‘No,’ I sighed.
‘I mean it.’ He put his face even closer. ‘Never sell your column.’
‘Bert... Have you?’
He closed up. He pried himself off me and went back to rocking. He winked, a vast caricature of a wink.
‘Bit of advice,’ he said nodding. He swivelled on rubbery ankles and weaved an unsteady path across the lobby to the lifts. Inside he turned round and I saw him standing there under the light clutching the half-bottle and still saying over and over, ‘Bit of advice, bit of advice.’
The doors slid heavily across in front of him. Shrugging, puzzled a little, I started on my way back to the Blaze. Fifty yards along, I stopped off to see if the people who were servicing my typewriter had finished it. They hadn’t. Call back Monday, they said.
When I stepped out into the street again a woman was screaming.
Heads turned. The high-pitched agonised noise pierced the roar of wheels and rose clean above the car horns. With everyone else, I looked to see the cause.
Fifty yards up the pavement a knot of people was rapidly forming and I reflected that in this particular place droves of regular staff reporters would be on the spot in seconds. Nevertheless, I went back. Back to the front door of Bert’s paper, and a few steps further on.
Bert was lying on the pavement. Clearly dead. The shining fragments of his half-bottle of whisky scattered the paving slabs around him, and the sharp smell of the spilt spirit mixed uneasily with the pervading diesel.
‘He fell. He fell.’ The screaming woman was on the edge of hysterics and couldn’t stop shouting. ‘He fell. I saw him. From up there. He fell.’
Luke-John said ‘Christ’ several times and looked badly shocked. Derry shook out a whole pot of paper clips on to his desk and absentmindedly put them back one by one.
‘You’re sure he was dead?’ he said.
‘His office was seven floors up.’
‘Yeah.’ He shook his head disbelievingly. ‘Poor old boy.’ Nil nisi bonum. A sharp change of attitude.
Luke-John looked out of the Blaze window and down along the street. The smashed remains of Bert Checkov had been decently removed. The pavement had been washed. People tramped unknowingly across the patch where he had died.
‘He was drunk,’ Luke-John said. ‘Worse than usual.’
He and Derry made a desultory start on the afternoon work. I had no need to stay as the Editor had O.K.’d my copy, but I hung around anyway for an hour or two, not ready to go.
They had said in Bert’s office that he came back paralytic from lunch and simply fell out of the window. Two girl secretaries saw him. He was taking a drink out of the neck of the bottle of whisky, and he suddenly staggered against the window, which swung open, and he toppled out. The bottom of the window was at hip height. No trouble at all for someone as drunk as Bert.
I remembered the desperation behind the bit of advice he had given me.
And I wondered.
2
Three things immediately struck you about the girl who opened the stockbroker Tudor door at Virginia Water. First, her poise. Second, her fashion sense. Third, her colour. She had honey toast skin, large dark eyes and a glossy shoulder length bounce of black hair. A slightly broad nose and a mouth to match enhanced a landscape in which negro and Caucasian genes had conspired together to do a grand job.
‘Good afternoon,’ I said. ‘I’m James Tyrone. I telephoned...’
‘Come in,’ she nodded. ‘Harry and Sarah should be back at any minute.’
‘They are still playing golf?’
‘Mm.’ She turned, smiling slightly, and gestured me into the house. ‘Still finishing lunch, I expect.’
It was three thirty-five. Why not?
She led me through the hall (well-polished parquet, careful flowers, studded leather umbrella stand) into a chintz and chrysanthemum sitting-room. Every window in the house was a clutter of diamond shaped leaded lights which might have had some point when glass could only be made in six inch squares and had to be joined together to get anywhere. The modern imitation obscured the light and the view and was bound to infuriate window cleaners. Harry and Sarah had opted also for uncovered dark oak beams with machine-made chisel marks. The single picture on the plain cream walls made a wild contrast: a modern impressionistic abstract of some cosmic explosion, with the oils stuck on in lumps.
‘Sit down.’ She waved a graceful hand at a thickly cushioned sofa. ‘Like a drink?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Don’t journalists drink all day?’
‘If you drink and write, the writing isn’t so hot.’
‘Ah yes,’ she said, ‘Dylan Thomas said he had to be stone cold for any good to come of it.’
‘Different class,’ I smiled.
‘Same principle.’
‘Absolutely.’
She gave me a long inspection, her head an inch tilted to one side and her green dress lying in motionless folds down her slender body. Terrific legs in the latest in stockings ended in shiny green shoes with gold buckles, and the only other accessory on display was a broad strapped gold watch on her left wrist.
‘You’ll know me again,’ she said.
I nodded. Her body moved subtly inside the green dress.
She said slowly, with more than simple meaning, ‘And I’ll know you.’
Her voice, face and manner were quite calm. The brief flash of intense sexual awareness could have been my imagination. Certainly her next remark held no undertone and no invitation.
‘Do you like horses?’
‘Yes, I do,’ I said.
‘Six months ago I would have said the one place I would never go would be to a race meeting.’
‘But you go now?’
‘Since Harry won Egocentric in that raffle life has changed in this little neck of the woods.’
‘That,’ I said, ‘is exactly what I want to write about.’
I was on Tally business. Background to the Lamplighter. My choice of untypical racehorse owners, Harry and Sarah Hunterson, came back at that point from their Sunday golf course lunch, sweeping in with them a breeze compounded of healthy links air, expensive cigar smoke and half digested gin.
Harry was big, sixtyish, used to authority, heavily charming and unshakably Tory. I guessed that he read the Telegraph and drove a three litre Jaguar. With automatic transmission, of course. He gave me a hearty handshake and said he was glad to see his niece had been looking after me.
‘Yes, thank you.’
Sarah said, ‘Gail dear, you didn’t give Mr Tyrone a drink.’
‘He didn’t want one.’
The two women were coolly nice to each other in civilised voices. Sarah must have been about thirty years older, but she had worked hard at keeping nature at bay. Everything about her looked careful, from the soft gold rinse via the russet coloured dress to the chunky brown golfing shoes. Her well-controlled shape owed much to the drinking man’s diet, and only a deep sag under the chin gave the game away. Neither golf nor gin had dug wrinkles anywhere except round her eyes. Her mouth still had fullness and shape. The wrappings were good enough to hold out hopes of a spark-striking mind, but these proved unrealistic. Sarah was all-of-a-piece, with attitudes and opinions as tidy and well-ordered and as imitative as her house.
Harry was easy to interview in the aftermath of the nineteenth hole.
‘I bought this raffle ticket at the Golf Club dance, you see. Some chap was there selling them, a friend of a friend, you know, and I gave him a quid. Well, you know how it is at a dance. For charity, he said. I thought a quid was a bit steep for a raffle ticket, even if it was for a horse. Though I didn’t want a horse, mind you. Last thing I wanted. And then damn me if I didn’t go and win it. Bit of a problem, eh? To suddenly find yourself saddled with a racehorse?’ He laughed, expecting a reward for his little joke.