Caroline Minuscule (18 page)

He tabulated the salient points, one by one. First, they had the diamonds. Second, realizing them would take time – Dougal had a vague idea that Amsterdam was the place to go, but unfortunately the only friend he had who had some acquaintance with the underworld of that city was at present in jail. Third, Lee would be after them: they were not only business rivals, but they had damaged his pride. Fourth, it seemed probable that, despite today's events, Lee would continue to regard them as amateurs – he would believe he could deal with them himself (possibly with Tanner's help, since he was already concerned). It followed, thought Dougal as he drunkenly turned a drop of spilled wine on the table beside his glass into a spiral, that Lee was the only person they had to fear.

As Dougal saw it, they had two options open to them. One was to hide from Lee: to lie low, either here or abroad, hoping to turn the diamonds into cash to live on, until they could safely assume that his interest in them had abated. The difficulty was that they would never feel secure. Never. The money would not be much compensation for a life spent under an indefinitely suspended sentence of death.

The alternative was to take the offensive. It meant the worms turning and pretending to be predators. It meant risking everything for the sake of peace of mind and a tolerable bank balance.

It meant the deliberate murder of Lee. Technically difficult, quite impractical and of course absolutely unthinkable in any case.

Dougal splashed more Glenfiddich into the three glasses and added a dash of water to his own. Primrose was looking at him like a plump and puzzled owl, as if he had forgotten that Dougal was there and now found it difficult to account for his presence.

‘Philip,' said Dougal gravely, as the mad laughter welled up within him. ‘You must remember to put out the laundry before we go to bed.'

The evening had passed more quickly than Dougal had thought. It was nearly midnight by the time they went up to bed. On another occasion he would have derived a great deal of innocent pleasure from the delicate and long-winded fashion in which their host, before he would let them upstairs, had approached the two difficult questions which tact forbade him to pose directly. Were Dougal and Amanda expecting to sleep together? If yes, could they be trusted in his parents' double bed without leaving unmentionable and embarrassing evidence of their presence? Having been assured, in a similarly oblique way, that the answer on both counts was yes (and was it Dougal's imagination that Philip, on hearing the first answer, looked distinctly peeved?), they stood up, deciding to leave the washing up to the morning.

Philip led the way upstairs. The change of altitude must have accelerated the effect of the alcohol, for he swayed alarmingly from side to side and, at one point, nearly fell back on Amanda. He showed them the bathroom, where he sat down heavily on the dirty linen basket and evinced a determination to talk about Spinoza. At this point, Dougal basely fled, leaving Amanda to deal with the situation, making the excuse that he had to nip downstairs and pick up their luggage from the car.

When he returned, Philip's bedroom door was closed and their host was presumably behind it. Dougal asked Amanda how she had done it, to which she replied, ‘Oh, you know,' with such a complete lack of emphasis that further enquiry was obviously unwelcome. They went to the bathroom together and brushed their teeth for thirty seconds, before giving up the ritual as a bad job. Back in the parental bedroom, they pulled off their clothes and climbed into bed: Amanda didn't even remove her makeup or brush her hair.

Dougal switched out the bedside light and the darkness enveloped them. Almost at once, through the thin partition walls, they heard Philip's door open, footsteps, the slamming of the bathroom door and the distant noise of retching.

‘Oh, the poor lamb,' said Amanda absentmindedly. ‘God, it's nice to be in bed. William, what the hell are we going to do?'

Dougal pushed the need to sleep away from him. It couldn't be avoided any longer: he and Amanda would have to talk about it. Suddenly he remembered.

‘We haven't even looked at them yet. The diamonds.'

He switched on the light again, clambered out of bed and padded over to the chair where their clothes were piled in confusion. He extricated the sausage of leather from his trouser pocket; it was an index of his tiredness, he thought, that he had noticed the bulge while undressing, without thinking anything of it. As an afterthought, he found the pair of nail scissors in Amanda's makeup bag.

Dougal sat naked on the side of the bed (there was something to be said for the Primroses' central heating system) and slit the stitching at one end of the sausage. Its contents poured out into the palms of his hands. Both he and Amanda involuntarily gasped.

Vernon-Jones's legacy consisted of unset diamonds, nothing else. All of them were cut; the light shimmered through them, creating a dazzling array of rainbows. The largest of the stones was the size of a child's marble. Amanda put her hand out and picked it up.

‘If this isn't real, I don't know what is.'

‘But we don't
know
.' Dougal found his scepticism unconvincing, even to himself. ‘We just have to work on the assumption that they are.'

Amanda shivered. ‘Put them away. It doesn't matter if they're real or not. We've still got the same problem. Lee.'

Dougal fed the stones, one by one, back into the bag. The occupation gave him an excuse for deferring his answer. At last the stones ran out, and he tossed the package on to the bedside table.

‘Pee-Pee – Philip – might be useful.'

‘Why?'

‘Lee doesn't know him. Suppose Lee has traced us to Cambridge. If we get Philip to do our shopping or whatever, it'll lessen the risk.'

‘But what do we tell Philip? We can hardly blurt out the truth.'

‘No,' agreed Dougal, ‘but we'll think of something. He's pretty gullible, especially where you're concerned. The real problem' – he reached for a cigarette, deciding that he could put it off no further – ‘is how we get round the fact that Lee is after us. I know he's small-time by Mafia standards, but we've got in his way and he's probably going to want to . . . well, kill us. Particularly if he finds out we've got the diamonds. He knows we daren't go to the police.' It was strange, he reflected: England had always seemed such a law-abiding country, and here they were fighting what amounted to a private civil war in the middle of it without anyone outside those directly concerned being in the least disturbed. He wondered what other manifestations of anarchy were going on around them.

Amanda said: ‘The only way we can ever get free of this is by killing Lee.'

The silence between them was flat and featureless; words, thought Dougal, cross like caravans in the desert. Amanda let her hair curtain her face again, which muffled her words:

‘Either we kill him, or we hide and wait till he kills us.'

‘It's been one of those progressions, starting when I found Gumper, hasn't it? A sort of ratio of inverse—'

‘William! You're blathering again. We're talking about—'

‘Deliberate manslaughter?' Dougal stared down at his legs: they were white and covered with black hairs and looked as if they didn't belong to him. ‘No, of course not. Murder.'

‘Well, be realistic. Got an alternative?'

‘No. It won't be easy. And I don't like it.'

‘Nor do I, William. Too dangerous.'

‘Too bloody everything.'

Dougal got back into bed and switched out the light. For once Amanda wanted his arms around her. She cried a little – softly, as if it was something which had to be done as a matter of form. Then her breathing grew steady and slowed to the peaceful regularity of sleep.

Dougal lay there awake. His left arm beneath her was asleep but nothing else was. He felt too hot, and perversely blamed the Primroses for their central heating. The bathroom door closed and he heard Philip going wearily into his bedroom. Despite Amanda beside him, he felt as lonely as a blind man in a cinema. With a silent movie on the screen, of course.

T
he coffee was thick and steaming: it had flecks of light brown foam on its surface.

Dougal's jersey was inside out. He was wearing yesterday's socks because they were warmer and nearer than the clean pairs in the suitcase.

‘Much better this way,' he said, ‘made in a jug. Any cigarettes in your bag?'

Amanda pulled out a half-full packet and a matchbook from the Crossed Keys. ‘How about Philip? You taking him a cup?'

‘No. Give him a bit longer. He's probably had a rough night.' The Glenfiddich bottle was empty.

Amanda refused a cigarette and waited for Dougal's morning cough to die away.

‘William, I've been thinking . . .'

So this was it. It was no longer possible to forget what had to be done, if not today then soon.

‘. . . as I see it, we've got four separate details to settle.' She tapped a fingernail on the table for each point. ‘One, we've got to disappear, so Lee can't trace us unless we want him to (I know he probably can't anyway, but we've got to be sure). Two, we need to think of a place and a method to kill him. Three, we have to get him there. And finally we have to do it.'

Dougal blinked. He felt almost envious of Amanda's directness. She had fully digested the implications of last night, while he had only just got to the point of forcing himself to swallow them. But it was a relief, too, to have the problem presented in the shape of a set of practical necessities. It was wonderfully simple that way, for one thing, and it gave one something to work on, for another.

‘The only way Lee can trace us,' he said slowly, ‘is by the car. Assuming he can throw his net of contacts wide enough, that is. And we have to assume that he can. We could leave it here, in Cambridge; put it in a long stay car park, and send the rental firm the keys and some cash.'

‘Philip could do it,' Amanda said. ‘And he could hire us another one in his name – just in case Lee knows who we really are.'

‘How about the diamonds? Philip could take those, too – put them in a safe deposit box. We could both have a key. As a precaution.'

Amanda nodded. Neither of them added: as a precaution against Lee killing one or both of us.

‘Easy enough to think of a story for Philip,' Dougal continued. ‘Though the most important thing is that you look like a damsel in distress and stare into his eyes as if he was the only man in the world . . . it'll work. It'll have to – otherwise you and I will have to wander around Cambridge, changing the car and going to the bank, leaving a trail Lee could follow in his sleep.'

As he finished, Dougal wondered if he wasn't overreacting, crediting Lee with superhuman powers, dodging away from shadows in his own mind. He had no yardstick by which to judge what was happening and felt curiously disoriented. On the other hand . . .

Amanda was talking. He shrugged the uncertainty away.

‘Okay, as you want. I don't think it'll make much difference. The real problems come afterwards, anyway.' Her mind jumped suddenly forwards, with Dougal clutching for the sense of what she was saying. ‘I suppose it's got to look like an accident – either that, or Lee will have to vanish entirely.' With her fingers, she was shredding one of the matches from the matchbook, painstakingly splaying the slithers around the unstruck head.

It looked like a thistle in the last stage of its life, a thistle from the flora of another country, another time. Dougal tried not to notice it. He found Amanda's down-to-earth approach to murder amazing – it made his own fumblings in that direction, with the unwilling assistance of Cedric, seem humiliatingly amateurish. She was looking at him, expecting him to say something. The words, when they came to his lips, tumbled out as if somebody else was speaking them: their sense was gross and he found it curiously difficult to articulate them.

‘Somewhere lonely. Get him there to make a deal. And club him over the head. Kill him.'

He thought of Malcolm: the friend who knew Amsterdam; who, if he had not been in prison, might have been able to help; for he was an expert negotiator of the trickier corners of life; who sailed away from problems whenever possible . . . whose boat was moored in a Suffolk estuary.

Shortly afterwards, Dougal climbed the stairs with a tray which held a mug of coffee, a glass of water and a couple of Alka-Seltzers. He knocked on Philip's bedroom door, pushed it open and was hit by a cloud of stale air.

Pee-Pee lay on his back, his chin in the air, breathing heavily. The bed was narrow, a child's size. The walls of the room were lined with books and photographs, chiefly of school and college groups. Primrose had prudently placed a bowl beside the bed; Dougal was glad to see it was empty.

He drew back the curtains, letting the grey February morning pick out the details – the patched teddy bear at one end of a bookcase, the tie Philip had worn yesterday dangling over the side of the wastepaper basket. Philip stirred and Dougal asked how he was.

‘Uh. Thirsty. I might have a fever . . . is there any tea? There's a thermometer in the bathroom cupboard—'

‘Here's some coffee,' said Dougal brutally. ‘It'll be better for you. And Alka-Seltzers, to perk up the metabolism. Can I use the phone? I'll find out how much it comes to.'

He put the tray on the bedside table, noticing as he did so that Primrose was apparently reading Milton's prose works at night. Personally, he would have considered
Areopagitica
to be an emetic rather than a soporific; but perhaps Pee-Pee kept it there for purely decorative purposes.

Their host was barely awake. He groped for his spectacles, nearly nudging the coffee off the table. Dougal found them for him and said he must be going. There were signs that Philip's need to talk was about to triumph over his need to sleep.