The Cilla Rose Affair

by Winona Kent

  Evan shut the door behind him. This was one of the shielded rooms, and there was a subtle increase in the quiet hiss of the air conditioning.

  Nicholas was not happy.

  “Would you mind telling me what the blazes you think you’re doing, Evan?”

  He had that morning’s Express open to yet one more story about Simon Darrow.

  “You handed me the mandate, Nicholas.” Evan sat down at one end of the table.

  “Yes—to substantiate our concerns about Victor Barnfather, not to rid the British airwaves of their top-rated presenter. What the hell happened?”

  “As far as we can tell, it was an accident.”

  “You’re quite certain he wasn’t deliberately pushed?”

  “I’m not certain about anything at this point, Nicholas. I do know Simon wasn’t feeling well when I interviewed him. He may have simply…fallen.”

  “What does the pathologist say?”

  “I’m going to see him in a little while. I’ll let you know. I’ll also be going over the Epsom surveillance tapes from Tuesday and Wednesday.”

  “I suggest you do,” Nicholas Armstrong replied, sending an envelope skidding down the table which, upon closer inspection, turned out to contain an internal memo to all senior personnel concerning an early retirement package put together by Human Resources in Ottawa. “Or I’ll be sorely tempted to put your name in for that.”

  Evan slipped the letter back into the envelope without comment and stood up.

  “Royal Navy all over me wanting to know where their bloody Sea King had got to in the middle of the night,” his superior muttered. “Go on, away with you.”

  Ian was waiting for him in the spare office that had been appropriated as their base of operations. He was studying a wallet-sized map of the Underground.

  “You know,” he said, “once upon a time Trafalgar Square was called Trafalgar Square.”

  “It was,” Evan confirmed, slipping the scoped-down edit of Ian’s surveillance at Epsom into the VCR. “And Charing Cross was called Strand, and Embankment was Charing Cross.”

  “What happened to Trafalgar Square?” Ian asked, confounded.

  “Progress,” his father replied, dryly, switching on the monitor. “By the way, I appear to have piqued someone’s interest. Be on the lookout for fleet-footed strangers.” He adjusted the tracking. “This is the infamous garden, I take it.”

  “Tuesday lunch,” Ian confirmed.

  “What’s that? A bird?”

  “Carrying on an animated conversation with my parabolic mike, yes. One of the hazards of shooting on location.”

  On the monitor, Simon Darrow and his wife strolled through their garden, Darrow making a remark about the spectacular colour of the roses, his wife worrying vocally about a tertiary crop of aphids.

  Suddenly Mrs. Darrlow let out a shriek, and made a terrified dash out of the frame.

  “What’s that all about?” Evan asked, curiously.

  “A wasp, I think. Or a bee.”

  On the tape, Simon Darrow was laughing at his wife. He continued his inspection of the roses alone and, after a few moments, Mrs. Darrow ventured a cautious return. Simon slipped his arm around her waist, protectively, and they turned away from the flowerbeds and began to walk back across the lawn towards the house.

  As they crossed in front of the concealed camera lens, Simon abruptly jerked away from his wife.

  “Ow!” he shouted. “Bugger it!”

  He leaped around, swatting his back with his arm.

  “Bee…?” Evan guessed.

  “Bee,” Ian confirmed.

  “Bloody hell,” Simon Darrow complained.

  It was Mrs. Darrow’s turn to laugh at her husband.

  “Serves you right,” she said.

  “That’s not fair, Nora.”

  “Don’t be such a baby. Come inside and I’ll read up on bee stings in the medical book.”

  “Two stiff drinks and an ice pack, I shouldn’t wonder,” Darrow grumbled, checking behind and about himself for any further insects.

  The camera panned with them until they reached the house, then reverted to static. Evan stopped the tape.

  “What do the audio logs say about the rest of Tuesday, and Wednesday morning?”

  “More domestic conversation. Tea and sympathy. He complained about the sting in the night, didn’t feel well, got up for a couple of aspirins, went back to bed.”

  Evan was deep in thought.

  He rewound the tape, and hit the play button again, studying the screen.

  “What are you looking for?”

  Evan raised a tentative hand, then played the tape a third time.

  “Listen,” he said, as the sparrow in the tree erupted in song.

  Ian listened.

  “All right—now, here’s Mrs. Darrow, discovering the aphids…she sees the bee—”

  He turned up the volume.

  “Hear that?”

  “Buzzing,” his son said, nonplussed.

  The buzzing faded as the bee flew out of range.

  “Now…Nora Darrow walks into the shot again…Darrow embraces her…they turn…There.” Evan froze the frame. “That’s the point where he’s stung.” He rewound the tape and played it again. “Listen.”

  Ian watched, and listened, intently.

  “What?” he asked, confounded.

  “No buzzing,” Evan replied.

  He rewound the tape a third time, and replayed it, pausing intermittently, for his son.

  “Watch him. Watch her.”

  “Arm around wife…” Ian said. “Turning…walking…he’s blocking our view of her—”

  “There’s something in her hand. Look—there—hand coming up—” Evan froze the picture. They both peered at the TV screen.

  “What is she doing?” Ian said.

  “I don’t know…” Evan said. “It looks to me like some sort of…syringe.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Ian said, slowly. “She poisoned him.”

  “It does look that way, doesn’t it, old son. Not the flu at all…but something more insidious.”

  Ian was perplexed. “They didn’t talk at all about your meeting at Tower Bridge. They didn’t discuss him agreeing to be interviewed by you. They didn’t talk about the Cilla Rose…He kept her totally in the dark.” Ian looked at his father. “Who, besides you, me and Nicholas Armstrong, knew about this assignment?”

  “Only Simon Darrow.”

  “But he didn’t tell anybody. He didn’t meet anyone, he didn’t leave any messages anywhere—We had him under surveillance the entire time.”

  Evan was thinking.

  “He went to the theatre on Monday night…”

  “But you followed him there. You told me: he went straight to his seat. He had a drink during the interval and chatted with his wife about nothing at all, and then he sat down again.”

  “I may have done a good job watching them, Ian, but it would have been impossible for me to hear everything they were saying to one another while they were sitting together in the audience.”

  Evan’s oldest son looked at him. “Nora Darrow?” he said, disbelieving the logic of his father’s statement. “KGB? Protecting her own skin?”

  “It certainly wouldn’t be the first time we had a husband and wife team operating in our midst.”

  Ian shook his head in disgust. “I should have known.”

  Evan rewound the videotape. “I’ve got a chap in a white sweatshirt and another in a tweed cap to vouch for the fact that we’ve touched a raw nerve somewhere. Let’s have a look at her file.”

  The PC was user-friendly, with a laminated self-help instruction card propped on top of its monitor, a red Canadian maple leaf decal affixed to the mouse and a little Mountie keychain doll, in a brown hat and dress red uniform jacket, standing guard over the keyboard.

  Evan signed in, and called up Nora Darrow’s dossier.

  “Maiden name, Maynard,” Ian said, reading the screen over his father’s shoul
der. “Fifty-six years old…born and bred in Beckenham…the usual school and employment stuff…nothing exceptional here. No cross references, no flags. An ordinary, upstanding citizen of the United Kingdom.”

  “Who’s just done away with Britain’s best loved DJ,” Evan added. He sent the file to the printer and accessed a blank screen that demanded the details of his next inquiry.

  Darrow, he typed. Simon.

  The last update had been made several years earlier. Appended to the Activities Summary was a flagged warning to the researcher that the first set of entries—those that concerned themselves with Darrow’s alleged movements aboard the Cilla Rose—were unsubstantiated.

  Evan accessed “Personal”, and the barebones details of Simon Darrow’s private existence paraded themselves before him—date and place of birth, past and present addresses and telephone numbers, his employment record, the registration numbers of his cars, his previous relationships, his marriages, his children, an abstract of his pertinent activities.

  “Nora’s his second wife,” he said, “and there’s no evidence here that she even knew Simon in 1966.”

  Ian was studying the printout of Nora’s biography. “She’s got a brother. Would he be able to tell us?” He handed the page to his father.

  “Potter Maynard,” Evan said, thoughtfully.

  “You know him?”

  “He’s an actor. We crossed paths years ago in California. God knows what he’s doing these days.”

  Ian sat on the edge of the desk. “I have an idea who might be able to help,” he said.

  His father glanced up at him.

  “I can ask him…if you like.”

  “No…I’ll do it,” Evan said. He checked his watch. “Meanwhile I’m late for an appointment with a pathologist.” He printed Simon Darrow’s file, and signed out of the computer. “And you have a funeral to go to.”

  The small country church near Epsom was inadequate, really, to contain the overflow audience that had descended from London.

  Audience was the only appropriate term, Ian decided, as he stood beside his car, with his camera and cassette recorder, pretending to be one of the media hounds. The churchyard and the narrow, hedge-lined lanes surrounding it had taken on the air of an all-star, three-ringed circus.

  A circus demanded a Master of Ceremonies, and doing the honours that morning was a slick, silk-tied individual named Shane Brody. As the designated family spokesman, Shane Brody was fielding questions from the media congregating outside the church with the same degree of panache he’d have employed to conduct a press conference.

  Passing through the centre ring at that particular moment was Simon Darrow’s daughter Tamara—Tiggy—an aspiring pop singer costumed for the occasion in a bright red sequined mini-dress and sunglasses.

  “Where’s your mother, Tiggy?” somebody shouted, as the young woman made her way towards her limousine.

  “She’s gone away where you lot won’t bother her.”

  That was the response that appeared in the newspapers, at any rate. The actual quote, which Ian caught on tape, was rather more colourful, and quite unprintable.

  Hurriedly, Shane Brody added: “Mrs. Nora Darrow is suffering from nervous exhaustion and has checked into a private hospital under an assumed name.”

  “Switzerland, more like,” a member of the press standing beside Ian muttered, under his breath, as Tiggy climbed into her limousine, exposing an exquisite six inches of black suspender and top-of-stocking.

  “What about Kevin? Where’s Kevin?”

  “Tiggy’s brother is not able to be with us this afternoon.”

  Kevin Darrow: last known address, Cardboard City, The Bullring, Underneath Waterloo Station, London SE1. The photo Ian recalled seeing had been a grainy one, shot from far away, and greatly enlarged. He had the look of a wildman—long and tangled hair, four earrings, and a Nazi swastika tattooed on his left cheek.

  The parade of stars continued—old friends from the BBC, craggy-faced singers from Sixties quartets.

  “Oy!” somebody shouted, “There goes a nice bit of history,” and there was a general stampede over to a less-populated corner of the churchyard, where a tall, fair woman and her comfortable husband were trudging off towards a secondary parking area.

  “Mrs. Emerson!”

  The woman, surprised, glanced over her shoulder.

  “You go on ahead, Ted,” she said, to her companion. “Won’t be long.”

  The comfortable husband departed, and Angela Emerson, the first Mrs. Darrow, waited on the cinder path for her pursuers to catch up.

  “Nice to see you here, Mrs. Emerson. Did you maintain a relationship with Simon over the years?”

  “Not really. I just came to pay my last respects. That’s all. He was, after all, a part of my history, too.”

  “You were his secretary when he was at Radio One, 1968?”

  “1967.”

  “Married him when? Same year? Didn’t last long, did it—what happened?”

  Angela Emerson considered the impropriety of Ian’s very direct question on the afternoon of her first husband’s funeral, and her distaste for the press made itself apparent on her face.

  “We divorced,” she said, “because it was a mistake to have married in the first place. I was very young.”

  “Was it another woman, Mrs. Emerson?” another of the reporters asked. “Someone he knew from before, when he was a pirate?”

  “No,” said Angela Emerson, pressing her lips together.

  “You’ve always maintained that, haven’t you? Publicly and privately.”

  “If he was seeing another woman, I had no knowledge of it,” she repeated, firmly. “Anything else?”

  “What are you doing with yourself these days? Still listening to the radio?”

  “My husband and I,” said Angela Emerson, “own a newsagent’s in Carshalton, and have done for the past fifteen years. I imagine I’ll be reading all about myself in tomorrow’s deliveries.”

  “Thanks very much for your time, Mrs. Emerson,” Ian said. “How old are you, by the way?”

  “One hundred and three,” she said, turning her back on him.

  Ian flicked off his micro-cassette.

  There was nothing in the least disturbing about the bland outer room of Dr. Baker’s private haven—whatever had to do with livers and brains, relative weights, drainage gutters, rubber boots and gloves went on in the chamber beyond, on the other side of a now-closed swinging door. Evan had nonetheless positioned himself in the best possible location to facilitate a quick exit.

  “Ricin,” the pathologist said, tentatively, taking his hands out of the pockets of his white lab coat. “Whatever makes you suspect that?”

  He was a very earnest young man, Evan thought, with black-rimmed spectacles, a lot of wavy brown hair, and skin that hadn’t quite recovered from what appeared to have been a rather spotty youth. He was too young to have remembered the Bulgarians.

  “Did you find a puncture mark?” Evan inquired.

  “Yes—in the small of the back—an insect sting. And as I’ve already told you, I am prepared to confirm the possibility of a severe allergic reaction—”

  “Did you excise the skin around the wound before you released the body?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Baker replied, clearly irritated by the inference that he hadn’t.

  Patience, Evan thought. “You’ve never heard of Georgi Markov or Vladimir Kostov, have you?”

  “I don’t believe I have, no.”

  “The two of them together achieved a certain amount of notoriety in 1978. Bulgarian dissidents, one living in London, the other in Paris. The one who lived and worked in Paris—Kostov—was the target of an assassination attempt as he was coming up from the Metro. He felt a sharp blow to his back, just above his belt—nothing else. He went to see his doctor because there appeared to be some sort of puncture mark at the site of the injury. The doctor concluded he must have been stung by an insect. Kostov subsequently developed a h
igh fever and some very painful swelling—but he recovered—unlike his unfortunate friend and fellow dissident in England, who was attacked by a man carrying an umbrella while he waited for a bus near Waterloo Bridge.”

  “Hang on,” Dr. Baker said. “I do remember hearing something about that…”

  “Within a day or so,” Evan continued, “he had a high temperature, vomiting, swollen lymph glands. As the poison spread throughout his system his blood pressure collapsed, his pulse rose and his temperature fell. His kidneys failed. His white cell count tripled. He lived for three days and then his heart stopped. During the autopsy a block of flesh was cut away from the back of his right thigh. It was sent to Porton Down to be analyzed, and what do you think they discovered embedded in that little square of skin?”

  “I’m not going to like this, am I,” Dr. Baker said.

  “A pellet. Fractionally larger than the head of a pin. Ninety percent platinum and ten percent iridium—harder than steel, resistant to corrosion, biologically inert. Two cavities had been drilled into this pellet, each .35 of a millimetre wide. And do you know what had been packed into those two little holes?”

  Dr. Baker looked uncomfortable.

  “A fifth of a milligram of refined ricin,” Evan said. “You’d be doing me a very great favour, Dr. Baker, if you’d go back and give that patch of skin something more than a cursory glance.”

  Chapter Seven

  Friday, 23 August 1991

  Somewhere, deep in the recesses of Anthony Quinn Harris’s history, lay his first memories of the Underground. Descending in the lift at Chalk Farm Station, stumping down the short flight of steps to the platform, one at a time, clutching his mother’s hand.

  He remembered the wind, snatching at his hair and tugging at a tatty blue blanket that went with him everywhere. He remembered waiting for the train, and straining at the end of a soft blue leather harness with bells, and the wind, warm, billowing in his face, smelling of black mystery and creosote. He remembered the train—they were red in those days, rolling stock left over from 1938, with wooden floors and window-frames, and scratchy green and red upholstery—phwooping out of the tunnel and roaring to a squealing stop, its nose buried in the opposing hole.