The Yellow Glass (18 page)

The place had a dead feel to it, but then houses with
windows swathed in net often do.
 
There
were white pillars that made me think of the Deep South mansions in
Gone With the Wind
[34]
and rose bushes and a lot of lawn that had grown taller than I expected lawns
belonging to people with portico-ed mansions to have.
 
I thought of Mrs Dyminge’s grass with its
‘aspirations’; the growing season had evidently begun and yet nobody had cut
this grass since the end of the previous year.
 
It seemed like a clue to me.
 
So,
screwing up courage, I lifted the latch on the front gate and ran up the
concrete path - scored with a stick as it set, so as to look like flagstones –
and hid behind one of the pillars by the front door.
 
Crisp, brown leaves were lodged in the
corners of the doorstep where the wind had sent them.
 
I picked one up and it crumbled between my
fingers.
 
Then I crouched down and looked
through the letter-box.
 
A whole pile of
letters had fallen onto the mat and been left to accumulate.
 
That decided it; I was confident that nobody
was at home.

The view through the letter-box yielded no more clues,
because an inner door of thick, patterned glass was firmly shut, so I stood up
and ran around the front of the house to take a look at the side.
 
No lavatory window had been left, carelessly,
open and there was no side entrance to the house but, on the plus side, there
was no fence barring the way to the back, so I scuttled all the way around,
expecting to find an expanse of garden; a rockery like a mini-Switzerland and a
bit of a shed, at the very least.
 
But I
didn’t find a bit of a shed, I found a lot of a shed.
 

All
of the space behind the
house, bar a couple of yards’ width of more scored concrete abutting the back
door, was taken up by a low shed that was considerably bigger than most
people’s houses.
 
A rectangular, white
building with four windows evenly spaced along the front and all barred.
 
The hairs on the back of my neck stood
up.
 
This seemed over the top for a
holiday home in Ringwould.

A thumping great padlock hung from the shed door and
my excitement mounted still further.
 
There was
definitely
something
worth hiding inside.
 
Could it be the
second secret?
 
How maddening that I
couldn’t get to it!
 
I yanked the padlock
this way and that, as if it might have been left not fully clicked by mistake,
which, of course, it hadn’t been.
 
Then I
cupped my hands around the sides of my eyes and tried peering between the
window bars, but all was black and indistinguishable.
 
Straightening up, I noticed that it was
beginning to grow dark around me and, while the passage between the two white
buildings must have been starved of light at the best of times, it was
positively gloomy now that the clouds above were thickening into a solid wodge
of charcoal grey, rimmed with the last vestiges of daylight.
 
If twilight were on its way, I must have been
asleep for much,
much
longer than I’d
imagined.

It was frustrating, but I’d noticed as much as I was
going to notice at ‘Seaspray’.
 
I sighed
out loud and turned from the window but, even as I turned, a faint glow from
inside the shed imprinted itself on my retina.
 
I jumped and, instinctively, glanced behind me to find the light that
had cast its reflection onto the shed window.
 
But there was no light.
 
I peered
inside the shed once more, my heart now thumping like crazy.
 
There was no doubt about it, something in
there had begun to glow, modestly at first and then, as if gathering the last
daylight to itself, ever bolder.
 
Deep in
the recesses of my odd brain, there came a click.
 
Twilight, black light, ultraviolet light;
three names for similar phenomena.
 
Arko’s yellow glass was inside the shed and it was starting to fluoresce
under the ultraviolet rays inherent in twilight.
 
I was transfixed as the glow burned pale
yellow, then gold, then a sharp acid-green, tossing light at the corners of the
shed, at bulky sacks and iron rods stacked against the wall.
 
At a row of coat hooks hammered high up,
where the figure of a man swung by his neck from a rope.
 
A gust of wind howled down the gloomy
corridor and swept under the shed door, pawing at the suspended figure.
 
He swung round to look at me.
 
It was Mr B Dexter and he’d never see Alaska
again.

 
Immediately after I’d had words with Rosa, I
jumped in the new car, drove over to HQ and convinced the night watchman to let
me in.
 
It was around ten at night and
the general hubbub had died down and only a few tenacious souls were hunched
over their desks in shirtsleeves, determined to burn the midnight oil.
 
Slipping past the stairs to the basement, I
detected the rumble of far-flung voices from down below.
 
Jay Tamang was probably at home, but it wasn’t
Tamang that I’d come to find.
 
I wanted
to get a look at the files - Arko Arkonnen’s files - because somebody had done
such a thorough job of pulling the wool over our eyes that it looked like we
were all sporting bloody balaclavas.

The whole thing took a bit of effort, because my
section’s remarkably efficient secretary had set up labyrinthine filing systems
of her own devising.
 
I’d never have
cracked them but for the fact that I’d hung about behind her door one day,
trying to get my lighter to work, and chanced to see what she was up to.
 
She’d had a type of grid worked out on a
piece of paper and was checking a pile of dockets against it before she filed
them away.
 
The grid interested me, so I
hung about a bit more and saw her hide it in the back of her desk calendar (one
of those office jobs with a page for every day that one rips off when today
becomes yesterday).
  
However, even with her
grid to hand, it was hard work finding Arko’s file.
 
I couldn’t think why she hadn’t been satisfied
with locking her filing cabinets like all the other girls; picking locks was
childsplay by comparison.
 
I reflected
upon the interesting nature of
unnecessarily
devious minds, before I switched on a desk lamp, hung my jacket on the back of
the chair and got down to work.

——

 
Nobody catches on!
 
He’s too good, that’s the trouble; it makes
my job a bit dull when nobody at all catches on and I’ve nothing to report.
 
So Arko was more than welcome.

——

Somebody had taken considerable pains to compose the
file on Ragnvald ‘Arko’ Arkonnen.
 

He was born in 1904 in Helsinki into a poor,
Finnish-speaking family in the period, before the Revolution, when Finland had
been subject to what was termed the ‘Russification’.
 
His father, Ove Arkonnen, was on record as a
supporter of the Socialist-Communist Reds during the brief Finnish Civil War of
1917.
 
When Imperial Germany sided with
the Whites, however, Arkonnen senior had been thrown into a prison camp, where
he subsequently perished of pneumonia, leaving his young family destitute.
 
Arko, himself, first came to the notice of
the authorities at an early age, when he stole some money from a Lutheran
church, for which he was given a spell in prison.
 
What followed was a fairly seamless descent
into the criminal underworld that could have served as a textbook for every
third-rate hood with ambition, it was so detailed.
 
It rather reminded me of Simenon
[35]
and the type of character that Inspector Maigret routinely pitted his wits
against on the streets of Paris.

——

 
Arko Arkonnen.
 
You bad, bad boy.

——

To sum up, there’d been another prison sentence - for
smuggling alcohol during Finland’s prohibition - and reports of a wide variety
of misdemeanours during that time, with the emphasis on extortion and
assault.
 
There were hints, too, of
several murders in his immediate sphere, where the culprit was never brought to
justice for lack of crucial evidence.
 
However, the second world war years drew a blank; from which one could
only infer that Arko had
not
been
fighting alongside the brave Finns, but had preferred to align himself with
parties unknown.
 
His subsequent
involvement in a string of different industries - before he bought into
Vas-Glas - and the clear indications that he’d benefited from ‘trade
privileges’ with the Soviets, gave some idea of just
who
he might have been fighting with during the war.
 
In short, Arko Arkonnen was a nasty species
of jumped-up thug, and an out and out Red, to boot.

I had to admit that nothing in Arko’s file smelt,
specifically, of rodent; it was all extraordinarily well done.
 
Perhaps
too
well done.
 
Was that it?
 
I thought of my niece and her propensity for
giving too much detail.
 

I leaned back in the chair and happened to clock the
filing cabinet against the wall, where I’d left it open in my hunt for Arko’s
file, and it was then that I had what’s known as a flashback.
 

“What an
unnecessarily
devious mind my secretary must have,” I’d thought.
 

I sat bolt upright.
 
Well . . could it be her?
 
She was
perfectly placed, after all.
 
In-situ.
 
What were the odds?
 
After all, HQ was - by definition - choc-full
of characters with unnecessarily devious minds (like my own, if I were being
honest).
 
Yet I had an instinct about it;
it was a foolish spy who got so bogged down in fact he forgot to use his
instinct.
 
I just had the strongest of
hunches that my secretary - Miss Whatshername - had written Arko’s file.
 
It was a gamble, but . . odds on, I’d found
our mole.

I resolved to drop into Personnel in the morning -
Saturday be damned - and do a bit of background research on our Miss
Whatshername, before I set a shadow on her when she left work on Monday.
 
We had some excellent shadows and it was
unlikely that their paths would ever have crossed . . although, if she were as
devious as I thought, I’d better shake up a good shadow who’d been out of the
building for a spell.
 

I put my jacket back on, thinking about Miss
Whatshername.
 
She was a spinster of a
certain age; just a touch desiccated, was the first impression.
 
A slim woman, neatly turned out and of
average height.
 
Pale pink skirt-suit
affairs.
 
Good legs.
 
Mousy hair set with a wave, quiet demeanour, nothing
remotely reprehensible about her.
 
I
seemed to think her voice was on the high side, although not shrill, and that
she wore reading glasses; the variety that had a touch of sparkle and a
definite point to the upper, outer edge of the frames.
 
The glasses hinted at a frivolity that was
otherwise entirely absent.
 
However, I couldn’t,
for the life of me, remember what her name was.

I did a swift search of her desk, which yielded
little, if not nothing.
 
Of course, she
was so
delightfully
devious that
there wasn’t a clue to be found.
 
The
kind of woman who can refrain from cosying up her office with anything
whatsoever - no calendar with pictures of cats, no snapshots of somebody’s baby,
no spare lipstick nor bottle of scent in the bottom drawer of the desk - is
rare, in my experience.
 
Miss
Whatshername was either watching her back, preparing to scarper, or a very rare
bird, indeed.

I drove back to Tite Street wondering whether the
parsimonious Hutch would run to shadows for Miss W, the Black Box nightclub
and
the journalist’s house in
Fulham.
 
He might take some convincing,
but there should be no skimping – you couldn’t defend Britain and what was left
of her Empire on tuppence halfpenny and that was all there was to it.
 
Then there was Rosa.
 
Oughtn’t Rosa to have protection of some
kind?
 
She’d sworn blind that she hadn’t
been followed down to Kent, but what did she know?
 
The girl was an amateur.
 

I parked the car and sat, running over it all, at the
wheel.
 
What I
really
ought to do, was to get one of the family to keep an eye on
Rosa and make sure she didn’t go trolling into Dover as if she were Bulldog
Drummond
[36]
.
 
But who?
 
My wife’s older sister, Millicent, would have been the ideal candidate
because, on top of being Rosa’s mother, she was an admirably tough cookie and
the real force to be reckoned with in that family.
 
However, she’d made it pretty clear that I
was persona non grata in those quarters and I wasn’t sure that I felt like
braving her quite so soon after our phone conversation.
 
I locked the car, thoughtfully.

Kathleen had gone to bed when I got in, leaving a note
propped up against the empty bottle of Gordon’s to the effect that she’d an
early call for Elstree and would be in the spare bedroom, neither of which was
unusual.
  
After an initial, rather nice,
period of frankness (brushes with death can have that effect, I’ve found), we’d
drifted back into politeness in the weeks since our journey down the slide and,
if she wasn’t busy filming, she was on the telephone to her agent, or her
sister.
 
She also spent long hours
chewing the cud with my father and his friend, Air Chief Marshal Sir Gabriel
Adair, at their home in Norfolk.
 
God only
knew what they found to say;
 
I
certainly didn’t because my father and
I’d never seen eye to eye (and the less I knew about the Norfolk set-up, the
better).
 
In the early days, Kathleen had
tried to interest me in their affairs in an all too transparent plot to effect
a touching family reunion - Kathleen’s plots were generally signalled with
flags and multiple costume changes -
 
but
I’d resisted and she’d given me up for a bad job.

I collapsed into an armchair and pulled the
boomerang-shaped coffee table closer with one foot, reaching for the green, glass
ashtray; a great chunk of trapped air bubbles.
 
Too much was churning about in my mind to make sleep a practical
proposition, so I smoked a couple of cigarettes and stared at the wall of
curtain - a blue and fawn material spattered with a pattern that might have been
snowflakes, or diagrams of atomic matter - before I got up to switch the
television set on.
 
It was just going off
air and I turned it off again before the National Anthem got into its
stride.
 
There was nothing for it but to
make tracks, and that’s what I was doing when the telephone rang.

“FLAxman 4390.”

“Ah.
 
Ah.
 
So
sorry to disturb you at this late hour, Tristram . .”
 

Talk of the devil, it was my father.
 

“Is Kathleen still . . I mean to say, is Kathleen
there?
 
Any chance of a quick word with
Kathleen?
 
In other words.”
 

Either he’d been on the juice, or senility was making
inroads.

“She’s asleep, Father.
 
Can’t it wait?”

“Um.
 
The thing
is, Tristram.
 
She rang for a brief
confab, oh . . twenty minutes ago, max, and I was supposed to ring her back,
but I got caught up in one thing and another and . .”

“Well she’ll be fast asleep by now and she’s filming
in the morning.”

“Is she?
 
She
didn’t mention that.
 
I don’t suppose
you’d just pop your head around the door and . .”

“No I won’t.
 
You can speak to her tomorrow.
 
Goodbye, Father.”

I was heading to the bathroom when I pulled up
short.
 
What did he mean “Is Kathleen
still . .”
  
Had he begun to ask “Is
Kathleen still awake, or is Kathleen still there?”
 
And, if it was the latter, had he aborted the
sentence when he realised he was giving the game away?
 
What was going on?

I knocked on the spare bedroom door, but there was no
answer, so I opened it as gingerly as I could.
 
She hadn’t bothered to draw the curtains and the orange glow from a
street lamp washed across the flower-strewn walls.
 
The bed was untouched, not a wrinkle in the
white counterpane.
 
I went cold.
 
Then I ran to our bedroom and wrenched open
the wardrobe doors.
 
She’d taken every
stitch she owned, down to her furs.
 
There was no need to sprint outside to check that her white Austin Princess
had gone, but I did.
 
This was one plot I
hadn’t seen coming.