‘You think I’m a dotty old prat, I suppose,’ he said.
‘Not at all, not at all,’ Farnham protested, groaning inwardly.
‘You’re a good boy,’ Vetter said. ‘Won’t be riding a desk here in the station when you’re my age. Not if you stick on the force. Will you stick, d’you think? D’you fancy it?’
‘Yes,’ Farnham said. It was true; he did fancy it. He meant to stick even though Sheila wanted him off the police force and somewhere she could count on him. The Ford assembly line, perhaps. The thought of joining the wankers at Ford curdled his stomach.
‘I thought so,’ Vetter said, crushing his smoke. ‘Gets in your blood, doesn’t it? You could go far, too, and it wouldn’t be boring old Crouch End you’d finish up in, either. Still, you don’t know everything. Crouch End is strange. You ought to have a peek in the back file sometime, Farnham. Oh, a lot of it’s the usual . . . girls and boys run away from home to be hippies or punks or whatever it is they call themselves now . . . husbands gone missing (and when you clap an eye to their wives you can most times understand why) . . . unsolved arsons . . . purse-snatchings . . .
all of that. But in between, there’s enough stories to curdle your blood. And some to make you sick to your stomach.’
‘True word?’
Vetter nodded. ‘Some of em very like the one that poor American girl just told us. She’ll not see her husband again — take my word for it.’ He looked at Farnham and shrugged. ‘Believe me, believe me not. It’s all one, isn’t it? The file’s there. We call it the open file because it’s more polite than the back file or the kiss-my-arse file. Study it up, Farnham. Study it up.’
Farnham said nothing, but he actually did intend to ‘study it up.’ The idea that there might be a whole series of stories such as the one the American woman had told . . . that was disturbing.
‘Sometimes,’ Vetter said, stealing another of Farnham’s Silk Cuts, ‘I wonder about Dimensions.’
‘Dimensions?’
‘Yes, my good old son — dimensions. Science fiction writers are always on about Dimensions, aren’t they? Ever read science fiction, Farnham?’
‘No,’ Farnham said. He had decided this was some sort of elaborate leg-pull.
‘What about Lovecraft? Ever read anything by him?’
‘Never heard of him,” Farnham said. The last fiction he’d read for pleasure, in fact, had been a small Victorian Era pastiche called Two Gentlemen in Silk Knickers.
‘Well, this fellow Lovecraft was always writing about Dimensions,’ Vetter said, producing his box of railway matches. ‘Dimensions close to ours. Full of these immortal monsters that would drive a man mad at one look. Frightful rubbish, of course. Except, whenever one of these people straggles in, I wonder if all of it was rubbish. I think to myself then — when it’s quiet and late at night, like now — that our whole world, everything we think of as nice and normal and sane, might be like a big leather ball filled with air. Only in some places, the leather’s scuffed almost down to nothing. Places where the barriers are thinner. Do you get me?’
‘Yes,’ Farnham said, and thought: Maybe you ought to give me a kiss, Vetter — I always fancy a kiss when I’m getting my doodle pulled.
‘And then I think, ‘Crouch End’s one of those thin places. Silly, but I do have those thoughts.
Too imaginative, I expect; my mother always said so, anyway.’
‘Did she indeed?’
‘Yes. Do you know what else I think?’
‘No, sir — not a clue.’
‘Highgate’s mostly all right, that’s what I think — it’s just as thick as you’d want between us and the Dimensions in Muswell Hill and Highgate. But now you take Archway and Finsbury
Park. They border on Crouch End, too. I’ve got friends in both places, and they know of my interest in certain things that don’t seem to be any way rational. Certain crazy stories which have been told, we’ll say, by people with nothing to gain by making up crazy stories.
‘Did it occur to you to wonder, Farnham, why the woman would have told us the things she did if they weren’t true?’
‘Well . . . ‘
Vetter struck a match and looked at Farnham over it. ‘Pretty young woman, twenty-six, two kiddies back at her hotel, husband’s a young lawyer doing well in Milwaukee or someplace.
What’s she to gain by coming in and spouting about the sort of things you only used to see in Hammer films?’
‘I don’t know,’ Farnham said stiffly. ‘But there may be an ex — ‘
‘So I say to myself’ — Vetter overrode him — ‘that if there are such things as ‘thin spots,’ this one would begin at Archway and Finsbury Park . . . but the very thinnest part is here at Crouch End. And I say to myself, wouldn’t it be a day if the last of the leather between us and what’s on the inside that ball just . . . rubbed away? Wouldn’t it be a day if even half of what that woman told us was true?’
Farnham was silent. He had decided that PC Vetter probably also believed in palmistry and phrenology and the Rosicrucians.
‘Read the back file,’ Vetter said, getting up. There was a crackling sound as he put his hands in the small of his back and stretched. ‘I’m going out to get some fresh air.’
He strolled out. Farnham looked after him with a mixture of amusement and resentment.
Vetter was dotty, all right. He was also a bloody fag-mooch. Fags didn’t come cheap in this brave new world of the welfare state. He picked up Vetter’s notebook and began leafing through the girl’s story again.
And, yes, he would go through the back file.
He would do it for laughs.
The girl — or young woman, if you wanted to be politically correct (and all Americans did these days, it seemed) — had burst into the station at quarter past ten the previous evening, her hair in damp strings around her face, her eyes bulging. She was dragging her purse by the strap.
‘Lonnie,’ she said. ‘Please, you’ve got to find Lonnie.’
‘Well, we’ll do our best, won’t we?’ Vetter said. ‘But you’ve got to tell us who Lonnie is.’
‘He’s dead,’ the young woman said. ‘I know he is.’ She began to cry. Then she began to laugh
— to cackle, really. She dropped her purse in front of her. She was hysterical.
The station was fairly deserted at that hour on a weeknight. Sergeant Raymond was listening to a Pakistani woman tell, with almost unearthly calm, how her purse had been nicked on Hillfield Avenue by a yob with a lot of football tattoos and a great coxcomb of blue hair. Vetter saw Farnham come in from the anteroom, where he had been taking down old posters (HAVE YOU
ROOM IN YOUR HEART FOR AN UNWANTED CHILD?) and putting up new ones (SIX RULES FOR SAFE
NIGHT-CYCLING).
Vetter waved Farnham forward and Sergeant Raymond, who had looked round at once when he heard the American woman’s semi-hysterical voice, back. Raymond, who liked breaking pickpockets’ fingers like breadsticks (‘Aw, c’mon, mate,’ he’d say if asked to justify this extra-legal proceeding, ‘fifty million wogs can’t be wrong’), was not the man for a hysterical woman.
‘Lonnie!’ she shrieked. ‘Oh, please, they’ve got Lonnie!’
The Pakistani woman turned toward the young American woman, studied her calmly for a moment, then turned back to Sergeant Raymond and continued to tell him how her purse had been snatched.
‘Miss — ‘ PC Farnham began.
‘What’s going on out there?’ she whispered. Her breath was coming in quick pants. Farnham noticed there was a slight scratch on her left cheek. She was a pretty little hen with nice bubs —
small but pert — and a great cloud of auburn hair. Her clothes were moderately expensive. The heel had come off one of her shoes.
‘What’s going on out there?’ she repeated. ‘Monsters — ‘
The Pakistani woman looked over again . . . and smiled. Her teeth were rotten. The smile was gone like a conjurer’s trick, and she took the Lost and Stolen Property form Raymond was holding out to her.
‘Get the lady a cup of coffee and bring it down to Room Three,’ Vetter said. ‘Could you do with a cup of coffee, love?’
‘Lonnie,’ she whispered. ‘I know he’s dead.’
‘Now, you just come along with old Ted Vetter and we’ll sort this out in a jiff,’ he said, and helped her to her feet. She was still talking in a low moaning voice when he led her away with one arm snugged around her waist. She was rocking unsteadily because of the broken shoe.