PETERMAN

PETERMAN

Chapter 1

The dark, still, lonely things that disturb in nature need only a little courage to understand them. An old man in Africa told me this when I was five years old, and because I believed him I grew into a child who could walk by himself in woods that were trackless, lonely and still. It was his parting gift to me before I was sent away, and he added something else: that whenever I found myself alone in the mild English woods I would rule over them whether I knew it or not. All I had to remember was that every tree and creature saw us as hunters, and had done since the flight out of Eden.

In the ten years that followed, through my unbroken exile, I wandered when I could in the solitary, silent places until I felt more at home there, with their faint echo of the savannah, than I do here in this isolated school with its taint of old tile polish and disinfectant.

Now I’m lying awake, still emerging from a dream, and having a bit of a job drifting back into sleep. I sleep pretty well normally, so it takes a dream of the troubling kind to find me like this. When it happens I just get up, go to the landing and sit by the window for a while until I feel right again. We’re not supposed to do it; there’s no rule or anything, but they don’t get on with too much waking in the dark reaches of the night.

The window’s open a crack. I ease it up and cold air spills in around me along with some moonlight. Outside it’s dead calm so all I can hear are the little snufflings and squeaks of a roomful of dreamers. You can see the woods from here, a ragged band of dark whose every path and hollow I can navigate blindfold.

When I first came here and needed to be on my own I would disappear in my free time and roam the sun-dappled paths until I knew they were mine. As I got older it was the dark of the forest that called me to evade my keepers and venture where it seemed that no-one else dared.

In summer after Lights Out, in the drier spells, I’d be off, out of the window, through the wicket gates, walking where I wouldn’t leave tracks in the dew, ranging alone under the moon, coming back smelling of the night well before sunrise. The few who knew about it kept my secret safe. In winter the going and coming needed more thought, more nodding at risk like an old friend.

Until tonight. Tonight I feel the friendship isn’t what it was. There’s a hint of warning in that wall of shadow beyond the fields. You thought you knew us, it whispers; but in truth no-one does. We can always turn you back into a stranger, leave you to discover the difference between unreasoning fear and reasoning fear; and see which you prefer.

And that’s why, this time, sitting out my worries by the window hasn’t done the trick. Those words, that choice, just came into my head, and it’s not the way I think or speak. I know it’s because of the dream. But dreams are just night nonsense.

There’s a mist forming in the woods, white and silent, rising up from its own bed in the ditches and streams and drifting across the meadow. Good; good because it’s real and I need some reality right now. I lean out and feel it turning to dew on my warm back.

In my sleep I saw the old black servant again. He came towards me in a moonlit forest clearing where everything was flat silver and his face was without expression. What I told you when you were very small– he said to me in a voice that wasn’t his– was perfectly true. It just isn’t the whole story. There are things beyond nature, and familiar courage won’t be enough; nor will the desire to understand; nor will you need to look for them. That’s all.

And I was left there, looking around me, calling out: then show yourselves! Bravado comes easily in dreams, but my voice was choked and my muscles cold and stiff. I’m not happy when I leave the window at last and climb back into bed.

When dawn breaks the mist encloses everything. All day and through the following night it holds the countryside in a clean embrace.

But far away in the big city it finds bad company and hangs around. Sulphur and soot and still air; a million chimneys and acres of railways and factories. I t deadens sound and confounds people as they shuffle in slow motion along the bottom of an acid sea. They slip under buses that are feeling their way; they fall into canals and wander like orphans in the open spaces. The smog seeps into front parlours and kitchens and hospital wards, gripping babies in their cots and coughing old people to death. Theatres and music halls close because you can't see the stage. The lights in shop windows merge into colours that are sickly and make passers-by grotesque. A couple of days of this in these years just after the war can kill you. A bad one leaves more dead and dying than an air raid.

Out here in the Oxfordshire countryside I’m part of another world. On the next night, the one after my dream, I’ve decided – after mustering some not very convincing excuses – to decline the invitation of the cold, velvety whiteness that envelops our remote community. Before long it’ll be Lights Out and, I hope, some undisturbed rest. Only three weeks now to the Christmas vac.

Meanwhile in London the smog just gets worse and worse; and a strange, unseen transformation begins. In the dark corners men start to twitch with villainy. Their little red eyes shine in the gloom. On their forest a different dusk begins to fall.

Through these streets walks a figure who seems to know his way with the assurance of a blind man; with the air of someone who took note of his surroundings in better times. He wears a raincoat and a bowler hat and he moves empty-handed against the hushed crowd, going towards his work instead of feeling for the Underground and home. Hayden McFee is a sergeant of detectives and he keeps the hours, and more than the hours, that criminals keep. He disappears down a side alley, enters the door of a nondescript building left intact but empty since the war, and begins to climb a staircase. Halfway up, his brisk pace slows to a stop.

Something has made him glance back, to where the indistinct light falls on a tongue of smog that has edged in behind him and spread over the floor. The first few steps vanish into it and an eddy of draught gives it the viscous look of a grey, dirty river on a falling tide. And just for a second, a parody of a hand spirals slowly out of the flood, like the stumpy, rotted fist of a long-drowned man. McFee stares at it; waits for the apparition to resolve once more into the smog filling the tiny hallway. He knows that his mind has seen more than his eyes have, and an old familiar weariness comes over him. More slowly, he continues up the stairs.

Behind a warped, peeling door is a grubby room in which another man sits at a trestle table with a telephone and some papers neatly squared up to the corners.

Big Ben, a long way off, booms out the hour. The sound struggles through the fog and swells through the missing pane of a sash window.

"All set?" says McFee.

Almost as though his presence has caused it, the leaden murmur from outside is replaced by the ticking of a clock and the hiss of a gas fire.

Detective-Constable John Davies can tell it’s going to be a night of few words.

“Yes, ready,” he says. “Fancy a brew?”

“Why not?” McFee takes off his hat and coat.
Davies fires up the Primus stove. The room is running on car batteries and bottled gas and there’s a blackout blind at the window because this building is supposed to be empty. With its peeling wallpaper and constant reek of damp it’s become a squatter’s bivouac where the squatters are the Law; the forward HQ for a routine stunt that’s just one more sign of the times.

A bunch of amateurs – deserters, most likely – have been emptying lorries and flogging the stuff on the black market. They haven’t been adopted yet by one of the serious gangster operators because McFee has done that himself. This overweight, messy plain-clothes copper has infiltrated their ranks and is now their shadowy, unseen Mister Big; and tonight it’s all going to wind up here, downstairs. Davies, whose posh Welsh accent hasn’t given him away in this end of London, was the driver who got talking carelessly to the wide boys, parked up to get a cup of tea and came back to a cleaned-out truck and a fiver on the seat. It’s the kind of undercover stuff he doesn’t really like.

“One day,” he says, just to make conversation, “we’ll crack cases using electronic brains, and send robots in helicopters to nick villains using X-ray telescopes.”

“You reckon?” from behind a cloud of blue pipesmoke. “Well, till then we’ll keep running ‘em down with dirty tricks and sending the boys in blue to feel their collars.” McFee closes his eyes and muses a bit. “Of course the villains’ll have robots too by then; might even be robots. Then we can all sit back and let ‘em just get on with it.” He opens his eyes suddenly. “You’ve heard of the Black Widow spider?”

“Yes. Never seen one.”

“Well, no; you’d have to go abroad. How do they nab their prey?”

“A web, I suppose.”

“Spot on. Ugliest web you ever saw; a mess filled with dead rubbish and leaves and whatnot. Just like the rest of the world, then. And that’s why her victims just walk right in. Mess, my lad. Blend in. If you want shining armour try another shop.”

John Davies puts on a weak smile and places a mug of tea among the layers of papers on McFee’s table. The mug is badly chipped. It seems it got that way when it fell off his filing cabinet at the Yard. That was eight years ago but it still goes everywhere with him. It’s one of three things Davies knows about his boss; the other two being that he made a name in the big manhunts of the Thirties and the even bigger spyhunts during the War, and that he’s still only a Sergeant, although he can’t get a word of sense out of anyone about why that is. He often wonders himself about McFee; sometimes even toying with the idea that he’s an imposter, like one of those men who put on a white coat and wander round hospitals pretending to be doctors. Anyway, he’s back now after making the Big Call to the wide boys from a phone box, because the phone on Davies’s table is only wired for receiving. He’s waiting for two more calls here: one to say the force are on their way to lie in wait; the second to report that the toerags are on their way too, to stash the stuff downstairs like Mister Big told them. And it’s all got to work first time, before the real underworld gets involved. It’s all about getting a few spivs off the street, not starting a turf war.

For now, just the clock ticking and the hiss of the gas fire. That and the air of complete unconcern that McFee seems to be showing about the whole business.

There’s a thump, thump on the stairs and in barges D.C. Hartington. Third leg on the team and loud and late as usual. He’s dressed like his own idea of a wrong’un, almost comical given he usually dresses like a spiv anyway. His job is to guide the villains and their van around to the back and into the arms of the law.

Nobody likes him much. “Well, well! Here we sit like bloody crows in the wilderness!” he says, scraping a chair round and sitting astride it like a G-man. Matey familiarity, which he hasn’t earned.

“Get him a tea,” says McFee, and closes his eyes, teeth still clamped round his pipe.

John Davies has to clean out the vent on the Primus before he can get it going again, and as he fiddles they hear yet more footsteps on the stairs. This time it’s Phil Waterman, Detective Sergeant and probably McFee’s closest colleague. His trenchcoat and hat are filmed with smog. He’s obviously been hurrying.

Davies turns and can’t hold back a frown. What’s Waterman doing here? He’s not on this case and it’s a bit risky having too much going on in what’s supposed to be a derelict neck of the woods. Has something gone wrong? He’s got a leather pouch under his arm. And he looks worried.

“What’s the game, Phil?” says McFee, pretty calmly considering this is a bit of an intrusion. Waterman, still breathing hard, takes out a folder and places it on the raftering chaos of McFee’s table. He shoots a look at the other two and John Davies suddenly realises that he and Hartington aren’t wanted. But it’s too late now. Anyway, in a team nothing ought to be that private.

"For your eyes, Hay. Had to foot it here smartish. Quickest way in this. Couldn’t use your line, obviously.” He hesitates for a second.

“It’s the prints from Sowerby's. The safe."

McFee doesn’t glance at the papers, but at Waterman. “Take a breather, Phil. It’s a bad night.”

“Could be I know that,” says Waterman. “Look, I’m meant to be on a bloody train in twenty minutes; and I’m not sending you this in the post. You’ll see why.” His voice takes on an impatient edge. "Hay, you need to look at these prints."

"Mm. Sowerby's. You needn’t have. I only expressed a mild interest. Nothing taken, was there?" McFee's eyes wander over the enlargements. "Very clear, these. Your real peterman doesn't leave prints, never mind this. This bloke’s an amateur."

Phil Waterman's voice has turned a little dry. "Afraid not, Hay. They don’t belong to anyone.”

“So it’s a new boy? Hard luck. This many, this clear; bloody Christmas.”

McFee is peering intently at the prints now, as if trying to divine something in them. Waterman darts another look at Davies and Hartington. He clears his throat.

“I had a feeling – don’t ask me what – so I did a bit of digging. Not in the current records. I looked where no-one in their right mind would look. Luckily it was me who did.” He waits for McFee to say something, but he doesn’t.

"It's Smallwood, Hay."

McFee takes the pipe from his mouth; looks up.

"That's ridiculous."

But he looks suddenly tired.

"Ridiculous," he says again. Waterman's expression is saying: there is no mistake.

John Davies sees that his boss's hands are gripping the prints and trembling. McFee stares at him. "Sit down, will you?" he says.

He puts his pipe on the desk. It has gone out. The room has gone quiet once more; gas fire hissing and clock ticking in the silence. That and McFee's breathing as he begins to speak, slowly, like a country bobby giving evidence in court.

"These prints that Phil just brought in are clearly those of Albert Gordon Smallwood. They were found fresh this morning all over a botched job at Sowerby's fur warehouse in Mitre Street, down in Whitechapel."

He pauses.

"Albert Smallwood was the finest peterman I ever met. An artist. He died of consumption in Pentonville prison hospital on today's date, November 27th."

A catch; an atom of time.

"Nineteen thirty-three. Exactly fourteen years ago.”

Chapter 2

The train's slowing and I'm alive and floating.

This branch line journey in a single carriage pulled by an old saddletank is my Orient Express. I’ve seen everything before but I still want to see out of both sides at once. The train strolls along the embankments, taking little bridges by surprise, then plunges into dark cuttings where you wait for the track to end in undergrowth. We pass lonely houses and stop at country halts with odd names where I lean out of the window and – every time I do it – breathe the air of a strange new country.

And all too soon we pull into Inglefield and the restrained excitement grows with the slowing of the train.

Inglefield. Two platforms, crossing, signal box. I’d give a lot to be the signalman for just one evening; to light my lamps, pull those levers and turn that great wheel to swing open the gates; the ding-ding of the telegraph, the thunk of the signal arm and the world beyond framed in the latticed footbridge; the track growing smaller until it's swallowed up, flanked by great gloomy trees as old as churches.

A few steps to say thanks to the driver and fireman. The locomotive subsides in a cloud of steam as I turn away. Here and there frost still coats the platform. I say hallo to the porter, pick up my case and walk through the ticket office to the yard. This is always where it really starts. Adventure, freedom. Refuge.