The Cilla Rose Affair (15 page)

“I’m astounded,” Ian said, “by all this redevelopment.”

He was standing at a portside window, which was large and rather dirty, but which afforded an unobstructed view of the river and its environs as the sightseeing launch chugged along to Greenwich.

“Yes, we’re currently exercising a rather grave concern over modernization,” his father replied, whimsically, as one particularly innovative housing project slipped into view, half original wharf, the remainder rising into a multi-storied tower of aqua and pink.

“Absolutely hideous, isn’t it?” Nicholas Armstrong judged. He opened the paper bag of sandwiches he had bought at a busy counter in a small takeaway in the shadow of Hungerford Bridge. “Lunch?”

“Thanks.” Ian helped himself to a brown bread and tuna salad, and returned to his observation of the river. “I mean, I remember when we were living here in the 1960s. Over in Holborn you could still see the damage from the war. Big empty lots, craters with fences around them. Walls shored up with timbers—I remember that really vividly because I’d never seen anything like it—an entire brick building, four or five storeys high, lopped off at one end and supported by scaffolding.”

“I’ll have you know,” his father said, “that before I met your mother and moved to Canada, I used to live in one of those buildings.”

Ian laughed.

“Now then, Harrises,” Nicholas said, “I understand you’ve involved yourselves in the acquisition of a long lost journal.”

“I was wondering how long that story would take to circulate.”

“Word travels fast in our little intelligence community, Evan,” Nicholas replied, unwrapping a sandwich of his own—cheese and pickle, on pumpernickel. “Is it true?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“And the journal’s genuine?”

“We have every reason to believe it is, Nicholas.”

“And how does it come to be in circulation after all these years, this mysterious diary that nobody’s ever heard of until now.”

“I don’t know, Nicholas. Perhaps that’s one for the history books.”

“And you feel the acquisition of this item for the sum of—what is it—”

“Ten thousand pounds,” Ian supplied, picking a French flag pin out of his collar and dropping it into the pocket of his trousers.

“Quite. You feel it would be beneficial to your investigation, do you?”

“I’m almost certain of it.”

Nicholas finished the first half of his sandwich. “I’ve heard you’re only one of the interested parties. The other’s Simon Darrow’s widow.”

“Indeed.”

Nicholas folded his brown paper bag in half and stuffed it into his pocket for later recycling. “You’re being deliberately obtuse, Evan.”

“Am I, Nicholas?”

“Yes, you are.” He steadied himself as the boat crossed the wakes of a police launch and a speeding river bus with tinted windows and blue airline seats. “Mysterious electrical outages. Curious holes in medieval cellars. I detect the distinct aroma, Evan, of one of your old television programs. Did that burst water pipe underneath the Fitzroy Theatre the other day have anything to do with you two?”

Ian deferred to his father. “Did it?”

Evan refrained from comment.

“I might remind you once again that you’ve already had one plan go disastrously wrong. I shouldn’t like to think any others you might have lurking up your collective sleeves were destined to meet the same ignominious end.”

“All is in hand, Nicholas. I take it you’ll expedite the requisition for the ₤10,000…?”

The DG of Canada’s Special Overseas Intelligence Unit looked at him. “It had better be worth it, Evan. As I’ve told you before, there’s no hard and fast evidence against Victor Barnfather. There never has been. Only innuendo and rumour, and you know as well as I do that neither one will stand up under close scrutiny. Be very sure of yourself, Evan.”

“Incontrovertible proof,” Evan confirmed. “Something it will be impossible for him to deny or dismiss as gossip. Understood, Nicholas.”

There were footsteps on the staircase; hurriedly, Rupert consigned his lunch—a hamburger and milkshake from McDonald’s—to the bottom drawer of his desk, acutely aware of the firm’s violate-upon-pain-of-transportation-to-Australia regulations concerning food and drink and the proximity of expensive computer keyboards.

“Good afternoon, sir,” he said.

“Good afternoon, Rupert. Mad keen to be here on a Saturday, are you?”

“Well, not exactly, sir. Mad keen to be following up a lead, yes—but I’d sooner be doing it somewhere else, preferably outside and on foot.”

“You play your cards right, Rupert, and we’ll soon have you off to Surveillance School.”

“D’you think so, sir? That would be brilliant, really.”

Victor Barnfather glanced over the fledgling’s papers, which were scattered across his desktop in a disorganized shuffle. “What is it, exactly, that you’re working on?”

“Actually, sir, I’ve been doing what you asked: looking up Fortress London in the Firm’s computer. It’s quite amazing, sir, really: the underground tunnels Whitehall had linked up to all of the main telephone exchanges—Citadel at Faraday House, Wood Street, Bastion at Covent Garden, Rampart at Colombo House, Waterloo and Fortress at Moorgate. It’s a pity the network was all made obsolete in the 1950s. Still, the tunnels still exist, don’t they, sir? And the older ones, as well—it was the Post Office extension from the Holborn tunnel up past Gerrard Street to Newman Street and Paddington District you wanted to alert me to, wasn’t it? The Fitzroy Theatre’s not far away from it at all, really.”

“Very good, Rupert.”

“And, sir, I’ve discovered something else. Quite by accident, as it happens—I was reading all about the tunnels and things when I came across a flagged reference someone appeared to have made in 1966. So I followed it along—and, well, here—”

He handed Victor a sheaf of paper torn from his dot matrix printer.

“These are the written transcriptions of the debriefing sessions of one Dr. Jurgen Wimmer. It was Dr. Wimmer who was principally responsible for the development of an advanced version of a sound cannon that was originally invented in wartime Germany. And in his third debriefing, sir, he specifically talks about using the sound cannon to breach the infrastructure of a large enemy city—its sewage and water pipes, its underground railways, its buried communication lines. Hence the flagged cross-reference.”

“How intriguing,” Victor remarked, curiously. “Dr. Jurgen Wimmer. Again.”

“Yes, well, sir—as you can see, I’ve made up a map.” Rupert slid some of the papers aside with his arm. “I mean, ideally there ought to be some sort of all-in-one affair available to us. But there isn’t. So I’ve enlarged the pages from my
A to Z
in the copier and pasted them all together—and I’ve drawn in the various underground installations by hand: blue lines for Thames Water Authority, brown for Public Health. LEB in green, Post Office and Telecom in orange, North Thames Gas in black. The tube’s in red.”

“Good God,” Victor muttered. With all of Rupert’s lines, pipes and tributaries in place, he was reminded of the elaborate coloured plates bound into the middle pages of family medical encyclopedias, portraying the human body, bones, muscles, arteries and internal organs. Rupert’s jungle of coloured webbing had virtually obliterated the original black and white street atlas.

“Anyway,” Rupert continued, “there’s our Fitzroy Theatre.”

He ran his finger down to the great chromosome-X in the heart of the West End, where Charing Cross Road intersected with Shaftesbury Avenue at Cambridge Circus.

“It’s much closer to the Northern Line, really, than to the Post Office extension you were concerned about. Bang on top of the Northern Line, in fact, sir—as you and I discovered first hand.”

“What’s your point, Rupert?”

“My point is, sir, that anything’s vulnerable, really, isn’t it? The Post Office tunnels, the sewers, the Underground. I mean, yes, I’ve spoken to LEB about the outage and yes, they’ve assured me it was probably just a random event on an aging grid. But as you well know, sir, they often don’t have access to the same sorts of information we do. I mean, the idea of a sound cannon would never even occur to them, would it, sir?”

“It wouldn’t, Rupert, you’re quite correct.” Victor contemplated the tangle of hand-drawn lines superimposed over the streets of London. “Do you think you might do me a favour and go back into the system and look up all you can on Wimmer’s sound cannon project? The history of the thing, Nazi Germany’s interest in it…”

“Certainly, sir, I’d be glad to.”

“Thank you. And report back to me when you’ve finished.”

“I will, sir, definitely.”

Rupert waited until Victor had gone, then pulled out his bottom drawer and retrieved his lunch. “Damn,” he said, as his telephone began to ring. Unwrapping his hamburger, he picked up the receiver.

“Rupert Chadwick,” he said, cradling the handset under his chin.

He stopped, the hamburger resting in mid-air.

“There’s been a what in South London?” he said.

Sally, who was the weekend receptionist, repeated what the woman in Tooting had told her in a breathless rush moments before.

“An earthquake?” Rupert said. “Are you absolutely certain about that, Sally? An earthquake in SW17?”

Sara Jane Woodford had wandered outside with her tomato juice, and was perching now on the low stone wall that encircled the patio attached to the room where the Wedding Breakfast—more of a mid-afternoon, three-course lunch, really—had been served, and where now the tables and chairs had been cleared away for the evening dance. It was cooler out here, high on the cliffs above Bournemouth, facing the sea; the inside of the hotel was stifling.

It was a grand old sedate aunt of a place, with gables and a garden, and a picture wall pasted with the likenesses of vaudevillian entertainers who had sung and danced their way through the public rooms in the 1930s and 1940s.

Grand, yes, but utterly ill-equipped for this blazing hot weather. Sara was wilting.

Below, on the lawn, the bride and Sara’s cousin, Terry, the groom—were having the last of their pictures taken and, beyond the bluff of cool, green trees, several adventurous guests were making their way down the zigzagging cliff path, to the beach, drinks in hand.

“Sara Woodford—imagine meeting you here!”

Sara withered. The voice belonged to a distant relation—a large, rambunctious girl from the right sort of family in Finchley, living proof of the unrelenting British class structure that had undergone a flowering renaissance in the Thatcher years.

“Not at all,” she said, sliding over to make room for Ursula on the wall.

“How are you?” Ursula inquired. “Still sinfully cohabiting with that ancient mariner in Putney? Can’t for the life of me remember his name.”

“Jon,” Sara said. “Ex-Jon.”

“Oh dear,” Ursula sighed. “Oh well. I’m married, of course. You knew, didn’t you? A paediatric surgeon.” She patted her ample middle. “Adonijah if it’s a boy, Jocasta if it’s a girl. Hywell’s convinced it’s twins, of course.”

“Of course,” Sara said. “Congratulations.”

Ursula was scanning the patio for further prospects. “There’s that blasphemously angelic blond creature from the church,” she exclaimed, craning her neck. “Don’t suppose you’ve an inkling who he is.”

“I do, actually,” Sara replied, seizing the opportunity to engage in a sporting game of long-awaited one-upmanship. “His name’s Robin Harris. One of Terry’s schoolfriends from Canada.”

“Is he really?” Ursula could barely contain herself. “I’ve always been terribly curious about the way they speak, the Canadians. I mean, they’re not like us, are they? They don’t differentiate between the educated and the not-educated. Those with, and those without. They haven’t got accents, have they?”

“Why don’t you judge for yourself?” Sara suggested. “I’ll introduce you.”

“Oh—do you actually know him?” Ursula’s eyebrows were two startled question marks.

Sara was enjoying herself. “We met the summer I was packed off to Vancouver to stay with my uncle and aunt.”

“God, all that long ago. You must have been, what—nine? Ten?”

“Sixteen,” Sara said. “Actually.”

“Oh,” said Ursula.

“Yes, he just popped up out of the blue—Terry sent him an invitation, of course, ages ago, but he wrote to say he couldn’t come. Now all of a sudden here he is. He rang me up yesterday at work. I nearly fell off my chair.”

“Lucky you,” Ursula remarked, in a droll voice—the voice of ungracious defeat. “I suppose he comes from terribly typical Canadian stock and does something boringly provincial—you know—for a living.”

“Something to do with broadcasting, I think Terry said…”

“Yoo-hoo!” Ursula called, waving at Terry’s mother. “Do excuse me, Sara—I must go and chat with that charming woman. Mummy will never forgive me if I don’t. Lovely seeing you again—love and kisses to both your parents—”

Smugly, Sara watched Ursula, large with child, totter down the flagstone steps in hot pursuit of the family of the groom.

Below, in the garden, Terry had picked up his new wife and was threatening to chuck her bodily into an ornamental fishpond for the benefit of the photographer.

“Pretentious old cow,” Sara said, unkindly, as Robin appeared before her, carrying a pint mug of lager. “Come for a walk on the beach with me, Harris. It’s absolutely smothering up here and I feel the need for some fresh sea air.”

At the water’s edge, kicking off her sandals, she said, “It’s lovely seeing you again, you know. You’ve not gone and got married, or anything horrible like that, have you?”

“Certainly not,” Robin replied.

Sara was pleased. She waited while he pulled off his shoes and socks and rolled up the legs of his trousers.

“You’re on the radio, I hear.”

“Sometimes,” Robin said. “Usually, though, I’m not. I’m the general dogsbody who pushes all the buttons behind the scenes and makes life pleasant for the high-priced on-air talent.” He looked at her. “What’ve you been up to, then?”

“Oh, well, nothing as exciting as you. I moved to London after college—I share a lovely old house in West Hampstead with three other girls.”