This time I heard the usual tape of Angela’s voice apologizing that she could not answer the phone in person. Please speak after the tone, she said, and the tone dutifully blipped. There was a pause, and I thought the caller must have hung up, but then another familiar voice sounded. “Hi. You don’t know me. My name’s Jill-Beth Kirov. We met at Anthony Bannister’s house, remember? I’m kind of looking for Nick Sandman and I gathered you were filming him, and I wonder if you’d pass on a message to him? My number is—”
She broke off because I had switched off the answering machine and lifted the telephone. “Jill-Beth?”
“Nick! Hi!”
I was angry. “How the hell did you know I was here?”
“What’s the drama, Nick?” She sounded pained. “I was just trying to reach you. I didn’t know where you were. I was just going to leave messages everywhere. I need to talk with you, OK?” For a second I forgot my careful arrangements with Micky Harding. “I don’t think we’ve got anything to say to each other.” She paused. “You want to play hardball or softball, Nick?”
“I’m sorry?” I said, not understanding.
She sighed. “I once had to investigate a guy who had a boat pretty much like yours, Nick. His was a yawl, but it was really cute. He even had a figurehead, a mermaid with his wife’s face. He was real proud of that boat. It burned. It was a real tragedy. I mean the guy had put his life into that yawl, and one careless cigarette end and suddenly it’s the Fourth of July fireworks show.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Nick!” She sounded very hurt. “I just want to talk with you, OK?
What’s the harm in that?”
I remembered Micky Harding and his promise that the newspaper could ease me off Kassouli’s hook. “All right.” I spoke guardedly.
She suggested this very lunchtime and named a pub in Soho, but I didn’t know if I could find Micky that quickly. I didn’t even know if I could find him at all during the weekend. “I can’t meet till Monday,” I said, “and that’s the earliest, and I’ll be back in Devon by then.”
She paused, then sounded warily accepting. “OK, Nick.” She named a pub that I knew and a time.
I put the phone down. It seemed that Yassir Kassouli had not given up his pursuit of Bannister. The hounds of revenge were slipped and running, and I now had to head them into the light where they would be dazzled and confused by publicity. I telephoned Micky’s paper and tracked him down to the newsroom. I told him where and when I was supposed to meet Jill-Beth. “Can you make it?” I asked.
“I’ll make it.” I heard anticipation in his voice. He was already relishing the headlines: “Tycoon Plots Piracy!”, “Yank Billionaire Threatens UK Jobs,” or, more likely from Micky’s newspaper, “Piss Off Kassouli!”
Angela came home irritated because a film editor had taken off sick and she had needed him to cut a particular sequence and the replacement film editor was, she said, a butcher. She played the message tape on the phone. I’d rewound the spool after Jill-Beth’s call and the American girl’s voice had been overlaid with an invitation for lunch, a message about flights to Nice, and a call from an old acquaintance of Angela’s who just wanted to say hello.
“What she wants is a job,” Angela said scathingly. “What kind of a day did you have?”
“I bought two charts,” I said, “and discovered a million things I can’t afford.”
“Poor Nick.” She reached out a long thin hand and touched my cheek. “A friend has said I could borrow a cottage in Norfolk this weekend. There’s no phone there, and he’s got a dinghy in the creek.
A Heron dinghy? Does that makes sense?”
“A Heron makes much sense.” My joy at having Angela to myself all the weekend must have shown, but I still wanted to make certain of it. “And Nice?”
“Bugger Nice. I’ll tell Tony I’m too busy.” So we buggered Nice, and I did not tell Angela about Jill-Beth’s call. I wanted to, but I didn’t know how to explain why I was meeting the American, nor did I care to say that I was only doing it because Micky would be there. Angela would have bridled at the thought of the bad publicity that would be flung at Bannister, and anyway I told myself I was only meeting Jill-Beth to end Kassouli’s interfer-ence. I thought I was taking care of the matter and I did not need Angela’s help, so I felt rather noble about it, and not in the least guilty, because, all things considered, and come Monday evening, Yassir Kassouli, just like Nice, would be buggered.
Micky Harding and I drove down to Devon on the Monday afternoon. I was nervous. “We’re taking on one of the richest men in the world, Micky. They threatened my bloody boat!”
“Ah.” Micky made the soothing noise sarcastically. “What we’re going to do, Nick, is screw the bastard.” He glanced at me as I twisted awkwardly to look through the back window. “You think we’re being followed?”
“No.” Instead I had been looking for Angela’s Porsche. She had gone to meet Bannister at Heathrow and, if they left directly for Devon, they could well overtake us on the road. I did not want to see them together. I was jealous. I’d just spent a weekend of gentle happiness with a small sailing boat and with Angela to myself. She had not even been sea-sick. But now, with the horrid crunch of a boat going aground, the real world was impinging on me.
Micky lit a cigarette. “You are bleeding nervous, mate, that’s what you are. I could do a story on that. VC revealed as a wimp.”
“I’m not used to this sort of thing.”
“Which is why you called in the reinforcements?”
“Exactly.”
The ‘reinforcements’ were waiting for us at a service area where the cafeteria offered an all-day breakfast and where Terry Farebrother was mopping up the remains of fried egg and brown sauce with a piece of white bread. I’ve never known a man eat so much as Sergeant Terry Farebrother; he wasn’t so much a human being as a cholesterol processor. Morning, noon and night he ate, and he never seemed to put an inch of fat on his stocky, hard body.
The one thing he’d hated about the Falklands was the uncertainty of meal times and I’d once watched him pick his way into an Argentinian minefield to salvage an enemy pack on the off chance that it might have contained a tin of corned beef. His moustached face was impassive as the two of us approached his table. “Bloody hell,” he greeted Micky Harding. “It’s the Mouse.”
The Mouse, who had known the Yorkshire sergeant in the Falklands, shook Terry’s hand. “You don’t improve with time, do you?”
“I’m just waiting till the Army takes over this country, Mouse, then I’m going to Fleet Street to beat up all the fucking fairies.”
“Not a chance,” Micky said. “We’ve got dolly-bird secretaries who’d crucify you pansies.”
Insults thus dutifully exchanged, Terry nodded a greeting to me and wondered aloud whether there was time to eat another plate of fried grease, but I said we should be moving on. “Shall I buy you a cheese sandwich?” I asked.
“Cheese gives me the wind something rotten. I’ll have a couple of bacon ones instead.” He half crushed my fingers with his handshake. “You’re looking better, boss. Sally said you looked like something the cat threw up.”
“How is Sally?”
“Same as ever, boss, same as ever. Bloody horrible.” Terry was in his civvies; a threadbare blue suit that was buttoned tight round his chest. He’d probably bought the suit the year before he entered the Army as a junior soldier and had never replaced it. He did not really need to, for Terry was one of those men who only look at home in camouflage or battledress. He was a bullock of a man; short, stubborn and utterly dependable. It was good to see him again. “No trouble,” he said when I asked if he’d had difficulties in getting away from the battalion. “They owed me leave after the bleeding exercise.”