Talking to Strange Men Read Free

glisten. It had belonged to his wife and would once have been too small for John, but lately he had lost a lot of weight and his shoulders were in any case narrow. He wore the jacket because she had worn it, because it was one of the few really personal things of hers he still had.
    Without thinking, he had come out of the passage into that exposed place, into the light. It had not occurred to him there might be someone on the green under the pillars. His mind had been occupied with the green and the messages, wondering why for instance there had been nothing there for a month, but actually to catch sight of someone in the act of depositing one, that had hardly crossed his mind as a possibility. Immediately, of course, he retreated. He did not think he had been seen by the very tall, very thin, man on the green, whom he had himself seen only briefly.
    Back down the passage he went, not running, but walking fast, and concealed himself in a doorway just round the end of it. Here he would make himself stand for a full ten minutes, he thought, until he could be sure the bearer of the message would be gone. After all, he had all the time in the world, he had the whole empty evening before him, and his sole purpose in using this route had been to keep that pillar under observation, to feed his curiosity, to try and find someclue as to what it was all about. Three months it had been going on now, he calculated. Well, it had probably been going on longer than that but it was in December that he had first seen one of their messages. Before that he had had no occasion to come down here, to this desolate place that had its utility by day but died at night.
    The hands of his watch crawled. At exactly seven he left the shelter of the doorway and made his way back along the passage. For one moment he had a nasty feeling that he would be punished for his nosiness if the tall thin man were to be waiting round the corner for him. With a cosh perhaps – or a gun. But he made himself go on, cautious, prepared. And there was no one.
    The stream of metal flowed on over the flyover. The pillars that supported it seemed faintly to vibrate. Where the roadway dipped right down and the pair of pillars were shorter than a man, a cat crouched in the scrubby grass. John could see its bright, piercingly green, eyes. He was allergic to cats, their fur gave him a sort of asthma, but it was usually all right out of doors, they didn’t bother him so much there. He went across the street and on to the grass and up to the pillar where the message must be. It was funny what a thrill of excitement he felt each time he saw one of those little packages up there. He reached up and took down the plastic envelope, not tearing it but unpeeling the scotch tape with care. An interesting thing was that this time it was up above his head, which meant perhaps that this was the first time for a long while that the tall man had deposited the message.
    As he had known it would be, the message was in code. But had they changed the code? Suppose it was a different code from last time? That didn’t really help him, nor did knowing if they had changed it, for he had so far deciphered none of the messages he had seen. As had become his habit, he wrote the words down in a small notebook he had bought for the purpose, going back across the street and standing under a light to do this. Then he folded up the paper again, replaced it in its envelope and returning to the green, taped it back inside the groove of the pillar once more, reaching up to find the spot where the tall man had put it.
    Should he have followed the tall man? John confessed to himself that he hadn’t the nerve for that. Not yet. Not unless he prepared himself, anyway. And there was another consideration, an absurd one perhaps, though it wasn’t a matter of vanity. He didn’t want to get the jacket wetter than was absolutely necessary. As it was, he would have to dry it with care. Did this sort