‘Oh tell him to get lost, Philip, for goodness’ sake,’ she said. She glared at me. It was a bit frightening. ‘He’s barged in here…’
‘Look, mind your own business, can’t you?’ I said. I was glaring oafishly back at her, and you could have sworn the two of us had been unhappily married for years. ‘Philip doesn’t mind, do you, Phil?’
Philip was about to say that he didn’t mind at all, that all this was going splendidly from his point of view, but Ronnie wouldn’t let him. She was spitting fire.
‘He’s being polite, you numbskull,’ she shouted. ‘Philip has got manners.’
‘Unlike me?’
‘You said it.’
‘You didn’t have to.’
‘Oh, you’re just so sensitive.’
Hammer and tongs, we were going. And we’d hardly had any rehearsal.
There was a long, nasty pause, and perhaps Philip started to think that it all might slip away from him at the last moment, because he said:
‘Did you want to trace specific movements of money, Thomas? Or was it, generally, the mechanisms people might use?’
Bingo.
‘Ideally both, Phil,’ I said.
After an hour-and-a-half I left Philip with his computer terminal and a list of ‘really good mates who owed him one’, and made my way across the City ofLondon toWhitehall, where I had an absolutely revolting lunch with O’Neal. Although the food was pretty good.
We talked of cabbages and kings for a while, and then I watched O’Neal’s colour gradually change from pink, to white, to green, as I recapped the story so far. When I laid out what I thought might be a reasonably zingy finish to the whole thing, he turned grey.
‘Lang,’ he croaked, over the coffee, ‘you can’t… I mean… I can’t possibly contemplate your having anything…’
‘Mr O’Neal,’ I said, ‘I’m not asking for your permission.’
He stopped croaking, and just sat there, his mouth flapping vaguely. ‘I’m telling you what I think is going to happen. As a courtesy.’ Which, I admit, was an odd word to use in a situation like this. ‘I want you, and Solomon, and your department, to be able to get out of this without too much egg down the front of your shirt. Use it, or don’t use it. It’s up to you.’
‘But…’ he floundered, ‘you can’t… I mean… I could have you reported to the police.’ I think even he realised how feeble that sounded.
‘Of course you could,’ I said. ‘If you wanted your department to be closed down within forty-eight hours, and its offices turned into a crиche facility for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, then yes, reporting me to the police would certainly be an excellent way of going about it. Now, do you have that address?’
He flapped his mouth some more, and then shook himself awake, came to a decision, and started sneaking huge, theatrical looks around the restaurant, as a way of telling all the other lunchers that I Am Now Going To Give This Man An Important Piece Of Paper.
I took the address from him, bolted my coffee, and got up from the table. When I glanced back from the door, I had the very strong feeling that O’Neal was wondering how he could arrange to be on holiday for the next month.
The address was inKentishTown, and turned out to be one of a clutch of low-rise sixties council blocks, with freshly painted woodwork, window-boxes, trimmed hedges and a pebble-dashed row of garages to one side. The lift even worked.
I stood and waited on the open second-floor landing, and tried to imagine what appalling series of bureaucratic errors had led to this estate being so well looked after. In most parts ofLondon, they collect the dustbins from the middle-class streets and empty them into the council estates, before setting fire to a couple of Ford Cortinas on the pavement. But not here, obviously. Here, there was a building that worked, where people could actually live with a degree of dignity, and not feel as if the rest of society was disappearing over the horizon in a Butlins charabanc. I felt like writing a stiff letter to somebody. And then tearing it up and throwing the bits on to the lawn below.
The glass-panelled door of number fourteen swung open, and a woman stood there.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘My name is Thomas Lang. I’m here to see Mr Rayner.’
Bob Rayner fed goldfish while I told him what I wanted. This time, he wore glasses and a yellow golfing sweater, which I suppose hard men are allowed to do on their days off, and he got his wife to bring me tea and biscuits. We had an awkward ten minutes while I enquired after his head, and he told me that he still got the odd headache, and I said I was sorry about that, and he said not to worry, because he used to get them before I hit him.
And that seemed to be that. Water under the bridge. Bob was a professional, you see.
‘Do you think you can get it?’ I asked.
He tapped on the side of the aquarium, which didn’t seem to impress the fish in the slightest.
‘Cost you,’ he said, after a while. ‘That’s fine,’ I said.
Which it was. Because Murdah would be paying.
Twenty-two
The clever men atOxford
Know all that there is to be knowed
But they none o f them know one half as much
As intelligent Mr Toad.
KENNETH GRAHAME
The remainder of myLondon excursion was taken up with preparations of one sort or another.
I typed a long and incomprehensible statement, describing only those parts of my adventure in which I had behaved like a good and clever man, and deposited it with Mr Halkerston at the National Westminster Bank in Swiss Cottage. It was long because I didn’t have time to do a short one, and incomprehensible because my typewriter has no letter ‘d’.
Halkerstonlooked worried; whether by me, or by the fat brown envelope I gave him, I couldn’t tell. He asked if I had any special instructions as to the circumstances under which it should be opened, and when I told him to use his judgement, he quickly put the envelope down and asked someone else to come and take it to the strong room.
I also converted the balance of Woolf’s original payment to me into traveller’s cheques.
Feeling flush, I then went back to Blitz Electronics on Tottenham Court Road, where I spent an hour with a very nice man in a turban, talking about radio frequencies. He assured me that the Sennheiser Mikroport SK 2012 was absolutely the thing, and that I should accept no substitutes, so I didn’t.
I then headed east to Islington to see my solicitor, who pumped my hand and spent fifteen minutes telling me that we must play golf again. I told him that was a splendid idea, but, strictly speaking, we would need to play golf before we’d be able to play it again, at which he blushed and said he must have been thinking of a Robert Lang. I said yes, he must have been, and proceeded to dictate and sign a will, in which I bequeathed all my estate and chattels to The Save The Children Fund.
And then, with only forty-eight hours to go before I was due back in the trenches, I ran into Sarah Woolf.
When I say ran into her, I do actually mean I ran into her.
I’d hired a Ford Fiesta for a couple of days, to take me aboutLondon while I made a final peace with my Creator and my Creditors, and the course of my errands took me within yearning distance ofCork Street. So, for no reason that I’m prepared to own up to, I took a left, and a right, and a left again, and found myself tooling past the mostly shuttered galleries, thinking of happier days. Of course, they hadn’t really been happier at all. But they’d been days, and they’d had Sarah in them, and that was near enough.