The Riddle Of The Third Mile (3 page)

‘Just you nime it, bighby!’

Browne-Smith swallowed a mouthful of his flat and tepid lager and took stock of the situation. Apart from the proximate Australian, he could see only one other customer, a man of indeterminate age (forty? fifty? sixty?) who sat at the bar reading a book. In contrast to his balding pate and the grey-white patches at his temples, the neatly-trimmed and black-brown beard was quite devoid of grizzled hairs; and for a few seconds the fanciful notion occurred to Browne-Smith that the man might be in disguise, this notion being somewhat reinforced by the fact that he was wearing a pair of incongruous sunglasses which masked the eyes whilst not, apparently, blurring the print of the page upon which he appeared so totally engrossed.

From where Browne-Smith sat, the decor looked universally cheap. The carpet, a continuation of the stairway crimson, was dirty and stained, with threadbare patches beneath most of the plastic tables; the chairs were flimsy, rickety, wickerwork structures which seemed barely capable of supporting the weight of any over-fleshed client; the walls and ceiling had clearly once been painted white, but were now grubby and stained with the incessant smoke of cigarettes. But there was one touch of culture-a most surprising one: the soberly volumed background music was the slow movement of Mozart’s ‘Elvira Madigan’ piano concerto (played by Barenboim-Browne-Smith could have sworn it), and this seemed to him almost as incongruous as listening to Shakin’ Stevens in St Paul’s Cathedral.

Another man was admitted through the curtain and was duly visited by the same white-breasted beauty who had brought his own lager; the man at the bar turned over another page of his book; the Australian, clearly audible still, was none too subtly prodding his hostess into revealing what exactly it was she was selling, because she’d got what he wanted and his only concern was the price she might be asking for it; the girl behind the bar had obviously exhausted whatever the
Daily Mirror
could prognosticate; and Barenboim had landed lightly upon the final notes of that ethereal movement.

Browne-Smith’s glass was now empty, and the only two hostesses on view were happily supping whatever the management had decided were today’s ingredients for Soho Wailbangers, Flamenco Revenges,
el al.
So he got up, walked over to the bar and sat himself down on a stool.

‘I’ve got another one paid for, I think.’

‘I’ll bring it to you.’

‘No, don’t bother. I’ll sit here.’

‘I said I’d bring it to you.’

‘You don’t mind me sitting here, do you?’

‘You si’ down where you were – you understand English?’ All pretence at civility had vanished, and her voice sounded hard and mean.

‘All right,’ said Browne-Smith quietly. ‘I don’t want to cause any trouble.’ He sat down at a table a few yards from the bar, and watched the girl, and waited.

‘You still didn’t ‘ear wha’ I
said,
did you?” The voice was now crudely menacing, but Browne-Smith decided that a few more rounds of small-arms fire could safely be expended; not
quite
time yet for the heavy artillery. He was enjoying himself.

‘I
did
hear you, I assure you. But-’

‘Look! I told you!’ (Which she hadn’t.) ‘If you want a bloody rub-off there’s a sauna right across the road. OK?’

‘But I don’t-’

‘I shan’t tell you again, mister.’

Browne-Smith stood up, and stepped slowly to the bar, where the man reading the book flicked over another page, disinterestedly neutral, it appeared, in the outcome of the escalating hostilities.

‘I’d like a pint of decent beer,
if
you have one.’ He spoke quietly.

‘If you don’t want tha’ lager-’

Abruptly Browne-Smith crashed his glass on the counter, and fixed the girl with his eyes. ‘Lager? Let me tell.you something, miss! That’s not lager-that’s horse-piss!’

The battle odds had changed dramatically, and the girl had clearly lost her self-control as she pointed a shaking, carmined finger towards the crimson curtain: ‘Get out!’

‘Oh no! I’ve paid for my drinks.’

‘You heard what the lady said.’ It was the man sitting his book by the bar. Although he had neither lifted his eyes one centimetre from the text, nor lifted, it seemed, his flat (West Country?) voice one semitone above its customary pitch, the brief words sounded ominously final.

But Browne-Smith, completely ignoring the man who had just spoken to him, continued to glare at the girl. ‘Never speak to me like that again!’

The hissed authority of these words reduced the girl to speechlessness, but the seated man had slowly closed his book, and now at last he raised his eyes. The fingers of his right hand crept across to the upper muscles of his left arm and, although as he eased himself off the bar-stool he stood some two or three inches shorter than Browne-Smith, he looked a dangerous adversary. He said nothing more.

The velvet curtains by which Browne-Smith had entered were only some three yards to his left, and there were several seconds during which a quick, if inglorious, exit could easily have been effected. But no such decision was taken; and before he could consider the situation further he felt his left wrist grasped powerfully, and found himself propelled towards a door marked
^;
‘Private’.

Two things he was to remember as his escort knocked quietly upon this door. First, he saw the look on the face of the man from Australia, a look that was three-parts puzzlement and one pan panic; second, he observed the title of the book the bearded man was reading:
Know Your Köchel Numbers.

The anonymous Australian, sitting no more than four or five yards from the door, was destined never to mention this episode to another living soul. And indeed, even had he reason to do so, it seems most improbable that he would have mentioned that enigmatic little moment, just before the door closed behind the two men, when the one of them who seemed to be causing the trouble, the one whose name he would never know, had suddenly looked at his wrist-watch, and said in a voice that sounded inexplicably calm: ‘My goodness! I see it’s exactly twelve noon.’

For a few seconds after he had crossed the threshold of the office, Browne-Smith experienced that dazzling, zigzag pain again that seemed to saw its way across his brain, momentarily cutting him off from any recollection of himself and of what he was doing. But then it stopped-as suddenly as it had started-and he thought he was in control of things once more.

Looking out over the lawn of Second Quad, George Westerby had watched the tallish figure (several inches taller than himself) striding out towards the Porter’s Lodge at 8.15 a.m. that same morning. Uppermost in his mind at that moment-and he gloried in it-was the realization that he would be seeing very little more of his detested colleague, Browne-Smith. He himself, George Westerby, having recently, celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday, was retiring at last. Indeed, a removal firm had already been at work on his vast accumulation of books; and the treasured rows from more than half his shelves had been removed in blocks, stringed up, and stacked into the tea-chests that now occupied an uncomfortably large area of the floor space. And soon, of course, there would be the wooden crates, and the lumbering, muscled men who would transfer his precious possessions to the flat he had purchased in London. A smaller place, naturally, and one that might well pose a few storage problems. That could wait though, certainly until after his forthcoming holiday in the Aegean Isles… over to Asia across that azure sea…

But even as he stood there by the window, nodding slowly and contentedly to himself for a few moments, it was Browne-Smith who still dominated his thoughts. It had always been “Browne-Smith” with him-not even “Malaria” Browne-Smith, as though such familiarity might compromise his eternal antagonism. There would be only a few more nights now when he would have to dine in Hall with that odious man; just a few more lunches, occasionally standing awkwardly proximate over the cold buffets; only one more College meeting, at the beginning of next week- the very last one. For the Trinity Term was almost over now; his last term, and very soon his last day and his last hours; and then the moment (when it came) of looking down for the very last time on that immaculate lawn…

George Westerby was collectively conscious of all these things as he stood watching from his first-floor window on that chilly early morning of the 11th July. What he did not know at that time-what he could not have known-was that Lonsdale College was never again to welcome Browne-Smith within its quiet quads.

The taxi-driver knew the street, and Browne-Smith settled himself in the back seat with a heightened sense of excitement. He would have wished to savour these moments longer, but in less than five minutes the taxi pulled up at the kerb of Number 29, a large four-storied balconied building in a fashionable terrace just behind Russell Square. In general, although the original brickwork on the lower reaches of the walls had been smutted by traffic-fumes and smoke, the house seemed to have maintained its elegant fagade with comparative ease. The black door, with its polished brass knobs and letter-box, was framed by white pillars; and the woodwork of the windows was also painted white, with neatly kept window-boxes adding their splash of greens and reds. Black railings, set in concrete, were stretched along the front; behind which, after a gap of about five feet, the wall of the house continued down to a basement. On these railings a board had been affixed:

Luxury Apartments for Sale or to Let

Please apply: Brooks and Gilbert

(Sole Agents) Tel. 01-483 2307

Viewing by appointment only

Browne-Smith walked up the three shallow steps, and pressed the single bell, apprehensively fingering the blue card that was now in his inside jacket-pocket. He waited. But he had heard no sound of ringing on the other side of the great door, and he could see no sign of life. At this moment, and for the first time, the idea filtered into his mind that he might have been cruelly duped for the silly fool – the silly
old
fool – that he was, in going along with the whole disreputable and dishonourable business. He turned to look at the busy street and saw an aristocratic female disembarking from a taxi only a few doors away. No, it wasn’t too late even now! He could just forget it all, hail the taxi…

But the door had opened silently behind him.

‘Can I help you?’ (That West Country intonation again.)

‘I’m a friend of Mr Sullivan’s.’ (Hardly the customary tone of his Mods tutorials-hesitant and slightly croaky.)

‘You have an appointment?’

He took out the small, oblong card and handed it to her. The typewritten legend was exceedingly brief, but also (as Browne-Smith saw it) exceedingly significant: ‘Please admit bearer’-nothing else, except for that little constellation of asterisks clustered hi the top right-hand corner.

The woman stood aside and beckoned him over the threshold, closing the door (again noiselessly) behind them. ‘You’re an important client, sir, and we welcome you.’ She smiled appropriately as they moved through the large entrance hall, carpeted in a light-olive shade, with the same carpeting leading up the wide staircase which faced the front door. She turned to him as she walked on ahead up these stairs, and Browne-Smith noticed her inappropriately ugly teeth as she smiled again. ‘All blue cards are on the first floor, sir. I’m afraid we haven’t got our full complement of girls just for the moment-it’s the evenings usually that we have our busiest time. But I’m sure you won’t be disappointed in any way. No one’s ever disappointed here.’

On the first landing, she turned to him again, her eyes assessing him shrewdly, like a tailor mentally measuring some wealthy customer. Then, after looking along the corridor to left and right, she appeared to decide where the most appropriate prospects lay, for she opened the door immediately across the landing with a brusqueness which seemed clearly to betoken her mistress-ship of the establishment.

At a table immediately inside the room on the left sat a woman of some forty summers, blonde and big-breasted, wearing a low-cut, full-length purple gown; and, as the lady of the house introduced her client, she stood up and slowly smiled.

‘You’re free, I think, this afternoon, Yvonne?’

‘Thees eevening, also, madame, eef you weesh it.’ The blonde smiled bewitchingly again, showing her beautifully even teeth. She was exquisitely made up, a moist lipstick marking the contours of her sensuous mouth, her hair piled immaculately on top of her finely-boned head.

‘Is Paula free, too?’

‘She weel be, madame. She ‘ave a client for lernch, but she weel be free aftair.”

‘Well-’ (madame spoke directly to Browne-Smith) ‘-if you’re happy to stay here with Yvonne, sir?’

He swallowed and nodded his unequivocal assent.

‘Good. I’ll leave you, then. But you are to have everything you want, sir-I hope you understand that? Absolutely
everything.’

‘I’m
most grateful.’

She turned to go. ‘You must know Mr-er-Sullivan
very
well, sir?’

‘I was just able to do him a little favour, that’s all. You know how these things are.’

‘Of course. And you promise to let me know if there’s anything that Yvonne here can’t-’

‘I don’t think you need worry.”

Then madame was gone, and the back of Browne-Smith’s throat felt parched as he fought to stem the flood of erotic imaginings that threatened to swamp him. He had little help from the woman who, briefly resuming her seat in order to make some entry in a red leather-bound diary on the table, leant forward as she did so and revealed even to the most casual glance that beneath her dress she was wearing little else-at least above her rather ample hips.