Read Online The Waiting Time by Gerald Seymour - Free Book Online Page B

shower, no bath, were down the stairs. If he used them early he didn’t have to queue. He shaved carefully. It seemed important that day that he should look his best. When he had shaved, checked in the mirror that he had not cut himself, he went to his wardrobe.
    There were only two suits to choose from. There was the one he wore five days a week at Greatorex, Wilkins & Protheroe and there was the darker one, which carried the story of Joshua Frederick Mantle’s recent life. Worn for the job interview eighteen months before — a formality because Mr Greatorex had already offered him office-boy employment. Worn for her funeral twenty months before, a bright May day with daffodils still out in the graveyard. Worn for the appointment with the specialist and for the wedding thirty-three months before, autumn leaves scrambling against the steps of the register office and only enough witnesses behind them to make it decent. Bought and worn for the leaving party in the mess a very long time before, and he had been a washed-up casualty of the ‘peace dividend’. From the wardrobe he took the dark suit and the white shirt hanging beside it. He laid them on his bed, which he had already made — it was the routine of his life, from far back, to make his bed as soon as he was out of it. Back at the wardrobe, he glanced over his ties. Two of silk, both from Libby, both for his birthday, but they remained hanging on the bar. His fingers touched two of polyester, Army Intelligence Corps and Royal Military Police, then left them. Two from the high street in Slough, neutral ties that gave away nothing of him, of his past, green and navy. He took the green one, and placed it on the shirt, beside the suit, on the bed. In a cardboard box on the floor of the wardrobe was the shoe polish, the brushes and the duster. He took the better black pair of shoes, the pair from the interview, the funeral and the wedding, the pair he didn’t wear in court or at the offices of Greatorex, Wilkins & Protheroe. The routine was to clean his shoes each morning, to spit on the polish and to buff the shoes to brilliance. It did not matter to him that it was raining, that the shoes would be quickly dulled. He dressed.
    He had the radio on, not for music or the weather forecast or the early news bulletins of the day but for the traffic information. It was important to him to know how long a journey would take him — another of the discipline routines that governed him. He took little comfort from the radio in the evenings, seldom used it, which was peculiar for a man who lived alone and who had reached the statistical age at which he had entered the last quarter of his life. It was as if he had rejected the outside living world that the radio would have brought him. He switched it off, then the bedside light.
    He stood for a moment in the gloom.
    Downstairs the lavatory flushed — perhaps the seed company’s representative or the computer programmer. Both the other tenants on the floor below had offered friendship, been deflected, and the family on the ground floor. They had all tried to build a relationship, drinks at Christmas, small-talk on the stairs, and had not been rewarded. Joshua Frederick Mantle distrusted the hold of a friendship, the tie of a relationship. He had adored his mother, shot dead in Malaya. He had respected his father, Military Medal pinned on his chest by the King. He had made his commitment to the Intelligence Corps, had been transferred out compulsorily after the matter in Belize. He had buried himself in the work of Special Investigation Branch, had been made redundant in the ‘downsizing’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He had loved Libby, sick, then dead and buried. He had no desire to be hurt again.
    There were few books in the sitting room, none recreational. He had hardly touched the fat volume in his hand for seven years. It was The Manual of Military Law, Part 1, and he scanned the section relevant to assault.