The Cilla Rose Affair (22 page)

Evan reached across the table without comment and removed the photograph from Nora’s hand and put it in his pocket.

“Fiction doesn’t become you.”

Nora sipped her wine. “Trevor Jackson’s diary,” she said.

Evan waited.

“You will, of course, remove yourself from the bidding process.”

“Not without guarantees,” he said.

“You will signify your intention to withdraw by absenting yourself from this afternoon’s meeting in Quidhampton. I will purchase the diary…and your boy will be released. Simple as that.”

Evan looked at her. “It wasn’t terribly clever of you, Nora, to use ricin to do away with your husband. I know of at least half a dozen other chemical agents that would have done the job in a matter of minutes, not days. And half of them would have been virtually impossible to detect. Accessibility was, I suppose, a factor—one can’t, after all, pop down to the corner shop and pick up a vial or two of FEA or tetraethyl lead, can one? Compared to that little lot, ricin’s your basic run-of-the-mill distillation experiment in textbook chemistry.”

Nora laughed.

“Are you trying to blackmail me, Evan? I’ve outplayed you with Trevor Jackson’s diary, and the only weapon you have left is this? I’d advise you not to continue. After all, you’re hardly in a position to be dictating terms, are you?”

“I have enough evidence to guarantee your prosecution. We could add kidnapping to that…forcible confinement…grievous bodily harm.”

“Goodness, aren’t you a clever little man. Persistent, too. Let’s agree on an impasse, shall we? What about…you pursue any of these matters any further—and it will be your very last dance upon this earthly stage. What about that? Dramatic enough for you?” She turned her attention to the menu. “Now then—what shall we have for lunch?”

Anthony knew of at least one ghost in attendance at Covent Garden—quite possibly two—although he had long suspected that the twin spectres had been borne of a single illusory egg, and had evolved—much like the mythology of man—into two separate spirits as the situations had warranted.

One was The Man in Grey, who called the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane home, and whose performance began with an emergence from the wall to the left of the Upper Circle, continued across the rear seating, and finished with a flash vanishing act in the vicinity of the Royal Box.

The optimal time for viewing The Man in Grey—fashionably attired in a white wig and three-cornered hat, a short cloak, riding boots and a sword—was between 10am and 6pm, preferably during a matinee performance at the height of the tourist season.

The other ghost was reputedly that of one William Terriss—actor—who had met his end outside the Adelphi in 1897, stabbed to death by a demented fellow performer as he was about to appear in a play called
Secret Service
. For some unknown and quite illogical reason, the haunt of William Terriss had become Covent Garden tube station, in spite of the fact that the structure in question didn’t even exist in 1897—and, indeed, would not be built for another decade.

The lift deposited him on the street, and Anthony turned right and entered the cobblestoned precincts of the refurbished Covent Garden marketplace.

His father was waiting for him outside the Penguin Bookshop. “Let’s go through here,” Evan suggested, leading the way into a glass-roofed gallery, to a small, plastic table-and-chair snack bar with blue and white patio umbrellas overlooking the cellar vaults and archways.

He took out the polaroid picture of Robin Nora had given him, and allowed Anthony to study it while he collected two cups of tea from the serving counter.

“He looks awful.”

“Yes, well, I don’t expect Nora’s been all that considerate towards him.”

“You don’t really care who you drag into your sordid spy life, do you? How could you let that happen to Robin? You ask him to fly over, you persuade him to take up with Sara—”

“He did so willingly, Anthony.”

“Yes, well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

Evan looked at his son. “Don’t be too quick to assume,” he said, carefully, “that your brother’s completely in the dark about what’s going on.”

“What do you mean?”

Evan drank his tea.

“How much does he actually know about Simon Darrow and Nora and Victor Barnfather?” Anthony demanded.

“How much do you know?”

“I thought—” Anthony shook his head. “I didn’t think you’d told him the entire truth. I’m sorry.”

“Anthony,” his father said, touching his hand. “You ought to know me better than that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes, well, I’m sorry this happened to Robin. It’s Nora, over-reacting. I was too damned convincing for my own good.” He considered the photograph. “The important thing now is to try and find him. What do you make of the place where he’s being kept?”

“A tunnel,” Anthony said, at length.

“That’s what we thought, as well. It’s a bit difficult to make any sort of distinction, but look at the wall behind his head. The picture’s taken at a slight angle. You can see the curve of the segments, and the bolts holding them together. Ian thinks it might be the Underground.”

Anthony propped the photograph up against the umbrella pole, and studied it, intently. “No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because that style—those bolted cast iron rings with the deep flanges—hasn’t been used on the Underground in decades. They tested experimental concrete and a more flexible type of unbolted cast iron when they built the Victoria Line, and the new sections of the Jubilee are all done in concrete.”

“What makes you think this can’t be an older Underground tunnel?”

“The wall isn’t dirty enough. The tube’s absolutely filthy. Even if it was an abandoned running tunnel, it would be black. Totally black. That wall’s not only practically spotless—it’s been painted white. Most unusual.”

“An abandoned station tunnel,” his father prodded.

Anthony shook his head. “The original station tunnels were all decorated—plastered over and painted or lined with glazed brick. Unless someone’s been doing some recent renovations.”

“That’s not such a far-fetched supposition,” Evan said, resting his arms on the white plastic table, and adopting the same low-level scrutiny of the photograph as his son. “Take your time.”

Anthony fixed his attention on his younger brother. “Unless…”

Evan raised an eyebrow.

“Come with me.”

He led his father out of the gallery and past the ragamuffin stalls of the Jubilee Market, to the Transport Museum.

“In here.”

He found the book on one of the shelves in the museum’s shop, last copy
: London Transport at War
. Anthony seized it and paged through it, stopping midway through.

“What do you think?”

He held the open book up, so that his father could see the series of five black and white photographs, two of them detailing views of a round, ribbed, concrete and iron tunnel lined with rows of bunk beds…a third providing a perspective of a smaller, empty passageway…and the fourth showing women at work in an adjacent canteen, also in tunnel. The fifth picture was of the oddly-shaped surface structure, the pillbox beneath which the tunnels had been constructed.

“The Government Deep Level Shelters,” Anthony said, with some satisfaction.

Evan looked closely at the photographs. The round surface building, with its flat roof and brick entranceway, seemed peculiarly familiar to him.

“How far down did these shelters go?”

“Seventy-five to 100 feet. The average was about 80. They were built right underneath their nearest tube station. And they were huge—two tunnels, 1400 feet long, 16 feet wide, divided into top and bottom decks by a concrete slab running down the middle. They could sleep eight or nine thousand at a single go.”

“I’ve seen that before somewhere,” Evan said, staring at the picture of the round pillbox.

“Goodge Street.”

Evan glanced up at his son.

“Goodge Street tube station. The Eisenhower Centre. You know—the archives firm.”

“Yes!” Evan exclaimed.

“I think the rest are all still standing. The archives people lease a number of them—Stockwell and Goodge Street for certain…I’m not sure about the others. I know the one at Camden Town was used as a set for
Doctor Who
…”

“Someone at London Transport would be able to tell me, I’m sure.”

Anthony gave the picture back to his father.

“I’ll go,” he said. “I know who and what to ask for.”

Nora was, by her own calculations, exactly on time for her meeting with Herr Lügner. She parked her car in a small gravelled lot beside a nearby public house—the only one in the Quidhampton area, it appeared—and walked back to investigate the cottage that had been marked with the large red X on the German’s map. The paved driveway beside the little house was empty, the windows dark. Curiously, Nora peered inside, able just to make out the downstairs living arrangements. There were two rooms and a kitchen—the kitchen an obvious afterthought tacked onto the back, quite modern, from what she could see, well-equipped, out of character with the rest of the cottage, which was decidedly ancient.

Well-preserved, though, Nora thought, scrutinizing the dining room and, through a second window, the sitting room. Careful restoration throughout. A sensitivity to historical detail. Quite a lot of expensive antique furniture.

Nora looked at her watch again, and was momentarily seized with a fleeting panic: what if he didn’t come? What if he’d changed his mind?

Or Harris had got to him first—double-crossed her…

The very idea infuriated her. It infuriated her to the extent that she marched back to her car, and paced around it, and then sat in it again, venting her anger as she searched through her handbag for her cigarettes.

She would give Lügner until half past four—and then…

She glared at the darkened, empty cottage.

She would make Harris pay for this.

It was just five o’clock, and the offices skirting St. James’s Park were beginning to disgorge their populations of secretaries, clerks, executives and assistants. Evan and Ian both stood up as they spotted Anthony, with an armful of papers.

“There were ten shelters,” Evan’s middle son confirmed, sitting down on the bench, passing his father the notes he’d made during his lengthy conversation with the woman from London Regional Transport. “Five north of the river and five south. The sites were picked so they could be made into an express underground railway after the war. Two of the shelters were on the Central Line and the other eight were on the Northern. Only eight were built—the one at St. Paul’s was too close to the foundations of the cathedral, and the one at Oval had to be abandoned because of problems with groundwater.”

Ian already had his
A to Z
out and was marking off all of the sites with a blue felt pen.

“The archives firm’s leasing four of the shelters—Belsize Park, Camden Town, Goodge Street and Stockwell. Chancery Lane was turned over to British Telecom.”

“For their Holborn exchange, yes, we know all about that. What about these ones?” Ian indicated the string of three shelters on the stretch of track between Stockwell and Balham.

“They’re empty,” Anthony said.

“You’re quite sure about that?”

“Positive. Clapham South was once used as a youth hostel during the Festival of Britain, but all three have stood abandoned for years.”

“Good work, old son,” Evan said, briefly. “And what’s this?” He slipped the elastic band off a rolled-up sheet of paper.

“Plans for the layout of the shelters—they all followed more or less the same general construction principles. I thought you might find them helpful.”

“Extraordinarily helpful, Anthony,” his father said, impressed. “You’ve done an excellent job. Thank you.”

He collected his notes, and stood up.

Anthony looked at him.

“Be careful, all right?”

“Goes without saying, old son.”

“You’re my bodyguard now, are you?” Sara said, irritably. She tramped through the pigeons and the tourists of Trafalgar Square, shouldering her bag—her new bag, the one she’d had to buy to replace the one containing all of her credit cards, her money, her identity.

“I’m not,” Anthony countered. He trailed her across the square, to the northeast corner fountain.

“Well,” Sara said, “I am surprised. Isn’t anybody going to follow me about, making sure I do my job properly?”

“I don’t think so, Sara.”

“Why else would they have me sign The Act, then? ‘Awfully sorry, Sara, old girl, but we’ve recruited you to help us with our little mission—you’re in the thick of it now—oh! Didn’t Robin tell you? Well, he must have forgotten—still—it doesn’t matter now, does it, we’re all on the same side, after all.’”

Anthony was momentarily taken aback. “They didn’t say that to you. I was there.”

Sara glared at him.

“They had me sign it years ago,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the fountain.

“And you’re a spy as well, I suppose.”

“No.”

He tore off a piece of his still-warm buttered croissant and shredded it, and tossed the bits to the caucus of pigeons that had assembled at his feet: assorted beggars, purple-plumed, grey, brown, with luminescent green collars—all extremely well-fed and in very little danger of starving.

“It was necessary for me to sign the document, that’s all. Here.”

He offered the rest of the croissant to Sara.

She sat with it in her hand, staring vacantly at the greedy riot, and at a small Asian boy intent on catching the slowest of the bobbing scavengers.

“He used me,” she said. “They used me. They only needed me so they could go on a fishing expedition into the agency. Keeping an eye on Harry. They deliberately made our computers go down so that Ian could come in and pretend to be a repairman, when all he was doing was putting a camera and a microphone into Harry’s computer.”

“They use everybody. Robin, you. Me. It’s what they do.”

“At least you have a choice in the matter,” Sara said, bitterly. “You can always say no, can’t you? Not Muggins here. They must have seen me coming a mile away.”

Anthony passed her his carton of milk, and she drank it, angrily, through the straw.