A Prospect of Vengeance

by Anthony Price

She blinked at him again. ‘As I recall, Mr Robinson, she left our employ in November, just before Armistice Day. And I do remember that because I was working with her in the same office: I was acting as Dr Garfield’s secretary at the time, and she was temping for Dr Cavendish’s secretary, who was on leave of absence.’

  He observed her lips tighten at the memory. And it was ‘tittle-tattle’ that he wanted. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes.’ Slight sniff. ‘I remember that because when … when the person selling the British Legion poppies came round she insisted on his pinning her poppy on her blouse. Which was … quite improper. But quite typical, also.’

  Tittle-tattle. ‘Typical, Mrs Simmonds?’ He cocked his head innocently, deliberately forgetting Mrs Simmonds’ earlier reference to Marilyn’s blouses.

  Half-sniff, half-sigh. ‘One of Miss Francis’s affectations was to wear as little as possible. I could never understand why she didn’t get pneumonia.’

  Ian opened his mouth. ‘Ah … ’

  ‘She left us shortly after that. She received an urgent telephone message … apparently her mother had been taken ill. So she left us immediately. And I remember that too, because it was mid-week, and I let her have £5 from the petty cash as an advance on the money due to her, for her fare home. Which I never saw again, of course—though I suppose I can hardly blame her for that, in the circumstances … Although what she was doing up in Yorkshire a few days later I’ll never know—I thought her home was in London.’

  ‘But you don’t know where?’ Instinct stirred: she didn’t know, but something had occurred to her, nevertheless. ‘Did she commute back home every day?’ That would have been easy enough from Rickmansworth. But London was a big place.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I believe she had digs somewhere down here.’ Slight frown. ‘She never minded working late, I will say that for her. But that may have been because she was trying to ingratiate herself with Dr Cavendish, in case Miss Ballard didn’t come back. And she’d stay to cover for anyone else—Dr Page, or Dr Garfield, or—or anyone else.’

  Like Dr Harrison, maybe?

  ‘She said she needed the money, so the extra hours were useful.’ Mrs Simmonds pressed on. ‘But she was a nosey young woman. Always chatting the men up, trying to insinuate herself where she had no right to be—‘ She snapped her mouth shut on herself suddenly, as if she’d heard herself. ‘But there, now: I’m being unkind, aren’t I—‘ She cut herself off again.

  ‘No.’ Maybe she’d misread his expression. But, at all costs he mustn’t lose her again. ‘No. You’re just being honest, Mrs Simmonds. And I respect you for that. Because … not many people are honest.’

  She stared at him. ‘Honest?’ The word seemed to hurt her.

  ‘Yes.’ If he could hold her now, when her defences were down, she’d give him everything she’d got. ‘Thanks to you, I understand much better now what others have said. And what they haven’t said.’

  ‘Do you?’ The pain showed again. ‘I wonder.’

  ‘Wonder … what?’

  ‘Perhaps I should have tried harder to understand her. After what you’ve told me.’ She looked away from him for a moment. ‘It’s a long time ago … ’

  ‘Yes. It is.’ He waited.

  ‘And yet … of all the temps we’ve had … I remember her so well—so well!’ She looked away again. ‘Better than any of them, you know.’

  Was that surprising? Apart from Marilyn’s see-through blouses, not many of Mrs Simmonds’ temps could have been shot by the IRA. But, more likely, the doting mother/kind auntie inside her was now torturing her with visions of Marilyn Francis working long extra hours not to chat up the men, but to support the fair-haired, blue-eyed baby he’d invented. And that, in turn, didn’t exactly make him feel a great human being.

  She looked at him. ‘Deep down I think she was sad.’

  ‘Sad?’ The word took him by surprise.

  ‘Yes. And a little desperate, perhaps … But I can understand that now, of course.’ She nodded wisely.

  ‘Many of these young women make the most terrible messes of their lives. Early marriages, or unplanned babies—just like Marilyn … We try to help them, naturally. And some of them take it all in their stride—quite amazingly resilient, they are … It’s as though they never expected anything different.’

  ‘Yes?’ He controlled his impatience. ‘Are you saying … Marilyn wasn’t resilient?’

  She thought about that for a moment. ‘Perhaps I am—yes. Some of the most intelligent ones have the biggest problems—the ones who realize that it could have been different: they are the sad ones.’ Another wise nod. ‘They don’t like what they’ve become, so they pretend to be someone else. And now I think about Marilyn … yes, I’m sure that she wasn’t really like that. She was just playing a role—‘ She blinked suddenly. ‘But that isn’t helping you, is it?’

  ‘On the contrary—‘

  ‘No.’ She sat up very straight. ‘As regards Miss Francis, Mr Robinson, I think your best bet would be a certain Gary Redwood.’

  ‘Gary—‘ His repetition of the absurd Christian name seemed to tighten her mouth. ‘A boyfriend?’

  ‘No.’ Her expression belied the question even before she’d rejected it. ‘Whatever Gary was to her, he most certainly wasn’t that.’ She turned away from him abruptly, to stare at a pair of steel filing-cabinets which seemed oddly out-of-place in an otherwise computerized office.

  ‘Who is he?’ It disconcerted him oddly that she didn’t move to consult the cabinets’ contents, but merely stared at them, as though their entire contents were already on disc in her memory.

  ‘Was, as far as this company is concerned, Mr Robinson. Yes.’ She switched back to him. ‘He was our messenger boy, while Miss Francis was with us … and for a brief time after that. Gary Redwood—his mother, who was a perfectly decent woman, worked in our canteen. They lived in Albion Street, near the railway line. But you won’t find him there.’ She looked at her watch. ‘If he has continued to stay one jump ahead of the Police, you should find him in Messiter’s timber yard, Mr Robinson—‘

  ‘Redwood—?’ He cupped his hands round his mouth to direct his shout at the man over the shriek of the circular saw.

  ‘Eh?’ The man tapped his protective ear-muffs.

  This wasn’t Gary Redwood, he was too old by a dozen years: even now the former Brit-Am messenger boy would only be in his mid-twenties. ‘Gary Redwood?’ Ian’s voice cracked.

  An uneven piece of mahogany fell away from the saw. The man picked it up and pointed with it towards a stairway before tossing it aside.

  The noise fell away behind Ian as he ascended the stair. He still wasn’t at all sure what he was really doing; or, at any rate, whether it really had any bearing on what had happened to Philip Masson. For the link between Marilyn Francis and Philip Masson was hardly more than a tenuous sequence of November days in early November, with David Audley in the middle of it. Dr Harrison, of British-American, had been jailed for passing high-tech secrets to one of Russia’s East European colonies—Hungary, was it? Or Bulgaria? And Marilyn Francis had quit Brit-Am (and Dr Harrison) on November 7, 1978, to keep an appointment with ‘Mad Dog’ O’Leary’s bullet (or somebody’s bullet) in Dr Audley’s presence four days later; and, as things stood at present, Audley was playing Macbeth to Philip Masson’s Banquo, his victim, if Jenny had heard more than a rumour. But there lay a full week between those two deaths, and a week was a long time not just in politics.

  ‘Mr Redwood?’ There was only one person in the timber-loft, so it had to be Gary. And as the man turned towards him from the pile of planks he was sorting the identification was confirmed: the acne-ravaged face and the stocky build filled Mrs Simmonds’ 1978 description to the life.

  ‘Yeah?’ Gary straightened up, balancing himself among the planks.

  ‘I believe you may be able to help me, Mr Redwood.’ He returned Gary’s empty gaze with a smile of encouragement. ‘You used to work at British-American E
lectronics just down the road, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah—‘ A fraction of a second after he began to answer, as though his brain was slower than his tongue, Gary’s expression changed from the blank to the wary ‘—who says?’

  Mrs Simmonds’ name was not the one to drop, decided Ian. And, in any case, he had a much better name to open Gary up. ‘You had a friend there—‘ As he spoke, Mrs Simmonds’ parting words echoed in his head: “She let them chat her up—even a dreadful ugly little beast like Gary. At the time, I thought it was disgusting. But perhaps I was wrong: perhaps she was just being kind to him!’; but now he observed Gary in the pitted flesh neither conclusion quite fitted ‘—a Miss Francis—Miss Marilyn Francis, Mr Redwood—?’

  A succession of different emotions twisted across the moonscape face, ending with a scowling grimace. ‘Who told you? Not that fucking old bitch Simmonds?’ Gary spoke with surprising clarity as well as bitterness. ‘You don’t want to believe anything she says—right?’

  It would be a mistake to underrate Gary, in spite of appearances. ‘She only said you were a friend of Miss Francis, Mr Redwood.’

  Gary shook his head, as at some crassly stupid statement. ‘About Miss Francis—Marilyn … she’s who I mean. You don’t want to believe anything the old bag said about her—right?’ The corner of his mouth twisted upwards. ‘It don’t matter what she said about me. Who gives a fuck for that, eh?’

  There had been a sum of unaccounted petty cash outstanding between Mrs Beryl Simmonds and Mr Gary Redwood, back in 1979. But who gave a fuck for that? What mattered was that, once again, Marilyn Francis had been memorable. ‘But … Miss Francis was a friend of yours, surely?’

  ‘Yeah—‘ Gary stopped suddenly. ‘No. I just talked to her—that’s all.’ He looked past Ian, down the length of the timber-loft. ‘She was a smasher—a right little smasher! Bloody IRA—bloody bastard sods!’ He came back to Ian. ‘I was only a lad then. First job out of school, like … But she was a smasher, she was—Miss Francis.’ He pronounced the smasher’s name almost primly. ‘Why d’you want to know about her?’

  Ian was ready for the question. ‘Not for anything wrong, Mr Redwood. I’m just a solicitor’s clerk, and we’ve got this will to check up on—next-of-kin, and all that. And probate, and death duties, and all the rest of it—‘ He shrugged fellow-feeling at Gary, as one loser to another ‘—I just do the donkey-work for my boss … ’ For a guess, Gary wouldn’t know probate from a hole in the road. But it might be as well to divert him, just in case. ‘She seems to have been a decent sort—Miss Francis?’

  ‘She was.’ He looked past Ian again, but only for a second. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And pretty, too.’ Ian followed Gary’s eyes, and his own came to rest on a copy of the Sun which lay folded on top of a bomber-jacket beside the wood pile. ‘Like Page Three—?’ He pointed at the newspaper.

  ‘What?’ Gary squinted at him. ‘Like—? No, not like that … That’ll be that old bitch going on—like she always did. She just dressed smart—Marilyn—Miss Francis did. But she was a lady. More of a lady than old Mrs Simmonds. And not stuck-up, like some of ‘em … She’d talk to you—really talk to you—not treat you like dirt, see?’

  Ian wasn’t quite sure that he did see. It wasn’t just that Mrs Simmonds’ and Gary’s views diverged on Marilyn Francis, that was predictable. There was something here that was missing. But he nodded encouragingly nevertheless.

  ‘An’ she was clever.’ Gary nodded back. ‘She knew things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Oh … I used to talk to her about the Old West,’ Gary trailed off.

  ‘The old—what?’

  ‘West.’ Gary’s eyes lit up at the memory. ‘Cowboys and Indians … and the US cavalry—General Custer … It’s my hobby, like—I read the books on it … And she knew about it—knew who Major Reno was, for instance—I didn’t have to explain about him getting the blame for Custer getting hisself killed—she knew. We had a good talk about that once, while she was helping me with the deliveries all round the office. Which she didn’t have to do, either … All about whether the Sioux had used more bows and arrows than Winchesters an’ Remingtons—she didn’t think they had many guns.’ He nodded vehemently. ‘An’, you know, she was probably right—there’s a new book I got out of the library just last week that says that … She was clever, I tell you.’

  So it hadn’t been just the see-through blouse with Gary after all—or the peroxide hair and the red nails. It had been General Custer and the Sioux (and Major Reno, whoever the hell he had been!). But—

  ‘An’ she knew about guns.’ Another decisive nod, which brought a cow-lick of hair across the bright-eyes. ‘Knew more than any girl I ever met—repeating rifles, an’ double-action revolvers … An’ we talked once about the SLRs what the army had. ‘Fact, she said I ought to join the army—said I’d make a good soldier, knowing about guns like I did—‘ Gary’s gargoyle features twisted suddenly.

  Clever little Marilyn, Ian had been thinking. Mrs Simmonds had said it, and Gary had said it—on that they were agreed. And he was himself thinking it: clever, clever Miss Francis!

  But Gary was staring up at him. ‘You didn’t join up, though—?’

  Gary straightened up. ‘Got flat feet—haven’t I!’ He scowled horribly. ‘Went down to the Recruiting Office—went down the day it was in the paper … Flat bloody feet, is what I’ve got. Bloody stupid!’

  Ian became aware that he was returning the scowl. ‘What … paper?’

  ‘That one.’ Gary gestured toward the Sun. ‘In all of ‘em—about the IRA shooting her. Christ! I’d ‘uv given ‘em shooting if I’d ‘uv got into uniform, and got to Ireland, I tell you—killing her like that, the bastards!’

  Lucky Ulster! Ian’s thoughts came away from clever Miss Francis momentarily. But now Gary would give him everything.

  ‘She talked about Ireland once—funny, that.’ Gary’s eyes were still bright with Marilyn Francis’ memories. ‘It was when we were talking about the army—about my joining up, maybe … She said it was a better job than running messages, an’ delivering the post an’ that, in Brit-Am. “No future for you here, Gary,” she says. “But you could be doing a good job in Ulster, keeping the peace, an’ protecting people. And they’ll teach you a trade too, most like—an’ you can practise your shooting for free!”’ One broad shoulder lifted in resignation. ‘She didn’t know about my flat feet … But, then, she’d have been sorry—she was … all right, I tell you—‘ He stopped suddenly again. But by this time he had remembered Ian, not Miss Francis. ‘What you on about, then—asking questions—?’

  Mills and Boon came to the rescue again, like the US cavalry in Gary’s old West, trumpets blaring romantically: Gary, feeling as he did about Marilyn Francis, would not be able to resist Mills and Boon either.

  ‘Well, Mr Redwood, it’s like this—‘ He looked around the empty timber-loft, and then advanced cautiously across the unstable planks so that he was able to lower his voice confidentially. ‘—Miss Francis had a child—a little boy … And I’m trying to trace him, so that we can give him some money, which is due to him—his inheritance, from his uncle.’

  ‘What?’ Gary frowned. ‘I didn’t know about—?’

  Ian raised his hand. ‘It was very secret—you mustn’t tell anyone, Mr Redwood.’ Actually, on reflection it was as much Charles Dickens as Mills and Boon. But Dickens would do just as well. ‘There are those who would like me not to find Miss Francis’s little boy, Mr Redwood. Because then they’d get the money, you see—eh?’ He gave Gary a sly look.

  ‘Yes—?’ Gary checked the timber-loft himself, but more carefully, before coming back to Ian. ‘What d’you want to know?’ Then he frowned. ‘It was a long time ago … But—?’

  ‘Did she have a boyfriend?’ The trouble was, Gary was dead right: it was a long time ago, 1978. And it might all be a waste of time, anyway. But … somehow Marilyn Francis was alive again now, in her own right; and he wante
d to know more about her, quite regardless of David Audley and Philip Masson and Jenny and Reg Buller and John Tully. ‘Was there anyone who visited her—anyone you can remember—?’

  ‘No … yes—‘ Gary’s brow furrowed with concentrated effort. ‘—there was a bloke I saw her with once, one night, just down the road from Brit-Am … I was just going past, an’ she didn’t see me … I thought he was chatting her up, at first.’

  ‘But he wasn’t—?’

  ‘No. Because she gave him something—an envelope, or a package, or something.’ The frown deepened. ‘Good-looking bloke, in a Triumph … But she didn’t like him—I could see that—‘ He pre-empted the next question ‘—because she gave him the brush-off, as well as the packet, whatever it was, an’ walked straight on without turning round, an’ just left him there—see?’ He brightened at the memory. ‘So he wasn’t any boyfriend of hers, anyway.’

  ‘No?’ She must have been hard-pressed to have taken such a risk, so close to Brit-Am. ‘But … didn’t she have any friends, Gary?’

  ‘Naow, she was just a temp. So she didn’t know no-one, see?’ Gary shrugged. ‘Each night … she just went back to ‘er digs.’

  Ian controlled himself. ‘Her … digs?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Gary dismissed the question. “Er digs. Old Mrs Smith.’

  Old Mrs Smith! Ian warmed himself on the recollection of Gary’s ‘old Mrs Smith’ as he came to the end of the low wall which separated the churchyard from Lower Buck-land Village Green.

  He stopped in the shadow of the huge old yew tree at the corner and studied the scene. It was purely a precaution, and an unnecessary one at that: if there had been any car behind him earlier he had certainly lost it at one of the three consecutive stretches of road works on the edge of Rickmansworth. And it still took an effort of will—almost a suspension of rational belief—to accept Reg Buller’s warning. So now, when he was aware that he was basking in self-satisfied success, was the moment to guard against carelessness and over-confidence, and make doubly sure before he searched for a telephone—