“It was just a thought, troubling my enquiring mind,” I replied, but neither of them looked convinced. “OK,” I continued, clapping my hands briskly, “reports on my desk by nine in the morning, please. Then we can concentrate on keeping the streets of Heckley safe for the good burghers of this town. Mr Wood wants us to restore the times when you could drop your wage packet on the pavement and it would still be there when you went back for it.”
“It would now,” Dave said. “Lost in all the rubbish. And nobody would recognise a wage packet, these days.”
“What’s Fenning’s Fever Cure?” Annette asked.
Chapter Seven
A couple of years ago Annabelle and I had a lightning drive down to London to see an exhibition of Pissarro’s work at the Barbican. I like him, the reviews were good, and it was an excuse for a day out. On the way home, late that night, Annabelle was making conversation to keep me awake. “If you could have one painting,” she began, “just one, to hang above your fireplace, which would it be?”
“Of Pissarro’s?” I asked.
“No. Anybody’s.”
“Oh, in that case, a Picasso. Any Picasso.”
“Except him.” She knew I was a Picasso freak.
“Right.” I gave it a long thought. We were approaching Leicester Forest services and I asked if she wanted to stop. She didn’t. “I think it would be a Gauguin,” I told her.
“A Gauguin? I’ve never heard you championing him before.”
“Oh, I’m very fond of him,” I said, “but there’s one in particular that gets me.” I thumped my chest for emphasis, saying: “Right here.”
“I know!” she exclaimed. “One with lots of nubile South Sea Islanders showing their breasts.”
“Where do you get these ideas about me?” I protested. “Actually, it’s a self portrait. Gauguin is just coming home from a walk, and his landlady is greeting him at the garden gate. It’s called Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin. He captures the moment beautifully. Haven’t you ever seen it?”
“No, I don’t think I have.”
“You’ll like it. The colours glow like a stained glass window. I have it in a book somewhere.”
The conversation was preserved in my mind with almost every other word that passed between us, but I hadn’t expected it to be recalled in this way. The Bart Simpson fridge magnet was drawing my thoughts back to Peter Latham’s house, or, more precisely, to the postcard that it pinned against the cold metal. It was the same picture as I’d told Annabelle I’d like to have on my wall, before all others: Gauguin’s self portrait, Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin.
There was no message written on the back, no pinhole through it. It was as blank as a juror’s expression. Cards like that are only available in galleries. Had Latham bought it for himself, because he liked it above all the other offerings on show? That was something for me to ponder over.
Tuesday morning we hit the headlines. The UK News, Britain’s foremost tabloid, written for Britons by Britons, with lots of white British bosoms for red-blooded British men, carried yet another world exclusive. Yesterday it had been the convent schoolgirl with the fifty-two inch bust — Only another seven days to her sweet sixteenth, then all will be revealed! — today it was: Why is this man in jail? above a near life-size photograph of a tearful Tony Silkstone.
Silkstone, we were told when we turned to page five, was living in a prison hell because he had rid the world of a scumbag. Latham was a child killer and rapist who had gone on to kill Silkstone’s wife. Cue blurred holiday snap of Margaret, wearing a bikini. Silkstone had done what any good citizen would have done — what the courts should have done years ago — and made sure Latham wouldn’t be raping or murdering anybody else. Good riddance to him, but meanwhile poor Silkstone had to wait in an overcrowded prison, three to a cell, while the geriatric legal system, aided and abetted by a police force only interested in statistics, argued what to do with him. Give him a medal, says the UK News! On the next page was a picture of Caroline Poole — not the sports day one, thank God — and all the gory details of how her violated young body was found, back in 1984.
Prendergast! I thought. Bloody Prendergast! The courts are supposed to be isolated from public opinion, but if you believe that you probably still think that Christmas is the time of goodwill to all men. And why shouldn’t the public have their say, you may argue: it’s the public’s law, after all. And while we are at it, let’s bring back lynching.
Wednesday I went to the Spinners with Dave and we had a good chinwag. We’ve lapsed a few times, lately. Thursday night I ate at home, alone. I didn’t have the opportunity to ask Annette if she fancied a Chinese, and I didn’t go looking for her. No point in appearing eager.
Summer fell on the third of July. Otherwise, it slipped by in the usual mixture of showers and mild days. As the saying goes: If you don’t like the English weather, just wait ten minutes. I did some walking, finished the painting and one Saturday, in an unprecedented burst of enthusiasm, dug all the shrubs out of the garden. They weren’t as labour-saving as I’d planned, so I decided to sow annuals from now on.
It was the silly season. A family in Kent — Mum, Dad and two kids — changed their names so that their initials matched the numberplate on their Mitsubishi Shogun. It was easier and cheaper than doing things the other way round. Heckley’s first space probe exploded on the launch pad up on the moors, and a man was drowned trying to sail across the Channel in a shopping trolley.
In the job, we had the opportunity to catch up with burglaries and muggings, and made a few good arrests. A female drug dealer whose home we were raiding one morning drove over Dave’s foot while trying to escape. There were all the usual “hopping mad” jokes, and for a few days he came to work with it heavily bandaged, minus shoe. I appointed him office boy, and the troops started calling him Big Foot behind his back. The new CCTV cameras were installed in the market place and soon earned their keep, and the chief constable’s daughter was fined and banned for driving while pissed. That cheered everybody up.
Annette took two weeks’ leave. I didn’t ask her if she was going away, but a card from the Dordogne appeared on the office notice board. The day she was due back I booked into my favourite boarding house in the Lakes. The weather stayed fine, sharpened by the first suggestions of an early autumn, and I bagged a few good peaks.
“Nice holiday?” I asked, when I saw her again.
“Mmm,” she nodded, without too much enthusiasm. Ah well, I thought, she has been back at work for a whole week. “And you?” she asked.
“Mmm,” I echoed, adding: “You caught the sun.” Her freckles were in full flush against a background hue several shades deeper than usual.
She blushed, adding to the rainbow effect. “I try to stay out of it,” she said, “but you caught it, too.”
“The weather,” I explained. “I caught the weather.”
On August 19^th Sophie learned that she’d earned three straight As, and the following day a magistrate allowed Tony Silkstone out on bail. Swings and roundabouts. We knew he was likely to be released but we’d opposed it, and I’d gone to court in case the magistrates had any questions. They didn’t. Silkstone was unlikely to abscond as he’d phoned the police himself to confess, and psychiatric reports were available which said that he was sane and unlikely to offend again. Coming home twice to find your wife murdered and raped by your best friend would be downright bad luck. What probably clinched it was the fact that he had a job to go to. Heckley magistrates’ court hadn’t tried anyone with a job for nearly two years. Silkstone had been inside on remand for eight weeks, which would be deducted from any sentence he was given, and there were conditions to his bail. He had to surrender his passport, reside at The Garth, Mountain Meadows, and report to Heckley nick twice per week. We wouldn’t be inviting him to stay for tea and biscuits.
While I was slogging up Dollywagon Pike, sweating off a hangover, the troops had collared a burglar who put his hand up to just about every outstanding blag on our books. I saw it as making the citizens of Heckley safer in their beds at night, to Gilbert it was an opportunity to make our clear-up figures look better than Olga Korbut’s on a
