‘Which is?’
‘The future. Or maybe even simply the reality of the present. So the monarchy is fast becoming a national treasure, like Stonehenge. And just like Stonehenge, it serves damn-all present purpose but it’s nice to look at and allows you to wallow in the past. And you, Mr Macready, have just taken a leak on Stonehenge, as far as anyone else is going to be concerned. So, like I said, I think we’ll keep the other party out of it for as long as we can. They might just throw you to the wolves.’
‘Okay. But what now?’
‘I try to find the guy who’s got the photographs and use my simple charm to win him over and get the negatives. But first I need to ask you a few questions …’
And I did.
Leonora Bryson showed me back to the lift when we were done. I made the move we were both expecting me to make, but she told me she was busy in a way that suggested she would remain busy for the rest of the century. Undaunted, I gave her my best philosophical some other time response but resolved not to give up. Some women were worth more effort than others. And I had three weeks.
CHAPTER FIVE
I went back to my office for an hour or two and tied up the loose ends on a couple of the divorce cases I’d been working on. It was mainly paperwork: the sad, sordid bureaucracy of marital disentanglement. Or extramarital entanglement. Or both. I trudged through the usual statements corroborating the evidence of a hotel manager, chambermaid or anyone else who would confirm that they had seen Mr X in bed together with Miss Y. Of course, it was all a put-up job — with me doing the putting-up for some divorce lawyer — and the witnesses were always twenty pounds better off after signing their statements. Divorce in Britain was a complicated and particularly seedy business. In Scotland, which had its own divorce laws, it was given exactly the same kind of turn of the Presbyterian screw that I had discussed with Macready.
Thinking about it, it was ironic that I was now investigating how someone had accomplished the same kind of setup I regularly put together. Except this time it had been Mr X and Mr Y, and at least one of them had not been party to the set-up.
By the end of the afternoon, I had everything I needed to tie up, tied up. I was left with just the three jobs on the books: the next day’s wages run, Isa and Violet’s job and the John Macready case. And between them, they would take up all of my time.
I made a couple of calls to those in the underground know and asked them if they knew a Henry Williamson. None did. I don’t know why that name, more than the others on the list, had stuck with me. Maybe it was because he was connected to Gentleman Joe Strachan’s First War record, which still remained a puzzle: why would his daughters believe Strachan had been a war hero when, according to Jock Ferguson, he had been anything but?
It was about seven by the time I got back to my digs, having eaten at Roselli’s, as I often did on the way home. I had the upstairs floor of a large villa on Great Western Road. It was basically a family home that had been subdivided and Mrs White, my landlady, lived downstairs with her two daughters, Elspeth and Margaret.
Mrs White — Fiona White — was a very attractive woman. Not in the same knock-your-eye-out way as the redoubtably configured Leonora Bryson, but she was even beautiful, in a careworn and weary sort of way. She had bright green eyes that should have sparkled, but never did, above Kate Hepburn cheekbones. Her hair was dark and cut conservatively and she dressed with taste, if without imagination. The reason Mrs White always looked careworn and weary was because of an unfortunate brief encounter during the war between a German torpedo and a British destroyer on convoy escort duty. The result had been that, within minutes, the destroyer was lying, broken, at the bottom of the Atlantic, taking all but a handful of its officers and men with it.
When I had first moved into my digs, it had seemed to me that the White family still waited for husband and father to return from duty, philosophical about the delay in the same way Brits had become philosophical about all delays and shortages. But Lieutenant George White slept an even deeper, darker sleep than Gentleman Joe Strachan; he was never coming home.
I was comfortable in my accommodation, other than that I had never brought a female guest to my rooms. It was pricey, I suppose, but I had become attached to the little White family. Most of all, I had long harboured a desire to become biblically attached to Fiona White.
The attraction, I knew, was mutual, but grudging on her part. Call me finicky, but when a woman is filled with self-loathing because she finds herself attracted to me, it tends to dent my ego. The truth was, and it confused the hell out of me, Fiona White tended to bring out the gallantry in me. Which was highly unusual, because, generally, an act of gallantry for me would be to ask the young lady to remind me again of her name before we did the dirty deed in the back of my Austin Atlantic.
There were a lot of things about me that were complicated: my relationship with women wasn’t one of them. Or maybe it was.
I found that whenever I looked at Fiona White, I felt something that I didn’t feel with other women. I wanted to protect her, to talk with her. Just to be with her. To watch her laugh. Strange feelings that did not necessarily involve unbuttoning my fly.
Perhaps foolishly, I had made my feelings known to her. I had been in a particularly sentimental mood, having handed over a large amount of money — something to make me misty-eyed at the best of times — to someone for no good reason other than I felt they deserved it more than me. So, giving my shining armour a final polish, I had knocked resolutely on Mrs White’s door and asked to speak to her. Sitting with her in the small kitchen of her flat, I had done all the talking … about what the war had done to us both, about how I felt about her, about how I wanted to put the past behind me — behind us — and how we could perhaps repair the damage in each other. To help each other heal.
She had sat quietly listening to me, a hint of the sparkle that should have been in the green eyes, and when I had finished my declaration of affection she had held my gaze and, without hesitation, given me notice to quit my lodgings.
I had taken that as less than a maybe. I had, of course, tried to talk her round, but she had remained resolutely silent, simply repeating that she would be obliged if I quit my lodgings within the fortnight, as the Brits referred to two weeks. I had been, I have to admit, more than a little dejected. And that in itself told me something about my feelings towards Fiona White. Hard though it was to believe, I had occasionally encountered some women who actually managed, somehow, to find me totally resistible. But this stung.
It had been the day after when I heard a soft knock at the door. Mrs White came in and, standing awkwardly and stiffly, proceeded to tell me that I need not look for new lodgings, unless I had found some already, and that she apologized for having been so brusque. I was relieved to hear it, but the way she delivered it was so impersonal that I felt I should have been taking down minutes. She went on to explain that, while she appreciated that what I had said had been well intentioned, there was no way she would be entertaining the idea of a gentleman friend.
As she spoke, there was a breathlessness in her delivery and I could see the neck above the white collar of her blouse blossom red. I was filled with the urge to rush over to her and kiss the bloom on her neck, but I decided to hang on to my lease instead. When she had finished she asked if I was in agreement and I had said I was and she shook my hand with the tenderness of a rugby-playing bank manager.