Authors: Ian Rankin
‘Interesting,’ said Barclay. He’d got Dominique’s attention. She read through the pamphlet, but didn’t speak until the beer had been placed in front of her, demolished, and another one ordered.
‘Bandorff was mentioned in the Witch file,’ Barclay reminded her.
‘Yes, he was in Scotland when the Pope visited.’
‘It can’t be just coincidence.’
Dominique didn’t say anything. She was running her tongue over her gums, as though washing them clean of something.
‘So what happened up there?’ he asked.
Her second beer arrived, and this time she drank it slowly, taking her time as she told him all about John Peter Wrightson.
Roadworks impeded Elder’s progress on the route to Brighton. There were times when it seemed to him the whole road network of England was being coned off and dug up. He was sure he could remember a time when there’d been no contraflows. But of course there’d been less traffic then, too. It was taking him a little while to get used to Doyle’s car. It was fast and certainly nippy in traffic, but the clutch seemed to have a mind of its own. Doyle had complained when Elder asked for his car. But it was only reasonable. They’d travelled down in the one car - Doyle’s - and now that car was needed. Besides, as Elder pointed out, Doyle was staying in the town. What did he need his car for? And if a car
were
needed, he could always borrow one from the police.
‘So what’s stopping you doing that, too?’ Doyle had said.
‘I’m in a hurry.’
‘I can’t see there’s any rush.’
Elder had already filled both Doyle and Greenleaf in on his planned trip, and the reasoning behind it, so he stayed silent and let Doyle have his grumble. As ever, Greenleaf wasn’t saying much. The silent type.
They looked like they’d been working together on interrogations for years. They looked confident, successful. They looked like a team.
‘If you scratch it,’ Doyle said at last, digging his hand into his trouser pocket, ‘if you so much as fart on the seat-fabric ...’ He held the keys in the air for an instant, not letting Elder have them.
‘Understood,’ he said. ‘It’ll get a full valet service before I bring it back.’
Doyle spoke quietly, spacing each word. ‘Just bring it back.’
Elder nodded. ‘Will do.’ He reached out his hand and took the keys from Doyle.
There was nothing for him to do in Cliftonville anyway. The note was already in the forensic lab. The paper and envelope would be analysed, since Witch rather than the barman had provided them. Sometimes you could tell a lot from a sheet of paper: brand used, batch number, when produced, where stocked. Same went for fibre analysis. They would take the envelope apart with surgical precision, just in case there was a fibre or anything similar inside, anything that could tell them anything about Witch.
Joe the barman had been little help. And so far no one they’d spoken to had seen or heard anything that Sunday night. The thing to do was get the local police involved and have them do the leg-work. Time was pressing. They needed to be in London. The summit would start on Tuesday; hardly any time at all to recheck security. A few of the delegations, Elder knew, had already arrived. Most would arrive over the weekend. The last to arrive, the Americans, would touch down on Monday morning. Thirty secret servicemen would protect the President. But they couldn’t protect him from a single sniper’s bullet, from a well-placed bomb, from most of the tricks Witch had learned.
Sitting in a slow-moving queue, Elder leaned forwards the better to scratch his back, just where it itched. He’d had the itch for a long time. It hadn’t really bothered him in Wales, not often, but now it had started up again. There was just something about a traffic jam that set it off. At least, he kidded himself it was the traffic jam.
Finally, he reached the outskirts of Brighton. He knew the town well, or had known it well at one time. He used to have a friend just west of the town in Portslade, beyond Hove. A female friend, the partner in a veterinary practice. He remembered her bedroom faced onto the sea. A long time ago ... He made friends with difficulty, kept them with even more difficulty. His fault, not theirs. He was a slovenly correspondent, forgetful of things like birthdays, and he found friendship at times a heavy baggage to bear. That was why he hadn’t made a good husband: he didn’t make a good friend in the first place. He sometimes wondered what kind of father he’d have made, if Susanne hadn’t been taken from him.
He drove through Brighton until he hit the seafront. There was no sign of a travelling fair. He couldn’t see any posters, either. Nothing to say whether it had been and gone, or was still to arrive. Nothing. But what he did notice were kids - kids lounging about, kids with nothing to do. School-leavers, probably, their exams over. Or the unemployed youth of the town. There were tramps too, and younger men, somewhere between school-leaver and tramp. They tried begging from passers-by, offering swigs from their bottle as trade. Living in rural Wales, Elder was accustomed to the occasional hippy convoy, but nothing like this. The unemployed men he knew in his local village had been hard-working men who wanted to get back into hard work.
He drove slowly all the way along the front and back, studying the faces he saw. The world was changing; time was slipping into reverse. It was like the 1920s and 30s, or even the Victorian world described by Dickens. In London, he’d seen teams of windscreen washers, something he’d only before seen on American TV dramas. Young men - predominantly black - would wait at traffic lights and, when the lights turned red, would wash windscreens, then ask to be paid. One group Elder had seen had brought a sofa to the kerbside, so that they could relax in comfort between shifts. He wondered how much they made. He’d arrived in London without his car. A car would have protected him from the worst of it, from the beggars waiting for him in underpasses, the buskers in the Underground, the cardboard boxes which had become people’s homes. That hopeless, toneless cry: ‘Spare change, please, any spare change. Spare change, please, any spare change.’ Like rag and bone men expecting society’s leftovers.
Finally, having twice driven the length of the promenade, he pulled in at the kerb, near a group of teenagers, and wound down his window.
‘Oi, oil’ cried one. ‘Here’s a punter looking for a bit of bum action! Go talk to the man, Chrissy!’
The one called Chrissy spat on the ground and gave Elder a baleful look.
‘I’m looking for the fair,’ Elder called from the car. ‘Is there a fair in town?’
‘You’re after kids, is that it? We know your sort, don’t we?’ There were grins at this. Elder tried to smile back, as though he too were enjoying the joke.
‘I’m just looking for the fair,’ he said, making it sound like a not unreasonable request.
‘Marine Parade,’ said one of the crowd, waving a hand holding a can of beer in the direction of the Palace Pier.
‘Yes,’ said Elder, ‘but that’s a permanent fairground, isn’t it? I’m looking for a
travelling
fair.’
‘Sorry I spoke. Here, give us five quid for some chips, guv.’ The youth was slouching towards him, hand held out. Elder didn’t see anything dangerous in the young man’s eyes; just an idiot vacancy. He knew pressure points which would have the youth dancing in agony within seconds. He knew how much pain the body could stand, and how much less the mind itself could stand. He knew.
Then he sighed and handed over a five-pound note.
‘The fair,’ he said.
The youth grinned. ‘There’s a fair up on The Level. Know where that is?’
Yes, Elder knew where it was. He’d practically driven past it on his way down to the shore. He didn’t recall seeing a fair, but then he hadn’t really been looking.
‘Thank you,’ he said, driving on. Behind him, the youth was fanning himself with the banknote. Already his friends were gathering round like jackals.
The front at Brighton was all pebblestone beach and inescapable breeze, fun-rides and day-trippers. But further up the town’s hill, past the Pavilion and the shops, was a large, flat, grassy park called The Level, criss-crossed with paths. Locals walked their dogs here, children shrieked on swings. And every year there came a fair. He wondered that he’d been able to miss it, but then he’d presupposed any fairground would be stationed along the promenade, where the pickings were richest. There weren’t as many stalls and rides as he’d been expecting. The usual waltzers and dodgems and rifle-ranges, ghost train, kiddies’ rides, hot dog stalls. But no big wheel or dive-bombers, nothing that he would call a big attraction. Marine Parade had stolen a march on the travelling fair.
And everything was closed, save a couple of the kiddies’ rides which were doing desultory business. A monkey swung down over the children on one ride, operated by a sour-looking woman. The trick seemed to be that if a child pulled the tail off the monkey, the child got a free ride. Something like that. The fair proper would no doubt open up later on in the day. He parked Doyle’s car at a safe distance from The Level itself - he didn’t want errant hands wiping candy floss on it - and walked back. One ride was discharging its cargo. The woman who operated both ride and monkey came out of her stall to collect the money from the few kids waiting for the ride to start up again. She wore a leather bag slung around her neck, the sort conductors still used on some London buses. Elder noticed that the rides were old, certainly older than their cargo. There was a horse, a racing car with a horn, a tiny double-decker bus, a sort of ladybird from which most of the paint had flaked, a jeep with movable steering-wheel, and a spaceship. There was heated competition for both the spaceship and the racing car.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to the woman, ‘where can I find whoever’s in charge?’
‘That’s me.’ She went on taking money, dispensing change.
‘No, I mean in charge of the fair as a whole.’
‘Oh?’ She gave him the benefit of a two-second glance, then sighed. ‘What’s wrong now?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Are you council?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
‘What then?’
He paused. ‘If you’d just tell me where I can find ...’
Having collected all the fares, she moved past him. ‘Mind yourself,’ she said. ‘If you stay on there, you’ll have to pay same as the rest.’ Back in her perspex-fronted booth, she turned on a tape-recorder. A pop song blasted out of the speaker overhead. Then the carousel started to turn, and she tugged her left arm, jiggling the monkey up and down, comfortably out of reach of the squealing children. Elder stood his ground by the open door. The children were waving at their parents as they spun slowly past them. One of the kids looked petrified, though he was trying not to show it. He gripped on to the steering-wheel of his jeep, hardly daring to take a hand off to wave, despite the cajoling of his mother. Fear, Elder was reminded, was utterly relative, a shifting quantity.
As the allotted time of the ride came to its end, the woman lowered the monkey so that a girl could whip off its tail. Then she pulled the monkey up again and hooked her end of its line over a nail on the wall of her booth, holding it there. The music was turned down, but not off, the ride came to a stop, the parents collected their children. The boy from the jeep looked pale. The woman looked at them through the perspex window, then turned to Elder.
‘Still here?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve nothing better to do.’
‘Sure you’re not council?’ He shook his head and she sighed again. ‘Try the caravan behind the waltzers,’ she said. ‘The long caravan, mind, not the little one.’
‘And who am I looking for?’
‘His name’s Ted. That’s all, just Ted.’
And indeed it was.
‘Just call me Ted,’ the man said when Elder appeared at the caravan door and asked for him. They shook hands.
‘I’m Dominic Elder.’
‘Pleased to meet you. Now, Mr Elder, what seems to be the problem?’
‘No problem, I assure you.’
‘Good, pleased to hear it. In that case, why don’t you come in?’
The caravan was large but cramped, the result of too many ornaments on too many occasional tables. Glass clowns seemed to predominate. There was a small two-seater sofa, and two armchairs, re-covered in an orange-coloured flowery print. Ted nodded towards a chair.
‘Take a pew, Mr Elder. Now, what can I do for you?’
It wasn’t until Elder was seated that he saw it was Ted’s intention to continue standing, arms folded, ready to listen. Elder admired the man’s grasp of psychology. Standing, he had authority over the seated Elder. They were not equals. That, at least, was the ploy. Ted might not be the man’s real name. He was in his 50s, and wore his hair slicked back, his sideburns long: a Teddy Boy look. Perhaps the name had stuck. There was doubtless a comb in the back pocket of his oily denims.
‘I’m looking for my daughter,’ Elder said.
‘Yes? In Brighton is she?’
‘I don’t know. I
think
she was in Cliftonville.’
‘We were there the other week.’
Elder nodded. ‘She’s keen on fairs, I thought maybe somebody might have seen her wandering around...’
‘How old is she, Mr Elder?’ There was sympathy in Ted’s voice, but not much. He was still suspicious.