He checked his watch. “Oh, well. You’ll like the second half. Which reminds me, have you got it for me?”
I handed him the slip of paper.
He read it and gave a short snarl of laughter.
“Very good,” he said. He folded it and put it in his pocket.
* * *
The second half of the concert began with some excellent modernist big band jazz directed by Danny at the piano. The compositions gradually devolved into 1940s-style swing. The auditorium grew darker and lights danced across the stage, and then began to angle upwards, probing the dark ceiling. I realised they looked like searchlights, hunting the night skies for enemy planes.
The horn section made a convincing imitation of aircraft sirens.
They faded to silence and Danny Overland left the piano and came to the microphone. A spotlight stabbed down on him. He seemed entirely at ease.
“During the Second World War—our war—the Royal Air Force chaplain, Reverend John Collins, was once forced to attend a lecture on ‘The Ethics of Bombing’. He sat through it patiently. Well, not so patiently. And when it was finally over he stood up and said, ‘Sorry I misunderstood you.’” Overland paused dramatically here. “‘I realise now that your lecture was actually about “The Bombing of Ethics”.’”
There was laughter from the audience.
“He was against the atom bomb, too,” said Overland. “That’s the sort of nutcase he was.”
More laughter.
“In Australia we love it when you come over and test your atom bombs.” Laughter, cheers and whistling from fellow Australians. “We like a bit of politics,” said Overland. “But what we prefer is a bit of music. In this case, the sort of dance music we used to play with a little outfit called the Flare Path Orchestra.”
Tumultuous applause.
“And after that we will conclude with a world premiere performance of a new piece I’ve written especially for the occasion.” He glanced casually into his hand, curled on the edge of the lectern. I doubt anyone else would have noticed anything, but I knew he was reading from the slip of paper I’d handed him.
“It’s a little number called ‘Bletchley Park Girl Comes Good in the End’.” He stared into the audience. “It’s part of a suite entitled Coded Messages to the Enemy.”
There was polite applause.
I looked up at the box.
Miss Honeyland was hurrying out, followed by Albert.
33. CHAMPAGNE
We had just arrived home from the concert and were unlocking the front door when my phone rang. It was Danny Overland. “You need to get over here right away,” he said. Then he told me where he was.
The cats stared at us in astonishment as we turned around and headed back out the door, pausing only to pour them a few biscuits. “The poor darlings,” said Nevada. “Did you see their little faces? They thought we were home for the night.”
“So did I,” I said. As we hurried back towards the Upper Richmond Road we phoned Clean Head. It so happened she was working that night. She was currently in Bayswater and just clearing a fare. We arranged to meet her in Hammersmith and caught a 33 bus across the bridge. It was after midnight by the time we arrived. Clean Head was waiting for us in the road behind Marks & Spencer. We climbed into the back of the cab and set off, streetlights flashing by above the dark, busy streets.
We hit traffic twice and got to Soho in about half an hour. Clean Head dropped us off in Berwick Street. “I’ll be driving around in a circle,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“I’ve got your back.”
“We know. Thanks.”
She drove off, her engine chugging in the night. The streets were full of people, many in a party mood, most a little drunk. Friday night in the centre of London. It was as busy as high noon. Around the corner, Danny Overland was waiting for us, in the entrance to Joan Honeyland’s mews.
“You took your time,” he said.
“We could have got here quicker on the Tube,” I said. “But we preferred to get a friend to drive us.”
“She’s a very reliable friend,” said Nevada.
“Never mind. Anyway, you’re here now. Come on.” He turned towards the dark entrance of the mews.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You haven’t told me what you’re doing here.”
“She invited me here,” he said, his voice echoing in the dark passageway. “For drinks.”
“She invited you for drinks?”
He shrugged. “After the concert. She sent me the invitation a few days ago.”
Nevada said, “And you came? After she tried to poison you once already?”
I said, “Knowing all that, you came here? On your own and unprotected?”
Overland smiled. “Not unprotected. I’ve got this.” He took out a Taser. I knew what it was, because I’d seen one just like it. One exactly like it, in fact.
“I wonder where you got that?” I said, and looked at Nevada. It was hard to tell in this light, but I think she had the good grace to blush. She’d probably rented it to him.
“Anyway, I didn’t need it,” said Danny Overland. He put the Taser back in his pocket. “Come on.” We followed him down the dark passage and out into the cobbled courtyard where the Mercedes gleamed in the darkness. I remembered Albert’s male-stripper routine as he’d washed it here, a million years ago.
We went through the open door and up the narrow staircase that smelled of dust. The dark apartment above us radiated a silent sense of emptiness, and Overland wasn’t making any attempt to be careful. I knew now what he wanted to show us. The place was deserted. They had flown the coop.
We came to the landing at the top of the stairs and advanced into the tiny sitting room. It wasn’t so dark in here. There was a small red and green art nouveau lamp glowing on the corner of a desk, its light doubled by its reflection in the window. I searched the panes for any trace of the bullet hole I knew had been there. It was as if it had never happened. Nice window repair.
I remembered their car, destroyed one day and like new again the next. She certainly knew how to get good service.
The one lamp provided enough light to see a pile of records—all 78s—with a piece of notepaper on top with some handwriting on it. I picked it up. It read ‘For Daniel Overland, to make use of in any manner he sees fit. This music must live.’ The last four words were emphatically underlined. Overland and Nevada watched as I looked through the records. They were all the ones we’d found—with the exception of the Victory Disc, which was still at my house—and a few others I’d never seen before.
“Miss Honeyland’s collection,” I said, and handed Overland the note. “They’re all for you.”
“There’s that, too,” he said, nodding at a white envelope on the desk. It was narrow but bulky and had my name written on it.
“But first you have to see what’s through here,” said Overland. He led us into a room I’d never entered before. The bedroom. There were two more lamps on in here, discreet spotlights over the bed. They created a dramatic light in the small shadowy cube of a room. Joan Honeyland was lying in the bed.
She wore an elegant pair of dove-grey pyjamas with yellow piping. Beside her, in a matching pair of pyjamas, lay Albert the chauffeur. The former chauffeur. He lay half on and half off the bed, his body twisted. His legs were still on the bed but his face and shoulders were on the floor, his torso bent like a man frozen halfway in the act of rolling over.
My mouth went dry. Nevada made a little sound in the back of her throat.
“They’re—”
“Oh yeah,” said Danny Overland. “As cold as the fucking grave.”
There were roses strewn all over the bed, red and white and yellow roses. They had evidently been originally placed with great care, but now a number of them were disturbed, scattered and spilled on the floor. All on Albert’s side of the bed.
“Where do you get flowers this time of night?” said Danny Overland.
“This i
s Soho,” I said. “You can find anything, any time.”
There was a silver tray on the dressing table with a bottle of champagne and two glasses on it. Nevada went over and looked at it. “Don’t touch that,” said Danny Overland. “And for god’s sake don’t drink any of it.”
Nevada looked at the bottle of champagne, then at the bodies on the bed. “Suicide pact?” she said.
“Well, suicide pact-ish,” said Overland.
“What do you mean?”
He nodded at the body of Albert, lying half on the floor. “If you look you can see that bloke’s got a t-shirt and boxer shorts on under his pyjamas.” I saw what he meant. Albert’s pyjama top was in rumpled disarray and had crept up his back, revealing shorts and a shirt. Danny Overland looked at me.
“When’s the last time you wore a t-shirt and boxers under your pyjamas, mate?”
“Never,” I said. I didn’t wear pyjamas, but I knew what he was getting at. “You think she put them on him?”
“Yeah, after he was unable to do so.”
Nevada was staring at the bottle of champagne. “You mean…?”
“She gave him a drink first,” I said, “and waited for it to take effect on him.”
Overland nodded. “And then put him on the bed and put the pyjamas on him. And then she did all the—” he waved his hand at the flowers, the discreet lighting, “—all the set decoration for her little tableau.”
“Then she took a drink herself,” said Nevada, looking at the glasses. One of them had a bright red smear of lipstick across it.
“And then she lay down beside him,” I said, moving towards the bed. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. “But later, after she was unconscious, he must have woken up.” I peered down at Albert lying on the floor. Luckily his face was deep in shadow.
“It had a different effect on him, whatever they took,” said Danny Overland behind me. “He’s young and strong. I mean was.”
As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness I saw what was on the floor by Albert’s pale hand. “There’s a telephone here. He was reaching for it, but he didn’t quite make it.”
“He didn’t want to make the journey with her,” said Overland, “or maybe he changed his mind.”
“Poor bastard,” said Nevada. She went back into the sitting room and I followed her. She had picked up the envelope with my name on it. She gave me a questioning look.
“Open it,” I said.
It contained a wad of banknotes. Nevada counted them. She looked at me. “It’s our bonus, for the successful completion of our task.”
There was also a note.
34. NOTE
The note was written on several sheets of Joan Honeyland’s monogrammed notepaper, neatly numbered.
Can you imagine what it’s like to work your whole life towards a purpose and to see your goal finally within your grasp and then to watch it being snatched from you?
Well, I can’t.
And I have no intention of finding out.
However, I mustn’t go without thanking you for all your efforts on my behalf. You and Nevada were extremely industrious and dedicated to your work, and I can’t begin to tell you what rare qualities those are in young people in this day and age. You were also courteous and efficient and showed loyalty to your employer.
If only Roberts, the recording engineer, could have displayed similar merit. Instead he tried to extort money from us and had to be dealt with. Unfortunately this involved us getting more deeply involved with people I had been trying to distance myself from for some time.
I make no apologies for my father’s beliefs and loyalties. They didn’t lie in the same direction as the prevailing beliefs and loyalties of his day, but that is a tragedy and I believe an error of history, and one that I sincerely hope will be rectified one day in this great nation.
I am deeply sorry that I destroyed the journals of my father. But having read them I realised what a vulnerable position his literary estate was actually in. So I set about making sure that no one would learn of those aspects of his character that might damage the value of his books.
Our books.
That is why I hired you to collect all the remaining copies of his records. I knew there would be few enough of these, and once I had them all in my control we would be safe for posterity.
Unfortunately, however, I am not the only one who is devoted to keeping my father’s memory alive.
She meant the Nazis at the farmhouse. I turned to the next page of the letter.
By a bitter irony, these people, whom he would regard with nothing but deserved disdain, know the truth about his heroic wartime effort.
And they rightly venerate him for it.
But this veneration comes hand in hand with a desire to share in the revenues flowing from his books. They seem to believe that they are continuing his work and my father would, if he were alive today, want to fund their efforts.
In fact, if he were alive today, he would put them in chains and make them dig ditches, which is about all they are good for. Perhaps after twenty years of hard labour he would let them join the fine new world he would build.
But if my father were alive today, everything would be very different.
Perhaps he could have succeeded at my task.
I have failed.
I turned to the next page of the letter.
I realised what I was doing wasn’t enough. That obtaining all his records, burning his journal, and suppressing the last copies of some pamphlets he wrote in the flush of his youthful enthusiasm wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.
Even silencing that recording engineer wasn’t enough.
What followed was a series of bullet points.
• There was Daniel Overland, with his contempt for my father, and who knew what dangerous memories of the war lurking behind those low brows of his.
• Then there was that illustrator trying, like so many others, to chisel a share of my father’s rightful earnings. He was always very proud of how he had dealt with her, making an agreement with her that only paid her what she was worth and not a penny more. “I out-Jewed a Jew,” he liked to say.
• And there were others, a seemingly unlimited supply of them. Like the little man with a beard who’s been hanging around our street, taking photographs.
The bullet points ended.
They all needed dealing with.
And I began to suspect that it would never end.
And then the announcement tonight at the concert, telling me that the Australian music-maker did indeed know exactly what transpired during the war. That was the final straw.
I reached the last page of the letter.
And so we take our leave of you.
The champagne has been poured and now I have penned this note.
Before closing I find myself wondering if I should give you the details of our ‘associates’. You could pass them along to the relevant authorities.
But I see they’ve managed to get themselves arrested on firearms charges, and I think I can trust to their incompetence and the efficiency of the police to see that they get what they deserve.
Farewell.
I don’t regret anything we’ve done. I do regret, keenly, that we didn’t succeed.
Joan Honeyland.
EPILOGUE
Danny Overland kept the records, including the Victory Disc, which I gave to him. I’d almost died getting hold of it, but I’m not really into playing 78s. And he made good use of it, and all the others. He had them properly remastered, and released an excellent Flare Path Orchestra CD with an authoritative booklet.
He gave Jenny a co-producer credit on the project. She had recovered from her ‘food poisoning’—which, come to think of it, really had been food poisoning—but I think he still felt guilty. He sent me a copy, and Nevada and I enjoy listening to it on those rare occasions when we listen to CDs.
It probably would have earned respectable sales among vintage jazz and swing enthusiasts.
&n
bsp; But by the time it was released, the story had broken. It was all over the media and caused sales of the CD to go through the roof. Of course, this was mostly motivated by ghoulish interest in the ‘secret Nazi code’, as the tabloids dubbed it. Someone even released an unauthorised cash-in single which cobbled samples of all the alleged coded passages together and connected them with a techno beat and rap vocals. This aberration was attributed to a pseudonym—Nasty Honey Man—and, since the single sank without a trace, no one ever tried to claim credit for it.
However, I suspect the involvement of one Stinky Stanmer.
Joan Honeyland’s ‘lethal passion pact’ (the tabloids again) attracted quite a lot of attention on its own merits, complete as it was with a May-December romance and a possible whiff of murder. But when the truth about her father was made public, it became a complete sensation.
Jasper McClew, the ferret-faced local historian, broke the story.
Or at least he tried to.
In his research he had pieced many of the facts together. And, crucially, he had photographs of Joan Honeyland talking with some known neo-Nazis. He’d planned to write a book about the Honeylands, but events moved too fast for him to complete it. Instead, he came to a deal with a television company to make a documentary about the subject.
But then the TV people discovered Opal. And Jasper found himself completely marginalised. No one was interested in taking shots of E.T. with a beard when they could instead film a pretty young girl who had pluckily travelled around the country, trying to track down her great-grandmother’s killer. And her hippie van made for great visuals.
We watched the documentary with a disconsolate Tinkler. The van did indeed look pretty distinctive. In addition to the sun and moon it now featured badgers. “I painted that badger,” said Tinkler. “Well, I painted the tail. And the whiskers. Most of the whiskers.”
Victory Disc Page 32