“Right, lad!” Atwood bustled out of another door, wearing a hairy coat which gave him bearlike proportions. His sparse locks had been slicked down across his enormous skull with water. “Where’s your car?”
“Car?” Hutchman had parked his car on a cindery patch at the side of the house, and had been planning to leave it there.
“It’s raining out there, lad.” Atwood spoke with ponderous exactitude. “My van is out of action and the Cricketers is a good half-mile from here. If you think I’m going to walk it in the rain, think again.”
Hutchman, needled by the other man’s unvarying boorishness, was tempted to call the expedition off, but reminded himself that the car no longer fitted the broadcast description. It would, in any case, be no more noticeable in a pub car-park than sitting virtually on its own beside the house.
“My car’s just outside the door,” he said. They ran to it in chilling rain. Atwood jigged impatiently until Hutchman opened a door for him, then he threw himself into the seat with an impact that rocked the car on its suspension. He slammed the door with similar violence, making Hutchman wince.
“Let’s go,” Atwood shouted. “We’re wasting good drinking time.”
As he started up the engine Hutchman tried to recapture the odd craving for pints of stout which had gripped him on Sunday night on the way to Crymchurch police station, but all that happened was that he got a cold feeling in his stomach. With Atwood directing, he drove out to the main road, the blue-white lighting of which emphasized the drabness of the buildings, and along it for a short distance to an unimpressive red-brick inn. Hutchman surveyed the place gloomily as he got out of the car. On every past occasion when he had become involved with a dedicated beer drinker and been dragged off to the area’s reputed sole source of good ale the pub concerned had always turned out to be remarkably dismal. This one was no exception to what apparently was a natural law. As they ran to the entrance through the rain he experienced a sad conviction that it was a warm starry night far to the south in Crymchurch.
“Two pints of special,” Atwood called to a barman as soon as they got inside the public bar.
“Make that a pint and a whisky,” Hutchman said. “A double.”
Atwood raised his eyebrows and parodied Hutchman’s homecounties accent. “Ho, pardon flipping me! If you wants whisky, Trevah, you can flipping well pay for it.” He leaned on the dark wood of the counter, shaking with amusement, then doggedly pursued his joke. “Ay’m reduced to common beastly beer this month — pater has cut may allowance, you see.”
Giving way to his annoyance, Hutchman took the thick roll from his pocket and threw a five-pound note onto the counter without speaking. When his drink came he drained the glass. The liquid warmed his stomach immediately, then seemed to follow an anatomically impossible radiant course into the rest of his body. During the following two hours he drank fairly steadily, paying for most of the rounds, while Atwood engaged the barman in a long, repetitious dialogue on football and greyhound racing. Hutchman wished for someone to talk to, but the barman was a tattooed youth who viewed him with scarcely veiled hostility; and the only other customers were silent, raincoated men who sat on bench seats in darker recesses of the room.
There was a doorway behind the counter which led into the select bar, and through it Hutchman caught brief glimpses of a queenly barmaid. She seemed to laugh a lot, gliding easily through the cozy orange light of the other room. Hutchman prayed for her to come and talk to him, vowing he would even refrain from looking down her blouse if she would only lean on his part of the bar and talk to him and make him feel partly human again. But she never entered the public bar and Hutchman, absurdly, was trapped with Atwood. As his loneliness grew, the familiar lines from Sassoon returned with almost unbearable poignance…
Sometime later the young barman drifted away to other company and Atwood, after a disappointed look around the room, decided to focus his conversation on Hutchman. “Good paying job, a draftsman’s, isn’t it?”
“Not bad.”
“What’s the screw?”
“Ten thousand,” Hutchman guessed.
“What’s that a week? Two hundred. Not bad. Does it cost much to get a boy in?”
“How do you mean?”
“I read that when a kid’s going to be an architect his folks have to put so much…”
“That’s architecture.” Hutchman wished the barman would return. “A draftsman serves an ordinary apprenticeship so it wouldn’t cost you anything.”
“That’s all right then.” Atwood looked relieved. “Happen I might put young Geoff into being a draftsman.”
“Supposing he doesn’t like it?”
Atwood laughed. “He’ll like it all right. He can’t draw very well though. The other day he tried to draw a tree — and you should’ve seen what he did! All whirls and squiggles it was. Nothing like a tree! So I showed him the right way and — give the lad credit — I must say he picked it up right fast.”
“I suppose you showed him how to do a comic-book tree?” Hutchman dipped his finger in a spot of beer and drew two straight parallel lines surmounted by a fluffy ball. “Like that?”
“Yes.” A suspicious look passed over Atwood’s slablike face. “Why?”
“You fool,” Hutchman said with alcoholic sincerity. “do you know what you’ve done? Your Geoffrey, your only child, looked at a tree and then he put his impressions of it down on paper without reference to any of the conventions or preconceptions which prevent most human beings from seeing
“Your boy brought you this… holy offering, this treasure, the product of his unsullied mind. And what did you do, George? You laughed at it and told him that the only way to draw a tree was the way the tired hacks who work for the Dandy and the Beano do it. Do you know that your boy will never again be able to look at a tree and see it as it really is? Do you realize he might have been another Picasso if — “
“Who d’you think you’re kidding?”Atwood demanded, but his eyes were clouded with genuine concern. Hutchman was tempted to confess he had only been playing with words, but the giant was discovering that his privacy had been invaded by a stranger and he was growing angry. “What the hell to you know about it, anyway?”
“A great deal.” Hutchman tried to be enigmatic. “Believe me, George, I know a great deal about such things.”
“Get stuffed.” Atwood turned his head away.
“Brilliant,” Hutchman said sadly. “Brilliant repartee, George. I’m going ho… to bed.”
“Go ahead. I’m staying on.”
“Please yourself.” Hutchman walked to the door with unnatural steadiness.
There were only four vehicles in the parking lot, but it took Hutchman a considerable time to accept the simple fact that his car was not among them.
It had been stolen.
CHAPTER 13
Muriel Burnley was going through a new and very unsatisfactory phase of her life.
She had never been happy working for Mr. Hutchman, with his thoughtlessness, and his disregard for company regulations, a disregard which caused her endless work of which he was not even aware. As Muriel drove to the office in her pale-green Morris Mini she added to the catalogue of things she had disliked about Mr. Hutchman. There was his casual attitude about money — which was all right for somebody who had married into it, but not all right for a girl who had to help support her home on a secretary’s salary. Mr. Hutchman had never inquired about her mother’s poor state of health, in fact — Muriel stabbed her foot down on the accelerator — Mr. Hutchman probably did not even know she had a mother. She had made the biggest mistake of her career when she had allowed the personnel officer to assign her to Mr. Hutchman. The trouble was that, shameful admission, in the days when she had seen him only from a distance she had been impressed by his resemblance to a young Gregory Peck. That sort of look was unfashionable now, of course, but she had heard that Mr. Hutchman often had trouble with his marriage and, as she worked so closely with him in the office, there had been a possibility that…
Appalled by where her thoughts were leading, Muriel urged her car forward, overtook a bus, and got back into lane just in time to avoid a van traveling in the opposite direction. She compressed her lips and tried to concentrate on the road.
And to think that all the time Mr. High-and-mighty Hutchman had been carrying on behind his wife’s back with that tart in the Jeavons Institute! It had been obvious that something was going on, of course. Mr. Batterbee had gone the same way, but even filthy Mr. Batterbee hadn’t got himself involved with underworld characters and brought the police snooping around the office. Muriel’s face warmed as she remembered the closeted interviews with the detectives. The other girls had been delighted, naturally. They talked a lot in the corridors in small gleeful groups which fell strangely silent when she approached. It was obvious what they were thinking, of course. Mr. Hutchman had turned out to be a… whoremaster, and Muriel Burnley was his secretary, and the police weren’t paying all that attention to our Muriel for nothing…
She swung the car past Westfield’s security kiosk and braked with unnecessary abruptness in the parking lot. Gathering up her basket, she got out, locked the doors carefully, and hurried into the building. She walked quickly along the corridors without meeting anybody, but on rounding the corner nearest her own office she almost collided with Mr. Boswell, head of Missile R and D.
“Ah, Miss Burnley,” he said. “Just the person I wanted to see.” His blue eyes examined her interestedly through goldrimmed spectacles.
Muriel drew her coat tighter. “Yes, Mr. Boswell?”
“Mr. Cuddy has been seconded to us from Aerodynamics, and he will be taking over Mr. Hutchman’s duties today. He’s going to have a lot on his plate for a few weeks and I want you to give him all the co-operation you can.”
“Of course, Mr. Boswell.” Mr. Cuddy was a small dry individual, who was also a lay preacher. He was sufficiently respectable to counteract Mr. Hutchman’s aura to some extent.
“He’ll be moving his things over this morning. Will you fix up the office before he arrives? Get him off to a good start, eh?”
“Yes, Mr. Boswell.” Muriel went to her office, hung up her coat, and began tidying the larger adjoining room. The police had spent a full morning in it and, although they had made some attempt to put everything right before leaving, had created an air of disorder. In particular, the desk’s oddments tray, where Mr. Hutchman kept an astonishing number of paper clips and pencil stubs had been left in a hopeless jumble. Muriel slid the tray out of its runners and emptied it into a metal wastebin. Several pencil ends, clips, and a green eraser fell wide and bounced across the floor. She gathered them up and was about to dispose of them when she saw something printed in ink on the side of the eraser. The words were: “31 CHANNING WAYE, HASTINGS.”
Muriel carried the eraser into her own office and sat down, staring nervously at it. The detective who interviewed her had returned again and again to the one line of questioning. Had Mr. Hutchman another address, apart from the one in Crymchurch? Had he an address book? Had she ever seen an address written on any of his waste paper?
They had made her promise to contact them if she remembered anything that even seemed like an address. And now she had found what their careful search had missed. What did the Hastings
