Night Over Water (11 page)

Harry had spent the money. It was mad, but now that he had made up his mind to go, he would pay any price to get out of the country. And the plane was seductively luxurious: it would be champagne all the way to New York. This was the kind of insane extravagance that Harry loved.

He was no longer jumping every time he saw a copper: there was no way the Southampton police could know about him. However, he had never flown before, and now he was feeling nervous about that.

He checked his wristwatch, a Patek Philippe stolen from a Royal Equerry. He had time for a quick cup of coffee to settle his stomach. He went into the lounge.

While he was sipping his coffee, a stunningly beautiful woman walked in. She was a perfect blonde, and she wore a wasp-waisted dress of cream silk with orange-red polka dots. She was in her early thirties, about ten years older than Harry, but that did not stop him smiling when he caught her eye.

She sat at the next table, sideways to Harry, and he studied the way the dotted silk clung to her bosom and draped her knees. She had on cream shoes and a straw hat, and she put a small handbag on the table.

After a moment she was joined by a man in a blazer. Hearing them speak, Harry discovered that she was English but he was American. Harry listened carefully, brushing up on his accent. Her name was Diana; the man was Mark. He saw the man touch her arm. She leaned closer. They were in love, and saw no one but each other: the room might have been empty.

Harry felt a pang of envy.

He looked away. He still felt queasy. He was about to fly all the way across the Atlantic. It seemed an awfully long way to go with no land beneath. He had never understood the principle of air travel, anyway: the propellers went round and round, so how come the plane went up?

While he listened to Mark and Diana, he practiced looking nonchalant. He did not want the other passengers on the Clipper to know he was nervous. I’m Harry Vandenpost, he thought, a well-off young American returning home because of the war in Europe. Pronounced
Yurrup.
I don’t have a job just now, but I suppose I’ll have to settle down to something soon. My father has investments. My mother, God rest her soul, was English, and I went to school over there. I didn’t go to university—never did like swotting. (Did Americans say
swotting?
He was not sure.) I’ve spent so much time in England that I’ve picked up some of the local lingo. I’ve flown a few times, sure, but this is my first flight across the Atlantic Ocean, you bet. I’m
really
looking forward to it!

By the time he finished his coffee, he was hardly scared at all.

 

Why had they kidnapped her? They wanted something from him, something he would not give voluntarily, something he would not do for
money—
something, he guessed, that he would want to refuse them. But what? He had no money, he knew no secrets and no one was in his power.

It had to be something to do with the Clipper.

He would get his instructions on the plane, they had said, from a man called Tom Luther. Might Luther be working for someone who wanted details of the construction and operation of the plane? Another
airline,
perhaps, or a
foreign country? It was possible. The Germans or the Japanese might be hoping to build a copy to use as a bomber. But there had to be easier ways for them to get blueprints. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, could supply such information: Pan American employees, Boeing employees, even the Imperial Airways mechanics who serviced the engines here at Hythe. Kidnapping was not necessary. Hell, enough technical details had been published in the magazines.

Don’t call the police. It won’t do you any good, the voice on the phone
had said.
But if you do call them, I’ll fuck her just to be mean.

 

 

 

 

T
he first words Mark Alder said to Diana Lovesey were: “My goodness, you’re the nicest thing I’ve seen all day.”

People said that sort of thing to her all the time. She was pretty and vivacious, and she loved to dress well. That night she was wearing a long turquoise dress, with little lapels, a shirred bodice and short sleeves gathered at the elbow; and she knew she looked wonderful.

She was at the Midland Hotel in Manchester, attending a dinner dance. She was not sure whether it was the Chamber of Commerce, the Freemasons’ Ladies’ Night, or the Red Cross fund-raiser: the same people were at all such functions. She had danced with most of her husband, Mervyn’s, business associates, who had held her too close and trodden on her toes; and all of their wives had glared daggers at her. It was strange, Diana thought, that when a man made a bit of a fool of himself over a pretty girl, his wife always hated the girl for it, not the man. It was not as if Diana had designs on any of their pompous, whiskey-soaked husbands.

She had scandalized them all and embarrassed her husband by teaching the deputy mayor to jitterbug. Now, feeling the need of a break, she had slipped into the hotel bar, on the pretense of buying cigarettes.

He was there alone, sipping a small cognac, and he looked up at her as though she had brought sunshine into the room. He was a small, neat man with a boyish smile and an American accent. His remark seemed spontaneous, and he had a charming manner, so she smiled radiantly at him, but she did not speak. She bought cigarettes and drank a glass of iced water, then returned to the dance.

He must have asked the barman who she was, and found her address somehow, for the next day she got a note from him, on Midland Hotel writing paper.

Actually, it was a poem.

It began:

It made her cry.

She cried because of everything she had hoped for and never achieved. She cried because she lived in a grimy industrial city with a husband who hated to take holidays. She cried because the poem was the only gracious, romantic thing that had happened to her for five years. And she cried because she was no longer in love with Mervyn.

After that it happened very quickly.

The next day was Sunday. She went into town on the Monday. Normally she would have gone first to Boots to change her book at the circulating library, then bought a combined lunch-and-matinee ticket for two shillings and sixpence at the Paramount Cinema in Oxford Street. After the film she would have walked around Lewis’s department store and Finnigan’s, and bought ribbons, or napkins, or gifts for her sister’s children. She might have gone to one of the little shops in The Shambles to buy some exotic cheese or special ham for Mervyn. Then she would have taken the train back to Altrincham, the suburb where she lived, in time to get the supper.

This time, she had coffee in the bar of the Midland Hotel, lunch in the German restaurant in the basement of the Midland Hotel, and afternoon tea in the lounge of the Midland Hotel. But she did not see the charming man with the American accent.

She went home feeling heartsick. That was ridiculous, she told herself. She had met him for less than a minute and had never said a word to him! He had seemed to symbolize everything she felt was missing from her life. But if she saw him again she would surely discover that he was boorish, insane, diseased, smelly, or all of those things.

She got off the train and walked along the street of large suburban villas where she lived. As she approached her own home, she was shocked and flustered to see him walking toward her, looking at her house with a pretense of idle curiosity.

She flushed scarlet and her heart raced. He too was startled. He stopped, but she carried on walking; then, as she passed him, she said: “Meet me in the Central Library tomorrow morning!”