CHAPTER FIVE

Going to bed in the small hours with a lot to think about isn’t anyone’s recipe for a sound dose of slumber. Was Rupe really up to defrauding Far Eastern banks and blackmailing veteran arch-criminals? I doubted it. In fact, I doubted just about everything I’d learned so far. More worryingly, I doubted it was wise to get mixed up in any of it. Cue a hasty retreat to Glastonbury? That at least made sense. And it was a comforting thought that finally lulled me into sleep.

Only to be jolted awake by a noise from the kitchen. Someone was moving about. I checked my watch. It was just gone four. Had the person who’d so carefully searched Rupe’s belongings come back for a second look? My heart began to pound.

Then the toaster popped and I remembered: postal workers keep early hours.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Echo as I staggered into the kitchen to find her munching and slurping. ‘Do you normally look this bad in the mornings?’

‘This isn’t the morning. It’s still last night.’

‘When did you get back?’

‘Too late. Far too late.’

‘Did tea with the suit stretch to supper?’

‘No, no. I was kept up by someone else. A bloke Rupe knows who works at the Pole Star.’

‘Not Carl Madron?’

‘You know him too?’

‘Difficult for a girl to go into the Pole Star without knowing Carl. He always tries it on. Just as well he’s the other side of the bar. Wouldn’t have thought he and Rupe had a lot in common.’

‘Neither would I.’ I looked at the photo-montage and tried to focus on the picture of Stephen Townley. A name and a face and Bill Prettyman’s criminal past. What did they really amount to? ‘But there are a lot of things I wouldn’t have thought about Rupe that it seems I may have to.’

‘Such as?’

‘I’ll tell you later. When I’ve scraped the fur off my tongue.’

‘All right. I’ve got to dash, anyway. How about you treat me to dinner at a Portuguese place I know?’ She grinned, something I felt I’d be unable to manage for quite a while. ‘In lieu of rent.’

‘It’s a deal.’ I found myself a mug and poured some tea from the pot Echo had brewed. ‘What’s the best way to get to Canary Wharf from here, do you think?’

‘Tube, via London Bridge.’

‘Other than the Tube.’ Her eyebrows shot up. ‘That’s something else I’ll explain later.’

The answer involved a trudge to Elephant and Castle, a bus to Shadwell and another from there to Docklands’ nerve centre. I set off in the drizzle-smeared dregs of the rush hour and arrived just as the early starters were taking their mid-morning fag break. The Isle of Dogs had been transformed from a building site into a city unto itself while my back had been turned. A mall about a mile long led me to a phalanx of reception desks at the foot of the Canada Square Tower. A message was phoned up to Eurybia’s perch on the umpteenth floor and ten minutes later Charlie Hoare emerged from the lift to greet me.

‘Glad you could make it, Lance. I think you’ll find the trip worthwhile. Shall we go? Came on the Jubilee Line, did you? Impressive, isn’t it?’

Hoare’s questions didn’t require many answers from me, which suited my less than razor-sharp state of mind. He piloted me to the underground car park, loaded me into his Lexus, weaved his way out onto the A13 and pointed the bonnet towards Essex. He seemed to feel I was in need of a potted biography of Charlie Hoare, man of the shipping world, and that took us well past Dagenham before I needed to do more than nod periodically and throw in the occasional ‘uh-huh’.

‘I go back to BC in shipping, Lance. Before containerization. Well before, as a matter of fact. Thirty-seven years is a long time. And it amounts to a lot of experience.’

‘Must do,’ I mumbled. ‘That means you started work the year I was born.’

‘’Sixty-three, yes. The twenty-second of July. I started the same day as the trial of Stephen Ward, you know. But I’ve gone on a hell of a sight longer.’ He laughed at that and I made an effort to join in. ‘I was still living with my folks in Beckenham then. The train used to run into Holborn Viaduct, as was, and I’d walk to work from there. Holborn Viaduct was right next to the Old Bailey, of course. The scrum outside that first morning was unbelievable. The trial of the century, they called it. If I hadn’t been so keen to create a good impression in the office, I might have bunked off and tried to get a ticket for the public gallery. As it was, they had to cope without me.’ Another laugh.

‘Quite a year, nineteen sixty-three.’

‘Certainly was. The Profumo affair. The Kennedy assassination. And a damned fine Lord’s Test match.’

‘Not to mention the Great Train Robbery.’

‘That too.’ He frowned. ‘Funny you should bring it up, actually.’

‘Why?’

‘Rupe asked me about it quite often: what I remembered, what gossip there was about it at the time. Mind you, we probably discussed Profumo as well. Rupe’s always been curious about the period.’

‘Has he?’ (It was news to me.)

‘Oh yes. Well, it is interesting, isn’t it? The trial of the century and the crime of the century, no more than a few weeks apart. Not that I have any shattering insights into any of it. Politicians caught with their trousers down and East End villains making off with mailbags full of money. Entertaining stuff. Unless you were Harold Macmillan, of course. He had to go after all of that.’

‘So, Rupe’s curiosity was . . . purely historical?’

‘Suppose so.’ Hoare thought for a moment as he slowed for a roundabout. ‘Frankly, I got the impression Rupe knew more than I did. Especially about the Great Train Robbery.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Odd, when you come to think about it.’

But it didn’t seem odd to me. Not at all.

We reached Tilbury and turned in through the dock gates. Hoare seemed to be a familiar face to the gateman who waved us past. Then Hoare put a call through on his mobile to somebody called Colin and arranged to meet him at one of the berths. I gazed around at the ships halfway through loading and unloading, at the cranes and gantries and Lego-like towers of containers. The clouds were low and louring. It had started to rain again. I didn’t feel in top form and I certainly wasn’t in my element.

‘I love ports,’ said Hoare, with a lyrical catch in his voice. ‘Always have. The foreign flags. The far-flung destinations. The exotic cargoes. “Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine”.’

‘They handle a lot of those here, do they?’

‘It’s a line of poetry, Lance. Masefield.’ He shook his head despairingly. ‘Never mind.’

‘Isn’t this one of yours?’ I nodded at the soaring flank of a berthed container ship we were passing. The name EURYBIA slowly disclosed itself, one huge letter at a time. ‘What are they unloading?’

Hoare glanced round. ‘Frozen meat, at a guess.’

‘What would Masefield have rhymed that with, I wonder?’

Hoare frowned, but didn’t rise to the bait. ‘There’s Colin, look.’

A car was parked ahead, next to a container that was standing somewhat forlornly on its own, away from the stacked multitude. A man was leaning against the driver’s door of the car, clearly waiting for us. He had one of those round, pliable faces that fold naturally into a smile. A keen wind was blowing in off the river, tugging at his fair hair and at the collar of the yellow safety coat he was wearing over his suit. Behind him, on the side of the rust-red container, the word EURYBIA was painted in white.

We pulled up and got out. ‘Colin Dibley, Lance Bradley,’ Hoare announced with a grin. Handshakes followed. ‘Good to see you, Colin.’

‘You too, Charlie. Though it’d be just as good and a sight drier and warmer in my office.’

‘I thought we could entice you out for a drink before we get down to business. Lance won’t want to stay for that anyway.’

‘Suits me,’ said Dibley. ‘Charlie tells me you’re a friend of Rupe’s, Lance.’

‘That’s right.’

‘He’s given us a bit of a headache with this baby.’ Dibley crooked his thumb at the container.

‘Is that the famous consignment of aluminium?’

‘It is.’

‘How long’s it been here?’

‘More than a month. It arrived a couple of weeks after Rupe paid me a flying visit. After the things he said then . . .’ Dibley shrugged. ‘I should have known he was letting me in for some kind of trouble.’

‘Has it been a lot of trouble?’ asked Hoare. ‘I mean, for us at Eurybia, yes, but for you, well, there’s no shortage of space, is there?’

‘Space is money, Charlie. You know that. Besides, there have been the lawyers to deal with. And Customs.’

‘Suspicious about the contents?’

‘You bet. A high-value cargo from Russia always sets them thinking about organized crime. When the owner goes missing . . . naturally they want to take a peek inside.’

‘What did they find?’

‘Aluminium, so they tell me.’

‘Any chance of me taking a peek as well?’ I asked, stepping closer to the double doors at the front of the container. There were bolts running from top to bottom, but no sign of a lock.

Hoare gave me a weary look. ‘No chance whatsoever.’

‘Can’t see what harm it would do.’

‘None to you, but plenty to me,’ said Dibley, reaching past me to finger one of the small pin-and-socket contraptions that prevented the bolts being slipped. ‘These are Customs seals. Breaking them’s a hanging offence.’

‘Just a thought.’

‘A pretty pointless one, Lance,’ said Hoare. ‘Customs have confirmed the contents. Aluminium. That isn’t the mystery. The mystery is why Rupe needed to raise so much money on his cargo.’

‘And mystery’s certainly what he was dealing in when he came here,’ said Dibley.

‘Time we made for the pub,’ put in Hoare, rubbing his hands. ‘I need a drink if I’m to listen to this one again.’

The rain began to get its act together as we left the Docks and drove out through the dismal margins of Tilbury. Dibley asked me some desultory questions about my friendship with Rupe, patently stalling till he could get his palm round a pint and unfold his tale of Rupe’s more recent activities. I decided to help him out by throwing in a question of my own. ‘Either of you two ever hear of a guy called Hashimoto?’

‘Don’t think so,’ said Dibley.

‘Nor me,’ said Hoare. ‘In our line of business, is he?’

‘Not sure. He called at Rupe’s house last week, apparently.’

‘Did he leave a message?’

‘Just that he wanted to speak to Rupe.’

‘And Rupe’s been based in Tokyo this year,’ Hoare mused. ‘This Hashimoto must know him from there. Could well be in shipping. I’ll ask around. Did he leave a phone number?’

‘No,’ I found myself saying. ‘He didn’t.’ Some instinct told me to keep a few cards up my sleeve. I was fairly sure Hoare wasn’t being completely frank with me. It made sense to return the compliment.

The World’s End Inn was aptly named, huddled as it was in the lee of the dyke where the Essex marshes met the Thames, with so much rain falling that it was hard to be sure where one ended and the other began. Inside, though, was the haven that is every decent pub. With drinks bought and lunches ordered, we drew up our chairs at a corner table and Dibley started to tell me what Hoare seemed to think I needed to hear.

‘I wouldn’t claim to know Rupe as well as you obviously do, Lance. He’s always struck me as a buttoned-up sort of fellow. Even a bit of a cold fish. But straight as a die. No question about that. He used to be out here every few weeks or so and we’d generally have a bite to eat here if we could fit it in. As far as work went, I’d have said he was a real asset to Eurybia.’

‘I’d agree,’ said Hoare.

‘Efficient. That’s what he was. Bloody efficient. And that’s rarer than you’d think.’

‘Rarer than rubies,’ intoned Hoare.

‘Masefield again?’ I asked. But all I got for an answer was a glare.

‘Anyway,’ said Dibley, ‘I’d not seen Rupe for quite a while, thanks to this Tokyo posting, when he turned up here at the end of August. It was the day after the bank holiday. Pretty quiet. Lots of people away. And he hadn’t made an appointment. He was lucky to find me in the office.’

‘Or unlucky,’ said Hoare.

‘Charlie reckons he was hoping I wouldn’t be in. So he could have a sniff around on the strength of looking for me.’

‘What would he be sniffing around after?’

‘Ah, well, that’s the question, isn’t it? What was he up to? I didn’t know he’d already resigned from Eurybia. In fact, I assumed Eurybia had sent him. It’s certainly what he led me to believe. He said the company was worried about a client they’d been dealing with: Pomparles Trading. Had I heard any whispers about them? The answer was no. Of course, it later transpired that Rupe was Pomparles Trading. Anyway, we popped down here for lunch. That’s when I began to notice a few . . . differences.’

‘In Rupe?’

‘Yeh. He was drinking more, for a start. I had trouble keeping up. It’d normally be the other way round. And he was . . . well, wilder, I suppose. Talking more loudly than usual. Waving his arms around. Like he was . . . high on something. I asked him about Tokyo, but he didn’t seem to want to go into it.’

‘What did he want to go into?’

‘The past, funnily enough.’

‘Nineteen sixty-three,’ murmured Hoare.

‘Exactly,’ Dibley went on. ‘Nineteen sixty-three. He asked me what I remembered of it. Well, I was still at primary school then. A few things stuck in my mind, naturally. All the tobogganing me and my brother did. It was a cold winter. We had a lovely summer holiday in Cornwall as well. Then there was the big stuff – Profumo, Kennedy, the Great Train Robbery. I trotted them out, with what little a tacker like me understood at the time. Rupe seemed to be hanging on my every word. When I’d finished, he said, “Ever heard of Stephen Townley, Col?”’

Stephen Townley. So, there he was again. The face in the photograph. The figure from the past. ‘Had you?’ I asked, to cover my surprise.

‘Nope. The name meant nothing to me. I asked Rupe if I should have done, if this Townley had done something notable back in ‘sixty-three. Rupe said, “No, you shouldn’t have heard of him. But, yes, he did do something notable in nineteen sixty-three. And you will be hearing about it. I’ll make sure of that.”’

‘What did he mean?’

‘God knows. He was talking in riddles. Playing some weird game of his own. There’s not much that annoys me more than the old “I know something you don’t know but I can’t tell you what it is” routine. I asked him once what he was getting at and when he dodged the question, I dropped the subject.’

‘And Rupe dropped it too?’

‘For a while. But he came back to it as we were leaving. At least, I think he did. It was pretty ambiguous. “Wouldn’t it be good,” he said, “just once, to make a difference?” “A difference to what?” I asked. But all he did was smile at me. Then he muttered something I didn’t quite catch – “You’ll see,” I think – got into his car and drove away. I phoned Charlie when I got back to the office and asked him if Rupe was, well, all right.’

‘Not all right, I think we can say now, don’t you?’ Hoare raised his eyebrows at me. ‘I told Colin that Rupe was a couple of days away from serving out his notice to us, that he hadn’t gone to Tilbury on Eurybia business, that as far as we knew he was still in Tokyo and that I’d never heard of the Pomparles Trading Company. When I looked into it, though, I found Pomparles on our system as a new client, with a container of aluminium on its way here from Yokohama. I was too busy to do any more about it at the time. If Rupe wanted to play silly buggers, I reckoned that was his affair.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘Seems I should have taken it more seriously.’ Then he looked at me. ‘I’m having to now, aren’t I?’

Charlie Hoare wasn’t the only one being forced to take Rupe’s obscure machinations seriously. Everything was getting very complicated. And complications have never agreed with me. Hoare and Dibley returned to the Docks for their business meeting, dropping me at the station en route. On the slow train ride back to London through the unlovely innards of Dagenham and Barking, I tried to kick-start my brain into thinking mode. Rupe had something – something big – on Townley. He needed money – a lot of it – to make it count. ‘You’ll see,’ he’d said to Dibley. But we hadn’t seen. Nothing had happened. Rupe had vanished. That was all. Townley was as anonymous as ever. Rupe hadn’t made a difference. Not yet, anyway. And he surely should have. Whatever kind of a difference he had in mind.

It had begun in Tokyo. That, at any rate, was a reasonable supposition. Which pointed to the so far elusive Mr Hashimoto. From Fenchurch Street I caught a bus to Trafalgar Square and walked across Green Park through the thinning rain to his hotel.

Mr Hashimoto wasn’t in. I was about to ask what the point was of staying at such a swanky hotel if he was never going to swank around the place, when the receptionist said brightly, ‘Are you Mr Bradley?’

‘Yes. I am.’

‘Mr Hashimoto left a message for you in case you called.’

‘What’s the message?’

‘He can meet you here at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’

‘Great. Tell him I’ll be here.’

The waiting game didn’t seem a bad one to play, given how short of sleep I was. To prove the point, I nodded off on the bus to Kennington and woke up with what felt like a broken neck at New Cross Gate.

I was still in the convalescent phase when I made it back to Hardrada Road. Rupe’s phone started ringing as I opened the front door and I was inclined to let the answering machine field the call, but when I heard Win start stumbling out a message for me I picked it up.

‘Hi, Win. Lance here.’

‘Oh.’ Why she should sound so surprised was hard to say.

‘Give me your number and I’ll call you back.’

This simple suggestion also seemed to throw her, but eventually I got the number of the call-box out of her and we were soon speaking without worrying that the pips were about to interrupt.

‘I haven’t really got any news for you, Win. I’ve met a few people up here who know Rupe, but what none of them seems to know is where he is.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m sorry, but there it is. I should find out more tomorrow.’ (Not least, Royal Mail permitting, what part her brother Howard had played in the discovery of two dead bodies in the Street area, one of them their father’s, back in 1963. I was tempted to ask Win about that there and then, but her telephone manner wasn’t exactly conducive to delicate discussion.)

‘Oh.’

‘Why not phone me around this time tomorrow? I might have something to report.’

‘All right. I’ll do that.’ She paused, then said, ‘Lancelot?’

‘Yes, Win?’

‘It was good of your mother . . . to call round.’

‘Well, she doesn’t live far away, does she?’

‘No, but . . .’ Another pause. ‘It’s good of you too, doing all this for us.’

‘It’s not so much.’

‘We’re relying on you, you know.’ (People doing that had to be either mad or desperate. I suppose the Alders counted as both.)

‘I’ll see what I can come up with, Win. Let’s talk tomorrow. I’ve got to go now. ’Bye.’

‘They’re a weird lot, then, are they, Rupe’s family?’ Echo put the question to me a few hours later, as we toyed with some appetizers in Kennington’s foremost Portuguese dining establishment.

‘Pretty dysfunctional, yeh.’

‘They sound like Stella Gibbons dreamed them up.’

‘Who?’

‘She wrote Cold Comfort Farm.’

‘Oh, yeh. Right. Well, cold comfort’s about all they’re going to get from me, far as I can see.’

‘Come on. You haven’t done that badly.’ She gave me a sparkly smile, though it failed to out-sparkle the spangles on her eye-shimmying orange top. ‘You’ve surprised me with what you’ve found out already.’

‘Have I?’

‘Aluminium smuggling. Great Train Robbers. I had no idea I was lodging with such a man of mystery.’

‘It’s not exactly smuggling.’ (I was beginning to wonder if confiding in Echo had been a good idea. But after a couple of drinks I was bound to confide in someone and Echo had no axe to grind that I knew of.) ‘As for Prettyman and this Townley bloke . . .’ I shrugged. ‘I just don’t get it.’

‘Perhaps Mr Hashimoto will tie it all together.’

‘Maybe. But if he doesn’t . . .’

‘What?’

‘That’ll be the end of the road. There’s nothing else I can do.’

‘You’ll just give up?’

‘I won’t have any choice.’

‘Bloody hell.’ She looked genuinely disappointed. ‘I thought you meant to go on and on until you dug out the truth.’

‘You’ve got me all wrong, Echo. I’m a natural quitter.’

‘Oh yeh?’ Her gaze narrowed. ‘I’m not so sure.’

‘Just you wait and see. Meanwhile . . .’ I took a big swallow of vinho verde. ‘Why don’t you tell me how you got a name like Echo?’

She shook her head. ‘Can’t do that, I’m afraid.’

‘Why not?’

‘A girl has to have a few secrets.’ She teased me with a grin. ‘But don’t worry. I haven’t got any that are half as exotic as Rupe’s.’

‘Now it’s my turn not to be sure.’

‘Think about something else, then.’ Her grin faded away. ‘What am I supposed to do if you draw a blank?’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Well, should I move out of Hardrada Road? Being lodger to an international commodities crook could be bad for my health.’

‘I don’t think you’re in any danger, Echo.’ (Could I honestly say that? Rupe had waded into some pretty murky waters – waters that might one day come lapping at our feet.)

‘It’d be sensible to move on, though, wouldn’t it?’

‘Might be, I suppose.’

‘I reckon I will. If you pack up and go home to Somerset. Has to be the safest option.’ Her face crumpled into a frown. ‘And then . . .’

‘What?’

‘Well . . .’ She gazed soulfully into her wine. ‘Rupe really will be lost then, won’t he?’