Jonathan Buckley - So He Takes the Dog

Sure enough, Peggy has something on Henry – not much, but more than anyone else so far. Every twenty days, ‘regular as clock-work’, Henry would come into the shop to buy a packet of twenty cigarettes. Surprisingly, given Henry’s rootless status, Peggy seems to have been well disposed towards him: he was her only customer for unfiltered cigarettes, she says, and she always made sure she had a packet in stock, just for Henry. His name was Henry Yarrow and he used to be an engineer, but what kind of engineer, and where he was an engineer, and when, she couldn’t say. He was from Minehead, she knew that much. Earlier that morning we’d been talking to a neighbour of the Fazakerlys and she’d said that she’d heard from someone that Henry’s name was McBain, or McCain, or McSwain, or something like that. Beginning with Mc and ending with -ain, anyway. Had Peggy heard that his name was Yarrow or had he told her himself? ‘He told me that was his name,’ Peggy replies, the implication being that she is not the sort of person to pass off mere hearsay as fact.

‘Definitely Yarrow?’ asks Ian, making a note.

Peggy bristles at this, as if she’d been accused of lying. Offended, she locks her arms across her chest, a picture of indignant rectitude, with her library of red-hot muck behind her. But Ian soon wins her round, thanking her for her valuable information, nodding at the name he’s written on his pad, as if it’s a word in code and any minute now the letters will rearrange themselves and give us a vital clue. Gratitude accepted, Peggy gives us her personal impressions of Mr Yarrow: very polite, always cheerful, didn’t smell at all, except sometimes in summer, but we’re all a bit ripe then, aren’t we? Then she starts on the questioning. Where exactly was he found? When? Who found him? What did we think had happened? Any leads? Ian fends her off, with heavy use of boyish charm. In the end she settles for knowing that Henry wasn’t freshly dead when the unfortunate member of the public stumbled across him. ‘Poor man,’ Peggy laments. ‘Poor poor man.’ And her head does this slow sad shake as if her good angel is whispering in her ear: ‘Shake head sadly now.’ More than anything, you know she’s irked at not having winkled more information from us.

We resumed the house-to-house trudge and Ian soon had another case for his gallery of the weird. Within sight of the Fazakerlys’ palace there was the home of the hearty Miss Ryle, who had turned her residence into something out of Heidi. On the outside all was normal: an ordinary pebble-dashed semi, with a neat little garden out front. Inside, it was all wooden walls, wooden ceilings, damned great cowbells hanging in the hall and on the landings, photos and terrible paintings of snow and ice and rocks in every room, and all the way up the stairs. In the kitchen there were dozens of bits of cloth in frames, stitched with rustic sayings and proverbs in German and French, with borders of tiny flowers. Most of an entire wall was taken up by a huge aerial photo of some mountain-top hut, with glaciers left, right and centre, and above the fireplace in the front room there was an enormous curved horn, a monster trumpet, as long as an oar. ‘Makes your head swim when you blow it,’ grinned Miss Ryle, as if confessing to a penchant for cocaine. Miss Ryle knows nothing about Henry. She was in Switzerland for much of December, she told us. ‘I’m always in Switzerland,’ she admitted cheerily, waving a stout arm in the direction of the mighty trumpet.

And down the road, three minutes’ walk from the Heidi house, there lived Miss Leith, similarly nearing fifty, similarly single, but with a liking for inappropriately vivid make-up and fuchsia-coloured shoes. Miss Leith also had a prodigious fondness for those disgusting little porcelain figurines of cheeky shepherds wooing busty peasant lasses, and cute old hobos offering roses to winsome young lovelies on park benches, and rosy-cheeked moppets with baskets of kittens. It was like sitting in a souvenir shop, surrounded by display cases full of heart-tugging tat. From Miss Leith, however, we learned that Henry’s name was Henry Ellis, or so she’d heard from someone. She can’t recall who that someone might have been.

Not far from Miss Leith and Miss Ryle lived Mr Jonathan Imber – early fifties, also unmarried, and quite understandably so. Mr Imber, a bearded gentleman, had turned his house into a shrine to Old Spice, the famous fragrance for men. He had assembled what he believed to be (and who are we to argue?) the country’s (possibly Europe’s, but not – sadly – the world’s) most comprehensive collection of Old Spice receptacles (not merely aftershave – talcum powder, too, and deodorants), dating back to the year of the brand’s creation. Misinterpreting a facial twitch as a glimmer of interest from Ian, he began to talk us through the Old Spice story. For Mr Imber the changing shape of his aftershave flasks is a story as engrossing as the evolution of Homo sapiens. ‘My little pastime,’ he called it, and suddenly ‘pastime’ became the most miserable word in the English language, a word for people who have not enough in their lives for their allotted time, for whom time is something that has to be got through. Mr Imber knew Henry by sight, but knew nothing about him; he didn’t even know he was dead.

A check was run, and there was no Yarrow family in the Minehead area that was missing a senior member who was once an engineer, or missing a senior member who was anything, come to that. ‘Interesting,’ Ian remarked after morning prayers, after we’d been told the Minehead search had drawn a blank. ‘Why would he lie about his name?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Covering his tracks.’

‘Possible. Or he’s just saying, “Fuck off and leave me alone.” Could be that.’

‘Why the different names? Why not stick to one?’

‘Prevent himself getting bored. I don’t know.’

We had no idea. A dozen people were working on Henry and nothing but Henry. By day four we had seven different surnames, and we were getting nowhere.

Then, late one afternoon at the end of the first week, a woman came into the North Street station, laden with carrier bags. ‘I don’t know if this will be any use,’ she sighed, dumping the shopping. She pushed an envelope across the counter. Inside there was a photograph of the woman and two small girls stamping on the ruins of a sandcastle. Sweet-looking kids, her daughters presumably, deduced the lad on duty, not getting it. ‘There,’ said the woman, putting a fingernail on the picture. ‘I think that’s him, the dead man. The tramp.’ In the background, obscured by sea mist and out of focus for good measure, stood someone who might well have been Henry, perhaps watching the girls. The face wasn’t much more than a beard and two dots for eyes, but the boys in the darkroom blew it up, cropped it, did a bit of magic on it to make the features crisper, and what you had in the end still wasn’t a terrific portrait but it was a lot better than nothing, and it was all we had, so it was printed and made into a flyer, and up it went on a hundred lamp-posts.

Of all his war stories the one that George Whittam liked to retell most frequently was the story of Billy Renfrew, his first big case after the move from London. Billy Renfrew was seventy-two years old and lived alone in a semi-ruined cottage in the South Hams, as picturesque and uneventful a zone as you could wish to find. One morning in late summer the postman – making his first call at Billy’s house for more than a fortnight – rode up to Billy’s door and saw that it was open. He knocked, got no answer, pushed at the door and stepped inside. Then he saw Billy sitting on the floor of the hallway and a lump of Billy’s brain stuck on the wall beside him.