Clouded Judgment

By Marc Breman

‘She wasn’t making this easy for him, but he had to go. He was doing it for the right reasons, and she would thank him for it later – except it was unlikely that she would remember any of it, or even him.’

Six weeks ago Colin Holly had been a different man. Now, after saving a world, his life had changed – up to a point. He had tried to engage more with his surroundings, and he’d kept doing the daily crossword in case he was needed again, but what he really wanted was not to go home to an empty house, not to miss Anna, and to find Kia and the team wanting his help and support. Perhaps, if he’d known what was in store for him during the next twenty-four hours, he’d have hidden himself away and held his head in his hands. But maybe it was time to vacate cupboards and deal with matters head-on; having protected the planet, how difficult could it be? It couldn’t turn out to be any worse, could it?

Meanwhile, somewhere deep in the North Atlantic Ocean, all was calm. The sky was clear and blue, the sun was high and warm, and the air was fresh and clean. Everything was quiet...’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marc Breman
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781999733759

Marc Breman

Born in Belsize Park, London (currently living back there, with my wife Carol), to Dutch parents.Character-wise: Leo Kottke, London Pride, Allan Holdsworth, Gunwharf Quays, Led Zeppelin, cheese, Stravinsky, my Les Paul, storms, Quo (not still, but again), Boulez, brandy, Stevie Ray Vaughan, pesto, Machaut. Did I mention Quo?Professionally, the last thirty years have been spent compiling crosswords for every tabloid in the land, particularly the Mirror two-speeds (for the full thirty years) and the Express Crusaders (just the last twenty), plus periodicals, trade magazines and advertising campaigns. I can reveal that the notorious last News of the World crossword, supposedly full of vitriolic references to Rebekah Brooks, contained nothing of the sort, having been submitted, by me, a full week before the shock announcement of the paper’s termination. Sad but true.The previous decade saw me as a musician. It started with me being drafted into a pop band signed to Epic with a couple of singles in the charts, touring with the likes of Elton John and Shakin’ Stevens. There followed a number of rock and jazz ventures of my own, none of which I was happy with, and the decade ended with me as Donovan’s lead guitarist on the first of his comebacks – not a massively enjoyable experience but at least I can say I’ve played Wembley Arena.At this point, in order to keep music enjoyable, it seemed sensible to restrict it to a hobby. It is still both. I still gig occasionally, currently as a Son of Sue and a Wild Uncle. I have also written a concerto for two guitars and chamber orchestra which can be heard on Soundcloud.Social networking sites bring me out in a rash, I’m afraid, (despite, or maybe because of, having an Instagram account at marcbreman_author) but there is a marcbreman.london, so I am available at [e-mail], an address that completely exhausts my talents for self-publicity.

Book preview

A FEW MORE INTRODUCTORY WORDS

Ah, you’re back. I’m so glad.

Starting without you would have been rather pointless. Holly’s journey is, after all, your journey, and indeed mine. Without you to hold his hand, he’s not going anywhere, and neither am I. Does a tree make any noise falling over in the forest if there’s no-one there to hear it? Yes, of course it does – but without an audience, why would it bother?

I digress. It’s another day, another puzzle, and some familiar characters are anxious to get started. Should they prove up to the task, the same updated grids will be found at the end of chapters as and when solutions are found.

The song thing – yes, I did associate another song with this book, and have again woven some of the lyrics and the title into the text, but as this song is even more obscure than the first, I’m not even going to mention that.

Anyway, genuinely delighted to have you back. See you on the other side.

THE GRID

CHAPTER ONE

I can’t wait to get this over with. Some hero.

He stood up from the breakfast table, figuring he’d stared at his uneaten sandwich for long enough.

‘Tudor, you moved!’ Her voice was both reproachful and warm, and gently betrayed her origins on the Yorkshire coast. ‘I was wondering if it was you or your statue.’

Mention of that hated representation of himself made him even more resolved. If he was going to be revered, let it be for the right reasons. The irony wasn’t lost on him that, should he succeed, he wouldn’t be remembered at all.

‘Camille, I’m going out. Got some things to do.’ He went round the table to where she was sitting and kissed her on the head – mainly, he realised, to stop her getting up and seeing him to the door. He wasn’t sure he could cope with that.

‘OK, husband,’ she simpered, never tiring of that word.

Christ, you’re not making this easy.

He stroked his bushy moustache. Well, at least that’s something she wouldn’t have to put up with any more. She’d always hated it.

‘Love you,’ he said as nonchalantly as he could. Her contented ‘Mmm’ reassured him that she hadn’t read anything into that. No reason why she should, he said it often enough.

He picked up his leather jacket from the back of the sofa and made it through the front door, determined to put a safe distance between them as soon as possible in case the idea that they would never see each other again made him change his mind. Oblivious to the cold outside, he walked two blocks before his breathing settled, as he focused on the task ahead.

Only then did he throw a reluctant glance at the sky. A steely clear blue was punctuated by solitary clouds like a pod of whales swimming slowly by. It wouldn’t be like that for long. He shivered, not from the cold. They’re not going to know what hit them. They’ll have to be on top form. But that wouldn’t be his problem any more.

Alone in the room, Camille got up and started clearing away the remains of the breakfast. She felt uneasy. She knew something was wrong from the way he’d taken his leave – as if the unprecedented sight of an ignored bacon sandwich wasn’t enough – but she hadn’t wanted to let on. Whatever it was must be important, and he’d tell her about it soon enough.

She had faith in him. After all, he’d saved her, which she took personally, despite grudgingly admitting that he’d also saved everybody else. And he didn’t keep secrets – except about his past.

It had been a year to the day since she had first seen him, silhouetted against the flashes of the photographers, and had run up to introduce herself. Whenever she asked him about his past, he’d say simply that he didn’t have one, which she took to be his way of saying that his life hadn’t really started until he met her. He in turn found this both endearing and amusing. He’d told her his biggest secret, that he genuinely hadn’t existed before that fateful day, and she had interpreted that in the only way she could.

The last thing left on the table, apart from the vase of lisianthus that he knew were her favourite flowers, was his newspaper, folded to reveal the crossword. She picked it up and looked at it, first in pride that he’d finished it, then in some alarm at the frenzied way he’d circled one horizontal and one vertical row.

*

The clues that led to that frenzy were causing consternation elsewhere.

Giving his daily cryptic crossword puzzle the customary early morning once-over, the man wondered, as he did every day, why this particular puzzle had to be so important, why it couldn’t have been one from a paper he would actually have wanted to read. Not at this time of day, obviously, not when there were far more pressing matters at hand. But maybe afterwards, when synonyms had been matched, abbreviations identified, anagrams appropriately realigned, solutions assembled and dispatched. It would have been a self-indulgent luxury to have been able to turn his attention to the rest of the paper’s contents – had they been worth reading.

But he wasted less time on this particular part of his ritual than was usual. Since he’d awoken that morning, he’d had the nagging feeling that there would be something out of the ordinary in today’s grid, and more worryingly, that it would be down to him to flag it up.

Starting at 1 Across, as always, he skimmed through the clues one by one without a single look at the grid itself. This was his normal procedure, refusing any help that letters from previous solutions may have offered, although in this case the grid was desolately empty.

The Across clues elicited little more than a furrowing of the brow, his mouth only making a few silent shapes rather than its usual mutterings, in between giving the end of his multicoloured pencil some particularly deep tooth marks.

Despondently toying with the knot of his tie, he moved on to the Down clues. He hadn’t got far when something made his heart beat a little faster.

Consulting the grid for the first time, he sought out the number of the solution that completed a line with the one that had just caught his attention. Referring back to the relevant clue, his eyes widened as he deduced its meaning, but it wasn’t until he connected it with the previous solution that his fist connected with the desk at which he was sitting – a loud thud but dull, muted by the number of books piled around him.

His chair shot back six inches, as though obeying some magnetic force.

‘Parcels!’ he yelled, without taking his eyes off the newspaper.

After a brief silence, footsteps could be heard on a staircase, unusually hurried footsteps responding to an unusually urgent tone of voice. In a matter of seconds, a man with an apprehensive look, one hand holding a television handset and the other in his pocket, appeared in the doorway.

The man at the desk finally prised his eyes away from the cause of his outburst and fixed them unblinking on the new arrival. His mouth twitched slightly, struggling to formulate the necessary words.

‘Radio gloves,’ he said at last.

The other man started. His arms tensed, bringing his hand out of his boiler suit pocket, causing whatever else was still in there to jangle.

‘Functioning? Breathing? Animate?’ His voice becoming ever more incredulous. ‘Alive?’

CHAPTER TWO

If you had said to Colin Holly six weeks ago that he’d be sitting on a bench outside his local pub every morning, he would have thought you very strange. You would not have guessed this opinion from his expression, which would have given nothing away, but he would have had good reason to question your sanity, not least for the fact that he’d been on the wagon for well over a decade, following a hazily remembered bout of dependency.

But in the six weeks since he’d played his part in saving a world and its endearingly eccentric inhabitants, he had jettisoned a number of daily routines – some unconsciously, some wilfully – and acquired a new one of stopping on the way back from buying his paper and sitting at one of the wooden picnic tables that had just replaced the round, metal tables outside the Luminous Steed after yet another regime change, grateful and mystified in equal measure that they’d been left out in the middle of winter.

He was determined not to adopt the fanaticism displayed by his late friend Eric after his similar encounter with this other world, but nevertheless felt compelled to get a head start on the crossword every morning, just in case his services were called upon again, as after a mere two days’ trepidation he fervently wished they would. He even caught himself occasionally whispering ‘1 Down’, just in case it whisked him away to a sun-drenched galleon, particularly appealing in the current cold snap, until he realised that it would be a different grid and potentially a far less benign location.

Looking at the clues, he would imagine what their combination might be generating, ever conscious that, even if his services weren’t called upon, Kia and her team would still have to deal with it, perhaps with a different Solver. That thought made Holly feel particularly uncomfortable.

Christmas had been and gone in the meantime, and although he had spent that day on his own watching television as he did every year, he had felt compelled to go round the corner to his local park late on New Year’s Eve and climb, along with countless others, the daunting hill that afforded a panoramic view across London. Despite refusing endless offers of whisky, he had enjoyed the camaraderie, feeling less of an outsider than he had for a very long time.

In another effort to participate more in what he found himself calling the real world, he had dusted off an old watch he’d found languishing on a shelf, a Hugo Boss with a rectangular, silver face and simple, single lines instead of numbers that his late wife Anna had bought him several lifetimes ago. She had tapped it when she gave it to him. ‘That’s my face,’ she had said, ‘so now you can see it whenever you check the time.’ He was enjoying wearing it again, checking it frequently, without ever really registering the information it was engineered to give him.

He also found himself venturing further from home, particularly up the steep incline that ran past the hospital, then turning left between the two churches to the next shopping parade. It was here that he’d noticed the appearance of the word ‘artisan’ to describe anything from bakeries to coffee. This disconcerted him for a while, until he realised that it reminded him of Mister Noose, or Rose Nose Tim as Uncle Sid had dubbed him, the Tabloid Artisan of the fateful grid and Holly’s first experience of the effect of his solutions up close – his first kill, as he imagined James Bond would have considered it. Having made that connection, he had to admit the word gave him a mild thrill every time he saw it.

But the frisson of the assassin would have to wait until later, unless of course his scrutiny of today’s grid turned up an obvious candidate for his next victim. He rebuked himself for this frivolous chain of thought. Making people disappear, even if they’d only existed for a matter of hours, was not something to be taken lightly.

Another change to his routine had been the location for buying his paper. The morning after his ordeal in Chateau Remorse (why did he insist on calling it that? Why couldn’t he call it after the Chameleon Realm or that charming old ship?), he had gone to his usual newsagent’s at the end of his street, full of the resolve of the previous night to get the proprietor’s attention and look him in the face for the first time. He had slapped the paper on the counter with an assertive ‘There you are, my good man!’. Unfortunately, his plan must have monopolised his attention up to this point, because the face that looked up at him all too readily was decidedly female and decidedly incensed. Holly’s occasional stammer reappeared with a vengeance.

Since then, he had been using the convenience store on the other side of the square. This involved playing dodge-the-bus on either side of the small, triangular central green. Here, while recovering his breath, he would nod solemnly at the rough sleeper who had made it his home, and admire the elaborate Victorian drinking fountain and its inscriptions, particularly ‘Every one that thirsts come up to the waters’, which he felt, coming from the era of temperance slogans, could have been written for him.

On his return journey this morning he had read it again and, suitably uplifted, had gone straight to the pub, albeit only to make use of one of its benches. He found this spot particularly conducive to this first examination of the clues, the background noise of traffic and conversations better at focusing the mind than the disconcerting silence of his house, especially after the daily disappointment of returning there to find himself still alone.

Ever hopeful that today would be the day, he set about acquainting himself with the constructs of that morning’s grid, just in case any of them decided he was an expendable obstacle to their continued existence. He also reminded himself that not all constructs had a negative impact, as demonstrated by the captain and the baron, and that ambivalent characters shouldn’t be dispatched too hastily, as in the case of the General Surgeon.

But for some reason his mind was racing, and not in a way that solved cryptic clues. This happened periodically. He was aware that, instead of thinking laterally, he was being drawn along straight lines – in this case, straight back to the day he met a giant celebrating his third birthday.

After a short time, short enough to curse himself for being so feeble, he was tempted to give up and go home. But he made what felt like a supreme effort and directed all his concentration, such as it was, at the crossword, determined to get at least something down on paper.

Almost reaching the end of the Across clues, and almost giving up again, he finally found one that even he in his current state of mind could solve – ‘Reference gets soldiers into trouble (7)’. It was the ‘into trouble’ that spoke to him first, especially coming at the end of the clue. ‘Trouble’ was an anagram indicator, and the anagram of ‘into’ would be ‘-tion’, a very common word ending. Finding ‘men’ as a synonym for ‘soldiers’ gave ‘men-tion’, a synonym in turn for ‘reference’.

He wrote that into the grid, safe in the knowledge that nothing would happen unless he completed the horizontal line by solving 26 Across. In fact, he gave that clue the most cursory of glances, almost relieved at not being able to solve it instantly. The word ‘mention’ certainly didn’t conjure up anything too menacing.

Hurrying on, the next clue that brought him to a standstill was the last Across clue, ‘Catholic tried adjusting belief (6)’. Again, ‘adjusting’ shouted anagram, in this case an anagram of ‘tried’, coming after an obvious C for ‘Catholic’, giving ‘c-redit’, meaning belief. Another word into the grid, another non-committal half a pair, and another word giving no immediate cause for alarm.

After a deep sigh, which reminded him how cold it was, he forced himself to cast an eye over the Down clues, and here he didn’t have far to go. Despite initially stumbling over the word ‘Rails’ – the first word he’d heard from a resident of that other strange world, albeit in anagram form – he refused to let himself get sidetracked.

‘Animated a veil badly (5)’ revealed its secrets without hesitation, and also gave him a welcome reminder of two characters he’d been missing – Uncle Sid, who would have been delighted that Holly was solely in anagram mode today, and Kia, who would doubtless have put all her money on something about cartoons. ‘Badly’ implied an anagram of ‘a veil’, and ‘animated’ suggested ‘alive’. This word did make Holly a little uneasy – whether something no longer was, or something was that would have been better off not. He shrugged off the idea, made the entry in the grid and deliberately avoided its companion word, 15 Down.

At this point, his mind finally remembered the word lateral and nudged him forcibly towards the person he actually missed the most. Despite all the extraordinary characters he had met that day, and the truly remarkable places he had visited, his overriding memory was of something that hadn’t actually happened.

He may only have imagined sharing a sofa with Anna, but in his mind now it was the most real thing he had seen. It had only been fleeting, and neither had spoken a word, but it was her face as she had looked at him then that he saw now when he closed his eyes.

Giving his mind an equal shove the other way, he looked back at his paper, conscious that his thoughts were fast approaching ‘what if ’ territory – what if that had been real? What if she hadn’t had that accident? Maybe this last idea was why, five clues further, he spotted ‘Small change in her injury (6)’.

‘Change’ was one of the most basic anagram indicators. Although ‘small’ was nearly always just an S, it still took him a while, rearranging the letters of ‘in her’ after the S, to come up with an injury, which turned out to be ‘s-hiner’, a black eye.

He stared at this word for some time, his mind trying not to conjure up an image of something inevitably hideous, not easy to credit but worth a mention, and definitely alive, punching him in the face. After giving himself a rational talking-to, he concluded that if sustaining such an injury was the only way of getting back into that world, even for only twenty-four hours, then it would be a price well worth paying.

Not entirely convinced of this argument, he decided he’d had enough mental exertions for the time being. Sliding the folded newspaper into the generous inside pocket of the fleece-lined jacket he’d found neglected in his wardrobe, he stood up stiffly and set off for home.

CHAPTER THREE

It wasn’t far to his house, but Holly was aware that he was trudging. And squinting. The sky was a cold blue, punctuated by dense, little clouds. The sun was bright enough to make him screw up his eyes at the reflections that came off every car, and when a cloud came over it was as though a dimmer switch had suddenly been fully deployed, so that he continued squinting in order to see anything as his eyes adjusted to this relative darkness. And just as he was achieving this, the sun would come out again.

As he walked through his open gate, he glanced at the next house along. There had been a time when he would have kept his head down and his gaze averted, but eye contact with his octogenarian neighbour Gus no longer worried him, and not just because his self-confidence had taken a slight but appreciable shot in the arm.

Since they had spoken that night after the day of the Chameleon Realm (there, didn’t that sound better?), Gus hadn’t ventured out of his house for some time, although Holly could see lights going on and off behind the blinds that were constantly closed, and when Gus had finally reappeared, he had walked past Holly as though he wasn’t there. Holly hadn’t taken offence. He could clearly see that Gus was simply preoccupied – to such an extent that Holly had even resisted his considerable urge to ask Gus what was bothering him in case the train of thought suffered a derailment.

Holly didn’t expect Gus to behave any differently today, so of course he did, not only by coming out of his door at this precise moment – as ever letting it close unsupervised behind him and not double-locking it, which always made Holly feel uncomfortable – but also by giving Holly the warmest of smiles.

‘Bless my soul. A rare sighting of a lesser spotted neighbour. Haven’t seen you for an age. Been away?’

‘Er, no, no, I haven’t been anywhere…’

‘Ah, hibernating. Staying in, curtains closed, riding out the storm. Very wise.’

Holly was too curious to learn what had been preoccupying his neighbour to let this obvious revision of the facts get in the way.

‘And did you solve your, er, problem?’ he asked, trying to sound both knowledgeable and vague.

‘Ah, told you about that, did I? Well yes, I finally got the better of Monsieur de Vigenère, after strenuous effort.’

In order to maintain his bluff, Holly tried to second-guess which type of contest had clearly just taken place, and settled on chess as the most likely candidate.

‘Friend of yours?’ he asked.

‘Sadly not, no. We missed each other by some four hundred years.’

Chess now seemed considerably less of a possibility. Holly kept his response to an interested expression in order to elicit more information.

‘A fascinating character,’ Gus continued, ‘a French diplomat, also an alchemist. And of course, a giant of cryptography, the particular field in which we were jousting.’ He leant slightly closer across the dilapidated, wooden fence that struggled to separate the two properties. ‘Do you like a puzzle?’ he asked, in a voice Holly imagined a conspirator would use to recruit someone into carrying out an act of treason.

‘I can think of nothing better,’ he replied. If I’m honest, he admitted to himself, I can’t actually think of anything else.

‘Splendid. We must compare solutions sometime soon, maybe over a few…’ He stumbled on a very distant memory. ‘…Actually, a cocoa would do just fine.’

Holly smiled and nodded.

‘Anyhoo, I must away to share the fruits of my labour.’ Gus was already through his gate and off along the pavement. ‘Go well,’ he called back, waving without looking round.

Watching him disappear beyond a tall hedge a few houses away, Holly almost regretted not including Gus in the trials of that earlier day. They might have arrived at some of the solutions a little earlier. But maybe bringing someone else along wasn’t how it worked. Maybe people were either in this world or the other, with only the Solvers flitting back and forth.

Holly was in any case pleased to see that Gus was more aware of his surroundings again, although hearing his voice now saying ‘Oh, excuse me, young lady’ from a short way down the street didn’t bode well. Having said that, Holly knew that with Gus you could never tell what was accidental and what was deliberate.

He turned and faced his own house. He didn’t see the peeling paintwork and the pointing that demanded attention. The windows that hadn’t been cleaned in years made no impression on him, and he was blind to the vegetation that had insinuated itself around anything that offered a toehold. All he could see was an empty, lifeless shell, promising another uneventful day.

He considered forgoing the daily let-down, the confirmation that the house was indeed deserted, and going for a walk, his longest walk ever, maybe even staying out for a full hour. But he couldn’t. Just in case. With a sigh, he fumbled with his keys, dropped them, cursed them, and eventually got them to work.

Halfway through the door he stumbled, needing three more steps to regain his balance. Looking round to see what he had caught his shoe on, it took a few moments to realise that it had been the shoe itself.

Being a creature of habit extended to wearing the same pair of shoes until they wore out. When he had been married, Anna had managed to restrict this to wearing the same pair of shoes until they showed the first signs of age. Nowadays, with the excuse that no-one cared what he looked like, including himself, they had to be falling apart, as one of them now was. The front of the sole of his right shoe had come away and was already curling down.