12
‘I just rang to see how you were getting on with your client. It’s young Terry Keegan, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is. I think we’ve reached a pretty good understanding.’
‘He’s kept out of trouble?’
‘So far, yes. I don’t think he’s in any trouble at all.’
Gwenny had called me at Pitcher’s and, for the moment, I seemed able to give satisfactory answers to all her questions. Then she said, ‘We’re having a bit of trouble here at SCRAP.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Orlando Wathen resigned. He suddenly announced that the main cause of crime was the soft and soppy liberal view we took of it in the sixties.’
‘Is that true?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t begin to think about it now. Anyway, Orlando wrote to the Daily Telegraph calling for life sentences for a second conviction for house-breaking.’
‘Did that have something to do with the fact that his house was broken into?’
‘I think it may have done. Anyway, we couldn’t have the head of SCRAP saying things like that, so he resigned and we’re looking for a replacement. That’s why I rang you actually.’
‘Why?’
‘Alex Markby said there’s a wonderful chap called Leonard McGrath. Apparently he’s done good things for the environment. But he also said that he’d found a job for your client, Terry Keegan, and helped him go straight since he came out of the Scrubs. Do you know anything about him?’
‘Oh yes. I know quite a lot about Leonard McGrath.’
‘Alex thinks he has great organizing ability. Is that right?’
‘I should say his organizing ability is terrific.’
‘That’s good to know. You haven’t met him, have you?’
‘Oh yes. I’ve met him.’
‘Do you think he’d be interested in helping young criminals? Will you have a word with him?’
‘Yes, I will. And I think he might be very interested.’ I had to put the phone down before I started to giggle.
Anyway, I had more important things to do than talk to Gwenny when I felt, quite honestly, more than a little guilty having broken the first rule of a praeceptor. I had to go down to my parents in Aldershot because it was the weekend and I meant to restore at least one of Terry’s ill-gotten gains to its rightful owner.
‘Timbo will be delighted,’ Robert said when I got down to Aldershot.
‘Delighted to get his pot back?’
‘Delighted that young Terry repented. There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repents than over ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance.’
‘I’m not so sure about his repenting. Apparently he couldn’t get much for the cup, even down the pub on a Saturday night.’ I was trying to bring Robert down to the harsh reality of the situation, but he was off on another ‘Thought for the Day’.
‘Rather odd that, you may think. I mean, it seems, on the face of it, a bit unfair on the ninety and nine just persons who don’t get God’s attention at all. What He really likes are the sinners. Are we to understand that He created them in order that He might have the pleasure of seeing them repent? How many of us are troubled, deeply troubled, by that thought?’
‘Not many of us,’ would have been my answer. ‘In fact hardly anyone at all.’ But I didn’t want to spoil what Robert told me would be the theme of his Sunday sermon in the cathedral. Then he changed the subject.
‘So you have done a splendid job with young Terry, Lucy. And I’m sure both God and my chaplain are extremely grateful.’
I could have woken Robert up to the reality of life as led by members of the Beau Brummell Club, but this would have been unnecessarily cruel. ‘And tonight we’re invited for drinks with the dear Smith-Aldeneys,’ my dad told me. ‘You remember them, don’t you, Lucy?’
‘Of course. I used to go to pony club with Persephone.’
‘They’re good people. She does a lot for charity and he’s chair of the Save the Cathedral Committee. They do excellent work, but I’m afraid they’re part of the ninety and nine just persons who bore God. They bore me too, if I have to be entirely honest about it.’
‘But we’re going to drinks with them?’
‘In this life, Lucy, we must take the rough with the smooth,’ my dad told me. ‘We can only pray for something more entertaining in the life to come.’
There was nothing really wrong with the Smith-Aldeneys. In fact they did everything right. They lived in just the right size of converted farmhouse to the south, that is to say the better, side of Aldershot. They had just the right amount of land, a large garden and a paddock for the ponies. They had just the right amount of money since Christopher Smith-Aldeney worked for a City bank, and the right number of children. Persephone, who was my age and just returned from backpacking in Cambodia, an experience which seemed to have changed her not at all, and a younger son, Billy, who was reading economics at Cardiff. Their mother, Olive Smith-Aldeney, controlled the whole family with determined charm. You could be quite sure at a party of the Smith-Aldeneys that nothing embarrassing or outrageous would occur and probably nothing very interesting either.
Then the usual harmless calm of drinks with the Smith-Aldeneys was broken, of course, by Robin, who said, ‘There’s a sort of glow about you, Lucy. Have you been fucking that little criminal of yours?’
‘Of course not! Don’t be ridiculous!’ I told him. Fortunately Persephone came up to us and wanted to discuss three-day eventing and the time when we were all at pony camp together, and Robin drifted away before he could come out with any more stupid and unfounded accusations.
And then of course Christopher Smith-Aldeney came up and asked if I’d like to see his collection of ancient coins and ‘my new acquisition’. Long ago, when I was about fourteen, I’d shown a sort of polite interest when Christopher showed me his coins and he had been sure that I was a budding numismatist, if that’s the right word. So I never visited Fallowfield, the Smith-Aldeneys’ home, without Christopher opening his glass cases and taking me on a brisk tour through the ducats and Louis d’ors, the crowns and the florins, the Arab coins stamped with Christ by the crusaders, the first pounds of the British Raj in India and the ancient coinage of Mesopotamia centuries before it had been turned into Iraq, as Christopher was never tired of telling me. But now there was something entirely new - a Roman coin with the head of the Emperor Claudius discovered by a metal detector in a field near St Albans. He told me what he’d paid for it and said it had given an entire lift to his collection.
‘Don’t you think it’s beautiful, Lucy?’ Christopher said, and although it seemed a rather ordinary bit of bronze to me, I agreed that it brought the whole history of the Roman Empire back to the drinks party in Fallowfield. With that he gave me the squeeze which brought him into close contact with my tits and the sort of distinctly damp kiss I used to get when I came back to the farmhouse after gymkhanas and pony club events with Persephone.
However, just as Christopher was uttering the corniest of lines and giving me the usual not entirely welcome squeeze, Mrs Smith-Aldeney came up considerably worried, not about her husband’s squeezing but about the conduct of my mother. ‘Sylvia says she didn’t come out to drink sherry in glasses the size of eggcups and could she have a G&T. I told her I’d ask you to find something or other.’ At which her husband put his Claudius coin down on the table beside his glass cases and went buzzing off in search of a bottle of gin.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I told Olive after Christopher had gone.
‘What’ve you got to be sorry about, Lucinda?’ Olive wasn’t in the best of tempers.
‘My mum,’ I told her.
‘Oh, don’t you worry.’ Olive became most sympathetic. ‘We’ve got used to her.’
I left the party as Christopher was administering a large gin to my mother, and I drove myself straight back to London as I had to be up early for a breakfast meeting with the Tell-All Beachwear account. I’d hardly started when my mobile rang its little tune (‘Toreador’) and Christopher was sounding desperate.
‘Lucy!’ he said. ‘I’ve lost the Claudius coin.’
‘You can’t have done.’
‘I thought I put it back in the case. But when I’d given your mother her drink and talked to a few people and the party was nearly over I looked and it wasn’t there.’
‘How extraordinary!’
‘You didn’t see what I did with it?’
‘I’m afraid not. But I’m sure it will turn up somewhere.’
‘I’ve searched every corner of the room.’
‘And you couldn’t find it?’
‘Nothing so far. It’s a complete mystery.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose it is.’