I began cursing.
I cursed the goad of Englishness that had held me back and spurred me forward all my life.
I cursed Diana for stealing my childhood, and despising me while she did it.
I remembered all my agonising lurches for connection, the mismatches, and the return, time and again, to burning alone.
And after I had cursed the England that had made me, I cursed the Office for being its secret seminary, and Emma for luring me from my comfortable captivity.
And then I cursed Larry for shining a lamp into the cavernous emptiness of what he called my dull rectangular mind and dragging me beyond the limits of my precious self-mastery.
Above all I cursed myself.
I was suddenly desperate to sleep. The weight of my head was too great for me to carry. My legs were giving up on me. I thought of lying down on the pavement, but by good fortune a cab appeared, so instead I returned to my club, where Charlie the porter handed me a telephone message. It was from Detective Inspector Bryant, asking me to be so good as to call the following number at my earliest convenience.
* * *
No one sleeps in clubs. You smell the male sweat and cabbage, you listen to the snuffles of fellow inmates, and you remember school.
It is the night after Sixes Match, the annual festival of Winchester Football, a game so arcane that even experienced players may not know all the rules. The House has won. To be immodest, I have won, for it is Cranmer, the team captain and hero of the match, who has led the extraordinarily savage charge. Now, by tradition, the victorious six are feasting themselves in House Library while the New Boys stand on the table and regale them with songs and entertainment. Some New Boys sing badly and must have books buzzed at them to improve their voices. Others sing too well and must be cut down to size with gibes and flying bread. And one New Boy refuses to sing at all and must in the fullness of time be beaten; and that is Pettifer.
"Why didn't you sing?" I ask him later that night as he bends over the same table.
"It's against my religion. I'm a Jew."
"No you're not. Your father's in the Church."
"I've converted."
"I'll give you one chance," I say expansively. "What is the Notion for Winchester football?" It is the easiest test I can think of in the entire school vernacular, a gift.
"Jew baiting," he replies.
So I have no alternative but to beat him, when all he needed to say was Our Game.
EIGHT
THE WINDOW WAS too small to jump from, and too high to see from unless you had a yen for orange cranetips and banks of rain-soaked Bristol cloud. There were three chairs, and like the table they were bolted to the floor. A mirror was screwed to the wall. I assumed a one-way glass. The air was old, foul, and beery. A curled notice warning me of my rights trembled to the traffic five floors down.
Bryant sat one end of the table, I sat the other, Luck between us in his shirtsleeves. I wondered where his jacket was. On the floor to Luck's right lay an open briefcase in fake brown leather. In its partitions I spotted four rectangular packages of different sizes, each wrapped in black plastic and labelled. On the labels were references written with a red felt-tipped pen, such as LP Exb 27, which I took to mean Exhibit 27 in the case of Lawrence Pettifer. It was somehow natural to my attenuated state of mind that I found myself worrying less about Exhibit 27 than about the other twenty-six. And if twenty-seven, why only four of them in the briefcase?
There was no preamble. Nobody apologised for hauling me over to Bristol on a Saturday afternoon. Bryant had one elbow on the table and was resting his chin in his clenched fist like a man holding his beard. Luck fished a chipped black cassette recorder from the briefcase and dumped it on the table.
"Mind if we do this?"
Not waiting to hear whether I minded or not, he pressed the start switch, snapped his fingers three times, stopped the tape, and wound it back. So we listened to Luck's fingers snapping three times. He had acquired a shaving rash since I had last seen him, and bags under his little eyes.
"Does your friend Dr. Pettifer possess a car, Mr. Cranmer?" he demanded morosely. And beckoned at the recorder with his long head: speak to that thing, not to me.
"In London, Pettifer had a stable of cars," I replied. "They tended to be other people's."
"Whose?"
"I never asked. I was not familiar with his acquaintances.”
“How about in Bath?"
"In Bath I have no idea what arrangements he made for his transport."
I was being dull and literal. I was much older than I had been a week ago.
"When did you last see him in a car?" said Luck.
"I would be pressed to remember."
Bryant had acquired a new smile. It had something of victory in it. "Oh, we'll press you if that's what you want, Mr. Cranmer, sir. Won't we, Oliver?"
"I understood that you had called me here to identify some property," I said.
"We did," Bryant agreed.
"Well, if it's his car you're talking about, I'm afraid it's most unlikely I can help you."
"Ever see him in a green or black Toyota, model circa 1990?" Luck asked.
"I am no expert in Japanese cars."
"Mr. Cranmer-sir is no expert in anything," Bryant explained to Luck. "He don't know nuffink, Officer. You can tell by all those big foreign books he's got in his mansion."
From the briefcase Luck handed me a thumbed police manual of line drawings of cars. As I turned its pages I saw the outlines of a 1989 blue Toyota Carina with the black flashing just like the one Larry had used for his positively last Sunday appearance at Honeybrook. Luck had seen it too.
"How about this one?" he was demanding, holding down the page with his bony finger.
"I'm afraid it doesn't ring a bell."
"Meaning no?"
"Meaning I do not recall him driving such a car."
"Then why does Mr. Guppy, your local postman, recall seeing a black or green Toyota driven by someone answering to Pettifer's description entering your drive just as he was coming out of the village church on a very hot Sunday, he thinks in July?"
I was sickened that they should have questioned John Guppy. "I have no idea why he should recall or not recall any such thing. And since the entrance to my drive is not visible from the church, I am inclined to doubt whether he did."
"The Toyota passed the church heading in your direction," Luck retorted. "It disappeared out of sight below the churchyard wall and did not come out the other end. The only turning it could have taken was into your drive."
"The car could have emerged without Mr. Guppy's noticing," I replied. "It could have stopped on the verge."
While Bryant looked on, Luck again foraged in his briefcase, extracted one of the packages and from it a plastic-covered bankbook from Larry's bank in London. It was such an old friend to me I almost smiled. I must have been through hundreds of them in my time, always trying to puzzle out what had happened to Larry's money, who he had given it to, which cheques he had forgotten to pay in.
"Did Pettifer ever make you a present of any cash, by any chance?" Luck asked.
"No, Mr. Luck, Dr. Pettifer never gave me any money.”
“How about you giving him some?"
"I lent him small sums from time to time."
"How small?"
"Twenty here. Fifty there."
"You call that small, do you?"
"I'm sure it would feed a lot of starving children. It didn't keep Larry going long."
"Do you wish to change, in any shape or form, your story to the effect that you and Pettifer were never once involved in any type of business transaction?"
"It's the truth. Therefore I do not wish to change it."