by Dick Francis
George shook his head. ‘Nothing. Nobody who knows him now has known him longer than about ten years. He either wasn’t born in Britain, or his name at birth wasn’t Kraye. No known relatives.’
‘You’ve done marvels, George. All this in one day.’
‘Contacts, chum, contacts. A lot of phoning, a bit of pubbing, a touch of gossip with the local tradesmen… nothing to it.’
Jack, moodily poking his fingers through the cobweb remains of his jersey, looked at me over the half-moon specs and said that there wasn’t a prelim on Bolt yet because ex-sergeant Carter, who was working on it, hadn’t phoned in.
‘If he does,’ I said, ‘let me know? I’ve an appointment with Bolt at three thirty. It would be handy to know the set-up before I go.’
‘O.K.’
After that I went down and looked out of the windows of the Racing Section for half an hour, idly watching life go by in the Cromwell Road and wondering just what sort of mess I was making of the Kraye investigation. A novice chaser in the Grand National, I thought wryly; that was me. Though, come to think of it, I had once ridden a novice in the National, and got round, too. Slightly cheered, I took Dolly out to a drink and a sandwich in the snack bar at the Air Terminal, where we sat and envied the people starting off on their travels. So much expectation in the faces, as if they could fly away and leave their troubles on the ground. An illusion, I thought sourly. Your troubles flew with you; a drag in the mind… a deformity in the pocket.
I laughed and joked with Dolly, as usual. What else can you do?
The firm of Charing, Street and King occupied two rooms in a large block of offices belonging to a bigger firm, and consisted entirely of Bolt, his clerk and a secretary.
I was shown the door of the secretary’s office, and went into a dull, tidy, fog-coloured box of a room with cold fluorescent lighting and a close-up view of the fire-escape through the grimy window. A woman sat at a desk by the right hand wall, facing the window, with her back towards me. A yard behind her chair was a door with ELLIS BOLT painted on a frosted glass panel. It occurred to me that she was most awkwardly placed in the room, but that perhaps she liked sitting in a potential draught and having to turn round every time someone came in.
She didn’t turn round, however. She merely moved her head round a fraction towards me and said ‘Yes?’
‘I have an appointment with Mr Bolt,’ I said. ‘At three thirty.’
‘Oh, yes, you must be Mr Halley. Do sit down. I’ll see if Mr Bolt is free now.’
She pointed to an easy chair a step ahead of me, and flipped a switch on her desk. While I listened to her telling Mr Bolt I was there, in the quiet voice I had heard on the telephone, I had time to see she was in her late thirties, slender, upright in her chair, with a smooth wing of straight, dark hair falling down beside her cheek. If anything, it was too young a hair style for her. There were no rings on her fingers, and no nail varnish either. Her clothes were dark and uninteresting. It seemed as though she were making a deliberate attempt to be unattractive, yet her profile, when she half turned and told me Mr Bolt would see me, was pleasant enough. I had a glimpse of one brown eye quickly cast down, the beginning of a smile on pale lips, and she presented me again squarely with the back of her head.
Puzzled, I opened Ellis Bolt’s door and walked in. The inner office wasn’t much more inspiring than the outer; it was larger and there was a new green square of carpet on the linoleum, but the greyish walls pervaded, along with the tidy dullness. Through the two windows was a more distant view of the fire-escape of the building across the alley. If a drab conventional setting equalled respectability, Bolt was an honest stockbroker; and Carter, who had phoned in just before I left, had found nothing to suggest otherwise.
Bolt was on his feet behind his desk, hand outstretched. I shook it, he gestured me to a chair with arms, and offered me a cigarette.
‘No, thank you, I don’t smoke.’
‘Lucky man,’ he said benignly, tapping ash off one he was half through, and settling his pin-striped bulk back into his chair.
His face was rounded at every point, large round nose, round cheeks, round heavy chin: no planes, no impression of bone structure underneath. He had exceptionally heavy eyebrows, a full mobile mouth, and a smug self-satisfied expression.
‘Now, Mr Halley, I believe in coming straight to the point. What can I do for you?’
He had a mellifluous voice, and he spoke as if he enjoyed the sound of it.
I said, ‘An aunt has given me some money now rather than leave it to me in her will, and I want to invest it.’
‘I see. And what made you come to me? Did someone recommend…?’ He tailed off, watching me with eyes that told me he was no fool.
‘I’m afraid…’ I hesitated, smiling apologetically to take the offence out of the words, ‘that I literally picked you with a pin. I don’t know any stockbrokers. I didn’t know how to get to know one, so I picked up a classified directory and stuck a pin into the list of names, and it was yours.’
‘Ah,’ he said paternally, observing the bad fit of Chico’s second best suit, which I had borrowed for the occasion, and listening to me reverting to the accent of my childhood.
‘Can you help me?’ I asked.
‘I expect so, I expect so. How much is this er, gift?’ His voice was minutely patronising, his manner infinitesimally bored. His time, he suspected, was being wasted.
‘Fifteen hundred pounds.’
He brightened a very little. ‘Oh, yes, definitely, we can do something with that. Now, do you want growth mainly or a high rate of yield?’
I looked vague. He told me quite fairly the difference between the two, and offered no advice.
‘Growth, then,’ I said, tentatively. ‘Turn it into a fortune in time for my old age.’
He smiled without much mirth, and drew a sheet of paper towards him.
‘Could I have your full name?’
‘John Halley… John Sidney Halley,’ I said truthfully. He wrote it down.
‘Address?’ I gave it.
‘And your bank?’ I told him that too.
‘And I’ll need a reference, I’m afraid.’
‘Would the bank manager do?’ I asked. ‘I’ve had an account there for two years… he knows me quite well.’
‘Excellent.’ He screwed up his pen. ‘Now, do you have any idea what companies you’d like shares in, or will you leave it to me?’
‘Oh, I’ll leave it to you. If you don’t mind, that is. I don’t know anything about it, you see, not really. Only it seems silly to leave all that money around doing nothing.’
‘Quite, quite.’ He was bored with me. I thought with amusement that Charles would appreciate my continuing his strategy of the weak front. ‘Tell me, Mr Halley, what do you do for a living?’
‘Oh… um… I work in a shop,’ I said. ‘In the men’s wear. Very interesting, it is.’
‘I’m sure it is.’ There was a yawn stuck in his throat.
‘I’m hoping to be made an assistant buyer next year,’ I said eagerly.
‘Splendid. Well done.’ He’d had enough. He got cum-brously to his feet and ushered me to the door. ‘All right, Mr Halley, I’ll invest your money safely for you in good long term growth stock, and send you the papers to sign in due course. You’ll hear from me in a week or ten days. All right?’
‘Yes, Mr Bolt, thank you very much indeed,’ I said respectfully. He shut the door gently behind me.
There were now two people in the outer office. The woman with her back still turned, and a spare, middle-aged man with a primly folded mouth, and tough stringy tendons pushing his collar away from his neck. He was quite at home, and with an incurious, unhurried glance at me he went past into Bolt’s office. The clerk, I presumed.
The woman was typing addresses on envelopes. The twenty or so that she had done lay in a slithery stack on her left: on her right an open file provided a list of names. I looked over her shoulder casually, and then with quickened interest. She w
as working down the first page of a list of Seabury shareholders.
‘Do you want something, Mr Halley?’ she asked politely, pulling one envelope from the typewriter and inserting another with a minimum of flourish.
‘Well, er, yes,’ I said diffidently. I walked round to the side of her desk and found that one couldn’t go on round to the front of it: a large old fashioned table with bulbous legs filled all the space between the desk and the end of the room. I looked at this arrangement with some sort of understanding and with compassion.
‘I wondered,’ I said, ‘if you could be very kind and tell me something about investing money, and so on. I didn’t like to ask Mr Bolt too much, he’s a busy man. And I’d like to know a bit about it.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Halley.’ Her head was turned away from me, bent over the Seabury investors. ‘I’ve a job to do, as you see. Why don’t you read the financial columns in the papers, or get a book on the subject?’
I had a book all right. Outline of Company Law. One thing I had learned from it was that only stockbrokers — apart from the company involved — could send circulars to shareholders. It was illegal if private citizens did it. Illegal for Kraye to send letters to Seabury shareholders offering to buy them out: legal for Bolt.
‘Books aren’t as good as people at explaining things,’ I said. ‘If you are busy now, could I come back when you’ve finished work and take you out for a meal? I’d be so grateful if you would, if you possibly could.’
A sort of shudder shook her. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Halley, but I’m afraid I can’t.’
‘If you will look at me, so that I can see all of your face,’ I said, ‘I will ask you again.’
Her head went up with a jerk at that, but finally she turned round and looked at me.
I smiled. ‘That’s better. Now, how about coming out with me this evening?’
‘You guessed?’
I nodded. ‘The way you’ve got your furniture organised… Will you come?’
‘You still want to?’
‘Well, of course. What time do you finish?’
‘About six, tonight.’
‘I’ll come back. I’ll meet you at the door, down in the street.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘If you really mean it, thank you. I’m not doing anything else tonight…’
Years of hopeless loneliness showed raw in the simple words. Not doing anything else, tonight or most nights. Yet her face wasn’t horrific; not anything as bad as I had been prepared for. She had lost an eye, and wore a false one. There had been some extensive burns and undoubtedly some severe fracture of the facial bones, but plastic surgery had repaired the damage to a great extent, and it had all been a long time ago. The scars were old. It was the inner wound which hadn’t healed.
Well… I knew a bit about that myself, on a smaller scale.
EIGHT
She came out of the door at ten past six wearing a neat well cut dark overcoat and with a plain silk scarf covering her hair, tied under her chin. It hid only a small part of the disaster to her face, and seeing her like that, defenceless, away from the shelter she had made in her office, I had an uncomfortably vivid vision of the purgatory she suffered day in and day out on the journeys to work.
She hadn’t expected me to be there. She didn’t look round for me when she came out, but turned directly up the road towards the tube station. I walked after her and touched her arm. Even in low heels she was taller than I.
‘Mr Halley!’ she said. ‘I didn’t think…’
‘How about a drink first?’ I said. ‘The pubs are open.’
‘Oh no…’
‘Oh yes. Why not?’ I took her arm and steered her firmly across the road into the nearest bar. Dark oak, gentle lighting, brass pump handles, and the lingering smell of lunchtime cigars: a warm beckoning stop for city gents on their way home. There were already half a dozen of them, prosperous and dark-suited, adding fizz to their spirits.
‘Not here,’ she protested.
‘Here.’ I held a chair for her to sit on at a small table in a corner, and asked her what she would like to drink.
‘Sherry, then… dry…’
I took the two glasses over one at a time, sherry for her, brandy for me. She was sitting on the edge of the chair, uncomfortably, and it was not the one I had put her in. She had moved round so that she had her back to everyone except me.
‘Good luck, Miss…?’ I said, lifting my glass.
‘Martin. Zanna Martin.’
‘Good luck, Miss Martin.’ I smiled.
Tentatively she smiled back. It made her face much worse: half the muscles on the disfigured right side didn’t work and could do nothing about lifting the corner of her mouth or crinkling the skin round the socket of her eye. Had life been even ordinarily kind she would have been a pleasant looking, assured woman in her late thirties with a loving husband and a growing family: years of heartbreak had left her a shy, lonely spinster who dressed and moved as though she would like to be invisible. Yet, looking at the sad travesty of her face, one could neither blame the young men who hadn’t married her nor condemn her own efforts at effacement.
‘Have you worked for Mr Bolt long?’ I asked peaceably, settling back lazily into my chair and watching her gradually relax into her own.
‘Only a few months…’ She talked for some time about her job in answer to my interested questions, but unless she was supremely artful, she was not aware of anything shady going on in Charing, Street and King. I mentioned the envelopes she had been addressing, and asked what was going into them.
‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘The leaflets haven’t come from the printers.’
‘But I expect you typed the leaflet anyway,’ I said idly.
‘No, actually I think Mr Bolt did that one himself. He’s quite helpful in that way, you know. If I’m busy he’ll often do letters himself.’
Will he, I thought. Will he, indeed. Miss Martin, as far as I was concerned, was in the clear. I bought her another drink and extracted her opinion about Bolt as a stockbroker. Sound, she said, but not busy. She had worked for other stockbrokers, it appeared, and knew enough to judge.
‘There aren’t many stockbrokers working on their own any more,’ she explained, ‘and… well… I don’t like working in a big office, you see… and it’s getting more difficult to find a job which suits me. So many stockbrokers have joined up into partnerships of three or more; it reduces overheads terrifically, of course, and it means that they can spend more time in the House…’
‘Where are Mr Charing, Mr Street, and Mr King?’ I asked.
Charing and Street were dead, she understood, and King had retired some years ago. The firm now consisted simply and solely of Ellis Bolt. She didn’t really like Mr Bolt’s offices being contained inside of those of another firm. It wasn’t private enough, but it was the usual arrangement nowadays. It reduced overheads so much…
When the city gents had mostly departed to the bosoms of their families, Zanna Martin and I left the pub and walked through the empty city streets towards the Tower. We found a quiet little restaurant where she agreed to have dinner. As before, she made a straight line for a corner table and sat with her back to the room.
‘I’m paying my share,’ she announced firmly when she had seen the prices on the menu. ‘I had no idea this place was so expensive, or I wouldn’t have let you choose it… Mr Bolt mentioned that you worked in a shop.’
‘There’s Aunty’s legacy,’ I pointed out. ‘The dinner’s on Aunty.’
She laughed. It was a happy sound if you didn’t look at her, but I found I was already able to talk to her without continually, consciously thinking about her face. One got used to it after a very short while. Some time, I thought, I would tell her so.
I was still on a restricted diet, which made social eating difficult enough without one-handedness thrown in, but did very well on clear soup and Dover sole, expertly removed from the bone by a waiter. Miss Martin, shedding inhibitions visibly
, ordered lobster cocktail, fillet steak, and peaches in kirsch. We drank wine, coffee and brandy, and took our time.
‘Oh!’ she said ecstatically at one point. ‘It is so long since I had anything like this. My father used to take me out now and then, but since he died… well, I can’t go to places like this myself… I sometimes eat in a café round the corner from my rooms, they know me there… it’s very good food really, chops, eggs and chips… you know… things like that.’ I could picture her there, sitting alone, with her ravaged head turned to the wall. Lonely unhappy Zanna Martin. I wished I could do something — anything — to help her.
Eventually, when she was stirring her coffee, she said simply, ‘It was a rocket, this.’ She touched her face. ‘A firework. The bottle it was standing in tipped over just as it went off, and it came straight at me. It hit me on the cheek bone and exploded… It wasn’t anybody’s fault… I was sixteen.’
‘They made a good job of it,’ I said.
She shook her head, smiling the crooked tragic smile. ‘A good job from what it was, I suppose, but… they said if the rocket had struck an inch higher it would have gone through my eye into my brain and killed me. I often wish it had.’
She meant it. Her voice was calm. She was stating a fact.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘It’s strange, but I’ve almost forgotten about it this evening, and that doesn’t often happen when I’m with anyone.’
‘I’m honoured.’
She drank her coffee, put down her cup, and looked at me thoughtfully.
She said, ‘Why do you keep your hand in your pocket all the time?’
I owed it to her, after all. I put my hand palm upward on the table, wishing I didn’t have to.
She said ‘Oh!’ in surprise, and then, looking back at my face, ‘So you do know. That’s why I feel so… so easy with you. You do understand.’
I shook my head. ‘Only a little. I have a pocket; you haven’t. I can hide.’ I rolled my hand over (the back of it was less off-putting), and finally retreated it on to my lap.
‘But you can’t do the simplest things,’ she exclaimed. Her voice was full of pity. ‘You can’t tie your shoe-laces, for instance. You can’t even eat steak in a restaurant without asking someone else to cut it up for you…’
