A Rather Remarkable Homecoming

by C. A. Belmond

  I’d been in Great-Aunt Dorothy’s apartment only once in my life, and at the time, I’d been fairly certain I’d never return voluntarily. It was when Jeremy and I first came into our inheritance. And to give you an idea of the kind of person she is, Great-Aunt Dorothy had summoned me there with the intent to convince me that Jeremy was a nefarious character trying to rob me and Rollo of our share, when, in fact, it was she and Rollo who were the ones scheming to do that very thing to me and Jeremy.

  So, when I now found myself once again standing outside that slightly spooky, tall, dark apartment building with its black wrought-iron fencing that ringed it with arrow-like, spiky tops—like rows of medieval spears ready to impale us right there in the street—I think I can be forgiven for inwardly cursing Rollo for putting me in this position again.

  Jeremy reached for the heavy iron handle of the front door, but apparently the building had new security, so we had to first buzz an intercom to talk to the guard in the lobby. I explained, in my most earnest Little-Red-Riding-Hood way, that I had come to surprise my old Auntie on her birthday. I made this up on the spot. Jeremy just grinned and went along with the ruse.

  It worked. The ancient, wizened old doorman buzzed us in without bothering to ask Great-Aunt Dorothy if it would be all right. He must have figured that a crotchety old bird like her was lucky to have any young relatives come calling.

  We entered the lobby, which smelled vaguely of mothballs, and we walked toward the very same elevator operator I’d seen last time—an elderly guy who was still dressed in his navy blue uniform with gold braid. It took all his strength and concentration to haul open those heavy wooden elevator doors and the old-fashioned iron grate, and then close them again, before the elevator lurched upward.

  It is the slowest elevator in the history of the world. Upon finally alighting on Dorothy’s floor, we had to walk down a long, gloomy dark corridor where her apartment was the last one on the end.

  This trek probably gave the doorman time to phone Great-Aunt Dorothy and let her know we were on our way. Which is probably why, just as we approached her door, the maid opened it before we could knock. She was that same tall, gawky woman I’d met last time, and, with her goosey neck and slightly bulging, staring eyes, she resembled a kind of greying, aging Olive Oyl from the Popeye cartoon.

  “Hi,” I said boldly. “Penny Nichols here to see my Great-Aunt Dorothy. And of course, you remember Jeremy Laidley.”

  The maid just gawked at us, but she didn’t try to detain us at the doorway, which I considered a good sign. We walked right into Great-Aunt Dorothy’s parlor, a huge, dark lair decorated in baffling, depressing tones of brown, beige and a mustardy yellow.

  And there she sat in her favorite high-backed gold-and-brown chair as if it were a throne, surrounded by all those expensive islands of opulence that still couldn’t fill up such an enormous room—the antique sofas and chairs, the urns and lamps and knick-knacks and tall, potted plants. She peered at us from the shadows of this gloomy parlor, which was always kept darkened by heavy, dusty velvet curtains.

  Great-Aunt Dorothy herself was a petite, birdlike lady with silver-white hair. Even at her advanced age she sat straight and rigid, dressed in a dove-grey silk dress. Her thin fingers were like little bird-claws clutching her favorite walking-stick at her side, the only evidence of her frailty when it came to getting in and out of chairs and walking about.

  “It’s not my birthday,” were the first words out of her mouth as she eyed us suspiciously.

  “You’re looking well, Dorothy,” Jeremy said neutrally.

  “What do you want?” Her tone indicated that relatives only showed up unannounced when they wanted money. Normally she’d be wrong about us. But thanks to good old Rollo . . .

  Although she did not invite us to take a seat, Jeremy calmly and easily plunked himself in one of those overstuffed armchairs. The nearest one to him was a good three feet away, and I took it, realizing that to remain standing would give the appearance of a supplicant easily dismissed.

  Jeremy, who knows Great-Aunt Dorothy better than I do, must have decided that the best course of action was to be as blunt as she was, for he said unceremoniously, “Rollo has been kidnapped.”

  “Bah!” Dorothy waved her bony hand in the air as if she were talking to Rollo himself and would brook none of his shenanigans. “He’s probably made the whole thing up, just to trick me into increasing his allowance. Well, when you speak to him again, tell him he’s fooling no one and I won’t fall for this deception!”

  In fairness to her, I must say that her son had a definite history of periodic crises where he had to pay off loan sharks and worse. She must have grown weary of Rollo’s constant, desperate attempts to wheedle money out of her; nevertheless, Dorothy had seldom given him tuppence, which is why he would beg, borrow, or bully Grandmother Beryl and Great-Aunt Penelope into helping him. But Rollo had been trying to reform lately. Surely that counted for something.

  “He’s really in trouble this time,” I said.

  Jeremy explained to Dorothy that he’d quietly consulted both the London police and a local cop in Cornwall for advice. The Cornish cop made discreet inquiries, and a few eyewitnesses reported seeing Rollo outside the pub last night, where he apparently was hustled into a car with a strange man at each side. Not much more could be offered in the way of clues, except that the men escorting Rollo had worn long black raincoats and dark glasses and hats.

  Jeremy concluded this recitation by looking Great-Aunt Dorothy in the eye with a firm expression and saying, “So, we do believe that Rollo is an innocent victim. We think he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and got picked up by some thugs out in Cornwall.”

  I had been watching Dorothy’s face as she listened, and her expression remained impatient and annoyed throughout.

  “The fool!” she spat out now, with, I must say, a surprising tone of triumph. “I told Rollo not to go visiting you there this summer. I told him times had changed since he was a boy. Why, nobody goes to the seaside anymore. There’s nothing but riffraff out there now.”

  “Except for royals like Prince Charles,” I couldn’t resist saying to her. She turned to me with a beady-eyed glare.

  “Exactly,” she said evenly. “His mother doesn’t go there any-more.”

  Only my Great-Aunt Dorothy could conceive of Bonnie Prince Charles as riffraff.

  “You have to listen to us!” I exclaimed. “Jeremy and I drove all the way here from Cornwall without stopping, because time is of the essence. Don’t you understand? These kidnappers are serious, and they say they’re going to kill Rollo if you don’t—”

  Jeremy jumped in, apparently thinking I was heading for the breakers. “We heard him with our own ears, Dorothy. Rollo was forced by his kidnappers to plead for his life,” he said crisply. “They have instructed you to put up a million pounds in cash so that we can make a trade. For your son’s life.”

  “Ridiculous,” Dorothy said. “Let your police handle it. They do this sort of thing all the time.”

  “The cops advised us to bring money to make the exchange,” Jeremy replied. “Of course we’ll try to do it with the minimum of risk, and yes, the police will back us up, so that quite possibly we’ll be able to recover the money once we get Rollo back. But we still have to go through with a convincing swap, and in order to do that, we have to have the cash.”

  Dorothy scowled. “This is a matter for my lawyer. He’s on vacation. Come back next week.”

  “We can’t!” I interjected, totally exasperated now. “If we don’t do this within hours, Rollo will be dead.”

  There was a short silence. I would like to say that Great-Aunt Dorothy finally broke down, and wept for her son, and said of course, we must do as the police advised. I would like to say that she clutched my hand with those birdlike talons and begged me to do everything in my power to see that no harm came to Rollo.

  But, alas, she did none of the above. Rather, what she did was lean f
orward with a smile I can only describe as evil, and say to me, “Well, you two are rich now, so why don’t you pay it?”

  Now here I must explain something that Jeremy, and our accountant, and countless other people have divulged to me over the years. When it comes to money, there are those who are luckily well-heeled, then there’s the veddy-rich, and then there’s the veddy-veddy-rich, which is the top of the aristocratic pyramid. On a parallel track are those whom Great-Aunt Dorothy dismissively calls “people in trade” who actually work for their money, and these are divided into the wealthy, the super-wealthy and the obscenely-wealthy.

  Where do I fall in all this? They tell me that, despite my pathetically modest upbringing, my inheritance from Aunt Pen has catapulted me into being one of “the luckily well-heeled”. Jeremy’s mum’s family is veddy-rich. But Great-Aunt Dorothy, sitting here in her parlor like a spider in her web, actually falls into the veddy-veddy-rich category.

  So imagine how hard it was to sit there that day and watch Dorothy putting on the air of an elderly pensioner who’s counting her food stamps. She actually said, rather defensively, “I’m an old woman, you know. I must look ahead to my last years, when I may require assisted living. I simply can’t be throwing millions about as if it were paper for the loo.”

  Nice metaphor. I really didn’t know what to react to first. I mean, how much longer does she think she’s going to live? If she lived to be a hundred and thirty—perish the thought—she still couldn’t spend all she’s got. And with a butler, a driver, a maid, a doting attentive son, a cook, a hairdresser, masseuse, plus the best personal, high-end, concierge-style medical care, a slew of lawyers and accountants—how much more “assisted” does this woman plan to get?

  Worse yet, it was clear that, of all the people in her entire attentive entourage, Dorothy actually believed that Rollo was the most dispensable person on her team. Rollo, the only one who truly loves her. I felt indignation rising in my throat.

  “How can you be so cold to your only son?” I gasped. “He lives for you. Last year when you got sick, he was absolutely beside himself with worry. Don’t you know how much he loves you?”

  Dorothy looked amused for the first time all day. “Dear girl,” she said petulantly, “what romantic notions you have. But we all must accept life as it is, not simply as we want it to be. And I have always known that I might one day outlive my son.”

  Having dropped this final, astounding bomb, she took the tips of her fingers and tapped her own chest in the place where a heart should be, and said slyly, “I am touched, truly touched Penny dear, that you care so much for my foolish son. I leave it entirely in your capable hands. I’m sure you and your Jeremy will make this all turn out for the best. Now, I am sorry but I have a dental appointment and must prepare for it. Clive will show you out.”

  The butler, I’d noticed, had been hovering in the doorway for some time now. Dorothy must have pressed a button somewhere to summon him, but I didn’t even see her do it. I glanced inquiringly at Jeremy, who was gazing at her now with undisguised disgust.

  “Dorothy, you will simply have to put up half of it,” he said briskly. “Call your bank and arrange to have it ready for us. Otherwise your son’s blood will be on your hands, and I will be sure to inform everyone who knows you about your unconscionable actions here today.”

  Dorothy had grabbed her cane and risen to her feet, but now she took a step forward so that she was right in Jeremy’s face as she leaned on her stick. I’d seen her wield that very cane as a weapon before, and I moved forward, too, not really knowing what I’d do, but perhaps to show her that I was prepared to clonk her right back with her own weapon if she dared assault Jeremy.

  “My friends—very nearly all of them—are dead,” she said levelly, as if, having outlasted most of the people she knew, she believed that God had done it on purpose to show that he was on her side, rewarding her for being a superior human being. “But, were they alive, my friends would applaud me, for they knew what a burden this son of mine has been, and they always thought that he would one day come to an end like this.”

  “Crikey,” I said to Jeremy when we were back out on the street, “she’s got Rollo dead and buried in a pauper’s grave already. I can’t believe she didn’t offer a single brass farthing. Not one!”

  Jeremy sighed. “I figured it would go this way,” he said, “but it was worth a shot.”

  “So now what do we do?” I demanded.

  “We go back to Cornwall, and find out who’s got Rollo,” Jeremy said decisively. “Otherwise you and I are going to be out of a lot of money.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I must say it really looked like it was curtains for Rollo, no matter what we did. We managed to scrape together thousands of pounds in small notes, all marked by the bank so that, if the kidnappers took them and then spent them, the bills could be traced. The real money was then wrapped around packets of counterfeit bills (provided by the police). The fakes were just bundled in there to pad them out, so that it looked like we had a suitcase full of a million pounds.

  We were banking—if you’ll pardon the pun—on the hope that the kidnappers wouldn’t take the time to closely examine every single bill in the suitcase before making the exchange.

  “But what if they do see the fakes?” I asked Jeremy, looking apprehensively at the open suitcase full of bundled bills.

  “Hopefully they won’t notice before the cops are able to move in and grab Rollo,” Jeremy said, adding cheerfully, “assuming the kidnappers don’t simply shoot us all dead immediately.”

  We drove into Port St. Francis with the red scarf dangling from Jeremy’s car door. (In case anybody wants to know, I bought the scarf in London from a sidewalk vendor just outside Harrods.) I kept a lookout for any pedestrian who seemed to stare intently at the scarf.

  Well, the fact is, they all did. I mean, it looked fairly ridiculous. And in a small town, any little thing out of the ordinary seems to capture the attention of the bored locals. Plus, the sidewalks were still teeming with tourists who gawped at everything, since they weren’t quite sure what they should stare at.

  “Look, there’s those creepy Mosley brothers,” I told Jeremy when he pulled over to pick up two cups of takeout coffee from Toby Taylor’s. “They’ve got the longest, blackest limo I’ve ever seen. I thought it was illegal to have dark windows. I bet the Mosleys are behind this kidnapping!”

  “Well, if they are, then our goose is cooked, because those guys would surely know how to pull off a professional kidnapping,” Jeremy commented.

  As we sat there drinking our coffee, I watched Toby Taylor come out of his restaurant, hop into the blue Ferrari that a valet brought him, and go roaring off. Suddenly my mind snapped into gear.

  “Jeremy!” I cried. “Follow that Ferrari!”

  Startled, Jeremy put down his hot coffee in the coffee-holder slot on the dashboard, and started up the car, saying only, “What’s up, Pen?”

  “Toby’s tires!” I exclaimed. “They have a streak of that orangey-pink paint on them. You know, just like the paintballs that somebody shot at our cottage. So, the only way a car could have that kind of paint on its tires is—”

  “If someone drove their car through those paint puddles in our cottage driveway,” Jeremy said, pressing his foot to the pedal to speed up. “Why should Toby have trespassed there?”

  Toby’s sports car had gotten pretty far ahead of us, but we could see him veering off the main road now in the direction of the older part of town.

  “Do you suppose it’s been Toby Taylor all along who’s been behind these threats?” I wondered. “Why should he care if we halt the sale of Grandmother Beryl’s house?”

  “Because it would stop the condo development,” Jeremy said. “Think of all the customers Toby stands to lose if we prevail. Why, with an influx of that many visitors, he could open three or four more restaurants; it’s what he’s publicly said he wants to do.”

  “Does he want it eno
ugh to go out and hire kidnappers?” I asked speculatively.

  “Darling,” Jeremy said, “restaurant owners can sometimes have links to unsavory characters who are known to get things done when all else fails. And it’s quite possible that Toby has ties to the Mosleys or anyone else who’d be a natural ally on this issue. So yes, Toby could be part of this.”

  “And to think we ate his Dover sole!” I said indignantly.

  “Well,” Jeremy admitted, “it was pretty good.”

  “I’ve had better,” I said stoutly.

  By now Jeremy caught up with the blue Ferrari. Toby had led us to the old warehouse area, not far from Ye Olde Towne Pub where Colin and his band played. But Toby didn’t pull up to the pub.

  Instead, he tore around the corner, down a road so narrow it seemed more like a driveway, which led us farther into the labyrinth of shuttered warehouses, over by a section of the docks that was largely deserted, since the fishermen had already sold the day’s catch and gone home.

  Jeremy slowed his car a few feet away, so that Toby didn’t notice us tailing him. Toby seemed preoccupied anyway, as he parked his car, locked it, then went up to one of the boarded-up warehouses and knocked at an unmarked, nondescript door. I watched in fascination as the door was opened by someone I couldn’t see. A second later, Toby went inside.

  Jeremy expertly backed the Dragonetta into an alleyway between two of the warehouses that were across the street from the one where Toby had disappeared.

  “Now what?” I whispered.

  “We sit here and scope this out,” Jeremy said in a low voice.

  “Oh, good!” I said, reaching for my coffee. “I always wanted to go on a stake-out.”

  “Be quiet,” Jeremy said tensely. “This is not a game.”

  “Woo, excuse me,” I muttered. At least the coffee was still hot. In all my excitement, I hadn’t drunk any yet. “Well,” I said after a few sips, “the guy makes a good cup of coffee, I’ll say that for him.”