Play Dead by Peter Dickinson Page A

it.’
    The driver chose an indirect route, presumably to discourage anyone else who might be trying to follow them, so the journey home took long enough for Poppy to have pulled herself together and be able to say thank you in a normal voice. Once inside the flat she put a kettle on, gave herself a slug of gin in a coffee cup while she was waiting for it to boil, made a pot of strong tea and rang Janet.
    â€˜You want me to come home?’
    â€˜I can manage, I think.’
    â€˜I’ll be about forty minutes.’
    â€˜You’re wonderful.’
    Toby meanwhile had been trying to interest Elias in building a ramp of cushions up to the sofa and then rolling down them. Elias was unresponsive. He had never in any case been able to see the slightest reason why Toby should occupy a space in the universe. Poppy’s impulse was to give herself another big slug of gin and then sit on the sofa hugging Toby to her and rocking to and fro while she wept over the beastliness of things. Instead she took him into the kitchen, half filled the washing-up bowl and put it on the floor, and settled down to play water games with some yoghurt pots, the kitchen funnel and the bulb-baster until Janet arrived.
    2
    Poppy was listening to Rosenkavalier when the doorbell rang again. Another reporter, she assumed. She’d had several telephone calls and then unplugged the cord, and had turned two separate men and a woman away from the door, telling all of them that she wasn’t going to say anything. She opened the door the couple of inches the chain allowed.
    â€˜Who is that?’
    â€˜Jim Bowles. Just come round to see you’re all right.’
    She opened the door.
    â€˜How very kind of you. Come in.’
    â€˜More caterwauling,’ he remarked as he followed her into the living-room. She spun round.
    â€˜Don’t be stupid,’ she snapped.
    â€˜No call taking offence, Poppy. Just my way of saying it’s not my type of music.’
    â€˜You’re still being stupid. Listen! Can’t you hear? Her lover’s there and she knows she’s getting too old for him. She’s singing about time. She’s telling him how she gets up at night and stops the clocks. Oh, please listen, Jim! For God’s sake, you might at least try!’
    She turned the volume up and filled the room with the voice and the leaf-fall comments of the orchestra. She stood by the fire with her arm along the mantelpiece and didn’t look at him until the aria ended. Then she switched the player off.
    â€˜You don’t have to say anything,’ she said.
    â€˜You aren’t too old, Poppy. My eye, you’re a fetching woman.’
    â€˜Thank you, but it isn’t about me. Not just me. Everything. It makes you share the sense of everything getting old and worn and lost and forgotten. Names on gravestones nobody will ever be able to read again. Bones under moors. That young man we saw this morning, he was a baby like Toby once. Somebody thought he was the loveliest thing that had ever happened.’
    â€˜Maybe. Or maybe they didn’t. Or maybe they tried to love him too hard, him turning out how he did.’
    â€˜It was the same man, wasn’t it? You remember, the one who followed us that day?’
    â€˜I’d say so. Tricky without the beard.’
    â€˜Do they know who he was yet?’
    â€˜Not as I heard. Not local. Nothing on him barring a return ticket to Mitcham.’
    â€˜Nothing? No money? No cigarettes? He pretty well chain-smoked.’
    â€˜Not a sausage, and the ticket’s a plant, like as not. That sort don’t buy returns.’
    â€˜He’d been castrated.’
    Jim looked at her.
    â€˜Who told you that?’ he said.
    â€˜Things the Inspector said. They’d lured him along to the play centre by saying there was a child he could have, and then they’d tied him up and done that to him—and other things. I don’t know if they meant to