The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (23 page)

THERE MUST BE some kind of disease that causes people to talk like that, and the name for it must be something like Airline Syllable Stress Syndrome. It’s the disease that seems to kick in at about ten thousand feet and becomes more and more pronounced, if that’s a good word to use in this context, with altitude until it levels out at a plateau of complete nonsense at about 35,000 feet. It makes otherwise rational people start saying things like “The captain has now turned off the seatbelt sign,” as if there were someone lurking around the cockpit attempting to deny that the captain has done any such thing, that he is indeed the captain and not an impostor, and that there aren’t a whole bunch of second-rate and inferior seatbelt signs that he mightn’t have been fiddling about with.

Another thing that Dirk reflected on as he settled back into his seat was the curious coincidence that not only does the outside of an aircraft look like the outside of a vacuum cleaner, but also that the inside of an aircraft smells like the inside of a vacuum cleaner.

He accepted a glass of champagne from the cabin steward. He supposed that most of the words that airline staff used, or rather most of the sentences into which they were habitually arranged, had been worked so hard that they had died. The strange stresses that cabin stewards continually thumped them with were like electric shocks applied to heart-attack victims in an attempt to revive them. Well.

What a strange and complicated hour and a half that had been. Dirk was still by no means sure that something somewhere had not gone terribly wrong, and he was tempted, now that the seatbelt sign had been turned off by the captain, to go and take a bit of a casual stroll through the aircraft to have a look for his quarry. But no one was going to be getting on or off the aircraft for a little while now, so he would probably be wiser to restrain himself for an hour. Or even longer. It was, after all, an eleven-hour flight to Los Angeles. He had not been expecting to go to Chicago today, and the sight of his quarry making a beeline for the check-in desk for the 1330 flight to Chicago had made him lurch. However, a resolution was a resolution, so after a brief pause to make sure that his quarry hadn’t merely gone up to the check-in desk to ask directions to the tie shop, Dirk had made his way light-headedly to the ticket sales desk and slammed plastic.

Overwhelmed with his sudden solvency, he had even booked himself business class. His anonymous employer was obviously someone of means who was not going to quibble over a few minor expenses.

Suppose his quarry was travelling business class? Dirk would not be able to keep tabs on him from a seat stuck in the back of the plane. There was almost an argument there for travelling first class, but not, Dirk reluctantly admitted to himself, a sane one.

First class? He just didn’t look it. The fare would be quite a few months rent on his flat. But who knows? Maybe he had caught the eye of a Hollywood casting director who was whisking him over for a screen test. It wouldn’t be difficult to slip into the first-class cabin and have a quick look around, but it would be difficult to do it without attracting attention.

Not on the plane? Dirk had seen him heading in towards passport control, but there had been a moment when he had suddenly looked round and Dirk had ducked quickly into the bookshop.

A few seconds later, when Dirk next glanced up, his quarry had gone—into, Dirk had assumed, passport control. Dirk had lingered for a decent interval, bought some newspapers and books, and then made his way through passport control and into the departure area himself.

It had not especially surprised him that he had not spotted his quarry anywhere in the departure area: it was a shining maze of pointless shops, cafes, and lounges, and Dirk felt that there was nothing to be gained by rushing around hunting for him. They were being funnelled inexorably in the same direction anway. They’d be on the same plane.

Not on the plane? Dirk sat stock still. Thinking back, he had to admit that the last time he had actually physically seen his quarry was before he had even gone through passport control, and that everything else was based on the assumption that his quarry was going to do what he, Dirk, had decided he was going to do. This, he now realised, was actually quite a large assumption. Cold air trickled down his neck from the nozzle above him.

Yesterday he had inexpertly boarded a bus while tailing this man. Today, it seemed, he had inadvertently boarded a plane to Chicago. He put his hand to his brow and asked himself, honestly, how good a private detective he really was. He summoned a cabin steward and ordered a glass of whisky, and nursed it as if it were very ill indeed. After a while he reached into his plastic bag of books and newspapers. He might as well just pass the time. He sighed. He drew out of the bag something he had no recollection of putting there. It was a courier delivery packet, which had already been opened. With a slow frown developing on his forehead, he pulled out its contents. There was a book inside. He turned it over, wonderingly. It was called Advanced Surveillance Techniques. He recognised it. He’d had a flyer for it yesterday in the post. He’d screwed it up and thrown it to the floor. Folded between a couple of pages of the book was the exact same flyer, flattened and smoothed out. With a deep sense of foreboding, Dirk slowly unfolded it. Scrawled across it in felt tip, in handwriting that was oddly familiar, were the words “Bon Voyage!” The cabin steward leaned across him. “Can I freshen your drink, sir?” he said.

THE SUN STOOD high above the distant Pacific. The day was bright, the sky blue and cloudless, the air, if you liked the smell of burnt carpets, perfect. Los Angeles. A city I have never visited.

A car, a blue convertible, sleek and desirable, came sweeping west out of Beverly Hills along the, as I understand it, gracious curves of Sunset Boulevard. Anybody seeing such a car would have wanted it.

Obviously. It was designed to make you want it. If people had turned out not to want it very much, the makers would have redesigned it and redesigned it until they did. The world is now full of things like this, which is, of course, why everybody is in such a permanent state of want.

The sleek, desirable blue convertible swept on. There is a set of traffic lights, I understand, on the borders of Bel Air and Brentwood, and as the car approached them, they turned red. The car drew to a halt. The woman shook her hair and adjusted her sunglasses in the mirror. As she did so, she caught sight of a brief flicker of movement in the mirror as a small, dark-haired figure emerged quietly from the shade of the roadside and snuck round the back of the car. A moment later he was leaning right over her, pointing a small handgun into her face. I know even less about handguns than I do about clothes. I’d be completely hopeless in Los Angeles. I’d be laughed at not only for my lack of dress sense but also my pitiful inability to tell a Magnum .38 from a Walther PPK or even, for heaven’s sake, a derringer. I do know, however, that the gun was also blue, or at least blue-black, and that the woman was startled out of her wits to have it pointed into her left eye from a range of just under one inch. Her assailant gave her to understand that now would be an excellent moment for her to vacate her seat and, no, not to take the key out of the car or even to attempt to pick up her bag, which was lying on the seat next to her, but just to be very cool, move very easily, very gently, and just get the fuck out of the car.

The woman tried to be very cool, to move very easily and very gently, but was hampered by the fact that she was shaking with uncontrollable fear as the gun bobbed about just an inch or so from her face like a mayfly in the summer. She did, however, get the fuck out of the car. She stood trembling in the middle of the road as the thief jumped into the car in her place, gunned the engine in a quick roar of triumph, and careered sharply off along Sunset Boulevard, around the bend, and away. She twisted around on the spot in an agony of shocked helplessness. Her world had turned abruptly upside down and tipped her out of it, and she was now, suddenly and unexpectedly, that most helpless of all people in Los Angeles, a pedestrian.

She tried to wave down one or two of the other cars on the road, but they manoeuvred politely past her.

One of them was an open-topped Mustang with the radio playing loudly. I’d love to be able to say that it was tuned to an oldies station and that the words “How does it feeeeel? How does it feeeeeel?” snarled out at this moment, but there are limits even to fiction. It was an oldies station, but the old song it was playing was “Sunday Girl” by Blondie, and so wasn’t even remotely appropriate, seeing as this was a Thursday. What could she do?

Another perfect crime. Another perfect day in the City of Angels. And only one tiny little lie.

IF THERE is an uglier building in England than Ranting Manor, then I haven’t seen it. It must be hiding somewhere and not, like Ranting Manor, squatting in the middle of a hundred acres of rolling parkland.

The original estate consisted of many more hundreds of acres that were the pride of Oxfordshire, but generations of syphilitic idiocy and blitheringness have reduced it to its current decrepit state—an ill-kempt bunch of woods, fields, and lawns littered with the results of various failed attempts to raise money by whatever means seemed to someone like a good idea at the time: a godforsaken fun fair, a once quite well-stocked zoo, and, of more recent provenance, a small high-technology business park, current occupant one faltering computer games company, now cast adrift by its American parent and believed to be the only such company in the world making a loss. You could find a billion-barrel oilfield in the grounds of Ranting Manor and you could pretty much guarantee that within a couple of years it would be operating at a loss, and would require the selling of the family tin to keep it going. The family silver has long since gone, of course, along with most of the family. Disease, alcohol, drugs, sexual imbecility, and poorly maintained road vehicles have combined to cut vicious swathes through the ranks of the Rantings and reduced them to almost none.

How much history would you like? Maybe just a very little. The Manor itself dates back to the thirteenth century, or at least bits of it do. The bits are all that remain of the original monastery, inhabited for a couple of centuries or so by a devout order of calligraphers and pederasts. Then Henry VIII got his mitts on it and handed it over to a courtly scumbag called John Ranting, in return for some spectacular piece of loyal villainy. He knocked it down and rebuilt it after his own pleasure, which was probably pleasing enough, seeing as the architects of the Tudor period pretty much knew what they were doing: stout beams, nice plasterwork and leaded windows, all the things we now value enormously but that John Ranting’s descendants, unfortunately, did not—especially the Victorian rubber magnate Sir Percy Ranting, who, in the 1860s, tore much of it down and rebuilt it as a hunting lodge. These Victorian

“hunting lodges” were built because the immensely wealthy merchants of the age were not supposed to parade their actual penises around in public, instead of which vast tracts of pretty and innocent English countryside had their erections inflicted upon them. Big, bulbous, ruddy buildings with vast ballrooms, grand, angular staircases, and as many turrets and crenellations as a recreational condom.

The nineteenth century was, in aesthetic terms, disastrous enough for Ranting Manor, but right slap-bang after it, of course, came the twentieth, with all its architectural theories and double glazing. The main additions during this period were, in the thirties, a sort of large Nazi billiard room and in the sixties an indoor swimming pool, tiled in orange and purple, to which were now added various clumps of brightly coloured fungus.

The thing that binds all these different styles together is a general air of dampness and decay and a sense that if a public-spirited citizen tried to set the place alight, it would go out well before the fire brigade arrived. What else? Oh yes. It’s haunted.

Enough of the wretched building.

At about ten-thirty in the evening, which would make it roughly the same time that the car was being stolen on Sunset Boulevard, a small perimeter gate squeaked open. The main iron gates to the estate were kept locked at night, but the side gate was usually to be found unfastened. A reputation for being an unwholesome and troublesome place was usually enough to deter any intruders. An old sign on the main gate said BEWARE OF THE DOG, beneath which someone had scrawled, “Why single out the dog particularly?”

The night was dull. The moon was up, or at least half of it was, but for the most part it was shrouded in clouds. The two shadowy figures limped their way in unison along the driveway, resembling, from a distance, a child’s pulling toy with a couple of off-centre wheels. They were taking the long way to the house. This wound a circuitous route through the estate, passing some of its failed or failing business enterprises on the way.

The dog whined and grumbled a little until its master bent down stiffly and let it off its leash, whereupon it gave a gruff yelp of pleasure, lurched forward a couple of paces, and then resumed its hobbling plod, in unison with, but now a good two of yards ahead of, its master. From time to time it glanced back to check that its master was still there, that all was well, and that nothing was going to jump out and bite them.

Moving thus, they slowly rounded a long bend in the drive, the man hunched inside a long dark coat, despite the easy temperature of the evening. After a few minutes they passed on their left the entrance to the zoo that had been such a drain on the estate’s limited resources. There were very few animals left in it now: a couple of goats, a chicken, and a capybara, the world’s largest rodent. There was also a special guest animal in the zoo at the moment, being housed temporarily while its normal quarters in Chatsfield Zoo were being rebuilt. Desmond—the animal’s name was Desmond—had only been in residence for a couple of weeks so far, but his presence had, not surprisingly, caused a bit of a stir in the village of Little Ranting.

As the man and his dog passed the entrance to the zoo, they paused for a moment, and then turned and looked at it again. The low, wooden gate, which should have been secured at this time of night, was standing open. The dog whimpered, and snuffled around on the ground, which seemed to have been scuffed and churned up a little. The man hobbled up to the open gate and peered into the darkness beyond. Among the low huddle of buildings, all was darkness, except for a single dim light that glowed from the hut where Roy Harrison, Desmond’s keeper from Chatsfield, was staying. Nothing untoward.

No sign of movement. So why was the gate open? It probably meant nothing. Most things, the man would have told you if you had asked him, probably meant nothing. Nevertheless, he summoned his dog with a gruff syllable and limped crossly through the gate, closing it behind them. Slowly, grindingly, they made their way along the gravel path to the single source of light: Roy Harrison’s temporary abode.

The place seemed quiet.

The man rapped sharply on the door and listened. No answer. He knocked again. Still, nothing. He opened the door. It wasn’t locked, but then, there was probably no reason for it to be. As he pushed his way into the tiny, dark hallway, his nose twitched at an odd smell. Zookeepers’ lodgings were exactly where you would expect to find a vast and rich range of odd smells, but not necessarily this particular sweet, cloying one. Hmmph. The dog let out a very, very slight little yelp.

On the right side of the hallway was a door, the source of both the light that could be seen from outside and the fragrance that could be smelt within. Still, all was quiet. Carefully the man pushed the door open.

At first glance he thought that the figure slumped over the kitchen table might be dead, but after a long, drawn-out moment of silence it emitted a light, riffling snore.

The sleeping keeper continued to snore. Next to him was a collection of crumpled beer cans, a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and a couple of glasses. In the ashtray lay the butts of three joints, and scattered around were bits of a ripped-up cigarette packet, a packet of cigarette papers, and a piece of silver foil twisted up in the traditional manner. The source of the smell. Roy had clearly shared a big evening with somebody, and that somebody had clearly then pushed off. The visitor tried gently to shake him by the shoulder, but to no avail. He tried again, but this time the keeper slowly slid sideways and collapsed in an untidy, slobbering heap on the floor. The dog was so startled by this that it leapt wildly for cover behind the sofa. Unfortunately the dog was larger and heavier than the sofa and knocked it backwards as he jumped over it, causing it to topple over on top of him. The dog yelped again, scrabbled briefly at the linoleum, and then leapt for cover once more behind a small coffee table, breaking it. Having run out of places to leap to, the dog cowered back in a corner, quivering with fright.

Its master satisfied himself that Roy was merely in a temporary state of chemical imbalance and not in any actual danger and, coaxing his dog with a few soothing words, left again. Together they followed the path back towards the gate and let themselves back out onto the main driveway, heading on the way they had been going, hobbling towards the main house. There were heavy scuff marks on the driveway.

Desmond suddenly felt bewildered. In an instant everything he had always smelt about the world had gone all swimmy and peculiar on him. There were some lights flashing around him, but he didn’t mind that. Lights weren’t of any real concern to him. Blink blink. So what? But this was most peculiar. He would have said that he was hallucinating, except that he didn’t know the word, or indeed any word. He didn’t even know that his name was Desmond, but, again, it wasn’t the sort of thing that bothered him. A

name was just a sound you heard, and didn’t have that rich, heady reek of really being something. A

sound didn’t well up inside your head and go woomph the way a smell did. Smell was real, smell was something you could trust.

At least it had been up till now. But now he felt as if the whole world were tipping backwards over his head, and this, he couldn’t help feeling, was a very worrying thing for the world to do.

He took a deep breath to try to steady his huge bulk. He drew billions of rich little molecules over the sensitive membranes of his nostrils. Not that rich, in fact. The smells here were mean little smells—flat, stale, and bitter smells with an acrid undertow of something nasty being burnt. None of the large, generous smells of hot, grassy air and day-old dung that haunted his imagination, but at least these paltry little local smells should steady him and root him on the ground.

They didn’t.

Hhrrphraaah! Now he seemed to have two different and completely contradictory worlds in his head.

Graaarphhh! What was all this? Where had the horizon gone? That was it. That was why the world seemed to be tilting up above his head. Where there was usually a perfectly normal horizon, there now wasn’t one. There was more world instead. A lot more. It just went on and on and on into a strange and hazy distance. Desmond felt big weird fears welling up inside him. He had a sudden instinct to charge at something, but you couldn’t charge at a worrying uncertainty. He nearly stumbled.

Haaarh! The new bit of the world had vanished! Where was it? Where had it gone? There it was again!

It unfolded itself blotchily into place and he felt as if he were tipping over again, but this time he was able to steady himself more quickly. Stupid little lights. Blink blink blink. This new bit of the world—what was it? He peered forward uncertainly into it, letting his mind’s nostril play over it. Those lights were beginning to distract him. He shut his eyes to let him concentrate on his exploration, but when he did, the new world vanished! Again! He wondered for a dizzying moment if there was any connection between these two things, but making logical connections between things was not really one of Desmond’s strengths. He let it pass. As he opened his wrinkly little eyes again, the unearthly new world slowly unfurled itself in his mind. Once more he peered into it.

It was a wilder world than the one he was used to, a world of paths and hills. The paths forked, divided, and deepened into valleys, the ridges reared into high hills. The far distance was completely broken up into massive mountain ranges and dizzying canyons shrouded in shifting mists. He was filled with apprehension. Just as making logical connections between things was not one of Desmond’s strengths, neither was mountaineering.

The flattest, broadest path lay straight ahead of him, but as he turned his attention to it, worrying things began to become apparent. Something nasty lay down that path. Something big and nasty. Something even bigger and nastier, Desmond ventured to think, than Desmond himself. For a moment he blinked again, and annoyingly the whole thing vanished once more. When it reassembled itself in his mind’s nostril a second or two further on, the sense of impending disaster intensified.

Was that thunder?

Desmond didn’t usually mind thunder, scarcely noticed lightning, but this thunder he did mind. There was no uplifting swirl of heavy air dancing, just bad, cracking explosions of blackness. Desmond began to feel very fearful. His enormous bulk began to quake and shudder, and suddenly he began to run. The strange new world shattered and vanished. He ran like a truck. He hurtled through a flurry of small, feeble lights and brought a whole ton of some kind of stuff, he didn’t know what, banging down around him. It crashed noisily and flashed a bit, but Desmond ploughed straight through it. He was out of there, fleeing like a locomotive, smashing through a flimsy door, maybe even a wall, it was all the same to him. He hurtled out into the night air, pounding the ground with hammer blows from his enormous feet.

Things around him scattered from him. Things shouted. Distant, plaintive exclamations of alarm and despondency welled up in his wake, but Desmond didn’t care. He just wanted some night air in his lungs.

Even this night air, stale and acrid as it was, was good. It was cool and rushed over him and into him as he charged. There was hard pavement beneath his feet, then, briefly, bits of fencing around his neck, and then rough, scrubby grass beneath his pounding, churning feet.

He was near the top of a low hill. A real, earthy hill, not some fearsome hallucination rearing up in his mind like the approach of death. Just a hill, surrounded by other low, sloping hills. The sky was clear of clouds, but hazy and murky. Desmond was not interested in stars. You couldn’t get a good whiff off a star, but here you could scarcely even see them, either. He didn’t care, he was just getting up a good heavy speed going down this hill, waking up some sleepy muscles and getting them going. Braaarrrm!