The cab driver asked where I wanted to go, which if answered literally would have meant to bed with Jett, warm, loved and healthy. Instead I opted for round the block and back to the station, where warmth in some places kept total misery at bay.
I sat on a bench in a waiting-room, sharing limbo with bona fide travellers and the hungry dispossessed.
My immediate impulsive reaction, to run away from Kris and Robin, was on reflection stupid, and could quite likely never be explained or given an adequate apology. Temporary madness, that flight had been. True, I had in my pocket lists of illegal materials, a damning piece of evidence, but evidence against whom? To whom should I give the folder? To someone one rung up from John Rupert? So where would I find him? And who would he be?
I thought for a long time about the enigmas that had been handed down.
Win quietly.
Look sideways at what you learn.
I had done neither.
If there was a path through a maze — if there were a maze — would the riddle be solved by going outward, or by searching deeper in?
The folder with the Vera copies in it could have been explained as a further teasing of Oliver Quigley. I had meant to laugh it off and could have done. Why had I run from Robin?
I chased the reason in the end to a dream of delirium, where Robin and Kris stood hand in hand beckoning me towards a gun to end my life. Subconsciously from then on I’d thought of them as allies, yet not believing Kris capable of real atrocious crime. Believing two opposite things at once was highly common though, like people who couldn’t abide the rich but bought lottery tickets every week, hoping to become what they said they despised.
Look at things sideways... What did he mean?
I tried looking sideways at the island of Trox. At mushrooms and cattle and world-wide anarchy.
Looked sideways at Odin...
Went to sleep.
When I woke at six I found that my sleeping brain had sorted out the sideways factor. Sideways, I yawned, was fast asleep.
No one had disturbed me during the four or five hours I’d spent in my huddled corner, but a quick glance in a looking-glass disguised as a beer advertisement on the wall there revealed that although the rash had faded to a mottled pinkish-brown, my eyes had now swollen to puff balls and my unshaven chin was a stubblefield in black. As no one, I imagined, would recognise this wreck as the well-brushed me, I left things as they were and sorted out the contents of my grandmother’s Sherlock Holmes cape-coat pockets, which I’d filled the evening before.
Apart from the folder of Loricroft’s German papers and copies, they chiefly contained Vera’s originals, my camera and my wallet. Camera contained Trox Island mud, but the wallet, more helpfully, disgorged passport, credit card, cheque, phone card, international driver’s licence and a fistful of cash borrowed from Jett.
As soon as lights came on in a nearby photo shop which boasted of its eight o’clock ‘instant passport photos’, I was knocking on its door, aiming to test the abilities of the sloppy-looking teenage boy in charge, who astonished me by actually waking up to interest when I asked if he knew anywhere that I could get speciality work done at this early time of day. He looked at the camera and peered more closely at me.
‘I say, aren’t you Perry Stuart?’ he said. ‘Something wrong with your face, isn’t there?’
‘It’s getting better,’ I said.
‘I can lend you a razor,’ he offered, absentmindedly prodding the camera with a pencil. ‘Do you want to see if there are still OK exposures under this muck?’
‘Do you know anyone who could do it?’
‘Do me a favour!’ He took my question as an affront. ‘I spent four years in night-school learning this job. Come back in an hour. And it’s an honour to do your work, Mr Stuart. I’ll give it my best shot.’
My expectations sank. A sloppy voice; a sloppy mouth. I wished I’d gone somewhere else.
There were more advantages, though, than drawbacks in a well-known face. When I went back an hour later I found a tray, laid with a cloth, bearing a pot of coffee, a basket of hot rolls, and many other comforts. Even a cleaned electric razor in a folded and frilled paper napkin. I thanked the shop’s incumbent for his thoughtfulness and then had to listen to multiple detail while he told me how to resurrect negatives from a cow-pat tomb.
I ate, I shaved, I admired his skill sincerely. I watched him make expert colour prints, and I signed autographs for him by the dozen when he refused to be paid any other way. His name, he said, was Jason Wells. I shook his hand, speechless, and asked for a card with an address.
‘It’s my uncle’s shop,’ he said. ‘I’ll get my own, someday. Do you mind if I take a photo of you, so I can hang it on the wall?’
He snapped and snapped away, and seemed to think himself well rewarded for the thirty-six clean negatives and the amazing enlargements I presently bore away.
Chapter 12
In some strange way the adulation and respect shining out of Jason Wells’s sloppy face, together with his professionalism and dedication, re-awoke in me the feelings of self-worth that had slept through a wretchedly debilitating illness and had for far too long let a brain used to ten thousand revs a minute waste time looking for one across.
Jason Wells might find that a sloppy exterior was right for him, but it didn’t match my normal on-screen self. It was time, I decided, for the on-screen self to go to work.
My grandmother’s grand tweed cape-coat wasn’t just Edwardian, it was splendid; it had presence. My clean-shaved chin was after all much better smooth. My hair, recombed, fell naturally again into its usual shapely BBC cut. I bought enough in a chemist’s for cleanliness, and a shirt, tie and trousers in an outfitter’s, in order to look pressed. I acquired an overnight bag to contain everything, and some films, a new camera and batteries from Jason Wells.
All I needed after that was to stand up straight, give out my name, explain my needs, and ask. Never mind that I still felt uncomfortably queasy. I’d forgotten, during the past battering weeks, the extent of my clout.
I wish to take a train to Heathrow airport, I said.
‘Certainly, Dr Stuart, this way. We have the Heathrow Express which takes fifteen minutes non-stop to the airport.’
I want to fly to Miami.
‘Certainly, Dr Stuart. First class, of course?’
I need to deposit this cheque with the credit card company in order to be in funds for the whole of my trip.
‘Certainly, Dr Stuart, the credit card company will send a representative to the first-class lounge at once to arrange it. And you’ll need some dollars, of course.’
I would like a shower before boarding.
‘Certainly, Dr Stuart. Our special services department will see to your every need.’
I have to make a phone call to my publishers in Kensington, and I would like to use a private room for a business meeting.
‘No trouble at all, Dr Stuart. Our business centre is in the Executive Club lounge.’
Cosseted in every way I found myself inevitably watching a television set. Equally inevitably, someone had switched on a channel showing the weather in store across the Atlantic.
‘Bad weather ahead in Miami, Dr Stuart,’ I was told, with happy nods. They thought bad weather was naturally the motive for my journey, though only my last call, to the Met Office, had given me even a five-day notice of coming trouble.
Standing in front of Heathrow’s best accurate weather update I heard that a weak cyclonic system might be developing in the Caribbean very late in the season. If it developed, which on past probability was unlikely, it would be designated tropical storm Sheila.