Touch and Go

Frantic now, she stripped herself of her uniform and bundled that too into the cupboard. She emptied out the magazine and books, leaving them scattered on the floor. It made the holdall lighter, but not by much. She saw the little case lying snug at the bottom but left it undisturbed. One quick look had been enough …

Just after she’d called the doctor—it would be ten minutes before he got there—she’d locked her bedroom door, put the case on a chair and sprung the old-fashioned catches, one on either side. When she raised the lid she had seen the little boxes and the names on them. With fumbling fingers she’d opened the ones on the top. The rubies had glowed at her, even in the pale early morning light, warm against their gold settings, rings, bracelets, brooches … There were larger boxes further down nestling on a bed of thick envelopes. She looked no further. She closed the suitcase, and put it carefully along the bottom of her holdall. Then she had straightened her cap, smoothed her apron and returned to the sickroom in readiness for the doctor.

Now she stuffed her washbag and a towel on the top along with clean nightclothes. Her other nightdresses she left on a chair. She dressed herself in the one good woollen suit she possessed, and stood still for a brief moment, quivering … Had she forgotten anything? Did it matter?

By now she was almost out of breath. No time to sit and take stock. She remembered to unpin the nurse’s watch from her discarded uniform. Nearly two hours gone already! How soon would they find out and come after her? That Mrs Hermanos, she would know … The quarrel in the kitchen, José had been shouting something about the ‘jools’ … They knew they were there, it was only a matter of time. The agency had her address, they’d soon be in touch with the precinct police … She must hurry, hurry. She should have called the cab first, then she could have been away quicker.

She dashed for the bathroom.

Keep your head, she told herself. Remember your training.

She began to feel calmer. She opened the door on to the landing, and stood for a moment listening. There was only the sound of squabbling infants. She went back inside, picked up the phone with a steady hand and made the call to a private cab service—not the one she normally used. She said it was urgent; they wouldn’t be long coming. She’d be better to wait in the apartment till she saw it in the street below. Although her neighbours on the other floors were used to her sudden departures when she was called out on cases, there was no need to call attention to herself this time.

She grabbed her short waterproof coat from the old wardrobe with the broken swinging door, put her suitcase and the holdall on the settee, and pushed her hair up under a knitted cap. Only then did she sit down to wait.

The minutes ticked on. She’d put the watch in her pocket but she could still hear it. Had she thought of everything? No need to check her handbag; when on resident duty she always carried all her personal papers in it, and sufficient money for emergencies. She could ignore her bank account, there was never much in it anyway.

In a fever of impatience she got up and went to the window. Now surely was the time to stop and think, time even to go back. She’d made a mistake … She’d never meant to … She could explain …

She’d said that to her father once when he’d yelled at her: ‘If I catch you stealing again, I’ll belt you black and blue …’ ‘I wasn’t stealing … she gave me the things …’ she’d blubbered then, but he’d belted her just the same.

Not this time, she told herself savagely, this time I’m not running away with nothing. This is my one chance. She thought of the red and gold treasures, snug in their little boxes … She saw the taxi-cab, heard the driver hoot. She gathered up her luggage, threw her coat over her arm and walked out of the apartment without a backward glance. No regrets. It was just a place she had been holed up in. By now she should have been able to afford better with all that money from her private nursing … Money down the drain, she thought with a sudden flash of resentment, for all the good it had done … Well, she would be rid of them too. There would be no going back.

As she was driven away she saw that the tree on the scrubby patch at the corner was budding green. Spring was coming; it must be a good omen.

CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_195f4d9c-6c11-5d24-9e26-b7a65bf493d5)

It was spring too, in another town, another country. Lennox Kemp looked out of his office window through the gold lettering that said Gillorns, Solicitors, and saw that the darling buds of May were having a hard time of it. He sympathized; he too had just been shaken by a rough wind, presaging change.

‘That’s wonderful news,’ he lied to his secretary.

Elvira beamed at him. She looked in splendid health. He should have noticed.

‘Great, isn’t it? After all these years.’

‘I didn’t even know you were trying …’ That didn’t seem the right thing to say. ‘I mean, of course, I’m delighted for you and Bill.’

‘He’s over the moon.… What do you mean, Mr Kemp, you didn’t know we were trying? Just because I’m over thirty doesn’t stop me having my first child.’

Kemp hastily put aside his own feelings. That was the worst of getting middle-aged, you got irritable at the mere thought of disruption to routine. He got up, walked round his desk and planted a kiss on her freckled forehead. The colour could still run fast up into her ginger hair the way it had done all the years he’d known her from the gauche girl with ladylike aspirations at McCready’s Detective Agency down in Walthamstow to the self-assured person she had become now, working for him in Newtown.

‘This calls for a drink, Elvira. It’s something to celebrate.’

‘Oh, Mr Kemp, it’s only eleven o’clock in the morning …’

‘Blow that. I need it for shock.’ He opened the cabinet and took out the sherry and glasses normally reserved for late clients requiring help to unwind.

‘Well, just a little one, then.’ She seated herself primly on the edge of a chair and put her notebook down on the desk.

‘Here’s to you, and Bill. When’s it due?’

‘Not for ages yet. Christmastime. And I’ll go on working right up to the last minute.’

‘Indeed you won’t. I’m not having you running around humping great files up and down the stairs.’

Elvira grinned.

‘You’re quite out of date, Mr Kemp. Everybody these days goes on working when they’re pregnant. I’ll be here at least till November so you don’t have to worry.’

‘Who’s worried? Anyway, it’s high time you had some assistance. I should have had someone in to help you ages ago now we’ve got so much work …’ He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. ‘It’s just that I’ve got so used to having you around, Elvira.’

‘I’ll be around for a while yet,’ she reassured him. ‘But it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we did get someone in, someone I could train. It’s no good just making do with temps because—’ Elvira hesitated—‘I’m afraid I won’t be coming back afterwards. I know lots of women do but me and Bill, well, we don’t think like that. We’ve waited so long to start a family …’

Kemp looked at her with affection. Even when he first knew her, Elvira had been an old-fashioned girl for all that she’d been a child of the swinging ’sixties.

‘Of course I wouldn’t expect you to come back. The baby’s going to be the most important thing in your life from now on, and that’s the way it ought to be.’

Elvira picked up their glasses. ‘I’ll just get these washed,’ she said, ‘before your eleven-thirty appointment arrives.’ She was apt to get a little embarrassed when the relationship between herself and her boss verged on the personal. ‘And perhaps next month we might start putting an ad in the dailies … They have special days now for legal secretaries. Unless you want to promote someone in the office?’

Kemp shook his head. ‘It’s not fair to pinch other people’s secretaries. I’ll leave it to you, Elvira, to pick your successor. But, please—not a dolly-bird!’

‘I told you you were out of date, Mr Kemp. They’re all career women nowadays.’

Left to himself, Kemp contemplated the idea of a career woman, and was not cheered. He would miss Elvira. She was a link with the past although she was never the one to speak of it. Well, he would just have to get used to the fact of her going.

It was not the only shock he was to receive in that month of May to jog him into remembrance of things past. The letter he received a few days later from New York told him baldly of the death of his former wife, Muriel. She had been Mrs Leo Probert when she died, and the solicitors who had been acting for her went on to say that it had been inoperable cancer from which she had suffered for over two years.

For a moment Lennox Kemp could read no further. He was shaken by a sense of unspeakable sadness. As if she was there in the room, he could see her face with its halo of golden hair brushed up in the fashion of twenty years ago, hear her high, sweet, schoolgirl voice, her tinkling laugh … He got up, pushed back his chair roughly, and went over to the window. The solid blocks of Newtown misted before his eyes, and he saw instead the green canopy of the Forest which had lain at their door, and he was walking with her down a glade between the hornbeams on a summer’s evening in another world, another time.

She didn’t deserve to end like that, he thought fiercely, not Muriel. She had been so beautiful, so much in love with life, reaching out for its highest peaks and the fast-running excitements that buoyed her up in hopes that would not wait …

For all she had made him suffer, the ruin of his early career, his forced penance on the wrong side of the law, the long years’ endurance, he would never have wished her such ill-fortune as had now befallen her. She had been only a year younger than himself.

His hands were still shaking when he took up the letter again, and read on:

‘You may wonder why we have contacted you since there has been no communication, to our knowledge, between yourself and our late client for many years. Something has arisen, however, which we as executors of the deceased’s estate find it necessary to bring to your notice. It is, in our judgement, too delicate a matter to be dealt with by correspondence. One of our partners is travelling to London early next month and we are suggesting that he call upon you at the first opportunity to discuss the situation. By that time it is hoped that our Mr Van Gryson will be in possession of all the available information, and he will be able to speak with you in the fullest confidence of your own discretion.’

Kemp read the paragraph once more. He recognized the form of words lawyers tend to use when they want to convey something of importance without actually saying anything at all. He noted that Mr Van Gryson was fairly high up in the list of counsellors attached to the firm; if he was coming all the way to London it either spoke volumes for the ‘delicacy’ of the matter or, more probably, fat fees for the executorship. Perhaps both. Muriel appeared to have died rich.

Kemp lifted the phone and cancelled all interruptions for the next thirty minutes. Emotions could wait—there would be time enough for those—now he had to think.

No mention of Mr Probert. Leo Probert had been a well-heeled gentleman of sporting instincts when Muriel had married him, but he had not been young. He was a middle-aged American on vacation in London when she met him. He offered escape, and a dazzling future when he whisked her off to Las Vegas where he owned casinos, giving her the entrée to that greater gambling world she had just begun to taste the sweets of, the sugar already on her teeth.

Kemp sighed. One could moralize on that, and denounce sugar as poison to the system, medically and on principle, letting Muriel’s addiction sink her without trace. But the facts were otherwise; she had flourished according to report, someone meeting the Proberts in later years having told Kemp she was still a lovely woman and living in style.

The letter ended with the usual expressions of condolence, in this case mere platitudes since neither the writer nor the recipient were acquainted.

Kemp dictated a reply, as carefully worded as Eikenberg & Lazard’s communication had been to him, and saying no more than that he would look forward to receiving a call from their Mr Van Gryson whenever he was in London.