CHAPTER ONE
That day started just like any other for me: late and slow.
I didn’t draw the curtains full back at first. There looked to be too much sun out for me to face before a shower and half a gallon of strong coffee. It had no business being so bright towards the end of October. In duller weather, the bills lying on the doormat wouldn’t have been so obvious. Nor would those shadows under my eyes I found myself studying as I shaved.
With my thirty-seventh birthday only a few weeks away, I wasn’t looking bad – for a forty-five-year-old. The fact was that I needed to take myself in hand. Or find someone to do the job for me. Neither eventuality seemed very likely. If the turn of a millennium couldn’t magic some improving resolution out of me, what could?
My problem’s always been that it doesn’t take much to make me feel better. A bacon sandwich and a clean T-shirt were enough to put me in a goodish mood that morning. I left the flat and went round to Magdalene Street to buy a paper. The Abbey car park was already full. Half-term, was it? There were certainly enough kids around. One of them managed to shout to a mate of his so loudly and piercingly as he roller-bladed past me that I jumped from the shock of it – much to his amusement.
The bar of the Wheatsheaf a few minutes before noon was a blessedly child-free zone, though. And dark to boot. I slid onto my usual stool under the photo-montage of the pub’s last fancy-dress night, sipped a healing Carlsberg Special and applied my mind to the quick crossword as a tune-up for trying to pick a winner from the afternoon races at Chepstow and Redcar.
Les, the landlord, was gently gearing up for the day with some polishing of pumps and checking of optics. The only other customers were a couple of aged regulars not given to talking much called Reg and Syd. It was quiet and soothing and safe. It was absolutely normal and very far from memorable.
But I do remember it. In every detail. Because that was the last time my life was quiet and soothing and safe. The door of the pub was about to open. And normality was about to slip through the window.
I didn’t know that, of course. I had no idea. It happened as it happened. It didn’t feel like fate or destiny or anything very significant. But it was. Oh yes. It most assuredly was.
I didn’t recognize her at first glance. Winifred Alder had to be pushing sixty and didn’t look much better for her age than I looked for mine. She was spare and gaunt, with iron-grey hair cropped jaggedly short – like she’d done it herself with scissors in need of sharpening. There was no trace of make-up. The red patches on her prominent cheekbones were windburn, not blusher. And make-up would hardly have been in keeping with her clothes – coarse grey sweater, brown shin-length skirt and a mud-stained mac. It was her shoes that gave her away. Clarks seconds, unpopular colour (purple originally, now faded to a murky mauve), circa 1980. They were what joined up the memories. It had to be her.
Or her sister, of course. Mildred was a pea from the same pod. A couple of years younger, though that was unlikely to amount to much of a visible difference at this stage in their lives. But, just as my mind dithered between the two possibilities, Winifred’s direct, sterneyed gaze made it up for me. Mildred had always been more of a flincher.
‘Come in out the rain, have you, luv?’ asked Les, grinning at her as the sunlight twinkled on his swan-necks.
‘Are you looking for me, Win?’ I put in. (There didn’t seem to be any other way to account for her presence; she wasn’t likely to have dropped in for a port and lemon.)
‘The waitress in that café you live over reckoned I’d find you here,’ Win replied, advancing a couple of cautious steps towards me.
‘A lucky guess.’
‘One you could have put money on, though,’ said Les.
‘Would you like something to drink?’ I ventured.
‘I’d like a word with you.’
‘Talking’s allowed here,’ said Les. ‘But I don’t have a dancing licence. You ought to know that.’
‘A private word.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Les. ‘I’m noted for my discretion. And Reg and Syd have got their hearing aids turned off.’
Win’s gaze wasn’t getting any softer. In fact, it was a deal more eloquent than her tongue. ‘We could go into the garden,’ I suggested. ‘If it’s open.’
‘Oh, it’s open,’ said Les. ‘Shall I bring the drinks out to you?’
‘What drinks?’
‘Well, you’ll soon be needing another. And for the lady . . . ?’
Win looked round at him, then ran her eye along the bar. Nitrokegs and alcopops were clearly a mystery to her. ‘A small cider,’ she finally announced. ‘Not fizzy.’
The garden was open in the sense that the door to it wasn’t locked. It was actually a cramped backyard accommodating two rusty tables divided by a washing-line sagging under the weight of half a dozen drying bar mats.
‘It could be worse,’ I said. ‘At least it’s not Les’s day for washing his smalls.’
Win looked at me as if I was speaking a foreign language and made no move to sit down. ‘Have you heard from Rupert?’ she asked abruptly.
‘Rupe? No, I . . .’ Rupert was her youngest brother. More than twenty years separated them, Rupe being something of an afterthought on his parents’ part. He was in fact a few months younger than me. We’d been friends at school and university and while we’d both been working in London. But I hadn’t seen much of him in recent years. Contrasting fortunes shouldn’t separate the best of friends and in some cases maybe they don’t. But they had us. While he’d gone on going up, I’d gone the other way. And, to prove it, there I was, out with the empties in Les’s so-called beer garden, while Rupe . . . Well, yes, what about Rupe? ‘I haven’t heard from him in a long time, Win.’
‘How long?’
‘Could be . . . a couple of years. You know how—’
‘Time flies when you’re having fun,’ said Les, his last orders baritone bouncing back at us from the walls of the yard. He plonked a bottle for me and a cloudy glass of cider for Win down on the table between us.
‘Thank you, Les.’
‘Want me to pick in these mats?’
‘No.’
‘It’s no trouble.’
‘No.’
‘All right, then. Please yourselves.’ He departed with a theatrical flounce.
I sat down and pushed out another chair for Win. She lowered herself slowly onto it, at any rate onto the edge of the seat, where she perched awkwardly, a string-bag I hadn’t noticed till then cradled between her knees. ‘I’d hoped . . . you might have heard from him,’ she said hesitantly.
‘Haven’t you?’
‘No. Not even . . . indirectly.’
What she meant by ‘indirectly’ wasn’t clear. Rupe’s family led a withdrawn life, keeping themselves to themselves. His mother had been alive when I’d first known them, his father long dead. Penfrith, their ramshackle home in Hopper Lane, down at the Ivythorn Hill end of Street, had once been a farm, before old man Alder’s death had forced them to sell their stock – cows, I mean – and most of the fields. It still looked like a farm of sorts, or had the last time I’d seen it. Rupe had flown the coop long since by then. His mother’s funeral was his last visit to Street that I knew of, back in ‘95. Since then, Winifred, Mildred and their other brother, poor simple old Howard, had lived on at Penfrith, unemployed and unattached to anything much except one another, without so much as a telephone to maintain contact with the world. As a matter of simple fact, I had no idea how Rupe stayed in touch with them, as apparently he did. Letters it had to be, from London or wherever his career took him.
‘We should have done, you see. Should have heard from him.’
‘How long’s it been . . . since you did?’
‘More than two months.’
‘You’ve written to him?’
‘Oh yes. We’ve written. No reply, though.’
‘Telephone?’ (There were call-boxes, after all.)
‘Just the same. No reply. Just his . . . whatever you call it.’
‘Answering machine.’
‘Yes. That’ll be it.’ She broke off to drink some cider, gulping down about half a glassful and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Well, it can’t go on, can it?’
‘I expect he’s abroad. You’ll hear from him soon.’
‘Something’s wrong.’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘Someone’s got to go to London and find out.’
Someone. Now Win’s journey to Glastonbury began to make sense. Not sense I much liked the sound of, though. I tried to talk it down. ‘When are you thinking of going?’
‘Me? To London? I’ve never been there in my life.’
‘Never?’ Stupid question, really. Did I seriously think Winifred Alder had ever visited the Big Smoke? A Sunday-school outing to Weston-super-Mare was probably the limit of her worldly travels. ‘Well, it’ll be a new experience for you.’
‘We want you to go.’
‘Oh, come on, Win, I can’t just . . .’
‘Drop everything and go?’
‘He’s your brother.’
‘He’s your friend.’
‘Even so . . .’
‘You won’t go?’
I shrugged. ‘Can’t see the need. It’s not as if—’
‘There’s need.’
‘Look, why don’t you just . . . leave it a little longer?’
‘We’ve left it long enough.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything to be worried about.’
‘How would you know?’
‘How would you?’
Win stared at me sullenly. She took another gulp of cider. Then she said, ‘He saved your life.’
‘Yes. So he did.’ It was true. Though in another sense you could say he’d also put it at risk. Still, facts were facts. I wouldn’t have been able to make my present contribution to the grand struggle of mankind but for Rupert Alder. ‘His life’s not in danger, though.’
‘It might be.’
‘There’s no reason to think so.’
‘Lancelot . . .’
It took me aback to hear someone use my full name, I don’t mind admitting. Lance was how everyone knew me. And just about everyone thought that’s how I’d been christened. I only wished they were right. Winifred Alder, of course, knew better. And she wasn’t one for diminutives. She called her sister Mil, it was true. But Mil was a special case. Rupe was always Rupert. And I, apparently, was always Lancelot.
‘He sends us money,’ she whispered, leaning towards me. ‘It’s how we live.’
‘Don’t you get . . . social security?’ No, I supposed, reading her faintly contemptuous gaze, they didn’t. They’d have called that charity. And they wanted nothing to do with the world, even its charity. But, still, they had to live. ‘You don’t have to tell me about it, Win.’
‘He’s stopped.’
‘Stopped?’
‘There’s been nothing since the end of August.’
‘I see.’
‘He wouldn’t do that to us.’
‘No. I don’t suppose he would.’
‘Will you go?’ She gave me what I think she intended to be a pleading look. ‘I’d take it as a kindness, Lancelot.’
‘Have you contacted the people he works for?’
‘They say he’s left. “Left the company”. That’s all I could get out of them. And it took me a purseful of coins to get that much. Most times I called they just . . . played music to me.’
I felt sorry for her then. I had a sudden mental glimpse of her, fumbling with her purse in a call-box while trying to make sense of the computerized telephone system she’d briefly been connected to. ‘I’ll phone them,’ I said. ‘See what I can find out.’
‘You’ll have to go up there. It’s the only way.’
‘I’ll phone, Win. This afternoon. I won’t let them fob me off, I promise. If that doesn’t work . . .’
‘You’ll go?’
‘Maybe. But I don’t suppose it’ll be necessary.’
‘It will be. There’s something wrong. I know it.’
‘Let’s wait and see.’
‘This afternoon, you say?’
‘Without fail.’
‘Unless you drink too much of that . . . lager . . . and forget all about it.’
‘I won’t.’ I smiled sheepishly at her. ‘Forget, I mean.’
‘I had to go to your parents for your address.’ The remark almost amounted to light conversation. ‘They seemed well.’
‘Oh, Mum and Dad keep pretty fit.’
‘Your father asked me to send you their regards.’
‘Did he?’
‘Struck me as odd. I mean, you must see a good bit of them, living so close.’
‘Just his sense of humour, Win.’ I forced a grin. ‘That’s where I get mine from.’
The day definitely wasn’t unfolding as I’d anticipated. And it was about to take another unwelcome twist. I saw Win off on her way to the bus stop, then made a bee-line back to the bar of the Wheatsheaf, where the sly sparkle in Les’s eyes forewarned me of mischief.
‘Lancelot, is it?’
‘What?’
‘Lance is short for Lancelot. I’d never have guessed.’
I took a slow breath. ‘We went into the garden for a private conversation.’
‘I was checking the soap in the Ladies’. Just in case your friend wanted to powder her nose. And the windows happened to be open, so . . .’
‘How long did it take you to check the soap?’
‘I did a thorough job.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Well, you said your dad has a sense of humour. Lancelot proves it, I’d say.’
‘Would you?’
‘Who’s this Rupe, then?’ Les lacked the Falstaffian figure of the classic landlord, but liked to throw himself into the father-confessor part of the role. ‘Never heard you mention him.’
‘A friend of mine. I do have some, you know.’
‘Pity you don’t bring them in here. How’s he related to raincoat woman?’
‘Brother. He and I went to school together in Street.’
‘Millfield, was it?’
‘We were born and bred in Street, Les. We went to Crispin, like everyone else.’
‘How’d he come to save your life?’
‘It was a caving accident.’
‘You, caving?’
‘A long time ago.’
‘What happened?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Background colour on my regulars is always valuable.’
‘I can’t see how.’ But I could see he wasn’t going to rest until he’d wheedled the story out of me.
Back in the summer of 1985, Rupe had persuaded me to join him on a caving expedition in the Mendips. He was a member of a caving club, but a reluctant one, preferring to go it alone, which he assured me wasn’t as risky as it sounded. Several times more risky was how it seemed to me once the two of us were underground. And negotiating a couple of ducks – short stretches of flooded cave where there was precious little air space between the water level and the roof – had me spooked long before Rupe noticed signs that the water level was rising, presumably because of rain on the surface. Only then did he reveal that the weather forecast had mentioned the ‘possibility’ of heavy showers. We turned back, though Rupe said it would probably be safer to go on and up to some refuge where we could sit out the flood. Naturally, that didn’t appeal to me, whereas the open air did, mighty powerfully. So, back we went, in my case in a tearing hurry.
That was my undoing. Rupe had all the gear – ropes, harnesses, lamps, karabiners – and knew how to use it. If I’d followed his instructions, there wouldn’t have been a problem. But I was cold, wet and frightened – especially frightened. I wanted out. And out involved climbing a more or less vertical slope, using a flexible ladder. Rupe went first, but hadn’t finished lifelining the rope for my ascent when I started after him. Halfway up, I slipped.
‘What happened?’ Les’s prompts had become repetitious by this stage of the story.
‘I fell.’
‘How far?’
‘Far enough. There was plenty of slack in the rope thanks to me not waiting. I hit the floor.’ Les winced. ‘Broke an ankle. And several ribs. Can’t recommend it.’
‘Painful?’
‘Worse than a hangover from your house red.’
Les ignored the jibe, apparently too caught up in the tale to notice. ‘Rupe went to fetch help?’
I smiled. ‘Not straight away.’
‘Why the hell not?’
‘The floodwater. He realized I’d drown if he left me where I was long before a rescue party arrived.’
‘So what did he do?’
‘Hauled me back to a higher level.’
‘That can’t have been easy.’
‘No. But he did it. Most of the time, I was no better than a dead weight. But we made it. He put me in a survival bag, waited till the water had stopped rising, waited some more till it had gone back down again, then went for help. The ducks were still flooded by then, of course, right up to the roof, and for longer stretches. Diving through them must have been pretty scary. The rescue party had oxygen when they came to get me, but Rupe just had his own judgement to back. Lucky for me he was a good judge.’
‘Could just as easily have been unlucky, though.’
‘Too right. Which is why I’ve never been underground since. Not even down the Tube.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘No. When I lived in London, the bus was always good enough for me. I wouldn’t even feel at ease in your cellar.’
‘No need to worry about that.’ Les suddenly put on a straight face. ‘There’s no bloody way you’re going down there.’
Les was all for me using his phone to call Rupe’s employer, keener than me as he was by then to find out what was going on. I claimed (which happened to be true) that I didn’t have the phone numbers I needed on me. I went back to the flat to dig them out and decided to take a nap that turned into an hour or more of solid zizz. Unexpected visitations and traumatic recollections can really take it out of a guy. Eventually, around four-thirty, I made the calls.
I got what Win had got: the answering machine on Rupe’s home number and some politely worded but totally unhelpful spiel from the personnel department of the Eurybia Shipping Company. ‘Mr Alder is no longer with us.’ How long had he not been with them? ‘I’m afraid I can’t say.’ Who did he work for now? ‘I’m afraid I don’t have that information.’ How could we find him? ‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’ Thanks for nothing. ‘Thank you for calling.’
But there were resources I had that Win didn’t. (Things really would have been desperate otherwise.) Simon Yardley had been at Durham with Rupe and me and was something big – or at least well paid – in merchant banking. The three of us had met for a drink occasionally in London when we’d all been working there. And I was pretty sure Rupe and he had gone on meeting after I’d dropped out of the picture. I still had Simon’s number, so I rang it. It was way too early to find a merchant banker at home, but the message on his answering machine suggested trying his mobile. Unlike Rupe, Simon didn’t want to be hard to contact. And he wasn’t.
‘Hi.’
‘Simon, it’s Lance Bradley.’
‘Who?’
‘Lance Bradley.’
‘Oh, Lance. Well, this is . . . How are you?’
‘Fine. You?’
‘Never better. Never busier either. Listen, could we do this some other time? I’m—’
‘It’s about Rupe, Simon. Rupert Alder. Can’t seem to get hold of him.’
‘Haven’t you got his number?’
‘He never answers.’
‘Try his office. Eurybia Shipping.’
‘He’s left them.’
‘Really?’
‘Have you got a mobile number for him?’
‘Don’t think so. Left Eurybia, you say? He never hinted he was thinking of moving.’
‘Have you seen him recently, then?’
‘Actually, no. Not now you mention it. Sorry, Lance, but I haven’t a clue. And I’ve got to run – metaphorically, that is. Next time you’re in town, give me a bell. Ciao.’
Ciao? It was a new addition to Simon’s patter and not exactly easy on the ear. Strange how he’d naturally assumed I wasn’t in town. He was right, of course, rot him. But maybe not for much longer. Win wasn’t going to stop tugging at my conscience until I’d done something more than make a few futile phone calls.
Did they have to be futile, though? I rang Rupe again and left a message, asking him to contact me urgently. I even gave him the Wheatsheaf number to try. My reasoning was that he might be reluctant to speak to his family for some good reason. Perhaps he’d been sacked by Eurybia. That would explain why the money had dried up. But he wouldn’t need to worry about speaking to me. He didn’t owe me anything. If I was right, he’d probably be in touch.
He wasn’t.