Free Hindsight by Peter Dickinson

do with spying on the naval base at Exmouth, via the officers who came to Molly’s Sunday teas; its only significance to this book is that I could have persuaded myself that such an implausible farrago made sense; I would, I now see, have been satisfied with almost anything that allowed me to write about Paul, and Molly, and the Captain, and the deer. But at the same time I was aware that these elements, in particular the deer, were beginning to put the book out of balance.
    Yet the deer were vital. I knew that at an irrational level. They were the key. For example, if Dobbs at our first meeting had had time to ask me how I’d come to meet Molly, I would have said something like, ‘Oh, I was out for a walk in the park and I ran across her and we got talking and it turned out she’d known my father.’ But the details of the incident, which apart from a few turns of phrase I believe I have now recalled exactly, were wholly lost to me until in describing Paul’s almost-ambush of the deer by the lake I once again saw in my mind’s eye the way that particular hind leaped with shock at the sight of me. Instantly I also remembered—re-lived would be a better word—the parallel leap of shock inside my own torso when Molly crept up behind me. I found this process of rediscovery immensely absorbing. I wanted to go on with it, even though I knew that in practical terms it wasn’t either what I should be doing to earn my living or what Dobbs had asked for. I quite expected some form of reproof from him. But certainly not a telephone call at 3 a.m.
    I loathe being telephoned in the small hours. It always gives me a headache next day. One wakes with such a pulse of alarm, one feels the need to rush and crash through the dark to stop the wretched thing clanging away, waking the whole house. One’s sure it’s a wrong number but at the same time aware that something semi-appalling may be about to be sprung on one—one of the children being picked up for drunk driving, for instance, or worse. One’s sleep-metabolism is disrupted by the rush of daytime biochemicals, especially if it’s a wrong number after all, and there’s nothing one can do to absorb the loosened energies.
    I picked up the phone and enunciated my own number.
    â€˜Rogers?’ said a voice, a stranger still, at the far end.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Dobbs here.’
    â€˜Oh … Can it wait till morning?’
    â€˜I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. I take it I’ve got you out of bed.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜I’m sorry about that. I picked up your stuff because I thought it might help me sleep.’
    â€˜We have our uses.’
    Dobbs didn’t respond either to my meaning or tone. He sounded, if anything, angrier than I was.
    â€˜This figure you refer to as the Captain,’ he said. ‘I take it that he is not a complete invention?’
    â€˜The Captain?’
    I was bewildered. I suppose I must have known what Dobbs was talking about, but the passages had been clearly marked (or rather left unmarked) by me as not really concerning him and therefore to be read as fiction.
    â€˜Captain Smith,’ he said. ‘One of the new masters in your latest instalment.’
    â€˜Oh. Both pretty well factual so far, I think. But …’
    â€˜What? Oh, I see. No, I’m not concerned with the other chap. But the Captain in fact both looked and spoke as you have described?’
    â€˜Best I could do.’
    â€˜I take it that his name was in fact Smith?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜May I ask you to think carefully about my next question? You have him say something about speaking nine languages, and you follow that up with a phrase …’
    â€˜â€œI am wanted by the police of five countries.”’
    â€˜That’s it.’
    â€˜Well?’
    â€˜Did he in fact use those words?’
    â€˜Often.’
    â€˜Oh, God!’
    I had