I had about three hours before Carl arrived to take the portfolio which, with any luck, would keep me in sunshine holidays for the next three winters.
"Should"ve called you Lucky," I told Slinky, as I stuffed her back into the sack which, by now, was becoming like her second home. "I never thought nasty old Dr. Lane would be idiotic enough to let you out to play on the allotments so soon."
Which was when Dr. Lane, approaching un.o.bserved from the rear, slammed his fist into my spine, shouting: "You moron! You"ve no idea what you"re interfering with here!"
What I had no idea of was why a grown doctor should be willing to a.s.sault a virtual stranger just to keep possession of a gingery cat with a kinky tail. What I did have an idea of, however, was that Lane had a big stick in his hand, and was just about mad enough to use it on me as I lay sprawled at his feet. His grey face was red now.
On an impulse, I swung the sack, Slinky and all, right into his belly. The cat screamed; he didn"t. He just tripped, fell, and landed with a splash in the shallow river. A splash and a thud, the latter caused by the sudden connection of his head with a rock.
I stared at him for about a minute. He didn"t move.
I was still a little shaky when Carl arrived, but the vodka was helping.
"Where"re all the other cats?" he asked, as I should have guessed he would.
"Who knows where staff go on their afternoons off?" I replied, haughtily. "To the pictures, I expect."
Carl laughed (which used up about ten minutes of the day, right off), took his photos, and eventually left. Slinky had chili for dinner. I had vodka.
When a noise in the hall woke me the next morning, I thought for a moment it was one of Slinky"s old mates discovering how to enter a house through the letter box. But it was the local paper, with a stop-press item announcing the suspicious death of Dr. Reginald Lane, 54, research scientist, at his home in River Walk.
At his home?
Police were said to be unable to explain why, when found dead sitting in a sun-lounger on his veranda, Dr. Lane (who had been shot twice in the lower body at short range) was wearing wet clothing and had a crude, apparently self-applied, freshly blood-stained bandage on his head.
The mystery- for me- only lasted until the lunchtime TV news, which reported that an animal-rights activist had confessed to the "justified execution of a ma.s.s-murderer." Lane had been right; I"d had no idea what I was interfering with.
Far from being an aggrieved pet lover, the doctor was actually what that Sunday"s tabloids called a vivisectionist. Slinky- and all the other cats on the allotments- had been part of an experiment, a deeply illegal experiment, it transpired, designed to develop a rapidly contagious but easily contained feline disease.
Quite who was sponsoring Lane"s alfresco laboratory has never been established, but speculation centered on the government, on the property developers, on all the usual suspects. At any rate, some people, it seems, do not value urban feral-cat populations in quite the way that I have come to value them.
And I certainly do value Slinky. I do. The calendar- Slinky"s Big Year (text by J. Potter) -will be, Jenni"s marketing colleagues a.s.sure me, the biggest-selling gift item nationwide next Christmas. There is talk of an animated television series. Two book publishers are bidding for the rights to Slinky"s autobiography, which I am to ghostwrite (well, yeah, obviously). I"ll have to make up some amusing adventures for her. The truth, I think, would not do at all.
Which brings me to why I"m writing this strictly private memoir.
The remaining allotment cats were rounded up by the council"s vet and taken away for tests "as a precaution." There was really no cause for concern, the authorities insisted, but just to be on the safe side...
(I bet they ended up on some health farm, all chili con carne and Ping-Pong and free booze, and all at the public"s expense. While your average humourist has to virtually kill himself just to meet the mortgage. Ask me, the welfare state saps enterprise. Look at Slinky: She got herself a career, she didn"t sit around waiting for handouts.) I don"t know if you"ve ever lived in close proximity to a cat which may or may not be carrying an unidentified bug, which may or may not be transferable to humans, and which may or may not kill you at some time in the future. But if you have, then you"ll know that it"s something that tends to worry you a little.
But really, most of the time I"m too busy worrying about what it"s going to be like entering the super-tax bracket.
Still, "just to be on the safe side..."
If I should predecease my Aunty Cissie, I would like her to inherit my copyrights and royalties. And please, whoever reads this, tell her I"m terribly sorry I never visited her.
I"m not, in fact, but what I always say is: Being nice doesn"t cost anything, does it?
At least, it doesn"t when it doesn"t cost anything.
Peter Robinson.
Missing in Action.
PETER ROBINSON is one of the finest writers to come out of the cold northern lands of Canada in recent years, with numerous appearances in Ellery Queen"s Mystery Magazine, in other anthologies, and writing some of the best mystery novels of the past decade. Like many others in our collection, his name and fame are growing with each new story or book. "Missing in Action," first published in Ellery Queen"s Mystery Magazine in November of 2000, has it all, his wry voice, a spot-on sense of history, and a keep-you-reading-until-the-last-page whodunit plot.
Missing in Action.
Peter Robinson.
People go missing all the time in war, of course, but not usually nine-year-old boys. Besides, the war had hardly begun. It was only the twentieth of September, 1939, when Mary Critchley came hammering on my door at about three o"clock, interrupting my afternoon nap.
It was a Wednesday, and normally I would have been teaching the fifth-formers Shakespeare at Silverhill Grammar School (a thankless task if ever there was one), but the Ministry had just got around to constructing air-raid shelters there, so the school was closed for the week. We didn"t even know if it was going to reopen, because the idea was to evacuate all the children to safer areas in the countryside. Now, I would be among the first to admit that a teacher"s highest aspiration is a school without pupils, but in the meantime the government, in its eternal wisdom, put us redundant teachers to such complex, intellectual tasks as preparing ration cards for the Ministry of Food. (After all, they knew what was coming.) All this was just a small part of the chaos that seemed to reign at that time. Not the chaos of war, the kind I remembered from the trenches at Ypres in 1917, but the chaos of government bureaucracies trying to organize the country for war.
Anyway, I was fortunate enough to become Special Constable, which is a rather grandiose t.i.tle for a sort of part-time dogsbody, and that was why Mary Critchley came running to me. That and what little reputation I had for solving people"s problems.
"Mr. Bashcombe! Mr. Bashcombe!" she cried. "It"s our Johnny. He"s gone missing. You must help."
My name is actually Bas...o...b.., Frank Bas...o...b.., but Mary Critchley has a slight speech impediment, so I forgave her the misp.r.o.nunciation. Still, with half the city"s children running wild in the streets and the other half standing on crowded station platforms clutching their Mickey Mouse gas masks in little cardboard boxes, ready to be herded into trains bound for such nearby country havens as Graythorpe, Kilsden, and Acksham, I thought perhaps she was overreacting a tad, and I can"t say I welcomed her arrival after only about twenty of my allotted forty winks.
"He"s probably out playing with his mates," I told her.
"Not my Johnny," she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. "Not since... you know..."
I knew. Mr. Critchley, Ted to his friends, had been a Royal Navy man since well before the war. He had also been unfortunate enough to serve on the fleet carrier Courageous, which had been sunk by a German U-boat off the southwest coast of Ireland just three days ago. Over 500 men had been lost, including Ted Critchley. Of course, no body had been found, and probably never would be, so he was only officially "missing in action."
I also knew young Johnny Critchley, and thought him to be a serious boy, a bit too imaginative and innocent for his own good. (Well, many are at that age, aren"t they, before the world grabs them by the b.a.l.l.s and shakes some reality into them.) Johnny trusted everyone, even strangers.
"Johnny"s not been in much of a mood for playing with his mates since we got the news about Ted"s ship," Mary Critchley went on.
I could understand that well enough- young Johnny was an only child, and he always did worship his father- but I still didn"t see what I could do about it. "Have you asked around?"
"What do you think I"ve been doing since he didn"t come home at twelve o"clock like he was supposed to? I"ve asked everyone in the street. Last time he was seen he was down by the ca.n.a.l at about eleven o"clock. Maurice Richards saw him. What can I do, Mr. Bashcombe? First Ted, and now... now my Johnny!" She burst into tears.
After I had managed to calm her down, I sighed and told her I would look for Johnny myself. There certainly wasn"t much hope of my getting the other twenty winks now.
It was a glorious day, so warm and sunny you would hardly believe there was a war on. The late afternoon sunshine made even our narrow streets of cramped brick terrace houses look attractive. As the shadows lengthened, the light turned to molten gold. First, I scoured the local rec where the children played cricket and football, and the dogs ran wild. Some soldiers were busy digging trenches for air-raid shelters. Just the sight of those long, dark grooves in the earth gave me the shivers. Behind the trenches, barrage balloons pulled at their moorings on the breeze like playful porpoises, orange and pink in the sun. I asked the soldiers, but they hadn"t seen Johnny. Nor had any of the other lads.
After the rec I headed for the derelict houses on Gallipoli Street. The landlord had let them go to rack and ruin two years ago, and they were quite uninhabitable, not even fit for billeting soldiers. They were also dangerous and should have been pulled down, but I think the old skinflint was hoping a bomb would hit them so he could claim insurance or compensation from the government. The doors and windows had been boarded up, but children are resourceful, and it wasn"t difficult even for me to remove a couple of loose sheets of plywood and make my way inside. I wished I had my torch, but I had to make do with what little light slipped through the holes. Every time I moved, my feet stirred up clouds of dust, which did my poor lungs no good at all.
I thought Johnny might have fallen or got trapped in one of the houses. The staircases were rotten, and more than one lad had fallen through on his way up. The floors weren"t much better, either, and one of the fourth-formers at Silverhill had needed more than fifteen st.i.tches a couple of weeks ago when one of his legs went right through the rotten wood and the splinters gouged his flesh.
I searched as best I could in the poor light, and I called out Johnny"s name, but no answer came. Before I left, I stood silently and listened for any traces of harsh breathing or whimpering.
Nothing.
After three hours of searching the neighbourhood, I"d had no luck at all. Blackout time was 7:45 P.M., so I still had about an hour and a half left, but if Johnny wasn"t in any of the local children"s usual haunts, I was at a loss as to where to look. I talked to the other boys I met here and there, but none of his friends had seen him since the family got the news of Ted"s death. Little Johnny Critchley, it seemed, had vanished into thin air.
At half-past six, I called on Maurice Richards, grateful for his offer of a cup of tea and the chance to rest my aching feet. Maurice and I went back a long time. We had both survived the first war, Maurice with the loss of an arm and me with permanent facial scarring and a wracking cough that comes and goes, thanks to the mustard gas leaking through my mask at the Third Battle of Ypres. We never talked about the war, but it was there, we both knew, an invisible bond tying us close together while at the same time excluding us from so much other, normal human intercourse. Not many had seen the things we had, and thank G.o.d for that.
Maurice lit up a Pa.s.sing Cloud one-handed, then he poured the tea. The seven o"clock news came on the radio, some such rot about us vowing to keep fighting until we"d vanquished the foe. It was still very much a war of words at that time, and the more rhetorical the language sounded, the better the politicians thought they were doing. There had been a couple of minor air skirmishes, and the sinking of the Courageous, of course, but all the action was taking place in Poland, which seemed as remote as the moon to most people. Some clever b.u.g.g.e.rs had already started calling it the "Bore War."
"Did you hear Tommy Handley last night, Frank?" Maurice asked.
I shook my head. There"d been a lot of hoopla about Tommy Handley"s new radio programme, "It"s That Man Again," or "ITMA," as people called it. I was never a fan. Call me a sn.o.b, but when evening falls I"m far happier curling up with a good book or an interesting talk on the radio than listening to Tommy Handley.
"Talk about a laugh," said Maurice. "They had this one sketch about the Ministry of Aggravation and the Office of Twerps. I nearly died."
I smiled. "Not far from the truth," I said. There were now so many of these obscure ministries, boards, and departments involved in so many absurd pursuits- all for the common good, of course- that I had been thinking of writing a dystopian satire. I proposed to set it in the near future, which would merely be a thinly disguised version of the present. So far, all I had was a great idea for the t.i.tle: I would reverse the last two numbers in the current year, so instead of 1939, I"d call it 1993. (Well, I thought it was a good idea!) "Look, Maurice," I said, "it"s about young Johnny Critchley. His mother tells me you were the last person to see him."
"Oh, aye," Maurice said. "She were round asking about him not long ago. Still not turned up?"
"No."
"Cause for concern, then."
"I"m beginning to think so. What was he doing when you saw him?"
"Just walking down by the ca.n.a.l, by old Woodruff"s sc.r.a.p yard."
"That"s all?"
"Yes."
"Was he alone?"
Maurice nodded.
"Did he say anything."
"No."
"You didn"t say anything to him?"
"No cause to. He seemed preoccupied, just staring in the water, like, hands in his pockets. I"ve heard what happened to his dad. A lad has to do his grieving."
"Too true. Did you see anyone else? Anything suspicious?"
"No, nothing. Just a minute, though..."
"What?"
"Oh, it"s probably nothing, but just after I saw Johnny, when I was crossing the bridge, I b.u.mped into Colin Gormond, you know, that chap who"s a bit... you know."
Colin Gormond. I knew him all right. And that wasn"t good news; it wasn"t good news at all.
Of all the policemen they could have sent, they had to send Detective b.l.o.o.d.y Sergeant Longbottom, a big, brutish-looking fellow with a p.r.o.nounced limp and a Cro-Magnon brow. Longbottom was thick as two short planks. I doubt he could have found his own a.r.s.e even if someone nailed a sign on it, or detect his way out of an Anderson shelter if it were in his own backyard. But that"s the calibre of men this wretched war has left us with at home. Along with good ones like me, of course.
DS Longbottom wore a shiny brown suit and a Silverhill Grammar School tie. I wondered where he"d got it from; he probably stole it from some schoolboy he caught nicking sweets from the corner shop. He kept tugging at his collar with his pink sausage fingers as we talked in Mary Critchley"s living room. His face was flushed with the heat, and sweat gathered on his thick eyebrows and trickled down the sides of his neck.
"So he"s been missing since lunchtime, has he?" DS Longbottom repeated.
Mary Critchley nodded. "He went out at about half-past ten, just for a walk, like. Said he"d be back at twelve. When it got to three... well, I went to see Mr. Bashcombe here."
DS Longbottom curled his lip at me and grunted. "Mr. Bas...o...b... Special Constable. I suppose you realize that gives you no real police powers, don"t you?"
"As a matter of fact," I said, "I thought it made me your superior. After all, you"re not a special sergeant, are you?"
He looked at me as if he wanted to hit me. Perhaps he would have done if Mary Critchley hadn"t been in the room. "Enough of your lip. Just answer my questions."
"Yes, sir."
"You say you looked all over for this lad?"
"All his usual haunts."
"And you found no trace of him?"
"If I had, do you think we"d have sent for you?"
"I warned you. Cut the lip and answer the questions. This, what"s his name, Maurice Richards, was he the last person to see the lad?"
"Johnny"s his name. And yes is the answer, as far as we know." I paused. He"d have to know eventually, and if I didn"t tell him, Maurice would. The longer we delayed, the worse it would be in the long run. "There was someone else in the area at the time. A man called Colin Gormond."
Mary Critchley gave a sharp gasp. DS Longbottom frowned, licked the tip of his pencil, and scribbled something in his notebook. "I"ll have to have a word with him," he said. Then he turned to her. "Recognize the name, do you, ma"am?"
"I know Colin," I answered, perhaps a bit too quickly.