Forfeit

10

We turned north into the Aldwych and up Drury Lane to St. Giles’ Circus. I made no move towards escape, although we stopped several times at traffic lights. My companion watched me warily, and I worked on where I had seen him before and still came up with nothing. Up Tottenham Court Road. Left, right, left again. Straight into Regent’s Park and round the semicircle. Stopped smoothly at the turnstile entrance to the Zoo.

‘Inside,’ said my companion, nodding.

We stepped out of the car, and the chauffeur quietly drove off.

‘You can pay,’ I remarked.

He gave me a quick glance, tried to juggle the money out of his pocket one handed, and found he couldn’t manage it if he were to be of any use with his knife.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You pay. For us both.’

I paid, almost smiling. He was nowhere near as dangerous as he wanted to be thought.

We checked through the turnstiles. ‘Where now?’ I said.

‘Straight ahead. I’ll tell you.’

The Zoo was nearly empty. On that oily Tuesday November lunch time, not even the usual bus loads from schools. Birds shrieked mournfully from the aviary and a notice board said the vultures would be fed at three.

A man in a dark overcoat and black homburg hat was sitting on a seat looking towards the lions’ outdoor compounds. The cages were empty. The sun-loving lions were inside under the sun lamps.

‘Over there,’ said my companion, nodding.

We walked across. The man in the black homburg watched us come. Every line of his clothes and posture spoke of money, authority, and high social status, and his manner of irritating superiority would have done credit to the Foreign Office. As Dembley had said, his subject matter was wildly at variance with his appearance.

‘Did you have any trouble?’ he asked.

‘None at all,’ said the knife man smugly.

A bleak expression crept into pale grey eyes as cold as the stratosphere. ‘I am not pleased to hear it.’

The accent in his voice was definite but difficult. A thickening of some consonants, a clipping of some vowels.

‘Go away, now,’ he said to the knife man. ‘And wait.’

My nondescript abductor in his nondescript raincoat nodded briefly and walked away, and I nearly remembered where I’d seen him. Recollection floated up, but not far enough.

‘You chose to come,’ the man in the homburg said flatly.

‘Yes and no.’

He stood up. My height, but thicker. Yellowish skin, smooth except for a maze of wrinkles round his eyes. What I could see of his hair was nearly blond, and I put his age down roughly as five or six years older than myself.

‘It is cold outside. We will go in.’

I walked with him round inside the Big Cats’ House, where the strong feral smell seemed an appropriate background to the proceedings. I could guess what he wanted. Not to kill: that could have been done in Fleet Street or anywhere on the way. To extort. The only question was how.

‘You show too little surprise,’ he said.

‘We were waiting for some... reaction. Expecting it.’

‘I see.’ He was silent, working it out. A bored-looking tiger blinked at us lazily, claws sheathed inside rounded pads, tail swinging a fraction from side to side. I sneered at him. He turned and walked three paces and three paces back, round and round, going nowhere.

‘Was last week’s reaction not enough for you?’

‘Very useful,’ I commented. ‘Led us straight to Charlie Boston. So kind of you to ask. That makes you a side kick of his.’

He gave me a blazingly frosty glare. ‘I employ Boston.’

I looked down, not answering. If his pride were as easily stung as that he might give me more answers than I gave him.

‘When I heard about it I disapproved of what they did on the train. Now, I am not so sure.’ His voice was quiet again, the voice of culture, diplomacy, tact.

‘You didn’t order it, then.’

‘I did not.’

I ran my hand along the thick metal bar which kept visitors four feet away from the animals’ cages. The tiger looked tame, too gentle to kill. Too indifferent to maul, to maim, to scrape to the bone.

‘You know what we want,’ said the polite tiger by my side. ‘We want to know where you have hidden the horse.’

‘Why?’ I said.

He merely blinked at me.

I sighed. ‘What good will it do you? Do you still seriously intend to try to prevent it from running? You would be much wiser to forget the whole thing and quietly fold your tent and steal away.’

‘You will leave that decision entirely to me.’ Again, the pride stuck out a mile. I didn’t like it. Few enemies were as ruthless as those who feared a loss of face. I began to consider before how wide an acquaintanceship the face had to be preserved. The wider, the worse for me.

‘Where is it?’

‘Tiddely Pom?’ I said.

‘Tiddely Pom.’ He repeated the name with fastidious disgust. ‘Yes.’

‘Quite safe.’

‘Mr Tyrone, stop playing games. You cannot hide for ever from Charlie Boston.’

I was silent. The tiger yawned, showing a full set of fangs. Nasty.

‘They could do more damage next time,’ he said.

I looked at him curiously, wondering if he seriously thought I would crumble under so vague a threat. He stared straight back and was unmoved when I didn’t answer. My heart sank slightly. More to come.

‘I suspected,’ he said conversationally, ‘when I heard that you were seen at Plumpton races the day following Boston’s ill-judged attack, that physical pressure would run us into too much difficulty in your case. I see that this assessment was correct. I directed that a different lever should be found. We have, of course, found it. And you will tell us where the horse is hidden.’

He took out the black crocodile wallet and removed from it a small sheet of paper, folded once. He gave it to me. I looked. He saw the deep shock in my face and he smiled in satisfaction.

It was a photo-copy of the bill of the hotel where I had stayed with Gail. Mr and Mrs Tyrone, one double room.

‘So you see, Mr Tyrone, that if you wish to keep this interesting item of news from your wife, you must give us the address we ask.’

My mind tumbled over and over like a dry-cleaning machine and not a useful thought came out.

‘So quiet, Mr Tyrone? You really don’t like that, do you? So you will tell us. You would not want your wife to divorce you, I am sure. And you have taken such pains to deceive her that we are certain you know she would throw you out if she discovered this...’ He pointed to the bill. ‘How would she like to know that your mistress is coloured? We have other dates, too. Last Sunday week, and the Sunday before that. Your wife will be told it all. Wealthy women will not stand for this sort of thing, you know.’

I wondered numbly how much Gail had sold me for.

‘Come along, Mr Tyrone. The address.’

‘I need time,’ I said dully.

‘That’s right,’ he said calmly. ‘It takes time to sink in properly, doesn’t it? Of course you can have time. Six hours. You will telephone to us at precisely seven o’clock this evening.’ He gave me a plain white card with numbers on it. ‘Six hours is all, Mr Tyrone. After that, the information will be on its way to your wife, and you will not be able to stop it. Do you clearly understand?’

‘Yes.’ I said. The tiger sat down and shut its eyes. Sympathetic.

‘I thought you would.’ He moved away from me towards the door. ‘Seven o’clock precisely. Good day, Mr Tyrone.’

With erect easy assurance he walked straight out of the Cat House, turned a corner, and was gone. My feet seemed to have become disconnected from my body. I was going through the disjointed floating feeling of irretrievable disaster. A disbelieving part of my mind said that if I stayed quite still the nutcracker situation would go away.

It didn’t, of course. But after a while I began to think normally instead of in emotional shock waves; began to look for a hole in the net. I walked slowly away from the tiger, out into the unwholesome air and down towards the gate, all my attention turned inward. Out of the corner of my eye I half caught sight of my abductor in his raincoat standing up a side path looking into an apparently empty wire-netted compound, and when I’d gone out of the turnstile on to the road it hit me with a thump where I’d seen him before. So significant a thump that I came to a rocking halt. Much had urgently to be understood.

I had seen him at King’s Cross station while I waited for Gail. He had been standing near me: had watched her all the way from the Underground until she had reached me. Looking for a lever. Finding it.

To be watching me at King’s Cross, he must have followed me from the Blaze.

Today, he had picked me up outside the Blaze.’

I walked slowly, thinking about it. From King’s Cross in the morning I had gone on the train to Newcastle, but I hadn’t come back on my return ticket. Collie Gibbons had. I’d taken that unexpected roundabout route home, and somewhere, maybe back at Newcastle races, I’d shaken off my tail.

Someone also must either have followed Gail, or have gone straight into the hotel to see her after I had left. I baulked at thinking she would sell me out with my imprint still on our shared sheets. But maybe she would. It depended on how much they had offered her, I supposed. Five hundred would have tempted her mercenary heart too far.

No one but Gail could have got a receipt from the hotel. No one but Gail knew of the two Sunday afternoons. No one but Gail thought my wife was rich. I coldly faced the conclusion that I had meant little to her. Very little indeed. My true deserts. I had sought her out because she could dispense sex without involvement. She had been consistent. She owed me nothing at all.

I reached the corner and instinctively turned my plodding steps towards home. Not for twenty paces did I realise that this was a desperate mistake.

Gail didn’t know where I lived. She couldn’t have told them. They didn’t know the true facts about Elizabeth: they thought she was a rich woman who would divorce me. They picked me up this morning outside the Blaze... At the same weary pace I turned right at the next crossing.

If the man in the black homburg didn’t know where I lived, the Raincoat would be following to find out. Round the next corner I stopped and looked back through the thick branches of a may bush, and there he was, hurrying. I went on slowly as before, heading round imperceptibly towards Fleet Street.

The Homburg Hat had been bluffing. He couldn’t tell Elizabeth about Gail, because he didn’t know where to find her. Ex-directory telephone. My address in none of the reference books. By sheer luck I twice hadn’t led them straight to my own front door.

All the same, it couldn’t go on for ever. Even if I fooled them until after the Lamplighter, one day, somehow, they would tell her what I’d done.

First they buy you, then they blackmail, Bert Checkov had said. Buy Gail, blackmail me. All of a piece. I thought about blackmail for three long miles back to the Blaze.

Luke-John and Derry were surprised to see me back. They made no comment on a change in my appearance. I supposed the inner turmoil didn’t show.

‘Have any of the crime reporters a decent pull with the police?’ I asked.

Derry said ‘Jimmy Sienna might have. What do you want?’

‘To trace a car number.’

‘Someone bashed that ancient van of yours?’ Luke-John asked uninterestedly.

‘Hit and run,’ I agreed with distant accuracy.

‘We can always try,’ Derry said with typical helpfulness. ‘Give me the number, and I’ll go and ask him.’

I wrote down for him the registration of Homburg Hat’s Silver Wraith.

‘A London number,’ Derry remarked. ‘That might make it easier.’ He took off across the room to the Crime Desk and consulted a mountainous young man with red hair.

I strolled over to the deserted News Desk and with a veneer of unconcern over a thumping heart dialled the number Homburg Hat had told me to ring at seven. It was three-eighteen. More than two hours gone out of six.

A woman answered, sounding surprised.

‘Are you sure you have the right number?’ she said.

I read it out to her.

‘Yes, that’s right. How funny.’

‘Why is it funny?’

‘Well, this is a public phone box. I had just shut the door and was going to make a call when the phone started ringing... Are you sure you have the right number?’

‘I can’t have,’ I said. ‘Where is this phone box, exactly?’

‘It’s one of a row in Piccadilly underground station.’

I thanked her and rang off. Not much help.

Derry came back and said Jimmy Sienna was doing what he could, good job it was Tuesday, he was bored and wanted something to pass the time with.

I remembered that I had left my copy of Tally and Elizabeth’s apple cake on the floor of the Rolls. Debated whether or not to get replacements. Decided there was no harm in it, and went out and bought them. I didn’t see Raincoat, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there, or that they hadn’t swapped him for someone I wouldn’t know.

Derry said Jimmy Sienna’s police friend was checking the registration number but would use his discretion as to whether it was suitable to pass on to the Blaze. I sat on the side of Derry’s desk and bit my nails.

Outside, the fog which had been threatening all day slowly cleared right away. It would. I thought about unobserved exits under the bright Fleet Street lights.

At five, Luke-John said he was going home, and Derry apologetically followed. I transferred myself to Jimmy Sienna’s desk and bit my nails there instead. When he too was lumbering to his feet to leave, his telephone finally rang. He listened, thanked, scribbled.

‘There you are,’ he said to me. ‘And good luck with the insurance. You’ll need it.’

I read what he’d written. The Silver Wraith’s number had been allocated to an organisation called ‘Hire Cars Lucullus.’

I left the Blaze via the roof. Tally, apple cake and mending ribs complicated the journey, but after circumnavigating ventilation shafts and dividing walls I walked sedately in through the fire door of the next-door newspaper, a popular daily in the full flood of going to press.

No one asked me what I was doing. I went down in the lift to the basement and out to the huge garage at the rear where rows of yellow vans stood ready to take the wet ink bundles off to the trains. I knew one of the drivers slightly, and asked him for a lift.

‘Sure, if you want Paddington.’

‘I do.’ I wanted anywhere he was going.

‘Hop in, then.’

I hopped in, and after he was loaded he drove briskly out of the garage, one indistinguishable van among a procession. I stayed with him to Paddington, thanked him, and back tracked home on the underground, as certain as I could be that no one had followed.

I beat Mrs Woodward to six by two minutes but had no heart for the game.

From six-thirty to seven I sat in the armchair holding a glass of whisky and looking at Elizabeth, trying to make up a beleaguered mind.

‘Something worrying you, Ty,’ she said, with her ultra-sensitive feeling for trouble.

‘No, honey.’

The hands galloped round the clock. At seven o’clock precisely I sat absolutely still and did nothing at all. At five past I found I had clenched my teeth so hard that I was grinding them. I imagined the telephone box in Piccadilly Circus, with Homburg Hat or Raincoat or the chauffeur waiting inside it. Tiddely Pom was nothing compared with Elizabeth’s peace of mind, and yet I didn’t pick up the receiver. From seven onwards the clock hands crawled.

At half-past Elizabeth said again, with detectable fear, ‘Ty, there is something wrong. You never look so... so bleak.’

I made a great effort to smile at her as usual, but she wasn’t convinced. I looked down at my hands and said with hopeless pain. ‘Honey, how much would it hurt you if I went... and slept with a girl?’

There was no answer. After an unbearable interval I dragged my head up to look at her. Tears were running down her cheeks. She was swallowing, trying to speak.

From long, long habit I pulled a tissue out of the box and wiped her eyes, which she couldn’t do for herself.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said uselessly. ‘I’m sorry...’

‘Ty...’ She never had enough breath for weeping. Her mouth strained open in her need for more air.

‘Honey, don’t cry. Don’t cry. Forget I said it. You know I love you, I’d never leave you. Elizabeth, honey, dear Elizabeth, don’t cry...’

I wiped her eyes again and cursed the whim which had sent me down to the Huntersons for Tally. I could have managed without Gail. Without anyone. I had managed without for most of eleven years.

‘Ty.’ The tears had stopped. Her face looked less strained. ‘Ty.’ She gulped, fighting for more breath. ‘I can’t bear to think about it.’

I stood beside her, holding the tissue, wishing she didn’t have to.

‘We never talk about sex,’ she said. The Spirashell heaved up her chest, let it drop, rythmically. ‘I don’t want it any more... you know that... but sometimes I remember... how you taught me to like it...’ Two more tears welled up. I wiped them away. She said, ‘I haven’t ever asked you... about girls... I couldn’t, somehow.’

‘No,’ I said slowly.

‘I’ve wondered sometimes... if you ever have, I mean... but I didn’t really want to know... I know I would be too jealous... I decided I’d never ask you... because I wouldn’t want you to say yes... and yet I know that’s selfish... I’ve always been told men are different, they need women more... is it true?’

‘Elizabeth,’ I said helplessly.

‘I didn’t expect you ever to say anything... after all these years... yes, I would be hurt, if I knew... I couldn’t help it... Why did you ask me? I wish you hadn’t.’

‘I would never have said anything,’ I said with regret, ‘but someone is trying to blackmail me.’

‘Then... you have...?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Oh.’ She shut her eyes. ‘I see.’

I waited, hating myself. The tears were over. She never cried for long. She physically couldn’t. If she progressed into one of her rare bursts of rebellious anger she would utterly exhaust herself. Most wives could scream or throw things. Elizabeth’s furies were the worse for being impotent. It must have been touch and go, because when she spoke her voice was low, thick, and deadly quiet.

‘I suppose you couldn’t afford to be blackmailed.’

‘No one can.’

‘I know it’s unreasonable of me to wish you hadn’t told me. To wish you hadn’t done it at all. Any man who stays with a paralysed wife ought to have something... So many of them pack up and leave altogether... I know you say you never will and I do mostly believe it, but I must be such an unbearable burden to you...’

‘That,’ I said truthfully, ‘is just not true.’

‘It must be. Don’t tell me... about the girl.’

‘If I don’t, the blackmailer will.’

‘All right... get it over quickly...’

I got it over quickly. Briefly. No details. Hated myself for having to tell her, and knew that if I hadn’t, Homburg Hat wouldn’t have stopped his leverage with the whereabouts of Tiddely Pom. Blackmailers never did. Don’t sell your soul, Bert Checkov said. Don’t sell your column. Sacrifice your wife’s peace instead.

‘Will you see her again?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Or... anyone else?’

‘No.’

‘I expect you will,’ she said. ‘Only if you do... don’t tell me... Unless of course someone tries to blackmail you again...’

I winced at the bitterness in her voice. Reason might tell her that total lifelong celibacy was a lot to demand, but emotion had practically nothing to do with reason, and the tearing emotions of any ordinary wife on finding her husband unfaithful hadn’t atrophied along with her muscles. I hadn’t expected much else. She would have to have been a saint or a cynic to have laughed it off without a pang, and she was neither of those things, just a normal human being trapped in an abnormal situation. I wondered how suspicious she would be in future of my most innocent absences; how much she would suffer when I was away. Reassurance, always tricky, was going to be doubly difficult.

She was very quiet and depressed all evening. She wouldn’t have any supper, wouldn’t eat the apple cake. When I washed her and did the rubs and the other intimate jobs I could almost feel her thinking about the other body my hands had touched. Hands, and much else. She looked sick and strained, and for almost the first time since her illness, embarrassed. If she could have done without me that evening, she would have.

I said, meaning it, ‘I’m sorry, honey.’

‘Yes.’ She shut her eyes. ‘Life’s just bloody, isn’t it.’