Dear Chief Inspector Peach,
It is not our custom to supply information regarding the children in our charge; however, in this case, given your official position and your serious interest, I have taken it upon myself to waive the regulations. Moses was admitted to the Rose Hill Orphanage on June 29th 1956. I myself personally supervised the admission. He spent nine years with us — nine very happy years, I believe — and on June 1st 1965 was adopted by a couple with whom he had formed an extremely satisfactory relationship during the year previous.
Mr and Mrs Pole, formerly of 14 Chester Row, Maidstone, Kent, have now moved to Leicester. I regret to say that I do not have their new address. However, with all the resources at your disposal, I am sure that you will be able to trace them without too much trouble.
Yours sincerely,
Beatrice Hood
A third far briefer letter from a sergeant in Leicester confirmed the information supplied by Mrs Hood. The Poles had moved to the outskirts of the city, a green suburb. The sergeant had been kind enough to provide Peach with the address. And there Peach had let the matter rest.
He lay back in his chair and listened to the rain. Three years had passed since then. Three passive years.
His eyes were drawn to the corner of his office. There, propped up on a shelf, stood the toy dog, visible only as a ghostly patch of white in the shadows. Some remote ray of light had caught the black and orange glass of its left eye, so it seemed to be winking at him, mocking him. Balancing on three legs, it lifted its fourth and urinated on his career. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to throw it out. It was the only piece of evidence he had. It was a symbol of progress — what little he had made.
At least he was one up on George Highness, though. There was some solace in that. At least he knew Moses was alive. Highness could only hope he was. Perhaps he would be able to torture Highness with that knowledge. Yes, he might just be able to make the bastard squirm a little. To think that the fate of the village should have rested in that man’s hands. It was monstrous. Monstrous. Highness would pay for that. Unquestionably he would pay.
Hands folded on his desk, Peach schemed for a while.
Then the phone rang.
He lifted the receiver. ‘Peach.’
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, dear — ’
It was Peach’s wife.
‘Hilda. What is it?’
‘It’s just that it’s getting very late. I was worried about you.’
Peach glanced at his watch. Good Christ, it was almost one o’clock. He hadn’t realised.
‘I’m sorry, Hilda. I had no idea it was so late. I’ll be home in a few minutes.’
‘I’ll have some supper ready for you.’
His dear wife. ‘Thank you, Hilda. I’ll be there very soon.’
He replaced the receiver. Locking up his office, he walked out into the rain.
*
At the age of forty-five, George Highness already slept as old men do. He went to bed early, usually at around ten. He took a glass of water with him for the night and a Thermos of weak tea for the morning.
By five he was always awake again. Then he would doze with the radio on, floating halfway between consciousness and dreams. The voices of the news announcers, turned to the lowest volume, muttered distantly, drowsily, like traffic or waves. At seven he poured himself a cup of tea, and sipped it noisily, as privacy allows you to, his head propped on a heap of pillows. Sometimes he reached for his electric razor and, holding a circular mirror in his left hand, trimmed his beard.
Then he could delay no longer, even though the day offered him nothing. He levered his thin legs out of the bed and on to the floor. The opening moments of this routine never varied. On with his dressing-gown and slippers, across the landing, and into the lavatory.
On this particular morning, perhaps because of the storm that had kept him awake for half the night, he was still asleep when the phone rang in his bedroom at eight-thirty. The sound reached down into his dream like an excavator’s mechanical arm and scooped him out of the rubble of his subconscious. He rolled over groaning, pulled the phone towards his ear.
‘Hello?’
‘Could I speak to Mr Highness, please?’
George thought he could place the voice. A man’s voice — alert, efficient, nasal. If he had been asked to put a smell to it, he would have said toothpaste. The name eluded him, however.
‘Speaking.’
‘This is Doctor Frost from the Belmont Home. I’m sorry to be calling you so early — ’
Frost. Of course. ‘That’s all right, doctor. I — ’
‘I’m afraid I have some rather bad news for you, Mr Highness. It’s about your wife — ’ The doctor paused.
Like one of those puzzles, George thought. Fill in the missing words. He had already guessed the answer, but he said nothing. He closed his eyes and saw blue crosses in the darkness. He listened to the doctor’s hygienic silence. He had always suspected Frost of being a coward.
Eventually: ‘She died at seven o’clock this morning.’
George opened his eyes again. The room a watercolour in grey. A coating of dust on the lampshade above his head. Through the window, the elm tree and a triangle of glassy sky. He turned on to his side and drew his knees towards his chest.
‘Mr Highness?’
‘Yes.’
‘Somebody will be contacting you later today. About the forms. I’m sorry, Mr Highness.’
Doctor Frost hung up.
George could see him now, a pink man in a white coat. Those sparse white hairs, how obscene they looked against his raw pink skull. His quick prim steps as he strutted down the hospital corridor. Congratulating himself, no doubt. An unpleasant task, successfully accomplished. On with the day.
And Alice –
And Alice, worth five or ten of him, lying in a drawer somewhere, her mouth ajar, her eyes transfixed –
George pushed his face into the pillow. His love, dormant these twelve years, rose in his throat, acidic, scalding. He tried to swallow, couldn’t. He closed his eyes again, curled up. His last thought before falling into a deep sleep concerned the telephone. He would disconnect it. He had only had it installed in the first place so he could speak to her, or be there if she needed him. Now there was nobody to speak to any more. Cut it off. Complete the isolation.
Its brash nagging woke him again just after ten. The medical secretary from the Belmont. Wanting to know whether Mr Highness would collect the death certificates in person or whether she should post them.
‘Post them,’ George snapped, and hung up.
As he reached for his tartan dressing-gown, his body began to shake.
*
Alice, Alice, Alice.
He tried to use the sound of her name to bring her back. It had been so long. He was in danger of losing his sense of her. It would be as if she had never been.
He tried to gather solid details. To give her death, in distance, substance.
That green-blonde hair, scraped back in a denial of its beauty. Her shoes scattered, often singly, throughout the house, the insteps cracked, the heels trodden down. The time when, pregnant, she walked naked down the stairs to breakfast. And later, in the winter, the tip of her tongue on her top lip as she trickled peanuts into the miniature wire cage in the garden so the birds wouldn’t starve. And that blurred smile, almost tearful, flung his way like a handful of grain, breaking up as it arrived.
Her smiles always blurred, as if seen from a moving train.
Her eyes always creased at the edges by dreams of leaving.
And how he would come back sometimes to find the doors locked and the curtains drawn. How he had to break into his own house. And all the breakfast things still standing on the table. Immovable from hours of being there. Petrified.