Marty nodded and said, “So what brings you here, then?”
“Business.” He smiled again, but he wasn’t getting any better at it. “But I’ve been wanting to come to Ireland for a long time. I’m of Irish stock.”
Jesus, who wasn’t? The day he picked up a fare at that airport who didn’t claim to have Irish blood, that was the day he’d win the lottery. Still, he put on his best “that’s amazing” smile and said, “Really? What’s your name?”
“Jeffers. Patrick Jeffers.”
Well, sure, anyone could call their kid Patrick, but he wasn’t so sure about the Jeffers bit. Didn’t sound particularly Irish to him.
“Don’t know any Jeffers. Must be a name from out West.”
“I think it is.” End of conversation.
Jeffers kept him waiting no more than two minutes. He went into the house empty-handed and came out with a briefcase. Now that was suspicious – no other way of looking at it, particularly some guy who’d never been to Dublin having business in a regular suburban street.
By the time he got him to the Wynn’s, though, there was no doubt it was his first time here – he’d been looking out of the window like a tourist for the last ten minutes.
“That’ll be twenty-two euros.”
“Keep the change,” said Jeffers, handing him thirty.
“That’s kind of you, Mr Jeffers. Enjoy your stay in Dublin.”
One thousand, nine hundred and ninety-two to go.
Bryan was a charmer, all right, and there was no doubt about what he thought he’d be getting when they went out later. First day on the job, all the girls had told Kate not to fall for any of his talk, and here she was, second day behind the reception desk, going out with him tonight.
She was smiling at him now as he leaned across the desk. And he thought she was smiling at the silver words coming from his mouth, but it was how much he looked like Danny that was really tickling her. If it weren’t for Bryan’s blue eyes, the two of them could meet and think they were long-lost brothers.
Of course, Bryan would be the good brother. They all thought she was some naive young slip of a thing, but twenty-four hours had been enough to tell her that Bryan was decent to the core. He was one for the girls, sure, but a good family lad at heart, working his way through college, a bright future ahead of him.
Danny, on the other hand, he was sexy and dangerous and the biggest mistake she’d made in her eighteen years. He’d come to a nasty end sooner or later and probably take a good few with him. The important thing was knowing that Danny wouldn’t stick around, and that she wouldn’t want him to.
Suddenly, Bryan pushed himself up and stepped away, making himself busy, and she saw one of the guests heading toward the desk, a businessman, boring-looking. She put on her best smile.
“Yes, sir, what can I do for you?”
“I checked in a short while ago?”
He sounded like he was asking a question, and she felt like telling him straight, Mister, if you don’t remember, I’m sure as hell, I don’t. He certainly didn’t look familiar.
“That’s right. Is your room satisfactory, Mr . . .?”
“Jeffers.”
“Mr Jeffries, that’s it.”
“It’s fine. But it’s Mr Jeffers. Actually, it’s an Irish name.”
“It is so. From up north, I think, Donegal, that way.”
“Yes, I think you’re right.” He smiled, wonky somehow, like he’d had botox and was still getting used to his face again. “How do I get to Trinity College?”
“Ah, you have to work really hard at school.” His smile stayed fixed – no sense of humour. “Just a little joke there. It’s just around the corner. Bryan here will point the way.”
Bryan had been straightening leaflets but snapped to attention now and ushered the Englishman out onto the street. He was cute, Bryan, a tight little backside on him, and he was going to get exactly what he wanted tonight, and the dates would be close enough that he’d never think to question whether the kid was his. How could he? In all probability, it was even going to look like him.
Jeffers had listened attentively as Bryan gave him directions for the short walk across to Trinity, but he seemed in no mood to move anywhere once he’d finished. So Bryan stood in silence with him, the two of them surveying the street like they were looking out over their ranch at sunset.
Then, absentmindedly, Jeffers said, “Have you heard of the name? Jeffers?”
“I haven’t. Sorry.” Jeffers nodded but still looked straight ahead, feet planted firmly, and so Bryan tried to fill the pause by saying, “I’m a student at Trinity myself. History.”
Jeffers turned and looked at him as if he’d revealed something vital. He stared at him for a few seconds, a look intense enough to be unnerving, and Bryan couldn’t help but see that Jeffers looked troubled. Finally, he said, “Let me tell you something, don’t ever fall into the trap of believing you don’t have choices. You always have a choice, in everything.”
He seemed to consider that for a moment, then nodded to himself and handed Bryan five euros before walking off along the street with Bryan’s thanks lost in the noise behind him. Bryan stood there looking at the five euros, wondering what might have induced such a bizarre fit of profundity.
He was close to laughing it off as he walked back into the hotel, ready to get another smile out of Kate by telling her, and then for some reason, it made him think of Lucy and it was no longer funny. You always have a choice, in everything. Lucy – if ever a girl could have turned him into a poet.
It was strange, though – two minutes with an English businessman who didn’t know how to smile, and suddenly he felt that if he didn’t get in touch with Lucy right now, see her this very evening, he’d regret it for the rest of his life. What was that all about?
Kate was smiling at him as he walked toward the desk. She was a pretty girl, and Danny had said she was easy, but he wasn’t sure he wanted it any more – not with her, not with any of these other girls.
“I’ve just got to make a call.” She smiled back at him, coquettishly, he thought, but girl, it wouldn’t be tonight.
“Mr Parker, you do not have to write essays on Joyce, and when we’re discussing him, I will not mark you down for opting out of the conversation, but if you insist on writing essays and speaking your mind, please be so kind as to read something other than Dubliners.”
The others laughed but Parker was smiling, too. She only teased him because she knew he could take it and because he was probably smarter than all the rest put together.
“You know, Dr Burns, I have skim-read Ulysses.”
“Would that be the jogging tour of Dublin, Mr Parker?” That earned another laugh, but the hour was upon them and they were already putting their things together. Parker was first out the door. Clare was the last, waiting till everyone had left before shyly handing in an essay.
She started to read through it once she was on her own again, but was only a page or two in – impressive, if lacking a little in flair – when there was a knock at the door and it opened a fraction.
“Come in.”
The man who stepped into the room was about thirty-five, six foot, the average kind of build that couldn’t easily be read under a suit. Facially, he looked innocuous, which immediately put her on her guard.
“Dr Elizabeth Burns?” She nodded, smiling, and he closed the door behind him.
“Call me Liz, Mr . . .?”
She’d gestured at the seat across from her desk and as he sat down and placed his briefcase in front of him, he said, “Patrick Jeffers. The office sent me.”
The office. It was about twenty years since she’d heard anyone call it that.
“And what office would that be?”
He didn’t answer, just smiled awkwardly and relaxed into his seat.
He seemed to relax then, confident and in control as he said, “I’ve got a lot of admiration for people like you.” She offered him a quizzical expression. No one h
ad ever contacted her like this so, whoever he was, she wanted to draw him out a little more. “People in 14. And no, I don’t expect you to admit it but, being buried deep the way you were for, what was it, four years, that really takes something.”
Her expression unnerved him a little, and with no wonder, for she was wearing a look of utter astonishment. “Mr Jeffers, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. People in fourteen, what?”
He nodded knowingly, uncomfortable, as if he’d spoken out of turn and made himself look unprofessional, which he had. At the same time, she was unnerved herself, wondering what this Jeffers was doing here, wondering why she’d had no word that he was coming. He knew she’d been in 14, so somebody must have sent him.
“You don’t sound Irish.” He tilted his head questioningly. “Jeffers is an Irish name, but you don’t sound Irish. Irish grandparents, perhaps?”
“Yes, I think so.” He hesitated before saying, “So you’ve heard of the name? I think you’re the first person since I arrived who recognizes it.”
“There’s actually a folk song, somewhere down in the Southwest, though the exact location escapes me at the moment, about the death of a Jeffers.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that.”
“Of course, there’s also the American poet, Robinson Jeffers.”
“Yes.” She could tell he didn’t like being sidetracked. He was here on business and wanted to get on with it.
“What do you want here, Mr Jeffers? Why has your office sent you?”
“Yes, I’m really just here to deliver a message.” He bent down and picked up his briefcase, but started to cover himself, saying, “Just some paperwork you need to read and sign.”
Amateur! He was opening the briefcase on his lap and she had absolutely no doubt what kind of message he was about to produce from it. There were all kinds of thoughts running through her head, questions of whether she’d been double-crossed, and if so, by whom, questions of who he was working for and whether she’d have to move on, but there was something more immediate, an instinctive reflex that would never leave her.
She picked the phone up off the desk and threw it hard. It cracked him on the head with a clatter, and then a further clatter as the briefcase and the gun inside it fell onto the floor. He was dazed for only a second, but she was around the desk before he came up for air and she was pulling the telephone cord tight around his neck.
“Who sent you?”
His arms flailed, trying to strike her a body blow but unable to find her where she stood directly behind him.
“Who sent you?”
He tried another approach, trying to pull her own hands off, then trying to get his fingers under the cord, desperately tearing at his neck, drawing blood with his fingernails. He wouldn’t talk; he was at least that professional. She yanked up the tension an extra notch, and the flailing of the arms gave way to a more convulsive movement through his entire body. She had to use all her strength to keep him in the seat, but she couldn’t resist leaning down, whispering breathlessly into his ear.
“You know that song about Jeffers? It’s a celebration. See, Jeffers was a diamond trader, and he was English!”
She couldn’t get the phone working again, even after she’d disentangled it from his body. She took her cell phone and dialled. When Lambert picked up she said, “Someone came after me. I’ll need removals.”
“Someone from the North?”
“No, he claimed to be one of us.”
“Name?”
“Patrick Jeffers. Passport backs that up.” She looked at the passport she’d retrieved from his jacket. He certainly had the right look.
“Jeffers? There has to be a mistake. Let me just check something.” She could hear Lambert tapping away on his computer keyboard. He was as much an old timer as she was and always hit the keys like they belonged on a manual typewriter. ‘Liz, Patrick Jeffers is on his first assignment, but he’s in Damascus; he’s a Middle East specialist.”
She looked at the throttled body, slumped in the chair like a drunk, and now that she thought of it, he hadn’t seemed to recognize the name of Robinson Jeffers, and surely he would have done, as surely as she knew who Robbie Burns was.
“Well, I hope he’s doing better than the Jeffers in front of me now.”
Lambert laughed. She liked Lambert; he had a good sense of humour. People didn’t need to look much in this game, but a sense of humour was an absolute must.
DISTILLING THE TRUTH
Marilyn Todd
The instant Marie-Claude’s husband told her that he’d compiled a dossier detailing the Chief Inspector’s corruption complete with dates, names and times, then placed the file personally in the hands of the Commissioner, she knew it was all over. No wonder he waited until he’d finished his tartiflette to tell her what he’d done. She’d have thrown the damned dish on the floor and to hell with dinner, and he could have whistled for his île flottante as well. As it was, she didn’t hear him out. What on earth was the point of lengthy explanations?
“You’re a fool, Luc. No one likes a whistle blower.”
“I didn’t join the police to be popular.”
“It’s the end of your career, you know that? They won’t keep you on in Paris after this!”
“Blackmail, extortion, what was I supposed to do, Marie-Claude?” He laid down Le Figaro and turned his gaze to her. “For years, Picard has been preying on the very people he was meant to protect. I couldn’t simply turn aside.”
“And I’m sure the Commissioner shook your hand and thanked you warmly for your efforts.”
One side of Luc’s face twisted uncomfortably. “Not exactly, no.”
“You see? No one likes a whistle-blower. They’d rather close ranks and have a bastard in their midst than admit to one bad apple, and you already know my feelings about the Commissioner.”
Like when they were invited over to dinner and she overheard him talking to her husband in his study when she went to find the bathroom.
“Your wife is truculent, selfish and a pain in the cul, Luc—”
The rest was drowned by children’s laughter upstairs, but who cared? That’s the last time she’d eat at that pig’s house, she told Luc, and if her husband felt bad about making excuses when future invitations arrived, then so much the better. She wanted nothing to do with a man who insulted her, and it wouldn’t have hurt Luc to have stuck up for her, either.
“ – couldn’t agree more, sir—”
Truculent and selfish, her cul. She pushed her thick curls back from her face. She had married too young, that was the trouble, and to a man ten years older than herself at that. Admittedly, after six years Luc was no less handsome and his back was as strong, but that type of love can’t sustain a marriage indefinitely. And when he wasn’t working all the hours le bon Dieu sent, he had his head stuck in a file or wanted to talk politics, and not even French politics, either. Honestly! Who cared whether rich diamond deposits had been found in Siberia or how many communists this Senator Mc-Whatever-His-Name accused in the American State Department? What was going to actually change people’s lives were things like the new television transmissions that were now coming out in colour, not some piece of paper signed by Egypt and Britain over a canal in Suez that Luc insisted was going to have far-reaching consequences. But however exasperated Marie-Claude got with her husband, she’d never once known him to lose his temper.
Not even when, a mere fortnight after delivering his sanctimonious dossier, the Commissioner transferred him to Cognac.
“You’ll like the South,” Luc said confidently, as their train pulled away. “Twice as much sunshine, warmer summers, better winters—”
“Better theatres, Luc? Will they have better street cafes and shops? Will they get subtitled versions of ‘On the Waterfront’, do you think?” By all accounts, it was set to scoop an Oscar. “Will they have better parks? Better gardens? Women in peignoirs leaning over the balconies, calling obscenities to men in the str
eet?”
He looked at her beneath lowered lids as the train chugged through the forests of Rambouillet. “You never liked Montmartre.”
“It had life,” she retorted. “It had character and substance, it was always noisy, colourful, constantly changing—”
Marie-Claude broke off. Why was she referring to these things in the past tense? For heaven’s sake, it wasn’t as though she wasn’t going back! No, no, once she’d seen Luc settled in (she owed him that) she would start a new life. A new life with a man who appreciated art, the cinema, fashion and fun. Someone who liked dancing, for sure!
“I’ll bet they’ve never heard of Perry Como in Cognac.”
“You can probably count yourself lucky if they’ve heard of Bing Crosby,” he murmured behind his guide book. “But this is promotion, Marie-Claude. We’re lucky to get it. Do you want to look through this, by the way?”
Marie-Claude shook her head. She’d seen enough of those military vines and flat-bottomed boats from upside down, thank you.
“We’ll be able to afford a house of our own, instead of a poky apartment on the fifth floor where you can hear everything that happens next door. We’re close to the seaside, and I’ll bet the air’s better, too.”
There was nothing wrong with the air in the Rue de Roc, she wanted to say, but his nose was back in the pamphlet and, as Orleans rumbled past, she stroked the hat in her lap. Such a jaunty little number, as well. Très Audrey Hepburn with just a dash of Ava Gardner. She sighed and closed her eyes. By the time she got the chance to wear it again, it would either have too many feathers or too few, and who would be seen dead wearing green for next season? At Tours, the only other couple in the carriage got off and an old woman with a runny nose got in.
“Amazing,” Luc said, turning the page of his paper to avoid creasing. “It says here construction’s underway on the St Lawrence Seaway that’ll allow deep-draught ships direct access to the rich industrials of the Great Lakes. Direct access. Can you imagine?”
Marie-Claude switched off. Her husband was clever, conscientious, honourable, but dull. Handsome, rugged, muscular and tall, yet he lacked passion where it really counted. And now, it seemed, he was a failure into the bargain.
The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries Page 52