You get used to it with policemen and people like that. It’s a special sort of look when they find they’re dealing with somebody who might have friends or relations who could get them into trouble with their superiors if they aren’t careful. That look, and saying my own name, made a sort of crack in my cell wall. I was still alone, closed tight in, but I could hear the voices from outside now, and get a whisper back through.
‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled.
‘It must be a shock.’
‘Yes. I’ll try . . .’
They let me make a pot of tea and then I sat down in the chair where I used to wait for B to come home. I could understand what they were saying now. I told them the answers but not anything else. They didn’t ask about the sapphires. While we were talking there was a ring at the door and one of them answered it. He came back as if nothing had happened and they went on with their questions. There was something about them not like ordinary policemen. They were quite old, solemn and fatherly. What they wanted to know about was B’s foreign trips. I told them he usually went to Germany and sometimes to Barbados. Once to New York. They were interested in the ivory statue and the other things like that but I could only tell them he’d brought them back from Germany. When they’d finished the senior one said, ‘Our caller was a journalist, Lady Margaret. For your own sake you’d better not talk to journalists. We’d prefer you not to in any case. My colleague will see that the coast is clear and then I think you’d better go up to your own flat and not come down here again.’
‘It’s bound to come out. We’ve been about together a lot.’
‘We’ll do our best to see that you don’t have any problems. Since you have been so frank with us I will tell you that this is not a normal criminal investigation.’
‘What do you mean?’
He shook his head.
I never finished the jigsaw. I rang Jane at Cheadle to tell her I was coming home. She was different now. She sounded cold and angry. She said she mightn’t be there, although it was the art-school vac. I had to beg her. My cell was closing in again.
I packed a few clothes, took the jigsaw to bits and put it back in its box. I left my case at the porter’s lodge while I walked down to the river with the box under my arm. A bright spring afternoon, the tide just past full, the dirty water sweeping seaward below the Embankment wall. I put the box on the wall, opened the lid and took out a handful of pieces, but before I could throw them someone gripped my wrist and forced it back over the open box.
It was a man, not one of the pair I’d talked to in B’s flat but another of the same sort, only younger. He let me spill the pieces back in the box and took it from me.
‘It was a goodbye present,’ I said. ‘It isn’t anything else.’
He poked among the pieces, took some out one by one, held them up to the light and looked at them closely, back and front.
‘It’s the only thing I can do, you see,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got anything else. Nothing that means anything.’
He closed the box, turned it over, looked carefully at the underneath.
‘Please,’ I said.
He handed it back to me and watched while I opened it again. I took the pieces and threw them in handfuls on to the river. They seemed to vanish as they touched the surface. The water was their colour, dark green or cardboard. The few white bits of unicorn might have been flecks of foam.
[1] This tawdry phrase is still my only means of thinking of the event. If I had been there at his side perhaps I could think of it (if I could think of it at all) in terms of the sudden clatter, the bewilderment, my own throat numb with screaming, the smashed body bleeding on to my dress. As it is, my contact is through a newspaper headline. I would rather have that than nothing at all.
PART TWO
1982–1983
I
Maxine was out of the office so I answered the telephone, using my old secretary-voice.
‘Cheadle Enterprises.’
‘Mabs?’ said the man after a slight pause. Nobody apart from my mother and sisters had called me that for twenty years.
‘Who is speaking?’
‘Ronald Smith.’
‘Would you mind telling me . . . Ronnie?’
‘Ah, it is you. Yes, Ronnie.’
‘How nice to hear from you after all these years. What can I do for you?’
Maxine came in and I signalled to her to get ready to interrupt with the urgent-call-on-other-line routine. This was more excusable than it may sound. Ronnie had been something of a public figure in the Sixties as a television journalist specialising in Eastern Bloc politics but with a lucrative sideline in British traitors, most of whom he had known well. Then he had dropped rather suddenly out of sight, after a series of drunk-on-screen episodes.
‘May I come and talk to you, Mabs?’
‘Is it about money?’
‘Am I hoping to touch you, you mean?’
‘I’m afraid so. Most people seem to be.’
‘In my case, no. But I’m told you make a charge for interviews.’
‘Sometimes. If people are trying to use me and my name for their own profit I don’t see why I shouldn’t get a percentage.’
‘Ah. This may be one of those times, then. The thing is, Night and Day is coming up to its fiftieth anniversary and I’ve been commissioned to write the official history to celebrate the event. I leave it to you, with your extensive knowledge of the publishing industry, to decide how much profit there is likely to be in that.’
One should never lift one’s eyes from the treadmill, never. His voice had aged, blurred, but the old hoot was still very marked and the half self-mocking pomposity of phrase. Also, I persuaded myself, the old eager inquisitiveness, the schoolboy’s delight in secret knowledge.
‘A bottle of champagne,’ I said. ‘Special price for you, Ronnie.’
‘Right. You’ll have to drink my share. I’m on the wagon.’
Of course. The world does not stay the same.
‘A bottle of Perrier, then,’ I said. ‘Can you come here? My London visits are always crammed. Mondays are best. We’re open the rest of the week. Not this Monday. Not next, not . . . hell! I suppose I could cancel . . . What about Monday March the 15th? Come to luncheon, one sharp, and I’ll clear the afternoon till three. That ought to be enough. I was only on the paper ten months, remember.’
‘Months of some significance.’
‘I suppose so. It seems ages now. Give me your address and telephone number in case there’s a crisis. One o’clock Monday the 15th. I’ll send you a pass for the gate and a map about parking and finding the garden-room door.’
When I put the telephone down I saw Maxine watching me with a frown on her flat, plain face.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘You never know where you are with long-lost friends. I didn’t need rescuing after all.’
‘You sounded sort of different. Not you.’
‘Did I? Tell Pellegrini luncheon for two in the Satin Room on the 15th. No wine—a cup of some sort. Do a pass for Mr Ronald Smith and tell the gate to expect him. Ring Burroughs and tell them I can’t see that man . . .’
‘It’ll be the third time you’ve put him off.’
‘Sure? What am I doing before luncheon that day? All right, don’t ring Burroughs—it won’t hurt the man to wait ten minutes. Ring Mr Smith and ask him to make it 12.30. Warn him I may be a bit late even so. Oh, and check if he’s got any diet requirements. He must be nearer seventy than sixty . . . Good Lord!’
And I had heard nothing of Tom for twenty years. I seldom looked at Night and Day but I knew Brian Naylor was still in charge—he’d got an OBE two years back, and he popped up on some television or wireless programme most weeks, the professional deflater, that flat voice still setting my teeth on edge. What on earth had made me think I wanted to see Ronnie?