And Honoria seemed to have a built-in radar that kept a most accurate track of her minion’s movements. If Amy went swiftly and efficiently about her business, looking neither to right nor left, deliberately depriving herself of the warmth of human contact, all would be well. But let her so much as stop briefly to comment on the weather, pat an animal or ask after someone’s health and before she had even stepped across the threshold on her return there would ring out, ‘Where have you
been
?’
Honoria knew nothing of Amy’s meetings with Sue. If she found out they would be stopped. How, Amy could not even begin to guess, but she was sure that it would be so. Even if Honoria knew they were a lifeline. Especially if she knew they were a lifeline.
‘There she is!’
Amy jumped away from the window, suddenly pale. Sue scrambled to her feet, catching the alarm, hating it when Amy so vividly demonstrated her subservience, uneasily aware that in the quick, dismayed movements lay a mirror image of her own.
As Amy moved quickly to the door, Sue shouted, ‘Wood! Wood!’
‘Gosh - I nearly forgot.’
Sue ran into the back yard, where a bundle of branches always lay ready. Amy’s excuse for her walk. They hugged goodbye on the step and Sue watched Amy race down the path and speed away, as if stapled to the wind.
She turned back into the house. It was not until she was packing her box for play school that she recalled the one thing above all others that had been worrying her and that she had meant to talk to Amy about. How could she have forgotten something that had occupied her mind so constantly? Now the question once more possessed her. Why, when Brian had simply walked briskly once round the Green on the night of Gerald’s murder, had he been absent from the house for well over three quarters of an hour?
Brian’s drama class had reconvened but was not going well. He had spent the first fifteen minutes trying to get them off the subject of murder. Starting with questions about Gerald the conversation had expanded rapidly to cover serial killers, the chain-saw massacre, vampirism and necrophilia - the latter dead boring, according to Collar.
In vain he had dragged them through a warm-up, got them pinching their cheeks to promote alertness, rolling their heads (‘let those cannon balls
go
’) and pretending to be clowns on unicycles to fire their imaginations. The minute it was over they were back on the same subject.
‘You being his friend, I reckon the filth would’ve let you see him.’
‘I didn’t want to—’
‘They say his head were well bashed in.’ Boreham’s eyes shone. ‘I bet his brains fell out.’
‘Different from you then,’ said Collar. ‘Bash you from here till Christmas your brains wouldn’t fall out.’
‘Why’s that then, Collar?’ asked little Bor, knowing his place and, for once, his lines.
‘’Cause you keep them up your arse.’
‘All right you lot,’ Brian bleated. He clapped his hands and adopted his ‘lost in the magical world of theatre’ expression. ‘Let’s go on. Have you all brought your scripts?’
They stared at him in deep incomprehension. He sighed, recognising the moment, for there had been many such. And yet, how rosy it had all seemed on day one. There they were, his raw material. There he was, a gifted Svengali ready to unlock talent and enthusiasm that a plodding, authoritarian educational system had all but vanquished Under his concerned tutelage they would expand and flower. Eventually their lives, immeasurably enriched, would intermingle with his own. Then they would be not teacher and pupils but friends. Lately, by some indulgently tortuous manoeuvre of his mind, Brian had seen one of them - preferably Edie or Tom - becoming famous and adopting his mentor’s surname in gratitude. Like Richard Burton.
Brian acknowledged no multiplicity of motives in all this. He gave, they took. He chose not to admit the charge he got in return. Those heady, fearful moments when an improvisation got out of hand and violence scented the air. (Brian had a warmly sentimental attitude towards violence, largely because he had never been around when any was being dished out. He referred to it sometimes as grace under pressure, tossing the phrase as casually into a conversation as if it had been his own.)
But the truth was that these moments reflected uncomfortably similar disturbances in his own heart. Repressed, they fuelled his dreams, spawning lubricious disorder. Why only last night—
Brian, struggling to quell these torrid recollections, found the Carter twins in his direct line of vision. Today Tom was in a Confederate Army greatcoat and tight snakeskin trousers. He sported a button showing a police helmet over the slogan ‘DESTROY THE HUMPBACKED PIGS’.
Edie rose from a circle of unseamed felt like a flower from a grubby black calyx. The skirt was slashed to the waist and worn over a tiny pair of striped fur shorts. Brian’s skin darkened still further at his first glimpse of these raffish tormentors. He took a deep breath, got down on his haunches and said, ‘What I’d really like is to end this play with what is known in the business as a coo dee tayartray.’
‘We had one of them,’ said little Bor, ‘but the wheel came off.’
‘A dazzling effect to stun and amaze.’
‘Sounds lovely,’ said Edie.
‘But one does have to work up to this sort of thing and, quite frankly, I’m not at all sure we’re in a recruitment mode in every sphere.’
‘Fact is Bri,’ said Denzil, ‘100% British Made’ according to the stencil across his forehead, ‘what we’d really like to do is something by ourselves.’
‘Yeah.’ Collar was enthusiastic. ‘I bet we’d be real good.’
‘I hardly think so.’ Brian felt shut out and rather hurt that they could even think of such a thing. ‘You’d never have the discipline for a start.’
There was a chorus of ‘oh yes we woulds.’
‘OK, where are the computer print-outs you promised to learn DLP at our last rehearsal?’
‘What’s DLP?’ asked little Bor.
‘Dick-licking pervo,’ said Denzil, quickly rewarded by a full house of guffaws. He pushed his tongue out as far as it would go and wagged it about, spraying the air with spittle.
‘We could try though, Brian,’ said Edie, ‘couldn’t we?’
‘If you insist.’ He could refuse her nothing. ‘But I must remind you that we’re running very short of time. I know yesterday’s interruption wasn’t your fault, but even before the police arrived we’d got nowhere. Messing about being chickens does not help us produce a text.’
‘I don’t see why chickens shouldn’t be in a play,’ said Collar. ‘People gotta eat.’
‘Wotcha think of Gavin Troy, Brian?’ asked Denzil.
‘Who?’
‘The red-headed git in the leathers.’
‘He seemed all right.’
‘He’s a bastard,’ continued Collar.
‘Nearly broke Denzil’s arm.’
‘Goodness.’
‘Have you as soon as look at you, Troy would,’ said Denzil, adding, not without a certain pride, ‘Missed me by a hare’s breath last week.’
‘What were you—?’
‘He had our Duane,’ said Collar. ‘And he weren’t doing nothing neither. Just happened to be standing by this chippie on the market square—’
‘Fat Leslie?’
‘Yeah - anyway this fight broke out. Duane climbed in the van to try and calm things down - p’raps make a citizen’s arrest like - when ratarse comes on the scene shopping with his missus. Straight over the counter wasn’t he? Poor old Duane ended up with his face on the hotplate.’
Brian stared, thrilled and aghast in equal measure, wondering how much of it was true.
‘Did he try and make you confess, Bri?’
‘Of course not. I haven’t done anything.’
‘That wouldn’t bother them,’ said Edie. She parted her legs, affording Brian a much clearer and more devastating glimpse of furry tiger markings. She plonked her eighteen-hole Doc Martens firmly on the parquet and rested her hands on her knees. ‘Keep after you. Wear you down.’
‘They were perfectly civil.’
‘Yeah, to you. Tame-o.’
‘Tame-o,’ repeated little Bor shyly.
‘Should see’m round our estate,’ said Denzil. ‘Any excuse, stop and search.’
‘After a feel half the time,’ said Edie and Brian’s heart jerked with excitement. She winked at him, lowering an eyelid the colour of ripe damsons spangled with silver. ‘You gotta go down the station?’
‘I don’t know.’ Brian was sharply aware of his complete ignorance as to the functioning of the humblest traffic unit, let alone the CID. ‘Do they usually say if they want to see you again?’
‘No,’ said Tom. ‘Not usually. They just turn up.’
And, at that very moment, the swing doors parted and Sergeant Troy appeared.
They talked this time, without the aid of refreshments, in a small room leading off the science lab. It was unheated and there was a faint but distinctly unpleasant smell coming from an old-fashioned sink in the far corner. The chill struck Brian keenly in spite of his thick lumberjack shirt, reindeer sweater and string vest.
Troy stood by the window, which was deeply embrasured. He had put his Biro on the stone shelf and was now taking out a notebook in a leisurely manner. He turned to the place he wanted and laid the book down next to the pen. He tugged his belt through the buckle and let his coat hang loose. Then he took off his cap and his hair sprang up, crisp and sparkling like a fox’s brush. Only then did he turn and speak to Brian, who was perched on a laboratory stool behind a bench of instruments and retorts.
‘Sorry to take you out of your rehearsals for the second time, Mr Clapton.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘Going well are they?’
‘Oh yes - very.’
‘What play is it you’re putting on again?’
‘
Slangwhang For Five Mute Voices
.’
Troy nodded and looked deeply interested without responding verbally.
‘A very demanding project. I ask a great deal of them. And of myself too, naturally.’ Brian relaxed a little, unwinding his legs, which had been locked around the struts of the high stool. ‘They’re a great bunch. Especially the Carter twins.’ He had to say her name. Just once. ‘Edie. And Tom. They really are remarkable.’
‘They are indeed, sir,’ replied Troy, who had come across Edie for the first time five years previously. She had been brought into the station when her mother, accompanied by the child, had been caught shoplifting. Edie had been wearing a full-length Teddy Bear coat with every inch of the cunningly pocketed lining stuffed with enough fags and sweeties to open a corner shop. A harmful little armful, to put it mildly.
‘So talented. And with life stacked completely against them. Yet they never give up.’
‘Certainly agree with you on that score, Mr Clapton,’ said Troy. Thinking - stone the crows, this bloke doesn’t know the difference between arsehole time and breakfast time. They must be running bloody rings round him.
‘The girl seems to me especially bright.’ That really must be the last time, Brian told himself. The very last. Not that he’d repeated her name, but still. Best stop while he was safe.
Troy merely smiled, but he had noticed the swoopy Adam’s apple and slightly quickened breath and he caught the sexual drift. Oh yes. Brian fancied a jump there all right. A little flutter. An apple for the teacher. And under age too. Naughty, naughty.
Admitting to recent fatherhood, Troy asked a couple of questions about teaching generally. Brian responded by talking about himself in particular and in great detail and Troy let him run on for a bit. This was the chief’s way when he had something nasty up his sleeve. He called it giving them a bit of margin.
First, isolate your rodent. Let him unwind, become expansive and off guard. Show him the prime Stilton. Have him sniff around a bit. Enjoy a nibble and then—
Brian, now so relaxed he was putting his slippers on, was explaining how he had rejected Cambridge as too elitist choosing instead Teacher Training College in Uttoxeter. His pale eyes shone behind his Schubert glasses. Even his dingy bottle-brush moustache bristled, with satisfaction at this sweet unrolling of his prideful narrative.
Troy, whose mum had always dinned it into him that self-praise was no recommendation, found it as boring as tears.
‘All this is very interesting, Mr Clapton,’ he lied pleasantly, ‘but perhaps now we’d better get down to the matter in hand.’
‘Oh.’ Brian had almost forgotten why they were there. ‘Yes, all right.’
‘Just a small point.’ Troy rustled the pages of his notebook in the pretence of finding a reference. ‘The night of Mr Hadleigh’s death, you told us’ - more rustling, this time at greater length - ‘that you left the house somewhere about . . . let’s see . . . quarter to eleven. Turning right, you walked once around the Green to, I believe the phrase was “blow the cobwebs away”.’
‘Yes,’ said Brian, though not without a pause.
‘And that is correct?’
‘Indeed it is. My yea is my yea, sergeant, and my nay my nay, as all who know me will confirm.’
‘Well, I’m afraid we have a witness, Mr Clapton, who says they saw you return at just gone midnight. And what’s more approaching your house from the entirely opposite direction.’
The expression on Brian’s face was that of someone suddenly savaged by a dove. He stared at the man who, only seconds ago, had been listening to the story of his life with such courteous interest. Troy smiled. Or at least parted his lips slightly. His sharp teeth gleamed.
‘Ahhh . . . really . . . ? I don’t know who this person is supposed to be, but perhaps it might be in order to ask them a few questions. Such as what they were doing, hiding in hedges at that hour of the night, spying on people.’
‘Hiding in hedges?’
‘Well, I didn’t see anyone.’
‘That is strange. Because you would certainly have passed him had you, in fact, been coming back from a walk around the Green.’
Silence. Brian, moisture prettily pearling his brow, closed his eyes. Immediately he lost thirty years. Aged three, he picked up a Victoria plum on a neighbour’s lawn and took it home. His parents, greatly alarmed at this early example of their only offspring ‘getting into trouble’, dragged him, crying, next door to apologise and return the booty. After that, forewarned, they laboured ceaselessly to protect Brian from his baser instincts.