He knew it would be hours rather than days. After all, he’d given them a deadline. He waited at home, and filled his time by sorting through his belongings, packing boxes, deciding what was truly important to him. Not the expensive acquisitions and antiques, which in any case he was likely to lose, but the memories. The books from his primary school, with the inscriptions inside. A copy of Moby Dick, its cover a little torn, its paper beginning to go yellow: ‘Awarded to Harry Jones. First in Class. July 1978. E. L. Vale, Headmaster’. It was one of several. Clever little sod. And there were the photos, of his father, and mother. So few of them together. And, of course, of Julia.
His memories of Julia weren’t of this house but of Julia herself; they would go with him wherever he went. He’d witnessed so many others who had lost everything, their communities destroyed by Saddam Hussein, the villages burned out by Colombian drugs gangs, the bombs that had gutted places like Belfast and Armagh. He’d been there, seen these things happen, knew that others somehow found the means to survive. Yes, all of that, but even so. This was his life, more than forty years of putting his neck on the line for others, Queen, country, constituents, and what had he got to show for it? A private life that resembled an Indian train crash and – this. Now he was losing it all, and along with it all, his reputation. Mr E. L. Vale would not have approved. Harry threw the book across the room into a distant corner.
It was lunchtime. Saturday. Harry was finishing off his second drink of the day along with the reheated remains of last night’s noodles when he was distracted by a knocking at the door. He found two well-dressed gentlemen on his doorstep, one late twenties, the other a little older.
‘Mr Jones? I am so very sorry to bother you,’ the elder of the two said with only the merest brush of a foreign accent, ‘but I am in London only for a couple of days with my brother. Forgive me, I am looking for a home in this area for my family, and one of your neighbours’ – he waved a vague hand in the direction of the other end of the street – ‘said you might soon be considering selling. It is most rude of me, but I am a cash buyer and I wondered . . .’
It wasn’t the best cover story, but Harry knew what was coming. They wouldn’t take no for an answer, would kick their way through the door if necessary, but it wasn’t. He let them in.
They tripped him from behind as soon as the door was closed, and pushed him to the floor. He could have put up a better fight before he succumbed, but that would only have served to make them more vicious. They left his face alone, no marks, and concentrated on his body. After the first of the blows he brought up the takeaway, noodles and nausea all over their shoes, which he hoped might discourage them, but they were professionals. While he was on his knees, retching over his carpet, they found a towel and wiped themselves down. Then they started over again, knees as well as fists; Harry knew at least one of his ribs had gone. Soon he was losing consciousness.
When they had finished on him they made a brief search of the house, kicking over the piles of books he had been sorting through. They found what they wanted in his study – his laptop, a few files. They threw them in a small holdall, along with his camera for good measure. Harry was no longer moving. They left him lying amidst his own bodily mess.
After they walked out of Harry’s house, his attackers sauntered down the street, their casual pace designed to attract no attention. They had no reason to suspect they might be followed, and as a result they didn’t spot Jemma. She was making a mess of the job, darting forward, drawing too close for fear of losing them, then stopping dead, because of her still greater fear that they would see her. She sensed from their build that they were the same men who had assaulted her, left her naked and terrified.
She tracked them around Berkeley Square, grateful for the crowds that gave her cover, then on into the crawling traffic of Curzon Street. It was there she lost them, as her eyes were on the approaching cars, waiting to cross the road, and when she looked up once more they had gone. She panicked, heedless of the vehicles now, dashing across the street to the spot where she had last seen them, and discovered an alley that led her into a backwater, an unhurried square filled with small, pavement eating places and boutique shops. And there, sitting at an outside table, were her two men, talking to a third. She slipped behind a table some yards down the broad pavement, reached into her bag, produced a map that she spread out in front of her and placed a camera on top of it, as might any tourist. She ordered a drink from the waiter, making sure she paid for it as soon as it arrived, and began inspecting her camera, as though checking the results of her morning’s work. That was how she took photographs, of all three of them. She had to work quickly, because the two men soon got up and went on their way, leaving the holdall behind. The third man, who was older, and in no hurry, opened the bag and rifled through its contents, before smiling quietly to himself and zipping it closed once more. He paid for his tea and left. Once again Jemma followed, keeping her map to hand, ready to bury herself in it if he looked in her direction, but he didn’t, pacing on steadily, as if he had found a new purpose.
As, indeed, he had. The man did what he always did after a moment of tension or triumph had passed. He strode purposefully along a route he had taken many times before, which sometimes led to a different destination but always took him in the same direction.
Jemma followed him, feeling sick not just from her inner tension but also the thoughts of Harry. She knew his two assailants were dangerous men, and there was a small part of her that hoped they had left him tied up, unmarked, as they had done her, but there was a much more insistent part of her that doubted this was possible. No way he would have handed over the contents of the holdall quietly, he would have put up a fight, bloody Harry always did. And the thought of what they might have done to him soon overcame all her other fears.
They had neared Marble Arch. She watched as he disappeared inside a pub, then followed him to the doorstep. That was when she saw the sign and knew she could go no further. ‘This is a majority gay and lesbian pub’, it proclaimed. It was a step too far for her, she would give herself away, ruin everything. She turned and ran all the way back to Harry.
She found him where they had left him, amongst the overturned piles of his books, in his vomit. She couldn’t help noticing there was blood in it, but he was breathing, heavily, his lungs rasping. ‘Harry, you bloody fool,’ she sobbed, kneeling by his side.
He opened an eye. ‘If this is what a man has to do to get you back, I think I’ll try Internet dating instead.’ He tried a sardonic smile, his face wrinkled in agony.
She helped him to the sofa, trying to make him comfortable, cleaning him up, crying quietly. She gasped when she took off his filthy shirt. She found more bruising and weals than there was skin. She bathed him, tenderly, in warm water, trying not to cause him too much pain, when suddenly he grabbed her arm, so tightly it was her turn to hurt. ‘What did you see? Tell me, Jem.’
As he listened to her, his body seemed to relax. His breathing became less frantic, he stopped sweating, the colour returned to his face. ‘Did you follow him in?’ he demanded when at last she told him about the pub.
‘I couldn’t, Harry. I’d have stuck out like a . . .’ She struggled to find a metaphor, but decided none was necessary. ‘I got photographs.’ She pulled out her camera and held it up for him to inspect. Many of the images were fumbled, out of focus, betraying how much her hands had been trembling, but amongst them were several excellent images. And they needed only one.
‘Good girl,’ he whispered, falling back on his cushion. ‘Were you scared?’
‘No.’
‘Liar.’
His eyes closed and he fell deeply asleep.
When he woke again, he found he was lying beneath a duvet. His books had been set into neat piles once more, and she had washed the carpet of all trace of the attack. He still felt like shit, every breath cost him dear, but he found he was able to smile, and he did. Only one or two cracked ribs, and he hadn’t even lost any
teeth. In the world of Harry Jones, this wasn’t exactly a famous victory, but at least he was still in the fight.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A cry came from the tennis court. ‘I think that was out.’
A second voice warbled from the other end of the net. ‘Was it? Then point to you.’
‘No, let’s play a let.’
‘You sure?’
‘Thirty-forty,’ the first player insisted, and prepared to serve again.
Doubles, of course. Singles would have been far too limiting for the annual tennis tournament of a small village like Upper Marlsford, ruling out most players over fifty. That didn’t prevent the matches being fought with considerable intensity, even while being wrapped in a blanket of neighbourly politeness.
This was the final. Felix and Patricia played hosts, handing round the squash and sandwiches he’d made. A good number of the villagers of Upper Marlsford had gathered to watch, dressed in their bleached straw hats, cotton dresses and open collars, sitting around the court on freshly mown grass or standing in the shade of the crab apple tree. Others had gone for a stroll through the gardens, constructed for the low maintenance that a weekend couple required yet nevertheless nurtured with enormous fondness by Felix.
‘It’s comforting to be able to do our bit,’ Patricia remarked as their paths crossed by the ancient sundial, a birthday present to him from her that was slowly being claimed by the lichen.
‘Love this time of year,’ he replied, his voice larded with nostalgia for his childhood. He was in starched shirtsleeves, which protruded from a multi-hued silk waistcoat that seemed to catch every colour of the garden. ‘Few weeks’ time we’ll be picking the early plums and apples. You know, Patricia, next year I’d like to try keeping some bees. What do you think?’
But she appeared not to have heard. ‘The English at play,’ she remarked, without much apparent approval, as a further cry came from the tennis court and at last the game was lost.
‘Next year you should enter,’ he encouraged, ‘you used to enjoy a game.’
‘You forget, Felix. I don’t like losing.’
‘Then let’s put in a swimming pool. Good exercise, and we could use one of those ground-source heat pump thingies. Ingenious bits of kit, so I’m told, very green and environmental. I suspect we could get some sort of grant.’
‘We don’t need a grant. We could do it on my expenses.’
‘Your expenses would cover a swimming pool?’ he said in surprise.
‘Felix, my expenses would fill a swimming pool. We’d open it once a year to the village, of course. Put it down as entertainment.’
She smiled contentedly, but he didn’t join with her. Instead he stroked his renewing beard, still not much more than stubble, not yet at its best. His brow said he had something on his mind. ‘I sold two picture frames this week. Broke my heart.’
‘To sell them?’
‘No, for what it said. You see, one was entirely authentic, wonderful rich patina, original gilding. Oh, a little battered here and there but only what you’d expect from something that was probably Georgian. The story of centuries told in every little chip and layer of dust. A one-off. It only needed a little restoration and retouching to be perfect once again. And the other . . . Well, that was no more than thirty years old, all pretence and brashness. I got twice as much for it. Yet in another thirty it will probably have fallen apart.’
‘The world moves on, Felix,’ she said distractedly, adjusting the sundial a fraction.
‘Yes, of course, my dear. But sometimes it pays not to push the future too fast. Let it get there in its own time.’
Ah, one of his homilies. An eyebrow arched halfway to her scalp. ‘Do I sense the brush of criticism?’
‘Of you? Never. But . . . sometimes, my dear, I wonder if you don’t require the world to be a little too precise. Orderly. All its ends tied together rather too neatly.’ He pulled a pocket watch from his waistcoat and examined it carefully. Then he moved the sundial back to its original position.
‘You know I don’t do untidy, Felix,’ she scolded. ‘After all, I’m a bureaucrat, remember. Everything in its little box.’
And everyone, too, he thought, but didn’t say. She moved away, not wanting a trial of strength over a wretched sundial.
‘This Jones business,’ he said, pursuing her, ‘you’ve made him entirely irrelevant.’
‘With your help.’
‘Precisely, which is why I make bold enough to wonder.’
She stopped suddenly and turned. ‘What do you wonder?’
‘Is it really necessary to humiliate him completely? Make him bankrupt? It seems . . .’
‘A step too far?’
‘Unnecessary.’
‘That’s the difference between the antiques trade and my business, Felix. I don’t live in the past, or even move with the times. I make the times. One can’t keep going back, letting things gather dust.’
From the court came a cry of despair, a point lost, and with it the match. Polite applause rippled through the onlookers, the vicar jumped to his feet, brushing crumbs from his chest, scrubbing his brow with a vast handkerchief as he prepared to present the winners’ cup.
‘Come on, Felix, we have more work to do.’ She struck out once again, leaving their conversation behind.
‘Yes, dear,’ he sighed, and dutifully followed.
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese might easily have given itself over to tourist tat, seeing that it had stood on its site near Fleet Street for more than four centuries since the Great Fire had burned down its predecessor, yet it had resisted the temptation. Its mishmash of corridors and staircases and wood-panelled rooms conjured up traces of earlier times, and that is precisely what Sloppy wanted. To go back. Forget about now. That was why he drank. When Harry arrived, soon after the doors had opened, he found his old colleague sitting alone in a booth down in the stone-clad vaults, cradling a glass. Harry had brought Jemma with him, suspecting that Sloppy might find the presence of a woman less threatening, quite apart from reducing Harry’s temptation to grab the man by the hair and beat the crap out of him. Not that his ribs left him in much of a condition to mete out physical punishment, but in Sloppy’s case, he’d be happy to make an exception.
Sloppy raised two bleary eyes as they approached. ‘You’re in luck,’ he muttered. ‘Money will be gone by this evening. So will I.’ He swallowed some of his wine, not tasting. ‘Who’s the new tart?’ he said, eyeing Jemma.
‘I’m just a friend.’
‘Sure,’ Sloppy muttered, ‘always lots of friends, has Harry.’ A smile, cold and hard, cut across his face. ‘Friday nights, when they let us out of Sandhurst and we bombed down to town. You remember? That very first club on the Kings Road, what was its name?’ He shook his head, trying to clear the mists, and turned once more to Jemma. ‘Don’t worry, it was only completely meaningless sex. They didn’t give us time for anything else. Spent too many months and too much money on our training, so they didn’t want romance getting in the way.’ A wistful tone crept into his voice. ‘There was that little blonde we used to argue about, I always thought she’d be better off with me instead of you. From Latvia or Lithuania or wherever. What was her name?’
It was Finland, her name had been Kaarina, but this wasn’t the time.
‘Sloppy, for pity’s sake. Concentrate! This is important, for both of us.’
‘Yes, she was.’
The bastard. Sloppy was enjoying making his old friend squirm. Harry produced a large manila envelope, and from it he took three photographs. He moved Sloppy’s drink in order to lay them out on the table. ‘Take a look, Sloppy. Is this our man?’
Sloppy seemed to be struggling. The alcohol was waging war with his eyesight and some bastard had moved his drink. Yet there was something in these photographs that was insisting on his attention. He lowered his head for a closer look, sticking his finger on the central photo as though to pin it down, in case it tried to escape. He shook his head. ‘Diff
erent hair, different glasses. Didn’t have that ridiculous bloody beard.’ He slumped back in his seat. ‘But they’re the same bloodsucking eyes. Like a lizard. That’s the piece of slime. I can feel his clammy hand even now.’ Sloppy closed his eyes. When they returned something had changed, as though he were no longer completely lost in a storm of alcohol but had been washed up on some beach, a place where he could find a little firm ground once more. ‘Who is he, Harry? Who the hell is he?
‘Dunno, Sloppy. But I know where the pisshead drinks.’
In fables, the fight against evil is pursued without quarter or hesitation; in the world of Harry Jones, there were always distractions. One of the most pressing was a letter he received by Special Delivery, for which he had to sign. It was a Statutory Demand. He scanned it, trying to take it all in. Insolvency Act . . . Debt for Liquidated Sum Payable Immediately . . . 21 days after its service on you, you could be made bankrupt . . .
It had started.
He spent the afternoon with more sorting, sifting, knowing it must be done and determined not to run from it. Jemma was assisting, taking pity, since Harry’s ribs still hurt like hell. She was helping him fillet the endless yards of filing he had accumulated during his parliamentary career and that, now his office in the House of Commons had been closed down, had been dumped across his dining room. Campaigns he had pursued, speeches he had made, and letters. As she read through them she grew aware for the first time how much of his work had been low-key, but vital for the constituents concerned. Over the years Harry had helped keep many families and homes together, even though he couldn’t keep his own.
The radio was on, a news report that the new Prime Minister, Dave Murray, had made a speech on a visit to the White House promising to repair the damage to relations caused between the two countries by recent misunderstandings. Privately, and on a few occasions publicly, the Americans had been suggesting that the Speedbird crash had been handled even more incompetently than Lockerbie. The Americans wanted justice, retribution, some means of restoring their national pride, and all they had was a grainy bit of footage from somewhere in Russia. They hadn’t even had the pleasure of watching that ball-less bastard Ghazi die. Yet Harry chose not to listen. Politics just brought back the pain, so he took himself off for a shower while Jemma ploughed through more of the filing.