by Simon Brett
‘What are they?’
‘Hm?’ He shook the water off his hands and reached for a towel.
‘The other good things?’
He grinned at me and shook his head. ‘Have to keep some secrets, you know, Nicky.’
‘OK. Point taken.’ I straightened my old Etonian tie in the mirror. ‘You wouldn’t consider letting me in for more than another ten . . .?’
We haggled a bit, but basically I got what I was after. I’d pay ten grand to Felicia and forty to Roland. She’d get the promised ninety from him, and not know that I’d contributed nearly half of it. Then Roland would account the profits back to me.
I felt pretty pleased with my day’s work. Though I say it myself, I’m a bloody good negotiator. And I had achieved a fifty-grand stake in one of the most lucrative little projects I’d ever heard of: lunch for three at Nico at Ninety was a small price to pay.
Struck me as I was walking down Park Lane from the restaurant that in fact I was almost going into the family business. The Foulkes fortune had been built up by ferrying Africans across the Atlantic. What I was now involved in was ferrying them back the other way. Rather neat, I thought.
‘I just feel so dreadful about this.’
Roland Puissant looked pretty dreadful too. We were at dell’Ugo, noisy as ever but smashing nosh. ‘Tell me about it,’ I said.
‘I’m almost embarrassed to.’
‘Come on, you don’t have to be embarrassed with me. I’m unembarrassable. Anyway, I’m a mate, aren’t I? Not to mention a business partner. You, me and Felicia, eh?’
‘That’s it. Felicia,’ he said glumly.
‘Come on, me old kipper. Pour it all out.’
And he did. It was bad.
Basically we’d been had. Felicia Rushworth had calmly taken our money and gone off to Jamaica with it. Whether there actually was any employment agency business seemed doubtful. Whether there was some useful contact at the Home Office who could fix work permits for Caribbean visitors seemed even more doubtful. Roland and I had fallen for the oldest ploy in the book – a pretty girl with a convincing line of patter.
‘And I just feel so guilty towards you,’ Roland concluded. ‘I should never have mentioned the project to you.’
‘Oh, now come on. I have to take my share of the blame too. You never volunteered anything. You never wanted to talk about it. Every detail I got out of you was like drawing a tooth.’
‘Yes, but I shouldn’t have got you involved. Or I should have seen to it that your stake stayed at ten grand.’
‘Well, you didn’t. You were bloody generous to me about that, Roland. At the time you were taking a considerable potential loss just to give me a chance.’
‘A chance I bet you wish now you hadn’t taken.’
‘Look, it’s done. I did it. Maybe I was bloody stupid but I did it. If you take risks, some of them are going to pay off and some aren’t. Anyway we’re in the same boat – both of us fifty grand to the bad . . .’ My words trailed off at the sight of his face. ‘You mean more than fifty . . .?’
Roland Puissant nodded wretchedly. ‘Practically cleaned me out, I’m afraid.’
‘But I thought you said you’d got a lot of other good things going?’
‘Yes, I did. Trouble is, all of those were recommended by Felicia. She generously took care of those investments too.’
‘Oh. So she’s walked off with the whole caboodle?’
‘About one point two million in all,’ he confessed.
I whistled. ‘Bloody hell. That is a lot.’
‘Yes. God, I’m stupid. I suppose . . . someone who looks like that . . . someone who’s as intelligent as that . . . it just never occurs to you that they’d . . . I was putty in her hands. Is there anything more ridiculous than a man of my age playing the fool because of a pretty face? Some of us just never learn, eh?’
I didn’t tell him how closely I identified with what he was saying. Instead, I moved the conversation on. ‘Question is . . . what’re we going to do about it?’
‘Bloody well get revenge!’ Roland spat the words out. I’d never seen him so angry.
‘How?’
‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head hopelessly. ‘No idea. Mind you, if I was out in Jamaica, I could do something . . .’
‘Like what?’
‘I know people out there. People who could put pressure on Felicia. Reckon they could persuade her to return our money.’
‘Are you talking about criminals?’
He shrugged. ‘Often hard to say where legitimate business practice stops and criminality starts, wouldn’t you say? But yes, this lot’s means of persuasion are perhaps more direct than traditional negotiations.’
‘Would she get hurt?’ The words came out instinctively. Whatever Felicia might have done to us, the idea of injury to that fragile beauty was appalling.
‘She’s a shrewd cookie. I think she’d assess the options and come across with the goods before they started hurting her.’
‘So you think we’d get the money back?’
‘Oh yes. I mean, obviously we’d have to pay something for the . . . er, hired help . . . so we wouldn’t get everything back . . . but we wouldn’t be that much out of pocket.’
‘Well, then, for God’s sake, let’s do it.’
Roland Puissant gave me a lacklustre look. ‘Yeah, great. How? I told you, she’s cleaned me out.’
‘Couldn’t I go to Jamaica and organize it?’
‘Wish you could.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Unfortunately, the people whose help we need are a bit wary of strangers. They know me, they’ve dealt with me before. But the last unfamiliar bloke who tried to make contact with them . . . ended up with his throat cut.’
‘Ah.’
‘No, I’m sorry. It’d have to be me or no one. But . . .’ He spread his hands despairingly wide. ‘. . . I don’t currently have the means to fly to Jamaica – let alone bribe the local villains. At the moment I’d be pushed to raise the bus fare to Piccadilly Circus.’
‘Well, look, let me sub you, Roland.’
‘Now don’t be ridiculous, Nicky. You’re already down fifty grand. I absolutely refuse to let you lose any more.’
‘Look, it’s an investment for me. It’s my only chance of getting my fifty grand back.’
He still looked dubious. ‘I don’t like the idea of you . . .’
‘Roland’, I said, ‘I insist.’
It was nearly a month later when Roland next rang me. He was calling from Heathrow. ‘I wanted to get through to you as soon as possible. I’ve had one hell of a time over in Jamaica, I’m afraid.’
‘Any success?’
‘Not immediately, no. I was just beginning to get somewhere, but then the money ran out and—’
‘You got through the whole ten grand I subbed you?’
‘Yes. As I said, the kind of help I was enlisting doesn’t come cheap.’
‘But why didn’t they come up with the goods? I thought you said they’d just put the frighteners on Felicia and she’d stump up the cash.’
‘That’s how it should have worked, yes. But she was a step ahead of us.’
‘In what way?’
‘She’d hired some muscle of her own. I’m afraid what I got into was like full-scale gang warfare. Bloody nasty at times, let me tell you. This time last week I didn’t reckon I’d ever see Heathrow again.’
‘Really? What, you mean your life was at—’
‘You don’t want to hear all this, Nicky. It’s not very interesting. Main point is, I’ve let you down. I said I’d go over there and get your money back and I haven’t. And I’ve spent your extra ten grand. In fact, you’re now sixty grand down, thanks to me.’
‘Listen, Roland, I walked into it quite knowingly. If you want to blame anyone, blame me. Blame my judgement.’
‘That’s very sporting of you to put it like that, but I can’t buy it, I’m afraid. You’re out of pocket and it’s my fault. But don’t worry, I’
ll see you get your money back.’
‘How? You’ve lost one point two million.’
‘I know, but there’s stuff I can do. There’s something I’m trying to set up right now, actually. And if that doesn’t work out, I’ll take another mortgage on the house. Anything to stop this awful guilt. I can’t stand going round with the permanent feeling that I’ve let an old chum down.’
‘Roland, you’re getting things out of proportion. I won’t hear of you mortgaging your house just for my sake. We can sort this thing out. Best thing you can do is get a good night’s sleep and we’ll meet up in the morning. See where we stand then, eh?’
‘Well, if you . . .’
‘I insist.’
‘Where’re we going to meet?’
‘Roland, you don’t by any chance play Real Tennis, do you?’
Don’t know if you know the Harbour Club. Chelsea, right on the river. Converted old power station, actually, but they’ve done it bloody well. Very high spec. Pricey, of course, but then you have to pay for class. And the clientele is, it has to be said, pretty damn classy.
Anyway, I try to play Real Tennis down there at least once a week. Enjoy the game, and it stops the body seizing up totally. Good way of sweating out a hangover too, so I tend to go for a morning court.
I thought it’d be just the thing to sort out old Roland. He’d sounded frankly a bit stressed on the phone, but I reckoned a quick canter round the court might be just the thing to sort him out. I was glad to hear he knew the game – not many people do – but surprised when he said he’d played it for the school. I didn’t know Harrow had a Real Tennis court. Still, Roland was at the place and I wasn’t, so I guess he knew what he was talking about.
I said we should play the game first, to kind of flush out the old system, and then talk over a drink. Roland wasn’t so keen on this – his guilt hadn’t gone away and he wanted to get straight down to the schemes he had for replacing my money – but I insisted and won the day. I can be quite forceful when I need to be.
I must say his game was pretty rusty. He said he hadn’t played since school but in the interim he seemed to have forgotten most of the rules. I mean, granted they are pretty complicated – if you don’t know them, I haven’t got time to explain all about penthouses and galleries and tambours and grilles and things now – but I thought for anyone who had played a bit, they’d come back pretty quickly. Not to poor old Roland Puissant, though. Acted like he’d never been on a Real Tennis court in his life.
Still, I suppose he was preoccupied with money worries. Though, bless his heart, he seemed to be much more concerned about my sixty grand than his own one point two million. I think he was just an old-fashioned gentleman who hated the idea of being in debt to anyone – particularly a friend of long standing. The idea really gnawed away at him.
The game seemed to come back to him a bit more by the end of the booking and, when our time was up, we’d got into quite a decent knock-up. Enough to work up a good sweat, anyway, and dictate that we had showers before we got stuck into the sauce.
It was when Roland was stripped off that I noticed how tanned he was. Except for the dead white strip where his swimming shorts had been, he was a deep, even brown all over.
‘I say,’ I joked as he moved into the shower, ‘you been spending all my money lying about sunbathing, have you, Roland?’
He turned on me a look of surprising intensity. ‘Damn, I didn’t want you to see that,’ he hissed.
‘Why? My suggestion true then, is it?’ I still maintained the joshing tone, but for the first time a little trickle of suspicion seeped into my mind.
‘No, of course not,’ Roland replied impatiently. ‘This happened when I got captured.’
‘You got captured? You didn’t tell me.’
‘No, well, I . . . No point in your knowing, really – nothing you could do about it now. And I . . . well, I’d rather not think about it.’ He looked genuinely upset now. I’d stirred up some deeply unpleasant memories.
‘What did they do to you, Roland?’ I asked gently.
‘Oh, they . . . Well, they stripped me off down to my boxer shorts and left me strapped out in the sun for three days.’
‘Good God.’
He gave me a brave, wry grin. ‘One way to get a suntan, eh? Though there are more comfortable ones.’
‘But if you were strapped down . . .’ I began logically ‘. . . wouldn’t you just be tanned on your front or your back? . . . Unless of course your captors came and turned you over every few hours.’ I chuckled.
Roland’s eyes glowed painfully with the memory as he hissed, ‘Yes, they did. That’s exactly what they did. So that I’d have to have the pressure of my body bearing down on my sunburnt skin.’
‘Good heavens! And those scratches on your back – were they part of the torture too?’
‘Scratches?’
I pointed to a few scrapes that looked as if they might have been made by clutching fingernails.
‘Oh yes,’ said Roland. ‘Yes, that was when they . . .’ He coloured and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I’d really rather not talk about it.’
‘I fully understand, old man.’ I patted him on the shoulder. ‘Still, you escaped with your life.’
‘Yes.’ He gritted his teeth. ‘Touch and go on a few occasions, but I escaped with my life . . .’ He sighed mournfully. ‘Though sadly not with your money.’
‘Don’t worry. We’ll have another go. We’ll get our revenge on Felicia Rushworth one way or the other.’
‘Hope so,’ said Roland ruefully as he ducked in under the spray of his shower.
At that moment his mobile phone rang. It was in the clothes locker he had just opened. ‘Shall I get it?’ I asked.
‘Well, perhaps I should—’
I pressed the button to establish contact. The caller spoke immediately. It was a voice I recognized.
I held the receiver across to Roland, who had emerged from the shower rubbing his eyes with a towel. ‘Felicia Rushworth,’ I said.
He looked shocked as he took the phone. He held his hand over the receiver. ‘Probably better if I handle this privately,’ he said, and moved swiftly from the changing room area to the corridor outside.
I sat down on the wooden bench, deep in thought. The words Felicia Rushworth spoke before she realized the wrong person had answered had been: ‘Roland, is the idiot still buying the story?’
Now, I’m a pretty shrewd guy, and I smelled a rat. For a start, Felicia’s tone of voice had sounded intimate, like she and Roland were on the same side rather than ferocious adversaries. Also, if one was looking round for someone to cast in the role of the ‘idiot’ who was hopefully ‘buying the story’ . . . well, there weren’t that many candidates.
Roland’s wallet was in the back pocket of his trousers, hanging in the locker. Normally I wouldn’t pry into a chap’s private possessions, but, if the ugly scenario slowly taking shape in my brain was true, then these weren’t normal circumstances.
Nothing in the wallet had the name ‘Roland Puissant’ on it. All the credit cards were imprinted with ‘R. J. D. Rushworth.’ In the jacket pocket I found a book of matches from the Sunshine Strand Luxury Hotel, Montego Bay, Jamaica.
I heard the door to the changing room clatter closed and looked up. ‘Roland’ was holding the phone, and had a towel wrapped round his waist.
‘God, she’s got a nerve, that woman – bloody ringing me up to taunt me about what she’s done.’
‘Oh yes?’
He must’ve caught something in my tone, because he looked at me sharply. ‘What’s up, old man?’
‘The game, I would say, “Roland Puissant.”’
He looked genuinely puzzled. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I told you I haven’t played for a while, bit rusty on the old—’
‘Not that game. You know exactly what I mean.’
‘Do I?’
I hadn’t moved from the bench. I’d curbed my anger, not even raised my voice while I
assessed how I was going to play the scene.
I still didn’t raise my voice as I said, ‘I’ve just looked in your wallet. All your credit cards are in the name of “R. J. D. Rushworth.”’
‘Yes,’ he replied in a matter-of-fact way. ‘I only got back last night. I haven’t got round to changing them yet.’
‘What do you mean? Aren’t you R. J. D. Rushworth?’
He looked at me incredulously. ‘Of course I’m not, Nicky. For God’s sake – you know I’m Roland Puissant, don’t you? But you surely never thought I was going to travel to Jamaica under my own name, did you? I didn’t want to advertise to Felicia what I was up to.’
For a second I was almost convinced, until another discordant detail struck me. ‘But why, of all the names in the world, did you choose her name – “Rushworth”?’
‘Well, I had to get to see her, didn’t I? Felicia’s got her security pretty well sorted out. I had to pretend to be her husband, so that they’d let me through to her.’
‘But the minute she saw you, your cover’d be blown.’
‘That was a risk I was prepared to take.’ He winced. ‘An ill-advised one, as it turned out.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’d been hoping that I’d get to see her on her own, but a couple of her heavies took me in. Well, I had no chance then, had I?’
‘That’s when the torturing started?’
He nodded, then shook his head. ‘I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.’
My heart went out to him. Poor bugger, not only had he lost all his money and been tortured by Caribbean thugs, now one of his best friends was suspecting him of . . .
Just a minute. Just a minute, I said to myself, hold your horses there, old man. The way he’d accounted for the credit cards was maybe feasible, but it didn’t explain the words with which Felicia had opened her telephone call.
‘When I answered your phone,’ I began coolly, ‘Felicia, presumably thinking she’d got through to you, said: “Roland, is the idiot still buying the story?” . . .’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, totally unfazed.
‘Well, would you like to explain to me what she meant by that, because I’m not much enjoying the only explanation my mind’s offering.’