“Not people who deal in stolen goods?”
“Absolutely not! You’ve got a real cynical streak, Hastings, you know? Anyway, what I do is, I connect buyers with sellers. I guess you could say I have a modest reputation. Like, in the past year, I’ve set up deals to return a three thousand year old mummy to the Egyptian Museum at Midan el-Tahrir in Cairo and a preserved head to a Maori tribe in New Zealand-”
“So you’re a dealer in body parts.”
“Only the ones that were separated from their owners a long time ago. I’ve also brokered the sale of a Rembrandt self-portrait by a collector in France to the Chicago Art Institute and brought a Jackson Pollock across the Atlantic the other way to take its place.”
“New World one, Old World nil,” I said.
“You don’t think there’s a lot of skill involved in throwing paint at a canvas? My French collector thinks Pollock’s just the cat’s whiskers. He thinks Old World art is decadent and the New World has all the energy.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’m more into cartoons.”
“Leonardo?”
“Peanuts.”
She balanced the figurine in one hand and sipped her coffee, watching me over the rim of the mug. “Anyway, about your buddy Roden. He contacted me a week ago and said he might have something I’d be interested in.”
I looked out of the window again, gathering my thoughts. I thought I saw dark wings glide past: the large moth had gone and I wondered idly if bats flew in central London. “Did Roden happen to tell you what this ‘something’ was?”
She placed her coffee mug back down on the table and touched her index finger to her lips. “He was kinda cagey on that point.”
“He’d have told you it was worth a lot of money, though, right?”
“He didn’t say, exactly.”
“But he said enough to get your attention.”
“He seemed pretty hot about whatever it was he had a lead on. I figured it was about a bit more than a collection of baseball cards, know what I mean?”
“But he didn’t tell you any more about it.”
“Not a thing.”
The pistol in the back holster was pressing into my spine and I leaned forward to relieve the pressure. “How did you know when he went missing?”
“Easy. I’d been calling him every day. Suddenly, all I was getting on his mobile was his answering service and he wasn’t returning my messages. So, I made a few enquiries-”
“Who did you ask?”
She smiled once more, holding the figurine against her body as if it could protect her from assaults on her credibility. She would have needed something more than a porcelain dancer for that: full body armor might have been nearer the mark. “I have sources. You need them in my business. Obviously, I can’t reveal their identities, not even to someone as special to me as you’ve become in these past few days.”
“But I guess they’d be the same sources that let you know that Roden was killed earlier today...” Which could, I thought, mean someone in the police or news services.
She shrugged for an answer.
“So who are you working for now?”
“I told you. I’m self-employed.”
“But you’d have a buyer for whatever it was that Roden was planning to sell.”
“Would I?” She placed the figurine on the side table and stretched her arms again, the action pulling the yellow dress tight across the contours of her body. “OK, the truth is I could have any number of buyers, depending on what the merchandise actually turned out to be. Like, I know all the collectors, public and private, in Europe and the States. Quite a few in the middle and far east, too. But have I contacted any of them? No, I haven’t. How could I when I don’t know what the merchandise is or what it’s actually worth?”
“So you have no idea who might have killed Roden or my colleagues?”
She suddenly became serious. “No, of course not. If I did, I’d tell the cops for sure. Let me tell you, the whole thing’s got me rattled. Which is why I wanted to talk to you.”
“I was wondering about that.”
“You’re a professional bodyguard, right? How about I hire you?”
“I told you once before, I’m already hired.”
“Yeah, I figured that’s what you’d say. You have a disturbing tendency towards honesty, Hastings. It’s doesn’t become you.”
“I’ll work on it.”
“You should. What do you say? Could we work together?”
“Seriously. Why me?”
“You mean apart from your matinee idol good looks?”
“Apart from my qualifications as a toy boy.”
She leant forward and linked her hands across her knees. “I told you. This business is getting scary. I need an ally. But also, I figure you were the last person to see Roden alive. You talked. It could just be you know more than you’re letting on.”
“Next question. If we work together, what’s in it for me?”
“You get to spend time with me.”
“Hard to resist.”
“And like I told you, I know all the players in this game. Maybe it’ll turn out one of them will know who was behind the murder of your friend…”
I felt the smile drain from my face. “Do you think that’s likely?”
She leaned closer, so that her face was only a couple of feet away from mine. “Who knows? There are some real wealthy people in this business and not many of them made it big by putting their money in their local Savings and Loan.”
***
A good few hours of the early morning had gone by the time I got back to Stratford and let myself back into my hotel room. The aspirin had worn off and my injured shoulder was throbbing again. I washed down more pills with the help of a glass of water and then gazed at myself in the bathroom mirror. I looked like hell. My skin was pale and clammy-looking and I had dark circles under my eyes. I made a resolution not to get shot again for a while and got myself painfully undressed and ready for bed.
A squall had brought rain sweeping in from the Cotswolds and, as I pulled the covers over my shoulders, I heard thunder booming like Napoleonic artillery. Raindrops splattered against my window. I’ve always liked the sound of bad weather outside a warm room but sleep proved elusive. I ordered my brain to shut down and rest but my thoughts kept going back over the events of the day. The vision of Robert Roden, lying on the ground with a bloody mess where his chest and head had been, replayed itself in my mind like a TV newsreel. I’d seen dead bodies before but that had been during my army days. In recent years, I’d lost my casual relationship with death. I told myself, not for the first time in my life, that the dead were dead and that nothing I could do would change a thing.
The fact was, Roden’s death was only part of what was keeping me awake. Another vision, of Miranda Smart stretching and smiling that conscience-damning smile, kept pressing itself onto the video screen of my recent memory. It was stupid, I told myself. I was a long way past being a love-struck schoolboy. More to the point, I’d long ago decided that I’d never hand another woman the power to make me suffer.
My mind began to play its melancholic tricks. Long ago, my shrink had taught me simple meditation techniques as a defense against depression. I closed my eyes. Hummed my mantra. Concentrated on the flow of air through my nose. In time, my fingertips began to tingle and my consciousness slipped into a world where pain could be locked in a deep, dark cave until, as inevitably happened, it made its next escape.
Chapter 11
The next morning, I ran a bath and climbed carefully in, holding my injured arm up to stop my bandages from getting wet. By 8.30 A.M., I was dry and dressed and calling Isbey, knowing that, as a creature of habit, he’d be in his office and straining the tea bag from his first Earl Gray of the day.
He grunted when he heard my voice. “Clearly, you’re still in the land of the living.”
“Control your joy, Colonel.”
“Have you heard any more fr
om the police?”
I settled down on the bed, resting the phone on my good shoulder. “Nothing. I don’t think they’ll have an easy job finding the killers.”
“I’m sure they won’t. Have you seen the morning newspapers?”
“They’re on to the story?”
“The ones I’ve seen are. It’s headline news in the Times. ‘Third violent death in tourist town’.”
“Are they reporting anything we don’t already know?”
“They’re linking the two recent incidents,” he said, “which is hardly surprising. Other than that, there’s nothing new.”
“Is there anything more about our involvement?”
“Just a repeat of the line that Thorpe and Young worked for the agency. It’s unlikely that they’ll contact you, Hastings,” he continued, “but if they do you should simply say that agency policy forbids its operatives to talk to the media. Then refer them to me.”
“There goes my chance of becoming a media celebrity.”
He was quiet and I guessed he was still angry at me from the previous day.
“I’ll keep schtum, Colonel.”
“I have talked to our friend Mr. Bakst,” he said.
“Oh? What’s he got to say for himself?”
“He is, of course, devastated by the loss of his representative Mr. Roden.”
“And?”
He coughed. “He was a little uncomplimentary about the fact that, once again, you failed to provide our claimed levels of personal protection for his man.”
“Despite the fact that Roden had run away from me and the minor detail that, when I caught up with him, I was unarmed and the gorilla in the alley was shooting at us with a small artillery piece?”
“I don’t suppose he considers that his problem.”
“So what’s he want to do about it?”
“He tells me he has decided personally to take over the business on which Dr Roden was engaged. That being the case, it appears he has no further need for our services.”
I pushed myself upright on the bed. “Oh?”
“He has, it seems, his own full-time bodyguard. He considers this person quite capable of providing the necessary level of protection to ensure his own security.” I heard a faint patter and guessed he was tapping his teeth with a pencil. It was a few seconds before he continued. “I can’t say I’m too upset about this development, Hastings. I’m sure we’re better off leaving this situation for the police to handle.”
The itch had returned to my injured arm and I scratched the flesh above the wound gingerly. I guessed that poor old Isbey was catching heat from his superiors. The firm likes to keep a low profile, especially since the embarrassment with the ‘advisors’ who got themselves involved in the foreign coup a few years ago. Its principals would undoubtedly be mortified by press references to its involvement in the Stratford killings. I figured, however, that this might be a good time to keep my views to myself. I was stinging from the implied rebuke over Roden being killed on my watch. No matter what excuses I might find, the fact remained that I’d been responsible and the Roden business was my first real failure since I’d started doing work for the agency.
I asked Isbey if he had another assignment for me and he said, no, not at such short notice, which meant that, as a contractor, I was off the payroll until something else came up. That being the case, I told him, I’d take myself a little break and wait for him to call. Maybe he wondered what that meant but, with me officially off the agency’s books, his responsibilities were at an end. When he rang off, I had the strangest feeling of being all alone in the world.
Bouts of depression aside, that’s something that had never bothered me before.
***
It was a little after 10 A.M. when I strolled through the front door of the Stratford and District museum on Henley Street. The information desk in the foyer was occupied by a thin, elderly woman who listened to my story about needing to see an expert on Shakespearean documents and asked me to wait before picking up the phone and making a sotto voce call. I watched a party of Japanese tourists mill around the foyer and then peered at a display stand holding a selection of Shakespeare-related books. I picked out a couple of recent biographies, paid the lady on my credit card and found a seat out of the way of the marauding holidaymakers.
Before I’d finished reading the introduction to the first book, a small, flustered-looking man came through a door marked ‘private’ and bustled up to me. I stood and shook his hand and he introduced himself as Frederick Taylor. He was the kind of man who could be anywhere from forty to sixty years old. He wore a faded corduroy jacket and had straggly, graying hair over round eyes and a small, pock-marked nose. I guessed he’d pigeon-holed me as another tourist trying to waste his valuable time but he enquired about my business with the eternal, eggshell-china politeness of the lesser-paid English professional classes. His hands danced a pirouette on his shirt-front as he spoke, as if he couldn’t wait to get back to whatever fascinatingly fusty studies had held his attention up until my arrival. His demeanor changed, however, when I showed him my scrap of paper.
He pulled a pair of half-moon glasses from his jacket and, adjusting them carefully, peered at the page. I handed it to him and he turned it from side to side as if it was a hologram and the act of viewing it from different angles might change its contents. For a while, he seemed to forget all about me. Several times I heard him mutter to himself and his free hand fluttered around his imperfectly-shaven chin.
“Fascinating.” He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “There is, of course, no play in the canon of this name.”
“That’s what I thought. Love’s Labor Lost, of course…”
“Love’s Labor’s Lost,” he corrected me. “Written about 1593. If the original of this paper were genuine, it would probably date from some years later than that. See,” he pointed at some of the names, “there’s mention of Will Kempe. He was a famous comedian in Shakespeare’s troupe, the Chamberlain’s Men. There’s a legend that Shakespeare tired of his brand of slapstick comedy and the two fell out as a result. Let’s see, Kempe left the company around 1599…”
“So…” I started.
His eyes flickered back at me and then down to the paper again. “But the other names include Slye and Condel and most authorities think that Kempe had left the Chamberlain’s Men before they joined. It’s hard to say for sure, of course. What records survive from the time are incomplete. Anyway, I believe Slye and Condel joined the company around 1599 so…”
“They may have overlapped with Kempe?”
He tapped his forefinger on the paper. “That would put 1599 as the most likely date for this document. If it was real.”
“And what are the chances of that?”
“It’s hardly likely. Strangely enough, a reference to a play called ‘Love’s Labor’s Won’ did appear in some contemporary records. A man called Meres, a great admirer of Shakespeare’s, recorded it in a list of his plays.” He smiled for the first time: unexpectedly, the air of dowdiness about him evaporated like rain on summer sidewalks and he looked like an eager undergraduate. “There are lots of mysteries about Shakespeare, you know. The news media weren’t all they could have been back in the sixteenth century.”
“They’re not always that hot now,” I pointed out.
“The thing is, much of Shakespeare’s life went unrecorded. It’s the same with a lot of his contemporaries. John Webster, for example: we’ve got his plays and he’s famous in an obscure sort of way, but we don’t even know when the man was born or when he died. As for dear old Will, for good chunks of his life, we’ve no idea whatsoever what he was up to.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well,” he said, “when Shakespeare was a young man, for instance. Everyone knows that he and Anne Hathaway had a shotgun marriage. They had a daughter and then twins, by the way. One son, Hamnet, who died when was ten or eleven. Anyway, Shakespeare was married when he was no more than twenty. He lef
t Stratford soon afterwards. There are no records of him after that for quite a few years. That’s the first of the Shakespeare mysteries. What was he doing during the lost years? He may have been a soldier or a teacher. Some people think he traveled in Europe, some think he was living in the north of England. Then, about eight years after leaving Stratford, he popped up on the cast list of one of the theatre groups in London.”
“He became an actor, then?”
“Yes, before he was a writer. People in the theatre think that’s one reason why he was such a great playwright, you see. He knew what actors needed from a part because he was one himself.”
“When he turned up in London,” I asked, “he was acting at the Globe?”
“The Globe wasn’t built until later. There were several theaters, though, the Rose, one side of the river, the Curtain on the other. There was another just called ‘The Theater’.”
“What else? You said there were lots of mysteries?”
“There’s the Dark Lady of the sonnets.” He smiled coyly, as if he was about to let me into some shocking scandal. “The Dark Lady was the love of Shakespeare’s life but she was what we might nowadays call ‘a real two-timer’. Will wrote about her in the sonnets. He said ‘when my love swears she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies’.”
“What else?” I asked.
“How long have you got? There are all sorts of mysteries.”
I pointed to the book I’d just bought. “There’s something in the introduction to this about lost plays.”
He nodded furiously, grabbing at his glasses as they started to slip from his nose. “Indeed. The most famous of them is a play called ‘Cardenio’. It’s thought it was based on some stories in Don Quixote. But no one knows for sure. It’s simply gone. On the other hand, there are a dozen or so reasonably well-known plays from the time that still exist but have no known author. It’s possible that some of these plays were actually written by Shakespeare. Some scholars even think he contributed to the translation of the King James bible. But there’s no proof of anything. So much from that time was lost for lack of preserving.”
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