‘When did you last see George, Mr Quinn?’ Reynolds asked.
Perhaps he thought that questions would keep the old man alert, as opposed to distracting him from the task in hand. At length, the old man answered, ‘He came up quite a bit in November. Every weekend but one, I think.’
Clifford knew for certain he’d been up on one weekend in November, and that was the significant one, to her mind.
They were behind a big lorry. It was decorated to look like a giant Kit-Kat bar. Reverting to his tour-guide role, Reynolds turned around and said, ‘They make Kit-Kats in York.’ She did hope the old man would not try to overtake it. Reynolds said to the old man, ‘I believe George was looking out for another sports car.’ He didn’t say how he knew. He couldn’t let on to the father that he’d been given sight of the son’s emails, even if by process of law. Whilst concentrating hard on the road, the old man said, ‘I know nothing about that. I thought he’d put all his efforts into making this one roadworthy.’
Let’s hope he succeeded, thought Victoria.
Much to her relief, they now rattled off the ‘A’ road. The old man would have to slow down now, but he didn’t; and the rain was becoming heavier, the sky darker … and she’d reckoned without the bends in the road. It was with incredulity that Victoria now watched the old man turn very deliberately towards Reynolds in order to say, ‘I don’t think the brakes are quite right, you know.’
Reynolds flashed a look back at Victoria. He said, ‘Would you like me to drive, Mr Quinn? I’m fully comp.’
All senior detectives were fully comp.
They were running alongside a verge with a white fence on the boundary of a prosperous-looking farm or estate. The fence posts seemed to glow against the blue-black sky. The posts began to curve to the left. The road followed the curve, and the Alpine followed the road. It was leaning in order to do so … and then it was leaning more. The old man ought to slow down just a fraction, then they’d be fine. Reynolds moved his hand towards the old man, who nodded once, apparently to himself. She saw him making a pushing motion with one of his legs; he seemed to be practising braking but of course he was doing the actual thing and it was having no effect on the Sunbeam’s desire to fly off to the right. He pushed his leg again. This time he said, ‘No, you see,’ and the Howardian Hills were shooting across the sky, and they were racing over the grass. The car gave a great bounce – it was trying to jump the fence – but it hit the fence and they stopped. Reynolds had taken the car out of gear, and put out his hand to steer, so in the end they’d crashed obliquely rather than head-on. He turned around first to Victoria.
‘You all right?’
Sexism. But his performance otherwise had been faultless, and it was a shame she was going to have to be pulling the wool over his eyes when they got to the house.
She was pleased to get out the word ‘Perfectly’. She was breathing fast, though. The old man was sitting thoughtfully at the wheel nodding to himself as if a point had been satisfactorily proved.
30
Quinn had the number of a breakdown service. It wasn’t the AA or the RAC, but the owner of a local garage. The breakdown man was called Lowther and his lorry incorporated a ramp for the carrying of broken cars, and a big cab with one long seat, on which the four of them were now sitting, absurdly, like people on a park bench. It was fascinating to watch the way the two windscreen wipers encompassed almost the whole of the very wide windscreen, onto which rain was now lashing. She and Reynolds had their bags on their knees. Any less upper-class person in the old man’s position would have fallen into a shamed silence, but Quinn’s confidence carried him through. The main thing was they were all right and they all jolly well deserved a hot bath and a drink. Admittedly, he did not seem willing to say much about the accident per se. This had been analysed intensively by Reynolds (still operating in full northern-sensible mode) and the man Lowther. Their verdict – both having crawled under the car with torches to conduct a horizontal conference – was that there were a couple of little holes in the ‘brake line’ from which brake fluid had been gradually seeping. They might have been made by sharp stones flying up, or they might have been made deliberately, and this – the latter – Clifford could not believe. But she tentatively suggested that the brakes might have been tampered with as a warning that had been prepared some time ago for Quinn the younger – analogous to the more direct warning issued to Reynolds in the Mayfair back street.
Lowther, who had no imagination, explained that he had seen the action of sharp stones on innumerable other brake lines, especially those of old cars driven along rough country roads. Old man Quinn, who had seemed keen to talk up the danger she and Reynolds might be facing, now retreated from any suggestion of sabotage. When Reynolds asked, ‘Are you aware of any Russians working in the area?’ he said, ‘Russians? Nowadays your average British workman is a Russian, isn’t he? But I tell you for a fact there’ve been none on the property.’
They had now come to the property. There was no sign, just a gate. Reynolds opened it. They began driving along an unmade road. ‘Sharp stones here,’ suggested Reynolds, and Lowther said that a car couldn’t work up any speed on this road, and speed was needed for the stones to fly and cut. The road twisted and turned past glum country features: a field of soil, a field of … something green, a pond with reeds in it, a pond without reeds, a small wood, a bigger wood, all under the heavy rain. The real countryside was in the hills beyond. But before the hills there was ‘The House’ that comprised the prestige part of ‘the property’: Queen Anne, therefore highly elegant. It was occupied now by an estate agent who had made his money selling much meaner properties. Quinn had grown up in The House, which the Old Man had had to sell, about twenty years ago. He now lived in ‘The Farmhouse’, the junior partner to the main property. They were bouncing their way up to the fork in the track that led to either one. Apart from the old man telling Lowther which track to take, the painful junction was passed in silence apart from the pounding of the rain, and beating of the dogged wipers. Victoria had briefed Reynolds about the two houses – told him to avoid the subject.
A little way beyond the fork was another copse, this one with a recess, a roughly paved space on which stood a leaning barn-like building with a canopy leaning at the same angle. The old man asked Lowther to insert the broken car under this canopy. After they had passed a further series of copses, they came to the farmhouse, and Victoria could see Reynolds monitoring the track and thinking that it would be perfectly possible to meddle with the car without the occupant of the farmhouse knowing. Or – under cover of darkness – to drive the car away entirely and bring it back.
Lowther parked his lorry in front of the farmhouse. Clifford climbed down, saying she needed the loo and could she have the key to the door because it was rather pressing? Reynolds was watching her. The old man indicated that the door was not locked. She walked over the cracked stone of what had once been a farmyard, and she was into the house which smelt of a dying coal fire. To the left was the living room, a jumble of predominantly red rugs and velvet chairs and predominantly green paintings: conservative Yorkshire landscapes. She climbed the narrow stairs, looked back. The men remained outside, talking in the rain. She turned left, went along the narrow corridor, bare boards with rugs like stepping stones. The white door of George’s bedroom. The key was in the lock, but the door was not locked. The Quinn smell: cigarettes and sandalwood. She saw the single bed with, instead of Quinn, one of Quinn’s country suits stretched out on top of it. She closed the door behind her. By the bed, a folder of papers, a copy of Vanity Fair, a novel, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, an unopened packet of Capstan’s … and a green floppy book. ‘Wine Notes’, she read on the cover. It was unused, every page blank, thank God. There was really only one hiding place. She stood in front of the wardrobe. Apparently nothing in it but suits and a very good, but broken, umbrella. She listened. Was that somebody climbing the stairs? Too fast for the old man. Must be Reyno
lds. She put her hand through the curtain of suits and there was a small painting – or an item shaped like a framed painting – wrapped in newspaper. She closed the wardrobe door. She moved towards the door of the room, and opened it. Reynolds stood there with a look on his face that she could not read. She took Quinn’s dressing gown off the back of the door. ‘You’re soaked,’ she said, ‘Get this on. I’ll run you a bath.’ She leant forward and kissed him on the cheek. ‘I believe you saved our lives.’ In the motion of the kiss she had also pushed him out of the room, and stepped out of it herself. She closed the door behind them. When Reynolds was out of sight – and he had lingered for a while, disorientated, as she had hoped, by the kiss – she locked the door, and removed the key. She put it in her pocket.
Five minutes later she was unpacking in her own room. She would be dressing down for dinner. She put out her jeans and her lovely, loose merino sweater. After his performance in the car, the old man had forfeited the privilege of not seeing women in trousers. She could still taste the horrible train coffee; she knew she should have brought her flask. She took out her soap bag. She removed her toothbrush and toothpaste; she did not remove the Glock pistol. Her accommodation featured what George Quinn had never been able to bring himself to call an en suite bathroom. She walked through to it now, in order to brush her teeth, but no sooner had she started brushing than she stopped. She was above the kitchen, where Reynolds had already collared Quinn about the floppy book he’d brought along. He was questioning the old man closely about the word ‘Carlton’. ‘Well, there are several Carltons in Yorkshire,’ the old man was saying. ‘There’s one up on the Moors.’
‘Is that the nearest?’ Reynolds asked.
It was.
Victoria Clifford genuinely believed that ‘Carlton’ must refer to Carlton House Terrace in London, since it was so near to where Quinn had been shot, and it accounted for the ‘HT’. She had told Reynolds that. She had told him almost everything she knew about the floppy book. Downstairs, the old man was, so to speak, putting up his hands in surrender. ‘I really have no idea about these notes. He’s my own son, but I didn’t understand him, you know,’ at which poor Reynolds immediately turned to lighter matters: ‘Not to worry, and sorry to trouble you about it, Mr Quinn. What a lovely place you have here,’ etc.
31
The fire, greyish when they had arrived, was now bright red. The old man wore entirely different clothes with exactly the same net effect as his previous ones. Reynolds looked fetching, Victoria thought, in Quinn’s dressing gown, a rather regimental item, which he wore tightly belted over Quinn’s pair of silk pyjamas. The room reminded her of one of those in Mark’s Club, the cosiest of the London clubs, with its overflowing braziers. The second bottle of claret was nearly finished, mainly thanks to the efforts of the old man. In anticipation of their arrival, he had embarked on a primitive Irish stew (as he called it). Victoria had taken it over. He was very grateful, but she was in truth little better at cooking than the old man.
They had given him some further details – the details they jointly agreed were relevant, so to speak – of the investigation Quinn had been conducting. Quinn senior was now talking about his time in the City. ‘In my day,’ he reflected roguishly, ‘all trading was insider trading. The City was a village. Everyone knew everyone.’ His eyes wandered over the mantelpiece, and its display of Christmas cards, every single one – Clifford had checked – sent by people who’d written their greetings in fountain pen not biro. ‘Come Christmas time,’ the old man said, ‘the partners would buy turkeys for all the staff.’ Then tea ladies had become coffee machines; dealing rooms became trading floors. His merchant bank was now part of an American investment bank. He had first implied that he’d more or less had to sell up as a result of the Big Bang in 1983. But now, with the claret at a lower level, he reflected, ‘We were greedy you know. Took the first offer that came along, which in retrospect was not nearly enough.’
That was graceful of him, Clifford thought, and he was quite mild about the new class of the super-rich, the avowed targets of his son’s investigations. Regarding the Russians, his line was, ‘We preached capitalism at the Commies for heaven knows how many years. We can hardly complain that they’ve turned out to be rather good at it.’ His main regret about selling was that, if he’d kept the bank, ‘the boy’ might have gone into the business instead of making the eccentric decision to join the police.
He showed Reynolds some of the photographs of George Quinn the beautiful boy, standing close to the beautiful and long-deceased mother. The only one of Quinn in adulthood was taken in the uneasy light of dawn outside Annabel’s nightclub. It was about 1985, and father and son were arm in arm. Victoria knew the story. The pair had dined at Green’s restaurant off Jermyn Street, and had a fearful row. But somehow they’d resolved to go together to Annabel’s, of which both were members. It had been one of those nights at Annabel’s when everyone in the club had danced, and lift-off had been achieved. Against all expectations, it had been a magical evening. Quinn had introduced his current boyfriend – an Italian whose name Victoria had not retained – to the old man, who had not been so old back then, and who had been friendly to the Italian, almost seeming to have come to terms with his son’s inclinations. Victoria supposed it was the Italian who had taken the picture. The old man was telling Clifford all about the evening, leaving out all the salient details. Victoria closed her eyes. She knew those evenings at Annabel’s, the extraordinary displays of mass affection that could occur on the dance floor.
It’s a love train, get on board.
Reynolds was looking rather left out. Clifford found herself feeling sorry for him. ‘Blake is from York,’ she said, which made the old man look at Reynolds.
‘Lovely place. Were you at school there?’
A bloody silly question. Reynolds obviously wasn’t part of the being-sent-away-to-school classes.
‘George’s first prep school was in York,’ the old man was saying. ‘He went on to Sedburgh, then of course Harrow. His grandfather on his mother’s side insisted on that.’
‘Was he the baronet?’ asked Reynolds.
‘That’s right,’ said the old man, half proud.
‘It’s an inherited title?’
‘Right again.’
‘Do you mind my asking what his ancestor had done to earn the title?’
A whiff of revolution in the air! And then Clifford saw the way this was going, and she didn’t like it.
‘Made a lot of money, I suppose,’ said the old man, ‘which they spent as fast as they earned. They liked to say it came from agriculture. In fact, it was from iron-making – in Middlesbrough.’
The old man distributed the rest of the wine. Clifford knew he was going to say more about money, and couldn’t think of a way of stopping him. ‘Of course the title, and such money as is left, goes down the male line, to George’s uncle …’ He indicated one of the photographs. The picture had been taken, judging by the young man’s preposterous hair, in the sixties. ‘Still going strong,’ the old man said, rather sadly. ‘He has four children.’
Victoria watched Reynolds draw the necessary conclusion.
Silence in the room.
‘Do you shoot?’ the old man suddenly asked Reynolds, who flashed Victoria a panicked glance. But he rallied well.
‘No,’ he said, ‘… but I’ve been shot at.’
‘Tell us about some of your murderers,’ Victoria prompted, and she watched him go red. After a few false starts (‘Oh, that was just a category C domestic’), she got him onto the Turks and the villain called Ender. Reynolds was a genuinely modest man, but with a genuine appreciation of his own worth, and he enjoyed telling the tale once he’d got going.
‘So this chap actually was what you might call a hitman?’ the old man suggested.
‘Yes,’ said Reynolds, ‘but he missed me.’
That business had culminated in the arrest of the top Turkish gangster in London, which, Victoria recalled
from her conversations with Quinn, had involved an impressive ‘dart’ on Reynolds’ part. She asked him to remind her.
‘The big boss was called Attila,’ said Reynolds.
‘Dear God!’ said the old man.
‘One of the few things we knew about him was that he wore a wig. Now what can you say about a man who wears a wig?’
‘Fellow’s losing his hair!’ the old man said, stupidly.
‘He’s vain,’ said Reynolds.
Clifford remembered now. They’d staked out all the top Turkish tailors in London and found him that way. She didn’t need to listen to the rest. She thought instead about the parcel in Quinn’s room. Ought she to go in and peel back the newspaper a little way? She couldn’t bear to do it.
They ate the primitive stew in the living room, which was the only heated room. The old man opened another bottle of wine, and the effect of consuming it was to make him seem his age. At one point he said, apropos of nothing, ‘Some baronets are actually rather vulgar, you know.’ Victoria was tired, but she couldn’t leave the room before Reynolds. She believed he was angling for time alone with the old man, but at nearly midnight he gave up, and said goodnight. Once Reynolds had gone she kept looking for an opportunity to leave the old man, or to usher him up to his bed, but it was hard to stop the lachrymose flow. Of Reynolds, he said, ‘I didn’t hear the accent at first, but it’s awfully strong, isn’t it?’ Then there came the usual, wistful, ‘If only you and George had … But you’ve heard it all before.’ She certainly had.
Like most British upper-class males, Charlie Quinn was essentially six years old, and she finally levered him into his bedroom with the promise of a cup of cocoa.
When she brought it up to him, he said, ‘I’ll do the washing up in the morning.’ That meant: ‘You do it.’
She made a start on the washing up.
The Yellow Diamond Page 17
