The Guardian

by Christopher Kenworthy

  “That is Irene.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lovegod leaned off his stool and picked up the magazine carefully. He was flushed and disheveled and cigarette ash was spilled down the front of his suit, but suddenly he looked sober.

  Arnold watched as he examined the picture carefully, holding it close to his eyes like a bank manager scrutinising a suspect note.

  “You certain? You haven’t seen her for two years,” he pointed out. “Or did she visit you recently? They did have visiting where you’ve been?”

  “It wasn’t that kind of prison,” said Carver unemotionally. “No, she hasn’t visited me or been in touch. But I have a picture of her taken just before I went away.”

  He opened his shirt and pulled out a square of black material. It was bent into a permanent dish shape, and so steeped in perspiration that the leather had taken on the sheen of oilcloth. But when Carver opened it, the picture inside was bright and true.

  “That’s new,” Arnold objected. Carver shook his head.

  “Two years old. I had it laminated before I went,” he said.

  Lovegod took the plastic coated photograph and laid it beside the picture. The girl in the magazine was visibly older – but it was undeniably the same girl. Lovegod nodded.

  “You’re right. What do you want to do?”

  Carver took the picture and slipped it back out of sight.

  He touched it with the tenderness a medieval monk might have used to handle a morsel of the true cross.

  “Clever of you to have it coated in plastic,” Arnold told him.

  Carver nodded but did not explain. Arnold got the impression Carver rarely explained himself.

  “What do you want to do?” Lovegod repeated. Now that the need for concentration was past, he had relapsed into his dangerously sodden state and was fumbling with a new cigarette while the previous one burned itself away, unstubbed, in the now full ashtray.

  “I want to find her. I want to start with the head of that children’s home. But I can’t get to him without you,” Carver told him.

  “‘S’all right,” said Lovegod. “We can go together in the morning. Nothing simpler.”

  Carver watched him for a moment, and apparently came to the same conclusion as Arnold. There was nothing useful to be done with Lovegod tonight.

  “I’ll pick you up at ten,” he said quietly. “On the dot. Your place.”

  Lovegod watched him leave the bar through half closed eyes, and then sat up abruptly. The drunkenness drained away like water running off a breaching whale.

  “Give him a couple of minutes to get clear,” he said crisply. “And then we’ll go back to the nick. I’d like to look up Harry Carver again. I want to know where he came from two days ago.

  “Then I’d like to know where he spent the last couple of years.”

  Arnold protested with a sinking heart. Already he was too late to get his last train home and he was in no condition to drive, even if he had been able to remember where he had left his car.

  He faced a long and expensive taxi journey home and a rough reception when he got there. His wife was not unused to police hours, but she was impatient of them, and she was doubly impatient of her husband’s frequent absences with his superior.

  “Lovegod, why won’t you go home?” he begged.

  “Home?” Lovegod was genuinely shocked. “The game’s afoot, Watson. Where should a good sleuth be but behind his bloodhound, magnifying glass in hand and deerstalker holding down his rapidly thinning locks? For shame, James. And you call yourself a bluebottle.”

  “I’m not Watson,” Arnold protested feebly. “You’re not Holmes – and we haven’t got a bloodhound.”

  Lovegod was already retreating rapidly towards the stairs.

  “Holmes had a bloodhound,” he said over his shoulder. “But I’ve got much better than that, Jimmy. I’ve got Harry Carver!”

  *

  He would have sounded less smug if he had seen his bloodhound at that moment.

  Carver stood in the angle of the buttress of the Church of St John The Intermediary on the opposite side of the street and watched the two policemen emerge from the club and set off towards the police station.

  His packed bag was slung behind his shoulder and his lightweight suede coat was zipped to the neck. It was hot on this warm night, but it prevented the light coloured shirt from showing against the sooty brickwork of the church behind him.

  When the policemen turned the corner of the street, he stepped up to the six-foot railings which fronted the churchyard, put a hand between the spikes, and jumped over them in one smooth movement. When his feet hit the pavement, they did not make enough noise to embarrass a stalking cat.

  He walked round the corner and fished from his pocket the ignition keys of a parked Ford Fiesta. Since he had parked it, he saw, the radio antenna had been torn off and apparently used to thrash the car soundly. Slender weals disfigured the paintwork, and both exterior mirrors had been torn off.

  It did not surprise him. Cars in this part of the world had a short and eventful life, and many of them finished up as spare parts on somebody else’s vehicle. For that reason, he checked carefully not only that all four wheels were on the car, but also that they were still firmly screwed on. The kids round here prided themselves on a sense of humour so robust as to be occasionally fatal.

  Then he put the bag in the back of the car, and drove sedately to Kensington, where he parked the battered vehicle on a meter and pushed through the doors of a discreet, elegant hotel hacked from the carcass of a vast Victorian house which had once been the love nest of a Crown Prince.

  He collected his key from the Night Porter who had the manner of an unfrocked Grand Duke of the late Tsar’s court, and ordered a pot of coffee and a large brandy.

  The Night Porter considered telling him that there was no room service after midnight, but read the expression in Carver’s eye, and wisely reconsidered. He prided himself as a judge of character, and it had saved him from painful mistakes before this.

  In his room, Carver unpacked his holdall. It was full of new clothes and shoes, and he stripped off wrappers and hung them all carefully in the wardrobe alongside a bathrobe and slippers which were already there.

  In the bathroom, he ranged a brand new open razor, a new sponge and some Penhaligon soap and cologne with the toothbrush and paste which were waiting on the shelf over the basin, and then started to run a bath. The coffee and cognac arrived while he was changing into the robe, and he signed for them silently and waited until the Night Porter had left before opening the pocket on the side of the holdall and producing a fluffy toy, a couple of girls’ books and an elaborately wrapped parcel from Cartier in Paris.

  Before he climbed into the bath, he put the brandy and a cup of coffee on the ledge next to it. Then he propped the back of the single upright chair in the room under the door knob.

  Harry Carver was a very careful man indeed.

  But he was also a very self indulgent one. He felt that if he had to live in some discomfort during his working life, he owed it to himself to make sure that his brief periods of leisure were as comfortable as he could make them.

  His last two years had been not only uncomfortable, but bitter, painful and dangerous. His period in London was therefore carefully planned to be luxurious in the extreme.

  However, Carver was deeply worried.

  Lovegod’s scepticism about Carver’s background was unjustified. Carver was in fact American, born in Denver, Colorado, of an American father and an English mother.

  Carver was deeply proud of his father’s origins. Big Tom Carver claimed his great-grandfather had been at Custer’s last stand on the winning side, and Carver saw no reason to doubt the fact.

  His father had been an immense man, who worked as a ski instructor on the snow covered slopes which attracted winter sportsmen and women from all over the world.

  One of the women who came
to ski and stayed to wonder was Mary Pearson, English and wealthy with it. She took one look at the towering ski instructor with the intriguing high cheekbones and black, penetrating eyes, and lost her heart and a good deal of her common sense.

  Tom Carver might be a fine ski instructor and a woodsman without peer, but he was a dismal businessman. When Mary put her money into a ski school for her new husband, Tom enthusiastically spent the lot, mortgaged the school and lost it in a poker game.

  Standing outside their former home, he had reassured his wife, “Don’t worry. My grandpaw knew how to give these guys a pasting. I’ll do the same. Just watch my dust!”

  When he was released from prison two years later, nothing had happened to dent his optimism.

  “I worked as a ski bum before. I can do it again,” he told his wife and two year old son. And work he did, bringing in excellent money, which his wife was careful to lock safely away from him and his poker games until she had enough to buy a guest lodge in the mountains.

  It was not a money spinner, but it kept Tom and his son Harry – the family never expanded – in comfort. In return Tom spent days with young Harry in the woods, teaching him woodcraft and self-reliance and to play a form of stud poker which would have grown hair on a six lane black-top.

  By the time he was fourteen, Harry Carver had the reputation of being able to track a mosquito across running water, and to see aces through a stacked deck with his eyes closed and a quart of moonshine whisky inside him.

  He also had the reputation of being hell on wheels in any kind of a fight, and grown men surveyed his shoulders and the level green eyes with thoughtful expressions and forbore to pick fights in his company.

  “There ain’t nothing on earth,” said Big Tom with the satisfaction of a man who has never laid a hand to anything he could not pick up unaided, “as will stop a man who knows he’s right and keeps a-comin’.”

  Harry took the advice to heart. He found out later that his father, a lifelong Western fan, had read the advice in a book and founded his life on it. Two years later Big Tom found out that there was indeed something which would stop a man, right or not.

  It was a .375 Smith and Wesson in the hands of a bank robber whose activities Tom Carver was ill-advised enough to interrupt.

  He lived long enough to pass on a description of the bank robber, his car and even his partner to the now sixteen-year-old Harry, who got to them before the police.

  The California police Lieutenant who had the task of cleaning up afterwards swallowed hard when he opened the hotel room door and saw just how high the blood had splashed.

  “If he wasn’t just a sixteen-year-old backwards kid, you’d have thought that maybe he had done it himself,” he told a colleague afterwards.

  “But those were two tough bastards. DiMaggio and Glassi, records as long as your arm. No way could he have taken both of them by himself. There wasn’t anybody else around when we got there. I reckon they creamed each other and the kid got there in time to finish off the winner. But he had reason, and there’s no proof he did any more than just track them down like he said and call us.”

  The incident opened a whole new life to Harry. From being able to track animals in the woods, he found he was now able to track animals of a different order through the modern city jungles.

  When his mother decided to return to the land of her birth, Harry already had a thriving agency. He found things.

  “FINDERS KEEPERS” said his business card in exuberant red type. “You lost something, I find it. No get, no sweat.”

  If it worked well in America, reasoned Harry, it could work well in Europe. So he packed his bags, sold out his agency to his assistant, and moved with his mother.

  England was a great disappointment to him. Nothing his mother had told him had prepared him for the continual cold and wet, the proportions of the streets and what he considered to be unreasonably small cars.

  He had to give up carrying his beloved gun – ironically a .357 Smith and Wesson revolver similar to the one which had killed his father. He had to work with policemen who were unwilling to turn a blind eye to Carver’s own set of rough and ready rules.

  Above all he had to adjust to magistrates who were not willing to hold still for Carver’s system of rough justice.

  But plenty of people still wanted things found. To be more accurate, they wanted people found. Most of the people they wanted found were not keen on the idea.

  Some of them were murderously unkeen on the idea.

  Carver dealt with them all with the same unemotional efficiency. His terms were simple. He found, he informed and after that it was up to the client what they did about it.

  Occasionally, he was hired to finger a fugitive from one or other of the various mobs. When that happened, he either refused the commission, or “failed” to find the subject. Attempts to force information from him generally turned out to be so disastrous that they were never repeated. Sometimes they turned out to be fatal.

  Lynn had been one of his mistakes.

  Lying in the steam heat of his bath, Carver thought about Lynn and her daughter, Irene. He looked upon the girl as his own daughter and certainly in Carver’s own mind, he was responsible for her.

  Lynn had been the daughter of one of the most insane men Carver had ever met.

  Brymon van Damm was a New York aristocrat whose outward polish concealed the soul of a stoat.

  “If he ever met an ethic, he drowned it,” a business rival told Carver tersely. Carver accepted the description without following it up – and lived to regret his uncharacteristic lack of curiosity.

  Instead, he accepted van Damm’s commission to find his missing daughter, Lynn.

  It had not been easy. With intelligence inherited from her father and a ruthlessness which was little short of his own, Lynn had covered her tracks and those of her child.

  When Carver ran her to ground in a tiny Normandy village, her panic had shaken him. Her attempt to kill him had shaken him even more.

  “You shan’t have her!” she shrieked at him across the scrubbed pine table at which she had been preparing the meal for herself and her child. A child which now stood with its back to the wall, eyes staring and mouth stretched into an O of fright and horror.

  Distracted by his need to defend himself from the frenzied attack, Carver did not notice when the Irene slipped past him and ran, screaming, into the night. Only when he had reluctantly subdued her mother with a sharp blow to the corner of the jaw did he notice that the child was missing.

  In gathering dusk, he tracked her across two ploughed fields to a quarry, and then frightened the panicky child so much that she slipped on the crumbling edge and fell. Only a dive flat on the grass saved her. He had caught her by the hair, and pulled her back from the drop squealing with fright and pain.

  Then he started making inquiries about her father. What he had discovered had sickened him. In a moment of remorse he had taken Lynn under his own wing, installed her in a town flat in Islington, and set himself to protect her from her own father and from the people who surrounded him.

  Naturally enough, people assumed Lynn was his, and that therefore Irene was his as well. He did nothing to correct the misapprehension, accepting it as being of his own making.

  Over the couple of years they had been together, his love for Irene grew as his regard for her mother waned. For reasons which he entirely understood, she was incapable of having a normal relationship with a man, certainly with one as aggressively male as Carver.

  He kept an eye on her when he was at home, accepted fewer jobs which might lead him abroad, and allowed a state of friendly neutrality to grow up in their home.

  Until Beirut.

  Beirut, even Carver had to admit, was bad. Had he known quite how bad, he would never have gone.

  He turned over in the bath and soaped himself for the tenth time. Somehow, the prison stench never seemed to wash off. It had to grow out, like bad sunburn.


  It was not the first time Carver had been in a prison, but it had most certainly been the worst time. Marseilles had been bad. Bastia had been brutal. The cage in the Spanish Sahara had been cruel. What had made Beirut different had been the intentional sadism of the set up. The hostages were in a bad way, but at least they had some hope that one day, just maybe, the harm done by Reagan might be cured and they might be allowed to return home.

  Carver was in for pure spite, and pure spite was what he had been given.

  He erupted from the bath with a whoosh of enjoyment, and showered off the suds under the sculpted brass rose, hooting with satisfaction as the water bit down to the skin. Then he dried himself off, rolled himself in the bedclothes and dropped into a sleep so deep as to be almost coma.

  For the first time in two years he was reasonably certain he would be allowed to awaken undisturbed in the morning.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Carver reckoned he had seen more decrepit homes than Lovegod’s – but never in Europe.

  The policeman opened the door of his Georgian terrace house himself, braces hanging to his knees, and a slice of toast topped with a half-inch of peanut butter in the unemployed hand.

  He had a cigarette in his mouth, his sparse hair was snaggled behind his ears, and his tie, already knotted for the neck, dangled from his right wrist. His eyes were veined red against a parchment shade of yellow, and his feet were bare.

  He stared at Carver with the festering malevolence of the hung over for the healthy.

  “It’s ten,” Carver told him flatly. Lovegod nodded carefully and shuffled back from the door.

  “Come in,” he said. “Watch out for the ... er.”

  He gestured at the carpet where, snugly settled in the angle of the bottom stair and the wall, a cat the colour of a badly dyed wig was nursing three kittens. They sounded like a flock of seagulls far away. Carver, who was fond of kittens, bent to stroke one end the cat instantly struck at him, claws extended.