Second Wind Page 20

  They shook their heads, thoughtful and depressed. John Rupert said, “Even though the Traders aren’t a hundred percent 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 antiterrorist country. You must know better then 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 realized 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 organization? 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 realized 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 sidewalk, flag down the first taxi to come along and set off to realms unknown. Ghost’s white hair, three floors down, had been unmistakable, and John Rupert’s long legs exaggerated from above his storklike 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 ghostwriter, 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-humoredly 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 lightheartedness during the next hour that the lady “authority” at the Health and Safety Executive who had originally sent me to Kensington hadn’t steered me very high up the antiterrorist ladder. John Rupert, all the same, had proved a reliable middle rung, leading upwards 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 recognizable 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 racetracks.

  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 airplane on Trox Island. Where is it now?”

  “On the airplane?” 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 call Kris.”

  “You’ve lost me,” Jett said, but I at least found Kris. He and Bell were both in Kris’s apartment 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 called 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-ax 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 motorbike delivery boys,” she said. “A courier.”

  “And... er,” I asked, “where was he going with it?”

  “It was a bit odd, really,” Bell thought, “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 here 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 recognized 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 windowsill, 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 which Glenda lost, and she agreed to courier the folder back to Oliver if he sent a prepaid 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 p
roblem-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 telephone bill in a search for a motorcyclist 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 nondelivery, 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.