was sitting upright.
A haunted face glared at Mrs Pargeter. It was lined with grime, circled by greasy hair and scrubby beard. The gummy eyes lurked suspiciously in deep recesses.
But, through the disguise of suffering and deprivation, it was undoubtedly the face that Mrs Pargeter had seen in a photograph frame on the mantelpiece when she had first visited ‘Acapulco’, Smithy’s Loam.
The dosser was Rod Cotton.
? Mrs, Presumed Dead ?
Twenty-Nine
“It’s all right. I’ll move on,” said the dosser in instant reaction to his awakening.
His voice had not quite lost its educated origins, but had become slurred into a kind of anonymous, classless growl.
“I’m not moving you on,” said Mrs Pargeter. “I want to talk to you.”
“Bloody do-gooders,” the voice complained. “Why can’t you leave us alone? Things are bad enough without you rubbing our bloody faces in it.”
“I’m not a do-gooder. As I say, I just want to talk to you.”
“Oh yes. Talk, talk, talk – maybe give me a cup of bloody awful soup – and then suddenly the talk’ll get round to God, won’t it? Well, don’t bother. Just leave me to go back to sleep. God’s irrelevant – got nothing to do with anything. If there was a God, he wouldn’t let people end up like this, would he?” His right arm waved vaguely to encompass the other muffled bodies beside him. Mrs Pargeter noticed that the wrist was enclosed in a grubby plaster cast. He turned his face away from her and buried it back into his carrier-bag pillow.
Mrs Pargeter reached into her Burberry pocket. “I’ve got something for you.”
“Don’t want any of your bloody leaflets,” the heap of clothes mumbled.
“I think you might want this.” She turned the top, breaking the seal on one of the half-bottles of whisky.
The dosser turned instantly at this familiar sound and squinted up at her. She held out the open bottle towards him. With a quick look round to see that none of his neighbours were watching, he seized it and took a long swallow. Then another. And another.
Mrs Pargeter held her hand out. “That’s enough for the moment.”
“No.” He cradled the bottle to his chest.
She kept her hand outstretched. “Yes. You talk to me, you tell me what I want to know, and you can have the rest.”
“I can have the rest now. I’ve got it,” he said childishly, still clutching the bottle to him.
“Yes, you can have that,” Mrs Pargeter agreed, “but you can’t have the second bottle.”
“Second bottle?”
She half-lifted it out of her other Burberry pocket. The dosser took a long swig from the bottle he held and looked furtively thoughtful. “Why do you want to talk?”
“I just do.” She lifted the second bottle fully out of her pocket and saw his eyes fix on it. “Come on, get up and talk.”
He hesitated only for a moment, then shambled upright. He had difficulty straightening his body after its night on the cold pavement, and flinched with muscular pain as he pulled the packed newspaper out of his greatcoat. “Not talk here,” he said cunningly. “Don’t want the others to see.”
He took another long, surreptitious swallow from his bottle, then, with elaborate precaution, hid it in his coat pocket. “Where d’you want to talk?”
“There’s a cafe over there. Do you want to go in? I’ll buy you some breakfast.”
He grimaced. “Not food. Can’t eat food early in the morning. Can’t eat it much any time. Over-rated stuff, food.”
“Shall we go through there?” Mrs Pargeter pointed to the gates into Embankment Gardens.
He nodded. “You give me the other bottle?”
“When we’ve talked, yes.”
She felt safer with him walking ahead of her. As he started off, she glanced across the road to Truffler Mason. She gestured with her head towards the gardens. He gave an almost imperceptible nod, and started moving in the same direction himself.
Mrs Pargeter followed the malodorous figure ahead of her in disbelief. She knew Rod Cotton to be in his early forties, and yet the figure ahead shambled like something out of a geriatric ward. What could have happened in six months to reduce a resident of Smithy’s Loam to this?
He hobbled to the nearest bench inside the gates, and slumped on to it. A smartly overcoated man with a bowler hat, already sitting there, registered the tramp’s approach, and moved briskly away to the other end of the gardens.
Mrs Pargeter sat down, as close to her quarry as her tolerance of his acrid smell allowed. He took the bottle out of his pocket, transferred it to his plastered hand and, again with a precautionary look around, unscrewed it and took another drink. Only about a quarter of the contents remained. He looked at her greedily. “The other bottle.”
Mrs Pargeter retained her cool. “When we’ve talked…” she said firmly, and then, timing it carefully, added the isolated monosyllable, “…Rod.”
Only a flicker of recognition crossed his face. “Who’s Rod?” he asked.
“You are.”
“No.”
“You are Rod Cotton.”
He shook his head slowly, as if suddenly it had become very heavy. “No, I’m no one. I don’t exist,” he said, slurring more than ever.
“You are Rod Cotton,” Mrs Pargeter persisted. “I know you are.”
A pathetic cunning came into his eyes. “Who was Rod Cotton?”
“Rod Cotton was a man in his early forties, married to Theresa, living at ‘Acapulco’, Smithy’s Loam. Until six months ago, he was a Sales Director with C,Q,F&S.”
He gave a twisted smile. “I don’t look like a Sales Director of anything, do I?”
“No, you don’t now, but –”
“I don’t look like anything. And do you know why? The answer’s because I’m not anything. I have no money, no home, no wife, nothing.”
Yet again Mrs Pargeter asserted quietly, “You are Rod Cotton.”
Another slow shake of the head. “There is no Rod Cotton. The Rod Cotton you describe was rich, successful. There’s no Rod Cotton to fit that description now.”
This, Mrs Pargeter reckoned, was as near as she was going to get to an admission of identity. “Do you still call yourself Rod?” she asked gently.
There was a snort of laughter. “I don’t call myself anything. I am no one, so I have no name. When the police move me on, I have no name. When I go into the hostels, I have no name.” He waved his plastered arm. “When I fall and end up in hospital, I have no name.”
The bottle was once again at his lips, and this time the contents were drained completely. A little trickled down the side of his chin and a panicked hand moved up to save this last dreg. He reached his hands out towards Mrs Pargeter. “The other bottle.”
“No. Not until you’ve told me what I want to know.”
He slumped back, disgruntled, against the bench.
“Look, you are Rod Cotton, aren’t you?”
“Give me the bottle and I’ll be Marlene Dietrich, if you like,” he replied with a cracked laugh.
“I want to know two things, Rod…”
“Oh yes.”
“The first is – what’s happened to you in the last six months?”
“What’s happened to who?” he asked deviously.
