Lonelyheart 4122 f-3 Page 9

  The manager, Mr Maddox, said he would be only too happy to assist in any way he could. He did hope, however, that Miss Teatime (who had impressed him as being a very respectable lady) was not, ah, not in any way, er...

  No, said Love, she wasn’t. He had been told to keep an eye on her purely for her own good—that was all.

  Mr Maddox was glad to hear it. One could so easily be deceived in people: one minute they were slipping sixpences into the blind stocking at the cocktail bar, the next they might be burning lavatory seats in a bedroom grate.

  Love expressed awed appreciation of this hazard and asked if Miss Teatime was available at that time to be covertly observed.

  Mr Maddox regretted that she was not; she had gone out, as was her morning custom. However, if the sergeant would come into the dining room and take lunch at one o’clock or thereabouts, he, Mr Maddox, would make a point of identifying her.

  Love saw that his assignment promised to be a higher class and more elastic business than his usual routine of taking stolen property lists round the second hand shops, interviewing youths suspected of smashing wash basins at the Assembly Rooms and asking to produce their dog licences such of Mr Chubb’s neighbours whose pets happened to have fallen foul of his marauding Yorkshire terriers. Accordingly, he spent the next hour in the Roebuck Tap, on the other side of the yard, where two halves of bitter and as prolonged a view as he dared take of Miss Phyllis Blow’s mammary canyon left him feeling quite pleasantly raffish.

  At ten past one, he wandered into the dining room. Mr Maddox was standing at the huge sideboard, mixing a salad dressing. He gave Love a knowing smile over the vinegar bottle and nodded to signify that the lady of whom he wotted was present already.

  With the defensive instinct of those who rarely eat in restaurants, Love selected a table against the wall farthest from the door. He drew from his pocket the newspaper that he had remembered to buy especially for the occasion and bivouacked behind it.

  Only half a dozen tables were occupied. He peeped over the top of the paper at each in turn. That, he decided, must be Miss Teatime—a woman sitting alone to whom a waitress was carrying soup.

  The woman turned and smiled at the waitress. She looked rather pleasant, Love thought—almost attractive. No chicken, though; there was quite a bit of grey in her hair. Her pale blue costume, while not “gear”, was smart and she sat with the straight-backed dignity that Love tended to associate with aunts, librarians and other strictly a-sexual characters. It was a pity that she seemed so well preserved. Healthy women of that generation were confoundly keen on walking as a rule. Love’s toes curled apprehensively.

  It was Mr Maddox who came to take his order.

  “The lady in blue, on her own,” he whispered to the menu.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Love.

  “I take it you don’t want her to know that you’re...you know—bodyguarding?”

  “Good lord, no!” Love breathed. “Braised steak,” he said aloud.

  “Mum’s the word,” the manager hoarsely assured him, then “Soup, sir?” he boomed.

  “No soup.” Love remembered that his quarry was one course ahead.

  He hid behind his paper again and observed the delicate raising and lowering of Miss Teatime’s spoon. Her head was held gracefully, just a fraction forward, and had none of that curious motion—half butt, half scoop—that most soup drinkers find it necessary to adopt. She held the spoon at the very end of its handle and gave it the appropriate lateral twist with her wrist but with fine flexible fingers. Love found himself wondering if his young lady would prove amenable to instruction along similar lines; the effect really was dinky.

  Thus preoccupied, the sergeant did not notice that Mr Maddox, having passed his order to the second waitress, was now stooped in guarded talk with another favoured customer. This was George Lintz, editor of the Flaxborough Citizen, a wiry man with a lean, mistrustful face bisected by a wide, apparently lipless mouth.

  The manager was not actually imparting information. He repeated nothing of what Love had said. But he was a man within whom confidences lay like heavy, indigestible suppers. He would have burst if denied the relief of passing, with side-long glances and tucked-in chin, gusts of portentous innuendo. No great harm was done. All Mr Lintz gathered was that if everything were told about middle-aged ladies in blue costumes, an eye or two might be opened...that an hotel manager could write a book if so minded...that it took all sorts, and that, in a word, one never knew.

  The editor, who was accustomed to this sort of importuning, bore it philosophically and forgot it as soon as Mr Maddox had sidled away.

  There was someone else, however, who did not forget.

  Miss Teatime had caught nothing of what the manager had been saying. But she did notice, without appearing to look in that direction, that some of Mr Maddox’s accompanying gestures were towards herself.

  One didn’t mind being talked about, of course; it was nicer than being ignored all the time. The interesting thing was why one had been chosen as a topic.

  Miss Teatime put down her soup spoon and looked around with an air of leisurely innocence. She gave an answering smile to one of the waitresses and to an elderly gentleman at another table. What she was really seeking was a sight of the person with whom the manager had been talking before he passed on to that rather common looking man with the thin mouth.

  Just then, the waitress arrived at Love’s table with his braised steak. He lowered his newspaper, beamed at her, and pressed himself back into his chair while she arranged dishes.

  Miss Teatime took the opportunity of scrutinizing him as thoroughly as a distance of twenty feet allowed.

  She decided that he was young, florid, capable within certain rather narrow limits, persistent and basically good natured. Quite likeable, in fact...

  Miss Teatime looked away again and mentally added the qualification:

  ...for a policeman.

  Chapter Ten

  Although Sergeant Love had been born and bred in Flaxborough and gravitated there once again after a few years’ service in other police divisions, he would not have claimed exhaustive knowledge of the town. Natives of any place have a tendency to take for granted those areas and features that lie outside the immediate orbit of home and work. Policing, of course, did make that orbit much wider in his case. Even so, there were lanes he had never entered, closes he had never explored, riverside walks that never had known his reluctant feet.

  Miss Teatime was to be the instrument of the filling in of nearly all those gaps.

  It seemed at first that she was a slow walker, much given to halting for the contemplation of such things as coping stones and door posts and coal hole covers and old fashioned street lamps. But Love soon learned how remorselessly she could clock on the mileage without any apparent effort. He had only to take his eyes off her slim, upright back for a few moments to find, on glancing again in her direction, that she had moved on and was rounding a corner a hundred yards away.

  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.

  Then she realized that she had not provided herself with the requested flower. Would it really matter? There was no one else in this part of the garden with whom she might be confused. On the other hand, her correspondent did seem a rather particular man—seafaring, she had heard, tended to make one a stickler for detail. It might be as well to conform. Cautiously, she slid her right arm down between the slats of the seat behind her and found she could just touch the soil of the flower bed. Her hand moved from side to side in search of vegetation. It brushed a leaf. By stretching to the limit she managed to close finger and thumb upon a couple of stems. She pulled. The prize came away and she drew it, not without some puzzlement at its weight, past the seat slats and on to her knee. She looked across at the women and the old men. Nobody seemed to have noticed.

  She glanced down.

  “Christ!” murmured Miss Teatime.

  On her lap was a clump of polyanthus, vividly yellow and of the proportions of a bridal bouquet. It must have been of recent transplanting and had come up, roots and all, its twenty or thirty blossoms trumpeting her guilt.

  Vainly she tried to conceal it behind folded hands. A woman on the right had looked up from knitting and was now staring openly. Miss Teatime dealt her the Christian martyr smile that she had always found immediately effective in afrighting the inquisitive and, left unobserved once more, she looked at her handbag on the seat beside her and tried to decide
if it were capacious enough to hold...

  “Aha!”

  A pair of large black shoes stepped smartly into her field of vision. Trousers. Men’s trousers. Oh, God! A park-keeper! She raised her eyes.

  “You didn’t mean me to miss you, did you?”

  The man before her was gazing with ironic admiration at the great plant. He had very pale blue eyes and yellowish eyebrows. Big face, very smooth, almost shiny. Unusually long ears. The hand extended towards the polyanthus was white and backed with a lot of fine, gingery hairs. Its thumb was fleshy but effeminately narrow at the end.

  Miss Teatime smiled nervously and slipped her fingers under the plant’s roots.

  “I suppose you don’t happen to have a paper bag or something?”

  He took the plant from her and examined it.

  “There’s a bit of root left on,” he announced. “You never know, it might take. I tell you what—let’s plant it to commemorate our first meeting!”