The One Safe Place (22 page)

She felt her legs waver, because all at once the policeman looked as young as he'd been trying not to look. "Inspector?" he called, not quite managing to conceal his dismay at the situation in which he found himself.

Susanne was distantly aware of clamping her free hand over his hand on her arm for support. She saw the three policemen raise their heads and prepare their expressions, and it wasn't until the young man flinched that she realised she'd dug her nails into his hand. Even before a policeman in a dark uniform began to climb the steps, parting his lips the merest fraction as though he wished he needn't speak, she felt darkness rising inexorably toward her from the room where Don should be.

Once Don reached the shop he would be safe. He felt as if the rain was helping him conceal his purchase until he could lock it in the drawer behind the counter and maybe leave it there until he'd told Susanne they owned it. But he left the rain behind sooner than the high-rise blocks, and was still at least fifteen minutes from the city centre when he had to pull over to the curb of a main road and climb out to brush off the hood the hundreds of beads of rain that were dazzling him.

He'd parked on a double yellow line, he saw, alongside a notice warning him he couldn't park at any time. He imagined a police car drawing up beside him, the policeman writing him a ticket if that was what they did here, and then peering into the car. "What have we got in the package, sir?" He was wiping his hands on his jacket and reaching for the door handle when he caught sight of a notice in the window of one of a block of dingy shops across the road.

ANTIQUES BRIC A
BRAC SECOND
HAND RECORD'S
AND BOOK'S

It looked anything but promising, yet Don knew he wouldn't feel entitled to call himself a bookseller if he passed it up. He drove into the nearest side street, which was blocked after fifty yards or so by a strip of sidewalk planted with pebbledashed bollards. He shoved the black parcel farther under the seat and locked the doors and checked them twice, and gave the Volvo a last backward glance as he waited to cross the main road. Eventually the traffic halted, raindrops trembling on its roofs as the cars vibrated impatiently, and he ran across as the green men started to falter.

The shop was flanked by a butcher's, where the only meat on display was dead flies, and a barber's whose striped pole lay inside like the parent of a brood of empty wine bottles. A curtain or a blanket draped the unwashed window of the shop Don had made for, and was almost enough to discourage him. Nevertheless he went in, though the door was slouching in its frame and reluctant, like quite a few booksellers he'd met, to admit the public.

Beyond the door was one large room. It smelled of stewing tea, which appeared to have lent its color to most of the contents of the place: the sleeves of the old 78s leaning in cartons, the floor and the walls and the music-hall posters tacked to the latter, the spines of nearly all the books packed into a couple of spectacularly homemade bookcases or piled on top, the pages of the tattered magazines stacked on a coltishly unsteady table, the suits of the three men seated on an assortment of chairs around a steaming cylindrical urn. Indeed, their skin looked as though it might have been steeped in tea, though perhaps that was an effect of the dimness that was stagnating in the room. They each gave Don an indifferent glance and returned to slurping tea as they discussed how to make Communism work in Britain, and Don wondered if it was even worth crossing the floor to the books. He misread a title, and felt absurd for going closer to make sure he had, sidling past an oval mirror and a table laid with unfashionable ware. A loose floorboard set a stand of fire irons jangling and nearly tripped him as he reached the bookcase.

He fell as though his anticipation had tripped him, because the spine which had attracted him still said
Beyond the Wall of Sleep.
It must be a reprint, though he'd never heard of one. He inched the book off the splintery shelf, expecting the covers to wobble askew inside the surprisingly intact wrapper or the pages to fall loose. But the binding was tight, and when he turned to the verso of the title page he saw that what he'd thought he was only dreaming was true. This was the first edition of a book of tales by H. P. Lovecraft, his second collection and by far his rarest. It was priced at twenty pence.

He'd glimpsed something else while easing out the volume. He let his gaze stray along the spines, by no means all of which were as faded as they'd looked at first sight: the dimness was bestowing that appearance on them while preserving them. There was the title he hadn't dared believe he'd seen, and it led his gaze to its neighbour, beside which yet another book was waiting to be noticed.
The Outsider and Others. Devil's Tor. Stoneground Ghost Tales. Madam Crowl's Ghost. Out of Space and Time. The Eye and the Finger
... By the time he'd finished unloading the shelves he had more than a dozen books, all of them first editions and as good as unread, and only the weight in his arms convinced him they were real.

He carried them to the grayish counter beside the urn and separated them into two neat piles for fear they might topple, and waited. In his, not Don's, own good time the stoutest of the men, whose shirt was losing a struggle to cover his stomach, remarked, "Bit of reading you've got there."

"Watch out you don't go blind," said the loudest drinker, picking leaves from between his teeth.

"Can I pay someone?"

The man who hadn't yet addressed him commenced rolling his mug of tea between his hands. "Tourist, are you?"

Don suppressed an impulse to declare his profession, and felt instantly guilty. "You could say that."

The mug-roller lost interest, barely glancing at the books Don had selected. "Two pound sixty. Hope you've got the right change."

"Would you happen to know where these came from?"

The proprietor clearly resented having to look, and made his displeasure even more apparent once he had. "Father of a comrade. No wonder he voted Tory all his life with his head in that kind of shite."

"You wouldn't know if there are any more where these came from?"

"Not unless he had them buried with him," the proprietor said with relish.

Don felt in his sodden hip pocket for change. "Could I trouble you for a carrier of some variety?"

The man peered at him for several seconds before producing a crumpled Safeway bag from a pocket of his coat. "That's the best I can do."

"Same here." Don handed him a five-pound note, adding quickly, "Keep the change if you need to."

He'd meant to avoid any argument just in case the proprietor considered not selling him the books, but now the silence seemed to threaten that. He lifted the books into the bag and supported it with both hands, and didn't risk another glance at the three men until he was at the door. "Thanks," he said. "It's been a pleasure."

None of them bothered to look at him, and they started talking as soon as he opened the door. "Must all think they're millionaires, these Yanks."

"My dad always said charity was the sign of a bad conscience."

"A way of not admitting it, more like."

Don no longer felt remotely guilty. He dragged the door shut and strode from one green man to the other, and turned along the side street, where he saw that the windshield of the Volvo had been cracked from top to bottom. The zigzag crack was a trail of rain which had trickled off the roof. He let himself into the car and lowered his prize carefully onto the floor in front of the passenger seat, and sighed luxuriously, and arched his back against the seal and stretched his limbs as far as they would go, and brought his hands and feet slowly to the controls, and sent the car toward Manchester.

He wanted to share his astonishing luck with Susanne, but not by interrupting her at work. She was still teaching her course, for the present examining images of violence in television documentaries and newscasts. He thought it might be easier to tell her about the gun, since if he hadn't gone to buy it he would never have chanced on the books.

A canal like an endlessly unrolling sheet of foil stretched under the road as he approached the centre of Manchester. Bridges darkened the road, and a train passed over it with a squeal which could have been emitted by the opening of an enormous metal door. Then the road was gathered into a junction which the British called a roundabout, their word for a carousel. The first time Don had driven into such a junction in Manchester he'd felt as though he'd fallen foul of a white-knuckle ride. Now the sight of three lanes of traffic circling clockwise didn't faze him. He drove past the cathedral and across a wide bridge over skeins of railroad, and cruised into Greengate Arches, a subterranean warehouse that had been turned into a car park.

At the foot of the cobbled ramp he drove along the stony tunnel until he found a space well out of sight of the attendant in the booth, and tried to think what to do with the gun. He didn't want to carry a loaded weapon through the streets, but neither did he like to leave it in the car, just in case someone broke in and stole it, however unlikely that was. He unwrapped the gun and sprang the clip of bullets out of it, and locked both clips in the glove box, then he parcelled the gun again and found room for it in the Safeway bag and lifted the bundle out of the car.

The echoes of the slam of the door sounded like a bass drum and seemed to pound a smell of mold out of the bare walls. Sunlight met him halfway up the ramp and drove back the chill. Three cars ran a red light as he waited to cross the six-lane road, and he thought of pointing the gun at the last offender, and smiled a little uneasily at himself. He tucked the bag under his chin and felt the cold of the metal reach for him through the plastic as he sprinted to an island that was already full of two globular women and a set of traffic lights, and experienced a stopover lasting some minutes before he gained the farther sidewalk.

He carried the bag past the cathedral, outside which several Irish nuns were giggling and drinking on the wall opposite the Mitre Hotel, and hooked his key ring out of his pocket as he came in sight of the Corn Exchange. A bus moved off toward the Arndale Centre shopping mall and revealed the hazy apparition of a tram gliding across the gap between two office blocks. The smell of old books greeted him as he unlocked his door and hasped it open and set down his burden on the top step while he untacked the sign that said BACK THIS AFTERNOON—which, now he thought about it, had presumed a good deal—and stuck it between gun and chin so as to bear everything down the steps.

He shut the gun in the drawer behind the counter and spread his other purchases in front of him. His delight with them was going to be feeble compared with the reactions of the customers he planned to contact. He'd write to them before he went home, but first he couldn't resist at least making sure that Susanne was too busy to contact. He dialled the University and had himself put through to her department. "Will Mrs. Travis be teaching just now, can you tell me?"

"Who wants her, please?"

"Is that Alice? This is Don. Mr. Susanne."

"Oh, hello, Mr. Travis." The secretary sounded unsure how to explain her initial wariness. "I think she may have left. I'll check." Alice threw her voice into the distance and received a distant answer. "Yes, she has."

"She wasn't meant to yet, was she? Would you know..."

"Just finished early, we think. We believe she was going straight home."

"I'll try her there. And Alice, thanks for making sure I was someone she'd want to know."

He dialled home and heard his own voice. "Susanne, Don and Marshall Travis. Even if any of the family is here we haven't got to the phone yet, so tell us who you are and what you want and your number after this beep."

"Hi, Susanne?" he said once the machine had uttered its cry. "Are you home? Are you home yet? Pick up the phone if you are. Sounds like you aren't, huh? I was only going to tell you, well, that's what I'm doing in fact, no, I'll wait until I see you. Let's just say why don't you come to the shop and bring Marshall if he finishes his homework, and we'll eat at the Turkish joint we all liked. You know, I'm beginning to think we might like to stay in this country for good."

That would need explaining. At once he felt he'd said too much. He wished there was some way he could run the tape back and substitute a less fulsome message. Contradicting it would be worse, and so he said, "Call me. I'll wait here until you do. By the way, I love you," and was aware of loitering with nothing more to say. He cut off his own silence and indulged in another survey of the books on the counter, and then he slapped his open mouth. He'd left Teresa Handley's novel in the Hangman.

It surely couldn't matter. It was inscribed to the Travises, but only by their first names. Most likely it wasn't even there by now, and in any case there was nothing for the author to be connected with. Certainly he shouldn't feel compelled to return to the pub. He'd just finished convincing himself of all this when someone, two men, blocked the sunlight through the doorway and started down the steps.

Before he was able to see their faces, another memory ambushed him. Two men had overheard him enthusing over a parcel of videotapes to Marshall and had then sneaked out of the shop. He'd thought at the time that they might have been thieves, except that he'd never been able to identify any theft. Suppose they'd been police or customs officers who had perhaps already known the contents of the parcel? Suppose the men who were slowly descending the steps were police who'd followed him from the Hangman? Then the foremost said, "Shut the fucking door, Dave," and Don knew why they seemed familiar. "Leave it open, would you, please," he said as loudly and steadily as he could.

"We'll leave you fucking open, pal. Fucking get it, Dave."

The speaker had reached the foot of the steps. His companion started to tramp back up. Don flung out a hand, though for a moment he wasn't sure what he was reaching for. His hand closed on the phone receiver and snatched it to his face. "Either you both leave right now—"