Personal

And it was, at least geographically. We parked the car in a lot made of crushed grit, behind a pub, but we didn’t enter the establishment. We walked right by it. Maybe there was an arrangement with the owner. Nothing said, nothing asked, nothing offered, but a clear understanding all the same. Don’t call the tow truck, and don’t ask questions. Then we made a left and a right through leafy streets, no doubt closely observed from behind lace curtains, but the British are cautious people, and we fell squarely on the right side of the benefit of the doubt. Just three random people, taking a stroll. We watched the sun go down, finally, and the sky went dark, and we passed a long board fence, and then just before another started up there was a yard-wide gap, which was the entrance to some kind of a public footpath, long and straight and narrow, with trodden-down weeds and a meagre scattering of black grit underfoot, and high board fences either side, exactly a yard apart all the way. We walked single file, Bennett first, then Nice, then me, a hundred and fifty paces, until we came out in a grit clearing with a green garden shed in it, which was recently painted, with two words over the door picked out in white: Bowling Club. Behind it was an immense square of perfect lawn.

‘Different kind of bowling,’ Nice said.

‘Very popular sport,’ Bennett said.

‘Hence the enormous clubhouse,’ I said. ‘But I guess they need to accommodate everyone at once. That would explain it. For the grudge matches.’

‘There are many other clubs,’ Bennett said. ‘All of them larger.’

He bent down and took out a key from under a stone. The key looked freshly cut. He put it in the door. He had to jiggle it a little. But he got the job done. The door swung inward, and I saw gloom inside, and caught a musty smell, of wood and wool and cotton and leather, all stored too long in damp conditions. He held the door with spread fingers and used the other hand to motion us through.

I said, ‘What’s in there?’

He said, ‘Check it out.’

What was in there was a whole lot of bowling club stuff, but it was all piled to one side, leaving a clear lane in front of the windows, which looked out over the immaculate grass. Neatly spaced in the clear lane were three kitchen stools, each one set out behind a pair of huge night-vision binoculars, each pair mounted on a sturdy three-legged frame.

Bennett said, ‘We had gales last winter. Nothing very serious, but one fellow lost a panel out of his fence, and another lost a twenty-foot conifer. Which by chance opened up a direct line of sight from this shed to Little Joey’s house. Which was lucky, because we can’t get any closer. We assume his immediate neighbours are either working for him or loyal to him or scared of him.’

‘So this little shed is surveillance HQ for Joey?’

‘You get what you get.’

‘You sit for hours with your back to the door?’

‘Take it up with whichever carpenter died fifty years ago.’

‘With the key under a rock?’

‘It’s a budget issue. It’s the sort of thing they suggest. Why not share a key instead of cutting ten? So they can buy a new computer.’

‘No video?’

‘That kind of thing, they like to spend money on. Wireless upload straight out of the binoculars. All day and all night. High definition, but monochrome.’

‘Does the bowling club know you’re here?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Good,’ I said. I figured swearing a busybody committee chairman to silence was like taking out an ad in the newspaper.

Nice said, ‘Suppose they come in to play a game of bowls?’

Bennett said, ‘We changed the lock. That one is ours, not theirs. They’ll think there’s something wrong with their keys. They’ll call a meeting. They’ll vote on whether to spend club funds on a locksmith. They’ll make speeches for and against. By which time either it won’t matter any more, or we’ll have changed the lock back again and gone home happy.’

I said, ‘How well can we see from here?’

He said, ‘Take a look.’

So I shuffled in, and sat down on the middle stool, and took a look.

THIRTY-EIGHT

CLEARLY THE BINOCULARS had some kind of fantastic high technology in them, because the image was spectacular. Not all green and grainy like I was used to, but liquid and silvery and endlessly precise. I was looking at a house about four hundred yards away, at an angle of about forty-five degrees. I could see the front, and all of one side, in large segments, through the bays of an iron fence, which was built on a brick knee-wall, and divided into sections by occasional brick pillars. The effect was reasonably grand, and I was sure the expenditure had been saner than the lunatic scheme at Wallace Court.