The light blue Rolls Royce appeared from the direction of the A40 roundabout, travelling slowly along the bus lane. Jackson could see the driver fairly clearly, and he felt the pulses jumping in his wrists as he moved slightly forward and watched intently. The Rolls was doing no more than 10 m.p.h. as it passed the kiosk and covered the short distance to Field House Drive, its left blinker startlingly bright as it turned into the Drive and stopped-still almost completely visible. The driver got out, slammed the door to, and locked it. With the car keys still in his hand, he walked to the boot of the car, unlocked it, peered inside, and closed and relocked it, without removing anything. Then he disappeared (though for no more than a few seconds) from Jackson's view, and must obviously have opened something on the obscured nearside of the car, for almost immediately another door was closed with an aristocratically engineered 'clunk'. The man was in full view again now, and this time he carried a brown carrier bag in his right hand. He appeared quite calm, glancing neither to his left nor right in curiosity or apprehension.
As he came directly opposite, Jackson could see him plainly beneath the street lamp: a thickset man of medium height, about forty to forty-five, his thick, dark hair going grey at the temples. He was dressed in an expensive dark blue suit, and looked exactly as Jackson thought he would-fortunate and prosperous. Not for a second did the staring eyes behind the hedge leave the man as he walked up to the kiosk, went inside, lifted the receiver, came out again, thrust a hand in his pocket as if to find loose change, and then re-entered the kiosk as a grey-haired woman went slowly by with her white-haired terrier. Jackson's body suddenly felt numb with panic as the man in the kiosk appeared to be speaking into the telephone receiver. Was he ringing the police? But, just as suddenly, all was normal again. The man came out of the kiosk, thrust the carrier bag swiftly into the ivy behind it, and then walked back to the Rolls, fingering his car keys as he did so. The Rolls turned in a slow and dignified sweep and, with a momentary flash from the polished silver of the bonnet's grill, accelerated away and disappeared towards the northern roundabout. The road was as still as the grave.
Jackson was now in a dilemma which his limited mental capacities had not foreseen. Was he to leave his vantage-point immediately, grab the bag, and cycle off as fast as he could down the nearest back streets into Jericho? Or was he to wait, take things coolly, saunter over the road when he could convince himself the coast was completely clear, and then cycle sedately down the well-lit reaches of the lower part of Woodstock Road as if nothing were amiss? He decided to wait. Five minutes; ten minutes; fifteen minutes. And still he waited. Suddenly a light flashed on in the front room of the house behind him, and he crouched down further as a young woman pulled the curtains across the window. He had to move. Feeling his way carefully along the inner side of the hedge, he reached the gate and walked down the grassy slope to the pavement. Cold sweat stood out on his brow, and he felt a prickling sensation along his shoulders as he crossed the road and walked the few yards to the kiosk. No one was in sight, and no car passed as he put his hand behind the kiosk and found the bag at once. He recrossed the road, put the bag inside the fishing-basket secured to the rack on his cycle, and rode down towards Jericho. Below South Parade the traffic was busier, and Jackson felt his confidence growing. He turned round as two youngsters behind him zoomed nearer on their L-plated motor-bikes, and saw them almost force off the road a middle-aged don-gown billowing out behind him, his left hand clutching a pile of books. But they were soon gone, searing through the streets and leaving a wake of comforting silence behind them. At the Horse and Jockey Jackson turned right and rode down Observatory Street; then straight over Walton Street and down into the familiar grid of the roads in Jericho. Outside 10 Canal Reach he padlocked the rear wheel of his cycle to the drain-pipe, unfastened the fishing-basket, and took out his door key. It had been more nerve-racking than he'd expected; easier, though, in a way. He looked up the Reach briefly before letting himself in. A few youngsters were fooling about outside the Printer's Devil, one of them jerking the front wheel of his cycle high into the air as he circled slowly round; two women pushed their way through the door marked 'Saloon'; a man was trying to back his car into a narrow space. Quite a bit of activity, really. But none of them had noticed him Jackson was confident of that. And what if someone had!
Jackson was quite right in believing that none of the people he had noticed so casually had noticed him, in turn. Yet someone had noticed him; someone whom Jackson could not possibly have seen; someone bending low behind one of the cars parked outside the Printer's Devil, getting his hands very dirty as he fiddled with the greasy chain of his bicycle-a chain that had been, and still was, in perfect working order. The gown this person had been wearing, together with the pile of books he had been carrying, was now stowed away in the basket affixed to the front of the new, folding bicycle which he held upright on the pavement as he watched the door of 10 Canal Reach close.
Chapter Eighteen
An experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite picturesque liar.
– Mark Twain, Private History of a Campaign that Failed
The Chairman of the Oxford Book Association was relieved to see the Rolls Royce edge slowly through the narrow entrance to the Clarendon Institute car park. It was six minutes to eight, and he was having an anxious evening all round. Only about fifteen members had so far turned up, and already two of the committee were hastily removing many of the chairs in the large upstairs hall reserved for the meeting. Friday was never a good night, he knew that, and the late change of date could hardly have helped; but it was embarrassing, for everyone, to have an attendance as meagre as this.
Morse counted twenty-five in the audience when he tiptoed into the back row at five-past eight. After listening to The Archers he had felt restless, and the thought that he might be able to have a word with the chairman of the OBA about Anne Scott had finally tilted the balance in favour of 'Charles Richards: Triumphs and Tribulations of the Small Publisher. It took only a few minutes for Morse to feel glad he had made the effort to attend. It was not (in Morse's eyes) that this thickishly set man, of medium height, had a particularly forceful presence-although, to be fair, his expensively cut dark blue suit lent a certain air of elegance and rank. It was his manner of speaking that was impressive. In his quietly spoken, witty, tolerant, self-deprecatory way, Richards spoke of his early days as a schoolmaster, his life-long interest in books, the embryonic idea of starting up for himself as a small publisher, his first, fairly disastrous months, his ladling of luck as time went by, with a few minor coups here and there, and finally the expansion of his company and the recent move to Abingdon. In his peroration he quoted Kipling (much to Morse's delight), and exhorted his listeners to treat that poet's 'twin impostors' with the same degree of amused-or saddened-cynicism.
He'd been good-there was no doubt of that-possessing as he did that rare gift of speaking to an audience in an individualised, personal sort of way, as if he were somehow interested in each of them. Afterwards there were a lot of questions, as if the audience, in its turn, was directly interested in the man who had thus addressed them. Too many questions, for Morse's liking. It was already half-past nine, and he hadn't drunk a pint all day.