Arms wide, at shoulder height, Roy slowly places one foot after the other along its length. He is concentrating on balancing, on feeling that he can walk on a thin rope. He is dead. If he falls off the rope he cannot kill himself and yet when he steps off the platform for the first time, he wants Sylvia to know that he is trying to do it right.
‘A geography student came to the door last night trying to raise sponsorship money for a project he wants to join,’ Sheila tells Alison. ‘About a dozen of them are going abroad, including geologists, anthropologists and marine biologists. They’re going to map uncharted territories and learn about the people there. He spent quite a lot of time explaining it and he left me some literature.’
‘Did you give him any money?’
‘I gave him £20. I’ve been thinking about it all night. It has made me look differently at the space around me. Have you seen those Police notices everywhere appealing for witnesses to crimes, with the date and time they were carried out?’
‘The yellow boards?’
‘Yes, they’re about three feet high, in tall, narrow tent shapes. The police put them as near as possible to the spot where a crime has happened. I walked past one this morning on the way to the paper shop. It makes it look as if the whole area has been labelled. If you leave aside that the police are involved, it looks as if the notices have been put there to guide anthropologists exploring the neighbourhood. I started to think, maybe they really are signs, and maybe there are others left around unobtrusively so that Londoners going about their daily lives won’t think twice about them.’
‘When you look at it that way, there are signs everywhere in London if you think about all the graffiti and posters.’
‘There are also sensory ones for smell and hearing, as if the labellers have never met the anthropologists and they aren’t really sure how to present the information to make it most useful to them.’
‘Every time you walk on a path in London you have to do that dog shit dance, trying to avoid the steaming piles dotted everywhere. I suppose it might be easier to bear if it hadn’t just been left there indiscriminately, lying warm and stinking right where it’s dropped from a dog’s arse. Do you think dog shit could be there for a reason, Sheila?’
‘What about the drum and bass music that comes from the open windows of the houses and flats? That could be a signal of some kind. It might serve the same purpose as fishermen banging on the hulls of their boats to attract fish. And then there are the cars driving around and around a small area playing equally loud music. It’s as if there are squads of counter agents trying to create confusion by obliterating the music signposts coming from the houses.’
‘But who are these signs for, Sheila?’
‘They could be aimed at anthropologists from outer space.’
‘Well, that’s one possible explanation.’
Chapter Twenty-Six ~ Plague of Blonde Women
Venetia Latimer sits in her living room with her feet on an ottoman and tries to put flesh on the bones of her scheme to entrap Mrs Fitzgerald. The meeting at the café went well. Mrs Fitzgerald appeared intrigued by Venetia’s ideas about testing the serum on soccer crowds. Now Venetia has to come up with a viable plan that will hook Mrs Fitzgerald and lead her into the hands of the law.
Mrs Latimer likes the geographical complexities of selling drugs at soccer matches. She can appear to implicate herself by pretending she is the other side of London selling to a rival team: ‘You take Chelsea, Ella, I’ll cover the Arsenal,’ without raising Mrs Fitzgerald’s suspicions. Unfortunately she has never been to a soccer match and her plan stalls in the detail. Do drugs dealers frequent the local pubs at soccer matches or do they stand right outside the grounds looking as if they have something to sell? The plan is too sketchy and an experienced operator like Mrs Fitzgerald will never bite. Which other area of life is predominated by males? Venetia Latimer sighs. Which isn’t?
Possibly Mrs Fitzgerald could be persuaded to sell the drugs in City pubs? If she had any success the effects might be interesting. Trading would slacken as the traders, their aggression curbed by the serum, tried to reach deals with each other that accommodated both sides.
Even better, Mrs Fitzgerald might agree to set up a hotline from her office to supply the serum. It would be perfectly plausible to explain that Mrs Latimer cannot use her own phone number in case it is recognized by Stephen or Joey or their colleagues.
Venetia Latimer reaches for the phone and calls The News of The World to sound out their interest in the story. She reaches the honey-trap team.
‘I can supply evidence that a London private detective is selling drugs in the City. Will you run the story if I play Linda Tripp to her Monica?’
The tired journalist places the phone receiver on the desk and shouts ‘Lady with a drugs story about a harmonica. Any takers?’ There are none. His colleagues are gathered at a desk near the window, reviewing a muddle of photographs of a nude sports hero smoking crack in the presence of one of the newspaper’s reporters.
The journalist offers to take the skeleton details of the story from Mrs Latimer over the phone but it is not long before he interrupts. ‘The problem, madam, is that you are telling me that this person is selling dog tranquillizers to city traders. It is not illegal to sell drugs unless they are banned substances. I’m afraid it won’t make the front pages.’
Mrs Latimer gets up and walks around her living room, momentarily stumped. She vows she will not rest until she gets Mrs Fitzgerald’s licence revoked, however tiresome the process of making this happen. Mrs Fitzgerald must be punished. There is nothing else for Venetia Latimer to do but to obtain an illegal substance and add it to the phials of serum before passing it to Mrs Fitzgerald for sale in the City.
As Jeremy opens the lid of the suitcase, even before Jane sees the piles of used purple £20 notes stacked neatly in rows on the left side of the gray lining, she catches the elemental smell that used money has - metallic, like soil.
‘Why is the money just on one side of the suitcase?’
‘Well, I’ve spent the money that was on the other side. I take what I need, going along the rows, top to bottom, right to left. I don’t see the point in rearranging it just to make it symmetrical. Sylvia gave it to me before she ran away. She asked me to pay someone to investigate her employer. There’s so much money here that I’ve been able to use some of it to fund the traffic campaign.’
‘What’s the investigation?’
‘Sylvia wanted to ensure the animals she’d been working with weren’t being ill-treated after she left. Personally, I think it’s all right to make a profit from animals if you feed them properly and exercise them.’
‘Are the animals being ill-treated?’
‘I don’t know. I try not to get involved. I drop off the money anonymously and collect a monthly report from a post office box to forward to Sylvia so that the detective agency can’t trace the money back to her. I saw the agency boss on a bus once. She looked straight at me, as if she knew me.’
‘Guilty people always think everyone else knows their secrets. Did you see any of the reports?’
‘Why?’
‘I’m always looking for stories. Animals make good telly. Come on Jeremy, help me out here.’
‘Why don’t you ask her what’s going on yourself? The agency’s only down in Brixton. I’ll give you the address if you like.’
In Sainsbury’s in Clapham Park Road, Ella Fitzgerald is approached by a tall, cadaverous blonde woman wearing wrap-around mirrored sunglasses that barely disguise the sappy bruises on her face.
‘Can you help me get some food?’ The woman refuses the two pound coins Mrs Fitzgerald offers her. ‘I’ve got money. Can you help me buy the food? I don’t know what to get. I haven’t eaten for three days.’ The woman sways unsteadily on her feet. Her words are beautifully enunciated in a deep voice, like Joanna Lumley’s.
‘A sandwich?’ suggests Mrs Fitzgerald, moved by the woman’s helplessness and her pe
rfect diction. ‘Tuna and sweetcorn? Cheese and pickle?’
‘I’m vegan.’
‘An avocado, then. Bananas.’ Mrs Fitzgerald steers her round the fruit and vegetable section, loading a small basket. ‘Bread rolls. Do you have any cutlery? Do you have anything to eat the food with? Crisps? Some chocolate for energy?’
‘I’m macrobiotic.’ The woman’s arm shoots out suddenly and grabs a bottle of white wine on special offer, clutching it close to her chest while Mrs Fitzgerald struggles with the basket. The woman produces a £10 note at the till.
‘Have you got a Reward Card?’ asks the check-out assistant.
‘No.’
‘Would you like one?’ The assistant, avoiding eye contact, hasn’t seen the oozing bruises or the urgency with which the woman plucks the wine bottle from the conveyor belt.
‘I’m in a hurry.’
Unaccustomed to driving in Brixton, Jane nevertheless quickly adapts to the local custom that permits those travelling in a moving vehicle to change road position without signalling. Until evolution grows a third hand on Brixton car drivers, they are fully occupied with one hand clamped to the mobile phone at their ear, while using no more than two fingers of the other hand to lightly steer past the dented saloon cars parked along the high street. If they are eating a sandwich while talking on the phone, they sometimes have to steer with one elbow, which takes a great deal of skill. As well as being unable to signal, there is little opportunity for Brixton drivers to change gear when their hands are occupied, and consequently they aim to maintain a constant speed in third gear.
All the most convenient parking positions in the bus lanes are already taken by the time Jane arrives in the high street. Cars and vans are parked along the red route and the double yellow lines on Coldharbour Lane, reducing it to a single duo-directional lane of traffic. Jane leaves the car in Tesco’s car park and walks the short distance to a doorway past McDonald’s, from where she can observe Mrs Fitzgerald’s office window. It’s an uncomfortable place to stand in the middle of the morning as the young mothers with pre-school children are out in force, bumping their children’s legs on the pushchairs and slapping them without warning, presumably to prepare them for the pain of separation once they are old enough to be handed over to a state education.
Somewhat shaken by the encounter in Sainsbury’s, Mrs Fitzgerald crosses Brixton High Street hurriedly, raising her handbag to hide her face as she tucks into the doorway leading to her first floor office, where she calls Alison over to the window.
‘Do you see that woman near McDonald’s?’
‘The tall blonde with sunglasses?’
‘There seems to be a plague of pallid blonde women in the area. Will you hand me the binoculars?’
‘She’s looking this way. Do you think she’s watching us?’
‘I thought it might be the woman from the supermarket but it isn’t. She’s dressed more smartly and she’s less damaged.’
‘Do you think she’s part of some counter-surveillance operation?’
‘She has a pair of binoculars trained on our window.’
‘Maybe she’s interested in the dinner dating agency? Miss Lester seems to be courting publicity for it.’
‘Alison, I’d like to avoid exposure to any kind of publicity.’ Mrs Fitzgerald shudders as she folds the strap of the binoculars and puts them into their case. She thinks of Gazza and Tony Adams MBE and Paul Merson, struggling with demons caused by the pressures of being in the public eye. She thinks of poor Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.
‘Imagine how it would feel to be watched all the time, Alison. I should hate to be famous. There is no rest from the intrusion. I have heard people say that if you desire fame then you should expect the press to spy on you and ambush you to take more photos.
‘It’s an argument that’s difficult to refute.’
‘There is no other job where if you commit a certain amount of your time to one kind of activity, for example having your picture taken or giving interviews to the press, that you are deemed to have somehow lost the right to stop doing that activity the rest of the time. It’s as spurious as saying that a woman who walks down the street in lipstick and a short skirt is “asking for it”, or that if a woman has sexual relations with one man then she should be prepared to be pestered for sex from other men. It is about control, respect and the right to privacy.
‘You’re right. If a ski instructor comes off the slopes at 6.00 pm people on skis don’t spend the rest of the night ducking in front of him shouting “what do I do now?”, trying to trick him into giving skiing lessons. If an accountant is on a family picnic on a Sunday afternoon you don’t get proprietors of small businesses launching themselves from the undergrowth and insisting on having their books balanced.’
‘Exactly. If a person is famous, they don’t stop being a person. The fame should not be an excuse for anyone to be harassed, bullied and sneered at. We are all trying to get by in our own way, even famous people.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven ~ Sylvia’s Flip-Flop
A torn piece of a poster washes up onto the shore, wrapping around Sylvia’s flip-flop as she walks by the sea very early in the morning, before tending to the elephant.
‘Personne Disparue. Est-ce que vous avez vu cette personne?’
Some French people have lost someone they love. Sylvia pulls at the paper to free it from her foot and it disintegrates in her hands. She scrunches it up like papier maché, squeezing out the salty sea water and making the paper small in her hand. She thinks about the lost person – a son perhaps, or a daughter; the photo has long since been torn away and swallowed by the sea. Sylvia has never had a child and she envies the French people their child at the same time as she deeply pities their loss. Until Roy came along, Sylvia had never loved anyone except Jeremy, although she had been loved and had run away from it because it crushed her.
‘Est-ce que vous avez vu cette personne?’ It strikes Sylvia that there’s something pitifully inappropriate about the words that the sea nudges at her feet in this remote place. She never sees anyone except Roy, the elephant, the cow, the ducks, the chickens, the dog and the delivery man.
For the first time in a long while, Sylvia feels lonely as she goes to find the elephant and start the day’s chores.
‘Is it a bad omen if a magpie does a shit in someone’s garden?’ asks Alison.
‘A lone magpie?’ Taron turns to the window in alarm. ‘Doing a shit in your garden?’
‘I just wondered.’ Alison watches Taron guiltily. She tries to discover from the look on her face whether Taron turned round quickly enough to see nature’s black and white harbinger of ill fortune leaving its expressive message.
Chapter Twenty-Eight ~ Cruising
Harvey joins the men’s group held in one of the public meeting rooms available for hire in St Matthew’s Church in Brixton. ‘I think I need some help in coming to terms with identity,’ Harvey told an acquaintance of his, a man he knows from the gym, someone he feels he has made a connection with as they chatted in the sauna or dried off in the shower area. ‘I have this trouble with labels. It shouldn’t matter but it does. Do you know what I mean?’ The man, a little older than Harvey, with some hints of gray in his brown hair and soft, understanding green eyes, recommended Harvey check out the men’s group that meets in Brixton on the first Tuesday of every month.
‘We don’t have a leader, here,’ says the leader of the group, a pleasant hint of a non-specific North American accent in his voice. ‘We just use this as an opportunity to talk. This is a non-judgemental meeting. Jonathan, would you like to kick off tonight?’
Jonathan is a remarkably shy and inarticulate young man in his early twenties who grips the sides of his wooden chair as he talks. He looks as if he is testing its structural stability in case he wishes to straighten his arms and raise his body from the seat. Jonathan’s contribution is difficult to follow, although he appears to be prefacing any salient comment he might be about to make with a long tribu
te to the group’s role in helping him to face the difficulties of his life.
Harvey looks around the group. There is a nice mix of men, black and white, gay and straight. The gay ones have something of the look of his friend at the gym, their well-cared-for bodies giving them an indeterminate age anywhere between late thirties and mid forties. They all have a kindness in their faces and a comfortable-in-their-clothes (or out) attitude. The straight ones are all rather awkward-looking. Harvey has cruised the room with his eyes and made assumptions about sexual orientation based on two things i) the gay ones have better grooming ii) the gay ones have all cruised him back.
Jonathan has finished talking and has collapsed back into his seat, rubbing the palms of his hands on his trousers and blushing with the effort of expressing himself.
‘Thank you, Jonathan,’ says the leader. ‘Mike, do you have a response to any of that?’
One of the gay men looks around the group and then addresses his remarks to Jonathan. ‘The first thing is to love yourself, Jonathan. We love you.’ There is muted applause. Harvey realizes the men in the group are not meeting for a philosophical discussion about how they perceive the world, but to discuss how to deal with the way the world perceives homosexual men.
Out and proud since he was about twelve, Harvey uses the distraction created by the applause to pick up his bag and head for the door. As he leaves, he glances back and makes eye contact with a tanned man with mesmerising brown eyes and thick, cropped gray hair, so he will know him again if he sees him around.
Chapter Twenty-Nine ~ High Wire Workout
Roy is near the end of his daily high wire preparation workout. He has been training himself to stand for lengthy periods on first one leg then the other, strengthening the muscles, and practising not falling over. Now he stands, feet placed hip distance apart, pointing forward, parallel to each other. The high wire balance bar rests on the back of his neck, gripped in both hands. Slowly he squats, keeping his chin up and pushing his bottom out as he bends his knees. Then he rises back up again, slowly, repeating the movement about twenty times. Roy puts the balance bar slowly down on the ground, shaking his arms and legs, then starts to stretch every major muscle. The routine finished, Roy goes and lies on the top of a sand dune.
Six Pack of Sleuths: Comedy Mysteries Page 74
