Death of a Dormouse. Reginald Hill

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       1

      The Sheffield branch of the Lewis Agency was situated at the top of a time-blackened building in a tall Victorian terrace not far from the squat Victorian cathedral.

      There was no lift, and Trudi laboured up the stairs passing other offices en route, a debt collecting agency on the first floor, an insurance broker’s on the second, a typing and secretarial bureau on the third. Two girls were standing outside this door, chattering like house sparrows, but they fell silent at her approach and did not resume their giggling conversation till she went by, face burning with the certainty that they had guessed her destination. Only pride prevented her from retreating there and then. It was pride, or rather a kind of stubborn pique, that had brought her here in the first place. There had been no more mention of the dating agency till Trudi had been packing to leave. Then Janet had casually tossed her a slim brochure and said, ‘You were asking about this, remember?’

      It had been the Lewis Agency’s hand-out. It was a smallish northern business, limited mainly to large towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The Sheffield address had been underlined in red.

      The blurb claimed that the agency was based on sound scientific principles but it still relied on human judgment rather than computer print-outs for matching its clients. While not specifically a marriage bureau, it aimed at a clientele who were looking for serious relationships, rather than just casual dates.

      Trudi and Janet weren’t meeting till the first week of the New Year. Determined that her friend should not have the satisfaction of getting the expected negative response to her casual enquiry if the brochure had been of any use, Trudi had rung up the agency on New Year’s Eve. A woman called Fielding had answered in a most businesslike way and Trudi’s vague general enquiries had been swiftly translated into a firm appointment the following Wednesday morning before her lunch date with Janet. She had sat up alone that night, toasted the New Year and gone to bed, hopeful that she would wake up in the morning a new woman.

      Now here she was, the same old nervous neurotic, labouring up the last flight of stairs and wondering what the hell she was getting into.

      A few minutes later she felt rather better, mainly because Mrs Fielding was such a pleasant surprise. A comfortably plump woman of perhaps sixty with rosy cheeks and white, uncontrollably curly hair, she sat behind a desk even more untidy than her hair and cheerfully proffered a cup of tea just brewed with the help of an electric kettle and an old brown teapot. If this was a demonstration that new scientific methods had not been introduced at the expense of the personal touch, it worked.

      After some preliminary chat which may or may not have been searching, Mrs Fielding said, ‘Shall we get down to it, Mrs Adamson?’ and extracted a blank form from the autumnal heap of papers before her.

      It all proved very painless. When she hesitated about her age, Mrs Fielding said cheerfully, ‘Knock a couple of years off. Everyone does it, so if you don’t, you’ll just end up being taken for two years older than you are.’

      After her own details came the details of what she was looking for. These seemed to form a fairly bland recipe when Mrs Fielding checked through them with her.

      Age, forty-five to fifty-five. Height, not less than five feet nine inches. Build, preferably well made but not fat. Non-smoker. Social drinker. Professional man. Generally middlebrow. Should like plays and music, but not too abstract or intellectual; town dweller, country lover; knowledgeable about food and wine, but not pretentious …

      As Mrs Fielding droned on, Trudi found herself thinking with amusement how fussy a penniless widow in her mid-forties imagined she could be! She was able to feel amused because none of this seemed real, it had all assumed the dimensions of a game.

      Even when she handed over the registration fee and signed a form agreeing to the payment of a further sum for each introduction that went beyond a first meeting, she could not feel it was real.

      It was only when she had descended the now empty stairs and regained the open air that the sound of traffic and the sight of people walking along the busy pavements brought back reality. She felt a sudden inrush of panic at what she had done. What if somewhere out there was a man who fitted the pattern of her imagined requirements exactly? What if there were dozens of them?

      She didn’t have to meet anyone, she told herself firmly. That was quite clear. She didn’t have to meet anyone.

      That stemmed the panic for a moment but it came back tenfold as she walked away, running over in her mind what had been said and written during the interview, and suddenly it dawned on her with terrifying clarity that what she had drawn in the limits of that stereotyped form was a blueprint for Trent.

      

      Janet’s unconcealed amazement almost made it all worthwhile. Typically, however, once she got over the surprise, she launched an armada of good advice.

      ‘First time, always meet somewhere public. Don’t let him pick you up or anything like that. I did that with one and he was over the doorstep, flashing his teeth and God knows what else, before I could say hello!’

      ‘Oh Jan! Not really?’ said Trudi, amused and horrified at the same time.

      ‘No, not really,’ Janet reassured her. ‘But really enough to be worth taking care over. So, somewhere in public. Inside, not out. You don’t want to risk hanging around in the rain, catching cold. Somewhere that you can sit around without attracting notice. Hotel bar rather than a pub, perhaps, though either’s a bit chancy.’

      ‘How?’

      ‘Well, I was approached by this chap in a hotel bar when I was waiting once; he fitted the general description, so I gave a big smile and chatted away merrily and thought that maybe I’d struck lucky till he suddenly produced the key of his room, asked me how much and whether I took American Express!’

      ‘Janet!’

      ‘Sorry. Joking again, but it was almost like that. Hey, what are we worrying about? Here. Here’s the ideal place! Lots of people, but wide open, very mixed population. And it’s familiar ground.’

      ‘Here’ was the open-plan bar-foyer of the Crucible, Sheffield’s civic theatre, where the two friends often came either for coffee or for a lunch-time drink and snack.

      ‘Now, one thing you’ve got to recognize, Trudi, is that men lie. Even more than us. We may trim our ages a bit, but men lie about everything. So you’ve got to use your eyes and your ears. He may say he’s a brain-surgeon on eighty thousand pounds per annum basic, but check his shirts for frayed cuffs. Have a close look at his shoes. Big money buys real leather. Check his mouth. If his dental jobs have been done by some NH jockey on piece-work, it shows. Ask him to spell pericranium. Tell him you’re doing a crossword or something.’

      ‘But what if he’s a radical brain-surgeon who likes gardening, has no interest in clothes and can’t spell?’ said Trudi.

      ‘Drop him,’ said Janet with a shudder. ‘You’re like me, dear. Too old for radicals. Next thing. No body contact. Shaking hands is the limit. Nudges, squeezes, accidental brushes, they deserve one warning. Hand up your skirt or erection against your bum, that’s it. Walk away.’

      ‘With his hand up my skirt?’ said Trudi. ‘That could be awkward.’

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