by Peter James
‘You don’t look too bad yourself.’ She liked his soft blue shirt and striped tie that was predominantly orange. She kissed his knuckles, then they stared into each other’s eyes as the engine ran busily on. He was looking relaxed and some of the anxiety wrinkles that had stressed his face over the weekend had gone, making his features even clearer and stronger.
‘I missed you,’ he said.
‘Missed you too.’ She was aware they were in full view of anyone coming out of the Museum but she did not care.
‘Edward go off to school OK?’
‘Yes, he seemed very happy.’ He raised a finger. ‘I had to make one solemn promise. That’d you’d be at Meston on Saturday afternoon when he comes home for the weekend.’ He angled his head and smiled. ‘Would that be a possibility?’
Her sadness about Meredith and her concern about Phoebe’s words were forgotten for a moment. She slid her arms around him, intoxicated by the sheer warmth he was exuding towards her and by her own response to it. ‘I think it could be arranged,’ she said softly.
‘How are the stings?’
‘Hurting a little but they’re a lot better today.’
Oliver eased out into the traffic. Frannie leaned back in her seat and asked, ‘Edward’s allowed home every weekend?’
‘From lunchtime Saturdays.’
‘Did you miss him today?’
‘As I took Monday and Tuesday off work, I had to knuckle down today; didn’t have too much time to think about him.’
‘What did you do at work today?’
‘I’ve been analysing and discussing motor-accident statistics.’
From the speed and aggression of his driving, Frannie concluded that the statistics must have left him unmoved. ‘What was that for?’
‘The bank’s involved in reinsurance for some of the motor-car insurers. We have to make decisions based on statistics.’ He was quiet for a moment as he changed lanes, aware of the direction of her thoughts. ‘So, how was the funeral?’
‘Grim. Her husband’s being very brave. I think he’s going to feel the shock later.’
‘You got back last night?’
‘Yes. I had some good news at work today. I’m going to work on a new exhibition, which I’m really pleased about.’
‘Great! Well done!’
‘Just a bit of luck, I think. And I had a rather interesting coincidence involving your family,’ she said hesitantly.
‘Oh yes?’
She told him about the brass tiger, but did not mention the cut she had got from it.
‘The fourteenth Marquess. William Halkin,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘He was involved with the East India Company, I think. And with Indian politics. He gave quite a lot of works of art to museums.’
‘Actually, when I first saw it I found it a bit eerie. I think your own fear of coincidences is starting to get to me.’ She was jerked forward against her seat-belt as he braked hard for a red light.
‘How do you mean?’
‘You know on the drive back to London we saw that accident?’
He nodded, his expression turning more serious.
‘Well, as soon as I got home the phone rang with the terrible news about Meredith. And after what you’d said about coincidences always seeming to mean something, I thought that was quite weird.’
The lights changed and Oliver accelerated more slowly. ‘I didn’t have very good news either on Sunday night. I didn’t mention it on the phone. Charles rang to tell me another six cows have gone down with the virus, and the vet has said we have to stop selling our milk until the herd’s clear of it.’
‘Are you going to lose a lot of money?’
The traffic was snarled up ahead of them in the Charing Cross Road. Oliver halted behind a taxi that was disgorging some passengers. ‘Yes; and our insurance doesn’t cover it.’
‘Maybe the homeopathy you’re going to try will help.’
‘Maybe,’ he said without conviction.
They drove around Trafalgar Square into Pall Mall, then Oliver slowed, found a parking space, and backed into it. Frannie enjoyed walking along the front of the white Georgian terrace on the Mall, her hand linked with Oliver’s, watching the last spangles of daylight through the trees.
At the entrance to the gallery Oliver showed his invitation, and beyond was the refined hubbub of the party in progress. A waitress stood at the top of a short staircase with a tray of drinks. Frannie could smell smoke and perfume, and a tinge of alcohol. She went across to the cloakroom, slipped off her mackintosh and laid it on the counter. An elderly, silver-haired attendant pushed a hanger inside and gave her a plastic disc.
Frannie opened her handbag and dropped the disc in. As she did so, something jolted her. Something about the disc. She dug her hand into her bag, rummaged with her fingers and retrieved the disc. It was number twenty-six.
Sudden goose-pimples prickled her neck as she remembered Phoebe’s words; and her scared voice, quite out of character. Just be careful of that number.
She saw, to her surprise, Oliver reading the number also and frowning, with a distinct look of unease on his face; or perhaps he was frowning at something else, she wondered, dropping it back into her bag and trying to brush the moment off with a smile. She was going to enjoy herself tonight. She very definitely was not about to get spooked by a cloakroom tag.
The party was a crush of wall-to-wall glamorous women, and tall men in City suits with loud ties or unstructured jackets with T-shirts. In her black cotton jacket, tailored shorts and white T-shirt, Frannie felt fine, although she knew she should perhaps have been dressier. But Oliver seemed to approve, introducing her proudly to friends and acquaintances.
She met an art dealer called James Shenstone who had been at Trinity College, Dublin with Declan O’Hare, and who regaled her with stories of the mischief O’Hare had got up to. He then introduced her to the artist, whose name she had already forgotten and which she failed to grasp when she heard it again. The artist was small and rather embarrassed-looking, and repeated several times to Frannie that it had not been his idea at all to hold an exhibition. When he learned that she was an archaeologist, he launched into a deep conversation about the relationship between archaeology and anthropology, before being wheeled away, shyly and rather reluctantly, for a photograph.
Frannie was then collared by an immensely boring man with a voice like gears meshing, who proceeded to lecture her for ten minutes about a lawsuit in which he was engaged, and which he assumed she had read of in the newspapers, whilst asking her not a single question about herself.
She was finally rescued by Oliver who put his arm protectively around her. ‘Shall we slope off?’
She nodded gratefully, gave the bore a sweet smile and followed Oliver to the entrance. He helped her on with her mac and they stepped outside; it was almost dark. ‘Sorry you got stuck with him. Did you enjoy yourself otherwise?’
‘It was great. I’ve got some good ammunition on my boss.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘That art historian I was introduced to?’
‘Jimmy Shenstone.’
‘Yes. He was at university with my boss at the Museum. Another coincid –’ She stopped in mid-sentence and gave him a guilty smile.
He gave her a hug. ‘You are allowed to mention the word; I’m not totally paranoid about it. Only slightly.’
Frannie laughed. ‘Race you up!’
She broke free and ran up the steps to Pall Mall, leaping them two at a time, Oliver shadowing her. They stopped at the top, breathless. ‘You’re crazy!’ Oliver said, exhilarated.
But when they got back to the car, his face fell. ‘Bugger!’
In the glare of the street light the wording of the paper square on the windscreen was clear:
WARNING. THIS VEHICLE HAS BEEN CLAMPED. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO MOVE IT. Beneath was the large star emblem of the Metropolitan Police.
Oliver insisted they leave the Renault and said he would sort it out in the morning; they took a t
axi to his flat in Cadogan Square.
In contrast to the grand elegance of the exterior of the building, the flat was small and furnished almost entirely in modern furniture. There were a few ancestral oil paintings, but most of the decor and pictures were modern also. The place felt snug.
Frannie smiled, but was feeling subdued. Phoebe Hawkins’ warning, Just be careful of that number, was lodged in her mind like an old tune. She followed Oliver into the tiny, high-tech kitchen, and waited as he removed a bottle of wine from the fridge and a couple of glasses from a cupboard.
‘Are you hungry? Would you like an omelette or something?’ he asked.
‘I’ll make it if you like.’
‘Don’t worry; I’ll do it in a minute – let’s have a drink first.’ He pulled a corkscrew out of a drawer and began opening the bottle.
‘Do you think there are different types of coincidence?’ she said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Can you make a distinction between what’s just pure chance, and – I don’t know – something supernatural, I suppose?’
He carried a tray through into the drawing-room, and put on a jazz cassette she did not recognize, then sat down beside her on a comfortable sofa. Behind her, through the window, she could hear the muffled sound of the traffic.
‘Man has an innate need to try to make sense of things he cannot understand. One of the perverse paradoxes of physics is that there is order in chaos. As I said, I was working with road-accident statistics today. In England in 1986, 5,618 people died in road accidents. In 1987, 5,339. In 1988, 5,230. In 1989, 5,554. In 1990, 5,402. You have the same constancy in the United States only the figures are much higher.’ He raised his hands in a despairing gesture. ‘How the hell can they be so consistent, year after year?’
She looked at him in amazement. ‘You can remember those in your head?’
‘Uh huh.’ He poured some wine into the glasses and handed her one. ‘Cheers. Don’t you think it’s strange? If you think of all the combinations of bad luck and chance that make up a car crash, you would expect to get peaks and troughs – some years more, some less. But it’s almost exactly the same number every year. It’s constant for road deaths, for dog bites, for air-travel deaths, for cancer, heart attacks. Everything.’
‘So why is that?’ Frannie asked.
Oliver drank some wine then looked serious. ‘There is a mathematical law of large numbers, but I don’t believe that’s the answer. I think there has to be something behind how the world works that we don’t yet begin to understand.’
‘Something supernatural?’
‘I think coincidences are signals that a greater intelligence or consciousness is at work. But I don’t have a firm conviction as to whether it is some supernatural force or entity, some God figure, or something that is simply inside us all – part of our programming.’
The music was soothing her, now. ‘So was our meeting part of the chaos or part of the cosmic order?’
‘Not necessarily either.’ He said the words sharply, almost chidingly.
‘Isn’t there a theory that we read too much into coincidence? That given infinity everything is possible? That if you sat a monkey at a typewriter it would eventually recreate the entire works of Shakespeare?’
‘I don’t believe in infinity. Life is finite; neither humans nor monkeys live for ever. It would be far more interesting if playwrights in three different parts of the world, who had never met, all sat down and wrote exactly the same play.’
‘I’ve heard of things like that happening.’
‘Yes. They do happen. All sorts of strange things happen that are dismissed as chance. People meet on railway stations and dismiss that as chance.’
Frannie smiled.
Oliver took a small sip of his wine and pondered it for some moments. ‘When we met at King’s Cross, Edward and I should have been on an earlier train; we only missed it because I remembered I had to make a phone call.’
‘Hey! I should have caught an earlier train also. I missed it because I had a phone call just as I was leaving the office.’ She watched his face, but could read no reaction.
‘We meet three years ago in your parents’ café. We meet three years later at a railway station. I place an advertisement in a magazine you don’t read, and you see it.’ He dipped his head and raised his eyes at her.
‘Didn’t Jung believe in meaningful coincidence? What did he call it – Synchronicity?’
‘He never explained it to his satisfaction. I think he accepted that telepathy had something to do with it.’ Oliver traced a finger around the rim of his glass. ‘Who was it who said that man doubts everything that can be doubted and hopes what is left over is the truth?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘That’s rather beautiful.’
‘I think it’s a sad indictment.’
‘Don’t mathematicians tend to be sceptical about coincidences because the odds on things such as meeting someone you know – like at a station or an airport, or someone phoning just as you’re thinking about them – are much smaller than we realize?’
‘I used to think that once.’ His eyes widened and he looked sad, suddenly. ‘I used to really hope that was the case.’ He cupped his glass in both hands beneath his chin and mustered a weak smile.
‘I’m sorry, I’m talking about a sensitive subject.’
‘It’s OK. It’s good to talk about it.’
She reached across and squeezed one of his hands. His skin was like ice. She lifted her hand away with a start and studied him. In his eyes was the same look of fear that she had seen in his car the first time he had taken her out. Then it had been fleeting, so fast she might have imagined it. This time she gripped his hand and squeezed again, alarmed. ‘What is it?’
He smiled. ‘I’m fine.’ He squeezed her hand back. ‘I’m fine,’ he repeated, then stood up abruptly and walked towards the kitchen.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Frannie walked down Phoebe Hawkins’ street shortly after seven, tired and in a bad mood. Oliver had been given tickets to a royal movie première and had asked her to go with him.
It was a damp night and a light drizzle was falling. She walked with her head bowed, clutching a bottle of Valpolicella in its tissue wrapping from the off-licence.
She itched to see Oliver again, had been missing him all day. He had rung and left a message at the office in the late morning, but she had been tied up almost the whole day with Declan O’Hare and a group of colleagues and had not seen the message until half past six.
Now, instead of being with him, she was plodding through the rain to spend an uncertain evening with someone she did not like, and her doubts were increasing. Phoebe Hawkins was sly; a manipulator who had become unpopular for that reason. At university you’d had to be careful what you told her because it would come back at you weeks later, distorted. An innocent comment about a friend would be turned into an insult and recycled to the person concerned in a quiet, underhand way, as a chance remark. Or a message would be subtly altered. For Phoebe the truth was no more than a raw material waiting to be fashioned. Frannie wondered if that was all Phoebe was up to now. Her old tricks. Making something out of nothing.
If Meredith’s death and Jonathan Mountjoy’s death and Susie Verbeeten’s blindness were nothing.
With every step she took closer to Phoebe’s street, she felt a growing feeling of gloom. A taxi drove past, and she was tempted to hail it, to get it to take her to Leicester Square, to join the crowds outside the cinema and watch for Oliver, see who he was with. The more time she spent with him, the more she enjoyed being with him. After he’d relaxed again last night, they had made love all night through, as tenderly and as forcefully as they had on Saturday.
It had not escaped Penrose Spode’s notice that she had arrived for work in the same clothes as the previous day. The shorts were not her usual office togs. He had not commented, of course, not in words; he had conveyed it all with one brief and complex manoeuvr
e of his facial muscles. Declan O’Hare had also noticed, because he missed nothing, and made a subtle joke connecting the brevity of her attention span to her sartorial consistency, but she had been able to keep him at bay by casually dropping that she had met an old friend of his, James Shenstone, and that he had been reminiscing about their days at Trinity College, Dublin.
She walked slowly past the parked cars that lined both sides of the street. She smelled cooking as she passed an open window, something garlicky, but she was not hungry, did not want to spend the evening drinking Valpolicella and eating nut rissoles, or whatever else Phoebe might cook, in a grotty kitchen.
A strobe flash of blue light skidded down the pavement and she heard the wailing of a siren. Frannie felt something walk over her grave. A gust of wind shook the trees in the street and a solitary leaf shuffled along the pavement.
Two coincidences yesterday: finding the bronze tiger; the number twenty-six. Then Oliver’s car getting clamped. Was that a connection? Any more than Meredith’s death had been a connection after the upturned car? Getting paranoid. She shivered. It seemed bitterly cold suddenly. Winter, not late summer. An old Buddy Holly song blasted from a window across the street. As she turned the corner, she saw ahead of her a jumble of vehicles and the stark white glare of an arc light.
For a second she wondered if there was someone filming, then a solitary blue cube of strobed light hurtled towards her and was gone. A policeman in a luminous yellow waistcoat was standing in the middle of the road, stopping a car. The next cube of blue light turned green on his chest.
In the brilliant white light behind him the first thing she saw was a bicycle wheel. Then the huge shadow of a lorry halted at an angle across the pavement. Its cab had demolished the brick wall of someone’s front garden. A small crowd of people stood on the street corner, watching.
‘Sorry, sir,’ the policeman was saying to the driver of the car. ‘Could you use another route?’
The bicycle wheel glinted in the glare of the light mounted on a tripod near it. A gear whined. A man shouted. She saw an ambulance. A fire-engine. A tender. A vast truck with a crane on the back from which a large metal hook was being lowered. Two men were trying to find a purchase beneath the front bumper of the lorry. On the panelled sides of the lorry were emblazoned in large letters: HUNSTONS WHOLESALE FRUITERERS. GARDEN-FRESH PRODUCE!
