I was suddenly desperate to sleep. The weight of my head was too great for me to carry. My legs were giving up on me. I thought of lying down on the pavement, but by good fortune a cab appeared, so instead I returned to my club, where Charlie the porter handed me a telephone message. It was from Detective Inspector Bryant, asking me to be so good as to call the following number at my earliest convenience.
* * *
No one sleeps in clubs. You smell the male sweat and cabbage, you listen to the snuffles of fellow inmates, and you remember school.
It is the night after Sixes Match, the annual festival of Winchester Football, a game so arcane that even experienced players may not know all the rules. The House has won. To be immodest, I have won, for it is Cranmer, the team captain and hero of the match, who has led the extraordinarily savage charge. Now, by tradition, the victorious six are feasting themselves in House Library while the New Boys stand on the table and regale them with songs and entertainment. Some New Boys sing badly and must have books buzzed at them to improve their voices. Others sing too well and must be cut down to size with gibes and flying bread. And one New Boy refuses to sing at all and must in the fullness of time be beaten; and that is Pettifer.
"Why didn't you sing?" I ask him later that night as he bends over the same table.
"It's against my religion. I'm a Jew."
"No you're not. Your father's in the Church."
"I've converted."
"I'll give you one chance," I say expansively. "What is the Notion for Winchester football?" It is the easiest test I can think of in the entire school vernacular, a gift.
"Jew baiting," he replies.
So I have no alternative but to beat him, when all he needed to say was Our Game.
THE WINDOW WAS too small to jump from, and too high to see from unless you had a yen for orange cranetips and banks of rain-soaked Bristol cloud. There were three chairs, and like the table they were bolted to the floor. A mirror was screwed to the wall. I assumed a one-way glass. The air was old, foul, and beery. A curled notice warning me of my rights trembled to the traffic five floors down.
Bryant sat one end of the table, I sat the other, Luck between us in his shirtsleeves. I wondered where his jacket was. On the floor to Luck's right lay an open briefcase in fake brown leather. In its partitions I spotted four rectangular packages of different sizes, each wrapped in black plastic and labelled. On the labels were references written with a red felt-tipped pen, such as
There was no preamble. Nobody apologised for hauling me over to Bristol on a Saturday afternoon. Bryant had one elbow on the table and was resting his chin in his clenched fist like a man holding his beard. Luck fished a chipped black cassette recorder from the briefcase and dumped it on the table.
"Mind if we do this?"
Not waiting to hear whether I minded or not, he pressed the start switch, snapped his fingers three times, stopped the tape, and wound it back. So we listened to Luck's fingers snapping three times. He had acquired a shaving rash since I had last seen him, and bags under his little eyes.
"Does your friend Dr. Pettifer possess a car, Mr. Cranmer?" he demanded morosely. And beckoned at the recorder with his long head: speak to that thing, not to me.
"In London, Pettifer had a stable of cars," I replied. "They tended to be other people's."
"Whose?"
"I never asked. I was not familiar with his acquaintances.”
“How about in Bath?"
"In Bath I have no idea what arrangements he made for his transport."
I was being dull and literal. I was much older than I had been a week ago.
"When did you last see him in a car?" said Luck.
"I would be pressed to remember."
Bryant had acquired a new smile. It had something of victory in it. "Oh, we'll
"I understood that you had called me here to identify some property," I said.
"We did," Bryant agreed.
"Well, if it's his car you're talking about, I'm afraid it's most unlikely I can help you."
"Ever see him in a green or black Toyota, model circa 1990?" Luck asked.
"I am no expert in Japanese cars."
"Mr. Cranmer-sir is no expert in anything," Bryant explained to Luck. "He don't know nuffink, Officer. You can tell by all those big foreign books he's got in his mansion."
From the briefcase Luck handed me a thumbed police manual of line drawings of cars. As I turned its pages I saw the outlines of a 1989 blue Toyota Carina with the black flashing just like the one Larry had used for his positively last Sunday appearance at Honeybrook. Luck had seen it too.
"How about this one?" he was demanding, holding down the page with his bony finger.
