The Cilla Rose Affair

by Winona Kent

  “Our father,” Anthony replied.

  Robin looked at him, dangerously.

  Sara stuffed everything back into Robin’s wallet in the wrong place, and returned it, his passport and his ticket to his knapsack.

  “I saw your father on the telly the other night,” she said. “What’s it like being the offspring of somebody famous?”

  “It’s a bloody nuisance,” Anthony replied, gathering up the litter of their lunch. “Peculiar looks come over peoples’ faces when they’re made aware of the genetic linkup. They forget how to hold a normal conversation. And everything you’ve accomplished on your own suddenly pales, and the only thing that seems to matter is that you’re that man’s son.”

  “I’d never quite thought of it like that. I’d always assumed, you know, the name would open doors.”

  “Doors open,” Robin agreed, pulling on his shoes and socks, “but without some accompanying talent, they slam shut on your foot pretty quickly. Ant notices it more than me, anyway. I’m somewhat more removed from everything in Canada.”

  He extended his hand, pulling Sara up.

  “He’s a Canadian, too, though, isn’t he?” They began the walk back across the park, towards Sara’s office.

  “Who?” Anthony inquired, with great humour. “Our Evan Dermott Harris? Irish father, Welsh mother, born in a stone cottage filled with peat smoke in the middle of County Westmeath. His humble beginnings haven’t been universally publicized. But they all know him and love him in Athlone. That’s a Celtic accent you’re hearing, Sara—he only took out Canadian citizenship after he emigrated from Britain in the 1950s.”

  “So now you know where all that red hair came from,” Robin said, clasping her hand.

  “Red hair…” Sara said, thoughtfully.

  Emma’s train slowed as it broke through the blackness and entered Waterloo. It squealed to a stop and its doors rumbled apart. Emma stepped onto the platform and stumped down its length to the connecting passageways that led up and out, to the mainline station.

  On the escalator, she leaned an elbow on the hard rubber handrail, and cast her eyes over the framed ads that had been hung at perfect 90 degree angles in the shaft. A noisy crowd of teenagers had disembarked with her, and she watched them dance ahead of her in their high-topped running shoes and outrageous hair. Why, she wondered, should young men actually wish to wear black spandex bicycling shorts with gaudy Hawaiian shirts? And why were the young women all in black net crinolines and leotards, and gentlemen’s dinner jackets three sizes too large for their thin shoulders?

  The world was becoming a very odd place.

  She found Evan in the newsagents’ kiosk, engrossed in a Dick Francis mystery.

  “On guard,” she warned, coming up behind him. “I might be wicked.”

  “You’re not wicked,” he said, putting the book back on the shelf. “I saw you coming up from the tube. What news?”

  “Victor has had words with Nora.”

  “Has he? And is he agitated?” Evan inquired, rather devilishly, Emma thought.

  “More than agitated, I should say,” she replied. “I’ll let you listen to the tape—I’ll wager you’ve got enough there to put the lady away quite handily.”

  “Nora’s not the end object of our exercise,” he reminded her.

  “Nevertheless, I should tread carefully, if I were you, Evan. She’s after your personal dossier at Macdonald House. After the dressing down she got from Victor this afternoon, Mrs. Darrow is in no mood to be trifled with.”

  “I rather like it down here after hours. It’s an altogether different world.”

  Beneath Leicester Square, the lights in the daytime-dark tunnels had been switched on. Burrowing under the city, signals crews, maintenance teams and engineering gangs roamed the rights-of-way, clad in neon orange. Other workers applied themselves to the platforms, cross-passages and escalator-shaft walls, replacing poster-sized ads. Fluffers—an army of cleaning women—dusted away the day’s debris. Battery trains shunted from location to location, transporting cables, rails and spare parts.

  Bob Lewis jumped onto the tracks from the far end of the platform. “Come along,” he beckoned, cheerfully. “It’s quite safe.”

  After some hesitation, Rupert followed him down, and trailed him into the black yawn of the running tunnel.

  “There’s a pathway along the side, as you can see,” Bob said. “Of course, it wouldn’t provide much by way of protection if you happened to be caught with a train coming at you at full throttle—but then, you’d have no business being down here under those circumstances now, would you?”

  “I daresay not,” Rupert said. It was dirty in the tunnel. He touched one of the circular cast iron ribs, and his hand came away black.

  “It might interest you to know that the Northern Line has the proud distinction of owning the longest section of continuous tunnel on the entire system: 17 miles, 528 yards between Morden and East Finchley, via Bank. For many years this was the longest railway tunnel in the world.”

  There was a string of electric lights spaced at intervals over their heads, stretching off into a perspective of dark eternity. Bob switched on his torch.

  “The Northern Line also has the deepest station on the system, that being Hampstead, at 192 feet below the surface. Just north of the station the Underground is at its deepest point overall—221 feet below the surface of Hampstead Heath. The deepest point below sea level is also on this line—67 feet, just south of Waterloo.”

  He was leading Rupert ever deeper into the black tube, continuing his conversational tour as he went.

  “Below the ground, the oldest part of the Northern Line dates from the year 1890, when it opened as part of the City and South London Railway, running from Stockwell to the City of London. The tunnelling on the section we’re walking through now was opened on June 22, 1907, and was known as the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway. It operated from a station beneath Charing Cross and ran to Golders Green, with a branch from Camden Town to present-day Archway. The internal diameter of the running tunnels is 11 feet, 8 1/4 inches, and the station tunnels are built to an internal diameter of 21 feet, 2 1/2 inches.”

  “Do you bring a lot of people down this way?”

  “Not many,” Bob replied, without turning around. “The odd Christmas party, walking tours by special request…I wanted to drive the trains when I was a kid but when I got older I reckoned I’d be better off on the Public Relations side of things. There were 16 stations in all along this original eight mile route, all except Golders Green giving access to the twin platforms by means of electric lifts provided by the Otis Elevator Company. At all of the stations except Golders Green, Charing Cross and Oxford Street, the surface buildings were two-storey, steel-framed constructions clothed in ruby-red terracotta. At ground floor level a ticket office was provided in the area leading to the lifts. The lift machinery was installed on the floor above. Although most of the lifts have now been replaced by escalators, many of the original station houses have been preserved, and can be seen on the Northern as well as the Piccadilly and the Bakerloo lines. Are you interested in all in the technical aspects of the Underground?”

  “The power supply, in particular,” Rupert prompted.

  “Two-rail system. Separate positive and negative rails—negative rail in the centre of the two running rails, positive on the outside, current supplied at 630 volts DC, fed to the track from 114 substations located every few miles along the lines. Current comes into each substation at 11,000 volts AC from three distribution switch points at Coburg Street, Cromwell Road and Stockwell. The substations provide current for fans, pumps, lifts, lighting and escalators, as well as the traction.”

  “And where does the power come from to supply your three major switching points?”

  “It used to come almost exclusively from our own generating stations at Lots Road, Neasden and Greenwich,” Bob replied. “However, during the last war arrangements were introduced to allow supplies
to be obtained from the national grid. At present about one-third of the Underground’s power comes from the grid. We expect to transfer over completely sometime this decade.”

  “So you don’t actually maintain your own independent power supply.”

  “Not exclusively, no. By the year 2000 we’ll be at the mercy of the utilities, just like everyone else.”

  “Then somebody could, in theory, tap into that supply—from down here, for instance—and if it happened to be a rather large and dramatic drain of electricity—it could, in theory, short out the mains in the roadway directly above.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Bob answered, doubtfully. “We’re on a completely different grid.”

  But Rupert’s mind was already racing ahead.

  “Is there ever a time when the tunnels are completely deserted? No trains, no fluffers, no engineering gangs?”

  “I suppose there might be,” Bob conceded. “We’ve got 273 stations and 254 miles of tracking to maintain, 85 of those in the tubes. We can’t be everywhere at once.”

  “No,” said Rupert, thinking. “So—in theory—a person could gain access to the tunnels after hours, and never actually be noticed.”

  “It would be bloody difficult, but yes, in theory, it’s possible.”

  “A person could come through with a maintenance crew, for instance.”

  “I suppose so, yes. He could hide somewhere until they’d moved on—in a shunting tunnel or a reversing siding. Mind you, there’s not a lot of that sort of thing along this stretch of tunnel—no, hang on, I tell a lie. There’s an abandoned station up ahead—old Romilly Square. Took a direct hit during the war and was never reopened.”

  Bob stopped, and shone his torch around the tunnel walls.

  “Here we are then—I reckon we’re just about directly underneath the Fitzroy Theatre.”

  “Thank you,” Rupert said, picking his way over the rails, and shining a small torch of his own into the cast iron ribs running over his head.

  “If there is any damage to the tunnel,” Bob volunteered, “I’m quite certain the works people would have noticed it by now.”

  Rupert craned his neck up into the darkness.

  “What, exactly, were you hoping to find? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Cracks…” Rupert said. “Some signs of impact…or electrical arcing…”

  “Well,” said Bob, shining his light up over his head, “I hate to put a damper on your enthusiasm…but I’m damned if there’s anything like that up there.”

  But something else had attracted Rupert’s attention. The trackbed, in contrast to the tunnel walls, was surprisingly clean—with the exception of a wide scattering of black over a very limited area, like a circular deposit of oily snow.

  Rupert examined his discovery in the bright beam of his light. “You’re quite certain,” he checked, “that nothing out of the ordinary’s been reported by any of your works people over the past few days, anywhere on the Northern Line?”

  “There’s a real myth about my sort of job,” Sara said. “The glamour, the exciting holidays abroad. The dangerous liaisons in foreign bedrooms.”

  She was walking with Robin along the deserted road, with dark, sleeping St. James’s Park on their left, and Wellington Barracks to their right.

  “It’s true for a little while, I suppose. It is glamorous. But then afterwards, it’s just bloody hard work. I mean, you’re whisked in and out of hotels by tour reps—you’re there just long enough to tick the rooms off on your comparison sheet—balcony—yes, view—no, toilet—clean—and then you’re driven about the city in a bus, and what it takes your clients a week to explore you’re done with in an hour, two at the most.”

  Robin slipped his arm around her shoulders.

  “My trouble is, I seem to be a walking disaster asking to happen wherever I go. I once toppled head first onto a rotating baggage carousel.”

  “You didn’t,” Robin said.

  “I did. I was reaching for my suitcase, and I realized too late it was jammed tight between two other bags. I was too stupid from jet lag to let go, and before I knew it I was tipped over and dragged halfway round the ramp. A rather nice gentleman came to my aid by inserting his hands under my armpits and lifting me up and setting me squarely on my feet again.”

  She giggled.

  “And then, in Fiji, I managed to shut myself out on the balcony of my hotel right in the middle of a raging tropical storm. And as I’d also pushed in the safety lock on my room door, the only person who had access to the master key was the manager—and he’d gone and taken himself off to a Rotary lunch in Suva and wasn’t expect back until morning. I was rescued in the end by another very kind gentleman with a long ladder and a windblown umbrella and a rather wet towel. I mean, it’s not as if I’m helpless, Harris—I just seem to be always landing in these stupid situations from which I require extrication.”

  Robin led her to a solitary streetlight.

  “You’re not under any sort of bizarre curfew, are you?” he said. “Sara Jane Woodford must be home before the stroke of midnight or she turns into a cantaloupe?”

  She laughed. “God no. Anyway, it’s gone two. I’ll have to flag down a taxi—”

  She stopped. It was necessary to stop, because he was kissing her, gently, with one hand lightly holding her shoulder, and the other…the other touching her breast where before only Jon had touched her, because there hadn’t been any others, just him, and his fingers had been quick and greedy, not like this, not a bold exclamation…but a question mark, a feather-light, lingering question that invited an answer instead of demanding one…

  She hadn’t forgotten him, all those summers ago. She’d only put him away—out of necessity—in a drawer filled with torn-in-half ticket stubs and bits of old jewellery, and a diary with tiny, dried wildflowers pressed between its pages.

  Finding him again at Bournemouth, talking to him, laughing and dancing with him, and then walking with him along the moonlit beach, had stirred those memories. Robin was a book she’d had to set down before reaching the end. She’d left a slip of paper behind, to mark her spot. In Bournemouth, she had discovered that book again, and had pulled the gossamer webs from its cover, and had opened it. And now it was time to turn the page.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tuesday, 03 September 1991

  Sara opened her eyes.

  She had been lying in Robin’s arms, listening to the quiet whisper of his breathing, relishing the warm nakedness of his skin, pressed against hers.

  After their love-making, she had drifted into an exhausted sleep, but it had been brief, and an hour later she had woken up, troubled by the unfamiliarity of the hotel room, the narrow little bed, the crisp white starchiness of the sheets, the foreign shadows, the noise from the overnight traffic and what seemed like endless sirens from ambulances rounding Russell Square, on their way to Great Ormond Street.

  She turned a little in Robin’s arms, and she thought of last night, and of all of the places on her body he had touched with his lips. And she discovered them again with the tips of her fingers.

  And she found herself, once more, thinking of Jon. Her first. Her educator. Her dazzler—who went about the business of sex the way he pursued lucrative business propositions—and other women—with gusto and energy. Jon the hunter. Jon the conqueror.

  And now, there was Robin, as gentle as he had been nearly ten years earlier, when their promises were filled with the passion of youth, and their kisses innocent.

  She slipped out of bed and, wrapping herself in a blanket, which had tumbled to the floor, went to sit beside the window.

  In the grand old Russell Hotel, across the way, a young man in a suit was polishing a pair of shoes in a back scullery. Beside him, a young woman in a maid’s uniform was arranging an early breakfast tray.

  Sara watched as they pantomimed a conversation, their heads bobbing, their hands making agitated points in the air.

  Once, on a fam to Ital
y, she’d spent an evening observing an oily man in a vest and a thin woman in a bra and slip, both of whom had been occupying the flat across the road from her hotel. They were arguing, and their protestations had grown more and more violent until, at last, the oily man had flung the scrawny woman onto the bed, knocking over the lamp, plunging the room into darkness.

  Sara had waited, her curiosity trampling down any guilt she might have felt over her shameless spying. Was there a stabbing going on? A strangling? A smothering with a pillow? Perhaps the brawny man was making rough, passionate love to the woman’s pale and drooping body. Perhaps there was no passion involved. She was his wife and he was angry about something—his tea not ready, her stockings in the sink. He raged and she submitted, and that was all there was.

  At the Russell Hotel, the butler had finished his shoes, and the maid had disappeared. The light remained on in the now-empty window.

  Sara let her gaze slip down to the street, where a solitary van was parked underneath a lamp, its windows partway open. Odd, she thought, resting her chin on her forearm on the windowsill. There were two men sitting inside, one older, one younger, the younger one drinking something from a thermos. The older man, the driver, had something dark in his lap—Sara couldn’t quite make out what—until he shifted slightly in his seat and she saw the binoculars.

  Intrigued, she waited. Who were they watching?

  The driver looked at his watch, then picked up his binoculars. Sara pulled back behind the curtains. She peeked out, cautiously, taking care not to let the fabric move. The binoculars were trained on her window.

  “Woodford,” Robin called, lazily. “Come back to bed.”

  She went.

  She climbed in, and his chin, night-bristled, nuzzled her neck.

  “There are two men outside in a van watching us,” she said.