Some change in eyesight is the case for some women—maybe a 10-20% deterioration or so. Within a few months of getting pregnant, they pull out the glasses that they wear ONLY when they’re pregnant, and once their baby is delivered, the glasses go back into storage. But this change doesn’t happen to all women.
-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
Won’t the guy want to see the puppets, too, before he’ll believe you?” We had made our way back into Canterbury and stopped off at the Pilgrim’s Rest to pick up the puppet case. It was late, and there was no sign of Cedric or Mr. Binterhof. We tiptoed in, not wanting to make Cedric think there was another burglary in progress. I’d asked my host to take the case out of the safe for me earlier in the day, and I’d stashed it under the bed.
“I suppose he will, won’t he?” I said. The police-puppet and the pregnant lady lay in their little coffin, face-up, looking a little apprehensive, I thought. “And he’ll want to tear them apart, too, if he’s looking for stashed drugs or secret microfiche or something.”
“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” Richard said.
“It’s the only way, you know. To make this crazy stuff stop. Trust me.”
“I’m trying to. So, are you going to let him have the puppets, too?”
“I wasn’t planning to let him have anything,” I said. “I was just going to show him that the case was just a puppet case and nothing more. My theory is that if I brazen it out and really explain that I don’t have what he’s looking for, he’ll get the picture.”
“What about ‘his people’? The ones he’s working for? They may not take his word for it, you know.”
“I guess you’re right. Okay, he can have the case. But he’s not getting the puppets. I’ll take them home in a cardboard box.” I lifted them out and placed them on the bed, side-by-side, their heads on the pillow, then closed the case and picked it up.
“And what if he does attack you, Polly? What if—just humour me for a second—what if you’ve read this thing all wrong, and he really is the guy who attacked Alma, and he really is a dangerous and ruthless criminal? There won’t be much I can do about it if he pulls a knife on you or something. Or a gun. Have you really, really thought about what you’re doing?”
I sighed and sat down on the bed. “I’ve been thinking about nothing else, Richard. This whole situation has totally wrecked my trip so far—I know that’s selfish, seeing as at least I’m still alive and Alma isn’t. But point one, I don’t believe what happened to Alma had anything to do with the thug and the puppet case. And point two, if I don’t confront this guy, he’s going to wreck the rest of my trip, too.”
“What about point three, that if you’d called the police, they’d be there to back you up and arrest the guy?”
“If the police were involved, they wouldn’t let me near the place. You know that, and they’d just scare him away. Then he’d wait to get me alone again, and he’d be pretty mad when he did, and then he might really hurt me.”
“You really don’t have much confidence in the police, do you?”
“Frankly, no. I have too much experience with the real thing. They don’t always get their man, you know.”
“Well, at least take something with you for defence, just in case this guy turns out worse than you think.”
“You have a gun handy?” I said.
“I have this,” he said and handed me a small can of pepper spray.
“Where the heck did you get that?”
“I’ve had it ever since I started hiking in bear country,” he said. “I keep it with me when I travel, too, in case of muggers.”
“And how did you manage to get this past customs?”
“I keep it in with my deodorant and stuff. Nobody’s noticed it yet.”
“You know, this could get you a week or two in Guantanamo Bay, if you tried to smuggle it onto a U.S. flight,” I said.
“That hardly applies here, Polly. Will you take it?”
“I’ll keep it in my pocket, yes, if it’ll make you feel better.”
“It will. Thank you,” he said. Actually, it made me feel better about this escapade as well, but I didn’t say so.
I sighed once more, for effect, and got to my feet. “Okay, let’s go.”
The full moon painted the scene silver. It was eerily bright until we got to the alleyway that would lead us to the ruined monastery house. Then the shadows kicked in. Richard had a keychain flashlight, but I wouldn’t let him use it. “We have to split up now,” I said. I was feeling nervous, but tried not to let it show. “Is there another way in to this place?” We were whispering.
“There’s another path along the river that leads to a private house on St. Peter’s Street,” Richard said. “It ends in someone’s garden, and it’s blocked off from the main road the same way Cedric’s courtyard is, with a high wooden fence you can’t climb over. The guy will probably come this way himself, but Polly—he’s probably already here, waiting for you.”
We stepped as quietly as we could along the path and came to the river—a trickle, really, with walls on either side—a deep channel cut into the earth. The moonlight glinted off the sluggish water below. There was a little bridge over the river, and in the near distance, Greyfriars, a black outline against the sky. The weird thing about moonlight, especially when it’s really strong, is that it leaches out colour so that everything looks like a black and white photograph.
“I’ll go on ahead, Richard. You follow me, but do the cloak-and-dagger thing, okay? Be stealthy. Don’t be seen. He’ll be looking for me, but I don’t think he’ll expect me to have a companion.”
“You don’t, eh?” he whispered. “How naïve can you get?” I chose to pretend not to hear him. Okay, I was being naïve. And probably really stupid, too, but I had got it into my head that the only way to shake off my pursuer was to meet with him and tell the truth. Too many situations get weird because people make mistakes about each other, good guys and bad guys alike. If the thug was under the impression that I had been supposed to hand over some pre-arranged something-or-other, and I hadn’t, well, he was perfectly justified in feeling frustrated about it. Okay, maybe his tactics lacked refinement, but we can’t all be James Bond. I suspected that he was just some dumb mook who had been hired to take delivery of a package and wanted to do a good job. You may think that this line of reasoning was insane, but I believed (and I still do) that even the villains of the piece thought that their actions were reasonable.
As I approached the Greyfriars building, I got one of those living-history neck prickles—a nice feeling, in spite of the gothic context. It was a beautiful structure, a tall and thin house of ancient brick, built, as the guide book had said, directly over the river, which ran underneath the double arches at its base, both pointed at the top like church doorways. There were no lights showing, which was no surprise—I didn’t expect that the thug had a key to the place. The guidebook had suggested that it was a ruin, but it looked pretty solid to me. I wondered what it would be like to live there—it had been built hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Would it creak with memories? Would you be able to hear the trickle of the water beneath the floor? And what was buried in the silt in the river? Coins and bottles and broken pottery, I’d bet. Stuff that people, maybe the monks, had tossed out the window and into the river, or dropped by mistake. Museum stuff now, but then, it had just been something to throw away. And hundreds of years from now, people will be regarding the stuff we throw away in a similar light—excavating our landfill sites, all excited to find a preserved newspaper or an ancient, twentieth century shoe. The garbage of history is thrilling because it confirms that our ancestors were just like us, litterbugs and hopelessly human.
I wasn’t trying to be stealthy. In fact, I was making sure I could be heard and seen, swinging the puppet case at my side, like I was going on a midsummer picnic, not a care in the world. I didn’t want the thug to miss me. On the opposite side of the river, across from the building, there was a small field, a meadow, really, then a fence backing onto the gardens of private houses on the street beyond. The field looked empty, just an expanse of dry grass, with a mist rising from it. It was not cold, but I was shivering anyway. On my side of the river, there were trees, the walls of a garden much closer to the river, above which I could see the tops of some old greenhouses. And beyond that, a number of trenches dug into the ground. That must be where the archaeological excavation was going on, the one that Mr. Binterhof was working on. There were trees and deep shadows, and I suddenly rather wished I had asked Richard for his flashlight. But of course, he was right behind me—just out of sight. I didn’t dare turn around to see. It would have given him away. But I was glad he was at my back, because I felt exposed and a tad vulnerable.
That was when I tripped. Polly goes down with a thump, not hurting the Sprog, thank goodness, but grazing her knees. I scrabbled to grab the puppet case, which teetered on the edge of the riverbank. There was a jingle of change as the contents of my pocket spilled out on the ground. I scooped up earth and coins and shoved it all back in again. It would have been rotten to lose Earlie’s lucky ha’penny at that point—I needed all the luck I could get. And of course it was right then that I had a flash of Alma’s body, crumpled at the foot of Becket’s tomb, oozing blood, and I started to waffle about my certainty that she had been attacked by the Right-to-Lifers.
I walked as boldly as I could up to the entranceway of the Greyfriars building. Still seeing no sign of movement in the shadows, I found a low stone wall and sat upon it. Then I waited. I suspected that the thug was probably waiting, too. Maybe hiding out there somewhere and watching me, although I didn’t feel watched. The place was profoundly empty. I listened with all my concentration, could hear a car pass by on the street beyond the line of houses on the other side of the field, listened for footsteps on the dry grass, or a rustling in the hedge on the other side of the trenches, but there was nothing. The moonlight was quite strong enough for me to see the face of my watch, a clunky thing that I’d had for years, and both hands pointed straight up. Exactly midnight.
According to the guidebook, the Greyfriars monastery had stood long ago on the grounds in front of me. Four or five feet below the surface, they had found a floor of black and white clay tiles, beautifully preserved, and the traces of a colonnade, what must have been a cloister-walk. Seven hundred years ago, little monks in dark habits had paced about among the arches, praying perhaps, or scurrying off on some important errand, humans going about their business. Again, as when I’d been underground in the subterranean Roman museum, I was struck by the peculiarity of the earth, the way it built up, seemingly all by itself, and buried what had originally been at the surface. Further below, there was the Roman stuff, then the medieval layer on top of that, then the Renaissance layer, each subsequent era sandwiched together like a cake, with chocolate loam and chalky clay in between. In another few hundred years, the twentieth century layer would be covered over, too. And our precious linoleum floors and discarded washing machines would be discovered with whoops of delight by future diggers, lifted out carefully (“it fell apart in our hands, but I think it was an early device for sending messages, what they called a typewriter”) and displayed in museums. Costumed interpreters, dressed in ancient bell-bottoms and quaint tank-tops, would explain to schoolchildren how the people in the olden days used to sit in front of this box, made of a material they called plastic, and watch the pictures that flickered across its screen.
There was a disturbance in the quiet. I felt it more than heard it. Beyond the hedge, the setting-down of feet, heavy steps, steps that weren’t trying to be silent. He was coming. I gripped the handle of the puppet case tighter and stood up so he would see me. A chilly sweat broke out on my forehead and I found I was panting. The Sprog, Bess, did a little loop-deloop and drummed at my bladder.
“There’s no sign of him,” D.C. Potts said and switched on a powerful flashlight, pointing it straight into my face and blinding me. “We’ve had the area secure for more than two hours. You’ve been stood up, Ms. Deacon.”
Richard appeared then, along with another two police officers, and then a few more. One popped out from behind a bush, another from an alcove in the stone wall, and two from the trenches. The place was alive with cops. The only thing that prevented me from having a huge hissy fit was the fact that I hadn’t sensed them at all. I’d been convinced the place was empty, deserted. Unless the thug had been psychic, he wouldn’t have known either, I was sure of it. Unless he’d seen them getting into position two hours beforehand.
“I’m really sorry, Polly,” Richard said. “I couldn’t let you risk it, eh? And I’m no good in a fight.”
“When did you call them?” I said through clenched teeth. He was about to find out how well he could manage a fight, because he was about to have one.
“At the pub, when I went for a whizz. I had to—you do get that, don’t you?”
“What I get is that you’re someone I shouldn’t have trusted,” I said and turned my back on him. He’d been wonderful in bed—tender and considerate and remarkably sensitive. Too bad it didn’t extend to the upright position.
“We’ll leave the case here, Ms. Deacon,” Potts said, taking it from me and placing it carefully on the stone wall. “You never know, he may still attempt to pick it up, and we’ll leave a couple of men to watch it. And if you’ll come with me, we’ll get a statement from you about this little incident this afternoon at Eastbridge. We’ve already talked to the priest.”
“I should think he’s probably miles away at this point—not the priest—the thug,” I said. “He’ll wait until this dies down, and then come looking for me again. Thanks a lot.”
“You didn’t really think you could just give him your suitcase and he’d toddle off all happy, did you?”
“Well, actually, yes, I did. Now he knows that the police are involved, which will probably piss him off and make him think that whatever-it-was is still in my possession,” I said.
“And what do you think that whatever-it-was might be?” Potts said.
“I don’t know. The whole thing is a mistake—a misunderstanding.”
“Well, come along. Let’s get a hot cup of tea into you. You’re shivering.”
Richard came too, but I was not speaking to him.
I was in bed by two. I’d answered Potts’s questions, signed a statement and given yet another description of the thug. They had a police artist work up a sketch of him, which was reasonably accurate, I thought, until the artist herself muttered that it looked like every single white van man she’d ever seen wreaking havoc on England’s motorways.
“I’d arrest the lot,” she said to Potts. “It would make everybody very happy.” Maybe she was annoyed because she had been dragged out of bed, I don’t know.
I eventually accepted Richard’s apology. Maybe the midnight tryst had been a stupid idea, but I was still privately very pissed off.
“Will you let me take you to lunch tomorrow?” he said. “There’s a seminar on glove puppetry at two we could check out.”
“I’m going to be busy with something,” I said. “But we can go to the banquet together, if you want.” The wrap-up of the conference was planned for Saturday night, with a gala show presented by the Muppetworks contingent (I adore Muppets) and no doubt a bunch of interminable speeches from the organizers. By Saturday night, I figured I’d be over my snit. But I didn’t want to see Richard until then. Besides, I was planning a little side trip, and I didn’t want him along.
I was feeling guilty (predictably) about getting romantically (or at least carnally) involved with a non-Becker person, and I’d promised my wayward Canadian policeman a favour. I had some ashes to scatter, and I decided I’d take the train over to Eastbourne to do the thing on Saturday. I also wanted to look up Becker’s great aunt, whose address was stashed away in my bag. If she wasn’t too frail, perhaps she would like to come with me. That task completed, I’d be able to attend the final puppetry banquet with a clear conscience. Sort of clear, anyway, because I admit I did think that Richard might possibly be interested in another, you know, catnap, after the public festivities were over. I was mad at him, but not that mad. That probably means I’m a bad person, or at least an immoral one.
In spite of what the child-Catholic in me would have called a state of sin, I had it in mind to attend the service at the Cathedral in the morning on Sunday. Then I had a flight back to Canada that night. That’s provided the thug, the one who stood me up, didn’t interfere with my plans. I was thoroughly disgusted with the whole business, to tell you the truth, and grumpy as hell. At the same time, I was still buzzing from having enjoyed some extremely satisfying sex with Richard. This was a weird combination of emotions, which may very well be the reason for my clouded judgement, at least in retrospect.
Richard seemed pathetically pleased that I was willing to join him at the banquet. “We’ll sit with the Mermaid people,” he said. “It’ll be the Canadian table, eh?” It suddenly struck me how young he was, and I squirmed a little. He was like a Labrador retriever puppy, all bouncy and eager. There were times when Becker’s remoteness and involvement in his own affairs were exactly what I wanted. Conflicted? You bet. I bade Richard goodnight at the door of the B&B and did not invite him in. Then I tiptoed upstairs and crawled into bed, so wiped I didn’t even bother to move the puppets, just shoved them to one side. Then I fell asleep with my hand on the policeman puppet, cuddling him to me like a teddy bear.