Jenny walked on (not hurrying, not dawdling) making a plan, senses vividly alert, antennae vibrating.
Twenty yards to go to the corner where she turned left. Then ten yards to her door, on the right.
Dim light from a single street-lamp a little ahead. Stinging rain. Execution weather.
A dark flicker, almost too quick and dark to see – the swirl of the skirts of a coat. A man just round the corner, waiting for her.
The single street-lamp was two yards off. Jenny walked on, three unhurried strides, and stopped dead.
A faint rustle and rattle behind her. Yes, another behind and quite close.
It would be natural if, now, she groped for her latch-key. But it was all a question of time.
Jenny reached deep into her trouser pocket and found her heavy gold cigarette-lighter. She struggled her hand out again, through the heavy constricting clothes she wore. Her spine tingled. Any second a thrown knife could spike indifferently through the shaggy leather, the wool, the soft pink skin of her back.
She freed her hand, holding the heavy little lump of precious metal. She hoped very hard she could throw straight. She threw.
She threw very straight. The lighter smashed the street-lamp and its bulb and the dark street was pitch-dark.
There were no lit windows here, no shops, no cars, no lights at all.
Jenny flattened herself instantly against the cold wall of the warehouse on her left. Something whistled past her, inches away. It clanged against an outcrop of wall and rattled metallically to the street.
A knife, breast-high, accurately thrown to where she had been.
He’d have at least two. And there was at least one other man.
Jenny shrugged off her pale-coloured fur. Their eyes would very soon get accustomed to the not-quite-total darkness. The fur slithered silently to the street. She stepped out of her short woolly boots, using the coat to muffle the sound. She could just see the coat, a blur at her feet.
Her trousers and sweater were dark and she wore a dark headscarf.
Barefooted (and it was horribly cold and wet) she slipped across the narrow street.
Footsteps thudded. Someone lit a match; Jenny got a glimpse of a gingery, hairy face. He got a glimpse of her coat. One of them picked it up. Her boots fell on to the pavement. They swore. They lit more matches.
‘Get the car, Roddy. Quick.’
Footsteps rattled away.
Car. Headlights. Maybe a spotlight.
‘She must be in this street still. Murch, stay that end. Cobb, this corner.’
More hurrying, obedient footsteps.
Jenny was bottled up. Light was coming, lots of it, blazing, making the bare little street as helpful to hide in as a white-tiled prison cell.
Jenny had given one huge, shuddering sigh of relief when her lighter had providentially hit the street-lamp. Now she was very frightened again.
The car must be near. The light would come very soon. Her feet were wet and cold and she was shivering with fright and with cold.
She had walked down this little featureless street hundreds of times in the months she had had the flat; but it was not pretty or interesting and she had hardly looked at it. High blank walls, almost windowless. Hardly a door.
Jenny tried furiously to remember if there was anything she could climb up or any hole she could crawl into.
Roddy, Murch, Cobb and their whiskery leader presumably knew the street even less well. Was there anything to know?
Jenny visualised, concentrating, shivering. In her mind’s eye she saw only the high, blank walls in the dirty yellow of London brick. No drain-pipes, no bolt-holes, the windows small and high, the few doorways shallow and useless. The only thing was the street-lamp.
Jenny clamped her jaws together to stop her teeth chattering. She longed for Sandro’s help and his strength and his gun. She longed to be somewhere quite different.
She stood still and listened. Opposite, by the street-lamp, a man coughed and shifted his feet.
The hurrying footsteps had stopped. Both ends of the street were guarded. It was narrow enough for one man to guard even in the dark.
It would not be dark long. A self-starter was whirring not far away, clearly audible. In a second the engine would fire and the lights would be switched on, and then very soon she would be dead.
The self-starter still whirred. The engine would be damp and cold.
‘Sod,’ said the invisible man opposite.
Two things happened at once.
The engine of the car fired, and light glowed at the far end of the little street, the beam at right-angles to the street. The car had to move forward a short distance and turn.
And the man under the street-lamp strode away towards the car. He had rubber soles. They squeaked on the wet street and his coat rustled.
Jenny sped across the street again and started to climb the lamp-post. It was not high enough to be safe for her, even at the top, but it might lead somewhere.
It was all there was.
Jenny could climb like a cat, having spent a large part of her childhood in the upper branches of trees. But this lamp-post was horrible to climb. It was cold to her hands and her bare feet, and the rain made it slippery. She wrapped her legs round it and hauled herself up, trying to be quick and being agonisingly slow, fighting her way up the slippery hateful metal. She began to breathe harshly with effort and with fright. She began to be frightened that her breath could be heard.
The car engine was being revved. They would move at any moment.
Jenny got near the top of the lamp-post and there was a crossbar. She heaved herself up more easily by the crossbar and got a knee over it.
As she groped upwards again her hand was suddenly and shockingly hurt. She sucked in her breath sharply with the pain and she nearly lost her grip and fell.
The lamp had been on for hours. It had only just gone off. It was blazing hot.
Gripping with her arms and knees, Jenny pulled the sleeves of her sweater down to cover her hands. She groped upwards again. She found she could bear contact with the hot metal briefly through the protecting wool – but only briefly.
She managed to get into a precarious crouch on the crossbar, half embracing the hot lamp. Something cracked and tinkled under her hands.
Broken glass.
Jenny sobbed with effort and terror.
The car was moving now. The glow from its headlights strengthened.
They had not really been slow. Danger bends the time-scale.
Jenny could now see, dimly, the wall beside her.
She thought the men would look up soon, but not straight away.
On the wall she could see a long, narrow, vertical wooden sign: some vegetable wholesaler’s sign – old, shabby, solid. It reached up to the gutter.
Jenny very gingerly stretched her legs. When she could no longer keep her balance on the crossbar she let her weight fall towards the wall. It was a little further than she expected. She whimpered at the thought of falling. Her feet nearly slipped.
Leaning on the wall with both hands, she found she could reach the wooden sign. But she would have to climb higher up the lamp-post before she could get on to the sign.
She had to put her bare feet on to the hot metal lid of the street-lamp.
She gritted her teeth and stepped up on to it, clawing up the wooden sign with her hands. The pain on the soles of her feet was bad.
There were bolts and brackets at intervals holding the sign to the wall. She got a footing quite easily. Then she climbed quickly and safely to the top.
The car was in the street now. Its headlights raked the asphalt and the yellowish brick walls.
Jenny grabbed for the gutter and got her elbows on to it.
She had to swing her weight far out over the street to get past the gutter. It was bad, but no worse than some of the trees (and gutters) of her childhood.
Then she was on the roof.
Her feet hurt. The broken glass had cut her arms and legs and torn her clothes. She had grazed her elbows and hurt her hands on the gutter. She tried to control her rasping breaths. Her heart thudded in her throat.
The car crawled down the street in bottom gear. She could hear footsteps and murmurs.
They would realise about the lamp-post, though they would find it difficult to believe. She doubted if any of them would be able to follow her up, and she was sure she could cope with a single attacker coming over the gutter. But they could find another way up. They could break down a door and get on to the roof from inside.
It was dark and wet and cold on the roof and the wind gusted at her viciously. Jenny kept her eyes away from the light in the street below so that she could see in the dark. She was exhausted and very sore.
She slithered up the roof to the ridge, then crawled along to the next building which was flat-roofed and a little higher. She climbed on to this and could walk to its far side. There a drain-pipe led to a fire-escape and in seconds she was in another street and running.
She found a taxi in the Strand and asked for Eaton Square.
The driver looked oddly at her bare feet, her torn trousers and the smears of blood on her arms and face. She showed him a pound note. (It was lucky she had her wages from The Joint.) Reluctantly he let her into his cab.
She wanted a cigarette very badly. But she had no lighter. The cab-driver said he was a non-smoker. There would be matches in Eaton Square.
Flavia was sitting up in bed, in her palatial but characterless hired bedroom. She was swathed in apricot silk. She was wearing glasses, and reading a slim but expensive book called Investment Analysis: How To Get Better-Than-Average Growth Without The Speculative Element: A New Philosophy. She made notes on a little gold pad with a little gold pencil.
Sandro, as a matter of politeness, had demanded entry; Flavia had laughed and refused. He was sitting in the drawing room, in a very well-cut dark blue suit from Sackville Street, a shirt from Jermyn Street, shoes from St James’s Street, and a tie from the Rue de Rivoli. He was reading a highly confidential Brazilian government publication which examined, statistically, the effect of certain stimulant drugs on the stamina and bravado of habitual criminals. He was frightened by what he read, and by the thought of the organisers of violent crime staffing their operations with fearless, souped-up zombies.
Colly, in another armchair, seemed to be not so much asleep as under hypnosis. He stared vacantly at a fly which orbited interminably round a lamp.
He was fishing out, from his very good memory, the names and circumstances of recent suicides of very rich men. There were three. All of them were to an extent a puzzle: causeless or inadequately caused. None of the three men had incurable diseases or wrecked marriages. All of them could have been blackmail victims who couldn’t take any more.
Blackmail was probably the likeliest answer for them all. But then the coincidence would be incredible. Unless it was no coincidence but the working of a single racket.
A racket which would have to be expensive and well organised.
Three suicides. That’s where it ended with big-time blackmail. Disgrace and ruin if you didn’t pay. Simple ruin if you did pay. You were caught in a jam with no way out, no way out at all. So you took a dive.
How many more? Was Matt Warren reaching this point?
The doorbell rang discreetly. Discreet feet shuffled to answer it. There was a pause full of murmured dismay and reluctance.
‘Don’t think I don’t realise I’m not dressed for the Ritz,’ said a high, clear, well-loved voice.
‘Jenny!’ roared Sandro and Colly in unison.
‘Darling, they’re very properly doubting if I’m quite what you want to see—’
The butler, with gloom and doubt on his face, opened the drawing room door and Jenny was allowed in.
Sandro sighed.
‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘Let me guess. You have been to a bal masque in the amusing costume of a street-arab. No? Then someone has tried to murder you.’ He yelled: ‘Flavia!’
‘There’s no need to bother Flavia,’ said Jenny.
‘Of course not, but she is a rich man’s Florence Nightingale. Is that a good English joke?’
‘Sick,’ said Colly, whose eyes were half closed again but who was looking at Jenny with concern and excitement.
Flavia swept in, took one look at Jenny, and gave a little scream of horror and pleasure.
‘Darling Jen, how horrible. But how lovely to see you. They been running you over? Why can’t you people behave?’
Flavia almost carried Jenny into the padded perfections of her bathroom, and then bathed her cuts and grazes and anointed her burns.
‘Honey,’ she said, dabbing gently and expertly at the sore parts of Jenny’s person (as she had a few years ago dabbed, cooing, at the sore parts of her younger brothers and sisters), ‘honey, what have you been doing?’
‘Too squalid. Quite awful. This man who was giving me dinner, simply creepy—’
‘Why go out with a creep?’
‘It’s all life. The rich tapestry. Warp, woof, weft, weave—’
‘What you mean is, you date a heel just for kicks?’
‘Don’t be severe when I’m lacerated.’
‘You and Sandro. I’m a hick, thank God, but some things I do know.’
‘Peasant cunning, love.’
‘It keeps me out of this kind of rape situation.’
‘He never. Try as he might.’
‘What did he try with? A blow torch?’
‘Weft, wharf, whoop – it sounds like something you might shout to a Welsh foxhound.’
‘I despise bloodsports,’ said Flavia.
She lent Jenny pyjamas and a robe, too large for her, and they came back into the drawing room.
‘A different bal masque,’ said Sandro. ‘I see you are now Christopher Robin.’
‘I feel like Piglet,’ said Jenny, ‘small and scared.’
‘That is something we should discuss.’
Flavia went back to bed and resumed the financial education which she needed much less than many Wall Street brokers.
‘So?’ said Sandro.
‘They got the car number. They were waiting outside the flat.’
‘Then you must not go near the flat until they are all dead or locked up.’
‘No. Such a bore. And the dogs are there.’
‘Colly will get the dogs,’ said Sandro.
‘Hey,’ said Colly. ‘No.’
‘No. On second thoughts there is no reason they should be allowed to link any of us yet.’
‘Somebody must get them,’ said Jenny. ‘They’ll want a drink, and breakfast tomorrow. And a walk. I mean, my eiderdown . . . ’
‘We will fix something. Your uncles will fix. Meanwhile you must disappear.’
‘Not forever, Sandro pet.’
‘Just so. Therefore we must consider how to destroy these rude people.’
‘Where did our rest go?’ mumbled Colly. ‘That vacation? Do you go to the cops about tonight, Jenny?’
‘They’ll be vexed if I don’t. Roddy, Murch, Cobb and the gingery man.’
‘The gingery guy they know about.’
‘Yes. So now we have those names.’
‘No faces? No voices?’
‘They must do what they can with the names. Goodness, how tired I am. Sandro pet, can Flavia give me a bed?’
‘A thousand.’
Jenny yawned. ‘So late again. The dogs will be wondering where I am.’
‘You would be best going abroad for a few days until we make a plan.’
‘You choose, love. Somewhere warm.’
‘I’ll come too,’ said Colly.
‘You have work,’ said Sandro.
Colly groaned.
The police were called. A glum detective made a note of the names Roddy, Murch and Cobb. Another detective had heard of a Murch, but believed him to be in Parkhurst. They agreed that Jenny should not return to her flat. They consented to take her dogs and deliver them to her home in the country.
They had no idea what was going on or who was responsible.
Early in the morning (film-makers’ hours) Flavia May left her front door in Eaton Square and got into the back seat of a Studio Humber. She was followed out of the house and into the car by a secretary or companion – a downtrodden young woman in dark glasses, enveloped in a macintosh, with a lot of untidy dark hair which might have been a wig.
The Humber went northwards, by St John’s Wood and the A5.
‘Jen, your rapist must be a very determined guy,’ said Flavia, as bright and disapproving in the morning as at night.
‘Terrifying,’ said Jenny. ‘Mad.’
‘Can’t you get police protection?’
‘And walk about all day with a bluebottle fore and aft?’ and me looking for a job?’
‘If you think you’ll get a job with that carpet on your head you’re crazy.’
‘Actually I think I’ll rest for a bit.’
‘Your life,’ said Flavia drily, ‘is so horribly exhausting.’
Flavia was headed for a studio in the northern suburbs, where she was to meet the lighting-cameraman into whose hands she would shortly be committing responsibility for her beauty. In a patch of wooded country near Boreham wood she told the chauffeur to stop. Jenny got out.
‘You’ll be okay, darling?’
‘A-okay. A chum will whizz up any second.’
Flavia nodded. She blew Jenny a kiss through the rear window as the Humber accelerated away.
Jenny sat under a tree a little way back from the road. She drew her knees up under her chin and smoked three cigarettes. It was cold and clear, with a light north-east wind.
‘No similar recent cases.’ But she was nagged by an elusive memory. Something had happened, something she knew about, which pre-echoed these unpleasant events.
She worried at this shadow at the very edge of her mind. She tried to grab it and hold it up to the light; it danced away, hiding its face. She decided that the more she chased it the faster it ran away. She would have to let it come, and then pounce.
She lit a fourth cigarette. The memory of something important, something relevant, something (she thought) hushed-up and nasty mocked her from the periphery of consciousness.
At eight-thirty an M.G.B. drew up a hundred yards away and Nigel Heywood got out. He was correctly dressed for the country, in tweeds and a cap. Jenny rose and walked to meet him.
‘Now what?’ said Nigel. ‘My God you rang me up early.’
‘It seemed beadiest,’ said Jenny. ‘Are you ill?’
‘What?’
‘I mean, what do you tell your office?’
‘Oh, yes, not well at all. Look, what is all this? Why me?’
‘You’re involved, pet. We thought you’d be the one to help.’
‘Mm,’ said Nigel non-committally.
They got into the car and Nigel drove, at Jenny’s direction, down on to the M4 and westwards.
They came at last, beyond Salisbury, to a countryside of rivers and rich valleys.
‘What do you and your friends think?’ asked Nigel after a long silence. ‘What is all this?’
‘We think it must be the edge of something quite big. There must be a point, and there do seem to be so many people.’
‘This Sandro – is he some kind of boyfriend of yours?’
‘Yes and no. I foam with adoration for him. Yes and no.’
‘Colleague?’
‘And that. That, more.’
‘In what, exactly?’
‘Oh, I suppose you’ll see.’
‘Will I?’
‘Nicola.’
‘Yes,’ said Nigel nervously. ‘How the hell did you get involved?’
‘Force majeure. And via Sandro.’
‘How on earth did you link up with him?’
‘We met in Italy,’ said Jenny. ‘He was a friend of friends.’
She said no more, but her mind raced back to the blood-spattered evening eighteen months before. . .
For her twentieth birthday, Jenny’s quirkish and unapproachable great-uncle the Duke of Sturminster gave her the return fare to Milan. It was August. She stayed near Como with Italian cousins of country neighbours of her parents. It was pleasant and uneventful – bathing, sailing, canasta, a little Milanese culture, and a few parties of pulverising grandness and great tedium. The last of these parties outdid the others in grandness and promised to outdo them in boredom: until dinner (for thirty-four, eaten off gold plate) was interrupted by six masked men with submachine-guns who removed gold, silver, jewellery and four small priceless pictures. Two servants and one guest, who showed token resistance, were shot dead. While Jenny herself was being robbed of diamond earrings and a small rope of pearls her despoiler’s mask slipped. She – only she – glimpsed his face. There was a muttered conference among the gang, in which the decision to kill her was unmistakably taken. At this point a powerful, rather ugly Italian, to whom she had barely been introduced, got her out of the room and away over the rooftops to safety. After various hectic episodes and several more deaths she could once again go safely into the streets. She even got her necklace back.
In the course of these events she came to admire and trust her rescuer as no one else.
‘A friend of friends,’ she repeated to Nigel. ‘We get on rather cosily. Added to which,’ she went on obscurely, ‘I always wanted to be a boy . . .
A giant beech in the home park. Well-hidden ropes. At the top, hammocks and stale provisions and a Victorian first-aid kit. Jenny, seven, eight and nine years old, becoming Midshipman J. Norrington in command of the forepeak. Sometimes she was Captain; sometimes Bloody Norrington, the pirate feared throughout the Spanish main for his daring and his brutality. She cut off her own hair with the nursery scissors, to the scandal of her Nanny.
For a time, in other trees, she was Lieutenant J. Norrington of the Hussars (or the Rajput Lancers, or the Heavy Dragoons) or a Colonel, or a drummer-boy.
She tried never, never to cry.
‘So when I found myself doing quite stern and manly things with Sandro,’ she said to Nigel as they hummed across another little river, ‘it was the most dreamlike wish-fulfilment thing.’
‘Good God,’ said Nigel.
‘And then, you see, it’s like smoking.’
Like drugs, like alcohol.
‘Won’t you ever settle down?’ asked her aunts. Mothers of other daughters, who resented her beauty, clucked at her fecklessness and secretly rejoiced. ‘You must feel it’s time,’ they cooed to her mother, ‘that Jennifer settled down.’
They meant: poor girl, unsatisfactory daughter, no steady Second Secretary, or lord of large acreages, or brewing or banking scion. They meant: what a shaming succession of unserious jobs, what a thumb-twiddling day-to-day life.
Had they known about the time she killed, by burning, a man called Rocco il Porco, they would have screamed.
As had Rocco il Porco.
‘Through there,’ said Jenny. ‘There may be a few holes in the drive.’
Nigel turned between Jacobean lodges and drove cautiously up a drive which was, in fact, in excellent order. They trundled over a cattle-grid. Deer (the famous black herd) flicked between the elms and oaks and beeches of the park. The house was quite soon visible, though still a long way away – delicate Georgian Gothic on a monumental scale, rebuilt by a pupil of Nicholas Hawkesmoor in 1740. The Norringtons were fortunately still very rich.
‘Wow,’ said Nigel, who was by no means past being impressed by the aristocracy.
‘Very cosy and dilapidated in bits,’ said Jenny. ‘The garden invades quite a lot of it.’
‘I can imagine, fabulous orchids from the hot-houses.’
‘Yes, rather sexy and terrifying. But I mean worm-casts appearing in the drawing room carpet and molehills popping up in the Gents. Sandro’s house is the grand one. No worm would dare show its face there.’
She thought about Sandro, who was fixing the second stage of her disappearance. She expected he would send her to Italy.
Sandro, since he was writing her name for a travel agent, was thinking about Jenny.
He had despised her at their first meeting, in the huge Uccello salone. A pink-and-white Anglo-Saxon, a lightweight Flavia. It had none the less seemed a good thing to seize a small opportunity to save her life when she was about to be filled with soft-nosed bullets from a stolen machine-pistol. Thereafter, for some weeks, saving her life and his own took on the quality of an absorbing and guilty game.
To his very great surprise this little, soft, over-protected, ill-read bit of fluff turned out to be ruthless and resourceful. Nothing shocked her. She was often frightened but always dangerous. She was clever, a quality which Sandro, who was clever, never under-valued. He came to adore her.
And Sandro himself?
He knew that psychologists said of obsessive gamblers that they underwent the agonies of suspense and loss in order to deaden for themselves the pang of some greater pain. This had been his state: but for gambling read the fear of death – read the game of chess where pawns are lives and checkmate is final indeed . . .
The travel agent nodded and made notes. Il Conte would receive confirmation and a typed itinerary for Her Ladyship.
‘Still cold out there, I hear.’
‘The camellias will soon be out,’ said Sandro with nostalgia.
Nigel stopped in front of an enormous portico and felt alarmed. He had no intimate experience of this sort of thing. He wondered if his palm would sweat.
Jenny’s total and unquestioning assurance was suddenly explained. She had come out into the world from that door.
‘Come on, love,’ said Jenny. ‘Nice drive, thank you. Let’s have a drink.’
A thin, good-looking lady of fifty crossed the gravel (acres of gravel) towards them. She wore a macintosh and gumboots and carried a pitchfork. Wisps of hay clung to her hair.
‘Why do we need fourteen donkeys? What good do they do?’ she said fiercely to Nigel.
‘They’re sweet. Hullo, Ma,’ said Jenny.
Mother and daughter embraced warmly. The Countess of Teffont still held her pitchfork.
Jenny had taken off her wig; she held it as she kissed her mother.
‘I see, darling, that you have just scalped an immigrant.’
‘He was pestering me, Ma.’
‘Then I dare say you did the only possible thing.’ She turned to Nigel, smiled cautiously, and held out a hand. Her eyes were startling: Jenny’s eyes.
‘Nigel Heywood,’ said Jenny.
‘How do you do?’ said Nigel.
‘How nice of you to come. I suppose there’s lunch. All fourteen wretched donkeys have had more hay than I thought there was in the world. It looks so light,’ she said sternly to Nigel, ‘and it turns out to be so heavy. How I resent being deceived.’
‘Why can’t Chapman feed your donkeys?’ asked Jenny. ‘Groom,’ she explained to Nigel.
‘Such a snob. And ten hunters now, heaven knows why. Miserable animals stick to us like glue.’ She turned to Nigel again. ‘Don’t you find that? Turn your back for one single second, and when you turn round again, more animals have joined you.’
‘Can you manage my dogs for a bit?’ said Jenny. ‘I might be going away.’
‘Lupin, Geranium, Poppy, Calvados, and what are those puppies called?’
‘Too silly. Somerville and Ross.’
‘Of course, darling, lovely to have them. They can sleep with the pugs in the Gents. Oh,’ said Lady Teffont, ‘I’m dead with cold and fatigue.’
‘Me too,’ said Nigel.
‘We’ll all find a warming drink.’
They went in. There were no worm-casts on the drawing room carpet, which was a little larger than a tennis court.
Roddy, Murch, Cobb and a fourth man were thirty-five miles away and travelling briskly.