by David Nobbs
‘I’m not trying to suggest that you’re evil,’ said Elizabeth. ‘But you said those hippopotamuses and things just came to you. Do you think
‘Do I think I flashed at a girl, with nine ‘O’ levels, attempted to rape a dental receptionist, and strangled a secretary without remembering any of those things?’
‘It’s possible,’ she whispered.
‘It’s not the kind of thing that usually slips one’s mind,’ said Reggie. ‘I don’t usually . . . wait a minute, though. I’ve just remembered. I did rob a bank yesterday. I completely forgot.’
‘Oh, Reggie, don’t be sarcastic. Please don’t be sarcastic.’
After supper he went for a walk round the dark, dimly lit streets of the Poets’ Estate. As he walked he went back, step by step, over the various walks that he had taken on the nights of the crimes.
No, there were no gaps. He could account for every second.
But would he be able to detect the gaps? Could he possibly be sure?
When he got home, he looked at his watch to see if it had gone forward any more than it should have done.
Did this mean that he was beginning to believe that he had black-outs when he wasn’t responsible for his actions?
They lay in separate rooms that night. Neither slept much. Towards dawn Reggie nodded off into a nightmare world of dead raped girls with their heads stuck in square hoops, and crude pictures of the Algarve in which, even as he stood watching them, he himself committed dreadful acts of sexual sickness.
He awoke drenched in sweat, had a bath, breakfasted alone, and walked to the shop.
He dreaded that the day would produce fresh evidence of ghastly crimes, dead girls in his garden or in the little yard at the back of the shop.
All it brought was two broken windows. He boarded them up, and closed the shop. Its brief career was over.
A panda car pulled up, with a screech of unnecessary drama. Two policemen walked towards him.
‘Broken windows, sir?’
‘Yes.’
They asked him, as he had known they would, to accompany them to the station.
They took him into a bare interview room. He expected to be kicked and punched, but they were quite polite, questioned him in detail about his movements on the nights in question, questioned him about his life-history, questioned him about his shop.
He could imagine the comments on the news. A man is helping the police with their inquiries. An arrest is expected shortly.
They took him through his movements again. And again. And again. He lost all sense of time. Cups of coffee came and went. Lunch came and went, or was it supper – lamb and two veg from the canteen.
‘You raped and killed her, didn’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Where exactly were you at the time she was killed?’
‘I don’t know when she was killed.’
Traps a schoolboy could have seen through.
‘You’ve got no evidence,’ said Reggie. ‘You can’t keep me.’
‘How do you know we’ve got no evidence?’
‘Because I didn’t do it.’
It was tempting to admit it all and end this ordeal.
He mustn’t.
It was tempting to admit that he might have been the murderer, that he didn’t know, and that if he was so uncertain of himself that he didn’t know, then there wasn’t any point in not being.
He mustn’t. ‘Let’s go through the movements again, shall we?’
Naked light. Sweat. Smell of socks. Faces moulded into unpleasantness by their job – the search for a sexual maniac.
I am not a sexual maniac. I am not a sexual maniac. I am not a sexual maniac. Say it to yourself like doing lines at school. I.I am. I am not. I am not a. I am not a sexual. I am not a sexual maniac.
Fingerprints. Samples of clothing. They wouldn’t find anything.
‘Let’s just go through your walk by the cricket ground once again, shall we?’
At last they took him home. They searched his house. He didn’t object.
It was what he should have expected from the very first moment when he had started to behave in an eccentric fashion, a year and a half ago.
It was all he would ever be able to expect.
They left. They warned him that the house would be watched. He didn’t mind.
The neighbours knew. Everybody knew.
Tom and Linda came round, pretending too carefully that it was a chance visit, making it obvious that Elizabeth had asked them to. call.
‘Have you taken a doctor’s advice about all this, Reggie?’ said Tom.
‘You think dad is the Fiend of Climthorpe,’ said Linda. ‘You’re disgusting. I never want to see you again.’
She burst into tears and rushed out into the night.
She ran down Coleridge Close and up the path that led between the prosperous gardens of the Poets’ Estate to the edge of the cricket ground. The poplars behind the pavilion were the wind’s playthings, and the hair of the man who blocked her path streamed out behind him.
She recognized him immediately. It was the man who had told her he was going to do the heavy breathing at Thames Brightwell.
She turned to run, and he knocked her to the ground.
They fought, kicked, punched. Desperation gave them both strength. She managed one scream before his hand was clamped firmly across her mouth.
Then there were other people there, pulling the man off her. One of their blows struck her and set her reeling.
She turned in time to see Tom, clear in the light of the nascent moon, punch the man in the face. The man crumpled up in a heap on the ground. Tom examined his fist with a mixture of surprise, horror and respect, and Reggie held Linda in his arms.
She looked down at the pleasant, vacuous face of the unconscious man.
‘I don’t expect his daughter thinks he’s the Fiend of Climthorpe,’ she said.
Chapter 13
The news of the arrest of the Fiend of Climthorpe was in all the papers. Many people told Reggie that they had never doubted him for a moment. A local glazier offered to repair Grot’s windows free of charge.
Quite a few people came to the shop on the day of its reopening. Some of them merely wandered around, pretending to look at the stock, but in reality taking furtive peeps at Reggie. He responded with bright frank smiles which sent their eyes fleeing from the encounter in embarrassment.
Barely an hour had passed before he sold another of Dr Snurd’s paintings of the Algarve.
The vendee was an elderly man, with white hair, sagging skin and a quiet manner suggestive of excellent taste. He was accompanied by a well-dressed lady whom Reggie assumed to be his wife – nor did anything occur in the subsequent dialogue to modify that view.
‘Look at those pictures,’ said the man.
His wife shuddered.
‘Don’t you think they’d be perfect for the Webbers?’
‘Absolutely.’
Reggie approached them discreetly.
‘Can I help you?’ he said.
‘We’d like one of these pictures,’ said the man.
‘You like them?’
‘Well, no, I don’t.’
‘They’re awful, aren’t they?’ said Reggie.
‘Terrible. Just the thing for our friends.’
‘You don’t like your friends?’
‘Oh yes, they’re delightful people. No taste at all, poor souls.’
‘I don’t know why you say poor souls,’ said the wife. ‘They’re perfectly happy.’
‘Which would you say they’d like the best?’ said the man.
‘Whichever we like the least, darling,’ said the woman.
‘Awkward, isn’t it?’ said Reggie. ‘Embarrassment of poverty.’
‘Which do you like the least?’ said the man.
‘I think the sunset over Albufeira is pretty awful,’ said Reggie. ‘I always feel it looks like the bloodshot eye of a drunken Turkish wrestler with cataracts.’
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br /> ‘You and your sales talk,’ said the man.
‘Or there’s this one,’ said Reggie, taking down a large canvas of the Praia Da Rocha. ‘It’s the biggest, so I suppose on that score alone it might be the nastiest.’
‘It is rather nasty, isn’t it?’ said the man.
‘Take it outside and have a look in the natural light,’ said Reggie. ‘You aren’t seeing it at its worst in here.’
When they had seen the picture in the natural light, they bought it for twelve pounds.
Reggie put a third notice in the window: ‘Lots of gifts for people with no taste.’
During the day he sold a few more bottles of Tom’s wine, and three square hoops to small boys. He felt badly about this, pointing out the disadvantages inherent in the shape if unencumbered motion was the aim. But it seemed that unencumbered motion was not the aim. Very much the reverse. There was a craze of pretending to be Irish at the school. Timmy Mitchison had a square hoop for his birthday, and this had given him an instant lead in Irishness. They were going to have square hoops whatever the cost, and thought them a snip at one pound fifty.
He also sold some of the tasteless puddings for the first time.
‘Are those puddings really tasteless?’ said a rather harassed woman in her late thirties.
‘Absolutely, madam. I defy the most sensitive palate in Britain to respond to them in any way.’
‘I’ll have two dozen,’ she said.
‘You like tasteless puddings?’ Reggie asked.
‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘It’s for my children. Some dislike one taste, some another. Their reactions are always based on what they dislike, not what they like.’
‘You are cursed with a malignant brood,’ said Reggie.
‘Exactly,’ said the woman.
‘Well, there’s nothing for any of them to dislike in these,’ said Reggie.
‘Exactly,’ said the woman.
It was gone seven o’clock when Reggie let himself into the house that night.
‘You’re late,’ said Elizabeth.
‘I was doing the books,’ said Reggie.
‘I wouldn’t have thought it would take that long to do the books.’
‘We took sixty-three pounds twenty pence.’
‘What?’
‘We took sixty-three pounds twenty pence.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Elizabeth.
‘Oh you of little faith,’ said Reggie.
‘Do you mean we’re actually going to make a go of this?’
‘Did you ever doubt it?’ said Reggie.
Elizabeth began to cry. She wept copious tears. Reggie sat beside her on the settee, ineffectually attempting to offer solace.
He poured them two extra large drinks, and raised his glass. Behind him was a square clean patch on the wallpaper, where a picture of the Algarve had so recently stood.
‘To Grot,’ he said.
‘To Grot,’ said Elizabeth.
The next day Reggie sold out of square hoops and he also sold a dozen more bottles of Tom’s wine to the man with the stick-out ears and the hateful sister-in-law.
‘She really loathed it,’ said the man, rubbing his hands. ‘Of course I had to drink a glass myself, but it was worth it to see her face. She wouldn’t admit she didn’t like it, pretended she loved it, so I said I’d get her a dozen.’
‘Splendid,’ said Reggie. ‘Excellent. I’m afraid I’ve only got eight bottles of sprout left, though. Will you make up the numbers with quince?’
‘Are they as bad?’ said the man.
‘Almost,’ said Reggie. ‘If you don’t think they’re bad enough, keep them. They deteriorate with age.’
‘I’m telling all my friends about your shop,’ said the man.
Reggie also sold two more of Dr Snurd’s paintings to people who thought they were wonderful. This led him to doubt whether works of art, however bad, could ever really be regarded as useless. For the moment, however, the question was academic. Such issues of principle were matters that the infant and sickly business could ill afford to consider.
He also sold the game with no rules, but the cracked pottery and second-hand books didn’t sell, and Reggie decided that these were not suitable lines. In fact he grew very attached to some of the books with their statements like, ‘The advent of fauvism had no immediate effect on Rugeley’ and, ‘In the early sixteenth century we find no references to bunions in Spain or Portugal. None of the rulers of the great Italian art cities appear to have suffered from them, or, if they did, the fact has not been recorded.’
That evening, Reggie and Elizabeth were invited to Tom and Linda’s for dinner.
On the way Reggie called on his doctor, and offered to sell his paintings in his shop. Painting was Dr Underwood’s hobby. His favourite subjects were Mrs Underwood and the Tuscan hill towns. If the abstract and the representative were not Dr Underwood’s strongest suits, then oils and water-colours were not his natural materials, and his undeniable shortcomings in imagination and composition were shown up most nakedly when he attempted portraits or landscapes. His paintings would sit very well alongside those of Dr Snurd.
When they arrived at Tom and Linda’s lovely house in the delightful village of Thames Brightwell, they were met with the mingled scents of garlic and human excrement.
‘Jocasta’s shit herself,’ explained Adam gleefully.
‘They’ll go to bed soon,’ said Tom, ‘but we don’t like to stop them watching Tomorrow’s World. It’s educational.’
When Adam and Jocasta had been persuaded, democratically, in return for certain concessions, to go to bed, the grown-ups sat at the oval dining table in the open-plan living-room, and tucked into their starters.
To Reggie’s astonishment, the wine was an excellent white Burgundy.
‘Whatever happened to the Chateau Blackberry?’ he inquired.
Tom’s geniality froze.
‘You don’t like my wines,’ he said. ‘I went past your shop today, Reggie.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes. I saw the notice in your window: “Every single item sold in this shop is guaranteed useless.”’
‘Yes.’
‘My wine is sold in your shop.’
‘Yes.’
That’s an offence against the Trade Discrimination Act.’
‘I’d like to see you prove it,’ said Reggie.
These haddock smokies make delicious starters,’ said Elizabeth.
‘I want you to withdraw all my wine tomorrow,’ said Tom.
‘I’ve sold nineteen bottles already,’ said Reggie. ‘I owe you twenty-one pounds.’
‘Twenty-one pounds?’ said Tom. ‘In less than a week?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good God.’
‘Yes.’
Linda removed the starter dishes, and produced the mullet niçoise.
‘Floppysquirts?’ inquired Tom.
There was a pause.
‘Sorry, are you speaking to me?’ said Linda.
‘Well of course I am,’ said Tom.
‘My name is not Floppysquirts,’ said Linda. ‘My name is Linda.’
‘Sorry, Lindyscoops,’ said Tom.
‘This mullet is lovely,’ said Elizabeth. ‘It’s the nicest mullet I’ve ever tasted.’
‘It’s the only mullet I’ve ever tasted,’ said Reggie.
‘We had mullet in Midhurst,’ said Elizabeth.
‘I’ve never even been to Midhurst,’ said Reggie. ‘Let alone had mullet there.’
‘Linda?’ said Tom.
‘Yes?’ said Linda.
‘Do you honestly like my home-made wines?’
‘I do,’ said Linda. ‘But I do enjoy having proper wine as well sometimes.’
‘What do you mean, proper wine?’
‘I mean commercial wine,’ said Linda. ‘We can afford it.’
‘You can sell all the wine you like in your shop, Reggie,’ said Tom.
‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ said Linda.
/> Tom stood up and raised his hand for silence.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Linda and I thought we’d like to give this little dinner to celebrate the . . . er . . . the fact that you, Reggie, er . . .’
‘That I’m not the Fiend of Climthorpe.’
‘Well, yes. And also to mark the opening of your shop and wish it success. I was a bit surprised when I saw what kind of a shop it was, but . . . er . . . I won’t make any hasty judgements on it. I’m not a hasty judgement person. So Linda and I would like to . . . er . . . to drink to the . . . er . . . the future of . . . er . . . Grot.’
They raised their glasses.
‘To Grot,’ said Tom and Linda.
As they drove home, full of hope and mullet, Reggie and Elizabeth allowed themselves to think that they might really be on the verge of a happier future.
The phone was ringing as they entered the house. It was the police informing them that Mark and the whole of the cast of his theatre company had been kidnapped by guerillas while presenting The Reluctant Debutante to an audience of Angolan mercenaries.
Book Two
Chapter 14
‘I can’t help worrying about him,’ said Elizabeth.
‘I know,’ said Reggie.
He held her close and pressed her body softly against him.
It was exactly two years since Mark had been kidnapped. There had been a long silence, then a letter in which he stated that he was free and happy, but he wouldn’t be coming home, as there was important work to be done. The letter had been in Mark’s handwriting, but it had lacked puns, brackets, exclamation marks, spelling mistakes or any other signs of his personality.
That was eleven months ago. Since then they had heard nothing.
‘We’ll hear from him soon,’ said Reggie. ‘I feel it in my bones.’
It was a bright morning in late November, and the garden was laced with the first frost of winter.
‘Briefcase,’ said Elizabeth, handing him his black leather briefcase, engraved with his initials ‘R.I.P.’ in gold.
‘Thank you, darling,’ he said.
‘Umbrella,’ she said, handing him a smart new article which answered perfectly to her description.
‘Thank you, darling,’ he said.
She watched him as he set off down the garden path, between the rose bushes which he had pruned so ruthlessly that autumn.
