This Other Eden (49 page)

Ruth
crossed to the dresser and, opening the bread bin, she took out a tiny two-way
radio.

‘Rosalie’s
old unit are back in the Partry Mountains. They have a new commander. Sean and
I have known him for years. He’s a good fighter, and loyal to Rosalie, although
she never liked him. The poor fellow was terribly injured and it’s made him
rather moody.’

Judy
feared the worst.

‘This
guy’s name… it wouldn’t by any chance be Saunders, would it?’

Rude
awakening.

Rosalie must have fallen
asleep because she woke up with a start to find Jurgen Thor standing beside
her, gently running his fingers through her hair. He was still stark naked and
it was quite clear that he was pleased to see her. Rosalie had slumped forward
in her chair and had been resting her head on her arms on the table. Hence
Jurgen’s erection was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes.

‘Congratulations,
Jurgen. If I had a medallion I’d hang one on it, now put it away. I have
something quite incredible to talk to you about.’

‘I
don’t want to talk, babe, OK?’ Jurgen replied, his words still slightly slurred
with sleep, booze and pills, ‘I want to make love.’

‘Jurgen,
this idiocy has gone far enough,’ Rosalie said firmly, ‘I have to talk to you
about Plastic Tolstoy.’

Jurgen
Thor looked at Rosalie for a moment, and even in that moment his eyes became a
little clearer. He took up a robe which had been dropped upon the kitchen floor
and covered himself. He did not reply until he had made himself a cup of coffee
and cleared his head a little.

‘What
about Plastic Tolstoy?’ he said finally. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of
bringing up that stuff about the funding again, OK? If you don’t like what you
hear then you shouldn’t ask questions. We discussed it, right? It’s a secret we
can never tell, and the subject is closed.’

‘No,
it’s not about the funding, Jurgen. Something much, much nastier than that.
Believe me, Plastic Tolstoy’s pragmatism goes a deal further than funding a
few greenies. That man will do anything, and I mean quite literally anything,
to sell a Claustrosphere.’

‘And
what do you mean by that?’ Jurgen asked.

‘I mean
that Plastic Tolstoy has been wreaking his own private environmental holocaust,
Jurgen, and I have proof.’

Jurgen
stared at Rosalie. She was so young and pretty. Just as Scout had been. It
seemed that now there would be two beautiful innocents to deny him rest and
haunt his dreams.

‘This
sounds most fascinating, baby,’ Jurgen said. ‘We should not discuss it here,
anyone might come in. They are fools, but even fools can tell tales. Come down
to my study.’

‘The
dead menagerie?’ said Rosalie, recalling all the animal heads.

‘Yes,
that’s right. The dead menagerie.’

And,
taking Rosalie gently by the arm, Jurgen Thor led her out of the kitchen and
down the stairs into the bottom floor of the house, to his study, with its
stuffed animals, antler chairs and its trap-door.

Unlikely
comrades.

Even above the sound of
the helicopter blades beating at the air, Judy could hear the sound of grinding
teeth emanating from inside the bag which Saunders was, of course, wearing over
his head.

‘I
don’t mind telling you,’ said Saunders, finally giving his teeth a rest. ‘When
I walked in and found out that it was you that I was supposed to help, I nearly
shot you there and then. In fact, it was only out of deference to Rosalie’s
gran that I didn’t.’

Saunders,
it must be remembered, was a scouser and there are certain codes on Merseyside,
one of which is to try and avoid upsetting people’s grannies.

‘That
was very nice of you,’ Judy said, attempting to sound ingratiating. Even though
Saunders appeared to have accepted Judy’s story, he still made Judy nervous.

‘It’s a
pretty incredible theory, Schwartz,’ Saunders said. ‘If it’s the truth then
everything’s shit, you know that, don’t you? The whole world’s pointless and we
might as well give up because it’s all a fucking joke.’

‘Yes, I
suppose that’s true,’ Judy admitted.

‘Well,
I just hope you’re right, that’s all, because this is the unit helicopter and
let me tell you I’m breaking a lot of rules just taking it like this.’

Judy
found Saunders’s attitude strange, but he did not say so. He found most things
about Saunders strange and if he had started mentioning them all he would have
been at it all night. Besides, Judy was too anxious to want to make
conversation. It had taken two hours for Ruth to get hold of Saunders and
another one and a half for Saunders to get to the cottage. What with the start
Rosalie had on them in the first place, that put her about six hours ahead.
Judy could only hope that somehow she had got delayed, or had put off confiding
in Jurgen for some reason. If she had not, then she was probably already dead
and the vital Ansaf one tape, which was their only proof against Plastic
Tolstoy, lost forever. There was no copy, the recording was contained within a
micro-chip inside the machine, not the easiest thing to reproduce. Judy had
been hoping to make a copy of sorts at Ruth and Sean’s by playing back the
message and videoing the playback, but to his amazement Ruth and Sean had no
video. Rosalie had said that she would make a copy of the tape at Jurgen Thor’s
place.

The
message is murder.

‘I think we should make a
copy of this right now,’ said Rosalie to Jurgen. ‘Do you have a video camera?’

‘What?
Oh, yes… Of course I have.’

Jurgen
was distracted. He was more than distracted, he was stunned. Taped evidence of
Plastic Tolstoy confessing to poisoning seas. Taped evidence of Tolstoy
attempting to organise a film star’s murder. This was dynamite indeed. Jurgen
had expected nothing so spectacularly damning when Rosalie set up Max’s little
answering machine. Indeed, for a moment, he thought that the whole thing must
be a joke.

‘This
is the most important bit of recording you will ever see in your life,’ Rosalie
said with deadly earnestness. ‘It’s the ultimate smoking gun.’

She
pressed playback and immediately a very beautiful women in a tiny, skin-tight
mini-dress had appeared on the screen.

‘Max.
Haven’t seen you in a while. Call me,’ the stunning beauty said, adding, ‘I
had the hammock repaired, by the way.’

Jurgen
looked at Rosalie and grinned. She, of course, coloured bright red.

‘Hang
on a minute,’ she said, ‘this isn’t it.’

A
second and third girl appeared on the little screen, wearing similarly minimal
clothing and leaving similarly seductive messages. Then Geraldine, Max’s agent,
popped up.

‘Max?
Are you back yet? You will not believe the
shit
I’ve been fielding for
you while you’ve been away, but you don’t need to hear about that. Leave it
with me, OK?’

There
were more girls, one even wearing a bikini, despite clearly being indoors.
Jurgen grunted appreciatively, Rosalie chewed her lower lip. The bikini girl
pouted that she had heard about Max’s divorce from Krystal and guessed he must
be lonely.

‘How
about dinner?’ she breathed over her cleavage. ‘I haven’t had a really good
nibble for ages.’ She then began to move her video phone all around her body,
offering close-ups of her artificially tanned flesh. Just as she was about to
drop the phone down into the briefs of her swimming costume, Rosalie got up and
hit fast-forward.

‘It’s
obviously further down the tape than I’d realised,’

Rosalie
said crossly. Of course Max could hardly help who phoned him up, but those girls
seemed awfully familiar, and what’s more, he must at some point have given them
his number. It is never any fun for a husband or wife to bump into evidence of
their partner’s past. Rosalie felt particularly hot under the collar, since her
own past consisted of exactly two affairs (not counting Jurgen). If Max ever
came across an old Ansafone tape of hers, he could play it at the next Sunday
School fête, a fact which Rosalie found herself resenting.

‘I was
enjoying that,’ Jurgen Thor complained as the tape whizzed on.

‘Never
mind that, Jurgen,’ Rosalie assured him. ‘This will really grab your interest.’

And of
course it did. Although not in the manner that Rosalie had presumed.

Having watched the tape,
Rosalie suggested that they video record it, as that was the only means they
had at present of producing a copy. Jurgen pondered a moment and then agreed.

‘Certainly
we must video record it, baby,’ he said. ‘I have a camera here in my desk.
Would you be so kind as to carry the machine over to that far wall, the light
is better there and there are no distractions in the background. Just put it on
the floor.’

Somehow
Jurgen felt easier about it this time. Yes this girl was young and she was
innocent, but not like Scout had been. Nor was she so naïve. This girl was a
tough fighter, just like he was. She knew the stakes and had voluntarily chosen
to bring the battle to him.

Jurgen
Thor did not think that he would cry this time.

Rosalie
picked up her husband’s Ansafone and began to cross the floor with it. Walking
the same condemned walk that Scout had walked before her.

Chapter
Twenty-Seven

The End

The
trap-door opens.

Judy and Saunders did not
have quite so long to wait up on the roof as Rosalie. Most of the party-goers
in Jurgen’s bedroom had roused themselves by the time the two men arrived, and
a single knock had solicited a response. It was morning and the girl that
opened the door for them had donned a sarong.

‘Hi.
You’re just in time for breakfast,’ she said. ‘Hot croissant and drugs, want
some?’ The girl did not say so, but she felt that Jurgen had rather let the
side down with these two. It was just presumed that anybody coming to one of
these functions would be beautiful, and the two men on the roof were most
definitely not. At least the nerd wasn’t and the other one had a bag over his
head which did not bode well at all. The beautiful girl in the sarong made a
mental note not to get stuck anywhere near either of them if things began to
get going again, which they just might, once the breakfast drugs had kicked in.

‘Where’s
Jurgen Thor?’ asked Judy, as he and Saunders pushed their way past the girl and
into the house.

Standing
at the top of the spiral staircase, the scene which greeted them was slightly
less decadent than the one which Rosalie had encountered on the previous
evening. However, slightly less decadent than that still meant pretty decadent,
especially to the likes of Judy and Saunders. They were momentarily lost for
words, finding themselves faced with a room full of half-naked people nibbling
at drugs, drink, brekky and each other in an extremely spaced out manner.
Trying not to stare, Judy cast his eyes around the room. Neither Rosalie nor
Jurgen were anywhere to be seen.

‘Uhm,
excuse me everybody,’ Judy mumbled, ‘sorry to burst in on you like this, but
does anybody know where Jurgen Thor is?’

‘He was
here a few minutes ago,’ said the girl in the sarong.

‘Yeah.’
A voice came from the bed. It was the girl who had tried to touch up Rosalie in
the night. ‘He went off to find that uptight redhead chick. I don’t think he’ll
get very far there.’

The
suggestion that Rosalie had possibly been alive as late as a few minutes ago
spurred Judy on and, followed by Saunders, he ran down the spiral staircase,
past the bedroom and further into the house. They passed the ablutions floor
where jolly squeals of glee were to be heard emanating through the steam of the
spa baths and power showers. They passed the kitchen, where a couple of
slightly more together souls were making coffee.

‘That’s
Rosalie’s coat!’ Saunders shouted, spotting the combat jacket that was hanging
over a chair.

A floor
below them, in the study, Rosalie herself had crossed the floor and was now
standing on the trap-door, the answering machine in her arms.

‘Where
do you want me to put it?’ she inquired.

‘I want
you to take it with you, baby. Ciao, good looking,’ Jurgen replied and his hand
moved towards the deadly lever.

Just
then, the door of the study burst open and Judy stood in the doorway with
Saunders behind him. Jurgen paused, his hand hovering over the switch which
would consign Rosalie to the chasm below.

‘Rosalie!’
Judy said. ‘Thank God, you’re alive!’