Armadillo

by William Boyd

  But not tonight, Lorimer thought, advancing into his condensing breath as he squelched across the lawn following the torchbeam, his shoes rapidly dampening from the unkempt grass (Lady Haigh disdained lawnmowers of any variety – when she couldn’t use sheep, she used hedge clippers, so she claimed). At the foot of the acacia the sepia coin of light illuminated a small patch of ground.

  ‘Look,’ Lady Haigh said, pointing, ‘a fritillary, now isn’t that astonishing?’

  Lorimer crouched and peered and sure enough there was a tiny bell-shaped flower, almost grey in the torch light, growing out of the scumbled earth, but with a distinct darker checkerboard pattern on the thin, papery flute.

  ‘Never seen one so early,’ she said, ‘not even at Missenden, and we had masses there. And we didn’t have any last year – I thought the frost had got them.’

  ‘You must have a little micro-climate going here,’ Lorimer said, hoping that was the sort of intelligent comment one made. ‘It certainly is a beautiful little flower.’ Not up Marlobe’s street, he couldn’t help thinking.

  ‘Ah, fritillaries,’ she said with touching nostalgia, then added, ‘I did put a mulch down for the acacia, you see. Nigel gave me a couple of buckets from his border. That may have encouraged it.’

  ‘Nigel?’

  ‘That very nice Santafurian in number 20. Sweet man.’

  Back in the kitchen Lorimer gently declined her offer of tea, pleading work that was waiting for him.

  ‘After you with the Standard, if I may,’ she asked.

  ‘Please take it, Lady Haigh. I’ve flicked through it already.’

  ‘What a treat,’ she exclaimed. ‘Today’s Standard!’ Jupiter chose this moment to waddle effortfully through from the sitting room; he sniffed once or twice at his basin of food and then just stood there, staring at it.

  ‘Not so hungry.’

  ‘He knows, you see,’ Lady Haigh said with a sigh. ‘The condemned man. He can tell. Won’t touch his hearty meal.’ She folded her arms. ‘You’d better say goodbye to Jupiter, he won’t be here tomorrow.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘I’m having him put to sleep, taking him to the vet. He’s an old dog set in his ways and I don’t want anyone interfering with him when I’m gone. No, no,’ she would hear nothing of Lorimer’s protests, ‘the next cold or flu will carry me off, you’ll see. I’m eighty-eight years old, for heaven’s sake, should have gone ages ago.’

  She smiled at him, her pale blue eyes shining – with pleasant anticipation, Lorimer thought.

  ‘Poor old Jupiter,’ he said spontaneously. ‘Seems a bit harsh.’

  ‘Fiddlesticks. I wish someone would take me to the vet. It’s driving me loopy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All this hanging about. I’m bored stiff.’

  At her door she put her hand on his arm and drew him close. She was tall, despite her stoop, and Lorimer supposed that once she had been an attractive young woman.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘do you think Dr Alan might be a tiny bit of a pansy?’

  ‘I should think so. Why?’

  ‘I don’t see any gels coming or going. But then again, I don’t see any gels coming or going for you, either.’ She laughed at him, a breathy giggle, and covered her mouth. ‘Only teasing, Lorimer dear. Thanks for the paper.’

  Lorimer worked late, doggedly going through the Gale-Harlequin contracts, paying special attention to the paperwork relating to the Edmund, Rintoul deal. They confirmed his suspicions, as he suspected they would, but the work could not distract him from the dark seep of melancholy that seemed to be penetrating his soul like a stain.

  So he spent two and a half hours surfing the channels on his cable TV before he caught the Fortress Sure advertisement once more. He quickly switched on his video and managed to record the last forty seconds. Replaying it, and freezing the frame at the end, he stared at the girl’s gently shuddering face for some moments. Now he had her, caught fast, and it was indeed her, without doubt. And surely, he thought, cheered suddenly, there must be some straightforward way of finding out her name.

  At half past four he padded quietly downstairs and slipped a note under Lady Haigh’s door. It read: ‘Dear Lady Haigh, is there any way I can prevent Jupiter’s last journey to the vet? What if I promise solemnly to look after him in the unlikely event of something happening to you? It would greatly please me. Yours ever, Lorimer.’

  Chapter 4

  Lorimer’s surveillance of Edmund, Rintoul Ltd had lasted two days and he did not anticipate it requiring much longer duration. He waited in a café across the Old Kent Road from their offices, a suite of rooms above a carpet warehouse. At the rear was a small builder’s yard, garlanded with razor wire and containing a couple of battered vans and, unusually, the firm’s own skip-lorry (which was also for hire). Lorimer turned in his seat to signal for another cup of tea, eventually catching the eye of the surly, unhappy patron who was swiping margarine on to a leaning tower of white bread slices. It was 10.45 in the morning and St Mark’s café was not busy: apart from himself there were a nervy, chain-smoking girl with lip, nose and cheek studs and a couple of old blokes in raincoats annotating the Sporting Life, doubtless waiting for the pub or the bookie’s to open.

  The St Mark’s was unpretentious in the extreme, not to say unequivocally basic, but Lorimer took a perverse pleasure in the place – these caffs were steadily dying out and soon they’d be distant memories, or else lovingly recreated as temples of post-modern kitsch, serving cocktails along with sandwiches aux pommes frites. There was one long counter, a chilled display unit, a lino floor and a dozen formica-topped tables. Behind the counter was a huge handwritten menu laboriously detailing the dozens of combinations available from a few central ingredients – eggs, bacon, chips, toast, sausages, beans, mushrooms, gravy and black pudding. The windows facing the Old Kent Road were fogged and teary with condensation and the display unit contained only three ingredients for sandwiches – ham, tomato and chopped boiled eggs. Tea was served from an aluminium teapot, coffee was instant, the crockery was Pyrex, the flatware plastic. Such brutal frugality was rare, almost a challenge to its clientele. Only the boldest, the poorest or the most ignorant would seek shelter and sustenance here. Lorimer felt it could easily qualify for his Classic British Caffs series – an informal log he kept in The Book of Transfiguration of similar establishments that he had encountered on his wanderings across the city. Forget pubs, he reasoned, this was where the country’s true and ancient culinary heritage resided; only in these uncompromising estaminets would you find the quintessence of a unique way of English life, fast disappearing.

  His dark brown steaming tea was poured, he milked and sugared it (Hogg would have approved) and he gazed across the road through the bleary porthole of clarity he had smeared in the condensation.

  As far as he could tell, Dean Edmund was the builder of the partnership and Kenneth Rintoul the front man who dealt with the clients and contractors. They were both in their late twenties. Parked up on the cracked and weedy pavement in front of the grafifitied shutters of the carpet warehouse were two shiny new motors – a Jaguar and a BMW – worth approximately £150,000 between them, so Lorimer had calculated, and Rintoul’s (the BMW) also had a personalized number plate – KR 007. Edmund lived with his wife and three children in a large new house in Epping Forest; Rintoul’s pad was a converted warehouse loft in Bermondsey with a distant view of Tower Bridge – there was clearly a deal of money swilling around. Rintoul sported a small ponytail and both men were neatly goateed. Lorimer had an appointment with them at eleven o’clock but he always thought it advisable to be ten minutes late – meetings tended to go better, he found, if they started with apologies.

  174. The Recurring Lucid Dream. It is night and you are walking down a corridor, cool lino under your bare feet, heading towards a door. From behind this door comes the noise of many people whooping and cheering and the indistinct blather of a TV set with
the volume high. You are vexed and aggravated, the noise is bothering you, angering you, and you want it to cease.

  Just as you reach the door you realize you are naked. You are wearing only an unbuttoned shirt (pistachio green, unironed) and its tail floats above your naked buttocks as you stride down the corridor. It is not clear whether you are fully tumescent or not. You reach for the door knob (just as an extra-loud mass screech of delight followed by gulping ululations erupt in the room beyond) – but you suddenly withdraw your hand. You quickly turn and retrace your steps to your small boxy room, where you dress immediately and with care, before going out again into the night.

  The Book of Transfiguration

  ‘This way, sir. Mr Rintoul and Mr Edmund will see you right away’

  ‘Sorry, I’m a bit late,’ Lorimer said to the rear view of the young, black and heavily perfumed receptionist who led him down a short corridor to Rintoul’s office. The day before Lorimer had had his hair cut and this morning had lightly gelled it flat. He was wearing a fawn leather blouson jacket, a pale blue shirt and striped knitted tie, black trousers and Italian loafers. He had removed his signet ring and had replaced it with a tooled gold band which he wore on his right middle finger. His briefcase was new, shiny brass and polished leather. All specialist loss adjusters had their own approach to the job – some were aggressive, some cynically direct, a few bullied, or set out to inspire fear, others came in strong and hostile like hit-men, some were neutral apparatchiks emotionlessly executing orders – but Lorimer was different: he was much more interested in the absence of threat. He dressed this way not to disguise himself but – crucially, deliberately to reassure: these were expensive clothes but they would not threaten the likes of Edmund or Rintoul, they did not hint at other worlds, strata of society alien or hostile or sitting in judgement – in theory they shouldn’t even notice what he was wearing, which was, in fact, their designed effect and the modus operandi of his personal and particular loss adjusting method. No one knew about this approach methodology was never discussed or shared amongst the adjusters – and Hogg only judged by results, he did not care how success was arrived at.

  Hands were warmly shaken: Rintoul was smiley, chipper, agitated, matey; Edmund tenser and more circumspect. Coffees were ordered, Priscilla, the receptionist, enjoined to use the espresso machine this time – not instant (‘We can tell the difference, darling’) and Lorimer began his apologies, blaming the delay on the diabolical traffic. They talked for some time on this subject, while the coffee was made and served, and the merits of alternative routes in and out of the East End were discussed in precise detail.

  ‘Deano lives in Epping Forest,’ Rintoul said, pointing a thumb at his partner. ‘Murder, isn’t it, Deano? Traffic.’ Rintoul moved constantly, as if he could not decide which body position to adopt, as if he were testing them all out. His facial muscles too were similarly mobile, Lorimer noticed – was that a smile forming or a pout, a frown or an expression of surprise?

  ‘MII, is it? Blackwall Tunnel?’ Lorimer said. ‘Got to be fucking kidding. Every day, there and back?’

  ‘Fucking nightmare,’ Edmund admitted, reluctantly, with a sniffing toss of the head. He was a gruffer, slower, heavier man, not entirely at ease in the office, off the site. His hairy wrists looked thick and clumsy projecting from the fine striped cotton of his snazzy shirt cuffs; his goatee was badly, half-heartedly shaved, as if he had grown it as the result of a dare rather than a genuine hirsute affectation.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Lorimer said, winding up the traffic discussion, ‘all part of life’s rich pageant.’ Polite chuckles at this. Lorimer was rounding his vowels, as well as swearing, and introducing the hint of a glottal stop. Click, click he sprang the locks on his briefcase. ‘Well, gentlemen, shall we ponder the fire at the Fedora Palace?’

  Incredulity mingled with regret (it had been the firm’s biggest contract to date), ritual cursing of the truly rotten filthy luck that so often attended those who toiled in the building trade (‘Try finding decent plumbers,’ Edmund said with real anger and resentment, ‘they’ve gone, like they’re extinct. There ain’t any.’). Lorimer listened, nodded, winced, then he said, ‘There was a ten-grand-a-week penalty clause if you were late.’

  A silence here: Edmund said, defiantly, too quickly, ‘We were on target.’

  ‘Seems a bit steep,’ Lorimer said, sympathetically, ‘steepest I’ve seen on a job like this.’

  ‘Fucking right,’ Rintoul said, bitterly. ‘But it’s the only way people like us get jobs like that, these days. They screw you on the penalty clause.’

  ‘It makes no sense: you have to work so fast, can’t guarantee the same quality, surely?’ Lorimer oozed sympathy, now.

  Rintoul smiled. ‘Exactly. That’s how it works, see. You bust a gut, you finish on time. Then they fuck you on the snagging – “This isn’t right, that’s not right.” Refuse to pay the last instalment.’ He turned to Edmund. ‘We didn’t get our full whack on what? Last three jobs?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘See? They got you. Short and curlies.’

  Lorimer looked at his notes. ‘You say you were on target to complete at the end of the month.’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Lorimer paused. ‘What if I put it to you that you were actually running late, well late?’

  ‘We was a bit late on account of the fucking Turkish marble,’ Edmund said, ‘but we had a waiver for that. All in order.’

  ‘The quantity surveyors say you were looking at a ten-to-fifteen-day penalty.’

  ‘Whoever told you that,’ Rintoul said evenly, his voice quieter, ‘is a fucking liar.’

  Lorimer said nothing: silence could be so eloquent, silence could work like a rising tide on a sandcastle. Rintoul leaned back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head; Edmund stared at his lap. Lorimer put his notes away.

  ‘Thank you, gentlemen. All seems very clear. I won’t trouble you no further.’

  ‘I’ll walk you down,’ Rintoul said.

  Outside the carpet warehouse Rintoul turned his back to the wind and hunched his jacket to him, leaning close to Lorimer.

  ‘Mr Black,’ he said, with quiet vehemence, I know what’s going on.’ Lorimer thought he could detect a faint West Country burr beneath the East End twang, a sedimentary trace of Rintoul’s early life in Devon or Dorset, perhaps.

  ‘Oh yeah? What is going on, Mr Rintoul?’

  ‘I know you insurance people,’ Rintoul continued, ‘you just don’t want to pay out, so you’re going to fucking shaft us with this fire business so you don’t have to pay the claim to Gale-Harlequin. We were on time to finish, Mr Black, no way we’d of been late. This is our life here, our livelihood. You could mess it all up for us, easy, you could ruin everything. I see the way you’re thinking, I see where this is heading…’ He smiled again. ‘Please don’t go down that road, Mr Black.’ There was no entreaty in his voice, but Lorimer was impressed – he was very nearly convincing.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t discuss my report with you, Mr Rintoul. Like you, we just try to do our job as professionally as possible.’

  Lorimer drove away from the meandering mean street that was the Old Kent Road, his head busy, away from the giant new petrol stations and the unisex hair salons, the cash ‘n’ carrys, the tyre and wheel depots and the karaoke pubs. ‘Houses cleared’ signs told him, and he saw the evidence in the landscape everywhere. Timber merchants, panelbeaters, lorry parks and closed-down electrical goods merchants behind dusty diamond mesh grilles passed by until he drove beneath the river and emerged on the north bank, swerving east through Limehouse and Poplar and Blackwall towards Silvertown. Lorimer put in a call to the office to book an appointment with Hogg. Janice told him when he could come in, then added, ‘I got a call from Jenny, PR at the Fort, about that advert. They think the name you’re looking for is Malinverno. I’ll spell it: Flavia Malinverno. F-L-A-V-I-A–’

  Lorimer stood in his e
mpty sitting room looking at the view through curtainless windows. He had a clear sight of the City Airport across the choppy blue-grey waters of Albert Dock and beyond that, dark against the sky, the industrial alp of the Tate & Lyle sugar factory, wisps of steam emanating from various pipes and funnels, a steel Krakatoa threatening to blow. To his right, in the distance, stood the immense obelisk of Canary Wharf, its blinking eye on its summit flashing at him like a beacon across Canning Town, Leamouth and the Isle of Dogs. The light was cold and harsh, the horizons bulldozed flat, bereft of houses, crisscrossed by the elevated concrete ribbons of the spine roads and the MII link and the stalky modernity of the tracks and stations of the Docklands Light Railway loftily picking its way from Beckton to Canning Town. Everything old was going here, or being transformed, cast out by the new. It seemed a different, pioneering city out here in the east, with its emptiness and flatness, its chill, refulgent space, its great unused docks and basins – even the air felt different, colder, uncompromising, tear-inducing – not for the faint-hearted or uncertain. And further over to the east, beyond the gas and sewage works, he could see the full mass of a purple and gunmetal cloudscape, a continent of cloud bearing down on the city, gilded with the citrus clarity of the estuarine light. Snow coming, he thought, all the way from Siberia.