The Tightrope Men / The Enemy (27 page)

When he had gone Lyng put his papers back into his briefcase and Carey stood at the window and lit his pipe. It took him some time to get it going to his satisfaction. Lyng waited patiently, and then said, ‘Well?’

Carey looked down into Whitehall and saw Denison crossing the street. Lyn ran towards him and they kissed, then linked arms and walked past the mounted guards and under the arch. ‘They’re sensible people; there’ll be no trouble.’

‘Good!’ said Lyng, and picked up the folder from where Denison had left it.

Carey swung around. ‘But Thornton is a different matter.’

‘I agree,’ said Lyng. ‘He’s got the Minister’s ear. We’re going to have a rough ride with this one regardless of whether Denison keeps silent.’

Carey’s voice was acid. ‘I don’t mind if Thornton plays the Whitehall warrior as long as the only weapon he shoots is a memorandum. But when it comes to a deliberate interference in operations then we have to draw a line.’

‘Only a suspicion—no proof.’

‘Meyrick’s death was bad enough—although it was accidental. But what he did to Denison was abominable and unforgivable. And if he’d got hold of Merikken’s papers his bloody secret laboratories would be working overtime.’

‘Forget it,’ said Lyng. ‘No proof.’

Carey grinned. ‘I told a lie just now—the only lie I’ve told to Denison since I’ve known him. I’ve got the proof, all right. I’ve got a direct link between Thornton and his crooked plastic surgeon—Iredale was able to put me on to that one—and it won’t be long before I find the sewer of a psychologist who diddled around with Denison’s mind. I’m going to take great pleasure in peeling the skin off Thornton in strips.’

Lyng was alert. ‘This is certain? Real proof?’

‘Cast iron.’

‘Then you won’t touch Thornton,’ said Lyng sharply. ‘Let me have your proof and I’ll deal with him. Don’t you see what this means? We can neutralize Thornton—he’s out of the game. If I can hold that over him I can keep him in line for ever.’

‘But…’ Carey held himself in. ‘And where does justice come in?’ he asked heavily.

‘Oh, justice,’ said Lyng indifferently. ‘That’s something else again. No man can expect justice in this world; if he does then he’s a fool.’ He took Carey by the elbow and said gently, ‘Come; let us enjoy the sunshine while we may.’

I met Penelope Ashton at a party thrown by Tom Packer. That may be a bit misleading because it wasn’t the kind of party that gets thrown very far; no spiked punch or pot, and no wife-swapping or indiscriminate necking in the bedrooms at two in the morning. Just a few people who got together over a civilized dinner with a fair amount of laughter and a hell of a lot of talk. But it did tend to go on and what with Tom’s liberal hand with his after-dinner scotches I didn’t feel up to driving, so when I left I took a taxi.

Penny Ashton came with Dinah and Mike Huxham; Dinah was Tom’s sister. I still haven’t worked out whether I was invited as a makeweight for the odd girl or whether she was brought to counterbalance me. At any rate when we sat at table the sexes were even and I was sitting next to her. She was a tall, dark woman, quiet and composed in manner and not very forthcoming. She was no raving beauty, but few women are; Helen of Troy may have launched a thousand ships but no one was going to push the boat out for Penny Ashton, at least not at first sight. Not that she was ugly or anything like that. She had a reasonably good figure and a reasonably good face, and she dressed well. I think the word to describe her would be average. I put her age at about twenty-seven and I wasn’t far out. She was twenty-eight.

As was usual with Tom’s friends, the talk ranged far and wide; Tom was a rising star in the upper reaches of the medical establishment and he was eclectic in his choice of dining companions and so the talk was good. Penny joined in but she tended to listen rather than talk and her interjections were infrequent. Gradually I became aware that when she did speak her comments were acute, and there was a sardonic cast to her eye when she was listening to something she didn’t agree with. I found her spikiness of mind very agreeable.

After dinner the talk went on in the living-room over coffee and brandy. I opted for scotch because brandy doesn’t agree with me, a circumstance Tom knew very well because he poured one of his measures big enough to paralyse an elephant and left the jug of iced water convenient to my elbow.

As is common on these occasions, while the dinner-table conversation is general and involves everybody, after dinner the party tended to split into small groups, each pursuing their congenial arguments and riding their hobby-horses hard and on a loose rein. To my mild surprise I found myself opting for a group of two—myself and Penny Ashton. I suppose there were a dozen of us there, but I settled in a corner and monopolized Penny Ashton. Or did she monopolize me? It could have been six of one and half-a-dozen of the other; it usually is in cases like that.

I forget what we talked about at first but gradually our conversation became more personal. I discovered she was a research biologist specializing in genetics and that she worked with Professor Lumsden at University College, London. Genetics is the hottest and most controversial subject in science today and Lumsden was in the forefront of the battle. Anyone working with him would have to be very bright indeed and I was suitably impressed. There was a lot more to Penny Ashton than met the casual eye.

Some time during the evening she asked, ‘And what do you do?’

‘Oh, I’m someone in the City,’ I said lightly.

She got that sardonic look in her eye and said reprovingly, ‘Satire doesn’t become you.’

‘It’s true!’ I protested. ‘Someone’s got to make the wheels of commerce turn.’ She didn’t pursue the subject.

Inevitably someone checked his watch and discovered with horror the lateness of the hour, and the party began to break up. Usually the more congenial the party the later the hour, and it was pretty late. Penny said, ‘My God—my train!’

‘Which station?’

‘Victoria.’

‘I’ll drop you,’ I said and stood up, swaying slightly as I felt Tom’s scotch. ‘From a taxi.’

I borrowed the telephone and rang for a taxi, and then we stood around making party noises until it arrived. As we were driven through the brightly-lit London streets I reflected that it had been a good evening; it had been quite a while since I’d felt so good. And it wasn’t because of the quality of Tom’s booze, either.

I turned to Penny. ‘Known the Packers long?’

‘A few years. I was at Cambridge with Dinah Huxham-Dinah Packer she was then.’

‘Nice people. It’s been a good evening.’

‘I enjoyed it.’

I said, ‘How about repeating it—just the two of us? Say, the theatre and supper afterward.’

She was silent for a moment, then said, ‘All right.’ So we fixed a time for the following Wednesday and I felt even better.

She wouldn’t let me come into the station with her so I kept the taxi and redirected it to my flat. It was only then I realized I didn’t know if she was married or not, and I tried to remember the fingers of her left hand. Then I thought
I was a damned fool; I hardly knew the woman so what did it matter if she was married or not? I wasn’t going to marry her myself, was I?

On the Wednesday I picked her up at University College at seven-fifteen in the evening and we had a drink in a pub near the theatre before seeing the show. I don’t like theatre crush bars; they’re too well named. ‘Do you always work as late as this?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘It varies. It’s not a nine-to-five job, you know. When we’re doing something big we could be there all night, but that doesn’t happen often. I laboured tonight because I was staying in town.’ She smiled. ‘It helped me catch up on some of the paperwork.’

‘Ah; the paperwork is always with us.’

‘You ought to know; your job is all paperwork, isn’t it?’

I grinned. ‘Yes; shuffling all those fivers around.’

So we saw the show and I took her to supper in Soho and then to Victoria Station. And made another date for the Saturday.

And, as they say, one thing led to another and soon I was squiring her around regularly. We took in more theatres, an opera, a couple of ballets, a special exhibition at the National Gallery, Regent’s Park Zoo, something she wanted to see at the Natural History Museum, and a trip down the river to Greenwich. We could have been a couple of Americans doing the tourist bit.

After six weeks of this I think we both thought that things were becoming pretty serious. I, at least, took it seriously enough to go to Cambridge to see my father. He smiled when I told him about Penny, and said, ‘You know, Malcolm, you’ve been worrying me. It’s about time you settled down. Do you know anything about the girl’s family?’

‘Not much,’ I admitted. ‘From what I can gather he’s some sort of minor industrialist. I haven’t met him yet.’

‘Not that it matters,’ said my father. ‘I hope we’ve gone beyond snobberies like that. Have you bedded the girl yet?’

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘We’ve come pretty close, though.’

‘Um!’ he said obscurely, and began to fill his pipe. ‘It’s been my experience here at the college that the rising generation isn’t as swinging and uninhibited as it likes to think it is. Couples don’t jump bare-skinned into a bed at the first opportunity—not if they’re taking each other seriously and have respect for each other. Is it like that with you?’

I nodded. ‘I’ve had my moments in the past, but somehow it’s different with Penny. Anyway, I’ve known her only a few weeks.’

‘You remember Joe Patterson?’

‘Yes.’ Patterson was head of one of the departments of psychology.

‘He reckons the ordinary man is mixed up about the qualities he wants in a permanent partner. He once told me that the average man’s ideal wife-to-be is a virgin in the terminal stages of nymphomania. A witticism, but with truth in it.’

‘Joe is a cynic.’

‘Most wise men are. Anyway, I’d like to see Penny as soon as you can screw up your courage. Your mother would have been happy to see you married; it’s a pity about that.’

‘How are you getting on, Dad?’

‘Oh, I rub along. The chief danger is of becoming a university eccentric; I’m trying to avoid that.’

We talked of family matters for some time and then I went back to London.

It was at this time that Penny made a constructive move. We were in my flat talking over coffee and liqueurs; she had complimented me on the Chinese dinner and I had modestly replied that I had sent out for it myself. It was then that she invited me to her home for the weekend. To meet the family.

She lived with her father and sister in a country house near Marlow in Buckinghamshire, a short hour’s spin from London up the M4. George Ashton was a widower in his mid-fifties who lived with his daughters in a brick-built Queen Anne house of the type you see advertised in a fullpage spread in
Country Life
. It had just about everything. There were two tennis-courts and one swimming-pool; there was a stable block converted into garages filled with expensive bodies on wheels, and there was a stable block that was still a stable block and filled with expensive bodies on legs—one at each corner. It was a Let’s-have-tea-on-the-lawn sort of place; The-master-will-see-you-in-the-library sort of place. The good, rich, upper-middle-class life.

George Ashton stood six feet tall and was thatched with a strong growth of iron-grey hair. He was very fit, as I found out on the tennis-court. He played an aggressive, hard-driving game and I was hard put to cope with him even though he had a handicap of about twenty-five years. He beat me 5-7, 7-5, 6-3, which shows his stamina was better than mine. I came off the court out of puff but Ashton trotted down to the swimming-pool, dived in clothed as he was, and swam a length before going into the house to change.

I flopped down beside Penny. ‘Is he always like that?’

‘Always,’ she assured me.

I groaned. ‘I’ll be exhausted just watching him.’

Penny’s sister, Gillian, was as different from Penny as could be. She was the domestic type and ran the house. I don’t mean she acted as lady of the house and merely gave the orders. She
ran
it. The Ashtons didn’t have much staff; there were a couple of gardeners and a stable girl, a house-man-cum-chauffeur called Benson, a full-time maid and a daily help who came in for a couple of hours each morning. Not much staff for a house of that size.

Gillian was a couple of years younger than Penny and there was a Martha and Mary relationship between them which struck me as a little odd. Penny didn’t do much about the house as far as I could see, apart from keeping her own room tidy, cleaning her own car and grooming her own horse. Gillian was the Martha who did all the drudgery, but she didn’t seem to mind and appeared to be quite content. Of course, it was a weekend and it might have been different during the week. All the same, I thought Ashton would get a shock should Gillian marry and leave to make a home of her own.

It was a good weekend although I felt a bit awkward at first, conscious of being on show; but I was soon put at ease in that relaxed household. Dinner that evening, cooked by Gillian, was simple and well served, and afterwards we played bridge. I partnered Penny and Ashton partnered Gillian, and soon I found that Gillian and I were the rabbits. Penny played a strong, exact and carefully calculated game, while Ashton played bridge as he played tennis, agressively and taking chances at times. I observed that the chances he took came off more often than not, but Penny and I came slightly ahead at the end, although it was nip and tuck.

We talked for a while until the girls decided to go to bed, then Ashton suggested a nightcap. The scotch he poured was not in the same class as Tom Packer’s but not far short,
and we settled down for a talk. Not unexpectedly he wanted to know something about me and was willing to trade information, so I learned how he earned his pennies among other things. He ran a couple of manufacturing firms in Slough producing something abstruse in the chemical line and another which specialized in high-impact plastics. He employed about a thousand men and was the sole owner, which impressed me. There are not too many organizations like that around which are still in the hands of one man.

Then he enquired, very politely, what I did to earn my bread, and I said, ‘I’m an analyst.’

He smiled slightly. ‘Psycho?’

I grinned. ‘No—economic. I’m a junior partner with McCulloch and Ross; we’re economic consultants.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard of your crowd. What exactly is it that you do?’

‘Advisory work of all sorts-market surveys, spotting opportunities for new products, or new areas for existing products, and so on. Also general economic and financial advice. We do the general dogsbodying for firms which are not big enough to support their own research group. ICI wouldn’t need us but a chap like you might.’

He seemed interested in that. ‘I’ve been thinking of going public,’ he said. ‘I’m not all that old, but one never knows what may happen. I’d like to leave things tidy for the girls.’

‘It might be very profitable for you personally,’ I said. ‘And, as you say, it would tidy up the estate in the event of your death—make the death duties bit less messy.’ I thought about it for a minute. ‘But I don’t know if this is the time to float a new issue. You’d do better to wait for an upturn in the economy.’

‘I’ve not entirely decided yet,’ he said. ‘But if I do decide to go public then perhaps you can advise me.’

‘Of course. It’s exactly our line of work.’

He said no more about it and the conversation drifted to other topics. Soon thereafter we went to bed.

Next morning after breakfast—cooked by Gillian—I declined Penny’s invitation to go riding with her, the horse being an animal I despise and distrust. So instead we walked where she would have ridden and went over a forested hill along a broad ride, and descended the other side into a sheltered valley where we lunched in a pub on bread, cheese, pickles and beer, and where Penny demonstrated her skill at playing darts with the locals. Then back to the house where we lazed away the rest of the sunny day on the lawn.

I left the house that evening armed with an invitation to return the following weekend, not from Penny but from Ashton. ‘Do you play croquet?’ he asked.

‘No, I don’t.’

He smiled. ‘Come next weekend and I’ll show you how. I’ll have Benson set up the hoops during the week.’

So it was that I drove back to London well contented.

I have given the events of that first weekend in some detail in order to convey the atmosphere of the place and the family. Ashton, the minor industrialist, richer than others of his type because he ran his own show; Gillian, his younger daughter, content to be dutifully domestic and to act as hostess and surrogate wife without the sex bit; and Penny the bright elder daughter, carving out a career in science. And she
was
bright; it was only casually that weekend I learned she was an MD although she didn’t practise.

And there was the money. The Rolls, the Jensen and the Aston Martin in the garages, the sleek-bodied horses, the manicured lawns, the furnishings of that beautiful house—all these reeked of money and the good life. Not that I envied Ashton—I have a bit of money myself although not in the same class. I mention it only as a fact because it was there.

The only incongruity in the whole scene was Benson, the general factotum, who did not look like anyone’s idea of a servant in a rich household. Rather, he looked like a retired pugilist and an unsuccessful one at that. His nose had been broken more than once in my judgement, and his ears were swollen with battering. Also he had a scar on his right cheek. He would have made a good heavy in a Hammer film. His voice clashed unexpectedly with his appearance, being soft and with an educated accent better than Ashton’s own. I didn’t know what to make of him at all.

Something big was apparently happening in Penny’s line of work that week, and she rang to say she would be in the laboratory all Friday night, and would I pick her up on Saturday morning to take her home. When she got into the car outside University College she looked very tired, with dark smudges under her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Malcolm,’ she said. ‘This won’t be much of a weekend for you. I’m going to bed as soon as I get home.’

I was sorry, too, because this was the weekend I intended to ask her to marry me. However, this wasn’t the time, so I grinned and said, ‘I’m not coming to see you—I’m coming for the croquet.’ Not that I knew much about it—just the bit from Alice and an association with vicars and maiden ladies.

Penny smiled, and said, ‘I don’t suppose I should tell you this, but Daddy says he can measure a man by the way he plays croquet.’

I said, ‘What were you doing all night?’

‘Working hard.’

‘Doing what? Is it a state secret?’

‘No secret. We transferred genetic material from a virus to a bacterium.’

‘Sounds finicky,’ I remarked. ‘With success, I hope.’

‘We won’t know until we test the resulting strain. We should know something in a couple of weeks; this stuff breeds fast. We hope it will breed true.’

What I knew about genetics could be measured with an eye-dropper. I said curiously, ‘What good does all this do?’

‘Cancer research,’ she said shortly, and laid her head back, closing her eyes. I left her alone after that.

When we got to the house she went to bed immediately. Other than that the weekend was much the same as before. Until the end, that is—then it changed for the worse. I played tennis with Ashton, then swam in the pool, and we had lunch on the lawn in the shade of a chestnut tree, just the three of us, Ashton, Gillian and me. Penny was still asleep.

After lunch I was introduced to the intricacies of matchplay croquet and, by God, there
was
a vicar! Croquet, I found, is not a game for the faint-hearted, and the way the Reverend Hawthorne played made Machiavelli look like a Boy Scout. Fortunately he was on my side, but all his tortuous plotting was of no avail against Gillian and Ashton. Gillian played a surprisingly vicious game. Towards the end, when I discovered it’s not a game for gentlemen, I quite enjoyed it.

Penny came down for afternoon tea, refreshed and more animated than she had been, and from then on the weekend took its normal course. Put down baldly on paper, as I have done here, such a life may be considered pointless and boring, but it wasn’t really; it was a relief from the stresses of the working week.

Apparently Ashton did not get even that relief because after tea he retired to his study, pleading that he had to attend to paperwork. I commented that Penny had complained of the same problem, and he agreed that putting unnecessary words on paper was the besetting sin of the twentieth century. As he walked away I reflected that
Ashton could not have got where he was by idling his time away playing tennis and croquet.

And so the weekend drifted by until it was nearly time for me to leave. It was a pleasant summer Sunday evening. Gillian had gone to church but was expected back at any moment; she was the religious member of the family—neither Ashton nor Penny showed any interest in received religion. Ashton, Penny and I were sitting in lawn chairs arguing a particularly knotty point in scientific ethics which had arisen out of an article in the morning newspaper. Rather, it was Penny and her father doing the arguing; I was contemplating how to get her alone so I could propose to her. Somehow we had never been alone that weekend.

Penny was becoming a little heated when we heard a piercing scream and then another. The three of us froze, Penny in mid-sentence, and Ashton said sharply, ‘What the devil was that?’

A third scream came. It was nearer this time and seemed to be coming from the other side of the house. By this time we were on our feet and moving, but then Gillian came into sight, stumbling around the corner of the house, her hands to her face. She screamed again, a bubbling, wordless screech, and collapsed on the lawn.

Ashton got to her first. He bent over her and tried to pull her hands from her face, but Gillian resisted him with all her strength. ‘What’s the matter?’ he yelled, but all he got was a shuddering moan.

Penny said quickly, ‘Let me,’ and gently pulled him away. She bent over Gillian who was now lying on her side curled in a foetal position, her hands still at her face with the fingers extended like claws. The screams had stopped and were replaced by an extended moaning, and once she said, ‘My eyes! Oh, my eyes!’

Penny forced her hand to Gillian’s face and touched it with her forefinger, rubbing gently. She frowned and put
the tip of her finger to her nose, then hastily wiped it on the grass. She turned to her father. ‘Take her into the house quickly—into the kitchen.’

She stood up and whirled towards me in one smooth motion. ‘Ring for an ambulance. Tell them it’s an acid burn.’

Ashton had already scooped up Gillian in his arms as I ran to the house, brushing past Benson as I entered the hall. I picked up the telephone and rang 999 and then watched Ashton carry his daughter through a doorway I had never entered, with Penny close behind him.

A voice said in my ear, ‘Emergency services.’

‘Ambulance.’

There was a click and another voice said immediately, ‘Ambulance service.’ I gave him the address and the telephone number. ‘And your name, sir?’

‘Malcolm Jaggard. It’s a bad facial acid burn.’

‘Right, sir; we’ll be as quick, as we can.’

As I put down the phone I was aware that Benson was staring at me with a startled expression. Abruptly he turned on his heel and walked out of the house. I opened the door to the kitchen and saw Gillian stretched on a table with Penny applying something to her face. Her legs were kicking convulsively and she was still moaning. Ashton was standing by and I have never seen on any man’s face such an expression of helpless rage. There wasn’t much I could do there and I’d only be in the way so I closed the door gently.

Looking through the big window at the far end of the hall, I saw Benson walking along the drive. He stopped and bent down, looking at something not on the drive but on the wide grass verge. I went out to join him and saw what had attracted his attention; a car had turned there, driving on the grass, and it had done so at speed because the immaculate lawn had been chewed up and the wheels had gouged right down to the soil.

Benson said in his unexpectedly gentle voice, ‘As I see it, sir, the car came into the grounds and was parked about there, facing the house. When Miss Gillian walked up someone threw acid in her face here.’ He pointed to where a few blades of grass were already turning brown. ‘Then the car turned on the grass and drove away.’