the glass panel in the door but I pushed and the door swung open. I reached up to catch the sprung bell before it announced my arrival.
It was a cramped place. An odd collection of bentwood chairs were dancing on the table-tops. The dining- room had been dressed to look like a Paris bistro of the 'thirties, with enamel Suze adverts, marble-topped tables and fancy mirrors on every wall. A debris of corks, paper napkins and cigarette ends had been swept to a neat pile in the corner under the serving hatch. On the counter there was an array of cutlery, a line-up of old bottles stuck with coloured candles and a pile of freshly laundered red check tablecloths. There was a smell of burned garlic, ancient cigars and freshly peeled potatoes. I walked through to the kitchen. From a tiny dark yard beyond it I could hear a young man's voice singing softly and the noises of buckets and metal lids.
Down two stone steps from the kitchen there was a large pantry. A freezer was humming to a tin hip-bath, full of peeled potatoes. Alongside there was a large plastic sack containing dry ice, its smoke moving around inside the clear plastic like a restless grey cobra trying to escape. A scrubbed table had been cleared to provide room for an electric sewing machine plugged into the overhead light socket. Hanging over the back of the kitchen chair there was a man's dark jacket. But it wasn't the jacket that caught my attention: it was a manilla file. It had been pushed under a folded length of lining material, but not pushed far enough to conceal it completely. I pulled it clear and flipped it open. On top there was a drawing of a splay-armed figure, its measurements noted in neat red ink. The rest of the contents were photographs.
There were a dozen photos, and this time they shook me more than the ones in my flat. It was the same man that I'd seen pictured with my car, and with my parents, but these were better photographs and I could see his face in greater detail than before. He was more than five, perhaps even fifteen years, older than me, a barrel- chested man with a full mop of hair and large stubby-fingered hands.
There were no other papers in the file, nothing to tell me about his job or his family or what he liked for lunch. Nothing to tell me why someone had chosen to sit lum in my car wearing my clothes, or pose him with my parents or frame the prints and position them carefully in my old flat. But these picture:) revealed something about the people who had arranged this business. For the first time I realized that I was up against someone of consider-able power and wealth. And it had all the clumsy power of a security department: a Russian security department for example. For reasons that I was unable to fathom, they had gone to all the trouble of dressing my
There were footsteps on the creaking wooden stairs. The sound of a cold room door and the clatter of footsteps on tiles. I closed the file and pushed it back under the lining material where I'd found it. Then I stepped quickly back through the door but grasped the edge, and peek-a-booed round it in what I hoped was the manner of a salesman.
'Who are you?' She was standing in the other doorway. Beyond her there was a food store. Through the open door I could see the entrance to the cold room. There was a rack of vegetables and a marble slab upon which, some charcuterie had been sliced and arranged on plates and garnished with twigs of parsley. The movement of air activated the cold room thermostat, and the refrigeration system started. It was a loud vibrating sound. She closed the door.
'Who are you?' I said. It was the unsedated, fully dressed Mss Shaw, and I had made the right decision. She was a shapely blonde in her middle twenties. Her long hair was parted in the middle so that it fell forward framing her face. Her skin was tanned, and she needed no makeup and knew it.
She was so unexpected that I hesitated for a moment while I looked at her in detail. 'It's about the accident,' I said.
'Who let you in?'
'The door was open,' I told her. A willowy man in flared denims came to the top of the stairs and paused for a moment. He was out of her sight but she knew he was there. 'Did you leave the door open, Sylvester?'
'No, Miss Shaw. The fellow with the frozen pork loins.'
That explains it,' I said. 'These guys with frozen loins…' I gave her a smile that I'd kept unused for a year or more.
'The accident,' she nodded. 'Go and make sure it's closed now, Sylvester.' A yellow tape measure hung around her neck and in her hand there was the dark-blue sleeve of a uniform jacket. She rolled the sleeve into a ball.
'Yes, the police sergeant phoned,' she said. She was slim, but not so slim that she'd slip through your fingers, and she had this incredible pale-blue cashmere sweater that exactly matched her eyes. She wore a carefully fitted dark tweed skirt, and strap-across low-heeled shoes that were suitable for long walks in the country. 'He said to throw you out, if you were a nuisance.' I was expecting a high voice but it was soft and gentle.
'He spoke to
'Policemen are so much younger these days.'
'And stronger, too.'
'I don't seem to get many chances to find out,' she sighed. Then she put the blue uniform sleeve aside with far too much casualness, and she raised a hand to shoo me back into the kitchen. All the time she was giving me back my super smile, returning it tooth for tooth, chewed thirty times just like nanny had told her.
In the kitchen she took two chairs and placed them to face each other. She sat in the one that faced the door. I sat down. She smiled, crossed her legs and smoothed the hem of her skirt, just to be sure that I didn't get a glimpse of her knickers. 'And you are from the insurance?' She embraced herself as if suddenly cold.
I reached for a small black notebook and creased the pages open with my thumb as I'd seen my insurance man do.
'And that's the little book in which you write it all down?'
'It's really the one I use for pressing wild flowers, bxit my wrist-watch tape recorder is on the blink.'1'
'How amusing,' she said.
The blond man came back into the kitchen. From a 1 took behind the door he took a bright pink apron: and put it on carefully, so as not to disarrange his hair. He began to place pieces of limp lettuce in wooden bowls. 'Leave that for now, Sylvester. We're talking. Do the wine.'
'I'll need warm water.'
'Just get the bottles up from the cellar. We won't be long.' Reluctantly he went out. His denims had bright red patches sewn on the behind. He went down the stairs slowly.
I said, 'What's he going to do with the hot water? Put Mouton Rothschild labels on the Algerian?'
'What a good idea,' she said, in a voice calculated to prove that the cashmere had been chosen to match her blood.
'You were with Mr Toliver when the accident happened?'
'I was.'
'And you and he were…?'
'I am a friend.'
'A friend, yes.'
'One more wisecrack like that and you will leave.' But she gave me the inscrutable Snow-queen smile to keep me guessing.
'You'd been out to dinner?'
'With friends — business associates I should say — we were on the way back to my apartment. It was the North Circular Road where the accident happened — or so they told me later.'
I nodded. She wasn't the sort of girl who'd recognize the North. Circular Road and admit it.
'The lorry driver pulled over too soon. He misjudged the distance.'
'The police said the lorry was stopped at the lights.'
'Sergeant Davis is driving me down to collect the Bentley this afternoon. I'll clear it up then. He said it's only a routine thing — thirty minutes or so and he'll bring me back.'
Lucky old Sergeant Davis. If she'd been an old-age pensioner maybe he would have let her go down to collect the Bentley by bus.
