Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Peach held the ploughed field upright while Dolphin wedged open the door to the courtyard. The rain had slackened off. The wind, a vast physical presence, threw its weight against the trees, and the trees swirled, their leaves roaring like stones dragged by the sea. The two men stood there for a while, admiring the power of the night.

‘By the way, Dolphin,’ Peach said, placing a hand on the sergeant’s arm, ‘you did well to apprehend the greengrocer. Extremely well.’

Dolphin’s face became foolish with modesty. ‘It was nothing, really. A bit of luck, that’s all.’

‘No, not luck,’ Peach said. ‘Planning. Timing .’

‘Planning?’

‘Why do you think we have night patrols, Dolphin?’

Dolphin considered this. ‘Perhaps I should be congratulating you, sir,’ he said, ‘rather than the other way round.’

Peach smiled into the wind. In exchanges like this, it could be seen that the two men shared a similar brand of natural cunning. At times Dolphin’s instincts led him, almost blind, towards perceptions and discoveries that astonished him. Like treading on the greengrocer, for example. In time, Peach thought, Dolphin would learn to be less astonished, he would learn to see these perceptions and discoveries as his reward for years of apprenticeship, as his right, as valid and innate parts of himself. Exchanges like this explained why Dolphin was, to all intents and purposes (though it had never been formalised), Peach’s deputy and, consequently, Peach’s most likely successor.

As they chuckled together over Dolphin’s remark, the wind hurled itself against the cardboard construction, threatening to whirl it away across the courtyard. Dolphin reacted with the speed of his relative youth and held it down.

‘I think we’d better get it inside,’ he yelled.

Peach nodded.

The two men struggled across the asphalt, round a tree, past a rack of rattling police bicycles. They stopped in front of a long low building with a curving corrugated-iron roof and no windows. It looked like an aircraft hangar. The New Egypt Police Museum.

Peach produced a bunch of keys, selected one, and unlocked the metal door. Once inside, he reached for the panel of light switches. Neon strips began to pop and fizzle overhead.

The museum had been founded circa 1899 by Chief Inspector Magnolia. It was a private museum, intended for the edification and amusement of the police alone. During the past fifteen years there had been moves on the part of several villagers to have the museum thrown open to all New Egyptians; it’s history, they had argued, our history, and in that sense they were right, of course, since the museum was, in fact, a comprehensive record of all the escape attempts that had ever occurred (in living memory, at least). But, naturally, Peach had quashed every request, every petition. The idea was intolerable. The museum acted as a library of information, he said, the equivalent of police archives, and, as such, must remain confidential.

He moved among the rows of exhibits. Rain tapped on the metal roof like a thousand men working with delicate hammers. He liked the fact that there were no windows. The building felt hollow, secretive. A drum, a womb, a submarine.

He paused before a lifesize reconstruction of the accident that Tommy Dane had staged on the main road outside the village in 1945. There was the actual hayrick Tommy had used (generously donated by Farmer Hallam). There, too, was Mr Dane’s bicycle, its mudguards dented, its wheel-rims sprinkled with rust. A dummy Tommy Dane, dressed in clothes that had been appropriated from his wardrobe following his death, lay on the ground in the position he had described during his confession, the head resting in a pool of simulated blood. An account of the escape attempt (written by Peach himself) hung from the roof, accompanied by detailed explanatory maps. Peach nodded as he skimmed through his own terse paragraphs.

He moved on, stopped again. Now he was looking down into a grave, a grave that contained a spotless gleaming coffin. Fashioned out of the finest cedar, the handles plated in silver and carved to resemble a family crest, the interior upholstered in a magenta silk quilt, it must have cost a small fortune. Likewise the tombstone. The tall slab of Italian marble supported an angel with outspread wings and uplifted hands. The names and dates had already been engraved:

LORD OSCAR NOBLE BATLEY 1859–1938

— a little prematurely, though. Peach couldn’t help smiling.

He walked to the far end of the museum. Here were artefacts dating back to the first recorded escape attempt. In 1899 the village postman, a man by the name of Collingwood, had devised a system of lianas stretching from his house on the western edge of the village green to the boundary a mile away. From reading the report (couched in rather fine Edwardian prose), one gathered that New Egypt had boasted a much larger number of trees in those days; one also gathered that Collingwood was a man of somewhat unusual build, being ‘exceptionally small and agile’ and possessing ‘arms of quite extraordinary length’. Collingwood had owed his downfall to the son of one of the village constables. The boy had loved climbing trees, as most boys do, and had discovered one of Collingwood’s lianas. Collingwood had collided with the boy in mid-air. He lost his grip; fell, and died instantaneously of a broken neck. The boy escaped with minor cuts and bruises. Shaking his head at this curious tale, Peach turned and, circling an ancient leather harness that had been suspended in the air by half a dozen stuffed birds, walked back to join Dolphin who was still waiting by the door.

And now the greengrocer’s ploughed field, he thought.

In his view, the museum was a gallery, housing a collection of uniquely creative acts; it represented the flowering of local genius. For, if the truth be known, he had more respect for a Collingwood or a Tommy Dane than for all the other villagers put together. They failed — their failures were inevitable and, in the end, rather pathetic — but at least, and in the face of overwhelming odds, they tried.

He rested a hand on the smooth worn shaft of the hayrick. His domain, this. The neatness, the order. Every single one of the men and women represented in the museum had been born in New Egypt and had died (or would die) in New Egypt. Birth and death closed like brackets round a single desperate theatrical escape attempt. And every attempt had been studied, documented, catalogued. Every attempt had become a case-history. It was perfection of a sort.

Suddenly something snagged on Peach’s line of thought, jerked it out of true.

The toy dog.

Blast that toy dog.

Peach swung round, hands clenched. A sour juice flooded the troughs between his cheeks and his gums. The diagonal lines on his forehead tangled, knotted. He brushed past Dolphin.

‘I want that hung from the centre beam,’ he snapped. ‘If you could arrange it, Dolphin.’

Dolphin stared at Peach without seeming to — a technique he frequently employed when on duty in the village. ‘But what about the report, sir?’

Peach waved an irritable hand. ‘Get someone to do it.’

The way Dolphin was staring at the ground, there might have been a wounded animal lying there.

Peach noticed and understood. ‘In fact, no,’ he said, gathering the remains of his former jovial mood. ‘Why don’t you do it yourself? You brought the greengrocer in. You were present at the interrogation. And it’ll be your first report on an escape. Why don’t you write this one up?’

Dolphin’s face acquired a sudden radiance. ‘Thank you, sir. I will.’

‘And don’t forget to lock the door,’ Peach added, withdrawing into the darkness. ‘We can’t have just anybody walking in here, can we?’