The Keys to the Street (20 page)

“I don’t know him. Why would I?”

“I can’t tell you why you would, Hob. Can’t you stop that shaking? You’re rocking the room and Leo’s not a well man. The old dog man may have something for you if you’re in the park around half four in the afternoon. Mind you, I’m only guessing but I reckon he’ll have something. It’s what I’ve heard. You’d better go now. I’ll see you later, or Gupta will.”

Leo was looking at him with those great glassy eyes in his skull face. Hob was beginning to feel very sick. He knew he wouldn’t be sick because he hadn’t eaten anything to bring up, but he needed to be out in the air.

“Say good-bye nicely to Leo,” said Carl. “He’s not feeling very bright.”

Downstairs again, Hob forgot about the fresh air. He’d had an idea. There was just a chance, not much of one but a faint chance, that he’d left a tab or even some blow—who was he kidding?—in the pockets of his clothes.

Everything he possessed lay in heaps on the bedroom floor, some of it piled on the blankets on the end of his mattress to help keep him warm on cold nights. The best he had came from charity shops; the worst, which was his daily wear, out of litter bins or off skips. He started fumbling through the smelly welter of garments, the pockets of an old red cardigan, stiff with dirt and food stains, jeans with missing knees and ragged hems, a scuffed leather jacket that had been his grandfather’s decades ago. The pockets yielded nothing but dead matches and old scratch cards.

His searching became manic and, frustrated, he flung stuff across the room, aged T-shirts that were grayish or blackish, sagging vests, a pair of striped pajama pants. The movement must have disturbed the mice, for the scraping noises began again, and a scurrying and a faint high-pitched squeaking.

Hob lay down on the mattress as the panic attack started and buried his face in the old clothes, uncertain now whether the sounds he heard were made by the mice or by himself. A huge empty loneliness isolated him and he whimpered. He pounded his fists on the floorboards and all the mice fled like an army in the full tilt of retreat.

13

B
oris and Ruby lugged Bean across the Marylebone Road at the lights between Park Square and Park Crescent. They were never red for long enough to satisfy him and he bared his teeth and shook his fist at impatient drivers. But he wasn’t going back through that tunnel while the key man was still at large.

He had given the police a precise description, from the long black hair and beard dyed a fierce cobalt blue to the feet in split and filthy leather boots. The keys, he believed, were fastened to his clothes with safety pins, and he described them as like an armor plating, a kind of chain mail worn for protection. Several times, because no arrest was made and nothing seemed to be done, Bean went back to the police and harried them. He wanted an identity parade so that he could pick the key man out. They told him they were working on his case and if anything developed they would get back to him. Bean had no faith in them.

Though he knew a large number of people, he had few friends, and those he had were acquaintances he met in the Globe on a Friday night, the only evening out he had. There was Freddie Lawson, who worked as odd-job man for the Crown Estates, and Peter Carrow, a park attendant, whose life had changed very much for the better when he was issued with a vacuum cleaner for sucking up the litter in the Broad Walk and round the pavilions. Lawson, a widower, and Carrow, whose wife had left him long ago, both drank far more than Bean did, drank away their wages in the Globe or the All-sop Arms every night, but it was on Friday that they met him in the
Globe and it was there that Bean recounted to them his experiences with the key man. Carrow, who knew most of the dossers by sight at least, immediately recognized Bean’s description and was even able to tell him the key man’s name.

By now Bean had convinced himself he had seen Clancy when he was mugged. He believed it. The two encounters had become blurred in his mind and he told Lawson and Carrow that it was just after he passed Clancy in the tunnel that the key man had stepped away from the wall and struck him on the back of the head. A number of other people, including the inevitable tourists, heard him say this.

“And the Bill won’t do nothing for you?” said Lawson.

Lawson always called the police the Bill. Carrow called them the Filth.

“They’re protecting him,” said Bean, “for reasons of their own.”

He tried to enlist the help of Valerie Conway. Since their confrontation over the matter of her given name, Bean had called her nothing. All kinds of styles and titles were in his repertoire, miss, miz, madam, ma’am, as well as surnames preceded by miss or miz, but he called her nothing now and she perceived that he had won that round. Therefore she was on her guard when he asked her if it wasn’t a fact that he had described to her his encounter with Clancy, calling him an “alien.”

“That wasn’t the same time as when you were mugged,” said Valerie.

“Oh, please,” said Bean. “Don’t give me that. I came here with the dog and for once you opened the front door to me on account of me being in such a state. I was on my knees, I couldn’t hardly see straight.”

“Maybe, but you never said who’d done it to you. If you want my opinion, you’re confused. You can’t expect me to make a fool of myself going to the police with a story that’s a figment of your imagination.”

“Perhaps you’ll fetch the dog,” said Bean.

Victory to Valerie, she thought, shutting the area door behind them. Bean crossed the road and went to pick up Charlie the golden retriever in St. Andrew’s Place. James Barker-Pryce, a wet dead cigar plugged into the left corner of his mouth, brought the dog to the door. Bean advised him to be careful if he was thinking of going out. There was a dangerous vagrant at large, identifiable by his blue-dyed hair and the keys pinned all over him. Barker-Pryce said he hoped Bean hadn’t been drinking. He never gave credence to anything told him by a member of the working class, never had and never would, they had always been mentally subnormal and were now even more reduced by television and drugs.

Bean told his tale to Mrs. Goldsworthy and then to Lisl Pring.

“I wouldn’t like anything to happen to Marietta,” was all she said.

Incensed, Bean forgot his usual deference. “Thanks very much,” he said. “Never mind me.” He added, ridiculously, a belated “Miss.”

Lisl Pring started laughing. When she laughed she sucked in her diaphragm and you could count her ribs. She wouldn’t have cared what Bean said to her so long as the poodle got its walks.

“I shall be going on my holidays to my sister in Brighton the first week of August,” he said and watched her face fall. “I’m telling you well in advance so as you can make other arrangements.”

Up in Park Village, Miss Jago showed more sympathy. She asked him if he was fully recovered, if the police had found whoever was responsible. Bean wondered what she was after. He had no belief in altruism. Maybe she was running short of cash in the absence of Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris and thought soft soap might secure her a discount.

“There’s no doubt who was responsible, miss,” he said darkly, shaking his head in the way people do when they wish to convey exasperation and disillusionment. “The kind of alien a lady like yourself would no more notice than you would a bit of muck on
the pavement. I wouldn’t even ask you if you’d come in contact with him.”

She came back with the dog in her arms, cuddling him like a baby.

“Every penny I’d got on me he took. And my camera. Luckily, I used up the film with the shots on it of these lovely dogs. Would you be interested in acquiring a portrait of the little shih tzu?”

She said it wasn’t her dog. That was a matter for Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris. He had guessed she’d say that and didn’t much care. Mrs. Goldsworthy had said she’d love a portrait of McBride or even an album of pictures.

It was common knowledge he was to be found in the park every day around eight-thirty in the morning and four-thirty in the afternoon, say a quarter of an hour on either side of those times. Bean thought afterward that this must account for it. But before the man came up to him he had set the dogs free and was walking the long exposed path toward the bridge and the new pond by the Hanover Gate. It was warm enough to do without his bomber jacket and he tied it round his middle by its sleeves the way the youth did. For the baseball cap, smart protection from the sun’s heat on his poor head, he was starting to feel a greater affection than he had for any human being. It had probably saved his life when Clancy attacked him.

By the railings that enclosed the grounds of The Holme, the big house that overlooked the lake, the woman was walking her dozen dogs. Not one of them was on the lead and all walked sedately, the little ones at her heels, the bigger ones in as orderly a fashion as if they had all been to training classes. Perhaps they had. The woman wore jodhpurs and a check shirt and her long dark hair flowed down her back. She must have one of those whistles inaudible to the human ear, for when a labrador lagged behind, Bean saw her put something to her lips and the labrador came running obediently.

Three of his dogs were close at his heels and the other three at the lake’s edge, Marietta barking at a red-headed duck, the shih tzu and
the scottie drinking from the scummy brown water, as Bean stepped onto the bridge that here crosses a loop of the lake enclosing an island. It was shady and dim, a dusty place, overshadowed by tall trees. Birds thronged the nearly stagnant water, pochards, mandarins, swans, mallards, pintails, coots and divers. Even in the winter a sour smell rose from the water and now, in the mild humidity of June, there was a powerful stench of decaying vegetable matter. He was halfway across when a man approaching from the other end stopped in front of him and asked for a light.

Bean might have said, “Sorry” or “I’m afraid I don’t carry one,” but in fact he said, “I don’t smoke,” in such a way as to put smoking on a par with snorting cocaine.

Instead of passing on, the man looked him in the eye. He was young, skinny but with a jowly face, a round head, and a crew cut, too young and strong for Bean to push past him. He had the sort of eyes Bean had heard addicts had, dull and with pinhead pupils. A flicker of fear plucked at his chest. But he was not alone. He could see Sunday crowds on the sunlit grass by the Hanover pond, footsteps were approaching behind him, and two girls with linked arms had come onto the bridge ahead.

“My mate heard you shooting the shit,” the man said. “Or it come over the grapevine.”

“I done
what?
”

The man took no notice. “I’m not talking about wasting. If you want him attended to it’ll cost you a Hawaii.”

Bean managed a mental translation but the last bit escaped him.

“Fifty smackers.”

“Chance’d be a fine thing,” said Bean. “I haven’t got it. It was three times that he took off of me. And my camera. Bastard with blue hair and all over keys.” He tried to collect his thoughts. “Fifty—that’s a lot of money.”

“Suit yourself. If you change your mind I’ll be here next Sunday. Same time, same place.”

It wasn’t true he hadn’t got it, but he couldn’t easily afford to part with it. Once again Bean thought how imperative it was to find ways of augmenting his income. He watched the round-headed man return the way he had come and head toward the Hanover Gate.

The idea that someone young and strong might “attend to,” which presumably meant “beat up,” the key man was very inviting. With recollections of certain episodes in the domestic life of Maurice Clitheroe—once he had spent three days in bed as the result of an encounter with a young giant from Salisbury Street—Bean thought longingly of Clancy in a similar state. And in Clitheroe’s case it had been
play
. It was only the cost that stopped him running after the round-headed man. Of course it was cheap at the price, but only if parting with the price didn’t hurt.

The golden dome of the mosque, heaving into view, was somehow reassuring. The man would be there again next Sunday.

•   •   •

It was a week since she had written to him but he hadn’t even phoned. What had happened that first time she had written to him, disclosing her identity, giving her address, was happening again. Dorothea, in whom up to a point she confided, said that perhaps he was one of those men who only want women who are hard to get. Women who were forthcoming and made overtures frightened them away. That wasn’t much comfort to Mary, who was remembering with some degree of shame the warm phrases in her own letter and how she had reminded him of the special friendship they had. It had been to some extent an appeal, her own loneliness cited and her bereavement.

When Saturday came she had given up. He had dropped her. She had said or done something to upset him or he had changed his mind about her. Alistair had phoned and asked her to have dinner with him; and though she had refused, putting the phone down after a quick good-bye, she had wondered if next time she would yield, if
Alistair, with his small violent acts, his petty aggression, and his overbearing ways wasn’t better than no one at all. When she thought of those small violences the blood came up and heated the cheek he had slapped.