In the weeks following, by coincidence, a Missing Persons file had been opened on Harold Pulver, not lying low in his Spanish bolt-hole after all. His family, unnerved, had eventually reported his disappearance to the police, and a bright spark at the Met had posited a link between the vanished businessman and the Corpse in the Car. An examination of dental records soon established that they were one and the same. Someone had got to Harry Pulver at last. Inevitably the list of suspects would be long: he had spent his life making enemies. The police hauled in associates, rivals, debtors, former cronies for questioning; all protested their innocence. The joke went that in the London underworld it would be easier to discount the slags who hadn’t wanted him dead. The police could make no headway. Leads petered out. The crime scene had been miserly with clues.
Freya had her own theory as to the perpetrator, one which could have set investigators on a different track. Analysis of the antique invoice would have yielded fingerprints, perhaps, so too the book of matches posted through her door. Instead, she had decided to keep them to herself, and told the police that her tip-off about the corpse had come from an anonymous phone call. Her motives were complicated. She sensed that if she did go public about ‘her’ suspect a reprisal would not be slow in coming. The killer had shown himself to be resourceful and decisive. Yet something else stopped her; the book of matches felt like a tip of the hat as much as a threat, an admission that she had guessed him right. Without ever speaking they had made a secret pledge to one another, her safety for his freedom. They would have to tread carefully around their collusion – both were at risk from its disclosure. But why would she have wanted Harold Pulver’s nemesis brought to book anyway? He had deserved his fate, just as Sonja deserved the veil of privacy she had cast over hers.
The Pulver story was still going when she arrived one mild October day for lunch at Bianchi’s. She hadn’t been back since she and Sonja had met there in the summer. It seemed to her now a haunted place, and she wasn’t sure why she had decided to return. Looking about the room at the other diners she felt for a moment that something of significance to herself, some warning, might be gleaned from the talk that rose and echoed against the walls. The very air seemed alive with omens. The little maîtresse d’ who greeted her was, as usual, a model of unobtrusive graciousness: perhaps she had come back for her.
Freya had arrived early, and remembered being nervous while she waited the previous time. Just as she began to give herself a talking-to she looked up and Nancy was coming towards her, the smile at full-beam.
‘Darling,’ she said, leaning in to her embrace. Nancy’s russet hair was shorter, with a touch of grey, though her figure remained adolescently gawky. Her green eyes, always remarkable to her, were framed today by the disconcerting novelty of a pair of wire-framed glasses.
‘You’ve got yourself writer’s spectacles,’ said Freya, covering her surprise.
Nancy made an uncertain grimace. ‘Not too grannyish, are they?’
‘No. Lennonish, I’d say.’
She looked relieved. They sat down, and Freya signalled a waiter for drinks. She and Nancy could go without seeing each another for months but once together would instantly slip into familiarity. Today she felt something new, an inescapable sense that she had missed Nancy more than Nancy would ever miss her. She quickly dismissed the thought.
‘You look well. Have you had a holiday?’
‘A week in Florence, staying with Kay,’ said Freya. ‘She was asking after you. Reads every book. In fact, remind me, I’ve got a copy of Disciples I want you to sign for her.’
‘Oh, I will, I will. Kay! She must be –’
‘Seventy-six. Going a bit deaf, but sharp as a tack otherwise. And still makes those flooring Negronis.’
Nancy shook her head, wonderingly. ‘I’m surprised you’ve had time for a holiday. Your name seems to be in the paper every day. Are you their crime correspondent now?’
Freya laughed. ‘No, but I sometimes feel like one. There’s been more interest in the corpse story than in anything I’ve ever written.’
‘People love a mystery.’
‘True. Nat’s delighted about it, of course – he says Pulver’s involvement will give Eureka the greatest publicity boost it could ever hope for.’
‘How is Nat?’
‘Thriving. He’s started a new play. He wrote something for me, actually, I must show you it.’ She reached into her handbag and pulled out a folded sheet of A4. ‘Lines composed for my birthday.’
She handed it over for Nancy, who read it aloud.
MY FAVOURITE THINGS
(with apologies to Oscar Hammerstein II)
Freya and Nancy and ice-cold Martinis
Albany rooftops and smoked-salmon blinis
Dead easy work for the money it brings
These are a few of my favourite things
Punts on the Cherwell and open-top Rollers
Beatles for Sale and slow left-arm bowlers
Lysergic acid and holiday flings
These are a few of my favourite things
Cream-coloured stockings and blue velvet jackets
Young women’s buttocks and firm tennis rackets
Wild nights and love bites and silver cock rings
These are a few of my favourite things
Girls in black undies and well-composed dramas
Krug in a bucket and satin pyjamas
Thwack of the cane and the twang of bedsprings
These are a few of my favourite things
When the prick wilts
When the whip stings
When I’m feeling blue
I simply remember my favourite things
And the best of them is you!
Nancy looked over to Freya, and they both burst out laughing.
‘I like the way it starts off quite innocently, then gets filthier as it goes along.’
‘Yeah. He told me he got halfway through and thought fuck it – let’s have some fun! I’d love to hear Julie Andrews sing this, wouldn’t you? Especially the bit about cock rings.’
Their pasta had arrived, and they toasted their reunion with a bottle of Gavi.
‘How’s your new one going?’ asked Freya.
‘Oh, all right. Another tale of heartache in the Home Counties. To judge from the reviews of Disciples it seems literary London has had enough of me and my middle-class concerns.’
‘Literary London can get stuffed,’ said Freya crisply. ‘Your books just get better and better.’
‘Spoken like a true friend,’ smiled Nancy.
‘It’s got nothing to do with being a true friend. I read a lot of novels, so I’m qualified to judge, and hardly any of them can do what you do. Nat says the same.’
‘Well, that’s nice. I suppose people must always have something to patronise,’ she added mildly. ‘I don’t mind. It’s quite funny, really, to see even the place you set a story attacked as “decadent and marginal”. I mean – Henley-on-Thames!’
The lightness with which she spoke was not, Freya knew, a put-on. Ever since she had known her Nancy had the quiet assurance of a writer indifferent to trends. She gossiped about better-known contemporaries, but she didn’t envy them. She noticed the condescension of the reviews, but she didn’t brood on them. She cared only about the quality of her writing; the rest was noise.
Mollified by the wine and the charm of the company Freya felt able to broach a subject she had always found prickly. She couldn’t help resenting Nancy’s husband for taking her away from London, despite the inconvenient evidence that Nancy had settled to life in Oxfordshire very contentedly.
‘How’s Adam?’ she said, adjusting her tone to an acceptable level of curiosity.
‘He’s fine,’ replied Nancy. ‘He’s just had some good news, actually.’ A fleeting movement of her face spoke warningly to Freya that the news might not be of unequivocal delight.
‘Really?’
Nancy nodded, but couldn’t quite hold her eye. ‘Yes,
he’s just got a teaching appointment. At Princeton.’
Freya felt a sudden chill. ‘Princeton? You mean, New Jersey?’
Yes, that Princeton, it was a very exciting opportunity for him, she explained, and it came with a great deal of prestige in a department –
‘So you’re going with him?’ Freya wasn’t interested in departments or their prestige; she wanted this out, now.
‘Oh, Freya. Of course I’m going with him.’
‘I see.’ She had felt an ominous vibration the moment she’d arrived, and here it was: her best friend’s ‘good news’. ‘So how long would this be for?’
Nancy hesitated, and Freya took a breath to hold down the panic. ‘I’m not sure – two years, possibly three.’
‘Three years!’ she almost wailed. ‘You can’t. Oh God. I felt something awful was about to happen but I’d never have guessed this.’
Nancy kept silent, knowing, and fearing, the greater vehemence she might provoke by offering an argument. In the early days of their friendship Freya had called the shots, and Nancy had happily followed. Through Oxford and the years of sharing a flat in Bloomsbury her leadership had been irresistible, until one day it wasn’t. Freya had outgrown the extreme reactions of her youth, had learned to curb her volatile temper, but nothing had shaken her conviction that she knew best – and could bend people to her will.
‘Nance, please, you can’t be serious. Not for three years.’
‘You make it sound like I’m going to prison.’
‘To me that’s what it feels like. Except that you’re choosing it.’
‘You can always visit.’
‘What, you in prison? I don’t want to visit. I want you to be here, where I can see you any time.’
Nancy smiled at her sadly. There was a pause before she said, ‘I can’t not go.’
Freya had stopped eating and pushed her plate aside. She took out a cigarette and lit it. It was as she had thought: She doesn’t need me like I need her. They had been through a lot together. She had done awful things to Nancy in the early days, things that still caused her a spasm of shame. There had been seven years when they didn’t speak at all, so bitter was the fallout. Then there was that moment a few years ago when her feelings for Nancy had turned the whole thing upside down. Their friendship had survived it all, and they’d probably get through this, too. Except Freya knew that she would never be the priority in her life again. She took a long drag of her cigarette. Her silence might have been interpreted as a sulk, but she didn’t feel like being ‘nice’ about it.
Nancy, always conciliatory, decided to steer the talk elsewhere.
‘That actress you told me about in your last letter – Sonja? – have you kept in touch?’
‘No.’
‘Oh … I finally got to see, on your recommendation, The Private Life of Hanna K. She’s wonderful in it, really.’
‘Yeah. She was.’
Nancy paused, hoping for more. ‘I thought – I gathered – well, things looked quite promising. The boat trip, and what have you.’
Freya shrugged, and waited a beat. ‘Another of my failures. We’d been getting on pretty well until … something terrible happened.’ She recounted the circumstances of Pulver’s vicious reprisals, on Nat, then on Sonja. As she spoke she felt the horror bearing down on her with renewed force; she could almost feel Sonja’s scream pierce her, almost see the blood fountaining down her cheek. Nancy listened in appalled silence; the colour seemed to drain from her face. Freya told her that the story was not to be repeated. The press, thank God, had never got hold of it. Sonja’s agent had announced simply that she was ill and had taken a temporary retirement from movies.
‘I wanted to visit her in hospital, but she wouldn’t – I kept asking. She’s back in Munich now.’
‘Oh, Freya, I’m so sorry. Were you close?’
‘We might have been. I thought there was something.’ She looked away, feeling some obstruction in her throat, and drank a mouthful of wine to clear it. Whenever friends asked about her love life she would joke and say that she was a hopeless case – always with the pleasurable anticipation of being contradicted. She liked to pretend she was romantically doomed. Lately, though, she was wary of saying things like ‘I’m too old and tired to love’, for the melancholy reason that she was starting to believe it. She could no longer muster the irony to make her life sound amusing.
When she looked up, Nancy’s gaze was on her. ‘Think how she must feel, though. Sonja. It must be so hard to go from being an object of passion to an object of pity, especially for someone whose face has been so adored.’
‘I wouldn’t have pitied her,’ said Freya, indignant. ‘I’d have made her realise – but what’s the point? It would never have worked anyway.’
‘You can’t be sure of that,’ Nancy said gently, and though Freya scowled she felt secretly grateful to her for not agreeing. In the next instant it occurred to her that Nancy had spoken of pity just to provoke her response. She stared at her friend, absorbing the details of her face, her eyes, the slope of her neck, as if she might memorise them.
‘God. What will I do without you?’ She had meant to keep her tone light, but a sadness tugged at the edge.
‘I’ll be coming back, you ninny,’ she said, taking her hand across the table. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
Freya nodded, though for the moment she couldn’t speak. Couldn’t see, either, for the tears blinding her eyes.
Title Card: SIX MONTHS LATER
INT. CHURCH – MORNING.
A memorial service is in progress. Music plays. At the lectern GWEN is speaking. Camera draws back to focus upon the audience packing the pews. Towards the front we see CHAS, seated next to JANE. All are dressed in black.
Music fades out as GWEN’s voice fades in.
GWEN
… He was of course a brilliant newspaperman, and a formidable critic. He has left behind a book, soon to be published; he should have lived to write many more. But his greatest success was not in his attainments; it was in himself, in the way he was – to all of us – that funny and kind and most trustworthy friend. The ache of his absence will dwindle, in time. The memory of his presence, I hope, will never fade.
CUT TO: Reverse shot of GWEN leaving the lectern and returning to the front pew. This is the cue for CHAS to rise from his seat and take her place before the audience. He approaches the altar with a heavy limp, and a walking stick. At the lectern he composes himself and takes out a folded piece of paper from his jacket.
CUT TO: Camera faces CHAS.
CHAS
George Corvick was my editor and mentor. He was also my best friend …
Music fades back in as the camera locks on CHAS, his upright bearing a model of grave dignity as he bids the departed farewell. But we may dimly discern something else in his expression – the remorse of a disappointed man.
INT. RECEPTION ROOM – DAY.
Public room of a London hotel, where drinks are being served to guests from the memorial service. Amid the crowd GWEN, who’s on the arm of her friend DEAN DRAYTON, spots CHAS. She detaches herself and approaches him.
GWEN
Sorry not to have seen you till now. Dean and I have been away –
CHAS
Yes, I heard. My congratulations.
GWEN
Thank you. You look … much better.
CHAS
(ruefully)
Walking again is good. I know how lucky I was to — When’s the happy day?
GWEN
Sometime next year. I’ve been too busy with George’s book to plan the wedding.
CHAS
I’ve been wondering about that. I see Antrobus has given it a new title.
GWEN
Well, it couldn’t be called The Figure in the Carpet any longer.
CHAS
You mean …?
GWEN
George hadn’t dealt with it – there are notes, nothing specific. It’s not half the book it
should have been – literally.
CHAS
I had a feeling he might have confided in you … what it was.
GWEN
The secret? No. I asked him, of course, but he refused. He wanted it to be his ‘Poirot’ moment, revealing the solution at the end of the book.
CHAS
He did have a sense of the dramatic.
GWEN
But not the timing. With both of them gone, it’s lost forever. (She looks over his shoulder at JANE, across the room.) Talking of timing, are you and Jane planning an announcement?
CHAS
Oh, you mean – marriage?
GWEN
Of course.
CHAS
(with a significant look)
There’s only one woman I’ve ever thought of proposing to.
GWEN
(gently)
Charles … It wouldn’t have worked. You know that.
CHAS stares across the room at DEAN DRAYTON, then turns back to GWEN.
CHAS
(shaking his head)
It makes me wonder, all the same …
GWEN
What?
CHAS
Well, George I could understand. He was a catch. But Dean Drayton? What’s he got that I haven’t?
CHAS and GWEN stare at each other for a few moments. Then CHAS sees JANE beckoning him from a scrum of people.
CHAS
Take care of yourself, Gwen.
CHAS walks away into the crowd.
EXT. JANE’S TOWN HOUSE IN CHELSEA – DAY.
INT. BEDROOM – DAY.
CHAS is getting dressed. He’s absently putting on a tie and gazing out of the window. He stops, lost in thought.
CUT TO: JANE, entering the room, catches him unawares. She stares for some moments.
JANE
Darling?
CHAS
(startled)
Sorry … miles away.
JANE crosses the room, puts her arms around him. She looks at him with concern.
JANE
You looked so terribly sad just then.
CHAS
Eureka Page 34
