“Have I heard of him?”
“I’m sure you have. Martin Whittaker, the marathon runner.”
Logan finished his drink and looked at his watch. “First things first,” he said. “You and I are going to run after Whittaker and put him in the picture.”
“I do this for therapy,” Whittaker said, using white on a thin brush to touch highlights on his still life of fruit in a crystal bowl. “It helps me fight the depression. Fortunately, I’m a better runner than I am a painter.”
As if they had come to attend his vernissage, Whittaker had supplied Nora and Logan with glasses of sherry. “Remember the first time I showed up at your movement class, Norie?” he said as he refilled their glasses.
“I remember,” she said, glancing at Logan.
“You’ve never believed how scared I was.”
“To me you seemed all confidence.”
“Talking to strange ladies — I was more petrified than I’ve ever been setting out on a road race.” He dunked his brush in turps and dried it on a rag. “Time for me to exercise my injury. Come next door and I’ll show you what I purchased with my Sports Council grant.”
They followed him from his studio into a room half the size, where one corner was occupied by a machine of chrome bars and springs and iron weights. “I’m trying to get over a back injury that includes a pinched sciatic nerve. I don’t mean to sound heroic, but for some months I’ve been running with pain.” He lay down on a ramp which was part of the machine and which accepted his head at a level below his feet. He inserted his ankles under a weighted bar. With hands locked behind his neck, he began a series of situps.
“Will you be all right for the London Marathon next month?” Logan asked.
“I’m not sure. At the moment it’s touch and go. I’d like to be the first man to win it two years in a row.” Whittaker changed his position and began raising and lowering weights on his shoulders. “I’d also like to be selected to run for England in the Olympics. It all depends on getting fit again.”
Logan was the one to broach the important subject. “Nora has a project, too,” he said. “You’d better tell him.”
“I’ve kept it a secret till now, Martin,” she said.
He was climbing into tracksuit trousers, his lean legs ivory-smooth. “Is it about the baby?”
“How do you know? I never told you!”
“I’ve known since before you left for Montreal the first time. I think you were in your seventh month.”
The life drained out of her. “Oh, God. Reg. It must have been Reg.”
“We had a conversation in a bar. Neutral ground, he called it. There was some kind of noxious drink. He described the whole situation to me, how it was impossible for Reginald Packer’s wife to have somebody else’s baby here in London where the word would get around. But you could have it someplace else and leave it there. It was Montreal?”
“She’s living there today. Your daughter.”
“Montreal is tough for road-racing. Too many hills.”
Logan said, “Are you hearing what the woman is telling you?”
“I’m not totally callous. She never even told me she was pregnant. I heard it from Reg. He offered to set me up with this training equipment, and funds enough to make me independent, like the Eastern Bloc athletes. All I had to do was forget about Nora Packer and my illegitimate child.” He began bending to touch the opposite toe, legs apart, torso and arms swinging rhythmically. “If it is, in fact, my child.”
Logan made a move, but Nora caught his shoulder and drew him away. “I won’t get any help here,” she said. “Nobody home.”
Outside, looking for a taxi, she said, “I should have known. Reg would cover all the bases — especially the father.”
“How did he find out it was Whittaker if you didn’t tell him?”
“He’s gotten hold of rarer information than that.”
A cab slowed and stopped. Logan opened the door: “Will you let me talk to him?”
Nora’s response was to give the driver her home address. As the cab pulled into traffic, she said, “All right, come and complete your education. Learn what it feels like to talk to a charming stone wall.” They went from room to room of the Packer Mayfair penthouse without locating the owner. Nobody home here, either. There was a note on the pine chopping block in the kitchen, held in place by a half full bottle. Nora read the message aloud: “I assume from today’s absence you’ve been on one of your mystery tours. The good news is I’m at Metro, recording three special programs for the station anniversary. Money money. Drink your medicine and get to bed.”
“Very nice,” Logan said. “Not many people can be sarcastic with a whiskey bottle.”
She glanced at her watch. “We could probably catch him at the radio station. Will you come with me?”
Nora wheeled a sinister Porsche from some cave behind the building, and when it turned out of the laneway Logan got in beside her. “Now you look more at home,” he said.
“There’s still time for you to back out.”
“I’m not bothered. If Packer gives me any difficulty, I’ll call in my large friend Colman.”
As they drove up Park Lane and turned past Marble Arch, heading for the broadcasting center in Euston, he asked her, “How did you ever end up married to such a sadistic bastard?”
“It was fun at first. He can be charming. I was working as a barmaid in the Crossed Keys and Reg came in one Saturday morning, making everyone laugh and buying drinks for the house. He waited for me after closing and it grew from there.”
“I don’t picture you working in a pub.”
“I quit Kenlow School with a year to go before graduation. Trouble at home.” She decided to tell him about it as she waited for a traffic light to change. “My father was a successful stockbroker in the City. We lived in Surbiton at the time. He got involved in some sort of manipulation — it must have been evil for that lot to investigate his affairs. Anyway, they did. Daddy thwarted justice by overdosing with drugs and alcohol.” The car raced away from the intersection like a dragster. “We were supposed to go to Brighton the following weekend.”
“So you quit school and went into the drinking trade.”
“Not immediately. I had a little money so I bummed around Chelsea for a year, staying with friends in a squat. Then I met Martin Whittaker and moved in with him. He needed help with the rent so I took the barmaid job. Shortly thereafter, Reginald Packer made his entrance.”
They drove the rest of the way to the studio in silence, Logan catching glimpses of the hard pretty face frowning through the windshield, the daughter cheated out of her weekend in Brighton by a man who had put himself permanently out of her reach.
Packer had completed the recording session and was standing in a tape-editing room making the engineers laugh. He was slim as a teenager, dressed in pearl-grey slacks and white cashmere sweater over a black shirt open at the neck. His grey hair was brushed in thick waves around the tanned, handsome face.
“Norie! What a lovely surprise. Who’s this? Mr. Logan, how are you?” He led them out of the room and down a flight of stairs to reception. “Come for a drink. I have a feeling you’ve rescued my wife.”
Now that they were with the great man, Nora had gone silent. They went next door to a hotel bar, where Packer set them up with some special cocktail he claimed to have invented. Logan waited for the lady to open the subject of the missing daughter, but she kept her head down and sipped her drink like a little girl allowed to stay downstairs with the grown-ups as long as she behaved herself.