Split Code (8 page)

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Bunty placidly. ‘Come and see. I told him you’d just saved Sukey’s life. Grover’s always trying to do Sukey in. He tried to take off her head once with the can opener. This is where the toys are.’

She had led the way back to the day nursery, which was a large over-warm room with armchairs, TV and spotless vinyl tiles patterned like games boards. Half of one wall was blackboard and the other half pinboard, covered with bits of paper scrawled on by Grover. All the other wall space, apart from the windows, was patterned with numbers, letters, animals and friezes from Disneyland. Bunty pressed a stud and the Lady and the Tramp slid aside, revealing a cavernous cupboard crammed with teddies, pandas, elephants and dogs in flare-resistant plush with safety-locked noses and eyes.

Grover’s wall let down in sections to show a complete electric railway, a farm, an Apache fort and a theatre with puppets and scenery. He had dress-up clothes and plasticine and planes and board games and jigsaws. Elsewhere there was a typewriter, a record player, paper, brushes, crayons, pencils and big pots of paint.

The last cupboard revealed party games, balloon packs and masks. Also a life-sized gorilla, angularly disposed on a shelf, who climbed down and embraced Bunty with vigour. ‘Hugo!’ said Bunty crossly. The monkey hair, I think, had caught on her earrings.

I was thinking of Scimmia and other, associated recollections when the gorilla took its head off and turning, embraced me without warning also. His head, emerging from the gorilla’s neck, was bald and heavy-jowled, and he had large, long-lashed eyes, a moustache and versatile eyebrows which looked, at present, pained.

‘Miss Joanna is uptight!’ said Hugo Panadek. ‘And in me reposes your reputation! Beautiful girl, you will smile: or I shall tell my friend Comer that this bottle of gin, you have brought and consumed all by yourself.’

‘In two glasses?’ I said.

‘Don’t be silly, Hugo,’ said Bunty. She was still cross. ‘Comer’ll bend his shape.’

‘Dear Bunty,’ said the gorilla. ‘Any change in Comer’s shape cannot but be for the better. Miss Joanna, what are you doing with the Booker-Readmans, who are so correct, and never have any fun unless it is approved by Society?’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I said; though I would. ‘At any rate, they’re not having much fun at the moment. Bunty, I’ve remembered something. Mr Booker-Readman has just lost his most valuable ikon.’

Nobody fainted.

‘His what?’ said Bunty, brightening.

‘Ikon, my illiterate beauty,’ said Hugo Panadek. ‘Its absence will only damage the handsome Simon in his pocket, and perhaps in his magnificent ego.’ He turned to me, unzipping his gorilla. ‘How sad for him. I am delighted to hear it. How was it taken?’

‘It wasn’t,’ I said. ‘He left it in a taxi. Bunty, that thing in the loo was an ikon.”

The plucked eyebrows remained arched under the brown vermicelli ball of her hair. ‘It wasn’t,’ said Bunty. ‘That was a picture. You said so.’

‘Please?’ said Hugo. Bunty produced the fragments, and he examined them. ‘This is an ikon.’ He gazed fondly at Bunty. ‘You wicked girl. You have placed Mr Booker-Readman’s ikon down the lavatory?’

‘You think that’s it?’ said Bunty. She looked, undistressed, at the moist heap on the paper and then calmly bundled it all up again and held it out to me. ‘God knows who bust it, but you’d better let Sultry Simon have a look at it. If it isn’t his, then forget it.’

I opened my mouth to demur. It might be valuable. It might belong to the Eisenkopps, parents or grandfather. Then I thought of what it would do to Grover, and changed what I was going to say. ‘All right, I’ll take it. I’ve got to leave anyway. I’m due a feed in a moment.’

‘Listen, Jo,’ Bunty said.

‘You are hungry?’ said Hugo Panadek.

‘Benedict Booker-Readman is hungry,’ I said. Last time Rosamund made up the feeds, the sod. cit. tablets blocked all the holes in the teats.

‘Listen,’ said Bunty again. ‘I’ve got a day off on Friday.’

‘I’m working,’ I said.

‘I know you’re working,’ said Bunty patiently. ‘But Mrs Eisenkopp’s got a sprained foot. How’s she going to manage with Grover?’

I looked round the walls. ‘Grover needs entertaining?’

‘Don’t be an ass,’ Bunty said. ‘Grover’ll sprint about and slaughter Sukey. I don’t suppose. . .’

‘...I could let him slaughter Benedict instead?’ In Hugo’s presence I didn’t care to say that Grover also had a personality hang-up, wind-burns and a throat infection.

‘Just till five. He wouldn’t be jealous of Ben.’ Bunty’s Liverpudlian wheedle was overpowering.

I had opened my mouth when a short, powerful man in a cardigan entered the room and I recognized, from our moment’s sizzling clash, Grover’s father once more. He said, ‘Do I hear you ask Nurse Joanna to look after Grover?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I could ask Mrs Booker-Readman in any case.’

‘I shall ask,’ said Comer Eisenkopp loudly. ‘This evening.’ He held out his hand. ‘Nurse Joanna. You saved my kid’s life. I made a big mistake about you, and I want you to know it. That’s a bit of paper that says I’m sorry.’

It was a cheque for a hundred dollars. I said, ‘Mrs Booker-Readman’s to be out all this evening,’ gazing at it.

‘If you don’t take it,’ said Comer Eisenkopp, ‘I’ll know I’ve offended you. Bunty says you sterilize all your own bottles.’

I had guessed Bunty bought her feeds ready-made. I said carefully, ‘I just like it that way. Disposable bottles are perfectly sterile, Mr Eisenkopp. And I couldn’t really . . .’ I held out the cheque.

He ignored it. ‘Mrs Eisenkopp and Bunty and I would like you to help us with Grover and Sukey. As a favour. Naturally, we should not show ourselves ungrateful.’

Two jobs was all that I needed. ‘Mr Eisenkopp,’ I said. ‘I’m paid to look after one baby for twenty-four hours a day, five and a half days a week. I couldn’t take Sukey and be fair to both of them. I shouldn’t mind an odd hour with Grover in an emergency, but you’d have to ask Mrs Booker-Readman. And if he misbehaves, I can’t promise not to smack. I don’t mean beat. I mean smack, a couple of times on the bottom.’

That, I reckoned, got me off the hook. He pushed the cheque back in my hand and stood gazing at me, more in frustration than sorrow. ‘You know the Germans have the worst problem of adult violence and child-to-child aggression because their kids get beat up all the time by their parents?’

Eisenkopp. I ask you.

He developed the thesis. ‘Mrs Eisenkopp and I made up our minds long ago. No doctor will ever push his dirty hypodermic into this little flower or her brother. Do you believe in injections, Nurse Joanna?’

I stared at him, but he was serious. I said, ‘I believe child diseases can kill. I’ve been smacked by my father when I deserved it.’

He tried. His lips hung out together as he made the effort. ‘I want you to promise,’ he said, ‘that if you have cause to reprimand Grover, you will tell Mrs Eisenkopp or myself?’

‘Mr Eisenkopp,’ I said, ‘Grover will tell you.’

‘Nurse Joanna,’ said Comer, ‘I’m real glad I met you.’

‘I also,’ said Hugo Panadek. Inside the gorilla skin he was bare to the navel, and the boundary demarcation was not all that evident either. ‘When you are off duty one day, you and I and Bunty will drink vodka together and play with my hypodermics. And if I am bad, you may smack me.’

I left right away. I sometimes wonder which of my two trades is the riskier.

Simon was away and Rosamund was just going out when I got back to the house with my booty. I emptied my pocket on to the hall table among the airmail
Times
copies and shuffled the ikon together.

Rosamund said, ‘What’s that? It doesn’t smell very nice.’

The bandeau she was wearing drew attention to her large open eyes and high cheekbones. She had the kind of fine, sallow skin that flushes easily. It began to turn red as I answered her. It became redder and redder, and then returned to being quite pale. Rosamund Booker-Readman said, ‘You are talking absolute rubbish. Of course that isn’t the ikon my husband lost. Anyone can see it’s some cheap reproduction. Give it me. You’ll give us all typhoid.’

And lifting the whole sopping bundle, she stalked down the basement and as I watched her, thrust the lot into the boiler.

It burned like firewood. When the last chip was consumed she banged the door shut and came upstairs for some handwashing. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Hadn’t you better get on with the feed? Or has Benedict lost his fascination now you’ve met the Eisenkopps?’

I said good-night and I hoped she’d have a pleasant evening. By hook or by crook, I could see, Benedict was going to have to smile at his mother.

I fed him and he cried all the time I was trying to do my ironing. At eight-thirty I gave in and supplied him with a clean nappy and an extra five ounces, upon which he fell asleep instantly. I switched on the baby alarm and went downstairs again to my ironing.

I like being alone. Outside were the spaced lights of the street, and the lines of parked cars, and the dark space where the Carl Schurz Park was, and the blazing edifice next door in which was the Eisenkopp duplex. Distantly one heard, from time to time, the whoop of sirens, or bantering voices, or the music of a transistor. The house itself was very quiet; reproaching the central heating on occasion with a creak from the stairs or the floorboards, or the sounds of the rush-bottomed chair I had used when feeding Benedict.

I had the empty bottle and teat still to wash. I remembered also that the contents of my pocket were still lying on the hall table, where I had pulled out the bundle for Rosamund. I finished the neat pile of white Viyella nightgowns, the pressed matinée jackets, the feeders. I was thinking chiefly of bed as I stuck the ironing board away and went to rinse out the bottle.

Benedict’s voice, crying, blared out of the baby alarm.

I stood, extremely surprised. Warm, fed, dry and exhausted, the child had no reason to wake. Nor was there pain or fright in the wailing: I knew Benedict’s voice in all its limited register. Whatever had roused him, that was the grumble of boredom. It needed no urgent attention and was going to get none from me. He would be asleep before I climbed to the bedroom.

I let him get on with it, and finished cleaning the bottle and teat and shoving them into the sterilizer. Benedict continued to cry. I tidied up, with the sound following me like a persistent seagull from room to room. It didn’t stop.

After ten minutes, the longest I would ever leave a bored baby, I went upstairs to the bedroom I shared with him and eased the door open.

I like babies to get used to the dark, so there wasn’t a light in the room. The crying, unamplified but unabated, followed me to my own bed, where I switched on my bedlamp and turned, chanting nonsense, to Benedict’s corner.

It was empty. In its place was a tape recorder, crying forlornly into the baby alarm.

Then the door closed with a bang, and the main lamp came on like a searchlight.

‘You took your time coming,’ said Johnson.

He was leaning on the wall, in shapeless corduroys, with his hands stuffed into the pockets. His voice was aggrieved.

I said, ‘Where’s Benedict?’ I didn’t know it was going to come out in my nursery school bark until I saw Johnson’s eyes bat behind the bifocal glasses. He looked pained.

‘Asleep in his basket next door. I have put him,’ said Johnson virtuously, ‘in a draught-proof corner with the door ajar in case he wakens.’ He bent and did something to the tape recorder, and the crying ceased. He straightened. ‘And I got in by copying Rosamund’s key when she came for her portrait sitting. Really, you should never trust locks.’

‘Or portrait painters,’ I said. I was reviewing, very rapidly, all that I had left lying about in my room since Rosamund’s first portrait sitting. I said, ‘And the recording? That was ingenious.’

‘Thank you. I bugged the woolly ball I sent Benedict,’ said Johnson cheerfully. ‘And then got Rosamund to bring it with her to the portrait sitting. The monologue was a wow. Do nurses all chat up their infants?’

‘It compensates,’ I said, ‘for the times we keep our mouths shut. What was all that about different boards and different games? And now you’re bugging balls and breaking and entering. Why the big change in policy? What else have you done?’

‘Well, I searched the house while you were doing the ironing,’ said Johnson irritatingly. ‘And if the woolly ball had been in Rosamund’s room. I might have made a killing in blackmail. Tell me all about the Carl Schurz Park snatch.’ I sat down on my bed. ‘Wait a bit. Blackmail? Rosamund isn’t having it off with anybody. Too busy with charity luncheons.’

‘I know Rosamund isn’t having it off’ said Johnson patiently. ‘Although I can’t say I follow your reasoning. But Simon is. That is, on the nights he tells her he’s out on business, he tells the gallery people he’s at home. There’s a woolly ball that could have told us he wasn’t.’

‘Here’s a woolly nanny who can tell you he isn’t, either,’ I said. ‘Maybe he’s just feeling henpecked. Maybe someone’s painting his portrait. You didn’t find a small, valuable article called the Lesnovo ikon when you were hunting through your client’s house, did you?’

There was a pause. ‘Well, go on,’ said Johnson. ‘The paralysed silence means you’ve got my attention.’

‘I wondered,’ I said. ‘Because I’ve just fished up a smashed ikon from Bunty Cole’s loo, and when I brought it over here, Rosamund burned it.’

‘All right,’ said Johnson. ‘You win.’ And sitting down, said politely, ‘Please tell me all that happened in the Carl Schurz Park, followed by all that happened in Bunty Cole’s loo.’ So I did, not missing out Comer or Beverley Eisenkopp, or Sukey and Grover, or Grandfather, or the gorilla-clad Hugo Panadek.

‘Panadek? What nationality’s that?’ Johnson asked.

‘Yugoslav,’ I said. ‘Claims to be an ex-Count from a long line of vampires. I have two questions to ask you. The Department set me up, you set me up, everyone set me up in this job because they hope I’m going to be approached by Mike Widdess’s killers. If I’m the target, who’s gunning for Benedict?’