindered him. Yet he had killed no one, thought Fleetwood, and he held a replica gun... 'If you put that gun down now,' he said, 'and let Miss Stanley go, let me take Miss Stanley downstairs... if you do that, you know the charges brought against you will be minimal compared to what they might be if you injure or threaten anyone else.' And the rapes? he wondered. There was no proof yet that this was the same man. 'You need not drop the gun. Just lower the hand you're holding the gun in. Lift your other arm and let Miss Stanley go.' The man didn't move. He was holding the girl so tightly that the veins on his hand stood out blue. The expression on his face was intensifying as his frown deepened; the skin around his eyes creased further and the eyes themselves began to burn. Fleetwood heard sounds at the front of the house. A scuffling and a thud. The sounds were drowned in rain noise as a sudden hard shower lashed the unbroken upper part of the window. The curtains blew in and ballooned. The man with the gun hadn't moved. Fleetwood didn't really expect him to speak and it was a shock when he did. The voice was strangled with panic, not much more than a murmur. 'This gun I have is not a replica. It's for real. You'd better believe me.' 'Where did you get it?' said Fleetwood, in whom nerves affected his stomach rather than his throat. His voice was steady but he was beginning to feel sick. 'Someone I know took it off a dead German in 1945.' 'You saw that on TV,' said Fleetwood. Behind him Bridges was standing in the short passage behind which were the bannisters and the stairwell. He could feel Bridges's breath, warm in the cold air. 'Who was "someone"?' 'Why should I tell you?' A very red tongue came out and moistened lips which were the same olive shade as the man's skin. 'It was my uncle.' A shiver went through Fleetwood because an uncle would be the right sort of age, an uncle would be in his fifties now, twenty-five or thirty years older than this man. 'Let Miss Stanley go,' he said. 'Why not? What have you got to gain by holding on to her? I'm not armed. She's not protecting you.' The girl didn't move. She was afraid to move. She sagged over the supporting arm that held her so tightly, a small thin girl in a blue cotton nightdress, her bare arms goosepimpled. Fleetwood knew he must make no promises he wouldn't be permitted to keep. 'Let her go and I can guarantee it will count very much in your favour. I'm not making any promises, mind, but it will count in your favour.' There was a thudding sound which Fleetwood was pretty sure was someone putting a ladder with padded ends up against the wall of the house. The man with the gun didn't seem to have heard. Fleetwood swallowed and took two steps into the room. Bridges was behind him and now the man with the gun saw Bridges. He lifted the hand which held the gun an inch or two and pointed it up towards Fleetwood's face. At the same time he drew his other arm from round Rosemary Stanley's waist, as if pulling his nails hard across the skin. And indeed the girl did give a shuddering whimper, shrinking her body. He pulled his arm back very sharply and kneed her in the back so that she staggered and fell forwards on to all-fours. 'I don't want her,' he said. 'She's no use to me.' Fleetwood said quite pleasantly, 'That's very sensible of you.' 'You've got to make me a promise though.' 'Come over here, Miss Stanley, please,' Fleetwood said. 'You'll be quite safe.' Would she? God knew. The girl crawled, pulled herself up, came towards him and held his sleeve with both hands. He repeated it though. 'You're quite safe now.' The man with the gun also repeated himself. His teeth had begun to chatter and he gobbled his words. 'You've got to make me a promise.' 'What, then?' Fleetwood looked past him and, as the wind raised the curtains almost to ceiling level, saw the head and shoulders of Detective Constable Irving appear at the window. The DC's body blocked half the light but the man with the gun didn't seem to notice. He said, 'Promise I can go out of here by the bathroom and give me five minutes. That's all - five minutes.' Irving was about to step over the sash. Fleetwood thought, it's all over, we've beaten him, he'll be quiet as a lamb now. He took the girl in his arms, hugged her for no reason but that she was young and terrified, and thrust her at Bridges, turning his back on the man with the gun, hearing behind him the chattering voice say, 'It's real, I warned you, I told you.' 'Take her downstairs.' Above the bannisters, on the wall down which the staircase ran, hung the reproduction of those praying hands, a steel engraving. Across the front of it came Bridges to hold the girl and take her down. It was one of those eternal moments, infinite yet swift as a flash. Fleetwood saw the hands that prayed for him, for them all, as Bridges, whose body had obscured it, moved down the stairs. Behind him a heavy foot dropped on to the floor, a sash slammed, a chattering voice gave a cry, and something struck Fleetwood in the back. It all happened very slowly and very quickly. The explosion seemed to come from far away, a car backfiring on the main road perhaps. There was no more pain, and no less, than from a punch into the base of the spine. He saw as he fell forward the loosely clasped beseeching hands, the engraved hands, sweep upwards above his view. Slumping against the bannisters, he clutched on to them, slipping down as might a child holding on to the bars of a cot. He was fully conscious and, strangely, there was no more pain from that punch in the back, only an enormous tiredness. A voice that had once been soft and low he could hear screaming shrilly: 'He asked for it, I told him, I warned him, he wouldn't believe me. Why wouldn't he believe me? He made me do it.' He made me do - what? Nothing much anyway, Fleetwood thought, and holding on to the bars, he tried to pull himself up. But his body had grown heavy and would not move, heavy as lead, numb, weighed down or pinned or glued to the floor. The red wetness spreading across the carpet surprised him and he said to all the people, 'Whose blood is that?'

Chapter 2

All his life, for almost as far back as he could remember, Victor had had a phobia. A teacher at college to whom he had been unwise enough to mention it had called it chelonophobia, which he claimed to have made up from the Greek. He made stupid cracks about it whenever the opportunity arose, such as when the Principal's cat wandered into the lecture room one day or when someone was discussing Alice in Wonderland. Victor had his phobia quite badly, to the extent of not wanting to hear the creature named or even to name it himself in his thoughts, or to see a picture of it in a book or some toy or ornament made in its image, of which many thousands were in existence. During the past ten years and a bit he had neither seen it nor heard it spoken of, but sometimes it (or one of its allotropes) had come to him in dreams. That had always happened and presumably always would, but he fancied he was a bit better about the phobia than he had used to be, for he no longer screamed aloud in his sleep. Georgie would have told him if he had. Even when he only moaned a little Georgie made enough fuss about it. One of those dreams had come last night, his final night in there, but he had learned by now how to wake himself up, which he did, whimpering and reaching out with his hands for reality. The girl came for him in her car. He sat beside her in the front but he didn't look out much, he didn't really want to see the world yet. It was when they stopped at a red light and he turned his head aside that he saw the pet shop, and that reminded him he would be a prey to his phobia once more. Not that there was anything of that sort in the window, no reptiles of any kind, but a white puppy and two kittens playing in a pile of straw. He shivered just the same. 'You all right, Victor?' the girl said. 'Fine,' he said. It was Acton they were going to- not his favouriteplace, but they hadn't given him much choice. Somewhere not totally unfamiliar, they had suggested - Acton, say, or Finchley or Golders Green. Well, Golders Green might be on the expensive side. He had said Acton would be allright, he had grown up there, his parents had died there, he had an aunt living there still. He found looking out of the car and seeing the familiar place, the same yet changed, still there, still going on while he had been a decade away, almost unbearably painful. That was something he hadn't expected. He closed his eyes and kept them closed until he felt the car turn and head northwards. Hanger Lane? No, Twyford Avenue. This was motherland and fatherland all right. They weren't going to stick him in the same street, were they? They weren't. Mrs Griffiths's house in Tolleshunt Avenue was three or four streets further west. Victor thought he would have liked to stay sitting in the car for ever but he got out and stood on the pavement, feeling dizzy. The girl led the way. Victor followed her up the path. She had one of those handbags that are divided into many compartments with zip-up sections and extraneous purses, and from one of these she took a ring with two keys on it, one of gold metal, one of silver. It was the gold one she inserted into the lock, opening the door. She turned and gave him a reassuring smile. All he could see at first was the staircase. Most of the hall was behind it. The girl, whose name was Judy Bratner and who had asked Victor to call her Judy from the start, led the way up the stairs. The room was on the first floor, its door opened by the silver metal key. Victor was surprised to see how small the room was, for Judy had told him what the rent would be, though he would not be paying it, and he stood on the threshold for a moment, letting his eyes travel from the tiny sink and draining board in one corner to the curtainless window with its cotton blind and thence to the beanpole figure of Judy and her earnest well-meaning dedicated face. The blind was down and Judy's first self-appointed task was to raise it. Some diffident apologetic sunshine came in. Judy stood by the window, smiling more confidently now, as if she had personally caused the sun to shine and had created - by painting it on canvas perhaps - the view. Victor went to the window and stood beside her, looking out. His right shoulder was a good six inches from her left shoulder but nevertheless she flinched a little and moved fractionally to the right. No doubt she couldn't help it, it was a reflex action, for she would know about his past. Looking down, he could see the street where he had been born and brought up. Which house it was he couldn't be precisely sure from here, but it was one of those in the terrace with the grey slate roofs and the long narrow gardens separated from each other by chestnut paling fences. In one of those houses, for the first time, he had seen it... Judy spoke regretfully and as if she had had to brace herself to do it. 'We haven't been able to come up with any sort of job for you, Victor. And I'm afraid there's no prospect of anything just at this moment in time.' How they talked! He knew about unemployment, how it had come up like a cloud during the latter part of his lost years and now hung fog-like over the whole country. 'You might go to the Job Centre yourself once you've settled in here. Of course you'd have to be open about your...' She sought a word, preferably a euphemistic piece of jargon. 'Antecedents,' he said flatly. She seemed not to have heard, though her face coloured. 'In the interim,' she said, 'it will take you a while to find your feet here. Things will seem a bit strange at first -externals, I mean. But we've talked about that.' Not as much, in fact, as Victor had expected. Other prisoners, coming to the end of their terms, had been gradually acclimatised to the outside world, taken out for a day, let out for a weekend. Nothing like that had been done for him and he wondered if there had been new rulings on release techniques for long-term prisoners. Newspapers found their way into the prison and there was no ban on reading them daily, but they were not senous newspapers, the kind known as 'quality', and they gave you headlines and pictures rather than information. For instance, after that talk with the governor which had taken place early on, there had hardly been any news about the policeman. Then, six months before his release was due, his 'rehabilitation programme' began. He was told about this in advance but all that happened was that Judy Bratner or her colleague, a man called Tom Welch, came to talk to him for half an hour once a fortnight. They were voluntary associates of the Probation and After-care Service or some such thing, though emphatically not to be called prison visitors. Exactly what they were and whom they were Victor had never found out, because Judy and Tom, though kind and bent on helping him, treated him as if he were a very stupid illiterate twelve-year-old. He didn't care because he didn't want to know. If they would do as they promised and find him somewhere to live and tell him how to get the Department of Health and Social Security to keep him, that was all he wanted. Now what he wanted was for Judy to go. 'Oh, I almost forgot,' she said. 'I have to show you where the bathroom is.' It was at the end of the passage, down six steps and round a corner, a small cold room painted the green of tinned peas. 'All you can possibly want, you see.' She began explaining to him how the room heater could be made to function by the insertion of twenty-pence pieces and the water heater fifty-pence pieces. Victor couldn't recall ever having seen a twenty-pence piece. It was one of those new coins. There was a pound coin now too, he seemed to remember. They walked back along the passage. A strip of beaded wood, which Victor thought was called a chair rail, ran along the wall at waist height, and on the 24 plaster above this rail, in letters no more than half an inch high, someone had written in pencil: The shit will hit the fan. 'Now I'm going to leave this number with you, Victor, so that you can give us a call if there's anything bothering you. Well, there are two numbers, just to be on the safe side. We don't want you to feel you're out on your own. We want you to feel there are some supportive people who do genuinely care. Right?' Victor nodded. 'Of course, needless to say, I or Tom will pop back in a day or two to see how you're making out. Did I tell you the pay phone's on the ground floor, just back of the stairs? You'll need five- and ten-pence pieces for that. Now you're OK for money, aren't you, till your DHSS comes~through? I'm afraid MrsGriffiths, who owns this house, she does know. I just thought I'd tell you, but there's no way she couldn't be told.' Judy's face screwed up with the agonising effort of it. Her working life consisted in recounting horrible unpalatable truths - there is no job, there is no security, comfort, ease, peace, future - and it was beginning to show on her troubled pinched face. 'I mean, we always have to tell them because they'd find out, you know. Actually, Mrs Griffiths has been on our books quite a while.' What did that mean? That half or all the other tenants were also axe-prisoners? Ex-criminals? 'But she doesn't live on the premises,' Judy said with the air of one telling first the bad news, then the good. She seemed to be searching for a remark with which to take her leave and grabbed at a whole clutch. 'It's really a nice area, not at all rough. This is a quiet street, not a through road. You might think about joining things, making friends. What about an evening class?' Over the bannisters, he watched her go downstairs. The front door closed behind her. He wondered if he were alone in the house. There was no internal sound at all. He listened and heard Judy's car start up, then a heavier vehicle with a diesel engine park further down the street, the shriek of a woman, followed by a ringing laugh. Victor went back into his room and closed the door. Judy or someone had placed on the draining board and the shelf beside it a wrapped loaf, a carton of margarine, long-life milk, canned mince and canned beans, tea bags, instant coffee and granulated sugar. The staples of English working-class diet as seen through the eyes of a social worker. Victor examined the sink, the taps, the small cylindrical water heater, familiarising himself with the place. Between sink and window was a cupboard, of triangular shape, formed by constructing a frame with a door in it across this corner of the room. Inside it hung his few clothes, some of which, he saw, were those he had possessed in that far-off time before his imprisonment. Everything he had owned then had gone into his parents' keeping, and both his parents were now dead, his father having died first and his mother a mere six months later. Victor had been told he might be temporarily released to attend his parents' funerals, but he had not wished to do so. It would have been embarrassing. The bed was a single size, made up with pink nylon sheets, two multicolouredblankets manufactured in the Third (or maybe Fourth or Fifth) World and a cover that had seen better days as a french-window curtain. The tape through which the hooks had been inserted was still attached to it. The only chair in the room was of Korean cane and there was a cane and glass coffee table on the stout frame, on which someone - the graffitist prophet of disaster? - had stubbed out a hundred cigarettes, giving almost but not quite the effect of pokerwork. Upon the slippery linoleum, red-patterned with cream rectangles so that the impression given was of ravioli in tomato sauce, lay two small rugs of green nylon fur. Victor looked out of the window. The sun had gone in and the roofs of West Acton lay red and grey and terracotta under a pale grey sky across which a large gleaming uniden- tifiable aircraft was making its way to Heathrow. There was no wind and it was very clear. A main road could be seen along which traffic flowed in a metallic stream. This road was just behind the gardens of the street where his parents' house had been - or, rather, where stood the house his parents had rented for the duration of their married life. He was glad they were dead - not from any conventional or sentimental standpoint, such as shame at having to confront them or fear of giving them pain, but simply because here was one additional trouble and stumbling block out of the way. Yet he had loved his mother deeply, or had told himself he had so often that he believed it. When he had gone to prison he had supposed he would begin regular sessions with a psychiatrist, for in pronouncing sentence the judge had repeated the jury's recommendation that he should receive psychiatric treatment. But he had never seen a psychiatrist - on account he supposed of shortage of funds or shortage of psychiatrists -and the only time it had been suggested that treatment might be meted out to him for a possible mental instability had been when he was asked, only two years ago, if he would care to volunteer for group therapy as part of an experiment carried out by a visiting sociologist. Victor had refused and no more had been said. But while he had been awaiting the summons to a psychiatrist in those early days he had sometimes turned over in his mind what he would say to this man or woman when the time came. Most of all he had thought about his phobia and the grotesque way it had begun and about the panics and the violent anger. He had asked himself too why the child of happily married middle-class parents, whose childhood had been for the most part uneventful and contented, should have needed to make motiveless unreasoning attacks on women. A psychiatrist might have come up with some answers. On his own, Victor had not been able to supply any. And he became angry when he thought about his anger, panicky and confused when he tried to examine his panics. Sometimes he thought of them as symptoms of some disease he had caught, for they could not have been inherited nor yet brought into being by ill-usage or neglect when he was young. In prison what he had felt most of the time, more than any other emotion, was self-pity. One day the Governor had sent for him. Victor thought it might be to tell him that his father, who had been unwell, was worse or even dying. But in fact his father was not to die for another five years. A prison officer took him to the Governor's of lice and sat down in a chair specially provided for such custodians, more or less between Victor and the Governor, who was in any case protected by his large oak desk. The warder sat in the way warders and policemen waiting for something or keeping a watch on people always do sit: upright, legs apart, hands folded in lap, and wearing an expression of blank idiocy. 'Well, Jenner,' the Governor said, 'we thought you might care to have some news of the progress made by DetectiveSergeant Fleetwood. Am I right?' 'Yes, sir,' said Victor. What else could he say? He would have liked to say he didn't care and it was nothing to him. He would have liked to pick up the inkwell from the desk and hurl it at the Governor's head, seeing the ink drip down the Governor's chin like black blood on to his immaculate collar. But he wanted to get the maximum remission. In those days he longed to get out. 'Sergeant Fleetwood has been in Stoke Mandeville Hospital for a year now. That is the orthopaedic hospital, you understand, which means specialising in injuries to the spine and limbs.' It didn't mean that. It meant correcting deformities. But the Governor was an ignorant bastard who spoke to everybody alike, as if they were all the same illiterate boneheads. 'I'm glad to tell you he has made great strides...' The Governor seemed to realise what he had said and, pausing, he cleared his throat. 'Of course he cannot walk without a mechanical aid, but there are hopes he may one day be able to do so. He is in good spirits and will soon be leaving hospital to make a life for himself in his own surroundings.' 'Thank you, sir,' said Victor. Before the trial, while he was on remand in custody, he had read articles in the newspapers about Sergeant Fleetwood. He had never felt pity for him, only contempt and 28 a kind of exasperation. If Fleetwood had been sensible, had listened to him and believed him, if he had believed him when he said the gun was a real gun, Fleetwood would be a fit vigorous man today, a man leading a normal life and doing his job. But he hadn't listened and Victor had lost his head. It was something he did in times of great stress or pressure; he always had. He lost his head, panicked and did things in that panic. Which was why it had been wrong to charge him with and convict him for attempted murder. He had not intended to kill or even maim or hurt Fleetwood. Panic came over him like a kind of electric suit, fitting him as a second skin, prickling him all over, crawling on him, tingling and sending into his hand an impulse that pulled that trigger and fired that gun. That was the only way he could describe what one of his panics was like: an electric suit full of tingling wires. There had been a sentimental article about Fleetwood in one of the popular tabloid papers. It said that his first name was David and he was twenty-eight (the same age as Victor) and engaged to be married to a girl called Diana Walker. There was a picture of her and him taken at their engagement party. The article made much of the fact that Fleetwood had been due to get married the following week. He hadn't got married but his girlfriend told the paper that they were only waiting for Fleetwood's superficial injuries to heal. She was going to marry him just as soon as she could. Never mind if he couldn't move, couldn't walk and might never walk again, she was only too happy to have him alive. They would win through, the two of them together. It was being together that was important. There was nothing in the article about Victor Jenner. Of course there couldn't be - nothing about what a monster he was and how it was a pity people like him couldn't be flogged within an inch of their lives - because that would be sub judice. But there was a great deal about what a wonderful policeman Fleetwood had been. The way they wrote about him, his brilliant brain, sweet nature, invincible courage, unselfishness, powers of judgement and deductive faculties, made you 29 wonder why he wasn't at least a chief superintendent or maybe Attorney General. Victor saw him as the instrument whereby he had been sent to prison for fourteen years. After that interview with the Governor, Victor had never been told another word about Fleetwood. He didn't see newspapers every day. Sometimes he didn't see a newspaper for weeks on end. But one day, some two years later, he did read a paragraph about a charity concert at the Albert Hall organised in aid of the dependents of injured policemen, and this concert had been competed by David Fleetwood. There was no picture but the paragraph mentioned that Fleetwood had introduced the performers from his wheelchair. Most of what went on in the prison the Governor knew nothing about. Word had got round as to details of Victor's conduct before he shot the policeman; the other men in the prison knew he was the Kensal Rise rapist and they all had a kind of virtuous antipathy towards rapists just as they did towards child molesters. It was all right to beat old ladies over the head in tobacconists' shops and break into the till, it was OK to rob banks; but rape was something else again, beyond the pale. Victor knew what it was like to be raped now. Four of them raped him one night and Cal, who later became his instructor in the office furniture shop, told him afterwards that maybe that would teach him not to do it again. In pain and bleeding but not on this occasion in a panic, Victor fixed him with a cold stare and managed, though there were tears on his face, a small tight smile. He was staring and smiling at such ineffable ignorance of human nature and life and the way men are. Did something like that teach you not to do it again? Victor didn't know. His eyes, while he had been dwelling on the past, had been fixed mesmerically on what he thought was the roof of the house he had lived in as a child, a red patch among other reds and greys, the white of streets and the 30 green of gardens. He shook himself and blinked his eyes to break the hypnosis. It was April. The clocks had gone on three weeks before and the days were long and light. Immediately below this window was a garden of sorts with a shed in it, four dustbins and a rusted filing cabinet. In prison he had worked in the office furniture shop, making filing cabinets like that one and stands for photocopiers and swivel chairs. Of course that couldn't be one of his grown old, for items made by prisoners were not allowed to be sold to the general public. MrsGriffiths's garden wasn't the kind you sat in or gardened in but the kind you ran out into with a bag of rubbish or to fetch a bucket of coal. A good many similar junk-filled backyards were visible as well as tended gardens, but otherwise it was all backs of houses. Victor wondered if Judy and Tom had purposely arranged it this way to avoid Victor's seeing people walking along when he looked out of his window... What they wouldn't want hi... to see were women. Was he crazy to think like this, to attribute such caution to others? As soon as he went out he would see women. They were half the human race. Judy and Tom might not know, he told himself, and Judy might have flinched and drawn away from him for quite some other reason. It wasn't, after all, for rape that he had gone to prison but for attempted murder. That first night he lay in bed listing in his mind all the things he had to do. He hadn't been able to bring himself to go out, for as soon as he opened the door and stepped on to the landing and heard voices from below and a girl's laugh, the electric suit had begun to fit itself around his body and his limbs, fastening itself at the neck and constricting his throat, prickling his wrists and ankles and squeezing his chest. Into the room he had retreated, gasping for breath. He had covered his head and the upper part of his body with bedclothes and lain on the bed for some half an hour. Then he got up and made himself tea and baked beans on bread, taking strong deep breaths all the time to steady himself. It took a deliberate effort of will and great concentration to make himself think of practical things but at last, after it got dark and he was lying in bed with the blind down and the top light and bedlamp on, he succeeded. The DHSS first, then register with a doctor, go to the bank and find out about his money. Then a telephone call to his aunt in Gunnersbury. Then the Job Centre. Great changes must have taken place, out there in the outside. Some intimation of this had come to him during the ride home with Judy. He fancied London looked dirtier and the people shabbier, and it all somehow looked bigger, though he could have imagined that. And he knew nobody, he had no friends, he was utterly alone. He remembered boasting in the old days that he didn't know what loneliness was, he liked his own company, but now he was less sure. Doubts came to him as to what he meant by his own company, as to exactly what that was. He had shared a cell for so long in a building full of 32 people that he found himself afraid of the comparative solitude of this room. But he finally did sleep and his sleep was crowded with dreams. He had always been a great dreamer and had dreamed a lot in prison, especially the dream about the road through life and the houses and, of course, inevitably the phobia dream, but never about the house in Kensal Rise, at 62 Solent Gardens. Now, after more than ten years, he did. He was in that bedroom again, an animal in a den with the hunters coming first by the back way, then by the front. As a hostage the girl was hopeless because he could only kill her and then what could he do? At this point in the dream Victor realised he was dreaming, for things had not actually happened quite like this. He thought he would wake himself out of the dream before it got to the bad part. Fleetwood opened the door and came in - only it wasn't Fleetwood, it was himself, or his mirror image. Victor heard himself shouting at Fleetwood to send a real policeman, not someone disguised, and Fleetwood, as if he understood, metamorphosed before his eyes, growing taller and thinner and paler. Behind him, on the wall, hung a picture, a line drawing or engraving, whose subject Victor could not make out, but which he feared. 'I'm dreaming,' Victor said, and he closed his eyes and opened them again, willing himself to wake, but the dream refused to go. 'This is a real gun,' he said to Fleetwood. 'I got it from my uncle who was a high-ranking officer in the German army. You'd better believe me.' 'Of course I believe you,' Fleetwood said, and then Victor knew there wasn't going to be a bad part to the dream. 'You car, have ten minutes to get away in. I'm not looking, see? I'm looking at this picture.' Fleetwood turned his back and looked at the picture, leaning on the bannisters. It wasn't what Victor thought it might be but a pair of praying hands. With his arm round the girl, Victor went past him into the bathroom; only, when they got there, it wasn't a bathroom but his Aunt Muriel's house in Gunnersbury, and his mother and father were there and his aunt and uncle, having tea. When his 33 mother saw the girl she got up and said, 'Hello, Pauline, you are a stranger.' Victor woke up. The room was full of sunshine. He reflected on his dream. How many people had to dream of things that happened ten years before and of people who were dead or disappeared because they knew no one new? Of course knowing no one worked both ways. He didn't know them - and they didn't know him. That, however, was something which would rapidly change. It would soon change if he registered with a doctor, made himself known to his fellow tenants and did what Judy had suggested in the way of joining evening classes. He would have to tell everyone he encountered who he was and where he had been for the past ten years. He would either have to do that or tell elaborate lies. Change his name, for a start, say he had been ill or living abroad. If he was going to do that, he must do it from the start. He mustn't even stay in this house longer than was strictly necessary. First, though, it was absolutely essential to go out. Rather as a man who has been in a motor accident knows he must as soon as possible get into a car and drive it again or he never will, Victor knew he must~go outdoors. It had been bad getting into Judy's car and being driven here. Everything had seemed very big and changed and unreal. And that was nothing to how it would feel if he were on foot with no strong capsule of glass and metal to protect him. But go he must, and this morning. He waited, lying in bed, until the sounds in the house ceased. The night before he had calculated that there were four other occupied rooms in the house, so when he heard the front door slam four times he got up. There might be more people, of course, wives who didn't work or old people, but that was a chance he had to take. As it happened, he met no one on his way to or from the bathroom. He dressed in clothes that had been his before his arrest, a pair of grey worsted trousers and a green velvet cord jacket. The trousers were tight on him and he had to draw in the belt under his belly, for he had put on weight in prison, on account no doubt of the stodgy food. Getting out wasn't easy. He went back twice, once because he thought he hadn't closed the window, and the second time - by then he was at the foot of the stairs -because he thought he might be cold and need a sweater. The big sunny windy terrible outdoors received him like icy water receives a naked diver. He gasped for air and the air rushed in to fill his lungs. For a while he had to stand still and hold on to the gatepost. This, presumably, was the agoraphobia from which his Auntie Muriel said she suffered. At any rate, his mother used to tell him she hadn't been out of doors for five years. If she felt like this, he could understand it. Presently he began to walk slowly along the street in the direction of Acton High Road. This led him past the house where he used to live. He walked along fearfully with a powerful sense that he was being followed. Every few seconds he found himself looking round sharply but there was never anyone there. He thought what a lot of cars there were, cars parked everywhere, double, treble the number there had been ten years ago. A woman came out of her front door and slammed it. The sound made him jump and he almost cried out. Outside the gate of his parents' house he stopped and looked at it. His mother hadn't been a fussy or even very careful housekeeper and in her day, from the outside certainly, the place had had a drab look. There had been curtains of different, and not very attractive, patterns at all the windows. Now every window was festooned with snowy white net, gauzy flounces ruched and looped up like a girl's petticoat. Victor had a strange feeling of breathlessness and an indefinable discomfort when this particular comparison came to him. Girls didn't wear petticoats, did they? Not unless fashions had changed drastically. He relaxed a bit when he remembered that his mother herself had possessed just such a petticoat, white and frilly and stiffened, in the mid-fifties, when such garments enjoyed a vogue. The stucco surface of the house had been painted white as icing on a Christmas cake and the woodwork a bright emerald green. On either side of the front door were green 35 and white tubs with cypress trees in them. Victor realised that the house looked so well tended because its occupants owned it. You took more interest in the appearance of a house when it was yours. His grandmother, his mother's mother, had been the original tenant, and when his parents got married they went to live with her. That was just after the Second World War. His grandmother died a few months before he was born and his parents continued with the tenancy, the rent being so low and the housing shortage so acute. His mother had been a happy woman who had had the good fortune to fall in love, marry the man she was in love with and remain in love with him for the thirtyfive years until he died. Victor had never been in love and couldn't imagine what it would be like. His mother had been only fifty-seven when she died. His father, who was ten years older, had died first. He had had a stroke five years after Victor went to prison and after that could only get about in a wheelchair. Propelling himself along the pavement one summer morning- on this very stretch of pavement, Victor supposed, between here and the corner - he had keeled over and died, running the wheelchair into a brick wall and overturning it. The cause of death was a massive heart attack. What his mother had died of Victor didn't know, though the death certificate which he had been shown gave the cause as coronary disease, which was surprising because she had been a strong woman. She had survived his father by only six months. But perhaps it wasn't so surprising, for her husband had been her whole life, the heart and core of her existence. Victor had sometimes tried to imagine how life had been for his mother on her own, but he had simply been unable to see her without his father. From babyhood Victor had been used to the society of demonstrative people. His mother was young and pretty and his father was always touching her, putting his arm round her and kissing her. They never sat in chairs but always on the settee, holding hands. When he looked back (as he did when rehearsing what to say to the psychiatrist), he was never able to see his parents singly or recall times 36 when he had been alone with his mother, though these must have been numerous, as for instance after school before his father returned from work. They never quarrelled, as far as he could remember. They were kind, affectionate parents too, and if Victor's mother always seemed to favour her husband over her son, as in the case of serving him first at table or giving him preference when it came to titbits - this was the hungry aftermath of war- Victor would have told the psychiatrist that this was only what he would have expected, his father being older and bigger and more powerful than he. His parents had few friends and almost the only visitors to the house were relatives. They were all in all to each other, locked in an exclusive relationship of companionability, devotion and sex. Victor's mother answered all his questions about sex carefully and fearlessly so that by the time he was five he knew how babies were made and knew too that parents went on doing that thing that makes babies, the man pushing his willy into the lady's bottom, even when they don't want babies but because it was right and, his father said, what men and women were for. His father drew diagrams for him - well, he didn't exactly draw them, he traced them out of a book, which rather disillusioned Victor- and answered questions his mother couldn't or wouldn't answer, such as what wet dreams were and how it felt to want to do that thing that made (or did not make) babies. For all that, he never really connected it with his own parents. Once, when he was about six, getting up to go to the bathroom, he had passed their bedroom door and heard his mother groaning: 'Don't, don't - Oh, no, no, no!' and then she gave a low howl like an animal. But she had looked so happy before she went to bed! With that howl still in his ears, he remembered her soft rippling giggle, her sidelong smile at his father, her hand caressing the nape of his neck. Victor wasn't at all afraid of his parents but he was afraid to go into the room. Just the same he screwed up his courage and tried the door handle. The door was locked. Next morning the first thing he heard when he woke was 37 his mother singing. She was singing a pop song of the time called 'Mr Sandman, bring me a dream'. There was a line in it that went 'Tell me that my lonesome nights are over'. She came into Victor's bedroom still laughing at something his father had said and she gave Victor a morning kiss and said it was a beautiful day and swept the curtains back to let the sun in. So he knew it was all right and that she wasn't hurt but happy. He even wondered if he had dreamed what he had heard, if in fact Mr Sandman had brought him this dream like in the song. He still wondered that. Certainly he had never listened outside that door again, which was why he had been utterly flabbergasted when, years later when Victor was in his twenties, he heard his father telling someone what a nuisance he had been when a little boy'a pest', his father called him - always wandering about the house at night, and he had once been found fast asleep on the threshold of their bedroom. The night before his seventh birthday he had seen them doing that thing. Later on, he had read in a magazine - the Readers Digest probably - that this is called in psychiatrist's terms 'the primal scene', and in another article that seven is regarded as the onset of the age of reason; in other words, you know what you're doing after that, you're responsible. It was the night before his birthday, and he knew they had bought him a present and hidden it somewhere and he was unashamedly looking for it. It was the same on Christmas Eve. He went about hunting for his presents, and they knew it, he thought; they knew it and half enjoyed his curiosity, playing up to it and hiding the presents in unlikely places. He wanted a cat or a dog but didn't think there was much chance of his getting either. As third best he hoped for a rabbit. They had more or less promised a 'pet'. He got out of bed at about half past nine, having been unable to sleep, and came downstairs looking for his present. There was no television in those days, or at least there was, but they didn't have it. His parents had the radio on in the evenings. Soft music was coming from the living room. He opened the door very quietly, to check if they were 38 sufficiently occupied not to be aware he was out of bed. They were sufficiently occupied. His father, with a shirt on but no trousers, was humping up and down on top of his mother, who lay on her back with her skirt up and her blouse undone on the brown velvet settee. It was not so much the movements they made as the noises, a kind of sucking slurping, his father puffing and gasping, his mother giving long sighs and short squeaks. It was not so much the noises as the movements, the way his mother thrashed from side to side, the way his father bounced and drove. It was both. He need not have worried about disturbing them. A shotgun (he thought years later) let off in that room wouldn't have disturbed them. He turned round and went away. Into the kitchen. He wanted a sweet or a biscuit, though this was forbidden after teeth-cleaning, he wanted something sweet for comfort. They possessed a small fridge but no sweet things were kept in it. The larder was a walk-in cupboard with a stone floor, a wire-mesh window in the door and an airbrick to the outside. Victor wasn't tall enough to reach the door handle but the door wasn't quite closed and he took hold of the edge of it and pulled it open. A huge shell. A head reared up from under the rim of it, snake-like but blank and dull-eyed, questing, moving from this side to that, two armoured feet sluggishly waving, the whole of it an inch or two from his face. He screamed. He covered his face and his ears and his eyes and rolled on the floor, screaming. His father and mother had finished, for they heard him and came running, fastening their clothes and calling out to him. His mother picked him up and held him, asking why, why? Afterwards he understood, he accepted explanations. It was his birthday present, kept for the night in a box on the larder floor, but he hadn't seen the box or the straw or the wire netting. Only the tortoise. They gave it away, of course, to the Macphersons down the road. That was the Macphersons', five houses down. Perhaps they were still alive, though the thing he had named once in his thoughts but wouldn't again couldn't be. Mrs 39 Macpherson might at this moment be watching him from her window. What had his mother told the neighbours? She would have had no chance of concealment. For days the papers had been full of him and then again at the time of his trial. He wondered if in fact she had cared so very much. It had been he, after all, and not his father who had been taken from her and shut up in prison. Victor moved away from the gate, for he had been leaning on it. Round the back there, behind the side gate, was a little paved sunny yard where his mother had grown tomatoes in pots, and one of the windows - or in this case a grid - that gave on to the yard opened out of the larder where the - thing had been in its wire-netted box. It occurred to Victor for the first time that only a very slat- ternly housekeeper would have thought of keeping an animal, a creature like that, in a larder overnight, and for some reason he shivered. His life would have been different if he hadn't opened that larder door, but perhaps not so very different. Victor gave the house a last look. He hadn't really lived there since he had left school and gone to the polytechnic. It was a pity his parents hadn't bought it so that he rather than the landlord might have had the - what sort of sum did a house like that fetch now? Twelve thousand pounds? Fifteen? He was astounded by what he saw in the estate agent's window when at last, his confidence very gradually increasing, he reached the High Street. Forty thousand for a house like that! What then was his bus fare going to cost him? Suppose he wanted to take a taxi? Victor was reminded of a joke which had been going the rounds before he went to prison and inflation had begun to take off. Alan that he worked for had told him. 'There was this man who thought he'd take advantage of inflation. He had himself put to sleep and frozen for twenty years. When he woke up the first thing he saw was a letter from his stockbroker, a year old, saying his investments were worth a million pounds. He went down the road to the callbox to phone his stockbroker and as he was feeling in his pockets for some small change he read 40 the instructions on the pay phone and they said: dial the number you require and when you hear the ringing tone insert nine million pounds...' It wasn't apathy or fear that kept him from doing more than make sure of his Social Security payments. He found himself increasingly reluctant to root himself here in Acton. After a week of freedom he had succeeded in avoiding contact with all the other occupants of the house, and he had seen neither his landlady nor her agent. His rent was paid direct. Presumably the DHSS believed - and with justification - that, if they gave the rent money to the tenant, the tenant would keep it for his own use. There would be time enough to register with a doctor when he was ill. Reading newspapers and magazines daily gave him instruction in current ways and current parlance. There was an expression 'to psych up' which he couldn't remember having heard before. Victor psyched himself up to go to the bank and find how much was in his deposit account -or he was in the process of psyching up, telling himself that once he was in the bank talking to the manager or whoever he wouldn't feel afraid, when something happened to drive him out. He had been almost a week in the room in this house when contact with another human being was forced upon him. There came a tap at his door at ten one morning and when he opened the door, sick and cold with trepidation, he found a woman outside announcing that she was Noreen and that she had come to clean his room. 'I don't want the room cleaned,' he said. 'It doesn't need cleaning. I can't afford to pay for that.' He hadn't used his voice much in the past week and hadn't resorted to talking to himself, so his speech sounded stilted and strange in his ears. Noreen was not apparently sensitive to these nuances. She walked in, pushing a vacuum cleaner. 'That's all taken care of,' she said. 'It comes in your rent.' She looked round her. 'Doesn't need it! You could have fooled me.' She set to work with furious vigour, yanking the bed away from the wall, piling the cane chair and table and rugs into the middle of the room, the vacuum cleaner already switched on though immobile, as if it needed to warm up. She was a small rather pretty woman of about thirty-five with long greasy curly dark hair. Her body was rather plump and bulgy but her legs were thin with fine slender ankles. She wore a black cotton skirt, mauve tee shirt and Scholl sandals. Victor felt an unexpected shocking violent surge of desire for her. He edged away and stood between the cupboard and the sink. The electric panic suit began to enclose him. In the past week he had been glad that he felt nothing. Why did this urge grip him now? She was not much to look at, this Noreen, and she smelled of sweat. She wasn't very young. Was it because he was in his own place and feeling reasonably safe while outside he was still afraid and astonished most of the time? He wanted to whimper and bleat like an animal. He wanted to scream. Noreen shouted above the sound of the vacuum cleaner, 'If you've got anything to go out for, I should go out now. Then you won't be under my feet. I usually get done in half an hour.' He put on his jacket and edged past her, walking with his hands on the walls. The years in prison hadn't killed it then. Had he ever supposed they would? Outside the door, on the landing, he fell on his knees and crouched forward with his head on the floor. He rocked back and forth. The vacuum cleaner whined and groaned and hiccupped behind the door. Victor banged his forehead on the floor. He lurched to his feet and staggered down the stairs. With his room taken over, there was nowhere for him to hide. He thought of a line he'd read somewhere once, long ago. No doubt he'd come across it in that mixed English-Sociology-Economics course he'd started at the polytechnic. For this is hell, nor am I out of it. He hadn't the least idea who had said that, but this was hell and he was in it up to his neck. The money his parents had left him was in a deposit 42 account at the local branch of Lloyds Bank. There had originally been something in the region of a thousand pounds but out of that had had to come the cost of his mother's funeral and payment for the removal of the furniture. Victor forced himself to walk to the bank, teeth gritted, hands stuffed in his pockets. Part of the way he walked almost blind, his eyes half closed, his head bent so that he was looking down at the pavement. In the bank everything was so easy that he wondered what had stopped him coming days before. He gave his name, which the bank teller didn't recognise, which obviously meant nothing to him, and though he couldn't give the account number, this hardly seemed to matter. They found out everything like that on computers now. Victor, who barely knew what a computer was, felt ignorant and awed. His account contained only just over three hundred pounds. A slip of paper, folded in half, was passed to him via the little trough under the grille. They were a lot more security-conscious in banks than they had been ten years ago. Cal had been inside for doing a bank, he remembered, and Georgie for holding up a postmaster in some Hertfordshire post office at gunpoint while his mate helped himself to a couple of hundred old-age pensions. Three hundred pounds - and that included the accumulated interest over five or six years. Victor didn't want to use the phone that was attached to the wall in the area behind the stairs. He might be overheard. It was always impossible to tell whether or not the house was empty. There was a pair of phone boxes outside the Job Centre, both unoccupied. Victor looked at what was on offer in the Job Centre window. The number of jobs going was at variance with what he had been told by Judy but no doubt when you came to apply they would turn out either to be filled or not what they seemed. There was even one that might suit him: 'Skilled or semi-skilled metalworker/cabinet maker wanted for office furniture workshop.' In the days he'd worked for Alan it had been as a driver in Alan's car-hire company. He could drive all right, drive anything, and he could make filing cabinets -but what was he going to tell them when they asked about his previous experience? He pulled open the door of the first phone box. There were no directories and when he tried to use the phone he found that it was dead. In the next box not only was the phone dead but the receiver had been cut off and laid on its side in the metal box where the directories should have been. Victor couldn't understand it. His face must have expressed his bewilderment for, as he came out of the box, a woman walking past said to him, 'Them two've been vandalised, love. They've been like it for weeks.' Victor thought it was outrageous that people could go about doing damage like that and getting away with it, going unpunished. He had been going to phone his aunt but now he asked himself what was the point? Whenever he chose to go there, she would be in. She never went out. Noreen might have finished cleaning the ravioli linoleum by now, but very likely she would still be in the house. He wasn't going back while she was still there. He began walking down Gunnersbury Avenue, for he couldn't get up the courage to take a bus. Traffic on its way to Heathrow pounded past him at rush-hour volume, though it was only eleven in the morning. It made him wonder what it would feel like and how he would feel if he tried driving a car again after ten years. This used to be what his mother had called a 'select area', but Victor had always thought it bizarre, rows and rows of large neo-Tudor houses, every square foot of their surfaces adorned with half-timbering, their roofs steeply pitched and their windows leaded and glazed with stained glass. It might not have been so bad if there had been space enough, if each house had been allotted half an acre of land, but instead they were crammed together. Mostly, the front gardens were rookeries with steps winding up through them to the front door. His aunt's was a corner house with the front door a studded oak mediaeval imitation and a kind of granite cliff hung with rock plants supporting the porch. Muriel Faraday had married late. She was older than his mother but Victor was sixteen before she got married. He could remember going to the wedding because it was just after his 'O' Level results had come in and at the reception his father went about telling people his son had eight 'O' Level passes, which had embarrassed Victor. The marriage had been in some registry office, he couldn't remember where, and Muriel had worn high heels and a big hat which had made her look huge beside the stooping elderly man who was her husband. Sydney Faraday was the owner of three prosperous greengrocery shops, a widower with grown-up children. Victor's mother told him that Muriel had stipulated that if she agreed to marry him there was to be no question of her ever serving in one of the shops, not even to help out in an emergency. Victor and his parents derived no benefit from Muriel's new prosperity, though his mother had had high hopes of fruit out of season and a discount on new potatoes. 'Not so much as a punnet of strawberries,' she used to say. It would have been difficult for such presents to be handed over since his mother invited people to the house or accepted invitations very rarely and his aunt, soon after her wedding, developed a phobia about going out. On only two or three occasions had Victor gone to his aunt and uncle's house, for Christmas dinner twice and one other time, but he remembered perfectly where it was. Before going up the steps to the front door, Victor walked down the steep ramp to the garage at the bottom. This garage was half timbered and had little diamondpaned windows like a country cottage on a calendar. Victor looked through one of the windows at the furniture inside, all of it covered up with his mother's curtains. On top of the curtains bric-a-brac from his mother's shelves and cupboards lay in heaps - cups and plates and vases and ashtrays and paperweights and candlesticks. Where one of the curtains had slipped, he could see the bedhead from his parents' bed, old gold quilted satin across the padded buttoned surface, from which hung a long thick cobweb. A concrete staircase, winding and rustically uneven, led 45 to the front door. All around it loomed artificial outcroppings of stone, hung with trailing plants and partly obscured by dark fan-shaped growths of horizontal conifers. For as long as Victor could remember - from the time, that is, when Muriel married Sydney and moved in here - garden statuary had relieved the gloomy starkness of these escarpments, creatures cast in concrete: a frog, a rabbit, an owl with painted yellow eyes, and a tortoise. Fortunately for Victor, the tortoise was the least obtrusive, for the stone on which it stood was the one nearest to the box hedge and half covered by fronds of juniper. Giving it only a cursory glance, you might have taken it for a stone itself. Victor, of course, had never approached it nearer than these steps, had never looked at it except out of the corner of his eye. Now he noted only that it was still there, neither more nor less obscured than it had been last time he was here, more than a decade ago. Either the juniper had not grown or else it was purposely kept trimmed back to this level. The front door looked as if it hadn't been opened for months or as if it were in fact the entrance to some fortress and his summons, by means of the bell that must be rung by pulling a twisted iron rod, would call forth a doorkeeper in chain mail holding a club. Victor hesitated before pulling it. He didn't want that furniture, he had nowhere to put it, and even if he had possessed an empty house waiting to be furnished, almost anything would have been preferable to these pieces in which memories and pains and shames were somehow petrified. But perhaps he hadn't really come for that at all, perhaps he had come to see Muriel, who was his only living relative, the only link left in that flesh and blood chain that anchored him to the past. She might be dead. They wouldn't have bothered to tell him that in prison. She might be bedridden or in a home. The house didn't look lived in. But it hadn't looked lived in when he had come on Christmas Day with his parents; there hadn't been a paper chain or a card on display. He reached for the iron rod and pulled the bell. All the windows down the street that he could see, all diamond-paned casements with curly metal handles in wooden mullions, gleamed with a kind of black glitter, but those in his aunt's house seemed to have a grey mist on them, a dusty bloom that had been rained on and then filmed with more dust. He rang the bell again. This time he heard something. Absurdly - because this was his old aunt he was calling on, he reminded himself, a nothing, nobody that mattered - he felt the tingle of panic, electric tremors in his shoulders and down his back. He drew in his belly and put back his shoulders and breathed deeply. The door came ajar slowly, drawn open with extreme caution, a crack, six inches, a foot. An old face peered out at him, twitching, mouse-like. She had aged so that he would hardly have known her, would not have known her in the almost impossible eventuality of their encountering each other elsewhere. He stared, his throat constricting. She had been a mountainous woman with a big flourypainted puffy face that used to remind him when he was a teenager of some elaborate cake in a patisserie window, powdery white with cherries on it and marzipan, surrounded by a golden frill. The cake had fallen into ruin, dust and cobwebs where the icing had been, a furriness as of mould on the spongy cheeks. The stout body, once tightly corseted, was wasted and bent. Muriel wore a pink net or snood on the wispy grey hair that in former times had been peroxided, a dirty blue wool dressing gown and dirty blue feather mules. Victor didn't know what to say. He swallowed. He waited for her to say something and then he understood she didn't know him. 'It's Victor,' he said. She stepped back, putting a hand up to her mouth. He walked into the house and shut the door behind him. She spoke in a hoarse whisper. 'Have you escaped?' He would have liked to kill her, he could imagine doing that. And then he understood that she was afraid. 'What do you mean, escaped?' he said roughly. 'There's four more years for you to go.' 'Haven't you ever heard of remission for good behaviour?' Horrified, she stared at him. She looked him up and down, her hands holding her face claw-like. A thin nervous giggle came from her. 'Good behaviour!' she said. 'I like that - good behaviour.' From distant times he remembered where the living room was. He pushed the door open and went in. She followed him, shuffling. 'I thought you must have got out over the wall.' He took no notice. The living room was full of newspapers and magazines. Against the wall opposite the fireplace four tower blocks of magazines reached from the floor to the ceiling. The impression was that the building had ceased only because the ceiling was reached. In the embrasure of the bay window, newspapers were piled, broadsheets on the left and tabloids on the right, to a height of about four feet. More magazines filled the area between the refectory table top and the floor beneath, the three bookcases, the alcoves on either side of the fireplace, even the sofa and one of the armchairs. A small space in the centre of the carpet only was free of them, this and the armchair draped with a blanket in which his aunt presumably sat in front of the television. And she never went out! How did one old woman who never went out assemble this hoard of paper? If you never threw anything away, he thought, if you took one daily paper and two weeklies, say, and two or three monthlies and you never threw anything away... Had she always been like this? He couldn't remember. He turned round to her. 'You've got my furniture.' It occurred to him, immediately he had spoken, that she would probably start in about how generous she'd been, what it would have cost him to have the furniture stored, and so on. But she only said, 'It's in the garage.' 'Could you take me, please?' She shook her head. 'It's outside,' she told him, as if some people had garages in the centre of their houses. 'You 48 can go through the kitchen and in the back way. There's keys. I'll get you the keys.' She shuffled along through the house and he followed her. Her husband had been well off and it was a big house, furnished with big expensive over-upholstered furniture from the thirties. The dining room had a lot of magazines in it too, arranged in similar pillar-like stacks. If no one had cleaned the place for several years, there had been nothing much to make it dirty. Pale soft dust was everywhere and a dusty smell. The kitchen looked as if no one had cooked food in it for a long time. His aunt opened a drawer and took out a bunch of keys. She had guarded his property well, for three separate keys were needed to open the garage door. She wasn't a bad old girl really, he thought. Maybe it was natural she'd been frightened when she first knew who he was. He had suspected her of malice and censoriousness but she was only a bit ga-ga. In the ruined face he could see something of his mother, which was odd because his mother had been lovely, but it was deep in the eyes, a something in the shape of the nostrils, the modelling of the temples. This made Victor feel strange, weak, worse in a way than he had when he knew his mother was dead. He unlocked the garage door, using the three keys. Even then it stuck and he had to put his shoulder to it. No one had been in there for a long time. Victor stood on the threshold, gazing at his past, his childhood, cradled in these beds and mattresses, in these tables and chests and chairs, all of it shrouded in the multicoloured fabric that had covered the windows and kept the outside at bay. Closing the door behind him, he pushed his way into the depths of it. He moved like someone who finds himself in a thicket or maze composed of trees he must not damage. The furniture smelled of his mother's house, a smell he had not been aware of while he lived with her, but which he at once recognised as personal and unique: his father's tabacco, beeswax, witch hazel, Coty L'aimant talcum powder. Victor found himself inhaling it as if taking in gulps of fresh air and he had to stop himself doing this. He closed his eyes, opened them, took hold of the hem of a curtain and tugged at it. Revealed beneath was the settee, upholstered in brown velvet, on which his parents had used to sit holding hands and on which, on the night of the tortoise, he had come upon them making love. Folded on its cushions was a brown check travelling rug. Pressed up against its back was a wheelchair. This must be the wheelchair his father had been confined to. After his father had suffered that first stroke Victor had never seen him again but his mother had continued to visit the prison, not noticeably cowed or dispirited by the atmosphere or even distressed by her son's being in there. She had been tranquil and talkative as ever, and he didn't think it had been put on for his benefit. Why should she have worried? She had his father, who was all she had ever wanted. He remembered her talking about this wheelchair and how clever he was at managing it, 'whizzing along the pavements'. That was the phrase she had used. Victor wondered why it had been kept. It should have been handed over to the social services surely, that was obvious. Why hadn't someone written to him about it? The solicitor, for instance, who had been executor of his mother's will, had arranged with his aunt for this storage of the furniture, and neatly abstracted his own fee from Victor's legacy. What persons in their right mind had thought he would have a use for a wheelchair? He covered it up again. All this stuff would have to be sold, that was the only thing to do with it. Walking along Acton High Street, he had passed a junk shop with a notice outside that said: Flats and houses cleared and good prices paid. The door locked once more with the three keys, Victor went back through the house. It was a very quiet house that might have been in the depths of the country rather than in a London suburb on the main route to Heathrow. He called out, 'Auntie Muriel?' There was no answer. He came to the dining-room door and saw her inside, leaning over the table which was covered with pieces of paper. Victor went into the dining room. He saw that the pieces of paper were cuttings from newspapers and magazines, all neatly clipped out, not torn, as if prepared for a scrapbook. Perhaps they had been prepared for a scrapbook, perhaps that was his aunt's design. When he saw what they had in common, he felt a great wave of heat, like a breaker in a warm sea, wash over him, flood up to his face and over his head. He felt sick, not because he cared or was remorseful, but because he thought she must have taken all these magazines, all those papers and periodicals, just for this, to this end. He held on to the edge of the table and gritted his teeth. That was nonsense, of course, no one would do that, and yet... He swung round and took hold of her by the shoulders. She made a little gibbeting noise and cringed. He had meant~to shake the life out of her, but he let her go, though roughly enough to send her staggering so that she almost fell. The cuttings on the table were all accounts, stories, photographs of David Fleetwood and the life he had led since Victor shot him ten years before.

Chapter 4

Having only two topics of conversation, the Second World War and the greengrocery trade, Sydney Faraday had talked exhaustively about battles and beetroot, the former slightly dominating. He had been a sergeant with a tank regiment, part of Montgomery's Second Army that swept across northern Germany in the spring of 1945. One of his favourite stories was how he and a corporal and a private had gone into a farmhouse kitchen near the Weser, found the occupants gone, nothing to eat but a sucking pig roasting, in fact ready to eat at that moment, in the oven. Another was the one about the gun. Outside Bremen Sydney had found a dead German officer lying in a ditch. He was still holding a gun in his hand which led Sydney to believe (on no other evidence) that he had shot himself out of despair at the way the war was going. On the altruistic grounds of not wanting the man branded a suicide, Sydney took the gun and kept it. It was a Luger. 'A German military small-bore automatic pistol,' Sydney would explain to the company, rather in the manner of an encyclopaedia. The first time Victor heard this story had been after Christmas dinner. He was only seventeen and still going about with his parents. He heard it again ten years later when his-mother said she never saw him these days and then nagged him into going with them to Muriel's on Christmas Day. Things were just the same: the same undercooked defrosted turkey, this time with canned potatoes, for there had been technological progress during the intervening decade, and greens that were perhaps sub-standard for the shop. While they ate the shop-bought, home-boiled pudding and drank the only pleasing constituent of the 52 meal, Sydney's port, Sydney told the story of the German officer and the gun once more. Victor's mother murmured, though to no avail, that she had heard it before. Muriel, who had no doubt heard it many many times, interjected mechanically with 'My goodness!' and 'I say!', uttered expressionlessly as if she was learning these exclamations as part of a minor role in a play. She had grown fat, and the more fat she became the more withdrawn. It was as if whatever spirit she had ever had was being steadily suppressed, muffled and smothered under layers of flesh. At the time Victor couldn't precisely remember from ten years before the exact words Sydney had used in telling the story of the dead German officer, but he didn't think they varied much from the present version. Perhaps the narrative had filled out a bit. 'So I thought, poor old devil, he must have been at the end of his tether. No future, I thought, nothing to look forward to. I reckoned on him being found and his wife and kids back home getting told he wasn't a hero, he wasn't killed on active service. Oh, no, he done himself in. You know how you get arguing with yourself on what's right and what's wrong. I thought to myself, Sydney, the only good German's a dead German, you know that.' 'My goodness!' said Muriel, deadpan. 'But somehow, I suppose the truth is we've all got the quality of mercy in us somewhere, somehow I couldn't leave him there to be branded a rotten coward. I picked up his dead stiff hand, cold as ice it was, I remember like it was yesterday, and took that Luger and stuck it in my pocket and never said a word to no one. That was a little secret between me and the dead, my own private mark of respect.' 'Can I have some more port?' said Victor. Sydney pushed the bottle at him. 'And you won't believe this but I've still got that Luger. Oh, yes. I can show it to you any time you care to see it. For some reason I've treasured it. It's not a matter of getting it out and having a gloat over it, not a bit. I just like to remember it sometimes and think to myself, you will pass this way but once, 53 Sydney Faraday, and any good you can do, do it nozu. Well, that was my little bit of good when we was sweeping across to victory in old Monty's wake.' Nobody asked to see the gun. Victor was thinking of asking when Sydney announced that he would go upstairs and fetch it. The Luger was wrapped in a white silk scarf, the kind of thing men used to wear with evening clothes. Victor's mother asked if it was loaded and when Sydney sneered that of course it wasn't, what did she take him for, handled it gingerly while remarking that it hardly seemed right on Christmas Day. Sydney wrapped the gun up again and returned upstairs with it. The moment he was out of the room Victor excused himself to go to the bathroom. He went quietly up the stairs. At the top on the left was Sydney and Muriel's bedroom, a big room with a pink flowered carpet and a pier glass in the middle of the floor. Victor glanced quickly in there, then turned down the passage towards the bathroom at the end. Sydney's stooping form could be discerned inside the second bedroom (there were four) lifting up the eiderdown on a brass bedstead. He didn't seem to have heard Victor pass by. At that time Victor had scarcely thought of needing a gun. Rather, he had reflected that a gun was a precious thing to possess because it was rare and it was forbidden. But in the following May he made an attack on a girl on Hampstead Heath and the girl had had some sort of training in martial arts, which wasn't very usual back in the seventies. She managed to throw Victor and escape. He remembered Sydney's gun. Sometimes Victor thought how wrong it had been of Sydney to put temptation in his way like that. If Sydney hadn't boasted about the gun and shown it off, he, Victor, would never dreamed of such a thing being in Muriel's house, and in default of that gun, of course, he would never have acquired one. And if he had never acquired a gun... - Even then he didn't think much about it until Sydney fell ill and went into hospital. He was suffering from lung cancer, and a year or so later he was to die of it. Muriel had scarcely set foot outside the house for years but she had to go and visit Sydney. Victor learned all this from his mother, who told him how Muriel would only go to the hospital if she went with her, arriving in a taxi at Muriel's door to collect her. For a long time Victor's mother had had a key to her sister's house. The next time the two sisters were due to go hospital visiting, Victor went to Gunnersbury. He watched the taxi come and his mother climb the mountain path between the alpine plants and horizontal conifers. His mother let herself into the house and came out five minutes later with the obese figure of Muriel clinging to her arm. Muriel had ori a big black hat with a wide brim and a black silk raincoat, as if she were anticipating Sydney's death and was already in mourning. A few minutes after the taxi was out of sight, Victor let himself in with the key he had had copied from his mother's. It was a bit stiff and new and for a second or two he thought it wasn't going to move the lock. It did. He wondered where that key was now, what had happened to it. There was no particular use he could think of for it, but just the same he liked having things of that sort, they made him feel safe and rather powerful. It must have got lost six months later when all his possessions were transferred to his parents' house. What, for that matter, had happened to the gun? Presumably, the police had held on to it, though it wasn't theirs any more than it had been Sydney's. It rightly belonged to the German government, Victor supposed. He went straight up the stairs, which were of dark polished wood with a runner down the middle of the treads of red turkey carpet. How dark this house always was, even in the height of summer! The gloomy upper floor smelled of camphor and as if the windows were never opened. Victor entered the room with the brass bedstead and lifted up the eiderdown. A stone hot-water bottle and a metal bedpan lay on the bare mattress, but no gun. Victor looked inside the hot-water bottle and inside the bedpan, he looked through the folded clothes in the chest SS of drawers, setting mothballs rolling out of sleeves and sock toes. The carpet was blue with a faded pattern round the border of yellow grapes and green vine leaves. He lifted up the carpet, he searched the wardrobe, he opened a wall cupboard full of shoes and boots, its upper shelf containing a small library of western novels in paperback: The Man Who Rode to Phoenix, The Secret of Dead Eye Ranch. It was his temper, his anger, which helped him that time. In a rage he kicked at the shoes in their wooden trees, overturning them. Underneath, a floor-board was loose. Victor could lift the board up with his fingers. Inside was a cardboard shoebox and inside the box was the Luger wrapped up in Sydney's fringed white silk scarf. What Sydney hadn't mentioned was that he had also taken off the German officer four rounds of ammunition. Probably that sort of rifling of a corpse would have been harder to explain on grounds acceptable to Sydney's vaunted morality. Sydney didn't die until Victor had been nearly a year in prison. He had been out of hospital and home again when Victor made use of the gun - totally unaware, Victor often thought, how much he shared responsibility for the maiming of Fleetwood. He and Fleetwood and the girl Rosemary Stanley each had a share in that responsibility: Sydney for taking the gun in the first place, Fleetwood for refusing to believe in its evident reality, the girl for her stupid screaming and breaking of that window. People never thought of how much they might embroil others in their careless behaviour. He hoped, though, that Sydney had been made to feel something of his guilt when, after the shooting, the police had gone to him and asked about the gun, how he had come by it and why he had given it to his wife's nephew. Even on his sickbed they hadn't spared him but had pestered him until he told them everything. That must have been one time, Victor thought, when he hadn't enjoyed boring guests with that particular after-dinner story, when he couldn't have put across all that spiel about how moral and caring he was. * In an interview he had given to a Sunday newspaper Fleetwood had talked quite frankly about his life and his feelings, less so to a women's magazine. Or the women's magazine had cut out the bits it thought might make its readers uncomfortable. He spoke about not being able to walk, about foregoing all those athletic activities which had been important to him, running, playing rugger and squash, going on walking holidays. He mentioned - not for the newspaper, only the magazine- how he had become fond of reading. One of the ventures he had begun on was studying for a degree with the Open University. He read novels and biographies and poetry, had joined the London Library as well as two book clubs. Gardening interested him and he enjoyed planning a garden, though he had to have someone else to do the work for him. He was considering as a hobby learning to make musical instruments, an organ perhaps or a harp. In the middle of the newspaper article, just when the reader might have started thinking that being paralysed and confined to an orthopaedic chair for the rest of one's life wasn't so terrible after all, Fleetwood said, 'I suppose the worst thing is what most people don't think of, that I'm impotent, without sex. I can't make love any more and it's pretty unlikely I ever will. People forget that that gets paralysed too, they think it's solely a matter of not walking. It's the hardest thing to bear because I like women, I used to love women, their beauty, you know. That's all lost to me in a real sense, I have to face it. And I can't marry, I couldn't do a woman that sort of injury.' In another cutting, which pre-dated the Sunday paper story by some years, was something about how Fleetwood's fiancee hadn't married him after all. There was a picture of her with him when he was fit and well and another picture of her sitting beside his wheelchair. She was slim and fair-haired, very pretty. The magazine the cutting came from wasn't particularly harsh to her or lacking in understanding. It quoted her without much comment, asking its readers at the end of the piece how they would feel in her situation: Write in and let us know your views. 'I loved David - well, I still do,' she had told them. 'I started off with high hopes. Good resolutions, I suppose you'd call them. The fact is, I just wasn't a big enough person to take it. I want a real marriage, I want children. I wish I could be a better person, more of what he expected, but I think it's better to know it now, to face up to it now, than to have tried marriage and failed.' The sickly sentimentality of it made Victor cringe but he went on reading. The cuttings were laid out on the table like a pack of cards for some elaborate patience game. They spanned Fleetwood's life from the day in the house in Solent Gardens to the present, or almost to the present, the latest being dated the previous Christmas. There was the story about the charity concert Victor had read of while in prison. A photograph of Fleetwood accompanied it. He sat in a wheelchair on the stage with, on one side of him, a famous comedian whose name had been a household word for years before Victor went to prison, and on the other, a beautiful long-legged girl in a spangled leotard who leaned over him with her arms loosely about his neck. More photographs were inserted into an account in a magazine of some of the physio-therapeutic treatment Fleetwood had undergone. One of those showed the former policeman sitting in a garden with a yellow labrador dog; another, in a later story, had him at his father's funeral, holding a wreath of pink and white roses in his lap; a third was in the text of an interview with Fleetwood in which he said he was moving out of London, it was even possible he might emigrate to Australia or New Zealand. In all there were fifty-one cuttings on the table - not quite a pack of cards - and the last of them was about Fleetwood distributing presents to children in an orthopaedic hospital. He had travelled to the hospital from where he now lived, in a place in Essex called Theydon Bois. Victor, who would scarcely have known his own aunt, whose own face in the mirror sometimes seemed unfamiliar to him, would have recognised Fleetwood without any introduction or caption. Once in his life he had seen him, for Fleetwood had been too ill to attend the trial, but he 58 would have known him anywhere. That face was printed on his memory more indelibly than his mother's. It was a firm square solid face with regular features and a rather large long mouth. The eyes were dark (and now mournfully sad), the eyebrows black and very nearly straight, the hair dark, thick and wavy. It was a face not unlike his own. There was no question of a twin-like resemblance, but they might have been taken for brothers. They belonged to the same physical type, as if to the same tribe of tallish, wellbuilt, even-featured people. Victor raised his head and looked at himself in the large oval steel-framed mirror which hung on the opposite wall and saw threads of grey in his hair, an indefinable ageing of the skin, something old and tired and experienced in the eyes which was similar to that in Fleetwood's own. They were each thirty-eight, which was young yet, but Fleetwood had ruined both their lives by refusing to believe an evident truth. His aunt had come creeping back into the room. She went behind the table, keeping the table between them, as a means of defence perhaps. On the hand which held together the two sides of her dressing gown was a magnificent diamond ring. The clustered diamonds formed a dome half an inch in diameter and a quarter of an inch thick. It was a ring that should have adorned the lily-white hand of youth. Victor thought how rich Sydney must have been, better off than any of them had thought. He said to her, 'What made you save all this lot?' Her expression was truculent and spiteful. 'Somebody had to.' It was a senseless remark. 'Why did they? What's the use of raking up the past? I've got to put all that behind me.' She was silent, looking at him, her tongue moving across the almost closed lips, a habit of hers that he could remember from early childhood. Then she said, 'There's some might say you ought to feel shame for what you did.' It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace. 'Anyway, I don't want this stuff,' he said. 'I'm not interested.' 'I never said you could have it,' she said. 'It's mine. That took me years to do.' She spoke as of a work of art, a book she had written or tapestry embroidered. Like a child who is afraid of having its hand slapped, she began gathering up the cuttings, casting cautious glances up into his face. A reek of camphor came from her and he stepped back' disgusted. 'I'll see about getting someone to move the furniture. I'll phone you.' 'You'll be lucky if you get an answer.' 'What's that supposed to mean?' She had put the cuttings carefully away into two quartosize brown envelopes. Probably she had some secret hideyhole for them, and Victor shuddered a little when he remembered hiding places in that house. 'There's some funny types phone,' she said. 'You wouldn't believe the things I've had said to me. Me, at my age. So now, mostly, I don't answer.' 'OK, I'll come round and tell you.' The envelopes were merely tucked in among the magazines, halfway down the Lady stack. 'It can't be too long for me,' Muriel said, her tone ordinary, mildly disgruntled, not matching the malevolence of the words. 'I'd sooner have your chairs and tables than you, and that's the truth. What you've done's enough to turn a person's stomach.' Outdoors was becoming familiar to him, less alarming. He had been on a bus and, to the amusement of the other passengers, expressed his amazement at the magnitude of the fare. Returning, he had tried the tube and the tunnels hadn't bothered him or the crowds. For days he had concentrated on getting used. to London, to losing the terrible self-consciousness that had made him feel everyone was looking at him and everyone knew. Walking along Acton High Street, he followed a girl part of the way - that is, she was walking along and he was behind her, going in 60 the same direction. She wore spiky heels and a short skirt which made him feel uncomfortable. He wouldn't express it to himself more strongly than that. It made him feel uncomfortable, that was all. Suppose it had been night time, though, and one of the paths crossing Eating Common rather than this densely populated place, what then? He refused to answer the question. The shop where they bought furniture and cleared flats was at the bottom of Grove Road. On the pavement outside was a rack of old books no one would buy either for their content or their decoration value, and just inside the window a tray of Victorian jewellery, rings and pendants and buttons. The stuff for sale inside reminded him of Muriel's own furniture, big, ugly, uncomfortable and shabby. A stuffed peacock with its tail feathers spread in a threadbare fan perched on the back of a chaise tongue upholstered in horsehair and black leather. A boy of about eighteen in jeans and a denim jerkin came out and asked Victor if he could help him or did he just want to browse round? Victor said he had some furniture he wanted to sell. It was really a valuation he wanted. 'You'll have to see Mr Jupp,' the boy said. 'All right.' 'Yeah, but he's not here, is he? He's up the other shop. I mean, you could go up there if you felt like it or I could pass on the message.' 'I could go if it isn't far.' 'Salusbury Road - well, sort of Kilburn. You want to go to Queens Park on the Bakerloo.' Victor didn't realise until he got there and saw the name Harvist Road. Everything seemed to be spelled wrong around here, or spelled in an unlikely perverse way, that made him feel uneasy or as if mocked. But it wasn't that which caused him to pause outside the station, lean against the wall and momentarily close his eyes. Solent Gardens was a turning off Harvist Road. A step or two or three westwards and you were in Kensal Rise. He had told Muriel he wanted to forget, to put the past behind him, but he was walking along Harvist Road in the opposite direction to where Jupp's shop was and remembering how, ten years before, with Sydney's gun in his pocket, he had been in the park that lay to the right here very early in the morning. In those days he had got into the habit of roaming London at all hours. Possessing the gun gave him confidence. With the Luger in his pocket he felt invincible, a victor indeed. Had Sydney, home again by then, ever missed it? Had Muriel been told? If they had, no hint of this had filtered through to Victor living up in Finchley in his 'studio' flat, driving cars for Alan to airports and stations. In the mornings he would sometimes get up at five and go out while it was still dark. His hours were strange and irregular anyway, meeting planes as he often did at six in the morning, taking home to Surrey or Kent party-goers who at midnight or later had drunk too much to drive themselves. That morning in the late autumn he had been on his way to Heathrow, due there at nine thirty to meet, in the best of the limousines, an Arab businessman and take him to the London Hilton. What had happened to the limousine? Victor had sometimes wondered since. Leaving home at five, he had parked it round the back here, in Milman Road. And then he had walked about, feeling an excitement rise in him that he couldn't have called pleasant but which he needed to have, the trembling, breathless, choking feeling Cal had told him he felt when he looked at a pornographic photo. Cal hadn't used those words but that was what he meant, and Victor had recognised this as the feeling he had when he contemplated forcing some woman, any woman. At seven thirty he had entered the park that lay to the north of Harvist Road. The girl was exercising a dog, a very small dog. She had just taken it off the lead and watched it run into the bushes when Victor seized hold of her. He caught her from behind, hooking one arm round her neck and clamping his hand across her mouth. That was to stop her crying out. She hadn't needed to make a sound because she was seen. A 62 man had been in among the trees, having 'stepped in there for natural purposes', they said at the trial, which meant standing up against a bush for a pee. That was just Victor's ill-luck. He didn't forget the gun but he didn't use it. He ran. He hadn't been certain whether both of them chased him or just the man, but it came out at the trial that it was both, and two or three others they picked up along the way. Like a pack of hounds after a miserable fox. Round those back streets he had run, doubling back and hiding, still thinking then about shaking them off and finding the car and getting off to Heathrow, still hoping. He had found himself in that lane between back gardens, a place of broken concrete pavings and garage entrances and padlocked gates. One gate wasn't padlocked though and he had gone in, up the path, bent double so they shouldn't see him over the fence, ducking down at last into a corner made by house wall and fence. It was then that he had heard the throb of a taxi's diesel engine and a front door slam. The occupants of the house were leaving it, were going out. If they were going out at this time of the morning, he had reasoned, it would be for the day. He climbed up on to the extension roof and in through a bathroom window that had been left open a crack at the top. It was a sash window with nothing to hold it and it had slid down easily. By then his pursuers were lost or at least were soundless and invisible. He crouched for some minutes on that bathroom floor. Then, because he was sure the house was empty, he went out on to the landing. He crossed the landing and looked through the crack of a barely open door, and because he could see nothing or not enough he pushed the door a little and the girl in bed inside, the girl called Rosemary Stanley, sat up and screamed at the sight of him, jumped up screaming and ran to the window, smashed it with a hairbrush and screamed 'Help me! Help me!' to the outside world. The strange thing was that the house meant nothing to him as he looked at it now. No doubt it was the same house, 62 Solent Gardens, the end of a terrace, but he 63 would not have recognised it on sight alone. He walked along the opposite side of the street, looking at it. The uneven plaster surface had been painted chalk white and the front door was a different colour- wasn't it? Victor couldn't remember whether he had ever seen the front door. The broken window had been mended. Of course it had, years ago. Yet somehow when he had thought about that house while in prison he had always seen it with the window broken and the wind blowing in and lifting the curtains. That had been one of the most frightening things, that billowing curtain, for each time it lifted he had expected to see a policeman on a ladder outside. And then, at last, he had seen one. He would never know why he had aimed the gun at Fleetwood and not at the policeman on the ladder outside the window. A woman came out, walked to the gate and leaned over it, looking to the right and then to the left. She was about forty, dark and plump, and there was no way she could be either Rosemary Stanley or Rosemary Stanley's mother. The Stanleys must have moved away. She went back into the house, leaving the door a little ajar. Victor turned round and walked back past the house towards Harvist Road and Salusbury Road and Jupp's shop. In that room with the girl it had all seemed unreal. This can't be happening, was what he had thought over and over again. The police had insisted he meant to rape the girl but this had never crossed his mind. Indignation was what he had felt, indignation and amazement that all this could have happened, the police outside and police trying to get in, a state of siege in fact, sirens sounding, a crowd gathered and watching - and all because he had put his arm round a girl's neck and run away and tried to find refuge in an empty house... Jupp's shop looked exactly like the one in Acton. There was a trough full of secondhand books out on the pavement and a tray of Victorian jewellery just inside the window. A bell jangled when he opened the door. Inside it was different, with less furniture and a case of pin-stuck butterflies, clouded yellows and commas and red admirals, 64 instead of the stuffed peacock. On a red marble table stood an ancient cash register priced at thirty-four pounds. Victor couldn't imagine why anyone would want to buy it. A dusty green velvet curtain at the back of the shop was pulled aside and an old man came out. He was tall and strong-looking with big calloused hands. His face was the purplish red of morocco leather, against which his mass of creamy white hair, worn rather long, and the yellowishwhite shaggy moustache made an almost violent contrast. He had little, bright, red-veined blue eyes. 'Are you Mr Jupp?' said Victor. The old man nodded. He was one of those people who always stick out their lower lips when they nod. For his age he was extraordinarily dressed in a pair of denim jeans, a red shirt and a black pinstriped waistcoat, which he wore unbuttoned. Victor explained what he wanted, that he had a houseful of furniture to be valued and a buyer found for the items. 'I could come and have a shuftee,' said Jupp. 'Where is it? Not out in the sticks, I hope.' Victor said it was stored in the garage of a house in Gunnersbury. The lower lip went out over the upper as Jupp nodded. 'So long as you don't get things out of proportion,' he said. 'I mean, no delusions of grandeur about mum's priceless antiques and all that jazz.' 'How did you know it was my mother's?' said Victor. 'Well, ask yourself, cocky, who else's would it be? Poor old mum's gone at last and left you her bits, which is the last thing you want to be lumbered with, them not being your Louis Kangs or your Hepplewhite, whatever you might wish others to believe.' 'It's good furniture,' Victor protested, beginning to feel aggrieved. 'I daresay. So long as we don't have to hear about valuations and finding a buyer. What I do is clear flats and houses, right? I have a shuftee and tell you a price, and if you like it I clear the lot, and if you don't you go elsewhere and find a bigger sucker than what I am. If you can. Right? You happy with that?' 'OK, but I'll have to warn her you're coming. My aunt, I mean. It's my aunt's place where it is. I'll have to go round and tell her you're coming.' 'Don't break no speed records,' said Jupp. 'It'll be a good fortnight. I'm up to my eyebrows for the next fort- night. How about we say two weeks tomorrow, cocky? You give me the good lady's address and I'll be there three on the dot.' Victor gave him Muriel's address. Jupp wrote it down and Victor's own name as well. Victor waited for the name to be recognised but it seemed to mean nothing to Jupp, who closed up his order book, took a packet of Polo mints out of his pocket and offered one to Victor. Not liking to refuse, Victor took a mint. Jupp hesitated reflectively, contemplating the mint on the top of the pack, rather as a man who is trying to give up smoking stares with longing and disgust and doubt and hunger at the next cigarette. After a second or two he gave a small sigh, folded the torn paper over the exposed mint and restored the pack to his pocket. 'Mustn't indulge myself,' he said. 'I used to be addicted to these things something shocking, hooked you'd say. Twenty packets a day was nothing to me and thirty was more like it. Luckily, I haven't got my own teeth or they'd have gone for a Burton. Nowadays I've got it down to five. A steady five and I'm happy, or let's say I can take it, I can live with it. I don't suppose you can understand that, cocky?' Although he had never been subject to an addiction, Victor could understand it only too well. It made him feel uncomfortable and in a way he wished he hadn't come to Jupp, but he didn't want to have to go searching for another secondhand furniture dealer, so he said he'd see Jupp at Muriel's on Thursday fortnight at three in the afternoon. This time he avoided the tube and got on to a bus instead. Going over the hump of bridge by Kensal Rise station, he caught sight from the window of a newsagent's 66 board on which was scrawled: Acton Girl in Rape Horror. He turned his head sharply away but at the next stop he got off the bus, went into the first newsagent's he came to and bought a paper, the Standard. The story was a short one, at the foot of the page. A girl from Acton Vale had been raped in Gunnersbury Park on the previous evening, her jaw broken by blows, her face cut. A gardener found her after she had lain all night where her attacker had flung her, in a shrubbery of laurels. Reading it gave Victor a strange feeling, a faint dizziness, a nausea. In the past he had sometimes read accounts of rapes he himself had committed during his marauding of London from Finchley to Chiswick and from Harlesden to Leytonstone, one of Alan's cars parked somewhere as, en route to fetch a client, he looked for what the more sensational papers called his 'prey'. In those days the police and judges and juries and the general public had been far less sympathetic towards rape victims and far less condemnatory of rapists than they now were. The consensus of opinion had been that the victims asked for all they got and that the rapists were tempted beyond control. High-ranking police officers were not above suggesting that victims should 'lie back and enjoy it'. It seemed to Victor, reading the Standard, that things had changed a lot. This had registered with him even while he was still in prison, that what with Women's Lib and women campaigning against the way rape victims were treated and the attitude of the court changing, rape was regarded with a severity unthinkable ten years ago. Here, on an inside, page, were some figures. He read them as he walked along. Out of 1334 cases of rape 644 men had been proceeded against. A variety of sentences had been imposed on those found guilty. Twelve of the men had been given life imprisonment, eleven of them seven to ten years' imprisonment, and fifty-six had been 68 given two to three years. It was interesting, he thought, that in only three cases had a restriction order been made under the Mental Health Act. Yet, speaking for himself, personally, he knew that the acts of rape he had performed had been beyond his control, had had nothing to do with will, had been as involuntary and as distinct from any decision or purpose of his own as his firing the gun at Fleetwood. Did that mean he was mad when he did these things or at least not responsible for his actions? Having now walked all the way down Ladbroke Grove, reading his paper and just staring at the blurring print, thinking, wondering how in the future he would control that which admitted no control, Victor got on a bus that would take him home. A faint feeling of regret for the prison he had left took hold of him, a certain nostalgia for that brutish sloth and lack of any responsibility. He had been looked after in there and safe, and if it had often been uncomfortable, always boring, a waste of life, there had been no worries and, later on, no fear. He read the story of the Gunnersbury Park rape once more as he walked up Twyford Avenue, raising his eyes just before he reached the house. Tom Welch was sitting outside the gate in his car. He got out when he saw Victor coming, putting on an over-warm, jovial expression. 'I guessed you wouldn't be long. I thought I'd wait for you.' It was a week since Judy had brought him here but Victor hadn't bothered to get in touch with the after-care people. They ought to be relieved, he thought, they must have enough on their plates. 'How are things? How have you been getting on?' Victor said he was OK, he had been getting on all right. Going up the stairs, Tom talked in a very hearty way about the weather and about the neighbourhood, that this was really the best part of Acton and these houses particularly attractive. When he saw the writing about the shit hitting the fan he laughed rather too loudly and said he hoped that wasn't Victor's handiwork. Victor said nothing. When they were inside he made Tom a mug of Nescafe, thinking that 69 later on he would have a drink. At last, after all these years, he would have a drink. Go out and buy himself a bottle of wine, maybe. 'Any prospect of a job?' Tom asked. Victor shook his head. He had forgotten about trying to get a job, it had seemed unimportant. There were so many other things to think about and handle and live with; At one time he had felt very differently. After one year at the polytechnic, they had refused to have him back because he had made such a mess of his first-year exams. He had done so deliberately. The course wasn't hard and he was sure he could have taken a good degree but it felt like school and he was sick of school. He wanted to work and make real money. Jobs were not a problem in the late sixties. He could take his pick. He tried the Civil Service and he tried a bank, but both bored him. His father began to get heavy, making vague threats, so Victor left home and took a flat, paying rent in advance with an insurance policy which had matured when he was twenty-one. He had a new job selling cars. The showrooms were in North Finchley, his flat not far away in what the estate agent called 'Highgate Borders', and he was engaged to a girl he had met at the polytechnic and who was still a student there. If Pauline's temperament had been different in one respect, he sometimes thought, his whole life might have been changed, none of this might have happened. He would be happily married - for didn't all the psychologists say that the children of the happily married had themselves the best chance of happiness in marriage? - he would be a father, a householder, prosperous probably, respectable, content. But Pauline... what a piece of ill-luck that this woman of all women was the one he had taken up with! He didn't want to think about her now. He could see that Tom, who was still talking about employment and unemployment, had his eyes fixed on the newspaper Victor had bought, which lay folded with the page uppermost on which the headline was 'Rape and its Aftermath'. 'You're sure you're all right,' Tom now said. 'There's nothing you're in need of?' What on earth did he mean by that? What would he say if Victor answered that yes, there was plenty he was in need of? His youth back again, a place of his own far from here, a decent job he'd enjoy doing - and another thing too, something that just at present he wouldn't even name to himself. His eyes strayed to the open newspaper, the word on the page, and he felt the blood go out of his face and a shiver touch the nape of his neck. Tom said, 'Look, Liz said to tell you to come and have Sunday lunch with us some time. I mean, why not this coming Sunday, Victor? Will you do that?' Victor sensed the effort behind the invitation. He had the impression Tom had had to conquer an enormous distaste for the task, would have given a lot to forget it, but duty impelled him, social conscience forced him. Of course Victor didn't want to go, he wouldn't go, but he couldn't think of a reason for saying no. He said yes, he'd come, while making a private decision not to turn up when the time came. After Tom had gone, Victor sat in the window, looking down over the roofs of houses, over the roof of the house where his mother and father had lived, and thought about things. It was seeing the house in Solent Gardens that had brought this about, even though he had resolved not to think about the past. He couldn't help it. It was funny how people expected you to mean the things you said, he thought. Judges and juries and policemen and psychiatrists and social workers and just about everyone took it for granted you meant what you said, though they didn't mean what they said, and of everything that was ever said, Victor estimated, only about a half or less was meant. They had called him a psychopath on the grounds of something he had said while he was in that bedroom with Rosemary Stanley. They took it as evidence of his cold-bloodedness and his intent to shoot Fleetwood. 'I won't kill her,' he had said to Fleetwood out of the window. 'I'll shoot her in the back, in the lower spine.' Fleetwood hadn't been at the trial to repeat that, but Rosemary Stanley had and half a dozen witnesses. It never occurred to any of them that he hadn't meant it. In fact, he could remember exactly why he had said it. The evening before, at home in Finchley, he had been reading the evening paper, this same Standard, only they called it the Evening Standard in those days, and there was a piece in it about some old war hero, an ex-airman with a VC, who was paralysed through a spinal injury. And there was a bit by a doctor in the article writing about what happened to you when you got shot down there, in the 'lower spine'. The words had come back to him as he talked out of the window and he uttered them as if by inspiration, as the nastiest thing he could think of just at that moment. It was his bad luck that when he shot at Fleetwood- never having fired a gun before, hardly knowing where and how to aim - the bullet had struck him just where Victor had threatened to shoot Rosemary Stanley. Why he had fired at all he didn't know. He had been so frightened, so intolerably frightened, in the worst panic of his life. Somehow, he had always thought, if he had been able to make them understand that, they would have let him off. But they never understood. They barely stopped to listen. And yet they must all have known fear, have been frightened out of their lives, just as every day they made remarks and comments, excuses and threats which they did not mean even at the very time of uttering them, which stemmed from fear or boredom or simply from not knowing what else to say. Victor picked up the Standard and read the rape story again. The girl's name wasn't given but she was twenty- four, a hairdresser from Old Oak Road. She was 'recovering in hospital', her condition 'satisfactory'. Victor wondered who it was that had attacked her in that park so near to Muriel's house and where he was now and what he was thinking. He turned the page and his eyes met those of David Fleetwood, sitting in his wheelchair with his dog beside him. The story was a chatty piece. Fleetwood was writing his memoirs, in fact had written them, and this autobiography was to be published in the autumn. There was talk of a sale of television rights. The photograph showed Fleetwood sitting in the garden at the front of his house in Theydon Bois, where he had been living for the past three years. Victor thought of the houses which stood in his life like landmarks. It was as if his life were a road and, as this road curved, another house of disturbing or even terrible significance came into view. His parents' house first of all, the one whose roof he could see, then Muriel's grotesque Tudor pile, the house in Solent Gardens with its broken window and the wind blowing in to lift the curtain, now this one, Fleetwood's house in Theydon Bois. Of the four the latter was the most attractive, part brick, part dark weatherboard, with a gable and latticed windows, a porch over an oak-studded door, a large integral garage, climbing plants, roses perhaps, half covering the wall and now coming into leaf. The front garden was neat and well tended, a garden pretty enough to be on a seed packet or advertising something - a hosepipe, say, or a lawn mower. Tulips filled the bed under the front windows and some sort of blossoming tree was in flower. On a birdbath a pigeon had obligingly perched, or perhaps the bird was made of stone. Fleetwood sat in his wheelchair, his knees covered by a rug, one hand on his Labrador's head, the other holding some sheets of manuscript. He had been interviewed by the Standard's reporter, talking about the book mostly, though not mentioning the actual incident that had caused his paralysis. Yes, he did feel pleased about the book; he would be getting a substantial advance from his publishers; but no, he wasn't planning to do any more writing in the future. Marriage? He didn't think so, though' of course it was possible. Well, yes, he did have a girlfriend. Clare, she was called, and she had typed the manuscript for him. It was all right for some, Victor thought, folding up the paper and putting it under the bamboo table out of sight. Money, success, a woman, a nice house- Fleetwood had everything; and what did he have? A furnished room, a sum of money in the bank that was very small by today's standards, an aunt whose property he just might inherit if she forgot to make a will. If she remembered to make one, he certainly wouldn't inherit anything. Muriel, anyway, though she looked a hundred, couldn't in fact be more than in her mid-sixties and might very likely live twenty years. His youth he had lost. It was pointless looking at it in any other way. Those years he had spent in prison were the best years of a man's life. That was the period of life when the best things happened to you, when you got on and when you settled down. Alan, for instance, who was the same age, would be married now with a house of his own and flourishing business. Victor had slaved for him, sweated his guts out getting up at all hours and often not going to bed at all, worked for him for five years after he got fed up with selling Fords, and Alan hadn't even come to see him in prison, hadn't so much as written. Pauline, he thought, would be married now to some poor devil who had perhaps adjusted to what Victor had never been able to accustom himself to: her icy impenetrable coldness. Well, no, not impenetrable, for he had penetrated on numerous occasions a limp flaccid body which lay passive as blancmange while Pauline studied something on the wall with intense concentration, her mind elsewhere. Once he had observed her counting on her fingers, doing sums. After a while this affected him so that he wilted inside her. Pauline hadn't seemed to notice. That had been around the time when she had begun being more wakeful and active during their sexual moments, wakeful and active to the extent of chatting about what her mother had said to her on the phone that morning and her history tutor's comments on her latest essay. Victor had got up and put his clothes on and gone out into the dark and raped a girl who was taking a short cut home through Highgate Wood. The girl had been terrified and had shouted and fought. It wasn't like doing it to a dead sheep with a chit-chat tape playing. It was wonderful. She had cried out, 'Don't, don't, 74 don't - Oh, no, no, no!' She howled like an animal. 'Oh, no, no, no!' It took Victor some time - by then he had committed three more rapes - to remember where and in what circum- stances he had heard that before. When he did remember, he refused to think about it. It seemed disgusting, blasphemous almost, to think of that. By then Pauline and he had parted. But if she had been warm and loving, greedy for sex as he had read that women in the 1970s inevitably were, if she had been all this and his wife, would he ever have attacked the two women on Hampstead Heath, the girls on Wandsworth Common, Wanstead Flats in Epping Forest? That Christmas, if that different Pauline, that transformed Pauline, had been with him instead of gone five years before, would he have been so interested in Sydney's Luger and a few months later stolen it? That night he slept badly and dreamed a lot. When Tom had been gone an hour or so he had gone out and bought a bottle of wine and drunk it all. It was the first alcohol he had tasted for nearly eleven years. It made him drunk, which was what he wanted, though he didn't want the after-effects. His dream was an enlarging of that fantasy of his about his life as a road and the houses which appeared as he rounded the bends in it. Only this time, after Muriel's house and before 62 Solent Gardens, there came into view along the road the block of flats in Finchley High Road where he had lived with Pauline and the house in Ballards Lane where he had been renting the top floor at the time of his arrest. He walked on, though the surface which had been smooth was now rough like a cart track, with stones and rocks in his path like the stones in the mountainous front garden at Muriel's. The house in Solent Gardens stood alone, having been lopped off from its fellows in the terrace, and the upper window was still broken, the wind blowing in and lifting the curtain. Why, in his imagination and his dreams, did he always see it from this side, the outside, when from that aspect he had glimpsed it only once, when they had brought him out between two policemen, his hands manacled? The next house along the road that he came to was Fleetwood's with its gable and its black weatherboard and climbing roses, but it wasn't the last. The last was the prison where he had spent half his adult life, a red-brick sprawl with a forest of chimneys sprouting out of its red roofs. Why did prisons always have so many chimneys, he asked himself stupidly as he woke up. It wasn't as if they were warm places or distinguished for their cooking or the standard of their laundry. His heart was pounding, his head throbbed and his mouth was bone dry. Because he couldn't go back to sleep again, he got up, drank pints of water straight from the tap, his mouth over the tap, and sat by the window, looking hopelessly out over Acton. It was dawn, pearl-grey and misty, the swell of traffic noise mounting already, birds starting to sing. All the gardens he could see were filled with small trees coming into leaf and flower, green and white and pink, so that a muslinpale haze of colour lay like a thin printed cloth over earth and brick and stone. Hating the human race, Victor thought with an anger that made him clench his fists how all these householders were so mean and grudging that they wouldn't even plant a tree unless it was a fruit tree they could get something out of. Why had his life been passed in these dreary suburbs? He had never lived anywhere interesting or different, though there were plenty of interesting places he had passed through on his way to the airports at Heathrow and Gatwick and Luton and Stansted. Like most Londoners born north of the river, he found it hard to contemplate living south of it. The west side of London he had enough of and he told himself he hated the north. Go east then, a long way, to Epping perhaps or Harlow, or as far as Bishops Stortford. Three hours later he was once more making his way down Gunnersbury Avenue towards Muriel's house in Popesbury Drive. This was the way he had regularly driven to Heathrow. He missed the use of a car. Would he ever have one again? He supposed he could go out to Epping 76 if he was serious about that - by bus or coach or all the way to the end of the Central Line. A lot more trees had come into leaf in the week since he was last here. Over the craggy outcroppings up to Muriel's front door the hanging plants had burst into masses of purple flowers, pink and mauve and purple and puce, so bright they hurt the eyes. Victor could hear Muriel scuffling about inside, fumbling at the door. She knew who it was - she had seen him from the window or she had guessed. The blue dressing gown and the mules she wore were the same, and so was the smell of camphor, but the pink snood with which she had covered her hair had been changed for a brown one. She peered suspiciously out at him, grudgingly easing the door open, widening inch by inch the gap between door and door frame until it was just wide enough for Victor to pass through. 'What d'you want this thee?' He might have been some importunate beggar always bothering her for money or meals rather than a nephew whom she had seen only twice in ten years. Needless to say, Muriel hadn't been to see him in prison either. If she wouldn't set foot outside for her husband's funeral, she'd hardly have gone prison visiting. Yet he had never done her any harm. You couldn't call taking that gun harming her, and if the police had come here questioning her about it and searching the place, no one had blamed her, no one had put her away for ten years. He followed her into the living room, explaining about Jupp and how he would be coming to look at the furniture two weeks from today. The room was stuffy with a fine fug built up. A large electric fire with two elements was switched on. Muriel had made herself a cosy haven or enclave in front of this fire, an island in the sea of magazines. There was the armchair in which she had been sitting with two cushions in the back of it and a pillow in a dirty white pillowcase, a plaid rug over one arm, a footstool that looked like a hassock pinched out of a church, a table on each side of it, one with a library book on it, a pair of glasses and a bottle of aspirins, the other containing a pile of magazines, a ballpoint pen and a pair of scissors. Instead of returning to her chair, Muriel stood there hesitantly, looking at him with a truculent stare. From a distant part of the house a whistle started up and rose to a scream. Of course Victor knew quite well what this must be, or he knew within a split second. At the start of it though, he gave a slight jump and for some reason this brought a grin to Muriel's face. 'I was going to make myself a coffee,' she said. Victor followed her down the passage to the kitchen. Muriel shuffled along, the belt of her dressing gown trailing behind her. For some reason she never fastened the belt but preferred to hold the sides of the dressing gown together with her left hand. The kettle was jumping about on the gas and squealing. Muriel was very slow. She put a spoonful of instant coffee into each cup, calculating that they contained precisely the same amount by studying the individual grains and tipping an extra grain off the top of the second one with a knife. Victor's nerves couldn't stand the bouncing and squealing and he pushed past her to lift the kettle off the gas. She looked at him in resentful surprise. She opened the fridge and removed a small carton of double cream. This went on to a round tray with one of the cups of coffee, a sugar basin and two biscuits on a plate. The biscuits were of the kind made for children called Iced Bears, shaped like teddy bears with coloured sugar on them. On to a second, smaller tray Muriel put the other cup of coffee and pushed it across the table to Victor. He could hardly believe his eyes. The tray with the cream and biscuits she meant exclusively for herself, she was hugging it to her with her hands round its rim. He didn't even merit a teaspoon. But what was the use of arguing with her? He reached across the table for the sugar, climbing over her hands, so to speak, in order to do so, like someone scaling a fence that surrounds a forbidden park. Taking his cup, he went out into the garage to have another look at the furniture. It was wonderful how material, mere pieces of coloured fabric, could awaken so 78 much in the memory. Covering a bedstead and some sort of chest were the curtains which had hung at his own bedroom windows when he was a boy. They must have been of very good quality to have lasted so long, a pattern of bluish-green and red blocks on a black and white back- ground, postwar and early fifties' fashion. He could clearly remember lying in bed and looking at that pattern, the sunlight shining through and making them transparent, or else they would be opaque when there was darkness outside. He would lie there waiting for his mother to come upstairs and tuck him in and kiss him goodnight. Sometimes, before he could read, he hoped for a story as well. She always promised to come but she seldom did; she was with his father, distracted by his father's greater glamour, stronger desirability. The neglect wasn't bad enough to make him cry, though, and he would fall asleep with the last thing printed on his retina those curtains patterned in bluish-green and red blocks on a black and white background. Perhaps he shouldn't let Jupp have all this furniture. If he was going to find himself somewhere to live in Epping, he might need it. Suddenly Victor knew he wouldn't be able to live with the furniture which had surrounded him when he was a boy. It was painful even to look at it. The curtain patterns, for some reason, were the worst, but the beds were bad too and that brown velvet settee. The only thing, he decided, he felt all right about was his father's wheelchair, and that was perhaps because he hadn't been there when his father had got it and he had never seen his father using it. Victor drank his coffee and covered up the bed and chest again and asked himself why he was suddenly taking it for granted that he was going to live in Epping. Surely he hadn't decided on that? He had never really been to Epping, just passed through on his way to Stansted, and once of course stopped off in the Forest near a pub called, he thought, the Robin Hood. And there, a good quarter of a mile from the road, in a glade of bracken and birch trees, he had come upon a woman walking alone, not young 79 or pretty or in any way attractive to him, but a woman alone... Victor went back into the kitchen. His aunt had gone. He found her back in her armchair in front of the electric fire in the close camphor-smelling fug, cutting a piece out of a sheet of newsprint with her scissors. 'I've got something to show you,' she said. 'No, thanks. I know what it is.' Out of the corner of his eye he had seen the photographed corner of Fleetwood's house, a section of gable, an inch of chimney stack. She took no notice but went on cutting, holding the paper and the scissors right up close to her nose. 'He's writing a book,' she said. 'It's going to be all about his past life.' 'I know,' said Victor. 'I've seen the paper. You're not telling me anything I don't know.' 'You'll be in it.' He felt anger beginning to mount again, hot liquid rising in the vessel of his body. 'There's bound to be a long bit in it about you, with pictures.' She laid the scissors down, folded the cut piece of paper in two. Her face was raised up towards his, the sagging flesh of her neck hanging in a double pleat from her chin. 'It's only what you deserve,' she said. Victor had read somewhere that walking or any vigorous exercise frees the body of tensions and calms anger. He didn't find this to be true in his own case. Making his way back to Gunnersbury Avenue, he was filled with murderous rage, to the brim now. The lack of understanding maddened him, not just in his aunt, in everyone, all those people who couldn't see why things happened, how things could happen to you almost without your being aware of them, and then- you were punished for ever, and even then they said it wasn't enough. He would be in Fleetwood's book. Victor wasn't much of a reader, he had always preferred films and television, but if he ever read anything it was biography and memoirs. If Fleetwood were to write a book about his life, indeed had done so, Victor would be in it, with a chapter to 80 himself probably, with photographs of himself. While his trial was going on, newspapers had used a studio portrait of himself taken at his mother's request at the time of his twenty-first birthday. His mother wouldn't have given it to a reporter, so Muriel must have done. Another photograph was the one of him being brought out of 62 Solent Gardens between two policemen. Probably both these would be in Fleetwood's book- unless he could stop it by some legal means, though he didn't know how to go about this and was afraid anyway that it might cost a lot of money. Could Fleetwood say what he liked about him in the book and he have no redress? No doubt, Fleetwood would call him a psychopath and those words he had shouted out of the window would be quoted again: 'I'll shoot her in the back, in the lower spine!' When she had stood in the witness box and repeated those words, Rosemary Stanley had cried. She had stumbled over the words and begun to weep - a very effective method, Victor had thought, of getting all the sympathy of the court, as if she didn't have enough already. That would doubtless be in Fleetwood's book, even though he wasn't at the trial. And Fleetwood's book was going to be on sale everywhere, in paperback as well, turned into a film for television. The idea made Victor feel sick. As soon as he was back in his room, he took the Standard from the rack under the bamboo coffee table in order to read the article again, to learn from it what he could. But he had left the paper folded so that the Gunnersbury Park rape story was uppermost and a line caught his eye, a kind of subheading in quotation marks: 'Rape is not a sexual act but an act of aggression'. Some psychiatrist had said it. He was wondering what it meant, how screwing a girl could be anything but sexual, when the front doorbell rang. Victor had heard that bell ring before, usually in the evening when one of the other tenants had gone to answer it. Whoever it was it couldn't be for him and he wasn't going to answer it now. The bell rang again. Victor heard footsteps and then voices. Someone had opened the front door and this surprised him, very slightly alarmed him, for he had been nearly certain there was no one in the house. Footsteps started up the stairs. He knew would go past his door and on up, they had to, there was no one who could possibly want him. There were at least two people coming upstairs. The knocking on his door was like thunder, the kind of thunder that makes you jump because it is preceded by no warning flash of lightning. Victor's calm, his sanity, his euphoria, vanished and he felt panic like a mass of tingling wires. He opened the door, aware of how vulnerable, how helpless, he must look. Outside stood a woman in a hat and two men in the kind of leisure wear the police thought disguised them. Victor knew the woman must be Mrs Griffiths, his landlady. He knew it from the expression on her face, forbearing, patient, virtuous yet mildly disapproving, the kind of look worn by someone who is socially conscientious enough to take axe-convicts into her house, along with all the inevitable consequences. 'CID,' said the older man, the one in the heather-mixture tweed jacket. 'Can we have a word, Vic?'

Chapter 6

No one ever called him that. Vic - he hated it, it sounded like the stuff his mother rubbed on his chest when he was a child. And what right had they to call him by his Christian name anyway? He heard the younger one, the one in the distressed leather jacket, say, 'Thanks very much, Mrs Griffiths. Sorry to bother you.' They didn't call her Betty or Lily or whatever her name was. But he had been in prison, of course, and therefore forfeited his human dignity, his right to respect for ever and ever. They came in and Distressed Leather shut the door. Heather Mixture said, 'Nice little place you've got here.' Victor said nothing. The palms of his hands tingled, he felt a creeping in his shoulders as if an insect was crawling across his back. He sat down. They didn't. 'Don't suppose you need to go out much. Haven't got a job; have you?' Replying to this with a shake of his head, Victor wondered if he would be able to find a voice. His throat had closed. He would have liked to ask what they wanted rather than endure all this facetious preamble but he didn't dare experiment with speech. They were both staring at him but at least Distressed Leather had sat down. 'Still, you've been out today, need a breath of fresh air sometimes, no doubt. We're having a nice spring, aren't we? It's often the way after a bad summer. But you wouldn't know about that really, would you, having been - what shall we say - out of circulation at the time? Most people in your situation, Vic, find going out a bit of an ordeal at first. But it hasn't taken you that way, am I right?' Victor lifted his crawling shoulders. 'No, it hasn't taken you that way,' repeated Heather 83 Mixture. 'You've been out, you've faced the world. How many times have you been out, would you reckon? Every day, every other day, twice a day? How about last Monday, for instance? Did you go out then?' His voice came, less than a voice but better than a croak. 'Why d'you want to know?' Even as he spoke, he knew. Nonetheless, it was a horrible shock to him. On Monday night a girl had been raped in Gunnersbury Park, he had read about it in the Standard; he had bought the Standard and read about it on his way back from Jupp's. He hadn't been to prison for rape, he had been in prison for shooting David Fleetwood, but once he had been convicted, before sentence was passed, he had asked through his counsel, on his counsel's advice, for two cases of rape to be taken into consideration. This had been done expediently in case the police tried to charge him with these offences once he had served his sentence. Victor's counsel was not to know that those two instances were not the only rapes Victor had committed. He hadn't wanted to mention them at all, he hadn't wanted to bring it - his nature - out into the open. But he had, he had yielded to persuasion. And now the police knew. He must be on a file somewhere, a file on one of these computers which had taken over the world-while he was inside. Victor didn't want to think, now, of the implications of that. 'Let's play it this way,' said Heather Mixture.-'You answer my question first. How about that?' 'I went to see my aunt.' Heather Mixture's facial muscles didn't move but a grin twitched at Distressed Leather's mouth. 'And where might this lady live?' 'Gunnersbury.' They went stiff and still. For a moment. 'As to your question, Vic, I think we can forget that, don't you? You know very well what we're on about. You know what you are and we know. It would save a lot of time and trouble if we all got in the car and went down to the police station.' They wanted to carry out some tests. Heather Mixture had all sorts of amusing euphemisms for being in prison, bringing them out one after another, for the sake of seeing Victor's discomfiture perhaps and Distressed Leather's twitching sycophantic mouth. At first Victor refused, saying he wanted his lawyer. The name of the solicitor who had briefed counsel for him nearly eleven years ago he still remembered, but not the man's office address or phone number. Nor did he have a five- or ten-pence piece for the phone. Heather Mixture said he could have his solicitor, no problem, easiest thing out, he could phone him from the police station. At that Victor gave in because he thought they could probably eventually make him go to the police station, though how he didn't know. The girl's name was Susan Davies. She was in hospital and would be there for a long time. She had described her attacker as being between twenty-five and thirty-five, darkhaired, of medium height. They told him all that. When Victor - pointed out that he was thirty-eight, Heather Mixture said most people liked being taken for younger than they were and, anyway, you didn't age so fast when you were sheltered from the world in durance vile. They told Victor they would like to do a blood test. Victor said he wanted his lawyer. Nothing easier, said a detective inspector Victor hadn't seen before, but when he asked for a phone directory the detective inspector said he couldn't quite lay hands on one just at that moment and why didn't Victor go over to the lab with Sergeant Latimer (Distressed Leather) and have his blood tested while he looked for a phone book? Of course Victor went. He was considerably unnerved. Latimer explained something to him he hadn't known before- perhaps it wasn't generally known or hadn't even been discovered before he went to prison. This was that some men are what are called 'secretors', that is, their blood group can be detected from their semen and other body fluids. There was no knowing whether or not Victor was a secretor without carrying out tests. Victor now saw that it was very much in his own interests 85 to have the tests done. He stopped worrying about finding a solicitor. All he wanted was to get out of there and get home - exonerated. He hadn't raped Susan Davies but he could already see that circumstantially he wasn't going to be able to prove he hadn't been in GunnersburyPark at the relevant time. There were no witnesses he could produce that he had been at home. And his Aunt Muriel - if it was imaginable that anyone could get any sense out of hercould only say that he had been with her for a couple of hours in the afternoon. The blood test would prove it. Three quarters of all people were secretors, Latimer said. They kept him hanging about there until they got the results of the tests. Nothing more was said about a telephone directory and Victor didn't mention it. It was early evening and they had brought him a hamburger and a cup of tea before they told him the results. Well, they didn't exactly tell him, they wouldn't, they merely said he could go home, they wouldn't want to be seeing him again. Like Judy and Tom, only more so, they treated him as if he were sub-human, sub-intelligent. Victor said he supposed he must be a secretor then. That's right, the detective inspector said. What blood group was he, Victor asked, not expecting an answer, expecting to be told this was a police station, if he didn't mind, not a Harley Street consulting room. But the inspector told him, laconically, disrnissively. It appeared that he was B positive. Did that mean anything to him? Victor left. On the way home he went into a wineshop and bought a quarter bottle of whisky and twenty cigarettes. Soon after he went to prison he had stopped smoking, though it was possible to smoke in there at certain prescribed times. But he had stopped. Now he felt he needed something strong and comforting to drink. At least he hadn't succumbed to panic, he hadn't fallen into raving madness and tried to grab, hit or shake them. He congratulated himself on that. The cigarettes and the scotch would take care of this shaking which had taken over his hands and sometimes his knees too from the moment he left the police station. He let himself into the house. Mrs Griffiths, in hat, coat 86 and gloves, was in the hall talking to a young woman Victor had never seen before. The young woman looked away. Mrs Grifffiths gave him a tight smile which Victor knew meant it was one thing having axe-convicts in one's house but only if they had turned over a new leaf. It was seven years since he had smoked a cigarette. The first puff made his gorge rise and he vomited into the sink. He sat down on the bed shivering. Things suddenly presented themselves to him with an awful clarity. While it had obviously been in his interest to have those tests done at that particular point in time, taking the long view it was a disaster. They had found out his blood group, they had found he was a secretor, and on top of that was the misfortune that he belonged to a rare blood group. Victor remembered incongruously an occasion years and years ago watching a television show in which the comedian Tony Hancock appeared in a sketch about blood groups. The point was that he turned out to have the rarest known group, AB negative. B positive, which was Victor's group, wasn't as rare as that but still only six per cent of the population belonged to it. Every time there was an attack on a girl in West London - in the whole of London and the Home Counties, come to that - and there was evidence that the perpetrator was a B secretor, they would come to him. But that was one thing, that could be borne, since there would be few cases. What if he himself were the perpetrator? Victor knew the time would come when he would want to assault a girl again. There was a part of him which said it wouldn't, that he would struggle for his own sake to avoid this, but at the same time he knew that the struggle couldn't be wholly effective. He poured some of the whisky into one of Mrs Griffith's thick moulded glasses, the kind that are given away with a sale of more than thirty litres of petrol. There was no question of vomiting that up. It warmed him and swam into his head. If the time came when he attacked a girl, when the time came, they would do whatever you did do to a computer, type it like a typewriter probably, and up 87 would come a printout: Victor Jenner, 38, 46 Tolleshunt Avenue, Acton, W5, secretor, blood group B Pos... And it would, must happen every time, only there wouldn't be 'every' time- there would be the once and the last, for after that he would be in gaol for the rest of his life. He could imagine the judge calling him a 'dangerous animal' who would have to be locked up 'for the safety of the community', a 'wild beast' who, unless permanently restrained, would indiscriminately ravish women and murder men. The thing was that he wasn't really like that at all, Victor thought; he was frightened and panicky and alone. He would have liked help but he didn't know where to get it - certainly not from Tom or Judy, who would offer evening classes and community service. How different must be the life of David Fleetwood whose fault all this was! Fleetwood was safe, secure, housed, pensioned. His sexual problems had been taken care of in the soundest, most final way. Victor, sitting on his bed drinking whisky in the darkening room, thought he wouldn't mind that solution to his own dilemma. Then the desire, the temptation, the uncontrollable urge, would be gone for ever. And most of all Fleetwood had respect. Everyone respected him, positively worshipped and honoured him. If he had had to go to a police station for tests, they would probably have called him sir. It was ironical really. Fleetwood had brought all this about by his obtuseness, yet it was he who had all the glory and Victor who got all the stick, on and on for years. Perhaps Fleetwood had done it on purpose, Victor thought. Human behaviour was incomprehensible, everyone knew that. Perhaps Fleetwood had got himself shot on purpose, knowing he would get looked after for life and that people adored a crippled hero. Victor walked along Twyford Avenue towards the High Street. He had passed two dreadful nights and a bad day. Both nights he had wakened up with his heart racing and his body all a-prickle. The first time he had lain there weeping, then turning his face into the pillow to muffle the 88 screams he couldn't otherwise control. In the morning he had met a fellow tenant on the landing, a man, who had asked him if he had heard anything in the night, someone crying, for instance, and a noise like bedsprings repetitively jerked. Victor muttered that he had heard nothing. Most of the day he had slept, finding it easy to sleep, escaping thankfully into sleep as a respite from life. But that night the panic came upon him with redoubled force, enclosing him in its straitjacket way, convulsing his limbs with a kind of spasticity, so that he could not lie still but had to jump out of bed and seize and manhandle the nearest object. This happened to be the cane chair, which he found himself grasping and pounding, up-down, up-down, first against the wall and then on the floor. His teeth were clenched and he could hear himself make a kind of growling sound. One of the legs split off the chair and hung by a strand of raffia. Spent and gasping, Victor flung himself on the bed. Almost immediately someone knocked on his door. Victor took no notice. His heart was beating so hard that it hurt him with its pumping as if it would pump its way out through his chest wall. Whoever had knocked at the door shouted that they wanted to know what the hell was going on. Victor staggered to the door, put his mouth close to it and whispered that it was nothing, it was over. 'For Christ's sake,' said the voice. Victor had no more sleep. He got up very early and went out on to the landing with a bar of soap and a pot scourer and erased the writing on the wall. There was no point in it any more. It had happened. The shit had hit the fan. He went to the library to see what he could read up about blood grouping. There was quite a lot of literature about it. Victor knew he was an intelligent person - someone had measured his IQ for him when he was at college and it had come out at 130 - and usually able to grasp scientific data, but blood grouping was too much for him. It was too complicated and abstruse for him to follow. What he did gather was that the ABO system had been discovered as far back as 1900 but that since then a dozen or so other systems had been found, including the Rhesus 89 one, and all these could be tested for, thus fining down even further the possibilities of whose blood was whose. There was the MNS system, the Lutheran, the Kell, the Yt and the Domrock. Why, it looked as if the time would come when everybody's blood group would turn out to be different from everybody else's. But later he began to think about it more rationally. He had never been charged with rape and rape had never been proved against him. Besides that, he intended never to attack a woman again. If he could survive ten years in prison without attacking a woman, surely he could survive the rest of his life. 'Rape is not a sexual act but an act of aggression,' the newspaper had told him. Was it anger then that made him attack women, and if he could otherwise handle his anger would that make him stop wanting to attack them? Tom lived in North Ealing, up near Park Royal station. Victor didn't think that the house was likely to be a landmark along his road, it being small, semi-detached and one of those between-the-wars council houses that proliferate in north-west London, though Tom probably owned it. An overturned tricycle lay on the patch of grass in front and beside it a teddy bear face-downwards, looking as if someone had shot it in the back. Victor winced and wondered why he had had to think of that comparison. He hadn't meant to come at all but to spend the day working out some plan for the future, walking first, continuing with the business of accustoming himself to the outdoors, then in his room, calculating how much money he had and how much he could muster. But he had got no further than Ealing Common when the rain began and he went into the tube station to take shelter. It wasn't going to stop, it was coming down in summer tempests. Park Royal was only two stops up the line and at least he would get his lunch cooked for him. The tricycle was covered with water drops and the teddy bear looked wet, though the rain had now stopped. Tom's children must have abandoned them to run indoors. Victor 90 didn't much like children. A thin woman in trousers and a flowered apron opened the door to him, smiling much too enthusiastically and assuring him in a very hearty way how delighted she was to see him, how she and the children had been looking forward to meeting him. A curious memory came back to Victor as he entered the living-dining room. It was of a newspaper article he had read years ago, long before he went to prison, in which the theory was put forward that no one can be in prison for more than five years and remain quite sane. A psychiatrist had written it, someone who called himself a behaviourist. Victor hadn't remembered that all the time he had been in prison, but he did now, and with a kind of jolt or shock- but he didn't know why he remembered it, there being nothing about Liz Welch or the small shabby cluttered room to bring it to mind. 'Tom's just popped out to get a bottle,' she said. 'Wine, I mean. Would you Like a can of beer for now?' They lived in the kind of hand-to-mouth way, Victor thought, which obliged them to run out to a wineshop whenever anyone came. There was very likely a single can of beer in the house. He had never drunk beer, didn't like it. The Welches were poor. Tom didn't get paid for working for the after-care people, he was a schoolteacher by profession, but Victor didn't feel particularly sorry for hunt It seemed to him insane to marry and lumber oneself with all this. The children came in, subdued, staring. The little girl wore steel-framed glasses. The boy, who was younger, had a bandaged knee through which the blood was beginning to ooze. When he saw the blood he burst into loud cries, was taken on to his mother's lap and comforted. Mrs Welch talked to Victor about the weather, other topics not being safe. 'All this rain day after day,' she said, unwinding the bandage. 'There hasn't been a day in the past week without rain. As bad as last year, isn't it?' She realised what she had said and blushed. Victor enjoyed her discomfiture. He wondered if it was Tom who had told the police where he was to be found. But Tom didn't know about his history as a rapist, did he? Tom came in while Liz was re-bandaging the child's knee. It had come on to rain again and water was streaming off his bright blue nylon cape. He shook hands heartily with Victor, produced the bottle of Bulgarian red wine he had gone out to buy and said they would be all right now. Victor suddenly decided against telling Tom he intended to move away from London. The less anyone knew about his movements the better. If they had been alone, he might have mentioned his fears about appearing in Fleetwood's book and asked where he could go for advice about taking legal steps. But he wasn't going to talk about it in front of this woman - he hoped she would wash her hands before she served the food - or this squalling boy or the girl who since she had come into the room had done nothing but stand in front of him and stare. Lunch came at last. It was roast pork, apple sauce, tinned peas and old potatoes that were boiled, not roasted, followed by a Sainsbury's raspberry and redcurrant tart with custard made from powder. It reminded Victor of better Sunday dinners in prison. Tom talked about television programmer and Victor said he was thinking of renting a television set. This seemed to thrill the Welches because it gave them an opportunity to recommend various rental companies and compare what they knew of rival costs. Tom went outside to make coffee while Liz cleared the table. Left alone with the children, Victor hid himself behind the Sunday Express. As far as he could see, there was nothing in it about rape Qr Fleetwood. The extraordinary thing was that on an inside page he came upon a photograph of a man on a horse riding in Epping Forest. It seemed to mean something, it seemed as if fate was pointing him that way. And of course it wasn't all that extraordinary. It was well known, for instance that things went in threes, that you had only to come upon a new name or place for it to recur twice more that day. He was startled by a fist banging on the paper from behind and he drew it away, not 92 intending to lower it. But the little girl caught hold of the top of the paper and pulled it down, bringing her face close to his over the top of it. 'What's a lag?' the child said. Victor muttered, 'I don't know.' 'My daddy told my mum we'd have to have one of his old lags over on Sunday.' Sometimes Victor thought he had educated himself from magazines. Most of the information stored in his brain seemed to have come from them. Perhaps reading magazines ran in his family or perhaps it was a passion that showed itself only in himself and Muriel, for he couldn't remember his father or mother ever reading anything much. But he could remember Muriel bringing him comics when he was very young, and perhaps the habit had started then. An article in a magazine had led him to believe he might cure himself of his phobia. This was years ago, before prison, before the house in Solent Gardens, before he took Sydney's gun. The article said~that the method it outlined was derived from modern psychotherapy treatment - only you proceeded on your own without the psychotherapist. You began by looking at pictures of the thing you feared. A week or two before this, a nature magazine had been among the ones Victor had bought and the centrefold was devoted to a feature on terrestrial turtles of North America, principally to the courtship ritual of the gopher tortoise. Catching a glimpse of this, barely more than that, Victor had slammed the magazine shut and put another magazine on top of it so that he shouldn't even see the cover. The cover was innocuous enough, being of a butterfly poised on the lip of an orchid, but because Victor knew what was inside, this innocent and in fact very beautiful photograph was enough to start a shiver up his spine. He did not throw the magazine away though, because there was another article in it he very much wanted to read - if he had the courage to touch even the outer pages again. Up till he had 93 read the piece about the modern psychotherapy, he hadn't had that courage. Well, he would try. In his teens, while he was still at school, they had gone on an educational visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the museum was a Staffordshire teapot of the Whieldon type, circa 1765 - he could remember all that, he would never forget - made in the shape of a tortoise in tortoiseshell-patterned pottery. There it was, in front of him, eyeing him, a totally unexpected sight. Victor had fainted. No one knew why. He wasn't going to tell them. Imagine letting one's schoolfellows find out about a thing like that. Boys of that age would have no mercy. The teachers who were with them thought he was ill, and in fact the incident had occurred not long after he had come back to school after having had flu with bronchitis. Since that time his phobia had been worse, had grown very slowly but progressively worse, until it reached a point where he not only couldn't look at a picture of the thing, he couldn't touch the book in which the picture was or even approach too closely the shelf or table where the book was. He suffered all this secretly, privately, in silence. Pauline had a tortoiseshell-backed hairbrush which he could touch, he could just touch it, but he disliked it and he didn't care to hear it called by name. Of course one could pass through life encountering the land-dwelling turtles of the family testudinae only rarely. It wasn't like having a phobia for cats or spiders. But fainting in the V and A had really frightened Victor, just as these horrid glimpses in magazines frightened him, or the effect they had on him did. What would happen were he to see a real one? With the aim of curing his phobia or attempting to cure it, he opened that magazine at: he centrefold and made himself look. At first it was a dreadful experience, making him feel shivery, queasy and weak, then starting up a barely controllable shuddering. But he followed instructions. He told himself that this was a harmless reptile, that these were mere photographs of this harmless reptile, rendered in glossy colour on to paper. They could not hurt him and he 94 was free to close the magazine whenever he chose. And so on. Up to a point it worked. He could look at those pictures. He could get quite blase about them, though he would experience a great tiredness, a feeling of total exhaustion after one of these sessions. He went to the library, looked 'tortoise' up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and obliged himself to fix his eyes on the most awful picture he had ever seen in his whole life: a colour photograph of testudo elephantopus, the giant Galapagos tortoise, a huge reptile four feet long and weighing three hundred pounds. Fortunately, the picture of it was very small. The next step would be to visit a pet shop. His nerve failed him. The article of instructions also failed because what was essential was the presence of the psychotherapist, if only in the role of a supportive human being. Victor couldn't do it on his own. He actually phoned a pet shop and asked them if they had any tortoises - he spoke the word aloud on the phone! - and they said they had and he started to go there, but he was worn out by the effort of it and his spirit was broken. What was the point anyway when you scarcely ever saw the things, or even their pictures, unless you went out of your way to find them? But he fancied he had never been quite so bad since then. Some progress had been made, some success achieved. He could walk past pet shops now, he didn't have to make detours to avoid them, and he could look at the covers of nature magazines and touch them, despite what might, what just possibly might, be inside. Since his emergence from prison, this slight emancipation he felt he had from his phobia wasn't put to the test until four or five mornings after his panicky crashing about in his room. Someone knocked on his door at about nine thirty in the morning. It was Mrs Griffiths, whom Victor got a good look at for the first time. She was dressed rather as a woman might have been for a Buckingham Palace garden party taking place some thirty years before: a navy blue suit, frilly blouse, straw hat with a white nylon flower in it, white gloves and very high-heeled white openwork shoes. Pinned to the left lapel of the suit jacket was a gold brooch in the shape of a tortoise, its shell formed of stones which might or might not have been sapphires. 'There've been complaints about you, Mr Jenner,' she said. She didn't pull her punches or hesitate or preface her words with an 'I'm afraid' or 'you won't mind my saying'. She charged straight in, speaking in a coarse near-cockney voice very much at variance with her genteel appearance. Victor had given the brooch one glance, swallowed, and now was looking away. But he didn't feel like fainting, he didn't even feel sick. He even thought he would be able to look at it again provided he fixed his eyes on the blue stones and avoided the tiny gold protruding head. 'Banging about in the night,' she said. 'Stamping. Knocking on the wall and I don't know what.' He could see her eyeing the furniture for chips or missing legs. 'What were you up to?' 'I have bad dreams,' he said, his eyes going back to the brooch. 'Just have them lying down in bed next time,' she said and, aware of his hypnotic gaze and perhaps also of the pallor of his face, 'I hope you're all right, Mr Jenner. I hope we're not going to have any trouble. For instance,' she said, 'are the police likely to come back?' 'No,' said Victor. 'Oh, no.' It would be a good idea to move as soon as possible, Victor thought after she had gone. When he closed his eyes, he could see that brooch, a glowing dark image on a white background, but gradually it faded and disappeared. There was a tube map on the station platform just as there had always been on stations. Victor didn't bother to look at it because the indicator informed him that the next train due would be going to Epping. It wasn't quite at the extreme other end of the Central Line but almost. A small subsidiary line went on to North Wealdand Ongar during the rush hours. He stood on the platform with a return ticket for Epping in his pocket, waiting for the train that would go no further than Epping. Later on, in the weeks to come, he was to wonder what would have happened if he had looked at that tube map. Would his life have been utterly changed, have run along a different track, so to speak, an alternate line? Certainly he might have changed his mind about going to Epping that day. But in the long run, probably not. Probably, by then, he was committed to certain steps, to certain inevitable courses, even though these were not known to his conscious mind. The journey was long and slow, for the line soon entered the tunnel, and would not emerge again till the eastern edge of London. Victor had bought Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Private Eye to read. The train began filling up at Notting Hill Gate. An elderly woman, very overweight, cast longing glances at his seat and sighed each time she was jostled or someone pushed past her. Victor wasn't giving up his seat to her. Why should he? No woman had ever done a thing for him; they had been positively antagonistic to him: his neglectful mother, that malicious old bag Muriel, Pauline, Rosemary Stanley, who had screamed and broken a window when he threw himself on her mercy, that hard-faced Griffiths woman. He owed 97 women nothing and he felt rather resentful when a man of her own age got up to give this one a seat. The train finally emerged from the tunnel after Leyton. Victor had never been this far along the line before. This was deepest suburbia, the view being of the backs of houses with long gardens full of grass and flowers and pear trees in bloom running down to the track. Four more stations of this sort of thing and then, after Buckhurst Hill, a burst of countryside, part of the Green Belt encircling London. Loughton, Debden, and what seemed to be an enormous estate of council houses with industrial areas. The train came out into more or less unspoiled country again, slowed and drew to a stop. The station was Theydon Bois. Victor stared at the name. He hadn't looked at the tube map and it had never occurred to him that Theydon Bois would be in this particular forest corner, adjacent to Epping. Essex, the Standard had said, and of course this was Essex, metropolitan Essex but still Essex. It was one of the biggest counties of England, extending from Woodford in the south as far north as Harwich. The effect on Victor of seeing that name, the letters of the two words seeming to stand out and vibrate, was one of sickening shock. He stood up and stared at it, leaning across the seat, resting his hands on the window ledge. The doors closed and the train began to move. Victor turned away and looked unseeing into the face of a fellow passenger, a middle-aged man. The man grinned at him. 'Theydon Bois,' he said, 'or Theydon Bwah, as the natives don't call it,' and he sniggered at his joke. Victor said nothing. He sat down again in a daze. This, then, was where Fleetwood lived. Out there, somewhere beyond the station buildings and the trees, was the house with the weatherboard and the gable, the roses round the door and the birdbath in the garden. If he had looked at the tube map, Victor thought, he would have seen where Theydon Bois was and he wouldn't have come. If he closed his eyes he could see that name, Theydon Bois, in dazzling white letters that vibrated a little, that danced. He wished 98 very much that he hadn't come, for he felt nauseous now, a real physical sickness. And what was the point of his coming to Epping anyway? What did he think he would get out of it? He couldn't afford to buy a place and there would be no flats to let here, there never were in places like this. As if he would think of living only a mile away from Fleetwood! The train stopped at Epping and Victor got out. This was the end of the line anyway. He had hesitated, thinking he might just as well stay in the train and go back again, but it was his feeling of nausea that stopped him. Fresh air would help that. He imagined being sick in the train with people looking. Epping hadn't changed much as far as he could see. The High Street seemed a bit quieter, if anything, less congested, and there were street signs which seemed to indicate that new roads to divert the traffic, motorways, had been built during those lost ten years of his. The wide market place looked much the same, as did the water tower shaped like a castle with a single turret sticking out of one corner that you could see from miles away, the grey stone church, the big triangular green and the tall shady trees. Victor walked from one end of the town to the other, from the Forest side of the tower up to nearly as far as St Margaret's Hospital. He didn't see much, the process of seeing, of registering what he saw, seemed to have gone into abeyance. All he could think about was Fleetwood and the fact that Fleetwood was no more than a mile or two away from him, over that hillside, to the south-east. Or perhaps even nearer, for when Theydon Bois people went shopping surely they would come here? Walking back, down the hill, he was aware that he was looking for Fleetwood. There were a lot of cars parked and Victor looked at all of them, seeking the sticker of a pin man in a wheelchair disabled people have on their car windows. If Fleetwood were shopping in the town he would himself be in a wheelchair. Victor caught sight of a wheelchair outside a supermarket and he approached it with a return of that sick feeling. But already, from a distance of 99 fifty yards, he could see that the occupant, whose back was to him, had fair hair. As he passed the seated figure, glancing back, swallowing the saliva which had gathered in his mouth, he saw a boy with drawn-up knees and twisted spastic hands. It was still early, not yet midday. The rain Liz Welch had bemoaned came back in a sudden squally shower with a rumble of thunder over the Forest. Victor went into a place that was half cafe half wine-bar and had a cup of coffee and because it was raining and nearly lunchtime anyway, a hamburger and salad and a strawberry yoghurt. The sickness was gone. So was the rain, for the time being, and the sun had come out with tropical heat and brilliance, shining on the puddles and wet pavements and making them too mirror-bright to look at. Victor studied the boards outside newsagents' shops. Several furnished rooms to let were advertised, two or three in Epping itself, one in North Weald and one in Theydon Bois. He noted down phone numbers. The North Weald one said 'enquire within' but when he went into the shop the girl behind the counter said she knew for a fact that room had gone weeks before, months before, they just hadn't bothered to take the advertisement out, she didn't know why. 'Could I walk to Theydon Bois from here?' he asked her. She looked at him, a grin on her face. 'Maybe you could. I know I couldn't.' She thought he was interested in the room advertised on the next card. 'I expect that one's gone too. Most of the stuff's out of date.' She spoke with the indifference to an employer's interest of someone whose job is boring and uncongenial. He had no intention of walking to Theydon Bois and he had no idea why he had asked the question. As for living there...! He left the shop and started to walk in the direction of the station. If he wanted to live outside London, what was wrong with somewhere along the river, Kew or Richmond, for instance, or in the far north on the borders of Hertfordshire? There was a train waiting but it was a long time before it departed. An elderly woman with a carrier bag got into the train. He and she were the only people in the carriage. Victor soon realised that there was something wrong with her, that she was probably more than a little mad, or at any rate suffering from delusions. She wore a long red flowered skirt and a sweatshirt with a number on it like an American baseball player's, highly unsuitable garments for someone of her age, but her shoes and stockings were of the most conventional and she had an old lady's knitted hat tied under the chin with knitted strings. At first she merely sat, smiling and nodding, shifting her bags about, placing one to the right and the other to the left of her, then both on the right, then both between her knees. The train doors shut, trembled and came open again. She got up, leaving the bags where they were, tripped to one end of the carriage and slid down the window between it and the next, ran all the way down to the opposite end and did the same to the window there. At the open doors she leaned out, looking up and down the sunlit deserted platform. Victor realised that she was playing at being a guard and a cold shiver went down the length of his spine. She was at least seventy. He couldn't remember ever having seen a guard in a tube train even in the old days, though they did have them, they did exist, and she was playing guards. He knew this but it still made him jump when, leaning out, she shouted, 'Mind the doors!' Either it was coincidence or she knew something he didn't know, but even as she spoke the doors began to close. She sprang inside, rubbing her hands together with evident satisfaction. She said to Victor, 'All aboard for Liverpool Street, Oxford Circus, White City and Ealing Broadway!' Victor said nothing. He was embarrassed but he felt something worse than embarrassment. He remembered the thought that had come back to him the day before, at the Welches, how the behaviourist had said that prison drove everyone mad who was in there more than five years. He, Victor, had been there twice as long as that. Already he sensed in himself strange currents of behaviour, diver gences from the norm and impulses he could barely understand. Would he one day become like this old woman? She was sitting opposite him again, shifting the bags, mouthing whispers, smiling. The train had gathered speed and was heading towards Theydon Bois. She skipped up the aisle between the seats, seized hold of the handle on the door at the far end of the carriage and struggled to open it. The awful thought occurred to him that she might be intending to throw herself out. He didn't know what to do. Her bags remained on the floor opposite him and he saw one of them move. He saw a slight movement inside one of the bags and the top of it seem to swell and sink. There might be some animal inside there - a rabbit? The thing he didn't care to name? - or it could simply have been the plastic of the bag itself responding to temperature changes. But Victor didn't think it was that. He got up and stood by the doors. She came and stood close beside him, looking up into his face. The train seemed to take hours pulling into Theydon Bois. It came almost to a stop, gathered speed again and finally stopped in the station. The doors opened and Victor got out, tremendously relieved. He meant to run up the platform and get into the next carriage and he hardly knew why he stood there instead, savouring relief. She called out behind him, 'Mind the doors!' He watched the train depart, taking the madwoman with it. Afterwards he thought he would have got out of the train anyway, his fate or stars or destiny or something decreed that he get out of the train, but for the moment he felt angered by what had happened. He would probably have to wait half an hour for the next train. It was a waste of money as well as time, he thought as he left the station and gave up the return half of his ticket. Now, when he had finished whatever it was he was going to do in Theydon Bois, he would have to buy a single ticket to West Acton. And what was he going to do? Look for Fleetwood's house, a quiet little voice answered him. The place was much bigger than he had expected. A huge green space traversed by an avenue of trees filled the centre of it. Around this green were houses, a church, a village hall, and roads from it that looked as if they might lead to more estates of houses. Victor walked along past a parade of shops, feeling vulnerable and wary. He had already noticed a car parked with a disabled sticker on the windscreen. But thousands of people had those. Alan had told him once that they were easy to get hold of. Your doctor would let you have one for nothing much worse than corns or a twinge of gout. There was no reason to suppose that this car, parked outside the shops, belonged to Fleetwood. And there was nowhere to be seen a man in a wheelchair or a man on crutches. Victor caught sight of his own face reflected in a shop window, dark, rather drawn, the eyes feverishly bright but the eye sockets becoming dark as an Indian's, the short black hair threaded with grey over the temples and with grey showing in the combed-back bit above the forehead. A thought that was rather more fanciful than those he usually had came to Victor: that age was like frost which passes leaving a whitening behind it and a withering and a shrivelling, a blight that destroys all the bright signs of hope. Would Fleetwood even know him if he saw him now? The former policeman, if photographs didn't lie, had barely changed at all. But then what had he had to change him? In and out of hospitals, waited on, cared for, cosseted, he had led a sheltered preserving life, had done nothing and undergone nothing to make him look old. Victor had a momentary vision of that bedroom at 62 Solent Gardens once more, of himself standing with his back to the cupboard, holding Rosemary Stanley in front of him, his arm round her waist, and of the door being thrown open and Fleetwood standing there- Fleetwood, who could have had no prevision that a few minutes only were to pass, two or three at most, and after that for the rest of his life he would never stand or walk again. For two or three minutes only they had looked at each other and spoken to each other before he let the girl go to Fleetwood and she threw herself into his arms. Perhaps it had been five minutes in all before the wind blew the curtain out and under the lifted curtain he saw the man on the ladder outside and Fleetwood had turned his back and Victor had shot him. For five minutes at most they had studied each other's faces, looked into each other's eyes, and Fleetwood had refused to believe, pinning enough faith on his refusal as to turn his back and, as it were, challenge Victor. The challenge had been taken up and the gun had gone off, but before that they had got to know each other's faces better than each knew his mother's face, as well as each knew his own looking back at him from the glass. Or was it all in his imagination? Was it nonsense and did he only feel he would recognise Fleetwood with such ease because he had been reminded of that face by pictures of it in a heap of newsprint? There had been no pictures of him for Fleetwood to see since those early ones, himself leaving 62 Solent Gardens between two policemen and another that Victor tried to forget: a faceless photograph that would be no use to Fleetwood for identification purposes, of the man accused of disabling him hustled into a police van waiting outside the court, a dark coat flung over his head. Victor looked over his shoulder. He saw a woman with a bandaged leg come out of a shop and get into the car with the disabled sticker. Looking for Fleetwood's house, be began to walk the winding roads, the network of roads where the gardens were pretty with pink and white blossom, trees spread with veils of green, houses of which so many were in the style of Fleetwood's, built at the same time and of similar materials, but which were nevertheless not the same, of which none was the one. The road he was on was a loop that brought him back to face the green. Beyond it and its trees were what seemed in the distance to be more pretty, blossoming, gardenbordered roads, more houses of brick and plaster and weatherboard with creepers climbing them and tulips in their flowerbeds. Victor crossed the road and walked across the green, feeling misgivings now, not doubting he would recognise the house when he saw it, but deploring the method he had chosen of finding it. Why hadn't he done the obvious thing, gone into a post office or a phone box and looked up Fleetwood in the phone directory? Anyone would be able to tell him where Fleetwood's particular road was, he wouldn't need a plan of the place. By now Victor had reached the avenue of trees, a metalled road which bisected the green diagonally. It would lead him back to the centre of this village suburb and to the parade of shops. A double row of oaks formed the avenue and Victor had scarcely come within the shade of their branches when he saw something which made his heart give a lurch, then begin a bumpy painful beating. From the far end of the avenue, approaching him quite slowly under the trees and on the crown of the metalled surface, were a man and a girl, and the man was in a wheelchair. They were a long way from Victor and he could not see their faces or discern much about them except that the girl wore a red blouse and the man a blue pullover, but he knew it was Fleetwood. The girl wasn't pushing the wheelchair, Fleetwood was manipulating that himself, but she was walking close by it and talking animatedly. It was a place where voices carried and Victor heard her laugh, a clear, happy, carefree sound. This would be Clare, he thought, this would be the girlfriend called Clare. In a moment, even if they proceeded at this slow pace, he would be able to see their faces and they his; he would be looking on Fleetwood's square-shaped, fresh, regular-featured, darkbrowed face, for the first time in the flesh for ten years, for only the second time ever. Victor made no conscious decision to avoid the confrontation. His motor nerves did it for him, turning him swiftly aside off the avenue on to the grass again, carrying him over the grass on to the main road where the garage was and the row of houses and the pub, so that by the time he reached the opposite pavement he was running, running for the station like someone who has no more than one minute in which to catch his train.

Chapter 8

In the old days Victor used to buy at least two daily newspapers and an evening, the Radio Times and the TV Times, the Reader's Digest, Which? and What Car? and sometimes even Playboy and Forum, though the former bored him and the latter made him feel sick. Cal's preoccupation with pornography, soft and hard, was beyond his understanding. Driving for Alan, Victor had a lot of waiting about to do, and it was while sitting in cars waiting that he did most of his reading. He even tried really high-powered periodicals sometimes, the Spectator or the Economist, but after a while he realised that he was only doing this to impress the client, who would be stunned to see the hire-car driver engrossed in literary criticism or polemics. Most days the coffee table in the Finchley flat had a heap of papers and magazines on it, though Victor had never hoarded them the way Muriel did. A psychiatrist writing in the Reader's Digest had said how people's life-style patterns have a way of reasserting themselves even if circumstances have changed and a period of enforced disruption has intervened. That just about described what had happened to him, if you like long words, Victor thought, and the patterns were reasserting themselves, at least the habit of buying newspapers and magazines was. As to other habits and patterns, they could lie low as long as they pleased. He had got back into the way of buying two dailies and an evening paper and reading them from front to back, reading everything that was in them, and that was how he came upon the paragraph about the arrest of a man for raping that girl in Gunnersbury Park. A small paragraph on an inside page, that was all. The man's name was omitted but it said that he was twenty three, lived in Southall, and that he had appeared that morning at Acton Magistrates' Court and been committed for trial. Victor wondered if he too were a secretor with a not too common blood group. At least it meant the police would leave him alone now- until the next time, of course. None of the papers had anything in them about Fleetwood. There was no reason why they should have had, for Fleetwood wasn't a celebrity whose every movement was news. Probably there wouldn't be any more until this book of Fleetwood's was published. Victor told himself that it was on account of the book and the probability that he would figure in it that he thought about Fleetwood so much. At first he had bitterly regretted running away at the point when it seemed that he and the former detective sergeant must inevitably meet, though he knew it was panic which had made him run and therefore something over which he had little control. And after a while he told himself it was for the best, for what could they have to say to each other but give vent to anger and recrimination? Yet what of the book? Was he going to appear in the book and in such a light that everyone he met who had read it would shun and hate him? Tom called round one morning to tell him he had heard of a job going if Victor was interested. A local wineshop owner wanted a driver for his delivery van and Tom had seen the vacancy advertised in the shop window. It was the place he had been out to that Sunday morning to buy the Bulgarian claret. 'You'd have to explain about your background,' Tom said awkwardly. 'Considering there'll be about a hundred people after the job and I'll be the only one who's done ten years inside, I'll be a really likely candidate, won't I?' 'I don't want to seem to take an authoritarian attitude, Victor, you know that, but you do have to think a bit more positively.' Victor decided that while he was here he might as well ask him. He showed Tom the Standard article about Fleetwood's book. 'I'm not qualified to tell you if it would be libel,' Tom said, looking worried. 'I just don't know. I shouldn't think he could just say anything he likes about you but I honestly don't know.' 'I suppose I could ask a solicitor.' 'Yes, but that'll cost you, Victor. I'll tell you what. You could make enquiries at the Citizen's Advice Bureau; they'll have a lawyer come there and give advice for free.' Instead of the Advice Bureau, Victor went to the public library, where they had telephone directories covering the whole country. There he looked up Fleetwood and found him entered as Fleetwood, D. G., 'Sans Souci', Theydon Manor Drive, Theydon Bois. Victor knew that the name of the house was French but he didn't know what it meant. He went over to the dictionaries section and looked up souci. Sails he already knew. The translation was 'without care' or 'carefree', which was an odd name for a house, he thought. Had Fleetwood given it that name himself and was he without care? Perhaps he was. He had nothing to worry about, no awful past to forget, uncertain future to dread. He didn't need a job, he would have a nice fat pension, and growing older wouldn't make much difference to him. Victor didn't want to drive a wineshop van, the idea was grotesque. Besides, it wouldn't be driving, or not much. It would be humping great heavy cases up staircases in blocks of flats. But he went by tube up to Park Royal and found the shop, a poky little place with its windows pasted over with cheap offers and amazing bargains. There was no job advertisement, and when Victor went inside to enquire he was told that the vacancy had been filled. Walking back to the tube, he realised he would have turned it down even if it had been offered to him. Taking that job would have meant staying here, either going on living in Mrs Griffiths's house or finding somewhere else in the neighbourhood. He still wanted to move out, to move a long way away. In his mind's eye he saw Epping once more, the forest and Theydon Bois with its green and the avenue of trees. It was pervaded in his memory by a kind of tranquillity, a soft sunlit peace. But Fleetwood lived there, thus making it impossible for him to live there too, and Victor felt building up inside him a second resentment of Fleetwood, as if the man were again ousting him from the proper course of his existence. His conduct had consigned Victor to prison for the best years of his youth. Now he was expelling him, as from paradise, from the only place in the world where he felt he wanted to live. Ever since he had come back from Theydon Bois, ever since that long long journey from one outer end of London to the other, he had had a sense of unfinished business. He should not have run away, he should have stood his ground. A strange idea kept confronting him whenever he was walking along Twyford Avenue, as he now was, or sitting in his room or lying on the bed, letting the magazine fall, concentrating no more - an idea that, once he had seen Fleetwood and spoken to him, the spell would be broken. For instance, he would no longer feel unable to find a place to live in Epping or even Theydon Bois itself, for there would no longer remain a fear of running into Fleetwood by chance or of having, each time he went out, to be on the watch to avoid meeting him. Why, it was possible once they had resolved things, that they might meet quite casually in the street or under those trees in the avenue and simply pass each other with a hello and maybe a remark about the weather. Possible but not too likely, Victor had to admit. There was the book to take into account, after all, and the fact, never to be done away, of the great injury Fleetwood had inflicted on him. No doubt, some would say, most did say, that this had only been tit for tat, and Fleetwood too had been injured. So well and good, Victor thought, but you measured injury surely by its long-term effects and Fleetwood was contented now, a famous, honoured person, soon to be a bestselling author, a man who lived in a house called 'Carefree', while he. .. There was no use going into it all again. Nothing made any difference to the fact of the unfinished business, the business he was never going to feel easy about until he had finished it. In Mrs Griffiths's house, on the ground floor, in a dark corner behind the stairs, was a pay phone. A cupboard had once been there and, later on, its walls and door had been taken away, to make more space, Victor supposed. When you stood by the phone and looked up, you could see the underside of the stairs treads, raw wood still, unpainted, though the house was getting on for a hundred years old. Tenants, over the years, had written telephone numbers in pencil and ballpoint on the raw pitch pine of those stairs. Victor had copied Fleetwood's phone number down on the same piece of paper on which Tom had written the address of the wineshop. Now he wrote it on the wood of the stairs and, on an impulse, 'David Fleetwood' beside it, having a confused idea in his mind of recording it there for future users of the phone to look at and wonder about while they waited for the pips to cease and their calls be answered. He wrote Fleetwood's name and then he dialled Fleetwood's number. He was pretty sure he was alone in the house. At this hour he usually was and by lunchtime Noreen had always gone. The bell began to ring. It rang seven times and then the receiver must have been lifted, for the sharp repetitive sound of the pips started. Victor, holding the phone with its lead at full stretch, was squatting on the floor, for he did not trust himself to stand - that is, for his legs to support him. He had a ten-pence piece in his hand and he stretched up and pushed it into the slot. A man's voice said, 'Hello? David Fleetwood.' Victor had sunk on to his knees. The voice was unchanged. He would have recognised it whatever words it had spoken, without the utterance of that name. The last time he had heard it, in that bedroom, it had said in fainter tones, 'Whose blood is that?' Now Fleetwood spoke again, on a note of slight impatience. 'Hello?' Victor had never used Fleetwood's name. In that room he had naturally not addressed him by name. He spoke it now, but hoarsely, in a whisper. 'David.' He didn't wait to hear what Fleetwood had to say next. The receiver slipped out of his hand and swung on the length of its lead. Victor got to his feet and replaced it in its rest. He heard himself give a kind of groan and he stood with his forehead pressed against the stair tread that had Fleetwood's name and phone number written on it. Why hadn't he spoken to Fleetwood? What was the matter with him? He should have explained to Fleetwood who he was and, if Fleetwood had hung up on him, so what? It wouldn't have hurt him, it wouldn't have done him any actual harm. Fleetwood probably wouldn't have hung up on him but would have been distantly polite and might actually have agreed when Victor asked if he could come and see him and talk about the book. The voice rang and echoed in his ears. He went upstairs and lay face-downwards on his bed. Fleetwood's voice continued to speak inside his head, saying the things he had said during the hour that passed between his arrival in Solent Gardens and his collapse on the landing floor, shot in the back. Victor could remember every word that had been said as clearly as if he carried a tape cassette inside his brain which he had only to push into a slot and switch on. 'That's very sensible of you. Come over here, Miss Stanley, please. You'll be quite safe.' Victor had said that Fleetwood had to make him a promise. 'What, then?' The same note of impatience as on the phone just now. The request then for escape by means of the bathroom window and for five minutes to get away in- a five minutes' start, like when kids played hide and seek. But Fleetwood had promised nothing, for just at that moment the other policeman appeared at the top of the ladder, the wind blowing the curtain in and up to reveal him. 'Take her downstairs,' Fleetwood had said. The gun went off in Victor's hand, filling the room, the little house, with the loudest noise he had ever heard in his life, shaking his body with a shock from toe to head, driving shock through him so that he almost fell. But it was Fleetwood who had fallen, sprawling forward on to the bannisters, clasping them with his hands and slipping down, down, silent while Victor shouted, a silence and a shouting that seemed to endure for an infinite age, until Fleetwood's calm voice intruded upon it and said, 'Whose blood is that?' Victor remembered it all, his mind playing the tape. When, then, had Fleetwood told him he didn't believe the gun was real? He must have told him, and over and over again, for it was this which had challenged Victor to shoot him, to prove he wasn't lying, but somehow Victor could not fit these statements of disbelief into the recording. They had to be there, though, for they had certainly been uttered. Perhaps he was too confused now, knocked sideways by the experience of hearing that voice again, to remember properly. Getting off the bed, he looked at his face in the mirror, pushing his face up close to the glass. He looked pale and drawn, his eyes unnaturally bright and the sockets dark as bruises. A muscle worked at the corner of his mouth. Chorea, it was called, 'live flesh'. He had read an article about it once in the Reader's Digest. The mirror had become hateful to him and he took it down, laying it face-downwards on the shelf by the sink. Mrs Griffiths (or Noreen) provided him with a clean towel each week on Mondays, a thin almost threadbare towel, larger than a hand towel but very small for a bath size and always of a sickly shade of pink. Probably the intention was to match the pale pink nylon sheets. Victor took his towel and the piece of soap from the sink and went along the passage to the bathroom. Because he had only two ten-pence pieces left with which to feed the water heater, he got rather a small bath, not the kind you could relax in and be comforted by. He put on clean jeans and the one good shirt he had and the jacket that had been among the clothes he had had in Finchley, a velvet cord jacket in dark green for which he had paid the then enormous sum of twenty-five pounds. It looked a bit shabby and indefinably out-of-date but it was the best he could do. By now he wasn't panicky or upset or frightened. He was excited. He was so excited that he had to stop himself running the quarter-mile or so to West Acton station. Although he had walked, although he had made himself walk nonchalantly, and had positively strolled into the station, his voice was breathless and hoarse when he asked for a return ticket to Theydon Bois. A man serving petrol at a filling station opposite the green told him where Theydon Manor Drive was, pointing to the far side of the green and away up to the left. It was three thirty in the afternoon and Victor had had no lunch, not even a cup of coffee. But he wasn't hungry. The idea of food was slightly nauseating. He began to walk up the avenue of trees. The weather was much the same as it had been that last time he was here, just a week ago, heavy showers followed by bursts of bright, quite hot, sunshine. Water still lay in puddles at the side of the road. The blossom had blown down during that week and petals lay everywhere in pink and white drifts. Apple blossom was coming out now and white fool's parsley. Victor walked up the avenue of oaks where he had seen Fleetwood and the girl coming towards him. Suppose Fleetwood always went out in the afternoons? Suppose he were out now? If he were out Victor thought he would just wait for him to come back, though the idea of waiting, of any sort of inactivity, was intolerable. He had to stop himself running. Following the directions the garage man had given him, Victor crossed the top of the green on the right-hand side of a tree-fringed pond. Theydon Manor Drive started here, a road that might have been a country lane and where the houses looked as if they had been built within the confines of a beautiful and varied wood. Tall chestnut trees were in full bloom, each bearing hundreds of creamy-white candlelike blossoms. Wall-flowers, the colours of a Persian carpet, bordered lawns of a rich soft green, and late narcissi and tulips filled tubs and window boxes as if flowerbeds alone were inadequate to support all the flowers people here had to have. The houses were all different, of varying sizes, all standing alone and surrounded by garden. Victor saw Sans Souci ahead of him when he had reached number 20. The road bent a little to the right and Fleetwood's house was facing him diagonally. It was one of the smaller houses, less grand and imposing than it had looked in the photograph. The front lawn with the birdbath was no more than fifteen feet by twelve. The bird on the rim of the fluted stone font was no longer there, so it had been a real one after all. Fleetwood was no longer there either and nor were the tulips, their heads all neatly snipped off. He must employ a gardener, Victor thought, for all was trim and well kept, the grass cut and the edges clipped, the climbing rose wired to its trellis. Breathless now, though he had not run, Victor stood for a while looking at the house. On the white-painted gate the name Sans Souci was lettered in black but above the front door, an oak door with studs, was the number 28. Victor could see no signs of life, though he hardly knew what signs he expected. He had come all this way in a white heat of excitement and need, but now he had arrived at his goal, a reluctance took hold of him. Even now there was nothing to prevent him turning round and returning the way he had come. Some idea of the self-reproach and bitterness and disgust this would cause stopped him. He moistened his lips, swallowed, put his hand to the gate. His fingers touched the black letters of the name that were slightly raised above the level of the white board. Although this was a shady place because of the trees and shrubs, numerous and tall, the path that led up to the front door was bathed in sunshine. There was a feeling in the air that a period of settled weather, of summer, was about to begin. The sun fell on Victor's face, deliciously warm. He wondered whether to ring the bell or use the knocker which was of brass, its clapper the figure of a Roman soldier. It was the bell he decided on, drawing his breath in sharply as he put his finger on the push and pressed. No one came. He rang the bell again and still no one came. Of course, if Fleetwood were alone in the house, it would take him a little time to answer the bell, since he must necessarily propel himself to the door in his wheelchair. Victor waited, feeling nothing, preparing nothing to say. The air-was pervaded with a sweet floral scent that he had smelled before, long ago, but could not place. For the third time he rang the bell. Fleetwood must be out. Victor looked through two front windows into a comfort-ably furnished room where there were bookshelves full of books, pictures on the walls, flowers in vases. On a coffee table the Guardian lay folded with, beside it, a packet of cigarettes, an agate table lighter and what looked like an address book. He moved on round the house but there were no more windows except one that obviously had on the other side of it a bathroom or lavatory. The floral smell was far stronger here as Victor rounded the side wall and came to the back of the house, to the back garden; he saw that it came from a climbing plant covered with a dense mass of pinkish-golden blossom, a honeysuckle perhaps. It hid from his view the whole of the back of the house. He took a few steps further along the path, then turned to look back. On the stone terrace that ran the entire length of the house, at this end of which the honeysuckle hung in a drapery of colour and scent, a girl was standing and staring at him. She was standing behind a circular teak garden table from the centre of which protruded the shaft of a sunshade, its blue and white striped canvas not yet unfurled. It was the girl who had been with Fleetwood in the avenue the previous week. Somehow, although on that occasion he had seen her only from a distance, he was sure of this. 'Hello,' she said. 'Did you try to ring the bell? It's not working, there's a loose connection or something.' He took a step or two towards her, across grass, up to the edge of the terrace. Smiling a little, assuming probably that he was some meter reader or salesman, she bent across the table to put the sunshade up. 'What was it you came about?' He made no answer, for the canvas sprang into a broad umbrella and the girl stepped aside, thus revealing open french windows behind and on the threshold of them, where a ramp had been built, a wheelchair in which David Fleetwood sat, his hands resting on the wheels. It was clear that he did not at first recognise Victor, for his face wore a look of polite enquiry. Victor was choked and silenced by a curious indefinable emotion, yet in the midst of this, or on another level of mind, he was aware of a pleased feeling that Fleetwood in life looked much older than in his pictures. His tongue passed across his lips. He had not foreseen Fleetwood's failure to recognise him and he was at a loss for what to do. Fleetwood, manipulating the wheels with practised hands; rolled the chair down the ramp and stopped about a yard from the table. Victor said, 'I'm Victor Jenner,' and, 'You'll know the name.' The girl didn't. She had drawn one of the striped canvas chairs up to the table and sat down in it. Fleetwood's face, squarish, brown-skinned with the black brows and the clear blue eyes, had undergone a slow change. The expression was not so much grim as wondering, incredulous. 'What did you say?' 'I said I'm Victor Jenner.' 'Good God,' said Fleetwood. 'Well, good God.' The girl looked at him inquiringly. He said, 'Clare, you were going to get us a cup of tea. Do you mind? You wouldn't mind if I asked you to leave us alone for five minutes, would you?' She stared at him. 'Leave you alone? Why?' 'Please, Clare. Do this for me.' His voice had become urgent, almost as if he were - afraid. 'All right.' She got up. She was a beautiful girl. With wonder that he should notice such a thing at such a moment, this fact registered in Victor's brain along with all the other wonders. He found himself half stunned, confused, by her looks, by the cloud of blonde hair, the honeysuckle skin, the small perfect features. Those eyes, that were a clear bluish-green, turned doubtfully from Fleetwood to him, then back to Fleetwood. 'You'll be all right?' 'Of course I will.' She went into the house. At first she moved with hesitation, then more quickly, disappearing through what was probably the doorway to a kitchen. Fleetwood spoke in a calm steady voice. Once a policeman, always a policeman, Victor thought. But Fleetwood sounded as if he were forcing himself to remain calm, exercising that control Victor always envied in others. 'Why have you come here?' 'I don't know,' Victor said and he didn't know, he really didn't know now why he had come. 'I wanted to see you. I've been - out three weeks. Well, a month nearly.' 'I know that,' Fleetwood said. 'I was told.' He had an air of recalling that he had been told much more than that, that he had somehow been warned about Victor's being once more at large, or having been told had warned himself to be on his guard. His strong lean brown hands were gripping the wheels of the orthopaedic chair. 'I didn't expect we should meet - like this.' Rather desperately Victor repeated, 'I wanted to see you.' 'Was it by any chance you who phoned at lunchtime?' Victor nodded. He wet his lips, pushed the back of his hand across his mouth. The edge of the table dug into his thighs and he pressed his hands heavily on it. 'Sit down, won't you?' Fleetwood said more gently, and as Victor lowered himself into one of the chairs, 'That's right.' He seemed relieved or as if recovering composure. 'Would you like a cigarette? No? I shouldn't either, I smoke too much, but I feel in need of one now. That's rather an understatement. I'm glad it was you who phoned.' Victor found himself holding on to the seat of his chair, grasping the corners of the canvas-covered cushion. 'Why - why are you glad?' 'I used to get some pretty unpleasant phone calls. Not so much obscene as, well, violent, insulting. Anonymous letters too. But the phone calls were a bit - well, upsetting. And they've started again lately.' The girl called Clare was coming back, carrying a tray. 'They're disgusting,' she said. 'They call David "cop" and "fuzz", and the main theme seems to be that it was a pity that thug didn't finish the job and shoot him dead.' Victor made a small inarticulate sound. It was evident that Clare supposed him to be some friend of Fleetwood from the past before she had known him. And Fleetwood himself was taken aback by what she had said. He drew on his cigarette, exhaled, said, 'This is Clare Conway. If, as I suppose, you found out where I was from the story in the Standard, you'll know who she is.' He paused as Victor gave an infinitesimal nod. 'Where are you living yourself?' The voice had a sort of authority about it, commanding though kind. Perhaps it was this quality which made Victor reply like someone making an application for a job or a document, 'Forty-six, Tolleshunt Avenue, Acton, West Seven.' He added, 'I've got a room.' Clare was looking puzzled and wary. She passed a teacup to Victor and indicated the sugar basin. Her hands were small and brown, rather plump-fleshed with tapering fingers. She wasn't a thin girl but no one would have called her plump either, well made perhaps, full figured. When she leaned forward to take back the sugar basin and pass it to Fleetwood, Victor saw the tops of her round smooth breasts above the neckline of her white and pink dress. Her eyebrows, like moth wings, were drawn together in perplexity. Fleetwood lit another cigarette from the stub of the first. 'I will have one,' Victor said. 'Please.' 'Sure,' said Fleetwood, and he pushed the packet across the table. The first inhalation made Victor's head swim. One of those sick feelings to which he was prone rose up into his mouth. He closed his eyes, bending across the table. 'Come on,' Fleetwood's voice said. 'Bear up. Are you all right?' Victor muttered, 'I'll be OK in a minute. It's years -years since I smoked.' Forcing his eyes open, he stared at Fleetwood, and Fleetwood said in a tone that was no longer steady, 'You know, when you first came here and said who you were, I thought, he's going to do what that phone caller said, he's going to shoot me again. He's going to finish the job.' Victor said stupidly, 'I haven't got a gun.' 'No, of course you haven't.' 'I didn't do it on purpose!' A voice burst out of Victor almost without his volition. 'I didn't mean to. I'd never have done it if you hadn't kept saying the gun wasn't real.' Clare had sprung to her feet. The blood poured into her face and it was crimson. Victor smelled a heavy wave of honeysuckle scent, as if brought about by the movement of the air, by the energy of them all, for even Fleetwood had moved all of himself he could move, flexing and tensing his upper body, leaning forward with hands upraised. 'Do you mean this is the man who shot you?' Fleetwood shrugged. 'That's what I mean, yes.' He flung himself against the back of the chair, turning his head to one side away from her. 'I don't believe it!' 'Oh, Clare, you know you do believe it. You only mean it's such an amazing thing to have happened, that he- that Victor- should have come here. Do you think I'm not amazed?' An extraordinary sensation of warmth touched Victor's skin like the sunlight had on the path, but this warmth penetrated and seemed to fill his body. It was prompted by Fleetwood's use of his Christian name. But even as he felt it he was aware of the girl's eyes on him, of the look on her face, an expression of the kind of hatred and disgust a woman's face might show when confronted by a poisonous reptile. She had even drawn her hands up from the surface of the table and crossed her arms over her breasts, a hand on each shoulder. On a note of infinite scorn she said, 'What have you come for? To apologise?' Victor gazed down at the brown polished bars of teak, at the blue china cup and saucer, the cigarette smouldering, its long accumulation of ash dropping on to the stone paving of the terrace. 'Did you come to apologise for ruining his life? For taking half his body away from him? For smashing his career? Is that why you're here?' 'Clare,' said Fleetwood. 'Yes, it's Clare and if that means, stop, Clare, control yourself, watch what you're saying, I won't, I can't. If you can't express how you feel, I'll express your feelings for you. I'll tell this thing, this animal - no, because animals don't do that, not to each other, not to their own species - this subhuman what he did to you, the pain and the suffering and the misery and the loss, what you've been through, the hopes raised and dashed to the ground, the pain and struggle, the awfulness of realising what paralysis means, the...' 'I would much rather you did not.' It was steely, the voice, the same which had said, 'I'm not making any promises, mind, but it will count in your favour.' And it repeated her name. 'Claret Please, Clare.' Victor had pulled himself to his feet. He stood unsteadily, holding the edge of the table, looking down into the cup at the tea leaves in the dregs, a pattern like islands. His head ached from that all-pervading perfume. 'He went to prison for ten years, Clare. In most people's opinion, that would be payment enough.' 'He sent you to prison for life!' 'That really isn't true,' Fleetwood said. 'That's an exaggeration and you know it.' 'It's what you said yourself last week. Those were your own words.' She moved a little way round the table towards Victor. He had an idea she might be about to strike him and he wondered what to do. 'You've come and you've seen,' she said. 'I hope you're satisfied with what you've seen. He isn't going to walk again, whatever the papers may say, and he knows it and all the doctors know it. Crudeness is what people like you understand, so I'll be crude. He isn't going to fuck again either. Not ever. Though he does still want to. And now you can get out. Get out and don't ever come back. Go!' she shouted at him. 'Go, go, go!' He looked at neither of them again. Behind him she was crying. He had a confused impression that she had collapsed or thrown herself across the table and was crying. From Fleetwood there was no sound. Victor walked back around the side of the house in the sunshine that was hotter and brighter though the afternoon had worn on. A palecoloured creamy-grey dove with a darker band round its neck sat on the rim of the birdbath, drinking the water. Victor closed the gate that was named 'Carefree' behind him, feeling nothing, feeling drained and empty and weak. But as he made his way to the station, walking on the springy green turf, a tremendous anger, familiar and welcome, invaded his body and filled those empty spaces with a seething heat.

Chapter 9

Anger fed him and buoyed him up and sustained him. It was a source of enormous energy which he wanted to keep, not rid himself of. There was no real temptation to punch and pummelled the bed and the furniture. He sat in his room feeding on his anger, directing it against that girl- that fat, showy, noisy blonde, he called her in his furious mind, that loud-mouthed bitch with her tits sticking out of her dress who used the sort of filthy language he had always hated to hear on a woman's lips. Fleetwood had said nothing, not a word of reproach - supposing he felt he had a reason for resentment - but that girl who probably hadn't been around Fleetwood for more than a year of two, who took it upon herself to sit in judgement on him, who raved and screeched... Now Victor's anger dictated to him all the things he might have said if he had thought of them, how in front of Fleetwood he might have put her down, squashed her with some well-chosen words that entirely exonerated him and revealed the truth - that no one was responsible, that it was fate, the force of circumstances and destiny which had inflicted such terrible injury upon the man she loved. That night he dreamed of rape. From boiling energy he was potent and inexhaustible, ravishing women like a soldier sacking a town, faceless women that he seized upon in the dark. And when he had done with them he raised them by the shoulders and battered their heads against the stone ground. He walked among the women, dead or unconscious, despoiled, lying in their torn clothes, their blood, holding a torch in his hand, looking for Clare's face but not finding it, never finding it, looking instead at the worn flaccid cheeks and loose mouth of Muriel and jumping away with a cry of horror. Whether it was the dream or the night itself or sleep which took away his anger he didn't know, but by the morning it was gone and it didn't return. A certain partial satisfaction replaced it, that he had after all, in spite of everything, seen David Fleetwood and talked to him. David, he said, to himself, savouring the name and repeating it, David. How would it have been if David had been alone and the girl not there, out perhaps or just not existing? Though he could form no very clear idea of what might have taken place in the absence of the girl, he had a profound feeling it would have been good, pleasing to both parties. Each might have acknowledged his personal share in their fates, his imprisonment and David's disablement, admitting that neither was more to blame than the other, but that the good thing which had come out of it was their ability to confront one another and discuss the subject. Of course that hadn't happened because that foulmouthed blonde bitch had intervened, yet Victor felt it would have happened - it was, so to speak, there waiting to happen. The necessary goodwill was present on both sides. Victor bought a lot of magazines, picking likely-looking ones off the shelves at W. H. Smith's and more from the station bookstall. He also bought a packet of cigarettes, he didn't quite know why, for he didn't really want to smoke and he certainly couldn't afford to. The way he lived, eating out, buying wine and now cigarettes, he wasn't going to be able to live on the DHSS money and soon he would be making inroads on the small capital left to him by his parents. He would have to get a job. Reading his magazines, he realised he was looking for an article or feature about David Fleetwood. Now he wanted to read about David, there was, of course, nothing to read. That was Sod's Law. But David wasn't a singer or an actor or TV personality, only someone who'd been - well, brave, was how you'd put it, Victor thought. There was no doubt he had been brave, though foolhardy was another word, but yes he had shown courage that time at 62 Solent Gardens. Victor had to admit it. They had both shown a good deal of bravery and - what was the word his father used to use?- grit. Did David know about the rapes? The police had always, as far as Victor knew, assumed, or half assumed, that he was the man responsible for several cases of rape carried out in the Kilburn-Kensal-Rise-Brondesbury districts of London. And he was responsible, there was no doubt about it, for this was a district his route to Heathrow led him through. But nothing had ever been proved against him and he-had never been charged with rape. Yet because Heather Cole had told the police, and repeated it at his trial, that he was the man who had taken hold of her in the park, he was immediately stamped as a rapist, the rapist. Then, for safety's sake, he had asked for two incidents of rape to be taken into consideration. That perhaps had been a mistake and had added to the assumption that he intended to rape Rosemary Stanley, whereas he had entered the house only to hide and his encounter with Rosemary Stanley had been as much of a shock to him at it was to her. To assault her had never crossed his mind, any more than while in prison or after his release he had thought of rape. A man was not responsible for his dreams, they were something else. Since he had never been convicted of rape and nothing in that way proved against him, the police had no right whatever to make these assumptions. At his trial, all the time, there had been this undercurrent of belief that rape was behind it all, attempts at rape the underlying cause of what prosecuting counsel had called 'the final tragedy'. The real cause, finding refuge from his pursuers and reacting to David Fleetwood's taunts, was never mentioned. But all this could give him no clue as to whether David knew about the rapes and if he had passed on what he knew to the girl, Clare. He might not know; he had still been in hospital at the time of the trial, and if he were fair-minded, as Victor had begun to believe he was, even if he had heard hints that Victor and the Kensal Rise rapist were one and the same, he might presume a man innocent until he was proved guilty. Not, Victor told himself, that he cared what the girl thought, but David's opinion was another matter. It was so long since he had raped anyone, and he never would again, that it seemed terrible he should be stigmatised for this thing in his past. Shooting David was one thing, that had been an accident, brought about by circumstances, by loss of control and will over his own reactions, by David's own folly, but the rapes were in another category, regrettable, something Victor could imagine he might one day feel remorse over, especially about the girl he had hurt in Epping Forest. He wouldn't like David to know about that, he wouldn't care for it at all. In vain he looked through his magazines for some note or paragraph about David. He had started going to bed early, there was so little to do, and he lay there reading a short story about an old man, a French peasant farmer, who, instead of keeping his money in the bank, plastered it into the walls of his house, the notes folded up and wrapped in strips of the plastic bag the farm fertiliser came in, thrust between the laths, then daubed and painted over. No night passed without dreams, and in this night's dream he was in a train, on the Northern Line, going towards Finchley. No one was in the carriage but himself and then, at Archway, his mother got in with David Fleetwood. David could walk, but not well; he had a stick and he hung on to Victor's mother's arm. They took no notice of Victor, they behaved as if he wasn't there, as if no one was there, whispering to each other, putting their faces close and then kissing. They kissed each other passionately as if they were alone. Victor jumped up and shouted and protested that it was disgusting what they were doing, it was indecent, that this was a public place, and woke up shouting, sitting up in bed and shaking his fist. This was the day he was due to meet Jupp in Muriel's house but he very nearly forgot about it. At lunchtime he bought the Standard and saw a driving job advertised in it, a mini-cab driver wanted, and the attractive thing was that it said 'car provided'. The firm was in Alperton. Victor went straight up there on the tube to look for the mini-cab company in Eating Road. Few people, he thought, would have got hold of the Standard before he had, and any who had would probably have obeyed the advertisement and telephoned. It might be that he would be the first applicant to present himself. In his one pair of good trousers, a clean shirt and the velvet jacket, he knew he looked presentable. Before buying the paper he had by a lucky chance had his hair cut. For a while he had considered growing it long again, the way it had been on the day of his arrest, but that was old-fashioned and he, too, was growing rather old for it now. In a few weeks' time he would be thirty-nine. The mini-cab company he found in half a shop, a very small poky place, not much more than a cupboard, where a middle-aged woman with streaked blonde and brown hair sat answering two phones. He wasn't used to women being bosses, for there had been far less of this when he went to prison, and he knew he had got off on the wrong foot when she corrected his assr.; nption that she was a sort of secretary-receptionist and that the boss was somewhere else. He never found out her name. She wanted a reference from his last job, she wanted to know why he hadn't had a job for ten years. Ten years? 'My God, with women it's babies,' she said. 'It can't have been that with you, where were you, in gaol or something?' She was joking but he said no more. So angry he could have leaped on her and seized her by the throat, he made a mammoth effort at control, turned round and left the place, slamming the door with all his strength behind him. The shop shook. The shop next door shook, and an assistant came to the window to see what the noise was. Victor looked back and saw old furniture, a brass bedstead, vases, a plant stand in the window behind her. With a jolt it reminded him of his appointment with Jupp - at Muriel's house in Popesbury Drive at three. It was ten to now. At least he could sell that furniture and get some money by this means. He got back into the tube at Alperton and it took him down to Acton Town, the nearest station to Muriel's. If anything, the purple flowers which overhung the rock slopes of Muriel's garden were even more purple today and their stems had grown longer, so that the stone ornament Victor avoided looking at was entirely concealed. He stared defiantly in its direction, feeling nothing. Since he was last here a laburnum of a particularly violent acid yellow had come into bloom. Two women chatting on the pavement were examining the laburnum and saying how lovely it was, what a wonderful sight, but Victor didn't think it was lovely or that flowers were inevitably beautiful just because they were flowers. Somewhere inside his brain he seemed to smell that honeysuckle once more, though none of the flowers here was scented and the only smell was a faint one of diesel fumes. A van with J. Jupp printed on the side of it was parked on the ramp that led down to the garage, backed up to the garage doors. Victor went round the back way, through the side gate, into the area between the garage and the back door of the house. The rear garden was a wilderness, blossoming apple trees rising out of grass that reached halfway up their trunks. Victor tapped on the back door, tried the handle. To his surprise it wasn't locked. His aunt and Jupp were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea. What had Jupp said or done to put Muriel so unusually at ease, to get into the house and make his way to the kitchen? Victor seemed to have interrupted a conversation, at least an anecdote of Jupp's, to which Muriel listened avidly. They both seemed rather sorry to see him. Muriel had her pink hairnet on and the left-hand earpiece on her glasses, which had apparently been broken, was done up with pink sticking plaster. At last Jupp got up and, saying this wouldn't buy the baby a new frock, followed Victor out to the garage. Today he had on the trousers of the suit of which the black pinstriped waistcoat was a part and with them a black tee-shirt and long ginger suede jacket with fringes. His long hair and walrus moustache looked thicker and more luxuriant, on account perhaps of recent shampooing. He took a Polo mint from his pocket and put it in his mouth. 'Remarkable woman, your aunt,' said Jupp. 'Had a fascinating life. It's not often you'll find a person frankly admit they married for money. I call that honest. Been a good looker too - there's what you might call remnants of it still.' Victor said nothing. They might not have been thinking of the same woman. 'Pity about her never going out, though. If you don't mind me saying so, you ought to make an effort there, get her moving, put a spot of salt on her tail, eh?' Victor did rather mind him saying so. He began to unlock the door. 'What was she doing then, storing all your stuff for you? You been away?' The only reason Muriel wouldn't have told him the truth was because she hadn't yet had the chance, Victor thought. When he was a little boy, very small, he had hated his parents talking about a time before he was born. That there had been a time when he didn't exist he hadn't been able to bear, and he had cried and stamped when his mother spoke of it. It was the first memory he had of outbursts of anger. Because that time of non-existence was intolerable to him, he had started saying he had been in New Zealand. When his mother spoke of 'before you were born', he corrected her and said he was in New Zealand. He said it now to Jupp. 'I was away a long time. I was in New Zealand.' 'Really?' said Jupp. 'Nice. Very nice. Let's have a looksee then. Let's have a shuftee at some of the movables.' He pushed his way about among the furniture, pulling off the curtains, the gold folkweave and the green rep, and Victor's bedroom curtains with the red and green squares on the black and white background, pulling them off and tossing them aside, peering under table tops and tapping surfaces with a rather long fingernail. Victor wondered if he was checking for woodworm. The wheelchair he pushed back and forth like someone trying to get a child off to sleep. Victor noticed that the wheelchair was the same make as David's, though his looked like a later model. Jupp stuck out his underlip. 'I tell you what, I'll give you four hundred pound for the lot.' Victor was disappointed. New furniture, he had seen from looking in shop windows, was very expensive. Secondhand furniture too had rocketed in price. Why, when he had wanted a few bits for his flat, the dealers couldn't give old sideboards and dining tables away. Things had changed. The three-piece suite alone was surely worth four hundred pounds. 'Five hundred,' he said. 'Now wait a minute. I've got to pay a fella good wages to come over here with me and clear this lot. I've got to pay for juice and maintenance of the van. I've got to lose half a day in the shop.' He took another mint, looked at it and put it back in his pocket. 'I reckon that wheelchair's worth a hundred,' said Victor. 'Look at it, as good as new.' 'There's not exactly a boom in the wheelchair market to be honest with you, cocky. Suspending an invalid carriage on a chain from your lounge ceiling hasn't caught on in Acton, it's not what you'd call chic, right? Four hundred and twenty.' They compromised at four hundred and forty pounds and Jupp said he would come back and pick the stuff up next Wednesday. He looked at the thigh-high grass in Muriel's garden and said what a wicked waste when there were lionesses and cubs looking for homes. Victor went back into the house. Muriel was washing up cups and saucers. She washed a cup, rinsed it, dried it on a teacloth, put it inside a cupboard, then began on the process with a saucer. Saying he needed to go to the bathroom, Victor went along the passage and up the staircase with its runner of red turkey carpet. It would not have been true to say nothing had changed when he had made this same journey just a little less than eleven years ago in search of Sydney's Luger. The house was much dirtier. Had it been Sydney who did the housework? Or was it simply that Muriel had done none since he died? The once polished edges of the stair treads lay under a layer of grey fluff and the carpet itself was coated with a mat that consisted mostly of hairs, Muriel's hairs presumably, shed and left to lie over the years. The sun was shining outside, even as it had been on that evening when he had let himself in with the key he had had cut, when Muriel and his mother had gone to see Sydney in hospital, and as on that evening the interior of the house was dark. It was gloomy and still and dark and everything was now coated in dust. Perhaps the windows had never been opened all those years. The camphor smell was still there and allied to it, mingling with it, the sharp sour choking odour that is the smell of dust itself. Once it had been a handsome house, for it had been built at a time when materials were relatively cheap, when fine hard woods were plentiful and when, somehow, there had been more time and more skill and craftsmen to create panelling and carved wood and unusual mouldings for cornices. And yet the builders or maybe the architect had gone too far so that the thickly leaded windows excluded more light than they let in and the curtains completed the job, curtains that some big store - Whiteley's, he guessed, or Bentall's - had made to order and hung themselves, swatches of thick velvet or heavy stub silk, lined and interlined, pleated and flounced and looped back with tasselled cords. They had never been cleaned or even brushed, and dust and powdered cobweb lay in their folds. Victor gave a twitch to one of the curtains in the room where he had found the gun in the hiding place under the cupboard floor. A cloud of dust flew out into his face, making him cough. The dust lay so thick on the carpet that you could no longer see the pattern of yellow grapes and green vine leaves; only a vague impression was received of a bluish-grey pattern. The western. novels were still on the shelf, undisturbed for more than a decade. He left the room and went into his aunt's bedroom. A big mirror, framed and swinging, mounted on two uprights, stood in the middle of the pinkish flowered carpet. Pink and white crepe-paper roses filled the fireplace, a decade of soot having fallen on to and spotted their petals. The bed, unexpectedly, was made and in the middle of it lay a pink fluffy dog, the zip fastener in its belly open and revealing the white nightdress which must be the one Muriel put on when she took off the nightdress she wore by day. The story of the French peasant in his mind, Victor thrust his hand under the pillows, between under-blanket and mattress. He pulled open the drawers in the bedside cabinets, opened the doors of the wardrobe, which he found full of Sydney's suits. A search of the pockets afforded him nothing. A section of the side compartment of this wardrobe was crammed with old handbags, navy and black and wine-coloured and white, cracked and split, their metal fastenings tarnished, their clasps broken. Victor pulled a black one out, it was imitation crocodile skin, and felt inside. The crackle of notes made him catch his breath. But he had been up here too long, he would be back next week when Jupp took the furniture. Without counting the money, he helped himself to a handful of whatever colour those notes were, closed the bag again, shut the wardrobe door and ran downstairs. Muriel was sitting by her electric fire, busy with her scissors, with copies of Country Life and Cosmopolitan. She seemed to be compiling a scrapbook of events in the life of the Duchess of Grosvenor. 'You were a long time,' she said to Victor. She had a way of looking at him which was similar to the way a mouse looks emerging from its hole: wary, suspicious, sharp, perceptive and entirely self-absorbed. He could almost see her nose twitching, whiskers vibrating, eyes making quick nervous movements. The ring that was a dome of diamonds was on her finger; perhaps she never took it off. His hand in his jacket pocket, he could feel the crisp notes there, one, two, three, four - at least four, maybe five, it was hard to tell. They might be tenners. 'I want to tell you something,' she said. He moved across the room, he stood by the window. It was just as stuffy there, the dense smell of mothballs and old unwashed clothes, of ageing newsprint and dust burned on the heater element, was just as strong, but you could see daylight, you could even feel the warmth of the sun struggling through the dirty diamond panes. The long yellow plumes of the laburnum hung against the glass. Muriel said, 'I never fancied making a will. I'm superstitious, I suppose, don't want to tempt providence.' She looked up from her cutting, up at the ceiling, as if God had taken up his residence in her bedroom and had his ear to the floor. 'But there comes a time when you have to do what's right and not what you want, and I knew the right thing was to make sure you never got hold of anything that was mine.' 'Thanks very much,' said Victor. 'So I made my will the day after you was here last time. Jenny next door that goes to the shops for me, she got a will form and took it to my solicitor and he's done what I wanted and I've got it signed and witnessed. You can see a copy if you want. I've left the lot to the British Legion. That would have pleased Sydney. I said to myself, poor old Sydney devoted his life to pleasing you, Muriel, and now you can do this to please him.' Victor stood staring at her. He could feel that pulse beginning to beat at the corner of his mouth, the twitch of live flesh. His hand in his pocket felt the money and he rubbed his fingers over the notes. 'The Legion do a lot of good,' said Muriel. 'They won't waste it. Sydney would turn in his grave if you got your hands on it.' 'He was cremated,' said Victor. It was the only time he had scored with a parting shot, uttered it at the right time instead of thinking of it afterwards. He slammed the front door behind him like he had slammed the door at the mini-cab place. Walking home by the back streets, up towards the Uxbridge Road, he took the notes out of his pocket. There were five of them, two twenties, one ten, two fives. The possibility that there might be twenties among the notes hadn't occurred to him and his spirits rose. Losing Muriel's house and her money was hardly a misfortune since he had never counted on getting them. The malevolence of her glare and her words grated on him, though. The attitude she had taken towards him, a combination of fear and dislike, made him glad he had taken the money and wish he had helped himself to more. Victor had never stolen anything before, unless you counted chocolate bars nicked off the counters at Wool- worth's when he was still at junior school. Everyone did that and it was more a game than delinquency. As an adult he had rather prided himself on his honesty. He and Alan and Peter, the other driver, had had a system whereby they shared their tips, which were sometimes substantial, and Victor had almost always rendered his up in full for the share-out. Once or twice the temptation had been too much for him - as, for instance, when that American, on a first visit, had confused pounds with dollars and given him twenty-five- but generally he had been honest. He told himself that, if Muriel's something she had to tell him had been different, had been, say, the very opposite of what she had told him, that she had made a will in his favour, he would have taken that money back upstairs and restored it to her handbag. Now his only concern was that she might miss it. What if she did? She was hardly likely to call the police in over her own nephew, however much she might hate him. On the strength of what he had from his parents, was going to get from Jupp and what he had taken from Muriel, Victor went into one of the High Street shops half an hour before it was due to close and bought a television set. Since he had come to Mrs Griffiths's house Victor had received virtually no mail. All he ever got were communications from the DHSS. Letters and cards were spread out on the table in the hall by whoever came out first and picked the mail up off the doormat. On Friday morning he had been promised delivery of his television set and when ten o'clock had passed with no sign of it- between nine and ten was the time named- he came downstairs to check that the doorbell was working. Electric doorbells can go wrong, as he had recently learned. He only looked at the mail on the table because there might have been a card from the TV people explaining why they hadn't come or saying when they would come. Between two postcards of foreign seaside places lay an envelope addressed in a strong upright hand to Victor Jenner, no 'Mr' or 'Esq.' or anything. The postmark was Epping. Victor forgot about the television. He took his letter upstairs. His throat drying, the tension that preceded nausea getting a hold on him, he sat down on the bed and split the envelope open. The letter was typewritten on both sides of a single sheet and signed 'Clare Conway'. Victor read: Dear Victor Jenner, You will be surprised to hear from me after the way I spoke to you on Monday. May I say that you took that very well? A lot of people would have shouted abuse back at me and I think you would have been justified if you had done that. This letter is in part an apology. I had no business or right to speak to you like that, I wasn't involved, the injurer or the injured, I was just being as I often am a bit too partisan. I am trying hard to say what I have to say but it isn't easy. I'll try again. David and I think it was very brave of you to come here, a very brave thing indeed to do because you couldn't know what sort of reception you would have, and in fact you had about as bad a one from me as possible. You didn't say why you came, though of course it was obvious you did so because you felt you wanted to make some sort of restitution to David. I imagine you as having been haunted by events and feeling the need to take some positive action as soon as you could. I'll admit here and now that I wouldn't be writing to you if it was your conscience only that was in question. You have to deal with that in your own way. It's David I'm concerned about as I have been almost since I first met him nearly three years ago. David is a wonderful person, easily the most just and honest and generous-minded, the most complete, person I have ever known, which seems an odd thing to say, since physically of course he is anything but complete. You can't be aware - no one can except those who are very close to him -how, in spite of being able to forgive and accept, he is still as haunted by what happened in that house in Kensal Rise eleven years ago as I suspect you are. He dreams of it, every possible association reminds him of it, the memory of it comes back to him every day, but the worst thing is that he can't resign himself to it as having been inevitable. He regrets. I mean that he is always thinking of what might have happened, what might have been avoided rather, if he had acted differently or maybe said different things. The point is, though, that since seeing you and talking a little to you last Monday, in spite of everything, in spite of me, he seems easier in his mind. At least I think he seems easier. And when I said I was going to write to you he welcomed the idea and said he would like to see you. You see, I am convinced that if you two could talk a bit more and tell each other what you felt, really talk this thing out, a lot might be resolved. David might at last be able to resign himself to what his life is going to be for the rest of it and you - well, it might solve things for you too and bring peace of mind. I hope this doesn't sound too high-flown - or worse, like some sort of psychotherapist. If you have read this far you will have guessed what I'm going to ask. Will you come and see us? I know it's a long way for you, so please come for the whole day, a Saturday or Sunday, and please make it soon. I'd like to think it was a good destiny that made David keep your address in his head. He has a good memory - too good, I sometimes think. In the hope that we shall see you, Yours, Clare Conway Victor couldn't remember the last time he had been really happy. It must have been before he went to prison, for certainly there had been no happiness since, not even when he knew he was going to be released and was released; resignation, yes, and a degree of contentment, the relative calm that came between bouts of anger and panic, but happiness never. The last time was probably when he knew he had got the Ballards Lane flat or when, six months before he took Sydney's Luger, Alan had promised him a future partnership in the business. It was an unfamiliar feeling but he recognised it: happiness. Like anger, only differently, without the burning pain and the beating heart, it filled the vessel of body and mind with the effervescence of a sparkling wine. It reached his lips and made him laugh aloud, he had no idea why. There was no phone number on the letter and he had thrown away Tom's piece of paper. When the television man had been, he would have to go back to the library. He went down to the hall, stood looking at the phone, wishing he could remember David's number and then, turning his head, he saw it. He had written it on the raw wood of the underneath of the stair treads and David's name beside it: David Fleetwood. His hand was shaking and he had to grasp his wrist in the other to steady it. Because of that tremor in his fingers, he couldn't be sure he had dialled the number correctly but he must have done, for when the pips sounded and he put his ten pence in, Clare's voice answered. He said, his voice uneven with excitement, 'It's Victor.' They weren't likely to know another Victor, so there was no need to say his surname. 'It's good of you to get in touch so quickly.' She had a beautiful voice, low and measured, a little formal, things he hadn't noticed when she was abusing him. 'I feel,' she said, 'a bit embarrassed talking to you. I was so awful.' 'Oh, forget that.' 'Well, I'll try. I do hope this call means you'll come. When will you come? When would it suit you? We'd like it to be soon. I've a job, and David sometimes has to go to hospital for checks, but apart from that we're always here, we don't go out much. It's complicated for David to go out - we have to make so many arrangements in advance.' 'I could come any time.' The doorbell rang and he knew it must be the television man but it seemed no more than a distant nuisance, something he wouldn't allow to be an intrusion. 'Could you come tomorrow?' she said.