Dreams of Leaving (71 page)

After listening to this report Peach leaned forwards and threaded his fingers together on the surface of his desk. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘but why Cawthorne?'

Hazard seemed surprised by the question. Then he said, ‘He's the postman, sir.'

‘The postman? I still don't follow.'

‘So was Collingwood, sir.'

‘Ah, I see.' And Peach nodded slowly, smiled to himself. A little farfetched, perhaps. A rather flimsy pretext, some might say, for such a violent attack. Still, there was no accounting for the mysterious workings of precedent, especially in a place like New Egypt. And he had been pleased to see an element of rationale creeping into Hazard's brutalities. ‘Very good, sergeant. Very good.'

But now, of course, Hazard was paying for it.

Peach watched Sergeant Caution bolt the struggling Hazard into the stocks. Hazard was muttering. Curses, presumably. Obscenities. Death-threats. When all three policemen had been secured in position, Caution stepped aside and gave the signal for the pelting to begin. Pandemonium. A hail of soft missiles. The crowd broke into a raucous version of the famous ‘Pelting Day Song':

Throw tomatoes

Throw a pear

At a policeman

If you dare

Throw some peaches
(laughter)

From a tin

Watch them trickle

Down his chin –

A cabbage bounced off Hazard's forehead. His face shook with volcanic fury. His eyes, bloodshot, scanned the crowd and noted names. There would be violence, Peach realised. There would be reprisals. He knew his Hazard.

He waited long enough to see a ripe tomato burst on Wragge's cheek, he watched Wragge wriggle as a clot of seeds and juice slid down inside his tunic collar, then he turned away. He didn't want to witness another second of his men's humiliation.

Throw some apples

Throw some eggs

Hazard's had it

Stop, he begs.

Just keep throwing

More and more

That's what Pelting

Day is for –

Taking Hilda by the hand, he began to push his way through the crowd. Cheers scored the air as if to celebrate his departure. He found that he was trembling.

‘You look cold, John,' Hilda said. ‘Perhaps a glass of mulled wine?'

‘Yes. Thank you.' He tucked his double chin into his collar.

‘A pretty good turn-out, wouldn't you say, sir?'

He turned round to see Dolphin standing beside him. In Dolphin's arms, the most enormous pink bear that he had ever seen.

‘Better than I expected.' Peach's eyes shuttled between Dolphin's face and the monstrous bear. He had known all along that this winter fair was a mistake. Look at the effect it was having on his men.

‘I won it, sir. In the hoop-la.' Dolphin bounced the bear in the crook of his arm. ‘My daughter's going to love it.'

That may well be, Peach thought, but for Christ's sake stop carrying it around like that. It's bad for credibility.

Hilda tiptoed back with two glasses of mulled wine. ‘Oh, Sergeant Dolphin. If I'd known you were here I would've brought you a glass too. It's
very
good.'

Dolphin sketched a bow. ‘Very kind of you, Mrs Peach. But I'm on duty.'

‘And that, I suppose,' Hilda scintillated, ‘is your new partner.'

Dolphin became foolish. ‘My new partner? Oh yes. I see. Haha.' He grinned down at his bear.

Peach now took his deputy aside. ‘Any trouble?'

‘Not really, sir. Mustoe's in the pub. Pretty far gone, as usual. Telling everybody what he thinks of Pelting Day. Says it's a put-up job. The police just pretending to be human for a few hours. That kind of thing.'

Peach tutted. Though Mustoe was right, of course.

‘Apart from that – ' bugger all. Dolphin finished the sentence in his head out of respect for the Chief Inspector's wife who was standing beside them. He turned his mouth down at the corners to indicate that there was nothing he couldn't handle. ‘Most people seem to be here.' He looked left and right as if about to cross a road. ‘Amazing turn-out. Never seen anything like it.'

‘Yes. I suppose so.' Peach was only making minimal contact. He was wondering whether this new lease of life, these new high spirits, could have anything to do with Moses Highness's recent visit. Had word got out? ‘You haven't heard any rumours, have you, Dolphin?'

‘Rumours, sir?'

‘Rumours that might – might be subversive?'

Dolphin frowned. ‘I don't quite understand you.'

‘Never mind.'

Another roar from the stocks. Hazard had just opened his mouth to swear at Cawthorne and promptly had it filled by a lump of bread soaked in sour milk.

‘All I can say is, I'm glad it's not me,' Dolphin said.

‘Quite,' Peach said. ‘Well, I should be getting along.' He took one step then, confidentially, over his shoulder, whispered, ‘I should leave that toy somewhere until you come off duty, Dolphin. Otherwise people might not take you seriously.'

Dolphin knew him well enough to detect the presence of a command beneath that quiet suggestion. Nodding, he moved away with Hilda. They stopped by the fire for a moment to warm their hands.

He gazed at the charred effigy crouching at the centre of the fire. Of its own accord and sparked by something he couldn't yet identify, his mind began to slip forwards, incisive, remorseless, as if unleashed. It had picked up some kind of trail or scent. Something in the atmosphere (the fairy lights? the jangling music? the clamour of voices?) had reminded him of the twenty-four hours he had spent in London. Something buried in those twenty-four hours, he now knew, could help him solve the problem of how to kill Moses.

He began to scrabble at the loose earth of his memories. The blonde girl
on the train? No. That Asian boy in the middle of the night? No, not there. His meeting with Madame Zola? Not there either. Then he remembered the enigmatic landlord of that pub on Kennington Road. Terence, wasn't it? Somewhere in that conversation, perhaps.

He sifted more carefully now. Words, gestures, nuances.
Bit shady, by all accounts.
No, it had come later. During the second drink. When Terence opened up a bit. When Peach asked him, ‘What else do you know about the place?'

‘Well, there've been some pretty mysterious goings-on – ' The landlord liked to leave his sentences hanging. At times he had reminded Peach of people in the village.

‘How do you mean?'

‘Vandalism, for a start.'

‘Vandalism?'

‘There's been a series of break-ins.' Terence ran the tip of his tongue along his moustache to signify the delicacy of the subject. ‘Too many for it to be a coincidence, if you know what I mean – '

‘What kind of break-ins, Terence?'

‘Oh, I don't know exactly. Let's just say there's been talk of a vendetta, though.'

Peach was still staring deep into the fire. His eyes were smouldering now. Everything had clicked.

He handed his glass to Hilda. ‘I've got to go.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘Home.' He was already ten yards away, walking backwards. ‘Something very important, dear.'

‘I'll come with you.'

‘No, no. It's all right. You stay here. Enjoy yourself.' The fire threw black streamers of shadow across his face. ‘I'll see you when you get back.'

Then he was running away over the grass, leaving Hilda standing by the fire in her burgundy suit with a glass of mulled wine in each hand.

When he reached his study he unlocked his bureau and pulled out the pink file. His heart was hammering against the bars of his ribs. He sat down, unfastened the top button of his tunic. He shuffled through his papers until he found the plans he had drawn up a few weeks before. Plans of The Bunker.

‘Yes,' he breathed. ‘Just as I thought.'

The Bunker had no fire-escapes. The only way out of the fourth floor, so far as he could see, was down the stairs and through the black side-door. So if a fire started on the ground floor …

He smiled.

There would be a fire at The Bunker. A tragic fire. He could see the headlines now:

Or perhaps:

(And if that black bastard got killed too, so much the better.)

There would be nothing to connect Peach with the fire. Nothing to implicate him. He would burn the pink file beforehand, though. Just to be on the safe side. It would have served its purpose, after all. There was a nice symmetry about that. The file. The nightclub. Both pink. Both burning.

A sudden blast of heat passed across his face.

Why wait?

Why not do it now? Leave tonight. Return first thing in the morning. Nobody would miss him. It was Pelting Day. Turn the chaos to his advantage. Leave now. No time to tell Hilda. Tell her tomorrow. Explain the whole thing then. He would think of something. He was Peach.

He leered. Yes, why not?

A Christmas gift for Moses.

Death.

Hands trembling with strange electricity, he hurried from the room.

*

‘Pelting Day,' Mustoe sneered. ‘What a bloody fiasco.'

He had been sitting in The Legs and Arms all day. He had drunk himself into a stupor at lunch-time and slept it off during the afternoon. Now he was drinking again. Pints of beer and whisky chasers. He was alone except for Lady Batley, who hadn't moved for hours, who never did, and Brenda Gunn, the bitch who ran the place. Brenda usually ignored him but on
this occasion, perhaps because she had been on the Pelting Day committee herself, he seemed to have touched a nerve.

‘Oh and I suppose your life isn't,' she muttered.

‘Isn't what?' he grinned.

‘A fiasco.'

‘Oh,' and he threw up his hands, pretended to cower, ‘oh,
Mrs Gunn.'

‘It's a success this year, actually.' Brenda folded her arms. ‘A real success.'

‘
Success.'
Mustoe snorted into his glass, then raised it ceilingwards. ‘To the success of Pelting Day.' He swallowed his double whisky in a single gulp. ‘My arse,' he added, and slipped sideways off his stool, very slowly, like a ship going down. Waves closed over his head.

Brenda took away his glass and wiped the bar.

‘Fiasco?' Lady Batley quavered suddenly. ‘What fiasco?'

Then he heard a voice calling him, calling from somewhere far above.

‘Dad?
Dad?'

He peered over his anorak collar. Managed to fit his flaccid lips around the words, ‘Piss off.'

‘Come on, Dad,' the voice said. ‘It's time to go home.'

‘There's no such thing.' As time? As home? Both, he thought, sweeping them savagely aside like empty glasses.

‘Something's happened, Dad,' came the voice again. ‘Something strange.'

He rolled over and sat up. Bracing a hand on his knee, he clambered to his feet. He stared down with revulsion at his eight-year-old son. Conceived during the preparations for escape in 1972. Conceived as a result of those bloody stomach exercises. A living reminder of his own failure. How he loathed the child who he had, in his own tortured bitterness, insisted on calling Job.

‘What's strange?' he snarled.

The boy looked up at his father with eyes the colour of ploughed fields. ‘They're saying Peach has disappeared.'

Mustoe lowered himself on to his stool. His son's words seemed to tap some hidden reserve of sobriety.

‘What did you say?' he said.

*

It was three in the morning. Elliot sprawled on his grey dralon sofa. A glass of Remy balanced on the fourth button of his waistcoat. He was drinking in the liquid harmonies of Manhattan Transfer. To somebody walking into the office at that moment Elliot might have looked the picture
of relaxation, but that somebody wouldn't have heard, as Elliot heard, the whirr of brain-wires, or felt, as Elliot felt, the chafing of one layer of skin against another. Elliot had said good-night to Ridley half an hour before in the foyer. He had been intending to lock up straight away and go home. But when he searched his pockets he realised that he had left his keys upstairs and when he found his keys on his desk he saw the pile of letters and when he thought about the letters he poured himself a stiff brandy, put a record on the stereo and lay down on the sofa.

Now he shook the sofa off, stood up. He walked over to the pool-table and set up the balls. He broke, put a stripe down. He played himself, and the physics of the game slowly altered his frame of mind. He could concentrate now. His cool pool-brain began to plan strategies.

When the music stopped – that five-second gap between tracks – he thought he heard something downstairs. The three-syllable creak of the double-doors. And remembered now that he had left them unlocked. He leapt across the room and killed the volume on the stereo. And stood motionless, lips ajar. Not a sound now, but the kind of silence that follows sound. This had been happening slowly for a long time. He felt a curious relief as he reached for the short pool-cue.

Half a dozen steps (executed so lightly and smoothly that they all ran together) took him to the door of the office. He pushed on the wood with spread fingers. An unmistakable smell drifted into his nostrils. Petrol.

He ran down the stairs, turned the corner into the last flight, and stopped, three steps above the foyer. A policeman stood by the double-doors. He held a pink paraffin can in his hands. There was something gluttonous about the way he was splashing petrol against the walls, as if the petrol was sauce and the walls were a meal he could hardly wait to eat.

‘So,' Elliot breathed, ‘it's you.'

A casual tilt of Peach's brutal head. The quills of his crewcut glinting. His grey eyes grinned from the cover of their heavy lids and his bottom lip slid unceasingly against his top one, in and out, in and out. And Elliot realised. The bloke was mad. Stark fucking mad. And would do anything.