They ran like hell towards the entrance of the yard. The big car shifted into forward gear and the spotlight swung towards the entrance. Jenny, Tamara and Nigel reached the entrance just as the spotlight did. The car was twenty yards from them. They were vividly lit. The car’s motor roared and it leapt forward. Tamara slipped and screamed. Nigel grabbed her arm as she fell and dragged her across the gaping emptiness of the entrance. The car rocketed towards them, the noise and glare intensifying with tremendous speed. They stumbled clear of the entrance and the car missed Tamara by inches. There was a screech of tyres and the car swerved and rocked and it stopped, slewed sideways, just short of the far side of the little dark street. By the time the driver had backed clear Nigel was in the back seat of Jenny’s Mini and Tamara (moaning) and Jenny were in the front.
Jenny failed to start the engine first time. Tamara screamed again. Jenny wanted to scream too. The engine fired and Jenny accelerated away up the street as the big car behind them accelerated too.
‘Lights!’ shouted Nigel.
‘No, love,’ said Jenny.
She swerved left-handed into the main road, the wheels screaming and the little car rocking violently but holding the road. Jenny murmured a prayer of thanks for the Mini’s front-wheel drive and nippiness and road-holding.
But it was not terribly fast. The weight of three people slowed it down, enfeebled the acceleration of the tiny engine. A long straight and the big car must catch them. Now, after a short straight, its headlights blazed in Jenny’s driving-mirror. It was only feet behind them.
‘You’re mad!’ shouted Nigel. ‘You’re mad!’
Jenny cornered savagely again, into another little dark street. This took Nigel by surprise and he was hurled across the cramped back seat. The big car screeched round the corner behind them.
Jenny turned again. She was the sort of woman driver who terrifies male passengers, not because she was bad (she thought) but because she was extremely good. Now she was terrified herself.
Each time she turned she gained a few yards on the big heavy car; in every straight it roared up behind them. Once it touched – a clang which nearly upset the Mini at fifty-five miles an hour. Jenny swerved right and they gained a few yards and the big car hurtled close to them again.
Tamara screamed without stopping.
Who would ever have dreamt, thought Jenny, that they’d come back again?
The slipper, she thought. They came back for the slipper.
They turned, turned, turned, doubled back, jigged through little mews and across empty main roads.
Jenny wondered about guns behind them. Presumably not, or they would have used them by now. Why not?
They shot red lights, nearly killed a solitary bicyclist and were nearly killed by a rumbling vegetable lorry. The big car thundered after them, lights glaring in the fog, screaming and rolling on the corners, gaining with every yard of straight.
They’re trying to kill us, thought Jenny. Why? Why is borrowing a slipper grounds for murder?
Tamara screamed and screamed.
Jenny had no plan except to go round corners as often and as fast as possible. Suddenly she had a plan. She remembered a place where she had been taken to tea as a child. Tea with an ambassador. Tea with foreign cakes.
West of Kensington Gardens Jenny got fifty yards clear of the big car. She slowed and turned towards the little dark opening she remembered.
‘It’s close,’ she murmured, ‘but I think, I think . . . ’
There were big metal bollards across the cobbles of the side road. These had been put up long ago to keep out the carts of the vulgar; they still made the small, quiet street into a footpath. The Mini nosed between them. Each side scraped.
‘Oh dear,’ said Jenny.
The car stuck. She accelerated hard. There was a grinding metallic noise and the Mini shuddered and screeched and went through and Jenny drove away fast.
‘No door handles,’ she murmured. ‘Will we ever get out?’
The big car skidded and turned and hurled itself towards the side-street. The driver didn’t know about the bollards and didn’t see them in time. The car hit a bollard with a clang like the end of the world and climbed up it and the bonnet was a mess.
Jenny slowed down. ‘Nigel, can you see if they’re all dead?’
Nigel craned to see out of the steamy rear window. ‘One isn’t,’ he reported.
Jenny looked round. The man with ginger whiskers had scrambled out of the wreckage and was limping after them.
‘What a bore,’’ said Jenny. It was possible this man had a gun or throwing-knife. It was possible one or more of his friends would crawl out of the big car and join him. It was tempting to try and get him, and take him to Sandro for questioning: tempting but unwise.
Jenny tried to remember the other end of the street, and had a sudden sick feeling of dismay.
‘We may have a problem now,’ she said cheerfully.
The problem was a huge wooden beam across the mouth of the side-street, hinged, open by day to admit tradesmen, bolted down at night. It was quite high.
The Mini jolted down two shallow steps, then drove up to the beam and tried to nose underneath. The beam touched the roof of the car just above the windscreen. Jenny put her foot down. There was another grinding noise and some glass broke. Then the car squeezed under and through.
‘My poor little car. Lucky the tyres weren’t too full. Have you still got that slipper?’
‘I think I dropped it when they tried to run us over,’ said Nigel, who had forgotten about the slipper.
‘Gracious, all their trouble for nothing,’ said Jenny. ‘I wonder why the slipper’s so important. Meanwhile I suppose we’d better tell someone about all this.’
Some disapproving policemen looked at the ruins of the big car. It was deserted. Any corpses had been taken away.
The car had been stolen at 4 p.m. from an angry doctor in Mill Hill.
The rooms above the garage were deserted too. Tamara whimpered when she saw them again.
Jenny pictured the scene, memory of which made Tamara whimper. Two girls, one tall and fair, one a little shorter with deep breasts and long black hair, standing side by side like slaves at auction, like meat in a market, being coldly inspected.
A nasty scene.
Gooseflesh on the girls’ thighs and bellies. Their breasts white and pathetic in the harsh glare of the naked bulb. Their faces terrified and uncomprehending.
Jenny felt angry. This was a beastly way to treat people.
The police said the premises were empty and to let; they had been unoccupied for two months. Eventual demolition was expected. The wooden boxes were empty.
They also knew by now that the grey two-seater had been stolen some days before. Its owner was the recently married son of a Balham greengrocer. He had paid £130 for the car and was surprised that anyone should bother to nick it.
Nigel looked sick. Jenny guessed that he was also imagining the scene in the bright bare room.
The fur slipper had disappeared from the entrance into the yard. A detective remarked that if you dropped yesterday’s newspaper in this part of London someone would pick it up and find a use for it.
‘You should have come to us straight away, sir,’ said a Station Officer sadly to Nigel.
‘Well, you see,’ said Jenny cozeningly, ‘we thought there was just a chance our chum might still be there if we rushed.’
‘What could you have done, Miss?’
‘We might have thought of something.’
Nigel described Nicola. Five foot four, superb figure. No, not one of your skinny model types. No, not plump.
Long dark hair. Very pale face. Eyes dark blue. Usually wore false eyelashes. Usual scent Joy. Clothes when last seen a red mini-skirt, black thigh-boots, red and black shirt of heavy silk, black leather coat with heavy brass buttons. No distinguishing marks.
When he tried to describe her face the shorthand writer thought he was exaggerating.
He was not exaggerating.
Nicola lay on her back on a bed in a dusty basement room. Her mouth was slightly open and her eyes were shut. Her face was paler even than usual – drained of blood, of life. It was so white that it was grey.
It would have been easy to imagine her dead, except for the very slight and slow movement of her breast under the grubby blanket.
A man stood looking down at her. A sad respectable man in a woolly muffler.
He turned, switched off the dangling overhead light, went out of the room and shut the door. He locked the door.
When the police had exhausted their questions, Jenny tried a few. But there were no answers.
The police offered no theory about Nicola’s kidnapping. They knew of no recent case even remotely similar.
No bells of recognition were rung by the description (Tamara’s almost useless description) of the American with the very small head. Nobody had heard of an American with a very small head.
And London was full of big dark men, many of them frightening. Gingery whiskers abounded, on the faces of the just and of the unjust. And sad respectable little men with woolly mufflers and flapping umbrellas could be seen in their hundreds queueing outside cinemas where nude films were shown.
At last, late at night, they were all taken home in police cars.
‘You should have come to us straight away, Miss. What you did was dangerous and irresponsible.’
‘I know, I weep. Good night, Officer.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you go to the police straight away?’ asked Sandro. He seemed quite angry.
Jenny was lying almost horizontally in a deep armchair rendered deeper by the collapse of its springs. ‘Don’t rail at me, love. The good blue gentlemen would have clumped up demanding entry, and no useful purpose would have been served.’
‘No useful purpose was served. And you damned nearly got yourself killed, you and your stupid little friends. Suppose they’d had even one gun?’
Jenny shuddered. ‘The very thought makes me thirsty. Be a love and get me another whisky and soda.’
‘You drink too much.’
Sandro nevertheless got up from the sofa where he was lying and prowled over to the cupboard where Jenny kept her drinks.
‘Get me one too, will you, chum?’ said Colly, apparently waking up.
Sandro grunted. As he squirted soda into two glasses he looked as though he might at any moment explode into violent physical activity or into a passion of rage, or burst out singing, or seduce someone.
Colly looked incapable of raising a full glass to his lips.
They were in Jenny’s flat, which was the top floor of a rickety office building near Covent Garden market. The fruit lorries made a nightmare noise early in the morning, but it was large and bright and could be made warm. It was very feminine and untidy and quite often full of people who were surprised to find each other at the same party.
‘By the way,’ said Jenny, ‘are either of you staying here?’
‘Not me,’ said Colly.
‘Good God, no indeed! Excitement I can bear, but discomfort and squalor are insupportable.’
‘This flat is not squalid.’
It was not altogether squalid. The furniture was ill-matched and shabby, but gay-coloured and clean. The pictures on the walls, many hanging quite straight, were a charming, higgledy-piggledly mixture of things Jenny liked: Some had cost her shillings or even pence; one, a Raeburn with a hilly landscape behind a solemn elderly man, was worth several thousand pounds.
Opening off the sitting-room was a passage and Jenny’s bedroom, another bedroom, a bathroom, and a big kitchen, and there was a door opening onto the steep wooden stairs which led down behind the floors of offices to the street. The street was often covered with the bruised and oozing remnants of fruit and vegetables – with cabbage leaves and brussels sprouts, with burst plums and the awful ruins of tomatoes. Upstairs in Jenny’s flat none of these things were permitted. Her own bedroom was large and soft and frilly and brightly coloured, and full of old teddy bears, and photographs of ponies and puppies, and stockings and underwear. A tiara hung negligently on the corner of a looking-glass; on the other corner hung a lot of dog-leads. On the bed lay six King Charles spaniels in a heap. It was the bedroom of a girl who had had a happy childhood.
‘You both have such boring rich ideas,’ said Jenny. ‘One frayed curtain and you assume a place is full of cockroaches. Where are you staying?’
‘With Flavia, where else?’ said Sandro.
‘Where is Flavia?’ asked Colly.
‘She has taken very nearly the whole of—which square?’
‘Well, which square?’
‘The square Flavia has taken very nearly the whole of. For several months. Eaton Square.’
‘Are you two matey together?’ asked Jenny.
‘We adore each other.’
‘Is Flavia making a film?’
‘The largest in history. She is to be queen – which queen is she to be?’
‘Well, which queen?’
‘Some queen. Absurd miscasting, as I tell her. She will always be an American bourgeoisie. You must know about her film. Even you, Jenny, can hardly have evaded the oceans of sickening publicity.’
‘I can hardly read, you know. I hardly ever went to any sort of school.’
‘Shocking. I really deplore the English upper classes.’
‘You love the English upper classes. There’s no snob like a Wop snob.’
Sandro laughed.
‘So neither of you are staying. Beasts. Just as well, really. I’ve had enough excitement for one night.’
‘Abduction, attempted murder, so tiring.’
‘Yes, I’m bushed. And so, so thirsty, beautiful Sandro . . .
‘Get your own drink.’
‘Colly, Angel . . . ?’
‘Don’t look at me, darling. Pleasant though I know you find it. I couldn’t move to save your life. That telephone this morning really took it out of me. I’d forgotten telephones could get so goddam heavy.’
‘So what,’ said Jenny from the sideboard, ‘do we make of this evening’s fun and games?’
‘What I find strange,’ said Sandro, ‘is their fussiness. They catch two plump young trout and they throw one back.’
‘We know they only needed one.’
‘Who only needs one? How is it possible only to need one? One for what?’
‘She’s gonna make all their fortunes,’ said Colly, ‘and she’s standing there naked when they say so. I don’t think we have any doubts what her job’s gonna be.’
‘Sure, caro, but why only one and why that one?’
‘They checked her health,’ said Jenny, ‘they checked her accent, they checked her arms for hypodermic jabs.’
‘Is she on the hard stuff?’
‘Oh no. Not a girl-friend of Nigel’s. I mean, I shouldn’t think so. He’s so earnestly respectable. Tamara certainly not. In spite of being such a dish she’s really rather a po-faced girl.’
‘Po-faced? What is this new misuse of your language?’
‘There’s no one so pompous, is there, as a pompous Wop . . . A large, well-organised, unarmed murderous gang who kept a clever nutty girl and tossed a dull one back into the water. Loopy behaviour.’
‘Loopy? Please attempt to address me in English.’
Jenny laughed and they all lay back (except that Colly had not moved) and thought quite hard about the implications of the kidnapping.
‘They were all ready, weren’t they? Ready to leap into instant action.’
‘At the command of an American. Who talked of shipping her home.’
‘He came over to get one, perhaps.’
‘Customs, immigration,’ said Sandro. ‘Someone ought to remember a man with a tiny head.’
‘Customs, immigration,’ said Jenny. ‘Someone may see Nicola.’
‘I think not,’ said Sandro.
‘America’s full of girls,’ said Colly with evident effort. ‘Every goddam state in the Union is lousy with girls who peel off and tie themselves in knots for a few bucks. If all this American needs is a naked lady, why go to all the trouble and expense?’
‘He wants English girls,’ said Jenny. ‘And he’s fussy about accent.’
‘Would their accents be different, those two?’ said Sandro.
‘Oh yes,’ said Jenny. ‘A little, but a lot, if you know what I mean.’
‘Doesn’t mean a goddam thing to me,’ said Colly.
‘But we must accept that it is important to them,’ said Sandro. ‘So is that slipper. Why did they try to kill you because you had one slipper?’
‘Didn’t want to break the pair,’ said Colly. ‘Nobody wants to lose just the one. I speak as a man with a dozen left gloves.’
‘What a terrible pity,’ said Sandro, ‘your Nigel did not hold on to it. It would lead us to them, I think.’
‘How? Why?’
‘I suppose we must find out.’
‘The beautiful blonde,’ said Colly, ‘is eliminated from the Miss Imported Call Girl contest because she speaks a little common. Or because she is not full of pin-holes. Or because she is full of pin-holes. Or because she is too tall. This guy is goddam hard to please.’
‘We will not easily find any of these men,’ said Sandro. ‘We cannot argue from the men to the racket. Therefore we must argue from the racket to the men.’
‘I wish I knew what any of that meant,’ said Jenny.
‘I have to go home, do I?’ said Colly faintly, ‘and hunt all over the United States for a small-headed guy running a one-girl brothel? Who, on his way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, has only one slipper?’
‘You know this Nicola,’ said Sandro to Jenny.
‘Yes. Not well.’
‘Describe her exactly.’
Jenny described her physically, then in terms of character and habits. ‘Fast-moving girl,’ she said. ‘Apt to be where the action is. Noticeable. Rather a—a desperate hunt for fun, I think. Drinks quite a lot, smokes too much. Gambles a bit, a late-night girl.’
‘She does not sound clever.’
‘She is clever. Clever, neurotic, a bit of an emotional mess I should think. That’s why Nigel was good for her. He’s dull but he’s intelligent and square. Sane. Normal.’
‘He may be useful. This girl. She is smart?’
‘Clothes? Oh yes. Spends a lot of money.’
‘I mean socially. She is ben nata?’
‘Oh, snobwise, yes, very much so. A bit above Nigel’s station really. What worries me is that this sort of thing, whatever it is she’s in for, may tumble her right over the edge.’
The light in the basement room was switched on again.
The man with the woolly muffler tiptoed to the bed. Nicola lay white and lifeless. The man pulled back the blanket. Nicola was in bra and pants only. She was beautiful. The man sat down on the bed beside her. He began pinching and caressing and exploring her flaccid body. His hands were obscene and he did obscene things with them. He was dribbling slightly and the breath whistled through the hairs of his nose.
Footsteps, loud and commanding footsteps, approached along the passage outside.
The man in the woolly muffler stood up and whipped the blanket back over Nicola and smoothed it and turned to face the big dark man who came in.
‘In final essence,’ said Sandro, ‘this girl is worth finding?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Jenny. ‘Poor little Nigel, of course we must find her. Besides, they’ll want more. I mean, this is horrid, it ought to be stopped. And maybe he’s already got several. I wonder how many juicy girls have disappeared recently.’
‘The police say none.’
‘They say none they know of. None quite like that.’
Sandro shrugged. ‘Girls disappear all the time. It is part of the British way of life. They disappear to be tarts, to take off their clothes in nightclubs, to drinks baths—’
‘Baths, pet? To drink baths!’
‘I mean meths. The country crawls with girls who have disappeared.’
‘The question is whether America does too. Oh dear, how difficult.’
‘Too difficult for this time of night,’ said Colly. ‘I’m gonna creep to bed.’
‘I also,’ said Sandro.
‘With Flavia?’
‘Probably not.’ Sandro sighed. ‘A film star with bourgeois morals. I detest everything about all Anglo-Saxons.’
He put on his fur-lined coat, which was less rigorously English than his other clothes. He and Jenny kissed lightly.
‘Good night, fatty.’
‘Good night, carina. If they got your car number you will be murdered within forty-eight hours.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of the slipper.’
‘Yes, it’s rather a worry. Love to Flavia.’
Colly had struggled to his feet. His short, mousy hair stood on end and he yawned cavernously. He also kissed Jenny, but he groaned as he did so.
‘Good night, Tarzan,’ said Jenny.
Colly waved as though his hand were heavy. He and Sandro disappeared down the wooden stairs.
Jenny felt suddenly too tired to move. She sank back among the collapsed springs of the armchair. She brooded about the evening, trying to make sense of it. Then she fell asleep. Presently she shifted in her sleep and a spring twanged and woke her. She shivered and stretched and got up and went into her bedroom. She threw off her clothes, sending them into various corners of the room. She got into bed without much disturbing all the King Charles spaniels who were asleep on top of it. Their weight and warmth was comforting. She fell asleep instantly.
Early next morning a man in a woolly muffler, and with a flapping umbrella, and with a look of sad respectability, went to County Hall and looked up the registered owner of a car whose number he had.