“A large sum of cash is always welcome,” said Rowan evasively.
“This much money should last you a good while. That is, if you don’t invest in any more wives,” said Kosminski with a nasty smile.
“No, it’s a bad habit,” said Rowan. “I’ve forsaken it. I smoke now instead. Packs and packs a day. Would you care for one? Cigarette, I mean. Though I’ve wives to spare as well.”
“Fifty… thousand… dollars,” said Kosminski slowly.
Somehow, between the double Scotches and Aaron Kosminski’s quiet insistence, Rowan Rover had found himself tentatively agreeing to accept employment. It had seemed rather logical at the time. After all, the tour was months away, and just as likely to be canceled as not. Besides, Kosminski had done a thorough job of researching his prospective assassin. When the preliminaries were over, he had produced a budget of Rowan Rover’s projected yearly income, offset with his ominous new expenditures. The resulting deficit was so crushing that murder seemed a small price to pay to make it all go away. By the time Kosminski had finished his murder talk, and was advising his hired assassin on sound investments and the virtues of a strict budget, the whole interview had assumed the surreal quality of one of Richard Jones’ well-planned practical jokes. Rowan had found himself agreeing as if the conversation were part of a script. In time, the incident became just another pub conversation.
Until today.
Today he found in his mailbox a business envelope bearing American postage stamps, with a post office box for a return address. Inside the envelope was a cashier’s check for ten thousand pounds, and a note that said, “Remainder upon completion of the task. Bon voyage. A.K.”
So it hadn’t been a practical joke, after all. That gave him pause. For several minutes he stood there with the letter in his hand, staring stupidly into space while he considered all the implications of the message. How could he possibly have allowed himself to get mixed up in such lunacy? Finally he put the letter aside, and withdrew the rest of the mail from the box. There was the usual assortment of bills, a window-enveloped letter from the bursar’s office of Sebastian’s public school (marked URGENT), and a circular from a company that specialized in boat repair. Rowan Rover glanced at his watch. There was still time to deposit the cashier’s check before the bank closed. At least that would eliminate all his nagging financial problems, leaving him with one enormous moral one: the contemplation of murder.
Now, ten thousand pounds richer and on the verge of paying his debts, he was solvent, but no less apprehensive. He began to contemplate his next course of action. “After all,” he told himself, as he nervously rearranged the books in his suitcase, “I am an authority on murder. I’ve written books on British murder cases. Don’t I stand up and tell people that if Crippen hadn’t used hyoscine-of all the improbable poisons!-he’d have gone free? Don’t I laugh when I talk about that stupid solicitor Herbert Rowse Armstrong, who kept inviting his enemies to tea long after they’d begun to notice that having tea with Herbert gave them stomach cramps symptomatic of arsenic poisoning? And he paid for his stupidity on the gallows, right enough.” The thought of the gallows was chilling, but, after all, Britain had abolished capital punishment in the early Sixties, and, much as the public wanted it back when they caught the Moors Murderers, it had stayed abolished. No worries about the hangman, then.
Rowan Rover was an expert on every tantalizing murder Britain had ever seen. He knew who was caught and why, and in most of the so-called unsolved cases, he knew who had done it and how they managed to get away with it. This knowledge was, after all, the reason he had been engaged to host the September murder tour. “If I wanted to,” he told himself cautiously, “I’m sure I could get away with murder. I’ve been studying it all my life.”
Then in his best imitation of American ex-president Richard Nixon, he shook imaginary jowls, and said, “But it would be wro-ong!”
He picked up the paperback encyclopedia of crime and stared at its cover, a collage of murderers’ faces, all very ordinary and respectable-looking. “Still,” he said thoughtfully, “it would be interesting to see if I could stage a convincing accident. I could certainly name a few killers who managed it. I wouldn’t mind seeing if I could get away scot-free.”
Suddenly he pictured his own face adorning the cover of a future edition of the encyclopedia of crime: the carefully dyed black hair, the distinguished bulbous nose, and his dark eyes narrowed into the menacing slits indicative of a merciless killer. It didn’t bear thinking about. He buried the offending volume beneath a couple of handkerchiefs in the suitcase, then turned his attention to the Guide to England. It was all very well to speculate on the fanciful, but his immediate responsibility was to lead a well-researched and entertaining tour for the travel company. They, after all, might wish to hire him again. Whereas the Kosminski offer was, while generous, hardly the thing he would wish to turn into a career. (He pictured himself in a cell next to the surviving Kray twin, swapping grisly business tips. No, definitely not a career.)
He took out his tour itinerary and hotel brochures, supplied by his employers. There were to be eleven travelers, and, judging from the names, ten of them were women. After he met them, he could make decisions about how strenuous the tour could be. If most of them were upwards of seventy, then he must curb his desire for three-mile walks before lunch. Also, before he planned a detailed list of places to visit, he must gauge their knowledge of and interest in true crime. (Would they want to see the pond where Agatha Christie began her famous disappearance? Or would they want seamier stuff-the field near Alton where Sweet Fanny Adams was dismembered in 1867, thus giving the Royal Navy a new slang term for canned meat? Truthfully, Rowan Rover hoped for the former: the case of poor, young Fanny Adams sickened even his Ripper-hardened soul.)
The tour would begin with a two-night stay in Winchester, in the hotel next to the cathedral. From there he could plan day-trips to nearby places of interest. He consulted the atlas to see what locales lay within an hour’s drive of Winchester. He wouldn’t think about Susan just now, he decided. There would be time enough to worry about that once he got the tour well under way. Besides, Rowan Rover was from Cornwall; Hampshire was not familiar country to him. Accidents would be much easier to arrange on home turf, he thought. Wait until we get to the West Country. The phrase poor Susan went west sprang unbidden to mind, and he actually laughed out loud-before the implication of the entire plan sent him pawing through the guidebook for safer subjects to contemplate. He found the assassination of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury; the Peasenhall case: throat-cutting in Suffolk; ritual sacrifices at Stonehenge. No matter where he looked, it all came back to murder.
“Let him go abroad to a distant country;
let him go to some place where he is not known;
Don’t let him go to the Devil, where he is known!”
– JONATHAN SWIFT
CHAPTER 4
GATWICK
“EXCUSE ME,” SAID Elizabeth MacPherson to the nearest Gatwick airport official. “I just got off a plane. Do I have to go through customs?”
The guard, or whatever he was, paused in mid-dash to consider her question. “Where did you fly in from?” he asked.
“Edinburgh.”
The man gave her a pitying smile. “Then it won’t be necessary, ma’am. Scotland is a part of this country, you see.”