The Happier Dead (11 page)

“Can I get you a drink, Felix?”

“Get you a drink, he says.”

“What’s that you’re drinking?” Oates said, motioning to the tumbler of brown liquid on the table in front of him.

“Fruit squash. I’ve given up the booze for Lent.” He grinned up at Oates.

“How about a whisky?”

For a few moments Minor was silent, and Oates thought he might tell him to piss off. Then he shrugged, and shouted, “Horace!” The barman came to the side of the saloon bar, turning a clean pint glass against a dirty cloth. Minor stuck his finger in the air above the table and waved it around three times. “And for my esteemed guest, Horace.”

The smell of whisky made Oates feel nauseous. He hadn’t eaten since he left home. On the stack of flyers there was a laminated menu, and he picked it up. When he moved the menu it left a darker outline of itself against the coloured leaflets, where the sun had bleached them.

“If it’s breakfast you’re wanting I’d go somewhere else. For a copper the spit’s the best thing in the food.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your company? Or maybe you just want to chat over old times, eh?”

Minor gazed up at him. Drink had dug the intelligence from his brown eyes and a wet cunning had welled up to replace it. Perhaps it had been a mistake to visit the old man. The whiff of disgrace still clung to him, and a handshake made you want to wipe your hand on your trousers. It was so unusual for a senior officer to seek Minor out that he must guess Oates was badly in need of his help. He should have sent Bhupinder, or even rung the pub’s old phone, but the moments of powerlessness in St Margaret’s had goaded him into taking action himself. It was another little defeat at the hands of the spa, and of its mistress.

“Can I sit?”

“You’re drinking aren’t you?”

It was too late to dissimulate. His only chance was to be straight with Minor and to try to pay whatever price he wanted for his help. Even if he had something to trade, Oates knew the pleasure of having him in his thrall might be so extreme that Minor would simply refuse to tell him anything.

“I was hoping you might be able to help me with something.”

“Oh yes?”

“An old case you worked.”

“See now, this is embarrassing. I’d love to help, but they’ve asked me to leave the service.”

“Come on Felix. I’m asking you as a favour.”

If Oates had hoped the direct approach would shame him into helping, he was mistaken. Minor was inoculated against shame, or rather he felt it so consistently that a little variation in the dose made no difference. He was not however insensible to his own pleasure, and he was grinning now.

“I know how you’re asking me.”

“So what do you say?”

“Must be a real emergency.”

“It won’t take a minute.”

“If it’s an emergency maybe you could deputise me.”

“I could get it out of the files. But it’d be quicker coming from you.”

“I’d not be sure of that.”

He was about to offer Minor a smoke when he remembered he still had the old-fashioned pack of Pall Mall. The former policeman was sure to notice, and the last thing he wanted was for Minor to catch the whiff of big money. He thought about trying to bum one off him, but decided against it. The frustrated need for a cigarette made him aware of his big hands, and he laid them on the table.

“So this is your favourite haunt now is it?”

“It’s the same as anywhere else.”

“A little dingy if you ask me.”

“You’re the one doing the asking.”

At that moment Horace loomed above their table, and set down their drinks. Minor was given a single dram of whisky, and Oates was given a pink concoction in a cocktail glass, with a maraschino cherry fastened to the rim, and a faded paper umbrella part submerged in the surface. He heard laughter behind him, and when he turned around the three big men at the bar were grinning at him over their shoulders like a set of dingy gargoyles built to guard the pumps. Minor cackled and slapped his thighs.

Oates popped the truncheon from the panel on his leg. He brought it out beneath the table, and pressed the button on the side to extend the sleek, heavy length of it. As it slid into position, it gave an oiled click like a dislocated finger popping back into place. He set the truncheon down on the table beside the glass.

“Drink it,” he said to the barman.

One of the men sitting at the bar went to rise from his seat.

“You sit down,” Oates said mildly. The man at the bar hesitated for a few seconds, his buttocks quivering in mid-air, before settling back with a creak onto the stool. He obeyed not because Oates willed him to, but because he could sense Oates willing him to defy the order, to furnish the spark to ignite the moment into the conflagration of battle. Horace tried to laugh, and went to turn away from the table.

“Is that not what you wanted then? I’ll get you another.”

“I said drink it.”

Horace licked his lips. He looked to the man who had almost risen, but his hopes of salvation were dashed by the sound of the man’s arse settling back into its foundations. He stared at Oates for a few seconds, and gritted his teeth. With a look of hatred he grabbed the stem of the glass. He made to chuck it back.

“Sip it.”

“What?”

“Don’t down it. Sip it.”

The barman raised the glass to his lip, and sipped. The slurp sounded loud in the silence of the bar. Oates risked a glance at Minor, and saw his eyes shining with the reflected light of another’s humiliation. They waited in silence as Horace drained the glass. Oates stood up.

“Now eat the cherry.”

Quickly now, his eyes on the ground, the barman obeyed and dabbled for the bright little fruit with his dirty fingers. He popped it in his mouth and munched once before swallowing.

“Now stay still.”

Oates took the little cocktail umbrella from the glass, and lifted it towards Horace’s eye. The barman flinched away at first, but Oates put out a hand to his shoulder and patted him, like a groom reassuring a skittish horse. He popped the umbrella up with thumb and forefinger, and brought the pointed tip closer to the watery swell of the barman’s eyeball. Horace had astigmatism, and the bloodshot belly of the eye protruded, pregnant with jelly.

“Don’t blink and you’ll be alright,” Oates said.

Tightening his grip on Horace’s shoulder, he brought the tiny wooden point of the cocktail stick just up to the downward brush of the blinking lash, and then thrust forward to lodge it behind the barman’s filthy ear. He heard one of the men at the bar exhale.

“You’re going to wear that umbrella for the rest of the day. I might swing by here before closing. I’ve got some errands to run. If I come in here and you don’t have that umbrella behind your ear, I’m going to break your wanking arm here and here.” He tapped Horace’s right elbow and forearm with the point of his baton,.“And not a man in this room will see a thing. Will you, my new friends? Now, I’ll have a whisky same as my old colleague here. And you can treat yourself too.”

“That’s real police, that’s real police now,” Minor said, wiping the tears from the corner of his eye.

“I’ll have you out of here old man,” the barman said.

“Have another cherry, Horace! It’s on the Inspector. You’re alright Oates, I always said you were alright.”

As Oates sat back down, Minor clapped him awkwardly on his armoured shoulder. All his former antagonism was gone, he was expansive. He asked what Oates wanted to know, and Oates told him, omitting any mention of the murder, the Great Spa or anything else likely to pique Minor’s interest. Minor was so elated by the confrontation that he didn’t even ask.

“I remember that Prudence Egwu. He asked us and asked us to find his bloody brother. In the end he lodged a complaint, not a general one mind, a personal one against me and the officer in charge. He was mad, but they have to investigate the complaints, even the mad ones. And he had the money to keep it going.”

“What happened?”

“What happened? Nothing happened. He was mad, same as I said. We looked and we looked and we found nothing. You know he actually said to me if it had been a white fellow had gone missing, we would have found him. I said only if he was hiding in the coal shed, son. He didn’t like that!” He smiled at the memory of how little the dead man had liked it.

“Did you get anywhere with tracing the brother?”

Minor shook his head emphatically. “He just vanished. Well, people do, don’t they?”

“Any leads? Anything odd about the case?”

“Plenty of odd stuff, but all talk. There was talk at the time of all sorts, because of what he did. Some people were saying a competitor of Nottingham had kidnapped him, like they had some underground lab somewhere to keep him chained up, or else they’d done for him to stop him perfecting the Treatment for Nottingham. Some people said Nottingham had nabbed him to stop him going over to the competition. We even had a call saying he’d been kidnapped by the Chinese secret service.”

“What did you think? Personally I mean.”

Minor shrugged. “He was an odd-bod. Didn’t have much of a life outside his work, except some charity bits and bobs, and church. Nothing tying him to the world but his ideas, and that’s a thin enough tether for anyone. Could be suicide, could be he just left.”

“Did you ever find out what he was working on?”

“No. But the brother told us all his research was gone. Don’t ask me how he knew. Tried to tell us it was proof of his kidnap theory.”

“Did you ever hear mention of something called the Tithonus Effect?”

“No. What’s that?”

“Just something someone said to me. Did he ever give you a picture of his brother?”

“You’ll find something on file.”

“This complaint...”

“You want to know if there’s trouble there for you?” Minor grinned. “There’s no nasty surprises on that one, saving what was there before we came on it. He was a very rich man, that Mr Egwu, and I think he hired his own men to keep looking after we’d dropped the case. But you can speak to the senior officer if you really want to check.”

“Who was that?”

“Don’t you know? Superintendent John Yates of the Met.”

Oates prided himself on his poker face, but something must have shown, as Minor smiled at him.

“Ask for you special did he? I bet he did, I bet he did. He used to ask for me special.”

Oates changed the subject, and the two of them chatted about people they had both known. Minor claimed he wanted news of them, but whenever Oates told him anything that looked like a divergence from the historical position, he just snorted and cited some incident from his own time on the force. He produced these anecdotes as if to refute the present, like a paleontologist brandishing the fossil record at a Catholic bishop. “Dick Owen will never go higher than Chief Inspector. I remember…” Bhupinder called, but Oates ignored it. They ordered another round, Oates asked for that cigarette after all, and for a while what with the smell of the pub and the old stories the two of them were friends again. They had settled into a brief silence when Minor said, “I was sorry to hear about your girl.”

Oates looked round quickly to see if any of the men had heard. They gave no sign, but still Oates felt the reference get loose on the floor of the pub. Once it was out he would never get it back, it would be away in the walls, chewing at the wiring of his authority.

“Yeah,” he said, as he got up to leave, “take care of yourself, Felix.”

“I’m alright, Detective Chief Inspector. It’s you as should be watching your back,” he said, and with that the moment of warmth between the men was dispelled, and Oates went back out into the rain. From the street he took one last look through the grimy window of the pub, and Horace was still wearing the umbrella perched at a jaunty angle behind his ear.

He shook his head for Felix Minor. Drink had made him paranoid, with all the self-aggrandisement of a full-blown ‘they’ out to get him. The psychic injury done him by his conviction had left him stranded in his glory days. Minor and Miranda were like two pilgrims walking the same trail, the old man in his dingy little pub where no one had changed the carpet in thirty years, the new-young woman in her state of the art pleasure dome, each of them searching for the shrine of their own youth. Minor was, if anything, more successful – his grievance provided a watertight seal against the present. Perhaps every man and woman walked their life on a see-saw, and one day a single footfall tipped the balance between the significance of past and future.

Oates remembered his own mother looking through photographs in her retirement home in Southend-on-Sea, and the signed picture she had been sent by a favourite pop-star, himself long dead. The past had become reality for her, and she spoke to her son quite cheerfully of their father, dead for ten years, as if he had just popped next door. Oates could accept that fate for himself, even the quiet horror of the doilies and the soft seaside rain, but it seemed as if the fulcrum of significance was retreating inexorably backwards, so that fifty and then forty and then thirty years old were somehow unbearable.

He thought about what Miranda had told him of St Margaret’s, that the real secret of promoting the feeling of youth was to remove from people their sense of responsibility. He could understand that, because the thought of his kids and the murder and his men back at the spa made him feel old. He could see the temptations of the retreat into the womb, where even the burden of conscious thought could be dispensed with, without needing the courage to let go the gift of life.

T
HE MORE HE
considered what Minor had told him, the less he liked it. Why would a man with a grudge against Nottingham book himself in for a holiday at St Margaret’s? Why for that matter had they taken the booking, and why had Charles not seen fit to mention the history to Oates and the investigating officers? As a public relations officer he could hardly be unaware of a man publicly making accusations of foul play against his employer, even if it had been five years ago. Why had John not warned him?

Oates couldn’t share Minor’s enthusiasm for the idea of deliberate deception. Being part of one of the institutions routinely fitted up for conspiracy had taught Oates to dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand. The kind of people who believed in such things were either half-mad like Minor, or else deeply innocent of the world, toys still in the packaging of their teenage bedrooms. Apart from anything else, the Met lacked the funding and organisation required for a decent conspiracy. Perhaps his boss simply hadn’t spotted the connection. Only the files with their archival memory had picked up the link.