I killed some hours at the British Library, trying to find out what I could about the Mackie Corporation ofAmerica. Most of the time was spent getting the hang of the index system, but in the last ten minutes before I had to leave, I
managed to establish the following priceless information - that Mackie was a Scottish engineer who had worked with Robert Adams in producing a solid frame trigger-cocking cap-and-ball percussion revolver, which the two of them exhibited at the Great Exhibition inLondon in 1851. I didn’t bother to write that down.
With one minute to go, I cross-referred my way into a crashingly dull volume calledThe Teeth O f The Tiger,by a Major J. S. Hammond (ret’d), where I discovered that Mackie had founded a company that had since grown to become the fifth largest supplier of defence ‘materiel’ to the Pentagon. The company’s headquarters were currently inVensom,California, and its last given annual pre-tax profit had more noughts on the end of it than I could fit on the back of my hand.
I was on my way back toCork Street, weaving through the afternoon shoppers, when I heard the news vendor’s cry, and it may well have been the first time in my life that I actually understood something a news vendor said. The other passers-by were almost certainly hearing ‘Reeded In Silly Shut Up’, but I hardly had to glance at the poster to know that he meant ‘Three Dead In City Shoot-Up.’ I bought a copy and read as I walked.
A ‘massive police investigation’ was under way following the discovery of the bodies of three men, all of whom had perished as the result of gunshot wounds, at a derelict office building in the heart of London’s financial district. The bodies, none of which had yet been identified, were found by the security guard, Mr Dennis Falkes, 51 and father of three, returning to his post after a dental appointment. A police spokesman declined to speculate on the motive behind the killings, but was apparently unable to rule out drugs. There were no photographs. Just a rambly background story about the rise in the number of drug-related deaths in the capital in the last two years. I tossed the paper into a bin and kept walking.
Dennis Falkes had taken some folding money from
someone, that much was obvious. The chances were it was Groomed who paid him, so when Falkes got back and found his benefactor dead he didn’t have much incentive not to call the police. I hoped for his sake that the dentist story was true. If it wasn’t, the police were going to make his life extremely difficult.
Ronnie was waiting for me in her car outside the gallery. It was a bright red TVR Griffith, with a five litre V8 engine, and an exhaust note that could have been heard inPeking. It fell some way short of being the ideal car for a discreet surveillance operation, but (a), I wasn’t in a position to quibble, and (b), there’s an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you’re climbing into a metaphor.
Ronnie was in high spirits, which didn’t mean she hadn’t seen the newspaper story about Woolf. Even if she had, and even if she’d known that Woolf was dead, I’m not sure it would have made much difference. Ronnie had what they used to call pluck. Centuries of breeding, some of it in, some of it out, had given her high cheek-bones and an appetite for risk and adventure. I pictured her at the age of five, careering over eight-foot fences on a pony called Winston, risking her life seventy times before breakfast.
She shook her head when I asked her what she’d found in Sarah’s desk at the gallery, and then pestered me with questions all the way toBelgravia. I didn’t hear a single one of them thanks to the howl of the TVR exhaust, but I nodded and shook my head whenever it seemed appropriate.
When we reached LyallStreet, I yelled at her to take a run past the house, and not to look at anything but the road ahead. I found a tape of AC/DC, slotted it into the cassette player, and turned the volume up as far as it would go. I was working on the principle, you see, that the more obvious you are, the less obvious you are. Given the choice, I’d usually say that the more obvious you are, the more obvious you are, but choice was one of the things I was short of at that moment.
Necessity is the mother of self-delusion.
As we passed the Woolf house, I put my hand up to my eye and prodded a bit, which allowed me to stare at the front of the house as hard as I could while apparently adjusting a contact lens. It looked empty. But then again, I’d hardly expected to see men with violin cases on the front steps.
We went round the block and I signalled to Ronnie to pull over a couple of hundred yards short of the house. She switched off, and for a few moments my ears rang with the sudden quiet. Then she turned to me, and I could see that the red spots were back in her cheeks.
‘What now, boss?’
She really was getting into this.
‘I’ll take a stroll past and see what happens.’
‘Right. What do I do?’
‘Be great if you could stay here,’ I said. Her face fell. ‘In case I need to get out in a hurry,’ I added, and her face picked itself up again. She reached into her handbag and brought out a small brass-coloured canister which she pressed into my hand.
‘What’s this?’ I said.
‘Rape alarm. Press the top.’
‘Ronnie…’
‘Take it. If I hear it, I’ll know you need a lift.’
The street looked as ordinary as it could, given that every single house in it cost upwards of two million pounds. The value of the cars alone, lining both sides of the road, probably exceeded the wealth of many small countries. A dozen Mercedes, a dozen jaguars and Daimlers, five Bentley saloons, a Bentley convertible, three Aston Martins, three Ferraris, a Jensen, a Lamborghini.
And a Ford.
Dark-blue, facing away from me, opposite the house on the other side of the street, which was why I hadn’t noticed it the first time round. Two aerials. Two rear-view mirrors. A dent half-way up the nearside front wing. Sort of dent a large motorcycle might make in a side-to-side collision. One man in the passenger seat.
My first feeling was relief. If they were staking out Sarah’s house, there was a good chance that it was because they didn’t have Sarah, and the house was the next best thing. But then again, they might already have Sarah and had just sent someone along to collect her toothbrush. If she still had any teeth, that is.
No point in worrying about that. I kept walking towards the Ford.
If you’ve ever had any training in military theory, it’s possible that you had to sit through a lecture on a thing called the Boyd Loop. Boyd was a chap who spent a large amount of time studying air-to-air combat during the Korean war, analysing typical ‘event sequences’ - or, in layman’s language, sequences of events - to see why pilot A was able to shoot down pilot B, and how pilot B felt about it afterwards, and which of them had had kedgeree for breakfast. Boyd’s theory was based on the utterly facile observation that when A did something, B reacted, A did something else, B reacted again et cetera, forming a loop of action and reaction. The Boyd Loop. Nice work if you can get it, you may be thinking. But Boyd’s ‘Eureka’ moment, which to this day causes his name to be bandied about military academies the world over, came when he hit upon the notion that if B could do two things in the space of time it normally took him to do one, he would ‘get inside the loop’, and the forces of right would thereby prevail.