The Persian Price (8 page)

She found a vacant seat and sat down; her back ached and she had tired herself walking so fast.

‘Nanny,' Lucy Field ventured. ‘Get out?'

‘In a minute,' she said. ‘Just wait a minute, like a good girl.'

She couldn't believe what had happened. She had gone down to see Mrs Field, prepared to make her position plain and expecting unconditional surrender. She really couldn't have her mothers walking in and waking up the children at any hour, and she really felt Mrs Field should have shown more consideration. She hadn't been given the opportunity to say anything. She was given a month's money and told very politely that Mrs Field was taking the child away and she could leave in the morning. She was thinking back on the scene, wishing she had come out of it better. The little girl sat mutely in the pram, waiting to be lifted out.

‘What a beautiful child,' a woman's voice said.

The nanny looked round, startled. She hadn't even noticed that someone had sat down beside her. Normally she enjoyed talking to people and it pleased her when Lucy was admired. The woman was young and spoke with a foreign accent. She was well-dressed and she smiled at her.

‘So pretty,' she repeated. ‘Do you look after her?'

‘Yes,' the nanny said. Resentment was boiling up in her. To be turned out of the house … In twenty years no other mother had ever dared.

‘She's a credit to you. How old is she?'

‘Three,' she said. ‘I've been with her since she was born. Here, come to Nanny dear; you can have a little run but don't go near the water.' She lifted the child out and brushed her pink coat down. ‘Play just here, dear, where I can see you. Show Teddy to the lady.'

Madeleine Labouchère held the toy for a moment. She smiled encouragingly at the little girl, who smiled back. She was rather a small child for her age, pale and slight by comparison with the fat, spoiled children of the Lebanese rich. She seemed to be subdued.

‘She's a dear little thing,' the nanny said and her eyes pricked. She was going to miss Lucy. And the splendid house, the easy life with servants to wait on her. She was going to miss it all. She brought a handkerchief out and blew her nose.

‘I don't know how she'll manage without me. I've been the only mother she's ever known, poor little mite.'

‘Oh dear,' Madeleine said. ‘Are you leaving then?'

‘Yes.' The nanny sniffed and blew her nose again. She wanted sympathy. ‘I've been given notice. Just like that! The mother's decided to look after her herself! Huh – I wonder how long that'll last.'

The hands clasped round Madeleine's bag were gripping tight.

‘How awful for you,' she said. ‘When are you leaving?'

‘Tomorrow,' the nanny said. ‘I told her this morning, I'm not going to be treated like that after all I've done for that child. I'm going first thing tomorrow, I said. She didn't like that, I can tell you!' It was so easy to turn the truth around; she was almost convincing herself that this was how it had happened. ‘She wouldn't have dared do it if Mr Field had been there! He trusted me completely.'

For one panic-ridden moment Madeleine had thought that Logan had suddenly come back too. She opened her hands and there were wet sweat marks on the leather purse.

‘I expect she'll get another nanny,' she said. ‘But it's very hard on you.'

‘Oh dear no.' The sarcasm was heavy. ‘Says she's taking Lucy to Ireland! That dreadful place, I ask you – going to look after her all by herself. I hate the Irish. We ought to let them get on and murder each other, that's what I say.
She
's Irish. Now Lucy, don't wipe your hands on your coat!'

Madeleine got up. The little girl stared at her; she had large blue eyes, with a hesitant look. Ireland. Unconsciously she used Peters's rare expletive. Jesus Christ on wheels. Ireland. The mother was in London, the nurse was leaving. The child was going to Ireland. The whole operation was falling apart.

‘I must be going,' she said. There was a gun in her handbag. It had come in Resnais's brandy flask, wrapped in plastic. For one wild moment she contemplated shooting the woman and grabbing the child. Now a couple were walking towards them; they had rounded a bend in the path without Madeleine seeing them. She hadn't a chance. She waved to the little girl and walked away. When she was some distance up the path she began to run to where Peters was waiting with the car.

‘We found this,' Colonel Ardalan's assistant said.

It was a strip of paper about two inches long, torn from a larger piece. It seemed to be the top of a newspaper. There were six figures written on it in pencil. They were faint and the paper was very crumpled.

‘It was in the trouser pocket,' the policeman said. Ardalan smoothed the paper down with two fingers and looked at it.

‘And that was all?'

‘Yes, Colonel. There were a few household things, another suit of clothes and the wife's possessions. Nothing much. They were just ordinary poor people. He was employed by the Hilton hotel as a waiter and I asked the personnel manager about him. He said as far as he knew the man did his work and that was all.'

Ardalan was smoking a thin cigar; he looked at the end of it and then rubbed it out in the onyx ash tray.

‘His wife said he was a clever man,' the Colonel remarked. It had taken a long time to get the woman to talk beyond a frightened mumble. When she offered this information about her husband, Ardalan had been impressed. Clever in what way? He knew about politics, she said. He had tried to talk to her but he said she was too stupid and couldn't understand. She had dropped her head in shame. These things were not for women, but he had been very angry. He went to the cafés and talked with other clever men. Three nights before he died, he had come and woken her up. He was excited and she thought he was going to beat her. But he only said bad things about the Minister Khorvan. What kind of things? Ardalan prompted her gently. Her husband had called the Minister a traitor. The Colonel had given her an encouraging smile. She was a pretty girl in her mid-twenties; the hand holding the black chador near her mouth was trembling.

She owed her life to Habib's appropriation of the bed. He made her sleep on the floor and so the murderer hadn't seen her when he crept into the room. She had crouched in the darkness, too terrified to cry out, while her husband struggled and fell out of bed. She hadn't see them cut his throat; she heard a horrible gurgling noise and then the killer slipped away.

Ardalan gave her a sum of money and sent her back in a police car to her family who lived on the other side of Tehran. He looked at the piece of paper and the jumbled figures. Six, all running into each other.

He lifted his telephone, pressed for an outside line and slowly dialled the figures. He heard the number ringing. It went on for some time until he hung up. He copied the figures out on a memo sheet and handed it to his assistant.

‘Get someone to find the address for this. I believe Habib Ebrahimi was involved in some kind of subversion. There is to be a full investigation. Start at once.'

Peters left the boarding house that midday. He checked into a respectable middle-class hotel in Cromwell Road, said he was staying for one night en route for New York, and booked a table in the restaurant for two friends for dinner. He spent the afternoon in his room, thinking. He had listened to Madeleine, not asking a question till she had told him everything. She had mentioned her idea of making the grab on the spur of the moment and he had frowned. ‘Thank Christ you didn't do anything like that,' he said. She hadn't wanted to go back to Resnais. She wanted to stay with Peters.

‘What was the kid like?'

‘Oh – rather a miserable little thing. Typical upper-class child. Listen – if we don't act immediately we'll lose the chance!'

‘We're going to act,' he said. ‘But not till we've worked out how.'

He had sent her away and gone off alone to his hotel to think of a new plan. Madeleine was right. If they delayed, the child would be gone to Ireland. And there was no provision made for their escape from there. Whereas the organization had fixed the route out of England. All he had to do was use the telephone when they were ready.

At seven o'clock they met in the lounge of the hotel. He shook hands with Resnais and kissed Madeleine on the cheek. He was dressed in a suit and silk roll-necked sweater. He looked a typical American in transit, entertaining two foreign guests. They had a drink each and talked about nothing; three other couples were using the lounge. By twenty-past seven they took their seats in the restaurant. At that hour it was almost empty. Four diners were scattered around at distances from each other. Peters ordered the set menu and a bottle of wine. Resnais leaned across to him.

‘What are we going to do? Nothing will be as easy as our original plan.'

‘Taking a child is never easy,' Peters said. ‘Madeleine mightn't have been able to get away with it.'

‘I could,' she interrupted. ‘That old woman didn't want to be bothered with the child. She would have let me take her.'

It had been such a simple plan; the less complicated the manoeuvre the better. Peters had always used the shortest route to any target.

Madeleine was to make an acquaintance with the Fields' nanny; two or three meetings in the Park. A way of becoming familiar to the child. A request to take the little girl out of sight for a moment, just to walk with her, show her something. Peters and the car would have been waiting. The message would have been planted in the pram. ‘Lucy Field is safe. If you want to get her back unharmed
do not go to the police.
Go home. We will contact you.' It was so simple it was disarming. There would be no struggle with a frightened little girl being hustled into a car by strangers. She would know Madeleine and go with her freely. And by the time the frantic nurse returned to Eaton Square, a further message would be telephoned, repeating the warning not to go to the police but to contact her employer Logan Field and do exactly what he said. It was unthinkable that a responsible employee, faced with a threat to the child's life, would have done otherwise than she was told by the kidnappers.

‘Merde,'
Resnais said, repeating it angrily.
‘Merde de merde!
Everything has to be changed. What are we going to do? Cancel it?'

Peters looked at him. He waited while the waiter set the first of three uninteresting courses down before them. A halved grapefruit with a sticky cherry in the centre.

‘We're going to take her tomorrow,' he said. ‘I'll tell you how.'

4

The telephone line between Tehran and London was clearer than usual. When James Kelly got through to Eileen he could hear faintly but distinctly. It was five o'clock his time and he had booked the call at eight that morning. He had spent a long day at the company's office, going through the figures with Logan, the chief mining engineer and the accountant, who had come out from England.

Money bored Kelly, who had not been trained in its business application. He had no flair for complicated calculations and cash flow remained a mystery which he had to pretend to understand. He dealt in people and situations; there was a residue of Foreign Office snobbery in his approach to balance sheets. Logan had a brain like a calculator; he not only understood figures but he enjoyed them. His attempts to manipulate the figures so as to justify the additional investment were fascinating, if obscure, to James.

He didn't share Logan's belief that Khorvan was serious. He was sure that this was a piece of Iranian face saving, an exercise in mischief, a gamble even; anything but a proposal which had to be met or lose Imshan.

Logan had brushed his reassurances aside.

‘The bastard is out to get us,' he said that morning. ‘I felt it in his office and I haven't changed my view. He thinks the cost of the refinery will smash the deal. It's my guess
he
suggested it. I've got to think of some bloody way round it before we go to the Shah.'

Kelly had felt superfluous at the meeting which went on all that morning and into the late afternoon. He had managed to excuse himself, without Logan really noticing, so he could get home in time for the call to London. Hearing Eileen's voice made him happy.

‘How are you? How was the flight?'

Banal questions which had to be asked, part of the ritual of communicating through the telephone, when what he really wanted was to say how much he missed her. And how much in love he was. He could imagine her while they talked. He had a poor visual memory, but Eileen's face was perfectly clear in his mind.

‘I think I'll go over and stay with my father. He hasn't seen Lucy for ages. Biddy can come with us.'

‘You go over to Meath,' he said. ‘Get the ball rolling first with the solicitors and then go home. It'll do you both good. You're sure you don't need me to come back?'

‘No,' her voice was grateful. ‘No James. It's sweet of you, but I can manage perfectly well. I've made up my mind and it's not as bad as I thought.'

James hesitated. ‘Can I say something?'

‘Of course. Anything.'

‘I love you,' he said. ‘I'm not trying to rush you, but I just want you to know. Goodbye, darling, and God bless you. Will you ring me when you get to Meath?'

‘I will.' He could hear that her voice was unsteady. ‘I promise I'll call as soon as I can.'

But in spite of talking to James, and having her father's instant support, Eileen couldn't sleep that night. There were moments when old habits asserted themselves and she argued that what she was doing was unnecessary. There was no real need to uproot Lucy from her home; she didn't have to wage war on Logan. She had been his wife for seven years. There must be understanding and flexibility left after all they had been to each other. He wasn't a cruel or vindictive man. Just because he had fallen in love with someone else it wasn't a reason for believing him incapable of decent feelings.