Sighing, Scott passed his handkerchief across the desk and stood up. He called out to a constable in an adjacent room:
“Hey, Bob, come and look after the desk until Sergeant Healey gets in, will you? He’s due on duty in the next ten minutes or so. I’ll take the kid and see if I can find his father. If I can’t—well, I’ll bring the boy back here and the job can go through the usual channels.”
“All right, Sergeant, I’ll watch the shop,” the constable agreed as he came into the duty-room and took his place at the desk. “I’ve been listening to your conversation! Right rum ’un that,” he grinned, nodding towards the tearful boy. “What an imagination!”
Imagination, yes. And yet Scott was not quite sure. There was “something in the air,” a feeling of impending—strangeness—hard to define.
“Come on, son,” he said, shaking off his mood. “Let’s go.”
He took the boy’s hand. “Let’s see if we can find your dad. He’s probably rushing about right now wondering what’s become of you.” He shook his head in feigned defeat and said: “I don’t know—ten o’clock at night, just going off duty—and you have to walk in on me!”
“Ten o’clock—already?” The boy looked up into Scott’s face with eyes wider and more frightened than ever. “Then we only have half an hour!
“Eh?” the policeman frowned again as they passed out into the Lon-don street (or was it “Mondon,” Scott wondered with a mental grin). “Half an hour? What happens at half past ten, son? Do you turn into a pumpkin or something?” His humor was lost on his small charge.
“I mean the lights!” the boy answered, in what Scott took to be exasperation. “That’s when the lights go out. At half past ten they put the lights out.”
“They do?” the sergeant had given up trying to penetrate the boy’s fertile but decidedly warped imagination. “Why’s that, I wonder?” (Let the kid ramble on; it was better than tears at any rate.)
“Don’t you know anything? the youngster seemed half-astonished, half-unbelieving, almost as if he thought Scott was pulling his leg.
“No,” the sergeant returned, “I’m just a stupid copper! But come on—where did you give your father the slip? You said you passed Woolworths getting to the police station. Well, Woolworths is down this way, near the tube.” He looked at the boy sharply in mistaken understanding. “You didn’t get lost on the tube, did you? Lots of kids do when it’s busy.”
“The Tube?” Scott sensed that the youngster spoke the words in capitals—and yet it was only a whisper. He had to hold on tight as the boy strained away from him in something akin to horror. “No one goes down in the Tube anymore, except—” He shuddered.
“Yes?” Scott pressed, interested in this particular part of the boy’s fantasy despite himself and the need, now, to have done with what would normally be a routine job. “Except who?”
“Not who,” the boy told him, clutching his hand tighter. “Not who, but—”
“But?” again, patiently, Scott prompted him.
“Not who but what.”
“Well, go on,” said the sergeant, sighing, leading the way down the quiet, half-deserted street towards Woolworths. “What, er, goes down in the tube?”
“Why, Tubers, of course!” Again there was astonishment in the youngster’s voice, amazement at Scott’s obvious deficiency in general knowledge. “Aren’t you Mondoners thick!” It was a statement of fact, not a question.
“Right,” said Scott, not bothering to pursue the matter further, seeing the pointlessness of questioning an idiot. “We’ve passed Woolworths—now where?”
“Over there, I think, down that street. Yes!—that’s where I lost my father—down there!”
“Come on,” Scott said, leading the boy across the road, empty now of all but the occasional car, down into the entrance of the indicated street. In fact it was little more than an alley, dirty and unlighted. “What on earth were you doing down here in the first place?”
“We weren’t down here,” the youngster answered with a logic that made the sergeant’s head spin. “We were in a bright street, with lots of lights. Then I felt a funny buzzing feeling, and…and then I was here! I got frightened and ran.”
At that moment, their footsteps echoing hollowly on the cobbles of the alley, the sergeant felt a weird vibration that began in his feet and traveled up his body to his head, causing a burst of bright, painfully bilious stars to flash across his vision—and simultaneous with this peculiar sensation the two turned a corner to emerge with startling abruptness into a much brighter side street.
“That was the buzzing I told you about,” the boy stated unnecessarily.
Scott was not listening. He was looking behind him for the broken electric cable he felt sure must be lying there just inside the alley (the sensation must surely have been caused by a mild electric shock), but he couldn’t see one. Nor could he see anything else that might have explained that tingling, nerve-rasping sensation he had known. For that matter, where was the entrance (or exit) from which he and the boy had just this second emerged?
Where was the alley?
“Dad!” the kid yelled, suddenly tugging himself free to go racing off down the street.
Scott stood and watched, his head starting to throb and the street lights flaring garishly before his eyes. At the boy’s cry a lone man had turned, started to run, and now Scott saw him sweep the lad up in his arms and wildly hug him, intense and obvious relief showing in his face.
The policeman forgot the problem of the vanishing alley and walked up to them, hands behind his back in the approved fashion, smiling benignly. “Cute lad you’ve got there, sir—but I should curb his imagi-nation if I were you. Why, he’s been telling me a story fit to—”
Then the benign smile slid from his face. “Here!” he cried, his jaw dropping in astonishment.
But despite his exclamation, Scott was nevertheless left standing on his own. For without a word of thanks both man and boy had made off down the street, hands linked, running as if the devil himself was after them!
“Here!” the policeman called again, louder. “Hold on a bit—”
For a moment the pair stopped and turned, then the man glanced at his watch (reminding Scott curiously of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland) before picking up the boy again and holding him close. “Get off the street!” he yelled back at Scott as he once more started to run. “Get off the streets, man.” His white face glanced back and up at the street lights as he ran, and Scott saw absolute fear shining in his eyes. “It’ll soon be half past ten!”
The policeman was still in the same position, his jaw hanging slack, some seconds later when the figure of the unknown man, again hugging the boy to him, vanished round a distant corner. Then he shrugged his shoulders and tried to pull himself together, setting his helmet more firmly on his aching head.
“Well I’ll be—” He grinned nervously through the throb of his head-ache. “Snarker’s son, indeed!”
Alone, now, Scott’s feeling of impending—something—returned, and he noticed suddenly just how deserted the street was. He had never known London so quiet before. Why, there wasn’t a single soul in sight!
And a funny thing, but here he was, only a stone’s throw from his station, where he’d worked for the last fifteen years of his life, and yet—damned if he could recognize the street! Well, he knew he’d brought the boy down a dark, cobbled alley from the right, and so….