In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage. As with words, so with sentences. What Clive had intended on Thursday and posted on Friday was, You deserve to be sacked. What Vernon was bound to understand on Tuesday in the aftermath of his dismissal was, You deserve to be sacked. Had the card arrived on Monday, he might have read it differently. This was the comic nature of their fate; a first-class stamp would have served both men well. On the other hand, perhaps no other outcomes were available to them, and this was the nature of their tragedy. If so, Vernon was bound to consolidate his bitterness as the day wore on and to reflect, rather opportunistically, on the pact the two men had made not so long ago and the awesome responsibilities it laid upon him. For clearly Clive had lost his reason and something had to be done. This resolve was bolstered by Vernon’s sense that at a time when the world was treating him badly, when his life was in ruins, no one was treating him worse than his old friend, and that this was unforgivable. And insane.

It can happen sometimes, with those who brood on an injustice, that a taste for revenge can usefully combine with a sense of obligation. The hours passed, and Vernon picked up his copy of the Judge several times to read again about that medical scandal in Holland. Later on in the day he made a few phone inquiries of his own. More idle hours passed while he sat about in the kitchen drinking coffee, contemplating the wreck of his prospects, and wondering whether he should ring Clive and pretend to make peace, in order to invite himself to Amsterdam.

3

Was everything in place? Had he remembered everything? Was it really legal? Clive considered these questions from the confines of a Boeing 757 parked in freezing fog at the northern end of Manchester airport. The weather was supposed to clear and the pilot wanted to keep his place in the takeoff queue, so the passengers sat in muffled silence, taking comfort in the drinks trolley. It was midday, and Clive had ordered coffee, brandy, and a bar of chocolate. He had a window seat in an empty row, and through gaps in the fog he could see other airliners waiting competitively in ragged, converging lines, something brooding and loutish in their forms: slit eyes beneath small brains, stunted, encumbered arms, upraised and blackened arseholes. Creatures like this could never care about each other.

The answer was yes, his research and planning had been meticulous. It was going to happen, and he experienced a thrill. He raised his hand to the smiling girl in a cocky blue hat who seemed personally delighted by his decision to go for the second miniature and privileged to bring it to him. All in all, given what he’d been through and the ordeals that lay ahead, and the certainty that events now were sure to accelerate giddily, he didn’t feel so bad. He would miss the first hours of rehearsal, but an orchestra finding its way through a new piece—always a dog’s dinner. It might be sensible to miss the whole of the first day. He had been reassured by his bank that to have ten thousand U.S. dollars in his briefcase was within the law and he was not required to explain himself at Schiphol airport. As for the Manchester police station, he had handled it capably, he thought, and had been treated with respect, and he could almost feel a touch of nostalgia for the bracing ambience and those hard-pressed men with whom he had worked so well.

When Clive arrived from the railway station in the blackest of moods, having cursed Vernon every mile of the way from Euston, the chief inspector himself came out to the front desk to welcome the great composer. He seemed awfully grateful that Clive should have come all the way up from London to help with the case. In fact, no one seemed at all annoyed that he hadn’t come forward earlier. They were only too happy, various policemen said, to have his assistance with this particular crime. In interview, when he made his statement, the two detectives realized, so they assured him, just how hard it must have been to write a symphony to order with a looming deadline, and what a dilemma he had been in when he was crouching behind that rock. They seemed rather keen to understand all the difficulties associated with composing the crucial melody. Could he hum it for them? He certainly could. Every now and then one of them would say something like, Now just take us back to what you saw of this man. It turned out that the chief inspector was working for an English degree at the Open University and had a special interest in Blake. In the canteen, over bacon sandwiches, the inspector proved he knew by heart the whole of “A Poison Tree” and Clive was able to tell him of his 1978 setting of that very same poem, performed at the Aldeburgh Festival the next year with Peter Pears and never once since. Also in the canteen, lying asleep on two chairs pushed together, was a six-month-old baby. The young mother was locked up in a cell on the ground floor while she recovered from a drinking binge. Throughout the first day Clive sometimes heard her plaintive shrieks and moans drifting up the peeling stairwell.

He was allowed to go through to the heart of the station, where people were charged. In the early evening, while he was waiting to go over his statement again, he witnessed a scuffle in front of the duty sergeant; a big, sweating teenager with a shaved head had been picked up hiding in a back garden with bolt cutters, master keys, a pad saw, and a sledgehammer concealed beneath his coat. He was not a burglar, he insisted, and no way was he going in the cells. When the sergeant told him he was, the boy hit a constable in the face and was wrestled to the floor by two other constables, who put handcuffs on him and led him away. No one seemed much bothered, not even the policeman with the split lip, but Clive put a restraining hand over his leaping heart and was obliged to sit down. Later a patrolman carried in a white-faced, silent four-year-old boy who had been found wandering about the car park of a derelict pub. Later still, a tearful Irish family came to claim him. Two hair-chewing girls, twin daughters of a violent father, came in for their own protection and were treated with joky familiarity. A woman with a bleeding face lodged a complaint against her husband. A very ancient black lady whom osteoporosis had folded double had been thrown out of her room by her daughter-in-law and had nowhere to go. Social workers came and went, and most of them looked as criminally inclined, or as unfortunate, as their clients. Everybody smoked. In the fluorescent light everybody looked ill. There was a lot of scorching tea in plastic cups, and there was a lot of shouting, and routine, uncolorful swearing, and clenched-fist threats that no one took seriously. It was one huge unhappy family with domestic problems that were of their nature insoluble. This was the family living room. Clive shrank behind his brick-red tea. In his world it was rare for someone to raise his voice, and he found himself all evening in a state of exhausted excitement. Practically every member of the public who came in, voluntarily or not, was down-at-heel, and it seemed to Clive that the main business of the police was to deal with the numerous and unpredictable consequences of poverty, which they did with far more patience and less squeamishness than he ever could.

To think he had once called them pigs and argued, during a three-month flirtation with anarchism in 1967, that they were the cause of crime and would one day be unnecessary. The whole time he was there he was treated with courtesy and even deference. They seemed to like him, these policemen, and Clive wondered if there were not certain qualities he had never known he possessed—a level manner, quiet charm, authority perhaps. By the time it came to the identity parade early the following morning, he was anxious not to let anyone down. He was led out into a yard behind where the patrol cars parked, where a dozen men were standing by a wall. Straight away he saw his man, third from the right, the one with the long thin face and the telltale cloth cap. What a relief. When they went back inside, one of the detectives gripped dive’s arm and squeezed, but said nothing. Around him was an atmosphere of suppressed rejoicing, and everyone liked him even more. They were working together as a team now, and Clive had accepted his role as a key prosecution witness. Later on there was a second parade, and this time half the men had cloth caps and all had long thin faces. But Clive wasn’t fooled and found his man right at the end, without a cap. Back indoors he was told by the detectives that this second lineup was not so important. In fact, for administrative reasons they might even discount it completely. Generally, though, they were delighted with his commitment to the cause. Consider himself an honorary policeman. They had a patrol car going out toward the airport. Would he like a lift in that direction?