With a fizzing of cheap wax, the candle began to gutter, and she looked up at the shadows it cast on the ceiling. Then, just as she was beginning to think there’d never be an end to the wave after wave of cold misery sweeping through her mind, she was asleep.
Chapter Ten
Basil Radleigh switched off the mobile telephone that had burst once more into life, and turned his attention back to Jennifer. “Of course, my dear,” he said with smooth and avuncular charm, “this is a most delightful if unexpected pleasure. I wasn’t expecting a visit from your father today in my little home from home. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be able to say that a very pretty girl has become a very beautiful young woman.” He stopped for the waiters to serve afternoon tea. Any number of times in the Olden Days, Jennifer had sat with her father in the National Liberal Club. “The biggest public urinal the Victorians ever built,” he’d called it with a laugh the first time he took her there. It wasn’t an original comment. And the glazed tiles that covered every wall and column did give the place a strongly lavatorial appearance. Her father had also once pointed at the stains on the high ceiling in the Lloyd George Room, and suggested that a Roman palace might have looked like this some time between the Vandal sack and the first siege by Belisarius.
The Club’s genteel seediness had finally come into its own. Being no shabbier than it had ever been, it seemed, by comparison with almost everywhere else in London, the height of luxury. Jennifer picked up her teacup and sniffed at the sparkling Earl Grey. She put it down and reached for one of the fresh teacakes. She cut it in half and spread it thickly with yellow butter that didn’t separate and run from her knife. She caught a momentary glance at herself in the reflection from the teapot. Though distorted, it told her she’d made the right choice of hat in John Lewis. It made her look older than sixteen, and immeasurably more elegant than she’d ever felt before. The dress, she was sure, was exactly right. It would have given both her parents a fit to see her in it. The club doorman had followed her with his eyes all the way up the grand staircase. Every head in the Lloyd George Room had turned in her direction as she walked in and crossed over to the man for whom her mother had never hidden either loathing or contempt. Even today, £8,000 was hardly a worthless sum. She had no doubt it had caused the shop assistants in John Lewis to do her proud.
“Mummy and Daddy were taken into custody last Wednesday,” she said when they were alone again. She’d rehearsed the artless and almost childish tone of her statement, and was expecting a panicky reaction. Instead, Radleigh put his teacup carefully into its saucer and looked at her to continue. “It was very early last Wednesday,” she said, filling the sudden void in their conversation. “I’d been away—on, on business. When I got back, I was told they’d been taken.”
Radleigh glanced about the room and leaned forward. “So, they were arrested, last Wednesday?” he asked in his softest, most silky voice. “I suppose you went to the local police station with a bag of cash?” She shook her head. Was that the tiniest flicker of relief on his baggy face? Before she could think about the question, his expression had changed, and he made a show of thinking. “Well, my dear,” he said grimly, “they must be half way to Liverpool by now. Couldn’t you have got here a little sooner?” Jennifer took a sip of hot tea and said nothing. If she could have written an epic poem about her journey, it wasn’t something she wanted to bring to the front of her mind. Radleigh frowned. Then he smiled, parting his lips to show the expensive dentistry they covered. “I’ll do what little I can, though I can’t promise a quick result after this delay.” Jennifer nodded and took another sip of tea. She crossed her legs, making sure not to notice how it raised her dress another inch and a half. It was to let him see this that she’d sat herself not opposite him, but at a right angle. “I’m having dinner tomorrow night with the Justice Secretary,” he sighed. “I can speak to him then about your parents. It will take a few telephone calls, and then a day or so to see if they’ve reached the holding pens in Liverpool. If they’ve been shipped off already to Ireland, getting them back will mean calling in some big favours.”
Jennifer put her cup down and stared for what seemed a long time into Radleigh’s eyes. There was a woman at a table on the far side of the room, talking in a loud, affected voice about the prices she was getting for the antiques she’d picked up during The Hunger. Two young men at a table closer by were quietly discussing how many convicts it would take to pump water from an old tin mine in Cornwall. They had to be members of the new engineering élite. At last, Radleigh let go of her stare and smiled at the tablecloth. “You should have stayed in Deal and waited for the police to come round to see you.” He looked up and set his face back into a friendly smile. “It would have saved everyone a lot of time and hardship if you’d stayed around to bribe them on the spot. Wednesday was a long time ago.”
Jennifer uncrossed her legs and sat forward in the chair so he could no longer see her thighs—not that he seemed to have been looking at them. She tried again. “I should add that this isn’t a police matter. I have reason to believe that my parents were taken by the State Security Bureau.”
She’d expected him to jump up and try for the exit. She’d been practising the look of polite implacability with which he’d be fixed in his place. Instead, he looked as if he was covering a smile. “The SSB?” he said eventually in a flat voice. He brushed crumbs from the sleeve of his dark suit. “I won’t ask for your evidence. I’ll just take your claim as true.” He dropped his voice very low. “This being so, I fail to see what more is to be said. Your father was mixed up in an illegal trade with the Outsiders. We all have to make a living, and, since there’s no demand for his books any more, I suppose his classical languages made him the perfect middleman. But your father gambled, and has lost. You should be glad that he won for so long. Most people won nothing at all from The Break.” He threw his napkin aside and looked about to call for the waiter.
Jennifer swallowed and made a big effort to stop her voice from shaking. “Don’t try walking away, Basil,” she said quickly. “If Daddy was gambling, you put up the stake money. Let’s not pretend that Daddy’s business was confined to selling a few bits and pieces to the Outsiders. I was given a letter in France that drops you in everything up to your neck.” She sat back in the chair and tried another flash of her legs. She had wondered, in the John Lewis changing room, about a cigarette holder. What had put her off in the end was ignorance of where in London to buy proper cigarettes—oh, and the fact that her one experiment with the cigarette she’d begged off Count Robert hadn’t been a success.
But Radleigh was no longer even pretending interest in her legs. He looked into her eyes and brought out a mocking laugh. “So that’s your plan, is it?” he sneered. “You come here dressed like a cheap little tart. When that doesn’t excite my amorous propensities, you try blackmail.” He laughed again and waved aside the photocopied sheet Jennifer had produced from her bag. “Don’t push that under my nose. I can’t read Latin, and I don’t care what it says. But listen to this, my dear.” He pushed his face close to hers. “I don’t remember whether William of Normandy could—or, rather, can—write his own name. But, if the original of that ‘document’ was in his own hand, and mentioned me a dozen times, I could still brush it aside with an accusation of forgery—and an army of experts wouldn’t be able to prove otherwise.” He sat back and smiled more easily. “One thing you probably do know about me,” he took up again, “is that I’m the sort of man who still gets due process in this country. Don’t think you can come here and put the frighteners on me.”