Caroline Minuscule (26 page)

‘Where was I? Your telephone call . . . I had to work on the assumption that Lee would continue to use Tanner – I was reasonably sure he would, because killing you and disposing of your bodies – forgive my bluntness, my dear – would be far easier physically with his support, and Lee wouldn't have wanted to bring in an outsider at this stage. I may be casting aspersions on Lee's memory (though that wouldn't be an easy thing to do), but I suspect he may have intended to get rid of Tanner as well, once you two were out of the way . . .

‘After lunch, on Monday, I left Rosington and my clerical persona behind and nipped back to town. I picked up a car and these agricultural clothes and booked myself into a pub on the main road between Chelmsford and Colchester. Tanner rang me this morning with the rendezvous details. I followed him and Lee at a discreet distance this afternoon. The rest you know.'

Hanbury sat back and poked a well-manicured finger around the inside of his crumpled Gauloises packet. He extracted the last battered cigarette it held with a grunt of satisfaction. Dougal's eyes involuntarily followed Hanbury's hand as he raised it to his mouth. The man's lips were fleshy, but smugly compressed, like those of a child with a secret.

It was Amanda who put into words the question which was awkwardly shaping itself in Dougal's mind.

‘James, why didn't you come here as soon as you knew where we were? We could have planned Lee's reception together. It would have been far less dangerous.'

‘I'm not surprised you asked that question,' said Hanbury in a guarded voice which implied that he rather wished she hadn't. ‘Of course, I would have liked to, but I had to take account of the possibility that Lee would change his plans – and the only way Tanner could have warned me of that was by phoning the pub. So obviously I had to stay there as long as possible.'

It was a reasonable explanation, Dougal thought, but then Hanbury was adept at making things sound reasonable.

Dougal jerked his attention away from increasingly gloomy speculations. Remember, he told himself, we still hold the ace – access to the diamonds. No point in panicking. He brought himself back to the lamp-lit saloon, a gently rocking cradle, blue with cigarette smoke. The wind must be blowing up a bit. Hanbury was watching him curiously. Again, Dougal had the uneasy feeling that Hanbury was watching his mind as much as his face.

‘Ah, yes, one thing more.' Hanbury stubbed out his cigarette with the graceful economy of effort of the leading man in a drawing room comedy. ‘Both of you are probably wondering why I didn't intervene sooner. I was about a mile behind the Lancia, navigating with the help of an Ordnance Survey map. Lee was far too old a hand for me to risk getting closer. When I reached the lodge gates, I couldn't come roaring up the drive – I had to park the car up the lane and then walk up to the house. By the time I got to the stables, only Tanner was left. I came down to the river as quickly as I could – I got there just as Lee was describing how he would kill you . . . his imagination and vocabulary seemed equally trite.
I
thought it was rather well timed, all things considered.'

Dougal nodded. Surprisingly well? Amanda yawned, as if this grubbing about on the border between detail and speculation was tedious to her. She apologized and stretched herself as unselfconsciously as a cat when waking up.

‘Now,' she said briskly, ‘you'll want our side of the story.'

Amanda did most of the talking. She seemed unusually vivacious – Dougal thought that their moods at present were like people facing one another at opposite ends of a seesaw; he was filled with a great longing to annihilate himself with alcohol, but put the kettle on for more tea instead.

By tacit agreement, they left out one or two episodes – or rather Dougal did, for he purposely took over the story at times. For example, he said he had seen Cedric at Bleeders Hall, and the tramp had run off into the night. He was deliberately vague about their stay in Cambridge – he could see no reason to bring Philip Primrose to Hanbury's attention.

Hanbury was flatteringly complimentary. Dougal was unwillingly aware that the older man's approval gave him pleasure. He asked several questions about the stones, which Dougal did his best to answer, and laughed aloud when he heard where they had been hidden.

‘I sometimes wondered whether Vernon-Jones nurtured a senile passion for Katie Munns. Though one imagines his lust would have been entirely cerebral. She's quite attractive, isn't she?' Amanda nodded mechanically and Hanbury continued, ‘in terms of Rosington, anyway. Not much competition.'

Malcolm engaged Hanbury's interest as well. ‘Such a pity he should have run into difficulties. Perhaps we can help him when he comes out.'

Dougal had expected the conversation to move to their plans for the immediate future, once everyone had been brought up to date with the present. Hanbury, however, began to talk of himself, as if he suddenly felt the subject needed an airing.

‘One seems to have this strange yearning to be one respectable person, settled in one particular place. It must be a symptom of middle age, I suppose.' He thought he might buy an apartment in a small town within easy reach of Paris and hang up his collection of old school ties for a while. Dougal had a vivid picture of the nomadic life – in terms of identity as well as geography – which Hanbury accepted as normal. Hanbury? The name had only an algebraic reality: a convenient symbol for an unknown quantity.

Dougal's mind wandered from what Hanbury was saying to how he was saying it. He visualized it set up in type, printed on a page. He counted the semi-colons and the places where split infinitives were conspicuous by their absence.

While Hanbury enthused about Gallic civilization, Dougal's attention feverishly flitted over the doubts and difficulties ahead. He felt smothered by exhaustion, and past the stage where he could think rationally. It's balanced, he thought vaguely, between the keys in my pocket and the weapons in the Harrods bag on the bunk beside Hanbury. Both parties had some right – in a context where ‘right' was little more than an acknowledgement of shared interests – to a share of the diamonds. Would Hanbury be content to divide them fairly?

Hanbury's air of being an honourable privateer on the high seas of public morality was assumed. It was one more mask, its expression moulded to reassure Dougal and Amanda. Dougal was certain of this: he used the same technique himself – the difference between him and Hanbury was only one of degree. He must bear in mind that Hanbury was wooing them now – not their affections but their confidence.

‘Look,' said Amanda. ‘Isn't it time we talked about what we're going to do next? We've got these diamonds to turn into money, and after we've decided how to do that, I'd like to go and have dinner somewhere. I'm starving.'

‘You're quite right, Amanda,' said Hanbury. ‘On both counts. Assuming we're all in favour of a quick, easy sale, our best bet's Amsterdam. I know the city quite well, so arranging the details wouldn't be a problem. They're unmounted stones, which helps . . . come to think of it, as they haven't actually been stolen, we should get a better price than I'd anticipated. Of course, it's impossible to have an idea of the size of our profit until their value has been fixed.

‘As to the method of payment, one can usually take it either in cash (American dollars are the most popular) or a cheque on a Swiss bank . . . the latter method would in fact be more profitable: otherwise the, um, cash discount would operate against us. Do either of you have Swiss accounts?'

Dougal and Amanda shook their heads with becoming gravity.

‘Then you should. Very convenient in every way, particularly as you may wish to use its facilities again one day.'

‘And how should we divide the money?' asked Dougal.

Hanbury grinned, which made him look young and endearing (he probably wasn't more than forty anyway, thought Dougal, that impression of maturity is just another mask). ‘That's an awkward one, isn't it? You two probably think straight thirds all round would be equitable. Naturally enough, I feel my claim is greater, and that I should get at least half. We should deduct all our expenses from the total beforehand, of course.'

‘Let's compromise,' said Amanda suddenly. ‘It's stupid to quibble at this point. Why don't you take forty per cent and we take thirty per cent each? Or you take fifty per cent. I really don't care that much. I'd much rather argue about the division of these notional thousands over a real dinner.'

‘How splendidly pragmatic,' said Hanbury. Dougal laughed.

‘The diamonds are in Cambridge,' she went on, ‘and one of us has to be there to collect them. I think it'd be best if we did it tomorrow morning. One of us – you'd be best, William – could stay here and tidy up.' Dougal had a vision of him hoovering bloodstains from the coach house floor. ‘Two of us will have to go to Cambridge, because the Escort has to go back there. If James and I sorted things out there, we could be back to collect you by mid-afternoon.'

‘And then to Amsterdam?' asked Hanbury.

‘Why not? We'd have to collect our passports in London, of course.'

‘Fine,' said Hanbury, stroking his chin. ‘We could drop the Lancia there, too. We could fix the air tickets at Cambridge and pick them up at the airport.'

Amanda turned to Dougal. The excitement in her face made her astonishingly pretty. ‘We'll do that, shall we?' She squeezed his hand.

Dougal said, ‘Yes,' because he couldn't think of anything else to say. His earlier doubts about Hanbury seemed absurd, cobwebs spun from insubstantial fears in the privacy of his own mind through which Amanda crashed without even knowing of their existence. The last few days had made him overanxious, he decided. She trusted Hanbury enough to go with him to Cambridge. It was a matter of assessing feelings, in the end, feelings about Hanbury. And Amanda was good at making that sort of judgement, where the opposite sex was concerned, at any rate. She did it naturally, too, without any of those tortuous and frequently ineffectual inquisitions which so often muddied his own feelings about other people. If she trusted Hanbury, then he should trust her intuition.

‘Good.' Hanbury looked relieved. ‘Now we can enjoy ourselves. I booked myself a room by phone at the Crimford Hall Hotel this morning—'

‘That place near Albenham?' asked Dougal.

‘That's the one. It's got quite a reasonable restaurant. You could probably spend the night there, if you wanted to. It's hardly likely to be crowded at this time of year.'

‘No, I don't think so.' Dougal spoke quickly and without thinking. To leave the
Sally-Anne
at this point would be desertion of a kind. He noticed that Amanda had opened her mouth to say something, but closed it as he got in first. Damn, he thought, I should have asked her first. But it was too late. Hanbury was saying he would change in his car and pick them up in the stable yard in half an hour, if that suited them.

‘I've got
nothing
to wear,' said Amanda. By the sound of her voice, this realization brought her closer to panic than anything else in the last five days had managed.

‘G
ood cleaning,' said Hanbury with a grin. ‘We'll bring you a present from Cambridge.'

He looked resplendent in the early morning sunlight, Dougal thought. He was wearing the raglan overcoat and pinstripe suit, the same outfit in which he had garotted Gumper. Confidence and cleanliness shone from his face in equal proportions. Not unlike a middle-aged Apollo, dressed for a day's work at the family firm in the city. Amanda, in a black suit, cream silk blouse and high-heeled black leather boots, lived up to this vision of urban magnificence.

Dougal, on the other hand, in jeans, reefer jacket and Wellington boots, felt seedy and out of place: the ugly duckling or (to put a more hopeful construction on it) Cinderella.

Hanbury climbed into his dark green Rover and started the engine. Amanda kissed Dougal lightly on the cheek and turned towards the Escort, which was parked beside the other car in front of the pockmarked facade of Havishall Place.

He closed the door for her and bent as she rolled down the window.

‘Take care,' they said simultaneously. ‘I will,' continued Amanda. ‘Back about four, probably. I expect we'll have lunch somewhere. Don't worry. We're over the hill, now.'

Dougal smiled. ‘Yes, I know. See you.' Hurry back, I love you, he wanted to add, as the window slid back into its rubber lining at the top of the frame. But the words wouldn't come.

The cars moved in procession down the drive, slowly because of the ruts and potholes. Dougal wriggled his toes in his boots, to remind himself of their existence, and stared at the place where the drive curved out of sight, until the sound of the engines had merged with the morning silence.

Tidying up took less time than he had anticipated, largely because Lee and Tanner had been laudably moderate in the quantities of their blood which they had allowed to be spilled.

Once it was done, he found that tidying had become an obsession. He spent an hour pottering around the
Sally-Anne,
washing up, coiling ropes and pumping the bilges.

At eleven, his energy began to falter. He had put the kettle on to boil some time ago, with the plan of scrubbing the decks. Now it seemed much wiser to use the water for a pot of coffee.

The Harrods bag was still on the starboard berth. Dougal examined its contents; Hanbury had glanced through them last night, but he had taken nothing.

First, he looked at the guns. Lee's
was
a Walther PPK. Tanner had toted heavier metal – a short-barrelled Smith and Wesson Magnum which was nearly twice the weight of the Walther. It couldn't have been comfortable to carry. Perhaps it gave Tanner a sense of security, or perhaps he only used it on expeditions to lonely country places where its size would have been an asset rather than an encumbrance. Dougal preferred not to admit it but he rather liked guns. Not as weapons, but as mechanical instruments which were small enough to understand.