21
Your father was a doctor,” Leo said.
“And yours was a civil servant.”
They were reading each other’s birth certificates, sitting in the registrar’s drab foyer.
“That’s a polite way of saying he worked behind the counter at what was then the Labor Exchange.”
“Mine was a GP, nothing grand.” Mary found herself often reassuring him. She was bent on establishing an equality between them. Leo, she saw, had been born in 1971 and she pointed out to him bravely her own birth date of 1965. “You were only a baby when my parents died.”
The date of their own marriage was fixed for August 17, a Thursday. After the formalities were completed Mary asked Leo if his brother would come to their wedding.
“I don’t think so. He’s not much of a one for weddings.”
“We shall have to have two witnesses and he’s an obvious one. I thought I’d ask my cousin Judith and my friend Anne, and Dorothea and Gordon will come. Will you ask your brother?”
“If you want me to.”
“And I should like to meet him first, Leo. Can I meet him?”
They sat down at a table outside a café in Marylebone High Street and ordered coffee. Leo looked as if the long walk had been too much for him and Mary made up her mind to take a taxi home. He had rested his head back against the chair and now he closed his eyes momentarily.
“Can I meet your brother, Leo?”
“Why do you want to?”
“Because he is your brother. I’ve hardly any relatives of my own.” He said nothing. She watched him ruefully, his tired face, his spent look.
“Am I nagging you?” she said.
He touched her hand. “You couldn’t nag anyone.”
“It’s just that you’re so fond of your brother, you’re always talking about him. If he’s such an important person in your life, won’t he be important in mine?”
The coffee came, black for her, a cappuccino for him. “When I’m married I shall break with my brother,” he said, and he looked away. “I don’t want you to meet him. There, I’ve said it. I don’t want that.”
“But you love him so much. He’s done so much for you. I don’t understand, Leo.”
Leo said stonily, “I loved him once. That’s all in the past. He won’t come to our wedding.”
• • •
On one of the hills of Kemptown in Brighton, Bean’s sister owned a small two-bedroom terrace house. From the back garden, if you stood on a chair, you could see between two high-rise buildings a segment of sea. Every August she went to stay with her ex-husband’s sister-in-law in the Peak District, and while she was away Bean stayed in her house. Most years they didn’t even meet. Not since Maurice Clitheroe died had he spoken to her except, briefly, on the phone. He made careful arrangements for his holiday. His clients were assured, not once, but again and again, that he would be back one week from his departure.
“I shall be in harness again on Friday the eleventh,” he told them, one after another.
Erna Morosini said she had seen a young woman exercising a bunch of dogs. The woman always wore jodhpurs and had long dark hair. She looked young and strong. Her name was Walker. Didn’t Bean think that was funny, her being called Walker and walking dogs? Did Bean know anything about her? Did he think she would take on Ruby while he was away?
“Would you really entrust your much-loved beagle to her, madam?” Bean asked. “She obviously takes charge of far too many dogs. You can see they’re out of control.”
“Well, if you put it like that …”
Mrs. Goldsworthy caused him even more disquiet by telling him that the school-leaver who had taken on Barker-Pryce’s Charlie would be exercising McBride “as a temporary measure.”
“I can’t do it. Not with my knee.”
It was the first Bean had heard of Mrs. Goldsworthy’s knee. Giggling and showing off her ribcage, Lisl Pring said she had made the perfect arrangement. She didn’t need the exercise but her boyfriend did and he was going to ride his bicycle round the Outer Circle, dragging Marietta behind him.
Bean was shocked. “That’s against the law, miss.”
“The cops are going to bother about that, are they? When they’ve got this murderer to catch?”
Mrs. Sellers said she would simply go back to what she had been doing before Bean was engaged, walking the dalmatian herself. But she looked aggrieved. Perhaps she thought there should have been something in the references about him having holidays.
Lunchtime or late morning were good times to catch Barker-Pryce, before he went down to the House. Bean encountered the school-leaver on the doorstep, about to exercise Charlie. He had a low opinion of anyone who didn’t take a dog out before noon and he gave the tall sixteen-year-old one of his looks, baring his teeth.
This time Barker-Pryce said absolutely nothing. He opened the door, stood aside to let Bean in, closed the front door, opened the door to the study, stood aside to let Bean in, closed the door. Where was his wife? His servant? The cleaner?
Bean had brought more photographs, but when offered them, Barker-Pryce shook his head in silence. He had the money ready, five twenty-pound notes in a stack on the desk next to the headed paper. Bean held out his hand and Barker-Pryce put the money into it, saying not a word. He opened the study door, stood back for Bean to go through, and left him to let himself out of the house. As he closed the front door Bean heard the rasp of a lighter struck by a thumb and the leap of a flame as a cigar was lit.
Dealing with The Beater would be less straightforward. Or so he believed. He had no knowledge of where The Beater lived nor of his real name and it was no use seeking him out where they had previously met, for that would defeat the purpose of his enterprise. He could of course wait for him in a likely place and make his demand, but as he walked back to York Terrace he asked himself whether it was necessary at this stage to do anything at all.
They had looked at each other and they had done so speechlessly. The silence, though, had been eloquent and Bean was certain each had read the other’s mind. The Beater would know that he had taken in the whole situation and appreciated exactly what the position was. The Beater would need nothing put into words. He would be more silent than Barker-Pryce. Even now, at this moment, he would be thinking of everything Bean knew and just how disastrously Bean could ruin his life and his prospects if he chose.
Bean went home and opened all the windows. In weather like this he wished Maurice Clitheroe had installed air-conditioning before he died. He put a pack of frozen Bombay potatoes and another of pilau rice into the microwave and, tucking Barker-Pryce’s hundred pounds into the suitcase he’d be taking away with him, thought that if he went on at this rate he’d soon be able to send out for stuff from Express Tikka and Pizza.
With BBC 1’s News at One turned on, sipping at a can of diet Sprite, he started wondering about The Beater once more. It was becoming clear to him that he need do nothing. The Beater would seek him out. He knew where he lived, for he might well have expected to inherit Maurice Clitheroe’s house himself and would have watched closely to see who would occupy it after Clitheroe’s death.
The Beater might come at any time.
This thought was vaguely unpleasant. Seated in the very room where so many unsavory happenings had taken place, Bean seemed to hear again his employer’s screams, the swish of the switch and slap of the cane. The Beater was not only an accomplished actor but strong, too. Thinness didn’t mean much, it was the muscles that counted. Bean fancied he would be quite ruthless. It might be wise not to let him into the house but to suggest, for instance, that they meet in a pub or even talk in the street.
He would do that. When The Beater surfaced—and Bean was sure now that this would happen before his departure for Brighton on Saturday—he would be prepared, leave nothing to chance, above all, never be alone with The Beater where there were no other people, no lights, no life.
He set off as usual at a quarter to four. Ruby didn’t want to be walked and dragged her feet all the way up Portland Place, only showing some interest in life when they came to the parking meter with which she conducted a desultory love affair. Passing the Cornells’ former home, Bean saw that the Venetian blinds were pulled down at all the windows and three black plastic bags of rubbish had been left in the area. A stink of something spicy and decaying wafted up to the pavement.
The afternoon was hot and he was wearing his red baseball cap with the perforated crown, his jeans, and a short-sleeved T-shirt with a herd of elephants marching across it, but he was sweating. When he was in Brighton he might invest in a pair of shorts. More and more people were wearing them, even men of his age. Into the gardens of Park Crescent where the lawns, green and springy the previous week, were fast drying and turning yellow. Ideally, he ought to find another dog in this area so that he didn’t have to walk the solitary one on her own all the way from Devonshire Street to Park Square. That prompted him to ask Mrs. Sellers if she knew of anyone, but she stared vaguely at him as if she didn’t know what he was talking about. Spots started panting as soon as they were out in the street.
A hot wind blew the trees and raised litter on dust clouds. McBride came sleepily out of the house in Albany Street, disinclined to walk, stopping every thirty seconds to scratch himself, but Marietta was quite sprightly, her chocolate skin looking as if it had been shaved, and perhaps it had. He didn’t even have to ask Lisl Pring.
She seemed to have forgotten his reproof or never to have taken it in. She said she’d just had a phone call from a friend who’d been ill. The friend had a lively young spaniel and was at her wits’ end to know how to get it exercised.
“Where would she be living, miss, this friend of yours?” Bean said. “Not too far away, I hope.”
“I’ll have to think. I mean, I’ve never been to her place. Gloucester Avenue? Or was it Gloucester Place? Same difference, you know what I mean.”
Bean didn’t. He thought there was all the difference in the world, about half a mile’s difference.
“I don’t mind asking her to give you a ring.”
“Thank you very much indeed, miss,” said Bean, but she didn’t notice the sarcasm. She wouldn’t.
Miss Jago was out at work. He let himself into Charlotte Cottage and, with Gushi running about him, jumping up his legs, had a quick look round. A postcard from Lady Blackburn-Norris, all about the weather in some far-off place and saying nothing of interest, a bunch of junk mail, fliers from a dry cleaner. Bean tucked Gushi under his arm and went out, back to the other dogs.
Once in the park, he took a photograph of Spots and McBride, looking sweet side by side. A beggar materialized from nowhere, the way they did, an oldish man with brown teeth and stubble on his face. He held out a hand that was more like one of those toadstools that grow on tree trunks than part of a human being.
“Change for a cup of tea, guv?”
“Bugger off,” said Bean. He’d have liked to kill them all. Whatever they said about that Impaler, his was a mentality he could understand.
• • •
It was the hottest day of the year. No one would have chosen to walk across the open center of the park, treeless and exposed to the heat of that sun. Walking home, she kept to the shady Outer Circle. Two men were running on the oval track by the Primrose Hill Bridge but they were dark-skinned and perhaps interpreted the heat as pleasant warmth. She crossed the Circle at the Gloucester Gate and glanced down over the low wall. The man with the beard was lying asleep on a groundsheet spread between the two round shallow pools, a book open and face-down beside him, a bottle of something standing in the water to keep it cool.
Next time they encountered each other, should she give him money? She had always given to beggars, but since her accession of wealth she had carried five- and ten-pound notes to distribute. Was he the kind of man who would welcome alms? He seemed to be sleeping in total peace, as if he had no cares, or had discovered some secret of life. She walked home and she must have been early, for Gushi was still out.
He trotted in, clearly affected by the heat, five minutes afterward. Bean’s face was glistening and beaded with sweat. He was an old man to be walking so far in temperatures in the upper eighties. She paid him for his week’s dog-walking. Gushi in the kitchen noisily lapped water. Mary went with Bean to the gate and was introduced to the dalmatian, a docile dog who licked her hand.
“A member of the company due to your good offices, miss,” said Bean. “Your reference went down a treat with Mrs. Sellers.”
His obsequious manner always embarrassed her. But now it was accompanied by the kind of leer only to be expected from a much younger man. He looked her up and down, as if making some kind of assessment or calculation. She went quickly into the house.
It was too hot to eat, or too hot for human beings. Gushi had recovered enough to wolf down a can of Cesar and she picked at bread and cheese and salad. When the time came to leave she would miss the little dog. Perhaps she and Leo could have a shih tzu of their own. She wrote a letter to Judith in Guildford, inviting her to the wedding, and another to Anne Symonds, who had been at college with her; and then with Gushi on the lead she went out to post her letters.
The pillar box on the corner was out of use, the two slots sealed up. The only other one she knew of was under the main arch of Cumberland Terrace. It was still very warm at nearly nine, the kind of evening that comes only after a day of exceptional heat. A few days before, in a sudden high wind, there had been a premature falling of leaves, plane leaves turning yellow and dropping onto the pavements. Or perhaps it was not premature but a normal happening that occurred always at this time of the year, an early warning of autumn. The leaves, dried and shriveled, crackled under her feet. She walked through the passage at the Cumberland Terrace.
A haze hung over the park, soft and mysterious. The trees had become purplish-gray shapes, utterly still. The air smelled of diesel and lavender, a curious combination. Few people were about. They would all be at café tables on pavements, in the gardens of pubs. She posted her letters, watched the locking of the park gates. The park police went in, it was said, and rounded up the dossers who tried to spend the night in the shelter of the restaurants and pavilions, but some always escaped their vigilance, sleeping among the bushes or under the lee of the zoo. That reminded her of the man she had seen asleep that afternoon, and carrying Gushi now—“You are just a baby,” she murmured into his fur—she made her way back into Albany Street at the Gloucester Bridge.
Mosquitos danced in swarms above the water of the pools. The air was crowded with wheeling insects, moths with dusty wings, gnats, blue flies. They seemed not to bother him. He sat among the rocks, resting on a rolled-up sleeping bag, reading his book. It came back to her that once, to herself, she had called him Nikolai, because she had seen him reading Gogol. When he saw her he got up, just as a man might when a woman comes into the room.
“Good evening,” she said.
He smiled. “Good evening.”
It was an opportunity. He had come a little way up the slope and was looking at her with what she interpreted as concern, though it couldn’t be. She could go down there and sit with him and talk. But what about and why? It was an absurd idea. Besides, Leo was coming, would be there in ten minutes. Even more absurd was what she said, in the light of what she had just said.
“Good night.”
He nodded, as if confirming something he had suspected. He had very blue eyes, intelligent and kind.
“Good night,” he said.
She remembered as she walked away that she had intended to give him money, but she had had none on her and now, anyway, it seemed an absurd idea, insensitive and wrong.
• • •
It was a man’s voice on the phone and somehow he had expected a woman. Well, he hadn’t really expected ever to hear another word about it. Not from that Lisl Pring, that butterfly brain. The funny thing was that he’d been watching her on television. Eastenders was a favorite program of his and he never missed an episode. Lisl Pring had been doing her stuff, looking quite different from in the flesh, if that was the term for someone as bony as she, looking fatter for one thing, quite well-covered and shapely, and the credit titles were coming up, when the phone rang. If the program hadn’t been more or less over he wouldn’t have answered it.
The voice said what its owner was called, or he supposed it did, and then something about a dog.
“Are you a friend of Miss Pring?” he had said because he hadn’t caught the name.
“I just said. It’s really urgent. I’d like to see you as soon as possible.”
Bean hadn’t cared for the tone. “I shall want to see you,” he had said, “and the dog. I’m not sure I’m prepared to take on a lively young spaniel. It is a spaniel, right, and a puppy?”
“Not a puppy. He’s two years old and he’s been to dog-training with me.”
“Well, I’ll see,” Bean said grudgingly. “She said Gloucester Avenue.” Or had she said Gloucester Terrace? “That’s seriously out of my way, you know.”
“As a matter of fact, it’s Gloucester Place, the top end.”
Maybe the top end wouldn’t be so bad. He was starting to say so, not sounding too enthusiastic, when the voice said, “But I’m moving. I’m moving to Upper Harley Street in a month’s time.”
Just exactly where he wanted another dog, halfway between Ruby and Spots.
“I could look in tomorrow,” Bean said. “About this time tomorrow?”
“Make it half an hour later.”
He’d enjoy himself all the more in Brighton if he knew he’d got six dogs to come back to. Six was a good round number, a number he should make a point of sticking with.
“Nine will do very well.”
Bean switched off the television and went back to his packing. He always packed a little bit every night for a week before he went away and so made sure of not forgetting anything. But he left out the red baseball cap and the elephant T-shirt. He’d travel in those.