Risk

13

We walked along to La Riviera at the end of the High Street and ordered moussaka. The place was full as usual, and Hilary leaned forward across the table to make herself privately heard. Her strong plain face was full of the interest and vigour she had put into her search on my behalf, and it was typical of her self-confidence that she was concentrating only on the subject in hand and not the impression she was making as a woman. A headmistress, I thought: not a lover.

‘His name,’ she said, ‘is Alastair Yardley. He is one of a whole host of young men who seem to wander around the Mediterranean looking after boats while the owners are home in England, Italy, France, and wherever. They live in the sun, on the water’s edge, picking up jobs where they can, and leading an odd sort of drop-out existence which supplies a useful service to boat owners.’

‘Sounds attractive.’

‘It’s bumming around,’ she said succinctly.

‘I wouldn’t mind dropping out, right now,’ I said.

‘You’re made of sterner stuff.’

Plasticine, I thought.

‘Go on about Alastair Yardley,’ I said.

‘I asked around for two days without any success. My description of him seemed to fit half the population, and although I’d seen the boat, of course, I wasn’t sure I would know it again, as I haven’t an educated eye for that sort of thing. There are two big marinas at Palma, both of them packed with boats. Some boats are moored stern-on, like at Ciudadela, but dozens more were anchored away from the quays. I hired a boatman to take me round the whole harbour in his motorboat, but with no results. I’m sure he thought I was potty. I was pretty discouraged, actually, and was admitting defeat, when he — the boatman, that is — said there was another small harbour less than a day’s sail away, and why didn’t I look there. So on Wednesday I took a taxi to the port of Andraitx.’

She stopped to eat some moussaka, which had arrived and smelled magnificent.

‘Eat,’ she said, scooping up a third generous forkful and waving at my still full plate.

‘Yes,’ I said. It was the first proper meal I’d approached since the dinner with Jossie, and I should have been ravenous. Instead, the diet of processed cheese seemed to have played havoc with my appetite, and I found difficulty in eating much at all. I hadn’t been able to face any supper, the evening before, when the journalists had finally gone, and not much breakfast either.

‘Tell me about Andraitx,’ I said.

‘In a minute,’ she said. ‘I’m not letting this delicious food get cold.’ She ate with enjoyment and disapproved of my unsuccessful efforts to do the same. I had to wait for the next instalment until she had finished the last morsel and lain down her fork.

‘That was good,’ she said. ‘A great treat.’

‘Andraitx,’ I said.

She half laughed. ‘All right, then. Andraitx. Small by Palma’s standards, but bigger than Ciudadela. The small ports and harbours are the old parts of the islands. The buildings are old... there are no new ritzy hotels there, because there are no beaches. Deep water, rocky cliffs, and so on. I found out so much more about the islands this week than if I’d just stopped in Cala St Galdana for my week and come home last Saturday. They have such a bloody history of battles and sieges and invasions. A horrible violent history. One may sneer now at the way they’ve been turned into a tourist paradise, but the brassy modern civilization must be better than the murderous past.’

‘Dearest Hilary,’ I said. ‘Cut the lecture and come to the grit.’

‘It was the biggest yacht in Andraitx,’ she said. ‘I was sure almost at once, and then I saw the young man on the quayside, not far from where I paid off the taxi. He came out of a shop and walked across the big open space that there is there, between the buildings and the water. He was carrying a heavy box of provisions. He dumped it on the edge of the quay, beside that black rubber dinghy which he brought ashore at Cala St Galdana. Then he went off again, up a street leading away from the quay. I didn’t exactly follow him, I just watched. He went into a doorway a little way up the street, and soon came out again carrying a bundle wrapped in plastic. He went back to the dinghy, and loaded the box and the bundle and himself, and motored out to the yacht.’

The waiter came to take our plates and ask about puddings and coffee.

‘Cheese,’ Hilary decided.

‘Just coffee,’ I said. ‘And do go on.’

‘Well... I went into the shop he’d come out of, and asked about him, but they spoke only Spanish, and I don’t. So then I walked up the street to the doorway I’d seen him go into, and that was where I hit the jackpot.’

She stopped to cut cheese from a selection on a board. I wondered how long it would be before I liked the stuff again.

‘It was a laundry,’ she said. ‘All white and airy. And run by an English couple who’d gone to Majorca originally for a holiday and fallen in love with the place. A nice couple. Friendly, happy, busy, and very, very helpful. They knew the young man fairly well, they said, because he always took his washing in when he was in Andraitx. They do the boat people’s laundry all the time. They reckon to have a bag of dirty clothes washed and ironed in half a day.’

She ate a biscuit and some cheese, and I waited.

‘Alastair Yardley,’ she said. ‘The laundry people said he is a good sailor. Better than most of his kind. He often takes yachts from one place to another, so that they’ll be wherever the owner wants. He can handle big boats, and is known for it. He sails into Andraitx four or five times a year, but three years ago he had a flat there, and used it as his base. The laundry people said they don’t really know much about him, except that his father worked in a boat-building yard. He told them once that he’d learned to sail as soon as walk, and his first job was as a paid deck-hand in sea-trials for ocean-racing yachts. Apart from that, he hasn’t said much about himself or who he’s working for now, and the laundry people don’t know because they aren’t the prying sort, just chatty.’

‘You’re marvellous,’ I said.

‘Hm. I took some photographs of the boat, and I’ve had them processed at an overnight developers.’ She opened her handbag, and drew out a yellow packet, which contained, among holiday scenes, three clear colour photographs of my first prison. Three different views, taken as the boat swung round with the tide.

‘You can have them, if you like,’ she said.

‘I could kiss you.’

Her face lit with amusement. ‘If you shuffle through that pack, you’ll find a rather bad picture of Alastair Yardley. I didn’t get the focus right. I was in a bit of a hurry, and he was walking towards me with his laundry, and I didn’t want him to think I was taking a picture of him personally. I had to pretend to be taking a general view of the port, you see, and so I’m afraid it isn’t very good.’

She had caught him from the waist up, and, as she said, slightly out of focus, but still recognisable to anyone who knew him. Looking ahead, not at the camera, with a white-wrapped bundle under his arm. Even in fuzzy outline, the uncompromising bones gave his face a powerful toughness, a look of aggressive determination. I thought that I might have liked him, if we’d met another way.

‘Will you take the photos to the police?’ Hilary asked.

‘I don’t know.’ I considered it. ‘Could you lend me the negatives, to have more prints made?’

‘Sort them out and take them,’ she said.

I did that, and we lingered over our coffee.

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that you have thought once or twice about... the time we spent together?’

‘Yes.’

She looked at me with a smile in the spectacled eyes. ‘Do you regret it?’

‘Of course not. Do you?’

She shook her head. ‘It may be too soon to say, but I think it will have changed my entire life.’

‘How could it?’ I said.

‘I think you have released in me an enormous amount of mental energy. I was being held back by feelings of ignorance and even inferiority. These feelings have entirely gone. I feel full of rocket fuel, ready for blast off.’

‘Where to?’ I said. ‘What’s higher than a headmistress?’

‘Nothing measurable. But my school will be better, and there are such things as power and influence, and the ear of policy makers.’

‘Miss Pinlock will be a force in the land?’

‘We’ll have to see,’ she said.

I thought back to the time I’d first slept with a girl, when I was eighteen. It had been a relief to find out what everyone had been going on about, but I couldn’t remember any accompanying upsurge of power. Perhaps, for me, the knowledge had come too easily, and too young. More likely that I’d never had the Pinlock potential in the first place.

I paid the bill and went out into the street. The April air was cold, as it had been for the past entire week, and Hilary shivered slightly inside her coat.

‘The trouble with warm rooms... life blasts you when you leave.’

‘Speaking allegorically?’ I said.

‘Of course.’

We began to walk back towards the office, up the High Street, beside the shops. People scurried in and out of the doorways like bees at a hive mouth. The familiar street scene, after the last three weeks, seemed superficial and unreal.

We drew level with a bank: not, as it happened, the one where I kept my own money, nor that which we used as a firm, but one which dealt with the affairs of many of our clients.

‘Would you wait a sec?’ I said. ‘I’ve had a thought or two this week... just want to check something.’

Hilary smiled and nodded cheerfully, and waited without comment while I went on my short errand.

‘O.K.?’ I said, rejoining her.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Where did they keep you, in that van?’

‘In a warehouse.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Do you want to see it? I want to go back for another look.’

‘All right.’

‘My car’s behind the office.’

We walked on, past a small, pleasant-looking dress shop. I glanced idly into the window, and walked two strides past, and then stopped.

‘Hilary...’

‘Yes?’

‘I want to give you a present.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said.

She protested her way into the shop and was reduced to silence only by the sight of what I wanted her to wear: the garment I’d seen in the window; a long bold scarlet cloak.

‘Try it,’ I said.

Shaking her head, she removed the dull tweed coat and let the girl assistant lower the bright swirling cape on to her shoulders. She stood immobile while the girl fastened the buttons and arranged the neat collar. Looked at herself in the glass.

Duck into swan, I thought. She looked imposing and magnificent, a plain woman transfigured, her height making dramatic folds in the drop of clear red wool.

‘Rockets,’ I said, ‘are powered by flame.’

‘You can’t buy me this.’

‘Why not?’

I wrote the girl a cheque, and Hilary for once seemed to be speechless.

‘Keep it on,’ I said. ‘It looks marvellous.’

The girl packed the old coat into a carrier, and we continued our walk to the office. People looked at Miss Pinlock as they passed, as they had not done before.

‘It takes courage,’ she said, raising her chin.

‘First flights always do.’

She thought instantly of the night in Cala St Galdana: I saw it in the movement of her eyes. She smiled to herself, and straightened a fraction to her full height. Nothing wrong with the Pinlock nerve, then or ever.

From the front the warehouse looked small and dilapidated, its paint peeling off like white scabs to leave uneven grey scars underneath. A weatherboard screwed to the wall offered 10,500 square feet to let, but judging from the aged dimness of the sign, the customers had hardly queued.

The building stood on its own at the end of a side road which now had no destination, owing to the close-down of the branch railway and the subsequent massive reorganisation of the landscape into motorways and roundabouts.

There was a small door let into a large one on rollers at the entrance, neither of them locked. The locks, in fact, appeared to have been smashed, but in time gone by. The splintered wood around them had weathered grey with age.

I pushed open the small door for Hilary, and we stepped in. The gloom as the door swung behind us was as blinding as too much light; I propped the door open with a stone, but even then there were enfolding shadows at every turn. It was clear why vandals had stopped at breaking down the doors. Everything inside was so thick with dust that to kick anything was to start a choking cloud.

Sounds were immediately deadened, as if the high mouldering piles of junk were soaking up every echo before it could go a yard.

I shouted ‘Hey’ into the small central space, and it seemed to reach no further than my own throat.

‘It’s cold in here,’ Hilary said. ‘Colder than outside.’

‘Something to do with ventilation bricks, I expect,’ I said. ‘A draught, bringing in dust and lowering the temperature.’

Our voices had no resonance. We walked the short distance to where the white van stood, with the dark tarpaulin sprawling in a huge heap beside it.

With eyes adjusting to the dim light, we looked inside. The police had taken the water carrier and the bag of cheese, and the van was empty.

It was a small space. Dirty, and hard.

‘You spent nearly a week in there,’ Hilary said, disbelievingly.

‘Five nights and four and a half days,’ I said. ‘Let’s not exaggerate.’

‘Let’s not,’ she said dryly.

We stood looking at the van for a minute or two, and the deadness and chill of the place began to soak into our brains. I shuddered slightly and walked away, out through the door into the living air.

Hilary followed me, and kicked away the door-stop. The peeling door swung shut.

‘Did you sleep well, last night?’ she said bleakly.

‘No.’

‘Nightmares?’

I looked up to the grey sky, and breathed deep luxurious breaths.

‘Well... dreams,’ I said.

She swallowed. ‘Why did you want to come back here?’

‘To see the name of the estate agent who has this place on his books. It’s on the board, on the wall. I wasn’t noticing things much when the police took me out of here yesterday.’

She gave a small explosive laugh of escaping tension. ‘So practical!’

‘Whoever put the van in there knew the place existed,’ I said. ‘I didn’t, and I’ve lived in Newbury for six years.’

‘Leave it to the police,’ she said seriously. ‘After all, they did find you.’

I shook my head. ‘Someone rang Scotland Yard to tell them where I was.’

‘Leave it to them,’ she urged. ‘You’re out of it now.’

‘I don’t know. To coin a cliché, there’s a great big iceberg blundering around here, and that van’s only the tip.’

We got into my car, and I drove her back to the park in town where she’d left her own. She stood beside it, tall in her scarlet cloak, and fished in her handbag for a pen and notebook.

‘Here,’ she said, writing. ‘This is my address and telephone number. You can come at any time. You might need...’ She paused an instant, ‘...a safe place.’

‘Can I come for advice?’ I said.

‘For anything.’

I smiled.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not for that. I want a memory, not a habit.’

‘Take your glasses off,’ I said.

‘To see you better?’ She took them off, humouring me quizzically.

‘Why don’t you wear contact lenses?’ I said. ‘Without glasses, your eyes are great.’

On the way back to the office I stopped to buy food, on the premise that if I didn’t stock up with things I liked, I wouldn’t get back to normal eating. I also left Hilary’s negatives for a rush reprint, so that it was nearly five before I went through the door.

Debbie and Peter had both done their usual Friday afternoon bolt, for which dentists and classes were only sample reasons. The variety they had come up with over the years would have been valuable if applied to their work: but I knew from experience that if I forced them both to stay until five I got nothing productive done after a quarter past four. Bess, infected by them, had already covered her typewriter, and was busy applying thick new make-up on top of the old. Bess, eighteen and curvy, thought of work as a boring interruption to her sex life. She gave me a bright smile, ran her tongue round the fresh glistening lipstick, and swung her hips provocatively on her way to the weekend’s sport.

There were voices in Trevor’s room. Trevor’s loud voice in short sentences, and a client’s softer tones in long paragraphs.

I tidied my own desk, and carried the Glitberg, Ownslow and Connaught Powys files into the outer office on my way to the car.

The door to Trevor’s room opened suddenly, and Trevor and his client were revealed there, warmly shaking hands.

The client was Denby Crest, solicitor, a short plump man with a stiff moustache and a mouth permanently twisted in irritation. Even when he smiled at you personally, he gave an impression of annoyance at the state of things in general. Many of his own clients saw that as sympathy for their troubles, which was their mistake.

‘I’ll make it worth your while, Trevor,’ he was saying. ‘I’m eternally grateful.’

Trevor suddenly saw me standing there and stared at me blankly.

‘I thought you’d gone, Ro,’ he said.

‘Came back for some files,’ I said, glancing down at them in my arms. ‘Good afternoon, Denby.’

‘Good afternoon, Roland.’

He gave me a brief nod and made a brisk dive for the outer door; a brusque departure, even by his standards. I watched his fast disappearing back and said to Trevor, ‘Did you sign his certificate? He said he would wait until you got back.’

‘Yes, I did,’ Trevor said. He too showed no inclination for leisurely chat, and turned away from me towards his own desk.

‘What was I doing wrong?’ I said. ‘I kept making him fifty thousand pounds short.’

‘Decimal point in the wrong place,’ he said shortly.

‘Show me,’ I said.

‘Not now, Ro. It’s time to go home.’

I put the files down on Bess’s desk and walked into Trevor’s office. It was larger than mine, and much tidier, with no wall of waiting cardboard boxes. There were three armchairs for clients, some Stubbs prints on the walls, and a bowl of flowering daffodils on his desk.

‘Trevor...’

He was busy putting together what I recognised as Denby Crest’s papers, and didn’t look up. I stood in his room, waiting, until in the end he had to take notice. His face was bland, calm, uninformative, and if there had been any tension there a minute ago, it had now evaporated.

‘Trevor,’ I said. ‘Please show me where I went wrong.’

‘Leave it, Ro,’ he said pleasantly. ‘There’s a good chap.’

‘If you did sign his certificate, and he really is fifty thousand pounds short, then it concerns me too.’

‘You’re dead tired, Ro, and you look ill, and this is not a good time to discuss it.’ He came round his desk and put his hand gently on my arm. ‘My dear chap, you know how horrified and worried I am about what has been happening to you. I am most concerned that you should take things easy and recover your strength.’

It was a long speech for him, and confusing. When he saw me hesitate, he added. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Denby’s affairs. We’ll go through them, if you like, on Monday.’

‘It had better be now,’ I said.

‘No.’ He was stubbornly positive. ‘We have friends coming for the evening, and I promised to be home early. Monday, Ro. It will keep perfectly well until Monday.’

I gave in, partly because I simply didn’t want to face what I guessed to be true, that Trevor had signed the certificate knowing the figures were false. I’d done the sums over and over on my cheese abacus, and the answer came monotonously the same, whichever method I used to work them out.

He shepherded me like an uncle to his door, and watched while I picked up the heap of files from Bess’s desk.

‘What are those?’ he said. ‘You really mustn’t work this weekend.’

‘They’re not exactly work. They’re back files. I just thought I’d take a look.’

He walked over and peered down at the labels, moving the top file to see what was underneath.

‘Why these, for heaven’s sake?’ he said, frowning, coming across Connaught Powys.

‘I don’t know...’ I sighed. ‘I just thought they might possibly have some connection with my being abducted.’

He looked at me with compassion. ‘My dear Ro, why don’t you leave it all to the police?’

‘I’m not hindering them.’ I picked up the armful of files and smiled. ‘I don’t think I’m high on their urgency list, though. I wasn’t robbed, ransomed, or held hostage, and a spot of unlawful imprisonment on its own probably ranks lower than parking on double yellow lines.’

‘But,’ he said doubtfully, ‘don’t you think they will ever discover who, or why?’

‘It depends on where they look, I should think.’ I shrugged a shoulder, walked to the door, and stopped to look back. He was standing by Bess’s desk, clearly troubled. ‘Trevor,’ I said, ‘I don’t mind one way or the other whether the police come up with answers. I don’t madly want public revenge, and I’ve had my fill of court-case publicity, as a witness. I certainly don’t relish it as a victim. But for my own peace of mind, I would like to know. If I find out, I won’t necessarily act on the knowledge. The police would have to. So there’s the difference. It might be better — you never know — if it’s I who did the digging, not the police.’

He shook his head, perturbed and unconvinced.

‘See you Monday,’ I said.