The Cilla Rose Affair (29 page)

Robin got up. He removed the cover from the bed, and wandered out to the kitchen wrapped up like an Indian.

“Hello.”

“Good morning.” Evan was in a navy kangaroo shirt, grey sweatpants and running shoes. “Tea or coffee?”

“Tea, thanks.” Robin sat on a chair beside an open window, enjoying the exclusive peculiarity of being up before the sun.

“I rather like London at this hour,” his father said. “The night clears the air.”

He abandoned the kettle, which was whistling violently on the stove, to put on some music in the sitting room.
Fingal’s Cave
. Robin recognized the rise and fall of Mendelssohn’s violins, the magnificent mist and swirl and froth of seawater crashing upon Hebridean rocks.

He could hear the morning rush of traffic beginning on Brompton Road.

Evan dropped two teabags into a pot, and rescued the kettle from the stove. “How are you feeling now?”

“Quite well, actually,” Robin answered, watching his father make toast—brown bread and that delicious unsalted English butter drawn from pampered cows. Three-fruit marmalade on the side. Fresh orange juice.

Evan lined up a sugar bowl and a small jug of milk, then glanced out of the kitchen window at the square below.

“What’s the matter?”

Evan raised his hand, tentatively, as if warning him away. “Different watchers,” he said, with thought. “I’ve not seen that car before in this neighbourhood.”

He jerked his head around, instantly alert, as he heard a knocking on the door to his flat.

“I’m not sure I like this,” he said, motioning his son out of the kitchen.

Robin disappeared into the darkened sitting room. He wished his father would carry a gun, but Evan flatly refused. He passed his yearly qualification on the firing range with multiple exclamation points, and claimed that was all he ever wanted to have to do with a weapon.

There was another knock; with a pounding heart, Robin watched his father approach the door and peer through the little eye-level spy hole and then, with some caution, say:

“It’s Mrs. Sullivan, isn’t it.”

Robin heard her Dublin-accented reply through the still-closed door. “Yes it is, and I’ve got your
Times
, Mr. Harris—they’ve brought it to the wrong flat again as usual.”

Still wary, Evan unlocked the door. Robin got up from the floor where he had been crouching, wrapped in his blanket, with his toast and his tea. He glanced out of the window at the street and the flats opposite—and froze.

“
Down
!” he screamed, as two gun blasts exploded through the kitchen window, shattering the pane and a panel in the half-opened door, knocking his father sideways into the wall and Mrs. Sullivan backwards into the hallway.

There was a moment of silence—it must have been silence, although Robin’s ears were ringing and it seemed as if someone was moaning, perhaps Mrs. Sullivan.

“Stay down!” his father shouted back.

Robin huddled on the floor, his head buried in the blanket, for what felt like a year, but there were no more shots. In the hallway, Mrs. Sullivan was struggling to her feet, and people were coming out of their flats.

“Are you OK?” he called.

There was no answer.

He crawled into the kitchen. There was blood on the wall, blood on the floor, blood on his father.

“You’re hit!” he said, horrified. “Where?”

“Arm,” Evan replied, getting to his feet with difficulty. He sat down again, immediately, sinking onto one of the kitchen chairs. He pressed his hand over the wound, and the blood oozed out between his fingers.

Robin grabbed a clean dish towel from a drawer and folded it into a wad and tucked it under his father’s hand. “Use that,” he said. “Is the bullet still in you?”

Evan checked. He shook his head. “In one side, out the other.” He wrapped the towel all the way around his arm.

“Where’s the nearest hospital?”

“There’s a 24 hour A&E in Fulham Road.”

His voice was getting shaky.

“You’re going into shock,” Robin said. “Car keys.”

“Hook on the wall by the phone.”

Outside, he could hear the distinctive report of a police siren. People were congregating around Mrs. Sullivan, who had propped herself against the wall; others were peering into the flat. Robin shut the door.

“I hope you’re going to put some clothes on,” his father said, faintly. “I think I ought to draw the line at being ferried into Casualty by a young man wearing nothing but a blanket.”

The woman pushing the linen cart along the carpeted corridor spoke no English. She was new to the hotel, was a refugee from one or another of the eastern European states that had erupted into chaos with the ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union. She had a willing smile and hands that had not seen much by way of menial work, and those who observed her from the linen room guessed her age to be about 40, and laid odds she wouldn’t last a week.

She went about her tasks diligently, however, drawing curtains open, changing sheets and pillowcases, substituting fresh, dry towels for damp, replenishing the soap and toilet paper.

She made up four rooms in this manner—four rooms belonging to early risers, businessmen—and prepared to enter a fifth, #1210, at the far end of the hallway.

A DO NOT DISTURB sign dangled from the doorknob. Glancing quickly over her shoulder, she produced, from her pocket, a coded card which freed the first lock. Gaining access, she employed a small pair of shears to break the safety chain, muffling the sound with a judiciously placed towel.

The room she entered was still dark, its occupant asleep, huddled beneath the sheet and blankets.

The chambermaid slipped outside again and withdrew, from between the towels, a compact gun, a 9-mm Heckler and Koch P7M8 with an adapted silencer. Taking deadly aim from close range, she fired six shots into her target, one after the other, taking a somewhat perverse pleasure in the jerking of the body beneath the covers, the motionless aftermath, the stillness.

The chambermaid left the room quickly, shutting the door behind her and returning the gun to its hiding place in the pile of towels on her cart. Doubling back along the hallway to the now-deserted linen room, she stripped off her uniform and replaced it with high heeled shoes and a chic summer dress. She removed her wig and consigned it, with the uniform, to a bag full of soiled laundry. Bending over, she brushed out her long, honey-coloured hair.

Retrieving the tools of her trade—keycard, shears, pistol—and placing them in an oversized handbag which she slung over her shoulder, she exited looking for all the world like a wealthy guest from one of the rooms she had just made up.

Her progress down the corridor to the lifts was calmly observed by the gentleman from #1211, across the hallway from #1210.

When he was quite certain she had left the floor, Ian slipped out of the room he had taken the precaution of reserving the night before under another name, and made his way across and into the room originally registered to him.

The six pillows he had stuffed under the blankets in a rough semblance of a sleeping body were a mess, the half dozen 9 mm bullets tearing through the covers and exploding into an effusion of foam chips.

Soberly, he collected all of the remnants and dropped them into a small rubbish bin under the dressing table. He retrieved the bullets—what was left of them—putting them in his pocket. He picked up the few belongings he’d scattered around the room to make it look lived in, then shut the door behind him, and returned to the relative security of the room on the other side of the hallway.

Nora bent down to retrieve the Friday morning post. Several bills had arrived, some letters—people were still sending their condolences, broadcasters in other countries who’d only just heard, people in related occupations whose paths had once crossed Simon’s.

On the bottom, there was an envelope with no external markings on it at all, something she surmised had quite obviously been dropped in through the mail slot by someone who had come before the postman.

She opened the flap of the envelope—it wasn’t sealed—and withdrew a small white card upon which had been typed a message:

URGENT I SEE YOU TONIGHT, 8:00

ROMILLY SQUARE, DOWNSTAIRS

Victor.

Nora carried the remainder of her correspondence into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa. She placed the white card on the cushion beside her and contemplated the curtains, which had not yet been drawn back to admit the morning sun.

“Bloody roadworks,” Harry fumed, stalking through to the rear of the office. “On top of which I’ve had to contend with three vehicular accidents, one involving two lorries and a spilled load of pig manure.”

Maureen laughed. “You should come up by train, Harry. Straight into Victoria, no tie-ups—”

“Barring those unfortunate mornings when major delays are forecast due to essential track maintenance,” Sara added, “the odd train driver doesn’t show up for work, and terrorist bombs go off in the concourse.”

“God help us. I think I’ll continue to take my chances on the A217, if it’s all the same to you. I never could stand sharing a compartment with five bowler hatted stockbrokers smoking cigarettes and jostling each other for reading space behind their newspapers.”

“You’re hopelessly out of date, Harry,” Sara said. “Nobody wears bowler hats anymore—and they’re all plugged into personal stereos. It’s all U2 and Erasure these days. Can I fetch you a coffee or anything?”

“And biscuits, if you wouldn’t mind, Sara, thanks.”

Harry carried on up the stairs, and Sara went down the road, to the snack bar run by the two good-looking brothers from Sicily.

“Just a coffee, Gino, thanks, and a packet of biscuits for you-know-who.”

“You been having renovations done to your place?”

“No,” Sara said, curiously.

“Only, you know, I see the workmen—”

“Oh,” Sara said, “you mean our computer man. Yes—sorry—we’ve been having trouble with our line and he’s had to go digging in behind the walls.”

“Ah,” said Gino, “I see. Yes. Only, you know, last night, very late, Carlos and I, we are coming out from show, and we see big vans.”

“Big vans. What, at the travel agency?”

“Yes, one in front, one behind, you know, in little courtyard where the cars park in the day. I say to Carlos, perhaps is new office furniture. We go and see. No furniture, but lots of tools. Inside vans, look like workshop, all bright lights, cables, things hanging, things on shelves.”

“What sorts of things?” Sara asked, perplexed.

Gino shrugged, and passed her coffee and biscuits over the countertop.

“Just things, lots of things. Electrical. Men sitting on stools with screwdrivers and hammers. Like I say, I think they have something to do with renovations.”

“Yes,” Sara said, thoughtfully, “perhaps you’re right. Perhaps it’s something Harry arranged and didn’t bother telling us about.”

“A surprise, maybe.”

“Maybe,” she said.

She paid for the coffee and biscuits and carried them back to the agency and upstairs.

“Here you are, then, Harry,” she said, placing them before him on the desk. “Don’t say I never do anything for you, will you?”

“You are a treasure, Sara. I could murder these. And before I forget again—” He presented her with a small plastic shopping bag. “Prezzie from Paris.”

“You shouldn’t have, Harry.”

“Don’t ever let it be said I don’t take proper care of my girls.”

“Thanks,” Sara said, reluctantly.

“And here,” he added, handing her the model railway enthusiasts’ file—the same one that Ian had spread out in pieces over the floor the evening before. “Final payment’s been dropped off. Do me an invoice showing it paid in full, will you? I can’t ever get the hang of the way that bloody computer thinks. Give me good old typewriters and pen and ink ledgers anyday.”

“Yes, Harry,” Sara said, going back downstairs. She looked inside her plastic bag. It was only a ruddy bottle of Anais Anais from the airport gift shop.

She stowed it safely in the bottom drawer of her desk, then transferred herself to the computer and brought up the model railway enthusiasts’ file and updated it to show paid in full, and caused an invoice to that effect to clack out of the printer in the rear.

She went to tear it off. What had Gino been talking about? she wondered. Large vans. Men at workbenches, fashioning things with hammers and screwdrivers. Was it something Harry was up to?

Even after what Ian had told her, she found it difficult to believe that Harry—her Harry, who brought back bottles of liquor and scent for his staff when he breezed in from his travels abroad and never complained when they showed up late for work because he was just as guilty as the next person and knew they’d make up the time without being asked—it was difficult to believe that Harry would knowingly be mixed up in something as dishonest as what Ian had described.

Still, she had been asked to sign The Act, and she had been told certain things by Ian’s father—things about Harry’s friends, most notably that woman, Nora Darrow, who was always jetting off somewhere or other.

Maureen would be the one to talk to about that. Maureen was up on her gossip. She liked to think she was Nora Darrow’s best pal.

Harry must have known whether his groups were legitimate or not, she reasoned, because it was Harry himself who rang up to double-check the departure times with the airlines, and if nobody was actually booked, then there’d be no record of them in the reservation system.

Which meant he was only saying he was doing it to prevent her or Maureen from making the call.

She tore the invoice off the printer and took it back to her desk.

“Right then,” Maureen announced. “I’m off to the bank. Hold the fort down for a quarter of an hour, will you?”

Sara waited until the office door had swung shut behind her.

Then, she sat down, and opened the model railway enthusiasts’ file.

Twenty seats on Northwest Airlines from London to Minneapolis to Las Vegas.

Looking up the number for Northwest, she dialled, and waited momentarily in the queue. A reservations agent with an American accent identified herself.