“Top of the morning, Fitz.”
“Same to you, McGee.”
“This is one Thursday you won’t forget in a hurry, I bet.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s the Thursday the D.A. decided to wipe your slate clean. You’re as free as a bird, Fitz. Step right on out of your cage now.”
“I don’t want to step out of my cage.”
“You don’t have much choice. The investigation has been dropped. We need the room and a bookie down the block needs the radio. So out with you, Fitz, and I’ll take you up to the office where you can collect your valuables.”
“I can’t leave, McGee. I just can’t.”
“You’ll leave if I have to drag you. Out you go. Out!”
“No, no, no. You don’t understand, McGee. I’ve got to stay here eight more days.”
“That’s not the way I hear it.”
“Fitzy.”
“Hello, Alec.”
“You look a little pale, Fitzy.”
“I suppose so.”
“But I think we can fix that, Fitzy. We’ll take a little spin in the country and get a little fresh air. See that green car near the parking meter?”
“Yes.”
“Just walk toward that, Fitzy.”
Mad Maud, the Harrowgate Hag
by Mary Costantin
To gain the advantage, one must get the number of an adversary.
My name is Ken Wenks. I am a Canadian journalist who, once having got to London, has made a career of staying here, I like it that much. Over the course of ten years, I have developed an intimate knowledge of the convolutions of Westminster and have used this expertise to guarantee my steady employment by a succession of North American publications, each better than the last. I am reasonably well-paid for my journalistic labors.
As Rob MacKenzie, prolific author of paperback thrillers, however, I have made a bundle and a half, even after the Inland Revenue has taken its cut. I have also made the acquaintance of one of my fans: the beauteous Shelagh O’Keeffe. Ah, Shelagh. Irish, beautiful, semi-aristocratic and the highly successful proprietress of an antiques shop and interior decorating service in the smartest part of Chelsea.
Shelagh convinced me that I should sink some of my booty into real estate. Houses. Well, to begin with, a house. The initial plan was that I’d buy a house, she, funded by me, would furnish and decorate it, and then I’d sell it at a handsome profit — minus Shelagh’s 10 % — to somebody like an American millionaire. House not even purchased, I had begun to entertain a second plan: once the house was fixed up, it would be the ideal place for Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Wenks to set up housekeeping, Shelagh being the Mrs. of the title. Shelagh... such red hair! Such green eyes!
Well, it wasn’t as easy as that. No, not at all. In hunting for a house, I kept looking backwards from Georgian while Shelagh kept looking forward from, let me be kind, 1984. A mystifying propensity, I hear you saying, in a girl who makes her living searching out antique furniture and bibelots. The truth is, she has made most of her money out of being the Modest decorator around: plastic slate, crocodile fabrics, wet-look wallpaper, all that.
What to do?
Even before I answer, I predict cries of “Male chauvinist pig!” I, however, prefer to think of myself as a student of human foibles. Shelagh’s foible is that she is something of a snob. She thinks a martini cocktail mixed with American ingredients, U.S. Air Force PX, is highly superior to a plain old Beefeater’s martini. One starry evening I plied her with this elixir and she finally agreed, among other things, to let me buy the house on my own if I would let her decorate the house on her own. A further martini applied, she also agreed to work into her interior schemes the assorted Queen Anne and earlier and later stuff I had already collected in my tiny service flat.
Free of Shelagh’s penchant for floor-to-ceiling glass, I did not find my search for a house an easy task. I quickly ran through the repertoire of one estate agent after another.
“A little fixing, that’s all it needs, truly.” That was an old Etonian trying to flog a boathouse on the Thames that had been uninhabited since the Great Fire.
“Trendy, baby, trendy.” A sharp-lapelled Cockney showing me a loft in Whitechapel that had most recently been a dress factory (surely Fagan had turned it down as depressing) complete with obscene scrawlings on the wall of the single, stinking, highly primitive loo.
“Of course, the lions crying at night may disturb your sleep,” the lady estate agent, probably a near-miss as a lady-in-waiting, said haughtily as she showed me around a Regents Park terrace house, “especially if you have young children. But, after all, they’re asking so awfully much for it, it really should be you crying, shouldn’t it?”
One morning, having got to the stage of utter hopelessness, I spotted the ad in the Times. Cracking the code, I discovered that a house in Hampstead, one of my favorite parts of Greater London, had come up for sale as the result of a particularly complicated estate finally having been settled. I smelled a rat, of course, since houses in Hampstead, which has become trendy, baby, trendy, for perhaps the tenth time in the last three hundred years, can easily be sold by word of mouth rather than by costly ads in the Times, but I held my nose and telephoned the private number listed in the ad.
No. 11 Jolly Row.
I wanted it for its rosy brick exterior even before I saw the delights of its interior: a cheerful daylight basement, front-to-back drawing room, front-to-back dining room, numerous spacious bedrooms upstairs; and, at the end of the elegant entry hall, a small room with a view of the garden now overgrown with weeds the size of sequoias. It would make an ideal study for me.
The rat I had smelled soon revealed itself as the price the inheritor was asking. Unnecessarily huge considering the house had been abandoned for ages, though not totally unreasonable.
For a time I played a waiting game, hoping for a reduction in price. I sent round an engineer who marvelled at the construction, the slate roof, the copper plumbing; an architect who offered to do his projections for almost nothing if I’d just let him work on such a gem of a place, and my daily. She said the servants’ quarters were so “comfy,” she could put together a staff for me in a matter of minutes.
With so many resounding Ayes! I handed over a check to the rather rabbity-looking estatee and, little time wasted, moved into My House. Shelagh went straight to work on the living and dining rooms and, even though surrounded by tea-swilling workmen who seemed only secondarily interested in ripping up floors and laying down carpets, and even though taken somewhat aback by the Mod stuff Shelagh was strewing around on the first floor, I found myself a happy man.
That agreeable state did not last very long.
Having worked in my sparsely furnished study until nearly midnight one night, I crawled into bed, only to be disturbed immediately by a violent storm which suddenly blew up. The windows rattled so severely it was almost as if the storm were trying to break into the house. At the very height of the gusts I heard a frantic banging on my front door. At first I thought a shutter had come loose, since the house was not in the best of repair, but it soon became obvious that someone was urgently summoning me.
I jumped into my robe and slippers, every Rob Mackenzie plot I had ever concocted flashing through my mind, and hurried down the stairs and went through a great deal of unbolting to open the front door a crack for a peek.
There was no one there.
The knocking had been so urgent, however, that I ventured out into the middle of the street. But Jolly Row was as quiet and as calm as an unopened tomb.