‘Tell me.’
‘We can’t have a cop-killer on our hands, the pressure is enormous.’
I took a deep breath, said, ‘You’ve given me up.’
For the first time, he sounded nervous, then, ‘I’m giving you a chance, I wasn’t even supposed to call you.’
‘You’re all heart, Sean. So what’s the bottom line?’
Deep breath, then, ‘They’re sending two guys to pick you up, they’ll be there in twenty minutes, so get the fuck out and run like hell.’
Curious, I asked, ‘And these guys, they’re not bringing me to the authorities, are they?’
‘You’re wasting time, get moving.’
Click.
I’ve poured a Bush, opened a beer, and am going to have a boilermaker. The Sig is in my lap and I have that song playing, here comes my favourite riff: ‘Fade…’
Brave New Murder by H. R. F. Keating
Perhaps it was the glory of England returning after the grim days of the Great War. Or perhaps it would prove, after all, to be something quite otherwise. It was the day of the first post-war Eton and Harrow match, that annual event, more social than sporting, which in the years up to 1914 had brought together in one place, Lord’s cricket ground, almost all the Upper Ten Thousand. There, on the excuse of watching the next generation bat and bowl, as many of them had themselves in past years generation after generation, they had come once more to parade themselves in the sunshine, to assert their status once again. And in the Pavilion and in beflagged tents, dark blue and light, to have luncheon.
Now at the beginning of a new decade all seemed to be as it once had been. Yet before a single ball had been bowled after the lunch interval, murder was to splatter an ugly blot on the fair surface of the day.
At the time that it took place none of the nine or ten thousand spectators, in whose ranks the late conflict had cut such a swathe, knew, of course, that it had happened. It was only in the days succeeding the match that the news of it came to dominate every conversation. During the interval they had, as was the custom in ‘the old days’, strolled about on the grass in front of the Pavilion, the gentlemen in tall shining silk hats, their womenfolk twirling bright parasols in dresses and hats as elaborate and striking as money could buy, if here and there could be seen a skirt that allowed stockinged calves to be fully in view.
‘I had hoped,’ the Bishop of Cirencester, the Right Reverend Dr Pelham Rossiter, remarked, catching sight of one young lady so dressed, ‘that no such indication of the dreadful decline in the country’s morality would be seen here today of all days. But it was, I fear, a hope destined to perish.’
‘My dear bishop,’ his companion, Wilfred Boultbee, the well-known City solicitor, replied, ‘I can see the day when ladies without even hats will be admitted at Lord’s, and heaven knows what depravities will go along with that.’ His full grey moustache sank to an even lower angle than habitually.
The two of them wandered on, gently digesting their shares of the lobsters and pigeon pies, the salmon mayonnaise and tender lamb that had been provided after the long years of wartime deprivation in all the abundance of the milk-and-honey days of yore. The last bubbles of champagne gently eructated behind their firmly closed lips.
Just a few yards away a rather less elevated conversation was taking place between two other people soon to be caught up in the murder.
‘God, what a fearful bore a day like this is,’ Julia Hogsnorton, daughter of the Earl, exclaimed to the Hon. Peter Flaxman, immaculate in beautifully brushed tall hat, tailcoat fitted to the twentieth of an inch over broad shoulders, pale spats just visible at the ends of black-and-white striped trousers, thin dark moustache trimmed to a nicety. ‘I can’t imagine how you can stand it.’
‘My dear girl, I stood it for four years before the war, and even enjoyed it then, in a way. Nice to show one is one of the world, you know. So I don’t find it impossible to enjoy it all again today. Since the fools with money are prepared to lay it on for me, and those Jewish Scotsmen are prepared to provide me with some cash, I’m happy to take advantage of their kindness. It’s better than Flanders fields.’
‘Not that you spent much time slogging through the mud there, flinging yourself down in it each time a shell landed. Or not if what you told me one drunken evening was true. An ADC somewhere well behind the lines, wasn’t it?’
‘Fortunes of war, old girl. Fortunes of war. But, talking of drunken evenings shall we go back to the tent? I seem to remember unopened bottles lurking somewhere in the background.’
‘Oh, all right. But it can’t go on for ever, you know, this relying on the gods and the moneylenders. A lady begins sometimes to feel uncomfortable in circumstances like that.’
‘Well, you’ll have to put up with circumstances like that, unless you can suggest a way I can unclasp old Boultbee’s tight fists.’
He walked on, at a slightly faster pace than before.
Unpleasant revelations were, too, manifesting themselves now to the older moral couple digesting their luncheon.
‘Bishop, excuse me,’ Wilfred Boultbee said abruptly. ‘I think I really must – Well, I think I should return to the luncheon tent. My soda-mint lozenges. I had them on the table, preparatory to taking one as I customarily do after any meal, but somehow I failed to see them as I left. But now I feel the need, acutely. You know my weakness of old, since we were at school even. A digestion that -how shall I put it? – that frequently fails to digest.’
‘I remember. Indeed I do. What was it we called you? Belcher Boultbee. Yes, that was it. Old Belcher Boultbee.’
His richly reverberant episcopal laugh rang out.
But Belcher Boultbee was immune to it. He had suddenly spotted something, or rather someone, yet more irritating to himself than a young woman showing her calves.
‘Bishop,’ he said, ‘let’s, for heaven’s sake, step out. I see that French fellow’s heading back to the tent, chap young Flaxman insisted on bringing to luncheon. I had hoped, once we’d eaten, he would have the decency to remove himself. It seems he has not.’
‘I’ll step out, if you want, though I must confess I found our foreign friend – What did Flaxman say he was called? The Comte de – de somewhere. I found him agreeable enough.’
‘Oh, agreeable,’ the City solicitor replied. ‘Yes, he’s all of that. It’s what you might call his stock-in-trade. And, for all that title of his, trade is what he’s about. I happen to know rather more about the fellow than he’d like to think I do.’
‘Very well, let’s get there before him. Perhaps he’ll sheer off if he sees us. For myself perhaps I’ll take just one more glass of champagne. And you can consume your soda-mint lozenge.’
A more modest version of the episcopal laugh could be heard as they hurried on.
Equally making their slow way towards the tent where they had lunched were the last two members of the party whom the murder was deeply to concern, Peter Flaxman’s cousin, Captain Vyvyan Andrews – they were both distantly related to Bishop Rossiter, the host – with his wife, Mary. Their conversation, too, was not as placidly reminiscent of the past days of glory as it might have been. But they had better reasons for lacking in joie de vivre.
‘We should never have agreed to come,’ Vyvyan Andrews, pale-faced to the point where his fair, once military moustache seemed almost to have vanished away, in his borrowed tailcoat and slightly stain-marked silk hat, was saying in a bitter undertone. ‘Never, never. I told you. But you would do it.’
‘But, darling, it was because – well, because I hoped it would do you good, cheer you up.’
‘Cheer me up. You’re pathetic, pathetic. How can you believe all I need is to be cheered up, as if I was having a bad cold, or a bit of a belly-ache? But I’m not sniffling and snuffling. I’m ill. Ill. My whole inside’s been gassed out, and I’ll never be the same again. Never.’