At the moment that the man in the woolly muffler emerged, hurrying, from County Hall, Nigel Heywood arrived at his office. He was late. He was feeling sick and old. He had a headache. His sleep had been punctuated by shuddering thoughts of Nicola.
He had a brief meeting with his boss, whose eyeballs were yellower than usual.
‘Ever find those girls?’
‘One.’
‘Yours?’
‘Yours.’
‘Damn. I might have stuck around. I got hold of a very ropey old do at the Candlelight. What’s become of Nicola, then?’
‘We don’t know,’ said Nigel.
Back in his own small office, among proofs of advertisements and modish pin-ups, Nigel sank his head on to his arms.
Nicola.
At the moment that Nigel groaned as he thought of Nicola, Sandro drank his fifteenth very small cup of very strong black coffee. He was sitting in the big upstairs drawing room of the copious premises taken by his ex-wife (and paid for by Galactic Studios, Los Angeles). The room was furnished and decorated with a strict regard to uniformity of style; it seemed less a room than an exhibition of unadventurous design.
‘Che caffe cattivo,’ said Sandro, frowning at a gilt wall-bracket. Sandro was dressed as though for a strapping tramp in Wiltshire, in a heavy ribbed sweater and cavalry twill trousers.
‘If you don’t like it, darling, why drink it?’ said Flavia, who was writing postcards at an imitation Empire desk.
‘To stay awake,’ said Sandro.
‘Itchy-coo, poor ickle fing, was it tired then? You’ve been up outa bed for a whole hour.’
‘How you are strenuous! I can see I shall have no peace until you begin filming.’
‘You know what you are? You’re a bum.’
‘What should I do? Dig a ditch? Drive a taxi?’
‘Work, Goddammit.’
‘Perche? What possible point?’
‘Oh, Sandro,’ sighed Flavia May, ‘how I would have loved you if you were a man.’
Flavia was romantically swathed in miles of violet silk; she called the garment, with her usual directness, a dressing-gown: but the effect belonged at a court ball in a period of ostentatious expenditure. From the top of this pyramid of purple emerged a bright gold head and a large, soft, sexy face with shrewd blue eyes.
Sandro looked at her with affection and impatience. ‘Storekeeper’s daughter,’ he said.
‘That’s me. The hell with all flabby aristocrats.’
‘Pennsylvania Dutch. You know something? I’m surprised your religion allows you to go to the movies.’
Flavia looked at him with affection and impatience. ‘When you were my husband—’
‘I am your husband.’
‘Jack is my husband.’
‘Jack is a very nice guy, and if you must have a paramour—’
Flavia shrugged, causing a liquefication through the copious billows of silk. She turned back to her postcard.
Shooting starts Tuesday, she wrote. Great to be back at work. London weather stinks. Kisses, F. She addressed it to the elderly head of a famous medical school in Michigan. The picture on the front was of a kitten in a pink-lined basket.
‘Lazing away on that yacht,’ said Flavia. ‘Who ever heard of yachting in the Mediterranean at this time of year?’
‘It was something to do,’ said Sandro apologetically.
‘Bum. Bum in spades. It really is a shame.’
Sandro thought briefly, and with no pleasure, of the sharp recent sea-battle between his motor-yacht and the heroin-laden fishing-boat of the Ornello brothers. His bazookas had been decisive; his mate had machine-gunned the gangsters in the water until Sandro stopped him. Two of his own crew had been killed (sturdy Ponzesi, brave men and born to the sea) one of whom was the mate’s son.
Flavia selected a postcard for the daughter of a drugstore owner in Scranton who had married (beneath him) her cousin. The picture was the Paolo Ucelli boar-hunt in the National Gallery.
‘So what will you do these next few weeks?’
‘I shall go possibly to the races at Newbury. There is some furniture I want to see at Wilton. I foresee an exhausting time.’
He wondered whether Jenny ought to disappear, and whether she could disappear totally enough, and why one girl had been kidnapped and kept and one kidnapped and released.
He wanted to take Flavia immediately to bed, but he knew this was not possible.
Very likely, in the dark, they would not have seen Jenny’s number-plate. Her lights were off. It was foggy. Knowing Jenny her car would have been filthy and the number-plates, at this muddy time of year, filthiest of all.
Very likely Jenny was safe. Relatively. For a while.
At the moment that Sandro started on his sixteenth cup of black coffee, Jenny was counting her wages on a table at The Joint.
‘What I think, love,’ she said, ‘is that you owe me another eleven and six.’
‘God of battles,’ shouted the manager. ‘I’ve worked this out with the utmost care. Eleven and six? Eleven and six? Eleven and six? Where do you get eleven and six?’
‘By adding up,’ said Jenny, ‘on my fingers.’
‘We can afford eleven and six,’ said the manager with dignity. ‘I admit nothing. This is an ex gratia payment to avoid nastiness.’
It was nearly lunchtime. Jenny had consented to dispense wine for the lunch rush and the dinner rush, and to finish after dinner. Consequently she was in her working clothes, in which (or the absence of which) the manager was not interested, his own preoccupations running in different directions. Jenny had become fond of him, and he of Jenny. Their rows had been frequent but minor.
‘I’m sorry you’re going,’ he said, putting eleven and six on top of the small pile of money on the table where they were drinking Chambery together.
‘Thank you, love. I’m quite weepy too, but my feet get so fearfully itchy.’
‘What will you do now?’
‘If I could but answer. Nothing so cosy, I’m sure.’
The restaurant was like all night-time places in day-time (although it was allegedly a day-time place also) – unkempt and grubby. Jenny found it depressing, and was depressed also by the thought that all three of them, the previous night, had seen the slipper.
Tamara’s face was presumably traceable, though she was by no means a top model and her cool, smooth features were not distinctive. Could they have seen Nigel properly? Surely not. In any case they couldn’t all three hide forever.
At the moment that Jenny picked up her crinkling and jingling wages, Colly Tucker surfaced, with a succession of groans, in his room at the Connaught. To the waiter who brought him his coffee he said something about a late session at the Clermont.
He had accepted, with bitter reluctance, a job for the morning. With his third cigarette he sat up in bed and did it: he rang up the police.
He dropped a few important names. Presently he was talking to the Station Officer who had chided Jenny the night before.
Yes, the taxi in the affair had been confidently identified. An owner-driven beat-up unlikely to pass the inspection another year. Stolen 8.12 p.m. from outside a shelter in Pimlico. Unusual crime in the ordinary way, largely pointless. Recovered in Paulton’s Square, off the King’s Road.
‘May I ask the nature of your interest, Mr Tucker?’
‘Nicola Bland is a friend of a friend of a friend of mine.’
‘I see.’
‘No news of her?’
‘No, sir.’
‘No.’
At the moment that Colly hung up and lay back, apparently half dead, on his pillows. Nicola Bland groaned and stirred. Her eyelids twitched.
But her waking was hardly different from her sleeping. Her limbs felt immovably heavy. Her eyelids were almost too heavy to lift. And it was dark in the room. There was nothing to see – nothing worth the effort of lifting those heavy and gummy lids.
Through sleep and near-sleep and unhappy doze shot formless, gibbering things in lurid colours. There were faces which dissolved and became swirling obscenities, and spinning lime-green moons liquidly melting into mouths and fingers.
She dimly asked herself: ‘What did I have too much of this time?’ It did not occur to her to wonder, nor was she in any condition to wonder, where she was or why or how long she had been there.
Nigel went into Nicola’s office in the afternoon – a dismal afternoon of stinging rain – an office which she had shared with a gaunt young designer with a spade-shaped beard. He fiddled with the things on her desk – an ashtray in the form of a hand, broken and glued together; chewed pencils, chewed by her pointed teeth; ball-points and felt-pens, some half-typed sheets, some handwritten scrawls, the bits and pieces of her working day – her last – yesterday.
Nigel’s heart turned over and over as he stood looking at the busy litter on the desk.
In the evening Sandro took Colly to an auction at Sotheby’s. A major Post-Impressionist sale, dinner-jacketed, televised.
‘Some of these pictures are pretty terrible,’ said Colly.
‘But some are good. Some will be expensive. They expect a new record for Gauguin. And there is a Matisse which I like.’
Colly looked at the Matisse. A big, flamboyant fauve painting, two girls with guitars in front of a flowered backdrop.
‘I know this one,’ said Colly. ‘I know the guy who owns it.’
‘So.’
‘He loves it. He loves it better than his own pink toes.’
‘So,’ said Sandro. ‘Money is also nice.’
‘He has so much he’s bored. Why—in—hell would he be selling?’
Sandro shrugged. ‘Texan?’
‘Minnesotan. Now New Yorker.’
‘Same thing. Fashion. Someone tells him Matisse is no longer chic. What are the motives of ignorant millionaires?’
‘Matt Warren is not ignorant. This is very damned odd.’
‘Hush. Attend.’
The auction was about to begin. The gossip-columns of two continents could have been (and the next day were) filled with the invited audience. Diamonds and pink pates alternated, in row upon luscious row.
Lots came and went quickly – Seurat, Braque, two small Picassos, suavely and expertly auctioned, knocked down to dealers buying for American museums.
The big Matisse came up. The bidding started at a high figure. The competition settled down, presently, to a French dealer, a well-known London dealer, and an American who was thought to be bidding for himself.
The price grew. All three seemed determined. The dealers virtually had blank checks from their principals; the American was doubtless taking advantage of United States tax legislation.
This was the sort of battle which fills auction rooms with that excited hush which has an undertone of ceaseless buzz. The bidding went jerkily – fast runs up through the thousands, the auctioneer’s head clicking from side to side to pick up the nods of the bidders: then hanging, hanging, until you thought the world must have run out of money.
Great for Matt Warren, thought Colly. But why in hell is he selling?
The Frenchman dropped out. A group of Frenchmen, their tender national susceptibilities outraged by this defeat, got up and left.
This enabled Sandro and Colly to see the American bidder for the first time.
Colly knew him. Slightly. Had met him in somebody else’s club. Had forgotten his name.
But would not forget that great intellectual head, the domed skull under the stiff grey thatch of hair.
The American got the picture. The price was short of a record but it was very, very high. There was a scatter of applause.
‘It will go to a suitable home, I think,’ said Sandro, nodding towards the successful bidder.
‘Yeah. I can’t remember if the guy’s a professor or what. Goddam rich, professor.’
‘A very pleased professor,’ said Sandro.
It was true that the man with the lion-like grey head was accepting muted congratulations like a conqueror returned from an honourable war.
‘Yeah,’ said Colly. ‘Taking almost indecent pleasure.’
‘That is how it should be.’
‘Maybe. But gloating, chum.’
‘It is a picture to gloat over. So your friend should not be so sad.’
‘Oh, he’ll be sad. That’s the puzzle, Sandro. I have to know the answer to something so goddam impossible.’
‘I’m getting married to this thing,’ said Colly, looking at the telephone with loathing.
Sandro had taken him to Flavia’s rented mausoleum. Jenny was expected shortly. Flavia disapproved of Colly as strongly as anyone, and much more outspokenly than most.
Colly thought for a little, then decided on the best person to ring up. A man who knew Matt Warren well, and knew just enough about Colly not to suspect him of idle curiosity.
This man said Matt Warren had already sold a Renoir and two small Guardis.
‘Tired of art?’
‘I wouldn’t think so.’
‘Tired of those paintings?’
‘You couldn’t be. They’re magnificent, all of them.’
‘Listen,’ said Colly to his distant friend. ‘If Matt Warren was being blackmailed, what could it be for?’
‘Well. The idea’s ridiculous. Unthinkable. Well. Nothing financially bluey, that’s certain. He’s absolutely honest. Christ, he’s too vain to cheat.’
‘Check. I’d guess the same.’
‘Girls he likes.’
‘Are you sure girls?’
‘Oh yes. Girls he likes, but this is a very prominent guy, Colly, with an awful lot at stake. Consequently I doubt if he’s put a foot out of line in twenty years. Also very happily married, also two fine kids. Unless . . . ’
‘Yeah?’
‘Scotch he likes.’
‘He just might have got tanked and screwed someone he shouldn’t?’
‘He might, but . . . What the devil are we talking about? The whole idea’s unthinkable.’
‘Sure. Forget it.’
Colly hung up. ‘You don’t pay out a fortune for being caught screwing,’ he said at last. ‘If someone put the bite on him for that, a guy of his type would go to the police. The police would be discreet because he’s rich enough to be goddam powerful. If there was publicity he’d hate it but he’d weather it. Millionaires screw people all the time, just like anybody else. He doesn’t have to resign from his golf club.’
‘Unless there is more.’
‘Yeah. A little girl, a kid. That would be statutory rape and he’d risk a stretch. Or an accident. Jesus, what has the guy done?’
Colly looked ready to drop off to sleep, but he made another call which established the size of Matt Warren’s fortune. At least his fortune until recently. It made the sale of a picture entirely unnecessary. Unless.
Jenny came in during Colly’s second conversation. Her cheeks were pink from the cold of the street. Colly and Sandro both looked at her with unconcealed lust and she looked back at them with love and friendliness.
‘You know a thought I think?’ she said as Colly hung up. ‘The money old pin-head must be spending.’
‘Yes? Who is this extravagant?’
‘Our chum. Nicola’s. At least five men on the payroll. A ticket to America for something Colly says America’s full of. Which I quite see it must be. Comes over here himself. There must be some fantastic great pay-off.’
Sandro and Colly both leant forward, listening. ‘Go on, carina.’
‘Well, it seems to me there are two serious possibilities. One, it’s a rich man’s nasty hobby. I sort of picture a nut with an obsessive desire to inflict the ultimate humiliation on gently-nurtured English birdies. Horrid theory, isn’t it? Or, second, it’s commercial. He’s getting his money back, and with a profit. Now – big question – how do you make really big loot with a girl? Not just hiring the poor little thing out to people. The answer that makes most sense to me is —’
‘Blackmail,’ said Sandro.
‘Nuts,’ said Colly. ‘The connection’s impossible.’
‘The connection is entirely possible,’ said Sandro. ‘This is not even coincidence, caro. Think – the timing is exactly right.’
‘Accident, bite on Warren. Accident, replacement needed.’
‘And only one.’
‘Jesus,’ said Colly. ‘I better talk to Matt Warren.’
‘Can you still lift the telephone, darling?’
‘No. So I’ll have to take a trip and talk to him personally.’
Jenny went off to her final stint at The Joint. Soon, as she expected, she saw Nigel Heywood. He seemed to be having no fun at all.
She waved at him, and then became busy with hock and Chablis and cheap claret.
When she had time, when it was late and quiet, she went to his table and sat down.
She put her hand on his and squeezed it. ‘Poor love.’
‘I don’t believe those bloody police have any idea even where to start.’
‘No, pet. I’m afraid none of us do.’
‘They tried Tamara with the Identikit. Apparently it was hopeless.’
‘She may be short-sighted.’
‘She’s just dim. Why,’ he wailed, ‘why Nicola and not Tamara?’
‘Why? . . . How could an inch of height matter? A tiny difference of accent – really it’s too bizarre . . . And then forearms. Pin-pricks.’
‘What?’ said Nigel.
‘Tamara doesn’t, I swear. Does Nicola, ever?’
‘Does she what?’ said Nigel, his face becoming careful.
‘Make with a hypodermic?’
‘No!’ he said loudly. ‘Sorry to shout – but no! Of course not. She may have tried pot. Possibly LSD.’
‘Avid for sensation,’ murmured Jenny. ‘But truly and honestly no pins and needles.’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Oh dear. We’d better have some more brandy. I don’t say it’ll help, but it’ll be comforting.’
Jenny herself tried to be comforting, only she had no comfort to offer. She saw that Nigel found it painful to talk about Nicola; she guessed he found it even more painful not to; agony to talk uselessly on and on, round and round the strangeness of the affair, but a greater agony not to.
At last he was tired: blessedly groggy: and he left.
He was wearing a short macintosh instead of his long navy-blue overcoat, and he had left his hat in his office; he was not recognised by the man in the parked Vauxhall or his friend nearby who had been watching the door of The Joint since seven o’clock.
Jenny was.
She had taken affectionate farewell of the manager, pulled on some trousers and the skin of the unknown shaggy animal, and emerged into the Fulham Road. There were a few people about: very few. She walked east for half a mile looking for a taxi (her Mini was already under repair, in a small discreet Kensington garage). She was glad to let the cold wet wind blow the brandy and the smell of the restaurant out of her head.
She found a taxi and lay back in the seat and lit a cigarette.
Something nagged at the back of her mind. Something had been odd.
About Nigel? No. About The Joint? Someone in The Joint? She thought not. About the street? Something in the street?
Lots of odd things happened late at night in the Fulham Road. It would never do to get nervy. Sandro would not be sympathetic; Nicola would not be found.
She peered through the rear window. The taxi was not being followed.
Oh well. And she was tired.
She stopped the cab in front of Moss Bros. There was no need for it to thread the little alleys to her door. And it was not now raining hard.
Paying off the taxi was a noisy business, as always. The door clanged shut; the flag on the meter clanged up; the taxi’s engine ticked over with the noise of an alert fire-engine; when it drove off the engine thudded like a foreign train.
Jenny shivered and pulled her shaggy old coat close round her. She turned the corner by Moss Bros and started her short cold walk.
She suddenly realised what had struck her as odd.
A man had gone into a telephone box just after she emerged into the Fulham Road.
Normal enough.
But he had been waiting by the box. Leaning against it.
Not normal.
Jenny smelled danger, immediate, imminent, very close, very bad. Her antennae were schooled to intense sensitivity by other risks in other places; now they prickled and twitched.
She guessed she was being followed.
They did see the car number, then.
This was all because of the slipper.
The early fruit lorries had not yet started their shunting, grinding, roaring and banging. The little streets were dead quiet except for the tick-tock of Jenny’s boot-heels (not hurrying, not dawdling) on the wet asphalt.
Jenny was frightened.
She thought it would be a knife. But a gun was possible.