Some fool had stopped a car in the middle of the road just beyond the bridge. I nearly ran into it.
I stamped on my brakes. Squeals behind me told me that a line of other motorists was doing the same. Not only was the car stopped, but its driver’s door was open blocking what was left of the road. There was no room at all to get by because the road was divided by a steep kerb to stop cars going the wrong way on the bridge. Motorists were stopped on the other side of this kerb, staring. The way they stared told me that my first idea – that this was an accident – was wrong. This car had been stopped deliberately. Then I saw its driver.
She was dancing. Dancing on the sidewalk beside her car.
She was a small, unlovely woman in glasses, with a figure like a sack of straw with a string tied round it. And she danced. She bent her knees, she hopped, she cavorted. Her ragbag skirt swirled, her untidy hair flew and her spectacles slid on her barely-existent nose. Beside her, her passenger also cavorted. Both of them waved their arms. Both bounded about. He was a teenage boy, dark and startlingly handsome, and he towered over her in his dancing, rather sheepishly. He had the air of one who was only dancing because she was not going to drive on unless he did. I exonerated him. As for her…
I put my thumb on my hooter-button and held it there. I was not the only one.
The woman stopped twirling, but only to bend at the knees and shoot out her fingers – those fingers were adorned with nails long enough to be classed as murder weapons – flick, flick, flick, towards the road. It was a totally contemptuous gesture. The boy did the same, self-consciously. I could see they were both singing, or chanting something, as they flicked. Then, calm as you please, they both went back to dancing.
I was angry enough to augment the sound of my horn with a blast of magic. It fair bellowed. Behind me, the bridge was jammed solid and half the cars on it were hooting too.
The boy at least noticed. He looked unhappy. But the woman went on dancing and he obediently imitated her. They did another flick, flick, flick of the fingers, this time in the direction of the rocky bank. And then they danced some more. I lost my temper.
I took my thumb off the hooter. I turned off my engine, pocketed my keys and got out of my car. They were doing another flick, flick, flick as I reached the woman’s car. Her keys were inside it, dangling from the ignition. I nearly slammed the door on them – except that then she would have had to pick the lock to get in and no other car would be able to move until she had. Instead, I stalked round the bonnet of her car and confronted the capering pair on the pavement.
“Luck, luck, luck,” they were chanting. Flick, flick, flick.
“Do you mind holding your Sabbath somewhere else?” I said. I had meant to say much more, but I had got so far when the traces of her personality hit me. She was Mallory. Of course. She had done nothing but lead me a dance all along.
She stopped dancing. She turned to me as if I had just crawled out of a sewer. Then, with immense disgust, she put one of her outsize fingernails to the bridge of her glasses and looked me up and down all over again.
Two can play at that game. I took my left lens between my finger and thumb and focused the look right back at her. “Maree Mallory, I presume,” I said contemptuously, before she had quite got round to speaking.
“Get lost,” she said, as she had been meaning to say all along. She had an unpleasingly loud, gloomy voice, with a sort of sob embedded in it. Then, belatedly, she registered what I had said. “You may know me,” she retorted, “but I don’t know you and I don’t want to.” Beyond her, I saw the boy – who must be Nick Mallory and not the infant Janine had implied – looking as if he wanted to get down and lie under her car.
I was angrier than ever. It was the sob in her voice, I think. “Rupert Venables,” I said – or rather, snapped. “I wrote to you.” I let go of my lens and brought out my wallet. “I’ve been looking for you all over town to give you your wretched legacy. Here you are.” I held out to her in a fan the ten ten-pound notes I had made ready to support my story.
She looked dumbfounded. And, as I had hoped, she automatically put out her hand for the money. I counted the ten notes into it with angry ceremony. There began to be yells, whistles and cheers from the motorists watching across the road and from some of those behind, who were now either hanging out of their windows or standing irritably beside their cars. Mallory’s face turned a dull, furious red. Her cousin’s dark face was redder still. Mallory’s chin bunched and her hand flinched, as if she wanted to throw the notes into the road. But the money meant too much to her. She hung on to it.
“Ten,” I said, “making a hundred. Now will you please get into your bloody car and drive it out of my way!”
She did not answer, just strutted haughtily to her open door, to further hoots and cheers from the line of motorists. The boy folded himself in through the other door with the speed of an early silent film.
“Was it worth the money then?” the driver of the car behind mine called out, as I went back to my own car.
I wanted to say it was indeed worth £100, just to be able to wash my hands finally of Mallory and her family, but I could hardly explain why. I simply shrugged and smiled and got behind my wheel as Mallory started her car with a leap and roared away in a cloud of blue oily smoke. Her car was nothing like as elderly as the brown Morris. She just didn’t look after it, evidently.
I was glad I did not have Andrew with me on the way back. I was able to swear the whole way home. I arrived still raging.
“What’s the matter now?” Stan asked from my dark living room, over the remorseless rhythm of a Bach fugue.
“Mallory,” I said, snapping on the light. “If anyone wants to make that girl a Magid, it will be over my dead body! She’s… unspeakable! And ugly with it. Besides being mad.” And I angrily described my day’s adventures.
“Hm. Did she show any talent at all?” he asked.
“I’m sure she has bags of it,” I said. “Enough to keep me away from her all day. Which is where I want to stay! I don’t want any part of someone who uses their talent to hold up rush-hour traffic by dancing widdershins in the street. Not even ashamed of it, either! At least her teenage cousin had the grace to look embarrassed.”
“Look on the bright side,” Stan said. “Mallory can’t behave like a Magid. So you’ve eliminated one candidate. Now you can start thinking about the other four.”
“What fun!” I said savagely, and stormed into the kitchen. I said to myself as I tore open the fridge, “And how am I supposed to look at four people when they’re scattered all over the globe? Japan, New Zealand, Bosnia, Ohio – oh, fun!”
Stan had evidently followed me. His voice said at my shoulder, “I’ve been thinking about that.”
I slammed the fridge shut. “Don’t do that!”
“When you’ve had something to eat and cooled off a bit, I’ll tell you,” he said.
It took me another two hours to simmer down. That only happened when I admitted to myself that not only had I been hoping that Mallory would turn out to be Magid material, but I had also, on the basis of her personality trace, been building up a picture of a brave person in considerable adversity. She had a broken home, she had been jilted by this man Robbie, she had no money and was forced to live with a bitchy aunt, and on top of this her father (adoptive father, I supposed) was dying of cancer. I had been prepared to be wonderfully sorry for her. But all that went when I saw her grotesque baglike figure prancing at the side of the road. Then, after the way she had first ignored and then looked at me, I wanted to