The Loop Read online

‘What now?’ said Nick.

  ‘Now I go to Doncaster.’ I didn’t feel tired yet; if I did, later, I could always stay at a motel up north and drive back in the morning. Nick could get on with typing up my notes and invoice for Alan.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Up north. Towards Leeds.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A major city in the North. Half-way to Scotland.’ She was great on maths and science, not so good on basic geography, apart from the London streets.

  ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘Three hours and a bit.’

  ‘Will you eat at a motorway service place?’

  ‘Maybe, if I’m really hungry. Why?’

  ‘I’ve never been on a motorway,’ she said, looking straight in front of her and twisting the baseball cap in her hands. ‘I’ve never eaten at a motorway service place.’

  She hadn’t missed anything. ‘Do you want to come with me?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. Her face would have lit up if it had been the sort of face that could. ‘I could drive, some of the way.’

  ‘But you can’t drive.’

  ‘Sure I can. I’ve been joyriding since I was eight.’

  ‘No way. No licence, no drive. Not in Polly’s car. She’d have fifty fits.’

  ‘I don’t like Polly,’ she said, with a spurt of undirected, threatened malice.

  ‘You’ve never met her. Save your opinion till tomorrow. She’s coming for the weekend. You can judge for yourself.’ I started the car and drove.

  ‘You’re going back to the flat,’ she said, several streets later.

  ‘Yeah. We’ve got to pick up some stuff, in case we stay up north overnight.’

  ‘Then we’ll eat at a motorway service place?’

  ‘If you want. The food’s rubbish.’ ‘I’ll judge for myself,’ she said, and grinned.

  Chapter Eleven

  The land around Doncaster was very flat. Flat fields, as far as the eye could see, which was pretty far. There were pitheads and electricity pylons striding to the horizon, and power stations with their drifting white trails of steam; some leafy suburbs and outlying neighbourhoods, once villages but now part of the sprawling town, with rows of small terraced houses, and above it all, the stunning sky, high and blue and laced with scudding clouds. Up here it was windy.

  Nick had read through all my Jacob Stone notes, when she wasn’t nagging me to stop for food or coffee, and now she was map-reading. We reached Armthorpe just after five. It was a small ex-mining town: corner shops, video shops, cut-price supermarkets, a pit-head in the town itself, and plenty of little houses.

  Although I knew the north was in recession, and had been in recession for years, they seemed to be weathering it well. The houses were well-kept with clean curtains, new doors and spruce gardens.

  We asked our way to Ormskirk Drive, and the natives were friendly. Plenty of ‘me loves’ and ‘me ducks’, plus workable directions which took us to a narrow residential street of very small houses with a busy adolescent-hangout chippy at one end and a large brick building which announced itself as a Rugby League drinking club at the other.

  A long way from Christ Church College, Oxford, I thought as I parked the Golf outside the unoccupied-looking, curtained windows of Number 5. He’d gone home every weekend. That’d have cost money which, judging from the house, his family didn’t have. What was he going home for? Not luxury. Affection possibly, the fierce affection of the fierce woman in the graduation photograph. Familiarity, possibly. He felt out of his depth in Oxford.

  But he’d chosen to make an academic career. He wanted it enough to work and save for it, in a job and a world he hated, according to Jams.

  ‘This it?’ said Nick, peering past me at the house. ‘It doesn’t look like he’s here.’

  It didn’t look like anyone was there, or had been for some months. The rose-bushes in the three-foot front garden were straying unpruned, old fish-and-chip wrappers caught in their branches.

  ‘I’ll try anyway,’ I said.

  I got out and went up to the door. Nick followed me. I looked for a bell but there wasn’t one, so I used the door-knocker, brass, once-polished, now dull. It sounded loud in my own ears. A curtain twitched at the front window of the next house along.

  I knocked again, not expecting an answer, then peered in to the front room. It was an old-fashioned parlour. Very old-fashioned. A scrubbed plank floor with rag rugs, wooden furniture, oil lamps. No comfortable chairs, no padding, no ornaments. Plenty of old hard-backed books, the kind that looked as if they’d have yellowed, speckled pages and smell of damp.

  The next-door curtain twitched again. I was being Neighbourhood Watched. I moved to the curtain-twitching house. The door was opened before I rang by a middle-aged woman, my height but well over my weight class, wearing a purple and black print cotton dress underneath a blue overall. ‘Can I help you, me duck?’ she said.

  I was sure she could. Under her tight perm she had eager prying eyes in a round face which had Nosy written all over it.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m Alex Tanner, a private investigator looking for Jacob Stone. I was hoping to find him here.’ I gave her a card and she read it, excited.

  ‘Oooh – a private investigator I’ve never seen one of them off the telly. Maggie Whittaker, pleased to meet you. Who’s he, your bodyguard?’ She nodded at Nick, who was standing by the car. She was wearing jeans and a heavy denim shirt; she’s tall, flat-chested, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped: people had mistaken her for a boy before and I considered not putting Mrs Nosy right, in case it alienated her, then decided it would alienate her more if she found out later.

  ‘He’s a she, my assistant, Nick Straker.’

  ‘Hiya, love, sorry about that, my eyes aren’t what they were. Have you come far?’

  ‘From London.’

  ‘You’ll be wanting a drink, then, and the toilet. Come in, both of you.’

  The front room was small and spanking clean, with rose-patterned wallpaper and a new bright pink three-piece suite that occupied most of the available floor-space. Like Carl’s bed in his bedroom, I thought. Carl would be leaving for the airport now, on his way to London. I’d made a big mistake with Carl. But I’d be making a bigger mistake if I didn’t concentrate because I was brooding about it, so I sipped my tea enthusiastically, smiled at Maggie Whittaker, and admired the furniture. Nick sat beside me, crouched up defensively, her tea cooling on a side table.

  ‘D’you mind if I tape our conversation?’ I said, taking out my little cassette recorder.

  ‘Of course not. Who’ll you play it to?’ she said.

  ‘Only us. To check if we’ve forgotten anything.’

  ‘Oh. Well, that’s OK with me,’ said Maggie, much less Yorkshire. ‘So what’s your business with Jacob?’

  ‘My client is worried about him. He seems to have disappeared.’

  ‘Who’s your client?’

  ‘His fiancée.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was walking out with a girl,’ she said.

  More standing up and pumping, I thought. ‘She’s a model,’ I said. ‘A leg model.’

  ‘Oooh,’ she said. ‘Would I know her to look at?’

  ‘You’d know her legs. She’s the Sheer Heaven girl.’

  ‘Oooh. On the poster down by Presto.’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘He’s done well for himself,’ she said. ‘I always knew he’d do well for himself. A serious boy, not like some of the others round here.’

  ‘She hasn’t heard from him since last September. He was supposed to ring her, but he hasn’t, and he isn’t at college in America.’

  ‘I haven’t seen him to talk to since his mother’s funeral,’ she said. ‘He went back to America then, to Chicago. You know his mother died?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry about Mrs Stone,’ I said. ‘Was she a friend of yours?’

  ‘It was sad, but we wasn’t close. Not since we was kids at school together I knew Jan
et well then, but not after she married Zeke Stone. They kept themselves to themselves, being Tubbies, of course.’

  ‘Tubbies?’

  ‘The church in t’next road. Christ’s Children of the Fountain of the Water of Life.’

  ‘Why do you call them Tubbies?’

  ‘D’you know, I’m not reet sure? That’s what we call ’em, always have.’

  ‘Tubmaster,’ said Nick. It was the first word she’d spoken in Maggie Whittaker’s hearing, and the woman smiled at her encouragingly.

  ‘What’s that, me love?’

  ‘In your notes, Alex,’ said Nick, ignoring her. ‘Jacob’s research. Thomas Tubmaster, who founded a sect. This must be it.’

  ‘Happen,’ said Maggie, who was getting more Yorkshire by the second. ‘Aye, happen.’

  ‘So most of Mrs Stone’s and Jacob’s friends would be members of the church?’ I said.

  ‘That’s reet.’

  ‘Who’s the minister?’

  ‘Abraham Master. Do you want his address?’

  ‘And telephone number, if you have it.’

  ‘The Tubbies don’t hold with telephones. Nor telly, nor any man-made fibres. Like those in the film with Harrison Ford.’

  ‘The Amish?’

  ‘Aye. Bit strange, but good neighbours. I’ll say that for them. Abraham lives at 12 Victory Road. Turn right at chippy. If he’s not at home, he’ll likely be praying in t’chapel next door. Is there owt wrong with the tea, me duck?’

  Nick looked at Maggie, looked at me, then drank her tea like a medicine. I nudged her ‘Thank you,’ she said. No social skills, but a sharp assistant, though I’d have spotted Tubmaster myself, eventually. Maybe age was slowing me up. Or maybe it was Carl.

  I made the withdrawing you’ve-been-very-helpful noises. Maggie was still holding my card. ‘I’ll call you, will I, if I hear owt about Jacob?’

  ‘Please do.’

  We were on the way to the car when Maggie caught up with us. ‘You could try Sandra.’

  ‘Sandra?’

  ‘Janet’s sister Sandra Balmer.’

  ‘Does she live around here?’

  ‘Not round here. Gone up in the world. I’ll get the address for you ...’

  Quickly, she was back with a scrap of paper. ‘There you go. She may not speak to you – she’s a mind of her own – and she and Janet fell out a while back, so she may not be able to help you even if she wanted to, but there’s not much goes on that Sandra doesn’t stick her nose into. It’s worth a go.’

  Chapter Twelve

  There was no answer when I knocked on the door of Abraham Master’s house, so I went next door to the chapel, as Maggie’d advised.

  The Church of the Fountain of the Water of Life was a square grey-stone building, about a hundred feet by a hundred by sixty high, with one row of narrow plain glass windows in each side, near the roof, almost like skylights. It was set back from the road and stood apart from the late-Victorian red-brick terraced houses on either side. It looked as if it had been there first which, if it was Tubmaster’s original eighteenth-century foundation, it certainly had. It was surrounded by a low stone wall enclosing a gravelled area. There was a gap in the centre of the wall facing the street, and from it a flagged path led to big black wooden double doors in the centre of the chapel on the street side.

  A large board mounted on a wooden post beside the gap was lettered in gold paint with the name of the church and the minister, and a text: Revelation 22, let him who is thirsty come, let him who desires take the water of life without price. I hoped they’d be equally generous with information.

  I stood in the street for a moment, wondering what struck me as odd about the church. Then I clicked. It was in good repair. The roof looked sound, the stone had recently been cleaned, the windows gleamed and the doors and noticeboard were freshly painted.

  Peculiar, for what must surely be a dwindling congregation in a large and expensive-to-maintain structure? Unless the minister was so charismatic that Tubbies flocked from far and wide to hang on his words, and gave the church all the money their lifestyle saved them on cars and electricity bills and telephone bills and computers and TVs and rental videos – on living in the 1990s, in fact.

  I waved at Nick, who I’d left in the car to locate Sandra Balmer’s address on the map, mimed ‘won’t be long’, and went past the poster, up the path, through the doors (which I’d half expected not to be open) and into the building.

  It was a cavernous space. The windows only admitted a fraction of the light still lingering outside, and it was otherwise only lit by several tall, presumably oil-burning, brass lampstands. Row upon row of plain wooden chairs stretched into the gloom – upwards of three hundred, I guessed.

  Only the front two rows were occupied, by about forty people, with a scattering of very small children but mostly middle-aged or older, dressed in black and white. They were standing to pray, facing a bare table with a large book on a wooden stand. I couldn’t make out what they were mumbling, but the tone was intense and self-righteous.

  At each corner of the chairs, facing outwards as if on guard, stood a man clutching a tall, antique weapon. A pike?

  When the guards heard me they all turned to face me and then the two nearest ones started to move in my direction in a slow heavy-stamping ceremonial march.

  I stood and waited.

  When they reached me, they stood side by side facing me about four feet apart and lowered their pikes towards each other so the weapons formed an X barring my way.

  They were both wearing black rough-looking serge trousers tucked in to long black leather boots, white collarless shirts and long black waistcoats, the sort of all-purpose ‘not-contemporary’ costumes the RSC use for minor characters. They both had very close-cropped hair. Right was fortyish, tall, red-faced and solid. Left was younger, medium height, pale-faced and even more solid. Dressed differently, neither of them would have been out of place in a tag-wrestling contest.

  ‘Halt!’ said Right.

  Since I was already standing still, I did nothing, not knowing my lines and rather sorry to be spoiling their fun.

  ‘I am a Squarekeeper,’ he said. ‘Do you seek the destruction of Christ’s Children?’

  That reminded me of the U.S. Immigration forms which ask if you intend to overthrow the government. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Are you a seeker after truth?’

  I was, but not in the way he meant. ‘I wanted to speak to Abraham Master,’ I said.

  ‘The Squarekeeper General is at prayer.’

  ‘Will he be taking a break soon? When this prayer ends, for instance?’

  Right and Left both curled their lips contemptuously.‘Our prayers do not end,’ said Left.

  As he spoke, the congregation fell silent and sat down. They’d ignored me throughout, but now one of them left the front row and came over to me.

  He was in his late thirties, medium height and muscular, with balding fair hair and a soft-looking face with wet lips. He wore a dark suit, cheap and shiny, a white shirt and a dog-collar.

  When he reached us Left and Right marched in place and banged the bottom of their pikes on the flagged floor. He saluted, they presented arms and stood still.

  ‘A seeker after truth, Master,’ said Right.

  ‘Back to your posts,’ said the man I supposed was Abraham Master, although I now saw it was probably not a name but a title, the guards stamped away and we were left facing each other.

  I apologized for the interruption and told him who I was and what I wanted. He turned the card I’d given him over and over in his hands, then put it in his pocket.

  ‘Return on Monday,’ he said. ‘I will speak to you then.’

  ‘Monday?’

  ‘This is Holy Week, sister. In Holy Week we must pray, and we do no secular business, only God’s work.’

  ‘But ...’

  ‘Only God’s work. Until He is risen. I will talk to you on Monday, not before. Christ keep you.’ He left me
and went back to the congregation.

  I went into the air and fading sunlight with relief, and stood on the path outside, thinking. This religion was seriously weird. Armed guards. Funny titles. No decoration, no statues, no organ for music. The church had been too warm, heated by four large new-looking wood-burning stoves, one in the centre of each wall, but it had also smelt damp and old and left-behind. Anything less like the source of the Water of Life I couldn’t imagine.

  But it did help me to understand Jacob. Now I could see why he could have lived for a year in International House. Barrack-like, impersonal: familiar to someone who must have spent much of his childhood praying here. ‘An ordinary home,’ he’d said. Denial? Wishful thinking? Rejection? He must have rejected the church to some extent because it could hardly be in line with Tubmaster’s moral teaching to have carnal knowledge of a leg model. And a Tubby surely shouldn’t have been in an aircraft in the first place.

  ‘How’d it go?’ said Nick, when I rejoined her in the car.

  ‘He was there, but he won’t talk to me until after Easter.’

  ‘When’s that?’

  ‘Sunday. I’ll have to come back on Monday.’

  ‘We’ll have to,’ she said pointedly.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’

  It was six o’clock, and I wasn’t tired yet. ‘How long will it take us to get to Sandra Balmer’s place? Have you found it?’

  ‘I’ve got the village – only about ten miles away. I tried Directory Enquiries for a phone number, but she’s ex-directory.’

  ‘Where’d you find a phone?’

  ‘Round the corner, outside the chippy. I’m not quite brainless, you know. And it’s time you got a mobile, I can’t work under these conditions. I’m hungry. Can I have some fish and chips?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A can of Pepsi?’

  ‘Oh, all right.’

  * * * * *

  On the drive over to Sandra Balmer’s jet-lag or just plain tiredness began to hit me. I felt as if I’d been awake for thirty hours on the trot, and I was losing interest in Jacob and everything except a hotel room and a bed that I could crash on face down, dreamlessly. I hoped that we’d find the house empty.