The Old Scallywags
by
James Leigh
Published by Wexyork Books on Smashwords
This book is also available in print at my website
Copyright © 2010 James Leigh
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oooOooo
"Grow old with me - the best is yet to come"
(Lines on a fridge magnet paraphrased from
Robert Browning's Rabbi ben Ezra)
The Old Scallywags
St Mark's Fair dawned fine after a night of storms and portents. At around ten the evening before, a meteorite shower flirted with stars in a clear sky, giving rise to rumours of alien invasion. Then, soon after midnight, clouds rushed in to blot out the stars, rain flooded the Clibourne Reservoir, and a west wind got up to heave a mass of water over the dam rim. The spate roared down the little River Clibourne, flash-flooding the larger River Arfon and drowning a brace of poachers too busy netting trout to notice it coming. Their bodies were flushed down to Nellie Asker pool near the county town of Hardcastle where they circled sadly all night.
By next morning though the wind had dropped again, and the sun shone on office cleaners who found the body of Josiah Scroggs naked on the floor of the Scroggs Brewery laboratory in Hollywell's Market Square overlooking the Arfon from the bluff called Paradise Fall. Eighty-two years old that day, he never ceased, so his funeral eulogist would later claim, to strive for perfection in such famous brews as Old Fetlock Crystal and Kneestring Snapper Stout. No-one, though, had been up at such an hour to spot Dr Ferdinand Barouche and Jonathan Abbits enter the lab from the next-door Blenheim nursing home by way of an overgrown path running along the edge of the bluff. After clearing the laboratory of certain equipment and materials, they barrowed them to the summerhouse at the foot of the Blenheim's garden.
Meanwhile in the county town itself, some fifteen miles down-river, a fourth and yet more sensational death was reported in the Hardcastle Courier, twice winner of the Top Provincial Newspaper of The Year Award:
"The body of a man thought to be this year's first victim of the assassin dubbed Jacqueline the Ripper was discovered last night in his basement flat in the North Hardcastle suburb of Brinton. He has been identified by Nossex CID as fitness coach Sean Finn.
As in the cases of student Jesus Molina and labourer Chas Pickering last year, Finn had suffered a stab wound to the back of the neck inflicted by a double-edged blade similar, forensic experts believe, to that used by toreadors to deliver the coup de grace in the Spanish bullring.
Also as in those cases, Finn seemed to have been making love with his killer, being killed at the moment of ejaculation, his underpants being then stuffed in his mouth, presumably to stifle his screams. A condom had been removed from his body, presumably to hinder forensic analysis of body fluids ...."
Nor, was that even all. Moira McMurdo, widow of a wealthy ship-builder and long-term resident of in the Blenheim nursing home, passed away some time before lunch after a long illness, while at eleven-thirty precisely, the home's manager, Dr Ferdinand Barouche, departed this world as spectacularly as his new open-top BMW did, clearing the parapet of the bridge carrying Hardcastle's newly-opened ring road after colliding with it. His body twirled over and over in the warm spring sunshine like a drum majorette's baton, seeming to take an age to land in Nellie Asker pool and narrowly missing several police frogmen trying to retrieve the drowned poachers' bodies.
oooOooo
Nurse Audrey Buxton wriggled out of the lift, pushing ahead of her a tea trolley with brass hooks from which dangled mugs that clonked like cow-bells and were her alarm call to residents. She was a handsome, broad-faced girl with freckles and strong legs. A wide nylon belt strained at her waist, while her bosom resisted firmly her starched uniform's attempts to flatten it out. Powerful upper arm muscles braced her against the trolley's inclination to pull her sideways into the outer wall of the rhomboid first-floor corridor giving access to the Blenheim's most sought-after rooms.
Once the rectory attached to next-door St Mark's Church, the home occupied the space between the church on one side and Scroggs Brewery on the other, the three buildings together with their outhouses and grounds making up the Paradise Fall side of Hollywell's Market Square. Stone-built to accommodate a large family with servants, it had been converted long before, first into a rest home for genteel sufferers from nervous complaints, then into a modern nursing home for the usual mixture of old and sick, or just old or just sick. Extra rooms had been added by converting stables and other outer buildings making up its side of the cul-de-sac separating the home from Scroggs Brewery.
Very little ever happened there, most residents being resident for too short a time to take much interest in their surroundings. Separated from Market Square by parking bays, flower troughs and memorial benches, its ground floor front consisted of offices and public areas, while the floor above was all large, light and airy 'best' rooms, each with its share of wrought-iron balcony running the length of the façade. Best fronts were now allotted on a first-come-first-served basis, but patients from the home's earlier days who had been passed on like goods-in-stock when it changed hands monopolised them all at first, vacating them only as they themselves passed on. No-one complained though. Turnover was brisk, and all lived in hope. Indeed, according to Dr Barouche, looking forward to a best-front kept many a resident alive longer than might have been expected.
Nurse Audrey stopped for a moment, smiled and let her trolley sidle into a side corridor wall which it met with a chiming chuckle of jarred crockery. Ahead of her and to her left, a small square window looked out over the home's rear garden, and through it just then the sun shot a single shaft of precise brilliance, a beam like blue electric cigar smoke crowded with dancing motes and lanced by the projected shadows of the window's glazing bars. Jumping into this sidelong pillar of light as though into a rock-pool on pretty Zante, the girl spread her arms and danced, imagining she felt its warm motes and photons snag in the blonde down of her forearms. Screwing her eyes up against the glare, she peered through the window to where unkempt gardens sloped away towards shrubbery and summerhouse, then over the sheer fenced drop of Paradise Fall. Here and there among untended flowerbeds gleamed spring flowers, and before her eyes pale pink buds of viburnum were being converted into rose which, with the crimsons and new glossy leaf-greens of camellias, glowed like traffic signals. Beyond and below the garden, the flooded Arfon still encroached on the long meadow known as Paradise, at that time of year studded with pale ladies' smocks, while across the river, black Italian poplars setting off its far bank from the Hardcastle Road punctuated woodland all dressed in the singing greens of spring.
As she watched, a pair of house martins flicker-dove past her window to wheel up under the eaves. It was the sign she had been waiting for, and it made up her mind. Ever since waking, a dream had gnawed at the fringes of her consciousness. Now it returned, and now she could frame an answer to the question it posed. She would give the Blenheim one more year. Sexy Keith would just have to find some other girl to apply his summer sun block on Zante, Zante, fiore di Levante, where the olive trees marched down in intense silence to the blue waters of tiny bays. She did not know why she decided as she did, but her unformulated reason was simple solidarity with the vision that built the original St Mark's convent and the nuns who cultivated its paradise by the river. It was not that Nurse Audrey was self-consciously caring. She just needed people to care for.
oooOooo
Ned Nattrass, known to all in the Blenheim as Nethead, could manipulate his dreams. Quite a few people can download sounds and sensations from the waking world into their sleeping one, usually in order to account for them without having to wake up. Some can even edit or censor them to get out of worrying, boring or embarrassing situations. Nethead, though, could direct his psycho-dramas like some Spielberg of the unconscious, even re-shoot whole scenes while dreaming them. That morning, for example, as the clinky-chink of Nurse Audrey's mugs against the wall penetrated a dream of himself as the great archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann wandering the Aegean shore near Hissarlik, he re-cast it instantly to incorporate a Greek princess emerging from the sea like foam-born Aphrodite. He waited for her to walk up to him and press her body, naked but for the clinking of Trojan gold, against his. On opening his eyes as Nurse Audrey entered his room, he thus hoped for a moment to see the latter's homely face superimposed on the body that launched a thousand ships.
Nethead was not the only old man in the home to have a crush on Nurse Audrey - not that he was actually old. His being a resident at all was due solely to his ex-wives, both of whom still adored him. It was they who pulled the strings that got him transferred from Hardcastle Infirmary some months before - a move essential, they thought, to break the cycle of efforts to manage on his own ending in new disasters, new emergencies, ineffectual treatment, slow recovery, and so back to frowsty bedsits and the same round over and over. They convinced those who mattered that the cycle would kill him if not broken, that more even than Moira McMurdo next door, Nethead was the sort of patient the old Blenheim had been originally founded to cater for. Neither stupid nor lazy, only his charm dazzled people into not noticing a near-total inability to cope with life.
A scholar once, he had clung to a minor position until even colleagues could no longer hide the fact of his incompetence. Failing to find another academic berth, he became a private tutor, full-time drunk, semi-invalid and, eventually, a derelict. Pneumonia almost killed him before his ex-wives, both of whom had since found themselves more competent and productive husbands, persuaded Hardcastle Infirmary and the local authority to support him in the Blenheim until other arrangements could be made. None, though, ever had, and so he stayed.
Needing to lose a little of his savings to qualify for financial support, he bought a laptop computer off a newspaper advertisement for precisely £1.25 below the upper limit on his permitted savings. It was an inspired choice for which he needed no tuition, taking to the machine instantly and absorbing its logic by a sort of intellectual osmosis. Relieved, the ex-wives were more than willing to split the monthly cost of his broadband connection, and soon he was sleeping all day and surfing all night, logging off finally at around four in the morning with a visit to the Irish Jesuits' (www.jesuit.ie) site before napping for an hour or so. After breakfast, he then slept properly, hardly dreaming until woken for dinner. The routine suited him perfectly. Both ex-wives visited him regularly, and he never failed to make them each of them a present of six of Mr Bellibone's best hand-made chocolates from the shop across Market Square, paying for their treats out of pocket money set aside for the purpose by Matron Percelle Middleton.
Dreams faded with dawn though, and when no expected footfall or rattle of door handle penetrated this one, he awoke, saw his room empty, heard other, alien sounds from the square outside and began to panic. Jumping out of bed, he ran onto the balcony, blue and white pyjamas flapping, exposing himself as he scanned the world for the source of the sounds. In the square the sun shone, men were putting up stalls and bunting, and as he watched, a great green and gold steam engine clanked into view with, over its fly-wheel, its name in big raised painted iron letters: Lady of Shallott. At the sight he shivered with pleasure. Two days before, he had seen dragons and maidens doodled across Google's home page and realized that it must be St George's day. Today, then, was April 25th, feast day of St Mark, guardian of earth and harvests, and first day of Hollywell's week-long St Mark's Fair culminating in its great May Day one.
Nethead had been afraid of the square ever since, not long after arriving in the Blenheim, he crept downstairs and let himself out to go swimming in the Arfon. Returning by way of Bridge Lane, dripping and naked, he was half-way across it before he realised that the familiar world had disappeared, to be replaced by a new and alien one. In the centre of it was an equestrian statue of a military man in a cocked hat waving a sabre. In front of Dr Foster's surgery was parked an old-fashioned ambulance of a vintage not seen in half a century. Mr Bellibone's chocolaterie had reverted to being a greengrocer's shop with vegetables piled high in boxes around its door and hand-lettered prices on the window indicating 6d for this, 1/- a pound for that, 2/4½d for something else. It was Cookie O'Riordan who, finding him cowering and whimpering, wrapped his nakedness in her cycle cape and pushed him ahead of her back to the Blenheim where Dr Barouche had to keep him sedated him for several days. The problem was that the Square had been dressed overnight for a television commercial to be shot there the next morning, only no-one had mentioned it to Nethead, with the result that even now he had to glance through the window every morning to check that everything was where it should be and that nothing was where it should not.
Hearing the rattle of the trolley again, he jumped back into bed, pulled the covers up to his chin and pretended to be asleep again. With his shiny domed head and wings of still glossy black hair poking out, he looked like a cartoon stag-beetle. Eyes closed, he still hoped for a peep between lids of Helen of Troy clad in nothing but Trojan gold - but then, suddenly, remembered why he had dreamt of Troy. Earlier, in a silence broken only by the creak of floorboards and the whimpering of residents in their sleep, he had learned on his computer that the ancient Iberians of Saguntum had called their city Arse. It reminded him that http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age was to be his browsing topic for the week. After which he would turn his attention to the heavens, having recently discovered the exciting http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/index.shtml astronomy blog and http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk, site of the British Astronomical Association.
Nethead, that is, was at home among the arcana of computing, ancient bones and the eternity of stars. It was only the sublunary world that baffled him. Eyes still shut, he heard the door open at last, smelt adorable Nurse Audrey (sweat, antiseptic, Johnson's Baby Cream, ) as she laid his mug and biscuit on the bedside table beside him and felt her hand gently remove his hand from her bottom. When he opened his eyes - yes! For a moment the most beautiful woman in the world stood naked and voluptuous in Trojan gold, Helen with a tea trolley. She winked companionably from the doorway and warned him, again, to expect visitors at ten o'clock. Again, he instantly forgot.
oooOooo
An exotic mystery, Baron Serge was the sole exception to the rule of best-front succession, arriving in the Blenheim only two weeks before and been accommodated in the best room of all which happened just then to fall vacant. He had been too frail to be moved since, and no-one really minded anyway since it was obvious he had only a short time to live, having refused all treatment apart from the purely palliative. He was not just a foreigner but a titled one. Neither he nor Alan Dodgeson who visited him on most days let much slip about him, but it was known that his dressing-gown was quilted silk, that his crimson satin pyjamas had a coronet and capital 'S' embroidered on each breast pocket, and that his name was Baron Serge Petrovich Romeo von Flogger.
His life had been peculiar, though not exceptional by Times obituary column standards. Born between world wars in the South of France, he had been orphaned while still in his carry-cot, inheriting the title when his father failed to take a bend at speed in his new Hispano-Suiza motor car on the run down to Nice after drinks in the hills behind with the artist Chagall. Father, mother and nurse were all dismembered in the accident, but the tiny new baron was unhurt and found still asleep in the upside-down wreck of the car - like Moses in the bulrushes as he once confusingly put it to Alan. Such a start accounted largely for his off-hand attitude to fate thereafter. As a young man in the Second World War he had spied for several countries before taking refuge in Canada where he became by turns an economist, journalist and double-agent, enjoying years of otherwise unaffordable travel to interesting places by way of coded contacts, cut-outs, letter-drops and introductions to often beautiful people. Neither he nor Alan Dodgeson could remember whose side he had been mainly on when they first met.
He had married three wives on three continents, all of them less loyal than Nethead's two, and after his first heart attack they descended on him like crows on the eyeballs of a dying sheep, so that when Alan found him, there was only just enough money left to pay his air ambulance out of Switzerland and fund his stay (so long as it did not last long) in the Blenheim. There, though, he rallied enough to enjoy the occasional split of champagne with Alan Dodgeson. He was a large baby-faced man who looked as though he had been left soaking in the bathtub too long. His hair was sparse, his skin pink, his eyes an extraordinarily light blue, and just then he lay on large pillows brought specially in Harrods so that, asleep or awake, he seldom needed to change position. Unlike other residents of the home, he had no furniture of his own except, against the wall near his bed, a steamer trunk with his name embossed and coroneted in the centre of the lid – Baron S v F.
Like Nethead, Baron Serge had been dreaming when Nurse Audrey arrived, and like Nethead he could direct his dreams, only more subtly in his case, for he could conceal his artifice even from his dreaming self. Thus, as Nurse Audrey writhed in the corridor like Martha Graham in her pillar of light, Baron Serge strolled up Piccadilly to where, between the Ritz and Green Park, a wrought-iron walkway like the one that used to connect his old Montparnasse hotel to its rear annexe led up to a tiny cobbled square full of cartwheeling Königsallee street arabs. When he asked if they knew where Verena was, they laughed, but with, not at, him, so he laughed too. Baron Serge often laughed in his sleep.
Now, beautifully dressed dancers glided over the square's cobbles to the strains of the Silver and Gold Waltz, their shoes scuffling and squeaking like those of the porteño tango dancers whose company his first baroness had loved. Young girls jived among them with an abandon that made some graceful accident inevitable, and one just then befell, the tallest of the girls pirouetting into an overstuffed settee and upending herself into it, making him laugh again. Now he chased geese down a narrow ruelle towards a Piccadilly that became, as he reached it, the nearer bank of a broad, fast-flowing river bounding over bleached boulders near Avignon, a wild wind ragging white clouds and tags of white foam streaming from little boats moored to buoys under an iron railway bridge. The little boats, all with open wheelhouses in front of open wells, snubbed and snagged at their moorings like puppies on a leash, taut ropes throbbing and thrumming in the fast-running current. Silken goats wearing bells that clonked like mugs around a nursing home tea-trolley grazed the water's edge, and seeing them, Baron Serge laughed a third time, this time laughing himself awake.
oooOooo
Every morning of her life, beautiful doll-like Moira McMurdo remembered how, as a young wife and mother, she had run Wee Jack's bath but, distracted by some reverie, forgot both him and bath and failed to see Hannah, his nurse, enter the room, note that the water was still clean and the lad still in his nappy , and so deftly strip and pop him in. It was true Moira had said she would get the child ready for bed and that Hannah could have the evening off, but the coroner refused to apportion blame for an infant's death by scalding. Now, nearly three-quarters of a century on, Moira lay flat and straight in her bed, arms at her sides, her fingernails grazing the outside of her thighs. She would lie in exactly the same position when she died, which would be soon, still pretty and vulnerable as a Sèvres teacup, for age had not withered or even changed her much. Her hair was still Titian's colour, her skin so translucent that, as Dr Barouche once gallantly remarked, she resembled the young rather than not so young Jeanne Moreau. Moira herself was aware that all her life's troubles had been caused in one way or another by a beauty she knew to be exceptional, even though the knowledge did nothing to mitigate her low opinion of herself.
In fact most people disliked her, Josie Maddox and Nurse Audrey being the Blenheim's only exceptions. Her mother had left her upbringing to servants, her father the ship-builder had spoiled her on the few occasions when he was at home, and while none of her husbands had actually maltreated her, all had been serial adulterers. And now too she knew that even her nieces Emily and Elizabeth, her only living relatives, could hardly wait for her to die. She learned it from a letter written by one to the other and left in a book borrowed from her own shelves as a page-marker. Brooding on the matter for days, she at last called in Harry Mervyn, Hollywell's leading solicitor, and instructed him to draw up a new will that would come as a shock to the girls. Late in the day, the leopard would change its spots and grow claws. If they would not remember her with love, then let it be with pain. There was to be a reckoning.
But at that moment Moira too was dreaming, in her case of a cathedral on the far side of a sunken meadow or marsh that she knew to be on the Channel coast near Hastings. It loomed grandly, the sea visible beyond it as she gazed excitedly out of the window. She knew there were others behind her in the compartment whose upholstered benches faced each other, but in the dream she could not see their faces and had no interest in them. Framed photographs of beautiful places filled the veneered strip between numbered seat-backs and luggage rack, and the luggage rack netting bulged with strapped cases. On the door was a thick leather strap by which she could lower the window, lean out, turn her face to the wind of their passage and smell the train's sweetly-acrid smoke (eyes firm shut against the dangerous smuts) and salt marsh air as the train rounded the last bend. Telephone wires soared and dipped, soared and dipped, seagulls screamed, and the wind banged in her ears.
Now she was inside the cathedral, walking among stone columns between high windowless walls. Strangers hemmed her in and she became aware of activities of all kinds going on around. Among shops and stalls were preachers, policemen, hecklers, even a choir. In the middle of the nave a class of children occupied a square of benches, facing inwards towards each other, their feet swinging. Now, though, she was in another part of the building, quieter and more remote, where there came chanting from a narrow door in a wall leading down a narrow passageway that got steeper and steeper and narrower and narrower. Now the space was too narrow to turn in and she was afraid. She had had this dream before, but unlike Nethead or Baron Serge, could not dream a way out of it.
Unable to wake and just before the dream became unbearable, she was suddenly outside the cathedral again and walking downhill towards an empty sunlit square with a stone fountain at the bottom, in front of which was a hotel or a spa in honey-coloured stone. As she reached it, the basin overflowed and burning alder bushes on its far bank were quenched by the rising waters. Moira McMurdo awoke weeping, knowing she would die.
oooOooo
Alan Dodgeson ambled down to the towpath through a copse studded with windflowers and forget-me-nots, his leather bag banging against his thigh like a Killybeg drum. He was nervous and surprised to find himself so. Knowing that mental stamina wasted like muscle tissue with age, he hoped his weakness was due only to being out of practice.
Ahead of him lay the St Mark's Fair eights course, the only straight stretch of river for miles in either direction, ending just past Hollywell's Roman bridge before which, on the river's far bank, rose its steeply terraced allotments. Round the bend, still out of sight from where he stood, Bridge Lane angled up past The Silver Swan to Market Square and the embattled malt-house of Scroggs Brewery, its roof line together with that of the Blenheim nursing home and church next door giving the little market town on its bluff the air of a condottiere stronghold. Only when he reached the bridge itself, of course, would he be able to see the long, lush meadow called Paradise.
The night's flood was subsiding, but as yet no bronze and gold-spotted trout rose to the morning's fly hatch, for the river still hissed gunmetal-smooth, foam-flecked and beer-brown over banks where pale grasses fluttered in panic just below the surface. Not wasting the opportunity, a dashing dragonfly was preying on ponderous hawthorn flies with their trailing undercarriages. Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourned. Keats? Probably. Hawthorns? Of course. There was an artificial in his lapel right then of the Saint Mark's fly (bibio marci), so-called because it usually appeared on or around the saint's feast day.
The name jogged his memory, and hearing St Mark's church clock chime, he stepped out faster. He was a tall, spare man on whom clothes hung as though from a hanger, six and a half feet of gangling ex-Intelligence resident with purpling knuckles, high cheek bones, pale eyes under pale, sandy brows and hair that had so far neither thinned nor greyed. He wore a suit of green loden cloth, carried a heavy stick (more club than stick) and, over his shoulder, a leather bag with a broad loose flap that made him look like an Austrian postman. He was rarely without something foraged in it: wind-fallen fruit or a hatful of the little olive-coloured pheasant's eggs he adored in spite of their tough membranes. Today he also wore a straw hat bought for a recent trip beneath the hot Andalusian sun, an accessory noted by a pair of crows swaying on the topmost branches of the crack willow he passed beneath that in summer shaded huge trout among its roots.
"What's that he's got round his neck?" signalled one, its glossy back flashing as the sun caught it. "Has he gone deaf?"
"It's a DVD player," the other answered. "He bought it last week at an airport on his way to Málaga. He also bought a camcorder."
"Odd. One wouldn't have put Alan Dodgeson down as an airport shopaholic."
"He has lived most of his life out of suitcases and would not mind if he never passed through another airport again, but a day-trip to the European destination of his choice happened to be first prize in a crossword puzzle competition he won some weeks ago. He considered his winning an omen. In fact it made up his mind. He took the prize, lunched on conchas, snow-cured ham and pajarete wine in a bar down by Málaga harbour and got in some camcording practice both inside and outside to test his equipment's capabilities. He presented the results to the proprietor who in return presented him with the chased-silver cigar-holder you see between his teeth."
"What's he listening to?"
"Beim Schlafengehen, one of Strauss's Four Last Songs, in the recording by Schwarzkopf and Szell."
"Why?"
"Is there another?"
"I mean, why that particular song? He looks pretty spry to me."
"A new chapter in his life is about to open, although he doesn't know it. He is nervous, and the music soothes him. He is on his way to expose fraud at the expense of old people unable to defend themselves."
"Wow. Will the experience make him any happier?"
"It will do him and others a power of good."
By then Alan had arrived at a long, narrow pool of floodwater on the towpath in which a stranded salmon tacked frantically, having detected his approach by means of the pressure-sensitive cells along its flanks. Some men in his position might have phoned for the RSPCA. A lunatic would have unpacked his rod. A farmer he knew once, faced with the same opportunity, ran home for his shotgun. He himself simply took off socks and shoes, stuffed them in a willow cleft in case the river should suddenly rise again, waded into the pool and, using his stick as a priest, stunned the fish. Grabbing it above the tail, he hauled it out and slit it open like an envelope with his tiny pink Swiss Army knife, emptying the guts into the river before, shins and feet mopped dry with his large white-spotted yellow handkerchief, stowing it in his bag. Now, further behind than ever, he came to the flight of stone steps leading up to the Hardcastle road by the bridge - but paused again, this time to let a pair of ladybirds finish making tiny, ponderous love on the stile. As he waited, he decided to smoke his fish in the smoker he had just converted out of what had once been his aunt's outside lavatory. It would be a fair test.
Fish and bag deposited over the bar of The Silver Swan, though, he was soon hidden among the wines and spirits of Hollywell's Countrie Fayre supermarket for the second time that week, having run up all ninety-six steps from the river bank to its car-park through the town's terraced allotments. He had chosen that route rather than the longer, gentler one by Bridge Lane and Market Square both to save time and to avoid the town brats who forced gingerbread Marksmen on everyone they could ambush every April 25th, those being so-called delicacies of spiced dough stuck with currants and baked in little man-shaped moulds. Now he crouched a short distance away from Till Number Four, peering through the gap in the shelf of a display unit he had made by removing several two-litre bottles of tempranillo from its middle.
Alan Dodgeson was a lucky man who dismissed all talk of luck as superstitious shorthand for whatever happened to happen, but in this case even he realised that luck alone had afforded an unmissable chance to expose Mrs Vi Fosdick's plundering. Blenheim nursing home pensioners who could still get out on their own generally cashed their pension giros in the post office at the top of Bridge Lane every Tuesday morning, after which they wandered along to the Countrie Fayre supermarket to spend a few pounds on luxuries. Some weeks before, he had seen Mrs Fosdick cheat one of them out of ten pounds by the simple expedient of giving change for a tenner instead of the twenty-pound note she had been given. Catching up with the victim outside, he told her he had seen what happened and offered to back her complaint to the management, but to his astonishment the victim shied from him as though he had made her an indecent proposal. She got confused so easy these days, she whined, and anyway it was probably an honest mistake if there had been a mistake. Besides, weren't much she could do about it now, was there? Mistakes Cannot Afterwards Be Rectified it said on the sign over the till. In vain Alan repeated that he seen the fraud perpetrated. Eventually accepting that he was causing the woman more distress than the loss of her money, he gave up on his knightly errand. The experience rankled.
He saw Mrs Vi Fosdick pull the same trick the next day, this time at the expense of an old man, then twice more in one morning, each time with the same result. The woman made no effort to disguise what she did, and it was obvious to Alan that at least one of the other cashiers knew what she was up to. At least none tried to copy her, but their pusillanimity made him set his trap.
First he studied carefully the elements of a scam as simple and direct as a highway robbery. Selecting some old and easily confused victim at a moment when there were few other customers about, Mrs Vi Fosdick checked his or her purchases through her till in the usual way before, if offered a note - as was likely, the victim having usually come straight from the post office - 'accidentally' knocking some item off the conveyer onto the floor. While the victim then bent to pick it up, she simply slid the note under her broad backside, took one of smaller denomination from a pocket under her tabard, slipped that in the till instead and rang up the transaction for the smaller amount, giving change accordingly.
Alan was sure most of her victims had at least an inkling of what had happened, but he saw the woman challenged only once, the confrontation lasting just seconds when the old man who made it was loudly informed of his misapprehension by an outraged Mrs Vi Fosdick who waved in his face the note she had taken from the top of the pile in her till, her tone clearly intimating that old fools like him ought not to be allowed out to embarrass and insult decent people. As bad luck would have it, Alan had been too far away on that occasion to help, but now he waited close at hand for a victim to appear among the St Mark's Fair early customers, sparse though they were because of the opening ceremony still taking place in the square up the road. The event, he recalled, was presided over that year by Lady Mamie Bloodwater, snatches of whose amplified oratory occasionally drowned out the store's strings-to-consume-by muzak.
Now, though, an extraordinary beldam shuffled into view among the packet soups and pot noodles. She looked unspeakable in Norah Batty tights and a brown, grey and purple woollen coat that seemed to have snagged on a thousand thorns and been peed on by cats before being wrapped round her from thorax to knee and secured in place by blanket pins. A vile yellow beret was pulled down over her ears. She was a bent Sycorax whose face he could not see, and he readied his camcorder. He could not imagine a more likely victim for Till Number Four.
"Tell us a story."
He jumped. The child who had appeared beside him had crimson blotched cheeks and black, glossy eyes like gob-stoppers. In spite of the beautiful morning it wore a gabardine coat heavy enough to stop swan-shot, the belt-holes rimmed with brass. It was a tiny Mussolini.
"Eh?"
"Tell us a story."
He glanced around. A woman, obviously the petty dictator's mother, loitered some distance away among the home-baking provisions. She and the child probably lived on one of the upland farms liable to be cut off by snow even in late spring where homemakers as a result had to keep baking supplies in.
"Tell us a story."
"Shan't."
"Go on."
He glanced through the gap again and noted that the crone had stopped by a pyramidal display of cling peaches in heavy syrup. She seemed to be undergoing a transformation. Now she was taller, straighter, her hands, mittens removed, no longer claw-like. He put his eye to the camcorder's viewfinder, zoomed to close-up and saw that she held a piece of paper in one of them, a small tube of something in the other. Now she was unscrewing the tube. What was she up to? A finger jabbed him in the buttock.
"Tell us a story."
He glanced through the viewfinder again. Now the crone had her mittens gripped between her teeth while holding the piece of paper in front of eyes that were no longer rheumy. Now she reminded him of someone he knew, but for the life of him he could not think who. Still, she showed no sign of moving and there was no other candidate for Till Number Four's attention. The child kicked him on the leg.
"At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay."
"Go on"
"His sword was made of custard, his feet were made of clay."
"Go on."
Now the child's mother approached, grabbed it by its armoured collar and towed it away without a word or glance at either of them. Alan re-applied his eye to the camcorder viewfinder - to find the crone gone. He panned wildly around. No, there she was, bent double again, snot-whitened woolly blue mittens back on, unloading her basket at Till Number Four just where Mrs Vi Fosdick waited plump-armed, plump hands folded in plump lap. He had rehearsed the scene so many times in imagination that he focussed without hesitation on the plump hands and prepared to follow them every inch, every moment of their way.
The crone finished unloading her purchases and handed over a twenty-pound note without even waiting for a total to be rung up, holding it by one corner before, with a convenience Mrs Vi Fosdick could surely only bless, dropping a clementine from her bag onto the floor, seeming almost to aim for it. There was still no-one else in view as she knelt down to scrabble, and as though unwilling to take such obvious advantage, Mrs Vi Fosdick only slowly slid the note under her backside and produced a tenner from under her tabard. Placing that carefully under the spring-clip of her till, she checked the crone's other purchases and rang up the total, even loading her plastic bag for her and leaving the paper one open to receive the wandering clementine. Finally, as the other straightened up, she handed over her receipt, a fiver and some coins in change. The pause was only slight.
"And what is this sum supposed to represent?"
The contralto voice was firm and jocular. Alan was sure he knew it.
"It's your change, dear , from the ten-pound note you gave me. Mustn't forget our change, must we?"
"I gave you a twenty-pound note."
Alan cracked his head on the underside of the tempranillo shelf. Of course. The voice was that of Matron Percelle Middleton of the Blenheim nursing home with whom he had been half in love since he arrived in Hollywell. Now she stood fully upright to reveal herself a queenly six-footer, trim of waist and broad-shouldered, full and low-breasted, with muscled calves and sharp, twinkly ankle bones that reminded him for some reason of aroused nipples.
Mrs Vi Fosdick frowned, unsuspecting.
"No, dear - ten. You gave me a ten-pound note. Look, here it is ,on top of the pile in my tray. Now take your change and shove off, eh? We don't want to hold everyone up."
Now Alan realized what it was that he was camcording. Matron Middleton had also tumbled to Mrs Vi Fosdick's larceny but decided on action far more heroic than his. Disguising herself as a victim, she had tethered herself like a goat in front of Till Number Four's tigress and seemed set to inflict a mauling on her predator. He continued camcording.
"That is not the note I gave you - as the security camera over your head will verify, you larcenous cow."
The glass facade of Hollywell's premier store appeared to bulge outwards like the seaward-facing window of a hotel in County Kerry where Alan stayed during the great storm that engulfed the Fastnet yacht race in whatever year that was. But there was a flaw in Matron Middleton's reasoning. Even if the CCTV camera over Till Number Four had been set to record and could distinguish between a twenty-pound note and other denominations, it was pointed outward, not downward. Presumably Mrs Vi Fosdick knew this, for although clearly surprised by her customer, she seemed still only watchful as she popped a tiny pillow of chewing gum into her fleshy mouth which pursed like a baby's sphincter to receive it.
"May I assist you, Madam?"
Matron Middleton turned to the store manager who had appeared at her side, possibly because Mrs Vi Fosdick had pressed a hidden bell-push. Alan reflected that he had never seen the man about and wondered if he were actually an accomplice.
Matron Middleton towered over them both. "I do hope so. You might start by asking your cashier to produce the twenty-pound note she has just stolen from me and is now sitting on."
The man glanced at Till Number Four, whose only response was a tiny philosophical shrug.
"We will discuss the matter in my office, Madam, if you will step this way."
"Not until she gets down off her stool and gives me back my twenty-pound note."
Now the man frowned. "Madam, I cannot order my staff about on the say-so of someone I have never seen before. Besides, Mrs. Fosdick cannot leave her post just now because there is no-one available to take her place."
Matron Middleton looked nonplussed, not having anticipated such a development, perhaps not realising either that her disguise did not command the respect she was used to receiving. Without the evidence the cashier was sitting on, she had no case, but then neither could she demand that the manager hang around until a relief cashier arrived. Alan closed down his camcorder and stepped out from behind the tempranillo shelves.
"What this lady says is correct," he told the man, "as will become clear when you do as she suggests and get your cashier to climb down off her stool. The longer you hang around here, of course, the bigger the crowd you will attract."
"Alan," Matron Middleton unwisely greeted him, "how nice to see you."
The store manager's eyes swivelled from one to the other.
"You are together?"
Alan smiled briefly but turned back immediately to the manager. "In fact your cashier often steals from your customers. I have caught her at it several times myself - and filmed her doing so." He patted his camcorder. "Of course, if you prefer to look at the footage down at the police station ...."
Now the manager frowned while Mrs Vi Fosdick suddenly came to life.
"Here, you can't do that. It's an invasion of privacy."
"So is that." retorted Matron Middleton, jabbing upwards with her finger like an apostle toward the overhead security camera.
The cashier now made an error of judgement. "Well, what if there is a banknote lying about?" she demanded resentfully of the manager. "She couldn't prove it's hers. Anyone can make a mistake or drop something, can't they? It's a free country."
It is not a well-chosen defence. The store manager looked shocked at the suggestion that banknotes might be sculling about unclaimed over the floor of his supermarket.
Matron Middleton rolled her eyes. "Anticipating such a canard, , I jotted down the serial number of mine and have it on me." She dipped her hand in her bosom.
Now at last the cashier looked alarmed and drew her legs up under her chin on her stool so that she looked like a cocktail-bar siren. Her very fat knees, Alan noticed, had dimples rather than kneecaps.
The manager sighed. "Very well. Let us get this over with. Come down off your stool, Mrs Fosdick."
"Shan't."
Her tone reminded Alan of the child in the iron mac – who now, he saw, squatted like a toad in his mother's shopping trolley by the short-coded goods cabinet at the end of the aisle, pouring honey from a plastic-stoppered jug over baking supplies while his mother watched the unfolding drama.
"Mrs Fosdick!"
Even now Till Number Four did not seem to realise that the game was up. Poutingly reluctant, she tried to slide down off her stool - and seemed surprised when she, or her tabard, stuck fast. She jerked at it, tipping the stool forward.
The manager's hands clasped, opened and re-clasped by his side. "Take it off, Mrs Fosdick. You are presumably decent underneath."
The mother of the child in the iron mac darted forward to help release the tabard's velcro. The manager then grabbed the garment as it fell away - to reveal it visibly bonded to the stool by means of a twenty-pound note. Now Alan remembered the tube he had seen in the crone's hand. Of course – Super Glue. The silence was broken by the child's mother's who had just noticed what her infant Mussolini was up to.
"You little sod!"
oooOooo
The Blenheim was not well-run. Having bought the home cheaply from its bankrupt previous owners, Lady Mamie Bloodwater installed Dr Ferdinand Barouche as its manager, but although he lived on the premises and took a qualified interest in its residents, he was not a caring man. In fact he subjected some of them to what, in Nurse Audrey's view, amounted to little more than a liquid cosh regime. Indeed the main reason she herself stayed, she tried to explain to long-suffering sexy Keith, was that someone had to keep an eye on her vulnerable old cherubs. She suspected that Matron Middleton was not happy with Dr Barouche's prescription regime either, but then no-one ever knew quite what Matron Middleton thought, and anyway she was not involved closely day-to-day the way ordinary staff were and Dr Barouche was a hard man to pin down. A chemist as well as physician, he spent almost as much of every day in the Scroggs Brewery next door laboratory as in the Blenheim. But then again and to be fair, it was said that he had patients on his panel in Hardcastle whom no other GP would touch, and for that reason alone Audrey was prepared to be tolerant.
Moira McMurdo would have agreed that standards had slipped. Indeed, she knew they had, having lived in the home longer than anyone else. If only she were not so tired. If it were not for dear Josie .Her slender nostrils flared suddenly against the gamey early morning smell of disinfectant and newly evacuated sewage wafting up the lift-shaft and along the corridor to her room. She lay on her bed as she had on waking, arms still straight by her sides, fingertips brushing her thighs. Only now she was mother-naked, for Dr Barouche was conducting his totally unnecessary weekly examination that the nieces insisted on, although not, Moira now knew, out of concern for her well-being. The reverse rather. They wanted the earliest clue possible to how long they had to wait for their inheritance. Moira trembled as his cold brown fingers knocked at her white and veined old rib-cage as though searching for a secret panel.
Without warning, and with only the briefest of psychic motions, sanity slipped away from her like the ground from under an avalanche victim's feet. It had happened before, and for the briefest of moments she was even aware of the transition. She lifted her head and glared down, first at the doctor's hands, then at her own nakedness, her slight double chin firm on the rolled-up sausage of her nightdress. In this increasingly common state she was aggressive. She closed her eyes and opened them again - to find herself staring straight into the man's loins. Her anger disappeared at the sight of the pulsing, downward-pointing banana inside his trousers and to the right of his fly. Surely, the man had the most enormous ....
Her head lunged sideways although the rest of her did not move. Now she glared out through her balcony window into Market Square where, among stalls being set up beside the children's fairground, Mr Bellibone was arranging a table on which his frumpish wife and daughter were laying out hand-made chocolates. Moira's eyes, still needle-sharp, blurred suddenly with tears which she wiped angrily with the hem of her pillow. "Fuck!" she murmured. She loved chocolates and even at that range could distinguish easily the shapes of truffles and logs, pralines, clusters, cream-filled globes, liqueurs and various candied fruits. Dr Barouche did not seem to notice the unladylike expletive.
A charabanc blocked her view momentarily before pulling into the kerb further along to disgorge a crowd of elderly Hollanders who ran back to the Bellibones' table. Moira tensed and she held her breath, feeling her spittle thicken to an elastic texture in her mouth. Managing to swallow, just, she turned back to see Dr Barouche's fly now open and gaping, a corner of his striped shirt poking out beside his long, slender and engorged cock, its glistening glans nodding in front of her with the sage grace of a cobra. Like that time when she crept down to her father's study in the middle of the night to find him at his desk holding a book bound in red moquette, she could hardly breathe. She gasped and gagged. Had he then made her fellate him? Had Dr Ferdinand Barouche shoved that great purple tulip on its muscled stalk between her lips, banged it with his loins against the roof of her mouth? She managed to scream at last, a hoarse, puny sound, like retching.
"What is it, Moira?"
Dr Barouche's voice was calm and abstracted. He had finished his totally unnecessary examination and was washing his hands in the basin behind the screen, thinking he would be late for his meeting. The St Mark Fair opening ceremony over, Mamie would be on her way back to the castle and impatient for him to arrive. He smiled his small, cruel smile. Scroggs' death and the need to clear out his lab had put him behind, of course, and he heard Moira's sobs with irritation. The woman had clearly had a bad night, and deterioration in her condition was to be expected. Soon the unstable, excitable states would become the norm, the lucid intervals shorter and rarer. Soon, too, he would have to change her medication. It would be interesting to see if he could get the balance right first time this time.
"Try to keep calm," he advised when she did not answer him, distracted now by the tinny yapping of the hot water tap. How many more times must he tell that peasant Abbits to mend the thing? Really, the man presumed. Did Mamie think him too stupid to realize that he was only there to spy on him? "You know it does you no good to let yourself get over-excited. Have you tried the breathing exercises I recommended?"
His medical bag was open at the foot of her bed, an old-fashioned one of stout leather and metal fittings, and the sight of it steadied Moira even as it rekindled the anger essential to her new equilibrium, binding the elements of her consciousness together like the weak force in particle physics to keep them from flying off to far corners of the universe. In her right mind she understood what was happening and knew that her condition would progressively deteriorate until her sanity crumbled irrevocably, like a sandcastle in the path of an incoming tide. All they could do, Dr Barouche had told her cheerfully, was mount a chemical rear-guard action. But Moira hated drugs even when they offered relief, and now she determined to launch her own chemical counter-attack. It could not be long now before the darkness became impenetrable. The time was right. She would have her revenge.
Her weapon, hidden under folded tissues in the box in her bedside cupboard, consisted of half a dozen of Mr Bellibone's best chocolates, their liqueur content removed and replaced with a powerful mixture of temezepam and diamorphine. Discovering in herself a resourcefulness and cunning she had not known she possessed, she had stolen them in tiny quantities over the course of weeks from the downstairs dispensary refrigerator on nights when Cookie O'Riordan was notionally on duty but actually half-drunk or wholly asleep in her office cot. Now she reached into the bedside cupboard, took out four of her doped chocolates and arranged them on her bedside table beside the lamp. Silence followed the cutting-off of the tap. Dr Barouche would reappear when he had finished drying his hands. Already it was too late to change her mind - only now she spotted the flaw in her strategy. Would the remaining two chocolates be enough to quench her own existence? True, Josie had bought her more that morning from Mr Bellibone's shop, but she had no more temezepam or diamorphine to inject into them. Nor could she get hold of any, for Josie herself was on night duty all this St Mark's Fair week, not Cookie O'Riordan, and Josie was not likely to fall asleep or leave the dispensary refrigerator door unlocked. Moira herself could no longer get out of bed in the middle of the night and prowl the home's darkened corridors and staircases anyway.
Tears of furious self-pity blurred her eyes, but then she pulled the bag toward her and grabbed from the top inside a bottle with a satisfyingly large 'POISON' label in red with, beneath it, the typed words prep.lubid. She slid it under her pillow just as Dr Barouche emerged from behind the screen.
"Moira, you can pull your nightie down now. Why were you crying?"
She closed her eyes and went rigid again, squeezing her nude old thighs together as his hands pulled down the hem of her nightdress, raising first her shoulders, then her bottom, like a child being tucked in. She felt her father's rough, warm hands on her skin as the tears forced their way from under her eyelids. Dr Barouche closed his bag. He was an observant man, and had he not been in such a hurry, he would have noticed the bottle's absence. But he was late and watching his patient instead.
"You will have to find courage from somewhere, Moira. You know your problem, don't you?"
She wiped her eyes which were now suddenly cold and dry again. Dr Barouche stood by her balcony window, staring out into the Square, feet apart, hands behind his back, head forward, dressed in the preposterous morning suit he affected when performing private examinations. Her room had been furnished from her old home with pieces that included a grandfather clock whose cavernous tocking disturbed the whole floor and a walnut chest on which were photographs of her parents: her mother on the left looking frightened, her big hands writhing in her lap, holding each other down; her father on the right, portly and confident - in just the pose Dr Barouche now affected.
"Like all your kind, you expect servants to do your suffering for you. You have passed your life in shallowness and complacency, never thinking that one day fear and suffering might track you down. What did the Roman say? Respice finem - consider your end. Without knowledge of suffering, we are helpless in our hour of trial, Moira. Were it not for the chemical crutches I give you ...."
"Fuck your crutches, you pompously flanelled twat." Moira's voice was cultured, firm and modest.
The man some called the Swami behind his back glanced at his watch again, a hint of warmth in his expression now.
"Well, I have no time to argue. We will see how you have coped when I get back." At last he noticed what she had left out on her bedside table. "Chocolates, Moira? You know they over-excite you."
But Moira's eyes were already turned back towards the square where the Dutch pensioners were piling back into their coach while Mr Bellibone danced up and down, whether in rage or glee, beside his ransacked table. Most of his chocolates had gone. She noticed he wore a long apron like the pop-eyed bald man who ran the hardware store in cowboy films.
"I left them out for you because I know you have a sweet tooth, Dr Barouche."
He frowned, hearing something in her tone that put him on his guard, but there was no time for more questions. He swept the four chocolates into one hand and dropped them in his pocket.
"Very well. I shall deflect temptation from you. Thank you for your gift, Moira."
"You have deserved them, Dr Barouche."
A line of Tennyson's that her father used to quote ran through Moira's head, something about a blank day breaking on bald streets. She heard the medical bag shut and Dr Barouche leave, then his voice on the stairs, followed by a brief screaming, probably from Jerome Campion who had once tried to rape her Then the sound as suddenly stopped. Probably the man had been writing poems on a lift or lavatory wall again. No matter how carefully staff monitored him, inspiration always seemed to come to him just when he had nothing to write on, or with. Really, standards were slipping disgracefully. Probably he was being locked in his room. Now she heard the engine of the doctor's BMW throb into life beneath her window, his being the only car allowed in front of the building during St Mark's Fair week.