The Miracle Inspector (13 page)

And so it was that he spent the week ferrying Angela to Maureen’s house every day on his way to work (with Jason in pursuit on his bicycle, though Lucas did not know it), so that Angela could sing to Christina and she and Maureen could hug each other in a womanly way (although not on camera).

On the way home every evening, he would pass by Maureen’s house to collect Angela and be offered preposterous home-made cakes and biscuits; ginger snaps, garibaldi, and those squashed up dried fruit things with chocolate on the bottom, whatever they were. If he didn’t eat enough of them while he was at the house – and it was difficult to know when he’d reached a limit she deemed suitable because Maureen was the only judge – then she would send him home with more of the stuff in a tin lined with greaseproof paper.

He somehow got into the habit of bringing little gifts to the house in return; a sparkly hair slide for Christina, a pot plant for Maureen. Small things, pretty, scented, lovely things that made Maureen almost crazily happily and caused her to remark how much he had made Christina smile and she only did that when she really liked someone.

Maureen was the perfect mother figure for Angela. He heard her asking Maureen one day, as he was in the other room saying hello to Christina, had she ever heard of the Possibilities Project? Maureen said no. Then he heard her ask Maureen did she remember the artist Anna Gray. But Maureen said she was sorry, she couldn’t recall the Possibilities Project or Anna Gray.

Having a famous person in the family, the rest of the family members were inclined to think other people must have heard of them, the way everyone always thinks other people know their secret, if they have one.

Maureen would have known Jesmond by name, of course, Angela didn’t even have to ask. Who could forget a man who had set free all the animals in London zoo and then written a poem about it? Anyone who had ever seen a ring-tailed lemur squashed on the road or the glow of predatory eyes high up in a tree, or heard of another tiger getting shot as it emerged from Hyde Park to take a bite out of one of the shoppers going into Harrods, they couldn’t help but bring Jesmond’s name to mind.

One night, when Lucas came to collect Angela, Maureen showed them a note that had come through her door the night before, shortly after Lucas had collected Angela and taken her home. It was handwritten in blue ink. When she saw it, Angela’s heart began to beat in an accelerated iambic metre. It was the same blue ink, the same handwriting as the poem Jesmond had put through her letterbox a couple of days earlier.

The message said:

If you want safe passage out of London, go down to Down Street.

Keep going down. Then head for Heathrow. Take a toll for the trolls.

From a well-wisher.

There was a poem enclosed with the note, entitled Gauzy Love Song. Maureen said that phrases such as ‘the merest puff’ and ‘a gentle exhalation’ appeared to allude to Christina’s illness and she thought the note might be from a paedophile.

‘Get rid of it,’ Lucas said.

‘You think it’s a trick?’ Maureen asked him.

‘It’s gobbledygook.’

Angela was offended that Maureen had waited to show it to Lucas, unconsciously believing it was important to talk it over with a man first. No doubt Maureen felt she was an honorary man because she’d once had a job. Well, her time as a reporter hadn’t done much to hone her investigative skills because Angela heard her admitting to Lucas that she was stumped, she had no idea what the note meant or who it was from. But Angela knew – it was meant for her. It was from Jesmond, who somehow understood that she had read some of those letters Lucas had destroyed and wanted to continue the correspondence.

Though she had no idea who it was from, the note had quite an effect on Maureen. She started to talk of leaving London. She talked of going to the countryside, somewhere remote, having picnics, walking with Christina to the top of a hill and rolling back down again, taking her shoes and socks off, paddling in streams.

This stirred Angela up. She forgot the mild animosity she’d felt towards Maureen at being excluded from discussions about the provenance of the note, and she talked of Australia and what they might do in that fine country, if only they could get there.

‘You’d find help for Christina, Maureen,’ she said. ‘And I could get a job.’

Lucas tried to put a stop to their nonsense, as Angela talked of giving birth to her children in safety and comfort while attended by female midwives, of swimming in the ocean, of barbecues, equality, friendships.

‘There’s no way any of us would ever get to Australia. No way. As for “heading for Heathrow”, what would be the point? There are no planes.’

‘We could go by ship.’

‘No, Angela. They chuck stowaways over the side when they find them. No one ever survives to tell the tale.’

‘How do you know so much about it, then?’

As usual, Maureen stood and waved goodbye at the door as they left. She was the oldest person he had seen in a while. It was the men who were taken away but the women lived on unseen, mouldering in the safety of their own homes. It made him sick to think about it. Which is how he came to promise that they would definitely make for Cornwall before Angela’s twenty-first birthday. That was a promise. They would drive slowly and carefully along the back routes. It would take them no more than a day. He had the passes from Jenkins, after all. Their birthdays were around the same time, actually. He would be twenty-five a few days after she turned twenty-one and they would be in Cornwall by then.

At last, they had something to look forward to. Angela was almost dizzy with excitement, staying up late every night when he brought her home from Maureen’s so she could select which treasures and keepsakes she would bring with them, having a trial pack then changing her mind, then returning to Maureen’s house to chatter to her about it all the next day.

It was a shame Lucas didn’t make more of that week. It was the last time he looked forward to anything.

Jason Prince was exhausted and emotional, but proud that he’d done the right thing for Jesmond’s family. Even though he was so tired, he sat down and worked on the poem he had been trying to write for a few days now, a eulogy that he would have liked to give to Jesmond’s family – that extravagantly tired-looking woman, that wan child – wrapped up with the information that it had cost him so much to obtain for them. But he couldn’t get the words right and he hadn’t wanted to delay their flight while he waited for the muse. Fortunately Jesmond had been fond of the booze, so had some of the rhymes he needed – clink, drink. He had some of the images he wanted – of Jesmond’s killers celebrating behind closed doors, dancing and singing, then pausing while one of them held up his hand to say a few words, to acknowledge the eminence of their foe. It wasn’t just a mention of the poetry and the songs that had to be worked into the poem, there was the extraordinary act of freeing the animals from the zoos which had made him as famous as anything else he had done. And it needed a killer couple of closing lines. So far he had, ‘
Jesmond,
here’s what I believe: you died/as you lived, because of poetry.
’ But did anyone care what Jason believed? Or that the words didn’t properly rhyme?

At least he’d been able to enclose the poem about the gauzy veil. It was done on a whim, really, inspired by the woman who lived at the address Jesmond had given him. He hadn’t dared put it through the letterbox of that house because of the ministry man. But she must have seen the poem – she spent all day with the woman and child he was now convinced were Jesmond’s wife and daughter – and he hoped she’d appreciated it. As friend or kin to a famous poet, she surely would have done.

He wouldn’t be able to show this new poem to anyone, for fear of it getting into the wrong hands and making him the target for retribution. He couldn’t even say that he hoped Jesmond would see it, wherever he was, because he didn’t believe that a person’s spirit lived on after he was dead. That’s why poetry was so important. Poetry survived.

When he finished it, he would put this piece with the others, and lock them away somewhere, and hope that his work would be found and admired one day after he was gone.

Lucas walked into the Ministry and everything was imperceptibly different. People looked at him oddly. He saw that whatever was to happen next would be beyond his control. It was the same feeling he used to get when it was his turn to be bullied at school. He knew that he could give himself up to it or he could fight, and that how he behaved might affect how people treated him in the future, although it wouldn’t affect what was going to happen to him now because it had already been decided.

He thought, am I making this happen or is it happening to me and I’m merely taking note of it? He went and sat in his office and felt frightened. He couldn’t say why. Was it the look from the security guard at the front desk as he came in, a taste in the air, a feeling he had? He tried to remember how he’d felt when he’d seen Angela’s bloody knickers on the floor, to console himself with a reminder that he had been wrong then.

But he wasn’t wrong now. Something was closing in on him. What were his options? What had caused this situation, first of all? If he knew that, then maybe he’d be able to rectify it, to make himself safe.

He had gone to Jones’s house and imagined kissing his wife. He had taken pot plants to Maureen’s house and received gingerbread in return. He had accepted passes from Jenkins and planned to use them to take Angela to Cornwall. But he hadn’t looked at any child pornography or made any bombs. And Jesmond, who had always been there, haunting the periphery of his life, was gone now and couldn’t damage him by turning up at his house and tipping off the authorities to their miracle inspector’s links to undesirables.

Then it hit him. Maureen. Perhaps Maureen was a terrorist or was known to consort with terrorists. There was no Mr Maureen. Of course, there was always a chance that he had died of natural causes or she had decided to go it alone from the get-go. But perhaps her husband had been considered dangerous and had been taken away by the authorities. Lucas didn’t know because you didn’t ask. He’d always thought it fortunate that his own father had died of liver failure at the age of thirty-nine, leaving his reputation intact. It was one of the things that had counted in Lucas’s favour when he’d been appointed to this job: he had no criminal relatives. His father had actually been highly regarded in some circles, being vaguely aristocratic and monied, and charming when drunk. But without doubt, the thing that had counted for Lucas the most was that his father had never gone to prison. If they’d known that Matthew had written the tunes for those protest songs! But few did – or few in authority, anyway. Jesmond had always been the front man.

Maureen. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Of course she was a rebel. An intelligent woman deprived of an interesting job in television news, with a child who didn’t receive the level of care she might get elsewhere, in more enlightened states or territories. All that biscuit-making was probably a cover for a home-made bomb factory. Angela spent all day there helping out. There would be spies and surveillance. Everyone would know what she was up to and now the finger would be pointed at him, too. All that crap about taking Christina to the countryside for a picnic. She’d probably been planning to go to a power station and plant a bomb.

Things in his office had been touched. He could see by the way they had been put back a little too neatly. People had looked at him oddly. His wife had been inveigled into bomb-making with a terrorist. He wasn’t surprised to look up and see that Jones had wandered into his office. Jones had a little false smile painted into the corners of his mouth from drinking Ribena.

Lucas wondered whether to rush at him shouting ‘arghhhhh’ and get his hands round Jones’s neck; a moment of glory before all Jones’s Ribena cronies crowded in from outside and kicked him in the kidneys until he died. Perhaps Jenkins would join forces with him, running in with a bag of cats so they could fling cats at Jones until they were overpowered. He couldn’t decide whether Jenkins would be on his side or not. Had he upset Jenkins with all that tosh about the hidden cameras and the pornography or had he helped him to see some higher truth about Jones and himself and the way London was run?

Lucas suddenly saw, with absolute clarity, that Jesmond and his father had been right. It would have been so much better to have been a cheerful, eccentric drunk, pissing off the authorities and being lauded for it by everyone else because he was so entertaining. Why go to work every day, investigating miracles that had never happened, why get up and brush your teeth and make love to your wife and do the washing up when it was all, inevitably, going to end like this, with Jones walking in to his office with a sneer.

But Jones didn’t seem to mean him any harm. He was unusually diffident.

‘There’ve been rumours,’ he began.

Lucas didn’t say anything.

‘If you found something, you’d tell me. Wouldn’t you, mate?’

Even Jones wanted to believe in miracles. Maybe he should tell Jones he’d gone to his house the other day because Joanna had reported a miracle. It was a brilliant excuse. But Jones might not know anything about the visit, so he’d be taking a risk by mentioning it. If only he could claim immunity before asking certain questions or saying certain things, the way he would if this was all just a game.

‘There are proper channels, you know,’ Lucas said primly.

‘I know,’ said Jones. He looked so hopeful, standing there, that Lucas might have warmed to him at last. They might have gone for a beer and talked it over and become friends. But just then, the soldiers came for him.

There were six of them, crowding into the doorway. It would have been impossible to run. Jones looked startled, then frightened, then upset, then helpless. He didn’t look as if he was responsible for what was happening, which might have been some comfort to Lucas if the six soldiers had been purely academic and not standing there, panting, stinking, big and real, waving their guns to show that they’d come for him. Lucas saw and understood all of this in the few seconds it took him to locate and fix on Jones’s face.

‘Help me,’ said Lucas. But Jones couldn’t.