Signalling Dismal for silence, I stood with the air pistol pointing at the wooden stairs. More mumbled words reminded me that the definition of a cottage was that you can hear sounds from every nook and cranny between its four walls. Whoever he was hadn’t realised it was the whistling kettle that woke him from a dream about childhood holidays on a steam train.
“Oh dear,” I heard. “Oh dear me.” He stretched, and shuffled across the room above, sounding weak and sleepy, though I was taking no chances. Neither was Dismal, who lay like a giant spring, a twitch now and again riding across his back.
The door at the top of the stairs opened, and he came down with hands to his eyes, a tallish well set man who I hoped didn’t have a weak heart, because at the bottom step the Hound of the Baskervilles roared across the room, knocking him arse over tit to the floor. His gurgling cry signified that a dream had turned into his worst nightmare. I kept the pistol levelled. “Dismal, come off him. You’ve eaten enough today already.”
The man’s face, not very clean, turned pale from fright. Even without Dismal his pathetic expression might have been normal, his face long in more ways than one. I placed him in his fifties, though shaving off the grey stubble could have marked him as younger. “Who the fuck are you?” I snapped.
He began to cry, which so disturbed me in a grown man I wanted to give him a punch in the head so that he would have something to cry for. “I’m the caretaker.”
“You lying pillock. There’s no such person. Show me your permit.”
He stood. “Will you hold that dog back?”
“Not unless you show proof of who you are, otherwise I’ll tell him to eat you, though I’m not sure he’d enjoy it. What are you doing here?”
He wiped his eyes with a piece of rag, and stopped blubbing, as good a piece of acting as I’d ever seen. “I’m a bloke on the tramp,” he said. “I stumbled across this place last night on my way north. I was done in, and thought I’d have a day or two’s rest.”
“So you broke the lock to get in? I’ll have the police on you, for trespassing and criminal damage.”
“It wasn’t me,” he whined. “I found it like that.”
He had no provincial accent, so could have been educated, unless he’d taught himself by listening to the BBC, though you could hardly rely on that these days. I lowered the gun. “I stand no nonsense. If you don’t give me any aggro you might be all right.” I was angry at reacting so violently to a harmless down and out. “Sit down, and tell me about yourself.”
With every bone shaking he lowered himself into a chair. Rain flailed at the window, chilling the room. I lit paper and wood in the fireplace but the homely blaze didn’t cure the damp. He looked uneasily at the worsening weather. “You aren’t going to throw me out in that, are you?”
I poured tea for him. “No, I’ll wait till there’s two feet of snow.”
This brought a smile, from a long way down in his body. “At least you have a sense of humour.”
“Don’t bank on that.” I sometimes thought a sense of humour was my worst failing, but I let him eat a cake, and drink his tea. Dismal growled as if the man was scoffing what was rightfully his. “You’d better start by telling me your name.”
From across the hearth he put a hand forward to be shaken. His nails were in mourning, but the grip was firm, his gesture friendly. I was ready nevertheless with fist and boot should he make a dodgy move, but I gave him a cigar, as if about to interrogate a prisoner of war, deciding that the kinder he was treated the sooner I’d get the truth.
“You’re very hospitable,” he said, “and I appreciate that. My name’s Peter Crimple.” He picked a twig from the fire to light up. “Five years ago I was an engineering supervisor, and was made redundant. Don’t ask what job that is. I hardly knew myself, and in any case it would be too complicated to explain, which I’ve forgotten how to do, anyway. The firm gave me a fairly golden handshake, which was nice of them, because I read it went bust six months later. I handed the money to my wife, though the house was already paid for, and our two girls married. I didn’t want to stay married. Well, I wouldn’t, would I? What man would? I’d had more than enough, so told my wife I was going out one morning to buy cigarettes, and didn’t go back. I haven’t seen her since. Two years ago I picked up a Big Issue on a bus and saw my photo. Underneath was a message from her begging me to get in touch, but I didn’t. Being on the road was punishment enough for doing what I’d done. At least it gives me nothing to feel guilty about, but I’ll never settle down again. I like walking about the country with a rucksack, because it’s amazing how kind people can be to a middle-aged chap like me. Mind you, I try not to look the hippy sort. Many’s the time I’ve been dropped a pound or two, after getting into conversation, or I’ve been invited into a café for a cup of tea. Sometimes I’ll call at a farm and ask if they’ve got any casual work, but they never have. I’ve often been given the leftovers from a meal and invited to sleep in a barn, though. Maybe people think that there for the Grace of God go I. My health’s improved a lot since I started on my travels. I used to have all sorts of aches and pains at work, and many a time I was so tired my head would droop on the desk and I would go half to sleep. That doesn’t happen anymore. Oh, I know you caught me having a nap upstairs, but no man’s perfect. Who could resist the sight of a bed? But it was too damp and cold to be comfortable.”
“So that’s your story?” I said, after he’d kept schtum for a couple of minutes. I didn’t believe a word of his rigmarole, and knew it was going to be difficult to get the truth out of a bloke who had been provided with such a good script. It would be hard enough to get the truth out of myself if ever I wanted to, in which case how can you trust somebody to tell the truth to you? Yet not being able to trust yourself might mean you could trust yourself absolutely, since you didn’t believe — or admit to believing — that there was anything to trust in you. All I knew was that every case was different, so who better than yourself therefore to know exactly where your untrustworthiness lay? It didn’t matter whether or not you knew yourself in the end if you knew that.
So I did know that all he had told me had been written specially for him, and he’d rehearsed it over and over again, probably in front of a full-length mirror. The question was, who had put him up to it? If he was an out-of-work actor who could blame him for taking on the role? Someone I knew who was acquainted with quite a few actors used them to flesh out the more sensational parts of his documentaries, and I wanted Mr so-called Peter Crimple to come out with the name before I rammed it in one piece down his throat.
“And you,” he said hopefully, “what’s your story?”
“I don’t have one, at least not for you. Since you’re in my house it’s up to you to tell me one, and you have, but I don’t believe any of it.”
He looked into his empty tea cup, hoping I would refill it. I didn’t. “During all my married life,” he said, his tone saddened by my neglect, “I was a devil to my children, and a demon to my wife. Is that the sort of truth you want?”
“How come she sent your mugshot to the Big Issue, then?”
“She wanted me back. You always miss whatever you’ve got used to. No matter how bad things were, as time goes on it gets to seem they weren’t all that bad.”
He really had been given a good script, though I would have expected no less from Wayland Smith, or Margery Doldrum. “This cottage is part of Lord Moggerhanger’s estate,” I said, “and I’m his steward, checking up on his properties around the country. If he walked in now and assumed it was you who broke the door lock he would hold your head under the water in the stream till even the minnows had to dart away at the horrified look on your face as you were dying. In other words, he’d drown you without a thought, just for a laugh.” Dismal’s tail thumped the floor, sensing my impatience. “All I know is you’re giving me the runaround, and I like it less and less.”