Free The Suburbs of Hell by Randolph Stow Page A

age of sixteen should be fingerprinted, with their consent. A solicitor and a schoolteacher worried in the
Tornwich & Stourford Packet
about civil rights, and Harry Ufford wrote the
Packet
a confusing letter arguing that the prints of all members of the professional classes ought to be in the records anyway. An edited but still puzzling version appeared in print, and he discussed it with Arthur in the deserted bar of the New Moon.
    ‘Well, I can’t make head or tail of it,’ said Arthur, showing his usual distaste for the subject. ‘From what I hear poor old Prykey was hit by a sniper, from somewhere near the telephone box. So what fingerprints could they have?’
    ‘P’rhaps he was
in
the box,’ Harry suggested. ‘P’rhaps they found one there.’
    ‘Well, good luck to them,’ Arthur said; ‘they’ll need it. The owners of a lot of the prints they’ll find there are in Turku and Antwerp and San Sebastian and even bloody Leningrad and Lagos now.’
    ‘If it’s not that,’ Harry said, ‘then they’ve found something in one of the other places. They int all that stoopid, Arthur. I read a lot of books about how they work in this sort of case.’
    ‘You and all the rest of the ghouls who drink here,’ said Arthur. ‘Kinky, I call it.’
    ‘Well, we int ezzackly crowded out with ghouls,’ said Harry, ‘are we? I mean, I can still sort of move my elbows, like, tonight.’
    ‘You know what it is?’ said Arthur. ‘It’s that outside Gents of mine. Nobody dares risk a pee in case he gets shot. I’ll let you use the Ladies, if you need it. Not many ladies get in here lately.’
    ‘I int scared of your bog,’ Harry said. ‘Glad I int a milkman, though. They’re the jumpiest boys outside Ulster these dark mornins.’
    ‘It’ll all blow over,’ Arthur said. ‘I’d put a tenner on that. What is it—two weeks since the Commander? Poor old boy. He was the same age as me. Well, he had no one to leave behind, and I suppose that’s a sort of a mercy. How’s that young brother of Paul’s? I haven’t seen him since they used to get in here sometimes of a weekend.’
    ‘I’ve seen him better,’ Harry said. ‘Things catch up with you, know what I mean? It’s sort of—I dunno, weird, and ’
orrible
—that the three what was picked out was
that
three. You’d think that whoever it is was tryin to kill Greg too, tryin to sort of kill him inside, like.’
    ‘Three in a cluster,’ Arthur said, ‘then a fortnight with nothing. I think it’s over, Harry. I don’t think I’m going to have to bring my Gents indoors. A nine days’ wonder, which will never be solved, I bet.’
    Harry was looking moody. ‘But that’s got to be,’ he said. ‘We can’t live with that unsolved. Christ, Arthur, you’re a proper cheerer-upper, you are. Now you’ve got me thinkin about that lad, that young Greg. He’s—’ Harry said, and paused, brow ridged with searching for the right word, ‘he’s wiped out, like, know what I mean?’
    Greg Ramsey seldom went upstairs in his brother’s house, and never into the room in which his brother died. Now and again, more and more rarely, the telephone would ring in that room, behind the closed door, but he made no move to answer it. He had arrived in Tornwich the last time with most of his possessions in his car, and before long had turned the downstairs sitting-room into an average student bedsit, where he spent most of his days listening to records or playing his guitar, or lying in his sleeping-bag with a book in his hand.
    The house was cold, but he did nothing about that except to switch on an electric fire. The meals he cooked for himself were usually vegetarian, and most often of baked beans. Washing-up piled in the shining new kitchen, which gradually acquired a greasy patina and a sour smell. One night, lying sleepless, he heard one of the taps dripping into the filled sink, and because he liked the sound in the empty house he set it dripping every night before