Talking to Strange Men (37 page)

For two reasons, he thought. They had got up and were moving out of the circle of tables, about to separate, she to continue northwards across the gardens, he to seek the Feverton entrance. Two reasons – I would keep thinking of Jennifer, I would wish she was Jennifer, I might even make a fool of myself and call her Jennifer. And then I am afraid. I am afraid she would say no.

Perhaps that's really why I haven't asked, I can't ask, he thought as they parted and she turned back once and waved, I haven't the nerve or the resources to face rejection . . .

ON THE CROWN
of the hill, at a viewing place, a telescope was sited for a better appreciation of the panorama of rocks, cypresses, olive groves, broken columns and gushing water below. A certain amount of drachmae had to be put into its slot in order to see more than a blur but the telescope no longer functioned and even its coin slot was blocked with dust. Mungo leant over the low wall, inhaling – so deep was his pleasure – rather than merely smelling the scent of the hillside herbs, the thyme and oregano and bay. It wasn't hard to imagine gods come to earth here, larger-than-life animated statues he saw them as, in robes like fluted cloud.

Down the slope Ian and Gail were chasing butterflies, not to catch them but to get a closer look at wing spans and colours unknown at home. The heat was intense but somehow light and dry.

‘Seems funny to think this place once belonged to us,' said Graham.

‘What do you mean, to us?'

‘Well, it was a British Protectorate after the Napoleonic Wars. We had a governor here for about fifty years.'

Graham was marvellous on history, he was going to do history at university. While Angus asked him about it, about how the British ever managed to get a foot in the Ionian Sea, Mungo turned to examine the telescope. It was stupid having it here if it didn't work, its ineffectual presence an affront to nature. Then, as he touched the blackened brass band on the cylinder, a fuse of memory was lit and the solution he had been seeking for months exploded.

‘Ang,' he said, ‘Graham.'

‘What?' Angus had already started down the slope. He turned round under the bay trees.

‘I've broken Moscow Centre's code,' Mungo said. ‘It just came to me in a flash of enlightenment. God, it was like one of those experiences mystics have. Everything was explained and made clear.'

‘Saint Bean,' said Angus.

‘You can mock but it was like that.' Mungo had his codebook out and was turning to his lists of Stern's messages, all with their ultimate numbers. ‘Listen. We knew the numbers at the end were the time. I realized that last week – I told Graham, didn't I? – I realized those numbers were times, not nine hundred and forty-two but nine forty-two, not one thousand and three but three minutes past ten. And I knew they were on a digital clock because Graham's got his with him in our room, but what I see now is that it's a particular digital clock. It's the one on the CitWest tower.'

‘How did you see that on a hill in Corfu?' Graham said, grinning.

‘Not because I'm a visionary. It was the telescope.'

Graham's eyebrows went up. He was wearing the tee shirt he had bought in Corcyra with a genuine jellyfish printed on it.

‘Charles Mabledene took that photograph of Perch's room when he got into Utting. You remember that, don't you? It's in the departmental archives. The photograph didn't show much but it did show he keeps a telescope on the windowsill. That was the clue to the code only we never saw it. You
couldn't see the clock on the CitWest tower from as far away as Utting but you could through a telescope. You couldn't see the tower from Rosie Whittaker's – not at ground level you couldn't. But you would be able to from the top floor of their house. The rest of Moscow Centre's agents would all be able to see the tower with the naked eye, or if not, with telescopes or binoculars.'

Angus gave an angry twitch of his head. ‘So what? When are you going to get over all this, Bean? I mean, isn't the joke wearing a bit thin?' He who never lost his temper roared suddenly, ‘You have to live, do you know that? You have to be a normal human being. When are you going to have a life instead of a game?' And he plunged down the slope towards his father and mother unpacking picnic things.

‘Take no notice,' Graham said kindly. ‘It's just that he's pissed off over Diana not coming.'

Mungo wasn't concerned. ‘What they do is, start with the date the person getting the message is to act on. That's what the first number is. Then they write the message in the code they directed yesterday or whenever and at the end they put the time in digits. It's the time on the prearranged date at which whoever gets the message is to look at the digital clock on the CitWest tower and note the temperature. Say, for example, the message begins with nine and ends with nine two three. That means the recipient has to look at the CitWest clock at twenty-three minutes past nine on the ninth and if the temperature is twelve degrees, start making a code alphabet from the twelfth letter of the alphabet.' Mungo was writing now, dashing off numbers and letters in his book rested on the old stone wall. Graham came and looked over his shoulder. ‘It does work. It's working out beautifully. You see, here's the last message we picked out of Lysander Douglas's hand. If you work from the message previous to that it directs with the numbers two seven then one 0 one five. That means Perch, say, had to look at the CitWest clock on the twenty-seventh at ten fifteen, record the temperature and work the code from whatever number in the alphabet the temperature was.'

‘But we can't. We don't know what the temperature was.'

‘No, but we can make guesses. Somewhere between twelve
and twenty degrees, wouldn't you think? On the twenty-seventh of July at ten fifteen in the morning? Or, that is to say, starting the code alphabet somewhere between L and T.'

‘You couldn't do it with Fahrenheit,' Graham said. ‘You could only do it with Celsius and in a climate where the temperature hardly ever goes above twenty-six.'

‘If it does I expect they start again from the beginning, twenty-seven being one and twenty-eight two and so on. We'll try it later, we'll start by assuming it was fifteen degrees. That's Dad yelling for us. He worries some of us will get lost and carried off by brigands.'

Graham nodded, grinning. He held out his hand in a funny grown-up old-fashioned gesture. ‘Congratulations.'

They shook hands. Mungo got embarrassed suddenly and vaulted over the wall and went running down to the picnic.

‘
SOMEONE WAS ASKING
for a monkey puzzle,' said the girl called Flora, the new assistant manager. Flora in a garden centre among the flowers, it was absurd. ‘
Araucaria araucana
, the Chile pine.' She was as bad as Gavin with her Latin names, John thought.

‘I suppose we might get her one.'

‘I told her they'd gone out of fashion. You never see them.'

‘There's one of them trees in John's road,' said Sharon, protruding sea-anemone lips into her handbag mirror, starting to outline them with red pencil. ‘Geneva, is it, John, or Lucerne?'

‘Geneva,' he said, having no idea how she knew about the monkey puzzle, not much caring. She could walk along there much as anyone else was free to do. He made an effort. Everything had become an effort, every utterance, even the
‘Can I help you?' to customers. ‘It's a fine specimen, I daresay a hundred years old from when they were fashionable.'

‘I'll come down and look at it one of these fine days. I'm partial to the old
Araucaria
.' The top flowerpot from the stack Flora was holding toppled and fell to the ground with a crash. That was the fourth thing she had smashed since she came less than a week before. John thought her the most accident-prone giddy creature he had come across. ‘Oh, sorry. Still, it's only a pot.'

John didn't say anything but went into the chrysanthemum house, into the warm damp and the bitter scent. It was Friday, a Friday coming to its end, and another weekend waited over the brink of it. You could easily reach a point in this world when you didn't know anyone, when you had no acquaintances, still less had friends. You could reach a point when all days were exactly the same, limbo-days, neither happy nor sad. And there could come a time – for him he thought it might already have come – when all your memories were too painful to revive and although they were all you had, there was nothing for it but strive to crush them into oblivion.

People would call it self-pity but that implied being sorry for oneself and he didn't feel pity for anyone much, least of all himself. It was rather as if he had withdrawn from all involvement. With Jennifer only was there something left, a fear for her really, as to what would become of her in her chosen role of guardian and protector to Peter Moran. He walked along the aisle, testing the dampness of the soil in the pots with his forefinger. Someone had slightly over-watered them. Flora, probably. John didn't want to go home, he would have liked the afternoon to go on and on, five-thirty never coming, the shoppers continuing to trickle in, take their trolleys or baskets, choose their little pots of alpines or cacti or herbs, lingering outside in the hot perpetually five o'clock sunshine, for ever.

Les had gone out as he always did about this time for the evening paper and four Marathon bars. Trowbridge's sold only healthy snacks, tropical mix fruit and nuts, sunflower seeds, harvest crunch. It hadn't been a busy afternoon and
the place was empty now. Sharon, reading the paper, said to Flora:

‘They found that missing boy, the Nottingham one.'

‘Alive, d'you mean?'

‘Are you kidding? They never are alive.'

Half a dozen people came in through the swing doors. John went to help a man who said rather hectoringly that it was roses he was interested in, only roses. As he passed Flora on his way to the rose-garden exit he saw that, facing the shelves, her back turned, she was quietly weeping and he knew, with a kind of hopeless wonder, that it was for a child she didn't know in a place she had very likely never been to.

A CUSTOMER WAS
coming in to view and test-drive one of the big Volvos. This was the reason Charles's father had made an exception to his rule of not coming in on Fridays. He brought Charles in with him at three and to his son's consternation, started showing some interest in why he wanted to come in at all. Charles said truthfully that he was going to the cinema but untruthfully that it was to see
Aliens
at the Odeon.

‘How are you going to get home?'

‘The last bus, I expect.' Getting home seemed an unreal concept. Or as if he were getting to the end of a journey and the limousine that awaited him was standing in sight, but between him and it was a deep gulf probably too wide to jump. ‘The last Fenbridge bus goes from the station at nine.'

‘You weren't thinking of hitching, I hope.'

Truthful again, Charles said he hadn't been. His father started on another of his lectures about not speaking to strangers. Then he said Charles must get a taxi, not a bus, at the station and he gave him the money for the fare. Charles thought it was like deliberately spending a night in a leper
hospital after you'd been told to mind and not catch a cold. He hung about the garage for a while. In the shop where you paid for petrol they sold chocolate bars and knick-knacks and weird things like cut flowers and plastic toys. Charles helped himself to a couple of Yorkies and, almost as an afterthought, to one of the penknives stuck on a coloured card that hung up among the ballpoints and key rings. He took it off its card and opened the blades. If they were each five centimetres long that was all they were and just remotely capable of injuring someone if handled, say, by a really experienced surgeon who knew exactly the site of the hyoid or the medulla or one of those things. Charles grinned ruefully to himself but he put the penknife into his pocket.

Just before four-thirty he went to get the bus. He intended to be early. This would be the first time he had ever been to this cinema, the Fontaine, which for as long as he could remember had shown foreign or controversial or less than generally popular films. There was no sign of Peter Moran. Charles started walking round a bit, though the area was familiar to him, harbouring as it did the safe house.

It hadn't occurred to him that Peter Moran might come by car, though he knew he had a car, having of course cleaned it at their first meeting. He recognized it at once, parked on a meter in Collingbourne Road. It was clear to him that while he had been walking round the other way, via Lomas Road and Fontaine Road, Peter Moran had parked here and gone to wait outside the cinema. Charles decided to try to avoid getting in that car if he could help it. He was wearing his watch today and saw that it was five to five. The heat had been intense all day, thirty degrees he had noticed when he saw the CitWest clock from the top of his bus. It made him wonder how high that digital recorder could go. Forty degrees? Forty-five? Perhaps they made different ones for different climates. The heat had somehow thickened during the afternoon and the sky grown overcast without much diminishing the sun's glare. He was aware of a powerful smell compounded of petrol and diesel fumes, gas and drains, something which he had noticed in the past was strongest just before a storm. He noticed something else
different too. The corrugated metal was gone from the fronts of the houses in Pentecost Villas and their shabby front doors were exposed. Builders or architects or someone had been in.

Peter Moran was standing outside the Fontaine, apparently studying the poster of Samurai swordsmen. He had his white tee-shirt on. From the back he looked very thin and fleshless, his elbows knobby, his legs like sticks. As Charles approached he turned round.

‘Hi, Ian.'

‘Hallo,' said Charles.