‘Good, good, Col. You’re right, there is only one human form. Therefore, if we are searching for signs of people here, this one must be it.’

  ‘We don’t know either why its arms are bent upwards like that.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Iles said. ‘We don’t. I knew you’d get there. That figure has Ralph Ember written all over it.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Oh, you’re still puzzled, are you, Col? I told my source always to keep a watch for Ralph Ember after that episode at Low Pastures in the night.’

  ‘Are you working from what we spoke of earlier – instinct, sir?’

  ‘I don’t need instinct. I have a source. Think lorries, Col.’

  ‘Lorries?’

  ‘Dumpers.’

  ‘You mean that Ralph – the mini-Ralph, that is – is standing between parked lorries – mini-lorries – for the sketch.’

  ‘Great, Col.’

  ‘Parked lorries in the arcade for some work?’ Harpur said. ‘That’s what these straight-line, box-type items in the sketch are, is it?’

  ‘Terrific, Col.’

  ‘Why was Ralph in the arcade at all?’

  ‘I’ve told you the source didn’t give me that. There was a woman shopper with some items she’d bought, so the source could tell me as much, but it’s of no significance. Ralph speaks to her and she replies. My source thinks “Sodding” or “Sod” in the reply but can’t give me more. There was a bit of trouble with one of the drivers.’

  Harpur said: ‘He’d be pissed off, I imagine, finding someone hanging about his vehicle to no apparent decent purpose. Our boy might think he’d better protect his face, in case of a coming thump. So, the arm up.’

  ‘Your mastery of this situation is breathtakingly perceptive, Col. You’ve blown the illustration wide open single-handed.’

  ‘Well, I’d say I had quite a bit of help,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Yes, you would say it, not stay cleverly, egocentrically and deceitfully quiet about how your successes were in fact achieved, which is why you’ll never make it to assistant chief.’

  Next day Harpur went alone to the arcade. He was restless, a state that could afflict him occasionally. He worried about two main developments that wouldn’t slacken their hold. They were developments which, in a strange sense, cancelled each other out. They still had enough in them, though, to give him deep unease.

  At home he thought he had hidden this edginess pretty well from Denise and the children, but then Jill, leaving for school in the morning, had said: ‘What’s up, Dad?’

  ‘Ah, that’s almost a film title, isn’t it?’ Play the dumbo, Harpur thought. It might make Jill feel sorry for him and try some extra tenderness. No.

  ‘Of course it’s a film,’ Jill said. ‘What’s Up, Doc? Re-runs of it get on to the ancient movies channel – your vintage. But why are you dodging the question?’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘You know you are.’

  ‘Do I?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Acute jumpiness about something,’ Jill said.

  ‘Jumpiness?’

  ‘Tenseness.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘OK, OK, Dad. You’re not going to talk. I can’t win.’

  ‘Talk about what?’

  ‘That I’d like to discover, but I’m reaching nowhere, aren’t I? I’ve been going over in my head for possibles. Nothing. Have to go. Can’t hang about, to get brick-walled. Is it anxiety in case you’re forced to deal with something you can’t manage?’ Jill said. ‘But, yes you can.’ She kissed him on the side of his head and whispered: ‘You’ll cope OK. As ever, Dad. We believe in you. Is it to do with the wharf body?’

  ‘Is what to do with it?’

  ‘Oh, don’t start again, Dad.’

  Watching her bustle off to her classes, Harpur took pleasure in the regularity of this term-time ritual. Hazel was also part of it but had gone on ahead. Harpur thought Iles could be very wrong when he doubted Harpur’s ability to safeguard the city’s nice orderliness. It would be tough without Iles, though not doomed.

  Harpur and Jill were in the porch at Arthur Street, Jill with a haversack of school books, lunch sandwiches and a can of ginger beer. He’d go later to the Courtway. Harpur didn’t get rapture from arcades, as Iles did. They seemed to Harpur like tunnels with a glass roof. The sound of people’s shoes was magnified in them and, given a sort of rapid slap tone, seemed to suggest a desperate urgency as they shopped, or tried to get beautified in one of the three very well-meant salons.

  Although Harpur didn’t experience a glow from arcades, he did agree with Iles that they were very suitable for tipsters, and he had a source in the Courtway himself, though not one he mentioned to Iles. He was the arcade janitor and had a little den with his gear near the south entrance.

  Perhaps this time Harpur would see something he’d missed previously, and, more significantly, that Iles had missed. Maybe Harpur could put a degree of light on the ‘something’ that Iles sensed was going on. Harpur would get high-quality joy from solving this teaser – joy and bitchiness at having done what Iles couldn’t.

  First of those two factors able to upset Harpur was Iles’s blunt declaration that something was going on.

  Second, there came Iles’s admission – twice – that he didn’t know what it was. Harpur found himself utterly unused to this kind of sequence. If Iles diagnosed in his mysterious style that something was going on, something would in fact be going on and, given a while – generally a very little while – Iles would find out what and deal with it, usually something bad or very bad or toweringly bad or inadequate. Now, though, there was no such resolution and Harpur felt at a loss and feeble. Perhaps Iles was correct to doubt his ability. He couldn’t have let Jill know about his large-scale worry, though she and possibly Hazel had spotted the symptoms. He’d found he needed another look at the arcade, and a look carried out solo.

  It dazed Harpur slightly to realize that not only was Iles due to move away soon, but even before that his powers here seemed to be shrinking. Harpur knew he was absent today, possibly getting a familiarizing tour of what would be his new ground as chief. Harpur didn’t want him to know of this second visit. It would question Iles’s magic. The ACC – almost chief – was not someone to be checked up on by a minion.

  ‘It could be nothing at all, Mr Harpur,’ his source said.

  ‘That’s always how information comes to us, Lance.’ Harpur did what could have been an Iles echo: ‘We deal in segments. On their own they could be nothing at all. Fitted together they occasionally make something. Not always. Occasionally.’ Harpur knew he must sound like lecture notes or that academic paper Iles had spoken of. Perhaps most police who ran informants were keen to give the practice a respectable, even elevated flavour, because they knew that in reality it was quite a shady, shameful game. Harpur himself felt a little like that sometimes.

  ‘Sketchy – so sketchy – I didn’t feel it right to bother you, not in the present state of things,’ Lance said.

  ‘What do you mean, Lance, “in the present state of things”?’

  ‘Power fights,’ Lance said.

  ‘Are there power fights?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Coming. On their way,’ Lance replied.

  ‘Segments,’ Harpur said. ‘They don’t make anything much until they’re fitted together, if ever. We have to accept the “if ever” caution. But as the segments fall into place next to other segments, we get a lovely sense of all of them destined to make up the desired fullness. They have that potential waiting in them, ready to be herded together to make a greatly wanted unit.’

  Harpur knew that if Hazel and/or Jill heard him spout this kind of preposterous blah they’d turn queasy yellow from nausea, but Lance was much easier to satisfy with these woozy, cheerful, bullshit notions. He was over seventy, not in great health, glad to be in a dolly job with a tipster sideline, and not inclined to initiate upset. ‘I do see some activity, oh yes,’ Lance said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here – the arcade.’

  ‘What activity?’ Harpur said.

  ‘You.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You’re part of the activity.’

  ‘What’s the other part, Lance?’

  ‘You’d be the most important of them, if I might say.’

  ‘More important than who?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Whom?’ Lance said. ‘My grandchildren correct me if I say who when it should be whom.’

  ‘My daughters are like that,’ Harpur said.

  ‘It’s old-fashioned and pompous to get it right,’ Lance said.

  ‘Whom, then, do you mean is part of the activity, beside myself?’

  ‘Ralph Ember. You’ve heard of him, I expect. Ralph W. Ember of Low Pastures. Among those lorries over there to do with rebuilding. A lot of dust for someone like me to clean up, except it’s not just like me, it’s me. Activity. Which I could do without.’

  They were in Lance’s lair, surrounded by heavy-duty brooms, watering cans, buff-coloured hoses, fire extinguishers. Lance opened a couple of folding canvas chairs for them.

  ‘And was there further activity, Lance, not just me and Ralph Ember and the rebuilding murk?’

  ‘What was Ralph staring at?’ Lance replied. ‘This is where matters get complicated and very obscure.’

  ‘Was he staring?’

  ‘At two blokes walking through the arcade, walking very … well, very thrustful. One of them I’ve seen around. Name of Chail, is it?’

  ‘There is a lad called Chail known to us,’ Harpur said.

  ‘He’s with a beardy, not someone I know. I don’t think he’s been here before. He’s the sort I’d remember.’

  ‘And they are both staring at Ralph?’ Harpur said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Only one staring?’ Harpur asked.

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘He’s staring at them, but they don’t respond?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Right. That’s why I said it wasn’t worth calling you about. Nothing happened.’

  ‘Nothing happening is something happening. The nothingness of it becomes something,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Ah,’ Lance said.

  ‘What?’ Harpur replied.

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ Lance said. ‘You can look at nothing and turn it into something. I can see what you mean. The fact that nothing happens tells you something. But I couldn’t have thought of that.’

  ‘I’m here as well,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Not the way I’m here.’

  ‘Which way is that?’ Harpur replied.

  Lance leaned forward in his chair to touch a couple of yard brushes and a wheelbarrow. ‘Me. I’m with this stuff every day. It’s my job. You just drop by once in a while with a smart analysis. It doesn’t last very long.’

  ‘What you see is very valuable to me,’ Harpur said.

  ‘You can interpret. That’s your job. You work out what things mean. These tools are just tools for sprucing up the arcade. It can’t be done without them. Their limit, though. The arcade is useful to you. It runs through the main part of the city and gives you a show.’

  ‘What d’ you think these activities mean, Lance?’

  ‘When I mentioned the staring and the negative staring, I see you perk up. Your face gets all interested and alert. I’ve strayed on to your area though I hardly knew it. What I have to think, Mr Harpur, is I saw this staring game, observing it for as long as it lasted, but I didn’t think it worth giving you a ring about it, although I’m a source. There’s something missing in me, and what it is is the ability to see what something signifies, or might signify. It’s no wonder I’m among the cleaning items. I can’t do probing and speculating. To me a watering can is a watering can.’

  ‘You’re the one who started me wondering,’ Harpur said. ‘I’d be nowhere otherwise, and I’d still be nowhere.’

  ‘What do you think it means, Mr Harpur?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ralph. The stare.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That’s your task, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’ Harpur said.

  ‘To interpret.’

  ‘You can do some deducing too, Lance.’

  ‘Ralph’s scared,’ Lance said. ‘That’s what I pick up.’

  ‘Possibly,’ Harpur said.

  ‘He was standing between a couple of lorries, wasn’t he?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Ah,’ Lance said.

  ‘What?’ Harpur said.

  ‘You know this already?’

  ‘Some of it,’ Harpur said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘That’s what I meant when I said information comes in segments. We’re talking about one of the segments.’

  ‘So what is Ralph scared of?’ Lance asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Harpur said.

  ‘His business?’ Lance said. ‘Anxious re the business? He’s had trouble like that before, hasn’t he?’ Lance sighed. ‘But this is me doing a think, isn’t it? I’m a janitor.’

  ‘A janitor who thinks,’ Harpur said. ‘Ralph runs into envy. Naturally he does.’

  Lance nodded a couple of times. ‘He’s asking for it – again without knowing what the possible trouble is.’ He paused. He put a hand on the wheelbarrow again, maybe to remind himself of his job. ‘Mr Harpur, I think if I was someone from outside, looking at it like someone new would see it, I would think, what a lovely spot this is; not only the arcade, although, yes, the arcade is lovely, but I mean in general. And that would be right. I admit a smashed skull at the sand and gravel wharf is something else, but mostly, averagely, it’s a sweet city, rich in tranquillity and all the protected goodnesses.’

  ‘Yes, it’s OK,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Oh, OK is not enough, surely Mr Harpur, if I might respectfully demur.’

  ‘OK-plus then,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Begrudging a bit, still.’

  ‘What are you saying, Lance?’

  ‘Do I sound a trifle fascist, Mr Harpur? The corporate state – people defined by their jobs and compelled to stay in them?’

  ‘That’s a depressing idea.’

  ‘So we have this Chail, who does a bit on the substances side as a dealer if I hear right?’

  ‘Yes, you probably hear right.’

  ‘He knows what things are like here, very comfortable and more or less safeish; but his companion – he’s the new pair of eyes that I mentioned. He needs to be given a tour and a sight of it with commentary from someone quite clued-up from his own business firm, but who’s thinking a possible major increase. Is Mr Chail mooting a partnership with Mr Beardie? This arcade visit is important. What is it they say, Mr Harpur?’

  ‘Who – not whom?’

  ‘The experts.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Fiscal gurus. What they say is “Expand or go under”. No alternative. No standing still.’

  Lance paused again, stayed silent for a minute, and then started to speak once more: ‘But you’ll …’ He shrugged, seemed about to go into another silence. He resumed, though: ‘But you’ll be saying to yourself, Mr Harpur, this geezer spends his time mostly locked up with the garden-type clobber, so when someone comes along, such as you, Mr Harpur, who does know a watering can when he sees one but is also able to do conversation, then this nothing-much handyman finds there’s something to be said for this talking lark. Yes, something to be said is said, so off he goes, unstoppable, jabber, jabber, jabber, quaint words like “mooting” and “thrustful”, “demur”, spiel upon spiel. I’m sorry, Mr Harpur. Blame the dustpans.’

  ‘No, that’s not how it is, Lance. It’s all very helpful and clear.’

  Harpur, considering retirement and the need for a replacement career, wondered if he could learn how to be a fiscal guru.

  ‘Chail didn’t want any interference from Ralph at that moment and so the staring ahead, plus, of course, to put Ralph devastatingly off-balance because apparently ignored.’

  ‘I don’t know what that’s about. I don’t understand it,’ Harpur said.

  ‘I see a sort of spreading shambles, not one I can put right with a squirt or two from the hose.’

  ‘We depend on you and people like you. We’ll win.’

  ‘Mr Iles is going, I’m told.’

  ‘That will make me even more dependent on you, Lance.’

  ‘I can’t compensate for the loss of Mr Iles,’ Lance said. ‘His sort don’t come in a catalogue.’

  ‘But we’ll have a go at it, won’t we?’

  ‘Of course, you’ve got other sources, haven’t you – big-timers, Mr Harpur?’

  ‘Stay well, Lance.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Ralph Ember found there were moments when he thought of his property and estate almost as if they were human, and not just human but human enemies. He would never have believed this possible. But yet it had happened. It had unquestionably happened. The feeling took in the whole building and acreage, including the recent extension.

  As a matter of fact, he was outside the extension now, and the sense of unfriendliness was at its strongest. His displeasure was not to do with the taste/style of the renovations. These were high-falutin’ considerations – snob considerations, which he’d admit might have commandeered his attention previously, but which seemed of next-to-no importance today. What he had to think was how easy it would be to kill him or a member of his family, if he or she were standing where he stood now. After that idiotic incident on ladders up at the roof, plenty of people knew about the layout at Low Pastures, not all of these people well-disposed. There was a door directly into the gallery to serve the extension, and separate from the main entrance hall to Low Pastures, and Ralph had always worried about it. He thought it too remote. Anyone using that door to go for a walk around the estate would be wonderfully framed as a target.

  The architect looking after the extension work had persuaded Ralph to let him include the door, though. His argument was that the extension served as a kind of gallery for Ralph’s china collection, and he might want to take visitors into that section to see the splendid items and sets without having to squire them around the rest of the house. The word ‘squire’ had greatly attracted Ralph. He liked the idea of having this type of status and able to confer the favour of a privileged look at the china collection, but not allow any further hobnobbing.