Sisters Three

by Jessica Stirling

  She wasn’t dressed to receive visitors. In fact, she wasn’t dressed at all. Under her housecoat she wore only a pair of cotton knickers and a vest. Her hair was mussy and she had applied no make-up and, she felt, still smelled rather of bed.

  Licking marmalade from her fingers, she opened the door an inch or two and peeped out. Tony was leaning against the doorpost, arms folded, a cigarette in his mouth. He looked haggard and in spite of his easy pose, strained.

  She stepped outside.

  ‘Dominic isn’t here,’ she said, ‘He’s gone to the warehouse, I think.’

  ‘I know. I saw him leave. Saw the nursemaid take the kids off to school.’

  ‘What is it? What do you want with me?’

  A sound in the hallway; she glanced over her shoulder and saw that Mrs O’Shea, not Leah, had come up from the kitchen to answer the bell.

  Shrilly, Polly said, ‘I have it. You may leave it to me, thank you,’ and to her relief watched the cook disappear downstairs again.

  ‘Did she see me?’ Tony said.

  ‘I don’t know. Does it matter?’

  ‘I don’t want Dominic…’

  ‘I don’t have any secrets from Dominic now.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Polly!’ he said, thickly. ‘Don’t send me away.’

  He looked down at her, spying on her breasts under the collar of the robe. His eyes were sad, like those of a dog. She felt sorry for him, sorry for herself, sorry for betraying Dominic.

  In three or four months she would be the boss, however, and if Tony was still around he would be answerable to her. He would not be her advisor, like Mr Shadwell or Carfin Hughes, he would be her employee. She could not allow her feelings to undermine the trust that Dominic had placed in her: everything had already begun to change.

  ‘Let me in,’ he murmured. ‘Half an hour, twenty minutes, that’s all.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Polly said.

  ‘Look, I need to talk to you.’

  ‘There’s nothing to say, Tony.’

  ‘God, but you look lovely.’

  ‘You won’t butter me into bed, Tony, if that’s your intention.’

  ‘Tell them I’m looking for Dom,’ he said. ‘I am. I am looking for Dominic.’

  She could not hold out against him.

  She recalled the excitement of their first sexual encounter, how he had mastered her and taught her more about herself and the faltering state of her marriage than she had believed possible. And no guilt, no more guilt than Dominic had, no more guilt than Tony, no regrets at giving herself to him: no guilt until he told her that he loved her. She couldn’t cope with that, with the pain and responsibility of loving and being loved. She loved him still, though, would love him forever, perhaps, live with him in mind day after day, yearning for him even when the planes came and the bombs fell and the world was crashing about her ears.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Come in. Come quickly.’

  And, for the very last time, allowed him to enter her house.

  * * *

  Kenny was no more impressed by the Athena Hotel than Dominic. The difference was that the Highlander felt out of place there, not just because he was a copper. He’d been raised in a socialist household by a man to whom capitalists were the enemy and landowners, all landowners, were in league with the devil.

  There had been nothing vociferous about Jock MacGregor’s left-wing politics. The only times Kenny ever heard his father rant aloud were out in the sheep field when scrapie, say, had claimed another breeding ewe or feed was running low. Then his old man, outwardly so stoical, would let rip and denounce in no uncertain terms the government agencies that had reduced an honest man to reaching for the begging bowl or sliding into debt for the sake of a few measly pence. On the subject of war, though, his father had been strangely reticent. War seemed very far from the doorstep of a tenant farmer on Islay, nothing much more than a diversion to keep Westminster politicians from applying themselves to the problems of feeding the hungry, housing the poor and bringing prosperity back to the land.

  When he pushed through the circulating door of the Athena Hotel, however, Kenny MacGregor could not help but feel his hackles rise at the brilliance of the foyer and the sight of so many haughty lackeys ready and willing to dance attendance on the rich. He had just started towards the reception desk when a familiar voice called out, ‘Over here.’

  Dominic Manone rose from the brown leather cushions of a steel-sprung sofa between two potted palm trees whose leaves were made of beaten copper on trunks of painted bronze. The foyer was all glass and mock marble, all sheen and shine, and for an instant Kenny wondered if it really was Manone who had signalled to him or some chimerical substitute whom he had never met before.

  He looked different, did Manone, leaner somehow and lighter, lacking the sinister bonhomie of the host that, at Christmastide, had almost deceived Kenny into forgetting that the man was a crook.

  They shook hands.

  ‘Sit down,’ Dominic said.

  ‘What, here?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Bit public, isn’t it?’ said Kenny.

  ‘I’ve nothing to hide, have you?’

  ‘I thought…’

  ‘Ah, rushing to judgement again, are we?’ Dominic said. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  They seated themselves side by side. The intimacy embarrassed Kenny. He had the feeling that every eye was upon him, speculating on why he’d been granted audience with the great, the almighty Dominic Manone. Nonsense, of course, daft and stupid nonsense. Nobody at all was bothered, least of all Manone.

  ‘I assume,’ Dominic said, ‘you don’t have a man still posted here?’

  ‘No, not for weeks.’

  ‘How is Winstock, by the way? I heard he was terribly ill?’

  ‘He’s recovering slowly.’

  ‘He won’t be back, will he?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Kenny said.

  ‘It must be very trying being a policeman,’ Dominic said.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘But quite rewarding at times, surely?’

  ‘It can be.’

  ‘What would you consider rewarding, Kenneth?

  ‘Putting you behind bars,’ said Kenny.

  Dominic laughed. ‘Is that all you want, Sergeant MacGregor?’

  ‘What else is on offer?’ said Kenny.

  ‘Oh, thousands,’ Dominic said. ‘Thousands of pounds or, if you prefer it, regular emoluments that would allow you to live very comfortably indeed.’

  ‘For doing what?’ said Kenny. ‘Turning a blind eye?’

  ‘You wouldn’t be the first copper to do that,’ said Dominic. ‘With responsibility comes…’

  ‘Temptation,’ said Kenny. ‘Aye, I’ve heard that one before.’

  ‘However, I’ve no intention of offering you cash or any sort of financial inducement. I don’t want you to turn a blind eye. I want you to open both eyes very wide and take note of what’s staring you in the face.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Me?’ said Dominic. ‘What use am I to you, Kenneth? It isn’t me you need to bang up.’ He spread his hands and at that moment seemed to be all Italian, not a dour and clever Scot. ‘I pose no threat to social order. I haven’t been a threat for a very long time, if truth be known. I’m just a young old has-been with a bit of a shady past. But,’ he spread his hands again, ‘I’m not a fool.’

  ‘I never thought you were,’ said Kenny.

  ‘I’m not going to beat about the bush, Kenneth. I can give you what you actually do want, signed and sealed and delivered, but it has to be done my way and I have to have certain guarantees before…’

  ‘Didn’t Bernard tell you? I don’t do deals.’

  ‘Bernard’s your man, not mine,’ Dominic said. ‘In fact, it was unfortunate that you got him involved at all.’

  ‘I didn’t get him involved. He got himself involved.’

  ‘Fifty pounds in a plain brown envelope,’ said Dominic,
shaking his head. ‘A signal we’ve gone into production. After it’s delivered I assume Bernard will telephone you, you’ll rake together a squad, descend on the farm in force and arrest everybody in sight. Is that the strategy?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Sure you do. And in case you’re thinking that poor old Bernard’s playing two ends against the middle let me assure he’s not. Bernard Peabody would never, never sell out.’

  ‘He sold out to you, didn’t he?’

  ‘He married my wife’s mother,’ said Dominic. ‘I gave him a job.’

  ‘In a shifty agency.’

  ‘Not at all. Lyons and Lloyd’s is legitimate. The one and only “favour” Bernard ever did for me was arrange the lease of Blackstone Farm. There! Now you know. That’s where the machinery’s set up and where the printing will be done: Blackstone Farm, near Breslin.’

  ‘What to stop me going there and…’

  ‘Not a damned thing,’ Dominic interrupted. ‘You can raid the place tomorrow, tonight for that matter, but all you’ll get for your trouble is an alcoholic printer and a more-or-less innocent girl.’

  ‘And Tony Lombard.’

  ‘Tony,’ Dominic said, ‘is expendable.’

  ‘Are you saying I won’t get you?’

  ‘Not a hope in Hades,’ Dominic said. ‘Nor will you get Edgar Harker. Nor will you, or your cohorts in the Home Office, get the agents that are lying in wait down south. All you’ll have is a girl, an old man, and one expendable second generation Italian who won’t – let me repeat this – who won’t sing.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that.’

  ‘Oh, but I am,’ said Dominic. ‘I’m absolutely sure of Tony Lombard’s unswerving devotion – if not to me, to my wife.’

  ‘Polly?’

  ‘The one and only Polly, Tony’s dear friend.’

  ‘Good God!’ Kenny said, sighing. ‘You knew about it all along?’

  ‘Now I suppose you’ll assume I’m only out for revenge. Not so. In your book, Kenneth, I may be a rat but I’m not so much of a rat that I’d sacrifice my wife and family, and my best friend, just for the sake of getting my own back.’

  ‘You’re cleaning house, aren’t you?’

  ‘Pretty much, pretty well,’ said Dominic.

  ‘What about Harker, what about Rosie’s father? How are you going to solve that nasty wee problem?’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Dominic. ‘You are.’

  ‘Am I? How?’

  ‘By being patient.’

  ‘What are you offering? The names of the agents?’

  ‘I don’t have the names of the agents. Harker doesn’t have them either. What Harker does have, however, is the name, number and location of a source account from which the agents’ payments will be drawn.’

  ‘These are Nazi agents, spies? Right?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dominic.

  ‘So you’re not a Fascist sympathiser?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ said Dominic. ‘Many of my friends and business partners are, or appear to be, but that’s only because the Italian brand of Fascism provided them with an illusion of unity. They’re not evil, not even misguided. Many of them don’t understand what Hitler’s all about, or that strutting little egoist, Mussolini, who fancies that conquering Abyssinia will turn him into Alexander the Great.’

  ‘Or Julius Caesar,’ said Kenny, nodding.

  ‘Or Julius Caesar,’ Dominic agreed. ‘I take it you’re still with me, Kenneth?’

  ‘Can you deliver Harker? Can you uncover the names of the agents?’

  ‘With your co-operation I can deliver Harker. Netting the individual agents is too much for either of us. Your Scotland Yard friends will have to carry out that part of the operation.’

  ‘Why are you doing this? What will you get out of it?’

  ‘I require two weeks grace, three at most.’

  ‘Grace?’

  ‘To print off the first consignment of counterfeit notes.’

  ‘I can’t possibly aid and abet a criminal act.’

  ‘Harker won’t come out of hiding until he has something to collect,’ Dominic said. ‘After sundry percentages have been deducted, he’ll have around a hundred thousand in hot cash to pass to John Flint before he deposits the proceeds into a private bank.’

  ‘At which point,’ said Kenny, ‘the individual agents will begin to perk up and take an interest?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dominic said. ‘Soon after Harker makes the first deposit some other person – I’ve no idea who – will move in and arrange payments to small personal accounts in other banks across the country. Might be five, or ten, or fifty for all any of us can tell at this stage. At that juncture, not before, your colleagues down south can move in and pick them off one by one.’

  ‘Including Harker?’

  ‘Yes, including Harker.’

  ‘So he won’t be our responsibility? He won’t appear in a Scottish court?’

  ‘He probably won’t appear in court at all,’ said Dominic. ‘Unless I’ve seriously misjudged the little weasel he’ll spill his guts in exchange for a passport and a ticket to Siam.’

  ‘Siam?’

  ‘Anywhere,’ said Dominic. ‘Anywhere that isn’t Europe or America. He’ll simply vanish, never to be heard of again. History repeating itself.’

  ‘What’s Janet McKerlie going to say about that?’

  ‘Janet McKerlie is the very least of our worries.’

  ‘Our worries?’ said Kenny. ‘I haven’t agreed to anything yet?’

  ‘Rosie, I take it, wants to meet her father face to face?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘And Lizzie?’

  ‘I really can’t say.’

  ‘Small fry,’ said Dominic. ‘I really do hate to admit it, but we’re all just small fry. Very soon Lizzie and the sisters three will have a lot more to worry them than confronting a ghost from the past.’

  ‘Coping with a war, you mean?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Dominic.

  Kenny sat back. He stared out over the foyer of the hotel and wondered how long it would be before the Athena’s bars and dining-rooms would be filled with men in uniform, the same class, the same autocratic faces as filled it now only in best blues or browns, emblems of rank standardised and properly displayed at last: wondered how long it might be until the mock-marble staircases and metallic palms lay ruined among the rubble in the wake of Luftwaffe bombing raids. He had a sudden clear vision of carnage and destruction, of choking dust and acrid smoke, of Glasgow lying buried, like Pompeii.

  ‘You want me to stay my hand for a couple of weeks, is that it?’ Kenny said.

  ‘Three at most.’

  ‘And then what?’ Kenny said.

  ‘I’ll let you know when Harker makes the collection,’ Dominic said, ‘and you can take it from there.’

  ‘What about Lombard and the others?’

  ‘They slip quietly away.’

  ‘No charges?’

  ‘No charges.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’ll tell Polly that the deal between her father and me fell through and he’s gone back to the United States.’

  ‘That isn’t what I…’

  ‘Polly will take my word for it,’ Dominic went on. ‘She’ll impart the information to Lizzie and her sisters – and they’ll believe her.’

  ‘Point is,’ said Kenny, ‘do I believe you?’

  ‘That’s up to you.’

  ‘What’s the alternative?’

  ‘There is no alternative, not if you want to snare the agents.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me what’ll happen to you?’

  ‘That depends,’ Dominic said.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On whether you trust me or not.’

  ‘Huh!’ Kenny exclaimed. ‘I don’t trust you, Mr Manone, not one inch.’

  ‘Which,’ said Dominic, ‘is just as it should be. Do I get my fortnight’s grace?’


  Kenny sat motionless, hands between his knees. He wasn’t puzzled by the offer or bewildered by the complexity of Manone’s scheme. It was, in essence, really very simple. In exchange for a brief delay he would have the sort of material that the SPU had been set up to obtain and would be able to hand on to higher authorities a pretty-well foolproof plan for smoking out a nest of German agents. He would not be there at the death, at the kill, as it were, but he knew how the system worked and that what Dominic promised could be delivered, knew too that one way or another Rosie’s father would vanish, never to be seen again.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it. But if you let me down…’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of letting you down,’ said Dominic and with an enigmatic smile, shook Kenny’s hand to set the seal on their arrangement.

  * * *

  Dougie had been printing since mid-morning. Everything was running sweetly, so sweetly that he had carried on until three o’clock before switching the machinery off to let it cool. The racket had had died away before Penny came galloping up the wooden stairs and called out, ‘There is a strange car coming along the track.’

  ‘Is Tony back yet?’

  ‘No,’ Penny said. ‘Where are all the finished sheets?’

  ‘On the table, dryin’ off.’

  ‘Roll them and hide them between the straws.’

  ‘An’ spoil them?’

  ‘It is a car I have not seen before, Dougie. It may be a policeman.’

  ‘Okay, okay. Stall him long as you can, lass.’

  Penny turned and ran down the staircase and out into the yard.

  Hastily Dougie removed the plates from the clamp and rolled up the finished sheets. He stuffed the rolls behind the straw then, still with the plates in hand, heard the urgent honking of a motorcar horn below in the yard. He thanked his stars that the girl had been alert or lucky enough to spot the intruder. Panting, he shoved the plates into the straw bales too just seconds before Harker appeared on the stairs.

  Edgar Harker came thumping up the stairs and on to the floor of the gallery.

  ‘You’re the guy, ain’t you?’ Harker said. ‘Know who I am?’

  ‘Aye.’ Dougie swallowed his panic. ‘I’ve a feelin’ you’ve been sent to collect…’ Behind the man’s shoulder Penny signalled with a scowl and a shake of the head. Dougie hesitated, then concluded, ‘to collect somethin’ we haven’t got yet.’