The Fountain in the Forest

by Tony White

  ‘Me too,’ she said, patting his side of the bed. ‘You’re glad I called you back, then?’

  ‘Not half,’ he said, putting his coffee down on the bedside table, and leaning over to kiss her upturned face, ‘but if you hadn’t called me, I’d have called you.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Susan, laughing.

  ‘Chance to do this?’ he said, pulling the sheet down to expose her breasts. ‘You bet!’ He bent down to kiss them each in turn, enjoying the taste of her skin and feeling her nipples hardening to the touch of his lips and tongue, feeling Susan arching her back slightly.

  ‘Did you grow up in London?’ Susan asked later, as they drank their cups of cold coffee.

  ‘No, Exeter,’ said Rex – there was no reason to skid around now – ‘but I came to London to go to college.’

  ‘You’ve got a degree?’

  Was that a note of surprise in her voice?

  ‘I know! Graduate policemen are a figure of fun in the force, but there was this scheme—’

  ‘Oh, I might have guessed: a quota,’ said Susan, gently ribbing him.

  ‘The “High Potential Developer Scheme”, it was called, “for Graduates”. A few chief constables started out that way and all.’

  ‘A few chief constables and you?’

  ‘Yeah, you could say that.’

  ‘Any chance of you—’

  ‘What, becoming a chief constable? I should coco. How about you, Susan?’

  ‘Classics.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Rex, impressed. ‘And how was that?’

  ‘Well,’ said Susan, ‘if you think that being a graduate policeman makes you a figure of fun, try being a black woman at Oxford.’

  ‘Ouch, I can imagine.’

  ‘I lost count of the number of times I’d walk into a seminar room or a lecture theatre and some dozy don would make eye contact and tell me they weren’t finished yet, or point at the coffee things, assuming that I was a cleaner, or from Building Services.’

  Christ almighty! Rex thought to himself, and almost said out loud. He practically spat out his coffee, but didn’t let on. He pretended to be surprised by what Susan was saying. ‘Blimey, in this day and age? Are you kidding?’

  Cleaner.

  Of course! Rex knew where he had heard the surname Bisika before. As in Gertrude Bisika, the cleaner at the Royal Palace Theatre, with the little framed photo on top of the television in her Peabody flat on Drury Lane.

  ‘I know,’ said Susan. ‘And these were supposed to be the clever ones. Oxford dons! Not National Front meatheads or anything.’

  ‘Not many of them at Oxford, I’d guess,’ said Rex.

  ‘Not many, no,’ Susan said. ‘But plenty in the town.’

  Rex made a mental note. The witness in the Tennyson case, the work colleague who said that he had lent Trevor Tennyson his inhaler once or twice when the younger man had forgotten his. The Post Office colleague whose testimony had unwittingly but effectively destroyed the case against the four policemen charged with Trevor Tennyson’s murder, his name had been Benedick Bisika. He was Gertrude Bisika’s late husband.

  ‘There’s a few in the force, though,’ Rex said, ‘unfortunately. Racist, sexist, homophobic, the works. Like you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Susan. ‘I’m black.’

  26: JONQUILLE (JONQUIL)

  It was dusk when JJ arrived back at his grandmother’s house in Exeter. It felt as if he’d been running for days, and he had waited until it was nearly dark to make sure no one had followed him. The snag, as he well knew, was that he’d be easy enough to find in any case. He would have to do something about that.

  JJ was no longer tripping, but it still seemed as if there were policemen lurking in every shadow, and at every turn, or just out of sight in the corner of his eye. Masked and boiler-suited, armed with axes and batons. As if at any second he might have to run for his life. Again.

  A branch of May, my dear, I say, he thought, the song still going around in his head. Before your door I stand …

  Hearing the bell, his grandmother looked up from her newspaper, glancing at the mirror above the bureau to the right of the living-room window – which was positioned just so – and recognising JJ’s profile as he stood there in the porch. She was shocked by the appearance of her grandson, and if he’d been paying attention he might have been shocked, too, by how much she had aged in just the few weeks since he had last seen her. His grandmother had always teased JJ that he was a bit of a scruff, but suntan or not, he looked to her as if he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards; like he’d been through the wringer. He felt like it too. Like he’d seen something that he shouldn’t have seen. As he shut the door behind him, she wondered if he might have been crying.

  ‘Where are your things?’ she’d asked. And it was only then that JJ remembered that his rucksack had been tucked behind the passenger seat in Milo’s van.

  ‘Um,’ he started to say, but there was too much to explain, so he just let it hang.

  ‘Well, there’s clean clothes in your room,’ she said putting a hand to his troubled forehead. ‘Why not have a hot bath and I’ll make us some supper. I’ve got something in the freezer you’ll like.’

  Half an hour later, JJ was sitting on his grandmother’s mauve sofa watching TV in jeans and a T-shirt, with a generous helping of home-made cottage pie and a small tin of beer on a tray on his lap. There was a documentary on telly about the First World War poets. JJ had done them for his English literature O-level, so knew most of the poems by heart. Well, he usually did, although right now everything looked and sounded strange, and not least because everyone was speaking in English. It was all slogging to Arras with whatever it was; cheerful sods and incompetent plans. While the words were read aloud by an actor with a slightly stuck-up voice that JJ almost recognised but couldn’t quite place, the camera showed pages from Siegfried Sassoon’s notebooks, then a galley proof of the actual poem that was being read – ‘The General’, it was called – which had been corrected and annotated in Sassoon’s own handwriting.

  JJ ate his tea in silence while he watched, shovelling the food at a steady pace, stopping only to take an occasional sip of the fizzy lager. On the television there were lingering shots of the Cenotaph and of poppies growing, garnet-red, on the edges of Flanders fields, amidst the daisies and the jonquil. A single poppy waving on its tall stem. There was talk of Shelley, of poets being the ‘unacknowledged legislators’, and of how these poems of the Great War could be seen as an attempt to adjudicate between the myth of noble sacrifice and the more prosaic reality of tactical blunders and wholesale unnecessary slaughter, of warfare being conducted on a vast and industrial scale. What those poor men had been forced to forgo in those dismal trenches – under pain of court martial and the firing squad; the threat of the stigma of cowardice – seemingly included the luxury of life itself, a desperate waste that was epitomised by Wilfred Owen’s needlessly re-enlisting only to be killed in the last weeks of the war. And if, as he watched this, JJ felt like he’d been through a battle himself, that was because he had.

  When the programme finished and the News at Ten came on, JJ didn’t move, and later his grandmother would simply put a blanket over his shoulders where he sat. He half expected to see himself on this item about ‘new-age travellers’ and Stonehenge. They showed footage of people sawing through a fence, the announcer saying that they had been making weapons to attack the police, and JJ didn’t have the fight in him to say, ‘No! They were sawing through the fence to try to escape!’, but he knew that’s what they’d been doing because he had been there.

  The voiceover said that police had been forced to defend themselves after a considerable number of vehicles in the so-called ‘Peace Convoy’ had tried to run police officers down.

  This was the opposite of what had happened. Who was writing this stuff?

  Here was footage of the convoy bowling down the A338 from Savernake! The pink-painted army patrol vehicle! T
he yellow British Telecom van towing a caravan! Two coaches bouncing across a field at sunset, narrowly missing each other. There were people being calmly arrested by bobbies in old-fashioned helmets, no footage of the masked goons – squaddies? – in unnumbered black boiler suits wading in and cracking skulls. Five hundred arrests!

  Later in the bulletin there was an update on the Riviera bombing. Even more than ‘the battle of Stonehenge’, as they were already calling it, this was the topic he had not wanted to broach, the news that he hadn’t wanted to see. News that he had heard first of all on the radio in the cab of the lorry that had picked him up when he’d stuck his thumb out at a red light in Salisbury, when he had still thought he was only running from Milo and the massed ranks of the police who had ambushed the convoy. He was still reeling from the sudden irreversible jolt of recognition and vertigo. The wave of grief and nausea had been overwhelming as the news story about ETA having ‘not yet claimed responsibility for the blast’ became a story about people and places that he knew. JJ had had to beg the driver to stop and let him out of the cab, and as the lorry had hissed to a halt, he had flung the door open and leaped down on to the verge, where he collapsed, sobbing and vomiting on to the dirty, litter-strewn grass: Sylvie!

  And now on the News at Ten, here was Alastair Burnet saying words like ‘terrorist cell’ and ‘high explosives’ over pictures of Pythag, Béatrice and Élise. There had been a series of explosions, he said; deaths. Terrorists – Basque separatists, it seemed – had blown themselves up while attempting to bomb a simple festival in a small French tourist town. As part of what seemed to be a plan to escalate and broaden ETA’s campaign on a new front, they had tried to bring death to a harmless annual celebration that was being enjoyed, as it was every year, by dozens of children and by tourists and French locals alike. Luckily the cell had been infiltrated by the French security services, and the terrorists had only succeeded in killing themselves.

  There was a photo of French police cars, and of a cordon across the Route de Grasse, then footage of the great ruined viaduct at Pont-du-Loup, victim of an earlier bombing at the end of the Second World War. An ITN correspondent was speaking to camera from the main square at La Fontaine-lès-Vence. They showed a shaky tourist video of an artificially created rainbow above the rooftops of an otherwise sun-baked French village, pictures of people in rainbow T-shirts enjoying a water slide and a parade. Then it cut with a jerk to a great cloud of dark smoke climbing above the olive groves and a menhir on the brow of some foreign hill, behind which JJ could plainly see a familiar rocky outcrop. This was the image that had already been on the front page of most European newspapers that day, too, if JJ had only seen them: a pall of smoke rising into the air before the unmistakable inverted ‘V’ shape of the dolomitic limestone cliff at Baou La Fontaine.

  27: AULNE (ALDER)

  Milo and JJ had arranged to meet Victor’s driver Tom in the car park at Fleet Services on the westbound carriageway of the M3. They’d arrived a bit early, so waited in the Wimpy Bar. For JJ, the bland and tasteless burger with its limp iceberg lettuce and pink mayonnaise was seasoned by both hunger and nostalgia, but nothing would persuade Milo to try even a mouthful. He merely looked on with an expression somewhere between incredulity and disdain, which was only exacerbated when he tasted his coffee. It felt strange to JJ that he could understand all the conversations going on around him. A couple of blokes at the next table were talking football, and it was all Don Revie this, Brian Clough that, and Kevin Keegan the other. He wished he could have switched the conversation off. He wished they were back in France.

  Truth be told, JJ was missing Sylvie like crazy. They had spent most of the last night before JJ’s trip making love. First in her bubble bath, after which she’d put on a tiny baby doll nightie and they’d fucked like it was going out of fashion, she gripping the bedstead with both hands and crying out in filthy broken English like some Bloomsbury bawd. Holding each other after they’d made love, Sylvie had surprised him by wiping up some of his sperm with her finger and smearing it around the inside of the pearl-encrusted golden locket that she was wearing around her neck, before clicking it shut and lifting it to her mouth to kiss it. Then they had slept in each other’s arms, neither wanting to let the other go.

  That had been more than twenty-four hours ago. Right now, at Fleet Services, it was cold, and the only other people around seemed to be on two wheels. In one corner of the car park were some bikers who looked about as hardcore as you could get without being Angels. At least, they weren’t wearing patches. These were ex-army types, Paras or Marines by the looks of it, with their cropped hair and MA1s, on chopped-up Kawasaki Zeds and Suzuki GS1100s, but definitely not wardroom material. While this lot loudly regaled each other with war stories – these were friendships forged in combat, after all, whether Northern Ireland or the Falklands – a handful of self-conscious teenagers on ‘Fizzies’, Yamaha FS1E mopeds, smoked furiously and tried to put in a creditable performance of not being shit-scared.

  ‘I’d fucking kill anyone who gave an animal acid, though,’ said one of the big boys, loud enough that they could hear. ‘Fucking kill ’em.’ And from his expression, JJ thought this sounded like an honest threat, if such a situation ever arose.

  When the bikers eventually revved up to roll out of there, one of them swung a long loop around the car park, ignoring JJ and Milo but beckoning one of the Fizzy boys over. The youngster meekly obeyed, but probably wished he hadn’t because all he got was bellowed at. Something along the lines of, ‘Don’t forget your stabiliser, you fucking pranny!’

  None of them had even given JJ and Milo a second glance as they transferred the cases of wine from lorry to van, even though it had taken them fully half an hour to finish the job. Tom said that he was planning to stay the night in the lay-by here at Fleet before delivering his load of bathroom ware – toilets, washbasins and bidets – to an upmarket shop in Weybridge that catered to the St George’s Hill set. These were rock stars and art collectors. The kind of people who had original Lowrys and Picassos on their walls, and who spent half the year down in their villas on the Côte, lunching at the Colombe d’Or or opening up their Ferraris for a quick burst from Monaco to Saint-Tropez, and who evidently wanted to bring a bit of that Gallic glamour into their Surrey en-suites. They couldn’t get enough of it, which was handy for Victor. And for everyone else, since what was good for Victor was generally good for La Fontaine-en-Forêt too.

  JJ’s old school friend Andy lived not so far from Fleet. He was at college nearby in Farnham, so had been renting a bedsit in a shared house in Aldershot during his first year. Not too bad, he’d said, the last time they spoke, which would have been just after Christmas, as long as you can steer clear of the psycho squaddies who’d wander around blotto most weekends looking for a fight. JJ would have liked to have taken a detour and dropped by, kipped on Andy’s floor, seen if he fancied another trip to Stonehenge, but Milo had put some feelers out and arranged to meet some of the Peace Convoy down in Savernake Forest, so they were headed down that way.

  Of course they were.

  Before they left, Milo gave Tom an eighth of double-zero for his trouble, enough to keep him pleasantly stoned for the duration, and promised another half-ounce when they got back to France in two weeks. Quite how he had managed to bring so much hash through customs was a mystery to JJ, but Milo had been fearless. He’d picked up a couple of cling-film-wrapped weights in Fréjus as usual, but had then simply tossed the carrier bag they were in under the driver’s seat of his van. He hadn’t even bothered to hide the slabs in the back of the socket set, where he usually put his dope. Talk about brazen. When they’d driven off the ferry at Dover and turned the corner to drive through the ‘Nothing to Declare’ lane, there were customs officials everywhere, which certainly didn’t bode well. JJ had been terrified, certain it would turn out badly. They were swarming all over every vehicle, but as Milo had driven up they’d seemed to melt away. It had been as if Milo’s old Ci
troën van was invisible. They had looked straight through them.

  ‘How did you manage that?’ JJ had asked, once they were safely out of Dover and bowling up the motorway. ‘I was shitting it. I was sure we were going to be busted.’

  ‘You ’ave to look so bored and so boring that they don’t even see you,’ said Milo with a shrug. ‘Completely ordinary and boring. That’s it.’

  And this had seemed perfectly reasonable at the time – of course it had! – but looking back on it as he made his way to their rendezvous, Rex could only laugh, because back then Milo had looked anything but boring. Skinny and suntanned in his battered old Citroën box van, permanently bleary-eyed, with his filthy sleeveless T-shirt and wraparound shades, oversized combats and his Taxi Driver Mohawk – the shaved-sided crew cut – he looked like an archetypal stoner, the kind of bloke you’d think would get stopped and searched whenever he set foot in a public place. In terms that even the layman would understand, he stuck out like a fucking sore thumb.

  It was so obvious, even then. The guy had a free pass! How could they not have seen that Milo was a copper? Rex had found out for himself, soon enough, but by then, of course, it had been too late to warn the others. Too late for anything.

  It’s always the guy with the van, Rex thought, and the money. The one who has a good backstory and a full wallet, but no visible means of support. The one who’s super-helpful and super-friendly, but who’s got to go away very suddenly and to somewhere very far away. Rex had more reason than most to know all this, since he had occasionally been that guy himself, back in the mid-nineties. But luckily Rex hadn’t needed to hide out in Australia or Argentina or wherever once that posting was over. He’d simply shaved off the ‘white Rasta’ dreads and the beard – with all its plaited-in beads and seashells – and had a wash, and he’d been unrecognisable. Rex had even seen Swampy and Co. in the street in London one time, and it was his proud boast that there was honestly not a flicker of recognition; not a fucking flicker.