The Cilla Rose Affair (18 page)

“I’ve been told, Nora, that you have been approached by an individual who wishes to sell you an item of some value.”

Nora was surprised. “That’s right, Victor. A diary.”

“Trevor Jackson’s diary, to be specific. One of your young men, was he not?”

“He was,” she replied. “But why on earth should it concern you, Victor? I’m almost certain there’s no mention of you in those pages.”

Victor ignored her. “I understand the other interested party is Evan Harris.”

“Well yes, but—”

“Do you know him?”

“Not to speak to, no. But I know who he is, Victor—he’s the annoying little man who tried to coerce Simon into telling him who his Soviet contacts were in 1966. He approached him with some nonsense he’d dug up—some old bits and pieces of writing that appeared to implicate Simon in the
Cilla Rose
episode—and stupid Simon, of course, panicked, and came running to me for help. I soon put a stop to that particular line of questioning.”

They were walking again, towards the ponds.

“I’d wondered about Simon’s death,” Victor said.

“Yes, well. He was a weak man. He crumpled far too easily. Survival of the fittest, Victor.”

“What an extraordinarily nasty woman you are, Nora,” Victor remarked, without smiling.

“Yes, but I’m still here, aren’t I, which is more than I can say for some others I’ve come to know over the years.” She paused. “I don’t suppose you can worm your way into the computer registry at Macdonald House.”

“Not officially. Why?”

“Harris,” Nora said. “He’s got three sons. The eldest, Ian, has a cross-reference attached to his name, and I’d dearly love to know why.”

“Access to the database might be arranged,” Victor replied. “It will leave footprints.”

“I’m prepared to risk that,” Nora said.

“Yes, but I’m not. I’ll have to find somebody else who’s willing to go hunting by moonlight. Meanwhile, Nora, let me tell you why I requested this meeting.”

“Yes, Victor, please do.”

“I have certain concerns about your reliability.”

“My reliability!” Nora laughed. “Is that all you were worried about?”

“Concerns, possibly, that you could be pressured into a confession in much the same way Simon was.”

Nora stopped, and met her companion’s hard gaze. “I can’t be blackmailed, Victor. Especially by some trumped up agent of a third rate Canadian intelligence service. You ought to give me more credit than that.”

Victor did not remove his eyes from her face. “Is the diary genuine?”

“From what I’ve been able to read of it so far, yes.”

“And from what you’ve been able to read of it…does it contain entries which might be used against you in a British court of law?”

“Well, yes, Victor, but—”

“Then I’d advise you to make damned certain, Nora, that Harris is unsuccessful in his bid to obtain that information. I have too much at stake to risk you—”

“You have too much at stake!” Nora exclaimed, derisively.

“I have too much at stake,” Victor repeated, “to risk allowing you to spoonfeed tidbits of your personal history to a sympathetic magistrate in exchange for immunity from prosecution and a guaranteed mention in the next comprehensive paperback exposé of the British intelligence community. Do I make myself clear, Nora?”

“Yes, Victor,” Simon Darrow’s widow replied, angrily. “You do.”

It was odd, Sara thought, that she should find herself so peculiarly attracted to a knee. It was a perfectly plain body part, clothed, in this case, in much-washed blue jean material, the fabric wearing thin in all of the expected places. The knee in question was bent at a 45 degree angle, its cap of bone and muscle an intriguing detail beneath the faded denim.

She caught herself staring, but instead of looking away, followed the straight line of the leg down, to the ankle, and the foot, which, bereft of shoe and sock, was nested in a clump of grass punctuated with tiny white daisies.

The ankle was slender, the foot long and narrow and chiselled with ridges of bone and blood vessel. A meadow of hairs, red-gold, had been scattered across the instep; and the toes were what her mother, the psychologist, would call prehensile: curious, independent, capable of interesting exploratory excursions.

She’d sworn off men. She’d made a pact with herself, after Jon, that there would be no more relationships.

Dear Jon—who was still capable of overwhelming her, on those brave occasions when she dared test the waters, allowing him back into her mind from his distant banishment.

Jon, with whom she had lived in a houseboat in the nether regions of Putney, who had been fond of white, fisherman-knit pullovers from Ireland and songs by Kate Bush. Jon, who was now somewhere in Scotland, pitching concerts for the preservation of the rain forests.

Jon, who had driven her to distraction with his untruths—she knew he was lying but had no proof—who claimed, in the end—after a friend of a friend had rung her in an alcoholic haze at two o’clock in the morning (more out of malice towards the friend than any genuine concern for Sara)—that he’d only told untruths to prevent her feelings from being hurt.

Dear Jon.

She’d sworn off men, and now, here she was, teetering hopelessly on the brink of involvement again.

The owner of the knee, having finished his sandwich and carton of milk, stretched his arms above his head, and watched, idly, as the last of the lunchtime joggers made their way back through the park, towards their towers and turrets in nearby Whitehall.

“By and large,” Sara said, watching a second group of office-dressed men and women, “we’re quite a shabby lot—don’t you think? Our men always seem to look a bit rumpled. And our architecture’s absolutely hideous—everything’s a hodge-podge of styles and tastes, all thrown in beside one another, nothing unifying, no themes, no schemes—Prince Charles was quite right, you know, when he called it a national disgrace.”

She went back to her investigation of Robin’s knapsack.

“I think London’s tried to become very American very quickly—but the trouble is, we seem to have adopted the worst of everything instead of the best. What on earth have you got in here?”

“Nothing much,” Robin said, distantly, exploring the hem of her skirt with his toe.

“Nothing much.” She took his toe prisoner in her fist. “Citizenship card, birth certificate—Santa Monica, September 13, 1968—you’ve got a birthday coming up and I can’t stand Virgos—social insurance, American Express, drivers license, Long Distance telephone card…Ah, look—I’ve found your passport.” She held it, open, at arm’s length. “You’ve got the most incredibly sad, blue eyes.”

Robin was momentarily taken aback. They were quite blue, it was true. But sad? “It must be a result of my tragic life,” he concluded. “The youngest child from a broken home. Forced to grow up in middle class British Columbia…”

“We wanted to expose him at birth,” Anthony said, coming back from his expedition to locate ice cream, “but our mother objected.”

He distributed his cache: orange ices on wooden sticks, wrapped in paper.

“He was actually quite an angelic little creature when he was a child. And then, on his fifteenth birthday, tragedy struck. He became hideous. So hideous, in fact, that old women would cross themselves whenever he passed them in the street. So hideous—”

“
Anthony
,” Robin objected.

“So hideous,” Anthony continued, animatedly, “that entire planeloads of faith healers from the Philippines would arrive daily at our front door, with offerings of pigs’ bladders and dogmeat—”

“Excuse me,” Robin interrupted, “but who was it who, one Halloween, put a hollowed-out pumpkin over his head, with little red light-up eyes and a black cap and cape, and went as The Elephant Man to a party where the invitation had specifically stated No Costumes?”

“Robin,” Anthony said, in a hurt voice.

“‘I am not an animal,’” his brother quoted. “‘I am a human gourd.’ Very adult, Ant. Very sophisticated.”

“And here’s your airline ticket!” Sara interrupted, silencing them. “God, you only picked this up the day before you travelled. Full fare economy, open return—issued in exchange for a Miscellaneous Charges Order and paid for in cash in Britain—someone with a lot of money to spare wanted you over here quite badly, from what I can see. Who was it?”

“Our father,” Anthony replied.

Robin looked at him, dangerously.

Sara stuffed everything back into Robin’s wallet in the wrong place, and returned it, his passport and his ticket to his knapsack.

“I saw your father on the telly the other night,” she said. “What’s it like being the offspring of somebody famous?”

“It’s a bloody nuisance,” Anthony replied, gathering up the litter of their lunch. “Peculiar looks come over peoples’ faces when they’re made aware of the genetic linkup. They forget how to hold a normal conversation. And everything you’ve accomplished on your own suddenly pales, and the only thing that seems to matter is that you’re that man’s son.”

“I’d never quite thought of it like that. I’d always assumed, you know, the name would open doors.”

“Doors open,” Robin agreed, pulling on his shoes and socks, “but without some accompanying talent, they slam shut on your foot pretty quickly. Ant notices it more than me, anyway. I’m somewhat more removed from everything in Canada.”

He extended his hand, pulling Sara up.

“He’s a Canadian, too, though, isn’t he?” They began the walk back across the park, towards Sara’s office.

“Who?” Anthony inquired, with great humour. “Our Evan Dermott Harris? Irish father, Welsh mother, born in a stone cottage filled with peat smoke in the middle of County Westmeath. His humble beginnings haven’t been universally publicized. But they all know him and love him in Athlone. That’s a Celtic accent you’re hearing, Sara—he only took out Canadian citizenship after he emigrated from Britain in the 1950s.”

“So now you know where all that red hair came from,” Robin said, clasping her hand.

“Red hair…” Sara said, thoughtfully.

Emma’s train slowed as it broke through the blackness and entered Waterloo. It squealed to a stop and its doors rumbled apart. Emma stepped onto the platform and stumped down its length to the connecting passageways that led up and out, to the mainline station.

On the escalator, she leaned an elbow on the hard rubber handrail, and cast her eyes over the framed ads that had been hung at perfect 90 degree angles in the shaft. A noisy crowd of teenagers had disembarked with her, and she watched them dance ahead of her in their high-topped running shoes and outrageous hair. Why, she wondered, should young men actually wish to wear black spandex bicycling shorts with gaudy Hawaiian shirts? And why were the young women all in black net crinolines and leotards, and gentlemen’s dinner jackets three sizes too large for their thin shoulders?

The world was becoming a very odd place.

She found Evan in the newsagents’ kiosk, engrossed in a Dick Francis mystery.

“On guard,” she warned, coming up behind him. “I might be wicked.”

“You’re not wicked,” he said, putting the book back on the shelf. “I saw you coming up from the tube. What news?”

“Victor has had words with Nora.”

“Has he? And is he agitated?” Evan inquired, rather devilishly, Emma thought.

“More than agitated, I should say,” she replied. “I’ll let you listen to the tape—I’ll wager you’ve got enough there to put the lady away quite handily.”

“Nora’s not the end object of our exercise,” he reminded her.

“Nevertheless, I should tread carefully, if I were you, Evan. She’s after your personal dossier at Macdonald House. After the dressing down she got from Victor this afternoon, Mrs. Darrow is in no mood to be trifled with.”

“I rather like it down here after hours. It’s an altogether different world.”

Beneath Leicester Square, the lights in the daytime-dark tunnels had been switched on. Burrowing under the city, signals crews, maintenance teams and engineering gangs roamed the rights-of-way, clad in neon orange. Other workers applied themselves to the platforms, cross-passages and escalator-shaft walls, replacing poster-sized ads. Fluffers—an army of cleaning women—dusted away the day’s debris. Battery trains shunted from location to location, transporting cables, rails and spare parts.

Bob Lewis jumped onto the tracks from the far end of the platform. “Come along,” he beckoned, cheerfully. “It’s quite safe.”

After some hesitation, Rupert followed him down, and trailed him into the black yawn of the running tunnel.

“There’s a pathway along the side, as you can see,” Bob said. “Of course, it wouldn’t provide much by way of protection if you happened to be caught with a train coming at you at full throttle—but then, you’d have no business being down here under those circumstances now, would you?”

“I daresay not,” Rupert said. It was dirty in the tunnel. He touched one of the circular cast iron ribs, and his hand came away black.

“It might interest you to know that the Northern Line has the proud distinction of owning the longest section of continuous tunnel on the entire system: 17 miles, 528 yards between Morden and East Finchley, via Bank. For many years this was the longest railway tunnel in the world.”

There was a string of electric lights spaced at intervals over their heads, stretching off into a perspective of dark eternity. Bob switched on his torch.

“The Northern Line also has the deepest station on the system, that being Hampstead, at 192 feet below the surface. Just north of the station the Underground is at its deepest point overall—221 feet below the surface of Hampstead Heath. The deepest point below sea level is also on this line—67 feet, just south of Waterloo.”

He was leading Rupert ever deeper into the black tube, continuing his conversational tour as he went.

“Below the ground, the oldest part of the Northern Line dates from the year 1890, when it opened as part of the City and South London Railway, running from Stockwell to the City of London. The tunnelling on the section we’re walking through now was opened on June 22, 1907, and was known as the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway. It operated from a station beneath Charing Cross and ran to Golders Green, with a branch from Camden Town to present-day Archway. The internal diameter of the running tunnels is 11 feet, 8 1/4 inches, and the station tunnels are built to an internal diameter of 21 feet, 2 1/2 inches.”