Simon wished he’d remembered to pick up his phone. He could have phoned Charlie. And said what? That Aidan Seed had come to Euston station for his tea? She’d have pissed herself laughing.
Seed had to be going on somewhere. No one came all the way from Spilling to London to have their dinner in a train station food court. Yeah, Charlie would say, just like no one confesses to murdering women who aren’t dead.
Simon was freezing, having left his coat in the car, and getting hungrier by the second. He groaned when Seed got up to buy more food. Two doughnuts and a coffee.
Greedy bastard.
Seed sat down again. He seemed in no hurry at all.
Finally, at twenty-five past six, he stood and stretched. He left the food court without picking up his newspaper and made for the station exit. Simon followed him out on to the Euston Road, to a crossing. He hung back, but there was no need. There were so many people pushing along the pavement in both directions that Seed would have had a job spotting him even if he’d been looking.
Simon crossed the road and kept his eye on the shiny black shoulder patches ahead. A woman coming in the opposite direction banged his arm with hers. Simon mumbled, ‘Sorry,’ but the woman said nothing, though their collision had been her fault. He couldn’t believe how rude some people were. Aware that his mind had drifted, he pushed the thought away.
The black jacket was gone. How could Seed have disappeared so quickly? The pavement was busy but not that busy. It wasn’t possible that Simon had lost him in the split second he’d spent thinking about that sodding woman.
Two people walking ahead, a man and a woman, turned right and went round the side of a wide building with large windows symmetrically spaced across its faμade. Simon looked because it was the only other option. If Seed wasn’t ahead, behind or across the road . . .
There he was, going in through a side door at the top of a concrete ramp. He stopped when he saw the man and woman approach, said hello to them, but it wasn’t the sort of greeting that would pass between friends, Simon thought. They knew each other, but not well.
Once they’d gone inside, Simon approached the door and saw that it had been wedged open. He peered into a wide, empty foyer containing a reception desk with a cash till at one end. Beyond the foyer was a corridor leading to another door. Closed. There was a poster on it that Simon couldn’t read, and a table to the left, covered with leaflets, books and pastel-coloured pamphlets.
Three elderly men with long, straggly hair and matted beards passed him on their way in, leaving in their wake a smell of stale sweat infused with alcohol. Homeless, Simon guessed. Once they’d gone into the room, he moved. The poster on the door at the far end of the corridor was headed ‘Quaker Quest’. Immediately, Simon thought of his two miserable experiences of Laser Quest in the early 1990s—birthday parties he’d been unable to avoid, friends from university who strove to be wacky. He pictured the three ageing tramps he’d just seen running around a darkened room, brandishing glowing swords.
‘A spiritual path for our time,’ the poster said. ‘Monday evenings, Friends House, Euston, 6.30 p.m. All welcome.’ At the bottom there was a website address:
www.quakerquest.org
. Simon picked up a leaflet from the table, a mini-version of the poster, but with more text. ‘Are you looking for a spiritual path that is simple, radical, contemporary? The Quaker experience could speak to you. We offer a series of six informal open evenings, exploring such issues as equality, peace, God, spiritual practice and faith in action. We will share our individual and common insights through presentations, discussions, questions and an experience of Quaker worship.’
Simon skimmed the titles of the books:
A Light That Is Shining
,
The Amazing Fact of Quaker Worship
,
God Is Silence
. He glanced at the closed door. It sounded as if there were twenty, perhaps thirty people chatting inside. Every so often, Simon caught a whiff of egg. Were there sandwiches? Was that why the three homeless men were there—free food?
Simon picked up a pamphlet called
Advices and Queries: the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain
. The booklet contained paragraphs of spiritual wisdom, numbered one to forty-two. Beneath the forty-second, there was a quote from someone called George Fox, dated 1656, about being a good example to others and walking cheerfully with God. Simon flicked through the pages, reading some of the shorter passages. Number eleven made him angry: ‘Be honest with yourself. What unpalatable truths might you be evading? When you recognise your shortcomings, do not let that discourage you. In worship together we can find the assurance of God’s love and the strength to go on with renewed courage.’
When you recognise your shortcomings, do not let that discourage you? Not a word about addressing those shortcomings, trying to stamp them out or replace them with more noble character traits. For the first time in his adult life, Simon felt nostalgic for the Catholicism of his youth.
He stood motionless in the corridor and listened as the clash of voices subsided and a woman started to speak. The predictable welcome, the timetable for the evening—Simon could hear most of it clearly enough. He frowned when he heard her mention Frank Zappa, assumed he’d misheard. No, there was the name again: she was asking if everyone had heard of Frank Zappa.
Bizarre.
No one said they hadn’t, as far as Simon could make out, but the woman told them who he was nonetheless. ‘Mr Zappa is reported to have once said, “If you want God, go direct”,’ she told her audience. A few people laughed.
A man’s voice took over, saying, ‘We Friends agree with Mr Zappa. God doesn’t need the help of a man in a silk suit asking you for money. Quakerism is an experience-based faith—we only trust what we’ve experienced ourselves. Quakers have an unmediated relationship with God—in other words, we go direct. There’s no holy book, no churches or clergymen, no official creed, and we don’t always use the same words. We define our experience of this immense “something other” in different ways. “The Divine” is one, “God” is another, “the light” . . .’
‘You can go in, you know.’ Simon turned, found a security guard standing behind him, an elderly man with a concave chest. ‘People turn up late all the time.’
‘I’m all right out here.’
‘Suit yourself. They won’t bite.’ The man started to walk away.
‘Is there anything else going on here tonight?’ Simon called after him. ‘In the building, I mean.’
‘No. Just Quaker Quest.’
Simon thanked him. No doubt, then: Aidan Seed was inside that room—a man who’d looked Simon in the eye and sworn he believed only in the material world, facts and science.
Checking the security guard wasn’t watching him, Simon turned the door handle, opened the door a fraction. Now there was a gap between it and the frame that was wide enough to see through. He saw chairs in semi-circular rows, people’s backs—some straight, some hunched. There was Seed, in the middle of the front row. Simon couldn’t see his face.
Beyond the chairs, the top half of the woman who had mentioned Frank Zappa was visible. She was talking now about something called ‘giving ministry’. She was young, younger than Simon, with a pretty, doll-like face, which surprised him. He frowned. Had he been expecting everyone at Quaker Quest to be pig-ugly? Her hair was dark brown and glossy, centre-parted and tied back from her face. Like Olive Oyl from the
Popeye
cartoons, only more attractive. She wore a blue sweatshirt and a rectangular blue plastic badge on a string round her neck, with a large white ‘Q’ on it.
The other speaker, the man, wore the same uniform. He was bald, overweight and sweaty. When the woman stopped talking, he took over, defining what worship meant to him. ‘It’s in every sense the spring, the ground,’ he said. ‘It’s what sends me out into the world.’ Having delivered his lines, he stood back, smiling.
‘When all the still centres of all the people present meet in the middle, we call that a “gathered meeting”,’ said Olive Oyl. ‘When a meeting gathers, that’s our opportunity to get to know one another in the things that are eternal. Actually . . .’ She paused and giggled, as if she’d just remembered a rude joke. Simon imagined the sort of comments Colin Sellers would be making if he were here.
I’d like to meet you in the middle, darling.
Etcetera.
‘To go back to the subject of ministry for a second, I had a funny experience that I’ll share with you, even though it’s a bit embarrassing,’ said the woman. ‘Sometimes, in the silence and the stillness, you start to get what seem like little messages. Some are for you to share with the meeting, others are for you alone. Over time, you learn to distinguish one kind from the other. Sometimes you get a message that seems to be teasing you.’
The tittering that followed this remark had a knowingness about it; evidently there were people in the room who knew all about receiving teasing messages from—what had the sweaty bloke called it? The Immense Something Other.
Wankers
, thought Simon before he could help it. He resolved to be more accepting and tolerant, the minute he’d got the hell away from Friends House.
‘One day when I went to meeting, I was feeling a bit hot and bothered. I’d had a silly row with my boyfriend that morning,’ Olive Oyl continued. ‘I’d caught him rinsing some cutlery and putting it back in the drawer, still wet. When he told me there was no point drying it, that it would dry on its own in the drawer, I went ballistic. Anyway, at meeting later that morning, I started to hear this voice in my head. It kept saying, “Cutlery is not eternal.” ’ She laughed, and her audience laughed with her. ‘I knew that message wasn’t to be shared—it was a private joke, just for me. And I was so grateful for that. It’s no accident that gratefulness and “great fullness” sound the same.’
The radiant expression on her face made Simon want to gag, as did her contrived avoidance of the word ‘gratitude’. He’d have liked to tell her what he thought she was greatly full of. Applause broke out. Simon had seen and heard enough. He was about to stand back when he saw Aidan Seed turn in his chair. He wasn’t clapping with the rest of them. He was the only person Simon could see who wasn’t.
Seed looked sickened. Even from a distance, in profile, through a crack between a door and its frame, his disgust was unmistakeable. ‘You’re not one of them,’ Simon muttered under his breath. ‘You’re never going to be one of them. So what are you doing here?’ He wasn’t expecting an answer, neither from Seed, who couldn’t hear him, nor from a supreme being eager to communicate with him confidentially, so he wasn’t surprised when he didn’t get one.
He went outside, hailed the first free cab he saw and told the driver to take him back to Muswell Hill. To Ruskington Road.
Charlie watched as the door to Seed Art Services opened with a slow creak. A few seconds later, Ruth Bussey burst out of the dark interior as if someone had shoved her from behind. She was wearing flip-flops on her feet. No socks or tights tonight either, Charlie noticed, and still limping. Charlie wondered again why anyone who hadn’t sprained their ankle would pretend they had.
She hurried over, wanting to catch Ruth before she got to her car, not caring if it was obvious that she was coming from the trees by the river, where she had no reason to be unless she’d been spying on the workshop. ‘Ruth!’
Ruth turned with a cry, then fell back against her Passat, pressing her hand against her chest.
‘I’ve been knocking and knocking,’ Charlie told her. ‘Since five thirty. But you know that, don’t you? You were in there all the time. Sitting in the pitch black with the door locked.’
‘I was thinking,’ said Ruth. Her voice lost itself in the biting wind that blew strands of hair in her face. ‘Trying to decide what to do.’
‘And did you?’
‘Yes.’ From her puffy eyelids and the chapped skin between her nose and upper lip, it was clear that crying had played a significant part in the decision-making process. ‘I wasn’t completely honest with you before, and it got me nowhere. I thought you’d laugh me out of the police station if I told you the full story.’
‘Where’s Aidan?’ Charlie asked curtly. What did the silly cow expect—a card saying, ‘Congratulations, you’ve stopped lying’?
‘I don’t know. I don’t know when he’ll be back. I don’t know much, but I’m willing to tell you what I do know, if you’ll help me. You’ve got to.’ Ruth grabbed Charlie’s arm. ‘He said he was going to kill her.’
‘What?’ A remark like that couldn’t be ignored, even if it came from the least trustworthy person on the planet, which Ruth Bussey might very well be, Charlie thought. ‘Who said he was going to kill who?’
‘Aidan. Mary. He called her “that bitch”. He’s not in Manchester—I rang Jeanette at the City Art Gallery. He wasn’t there last weekend . . .’
‘Slow down. You’re not making sense.’
Ruth shivered convulsively in her crumpled white shirt. Charlie had her coat in the boot of her Audi. ‘Leave your car,’ she said. ‘I’ll drive you home and we can talk there.’ She would get inside that bloody lodge house one way or another. She’d been irritated all day by the thought of Malcolm Goat-man Fenton trying to keep her out.
‘A man’s been following me,’ said Ruth, as they walked down Demesne Avenue to Charlie’s car. ‘No, that’s wrong. Not following—he doesn’t stalk me when I go out or anything, but he walks past my house. With a black Labrador.’ Having started to talk, she seemed unable to stop—the words flowed out, devoid of tone, as if all she wanted was to get it over with. ‘I first noticed him last June. He was there every day for a while. Then he disappeared, for months. I thought he’d stopped but . . . he came back on Sunday, yesterday. I can show you—I’ve got him on tape. I saw him this morning too. Aidan says he’s just walking his dog in the park. He gets impatient when I mention it, calls me paranoid, but he’s never seen him, the way he looks at the house.’