Sam Thompson - Communion Town

They had drawn back and left her standing there in the centre of the space. The faces at the tables had turned towards her, and it had struck her as funny that all of them were looking away from the sea: it had been as if she was standing on a stage with the city as a backdrop behind her. The streets had been vacant, their brick mouths lamplit. Then something had changed in the men’s faces and she had seen the figure walking towards her.

As she listened to the voices in the hall, she saw how things might have been if only she had behaved differently from the moment she had arrived here. She saw herself going to a language school or, better, learning in private from Dawn, or by herself from a book, learning another language properly for the first time, not to please anyone or to persuade them of anything, not even because she needed to, but just learning to speak the language. Just staying and not telling anyone, and perhaps, in good time, disclosing her new knowledge to her friends. Why shouldn’t she?

The man who had appeared from inside the city, limping towards her where she stood on the promenade, had been very old: one of those frail, shrivelled old men you could easily mistake for an old lady, with the face so hollow and small and the sparse white hairs curling from the chin. He had pitched sideways every now and then as he came towards her. She had seen worms of yellow matter in the corners of his eyes, and caught a smell of sickness. But it was important to be nice to elderly gentlemen, and she was good at it, so she had greeted him with a friendly smile and got ready to offer him her arm if he needed it. He must have come for the festival too. Touchingly, he had decorated his coat with a rather bedraggled carnation.

She had been about to offer to help him to a seat, but he had gripped her hand with fingers which were narrow and knobbled as twigs but stronger than they appeared, and would not let her move. She hadn’t liked the intensity with which the clouded eyes looked up into her face. The men at the tables had watched as she had tried to draw away, but the old man had leant on her arm, threatening to fall, and tightened his grip so that, although he weighed very little, she couldn’t bring herself to shake him off. Craning up towards her ear, he had begun to speak.

The strange thing was that, now, she could remember nothing at all about what he had said. At the time, she was sure, she had understood him — had even felt a swell of relief that someone was making the effort — but now it was gone, the old man’s story, whatever he had wanted to tell her. She only remembered that it had made her very uncomfortable and that she had known that she did not want to hear it. The ruined eyes had been fixed on her so hungrily. Lifted by a wave of nausea, she had tugged her arm from his clinging grip, and, before he could get out more than a few words, she had left.

A ripple of outrage or disappointment had followed her from the trestle tables, but she hadn’t cared. All right, yes, she had thought furiously, as she hastened away from the waterfront without looking back: yes, I’ve embarrassed myself again, I’ve come blundering in and shown myself up at your stupid festival that I don’t see the point of, I’ve probably let everyone down and I don’t even know how. Let me get away.

She felt tired. She wondered why she presented herself the way she did, why she could only wheedle her petulant demands of the world instead of being brave and humble and simple as she knew she could be. Why were all her actions forgeries and all her words lies, when the last thing she really was, was a liar? The one thing she wanted was to be honest with people. Why had she made such a fool of herself to Dawn with every single thing she had done and said? Dawn, who was never unbalanced, who had everything she needed and who never flailed around like a stupid marionette. Andie had tried her best, but there was a law that said wherever inside yourself you place what matters most, that’s where you will fail. The voices came down the corridor into the room but they told her nothing and she was not trying to listen.

That evening, when Dawn arrived home from her afternoon’s work at the school, Andie mentioned that her train left in forty-five minutes’ time and it had been so kind of Dawn to have her to stay. Dawn wanted to ask what about the plan of staying for the rest of the month, but she could find no tactful way to do so when apparently it had been forgotten. As Andie collected up her things she chattered brightly about the next city she was going to see, sharing highlights from the guidebook.

Dawn walked with her towards the station, but only part of the way. Possibly she had eaten a bad mussel the other night, and she had certainly swallowed several bits of grit: all through today she’d thought she could feel tremblings of food poisoning, and she wanted to go back to her apartment and address them in private.

They paused on the promenade before separating. The remains of the feast had been cleared away, and an older woman was sluicing down the flagstones with a bucket.

Andie shifted her feet, her legs braced against the weight of her rucksack. She looked down at the pavement and across at the sky which was growing deeper over the sea. Fine strands of hair at her temples were filled with the light. She said she would see Dawn back home. They should stay in touch. Dawn agreed, her attention drifting into the silver floss. Andie was saying something else, her voice low, and too late Dawn realised that she had not been listening. Andie’s face was fretful as she waited for a reply.

‘All right,’ Dawn said, and she imagined that the pieces of grit were fragments of a precious material, specks of pearl. ‘I’ll let him know.’

Exquisite enigmas, mysteries sinister and bizarre: for Peregrine Fetch these were at once a vocation and the keenest happiness in life. As an archive of the gruesome and the perplexing his casebook is without peer and yet, even there, the details of his final adventure must strike the interpreter as anomalous. It may be that we have yet to grasp the whole pattern of the crimes. Which of us can hope to explain the events of the night on which the most gifted investigator of our time met his match? Peregrine Fetch was the man who solved the Theft of the Paper Orchid, and who exposed the trickeries at work in the affair of the Nightmare Gallery; it was he who brought to its denoument the sanguinary chronicle of the Revenge of the Trelawneys, and who won the horrified applause of every citizen by unravelling the case of the Riddle in Brass. Regardless of the outcome of the investigation whose narrative it is my task now to set down, I count myself privileged to have been his assistant, his apprentice and his friend.

In the small hours of one night in March last year, I was at work in the consulting rooms where, by day, Peregrine Fetch received his clients, heard their tales and meditated on their problems. I myself often puzzled late over the files of our ongoing investigations, doing my best to follow my mentor’s ratiocinatory principles as far as they could lead — far enough, perhaps, to tease out whichever snarl of human evil lay before me on the desk. When on occasion I accomplished some small success in this regard, Peregrine’s features would crinkle and his grey eyes would release the spark of warmth which at other times they hid so well.

All night I had worked alone amid columns of case notes, kept company by the raindrops that flung themselves at the windows, but now I heard hurried footsteps in the street below. Moments later I was joined by Inspector Nimrod of the City Watch.