Cedric Fleming’s house was not, after all, in Henley on Thames, but in a hamlet two miles north of the town. It was approached through a wood, using a road so narrow and overhung that only the forewarned were likely to persist to the clearing where several stone cottages stood. A group of three in a terraced row had been converted into a single dwelling which demonstrably belonged to Fleming, because he was leaning out of a ground floor window feeding a small animal.
It ran off to the woods when Dick Garrick’s Renault trundled into the rustic scene. ‘It was a young deer!’ said Jane delightedly. ‘Cedric was feeding it, just like Snow-White.’
Garrick frowned, troubled by the comparison, as the paunchy figure of their editor-in-chief appeared at the door, wearing shorts and a string vest.
‘Would you settle for St Francis?’ murmured Jane, as Fleming came to meet them. ‘That was a fawn, wasn’t it?’ she asked him.
‘Full-grown deer,’ said Fleming. ‘Chinese muntjak. Pretty things, aren’t they? Some escaped from the herd at Woburn a century or so ago and colonised the woods. We have mink as well. Exotic creatures in abundance, not to mention yours truly. Come in and have a beer. You must be parched.’
He led them through a hallway to a spacious kitchen, where modern appliances stood comfortably with a wooden dresser, cupboards and table of Edwardian vintage. Garrick put in a request for something non-alcoholic, so Jane had the lager that Fleming had taken from the fridge.
Fleming picked a cigar from a box on the dresser and went through the ritual of preparing it.
Garrick asked, ‘Is anyone joining us?’
‘Red Goodbody.’
Jane said warmly, ‘Great! He wrote that terrific series a few months ago on the people who arrange escapes across the Berlin wall.’
‘The Fluchthelfer,’ put in Garrick in a murmur that was almost an apology for his habit of supplying salient information.
‘Red had a couple of years as a general reporter, but I think it was before either of you joined the paper,’ Cedric informed them. ‘He isn’t here yet.’
‘Is he coming from Berlin?’ asked Jane.
‘He flew in yesterday and looked up some old friends in Fleet Street.’
‘Does he have transport? We could have offered him a lift,’ said Garrick.
‘Knowing Red, I didn’t suggest it,’ said Fleming cryptically, adding, ‘He won’t have any difficulty getting here, but he may be late. With that in mind, I asked him to be here by three, although I don’t expect to get down to business until four. Are your bags in the car? Let’s get you settled in.’
They collected the luggage and re-entered the house from the opposite end.
‘Slight imperfection in the design,’ Fleming explained, as they went upstairs. ‘It is possible, on a rainy day, to go from one end of the house to the other, but it means cutting through bedrooms, so we more usually keep to the original front doors. These are the guest-rooms, then, or three of them. Jane, which one would you like? All have shower-rooms attached.’
‘The end one, then,’ said Jane, mindful of rainy days.
‘Right.’ Fleming pushed open a door and showed her into an airy room with green and white blinds at the windows and white mohair rugs on a cork-tiled floor. The wall behind the bed was pine-clad and fitted with a shelf-unit containing paperbacks, wine-glasses and a mini-bar. He deposited her overnight case on the stool in front of the dressing-table. ‘There’s plenty of hot water, if you want to freshen up. We’ll all meet at four in the living-room at the other end.’
‘Should I bring my cloak and dagger?’
Fleming smiled and closed the door.
Jane went to the window and looked out. It was barely credible to Jane that she was in the country house of her editor-in-chief, recruited overnight for something big. She had always envied the newsmen sent at a moment’s notice on assignments they could never predict. Her work as assistant on the diary never seemed like the real thing. Most of the stories were dreamed up by PR people wanting to push something. This one had the prickle of urgency about it – the summons to Henley, the reporter flown in from Berlin. And she – only heaven and Cedric Fleming knew why – was part of it.
She heard him go downstairs. One slight apprehension had been taken care of by the room arrangements: she was at the opposite end of the building from Cedric. Not that she had discerned even a glimmer of incipient lust in his small brown eyes, but she knew about executives and power and its supposed effect on subordinate women, and presumably so did he. She was the only woman to be invited. Having floated these sexist notions and seen them sink without trace, she felt annoyed with herself. It was no use demanding professional respect if you hadn’t the confidence to recognize it when it was given.
She started to unpack. Towards four, she checked her face, freshened her lipstick, and came out of her room. She knocked on the third door along the passage. She was sure Dick Garrick had not been given the room next to hers, because she would have heard movements through the connecting door.
‘Ready?’ she asked, when he looked out.
‘Certainly.’ In response to Fleming’s shorts, he had discarded his tweeds for cords and a shirt. ‘How’s your room?’
‘Fine.’
‘I wonder if Goodbody’s arrived now.’
‘Somehow I don’t think so,’ said Jane. ‘I have a view of the road, and I haven’t heard a car all afternoon.’
They came out of the house and entered it again by the door they had first gone through to the kitchen.
‘This way,’ Fleming’s voice hailed them from a doorway on the left. ‘Tea or coffee, Jane?’
They stepped into a low-beamed, red-carpeted room lined with books to halfway, and above them white plastered walls hung with cartoon prints by Gilray. One of the leaded windows was open, but the whiff of Fleming’s last cigar lingered, asserting his occupancy. He stood at a trolley, coffee-jug poised. He had changed into a faded linen suit that might have been one of Sydney Greenstreet’s cast-offs from Casablanca.
Jane took a black coffee and a salmon sandwich.
Fleming told them, ‘I’m afraid Red Goodbody is late, later than I anticipated.’
‘Nil desperandum,’ Dick Garrick announced from across the room. He had spotted an old sports car, a white MG Midget, zoom into the clearing with two laughing girls in the front seats and a man in a leather jacket perched on the luggage behind them with a hand on each of their shoulders. They came to a screeching halt, sounded the horn, and all got out. One girl’s hair stood up from her scalp and was streaked green and blue.
‘Goodbody?’ Dick enquired.
‘Beyond any shadow of doubt,’ muttered Fleming.
Jane joined them at the window. Red Goodbody turned to retrieve a well-filled carrier bag marked ‘Berlin Tegel Duty Free’ and an old wicker basket fastened with rope. His jacket was scuffed almost into suede and his cords that once might have been maroon had faded to coral pink. The type, Jane decided, who knows he’s good-looking and deliberately cultivates a shabby appearance.
‘Then who are the others?’
‘If you’ll excuse me, I mean to find out.’
In a moment, Fleming returned with the girls and Goodbody in tow. ‘These young ladies were gracious enough to offer a lift to our colleague, Mr Goodbody.’
‘We found him at Heston Services,’ said one, almost too convulsed at the memory to get it out. ‘He was sitting in the passenger-seat when we got back from the ladies. Cheeky sod. Gloria didn’t half lay into him. Then he told us about this pub at Junction 3 that serves Fuller’s.’
‘The Queen’s Head,’ put in Gloria, as if everyone in the room was agog to know. ‘We took ages finding it. We were looking on the wrong side of the motorway. If you ask me, he didn’t know the pub at all. We were bound to find one called the Queen’s Head eventually, weren’t we.’
‘Gloria, it was a Fuller’s pub.’
‘Now, about the little room,’ the other girl prompted.
Fleming said darkly, ‘Second on the right through there.’
‘Ta-ta, boys and girls,’ trilled Gloria, as they both set off in that direction.
‘Well,’ said Red, picking up a sandwich. ‘Now, what are you waiting for, Cedric?’