Roger Curtis - Lights in a Western Sky

Then his heart sank. There, behind Claire, his dark head half obscured by hers, was the young man from the train. How could that be possible? Perhaps he had been foolish to assume that the man had been destined for the capital. Maybe, after all, there were railway matters of great importance to be considered at Colchester. The couple approached the table. Gabriel saw that the man was clutching his laptop computer.

‘It’s alright if Ahmed joins us, isn’t it, Father?’

‘It’s a free country,’ Gabriel replied, trying to appear disinterested but inwardly seething. ‘Remember that we need to be going in a moment.’

Ahmed sat between Claire and her father and placed his laptop on the table. Almost immediately there was the jingle of a mobile phone from his pocket. As he answered it he looked closely at his watch. There was a brief exchange in a language Gabriel did not recognise. A smile of immense satisfaction spread across Ahmed’s face. He looked at his watch again, but this time more intently and appearing to follow the movement of the second hand. Then, to Gabriel’s surprise, he handed the older man the mobile. ‘Stupidly I left my reading glasses on the train,’ he said. ‘Would you be so kind as to dial that number for me?’ He pointed to a number typed on a tiny piece of paper stuck to the casing with tape.

Caught unawares, Gabriel took the phone and sat clutching it sheepishly, not knowing what do, or how to give it back without loss of face.

‘Go on Dad, ring it,’ Claire said.

‘Funny number that,’ Gabriel said, perplexed.

‘It’s a mobile number,’ Clare explained, ‘you should know that!’

‘Well, okay then.’ With clumsy fingers Gabriel entered the number and held the mobile to his ear. ‘It doesn’t seem to be ringing,’ he said.

‘That’s not entirely unexpected,’ Ahmed replied.

With a movement of his body indicative of supreme satisfaction Ahmed leaned back in his chair. Without looking at Gabriel he held out his hand for the mobile. There was a finality in this gesture which suggested that something of great moment had been accomplished. He turned to look at Gabriel. ‘You have done me – us – a great service,’ he said. But it was not gratitude that Gabriel saw in the man’s expression, more like revenge. Ahmed looked at his watch again, and to Claire said, ‘It has been the greatest of pleasures meeting you. I feel sure we shall meet again.’ To Gabriel he said nothing. Then he rose, grasped his laptop and left them. ‘I’ve another train to catch,’ he mumbled.

‘Well, what was all that about?’ Gabriel exclaimed.

‘He was nice,’ Claire said.

‘Anyway, he’s gone and we’ve got to get to where you’re going. Come on, young lady.’

They walked out slowly beneath the television screen. As they did so the news item seemed to change. The presenters – a man and a woman – looked concerned in a way that was momentarily personal and somehow unprofessional. A red band appeared with a message that said breaking news . ‘News is coming in,’ the male presenter said, ‘of a major rail accident outside London.’ The camera swung onto his female companion. ‘We are hearing that at about 8.57 a commuter train bound for Liverpool Street…’

‘My God,’ Gabriel said. ‘Another one. What is this country coming to.’

‘We’ll have to find out later, Dad,’ Claire said, pulling at his hand. ‘Otherwise I’ll be late.’

They walked out of the station into the sunlight. Gabriel thought again about the suits he would see in the High Street. It suddenly occurred to him that the father of a model might have responsibilities that were not necessarily negative. He called a taxi and, hearing himself critically for the first time, thought that he might do worse than to take the edge off his Norfolk accent. This new life might have possibilities after all.

‘No luggage, Sir?’ the taxi driver asked casually.

Luggage? The dim remembrance of the impact of his fist upon a blue travelling bag on a luggage rack entered his mind. Well, that might have been coincidence. The man might have put it in left luggage. But then he remembered Ahmed’s anxious glancing at his watch and the sly grin as he handed Gabriel the mobile phone. He saw in his mind the hands of the clock on the cafeteria wall as they left, and calculated backwards through the five minutes to the time just before the young man had left them.

Gabriel felt a sharp burning pain in the tip of his index finger – the finger that had touched the last of the digits. He remembered particularly straining to hear the ring tone that did not come.

He felt his body swaying and clutched wildly at the top of the open taxi door.

The radio in the cab was playing.

‘They’ve really done it his time, the bastards,’ the cabby said. ‘Two trains at once, passing each other apparently.’

Christopher’s morning had not been kind. First it was Alice from the almoner’s office, stepping uninvited into the notional space around the table that was barred to all but himself when an autopsy was in progress. Then there was Bertie, his assistant, clattering about on the second table, saw and chisel in hand, as if he were in a calypso band. Fortunately there were no police today. Time, then, for one more body before lunch with Alice.

Though the instruments were already laid out for him, he rearranged them – unnecessarily, as he always did – in accordance with that tiny manifestation of autism known only to his family. He called for Bertie to help him pull out the drawer and together they manoeuvred the ice-cold cadaver onto the stainless steel table. Then he remembered it was the one with the curious history.

It was clear the man had died through asphyxiation caused by vomit blocking the airways. What had caused that was not immediately apparent. It was a while after he started probing the stomach contents that he found it, the object that would transform his day: a tiny glistening ball hardly larger than a pea that dropped from his forceps and tinkled across the steel surface before coming to rest on what he saw was one of its many faceted surfaces. It first crossed his mind that the object was a perfectly cut diamond, so brightly did it refract the light from the lamp above, but on closer inspection there was no doubt it was metallic. He looked up once to see Alice gesticulating at the partition window, then waved her away and put it from his mind that they had agreed to lunch together.

Under his magnifying lens the object was not just a simple sphere. The colour of each of the many facets was distinctly unique and beneath the surface of each he believed he could see – although sense was probably a better word – tiny oscillations in the refracted light. A cloud began to form before his eyes, followed by a throbbing at each temple. But that was just the beginning.

No-one saw – not even Alice – that when they lifted him from the floor the metal sphere rolled as if propelled by its own energy along the gully and into the drain, from which – although of course no-one looked for it – it was never recovered.

Exactly a week later Christopher – or rather his cadaver – suffered the indignity of being autopsied on the very same table. And then Bertie took Alice for lunch.

The Robinsons had moved to Suffolk in anticipation of their joint retirements. For George it was a logical progression from the chic, but rather dismal, town house in Hackney to a listed farmhouse with three acres where he could bed himself in for retirement. Alma accompanied him reluctantly, not realising that the bane of her life, the urban fox – one of which had threatened their grandson Tommy in his pram – had country cousins with a taste for guinea fowl and chickens. That was minor, though, compared with a new arrival some two years into their translatio in paradisum . There had been odd sightings of the hound-like creature – hardly a deer at all – in the village, but it was only when, one morning, George found his rose-heads decimated and the agapanthus leaves truncated – with characteristic teeth marks – that they knew there was a problem. At first seldom seen, the sand-coloured beasts quickly became less timid. In full view of the house they cropped the lower strata of the laurel bushes, so that the animals lurking in the undergrowth became more visible below the browsing line. And so with the vegetables. The one obvious solution – to fence the garden – failed at the first hurdle when George paced out the quarter-mile perimeter and Alma resolutely refused to forego their holiday in Ibiza to meet the cost. So they fell back on simple solutions: devices which emitted frequencies that allegedly only deer could hear; talking boxes that only excited curiosity; and, as a last resort, an imitation fox that jumped out of a box to flashing lights when triggered by movement (usually George’s). By the end of the summer the muntjacs – which had now multiplied alarmingly – showed only disdain, while the bird population, to Alma’s dismay, had upped and left. In a last desperate measure George fenced the flower and vegetable beds with wire netting, but admitted defeat when one of the creatures, having jumped the fence, had caught its leg in the netting when chased by George and had to be cut free, to the sound of loud bellows from both parties.