Single & Single Read online

  “I need to see her,” he said.

  “You can see her Saturday.”

  “I won’t wake her. I just need to see her.”

  She was shaking her head and grimacing to show that he disgusted her.

  “No,” she said.

  “I promise,” he replied, not sure what he was promising. They were speaking in damped voices for Carmen’s sake. Heather clutched her nightgown at her throat to block his view of her breasts. He smelt cigarette smoke. She’s taken it up again. Her long hair, naturally dark brown, was dyed blonde. She had brushed it before letting him in. “I’m going to have it cut short, I’m sick of it,” she’d say to get him going. “Not an inch,” he’d say, stroking it, folding it against her temples, feeling his lust collect. “Not half an inch. I love it as it is. I love you, I love your hair. Let’s go to bed.”

  “I’ve had a threat,” he said, lying the way he’d always lied to her, in a tone to discourage question. “People I got mixed up with in Australia. They’ve found out where I live.”

  “You don’t live here, Oliver. You visit when I’m out, not when I’m in,” she retorted, as if he had propositioned her.

  “I need to make sure she’s safe.”

  “She’s safe, thank you. As safe as she can be. She’s beginning to get used to the idea. You live in one place, I live in another place, Jillie helps me look after her. It’s hard, but she’s working it out.”

  Jillie the au pair.

  “It’s these people,” he said.

  “Oliver. Ever since I’ve known you there’s been little green men who were going to come and get us in the night. It’s got a name, you know. Paranoia. Perhaps it’s time you talked to somebody about it.”

  “Has anyone funny called? Strange inquiries—people coming to the door, asking questions, offering you unlikely things to buy?”

  “We’re not in a movie, Oliver. We’re ordinary people living ordinary lives. All of us except you.”

  “Has anyone called?” he repeated. “Phoned? Asked for me?” He caught the flicker of a hesitation in her eye before she answered.

  “A man telephoned. Three times. Jillie got him.”

  “For me?”

  “Well, it wasn’t me, was it, or I wouldn’t be telling you.”

  “What did he say? Who was he?”

  “‘Tell Oliver to ring Jacob. He knows the number.’ I didn’t know you’d got a Jacob tucked away. I hope you’ll be very happy.”

  “When did he call?”

  “Yesterday and the day before. I was going to tell you when we next spoke. All right, I’m sorry. Go on, then. Look at her.” But he didn’t move except to grasp her upper arms. “Oliver,” she protested, pulling angrily free of him.

  “A man sent you roses. Last week,” he said. “You rang me.”

  “That’s right. I rang you and told you about it.”

  “Tell me again.”

  She heaved a theatrical sigh. “A limousine brought me some roses with a nice card. I didn’t know who they were from. Right?”

  “But you knew they were coming. The firm had rung up in advance.”

  “The firm had rung up. Correct. ‘We’re delivering some flowers for Hawthorne and when will somebody be in?’”

  “It wasn’t a local firm.”

  “No, it was a London firm. It wasn’t Interflora, it wasn’t the little green men. It was special blooms being sent all the way from London by a firm that specializes in special blooms, and when will I be in to receive them? ‘You’re joking,’ I said. ‘You’ve got the wrong Hawthorne.’ But they hadn’t, it was us. ‘A Mrs. Heather and a Miss Carmen,’ they said. ‘And how about six tomorrow evening?’ I still thought it was a joke or a mistake or a selling gimmick, even after I rang off. Six o’clock on the dot next day this limousine rolls up.”

  “What kind?”

  “A shiny great Mercedes—I told you, didn’t I?—and a chauffeur in a gray uniform like one of the ads. ‘You ought to wear gaiters,’ I said to him. He didn’t know what gaiters were. I told you that bit too.”

  “What color?”

  “The chauffeur?”

  “The Mercedes.”

  “Metallic blue, polished like a wedding car. The chauffeur was white, his uniform was gray and the roses were creamy pink. Long stemmed, scented, just opened, and a tall white china vase to put them in.”

  “And a note.”

  “That’s right, Oliver, a note.”

  “Not signed, you said.”

  “No, Oliver, I didn’t say it wasn’t signed. I said it was signed. ‘To two beautiful ladies from their devoted admirer’ on the firm’s card, Marshall & Bernsteen, Jermyn Street, W1. When I rang them to find out who the admirer might be, they said they weren’t at liberty to reveal the name of the customer even if they knew it. Lots of flowers went out that way from anonymous customers, particularly round St. Valentine’s Day, which it wasn’t, but their policy was the same all year. Right? Satisfied?”

  “Have you still got them?”

  “No, Oliver. I haven’t. I had a little moment, as you know, when I thought they might have been from you. Not because I wanted them to be particularly, but you’re the only person I know who’s mad enough to make a gesture like that. I was mistaken. It wasn’t you, as you were kind enough to tell me in very clear terms. I thought of sending them back or giving them to the hospital, but then I thought to hell with it, at least somebody loves us, and I’ve never seen roses like that in my life, and they were sent to us, so I did everything I could think of to make them last. I bashed the ends of the stalks and mixed the little packet of powder into the water and kept them in a cool place. I put six in Carmen’s room and she loved them, and when I wasn’t worried about mysterious sex maniacs I was completely in love with whoever sent them.”

  “Did you throw away the note?”

  “The note was not a clue, Oliver. It was written by the firm to the sender’s dictation. I checked. So it was no good me puzzling over the handwriting.”

  “So where is it?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “How many roses were there?”

  “More than anyone’s ever given me before.”

  “Didn’t you count them?”

  “Girls count roses, Oliver. It’s what they do. It’s not that they’re greedy. They like to know how much they’re loved.”

  “How many?”

  “Thirty.”

  Thirty roses. Five million and thirty pounds.

  “And you’ve heard nothing since?” he asked, after a space. “No phone call—letter—nothing to follow them up?”

  “No, Oliver, nothing to follow them up. I have raked over my entire love life, which doesn’t amount to a lot, thinking of all my men who might have struck it rich, and the only one I could come up with is Gerald, who was always going to win the Irish Sweepstake but in the interim he was on the dole. However, I live in hope. The days go by but I still look out of the window now and then in case there’s a blue Merc waiting to whisk us away somewhere, but it’s usually raining.”

  He stood at Carmen’s bedside, peering down at her. He stooped over her until he could smell her warmth and listen to her breathing. She snuffled and appeared about to wake as Heather grabbed his wrist and marched him into the hall, through the open doorway and down the path.

  “You’ve got to get out,” he told her.

  She didn’t understand him. “No,” she said. “You have.”

  He was glaring at her without seeing her properly. He was shaking. She could feel the shaking in his wrist before she let it go.

  “Away from here,” he explained. “Both of you. Don’t go to your mother or your sisters, they’re too obvious. Go to Norah’s.” Norah her friend, the one she talked to for an hour at full rates every time they had a row. “Tell her you’ve got to get away for a bit. Say I’m driving you mad.”

  “I’m a working woman, Oliver. What do I tell Toby?”

  “You’ll think of something.”<
br />
  She was scared. She was dreading whatever Oliver dreaded, even if she didn’t know what it was. “Oliver, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Call Norah tonight. I’ll send you money. Whatever you need. Someone will come and see you and explain.”

  “Why don’t you do the explaining yourself?” she screamed after him.

  It was his secret place not ten minutes’ drive from the bungalow at the end of a timber track cut into a hilltop. It was where he had come to practice his balloon sculpture and his plate spinning and the juggling he couldn’t get his hands round. It was where he used to hide himself when he was afraid he would hit her or smash up the house or kill himself out of rage at the deadness of his soul. Sitting up here in the van with the window down, he would wait for his breathing to settle, listening to the prickle of pine trees and the mewing of night gulls and the rumble of other people’s worries coming up from the valley. Sometimes he would sit all night staring into the bay. Sometimes he saw himself balanced on the seawall at high tide, kicking off his shoes before jumping feet first into the foam. Or the sea became the Bosphorus, and he imagined a constant crisscross of small and large boats nearly colliding. Parking in his usual corner, he switched off the engine and stabbed out Brock’s number on the green digits of his car phone. He heard the altering tones as his call was rerouted, and knew he had dialed right because he heard a woman’s voice reciting the number back at him, which was all she ever did; she was a recorded woman, an unattainable abstraction.

  “It’s Benjamin for Jacob,” he said.

  More atmospherics, followed by the voice of Tanby, Brock’s emaciated shadow. Cadaverous Cornish Tanby, who drives Brock’s car for him when he needs to catch an hour’s kip. Fetches Brock’s Chinese take-in for him when he can’t leave his desk. Fronts for him, lies for him, hauls me upstairs when my feet are lame from drink. Tanby the calm voice in the storm, the one you want to throttle with your sweating hands.

  “Well, there’s a nice surprise at last, Benjamin,” said Tanby, all jaunty. “Better late than never, I will say.”

  “He’s found us,” Oliver said.

  “Yes, Benjamin, I fear he has. And the Skipper would like a one-to-one with you in this regard as soon as possible. There’s a fast train leaving your neck of the woods at eleven-thirty-five tomorrow morning, if that’s convenient. Same place, same routine. And the Skipper says to bring a toothbrush and a couple of your City suits and bits to match, specially the shoes. You’ve seen the newspapers, I dare say?”

  “What newspapers?”

  “Then you haven’t. Good. Only, the Skipper doesn’t want you worried, you see. Everybody you care about is all right, he says to tell you. No losses within the family, not as of now. He wants you reassured.”

  “What newspapers?”

  “Well, I take the Express myself.”

  Oliver drove slowly back into town. His neck muscles were aching. There was something odd going on in the big veins leading to his head. The newspaper kiosk at the railway station was closed. He drove to a bank, not his own, and took two hundred pounds cash out of the wall. He drove to the waterfront and found Eric at his usual corner table in the brasserie across the square, eating what he always ate now he was retired: liver, chips and mushy peas and a glass of the Chilean red. Eric had stooged for Max Miller and understudied with the Crazy Gang. He had shaken hands with Bob Hope and slept, he liked to say, with every pretty boy in the chorus. When Oliver was on a bender, Eric would drink along with him, apologizing that his years prevented him from keeping pace with Oliver’s consumption. And if the need arose Eric would take Oliver back to his apartment, which he shared with an ailing young hairdresser called Sandy, and open up the sofa bed in the lounge so that Oliver could have a nice rest and baked beans for his breakfast in the morning.

  “How’s tricks, Eric?” Oliver asked, and Eric at once thrust up the clown’s hooped eyebrows that he darkened with Grecian Formula.

  “They comes and they goes, my son, I’ll put it that way. There’s not quite the demand these days for a geriatric poof with origami and the bird noises. I expect it’s the recession.”

  On a page torn from his diary Oliver wrote out a list of his engagements for the next few days.

  “It’s my guardian, Eric,” he explained. “He’s had a heart attack and he’s asking for me. And here’s a bit of extra.” He slipped him the two hundred pounds.

  “Now, don’t you go being too hard on yourself, my son,” Eric warned, stowing the money inside his bright check jacket. “It wasn’t you who invented death. God did. God’s got a lot to answer for, you ask Sandy.”

  Mrs. Watmore was waiting up for him. She looked pale and scared, the way she had looked when Cadgwith came to feel Sammy’s collar.

  “If he rang once he must have rung a dozen times,” she burst out. “‘Where’s that Ollie? Tell him he’d no cause to run out on me.’ Next thing I know, he’s on my doorstep, ringing my bell and slamming my letter box and waking up next doors.” He realized she was talking about Toogood. “I can’t have trouble, Ollie. Even for you. I’m in debt to my eyes, I’ve got neighbors, I’ve got lodgers, I’ve got Sammy. You’re too much, Oliver, and I don’t know why.”

  She thought he hadn’t heard her, because he was leaning over the hall table, reading her Daily Telegraph, which wasn’t usual in him at all. He hated newspapers, would actually make a detour to avoid them. So she thought he must be fobbing her off and was going to tell him to get his head out of that newspaper and give her a proper answer. Then she took a calmer look at him and knew by his posture of alertness and her own intuition that what she had always feared would happen had happened, and that he was finished for her, and for Sammy too, it was over. And she knew, even if she couldn’t put her knowledge into words, that all the time he had been with her he’d been hiding from something, not just his child or his marriage, but from himself as well, given what her late husband would have called his caliber. And that whatever it was he had been running away from, it was bigger than his wife and child and it had come to find him.

  HOLIDAY LAWYER SHOT DEAD IN TURKEY, Oliver read. Photograph of Alfred Winser, described as chief legal officer to the West End finance house of Single & Single, and looking strictly legal in the horn-rimmed spectacles that he never wore unless he was interviewing a new secretary. Identification of body delayed while a nationwide search is mounted for the widow, who, according to her mother, is taking advantage of her husband’s absence to have an away-from-it-all holiday of her own. Cause of death still to be determined, foul play not ruled out, vague talk of a resurgence of Kurdish terrorism in the region.

  Sammy stood in the doorway, wearing one of his late father’s pullovers as a dressing gown. “What about our billiards?” he demanded.

  “I’ve got to go to London,” Oliver said, not lifting his head from the newspaper.

  “How long for?”

  “Few days.”

  Sammy disappeared. A moment later the voice of Burl Ives came floating down the staircase, singing, “I never will play the wild rover no more.”

  6

  For his reunion with Oliver, Brock took all the usual precautions and others that were less usual but dictated by the discreet crisis that was breaking over his department, and by his almost religious sense of Oliver’s rarity. It is an axiom of Brock’s profession that no two informants should ever use the same safe house, but in Oliver’s case Brock insisted on a house without an operational history of any kind. The result was a furnished three-bedroomed brick villa in the backwoods of Camden, with an all-night Asian grocery store one side and a bustling Greek restaurant the other. Nobody was interested in who went in or out of the battered front door of number 7. But Brock’s precautions did not stop there. Oliver might be hard to handle, but he was Brock’s ewe lamb, his prize acquisition and his Benjamin, as every member of the crew was made thoroughly aware. At Waterloo Station, rather than entrust Oliver to an unmarked van, Brock had Tanby meet him on the platform and
usher him into a tame London cab, sit with him in the back and pay the fare in cash like any honest citizen. And in Camden he posted Derek and Aggie and two equally unlikely looking crew members on both pavements with the task of making sure that Oliver, consciously or otherwise, had brought nobody in his wake. In our world, Brock liked to preach, you did best to think dirty and double it. But with Oliver, if you knew what was good for you, you added the number you first thought of as well.

  It was midafternoon. Arriving at Gatwick airport the previous night, Brock had driven himself straight to his anonymous office in the Strand and telephoned Aiden Bell on the secure line. Bell was commander of the interservice task force to which Brock was currently assigned.

  “It’s a company town,” he told him, after relaying Captain Ali’s suicide theory with appropriate skepticism. “It’s either we make you rich or we make you dead. The town’s chosen rich.”

  “Wise chaps,” said Bell, an ex-soldier. “War party after prayers tomorrow. At the shop.”

  Then, like an anxious shepherd, Brock called up his outstations one by one, beginning with a shuttered corner flat in Curzon Street, passing to a British Telecom repair van at the edge of Hyde Park and from there to the headquarters car of a mobile squad assigned to a lost valley in the emptiest part of Dorset. “What’s new?” he demanded of each team leader without bothering to introduce himself. Not a peep, sir, came the disappointed answers. Not a whisper, sir. Brock was relieved. Give me time, he thought. Give me Oliver. A churchlike quiet overtook him while he set to work transferring his operational expenses to a claim form. It was broken by the buzz of his Whitehall internal line and the glib voice of a very senior, hairless Metropolitan Police officer named Porlock. Brock at once pressed a green button that engaged the tape recorder.

  “Where the hell have you been, Master Brock?” Porlock demanded, all banter, and Brock saw in his memory the naked grin stretched humorlessly across Porlock’s pitted jaw and wondered, as he always wondered, how anyone so brazenly corrupt could walk so bold for so long.