As George waited to cross Peach Street, a truck swept past trailing yards of blue smoke. Stacked upright behind the tailboard and lashed into position with ropes stood an entire platoon of dummy policemen. These were not the dummies he was used to (blue uniforms stuffed with old rags, foam rubber or straw). These were professional dummies, the kind you see in shop windows. They had eyes, noses, hands, hair. They were uncannily lifelike. Even at a distance he recognised a Peach, two Hazards and a Dolphin. He shuddered. Alice’s words came back to him like a prophecy. Look at their faces!
He stumbled across the road and climbed over a stile into the allotments. He sank on to a bench, breathed in the bitter fleshy smell of cabbages. Ranks of bean-canes sharp as lances. A guarded peace. Over by the tin shed where the gardening tools were housed he could make out the squat figure of Mrs Latter, the woman who ran the post office and a keen grower of marrows. He raised a hand to her, a salute rather than a wave, but she didn’t respond. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed him. He slid his hand back into his coat pocket like a useless weapon.
After picking his way through the rows of vegetables, he crossed the road again and set out across the village green. Passing the pond on his right (a squabbling of ducks, the plop of a frog), he turned left into Magnolia Close. The church rose at the end of the street, an obstacle, solid, adamant. George suddenly realised that the route he had chosen would lead him past the Chief Inspector’s house. Normally he steered clear of Magnolia Close, but, then again, normally he didn’t go out twice in a single day. He considered turning round, but his feet ached, and if he carried on past the church he would be home in five minutes.
Peach’s house stood at right-angles to the church on the corner of the village green. It had once been the vicarage. Peach had evicted the priest shortly after the war claiming that, as Chief Inspector, he needed the house because it had such a commanding view of the village. (It also had an eighteenth-century wood-panelled staircase and an unusual parterre with triangular flower-beds enclosed by low box hedges, not to mention a topiary in yew dating, supposedly, from 1841. Enthusiasts would sometimes stop outside the house and enquire if they might look over the gardens. Mrs Peach was always most gracious.) But he hadn’t won the house without a fight.
‘What about the spiritual welfare of the village?’ the then priest had argued. ‘Is not my rightful place at the heart of the community?’
‘It’ll take you precisely three minutes to walk from the church to your new house,’ Peach told him. ‘I’ve timed it myself.’
‘But symbolically?’ the priest persisted.
No mean philosopher himself and as brutally secular as any medieval emperor, Peach had quashed the priest’s arguments. Truth to tell, with his army of policemen behind him, his victory had never been in doubt. What did the hapless priest have to call upon but the assistance of his sexton (a widower with cataracts) and the wrath of God?
‘But I need a big house — my family — ’ he had pleaded, honest at last, and grovelling too.
Peach had quoted Colossians. ‘Set your affection on things above, not on things of the earth.’
Touché, priest.
‘My children,’ the priest whimpered, ‘I have to provide for my children.’
‘And what makes you think that I’m not going to have children?’ Peach had countered. ‘I’m only thirty-six.’
The priest could hardly tell Peach that he had it on very good authority (from the doctor himself, in fact) that the Chief Inspector’s wife was incapable of having children. He gave way, and was moved (the police transported his furniture) to a pleasant if characterless house on the far side of the village green. The roles of church and state were set for Peach’s reign.
George had slackened his pace. He now stood at the entrance of Peach’s driveway. Lights showed in all the windows. A murmur of voices reached George’s ears. Some kind of party, it seemed, was in progress.
In order to peer through the living-room window, George had to part the sticky tentacles of a rose-bush and clamber up on to an ornamental stone mushroom. Inch by inch, he raised his face to the level of the sill.
The entire police force of New Egypt had assembled inside the room. Peach stood with his back to a log fire, his lower lip glistening, possibly with sherry. His wife moved among the officers with a tray of cocktail sausages and canapés. Firelight flickered on thick blue cloth. As George watched, Peach raised a hand.
‘Gentlemen, your attention, please.’ He took a pace forwards, hands clasped behind his back. ‘Before we proceed any further, I’d like to make sure that we’re all here. Sergeant Dolphin?’
Dolphin, with his schoolboy’s face and his bully’s torso, flush from his recent triumph over the greengrocer, took up position beside Peach and produced a clipboard and pen. He began to call out names, the names George knew off by heart.
‘Arson?’
‘Present.’
‘Blashford?’
‘Yes.’
‘Caution?’
‘On duty,’ somebody said. ‘In the station.’
Dolphin noted the information down. Then he proceeded. ‘Damage?’
‘Here, sergeant.’
George was gazing, mesmerised. He had never suspected Peach of using roll-calls. A small detail, granted, but one that might have found its way into the book, had he known about it.
Dolphin, meanwhile, had reached F.
‘Fisher?’
‘Night patrol,’ a voice called out.
‘Fox?’
‘Present.’
Now laughter erupted as PC Grape said, ‘Here, sergeant,’ before Dolphin had time to call his name. Grape had something of Peach about him. He was reputed to possess a sixth sense that meant he could hear what people were thinking. George had the feeling that Grape would one day play an important part in thwarting some poor villager’s dream of escape.
‘Hawk-Sniper?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hazard?’
‘Here.’
The collar of George’s coat suddenly lifted in the wind. He glanced over his shoulder. He hoped to God that he couldn’t be seen from the road.
Dolphin’s voice droned on. ‘Marlpit?’
‘— esh. I mean, yes, sergeant.’
George whinnied. Marlpit had been caught with a mouthful of sausage.
‘Peach?’
‘I’m here, sergeant.’
A ripple of amusement. Sycophants, George thought.
‘Pork?’
‘Yes.’
‘Savage?’
‘He’s still sick, sergeant,’ Marlpit said, his mouth now cleared of sausage.
Furtive grins. Savage had shot himself in the foot during rifle-practice earlier in the week.
‘Twinn, C?’
‘Present.’
‘Twinn, D?’
‘He’s on night patrol,’ came the nasal whine of Colin, Twinn D’s brother.
‘Thank you, Twinn. Ulcer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Vassall?’
‘Here, sergeant.’
‘Voltage?’
‘Here.’
In listening to this roll-call, George began to realise just how many police officers New Egypt employed. Of course, he knew. But it was the difference between knowing there’s a lot of sand on the beach and counting the individual grains one by one. So far there had been six absentees and still the room heaved with blue cloth. A claustrophobia of truncheons and boots. And the names seemed to go on for ever.
‘Wilmott?’
‘Yes, sergeant.’
‘Wragge?’
‘Night patrol,’ somebody called out.
Dolphin tucked his clipboard under his arm. Thanking his second-in-command, Peach moved forward again. He pushed his lower lip out and back, a signal that he was about to speak.