With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed

  On the other hand, since I did unintentionally provide him with his first and best plot – has he ever done anything better, or more creepy, than S is for … Secateurs!? – he ought to be jolly grateful. The new book isn’t so good by a long chalk, except that, to be fair, when you get to the end, and find out that the gardener did it (the gardener!), it comes as a complete surprise.

  But the main thing is Tim’s reaction. There we are, middle of the afternoon, and here’s Carmichael in the dining-room snogging this unknown woman over a batch of scones, and Tim just stands there gaping. I say something like, ‘This is my old friend Trent Carmichael,’ but Tim says nothing, he points at the woman – who’s somehow got clotted cream on her neck, and lipstick all over the place, and buttons half undone – and he makes stifled baby-like ‘Mm … Mmm …’ noises. The others don’t know what to make of this, but I do. He is obviously traumatized by displays of sexuality! Compounded with this he also hates the sight of cream (mother’s milk! mother is a cow?!); or JAM (good grief! red stuff! menstrual blood! oozing thickly!). Either way, he cried for his mummy (‘Mm … Mmm …!’) in a very gratifying way.

  ‘This is Michelle,’ says Trent. The woman glances at Tim, and is so struck by the incredulous look he gives her that she actually runs out of the room. ‘I work with that woman,’ Tim confides to me, in a whisper, as we make our way upstairs. ‘Of course you do,’ I say in my best bedside manner, thinking He must relate the event to himself! ‘But on the other hand, Tim,’ I said calmly, ‘you are probably having just a teeny bit of a breakdown, because of getting the sack. And as for that, well, let’s remember that you don’t actually work with anyone any more!’ It was a kindness to mention it.

  I do believe I am uncovering a completely new syndrome. I could call it post-traumatic redundancy syndrome, and it could form the whole second half of the book. Later in the afternoon, when we went out to buy a toothbrush for Tim (he worries about his TEETH!), we passed a woman on the street, she was wearing a pink coat and carrying a big white toy bunny-rabbit in broad daylight. I pointed her out myself, just for the sake of a laugh. But ‘Good heavens,’ said Tim, clutching the wall of the bank. ‘I work with that woman.’ ‘No you don’t,’ I said, ‘you ought to get a grip.’ ‘I do,’ he insisted. ‘If you want, I’ll ask her,’ I offered, but the woman took one look at Tim and disappeared. He is scaring people, terrorizing complete strangers. It is possible he will have to be hospitalized. Anyway, she dropped the rabbit and Tim picked it up – which is terrific stuff for the case-study, as I hardly need mention. In the spirit of scientific discovery, I took a photo.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I pointed out more people that Tim might claim to have worked with (a couple of dogs and cats, too, just in case), but the delusion seemed to have passed. However, just before bedtime I heard him shout something that sounded like ‘Make peace!’ from his room, and of course I ran in, because if he was starting to yell stuff, I didn’t want to miss it. ‘You want to make peace?’ I said, hardly able to contain my excitement. ‘That’s terribly interesting, you know, Tim.’ ‘I saw him from the window!’ he said. ‘All mangy and bloody and curiously singed.’ ‘Who?’ I said. ‘Makepeace,’ he yelled at me, ‘a bloke I work with.’

  Well. I looked out of the window, and there was nobody there. So I told him to get some sleep, but then he did a very curious thing. (I can hardly write this I am so agitated.) He flung up the window and shouted, as if to the empty night sky, a great metaphysical question. ‘Makepeace,’ he demanded, ‘where is your copy?’

  Such an extraordinary, compelling, sad, and almost beautiful thing to say. Where indeed is anybody’s copy?

  Tim’s nocturnal sighting of Makepeace was unremarkable, of course, until you realize that his lifeless corpse had been discovered, earlier that day (Wednesday), in the remains of the shed fire in Angela Farmer’s garden.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Trent Carmichael suddenly. Up to now, his poking through the ruins had been pretty half-hearted and pettish. Not surprisingly, the great detective was a bit cross, having come hotfoot from London in dismal weather on a consultative mercy dash, only to discover that Angela had unilaterally sent her troublesome journalist away straight after breakfast, apparently with a full apology and a small packet of cheese-and-pickle sandwiches. Investigating a burned-out Devonian shed in the presence of that little snot-nose Gordon Clarke was hardly an adequate compensation for this disappointment, and Carmichael was not a man to demonstrate grace under pressure.

  ‘What’s what?’ replied Angela distractedly. She felt glum. Holding Gordon’s hand and suddenly squeezing it, she had just noticed the melted remains of her old wind-up gramophone and was feeling the prickling at the back of her nose which normally (though not very often) presaged the onset of tears. Carmichael pointed to something sticking up out of the ashes. ‘Well, to be honest, my dear, it looks like – well, it looks like a human hand.’

  It was true. They all stared. Angela was so surprised she forgot to tell him off for calling her ‘my dear’. From amid the mess of blackened timbers, charred pots and smouldering paper, a curled, blackened, human hand reached out, the index finger extended, and the whole thing rocked slightly, rather as though its owner were saying ‘Over here!’ or trying to beckon a waiter.

  ‘Oh God, that’s terrible,’ said Gordon, in a very small voice.

  ‘Who is it?’ whispered Carmichael. He took the opportunity to steal a comforting arm around Angela’s shoulders, but impatiently she shook it off.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she bawled, ‘are you telling me I have a barbecued stiff in my shed? Is this some kind of a joke?’

  Nobody had the stomach to see what else was underneath, but Gordon recognized the remains of his dad’s hatchet lying nearby, and also Makepeace’s bag of bicycle bits (lamps, pump, chain and padlock, all buckled from the heat), so it was pretty obvious whose hand was sticking out here, arrested for all eternity in the futile act of trying to order an extra round of poppadoms. Poor Makepeace. The man who was never wrong. A lot of people, when they heard the news of his passing, would sigh and hang their heads, and remember him. And they would think, ‘Thank heaven I’m never going to be bullied by that bloody little know-all again.’

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said Carmichael, turning to Angela, ‘is how you didn’t see or hear anything. Isn’t that your bedroom immediately above here? Wouldn’t you notice that there was a fire burning? Wouldn’t you hear the crackles, see the lights, feel the heat?’

  Gordon frowned and looked at Angela. He hated to admit it, but Carmichael had a point. Angela was a light sleeper; plus she had a stranger locked up in the house; plus she was blushing heavily now, in a manner he’d never seen before.

  For herself, Angela found it hard to answer this question with any degree of honesty, especially as her own internal shed-burning – complete with crackles, lights and licky hot flames – was merely dormant, and honestly might flare up again at any moment if she gave a single thought to the night’s events.

  ‘I don’t want the cops involved,’ she snapped. ‘OK.’

  There was a pause. They all looked around. The hand waved; ‘Excuse me –’

  ‘Any reason?’ asked Carmichael casually, as though it didn’t really matter.

  ‘Yep.’ She pulled her jacket around her shoulders, and gave a brave smile to Gordon. She was wondering whether to tell him she had taken Osborne as a willing sex slave and temporarily concealed him in the garage with a stack of cup cakes and the bunny for company. But possibly, on second thoughts, he was a bit too young to understand.

  ‘Right,’ said Carmichael. ‘I mean, you don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.’

  ‘You’re dead right I don’t.’ Angela sniffed, and lit a cigarette.

  ‘So what do you want me to do?’ he exploded. ‘What do you want me to detect? After all, we know who’s under there. Also, we assume it was an accident –’

  ‘Of course it was.’

 
‘So I’m just not quite sure where my expertise comes in.’

  They all looked at the hand. It seemed to be beckoning, in a polite sort of gesture, as if to say, ‘Sorry to be a nuisance, but I wonder, could I have a word?’

  ‘What would Inspector Greenfinger do?’ asked Gordon, tearing his gaze away.

  ‘He’d sit down for a minute indoors, if he had any sense,’ said Angela.

  ‘Just right,’ said Carmichael. ‘He would say, “Well, Pete” – Pete is his sidekick, but you knew that – “Well, Pete, I don’t think that fellow is going anywhere!” and surge indoors for a cup of hot, strong camomile tea.’

  ‘Swell,’ said Angela.

  They turned to go inside. The hand could wait. Carmichael, eager to change the subject, started telling them the plot of his next novel, in which the victim was found with a big old-fashioned watering-can forced down over his head. They chuckled appreciatively. ‘He yells for help through the spout, but no one hears him,’ he added proudly. ‘In fact, he is only found eventually when someone inadvertently trips over the handle.’

  They all laughed and speeded up, heading gratefully for the back door. What a ghastly way to spend an afternoon. Thank goodness it was over.

  And meanwhile the blackened hand still signalled from the debris. ‘Er, I don’t suppose you could hold on a minute?’ it said. ‘I just feel sure there is something you haven’t taken into account. If you could just – Hello? Excuse me –’

  But they had gone.

  The thing about Lillian’s clever choice of disguise – as travelling fluffy-bunny salesperson – was that it rather defeated her intention. In some vague indefinable way (but something to do with a tall, striking, baby-blonde woman trailing soft toys about in broad daylight) it just didn’t help her to blend into the surrounding landscape. People pointed her out; small children scoffed and jeered; and Gordon, first thing in the morning, brought up an ironical extra little breakfast tray with just a lettuce leaf on it. But if she wanted to change her cover story to something else, it was a bit late now. And besides, if she was honest, she rather liked the bunny she’d bought at the shops. He was woolly and earnest-looking, and, like all the best soft toys, he was a very good listener. Certainly he was a comfort in this ghastly unnecessary mess she had got herself into. He was her only ally. For if Michelle and Makepeace had contrived to get rid of Osborne (she was still sure of this), and if Angela Farmer and the Dunquenchin team had lent their support – well, that only left the soft toy she could trust.

  But she had dropped the bunny when she saw Tim in the High Street; and now, to cap it all, she’d been robbed. Somebody had taken the letters. Those nutsy letters Michelle had written, about wanting to stake out Osborne and do horrid things to his nipples – they had been stolen from her room by somebody during the day, when she was out fruitlessly casing the Farmer house. All in all, it was no wonder she felt pretty insecure. No sign of Osborne any more; no friendly furry helpmeet with long floppy ears; and when she got back to her room in the evening, not only were the letters gone, but there was a little drop of blood on the carpet and the room was permeated by the curious and unpleasant odour of singed hair. On top of which, an insane missive was attached to her pillow. In a mad scrawl it said: ‘Knowledge is Power, and you know nothing.’

  The only person to have a fairly good day was Osborne. No sane person would choose to be cooped up in a dark, empty, paraffin-smelling garage while a legendary thriller-writer sleuths for clues twenty yards away; but on the other hand, Osborne was not slow to appreciate the chance of forty winks. Angela’s sudden and virulent arrival in his life had been cataclysmic, and the result was that a little lie-down was called for. ‘I’ll come get you as soon as I can,’ she promised as she lowered the up-and-over door, sealing out the natural light; but inwardly he begged her not to rush. He felt he had been wrenched, pushed, dragged, drawn and wrung; he felt like a weed that has forced its way through concrete. The sight of the cup cakes made him feel sick.

  Most of the day he snoozed, intermittently waking up to switch on his torch and read a few more pages from Trent Carmichael’s nasty S is for … Secateurs! before snuggling down in a nest of old blankets, peeling a cup cake, and surrendering himself to the far from unpleasant feeling that, at present, there was precisely nothing he could do. This was true, of course. If Come Into the Garden had folded, there was nothing he could do. And if Makepeace had been sizzled to a crisp in the shed fire (as Angela popped in to tell him during the afternoon), well, there wasn’t much he could do about that either. Of course he felt sorry for the little chap, but it was curiously difficult to regret his passing, or even fully to believe in it. During one of his many snoozes, he hallucinated that Makepeace was being buried, yet kept insisting on sitting up in the coffin. ‘You’re dead,’ people told him. ‘I am not,’ he protested. ‘Come on, lie down.’ ‘I won’t.’

  Lucky that Osborne appreciated this chance to loll about; lucky that he believed in ‘sleep debt’ the way other people believed in overdrafts. In fact, he thought of his daily ten hours of nod in precisely the same balance-sheet terms: that if you draw out you must pay in; and that when you overdraw consistently, ultimately you receive a nasty letter threatening to revoke your credit facilities until further notice. So he stretched, yawned, snuggled down with his eyes closed, and let his thoughts wander across the border into Bo-Bo Land. The rabbit stirred, and unconsciously he scratched its ears. For Osborne, sleep was the constant state, the default mode to which he always returned when his attention was not demanded elsewhere. Everyday life might extend distractions to pull him out of the sack, but the moment it relaxed its grip, he sank back gladly into catalepsy. Sometimes it seemed to him that even if he slept till the millennium, he would simply never catch up. Osborne’s sleep debt was evidently of prodigious proportions, somewhere along the lines of the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement.

  Turning over to get more comfortable, he thought vaguely about S is for … Secateurs! and wondered what everyone saw in it. The story concerned a precocious pubescent girl, physically unattractive but jailbait none the less, who blackmailed two older men after involving them in the dismemberment and disposal of a body. It seemed that, partly crazed by a youthful perusal of the works of Sigmund Freud, this West Country Lolita had killed her father over a misunderstanding at the allotments, when at the fervid height of her teenage sexual alertness she overheard him tempting a schoolfriend with a giant marrow. ‘Do you see how it’s grown?’ he said in all innocence. ‘Tell you what, I’ll treat you to a bit later, if you’re interested.’ It was a tragic choice of words – especially for a man whose psychotic daughter not only harboured a burgeoning Electra complex, but whose favourite job was sharpening the blades of the hedge clipper.

  Osborne squirmed slightly at the memory. He pictured the large garden in S is for … Secateurs!, extraordinarily similar to Angela’s, in which the burials took place. It disappointed him that Carmichael had modelled the topography so closely on a real locale; what a shame it was when novelists didn’t bother to make things up. In the story, the garden had the same dark poplar trees, the same ancient mulberry, the pergola, and (of course) the magnificent shed. It occurred to him suddenly that the sinister author picture he had seen on the back of Murder, Shear Murder actually showed the out-of-focus shape of Angela’s shed in the background. Ho hum. Another instance of lack of imagination.

  But it occurred to him also, as his mind started its slow, struggling ascent out of the pit of slumber, that a line from one of the G. Clarke letters didn’t really make sense. ‘I haven’t even met Trent Carmichael …’ it said. There was something wrong with that. What, though? He switched on his torch, and got the letter out of his pocket: ‘I haven’t even met Trent Carmichael.’ He scratched his head. Well, of course the real G. Clarke did know Carmichael, but that wasn’t the point. It was that – oh yes, good heavens, this letter had been written before the Carmichael piece appeared in the magazine. He sat up so quickly that he
bumped his head on a fire extinguisher. ‘Bugger,’ he said, but it was only a reflex.

  This Carmichael reference was significant. How could somebody respond to a piece that wasn’t yet in print – to a piece, in fact, that had never been published at all, because the magazine had closed down in the week it was due to appear? There was only one person who knew he had written it: Michelle. He gasped as he considered the implications. It was Michelle who wanted him to rummage in her shed. It was Michelle who wanted to dress up in a négligé and gardening gloves and flip-flops. Which was why, when the garage door flipped momentarily open, and a small figure scurried in wearing a loose frock and carrying a pitchfork, he yelled, above the boom of the closing door, ‘Michelle! Oh God, you’ve come to get me!’

  ‘You’re wrong there, as usual,’ said a familiar voice. And suddenly the garage reeked of burning hair.

  12

  Up in the office at Dunquenchin, Gordon was having a breakthrough. He might have shouted ‘Eureka!’ if his classical education had been better; as it was, he shouted ‘Dad!’ Twelve months of terribly advanced electronic remote-contact wizardry with teams of Californian graphics experts, combined with neurological analysis of such amazing complexity and sophistication that quite honestly you or I would never understand it – even (ahem) if it could be described in words – had finally culminated in that virtual reality program he had called, provisionally, Phototropism.

  It was Thursday morning, and breakfast was finished. It seemed the perfect opportunity for a test run. Hearing the footsteps of his dad coming up the stairs, Gordon strapped a custom-built Fly-Mo unit to his bonce (or that’s what it looked like), thrust his hand into a wired-up glove, adjusted quickly to the intense consuming dark, and for the very first time surrendered himself to the entirety of the finished game. Though he was a pioneer, he felt safe and confident. Earlier, his dad had commented kindly, ‘You need taking out of yourself, son’; and Gordon had promptly decided that a ‘proto-photo-trip’ was precisely the thing required. In theory, the program would trigger receptors in his brain to convince him – little by little, and depending on the level of skill – that his entire body was growing and reaching out like a plant in sunlight. It would take him out of himself, exactly.