Grasshopper Page 25

  By that time the police knew Silver had been abducted. It was the only possible explanation. They interviewed known local paedophiles. They began house-to-house investigations in the nearby town. On the Monday morning – Silver had gone missing on the previous Friday – a woman called Diana Lomax found him on the sands in a little cove about a mile from where he had vanished. He seemed fine, not distressed or even puzzled, but then he was always a self-contained level-headed child. He was dressed as he had been on the Friday, in exactly the same clothes, but they were clean, they had been washed. In his hand he held a small plastic spade with which he had dug a little pit in the sand and when Mrs Lomax found him he was watching the water fill it, standing there, intently looking at the level rising.

  She knew what construction would be put on her appearing with him but she was afraid to leave him there. Never mind the questioning and the implications of blame, she couldn’t leave a little child alone on that beach while she went up the cliff and called the police. Besides, his abductor might be nearby. Because he took some persuading to leave his newly dug pit, she bribed him with the chocolate bar she had in her beach bag with her swimming things. He refused to walk, of course, little children always do, so she carried him all the way up the zigzag path and across the meadow and into the hotel, where she sat him on the reception desk while she called up to the Silvermans’ room. Silver’s father came down. Silver laughed when he saw him and said, ‘There’s my dad.’

  Jack Silverman called Diana Lomax ‘one of the Righteous among the Nations’. He seemed to worship her. He tried to give her money, then when that was refused, buy her some expensive present, a car or a valuable piece of furniture. That was refused too. Every Christmas he wrote to her and thanked her afresh for saving his son’s life, which was what he was sure she had done. He was always asking her to come and stay because he knew she liked visiting London. She appeared to prefer staying with her friends who lived somewhere near the Silvermans, but she managed to avoid telling Jack exactly where. It would have been apparent to anyone but his father, Silver said, it was apparent to his mother, that Diana Lomax wanted nothing more to do with the Silvermans. Reluctantly she agreed to Jack and Erica’s taking her out to dinner while she was in London and, protesting, let Jack pay for a car to take her to Paddington Station when she went home. She left without saying goodbye, but even that discourtesy made no difference to Jack.

  A couple of years later Diana Lomax had her first operation for cancer. A year after that she died. Jack wept when he heard the news as he had done when he came downstairs that Monday morning and she lifted Silver off the counter and put him into his arms.

  ‘I don’t really like to say this,’ I said, ‘but have you ever thought that maybe it was Diana Lomax who took you away?’

  ‘Of course. Often. When I was fifteen and got keen on finding out,’ he said. ‘I thought my dad was going to hit me when I suggested it. I still suppose it’s possible. But if she did what did she want me for?’

  That was something else I hadn’t liked to ask, and hadn’t asked.

  ‘A couple of doctors examined me, if that’s what you’re thinking. Nothing. And not a mark on me. Diana didn’t want a child, she’d had three children, all grown up by then. She had two grandchildren she saw a lot of. She had a job, she had a boyfriend in the same village, she wasn’t lonely or frustrated or psychologically disturbed. The police questioned her for hours, they investigated her background, searched her house. There was nothing.’

  I asked him what he personally thought had happened to him. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t an idea. I’d like to know, though I never will now. Sometimes I think I remember a boat, being in a sailing boat or seeing a sailing boat, and sometimes I see a room with a green armchair and birds on a mantelpiece, but I only think I do. I may have made those things up. There are three days of my life unaccounted for, a sort of lost weekend like people have from heavy drinking. Alcohol amnesia, except that all I used to drink in those days was milk and orange juice.’

  Both our stories – you could hardly call them ‘peak experiences’ because they were neither good nor pleasurable events – involved heights. I asked Silver if he thought that significant and he said it must be. We walked around the roofs a bit after that, going in the other direction towards Castlemaine Road, jumping over the chasms between the terraces nearly as well as Wim would have done. Both of us, it appeared, had had our baptism of fire and it had left us with a lifelong yearning to be high above the world.

  Max and Selina’s party was over. We looked down at the deserted garden where empty and half-empty glasses stood about on the white furniture, gleaming faintly in the half-dark. The lights had all been put out and the mosquito zapper switched off. The trees swayed a little in the wind that had risen while we were up there and their leaves trembled and shivered. I thought that if I shut my eyes and wished hard enough, I’d see Mabel when I opened them, stepping daintily across the lawn and jumping on to the wall outside my window. I shut them and wished and nothing happened. Silver put his arms round me and held me tight.

  We looked over the front then and saw all the people going home, kissing Selina, some kissing Max, car doors slamming and the civilized academics wincing because the noise they made might wake the neighbours. ‘Good night, ladies, sweet ladies, good night, good night,’ said Silver.

  It wasn’t very late, not much past eleven. No one was about in the flat. I suppose it’s hindsight that tells me the calm silence felt expectant, as if waiting for something to happen, but I think I really sensed this at the time. Perhaps all interiors feel like that when there’s no activity going on in them, no wind to rattle windows or rain to dash against glass. Quiet, calm, stillness. The sound of traffic on the Westway was a distant hum, not unlike the sea.

  We had been in the living room about ten minutes, made ourselves tea and put the radio on very softly, I talking of going back to old Mrs Fisherton’s, when Wim came in at the window. He gave Silver one of his usual hugs and then he hugged me. I fetched him a mug of tea, strong and black, the way he liked it. Liv must have been listening for him, maybe had been listening for him for three days, for she came out of the bedroom and although he only nodded to her, saying ‘hi’, sat down on the floor at his feet. Her position seemed designed for resting her head against his legs, and if she failed to do this it was probably because she feared a rebuff.

  Wim’s silences often seemed enigmatic or profound but it’s possible they only indicated an empty mind. Yet he had the ability to be with people, part of the company, while taking no part in the conversation. When he did speak he was articulate and fluent. He never made small talk, would have scorned asking how someone was or commenting on the weather or the temperature. That evening he drank his tea, set the mug down and made the statement that was to change our lives.

  ‘I’ve seen Andrew Lane and Alison Barrie,’ he said.

  Silver smiled. ‘You and Morna both.’

  ‘Who is Morna?’

  ‘The girl I was at Queen Mary’s with. You’ve met her a couple of times. Morna, remember? Big dark girl, beautiful face.’

  That was the first jealousy I felt with Silver, a thin shaft of it going into my side like a long pin, and I resolved to crush it if it came again.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Silver said. ‘The point is only that she said she saw him, Andrew Lane, I mean. Coming out of a shop in Elgin.’

  ‘He wasn’t coming out of a shop when I saw him,’ said Wim. He lit a cigarette and passed round the pack. ‘He was in a room in a flat and she was there. Not the boy, though. I expect the boy was in bed.’

  I hadn’t expected an interest in people from Wim, and perhaps the kind he had was more anthropological than social. He liked to see how they behaved when they didn’t know they were being watched. He wanted to see their faces when they thought they were alone. Jonny, bent on a rather different assessment of flat-dwellers, best pleased when they were absent from their homes, made his reconnaissance fro
m balconies. Wim lay on the mansard, head-down, and peered over the top edge of dormers. It was much to his advantage that few people on the top floors drew their curtains or pulled down their blinds.

  He had been on his way back to Silver’s after a night and a day and half a night on the roofs. Sleeping up there, drinking orange juice and eating cold pizza on the tall terraces of the Bayswater Road after scaling the asymmetrical heights of Park Lane. He’d walked along the canal from Paddington Basin to the bridge at the Paddington Stop and then climbed on to the roof of a terrace in Formosa Street, some builder having thoughtfully left a ladder behind for his use. Wim never admitted to physical tiredness, he never admitted to anything, come to that, but by the time he had climbed the scaffolding on to the gable end of Torrington Gardens, he paused to drink the water he had with him and to eat a bar of Cadbury’s Whole Nut chocolate. Then he lay on the slope of the mansard and edged his way along. Each time he came to a dormer he hung his head down over its lintel and looked through the topmost pane of glass. It was dark outside, the feeble orange moon drifting in and out of cloud masses, but bright with light inside except in those flats where the occupants had already gone to bed. Some of the residents used the dormer room as a bedroom but in all but one of these the curtains were drawn. In the odd room out, where there were no curtains to draw, a lone old Chinese man in striped pyjamas slept on a futon, lying on his back, his arms outflung. The time was just past eleven-thirty.

  Wim, apparently, observed all this with interest. It was from the fifth window from the Peterborough Avenue end that he saw the missing couple. They were sitting opposite one another across a table, holding hands on its surface and talking. The window was closed and what they said was inaudible. The positions they had chosen to sit in were such that, in order to see the face at the window, the man would have had to turn his head to the left almost in a half-circle and the woman hers sharp right. Only a noise at the window would have alerted them to move like this and Wim never made a noise.

  He watched them for a few minutes, half-expecting the boy Jason to come into the room. But it was too late for a child to be up. The man was fully dressed but the woman wore a dressing gown over a long nightdress. Her hair was fair, dry and brittle-looking, her face strained and networked with lines. Andrew Lane was less easy to identify because before he had disappeared with Alison Barrie and the child he had worn a beard. But the square brow and the thick black circumflex eyebrows were unmistakable.

  ‘Have they been there all the tinie?’ Silver asked. ‘It’s been months. Since March, hasn’t it?’

  ‘February,’ I said. ‘They went away from wherever they lived a few days before my birthday.’

  All those people talking about it at the lunch party Max and Selina gave for me, and Silver’s parents there, only I knew nothing of whose parents they were then, or what he would mean to me.

  Wim shrugged. Who knew how long they had been there? The point was that they were there now.

  ‘Are you quite certain it was them?’ Silver asked.

  ‘If you mean, would I swear to it in a court, no. But it was them, just the same.’

  ‘Well, they’re all right there at the moment, aren’t they? They’re safe there. We won’t worry about it. We’ll go and take a look tomorrow. Not tonight but tomorrow.’

  ‘They switched the light off before I left,’ Wim said. ‘They went to the door together and the guy turned the light off.’

  It was at this point that Jonny arrived. We heard his feet on the stairs and his key in the door, but before he had even appeared we all knew, by some silent sharing of thoughts, that it would be best for him to know nothing about it. As usually happens in a case like that, no one could think of anything to say. Jonny smelt of drink. His face was red and climbing the stairs had made him sweat. His eye rested contemptuously on Liv who by now had managed to press herself against Wim’s legs.

  ‘Polly, put the kettle on,’ he sang in a slurred voice. ‘We’ll all have tea.’

  Liv didn’t move.

  ‘Don’t think,’ Jonny said to her, ‘that sleeping in that room on your tod is going to save you. I can get in there any time I want. You put the chest of drawers against the door and I’ll bash the fucking chest of drawers to bits.’

  ‘Make your own tea, Jonny,’ Silver said. ‘You’re pissed out of your mind.’

  ‘Pissed,’ Jonny admitted, making a fine distinction, ‘but not out-of-my-mind pissed. My mind is clear. I know what I’m doing.’

  Wim yawned. I thought I could read what he was thinking. For two pins I’ll go in there with her, and by the time you come bashing down the furniture I’ll be fresh for a fight. But Jonny forgot about his tea and went off to bed. The stairs had winded him and he staggered, grabbing the door handle to save himself from falling. I told Silver that I was going home. He came downstairs with me, leaving the other two – to what? Nothing, probably. Too many things happened the next day for me ever to find out.

  It was one in the morning and the whole of 19 Russia Road was in darkness. I crept down the iron staircase, the cold fronds of ivy tapping against my face, and let myself in. Once Mabel would have been there to greet me or, uncurling her body and rolling on her back with waving paws, have welcomed me to bed. The place seemed disproportionately silent and dark. Having been out in the open for most of the day and up high in the sky for half the night, I felt more oppressively than had become usual with me, the dull misery of life in a basement. It was deep night, the beginning of the small hours, but it might as well have been a spring morning or summer noon, nothing of the sky and nothing of sunlight was ever visible down there. I got into bed and lay with the light on, thinking about those two, Lane and Barrie, to stop myself mourning Mabel. How long had they been in a top flat in Torrington Gardens? Was the boy with them? Precisely which house was it the flat was in? Had Wim taken the number or simply counted the dormers? And how were they living in there? On what? Had they money? Morna had seen Andrew Lane out shopping, so presumably they had enough.

  Thinking about money reminded me. I had omitted to check on Liv’s £2,000, something I did most days. I got up. Walking through old Mrs Fisherton’s to the dining room I felt the whole weight of that big tall house pressing on me and it suddenly seemed remarkable that a house like this one should stand and go on standing for 100 years and more. It was quite fragile, it must be, bricks on timber, bricks on bricks, thin slivers of mortar, top-heavy surely. For a moment I was almost afraid of its sudden collapse, a soft rushing sound first, increasing to a rumble and a roar as the whole edifice came tumbling down, engulfing me in broken bricks and debris and splintering wood. Of course, I knew it was only my claustrophobia that made me fancy such things, that I could be buried under the falling house, suffocated under it, my mouth full of plaster dust and sticky cobwebs, but I really did feel a terror of it for a few seconds. I had to stand still and breathe deeply before I opened the door that was always kept closed and let myself into old Mrs Fisherton’s nasty dining room.

  I switched the light on and immediately saw that things were different. Things were not as I had left them when I was last in there two days before. The trolley had been moved a few feet away from the wall, a dark green tray patterned with various species of tropical birds lay on the table. Most troubling of all, most sinister, was the torch that stood on the sideboard, lamp end downwards.

  Quickly I opened the table napkin drawer. Liv’s money was gone.

  17

  It’s a strange feeling you have when you discover you’ve lost a sum of money, a sudden hollowness inside, as if something has fallen out of your body. Not just money, though. I expect you feel it when you have lost any valuable item, jewellery, something expensive that you’ve just bought. Last evening, leaving the former Gilmore Hotel in Sussex Gardens, I went to find my car which was parked quite a long way away, on a meter in Praed Street. Several times that day I had been back to the car to feed the meter (when no traffic warden was looking) and moving the
car and putting cash into the new meter (when one was). Someone must have watched me and seen me feel for change in my jacket pocket, for, when I got to the car at just before six, not only the remaining change but my wallet which was also in it were gone. Mugging has never happened to me before and I didn’t like it, though the sum involved was only £30 and credit cards are quickly replaceable. I suppose that what I hate is being made a mug of, not being streetwise enough, not being sufficiently on my guard.

  I had no such feelings when I understood that Liv’s £2,000 was gone, no hollowness as of having expelled well-being and contentment, but pure panic. I searched every drawer in that room, though I knew perfectly well where I had left those wads of notes. But that is always done in these circumstances, it comes of not trusting oneself, doubting one’s own memory. I desperately wished I had asked Silver to stay with me that night, just to have him there, his comforting presence. I thought of going back to him. If I did that I might find Liv still up, still in that room with her head against Wim’s knees. Sooner or later I should have to face her but not then, not now. In the end I just went back to bed. I even managed to sleep, waking early to a pounding on the door at the foot of the interior staircase.

  It frightened me more than when Beryl appeared in my bedroom or when Selina just turned up, walked into the flat when it pleased her or was to be discovered sitting in one of my armchairs. This time it couldn’t be Selina, for Selina never knocked, it must be someone with a message to say one of my parents was ill, or someone from next door to say Silver had had an accident. I jumped up, in the absence of any sort of dressing gown threw the bed quilt round me, and called out, ‘Come in, come in,’ and ‘I’m coming.’