freedom costs money

Here is yet more of The Family Plot, which seems to be following the usual pattern of everything that I write, that is, far far too many people followed by a lack of direction from which I escape by having someone chloroform the main character. Some of it has already, I think, appeared on here, but most of it is freshly laid today.

I woke suddenly.

I was in a large hotel lounge that had walls of glass on three sides looking out towards an infuriated sea that foamed beneath a purple evening sky – the hotel occupied a headland that jutted into the sea like the prow of a ship. A road ran around the headland and the sea flung itself angrily up over the sea wall and onto it, the spray from the shattered waves flew the fifty yards between the sea and the hotel and was lashed against the plate glass by the wind which wailed around the corners of the lounge. Further inland, I could see a black tongue of tarmac extending from beneath the yawning concrete porte-cochere of the hotel to the seafront road; between the seafront road and the hotel drive there was a magnificent row of thick-trunked palm trees, their branches flailing in the wind like bereaved women, and a row of five flagpoles that waved in the strong wind. The flags were supposed to represent, I suppose, the international flavour of the hotel: there was the loud and tasteless star-spangled banner of the United States, the complicated perspective-defying mess of the Union Jack, the logical stripes of Germany, the somehow jauntier French tricolour and some others that I did not recognise. Perhaps they were the flags of local businesses – there certainly was one showing the stern logo of PIC (industrial skyline in silhouette with the letters PIC looming above it in gothic script), whose plant dominated the town at that time.

The fourth wall of the lounge was panelled in dark smooth wood, the effect endeavouring to mesh with the faintly oriental feel that pervaded the hotel and not quite managing to do so – here and there were fretwork screens, potted bamboos and framed embroideries of peasants toiling in paddy fields; in the lobby, I remembered, there was a small ornamental lake with tiny pagodas and bridges and where, when the hotel was new, there had been bonsai trees. Now there were only bonsai stumps. Remembering the lobby recalled me to myself. I could not remember how I had come to be in the lounge: I had suffered a long and trying journey. I supposed, felt, imagined, that I had been left here to await something or other – my bags, which I felt sure should be with me, were not. People stood among the low green velvet upholstered sofas and armchairs of the lobby talking in hushed tones and sipping coloured drinks from tall glasses. The lights were on low and the light outside was failing quickly. For the first time I noticed a large ship in the bay beating against wind and tide in a vain attempt to stay off the beach – it was this that the people in the lobby appeared to be discussing.

I could not worry about the ship now, though. I had seen also that the telephone cables to the hotel had been pulled down by the wind and lay in a tangled knot across the hotel drive. Periodically the wind ripped a branch from the palms and hurled it at the front of the hotel. Salt spray hissed angrily at the window. The lights in the lounge flickered timorously. The street lamps went out. I strode across the lounge purposefully, intending to discover what was going on – I wanted my room to be arranged before the power went off, as it surely must. Also, I was becoming more worried that I could not recall where I was – well, let me clarify: not more worried, more irritated. I travelled a lot in those days and often I would wake and be unsure of my location. Normally, though, it was after a night’s sleep and in a darkened bedroom that I was placeless, now though it was in the failing daylight after only a brief catnap brought on by exhaustion. I wanted a proper sleep. I wanted my room.

I did not reach the lobby. I was compelled to request a shabby-looking man to stand aside to let me pass through a narrow gap between the velvet furniture, but he misinterpreted my softly placed hand on his shoulder and murmured apology as a desire to talk to him. Worse, he seemed to know me.

“Ah, Caine,” he said, “found your brother yet?”

I assumed that he was drunk. My brother, I thought at that time, was dead. He was dead. The man, whoever he was, had a glass in his hand – empty.

The man saw me looked at his glass and realised what I had assumed. He extended his hand and said, “Name’s Arthur Stone, we met last year at the Strada day in Turin.”

I pretended to know what he was talking about and looked out at the ship to try to deflect his attention.

“Bad business, that,” Stone said. “There’s no way she’ll clear the Fangoso.”

“The what?”

“The Fangoso,” repeated Stone as though he’d assumed I simply hadn’t heard him. He noticed my continuing puzzled expression and gestured at a line of enormous waves that extended out into the black ocean from the tip of the headland. “Those waves there,” he explained, “are breaking over the jagged jaw of the Fangoso Rock. That ship is the Turaco, on board are two-hundred and four Espagnol Flamingos for the British market. She was supposed to arrive at Peasefurnace this morning but she’s been held up by the storm. Now the hurricane has driven her back against the coast and she’s trying to get back into the harbour here. Gruber’s beside himself.”

Stone looked into the middle distance. I looked at the blackening silhouette of the ship through the salt spray and wondered whether this really was a hurricane and whether all these people had gathered to watch a shipwreck. It seemed so. There was an air of expectancy and they each glanced to the ship from time to time to confirm that they had missed nothing.

“Gruber?” I asked, aiming to fill that gap in my knowledge. I knew what an Espagnol Flamingo was: two- or four-door saloon or five-door station wagon, three cylinder wet-sump two stroke, four speed rear-mounted transaxle, front double wishbones with torsion bars, rear swing axles on semi-elliptic leaf springs. Quad headlamps, reclining seats, heated rear window, reversing lamp. Made in Tierra Del Mar. Crap.

Stone looked at me as though I had said something quite stupid. “Espagnol CEO,” he explained. “He’s here for the reception although I expect there’ll not be one if the Turaco goes down. He’ll probably go into the library with a revolver or whatever it is that krauts do.” He paused and examined me critically for the first time. “You’re looking a bit worn,” he observed. There wasn’t really any detectable emotion in his voice. It was a statement and it was true. “Odd about your brother,” he went on. I waited to see whether the garrulous Stone would explain what needed to be explained.

He didn’t and so I patted his arm filially and wandered through one of the doors in the panelled wall to the enormous reception lobby. Two walls of the room were of the same timber panelling as the lounge, of the other two, one was of glass and was perforated by the glass main entrance doors that were guarded by an elderly commissionaire with a white walrus moustache and a great deal of gold-braid, the other wall was behind the reception desk and was of the same pale marble as the floor. The ceiling was stippled plaster that made me think of a cave I had once been in. It wasn’t much like the cave – it was too smooth and white and high and warm, but the feeling of a relationship between the lobby and the cave was there. In the centre of the lobby were three new Espagnol cars, each polished to a ludicrous shine that showed off the rippled bodywork and colossal panel-gaps that were the mark of poor quality in those days: there was a two door saloon in blood red, a four door saloon in royal blue and a five door station wagon that was the colour of English mustard, though Espagnol called the colour Desert Sunset. Someone had left a sandwich on the roof of the station wagon, and all three cars were entirely ignored.

Apart from the commissionaire, the only people in the lobby were behind the desk. One of them, an elderly man, waved to me and I went across to lean against the desk. He bid me a good evening and I returned the sentiment. A girl in the uniform of a chambermaid read a magazine in Spanish and did not look up. The old man, who I discovered from his name badge to be called Lionel Stillings, emerged from behind the desk by way of a little concealed door and pressed his hand against my shoulder to guide me to the glass by the doors. A stream of cold came off the glass, which here, beneath the porte-cochere, was not lashed with such ferocity by the storm. Water poured from the roof of the porte-cochere where the wind had pulled away a drainpipe and slapped heavily on the concrete flags. The wind had uprooted marigolds and pansies from the pebbledashed planters that separated the porte-cochere from the lawns that had the flagpoles and the palms set in them and had scattered them across the tarmac of the drive. Stillings and I gazed at the weather for a moment.

“We still have not been able to discover your brother’s whereabouts,” whispered Stillings, presently. He looked about to go on but did not, instead he looked from me to the commissionaire and back several times. Eventually he seemed to reach a decision and said to the commissionaire: “Erast, you may take the rest of the evening off – I think with this weather no more guests will be going out and no more will arrive.” He peered at the seafront road and said almost to himself, “the road is quite flooded.”

Erast clicked his heels together and then clicked away on them to the lounge, presumably to watch the ship meet its almost certain end on the Fangoso rock.

“I say,” I said, suddenly conscious that I’d heard the word Fangoso somewhere before, “what does Fangoso mean? It sounds familiar.”

Stillings looked wrong-footed. “I don’t know,” he eventually said, “I suppose it could be from the Old English…” he trailed away into nothing, trying to maintain a knowledgeable expression. The he said, confidently, “I expect it’ll be from the same root as the river’s name.”

“The river,” I asked, “what river?”

“Ah, yes, I had forgotten that you have only this afternoon arrived: the river flows into the sea immediately to the south of us beyond the headland. Its estuary is our little town’s harbour. It is called the Rio Fangoso.”

“That sounds Spanish,” I said. I didn’t mean anything else by it. It did, I thought, sound Spanish. I did not think I was in Spain, though – indeed, I was certain that I was not, but still I could not recall where I was. I was irritated afresh: I could scarcely establish my whereabouts by a process of elimination. I automatically discounted Australia and then automatically changed my mind – this could be southern Australia, couldn’t it? It wasn’t, though.

Stillings nodded at my statement. He wore a confused expression now also. “There is a motorcade coming up the drive,” he said, and clicked away across the marble. He was right. There was a motorcade coming up the drive – two motorcycle outriders with flashing blue lights, a black Lancia Flaminia with blue lights behind the grille and flags (lime green and blood red in three stripes – the outermost red, the centre green) fluttering from the front wings, a black Lancia Trevi with a blue light rotating on its roof, an Alfa Romeo Guiletta police car and two more motorcycle outriders identical to the first. They all swept to a stop under the concrete porte-cochere and four large men leapt out of the Trevi with guns and pointed them at the storm. The driver of the Flaminia got out and opened the rear passenger door to release a cloud of cigar fumes and a small swarthy man in an olive drab uniform that was immaculately creased. At his left side dangled a presumably ceremonial rapier, on his right side there was a pearl-handled revolver, on his head there was a peaked cap, across his chest were the telegraphic coloured stripes of innumerable military decorations. He wore, despite the fact that night had by now fallen, large black sunglasses and he was swagged with metre upon metre of gold braid. He was not unlike the commissionaire.

Stillings had reappeared at my elbow and let out a small cry of indistinct meaning.

“Oh God,” he whimpered, revealing that the cry had not been one of joy, “it’s President Ortega!”

I was not entirely uncertain that I had not heard of him before, and a certain negative impression communicated itself to from deep within the grey recesses of my brain and impelled me to return to the lounge. I had only just entered the lounge when simultaneously I felt a hand on my shoulder and noticed a woman who had been walking towards me stop and open her mouth as though she might speak. She did not, though: the other person appeared to have discouraged her and she turned an moved away into the gloom. It appeared that as I had passed through the door into the lounge the main lights had gone out and that now we were illuminated only by the emergency lights and the dim glow of the tabletop candles. I turned to see whose hand was on my shoulder and found a pair of men who I knew from somewhere.

They would neither be easily forgotten. The man with his hand on my shoulder was a good foot shorter than I, and was missing a leg, a hand and an eye and was covered all over with tiny scars, as though he had at some stage been run over by a lawn mower; the other man was my height but stooped, was exceptionally fat and wore steel-framed glasses which clung right at the very end of his nose like horses on a carousel. I even knew their names: the short man was Professor Dexter Paramount and the fat man was Edward Meal.

“Barrington,” exclaimed Paramount in an urgent stage-whisper, “what are you doing here?”

“We thought you were dead,” insisted Meal, apparently expecting me to argue against his assertion. I shrugged a declamatory shrug and looked around for something to say. Most of the people were now pressed against the glass to observe the ship’s demise, which must have been imminent.

“Well?” demanded Paramount when I did not answer. He had a tight grip on my arm now, but he released it when President Ortega marched triumphantly into the room and eyeballed its population. Paramount hid behind Meal and whispered even more urgently: “What’s he doing here? Listen Barrington, have you got any idea what’s going on here – I mean why we’re all here? It can’t be coincidence – there’s that Englishman over there and the Yank and Perestroika’s here somewhere.”
He was going to go on, but I stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Listen,” I said, quietly but with, I hoped, some force, “stop calling me Barrington – it’s Psmith, right? Have you got that? It’s Psmith.”

He looked momentarily confused as though he feared he might have got the wrong man, but then nodded conspiratorially. “I see,” he said, and then a look of panic ran across his face and he fixed me with his watery eye. “This isn’t anything to do with us, is it?”

“Is what anything to do with you?”

“Your being here. I assume you were in Desamparados as…” he hesitated as though he couldn’t find the right word. He abandoned the sentence and began again: “He’s here too you know, I wondered if, well, you know, if you were here to try to arrest him or something.”

“Who?”

“Boag,” he insisted, his eye darting about as though he felt that an unnecessary risk was being demanded of him by saying the name aloud.

“Boag?”

“Yes, Boag,” he gripped my arm again. He was bolder now – Ortega and his entourage had crossed the room and were sitting in the shadows sipping tall drinks, Ortega was facing away from us.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t know anything about that: I was called here by a woman who said that my brother had been killed and that there was to be a funeral.”

Paramount narrowed his eye sceptically. “But it’s nothing to do with us?”

“Nothing,” I confirmed. I had no idea what he was talking about.

He seemed to consider for a moment whether to end the conversation there or not and then stepped closer to me and hooked his finger through the buttons of my jacket. Meal stepped closer too. “We don’t know why we’re here,” he said, quietly, looking around. “We were called here by somebody who said that if we came to the Flamingo launch party we would learn something to our advantage – all our expenses have been paid.” He paused and waited for me to say something, but when I didn’t he went on: “Further, that chap Gruber is the absolute spitting image of Fischer, you remember Fischer I presume, and I think we can assume that if Perestroika is here then so must be Beauregard. Quite the little reunion, don’t you think?”

I had little idea of what he was talking about and I wanted to sit down. I was feeling very tired and hungry and I was not really in the mood for all this mystery.

“Listen Paramount,” I said, “I’ve only just arrived and I’m hungry. Perhaps we could talk about this later, I really must try to find something to eat right away.”

“Stay away from the pork,” said Paramount, and gave a hearty laugh. I was already moving away from the baffling pair and so did not respond to the joke, or jibe, or whatever it was meant to be. I was bound for the bar.

The barman was a swarthy individual who I did not recognise but who called me Andrew with some certainty. Andrew, I explained to him, was my brother and was dead.

“I am sorry to hear of that, sir,” said the barman, “I knew him slightly and he seemed like a pleasant gentleman.”

I muttered some platitude and was about to enquire as to the availability of food when the barman launched into some anecdote about Andrew: “he was a man who could tell a most excellent story, Mr Caine, only yesterday evening he was telling a tale of hunting for wild boar in the Dordogne…”

I interrupted him: “Yesterday?” I was surprised – I had been informed of his death by telephone and called to the hotel several days previously, presumably, if the barman’s account was true, well before my brother was actually dead. I demanded to know if the barman was sure.

“Indeed yes sir,” he responded, with some hurt and confusion in his voice, “he stood exactly where you are now sir talking to Mr Palgrave for some moments, and then he crossed to those seats over there,” he gestured to an empty cluster of the velour sofas in the corner of the room, “and dined with Miss Syrup. Are you quite well, sir, you look a little pale.”

I lied and told him that I was quite well.

“Perhaps it is this light, sir, the emergency lights do lend everything a verdant tinge I always think, sir.”

“Actually,” I said, leaning heavily against the bar, “I am extremely hungry. Does the hotel contain a restaurant?”

The barman adopted a forlorn expression. “It does sir, but I fear that it is closed along with the rest of the building: only the lounge here and the function room have been hired for this event. There is to be a celebratory meal served after the launch of the automobile, sir, but I fancy that if the Turaco is wrecked then that meal will not take place.”

“I don’t suppose you’d be able to supply me with some sandwiches in the meantime, would you?” I asked, losing hope.

“I’m afraid I cannot, sir. It is likely that the sudden introduction of sandwiches into this environment would trigger a feeding-frenzy which you would be most unlikely to survive unscathed – pardon me, but I believe the lady wishes to speak with you.”

He gestured behind me and I turned to find the woman who had been frightened off by Paramount and Meal wringing her hands behind me and looking up at me with imploring eyes. “Do you think,” she asked in a tiny voice that was cracked with emotion, “that you would be able to talk to me for a moment?”

I made an empty gesture and followed her towards an empty nest of the green chairs where we sank into the velour facing one-another across a glass-topped coffee table. She was not young, and she looked as though she had recently been crying. She wore an outdoor coat despite the fact that the lounge was quite warm and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps she had not been crying and that it was rainwater that streaked her face. She moved a large bag from the sofa beside her to the floor and I saw a large electric torch within it.

“Is there nothing you can do?” she asked, after a brief period of hand-wringing and sighing.

“About what?” I asked.

“Why must you be so cruel?” she cried, her voice going from a shriek to a guttural growl as she said the sentence.

I made as though to leave her. I had no desire to be harangued by a mad woman, which I had concluded was what she must be. She gave a cracked howl that became soundless and she pressed her hands against the table so hard that I feared it might break. Arthur Stone was observing us in his tabloid way and I feared a scene, so I settled back into the chair. “Explain yourself,” I said, “calmly, rationally, from the beginning, and I will do what I can.”

This seemed to calm her and she sat back a little in her chair, though still somehow bolt upright, and folded her hands around her knees instead of continuing to wring them. All the while I fought to conceive of some plan that would enable me to escape her.

“Well,” she began, her voice level but fragile, “as you know, my boy is a stoker on the Turaco, and I know how much he loved you – loves you. I cannot imagine how you could send him away on that ship on a night like this, in a hurricane like this. That ship, he says, is over half of one century old and it is leaky and dangerous. I want you to call it back.” She fixed me with a determined stare and waited, rocking ever so slightly in her seat. I was conscious that everyone in the room had stopped talking and was watching us. They were all watching me. I felt as though I was being asked to defuse a bomb or stop some runaway train – I do not know how to do either of those things.

“Well,” I began. She seemed to detect that whatever it was that I was going to say (which, incidentally, I had not yet decided, the “well” being a feeble tactic intended to buy more time) was going to contain negative ramifications for her boy. Once she had detected this, I realised that nothing I could say could possibly save the situation, and so I gave a slight shrug. I was tired, I knew none of these people: let her make a scene.

She fell backwards in her chair and opened her mouth. At first I thought there would be no sound, but as I, and the entire loungeful of people, watched and listened, a faint supersonic screech became audible. It built and built and became louder and louder until she was screeching like a Phantom jet. I and the rest of the people in the lounge listened to her for a short while, wondering whether or not she was going to stop, and then another woman picked her way patiently through the people and slapped her full across the face with her open hand.

Instantly the screaming woman’s face was transformed from a Munch-like scream into that of a pouting reddened cherub’s. Tears welled and her eyes darted from me to the woman who had slapped her and back. She gave one heavy sob and then fixed the woman who had slapped her with her teary venom-filled eyes. “He’ll do nothing for you,” she spat, and then rose, snatched her bag and strode unsteadily away to the bar.

The woman who had administered the slap seated herself opposite me and proceeded to invest a great deal of time and care in the lighting of a cigarette. The other people in the room had gone back to their morbid observation of the stricken ship and so we were as alone as was possible in a roomful of people. She was a beautiful woman. She wore her auburn hair in series of improbable waves that cascaded from her head onto her pale bare shoulders; her dress, which looked to be silk and was cut to make the best of her, was also auburn. I looked at the reflected room in the window. She reminded me too much of Laura to be alluring.

Once she had lit the cigarette and established a mysterious fog of smoke about her, she condescended to speak: “I am Nancy Gold,” she said, “We have met before, but I know that you must meet a great many people in your job and so if you do not remember me I forgive you.”

“Are you certain that you have not met my brother, not me?” I asked.

She nodded, which I took to mean that she was certain that she had met me, but what she went on to say suggested that she was wrong; she said: “I remember the time we were in France and you took me out in that automobile of yours – I think it was an Alfa Romeo – and we…”

I interrupted her to say that I had never been to France.

She smiled and took a drag from the cigarette. She did not argue. She asked me my name, which seemed odd for someone who claimed to know me.

“Psmith, with a P,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows. “With a P,” she repeated. “What is that? To perhaps make it seem less like a psuedonim? Psmith. Really. You are losing your touch.”

I looked at her without any thought in my head. My exhaustion was catching up with me and I had to fight to reopen my eyes whenever I blinked.

“And observe,” she said with a smile, “the lights of the Turaco have disappeared. Do you think that she has rounded the headland or that she has sunk?”

I neither knew nor cared.

I slept suddenly.

****

I woke suddenly.

I was no longer in the hotel lounge: I found myself, as I blinked away the sleep of what felt like only a few moments, in a large ballroom with plate glass windows all down one of the long sides and a monstrous coffered gilt ceiling with recessed lights of quite remarkably unattractive design. The lights were not on – still only the emergency lights functioned – and the room appeared to be in some state of disarray: it seemed part way through some sort of transformation, with tables and chairs stacked at the end of the room furthest from me and a rolled carpet in the centre of the dance floor. The dance floor itself was wooden and recessed, and two steps ran all the way around its perimeter. The higher part of the floor, at the top of the two steps, was carpeted in turquoise and was covered in little tables which each bore a burden of little pink-frilled lamps. The three walls without windows were covered in mirrors that seemed to be tinted gold or bronze, and reflected the room lit by the emergency lights in a kind of starkly gloomy way that was both crystal clear and indistinct all at once. A section of the room at the opposite end to where the tables and chairs were stacked was concealed by a curtain, and I fancied I could smell food.

A large man in a sports jacket emerged from behind the curtain and advanced across the dance floor to where I sat on the dais, slumped in a green velour chair that was similar to those in the lounge. Obviously I was still in the hotel, and I was beginning to wonder who had moved me from the lounge when the sports-jacketed man came within speaking distance.

“So,” he said, triumph writ large across his huge face, “I’ve found you. Thought you could outrun me, did you? Well, I think we can agree that you were wrong.”

He was a very large, square, distinctive-looking man but I did not recognise him. I elected to remain silent in the hope that he would say something that might remind me of his identity without me having to appear as though I did not know what was going on.

“So, then,” he said, rubbing his shovel-like hands together and cracking his knuckles, “are you going to cough-up or am I going to have to make good on my threat?”

I decided to come clean. I found in my hand a glass of what looked a lot like whiskey so I sipped it ruminatively and examined him with forced leisure. I did not want him to think that he had flustered me. The whiskey was very bad. I pulled a face and put the glass on the floor, which was close at hand owing to the lowness of the chair. I stood up and stretched. My back gave a small crack and a slight pain left my left leg.

“I’m afraid I don’t know you, old chap,” I said, “perhaps you’ve mistaken me for somebody else. Only then did it occur to me that it was eminently possible that he had mistaken me for somebody else.

He took as small step towards me which covered a large distance. “Now you look here, Caine,” he said, “I’m a reasonable man, I only want to be paid for what I’ve done. That’s all. I don’t want any unpleasantness but by God there will be some if you do not give me what you owe me. I cannot afford to work for nothing. Perhaps you can, but I cannot. I’ll not even charge you for the trouble of coming all the way out to this Godforsaken place if you just give it to me now.”

He obviously had got the right man – me. He also, I surmised, since he’d called me Caine, knew me from Crakethorne. Then, from nowhere, he said: “There’s a reward, you know.”

“A reward?”

“Yes. For information leading to your arrest.”

“My arrest.” I said it slowly, thoughtfully, as though the concept was familiar to me but that I was reconsidering it for his benefit. “I see,” I said, eventually.

The man laughed, as though impressed by my bravado.

I resolved to pay him, if I could. It seemed unlike me not to have paid him already. I was not one to accumulate debts. “Remind me how much I owe you,” I said, nonchalantly feeling inside my pockets for my wallet.

He handed me an invoice and I abandoned my search. It was from Newcastle, Newcastle & Newcastle & Sons, Builders, and covered an extensive programme of renovations to a house called Renfield on Prince Caspian Drive in Crakethorne. The bill was for the sum of nineteen-thousand six-hundred and forty-nine pounds and eleven pence, including VAT. The figure was not unfamiliar to me, and nor now was the sports-jacketed man: he was the last of the line of Coggs, the last remaining son referred to by the & Sons. Why he was called Coggs, not Newcastle, was a constant source of bafflement to me.

“I see now,” I said, and slipped the invoice into my jacket pocket. Oddly, I could not recall wearing a jacket in the lounge, and I wondered just how long I had been in the ballroom. I took my hand out of the jacket pocket and found in it a revolver. I looked at it in some surprise.

Coggs began to back away, making a sort of deprecating gesture with his hands held out in front of him. There was nobody in the room with us, and it occurred to me that I could pump him full of lead – that was the phrase that ran through my mind – and nobody would know it was me. Even if they did, I could always blame Lomax.

But I lowered the gun. Lomax was lying low, I told myself, Lomax could not come out now, and certainly Psmith did not want to draw attention to himself, still less Caine. Caine already, it seemed, judging by Coggs’s words, had attracted the attention of the police.

“Come back here,” I said to Coggs, who complied with obvious reluctance. “What do the police want with me and where did this gun come from?”

Coggs hesitated a moment and then said: “Well, Laura,” before shrugging as though that should explain everything. It didn’t. I assumed that he knew even less about the gun, since he hadn’t mentioned it. I put it back in the jacket pocket.

“What do you mean, ‘well, Laura’?” I asked him, and gestured to a seat. We both sat and looked at one another through the grainy twilight of the emergency lights, I with a benign, friendly, slightly inquisitive expression on my face and he with a look that I could not fathom. He seemed to be in some discomfort.

“Are you quite well?” he asked, I thought rather over-solicitously. There was a hint of condescension in his voice which I did not like. I rested my hand on the gun through the tweed of the jacket.

“I’m fine,” I said, succinctly and firmly but still in a friendly tone, “now what about Laura?”

“They, that is, the police think that, the police think that well, that, the police seem to have you as their number one suspect,” he said, rather uneconomically.

“I see,” I said.

“In fact, they don’t seem to have any others,” went on Coggs, “their investigation seems these days to be less of an investigation more of, well, more of a manhunt.”

I nodded sagely. “A manhunt you say? Well, good luck to them.”

Coggs seemed to imagine that the conversation was not going in the direction which he would have liked. “Look,” he said, “I’ll tell you now, the reward is not what you owe me – it’s considerably less – but I’ll have to tell them where you are and claim it if you don’t pay me. Christmas was not cheap, you know what it’s like, I have bills to pay too…”

I interrupted him cheerily. He clearly needed his mind taking off his debts. “Here comes someone,” I said to Coggs, waving to the fat penguin-like creature who was clicking across the wooden dance floor with his walking cane.

Coggs turned in his seat, clearly uncertain as to what he should do now. I distributed benevolent smiles between the two of them and waited for the penguin man to arrive.

“Any news?” asked the new arrival.

“Aren’t you going to introduce yourselves to one another?” I asked, cleverly sidestepping any need to admit that I had no idea who the new man was.

“Gregory Andrews,” said the penguin man, distractedly.

“Coggs,” said Coggs. He had adopted a surly expression and curled into himself like a snail without a shell.

“Excellent,” I said, and retrieved the whiskey from the floor. It was not as awful as first imagined.

“So?” asked Andrews, “what have you heard?”

“Nothing,” I said. It was entirely true.

Andrews gave an exasperated noise and tapped his cane irritably on the carpet. “It’s this bloody storm,” he said. “It must have delayed his aeroplane. And if the ship goes down there’ll be no point in him coming and the plan will be…” he caught himself in the middle of what he was saying and fixed Coggs with a stare that was at once aggressive and frightened. “Who exactly are you,” he demanded, “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Coggs looked embarrassed. Andrews essentially meant his words to be taken as a dismissal, but before Coggs could reply in any way a fire exit at the far end of the room slammed open against the wall, admitted a soaked figure into the room and then slammed closed.

Andrews looked over his shoulder. “Palgrave,” he said. Then he turned to me and said: “he’s not managed to find him. Bloody useless. Don’t know what Daniels was thinking.”

I had no idea who any of these people were, and so said nothing. I had drunk most of the whiskey by now and, having eaten nothing for what seemed like days, was quite drunk. I nodded slowly so that I looked like I knew what was happening.

The man Palgrave walked up the ballroom, taking off his raincoat and shaking the water off it as he came. He was dangerously thin and pale. “Your brother turned up yet?” he asked as he drew near, and then he stopped and examined me more closely. “Are you alright?” he asked. “You look like crap.”

I waved a hand, forgetting that the whiskey glass was in it and so tipped the remainder of the drink on the floor. The other three men looked at me but said nothing.

“Bloody rubbish,” I said.

Coggs excused himself and slunk away, but, halfway across the room he paused and turned and said: “if you don’t get me the money by tomorrow I’ll have no choice. You know what I mean.”

I did know what he meant. I went on nodding to show exactly that.

“Who’s that?” asked Palgrave, but he didn’t wait for a reply. “We’ve got a bigger problem than him, whoever he is,” he went on, “the police are looking for your brother so if we don’t find him soon we’re going to have to think of another way out.”

I went on nodding.

“And what are we going to do with the urns?” Andrews whispered urgently. “They still haven’t been collected and I don’t want them in the house any longer.”

Palgrave nodded. “That Hansom chap’s been following me around,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before he realises you’ve got them.”

“He was here yesterday,” I said. “The barman told me he had a meal with somebody called Syrup – in fact,” I said, holding up my finger to emphasise the fact that I’d suddenly realised that Palgrave must already have seen my brother, “the barman said that you were talking to him, Palgrave.”

Andrews and Palgrave exchanged a look and then Palgrave hesitatingly said: “But that was you.”

I stopped nodding and shook my head quite firmly, indeed, so firmly that I was forced to close my eyes for a moment in order to rebalance myself. In the moment in which my eyes were closed I heard a rushing sound, but I didn’t see what had happened to cause it.

My nostrils were filled with the chemical smell of chloroform.

I slept suddenly.