Play Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  Poppy found a damp handkerchief and pretended to mop her face with it, removing the gathered tears in passing. It was dark now outside, the train swaying through suburbs, past lit back windows, every bright rectangle signalling a set of lives, unknowable. A figure against the light, young, but boy or girl? The gesture expostulation or boasting or laughter? You could picture a parent sitting at a table, a checked oilcloth on it … but already you were into the realm of fiction, the odds against your imagination mapping any actuality too high to be worth thinking about. How different were her guesses about the Simpsons? How much more damage might she do, even if she happened to have guessed right?

  She thought of Mrs Ogham-Ferrars, with whom she’d felt such instant and admiring affinity, a really lovely woman fighting to cherish her husband’s last few scraps of worthwhile life. No hope, not much money (never had that much, probably, and spent it all living the life they’d wanted, plus the wedding expenses of three daughters). How much more could she bear? Learning that her son-in-law had killed two people, one of them her son, and that her daughter had helped him? Having to give evidence? The thought was appalling.

  I shan’t do anything about it, Poppy thought as the train eased at last into Waterloo. Mrs Ogham-Ferrars will tell the police that Marigold can identify the body and they’ll learn about the connection that way. Then they’ll start to ask questions. They’ll work it out themselves. It’s all in the past. It’s nothing to do with me any more. I shall go home and have a deep, hot bath and decide what to do with the rest of my life. There’s never as much of it left as you think.

  JANUARY 1990

  Crowds on streets again, but not peaceful. The camera jerked and wavered, snatching at images. Gunfire rattled off-shot. Groups huddled into doorways. A body lay face up, arms spread, crucified to the earth. Three exhausted men were dragged from some hole and hauled away. Securitate the voice-over said, being taken to military courts, but it looked as if the noose would get them first. This was Romania, and it was different. John had been right. He couldn’t have known, not this. There must have been something else, something planned.

  The bell rang. Poppy turned the sound down and went to the door. She felt excited, confident, amused at herself in her new role, She-who-knows-what-she-wants-and-is-going-to-get-it. Mr Firth was waiting on the doorstep. She took his drizzle-dampened coat and hat, led him into the living room and gave him the magnet. He flipped it up and down in his palm.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten I’d only lent it to him. I’ve survived without it, somehow.’

  ‘It was just an excuse to get you here,’ said Poppy. ‘I hope you’ll stay and have a drink. It’s all right—I shan’t ask you to talk work.’

  He showed no reluctance or surprise. She had phrased her telephone call carefully, so that he could understand, if he chose, that this was what she had in mind.

  ‘There’s not much choice, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Gin or red wine.’

  ‘I’d like wine, please.’

  That was a good omen. She’d guessed his tastes and bought a bottle of Rioja. He settled into the armchair and tried to persuade Elias to come and be petted. Elias cut him dead. He didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘Did you manage to see your daughters over Christmas?’ she said.

  ‘They came down for a couple of days in the New Year. It went as well as you’d expect. I don’t know how to talk to them. I wish I could understand their tastes in music. It would probably have been the same if the family had stayed together, I suppose, if not worse. They’re not bad kids, and as it is they feel they’ve got to make some sort of an effort for me, whereas if we’d been living in each other’s pockets, not hitting it off … How’s young Toby?’

  ‘Boisterous. Talking away.’

  ‘Driving everyone mad with questions, I expect.’

  ‘Oh no, not Toby. Toby tells you. I think he was trying to explain to me in the park today that the trees were there because a helicopter had come and put them there. Helicopters can do no wrong at the moment.’

  ‘It’s a marvellous age.’

  ‘For the lucky ones.’

  ‘Yes, we’ve got a vile little case come up in Widmore Street—you don’t want to know about that.’

  ‘Not really. But I do worry about Nick. Mary Pitalski’s son, I mean—I must have read the father’s name somewhere, but I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Lewis.’

  ‘Oh, of course. I rang a couple of times last month but only got an answerphone. They haven’t been to the play centre. Do you know?’

  ‘I’m off the case now. Internal police politics. But I sat in for a bit, handing over. Last I heard the kids had gone down to Lewis’s mother, somewhere near Chichester. He keeps a boat there.’

  ‘They usen’t to take Laura?’

  ‘She didn’t get on with Mrs Lewis. Granny had views, know what I mean?’

  ‘Do I not! My mother-in-law … No, I’ll let you off her … So Laura could stay in London and meet Jonathan?’

  ‘In the Shepherds Bush MacDonald’s. The staff remember them well. They’d stay for hours and she’d keep buying things and trying to persuade him to eat something … Was it you told Mrs Ogham-Ferrars to get in touch with me?’

  ‘I asked her not to say.’

  ‘She didn’t. But she wouldn’t talk to Bob Caesar. It had to be me. And she hasn’t time to read the papers.’

  ‘Did you actually see her?’

  ‘I went down. Last thing I did before the hand-over, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I’m glad you met her. I thought she was marvellous. I can’t bear to think what she must be going through now, on top of everything else, knowing about her daughter. It’s like Faust, or something, having to pay at the end for all the good things you’ve had before. And knowing it was partly things she’d told you herself.’

  ‘I’m afraid so, but I don’t agree about Faust. All that’s just random, as far as I can see. I know one old boy whose life had been mostly hell—orphanage, married just in time for the war, Jap POW camp, came back to find his wife had bolted, leaving him with a daughter—probably not his, but he took her on. Never any money. Daughter turned out schizophrenic, and hanged herself, and so on and so on. He was living next door to a Pakistani couple. He’d had a leg off and was starting to go blind. The Khans gave him a hand, and gradually took him over. Not entirely altruistic—they’ve spread into his spare rooms, but they treat him right. He goes along to the mosque, and so on. So his last five years haven’t been too bad, but if he’d never met the Khans he’d still be in hell, or dead. You can’t point to him as an argument for wisdom and serenity being the reward for a life of suffering, any more than you can with Mrs Ogham-Ferrars the other way round. Do you want to know about the rest of it?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re not supposed to tell me.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You won’t pass it on.’

  ‘Won’t they want me for a witness?’

  ‘Only if they want to bring up about the man who followed you being the same chap. I doubt it. They’ve got a lot of stuff. The drugs people were on to Simpson, you see, coming from the other end, so to speak. They’d had an eye on him since a few years back, when they got wind he’d been doing some small-scale drug-running out of Turkey. That seems to have been a sort of trial run, to make the right contacts and so on. Then he lay low for a bit, and then, last year, somebody seems to have staked him with real money …’

  ‘They sold a house in Addison Crescent and moved to Linen Walk—at least that was their address in last year’s Debrett, but it didn’t have little Pete in it, so it must have gone to press before he was born. They could have cleared a lot of money—it depends on mortgages and things—but getting on for a million, I’d think.’

  ‘That would be about right. Anyway he bought a bigger boat and set up a serious operation. He d
idn’t know our people were watching him. He was all ready to go when that blew up.’

  He nodded towards the TV. The documentary Poppy had been watching had flashed back to the Berlin Wall coming down.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ she said.

  ‘You’d be surprised. You don’t read about it, but one result of the frontiers opening up is that new routes became available for getting drugs through to the West. Heroin’s the main one.’

  Oh God, thought Poppy. John Capstone. Had Laura been right about everything? Her shock must have shown, to judge by his look of query.

  ‘Did Mrs Capstone tell you about her telephone calls?’ she said.

  ‘Did she not! Ah, yes, I see what you mean. No, it looks as if your friend’s in the clear. I’m afraid that’s all I’d better tell you about that side of things.’

  ‘Oh … Look, this really isn’t why I asked you round—I’m not seeing him any more, as it happens—but well, the evening after I’d come and told you what I knew, he was here—Mrs Capstone turned up as well—and between us we made him tell us what he was really up to—you know, why he wanted me to lie about him being followed, and so on. If he was telling us the truth, and I really do think he was, then it was worth it. I’m not being inquisitive, it’s just so frustrating not knowing what happened in the end. Whether he brought it off, I mean. Do you know? Do you even know what I’m talking about?’

  ‘I’m glad that in your opinion it was worth it,’ he said, very drily indeed. ‘I won’t ask you to tell me any more. This was one of the reasons I was taken off the case. No policeman likes to be told what questions he can and can’t ask.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Once, years ago, Poppy had seen a whale. A client of Derek’s had offered them an almost-free Caribbean cruise in a merchant ship fitted with a few passenger cabins. Derek’s response to the material realities that underlay his business had been to retreat into the sphere of total abstraction and attempt to write a thesis on the philosophy of music, though both he, in his heart, and Poppy too, knew that he wasn’t intellectually up to it. His failure to achieve what he wanted came out as irritation with her, so she spent much of her time alone, and coming to terms for the first time with the knowledge that she didn’t, after all, love him, nor he her. Waking early one morning she had gone on deck to watch the sun rise. Down there in the tropics it seemed to take only a few minutes for night to become day. The stars went, the sea silvered, in the distance like stretched silk, taut to the horizon, but close to the hull moving in immense slow undulations, still with that same glossy, tense surface that looked as if it could carry weight. Then, twenty yards from the ship, without a ripple of forewarning, the surface had blistered, risen to a mottled, sliding hump, which narrowed, rose clear, and only as the huge flukes had plunged out of sight had Poppy understood what she’d seen.

  In a way the encounter with John Capstone had been like that. He wasn’t the whale. The whale was the incomprehensible forces of control which have their lives below the visible surface of events. Such momentary revelations are all most of us will ever know of them. She had been very close indeed, very lucky. Perhaps her life had been changed, as she felt it had been by the whale.

  ‘You were explaining about drugs,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes, I was talking in general terms,’ said Mr Firth. ‘Drug dealing’s a business as well as a criminal activity. There are cartels, multinationals, spot markets and so on. You won’t find many pro-Gorbachevs among the big dealers. All he’s done for them is unsettle the trade, and when that happens it isn’t the lawyers they send for. There’s been some rough stuff, and the syndicate Simpson had been in touch with to handle his goods was one of the ones that lost out. He’d come home, urgently, to see what else he could set up. He must have been extremely jumpy. He can’t have relished hearing from Jonathan at that point—Laura must have kept up with their movements and told Jonathan.’

  ‘No,’ said Poppy. ‘She heard Little Sue at the play centre talking about Mrs Ogham-Ferrars. I saw her face. She hadn’t realised till then who the Simpsons were. There’s lots of Simpsons around, and she wouldn’t have expected them to have a baby as young as Pete.’

  ‘You know, the drugs people say it was a difficulty pregnancy. They did a lot of flying to and fro, for check-ups. She’s a real tough.’

  ‘You’re saying she started another baby as sort of cover! If that’s true, it’s, I don’t know … What a reason for being born!’

  ‘You want us all to be children of love? I know I wasn’t, for a start.’

  ‘I think I was conceived because my father knew he was going to be killed in the war. But do you know what’s happened to Pete? Big Sue at the play centre says Little Sue took him down to his aunt—that would be Susan, I think Tollery, wasn’t it?—but she wants to adopt him herself.’

  ‘Not my pigeon. I could find out.’

  ‘It’s all right. I’ll ask Big Sue again. I’ve just thought of something. Little Sue would have told Laura when the Simpsons were back—just play-centre gossip—and she’d have passed it on to Jonathan. But where had he been? Why didn’t he know about the Simpsons before?’

  ‘He was in Canada, then the States. Mrs Ogham-Ferrars was extremely open about him. She says he was a sweet, quiet, timid child but then he became a difficult adolescent. He was thrown out of several schools. He had a minor drugs problem but managed to stay out of trouble. A few summers back he went out for a holiday with the Simpsons in the Aegean, there was some sort of row and he split up with them and disappeared. This turns out to have been just about the time when Simpson was doing his earlier drug runs. The next thing Mrs Ogham-Ferrars knew was when Laura got in touch saying Jonathan was now an addict and she was looking after him but she’d had to give up her job to do it and she needed some money. They hadn’t any money to spare, so in the end they sold their home and moved to Abbots Charity. They sent Jonathan to a private rehabilitation centre, and otherwise allowed Laura to take charge.’

  ‘I expect she was the only person who could deal with him.’

  ‘It wasn’t just that. Mr Ogham-Ferrars had been getting a bit absent-minded, she says, not enough to worry about, you’d expect it at his age, and so on. The move seems to have tipped him over the edge.’

  ‘It’s like a family curse, isn’t it?’

  ‘Again, I can’t think like that. I just know it’s a pattern with old people near the edge, when they move out of some familiar set-up. Anyway, Mrs Ogham-Ferrars had her hands full, and she left things to Laura. Jonathan was cured of his addiction, but after that things didn’t work out. The Ogham-Ferrarses couldn’t afford to go on supporting him and Laura indefinitely, but that’s what he expected and Laura backed him up. Nothing was ever his fault, in her eyes. He’d turn up at Abbots Charity and simply yell at them. Mrs Ogham-Ferrars says she thinks Laura was egging him on, because she wanted him for herself. And it had such a distressing effect on her husband that in the end she had to hide away anything that might remind him of Jonathan.’

  ‘It makes one’s own problems seem nothing at all.’

  ‘A lot of my work’s like that. It’s one of the things my wife found difficult. In the end Mrs Ogham-Ferrars saw nothing for it but to stop the arrangement. There’s a nephew in Canada who found Jonathan a job, and they shipped him out, but of course it didn’t stick and he bummed around for a while. That’s when he seems to have started taking an interest in children. There was a so-called orphanage in Philadelphia where he worked, illegally of course—he hadn’t got any papers—Laura used to get postcards from Philadelphia according to Mary Pitalski—but last spring it blew up into a public scandal with local politicians involved. He was lucky just to get slung out as an illegal immigrant.’

  ‘I keep seeing him in my mind’s eye as a child Toby’s age, or Nick’s, or Pete’s. It seems so unfair.’

  ‘The hardest thing for us to accep
t about the universe is its sheer bloody randomness. Our minds are programmed to look for reasons, for patterns, for purposes, for justice. They’re simply not there. If we want them we have to create them. Justice is a man-made thing, like a toothbrush. If I do my job right Toby, and my own grandchildren if I’ve the luck to have them, will grow up in a marginally juster universe. But it will still be local, trivial, weightless compared to the massive randomness of the rest of things.’

  ‘You don’t believe there’s a God?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. But if there is, he’s looking the other way.’

  ‘How can you live with such a depressing outlook? I know I couldn’t.’

  ‘I don’t find it depressing. Quite the opposite. The fact that I can make minuscule differences, that I can create my scrap of justice—you’ve got a lot of tapes, haven’t you? You listen quite a bit?’

  ‘Yes. All the time. What they call standard classics, though I’m prepared to be a bit more adventurous when I feel up to it.’

  ‘Jupiter Symphony?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Why does that matter to us? I’m not saying what is it, but why do we care? We care because it’s an assertion that it is possible to create patterned, elaborate, multi-dimensional forms of order by extracting particular sounds from the random noise of the universe. It’s not immortal. If it had only been played once and then forgotten it would still have mattered. There must have been a Mozart-equivalent in Nineveh. Despite the randomness of things, despite lives like the Ogham-Ferrarses’, we aren’t wholly the slaves of chance. We have some control.’