The Stone That Never Came Down (11 page)

XIII

“So who exactly is this helpful friend I’m taking you to see?” Kneller demanded as he inched his car through the dense traffic of the West End. The New Year’s bargain-sales were under way and the streets were crowded with both vehicles and pedestrians, but the stores themselves were nearly empty; most people were simply gazing with awful envy at the window-displays. It was a grey, cold evening, though not actually snowing or raining at the moment.

“Habib Nasir,” Hector said, and checked his watch. “If I’d known it was going to take so long I wouldn’t have asked you to call on him with me … He’s not exactly a friend. He married a girl I was in medical school with, called Eileen. And he works for the Epidemic Early Warning Unit.”

“The people who run a computer watch on notifiable diseases, try and catch an outbreak before it spreads?”

“That’s them. Except they don’t only monitor diseases, they keep their eye on all aspects of hospital practise, including drug abuse. They’re overworked and understaffed, but they’re always willing to help out a GP like myself, and if people do start falling asleep for two or three days after receiving a transfusion it may very well show up on their graphs.”

“How did you account for your inquiry?”

“I sort of gave the impression that I’m on to a new variety of narcolepsy, and want to write a paper about it.”

“Neat,” Kneller approved. And then, abruptly: “Oh, hell! Godheads!”

Horrified, Hector hunched close to the windscreen. Half the street-lamps were out–an economy measure imposed by the Electricity Generating Board owing to its inability to meet demand this winter–but the shops, of course, were all brightly lit as part of the government’s desperate attempts to counteract the slump by stimulating consumer purchases, so he could clearly see the group of young people, well and warmly clad, working their way along the line of stationary cars in teams of three and demanding alms.

A girl came banging on the window at Hector’s side. He scowled and ignored her. Promptly her companions, both burly young men, took station at the car’s nose and poised their big plastic crosses hammer-fashion.

“Pay up or they’ll smash your headlights!” the girl cried.

Providentially, though, a police-car appeared from the opposite direction, siren howling and light flashing, and drew to a halt only twenty yards ahead. As men in uniform piled out of it, the godheads made off with expressions of disgust.

“Amazing,” Kneller said. “I didn’t know godheads had any reason to avoid the police.”

“You wouldn’t think so, would you?” Hector agreed sourly. “Not when quoting the Bible in the dock seems to get you off any charge short of murder. You know the bunch who set fire to that Hindu temple were only given a year’s probation?”

“No, I haven’t seen the news this evening.” Kneller was peering ahead. “What
are
those policemen up to?”

“Oh! Then you haven’t heard what Dalessandro’s done?”

“No, what?” Absently. Then: “Lord, they’re putting a barrier across the road! Diversion signs, too!”

“He’s called for everybody who wants a Government of National Unity to stay away from work on Monday. He claims he can shut down the country–factories, offices, railways, docks, the lot.”

“Remind me not to be in Italy on Monday, then,” Kneller said dryly, and wound down his window as one of the policemen approached. “Constable, what’s going on?”

“Bomb-scare in Whitehall, sir. Phone-call from someone who claims he’s planting bombs on behalf of those bloody strikers in Glasgow. Probably a hoax, but it’s best not to take chances, isn’t it?”

He moved on.

“What the hell are they trying to do to us?” Kneller said after a pause.

“Who–the government, or the terrorists?”

“The government!” Kneller snapped. “If they weren’t such incompetent idiots, there wouldn’t be any terrorists! I mean –well, look at this street right here! Hordes of people who can’t afford to buy anything! Two million out of work! Advertisements all over the place saying
buy, buy!
Power-cuts literally every evening! I mean they must have known there was bound to be another cold snap sooner or later, and every winter I can remember when there was more than a week of snow it’s been the same–‘We weren’t prepared to meet the load!’ ”

Hector nodded. “I know exactly what you mean.”

“And because people don’t trust them, seeing how incompetent they are, how incapable of providing a decent life for everybody in this, which is one of the richest countries on earth, what do they do? They try and
force
people to behave the way they want! At the point of a gun!”

“I was born in Glasgow,” Hector said. “When I heard they were sending the Army in, I felt sick. Literally. You’d think that after Belfast … But not a bit of it. They won’t stop until Glasgow is a heap of rubble, too.”

“I’ve been to Belfast,” Kneller said. “Street after street of ruins. Beggars by the hundred. But the children are the worst. The orphans. Not only ragged, not only half-starved, but insane.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Hector said sombrely. “Those who could get out, did, and quite a lot of their families have settled in my clinic’s catchment area. They bring their kids to me and complain about them screaming in the night–and a lot of them have bruises to show how they tried to shut them up–and expect me to drug them into docility. Undo the effect of years of terror with a single pill! And you’re absolutely right about not providing a decent life for the citizens of this rich country. It’s bad enough having to fight every inch of the way for adequate medical facilities, having to justify every drug you prescribe to some hidebound bureaucrat, but what I find worst is having to treat people who could be cured in a week if they could afford to eat a balanced diet. You know I’ve had scurvy cases this winter?”

“Maybe I’m wrong, then,” Kneller said. “Maybe they aren’t relying exclusively on guns. Maybe they’re intending to starve the public into submission.”

“Maurice said something like that,” Hector muttered. “The last time I saw him. And not only to me, either. To Malcolm Fry as well, apparently.”

“And to me,” Kneller grunted. “Weeks ago. At the time I thought he was just suffering one of his regular fits of the blues, and I didn’t pay too much attention. But the more I think about the missed chances we’ve had, the more I look at the mess we’re in, the more inclined I am to believe even his most extreme charges.”

The traffic was moving again, by fits and starts. Without warning, on catching sight of an intersection ahead, he swung to the left and signalled a turn.

“Are you sure–?” Hector began.

“That I’m going the right way? Not to worry! I just realised: if the bomb-scare is in Whitehall, the only alternative routes open for traffic will be streets we’d pass along if we continued straight ahead. If I go this way, we can cut across them at junctions where there are traffic-lights. We ought to save–hmm!–about eighteen or nineteen minutes.”

“You must know London as well as a taxi-driver,” Hectoff said. “I have no sense of direction to speak of.”

Kneller looked briefly surprised. “Nor do I, really! But … well, this just seems like an obvious idea. I hope I’m right. Ah–you were talking about Malcolm a moment ago. I presume he was still all right when you saw him today?”

“Oh, he’s perfectly fit. No doubt of it. I did something new this morning, though, which I was going to tell you about. Remember I sent to MENSA for one of their Cattell Three tests and gave it to him the other day?”

“Yes, you told me.”

“Well, he didn’t score any higher on that than you’d have expected–he says he was rated 135 when he was at school, about what you might guess, I think, and MENSA scored his paper at 139, which is too close to be significant. But–well, do you know the Christmas general-knowledge test they always reprint in the
Guardian?
”

“The one from King William School that’s supposed to occupy the boys for the whole of their four-week holiday?”

“That’s right. The answers won’t be published for at least another fortnight. So I gave it to him. He does read the
Guardian
himself, but he swears he hasn’t researched the quiz because he’s been far too busy. I believe him.”

Hector licked his lips. “Well, he answered ninety-seven of the questions. The other three he left blank. Said he didn’t know and wouldn’t pretend.”

“And–?”

“And during my lunch-break I made a random check of a dozen of his answers. Phoned a librarian I know. All correct, according to the
Encylopaedia Britannica.
”

“So he’s probably telling the truth about what VC has done to his memory.”

“Yes. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. Those question-papers are deliberately made so hard that nobody without eidetic recall can cope–and at that you’d have to be extremely widely read. I think we can take it for granted that Malcolm Fry does now have total recall.”

“And seems physically fit,” Kneller muttered. “Well, if there are no untoward side-effects … You were going to try and talk to his girl-friend, and this lodger who helped to nurse him over Christmas.”

“I’ve seen them both, yes. Billy Cohen isn’t much help–he only met Malcolm five months ago when he answered an advertisement for a room to let and Malcolm doesn’t socialise very much with his lodgers. Small wonder, because apart from Billy they sound like a terribly dreary bunch. And frankly Ruth can’t tell me much more than Billy, because she met him even more recently, at a party about three months ago. She has given a couple of important hints, though.”

“Such as?”

“Well, she let it fall that he’s become a spectacularly good lover, almost overnight. In fact she’s decided to move in with him and disregard the scandal and the complaints of the neighbours. She says she can’t imagine ever meeting another man who would turn her on so well.”

Braking for yet another stop-light-but they were making good progress on the roundabout route he had switched to–Kneller said, “That sounds like a real boon! Lord, when I was in my mid-thirties, I thought the millennium had arrived, you know. I had … Well, I had a rather repressed upbringing. It wasn’t that my parents wanted me to be inhibited; rather, it was that to find out how to make me uninhibited they had to go and look up a book! Twenty years ago, fifteen, I was really getting excited about the relaxed and casual attitudes of my students. I thought maybe we were going to digest this conflict between the Christian injunction to get married and stay married, and the simple fact that nowadays we live so much longer it’s a miracle if you can settle for a single partner, so– Sorry! It’s a hobbyhorse of mine, that. I didn’t mean to go off at a tangent.”

“The only other point I was going to make,” Hector said, “was that apparently Malcolm has had a couple of bouts of extreme depression. But this may well have no connection with VC. Wouldn’t you expect someone to be depressed in his position? You know his wife packed the kids in the car because he’d been six months out of work, and drove off, and now she’s found someone else and wants to prevent him seeing his own children ever again? With or without VC, that plus the state of the world could easily explain his depression.”

“Agreed,” Kneller said with a grimace.

“So on balance I’m very optimistic about VC,” Hector concluded.

“I’d like to be. I have reservations, though. There are people I’ve run across in the Civil Service, the armed forces, commerce, even the academic world, who would cheerfully exploit the stuff for the purpose we mentioned the other evening: creating an élite and a subcaste. I’m not joking, you know … Well, here’s the right road–and by a miracle there’s a parking-space right outside the place we’re going to!”

Hector said in surprise, “But that’s where Habib always parks!”

“Damn! Is it? I hope he hasn’t got sick of waiting!”

The door of the apartment opened cautiously on a security-chain and a tremulous voice said, “What do you want?”

“Eileen! It’s me–Hector!”

“Oh, thank goodness! Come in!” Eileen, a pretty blonde looking very tired and miserable, released the chain. “I’m sorry, Habib isn’t here. I gather he found exactly what you wanted, and he’s left you a note. But he had to go out when they told us about the bombing.”

“You mean it actually went off?” Hector demanded. “No wonder we were diverted! That’s why we’re late.”

Locking the door again, Eileen stared at him. “But Regent’s Park is nowhere near your route, surely!”

“I think we must be talking about two different bombs,” Hector said slowly. “Why Regent’s Park?”

“Because they blew up the Islamic Cultural Centre, that’s why! Habib isn’t exactly devout, but when something like this happens … They think it was godhead work. At any rate there were bloody great crosses painted all over everywhere.”

She hesitated. “Look, forgive me, but I’m just going to hand over the note Habib left and turn you out again. I can’t stand company tonight. I want to sit by myself and–and cry my eyes out! It’s terrifying! The world feels as though we’re on a roller-coaster ride to Armageddon!”

Back in the car Kneller said, “That about sums up my own view.”

“And mine,” Hector said, examining the sheet of paper–a computer print-out–which Eileen had given him. “Hmm! How-interesting! I recognise one of these names.”

“Which one? And how many are there?”

“Five. I can’t place Bott or Bradshaw or Crawford or Jarman-Sawyer, but ‘Dennis Horace Stevens’ sounds like the first soldier to get hurt in the Glasgow riots–the one who caused a scandal when he appeared on TV and told the world what he thinks of the army.”

“I’m not with you,” Kneller said after a pause.

“Likely not. I didn’t see it in the London papers. But my sister was watching, and wrote to me about it. To top it off he’s vanished from Rathcanar Hospital. Walked out with heaven knows how many stitches in him. I wonder how the poor devil’s feeling–if he’s alive!”

Kneller took and scanned the list. “I think I recognise another of these names,” he said.

“Which of them?”

“Didn’t you know that Brother Bradshaw is the same as Bob Bradshaw, who used to star in the TV series
Gunslinger?
”