I never entirely disobeyed her but I wasn’t bad at finding ways to modify the format, so that when I asked to borrow her warm deep-pocketed Edwardian Sherlock Holmes look-alike cloak, all she said was ‘take some gloves’ and ‘come back safe’. Nothing, I was encouraged to hear, about heebies or jeebies.
I kissed her on her forehead, our tiredness mutual, and travelled with Jett in her car to Paddington Station, terminus of trains to the west, playground of suicidal manic-depressives (but not of Glenda) and home of a simple coin-in-the-slot photo-copying machine.
After a Romeo and Juliet length and intensity of good-nights, Jett confessed to receiving a Ravi Chand medical opinion, Sunday morning edition.
‘What was it?’
‘Wait a week.’
I had already waited too long.
‘With such a slow start,’ I said, ‘our disengagement should take fifty years.’
Smiling with shiny eyes she helped me make a set of copies of Vera’s equine research work, and when she finally left me two short streets later I had a set of Vera-copies in a buff folder in one of the cape’s deep front pockets, and Vera’s originals in a paper clip in the other.
By midnight or soon after I was sitting on Kris’s doorstep waiting like the Zipalong rider for the weather-man to come home.
He stopped, key in hand, surprised to see me there so late.
‘I locked myself out,’ I said, shrugging. ‘Do you mind if I sleep here?’
He looked at his watch. He said ‘OK,’ without huge enthusiasm, but he’d landed on my own doorstep often enough at midnight.
‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘Take your coat off. You look awfully ill. Coffee or tea?’
I said I was too cold to take my coat off. He boiled water and clattered some mugs.
I said, faintly smiling, ‘Whatever you sent to Newmarket with Zipalong’s motor-bike, it wasn’t what Glenda took from George.’
He stared. ‘How the hell do you know?’
‘Well, who else but you could make sure that Zipalong’s motorcyclist reached Quigley’s house at the right time? You kept the poor man eating toast and generally waiting about until you were sure that he would arrive after Quigley had gone to Cheltenham races.’
Kris said, laughing, ‘It was only a joke on fussy old Oliver.’
I nodded. ‘He’s easy to make fun of.’
‘Glenda,’ Kris said, ‘drove us half crazy all day Thursday saying she’d got a whole lot of George’s papers that were proof of his out and out treason. We got fed up with it. Then Oliver phoned and he and Glenda had a frightful row. He told her what she’d taken was a list of horses that would be running in Germany, and it was his, Oliver’s, and he wanted it back.’
‘But you didn’t send it back,’ I said.
‘Well, no.’ He grinned. ‘It stirred silly old Oliver up a treat.’
‘What did you send with the courier to Newmarket?’
‘A list of horses. I clipped them out of newspapers. What else?’
‘Did you read the list you were supposed to have sent?’
Kris said, ‘Of course not. It’s all in German.’
‘Show me,’ I asked persuasively.
He nodded and, willingly moving into his spartan bedroom, pulled open a drawer and picked out a completely ordinary buff folder from underneath his socks. Without any sort of dismay he handed it to me, and one brief glance verified its contents. Different to those on Trox but for the same purpose.
‘There you are,’ Kris said, ‘love letters, Glenda thought. But they’re really only lists of horses. See that word?’ He pointed. ‘That word means racehorses.’
The word he pointed to was Pferderennbahn.
‘That word,’ I contradicted mildly, ‘is horseracetrack.’
‘Well? So what?’
‘So... er,’ I asked. ‘Who met the motorcyclist at Oliver’s house to sign for the package?’
‘Guess.’
‘I’d guess... how about Robin Darcy?’
‘You’re too bloody smart.’
‘You and Robin are friends and he was staying at the Bedford Lodge Hotel, which is barely a hundred yards down the road from Quigley’s stable, I’m told. So who else was more likely? It was obvious, not smart.’
‘Yeah... well, it was only a joke. How did you get it right?’
‘You told us Robin left for Miami on Tuesday... what does it matter? I happened to be phoning that hotel and they said he left yesterday. Never mind. How about if we made a copy of these German letters. We can do it easily along at Paddington, and then you can see Oliver’s face when you show him you’ve got his precious list safe after all. It’s always prudent to make copies. It would be a disaster if Oliver could sue you because you’d lost the originals.’
Kris yawned, sighed, and agreed.
‘I’ll do it for you,’ I said, ‘if you like.’
‘I suppose I’d better come. Let’s go now and get it over.’
‘Right.’
I picked up the folder and, summoning energy I didn’t think I had, headed out of Kris’s bedroom, down the hall and out of the front door without looking back, happily humming a marching tune as if the whole thing were a pre-arranged jaunt.
I could hear Kris behind me saying ‘Well...’ doubtfully, but it wasn’t far to the station, and my enthusiasm kept us both going the whole way.
I sent Kris off to get more coins for the machine and made copies quickly with a German list on top for all the world — and Kris — to see. We set off back to his flat with me grasping a folder inside my grandmother’s cloak and Kris clutching Glenda’s folder to his chest.
The impetus was draining away in us both and the night suddenly felt very cold indeed when Kris uneasily said, ‘I hope Robin will think these copies a good idea. Anyway, he’ll be coming for the folder at any minute now. Any time after one o’clock, he said, when I’d finished my shift for the day.’
‘I thought he was in Miami,’ I said, uneasy in my turn.
‘No, he’s going tomorrow. He changed his plans, I think.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘Any time from now on, he’ll be here.’
‘Really?’
I didn’t like that. I needed a peaceful retreat, and a gentle walk away.
Kris was in front of me, suddenly deeper in doubt, equally suddenly taking quick steps ahead and saying, ‘I don’t know... There he is!’ he joyfully shouted, pointing. ‘Let’s tell him now...’
I stopped walking, stopped listening, turned fast on my heel and started back towards the station at a paratuberculosis effort of a shambling run.
It was my day for spending another of those twenty-nine lives.
Kris could always run faster than I could, but not faster than a roving taxi whose driver was convinced he was saving his new passenger from a mugging. As I scrambled untidily into the cab it circled on two wheels into a side road, and I glimpsed the two figures stop running after me and stand with arms akimbo just short of Kris’s flat, looking along the road in my wake, deprived of their quarry.
Under the lights, the heavy dark spectacle frames flashed on the round head of the short, unmistakable Robin. Behind him stood the tall, blond, frustrated, god-like Norseman.
Kris still firmly clutched Glenda’s buff folder, though it now contained, not dangerous requisites in German, but the plain English copies made, with Jett’s help, of Vera’s records of the filly’s radiation history at the Equine Research Establishment.
In one deep pocket, I carried Vera’s originals, as before, and in the other a true Trading gift to mankind, the Loricroft legacy of the where, the how much, the how soon and the strength of available U-235 and Pu-235