Night Over Water (9 page)

Middle-aged women were even easier than their daughters, he thought. In the empty corridor he caught sight of himself in a mirror. He stopped to adjust his bow tie and grinned triumphantly at his reflection. “You are a devil, Harold,” he murmured.

The party was coming to an end. When Harry reentered the drawing room, Rebecca said irritably: “Where have you been?”

“Talking to our hostess,” he replied. “Sorry. Shall we take our leave?”

He walked out of the house with his host’s cuff links and twenty pounds in his pocket.

They got a cab in Belgrave Square and rode to a restaurant in Piccadilly. Harry loved good restaurants: he got a deep sense of well-being from the crisp napkins, the polished glasses, the menus in French and the deferential waiters. His father had never seen the inside of such a place. His mother might have, if she had come in to clean it. He ordered a bottle of champagne, consulting the list carefully and choosing a vintage he knew to be good but not rare, so that the price was not too high.

When he first started taking girls to restaurants, he had made a few mistakes; but he was a quick learner. One useful trick had been to leave the menu unopened, and say: “I’d like a sole. Have you got any?” The waiter would open the menu and show him where it said Sole
meuniere, Les goujons de sole avec sauce tartare,
and
Sole grillée,
and then, seeing him hesitate, would probably say: “The
goujons
are very nice, sir.” Harry soon learned the French for all the basic dishes. He also noticed that people who frequently ate in such places quite often asked the waiter what a particular dish was: wealthy English people did not necessarily understand French. Thereafter he made a point of asking for the translation of one dish every time he ate in a fancy restaurant; and now he could read a menu better than most rich boys of his age. Wine was no problem, either. Sommeliers were normally pleased to be asked for a recommendation, and they did not expect a young man to be familiar with all the chateaus and communes and the different vintages. The trick, in restaurants as in life, was to appear at ease, especially when you were not.

The champagne he chose was good, but there was something wrong with his mood tonight, and he soon figured out that the problem was Rebecca. He kept thinking how delightful it would be to bring a pretty girl to a place like this. He always went out with unattractive girls: plain girls, fat girls, spotty girls, silly girls. They were easy to get acquainted with; and then, once they had fallen for him, they were eager to take him at face value, reluctant to question him in case they should lose him. As a strategy for getting inside wealthy homes it was matchless. The snag was that he spent all his time with girls he did not like. One day, perhaps ...

Rebecca was sullen tonight. She was discontented about something. Perhaps after seeing Harry regularly for three weeks, she was wondering why he still had not attempted to “go too far,” by which she would mean touching her breasts. The truth was he could not pretend to lust after her. He could charm her, romance her, make her laugh, and make her love him; but he could not desire her. On one excruciating occasion, he had found himself in a hayloft with a skinny, depressed girl set on losing her virginity, and he had tried to force himself; but his body had refused to cooperate, and he still squirmed with embarrassment every time he thought of it.

His sexual experience, such as it was, was mostly with girls of his own class, and none of those relationships had lasted. He had had just one deeply satisfying love affair. At the age of eighteen he had been shamelessly picked up in Bond Street by an older woman, the bored wife of a busy solicitor, and they had been lovers for two years. He had learned a lot from her—about making love, which she taught him enthusiastically; about upper-class manners, which he picked up surreptitiously; and about poetry, which they read and discussed in bed together. Harry had been deeply fond of her. She ended the affair instantly and brutally when her husband found out that she had a lover (he never knew who). Since then, Harry had seen them both several times: the woman always looked at him as if he were not there. Harry found this cruel. She had meant a lot to him, and she had seemed to care for him. Was she strong-willed, or just heartless? He would probably never know.

The champagne and the good food were not lifting Harry’s spirits or Rebecca’s. He began to feel restless. He had been planning to drop her gently after tonight, but suddenly he could not bear the thought of spending even the rest of this evening with her. He wished he had not wasted money on dinner for her. He looked at her grumpy face, bare of makeup and squashed beneath a silly little hat with a feather, and he began to hate her.

When they had finished dessert, he ordered coffee and went to the bathroom. The cloakroom was right next to the men’s room, near the exit door, and not visible from their table. Harry was seized by an irresistible impulse. He got his hat, tipped the cloakroom attendant, and slipped out of the restaurant.

It was a mild night. The blackout made it very dark, but Harry knew the West End well, and there were traffic lights to navigate by, plus the sparing glow of car side lights. He felt as if he had been let out of school. He had got rid of Rebecca, saved himself seven or eight pounds and given himself a night off, all in one inspired stroke.

The theaters, cinemas and dance halls had been closed by the government, “until the scale of the German attack upon Britain has been judged,” they said. But nightclubs always operated on the fringe of the law and there were still plenty open if you knew where to look. Soon Harry was making himself comfortable at a table in a cellar in Soho, sipping whiskey and listening to a first-rate American jazz band and toying with the idea of making a play for the cigarette girl.

He was still thinking about it when Rebecca’s brother came in.

 

The following morning he sat in a cell in the basement underneath the courthouse, depressed and remorseful, waiting to be taken before the magistrates. He was in deep trouble.

Walking out of the restaurant like that had been bloody silly. Rebecca was not the type to swallow her pride and pay the bill quietly. She had made a fuss, the manager had called the police, her family had been dragged in.... It was just the kind of furor Harry was normally very careful to avoid. Even so, he would have got away with it, had it not been for the incredible bad luck of running into Rebecca’s brother a couple of hours later.

He was in a large cell with fifteen or twenty other prisoners, who would be brought before the Bench this morning. There were no windows, and the room was full of cigarette smoke. Harry would not be tried today: this would be a preliminary hearing.

He would eventually be convicted, of course. The evidence against him was indisputable. The headwaiter would corroborate Rebecca’s complaint, and Sir Simon Monkford would identify the cuff links as his.

But it was worse than that. Harry had been interviewed by an inspector from the Criminal Intelligence Department. The man had been wearing the detective’s uniform of serviceable serge suit, plain white shirt and black tie, waistcoat with no watch chain, and highly polished, well-worn boots; and he was an experienced policeman with a sharp mind and a wary manner. He had said: “For the last two or three years we’ve been getting odd reports, from wealthy houses, of lost jewelry. Not stolen, of course. Just missing. Bracelets, earrings, pendants, shirt studs ... The losers are quite sure the stuff can’t have been stolen, because the only people who had the opportunity to take it would have been their guests. The only reason they report it is that they want to claim it if it turns up somewhere.”

Harry had kept his mouth shut tight throughout the entire interview, but inside he was feeling sick. He had been sure that his career had gone entirely unnoticed until now. He was shocked to learn the opposite: they had been on to him for some time.

The detective opened a fat file. “The Earl of Dorset, a Georgian silver bonbonnière and a lacquered snuffbox, also Georgian. Mrs. Harry Jaspers, a pearl bracelet with ruby clasp by Tiffany’s. The Contessa di Malvoli, an Art Deco diamond pendant on a silver chain. This man has good taste.” The detective looked pointedly at the diamond studs in Harry’s dress shirt.

Harry realized the file must contain details of dozens of crimes committed by him. He knew also that he would eventually be convicted of at least some of those crimes. This shrewd detective had put together all the basic facts: he could easily gather witnesses to say that Harry had been at each location at the time of the theft. Sooner or later they would search his lodgings and his mother’s house. Most of the jewelry had been fenced, but he had kept a few pieces: the shirt studs the detective had noticed had been taken from a sleeping drunk at a ball in Grosvenor Square, and his mother had a brooch he had deftly plucked from the bosom of a countess at a wedding reception in a Surrey garden. And then how would he answer when they asked him what he lived on?

He was headed for a long stretch in jail. And when he got out, he would be conscripted into the army, which was more or less the same thing. The thought made his blood run cold.

He steadfastly refused to say a word, even when the detective took him by the lapels of his dinner jacket and slammed him against the wall; but silence would not save him. The law had time on its side.

Harry had only one chance of freedom. He would have to persuade the magistrates to give him bail, then disappear. Suddenly he yearned for freedom as if he had been in jail for years instead of hours.

Disappearing would not be simple, but the alternative made him shiver.

In robbing the rich, he had grown accustomed to their style of living. He got up late, drank coffee from a china cup, wore beautiful clothes and ate in expensive restaurants. He still enjoyed returning to his roots, drinking in the pub with old mates or taking his ma to the Odeon. But the thought of prison was unbearable: the dirty clothes, the horrible food, the total lack of privacy and, worst of all, the grinding boredom of a totally pointless existence.

With a shudder of loathing he concentrated his mind on the problem of getting bail.

The police would oppose bail, of course; but the magistrates would make the decision. Harry had never appeared in court before, but in the streets from which he came, people knew these things just as they knew who was eligible for a council house and how to sweep chimneys. Bail was automatically refused only in murder trials. Otherwise it was up to the discretion of the magistrates. Normally they did what the police asked, but not always. Sometimes they could be talked around, by a clever lawyer or by a defendant with a sob story about a sick child. Sometimes, if the police prosecutor was a little too arrogant, they would give bail just to assert their independence. He would have to put up some money, probably twenty-five or fifty pounds. This was no problem. He had plenty of money. He had been allowed to make a phone call, and he had rung the newsagent’s shop on the comer of the street where his ma lived and asked Bemie, the proprietor, to send one of the paper boys to fetch Ma to the phone. When finally she got there, he told her where to find his money.

“They’ll give me bail, Ma,” Harry said cockily.

“I know, son,” his mother said. “You’ve always been lucky.”

But if not ...

I’ve got out of awkward situations before, he told himself cheerily. But not this awkward.

A warder shouted out: “Marks!”

Harry stood up. He had not planned what he would say: he was a spur-of-the-moment improviser. But for once he wished he had something prepared. Let’s get it over with, he thought edgily. He buttoned his jacket, adjusted his bow tie and straightened the square of white linen in his breast pocket. He rubbed his chin and wished he had been allowed to shave. At the last minute the germ of a story appeared in his mind, and he took the cuff links out of his shirt and pocketed them.

The gate was opened and he stepped outside.

He was led up a concrete staircase and emerged in the dock in the middle of the courtroom. In front of him were the lawyers’ seats, all empty; the magistrates’ clerk, a qualified lawyer, behind his desk; and the Bench, with three nonprofessional magistrates.

Harry thought: Christ, I hope the bastards let me go.

In the press gallery, to one side, was a young reporter with a notebook. Harry turned around and looked toward the back of the court. There in the public seats he spotted Ma, in her best coat and a new hat. She tapped her pocket significantly: Harry took that to mean that she had the money for his bail. He saw to his horror that she was wearing the brooch he had stolen from the Countess of Eyer.

He faced front and grasped the rail to keep his hands from trembling. The prosecutor, a bald police inspector with a big nose, was saying: “Number three on your list, your worships: theft of twenty pounds in money and a pair of gold cuff links worth fifteen guineas, the property of Sir Simon Monkford; and obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception at the Saint Raphael restaurant in Piccadilly. The police are requesting a remand in custody because we are investigating further offenses involving large sums of money.”

Harry was studying the magistrates warily. On one side was an old codger with white sideburns and a stiff collar, and on the other a military type in a regimental tie: they both looked down their noses at him, and he guessed they believed that everyone who appeared before them must be guilty of something. He felt hopeless. Then he told himself that stupid prejudice could quickly be turned into equally foolish credulity. Better they should not be too clever, if he was going to pull the wool over their eyes. The chairman, in the middle, was the only one who really counted. He was a middle-aged man with a gray mustache and a gray suit, and his world-weary air suggested that in his time he had heard more tall stories and plausible excuses than he cared to remember. He would be the one to watch, Harry thought anxiously.