The Cilla Rose Affair (7 page)

“What are you doing with yourself these days? Still listening to the radio?”

“My husband and I,” said Angela Emerson, “own a newsagent’s in Carshalton, and have done for the past fifteen years. I imagine I’ll be reading all about myself in tomorrow’s deliveries.”

“Thanks very much for your time, Mrs. Emerson,” Ian said. “How old are you, by the way?”

“One hundred and three,” she said, turning her back on him.

Ian flicked off his micro-cassette.

There was nothing in the least disturbing about the bland outer room of Dr. Baker’s private haven—whatever had to do with livers and brains, relative weights, drainage gutters, rubber boots and gloves went on in the chamber beyond, on the other side of a now-closed swinging door. Evan had nonetheless positioned himself in the best possible location to facilitate a quick exit.

“Ricin,” the pathologist said, tentatively, taking his hands out of the pockets of his white lab coat. “Whatever makes you suspect that?”

He was a very earnest young man, Evan thought, with black-rimmed spectacles, a lot of wavy brown hair, and skin that hadn’t quite recovered from what appeared to have been a rather spotty youth. He was too young to have remembered the Bulgarians.

“Did you find a puncture mark?” Evan inquired.

“Yes—in the small of the back—an insect sting. And as I’ve already told you, I am prepared to confirm the possibility of a severe allergic reaction—”

“Did you excise the skin around the wound before you released the body?”

“Yes,” Dr. Baker replied, clearly irritated by the inference that he hadn’t.

Patience
, Evan thought. “You’ve never heard of Georgi Markov or Vladimir Kostov, have you?”

“I don’t believe I have, no.”

“The two of them together achieved a certain amount of notoriety in 1978. Bulgarian dissidents, one living in London, the other in Paris. The one who lived and worked in Paris—Kostov—was the target of an assassination attempt as he was coming up from the Metro. He felt a sharp blow to his back, just above his belt—nothing else. He went to see his doctor because there appeared to be some sort of puncture mark at the site of the injury. The doctor concluded he must have been stung by an insect. Kostov subsequently developed a high fever and some very painful swelling—but he recovered—unlike his unfortunate friend and fellow dissident in England, who was attacked by a man carrying an umbrella while he waited for a bus near Waterloo Bridge.”

“Hang on,” Dr. Baker said. “I do remember hearing something about that…”

“Within a day or so,” Evan continued, “he had a high temperature, vomiting, swollen lymph glands. As the poison spread throughout his system his blood pressure collapsed, his pulse rose and his temperature fell. His kidneys failed. His white cell count tripled. He lived for three days and then his heart stopped. During the autopsy a block of flesh was cut away from the back of his right thigh. It was sent to Porton Down to be analyzed, and what do you think they discovered embedded in that little square of skin?”

“I’m not going to like this, am I,” Dr. Baker said.

“A pellet. Fractionally larger than the head of a pin. Ninety percent platinum and ten percent iridium—harder than steel, resistant to corrosion, biologically inert. Two cavities had been drilled into this pellet, each .35 of a millimetre wide. And do you know what had been packed into those two little holes?”

Dr. Baker looked uncomfortable.

“A fifth of a milligram of refined ricin,” Evan said. “You’d be doing me a very great favour, Dr. Baker, if you’d go back and give that patch of skin something more than a cursory glance.”

Friday, 23 August 1991

Somewhere, deep in the recesses of Anthony Quinn Harris’s history, lay his first memories of the Underground. Descending in the lift at Chalk Farm Station, stumping down the short flight of steps to the platform, one at a time, clutching his mother’s hand.

He remembered the wind, snatching at his hair and tugging at a tatty blue blanket that went with him everywhere. He remembered waiting for the train, and straining at the end of a soft blue leather harness with bells, and the wind, warm, billowing in his face, smelling of black mystery and creosote. He remembered the train—they were red in those days, rolling stock left over from 1938, with wooden floors and window-frames, and scratchy green and red upholstery—phwooping out of the tunnel and roaring to a squealing stop, its nose buried in the opposing hole.

He sat now, facing forward, mesmerized by the view from the window: the grimy ribbon of bound-together cables, the bolted segments of ribbed cast iron, sooty black.

He loved the tube. There was something about the stations, buried under London, that made him feel safe. He understood how they must have felt during the war, seeking shelter on the platforms while the bombs rained down above.

There was something about the tunnels, snaking under the streets, being carried along through the secret entrails of the city…

He smiled. It was probably some classic Freudian hang-up left over from his childhood.

The train climbed slightly, and slowed. Anthony pressed his hands against the window, shielding his eyes from the reflecting glare of the interior lights. The train slipped out of its running tunnel, and entered a dark, wide abandoned space, and in the passing of a few precious moments, he was able to glimpse what was left of a wooden staging platform, the dull gleam of once-white tile walls, a warehouse of debris deposited by generations of work crews.

Fragmented remnants.

There were many of them under London—people rattled through them every day without noticing anything more than a gap in the girders and a change in the pitch of the train’s rolling echo.

It was over quickly. The train picked up speed again and clattered away into its running tunnel, the majority of its passengers unaware they had just been taken through the skeletal remains of another lost tube station.

He surfaced at Leicester Square. Below him, on the landing between the Northern and Piccadilly Lines, a brave tenor was attempting Gilbert and Sullivan, a cappella, the male and female parts in turn. Leaning on the moving handrail, Anthony observed reactions: near fright at the top, where the overhanging curve of the roof of the escalator shaft obscured what was actually going on at the bottom; and notable relief midway down, where it finally became apparent that the bloodcurdling shrieks emanating from below had nothing whatever to do with subway terrorism.

Charing Cross Road in the afternoon was a madhouse: lost clumps of tourists congregating on crowded corners to consult their maps, showgoers on the prowl for ticket bargains, book-browsers and bottom feeders and altogether too much vehicular traffic for the narrow thoroughfares that branched off like ribs from a backbone into the long shadows of Soho and Covent Garden.

This was where London began. His London, anyway. By day, the playhouses of the West End looked tatty and old, their doors shut tight and their splashy production stills hanging faded and worn in their streaked glass cases. Come night, however, under the kind disguise of the marquee lights, their souls awoke, and they were once again grand.

Anthony trudged through the dwindling afternoon, his Walkman on, listening to Jean Michel Jarre’s
London Kid
. He absorbed the sights and the smells, coming at last upon his place of current employment: a small, friendly theatre of Victorian vintage that came complete with a lost underground river seeping through its foundations, a wonderfully ornate interior of pink and turquoise and gold, and a ghost—reputedly that of the original owner, who’d been bludgeoned to death by a disgruntled actor.

The same ghost, Anthony supposed, as he let himself in through the stage door, that several evenings before had been responsible for a three-hour power failure that had resulted in the doors being locked and the show being cancelled and a good number of disconcerted patrons having to line up at the Box Office for refunds and rain-checks.

He could smell the subterranean river on the stairs, and sweat and makeup and that peculiar pervasive odour old London bricks gave off, that made him think of bombsites and churches.

His shared dressing room was small, and hot, and crowded. Negotiating his way around the assembled players, he caught sight of himself in one of the mirrors. He resembled neither of his parents in particular, but what there was by way of inheritance was his mother’s: her honey-coloured, rather coarse hair, with its tendency towards havoc; her hazel eyes; and her nose—noble, it had been called, by relations who liked to believe they shared the distinction.

He had on this day pulled a white, loose-sleeved shirt out of his closet—a theatrical sort of blouse whose origins escaped him. He strongly suspected the wardrobe of one of his university productions—a third year Molière. His trousers were cotton, brown, with cuffs rolled rakishly up over his ankles, and his boat shoes were scuffed-in new.

He was without socks.

One of his colleagues, a morose individual who seemed eternally to have his nose buried in the
Flats to Let
columns of the daily papers, handed him, as he passed, a postcard that had been delivered earlier in the afternoon.

“Fan mail,” he said, in a slighted voice.

It was a large glossy rectangle of nothing, black, bearing a legend: LONDON AT NIGHT. Anthony flipped it over and read the brief, blue-inked fountain pen message, and the signature: a flourishing “E”.

“Ardent admirer?”

“Ardent father,” he said, curiously, dropping the card into his pocket.

It was an older neighbourhood, not quite middle-class, with wide pavements and tall, three-storey terraced houses, bay windows and freshly-painted doors and gates, and gardens growing roses.

Number 98 was the black sheep of the block: flagstones instead of lawn, a rusting bicycle with a flat tire propped up where the flowers ought to have been. There was no gate.

Ian had assumed Mrs. Varney’s establishment would be close to Clapham Common. He discovered, after a rather long walk from the tube station, that it was not.

He rang the bell beside the door, and it was answered by a slight, grey-haired woman in a flowered pinafore, a cigarette languishing in her mouth.

“Mrs. Varney?”

“Full up,” she said, curtly. “You should’ve rung first—saved yourself the bother.”

“I haven’t come about a room, Mrs. Varney.” He showed her his warrant card in its green plastic folder: the CSIS crest, his authority to investigate, his picture and identification.

She peered at it, holding it close to her narrowed eyes. “You with the police, then?”

For a fleeting moment, Ian was reminded of his father’s old TV series: the running line, couched in chicanery, the innocent heroine wide-eyed at the moment of truth—“Are you some kind of weird policemen?”

“No, miss, we belong to a top-secret organization dedicated to the eradication of evil the world over. We’re called—”

“Canadian Security and Intelligence,” Ian said, putting away his ID. “I’d like to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind…”

“About what?” Mrs. Varney asked, suspiciously. “If you’re here about those Irish charter flights…”

“About Simon Darrow,” Ian answered, quickly. “I understand he was once a lodger here.”

Mrs. Varney squinted up at her visitor. “Canadian Security and Intelligence, you say…? Nothing to do with Scotland Yard?”

“We’re the Canadian counterpart to MI5,” Ian said, patiently, waiting on her doorstep. “I’m investigating the death of Simon Darrow. The disc jockey.” He despised this part of his job—door-to-door legwork. He was far better in the field.

“What’s that got to do with MI5?”

It was never this difficult on television. “Could I just come inside and have a quick chat with you? Simon Darrow was once a lodger here…”

“MI5 must have a bloody good memory,” Mrs. Varney replied. “That was in 1966, that was. Oh well, you’d better come in. Can’t have the neighbours gossiping, can we?”

Thank you
, Ian muttered, under his breath, as she led him down a gloomy, narrow hallway, to a room at the back where, he imagined, each morning a motley crew of dossers sat hunched around a communal table, sharing cold toast and greasy eggs, and endless pots of tea.

The only table guest at this hour of the day was a large black and white cat, and he was on top of it, a sleeping, snoring centrepiece.

“I used to watch him on the telly, you know. Doing that music program. Who’d have thought it? A young man like that. Cuppa tea?

“No,” Ian said, “Thank you. Do you remember how long Simon was a lodger here?”

“Now you’re really taxing my memory, you are. Not long at all, really, when I think about it. Six months at most, and even then, it was only for one week in every three.” Mrs. Varney stubbed out her cigarette and extracted a second one from a china holder on the mantlepiece—a souvenir from Bognor—and lit it with a wooden match from a large box beside the telephone. “He was one of them radio pirates, wasn’t he. Worked on a boat.”

“What I’d really like to know, Mrs. Varney, is if you remember anything about his personal life. Friends, girlfriends…”

“I know he used to go out evenings. Not every evening, mind—only once, usually, once every time he came to stay. She used to wait for him in her car—one of them sporty little things, you could tell she had money. I used to wonder what she was doing messing about with a lad like Simon, but there you are, see—she must have seen something in him none of us did—potential, like, that spark, whatever you want to call it.”

“Did he ever talk about her? Mention her name?”

“I don’t think so. I had me rules, you know—no entertaining visitors and that—so he did his entertaining out—stayed out all night, sometimes, didn’t come back ’til morning—’course I still charged him for the use of his room.” She drew upon her cigarette. “She kept him in ready cash, I’ve no doubt. Pretty, in a way—dark hair, liked to wear red.”

“Did he ever mention her name?” Ian asked, again.

Mrs. Varney inhaled the curling tendrils of blue smoke. “If he did,” she said, “I don’t remember. It was too long ago.” She brushed some breakfast crumbs off the table top with a brisk sweep of her hand. “And why’s MI5 involved in all of this, eh?” She narrowed her eyes at Ian again. “Our Simon Darrow wasn’t any sort of James Bond spy boy, was he?”