‘Come round and find out. It’ll amuse you.’ He gave her the address. ‘Flat No. 8, the third bell. I’m on the first floor.’
Later he rang Greg. ‘She doesn’t think much of you, and she said she was here with a friend. But she has the address. Now you owe me.’
The next evening Greg stood at the window looking down at the street. She came by taxi, and he saw the top of her glossy head as she paid off the cab. He retreated back into the room in case she looked up. The bell rang; he pressed the buzzer and stood by the door waiting. There was a knock. He opened the door.
‘You!’ she exclaimed. ‘I came to see Henry. What are you doing here? Where’s Henry?’
‘He’s not here just at present,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But come on in.’ She stood where she was, looking at him. ‘Henry asked me to let you in. He’s been called away.’
‘Henry said he had some news for me,’ she said. ‘When will he be back?’
‘Not long now.’
Slowly she entered the room and he closed the door behind her. She looked around, at the photographs on the chimney-piece, at the sporting magazines on the table. ‘This isn’t Henry’s place,’ she said, her back to him.
‘No, it’s mine,’ he said breezily. ‘I got Henry to ask you.’
She swung round. ‘Are you working for the Caverels?’ she said quickly.
‘No, of course not. It’s nothing to do with any of that.’
‘Then what is it to do with?’ She began to walk to the door. He stood with his back to it.
‘All I know about your claim is what you told me. I hope you win, and if I could help, I’d like to.’
She stopped. ‘Then why –’ she began.
‘I just wanted to see you, and I didn’t know where you were. Then I heard that Stevens’ were your lawyers so I rang up but I knew they’d never pass on my message so I got Henry to ask you here.’
She was staring at him. ‘You talk like Henry,’ she said.
‘He’s Australian, like me.’
She started to walk again towards the door, forcing him to step aside. ‘Don’t be mad,’ he said grinning. ‘I don’t mean any harm, at least not what I’d call harm. I just wanted to see you again.’
She turned. ‘Why?’
‘Guess why.’
She was staring at him. ‘Why?’ she repeated.
‘Because I think you’re – I think you’re quite wonderful.’
Her eyes were still on him, her face still serious. He was still smiling. ‘I think you’re great, terrific, marvellous. I fell in love with you the moment we met and I had to see you again. That’s why.’
She half smiled. ‘Well, now that you are seeing me again, are you still in love?’
‘More than ever. I’d do anything for you.’
‘You didn’t last time we met.’
‘I know. I just couldn’t think. I’m new in London, like you.’
‘Did you believe what I told you?’
‘Of course I did.’
For several seconds she stood staring at him; then she walked from the door and began to prowl round, examining the pictures and the photographs, fiddling with objects on the tables. After she had circled the room, she sat on the sofa, drawing up her long legs beneath her.
He went to the side table. ‘A drink?’
She shook her head. He opened a can of beer, his back towards her. ‘I hear you found a very good lawyer.’
‘No thanks to you.’
‘In the office where I work, the office you came to, they say he’s bloody sharp.’
‘I hope he is. And he has a PR man who works with him, called Willoughby Blake. Have you heard of him? He’s famous.’ He shook his head. ‘But my friend doesn’t trust Blake. He says Blake wants to get rid of him and take me over.’
‘Will you let him?’
‘My friend won’t.’
He looked down at the can in his hand. ‘Is all this so very important to you?’
‘I told you. I want my rights.’
‘But what does that mean? Suppose it goes through the courts, appeals and everything, and in the end you get your father’s estate? Then what? Do you want to stay here, live all your life in England, in the damp and the cold and the rain, with all these toffee-nosed Poms with their plummy voices? Do you really want to live in that great barrack of a house?’
‘If it’s mine, I do.’
‘Have you seen the place?’ She shook her head. ‘I have,’ he went on, ‘just after I’d seen you, I was asked to play cricket there. It’s vast. I couldn’t live in it. I wouldn’t want to.’
She stretched her arms high above her head. ‘Can’t you see me in a castle, sitting on a throne, wearing a crown?’ She began to laugh. ‘Wouldn’t I look great?’
‘You’d look great in anything anywhere. But is that what you really want?’
‘I want what’s mine.’
He shrugged. ‘Well, if that’s what you really want, that’s good. Then fight for it, go and get it and don’t let a bunch of stuffed shirts keep you from getting it.’
‘I’m not going to. And when I win, my friend says I’ll be very rich.’
‘Who is your friend?’
‘That’s my business. Are Australians always so nosy?’
‘Usually.’
She stared at him, looking him up and down. He grinned back at her. ‘Do you really like the way I look?’ she asked.
‘I certainly do.’
‘You think I’m beautiful?’
‘I think you’re more than beautiful. As I said, I think you’re wonderful. That’s why I got you here.’
‘You said you wanted to get to know me.’
‘Of course.’
Suddenly she was serious. ‘Do you? Or is it that you just like what you see?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I want to get to know you, all about you. But I do very much like what I see.’
She stretched both hands high above her head again. ‘Who knows what anyone else is like. No one ever knows.’
‘They find out, if they care enough.’
Suddenly she said, ‘I get headaches, bad headaches.’
‘I’m sorry. Have you one now?’
‘No, not now. I get them, though.’
She got up and went to the window looking down at the street. ‘Do you know what I was doing before all this began?’
‘Henry said you were a dancer. That’s why you were in the advert with him.’
‘I was in that advert ’cos I’m black, and they needed some black girls in grass skirts to go with the palm-trees and they hired us from the cabarets.’
She came back to where she’d been on the sofa and leaned against the cushions. ‘I was a stripper. I’ve been a stripper since I was a kid. That’s how I lived, taking my clothes off in clubs all over Europe – Paris, Berlin, Cannes, Budapest. Most of Europe must have seen me. All of me.’
‘What of it?’ he said.
‘After the show we’d have to sit with the punters, chatting them up, making them buy champagne.’ She paused. ‘You know what that means?’ He nodded. ‘Some were all right.’ She got to her feet. ‘I think I will have that drink now,’ she said.
She went to the drinks table, her back to him. ‘You know, I quite fancied you when I saw you, even though you weren’t any bloody use. The dimple in your chin. I like that.’
He heard the ice going into a glass. When she turned she had a glass half-filled with ice in one hand, the vodka bottle in the other. She poured some vodka over the ice, a lot of vodka. ‘You’re pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?’
‘On the surface,’ he said grinning again at her. ‘Only on the surface.’
She put down the vodka bottle and drank from her glass. ‘Seeing you again’, he went on cheerfully, ‘makes me feel good, very, very good.’
‘I like your voice.’
‘Poms don’t.’
‘Poms?’
‘English.’
‘You’re not English, a
re you?’
‘No, I told you. I’m an Ozzie. But my mother’s English.’
‘If my ma’s right, so was my dad. I’m half English too.’ She drank again. ‘I don’t feel it.’
‘Nor do I,’ he replied. He wondered why she said ‘If my ma’s right.’ Wasn’t she certain?
She came towards where he was on the sofa and bent and rested her hand on the side of his face. Then she kissed him on the forehead. He tried to pull her to him but she drew away and strolled again round the room, drinking as she went. She paused at the far end.
‘Three doors,’ she said. ‘What’s in there?’
‘The kitchen.’ She walked to the next door. ‘Bathroom,’ he said, ‘and loo.’
The third door she opened and stood in the doorway, looking at the bed. She raised her glass, drank and walked inside. When he came to the door, she was sitting on the bed.
‘You didn’t know about me, about what I used to do, when you asked me here, did you?’ she said. ‘Or had you guessed?’ He shook his head.
She drank again from her glass and then put it on the table beside the bed. ‘Don’t be scared,’ she said, beckoning him.
She came at him like a hurricane, forcing him on to his back, riding him, then switching him over so that she lay beneath him, then back again, her nails scratching his sides, his shoulders. But she kept her mouth away from him. When she was on top of him and rose and fell, she had her eyes shut and was murmuring. Only when it was over did she let him kiss her on the lips. They lay side by side, his hand on her thigh.
‘I needed that,’ she said.
He took his hand away abruptly. ‘Was that all it meant?’
She turned her head to him. ‘No, I was teasing. It was different.’
‘Different! From what?’
‘From other times.’ She bent and kissed him gently on the lips. ‘Do you believe in fortune-tellers?’
‘No, do you?’
‘In a way.’
‘In what way?’
‘I like to be told what’s going to happen.’
‘Did they tell you about me, that I was going to happen?’
‘Of course, a dark man with a dimple would come into my life. No, I mean the real future, what’s really going to happen.’
‘It’s nonsense,’ he said.
‘Is it? Are you so sure?’ When she heard herself saying that, she remembered the Gypsy in Paris asking the same question and asking was it the past or the future she’d seen. And she’d replied it was only a dream, just a dream.
She turned on her side and saw the clock by the bed. ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘I have to get back to the hotel, to my friend.’ He was going to speak but she put her finger on his lips. ‘Don’t worry. He’s just a friend.’
He watched as she went naked from the room to the bathroom. She had made love as no one had ever made love with him before. Then he thought of what she’d told him about herself and the clubs and the punters. He swung his legs off the bed, put on his robe and in the sitting-room poured himself some vodka and drank it neat.
She reappeared, dressed. He pulled her to him but she broke away. ‘Why do you have to go?’
‘The lawyer’s coming tonight. Nowadays it’s nothing but meetings, people asking questions, other people taking notes. I have to do what they say now. But I shan’t when I’m rich.’
‘Where can I find you?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s too difficult. They mustn’t find out about us. The lawyer says I must be careful. He says I may be followed.’
‘Who by?’
‘By the family lawyers.’
‘Why?’
‘To see what I get up to. They’d like to catch me out. I’ll get in touch with you here.’
She had indeed been followed, by a stout, neat little man in a dark suit, carrying an umbrella. He had sat in the café opposite watching the door of the house she’d entered, waiting for her to emerge. When she did, he followed her back to the hotel in Paddington, but while he had been waiting he had examined the names in the plates beside the bells on the front door and made a note on a pad with a small gold pencil. He’d come back later and check out the people who lived in the flats. It would, of course, be a man she’d been with. He had no doubt of that.
14
At about the same time on the same evening, when Fleur was with Greg at his flat in Fulham, Richard Jameson eventually caught up with Paul Valerian in a Polish restaurant in Knightsbridge. Jameson had been looking for him all day. He had come to deliver Willoughby Blake’s final offer.
Valerian had been in the restaurant since noon, lunching, drinking, playing chess with cronies, but by six o’clock he was alone, a brandy glass and a newspaper before him, the chess board pushed aside. He looked up when Jameson approached. His eyes were rheumy and bloodshot.
‘You again,’ he said thickly.
Jameson drew up a chair. He was carrying a black briefcase which he laid on the table. ‘I have here’, he said, ‘fifteen thousand pounds.’ He opened the case, and showed Valerian the bundles of banknotes.
‘That’s a lot of money to be carrying around,’ Valerian replied.
‘It is. You can take it from me now, this instant, and you can be in Paris by tomorrow morning. This way, whatever happens, you have for certain fifteen thousand pounds. It is in fifty-pound notes. All you have to do is take it.’ He closed the lid of the case and pushed it across the table towards Valerian.
Valerian stared at him through his bloodshot eyes. He must have been drinking all day, Jameson thought.
‘I told you. I’m not interested.’
‘So you said, but this is an even larger sum than what we talked about when last we met. To prove they are in earnest I have brought the money to you. It’s their final offer.’
Valerian pushed the case back across the table towards Jameson. ‘What do they think they are doing, offering me money? Whose money is it?’
‘It is my principal’s money. He’s so serious about wanting you to go home to Paris that he is willing to pay you this very large sum to persuade you to leave. If you stay, he believes that the young woman may not succeed. He is prepared to pay this money to you because he thinks that it is in her best interests you should go.’
‘Why should I? Why doesn’t he go? Who says it’s in her best interests that I go? I am her friend. He is not. She needs me. It’s me who is in charge of this, not him, not you. It’s me who began it and it’s me who’ll end it. I’m doing the paying, not them, and when it’s over, I’ll pay them for what they do for her, as I arranged with the lawyer. Now go back to your boss and tell him that, once and for all.’
He tried to rise. Jameson put his hand on his sleeve.
‘Be sensible. Do what they ask, do it if it’s only for the young woman’s sake.’ He paused and then said slowly, ‘She’s your friend. Do it for her sake, and for yours. They mean it. They want you to go.’
Valerian shook off Jameson’s hand, staring blearily at him. ‘Take your hands off me. I’ve had enough of the lot of you.’
He stumbled to his feet. ‘Tomorrow I find other lawyers. There’s plenty of other lawyers who’ll take us on. We don’t need you.’ He bent and shook a finger under Jameson’s nose. ‘Go home and you tell them that tomorrow I take Fleur to other lawyers. Tell Stevens and Blake I don’t want to see them again. Tell them they’re finished.’
He turned and wove his way unsteadily past the empty tables and out into the street. Jameson followed. On the escalator of the Knightsbridge underground, Jameson stood a few steps above. He was quite close when they joined the crowd on the platform. Valerian shouldered his way aggressively to the front until he was standing on the edge of the platform.
* * *
A little later the Piccadilly line stopped running. There had been an accident at Knightsbridge. A man had fallen in front of a train. At the time the station had been packed with commuters and shoppers on their way home, a mass of people several rows deep
who were crushed together on the platform. From behind more had poured down the escalator, struggling and pushing to get on to the platform. Afterwards all that anyone could remember was that the man, a large man, very stout, had been seen suddenly to lurch forward and fall. Some said he was drunk. He certainly smelt of drink. He must have lost his balance, they said, pushed forward by the pressure of the crowd behind him. Others said he could have deliberately thrown himself in front of the train.
No one took any notice of the tall sandy-haired man with the black briefcase who had been among the crowd near the front of the platform and who after the accident had pushed his way back to the exit, as had so many when they realised that for some time no more west-bound trains would be running from Knightsbridge. Later the dead man was identified from papers on him as Paul Valerian, born in Warsaw, with a French passport and an address in Paris. No one knew where he was staying in London.
15
From time to time Paul Valerian had taken Fleur in the evening to a small restaurant near Paddington station, but usually she preferred to be on her own. If there were no meetings, she sometimes lay in bed all day, nursing her migraine in her darkened room while Paul was out with fellow Poles at their clubs or restaurants. After she’d got back from being with Greg, she found a message for her that the evening meeting with Stevens and his clerk had been cancelled and she went to bed.
At seven o’clock next morning she was woken by the telephone. Mr Willoughby Blake, the woman at the desk said, was on his way up to her room. She had only time to fling on a dressing-gown before he was at her door. When she opened it, he took her by both hands.
‘Come and sit, my dear. I’m sorry to come so early but I’ve something to tell you.’ He led her to the bed. ‘I’m afraid I have bad news.’
She sat on the edge of her bed, and he drew up a chair. Speaking very gently he told her of the accident at Knightsbridge underground station and that Paul was dead. She stared at him, silent and wide-eyed. He took her hand. ‘I am sorry, so very sorry. I know what a shock this must be and I wanted you to hear the news from me and from no one else. I came as soon as I heard. You must let me do what I can to help.’
On his way to her he had rehearsed what to say. He expected hysterics. Over the past weeks he had seen how agitated she could become, suddenly, unexpectedly, sometimes over trivialities, and he was prepared for total collapse when she heard what he had to tell her. But instead she just stared at him, wide-eyed, sitting bolt upright, rigid and frozen.
The Caverel Claim Page 7
