‘How will you find out?’ Charles asked.
‘Um… engage Sid Halley to look into it, I dare-say.’
Charles laughed. I felt uneasy all the same. Someone had been listening on that number, and now someone had broadcast it. It wasn’t that my phone conversations were excessively secret — and I’d started the semi-exclusive number anyway solely so that the machine didn’t buzz unnecessarily at awkward moments — but now I had a sense that someone was deliberately crowding me. Tapping into my computer — which wouldn’t get anyone far, as I knew a lot of defenses. Assaulting me electronically. Stalking.
Enough was enough. Five newspapers were too much. Sid Halley, as I’d said, would have to investigate his own case.
Charles’s long-time live-in housekeeper, Mrs Cross, all dimples and delight, cooked us a simple supper and fussed over me comfortably like a hen. I guiltily found her a bit smothering sometimes, but always sent her a card for her birthday.
I went to bed early and found that, as usual, Mrs Cross had left warm welcoming lights on in my room and had put out fresh pajamas and fluffy towels.
A pity the day’s troubles couldn’t be as easily cosseted into oblivion.
I undressed and brushed my teeth and eased off the artificial hand. My left arm ended uselessly four inches below the elbow; a familiar punctuation, but still a sort of bereavement.
My right arm now twinged violently at every use.
Damn the lot, I thought.
Chapter 2
The morning brought little improvement.
I sometimes used a private chauffeur-driven car-hire firm based in London to ferry around people and things I wanted to keep away from prying eyes and consequently, waking to a couple of faulty arms, I telephoned from Charles’s secure number and talked to my friends at TeleDrive.
‘Bob?’ I said. ‘I need to get from northwest of Oxford to Kent, Canterbury. There’ll be a couple of short stops on the journey. And, sometime this afternoon, a return to London. Can anyone do it at such short notice?’
‘Give me the address,’ he said briefly. ‘We’re on our way.’
I breakfasted with Charles. That is to say, we sat in the dining room where Mrs Cross, in her old-fashioned way, had set out toast, coffee and cereals and a warming dish of scrambled eggs.
Charles thought mornings hadn’t begun without scrambled eggs. He ate his on toast and eyed me drinking coffee left-handedly. From long acquaintance with my preference for no fuss, he made no comment on the consequences of iron bars.
He was reading a broad-sheet newspaper which, as he showed me, was making a good-taste meal of Ginnie Quint’s death. Her pleasant, smiling face inappropriately spread across two columns. I shut out of my mind any image of what she might look like sixteen floors down.
Charles said, reading aloud, ‘ “Friends say she appeared depressed about her son’s forthcoming trial. Her husband, Gordon, was unavailable for comment.” In other words, the press couldn’t find him.’
Ordeal by newsprint, I thought; the latter-day torture.
‘Seriously, Sid,’ Charles said in his most calm, civilized voice, ‘was Gordon’s rage at you transient or… er… obsessive?’
‘Seriously,’ I echoed him, ‘I don’t know.’ I sighed. ‘I should think it’s too soon to tell. Gordon himself probably doesn’t know.’
‘Do take care, Sid.’
‘Sure.’ I sorted through the flurry of impressions I’d gathered in the brief seconds of violence in Pont Square. ‘I don’t know where Ginnie was when she jumped,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think Gordon was with her. I mean, when he leaped at me he was wearing country clothes. Work-day clothes: mud on his boots, corduroy trousers, old tweed jacket, open-necked blue shirt. He hadn’t been staying in any sixteen-story hotel. And the metal bar he hit me with… it wasn’t a smooth rod, it was a five-foot piece of angle iron, the sort you thread wire through for fencing. I saw the holes in it.’
Charles stared.
I said, ‘I’d say he was at home in Berkshire when he was told about Ginnie. I think if I’d loitered around to search, I would have found Gordon’s Land-Rover parked near Pont Square.’
Gordon Quint, though a landowner, was a hands-on custodian of his multiple acres. He drove tractors, scythed weeds to clear streams, worked alongside his men to repair his boundaries, re-fence his sheep fields and thin out his woodlands, enjoying both the physical labor and the satisfaction of a job most competently done.
I knew him also as self-admiring and as expecting — and receiving — deference from everyone, including Ginnie. It pleased him to be a generous host while leaving his guests in no doubt of his superior worth.
The man I’d seen in Pont Square, all ‘squire’ manner stripped away, had been a raw, hurt, outraged and oddly more genuine person than the Gordon I’d known before: but until I learned for sure which way the explosively tossed-up bricks of his nature would come down, I would keep away from fencing posts and any other agricultural hardware he might be traveling with.
I told Charles I’d engaged Teledrive to come and pick me up. To his raised eyebrows I explained I would put the cost against expenses. Whose expenses? General running expenses, I said..
‘Is Mrs Ferns paying you?’ Charles neutrally asked.
‘Not anymore.’
‘Who is, exactly?’ He liked me to make a profit. I did, but he seldom believed it.
‘I don’t starve,’ I said, drinking my coffee. ‘Have you ever tried three or four eggs whipped up in mushroom soup? Instant mushroom omelette, not at all bad.’
‘Disgusting,’ Charles said.
‘You get a different perspective, living alone.’
‘You need a new wife,’ Charles said. ‘What about that girl who used to share a flat with Jenny in Oxford?’
‘Louise McInnes?’
‘Yes. I thought you and she were having an affair.’
No one had affairs anymore. Charles’s words were half a century out of date. But though the terms might now be different, the meaning was eternal.
‘A summer picnic,’ I said. ‘The frosts of winter killed it off.’
‘Why?’
‘What she felt for me was more curiosity than love.’
He understood that completely. Jenny had talked about me so long and intimately to her friend Louise, mostly to my detriment, that I recognized — in retrospect — that the friend had chiefly been fascinated in checking out the information personally. It had been a lighthearted passage from mating to parting. Nice while it lasted, but no roots.
When the car came for me I thanked Charles for sanctuary.
‘Anytime,’ he said, nodding.
We parted as usual without physically touching. Eye contact said it all.
Getting the driver to thread his way back and forth through the maze of shopping dead ends in the town of Kingston in Surrey, I acquired six dressing-up party wigs from a carnival store and an angel fish in a plastic tub from a pet shop; and, thus armed, arrived eventually at the children’s cancer ward that held Rachel Ferns.
Linda greeted my arrival with glittering tears, but her daughter still lived. Indeed, in one of those unpredictable quirks that made leukemia such a roller coaster of hope and despair, Rachel was marginally better. She was awake, semi-sitting up in bed and pleased at my arrival.