The Detection Collection. Simon Brett

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СКАЧАТЬ intake of wine still coursing through his veins, he finally decided. Be a devil. Alice will never know.

      But next morning, leaving Alice still snugly there for her few extra minutes, as he stepped into the bathroom he saw at once, in the familiar scratched blue plastic mug on the shelf above the basin, a totally alien toothbrush.

      It came as a shock. As if … As if, he was to say afterwards, it had been left there by a real alien, a little man from Mars. In a moment, of course, various explanations occurred to him, likely or unlikely. The likeliest – he could not even think the brush might belong to someone Alice had invited in – was that she had bought herself a new one. But that, in fact, was not at all likely. For one thing he was almost sure she had acquired her pink-handled brush only a month or so ago – she had always said it was better to have a different colour from his – and in any case the alien brush was not at all like anything Alice would ever buy.

      No, this brush, the alien one, was, well – alien. It had a very broad long white handle, looking something like a spatula. Its head, too, was large, larger than that on any toothbrush he had ever seen, and its bristles, thick, and somehow aggressive, were noticeably longer than the ones on Alice’s or his own.

      He wanted, and did not want, to touch it, to pick the thing up and examine it more carefully. But in the end, after taking his shower, thinking hard the while, all he did was delicately to extract his green brush from the scratched old mug, use it, more hastily than usual, and slip it back into the mug close beside Alice’s, almost touching in fact. Then, standing rather far back from the mirror, he started his razor buzzing.

      But, dressing finished, just as Alice stirred he made a sudden dash into the bathroom again and – he did not really know why – snatched up the alien thing, stood for just one moment looking at it, and then stuffed it – it was quite dry – into the inner pocket of his jacket next to his wallet.

      Sitting in the kitchen over his two quick cups of tea and one thick slice of toast and marmalade, with Alice opposite in her pink-roses housecoat – her library job did not start till ten – he managed to slant his tentative inquiries about how she had spent the time while he had been in Bedford into the subject of shopping. Then, when this produced nothing, he asked whether she had remembered to renew … Not, absolutely not, her quite new toothbrush but, randomly hit on, the half-empty jar of marmalade.

      ‘No,’ Alice said, in her usual neatly efficient manner, ‘if we’re careful we won’t need more till we go for the big shop on Saturday.’

      Henry would have liked to have tried some other approach. Each time he thought about that wide, gleaming white toothbrush he had seen planted between the two of theirs in the mug, he felt a dart of disquiet. But time was getting on, and he was never, except when there was a strike on the Underground, late for work.

      So he swallowed the last of his tea, folded his napkin, put it in its ring and went to collect his briefcase from its place in the hall, calling out his customary ‘Goodbye, darling, see you about six.’

      Then, as he closed the hall door, as usual firmly, a new thought struck him.

      He hauled his key from his trouser pocket, the right-hand one of course, handkerchief always in the left, slid it into the Yale, opened the door, and, shouting out the first thing that came to mind, ‘Forgotten something’, he thrust his head into the sitting room, glanced rapidly round – windows all intact, latches in place – before running upstairs, heedless now of any noise he might make, and taking an equally quick survey of the windows there.

      Yes, each one properly closed, as Alice always made sure they were before going to bed. So, how …? But no time to think about that now.

      ‘Got it,’ he called out (What can I say it is, if Alice …?) and in a minute he was striding down the road towards the station, briefcase swinging from his hand.

      At his desk in Manifold House he found it hard to concentrate on his report on the Bedford branch. The thought of the alien toothbrush kept flicking up in his mind, like a colour TV ad during an old black-and-white film, momentarily startling and then back to the monotone world of yesteryear. But the puzzle of that mysterious arrival in the scratched old plastic mug seemed to be without any practical answer. Earlier in the train, when in putting his wallet back after tucking his travel card away he had just touched it, he had felt so dazed he had been unable to bring his mind to consider it at all. But now, for minutes-long spells, he found himself doing nothing but grinding and grinding away at the out-of-this-world puzzle.

      But is it really out-of-this-world, he asked himself almost every other time the image of the over-large white toothbrush entered his head. Can it be? Can my house, our own little house, have actually been invaded by Martians? By toothbrush-using Martians? No, ridiculous. Impossible. But then had Alice, for some unfathomable reason, really gone out and bought such a strange object? As totally unlikely.

      Once even he went to the toilets and, in a safely locked cubicle, took out the monster brush and peered and peered at it. But no enlightenment came. A burglar? A burglar, while sleepy Alice slept and slept? No. All the windows had been shut and intact, and no sign either of the back door or the front having been forced. And, anyhow, why should a burglar do no more than just put that extraordinary object into the mug?

      So did this thing in my hands, he thought, somehow just materialise, there where I saw it as I stepped into the bathroom? Where I snatched it up before Alice could see it? For heaven’s sake, science fiction is fiction, pure fiction, and I, Henry Tailor, am real. As real as— As this toothbrush I’m staring at.

      Quickly he put it back in his jacket pocket – what if someone spots it, asks questions? – and as soon as he was at his desk he surreptitiously transferred it to his briefcase. Then, for the first time ever, he used its tinny little key.

      At a late stage of the afternoon he recognised that he had managed to scrabble together some sort of a report on the Bedford branch. Muddled though it was, he thought in a moment of inner truth, it would get much the same reception up above as the properly thorough ones he prided himself on submitting. Still, putting it in the internal post – H.J. Manifold’s disapproved of inter-office e-mailing – he felt a small surge of relief. And with that came an idea.

      Is there perhaps, here in the building, some disinterested outsider I could talk to about all this? At once then, with a sudden bad-taste gulp, he realised that all this meant, in the deepest recesses of his mind, the possibility that— That the alien toothbrush had somehow been there in the bathroom because of Alice. Because Alice really had the lover he had dismissed from his mind almost before the thought had entered his head? But, no, no, no. That was just not possible, not my Alice.

      So shall I, at five o’clock, look out for Peter Crossley-Smith from Major Branches – he’d be the one – and suggest a quick drink? I could still be home by about six. I’ve done it before. I did it when, deciding for once to go out with two or three of ‘the boys’, I met Peter. Old Five Wives, as they call him, sometimes to his face. When he invariably replies, with that neighing laugh of his, Probably be Old Six Wives before I’m done.

      For once, as it turned out, Old Five Wives was not surrounded by any noisy departing slaves from the H.J. Manifold’s mill. Henry was able to fall into step beside him and, after he had suggested the statutory ‘quick pint’, managed even to say there was something he particularly wanted to discuss, ‘a sort of, well, private matter, so perhaps we could go somewhere different for a change.’

      ‘Touch of the naughties, is it?’ Five Wives, propped at the unfamiliar bar, immediately asked.

      ‘Oh. No, no. No, nothing of that СКАЧАТЬ