“Oh, it’s you again.” There was a world-weary tone in Sergeant Fairweather’s voice which strongly suggested that he was far from overjoyed to receive a phone-call from Alistair T. Winkleigh.

“Yes,” Alistair acknowledged. “It is. Me, I mean.”

It sounded as though the sergeant was sighing. After he’d sighed for a while, he said, “And what can I do for you this time, sir?”

“Well, you see, I happened to be at Winslip Apartments today.”

“You did, did you?”

“Yes. It’s a block of flats.”

“I am familiar with it, sir.”

“It was swarming with policemen.”

“Swarming, sir? Like ants or wasps, you mean?”

“Well, they weren’t exactly swarming. Dawdling would perhaps be a better description. The top floor was dawdling with policemen.”

“Dawdling?”

“Or possibly teeming. Yes, I think teeming is a better word.”

Sergeant Fairweather sighed again.

“At any rate,” Alistair went on, “there were a lot of policemen there. On the fourteenth floor, that is. A dead body had been found. Strangled. And eviscerated. The internal organs had been arranged…”

“Sir. I have to stop you there. No details have been released of the, er, incident that was investigated earlier today. I have to ask how you came in possession of these, er…?”

“Facts?” Alistair suggested.

“Speculations,” Sergeant Fairweather replied.

“Well, a young policemen let me through. I wandered into the flat and…”

“You did what?”

“I’m an investigative journalist, sergeant. It’s what I do.”

“I happen to have read some of your, er, ‘journalism’, Mr Winkleigh. As far as I can see, you normally confine yourself to writing about award-winning hamsters and whistling old-aged pensioners.”

“The point is, sergeant, that you may recall that, when I spoke to you earlier in the week, I suggested the strong possibility that the resident of a flat on the fourteenth floor of Winslip Apartments might have, well, come to a sticky end. Prior to that I told you about another gentlemen who had been murdered by being thrown from the Shawvale viaduct.”

“I must remind you, sir,” said the sergeant, “that murder is your interpretation. Not ours.”

“The point I am trying to make….” Alistair was starting to be annoyed by Sergeant Fairweather’s thick-headedness which, he thought, was bordering on wilful obstructiveness. He drew a deep breath before continuing: “The point which I am trying to make is that I have alerted you to two mur… for the sake of argument, let’s call them two unexpected deaths. One of which involved a ritualistic evisceration which, according to you, may have been self-inflicted though I find it hard to imagine how that might have been done. In both cases, you failed to investigate until the body had already been found by, well, a civilian.”

“Do I take it that you wish to make a complaint, sir?”

“No, I bloody well do not! I mean, well, that is, I may consider that possibility at some future date. But for now what I’d really like you to do is investigate another unexplained disappearance. Which might possibly be a murder. Of course, we shan’t know if that is the case until you do a bit of investigating.”

“A third murder, sir?” The sergeant paused to let the implausibility of this sink in. “You have evidence of a third ‘murder’, have you?”

“Well, not evidence exactly. But reasonable cause for concern, I think. Given the fact that this is another local man who vanished without explanation.”

“Men vanish without explanation all the time, sir.”

“But there’s a common factor, in this case. Something that ties him with the previous two murders.”

“There is? And what, sir, might that be?”

“He’s gay.”

“Gay?”

“Homosexual.”

“I see, sir. And you think the previous two, er, victims might also have been…?”

“Of course they bloody were. As well you know. Or, at least, you bloody well should know if you’ve been doing your job, you incompetent bloody buffoon.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. Alistair wondered if he’d gone too far. Maybe he should not have shouted at Sergeant Fairweather. Maybe he had exceeded the bounds of polite conversation by referring to the sergeant as an incompetent bloody buffoon? Had Sergeant Fairweather hung up on him?

But no, here he was again. “Just getting a pen and paper, sir. Now then. What would be the name of the missing individual?”

“Richard Prestwich,” Alistair said. “P, R, E, S…”

“Yes, sir, I believe I can spell the name. Now, when was Mr Prestwich last seen and where does he live?”

No sooner had Alistair put the phone down than it was ringing again. A deep, rather ecclesiastical-sounding voice introduced itself as Reverend Frobisher, the vicar of St. John’s Church in Shawvale. “The church,” he said, “has suffered a somewhat unfortunate event. An artefact of some importance has been purloined.”

Alistair listened to the vicar’s sorry tale and as he did so he wondered how he might spin the mundane story of a petty theft into a yarn that would fill a few columns and keep the discerning readers of The Dursfield Evening News enthralled; on the edges of their seats, as it were.

“And was this artefact rare or unusual?” Alistair asked. “I mean, was it an item of great antiquity or of inestimable value?”

“Well, now you’ve hit the nail on the head,” said the vicar. “Let me explain.” And as he explained, Alistair knew that he had the story he was looking for.

“Yeah, boy, you done good.”

Alf Larkin had his feet up on the Formica-topped table in his kitchen. He was smoking a foul-smelling cigarette and drinking warm lager from a can. Alf lived in an end-of-terrace house just off Fore Street, no more than two minutes’ walk away from Phil’s house. The house was an old, solidly-built stone house, just like Phil’s parents’ house. But there the similarity ended. Phil’s mum kept her house spotlessly clean. It smelled of flowers and beeswax polish. Alf’s house was a mess. Scattered across the floor were empty bottles, greasy bits of newspaper that might once have been used to wrap fish and chips, ancient pairs of socks and discarded girlie magazines. There was an overpowering smell that was forty-five percent decaying food, forty-five percent bodily odour and ten percent something unidentifiable but distinctly unpleasant.

“Yeah,” said Alf, adding an impressive belch for dramatic effect, “you done all right, that’s what you done.”

It was midday on Thursday. Phil had only got back home at around two o’clock in the morning and he’d treated himself to a good long lie-in. Once he’d had his breakfast and slouched around reading a science fiction novel for a while, he decided to go and have a word with Alf. Phil didn’t know what had happened after he had done his owl-hooting impressions the night before. He was worried in case he’d done the wrong thing, in which case Alf might hold a grievance against him. And the one person Phil didn’t want to hold a grievance against him was Alf Larkin. If you got yourself into Alf’s bad books your life could take a sharp turn for the worse. But, as it turned out, everything seemed to have worked out fine, which put Phil’s mind at rest.

“I tell you what,” said Phil. “I nearly pissed myself when that old man turned up. I mean, why was the old git up there at that time of night, ’ey?”

“Vagrants,” Alf Larkin said, knowledgeably. “Down and outs. That’s where they go. Into churches is where they go. They have a kip on the pews. Still, no harm done. Like I said, you done good by giving us the warning signal. Me and Harry skedaddled out through the vestry or whatever it’s called. We never saw the tramp and he never saw us, which is all that matters.”

Yeah, Phil thought, but he saw me, didn’t he?

“What were you up to, then?” Phil asked. “You and Harry. You never said.”

“Having a look around is what we was up to.”

Phil smiled. “Yeah! I bet! But what were you really up to?”

Alf tapped the side of his nose. “The less you know, the better. Know what I mean?”

Phil was smiling still. The smile seemed to say: Come on, Alf, I’m a man of the world. I have my own ideas about what you were up to, so why don’t you just let me in on the secret, like you let Harry Throop in on it?

Just then the door to the kitchen opened. A young woman wearing a revealing negligée stood there. Her eyes were red from sleep, her blonde hair as disordered as a haystack in a gale. In her hand she was holding a spectacular-looking cross, the sort of thing that Phil recalled from the far-off days when he used to go to church. It was the sort of cross that you expect to see standing upon an altar. It was a golden cross studded with jewels of varying colours.

“Morning Alf,” the girl said. “I found this in the bathroom.”

“You stupid bitch, Sandra,” Alf replied. Then, winking at Phil, he added, “Don’t breathe a word to nobody. OK?”

Phil was looking a bit pale. He gulped before he answered. “OK, Alf,” he said. “You know you can trust me.”

“Excuse me, sir, you can’t go down there.”

They had just come out of the lift on the fourteenth floor of the tower block and there was a policeman barring their way.

“What’s happening?” asked Alistair.

“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t tell you anything about…”

“Oh, my God!” said Celestine, noting the open door at the far end of the corridor and the gaggle of policemen walking in and out of it. “It’s Doug, isn’t it!”

“Do you live here, madam?” the policemen asked.

“What?” Celestine raised a contemptuous eyebrow. “With Doug, you mean? What do you take me for? A drag queen or his char lady?”

The policeman, who was young and gave the impression of being somewhat intimidated by Celestine, struggled to find an appropriate response. It was while he was struggling that Alistair interrupted. Taking out his wallet, he flipped it open to show the policeman and said: “Press. I’ll need a statement from the crime scene officer in charge.”

The young policemen struggled even more to find a suitable response but by that time it was too late: Alistair, with Celestine in his wake, sailed majestically down the corridor to where policemen and various other men wearing gloves and surgical masks were wandering in and out of Doug’s room without, as far as Alistair could make out, any checks being made on their identities. Thus it was that Alistair wandered first into Doug’s living room and then into the bedroom before an eagle-eyed detective sergeant grabbed him firmly by the elbow and took him back out into the corridor.

“Reporter or not,” said the sergeant, “you’ve no right to be here, you are impeding a police investigation and if you don’t go voluntarily, I’ll be glad to have you escorted to the station.”

But by that time, Alistair was all too ready to get as far away from that reeking hellhole as he possibly could. What he’d seen in Doug’s bedroom had shocked and sickened him. He knew then that they were dealing with a someone who had killed before and would probably kill again. And, based on what he had done to Doug, it was clearly a killer with a warped and diseased imagination.

“I’m guessing the woman in the flat below must finally have managed to get someone to look at the leak from the flat above,” Alistair said, once they were on the road again.

“And it wasn’t water,” Celestine said.

“No. It wasn’t.”

“Poor Doug.”

“Yes,” said Alistair. There was really nothing else to say on the matter.

“What the fuck am I doing here?”

Phil had been standing outside the railings for the last half an hour. On the other side of the railings was a graveyard. At the centre of the graveyard was a church: St John’s. It was a small, stone-built church, dating from the 18^th Century, with a squarish belltower at one end. Phil thought it was ugly. Then again, Phil thought all churches were ugly. His mother was a staunch Catholic but Phil had lapsed at an early age. Once upon a time, he had been an altar boy at St Jude’s, the Catholic Church at the other end of the village. He’d never been inside St. John’s, though. It was Anglican and therefore, in his mother’s opinion, heretical.

Phil looked at his wristwatch. In the darkness, he had to squint to see the faintly-glowing luminescent numbers. It was gone half-past one.

“Jesus Christ!” he said and then, realising the inadvertent blasphemy, he crossed himself out of ingrained habit, glanced at the church and muttered, “Sorry, God, no offence intended. Only, it’s past my bedtime, my mum will be wondering where I am, I told her I’d be back at soon as the pub closed, and now here I am stuck outside a bleedin’ cemetery at half-past one in the bleedin’ morning, and I don’t even know why I’m here!”

St John’s Church stood some way beyond the far end of the village, at the end of a track that led nowhere except to the church itself. The track was barely used, due to the fact that hardly anyone went to the church any more. If he’d been standing there at half-past one in the afternoon, Phil would have been unlikely to see another person. At half-past one in the morning, there was literally no chance, not any chance at all, zero, zilch, rien, of seeing anyone, so why Alf Larkin had posted him there “as a lookout” was anyone’s guess.

“Evening.”

Phil’s heart skipped a beat, or maybe two beats. There was a voice in the darkness.

“Lovely night,” said the voice, a deep, rumbling baritone voice. “If you like that sort of thing.”

Phil could just about make out a more or less man-sized shape, a black silhouette against the slightly less black darkness all around. What was he doing here at that time of the night? A horrible thought occurred to Phil: maybe the man had followed them? Maybe he knew what they were up to. In which case the man knew more than Phil knew. All that Alf Larkin had told Phil was that he and his mate, Harry Throop, were going to take a shufti around the old church and if anyone happened to come along, Phil was to let them know. He would do this by hooting like an owl. This was a problem since Phil didn’t know how to hoot like an owl – he’d never tried doing it. But (he told himself) nobody would come along that remote path at half-past one in the morning anyway, so the occasion for him to hoot like an owl would never arise.

Or so he had thought.

The man was still standing there. He was waiting for Phil to say something. Phil couldn’t think of anything to say. He could try hooting like an owl but that, he thought, might rouse the man’s suspicions. So, he said: “Warm. For the time of year.”

The man laughed. Phil didn’t know why. The fact that the night was warm did not seem particularly humorous to Phil. Maybe the man was a nutcase?

“I suppose it is,” the man said at last. “At least the sky is dark.”

Yes, he’s definitely a nutter, Phil thought. Better humour him, then maybe he’ll go away. “Yes,” Phil agreed. “The sky is dark, as a rule. At night.”

“That is where you are mistaken,” the man said. “The moon at present is a waxing crescent. A couple of weeks ago, it was a full moon. Not so dark then.”

“Ah.” Phil was running out of things to say. He just wished the man would go away.

“Tonight is better for star-gazing, you see. Do you take an interest in astronomy, by any chance?”

“Not really.”

“You should,” said the man. “The Universe in all its splendour stretches to unfathomable distances and it’s there in the sky for all of us to see. And yet so few of us even bother to look.”

“You’re right there,” said Phil, thinking to himself: the old man must be drunk, or on drugs, or maybe just short of a few screws. But whatever he is, I wish he’d stop nattering to me and hurry up and go wherever it is he’s going.

“Well,” said the old man, “so nice to have talked to you. I must be off now.”

About bloody time too (thought Phil) but he said, “Yeah. Take care.”

“Thank you,” said the old man and he turned around and walked back along the path, past the railings and then he stopped. Having stopped, he turned towards the gate set into the railings. He unlatched the gate and it creaked open on rusty hinges. Then he walked onto the path leading from the gate towards the church. “Oh, no!” thought Phil, “the bloody fool’s only going into the bloody church, isn’t he!” What was Phil to do? What could he do? Alf and Harry were in the church. Phil didn’t know exactly what they were up to but it was a safe bet that whatever it was it didn’t involve praying. Phil had to give the warning signal. To let Alf and Harry know that someone was coming. But what did an owl sound like, exactly? Something like twit-twoo, wasn’t it? How was he going to make a noise like that? And even if he could make a noise like that, what chance was there that he’d be able to make it loud enough to be heard inside the church? Oh, sod it, any sort of hooting noise would have to do.

He hooted at the top of his voice as he belted down that narrow little lane back towards the village as fast as his legs would carry him.

It was too hot to be working out, really. But Michael couldn’t face the thought of going back to his digs and staying in his room all evening. And he couldn’t face the thought of going out to a pub. So what else was there? The gym was called The Dursfield Fitness Studio but everyone called it Big Donnie’s because the owner’s name was Donnie and he was only a few inches over five feet tall. But what he lacked in height, he made up for in muscle. Donnie was seriously fit.

Big Donnie’s Gym was in an old warehouse that had been given a lick of paint and fitted out with a dozen benches, some weight-racks and a couple of exercise bikes. That evening all the windows were open but even so it felt hot and airless.

There were only two other people there: an unfit middle-aged bloke who was struggling with some light weights on a barbell and a young muscular chap, in his twenties, with dark, curly hair and a deep suntan; he was lifting serious weights. Michael seemed to know him from somewhere though he couldn’t think where.

It was while Michael was having a break after doing a couple of hundred sit-ups, that the young chap came over to him. Michael was leaning against the wall next to an open window at the time. He was surprised when the man spoke to him. “If you’ve got a few minutes…” he said.

Michael, who had been drinking from a bottle of water that he’d brought with him, put the bottle down on the windowsill and turned to look at the man. “What?” he said.

“I was wondering if you’d spot for me. Just a couple of minutes.”

It wasn’t unusual for one man to ask another man to ‘spot’ for them. It meant that they were trying to lift weights on the edge of their capability. If the weights slipped they could seriously hurt themselves. So the person ‘spotting’ stood by, ready to hold the weights or lower them back onto a rack if the lifter got into trouble.

“OK,” said Michael. “Where are you?”

The young man nodded towards a bench at the far side of the gym. Michael watched him walking over to the bench. He was one of those chaps who dressed up to work out. He was wearing flashy Adidas trainers, long white socks, tight satin-sheen shorts and a low-cut sports vest to show off his pecs and biceps. That was when Michael recognised him. He was the builder he’d seen a few times walking past the showroom window. The one who’d smiled at Michael on one occasion. He could lift weights well enough. Michael didn’t need to help him once.

“Cheers,” the man said, when he’d finished doing some bench presses.

“You’re welcome,” said Michael.

Michael assumed the young man must be a homo. Some of them looked masculine but they gave themselves away one way or another. Sometimes it was the way they spoke, sometimes it was the way they walked, sometimes it was the aftershave they wore, sometimes it was the way they fluttered their hands. With this young chap, though, it was the way he dressed. Done up to the nines. Not like Michael who was wearing a tatty old pair of running shoes, a baggy pair of tracksuit bottoms and a tee-shirt that was frayed at the edges. He didn’t go to the gym to be looked at. Whereas this young chap did.

Michael was thinking this when a young woman walked in. By rights, women weren’t allowed in the gym. But sometimes they wandered in anyhow. This one was a sight for sore eyes: a blonde, big-bosomed, good-looking, wearing a tight tee-shirt and an arse-hugging skirt. She went straight over to the young man, flung her arms around him and kissed him.

“I thought you’d be ready,” she said. “You haven’t forgotten you’re taking me for dinner, I hope.”

The young man smiled back. Then he kissed her again. “I’ll get showered and I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Michael wasn’t sure what to make of it. Maybe the young man was a queer and the girl didn’t realise? Or maybe Michael had been wrong about him? No. Michael had an instinct about these things. When he saw a bloke, he could tell straight away if he was a homo. Michael carried on doing a set of barbell curls and watched the girl from the corner of his eye. The poor, silly bint didn’t have a clue. Some girls were like that. Suddenly she looked at Michael, a frown on her face. “What d’you think you’re looking at?” she said.

“Me?” he said, genuinely shocked. “Not me, miss.”

Michael glanced across at the fat, middle-aged man who was sitting, panting on a bench. They raised their eyebrows at one another as though to say, “What’s up with her, I wonder?”

But Michael knew what was up with her. She was dating a homo. “Poor, silly bint,” he thought. But it made him smile.

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Alistair drove Celestine back to her house. By the time they got there, the evening was well advanced and Alistair’s determination to go back to his room to work on his latest world exclusive story (“Dursfield Tripe-Eating Contest, Shock Result!”) was waning by the minute. When Celestine suggested that he should stay for dinner (“I have a wonderful way with risotto, my love”) it occurred to Alistair that the editor of the Dursfield Evening News, the newspaper’s entire readership and, indeed, the rest of the world’s population, would be none the worse for being kept waiting one more day for the shock result of the Dursfield Tripe-Eating Contest and so he consented to Celestine’s suggestion.

Sitting in her lounge, a fragrant breeze wafting in from the garden through the french windows, their conversation soon turned to murder. If they wanted to find out what had happened to Doug, the first thing they would need to do would be to get into his flat. Alistair felt sure that there must be a caretaker who had a key. Find the caretaker and the rest would be plain sailing.

“When do you want to go?” Celestine asked.

“No time like the present.”

“Leave it till tomorrow,” Celestine said. “We can go at the crack of dawn. Six o’clock, seven o’clock, something like that.”

“Why not now?” Alistair asked.

“Now,” said Celestine, “I have something else I need to do.”

“Oh?” said Alistair.

Celestine flung her arms around him and planted upon his lips a kiss that took his breath away.

“Oh!” said Alistair.

In the event, they did not go to Doug’s flat at six o’clock the next morning. Nor at seven o’clock. Indeed, at ten o’clock they were still in bed. At eleven o’clock, they were eating a leisurely breakfast of toast, marmalade and coffee. It was almost midday by the time they got to Doug’s flat. There was no need for them to search for a caretaker to admit them, however. The door to the flat was already open and the place was seething with policemen.

“I’ve known Doug for about two years. You see, I came to teach at this school four years ago. It was my second teaching job. I did a short stint at a small private school down south for a while but I never felt at home there. I grew up in Yorkshire, a small village to the west of Dursfield, and so I decided to come back.”

Jim Wilson, Alistair T. Winkleigh, Celestine and Lord Byron were sitting in the so-called ‘beer garden’ of the Lion and Thistle public house, in a leafy suburb of Dursfield. The garden was in reality no more than a paved area with tables, benches and a few withered looking shrubs in ornamental pots, but at least it was out of doors and a slight breeze made the heat of early evening more bearable. Alistair and Jim were drinking cold lager. Celestine was sipping a bright pink concoction decorated with cherries on cocktail sticks and a small paper parasol; this was apparently called a Pink Indiscretion and tasted absolutely foul but had the benefit of being potently alcoholic. Lord Byron was snoring rather than imbibing.

“You came here four years ago,” Alistair said, “but you only knew Doug for two years. Was that when Doug started teaching in the school?”

Celestine interrupted. “Good God, no! I’ve known Doug for absolutely ages and he’s always been a teacher in that god-awful school.”

“Celestine’s right,” Jim confirmed. “When I said I only got to know him a couple of years ago, I mean that I only got to know him well. As a friend. I’d seen him around, of course. In the staff room, in assembly, passing in the corridors. But it was only after we happened to bump into one another one night, at a nightclub, that we realised, well, that we had something in common. By which I mean that we were both gay.”

“Homosexual,” Celestine explained for Alistair’s benefit.

“I am aware of the meaning of the word,” Alistair replied, tetchily.

Celestine turned her attention back to Jim Wilson. “So, anyway, my love, as far as I can see, the key to the mystery is whatever happened last Friday night.”

“We went out, as we usually did, on Friday evenings. It was my turn to drive. That’s how we generally do it. One week, we go in Doug’s car, the next week we go in mine.”

Celestine gave a self-satisfied grin and nudged Alistair in the ribs with an elbow. “Just as I thought,” she said.

Alistair sucked his empty pipe reflectively. “So what we need to know now is what exactly were the last movements of Doug Steel.”

Jim winced. “The last movements? You really think that…?”

“The last observed movements,” Alistair interjected. “Where the word ‘last’ should be taken to mean ‘prior’ or ‘previous’ rather than ‘ultimate’ or ‘final’.”

“Where is this nightclub that you and Doug went to?” Celestine asked.

“It’s a place in Huddersfield,” Jim replied. “The Gemini. We often go there. Usually on Fridays but sometimes on Saturdays. Once or twice on Friday and Saturday. The Gemini is Doug’s favourite club. I prefer Charlie’s in Leeds. It’s smaller but more, well, intimate, if you know what I mean.”

Alistair, who had only once in his entire life been to a nightclub of any sort – a place the size of a small aeroplane hangar in London – did not know what Jim meant. If the London nightclub had been anything to go by, intimacy was not a defining quality of such establishments. But he did not enter into a discussion on that subject. His journalistic instincts told him that Jim Wilson would seize upon any opportunity to digress at length from the topic under discussion and it would, therefore, be prudent to avoid providing him with such opportunities.

“Why do you drive so far to go to these places?” Alistair asked. “Don’t you ever go to gay pubs and clubs here in Dursfield?”

Jim Wilson gave an involuntary shudder. “Certainly not.”

“Why not?”

“We are teachers, Mr Winkleigh. Work it out for yourself.”

Alistair had not given any thought to the clandestine nature of a homosexual’s life. He wondered whether or not that factor that might be significant to his investigation. “You told us you went in your car,” he said, after a moment. “So what time did you arrive? And what happened thereafter?”

Jim explained that he had met Doug at Doug’s flat at about half-past eight the previous Friday. Jim had driven to Huddersfield and he and Doug had spent an hour or so at a pub called The Greyhound. At about half-past ten they had moved on to The Gemini which, according to Jim, was one of the biggest and most popular gay clubs anywhere in Yorkshire. The club had a big dancefloor and a few little rooms and niches where the pounding disco music wasn’t quite so loud, which meant that it was possible to find a relatively quiet corner where you could go to sit and chat.

“Though,” added Jim, “that’s not really the point, is it?”

“How do you mean?” asked Alistair.

“Well, I mean, you don’t go to a nightclub to talk, do you?”

“Don’t you?”

“Of course not! You go to dance and…” Jim suddenly realised that he might be talking more freely than was entirely prudent. This man, Alistair T. Winkleigh, was, after all, a journalist. Jim Wilson had always led a discreet life. Nobody at school had the slightest inkling that he was gay. In fact, he’d overheard some pupils making ribald comments to the effect that they thought Mr Wilson was having a passionate love affair with Miss Cheams, the geography teacher, a contingency which was made all the more improbable by the fact that, to Jim’s certain knowledge, Irene Cheams had not the slightest romantic interest in men.

“You go to dance and do what?” Alistair prompted.

Celestine answered the question with tinkling laughter. “Come on, Alistair! You may have led a sheltered life; but surely not entirely monastic! Men go to clubs of that sort in search of a shag.”

Jim cast his eyes down. He seemed strangely interested in watching the bubbles in his glass of lager.

“Bloody Nora!” cried Celestine. “You are blushing!”

Jim put his glass upon the table and wiped some froth from his lips with the back of one hand. “It’s th-the heat,” he stammered. “I, I always get a bit, flu-flushed when it’s warm.”

The first thing Jim Wilson did as he left through the staff door at the back of the school was to loosen his tie. With his pale grey jacket draped over his shoulder, he slouched across the hot tarmac of the small car park towards the slightly rusty maroon Ford Fiesta that sat baking beneath the wholly inadequate shade of a straggly hawthorn bush. It was just after five o’clock but the air was hot and stagnant. Maybe he would go out tonight? To his local pub, The Lion and Thistle. That had a garden, of sorts – a paved square at the back of the pub with half a dozen tables and benches scattered about. Maybe he’d give Doug a ring, to see if he fancied coming out for a drink.

No! What was he thinking about? Doug had vanished. “Disappeared,” thought Jim, “in mysterious circumstances.” That was such a Doug-like thing to do. Anyone else would have phoned in sick or made some other excuse for not being at work – a death in the family, maybe, or some vague but unavoidable personal crisis. But no, that wasn’t Doug’s way. Doug would just vanish, without a word. So much more dramatic.

“And then, next week, he’ll saunter in as though nothing has happened.” Jim couldn’t help smiling. It appealed to his sense of humour.

He unlocked the car door and sat in the driver’s seat. Blast! It was hot! The sun had been shining on the car’s leather-effect vinyl upholstery, turning it into a red-hot torture device for the human buttocks. He closed the door and wound down the window. Then he put the key into the ignition and was just about to start the old car into motion when he noticed a face. A woman was smiling at him through the open window.

“Jim!” the woman said.

Jim Wilson smiled back uncertainly. He was desperately trying to think if he’d ever met this woman before.

“You don’t recognise me, do you?” the woman said.

“Ummm…” Jim spent a moment wondering whether he should be honest or polite. Honesty won. “No, I don’t.”

“Sandy Billington’s party. Last summer.”

Jim remembered Sandy Billington. She was a friend of Doug’s. An actress. He remembered the party too. It had been in a big house in one of the more fashionable suburbs of Leeds. Roundhay, somewhere like that. There had been a swimming pool and a cocktail waiter. There had also been something like a hundred guests. If this woman had been one of them, she hadn’t made an impression.

“Of course,” the woman said, “I might have looked a bit different. My hair was auburn.” Her hair at the moment, was blond. “And very, very long.” Now it was very, very short. “And, I was probably wearing a black leather catsuit.” She was now wearing beige slacks and a white silk shirt with puffed-out sleeves like a ballet dancer. “But, damn’ it all! You must remember my Old English cough-drops!”

“Aha!” A look of recognition bloomed on Jim’s face. “Celestine! How fabulous to see you again!”

Within a second, Jim was out of the car, embracing Celestine with vigour. “I didn’t recognise you in the glasses!”

Celestine happened to be wearing a pair of very large, very dark sunglasses which obscured most of her face. “Oh, these?” she said. “I’d forgotten all about them.”

Having released Celestine from his embrace, Jim said, “What brings you here? You don’t have a child in this school, do you?”

“Do I look old enough to have a child at this school?” Celestine asked frostily.

“Well, no, but… Well, people adopt, you know.”

Just then, Jim became aware of a strange, slobbery wet thing that was moving sinuously over the fingers of his right hand. On looking down, he was surprised to find that it was a tongue. The tongue belonged to a big, shaggy dog that looked a bit like an Old English Sheepdog with overtones of Golden Retriever and St Bernard. When he looked back up at Celestine, Jim was equally surprised to see that she had been joined by a tall, gangling man wearing a dark green, threadbare corduroy jacket and clenching an unlit pipe firmly between his teeth.

“I’m Alistair T. Winkleigh,” the man said, extending a hand. “And you, I am given to believe, are a homosexual.”

Master Marxism In Ten Days. That was a good seller. Nevin was arranging the window display in his shop, The Wrong Read. He had put a stack of that book right at the centre of the window.

Marxism For Cats. That was another good seller. He placed a few copies of that in a prominent position too.

Das Kapital. Nobody could be bothered reading that these days. Nevin could perfectly understand why. It was excessively long and contained very few good jokes. He removed the dusty copy which had been in the window so long that its cover was becoming bleached by the sunlight, and replaced it with the paperback edition of The Lord Of The Rings. The two books were of about equal thickness but The Lord Of The Rings had elves and dragons whereas Das Kapital did not. If only Marx had added a few dragons to his masterwork maybe the student population of Dursfield would be clamouring to read it. “Old Karl really missed a trick there,” Nevin mused, as he added a copy of The Hobbit to the window display for good measure.

The bell above the front door of the shop tinkled. A customer! He didn’t get many of those during the summer months when most of the students were away doing the sorts of things that students liked to do, which tended to be more or less anything that did not involve studying.

Nevin, who had been leaning over the waist-height panel that separated the interior of the shop from the display in the window, turned back into the shop to deal with his customer. “Can I help you?” he said and then added, “Oh, it’s you! I didn’t think the stuff I sell would be your cup of tea.”

“It isn’t,” said Gary. “That’s not why I’m here. By the way, this is Phil. He’s a mate of mine.”

“Speaking of tea, can I offer you cup of something herbal?” Nevin asked.

“We haven’t got time,” Gary said. “We’re looking for someone.”

“Richard,” Nevin said. “Nobody’s seen him all week. I saw him on Sunday but…”

“No,” Gary interrupted. “Not Richard. Ziggy. Do you know anyone called Ziggy?”

Nevin’s mouth took on a grim set. “Why are you looking for Ziggy?”

“Because,” said Gary, “Ziggy might know what happened to Richard.”

“Is that Alistair?”

“Who’s speaking?”

“I spoke to him before. He knows what it’s about.”

Derek Robottom sighed, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes and put his glasses back on again. He had no patience with idiots and, he had decided, whoever it was on the other end of the line was clearly an idiot. But he was probably also a reader of the Dursfield Evening News and so Derek Robottom struggled to suppress the urge to tell the man to bugger off and, instead, in a calm and polite voice, he said, “I’m afraid Mr Winkleigh isn’t here at the moment.”

“When will he be back?”

“Hard to tell. He doesn’t actually work here, you see. He’s a freelancer. There’s no telling when he’ll next pop into the office. Could be today, tomorrow, next week or next month. If it’s a personal matter, maybe you can give me your contact details and I’ll pass them on.”

“Who are you?”

Derek Robottom didn’t like the man’s abrupt manner. No, he didn’t like it at all. But he sucked meditatively upon his dentures, glanced at Denise the Arts Editor as she toddled past in her high heels, short dress and revealingly low-cut tee-shirt and, when he felt sufficiently calm, he said, “My name is Derek Robottom. I am the News Editor.”

“Then it’s you I want to speak to.”

“Oh yes? You have some news?”

“The biggest news you’ve had in your life.”

“Oh yes?”

Derek was prepared to listen to the man for another thirty seconds. If he hadn’t come up with an actual news them in that time, he’d end the conversation then and there.

“Yes,” the man said. “I can tell you all about the murders.”

“Oh yes? And which murders would those be.”

Michael told him.

“What’s his jacket got to do with anything?”

Phil shrugged. “Seems funny, that’s all.”

Gary and Phil had already been to the central library, a concrete monstrosity occupying three floors, in the hope that Richard might be there. But not only was Richard not at work but, what is more, according to the woman at the Enquiries desk he hadn’t been to work all week.

“If he’d decided to kill himself, he wouldn’t have taken his jacket off first, would he?” said Gary.

“Then again,” added Phil, “if someone had killed him for his money…”

“They wouldn’t have left his wallet in his jacket…”

“…and then chucked the jacket over the viaduct.”

They had left the town centre now and were walking along Clutterford Lane. Gary hadn’t been there since the night when he had gone to the West Indian Club and then on to Richard’s place. By daylight, it looked totally different. At night it had seemed strange and vaguely exotic. In the bright light of day, the long, upwards-sloping lane was merely shabby. The houses here had seen better days. Some of them must have been quite grand once upon a time. They had front gardens surrounded by ornamented cast-iron railings, some even had porticos – colonnaded porches that tried to look like entrances to Roman temples. But now the gardens were rank and weed-infested, the plaster and paint had long ago flaked off the colonnades and everywhere gave the impression of decline and decay.

“Here we are,” said Gary, at last.

They were standing in front of a two-storey house whose walls, like those of many of the neighbouring houses, were blackened by soot, the lingering residue of the smoke-belching chimneys which had once darkened the air of this old mill town.

“Number 257,” Phil said. “You’re sure this is the place?”

“Well…” Gary glanced at number 255 to the left and at number 259 to the right. “They all look alike, really. It was dark. We’d had a few drinks. I wasn’t paying much attention.”

“So you’re not sure, then?”

Gary’s expression brightened. “There’s that tree. In the garden.”

Phil looked at the tree. It was in a dingy little, litter-strewn front garden just to the right of where they were standing. “That’s number 259,” he said.

“That’s right,” said Gary. “I remember waking up and hearing birds twittering. And when I looked out of the window, they were sitting in that tree. But here’s the thing. The tree wasn’t right outside the window. It was on the left of the window. Which, from where we are now standing, would be on our right. In other words, the tree was in the garden of number 259, which must mean that Richard’s flat is in number 257. Come on, let’s ring the bell.”

They walked along the short, uneven, cracked paved path that led from the street to the front door of the house. There were two buttons set in the wall to the right of the front door, each of which was identified with a hand-printed name enclosed in a small transparent plastic box. The top button was labelled “R. Prestwich”. The button below that was labelled simply “Gupta”. Gary pressed the top button. He heard a bell ringing somewhere inside the house. He waited and then he rang the bell once more. On his third attempt the door was opened. Standing there, facing them, was a young Indian woman wearing a colourful red and gold-trimmed sari and holding in her arms a decidedly overplump-looking baby. Without waiting for Gary to say anything, the woman snapped at him: “He’s not here.”

Gary was flustered. The woman was in the process of closing the door before he could think of anything to say. “Richard,” he said, at last, “I was wondering if…”

“I told you,” the woman said, “he’s not here.”

“Was he here yesterday?”

“No.”

“The day before?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. He is not a good person. If he has gone away, that is good.”

“Could I come inside? Just to go and see if he’s in, I mean?”

“No!” The woman slammed the door.

Phil said, “That’s that, then. End of the line. End of the investigation.”

“There is someone,” Gary said. “Someone who might know where Richard went.”

“Who would that be?”

“A bloke called Ziggy.”

“And who,” said Phil, “is Ziggy?”

“No idea,” said Gary, “but I know a man who might.”

That evening, Alistair T. Winkleigh was struggling to complete a news story about an unusually virulent attack of green-fly which had been plaguing the Mayor’s ornamental rose garden, when he became aware of a hesitant knocking upon the door to his room.

“Enter!” he cried out.

The door opened and in strode the scruffy art student from the adjoining room. Gerry, or Gary, or Geraint or whatever he was called.

“Gerry,” said Alistair, choosing one of the possible names at random, “and what can I do for you?”

“I’m worried.”

“Indeed. What about? Though I should warn you that if the cause of your worry is medical you should see a doctor and if it’s financial, I am the last person in the world you should see.”

“It’s a friend of mine.”

“Ah?”

“Well, more an acquaintance, really. But anyway, he’d gone missing.”

“In unexplained circumstances?” Alistair asked, hopefully.

“Yes. He’s a librarian.”

“Is that significant?”

“I don’t know. He’s also gay.”

“Ah!” said Alistair. “That, I think, is of more relevance. Clear my underwear off the sofa, sit yourself down and tell me all about it.”

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The Joy Of Conjugation

“Sir! Sir!”

Jim Wilson, MA (Oxon), teacher of the French language at the Dursfield Comprehensive School, turned away from the blackboard upon which he had been writing the conjugation of the verb pouvoir in both the future and conditional tenses. He lowered his glasses onto the bridge of his nose and peered over the top of the frames, focussing his eyes upon a scrawny teenaged boy occupying a desk in the second row, his hand waving in the air, a look of such excitement upon his face as was rarely to be seen among Mr Wilson’s students.

“Yes, Tomkins?” he said.

“What’s the French for ‘seal’, sir?!”

Jim Wilson groaned inwardly. In his experience, one of the principal interests which teenage boys found in the study of the French language was the discovery of words which, when slightly mispronounced, sounded improper in English. The French word for “seal” is “phoque” and, when spoken with a Yorkshire accent, this sounds remarkably like an English slang word describing the act of copulation. Fortunately, there was more than one type of seal and Jim Wilson had memorised the French for all of them.

“Sceller,” he replied.

“What, sir?”

“Sceller, to seal; Je scelle, I seal; tu scelles, you seal; il scelle, he seals; elle scelle…”

Tomkins interrupted: “No, I don’t mean ‘to seal’, I mean ‘a seal’. You know, the animal that swims around and eats fish.”

“Ah, I see. You are referring to the mammal.”

“Yes.”

“In French?”

“Yes.”

Jim Wilson ruminated upon this for a while and then burst out: “Quite simple. Éléphant de mer!”

Young Tomkins screwed up his face in disappointment. “Sir. There’s another word.”

“Is there?”

“That’s what I heard, anyway.”

“I didn’t realise you had such a keen interest in marine biology, Tomkins, let alone marine biology in French.”

Tomkins smiled. “There is, though, isn’t there, sir. Another word for ‘seal’, I mean.”

“Boff!” Jim Wilson shrugged his shoulders in the French manner. “Bien sûr. Il y en a beaucoup. Par example, le léopard de mer, et puis, le veau marin….”

“Sir!” Tomkins was practically biting his lower lip with frustration. “Sir, there’s another word though, there is, though. There is, sir, isn’t there?”

The other pupils in the class who, initially, had shown some interest in Tomkins’s interruption, largely due to the fact that it had the wholly desirable effect of slowing down the rate at which their teacher was writing verb conjugations on the blackboard, were by now beginning to grow restless. Someone threw a paper plane across the room and someone else tittered. A voice from the back of the class said “Bloody Hell, Tomkins, shut up!” and another voice said, “Who cares about seals, anyway?”

Jim Wilson decided it was time to restore order. He snapped his fingers, then pointed a finger at Tomkins and said: “Translate ‘I shall be able to see the seal tomorrow.’”

Tomkins looked aghast. How was he supposed to translate that?

“Come on, boy,” Jim Wilson urged, “all you need is the future first person singular conjugation of the verb pouvoir” – he turned pointedly to look at the writing on the blackboard; then he turned back to stare at Tomkins – “which, of course, you will by now have committed to memory. As for the remaining vocabulary, well, I am given to understand that you know that already. So, go on. Off you go. Translate ‘I shall be able to see the seal tomorrow.’”

Tomkins looked miserably at the conjugation tables written on the blackboard, then he stumbled through the translation, placing undue emphasis on what he conceived to be the naughty French word for ‘seal’ but this turned out to be considerably less rib-ticklingly hilarious than he had anticipated and nobody laughed.

Jim Wilson turned back to the blackboard and continued, dispiritedly, writing out verb tables. He was in a bad mood. It didn’t help that he had barely slept the night before, thanks to the heat; and the stuffy atmosphere of the classroom only made him feel sluggish. Increasingly, of late, he wondered if he might not be wasting his time, letting his life drift past him. Trying to teach these kids a language that they did not want to learn was becoming an increasingly arduous and depressing activity. He wasn’t alone in his feelings in that respect. He and Doug Steel had talked about it often. If anything, Doug was even closer to the end of his tether than Jim was. “One day, I’m just going to clear off out of it,” Doug had told him only a few days earlier. “I’m going to go and live in a shack on a tropical island and write the Great Novel that’s lurking somewhere inside me.” Jim had laughed. That was the sort of thing Doug was always saying. But, of course, he would never do anything about it. Or would he? The fact of the matter was that Doug has disappeared. Vanished without a trace. Jim had been with Doug the previous Friday. And he had seen neither hide nor hair of him since. On Monday morning, Doug simply had not turned up at school. Jim had tried phoning Doug. The headmaster had tried too. There had been no answer. Maybe Doug had gone away somewhere on a whim? If not to a tropical island at least to somewhere more intellectually stimulating than Dursfield. Southport perhaps? Or Bridlington? Or Bognor Regis? Jim Wilson was of the opinion that just about anywhere you could name would be more intellectually stimulating than Dursfield.

Jim loosened his tie. It was too hot to be wearing a tie but the headmaster insisted upon it. “A teacher,” he had said, “sets standards which his pupils will emulate.” For the male teachers, those standards included wearing a jacket and tie at all times. As the heat had continued to increase over the past few days, the jacket rule had been relaxed (by special dispensation, jackets could now be removed during class) but the tie rule had not.

Jim Wilson looked at the blank faces, the tired eyes, the yawning mouths, the bored expressions of the teenagers arranged in rank upon rank of desks in front of him and he thought to himself that he would like to be anywhere, absolutely anywhere, apart from where he was. Maybe Doug really had done a moonlight flit? If so, Jim envied him.

“You took your time, didn’t you!”

Michael had just returned to the showroom and Darren was already moaning at him. Michael looked around the room as though trying to spot the crowds of customers who were, no doubt, hiding behind the shower cubicles and bathroom suites. Having failed to find any, he said, “You don’t seem to be rushed off your feet.”

“That’s not the point!” Darren snapped. “The point is, you said you’d pop out for five minutes to buy a newspaper and – Darren looked ostentatiously at his wristwatch, a gold-effect Timex that tried to look as though it had ambitions to be a Rolex – “you’ve been twenty minutes. More like twenty-two minutes, as a matter of fact.”

“Yeah, well, there was a queue. In the newsagents.”

Darren glared at Michael. “So where is it, then?”

“Where’s what?”

“The newspaper.”

“I chucked it away. There was nothing worth reading.”

Darren glared at him a bit more then muttered something about Michael having the wrong attitude and how he, Darren, was far too easy-going with him. Then he went back into his cubicle with its floor-fan and its open window. He would no doubt spend the rest of the afternoon on the phone, as he always did, while Darren would once again have to sit at his desk in the hot, stagnant air of the showroom.

Michael was still on edge after the phone call. It had been a mistake to phone a Fleet Street newspaper. They probably get all kinds of cranks phoning them which is why they hadn’t taken him seriously. No, the way to do it would be to get the local papers to run the story, then that would be picked up by the TV stations, then by the national newspapers. The BBC would take it from there. Michael already had a contact at the Dursfield Evening News. Even though the newspaper hadn’t done any proper investigating up to now, Michael had a feeling that the journalist he’d spoken to had at least taken him seriously. And he would take him even more seriously when Michael phoned again and gave him all the details.

Which just left the problem of how many details should Michael give? Michael wanted to convince the journalist that he knew what he was talking about so he would have to give him details that had not been made public. On the other hand, he didn’t want to give him any clues as to his identity. Michael wanted to be famous, but he didn’t want to be recognised. Like the superheroes in the comics he’d read when he was a boy: Batman and Superman and Spiderman. Michael had a secret identity. The thought made him smile.

The first one had been a bit of a mistake. He knew that now. Michael had picked him up in a pub in Halifax. The man was a taxi driver but it was his night off. He fancied himself as a bit of a hard man. He told Michael he’d been a boxer, said he worked out with weights, but Michael could tell right away that the man was over the hill, he drank too much, ate too much, he was starting to run to fat. Michael told him he lived in rented accommodation so he couldn’t invite the man back but he knew a place where they could go: somewhere with guaranteed privacy even though they’d be right out in the open. So the man drove him there in his taxi. If the man had ever been a boxer, he was a boxer no longer. He’d gone soft. Run to seed. Michael handled him easily. Bashed his head against the stone wall then hefted his body onto that parapet and over it went. The bloody idiot had taken his jacket off. He’d been about to unzip his jeans when Michael had put an end to him. He had no use for the jacket so he threw that over the parapet too. But what was the point of it all? The police reckoned the man had thrown himself off, committed suicide. The bloody morons!

Then there had been the teacher. Michael had met him in Huddersfield. It had been the teacher’s idea to drive back to his flat, which turned out to be on the fourteenth floor of a stinking high-rise on the fringes of Dursley. Michael had tied his arms to the bed with a couple of belts. He said it was a game. The stupid fucker believed him. Once he was tied up, Michael had put a pillow over the man’s face. He’d seen people bumped off that way in films. It looked easy. But it wasn’t. The man fought back, thrashing around with his feet, trying to scream. In the end, Michael had taken the pillow off the man’s face and knocked him senseless with a brass-bottomed lamp that was standing on the bedside table. Then, to finish him off, he went into the kitchen and got a knife. Then he cleaned up. Cleaned the knife. Washed the glasses they’d been drinking from. Polished the brass-bottomed lamp. After that, he stayed with the man for a while, just looking at him. Until dawn came.

Then there had been Richard. Michael had made a much neater job of that. He was learning from experience. He’d come better prepared that time. With a thin Nylon cord. It was neat and quick. Once it was done, he arranged Richard on the bed. He looked peaceful there, staring up at the ceiling. But Michael knew the job wasn’t finished. Too neat. Too peaceful. So he’d got a knife again. And this time he really went to work.

But that was just the beginning. He was already planning the next one.

“Hello.”

“What?” Michael hadn’t noticed the woman entering the showroom. It gave him a shock to see her standing at the other side of his desk, watching him. For a moment, he felt as though she had been listening in on his thoughts.

“I said, I wonder if you can help me?” She was a young woman. Indian by the looks of it, though she was wearing a smart blue dress, not a sari, and her accent was more Dursley than Delhi.

Michael realised he’d been doodling on a pad of paper. He had drawn a picture of a man with his arms and legs flung wide apart and a big X carved across his body. Michael quickly slid the doodle underneath a stack of brochures. “What are you looking for, madam?” he said, standing and giving her a professional-quality smile.

She said she was looking for a bidet. At that moment, that seemed so ridiculous to Michael that he had to bite his lip to stop himself laughing. Glancing through the glass door into Darren’s cubicle, he saw that Darren was watching him with eagle eyes. Michael assumed his most businesslike manner. “Certainly, madam,” he said, suavely. “Is there any particular style or colour you are looking for?”

“We’ll need a battering ram.” Celestine was reclining on the sofa, stroking Lord Byron’s head. The dog had arranged himself in an optimal head-stroking position, lying stretched out on the floor with his slobbery jowls resting on the edge of the settee.

Alistair T. Winkleigh, who was sprawling on a loosely-stuffed armchair, with his back propped against one arm of his chair and his legs dangling over the other arm, made a sort of choked spluttering sound. “Did I hear you aright?” he asked, once the spluttering had subsided. “Did you say we would need a battering ram?”

“I did.”

“May I ask why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No.”

“Why, my love, to batter. What else would one use a battering ram for?”

Alistair sucked meditatively on his empty pipe. “I suppose,” he conceded, “that you have a point.”

After some more meditative pipe-sucking, he added, “But what exactly do you intend to batter?”

“The door to Doug’s room, of course.”

“Why would you want to batter the door to Doug’s room?”

“Oh, you are a dunce, Alistair! Obviously, we need to batter down the door to get into the room. Doug’s been done away with for sure. The people who own the building don’t seem bothered; the woman in the room below has been pestering them, so she says, but to no avail. And as for the police! Well, they couldn’t care less, could they. So, there’s nothing for it now – we have to take matters into our own hands.”

“That’s all well and good. In principle.” Alistair was no longer sucking his pipe; he was chewing on its stem, which was something he did only when experiencing a high degree of nervous excitement. “But the problem is, battering our way through his door would be breaking and entering.”

“Yes. So?”

“Breaking and entering is an activity of which the law takes a dim view.”

“Then the law, my sweet, is an ass.”

“It would also involve malicious damage. Of the door, I mean.”

“Who gives a toss about the bloody door? It’s a shoddy bloody door anyway. A bit of malicious damage could only do it good.”

“But the real clincher,” continued Alistair, “the thing that puts an insurmountable barrier in our way, which would, indeed, prevent us from succeeding in any attempt to batter down Doug’s door with a battering ram…is that…”

“Yes?”

“We haven’t got a battering ram.”

Celestine considered this point. “They must be available.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know. What sort of people use battering rams?”

“Nobody.”

“Really?”

“Not that I am aware of.”

“Ah.”

Celestine closed her eyes and stroked Lord Byron’s head with increased vigour, both activities aimed at increasing her powers of cogitation. After a few moments, her eyes snapped open again, she sat up straight, Lord Byron made a pathetic howling noise to indicate his disapproval of the sudden lack of head-rubbing, and she exclaimed: “Wilson!”

Alistair, who had been taken by surprise by Celestine’s exclamation, clenched his teeth on his pipe’s stem, said “What?” and sat up in his chair, his eyes fixed upon Celestine who, by this time, was striding around the room like Caesar exhorting his troops.

“Wilson,” Celestine said between strides. “I told you about him.”

“Ah, yes, of course.”

“You don’t remember, do you?”

“Well,” Alistair attempted to look as though he was not squirming before the ferocity of Celestine’s gaze, but his attempts were not successful.

“Wilson is Doug’s friend.”

“A close friend?” Alistair asked.

“If you mean, do they shag one another, I think not. Though maybe they do. In my experience, men are not very particular about that sort of thing. At any rate, they often go out together, to nightclubs and whatnot. Sometimes they go in Wilson’s car and sometimes they go in Doug’s. Apparently that has the benefit that if the person who isn’t driving meets someone with whom he wishes to spend the night, he can go off with that someone while the person who is driving returns home in his car. If they both find someone with whom they wish to go off, the same thing applies.”

“And if the person who is driving meets someone but the person who isn’t driving doesn’t…? Wouldn’t that mean that the person who isn’t driving gets cast adrift wherever the nightclub happens to be? Sheffield or Leeds or Harrogate or wherever?”

“I don’t think that situation has ever arisen.”

“Maybe it has now?”

“You mean that Wilson may have driven Doug in Wilson’s car to, wherever they went to. And Wilson drove off with someone, leaving Doug stranded?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“But they went off on Friday night. It’s Tuesday now. Surely Doug would have caught a bus or a train or hitched a lift home by this time?”

Alistair shrugged. “Between leaving his flat to go to… wherever it is he went to on Friday evening… and now, well, a thousand things might have happened.”

“And only Wilson would know! That’s it, don’t you see? It’s the answer to everything. We must speak to Wilson!”

“Where does he live?”

“I have no idea.”

“Then how are we going to find him?”

“Oh, that’s easy. I know where he works!”

Michael was standing in the telephone box down at the end of Green street. He had written down a phone number earlier on. Now he dialled it. He waited. The phone kept ringing but nobody was answering. Finally he got through. He put some coins into the slot. It was a woman’s voice at the other end. She said the name of the newspaper. Then she asked who he wanted to speak to. “The Editor,” Michael said. She told him the Editor was unavailable. Would he like to speak to his assistant? “No,” Michael said. “I’ve got a story. A big story.” Maybe she could put him through to the News Desk, she suggested. She wanted to know his name. “John,” Michael said. She asked for his surname. He nearly said “Smith” but then realised how phony that sounded so on the spur of the moment he said, “I prefer to stick to my first name.” Just a minute, she said, and she would try to put him though.

She was taking her time about it.

Michael shoved some more coins into the slot. It was sweltering hot. He felt the sweat pouring down his face, getting into his eyes, making them sting. He stared out through the grimy windows of the phone box. There was a woman waiting outside, wearing a long beige coat, far too heavy for the weather, and a brown hat. She had her arms folded. A shopping bag was hanging from the crook of one of her elbows. Michael smiled at her. She glowered back at him sourly.

“…a story for us. How can I help you?” The voice took him by surprise. He had not heard exactly what the man had said. “Is that the News Desk?” he asked. The man on the phone said it was. “Well,” said Michael, “you’d better hold the front page!” He’d expected the man on the other end to laugh when he’d said that but he didn’t. He said nothing. So Michael went on, “You’ll have heard about the murders in Dursfield.”

“Can you spell that?” said the man.

“Spell what?” said Michael. “You mean you want me to spell Dursfield?”

The man said that’s exactly what he wanted.

How stupid was that! Michael told the man in no uncertain terms that he didn’t have time to spell Dursfield because he had information about another murder and that’s what he wanted to talk about.

“Another murder?” the man said. He sounded sceptical. Not just sceptical, arrogant, as though he didn’t believe a word Michael had said. “And how did you come by this information?” the man asked.

“Because,” said Michael, “I happened to be there at the time.”

This time the man on the phone did laugh. Well, it might not have been a laugh. It might have been a cough. But to Michael it sounded as though the man was sniggering. Sniggering because he wasn’t taking Michael seriously. He probably thought Michael was deluded. Or a practical joker. He probably felt himself to be superior to Michael. Just because he worked on some poxy Fleet Street newspaper. That really wound Michael up.

“How old are you?” Michael snapped. That took the man by surprise. It took him a few seconds to gather his thoughts. Then he said, “I don’t see what relevance…” Michael asked again: “How bloody old are you?” “Twenty,” said the man. Now Michael laughed. “Twenty!” he said. “They’ve bloody put me through to the tea boy. Look, I want to speak to the Editor.” But there was nobody there. The man had put the phone down on him. Bloody cheek! Michael slammed the phone receiver into its cradle and opened the door of the kiosk. As he went out, the sour-faced old woman muttered, “You took your time, didn’t you!”

“Get stuffed!” Michael told her.

“They probably think you are the killer.”

Alistair T. Winkleigh was sharing a settee with a large and slobbery Golden Retriever/St Bernard/Old English Sheepdog-mix in Celestine’s fragrant living room. The fragrance of the room was imparted by a rampant collection of odoriferous flowers in pots beneath the cross-leaded windows looking out onto the garden, with the addition of a certain musky undertone that smelled vaguely of Golden Retriever, St Bernard and Old English Sheepdog.

“I mean, my love, how else could you possibly know in advance about two different murders?”

“But he phoned me,” Alistair protested. “The killer phoned me.”

Celestine, who had been busy at her cocktail cabinet (an ancient Louise XV escritoire in which she stored a variety of exotic spirits and liqueurs), handed to Alistair a glass containing a bright purple liquid of dubious composition.

“I know that, my love. But the police are notoriously unimaginative. They probably think you are taunting them. It is what murderers do, isn’t it. Taunt, I mean. Besides which, predicting one murder may be regarded as a misfortune; predicting two looks like carelessness.”

“I beg your…?”

“A minor adaptation of a line from ‘The Importance Of Being Earnest’. I played in it once, you know. In Ebbw Vale. We were hoping the production would transfer to London. The West End. Or maybe the South Bank. But it didn’t. We did a short stint in Betws-y-Coed, though, so I can’t complain..”

Alistair looked impressed. “I didn’t know you were an actress. I thought you painted.”

“Painter, actress, poet, chanteuse…”

“You sing too?”

“I spent some time providing the cabaret in an unsavoury nightclub in the backstreets of Marseilles. It’s something I prefer not to talk about. But I had no money at the time and the alternative forms of employment were even less appealing. However, raking over the details of my theatrical career is not going to help you to prove your innocence. Why are you pulling that funny face?”

“This cocktail. What’s in it?”

“No idea. I just poured in a couple of shots from the first three bottles that came to hand. But you are changing the subject. You are, by now, in all likelihood, the chief suspect in a series of murders.”

“There’s only been one murder.”

“One that we know of,” Celestine insisted. “Though the more time that passes, the more sinister becomes the mystery of my disappearing friend, Doug Steel.”

“We don’t know that there is any connection between Doug and Bill Stoneman.”

“And who, may I ask, is Bill Stoneman?”

“The body beneath the viaduct.”

“How do you know his name?”

“I’m a journalist. I asked the police.”

“And they told you?”

“They did.”

Celestine sat in a large, elaborately florally-decorated armchair. “You wield such power,” she said. “I’m impressed.”

“I’ve also discovered something else of interest about Bill Stoneman.”

“Which is?”

“He was gay.”

Celestine spluttered into her cocktail. “How the Hell did you find that out[HC1] ?”

“He drove a taxi.”

“Good grief! Are all taxi drivers gay? I had no idea.”

“No, they aren’t. But they are a close-knit community. I contacted the taxi company that he worked for, then went around to have a chat with the boss who told me all that he knew about Bill Stoneman which, frankly, didn’t amount to much. He was about six foot tall, thirty-two years of age, he lived in a flat somewhere to the south of Dursfield, collected old Batman comics, liked horror films and had once been an amateur boxer but had to give it up due to a back injury.”

“Forgive me, my love, but I fail to see how that leads you to deduce his sexual preferences.”

“It didn’t. That was Bob Stoker.”

“I am baffled.”

“Bob Stoker is another taxi driver. I happened to bump into him on the way out of the boss’s office. It turns out that Bob Stoker and Bill Stoneman were friends.”

“Going at it every night like rabbits, you mean?”

“Not that sort of friendship. Bob Stoker is heterosexual. He is also an aficionado of horror films. An enthusiasm which he shared with Bill Stoneman. Anyway, it turns out that Bill told Bob that he was gay. Not just gay but actively so.”

“Like the proverbial rabbit?”

Alistair nodded. “Very like the proverbial rabbit.”

“That must be significant, then, mustn’t it?”

“I should have thought so. The police, however, don’t. I told them all I had learnt about Bill Stoneman. They told me I was telling them nothing they didn’t already know. As far as they are concerned, a gay man can fall to his death just as easily as a straight man.”

“But,” said Celestine, “that must make Doug’s disappearance suspicious. Don’t they think there may be a connection?.”

“I don’t think they care. They couldn’t be bothered to do a proper investigation after the body of Bill Stoneman was found under the viaduct, so what hopes have we got of them getting them to do a proper search for Doug Steel?”

“Or whatever remains of him,” Celestine said with an air of cynicism. “The answer to your question is, I fear: no hopes at all. Did you tell the police about the bloodstain?”

“I did. I said there is a wet, reddish/brownish stain on the ceiling of the woman in the room immediately beneath Doug’s.”

“And what did they police say to that?”

“They said it was a water leak, the reddish-browning colour was rust and the woman on the flat should report the matter to her landlord.”

“Bloody Nora, that’s a bit flippant!”

“We’ve run up against a brick wall,” said Alistair, wincing after taking another sip of the luminously purple cocktail.

“I disagree,” said Celestine, firmly.

“You do? Why?”

“Have you never read Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories?”

Alistair shook his head.

“What about her Secret Seven yarns?”

Alistair shook his head again.

“Swallows and Amazons?”

He didn’t bother shaking his head this time. Then again, he didn’t nod either.

“Bloody Hell! For a writer, your literary education is sorely lacking, my love. How about Scooby-Doo?”

“The cartoon, do you mean?”

“I do indeed. You see, in all those cases – The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, Swallows and Amazons and even,” Celestine sighed, “Scooby-Doo, dire things happen but the forces of law and order, not to mention the grownups, do nothing and so a bold team of amateur sleuths takes on the case and invariably solves the mystery.”

“And you are suggesting what?”

“Give me your glass.”

“I haven’t finished my drink.”

“Slug it back then. I can tell you are going to need a few more to brace yourself. My idea is simple. However, we first need to recruit a team.”

“Oh, it’s you again.” Sergeant Fairweather didn’t sound pleased to hear Alistair’s voice.

“Yes,” Alistair confirmed, “it’s me.”

Down the phoneline came a distinctly frosty silence which, eventually, was followed by the words: “And how may I help you today, sir?”

“Well, I don’t know quite how to put this but, well, you remember I spoke to you before. About a week ago?”

“That conversation is fresh in my mind, sir. You phoned to tell us there’d been a murder, the murderer had phoned you and you knew where the victim was.”

“Under the Shawvale viaduct. Which is exactly where you found him.”

“That is true, sir. A dog found him, as a matter of fact. A dog named Harold, belonging to the proprietor of the local fish and chip shop, a certain Mrs Betty Battersby.”

“But if you’d bothered to look there after I phoned you, you’d have found the body before the dog did.”

“Possibly, sir.”

“Why didn’t you look, then?” Alistair realised that his tone was taking on an aggressive quality which, since he was hoping to solicit the help of Sergeant Fairweather, might not be entirely prudent. Adopting a tone which, he hoped, might sound slightly more emollient, he added, “What I mean to say is that I entirely understand the pressures you chaps are under and I think it’s long overdue that the Government gave you a pay rise.”

“Indeed, sir?” Seargeant Fairweather’s tone did not convey the impression that he was entirely convinced of the sincerity of Alistair’s sudden concern about police salaries.

“In fact,” said Alistair, “I’ve been thinking for some time about running a campaign. In the Dursfield Evening News. On that very subject.”

There was another frosty silence at the other end of the line. The silence was followed by Sergeant Fairweather’s voice, sounding even frostier than the silence. “Was there any reason, other than to commiserate with the policeman’s shocking rate of pay that you phoned me today, sir?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact there was. I have reason to believe there has been a murder.”

“So you have already informed us, sir.”

“No, no, not that murder. Not the viaduct murder. A different one.”

There was another silence at the other end of the phone. This silence was, thought Alistair, even more silent than the silence that had preceded it. And, if possible, even more frosty.

The Mysteries of Sexual Attraction

“I met someone.” That is what Cyril had told Marlene when she had asked about his garden party. The words “I met someone” suggested more than they actually said. Naturally he had met someone. He had met quite a lot of people. Fifteen to be precise. Thirteen of whom he already knew quite well. There were the neighbours, Mr and Mrs Harbottle from Number 21; and Mr and Mrs Wyke-Gifford and their teenage daughter Sandra from Number 25. Then there were some people he knew from the local Conservative Club and a couple of people he’d met at the Music Appreciation Society (held on a Tuesday evening, once a month in the local Church Hall). Of course, none of those people knew anything about Cyril’s “other life” (as he thought of it). All they really knew about him was that he was a pleasant, well-mannered, well-dressed gentleman with a good, respectable job, who, due to some curiosity of circumstances, remained an eminently eligible bachelor.

There had been two other people at the party, however, who did not think of Cyril in quite those terms. Cyril had intended to invite only one of those two people but then, in a moment of madness, in a public house in Leeds, he had invited the other one too. The person whom he had intended to invite was young, good-looking and cultured: Richard looked, thought Cyril, like a Greek god; or, at any rate, like one of the more athletic gods which Ancient Greek sculptors had so lovingly hewn out of solid marble. Cyril had always liked Richard. He was an intelligent young man who appreciated art and music which meant that he and Cyril had no problem in chatting about topics of mutual interest.

The other chap, however, was quite a different kettle of fish. He said he was called Ronnie though, frankly, Cyril doubted that. When Cyril had first asked him his name, “Ronnie” had actually hesitated before replying. Of course, Cyril himself had occasionally been in the position of assuming a false identity. To do so was normal practice when signing the book upon entering a gay club. One certainly wouldn’t wish to risk incriminating oneself by signing one’s real name in such a book. But in real life, when talking to friends, never! Never had he pretended to be someone whom he was not. And yet, he had the distinct impression that Ronnie (or whatever he was really called) was doing precisely that.

There were other reasons why Cyril did not have a warm and cosy feeling about “Ronnie”. For one thing, he was ignorant. The afternoon being rather sultry, Cyril had opened the french doors leading from his lounge to the back garden. In the lounge, he was playing a tape of classical music. Since he had failed to engage Ronnie in conversation on a subjects ranging from the films of Pasolini to the political situation in Uruguay, he had ventured to remark upon the music that could currently be heard wafting through his french windows.

“What sort of music do you like, Ronnie?” he had asked casually.

Ronnie had looked at him as though he had been asked to provide a proof of the Riemann hypothesis. Cyril tried another approach. “This music,” he had said, nodding towards the french windows. “Is that the sort of thing you like?”

Ronnie had smiled. It seemed that Cyril had finally posed a question which he had been capable of understanding. “Oh, I should say so!” Ronnie had said. “All that classical stuff. Mantovani, James Last, the whole kit and caboodle.”

Cyril had shuddered, possibly visibly. The ghastly cascading strings of Mantovani? The pure schmaltz of the James Last Orchestra? Cyril could hardly have been more horrified if someone had mistaken the sublime piano-playing of Vladimir Horowitz for the glitzy key-tinkling of Liberace!

Yes, there were two reasons why Cyril hadn’t liked Ronnie. First, he felt that Ronnie was a liar[HC1] . Anyone capable of lying about their own name was surely capable of lying about anything. And secondly he was a philistine. He didn’t have a grain of artistic appreciation in his entire body. The man simply had no soul. Oh, and of course, there was a third reason. Richard had taken a fancy to Ronnie. You could see it in the way Richard was looking at him. Cyril couldn’t work out what on earth Richard saw in such a dreadful person. Apart from the obvious, that is. Ronnie was suavely good-looking, not to say hunky, in a certain rather obvious sort of way. He was tall, had one of those squarely masculine faces, he was dressed impeccably in a dark blue blazer, cream silk shirt, dark tie and Panama hat; moreover, from the way he carried himself, Cyril sensed that in all probability he also had a good physique. All the same, it seemed rather fatuous of Richard to waste his time on such a stupid, uncultured person just because he found him sexually attractive.

“It was Harold who found him.”

Phil was in the kitchen of a small terraced house a few streets away from his home, holding in his hands a blue-and-white-striped mug of tea. He was seated at a wooden table covered in a rosebud-decorated sheet of linoleum at the centre of which a plate of desiccated fig-rolls provided temptation well within the limits of his endurance. Sitting at the opposite side of the table was Mrs Betty Battersby, a plump, middle-aged woman whose homely face was dominated by a huge pair of spectacles that seemed to goggle, owl-like, from beneath a nest of tightly permed honey-blond hair. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth and she periodically coughed as the smoke caught in her throat but never once did she think of removing the cigarette.

Phil had met Mrs Battersby’s son, Barry, the previous day at the Shawvale Non-Political Working Men’s Social Club, popularly known as The Dungeon – and it had been Barry who had taken Phil to his mother’s house and made the introductions. Phil had not been introduced to anyone called Harold, however. According to Barry, his mother was a widow and Barry was her only son. By a process of elimination, Phil deduced that Harold must be portly black Labrador which was snoozing at Mrs Battersby’s feet and snoring loudly.

“Harold,” Phil ventured tentatively, “is the dog?”

“Shhhh!” Mrs Battersby gave Phil a glare of stern disapproval. Then she added, in a whisper, “Harold doesn’t know he is a, you know, a D. O. G., so I prefer not to use that word in his presence.”

“Mum, for God’s sake!” Barry, who was leaning on the top of a waist-high refrigerator, drinking lager from a tin, gave the distinct impression that he was not entirely convinced that fat black Labradors were likely to have an extensive command of the English language and that, therefore, his mother’s attempts to prevent Harold from discovering his canine nature were misplaced.

Mrs Battersby turned to her son and snapped: “As for you, Barry Battersby, you idle no-good layabout, if you’ve got nothing better to do than criticise your mother, well, you can… you can…”

“Yes, Mum? I can what?”

“You can go and criticise me somewhere where I can’t hear you!”

Barry opened the door of the fridge upon which he had been leaning, took from it another can of lager and said, “I’ll go and watch the telly then.”

“You watch any more telly and your eyes will turn square,” said his mother. “Now then,” she continued to Phil after her son had left the room, “what is it you want to know, exactly? Barry said you were a journalist.”

Phil shook his head. “Not me. It’s a friend of mine.”

“Your friend’s a journalist?”

“A friend of a friend.”

“Oh.” She paused to drink some tea. A thought occurred to her. “Is there any money involved? I mean, if he interviews me, this journalist, I expect there’ll be some sort of remooneritions, not to say cash.”

“I don’t know. I mean, I doubt it. To tell you the truth, I don’t know anything about journalism. It’s just that I know that this journalist, the one I was talking about, well, he thinks there’s something funny about that bloke who got pushed off the viaduct and I thought that maybe I could help to find out a bit more about it all. Being as how I live nearby and that.”

“Pushed off? You said he was pushed off?”

“Or fell. Whatever.”

“Only that’s what I said to the policeman. I said, that man there, the one my D. O. G. found in the bushes, under the viaduct. Stunk to high heaven, he did. Rotting meat, you see, what with this terrible heat we’ve been having. And as for the flies. Swarms of them there were. If anyone’d been down there before me and Harold, they’d have smelled the stink and heard the flies buzzing, for sure. So anyway, I told the police all that. But they didn’t seem right interested. Whatever happened to that poor bloke, I told them, it’s not natural, that’s for sure. And this policeman, he says to me ‘So what leads you to believe it in’t natural, missus?’ Cheeky bleeder, he was! And I says, well, one thing’s for sure, he didn’t jump, he were pushed. And do you know what he said, this policeman?”

“No. What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Now then, madam, you just leave it to us.’ I ask you – what sort of answer is that? I told them, this is a murder scene, that’s what this is. And this policemen, who can’t have been no older than my Barry, and can’t have been no brighter neither if you want my opinion, he turns to me like I were born yesterday and he says ‘You just leave it to us.’ Of course, you know what that means, don’t you?”

Phil shrugged. “Not really.”

“It means,” Phil watched in fascination as the cigarette at the corner of Mrs Battersby’s mouth jiggled up and down ever more wildly the more excited she got. “It means,” she said, “that they’ll brush it under the carpet, forget it ever happened, say it was suicide or an accident or some such cock and bull story. And all the while, the murderer is still out there. Looking for his next victim.” Here she paused, filled up Phil’s mug and offered him one of the dried-up fig rolls, which Phil declined.

“Why do you think he killed himself?” Phil asked.

“The evidence.”

Phil’s heart skipped a beat. “What evidence would that be?”

“His jacket.”

“What about his jacket?”

“He wasn’t wearing one.”

Phil could barely hide his disappointment. He’d been hoping for a clue. The fact that the dead man wasn’t wearing a jacket didn’t sound significant.

“It was a hot night,” Phil said. “That’s probably why he wasn’t wearing a jacket.”

Mrs Battersby tapped the side of her nose with a forefinger. “That’s what they’d like you to think.”

“Who?”

“The police. And the murderer too, most likely. But I’m not so easily taken in. I’ve studied the criminal and his methods.”

“You have? Where?”

“Columbo. You know the little detective with the crumpled overcoat. The police always go off on the wrong track. But Columbo, he tracks down the villain. By following the evidence. ‘Just one more thing,’ that’s what he says. Everyone thinks he’s a dope, see, but really he’s figured it all out.”

Phil was starting to think that he was wasting his time. The dog Harold (who didn’t realise he was a dog) may have sniffed out a body lying in the bushes but that didn’t mean that Harold’s owner had anything of importance to say on the subject. Indeed, so far, all that Mrs Battersby had told him was that the dead man hadn’t been wearing a jacket and that she had deduced the fact that he had been murdered by watching an American TV show.

“They found his jacket, you know,” Mrs Battersby said.

“I thought you said he wasn’t wearing a jacket.”

“That’s right. He wasn’t.”

Phil was having difficulty making sense of this and he wasn’t completely sure whether or not Mrs Battersby really did know something that might help Alistair in his investigation, so he asked her to tell him the story from the start while he jotted down notes in a lined notepad that he’d brought with him.

“I was taking Harold for his afternoon walk, you see.” Said Mrs Battersby. “It must have been about half-past three because I’d just shut up the shop. I run the Battersby’s Better Battered Fish and Chip Shop in Fore Street and we open from twelve to three and then again from six to ten.”

By the time she had finished her narration, Phil realised that there was, after all, something important that Mrs Battersby had seen. And maybe, just maybe, it really did mean that the man had been murdered.

“Alistair Who?”

“T. Winkleigh.”

It was a bad phone line. It was hard to hear what was being said through all the crackles. Alistair repeated his name, enunciating with precision: “Alistair T. Winkleigh.”

“Never heard of you.”

“I’m a reporter with the Dursfield Evening News.”

“I’ve still never heard of you.”

“My name doesn’t always go on the byline.”

“But sometimes it does?”

“Yes, it does sometimes.”

“Anything in today?”

“Today’s paper has not yet been published.”

“Yesterday, then?”

“Well, yes, I have, as a matter of fact, yes, I do have something in yesterday’s paper.”

“Which page?”

“Page…” Alistair hesitated. If, by chance, the story in yesterday’s newspaper had been of an investigative nature – had it (for example) been an exposé of corruption in the inner sanctums of the local council or an astonishing revelation of the bribes paid by criminal gangland-bosses to the Chief Constable – then Alistair would have been all too pleased to direct the headmaster’s attention to his article in the Dursfield Evening News. However, the subject of his latest feature was not on such a theme, which explains his hesitation.

“Sorry,” said the headmaster, “I didn’t catch that. What page did you say it was on?”

“Five,” said Alistair. “But really there’s no need to…”

“Just a moment, please. I have the newspaper in my desk drawer. It won’t take me long.”

“Really, I promise you, there’s…”

But the headmaster was no longer listening. He had put the phone down, presumably upon the top of his desk in order to leave his hands free to open his desk drawer and take from it a copy of yesterday’s edition of The Dursfield Evening News.

Presently there came the sound of a newspaper being unfolded, followed by the sound of the telephone handset being picked up. “Ah yes, here it is. Alistair T. Winklight.”

“Winkleigh,” Alistair corrected.

“That’s you, is it?”

“It is.”

“Let me see. Yes, there’s your article: ‘Golden Bertie’s Gone For Gold’. Hmmmph. A bit repetitious, if you don’t mind my saying. Surely a better headline would have been ‘Bertie’s Gone For Gold’.”

“Yes, perhaps. I don’t write the headlines, you see. Someone else does those.”

“Ah. Is that so, indeed? Now, let me see. Who exactly is this Bertie?”

“You really don’t need to read it. I mean, you’ve established my credentials, so to speak.”

But the mumbling on the other end of the line suggested that the headmaster was already reading Alistair’s article and he was one of those readers who cannot do so without a verbal accompaniment: “Holmswich Village Fur and Feather Show… mumble, mumble, golden hamster…. mumble, mumble…” Pause. Then: “Oh, I see! Bertie’s a hamster!”

Alistair T. Winkleigh sighed. He had hoped that the headmaster, having established that Alistair T. Winkleigh was indeed, as he claimed, a journalist by profession, and, having furthermore discovered one of his published articles, might have been satisfied without actually bothering to read the aforementioned article. Alistair imagined the horror that must now be crossing the headmaster’s face as he realised that the journalist to whom he was speaking was not one of those intellectual chaps who wrote clever articles about politics or literature but was, on the contrary, a man who spent his time waxing lyrical about beauty competitions for hamsters. He half expected the headmaster to slam the phone down. That, at least, would have been less humiliating than to be laughed at.

The headmaster was not merely laughing, he was guffawing. He was guffawing to such an extent that he gave an occasional involuntary snort. When, after some time, his guffawing had subsided to a sufficient extent to allow him to speak, he said: “I understand the headline now. ‘Golden Bertie’ is a golden hamster. Yes, that’s rather clever. It’s just a pity that more journalists don’t have your facility with words, Mr Winklight. A most amusing article. Now then, how may I be of assistance?”

Alistair was too shocked to respond immediately. He tried to think of something to say but could not and, instead, made a sort of strangulated gurgling noise into the mouthpiece of the telephone.

“Mr Winklight? Are you there, Mr Winklight?”

“Er, yes, yes, I am.”

“Only it sounded like you were gurgling.”

“It’s a bad line. I thought it was you who were gurgling.”

“Me? Why should I be gurgling?”

“I don’t know. I’m not familiar with the duties of a headmaster.”

For a moment, it sounded to Alistair as though the headmaster might, indeed, be gurgling, as though, perhaps, he found himself momentarily at a loss for words. For some reason, people often did find themselves at a loss for words when speaking to Alistair. Perhaps it was because they were unused to being subjected to such rigorous journalistic inquiries? At any rate, Alistair felt that the time was right to ask the question that he wanted to ask. So ask it he did: “Is Doug Steel in work today?”

“Who?”

“Doug Steel. Douglas, that is.”

“Oh, you mean Reginald.”

“No. Douglas. I am given to believe he is a teacher. At your school.”

“He is. But he prefers to be called Reginald.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because that is his name.”

“I thought his name was Douglas.”

“He has two names. Reginald Douglas. Reginald is the name he prefers when at school.”

“And when not at school?”

“I really have no idea.”

Alistair was starting to get the impression that the headmaster was giving him what is known in the journalistic profession as “the runaround”. He was nattering on about all kinds of irrelevant things in order to avoid answering a straightforward question. Alistair T. Winkleigh was not the sort of journalist who could be so easily fobbed off. “So is he in work today or isn’t he?”

“That’s not the sort of information that I would normally divulge…”

“So I shall write in my article, that the headmaster, Mr Samuel Bottomly, (53) – you are fifty-three, aren’t you?”

“No. I’m forty-nine.”

“Mr Samual Bottomly, (49), refused to confirm that the much loved teacher, Reginald Douglas Steel, is missing, thereby frustrating our attempts to locate this vulnerable individual…”

“Vulnerable? In what way is he vulnerable?”

“I’m afraid that’s not the sort of information I can divulge.”

“Oh, look here, I don’t want to impede your investigations, Mr Winklight, far from it. Indeed, if I can be of any assistance at all, in locating Mr Steel, you can rely upon me to offer my unstinting assistance.”

“So he isn’t at work, then?”

“No, he isn’t.”

After further discussion, it turned out that Reginald Douglas Steel had not been in work the day before either; moreover, he had not contacted the school to offer any explanation for his absence. As far as anyone knew, he had just vanished.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” muttered Alistair T. Winkleigh.

The Station Inn was almost empty when Gary got there at half-past nine. Monday was not a busy night. He glanced around but there was no sign of Richard. No sign of Nevin or his crowd either. There was a middle-aged man reading a newspaper in the far corner. A couple of lads were chatting at another table. Nobody else except Miranda, who seemed to be a permanent fixture, sitting on a high stool right next to the bar.

“You’re keen,” Miranda said. “Not many of us manage to stagger along here on a Monday. Let me buy you a drink.”

“Thanks, but…” Gary shook his head, “I’m not staying.”

“Suit yourself.” Miranda paused a moment to assess the situation. “Nothing the matter, is there?”

“No, I just…”

“Look, you probably think I’m a silly old fool, but I’m not so daft that I can’t see when there is something up. And when I look at you, Gary, I see that there is something on your mind. So, why don’t you just…?”

“You haven’t seen Richard, by any chance, have you?”

“Not tonight, no. Last night though. If you’d been here last night you’d have seen him.”

Gary looked surprised. “Last night? Sunday night? You’re sure of that?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. I just thought that… He’d said he’d meet me here on Saturday…”

“And he stood you up? That’s the way men are, my love.”

Gary smiled. “No. It wasn’t like that. I mean, I hardly even know him. It’s just that I was worried, in case….”

“In case what?”

“I don’t know. Just worried, I suppose.”

“Well worry no longer. Richard is alive and well and as terrifyingly good-looking as ever. Or, at least, he was last night. Not that he stayed very long. He just popped in for a few minutes and then he popped out again. I can’t help thinking he may have had a prior engagement. Then again, I suppose he might have…” But Gary was no longer there; he had mumbled a hasty Goodnight and had walked out of the pub while Miranda was still speaking.

“Everyone’s in such a rush these days,” Miranda muttered.

“Let me buy you a drink.”

Miranda turned and was astonished to see, standing next to him, the middle-aged man who had been reading a newspaper at the other end of the pub. Miranda was so astonished that, for a moment, he was rendered speechless.

“Gin and tonic, was it?” said the man.

Regaining the power of speech, Miranda confirmed that a gin and tonic was precisely what it was. “But,” he added, “the tonic is entirely optional.”

Everyone called it The Dungeon. Its official name was The Shawvale Non-Political Working Men’s Social Club. Any doubt about which name suited it better was removed as soon as you entered its door. It was dark, with an air of menacing decrepitude that would only have been slightly enhanced by the addition of a few starving prisoners shackled to the wall. To what extent it resembled an actual dungeon – the sort that Mediaeval castles provided as accommodation for their more unwanted guests – Phil could not be sure, as he had never seen one in real life. He had, however, seen dungeons in Hollywood films and most of them looked a lot cosier than the interior of The Shawvale Non-Political Working Men’s Social Club. But what it lacked in interior decoration it made up for in cheap beer. You could drink all night in The Dungeon and still have change from a pound. As long as you didn’t offer to buy any rounds, that is. Phil was always careful about that. If rounds were being bought, he’d accept a pint with good grace. When it was his turn to buy a round, as often as not he would be mysteriously absent. Maybe he’d suddenly been caught short and had to dash off to the gents. Or maybe he’d suddenly remembered something of pressing importance that he had to do and had left The Dungeon without anyone noticing.

Except, of course, people did notice. Phil was beginning to get himself a reputation. Phil The Sneak, they called him – a pun on Phil The Greek, the name sometimes impertinently used to describe Prince Philip, the Duke Of Edinburgh; though whether the Duke Of Edinburgh was equally parsimonious when it was his turn to buy a round of drinks is not a matter of public record.

There was a simple reason why Phil avoided buying rounds: he never had any money. Over the summer, the only cash he had was his unemployment benefit which barely even covered his bus fares, so there was never much left over for booze. But tonight, Phil wasn’t worried about that. Because Alf Larkin had just given him two five-pound notes. “And there’ll be another two for you after the job’s done,” Alf had promised.

The nature of the job had been left vague. All Alf had told Phil was that it was going to take place on Wednesday, it was sweet and simple, there was no danger involved and, as far as Phil was concerned, he’d just have to stand around watching and tell Alf if anyone was coming.

“Money for old rope,” Alf had said, with a broad grin that showed off his missing upper-right incisor to good effect.

Phil had taken what Alf had told him with a pinch of salt. If Alf was doing a job, you could bet there’d be something illegal about it. Or, if not actually illegal, then at least not quite on the right side of the law. It wasn’t as if Alf was a professional crook. He was a car mechanic. A good car mechanic, by all accounts. But he had a taste in flashy cars that a car mechanic’s wages didn’t easily pay for. Alf’s car at that moment was a second-hand black Lancia with a dent in the driver-side door but it was his ambition to own a Porsche 911. “Or a Ferrari would do,” he had once said, in a rare moment of humility. But it amounted to the same thing: a car mechanic’s wages didn’t stretch to a slightly battered second-hand Lancia so they definitely didn’t stretch to a Porsche 911 or a Ferrari.

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Alf was in the back room, playing snooker. The back room of The Dungeon was very similar to the front room apart from the fact that it was a bit darker and it had a snooker table. Phil didn’t play snooker, he didn’t understand snooker and he had no interest of any description in snooker. So he leaned against the wall and watched Alf Larkin poke balls around with a stick; and then some other bloke called Harry Throop poked balls around with another stick. And sometimes the balls bounced off one another and sometimes they went down holes arranged around the edge of the snooker table. It made no sense to Phil but Alf and Harry seemed to take it very seriously, and so did a small group of other blokes who were standing around smoking and drinking and occasionally offering words of advice to pocket the green, put on a backspin and grimple the tresselfolds; or, anyway, something like that. Whatever they were on about didn’t make any sense at all as far as Phil was concerned.

After a while, they had a break and Phil, making free with his newfound wealth, bought a round of drinks for Alf and his mates. Sitting with Alf at a wobbly, beer-stained table in the front room of the club, Phil said, “I went up the viaduct today.”

“Oh yeah,” said Alf.

“Yeah. Where that bloke was killed.”

“Jumped off.”

“So they say.”

Alf gave him a funny look. “What d’you mean, ‘so they say’? You got any other ideas?”

For some reason, Phil had a feeling he might be treading on dangerous ground. It was the way Alf was looking at him. It was one of those expressions that gave you the impression that Alf might take serious exception to what you said if you happened to say the wrong thing.

“Not me,” said Phil. “I don’t know nothing about it. Just what people say.”

“Oh, yeah? What do people say?”

“I heard he was a taxi driver.”

Alf drank his beer and gave Phil one of those expressions again. “Where’d you hear that from? I ’an’t read nothing about him being a taxi driver in the papers.”

“Not sure where I heard it,” Phil said. “Just people talking. I heard it was Betty Battersby who found it. The body, I mean. Her and her dog. You heard about that?”

“I heard about that.”

Phil drank some more. “I bet it was a mess, that body.”

“Fell a hundred feet or more. I’d say it wasn’t likely to be in the best of shape.”

“Why d’you think he did it? Jumped off, I mean. That is, if he did jump.”

One of Alf’s mates came and sat in a vacant seat at their table. He was a tall chap, about thirty, running to fat a bit, but tough-looking. “What’s it to you?” he said.

“Sorry?” said Phil.

Alf laughed. “Now, now, lads, no arguing. Not until I’ve made the introductions leastways. This is Barry,” he said to Phil, indicating the man who’d just sat at their table. “Barry Battersby. Betty Battersby’s son.”

“Oh,” said Phil. “Nice to meet you.”

Barry Battersby glared at Phil and repeated his question: “What’s it to you?”

There was really nothing much that needed to be done with the Garnley and Stiffold accounts. It was just a matter of checking a few figures and making a few minor amendments. Cyril could easily have had the work completed by half-past two. However, since the accounts weren’t required from him until three o’clock, he dawdled over them.

He was feeling a little better now. The sense of nausea from which he’d been suffering in the morning had passed. He didn’t have a summer cold after all. He was just over-tired and, he had to admit, slightly hung-over. He had drunk far too much sangria at the garden party on Saturday. And then on Sunday evening he’d gone to the New Penny in Leeds where he had planned to confine himself to orange juice but, in the event, had decided to spice up that innocent liquid with a few hefty splashes of vodka. Cyril preferred going to the Leeds pub rather than to the Station Inn in Dursfield. The New Penny was busier, it attracted more people and, best of all, it was more anonymous; he rarely met people whom he knew when he was in Leeds. When he stayed in Dursfield, it was a constant worry for Cyril that he might bump into someone who would recognise him: a neighbour or local shopkeeper – possibly even one of his clients! The horror of being found in a gay bar by a friend or a colleague was almost too much to contemplate. It had never actually happened but he felt slightly nauseous just thinking of the possibility.

Leeds had another attraction. When he went to Leeds, he was, so to speak, a fresh face; which meant that someone might notice him and think, “Oh, he looks just my type”, whereas in Dursfield everyone knew him already. “Oh, it’s only old Cyril,” they would say, as though he was some comfortable but rather dull old uncle.

Of course, if he became too much of a regular in Leeds, that anonymity would vanish and he’d be back to square one. He had only started going to Leeds on a more or less regular basis a few weeks ago so he had not yet become a recognisable member of the “Leeds scene”. On his expeditions to Leeds, Cyril had never seen anyone from the “Dursfield scene”. Not until the previous Thursday, that is.

Last Thursday, Cyril had been crushed up against the bar of the New Penny trying to get a drink when he caught sight of someone from Dursfield. It happened to be someone of whom Cyril was very fond; though, it has to be said, this feeling of fondness did not appear to be reciprocated.

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The man of whom Cyril was so enamoured was Richard Prestwich. Richard was, of course, much younger than Cyril. Almost half his age, in fact. Had they been closer in age, Cyril wondered if there might have been the possibility of forming a friendship. Possibly a close friendship. Richard was quite intelligent; he knew about all sorts of things – literature, art, music – and, well, so did Cyril. They were, in many respects, entirely compatible. Only the difference in age stood between them. Cyril had, over the past couple of months, tried to establish an amicable relationship with Richard. After all, some young men were attracted to older men. Not that Cyril was terribly old. Forty-five. Some people would say that forty-five is the prime of life. Though Cyril would be bound to admit that he was not entirely in what one might call “prime condition”. He was, it had to be conceded, somewhat overweight. Chubby even. That was due to the fact that he spent all day working at a desk. But that could easily be rectified. Perhaps he might join a gym? People did that nowadays, didn’t they. Even at the age of forty-five.

At any rate, when he had met Richard in the Leeds pub last Thursday, Richard had been cordial. “Cyril!” he had said, “What on earth are you doing here?” as though he had assumed that the environs of Leeds was an astonishingly exotic location in which to find someone as mundane, as ordinary, as comfortable and predictable as dear, dull old Cyril. But even though Cyril knew that was what Richard thought of him, he had nonetheless felt pleased to be both recognised and welcomed. So he had invited Richard to his garden party.

“What’s it in aid of?” Richard had asked. “Not your birthday, is it?”

“It’s to celebrate the summer solstice.”

Richard had laughed. “Seriously?”

Cyril had smiled in what he hoped had looked like a coy and amusing way. “Well, not entirely. The solstice was on the 21^st, I believe. But that’s no good for a party since the 21^st was a Monday. Nobody would come to a garden party on a Monday, would they? I thought Saturday the 26^th would be near enough. It will be at the Grange. They say the weather should hold, so I think a garden party should be quite fun.”

That was when Ronnie had turned up. He had been at the bar, getting drinks for himself and Richard[HC1] .

“What party would that be?” Ronnie had asked.

Cyril’s initial reaction had been that it was none of Ronnie’s damn’ business but he was far too polite to say so. Besides, before he had a chance to reply, Richard had said, “Cyril’s throwing a garden party for the summer solstice.”

Ronnie had smiled. “What a great idea,” he had said.

And in the next moment, Cyril had said to Ronnie, “Oh, but you must come! Really, you’d be most welcome.”

Of course, Cyril had expected Ronnie to decline the offer. After all, he wasn’t a friend of Cyril’s. In fact, Ronnie had only met Cyril a few seconds earlier. It was simply a matter of politeness for Cyril to invite him and it would equally have been a matter of politeness for Ronnie to decline. But he didn’t. Ronnie accepted the invitation without a moment’s hesitation.

Cyril regretted inviting him immediately. And he regretted it even more when, on the Saturday afternoon, Richard had arrived in the company of the appalling Ronnie.