Dreams of Leaving (5 page)

He stood up. Wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Brushed some mud off his coat. A greyness invading him, gloom in his blood. He turned away and, walking fast, reached home in ten minutes. So far as he could tell nobody saw him return.

Alice was sitting at the kitchen table. She had been staring at the door. When he opened the door and appeared in the gap, she stared at him with equal blankness. Sleep had swollen her eyelids, creased one side of her face.

‘Is it done?' she asked. Her voice flat and neutral. An automatic pilot through the storms in her head.

He nodded. ‘It's done.'

*

At midday George called the police and reported his son missing. The Chief Inspector would be there in fifteen minutes, he was told. He replaced the receiver and looked across at Alice. He had talked to her earlier that morning.

‘Alice,' he had said, sitting down at the kitchen table, ‘I've got to talk to you.'

Her face, sullen, lifted an inch. ‘Talk then.'

‘Now we've got this far, I don't want to risk ruining the whole thing.'

Her resentment crystallised. ‘We've?'

‘We did this together, Alice. We thought it would be the best thing for Moses, remember?'

Alice frowned.

‘What I wanted to say was, let me do the talking. When Peach comes, I mean.'

The skin of her face seemed to stretch thin with fear. ‘Peach? Is he coming?'

‘Probably. But don't worry. I'll talk to him.' He took her hand. It felt soggy. Her entire body was soaked in grief. ‘You're upset,' he said. ‘If he asks you anything, you're upset. Do you see?'

‘I am,' she said.

Too intent on his own line of thought, he didn't grasp hers.

‘Upset,' she added.

‘I know.' And then, not liking himself, but seeing a necessity, ‘That should make it easier, shouldn't it?'

The rims of her eyes, red as they were, registered a faint irony.

‘We wanted this for Moses,' he reminded her, aware that this wasn't the whole truth.

Her face collapsed again.

‘I don't know,' she wept. ‘I don't know.'

From an upstairs window he watched Peach arriving. Peach was a burly pear-shaped man. He wore his grey hair in a crewcut. His lower lip jutted. He could look brutal or avuncular at will with scarcely an alteration in expression. His legs moved smoothly (and independently, it seemed, of his body) as he negotiated the garden path. He was flanked, as always, by two officers. Dolphin and Hazard. Both hard men.

When the bell rang George answered the door. He ushered the three policemen into the lounge. Alice shrank against one end of the sofa, her hand closing round the sodden ball of her handkerchief. Ignoring George's offer of a seat, Peach stood in silhouette against the window. Dolphin and Hazard took the armchairs on either side of the fireplace. Peach wasted no time in coming to the point.

‘When,' he said, ‘did you last see your son?'

‘At around eleven-thirty,' George told him. ‘It was a sunny day and we'd left him at the bottom of the garden in his pram. Alice was upstairs cleaning. I was in the kitchen preparing some lunch. When I went out to check him the pram was still there but he was gone.'

Peach massed at the far end of the room. Absorbing information. Blotting out the light.

‘I couldn't have been more than twenty yards away from him the whole time,' George added, ‘but I never heard a thing.'

Don't talk so much, he told himself.

Peach could be heard jingling a selection of keys and small change in his pocket. ‘And you, Mrs Highness, were upstairs,' he said, ‘cleaning.'

Alice whispered, ‘Yes.'

‘I beg your pardon?' Peach said.

‘Chief Inspector, please,' George said. ‘This has been a terrible shock for my wife. She's very upset.'

‘And not for you?' Peach enquired.

‘And not what?' George asked, though he had understood.

‘Never mind.' Peach moved from the window. Light invaded one half of his face. He seemed, unaccountably, to be smiling. ‘You have no idea who could be responsible for this?'

‘No idea.'

A long silence followed. George could hear the rustle of Dolphin's notepad and the scratching of his fountain pen. Hazard was fidgeting in his armchair. He seemed to be trying to contain violence of the most unpleasant kind. Peach stared out of the window.

‘Unusual, don't you think,' Peach said eventually, ‘the disappearance of a baby?' His voice light, almost conversational.

‘Not especially,' George replied. ‘Babies disappear all the time.' Only to realise that he had fallen for one of Peach's tricks. A truly grief-stricken parent would never have answered with such apparent objectivity. ‘But,' he rushed on, wanting now to convey courage in the face of adversity, giving himself, as it were, a stiff upper lip, ‘we haven't given up hope, Chief Inspector.'

Peach moved across the room on extraordinarily light feet. ‘And what about you, Mrs Highness? Have you given up hope?'

Alice flinched. Eyes staring. Hands clenched. Still that girl in the woods, her head pressed into the leaves. The boots, the boots.

‘I told you,' George stepped in, ‘she's very upset.'

Peach said nothing. He looked at Alice, then at George, then at Alice again. His lower lip moved out and back. Once. Smoothly. ‘Well,' he said, ‘that'll be all for the time being,' and, gesturing to Dolphin and Hazard, spun like a huge lubricated top in the direction of the hallway.

George followed them out and suddenly couldn't breathe. The three policemen packed the narrow space to suffocation point. They had arrested all the light, all the air. The coarse rasping blue of their uniforms everywhere. Even their breathing seemed blue. God, how he loathed that colour now. He couldn't even look at the sky without thinking of policemen. Peach opened the front door and passed through. A draught flowed into the house. George gulped it down.

‘Not feeling too good,' he muttered.

Dolphin made a note of the fact on his pad.

As George closed the door, he heard Alice run up the stairs.

*

The next day, at nine in the morning, the phone rang. The Chief Inspector would like to see them. Separately. Mr Highness at two p.m. Mrs Highness at three p.m. Was that convenient?

‘What is this?' George cried. ‘A trial? We've lost our son, for Christ's sake.'

‘I'm sorry, Mr Highness,' came the official police voice. ‘It's the Chief Inspector's request.'

‘Well, it's out of the question. Absolutely out of the question. Please inform the
Chief Inspector
that we'll be coming together.'

The official police voice sighed. ‘At two p.m., Mr Highness?'

‘At two p.m.'

George replaced the receiver.

Peach didn't refer to this telephone conversation when they were shown into his office that afternoon. In his mind he had probably already turned their refusal to appear separately into an admission of weakness. Which it was, of course. Instead of taking them apart one by one, in isolation, he would now attempt to play them off, one against the other. Peach sat behind his desk, his lower lip drooping with scepticism. His eyelids looked heavy, ornately wrinkled, curtains that rose and fell on mysteries that ran for years. His fingers, plaited together on the surface of his desk, reminded George improbably of the rush basket. Peach asked them both to be seated. There was a pause while he adjusted the position of a document. Then he began.

‘You know, of course, that I'm suspicious.'

George assumed a puzzled air. Aware beforehand of just how exacting this interview was likely to be, he had been practising all morning in the bathroom mirror. He felt his eyebrows slide into position, he felt ridges forming in the skin above the bridge of his nose. Perfect.

But Peach turned away from him, making an irrelevance of his expression. ‘Mrs Highness,' he said, ‘I think
you
know what I mean.'

Alice's eyes rolled sideways in their sockets.

‘You mean,' George rushed in, ‘that someone might have kidnapped Moses? Abduction. Is that what you suspect?'

‘Abduction?' Peach pretended to be dealing with a possibility that hadn't occurred to him. ‘No, not abduction.'

‘What then?'

Alice sniffed. (George had told her to sniff as often as possible. At awkward moments she should cry. But only at awkward moments. Strategy, you see. Anything to distract Peach.)

‘Deception,' said Peach, yet to be successfully distracted, ‘might be one way of putting it – '

George altered the angle of his head. He wanted to appear just that little bit slower than he really was.

‘Subterfuge would be another,' Peach went on. ‘Intrigue. Finagling. Machination.' A pause. ‘Conspiracy.'

George couldn't resist. ‘Nice words,' he said. ‘
Roget's Thesaurus?
'

Peach's steady gaze dropped in temperature. ‘Where's Moses?' he snapped.

‘I don't know.'

‘I don't believe you.'

The two men's eyes locked.

Alice began to cry. George silently applauded her timing then, looking at her, realised that her tears were genuine. He put an arm round her and drew her towards him.

‘If we knew where Moses was,' he said, ‘we would hardly be sitting here, would we?'

Peach considered this. ‘I don't know,' he said.

‘I thought you knew everything.'

Peach eased his chair backwards. His mouth widened in anticipation of a smile. The smile never arrived. He folded his hands across his belly. Somehow he managed to make this otherwise homely gesture look threatening. Another silence began. George stared out of the office window. To kill time he counted the thorns on a rose-bush. He had reached thirty-six when Peach spoke.

‘We found a toy dog,' he offered casually.

George shifted in his chair. ‘Oh?'

‘By the river.'

‘By the river,' George repeated. He wondered how Peach knew that Moses had a toy dog.

‘A white toy dog,' Peach said. Leaning forwards, he reached into an open drawer, produced the white toy dog and stood it upright on the desk.

George gasped. It was Moses's toy dog. Alice began to cry again. This time George didn't notice. He couldn't understand how the toy dog had fallen into Peach's hands. He thought he had put it into the basket with Moses. He had certainly intended to. Did this mean that Peach had found Moses too? Was this interview just another of Peach's sadistic charades? He reached out and picked up the toy dog. He turned it over, playing for time. He was trying to remember. He knew that he had slipped it into his coat pocket that morning. He had wanted Moses to have something to hold, something to comfort him on his lonely journey downstream. But, now he thought about it, he couldn't actually remember
handing
the toy
dog to Moses. It must have fallen out of his pocket then. So. Peach knew nothing.

‘Yes,' George admitted, ‘this is my son's toy dog.' He put it back on the desk. His hand was shaking. The dog toppled over. He smiled. He had never been able to make the dog stand up.

‘You don't seem particularly overwrought,' Peach observed.

‘What do you want me to do? Break down? Would that satisfy you?' George's voice had lifted an octave in sudden anger.

‘Just an observation,' Peach said. Two shelves of Pelican psychology ranged behind his head. Nasty little blue spines. Titles like
The Hothouse Society
and
Alienation and Charisma.
Something of an expert on the subject, Peach.

‘Just in case you haven't noticed, Chief Inspector, my wife's in a terrible state,' George said, calmer now, ‘and the way you're conducting this interview isn't exactly helping matters.'

‘I know your wife's in a terrible state.' Peach's tone of voice implied that, in his opinion, this ‘terrible state' had nothing whatsoever to do with the disappearance of the baby. Implied, therefore, that he was privy to the secrets of their marriage. Implied, in fact, omniscience. Such a very cheap yet complex remark. Vintage Peach.

George said nothing.

The Chief Inspector shrugged. He stood up. Walked to the window and back, twisting one palm against the other. ‘Believe me when I say this,' he said. ‘If there is anything irregular going on here, I shall discover it. Believe me.'

‘I believe you.'

‘Good.'

‘We've been here over an hour,' George said, ‘and my wife's exhausted. May we go now?'

Peach spread his hands. They were empty of questions.

As George guided Alice towards the door (grief had made an invalid of her), Peach appeared to relent. ‘We'll do everything in our power,' he assured the couple, ‘to find your son.'

‘I'm sure you will,' George muttered.

Whichever way you looked at it, it was true.

*

Nobody could have predicted the effect that the news of the baby's disappearance would have on New Egypt. During the last two weeks of June the apathy lifted. Rumours flew the length and breadth of the
community on giant wings. At first people talked of a kidnapping, a ransom – even a child molester. But then talk of an escape crept in. Stealthily, very stealthily. The few who still harboured dreams of escape themselves gathered in obscure corners of the village – under the disused railway bridge, behind the cricket pavilion, at the back of the greengrocer's shop – to discuss whether it was possible and, if so, how it could have been done. Dinwoodie held the floor, his bony hands marshalling facts, attacking the air, his extravagant grey hair tumbling on to his high shoulders, into his eyes. The greengrocer also advanced several interesting theories. The two men could often be seen returning through the summer dusk to the privacy of Dinwoodie's garage. In the light of a single naked bulb, surrounded by tools and grease and the dismembered limbs of motorbikes, they would squat on fruit crates, they would whisper and gesticulate, they would rail and connive. ‘It is time,' Dinwoodie had been heard to say, ‘to make a stand.'