‘Not so far, Mr Blake Reynolds.’
If that was true, then it was just as well, in view of the fact he would be spending the night in the same house as her.
‘And what about theft?’ said Reynolds. ‘Because I know you have committed a theft.’
‘I see,’ she said, perfectly coolly opening the door of the glass stove and throwing her cigarette in. ‘So – theft,’ she said, sitting back down. ‘What is the definition of it?’
‘The appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive.’
‘Very good. I did not steal anything.’
Reynolds eyed her. He said, ‘Do you remember Russia?’
‘How could I? I was not even two when I left. Well. Maybe. I have some pictures in my mind. One is a machine in the kind of foyer of a kino. You know, a cinema. There is a red carpet, red curtains and this machine, like it was on a stage: a Super Mario … and my father showing me. It was like a symbol of everything that would be coming in the future.’
‘Where was that?’
‘It might have been Novosibirsk. But I don’t think … I also remember a car going through forests. I will tell you something about that car. Not just front seats and back seats, but three rows of seats, and so it was a very long thin road through the trees, and a long thin car, like an arrow. I think that was Russia, but it might have been here.’
‘Do you remember your mother?’
‘Wait,’ she said, and she left the room. When she came back she was holding a photograph: half a dozen young women sitting at a table in a restaurant or a club. It was perhaps a fish restaurant because there seemed to be yellow porcelain fish flying up the wall. It wasn’t particularly smart: the overhead lighting was fluorescent. All the women were good-looking, one especially so. ‘My mother,’ Anna said. There was a resemblance. She and her mother were both small, fairylike people, but with determination somehow indicated. The photograph was possibly over-exposed. It was tinged with orange and yellow, and the stone – quite small – in the necklace of the woman indicated was the yellowest of all. ‘But I do not remember her, no,’ Anna Samarina continued, setting the photograph carefully on the mantelpiece. ‘I was looked after by a lot of babushkas, all very kind, so they are like one person. Nannies, you know.’
Reynolds believed she’d just told him, in a roundabout way, that she’d stolen the yellow diamond, and had every right to do so.
Reynolds said, ‘Your father was orphaned.’
‘Yes. Lived with his father’s sister: his aunt, in fact. His mother died of cancer, father in a work accident.’
‘What did he do?’
‘What could he do? He was like five years old.’
‘I mean his father.’
‘Railway worker. He was doing some separation between two trains. Sorry, two carriages. Well, maybe it was two trains. They came together and he was crushed to death by the …’
She looked at Reynolds until he said, ‘Buffers.’
‘Buffers. You are obviously an expert. It was very late at night, and very cold. It was always dark and cold in that place. Why not work for Papochka? Even if it’s all a disaster you will come out with a lot of money.’
She then insisted on his speaking about his own early years. When he said his own mother had died when he was young, she said, ‘That is obvious.’ But he thought it was just his downbeat northern-ness she had detected, not the true melancholia of her own character. She brought another bottle of wine and he told her the story of the Turks, which, he guiltily reflected, he had worked up to a fine polish.
He went up to bed at one o’clock in the morning, folding back the gauze curtain to climb into the bed. He fell asleep immediately and he dreamt of Quinn, who was walking about London W1, which had become something between a Monopoly board and a model village. After a while, he sat down on the Ritz Hotel and lit one of his strong cigarettes. Reynolds too was there, also giant-sized. Quinn had been about to give Reynolds something: another floppy book perhaps. But it was not forthcoming; he was withholding it.
Reynolds turned over in bed. There was somebody in the room. This person was moving fast towards him. She was in the room. She wore a white T-shirt, nothing else. She climbed under the duvet, and lay down with her back to him.
She said, ‘This is my bed, you know.’
‘Then I’d better get out of it.’
She turned around to face him. She sat up and took her T-shirt off.
‘Goodbye then,’ she said.
She lay down again, closer than before.
‘I don’t think you really want to be doing this,’ he said.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘It is very easy for you to find out.’
He was in range of the heat of her body. He simply had to turn towards her. It would be worth any amount of trouble … Any amount of trouble. It was natural to go towards her, just as it is natural to recline rather than to stand or sit upright. The magnetic force was irresistible.
He rolled away through the gap in the gauze curtain, moved towards the chair on which he’d draped his clothes – it was necessary to make a certain adjustment on the way, at which she laughed – and then he was stepping into his trousers. It was like a bedroom farce, only sadder.
‘Where are you going?’ she said.
‘I don’t know. Nice. I’ll get a flight from there.’
‘Not until six o’clock, you won’t.’
‘Is there a car here that can take me?’
‘I can order you a car. A taxi. Then I think you should take a train to Paris.’
‘Why?’
‘He won’t be expecting you to take a train, since you came by plane.’
‘Porter. In effect, you’re doing this to save him. Because he’s the bad man, right?’
‘Doing what? I’m lying here in my bed.’
Maybe she was only trying to save herself. But no: there was something more at stake. Reynolds believed that she wouldn’t be close to tears over just herself; and she did seem to be close to tears.
40
Reynolds departed from the airport anyway. He couldn’t afford to spend a whole day on a train, and there was no sign of Porter. He thought himself both risible and honourable for having refused what had been offered in the chateau. Risible/honourable. The coin kept spinning in the air for as long as the aeroplane – easyJet – was itself aloft. Mainly, his thoughts were unworthy. He thought especially of Anna Samarina’s naked body … and he had only just been honourable. The case might well have been ruined by such intimacy as had occurred. He kept thinking of Miss Havisham’s possible testimony, or then again: had there been a camera in the room?
He’d had the option of flights to London or Manchester. He bought a ticket for Manchester, since that was closer to the Carltons by two hundred miles. From the departure lounge, he called the Duty Desk of North Yorkshire Police. When he said he was calling about the disappearance of Joseph Caldwell, he was put through to a Detective Sergeant Eddie Ibbotson. Reynolds had expected to be put through to a more senior man. Ibbotson, whom Reynolds had possibly woken up, said, ‘It’s been snowing here for two weeks. The bloke’s got to be dead, it’s just a matter of finding the body.’ Reynolds said there might be a tie-in with a case he was working on. Ibbotson was very interested in this, although he was sure the likely death of Caldwell would turn out to be a ‘natural’. Reynolds assumed he’d have no objection to his going up there to ask a few questions. Ibbotson did not – in fact could not – object. Would Reynolds mind if he came along? Reynolds said he wanted to keep it as low-key as possible, in other words ‘no’. Ibbotson said the man Reynolds needed to get hold of in the village was a neighbour called Morley. It seemed he was the world’s leading expert on the disappeared man.
It wasn’t until he was sitting on the plane that Reynolds assembled the letters in his head: Detective Sergeant Eddie Ibbotson might be reduced to ‘SERG E I’, and he believed it had been so reduced in Quinn’s floppy book. He tried
to call Ibbotson again, to ask whether Quinn had been in touch, but this time he got voicemail just as a stewardess instructed him to turn off his phone. In any case, Ibbotson would surely have mentioned any earlier contact from the Met.
After passport control at Manchester, Reynolds walked up to the police desk and flashed his warrant card. Half an hour later he was driving an unmarked Saab from the police pool at ninety miles an hour along the M62, which made a black ribbon over the snowy wastes of the Pennines. The sky seemed made of clouds of snow. As he drove, he experienced intermittent waves of love for Anna, followed by waves of love for Caroline. In between, he was thinking about Quinn: the flat in Argrove, the art collection, the Mayfair lifestyle, the membership of Annabel’s; then the undisclosed trip to the Riviera. George Quinn had been on the take, and Victoria Clifford could not have been unaware of the fact. It was a conclusion that answered a lot of questions even if it begged many others.
He approached Carlton over the snowy North Yorkshire Moors. Occasionally a house – or something resembling a cross between a stone barn and a house – would be indicated by a sign dangling from a gibbet-like post. All trees had been banished to the horizon, like an army in retreat. Occasionally, Reynolds would see a man standing on the hills, usually with a jeep nearby. On one horizon, he saw two men in combat jackets walking with guns. The snow was dirty snow, having lain for some time. It was the same colour as the sheep. He passed a couple of yellow police signs: ‘Appeal for Information’ – that was Ibbotson, asking after Joseph Caldwell. Some signs, indicating roads apparently leading nowhere, read ‘Except for access’. So they must have led somewhere. Apart from a couple of motorbikes exceeding the speed limit, Reynolds had this road to himself. He kept thinking it would eventually be blocked by some rock fall from a ravine, or a flood of the secretive, black river that came and went beyond the verges. But as long as he kept driving, the road was there. Reynolds felt that he was continually calling its bluff.
Carlton was on the edge of the moor, and preceded by a forest of pines. As the road twisted and turned, the headlights of the car picked out rocky tracks leading into the trees. The ‘Carlton’ nameplate was set on an old millstone. A stoical horse in a blanket stood nearby. It looked as though it was on sentry duty. There were only about a dozen houses in the village, and no people. Two of the houses had farms attached. Not being able to figure out where Carlton ended and Carlton High Top began, Reynolds drove into one of the farmyards and knocked on the door. A dog began barking but not from within the house. A smiling young woman answered. He said he was looking for a Mr Morley. She said, ‘Oh, Anthony,’ and pointed into the darkness.
Reynolds drove in the direction indicated, which took him through some further trees and towards another half-dozen stone houses. Morley apparently lived in the first of these. Reynolds knocked. A deep voice came from within. ‘Who is it?’ Reynolds shouted ‘Police!’ which made him feel rather thuggish. The door was unlatched. Anthony Morley was about seventy: a wiry, bald, grave man. He stared for a long time at Reynolds, as Reynolds held up his warrant card.
Morley ushered Reynolds into his house, but only as far as the hall. Reynolds explained that the missing man’s name had come up peripherally in a cold case that might need to be revived. He was not in any way a suspect, and it was unlikely the matter was connected to the disappearance, but it was better if he didn’t go into too much detail. He would simply like to find out a bit more about the man. Morley eyed Reynolds; he nodded. He left Reynolds in the hall, while he went into another room to make a phone call.
Morley returned wearing a duffel coat, and carrying a file of papers and a torch. Families of silent sheep watched from the verges as they progressed towards the house of the missing man. If Carlton High Top was a satellite of Carlton, then the house of Joe or – as Morley called him – Joseph Caldwell was another satellite again. And a church stood a little way beyond it, at a diagonal distance of about fifty yards. Caldwell, as a Quaker, had had nothing to do with that church, which was C. of E. Quakers did not attend church services: in their plain and spartan way, they attended ‘meetings’, which largely consisted of sitting in silence with their fellow Quakers, or ‘Friends’. Morley explained that people could speak out at any time, ‘providing they felt moved by God to do so’. With that small proviso, thought Reynolds. Morley pointed beyond the church to a grassy hummock where once had stood the Carlton Meeting House, the centre of Quakerism in the locality from 1650 until 1936, when it was pulled down, a new meeting house having been built in the nearby town of Helmsley.
Morley admitted Reynolds to the house of Joseph Caldwell. He turned on the lights and Reynolds saw a room with not much in it but a circle of plastic chairs. They walked through to the kitchen. The room was dominated by the clicking – not exactly ticking – of an electrical wall clock of seventies vintage. It was ten to five. The cooker was old enough to have legs. Reynolds could not immediately see any fridge. Morley went upstairs and came down with a file of papers. Reynolds heard a car pull up, and two women came into the house. Morley introduced them as the missing man’s two sisters, Betty and Helen. Betty had been quoted in the newspaper report that Quinn had read. They were nut-brown women in their seventies, both dressed, it seemed to Reynolds, for hiking, and with snow on their boots. As Reynolds explained himself, Betty made tea, which involved the lighting of gas under a blackened kettle, and the filling of a giant earthenware pot with loose leaves. There was no milk, but there were biscuits: broken digestives in a battered tin.
‘If you’re lucky,’ said Betty, ‘there might be a couple of chocolate ones left.’
Reynolds got the idea that the occasional chocolate biscuit was as near as Joe Caldwell – the sisters had reinstated Joe – ever came to self-indulgence. They decided to speak in the living room, where the circle of chairs stood.
‘Let’s have the fire on, Anthony,’ said Helen, and Anthony Morley switched on a two-bar electrical fire. Reynolds watched one bar begin to glow red; he would wait in vain for the other bar to come on. Reynolds and the two women sat on adjacent chairs. Anthony Morley – who had declined tea – sat two or three chairs away, with arms folded and the papers he’d brought on his knee. There were posters, tacked straight to the walls. One showed a dove flying towards a rainbow above the words ‘Peace Museum’. Another showed a dove sitting on a pound sign, and the slogan, ‘Taxes for Peace Not War’.
‘Now, love,’ said Betty when they’d all sat down. ‘How can we help?’
Reynolds asked first for a potted biography of the missing man.
‘In his working life he was a schoolteacher,’ said Betty. ‘Taught history and R.I.’
‘It’s not called that now, dear,’ said Helen.
‘She means Religious Instruction,’ said Morley. ‘Which is now Religious Education. He also taught English. He retired in 1987, when he was deputy head of Helmsley Secondary Modern.’
Morley was like the umpire of the conversation. He would intervene to make factual clarifications.
Caldwell had lived in Carlton all his life. He was, according to Betty, ‘a lovely, lovely man’, always keen to see the best in people.
‘To find “that of God” in people,’ Morley interjected.
Reynolds wondered whether they were all Quakers.
‘Oh yes,’ said Helen, delightedly.
‘We generally say “Friends”,’ said Morley.
‘But you can call us what you want,’ said Betty.
Caldwell was an elder of the church, whereas the others were only members. There were no vicars in Quakerism, but Caldwell was as near as they came. His lifelong aim had been to raise the funds for rebuilding the old Meeting House. Meanwhile he had been involved in running two other meeting houses in the locality, and latterly he had been holding meetings in the room in which they presently sat. According to Betty he’d had authorisation from a body called Monthly Meeting to do this.
‘Not that authorisation was needed,’ said Morley, and it seem
ed that Quakers could meet anywhere at any time. Caldwell had devoted much of his spare time to a Quaker-affiliated body that Betty called the Committee for International Peace and Reconciliation, and as she said this, Anthony Morley looked up slightly startled, and said to Reynolds, ‘Yes. She has the name right.’
Reynolds asked, ‘Did that bring him into contact with Russia?’
‘The Soviet Union, as was,’ said Morley.
It appeared that Caldwell had been in regular contact with the Soviet Union as was, both directly and through the embassy in London. This was all in the seventies, when he would quite frequently travel down to London to stay at what Helen called ‘a lovely little sort of Quaker guest house, right in the very centre’.
‘The Pen Club,’ said Morley, ‘off Russell Square.’
His main activity had been to promote British–Soviet student exchanges, as a means of fostering cultural understanding.
‘They were quite controversial at the time,’ said Helen.
At this, Anthony Morley moved into the seat next to Reynolds.
‘You may find these of interest,’ he said. He began passing selected papers to Reynolds. Some were old photocopies, all from the same source. ‘They’re from The Quaker,’ said Morley, ‘the principal Quaker journal.’ Certain items were highlighted. Reynolds read things like, ‘The Committee decided to seek a meeting with the Indian High Commissioner and send a letter to the British government on the question of recent nuclear tests’; ‘The appeal for funds to establish a Chair of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford was launched at a press conference at Friends Meeting House, London on Wednesday 22 March.’ Reynolds looked up; he thought he could hear a car approaching the village. He looked down again, reading, ‘The banner of the International Committee for Peace and Reconciliation will again be carried at the Aldermaston march this year.’
Reynolds could no longer hear the car. He asked, ‘Is there anything on the exchange visits, Mr Morley?’
The Yellow Diamond Page 22
