The Way You Look Tonight

by Richard Madeley

  She followed him out onto the little metal landing and into the whitest, hottest sunshine she had ever known. She gave a small gasp of shock, and almost at once felt rivulets of perspiration begin to trickle from her hairline and down her forehead, neck and back.

  ‘Oh my goodness! How long does it take to get used to this?’

  He shrugged. ‘A week or two. But you have to embrace it. Don’t complain about it or talk about it. You need to adopt the right psychological attitude.’ He squinted at her in the glaring light as they began to descend the stairway. ‘Think you can do that?’

  Stella didn’t reply at once; she was struggling with the unprecedented sensation of inhaling something disturbingly close to liquid air. ‘What’s that smell?’ she managed eventually. ‘It’s like a bowl of rotting fruit in a steam-laundry.’

  He laughed. ‘That’s the Sunshine State’s special scent of summertime, ma’am. But like I told you – you’ll get used to it. You might even come to like it.’

  He trotted briskly down the stairway ahead of her. She couldn’t see even the faintest marks of perspiration on the back of his spotless linen jacket.

  Stella looked fuzzily at the airport terminal, sticky beads of sweat now oozing from her eyebrows and dropping down into her eyes, causing them to sting.

  This was awful.

  She remembered the brick of high-denomination dollars they’d given her just before she left Boston.

  Maybe she should just buy a ticket home to England and be done with the whole thing.

  There was a sudden roar of diesel engine and the airport transfer bus pulled up close to the bottom of the steps. Pork-pie hat turned round and waved at her. ‘C’mon in!’ he called. ‘The air-con’s lovely!’ He pointed at the vehicle’s sealed windows. ‘It’s gonna be like a Frigidaire in there!’ He disappeared inside the bus.

  Stella tottered after him. Back in England on hot days you opened windows on a bus; here it seemed that you had to keep them tightly closed.

  Maybe, she thought, as she climbed on board into a miraculous coolness, she could contrive to spend most of her time in Florida indoors.

  A minute or two later there was a grinding of gears and the vehicle moved slowly across the tarmac to the terminal building.

  The journey took less than five minutes but by the time they arrived, the sun had vanished behind the blackest cloud she had ever seen and fat raindrops were beginning to drum loudly on the roof of the bus. Lightning flickered and, as she hurried into the arrivals hall, there was a violent crash of thunder, seemingly directly overhead. It made a cracking, shivering noise, like great tree-trunks being split in two.

  Pork-pie grinned at her. ‘Another perfect day in Paradise,’ he said. ‘How long you staying in Florida?’

  Stella looked out at the sudden tropical downpour which was now so ferocious that anything further than fifty yards away from the terminal was completely obscured from view.

  ‘I only wish I knew.’

  The elderly professor replaced the handset in her study and stared blankly at her bookshelves opposite.

  ‘My goodness,’ she said at last.

  She could honestly say that it had been the most extraordinary phone call she could remember receiving since the war.

  It had come from the State Department in Washington, of all places. An extremely polite American had telephoned to ask her – her – to provide the White House with her general assessment of a former Girton student, Stella Arnold. Her reliability, honesty, and, specifically and most importantly, her standing in current academia on the subject of psychopathy and criminal psychopaths in particular.

  Professor Harriet Donnelly had initially offered a rather frosty response.

  ‘And why should you want to know this, may I ask?’

  The pleasant voice, speaking from more than three and a half thousand miles away, had explained that Stella Arnold was being considered for a special internship at the White House, and that this phone call was part of a perfectly normal series of background checks.

  ‘I see,’ said Professor Donnelly. ‘Well, I don’t suppose it can do any harm . . . Miss Arnold is of impeccable character, I can certainly vouch for that. As for her specialist knowledge in the field of criminal psychopathic behaviour, she is, considering her extreme youth, exceptional. At the Paris conference on the subject last summer, she—’

  The pleasant voice interrupted her to explain that the decision on the internship had to be finalised within twenty-four hours and therefore something in writing would be required. If Miss Donnelly could possibly put the salient points in telegram form, that would be greatly appreciated. There was no need to worry about the cost; she must feel free to use as many words as necessary, she would be promptly reimbursed.

  So now the professor crossed the study to her writing desk and switched on its green-shaded lawyer’s light. She opened a large leather-bound notebook and took out a fountain pen and began to compose a restrained eulogy to the most exceptional student of Psychology she had ever had the pleasure – no, the honour – of tutoring.

  PART TWO

  19

  Stella was sixteen when they finally told her everything. About him; about what he really was; what he really had been all along.

  She’d suspected much of it for a long time, of course. Most fathers didn’t go round kidnapping their own children for ransom.

  The biggest shock was to be told that he was dead, and had been for so long. She’d always had a vague idea of him continuing his shadowy, underground existence down on the Côte d’Azur, pursuing a violent criminal lifestyle underwritten by the enormous ransom her grandfather had been forced to pay for her release.

  She’d always despised him, and learning that he was long dead changed nothing.

  But as her mother sat there before her, steadily turning the secret pages of their shared pasts, her father’s death turned out not to be the biggest surprise, after all.

  Because there was something else her mother had to tell her.

  Or rather, that her grandfather was about to confess.

  Stella was sitting with her mother in the breakfast room of the Dower House, the country home tucked beneath the Weald of Kent where Diana had grown up before the war; the place where she first encountered James Blackwell, the man who would steal her heart – and, a decade later, for two terrible days, her daughter.

  Diana’s mother and father had insisted that she and their granddaughter live with them in the Dower House when they returned so unexpectedly and dramatically from the south of France, the very day after Stella’s release.

  ‘Just for a while, anyway,’ her father Oliver had said. ‘Until you both find your feet.’

  But the arrangement had become permanent. Stella had been boarding at a girls’ public school in neighbouring Sussex for the past six years and Diana had accepted an offer from her old Cambridge college to complete the degree in Politics that the war had interrupted. She’d gone on to take her doctorate at Girton, where she now lectured.

  Mother and daughter spent their holidays back in Kent with Oliver and wife Gwen and now, on this sunny August morning four months after Stella’s sixteenth birthday, Diana was reluctantly embarking on the conversation she had been dreading for so long.

  ‘Do I have to tell her?’ she’d almost pleaded with her father the night before, with Stella safely upstairs in her bedroom. ‘It’s not as if she ever asks about it, or him.’

  ‘Which means she probably thinks about it a good deal,’ Oliver had replied evenly. ‘One day she’ll simply confront you outright, and you’ll be caught off-balance. She won’t take any flannel, either – you know what she’s like. Once she sets her mind to something she’s an unstoppable force. You need to seize the initiative, now, my dear. It’s best for you and fairest for her.’

  ‘But, Daddy . . . apart from anything else, what on earth do I say about your part in it all? Only you and I and Mummy know what you did. Stella will be horrified.’

  Her f
ather went across to a silver cigarette box on the card table in the centre of the drawing room and brought it back with him to the sofa they were sharing.

  ‘She’ll be shocked, certainly,’ he said at last, sitting next to her and stretching his legs out before him, ‘but possibly rather thrilled, too. Don’t deceive yourself, Diana – Stella holds no sort of candle for her father. She detests him. In any case, she’s such an innately rational person that I’m sure she’ll see the logic in what I did . . . what I had to do, that night.’

  He lit a cigarette and waved it expansively in the air. ‘Remember how well she handled her kidnapping, Diana. She was only ten but she wasn’t the least bit afraid – in fact when I delivered the ransom to that bastard he told me that Stella had been in a constant state of simmering fury throughout. She’d even managed to attack him – remember the scratches and bite marks I saw on his face and wrist?’

  Diana smiled despite herself. Her father was so proud of Stella, and of her fighting spirit.

  She looked at him sidelong as they both drew on their cigarettes. He hadn’t changed much since that last, extraordinary night in Nice. Now in his mid-fifties, Oliver Arnold was one of the leading libel barristers of his day. He was still dressed in the three-piece navy suit he’d worn to court that morning. His cufflinks were unclipped and his tie was loosened, as they always were at this time of the evening. Perhaps his hair was a touch greyer about his temples, and his waist a little thicker, but that was all.

  Occasionally, when she was in town and one of her father’s more celebrated cases was under way, she would drop in to the public gallery to watch him conducting cross-examination. Sometimes she wondered what a trembling witness might think if they knew that just a few years earlier, the bewigged, gowned and languid figure standing in the well of the court had, without hesitation or a shred of compunction . . .

  He broke into her train of thought. ‘Diana? Did you hear what I just said?’

  ‘Sorry, no. Just thinking of something. Again, Daddy?’

  ‘I was saying that once you’ve told Stella everything we know about her father, I’ll tell her the final part about me and him. What really happened that night. Unless of course you think it’d be better coming from you.’

  She was suffused with relief.

  ‘It was what I was most dreading telling her. And no, I really think it will be better coming from you, Daddy. But aren’t you in the least bit, well . . . anxious about telling her everything? What you had to do to protect us both?’ He smiled at his daughter.

  ‘Don’t worry. Just think of it as a closing speech.’

  20

  The car had just breasted Cutler Ridge – the only area of raised ground in this part of southern Florida, particularly vulnerable in the hurricane season – and was heading down towards the swamps and marshes that divided the mainland from the first of the Keys, the chain of narrow islands that stretched out like a long string of pearls into the Gulf of Mexico.

  Stella leaned forward to speak to the driver. ‘How much further?’

  He paused in the act of inserting yet another potato chip into his mouth. She had watched in growing amazement as he went through pack after pack of them. This must be his sixth since leaving the airport. It would certainly help to explain the size of his stomach, which was pressing gently against the lower curve of the car’s steering wheel. He must be the fattest agent in the entire US Secret Service, she decided.

  ‘To Largo Lodge, ma’am?’ he replied, small crumbs of crisp spraying from his lips and landing on the dashboard in front of him. ‘Well, let’s see now. Key Largo’s about thirty miles, the Lodge’ll be another five. We’ll be there in forty minutes, I reckon, if the swing bridge ain’t up to let one of these here luxury launches through the Sound. That always adds another quarter of an hour.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Stella sank back into her seat. The scenery outside was boring; an endless flat expanse of fields sown with regimented fruit trees and bisected by drainage canals. Now and again they passed a scruffy-looking palm at the roadside. She was looking forward to the point where, according to the crumpled map she’d found in the back of the car, the Atlantic began to press up against the highway to the left, and the Gulf of Mexico pushed in from the right. That would be the start of the Florida Keys, and . . .

  And what, exactly? She still wasn’t sure precisely what it was she was supposed to be doing down here. She fished in her handbag for the handwritten scrap of card they’d given her before she left Boston that morning.

  Service car to collect you at Miami Airport. FBI Agent Lee Foster to meet and brief you on arrival at Largo Lodge, KL.

  That was it, apart from a scribbled Washington number she was supposed to call in any crisis or emergency.

  She wondered what Agent Lee Foster was like.

  Just as long as he wasn’t another Crew-Cut.

  22

  Stella often wondered what sort of reaction she would have got from the professors on her selection board for Girton if she had answered their very first question with the literal truth.

  Why did she want to study Psychology, the youngest woman on the all-female panel had earnestly enquired of her.

  ‘Because my father was a homicidal psychopath and my grandfather shot him dead. It was an ex-judicial execution. That’s rather left me wondering if I’ve inherited any similar proclivities for ruthlessness from either of them, so I thought I’d thoroughly investigate the question. Good enough reasons for you?’

  She doubted if such directness would lead to the offer of a place at Cambridge so had dissembled accordingly.

  But it would have been a completely honest answer. Since the morning Stella had learned that her father was not only a gangster but a merciless killer, and that her grandfather had despatched him with a nerveless touch all his own, she had begun to wonder whether something of either man’s ruthless streak infected her, too.

  Not that she compared her father with her grandfather; not in moral terms. James Blackwell had been the epitome of selfish wickedness; Oliver Arnold was a good and loving man. She knew that. But somehow it disturbed her that she had found it so easy to accept her grandfather’s explanation for shooting her father dead.

  23

  Key Biscayne hadn’t exactly turned out to be the happy hunting ground of his hungry imagination.

  But he was stone-cold right about the new money that was pouring in to the island, that was for sure. A lot of modern waterfront developments had sprung up since he was last up here two or three seasons back. Gated communities, mostly, which were no damn use to him. Uniformed guards in spick-and-span air-conditioned cabins behind electric barriers. He quickly registered that cars and delivery trucks wishing to be admitted needed to have special community identity stickers gummed to their windshields, different colours for different condominiums.

  As he cruised slowly up and down the newly completed ocean boulevards he noted that the occasional cab was allowed through the gates, but all the drivers seemed to have some sort of specific reservation or booking code which they bawled out to the gatehouse as they pulled up at the checkpoint. Guards inside consulted a clipboard and ticked them off before they raised the barrier.

  His own company’s booking office back down in Key Largo never received calls from this far north, and the cabs going in and out of these model communities were a lot shinier and smarter than the scruffy sedan he drove. There was no chance of bluffing his way past the gatekeepers, he could see that; he’d stick out a mile.

  Anyhow, even if he did talk his way inside, there were far too many residences (pink-and-white-painted two-storey town houses, mostly) with their owners wandering around in a virtual uniform of golf pants and Aertex shirts, to even think about trying anything. Through green-painted mesh fences he could see Hispanic groundskeepers tending perfectly maintained lawns and clusters of sub-tropical plants that lined the pavements. Here and there, classy-looking speedboats were being carefully towed on trailers down to private launch
ramps that sloped gently into the lapping waters of the dock.

  It was hopeless. He’d wasted the best part of a day driving up here, and then poking around, and he had nothing to show for it – no mark, no plan of action, not even a goddamned legit fare for his trouble. He couldn’t understand what he’d been thinking of.

  These days, he decided, Key Biscayne had become pretty much a semi-detached suburb of Miami itself. That was mostly thanks to the new Rickenbacker Causeway, which they’d finally gotten around to completing a few years back. Biscayne had lost any remaining atmosphere of the proper Keys – his Keys –which lay sixty miles to the south, where the islands began curving away from the sprawling brackish swamps of the Florida Everglades, down towards Cuba.

  The real Keys were a sloppy, choppy mix of Caribbean, Cuban, and all-American Joe. Not like this pristine place. Welcome to Perfectsville, USA.

  Cursing under his breath, he swung the old Buick in a hard, tyre-screeching semi-circle across the street and headed back towards Route 1. He glanced at his watch. It would be dark in a couple of hours. Already, he knew, folks down in Key Largo were beginning to drift towards ocean bars and restaurants on the westward-facing shores. They’d order cocktails, and jostle subtly for the best spots to watch the timeless end-of-day ritual: sunset. They’d raise their glasses as the sun drowned itself in the warm, soupy Gulf of Mexico, only to rise again a few hours later, dripping and renewed, from the cold Atlantic.

  Highway traffic was light this evening and if he hit the gas he figured he could be at his favourite Gulfside seafood bar in time to catch the spectacle. The skies were clear, apart from some patches of high, thin cirrus. That promised a fabulous red-and-gold sunset and if the horizon stayed cloud-free and the ocean was calm, there might even be a chance of seeing the mysterious Green Flash – an incredibly rare phenomenon. He’d lived in the Keys for most of his thirty-two years and even he had only witnessed it once: the weird, piercing emerald ray that shot from across the ocean like a searchlight, at exactly the same moment the last fragment of glittering sun winked out below the horizon.