Twisted Agendas (5 page)

Danny glared at Piper.

“Is that so, Miss?” the policeman said, his narrowed eyes locked on hers. “Pull your car over there.” He pointed to the side of the road and then walked away.

Danny’s knees trembled as he put the car into gear and began to move toward the side of the road.

“You’ve made him furious,” he said through clenched teeth. “They can keep us here for hours.”

“My father’s a New York cop. I don’t intimidate easily.”

He succeeded in not making any kangaroo-like hops as he pulled to the ditch and killed the engine after parking. “Have you got your passport in case he insists?” Danny asked, only
barely managing to conceal his irritation. A part of him couldn’t understand what the big deal was in showing her passport to the policeman.

“I brought my Irish pass along.”

“You’ve got an Irish one?”

“Americans are allowed to hold two nowadays.” Piper looked out to where the officer was squatted, talking to a colleague seated inside one of the police cars. “That cop’s
not allowed to ask for my identification unless he suspects me of committing a crime.” She began to fumble inside her bag. “We have to stand up for our rights. Show these people we know
the law.”

“Maybe that’s the case in America. In Northern Ireland, they can demand identification from anyone as well as search the car.”

“Yeah, it’s real draconiann over there, ain’t it?” Piper took out a notebook and began to flick through it. “Blair’s trying to get a similar law passed over
here, too.”

His anger gave way to reluctant admiration. He looked over at the policeman. The sound of something tearing made him look back at Piper. She’d ripped out pages from her notebook and was
calmly folding them while watching the chatting policemen.

“Just taking precautions.” She stuffed the notes hurriedly inside her bra. “Should he decide to be an asshole and give us a hard time, it’d be better he doesn’t see
these interview notes.”

The officer returned, stooped and locked eyes with Piper as he handed Danny his driving license. “You can leave.”

They arrived in Hammersmith at ten past two in the morning. Following Piper’s directions, he turned into a narrow street lit by overhead neon lamps that exposed the
peeling paint façades of row houses. Two-foot wide front gardens and triple steps led up to their front doors. At the gables of the end houses on both sides of the street was a diagonal
overhead railway bridge. Beyond this was a four-way stop and two zebra crossings and then the street grew wider. Finding no available parking spaces, she instructed him to drive across to the wider
section of the street that had an antique shop on one corner and a shabby newsagent’s on the other.

He parked between an old Jaguar and a Volkswagen Beetle with flower head motifs on its side that resembled sunflowers. The plangent blare of a siren started up. He looked into the wing mirror
and saw a car with flashing blue lights coming toward him. Danny stopped in mid-reverse with the front third of his car sticking out into the road. The police car drew closer and closer until it
pulled up alongside them. Piper’s face was white as alabaster against the vivid blue of the blinking lights. A policeman looked in but the car continued by, turned right at the intersection
and disappeared.

“Someone’s in trouble, huh?” Piper said.

A crisp morning breeze cooled Danny’s inflamed face when he got out of the car. Not wishing Piper to know he’d been unnerved, he lifted his arms and yawned as he looked around.
Though of the same architectural style as those on Piper’s section of the street, the façades of these row houses were impeccably maintained, their original, small windows replaced
with larger modern ones.

“This is a nice part of the street,” he said.

“This section of Chumley Street was yuppified in the eighties apparently,” she said. “It was a solid working-class neighbourhood until the yuppies snapped up the properties
dead cheap and hired a bunch of trendy architects.”

“You don’t like what they’ve done?”

“What gave me away?” She laughed. “Though I’ve gotta admit, I wish my landlord would paint the interior of my house. The wallpaper’s shit.”

Piper’s house lay in the middle of the block. She hadn’t exaggerated about its interior. The seventies velvet-striped wallpaper in the hall was grimy and ceiling plaster bulged
precariously in two places. She picked up the post off the floor and began sorting through it as he followed her into a small living room that smelled of cigarette smoke and stale alcohol. Two
half-full mugs of cold tea and empty beer bottles were on the coffee table, beside a tin ashtray laden with cigarette butts. Three tabloids and a Sunday broadsheet were scattered on the floor and
sofa.

“Sorry about the mess,” she said. “I told Pat I’d be away until Friday but I decided to come back early. He’s usually quite tidy.”

Danny folded the newspapers on the sofa and sat while Piper went into the kitchen to fetch iced water for them. Loose photographs were scattered on the coffee table, many of them smudged with
fingerprints. He picked them up and flicked through them. All the shots were of bridges: Tower Bridge and another one he didn’t recognise. The most attractive photo was of a galleon with
tiers of blazing white sails passing underneath the uplifted arms of Tower Bridge, but most were close-ups of the sides and underbelly of the unknown bridge that had enormous green piers and a
pedestrian walkway..

“Are you into photography?” he asked Piper, as she gave him a glass of water.

Her eyes chinked. “Why do you ask?”

He held up the photograph of the ship passing under Tower Bridge. “This one’s good.”

Piper took the photo. She set her water on the table and beckoned him to give her the rest of the photographs.

“I don’t know the other bridge,” said Danny.

“It’s Hammersmith Bridge. It’s just a few blocks from here.” Piper tapped the photos on the surface of the table until their edges were aligned. “I’ll show
you the room now.”

When they reached the head of the stairs, Piper pointed to a closed door and told him it was Pat’s room. Three more stairs at right angles to the main staircase led to a short landing.
“Bathroom’s in here… I mean toilet. Keep forgetting that.” She pulled on the drawstring to switch on the light. It was pretty, with gleaming white and green tiles and a
surprisingly large shower. “Don’t flush the john real hard. The handle’s loose and the plumber hasn’t come yet.”

Two more doors stood at right angles to one another. Telling him to go into the first room, she excused herself and went into the second. She returned moments later without the photographs.

“Like I said, it’s small.”

“It’ll do fine.”

She nodded at the wardrobe and informed him he could remove some of its contents and put them into her bedroom to make space for his things. “Time I get some shuteye. I’ve got to go
early to the library and catch up on a bunch of stuff I should have read ages ago.”

“Running behind, are you?”

“Wouldn’t be if they had enough copies of the books on the reading lists at the library.” She laughed scornfully. “You have to literally elbow students out of the way at
Course Collection.”

“That’s the way things are here. It was the same at my university.”

“It’s a cultural thing. The Brits think Americans don’t understand irony, and we can’t understand why they line up so quietly for everything, even goddamned library
books.”

After fetching bed linen and a pillow and helping him shift a large cardboard box laden with books so he could set up the sofabed, Piper took her leave. Despite the metal rod in the bed’s
middle that kept digging into his lower back and ribs every time he shifted on his side, tiredness won out and he fell asleep within half-an-hour. The sound of water gurgling through water pipes
awoke him. He put out his hand, fumbled for the switch on a table lamp on the floor nearby and checked his watch. It was already late morning. His joints ached like he was in the preliminary stages
of flu.

He pulled himself up on the sofabed and looked around. The room was just a little bigger in dimension than his mother’s dressing room. On one side there were boxes and a stack of suitcases
with airline tags secured on their handles. A bundle of wrinkled shirts and jeans lay on top of a wooden trunk, adjacent to an ironing board with a heavily scorched cover propped against the side
of a single-sized wardrobe that had three more suitcases nested on its top. Behind his head, bookshelves ran the width of the room, extended up to the ceiling, and were laden with bric-a-brac,
economics and law textbooks and novels.

After showering, Danny went down to the kitchen where he discovered Piper had brewed real coffee. That was a pleasant surprise. Everyone he knew made the instant kind. She’d also left a
key and a note stating where he’d find the cereal, cautioning there was only powdered milk and that, as she didn’t have to work at the pub that evening, she’d cook dinner for
them. He slathered a brick of Weetabix with strawberry jam and ate it in the living room while peering out the front window at pedestrians. The London accent sounded as he’d heard on the
television. He felt lucky. Only hours in the city and he already had the run of someone’s house. London was going to be very good to him.

He fetched the rest of his luggage from the car and began to sort through his clothing, removing enough T-shirts to last him a couple of weeks. His suits, jackets, two pairs of chinos, dress
shirts and an overcoat needed hanging. He tried to open the wardrobe but found it locked.

Danny searched for the key, trying first in the drawers and then checking under the sofabed even though there was only a tiny gap between its frame and the nubby carpet. Next, he tried the
bookcase, searching inside any ornaments where it might have been placed. He ran the tips of his fingers along the edge of the wardrobe’s top and then, fetching a chair, stood and searched
the entire top of the wardrobe. Before climbing down, more as an afterthought, he stuck his hand between the tiered suitcases and found it sandwiched between the bottom and middle one.

A curious acrid aroma filled his nostrils after he opened the wardrobe door. A black work boot dropped to the floor, a piece of caked mud resembling a miniature portcullis breaking away from the
ruts in its sole. Sudden movement above caught his eye and he looked up just as a portion of a down duvet that had been crammed into the shelf slid to the floor.

The wardrobe railing bulged with winter dresses and coats. He removed six dresses and an overcoat and took them to Piper’s room furnished with contemporary blonde wood Danish furniture. A
replica of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
hung on the wall. The edge of a narrow trapezium of sunlight streaming through the window sliced the photograph of a young boy clutching a cat to
his chest on her bedside table, imparting a chiaroscuro effect on his neck and part of his face.

A second purge of the wardrobe still didn’t create enough space for his clothes. As he was leaving his room a third time with a larger bundle of dresses, he heard a scraping sound followed
by a dull thud. Something had fallen on the floor of the wardrobe. He set the dresses on his sofabed and went to investigate, expecting to find that the brass rack holding the garments had
collapsed. Instead, the barrel of a gun pointed at his shins.

Agnes Hartley sat on her rocker and gazed at the Queen Mother’s photograph hanging on the wall above the fireplace. Flanking its left side was a frame containing a signed
sun-faded photograph of Margaret Thatcher. On the opposite side were two framed letters from the Queen Mother – one dating from the mid-seventies, the second from the early nineties –
in which she thanked Agnes for various correspondence. Every shelf and wall in the living room was cluttered with photographs of Agnes’ family and members of the Royal family through the
generations, as well as plates, spoons, ashtrays and other Royalty memorabilia. On a small table, partly pushed into an alcove that had a frayed Union Jack affixed to the wall, was a Royal Navy
sailor’s hat. A collection of photographs were arranged around it. The photographs were of her late husband Charlie who’d died of a massive coronary nearly one year ago, including a
photo of him with their son Keith as an infant on his shoulders, another of Agnes and him on their wedding day and a faded Polaroid of Charlie in gardener’s overalls holding a large striped
marrow.

Approaching footsteps alerted Agnes to the postman’s arrival. She waited for the thud of the post as it hit the floor, but instead the doorbell rang.

“Mornin’Agnes,” the postman said. “This needs signing for.”

She squinted and regarded the buff coloured envelope. “I’m not expecting anything needing my signature.”

“Got your name on it, love.”

She signed and took the registered letter into the living room. Her heart missed a beat when she opened it. Fingers trembling with excitement, she began to read: