The Cilla Rose Affair (17 page)

Evan’s phone was clean.

He put everything back together again and decided against investigating the insides all of his light switches. He’d nearly killed himself the last time when, for some obscure reason, the electricity in one of the wires had opted to take an excursion through the screws attached to the cover plate.

He unpacked the blue metal box he’d brought up from the boot of his car, and set it up on his coffee table.

There were two sorts of sweepers—the kind that looked like a cross between a hoover and a metal detector, which sought out the semi-conductors—diodes or integrated circuits—found in common electronics—and this sort—a radio-frequency scanner. Less expensive and altogether less tedious to operate, it was about the size of a videotape recorder, and worked by plotting the telltale signal footprints generated by hidden transmitters.

He sat forward on the sofa, clipped on a pair of headphones, and, addressing the bank of knobs and dials before him, clicked through the frequencies, watching the blue peaks and valleys on the tiny built-in screen.

You couldn’t prevent an entry if somebody was that intent on getting in. You couldn’t even rely on the old James Bond stand-by’s. All the hairs glued across all of the doorways in the world wouldn’t stop a professional: he’d merely anticipate you, and stick the hair back on his way out.

Evan hadn’t had any clandestine visitors, he was fairly certain—but that didn’t take into account upstairs or next door. The weak points of his flat were the common areas—the walls, the ceiling, the floor.

He stopped, and went over the last frequency again. It was only a slight aberration—but enough to put him on the alert.

He switched off the machine.

He had no intention of tearing the place apart, like Gene Hackman in the closing moments of
The Conversation
. Better to leave the device in place, to let the eavesdroppers continue to believe it was secure and undiscovered.

Such liabilities, given the right circumstances, could often be turned into assets.

Kennington, Oval, Stockwell…

Clapham North, Common, South…

Balham, Bec, Broadway…

Anthony used to have the stops memorized—dingy yellow interruptions along a sooty black tube, ad-lined walls, the red-white-and-blue Underground roundel providing the only individual identity.

Even before he’d come to live in London, they’d been renovating. But the cosmetic facelift—brilliant plastic panels depicting themes of vital significance to the neighbourhoods above—had been confined to the stations north of the river.

The southern suburbs were decaying, insidiously, yellow ochre tunnels pockmarked by seepage, their through-ways grubby, their anti-suicide pits dank and scattered with swept-along litter. The one visible exception was Stockwell, and that was only because it had been upgraded to provide a cross-platform interchange with the much newer Victoria Line.

Kennington, Oval, Stockwell.

Clapham North and Clapham Common.

Anthony viewed the station through the window. He recalled once having to catch a train here, and he remembered the peculiar insecurity of being forced to wait on an island platform, with the tracks on either side of him and no wall to retreat to, the wind gusting and the great cavern of a station tunnel looming high over his head.

Clapham Common, Clapham South.

Balham, Bec, Broadway.

Tooting Broadway hadn’t changed. Anthony wandered through the cross-passage, which was still lined with the aging green, white and black glazework that characterized all of the original Northern Line stations. The wind ruffled his hair as he rode to the surface, where local beautifiers had undertaken a modernization scheme of their own, and had painted the archway over the entrance to the escalator shaft a bright lilac.

Outside the station, Edward VII still stood guard, imperiously, over a pair of public toilets in the traffic island. The Kings Road Boutique was still there, too, its battered black and white op-art marquee a lingering sad remnant from the Swinging Sixties.

In the early 1980s, Anthony had come to London as a visitor, his younger brother in tow. They had spent the summer with their grandmother.

The London Anthony had taken home with him in pictures and in his mind then had been shabby: street after street of once-elegant houses, blackened by the grime of ages, respectability crumbling from years of neglect. He remembered bad-tempered women with ruined feet, their day’s shopping crammed into string bags, comparing miseries in loud voices while they waited in weary queues for buses that didn’t come.

In the London of Now—in the slick public relations job that was presented to the rest of the world—the decay was gone. Brave new edifices of concrete, glass and steel lined the famous scenic postcard curve of the river.

In the tourists’ London there were Burger Kings and golden arches.

In the southern suburbs, there was Tooting.

The bus lurched and lumbered along the narrow main road, passing the church at Amen Corner, the cinema—it was a bingo palace now—the red brick police station—blue lamps and Wanted posters—careening up and over the junction to the Marsh.

It wasn’t a marsh at all, but a rhomboid-shaped field that had been rimmed with centuries old oaks and elms. The changes were small, but significant: the air raid shelters, the two camel-backed humps in the grass that were the last visible remnants of the war, were gone. The playground was gone, too, done away with by vandals and the local council.

Anthony walked across the square bit of asphalt where he and Robin had commandeered the roundabout and ridden it, shrieking with the exuberance of youth, one glorious morning at half past three.

His grandmother’s house was the third one from the corner, a dark little piece of a working class terrace, its tiny garden behind the low brick wall a jungle of overgrowth—long grass and wildflowers, shrubs and moss.

Anthony stood for a moment, one hand on the rough grey gate, looking at the small haphazard parade of shops midway down the block: off-license, hardware, newsagent. Fish and chips on the corner, frying tonight, halibut and cod, malt vinegar, pickled onions floating in a huge jar of brown liquid on top of the counter.

She was a towering pillar of a woman, their Gran. Anthony remembered her, having refused all offers to relocate to a better neighbourhood, standing on the step in her flowered pinafore, her arms folded. She’d written to them regularly in Canada, her letters filled with vehement opposition to Margaret Thatcher and the evil menace of privatization.

He walked up the short path, and let the knocker drop on the door.

He could hear her footfall in the hallway, and the lock being turned.

“Hello, my darling.” She was warm and wonderful and she smelled of violets and hand cream and face powder from Boots. “Come along in—I’ve put the kettle on for tea—are you hungry?”

He didn’t notice the young man who had got off the bus after him, and followed him across the marsh and the playground to the road. Indeed, he wasn’t aware that he was being watched at all, and that the young man in the sweatshirt and trainers had been with him from the time he had descended in the lift at Chalk Farm.

The green-painted front door closed behind Anthony, its knocker tapping against its striking plate. The young man lingered at the corner for a few moments, then crossed the road and went into the newsagent’s to buy himself some chewing gum and a
Sunday Sport.

Monday, 02 September 1991

“The trouble’s definitely not with this set.” The repairman replaced the cover of the computer. “Could be something to do with the line, though. Where’s your other unit?”

“Do us a favour,” Maureen said, “and take him up.”

She was, Sara noted, engaged in the manual calculation of an airfare. Point A to Point B. Not a difficult proposition, by any stretch of the imagination. “Follow me,” she sighed, and she led the man from Agency Automation through to the back, past filing cabinets filled with spent holidays and visa forms and passport applications and obsolete inoculation booklets, and up the narrow stairs to Harry Dailey’s office.

Harry, when he was in attendance, occupied a small suite on the upper floor of the agency. There were a number of tall, potted plants, which Maureen forgot to water more often than she remembered; there was a comfortable armchair; there was a small fridge and a microwave oven; a small table, and a large desk.

Harry Dailey’s office, when Harry Dailey was not in attendance, doubled as the staff lunch room, and more than once Maureen had sprinted up there for a fast 40 winks in between clients.

Harry Dailey’s desktop contained stacks of unread bulletins from an assortment of airlines; travel magazines; client files in used and used-again cardboard folders; reservation cards; a calendar from British Airways and a paperclip holder from TWA. There was a small globe of the world that you turned upside down and made into a pencil sharpener, and there was a coffee mug from Lufthansa.

“Here we are.”

Sara exhumed Harry’s computer.

The repairman set down his caseful of tools.

“Worked here long?” he asked, conversationally, while he unscrewed the cover.

“About six months, actually. I used to be with another firm down the road.”

“Why’d you leave?” He wasn’t English.
American
, she thought
. Good-looking chap. Red hair and very green eyes. A surprising absence of freckles
.

“I didn’t. They left me. Went out of business.” She wondered whether she’d seen him before somewhere. He looked, she thought, vaguely familiar.

“You get a lot of free trips?”

“Discounted,” Sara said. “When you can afford to take them—which isn’t often, these days. And Harry’s not all that generous with his fams.”

The repairman looked at her, warily, and feigned a step backwards.

“Fam trip,” Sara said. “Educational tour. Twenty-five travel agents on an escorted rampage.”

“Only the way you said it, I thought it was an exotic travel industry euphemism for something else.” He removed something small and black from Harry’s computer, looked at it, and replaced it with another. “Where’s your boss this morning?”

“Harry? Gone to France. Back Thursday.” Sara slid off the desk. “I’d love to stay and chat, but—my glamorous career does beckon.” She paused. “Where in America are you from?”

“Canada, actually,” he said.

“Oh—sorry. Only, I wondered…you look familiar. Have I met you before anywhere, d’you suppose…?”

“Don’t think so,” he answered, glancing up at her with a smile. “I’d have remembered.”

Downstairs, Maureen was still immersed in her airfare. “How was Bournemouth, by the way?”

“Very nice,” Sara said, sitting down.

“Come on, then. Give us the intimate details.”

“No.”

“You boring old prude.”

“We’re old friends, Maureen, not bloody Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger.”

“Who was it told me that all those years ago in Vancouver you two were nothing short of Romeo and Juliet in the throes of phenomenal tragedy?”

Sara smiled. “We were very young. And very innocent.”

“That’s the best sort. Anyway, you’re not very innocent anymore, are you. And I daresay he’s not—”

“No,” Sara said, resting her chin on her fist. “He’s definitely not.”

“Well, then.”

“
No
,” she said, adamantly, seeking refuge in a brochure.

She glanced at the back of the office.

“Wonder what they earn, those computer people.”

“More than us,” Maureen grumbled, from the depths of the air tariff.

Her hair tucked under a sensible black beret, her feet clad in flat laced walking shoes and grey ankle socks, her identity concealed beneath a drab, belted mackintosh, Emma Braden observed from the sidewalk as Nora Darrow wandered around the bus stops at Euston Station, studying posted schedules, scrutinizing departure times, until she found the route she wanted.

A 168 stood waiting, and Emma followed Nora aboard and up to the top deck, where she made herself comfortable in the back.

The ride up Haverstock Hill was slow and lumbering, with frequent stops that appeared to irritate Nora, but which gave Emma a secret delight. From her mobile lookout, she was able to observe all of the commerce and trade of this little corner of North London: Camden Town, Camden Locks, a rag market, old stables, bookstalls and derelict brick railway catacombs. The Roundhouse, which had once turned locomotives.

Chalk Farm.

Evan’s middle son lived over that way. Evan had once lived here, too, in a block of flats on the slope of Haverstock Hill. Those ones, there—or the building after it—she wasn’t altogether certain.

The 168 continued up the hill, past carpet shops and hairdressing salons, Chinese restaurants, Kentucky Fried Chicken, newsagents, a pub.

Belsize Park, where Emma herself lived.

The Post House Hotel and the Roman Catholic Primary School…a gas station…the Royal Free Hospital. The bus was turning off, having come to the end of its run. Its other passengers—two well-heeled women who’d complained all the way up about the road works and the traffic delays, an elderly man with a shopping bag, and a dark girl who looked as though she might have been an au-pair—disembarked.

Emma lingered for a moment on the upper deck, observing the village scene—it had the air of an ancient market with its stone fountain and rows of small shops—and the congress of passengers at Hampstead Heath station, on the other side of the square. Then she, too, got off, and followed Nora Darrow across the square and into the trees.

“Victor!” Nora exclaimed, greeting him on the footpath. “Our meetings are usually so much more sedate. What on earth are you up to? Cryptic messages directing me to the old Mitcham Common drop…vague notes pointing me to Hampstead Heath…”

Victor Barnfather did not share her flippant mood. He glanced behind him, but saw only a bookish oddball of an old woman, bent over, examining something on the path, and a young lady in jogging shorts, out for her daily run. He walked in silence until he felt an appropriate distance had been achieved, and then, he spoke.