“No, it isn’t. I mean it couldn’t be. I mean you must be mistaken.”
I said, “No, it was you all right.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you saying you weren’t here a few weeks ago, hanging around?” We were now standing beside a trendily funky diner, on the corner of the street that led into Miss Honeyland’s mews.
“I’m saying it’s highly unlikely.”
I laughed. “What the hell does that mean?”
He seemed a little stung by my laughter. “It means,” he said, “even in the unlikely event that I was here, if you did happen to see me here, I didn’t see you. I wouldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
He lifted his hand to his glasses. “I wouldn’t have recognised you if I wasn’t wearing my glasses.”
I said, “But you were wearing your glasses.”
“Was I?”
“And you had a camera.”
“Did I? I don’t recall. Well, it’s been nice running into you…” He started to walk off again. I followed him, easily keeping pace now that he no longer had a head start.
“Are you saying you’ve never been around here before?” I said.
He stopped and looked at me. “I will concede that I have been here, in this neighbourhood, previously, in the past, on more than one occasion.”
A dispatch rider thundered past us on a powerful motorcycle, his visor gleaming in the sunlight, rendering his face invisible. A common enough sight here in Soho where people constantly felt the need to urgently dispatch something important to someone else, even in this age of email. I looked at Jasper. “Doing what?” I said.
“I’m not just a local historian, you know.” He puffed up inside his waxed-cotton jacket. “I am working on other things. I do have other projects. Certain, specific, other projects.”
I sensed a disclosure in the offing. Perhaps we were finally getting somewhere. “For example?”
He peered at me craftily. “For instance, a biography of Millicent Cavermann.” He apparently expected this to be a major revelation, but the name meant nothing to me. I shrugged.
“And who is that?”
He looked crestfallen. “Millicent Cavermann née Honeyland, family nickname Taffy, because of her fondness for that sweet snack, a chewable boiled sugar confection, what is known in our country as toffee. She acquired a taste for it when her family was living in America. Her father was a diplomat who was stationed over there for a period between the wars.”
I waited for him to stop talking long enough for me to say something. “Did you say Millicent Honeyland?”
“Yes.”
“The sister of Lucky Honeyland?”
“Yes.”
“Joan Honeyland’s aunt.”
“Obviously.” Some of Jasper’s natural confidence, and general snottiness, had returned.
“She was the Nazi enthusiast,” I said.
“And notorious anti-Semite. Yes. ‘Mitford in a minor key.’ Have you heard that appellation?”
“As a matter of fact, I have.”
“Did you know it was I who originated that phrase? In an article published some three years ago. Since then many others have falsely laid claim to it. It’s now become an Internet meme. It’s enormously frustrating, to have created such a memorable and euphonious phrase and to have others repeat it ad infinitum with no mention of its creator, no credit where credit is so manifestly due, as if it were some workaday form of words worn smooth by commonplace usage.”
I was about to insincerely offer my condolences.
But that was when we heard the gunshot.
* * *
I left Jasper McClew standing where he was and ran down the street, past a man who was confidently assuring his girlfriend, “It was a car backfiring.” As they disappeared behind us I heard him add, “I know the difference between a car backfiring and a gunshot.”
So did I, and unfortunately I’d formulated quite the opposite conclusion.
The sound had seemed to come from Joan Honeyland’s mews. I ran out of the bright sunlight into the cold shadow of the arched entranceway, the sound of my footsteps ringing urgently off the flagstones. The Mercedes was parked there, pristine, lustrous and glowing. I went through the door, which was open, and suddenly came to a lurching halt.
What was I doing?
I was running towards a place where I thought a firearm had been discharged. Running towards it. I was standing just inside the dim, musty entrance hall, where a narrow staircase led up to Miss Honeyland’s flat. There was a movement in the shadow at the top of the stairs. I jerked back instinctively. As I did so I caught a glimpse of a man’s face, peering down at me.
It was Albert the chauffeur. He looked more scared than I was. Something glinted in the air above his head, a small, smooth distorted blob of metal. It bobbed erratically, catching the light, and I realised it was the head of a golf club. He was holding a golf club, ready to use it as an offensive weapon. Or perhaps a defensive one.
I called up the stairs, “It’s me.”
His voice was unsteady. “What are you doing here?”
“I have an appointment. Then I heard a shot. And I came running.”
There was a moment of silence at the top of the stairs and then he said, “All right. Come on up.” He waited at the top of the stairs as I came up, feeling a little apprehensive about the golf club, which he was still clutching tightly. But I wondered if he’d even have room to swing it in this confined space. My nerves being on edge, I tensed up in readiness, but he stood aside to let me by and slowly lowered the club.
“Did I hear a shot?” I said. “I mean, was it a shot?”
“Yes.”
“Someone was shooting at you?”
“Yes. Someone was shooting at us.”
We walked into the tiny sitting room. Miss Honeyland was standing there, composed and calm and opening a bottle of champagne, of all things. I didn’t think this was a woman who had just been shot at, but then she turned to look at me and her face was white as milk and she looked spectacularly aged, every flaw and wrinkle cruelly deep-etched.
And then there was the bullet hole in the window.
It was a neat perfectly circular hole punched in the lower pane of the window overlooking the courtyard. There was an odd frosting of the glass around the perfect hole, which I suspected on closer inspection might prove to be an aura of microscopic cracks radiating outwards.
But somehow I wasn’t tempted to make that closer inspection. I wasn’t sticking my head anywhere near that window. In fact I skirted the whole area carefully as I entered the room.
“That’s all right,” said Miss Honeyland calmly. “They’re gone now. Whoever they were.”
“You didn’t see them?”
“No, just heard them. First the gunshot, of course, and then the sound of someone running across the cobbles from the courtyard, out onto the street. By the time we looked out the window—as you can imagine we were, like you, reluctant to show our faces near it for a moment or two—by the time we looked, they were long gone.”
“But I came in through the entrance,” I said. “I didn’t see anyone.”
“No, there’s a side passage,” said Albert scornfully, as if anyone who wasn’t an idiot was expected to know this. “They went out the side passage.”
“Ah,” said Miss Honeyland in an odd voice. She had carefully removed the foil and the cradle of wire from the cork of the champagne bottle and was now staring at it. “You know, it’s absurd,” she said. “You’re both going to think I’m a complete amoeba, but I don’t think I can bear the sound of the cork popping.” She held up the bottle and stared at it hopelessly.
“I’ll put it back in the refrigerator,” said Albert, moving towards her.
“Don’t do that,” she said sharply. “I want a drink. I want it opened. I just want it opened carefully.” He obediently took the bottle from her and, clutching the cork in the solid slab of his fist, he began to strugg
le with it. “You hold the cork stationary and twist the bottle,” Miss Honeyland advised him.
Nevada would have been proud of her.
So instructed, Albert managed to open the champagne, easing the cork out with just the slightest hint of a sound. Miss Honeyland nonetheless flinched. While Albert carefully poured a glass for her, I edged over to the other side of the room to see what had happened to the bullet. It took me a moment to find it. I was working from the position of the hole in the window and a rough guess about where the gunman must have stood outside.
They had fired upwards and so the hole on the wall had to be higher than the one in the window.
A rising trajectory.
I finally found it. Right on the dartboard with the pictures of famous children’s book characters pinned to it. The bullet had left a deep gouge, furrowing through the yellow painted wood of the board and into the wall behind it. It had decapitated Peter Rabbit and narrowly missed Winnie the Pooh.
I felt a cold tingling in the muscles of my back as I looked at it. It was either a wild fluke, or a terrifyingly accurate shot.
Miss Honeyland looked at the glass of champagne in her hand, then at me. “You probably think I’m mad. I mean, drinking champagne now. In a situation like this.” I tried to protest politely, but she rattled on too quickly for me to interject anything, her voice wavering with a kind of frenetic gaiety. “But it’s sort of a family tradition, you see. Be they happy occasions or sad, light-hearted or solemn. We always marked them with a glass of bubbly. Some think it’s a bit macabre, but it made perfect sense to us. We even opened a bottle in memory of my father when we got word that he died.”
Suddenly there were tears flowing down her raddled cheeks. Albert moved towards her, but she immediately said, “I’m fine.” He moved back again, watching her carefully. She looked at me, her eyes sparkling with tears. “And anyway, what better excuse for a celebration than the fact that we’re alive? We’re still alive.”
* * *
Miss Honeyland said they were going to ring the police, of course, but perhaps I didn’t want to hang around for that. I didn’t. They poured a glass of champagne for me before I left, though. I took a polite sip, but it tasted like battery acid to me. There was nothing wrong with the vintage. It was the after-effects of fear.
It was just hitting me now. My legs were like jelly going back down the stairs, jolting me jauntily from side to side in the narrow, shadowed space. I staggered out into the daylight and across the cobbled courtyard like a drunk. I paused to look back up at the window with the bullet hole in it, just about visible from where I was standing.
I realised that this must have been where the gunman had stood.
For some reason, with this thought, my legs began to steady and I was able to walk quite normally back into the street. Jasper McClew was gone, of course. I didn’t blame him.
I wouldn’t have hung around either.
But I still wished I could have talked to him. There were suddenly a lot of things I wanted to ask him. I turned south and headed towards Piccadilly Circus. I’d get the Tube to Waterloo and then a train home. I was feeling a sudden powerful yearning to return safely to my home place and just sit there. Any sudden noise—a motorcycle accelerating, a blast of music from an upstairs window—set my heart racing.
I crossed the streets with great care, watching carefully for traffic. Recent events had given me a bruised awareness of mortality and made this seem like a particularly stupid time to get run over. So I paused carefully at the edge of the pavement, waiting for every van, car and bike to go past before I crossed the road.
Which is why I was standing outside the sushi bar in Brewer Street, waiting for a truck to rumble by. And I happened to glance inside, and I saw him.
Jasper McClew.
He was sitting with someone at a table just inside the window. His companion was an elderly woman. She was small, sharply dressed in a vivid bohemian style and wearing a beret like the artist that she was.
Toba Possner.
Jasper was leaning across the table towards her.
They were deep in animated conversation.
26. BOVINE TB
“So what did they say when you just walked into the sushi bar and joined them?”
“Well, Jasper didn’t say anything. He just stared at me, very upset. He clearly thought I’d painstakingly shadowed him to his secret rendezvous and he was plenty pissed off about it. After all, he’d last seen me running in the opposite direction. And as soon as he was sure I was gone, he’d promptly scarpered.”
“He vamoosed.”
“Correct. So now he couldn’t figure out how I’d managed to find him.”
Nevada passed me the colander. Small yellow shells of pasta lay in it, soft and warm. Steam was rising from the sink. She said, “Did you tell him it was sheer chance?”
I added the pasta to the mixing bowl. It was a big white mixing bowl, which nicely set off its contents: bright green shards of herbs and red slivers of Alaskan smoked salmon, all swimming in a layer of golden olive oil.
“No, I let him think I was a master sleuth. Which pissed him off even more.”
“So he wasn’t pleased to see you.”
“No, but Toba Possner was. She seemed perfectly pleased to see me. Relaxed and—”
“Convivial?”
“Yes. Exactly. She was all sort of, ‘sit down and have some sushi with us’.” I spooned some fromage frais into the mixing bowl and stirred it in. I picked up another spoon and tasted a sample. It was too salty. The smoked salmon was still too dominant. But that was what the fromage frais was for.
“Did you have any sushi?”
“No.”
“Did they explain why they were meeting?”
“She said Jasper was interviewing her.”
“For his book about the sister? The fascist sister?”
I added a bit more of the fromage frais. “Yes. Millicent Honeyland. Also known as Taffy.”
“And did she? Know the sister?”
“No. She only knew the brother. Our friend, Lucky Honeyland. And she only knew him briefly. In the days when she was an impoverished art student and he was visiting her cold-water studio and bullying her about the illustrations for his book.”
“Farmer Henry and the Frigging Locusts,” said Nevada. “You know, I loved that book when I was a kid. Did you ask Toba about doing a portrait for us?”
“A portrait?” I said. I tasted another sample from the mixing bowl. It was delicious. Perhaps still a shade too salty. A bit more fromage frais was called for.
“Of the cats.”
“No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t,” I said. “I merely established that she was there talking to Jasper—”
“E.T. with a beard.”
“The ferret-faced local historian, right. She was talking to him about Lucky Honeyland. For background material. For his tome about the sister.”
“And you don’t think he was the shooter? Wait a minute. He couldn’t have been, could he? He was talking to you when you heard the gun fired.”
“That’s right.” I liked the way she used the word ‘shooter’.
Nevada frowned. “But what about her? I mean Toba Possner herself. Could it be her?”
“The shooter?”
“Yes.”
I served up, and Nevada clattered a few saucepans into the sink. We carried our plates out of the kitchen and sat at the dining table.
I was thinking. “Yes,” I said finally. “It could possibly have been her. She was in about the right place at about the right time.”
“You really think she could have done it?”
“Well, she certainly has a reason to want to put a bullet in our client.”
“For swindling her out of the revenue from her own artwork, yes. I must commission that painting from her.”
I said, “You still want it, even if she’s a potential assassin?”
“In fact I’m all the more eager. We need to get it from her
before she’s slung into prison.”
“Assuming she’s guilty.”
“Always assuming that.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I have a feeling that was just a warning shot.”
“Why?”
“Because they didn’t hit anyone.”
Nevada shook her head. “That doesn’t necessarily follow.”
I tasted my dinner. I’d added too much of the fromage frais. I cursed myself. Now there remained only a tantalising hint, a delicious ghost, of the taste it had possessed a few short seconds ago.
“What are you sulking about?”
“Too much fromage frais.”
Nevada tasted her meal. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s absolutely delicious.”
I started to dig in. It wasn’t bad.
“Oh, and by the way,” said Nevada, “before I forget, what’s-his-name rang. The bloke with the son who came off his motorbike. Penny something. Pennycook.”
I said, “Oh, the guy who runs dope.”
“Don’t you dare remind me of that. I get thrills of mortification every time I think of it even now.”
“What did he want?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. Presumably because I was only a woman.”
After dinner I rang Darren Pennycook. He sounded pleased to hear from me. After the usual polite greetings he said, “You see, the thing is, I spoke to Billy.”
“Your son.”
“Yes. Initially he was very reluctant to tell me the location of the farmhouse. You remember the farmhouse?”
“Yes,” I said. “It was full of Nazis.”
“Yes. Well, full of Nazi paraphernalia.”
“And more to the point, a record I want.”
“Exactly. The V-Disc recording of ‘Deep Penetration’. Incidentally, that’s not a sexual reference. It actually refers to bombing missions. Specifically the deep penetration into Germany required to bomb Berlin. Danny Overland told me all about that.”
“Yes, that’s the record all right,” I said. “And your son is willing to tell us its location?”
“Assuming it’s still in the same place, yes.”
That was a point I hadn’t considered. Perhaps the record was no longer there. “Anyway,” said Pennycook, “he has given us the address of the farmhouse. As I said, he was very reluctant to reveal the information. He kept saying that they are dangerous people and I kept saying that you understood that. So he finally agreed.”
Victory Disc Page 25
