I gathered I was being offered a medium honour which it could be impolite to refuse: I agreed on eight-thirty Wednesday, though I would rather have gone a day sooner.
Until then... Until then there was first of all Jett van Els, whose third week with my grandmother had concluded that Monday morning. At ten she had changed places with another of my grandmother’s ‘dear girls’, and at one o’clock she met me in a sandwich bar for lunch.
She came dressed not in the nurses’ uniform familiar to me, but in black trousers, a thick white sweater and a boxy scarlet coat with black and gold buttons. I greeted her with frank admiration and the first thing she said was, ‘You’re not well.’
I kissed her anyway.
‘I’m a nurse, remember,’ she said, ‘and I’ve seen pallor in too many faces.’
She made no more fuss about it, however, but hung her coat on a nearby peg and read the possible menu with half her attention.
‘What job do you start next?’ I asked, settling on cheese and chutney in brown bread for myself, but not caring much what I ate.
‘I’m taking a week off, and next Monday I’ll be back with Mrs Mevagissey.’ She spoke calmly as if this programme were usual. Normally, if a nurse returned, it would be after at least a month.
‘Did she agree?’ I queried, my eyebrows rising.
Jett smiled at my surprise. ‘Your grandmother warned me severely not to grow fond of you, as you were inconstancy personified, or words to that effect.’
‘She doesn’t want you to be hurt.’
‘And will I be?’
It wasn’t the sort of exchange I’d ever before embarked on.
I said weakly, ‘It’s too soon to tell.’
‘I’ll negotiate terms of disengagement.’
We ordered food. She chose tuna, which I’d never liked, and I found I hoped her future plans wouldn’t take her far away. Jett van Els, with or without Belgian father, was more likely to leave Perry Stuart in tatters than the other way round.
‘Seriously,’ she said, having healthily despatched the tuna, ‘what’s hurting you?’
‘Onset of broken heart?’
She shook her head, smiling, ‘I saw the papers yesterday, with your grandmother. It’s amazing you and your friend Kris survived at all.’
I said I’d probably cracked a rib or two, which could be a bit frustrating in the active love department, for a couple of days.
‘Think in terms of a week or two,’ Miss van Els instructed. ‘Or a month or two.’ She smiled with composure. ‘The first rule of disengagement is to take your time at the beginning.’
‘How about lunch tomorrow, then?’
‘All right,’ she said.
Although I wouldn’t do my act before the cameras until well after six o’clock, I was always at work in plenty of time before two, when the twice-daily conference on world atmospheric conditions took place.
One had to consider as a whole the jacket of air swirling round the spinning planet and to foresee if possible how far the low pressure systems in hot areas might deepen further still, to give rise to gales.
I had always found it extraordinary that people turned their backs on physics as a subject at school and university, even if public opinion was at last gradually changing. Physics was the study of the hugely powerful invisible forces that ruled the way we lived. Physics was gravity, magnetism, electricity, heat, sound, air pressure, radioactivity, and especially radio, the mysterious forces that clearly existed, whose effects were commonplace, whose powers were unlimited, and which could not be seen. Every day I dealt with them as friends.
No one at work made much comment on Kris’s or my Saturday escapade, as our colleagues seemed to have exhausted their ‘welcome backs’ after Odin. Their matter-of-fact approach suited me fine, though perhaps I would have preferred a more concerned response to enquiries into the fate of a missing dipstick further north. When I telephoned for news, I got nowhere, as it wasn’t my dipstick, I was told. When Kris telephoned, at my prompting, he still got nowhere, as nothing could be discussed unless he made the journey to talk to them in person.
‘Get Luton to ask,’ I suggested, but Luton received only a suggestion that Kris himself should be more closely questioned.
‘What does that mean?’ Kris demanded.
I said, ‘It means they haven’t found a dipstick at their end. It means they think you didn’t screw your dipstick in tight and they are trying to say it was your fault the oil came out.’
Kris scowled, but when I went to Kensington on Tuesday morning to pretend to be engaged on a text book, John Rupert took the leaking oil to be a bona fide attempt to put Kris and myself underground.
‘I fly my own plane,’ John Rupert said. ‘I’ve been a weekend pilot for twenty years, and I wouldn’t like to try to land blind. A year ago, oil on the windscreen killed four people who crashed into Kent cliffs on their way back from France. Their dipstick was found on the ground where they’d topped up their oil before setting off for home. It was in all the papers.’
‘Poor sods,’ I said. ‘I remember it.’
‘No one,’ John Rupert observed with conviction, ‘could have expected you both to be back at work unharmed.’
The door opened quietly for the advent of Ghost. He shook hands with stretched sinews and finished off the single ginger biscuit overlooked by John Rupert himself.
‘News?’ Ghost suggested laconically, quietly crunching. ‘Thoughts?’
‘Apart from attempted murder by oil,’ John Rupert said.
‘Because you both lived,’ Ghost said dryly, ‘no one will consider it an attempt...’ He broke off and asked me straightly, ‘Could it have been by any means an accident?’
‘Only if it was random mischief by a stranger, which is, I believe, what the local investigators think.’
‘But you don’t?’
‘No.’
‘And is that why you’ve come back to us?’
I blinked. ‘I expect so,’ I said.
Ghost smiled: a fearsome facial expression threatening the wicked with decades in limbo.
I said, ‘I don’t know exactly who whisked out the dipstick, but I’ve brought you a list of possibles.’
They read them. ‘All from Newmarket,’ Ghost commented. ‘All except this last one, Robin Darcy.’
‘I don’t think it was him,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘He shook hands with both of us. Separately, that is.’
‘You’re old fashioned,’ Ghost said. ‘Shakespeare was bang up to date. One can smile and smile and be a villain.’
‘I don’t want it to be Darcy,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ Ghost sounded satisfied. ‘Gut feelings... those I believe in.’
John Rupert studied the list. ‘Tell us about these people,’ he said. ‘What about Caspar Harvey? And Belladonna, his daughter?’
I was surprised at how much I’d learned about each of them and it took me a good hour to roam round the perimeter of quivery Oliver Quigley (old and new perceptions) and George Loricroft, a bully who believed himself entitled to dominate his semi-bimbo wife, who was much brighter than her husband realised or allowed for and who half-understood too much but not quite enough, and was therefore a danger to herself, though she didn’t know it.
‘I don’t think the dipstick was Glenda’s doing,’ I explained, drawing breath. ‘I don’t think she wanted Kris and me dead. She wanted us to be alive, to be weather-men, and to check on her suspicions.’
I explained about the snow and ice discrepancies in Loricroft’s actual and professed journeys.