Shuttlecock (2 page)

I move suddenly forward to pull Peter up from the floor. I know I am about to act like an ogre, a madman – it’s happened before (when did all this begin?) but I can’t do anything about it. He tries to squirm free but I catch him by the collar. There is a moment when he swings obliquely, dangling in my grip, his sandalled feet not yet having found a footing on the floor, and just at this point, for some reason, I get a sudden mental vision of myself sitting in Quinn’s leather chair. At the same time I glimpse Marian standing in the doorway. She has been watching my anger with a resigned, long-suffering expression – she’s seen all this before too – but when I
seize on Peter she bites her lip and clenches the tea-towel in her hand.

‘Don’t you smirk at your father when he’s telling you off!’

Peter is on his feet now. I have my hands on his shoulders and I’m giving him a good, vigorous shaking. His little protuberant eyes bounce back and forwards on the end of his neck.

I finish with him, though he goes on shaking even when I’ve released him. Martin hasn’t moved; he has a hand guiltily covering his biscuits.

‘There’ll be no more television for either of you! This evening or any evening! That’s final. Do you hear? I said, do you –’

From both of them comes a thin, compliant ‘Ye-es.’

And then, again, I know what is going to happen next. I can predict it like a scene in a play. Peter is going to cry. Not helpless tears, of shock and distress – though that is how they will seem, and they will be real enough tears – but tears that are quite perfectly timed and calculated. Both he and Martin know that I am easily beguiled by tears. I will even take back what I have said and say sorry, for tears. Underneath everything, they know that I am essentially a weak man. That’s just the trouble. They know that when I rave at them and wallop them it’s because I’m weak. That’s why they don’t say Hello and turn to look at me when I come in. So all this show of strength means nothing.

Sure enough, Peter starts to blubber.

‘Huh!’ I say. ‘The Bionic Man never cries, does he?’

Peter’s tears actually check slightly at this. But I have to think of something fast to avoid being swayed by them.

‘Now, shall I tell you what you are going to do, right
this very instant? You are going to go out into the garden – on this nice, warm evening – and you are going to – dig out all the weeds in the far flowerbed –’ (even as I say this I remember that Marian has carried out precisely this task the previous afternoon) ‘– no, you are going to dig out all the stones, all the large stones, in
all
the flowerbeds, and put them in a
neat
pile by the compost heap. Do you understand?
Do you
– ?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘And you say Hello to me when I come in – okay?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘Well out you go then!’

And later, if they had dared and wished to, the boys could have seen Marian and me, through the kitchen window, arguing like sparring fish in a tank. They would have seen me jerking my hands and pointing my finger and Marian clamping her hand over the top of her head, as though to hold it in place, the way she does when she argues. We nearly always argue after my outbursts with the kids. It’s not so much that Marian takes issue with me for letting fly at them (she gave that up a long time ago) but that my tirades against the boys never seem to get used up or have sufficient effect with them alone and have to spill over onto Marian.

‘We don’t live at the top of a concrete block, do we? Or underground,’ I add for some reason. ‘We live in a house, with a garden. There’s a common just up the road. Grass, trees. It’s spring, isn’t it?’ I wave a hand towards the window. ‘Warm weather. So why do they have to sit in front of the television all the time?’

‘Yes! Yes! I’m not arguing with you! I’m not your children, am I? Ask them. Find out from them!’

‘It’s unnatural.’

‘All right. Ask
them
. You’re in charge.’

Through the window, Martin and Peter are crouched, backs half turned towards us, at the edge of one of the flowerbeds. It is already getting dark. They can probably hear Marian and me arguing. Our garden, like the gardens of the other houses in the road, is small – more a sort of extended back-yard. And it has a wall all the way round it so that anyone in it, viewed from the house, looks confined. Martin has a red polo-neck sweater and Peter a brown one and they both wear identical child’s blue jeans. They seem to be going through some strange semblance of activity, half earnest, half ironic. There are no large stones in our well-dug flowerbeds. They are looking for these mysterious large stones.

‘Tomorrow morning I want you to go down to that rental place and ask them to take our television back.’

‘Oh come on!’

‘I mean it. You do it. I thought you weren’t arguing with me. I meant what I said tonight. You stop the payments and get them to take back the television.’

‘I’m not going to do that.’

‘Oh yes you are,’ I say, grabbing Marian’s arm and poking a finger almost into her face. ‘Yes you bloody well are!’ Her eyes bob just like Peter’s.

And I’m suddenly astounded that all this is so predictable, and yet unpredictable too. Coming home and being bad-tempered and aggressive. As if every night I mean to be different. And tonight I had actually said to myself: a warm evening at the end of April; my interview with Quinn; my penitence on the train. I will say to Marian, ‘Get an old crust of stale bread. Come with me. We’re going to feed the ducks on Clapham Common.’ You see, underneath, I am a soft-hearted man. I wouldn’t
even have minded if the kids had wanted to stay in watching television. So much the better. I’ve never told Marian about Quinn and what’s going on at our office. There might have been ducklings on the pond, following their mothers – line astern. We’d have stood and thrown bread in the water. Marian would have been baffled. And perhaps I might have told her about my promotion.

But our life never has these tender moments. It’s been like this for years.

I work in an office five minutes’ walk from Charing Cross Underground, which is really a sub-department of the police. I hasten to add, I am not a policeman. I am more a sort of specialized clerk, an archivist. Our department has little to do with the day-to-day activities of the police – the police as the public think of them, the men in blue and conspicuous plain clothes. And yet it is an important, even an indispensable department.

Have you ever wondered what happens to the records of crimes that were committed long ago? Of police inquiries that took place up to a hundred years, or more, in the past? More to the point, have you ever wondered what happens to the records of crimes, or the evidence of possible crimes, relating to recent years, which because of some factor or other – often the death of the party or parties involved – have ceased to be acted upon? A suspected
child-molester, for example, who commits suicide before proceedings can be taken, so that, after the inquest, the case is officially closed. Or an almost-successful embezzler who, being discovered after years milking the company funds, succumbs to a fortuitous coronary. All such records are the business of our department. In our vaults you will find the memorials of century-old murders, arsons, thefts and frauds – the delight of professional criminologists who, admitted only by the strictest permit, sit sometimes all day, at little lamp-lit reading desks, working through sheaves of yellowed documents. But you will find also – or you would find, if Quinn ever allowed you to – information relating to the living; information sometimes of a nefarious and inflammatory nature, the subjects of which would, to say the least, feel uneasy if they knew such information were stored, no matter how discreetly and inertly, in a police building. But it is not true – in case you are beginning to draw in your nostrils – that we keep files on people as such. Ours are distinct from ordinary police criminal records, where the criminal history of any person possessing one can quickly be referred to. We deal solely with individual cases, and ones which have been formally closed. In the official phrase, with ‘dead crimes’.

What then is the object of our department? You will be surprised – the police are no fools. They know that every scrap of information is worth preserving. If in every hundred files only one contains a fact that may be useful in future, then it is worth keeping a hundred files. Before a case is closed, every avenue is checked first, so that what filters down to Quinn is only a tiny fraction of all that is handled. And once in our department, in the great majority of cases, there it stays, never to be touched again. But should some investigation yet-to-be discover
a new link, should the material in our files prove relevant to some other case, it is instantly unearthed.

That is the main function of our department. But there is another. You may be surprised again: the police not only aren’t fools, they consider their obligations too. What a relief from responsibility, what a weight off the official mind it would be if half the files in our office could be instantly destroyed. But they cannot be destroyed. And the police are aware of what possible harm might be done – not in the sense, of course, of direct incrimination, but in the damage done to reputations, livelihoods, personal trusts and confidences – if the contents of these files were revealed to the wrong people. We sit in a strong-room of secrets. We are custodians. Though custodians of what is often as much a mystery to us as to the public. For many of our files are sealed. Only Quinn can unseal and reseal them. And many are not only sealed but kept in safes and locked boxes which only Quinn can unlock.

What is it about institutions such as ours that invariably sites them underground? Most people, these days, go up from the street to work; we go down. We – that is, I and Quinn’s other four assistants, Vic, Eric, Fletcher and O’Brien – work in a cavernous room half below and half above pavement level. Every morning we descend into this crypt. Around us rise shelves and cabinets stretching up to the ceiling, containing, for the most part, general indexes, inventories and cross-reference catalogues. The case files are kept in a series of rooms adjoining the inner wall of our offices, and then, going back chronologically as you descend, there are two more floors of archives below ours.

Quinn’s own office occupies a privileged position on a superior level, like that of a bridge on a ship. The entrance
to it is off a corridor on the ground floor of the building, but its rear wall forms the upper half of an end wall of our large room. He had some bizarre ideas, the architect responsible for converting our building. A back door and a small flight of stairs enable Quinn to communicate directly with our office; and a glass panel has been set in his rear wall, so if he wishes – and Quinn often does – he can look down at us as we work. Quinn has a large leather chair, a heavy, old-fashioned desk set on a maroon carpet, and an external window which looks out of one wing of our building (a solid, stony structure, by the way, of several decades’ standing) where there is actually a strip of grass and three or four flowering cherry trees, one of them directly outside Quinn’s window. The leather chair apart, Quinn’s office is not luxurious – comfortable, imposing, but not luxurious. Doubtless, there are better appointed offices elsewhere in our building. But then I am not concerned, as it happens, with anyone beyond Quinn. And I envy Quinn his cherry tree and his daylight.

Although half our room is above ground level, there are no windows. The only natural light that filters in comes through one of those grilles of thick, opaque glass set into the pavement – which people walk over without noticing and which often denote underground public lavatories. In our case it is set into the ceiling at the far end from Quinn’s office, where our room actually extends a little way, at basement level, under the pavement. You can stand beneath it and hear, surprisingly remote and faint, the clip-clop of people walking above. There is a general complaint that if only the glass were clear you could look up skirts. I ought to point out, incidentally, that in our immediate office there are no female staff.

And what do we do in this dungeon? Very few inquiries
from outside are passed directly to the assistant staff. Our task, when this does happen, is routine: to consult the appropriate files, extract and collate the relevant information and draft a report to be sent, after vetting by Quinn, to the source of the inquiry. But only with the simplest and most straightforward queries are we allowed complete initiative. Most inquiries come via Quinn, so that, while we receive from him specific and express instructions, the reasons for them often remain obscure to us. And then a good many cases are handled solely by Quinn himself. Of these we know nothing.

What takes place with those cases that reach us is a sort of elaborate game of consequences – or, more accurately, hunt-the-thimble. Quinn has his own file index in his office. He gives one of us the code numbers of the files concerned and specifies the information to be extracted. Now, we are not necessarily told the purpose for which this information is to be obtained. In the case of complex inquiries where more than one file may be involved and several items of information have to be connected, we may work quite methodically and logically, but on quite false initial assumptions. Then Quinn shows us no mercy. He opens the back door of his office, waving the draft report of our findings. He stands at the top of his flight of stairs (Quinn scarcely ever comes down them; he has a slight limp in one leg, but I’m sure that’s not what prevents him) and yells out the name of the culprit. ‘Up here with you!’ And you go. Since I am the senior assistant and am given the majority of these more involved inquiries, it is usually my name that is yelled, and I have to bear the humiliation of being singled out in front of my colleagues.

But this is not all. If, in the course of an inquiry, you need one of the sealed files or one of the files that are kept
in Quinn’s safe, you have to apply to Quinn himself for access to the contents. In such an event, Quinn will do one of three things. He will unseal or unlock the file and give it to you – no problem; or he will say, ‘That’s all right, I’ll take over from here’ – causing you no more trouble at least, but rendering all your previous work wasted; or – and this is worst – he will retain the sealed file in question, briskly say, ‘I’ll deal with this,’ and tell you to carry out the remainder of the inquiry. Can you solve a mathematical problem if one of the factors needed to solve it is missing? And there is yet a further dilemma. Sometimes when looking up one of the files listed in Quinn’s instruction, you discover it is missing – absent from the shelves. Now there is a ready explanation for this. It simply means that the file is one of those Quinn himself is using in one of the inquiries he handles alone. Obviously, you are obliged to point this out. You do. ‘Excuse me, sir, but I think you must have this file – it’s not on the shelf.’ Quinn’s reply on these occasions is never direct. ‘Do I, Prentis? Do I? Hadn’t you better check first that it hasn’t been put in the wrong place?’ He looks at you over the top of his glasses. And then, after an unpleasant pause and with a sigh that seems to condemn you for stupidity: ‘All right, Prentis – I’ll carry on from here.’