Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (12 page)

“All right, all right,” he admitted, “me
too. I was in Paris when the damned thing folded under me and I got stuck with
the useless shares. Eighty thousand pounds borrowed against my stock at the
gallery–stock I cannot move at the moment because of the drop in values in the
art market. The
bank are
asking me to consider selling
my gallery. And what is worse, I told some of my friends to invest in the bloody
company.”

Silence enveloped the room. It was Jean
Pierre who broke it again:

“So what do you suggest, Professor,” he said
sarcastically, “hold an annual dinner to celebrate what fools we have been?”

“That was not my plan.” Stephen realised
that what he was about to suggest would shock, so he rose again to his feet,
and quietly and deliberately said:

“We have had our money stolen by a very
clever man who is an expert in share fraud. We are not knowledgeable about
stocks and shares, but we are all experts in our own fields. Gentlemen, I
therefore suggest we steal it back.

NOT A PENNY MORE AND NOT A PENNY LESS.”

A few seconds’ silence was followed by
uproar.

“Just walk up and take it, I suppose?” said
Adrian.

“Kidnap him,” mused James.

“Why don’t we just kill him?” said Jean
Pierre.

Several minutes passed. Stephen waited until
he had complete silence again and then he handed round the four dossiers marked
“Harvey Metcalfe” with each individual name below.
A green
dossier for Adrian, a blue one for James and the yellow for Jean Pierre.
The red master Stephen kept for himself. They were all impressed. While they
had been wringing their hands in unproductive dismay, it was obvious that
Stephen Bradley had been hard at work

Stephen continued.

“Please read your dossier carefully. It
gives you full details of everything that is known about Harvey Metcalfe. Each
of you must take it away and study the information, and return with a plan of
how we are, between us, to extract one million dollars from him without his
ever becoming aware of it. All four of us must come up with a separate plan.
Each may involve the other three in his operation. We will return here in
fourteen days’ time and present our ideas. Each member of the team will put ten
thousand dollars into the kitty as a float and I will keep a running account as
the mathematician. All expenses incurred in retrieving our money will be added
to Mr. Metcalfe’s bill, starting with your journey down here this evening and
the cost of the dinner tonight.”

Jean Pierre and Adrian protested. Again it
was James who stopped the proceedings by saying simply:

“I agree. What else have we got to lose if
we fail? On our own we have no chance: together we might just beat the bastard.”

Adrian and Jean Pierre looked at each other,
shrugged and nodded.

The four of them settled down to a long
discussion about the material Stephen had acquired over the past few days. They
left the college just before midnight, agreeing that they would each have a
plan ready in fourteen days’ time. None of them was quite sure where it was all
going to end, but each was relieved to find he was not on his own any longer.

Stephen thought that the first part of the
Team versus Harvey Metcalfe had gone as well as he could have wished. He only
hoped his conspirators would get down to work. He sat in his armchair, lit a
Winston and started thinking.

A
drian retrieved his car from the High
Street, thanking its “Doctor on Call” sticker not for the first time in his
life for the extra degree of freedom it gave him in parking. He drove back to
his home in Berkshire. There was no doubt about it, he had been impressed by
Stephen Bradley and he was determined to come up with something that would
ensure he played his full part.

He let his mind play a little on the
delightful prospect of recovering the money he had so ill-advisedly entrusted
to Discovery Oil and Harvey Metcalfe. It seemed worth a try: after all, he
might as well be struck off the register of the General Medical Council for
attempted robbery as for bankruptcy. He wound the window of the car down a
little way to dispel the last delicious effects of the claret and thought.

The journey between Oxford and his country
house passed very quickly. His mind was so preoccupied that when he arrived
home to his wife there were large sections of the route he could not even
remember. He had only one card to play other than his natural charm and he
hoped that he was right in thinking that card was the strength in his armour
and the weakness in Harvey Metcalfe’s. He began to repeat out loud something
that was written on page 16 of Stephen’s dossier:

“One of Harvey Metcalfe’s recurrent worries
is...”

“What was it all about, darling?”

His wife’s voice brought Adrian quickly to
his senses and he locked the brief case which contained the green Metcalfe
dossier.

“You still awake, Mary?”

“Well, I’m not talking in my sleep, love.”

Adrian had to think quickly. He had not yet
steeled himself to tell Mary of his foolish investment, but he had let her know
about the dinner in Oxford, not realising it was in any way connected with
Discovery Oil.

“It was a tease, sweetheart. An old friend
of mine from Cambridge has become a lecturer at Oxford, so he dragged a few of
his contemporaries down for dinner and we had a damn good evening. Jim and Fred
from my old college were there, but I don’t expect you remember them.”

A bit weak, thought Adrian, but the best he
could do at one-fifteen in the morning.

“Sure it wasn’t some beautiful girl?” said
Mary.

“I’m
afraid
Jim and
Fred could hardly be described as beautiful, even by their loving wives.”

“Do lower your voice, Adrian, or you’ll wake
the children.”

“I’m going down again in two weeks’ time to...”

“Oh, do come to bed and tell me about it at
breakfast.”

Adrian was relieved to be let off the hook
until the morning. He clambered in beside his fragrant silk-clad wife and ran
his finger hopefully down her vertebral column to her coccyx.

“You’ll be lucky at this time of night,” she
said.

They both slept.

Jean Pierre had booked in at the Eastgate
Hotel in the High. There was an undergraduate exhibition the next day at the
Christ Church and Gallery. Jean Pierre hoped to find some new young talent,
which he could contract to the Lamanns Gallery. It was the Marlborough Gallery,
a few doors away from him in Bond
Street, that
had
taught the London art world the astuteness of buying up young artists and being
closely identified with their careers. But for the moment, the artistic future
of his gallery was not uppermost in Jean Pierre’s mind: its very survival was
threatened and the quiet American don at Magdalen had offered a chance of
redress. He settled down in his comfortable hotel bedroom, oblivious to the
late hour, to go over his dossier and work out where he could fit into the
jigsaw puzzle. He was not going to allow two Englishmen and a Yank to beat him.
His French father had been relieved at Rochefort by the British in 1918 and
released from a prisoner of war camp near Frankfurt by the Americans in 1945.
There was no way he was not going to play his part in this operation. He read
the yellow dossier late into the night: the germ of an idea was beginning to
form in his mind.

James made the last train from Oxford and
looked for an empty carriage where he could settle down to study the blue
dossier. He was a worried man: he was sure the other three would come up with
some brilliant plan and, as had always seemed to happen to him in his life, he
would be found lacking. He had never been under pressure before–everything had
come to him so easily. A foolproof scheme for relieving Harvey Metcalfe of some
of his excess profits was not going to come anything like so readily. Still,
the awful vision of his father finding out that the Hampshire farm was
mortgaged up to the hilt was there to keep his mind on the job. Fourteen days
was not very long: where on earth would he begin? He was not a professional man
like the other three and had no particular skills to offer. He could only hope
that his stage experience might be of use in some way.

He bumped into the ticket collector, who was
not surprised to find James the holder of a first-class ticket. The quest for
an unoccupied compartment ended in failure. James concluded that Richard Marsh,
the chairman of British Rail, was trying to run the railways at a profit.
Whatever would happen in Britain next? What was more aggravating, they would
probably put him in the Lords for his trouble.

The next best thing to an empty compartment,
James always considered
,
was one containing a
beautiful girl, and this time his luck was in. One of the compartments was
occupied by a truly stunning creature
who
looked as if
she was on her own. The only other person in the carriage was a middle-aged
lady reading
Vogue,
who showed no
signs of knowing her travelling companion. James settled down in the corner
with his back to the engine, realising he could not study the Metcalfe dossier
on the train. They had all been sworn to total secrecy, and Stephen had
cautioned them against reading the dossiers in anyone else’s company. James
feared that of the four of them he was going to find it most difficult to keep
silent: a companionable man, he found secrets rather tedious. He patted his
overcoat pocket holding the dossier in the envelope supplied by Stephen
Bradley. What an efficient man he was, thought James.
Alarmingly
brainy, too.
He would no doubt have a dozen clever plans ready for the
next meeting. James frowned and stared out of the window in hope of some
serendipitous ideas. Instead, he found himself studying the reflection of the
beautiful profile of the girl sitting opposite him.

She had a shiny nob of dark brown hair, a
slim, straight nose and her long lashes lay demurely on her cheeks as she read
the book she held in her lap. James wondered if she was as entirely oblivious
of his presence as she appeared to be, and reluctantly (and wrongly) decided
that she was. His eyes slipped down to the gentle curve of her breast, softly
encased in angora. He craned his neck slightly to see what sort of legs the
reflection had. Damn it, she was wearing boots. He looked back at the face
again. It was looking at him, faintly amused. Embarrassed, he switched his
attention to the third occupant of the carriage, the unofficial chaperone, in
front of whom James had not the courage to strike up a conversation with the
girl.

Suddenly he realised that the model on the
front cover of the
Vogue
magazine the
middle-aged lady was reading was the exact image of the girl he was sitting
opposite. To begin with, he could hardly believe his eyes, but a quick check
against the real McCoy left him in no doubt. As soon as
Vogue
was relinquished in favour of
Queen,
James leant across and asked the chaperone if he might have
a look.

“Left my brief case on the station by
mistake,” he said idiotically. “I haven’t got anything to read.”

He turned to the second page. “Cover,” it
said: “Picture yourself like
this ..
black
silk Georgette dress with chiffon handkerchief points.
Ostrich feather boa.
Turban with
flower matching dress.
Made to measure by Zandra
Rhodes.
Anne’s hair by Jason at Vidal Sassoon.
Photograph by Lichfield. Camera: Hasselblad.”

James could not picture himself like that
with any degree of success. At least he knew the beautiful cover girl’s name,
Anne. The next time the real-life version looked up, he showed her by sign
language that he had seen the photograph. She smiled briefly at James and then
continued to read
The Odessa File
,
which she was enjoying almost as much as Frederick Forsyth’s first novel,
The Day of the Jackal.

At Reading station the middle-aged lady
left, bearing off
Vogue
with her.
Couldn’t be better, mused James.
Anne looked up, faintly
embarrassed, and smiled hopefully at the few passersby in the corridor looking
for a seat. James glared at them as they passed. No one entered the carriage.
James had won the first round. As the train gathered speed he tried his opening
gambit, which was quite good by his normal standards:

“What a super picture on the front of
Vogue
taken by my old mate Patrick
Lichfield.”

Anne Summerton looked up. She was even more
beautiful than the picture James had referred to. Her dark hair cut softly in
the latest Vidal Sassoon style, her big hazel eyes and a faultless skin gave
her a gentle look that James found irresistible. She had that slim, graceful
body that all leading models need in order to earn their living, but Anne had a
presence that most of them would never have. James was quite stunned and wished
she would say something.

Anne was used to men trying to pick her up,
but she was rather taken aback by the remark about Lord Lichfield. If he was a
friend it would be offhand not to be at least polite. On a second glance she
found James’s diffidence rather charming. He had used the self-deprecating
approach many times with great success, but this time it was perfectly genuine.
He tried again.