It was a large detached property with a low front wall and a well-tended garden. There was a gravel driveway, and a Volvo estate parked by the front entrance.
Bel squeezed my arm. ‘Is this the sort of place you want to live?’
I thought about it. I wanted a penthouse in Manhattan, so I could look down on an entire city, like holding it in my open hand.
‘Maybe,’ I said.
There was a nameplate by the garden gate, but I deflected Bel’s attention by pointing to some trees across the road. Maybe she wouldn’t have noticed the name anyway, not that Ricks is such a common name.
They were Eleanor Ricks’s parents.
This was where she’d been born. Just over forty years ago. I’d read that much in the papers. Her parents had been eloquent after her murder. They weren’t in favour of the death penalty, even for terrorists. That was big of them.
Bel and I made love that night under our canopy. The room was costing £85 a day, including Full English Breakfast. My reserves were pretty low. Soon, I’d have to raid my Swiss account. Bel had posed the question of jobs. She thought she could get work as a secretary or something. And maybe I could... well, there’d be something I could do.
Sell burgers maybe, or stack supermarket shelves, like Hoffer had suggested.
We made love, as I say, and she went to sleep. I got dressed again and went down the stairs. The bar was still busy with Saturday night spenders, but nobody saw me as I passed into the night.
I walked through the village. Even at night it was picturesque, all hanging baskets and tile roofs, distant hills and low stone walls.
The walls around the cemetery were high though. The Real England had no place for death. Even so, I was coming here to pay my respects. The gate was unlocked, so I pushed it open. The wrought iron swung open in silence.
It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. There were still fresh flowers on Eleanor Ricks’s grave. I stood there for a while, shuffling my feet, hands deep in my pockets. I wasn’t really thinking anything. After about five minutes, I left the cemetery again.
Her parents’ place was just up the hill.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank The Haemophilia Society, and especially Alan Weir, for help with details of some aspects of haemophilia. Those who require more information should write to: The Haemophilia Society, 123 Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7HR. Thanks also to David in Edinburgh, Andrew Puckett, and my wife Miranda for helping with research.
Gerald Hammond was knowledgeable as ever about firearms, and I should also thank the Estacado Gun Club for taking me along on a shoot. In fact, so many people in the USA helped with this book that it would take a sizeable supplement to list them all. So a general thank you must suffice. But special honours must go to Becky Hughes and David Martin in Seattle, Jay Schulman in Arlington, Mass., and Tresa Hughes in New York, for putting up with me, Miranda and our son Jack for so long.
The Chandler-Fulbright Award made it possible for me to spend so much time (and money) in the United States. I owe a debt to the estate of Raymond Chandler and to the staff of the Fulbright Commission in London, especially Catherine Boyle.
The real unsung heroes of this book are probably Elliott Abrams and Fawn Hall. For those who don’t know who they are, a two-part essay by Theodore Draper in the New York Review of Books serves as a good introduction, though you’ve really got to go to Draper’s book A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs or to the full Congressional Hearings to get the bigger picture. I quote from part one of the essay, published in the edition of 27 May 1993:
Unfortunately, Abrams didn’t know how to set up a secret account in which to deposit the expected $10 million from Brunei [with which to fund the Contras]. He went to Alan Fiers of the CIA and Oliver North of the NSC staff for tutoring, and chose to follow North’s advice. North gave him an index card with the number of a secret Swiss account, which North controlled; North’s secretary, Fawn Hall, accidentally transposed two digits in typing out the number on another card; Abrams gave the erroneous information to the Brunei foreign minister; and $10 million went into the account of a stranger from whom it took months to get it back.