Holly Lester (10 page)

When she had left, he remained lying on the camp bed, feeling suddenly very tired – he was not sleeping well at night. He must have dozed off, for the next thing he knew he heard voices from the sitting room next door.

‘He's late,' one voice said.

‘No he's not. We're early. Have a drink.'

There was a series of clinks while Billings lay there, thinking furiously. He looked at his watch; he had been asleep for over an hour. His instinct was to jump up and put on his clothes, but since the bed springs creaked he would be heard. There was nowhere to go in any case, because the sitting room stood between him and the flat's front door. Since the door at the end of the room was wide open, he realized he had to counter every impulse and simply lie there, hoping not to be discovered.

The buzzer went. ‘Here he is now,' said one of the voices.

After a minute he heard, ‘Do you know Hamish Ferguson?'

‘I know
of
him, of course, Alan, but we've never met. How do you do?' This was a third voice, dry and deep, very pukka.

‘Would you like a drink?' said Alan, who must be Trachtenberg. He spoke standard RP, with just a faint twang which Billings was coming to see as
de rigueur
among the younger educated classes.

‘No thanks,' said Mr Pukka. ‘I was expecting Mr Lester to be here, too.'

‘Why? We weren't expecting the Baroness, after all.'

‘She didn't see the need, and frankly I didn't want her to take the risk.'

‘What risk? She's not standing for anything anymore.'

‘It's posterity that matters to her now.' The voice grew withering. ‘You chaps have some time to go before that's an issue.'

‘You have to take some things on trust. We've trusted
you
– we wouldn't have sent Harry eight thousand miles to see Murdoch's lot last summer if we didn't.'

‘Fair enough,' the voice said, as if a great concession were being made. ‘Let's get down to business then shall we? We can offer the following: Dowling's report will come out five days before polling, whatever the date. We can guarantee that. You can expect a new witness on the Farquharson cash issue. That needs to be carefully timed – we'll have to watch that very carefully or the witness may scare. And then there'll be something on Nichols.'

‘Jock Nichols?' said the third voice, the man named Hamish Ferguson. It was harsher than that of the other two – English despite the Scots name, but sharp and aggressive. The pukka man must have nodded, for Ferguson continued. ‘We knew there was something funny there – he died a lot earlier than most people think.'

‘Yes, but it's
where
he died that's interesting. His widow's very angry, so the story will stick.'

‘What is the story precisely?' asked Trachtenberg.

‘Let's just say that when he died, he wasn't where he was supposed to be. That's all you need to know for now,' he added with a low chuckle.

‘All right. Now is there anything we should know about that's likely to come out? On our side, that is.'

‘Nothing major. Except,' and the man paused, ‘there has been the odd sniff around your leader's lady.'

Billings felt his adrenalin surge and waited to hear what was said next. There was a long silence, then Trachtenberg said slowly, ‘There's nothing there too damaging. A pretty blameless personal life all the way through. The child, bless him, is a proper little horror, but he's too young to have done anything worse than pinch sweets from his nanny.'

‘It was more the
extended
family I was thinking of. I gather there's a brother.'

Again, there was a long silence. ‘Has someone found him?' Trachtenberg asked.

‘Not that I know of. But someone's trying to.'

‘If you hear anything firm on that, we'd be very grateful if you'd let us know.'

‘Done,' the man said simply.

‘I think that's pretty much it, then,' said Trachtenberg. ‘Anything I've forgotten, Hamish?'

‘It would be good to fix a next meeting.'

‘Why don't we say two weeks' time?' said the pukka man. ‘Same time, same place?'

‘Fine,' said Trachtenberg and Ferguson in unison.

‘I take it this place is safe enough. You said it belongs to Fritz Kimmo.'

There was the slightest of pauses. ‘That's right. So you could always say you were seeing him, and we can always say we're seeing Sally. That's what's nice about a politically hybrid marriage.'

‘As long as no one thinks
I'm
seeing Sally and
you're
seeing Fritz.' The man laughed maliciously. ‘This looks a right little love nest, if you ask me.'

Ferguson laughed. ‘We could probably lend it to you if you like.'

‘I'd better be off.' Mr Pukka seemed less happy being teased than teasing.

‘We'll come with you,' said Trachtenberg, and Billings exhaled slowly with relief. He waited patiently until he heard the front door close, listened for voices (there were none) then shot out of bed and got dressed. He gave it five minutes, then left the building, knowing that – as with the Thatcher memo he'd pocketed – he'd been privy to discussions not meant for his ears. What on earth would he have said if, say, the man named Ferguson had looked into the bedroom and found him lying there?

He saw Holly again the next evening, but decided to say nothing about the episode from the night before. In his mind, he associated it with the Thatcher memo, and since he'd lied to her about that he felt it impossible to tell her the truth about the Trachtenberg meeting. He could tell that Hamish Ferguson was clearly Labour, and Trachtenberg he knew about by now of course, but who was the other man? The Tory spy Holly had mentioned? Possibly, but he sounded too grand for the low level gay Holly had mentioned.

In the following days, as he continued to see her, his thoughts were in any case focused on Holly – on his growing feelings for her, coupled with the burgeoning realization that there seemed no possible real future to his relationship with her. This heightened the
carpe diem
freneticism of their encounters, and made the repeated meetings in those three weeks seem an unreal bonus. ‘I feel as if I've won the Lottery,' said Billings one evening as he undressed her. She flashed a smile with complicit feeling, then frowned. ‘Even Lottery money runs out,' she said sadly.

And so he was not altogether surprised in the third week of their nightly – or really daily, since it was always early evening and in spring still light outside – assignations, when, as he lay talking quietly with Holly about Sebastian, her little boy, that he heard the front door of the flat open and shut, then a pair of shoes march in a quick and clicking pace across the sitting room floor. There was a knock on the door, Billings pulled the covers over them both, and the tall figure of Alan Trachtenberg entered the room. He looked once, witheringly, at Billings, then addressed himself to Holly.

‘You had better get dressed, my dear,' he said, with no affection in his voice.

‘What's happened?' she asked, sounding scared.

‘The press are everywhere and Harry's waiting for you to return from your personal trainer.' He resolutely didn't look at Billings. ‘Come on,' he said, spitting the words, ‘get a move on. That sad Tory cunt's called a General Election. In six weeks' time, if you listen to me, you'll be living in Downing Street.'

He couldn't tell how the picture had been stolen, or exactly when. Tuesday morning he went downstairs to unlock the vault room, and immediately noticed the empty space on the wall, low down in the corner. A single picture hook remained, forlornly.

The missing picture was a Burgess watercolour, a lovely landscape of the Vale of the White Horse, using improbable colours (orange for a meadow, a sinuous green for a stream in the foreground) that somehow worked. A snip at £750, though now it seemed someone had got it for free. Why steal this, when upstairs a Tyson fetched twenty times that, and a Leonard Starker near the gallery's front was even dearer still? In fact, you would have been hard pushed to find a cheaper picture for sale in the whole of the spring show.

He opened the door to the vault room, thinking hard. The Burgess had been hanging there the day before at closing – he was sure he would have noticed the gap on the wall when he went to lock the vault room. So it must have gone in the night, and he opened the vault room with trepidation, expecting its window to be broken, the metal covering bars cut, the room's contents gone.

But nothing was amiss. The window was undisturbed, locked and safely barred; the canvases stacked against the wall looked very much like the same canvasses there when he had locked up sixteen hours before. The only odd item was a tin of Coke, half-empty, sitting on a counter top.

He took this with him upstairs and showed it to Tara when she came in. ‘You left this downstairs,' he said.

She shook her head immediately. ‘Never touch the stuff. Too much sugar, too much exploitation of innocent Third World appetites. I'd ban it, if it were up to me.'

‘I found it in the vault room. If it isn't yours, who's been in there?'

Tara shrugged. ‘No one that I know of. Maybe Mrs D'Olivera.'

The cleaner, but she'd left before he'd shut up shop. ‘Well, unless you've sold the Burgess downstairs, someone's gone and pinched it.'

‘Sold the Burgess? You don't mean the one your friend Mrs Lester bought?' He shook his head. ‘You mean the watercolour?' She looked at him with the mixture of incredulity and pity that entered her voice when any watercolour was the subject of discussion.

‘I think I'd better phone the police.' Now she looked at him with even greater amazement. He could see why: half a tin of Coca-Cola and an unoccupied picture hook would seem insufficient reason to ring Inspector Plod.

But what else could he do? he asked himself as a customer approached and saved him from further ridicule by asking Tara for help. Billings walked downstairs and went into the vault again. He examined the paintings stacked against the wall one by one; halfway through them, he found the Burgess.

The non-theft was not the only odd occurrence, and Billings had found the usually sedate routine of his professional life punctured by a succession of unsettling events. He had arrived one morning to find a large brick on the pavement outside the gallery, and a visible dent in the metal grill that shielded the gallery's window panes during the night. Then his post had arrived the next morning with a note from the Bolivian jewellers next door, explaining it had been mistakenly delivered there. When Billings had popped his head in at the neighbouring shop to say thank you, he had discovered that neither the receptionist nor the proprietor had any idea what he was talking about.

And then one evening he had found Marla on his doorstep off the Goldhawk Road, holding the lead of an uncharacteristically healthy-looking Sam. ‘Yes, Marla,' he greeted her testily.

‘It's not what you think,' she said.

‘What is it then?'

‘I just thought you should know. Three times now I've seen a van parked just here,' she said motioning at the kerb. ‘One time the driver was knocking on your door. I thought he must be trying to deliver something, but when I asked if I could help he said no. He wasn't very nice about it.'

Billings said nothing, trying to interpret this new information. Marla mistook this for his by now habitual annoyance. ‘Sometimes I bring Sam this way on his walk, but I'm not spying on you, honest. I just want to see if you're okay,' she said, and her voice faltered slightly. ‘I won't walk by here if you'd rather I didn't.'

For once he found himself feeling sorry for her. ‘I don't mind if you walk this way, Marla. Honestly, I don't mind at all. And thanks for telling me. If you see this man again, could you let me know? And try and take the registration number?'

Inside he found nothing sinister in the flat. The obvious targets of burglary were undisturbed – his television, the silver (such as it was), some cash in the bedside table drawer. He opened the Andrew Wyeth volume carefully, found the document he had so rashly lifted from the Wigmore Street flat, then breathed easy on all counts.

Surely these mysteries were connected with Holly, but quite how he was at a loss to explain – and there seemed little chance of getting any explanation from her. He had not seen her since Alan Trachtenberg had announced the General Election from the far end of the Wigmore Street bed. When Trachtenberg had withdrawn to wait for Holly in the foyer downstairs, she and Billings had dressed quickly. ‘I'm awfully sorry,' Billings had said, putting on his trousers.

‘What about?'

‘Getting caught like this.'

Holly had said caustically, ‘Don't worry. There isn't much Alan doesn't know.'

So he had known about the use to which they put his flat. ‘You can trust him then?'

‘Trust Alan? You must be joking. Put it this way: I have as much on him as he has on me. That's the best reason I can think of to “trust” anyone.' She picked up her handbag. ‘I'd better leave first, in case there are any reporters outside.'

‘All right. I'm not sure it's even worth asking when I'll see you again.'

She shook her head. ‘It's all systems go for the next six weeks. After that, we'll just have to see. I'll ring you, though. And you've got my mobile number.'

‘I'd be scared to use it.'

She came over and straightened his tie. ‘Wish us luck then.'

He kissed her softly and she shivered, then pushed him gently away with both hands. He said, ‘I wish
you
luck. And love.'

She looked at him tenderly. ‘I know you do. Bye-bye for now.'