'On the contrary — '
'No.' She sat up very straight. 'As regards Miss Francis, Mr Robinson, I think your best bet would be a certain Gary Redwood.'
'Gary — ' His repetition of the absurd Christian name seemed to tighten her mouth. 'A boyfriend?'
'No.' Her expression belied the question even before she'd rejected it. 'Whatever Gary was to her, he most certainly wasn't that.' She turned away from him abruptly, to stare at a pair of steel filing-cabinets which seemed oddly out-of-place in an otherwise computerized office.
'Who is he?' It disconcerted him oddly that she didn't move dummy2
to consult the cabinets' contents, but merely stared at them, as though their entire contents were already on disc in her memory.
' Was, as far as this company is concerned, Mr Robinson.
Yes.' She switched back to him. 'He was our messenger boy, while Miss Francis was with us ... and for a brief time after that. Gary Redwood — his mother, who was a perfectly decent woman, worked in our canteen. They lived in Albion Street, near the railway line. But you won't find him there.'
She looked at her watch. 'If he has continued to stay one jump ahead of the Police, you should find him in Messiter's timber yard, Mr Robinson — '
' Redwood — ?' He cupped his hands round his mouth to direct his shout at the man over the shriek of the circular saw.
' Eh?' The man tapped his protective ear-muffs.
This wasn't Gary Redwood, he was too old by a dozen years: even now the former Brit-Am messenger boy would only be in his mid-twenties. ' Gary Redwood?' Ian's voice cracked.
An uneven piece of mahogany fell away from the saw. The man picked it up and pointed with it towards a stairway before tossing it aside.
The noise fell away behind Ian as he ascended the stair. He still wasn't at all sure what he was really doing; or, at any rate, whether it really had any bearing on what had dummy2
happened to Philip Masson. For the link between Marilyn Francis and Philip Masson was hardly more than a tenuous sequence of November days in early November, with David Audley in the middle of it. Dr Harrison, of British-American, had been jailed for passing high-tech secrets to one of Russia's East European colonies — Hungary, was it? Or Bulgaria? And Marilyn Francis had quit Brit-Am (and Dr Harrison) on November 7, 1978, to keep an appointment with 'Mad Dog' O'Leary's bullet (or somebody's bullet) in Dr Audley's presence four days later; and, as things stood at present, Audley was playing Macbeth to Philip Masson's Banquo, his victim, if Jenny had heard more than a rumour.
But there lay a full week between those two deaths, and a week was a long time not just in politics.
'Mr Redwood?' There was only one person in the timber-loft, so it had to be Gary. And as the man turned towards him from the pile of planks he was sorting the identification was confirmed: the acne-ravaged face and the stocky build filled Mrs Simmonds' 1978 description to the life.
'Yeah?' Gary straightened up, balancing himself among the planks.
'I believe you may be able to help me, Mr Redwood.' He returned Gary's empty gaze with a smile of encouragement.
'You used to work at British-American Electronics just down the road, didn't you?'
'Yeah — ' A fraction of a second after he began to answer, as though his brain was slower than his tongue, Gary's dummy2
expression changed from the blank to the wary ' — who says?'
Mrs Simmonds' name was not the one to drop, decided Ian.
And, in any case, he had a much better name to open Gary up. 'You had a friend there — ' As he spoke, Mrs Simmonds'
parting words echoed in his head: " She let them chat her up
— even a dreadful ugly little beast like Gary. At the time, I thought it was disgusting. But perhaps I was wrong: perhaps she was just being kind to him!'; but now he observed Gary in the pitted flesh neither conclusion quite fitted ' — a Miss Francis — Miss Marilyn Francis, Mr Redwood — ?'
A succession of different emotions twisted across the moonscape face, ending with a scowling grimace. 'Who told you? Not that fucking old bitch Simmonds?' Gary spoke with surprising clarity as well as bitterness. 'You don't want to believe anything she says — right?'
It would be a mistake to underrate Gary, in spite of appearances. 'She only said you were a friend of Miss Francis, Mr Redwood.'
Gary shook his head, as at some crassly stupid statement.
'About Miss Francis — Marilyn . . . she's who I mean. You don't want to believe anything the old bag said about her —
right?' The corner of his mouth twisted upwards. 'It don't matter what she said about me. Who gives a fuck for that, eh?'
There had been a sum of unaccounted petty cash outstanding dummy2
between Mrs Beryl Simmonds and Mr Gary Redwood, back in 1979. But who gave a fuck for that? What mattered was that, once again, Marilyn Francis had been memorable.
'But . . . Miss Francis was a friend of yours, surely?'
'Yeah — ' Gary stopped suddenly. 'No. I just talked to her —
that's all.' He looked past Ian, down the length of the timber-loft. 'She was a smasher — a right little smasher! Bloody IRA
— bloody bastard sods!' He came back to Ian. 'I was only a lad then. First job out of school, like . . . But she was a smasher, she was — Miss Francis.' He pronounced the smasher's name almost primly. 'Why d'you want to know about her?'
Ian was ready for the question. 'Not for anything wrong, Mr Redwood. I'm just a solicitor's clerk, and we've got this will to check up on — next-of-kin, and all that. And probate, and death duties, and all the rest of it — ' He shrugged fellow-feeling at Gary, as one loser to another ' — I just do the donkey-work for my boss . . .' For a guess, Gary wouldn't know probate from a hole in the road. But it might be as well to divert him, just in case. 'She seems to have been a decent sort — Miss Francis?'
'She was.' He looked past Ian again, but only for a second.
'Yes.'
'And pretty, too.' Ian followed Gary's eyes, and his own came to rest on a copy of the Sun which lay folded on top of a bomber-jacket beside the wood pile. 'Like Page Three — ?' He pointed at the newspaper.
dummy2
'What?' Gary squinted at him. 'Like — ? No, not like that . . .
That'll be that old bitch going on — like she always did. She just dressed smart — Marilyn — Miss Francis did. But she was a lady. More of a lady than old Mrs Simmonds. And not stuck-up, like some of 'em . . . She'd talk to you — really talk to you — not treat you like dirt, see?'
Ian wasn't quite sure that he did see. It wasn't just that Mrs Simmonds' and Gary's views diverged on Marilyn Francis, that was predictable. There was something here that was missing. But he nodded encouragingly nevertheless.
'An' she was clever.' Gary nodded back. 'She knew things.'
'What things?'
'Oh ... I used to talk to her about the Old West,' Gary trailed off.
'The old — what?'
'West.' Gary's eyes lit up at the memory. 'Cowboys and Indians . . . and the US cavalry — General Custer . . . It's my hobby, like — I read the books on it ... And she knew about it
— knew who Major Reno was, for instance — I didn't have to explain about him getting the blame for Custer getting hisself killed — she knew. We had a good talk about that once, while she was helping me with the deliveries all round the office.
Which she didn't have to do, either ... All about whether the Sioux had used more bows and arrows than Winchesters an'
Remingtons — she didn't think they had many guns.' He nodded vehemently. 'An', you know, she was probably right dummy2