9
So far as I was concerned, it was a council of war.
Was I going to let him get away with it? No, I wasn’t! Was I going to go on trying to do a bit of good in the world by turning Terry Keegan away from a life of crime no matter how bleak things looked at the moment? Yes, I was!
So that’s why I called a council of war at twelve noon in the sitting room of the palace. The interested parties present were my dad, Robert, in the chair, Robin Thirkell, Tom Weatherby and Sylvia, my mother, who, I must say, didn’t have much to contribute. Oh, and me of course, as the person primarily responsible for the irresponsible Terry Keegan.
‘Tim’s not coming,’ Robert told us. ‘He said he wanted to give young Terry a boxing lesson for his own good, but that your friend reacted in an unsportsmanlike way. Below the belt, Timbo called it.’
‘You mean Tim started the fight?’ I asked hopefully.
‘Oh yes, but purely as a matter of sport.’
‘It was all going so well with Terry,’ I felt I still had to defend my client, ‘until Timbo hit him.’
‘I’m not so sure.’ Tom, I know, didn’t approve of my doing good in the world so far as Terry was concerned. It was as though he was ridiculously jealous of Terry or something. ‘He was bloody rude to us in the restaurant and he broke a lot of plates.’
‘Oh, everyone breaks plates to start with,’ Robin said (brownie points for him for being cheerfully tolerant). ‘I thought you were doing a marvellous job with that young man, Lucy. In fact I’m going to see if I can’t get a load of wrong’uns and help them by finding them jobs at the farm. Loads of fresh country air might make them go straight!’
‘Or not,’ said Tom, who doesn’t like Robin for reasons, I would say, of jealousy. Again, it’s ridiculous, because Robin and I haven’t done it for a long time now.
‘The first problem we have to face,’ I did my best to call the meeting to order, ‘is Mr Markby, Terry’s probation officer.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Robert nodded, making it perfectly clear that he had no idea what I was talking about.
‘Terry’s only out on licence,’ I told them. ‘He has to report to Alex Markby at regular intervals or he’ll be back in the Scrubs. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?’
Tom looked as though he would rather welcome this solution, but Robin asked, ‘What do you suggest we do, Lucy?’
‘I propose we ring up Mr Markby and say . . . well, let’s say he’s living with Robin on the farm.’
‘But wouldn’t that be a lie?’ Tom pretended to ask an innocent question.
‘I was visiting the cottage hospital out at Frimley,’ began Robert, about to embark on one of his ‘Thoughts for the Day’. ‘There was an old chap in there, obviously dying. Lung cancer. And he said to me, “Bishop,” he said, “it’s bad weather now but I’ll be in beautiful weather up there, won’t I? Sitting on a cloud I’ll be, with all angels and me singing and playing on . . . what do they call them?”
“‘Harps?” I suggested. ‘Of course, we no longer believe in harps and angels sitting on clouds. I don’t know how you could sit on a cloud anyway. You’d just fall through! What I mean is that heaven is a state of mind, a oneness with nature, and death is a passage into the universal mind-set. But not angels with harps.’ Here my dad uttered a dismissive little laugh. ‘Or sitting on clouds. But what did I say to old Paisley - that’s the fellow with the lung cancer - “Of course you’ll be sitting on a cloud, Ted, and I look forward to joining you there in due course.” All I’m trying to say is that on many occasions what many folk call a lie is in fact an act of mercy.’
‘All right,’ I told them, ‘that’s decided then. I’ll do an act of mercy tomorrow and tell the probation officer that Terry’s gone off to live on Robin’s farm. Then we’ll really start looking for him.’
‘Lucinda Purefoy here. I’m ringing about Terry Keegan. I’m his praeceptor. On behalf of SCRAP.’
‘Oh yes.’ Mr Markby’s voice revealed a complete lack of interest in my call.
‘I’m just ringing you to report that Terry’s changed his address.’
‘I know.’ This came into my ear accompanied with a heavy sigh which obviously meant, ‘When’re you going to stop wasting my time?’ ‘He has to report regularly to me as he’s still on licence, you know. He told me about his change of address.’
I thought this was a bit off as I hadn’t been able to find Terry or tell him where we’d pretend he was living. I thought I’d better say my piece pretty quickly.
‘He’s staying with a family friend, Robin Thirkell, at God’s Acre Manor, near Farnham. Terry’s going to work on the farm for Robin. I think it will be good for him to be getting some fresh country air.’
‘He isn’t.’
‘What?’
‘He isn’t getting any fresh country air.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because he has a room in a maisonette in Connaught Square belonging to a Mr Leonard McGrath, a financial adviser with no convictions or criminal connections of any sort.’
‘Well, neither has Robin Thirkell got any criminal connections. ’
‘That’s as may be. If you’d take my advice, Miss Purefoy, did you say your name was? Yes, Purefoy. I remember you from SCRAP. You’d be far better off leaving this sort of job to professionals. We have long experience of keeping discharged prisoners on the straight and narrow. I understand Keegan’s helping Mr McGrath in his financial business, so he’s doing rather well. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a great deal of work to do. He’s not my only client, you know.’
Then Mr Markby rang off, having achieved number one slot on my list of people I didn’t really like at all.
My efforts to do a bit of good in the world had clearly been the most pathetic failure - it was the second time Terry had walked out on me and by now I had to wonder if I hadn’t taken on a hopeless case and there was no point in trying any more. He’d walked out on me without a word of thanks. He hadn’t even sent a thank-you letter to Robert for all the trouble my dad had taken over him, and, quite honestly, he’s got an awful lot to do being a bishop and all the worrying he has about Sylvia. I suppose that’s something I hadn’t fully understood about criminals. They’re just not the sort of people who write thank-you letters.
Added to which, all the time I’d wasted on Terry had left me a bit short of money, so I decided to take up the job at the Pitcher and Pitcher Advertising Agency, where my immediate boss was a workaholic woman who’d been put in charge of several important accounts ranging from sanitary towels and breath freshener to garden furniture. Robin had gone off on what he called a business trip to Afghanistan, and Tom, my present boyfriend, had got really stuck into his documentary script about the London Underground (railways and not criminals), so that he mostly didn’t want to go out in the evenings, or if he did it was to observe tube stations like Dollis Hill and Neasden, where he could record the underground adventures and unusual experiences of typical travellers. He thought this documentary script was going to land him a writer-director’s job in television, although I couldn’t see it myself. Of course I didn’t say so to Tom. What I’m trying to get across is a picture of my life at that particular moment in time, which I can only, quite honestly, describe as dull and boring, with an emphasis on the dull.
Pitcher and Pitcher’s offices are in Oxford Street and in my lunch hours I began to leave the garden furniture account with some gratitude and walk round Connaught Square. It’s a big square with tall houses, some of which are divided into flats or separate rooms. You go up the front steps and you are met with a row of bells with various names attached to them. I began to walk round the front doors without any luck until, on my second or third visit, I can’t remember which, I found it, a card which read ‘Leonard McGrath, BSc. Financial Adviser. Environmentally Friendly Investments. Mortgages and Home Loans Negotiated’. I felt a sort of excitement, I don’t know why, as though life might get interesting again, as I rang the bell.
‘Who’s that?’ The voice that emerged from the intercom sounded cautious and slightly alarmed. It wasn’t Terry’s voice.
‘My name’s Julie Connaught.’ I didn’t want to warn Terry if he was up there that I was coming back into his life so, rather unimaginatively, I adopted the name of the square. ‘I’ve come for some advice about taking on a mortgage.’
There was a long pause and then the voice said, not quite so suspiciously, ‘You prepared to meet the usual fees for a consultation?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Come up then. Top-floor maisonette.’ There was a loud buzz and the door clicked open and I started to climb endless stairs. Somewhere near the top a tall, thin man with sharp, enquiring eyes was standing outside an open door. He was wearing a sort of Middle Eastern robe with slippers.
‘Miss Connaught?’
‘Yes. Are you Mr McGrath?’
‘Oh yes indeed. We’re quite informal in the office here. As you can see, I’m working from home. Have you brought the paperwork with you?’
‘No.’ I had to think of an excuse. ‘I’d imagined we would just have a preliminary consultation.’
‘Well, of course. Come right in.’ He gave me a curious sort of twisted smile and led me into a room which contained a good deal of white furniture, a large sofa and a complete absence of office desks or computers.
‘We like to keep the atmosphere informal for client consultations, Miss Connaught. This is Diane, my secretary.’
Diane was lounging on the sofa, her feet up on a leather stool. I can only describe her appearance as tacky. When I tell you that she was wearing a ridiculously short denim skirt with chains on it, torn fishnet tights, biker’s boots, a tight T-shirt with ‘Foxy Woman’ written on it in sequins and blue varnish on her fingernails which was seriously chipped, you get what I mean. Business in Environmentally Friendly mortgages couldn’t have been brisk because she was reading, or at least turning over the pages of, Heat magazine.
Mr McGrath invited me to sink into a white armchair, which I did while considering how to introduce the subject of Terry Keegan. He went on about the fee for a preliminary consultation and how he would take all the worries about my mortgage off my shoulders. Looking round the room, I was surprised to see some quite unexpectedly good pictures and then I noticed on the mantelpiece, beside which Mr McGrath was standing, a familiar-looking tall silver cup.
I stood up when Mr McGrath was still wittering on about mortgages, took the cup off the mantelpiece and read, as I had expected, ‘To the Rev. Timothy Rideout, Inter-denominational Boxing Trophy: St Crispin’s Theological College, 1984’.
‘What are you looking at that for?’ Mr McGrath was not best pleased at my interest in the cup, and Diane (did I forget to tell you that she had dyed red hair?) looked up from her magazine with obvious suspicion.
‘It’s just something I seem to recognize,’ I told him. Before I could explain myself any further, the door opened and in came Terry, who saw me holding the cup.
‘Oh, Terry,’ Mr McGrath introduced me, ‘this is Miss Connaught, come after some advice about her mortgage.’
‘No, it isn’t, Chippy.’ This seemed to be Terry’s name for Mr McGrath. ‘It’s Lucy Purefoy, come after me.’
‘What the hell do you mean?’ Mr McGrath, or Chippy as I’m going to call him from now on, looked entirely confused. Then he turned on me in anger. ‘Are you going under a false name then?’
‘Well, yes.’ I had to admit it. ‘Entirely false!’
I thought for a moment that Chippy was going to attack me, push me out of the room and hurl me down the stairs. But Terry calmed him down when he said, ‘Back off, Chippy. She’s a friend of mine.’