To the Hilt (29 page)

“What thing?” I asked.

“A paper, really. A list. Very short. But Norman thought it important.”

I cleared my throat, trying to disregard sudden breathlessness, and asked if she would give the list to me instead.

After a pause she said, “I’ll give it to Lady Westering. Ever so kind, she was, that day I had to identify Norman.”

Her voice shook at the memory.

I said I would bring Lady Westering to her house, and please could she tell me how to find it.

My mother disliked the project.

“Please, ”
I said. “And the drive will do you good.”

I drove her northwest out of London in Ivan’s car and came to a large village, almost a small town, not far from the big bustling spread of modem Banbury, where no fair lady would be allowed anywhere near the Cross on a white horse, bells on her toes notwithstanding.

Minton Terrace proved to be a row of very small cottages with thatched roofs, and at No. 4 the front door was opened by the rounded woman we’d met at the mortuary.

She invited us in. She was nervous. She had set out sherry glasses and a plate of small cakes on round white crocheted mats which smelled of cedar, for deterring moths.

Audrey Newton, plain and honest, was ashamed of the brother she had spent years admiring. It took a great deal of sherry drinking and cake eating to bring her, not just to give the list to my mother, but to explain how and why Norman had given it to
her.

“I was over in Wantage, staying with him for a few days. I did that sometimes, there was only the two of us, you see. He never married, of course. Anyway, he was going away on holiday, he always liked to go alone, and he was going that day, and I was going to catch a bus to start on my way home.”

She paused to see if we understood. We nodded.

“He was going to go in a taxi to Didcot railway station, but someone, I think from the brewery, came to collect him first. We happened to be both standing by the window on the upstairs landing when the car drew up at the gate.” She frowned. “Norman wasn’t pleased. It’s extraordinary, but looking back I might almost say he was frightened, though at the time it didn’t occur to me. I mean, the brewery was his
life. ”

And his death, I thought.

“Norman said he’d better go,” she went on, “but all of a sudden he took an envelope out of the inner pocket of his jacket—and I saw his passport there because he was going to Spain for his holiday, as he usually did—and he pushed the envelope into my hands and told me to keep it for him until he sent for it ... and of course he never sent for it. And it wasn’t until I was clearing out his house after the cremation that I remembered the envelope and wondered what was in it, so I opened it when I got home here and found this little list, and I wondered ... if it had anything to do with the brewery

... if I should give it to Sir Ivan, as he had been so good to me, paying for everything he didn’t need to, considering Norman stole all that money, which I can hardly believe, even now.”

I sorted my way through the flood of words.

I said, “You brought the envelope home with you—”

“That’s right,” she interrupted. “Norman told me to take his taxi, which he’d ordered, when it came, and he gave me the money for it to take me all the way home—such a
treat
—he was so generous ... and I would never get him into trouble if he was alive.”

“We do know that, Mrs. Newton,” I said. “So you only opened the envelope one day last week ... ?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And you phoned Sir Ivan ...”

“But I didn’t get him.”

“And you still have the list.”

“Yes.” She crossed to a sideboard and took an envelope out of a drawer. “I do hope I’m doing right,” she said, handing the envelope to my mother. “The brewery man telephoned only about an hour ago asking if Norman had left anything with me, and I said only a small list, nothing important, but he said he would send someone over for it early this afternoon.”

I looked at my watch. It was then twelve o’clock, noon.

I asked my mother, “Did you tell anyone we were coming here?”

“Only Lois.” She was puzzled by the question. “I said we were going to see a lady in Bloxham and wouldn’t be needing lunch.”

I looked at her and at Audrey Newton. Neither woman had the slightest understanding of the possible consequences of what they had just said.

I turned to Mrs. Newton. “The brewery told me they didn’t know your name. They said they didn’t know Norman Quorn
had
a sister.”

She said, surprised, “But of course I’m known there. Norman sometimes used to take me to the Directors’ parties. Ever so proud, he was, of being made Director of Finance.”

“Who was it at the brewery who phoned you today?”

“Desmond Finch.” She made a face. “I’ve never liked him much. But he definitely knows me, even if no one else does.”

I took the envelope from my mother and removed the paper from inside, which was, as Audrey Newton had said, a short list. There were two sections, one of six lines, each line a series of numbers, and another, also of six lines, each line either a personal or corporate name. I put the list back into the envelope and held it loosely.

A silence passed, which seemed long to me, in which I did some very rapid thinking.

I said to Audrey Newton, “I think it would be a marvelous idea if you would go away for a lovely long weekend at the seaside.” And I said to my mother, “And it would be a marvelous idea if you would go with Mrs. Newton, and get away just for a few days from the sadness of Park Crescent.”

My mother looked astonished. “I don’t want to go,” she said.

“I so seldom ask anything,” I said. “I wouldn’t ask this if it were not important.” To Audrey Newton I said, “I’ll pay for you to go to a super hotel if you would go upstairs now and pack what you would need for a few days.”

“But it’s so sudden,” she objected.

“Yes, but spur-of-the-moment treats are often the best, don’t you think?”

She responded almost girlishly, and with an air of growing excitement, went upstairs out of earshot.

My mother said, “What on earth is all this about?”

“Keeping you safe,” I said flatly. “Just do it, Ma.”

“I haven’t any clothes!”

“Buy some.”

“You’re truly eccentric, Alexander.”

“Just as well,” I said.

I picked up my mobile phone and pressed the numbers of the pager Chris carried always, and spoke the message, “This is Al, phone me at once.”

We waited barely thirty seconds before my mobile buzzed. “It’s Chris.”

“Where are you?”

“Outside Surtees’s house.”

“Is he home?”

“I saw him five minutes ago, wandering around, looking at his horses.”

“Good. Can Young and Uttley do a chauffeur and nice-car job?”

“No problem.”

“Chauffeur’s hat. Comfortable car for three ladies.”

“When and where?”

“Like five minutes ago. Leave Surtees’s, get the chauffeur to Emily Cox’s stable in Lambourn. I’ll meet you there.”

“Urgent?”

“Ultra urgent.”

“I’m on my way.”

My mother fluttered her hands. “What is ultra urgent ?”

“Have you by any chance got a safety pin?”

She looked at me wildly.

“Have you? You always used to have, in a baby sewing kit.”

She dug into her purse and produced the credit card-sized traveling sewing kit that she carried for emergencies from lifelong habit, and speechlessly she opened it and gave me the small safety pin it contained.

I was as usual wearing a shirt under a sweater. I put the Quorn envelope in my shirt pocket, pinned it to the shirt to prevent its falling out and pulled my sweater down over it.

“And paper,” I said. “Have you anything I could draw on?”

She had a letter from a friend. I took the envelope, opened it out flat, and on its clean inside, with my mother’s ballpoint pen, had time to make nine small outline drawings of familiar people—Desmond Finch, Patsy, Surtees, Tobias included—before Audrey Newton came happily downstairs in holiday mood carrying a suitcase.

I showed her the page of small heads. “The person who came to pick up your brother on the first day of his holiday ... was it one of these?”

She looked carefully and, as if the request were nothing out of the ordinary, pointed firmly. “That one,” she said.

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Let’s get going,” I said.

Audrey Newton having locked her house, we drove away and headed for Lambourn.

“Why Lambourn?” my mother asked.

“I want to talk to Emily.”

“What’s wrong with a telephone?”

“Insects,” I said. “Bugs.”

Friday lunchtime. If Emily had gone to the races it would have complicated things a little, but she was at home, in her office, busy at paperwork with her secretary.

Nothing I did surprised her anymore, she said. She agreed easily to my making lunch and pouring wine for her unexpected guests but adamantly refused to join them in any flight from Egypt. She was not, she pointed out, Moses.

I persuaded her to go as far as her drawing room and there explained the explosive dangers of the present situation.

“You’re exaggerating,” she objected.

“Well, I hope so.”

“And anyway, I’m not afraid.”

“But I am,” I said.

She stared.

“Em,” I said, “if someone were standing behind you now with a knife, threatening to cut your throat if I didn’t shoot myself, and I believed it, then ...” I hesitated.

“Then what?”

“Then,” I said matter-of-factly, “I would shoot myself.”

After a long pause, she said, “It won’t come to that.”

“Please, Em.”

“What about my horses?”

“Your head groom must have a home number. You can phone him.”

“Where from?”

“I don’t know, yet,” I said. “But wherever you are, use your portable phone.”

“It’s all mad.”

“I wish I were in Scotland,” I said. “I wish I were painting. But I’m here. I’m walking over an abyss that no one else seems to see. I want you safe.”

“Al ...” She breathed out on a long, capitulating sigh. “Why you?”

The cry of ages.

Unanswerable.

Why did I care about right and wrong?

What made a policeman a policeman?

Emily went quickly out of the room and left me looking at the painting I had given her, that was not about an amateur game of golf in bad weather, but about the persistence of the human spirit.

After a while I unpinned the Quorn envelope from my shirt pocket. I lifted the golf picture off its hook and turned it over, and I slotted the envelope between the canvas and the frame, in the lower left-hand corner, so that it was held there securely, out of sight.

I hung the picture back on its hook and went out to see how lunch and life were passing in the kitchen.

Although not natural friends, my mother and Audrey were being punctiliously civil to each other and were talking about how to pot cuttings from geraniums. I listened with the disjointed unreality perception of an alien. At any minute the brewery might be breaking into the house in Bloxham. One should dip the slant-cut stem into fertilizer, Audrey said, and stick it into a peat container full of potting compost.

A large car rolled up the drive and stopped outside the kitchen window. The driver, a chauffeur in a dark navy-blue suit, flat cap with shiny peak and black leather gloves, climbed out and looked inquiringly at the building, and I went out to talk to him.

“Where am I going?” he said.

“Somewhere like Torbay. Find a good hotel with a sea view. Make them happy.”

“They?”

“My mother, my wife and the sister of the man who stole the brewery’s money. Hide them.”

“Safe from Surtees?”

“And other thugs.”

“Your mother and your wife might recognize me.”

“Not without the wig, the rouge, the mascara, the high heels and the white frills.”

Chris Young grinned. “I’ll phone you when I’ve parked them,” he said.

“What’s your name today?”

“Uttley.”

When I went back into the kitchen Emily, having made herself a sandwich, was talking to the head groom on the telephone.

“I’ll be away this weekend.... No, I’ll phone you...” She gave her instructions about the horses. “... Severence runs at Fontwell tomorrow; I’ll talk to the owners, don’t forget to send the colors ...”

She finished the details and hung up; not happy, not reassured.

“My dears,” I said lightly, looking at all three women, “just have a good time.”

My mother asked, “But why are we going? I don’t really understand.”

“Um ... Emily knows. It’s to do with hostages. A hostage is a lever. If you hold a hostage you hold a lever. I’m afraid, if any of you were taken hostage, that I might have to do what I don’t want to do, so I want you safely out of sight, and if that sounds a bit improbable and melodramatic, then it’s better than being sorry. So go and enjoy yourselves ... and please don’t tell
anyone
where you are, and only use Emily’s mobile phone if you
have
to phone someone, like Emily to her head groom, because it wouldn’t be much fun to be taken hostage ...”

“You might get your throat cut,” Emily said nonchalantly, munching her sandwich, and although my mother and Audrey Newton looked suitably horrified, it seemed Emily’s words did the trick.

“How long are we going for?” my mother asked.

“Monday or Tuesday,” I said. Or Wednesday or Thursday. I had no idea.

I hugged my mother goodbye and kissed Emily and warmly clasped Audrey Newton’s soft hand.

“The chauffeur’s name is Mr. Uttley,” I told them.