“Oh, God!” drawled an English voice from inside the room just vacated by the fat man. “Not
again.”
Albert waved the gun, indicating that the Arabs should lead the way. He was careful to keep a distance between him and his attacker, who had taken a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and was dabbing at the knuckles of one hand, scraped raw on the banisters.
The room they entered was about fifteen feet wide and twice as long. Stark, cushionless chairs on either side of the glass conference table were offset, slightly, by semi-stuffed leather sacks dotted around, presumably for sitting on. A single white lily arched out of a long-stemmed black vase on the blackwood desk opposite the door, behind which sat a man wearing a dark suit, an almost fluorescently white shirt, and a burgundy silk tie.
“Oh …
God,”
he said again, as if weary of life’s incessant demands upon his patience. “Not the Browning version.”
Albert knew a second’s surprise. His gun was, in fact, a Browning.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve come to read the meter.” The man’s voice essayed Oxbridge arrogance, although Albert already knew he wasn’t out of the top drawer. Now he sighed, a long, stagy job, and said, “You are trespassing, you do know that.”
The harder he tried, the more his voice turned into a queeny bleat. He sat with his hands folded in his lap,
where Albert couldn’t see them. Albert didn’t like that. “Hands on the desk, please.”
Another theatrical sigh. First fingers appeared over the lip of the desk, then two hands scurried along the surface to rest, palms down, a couple of feet apart.
Albert gestured the two Arabs over to the far end of the room while he focused on the face behind the desk. It was pale, clean-shaven, with a thin mouth too long for the narrow cheeks above. His hair was brushed straight back from the forehead in furrows. Age, about forty, which would be right.
“Mr. Eddy Clapham? Or is it some other name now?”
Sigh, sigh, sigh. “Edward Clapham, at your service. What
can
we do for you, Mr …?”
“Albert.”
“Really?”
Eddy seemed to have trouble accepting it. A black phone tremolo’d. He picked it up, said, “Fuck off,” and replaced it. Then he picked it up again for long enough to say, “That’s an entire morning’s fuck-off, you understand.”
Silence fell. There was a general air of resignation in the room that this kind of incident was to be expected in their line of business, whatever that might happen to be.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” Albert said.
Sigh. “Look …”
Sigh.
“If it’s about income tax … no, they don’t carry guns, you must be an excise man. If it’s about the warehousing …”
“It’s about Anna Elwell. Your wife.”
“Oh.” For the first time, Eddy looked less than sure of himself. “You what?”
Albert, hearing that sudden coarse slang, noted the descent from Oxbridge to Redbrick. “You’re rather elusive. No one answers the phone and we don’t have the
facilities to interview you in …”he raised his eyes to the ceiling … “Teheran, Damascus, Baghdad—”
“Yes, all right, I’m on the computer, I get the message.”
“And Tel Aviv. How ever do you manage the visas?”
The fat Arab giggled. Eddy must suddenly have found the two bodyguards as distasteful as Albert did, for he said, “Oh, do shut up. Get out, both of you, go on, get out.”
The attacker led the way, haughty and lithe, while the fat Arab waddled in his wake, struggling to keep up like a tug they’d forgotten to unhitch from the cruiser.
Albert, watching their departure, was struck by a sudden, recent memory. “Do you own a Porsche
944?”
“Now look, I paid for that…. What’s wrong with Anna?”
“She’s disappeared.”
The ensuing silence was a long one. “Who are you, exactly?” Eddy asked.
Albert put away his Browning and produced a card. Eddy held it up to the light, as if suspecting a forgery, before handing it back with the comment “You’re not Special Branch.” He was neither disturbed nor angry, just certain, in the same way that Seppy Lamont had been certain. “Let’s go over to the window. I don’t like a desk between me and my guests. It’s a real no-no, where I operate.”
Eddy pulled one of the austere high-backed black chairs away from the conference table and sat sideways on it. Albert stood in his favorite position, right elbow on left palm and the back of his free hand covering his mouth.
“What do you want to know about Anna, then?”
“When did you last see her?”
“Light years back. Clean break. Not
au revoir,
strictly
adieu.”
“What about Juliet?”
Eddy’s face softened a fraction. “I still see her sometimes. She’s in Cornwall, rotten setup if you ask me.”
“You last saw her when?”
“Couple of months ago. I can check the diary….”
“Not necessary. Why did you leave Anna?”
“How’s that relevant?”
“We want to know where she is, what she might be doing, who she might be meeting.” Albert rounded on Eddy. “What she’s … capable of.”
“Nothing bad, if that’s what you’re implying. Anna’s strictly one of the good girls.”
Another long silence.
“Why did we break up?” Eddy said suddenly. “Oh, all kinds of reasons. Blonde kinds. Brunette kinds. Redheads.”
“You were a womanizer and she was jealous.”
“You could say that. It wasn’t my fault she was frigid, now was it? You can blame that on her bloody mother. That and a whole lot of other things.”
Good, Albert thought to himself. Frigid … maybe even neurotic? Yes, he could tell Fox that Anna was neurotic.
“Her mother … I’ve met Mrs. Elwell.”
“Then you’re halfway to understanding Anna,” Eddy commented. “The wonder is how she survived. It puzzled me, the way she could be so strong.”
“Why is that puzzling? Isn’t a loving home supposed to be the best preparation for life?”
“Don’t you believe it. The best preparation for anything is hardship. Opposition. Everything else is just padding.”
“Why did you marry her in the first place?”
“Why did you marry your wife?”
Albert ignored the question. “Anna was pregnant.”
“So?”
“She was pregnant, you’d both just come down from Oxford, she with a first in Law, you with a third in PPE. You got her knocked up, her mother brought pressure to bear.”
“Pressure! Good God, more like the Spanish Inquisition.”
“How long did it last?”
“What, the marriage? A year, say.”
“A year that wasn’t all bad.” Albert stood staring out the window at the river. Sometimes it was possible to see for extraordinary distances, even on a day as gray as this one. “And you didn’t marry her just because she was pregnant, did you, you married her because she was a good woman, and fun to be with, and she had prospects, am I right, mm?”
Sigh, sigh,
sigh!
“So now tell me … that year you spent together. What was she like”—Albert turned away from the window—“then?”
Eddy rested one elbow on the table and the other on the arm of his chair, interlacing his hands in front of him. “Like?” he said after a long pause. “She was like …”
Albert idly filled in the gap with possible descriptions. She was fun. Cold. Jolly. A real bitch.
“She was like a goddess, then,” Eddy said, and Albert, hearing his voice, hearing what lurked behind it, was catapulted out of his speculative reverie into an immediacy for which he had not bargained.
“Explain, if you will, what you mean by that.”
“When we were at Oxford, I thought of her as beyond my reach. I was nothing, came from nowhere. She …”
“Go on.”
“She … gave off light. Always a little joke, soothing away your troubles. I’ve seen people stand up when Anna came in. As if she was royalty, you know? And they wanted to get a better view, get close to her. She excited people. Was interested in them. She brought out the best in you, by listening.”
Albert remembered the photograph of Anna that he’d seen in the Lescombes’ drawing room. “I see.”
He was having to adjust his mental picture of Eddy Clapham. Until now he’d assumed that the man’s sole motivation was financial, which by itself caused no problems because Albert, too, had a healthy respect for money. What differentiated him from Clapham was his idealism, the principles that made life worth living; whereas the only convictions a man like Clapham had were criminal ones. Or so Albert had thought. Now he wasn’t so sure. He began to listen for the things that weren’t being said.
“When she said she’d sleep with me, I thought this was it, y’know, let’s do it and die, there isn’t any more to be had, not here, not in this life.” Eddy grunted. “Talk about a let down.”
“And on her side … what was it about you that Anna found attractive, I wonder?”
Eddy laughed, an artificially elegant sound. “That’s easy.”
“So enlighten me.”
“It was such a fabulous time to be at Oxford. Suddenly there was pot, and women, and no need to work if you didn’t feel like it. I used to play the hard man, I
grew a beard. Anna was just … goggle-eyed. She’d never had any contact with someone like me before. Never been
allowed
any, in case she caught fleas, you know?”
“She was infatuated by someone radically different?”
“And dangerous. Somebody
alive.
Someone who cared about things—you’ll never believe this, but I had a social conscience then. Demos. Love-ins, I was into all that.”
“And was she?” Albert sneered.
“Only for my sake. Not that she didn’t have a conscience, hers was even better developed than mine. She didn’t care for the, how shall I put it, the stagecraft.”
“But in the end she found you … irresistible?”
Eddy shrugged. “We were both young, the genes with a G were singing and the jeans with a J were too tight, y’know the kind of thing.”
Albeit didn’t. “You
wanted
her to get pregnant?”
Eddy laughed self-consciously. “I’ve even asked myself that. Maybe I did, yes.”
“You were happy enough to get married, anyway?”
“Yeah. Except …”
“Except for what?”
When Eddy shook his head and continued to stare at the floor, Albert prompted him. “She was working too hard because she wanted to get to the bar …”
“The exams were tough.”
“And then there was the kid…. What were you doing at that time?”
“Nothing much. I thought I might qualify as an accountant, but—”
“Those exams also were tough.”
When Eddy shrugged, Albert reminded himself that
first impressions were often the most reliable. Here was one of life’s losers. Albert could not envisage his funeral. Who on earth would give up an afternoon to mourn Eddy Clapham?
“And then someone told you about the gold,” he said. ‘A world where every so often, just two or three times a year, people need to buy the physical stuff, in bars. And because there’s so little about, and because hardly anybody knows where to find it, there’s this exclusive club, isn’t there, which can fix that, mm? Everything from chartering the plane to bribing customs to working out how many Heckler and Koch submachine guns the guards will need when they land in Benin. Or Belize.”
“It’s a dicey world, friend.”
“I don’t doubt it. But profitable, very.”
“If you get it right.”
Albert suppressed irritation. Clapham’s milieu resembled his own in enough ways to make him wonder whether there might not be other, distinctly off-putting similarities between them.
“And did you get it right,” he rasped, “you with your contacts and your drinking in nightclubs, while Anna was feeding the baby before staying up half the night to study, mm, did you?”
“What’s with all this moralizing? Have you got something going with Anna, or what?”
Albert smiled, although he didn’t feel particularly jolly. The picture that Eddy was painting of Anna left much to be desired, from his point of view. Perhaps if they moved forward in time … “Anna passed her exams, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“And wanted support, someone to look after the child while she practiced.”
“That kid always was a pain. She’s not much better now.”
“Ah. The devoted father.”
“Look—”
“I’m looking.”
“It wasn’t my fault Anna got frightened she might kill herself. I didn’t give her PND, now did I?”
Albert slipped into overdrive, don’t think, don’t pause, act your heart out, make him think you knew that, “PND meaning postnatal depression?”
“Yeah,” Eddy said, and—
“Miracle!”
Albert thought to himself. A copper-bottomed miracle …
“By the time Juliet was born I wasn’t having much to do with Anna. She was way over the edge before I came along. She’d got ripped up over finding out about the adoption, changing schools and that. Then after the brat was born, she got this, you know, this terrible downer some women get. Kept on saying, ‘I’m going to kill Juliet, I’m going to kill myself, if somebody doesn’t help me.’”
Way over the edge … all ripped up … “I’m going to kill myself” …
“Would she have done it, d’you think?” Albert asked.
“No. Definitely not. She had too much guts for that. But she wasn’t responsible, according to the doctor.”
“What happened to Anna after that?”
Eddy was looking at Albert now, really looking at him, making assessments. “Liking this, are you?”
“What happened!”
“I heard she was seeing a shrink.”
“Who did you hear that from?”
“Mrs. Elwell told me. Meant to rub it in. Blame me.” He slipped into a silly voice, “‘Edward, I felt you had a right to know, Chappy didn’t want me to say anything, but …’ Christ all-bleeding-mighty.”
Sigh!
“Do you know which psychiatrist Anna saw at that time?” Albert asked.
“No. I mean, Lydia Elwell may have mentioned the name, but I can’t remember now, offhand.”
“Was his name Kleist, by any chance?”
Eddy pursed his lips. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
No matter, Albert thought. I’ve got more than enough. “If you should remember, give me a ring.” He started searching through his pockets for a piece of paper but Eddy forestalled him.