‘And we are going to say “Coo-ee, we’re over here”?’
‘Um,’ I said. ‘I think they may know already.’
‘God give me strength,’ she said. ‘All right. I see what you’re doing, and I see why you didn’t tell me. And I think you’re a louse. But I’ll grant you you’ve been a damn sight more successful than I thought you’d be, and here we all still are, safe and moderately sound, so all right, we’ll let them know we’re definitely here. On the strict understanding that we then keep our heads down until you’ve fixed the police in Melbourne.’
I kissed her cheek. ‘Done,’ I said.
‘So how do we do it?’
I grinned at her. ‘We address ourselves to the telephone.’
In the end Sarah herself made the call, on the basis that her Australian voice would be less remarkable than Jik’s Englishness, or mine.
‘Is that the Ruapehu Fine Arts gallery? It is? I wonder if you can help me...’ she said. ‘I would like to speak to whoever is in charge. Yes, I know, but it is important. Yes, I’ll wait.’ She rolled her eyes and put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘She sounded like a secretary. New Zealand, anyway.’
‘You’re doing great,’ I said.
‘Oh... Hello? Yes. Could you tell me your name, please?’ Her eyes suddenly opened wide. ‘Wexford. Oh, er... Mr Wexford, I’ve just had a visit from three extraordinary people who wanted to see a painting I bought from you some time ago. Quite extraordinary people. They said you’d sent them. I didn’t believe them. I wouldn’t let them in. But I thought perhaps I’d better check with you. Did you send them to see my painting?’
There was some agitated squawking from the receiver.
‘Describe them? A young man with fair hair and a beard, and another young man with an injured arm, and a bedraggled looking girl. I sent them away. I didn’t like the look of them.’
She grimaced over the ‘phone and listened to some more squawks.
‘No of course I didn’t give them any information. I told you I didn’t like the look of them. Where do I live? Why, right here in Wellington. Well, thank you so much Mr Wexford, I am so pleased I called you.’
She put the receiver down while it was still squawking.
‘He was asking me for my name,’ she said.
‘What a girl,’ Jik said. ‘What an actress, my wife.’
Wexford. Wexford himself.
It had worked.
I raised a small internal cheer.
‘So now that they know we’re here,’ I said, ‘would you like to go off somewhere else?’
‘Oh no,’ Sarah said instinctively. She looked out of the window across the busy harbour. ‘It’s lovely here, and we’ve been travelling all day already.’
I didn’t argue. I thought it might take more than a single telephone call to keep the enemy interested in Wellington, and it had only been for Sarah’s sake that I would have been prepared to move on.
‘They won’t find us just by checking the hotels by telephone,’ Jik pointed out. ‘Even if it occurred to them to try the Townhouse, they’d be asking for Cassavetes and Todd, not Andrews and Peel.’
‘Are we Andrews and Peel?’ Sarah asked.
‘We’re Andrews. Todd’s Peel.’
‘So nice to know,’ she said.
Mr and Mrs Andrews and Mr Peel took dinner in the hotel restaurant without mishap, Mr Peel having discarded his sling for the evening on the grounds that it was in general a bit too easy to notice. Mr Andrews had declined, on the same consideration, to remove his beard.
We went in time to our separate rooms, and so to bed. I spent a jolly hour unsticking the Alice bandages from my leg and admiring the hemstitching. The tree had made tears that were far from the orderly cuts of operations, and as I inspected the long curving railway lines on a ridged backing of crimson, black and yellow skin, I reckoned that those doctors had done an expert job. It was four days since the fall, during which time I hadn’t exactly led an inactive life, but none of their handiwork had come adrift. I realised I had progressed almost without noticing it from feeling terrible all the time to scarcely feeling anything worth mentioning. It was astonishing, I thought, how quickly the human body repaired itself, given the chance.
I covered the mementoes with fresh adhesive plaster bought that morning in Hamilton for the purpose, and even found a way of lying in bed that drew no strike action from mending bones. Things, I thought complacently as I drifted to sleep, were altogether looking up.
I suppose one could say that I underestimated on too many counts. I underestimated the desperation with which Wexford had come to New Zealand. Underestimated the rage and the thoroughness with which he searched for us.
Underestimated the effect of our amateur robbery on professional thieves. Underestimated our success. Underestimated the fear and the fury we had unleashed.
My picture of Wexford tearing his remaining hair in almost comic frustration was all wrong. He was pursuing us with a determination bordering on obsession, grimly, ruthlessly, and fast.
In the morning I woke late to a day of warm windy spring sunshine and made coffee from the fixings provided by the hotel in each room; and Jik rang through on the telephone.
‘Sarah says she must wash her hair today. Apparently it’s sticking together.’
‘It looks all right to me.’
His grin came down the wire. ‘Marriage opens vast new feminine horizons. Anyway, she’s waiting down in the hall for me to drive her to the shops to buy some shampoo, but I thought I’d better let you know we were going.’
I said uneasily, ‘You will be careful...’
‘Oh sure,’ he said. ‘We won’t go anywhere near the gallery. We won’t go far. Only as far as the nearest shampoo shop. I’ll call you as soon as we get back.’
He disconnected cheerfully, and five minutes later the bell rang again. I lifted the receiver.
It was the girl from the reception desk. ‘Your friends say would you join them downstairs in the car.’
‘O.K.’ I said.
I went jacketless down in the lift, left my room key at the desk, and walked out through the front door to the sun-baked and windy car park. I looked around for Jik and Sarah; but they were not, as it happened, the friends who were waiting.
It might have been fractionally better if I hadn’t had my left arm slung up inside my shirt. As it was they simply clutched my clothes, lifted me off balance and off my feet, and ignominiously bundled me into the back of their car.
Wexford was sitting inside it; a one-man reception committee. The eyes behind the heavy spectacles were as hostile as forty below, and there was no indecision this time in his manner. This time he as good as had me again behind his steel mesh door, and this time he was intent on not making mistakes.
He still wore a bow tie. The jaunty polka-dots went oddly with the unfunny matter in hand.
The muscles propelling me towards him turned out to belong to Greene with an ‘e’, and to a thug I’d never met but who answered the general description of Beetle-brows.
My spirits descended faster than the Hilton lifts. I ended up sitting between Beetle-brows and Wexford, with Greene climbing in front into the driving seat.
‘How did you find me?’ I said.
Greene, with a wolfish smile, took a polaroid photograph from his pocket and held it for me to see. It was a picture of the three of us, Jik, Sarah and me, standing by the shops in Melbourne airport. The woman from the gallery, I guessed, had not been wasting the time she spent watching us depart.
‘We went round asking the hotels,’ Greene said. ‘It was easy.’
There didn’t seem to be much else to say, so I didn’t say anything. A slight shortage of breath might have had something to do with it.