Second Wind

Chapter 11

At around noon I ran dear dishevelled Melanie to the other end of the wire and asked if I could speak to my ghost writer about my book on storms. ‘Sure,’ she blithely replied and in a moment Ghost himself was saying, ‘I thought you’d come out in spots.’

‘Spots don’t gag you.’

‘So I gather you want to talk.’

‘There are storms present and future,’ I said. ‘There are things you should know.’

‘On our way.’

They both came, long John Rupert and insubstantial Ghost.

I invited them to sit down, and apologised for the imitation measles I could well have done without. Ravi Chand expected the rash would fade by Sunday, but Sunday seemed a long way off. I looked a mess.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ John Rupert asked.

‘Mycobacterium paratuberculosis variant X.’

‘Ah,’ one said and ‘Yes, of course,’ said the other. Neither had ever seen it before, but then, nor had anyone else.

‘Last night,’ I said, trying not to make it sound too theatrical, ‘Glenda Loricroft, wife of George, jumped in front of an underground train.’ Their mouths opened speechlessly. ‘On Wednesday morning in Newmarket it seems she had bashed in her husband’s skull. He lay undiscovered in his bedroom until the police found him this morning, when they went to tell him his wife had killed herself.’

John Rupert and Ghost started breathing again, and I said, ‘Before you ask, he had not been unduly missed by the staff of his racing stable, because he constantly travelled overseas without saying where he was going. He supervised a schooling session early on Wednesday morning — I was there myself. So was Belladonna Harvey, his assistant, but when neither she nor George, nor George’s wife appeared yesterday morning, or today, the head lad simply carried on with the stable routine as he’d done several times before.’

They listened intently while I told them about Glenda, the filly, the alpha-particle powder and the lead container. I asked them, after that, if they had any authority to search Loricroft’s world? The answer seemed to be somewhere between ‘No’ and ‘It depends’, and ‘It’s up to the Newmarket police’. There was no simple ‘Yes’.

‘Of all the possible Traders,’ I remarked, ‘George Loricroft might have been the one most likely to handle and keep orders from foreign sources, but he’s been dead two days...’

John Rupert nodded, ‘His Trader colleagues will have picked the body clean. But what would you have hoped to find? He would have been too careful. They always are. The real question now is, who will take his place?’

A thoughtful silence ensued. Glenda’s spurious snowfalls, Ghost said, had put more than a husband out of action. There would be a pause for regrouping. A vulnerable period, he thought, for the Traders.

John Rupert asked me again, ‘What would you have hoped to find at Loricroft’s place?’

‘I suppose names and addresses would have been too much to hope for,’ I said. ‘Glenda herself might have got rid of anything obviously damaging. She had time. But how about a dipstick in the boot of his car, say, with smears of oil matching that in the crunched aeroplane? How about bank statements, phone bills... a paper trail?’

They shook their heads, thoughtful and depressed. John Rupert said, ‘Even though the Traders aren’t a hundred per cent professional, Loricroft will have known better than to leave damning paperwork lying around.’

Ghost agreed. ‘Do you know what I think?’ he said. ‘I really do think we may have them undecided at this moment and not knowing what to do next, but it won’t last long. So what we need now are some good sound ideas. Fruitful ideas. It’s time for genius.’

John Rupert smiled lopsidedly. ‘We need someone they would never expect to be actively working against them.’

I found both visitors turning their heads until their eyes focused on my face, and I thought that if they expected fruitful ideas from me, they had come to a dry well.

‘I,’ I pointed out, ‘originally sought you out for help. My province is as a forecaster of wind and rain and sunshine, not as an ideas man in anti-terrorist country. You must know better than I do how to profit from a Trader’s death.’

I waited for a good while during which they unhelpfully offered no suggestions even in the fruitful category, never mind genius, and with disquiet I realised that they had begun to rely on me for direction, not the other way round.

‘I need a few answers,’ I said reluctantly. I had to be crazy, I thought, even to begin on such a journey, but unless I knew where I was going, I would no longer agree to go anywhere at all. Only an idiot would set out without a map.

I said, ‘The chief question I want answered is what exactly do you expect from me? Then... are you two part of a large organisation? Do you pass on to others what I tell you? Who is “Us”? Am I useful, or shall I just nurse my myco-dots and forget about the Unified Traders?’

I watched their changing expressions and realised I was in effect facing them with their most difficult of decisions, the question of what did and what did not fall into the category of ‘need to know’.

John Rupert glanced at Ghost and uncoiled slowly to his feet. Ghost followed him silently to the door.

‘We’ll consult,’ they said. ‘We’ll be back.’

Life would be simpler, I thought, if they stayed away. Much simpler if I disentangled myself altogether. Much simpler if I’d never gone to Kensington in the first place. What did I now want to do? Extricate or dive in?

I walked over to the window and looked down into the street that ran along the side of the building. Taxis often decanted and picked up fares there, but I was unprepared for John Rupert and Ghost to run across the pavement, flag down the first taxi to come along and set off to realms unknown. Ghost’s white hair, three storeys down, had been unmistakable, and John Rupert’s long legs exaggerated from above his stork-like stride.

Their taxi had barely cleared the first corner before Jett arrived in my room, saying, ‘Have you heard?’ and with eyes stretched wide, in disbelief, ‘George Loricroft was actually dead upstairs...’

She brought a fax from the BBC to the hospital saying that as Dr Chand had requested a further week of tests for my tubercular illness, I would not be expected back at work until I’d fully recovered.

‘Don’t worry, please,’ said Ravi Chand, looking in and reassuring his protesting patient. ‘You can still probably leave on Sunday, but you obviously need rest. You have a strong constitution but also you don’t know when you are in danger of overtaxing yourself. Illnesses like this deplete muscle power, believe me.’

He swept out again at his usual speed, white coat floating, waving a hand to Jett.

‘You know him well,’ I commented, and added in his own chirping accent, ‘my dear Jett.’

‘I’ve nursed several of his patients after they’ve left here,’ Jett said, smiling from past familiar moments. ‘Ravi’s terrifically well thought of. I brought you here because he’s a top man for radiation sickness, which I thought you had, but he’s mega thrilled to find you’ve got something he’s never met before. He’s going to write you up for publication, did you know?’

She stayed, good company, until John Rupert and Ghost returned, and then left, saying she would be back in the evening.

The two men brought cold November air in with them, but little in the way of fruitful aid.

Ghost studied his toe-caps, smoothed a hand over his hair and did his best. ‘We have consulted our — er — superior officer, and the answers he told us to give you are...’ He still hesitated, as it seemed telling nothing at all was a near-unbreakable habit. ‘The answers are...’ He pulled a small neat sheet of paper out of his breast pocket and read in a strangled voice, ‘Yes, you are useful, yes, your information is passed on, and as for our ultimate aim...’ he hesitated yet again, and I waited in persuasive silence until he managed to resume. Then, looking down at the page, he read, ‘We do want to put the Unified Trading Company out of business, but we also want more, we want the people behind them, the unknown mostly foreign groups who are constantly planning and putting together the threat of a bomb. It’s like infiltrating a drugs ring, to get beyond the pushers to the main suppliers.’

‘Except,’ I said dryly, ‘that your suppliers are trading in enriched uranium and plutonium, not in fairly harmless stuff, like cocaine.’

Ghost wriggled in his chair and read again directly from his paper.

‘As Dr Stuart is primarily a meteorologist he is not expected to proceed any further in this matter.’ He folded the paper and tucked it away. ‘That’s all I have,’ he said, sighing. ‘John Rupert has a shorter message.’

I turned to John Rupert who, also with hesitation, issued a much briefer instruction. He read, ‘Win quietly. Look sideways at what you learn. I have faith in you. If you can swim through a hurricane, you can find a way through a maze.’

I said, ‘Are those the exact words?’

John Rupert nodded. ‘When I asked him what he meant, he said you would understand.’

He looked uncomfortable, and I saw that even for ‘authorities’ there were baffling acres of ‘need to know’. One thing that these two apparently didn’t know was the identity of their superior officer. I asked who he was. They numbly shook their heads and confessed ignorance, but owing to the overall secret nature of their business, I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe them.

They both expected (and said) that in the absence of fully satisfactory replies to my questions, I would retire from the field at once; but in a minor fashion I was addicted to crossword puzzles, and as I’d been invited to find a way through a maze that might not exist, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to discover more about how the undercover mind worked. Rather to the surprise of publisher and ghost writer, I asked them about books.

Ghost knew hardly enough about storms to blow the head off a dandelion, but said if I talked onto a tape the way I could talk in their office, with all my best stormy dramatics topping high C, we might even hit best-sellerdom, and John Rupert good humouredly worked out how many tons of paper it would need. The book that had started out as camouflage unexpectedly struck flint and caught fire.

I learned from my visitors’ increasingly relaxed light-heartedness during the next hour that the lady ‘authority’ at the Health and Safety Executive who had sent me to Kensington originally, hadn’t steered me very high up the anti-terrorist ladder. John Rupert, all the same, had proved a reliable middle rung, leading upward to a loftier level, and had given me a path now if I wanted to take it.

‘What have you decided?’ he asked.

‘Have to think,’ I said.

When he and Ghost had left I sat in an armchair in the dusk and let the meaning of the answers I’d been given filter through into a clearer understanding.

First of all, I thought, I’d been told incidentally that I might already know by sight the person who stood on the next rung up. Next-rung-up most likely had, like myself, a recognisable face. Maybe next-rung-up was a politician.

Next-rung-up, far from choking me off, had more or less urged me to go on. It seemed to me that the main message that had been delivered could be interpreted as ‘destroy the Trading operation, but don’t let the Traders know how you did it’.

I drifted from the possible future back to the unexpected past and tried without stress to see if a pattern would emerge that I could trust, like laying down random-seeming threads on a loom that all of a sudden revealed themselves as a piece of whole cloth in three dimensions. There had been a whole lot of ‘magic illusion’ pictures like that once, which gave three-D effects if one looked beyond the close and obvious and focused on the distant. A lot of weather forecasting fell into atmospheric pressure pictures of close and distant fronts, three dimensional and always on the move.

The close and obvious in Unified Trading terms — as I saw now, when it was too late — had been George Loricroft with his multiple contacts on European racecourses.

If I’d been a Trader I would be searching now for either a dishonest physicist or a linguist or preferably both in the same man. Yet George Loricroft had been neither...perhaps a racehorse trainer then... perhaps the Traders were indeed solely middlemen, and George had broken the company’s own rules of never taking the merchandise home, especially if you have a jealous wife.

Jett arrived when I reached that unfruitful point, slapping on hospital-bright lights and asking why I was sitting in the dark.

I blunder about in the shadows, I thought, but made do with ‘Hi’ and ‘You know those crossword puzzles with no black squares and not even black lines?’

‘They’re impossible,’ Jett said. ‘I can’t do them.’

‘They sometimes take me a week and a reference library,’ I said.

‘What exactly is the point?’

‘The point is, where in the world is one across.’

‘Do you mean you don’t know where to start?’

I said, ‘Dearest Jett, you’re right. Where in the world would you look for a folder full of orders and invoices? Where would you keep it if it was yours?’

Jett said she didn’t know, but asked if I meant Vera’s Equine Research Establishment folder full of records of Harvey’s filly. That folder and the box of fragrant droppings were still in her car.

‘No,’ I said, though struck by the similarity. ‘The last time I saw the one I mean, it was being stowed aboard an aeroplane on Trox Island. Where is it now?’

‘On the aeroplane?’ She was puzzled.

I shook my head. ‘That plane was rented, and everything on it would have been cleared out between flights. I’d expect that one of the Traders still has that folder. Nothing else makes sense, unless—’ I broke off in half sentence and only after a short-breath recovery said, ‘Let’s phone Kris.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ Jett said, but I at least found Kris. He and Bell were both in Kris’s flat eating Thai rice and sounding glum.

Their reaction to the suggestion of a little hospital visiting brought them rapidly round with a six-pack of Heineken, though inevitably vivid memories of George and Glenda hovered over the room, forbidding much in the way of laughter.

Bell had brought Glenda’s suitcase with her, as I’d asked, and it was Bell who opened it, but inside there were only rudimentary overnight clothes and no folder. A good idea, but no good fruit.

‘Funny you should ask about a folder,’ Bell said. ‘You know I talked to Dad this morning about Glenda and George — and I’m so sorry that I couldn’t stop crying — well, Dad phoned again and asked me if there was a folder in Glenda’s case and he positively begged me to go and look at once—’

‘And was the folder there?’ I interrupted.

‘You’re as bad as Dad. He was in a frightful tizzy. And, if you want to know, everything that’s in the case is more or less all she brought with her, which isn’t much, but then she’d just killed George... Oh dear...’ Tears welled in her eyes, unstoppable.

‘You didn’t even like him,’ Kris said crossly, handing her tissues.

Kris liked Robin Darcy.

‘Robin Darcy was in Newmarket, wasn’t he?’ I asked Bell.

‘Yes, he was,’ she said, ‘but he went back to Florida.’

‘Which day?’

‘Ask Kris.’

Kris said, ‘Tuesday,’ sounding bored. ‘Long before Glenda pinched the folder.’

‘Why do you all fuss so much over a folder?’ Bell asked, irritated. ‘You’d think it held the crown jewels. All it had in it was a bunch of shopping lists, but they were mostly in German, or some language like that.’ She seemed unaware of my own state of pole-axe and blithely continued. ‘Dad practically zoomed off to outer space, but he came down to earth again when I told him the folder had gone back to Newmarket and was quite safe.’

I took a steadying breath and asked more or less calmly who had taken it back to Newmarket?

‘One of those motor-bike delivery boys,’ she said. ‘A courier.’

‘And... er,’ I asked, ‘where was he going with it?’

‘It was a bit odd, really,’ Bell said, ‘considering Glenda was practically scratching his eyes out at Doncaster races.’

‘Oliver Quigley?’ I said it jerkily, enlightened but horrified.

Bell nodded. ‘That’s right. The courier came with a big envelope for it this morning, with everything paid for in advance, so of course Kris put the folder into the envelope and stuck it up, and we gave it to him. Actually I haven’t thought about it since. The courier came before we knew about George. Before we knew he was dead. When we heard, it put everything else out of our heads.’

‘Um...’ I cautiously asked, ‘did Glenda herself say anything about sending a folder to Oliver Quigley?’

‘It was about all she didn’t gabble on about, but yes, she did talk to Oliver, but not for long. Talk — it was more like a shouting match — but she told us to give the folder to the courier if he came for it, and then she went out for some air... and oh dear, poor Glenda... She didn’t come back...’

Kris raised his eyes heavenwards and passed tissues. He said, ‘The courier was waiting on my doorstep when we got back from your place. He’d been waiting for ages, he said. He wasn’t best pleased, but we gave him coffee and toast and stuff, and I gave him a big tip when he left because he’d recognised me, and he went off quite happy.’

‘Ridiculous really,’ Bell said, ‘but we were pleased to have done something for Glenda, even though she was dead.’ Bell meant it seriously but Kris hid a giggle.

‘Drink the beer,’ I told him, but he gave his second can to Bell.

He was perched on the window-sill, long-bodied, pale-skinned and incredibly sane. His own near-death at Luton and Glenda’s actual acting out of the chief threat of his suicidal nature had, in an extraordinary way, flattened out his wilder self, and it was he who gave me a thoughtful stare and said, ‘Let’s start at the beginning, kiddo, and we’ll find your bits of paper for you, and you’ll explain why you want them, and then I’ll give them to Bell’s father, to make him like me a bit as a son-in-law.’

‘So the wedding’s on?’ I asked.

‘At the moment,’ Bell agreed.

‘Folder,’ Kris said flatly, coming back to basics. ‘Glenda brought one with her in her suitcase, and I’d guess from the ruckus that she’d pinched it. How am I doing?’

‘Terrific,’ I said.

‘How about this, then? There were things in the folder that she knew Oliver Quigley wanted back...’ Kris stopped and scratched his head and then doubtfully went on. ‘They had a slanging match on the telephone which Glenda lost, and she agreed to courier the folder back to Oliver if he sent a pre-paid envelope for it, which he did, but it was just one thing too much for poor old Glenda.’

Both Bell and Jett were nodding and I wondered if Kris really believed his edition of things, or was deliberately trying to mislead us all... and I regretted how suspicious I had become after barely four hours as an unofficial snoop.

By nine o’clock all three of my visitors had voted for more lively entertainments than rash-watching, and by midnight I’d discovered the loneliness woven into problem-solving, when success meant that no one knew there was a problem to begin with.

On Saturday morning a spot-check persuaded me that perhaps there was an improvement there, though the rash now itched under a three-day beard. A week after Luton, I still had black rib bruises with accompanying painful reminders if I forgot to move slowly. Only in the vomit department had things unmistakably improved. All in all, apart from Jett’s cheerful visits, it hadn’t been the grandest seven days ever. More like a long lesson in my grandmother’s lifetime philosophy: if you can’t fix it, think about something else.

I spent most of Saturday morning running up a frightening hospital phone bill in a search for a motor cyclist who had, on Thursday, ferried a large envelope to Oliver Quigley in Newmarket, but learned, when I at last found a courier company who’d even heard of Oliver Quigley, that they were now being accused of non-delivery, even though the package had been duly delivered and signed for.

They were upset, and at times incoherent with anger. Would they please, I asked them, slow down and start again?

Yes, agreed the Zipalong Couriers. Yes, they had been engaged to collect and deliver the package I described, and yes, their man had unfortunately had to charge a good deal extra for waiting time. But Mr Ironside had made it worth his while. Yes, their man motorcycled to Newmarket and identified Mr Quigley’s house, and yes, a Mr Quigley had received the envelope, and signed for it, and it wasn’t their fault that Mr Quigley was now complaining that the Zipalong courier hadn’t arrived, and that at the time of delivery he, Quigley, had been at Cheltenham races.

‘What had been the delivery time,’ I asked.

‘Noon.’

By the time they thought of asking what my interest was in the affair, I’d learned enough courier etiquette to fill a ‘how to’ book for Ghost.

I disconnected from Zipalong with fulsome thanks, and phoned the mobile number of Oliver Quigley, anxious racehorse trainer, all now, it seemed, restored to his normal self of trembles and shakes.

When my phone caught up with his phone, he was again at Cheltenham races, outside the Golden Miller bar. He offered a stuttery greeting that ignored the stripped-down personality I’d seen at Doncaster.

‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I wondered what happened with Zipalong Couriers.’

The stuttering reply included stable-yard language at its roughest, but meant in essence that when Oliver Quigley was reported to be receiving and signing for couriered envelopes in Newmarket at noon yesterday, Friday, he had been at Cheltenham races saddling his runner in the three-year-old hurdle. A pointless exercise, as the horse in question had one speed only — slow — and wouldn’t have won even if Perry Stuart had been where he ought to be — in front of the cameras with details of the weather — instead of fussing over a couple of bruises in hospital.

At my third try of ‘Mr Quigley?’ he slowed down and said ‘What... what?’ If he had been at Cheltenham, I asked, who had signed for Glenda’s package?

Oliver was inclined in bad temper to think it was none of my business. I would be happy to help him with last-minute underfoot forecasts, I murmured. In that case... Oliver Quigley believed that when the courier found no one at home yet again, he was so pissed off (Oliver said), he just signed as if he were Quigley, and took the package away with him and chucked it in a ditch.

‘Do you really think so?’ I asked.

‘Mark my words,’ Oliver said, the receiver clattering with shakes against his teeth, ‘they never delivered that parcel and I’ll sue the pants off them until I get it back.’

‘Good luck,’ I said.

‘I could kill that bitch Glenda,’ he said. ‘If she weren’t already dead I’d kill her. If Zipalong don’t find my package soon it won’t be worth suing them... but I’d do it anyway. I’ll get that thief of a motorcyclist run off the road.’

I was glad, while listening to him moaning on and on, that Cheltenham racecourse was a hundred or more miles west of where I sat.

After Oliver I spent a silent hour or two by myself while smooth cogwheels like quiet fruit machines clicked gently into place, and I made at the end of that time two telephone calls, one to the Bedford Lodge Hotel in Newmarket and the other to the Met Office at Bracknell.

John Rupert and Ghost had got things right. The murder of one of the Traders was splitting the others apart.

As John Rupert had given me his own mobile number (‘in case’ he explained) I phoned him in the middle of a golf game which he put on hold with good grace.

‘You’re not worse, I hope,’ he said.

‘No, the opposite. Can I ask you a question?’

‘Always ask.’

‘Then how serious are you about the book on Storms?’

‘Oh!’ I’d really surprised him. He said guardedly, ‘Why?’

I said frankly, ‘Because I need a contract... actually I don’t need a contract, I need an advance.’

‘An advance... for anything special? I mean, is this urgent? It’s Saturday afternoon.’

‘I think I can get you another Trader, but I need a ticket to Miami.’

He took barely ten seconds to make up his mind.

‘Tomorrow do?’ he said.

By lunchtime on Sunday (‘tomorrow’) Ravi Chand was peering at my fading rash with a magnifying glass, a bright light and a disappointed expression.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked anxiously.

‘From your point of view, nothing. From mine, my laboratory animal is walking out with only half of my investigations complete.’ He sighed. ‘Jett promises she will week by week bring you back for continuing treatment. I will publish as soon as I can.’

I asked diffidently, ‘What about the owners of the herd that gave me this disease? Doesn’t my rash belong to them?’

‘The owners, whoever they are, are using that herd as a living laboratory totally isolated from outside factors. Ideal. They might stand to make millions from new pasteurisation methods.’

‘How so?’ I asked.

‘The present law states that raw milk has to be raised to 71.7 degrees centigrade, that’s 161 degrees Fahrenheit, for a minimum of fifteen seconds to be pasteurised. If anyone could patent a new procedure which reduced the temperature or the time then they would make a fortune due to the fuel saving. That’s what they’re after. They are not interested in, or experimenting on, a new disease infecting humans. If they were, there would be immense interest in any affliction resembling your illness. Instead, there has been no reaction at all to your progress. The incubation time was short, the onset sudden, and now the speed of your recovery is conclusive. This illness is new. It’s different. You are unique. I have incidentally named your illness in our joint honour, Mycobacterium paratuberculosis Chand-Stuart X.’

He shook my hand warmly. ‘I cannot lock you in a safe with my notes, but please, please, dear Dr Stuart, dear Perry, keep yourself alive until I publish.’

Jett came in her car to collect me, and Ravi Chand in his white coat stood on his doorstep waving us a sorrowful if temporary goodbye. I’d been in his care so far only from Wednesday to Sunday, but the swift Chand-Stuart disease (curable, thank the fates) struggled in many a Petri dish in his laboratory towards universal recognition.

Jett drove to my grandmother’s flat, where she was due to start work again the next day. She seemed pleased at the prospect, but to me it meant an end to the nearness I’d valued all week. Jett had definitely burrowed far under my unattractive skin.

My grandmother exclaimed in alarm at my thinness but was enjoying the company of John Rupert, who had postponed another game of golf on my behalf and was covering every surface in sight with contracts for a gathering of Storm.

With everything signed he shook hands with my grandmother and left me with a vast cheque made out to a credit card company to cover every expense.

‘Instant money and more to come,’ he promised, ‘when Ghost starts page one.’

When he’d gone my grandmother asked the resident ‘dear girl’ to give me the little parcel the postman had delivered for me the morning before. According to its postmark it had been sent from Miami, and only to one person there had I given my grandmother’s address.

Unwin of the yellow-toothed grin had amazingly sent me the best gift he could, because when I’d threaded a way through yards of bubble packing I found a note wrapped round a plastic sandwich bag, and, inside that, my small old familiar mud-filled camera. With surprise and jubilation I opened and read the note.

Explaining to the others where it came from, I put the camera contentedly in my pocket and on a different tack set about making phone calls to find Kris and Bell. Result, Bell had gone home to Newmarket where she and her father were now presently in unofficial charge of the Loricroft stable.

‘It’s all dreadful,’ Bell said, tears in the offing. ‘Oliver Quigley and Dad are single minded about this wretched folder, which still hasn’t turned up anywhere. They’ve both gone to Cheltenham again today and left me looking after things. Dad’s berserk with worry and he won’t tell me why.’

‘Where’s Kris?’ I asked with sympathy, and she said he would be at the Weather Centre doing radio forecasts until midnight; and he would be sleeping in his own flat, as far as she knew.

‘Are you better?’ she remembered to ask, and I thanked her and said I’d been let out of the cage.

‘What does pax mean?’ Jett asked, reading Unwin’s notes.

‘Passenger,’ said my grandmother, who’d been one most of her life. ‘And Perry, after supper from the take-away, and when you’ve said goodnight later to our dear Jett van Els, you can lie down here on the sofa and have a good restful sleep. Don’t think of going home. You look far too frail for climbing all those very steep stairs.’

I never entirely disobeyed her but I wasn’t bad at finding ways to modify the format, so that when I asked to borrow her warm deep-pocketed Edwardian Sherlock Holmes look-alike cloak, all she said was ‘take some gloves’ and ‘come back safe’. Nothing, I was encouraged to hear, about heebies or jeebies.

I kissed her on her forehead, our tiredness mutual, and travelled with Jett in her car to Paddington Station, terminus of trains to the west, playground of suicidal manic-depressives (but not of Glenda) and home of a simple coin-in-the-slot photo-copying machine.

After a Romeo and Juliet length and intensity of good-nights, Jett confessed to receiving a Ravi Chand medical opinion, Sunday morning edition.

‘What was it?’

‘Wait a week.’

I had already waited too long.

‘With such a slow start,’ I said, ‘our disengagement should take fifty years.’

Smiling with shiny eyes she helped me make a set of copies of Vera’s equine research work, and when she finally left me two short streets later I had a set of Vera-copies in a buff folder in one of the cape’s deep front pockets, and Vera’s originals in a paper clip in the other.

By midnight or soon after I was sitting on Kris’s doorstep waiting like the Zipalong rider for the weather-man to come home.

He stopped, key in hand, surprised to see me there so late.

‘I locked myself out,’ I said, shrugging. ‘Do you mind if I sleep here?’

He looked at his watch. He said ‘OK,’ without huge enthusiasm, but he’d landed on my own doorstep often enough at midnight.

‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘Take your coat off. You look awfully ill. Coffee or tea?’

I said I was too cold to take my coat off. He boiled water and clattered some mugs.

I said, faintly smiling, ‘Whatever you sent to Newmarket with Zipalong’s motor-bike, it wasn’t what Glenda took from George.’

He stared. ‘How the hell do you know?’

‘Well, who else but you could make sure that Zipalong’s motorcyclist reached Quigley’s house at the right time? You kept the poor man eating toast and generally waiting about until you were sure that he would arrive after Quigley had gone to Cheltenham races.’

Kris said, laughing, ‘It was only a joke on fussy old Oliver.’

I nodded. ‘He’s easy to make fun of.’

‘Glenda,’ Kris said, ‘drove us half crazy all day Thursday saying she’d got a whole lot of George’s papers that were proof of his out and out treason. We got fed up with it. Then Oliver phoned and he and Glenda had a frightful row. He told her what she’d taken was a list of horses that would be running in Germany, and it was his, Oliver’s, and he wanted it back.’

‘But you didn’t send it back,’ I said.

‘Well, no.’ He grinned. ‘It stirred silly old Oliver up a treat.’

‘What did you send with the courier to Newmarket?’

‘A list of horses. I clipped them out of newspapers. What else?’

‘Did you read the list you were supposed to have sent?’

Kris said, ‘Of course not. It’s all in German.’

‘Show me,’ I asked persuasively.

He nodded and, willingly moving into his spartan bedroom, pulled open a drawer and picked out a completely ordinary buff folder from underneath his socks. Without any sort of dismay he handed it to me, and one brief glance verified its contents. Different to those on Trox but for the same purpose.

‘There you are,’ Kris said, ‘love letters, Glenda thought. But they’re really only lists of horses. See that word?’ He pointed. ‘That word means racehorses.’

The word he pointed to was Pferderennbahn.

‘That word,’ I contradicted mildly, ‘is horseracetrack.’

‘Well? So what?’

‘So... er,’ I asked. ‘Who met the motorcyclist at Oliver’s house to sign for the package?’

‘Guess.’

‘I’d guess... how about Robin Darcy?’

‘You’re too bloody smart.’

‘You and Robin are friends and he was staying at the Bedford Lodge Hotel, which is barely a hundred yards down the road from Quigley’s stable, I’m told. So who else was more likely? It was obvious, not smart.’

‘Yeah... well, it was only a joke. How did you get it right?’

‘You told us Robin left for Miami on Tuesday... what does it matter? I happened to be phoning that hotel and they said he left yesterday. Never mind. How about if we made a copy of these German letters. We can do it easily along at Paddington, and then you can see Oliver’s face when you show him you’ve got his precious list safe after all. It’s always prudent to make copies. It would be a disaster if Oliver could sue you because you’d lost the originals.’

Kris yawned, sighed, and agreed.

‘I’ll do it for you,’ I said, ‘if you like.’

‘I suppose I’d better come. Let’s go now and get it over.’

‘Right.’

I picked up the folder and, summoning energy I didn’t think I had, headed out of Kris’s bedroom, down the hall and out of the front door without looking back, happily humming a marching tune as if the whole thing were a pre-arranged jaunt.

I could hear Kris behind me saying ‘Well...’ doubtfully, but it wasn’t far to the station, and my enthusiasm kept us both going the whole way.

I sent Kris off to get more coins for the machine and made copies quickly with a German list on top for all the world — and Kris — to see. We set off back to his flat with me grasping a folder inside my grandmother’s cloak and Kris clutching Glenda’s folder to his chest.

The impetus was draining away in us both and the night suddenly felt very cold indeed when Kris uneasily said, ‘I hope Robin will think these copies a good idea. Anyway, he’ll be coming for the folder at any minute now. Any time after one o’clock, he said, when I’d finished my shift for the day.’

‘I thought he was in Miami,’ I said, uneasy in my turn.

‘No, he’s going tomorrow. He changed his plans, I think.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘Any time from now on, he’ll be here.’

‘Really?’

I didn’t like that. I needed a peaceful retreat, and a gentle walk away.

Kris was in front of me, suddenly deeper in doubt, equally suddenly taking quick steps ahead and saying, ‘I don’t know... There he is!’ he joyfully shouted, pointing. ‘Let’s tell him now...’

I stopped walking, stopped listening, turned fast on my heel and started back towards the station at a paratuberculosis effort of a shambling run.

It was my day for spending another of those twenty-nine lives.

Kris could always run faster than I could, but not faster than a roving taxi whose driver was convinced he was saving his new passenger from a mugging. As I scrambled untidily into the cab it circled on two wheels into a side road, and I glimpsed the two figures stop running after me and stand with arms akimbo just short of Kris’s flat, looking along the road in my wake, deprived of their quarry.

Under the lights, the heavy dark spectacle frames flashed on the round head of the short, unmistakable Robin. Behind him stood the tall, blond, frustrated, god-like Norseman.

Kris still firmly clutched Glenda’s buff folder, though it now contained, not dangerous requisites in German, but the plain English copies made, with Jett’s help, of Vera’s records of the filly’s radiation history at the Equine Research Establishment.

In one deep pocket, I carried Vera’s originals, as before, and in the other a true Trading gift to mankind, the Loricroft legacy of the where, the how much, the how soon and the strength of available U-235 and Pu-235

The cab driver asked where I wanted to go, which if answered literally would have meant to bed with Jett, warm, loved and healthy. Instead I opted for round the block and back to the station, where warmth in some places kept total misery at bay.

I sat on a bench in a waiting-room, sharing limbo with bona fide travellers and the hungry dispossessed.

My immediate impulsive reaction, to run away from Kris and Robin, was on reflection stupid, and could quite likely never be explained or given an adequate apology. Temporary madness, that flight had been. True, I had in my pocket lists of illegal materials, a damning piece of evidence, but evidence against whom? To whom should I give the folder? To someone one rung up from John Rupert? So where would I find him? And who would he be?

I thought for a long time about the enigmas that had been handed down.

Win quietly.

Look sideways at what you learn.

I had done neither.

If there was a path through a maze — if there were a maze — would the riddle be solved by going outward, or by searching deeper in?

The folder with the Vera copies in it could have been explained as a further teasing of Oliver Quigley. I had meant to laugh it off and could have done. Why had I run from Robin?

I chased the reason in the end to a dream of delirium, where Robin and Kris stood hand in hand beckoning me towards a gun to end my life. Subconsciously from then on I’d thought of them as allies, yet not believing Kris capable of real atrocious crime. Believing two opposite things at once was highly common though, like people who couldn’t abide the rich but bought lottery tickets every week, hoping to become what they said they despised.

Look at things sideways... What did he mean?

I tried looking sideways at the island of Trox. At mushrooms and cattle and world-wide anarchy.

Looked sideways at Odin...

Went to sleep.

When I woke at six I found that my sleeping brain had sorted out the sideways factor. Sideways, I yawned, was fast asleep.

No one had disturbed me during the four or five hours I’d spent in my huddled corner, but a quick glance in a looking-glass disguised as a beer advertisement on the wall there revealed that although the rash had faded to a mottled pinkish-brown, my eyes had now swollen to puff balls and my unshaven chin was a stubblefield in black. As no one, I imagined, would recognise this wreck as the well-brushed me, I left things as they were and sorted out the contents of my grandmother’s Sherlock Holmes cape-coat pockets, which I’d filled the evening before.

Apart from the folder of Loricroft’s German papers and copies, they chiefly contained Vera’s originals, my camera and my wallet. Camera contained Trox Island mud, but the wallet, more helpfully, disgorged passport, credit card, cheque, phone card, international driver’s licence and a fistful of cash borrowed from Jett.

As soon as lights came on in a nearby photo shop which boasted of its eight o’clock ‘instant passport photos’, I was knocking on its door, aiming to test the abilities of the sloppy-looking teenage boy in charge, who astonished me by actually waking up to interest when I asked if he knew anywhere that I could get speciality work done at this early time of day. He looked at the camera and peered more closely at me.

‘I say, aren’t you Perry Stuart?’ he said. ‘Something wrong with your face, isn’t there?’

‘It’s getting better,’ I said.

‘I can lend you a razor,’ he offered, absentmindedly prodding the camera with a pencil. ‘Do you want to see if there are still OK exposures under this muck?’

‘Do you know anyone who could do it?’

‘Do me a favour!’ He took my question as an affront. ‘I spent four years in night-school learning this job. Come back in an hour. And it’s an honour to do your work, Mr Stuart. I’ll give it my best shot.’

My expectations sank. A sloppy voice; a sloppy mouth. I wished I’d gone somewhere else.

There were more advantages, though, than drawbacks in a well-known face. When I went back an hour later I found a tray, laid with a cloth, bearing a pot of coffee, a basket of hot rolls, and many other comforts. Even a cleaned electric razor in a folded and frilled paper napkin. I thanked the shop’s incumbent for his thoughtfulness and then had to listen to multiple detail while he told me how to resurrect negatives from a cow-pat tomb.

I ate, I shaved, I admired his skill sincerely. I watched him make expert colour prints, and I signed autographs for him by the dozen when he refused to be paid any other way. His name, he said, was Jason Wells. I shook his hand, speechless, and asked for a card with an address.

‘It’s my uncle’s shop,’ he said. ‘I’ll get my own, someday. Do you mind if I take a photo of you, so I can hang it on the wall?’

He snapped and snapped away, and seemed to think himself well rewarded for the thirty-six clean negatives and the amazing enlargements I presently bore away.