gay, cynical humour. If I might still use that much-abused word . . .
Her first words were a disappointment.
‘The police are dragging the Wheatstone Pond. That girl’s body has turned up. Three days.’
‘Oh!’ I had not had her down for that sort of ghoul. Besides, I had known the girl. She used to come into my shop sometimes. The papers said she was called Margie Duff. She’d been a shy little thing, but I’d liked her.
‘They’ve got frogmen down. Looking for clues, I suppose.’
I just shrugged. She sensed my disappointment and hurried on.
‘They’re bringing up some interesting stuff, that has nothing to do with the murder. Old pop-bottles . . .’
I nodded dismissively. I had not yet sunk to selling old pop-bottles, glass-alleys and Hamiltons, like some I could mention. They fetch seven or eight quid each, but they’re a lot of bother to get clean.
‘Rusty prams . . . bicycles . . . even an old motorbike. The police don’t seem to know what to do with them. They’re just leaving them lying about. Some kids are starting to muck about with them. It seems a shame . . .’
‘Jap bike, is it?’ I still wasn’t really interested.
‘No, it’s a Scott Flying Squirrel. Very much pre-War, I imagine.’
That got me going. Not just a woman knowing about Scott Flying Squirrels, which was strange enough, but the idea of kids mucking about with a classic or even vintage motorbike that, restored, might be worth thousands. I twisted my shop-door sign round to read ‘Back in fifteen minutes’, locked up, and practically ran. She matched my pace easily.
Wheatstone Park’s a bit of a mess. They took the railings away for the War Effort in 1943, only to find they were unsuitable for munitions. So they dumped them in the shallows of the Thames Estuary, along with so many others. Just the gates remain, forever open, forever useless. The bigger trees still survive, and the inevitable rhododendrons. But there is little pleasure in walking there. Too many crushed Coke cans, contraceptives, syringes.
The Wheatstone Pond, from which our whole district gets its name, is about two acres, romantically irregular with one tiny wooded island. Well-escorted children still sail model boats there on Sunday mornings, but it isn’t really satisfactory. The trees at the water’s edge cause wind-shadows and sudden eddying gusts, so that a yacht will halt suddenly, for minutes on end, or change course without warning, as if steered by some ghostly hand. There is green scummy weed that rises from the depths to foul propellers. Beds of dead reed trap expensive plastic electric tugs and liners, far from the bank, where they bob and nod helplessly over the weeks while the sun bleaches their bright reds and blues to a sickly grey.
Around the Pond is a wide path of crumbling tarmac, with sudden mini-cliffs to catch your feet and send you sprawling. Crowds gather there, spontaneously, on certain occasions after dark. I remembered one scene of sheer madness, one Guy Fawkes’, when people had gathered to watch a distant firework display over Hampstead Heath.
Some fool had brought along, for a reason best known to himself, a beautiful scale model of a destroyer over three feet long. He put it into the water, and began to sail it, to the sound of ironic cheers. But then some other idiot threw a smoking firework at it. The firework floated upright in the water, the fuse still smouldering, like a cigarette-end in the dark. Then it went off, hurling a most realistic spout of white foam across the destroyer’s bows. Like a miniature depth-charge. In a second, the crowd, which had merely been amiably drunken before, went into a frenzy. Suddenly, everyone was throwing fireworks at the destroyer. It vanished into a forest of waterspouts. One firework must have exploded on the deck, blowing the foremast and the radio-control away, for the destroyer began sailing in huge circles, while its frantic owner began attacking the firework-throwers at random.
But there were too many of them, and in the end the little vessel sank by the stern, its bow at last vanishing to a hysterical storm of cheering. A lovely model, made of sheet metal; thousands of hours of work.
I have disliked the Wheatstone Pond ever since.
By the time we got there, it was all over. Even the crowd of expressionless ghouls were starting to break up and drift away. The young police frogmen were packing up and laughing among themselves in that heartless way. A