'I won't leave you,' I assured her, 'until you meet Popsy. Don't worry.'
Popsy was late. We stood and waited, with Alessia apologising twice every five minutes and me telling her not to and, finally, like a gust of wind, a large lady arrived with outstretched arms.
'My darling,' she said, enveloping Alessia, 'a bloody crunch on the motorway. Traffic crawling past like snails. Thought I'd never get here.' She held Alessia away from her for an inspection. 'You look marvellous. What an utterly drear thing to happen. When I heard you were safe I bawled, absolutely bawled.'
Popsy was forty-fiveish and wore trousers, shirt and padded sleeveless waistcoat in navy, white and olive green. She had disconcertingly green eyes, a mass of fluffy greying hair, and a personality as large as her frame.
'Popsy…' Alessia began.
'My darling, what you need is a large steak. Look at your arms… matchsticks. The car's just outside, probably got some traffic cop writing a ticket, I left it on double yellows, so come on, let's go.'
'Popsy, this is Andrew Douglas.'
'Who?' She seemed to see me for the first time. 'How do you do.' She thrust out a hand, which I shook. 'Popsy Teddington. Glad to know you.'
'Andrew travelled with me…"
'Great,' Popsy said. 'Well done.' She had her eyes on the exit, searching for trouble.
'Can we ask him to lunch on Sunday?' Alessia said.
'What?' The eyes swivelled my way, gave me a quick assessment, came up with assent. 'OK darling, anything you like.' To me she said, 'Go to Lambourn, ask anybody, they'll tell you where I live.'
'All right,' I said.
Alessia said 'Thank you,' half under her breath, and allowed herself to be swept away, and I reflected bemusedly about irresistible forces in female form.
From Heathrow I went straight to the office, where Friday afternoon was dawdling along as usual.
The office, a nondescript collection of ground floor rooms along either side of a central corridor, had been designed decades before the era of open-plan, half-acre windows and Kew Gardens rampant. We stuck to the rabbit hutches with their strip lighting because they were comparatively cheap; and as most of us were partners, not employees, we each had a sharp interest in low overheads. Besides, the office was not where we mostly worked. The war went on on distant fronts: headquarters was for discussing strategy and writing up reports.
I dumped my suitcase in the hutch I sometimes called my own and wandered along the row, both to announce my return and to see who was in,
Gerry Clayton was there, making a complicated construction in folded paper.
'Hello,' he said. 'Bad boy, Tut tut.'
Gerry Clayton, tubby, asthmatic, fifty-three and bald, had appointed himself father-figure to many wayward sons. His speciality was insurance, and it was he who had recruited me from a firm at Lloyds, where I'd been a water-treading clerk looking for more purpose in life.
'Where's Twinkfetoes?' I said. 'I may as well get the lecture over.
'Twinkletoes, as you so disrespectfully call him, went to Venezuela this morning. The manager of Luca Oil got sucked.'
'Luca Oil?' My eyebrows rose. 'After all the work we did for them, setting up defences?'
Gerry shrugged, carefully knifing a sharp crease in stiff white paper with his thumbnail. 'That work was more than a year ago. You know what people are. Dead keen on precautions to start with, then perfunctory, then dead sloppy. Human nature. All any self-respecting dedicated kidnapper has to do is wait.
He was unconcerned about the personal fate of the abducted manager. He frequently said that if everyone took fortress-like precautions and never got themselves - in his word - sucked, we'd all be out of a job. One good kidnapping in a corporation encouraged twenty others to call us in to advise them how to avoid a similar embarrassment; and as he regularly pointed out, the how-not-to-get-sucked business was our bread and butter and also some of the jam.
Gerry inverted his apparently wrinkled heap of white paper and it fell miraculously into the shape of a cockatoo. When not advising anti-kidnap insurance policies to Liberty Market clients he sold origami patterns to a magazine, but no one grudged his paper-folding in the office. His mind seemed to coast along while he creased and tucked, and would come up often as if from nowhere with highly productive business ideas.
Liberty Market as a firm consisted at that time of thirty-one partners and five secretarial employees. Of the partners, all but Gerry and myself were ex-S.A.S., ex-police, or ex-something-ultra-secret in government departments. There were no particular rules about who did which job, though if possible everyone was allowed their preferences. Some opted for the lecture tour full-time, giving seminars, pointing out dangers; all the how-to-stay-free bit. Some sank their teeth gratefully into the terrorist circuit, others, like myself, felt more useful against the simply criminal. Everyone in between times wrote their own reports, studied everyone else's, manned the office switchboard year round and polished up their techniques of coercive bargaining.
We had a Chairman (the firm's founder) for our Monday morning state-of-the-nation meetings, a Co-ordinator who kept track of everyone's whereabouts, and an Adjuster - Twinkletoes - to whom partners addressed all complaints. If their complaints covered the behaviour of any other partner, Twinkletoes passed the comments on. If enough partners disapproved of one partner's actions, Twinkletoes delivered the censure. I wasn't all that sorry he'd gone to Venezuela.
This apparently shapeless company scheme worked in a highly organised way, thanks mostly to the ingrained discipline of the ex-soldiers. They were lean, hard, proud and quite amazingly cunning, most of them preferring to deal with the action of the after-kidnap affairs. They were, in addition, almost paranoid about secrecy, as also the ex-spies were, which to begin with I'd found oppressive but had soon grown to respect.
It was the ex-policemen who did most of the lecturing, not only advising on defences but telling potential kidnap targets what to do and look for if they were taken, so that their captors could be in turn captured.
Many of us knew an extra like photography, languages, weaponry and electronics, and everyone could use a word processor, because no one liked the rattle of typewriters all day long. No one was around the office long enough for serious feuds to develop, and the Coordinator had a knack of keeping incompatibles apart. All in all it was a contented ship which everyone worked in from personal commitment, and, thanks to the kidnappers, business was healthy.
I finished my journey along the row of hutches, said a few hellos, saw I was pencilled in with a question mark for Sunday midnight on the switchboard roster, and came at length to the big room across the far end, the only room with windows to the street. It just about seated the whole strength if we were ever there together, but on that afternoon the only person in it was Tony Vine.
"Lo,' he said. 'Hear you made an effing balls of it in Bologna.'
'Yeah.'
'Letting the effing carabinieri eff up the R.V.'
'Have you tried giving orders to the Italian army?'
He sniffed as a reply. He himself was an ex-S.A.S. sergeant, now nearing forty, who would never in his service days have dreamed of obeying a civilian. He could move across any terrain in a way that made a chameleon look flamboyant, and he had three times tracked and liberated a victim before the ransom had been paid, though no one, not even the victim, was quite sure how. Tony Vine was the most secretive of the whole tight-lipped bunch, and anything he didn't want to tell didn't get told.
It was he. who had warned me about knives inside rolled up magazines, and I'd guessed he'd known because he'd carried one that way himself.
His humour consisted mostly of sarcasm, and he could hardly get a sentence out without an oiling of fuck, shit and piss. He worked nearly always on political kidnaps because he, like Pucinelli, tended to despise personal and company wealth.