The man led Mordecai behind the car. Unusually, instead of doors at the side, over the running board, entry to the main cabin – the tonneau – was via a door mounted in the rear, centrally, above the bumper.
The small crowd parted and Mordecai was beckoned on.
‘Please…’
The man opened the door and extended his palm, bidding him to enter. Mordecai had second thoughts. He had heard of things… of West End toffs travelling east for ‘a bit of arse’…
‘No.’
The man rolled his eyes, as if Mordecai were a petulant child.
‘Please.’
A boy yelled out, ‘Go on, mister… go for a spin!’
And with that, Mordecai stepped up and in, and the man closed the door behind him.
It was dark in the car’s cabin, just the yellow glow of dimmed electric lighting. It smelled of expensive leather and cologne. Whoever was in there, in the gloom, he sensed, was taking wry amusement at his disorientation. Eventually they spoke.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Plavinas,’ came a deep, resonant, plummy voice.
Mordecai was sitting opposite him, on the edge of the seat and on edge in his demeanour.
‘Do you like my car?’
Mordecai shrugged an ‘I suppose so’.
‘A Darracq. French. I had it shipped over from Paris.’
The automobile was already moving, Mordecai realised, its engine smooth, its suspension so gentle that you barely noticed.
‘Who are you?’ asked Mordecai. ‘What do you want?’
The car glided into a higher gear, picking up speed. The man turned a dimmer switch and the lighting increased a fraction. He was about sixty years old, well fed and had on an expensive chocolate-brown silk suit; his silver hair was brushed back behind his ears and he had bright-blue twinkling eyes. Around his shoulders was draped a fur coat.
‘The essence of conversation, Mr Plavinas… may I call you Mordecai…?’
Mordecai shrugged again.
‘…especially in a tense, maybe even confrontational situation, is never to betray that the circumstances are beyond your control. Not to reveal your hand, as you might put it. You must at least create the illusion of having the other fellow in your pocket. Your question here… two questions… indicate a man who is confused… afraid.’
‘I not afraid.’
‘My goodness, your English,’ he mocked. ‘It’s “I am not afraid,” or the contraction “I’m not afraid” if you really must.’
Mordecai’s anger was rising.
‘What you want?’ he growled.
The man casually fiddled with the signet ring on his little finger.
‘And there you go again…’
Mordecai balled his fists, but the man gave no hint of feeling threatened. He exuded nonchalance. There was something wriggling. Mordecai hadn’t noticed, but within the fur of the coat, nestling on the man’s lap, was a small dog, a bony thing with sleek brown fur, pricked triangular ears and oversized saucer eyes.
‘Please, let us not have this turn vulgar.’
Next to the man, on the seat, was something covered in a tartan blanket. He pulled it back to reveal a large wicker hamper. He unfastened the buckled strap and opened it. It was packed with breads, meats, cheeses, pâté and garnishings. There were some lavish sandwiches already made up. The inside of the lid was stamped with the word ‘Harrods’.
‘I’m assuming you are hungry… Please, dig in, help yourself…’
The rumbling in Mordecai’s belly dictated his response. He grabbed a steak sandwich, the fine meat and its accompanying salad and ripe tomato slices packed within floury white bread, and tore into it like a savage. The man, pointedly, offered a linen serviette. He pulled out a sliver of luncheon meat and fed it lovingly to his lapdog. There was a half-bottle of champagne in an ice bucket… Moët et Chandon. He uncorked it and untethered two crystal glasses fastened inside the hamper lid.
‘Oh, I forgot… you don’t.’
He offered Mordecai a bottle of Perrier water instead and popped its lid with an opener. Mordecai swigged from it. The man poured a glass of champagne for himself.
‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he said, though Mordecai was too engrossed in his eating.
‘Well here’s to you, Mordecai,’ he added. ‘Glad to have you on board. And in answer to your question – two questions… One: who I am is of no great relevance, not at the moment. And… Two: what do I want? I want you to do something for me.’
Mordecai’s face fell. He thought again – ‘the gent’… ‘the bit of arse…’
The man read his expression.
‘My goodness, you really are such a base creature,’ he scoffed. ‘No, no, no, nothing like that at all. But you must come with me. In fact you already are.’
‘What time I… What time will I be back?’
‘My dear fellow, never,’ he said. ‘You can never come back to this place ever, ever again.’
Chapter Sixteen
Finch opted against public transport and wound his way out of Soho. He cut through the alleyway by the Pillars of Hercules pub, traversed Charing Cross Road with its antique bookshops, got a bit lost around Seven Dials, till he emerged amid the cobbles, hustle and bustle of the Covent Garden market. He proceeded along Long Acre and turned south down Bow Street, past the grand rebuilt Royal Opera House. He clipped the edge of the crescent of the Aldwych, coming out opposite the red-tiled Strand Underground station of the Piccadilly Railway.
He crossed the Strand itself – once upon a time the north shore of the Thames, he was fond of dropping into conversation – and passed through the street façade into the courtyard bordered by the neoclassical grandeur of Somerset House with its magnificent arches and elegant stonework.
Before entering, he strolled around to the terrace, took a moment and looked out across the Thames. The river was the city’s… the country’s… indeed the Empire’s… lifeblood and he liked to remind himself of it. Even here, upriver, there were barges ploughing back and forth, steam ferries crossing here and there, pilot launches bobbing in between. A creaking vessel rolled past, laden with sacks of grain.
He had never ceased to admire the sheer scale of activity that was occurring just a few gentle curves away downstream, the other side of Tower Bridge – the hundreds of ships arriving daily to disgorge their wares transported from around the world and the army of men engaged in unloading it all.
It started to rain. He pulled his collar up. As a child, he had been transfixed by a painting by the artist Canaletto which he had gazed at while clutching his father’s hand in some gallery or other. In a near photorealistic manner, the artist had captured the view from this very spot, rendering London and the river in honeyed Venetian hues, like some jewel of the Enlightenment. Even the boatmen were standing, sculling as if they were on gondolas.
Today, in contrast, the scene was far less romantic. Scaffolding and a temporary boardwalk covered the crumbling Waterloo Bridge.
What would the Iron Duke have thought?
The grey clouds now gathering and the pall of smog made him question whether things really were that beautiful in the past, or if the Italian painter was just thinking wistfully about home.
Inside Somerset House’s great lobby, with its black and white tiled floor, Finch was directed to the General Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, whose public reading room occupied a large hall on the first floor with its row upon row of wooden cabinets and file drawers.
After filling in some forms, the acquisition of a ‘day card’ and a by-rote, unenthusiastic orientation speech on the part a bored and halitotic clerk, Finch set about his business. It was something he had hit upon while sitting in the Soho pub – he would try and gain some background information on the various players in this unfolding drama.
He started out by looking for the public file on a certain ‘Mr Chilcot’. Though without a Christian name or names – Jilkes’ secretary had listed him merely as G.C. – it was a wild stab in
the dark. There were several drawers alone containing information on thousands of people named either Chilcot or Chilcott. Christ, he didn’t even know the spelling.
The drawers were long thin troughs full of handwritten index cards, separated by dividers and full of coded letters and reference numbers. He had made a few notes on how to decipher the coding with the pencil and rough sheet of paper he had been provided with (‘No outside material in the reading room!’). But he was going nowhere fast. He had an address: 11 Chepstow Place, London W2, but found no way of cross-referencing it.
He looked around the room. Seated on the periphery, at the reading tables, were people – mostly men, but a few women – making discreet notes about some nugget of information they had just unearthed. Tax collectors, solicitors, private detectives, bailiffs, wronged spouses…? He suspected there was either professional interest or private desperation behind most of the investigations, the gold all panned in perfect silence. There were others like him, less adept novices sighing in exasperation over the drawers.
The bored clerk reluctantly indulged him with a further tutorial but it was no use. The Bayswater address seemed absent from the Land Registry altogether. The information from the 1901 census was still incomplete, or hadn’t yet all been transferred by hand to the files, recounted the clerk with an acidic schadenfreude (‘Sir did appreciate there were forty-two million people resident in Great Britain and Ireland?’).
Finch, irked, pulled rank, flashed his medical credentials and spun the clerk a line about needing to track down information as a matter of urgency… no… life or death. Browbeaten, the snippy man agreed to make a telephone call on Finch’s behalf to Companies House. But, again, after an endless interlude, it yielded nothing. There were several small ‘Freelands’ – a garage in Portsmouth, a lettings agency in Wolverhampton, a joinery in Cardiff, but there was no company or society listed that fitted the bill.
On a whim, Finch tried something else. He went back to the files and worked his way through the trays marked ‘P’ till he came to the name ‘Pickersgill’. Despite it being an unusual name, there were far more Pickersgills listed than he had anticipated. Most were in Yorkshire but there was a pocket in Norfolk.
Finch took the information over to the county records, put his new-found skills to use and, after a few minutes – and some under-his-breath swearing – managed to locate the index card for Pickersgill, Sidney John, b. February 22nd 1854 (still officially alive and kicking) who resided, as a tenant, at an address in Endthorpe, Norfolk. He had a wife, Edna, but no children listed. His profession was recorded, intriguingly, as ‘servant of the parish’ rather than ‘fisherman’ or ‘seaman’, but then the man could have changed jobs. As of 1901 there was no evident criminal record (despite the police suggestion). Yes… it had to be him.
There was a room off the hall, at the far end, marked ‘Military Records’. Finch went in and searched on. He took his details on Pickersgill and looked in the various files for the Norfolk Regiment. Again, he wondered why a fisherman had enlisted in the army over the navy. But the South African War was a land campaign and volunteers and reservists had been deployed on that basis.
The Norfolk Regiment had a long history. There was some information given on its founding – at the request of James II, it turned out, to put down the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685. As a foot regiment it had served in various guises over the years: at the Battle of the Boyne, in the War of Spanish Succession, the American Revolutionary War… Back then, regiments were designated by number rather than county. From the nineteenth century, it gained a permanent base in East Anglia and had served in the Peninsular War, the Crimea, Afghanistan, the Boer War. Though it was only since 1881, when the regiment was established in its modern identity, that thorough records existed.
Finch spent an hour going through files, but to no avail. He then found a different way into the system and cross-referenced the name (he was getting quite good at this, he fancied). He was, nonetheless, heading up another blind alley, his eyes watering over the endless rows of cards and their fussy, minute copperplate type. He checked his Zeiss wristwatch and was about to give up completely when, lo and behold, he found it. He felt his heart race and a little thrill after all his efforts. But…
He looked again, double-checked. It couldn’t be… could it?
All roads led him to the same place… to the same conclusion. Sidney John Pickersgill had served in the South African War all right, of that there was no doubt, and had been pretty much in all the places he had claimed. But he had not been an infantryman at all, let alone in the Norfolks. He had attained the rank of corporal in the Military Foot Police.
Confused, Finch closed the drawers and left. The prissy clerk called out, asking if he’d found what he was looking for. He did so with the tone of one hoping for failure.
Finch knew he shouldn’t have done what he did next but he was so close, he was driven to it. A couple of hundred yards away, along the Strand, stood the Savoy Hotel. As he was in the neighbourhood… it would not be unreasonable… Would it? Five minutes later he had turned off into Savoy Court, the curious, anomalous stub of a road, the only one in Britain where traffic drove on the right.
The hotel had been bought and done up a few years back by theatre impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte – his Savoy Theatre stood on the corner – and founded on the profits of his Gilbert and Sullivan productions. It was regarded as one of the world’s most luxurious. Finch had visited it before – it was the first time he had ever ridden in an elevator, a ‘lift’, he remembered – though he never fancied he would ever be well heeled enough to stay here himself… or know anyone who did.
Finch walked beneath the gilded canopy that overhung the entrance. Two top-hatted doormen snapped alert and ushered him in. The place was exquisite: fine marble stonework and mahogany panelling with gold leaf inlays, beautifully upholstered furniture. There were potted palms and ferns sprouting from golden tubs. In the corner of the tea room, where cake stands were piled high, amid the waft of tea and coffee, a string quartet was playing Brahms. The ambient music, the genteel hubbub, the added aroma of food, perfume and cigars, even the temperature, immediately spelled comfort of the highest order.
A valet of some sort asked Finch if he was resident or visiting and steered him towards reception. Beyond, he could see into the American Bar, furnished in the new modernist arts décoratifs style. It was famous for its cocktails, its female bartender one of the hotel’s most celebrated employees, whose gin and vermouth concoction, the suggestive ‘Hanky-Panky’, was perennially name-dropped in the society pages. Finch wondered whether he should try one for himself.
He enquired at the front desk – per etiquette, he decided – after Mr and Mrs Edward Pointer, even though the words felt awkward, distasteful in his mouth.
‘Certainly, sir,’ replied the obsequious receptionist and telephoned up to their room. ‘Whom may I say is calling?’
Though after a minute of ringing, it was obvious that the Pointers were out.
Finch sauntered through the lobby and out of the riverside exit. He entered the Victoria Embankment Gardens, with the obelisk of Cleopatra’s Needle beyond, and walked to sit near the bronze statue of Robert Burns – perched on a tree stump, quill in hand. Finch smoked, craved a drink and wondered what the hell he was doing. Couples in their haute couture and Parisian finery promenaded down winding paths through the trimmed shrubbery. Even though the weather was dull, some women carried frilled parasols.
Finch reflected on his whimsical adventure and wondered whether Jilkes’ advice hadn’t been the best – get your head down, keep your nose clean. He looked at his watch again and was contemplating his route back to St Pancras – the better to beat the rush hour – when he suddenly realised she’d strolled right past him, and on her own. She was in a maroon dress and jacket and wore a beret with her hair tucked up.
‘Annie?’
She startled and wheeled round. Finch sprang to his feet.
‘
What on earth…?’ she spluttered.
‘Sorry,’ said Finch.
‘My goodness, you’re quite the one for surprises.’
His words flowed out in a torrent.
‘I had some business nearby. It would have been rude not to… I just left a message for you at the front desk… Had no idea… Didn’t expect to catch you here… on your own.’
‘Edward’s in Glasgow. Business,’ she said, dropping his name at the first opportunity, he noted. ‘There for a couple of days. I like to take a turn along the river, through these gardens, in the afternoon. This little patch of green. It’s a well-kept secret.’
She came and brushed her lips lightly on his cheek, just like the other night. She wore a pair of pearl earrings, minimal make-up and her hair smelled of juniper berries.
‘My… Finch. So here we are… Again!’ she added, seemingly genuine. ‘And how’s Maude? It was lovely to meet her. She’s delightful. You’re a very lucky chap.’
He didn’t know why, but the comment made his heart sink.
‘Something wrong?’ she asked.
‘Nothing.’
She sighed.
‘Come on, Finch, I know you better than that.’
The endearment didn’t help either. It reminded him of how they used to be.
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Finch, you’re doing it again.’
‘Doing what?’
She was irked. The rising inflection of her accent was amplified by her temper. He remembered that. He remembered, too, the rebellious, uppity streak from the first time they had met – she and her pals, fellow nurses, all rather boisterous, spirited.
‘The other night,’ she prickled. ‘Christ, what are the odds we’d run into each other like that?… And then you… you…’
The Cold North Sea Page 12