The cabs sat, facing opposite directions, blocking everyone behind them. ‘This’ll be interesting,’ John thought. London cabbies took great pride in their driving skills and could, on nearly every occasion, come up with colourful and varied reasons as to why they couldn’t possibly be at fault. Now here were two clearly in the wrong and just as clearly making the congested traffic even worse. His driver was breathing heavily.
They pushed their windows down in unison. John was reminded of the slow, tense walk down dusty, empty streets as gunslingers squared up to each other in old western movies. ‘The driver’s hand flashed down for his window,’ he thought in amusement.
The air in the small space between the two vehicles was electric. ‘Haven’t you got a horn then, mate?’ the other cabbie asked finally, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
His driver mulled this over for a full two seconds. Then, with no trace of a smile, responded lazily. ‘What? Sitting here looking at your ugly face?’
Devereaux laughed. Good stuff. He must remember to tell Karen tonight.
The other driver took it in his stride. ‘What’s it like up yonder?’
‘It’s jammed all the way to Marble Arch,’ John’s driver told him with a degree of satisfaction. He knew he had come out of the encounter in front.
John’s mind drifted while the two cabbies discussed the traffic. Born and educated in England he may have been, but the language of Cockneys and East Enders was a mystery he could not unravel. He loved their dry humour, when he could understand it, but was more at home with French, the language of his childhood spoken by his French-born father and English mother.
‘Black,’ he was thinking. ‘Black is the colour of London. Black taxis, black umbrellas, black coats and scarves, all going God knows where, all intent on getting there, all irritated and frustrated, cold and wet and miserable. What a way to live.’
He looked down at his own black shoes, dark grey trousers, black umbrella dripping sullenly on the floor of the taxi. Then he thought of Karen, his wife. She was South African. The drabness of London was something to which she refused to conform. Karen’s coats were either cherry red, midnight blue, moss green or caramel yellow. Her umbrellas were always white. She stood out in a crowd with confident ease which was why he noticed her in the first place and probably why he married her – something he had never regretted.
The traffic inched forward again. The would-be rocker in the red car was now belting out an old Beatles number. John could read his lips. ‘Songwriters,’ he mused, his mind drifting sideways again, ‘didn’t exactly need talent in the sixties.’ Alana loved that song. Having found it on one of John’s old records she sang it incessantly.
Alana (she preferred Lana, and obstinately refused to answer to anything else), his twelve-year-old daughter, was a source of constant delight to him. John had inherited his father’s Gallic dark good looks and had passed the best on to his daughter. While John was considered handsome, Lana was undoubtedly breathtaking. ‘Mon Dieu, hearts will be sore over this one,’ John’s father had said on introduction to his grand-daughter when she was five days old. Twelve years later he hadn’t changed his mind. Tall for her age, slim and supple, already possessed of a penetrating and questioning intelligence, unruly dark curls framing the alabaster skin of her perfectly oval face. Dark, winged brows over sparkling deep blue eyes – an unusual combination, made more so since John and Karen both had brown eyes. Her nose would go aquiline once it lost its baby button look, an inheritance from French ancestors. Her mouth was pure Karen – wide, with a smile which curled at the ends and put mischief into her eyes. At twelve, Lana knew exactly what she wanted to be when she grew up – a geologist like her father. She certainly had a mind of her own.
John found himself smiling and adjusted his face back to neutral. ‘A pity we couldn’t have had more children,’ he thought. ‘There should be more Lanas in this world.’ He was besotted by her and didn’t give a damn who knew it. Discipline was normally left to Karen. Lana had him around her elegantly long little finger.
‘Gotcha.’ His driver found a gap and went for it. Travelling down Regent Street at thirty-five kilometres an hour felt like they were speeding after the snarl left behind. John allowed a glance at his watch. Four twenty-two. The meeting started in eight minutes. He’d be okay if there were no more traffic jams.
Portland Place was flowing freely. Park Crescent appeared congested but the driver, with consummate skill, slid into a space not even an insane cyclist would try and caught the lights in time to cross Marylebone Road. From there the traffic eased considerably. They turned left into Regents Park Outer Circle and left again into York Gate. ‘What number, guv?’
‘All the way to the end.’
The driver clearly felt an explanation was required as to why he got them tangled up in the congestion at Oxford Circus. ‘Want to know why I didn’t go down Gloucester Place?’
‘Why?’ John didn’t want to know but good manners prevailed.
‘That way takes you past Madam Tussaud’s. Bleedin’ place gives me the creeps, know wot I mean?’
John didn’t. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘All them wax dummies. Mate of mine told me they use the real eyes.’
John didn’t think so. A lot of the wax effigies were of living people. He rather thought they still required use of their eyes.
The driver was on a roll. ‘Seems kind of pagan. Know wot I mean?’
‘Quite so,’ John murmured. ‘This’ll do, driver.’
The taxi swerved into the curb. ‘Sorry, guv. All that waitin’s going to cost you. That’s twelve quid neat.’
John tipped him a pound and the driver looked at it sourly. ‘Ta,’ he said finally.
The freezing rain had turned to snow. Flakes drifted down and settled on Devereaux’s black hair and the collar and shoulders of his coat. He shook open his umbrella and hurried through the gate and up the path towards an imposing granite building which sat squat and solid within its own grounds, its cream paint somehow sunny and out of place in the surrounding drabness.
‘Evenin’, Mr Devereaux, sir.’
John believed doormen to be an endangered species and was always relieved to find Duncan still at his post. ‘Evening, Duncan.’ Ever cheerful, ever helpful and usually courteous, Duncan was a relic of Britain’s more formal past. Nothing escaped him. He was a walking encyclopaedia of snippets of gossip, knew everybody’s name and, more often than not, the name of their spouse and children, had his favourites and treated those who did not meet his approval with profound but scrupulously polite disdain. John, he liked.
‘Go through reception today, Mr Devereaux. She’s in one of her moods.’ Duncan was referring to the receptionist, Cecilia Bagshaw, for whom he harboured a secret admiration. Years ago he had been incautious enough to inform her of his feelings and, as far as John could see, Duncan was still licking his wounds.
John went through the heavy, double glazed glass doors on which ‘Petroleum and Gas Exploration Technology’ (PAGET) was gold leafed in discreet lettering, and into the large and formal reception area. Miss Cecilia Bagshaw presided over this space like a jealously possessive Great Dane. He could have taken the lift and bypassed the receptionist, he often did that. But when she was in a bad mood, as she obviously was today, it was more than anyone’s life was worth to get on her wrong side.
Cecilia Bagshaw had her own methods of dealing with recalcitrants. Messages that were not delivered. Phone calls cut off (she was especially gifted in this regard when one was making a call from some far flung and under-developed place where a telephone call to London could take several days to get through). Another favourite of hers was to pass on blatantly incorrect information. She was blandly indifferent to the truth . . . ‘Mr Devereaux is out of the country and cannot be contacted’, when Mr Devereaux had just passed her desk on his way to the boardroom.
On her own, Miss Bagshaw had probably lost PAGET more business than the rest of the staff put together
. However she was devoted to Bernard Pickstone, the Managing Director. No-one, but no-one got to see Bernard without an appointment. No-one, but no-one’s work took precedence over Bernard’s. And absolutely no-one could ever say a bad word to her about Bernard without receiving a tongue-lashing so impressive that they rarely recovered. And she was always ready to drop everything, including visits to her ailing mother, if Bernard asked her to. She had been with the company for over a decade, since its humble beginnings. On principle, she personally disapproved of each new staff member until they could show that her own authority would not be threatened. For his part, and for reasons of his own, Bernard rewarded her aberrations with a blind eye.
Pre-warned by the doorman, John knew the moves. ‘Evening, Miss Bagshaw. You’ve done something different with your hair. It suits you.’
Miss Bagshaw’s downfall was her vanity. At thirty-eight, her often sour disposition had left a legacy of permanent disapproval imprinted on her face. Even smiling, something she didn’t do very often, she managed to look critical and picky. ‘Are you sure? I didn’t do much, just, sort of, you know.’ She patted her hair nervously then, using her little finger, wiped an imaginary lipstick smear away from the corner of her mouth.
‘Absolutely,’ John said sincerely. He felt sorry for Miss Bagshaw. True, she owed her solitary existence to her own personality but the poor woman knew no better. ‘It makes your eyes larger.’
Her eyes went wide. ‘Mr Pickstone is waiting for you, Mr Devereaux.’
As he ran up the wide main staircase to the first floor, Miss Bagshaw stared after him with eyes forced as wide as they would go. So wide in fact that fifteen minutes later she would develop a blinding headache.
At this hour, people were leaving their offices to do battle with London’s peak-hour traffic. John knew most of them. Although he was not a full-time employee of PAGET, he had been consulting for them for nearly eleven years, since the days when they operated out of a dingy suite of six rooms opposite Euston Station. A spare office was kept in the York Gate building for his exclusive use. Bernard Pickstone, geophysicist, founder and Managing Director of PAGET, was a close personal friend and a man for whom John held profound respect.
The two men shook hands warmly. ‘Like your tie,’ John said, eyeing the gold, brown and purple monster which shrieked against the blue of Bernard’s shirt. Bernard Pickstone was happiest in the field wearing old khaki shorts, shabby boots of indeterminate age and bottle green T-shirts. Now he resided permanently in London and rebelled by means of his ties, the variety of which ran the gauntlet from psychedelic, through pornographic to wildly imaginative. At present he was emerging from an Aztec phase and was entering an Australian Aboriginal one. This tie straddled the two cultures.
‘Designed it myself,’ Bernard said, pleased and quite unnecessarily. ‘How are you, John, how’s the lovely Karen?’
‘Lovely as ever. How’s Maggie?’
Bernard’s wife, Margaret, had been the victim of a hit-run accident two years previously. She lay in a coma on a life support system just across the road in the Princess Grace Hospital. Bernard spent every lunchtime with her. She was the reason he refused all field work for, as dearly as he loved being in the field, he loved Maggie more. ‘No change.’
‘Damn! Wouldn’t you think –’
‘The doctors want to switch her off,’ Bernard cut in. ‘I keep telling her to get her act together and wake up but you know Maggie. She’ll do it when she’s good and ready.’
John knew she wouldn’t. Maggie had been declared officially brain dead two months after the accident, a fact Bernard simply refused to acknowledge.
‘What are you reading to her now?’
Every day, between twelve o’clock and one-thirty, Bernard read to Maggie who had loved books passionately before the accident. ‘Rudyard Kipling.’
‘Now this is the Law of the Jungle – as old and as true as the sky,’ John quoted from a boyhood memory.
‘And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die,’ Bernard finished. ‘Stirring stuff, John. Maggie loves it.’
‘A lady of extreme good taste,’ John said gently. Talking about Maggie was a joy to Bernard most of the time but John always trod warily since, once or twice, a memory too painful to recall, or an incautious remark on someone’s behalf, would upset this grieving man to the point where he would have to leave the room. Miss Bagshaw, for all her sins, tenaciously shielded Bernard from confronting the truth.
‘Did you drive up?’ Bernard changed the subject abruptly.
John and Karen lived in Sevenoaks, some thirty-five kilometres away. ‘Karen dropped me in Greenwich. She’s picking me up here later. We’re going on to a show.’
‘What have you done with my goddaughter?’
‘Staying over with a friend. She sends her love.’
Bernard gave a lopsided grin. He doted on Lana. He and Maggie had no children. ‘Like a scotch?’
John shook his head. If he had a drink he’d want a cigarette and Bernard loathed the smell of cigarette smoke. Woe betide the unfortunate wretch who incautiously lit up in his office. John watched the golden liquid splash lazily into Bernard’s crystal glass. Whisky was something Bernard took seriously. Where wine buffs were common enough, whisky buffs were somewhat rarer. Most whisky drinkers tended to like one brand and stick to it. Bernard liked to experiment. He saw John watching him. ‘Glenallachie,’ he said. ‘Fairly new distillery up near Aberlour. Used for blending mainly but this is a single Glenallachie malt, eight years old. Not a bad drop, slightly tarry but pleasant enough all the same. Sure you won’t have one?’ Without waiting for a reply he poured a second glass.
John held out his hand for the glass, cursing inwardly the cigarette craving he knew would follow. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
Bernard crossed to his desk and sat behind it. John waited in silence. Bernard would tell him in his own time the reason he had requested this meeting. Finally. ‘We’ve lost a man.’
John’s heart skipped a couple of beats. Oil and gas exploration had its dangers. Forefront of these were the unpredictable politics in some of the countries geologists were sent. ‘Who?’ He steeled himself for bad news. Over the years of consulting for them, he had worked with most of the permanent staff of PAGET and had a number of good friends among them.
‘Cunningham.’
Robin Cunningham. Solitary nature, shy to the point of unfriendly, a brilliant geochemist and an alcoholic. No-one knew much about him. His alcoholism was on record only because he insisted on mentioning it at any time he discussed anything other than work. Perhaps it was part of his therapy but he was not generally liked. ‘What happened to him?’
Bernard sipped his scotch. ‘He seems to have done a runner.’
‘Robin! No way. He lived for his job.’
‘His marriage was in trouble.’
‘He told you that?’ The information was no surprise, the man must have been hellishly difficult to live with.
‘She did.’
John had never met Robin’s wife. ‘What’s she like?’
Bernard rose and went to the side cabinet to replenish his glass. John shook his head at the proffered decanter. ‘I’ve only spoken to her on the phone. Seems nice enough.’ Bernard returned to his desk. ‘We called her. He’s been away two weeks. We haven’t heard from him and neither has she.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Malawi.’
‘Malawi! What for? There’s no oil in Malawi.’
Bernard inclined his head. ‘I agree.’ He raised his hand to stop John’s next words. ‘At least, if there is, it will be thousands, if not millions of years before it’s worth looking at.’
‘So what else did Robin’s wife say?’
Bernard hesitated. ‘I’m only telling you this because I want you out there. It could be relevant. I’m breaking a confidence here.’
John nodded. Bernard knew he could trust him.
‘She ummed and er
red a bit but finally told me that just before Robin left for Malawi she had told him she wouldn’t be there when he got back. Seems his drinking is out of control. He’s dropped out of the AA program. Apparently, in his current frame of mind, his wife thinks he’s capable of just about anything. In fact, she’s a bit concerned for her own safety.’
‘So she thinks he’s just legged it?’
‘She believes he’s gone on a binge somewhere and decided to hell with it. If that’s the case, he’s taken his Malawian assistant with him. They’ve both gone missing.’
John sipped at his scotch, aching for a cigarette. ‘What is it you’re not telling me?’
‘I’m not entirely convinced.’
‘Why not?’
‘Like you said. Despite his drinking, Robin lived for his work. And there’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘The Malawian Minister who commissioned our survey took great pains to emphasise that it was to be conducted in absolute secrecy. Apparently the President regards the lake as his own personal property. Even changes of land ownership on the shores of Lake Malawi have to go across his desk. Several South African consortiums have wanted to build casinos there and have been refused. He wants nothing to spoil the pristine beauty of his lake. He was not informed of the survey.’
‘How the hell did they expect to keep it from him? From the little I know he keeps an iron grip on everything.’
Echo of an Angry God Page 5