by J M Gregson
A woman would have had the sense to refuse graciously but firmly. But Bert Hook said diffidently, ‘I’d make a fool of myself, Keith. And I’ve only got my trainers on.’
Within two minutes, he had a ball in his hand and was windmilling his arms to flex his creaking shoulders. He cautiously marked out a run-up considerably abbreviated from that of his palmy days. Hook noticed with a chagrin he could not register publicly that the tail-end batsman had been replaced by one of the dark-skinned specialist batsmen his friend had mentioned. His once rhythmical run was laboured. His first ball was short enough to be dispatched comfortably off the back foot. His second was the leg-stump half-volley which all bowlers seek to avoid. The batsman showed his class as he leant on it comfortably, sending it along the ground for what would probably have been a leg-side boundary. Bert kicked the turf disgustedly and lamented the pretensions of middle age.
He dug the next one in just short of a length and was pleased to see the batsman surprised by the pace as the ball rose chest high; he fended it off in the air for what might have been a catch at short leg. There was a nod from the batsman, a little clap from behind the net. Bert realized to his dismay that spectators had gathered in the twilight to witness the humbling of the old warhorse.
His next ball pitched on a length and left the bat, the away swinger he had found it most difficult to bowl in his heyday. The batsman, still mindful of the previous rising ball, was a little slow into his forward defence and his thin edge would undoubtedly have been a catch to the wicketkeeper. He nodded a sporting acknowledgement to the panting bowler, who could not resist a grin of modest delight in response.
He would go for the in-swinger next, the one the commentators now called by that mystical name of ‘reverse swing’. It had always been his natural delivery. To his secret surprise and delight, he pitched it exactly where he wanted to, found the tiny gap between bat and pad, and deftly removed the batsman’s middle stump. This time there was combined and enthusiastic applause from behind the net, as the batsman acknowledged his defeat and ruefully replaced the stump.
Bert had enough sense to give up while he was ahead. ‘The light’s going now,’ he said sympathetically to the batsman. He tried to disguise how heavily he was breathing as he picked up his sweater from the end of his run and went over to collect his boys from the appreciative group behind the net.
Hook was a genuinely modest man, so that he was glad to get away from the extravagant praise for his tiny renaissance. But he was only human. He lingered a little while in the attached garage as the boys scampered into the house, so that he could hear what they said to his wife.
‘Our dad got Billy Singh out twice,’ said Luke excitedly, anxious to be the first to deliver the news.
‘He’s the opening bat for the first team,’ explained Jack to his mother. ‘He’s not really Billy, but we call him that.’
‘He got fifty-seven last Saturday,’ said Luke. ‘But Dad had him on a plate. Knocked his middle stump out with a breakback.’
‘More of an off-cutter, really,’ corrected his elder brother magisterially. ‘Dad must have been pretty good in his day.’ Eleanor Hook knew enough of teenagers to realize that this was the height of praise. ‘He was very good indeed,’ she said stoutly, ‘and now it’s high time that you boys were off to bed.’
‘You’ll be a hero with the boys for at least a weekend,’ she said to Bert as they sat in comfortable married relaxation, with the boys in bed and mugs of tea in hand. ‘Of course, to my mind, it’s just more evidence of the Peter Pan which seems to lurk in all men.’
‘You’re probably right. You usually are, in these things,’ said Bert Hook dutifully. But even his most determined efforts could not quite remove the smile from his face as he sipped his tea.
As Bert Hook relaxed after his unaccustomed effort, Michelle de Vries was preparing to leave the house of her lover. She too was pleasantly exhausted, but from physical efforts of a totally different sort.
‘I’ll see you on Tuesday as usual.’ Guy Dawson had the enigmatic smile he always seemed to reserve for the moment when they parted. It might have been satisfied recollection of their uninhibited abandonment in bed over the last two hours. It might have been anticipation of another meeting in four days’ time. It might even have been the satisfaction of sex without commitment, of having a woman so under his spell that she abandoned all inhibitions in his bed and came to him whenever he called her. But Michelle didn’t want to consider that possibility.
He kissed her briefly in the hall before he opened the door for her to leave. She held him firmly, feeling the firmness of his back muscles under her fingers, opening her lips and searching for his tongue with hers, insisting without words that this was real affection, not the token endearment of parting. She was more breathless than she wanted to be when she stepped back from him - like a silly teenager in the grip of her first passion, she told herself angrily.
To counteract this thought, she said, ‘We’ll have to be careful about our meetings. I don’t want Gerald to get suspicious.
I thought he raised his eyebrows about tonight. That might be just my imagination, but I think we should watch it.’
‘Cool it a little, you mean. All right.’
He had acquiesced a little too readily. She would have liked a little argument, or at least some expression of regret. She said, ‘I don’t mean cool it, no. I could never cool it, with you, Guy!’
But the teasing words fell oddly from her lips, although entirely sincere. You shouldn’t play the coquette, she reflected wryly, when you were a married woman of forty-four and your lover was a single man of thirty-seven. She wanted Guy to take her in his arms again, to tell her that whatever meetings they could arrange were as precious to him as they were to her. Instead, he ran his fingers briefly over her forehead and through her hair, then opened the door upon the warm summer night.
‘See you Tuesday, then,’ he whispered conspiratorially.
Before she had reached the gate, the door had closed upon that composed smile and she was on her own in the warm, scented darkness.
Michelle made her way back to her car, which was parked discreetly under a tree a hundred and fifty yards away. Thoughts tumbled one upon another in her troubled, racing mind. What was this going to do to her relationship with Gerald, the husband whom she both loved and needed? She had never intended it to get as serious as this when Guy Dawson had advanced the theory that a little fling would do no one any harm. It was much more than a little fling now for her, but what was it for Guy? Was she any more than a convenient and responsive body, a passing phase in his sexual life? He assured her that she was more than that whenever she raised the subject, but she would have liked a little more evidence of his feelings. But she felt that she couldn’t pursue the matter without becoming a clingy female, and no man liked that.
Michelle de Vries was far too preoccupied with her feelings to notice the slight figure who noted her departure from the house of Guy Dawson, who slipped from shadow to shadow to follow her at a discreet distance as she made her way to her car, who made a note of its number as she drove away.
Darren Chivers, creature of the night, had more material for his records.
Seven
Anne Jackson did not suffer from that Monday morning gloom her colleagues and the wider world found so debilitating.
She paid lip service to the idea, of course, nodding gloomily along with her peers about the prospect of the resumption of work after the joys of the weekend, but she enjoyed her work and secretly relished it. She liked children, so that the prospect of a day with her thirty energetic charges filled her with eager anticipation rather than the panic which the idea might have compelled in less accomplished young women.
Anne had already been in her classroom for half an hour, preparing materials for the day’s work. At a quarter to nine, she was sufficiently on top of things to venture out into the sunshine and watch the children coming into school. Many of them lived sufficiently c
lose to the quiet suburban school to walk here unaccompanied by an adult. Those who came with parents mostly left them at the gates and scampered happily into the buildings without a backward glance. A good sign that. Happy children made effective learners.
Anne walked down the short drive, returning the greetings of the children who spoke to her, smiling at the parents she knew. Her interest had been attracted by one figure outside the gates, but she did not wish to draw attention either to this man or to her own concern with him.
Anne Jackson did not subscribe to the present media-driven obsession with paedophiles; she thought it unfortunate that parents should be as fearful as most of them were of sexual or other interference with their children. The apprehension inevitably communicated itself to their offspring, who, in the worst cases, were sometimes terrified of people who only wished them well. Nevertheless, when Anne saw a man behaving in a manner she thought was odd, if not suspicious, she was certainly not about to ignore it.
The slight figure was presumably trying to be unobtrusive. The irony was that both his dress and his manner seemed designed to excite suspicion, especially at this time, in an area thronged with children. The man hurried from the shadow beneath one huge chestnut tree to the shadow beneath the next, then paused for a moment to get his bearings, as if confident that he could not be seen there. On this June morning, when the sun was already high, bright summer dresses and tee shirts dominated the dress among adults. This man was wearing a shabby navy anorak which was zipped up to his throat.
Anne Jackson thought she recognized that anorak. When the man within it turned his thin face to glance instinctively back over his shoulder, she was certain that she did.
This was the man she had seen in the supermarket car park ten days ago, the man her fiance Chris Rushton had earlier been watching in the pub. A man with a criminal record. Not as a paedophile, thankfully, but as a drug dealer. There was much talk nowadays of drugs being dealt at the school gates in city schools; there had even been an instance of it in Cheltenham, that bastion of conservatism and traditional values, last year. Warnings had gone out to all the schools in the locality, with directions as to the action to be taken if teachers suspected their pupils were being offered illegal substances as they left the premises.
Surely drugs weren’t revealing their ugly presence at the gates of a quiet primary school? But whatever the man’s purpose was, it seemed to her relief that he had no concern with children. He was level with the entrance to the school now, but on the other side of the road. He made no attempt to turn towards the gates and completely ignored the chattering children who passed within a foot or two of him as he moved on.
Forty yards beyond this point, he stopped in front of a house and looked towards the street lamp adjacent to it and the houses on either side, apparently confirming to himself that this was the house he wanted. Then he produced a stub of pencil and a small pad and made a brief note. Anne presumed he was recording the number and name of the house, for he seemed to take his information from the gatepost in front of it.
Then he turned on his heel, and with the same curious, slightly stooping gait, moved swiftly back whence he had come. No paedophile this, and, on this occasion at least, no drug-dealer either.
From within the school grounds, Anne Jackson watched curiously as he moved like a fugitive from tree to tree, checking that no one was following him along the pavement. Before he reached the comer where he would have disappeared from her view, he pulled a bicycle from beneath the last tree, mounted it, and rode swiftly away.
Ten hours later, on the same sunlit Monday, Mark Rogers was feeling very weary. The evening in the restaurant at the top of the Post Office Tower now seemed a lot more than six days behind him. The meeting with his boss in Bristol had gone on for a long time, and some harsh questions had been asked.
There had been eight of them in the meeting. Some of the others had received much rougher treatment than he had. He consoled himself with that thought now that he was at last alone. But there were harsh times ahead, everyone had agreed. In the recession which was coming, the weak would go to the wall and even the strong would need all their wits to survive. Bonuses this year would be slim or non-existent; the main aim would be to keep your job.
Work was going to be quite demanding enough, without this extra thing he had hanging over him.
Like any great city in the summer heat, Bristol was hot and dusty. The stale, diesel-tainted air tasted like ashes on Mark Rogers’ tongue as he made his way slowly to the multi-storey car park to collect his vehicle. Arriving in early afternoon, he had been forced to drive up to the top floor to find a space, and there was a good signal from there for his mobile phone.
He rang Samantha. ‘I’m going to be late, love. I’m afraid. We’ve given ourselves a break, but the meeting is set to go on for another hour yet.’
‘OK. Thanks for ringing. I’ll get the kids to bed, tell them Daddy’s working late. We’ll have a quiche and a drink in front of the telly whenever you get here. Allow you to unwind after a long day.’
‘Give them a kiss from me. Tell them I’ll do the stories tomorrow night.’
It made him feel worse that she was so unquestioning and so accommodating. He didn’t like lying to his wife and had done very little of it over the years. But he needed time to deal with this other thing which he couldn’t tell her about, which he couldn’t tell anyone about. He felt immensely tired and depressed. He had to make a conscious effort to start the Mercedes and turn it towards the long downward spiral which would bring him to the street.
At least the length of the meeting meant that the rush hour had cleared from the city. It was a glorious evening, and the sun was not in his eyes as he drove northwards towards Gloucester on the M5. He found himself driving more and more slowly as he turned off the motorway and moved towards the centre of the city and this appointment he did not want to keep.
He allowed himself a pint of bitter, found that it was surprisingly well kept in such a sleazy pub. The man wasn’t there yet, but Mark was a little earlier than the time arranged, since he had thought originally that he would have been coming here from home after his evening meal. He felt automatically at the bank notes in the inside pocket of his jacket, then wondered if he should have done so. Might it be a gesture which gave too much information to the denizens of a seedy place like this?
But there weren’t many people in the pub at this hour, which fell between those of the after-work drinkers and the more serious clientele of the later evening. He was sitting unobserved on the bench seat in the alcove, as the man had directed him to do. It irked him to be accepting direction from a man like this, to be at the mercy of such a creature. He was more than ever determined to do something about the situation. People like this never went away, though they perpetually promised to do so.
His pint was almost finished, though he had scarcely realized that he was drinking. What he did realize now was how much he had needed it, how much he had needed to wash away the ashes of a depressing day. A depressing day which had the most distressing part of all still to come. He wanted another drink, but he wasn’t going to risk one; he needed his wits at their sharpest, with this evil still to be dealt with.
As he contemplated the dregs of his beer, the man slid in beside him, setting his thin thigh against that of his victim, coming so close that Mark could see his broken teeth and smell the staleness of his breath. As usual, Chivers had arrived without his advent being noticed, as if he was an evil that had materialized from the air. Mark eased himself instinctively away from him, but he knew that there was no escape from the hold this fellow had over him.
‘You got the money?’ asked Darren Chivers.
‘I’ve got it, yes.’
Chivers glanced automatically to each side of the alcove, though he had checked that they would be unobserved before he had ventured into it. ‘Hand it over, then.’
Mark Rogers handed over the notes in the paper bag which had once contained his chi
ld’s asthma prescription from the chemist’s. ‘This has to be the last.’
Darren Chivers flipped open the comer of the paper bag, assessed the contents, flicked the comers of the twenty-pound notes expertly between thumb and fingers. ‘A thousand? That’s what we agreed.’
‘There’s a thousand in cash. More than I can afford. I don’t know how I’ll explain the withdrawal to my wife, if she looks at the bank statement.’
‘Your problem, mate, not mine. You’ll think of something. You could even confess, but I wouldn’t advise it. Women can’t keep secrets, especially ones that need to be kept, like this.’
‘There’ll be no more. I’m going to be pushed to keep my job at BT, the way things are going.’ Mark knew immediately that he should not have said that.
‘Have no chance at all, would you, if they knew what I know? But they don’t, and you’ll need to make sure it stays that way.’
Mark Rogers wanted to put strong hands round the thin throat, to still those taunting, mobile lips for ever. ‘I told you, I can’t give you any more. It will be the worse for you if you try.’
‘The worse for me if I try.’ Chivers repeated the phrase as if he needed to weigh it carefully. ‘That sounds like a threat, to me, Mr Rogers. You’re in no position to make threats. I call the shots here!’ Darren Chivers delivered this last phrase with real relish. He had never in his life been in a position to call the shots, but he was now calling them with powerful people, people like this, who would have curled their lips in scorn without the information he possessed. He was finding more satisfaction in this second trade of his than mere money.
Mark pushed his hands deep into his pockets. They were itching to inflict serious damage on this squalid tormentor, but this was neither the place nor the time for action. For the moment Chivers called the shots, as he had just been reminded. He repeated firmly, ‘There won’t be any more. Not from me. I’m going to be pushed to survive and support my family in the next year.’
