Rupert Thomson: Dreams of Leaving

Don’t talk so much, he told himself.

Peach could be heard jingling a selection of keys and small change in his pocket. ‘And you, Mrs Highness, were upstairs,’ he said, ‘cleaning.’

Alice whispered, ‘Yes.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Peach said.

‘Chief Inspector, please,’ George said. ‘This has been a terrible shock for my wife. She’s very upset.’

‘And not for you?’ Peach enquired.

‘And not what?’ George asked, though he had understood.

‘Never mind.’ Peach moved from the window. Light invaded one half of his face. He seemed, unaccountably, to be smiling. ‘You have no idea who could be responsible for this?’

‘No idea.’

A long silence followed. George could hear the rustle of Dolphin’s notepad and the scratching of his fountain pen. Hazard was fidgeting in his armchair. He seemed to be trying to contain violence of the most unpleasant kind. Peach stared out of the window.

‘Unusual, don’t you think,’ Peach said eventually, ‘the disappearance of a baby?’ His voice light, almost conversational.

‘Not especially,’ George replied. ‘Babies disappear all the time.’ Only to realise that he had fallen for one of Peach’s tricks. A truly grief-stricken parent would never have answered with such apparent objectivity. ‘But,’ he rushed on, wanting now to convey courage in the face of adversity, giving himself, as it were, a stiff upper lip, ‘we haven’t given up hope, Chief Inspector.’

Peach moved across the room on extraordinarily light feet. ‘And what about you, Mrs Highness? Have you given up hope?’

Alice flinched. Eyes staring. Hands clenched. Still that girl in the woods, her head pressed into the leaves. The boots, the boots.

‘I told you,’ George stepped in, ‘she’s very upset.’

Peach said nothing. He looked at Alice, then at George, then at Alice again. His lower lip moved out and back. Once. Smoothly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’ll be all for the time being,’ and, gesturing to Dolphin and Hazard, spun like a huge lubricated top in the direction of the hallway.

George followed them out and suddenly couldn’t breathe. The three policemen packed the narrow space to suffocation point. They had arrested all the light, all the air. The coarse rasping blue of their uniforms everywhere. Even their breathing seemed blue. God, how he loathed that colour now. He couldn’t even look at the sky without thinking of policemen. Peach opened the front door and passed through. A draught flowed into the house. George gulped it down.

‘Not feeling too good,’ he muttered.

Dolphin made a note of the fact on his pad.

As George closed the door, he heard Alice run up the stairs.

*

The next day, at nine in the morning, the phone rang. The Chief Inspector would like to see them. Separately. Mr Highness at two p.m. Mrs Highness at three p.m. Was that convenient?

‘What is this?’ George cried. ‘A trial? We’ve lost our son, for Christ’s sake.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Highness,’ came the official police voice. ‘It’s the Chief Inspector’s request.’

‘Well, it’s out of the question. Absolutely out of the question. Please inform the Chief Inspector that we’ll be coming together.’

The official police voice sighed. ‘At two p.m., Mr Highness?’

‘At two p.m.’

George replaced the receiver.

Peach didn’t refer to this telephone conversation when they were shown into his office that afternoon. In his mind he had probably already turned their refusal to appear separately into an admission of weakness. Which it was, of course. Instead of taking them apart one by one, in isolation, he would now attempt to play them off, one against the other. Peach sat behind his desk, his lower lip drooping with scepticism. His eyelids looked heavy, ornately wrinkled, curtains that rose and fell on mysteries that ran for years. His fingers, plaited together on the surface of his desk, reminded George improbably of the rush basket. Peach asked them both to be seated. There was a pause while he adjusted the position of a document. Then he began.

‘You know, of course, that I’m suspicious.’

George assumed a puzzled air. Aware beforehand of just how exacting this interview was likely to be, he had been practising all morning in the bathroom mirror. He felt his eyebrows slide into position, he felt ridges forming in the skin above the bridge of his nose. Perfect.

But Peach turned away from him, making an irrelevance of his expression. ‘Mrs Highness,’ he said, ‘I think you know what I mean.’

Alice’s eyes rolled sideways in their sockets.

‘You mean,’ George rushed in, ‘that someone might have kidnapped Moses? Abduction. Is that what you suspect?’

‘Abduction?’ Peach pretended to be dealing with a possibility that hadn’t occurred to him. ‘No, not abduction.’

‘What then?’

Alice sniffed. (George had told her to sniff as often as possible. At awkward moments she should cry. But only at awkward moments. Strategy, you see. Anything to distract Peach.)

‘Deception,’ said Peach, yet to be successfully distracted, ‘might be one way of putting it — ’

George altered the angle of his head. He wanted to appear just that little bit slower than he really was.

‘Subterfuge would be another,’ Peach went on. ‘Intrigue. Finagling. Machination.’ A pause. ‘Conspiracy.’

George couldn’t resist. ‘Nice words,’ he said. ‘ Roget’s Thesaurus? ’

Peach’s steady gaze dropped in temperature. ‘Where’s Moses?’ he snapped.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

The two men’s eyes locked.

Alice began to cry. George silently applauded her timing then, looking at her, realised that her tears were genuine. He put an arm round her and drew her towards him.

‘If we knew where Moses was,’ he said, ‘we would hardly be sitting here, would we?’

Peach considered this. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘I thought you knew everything.’

Peach eased his chair backwards. His mouth widened in anticipation of a smile. The smile never arrived. He folded his hands across his belly. Somehow he managed to make this otherwise homely gesture look threatening. Another silence began. George stared out of the office window. To kill time he counted the thorns on a rose-bush. He had reached thirty-six when Peach spoke.

‘We found a toy dog,’ he offered casually.

George shifted in his chair. ‘Oh?’

‘By the river.’

‘By the river,’ George repeated. He wondered how Peach knew that Moses had a toy dog.

‘A white toy dog,’ Peach said. Leaning forwards, he reached into an open drawer, produced the white toy dog and stood it upright on the desk.

George gasped. It was Moses’s toy dog. Alice began to cry again. This time George didn’t notice. He couldn’t understand how the toy dog had fallen into Peach’s hands. He thought he had put it into the basket with Moses. He had certainly intended to. Did this mean that Peach had found Moses too? Was this interview just another of Peach’s sadistic charades? He reached out and picked up the toy dog. He turned it over, playing for time. He was trying to remember. He knew that he had slipped it into his coat pocket that morning. He had wanted Moses to have something to hold, something to comfort him on his lonely journey downstream. But, now he thought about it, he couldn’t actually remember handing the toy dog to Moses. It must have fallen out of his pocket then. So. Peach knew nothing.

‘Yes,’ George admitted, ‘this is my son’s toy dog.’ He put it back on the desk. His hand was shaking. The dog toppled over. He smiled. He had never been able to make the dog stand up.