Clifford’s taxi was proceeding fast through the Christmas town. She thought of the young Russians in London: all on a crash course in westernisation. There were many fine students among them and she envied them all. At home, one third of a bottle of Cava awaited her, and a probable electronic onslaught from Dorothy Carter, plus a slightly more seemly one from Rachel Reade. But none of that was important; she had brought matters to the tipping point in a very big game, and it was really quite sexy in the sense not only of excitement but also mutuality – because this would be the moment of truth for her every bit as much as for Reynolds. He had been in a bit of a state when he’d called. He apparently had to speak to Croft because he was in danger of ‘knackering the case’. It wasn’t like him to swear, if that counted as swearing.
He would be going to France, of course. She had made sure of that with Croft, who really had been at the Commissioner’s dinner, and whose phone really had been turned off. But Reynolds had got on to his personal assistant, Celia Walsh, and Celia had gone to the restaurant – Langan’s Brasserie, quaintly enough – in person and dug him out. So she would be sending Celia Walsh a bottle of Berry Brothers claret. The ‘ordinary’ would do.
Reynolds had been keen to find out where she was, but his pride stopped him from asking. Reynolds was proud, also rather vain. She kept noticing that the little mirror on the mantelpiece at Down Street had been moved. The trouble was that he didn’t accept these as facets of his character, whereas Quinn had regarded fancying himself as not being any sort of problem at all. It was vital that Reynolds should not know where she’d been. Nothing must deflect him from following the path he was on. In any case her endeavours might not come to anything …
She had in fact spent the past two hours on the borders of Paddington and the West End; on the borders of London and the rest of the world, in other words. International London. There’d been little evidence of Christmas in those streets, but they were always Christmassy in their own way: brightly lit all-night pharmacies; Turkish delight in snowy piles in shop windows; teapots shaped like Aladdin’s lamps; tea drunk in glasses in decorative silver holders; muffled-up men sitting outside cafés smoking those … she wanted to call them hubble-bubbles … sending clouds of white smoke flowing through the cold, dark-blue air. Arabs predominated on those streets; but the big synagogue was there too, and all sorts lived in the mysterious, half-smart mansion flats of the district.
Her contact had been Russian, and confined to a wheelchair. A silent helper had waited outside the café, which had been Mitteleuropean, with gloomy wood panelling, and many cakes laid out on a long, white-cloth-covered table, like the food at a funeral. The other customers had been vampiric, elderly Mitteleuropeans, with a couple of fat Mitteleuropean grandchildren. The former used knives and forks to eat their cakes, the latter their fingers. It had been tremendously hot; the till, and the girl who worked the till, were genteelly concealed behind a red velvet curtain. Sombre classical music was emanating from the background – a sort of massed, buried choir. Her contact had selected a strawberry square. That had been at 7.30 p.m., an odd time to be eating a strawberry square, Clifford had thought. Then again, she herself had been tempted by the coffee éclairs, but she had come directly from Claridge’s, where she had eaten a bowl full of crisps, so she just had a coffee. Then the envelopes had been exchanged. Hers had been Smythson, of course. Watermarked cream wove. The other envelope had just been any old scruffy brown thing.