by F. G. Cottam
It was a question for Veronica of waiting until Ruthie was out of sight and only then following, gaining on her and identifying her tail from behind and then trying to sneak a look at his or her face somehow, without being spotted herself. She’d told Ruthie she was confident she could do it. She was fit and athletic and Ruthie’s progress walking anywhere was on the slow side of serene. She had excellent eyesight. She was naturally observant as a function of her career. She’d said over breakfast that more than anything, it was a case of wearing the right shoes. It was Jimmy Choos and pencil skirts and a rope of pearls for the office. For today, though, it was jeans and trainers.
Veronica had plaited her hair and crammed it under a watch cap. She had on a leather biker jacket and was totally devoid today of make-up. She wore dark glasses and when she’d looked in the full-length mirror before leaving home five minutes after Ruthie had that morning, hadn’t looked very much like herself at all. Apart from the outfit, she was about four inches shorter than she habitually tended to be. She spotted Ruthie, about 300 metres ahead of her, heading as she’d said she would for the Costa coffee shop on Cliffe High Street. It had chairs and tables on the pedestrianized street outside, just this side of the bridge that crosses the River Ouse.
Ruthie would sit at one of the pavement tables and drink her regular flat white and anyone studying her while she did so would be in plain sight and easy to spot. There weren’t that many pedestrians about at eleven in the morning in this prosperous little town. The weather was mild and dry, but it was a long way out of the tourist season.
There was a busker squatting against the wall by the cafe entrance playing something tuneless on a penny whistle. There were a couple of customers whose tethered dogs stopped them drinking their beverages inside. There were a couple of kids who Veronica thought should probably have been at school, since it was far too quiet for half-term. There was a group of vagrants drinking cans of Special Brew and K Cider on a bench on the other side of the road, but she saw no one who looked as though they might have followed Ruthie Gillespie there from inner London that morning.
Veronica watched Ruthie light a cigarette like she hadn’t a single care in the world. Unlike Veronica, Ruthie had travelled there very much as herself; glossy black bob, red lipstick, black coat, jeans and Doc Marten boots. Here, she looked even more conspicuous than she generally did. Lewes tended towards the florid, wardrobe-wise; a lot of the checks and overchecks and plaid and ginghams Veronica associated with the beaus and hipsters of Brighton. Some of the clothing she saw had a quite Dickensian character. Some of it was vaguely rural in a way that evoked the Bloomsbury Group. She’d read that Virginia Woolf had drowned herself not far from here. The prosperous residents of Lewes had a self-conscious stylishness about them.
Two things happened then almost simultaneously. Ruthie scrabbled out her cigarette in the ashtray on her table and took a final sip of coffee and got to her feet and went into the Costa branch, Veronica assumed to use the loo. Coffee was a diuretic. And public loos tended to be unpleasantly dirty places. And then a blond man with indeterminate features strode past the point at which she stood in the direction of the High Street proper, back up the hill the way she and Ruthie ahead of her had come.
Veronica turned. There was something familiar about the man. And she saw the brown leather patches sewn onto the elbows of his tweed jacket and knew it was the driver of the vintage Morris Minor. The mint condition Morris Minor, she reminded herself, the one that had parked a few evenings earlier at the end of her own road. She’d hadn’t described him to Ruthie. Had she done so, she’d have said he looked like a secondary school teacher from an earlier decade. Sociology, or maybe geography.
Veronica looked back to the Costa branch, but there was no sign of Ruthie emerging. Maybe she was in a queue at the counter. She didn’t want to lose this potential lead. She began to follow the man, trying to match his pace, keeping her distance, close to the windows and awnings of shops because should he turn unexpectedly they provided at least a measure of concealment.
He didn’t look terribly intimidating to her. He was a slight man, narrow-shouldered and she thought no more than about five feet eight in height. His trousers flapped loosely around skinny legs. He had the bantam physique she thought of another era, one that predated the general prevalence of junk food and sugary soft drinks. The days when men didn’t snack on crisps and chocolate because a two pack a day Woodbines habit killed their appetite and stopped their taste buds from functioning.
He seemed to know where he was going. His pace was steady and unhurried but he didn’t dawdle to window-shop and he kept looking straight ahead, as if sure of his goal. When he got to the top of the hill, to the elaborate Lewes landmark of the bronze war memorial, he turned sharp right and out of sight.
There was no sign of him when Veronica reached the spot. He had vanished. She thought there was only one place to which he could have gone, though, and that was an antiques market directly in front of her. A vintage car stood outside it, a Jaguar from the pre-war era. The building itself was mid-Victorian and austere, cloaked still in the grainy soot from the period before the Clean Air Act presumably put an end to the coal fires of Lewes back in the late 1950s.
She smiled to herself at the irony of it. Touring the rooms and stalls of an antiques market wasn’t how she’d planned to spend her day off when the bloody things surrounded her at work on a daily basis. But a woman had to do what a woman had to do. She didn’t intend to confront this man, but she wanted a closer look at him and some clue if she could get one about precisely what he was up to.
She went inside. There was a reception desk to her left and beyond that a warren of display cases crammed with the curios of past eras. Her first thought was that the people of this part of Sussex had owned an enormous quantity of stuff. They had been inordinately fond of carved wooden candlesticks and pocket watches. There were toy locomotives and cars made from pressed tin. There were old leather footballs preserved over decades by faithful applications of dubbin. There were pairs of boxing gloves and cricket bats that looked old enough to be Edwardian. Some skilful taxidermist had preserved a large tarantula, which made Veronica shudder despite it being behind glass and dead.
Right at the back of the gallery, there was a coloured bead curtain obscuring the entrance to somewhere. Through it, she could hear a classic single being played. It was The Beatles. It was ‘Eight Days a Week’. It sounded scratchy with surface noise, like vinyl under the tone-arm of a record player. Veronica could smell cafe smells through the curtain, but couldn’t see anything. She could smell coffee and potatoes baking and chili con carne and curiously, also cigarette smoke. That was surely against the law? Did the antique arcade cafes of Lewes possess some special dispensation? She didn’t think so. Affluent bits of Sussex were as much victim of the curse of health and safety as anywhere was.
She went through the curtain and from wood under her feet, to the slippery smoothness of a linoleum floor. The smells and the music swelled in intensity. There were no other customers. There was no one either behind the zinc counter to serve her. Not that she wanted to eat anything, with that bitter pall of smoke making the air in the cafe hazy and opaque.
The Beatles were playing on a Dansette portable, an antique in itself, Veronica knew, who was surprised you could still get the styluses for their head-shells. She noticed a discarded cigarette packet on a table, red and white livery and empty when she picked it up, the brand Embassy No. 6. She’d never smoked in her life, but she was fairly sure that these days the packets were anonymous, uniform, dull. And they had gruesome pictures on them underscored by dire health warnings, didn’t they? The tables were all identical, Formica topped with a lurid starburst pattern. The chairs pulled up to them were plastic and modular with spindly metal white-painted legs.
The Beatles record clicked, trapped in a single groove she supposed by a scratch on the vinyl, or a bit of fluff trapped against the stylus. Whatever it was had marooned the p
hrase ‘Eight days’, which now repeated, Lennon and McCartney’s ageless harmony endlessly echoing through time, trapped in isolation and monotony and somehow, completely disembodied and sounding weirdly inhuman.
Eight days. Eight days. Eight days …
It was then that she noticed the Pirelli calendar tacked to one wall. A Bardot-esque woman draped in a bikini lay across the bonnet of a vintage Porsche, a cigarillo clamped between her bared teeth. According to the calendar, they were in March of 1965.
Veronica swallowed, suddenly and coldly sure that the split-screen Morris Minor wasn’t, with its showroom-sheen, an immaculate collectible at all. It was actually a brand-new car, bought probably on hire-purchase, for a price quoted in pounds, shillings and pence. But that impossible certainty was interrupted then by a voice, drifting out from someone somewhere unseen, from the back of an alcove behind the counter, behind the Perspex display cases with their smoke-scented custard slices and tarts with smeared toppings of raspberry jam and glaze-cherry-topped cream buns.
‘I’m sorry to have kept you,’ the voice said, male and blandly classless. ‘I’ll be with you in no time at all.’
I’m sorry to have kept you.
It felt to Veronica that no time at all was exactly where she was. On rubber legs, on smooth linoleum, she backed the way she’d come through the bead curtain, turning only when she was three feet beyond its fingering reach and back among the solid baubles of Lewes’ verifiable antique past.
She paused at the reception desk. She thought about asking casually about the period cafe at the other end of the gallery. But her mouth was too dry for her to be able to articulate the words and she was too fearful anyway of the answer she would get.
Veronica turned right outside the antiques emporium when she should have turned left and left again to get back down the hill to Cliffe High Street and the Costa Coffee branch. She had reached the spacious car park of the Tesco superstore before she came to herself and went in and bought a can of Diet Coke to quench her thirst and drank it down and fumbled out her phone and called Ruthie.
‘Where are you?’
‘Tesco’s car park.’
‘Stay there. It’s five minutes away from here. I’ll come and get you.’
‘Something weird happened, Ruthie. After I saw the Morris Minor guy.’
‘Right. Then it’s the White Hart bar for a stiffener,’ Ruthie said, ‘and you can tell me all about it there.’
A fire burned brightly in the big grate in the lounge of the White Hart Hotel. They took their drinks to chairs where it would warm them. It was still quiet, just before noon, after the breakfast stragglers, too early for the lunchtime clientele.
‘I doubt it any longer exists,’ Veronica said.
‘I doubt it ever existed,’ Ruthie said. ‘What you’ve described is one of the milk bars opened in London by George Walker in the 1960s. He was the tycoon brother of the champion boxer Billy Walker. I think Billy’s prize-purses were where George’s capital originally came from. But George sited them in the West End of London. They were part of the swinging London scene. They just wouldn’t have worked somewhere this staid and provincial.’
‘How do you know this stuff?’
‘Studied twentieth-century British history at uni,’ Ruthie said. ‘The 60s were the end of the age of austerity. And I know that antiques market. There’s no cafe there. What you saw was something Max Askew remembered from his life.’
‘It seemed pretty real to me.’
‘You haven’t described windows. You haven’t described a view.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘Because there wasn’t one, was there?’
Veronica gulped brandy and coughed. Ruthie was drinking only tonic water but had insisted her friend self-medicate with the classic remedy for shock.
‘Look, I’ll go back and check,’ Ruthie said. ‘They could have built a film-set there, I suppose. It could have been set up for a period drama.’
‘Can Max Askew hurt us?’
Ruthie was silent. Then she said, ‘Frederica Daunt said not to engage. I think I’ve stirred the memory of Max Askew by going to Proctor Court. His memory and his memories too. But he isn’t real.’
‘So I hallucinated it all?’
‘Something a bit stronger than that,’ Ruthie said. ‘I think it’s called a scent memory. There are places where sane people claim to have heard and seen things that aren’t actually there.’
Veronica looked around, at the eighteenth-century fireplace and hung portraiture on the panelled walls. At the Chippendale chairs and antique tables with their elderly cut-glass vases filled with autumnal blooms. ‘It probably happens here.’
Ruthie shrugged. ‘All the time,’ she said.
‘But you’re not actually being followed. Not by anyone real, or living.’
‘No, I’m not. Not yet, anyway. That will come when I get closer than I am now to the truth.’
‘I think you think you already know the truth.’
Ruthie said, ‘Without evidence there is no truth. Without solid proof, everything’s just speculation.’
‘By which you mean bullshit,’ Veronica said. She drained her glass. The hand holding it still shook slightly.
‘If we’re calling a spade a spade.’
Her phone rang. She saw without real surprise that her caller was Sir Terence Maloney.
‘It’s time we talked,’ he said.
‘High time,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘The Garrick Club at 11 am. Be punctual.’
‘I’m always punctual.’
TWENTY-NINE
Ruthie dressed for her encounter with Sir Terence in a black pencil skirt and black jacket over a silk ivory shirt. The jacket and skirt had been bought separately but were of the same finely woven woollen cloth and so looked to the casual eye like a suit. She looked in the mirror thinking that this was as demure as she ever got. She would have dressed exactly like this for a court appearance if she were the one in the dock. Bail allowing, of course. All her ink was covered and she wouldn’t wear lipstick or perfume. She looked demure, but she felt equipped today for a combat role. It was, she considered, the right mentality for the coming confrontation.
That Thursday morning, the weather had finally broken. Fallen leaves gusted against Veronica’s windows, and rain pattered incessantly on the glass. The temperature had plunged by a good – or perhaps bad – ten degrees. Carter Fucking Melville’s money would pay for the cab she intended to take into town, though she wouldn’t use the Amex card made out in her name. There’d been something confidential, maybe even clandestine about Sir Terence Maloney’s tone. And she wasn’t going to run into Melville at the Garrick. He was exactly the sort of aspiring member unanimously blackballed.
She’d shared breakfast with Veronica, who had been remorseful about their misadventure of the previous day. It had been her idea, after all. It had been one of those wine-fuelled schemes that had still seemed attractive the morning after and so they’d gone through with it and the outcome for Veronica had been grim and chilling. She’d been forcefully reminded that the world was a more complex and ambivalent place than she’d ever personally wished it to be.
‘We learned something from it,’ Ruthie said to her, who had gone back to the antiques arcade where of course, there’d been no sign of any 1960s era milk bar. Not so much as a relic.
‘I’ve learned something,’ Veronica said, ‘which is not to meddle.’
And Ruthie nodded, knowing resignedly that meddling seemed these days to be what her life mostly comprised.
Now, her cab beeped in summons at the kerb. She put on her coat and picked up the bag containing her tape machine and her notebook and pens and locked the door behind her.
Sir Terence had organized a private room for their audience. A sherry decanter stood on a card table at his elbow, but he was drinking from a cup and there was a tray of coffee-related items atop a trolley under the window against one wall. He rose to greet her a
nd shook her hand quite formally. His grip was firm but not bone-breakingly so. He looked like he did in most of the photographs she’d studied of him; physically fit in a superbly cut suit she knew he’d had hand-tailored by Anderson & Shepherd of Savile Row. He wore his wavy grey hair rather long for a businessman, but it looked good on him. He was well over six feet tall and looked a decade younger than his calendar age, tanned and appraising her with amused grey eyes she knew in his past had witnessed some terrible excesses.
He poured coffee for her and she sat opposite him, in the chair facing his. ‘Ask away,’ he said.
‘He was fond of Sebastian Daunt and he loved Paula Tort faithfully. But would it be fair to say that you were Martin Mear’s best friend?’
‘I was a humble roadie.’
‘You were a bit more than that. A lot more.’
‘And Martin had three bandmates,’ Sir Terence said.
‘More in the nature of employees than anything else,’ Ruthie said. ‘And he clashed with James Prentice.’
‘Often when people clash it’s because of their closeness. Passions running high.’
Ruthie shook her head slowly. ‘I’m not buying it,’ she said. ‘You were the best friend he had in the world.’
Sir Terence frowned. He sipped coffee and then placed his cup and saucer carefully on the card table beside him. He said, ‘Where is this going?’
‘I don’t know precisely, Sir Terence. But I do know you fly a light plane.’
‘Man’s entitled to a hobby.’
‘Except that your plane is equipped with pontoons.’
‘Not considered a crime in aviation circles.’
‘And good for landing somewhere remote surrounded by sea water.’
‘Your point being?’
‘I reckon you spend a lot on aviation fuel,’ she said.