Caroline Minuscule (19 page)

The telephone was downstairs in the little dining room which was sandwiched between the sitting room and the kitchen. Dougal collected the matchbook with the telephone number of the Crossed Keys, a cigarette and an ashtray. There was no point in putting it off. Amanda was piling crockery into the sink with a look of distaste on her face. She smiled at him but said nothing.

While the number was ringing, he lit the cigarette with the last match. Supposing Lee had left Rosington last night, supposing . . .

Mrs Livabed answered. She was one of the rare people whose voice retained its natural resonance on the telephone.

‘Mrs Livabed? Good morning. This is William . . . um, Massey—'

‘Oh, hullo, love! Was it something you left? The chambermaids are upstairs now (they don't come on Sundays, of course, but then it's not like before the war, is it?)—'

‘No. Actually, I wanted a word with Mr Lee, if he's still there.'

‘Oh, the Irish gentleman. You're in luck – he's leaving this morning. Having his breakfast now, him and his friend. How's Wales, by the way?'

‘Where?' asked Dougal before he remembered it was where they were supposed to be. ‘Oh, fine, thanks. Raining rather a lot.' That seemed a safe touch of local colour. ‘The old lady was delighted to see us.' Thank God Lee hadn't left. First hurdle cleared. ‘Anyway, Mr Lee . . .'

‘Well, he is having his breakfast now – shall I ask him to ring you back when he's finished?' Mrs Livabed's tone implied that the bond between a man and his breakfast was not something to be broken lightly.

‘It is rather urgent,' said Dougal apologetically. ‘I have to go out in a moment. It's a business matter, you see.'

Mrs Livabed appeared to notice nothing incongruous in this. ‘Ah,
business
,' she said knowingly, as if this explained and even excused the most blatant irregularities. ‘I'll get him – he must be at the toast and coffee stage by now.'

The line went silent. Presumably Lee would take the call at the reception desk: there had been no phones in the bedrooms and Dougal couldn't remember seeing a booth with an extension for guests to use. The door of the dining room opened, and Philip's face, bleary and bristly, peered in. Dougal waved him frantically away – ‘Shan't be a moment – very important call.'

‘Mr Massey?'

On the telephone, Lee's voice sounded even flatter than usual, as if it came from the vocal cords of a slightly imperfect automaton. Made in Ireland, of course.

‘Hullo,' said Dougal. He suddenly felt rather foolish. ‘Look, we'd like to come to an arrangement with you.'

‘About what?'

‘After we left you yesterday, we found . . . what we were looking for.'

‘The devil you did.' Lee's voice suddenly dropped in volume, as if he was looking round for potential eavesdroppers.

‘It was just one of those absurd flukes – you know.' Dougal made his voice sound as apologetic as possible: it was an accident, Mr Lee, please don't hurt us.

‘Where was it?'

‘At the Munnses'. Vernon-Jones gave Hanbury a photo of a script called Caroline Minuscule. Well, Lina's real name is Caroline. Little Caroline, you see.'

‘Well I'm damned.'

Probably, thought Dougal. ‘It was in the roof of a model of the cathedral which Vernon-Jones had given her – a pouch of leather with the diamonds sewn in.'

‘So that explains it.'

‘What?' For a moment Dougal wondered if he had misheard.

‘You got that photograph. I got a little brass paperweight, in the shape of the cathedral. Souvenir from Rosington sort of thing. The cunning old bugger.'

‘He certainly made things unnecessarily complicated. And the Munnses might have got hurt.' Dougal sounded priggish to himself, but Lee grunted in agreement.

‘Do they know about it?' he asked after a pause.

‘No. We managed to remove the diamonds without any fuss. There's no reason why they should ever know.' Dougal felt that he owed this at least to Katie Munns, to keep her and Lina out of the mess.

‘How much was there?' Lee seemed to take his willingness to tell him anything for granted.

‘I've no idea. Maybe about forty stones of varying sizes. Some of them are pretty big. Neither of us knows anything about diamonds. That's the trouble. That's what I want to talk to you about.'

‘You do, do you? You know there's not a cat's chance in hell of you keeping them? I can fix anyone you could find to handle them for you. If I don't find you first. Never fear, I'll find you. Some things are too expensive.' The monotone of Lee's voice had acquired a breathy, gravelly quality, like a cat using its purr to express menace. Dougal turned the other bar of the fire on.

‘Exactly, Mr Lee. That's why we'd like to come to an arrangement. Please. You see, we're out of our league in this sort of business.' And what, Dougal wondered, did Lee think was their league – part-time, shabby-genteel conmanship? Perhaps he wasn't so far wrong. ‘We wouldn't even know how to go about converting the diamonds into money, let alone how to spend it safely. So it occurred to us that the best thing to do was to come to a business arrangement with you. If we held on to them, we'd lose our peace of mind—'

‘At the very least.'

‘—and you would have to waste money and time finding us. And there would always be the possibility that something would go wrong and we'd both lose the diamonds.'

‘Come to the point. What are you proposing?'

Dougal tried to give a convincing verbal impression of a person overwhelmed by the magnitude of the matter which had embroiled him. ‘Well – not to put too fine a point on it – would you care to have the diamonds in return for a cash commission for us? Assuming they are worth about a hundred thousand, how about ten per cent? Then we'd both gain. No hard feelings on either side. After all, without us, you might never have found them.'

Lee did not reply at once. Dougal became acutely aware of the sounds around him – the clatter of dishes, water trickling into the lavatory cistern and the murmur of Primrose's voice.

‘Yes, that sounds possible. Simpler all round, eh? London or Rosington, then, depending where you are. This morning?'

‘Well, actually —' here came the difficult bit ‘— I'd prefer tomorrow and Suffolk.' Surely Lee wouldn't quibble about the conditions of the transfer, not if he believed they had been terrorized into good behaviour? ‘You see, we want to leave the country. Not just over this business – there are several other reasons why we'd be better out of the way at present.' Dougal hoped he sounded convincingly mysterious and harassed. ‘We're hoping a friend will take us over to the Continent tomorrow. If we could meet at the mooring, fewer things could go wrong, we could make the exchange and be off on Tuesday's tide—'

‘Where in Suffolk?'

‘I don't know, yet. I'll have to contact this bloke first. He prefers to be discreet.'

‘If you're just trying to gain time . . .'

‘No. Really.' Dougal tried frantically to think of reasons why Lee should not suspect any sort of double cross. ‘I wouldn't have rung you in that case, let alone told you we'd found the diamonds.'

It seemed to satisfy Lee.

‘When will you let me know the details?'

‘I could phone you tomorrow morning – I've got to get hold of this friend today and sort everything out.'

‘Make it between nine and ten. Without fail. Got something to write with?' Dougal grabbed the pad and biro which the Primroses had thoughtfully left on top of the telephone directories. Lee gave a London telephone number – Hampstead, Dougal recognized. ‘Remember, the time for playing games is over, son.'

The way Lee said ‘son' made Dougal swallow. He gave the appropriate assurances. There was no need to act the terrified innocent: that was exactly how he felt. And it was vital that Lee should believe him. Their only hope of pulling this off lay in Lee underestimating them as much as possible. When he finally put the phone down, his hands were clammy with sweat. He hated Lee. It occurred to him that fear wasn't good for the character.

In the kitchen, Amanda was drying the casserole dish which had held the stew.

‘It's okay,' he said, as he slumped into a chair. ‘Lee agreed to everything. The bastard. Where's Philip?'

‘He's upstairs now. He told me about his research while I was washing up.'

The door opened and Pee-Pee came in. He darted a curt glance at Dougal, as if he wished he wasn't there. Scraps of bloodstained lavatory paper clung wispily to parts of his neck and face: his razor liked the taste of blood.

‘I must say, Bill, you were on that phone rather a long time. And it is at peak hours, too.'

Dougal forced an apologetic smile and reached for his wallet. Sometimes he wished life would pause at a request stop, so he could get off for a while.

‘A
mericans, you say?' said Philip Primrose, rubbing his chin in a spasm of agitation, thereby dislodging a shred of tissue paper and causing one of his cuts to start bleeding again. ‘That's bad. You simply can't trust them. Revolting colonials,' he added with an air of conscious originality.

Up to this point, he had listened warily to Dougal and Amanda as they explained what they wanted him to do. But mention of the cut-throat American rivals of Amanda's father's firm had swept away his caution.

‘I applied for a research scholarship at Harvard a couple of years ago. Just after I left Oxford. And you know they turned me down flat, without even the courtesy of going through my Ph.D. proposal properly. That shows the sort of people we're dealing with. And Bill, you remember that awful American girl at college?'

Dougal did indeed:
Ah, piss off, pruneface, you make me wanna puke
.

‘Which of course is why I ended up in London. All very well but not quite the same. I thought I'd save the Other Place until later.' Primrose glanced at Dougal to see if his reference had been taken.

Amanda murmured sympathetically. Dougal had a vision of Philip's life, each stage planned on the principle of deferred gratification, so he could say, after the event, ‘When I was up at Oxfordarvard/Cambridge . . .' according to the context. He put the thought away from him as unworthy and mostly untrue. The trouble with being with Primrose was that he encouraged the baser side of one's nature, just as with other people it was easy to appear, and in fact to feel, consistently pleasant and generous.

‘You're sure there's nothing criminal about this?'

‘No,' said Dougal patiently, ‘that's the trouble. We know we had a car on our tail on the way to Cambridge yesterday – a black Lancia, but they've done nothing, so we can hardly ask for police protection. The police would think we were mad. Once the Americans do something, it'll be too late, of course. That's why we need your help – to get us another car and deposit the formula (there's an electronic component with it, by the way).'

‘In a way, it's a matter of life and death.' Amanda stared earnestly into Philip's eyes and he looked back with his mouth slightly open, like a rabbit caught in the beam of headlights. ‘Not just for Daddy – though of course he's financially committed – but because of all the jobs that depend on Britain using the idea first. The minister told him it was vital, because if we develop this, contracts should flow in from abroad . . . I don't really understand it fully – I expect you've got a better idea of how these things work than I have – but I do know how important it is.'

‘But why are you and Bill involved in all this? I should have thought—'

‘Because this business is too delicate to go through the usual channels,' said Dougal firmly. ‘Mr Jackson – Amanda's father – insisted we have contingency plans, even so; the bank deposit idea was one of them. The component's far too delicate to go by the post. He was afraid the Americans might get on to us after all.'

‘It wasn't just Daddy, actually. The minister himself said the people concerned with the transfer should be absolutely trustworthy, not just employees.' A straightening of Primrose's spine told Dougal that he had not missed the implied compliment. Amanda rushed on: ‘He wanted MI5 (or is it MI6 or something completely different these days?), but there was a hitch because technically Daddy counts as private sector.'

‘In fact,' Philip summed up, ‘this is a case of Unorthodox Action in the Public Interest.' He said the words as if they were sacred. Dougal suddenly realized they would have to be careful about offering money. Primrose was genuinely moved by his own nobility, as if the demand they had made on him had revealed, to himself, a hitherto unsuspected spring of adventure beneath the arid surface of his life.

Dougal leant forward and lowered his voice. ‘This isn't the sort of business one can publicize, you know. I doubt whether anyone besides Amanda's father and the minister will know of your involvement. Which is not to say there may not be repercussions, you understand?'

Philip nodded violently and said, ‘Not at all' several times. He had turned pink again. Dougal felt rather guilty: Primrose's emotion was worthy of a better cause.

‘Daddy gave us an emergency cash fund, so at least money won't be a problem. Which reminds me, we'll have to give you something for last night and everything, or he'll throw a fit. He's one of these people who insists on paying his way or else he goes all broody, poor darling, and feels guilty about getting something for nothing. You will let us, Philip, won't you?'

A genteel discussion ensued, during which Amanda was charmingly obstinate, Primrose repeated polite disclaimers of any desire to be paid, the conviction in his voice rapidly and audibly dwindling, while Dougal said, ‘Come on, old chap,' in a manly voice, as if Philip was being offered a dose of castor oil which he should accept to please the lady.