Sterling stayed at the window after the BMW moved off. A small, rational part of him sensed that Gloria Etchingham had put on a performance which he had been drawn into, and that he had been played. So he needed to be cautious. But a larger, more naïve part felt flattered and important, as if there was a spark between them, and she’d specially selected him for a crucial task.
As he looked out, something in the churchyard near where the courting couple had been half an hour before caught his policeman’s eye. A thin young man in a dark leather jacket was leaning coolly on one of the headstones. Sterling just had a chance to note the John Lennon gold-rimmed spectacles, the pale face and the narrow head; brown hair cropped short on top. Maybe the man sensed Sterling’s gaze. A minute later, he was gone, drawing back around the church and then striding down towards Holy Ghost Alley. It was too late to follow, so Sterling returned to his chair, picked up the sheet of paper, leaned back, put his feet up on the desk and scanned the jumble of letters and numbers. A few moments later, he tipped forward and started the computer.
After an hour of searching for the meaning of Keith Etchingham’s code and reading news reports of his disappearance, he was little further forward. He looked at his watch. He had been due in the pub 20 minutes ago. He turned the computer off, slipped on his overcoat and made his own descent, though less daintily than Gloria Etchingham, down the stairs and into the square. It was time for that pint. He could mull things over and seek further inspiration in the pub.
He followed the footsteps of the thin man into St Peter’s Street and Holy Ghost Alley. The alley started off as a kind of tunnel cut between two houses, and was then hemmed in by the brick walls of little Edwardian villas that enclosed small back yards. It was claustrophobic until you burst into the wide high street up from the quay.
Sterling’s local was a few yards up on the seaward side. He’d had a fondness for the Cinque Ports Arms since his first-ever pint of beer here before a cricket match against Sandley School. His team had arrived early and the teachers had let them wander into town. He didn’t play well that afternoon. He couldn’t hold his drink as well as he’d learned to in his mid-thirties.
Now his first watering hole was his favourite. The landlord had changed since those sunny, youthful days, of course. The current incumbent, Mike Strange, had been “something in the security services” before his battered retreat to Sandley. He and his wife Becky had taken over the pub three years before, after a traumatic experience in the Middle East. Mike was still prone to “episodes”, and his hands shook occasionally as he pulled pints. Sterling had never known a person to move more swiftly or silently. He still gave a start every time Mike materialised to remove empty glasses and crisp packets.
Now he was at the bar – a short, wiry man of about 40 with a sallow complexion and brown eyes. His dark, close-cropped hair was flecked with grey. Although he dressed casually, he was dapper, from the light desert boots on his feet to the immaculately ironed jeans and the sharp creases of his Oxford shirts. He rarely spoke, and when he did, he said little.
Sterling thought of the time he had met Becky in town. Over coffee, he had tried to find out more about him. ‘Ah, Mike,’ she had replied, wistfully. ‘Well, he’s certainly not like you. He reckons that you could start a party in an empty aircraft hangar, and that you’ll talk to anyone. Look at you now, having coffee with me. He’s much more introverted. He likes and admires you for all the things he’s not. But he’s very loyal and trustworthy, and he’s afraid of nothing. You might find that out one day.’
At the bar, Mike raised his eyebrows as Sterling approached. After a moment, a pint of Spitfire appeared. Mike gestured with the side of his head towards the little sofa in the corner by the fire. Sipping the top off the pint, Sterling wandered over. Jack Cook, approaching fifty, large-framed and going to seed, was in from the café. He was a cheerful and generous drinking buddy, witty and louche enough that you could forgive his casual, virtually compulsive untrustworthiness – especially where there was money to be made.
With him was Angela Wilson, the librarian. Her slender black fingers drummed the tabletop. She was impatient for news. Her Sandley friends still didn’t know why she had left the metropolis for their hick little country town. The burglary at the house she’d just moved into had been Sterling’s last case in the police. ‘I didn’t get out of London for this,’ he remembered her saying after the court hearing had sent the young housebreaker down for six months. In the lonely turmoil of Sterling’s life then, his wife gone, his job gone, he sensed a kindred spirit.
‘You were just unlucky. What happened to you wasn’t typical. It’s nice down here, actually. I’ll show you,’ he’d said in the coffee shop near the courthouse. And he had, in trips to the coast and walks round the town, whilst she developed his talent for crosswords, and, with her witty and wide-ranging discourses, helped him to plug the gaps in his education. Because of her, there was less to regret about his careless inattention at school.
‘So, Frank, what’s new?’ said Jack.
The question was inevitable. Everyone in the Square had seen the comings and goings (or rather, the coming and going) from Sterling’s office. He had been considered a promising police officer in the local force – allegedly alert, bright and hard working – but with a number of flaws. One of them surfaced now.
‘You mean the building inspector’s visit?’ Sterling said flippantly. ‘Very routine, Jack. Nothing at all to write home about. Everything just as it should be.’
Angela smiled widely. ‘Yeah, right.’
On the sofa with his pint, Sterling made an announcement. ‘Well, lady and gentlemen’ (Mike had appeared silently at his elbow, making him start as usual), ‘I’ve got myself a case.’
Since they were all, in their different ways, in ruts – the library, the pub, the café – they took a borrowed pleasure in Sterling’s attempt to be different. They willed him to succeed.
‘Of course, client-investigator confidentiality prevents me from being able to divulge more details,’ he said, the police-speak borrowed from many a tortured encounter between police spokespersons and the press, ‘but I am able to report that I am both excited and intrigued. ‘And,’ turning to Angela, ‘I may need help with a little research.’
The banter continued into the evening. The group moved on to other things. But towards the end, with a couple more pints having slipped smoothly down in the way of the first, and the crossword set out companionably in front of them, Angela and Sterling drifted back to the subject of the Etchingham visit.
‘I imagine she made a pretty big impression on you, Frank,’ Angela said. ‘A woman like that.’
‘Did you see her?’
‘Saw her. Smelled her perfume at the bottom of the stairs. Saw the car.’
‘Well, she was very attractive.’ It seemed pointless denying the undeniable.
‘How about the case? Is it going to be interesting? And just as important, is it going to be safe?’
‘Yeah, both, I think.’
‘You know what you’re like. Just don’t get into any muddles like the ones you’ve got into in the past.’
Their eyes slipped down awkwardly to the final clue in the paper in front of them:
Sounds like quiet filth, idiot (7), with only four letters missing - S_H_ _ _K.
They were silent. Sterling reflected on the “muddles” that had done for his marriage, and with them the pain and dislocation. A natural tendency to pessimism had not helped.
At around ten, it was natural for everyone to drink up and leave the cosiness of the pub for the cosiness (or otherwise) of their homes. At the door, Sterling looked back and nodded at Mike, mouthing his thanks, and as always, Mike was ready to acknowledge them. The journey home was a gentle stroll down No Name Street, over the road, through the arch of the Guildhall, across the Cattle Market and into his house just beneath the grassy embankment, the street lamps orange-capped sentinels as he padded on his way. He felt good – a case, some much-needed income, the company of friends.
A little final celebration was all he needed now, so he put on some West Coast balladry. The knock at the door a few minutes later caught him at a moment of mellowness. Sterling could be naïve, especially after a couple of pints, and when he heard the knock on the door, he opened it in hope, rather than fear. But caution was what should have guided him. The door, barely ajar, was shoved sharply right in his face, banging his forehead.
Sterling was five foot eleven, and his assailant was shorter, but he seized the advantage straight away, and never gave it up. A punch landed right on Sterling’s collarbone just as his hands were feeling his forehead. Another landed in his stomach, doubling him over, and he found himself on his hands and knees in his own hallway, not quite knowing whether he was gasping or retching. A balaclava-covered head bent to his right ear, the mouth a mean little ‘O’. Sterling could smell the damp wool and feel the spittle of his attacker on his ear. At the same time, he heard the heart-soaring guitar riff at the end of “Ship of Fools”. He wondered if some sort of prescience had influenced his choice. Equally ludicrously, hope flashed through his addled brain that future enjoyment of that riff would not be ruined by the current association.
‘That job you took today,’ said the ‘O’ in the balaclava. ‘You know what I’m talking about. Leave it alone. Carry on, and it’ll be much worse than this.’
He aimed a final kick at Sterling’s rib cage, which connected with what must for him have been a very satisfying crunch, and then slipped back into the night. Before curling into a ball by the radiator to analyse which bit was hurt the most, which bit might be broken, and whether any blood was staining his much-liked hall carpet, Sterling thought it sensible to crawl over to shut the front door. He didn’t want his attacker to come back thinking that he had not quite finished the job.
Sterling was no stranger to beatings, administering and receiving. He’d been in plenty of police vans at closing time on New Year’s Eve and other flashpoints, and he had participated in his fair share of rucks. So although he didn’t relish violence, not like some of the other men, and, he reflected, women, cooped up for half an evening and raring to get out and crack a few heads, he did feel that he knew about it. And the thing about the going over that he’d just received was that, although it hurt, his experience told him that it had been administered just a tad half-heartedly. A kick in the balls as a coup de grace would have been far more powerful a message than the kick in the ribs. And why not a punch on the nose to generate a bit more blood and drama? It had all been a bit tentative.
“Ship of Fools” had long finished by the time Sterling lurched into his armchair, with this and other thoughts flooding through his mind. He knew his weaknesses, but there was something else. Setbacks, bullying, intimidation – they just made him more stubborn and determined. He knew in that moment that he’d be seeing this case right through to the end, despite the throb in his forehead, the wince of pain in his ribs that every tiny shift brought, and the tenderness in his stomach. In that same moment, the answer to the last unsolved clue popped into his head: schmuck. Of course. Someone must have been trying to tell him something.