Talking to Strange Men (6 page)

From his window he could make out the roof of his father's surgery building. His mother was an anaesthetist at Hartland Mount Hospital, not a GP, though she sometimes helped out when one of the partners was sick or on holiday. There were three doctors in the practice besides Fergus Cameron. They worked from a listed building, one of the oldest in the city, that Mungo's father had bought nearly twenty years before and now wanted to extend. He wanted to build a new waiting room and consulting rooms on to the back. A group from the city planning committee had already been to view the premises. If they agreed to building, listed building consent would almost certainly be given. Their decision depended almost exclusively on the advice given them by the city planning officer, a man called Blake, who was in some way related to Ivan Stern.

‘They don't know the meaning of speed,' Fergus Cameron had said. The family were all at lunch, Fergus and Lucy, Angus, Mungo, and Ian just home from medical school for the Easter break. ‘Those representatives of the planning committee came to see the place two days after the monthly meeting. Which means we have twenty-four days to wait for a decision. And in the meantime I could lose that other property.'

The other property was a much more modern building at the western end of Ruxeter Road. Fergus could get it comparatively cheaply if he bought it now but would very likely lose it if he waited three weeks. And suppose the planning committee's decision went against him?

‘There's absolutely nothing to be done, darling,' said Lucy, eating salad with a fork and reading the
Lancet
. She was a large placid woman of perfectly even temper who had sat – and passed – her examination for membership of the Royal College of Physicians when nine months pregnant, answered the final question, laid down her pen and gone into labour. Ian was born five hours later. She turned the page. ‘It's all in the lap of the gods.'

Mungo wasn't too sure of this. It might be in his lap. That was why he had gone straight upstairs really, apart from taking comfort from the ‘most secret' document. Today was
25 March. Only six more days' use to be got out of the current code, after which he'd have to start a new one. Might use Stern's
Childers
which would be rather amusing. But now for his father's planning application. The difficulty wouldn't so much be in acquiring the advance information as in convincing his father that the advance information he had was accurate. Deal with that when the time comes, thought Mungo. He'd use the drop under the flyover. Instructions alone wouldn't be sufficient, there would have to be a meeting. In the safe house possibly and it shouldn't be postponed. Monday at the latest. He looked about him but couldn't see the book anywhere.

That Ian, he thought. The minute he's home he's on the nick. Nothing's sacred. The first thing he heard when he opened the door was a girl laughing. lan's girlfriend Gail that would be. Mungo went downstairs and saw them all in Angus's room, Angus showing off the computer, Gail pressing one of the keys and making a picture of an explosion come up with ‘ka-boom' printed in the middle of it.

‘You've got my Albeury,' Mungo said.

Ian grinned at him. ‘Have a heart. I've nothing to read.'

‘You can't have that. Not till next Thursday anyway. You can have the latest Yugall if you like.'

‘That's very handsome of you, Bean.'

Mungo wondered why Angus was looking at him like that, half-smiling and yet as if he were somehow sorry for him. He didn't like it much and it made him feel a certain regret that he was too old to go and trip his brother up and stick his tongue out at him.

FERGUS CAMERON WAS
as nervous as his wife was placid. He worried about everything. He worried about his wife and his sons and his home and about money, though as he very well
knew none of these people or these matters afforded genuine cause for anxiety. Not of the stuff of which general practitioners are ideally made, he was nevertheless enormously popular with his patients. There was nothing godlike about him. When they told him they were worried or depressed he said he understood and he commiserated with them. They could tell he was sincere. When they came to him worried that they might have cancer or muscular dystrophy or heart disease he said that he worried about those things too, even though he had no more cause than they. Because he did not know he had anything to feel superior about, he chatted to them as might their next-door neighbours and as often as not told them of his own worries. As a physician he was no better and no worse than the other doctors in the practice and less well-qualified than his own wife, but he was much better liked than any of them.

It was on account of his pleasing personality and reputation for being easy to get on with that the City Board of General Practitioners had appointed him their representative on a particularly awkward mission. This was to call on an eighty-two-year-old woman who still had a medical practice and still saw patients and explain to her in the gentlest and most tactful way that it was time she retired. Old Dr Palmer had been making mistakes in prescriptions which, though no harm had yet been done, might one day result in disaster.

She lived in one of the north-eastern suburbs, three or four miles away. Fergus had been worrying about this visit and what he would say to her, not just for the whole of Saturday but Thursday and Friday as well. In the event – as was so often the case in the event – things turned out perfectly satisfactorily and with the minimum of pain. Almost the first thing Dr Palmer said was that she was glad to have an opportunity to talk to him alone because she was thinking of retiring and would like to hear his views. Driving home again, one anxiety removed, instead of relaxing, Fergus perforce allowed the worry which the Dr Palmer business had temporarily displaced to return.

What was he going to do about the surgery extension?

If the city council's planning committee allowed the extension there was no problem but he could not know for
the next three weeks whether permission would be granted. In the meantime a building that had been specifically constructed as a private clinic had come on to the market. In a moment or two he would pass it, it was up here on Ruxeter Road. The asking price was seventy thousand pounds, rather less than the extensions were going to cost. He would have to take out a mortgage anyway, there was no question of anything else. His boys were at present costing him and Lucy the maximum, with Ian at university and Angus and Mungo both at their public school. And he would prefer to keep the beautiful old building in which the practice was currently housed. The top floor, for instance, would one day make an excellent flat if any of the boys should want it.

While he waited for planning permission it was most likely that the clinic building would be sold to someone else. The estate agent had told him as much. He was passing it now, and stopping at a red light, turned to look at it. That stark sixties architecture, that box construction and plate-glass windows weren't to his taste but how much did his taste matter? It might so easily happen that planning permission was refused and this building simultaneously lost to him.

The lights changed. It was as Fergus was moving off that he caught sight of his son Mungo walking along the opposite pavement in the direction of a row of derelict houses, condemned to demolition and boarded up, and a public house called the Gander. Since Mungo could scarcely have any business at the condemned houses he must be going to the pub. Because of his great height he could easily pass for four years older than he was. Fergus very much disliked the thought of his youngest going into pubs at the age of fourteen but he didn't know what he could do about it. He drove on with a fresh worry in reserve.

On one side of the wide road were row upon row of little poky shops, opposite them a bingo hall and the old Fontaine Cinema. All those houses awaiting demolition didn't improve matters. But when they were demolished and new blocks erected, what then? He could offer for that clinic building and proceed with negotiations while he was waiting to hear if planning permission had been granted. And then, if he got his permission, withdraw from the purchase. It would be
dishonourable and underhand and Fergus knew he couldn't do it.

But suppose he lost both? What would happen then was that he would have to look around for other premises and whatever they were, they would cost him a hundred thousand pounds, not seventy. He put the car away in the garage at the bottom of the garden, a converted coachhouse. The Cameron garden was a pleasing wilderness of old pear trees and lilac bushes growing out of shaggy grass. Or Lucy said it was pleasing and the boys used to play in it when they were younger. Fergus would have liked a pretty garden with flowerbeds and rose bushes like his grandmother had had in Oban, but he wouldn't have liked to do the gardening, as Lucy pointed out.

She was lying in an armchair with her feet up. Ian and Gail sat on the sofa, holding hands and yelling with laughter at
Some Like It Hot
on television.

‘How did it go, darling?' said Lucy in her sleepy, smiling way.

‘OK. Fine. Much better than I thought.'

‘Things are always much better than you think.'

Fergus smiled rather sadly. ‘If life has taught me anything it's that while most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.'

If Gail hadn't been there he would have said something about Mungo. He went downstairs to get himself a drink. Fergus usually made himself a cup of cocoa in the evenings and in the mornings too sometimes. He made it with whole, full-cream milk and real cocoa – not drinking chocolate – and white granulated sugar, first mixing cocoa, sugar and a little of the milk to a paste in the mug, then pouring on the milk at the zenith of its boiling. His wife and children laughed at this and always refused offers of his cocoa, which Fergus had never understood: why it should be funny, why there was apparently something intrinsically funny in the very idea of cocoa, when in fact it was the most delicious drink he had ever tasted.

He found his son Angus in the kitchen, with a slice of cold pizza in one hand and a blue cardboard box, something to
do with the computer, in the other. Since he and Lucy had given Angus that computer for his birthday he had been obsessed by it.

‘I was looking for somewhere to keep the floppy discs.'

‘Why can't you keep them in your room?' said Fergus, opening a new tin of cocoa.

‘When I've saved a file to archives I don't want the floppy discs in the same area as the hard disc, do I? I mean suppose there was a fire in my room?'

Fergus didn't know what he was talking about. For form's sake, he offered cocoa. Angus shook his head abstractedly, climbed up on to a stool and put the box on the top shelf of a cupboard, up among the wine-making equipment no one had used for ten years.

‘Angus, do you think Mungo goes to pubs?'

‘Mungo? What would he do that for? He wouldn't even have a glass of wine at my party.'

‘I thought I saw him going into a pub.'

‘Unless maybe he's a secret drinker.' Fergus's children were never much comfort to him. They seldom allayed his fears. ‘Where was this pub then?'

‘Ruxeter Road, near where all those houses are going to be pulled down. I shouldn't talk to you about him. It's not fair on you or him. I daresay he was just walking home, only it was a funny way for him to be going.'

‘I wouldn't worry if I were you, Dad,' said Angus. This was the sort of thing people always said to Fergus. He knew they wouldn't worry, that wasn't the problem.

He took his mug of cocoa back upstairs. Angus stood eating his pizza. It was quite clear to him where Mungo had been going, to the safe house which was one of the middle ones in the condemned row between the Gander and Collingbourne Road. He would have been meeting someone there or even hiding someone there from Stern, would most probably be there now.

And Angus realized that he too worried about Mungo, not like his father did, not jumping to crazy conclusions about Mungo's slinking off for illicit pints or gin and tonics, but about Mungo's being so – well, fixated on Spookside. Did he ever think of anything else? Didn't his school work
suffer? He was probably a bit young to be thinking about girls, Angus could understand that, but did he have ordinary friends? Did he have any other interests at all? This mantle that had fallen upon Mungo's shoulders was his own. And ‘fallen' was the wrong word anyway, for he had taken it off himself and placed it over Mungo. He had taught Mungo everything he knew, had inculcated in Mungo a passion for, espionage which he himself no longer shared. At fifteen he had grown out of Spookside. Surely the same would happen to Mungo, surely there would soon be signs of weariness . . .

Angus could remember it all very well. Sometimes, now he had the computer, he thought of putting it on that and keeping a record, though he didn't know for what purpose. For his own children, if he ever had any? For some sort of future social study?

The beginning of it all. Its inception. ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness' – Angus had read that under the picture on the Lyle's Golden Syrup tin but apparently it came from the Bible. He thought it expressed what had happened with him and Guy Parker and Spookside, as someone had christened it. As Guy had christened it. And now it was a world away, down there in his childhood when he had had other priorities and other needs.

He had been thirteen and Guy Parker had been thirteen too, a month or two older. They had known each other all their lives, been friends since, according to their mothers, those mothers met at the baby clinic. And Mrs Parker used to mind him and Ian while his own mother was working at the hospital. Guy and he went to prep school together, Hintall's, where Ian had been and Mungo was then in the second form.