The Man in the Street

by Martin Howe

  The idea of stalking his foe had come to David by chance. He was late leaving the office one evening, having stayed on to print out a few extra copies of his curriculum vitae, when he saw Larry Beckinsale in front of him as he came out of the lift. David’s first thought, that “the bastard will be waiting for his limo to take him home,” proved to be wrong and Larry had set off up the hill towards the underground station on foot. David was going that way anyway and pausing briefly to let some distance open up between them, followed him. For a vague reason, that he didn’t fully understand, he decided to keep him in his sights. It dawned on David as he followed Larry slowly through the milling rush-hour crowds that he ought to, at the very least, know where he lived. It seemed a useful piece of intelligence to have at the time and the thought of shadowing him was appealing. Deliberately, he sought out the shaded anonymity of the shop fronts and flitted from doorway to doorway, but the subterfuge was unnecessary as Larry never looked round. David had to speed up as his mark disappeared into the underground station and he only just caught sight of him as he walked down the escalator to the Victoria line. Running to catch up he collided with a commuter, causing the woman to drop her briefcase, and stopped to apologize.

  He burst onto the crowded platform and realized he was standing directly behind his target. Slowly, scarcely breathing, he drew back, sidling away until he was masked by a group of schoolboys, arguing about football. The exhilaration of the chase was strangely compulsive – his heart raced as he waited for the next tube to arrive and he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. He felt alive.

  The train was packed, perfect cover for David, who, concealed by the crowd, made sure that Larry was always in view. The man was holding onto the vertical handrail in the middle of the carriage and staring at the legs of a young women sitting below him. His gaze was lascivious and relentless. She shifted uneasily in her seat, sensing the violation, but did not look up. David, watching as the object of his hatred openly demeaned himself, was filled with voyeuristic pleasure.

  The crowd thinned out at each stop as they headed north. David was constantly forced to subtly shift position in order to hide behind the remaining passengers. Suddenly, Larry Beckinsale was gone. David lunged forward, elbowing a young man out of the way, and caught the door as it began to close. Pushing himself on to the platform, he shouted out an apology and set off after his quarry whose head and shoulders he could clearly make out above the threading crowd heading for the exit.

  The run down, litter-strewn, streets around the station soon gave way to wider, cleaner, leafier avenues lined with newer, more expensive cars. The large Victorian houses were nearly all well kept and the odd skip full of building rubble pointed to the upward mobility of the area.

  “No net curtains round here. Should be easy to spy on what everyone gets up to,” thought David as he closed in on Larry Beckinsale. His prey appeared oblivious to everything going on around him and David was feeling more confident. He vaguely knew where he was, he’d lived nearby in a small flat with Susan before they’d got married and they’d used to walk around this neighbourhood fantasizing about the houses they would own when they were rich and successful. Fat chance of that now.

  Larry went up to the front door of a tall Edwardian house – black and white chequer-board tiled pathway, grey front door with stained glass surrounds, double bay windows – that David and his wife would have been only too happy to have owned, and let himself in. David walked past and then backtracked on the opposite side of the road, peered briefly through the hedge in front of the house, noted the number – 77 – and then moved on, satisfied. He had discovered that the house backed on to the old railway line on his second visit, having found it impossible to stay away from the area once he knew where his adversary lived. He felt driven to uncover as much information as he could about the man, with initially only an indeterminante feeling about how it might be useful.

  The houses all looked the same from the embankment at the rear and it had taken him a while to establish which was number 77. He had a clear view into the back gardens from the footpath and he deliberately counted off the houses one by one. He had been careful, as he didn’t want to draw undue attention to himself, in what was a “neighbourhood watch” area. On his second attempt he was confident he’d worked it out, when to his surprise Larry appeared in the next-door garden in a pair of cutoff shorts and an Hawaiian shirt and began setting up a barbecue. David ducked behind a bush, then slithered down the bank. He had discovered his vantage point in the shadow of the pine tree and immediately felt at ease. Time had slipped by as he watched fascinated as his enemy relaxed in full view, unaware that he was being observed. For the first time since the trouble at work had begun, David felt the scales tip in his favour. Knowledge was power after all. His resolve had never wavered after that and he returned to spy on Larry Beckinsale and his family, at every opportunity.

  His wife queried where he was at first, but seemed to accept his excuses that he was working late trying to find a new job, meeting with prospective employers, drinking with old friends working elsewhere in the business, networking, and never asked again. She was often in bed when he came home and he would sit downstairs in the dark with a bottle of beer, brooding about what he should do, his dark mood calling for a cathartic act of retribution, an explosion of outrage. So absorbed was he in this violent fantasy world, cast free of any rational restraint, that he found to his puzzlement, as he awoke with a start at dawn one morning, that the boundaries between sleeping and waking were becoming blurred, that he could no longer differentiate between invention and truth. Larry Beckinsale was an obsession, haunting his dreams and dogging every conscious moment. No firm decision was ever made, no strategy actively formulated, a plan just slowly took shape, coagulating in the rich broth of his boiling imagination. David knew he would take measures to right the injustice that had been done to him, that was a self-evident truth. He had the template for action, it was there documented in black and white, the folly of the man, trapped by the foolish routine of his life. They were both incapable of escape.

  The pine bark felt harsh, unyielding to his hesitant, probing fingers. A sudden sharp pain made him gasp. There was blood on his hands and he tentatively tasted it, his tongue flicking between dry chapped lips. He looked up. The sky, dimly visible through the dense mixed tree canopy, appeared to be darkening, light draining away. A couple talking loudly, arguing, passed along the path above him.

  “I don’t care if you say you never slept with the guy, he acts as if you did and that’s what bug…”

  “For Christ’s sake, he’s an arsehole, how many more times. He’s just playing on your insecurity.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t get away from the fact that you really want to fuck…”

  Their voices ebbed, drowned out by the distant sound of a police siren.

  “Time to go.”

  David stood up and brushed the seat of his trousers. The material felt damp. For an instant he was distracted, peering round to see the extent of the problem, but immediately lost interest and stared intensely down the slope. The bank fell away sharply and towering clumps of verdant vegetation blocked his way. Thickets of sycamore saplings, strained towards the light, while contorted tangled bursts of brambles clung to the steepest sections of the embankment, claiming space with their long barbed tendrils. There was a rickety fence at the bottom of the bank that marked the boundary with the Beckinsale’s garden and David could make out the darker green stands of nettles growing profusely in the damp ground. He would have to be careful and tread warily.

  A thin trunk bent dramatically under his weight as his feet slipped in the slack shifting soil. He grabbed another to steady himself and then another to lower himself down the slope until he stood waist high in nettles, peering through a crack in the old wooden fence, where a slat had come loose. Nobody had noticed him, the air was unchanged, he could hear the drone of the television and
see Larry sitting in his armchair through the large open picture window. Suddenly aware of a stinging pain across his lower legs – the lightweight linen of his summer suit no protection against the nettles – he bent down to rub his burning skin.

  “Shit, that hurts.”

  The air was clammy in the overshadowed hollow behind the fence and smelled of dank decay. Clouds of midges, attracted by the heat of his body, swarmed across David’s face, catching in his hair and swirling around his nose and mouth.

  “Oh God.”

  Flailing his arms brought only temporary relief, the insects rising above his head, before descending in growing numbers, assaulting ears, eyes and nostrils. He looked up at the house. Larry Beckinsale had not moved. About ten feet away from where he was standing, right in the corner of the garden, David saw that one of the fence panels had come loose and was propped up against a concrete post. There was a space at the bottom large enough for him to squeeze through, and he would be hidden from the house by a large flowering shrub. He knew he could turn back, but he had no reason to, he didn’t have a definite plan.

  The rest was easy. Keeping constant watch on the back of Larry’s blond head silhouetted against the window, David crawled into the garden, crossed the lawn, hesitated for a moment before silently sliding open the kitchen doors and stepping inside.

  Chapter 10

  RIGHT REVEREND

  3rd December 1972

  “Good morning, Mrs. Owen I’m glad you could make it to the service. You’re obviously feeling better?”

  “Yes vicar, thank you very much. I hope I’ll see you next Sunday.”

  “If not I’ll come to see you the following week, Mrs. Owen, goodbye to you.”

  The old lady slowly made her way down the brick path towards the church gate, clutching a knobbed walking stick in one hand and the arm of her young niece in the other. As the Reverend Anthony Coxon-Dyet was about to turn away, she raised the stick and waved farewell.

  “Game old bird,” thought Anthony, “If I’m like her when I reach that age I’ll be doing well.”

  The service had passed off without any interruptions. Things appeared to be returning to normal. “Thank God,” mused the vicar as he turned to head back into the church. Suddenly he changed his mind and stood staring out across the churchyard, where the last of the previous night’s harsh frost was melting in the bright winter sun.

  “It really has been a nightmare,” Anthony mused to himself. “If I was younger I’d have been more careful, and I still haven’t heard from the Bishop. He won’t be pleased, not after the last time.”

  The previous Sunday the church had been filled with reporters and photographers – the best congregation St Botolph’s had seen in years – and after matins he had been pestered for interviews, statements, photographs, in the church, outside in the graveyard, clutching the parish magazine, sitting on a gravestone. It had become very undignified, much as he enjoyed the controversy.

  “A little too much spice is not good for anybody, so sayeth the Right Reverend Archibald Jenkins, Bishop of said diocese. What a prig. I can hardly wait to go and see him.”

  He could clearly hear the senior clergyman’s pompous over-modulated voice.

  “I fought in the last war to defend freedom of speech Anthony, but there are responsibilities that go with it, particularly for someone in your position. Please, old boy, let’s have no more trouble. A little local difficulty is not a problem but the nationals. Come now, see it from my point of view. Dickie won’t be pleased and you know things are, how shall we put it, a little tricky for me with Lambeth Palace at the moment. Team players are what I’m looking for. A few years of calm that’ll see you and me to retirement are what I want. Come on humour me, Anthony …Tony? Good man. What are you having?”

  A magpie settled on a headstone, its tail bobbing urgently, then sailed into the air with a harsh shriek. Anthony smiled, life really was playing tricks on him. He fondly believed that every Sunday, at this time, after Morning Prayers were over, he would stroll round the churchyard and visit the grave of his late wife, Emily. He knew, however, and this was what was amusing him, that this happened less and less often these days. “Why?” was a good question, one a vicar should address, guilt or the lack of it being one of his areas of expertise. But not now, today he would make amends and pay her a call.

  Emily was buried on the edge of the cemetery, in one of the furthest points from the church. Her resting place was overshadowed by a line of tall lime trees, which in the summer dappled the area in a bright green and yellow light and showered the gravestone with a sticky resin, that, over the years, had all but obliterated the rough-hewn inscription: Emi…Cox…Dy..t, Born 191…, …ed 196…, ..oving w… of th.. …end Anthony … …t.

  Parishioners in the past had tried to scrub the stone clean, but it had achieved very little, and he’d told them not to bother. It appealed to his sense of the order of things to let her memorial on earth fade away as his own memory of her dimmed. Now, if he forgot his glasses he could read very little of her epitaph. At this time of year, the trees were bare and there were views from her grave across an open expanse of undulating pasture that stretched from the churchyard to a wooded ridge about a mile or so in the distance. A low brick wall marked the boundary of the graveyard and it was possible to get into the field through a small wooden gate, built with massive black iron hinges and a spring, far too powerful for its size, that would slam the gate shut if it was released too soon. Summertime in the church grounds was marked by the irregular sound of the banging of the back gate as visitors were caught unawares. On fine days, Anthony used to lean on the gate and stare out at the cows and sheep grazing on the lush grass, the rooks roosting noisily around their nests in the tall trees and think about nothing specific. The past would frequently occupy him, things that he had done, people he had known, rehashing decisions made, reappraising relationships, reordering events. Such reflections involved convoluted lines of argument, with connections and assumptions constantly shifting, but he managed, most of the time, to usher himself into a realm of contentment with the life he had led, tinged inevitably with a feeling of having got away with it, of surprise. And the Reverend Coxon-Dyet was sensitive enough to appreciate that self-satisfaction was dangerous territory for a priest to stray into. If disturbed, he would turn with a pained, distracted look on his face, the front of his clothes smudged with the powdery green algae that covered the leeward side of the old gate.

  Today he went to sit on the wall, the chill of the bricks seeping rapidly through his thin overcoat and trousers. He had a direct line of sight from there to his church, where he had been the vicar for over twenty years, and he wanted to check the state of repair of the roof. There had been a number of leaks recently in the sacristy and transept and the Parochial Council was to meet that week to discuss the options. It was not as clear a vantage point as he remembered – much of the roof of the nave was obscured by the dark sullen bulk of two ancient yews, their branches saturated in gold from the late morning sun and shimmering in the light breeze. Looming above these evergreen crowns was the flint tower of St Botolph’s, glinting in the glorious brightness. A flock of pigeons swept out of the black louvers of the belfry and banked steeply upwards across the pale blue face of the clock, its crimson hands halted permanently at five to twelve.

  “Only a few minutes slow.”

  Anthony smiled, glancing at his watch.

  “Emily would have found that funny.”

  He absentmindedly kicked at the ground in front of him rubbing his hands as he watched a small cloud of dust rise up then settle gently on the toe of his brown suede shoes. Distant voices made him look up.

  On the paved path that ran round the churchyard a man in a dark overcoat was leaning over a hunched figure in a wheelchair and tucking a red and black check blanket around his legs. Anthony smiled at them and waved, then looked again at the church. He h
oped it wasn’t the copper cladding on the north aisle that was letting in water, that would cost a fortune to mend and any patch would take years to weather back to match the stained turquoise wonder of the present roof. The aesthetics would be ruined. If there was one thing he truly loved about the church it was the vibrant blue flashes that ran the length of the nave and could be seen from miles around in clear weather. Frustration with the deteriorating fabric of the building and what he considered a dereliction of duty on the part of the Parochial Council was a recent grievance of his. It was closely associated in his mind with a deepening appreciation, as he aged, of his fortunate position. In the past, when he had been less settled, he had been more phlegmatic. But not now.

  “The philistines on the council probably won’t even stump up for copper to do the repairs, the bastards.”

  He relished the intensity of his feelings, burnishing his anger at every perceived slight and material failing, collating a mental compendium of wrongs that formed the substrate for his subsequent actions. Lately, he feared he might be overwhelmed by the parish and its many demands and was determined not to let that happen, but he was getting old and he needed that core set of justifications from which to draw strength. His last escapade with the parish magazine had been effective publicity for St Botolphs, perhaps a little less good for him personally. Thinking first rather than doing was now the order of the day, for the time being at least. Emily had been right, he should have kept a diary, it would have helped. If he’d written things down, everything, not just what had happened to him, the events of his life, but what he had really thought. If he’d kept nothing back, perhaps he could have forgotten more, safe in the knowledge it wasn’t lost. Emily had been right about a lot of things, thinking back.