I took a deep breath and said, “Listen, Adela, about your phone call. It was really nice to hear from you and I was terribly flattered, but—”
“You have a girlfriend.”
I paused, relieved. “Yes,” I said.
She smiled at me. “That isn’t necessarily an obstacle.”
“Isn’t it?”
“She may not mind. Your girlfriend may not mind you seeing me.”
“No, actually I think she will. I strongly suspect she will. I’m pretty sure she will.”
“Then maybe she could be a participant.”
“A participant?”
“Yes, you know, you, me and her…”
“Oh yes, of course.”
“You hadn’t thought of that?”
“No I hadn’t,” I said. “How old-fashioned of me.”
“So you didn’t ask her if she might be interested? In the three of us? Together?”
“No.”
“But you will ask her?”
“Yes.” When hell freezes over, I added silently.
“Okay.” She smiled at me. “Help yourself to a pastry.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said.
She walked across the room towards the staircase. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
I looked at her coffee on the table. “Do you want me to open that and pour it into a real cup?” No one should have to drink their coffee out of cardboard.
“No thank you, that’s fine. I’m going to drink it in the car.” She disappeared up the stairs. I inspected the bag of pastries. They were warm and there was the rich fragrance of cinnamon rising from them. I was sorely tempted, but worried that if I ate one I’d be somehow committing myself and Nevada to participation in a string of orgies arranged by Scandinavian swingers.
Adela came back in carrying a large cardboard box that had the logo of a book distribution firm on the side. It was full of men’s shoes. “We’re having a clear out.”
“So I see.” The shoes looked new to me, and hellishly expensive.
She saw my look and shrugged. “He never wears them. I’m taking them to donate at one of the local charity shops.” I could have given her a map of these establishments, but I didn’t think she needed it. “There’s already a load of stuff in the car. I was just about to pack up and go when you arrived.”
“Don’t let me keep you.”
“It’s fine, I can give you a lift.” She scooped up the bag of pastries and the coffee and carefully put them in the box among the shoes. I followed her back out of the kitchen, wondering how I could politely decline the lift. She locked the door and put the key back in the lampshade. I offered to carry the box but she shook her head. I followed her out to the street where a dusty black Citroen was parked under a cluster of trees. The back seat was full of boxes, with some jackets and trousers draped over them. It looked like she’d purloined half his wardrobe.
There was also a pile of hardcover copies of The Sovereignty of the Self. I looked at her. “He’s getting rid of his books?”
She shrugged. “Nobody ever buys them. We have hundreds of copies. The house is full of junk. He asked me to do a clear out.” She smiled and handed me the box. “Put that in the back. I’ll tidy the front seat for you.”
I opened the back door of the car. “It’s okay,” I said. “I can catch the Tube home.”
“I will take you to the Tube station.” She was rooting around in the front, clearing maps and other clutter off the passenger seat.
I delved among the clothing and books in the back, looking for a place to put the box of shoes. I lifted a brown and white check jacket and underneath it was a pile of records. My heart instantly raced—a purely reflex reaction. I quickly set the box down and had a look through them.
“Help yourself to anything you want from back there,” said Adela.
I went cold from throat to groin. The LPs all featured Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band.
They were the same ones that I had bought the other day. The ones that had disappeared.
* * *
Adela drove me to the Tube station, which wasn’t at all awkward until she put on the brakes and turned to me, leaning forward, obviously expecting a kiss. I gave her a chaste peck on the cheek and got the hell out of there.
With the Glenn Miller records.
I headed home as fast as I could. I had to tell Nevada—not about the peck on the cheek, I thought we could safely omit that—and consider the implications thrown up by the fact that Dr Osterloh had these records in his possession.
I came through the front door to find Nevada racing towards me from the living room, smiling and saying, “Darling, we’ve got company. Lucy has dropped in for a visit.” She added, mouthing silently, something that eventually I realised was, She’s pregnant.
Pregnant? I silently mouthed back. She nodded her head impatiently towards the front room and I went down the corridor and inside, preparing a big and hopefully convincing smile for our guest.
I instantly saw that our charades in the hallway had been redundant. Lucy had her open purse on the table in front of her. While Fanny was nosing around inside it, Lucy was holding in her hand the bright packaging of a commercial pregnancy testing kit. She set it down and looked at me and said, “I’m going to have a baby.”
Also on the table, in addition to the cat, the purse and the pregnancy test, were seven cans of Guinness. Six of them were in front of Lucy—three already open—and one in front of the chair where Nevada had presumably been sitting.
“Congratulations,” I said.
Lucy was looking rather smarter than previous times I’d seen her—I put this down to Nevada’s recent benign, though no doubt expensive, influence on her wardrobe—but her face was red and blotchy. She looked like she’d been crying.
She opened another Guinness and offered it to me. “Thank you,” I said, accepting it. What I really wanted was a cup of coffee and I was going to disappear as soon as possible into the kitchen to make myself some of the proper stuff. I gestured at the cans on the table.
“Are you sure you should be… I mean, in your current…”
“Guinness is good for the baby,” snarled Lucy.
“Well, okay,” I said.
“It’s all the iron that’s in it.”
Nevada came in and sat beside me. She picked up her can of Guinness and sipped.
“But isn’t that much later, during breastfeeding…” I said.
“What would you know about breastfeeding?” said Lucy with rising truculence. I decided this would be a good time to fix myself that coffee and went through to the kitchen. When I came back Lucy was talking about Rory. Rory apparently was the father. She’d met him when she’d arrived in London. That was fast work, I thought.
“He’s a journalist. His father was a journalist. He knew my father. So when I got here I got in touch with him and we met and it just happened.”
I bet it did, I thought.
“Now the important thing is the baby,” said Lucy. “That’s all that matters. So the book is more crucial than ever.”
For a moment I couldn’t even remember what book she was talking about. Then I got it. She was supposed to be researching the definitive story of Valerian.
“Isn’t it funny? I started work on this book for my father. It was the book he was always saying he was going to write. The book that he could write better than anyone in the world. He knew Valerian better than anyone in the world. And it’s a tragedy, a genuine tragedy, that he never wrote it. That’s why I have to write it. For him. Isn’t it funny? I started writing the book for him and now I’m writing it for my child.” She looked at me owlishly. “It costs a lot of money to raise a child,” she said.
After the earlier shredding I’d got for mentioning breastfeeding, I wasn’t sure I was supposed to even have an opinion on this subject, but I cautiously nodded.
“So I need to get a lot of money,” said Lucy. I nodded. “So the book must be a huge success.”
&n
bsp; No pressure there, then, I thought.
Lucy then proceeded to speculate on whether she’d first receive a seven- or eight-figure advance for this putative masterpiece. She discussed film rights, television rights, radio and book club rights and whether she would be able to get it on Oprah. She conjured vast fortunes pouring in for this purely hypothetical book of which she had yet, to my knowledge, to write one word. Perhaps I was being unduly influenced by the Colonel’s cynicism on the subject. But maybe he was right.
He was certainly right about the Guinness-induced flatulence.
Eventually she left. We had called Clean Head to come and pick her up and make sure she got safely home—or at least back to the hotel in Mayfair—with her newly acquired precious cargo. After many goodbyes, Nevada shut the door behind her—a welcome blast of fresh, frigid wind blew through the house—and came back in and sat down.
“My god,” she said. We stared at the Guinness cans on the table in front of us. One of them was still unopened. I lifted it and shook it, listening to the widget rattle around inside.
“She left one,” I said.
The doorbell rang. “She’s come back for it,” said Nevada, and she giggled and went to answer the door. I tried to piece my thoughts back together after the barrage of information, sentiment and lunatic speculation that had been Lucy’s visit. I had to tell Nevada about my suspicions concerning Dr Osterloh.
“Oh, hello,” said Nevada. Then she fell silent and the front door shut. I looked up as she came back into the room. Her face was white. A man followed her into the room.
It was Nic Vardy.
And he was pointing a shotgun at us.
29. RED BUTTERFLY
I recognised the shotgun. It was one of the collection I’d seen at Vardy’s Docklands flat, safely locked away behind glass. I wished it was there now. It wavered in the air as he pointed it first at me then at Nevada. I estimated the chances of grabbing it away from him without running the risk of one or both of us getting blasted into a red mess and decided that there was no hope.
Sighting along the twin barrels of the gun, his eyes were bloodshot and brightly raw-looking as if he’d been drinking a great deal. This was not a comforting thought.
“Get back,” he said. “Back into the room.” We did as he said.
I said, “What the hell…”
“Shut up.” He moved the shotgun from Nevada and pointed it at me. My whole body went cold. “Don’t say anything.”
“Nic,” said Nevada. “What on earth are you doing?” She spoke in an amazingly calm and casual voice, as if we were all just having a conversation. Mind you, she didn’t have a shotgun pointed at her just at this instant. That must have helped, but nonetheless I had to admire her coolness. I was still trying to wrap my head around what was happening. I had been sitting in my living room thinking about doing the washing up, and now this.
“Please be quiet,” said Vardy. There was a note of pleading in his voice.
“Nic,” said Nevada. I noticed how she kept using his first name. Clever. “What on earth?”
“Please don’t make this any harder than it has to be.” He was talking to Nevada but kept the gun pointed at me, which was very unpleasant. Better than him pointing it at her, but unpleasant nonetheless. I made a deliberate effort to stop staring into the dark twin tunnels of the barrels and lifted my gaze to his face. I was startled, in so far as I still had the capacity to be startled, to see that there were tears flowing down his cheeks and I realised that his eyes weren’t bloodshot from drinking but from crying.
“Don’t make what any harder? Why are you doing this, for heaven’s sake? Why not just put the gun down and let me make you a cup of tea.” Nevada was the sweet voice of reason. But Vardy wasn’t listening. Or he wasn’t letting himself listen. He shook his head stubbornly.
“No, it has to be done. I’m sorry, but it has to be done.”
“What has to be done? Why?”
More tears flowed down his face. They were splashing on the floor. “Why did you have to do it?” he said.
“Do what?”
“Stick your nose in. Go nosing around. Digging things up. Why couldn’t you just have let the past be the past?”
“You mean about Valerian?” said Nevada with convincing innocence.
“Yes.”
“We honestly haven’t found anything,” said Nevada. “About Valerian or anything else.” And she was so sincere that I believed her. In fact, I suddenly began to believe, with a deep and searing frankness, that we hadn’t found anything. Such is the pedagogical power of having a gun pointed at you.
“Yes you have,” said Vardy. “Or if you haven’t found out anything, you’re about to.” He shook his head obstinately. “I’m sorry. But it has to be done.”
“Look, Nic, we promise to drop it. To drop the whole thing. We’ll never ask anyone another question about Valerian, and we’ll never even think about her again. Whatever it is you think we’ve uncovered or you think we might uncover, we haven’t and we don’t care. We don’t care about any of it. We’ll just leave it all alone and never give it another thought.”
“I wish I could believe you.” His tears kept flowing, copious and continuous. They ran down his face and splashed on the floor. But the shotgun remained steady, aimed squarely at me.
“Nic, this just isn’t you,” said Nevada. “You don’t even like to shoot birds.”
“It has to be done,” he repeated, as if it was a phrase he’d learned by rote.
“But, Nic,” said Nevada. Her voice was gentle, reasonable, oozing with sympathy. “You told us how you’d given up hunting because you couldn’t bear the bloodshed, the cruelty, the foolish waste.” I couldn’t remember if he had actually said anything remotely resembling any of this, but it all sounded good to me.
“I know,” said Vardy. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”
“But it doesn’t, Nic, it really doesn’t.”
He turned his tear-stained face to her. “Doesn’t it?” He began to lower the shotgun and Nevada took a slow step towards him, her arms extended carefully at her sides, a smile on her face. She moved towards him and held out her hands for the gun. He lowered it further, his face starting to look slack and beaten, but somehow relieved beyond description.
There was an abrupt rattling sound from the other side of the house.
Vardy stepped back and the shotgun went up again, clutched tightly in his hands, shaking with tension, pointing at me. I stared at the twin barrels jerking in little circles, aimed point blank at my face. His finger curled around the trigger and Nevada said, her voice high and tight with fear, “It’s just the cat flap. It’s just the cat flap.”
Vardy relaxed a fraction and his finger eased off the trigger and Turk came trotting into the room. She looked up at us and then at Vardy, then circled him warily.
“You have a cat,” said Vardy stupidly.
“We have two of them,” said Nevada.
Turk sniffed at the wet spot on the floor that had been formed by Vardy’s tears, then jumped up onto the table beside me. “Now, Nic,” said Nevada, “we were just saying…”
“It doesn’t matter what we were saying.” His hands were steady again.
“You’re right, it doesn’t, Nic, but you were just about to give me the gun.”
For the first time the shotgun moved away from me and pointed at Nevada. “No,” he said. “Get back.” I considered jumping him, but I couldn’t take the risk that the gun would go off while it was pointing at Nevada. Presumably, though, he would turn and point it at me again. And if I could just move while he was in the act of turning, while he was pointing at neither of us…
It was sickeningly as if he’d read my mind, because as soon as Nevada had backed away from him, he turned towards me so sharply and suddenly that I had no chance to move. He walked away from her but kept pointing the gun at me. I realised what he was doing. He was making sure she wasn’t close enough to him to try anything. And meanw
hile he had me utterly neutralised. I could almost feel the gun barrels pointing at my face, as though chilled air was flowing from them.
The shotgun was steady in his hands, ready for action, and somehow I didn’t see him setting it down again. There was a tortured resolve on his face that told me he wouldn’t soften now. But Nevada kept at it, persistent and gentle. “That’s Turk there on the table, Nic. We have two cats, Fanny and Turk. They’re lovely little creatures, and I’d hate to have anything happen to them. It would break my heart. You would never hurt a cat, would you, Nic?”
“Of course not,” said Vardy thickly.
“Of course you wouldn’t.”
He frowned, his brows knotting. “Hurting animals is a disgusting idea.”
“And you’d never hurt a person, either, would you?”
“I’m sorry. I have to. This is different. It has to be done.” That phrase again.
“Nothing has to be done,” said Nevada, gently and reasonably.
“This does.”
Moving restlessly on the table at my elbow, Turk suddenly howled for attention. She had no comprehension of the situation and didn’t understand why no one was petting her. “What’s the matter with her?” said Vardy. “Is she hungry?”
When he said this, I thought of something, and Nevada must have had exactly the same thought. I could see it in her eyes. “That’s right,” said Nevada carefully. “She’s hungry. Please let me feed her, Nic. Whatever happens, whatever you have to do, let me at least give Turk her meal.”
Vardy glanced at her suspiciously. I noticed with a sinking feeling that his face was dry now, all tears gone. “It’s all right,” said Nevada soothingly. “There’s no way out from the kitchen. Only this door that leads back in here. I’m not going anywhere.” Vardy kept the gun pointed at me but took a step backward and turned his head to glance into the kitchen. “And the curtains are drawn,” said Nevada. “No one can see me.” Vardy turned back to me just as I was deciding that now was the time to go for him—and the moment passed.
The Run-Out Groove Page 27
