“I’m sorry, Marcia,” he said to himself. “I’m very sorry, but this is something that I’m going to decide myself.”
The virtual Marcia smiled in a rather self-satisfied way. “Then why ask me in the first place?”
“Because I need to talk to somebody. And I like talking to you.”
“Some consolation! You like talking to me, but you don’t want to listen to my advice, do you?”
This internal conversation might have continued for some time, had William not been distracted by Freddie de la Hay, who, having picked up the scent of a squirrel, was straining at his lead. William checked Freddie, and as he did so he came to his decision. He would say yes. He would telephone Sebastian Duck immediately and tell him that he was prepared to go along with what had been suggested and lend Freddie de la Hay to them.
He reached into his pocket and took out the card that Duck had given him. He scrutinised it for a moment, as if the number itself might reveal something. It was one of those very easily remembered mobile numbers, unlike one’s own: a sequence of 123 and 666 at the end – 666, whose number was that? The Devil’s, of course. William laughed. What nonsense! He would be imagining the smell of sulphur next.
William dialled, and Sebastian Duck answered immediately.. “Duck,” he said
“It’s William French.”
“Of course. Well, I enjoyed our meeting. Such a nice day. And you’re still in the park, making the most of it.”
“Yes. I thought that my dog might enjoy …” William stopped. How did Duck know that he was still in the park? The question presented itself, but was quickly dismissed; Duck and his colleagues might be paranoid, but he would not be.
“I’ve given the matter a bit of thought,” said William. “And the answer is yes. I’ll do what you people want.”
Sebastian Duck’s pleasure showed in his voice. “Well, that’s very good indeed. Thank you. Should we make the arrangements right now?”
William asked what there was to arrange. Did he have to sign something? The Official Secrets Act, if that was what they still called it?
“No, nothing so formal. A waiver form – that’s all. Standard procedure.”
“All right.”
“Then we’ll take him right now, if you don’t mind. And I might add that he’ll be terribly well-looked after. We use the Met’s dog-handler people. One of them will be specially assigned to this case. They’re very experienced.”
William looked about him. “Right now? When I get back to the flat?”
“No. Here and now. In the park, if you don’t mind. One of our people is not far from you, you see. She’ll take Freddie.” Duck paused. “Or F as we’ll call him for the purposes of this operation.”
William spun round. A short distance away there was a young couple, obviously immersed in one another, walking arm in arm; another man with a dog, walking in the opposite direction; a teenager carrying a skateboard under his arm; and … He became aware of a woman approaching him along the path.
“Somebody’s coming,” said William. “Is this …”
“That’s her,” said Duck. “When she comes up to you, she’ll engage you in conversation. She’ll say, ‘Nice weather,’ and you’ll say, ‘Of course, but it could change.’ Got that?”
William wanted to laugh out loud. This was a comedy, and a weak one at that. Would his next set of instructions be tucked away in a hollow tree? he wondered.
The woman, who was somewhere in her late thirties, was attractive and she smiled brightly at William as she reached him on the path. “Nice day, Mr French.”
William found himself momentarily confused by the deviation from the agreed code. Did it matter? And what had he been meant to say? Could change?
“Yes,” he said. “I mean, nice weather. Er.”
The woman’s smile broadened. “Oh, don’t worry about all that. Ducky is a little … how shall we put it? Melodramatic. He’s read too many John le Carré novels, I think. This is Freddie?”
She bent down and stroked Freddie gently behind the head. The dog looked up at her with undisguised affection.
“He loves that,” said William.
“Don’t we all?” she said, as she stood up.
William looked into her eyes. For a moment he entertained a wild, impossible hope; that this attractive, vivacious woman might be just the person he was looking for. There had been stranger meetings, after all; people who met their life partners in lifts or in the queue for tickets to the Tutankhamun exhibit, or on jury service in a murder trial. There was no end to the strangeness of the circumstances in which we encounter those whom we love and who love us, so why should he not meet somebody like this in a place like this, on an errand as absurd and ridiculous as this? Why not?
Chapter 23: Dee Lies to Caroline
Saturday was Caroline’s day for a long lie-in, but not that Saturday. She had not slept well the previous night, having gone to bed in a state of intense anger. Never let the sun set on your wrath – that was the motto in one of those preachy needlework samplers that her mother liked so much. Dignified with an ornate Victorian frame, it had hung in her room at home until, at the age of sixteen, she had hidden it in a cupboard and denied all knowledge of its whereabouts. Well, on Friday night, she had certainly forgotten the adage, or at least left it mentally sequestered in its cupboard, as she switched out her light in a state of unambiguous wrath, all of it directed against James.
How could he have forgotten their arrangement to have dinner together? It was not as if it had been made weeks, or even days, earlier; it had been concluded a few hours before it was due to take place. One did not forget obligations as freshly minted as that; one simply did not.
What had happened? Had he simply decided that he had something better to do? James would never behave with such discourtesy, and yet, when she tried to telephone him, she found that his mobile phone was turned off. The only time he did that, she knew, was when he did not want to hear from her. It had happened once or twice before, after a minor row or misunderstanding, and he had even admitted it.
“I can’t bear conflict, Caroline,” he explained. “I simply can’t. There are some people, you know, who like to fight with others – I’m not one of them. I’m really not.”
“But you can’t just turn off your phone,” she said. “That’s running away.”
“I’d never run away from you,” he said soothingly.
“You’d simply turn me off?”
He smiled. “Not you! But I must admit there are some people who really need an on–off switch. I can think of at least three. Maybe even more.”
The fact, then, that he had not answered his phone on Friday night pointed to only one conclusion – he had been avoiding her because he knew that he was standing her up. And even if the phone was off because the battery had run down, or he had simply forgotten, still he stood accused of thoughtlessness at the very least.
Unless something had happened. It was this thought that, more than anything else, ruined her sleep. There were many dangers in London. A traffic accident, for example – James was so unworldly and she had often had to grab his arm to prevent him from walking out into the traffic expecting it to stop. There was that, of course. She imagined herself standing in the police station while the police ran through a list of traffic incidents involving pedestrians. “An art historian, you say, Miss? Well, we did have a young man knocked down near the Courtauld …”
And there were other dangers. People simply disappeared in London. One moment they are on their way to a meeting with a friend and the next they are nowhere to be seen. What happened to these people, she wondered. They were abducted, she had read, but where to? And how did their abductors keep them once they had them? It would be difficult, surely, to imprison somebody in central London; there simply wasn’t the space.
James had no enemies – or none that Caroline knew of. He had not even written a critical review. It would be understandable if he had written something scathing abou
t an installation artist, for instance; such a critic might suddenly find himself put into a tank of formaldehyde or something like that by the artist’s supporters. But James had never had anything published, not even a review.
Anger turned to anxiety, and then back to anger as yet another possibility suggested itself. James might have gone off with somebody else: while Caroline was waiting for him in Corduroy Mansions, he might have been in some entirely other part of London cavorting with somebody else. She tried to imagine James cavorting; she tried to imagine anybody cavorting. It was difficult. And if James had already expressed an antipathy to kissing others for fear of germs, then surely he would be highly unlikely to cavort. Cavorting, even if it was difficult to picture, was surely even more likely to pose a risk of contamination by germs. For a moment she pictured James in the arms of another woman, preparing to cavort … She put the thought out of her mind, only to have it replaced by a still more unsettling one. What if James had decided to go off for dinner with one of those rather foppish young men who hung about the auction houses? There was one who she was quite convinced was interested in James; she had seen him looking at him, in that way. James had said, “Oh, him, he’s not at all my type,” and laughed, but now the exchange came back in a most unsettling way.
She decided to get out of bed and make herself a reviving cup of coffee. She would not phone James, she thought; she would wait for him to phone her. And then she would be cool – no matter what effort it cost her. She could even pretend to have forgotten the engagement herself, which would be very satisfactory revenge – if he phoned to apologise and she asked him what he was talking about.
She went into the kitchen. Dee, who drank green tea first thing in the morning, was standing by the window, nursing a mug in her two hands.
“Go out last night?” asked Caroline.
Dee looked out of the window. “Yes.”
“Party?”
Dee shook her head. “No, nothing special. Just went out for a meal.”
Caroline thought that rather unlike Dee, who was perpetually moneyless. “Special occasion? By yourself?”
“Yes,” said Dee. “Just me. Private treat.”
Chapter 24: Berthea Reflects on Oedipus
Berthea Snark, psychotherapist and mother of Oedipus Snark MP, had settled herself into her seat on the train, and was now waiting patiently it to pull out of Paddington station. It was a Saturday morning, and the station was halfway between the busyness of a weekday – when driven hordes of commuters poured into London from Oxfordshire and beyond – and the relative somnolence of a Sunday. On Saturday morning there were people travelling to see friends for the weekend, grown-up children returning to parents in the country for much-missed home cooking and laundry services, and tourists in search of an England that had once existed but now survived only in the imagination – an England of quiet villages and cricket greens and tiny, silent pubs.
Berthea Snark was on the train because she was going to visit her brother, Terence Moongrove, in his poorly maintained Queen Anne house on the edge of Cheltenham. She made this trip four or five times a year, and although her main motive for these journeys was concern for Terence, for whom she felt a considerable degree of responsibility, she also went because she enjoyed getting out of London. Her visits were usually for four or five days – quite long enough to feel the benefit of being in the country but not long enough to make her forget that she lived in London.
Sometimes, of course, they were longer; recently she had spent several weeks looking after Terence following his near-death experience. This had happened when Terence, a mechanical innocent of the first water, had attempted to recharge the battery of his Morris Traveller by connecting it directly to the mains. Not only had Terence stopped breathing for a few moments after this incident, but the battery, and the Morris itself, had stopped functioning altogether. This had resulted in Terence acquiring a second-hand Porsche from Monty, the son of his neighbour, Alfie Bismarck. Berthea had her misgivings about the acquisition of the Porsche, as she had about everything that Terence did. Her brother had always been a dreamer, and a lesser sister would have lost patience well before this, perhaps, with a brother who went on about sacred dance and the writings of the Bulgarian mystic, Peter Deunov. But Berthea was a tolerant sister – up to a point – and, of course, a psychotherapist, and she understood that no amount of persuasion on her part would ever detract Terence from his mystical preoccupations and his alternative lifestyle. All that she could do, really, was to protect him from the more obvious dangers inherent in such an approach to life. And always, in the background, she could hope that one day he might meet somebody who would take him off her hands. Not that this was at all likely, given Terence’s unprepossessing appearance – which included a propensity to cardigans and yellow slippers – and, more importantly, his utter inability to understand the way in which women – or indeed anybody else – thought.
But as she settled herself into her first-class seat – a luxury justified, she felt, by the ability it gave her to work during the journey – Berthea was thinking not so much of her brother Terence but of her son, Oedipus Snark, a well-known Liberal Democrat MP and boulevardier¬, as one newspaper had sarcastically described him. Berthea cut out all newspaper references to Oedipus, including this one, which appeared in a particularly waspish diary column. She did this not as most fond mothers did, pasting the cuttings into bulging scrapbooks; she preserved these items as material for her project and, possibly, as evidence.
Berthea’s project was the writing of an unauthorised biography of her son. This was admittedly an unusual activity for a mother, but, as the commissioning publisher had acknowledged, a mother was surely better placed than most to write a warts-and-all biography of a son.
“Not that many do,” mused the publisher. “Loyalty, I suppose …”
If Berthea felt reproached by this mention of loyalty, she had not shown it. She felt no compunction in writing her son’s biography because, after a great deal of soul-searching, she had decided that he simply had to be stopped. Now, normally one would not have to say of a Liberal Democrat MP that he or she had to be stopped. It was simply unnecessary, as few Liberal Democratic MPs, alas, needed to be stopped. This was not their fault – such MPs were usually principled, hard-working and effective; the problem was that the party to which they belonged – admirable though it might be – regrettably seemed unlikely to be in a position to form a government. So the stopping of a Lib Dem MP seemed to be uncalled for, whereas the MPs of other parties could be really dangerous in that they could well find themselves with hands on the levers of power. Some of them – the most egregiously selfish or unscrupulous – had to be stopped for the public good, lest they find themselves in power.
Oedipus Snark, his mother believed, was only in the Liberal Democratic Party because the other two main parties had rejected him. Not many people knew this, of course, but she, being his mother, had seen the correspondence he had carelessly left lying about in the days when he still occupied a room in her mews house behind Corduroy Mansions. There were letters from party secretaries, politely phrased but clear in their message that he was not what they were looking for as prospective candidates. The Liberal Democratic Party, however, in its profound decency, had allowed him through and then, as a result of the vagaries of the selection process, he had found himself selected as a candidate for a London constituency. And that could have been as far as he got, had it not been for the fact that both the main party candidates for that particular constituency had simultaneously been involved in serious scandals. They went down, and Oedipus Snark, then only thirty-one and one of the youngest parliamentary candidates, went up.
Berthea Snark might have left it at that, but there was still a danger that Oedipus might find himself near power, this by his own admission. “Mother,” he had said, “I know you think that I won’t get anywhere politically, but may I let you into a little secret? They want me to cross the floor, to join up with them. A
nd you know what mother? I’m going to do it when the time is ripe, and in return … Guess what? A cabinet post! Not a junior minister – a real, six-cylinder, eighty-four-horsepower ministerial post! What do you think of that, mother?”
Berthea said nothing. But what she thought was this: But what if people knew about you? What then? And then, as a delicious – but guilty – afterthought, she muttered to herself, Creep!
Chapter 25: Cars and Auras
When Berthea’s train drew into Cheltenham station, Terence Moongrove was waiting to meet her. He had arrived at the station half an hour earlier, allowing, as usual, a generous amount of time to park the car. This had taken him less time than anticipated, however, because he found the Porsche much more manoeuvrable than the Morris Traveller. It was not just the steering that seemed different; it was the response of other drivers, who generally seemed to get out of the way when they saw Terence in the high-powered German sports car.
“It’s a very funny thing, Mr Marchbanks,” he said to his long-suffering garagiste. “When I drive this new car you got me, I find I get looks from other drivers. Admiring looks, I think. Do you think that Monty Bismarck got the same thing when he drove this car?”
Mr Marchbanks raised an eyebrow. “Looks? Well, I don’t know – you’d have to ask Monty about that, I suspect. But I do know that some people judge others by their cars.”
Terence found this very strange. “What a peculiar thing to do,” he said. “What really counts is the spirit, Mr Marchbanks. Or a person’s aura. That’s the really important thing to look out for.” He paused, weighing up an idea that had come to him. “Do you think that cars have auras, Mr Marchbanks?”
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