The Cilla Rose Affair

by Winona Kent

“Are there?” he answered, sleepily.

  “Yes. I expect they think you’re having it off with somebody’s wife.”

  “Not me,” Robin said, kissing her.

  “Oh, well, then, I’ll just ignore them, shall I?”

  “Mmm,” Robin said.

  “Mmm,” she said back, snuggling into the warm hollow of his armpit. She buried her nose in the delicious thatch of red-gold hair on his chest, and breathed in the subtle scent of his skin—the lingering, faraway hint of Fa soap and something lemon and lime. And she thought to herself how peculiar it was that men could possess such tiny, perfect nipples.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tuesday, 03 September 1991

  Evan left his car, and walked the short distance to the DLR station at Tower Gateway. He climbed the long staircase and bought a ticket to Island Gardens, and took a seat aboard the two-car shuttle that was waiting at the platform.

  It was a slow journey; he sat facing forward in the lead car, watching the narrow little track run east on its viaduct, parallel to the BR Fenchurch Street line.

  At Westferry, three people got off, and one came aboard, wearing a sunhat and carrying a large straw bag.

  “Evan Harris,” she said.

  “Nora Darrow,” he acknowledged.

  She sat down beside him. “How fares The Flowerpot Man?”

  “He’s on hiatus,” Evan replied, “for the summer.”

  “Is he really? I wonder if he realizes what a dangerous life the actor who portrays him is leading these days.”

  “It was mentioned as being one of the hazards of the trade, yes.”

  “I’ve got something for you. The opportunity’s never really arisen to return them to their rightful owner.” She placed the small brown paper bag squarely in Evan’s hands. “Oh, do look,” she urged, with a pleasant smile.

  Evan obliged. Nestled inside, like a mass purchase from an electronics shop, were all of the eavesdropping devices his son had diligently installed in each of Simon Darrow’s homes.

  He placed the bag on the floor without comment.

  “I’ve requested this meeting, Evan, in order to warn you that you had better watch your back. You’re beginning to get on some rather well-placed nerves.”

  “So I see. Are those two gentlemen who seem to be perennially camped outside my front door acquaintances of yours?”

  “I should abandon my little witch-hunting project if I were you, Evan,” Nora continued, ignoring him. “You won’t prevail.”

  “I don’t play games hoping to lose, Nora.”

  “Why is it you Americans always see things in terms of basketball? You shoot, I shoot, we all shoot until the clock runs out. You never seem to care much for how well the match is played. You only want to know who has the two-point advantage when the final buzzer sounds. Why is it you Americans always see everything in terms of half-time scores?”

  “I’m not an American, Nora,” Evan reminded her.

  “So sorry.” There was a touch of condescension in her voice. “I’m so used to seeing Canadians in the shadow of their mighty keepers to the south. I quite forgot that somewhere in that vast uninhabited wasteland there does lurk a rudimentary civilization. Not much of a drum-beating, flag-waving populace, are you, though? Not much good at anything, really, except ice hockey and the odd raspy-voiced pop song. Leave the Trevor Jackson diary alone. You’re out of your league. Go home to Canada and see if you can’t amuse yourself hunting bear or moose or whatever it is that terrorizes the villages and towns over there.”

  Evan considered the towering office block at Canary Wharf, where the railway swung over the three elongated basins of the West India Docks.

  “There’s nothing I’m currently aware of, Nora, that could possibly compel me to do anything of the sort.”

  The train eased to a stop beside the station, where a group of children on a day’s outing had assembled in hodge-podge disarray. “We’ll see,” Nora said, pleasantly, getting to her feet. “Goodbye, Flowerpot Man.”

  “And don’t think I didn’t notice you’re wearing exactly what you came to work in yesterday.”

  “Shut up, Maureen,” Sara said, disgustedly, putting away the Airline Guide.

  “Two hours late coming in this morning, having trouble remembering the names of your clients—you can’t fool me, Woodford. You’ve got that look on your face. Undisguised lust.”

  Undisguised indigestion, Sara thought, from not having had a proper breakfast this morning.

  And she wondered, as she searched through the computer for the name of a moderately priced hotel in Quebec City, what was going to happen to her when Robin’s holiday was over, and he had to go back to his job in Canada? Would it turn into one of those long distance relationships? Promises made over the telephone, letters criss-crossing the Atlantic?

  Or was this all there was going to be? A brief fling, more along the lines of Maureen was used to, ending with the obligatory drive to the airport, and parting kisses at the sliding door, no assurances, no expectations.

  It was all right for Maureen—brash, confident Maureen, with her architect in Esher—satin bedsheets, torrid conversations about load-bearing walls and custom-made plinths—a post-copulative shower and a spot of breakfast, then in to work positively bursting with all of the intimate details.

  It was all right for Maureen, who kept condoms in her bankbook and The Perfumed Garden in the top drawer of her desk.

  Sara booked the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City and asked for a display of flights going on to Montreal.

  She wondered what Maureen would have made of this morning, in the bath.

  “You’ve got a scar on your back.”

  “Two,” Robin had replied, after a moment.

  Sara’d looked closely. “Yes, two. You’re right.” She’d traced them in the soap lather with her finger: a pair of faint pink lines under his tan, one stretching from the top of one shoulder blade to the bottom of the other, the second above his waist, short and straight across. “How peculiar,” she’d said, thoughtfully. “What are they from?”

  He hadn’t answered. And then, suddenly, she hadn’t wanted him to. His silence intimated something buried, something dangerous, something she wasn’t meant to know about. She’d changed the subject, scrubbing away her question with a wet flannel and the soap.

  Maureen would have conducted a close inspection of the rest of his body with a magnifying glass and a bottle of that cherry-tasting love lotion that made your tongue go numb.

  “Go on, then, have your lunch. There he is across the road—lovestruck.”

  Sara looked. He wasn’t lovestruck at all. He had his nose buried in an A to Z. He reminded her of an intrepid archaeologist: wild, fair hair, parted at the side and falling untidily over his ears, knapsack slung over one shoulder.

  “Yes, I will, thanks.” She abandoned the flights from Quebec City to Montreal and closed the file. “See you later.”

  Robin had been exploring. His last visit to London had been many years earlier, in the company of his middle brother. The city had changed since then: the world had changed.

  He’d been underground, and had discovered its smell: a hazy, stale, wafting odour, like the murky effervescence of old lavatories, and cellars that were overrun with mice.

  He failed to see where the attraction lay for Anthony.

  But then, he’d long ago stopped trying to understand what made his middle brother tick. Artists were peculiar people, driven by passion. He often didn’t understand his father, either.

  He had waited on the platform, recalling his grandmother, who flatly refused to use the tube, citing the peril of tuberculosis, the germs of which, she was convinced, lay in wait in the tunnels for the naive and the unsuspecting.

  He had surfaced at Piccadilly, and had been astounded by the reconstruction: scaffolding was everywhere. Sara was right: out with the old, in with the new. Things were in a mixed-up jumble: a brilliant red or blue addition here, a pseudo-neo-classical facade th
ere, a multi-storey shopping centre wedged in between. Even the telephones seemed to have changed: gone were all the familiar red London call boxes—more apt in the old days to have their glass windows kicked in by indiscriminate boots and their coin slots jammed with glue—replaced by stainless steel and hot pink stickers advertising Naughty French Schoolgirls in Need of Discipline.

  He had trudged around at last to Cambridge Circus: Le Carré land, he’d thought, dangerously—the home of Smiley’s People, and spies who came in from the cold. There was Sara’s building, the whole of it—top to bottom, from its second-storey arched windows and flat roof to the sidewalk below, cloaked in dark red tiles.

  He could see that at street level there had once been three large openings, rather like the huge display windows on the ground floor of a department store. The opening on the left had, since the building’s inception, been completely bricked in. The opening on the right led to an enclosed yard, backsided by flats and offices and climbing vines of black drains and water pipes.

  The opening in the middle had been converted for use by the travel agency.

  Closing his A to Z on his finger, Robin glanced across to his left, at the man who was looking in windows, pretending to be interested in Temp postings.

  Robin joined him in a perusal of offerings for Word Processing and Audio Typists. “Why,” he said, congenially, “have you been following me?”

  The man appeared startled. “Me, son?”

  “Yes, you. Son.”

  “You’re mistaken.” The surprise was replaced by indignant outrage. “I haven’t been following you. I’ve never clapped eyes on you before in my life. You’re paranoid, you are.”

  “You and your friend were outside my hotel last night and today you’ve been trailing me all over the West End. I just thought you’d want to know that I knew. In case you were planning to keep it up for the rest of my visit.”

  “You’re a nutter, you are.” The man was uncomfortable, and looking to make a quick escape. “Bloody nutter tourists.” He was backing away. “Go back to America, that’s my advice. We don’t want none of your lot over here.” He turned and broke into a quick sprint, disappearing around the nearest corner.

  “Who was that?” Sara inquired, joining Robin from across the road.

  “I don’t know. I thought he was following me.”

  “I’ve put ideas into your head after last night,” Sara joked. She considered the exterior of her office, which Robin had been studying from a distance. “Are you completely fascinated by that? Maureen is. She’s forever going on about our outstanding examples of glazed ruby-red terracotta. They used to keep the lift machinery upstairs, where our boss’s inner sanctum is.”

  “What lift machinery?” Robin asked, glancing over his shoulder, satisfying himself that the man had gone for good.

  “For the tube. It used to be an Underground station. Romilly Square.”

  Ant would be interested in this, Robin thought. “Does that happen a lot? Underground stations being used for other things?”

  “Not a lot—there aren’t that many that are out of service. Maureen’s current bed partner’s an architect. He’s given us the low-down on the building. It dates from the turn of the century—one of the original Northern Line stations. We’ve got an alleyway next door that used to be the main entrance, and when they put our office in they bricked it up to make our side wall. Our office and the empty space next door were where the two lifts went. Take away our floor and you’ve got a sixty foot drop, straight down to the trains. God help us if we ever get dry rot.”

  “Why isn’t it an Underground station anymore?” Robin asked, curiously.

  “I’m not sure,” Sara said. “One of the tunnels got a direct hit during the war, I think. They cleared out the mess and got the line re-opened but in the end they decided it was a bit redundant having an intermediate stop so close to both Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road…so the station was abandoned.”

  “Interesting,” Robin said, slipping his arm around her waist.

  “I think so, yes. Maureen was absolutely furious with me for coming in late this morning, by the way—I’ll have to make it up later. I can meet you and Anthony at the theatre, if you like.”

  “Certainly not,” Robin replied. “I’ll be outside your office at seven o’clock. Now—where would you like to have lunch?”

  Rupert studied the printout he’d requested from MI5’s main computer. There were rivers buried under London—not only the Cranbourne, but the Westbourne, the Tyburn, the Walbrook and the Fleet, all of strategic importance, all, for the most part, banished to conduits and brick-lined tunnels, the only clue to their existence beneath the roads being the topographical details they had left behind—famous street names, dipping valleys, the odd visible iron pipe, such as the one which carried the Westbourne over the tracks and platforms at Sloane Square. And there were sewers: Bazalgette’s major interceptories, almost 100 miles of them, high, middle and low levels, carrying off the contents of another 13,000 miles of smaller main and local sewers. One of the middle-level interceptory sewers ran underneath Oxford Street, parallel to the Central Line. And one of the low levels was an integral part of the Thames shoreline, travelling from the Chelsea Embankment to the Houses of Parliament and inside Bazalgette’s Victoria Embankment to Blackfriars, Cannon Street and Tower Hill.

  There were rivers and sewers, and tunnels and more tunnels: directly above the low level Embankment interceptory, for instance, lay an arched, brick-lined passage running from the Houses of Parliament, beneath Hungerford, Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridges, then turning northeast to Mansion House tube station and the Bank of England.

  The telephone and post office people had tunnels—the Post Office Railway and its deep-level tributaries, designed at the end of the second world war to withstand an atomic detonation; the Fortress London complex—sunk deeper into the ground than all of the tube lines but forgotten about after the threat of nuclear war had passed. They were all still in existence.

  A terrorist could, in theory, attack any of these with some success—although Rupert drew some comfort from the fact that closed circuit television cameras were in place to monitor the most sensitive areas—those portions of the Tyburn which passed under the American Ambassador’s residence in Regent’s Park, for instance…and MI5’s old headquarters in Curzon Street…and Buckingham Palace.

  Nevertheless, the very core of London remained vulnerable—and was at risk of being damaged by something Rupert had only read about in a decades old transcript. A weapon which, in theory, had been dismantled upon the death of its inventor in 1966.

  And assuming someone had resurrected and refined the technology—who would want to use it against the British? Some disgruntled nation from the Middle East? A madman from one of the disintegrating Soviet satellites, driven by ego and a misplaced sense of nationalism?

  Or an independent operator, someone with a large, irrational bone to pick with the current government?

  The very idea quite frightened Rupert, and, at the same time, intrigued him. He didn’t for a moment doubt that such people existed. There were, after all, a number of arms dealers circling the globe, unaffiliated with any regime and thoroughly without conscience when it came to whom they chose to do business with. There were rented assassins and freelance soldiers. And there were terrorists for hire, unbound by political ideals, working only to secure for themselves a lifestyle festering with excess.

  The only question was, where would he strike next? And was the damage likely to be so innocuous this time?

  Rupert had the oddest feeling that the broken water pipe in the cellar of the Fitzroy Theatre, Mrs. Carter’s earthquake and the other power outages were merely practice runs, small test firings—in preparation for something much, much larger.

  Yawning, Sara called up the Marsden file on the computer. That flight from Paris to Frankfurt still hadn’t cleared.

  She pulled a couple of Greek tour brochures out of the racks a
t the back of the office and compared their itineraries, their costs, their inclusions and exclusions and hidden extras. She made a note to ring Mr. King in the morning.

  She booked those two young men who reckoned they knew all there was to know about the world on a flight to Bangkok, and looked up Thailand in the Travel Information Manual, and wrote down their passport, visa and immunization requirements.

  There was a knocking on the window, and she glanced up, smiling. Robin was making animated gestures through the glass about the lateness of the hour, and the fact that he’d brought her dinner—something hot and fast in a white paper bag.

  “Right,” Sara said. “That’s it for you lot tonight. Penance over. Hours made up, tally sheet balanced.” She signed out of the computer, switched off the lights, locked the office door behind her. “What have you concocted for me, Harris? Something fabulously exotic, I hope.”

  “Hamburger and chips,” he said, offering her the bag. “Ant will be along shortly. He’s hunting down tickets for us at that half price place in Leicester Square.”

  “There’s that man again. The one you were speaking with earlier.”

  Robin looked.

  And it was while he was looking that Sara was jostled from the side.

  No—not jostled—bumped into.

  Deliberately.

  So that she lost her balance and fell off the curb. And in that split second of distraction, as she was tumbling to the pavement, her ankle twisted, a young man in a denim jacket hurtled past her, hooking his arm through the strap of her bag, yanking it off her shoulder.

  “Hey!” she shouted, stupidly, but it was too late, he was gone. She landed with a thud, jamming first her wrist, and then her elbow, into the sidewalk. Her take-away dinner flew into the road, and was squashed by the wheels of a car that had squealed to a stop, too late to be of any practical help.

  Sara looked up, bewildered, in momentary shock. She thought of Paris, and the gangs of filthy street urchins who roamed the Moulin Rouge with newspapers draped over their arms, bumping into the unsuspecting tourists from the buses, distracting them while they slipped their agile fingers into their pockets and purses. And by the time it was clear what had happened, they’d melted into the alleyways, their stolen loot already in the hands of somebody else.