The Cilla Rose Affair (13 page)

FRAU DARROW (it said, briefly)

PLEASE RING ME. I HAVE IN MY POSSESSION SOMETHING WHICH MAY BE OF INTEREST TO YOU.

There was a telephone number, and a signature: Lügner.

Intrigued, Nora carried the postcard into the sitting room. Who could possibly know that she was staying here? Unless…

She dismissed the thought. Harris wasn’t that clever. He didn’t have the resources at his disposal. She’d been keeping a close eye on that man: if he’d enlisted the help of anybody at MI5, she certainly would have known about it.

Placing the telephone on the arm of the sofa, she dialled the number.

“This is Lügner.” He had a pleasant enough voice. Very German.

“And this is Nora Darrow.”

“Frau Darrow! How good of you to ring.”

“How did you happen to know I was here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

The German voice at the other end was noncommittal. “I have my ways.”

“Your postcard mentioned an article which might be of interest to me.”

“Indeed, Frau Darrow.”

“What is it?”

“Perhaps you would care to meet me, in order to discuss the matter.”

“But I know nothing about you,” she deferred, charmingly.

“You know I am called Lügner, and you must know I am German. I am East German, in fact, but this is no longer important, as we are all meant to be good friends now, are we not?”

“Where shall we meet, then, Herr Lügner?”

“Shall we say the London Dungeon, Friday afternoon at two? You know of this place?”

“I think I ought to be able to find it. How will I recognize you?”

“I am older. I am grey-haired. I promise I shall wear a white carnation in my buttonhole, and I shall carry a shopping bag from that famous department store, Harrod’s.”

“I can’t wait.”

“You will not be disappointed, Frau Darrow. This I can guarantee.”

“Until tomorrow afternoon, then, Herr Lügner.”

Friday, 30 August 1991

It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the Dorchester. It wasn’t even the Holiday Inn. It was functional and grey and commercial, the sort of place where your key came on the end of a long metal wand, and where rules about entertaining guests in your room were posted prominently in the lobby over the reception desk.

Christopher Robin Harris lugged his suitcase into the midget lift, pressed the button for the sixth floor, and waited for the slow ascent to end.

There was not much more to be said for the accommodation. The predominant colour was orange. Orange curtains, an orange bedspread. There was an upright wooden wardrobe in the corner, and a television set plugged into what appeared to be the one electrical outlet. The walls were textured plaster painted a dirty beige, and, with the exception of a rather nondescript and very dark landscape fastened down with screws, without ornamentation. The carpet was brown with orange swirls, suitable for someone’s sitting room hearth.

The bed was hard, and narrow.

Robin checked his watch. He was hot and tired, and he smelled of airplanes. And he was due to meet his father in 20 minutes.

Kicking off his desert boots, he plumped up the pillows and lay back on the bed to contemplate the ceiling. He detested overnight flights. The only thing that made them moderately bearable was a seat beside a window—a seat he’d thought he’d confirmed when he’d visited the airline ticket office a day earlier to pick up his ticket.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Harris. One to London?” The counter agent at Vancouver Airport had taken charge of that ticket, and his passport, and keyed his reservation data into the computer. “We’ve had a last-minute change of equipment this afternoon, Mr. Harris, and unfortunately the seating configuration is slightly different…” He was typing, rapidly. “—and it looks like…the best I’m going to be able to offer you…is 38C.”

“On the aisle,” Robin guessed.

“On the aisle,” the agent said.

“I’d really rather have my original window seat. 36A.”

“No windows left—sorry. Perhaps someone will be willing to switch with you once you’re on board.”

“I doubt it,” Robin said, checking over the top of the counter to make sure the tag wrapped around the handle of his suitcase read LHR. There was nothing like landing at Heathrow only to discover your bags had been sent to Hong Kong.

“Gate 24 in half an hour.” His boarding card, ticket and passport were returned to him. “Have a good trip.”

“Thanks,” Robin said, without enthusiasm.

It had been a very long flight, and he’d endured it flanked on either side by infants, one of which had seemed perennially hungry, the other perennially wet. He’d dabbled in the polar route diversions—films, meals, six overmodulated audio selections, the inflight magazine.

There had been a brief respite in the middle of the night when he’d undertaken a bold expedition past the forbidding grey curtain to use the Business Class toilet—but that had been the extent of the excitement.

Disgruntled, silently cursing the sleepers sprawled all about him, heads thrown back and mouths open, he had resorted at last to reading: a good little spy story he’d picked up at the airport bookstore.
Blood and Questions
by Emma Braden. Never studied in the hallowed hallways of the University of British Columbia, never likely to be. Five years after graduating with his B.A. in Literature, he still battled voices that egged him on to more meaningful works of fiction—Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, Thomas Mann.

Maybe it was just him, but Robin had always felt there were more important things in life than the mystical lyricism of water and the quest for prelapsarian bliss in a textual account of
Huckleberry Finn
.

He’d landed at Heathrow bleary-eyed and bad-tempered, retrieved his familiarly-battered suitcase, replete with radio station stickers, exchanged pleasantries with the officers at Passport Control, dragged his bag through the Green customs alley. He’d caught the Airbus into Central London.

Yawning, he looked at his watch again—he’d set it to London time somewhere over Greenland—and forced himself to get up.

Over the years, Evan Harris had wandered in and out of his youngest son’s existence, a very casual sort of parent—the red haired chap with the blazing green eyes that you caught on
The Late Movie
in various disguises, who shared your last name and a number of your genetic traits, who sent you birthday cards more or less on time and who, very occasionally, insinuated himself into your life with such velocity that the ensuing havoc was nothing short of spectacular.

Robin rang for the lift.

His father’s primary claim to fame had been that television series he’d done in the 1960s. An opening montage of rapid-fire clips that condensed the entire forty-eight minute plot into thirty seconds of near subliminal action. A mandatory teaser followed by a moment of black, and then, the credits: the stylized
Spy Squad
logo, the close-ups of the three regulars at work—running, jumping, karate-chopping the villains, laughing inanely and for no apparent reason—all to the accompaniment of a very catchy but totally unhummable piece of music that had once climbed to Number Three on the popular charts of the day.

An intriguing program, Robin thought, as the lift arrived, and he stepped inside and pushed the button for the ground floor. A show that had spawned a cult following of millions, that had been synonymous with incredible gadgets, nefarious villains and a now-infamous multi-purpose gun—the one that Jarrod Spencer was somehow always able to slam together, week after week, while being pursued down sinister alleys, across mined fields, through uncharted villages on the dark side of the Balkans.

The lift deposited him in the lobby, and he tracked the smell of fried chips and coffee across to a chaotic restaurant guarded by a harassed-looking Sicilian in an ill-fitting black suit. He could see his father, seated by the window: Evan Harris, fibber, storyteller, actor, watcher. Purveyor of outrageous charm.

He was reading a newspaper, unconcerned by the mass anarchy in his general vicinity.

“Good afternoon.”

Robin gave his father a warm, one-armed hug, and sensed right away the surprise his gesture had generated. I ambushed him, he thought. He wasn’t expecting that.

He sat down. “I’m not altogether certain what to make of this place,” he said, warily.

“Primitive
Metropolis
,” his father judged, putting away his reading glasses, and considering the padded grey vinyl chairs, the striped yellow and grey wallpaper, the art nouveau chrome light fixtures, “with subtle undertones of
Bride of Frankenstein
.” He put his hand over the coffee cup as a spotty youth in a stained waiters’ jacket appeared with an aluminum teapot in one hand, and a matching coffee urn in the other. “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering you lunch.”

“Thanks.”

His youngest offspring had turned, Evan mused, into a rather pleasant-looking young man. Interesting blue eyes, netted out of the genetic fishing pool by way of some ancient recessive patriarch nobody’d ever been able to recall to any degree of accuracy. Lashes that were red-flecked and thick, and hair that had always been fair, without any hint of the copper that had infiltrated down to Ian.

He was wearing faded jeans and a bright blue cotton t-shirt, and he’d slung a small canvas knapsack over the back of his chair.

Evan enjoyed Robin’s company and it was true—he had been taken by surprise. Such gestures from his youngest son had, in the past, been rare.

“Did you have any trouble getting the time off work?”

“I probably won’t have a job when I get back, but no,” Robin said, as two plates of fast-fried fish sticks and chips and a generous helping of boiled peas arrived, along with a bottle of salad cream and a plastic ketchup container in the shape of an overly-ripe tomato. “Do you actually eat this stuff over here?”

“I generally do my utmost to avoid it, in fact.”

Robin gave his father a look, and heaped the peas onto his plate with a spoon. He gave one of the fish sticks an experimental poke with his fork.

“And while I’m at it,” he said, as his father transferred the large helping of peas onto a nearby saucer and covered them, mercifully, with a paper napkin, “would it be too presumptuous of me to inquire why you require my presence in London on such short notice?”

Rupert held the stage door of the Fitzroy Theatre open for his superior, then followed Victor Barnfather in, past the porter, and down.

Buried beneath the theatre was a sub-basement, concrete and brick, wires and pipes. Underneath the sub-basement lay the underpinnings, ancient foundations embedded in the various layers of sand, gravel and clay common to London’s West End. The staircase here reverted to steep, hewn stone; the brick ceiling was low and uneven, the atmosphere musty, damp and dark. Rupert had brought a torch, but it was unnecessary. A strand of temporary service lights had been strung along a wire to show them the way.

“All right, sir?” Rupert checked.

“So far,” Victor answered, testily. He disliked closed-in places. It was a weakness that had been duly noted on his personnel file, one of those things that had branded him a low-grade risk very early on in his career, an agent who possessed a vulnerability that could, under certain rare circumstances, render him a target.

He continued the descent, slowly, suppressing the panic, until he reached the bottom, and a vault, the dimensions of which he estimated as some 70 feet long and 40 feet wide. A row of half a dozen stone pillars divided the cavern in two, supporting an ecclesiastically-arched ceiling which rose at least 20 feet above the terracotta floor.

At the far end of this grotto, a number of the ancient bricks had been levered up and stacked neatly against the wall. Beside the brickpile was a small mountain of wet gravel. Perching on the ledge of bricks was a wizened little man with greying hair and a black umbrella.

“Good afternoon,” he said, getting up, extending his hand. “Jeremy Litchfield, Thames Water Authority.”

“Victor Barnfather, MI5. And this is Rupert Chadwick.”

“How do you do?” Rupert said. He peered into the excavation. “What is it?”

“A water pipe with a hole in it,” the little man replied.

“A sewer?”

“Bit of a hybrid, really—the Cranbourne. Sewer, river, not quite one or the other. The general feeling is that it was an illegal sewer put in by Richard Frith when he was building Soho in the late 1600s. It would have taken waste water away to an ancient drain around Seven Dials. Roundabout the end of the last century it was used to supply the Hippodrome for its water shows. It empties into the Thames at Aldwych.”

“Tell me what happened to the pipe,” Victor prompted, impatiently.

“For all intents and purposes, it collapsed. And with a rather loud bang, too. The cellar was flooded: you can see the high water mark on the walls.”

“What would have caused the noise? The pipe itself?”

“You arrive at your own conclusions,” said Jeremy Litchfield. “We’ve diverted the water so you can observe the actual damage. The pipe’s in a number of pieces, as you can see. Shattered, I think, would be an appropriate description. Quite disintegrated. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it had been smashed with a large, blunt object. But, of course, it wasn’t: the pipe’s buried, and totally inaccessible.”

Rupert bent over to study the hole. In the distance, there was a faint grumble. He jumped to his feet, alarmed, as the grumble grew into a thundering roar beneath his feet, too loud for a river torrent, shaking the bricks, the masonry, sending dust sifting down from the ceiling and dislodging loose stones from the mound of wet gravel.

“Never fear,” the little man chuckled. “It’s only the Northern Line.” He tapped the floor with the tip of his furled umbrella. “We’re right on top of their southbound tunnel. Amazing what comes to light when you go meddling beneath the streets, isn’t it?”

Dark and dripping, buried under the arches off Tooley Street and crossed with the wandering souls of both the morbidly curious, and the outrageously amused, the London Dungeon oozed atmosphere. Perhaps, Nora thought, as she picked her way among the instruments of torture, the lurid tales and the graphic tableaux replete with sound effects and wet blood, some of its more frequent visitors might even have been secretly stimulated.