She was aware that she was speaking incoherencies, but she seemed helpless to be any clearer.
And at any rate, she told Vetter and Farnham, she hadn’t been all that incoherent, because the man and woman had drawn away from her, as if, when Evvie asked what the matter was, Doris had told her it was bubonic plague.
The man said something then — ‘Happened again,’ Doris thought it was.
The woman pointed. ‘Station’s right up there. Globes hanging in front. You’ll see it.’ Moving very quickly, the two of them began to walk away. The woman glanced back over her shoulder once; Doris Freeman saw her wide, gleaming eyes. Doris took two steps after them, for what reason she did not know. ‘Don’t ye come near!’ Evvie called shrilly, and forked the sign of the evil eye at her. She simultaneously cringed against the man, who put an arm about her. ‘Don’t you come near, if you’ve been to Crouch End Towen!’
And with that, the two of them had disappeared into the night.
Now PC Farnham stood leaning in the doorway between the common room and the main filing room — although the back files Vetter had spoken of were certainly not kept here. Farnham had made himself a fresh cup of tea and was smoking the last cigarette in his pack — the woman had also helped herself to several.
She’d gone back to her hotel, in the company of the nurse Vetter had called — the nurse would be staying with her tonight, and would make a judgement in the morning as to whether the woman would need to go in hospital. The children would make that difficult, Farnham supposed, and the woman’s being an American almost guaranteed a first-class cock-up. He wondered what she was going to tell the kiddies when they woke up tomorrow, assuming she was capable of telling them anything. Would she gather them round and tell them that the big bad monster of Crouch End Town
(Towen)
had eaten up Daddy like an ogre in a fairy-story?
Farnham grimaced and put down his teacup. It wasn’t his problem. For good or for ill, Mrs.
Freeman had become sandwiched between the British constabulary and the American Embassy in the great waltz of governments. It was none of his affair; he was only a PC who wanted to forget the whole thing. And he intended to let Vetter write the report. Vetter could afford to put his name to such a bouquet of lunacy; he was an old man, used up. He would still be a PC on the night shift when he got his gold watch, his pension, and his council flat. Farnham, on the other hand, had ambitions of making sergeant soon, and that meant he had to watch every little posey.
And speaking of Vetter, where was he? He’d been taking the night air for quite awhile now.
Farnham crossed the common room and went out. He stood between the two lighted-globes and stared across Tottenham Road. Vetter was nowhere in sight. It was past 3:00 a.m., and silence lay thick and even, like a shroud. What was that line from Wordsworth? ‘All that great heart lying still,’ or something like.
He went down the steps and stood on the sidewalk, feeling a trickle of unease now. It was silly, of course, and he was angry with himself for allowing the woman’s mad story to gain even this much of a foothold in his head. Perhaps he deserved to be afraid of a hard copper like Sid Raymond.
Farnham walked slowly up to the corner, thinking he would meet Vetter coming back from his night stroll. But he would go no farther; if the station was left empty even for a few moments, there would be hell to pay if it was discovered. He reached the corner and looked around. It was funny, but all the arc-sodiums seemed to have gone out up here. The entire street looked different without them. Would it have to be reported, he wondered? And where was Vetter?
He would walk just a little farther, he decided, and see what I was what. But not far. It simply wouldn’t do to leave the station unattended for long.
Just a little way.
Vetter came in less than five minutes after Farnham had left. Farnham had gone in the opposite direction, and if Vetter had come along a minute earlier, he would have seen the young constable standing indecisively at the corner for a moment before turning it and disappearing forever.
‘Farnham?’
No answer but the buzz of the clock on the wall.
‘Farnham?’ he called again, and then wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand.
Lonnie Freeman was never found. Eventually his wife (who had begun to gray around the temples) flew back to America with her children. They went on Concorde. A month later she attempted suicide. She spent ninety days in a rest home and came out much improved.
Sometimes when she cannot sleep — this occurs most frequently on nights when the sun goes down in a ball of red and orange — she creeps into her closet, knee-walks under the hanging dresses all the way to the back, and there she writes Beware the Goat with a Thousand Young over and over with a soft pencil. It seems to ease her somehow to do this.
PC Robert Farnham left a wife and two-year-old twin girls. Sheila Farnham wrote a series of angry letters to her MP, insisting that something was going on, something was being covered up, that her Bob had been enticed into taking some dangerous sort of undercover assignment. He would have done anything to make sergeant, Mrs. Farnham repeatedly told the MP. Eventually that worthy stopped answering her letters, and at about the same time Doris Freeman was coming out of the rest home, her hair almost entirely white now, Mrs. Farnham moved back to Essex, where her parents lived. Eventually she married a man in a safer line of work — Frank Hobbs is a bumper inspector on the Ford assembly line. It had been necessary to get a divorce from her Bob on grounds of desertion, but that was easily managed.
Vetter took early retirement about four months after Doris Freeman had stumbled into the station in Tottenham Lane. He did indeed move into council housing, a two-above-the-shops in Frimley. Six months later he was found dead of a heart attack, a can of Harp Lager in his hand.
And in Crouch End, which is really a quiet suburb of London, strange things still happen from time to time, and people have been known to lose their way. Some of them lose it forever.
The House on Maple Street
Although she was only five, and the youngest of the Bradbury children, Melissa had very sharp eyes and it wasn’t really surprising that she was the first to discover something strange had happened to the house on Maple Street while the Bradbury family was summering in England.
She ran and found her older brother, Brian, and told him something was wrong upstairs, on the third floor. She said she would show him, but not until he swore not to tell anyone what she had found. Brian swore, knowing it was their stepfather Lissa was afraid of; Daddy Lew didn’t like it when any of the Bradbury children ‘got up to foolishness’ (that was how he always put it), and he had decided that Melissa was the prime offender in that area. Lissa, who was stupid no more than she was blind, was aware of Lew’s prejudices, and had become wary of them. In fact, all of the Bradbury children had become rather wary of their mother’s second husband.
It would probably turn out to be nothing, anyway, but Brian was delighted to be back home and willing enough to humor his baby sister (Brian was two full years her senior), at least for awhile; he followed her down the third-floor hallway without so much as a murmur of argument, and he only pulled her braids — he called these braid-pulls ’emergency stops’ — once.
They had to tiptoe past Lew’s study, which was the only finished-off room up here, because Lew was inside, unpacking his notebooks and papers and muttering in an ill-tempered way.
Brian’s thoughts had actually turned to what might be on TV tonight — he was looking forward to a pig-out on good old American cable after three months of BBC and ITV — when they reached the end of the hall.
What he saw beyond the tip of his little sister’s pointing finger drove all thoughts of television from Brian Bradbury’s mind.
‘Now swear again!’ Lissa whispered. ‘Never tell anyone, Daddy Lew or anyone, or hope to die!’
‘Hope to die,’ Brian agreed, still staring, and it was a half-hour before he told his big sister, Laurie, who was unpacking in her room. Laurie was possessive of her room as only an eleven-year-old girl can be, and she gave Brian the very dickens for coming in without knocking, even though she was completely dressed.