Talking to Strange Men (24 page)

He found two of the books on the shelf above the counter top Utting people used as desks. The chess book wasn't there though and a search of the room failed to find it. Perch had probably taken it home and left it there or never brought it to school. The only thing of real interest in the room was a telescope mounted on the windowsill with its sights turned to the city. Charles had a squint through it. It was amazing how much was to be seen and how clearly. He could even see the clock on the CitWest tower and read that the time was six-twenty-two and the temperature seventeen degrees. In the absence of a flash bulb he wasn't able to take much
of a photograph of the room but he did his best. As far as he knew, this would be the first picture anyone at London Central had of the interior of Utting. He left the building without mishap, carrying the two books in a green and white Marks and Spencer's plastic carrier he had found in Perch's wastepaper basket.

Re-entering Curie where his parents were still closeted with Sarah's housemistress, Charles passed Rosie Whittaker in the hall. She knew Sarah and looked as if about to speak, but he froze her with a cold uncomprehending stare.

CONSTANCE GOODMAN BELONGED
in that category of women who are nice to their children's friends but not very nice to their children. This had been evinced in the friendly wave she gave John from the car after rapping crossly on the window to summon Colin. In her seventies now, she was known to three generations whom she had taught at primary school. John – and Cherry – had been among her pupils, though her own son never had. Those former pupils, when she met them, she tended to call ‘pet'; her son, though the term was often less than affectionately bestowed, was ‘chickie'. And Colin did have something of a chicken-like look with his pink beaky face, small dark eyes and curly hair. He had seemed quite excited when he let John into the house, rather resembling Harpo Marx when suppressing glee.

‘Nice to see you, pet,' Mrs Goodman said, creaking about on arthritic joints, laying the table for a tea John hadn't felt he could possibly eat. ‘I'll make myself scarce for ten minutes and you and Colin can have your chat.'

She had made it very plain that she knew what it was Colin had to impart but was being discreet.

John waited until she closed the door and said, ‘What on earth is it?'

That was three weeks ago now and he had done nothing with his information. He had been torn, in perhaps the worst dilemma of his life. It was as if he needed something to happen, something that would either trigger off a disclosure or show him that he must bury what Colin had told him. Present always in his mind was a desire not to behave badly, yet perhaps disclosing this would not be bad, would be a duty as well as his own salvation. Scarcely a vestige of triumph remained that without guessing precisely, he had been right about the thing that lurked behind Peter Moran's dull eyes.

Making his way out to Colin's on the Honda that Saturday afternoon, his feelings had been very different. He had been curiously buoyant and hopeful, though with nothing then on which to base this optimism. Colin and his mother lived a long way out of the city, on the outskirts of Orrington really, and it took him nearly half an hour to get there. The bungalow, which he hadn't visited since Jennifer left him, had such a stark and barren look about it that you might have thought it brand-new but for the unmistakable building features – you couldn't call it architecture – of the early sixties. The garden consisted merely of closely mown grass, flowerless and treeless, while the house was a low-roofed L-shape of light pink brickwork with square metal-framed windows. Once John had tried giving Colin rooted shrub cuttings and boxes of seedlings but what became of these he never knew, certainly they never appeared in that garden.

When he and Colin were alone together and two more doors had been heard to close on Mrs Goodman, a woman of ostentatious tact, Colin again asked him if it were really true Peter Moran was living with Jennifer.

‘I've told you so,' John said. He was beginning to learn that people don't necessarily listen attentively when one confides in them, but still he said, ‘Surely I told you so when Jennifer first left me?'

‘You may have done. The name didn't ring a bell – then.'

‘I wish you wouldn't be so mysterious.'

‘How much do you know about this chap, this Moran?'

‘He's about thirty-five. He comes from around here – or I think he does. He's got a degree, economics or philosophy or something. I believe he was once a teacher, I'm not sure.
He hasn't got a job now, that's for sure. He's renting a tumbledown sort of cottage out at Nunhouse that I suppose the dole pays for.' John knew he sounded contemptuous but he didn't care. ‘Oh, and he's got one of those little French cars that aren't really cars, if you know what I mean.'

Colin started to laugh. ‘You really love him, don't you?'

‘What do you expect?'

‘How did Jennifer meet him?'

John didn't much care for the question. ‘I don't know how she first met him. It was a long time ago.' He hesitated. He said with difficulty, ‘They were engaged but he broke it off just before – the wedding. That would have been about four years ago.'

‘Four years ago, ‘said Colin, ‘I served on that jury at the Crown Court at Orrington. Do you remember that?'

John remembered. Colin had made a fuss about taking time off work and the inadequacy of a juryman's pay.

‘When I saw Moran at your house on Thursday I recognized him at once and when I got home I looked him up.'

‘What d'you mean, looked him up?'

‘You know me, making notes of everything. I noted down everyone who came up in court and made a few comments of my own. It was helpful at arriving at verdicts. Your Peter Moran was one of the people before that court. Do you want to know what he was charged with?'

‘Of course I do.'

‘Assault on a child under the age of thirteen,' said Colin. He moistened his lips, evidently embarrassed. ‘I mean indecent assault.'

Mrs Goodman put her head round the door.

‘Finished, chickie?'

‘You know what I've been telling him, so I doubt if it matters much.'

‘Don't be sarcastic with me, chickie. I can't spend all night in the kitchen.' She dumped on the table a tray of tea things, including a huge brown teapot and an equally dark and heavy-looking fruit cake.

‘Please, Mrs Goodman,' John said. ‘I honestly don't mind.'
He looked at Colin. ‘I can't believe it.' But he could. It explained so much, Peter Moran's abrupt leaving of Jennifer, Jennifer's belief that she was the only woman there had ever been in his life, his failure to get work in his own field, above all that suspicion of horror John had always felt about him. ‘What happened to him?' he asked. ‘I mean what was the' – he couldn't find the right word – ‘punishment?'

‘It was a first offence. Or the first time they'd caught him, more like. He got three years' probation on condition he spent six months in a psychiatric clinic.'

Mrs Goodman was pouring out half-pint-size cups of dark brown tea. Colin reached for his and slopped from the overfull cup into the saucer.

‘You did that, chickie, mind, not me.'

‘All right, Mother, I'm not complaining.'

‘Did he spend six months in a psychiatric clinic?'

‘I suppose so. He must have.'

John didn't like having to ask this question in front of Mrs Goodman. He could never be in her presence without recalling her as she had been in class, biggish, gaunt, beaky-faced, writing sums in long division on the blackboard or walking down the aisle between the desks and pausing to look over one's shoulder. Not looking in her direction, eyeing his plate on which reposed a thick slice of Dundee cake, he said: ‘Was it a girl or a boy?'

Mercifully, Colin needed no further elucidation. ‘Oh, a boy.'

‘I wonder why it wasn't in the papers.'

‘It was in the Orrington paper, pet. Perhaps it wasn't big enough for the
Free Press
.'

‘He pleaded guilty, you see,' said Colin. ‘It wasn't much of a case. It was all over in half an hour.'

John knew what they were thinking. And he too repeated her name with a silent inner voice. Jennifer, Jennifer . . . He said abruptly to Mrs Goodman:

‘Do you know what a lodestone is?'

‘A magnet, isn't it?'

‘That's what the dictionary said.'

‘Wait a minute, pet. Wasn't it supposed to be a kind of
magic magnet which – well, if a husband possessed it, he could use it to get back a runaway wife?'

‘Charming,' said Colin. ‘So much for your well-known tact.'

Mother and son had begun quarrelling after that in a kind of gruff controlled way. They never quite lost their tempers, though Mrs Goodman would sometimes laugh unpleasantly and Colin's eyes flash. It ended with Mrs Goodman remarking that John would hardly now want to spend the rest of the evening in such a disagreeable house whose occupants sparred all the time and made their guests uncomfortable. How do you respond to that one? Of course John hadn't wanted to stay and didn't, taking his departure with all sorts of fabricated excuses while Mrs Goodman shook her head sadly and said it was just what she had foreseen, Colin had driven his friend away by his rudeness.

John could see a parallel between his present behaviour and the way he had reacted to Mark Simms's confession. Returning home on the Honda, he had been full of plans for how to use his new knowledge just as, on that previous occasion, he had intended to go to the police. That evening he had spent in restless speculation and by the next day he had decided he must know more facts. Consulting the newspaper files in the library of the
Orrington Onlooker
was a far simpler process than he expected, but the account of the court proceedings was brief, for the child's name could not be given or any personal details about him included. The boy hadn't been injured in any way. Peter Moran had not attempted to deny what he had done. In fact there was little more to be gathered from the paper than Colin had already told him.

If he was like that though, why did he want Jennifer? To persuade himself, presumably, that he wasn't like that. To be saved from himself and protected? Because there was something very motherly and caring about Jennifer? Or simply because Jennifer wanted him and with her love provided a cloak for his activities? Speculating, John realized how little he understood of abnormal psychology. And he shied away from the thought that Jennifer might want her lover more than he wanted her. Perhaps Peter Moran had
been cured in the clinic he had attended – if he had attended it.

But there was a memory which kept returning to John and a question he continually asked himself. That Saturday when he and Jennifer had met in Hartlands Gardens, 2 April, that was the afternoon on which Peter Moran had ‘gone out' and the afternoon also on which twelve-year-old James Harvill had disappeared. Was it fantastic to connect the two, knowing what he now knew? The question John kept asking himself and receiving, of course, no answer to, was: Does Jennifer know?

The information seemed to lie heavily in his keeping like a ponderous inert mass or like the lodestone that was a magnet with supernatural powers. He had only to lift it up and show it to the light of day to draw his wife back to him . . .

‘
HAVE YOU EVER
thought,' Angus said, ‘that it might all end in tears?'

They had encountered each other after prep in the New Library.

‘Why would it?' Mungo looked seriously puzzled. ‘We never do anything illegal.'

‘You sail near the wind sometimes. And things go wrong, even things that start innocently. You could get yourselves expelled, you could get into some disaster.'

‘You sound like Dad.'

That was on 29 June, the day Mungo sent out a directive to his agents to ignore all further
Spytrap
commands and adopt
Armadillo Army
Three. It went out in
Spytrap
and the direction for the new code referred to the third story in the Yves Yugall collection, a sharp little thriller called ‘Gila Haunt'. He preserved the Utting photograph Charles
Mabledene had taken in a file marked ‘Most Secret'. The two books on yachting were restored to Bruce Reynolds and the photograph of the Whittakers' damaged car conveyed, via his brother, to the elder Ralston.

No efforts on the part of Mungo or any of his experts had been able to break Stern's code, nor was there any clue as to what that preliminary number and those ultimate numbers signified.

During the first week of July Unicorn received a letter from his father which seemed to indicate the possible imminent loss of 53 Ruxeter Road. Unicorn's father wrote to his son of the possibility of buying a flat in Pentecost Villas when the block had been converted. Demolition, it seemed, was no longer envisaged. Mungo, in
Armadillo Army
Three, instructed Basilisk and Empusa to find out more. The blow fell when Unicorn, paying a routine call to the horse trough drop, picked up a message to abandon Pentecost Villas research. He had given up all work on the elaborate plan to have his father secure building dates and plans and on his own initiative called off Basilisk, before the discovery was made by Mungo that the directive was a false one and came from Stern or Stern's mole. Moscow Centre had broken the July code.

This didn't necessarily mean that Stern knew the location of the safe house. In all commands, since the primary reference to it when its precise address had been given, it was referred to as PV for Pentecost Villas. Stern very likely didn't know. But he had broken the code within days of its formulation.

Mungo, three days before the end of the summer term, changed the code from
Armadillo Army
Three to
Armadillo Army
Seven, reasoning that such a daring choice wouldn't be suspected. The change, initially, was known only to Unicorn, Basilisk, Medusa and Charybdis. On the last day it was also imparted to Dragon who was Charles Mabledene.