Waking Caliban

by Mike Cartlidge

  I moved my head again, raising it an inch off the pillow. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention but I could hear nothing other than the sound of my own breathing. Then something changed and I realized that the TV light had disappeared as something or someone had moved between it and the bed.

  As quietly as I could, I slipped my legs from under the sheet and reached over and pressed the switch on the bedside lamp. The light dazzled me and it was a second or so before I could react to the two figures standing a couple of feet away from me.

  They were both dressed in black, their faces hidden beneath balaclavas, and they were both very large. One of them was holding a slim-bodied torch, no doubt turned off the moment I’d started to stir. I finished getting clear of the sheet and pushed myself forward. Before the first of the men could move, he’d collected the side of my foot in his stomach. He collapsed with a grunt as the wind was knocked out of him.

  The other guy was too fast for me, though. As I came back to defensive stance, he pushed something towards my face. There was a hiss of gas and I felt my eyes tear up and my lungs start to burn.

  Instinctively, I dropped my head and, as I did so, he hit me on the back of my neck with something that felt unreasonably hard.

  ***

  I came to some time later and tried to move. None of my limbs wanted to co-operate. I managed to turn over and lay on my back on the floor. The blow I’d received had left me with a violent headache and either I had concussion or the gas they’d used was still affecting me: my mind wanted to go off on little side-trips of its own and I kept having the strangest visions, familiar yet alien, as though I was reliving every dream I’d had for the past month. I rolled over again and forced myself up, first to my knees and then, shakily, to my feet. Now I felt sick but at least that took my mind off the dizziness. My door was unlocked, which was no great surprise: the lock was as old as the rest of the hotel and would have presented a pro with as much trouble as a pair of marshmallow handcuffs.

  I stepped along the hallway and knocked on Roden’s door, leaning on the frame to steady myself. There was no response and I banged harder a couple of times and then pressed my ear to the scratched wooden surface. I couldn’t hear anything except a ringing in my ears. I shook my head to try to clear it. That turned out to be a spectacularly bad idea. I waited until the worst shafts of pain stopped shooting between my spine and my eyes and then, in a rare moment of lucidity, decided to try the door handle. The door swung open.

  The room inside was pitch black. I pressed the light switch and peered around. The door to the tiny bathroom was open so I could see almost every inch of the place. Everything was pretty much as I’d seen it the previous evening.

  I’d been ready to receive a stream of invective if it turned out I’d woken my client from his slumbers. There was no need to worry, though. There was no sign of Roden’s suitcase and the bed was empty. The man was gone.

  Chapter 2

  In the movies, someone gets a whack on the head, has a little nap and then wakes up and leaps right back into action.

  Life’s not really like that. I groped around and, after a few false starts, managed to find my way back to my own room. I was still feeling nauseous and I had to concentrate hard as I grabbed my mobile and thumbed Isbey’s private number. I could hear the ringing of the phone on the far end for what seemed like hours before he answered. He sounded pretty disgruntled at being woken up at such an ungodly hour until I told him why I’d called. When he asked me how I was feeling, I answered truthfully. There’s no point playing the hero at times like this. If you can’t function properly, you’ll only endanger other people by pretending you can. Isbey agreed with my self-diagnosis of concussion, making it sound as though it was my own silly fault. I couldn’t argue: if I’d thought there was any threat at all from the notorious Stratford-upon-Avon underworld, I’d have rigged an alarm to my door. I told Isbey as much and he told me, quite sensibly, that it was too damn late to worry about it now. His voice remained as calm as ever as he went on to instruct me that I was to do nothing but hang on where I was until I heard from him again. I clicked off the phone and allowed myself one thump of my fist on the dresser. It hurt me more than the furniture. I lay on the bed, discovered that only made me feel worse, and sat instead on the room’s only chair, trying to stop my head from spinning.

  Ten minutes later, Isbey called back. He’d got hold of Bakst, he said. The client was furious that I’d managed to lose Roden but was insistent that I was to avoid alerting the police. Roden was to be found, but the agency, rather than any official body, would be doing the finding.

  Maybe if I’d been thinking more clearly I’d have argued but, as it was, I decided to leave Isbey to consider the situation’s moral dimensions. He once told me he went to Gordonstoun School at the same time as Prince Charles and I was sure they’d have covered this sort of thing in their ethics classes.

  Meanwhile, Isbey told me, he’d be sending someone to pick me up and bring me back to London. The agency, he said, always looked after its people, even when they’d proved themselves to be complete idiots. He gave me orders to wait in my room until I got another call on my mobile. Then I was to go downstairs and meet the driver he’d already sent to collect me.

  ***

  It was 6am by the time Isbey’s driver collected me and nearly ten by the time we made it back to London and through the traffic to the agency’s offices.

  Isbey had arranged for the firm’s doctor to check me over and he examined the bump on the base of my skull and manipulated my neck. I told him about the gas that had been squirted into my face and he cleared his throat and told me breezily that I’d be right as rain in a few days time. He prescribed aspirin and three days off work.

  Left to myself, I’d have been ready to head back to Stratford the next day but Isbey had been hovering in the background and listening while all this was going on. “I’m afraid that prescription must be regarded as an order,” he said.

  I sighed. It was, after all, no skin off Isbey’s nose. I was a contractor and, if I wasn’t working, he didn’t have to pay me. I was sure he’d be able to find some willing volunteer to take my place. I bowed to the inevitable and he summoned his driver again and had her drive me home.

  It was late morning by the time we arrived back at Madame George’s. Faith, the driver, insisted on carrying my bags inside and stopped in her tracks when, through the open door from the hall, she saw the inside of George’s salon. The Lovely One herself was up and about – unusually early in the day for her – and when she saw me she rose from her chaise longue, a vision in blue crushed velvet against the bright red upholstery. She flounced over to me and planted a kiss on my cheek, pulling back in alarm when she saw me wince.

  I never fully understood the way that Madame George felt about me. We’d met several years earlier, when I was on one of my first jobs since my return from oblivion. I’d had been brought in to protect Chantelle, one of the ladies of the house, from a stalker. I lived in for a week and nothing much happened until, one night, the unhappy client got in past the regular house protection and I stopped him as he was on the brink of remodelling Chantelle’s face with acid. That, I’d thought, was that. I moved back home but, the next day, George and Chantelle visited me with a ‘thank-you’ bouquet of flowers, took one look at my pathetic bed-sit, stuffed my personal belongings into a couple of carrier bags and moved me into an empty room on George’s top floor. I’d lived there ever since, one of a disparate group of souls that George had taken a fancy to over the years and who shared the house with its working occupants.

  “I’m OK,” I told her. “I just had a little problem.”

  Faith was recovering her poise. “Somebody took a swing at his head,” she said.

  George clutched my face in her hands. “You poor dear!” She turned and took my bags from Faith and, fussing me along in front of her, carried them up the three flights of stairs to my room.

  ***

 
; When George left me, I took more aspirin and lay back on the bed. I’d finished the account of the Norman Conquest and I picked up a financial history book – a ‘biography’ of the British pound – that I’d bought a few days earlier. At some point, I must have slept. It was nearly three o’clock when the phone rang and I heard Isbey’s clipped enquiry after my health. I told him I was fine and that, irrespective of what the doctor said, there was no reason why I couldn’t be back at work tomorrow. I should have saved my breath, of course. Isbey’s career as a staff officer had taught him to play it straight all the way. As far as the agency was concerned, I’m sure that was why he was where he was, and fair enough, too. Put someone like me in his job and within hours the whole operation would have looked like a student flat on a Sunday morning.

  “All right, Colonel,” I said. “I’ll play the impatient patient for a few days.”

  “You know it’s for the best, Hastings.”

  “Any news on Roden?”

  “We have no new information but we’re on the case.”

  “Have you called up his colleagues at the university?”

  “Of course we have. They say he’s on a sabbatical. Nobody’s seen him for weeks and nobody expects to see him until the start of the next term.”

  “What about where he lives?”

  “Same story again. The neighbors say he keeps himself to himself…”

  “Did you find his car?”

  “No sign of it, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ve been thinking about why the two lads back in the hotel would bother coming to my room in the middle of the night. It stands to reason they must have been looking for Roden, not me.”

  “That stands to reason.”

  I thought about Roden’s ‘quest for literary enlightenment’ and wondered just what that little phrase concealed. “So why did they come after me?”

  “They could have picked the wrong door,” Isbey pointed out. “Maybe they realized they were in the wrong room and attacked you because you’d woken up and disturbed them.”

  “And then they popped next door and picked up Roden?”

  “It could have happened like that.”

  “It’s possible,” I conceded. “It seems unlikely, though. I mean, there must have been some way they’d found out what room Roden was in-”

  “I should imagine they might have offered the chap on the front desk a small inducement,” Isbey interrupted.

  “Has anyone asked him?”

  “Of course. The gentleman in question denies everything.”

  “That’s probably what happened, though,” I said. “But, if that was the case, why didn’t they get the right room first time?”

  “They bungled it?”

  “Unlikely. These lads came equipped with capsicum spray or something similar. I’d say they were professionals.”

  I heard him sigh. “So what’s your hypothesis, Hastings?”

  “I reckon Roden took such a dislike to me that he asked them to pop in and beat me up before they had him away.”

  “Would you like to make a serious suggestion?”

  “They’d already looked in Roden’s room and they only came to mine because they hadn’t been able to find him.”

  “Why wouldn’t they have been able to find him?”

  “Because he’d already left of his own accord?”

  He was silent for a few seconds. “Roden’s playing his own hand. It’s possible.”

  “Better be careful with any follow-up action,” I told him.

  “You may be sure we’re being very careful. We have already deployed a two man team.”

  It was a typical agency approach to a potentially risky situation. The duo would comprise an ex-policeperson, who would supply investigation and detection skills, and an ex-soldier in case there were problems. It wasn’t that the ex-cops on the agency’s books were exactly pushovers: it was more that the ex-Army faction were the experts when it came to keeping themselves and others safe. It was a strategy that, in the gospel according to Isbey, had always proved itself in the past.

  “Tell them to watch out for themselves,” I urged him. “The boys who popped in to see me last night were the size of tyrannosaurs. And they were probably a bit meaner.”

  “The team will be under orders to trace Roden and then take no further action. Once we have a line on our man, I intend to talk to Bakst again before we make any decisions.”

  I fingered the lump on the back of my head. I hated to think of others being sent to finish a job that I’d started. “Who have you assigned?” I asked.

  “One of them’s a chap called Brett Young…”

  I thought I remembered meeting him a year or two back. “Ex police?”

  “That’s right. He was a Detective Inspector in the CID. Metropolitan Police. Sound chap.” He paused. “The other man’s Geordie Thorpe.”

  I knew Thorpe, of course, rather better.

  Chapter 3

  It was Thorpe who’d got me into the agency in the first place. I ran into him again at a time when I’d sunk pretty low. I’d spent time in doss houses and, for a while, consulted a National Health psychiatrist who sympathized with my problems but, for all his compassionate phrases, could do little to help. I think depressives are either born or made. The former suffer as a result of a chemical imbalance of some sort, while those that are made are the victims of circumstance. Chemical aids work well for some but I never thought they would for me. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t like drugs. What it all came down to was that I was suffering from life and there aren’t too many cures for that.

  It was November and I’d been making a big effort to turn my life around. Some months earlier, I’d enrolled in a night school class and taught myself the basics of how to use a computer, thinking that I should make some effort to bring my meager business skills up to date. And, noticing that people weren’t queuing at my door to offer me chief executive positions in industry, I’d found myself a job, working as a laborer in a timber yard. I’d even held this job for three months, despite the best efforts of a bullying foreman who taken a particular exception to me. I’d managed to hold my temper and turn the other cheek and, as a result, I’d earned enough to replace the most ragged of my clothes and got back to a routine of eating more-or-less regular meals. And I’d moved myself into a small bed-sit in Hounslow, a real bargain of a place with very few drawbacks other than rising damp and its location, which was right under one of the main Heathrow flight paths.

  So, things were looking up, even if it was only from the vantage point of the gutter. I have no idea, though, what made me travel into the city for that year’s Remembrance Day Parade. I’d never even considered going to one before. Maybe I had some subconscious urge to relive my military past. Maybe I was just trying to punish myself with memories of all that I’d lost. Maybe it was just that November 11th fell on a Sunday that year and I wasn’t exactly flush with ways to spend the weekend.

  I caught the tube and, arriving early in Westminster, shuffled my way through the gathering crowds. It was a day to match the solemnity of the occasion. Overhead, gray clouds wept unsteady drizzle and echoed dull peals of thunder from the Thames estuary. There was a strange light in the streets, as if real life had been transported into the depths of a faded watercolor painting. As Big Ben chimed eleven, I turned my coat collar up against the rain and pushed my way through the crowds outside the Abbey.

  Most of the Para veterans on the road were in their fifties and sixties but there were one or two who could have gone all the way back to the regiment’s genesis during the Second World War. The old-timers stood quietly, sometimes touching the lines of medals on their greatcoats as if to make sure they were straight, sometimes talking to their comrades as the younger men surged around them. At one point, there was a chorus of ribald remarks as a handful of Royal Marines marched by: there was always rivalry between the Red Devils and the Marines, who both regarded themselves as the elite amongst the armed forces of the British Isles.r />
  After a while, the handful of old Paras formed up and marched off, colors flapping in the breeze. I walked along the Mall, intending to watch the wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph and, despite myself, enjoying the atmosphere of camaraderie that warmed the chilly autumn air. At one point, there was a chorus of good-natured boos from the veterans and I looked through the crowd to see a detachment of Military Police, marching along and doing their best to ignore the old reprobates at either side of the road.

  The Redcaps were followed by a detachment of the Gloucestershire Regiment and, for the first time in four years, I saw my father, strutting in his General’s uniform behind the standard-bearer. He didn’t look as though he’d changed that much: he would have been well into his sixties but his back was still as straight as Big Ben’s clock tower, his small moustache a-bristle, his iron gray eyes fixed with a certainty of his place in the scheme of things that made the Pope’s belief in a Catholic god look wishy-washy. I was lost for a moment, remembering how I’d looked up to him when I was a child. I wondered how my mother was and even toyed with the idea of trying to see her again, even though I knew she was too staunch in her support for the old man ever to defy his ban on contact with me. For a moment, my eyes misted and I turned away, hating myself for my weakness and self-pity.

  I was about to leave when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to find Geordie Thorpe standing behind me, wearing civvies, a smart topcoat over a suit and tie, compact and dapper as ever. He said nothing and I kept my expression carefully blank. “Hello, Sergeant.”

  “Good day, sir.” His eyes took in my shabby charity shop raincoat and I was sure they flickered over the frayed cuffs of my trousers, sole survivors of the couple of suits I’d had when I left the army. “You’re well, I hope,” he said. An inch or so shorter than me, Thorpe was whippet-thin and wiry and I doubted if he’d gained an ounce in weight since the days we’d served together.