‘So here we all are,’ said Ian once Doug had departed. ‘All together at last.’ He pulled up a tiny chair for himself and sitting down went on, ‘I'd like to take this opportunity, Dr Gyggle — if indeed that is your real name — to thank you for all the wonderful help you've given me over the years. I don't know what I would have done without you.’ Gyggle shifted uneasily on his dwarfish seat — it was so low that his bony knees were stuck right up inside the billowing end of the beard.
‘Don't get chippy, Ian, there isn't any call for it. Hieronymus Gyggle is a trusted confrère of mine and I was hardly likely to leave you unsupervised while I was away, now was I?’
‘S'pose not.’
‘“S'pose not” isn't good enough, it never is. It wasn't good enough when you were a spotty little twerp and it isn't any better now that you're a grown man. I do wish that you'd buck up a bit, Ian, and face your responsibilities. You aren't the only person in the world that matters, you know, and anyway, we aren't here to maunder on about your distinctly minor problems, we're here to talk product.’
‘Why? Why bother?’
‘Because your agency D.F. & L. Associates has been contracted to handle the marketing for my new financial product, which as you know is beset with numerous problems, not least among them this naming business. Have you managed to do anything on that yet?’
‘I've set up a naming group.’
‘Oh good, well that's all right then, you've set up a naming group, how perspicacious of you. Cretin! Fool! Booby! When did a naming group ever settle a problem like this, I ask you, you're no better than your father the Essene.’
‘Well, we came up with the name for the Painstyler in one of these groups and I've managed to get the same people along again.’
‘Harumph! Well, I admit that does sound a bit more promising — pass me that ashtray, will you, Gyggle.’ The lanky shrink handed him one of the tinfoil doilies that pass muster for ashtrays in such places and The Fat Controller stubbed out his Voltiger. The three of them sat in silence while he invented fire with his primitive lighter and then used it to light another.
‘Now, Ian,’ he resumed, thick smoke gushing from his rapacious mouth. ‘There are several tricky aspects to all of this and although I don't expect you to follow the many dizzy twists and scale the haunting crags of my reasoned plotting — genius is after all a lonely estate — I do expect you to apply yourself.
‘Firstly the matter of this young woman — what's her name, Gyggle?’
‘Jane,’ said the shrink. ‘Jane Carter.’
‘That's right. Now this Jane Carter, you can have her if that's what you want — you can even marry her for all I care. Of course, you'd be wise not to tell her about your little outrages, I don't think she'd take too kindly to them, it might put a bit of a crimp on your relationship, hmm?’
‘Little outrages? I'm not sure I follow you.’ Ian was non-plussed.
‘Well, the woman you killed with the poisoned umbrella at the Theatre Royal for a start; and then there was that other chit, what was her name? Ah yes, it's coming to me now, June. Jane and June, not very imaginative when it comes to your playmates’ nomenclature are you?’
‘I don't know what you're talking about. I never killed anybody, you killed the woman at the Theatre Royal and I never did anything to June — ’
‘You sexually assaulted her.’
‘No I didn't.’
‘Did.’
‘Didn't.’
‘Did!’
‘Gentlemen, perhaps I could assist?’ Gyggle had regained his professional composure and was speaking once again in the honeyed tones of his consulting room. ‘Ian, I do think Samuel is being a little unfair to you but I'm afraid that the substance of what he says is true. The only way I can explain this to you is to adopt a schema from somewhere else — the cinema or detective fiction, perhaps. You see, Ian, all your adult life you have been committing these little “outrages”. It has been Samuel's — and latterly my own — responsibility to cover things up, to clear up the mess. I don't mean literally, of course, although many of your activities have left quite a few stains, I mean clear up the mess in here.’ And then Gyggle made a gesture identical to the one The Fat Controller had, all those years ago. He tapped his temple with his bony finger, forcefully, as if requesting admission to his own consciousness. ‘We didn't want you to suffer the torment of your own behaviour, Ian, because you had no option. You are, I fear, chronically ill equipped in the self-control department but you do have a conscience — ’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘And that does mean that you would have found your own behaviour pretty upsetting.’
‘Wait a minute, you're saying that you two have brainwashed me in some way, is that it?’
‘Oh absolutely,’ The Fat Controller broke in, the beginnings of one of his mirth eruptions starting to rumble. ‘Ha, ha — ahahahahaha! Oh my word yes! We had to wash your brain, Ian, because it was dirty! Hahaha!’ He spewed laughter and smoke.
‘This is cheap,’ said Ian. ‘I would have expected better of you.’
This pulled the fat man up short. ‘Whassat!’ he barked. ‘You dare to impugn my behaviour in this way, as if I were some pettily corrupt bureaucrat and you an ethical ombudsman? Come, come, I have never made any secret to you of how I regard my position, I have always told you that I hold myself to be above mere human concerns. Why would you imagine that this didn't extend to enmesh you fully — even your very sense of self? Come, come, it's you who are being cheap. Anyway, all of this jawin’ is too, too fatiguin’ — we're not at a college debate. It would all be far better explained by a spot of retroscendence, eh?’
‘I don't want to retroscend,’ said Ian. ‘I don't want anything to do with your banal psychobabble and your hypnotic games. In fact, I don't want anything to do with you at all.’
The Fat Controller didn't respond in quite the way Ian expected to this monumental cheek. For the first time ever Ian saw the big man looking discomfited, a little ashamed even. ‘I don't think,’ he said softly, ‘that that's something you have an option about but perhaps it will be clear to you after the retro, hmm?’ He came over and placing Ian's neck in the iron maiden of his hand said, ‘Let us consider the history of this suit, for example, shall we? Fashionable item, isn't it, I especially admire the leather pocket-facings. I hear they're all the rage at the moment. From Barries’, isn't it, on the King's Road?’
‘It's mine.’
‘It is now but it used to belong to a man called Bob Pinner. Let me explain — ’
And then they retroscended.
Ian Wharton was lying in among the dirty bushes that skirt the easterly edge of Wormwood Scrubs. It was only nine-thirty in the morning but the late-summer day was already prematurely aged and complaining with the heat. In the direction he faced, the cracked ground humped away in a sweeping undulation towards the prison, pushing up a single nodulous copse between the defunct goalposts.
Ian lifted himself up on his elbow and, turning his head, looked out from his enclave towards the corner of the Scrubs. Here, tucked into the elbow of the road where it chicaned under the railway bridge, was a derelict house. It was there that Ian had spent the previous night.
The house had been intended for one of the park-keepers who used to work on the Scrubs. It was a solid manse, three-bedroomed, pebbledashed, with diamond-patterned mullions in the windows and green coping over the doors. The house belonged with others of its own kind in some quiet suburb. It hardly deserved its expulsion to this ragged corner of the urban veldt.
Ian had come to the house at nightfall — leading Fucker Finch's pit bull by the scruff of its thick neck. He had prised away a slab of chipboard from the front door and gone into its warm mustiness. The house was empty save for the banked-up dust of insect and rodent activity. The walls had been worked over by the artistry of decay, wallpaper falling away from wallpaper falling away from wallpaper; flock, patterned in roses, patterned in stripes. Here and there delinquents had used Magic Markers and the ends of charred sticks to describe their zig-zag graffiti.