by HRF Keating
‘John, you’re a marvel.’
And so am I, in my way, she thought as she cut the call. Off goes Professor Wichmann apparently into the blue, and — when eventually I think of this — I track that walking enthusiast from long ago in the Schwartzwald of Germany, to — yes, right to Windermere, bang in the middle of the walking country of the Lake District.
But will he just be walking there? Or will he be looking for a suitable place to experiment with CA 534 before he issues a threat to use it?
But it still could be that my own inquiries scared an innocent old man, who was once a very young man living in a country where the threat of arrest, merely for one’s racial origins, always lurked. Was it me who made him, scared by that police interest, suddenly go into hiding?
But, whatever the reason, he has disappeared. And he still has to be found. So, call Mr Brown with my deduction?
Well, better not. Better wait a little until I’ve gone over all this and made sure it’s watertight. And better to wait, too, to use the mobile when I’m no longer driving.
Back home, however, she had seen nothing to doubt in her reasoning. Or, at least, she felt her notion was still worth pursuing, though, late as it was, she postponed ringing Mr Brown with a mere notion.
When, first thing next day, she did call him, having waited since it was Sunday to give him time to be up and about, he agreed that her theory was worth pursuing, if with some expressions of Scottish caution. ‘We’ll see, though,’ he concluded. ‘We’ll see if those unmentionables down there in London come up with something first.’
*
Harriet realised then that she had come to the end, for the time being, of her inquiries. The man whom the Faceless Ones had put in the frame, with the merest fragment of evidence only, that single reference in Inspector Skelton’s files, was the subject of a full-scale hunt. Her share in it, for what it had been worth, was now over. All right, with no mobile, Wichmann can’t be pinpointed among the Cumbrian hills, where I believe him to be. But that doesn’t mean that he can’t be found. Perhaps even more easily there than elsewhere because there are so few people at this time of year out on those bleak but beautiful mountainsides. So, sooner or later, he will be traced. Traced and arrested.
Then will I have to go up to Windermere, or wherever they take him, to confront him in a cell? Or will that task be given over lock, stock and barrel to the Faceless Ones?
Sitting there after breakfast — John had fetched fresh croissants — she asked herself: what do I do now?
Answer: sit here like a lemon.
A lemon, she suddenly thought, that’s oozing tears. Tears for dead Graham, tears for Malcolm, perhaps never to walk again. Yes, Mr Brown’s recommendation of work as the way to drag oneself out of the worst of grief has abruptly been, if not withdrawn, at least put into suspension. And what has happened? Grief has come tumbling back.
Graham. My Graham. My newcomer to the service, guardian of my belief in it, is dead. His life all in one second ended by the unthinking actions of a few deluded terrorists.
She turned to John, sitting ploughing through the massed pages of the Sunday Times.
‘John, John. What is happening to the world? Has everything changed for ever? Graham’s dead. Do you realise that? He’s dead. Dead, dead.’
John let the paper fall in a heap to the floor, rose to his feet, crossed over to her, stooped and put a hand on her shoulder.
‘Darling, no, the world hasn’t changed. And, yes, I do realise Graham’s dead. That’s been there solidly in the back of my mind ever since that phone call from Notting Hill police station. But I’ve been lucky, in a way. At much the same time things in the office began to go haywire. A senior executive — no names, of course — was suspected of having his hand in the till, deep in. It’s the sort of possibility that hovers over all concerns dealing in huge sums. Well, now it looks as if he really is guilty. Looks, but no more. We’ll see. Still, the effect of all the hoo-hah has been that I just haven’t been able to think much about what happened to us.’
He gave her arm a reassuring squeeze.
‘Listen, I know it’s early morning, but why don’t we have a drink? Or … Or shall we go back up to bed?’
‘No. No, not that. I couldn’t bear to. I couldn’t bear to think of that sort of happiness when … When Graham … You know, ever since we heard I haven’t …’
‘And you know that, lying awake far into the night, I haven’t either.’
She looked up.
‘But, yes. A drink would help. It only really all came back fully into my mind because, quite suddenly, the task Mr Brown gave me has gone into suspension. Then the black thoughts swept in.’
She took hold of the large whisky and ginger he made for her — she’d noted the spirit splashing into the glass, the ginger ale spurting up as the bottle was opened.
‘So here I am,’ she said, ‘with nothing to do. And I don’t like it.’
John, head down at the little fridge they had in the corner, looking for a bottle of his Australian chardonnay, muttered something she only just caught.
‘When there’s nothing to be done, do nothing.’
‘Do nothing?’ she snapped as soon as what he had said sank in. ‘But you can’t just sit there and decide there’s nothing to be done. Not when there is something, however hard it is to see what to do about it next.’
John straightened up, bottle in hand.
‘Well, that’s my philosophy,’ he said. ‘And I haven’t found it altogether a bad way of looking at things.’
He took the corkscrew out of its drawer and began opening the chardonnay.
‘As a matter of fact,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘now I come to think about it, I have got something for you to do.’
‘All right, anything to keep me occupied.’
‘Well, maybe you’ll withdraw that offer, when you hear what it is. You see, I don’t like to be out of touch with my fellow board members just at the moment. It’s possible, just, that I may be called in, Sunday or no Sunday.’
‘Well, come on, what’s this leading up to?’
He produced the hint of a grin.
‘To you going in my place for my long overdue Sunday visit to Aunty Beryl.’
‘But I’ve never met the woman, and she’s your aunt or cousin or whatever, so —’
She came to a halt.
True enough, she said to herself, I don’t see any good reason to pay John’s distant cousin a call in his stead. But I do know something about her. She’s a member of the Council of WAGI. And, all right, WAGI, despite Mr Brown’s thoughts on violence as the weapon of the weak, has never looked to me likely as the Heronsgate House culprit. But, if eventually it turns out old Wichmann has some perfectly good reason for suddenly vanishing, then WAGI, however hopeless an outfit it is, does come back into play. Sort of.
‘OK,’ she said to John. ‘There is actually something I’d intended at one stage to check with your aunt or cousin or whatever. So I might as well do it now. So, as seeing her will keep me nicely occupied for an hour or two, and occupation seems to be a good thing, I’ll go. Even if it is you just dodging out of it.’
‘I’m not actually. I may get a call from the Chairman at any moment.’
‘Take your word for it. So when shall I be off? I suppose I’d better get her a bunch of flowers or something.’
John looked for an instant mortified.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I’ve never, in all the years I’ve brought myself to visit the old — Well, the word bitch sprang into my mind. But shall I say in all the years I’ve been visiting the old lady I never thought to take her flowers. They didn’t seem to fit the image, somehow.’
‘Well, bitchy image or no bitchy image, I’m going to do the right thing and take flowers. I see a bunch of Spring-yellow daffodils. A great big bunch.’
*
She went at four o’clock, the established time for John’s infrequent Sunday visits, since there was no way of let
ting Beryl know she was coming. ‘Heavens no,’ John had said when she had suggested giving her a call in advance, ‘the old creature hasn’t had a phone for years, says she can’t afford it, even though I actually offered to foot the bill.’
The flat, when she rang the bell in the centre of its ill-painted brown door, proved to be every bit as awful as John had once said it was, and Aunty Beryl looked as if she might be just as difficult, even bitchy, as he had said.
She was a shrivelled up old lady of, Harriet guessed, seventy-five or so. Thin in every part of her, stick legs in what looked like lisle stockings, wrinkled here and there, a body, under an ancient woollen dress in two shades of blue, both pale, more like a skeletal collection of bones than a creature of flesh and blood, and a narrow, sunken face yet more wrinkled than the stockings. Only from out of it there darted a pair of active blue eyes.
The flat — Harriet had been struck at once by a faint, pervasive odour of urine — was even shabbier than Professor Wichmann’s. The only two armchairs in its single tiny living room were grimed over and worn down to the threads of their covers, almost impossible to guess what colours or pattern there had once been. There was a small carpet, perhaps better called a mere rug, and Harriet, as she took it in, made a quick mental note not to trip on any of the holes she spotted. The gas fire, not lit although the day was blustery and cold, had next to it, almost as big, a bright-red meter menacingly demanding coins for its maw.
‘I don’t suppose you remember me,’ she had said in greeting, ‘though you were at our wedding, all those years ago. I’m Harriet, John’s wife. He’s been terribly busy at the office all this weekend, I’m afraid, some crisis or other. So I’ve come in his place.’
Scarcely pausing, in view of the fiercely suspicious look in Aunty Beryl’s button-blue eyes, she thrust forward the big double bunch of daffodils.
‘I — I brought these for you.’
Aunty Beryl, with a new look of suspiciousness, seized hold of them and banged them down, as if they were laden with some deadly poison, on the narrow, ornately carved mahogany sideboard taking up almost the whole of one of the walls of the cramped little room.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, her slight Birchester nasal twang manifesting itself, ‘I know who you are. Always getting your picture in the Evening Star. Or you were in the days when I used to see it. Don’t get it any more. Nothing but wickedness in it: rapes, violence, drunks reeling about the streets, stalkers, everything. A body doesn’t feel safe, not for a moment.’
Harriet had felt depression creeping up ever since she had heard the bolts on that battered front door being pulled back one by one and the door itself at last opened, scraping over a loose piece of floorcovering in the tiny hallway. She managed now to fight off her gloom with a mental poor-taste joke about the unlikelihood of anybody wanting to rape Aunty Beryl.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the Star likes nothing better than to print a picture of me when some investigation’s not going well. But it’s something I have to put up with.’
But Aunty Beryl was not made any sweeter by that.
‘And your twin boys,’ she had gone spitting on, ‘the one killed, the other in hospital and not likely to come out of it. I heard about them on my little radio, in spite of not seeing the Star and not having that nasty television.’
That mention of the twins hurt. For a moment, to keep herself in control, Harriet had to stand there in silence, biting at her lower lip.
At last she managed to say something.
‘Well, I’m happy to say that Malcolm, the one in hospital, is getting better every day. The doctors don’t say anything about — about his not being able to leave eventually, though they’re not sure he’ll be able to go to Graham’s funeral, even in a wheelchair. But otherwise the outlook isn’t too bad.’
‘There’s that MSA, remember,’ Aunty Beryl came back. ‘They say every hospital’s riddled with it nowadays. Nasty little germs all over everywhere. Deadly when you do catch one. Deadly. Nothing they can do. One reason I hope I’ll never have to end my days in hospital, not wherever it is, that St Oswald’s here or St Mary’s down in London. They’re all the same. More dying of MSA than of what they’ve been taken in for.’
Again Harriet had to force herself to thrust away what the old woman was saying. Or direly prophesying.
The best she could do was to correct her, and not without sharpness.
‘I think you must mean MRSA, not MSA,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure what all the letters stand for, but the R is resistant. To antibiotics, I think.’
She nerved herself up to declare that Malcolm was very unlikely to be affected in that way. But, even as she thought it, she realised it was by no means as impossible as she was about to assert.
She clamped her lips shut.
And then, at the last moment, a quick idea came to her. Perhaps even a useful one.
‘Yes,’ she said, jabbering a little, ‘everything seems to be initials these days, don’t you think? DVDs, VHS — oh, I don’t know — FIFA and BAFTA, OAPs and OBEs. Who knows what they all stand for? Didn’t John, in fact, tell me you yourself belonged to something called W-A-G-I?’
‘Women Against Genetic Interference,’ Aunty Beryl proclaimed, drawing herself up.
‘Ah, yes. That was it. Have you been a member long?’
‘For years. A friend of mine from the old days, Gwendoline Tritton, asked me to join. We do very good work, you know. People just don’t realise what terrible things scientists are up to nowadays. Changing everything they set their eyes on. The food we grow, all the animals, making them quite different just to suit their own ideas, even altering human beings. Clonging. Clonging.’
‘Yes,’ Harriet said, deciding not to offer cloning.
And how could you explain to someone like Aunty Beryl — perhaps to any WAGI member — that they were caught up in a whirlwind of wild exaggeration?
Yes, I can see now why John keeps putting off visiting her, if he gets a stream of such utterly illogical ideas flung at him whenever he opens his mouth, let alone the envious insults. All right, one ought to feel sorry for anyone living like this, poor as poor, when once — at the time of our wedding? — she must have been reasonably comfortably off. Now here she is, afraid of being mugged, of ending her days in a germ-infested hospital, of the nasty television and a dozen other things. A miserable life. But, when seeing her means exposing oneself to the sort of unpleasantness she’s just flung at me, it’d be by no means easy to do the decent thing and come to Sunday tea. Not that I’ve been offered a cup, for all those daffodils I brought.
Chapter Twelve
Despite the sharp chill in the air, Harriet, who had left Aunty Beryl’s wretched flat at the end of another half hour almost as if she was fleeing from the plague, stood just where she was on the stained and sticky pavement, just round the corner out of sight of Beryl’s windows. She breathed deeply in.
God, I’m glad to be out of that. And was it in any way worthwhile? Did I learn anything more about WAGI as Aunty Beryl went on spitting and snarling with whatever came next into her head as I tried to chat? Well, yes, I suppose, I did. A bit. A tiny bit. I managed to gather that WAGI’s a more active organisation than I learnt from those Minutes that Gwendoline Tritton flourished in my face, that it meets quite frequently, sends out a lot of propaganda.
Even though Aunty Beryl suddenly clammed up, I learnt that they still occasionally like to inflict a little physical damage, more than that single attack on the crop of GM maize that earned fines for those taking part, Aunty Beryl’s paid by John.
But did I learn anything indicating that WAGI, rather than old Professor Wichmann, had managed to hire the thugs who petrol-threatened that blarneying Irishman, Michael O’Dowd? And, no, I didn’t. It’s impossible to believe a lot of old women could have the knowledge or contacts to get hold of criminals like the ones who used such violence. Ferocious though Gwendoline Tritton is, I just can’t see anyone like her being able to do that.
; Nor, come to that, do I see old Wichmann knowing where to find any criminal heavies. Unless … Unless, still hard to believe, he’s all along had contacts with some relic Nazi organisation. That all his talk of living under threat in Germany before the Second World War was pulling the wool over my innocent eyes.
Then a nasty little forgotten task came back to her.
Oh God, I never asked damned Beryl if she had been at the Council meeting of WAGI on the night of the raid, if she could vouch for all fifteen members, sixteen with herself, being there till after midnight.
Go back and see her again? Be assaulted with jibes about Graham and Malcolm? No. No, I absolutely can’t.
But never mind that, I still haven’t questioned the other names on that list. No point now, really, now that Wichmann’s disappeared.
She shrugged her raincoat more closely round herself and set off to where she had left the car.
So it is, as Dad used to say, ‘Home, James’. And still, thanks to the Faceless Ones taking the hunt for Wichmann totally under their control, with nothing to do.
*
There at home, over their evening drinks, she managed with some difficulty not to tell John — no call from his crisis-hit Chairman — why she had really gone to Aunty Beryl. No reason to tell him any more about the missing CA 534 than he had already known. But tell him about his cousin or aunt she must.
‘All right,’ she burst out in answer to his mildly interested inquiry, ‘you really let me in for it there, didn’t you? I mean, the decent thing would have been to have given me some warning. But, no. You just let me be trapped in that appalling flat in sleazy Moorfields —’
‘Oh, come on,’ John interrupted. ‘I know Moorfields has its unlovely aspects, but Harrington Street isn’t too bad.’
‘And when were you last there to know how bad it is?’
Mustn’t take out my rage on poor John. But, damn it, I’ve got to vent it on somebody.
John raised both hands, palms outwards, in defence.
‘Well, all right, it has been perhaps six months since I saw Beryl. But I still think there are worse places around there than Harrington Street.’
