Talking to Strange Men Read online

  He turned down a street that would bring him out at the Shot Tower. Before he reached the end of it he could see the thick-set concrete shape of Alexandra, the bridge lying low on the water (for no vessels of any size came up higher than Rostock), the incised lines and parabolas on its sides painted in a red and green which the lights bleached of colour. If someone were following him – and it would have to be a very clever, almost invisible, someone – this person would hardly dare cross the bridge. He would know where Mungo was bound for.

  In the middle of the bridge he was very vulnerable, very alone. There were cars but only one other pedestrian, someone he didn’t recognize but young and of the male sex. This person was walking towards him on the pavement, on the parapet side. He wasn’t wearing black oilskin and he was coming from the wrong direction anyway. Even one of Stern’s Stars – a Moscow Centre pun from the Utting German Department – couldn’t be in two places at once.

  They passed one another with studied indifference. At least, Mungo’s was studied. He lifted his eyes from an apparent scrutiny of the river’s rippling surface and looked across to the western bank and the tower on the CitWest insurance building. Green digits on its crest told him the time was six-fifty-nine, the temperature six degrees Celsius. And then the cathedral clock, the clock that from here was invisible, hidden on the north face of the apse, began striking the hour. It was always fractionally fast. The mist which the rain had become gave to the grave and majestic cathedral an other-worldly look as if it floated the way a palace might do in a dream, its twin spires and saint-laden east front no longer anchored to the earth but soaring to heaven.

  The road came off the bridge under the cathedral wall. Mungo felt the vibration from the clock’s notes thrill through his whole body. Up above him gargoyle faces in decaying stone grinned or grimaced or made rictus mouths of agony. They seemed to emerge from the mist, these faces, as if attached to bodies, as if belonging to medieval people who moved to peer at passers-by over a high stone wall. Mungo shook himself. Stop seeing visions, he said, there’s nothing there, there never was anything, and coming out into the square with its trees, thought, I’ll run the last bit, I could do with a good run.

  2

  THE SUDDEN COLD caused John Creevey to pull up the zip on his jacket. It was not of black plastic, this jacket, but very dark blue leather, and a light skin of rain made it glisten. It had belonged to his wife and would once have been too small for John, but lately he had lost a lot of weight and his shoulders were in any case narrow. He wore the jacket because she had worn it, because it was one of the few really personal things of hers he still had.

  Without thinking, he had come out of the passage into that exposed place, into the light. It had not occurred to him there might be someone on the green under the pillars. His mind had been occupied with the green and the messages, wondering why for instance there had been nothing there for a month, but actually to catch sight of someone in the act of depositing one, that had hardly crossed his mind as a possibility. Immediately, of course, he retreated. He did not think he had been seen by the very tall, very thin, man on the green, whom he had himself seen only briefly.

  Back down the passage he went, not running, but walking fast, and concealed himself in a doorway just round the end of it. Here he would make himself stand for a full ten minutes, he thought, until he could be sure the bearer of the message would be gone. After all, he had all the time in the world, he had the whole empty evening before him, and his sole purpose in using this route had been to keep that pillar under observation, to feed his curiosity, to try and find some clue as to what it was all about. Three months it had been going on now, he calculated. Well, it had probably been going on longer than that but it was in December that he had first seen one of their messages. Before that he had had no occasion to come down here, to this desolate place that had its utility by day but died at night.

  The hands of his watch crawled. At exactly seven he left the shelter of the doorway and made his way back along the passage. For one moment he had a nasty feeling that he would be punished for his nosiness if the tall thin man were to be waiting round the corner for him. With a cosh perhaps – or a gun. But he made himself go on, cautious, prepared. And there was no one.

  The stream of metal flowed on over the flyover. The pillars that supported it seemed faintly to vibrate. Where the roadway dipped right down and the pair of pillars were shorter than a man, a cat crouched in the scrubby grass. John could see its bright, piercingly green, eyes. He was allergic to cats, their fur gave him a sort of asthma, but it was usually all right out of doors, they didn’t bother him so much there. He went across the street and on to the grass and up to the pillar where the message must be. It was funny what a thrill of excitement he felt each time he saw one of those little packages up there. He reached up and took down the plastic envelope, not tearing it but unpeeling the scotch tape with care. An interesting thing was that this time it was up above his head, which meant perhaps that this was the first time for a long while that the tall man had deposited the message.

  As he had known it would be, the message was in code. But had they changed the code? Suppose it was a different code from last time? That didn’t really help him, nor did knowing if they had changed it, for he had so far deciphered none of the messages he had seen. As had become his habit, he wrote the words down in a small notebook he had bought for the purpose, going back across the street and standing under a light to do this. Then he folded up the paper again, replaced it in its envelope and returning to the green, taped it back inside the groove of the pillar once more, reaching up to find the spot where the tall man had put it.

  Should he have followed the tall man? John confessed to himself that he hadn’t the nerve for that. Not yet. Not unless he prepared himself, anyway. And there was another consideration, an absurd one perhaps, though it wasn’t a matter of vanity. He didn’t want to get the jacket wetter than was absolutely necessary. As it was, he would have to dry it with care. Did this sort of leather soil in the rain?

  When she bought it they were on their honeymoon at a place on Lake Garda. He had thought it rather masculine for Jennifer but she had loved it, the unusual colour, the softness of the calfskin. Only Italian leather was like that, she had said, and she had planned to buy herself something to wear in leather as soon as they decided on Italy. It smelt of her, offered the occasional fleeting illusion that she was pressed close against him. This was the first time John had worn it to go out in. He put it on because he had made up his mind it wouldn’t rain today. The weather forecaster on television had said rain was unlikely in the west.

  The first time he had come here – or rather had passed here on his way back from Nunhouse – he had been more sensibly dressed in his raincoat and had had an umbrella with him. He had needed the umbrella because he had stood for quite a long time opposite the cottage in Fen Street which Jennifer lived in, just watching the place, watching the windows and the front door. That time – it was just before Christmas – there had been no one at home. But he had returned, in spite of himself, a few days afterwards and was rewarded by the sight of her, or the shape of her rather, a dim figure moving behind the clouded glass of the living-room window. Going home by bus, looking out of the bus window in a kind of stunned misery, he had caught sight of something stuck inside one of the flyover uprights. But he had been too wretched then to think much of it, still less follow it up.

  Going to Nunhouse was unwise. It was worse than that, humiliating and somehow perverted, voyeur’s behaviour, Peeping Tom’s. But he couldn’t help himself. He went back, and waiting on the opposite side of the road at last caught a glimpse of her at an upstairs window. There he had stood, watching her hungrily until she revealed more of herself, lifting up the curtain and smiling, then waving. Unable to believe his eyes, trembling with relief, he had been on the point of stepping out from under the hawthorn tree, crossing the road. But then he saw who was coming from the other direction, who it was she
was smiling and waving at, who she had been waiting for, and he turned and walked quickly away.

  It was a village of sorts Peter Moran and she lived in, and in a cottage of sorts. Nunhouse had been half-swallowed by the expanding city, devoured by an outskirts estate of council houses, as a small pretty fish might be devoured by a predatory shark. And the cottage was a tiny thatched hovel with a shack-like extension tacked on the side. That was the best he could do for her, John thought, the best Peter Moran could offer a woman for all his university degree and his posh voice. The bus ran only every two hours and John had walked all the way back, though it was a long way and he didn’t enjoy walking. But she had made him ashamed of the motorbike, the Honda. If she saw him there he didn’t want her to see the Honda too. Perhaps it was true, as she had once gently said, that motorbikes were best for people under thirty. What then if you were over thirty but couldn’t afford to run a car?

  Walking back this way, along what had not so long before been a country lane, then on to a main road which was almost disused since the coming of the motorway, he had somehow missed the turning that would bring him to the eastern suburb where he lived and had come up under the flyover. Immediately he realized where he was he had started to retrace his steps. Another two or three minutes’ walking in that direction, nearer and nearer to the East Bank, and he would have come to the place he had avoided for sixteen years. No doubt it had changed now, no doubt they had rebuilt things, pulled things down and put new ones up, but he would know it, he would recognize it, even under fresh concrete, new gleaming metal, tiles, paintwork.

  He crossed the street in the direction he had come from and began taking a short cut across the green, making his way between the uprights that supported the overhead road. Why had he looked back? Had he remembered what he saw from the bus? Had he heard something? A rare car perhaps or a footstep? Or had it been a sound made by one of the cats? Since then, on his frequent visits, he had often seen them, the yellow king cat and his many-coloured wives and offspring and rivals who lived here under the pillars, amid the grass and stunted blackthorn bushes.

  Whatever it was that caused him to turn his head, he had turned it and seen, taped inside the groove of the central pillar, the first – or first to him – of the plastic-covered messages. Misery has to be very deep, has to be at suicide point, before it can quench curiosity. That thought actually came to him when he saw the little package up there. Until then he had believed his unhappiness total, swamping everything else, allowing room only for other old miseries to come in and share its ebb and flow. There was a place in its deep wide sea for his sister and her death but none, he had believed, for an island of interest and speculation. Yet here . . .

  It had been about six feet up. He unpeeled the tape, took the folded sheet out of the envelope and read what was written on it – or tried to read it. He happened to have a ballpoint pen with him and he copied the six coded words, or six groups of letters, on to a piece of paper that he found in his raincoat pocket, a supermarket account print-out. Then he folded up the message once more, replaced it in its envelope and re-taped it to the inside of the pillar.

  At home he had looked once more at the coded message. John knew very little about codes and what little he did know he remembered from schoolboy books he had read when he was very young, twenty-five or thirty years ago. But he was so intrigued by this unlikely message found in this unlikely place that he had shown it to Colin Goodman, though without telling Colin the circumstances in which he had discovered it. Not that he had known then that Colin was interested in codes, though he was aware that he did crossword puzzles, and no mean ones at that, The Times, no less, and sometimes the Guardian. Codes, however, it turned out were something Colin also dabbled in. He looked at the letters on the supermarket bill and quickly came up with what seemed a sound idea of the kind of code that had been used, though that was a long way from being able to decipher the message.

  No more appeared for a while after early January, then there were two in mid-February, this one now. It was a strange thing what those messages had done for him, John thought as he walked home. They had distracted his mind. In a curious sort of way, incredible as that seemed, they had consoled him. He was still deeply unhappy, his life emptied by Jennifer’s desertion of everything that made it worth while, his future destroyed, but he had ceased to be obsessed, he was no longer single-mindedly wretched. It was weeks now since he had made one of those shameful vigils outside her house. And in that time he hadn’t thought exclusively of her. Whole minutes, hours even, had gone by in which his mind hadn’t been occupied by her. And as he visited and revisited the green with its steel pillars where the cats lived, watching for new messages, he felt that he had an interest in his life. It was absurd, of course, it was ridiculous that a man of his age should be so absorbed by this mystery but he was and he was thankful for it. Without this to sustain him, wouldn’t he have broken down? Wouldn’t he have abandoned himself to despair?

  Twenty-five Geneva Road was a small semi-detached house in a street of small semi-detached houses, but what distinguished his was its garden. Even from the end of the street, two hundred yards away, you could make out his garden and see what set it apart from the rest. An early-flowering prunus was in full bloom in the tiny front garden, a pale shimmer in the gathering dark. The lamplight took away its rosy colour but not the gauzy delicacy of its flowers. And as he approached he could see the clusters of blue star-shaped scillas at the foot of the tree, a drift of aconites, iris stylosa, its unfolding lilac petals half hidden by its long fragile leaves, while his neighbours’ gardens, though neat and trim, were barren.

  Still, if he couldn’t contrive a nice garden, who could? He was proud of it, though, this flowery strip under the bay window, and the longer plot at the back with the rockery and the little pond, the two brave herbaceous borders the area of land wasn’t really big enough to support, the collection of rare shrubs and the gingko tree. It was still impossible for him to understand why Jennifer hadn’t appreciated the garden. He had said that to Colin in the days when he had had to open his heart to someone and Colin had been there and willing to listen.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ Colin had said gently, ‘that having a nice garden would keep a woman from leaving her husband.’

  Put like that, it did sound rather preposterous.

  John let himself into the house. It was shabby inside and not very clean. When he came in like this after being out for some time he was aware of the smell. It was the smell of somewhere that hasn’t been properly cleaned for a long time, where all the curtains need washing and the carpets shampooing and the windows opening. But after he had been indoors a little while the smell faded.

  There was nothing to remind him particularly of Jennifer. He switched lights on, took the blue leather jacket off and laid it over the arm of a chair. Jennifer had added scarcely anything of her own to the furnishings of the house, nothing at all down here. It remained as it had been in his mother’s time and she had been content with that. But it seemed peculiar to him, and had seemed strange then, that a young woman with good taste and very decided ideas had been prepared to live with fifties furniture when over and over he had suggested they have the place done up and buy new things.

  He sat down, opened the notebook and looked at the latest message. SIDKCKDM AF HCRKTABIE SHIMC KD LFDAILA. This was the fourth. He had told Colin they came from a friend of his up North with whom he had been corresponding for years. As schoolboys they had been keen on codes and lately the friend had taken to sending these cipher messages. He didn’t know whether Colin believed him. It wasn’t a very convincing story.

  ‘The code is probably based on a line from a book,’ Colin said.

  ‘What do you mean, a line from a book? What book?’

  ‘That’s what we don’t know.’

  ‘I wish you’d explain.’

  ‘Well, let’s take a sentence, any sentence. For instance: now is the time for all good men to come to the aid
of the party. The first letter N would represent A, the second letter O would represent B, W would be C, I would be D, S E and so on.’

  Colin was writing all this down. John looked at the paper.

  ‘What happens when you reach T. T is already F so it can’t be I. Do you miss it out and go on to the I? But that would make I I.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. That’s what you do. And if you get to the end of the sentence before you reach the end of the alphabet, you start a new sentence. In this case presumably: the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Do you see?’

  John had objected, ‘It seems very simple.’

  ‘It is very simple. But if you don’t know what the sentence is it’s virtually indecipherable.’

  ‘Could it be deciphered without knowing the sentence?’

  ‘I expect there are some people who could do it but I couldn’t.’

  ‘So if I don’t know what the book is I haven’t a hope of finding out what these messages mean?’

  Colin laughed.

  ‘It’s not as bad as that. This friend of yours, this Philip, if you and he know each other that well, presumably you know the kind of books he likes. I mean did you have a favourite book when you were kids?’

  John didn’t enjoy perpetuating these lies. He shrugged rather unhappily.

  ‘Most likely it’s a first sentence or last sentence, you see. And a first is more probable that a last.’

  ‘Why is that?’