will also accept this small token of my thanks?”
I took the envelope. I didn’t open it. I was hoping he had been so generous that I would feel constrained to refuse the gift, and I knew I couldn’t afford that quixotic gesture, not since my own money had sunk to the bottom of the English Channel.
Sir Leon held his hand out to me. “Should your sister challenge your right to give me the painting, then I trust you will make yourself available to my lawyers? My driver is at your disposal for the rest of the day.” I shook his hand, then he turned away. I wondered how such a dry little sod had ever attracted a woman like Helen. Not a week before she had offered me a bedroom in Comerton Castle, now her husband was giving me the boot.
“Sir Leon!” I called out when he was a dozen paces away.
“My lord?” He turned back.
“I haven’t given up my hopes of Jennifer.”
He shrugged. “I cannot command your hopes, my lord. I can only make my own views very plain to you both. Good day to you.” He nodded coldly, then walked between the lunatics to where his pilot waited.
I opened the envelope. It had a thousand pounds in it, and I knew I probably would have felt obliged to hand it back. I wondered if he would have taken it. He wanted rid of me, and would happily pay a hundred and twenty- one thousand pounds for the privilege. I watched his helicopter take off and reflected on the fact that, for the first time in my life, I’d actually been fired. And that I was in love. And that I had a new enemy.
I had Sir Leon’s driver take me to Exeter where, in a shabby pub close to the police station, I found Harry Abbott. He watched me limp between the tables, then ordered me a pint of bitter. “I tried to telephone you today,” he said grumpily, as though I’d inconvenienced him by being away from Charlie’s house.
“I was with Sir Leon Buzzacott.” I took a first sip of the pint, and sighed with relief at the taste. “I’ve just been fired, Harry. It was very nicely done, and he even gave me a golden handshake, but it was still a firing.”
“Fired?” Harry asked in puzzlement.
“My services are no longer required for the retrieval of the painting.” In truth I was still rather dazed by the experience. Sir Leon had spent weeks seeking my help and, at the first stiff hurdle, had brushed me away like dirt. “He gave me the heave-ho, Harry, then warned me off his stepdaughter.”
“You can’t blame him for that,” Harry said reasonably. “Who wants a nice girl like Jennifer being mauled by some dirty-minded bastard like you?”
“I was beginning to like you in the last few days, Harry. I can see I was wrong.”
He grinned. “So what’s little Sir Leon going to do now? Pay the ransom?”
“Yes.”
Harry grimaced. “He was bound to do it in the end. He wants to get his paws on that picture, doesn’t he? God knows why. I know a fellow in Okehampton who could knock him up an identical fake in a couple of weeks. Who’d know the difference?”
“Beats me, Harry. So why were you trying to telephone me?”
“To tell you to bugger off, Johnny.” He spilt a packet of pork scratchings on to the bar and generously pushed one small sliver towards me. “I’ve drawn a blank, you see. Garrard’s gone, and so has his thick friend. I can’t find hide nor hair of them. I’m sorry, Johnny, but they’ve disappeared.”
“Just like Elizabeth,” I said grimly.
“Who’s probably still in France,” he said, “and I can’t issue a warrant for her because I’ve got damn-all evidence. I can’t even get a search warrant for her bloody house. Of course there’d be plenty enough evidence for a warrant if she was just some housewife, but as she’s the Lady la-di-da Tredgarth I can’t get near her.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t worth searching her house?”
“I don’t expect to find a Van Gogh hanging in the downstairs loo, Johnny, but I’m getting desperate now. I’ll settle for her private telephone book, or her diary, or anything.” He wiped beer off his lips. “You never know, we might find Garrard’s phone number written down in her book, but without a search warrant?” He shrugged, then flinched as a piece of scratching irritated a loose filling in his teeth.
“What about George Cullen?” I asked.
“What about George?”
“He knows Garrard.”
“Listen.” Harry tapped my forearm to emphasise his next words. “George Cullen is terrified of me. He’d fly to the moon rather than hold out on his Uncle Harry. I told you, I talked to him, and George doesn’t know a dicky-bird about it.”
“So who does?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Johnny. No one. Unless those bastards have another go at you, we’re done. And frankly I can’t get the manpower to look after you any more, so the best thing you can do is go. Get yourself another boat and piss off.”
Sir Leon had given me the same advice, though couched in politer and more practical terms. I scooped a handful of Harry’s pork scratchings off the bar. “Can you give me a lift to Charlie’s house?”
“All the way to Salcombe?” He sounded outraged.
“I’ll buy you a pint on the way.”
“You’ll buy my bloody supper, you miserable hound.”
So he gave me a lift, and I wondered just what I would do now. All I knew was that I didn’t want to run away to sea again, because this time I had someone worth staying for. Which meant that, despite the bastards who were trying to see me off, I would stay.
Charlie was not at home that night, which made staying at his house an awkward experience. Yvonne was watching television when I arrived, so I went straight to bed. At four in the morning I woke up in a muck sweat, panicking because I had been dreaming that I was drowning. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so as soon as I heard Yvonne up and moving, I went down to the kitchen and asked if she’d mind driving me to where I could catch a bus. She grudgingly agreed. “He should be home tonight,” she told me as she drew up at the bus stop in Kingsbridge, “but you can never tell.”
“I might be back, I might not. I’ve got a lot to do today.”
“You’re just like him, aren’t you?” She drove off before I could thank her for the lift.
I caught the first bus to Plymouth. The weather was warm and calm. The south coast seemed trapped in one of those rare bubbles of high pressure which would fill the beaches and becalm the yachts. Not that my concern this day was with the sea. Instead, and perhaps foolishly, I would retrace Harry Abbott’s steps.
I reached George Cullen’s yard a few minutes after nine. Rita was making the day’s first cup of tea. “Look at you!” she said in shocked sympathy. I was still using Charlie’s cane, for my left ankle was fearsomely painful. “You poor man. I saw it in the papers. How did it happen?”
“Like they said, an accident. Gas leak.” The papers had speculated about sabotage, but someone, presumably Harry, had killed that notion. The story had run for a day or two, then disappeared.
“You should take more care of yourself, Johnny.” Rita took down a third chipped mug into which she poured a dollop of milk. “He’s in there,” she said, “and I’ll bring your tea in.”
George half smiled when I limped into his office, then his face assumed a properly sympathetic look. “Johnny,” he said as greeting.
I didn’t say anything, but just limped over to the desk. He had a tabloid open at a page showing a naked girl with a pair of breasts like over-inflated lifebelts. Other similar pictures faded on his walls.
“Johnny,” he said again. “You had a spot of bother, I hear.”
I slammed the stick on to his newspaper so hard that everything on his desktop jumped a full inch into the air. “Listen, you fat swine, I’m going to ask you some questions, and your miserable life depends on the answers you give me. Do you understand that, George?”
He golloped at me like a dying fish, then nodded hastily. “Of course, my lord. Of course I do. Anything you want. Just ask.”
I shoved the metal ferrule of the stick into his fat gut. “You know who Garrard and Peel are, don’t you?”
“Course I do. Yes. I told you I did.” He was staring bug-eyed at me.
“So did you tell them where they could find me on the night when they tipped
