Rupert Thomson - Dreams of Leaving

Dolphin agreed that they couldn’t.

A gale outside now. Wave on wave of wind washed through the courtyard. Something banged repeatedly in the rifle-range like an old-fashioned gun. A dustbin overturned, and birds made of newspaper whirled up into the loud black sky. One hand clutching his collar to his throat, Peach stood the dustbin upright and replaced the lid. The wind, swooping down, lifted his tunic at the back and with a whoop of delight investigated the Chief Inspector’s buttocks. (Like most figures in a position of authority, Peach was the butt for many scurrilous jokes, often of an anatomical nature.) This mockery touched an already exposed nerve and Peach, normally the calmest of men, felt like lashing out. At what, though? The wind? The toy dog? That empty coffin buried in the cemetery?

He stamped indoors, slamming the door. His flesh vibrated with anger under his uniform. Where was Hazard?

‘Hazard? Hazard? ’ His voice boomed down the silent green corridor.

But the stuttering of the typewriter had ceased. Hazard must have gone home.

‘Skiver,’ Peach muttered.

He burst into the kitchen, put the kettle on. Then waited for it to boil, hands fidgeting in his pockets. Nobody pulled the wool over his eyes. Nobody.

A shrill whistling brought him round. He poured the boiling water into the teapot and carried it, together with a bottle of milk and a white china mug, into his office. While the tea brewed, he opened his filing-cabinet and searched for the dossier.

Ah, there it was. Filed under H. H for Highness.

He opened the pink cover. MOSES GEORGE HIGHNESS. He sat down at his desk and, sipping the strong tea, scanned the first few pages to refresh his memory.

A description of the child. The circumstances of his disappearance. Transcripts of the interviews with the parents. Certain phrases leapt out, clarified by the passage of years. Babies disappear all the time. Barefaced. Almost confessional. How could he have been fooled, even for a moment?

He turned the page. The reports of the daily search-parties. The discovery of the toy dog. Pretty slim pickings. Then a piece of paper slipped out of the file and see-sawed through the air to the floor. Bending with difficulty — these days Peach had to ask his wife to cut his toenails for him — he scooped it up. It was a cutting from the local rag. One of the most dramatic headlines they had run for years: TRAGIC DEATH OF BABY, it said. A lie, of course. A cover-up. He knew that now.

Running his hand across the stubble of his cropped grey hair, Peach turned the page again. The new entry was dated October 10th 1969. Over thirteen years after the funeral. He began to re-read the notes he had made of a conversation that had taken place on the main road that day.

He had stopped a car, he remembered, a routine check, only to discover that the driver was a policeman himself, from a town less than thirty miles away. The policeman was on holiday. On his way down to the coast to join his wife, he said. A couple of children brawled in the back of the car.

‘Fine children,’ Peach had remarked.

‘More trouble than they’re worth,’ the policeman said. ‘Got any kids yourself?’

Peach regretted that he hadn’t.

‘Just as well. I wouldn’t have any, if I was you.’

Peach, who couldn’t, winced. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you’re probably right.’ But how he longed for an heir. The things he could have taught a son, for instance. Why, he might even have taken over from his father as Chief Inspector! Peach felt the splinters of his shattered hopes lodge in his chest.

The policeman, in a brash holiday mood, didn’t notice. ‘People have ’em,’ he was saying, ‘don’t realise how much work they are, then they don’t want ’em any more. What do they do? They dump ’em, don’t they?’

A gloomy Peach nodded. But the policeman’s next sentence snapped him back, as if his fantasy had been attached to the real world by a length of elastic.

‘Talking of kids — shut up a moment you two, will you? — did you ever hear about that case a few years ago? The baby they found on the river? Happened down our way. Strange story that was, and no — ’

Peach jumped in sharply. ‘What baby?’

‘Didn’t you hear about it? These two old dears found a baby floating down the river. They brought him in to us. In ever such a tizzy, they were.’ His laughter gobbled obscenely like water running out of a bath. ‘They didn’t even — ’

But Peach didn’t want to hear about old women. ‘This baby,’ he interrupted. ‘What was it like?’

‘About eighteen months old. Had a funny name. Something from the Bible — ’

‘Moses?’ Peach’s voice remained calm, but his heart seemed to be pushing against the inside of his uniform.

‘That’s it. And he was only found by the river, wasn’t he? Some sense of humour his parents must’ve had.’ The policeman’s mouth opened wide. His teeth were curiously pale and large, like ice-cubes.

Sense of humour? Peach was thinking. Don’t talk to me about sense of humour.

Before the policeman drove on, Peach asked for the address of the police station that had taken the baby into custody. The policeman never thought to question Peach’s interest in the case. A fool, Peach thought, and a complacent one at that. But perhaps he was being unfair. After all, the man was on holiday. And he had given Peach his first real lead in thirteen years.

Peach looked up from the file. Lightning bleached the windowpanes a faint cold blue. The thunder had moved away over the hill. He turned that autumn morning over in his head. The blades of grass plated with early frost. Hedgerows rusted by a month of rain. A random shaft of sun bringing out the ginger in Sergeant Caution’s two-day growth of beard.

And when he watched that policeman’s car disappear round a bend in the main road, how strongly he had felt the temptation to disappear himself. To verify the story. To know the truth about Moses.

Two considerations had held him back. One, his sense of responsibility (imagine a Chief Inspector defecting! the hypocrisy!). And two, the pointlessness of such a move. What good would it do? If the baby had got away, had grown up in the outside world (he would be sixteen now, Peach calculated), he would have no memories of New Egypt. He might have been born anywhere. Equally, very few of the villagers remembered Moses now, not without being prompted. He had drowned in the river, and that was that. From both points of view the case was closed. There was no foreseeable danger. Better then to forget. Let time and apathy bury the memory. Only he, Peach, would carry the burden of knowing what had really happened.

And George Highness, of course.

George Highness. Would he talk?

Somehow Peach doubted it. The man was private to the point of arrogance, and stubborn with it. Those characteristics would prevent him broadcasting what he had done, would nip any revolutionary instincts in the bud. It would be enough for George Highness to know that he had outsmarted the entire police department of New Egypt. Peach imagined that he must derive enormous satisfaction from that knowledge.

Once again he saw Highness during the closing moments of that funeral in 1956. When he walked over to offer his condolences, Highness had actually smiled. No more than a slight puckering at the corners of his mouth, but a smile none the less. The sheer brazen impertinence of it. Since then Peach had developed a theory about smiling. Why, only the other day he had delivered a lecture on the subject to a group of new recruits.

‘Now if you see somebody smiling,’ he had told them, ‘it can mean one of two things. One, that the person in question is perfectly adjusted to life in the village. Anybody who is that well adjusted should be viewed as a potential threat. Can any of you tell me why?’