The policeman I spoke to was the desk sergeant, and as I had predicted he would be, he was. After a brief recital of my fear that I was being pursued for reasons beyond my knowledge, he asked what exactly the young man had done. He listened. He said, “So this stalker…” his term not mine, although at once the word gained a resonance for me, “has followed you from a pub, come to your house, bought you, you say, a dustbin,” an emphasis there, “and some beer. And you have bought him breakfast.”
A short interval ensued.
I was about to speak when the sergeant went on. “Has he actually threatened you in any way, sir?”
I answered truthfully, “Not as such. But he won’t leave me alone.”
“Is he there now, sir?”
“No.”
“Then perhaps he’s got bored, sir. Or he’s decided the breakfast was enough. It was a big full English, you said. Sounds very nice.”
“But what am I to do if he comes back?”
The policeman sighed. His voice altered and became unpleasantly convivial, demonstrating he had absolutely nothing against my sort. “Well, if I was you, sir, I’d pay him off and tell him to get lost before the wife catches him.”
I stood, nonplussed by the inevitable inference he had taken.
He ended, “Thank you, sir. Have a nice day.”
After the police I tried Harris’s number again. This time a perky P.A. answered. She belonged to Janette, of course. Janette was staying at the house in Hampshire while Harris sorted out his father’s affairs in Spain. However, right now, Janette wasn’t available, could the P.A. assist me? Obviously she could not.
After this, I went through an inventory of any person who might be able to assist, but as I had decided earlier, there was no one. The few non-business friends I now possess are of the acquaintance variety, and the males among them are my age or older, either skeletal or overweight, with diabetes and heart problems, or simply doddery.
I was on my own. The place I have been most often.
Every ten minutes or so I was going round the house, glancing from windows, out at the street, down at the side path and across the garden (where the dustbin still maintained its sentry post) to the alley to the back. I even scanned the frontal oak trees and the fir at the rear. Joseph Traskul, like Vilmos, seemed quite capable of physical feats, such as climbing up into trees. He must have scaled the back fence after all, toting the bin.
Belatedly I wished I had modernised my security. The locks and bolts and the temperamental burglar alarm were all I had. And I had noticed the alarm hadn’t gone off when I let myself back in this morning, though I had fumbled in my haste.
At lunch time I checked the fridge and freezer. I don’t eat vast amounts, and I had reasonable provender for a short siege.
I made myself a quick omelette and drank some tap water. I checked my potential armament, which is quite impressive, as in most homes it is, if ever analysed. Years of penning my usual kind of book had taught me quite a lot about what can be utilised, and even to some extent how. But I’m not a violent man. To describe a killing and a death neither excites nor upsets me. But the idea of doing it myself is still as alien to me as the thought of landing in person on the moon. Even so, we recall, men have landed there.
I put a couple of meat knives, a screwdriver, hammer, and a small drill and some other stuff, on the kitchen table, which by now I’d pushed up against the back door. I’d let the blind down over the side window of the kitchen, and stacked up pans in the sink, both to impede an entry and to make a noise. He would have to break the windows anyway. That would be enough.
On the credit side, if I ever felt able to sleep again, I never sleep for long unbrokenly, nor very deeply.
At the other windows on the ground floor I drew other curtains. The lower storey grew dark and menacing.
How long would this go on?
The telephone still worked. I kept testing it. Even if it failed – tampered with in some way – I had topped up the mobile and recharged it only yesterday morning. On the other hand, if I called them again the police might not bother. My sergeant had plainly concluded I was an ageing queer who had had a tiff with his young lover or not properly recompensed a male prostitute. They had more important things to see to.
I made some coffee, and having parked the hall table against the front door and laid various bits and pieces by the curtained windows to announce entry, I took myself upstairs.
The computer switched on, I checked for emails. There were none.
I turned to the notes for the new dry little novel. Sat there staring at them.
Was I being a complete fool about all this?
The phone in the hall rang at 3.07 p.m. It’s handheld, and when I work upstairs I bring it with me. I wondered if the police had decided to contact me and quiz me about wasting police time.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Roy.” he said.
Christ, his voice, so soon, was entirely unmistakable.
What to say? Who is this? Or break the connection. Break it, and unplug the phone?
How had he got the number? He could not have got the number unless he had found out my second name. And there was no way on earth he could have. Or maybe there was, that thing about searching the Web – every house shown on some sort of map, every name, even the most obscure, locatable somehow…
I hadn’t spoken. So he said, gently, “You’re asking yourself how I got this number?”
I swallowed. “Yes. I was.”
“Shall I tell you? You really ought to work it out for yourself, Roy, shouldn’t you? But then, you still don’t grasp how I found your house – or have you deduced that?”
Deduce. He knows me. He knows I write detective stories. Is that it? But I write as R.P. Phillips…
“I have,” I said stolidly, “been in touch with the police.”
“Really?” I could hear his smile, all the way along the wire.
“They suggest…”
“If only you knew, Roy, how pointless all this is, on your part. I have become interested in you.”
Apparently he too understood the police would think this situation irrelevant. But how could he be sure? Perhaps – had he done this sort of thing before?
“Interested in what way?”
“Well, human interest, you know, Roy. No such thing as a dull person. What is that quote from the German – ‘scheinst… And how the dull shine!’ Bernhardt, isn’t it? Actually a Jewish philosopher, living in Germany. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.”
“No.”
“There, you see, I could introduce you to his work.”
“Tell me how you got the number.”
“I’m just round the corner. It’s taken me until now to digest that amazing breakfast. I’ll be with you in…”
“No. You won’t be with me in anything. Stop this now. I’ve told you about the police.”
“Oh. That.”
I cut the connection.
I sat there. I was imagining him scrambling ably over the fence, tapping out the window with a hammer and brown paper so it made no appreciable sound. I had never had the windows properly double-glazed. A cat could get in if it really wanted.
I went downstairs, carrying the phone, and with the sharpest of the knives I had previously selected.
From the front window I peered out, between my mother’s heavy Dralon curtains.
The day had clouded over, adding to the indoor murk. The blonde woman from across the street, No 73, was standing on her front lawn, staring despairingly at her poodle, which was performing the first syllable of its breed name in the grass.
Could I signal to her? It would be useless. She and I anyway had never exchanged more than a polite grunt.
I waited rigidly for the phone to go again, but it didn’t. Nor did he appear.
At this juncture I made a resolution. I pulled the phone plug out.
Instead I tried my mobile. Thank God, no sign of unknown calls, no private numbers.
I thought of Harris up to his eyes in Dad’s Death, and considered he had, in all the thirty odd years we had known each other, never given me the number of his personal telephone or mobile. Harris too was not a friend. He could, would, do nothing.
I was very angry by now. I was frustrated, jittery, at the end of the proverbial tether.
Probably, I thought, he will get tired of this. And also, if he has done this before, perhaps he does have a criminal record. For example, if he had done this to a woman, the police would have been far readier to intervene. The name Joseph Traskul – it was much too dramatic. It could well be an invention, and each victim would be offered a different one. I hadn’t described him to the police – I don’t, in my ordinary fiction, go in for a lot of description, it slows the action down… But I had his letter – handwriting and DNA. I went straight to the kitchen and got that and in that moment the doorbell went.
Naturally I’m not brave. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Which has to be one of the truest analogies ever coined.
The bell went once, then twice, then again and again. And then the letter box flapped up; I could see the slot of light between the table legs of my barricade.
A voice called briskly through to me. “Roy. Are you all right in there? Can you hear me, Roy? Can you answer?”
It wasn’t his voice.
In the shock of relief I couldn’t think for a second who the hell it was. Then sense returned and I knew.
“George – yes, hang on.” It was my attached neighbour from 72.
“Oh, that’s good. You’re all right, are you? Only…”
“Hang on, George. Don’t go away.” I got to the door. I was numb with the release of tension.
“But all your front and side windows are blacked out…” George insisted, anxiously harking back to the war years I so wisely missed, “and…”
“I’m fine.” I dragged the table away.
George is old, about seventy-nine, eighty maybe. We’d exchanged a few pleasantries, the odd pint of milk or piece of advice on electrics or plumbing. His wife, Vita, once brought me a slice of the delicious cake she’d baked for his seventy-seventh birthday, after I politely cried off the party. But now George, perhaps, was an ally, a character witness. Too old to involve with a stalker, he might still make an impression on the Bill.
As I undid the door I heard him reassuringly murmur something outside to Vita, saying it was all right, no need to be upset.
And I felt very sorry to have worried them both, these sprightly fragile pensioners. Then I opened the door and there they stood. George, and behind him Vita, with both her hands clasped round the right hand of the man beside her, who was a strained, almost tearful Joseph Traskul.
“Oh thank God, Dad,” he exclaimed. “I really thought this time you were dead!”