The Fountain in the Forest

by Tony White

  But now another old rat had crawled back out of whichever sewer it was he’d been hiding in, only this time there was no need for a disguise. Not yet, anyway.

  For a second, Rex had thought about meeting Milo in one of the anonymous cafe chains on Kingsway near the old tramway tunnel, losing themselves amongst the office workers, but then he’d thought better of it. He didn’t know what his former friend was like these days – what he was like in real life! – and didn’t want to risk him overplaying the old hail-fellow-well-met routine and turning them into some kind of side-show; to draw attention and give people something to blab about. Instead, Rex had figured that he’d meet him out the back of the Royal Palace Theatre. That was where he usually met his grasses, so what was the difference. He could tip Terence the wink and he’d accidentally-on-purpose flip the fuse on the stage-door CCTV camera’s power supply, like he’d done a few times before. That way Rex knew that he could be doubly discreet, but also that Terry might be lurking around and have his back, just in case the balloon went up, which it might well do. Although, as he crossed over a deserted Drury Lane, Rex had no idea just how bad things would get. Well, not strictly true. He was ready for anything, but he didn’t necessarily fully comprehend that before the night was out his old mate Milo would be just another cadaver – a nameless, noseless mystery to be solved; or not! – nor that he and Terence would find themselves with some pretty quick thinking to do.

  Luckily, if there’s one thing Rex was good at, it was thinking on his feet.

  28: COUVOIR (HATCHERY)

  By the time JJ and Milo had arrived in Savernake, the Peace Convoy had been there for a week or two, rolling in from their wintering place up in Leeds to set up camp. They had permission to be here too, and everyone knew that this was as close to Stonehenge as they could get without being moved on. Since then, more people had been arriving every day. Some in family cars – Escorts and Cortinas – or vintage camper vans, others on motorbikes or in brightly painted old Bedford lorries or army trucks and Land Rovers, some pulling caravans. Smoke curled out of the cone-topped flues that emerged from the roofs of converted buses and ambulances once destined for the scrapheap but now given a new lease of life as homes. There was a bus with STONEHENGE JUNE 1985 – GO FOR IT! painted on the front, a heavily laden and battered old Austin Princess with STONEHENGE HERE WE COME written on the driver’s door in marker pen. One bus had been converted into a theatre, and another— Yes, there it was now, pulling in off the main track: a bit of British motoring history, a real museum piece, a labour of love! So JJ hadn’t imagined it: a vintage, purpose-built mobile cinema, its projector housed in a great glass dome above the cab, and pulling what looked to be a box office cum power unit in a separate matching-liveried trailer.

  Wandering around the site, JJ could readily see that this was not an army of anarchists mustering for war. It was not an evil incubator from which some antisocial new-age hydra might emerge, come to wreak destruction upon the land, but a diverse group of mostly young people, many of them with babies and young children. Living life on slender means, perhaps, but all wanting nothing more than the chance to make a decent fist of it. There were Greens and peace protestors, space rockers and druids, Greenham women, hippies, posi-punks, soul boys and casuals, you name it. People were pitching tents and building fires, playing guitars and singing. All of them intent on nothing more than continuing their chosen way of life, celebrating a psychedelic solstice, sure, some of them, but also exercising what all were convinced was their inalienable, centuries-old right to gather peacefully for a free festival, rather than be herded into the mass-produced version down the road that cost sixteen pounds to get into: half a week’s dole money!

  The gathering at Savernake was not so different from the commune at La Fontaine-en-Forêt. JJ could see why Milo had wanted to come, because this was what it looked like when people put into practice the revolutionary principles by which they had chosen to live their lives. Would the commune be able to survive on the road, JJ wondered, if it ever had to leave La Fontaine-en-Forêt? He supposed it was unlikely, but not impossible. What if they were ever evicted?

  Savernake was almost like a festival in its own right, like a festival should be, albeit without the stages and the sound systems, and though he missed Sylvie, these were an idyllic couple of days for JJ. There were no leaders here, no anarchist generals, no lieutenants and warriors, but the plan such as it was, as far as JJ could gather from his numerous campfire conversations, was to wait here until there was a critical mass of people, and then by sheer strength of numbers to take the Stonehenge site for as much of June as possible. Not to wait for Solstice Eve, but to get there early. Hanging around here for too long would only give the police more time to prepare. This way they’d have surprise on their side. From Savernake they could be on-site in forty-five minutes, and that was nowhere near enough time for court orders or warrants to be issued.

  With bunting and flags hanging from some of the buses, with the sounds of singing voices being carried on the warm May breeze, and the sour smell of the hawthorn blossom that bedecked every hedge, JJ found himself remembering school festivities in his childhood. The headmistress of his primary school in Exeter had built singing and country dancing into the timetable, incorporating traditional country celebrations into the school calendar. Many years later, accompanying Helen to a concert at Cecil Sharp House near Regent’s Park in London – home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society – he would realise that this hadn’t appeared from nowhere, and wonder whether as a young woman Mrs Gummer must in turn herself have been taught by exponents of that first English folk revival, with its rural romanticism and its classical arrangements of agricultural rather than urban or industrial song. Perhaps she had wanted to soften the lines of the new-build 1960s school building she found herself in charge of, by aligning it with these more archaic and traditional forms of folk art. Certainly JJ remembered May Day celebrations, on warm days just like this one. May Days that had been less to do with working-class solidarity than an excuse for maypole and morris dancing. The school choir on the playing field, singing the ‘May Day Carol’:

  I’ve been a-rambling all the night,

  And the best part of the day;

  And now I am returning back again,

  I have brought you a branch of May.

  The first of June dawned bright and sunny, but JJ felt homesick for La Fontaine-en-Forêt. He missed Sylvie’s bed most of all, but right about now he might ordinarily be learning t’ai chi moves from Victor, or helping Béatrice with some cooking. He missed Élise’s history lessons, and her brother with his almanac and his daily calculations. JJ wondered what the revolutionary date might be today, though he knew full well what day it was here in Wiltshire.

  In Wiltshire it was D-Day.

  Word had gone around the night before that this was going to be it, so as soon as it had started to get light, people had begun striking tents, putting out fires and packing up, although it would take another few hours to actually get out on to the road. It was about 1 o’clock by the time that a flag-flying blue coach led the convoy out on to the A338 and turned south towards Shipton Bellinger.

  The hedges alongside the road were bedecked with white and pink hawthorn blossom. JJ had bought some Spider’s Web acid from a Leeds goth who had travelled down with the Peace Convoy, and this time he planned to be tripping when they arrived at Stonehenge. Milo looked at him like he was crazy, but JJ dropped one anyway. The sun was shining and the mood in the convoy was good, and if Stonehenge was only forty-five minutes away, then he’d be safe and sound on the site before it really kicked in.

  That was the theory, anyway, but perhaps it didn’t take account of British roads, because before they’d gone about twenty minutes the convoy slowed down to a crawl.

  ‘Putain merde!’ said Milo, slapping his steering wheel in frustration. He opened the flaps on the dashboard to try to stop the engine from overheating.

  ‘Maybe we’re stuck
behind a tractor,’ JJ said, remembering the country roads of his youth.

  ‘Oui, peut-être,’ said Milo. He punched the button to stop the cassette, then punched again to eject Combat Rock. He shuffled around in the open glove compartment and picked out another cassette. ‘To remind us of ’ome,’ he said. ‘I tape it from Béatrice.’

  It was a C90 tape’s worth of Bach harpsichord concertos recorded from Béatrice’s box set of LPs – music to cook by! – but it made JJ even more homesick for the commune and his beloved Sylvie. Milo turned it up so that the frills and runs of the music seemed to be in sync with the leaves of the hedge that were rippling in the breeze. It was like a soundtrack to a movie in which nothing was happening; a road movie in which no one moved, the flute and harpsichord notes floating up into the clear blue sky above their heads.

  Behind them, an old-fashioned Bedford coach opened its doors with a hiss, and a few punks jumped out. One of them lit a cigarette while looking askance at the music coming from Milo’s Citroën, then he laughed. They were walking faster than the traffic was moving.

  ‘Is it a tractor?’ JJ asked one of them. ‘Do you know?’

  But the punk only shrugged and carried on.

  JJ took Milo’s wooden-handled knife from the glove box. He figured he could cut some hawthorn from the hedges, and use it to garland the roof rack. Like in the ‘May Day Carol’:

  I’ve been a-rambling all the night,

  And the best part of the day …

  There was a chalk drainage ditch along the verge. Bright white, it looked freshly cut, but was too wide to cross in one leap. JJ scrambled in and up the other side, where tall poppies and daisies were waving gently in the breeze. The convoy stretched in both directions as far as he could see – there must have been hundreds of cars and trucks, buses and horseboxes – while beyond the hedges on either side of the road were rolling green fields planted with young crops. He couldn’t see Stonehenge yet. Perhaps they weren’t close enough. Parked in front of them was a green Plaxton coach, like the ones that had taken his class at school to swimming lessons or for summer days out. Someone had painted an idyllic scene on the inside of the windows, of coaches and teepees pitching camp by a river beneath mountains and clouds and the dual light of a golden sun and moon. A poster stuck to the back said YOU HAVE BEEN MISINFORMED (AS USUAL) – STONEHENGE 1985 FREE FESTIVAL SHALL HAPPEN! It was decorated with yin and yang and Om symbols. JJ felt as if he’d been staring at this for hours, and yet with each second he was seeing it afresh. He was starting to feel the acid now, that was for sure: an adrenaline kick spreading out from his stomach while he listened to that not-quite-rhythmic sound in the distance, like far-off sleigh bells somewhere behind them. He thought of those school morris dancing lessons, the rattle of bottle tops nailed to broomsticks, a clamour of May Day voices carried on the warm air.

  And now I am returning back again,

  I have brought you a branch of May …

  In the van, Milo was waggling his fingers as if playing an imaginary piano, and laughing, but above the Bach, JJ could still hear that occasional, nearly familiar sleigh bell sound. He wove two branches of hawthorn across the front of the roof rack, and some ivy. Then Milo told him to get in. They were moving again. Perhaps only just, but moving all the same.

  A branch of May, my dear, I say,

  Before your door I stand …

  For a moment Rex had thought that it was Terence under the colonnade on Russell Street. Bald pate and closely cropped hair, what was left of it, similar height and slightly overweight in his baggy jacket, but then the head turned and Rex saw the silhouette: Concorde! Wow, he’d forgotten all about Milo’s extraordinary aquiline nose. As he got closer, of course, he saw that the suit was Armani-baggy rather than ill-fitting.

  Hearing footsteps, his nemesis turned, but Rex did not allow himself to betray any of the shock that he felt at seeing those once-familiar features instantly aged. Still tanned, but with even ruddier cheeks and a much broader face. It was as if a fat bloke was wearing a tiny Milo mask on the centre of his great wrinkled and jowly face.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ said Rex.

  Then Milo spoke, and this is what Gertrude Bisika’s friend Iris heard from her window in the Peabody flats on the other side of Drury Lane.

  ‘Well, you must be Joe King,’ he said.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Rex, gesturing towards the Long Dock door, which he had arranged to be left unlocked. ‘Let’s talk in private. What are you called now, more to the point?’ He paused for a beat. ‘As if I didn’t know.’

  If the Frenchman noticed this, he didn’t let on. François Couvoir – the man Rex had known thirty years earlier only as Milo – took great delight in telling Rex that he was Commissaire Divisionnaire (roughly, Divisional Superintendent) of the SDAT, the French anti-terrorist police. Did he honestly expect the Detective Sergeant to be surprised? Rex may have been outranked, but he wasn’t easily impressed. If Milo – François! – were here on official business and on Rex’s manor, Lollo would have known about it, and therefore so would Rex. More to the point, if that were the case, not only would Couvoir have been in uniform – even if not the No. 1 full dress – but he would certainly have brought more bodies along tonight. He’d have come mob-handed. You’d never organise a stunt on unfamiliar turf like this on your tod, with no backup. The fact that he had done precisely that suggested that this was something else, but what?

  Had Milo always been a bit of a maverick back in the day, or was this something purely personal? Surely not after all this time. A diversionary tactic? Probably, in one form or another, but if so, a diversion from what? And yet, as Rex led the way down the Long Dock, civvies or not, the Frenchman still walked with all the confidence of a man who thought he was in charge. Or to be more precise, with all the confidence of a man who had a SIG Pro 2022 under his jacket, because even if he hadn’t shown it yet, Rex would bet you anything that it would be there.

  Truth be told, Rex had also been digging around. His search for Milo had been low-level, but relentless. Although for years it had borne no fruit. And when he had eventually found him, it had been by accident. In the run-up to the Tennyson trial, anxious to cover all angles, Rex had been tracking back through the campaigns and the conspiracy theories about French deaths in custody, as well as poring over the legal coverage of certain high-profile UK cases. He’d been half-heartedly looking for anything, any new angle that might have been useful in the then upcoming trial of the ‘Tennyson Four’. He had found himself scrolling through photos from the late 1980s of a crowd that had been marching to mark the first or second anniversary of the death in custody of a French-Algerian student named Malik Oussekine, and there he was: Concorde! Bold as brass and holding up a banner reading L’ÉTAT TUE! TUE L’ÉTAT! – THE STATE KILLS! KILL THE STATE! The protest had been part of a then growing solidarity movement for the families of the bavures, the offensive French term meaning ‘blunders’ or ‘errors’ that at the time was used to describe victims in death-in-custody cases. In the surge of grief and rage that had engulfed him, sat there at his laptop, Rex had almost thrown up on the spot. Seeing Milo – unmistakable even in a suit and without his Mohawk – among the crowd of protestors rather than among the police lines had finally confirmed his fears.

  After this, Rex had found it relatively easy, using Lollo’s log-ins, to search the Detective Chief Inspector’s ‘Temporary’ drive for emailed meeting notes and correspondence relating to ACPO – the Association of Chief Police Officers – Interpol or EU networking conferences involving senior personnel from the UK’s Special Demonstration Squad, or more recently the National Public Order Intelligence Unit.

  Detective Chief Inspector Jethro Lawrence never cleared his cache – he wouldn’t have known a Temporary drive from a gravel one – and consequently Rex had been able to build these searches into his daily routine, although he had never really expected to find anything. But suddenly there he was: a Commissaire François Couvoir was listed as part of
a Parisian operation that had infiltrated the French ‘Stolen Lives’ movement, specifically the Malik Oussekine campaign. More than this, Couvoir was named on the agenda for a knowledge-exchange gathering in London with the UK team who had themselves successfully infiltrated family and campaign groups during the infamously protracted inquiry into the racist murder of London teenager Stephen Lawrence.

  It had been relatively straightforward after that to find ID and press images of the by now Commissaire Divisionnaire François Couvoir.

  Rex had felt almost elated. So Milo had actually been to Scotland Yard, and not only that but he had given a PowerPoint presentation on lessons learned during the Malik Oussekine campaign? It was unbelievable: Milo had been right here in London only ten years ago!

  And now he had been foolish enough to come here again.

  As Rex turned the lights on, Couvoir looked around, taking stock; casing the joint. If he was impressed by this great room, this hidden slice of Georgian London in Theatreland, he didn’t let on, but Rex knew the drill well enough to recognise somebody else doing the old six-point risk assessment, just like any policeman would: checking for vantage points and hiding places, potential assailants. Rex had done the same outside. Weaknesses? Weight. Risks? A gun, most likely. Exits? Only one, now that they were inside.

  Bringing someone new here made Rex see this strange narrow space of the paint frame with fresh eyes. The height of the place, the narrow workbenches laden with tins and rags and brushes, the Jackson Pollock-like accretion of splashes and drips, the haze of sprayed paint. And that was without the frames themselves: these two enormous proscenium-sized grids of blackened and paint-spattered beams and cross-struts that hung suspended along either side of the studio. Stretched across one of them was a scrim, the painting on it already recognisable as a biblical tableau. Something from the New Testament. Eleven disciples sleeping, while to one side Christ kneels at the feet of an angel. The whole thing seemed to have been painted so as to appear slightly off-register, as if in imitation of a cheaply printed nineteenth-century handbill.