“…because of the events of the summer, the authorities have closed the border with Hungary at first, then with Czechoslovakia, and now a complete travelling ban has been instituted in the GDR. The Honecker regime is isolating itself from the rest of the East Bloc countries…”
“That’s right, my dear Alastair, it is like putting a cat in a sack. Just as their pent-up urge for freedom is at its height, the GDR citizens are in effect being locked up inside their own country.”
“Now we also hear that the GDR is cracking down on protesters in Leipzig. Would you say that Leipzig is significant, Brian?”
“Yes, it is the second largest city of the GDR, and it is at its industrial heart. And not only that. Leipzig industry is the most cutting-edge of the whole communist bloc. It produces all the high-end optics and electronics needed for the most advanced weapons systems of the Warsaw Pact…”
“So you’re saying that the Russians should be getting nervous as well?”
“Exactly. In Brezhnev’s days the tanks would already have been brought to bear on such an insurgency. But now it is the Soviets themselves, by way of Gorbachev, who are cautioning the Honecker regime to back down. A complete reversal of policies, obviously.”
“The Russians and their German client state are at loggerheads…”
“Absolutely. Gorbachev is advocating ‘Glasnost’ and ‘Perestroika’, openness and reform, and the Honecker regime just hates that. Only recently the East German authorities have banned several Soviet publications on the grounds that they are subversive…”
Jonathan couldn’t help hearing the bloody Beeb going on and on about politics in bloody Germany. Why didn’t we just crush them after we won the bloody war? He didn’t care for a word of what the radio was saying, but he recognized the kind of stuff Mummy was for ever listening to. He felt a pang of longing for his mother, and for the sausages and bacon she kept stocking up for him. Not to mention the beer. Oh, Mummy, we had it so good; why did it have to end?
And when she listened to that awful nattering on the Beeb, he would grumble at her and just switch it off. He was not very likely to do that now. It was the foreman himself who had a radio on in his shack and spent hours on end listening at this highbrow gibberish at full volume. He only turned it down to give fresh orders.
And he, Jonathan, spent those endless hours doing backbreaking work. Unloading a consignment of cement in heavy sacks from a lorry; carrying a big load of bricks up a ladder; collecting the rubbish off the building site and throwing it into a skip.
As bloody Brian and bloody Alastair kept their bogus dialogue going, Jonathan reflected that the foreman had it easy, just sitting there, watching the others work, giving orders, probably making good money on their backs. “I wouldn’t mind being a foreman myself. How come I’m not and that bloody fool is?”
He worked as a day labourer, going from site to site, hired for a couple of hours—a couple of days at most—and badly paid because he wouldn’t show any ID, and the foremen told him he was too fat to be a good worker anyway. Well, that last problem was taking care of itself. With the pittance he earned he could no longer eat as many sausages as he wanted, and the hard work made the fat melt away. He no longer looked like the picture on his driver’s licence, the one the police had put up on the notice boards of every station in town. His face was getting thinner, his hair longer and greasier.
Another problem was that everyone seemed to think that he had a very posh accent (the idea!) and derided it. They kept imitating him, repeating every word he said with a very bad mock-posh accent, the bastards. So he had to keep his mouth shut. And again Jonathan thought of his mother: how she’d always reproached him when he talked “too common” and swore too much.
He spent most of his hard-earned money to pay the rent at the dosshouses where he stayed at night. Again, he had to pay more because he wouldn’t show any ID. The bloody slumlords exploited him mercilessly; his only consolation was that they couldn’t exploit him for long; he never slept in the same bed twice in a row, though he did come back to each address intermittently. “I wouldn’t mind having a nice little dosshouse of my own. Just sit there all day, counting my money, waiting for other poor sods to hand it over in spades.”
As he worked on for endless hours every day, Jonathan kept reminding himself that he was not going to do this forever. He had plans. For the moment he had to keep his head down, stay out of the hands of the law, wait for things to calm down a bit. Surely those pictures of him would not stay up forever at the police stations? “I’m gonna have to leave Britain as soon as they’re no longer looking for me. Start a new life somewhere abroad. If I’m not welcome anymore in this bloody country it can’t be helped…” He had vague ideas of making it big, somehow, somewhere. Of course Jonathan didn’t speak any foreign languages, not really, but he’d been told that in places like Amsterdam, say, or Oslo, everyone could speak English anyway…
But for the moment, while he was waiting for the right moment to make his escape, his biggest dream was to make a criminal career right here in London. Burglary! Though he wasn’t really agile enough to scale facades, nor lean enough—just yet—to slip in through the slightest opening. It would have to be more in the style of breaking in with a crowbar… Imagine getting into a really posh place and just helping yourself, jewels, money, anything you want. Imagine breaking in into Marks and Sparks in the middle of the night! It’s always nice to have a dream, isn’t it?
“Hey! You! Fat arse! Get a move on with those cement sacks. I’m not paying you good money to stand there daydreaming!”
Jonathan started, and even though his back and limbs were aching, he resumed unloading the lorry in a hurry. The driver, lounging in the cab of his vehicle, sniggered. Jonathan started fantasising about murdering a couple of people in a gruesome way, crushing them under a hydraulic vehicle lift… He could still hear McCullough screaming in his mind’s ear, although that had happened before he was crushed. “But wait a minute. Yes. That’s it! You could tie up a chap under that lift without knocking him out, then let the lift come down on him real SLOW and listen to the screams while you crush him to death… I wouldn’t mind hearing that bloody foreman and the driver screaming like that… with great conviction.”
Daisy was desperately looking for a phone number. She had once written it on a card with her pocket-size Braille slate, but she couldn’t find it in the drawer where she kept such cards. “Extraordinary!” she reflected, “I could find that computer list from twenty years ago within minutes, but King Louie’s number has disappeared…”
She’d been on the phone with Louie on a daily basis only a couple of years ago, when he’d needed her to escort him on the Tube escalators. Of course, at the time it was mostly him calling her, but sometimes she had to cancel an assignment when something else turned up, and then she knew exactly where the card with his number could be found. “I must have lost it when we moved.”
In the living room Daisy sat down next to her telephone and thought hard. She still had the same set as in the old flat, with an old-fashioned rotary dial; why change something so familiar, so easy to use by the force of habit, the habit of a lifetime? Suddenly she had an idea: why not try Bernard’s here and now method? Yes. Tonight I’m going to the cinema with Margery. So here I am, sitting next to the phone; I have the card in front of me on the coffee table; I put my fingers on it. First line: KING LOUIE. So I know I have the right card. Now I put my fingers on the second line, skip the area code, read the next three figures, and then my finger flies to the phone dial: six o’clock—turn all the way around; ten-thirty—turn; one o’clock—pull down… 941!
Without thinking Daisy had already been dialling the first three digits; her index finger seemed to have kept the memory of the phone number, finding its way on the rotary dial of its own accord. She kept moving her forefinger until the number was complete.
A moment later the ringtone started buzzing in the receiver. “Let’s see if my finger got it right.” Then a clicking sound. “Hello?”
“Hello? Louie? Is that you?”
“Hey-hey, Baloo! What a pleasant surprise! Long time no see!”
Daisy giggled with relief. “King Louie!”
“Baloo-Bear! I tried to reach you a while ago, but your number didn’t work.”
“Well, that’s because I moved to another place.”
“Well, give me your new number right away.”
Daisy dictated her new number and said, “Listen Louie, I need a favour.”
“Of course, Big Bear, anything you say.”
“Do you still run that soup kitchen for the disabled homeless?”
“Of course. If I stopped the charity, you’d be the first one to know, or at least your bank would be getting your money back straight away. You’re still our main sponsor.”
“Oh. Right. The bank, yes. I didn’t think of that.”
“I hope you’re not thinking of spending those funds elsewhere?”
“Oh no! Yours is the best-run charity I’ve ever supported. I’m sure you still keep yourself very busy from dawn to dusk, focusing entirely on the task at hand…”
“You bet, Lady Posh! I can buy an awful lot of potatoes with that moolah. In fact we no longer discriminate between disabled or not; we have several kitchens now. We have more sponsors too, so we’ve expanded!”
“Good. Now, what I wanted to ask you, is to keep an eye out for a young chap, twenty-one, rather fat… I’m talking about my son Johnny-John; Jonathan.”
“You have a kid of twenty-one, precious? I had no idea you even had kids; this one’s really an afterthought, huh?”
“Yes, and kids make you suffer hell, believe me. Now, my son got into trouble with the law and had to go underground overnight. I have a feeling he will be joining the homeless pretty soon, if he hasn’t done so already. So if you spot him, let me know, all right? I’d appreciate any news about his welfare.”
“Does Jonathan look anything like you, gorgeous?”
“Well, I wouldn’t know, obviously, though it seems he takes a lot after his father. Not so long ago his schoolmates were still calling him ‘potato-face’. On the other hand, he seems to have tiny teeth like me; probably dimples too when he smiles…”
“Right: a potato-face with an angel-smile… got it. I’ll get back to you. We should get together again, one of these days, for old times’ sake. Remember the laughs we had on the Tube?”
Beatrice lived alone in a Georgian mansion on a garden square similar to the one where Daisy lived. The house was her “ancestral home”, as she called it; she was born there, like her father and her grandfather before her, and she had lived there with her parents all her life. She had never married, and now that her dear Pater and Mater were gone, she had inherited the place.
“I’m afraid my whole life has been a waiting game,” she told her guests one afternoon, “I’m a bit like Prince Charles, I have spent my life waiting in the aisle… and now that I have come into my inheritance, I have a feeling that it’s all a bit too late!”
“Oh, come-come,” Daisy cried, “it’s not as if you have only started living now… You’ve had a very interesting life so far and you still have a long way to go… hopefully. And the same applies for Prince Charles, by the way.”
“Yes, maybe you’re right, darling. But let’s not talk about me. We’re here to welcome Bernard into your life, dear Daisy… Bernard, it’s been a long time. Do you remember when we last met, in 1939 or 1940?”
“No, my dear Beatrice, I’m sorry to say that I don’t recall ever meeting you.”
“Funny, because Daisy has been telling us that you have a kind of total recall of the most fleeting details of your earliest childhood… Well, Margery, do you remember Bernard?”
“Absolutely! It was in the fall of 1939. I must have been thirteen, and Cedric had invited all his female relations to a social do at his school, even Maud was there. He looked magnificent in his military uniform, and so did you, Bernard. And I remember a nice boy named Peter Hodgkiss as well. He actually asked me for a dance several times. Of course, I also recall that you were not in a wheelchair then. And I can assure you that I, for one, was star-struck by all you boys on that day.”
“Well, all the same, I’m afraid I do not recall seeing any of you ladies at our annual ball…”
“Typical,” Margery said to Beatrice, “you dress up to the nines for an event like that, and some boys don’t even register that you’re there at all…”
“Not being noticed is the story of my life! Speaking of which, Daisy, Margery has sensational news to tell us, don’t you, darling?”
“Yes. The confirmation has just arrived, so I guess I may tell everyone, now. I’m going to Columbia University as a tenured professor.”
“Marge! Congratulations!” Daisy cried. Bernard smiled: what a clever girls these were. He liked Daisy’s friends. He was thrilled at being presented as Daisy’s boyfriend. And even though his being wheelchair-bound had just been mentioned, these fine ladies were too well-bread to pay any heed to his appearance, which was always a relief.
“So you finally got the recognition you deserved?” Daisy asked.
“Yes. I’ve spent my life playing a waiting game of my own: the academic waiting game. I always kept my nose to the grindstone, so to speak, and one tenure after the other passed me by, because I was not willing to strive and to connive. Then one day—what do you know?—it turns out the good people at Columbia have noticed the quality of my work, and they’re offering me tenure without ifs or buts…”
“Wonderful! You’ll be dreadfully missed, of course, but we will come and visit you in New York sometime, Bernard and I.”
“I don’t know about that,” Bernard grumbled, “travelling in a wheelchair is not as easy as all that, you know.”
“Oh, hush, Bernard. In New York they also have special taxi’s you know.”
“Daisy has travelled all over the world,” Beatrice remarked.
“Yes, starting with our visit to Paris just after the war. Remember how we just took the stairs and climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower?”
“How could I ever forget, darling, my legs still ache when I think of it!”
“Did you enjoy the view?” Bernard asked, “That is to say, without meaning to be rude, of course, what use is the view to a blind person? What did you make of the experience?”
“I enjoyed just being there immensely, Bernard. Of course I asked Bee to describe what she was seeing, and she waxed lyrical about how all of Paris lay at our feet…”
“You don’t mind when people wax lyrical about what they can see and you can’t?”
“No, of course not, silly! You know, it’s always a pleasure to share a view vicariously. I love it when people are enthusiastic about a spectacular vista, because they tend to describe it so well. I only wish that people showed the same abilities when they are looking at more daily, humdrum things…”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” Bernard said.
“Anyway, apart from what Bee was describing, I could feel that we were high up in a fresher atmosphere, I could hear that the sounds from the city down below were muted… It was just wonderful. I had the same experience on top of the Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, where I went with Rick a couple of times in the 50s, or on top of the Gornergrat in Zermatt, where I was, with Bee again, a couple of years ago.”
“You don’t travel much yourself, do you, Bernard?” Margery remarked, as she noticed how astonished he was at Daisy’s stories. “In fact, Daisy is our scout; she’s seen more of the world than most people we know, and she reports back to us. I’ll never forget how she even managed to tune in into the counterculture of the 60’s at the time. Daisy was our Hippie out there on the London scene, it was amazing!”
“Oh, that reminds me, Margie. Remember how we visited Berlin together in the 70’s, and how we made that daytrip to Ost? Well, lately I’ve been hearing amazing stories on the news about what’s happening there. Are you people aware of the fact that the communist system is unravelling, right now?”
“I must say I tend to skip those stories about the communists,” Beatrice confessed, “their dismal dictatorships have been going on for as long as we’ve lived and it tends to get boring…”
“Exactly my opinion,” Bernard said. “We’ve seen it all before, the communists will prevail yet again.”
“No! You should all pay attention, I’m telling you that something amazing is happening right now…”
“All right,” Margery chuckled, “I for one shall heed your warning. Even though I’ll be very busy moving to the States, I’ll try to pay attention to this thing. You know, Bernard, Daisy’s not only our scout, she’s also our Red Indian tracker, keeping her ear to the ground and telling us which way the bison are stampeding.”
Sometime later, at New Scotland Yard, they were once again sitting across from one another on both sides of the desk, the investigator and the witness… or the suspect. Bernard said in his soft, crooning voice, “So, on the spur of the moment, you decide to drink the man’s blood…”
“Yes… It sounds awful when you put it in those words, but at this moment in time I’m just following my animal instincts. I am deaf as well as blind, so I’m feeling half dead already, but I want to survive. I just want to live a few days more and see what happens…”
“All right. Now, before we go on, I must caution you again: I’m taking notes; I’m very proficient at shorthand. I will use all this to write up the final deposition. So now you have officially admitted that you did drink a human being’s blood with the aim of feeding yourself… I may put that on the record?”
“Yes, yes. But, God, Bernard, all this makes me feel terribly uncomfortable. So I was a cannibal! You’re making me go through hell once more! Is it really necessary?”
“Well, Daisy, I’ve already said so a dozen times: we need to get to the truth. I put it to you that your whole life until now has been utterly dominated by these unresolved issues. Take the case of your own son, for instance. Maybe he would never have killed McCullough if your narrative had not been: ‘I killed your father and got away with it.’ If only you had been able to tell him instead: ‘Of course I went to the police as soon as I could, and the judge decided that I had acted under duress, so I was not prosecuted…”
There was a long silence. Then finally Daisy said, “So it was my fault after all? I did fail as a mother!”
“Well, I admit that is what I seem to be implying, but it’s not exactly what I mean… It’s all idle speculation of course, and I’m being unfair. Jonathan is still personally and entirely responsible for his own actions, obviously.”
“Is there any news of Jonathan?”
“No. I’m not supposed to discuss this with you, but the boy is very clever. The entire force is looking for him, but he’s managed to stay out of their hands for quite some time now. Perhaps he’s smarter than I credited him for, though this can’t go on forever.”
“I’m so sorry for what happened. I helped him to escape; I tipped him off. But what else could I do? I’m his mother!”
“That’s all right, darling. Let the police do their job; I did mine; I identified the culprit. And what I want to do now, is to wrap up both the Martin and the Loretta McCullough cases, so that the Crown Prosecution Service can take a look at them. Your deposition is central to these cases, and it is absolutely essential that you tell the truth.”
“Yes, but what has it got to do with the Martin McCullough case? Do you really need my deposition there?”
“Well, maybe it is not as essential, no. We have enough hard physical evidence. But still, we need to establish how you killed Jonathan’s father, so we can explain why the suspect killed the victim in this peculiar way. It explains his motives.”
Collins had collected enough proof for the case when he had gone to speak with Daisy’s dentist. The man told him that Jonathan had needed braces at the age of thirteen. He still had photographs he’d made when Jonathan’s braces came out a couple of years later, and he could therefore testify with absolute certainty that the marks found on the victim’s body were indeed those of the suspect’s teeth.
Even more crucially, when Collins had asked him if Jonathan had ever stolen anything from his practice, the dentist had volunteered the information that a bottle of chloroform had disappeared shortly after the young man’s last visit. He had in fact suspected the “shifty little bastard” of taking it, but did not report the incident to the police. “I see now that maybe I should have,” the man had added.
“So you see, my dear,” Bernard concluded, “even what you tell me about chloroform in your testimony helps us to explain why the suspect enacted his bizarre crime the way he did. But let’s get back to what happened in the Master’s dungeon. Our here and now narrative…”
The dungeon had been found. The pharmacist’s list had worked its magic. Again, Collins had done the footwork, following the instructions of his new, temporary superior. First he’d had to compare long lists of names by hand. The police records from 1966 were not on the computer, of course. You had to go down to a vault in the basement levels of New Scotland Yard and ask the archivist to retrieve them. There were an awful lot of people who had been prosecuted for possession of illegal substances at the time. Most of them only fined for possession and released. Looking at those lists you could easily picture how it had been in the swinging sixties, all those people just buying drugs without a thought for the consequences, while the laws were still very strict…
After days and days of backbreaking work, finally some results. What broke your back, of course, was to bend over those files at your desk and scrutinize them