Colin Watson - Lonelyheart 4122

She led him, for two foot-stewing, thigh-racking days, past practically every name in the Flaxborough street directory and into parts of the outskirts that might, to his eyes, have been precincts of Kiev or Medicine Hat.

He slogged along wharves, banged his head in a tunnel under Barnet Street and trailed up a steep lane that led to what seemed to be a ruined keep. During other excursions, he found himself, for the very first time in his life, in the Grainger Museum and Art Gallery, a permanent exhibition of folk crafts in an annexe of the public library, and (very briefly) a ladies’ convenience in Brown and Derehams.

On the third day, the sergeant rested. But the circumstances were of Miss Teatime’s devising, not his own.

He had risen early and taken up his post in the diminutive room which Mr Maddox had put at his disposal and which commanded views of the hotel staircase and the doors of dining room and lounge. He could glimpse, just inside the dining room, Miss Teatime eating her breakfast.

Miss Teatime could not see the sergeant, but she guessed he was not far away; for forty-eight hours his face had bobbed in remote corners of her excellent vision like a pink lantern left burning in daylight. She was not unduly concerned, merely a little curious. And as she spread marmalade and began to read the letter lying by her plate, the thought of her rosy visaged familiar was for the moment dispelled altogether.

“4122 (R.N. retd.)” expressed delight at her having agreed to a meeting and would “weigh anchor” that very day in response to the signal he had so keenly awaited. Would she be in the Garden of Remembrance by St Laurence’s Church at eleven bells precisely...

At this point, Miss Teatime paused. She had a vague idea that “bells” meant something different from the hours of ordinary land-based folk. But no, he would not expect her to work such things out; it doubtless was just another of his jocular figures of speech.

She read on.

I am sure I shall recognize you on instinct (do you believe in Telepathy?) but just to make sure that neither of us accosts some perfect stranger (!!) I suggest you take the seat nearest the water fountain and have in your hand some flower or piece of greenery. You will spot me, I expect, by my ugly old quarter-deck mug! (No, I am joking—my face is not all that fearsome really)...

Quarter-deck, Miss Teatime repeated to herself. Did they have quarter-decks these days? Perhaps they did...

I am most intrigued by this “Secret Ambition” that you mention. Are you not going to tell me what it is? I promise, faithfully not to think you “silly and romantic”. In any case, aren’t we all, at heart?

Forgive me if I write no more just now, as I have to board a train for the Big City—a rare thing these days, thank goodness, but time and tide and directors’ meetings wait for no man, I’m afraid!

Until we meet,

Yours impatiently,

4122 (It’s Jack to my friends, if

you’d like to know!)

Miss Teatime folded the letter and thoughtfully stirred her coffee. Today was going to be one occasion when the pleasant young policeman would have to be deprived of a passage in her wake...

She smiled at the way the phrase had popped into her head: maritime metaphor seemed to be infectious.

Ten minutes later, Love watched Miss Teatime emerge from the dining room and disappear from his view at the first turn of the stairs. He was not sorry that she apparently intended to go straight out this morning, relinquishing her usual hour of reading the papers in the lounge. His hideout—actually an empty store cupboard with a small glass panel high in the door—was stuffy and uncomfortable.

Another quarter of an hour went by. Love dutifully kept his face pressed to his tiny window.

Nearly half an hour. He propped the door a couple of inches open and breathed in the air from the corridor. It smelled of cooking vegetables.

The clink of distant glasses told him that the bars had opened.

The cupboard had become unbearable. He stepped stiffly into the corridor and took a few cautious turns up and down.

After a while, this, too, palled. Love went out into the street. He crossed over and found a shop doorway in which he could enjoy the morning sunshine and keep an eye on the pillared entrance of the Roebuck at the same time.

A fair number of people greeted him as they passed. Several stopped and showed readiness to chat. The detective “tails” on films and television, Love ruefully reflected, didn’t have their job complicated by acquaintance with so many friendly and garrulous citizens; nobody as much as glanced at them.

Eventually, an increasing suspicion that he had blundered in some way made the small talk and disrespectful banter of the strolling Flaxborovians insupportable. He went back to the hotel and sought the advice of Mr Maddox.

Another way out of the building? Well, there was and there wasn’t, said Mr Maddox enigmatically. But before he considered the point more closely, perhaps it would be wise to establish whether Miss Teatime were still in her room. He sent a chambermaid to find out, enjoining tact with such gravity that the girl immediately assumed a scene of vicious abandonment to be in store and so took a friend from the kitchen to share.

Both were disappointed.

“Not there,” said Mr Maddox. “Ah. In that case, she must have gone down the service stairway at the back, which guests never do. I must say, I’m surprised. But it just goes to show.”

He spread his hands and went off to supervise the setting of tables.

Love gloomily repaired to the Tap to await lunch time and the possible reappearance then of “the subject” (from the remembered terminology of espionage he picked the word with sour annoyance).

Phyllis was behind the bar. But this time she was wearing a sombre woollen dress buttoned right up to her chin.

Everybody was being rotten to him today.

The Garden of Remembrance was a hedged enclosure won from the older part of St Laurence’s cemetery through the efforts of a particularly Toc H-minded vicar. It was nearly square and the gravel paths round its perimeter and across the diagonals gave it the semblance of a flag, with a domed drinking fountain as its central motif.

There were two teak seats on each of the four sides and four more seats were grouped round the fountain. The geometrically spaced flower beds contained geometrically arranged plants. Every plant of the same species was of identical size and seemed even to bear a precisely similar number of leaves and flowers. At each corner and in the centre of each side was a Lombardy poplar. Exactly between them, cypresses had been set. The trees were young, but already they helped the privet hedge to shelter the garden from winds and to make traffic noise seem farther off.

Miss Teatime opened the low, wrought iron gate into the garden at five minutes to eleven.

Several women, two with prams, were settled in seats round the sides. A group of three old men sat together, gazing resignedly straight ahead. They wore long black coats and their cloth caps were tilted forward almost to their eyebrows. Two children raced up and down the diagonal paths and chased each other round the drinking fountain. Eventually one of them fell over and was carried back to a seat by his mother, who made noises even more unnerving than his and who seemed incensed not by his late boisterousness but by his imperfect mastery of balance.

There was no one in the garden who looked likely ever to have walked a quarter-deck.

Miss Teatime strolled to the centre of the square, remembering the injunction to choose the seat nearest the fountain. To her eye, though, all four looked equidistant, so she picked the one that gave the easiest view of the entrance.