Stanley and the Women (30 page)

The
flick-knife right enough. I looked at it and kept my mouth shut.

‘Did
you know your son was in the habit of taking this kind of weapon round with him?’

‘No,’ I
said, thanking God for the form of the question.

‘I see,
sir. Now you do know, it might be sensible to discourage him from carrying one
in future. For one thing, as you’re no doubt aware, such weapons are illegal.
They may not be offered for sale, bought, possessed, borne on the person,
anything. You and he have Major Fuad to thank for asking us to overlook the
offence. Perhaps you’d like to dispose of this.’ He handed the thing to me and
stood up. ‘I have some further questions which I’ll put to you in another
place. Thank you, Major Fuad. We’re all grateful to you for your restraint in
not taking the matter further. And now we won’t keep you.’

I did
my best, not a very good best, to imitate a man being grateful, got in return a
glare of hostility with nothing imitation about it, and left the room with the
others.

Outside
in the hall, the Superintendent said to Steve, ‘Are you all right, sonny? Do
you want a doctor?’

‘No, I’m
all right.’

‘You
sure, now? You didn’t get any nasty kicks? What do you say, Mr Duke? Do you
think your son should see a doctor?’

‘I
reckon we can leave it for the moment.’

‘Okay,
fine. There aren’t any further questions actually, sir, but there is a little
more to be said, later, when we’ve run you home. I’ll just have a word with the
PC a minute.’

I
squeezed Steve’s arm and muttered that he had had a rough time and he nodded
and looked at the floor with his mouth open. It occurred to me to wonder what
he had told those Arabs. About Joshua and the rest of them milling around Hampstead?
No wonder they had asked him to name his informants. What was he thinking now?
About which embassy to try next, possibly, or something as far out as the rim
of the galaxy, where Jews in phylacteries and Star of David tee-shirts sat in
intersystem ships tuning their hyperspatial receptors to his brain currents.
The cleverest thing I could think of to say to him was not to worry and we
would look after him.

When we
got to the house Superintendent Fairchild sent his driver to the pub and made a
phone-call in the kitchen. Susan was terrified at the sight of the police
uniform, but I soon calmed her down and told her what had happened. I called
the hospital and spoke to Dr Gandhi. Should I bring Steve in for the night?
Unnecessary since he appeared calm — but bring him all the way in the morning. Agreed.
Steve side-stepped me when I went to comfort him, asked for and was given
aspirins and slouched off to his room without another word.

‘I owe
you an apology for that ragtime carry-on down the road,’ said Fairchild when
the three of us settled in the sitting room with our drinks. ‘But there was no
help for it. Now I expect you’d like to know what really happened down there,
wouldn’t you? Right.’

He was
facing me directly. ‘All okay up till the point where your lad starts giving
them funny answers to their questions. So he’s a joker or a nutter or an
unbelievably useless would-be infiltrator, but anyway he’s not what he says he
is. So they set about working him over out of habit, till one of them remembers
they’re not supposed to do that, even if this is the Jabali … Embassy. Then
they call in the PC and say it was the boy that went for them in the first
place, and there we are. How do I know? There wasn’t a mark on either of the
two I saw, Captain Abdullah or whatever he calls himself and some goon. And
that knife, it was closed-up in his pocket when the PC searched him. They hadn’t
even done
that,
would you believe it. You’d have thought at least …
I don’t know.’ The Superintendent shook his head and sighed in professional
vexation. ‘Oh no, I know those fellows of old.

‘Because
— I’m not an ordinary copper, I belong to a special corps that does all the
security on the embassies and what-not. Now, you see, Mr Duke, my standing
orders say that whenever possible I must promote cordial relations between
their side and our side. Cordial relations. What that means in this instance,
there’s that Fuad knowing full well his side have made a bit of rubbish, an
error, and the thing these blokes can’t stand is losing face, right? So we all
pretend he’s the one with the grievance, and we have you down to be given a
going-over on behalf of your son, because he’s too young and helpless to be
worth a going-over, you know, to get any real satisfaction out of it. And you
heard me being grateful to him, Fuad that is, for not pressing charges when he
knew I knew what I knew. So now he’s won that one we’ll have cordial relations
for a bit. Meaning instead of him being unbearable on purpose he’ll give us a
dose of being unbearable not on purpose.

‘Oh, it’s
a funny old job sometimes. You’d hardly credit it — I have to get into this
clobber every time I put my nose inside the door, else they go on about not
showing proper respect. Nothing wrong with Fuad going round in his fancy suits,
of course. It’s all right when they do it, you see.’

‘But he
can’t think he’s really won,’ I said.

‘Not a
bit of it, Mr Duke, not a bit of it. As I say, he knows full well. But he
seems
to have won, everybody goes on as if he has, and that’s all that worries
him. These fellows, they’re like,’ he glanced at Susan and away, ‘like
children, really, aren’t they? Just big talk,’ he wound up vaguely.

Susan
was sitting with her legs under her on the grey settee. Now she straightened
her back and said quite fiercely, ‘I don’t see why that pair of bastards should
be allowed to just get clean away with roughing up poor Steve.’

The
Superintendent reacted unfavourably to the swear-word, though I could not have
said what he physically did. But he politely turned in his seat towards Susan,
giving her his full attention for almost the first time since they had met. ‘Oh,
they won’t, Mrs Duke, far from it,’ he said decisively. ‘Our friend Fuad will
see to that. I must say I’d quite like to know what he’s got lined up for them,
just out of curiosity. No, I understand your concern for your son, but I can —’Stepson.’

‘I’m
sorry, I just assumed. Oh yes, those two’ll be taken care of all right. Thank
you, just a drop if I may, I really must be going.’

Saying
something about putting the meat in, Susan took herself off — we were having a
couple of neighbours in that evening. Fairchild conscientiously looked round
the room, nodding to himself once or twice.

‘Are
you a writer, Mr Duke?’

‘Not
really, Superintendent. My wife is. I’m in advertising myself.’

‘M’m.’
His face seemed to go slightly gloomier. Then, making it as clear as daylight
before he spoke what was coming up, he said, ‘Your boy, I take it he is, er…’

‘Yes,
he’s disturbed. He goes to a day clinic at a psychiatric hospital. They say he’s
improving.’

‘I
thought it was that pretty well straight away. At first I thought glue-sniffing
or one of those, but then I thought no no. You get to recognize it. You know,
if those fellows down the road were any good, they’d have got on to it and just
turfed him out before he could start making a nuisance of himself. They’ll
never learn, I’m afraid.’ He paused and hung out another sign. ‘That knife of
his, now. You’d seen it before, hadn’t you?’

‘Yes,
but I didn’t know he was taking it around with him. I or rather my wife had
just come across it in his drawer.’

‘And
you left it there? What a silly way to behave, even for someone who didn’t know
that weapons of that sort are illegal. I mean as I say, I’m quite satisfied in
my own mind that this afternoon that knife never left his pocket, but nobody
with any gumption would bet on a thing like that in advance, surely to God.’

‘I see
that now, but the hospital people were on at me not to let him feel —’

‘Misprize
common sense at your peril is my motto. Well, it’s not my place to go on about
this, especially when I’m drinking your excellent whisky. Which I must now very
reluctantly tear myself away from.’ He got to his feet, drained his glass and
gave me a look. ‘Bury that nail-file good and deep, eh?’

I
followed him to the front door. He put on his uniform cap, making himself look
quite grimly official, and seemed to be thinking something out. Finally he
said,

‘You
know, Mr Duke, from a personal point of view, speaking just for myself you
understand, the Major Fuads of this world have got one thing to be said not
for
them at all, just
about
them. They do seem to have got the women
problem sorted out nice and neat. Whether you like it or not. Well, here I go.
Thank you for your hospitality. Say good night to Mrs Duke for me if you would.
And good night to you, sir.

He
hesitated for a moment, then turned away. While I strolled back upstairs to get
my drink that last mention of Major Fuad got it across to me who he had
reminded me of. I winced and groaned to myself and felt bad, all in vain — it
was Nowell, no question, not just the tune being more important than the words
and the no nonsense about forbearance towards a helpless victim, but also the
sort of substitutional effect, saying A and meaning X, or rather talking about
A but
really
talking about X, and not caring who knew it — especially
that. At the same time I realized I had started to wonder whether I ought to
ring her and tell her about the dust-up at the embassy. Not now, that was for
sure — perhaps in the morning, from the office.

‘What a
horrible bugger, that policeman,’ said Susan when I joined her in the kitchen.

‘Is he,
was he? What was wrong with him?’

‘Oh,
the ghastly bloody complacent way he could see through everyone and
know
exactly
what happened out of his vast experience.’

She was
being pretty definite about it, but I held on a bit longer. ‘Well, with a bloke
like that, I should imagine experience would be quite a reliable guide.’

‘And
the way he sneered at me for being your second wife. Fucking cheek. Who the
hell cares what
he
thinks?’

I had
been looking fairly closely at the Superintendent at that stage in the
conversation, and I had seen nothing but a passing embarrassment. Still, it was
probably not an interesting enough point to be worth a mention, so I made a
semi-agreeing noise instead.

‘Incidentally,’
she said with a look that failed miserably to convince me that what she was
going to say would be incidental, ‘it wasn’t such a good idea to let him have
his knife back, was it?’

‘No, it
wasn’t. Your friend the Superintendent said the same sort of thing. I just didn’t
think of him going and doing a thing like that. Good job he didn’t actually
do
anything.’

‘According
to that cop.’

‘Well,
yes.’

She
came over and put her cheek against mine. ‘Bit frightening, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. And
awful. Let’s have another drink.’

The next morning Steve was
nowhere to be found. His bed had been slept in, in fact I had seen him sleeping
in it when I looked in last thing. He had evidently made himself a cup of
coffee. We reckoned or hoped he had gone out to buy cigarettes, though five to
eight seemed a bit early for that, and there was rain about and he had not
taken the mack I had lent him, but none of that counted for much. If buying
cigarettes was all he was up to he would be back by 8.20 at the latest. 8.20
came and went. I could think of nothing to do but get on with shaving and
dressing.

Half a
dozen decent-sized trees stood in a line in the bit of garden at the side of
the house, elms that had somehow escaped disease. As I shaved, the mirror in
front of me reflected a view through the window of the upper parts of two of
these elms. I was working my way round my moustache when I caught a movement in
one of the two. As soon as I went over and looked I saw Steve standing on a
branch next to the trunk about thirty feet from the ground. He was holding on
to and also leaning on another branch in a position that was probably quite
comfortable for the moment. I tapped on the window and after an eerie interval
he turned his head and caught my eye. The light was poor but good enough to
show me that he was very pale. I collected Susan and we rushed out and round.

It was
not actually raining all that hard just then, but there was a lot more to come in
the sky and a gusty wind was blowing. In just his shirt and jacket and trousers
Steve was going to be wet through before very long and thoroughly chilled,
unless he already was after however long he had been up there. Some rooks or
crows were flying about near the tree-tops and cawing a good deal, perhaps
because of him. He watched us approaching as though it was barely worth his
while. When I asked him what he was doing he took no notice, in fact he looked
away and seemed to stare into the next garden or the one further, where there
might have been something interesting going on for all I knew. His hair clung
to his head with the wet.

I
decided it would be impossible to climb the tree to a height where I could hope
to get through by talking to him face to face, and pointless to go up to any
lower level. So I stayed where I was and said all the things you would say in
the situation, or as many as I could think of, and no doubt some more than
once. Susan went in and fetched the mack he had left behind, and then I did do
a climb and managed to loop the thing over the branch he was standing on. He
ignored it. A little after that he pulled himself forward and I thought for a
moment he was coming down, but he was going up, up to the next tier, so to
speak. I stepped back for a better view, remembering rather late in the day
that he had been given to this sport as a young boy and had once, on holiday in
Wales, climbed some horrible height like seventy feet to get to a bird’s nest,
not to take the eggs, just look at them. Now I saw him find a fork and another
bit that between them made a kind of seat where he had no need to hang on to
anything.