My mind tumbled over and over like a dry-cleaning machine and not a useful thought came out.
‘So quiet, Mr Tyrone? You really don’t like that, do you? So you will tell us. You would not want your wife to divorce you, I am sure. And you have taken such pains to deceive her that we are certain you know she would throw you out if she discovered this...’ He pointed to the bill. ‘How would she like to know that your mistress is coloured? We have other dates, too. Last Sunday week, and the Sunday before that. Your wife will be told it all. Wealthy women will not stand for this sort of thing, you know.’
I wondered numbly how much Gail had sold me for.
‘Come along, Mr Tyrone. The address.’
‘I need time,’ I said dully.
‘That’s right,’ he said calmly. ‘It takes time to sink in properly, doesn’t it? Of course you can have time. Six hours. You will telephone to us at precisely seven o’clock this evening.’ He gave me a plain white card with numbers on it. ‘Six hours is all, Mr Tyrone. After that, the information will be on its way to your wife, and you will not be able to stop it. Do you clearly understand?’
‘Yes.’ I said. The tiger sat down and shut its eyes. Sympathetic.
‘I thought you would.’ He moved away from me towards the door. ‘Seven o’clock precisely. Good day, Mr Tyrone.’
With erect easy assurance he walked straight out of the Cat House, turned a corner, and was gone. My feet seemed to have become disconnected from my body. I was going through the disjointed floating feeling of irretrievable disaster. A disbelieving part of my mind said that if I stayed quite still the nutcracker situation would go away.
It didn’t, of course. But after a while I began to think normally instead of in emotional shock waves; began to look for a hole in the net. I walked slowly away from the tiger, out into the unwholesome air and down towards the gate, all my attention turned inward. Out of the corner of my eye I half caught sight of my abductor in his raincoat standing up a side path looking into an apparently empty wire-netted compound, and when I’d gone out of the turnstile on to the road it hit me with a thump where I’d seen him before. So significant a thump that I came to a rocking halt. Much had urgently to be understood.
I had seen him at King’s Cross station while I waited for Gail. He had been standing near me: had watched her all the way from the Underground until she had reached me. Looking for a lever. Finding it.
To be watching me at King’s Cross, he must have followed me from the Blaze.
Today, he had picked me up outside the Blaze.’
I walked slowly, thinking about it. From King’s Cross in the morning I had gone on the train to Newcastle, but I hadn’t come back on my return ticket. Collie Gibbons had. I’d taken that unexpected roundabout route home, and somewhere, maybe back at Newcastle races, I’d shaken off my tail.
Someone also must either have followed Gail, or have gone straight into the hotel to see her after I had left. I baulked at thinking she would sell me out with my imprint still on our shared sheets. But maybe she would. It depended on how much they had offered her, I supposed. Five hundred would have tempted her mercenary heart too far.
No one but Gail could have got a receipt from the hotel. No one but Gail knew of the two Sunday afternoons. No one but Gail thought my wife was rich. I coldly faced the conclusion that I had meant little to her. Very little indeed. My true deserts. I had sought her out because she could dispense sex without involvement. She had been consistent. She owed me nothing at all.
I reached the corner and instinctively turned my plodding steps towards home. Not for twenty paces did I realise that this was a desperate mistake.
Gail didn’t know where I lived. She couldn’t have told them. They didn’t know the true facts about Elizabeth: they thought she was a rich woman who would divorce me. They picked me up this morning outside the Blaze... At the same weary pace I turned right at the next crossing.
If the man in the black homburg didn’t know where I lived, the Raincoat would be following to find out. Round the next corner I stopped and looked back through the thick branches of a may bush, and there he was, hurrying. I went on slowly as before, heading round imperceptibly towards Fleet Street.
The Homburg Hat had been bluffing. He couldn’t tell Elizabeth about Gail, because he didn’t know where to find her. Ex-directory telephone. My address in none of the reference books. By sheer luck I twice hadn’t led them straight to my own front door.
All the same, it couldn’t go on for ever. Even if I fooled them until after the Lamplighter, one day, somehow, they would tell her what I’d done.
First they buy you, then they blackmail, Bert Checkov had said. Buy Gail, blackmail me. All of a piece. I thought about blackmail for three long miles back to the Blaze.
Luke-John and Derry were surprised to see me back. They made no comment on a change in my appearance. I supposed the inner turmoil didn’t show.
‘Have any of the crime reporters a decent pull with the police?’ I asked.
Derry said ‘Jimmy Sienna might have. What do you want?’
‘To trace a car number.’
‘Someone bashed that ancient van of yours?’ Luke-John asked uninterestedly.
‘Hit and run,’ I agreed with distant accuracy.
‘We can always try,’ Derry said with typical helpfulness. ‘Give me the number, and I’ll go and ask him.’
I wrote down for him the registration of Homburg Hat’s Silver Wraith.
‘A London number,’ Derry remarked. ‘That might make it easier.’ He took off across the room to the Crime Desk and consulted a mountainous young man with red hair.
I strolled over to the deserted News Desk and with a veneer of unconcern over a thumping heart dialled the number Homburg Hat had told me to ring at seven. It was three-eighteen. More than two hours gone out of six.
A woman answered, sounding surprised.
‘Are you sure you have the right number?’ she said.
I read it out to her.
‘Yes, that’s right. How funny.’
‘Why is it funny?’
‘Well, this is a public phone box. I had just shut the door and was going to make a call when the phone started ringing... Are you sure you have the right number?’
‘I can’t have,’ I said. ‘Where is this phone box, exactly?’
‘It’s one of a row in Piccadilly underground station.’
I thanked her and rang off. Not much help.
Derry came back and said Jimmy Sienna was doing what he could, good job it was Tuesday, he was bored and wanted something to pass the time with.
I remembered that I had left my copy of Tally and Elizabeth’s apple cake on the floor of the Rolls. Debated whether or not to get replacements. Decided there was no harm in it, and went out and bought them. I didn’t see Raincoat, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there, or that they hadn’t swapped him for someone I wouldn’t know.
Derry said Jimmy Sienna’s police friend was checking the registration number but would use his discretion as to whether it was suitable to pass on to the Blaze. I sat on the side of Derry’s desk and bit my nails.
Outside, the fog which had been threatening all day slowly cleared right away. It would. I thought about unobserved exits under the bright Fleet Street lights.
At five, Luke-John said he was going home, and Derry apologetically followed. I transferred myself to Jimmy Sienna’s desk and bit my nails there instead. When he too was lumbering to his feet to leave, his telephone finally rang. He listened, thanked, scribbled.
‘There you are,’ he said to me. ‘And good luck with the insurance. You’ll need it.’