by Ken Follett
He was no longer jumping every time he saw a copper: there was no way the Southampton police could know about him. However, he had never flown before, and now he was feeling nervous about that.
He checked his wristwatch, a Patek Philippe stolen from a Royal Equerry. He had time for a quick cup of coffee to settle his stomach. He went into the lounge.
While he was sipping his coffee, a stunningly beautiful woman walked in. She was a perfect blonde, and she wore a wasp-waisted dress of cream silk with orange-red polka dots. She was in her early thirties, about ten years older than Harry, but that did not stop him smiling when he caught her eye.
She sat at the next table, sideways to Harry, and he studied the way the dotted silk clung to her bosom and draped her knees. She had on cream shoes and a straw hat, and she put a small handbag on the table.
After a moment she was joined by a man in a blazer. Hearing them speak, Harry discovered that she was English but he was American. Harry listened carefully, brushing up on his accent. Her name was Diana; the man was Mark. He saw the man touch her arm. She leaned closer. They were in love, and saw no one but each other: the room might have been empty.
Harry felt a pang of envy.
He looked away. He still felt queasy. He was about to fly all the way across the Atlantic. It seemed an awfully long way to go with no land beneath. He had never understood the principle of air travel, anyway: the propellers went round and round, so how come the plane went up?
While he listened to Mark and Diana, he practiced looking nonchalant. He did not want the other passengers on the Clipper to know he was nervous. I’m Harry Vandenpost, he thought, a well-off young American returning home because of the war in Europe. Pronounced Yurrup. I don’t have a job just now, but I suppose I’ll have to settle down to something soon. My father has investments. My mother, God rest her soul, was English, and I went to school over there. I didn’t go to university—never did like swotting. (Did Americans say swotting? He was not sure.) I’ve spent so much time in England that I’ve picked up some of the local lingo. I’ve flown a few times, sure, but this is my first flight across the Atlantic Ocean, you bet. I’m really looking forward to it!
By the time he finished his coffee, he was hardly scared at all.
Eddie Deakin hung up. He looked around the hall: it was empty. No one had overheard. He stared at the phone, which had plunged him into horror, hating it, as if he might end the nightmare by smashing the instrument. Then he slowly turned away.
Who were they? Where had they taken Carol-Ann? Why had they kidnapped her? What could they possibly want from him? The questions buzzed in his head like flies in a jar. He tried to think. He forced himself to concentrate on one question at a time.
Who were they? Could they be simple lunatics? No. They were too well organized: crazy people might manage a kidnapping, but it had taken careful planning to find out where Eddie would be immediately after the snatch and get him on the phone with Carol-Ann at the right moment. They were rational people, then, but they were prepared to break the law. They might be anarchists of some kind, but most likely he was dealing with gangsters.
Where had they taken Carol-Ann? She had said she was in a house. It might belong to one of the kidnappers, but more likely they had taken over or rented an empty house in a lonely spot. Carol had said it had happened a couple of hours ago, so the house could not be more than sixty or seventy miles from Bangor.
Why had they kidnapped her? They wanted something from him, something he would not give voluntarily, something he would not do for money—something, he guessed, that he would want to refuse them. But what? He had no money, he knew no secrets and no one was in his power.
It had to be something to do with the Clipper.
He would get his instructions on the plane, they had said, from a man called Tom Luther. Might Luther be working for someone who wanted details of the construction and operation of the plane? Another airline, perhaps, or a foreign country? It was possible. The Germans or the Japanese might be hoping to build a copy to use as a bomber. But there had to be easier ways for them to get blueprints. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, could supply such information: Pan American employees, Boeing employees, even the Imperial Airways mechanics who serviced the engines here at Hythe. Kidnapping was not necessary. Hell, enough technical details had been published in the magazines.
Might someone want to steal the plane? It was hard to imagine.
The likeliest explanation was that they wanted Eddie to cooperate in smuggling something, or somebody, into the United States.
Well, that was as much as he knew or could guess. What was he going to do?
He was a law-abiding citizen and the victim of a crime, and he wanted with all his heart to call the police.
But he was terrified.
He had never been so scared in his life. As a boy he had been frightened of Pop and the devil, but since then nothing had really petrified him. Now he was helpless and rigid with fear. He felt paralyzed: for a moment he could not even move from where he stood.
He thought of the police.
He was in goddamn England. There was no point in talking to their bicycling local cops. But he could try to put a telephone call through to the county sheriff back home, or the Maine State Police, or even the F.B.I., and get them to start searching for an isolated house that had recently been rented by a man—
Don’t call the police. It won’t do you any good, the voice on the phone had said. But if you do call them, I’ll fuck her just to be mean.
Eddie believed him. There had been a note of longing in the spiteful voice, as if the man was half hoping for an excuse to rape her. With her rounded, belly and swollen breasts she had a lush, ripe look that—
He clenched his fist, but there was nothing to punch but the wall. With a groan of despair he stumbled out through the front door. Not looking where he was going, he crossed the lawn. He came to a stand of trees, stopped and leaned his forehead against the furrowed bark of an oak.
Eddie was a simple man. He had been born in a farmhouse a few miles out of Bangor. His father was a poor farmer, with a few acres of potato fields, some chickens, a cow and a vegetable patch. New England was a bad place to be poor: the winters were long and bitterly cold. Mom and Pop believed that everything was the will of God. Even when Eddie’s baby sister caught pneumonia and died, Pop said God had a purpose in it “too deep for us to comprehend.” In those days Eddie daydreamed about finding buried treasure in the woods: a brass-bound pirate’s chest full of gold and precious gems, like in the stories. In his fantasy he took a gold coin into Bangor and bought big soft beds, a truckload of firewood, pretty china for his mother, sheepskin coats for all the family, thick steaks and an icebox full of ice cream and a pineapple. The dismal, ramshackle farmhouse was transformed into a place of warmth, comfort and happiness.
He never found buried treasure, but he got an education, walking the six miles to school every day. He liked it because the schoolroom was warmer than his home; and Mrs. Maple liked him because he always asked how things worked.
Years later it was Mrs. Maple who wrote to the congressman who got Eddie a chance to take the entrance examination for Annapolis.
He thought the Naval Academy was paradise. There were blankets and good clothes and all the food you could eat: he had never imagined such luxury. The tough physical regimen was easy to him; the bullshit was no worse than he had listened to in chapel all his life; and the hazing was petty harassment by comparison with the beatings his father handed out.
It was at Annapolis that he first became aware of how he appeared to other people. He learned that he was earnest, dogged, inflexible and hardworking. Even though he was skinny, bullies rarely picked on him: there was a look in his eye that scared them off. People liked him because they could rely on him to do what he promised, but nobody ever cried on his shoulder.
He was surprised to be praised as a hard worker. Both Pop and Mrs. Maple had taught him that you could get w
hat you wanted by working for it, and Eddie had never conceived any other way. All the same the compliment pleased him. His father’s highest term of praise had been to call someone a “driver,” the Maine dialect word for a hard worker.
He was commissioned an ensign and assigned to aviation training on flying boats. Annapolis had been comfortable, by comparison with his home; but the U.S. Navy was positively luxurious. He was able to send money home to his parents, for them to fix the farmhouse roof and buy a new stove.
He had been four years in the navy when Mom died, and Pop went just five months later. Their few acres were absorbed into the neighboring farm, but Eddie was able to buy the house and the woodland for a song. He resigned from the navy and got a well-paid job with Pan American Airways System.
In between flights he worked on the old house, installing plumbing and electricity and a water heater, doing the work himself, paying for the materials out of his engineer’s wages. He got electric heaters for the bedrooms, a radio and even a telephone. Then he found Carol-Ann. Soon, he had thought, the house would be filled with the laughter of children, and then his dream would have come true.
Instead it had turned into a nightmare.
CHAPTER FOUR
The first words Mark Alder said to Diana Lovesey were: “My goodness, you’re the nicest thing I’ve seen all day.”
People said that sort of thing to her all the time. She was pretty and vivacious, and she loved to dress well. That night she was wearing a long turquoise dress, with little lapels, a shirred bodice and short sleeves gathered at the elbow; and she knew she looked wonderful.
She was at the Midland Hotel in Manchester, attending a dinner dance. She was not sure whether it was the Chamber of Commerce, the Freemasons’ Ladies’ Night, or the Red Cross fund-raiser: the same people were at all such functions. She had danced with most of her husband, Mervyn’s, business associates, who had held her too close and trodden on her toes; and all of their wives had glared daggers at her. It was strange, Diana thought, that when a man made a bit of a fool of himself over a pretty girl, his wife always hated the girl for it, not the man. It was not as if Diana had designs on any of their pompous, whiskey-soaked husbands.
She had scandalized them all and embarrassed her husband by teaching the deputy mayor to jitterbug. Now, feeling the need of a break, she had slipped into the hotel bar, on the pretense of buying cigarettes.
He was there alone, sipping a small cognac, and he looked up at her as though she had brought sunshine into the room. He was a small, neat man with a boyish smile and an American accent. His remark seemed spontaneous, and he had a charming manner, so she smiled radiantly at him, but she did not speak. She bought cigarettes and drank a glass of iced water, then returned to the dance.
He must have asked the barman who she was, and found her address somehow, for the next day she got a note from him, on Midland Hotel writing paper.
Actually, it was a poem.
It began:Fixed in my heart, the picture of your smile
Engraven, ever present to mind’s eye
Not pain, nor years, nor sorrow can defile
It made her cry.
She cried because of everything she had hoped for and never achieved. She cried because she lived in a grimy industrial city with a husband who hated to take holidays. She cried because the poem was the only gracious, romantic thing that had happened to her for five years. And she cried because she was no longer in love with Mervyn.
After that it happened very quickly.
The next day was Sunday. She went into town on the Monday. Normally she would have gone first to Boots to change her book at the circulating library, then bought a combined lunch-and-matinee ticket for two shillings and sixpence at the Paramount Cinema in Oxford Street. After the film she would have walked around Lewis’s department store and Finnigan’s, and bought ribbons, or napkins, or gifts for her sister’s children. She might have gone to one of the little shops in The Shambles to buy some exotic cheese or special ham for Mervyn. Then she would have taken the train back to Altrincham, the suburb where she lived, in time to get the supper.
This time, she had coffee in the bar of the Midland Hotel, lunch in the German restaurant in the basement of the Midland Hotel, and afternoon tea in the lounge of the Midland Hotel. But she did not see the charming man with the American accent.
She went home feeling heartsick. That was ridiculous, she told herself. She had met him for less than a minute and had never said a word to him! He had seemed to symbolize everything she felt was missing from her life. But if she saw him again she would surely discover that he was boorish, insane, diseased, smelly, or all of those things.
She got off the train and walked along the street of large suburban villas where she lived. As she approached her own home, she was shocked and flustered to see him walking toward her, looking at her house with a pretense of idle curiosity.
She flushed scarlet and her heart raced. He too was startled. He stopped, but she carried on walking; then, as she passed him, she said: “Meet me in the Central Library tomorrow morning!”
She did not expect him to reply, but—she would learn later—he had a quick, humorous mind, and he immediately said: “What section?”
It was a big library, but not so big that two people could lose one another for long; but she said the first thing that came into her mind: “Biology.” And he laughed.
She entered her house with that laugh in her ears: a warm, relaxed, delighted laugh, the laugh of a man who loved life and felt good about himself.
The house was empty. Mrs. Rollins, who did the housework, had already left; and Mervyn was not home yet. Diana sat in the modem hygienic kitchen and thought old-fashioned unhygienic thoughts about her humorous American poet.
The next morning she found him sitting at a table under a notice that read SILENCE. When she said: “Hello,” he put a finger to his lips, pointed to a chair and wrote her a note.
It said I love your hat.
She had on a little hat like an upturned flowerpot with a brim, and she wore it tilted all the way over to one side so that it almost covered her left eye: it was the current fashion, although few women in Manchester had the nerve for it.
She took a little pen from her bag and wrote underneath, It wouldn’t suit you.
But my geraniums would look perfect in it, he wrote.
She giggled, and he said: “Shhh!”
Diana thought: Is he mad, or just funny?
She wrote, I love your poem.
Then he wrote, I love you.
Mad, she thought; but tears came to her eyes. She wrote, I don’t even know your name!
He gave her a business card. His name was Mark Alder, and he lived in Los Angeles.
California!
They went for early lunch to a V.E.M. restaurant—Vegetables, Eggs and Milk—because she could be sure she would not run into her husband there: wild horses could not have dragged him into a vegetarian restaurant. Then, as it was Tuesday, there was a midday concert at the Houldsworth Hall in Deansgate, with the city’s famous Hallé Orchestra and its new conductor, Malcolm Sargent. Diana felt proud that her city could offer such a cultural treat to a visitor.
That day she learned that Mark was a writer of comedy scripts for radio shows. She had never heard of the people he wrote for, but he said they were famous: Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Amos ’n’ Andy. He also owned a radio station. He wore a cashmere blazer. He was on an extended holiday, tracing his roots: his family had come originally from Liverpool, the port city a few miles west of Manchester. He was not much taller than Diana, and about her age, with hazel eyes and a few freckles.
And he was pure delight.
He was intelligent, funny and charming. His manners were nice, his fingernails were clean and his clothes were neat. He liked Mozart, but he knew about Louis Armstrong. Most of all, he liked Diana.
It was a peculiar thing how few men actually liked women, she thought. The men she knew would fawn on her, try to
paw her, suggest discreet assignations when Mervyn’s back was turned and, sometimes, when they got maudlin drunk, declare their love for her; but they didn’t really like her: their conversation was all banter, they never listened to her and they knew nothing about her. Mark was quite different, as she found out during the following days and weeks.
The day after they met in the library, he rented a car and drove her to the coast, where they ate sandwiches on a breezy beach and kissed in the shelter of the dunes.
He had a suite at the Midland, but they could not meet there because Diana was too well known: if she had been seen going upstairs after lunch the news would have been all around town by teatime. However, Mark’s inventive mind produced a solution. They drove to the seaside town of Lytham St. Anne’s, taking a suitcase, and checked into a hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Alder. They had lunch, then went to bed.
Making love with Mark was such fun.
The first time, he made a pantomime of trying to undress in complete silence, and she was laughing too much to feel shy as she took off her clothes. She did not worry about whether he would like her: he obviously adored her. She was not nervous because he was so nice.
They spent the afternoon in bed, and then checked out, saying they had changed their minds about staying. Mark paid in full for the night so that there was no bad feeling. He dropped her at a station one stop down the line from Altrincham, and she arrived home by train just as if she had spent the afternoon in Manchester.
They did this all the blissful summer.
He was supposed to go back to the States at the beginning of August to work on a new show, but he stayed, and wrote a series of sketches about an American on holiday in Britain, sending his scripts over every week by the new airmail service operated by Pan American.
Despite this reminder that time was running out for them, Diana managed not to think about the future very much. Of course, Mark would go home one day, but he would still be here tomorrow, and that was as far ahead as she cared to look. It was like the war: everyone knew it would be awful, but nobody could tell when it would start; and until it happened there was nothing to do but carry on and try to have a good time.