The Birthday Present (16 page)

Those words told him she knew Lloyd had been employed by him on the night of the crash. Two hundred and fifty pounds was the remaining sum to be paid on completion of the mock kidnap. When she said that, Ivor had a quick and vivid picture of himself scooping up the two envelopes from our hall table when Hebe hadn't come. For a moment he said nothing. He was thinking that if she knew about the payment,
what else must she know? Everything, surely. And then, quietly and with a small smile, she confirmed his fears.

“Lloyd told me what you were paying him to do. It looked easy. It would have been but for Dermot's driving. I think I ought to tell you that Lloyd and I were still on—well, friendly terms, but we'd split up, we'd not much feeling for each other anymore. I'm not saying I hadn't loved him once or I wasn't sad when he died, but I couldn't say it devastated me.”

Ivor was only interested in how this affected him. That was natural. “You know all about that night? About how they were supposed to bring her—Hebe—to me?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And you knew how they were meant to pick up Hebe Furnal and not Kelly Mason?”

“Yes. You're going to ask why I didn't go to the police.”

“You could ask me that,” Ivor said.

“If it had been Lloyd who was injured and Dermot who was dead I would have, I'd have wanted to—well, clear him of blame. But Lloyd was dead. And Dermot was unconscious and couldn't speak. I thought that if I said it was a sort of game they wouldn't believe me and, you see …” Here she hesitated, then said quickly, “Lloyd never told me your name.”

Ivor felt as if he'd been struck a heavy blow. It rocked him.
“What?”

“Please don't be cross. It's true. He never told me your name and I never asked.”

“Oh, God,” Ivor said and then, “I won't be cross.”

“Lloyd came over in the morning that Friday to pick up some of his stuff he'd left in my house. He was renting a flat somewhere. He owed me some money—just the amount you owed
him.
He gave it to me and said this MP Nicola Ross had introduced him to was paying him to pick up a girl, put handcuffs and a gag on her, and take her to a house in
Hampstead. The girl would know it was just a game, and he was going to get five hundred pounds for it. I could have asked what MP but I didn't. I wasn't really interested. I just thought it was good money for doing very little, and then Lloyd and I talked about other things.”

“So you'd never have known who I was if I hadn't told you on the phone.”

She smiled. “That's right.”

He knew he had betrayed himself. “What are you going to do?” It was the same question he had asked Jane Atherton and he got much the same answer.

“Do? I don't understand.”

I don't know if there was a long silence after that but it was long enough for Ivor to consider his position, as employers are supposed to say when they're about to give someone the sack. Next day he was due to speak in the Commons on a new aircraft that had just been perfected with a view to its use in the Middle East, should war come. He imagined the police arriving—would they be permitted to enter the department and find him in his office?—and he still being obliged to make the speech, knowing he would be arrested when he left the chamber.

“I made up my mind in those few moments that I'd kill myself,” he said when he told me.

“Don't be ridiculous,” I said.

“No, really. Not possessing a handgun like all those bloody Americans do, I thought I'd hang myself. At home, of course, not in the department.” He gave one of his wild laughs, laid a hand on my arm. “Don't look like that, Rob. It never had to happen.”

He wanted to ask her if she was going to blackmail him or try to blackmail him, but he couldn't bring himself to say the words. A waiter came to their table. Juliet gave him her
order and Ivor, though he felt he couldn't eat a thing, said he'd have the same. Drinking wasn't beyond him, though, and he ordered a bottle of wine without asking her what she'd like. When the waiter had gone he looked at her in despair, his head full of suicide plans. When she had told him her intentions, he thought, he would pay the bill, perhaps empty his pockets and simply put all the money he had on the table, get up and leave. He'd go home, drink half a bottle of whisky, and do the deed, trying not to think about it too much beforehand.

“He's such a drama queen,” Iris said when I told her. “What's the masculine for
diva?”

“It didn't come to that, anyway,” I said. “Of course it didn't. She just said she wasn't going to do anything. It wasn't her business. It was in the past and telling the police or the media wouldn't serve any useful purpose.”

“I imagine he could hardly believe his ears. The trouble with Ivor is he always—well, nearly always—believes the worst of people even when he doesn't know them. Juliet sounds rather nice.”

“She was very nice to Ivor.”

He found he could eat his dinner after all. The wine he had ordered to drown his sorrows or help him on his way to his death now became a celebration drink. Everything was going to be all right. A small setback came while they were eating their main course. It was a case of the good news and the bad news, only neither of them put it like that. The bad news, Ivor said, was that she told him Dermot Lynch had come home, the good that he had no memory of the crash or what had led up to it. Lloyd had told her Dermot was to drive the pick-up car and the two of them had met a couple of times after the Victoria pub meeting and before the birthday present evening. A few weeks after the crash she, Juliet,
had gone to see Mrs. Lynch, solely, it appeared, because she felt sorry for her, and since then had visited her every so often but had never told her about the MP and the kidnap setup. What would have been the point?

“You mean, you went to see her just out of the kindness of your heart?”

“It was no big deal,” she said. “Three stops on the tube. She's a very gentle, simple sort of woman. She's had a lot to put up with. Sean being questioned like that about Sandy Caxton's murder and now Dermot. He'll never be quite right, you know.”

Ivor asked her what that meant.

“He had a lot of brain damage. He can move around and talk a bit and so on, I've seen him, but he'll never work again. Look, it wasn't your fault. It was his. It was he who drove through a red light, not the lorry driver. And he took the gun along. Sean told me. Sean brought the gun back from a package tour to Poland before the Soviets went. Someone sold it to him for a few dollars.”

It was that simple. Sean Lynch hadn't had access to some secret IRA store of firearms. His brother had “borrowed” a souvenir of a foreign trip to give appropriate color to a mock hijack. Ivor imagined them laughing about it together. He had a heady feeling of everything at last going his way. It was over, he thought, forgetting he had felt that way before. Of course there still remained things for him to do. One must be to compensate the Lynch family. He must find a way of paying some sort of pension to Philomena Lynch or perhaps to her son who would never work again. It would be tricky but it could be done. And there was no longer any need for him to obey my injunction not to go near the Lynch family, for both he and Sean Lynch were innocent of any wrongdoing. I think Ivor genuinely believed by this time that
he had done nothing wrong as he basked in the sweet smiles of Juliet Case, contemplated her cleavage, and thought about those ankles, at that time invisible under the table, with no wider a span, he said poetically, than the silver ring his napkin had come in.

Surely with extreme exaggeration, he said she was the only woman he had ever taken out to dinner who thanked him. Perhaps he had forgotten that Hebe hadn't had the chance to thank him as they had never had a meal together. He took Juliet home in a taxi and she invited him in for a drink. A character in Shakespeare says, “Our courteous Antony, whom ne'er the word of ‘No' woman heard speak.” That was Ivor. At any rate, no woman as attractive as Juliet Case had ever heard him say no. It was already eleven, he had a heavy day ahead of him with an important speech to make, but he didn't hesitate. The inevitable happened—inevitable with Ivor, that is, I don't know about her. He didn't stay the night, though, but left at two and was lucky enough to find a taxi at Queen's Park station.

He told us this very discreetly but there was no doubt what he meant. Juliet Case, who had been Lloyd Freeman's girlfriend, had slept with him the first time they met.

“But there you are,” he said airily. “My luck's come back.”

Next morning he sent her two dozen red roses with the always irresistible message that carries an undercurrent of breathless urgency:
When can I see you again?

What answer she made I don't know but he did see her again and again and again. Soon Ivor was in the middle of a full-blown affair with Juliet Case. We nearly quarreled, he and I, when he said he wished, instead of parting with them to Hebe, who hadn't lived to enjoy them, he'd held on to those pearls and given them to Juliet. I told him he was a callous shit, but he was too pleased with himself and her to care.

A
fter all your education,” my mother said. “A sixteen-year-old with no O levels could do that.”

I asked her if it wasn't better for a child to be looked after by an educated woman than by someone who was ignorant of everything but pop music and clothes, but all she said was, a frequent rejoinder, “Oh, you know what I mean.”

It was plain that Gerry didn't want me. He especially didn't want me living in his house. But he needed a nanny for Justin, and Justin, who hadn't liked Grania or Lucy or Emily or the nameless one—whose name, I discovered, was Wendy—seemed now to like me. Second only to Gerry himself, he liked me. This was a mark in my favor in more ways than one. If you were getting married, wouldn't you prefer someone your child liked?

L
ETTING MY FLAT
was fairly easy. I found a tenant within days of advertising, a woman of about my own age called Pandora Flint. She was the fourth prospective tenant I'd
seen. There had been objections on my side or theirs to the other three—two found the place too small for the rent I was asking and the third wanted me to take out my furniture and let her bring hers in—but Pandora seemed all right. She loved the flat and didn't hesitate when I asked her for a deposit and two months' rent in advance. It was a year's lease with an option for renewal she was taking on and that suited both of us. If any problem existed it was that I disliked her on sight.

To look at, she was very much like Hebe. I suppose Hebe's isn't an uncommon type, tall, slim, blond with regular features and long legs. You see them all over the place, two-a-penny, as my mother would say. Hebe had been my friend, so it would have been logical for me to be predisposed to Pandora, but things don't work that way. Hebe had been warm and effusive and demonstrative, a touchy-feely woman; Pandora was cool and distant, with one of those remote whispery voices that sound as if its possessor is just coming out of a trance. None of this mattered to me if she turned out to be a good tenant, as she did. Unfortunately, she was less than perfect in other ways.

I don't know what it was like in other parts of the country but in the district of London where I lived and the district where Gerry lived there were scarcely any waste bins to be found on the streets. Fear of IRA bomb attacks was so great that street bins in which explosives could be placed had all been taken away and so had left-luggage lockers at stations. If I wanted to dispose of Hebe's fetishistic stuff before I moved into Irving Road, I had to do it at once. Unthinkable to take them with me to my new home. I would have to put them into the bag in my own kitchen bin and take the bag down to one of the dustbins that permanently stood outside the front door common to all six flats. The idea of this troubled me a
lot. At the beginning of January, the man called Michael in one of the ground-floor flats had rung my bell and, when I answered, held up the small plastic carrier I had put in one of the dustbins ten minutes before. I recognized it at once and was perfectly aware of its contents before he told me.

“I was sure you didn't mean to throw away a Christmas pudding in a basin,” he said, “and a dozen mince pies and a present which hasn't been opened.”

“On the contrary,” I said, “I intended to throw them away and I did. Perhaps you'd be kind enough to put them back where they came from.”

Considering the indignation I felt, not to say anger, I think I'd been very moderate in what I said. Later on I checked the dustbins and neither the carrier nor its contents were there. No doubt, he'd eaten my mother's Christmas pudding and mince pies and given whatever was in the package that my aunt had sent me to his girlfriend. But I dared not risk anything like that happening again, not when you consider what would be in the bag this time. Spiked dog collars and lace-up boots and corselettes aren't the kinds of things you can take to the Oxfam shop. Eventually, the day before I left for Irving Road and when all my stuff was packed in the car ready to go, I went to the luggage shop in Kilburn High Road and bought a sturdy suitcase that locked.

When I got back to the flat the window cleaner had come. He always turns up without warning and needs to go inside the first-floor flats and the two on this floor. Mummy says they used to climb up ladders to reach the windows and, if the inside wanted doing, people cleaned their own. Those days are gone, I tell her, it's a question of health and safety. This window cleaner is called Stu, short for Stuart, I suppose. If he's got a surname I've never heard it. He's coarse and rude and intrusive and once he asked me why I didn't
grow my hair. I would look a lot better with long hair, he said in his charming way.

He took an incredibly long time cleaning my three windows and while he was doing it he stared at me a lot. I couldn't start on transferring Hebe's things into my new suitcase while he was there, because he'd see all her kinky stuff and comment on it. I can imagine the kind of thing he'd say, though I'd rather not. So I had to sit about and pretend to read a book. His charges go up every time and we haggled about the cost but he won. He always does.