The Green Flash

  III

  So it was August when we finally made it, and in the end the visit wasn’t exactly a ten-strike. For one thing, the wide open spaces I’d come to appreciate were full of trippers, and for another, Erica, who had a very fair and fine skin, was nearly driven off her nut by the midges. Even I couldn’t stay out of doors in the afternoons.

  But anyway for the next year nothing was really going to be of lasting interest to my girl-wife except her blasted foil. The only thing that might have lit her up would have been a fencing contest in Inverness. Needless to say we’d brought weapons with us, so that she need not miss the whole of her routine.

  She was bright and cheerful and interested, and looked very young with her fresh face and blonde ponytail; but her interest was shallow. The new kitchen was finished and Mrs Coppell was delighted with it, except that she was afraid to use some of the gadgets in case they jumped out and bit her. Two more prospective clients had been shown round but no offers made. Nor any let this August. A minimum of £20,000 was needed, Macintyre said, to bring the house into a state of good repair. Most of this would be spent on the roof. When he had gone Erica offered me £20,000 and said she would write me a cheque as soon as we got home. I said: ‘Thanks. Thanks, love. Thanks a lot.’ But when it came to the point I found it quite hard to go along with the idea of her shelling out all that to pay for my toy. It had been part of the implicit deal, maybe – ‘we like each other and you’ve got money and I’ve got a title’ – but and but and but.

  It would have been easier if she’d shown the sort of interest that Shona had shown, especially in the old hall and its odd inscriptions. She didn’t. Nor was she as excited as Madame had been about the countryside – which was very explainable considering the drawbacks the Highlands were then suffering from.

  When Alison knew we were ‘in residence’ she invited us to lunch. It was not something high on my agenda of goodies, but it was hard to say a flat no again, so we accepted. When we got there there were eight other guests and this helped to dilute the Abden women. Lady Abden herself came down to meet the new Lady Abden and was fairly gracious, considering. There was the local doctor and a Mr Hamish Fraser, a laird from near Inverewe, and a Mr and Mrs Dalgleish who owned a lot of property in Ullapool; a Mr Lovat Donald, younger brother of the head of the clan; a couple of others whose names I heard and instantly forgot; and Captain Bruce Macintyre, being more gentlemanly than the gentlemen.

  Alison and Erica were a shade sniffy to begin, but later seemed to get on; there was nothing like the feline enmity there’d been when Shona and Alison met. Over lunch I was at the other end of the table from Erica, and not for the first time perceived my young wife to be a bit too socially conscious. What would bring her back to Wester Craig – once Moscow had been worked out of her system – would be if the society here was sufficiently grade A. After all, the wife of a Scottish laird with an old title might rate more in the Highlands than she did in London. But if this was the society she could expect to meet – monied and landed though it was – then she’d be likely to stay in London.

  On the whole this attitude suited me. Wester Craig had little or no appeal, and I would be glad to be rid of it. But that wasn’t the whole picture. In squash you have a wall to hit your ball against. Could be that I would have liked Erica to be that wall.

  When we got back to London Shona’s father had died and I didn’t see much of her for a while. Though things were going well between Erica and me, I would have had to confess if you twisted my arm that I missed those quiet evenings in Shona’s flat, her piano playing, her intimate company. Our love affair had had too many agreeable accretions for you to be able to throw it away like last year’s credit card.

  By ordinary standards we had our moments, Erica and I, but for the most part we stayed at the three-foot paddler’s end. But I did seem to have something going for me in her eyes. In between the endless athletics and other sporting operations she could be amorous enough. She was still young; and as unpredictable as only pretty women can be. I reflected that another five years of fencing and the high life and it was not impossible she’d turn right round and perversely want a family life far more than I ever should.

  Shona and I stayed on fair terms; but once there’s been this powerful thing between you and it’s gone – especially if it has only gone on one side – the look changes, the way of tackling a thing together. It becomes a sort of friendly co-operation with an undertone of hostility.

  Big changes were taking place in the perfumery game at this time. The old system of strict agencies, whereby Mr B the chemist was granted the sole agency for Elizabeth Arden perfume – provided he took and stocked a number of her less popular items – was going for a burton. General traders were muscling in, often undercutting. Writs and summonses were flying through the air like autumn leaves on a windy day. But there seemed to be the beginnings of a recession, and in its cold draught they couldn’t be stopped. The big stores began to buy less and to be more choosy what they took. People were buying less. No use marketing some brand-spanking new perfume with ballyhoo in the press and on TV and scoring a bull’s eye so far as the wholesalers were concerned, and then finding that the first orders weren’t followed up. Women were buying less, not because they were less interested but because they hadn’t so much money to spend.

  The infant mortality in 1979 of brilliant, original, seductive and irresistible new perfumes reached record heights. Even Shona and Co. had some extra warehouse shelves built.

  For my part, if I’d had the power and not been just a paid slave, I would have done something to try to break out of the vicious circle of price and production costs. Old John Carreros’ rough arithmetic all those years ago was still valid – inflation hadn’t altered it. A woman buying perfume still got about five pennyworth of content for every pound she paid in the shop. Yet the whole perfumery lark was so contradictory that no one could come up with easy answers. On the one hand it was a con trick; on the other hand women accepted – demanded – this sort of sale psychology and would take no other. They wanted their perfumery dear; they wanted it in elegant boxes; they wanted to feel that what they were using was the most expensive they could afford. It did them good to feel that way. Put some Charisma in a medicine bottle and offer it at a quarter the price and sales would drop like the stick of a rocket. It was all very odd and very hard to work out in simple economic terms.

  Anyway events in my job took quite a lot of my attention just then, almost as much as Erica gave to her fencing, and there were weeks when we were only nodding acquaintances. At Christmas I suggested we might try Scotland again just for the devil of it, but she had a training camp at Penzance, so we went there instead.

  It was in the March that a report came in from a rep covering the Midlands that he had had a complaint from a customer, who had a sole agency, that a shop in the same high street was selling Shona products, particularly Faunus and Charisma, and at a lower rate. When the rep went along, he found them selling what appeared to be the right stuff. He had brought two boxes back with him.

  They were taken to Stevenage and analysed. The Faunus forgery was exactly the same as the one at Stovold’s, the Charisma better. Of course this was aired at the next meeting, and I told the company about the Stovold forgery last year and what I had done. The general feeling was that I hadn’t done enough.

  Afterwards Shona said: ‘You must have known there would be a repetition.’

  ‘A clumsy forgery like that? I thought someone was making use of a few dozen of our boxes to cash in.’

  ‘You did not think the boxes might have been copied also?’

  ‘Not at the time, no.’

  ‘Stovolds were greatly at fault. Did you tell them so?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘But you did not choose to inform me.’

  ‘Just at that time we were not on the best of terms.’

  She said austerely: ‘It is a grave error, David, to confuse business with pleasure.’

/>   I grunted. ‘As I told you at the meeting, I sent Morris to make enquiries and he drew a blank. What else could you have done?’

  ‘What we shall do now – alert all our representatives to examine the stock in the shops to see if any more of it is forged.’

  ‘And how will that help to catch our little forger friends?’

  ‘We shall see … I would like you to take charge of this, David.’

  I looked at her ironically. ‘Set a thief to catch a thief, eh?’

  ‘You are talking nonsense. But I believe you will have the best ideas how to go about it.’

  The following day I picked up Van Morris and drove to the Midlands. Van with his square shoulders and hard, chiselled face would be an asset, I thought. After all, if de Luxembourg could do some Mafia work in the old days, a vaguely threatening approach might help us along now.

  The character who ran this shop was called Callender and he didn’t want conversation with us at all. But we pressurized him to talk and he gave us an address in Manchester from which he said a firm called Matthew Smith and Co. had supplied the goods. In Manchester – it was almost in Salford – we found the usual accommodation address: a corner-shop tobacconist who ran postboxes as a sideline and described the man who came in to pick up the letters as driving a big Jaguar – ‘though not so big as yours, I fancy’ – and as being middle-aged, dark, with a moustache. ‘Hasn’t been near for a month or more now. Don’t suppose I shall ever see him again.’

  Back to Callender’s shop again, which by courtesy of the motorways we reached just before closing time. Callender was ill-tempered, angry at being disturbed again, unhelpful as a pig. I asked him how he came to meet this Matthew Smith.

  ‘I never did. His rep came round one day. Seemed all right to me. We’re working men up here, Mr Abdy … Sir Donald. We trade in and out; we have a mixed business; I’m a busy man; margins are getting narrower, what with the recession and all the small traders muscling in. I’m busy ordering and trading and selling all day long. Can’t weigh up every offer that comes along, make certain it’s Simon Pure. Bankrupt stock, he said; how was I to know different? People do go bankrupt, especially in the Midlands and the North; different world up here from your soft South, y’know.’

  I said: ‘What was he like, this rep?’

  ‘Oh … middle-sized, thirty-five or forty, more dark than fair; only saw him for five minutes.’

  ‘Clean-shaven?’

  Callender blinked a couple of times under his eyeshade. ‘Well … he had a moustache – thin moustache – bit Frenchie looking.’

  ‘How were the goods delivered?’

  ‘Delivered? I don’t know. By van, I suppose. Maybe my stockman would know, but he’s gone home an hour ago.’

  I insisted on seeing his storeroom and after more angry chop-logic he let us through. In the end we turned up a carton which held twenty-four boxes of Charisma eau de toilette. The carton itself was marked ‘Wellington’s Baby Foods’.

  ‘That’ll help you a lot, won’t it?’ sneered Callender, apparently not aware that I’d taken a great dislike to his face.

  Then we came on a similar carton with three dozen boxes of ½-oz Charisma perfume. They were good copies of the original boxes. I took a couple of samples.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘That’ll do. Make sure you destroy these.’

  Callender grunted. ‘ Maybe yes.’

  ‘I’ll send someone round next week. If they’re not gone we’ll get in touch with the police.’

  In the car going home Van said: ‘You looked in a bit of a pucker then, guv. What was you thinking of doing, belting ’im?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘He was asking for it, wasn’t ’e. But if we’d knuckled him it’d have been him sending for the fuzz, not us.’

  ‘It was just a whim I had. Don’t know how you guessed.’

  ‘Remember that whim you had in stir? I just held you back, else you’d have lost your remission.’

  There was silence for a bit, then Van said: ‘Do it make you feel queasy, like, being on the side of the law?’

  ‘It hadn’t occurred to me.’

  ‘Jees, it does me. Even after all these years can’t see a fuzz car without coming out in a rash … Know what I’d do if I was Callender?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Steam the labels off and sell the bottles as fire-damaged stock or some such. We couldn’t touch ’im neither.’

  ‘D’you know the addresses of any carton traders, Van?’

  ‘What traders?’

  ‘Those were new cartons, not old ones picked up at a supermarket.’

  Most of the big business trading in what used to be called household names overproduce their boxes and their cartons from time to time; the shape is wrong for the latest products, or different delivery vans pack different ways; then they flog off the old stock to carton traders, who get rid of them to small dealers who can put them to good use. I thought Van must know this but he didn’t seem as well informed as I was.

  ‘There’s four or five of them in London,’ I said. ‘A couple in the Midlands and the North. One at least in Scotland. We’ll have a go at some of them tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m not with you, guv.’

  ‘Somebody must have sold the cartons to Matthew Smith. It’s a long shot but we can try. Doesn’t it strike you as all being a bit of a one-man band?’

  ‘Because the rep and the man picking up the letters was the same bloke?’

  ‘Yes. And it only seems to have been an isolated incident again.’

  ‘Dunno, guv. I’ve a hunch it’s bigger than that.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I

  Yours, Maurice

  A woman of many moods, my wife. As many moods as she had hairstyles. For fencing or other athletic occasions the ingenuous ponytail was spot on; but for supper parties she began to fancy it brushed straight down at the side of her face, where it made a shiny blonde curtain that fell forward all the time and had to be forked back; or it was extravagantly back combed and worn high; or it was looped at the sides with her ear showing through like a Jane Austen girl. Each coiffure called up a different persona: dignity, elegance, girlishness, sophistication. She even spoke a bit differently and was cross when I twitted her about it. I told her marriage hadn’t gone to her head, it had gone to her hair.

  One day the following month she said to me: ‘David, I think I’ve found you a new job.’

  ‘What as: coach-in-chief to the Women’s Foil Champion?’

  ‘Don’t be funny. Have you heard of Globe Differentials?’

  ‘I should have. I’ve had them in at least two of my cars.’

  ‘Well, did you know they’ve just been bought up – by the Japanese?’

  ‘Who told you this?’

  ‘Daddy, at the weekend. Ninon Kuni are buying into the English market and Globe is one of their first purchases. They want to manufacture most of their car engines and gearboxes here: it’s some deal they have with Austin Rover.’

  ‘They’re buying into England to get into the Common Market,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe. Anyway they’re going to expand Globe by opening two new factories in the first year. One in Wales, one in Lancashire. But that’s only a beginning. And what they’re looking for is a new man to take over the whole operation in England for them.’

  ‘And where do I come in?’

  ‘Where d’you think?’

  I smiled at her. ‘This one of your practical jokes?’

  ‘Certainly not!’

  ‘Then there’s more to it than meets the eye.’

  ‘Well, Daddy knows Mr Matsuko, who is over here at present, and you could call and see him.’

  I said: ‘The sales manager of a perfumery firm? With no special know-how of the kind he’s looking for?’

  ‘You’ve a terrific knowledge of cars – and interest in them. You’re titled … all right, all right, it shouldn’t count but you know damned well it does. And you’ve got abiliti
es far beyond selling Charisma. It’s organizing skill he’s looking for, not narrow technical knowledge.’

  ‘Did Daddy tell you all this?’

  ‘I sometimes wonder – you must have a pansy streak! You can be bitchy enough!’

  I patted her arm, which she withdrew out of my reach. ‘You have it all planned. Go on.’

  ‘I’ve nothing planned, David. But it seems to me a wonderful opportunity. And you’d get much better paid.’

  I was pretty sure Erica was jealous of the fact that I still saw Shona; this would be a way of ending it as a business thing. All the same, you couldn’t just throw the idea out of the window because of that. I was now her husband, she was pitching for me, just as I was hanging in with her on the Moscow job. We were husband and wife; I still sometimes had to remind myself of that.

  In the end I said all right, if Mr Matsuko wanted to see me I’d go along and listen. It wasn’t quite the right attitude for some bright-eyed, white-cuffed, youngish executive eager as a squirrel to better himself, but that was the best I could muster.

  A week or two before all this Shona had complained of me being irritable. I’ve not known you so – irascible before. I hope you are not still thinking of the failure of Semaphore.’

  ‘I’ve not given Semaphore a thought. In fact I’m not thinking of anything in particular.’

  ‘That was my impression.’

  ‘Are you suggesting I’m not doing my job?’

  ‘Far from it. But tell me what else you can do about the forgeries.’

  My impression was I’d done pretty well all I could do, even though it hadn’t come to much in the end. I’d traced the particular carton firm to a place in Tottenham. The manager was a fat dark little Pakistani. I told him the truth, that we were on the track of some forgeries, that the forgeries had been delivered in Wellington’s Baby Food cartons which had probably been supplied by his firm, said could he help us by giving us the name of the firms he had supplied with these particular cartons.