The Aerodynamics of Pork Read online

  Patrick Gale

  The Aerodynamics of Pork

  Copyright

  Fourth Estate

  An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.4thestate.co.uk

  Published by Flamingo 1992

  First published in Great Britain by Abacus 1986

  Copyright © Patrick Gale 1986

  The quotation from Eric Crozier’s text of Britten’s Saint Nicholas is reproduced by the kind permission of Boosey and Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd Copyright © 1948 by Boosey & Company Ltd

  Patrick Gale asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Source ISBN: 9780586091463

  Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007385409

  Version: 2015-02-26

  HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

  Dedication

  I dedicate this first-offering to the cherished memory of my brother Matthew, because he held the gifts of rage and love, but mostly because he could laugh like a drain.

  (Notting Hill, February 1984)

  Epigraph

  There is something in us all, that does not come out in family life, or is suppressed by it, or rejected by it, or something. But I daresay it keeps the better and fresher for its own purposes.

  Anna Donne, Elders and Betters by Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Criminals frequently follow a general pattern of actions when committing a crime. If it can be said that crimes have a personality then it is because individual criminals, by the methods which they follow, give their crimes noticeable characteristics. The criminal’s method of working is known as his modus operandi or M.O. It is difficult to avoid acting in a way which is natural to an individual and upon this human factor the strength of the modus operandi system stands.

  Police Training Manual: Section 63

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Friday One

  Friday Two

  Friday Three

  Friday Four

  Friday Five

  Friday Six

  Friday Seven

  Friday Eight

  Saturday One

  Saturday Two

  Saturday Three

  Saturday Four

  Sunday One

  Sunday Two

  Monday One

  Monday Two

  Monday Three

  Tuesday One

  Tuesday Two

  Tuesday Three

  Tuesday Four

  Wednesday One

  Wednesday Two

  Thursday One

  Thursday Two

  Thursday Three

  Birthday

  Have you read…?

  About the Author

  Also by Patrick Gale

  About the Publisher

  FRIDAY one

  When the leading lady is also the birthday girl, nobody and nothing gets in her way. This month’s conjunctions, the most favourable for Lady Lion since she first strutted out in her birthday best, will make her invincible. So, tell those guys to watch out because for the next week the little firecracker in their lives is going to get everything she wants, and we mean everything!

  On any other occasion Seth would have been mortified to have been seen reading the thing in public, but his last term was finished and, God willing, it was the last time he would take this train.

  A thud of compressed air against the windows; the only sizeable tunnel of the journey. On the upward trip it required a ritual. When the darkness came, Seth had to say ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’, over and over in his head, counting on his fingers, until sunlight reappeared. The number of times he said it told him the number of days he had to wait for sex. It was always a fairly safe bet, more a reassurance than a matter for anxiety. Each time he said it about eight or nine times: each term it took a week for the hot-house atmosphere to send the wraiths of holiday sweethearts wilting into bland insignificance. Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’

  He reached up to touch the spot on his left temple. Flushed a shade of angry prawn, it still wasn’t ripe. He hoped Mother wouldn’t think that he didn’t wash. He prided himself on his ability to avoid the grease-bound ill temper of his teenage cousins.

  The train was slowing down. Basingstoke. To one side, pre-fabricated buildings sporting familiar names, to the other, a housing estate. Expanses of turf, tidy concrete paths, golf course, shopping precinct, saplings in wire cages.

  The platform was full. Seth lifted his things off the seat before him and placed them in the luggage rack, all things save his violin. Having ensured that this took up all the space to his left, he loosened his tie, undid his top button, placed a protective hand on the case, and closed his eyes in feigned sleep.

  Doors opened and he could hear the carriage fill. Mumbled apologies and murmured thanks sounded around him. A titter of children stamped past in the aisle. Doors slammed and the carriage was once more in motion. He could feel someone’s skirt against his knees.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Her voice was firm and forties, faintly troubled. She had entered in a hurry and was now balancing between the legs by the door. He pictured her perfect creases and the vaunting caprice of her perm.

  ‘Excuse me, young man?’

  His fingertips reminded him that he was still nursing an unsuitable magazine on his lap. It was now impossible to lift the pretence. A drop fell from his armpit to run down his ribs and soak into a fold of cotton above his waist.

  ‘Here. Take mine.’ A man’s voice from in front. ‘I think he’s been asleep for some time.’

  There was a stir as he stood up, and she fluffed herself back into shape and lowered her rump.

  ‘Why, thank you. So kind.’

  That pinched ‘O’ of a crumb-anxious scone-eater.

  Someone started to slide his violin from beneath his grasp. The saviour was making room to sit down. Seth produced his best deep-sleep mumble and slid his hand on to his lap, nestling his head further into the curtain. The man, whose voice had been youngish and pleasant, sat beside him, presumably with the violin across his pinstriped thighs. As seat springs stretched to his left, Seth checked the impulse to decline into his companion’s lap, but allowed himself a slight stir to straighten an ankle twisted unnaturally in the hasty preparations for the tableau. The magazine slapped to the floor. The basilisk snorted her surprise. Forty minutes to Waterloo. Forty woollen suits in swaying, July proximity. The siren call of a youthful libido proved irresistible. Leaving the angels to their tears, Seth pursued a fantasy a while, then slid to earnest slumber.

  Seth Felix Peake, fifteen years eleven months, was
a regular misdemeanant only in the eyes of the Church and of those parents whose schools were founded later than eighteen-fifty. He had not been expelled. In the academic opinion he was lost, but in the eyes of his mother, he had been discovered just in time.

  FRIDAY two

  It was clever; started by the wind, of course, but once set in motion it did seem to move by its own momentum. Maude Faithe, Mo to her friends, stared with genuine interest at the system of cogs, water, sails and weights labouring before her. A woman stood clutching a little girl’s hand. Pointing, she cried, ‘Do look, darling. Isn’t it clever? Do you see how it works?’

  Darling Maude looked again. She saw how it worked. The bright enamelled shades of the sculpture’s parts no longer charmed her.

  ‘Makes you feel a bit sick, really,’ she thought, and moved on.

  Plain clothes assignments made a nice change. The sense of cloaked power as you walked with the unsuspecting. Uniforms had their strong points. People thought you were kinky to like wearing a uniform, but it wasn’t that; uniforms protected you. They meant you could walk along the street being yourself, but just being a WPC to anybody else. Made you sick the way people looked at your civvies, sizing you up. It had made her sick at school when they’d teased her for having only one skirt. In a uniform people stopped sizing you up and started accepting. There again, in a uniform they knew what you did and expected you to do it – the beauty of plain clothes was that you only had to do it when the spirit moved you. Cloaked power. It was a bit kinky when you thought about it, really.

  Mo looked nonchalantly at the crowd around her. She was proud of her nonchalant look. How to watch unsuspected was the secret of cloaked power.

  It was a pretty small area to watch, a green space near County Hall. She’d been sent to patrol a crowd like this the week before, in that converted railway shed. Always the same people. Always the tall, toffee-nosed women with headscarves tied to their shiny, black handbags, and sometimes their husbands, who were always in suits. Always the fairies, who tried to dress differently from everyone else, and so ended up looking the same. Mo could spot a fairy at twenty paces. And then there were the feminist types. People talked a lot of crap about how men aged better. Men only aged better because they didn’t try to look so stupid. If a man grew his hair long and curly, and wore tight clothes, and showed his legs all the time, he wouldn’t age so well either. Mo was glad some women had seen the light at last. It gave her something nice to look at.

  Of course, Timson had made out that the organizers had asked for a fairly senior representative of the Met to come along and ‘spread good relations’, but she saw through his little lie. Making her snoop for small fry was the punishment he gave because she wouldn’t lick his arse like the rest of them. Besides, wandering through a crowd in uniform would have been a wasted opportunity. She’d come in civvies.

  All had gone well at first. It was even exciting at first. Women recruits were just starting to be given more responsibilities than looking after lost kids and acting as decoys in nightclubs, so she’d felt a bit of a pioneer. She’d been so proud when the papers came and took pictures one day. Until she’d read the articles, that was, and then she saw that all they were interested in was the sexiness of the new uniform. She started getting wolf-whistles in the street, which she never had in civvies, and when such attention began to be paid from her colleagues she complained.

  Despite the warnings of the other women, she’d taken a collection of the offending newspaper cuttings together with reports of harassment to an appointment with a superior officer. There she’d demanded that since women were doing a ‘man’s job’, they be allowed to wear the same clothes. The bastards in the office, all men, of course, had laughed and said that if she’d wanted to hide her legs so much she should have been a bus driver. Her blood boiling, she’d marched home, taken a pair of kitchen scissors and cut off all her hair-do. Reappearing for work the next day looking like some escaped nun she was spared the wolf-whistles, but she also ruined her chances of promotion for the next few years.

  In the end it had come twice, each time as a reward for bravery. Constable Faithe rescued a man from a burning building and then ran back into the inferno and retrieved an unconscious child. Two years, and some exams later, Sergeant Faithe had captured a sex-attacker. She’d been on plain clothes duty in the danger area, on a Highgate estate, when a man had run up to her and, panicking, spoke of a dying woman in his nearby flat. She had recognized the approach and then a similarity to a recent photofit of the wanted man. On a quixotic impulse, she’d pretended to be fooled and returned to his flat. She knew that an attempted attack would provide the concrete evidence for his arrest. The attack came with an unexpected violence. Mo had overpowered him, but not before she’d received a severe knife wound in the thigh and a slash across one cheek. She’d remained in hospital for several weeks before emerging an Inspector, with a GLC award for services to women, and a face scarred for life.

  Most had forgotten her quondam reputation as a troublemaker when she was sent out in charge of a team to keep control during a new equipment delivery at Greenham Common airbase. There were likely to be road-blocks by peace protesters, and it was the Force’s job to see that the delivery found its way into the compound, and to quell any violence.

  Mo had read all the articles, but had never believed that things would reach such a state that groups from the Met would be asked to help out the Thames Valley contingent. As she watched the cold drizzle on the van windows, she’d remembered a piece in the Mail. It had said how the campers slept out in the open, belongings protected by plastic sheets. No sanitation. No way of keeping food fresh. The writer had sought to shock, emphasizing the juxtaposition of the women’s all too apparent intimacy and their squalid living conditions. They called each other ‘love’ and shared cigarettes.

  ‘Must be made of iron,’ she thought. Men in the back of the van laughed at a shared joke, others were reading papers or smoking. Just another day’s work. Mo was glad she’d used a false name on her CND subscription form, glad she hadn’t been too brave. Apparently there were lists. No violence was likely so it was hard to see why so many police were needed. Surely an array of power apparent would be enough to clear the way?

  ‘Please don’t let them see me be gentle.’

  The van stopped, doors flew open and soon they were making their way along a track deep in mud. There was a workaday feel about the movement. Mo gave out orders, answered questions mechanically, her mind intent on the Mail article and its photographs. They called each other ‘love’ and shared cigarettes. She rounded a corner and saw the gate. Across the gateway and on thirty feet of track before it sat women. They looked so incongruous there that at first she was struck only by their numbers. As she approached she saw that they were mostly aged between nineteen and thirty, muffled against the damp and cold, noses shining, cheeks flushed. The arrival of power apparent was barely registered on a single face. Mo heard a few policemen joking quietly, then one of them calling out,

  ‘Hello, my loves!’

  A woman started to sing something and the rest joined her, smiling amongst themselves, some rocking gently on the grass.

  The first men had reached the group and were having bodily to haul protesters away on to the verge. Passive resistance. Mo had briefed her team on this. The supplies juggernauts were pulling up behind, waiting to get through. Mo arrived at the group, hating her regulation skirt. She had to be brisk, to hide her softness.

  ‘Come on. Let’s be moving you,’ she said in the firmest tone she could muster and, bending down, she slipped her hands under the arms of the nearest woman and began to pull. She felt the body go quite limp. Her feet slipped in the mud. Women’s voices called out.

  ‘Hey! She’s one of us!’

  ‘Wotcha, sister!’

  ‘Love the split-skirt, darling!’

  She bowed her head, and hauled the woman back through the mud. It was ridiculous. Embarrassing. Whenever a protester was r
eleased, she lay still until her remover had walked a few paces, then hurried back to the group. Now Mo understood the need for numbers. Of course, arrests could easily be made – places like this were a mess of by-laws – but only as a last resort; arrests meant unwanted publicity. The material – not the enemy, official memos never spoke their mind – the material was too inflammatory. Tactful power was called for, but tactful power, Mo reflected, was difficult to summon in a skirt and three inches of liquefying mud. She marched back to the group and seized another pair of shoulders. A woman sang, ‘You can’t kill the spirit.’

  Mo hurried towards the protesters. It was like some stupid Brownies game. Get two girls outside the circle before the whistle blows and the first one rushes back to Brown Owl. Another pair of shoulders, wool wrapped. More mud.

  ‘On and on and on.’

  A man’s voice was raised. Mo glanced across. An arrest was being made. The accused would only sing in response to his questions. If it wasn’t so bloody maddening, you’d have to laugh, thought Mo. Then she slipped and sat heavily in the mud. She swore. The protester stood and pulled her up with a smile. Mo thanked her, and blushed. The woman ran laughing back to her sisters. They laughed too and a new song was started.

  ‘Lean on me, I am your sister.’ The notes were distorted by giggles. ‘Lean on me, I am your friend.’

  Angry now, Mo staggered across in the confusion. Just one more try, then she’d arrest one. But as she bent, the girl she had meant to seize rolled over and huddled herself around Mo’s ankles in a foetus posture. It was all Mo could do to keep upright. Her feet sank deeper in the mud as she tried to free them.

  ‘Lean on me.’

  She saw the face. The blonde hair cropped short, the pierced ear gently pointed, brown eyes staring straight ahead, mouth curled in a mischievous grin. The girl in the mud was beautiful. Mo froze, staring at her.

  A man approached. Sergeant Higgins. Mo hated him. Cocky little bastard.