by Bill James
It was early in the evening and Ralphy himself might be absent. Generally, he arrived around midnight and stayed to oversee shut-down at 2 a.m., or later when the club hosted some special celebration of, say, a birth or parole. Harpur thought he’d stop off there, anyway. If big upheavals in the substances scene threatened he needed to get some inklings – more than came from Iles’s tap and ‘visualizing’, more even than Jack’s lock and stain despatches.
To guard against assassination by contracted marksmen, Ember had arranged for a thick metal shield to be fixed high on one of the club pillars, blocking any direct line of fire from just inside the Monty main door to where Ralph sometimes sat doing accounts or dreaming of his projects at a small shelf-desk behind the bar. As a way of softening its appearance and disguising the harsh function, this steel screen was covered with a collage of illustrations. Ralph had mentioned to Harpur that they came from a book called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by a poet, William Blake, famous also for ‘Jerusalem’. Ember knew such things. He had started a mature student degree course at the university down the road, though he suspended it not long ago because of business demands. These included his tricky mission to get the Monty’s social standing considerably up, plus new and persistent uncertainties in the drugs game because of government legislation, and because of constant invaders, like Chandor.
Once Harpur had passed under the shield he could see Ember was at his usual place, working on some papers. ‘In early tonight, Ralph,’ he said.
‘Catching up, Mr Harpur. The Inland Revenue won’t take delays, you know.’
‘But think of the extra work if you had to tell them about all the real money.’
‘Mr Iles not with you this time?’ Ember replied. ‘Off sick? Yet it’s wonderful what they can do with just one course of pills these days. He’s still seeing that girl who works the streets around Valencia Esplanade, is he? Honorée? I’m sure he’ll be back to his usual form very soon.’ Ember fixed Harpur a gin and cider in a half-pint glass and poured himself a Kressmann armagnac.
‘I was in the area,’ Harpur replied.
‘That’s the function as I see it of a club like the Monty,’ Ember said. ‘Somewhere to stop off at a whim and recoup.’
‘True.’
‘It might be a marginal role to the main matters of life, but a necessary and worthwhile one, I feel.’
‘True, indeed.’ At the other end of the bar near the pool tables Hilaire Wilfrid Chandor and a few friends stood drinking shorts. Yes, Nordic. Harpur would have liked to stroll over and see if Chandor and/or the others smelled of cleaning fluid, and/or of incendiarized Charles Laity shoes, and/or of an incendiarized Mixtor-Hythe hand-tailored suit, and/or of incendiarized flesh. There were few other people in the club yet. Harpur had wondered whether Manse Shale would be here and available for a general chat, but Ember did not like his close, outside business connections to use the Monty. Most likely Shale was a member but realized he shouldn’t show up here too often. Ralph treated the club as very separate. All right, it could be regarded as a sink, but a legit sink, acknowledged fully to the Inland Revenue, and perhaps about to set off towards social eminence. Yes, very perhaps. Ralph might not object to Chandor and/or possibly one or more of the others having membership. After all, Chandor had not really got into the substances trade scene properly yet – which would be why he had targeted the rectory and Manse’s art. Of course, Chandor might be thinking of something comparable against the other great and enduring figure in that scene, Ralph Ember. Did Ember appreciate this? Generally he was quick to detect menace. Had he become casual, convinced he’d soon be kicking out virtually all the present membership, anyway, and replacing them with cardinals, professors and ITV board chairmen?
‘Sometimes I wonder about the shield, Ralph,’ Harpur said.
‘Shield? Which shield is that, Mr Harpur?’
‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Fine against someone shooting from the door. But useless if he or they is or are actually inside the club.’
‘Oh, you mean the air-conditioning baffle board.’
‘No, the two-centimetre-thick steel slab.’
‘Yes, an air-conditioning baffle board,’ Ember said. ‘The engineers maintained it would give me I don’t know how many per cent better heating or cooling by deflecting air currents. They drew diagrams – looked like the wind direction maps on a TV weather forecast. I thought it worth investing.’
‘Chargeable against tax as a business expense? How do you describe it to the Revenue – “William Blake anti-hitman rampart”?’
‘And definitely my electricity bills are down,’ Ember replied.
‘You let all sorts in here.’
‘Many a droll comment I get, as you can well imagine, Mr Harpur, when I tell folk where the illustrations come from. Couples remark they could have posed for pictures with that as the title – each claiming to be the Heaven side of their own marriage, of course,’ Ember said. ‘I’ve heard that a hundred times but I feel it kindly to laugh. This seems to me a duty of one who presumes to run a club – kindness, bonhomie.’
‘How do you vet people?’
‘Which?’
‘Members.’
‘A definite and proven procedure.’
‘Being?’
‘I couldn’t tell you how many applications we turn down, Mr Harpur.’
‘It’s the ones you don’t turn down that worry me.’
‘And how’s the big scene, city-wide?’ Ember replied.
‘I was going to ask you that. Things shift, Ralph.’
‘Constantly.’
‘But you manage to keep ahead, do you, you and Manse?’
‘ “Ahead”? I’m not sure what ahead means in that context. The club continues. And, obviously, even if I did know what ahead means, I couldn’t answer for Manse.’
‘You’re pals. You’d probably hear if he had problems, wouldn’t you?’
‘Would I? What kind of problems, Mr Harpur?’
Chandor and his party turned to leave. Chandor gave Ralph a small nod and a small smile. Ember nodded back.
‘Yes, things shift,’ Harpur said. ‘It’s hard to keep up.’
Ember refilled Harpur’s glass and then went off to another part of the club. Harpur sat on for a while with his drink but talked to nobody else, learned nothing and had learned nothing, except that The Marriage of Heaven and Hell might be only a placebo, and he’d known that already. When he reached home, his daughter, Jill, came out into the hall and said: ‘People here, dad. One’s the Press. Both ladies.’
‘Oh?’
‘Looking for you. To do with someone missing.’
‘Oh?’
‘A man. They’ve come on here from headquarters. We’ve been taking care of them.’
Harpur didn’t always like it when Jill and his other daughter, Hazel, took care of callers. The two girls could be very considerate, hospitable and deeply nosy. ‘Thanks, Jill,’ he said.
She went ahead of him into the big sitting room: ‘Here’s dad now,’ she said. ‘He’ll sort things out.’
Harpur thought he recognized one of the women, not the other.
‘Kate, of the Evening Register,’ Jill said, waving a hand towards the younger woman. ‘She’s Crime.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Harpur said, ‘I’ve seen you around the courts, haven’t I, and at press conferences?’
Jill waved again, this time indicating the other visitor: ‘Meryl Goss, from London,’ she said. ‘She’s on a search for someone. Well, her partner.’
‘Searching where?’ Harpur said.
‘He’s in this city,’ Jill said. ‘Not findable yet, though.’
‘He definitely came here,’ Meryl said, ‘but suddenly he’s not in touch. That’s entirely unlike him.’ She’d be about thirty-two, tall, frizzed fair hair, fresh-faced, wearing jeans and a three-quarter-length navy fabric coat.
‘So, she’s arrived from London, looking,’ Hazel said.
‘Of course, someone
who’s grown up and seems to go missing – well, your people at headquarters wouldn’t think much of that, would they, dad? They’d think he can do what he wants.’
‘This is different,’ Meryl said.
‘Yes, it sounded different to me, Mr Harpur, ‘Kate said. ‘That’s why I –’
‘Kate was around Reception at headquarters, dad,’ Jill said, ‘waiting to see one of your officers about an article they’re doing in the Register, and heard Meryl report this missing person, and obviously upset.’
‘I expect Kate can tell me herself,’ Harpur said.
‘Yes, we talked a bit,’ Kate said, ‘and I felt it sounded like something that could be . . . it could be something that would need a senior officer to look into. Not routine.’
Meaning, Kate wondered whether it might make a news story for her. He would have liked to ask Meryl whether her partner wore Paul Mixtor-Hythe suits and Charles Laity shoes, but didn’t.
‘I knew you were in the phone book, so we came out here and waited,’ Kate said.
‘We told them you’d be glad,’ Jill said.
‘Of course,’ Harpur said.
‘Her partner’s in property development,’ Hazel said. ‘Kate believes he came here to see some intermediaries.’
‘Yes, intermediaries,’ Jill said.
‘Do you know who they are – the intermediaries?’ Harpur said.
‘No,’ Meryl said.
Harpur would have bet on it.
‘And then silence,’ Kate said.
‘It’s a worry,’ Meryl Goss said.
‘Meryl works in a big London office but she’s taken some days off because of this search,’ Jill said.
‘We’d better have a name and description,’ Harpur said. ‘And pictures?’
‘Graham Trove,’ Meryl said. ‘Thirty-five, middle height, dark, short hair.’
‘They live together in Camden Town,’ Hazel said.
‘He nearly always wears a suit,’ Jill said.
Harpur would have bet on it.
Meryl was sitting in an armchair, a cup of tea provided by the girls on the carpet near her and alongside her handbag. She bent down to the bag and produced two photographs. Harpur, who’d remained standing near the door, crossed the room and took them from her.
‘And Meryl left one with Reception at headquarters,’ Kate said.
‘Have you got one, Kate?’ Harpur asked.
‘No.’
‘I didn’t want that,’ Meryl said. ‘I’d rather not have anything in the Press at this stage.’
‘Right,’ Harpur said.
‘We probably couldn’t publish yet, anyway,’ Kate said. ‘It’s not really a story so far.’
But Harpur saw she sensed that soon it might be – how good reporters got to be good. He looked at the pix. In one Graham Trove stood alone smiling outside what appeared to be a front door, perhaps the entrance to the Camden Town house. He wore a suit and collar and tie. Harpur tried to stop a vision of him with his throat cut supplanting the actual snapshot. The other picture showed Meryl and Trove conducting a comic kiss in a garden, perhaps at the rear of their house. They stood far apart, both bent over from the waist and stretched forward, like a couple of doves billing.
Hazel said: ‘Graham has phoned her several times, saying he’d arrived and so on and that things were going well. If he used a mobile these would be traceable, wouldn’t they, dad?’
‘Not all. Depends on the phone and how he pays. But then they stopped?’ Harpur said. ‘So, what happens when you ring him?’
‘Nothing or voicemail.’
‘We thought this might trouble you, dad,’ Jill said.
Yes, it troubled Harpur. In the morning he went up to Iles’s suite and put a photograph of Trove in front of him. ‘Yes, I’ve seen that,’ the ACC said.
‘How?’
‘A routine missing person inquiry came to us.’
‘Do you always look at routine missing person material, sir?’
‘I looked at this routine missing person material.’
‘Is that because you think you might have seen a missing person dead?’
‘Am I being interrogated? You must be a detective, Col. So, how do you come to have the photograph?’
‘I like to keep you up with what I’m doing, sir.’
‘That right?’
Chapter Three
Now and then, of course, Manse Shale had wondered about installing closed circuit television in and around the rectory. So far, wondering about it was as far as he’d gone. He did not really like the idea of cameras. Chilly things, staring, reporting back. Although CCTV might be fine at a bank or petrol station or jail, it did not seem to Manse suitable for his and the children’s home – and Patricia or Carmel or Lowri’s home, during their joyful, allocated spells as residents. And to Mansel it did not seem suitable for an ex-rectory, either. He prized this religious connection and wanted nothing to taint it. A rectory, when it was still a working rectory, would not have had CCTV. God watched over it, not fucking cameras. People visiting the rector might of felt snooped on, might even of got put off coming here, if cameras tracked them. This would be the wrong kind of treatment for church members, like they was enemies, whereas they might want to discuss raging soul problems or hand in decent garden produce for the harvest festival.
It’s true that if he’d had CCTV filming, Manse would of known straight off who lifted the pictures and what went on at the top of the stairs. But he had known by brain power, anyway, who ran the raid and who, like ultimately, was responsible for the corpse in the great suit near the first landing.
But with CCTV he might of had a security camera at the front door to check callers and show them on a monitor. Someone rang the bell now, giving it heavy pressure, it seemed to Manse – a true let’s-be-having-you-Shale blurt. He was in his den-study, maybe Manse’s favourite room, although it had Dutch portrait paintings here, not Pre-Raphaelites. He hated narrowness, and art certainly existed before and after the Pre-Raphaelites, he knew that – well, so obvious, think of them cave drawings or David Hockney with swimming pools. Manse sat at what was known as a ‘partner’s desk’, made of mahogany and with a leather top, going through some bank statements. You had to watch them sods in the banks.
These days, a partner at the head of a company would not have a big desk like this, most probably, but a ‘work station’ for his computer, surrounded by comfortable furniture, such as what were called now, sofas, not settees, where discussions on company policy would take place in a relaxed mode, also ‘brain-storming’ sessions, meaning where they tried to think of ideas a bit new. Manse’s study needed something different from a work station, though. The great size of the desk and the red leather top and the magnificence of the wood suited so well this big, square, high-ceilinged room. The bell continued to call and harass. To Manse it sounded like the police – non-stop, bossy. Lacking CCTV he could not tell who it really was, but he got some greasiness and kow-tow smiles and sharp thinking ready in case it did turn out to be police. You could never be sure what them fuckers knew or thought they knew or had made up. As Ralphy Ember said once: ‘Always try civility first, Mansel, but never count on it.’
When he went to open the door he saw it was Sybil. ‘My damn key doesn’t damn well work,’ she said. She waved it at him like a little spear. This must be what started the anger.
‘I’ve had the locks changed,’ Manse said.
‘Why? To keep me out?’
Yes, it was anger, but also fear, sadness. He decided he still did not want her to know why he’d ordered new locks. If the children seemed at risk here, she might insist on taking them to live with her and lover boy. Such a decision by Syb was not likely, but possible. She definitely felt some connection at times with Laurent and Matilda, he’d noticed that. She did know about motherliness and fell into it now and then. Manse said: ‘A girl who stayed here a while grew rather clingy and wouldn’t leave. I’m not one to get violent over something like that, am I,
Syb, so best just quietly keep her out? She’ll find another place, most likely.’
‘But why did you open the door, then? It could have been her.’
‘I had the idea it might be you.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. Like sixth sense?’ Shale said. ‘Maybe the special way you rang the bell.’
‘Special how?’
‘Like a personal message. Like saying, “It’s Syb, please answer.” ’
She moved into the hall and he shut the door. ‘Did you want it to be me?’ she said. ‘Is that why you thought the ring of the bell might be my ring of the bell? The thing is, you never knew until now how I do ring a bell because I didn’t need to, having a key.’
‘It’s something mysterious, yes,’ Mansel said.
‘I’ve heard of these girls – Patricia, Carmel, Lowri – from the children, damn it,’ Sybil said. ‘Which one grew clingy? Had you said something to her that would make her get clingy? Promises? Implications? What about the others? You give them all a key to our . . . to your home?’
‘It was a lovely surprise, Syb, when I opened the front door,’ Shale replied.
‘But you said you could tell it was me.’
‘Still great to find I had it right.’
‘Suddenly, I wanted to see the old place – and you, naturally, although it’s not long since Severalponds. I jumped in the car. Impulse. An hour, maybe two, and I’m on my way back. Perhaps I’ll wait for the kids to get in from school. Has Laurent chucked out that crap thing Ivor bought for him?’