I felt as the suspect must feel when the hard lights are turned on his eyes. Quinn’s face was a mere foot from my own. The flush in his cheeks was matched by the flower in his lapel. Another rose; a small blood-red one.
‘I didn’t know — ’
‘It seems to me, Prentis, you don’t know quite a lot. Think I’m making this up?’
He bent forwards, both hands in his pockets, like a cross-examining lawyer.
‘But if the widow’s evidence claimed that Z attacked his own son, it hardly seems — ’
‘Another of her fabrications — precisely to hide the fact that the son was on the father’s side. What’s true, Prentis, tell me: what really happens or what people will accept as true?’ He began to pace again. ‘In any case, even if father and son had once been enemies, it doesn’t mean that now — Stranger things happen. We know that. Don’t we?’
The old bastard.
He turned, moved back towards his desk but did not sit. I watched his limp — a slight drag of the right foot, a lean forward with the shoulder. Crippled body: warped mind? Each of his little probing questions was delivered in an odd, contorted way, as if aimed simultaneously to provoke and deter.
‘But — with respect, sir — I don’t see why this is an official inquiry. The interests of Z’s son aren’t an official matter. They don’t concern us.’
‘Oh you think that, do you? Don’t you think that’s a rather easy distinction, Prentis — the personal, the official? We upset people’s private lives with our inquiries and then we have the gall to say that private matters don’t concern us — not official business. Our investigations caused all the stir, they created the mess — don’t you think we should clear it up?’
‘I — er — I’m confused.’
‘You’re confused. You’re confused!’
He gave me a merciless look. ‘You’re confused. You don’t know what to think?’
Then a strange thing happened. Standing by his desk, he made a delicate, sweeping, almost magician-like gesture with his hand, as if smoothing out some imaginary rough surface. His face changed, relaxed and put on that old mask of benevolence (or had the mask just been dropped?). I thought: this is madness too. Like the inmates in Dad’s hospitaclass="underline" one day they smile and babble affectionately, the next day they glare at you with eyes of steel.
And suddenly I remembered very clearly the face of Mr Forster (hands delving in the bright green cage): a subtle gaze; sly mouth; that strawberry mark above the lip: the face of someone who knows what you don’t.
‘Well, Prentis.’ Quinn pulled back his leather chair. ‘Shall we shelve the matter then, you and I? Go no further? Leave well alone? You know what it’s like in my job.’ He raised both hands, palms upwards. ‘You have to carry the can for ordering investigations, for giving information, which might have God knows what consequences.’
I thought: this is it. All this is a fantastic preamble to the subject of my promotion.
He lowered himself into the chair. As he sat down his air of good intention, familiarity increased. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and forehead. A gesture of simple tiredness — or of final, candid concession? Quinn is cracking; he isn’t in command at all. He is going to tell everything, confess everything, to treat me (‘You and I’) as an equal. It may sound odd, but I had the feeling a child has when it knows its parents are happy and everything in the household is harmonious and secure. From along the corridor came the patter of typewriters; the ring of phones; outside, the cherry tree swayed. Quinn rubbed his brow, head lowered, so that I faced the bald, pink part of his scalp. So unprotected. Martin’s head under my cricket bat. For the first time I thought of Quinn outside the office, as a private person. At home he would wear cardigans, take in the milk in his dressing-gown. But all this — don’t think I had entirely lost my guard — was tempered by the fear that at any moment he might say something to make that icy feeling return. An idea was forming in my mind that I was half afraid Quinn could somehow see. The strange pertinency of his questions, and the C9 case. What did he know about me? About Dad, Marian and the boys. All this talk of investigation. Supposing Quinn were investigating me?
He raised his head, replaced his glasses and spread his hands on the desk. Now –
But he did not speak of my promotion. Every line in my face must have shown him that I was hoping he would do so.
‘So we drop it then? Let it lie?’
He pushed his head forward and peered hard at me. Grey-blue, alert eyes, like Martin’s. What did he want me to say? The eyes flickered, behind the lenses of his glasses, as if some crucial issue rested on my answer; as if some conflict in Quinn’s own conscience hung upon it.
I gave the coward’s response.
‘I really don’t know, sir. Is this such a special case?’
‘Every one of our cases is special for someone, Prentis.’
He looked me up and down. An officer assessing some picked man.
‘To get back to my original point, Prentis. About the past histories of X and Z — and Z’s son, if it comes to it. I take it that you did look at what there was on that?’
‘I’m afraid — there wasn’t anything, sir.’
‘Wasn’t anything? But you looked at file E?’
‘File E, sir?’
‘File E.’
I tried to meet his eyes. ‘File E wasn’t on the shelves, sir.’
‘Oh, not on the shelves? Is that so? Is that so, Prentis?’
There was a long pause — long enough for a challenge, or an explanation. And suddenly the mask — the face — was gone.
‘Right, that will be all, Prentis.’
He picked up a pile of papers on his desk, shuffled them, put them to one side, picked up another pile and, with the air of some tireless robot, began working through them, as if I were no longer in the room.
‘Well, what are you waiting for man?’
I must act soon.
[14]
It is almost the end of May. The weather is getting hotter. In the Tube at rush-hours people are getting restless. I can tell by their quick eyes, by the way they barely tolerate each other’s sticky, jostling bodies, each other’s need to occupy space of their own. Something must happen soon. All this packing together of nature into unnatural circumstances must lead to something.
Two or three times, when I’ve emerged at Clapham South onto the pavement, I’ve had this urge to take off my tie, my socks and shoes — to go no further — and simply to walk away; as if Clapham Common were some endless, enveloping savannah. But, of course, I don’t. I turn to my left, along Nightingale Lane, and shamble home, like any man returning from work, clad in his weariness, his perplexities, his frustrations. If you were to pass me by, it would not surprise me if you noticed my brows contract tightly every so often (I have inherited from Dad that intermittent little knot of lines above the nose and between the eyebrows, though in my case it makes me look simply harassed, not nobly thoughtful) and my lips move and mutter indistinct, garbled words. They say if you want to see a man as he really is, catch him unawares, when he isn’t thinking of being seen. Well, that’s the time to catch me. When I’m not under the eye of Quinn or of my family — and I’m free from the scrutiny of the Tube. That’s when I am what I am, I don’t deny it. But recently I’ve been keeping a check on myself, even during these permissive moments. I’ve been developing an eager, erect carriage as I step homeward, a brisk, confident pace (in this heat) and imitating the zeal of some of my fellow commuters. For not all of them drift home like zombies capable of walking under a bus without noticing it. Some of them launch themselves from the station with an energy unsapped by the rigours of the day, shirt collars seemingly undirtied, briefcases and papers jauntily gripped, and sail buoyantly along the pavement, eager to embrace wives, dandle children and nurture gardens; and whether they are acting or not I don’t know. But I’ve been induced to ape them in a quite fraudulent manner myself.