The Birthday Present (13 page)

“This man is Dermot Lynch's brother?”

“The very same. Things would be bad enough if it came out that I'd employed Dermot and Lloyd Freeman to snatch Hebe, but that's nothing compared to my being connected with the brother of a known member of the IRA and Sandy's assassin.”

He reminded me that the Conservative Party loathed the IRA and had done so ever since the horrors of the Brighton bombing. It was impossible to overestimate the disastrous results of anyone connecting him with Sean Lynch.

“Or any of the Lynch family,” I said.

“I know.”

“See you do know, Ivor. Last week you were telling us about going to the flats where the Lynches live and about your dreams.”

He took a deep draft of his Merlot, which is probably some thing else ministers aren't supposed to do when they may be going to speak. “They were dreams. That's all they were. I won't go near the Lynches again. I'll bear it in silence.”

He gave a wild sort of laugh. People turned round and someone, a woman, smiled and raised her eyebrows.

Soon after that the division bell rang. He finished his drink and said, “It's a funny thing but I'll always remember it, the division bell ringing when I first met Hebe and repeating her phone number over and over and going to vote and writing the number down.” He gave a sort of sigh, half despair, half exasperation. “I won't do anything silly, Rob,” he said, and was gone.

There was a lot he didn't tell me that night. He had in fact already been back to William Cross Court and plunged himself even more deeply into what he'd called the sorry mess. But it was not until weeks later that I learned this.

H
E HAD PROMISED
not to go near the Lynches again. Perhaps by that he had meant only that he wouldn't speak to Sean Lynch, some thing he could hardly have done while Sean was in custody. But I don't know. Anyway, he broke his promise. You have to understand that to go there at all was almost impossibly difficult for him when the Commons was sitting. A minister, even a junior minister, is expected to be attending all those meetings, chatting to his coterie of fans, picking up gossip or, in the latter part of the day, in the division
lobby to vote. His job isn't like that of some other professional who can easily take two hours off here or there once he has reached a certain status. But that autumn there was a conference he attended in Brighton—not the Conservative Party conference, that had taken place a month before in Bournemouth, but something to do with aircraft production and technology. He was taking part in a brains trust and next day speaking to a group about the vital importance of a certain kind of bomb being used by Air Power (or some such thing). Once that was done he came back briefly to London. He had been taken to Brighton in his government car but he couldn't use that for this clandestine visit. A train took him to Victoria and from there he got the tube up to Warwick Avenue.

It's hard to say why he went, what he hoped to accomplish. When the time came for him to tell me, he said he didn't know. I expect a psychologist would say that someone with an obsession needs to keep its object within his sight as much as he can. He needs it not just in his mind but as concrete visible substance. In his case the concrete, in more ways than one, was William Cross Court.

He had thought about this a great deal. I might say that he thought about little else. The same fears and hopes and speculations went round and round in his head before he spoke at the conference and when he'd finished speaking, when he was having a drink at the hotel bar, when he was having dinner and, most of all, incessantly, horribly repetitively, while he was alone in his bedroom at night. He knew it had to stop. If he wasn't to have some sort of breakdown he had to put an end to it. In spite of all objections and all warnings, in spite of her son Sean still being questioned down the road at Paddington Green police station, the only way was to speak to Philomena Lynch.

He had decided to introduce himself and tell her that Dermot had serviced his car and he had been increasingly concerned about him. He would say he knew he should have come before but his unwillingness to intrude on family troubles had held him back. Now, because he happened to be in the neighborhood, he had remembered her address and had come on an impulse to inquire after Dermot.

This sounds so transparently false—what was wrong with the phone?—that one wonders why a man of Ivor's intelligence could have considered it. It looks too such a foolhardy act, so near to career suicide after what he had promised, that when he did tell me I found it almost beyond belief. But he came up with an explanation I could very nearly understand. He said it was like some game where you cast a dice and the whole of your fortune and your future hangs on your throwing a six. In fact, the odds in his case were much lower. If he threw a six Philomena Lynch would talk to him and tell him her son would never regain consciousness and she was considering switching off the life support. He would be off the hook, all would be well, the agony of the last months would be over. Other outcomes of his throw would be that she refused to talk to him, that she talked and told him Dermot was getting better; and, worst of all, that as he improved Dermot had told her he had something he wanted to talk to the police about.

It was worth risking one of those three possibilities for the prospect of getting a six. I suppose this is the way all gamblers think. The six is such a glorious result, the ultimate peace of mind. If I'd ever experienced months of unbroken anxiety, Ivor said, I'd know what he was talking about. But while he was thinking like this, climbing the stairs at William Cross Court, between the graffiti-daubed walls, he was also castigating himself for the enormity of his
mindset, that he was hoping and longing for another man's death.

In the event, he never went into the flat. He never asked Philomena Lynch about Dermot or even talked to her. Because, as he reached the third flight, he heard footsteps behind him. They were the footfalls of a woman wearing high-heeled shoes. Unlikely that this was Mrs. Lynch but he didn't want to chance it, for he was still, after all these hours and days of heart-searching, uncertain how to begin what he had to say to her. So he went on up the fourth flight, as he had done before, and again, as he had done before, paused at the top and looked down. The woman who came to the top of the third flight, crossed the landing and rang the Lynch doorbell, was Lloyd Freeman's ex-girlfriend.

He had seen her only once before and that had been at Nicola Ross's party, when she and Lloyd were still together. But he knew her at once. She was a beautiful woman, generously made but not at all fat, with nearly perfect features and a mass of thick, dark, curly hair. Somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties. The long skirt she wore, red with a pattern of black swirls, just skimmed very fine, delicate ankles. You could see, Ivor said, irrepressible womanizer that he was, what the Victorians meant when they got excited by a glimpse of ankle. Lloyd Freeman's girlfriend glanced up and saw him just as the front door opened, but plainly she didn't recognize him.

It was a fine day for mid-November, sunny but rather cold. Ivor went downstairs and somewhere in the gardens of William Cross Court found a seat beside a bed of straggly geraniums. He sat down to wait for the woman to come out.

W
hen half an hour had passed and she hadn't come out Ivor began an internal argument with himself. What was he going to say to her when she did appear? Introduce himself? She might know the whole story of the birthday present or part or none of it. What he must not do was assume, as he had begun to do, that she and Mrs. Lynch were conferring up there as to how to expose him or even get some sort of compensation out of him. The chances were that this woman—had Lloyd ever called her by her name in his hearing?—had got to know Mrs. Lynch because she sympathized with her. They were, after all, more or less in the same boat. Lloyd had been killed and Dermot terribly injured in the same car accident. Nothing could be more natural than that the tall dark woman with the perfect ankles had befriended Dermot's unfortunate mother.

But there was no point in his waiting for her, was there? He couldn't go up to her and ask how Dermot was, for he was sure now that this was what they must be talking about up there in flat 23. He didn't know her and she didn't know
him. She might be hours. Wouldn't it be best to leave now, return to the conference, or just go home? And continue to suffer agonies each time he opened a newspaper or a journalist spoke to him? This was all very well, but it's my opinion that at least part of his reason for waiting was that the woman was attractive. She was far more attractive, she was more beautiful, than he remembered from that previous sighting. And however fraught with anxiety he might have been, Ivor was Ivor.

As it happened, he had no longer to wait. After she had been in there three-quarters of an hour she came out of the entrance to the flats. She came out quite briskly and, not looking in his direction, walked into the street and off toward Warwick Avenue tube station. He got up from his seat and followed her.

I
VOR TOLD ME
that if she had looked back and seen him or had noticed him as they went down into the station and approached the escalators, he'd have given up the idea of following her. But she didn't look back. She must have had a return ticket. He hadn't. He bought one at the ticket window, the most expensive on offer, because he had no idea how far she would go. At the foot of the escalator he turned first to the platform where trains are southbound, but she wasn't there. He spotted her at the far right-hand end of the northbound platform.

The areas this part of the Bakerloo Line reached were unknown territory, Queen's Park, Kilburn Park, Willesden Junction. Nowhere near West Hendon, as far as he knew. This was the sort of thing he was proud of not knowing. For someone like Gerry Furnal not to know where Jermyn Street was or the Carlton Club betrayed him as a dowdy
provincial, while Ivor's ignorance of the whereabouts of Willesden Junction station only showed his urbanity. Well, the train came in and he got into the carriage next to the one Freeman's ex-girlfriend was in. He began to be conscious then of the unreality of what he was doing, a Minister of the Crown, a Member of Parliament, tailing someone like a disreputable private eye. And he was constantly aware that the whole thing was undignified, base, he should stop, give up; but he didn't. He stayed in the train until at Queen's Park he saw her walk past his window. Quickly he got out and followed her onto the street. Still she didn't look back.

He tried to remember the area code of the phone number Lloyd had given him but he had never used it and he knew only that it was one preceded by the digits 081. Had Lloyd and she lived together or been lovers with separate homes? He castigated himself now for not finding out her name when he had seen her at that party. But why would he have? He had no idea then what the future held. If anyone had told him then that he'd be desperate to talk to this woman he wouldn't have believed them.

For the first time, she looked round and saw him behind her, a long way behind. Did she recognize him? If so, she gave no sign. She was leading him toward what he supposed must have been Queen's Park itself, or rather to a street running along one side of it, a place of small semidetached houses, neat, quite attractive. At number 34 she turned in at the gate, put her key in the front door lock, let herself in, and closed the door behind her.

There were two bells on the left-hand side of that front door: the lower one was marked J. Case, the upper John Dean-Upwood. As he turned away, he paused inside the gate and looked back at what must be her window. She was standing between the half-drawn curtains, watching him.
He almost ran. He had to tell himself that she would only think he had been delivering something or even had come to the wrong house, and controlling himself, he walked quite slowly away.

Back in the flat in Old Pye Street, he looked up J. Case in the phone book and saw that the number he had for Lloyd was the same. So they had lived there together. It was five in the afternoon. He poured himself a generous gin and tonic, drank it, and went back on the train to the conference.

I
N LONDON AGAIN,
he set about getting in touch with Freeman's former girlfriend. First of all he made inquiries of Nicola Ross, taking her out to dinner and picking her brains.

“What does the J stand for?”

“Juliet. A tad fanciful, don't you think, darling? She used to be married to Aaron Hunter.” Of course Ivor knew the name. He had seen Hunter on the stage, as we all had, but notably when he and Nicola appeared opposite each other in a revival of
Private Lives.
“She's an actor.” Nicola never said “actress.” “But she doesn't get much work. God knows what she lives on. She and Lloyd had been together two or three years but they'd split up a while before he was killed.” Then she said rather sharply, “Why do you want to know? Have you met her somewhere?”

Ivor hadn't got as far as thinking up a plausible reason for making these inquiries. He said lamely, “I saw her at your party. When Lloyd was killed I thought about her. I wondered if there was anything I could do for her.”

I've sometimes thought that Ivor and Nicola Ross ended their affair because Nicola was too astute to suit him in the long term. She would have seen through him. Ivor was quite ruthless enough, when embarking on what he intended to
be a permanent relation ship, to foresee a time when he might want to start an affair with someone else. From the first, Nicola would have been on to him. His apparently artless speculation as to how he could help Juliet Case didn't deceive her.

“I've never seen you as a philanthropist, darling. I suppose you fancy her. Are you talking about giving her money? Compensation for losing Lloyd, would it be?”

He must have winced a bit at her directness. “Well, I don't suppose anyone else thinks of her.”

“You can't know that. Anyway, I told you. He'd scarpered weeks before. What are you planning to do? Schlep over to Queen's Park with a check for a thousand quid?” She fixed on him her penetrating stare. “It's not as if you had anything to do with the crash, darling, or did you? I've always found it hard to—well, equate abduction with what I knew of Lloyd.”