The Peacock Cloak

for these good but justifiably angry people to move on in their own good time.
    “Where’s Lavender Grove, mate?” the crowd called out collectively to the people of Upton.
    “Up that way, turn right and then left, you can’t miss it, mate,” the people of Upton called back in strong stern voices, only too glad to be of help. And some of them came along.

    Pretty soon the crowd reached Lavender Grove, and, shouting and yelling all the while, began squeezing itself in as best it could.
    It was street of little detached houses with tidy front gardens. Outside every house on the street there were law officers in blue to make sure that no one got carried away.
    “Frustrating, isn’t it?” said a tall man near Johnny. “You want to do over the whole damn street of them, don’t you?”
    “Course you do,” Johnny said.
    But the man’s friend opined that it didn’t really help to take it out on the neighbours. A neighbour’s proper role in this situation was more to come out and tell stories to Screen about the one being Named.
    “…about how they never would have thought it, and all that,” the man said.
    “Well, I suppose,” the first man reluctantly agreed.
    There were law officers in front of number 15 too. But they were there for a different reason. Their job was to ensure that the people inside did not slip away before it was time. They had a couple of cars ready with their engines running and red lights going round and round on top. Pretty soon the sergeant in charge decided there were enough people crammed into the street. He nodded to the officer by the door, and the officer gave a sharp rap and soon out came the wife Jennifer and the two children Horace and Portia, their faces white with the knowledge of their sin. For, as everyone knows, to be in the presence of sin is sin. It’s something you catch like a disease.
    And the crowd booed and hissed and yelled and a couple of hotheads rushed forward to lay into them, dear good passionate young fellows that they were, and had to be gently pushed back by the law.
    Cold and stern, the law put the mother and the two children in one of their cars and off it went down the street with the other car following after. You could see the law didn’t like it any more than anyone else, letting Welfare’s family get off lightly like that, but they had their job to do, and all credit to them.
    “Chuck them down a well and see how he likes it,” yelled a fat woman, and a great roar of approval went up.
    Johnny looked at her enviously and wondered what she’d got that he hadn’t. But he noticed that the crowd seemed to sense somehow that these were only words, not an actual proposal. It let the car go by and out of Lavender Grove and off to wherever they were going.

    So now came the real business. All these good honest people who’d come up here from City Hall were standing looking at the front door of 15 Lavender Grove and everyone knew there was no more wife and kids or anyone else in there, just Named Welfare himself on his own. And it was a strange feeling, a strange exciting feeling that you felt going right through you, in your body as well as in your mind, a bit like sex, knowing he was inside there, scared witless, and knowing that somehow or other they would soon get him out.
    And then there was a rustle of excitement from the back of the crowd, and calls of “Gangway! Gangway!” and people moved back to make a path for Accuser himself, arriving not in a car but on foot, there in the actual flesh, moving among them. He passed so close that Johnny could reach out and touch his black robe as he went by.
    Straight up to the house went Accuser and rapped hard on the door.
    “David Simpson!” bellowed the Public Accuser. “Come out and face the people of this city.”
    Nothing. No sound from inside at all. So Accuser, grim-faced, picked three strong men from the crowd and they all went into the house and pretty soon, after a little bit of muffled shouting, came out again with the despicable man who had let little Jenny die. The crowd, the poor wounded grieving crowd, went crazy with rage, screaming and yelling at him that he was scum and vermin.
    Accuser held up his hands for quiet, and then he turned to the snivelling Welfare and demanded of him loudly and firmly and with great dignity that he own up to what he had done.
    “Do you deny that it was your fault that that dear little girl was thrown down the well?” boomed Accuser in his great and