Caroline Minuscule

by Andrew Taylor

  Lee did not reply at once. Dougal became acutely aware of the sounds around him – the clatter of dishes, water trickling into the lavatory cistern and the murmur of Primrose’s voice.

  ‘Yes, that sounds possible. Simpler all round, eh? London or Rosington, then, depending where you are. This morning?’

  ‘Well, actually —’ here came the difficult bit ‘— I’d prefer tomorrow and Suffolk.’ Surely Lee wouldn’t quibble about the conditions of the transfer, not if he believed they had been terrorized into good behaviour? ‘You see, we want to leave the country. Not just over this business – there are several other reasons why we’d be better out of the way at present.’ Dougal hoped he sounded convincingly mysterious and harassed. ‘We’re hoping a friend will take us over to the Continent tomorrow. If we could meet at the mooring, fewer things could go wrong, we could make the exchange and be off on Tuesday’s tide—’

  ‘Where in Suffolk?’

  ‘I don’t know, yet. I’ll have to contact this bloke first. He prefers to be discreet.’

  ‘If you’re just trying to gain time . . .’

  ‘No. Really.’ Dougal tried frantically to think of reasons why Lee should not suspect any sort of double cross. ‘I wouldn’t have rung you in that case, let alone told you we’d found the diamonds.’

  It seemed to satisfy Lee.

  ‘When will you let me know the details?’

  ‘I could phone you tomorrow morning – I’ve got to get hold of this friend today and sort everything out.’

  ‘Make it between nine and ten. Without fail. Got something to write with?’ Dougal grabbed the pad and biro which the Primroses had thoughtfully left on top of the telephone directories. Lee gave a London telephone number – Hampstead, Dougal recognized. ‘Remember, the time for playing games is over, son.’

  The way Lee said ‘son’ made Dougal swallow. He gave the appropriate assurances. There was no need to act the terrified innocent: that was exactly how he felt. And it was vital that Lee should believe him. Their only hope of pulling this off lay in Lee underestimating them as much as possible. When he finally put the phone down, his hands were clammy with sweat. He hated Lee. It occurred to him that fear wasn’t good for the character.

  In the kitchen, Amanda was drying the casserole dish which had held the stew.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said, as he slumped into a chair. ‘Lee agreed to everything. The bastard. Where’s Philip?’

  ‘He’s upstairs now. He told me about his research while I was washing up.’

  The door opened and Pee-Pee came in. He darted a curt glance at Dougal, as if he wished he wasn’t there. Scraps of bloodstained lavatory paper clung wispily to parts of his neck and face: his razor liked the taste of blood.

  ‘I must say, Bill, you were on that phone rather a long time. And it is at peak hours, too.’

  Dougal forced an apologetic smile and reached for his wallet. Sometimes he wished life would pause at a request stop, so he could get off for a while.

  17

  ‘Americans, you say?’ said Philip Primrose, rubbing his chin in a spasm of agitation, thereby dislodging a shred of tissue paper and causing one of his cuts to start bleeding again. ‘That’s bad. You simply can’t trust them. Revolting colonials,’ he added with an air of conscious originality.

  Up to this point, he had listened warily to Dougal and Amanda as they explained what they wanted him to do. But mention of the cut-throat American rivals of Amanda’s father’s firm had swept away his caution.

  ‘I applied for a research scholarship at Harvard a couple of years ago. Just after I left Oxford. And you know they turned me down flat, without even the courtesy of going through my Ph.D. proposal properly. That shows the sort of people we’re dealing with. And Bill, you remember that awful American girl at college?’

  Dougal did indeed: Ah, piss off, pruneface, you make me wanna puke.

  ‘Which of course is why I ended up in London. All very well but not quite the same. I thought I’d save the Other Place until later.’ Primrose glanced at Dougal to see if his reference had been taken.

  Amanda murmured sympathetically. Dougal had a vision of Philip’s life, each stage planned on the principle of deferred gratification, so he could say, after the event, ‘When I was up at Oxfordarvard/Cambridge . . .’ according to the context. He put the thought away from him as unworthy and mostly untrue. The trouble with being with Primrose was that he encouraged the baser side of one’s nature, just as with other people it was easy to appear, and in fact to feel, consistently pleasant and generous.

  ‘You’re sure there’s nothing criminal about this?’

  ‘No,’ said Dougal patiently, ‘that’s the trouble. We know we had a car on our tail on the way to Cambridge yesterday – a black Lancia, but they’ve done nothing, so we can hardly ask for police protection. The police would think we were mad. Once the Americans do something, it’ll be too late, of course. That’s why we need your help – to get us another car and deposit the formula (there’s an electronic component with it, by the way).’

  ‘In a way, it’s a matter of life and death.’ Amanda stared earnestly into Philip’s eyes and he looked back with his mouth slightly open, like a rabbit caught in the beam of headlights. ‘Not just for Daddy – though of course he’s financially committed – but because of all the jobs that depend on Britain using the idea first. The minister told him it was vital, because if we develop this, contracts should flow in from abroad . . . I don’t really understand it fully – I expect you’ve got a better idea of how these things work than I have – but I do know how important it is.’

  ‘But why are you and Bill involved in all this? I should have thought—’

  ‘Because this business is too delicate to go through the usual channels,’ said Dougal firmly. ‘Mr Jackson – Amanda’s father – insisted we have contingency plans, even so; the bank deposit idea was one of them. The component’s far too delicate to go by the post. He was afraid the Americans might get on to us after all.’

  ‘It wasn’t just Daddy, actually. The minister himself said the people concerned with the transfer should be absolutely trustworthy, not just employees.’ A straightening of Primrose’s spine told Dougal that he had not missed the implied compliment. Amanda rushed on: ‘He wanted MI5 (or is it MI6 or something completely different these days?), but there was a hitch because technically Daddy counts as private sector.’

  ‘In fact,’ Philip summed up, ‘this is a case of Unorthodox Action in the Public Interest.’ He said the words as if they were sacred. Dougal suddenly realized they would have to be careful about offering money. Primrose was genuinely moved by his own nobility, as if the demand they had made on him had revealed, to himself, a hitherto unsuspected spring of adventure beneath the arid surface of his life.

  Dougal leant forward and lowered his voice. ‘This isn’t the sort of business one can publicize, you know. I doubt whether anyone besides Amanda’s father and the minister will know of your involvement. Which is not to say there may not be repercussions, you understand?’

  Philip nodded violently and said, ‘Not at all’ several times. He had turned pink again. Dougal felt rather guilty: Primrose’s emotion was worthy of a better cause.

  ‘Daddy gave us an emergency cash fund, so at least money won’t be a problem. Which reminds me, we’ll have to give you something for last night and everything, or he’ll throw a fit. He’s one of these people who insists on paying his way or else he goes all broody, poor darling, and feels guilty about getting something for nothing. You will let us, Philip, won’t you?’

  A genteel discussion ensued, during which Amanda was charmingly obstinate, Primrose repeated polite disclaimers of any desire to be paid, the conviction in his voice rapidly and audibly dwindling, while Dougal said, ‘Come on, old chap,’ in a manly voice, as if Philip was being offered a dose of castor oil which he should accept to please the lady.

  Once Primrose had been brought to see that acceptance was more gentl
emanly than refusal, the matter was quickly settled. Amanda schooled him in what he had to do – parking the Mini, posting its keys and a postal order to the hire firm, hiring another car in his own name and going to the bank – while Dougal went upstairs to wrap up the diamonds and count out the cash.

  He begged materials from Philip and constructed a misleadingly shaped package of cardboard and brown paper, secured with string and several yards of Sellotape. It remained to write a brief covering letter to the bank. They decided to use Philip’s local branch for simplicity’s sake. Dougal requested two keys for the safe deposit box and enclosed specimen signatures from himself and Amanda.

  Primrose left the house in a flurry of excitement. The collar of his overcoat was turned up and he insisted on wearing a muffler which obscured most of his face.

  The house was secure and tranquil without Primrose in one or other of its rooms. They had some Shreddies in the kitchen, feeling too lazy to cook breakfast. Amanda questioned him about Malcolm’s boat, the potential refuge which had occurred to Dougal over the first cigarette of the day.

  The Sally-Anne was more than Malcolm’s boat; it was his home and his livelihood. He lived on it for eight or nine of the warmer months of the year, financing a leisurely outdoor life for himself by importing hash from Holland. He kept clear of its distribution and relied on a few trustworthy black market contacts at either end of the operation.

  Last summer, one of his most reliable Amsterdam connections had asked him, as a personal and extremely well-paid favour, to deliver half a pound of cocaine to what Malcolm described as the Fortnum and Mason of British dealers. The consignment was urgent and he flew from Amsterdam to Heathrow with it. There he was unlucky – he fell foul of a spot check by customs officers on the green, nothing to declare channel.

  In October a judge, who was shocked to find that Malcolm had been an undistinguished junior member of his own Cambridge college, called him a sore on the body politic and sentenced him to twelve months’ imprisonment.

  Dougal had promised to keep an eye on the Sally-Anne in her owner’s absence. The boat was moored in Suffolk, in the Alben estuary, one of five fingers of the North Sea which dig deep into the East Anglian coast, as if a large and powerful child had spread his hand and gouged the earth out in a fit of absentmindedness.

  The responsibility was not an arduous one. Every month or so, Dougal would go down to pump out the bilges and turn the engine over. So far, he had kept these visits brief; he was an amateur among amateur sailors at the best of times and, though he enjoyed boats of all types, he preferred to enjoy them with people who knew what they were doing. Nor did winter encourage nautical experiments – Dougal had once accompanied Malcolm on a trip up to Lowestoft in November and had spent most of the voyage convinced he had frostbite.

  But now the Sally-Anne seemed the most attractive object in the world. The loneliness of the mooring and its approaches was ideal. There would be few people on the river at this time of year; and even fewer would be around midweek.

  There were other advantages besides privacy. If Lee had little experience of small boats, he would face all the physical difficulties of an unfamiliar element – the cramped space, the constant shifting of a small boat in water and an ignorance of what might be used against him as a weapon. If Lee tried to rush them with overwhelming force, they would have an infinitely extendable moat between them and him. You can’t follow a boat in a car.

  If they did succeed in getting rid of – the euphemism still came more easily to his mind – Lee, the Sally-Anne gave them a good chance to dispose of the corpse. A weight would take it to the bottom and an ebb tide would sweep it out into the chilly depths of the North Sea.

  It was odd how trifles could be important at a time like this. In the middle of planning a murder, Dougal found himself feeling smugly virtuous at the thought that visiting the Sally-Anne would have the additional benefit of allowing himself to discharge his obligation to Malcolm. He hadn’t been down to the boat since the week before Christmas and had been beginning to feel slightly guilty.

  In theory, the one problem remaining was the method of killing Lee. It would have to be done cleanly – it would be awkward to have Lee’s blood spattered over the saloon, for example. And God knew what Malcolm would say if he found his beloved home had been doubling as an abattoir in his absence.

  Straightforward poisoning would be simplest. But where would they get the poison? And how could they find a way of introducing it into Lee’s system? The man could hardly be expected to ask for a cup of cocoa to keep out the cold.

  Using knives was a possibility: Lee would not be able to prevent one of them getting behind him. The tidy, fairly bloodless nature of Cedric’s death had impressed Dougal, but it had been due to luck alone. Sticking a knife in some nonvital part of Lee’s body would only outrage him and in any case there might be an uncontrollable spurt of blood.

  They could not hope to obtain a gun unobtrusively. On the whole Dougal favoured a blunt instrument. There was a tool kit aboard the Sally-Anne which included a monkey wrench and a large spanner. They could always buy a couple of knives in case anything went wrong. Or to use for the coup de grâce once Lee had been safely stunned.

  Discussing the details of Lee’s forthcoming death gave the entire plan a welcome unreality. Concentrating on physical details – knives, spanners and so on – blurred the outline of what they were actually planning to do. Dougal wondered if soldiers on the eve of an offensive forgot the possibility of deaths, their own included, in the mundane rituals of cleaning weapons and studying maps. His father must have done the same thing dozens of times. Once the initial decision was taken – whatever one’s reason for it – the process of trying to destroy somebody acquired an irresistible momentum of its own.

  Assuming it was irresistible. And that they didn’t meet the immovable object.

  The rest of the morning and most of the afternoon must have passed in the usual way, one after the other, but Dougal found afterwards that his memories of the period were incomplete and jumbled. It was as if a cinefilm had been reduced to a few clips and stills.

  Philip came back to the house with a bright yellow Ford Escort, his various missions successfully accomplished, radiating a certain coy smugness. Amanda cut him short when he was trying to render an exact account of his stewardship, down to the last half pee. Amanda was notoriously uninterested in financial details, but Primrose didn’t know this, and his mouth drooped like that of a reprimanded child.

  About an hour after that – it must have been around two o’clock – Dougal and Amanda left Cambridge. Amanda pecked Philip on the cheek as she said goodbye, returning his self-esteem to him as quickly as she had removed it.

  Amanda drove them down to Ipswich on the A45. Dougal dozed for most of the journey, vivid and uncomfortable dreams about nothing in particular, except they all shared the hypnotic whine of the car’s engine and the rushing movement of air. His head kept dropping down on his chest and swaying painfully against the window.

  Amanda parked in a side street in Ipswich. Dougal woke up sharply when she turned the engine off. They spent half an hour rushing round shops. Neither of them had a clear idea of what they needed. Amanda thought Dougal should have been making a list in the car instead of sleeping and said so. Uncertainty about the length of their stay on the Sally-Anne didn’t help. They acquired three carrier bags and filled them with a variety of tins and bottles. Dougal bought a bottle of brandy in the vague belief that it would be the right thing to drink during an emergency.

  They passed an ironmonger’s and Amanda remembered they needed knives. Their choice fell on a model with a slender blade about eight inches long. Dougal felt they should be signing a pointed instruments’ equivalent to the poisons’ book; the knives were purpose-built for murder. They were served by a stooping man with grey and greasy hair in a grey and greasy coat, who merely expressed surprise that they were buying the most expensive knives in the shop. He was not a natural salesm
an. Amanda said firmly that they were for a friend’s wedding present and they wanted the very best. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ he replied mysteriously.

  Dougal grew happier and more alert as they left the anonymous outskirts of Ipswich behind them. They drove up the A12 towards Woodbridge. It was growing dark now, and when they turned right into a B road leading to Albenham, the evening closed around them with a rush. The land on either side became flatter and bleaker, the temperature seemed to drop perceptibly.

  ‘Where the hell are we?’ asked Amanda irritably.

  ‘Somewhere south of the Deben estuary and north of the Alben. Not far now. When you get through this village, take the next right. There’s no point in going through Albenham itself.’

  After a mile on a lane which had evidently been designed with tanks or tractors in mind, during which they met no traffic, which was just as well as there wouldn’t have been room for two vehicles abreast on the road, they reached the entrance of the drive of Havishall Place. A roofless lodge cottage marked the spot.

  Amanda inched the Escort into the drive and drove slowly along its uneven surface. ‘Only another half mile,’ Dougal told her.

  ‘Shit.’

  The grounds of Havishall Place included the creek where Malcolm kept the Sally-Anne. The house itself was a substantial but plain Edwardian building which had been derelict since a fire had gutted its interior just after the war. Both house and land were owned by a prosperous builder in Albenham, who planned to turn the site into a marina when funds and planning permission were forthcoming. In the meantime he had leased the mooring to Malcolm, and the handful of fields which went with the house to a neighbouring farmer.

  The stable yard had hardly been touched by the fire. The roof of the coach house was intact and Malcolm left his car there when he was on the Sally-Anne, and a bundle of oars, sails, rowlocks and miscellaneous essentials when he wasn’t. A footpath led across a couple of fields to the creek.