Copyright & Information

The Gigantic Shadow

 

First published in 1947

© Estate of Julian Symons; House of Stratus 1947-2011

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

 

The right of Julian Symons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

 

This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

 

Typeset by House of Stratus.

 

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

 

 

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

 

 

www.houseofstratus.com

About the Author

 

Julian Symons was born in 1912 in London. He was the younger brother, and later biographer, of the writer A.J.A. Symons.

Aged twenty five, he founded a poetry magazine which he edited for a short time, before turning to crime writing. This was not to be his only interest, however, as in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and held a distinguished reputation in each field. Nonetheless, it is primarily for his crime writing that he is remembered. His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day.

 

Symons commenced World War II as a recognised conscientious objector, but nevertheless ended up serving in the Royal Armoured Corps from 1942 until 1944, when he was invalided out. A period as an advertising copywriter followed, but was soon abandoned in favour of full time writing. Many prizes came his way as a result, including two Edgar Awards and in 1982 he received the accolade of being named as Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America – an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. Symons then succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain’s Detection Club, a position he held from 1976 to 1985, and in 1990 he was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers for his lifetime’s achievement in crime fiction.

He published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994; with the works combining different elements of the classic detective story and modern crime novel, but with a clear leaning toward the latter, especially situations where ordinary people get drawn into extraordinary series of events – a trait he shared with Eric Ambler. He also wrote two modern-day Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In A Three Pipe Problem the detective was ‘...a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character’. Several of Julian Symons’ works have been filmed for television.

 

Julian Symons died in 1994.

Introduction

The French call a typewriter une machine á ècrire. It is a description that could well be applied to Julian Symons, except the writing he produced had nothing about it smelling of the mechanical. The greater part of his life was devoted to putting pen to paper. Appearing in 1938, his first book was a volume of poetry, Confusions About X. In 1996, after his death, there came his final crime novel, A Sort of Virtue (written even though he knew he was under sentence from an inoperable cancer) beautifully embodying the painful come-by lesson that it is possible to achieve at least a degree of good in life.

His crime fiction put him most noticeably into the public eye, but he wrote in many forms: biographies, a memorable piece of autobiography (Notes from Another Country), poetry, social history, literary criticism coupled with year-on-year reviewing and two volumes of military history, and one string thread runs through it all. Everywhere there is a hatred of hypocrisy, hatred even when it aroused the delighted fascination with which he chronicled the siren schemes of that notorious jingoist swindler, Horatio Bottomley, both in his biography of the man and fictionally in The Paper Chase and The Killing of Francie Lake.

That hatred, however, was not a spew but a well-spring. It lay behind what he wrote and gave it force, yet it was always tempered by a need to speak the truth. Whether he was writing about people as fiction or as fact, if he had a low opinion of them he simply told the truth as he saw it, no more and no less.

This adherence to truth fills his novels with images of the mask. Often it is the mask of hypocrisy. When, as in Death’s Darkest Face or Something Like a Love Affair, he chose to use a plot of dazzling legerdemain, the masks of cunning are startlingly ripped away.

The masks he ripped off most effectively were perhaps those which people put on their true faces when sex was in the air or under the exterior. ‘Lift the stone, and sex crawls out from under,’ says a character in that relentless hunt for truth, The Progress of a Crime, a book that achieved the rare feat for a British author, winning Symons the US Edgar Allen Poe Award.

Julian was indeed something of a pioneer in the fifties and sixties bringing into the almost sexless world of the detective story the truths of sexual situations. ‘To exclude realism of description and language from the crime novel’ he writes in Critical Occasions, ‘is almost to prevent its practitioners from attempting any serious work.’ And then the need to unmask deep-hidden secrecies of every sort was almost as necessary at the end of his crime-writing life as it had been at the beginning. Not for nothing was his last book subtitled A Political Thriller.

H R F Keating

London, 2001

Dedication

Again, for Kathleen

Chapter One

‘The name’s Mekles,’ Jerry Wilton said. ‘Nicholas Mekles. You must have heard of him.’

Should he have suspected something then, should there have been some small jarring shudder, like the moment when the fated ship first noses into the iceberg? Such a premonition would have been irrational, and Hunter liked to think that his life was ruled by reason. He felt nothing.

‘The name is familiar,’ he said. ‘But the fame escapes me.’

Jerry wiped his red face with a grey silk handkerchief. It was a hot day in early June, and the window in his small office was closed.

‘I don’t know what you read, but it isn’t the papers,’ he grumbled. ‘Mekles is always in the news. Big parties on his yacht, the Minerva, in the Med. or the Adriatic. Film actress fell off it during one of them, got herself drowned, she was his mistress, people said she might have been pushed. Owns a shipping fleet, shady goings-on I seem to remember in relation to that, Charlie Cash can dig it out for you. Gambles a lot, Monte Carlo, Nice. Fabulous villa out there on the Riviera, more big parties, socialites rubbing shoulders with crooks. Never married, but women queue up for him, socialites again a lot of them. And more, lots of it, the same sort. Plenty for Charlie to get his teeth into.’

‘I remember him now,’ Hunter said. ‘A sort of blend of playboy and gangster.’

‘More gangster than playboy. There are all sorts of rumours about him. They say he keeps half a dozen thugs as bodyguards. Also that he takes a lot of trouble to get the dirt on anyone he has dealings with.’ Jerry looked at the three pills on his desk, blue, green and white, selected the blue one, popped it in his mouth and swallowed.

Even then Hunter felt no anticipatory tremor. ‘A pretty tough customer.’

Jerry nodded solemnly. His face was glistening again, but this time he did not bother to wipe it. ‘He’s coming to England on Friday week, staying over till Tuesday. We’ve approached him, told him about the programme, and he’s agreed in principle.’

‘Why would a man like that want to go in front of the cameras?’ Hunter wondered. ‘He’s got a lot to hide.’

‘Vain as a peacock. Likes to show off in front of his women. Tickled to death to be asked.’

‘Even on my programme?’

‘Especially on your programme. Nicholas Mekles pitting his wits against those of TV’s special investigator and coming out on top – what a thrill for him. And anyway, it’s fame to be on that little old silver screen, something money can’t buy. Don’t tell me I’ve got to teach you psychology as well as fixing the programmes,’ Jerry cried in a pretended exasperation that only just missed being real. Hunter watched, fascinated, as he picked up the green pill and swallowed it, as he had the blue, without water. ‘Replaces the salt you lose through sweat,’ Jerry explained. ‘Salt makes energy. You take three in half an hour, twice a day. They cost thirty bob a packet. What do you think?’

‘It seems all right.’ He had found in the past that it was never wise to show too much enthusiasm.

‘All right!’ Jerry flung up his hands. ‘I serve up something like this on a plate for you, something that’s really the chance of a lifetime to turn a gangster inside out, and you say it seems all right.’ Again there was an undercurrent of real annoyance beneath the jocularity.

‘When I say all right, I mean I like it.’ And he did mean it, he had no real reservations. ‘It seems to me we’ve got to be a bit cagey, that’s all. The thing’s got slander possibilities sticking out all over it.’

‘Just a matter of the way you handle it.’ With agreement obtained, Jerry was mellow, calmly judicial.

‘Make the questions too soft and we get nowhere. Make them too hard, and we get a slander action up our shirts.’

‘I don’t think Mekles can afford to bring slander actions. Anyway you can handle it, you and Charlie, you’ve handled trickier ones.’ Jerry exuded confidence, went so far as to give a wink from the little blue eye in his boiled red face. ‘After all, it’s the trickiness that makes the programme, isn’t that right? Now, let’s get down to brass tacks.’

Before Hunter left, Jerry had swallowed the white pill.

Chapter Two

Hunter’s television programme was called ‘Bill Hunter – Personal Investigator,’ and it had a subsidiary heading tacked on: ‘Presents the News Behind the News.’ The programme ran for a quarter of an hour each week, and consisted simply of an unscripted interview with some celebrated or notorious person. There were, however, unusual features about it. Most programmes billed as ‘unscripted’ are so only in name – the protagonists have discussed very thoroughly in advance the course that the programme is to take. Hunter, however, had stipulated from the start that he should not meet his subject in advance, or discuss a line of questioning with him. The questions might be disconcerting, the answers might come as a surprise to Hunter. The programme therefore rightly appeared to viewers as a battle of wits.

This impression was enhanced by the fact that the people interviewed had always a slightly gamey flavour about them. They were film stars famous for the number or nature of their love affairs, generals suddenly sacked or demoted, extreme Left or Right wing politicians, surprisingly rich American trade unionists, organisers of nudist colonies, former members of secret societies devoted to violence. To the watchers sitting comfortably in their armchairs it seemed that the people interviewed were being ruthlessly quizzed by a Personal Investigator who had discovered a complete range of skeletons in their cupboards.

In fact, the questions were all based upon the material unearthed by Hunter’s research assistant Charlie Cash, and Charlie’s research rarely went beyond industrious digging in old newspaper cuttings plus the fruits of intelligent guesswork from conversations with friends around Fleet Street. Occasionally questions based on Charlie’s speculations provoked unexpected reactions, and the person interviewed got really annoyed. These were the moments when the watchers in suburban semis wriggled most deliciously in their overstuffed armchairs, the moments that fixed the Personal Investigator in their minds as an inquisitorial father figure extracting secrets from mentally-tortured victims. The idea was seven-eighths illusion, but then, as Hunter sometimes reflected, wasn’t the whole apparatus and effect of TV designed to create an illusion? The difference between TV and the cinema, he had once heard someone say, was that while both created legendary figures, the cinema did not try to deny that they were fabulous while TV pretended that they were just homebodies like you and me.

Reality faced him now, however, reality quite undeniable, in the shape of Charlie Cash sitting across the table from him in Charlie’s little Fleet Street office, a dusty cubicle filled with law and reference books, quite remote from Jerry Wilton’s splendour of glass walls and chromium fittings. Charlie sat behind a table spilling over with papers. He had a long thin nose, sloping shoulders, and the hungry look of a good research man. He twisted a toothpick in his mouth.

‘Here’s the stuff on Nick the Greek.’ He handed over two large envelopes marked A and B. The first contained facts, the second what Charlie called his intelligent guesswork. There would be a separate page for each story, and appended to the story would be a note from Charlie about its origins and possible use. Charlie, with the aid of a secretary, gave this kind of service to a dozen people, and got well paid for it.

‘Is he a Greek?’

‘He’s rich, a crook, a commercial genius. Must be a Greek or an Armenian or a Jew, isn’t that right, statistics can’t lie. Anyway they say he carries a Greek passport, though there seems to be a bit of mystery about it.’

‘How does it strike you?’

Charlie looked down his long nose. ‘Not too good.’

‘Jerry thought we were on to a winner.’

‘Jerry believes what he reads in the papers. He doesn’t know a tiger from pussy. This Mekles is a nasty piece of work.’

‘We’ve handled nasty pieces of work before now.’

‘Yes, but this is different. The stuff about our friend Nick that Jerry is thinking of is really old hat. That girl who fell off the yacht, for instance, Lindy Powers –’

‘The film actress?’

‘That’s what they called her. She had a bit part in a B film, then lay around Hollywood until Mekles picked her up. Anyway, the press did that to death at the time. If you want to give it another going over, you can, but it’s stale stuff. Same with a lot of the rest of it. There was a story that he had some famous stolen paintings in his villa on the Riviera. Mekles showed reporters round, turned out the paintings had been bought through art dealers, only he’d bought shrewdly and cheaply. That sort of thing.’

‘Do you mean we haven’t got a story?’

‘You’ve got a story, only I don’t see how you’re going to tell it without landing up to your neck in slander. And other trouble too, I dare say. Nasty revengeful type friend Nick is said to be.’

‘What’s the story, then?’

‘There are half a dozen, and they’re all poison. You know the international groups controlling tarts are supposed to have taken a knock since the Messina brothers were put inside? So that the import of French tarts into Britain by marriages of convenience almost stopped, for instance? Well, in the last few months the organisation has got a lot tighter again. Mekles is said to be one of two or three people controlling it. Then drugs – he’s said to have both the import-export and the distribution ends tied up. It’s distribution that’s the problem as you know, getting the stuff into and out of the country is easy here, not like the States. Fake antiques is another sideline – there’s still a ready sale for them in the States, though Americans have smartened up a lot in the last few years and look twice at worm holes made with a drill. But Mekles has an east end factory turning out the stuff.’

‘Let’s get down to cases, Charlie. How much of this can I use?’

Charlie dropped the toothpick into a waste basket, picked another. ‘I thought I’d made that plain. None of it.’

‘None of it?’

‘I don’t see how you can. It’s all B stuff. I know it, but there’s no proof. Take the factory. It runs as a perfectly straight concern, making cheap furniture that falls to bits when you use it. Now, a pal of mine named Jack Foldol, a bookie’s tout, knows the manager at this factory, a White Pole, if you know what I mean, named Kosinsky. One day Kosinsky told him about the other stuff they made, and the prices they got for it. Kosinsky also said that one day Myerson, that’s the man who’s supposed to own the place, had made a terrific fuss about an important conference, cleared everyone out of the place. Kosinsky was curious, managed to hang around, saw Mekles arrive, recognised him from newspaper photographs. Kosinsky hasn’t any doubt it was Mekles, heard a little bit of what they were saying, enough to know that Mekles was giving Myerson orders.’

‘If it was Mekles.’

‘That’s what I mean. It’s all hearsay stuff. I told you you couldn’t use it.’

‘Does Mekles come here often? From the way Jerry spoke I thought this was a first visit.’

‘Hell, no, he’s been in England a dozen times. Why should they keep him out, he’s a solid citizen. It’s a headache, and I’m glad it’s yours.’

Hunter nodded, took the envelopes. He had, even now, no warning presentiment. He had made good programmes out of less promising material.

‘How’s Anna?’ It was a question Charlie never forgot to ask. ‘That’s a great little woman, Bill. One of these days I’m going to come along and take her away from you. In the meantime, don’t forget to kiss her foot for me, will you?’

Chapter Three

On that Monday night he stepped into the hotel’s revolving door, was whirled round, and then whirled round again before he got out. Inside he spoke to a commissionaire. ‘Mekles,’ he said, ‘Mr Nicholas Mekles.’

On the commissionaire’s face there was a fine glaze of disapproval. ‘Mr Mekles is on the fourth floor, sir.’

Are your eyes fixed so that you can’t look at me when you speak? he wanted to ask. But before he could say anything a voice called from the other side of the reception hall and he saw Jerry Wilton, sweating and anxious.

‘Been looking out for you, Bill. How are you?’

‘How should I be? Hot.’ Outside the night was hot, in here it was cool, but the air conditioning had a stifling effect. He wanted to pull his shirt collar open.

‘We’re all set. Less than quarter of an hour to spare.’ Jerry managed to sound reproachful. ‘I’ve been talking to Mekles. He seems a nice little chap, most co-operative. Just time for a word with him, if you’d like one.’

‘No, thanks.’ Jerry always wanted him to talk to the subjects, and he always refused. ‘I’d like a drink.’

‘A drink, yes, of course.’ Jerry’s anxiety was perceptibly increased, but he was brave about it. ‘There’s a bar round to the left. Let’s make it a quick one, you know me, just a time slave, like to be on the platform half an hour before the train goes.’

While they drank whisky Jerry turned round a ring on his finger, tapped the counter, scratched one leg with the other, did everything but look at his watch. ‘How did the programme come along?’

‘Terrible. Just terrible!’

‘What’s that?’ Jerry looked as though he had heard a priest reading from a handbook on atheism.

‘I told you, terrible. We like to play with squibs and you’ve given me a stick of dynamite. You’d better hope I won’t set a match to it.’ He held out his glass for another whisky.

Jerry stared, then laughed. ‘You aren’t serious, Bill.’

‘Perfectly serious.’ What makes me needle him, Hunter wondered, even though the needling is the truth, and it probably will be a terrible programme?

When they got out of the lift at the fourth floor flexes were trailing all over the place. Two electricians were hanging about, and there was a stocky man with a cauliflower ear in the corridor.

‘One of Mekles’ bodyguards,’ Jerry whispered. ‘He really does have them. And do you know, Bill, he’s taken the whole bloody floor? What it is to be rich, eh?’ Admiration was blended with envy in Jerry’s voice.

‘What it is to come out on top in the rat race.’

Jerry looked at him, said nothing. They turned left into the room where the telecast was to take place, and Hunter walked under the intense heat of the arcs. Three or four people began talking to him at once. Would he sit down in his special chair, raise his head, raise his hand, lean forward. He did all that. While the make-up men were working on his face, brushing his jacket, he saw Charlie Cash hovering in the background, and raised a hand.

Charlie came over. ‘You’ve got everything?’

‘In here.’ Hunter tapped his head.

‘Got a line to work on?’

‘I put my trust in God.’

‘You believers.’ Charlie turned down the corners of his mobile comedian’s mouth, went away.

Jerry Wilton walked over to an inner room, opened the door, spoke to somebody there, came back.

‘We’re on in one minute. Quiet, please.’

There was silence. Hunter could feel sweat trickling down the back of his neck. He wanted to wipe his forehead, but didn’t dare to do so. The green light showed and he heard a voice full of synthetic excitement and enthusiasm saying:

‘And now we bring you again our News Behind the News programme, with Personal Investigator Bill Hunter in another candid, unscripted, no-holds-barred interview with one of the most interesting personalities in London this week, with –’

Now on more than a million television screens the announcer’s face was replaced by Hunter’s, and he began to talk: ‘–a modern mystery man, Mr Nicholas Mekles. To many of us Mr Mekles is a name. We know of him as the owner of a shipping fleet. He is lucky enough to have a fabulous villa on the Riviera and an equally fabulous yacht. He is reputed to exercise control over a dozen different organisations. Some people say he is the richest man in the world.’ Hunter paused, so that his next words should take on an emphasis that was not in his voice. ‘How has Mr Mekles reached his present position? Where did the money come from? Those are two of the intriguing questions I propose to ask this man of mystery. Mr Mekles is paying one of his occasional visits to London – he has taken the whole fourth floor of the Park Lane Grand Hotel, and it’s from a room in his suite that I am talking to you. And now, let’s meet the man of mystery.’

The cameras followed him as he walked across the room and tapped on the inner door. This door opened and Mekles came out, a man like a very elegant lizard, olive-skinned and sweetly smiling, with small snapping dark eyes.

The two men sat down, Hunter with his back to the cameras so that the audience looked past him at Mekles. For the rest of the programme the watchers would never see Hunter’s face. The effect had been adapted from an American programme, to give the impression of a man being judged rather than questioned. The cameras shifted occasionally to give a glimpse of Hunter’s shoulder as they looked over it, or to show the back of his head. Mekles, beyond him and in a lower chair, looked like a criminal undergoing interrogation.

Open mildly. ‘Can you tell me, Mr Mekles, how this man-of-mystery label got attached to you?’

The little man in the chair below him shrugged. His tongue shot out, briefly licked narrow lips. His voice was low, musical, the words perfectly comprehensible but the stress on syllables foreign. ‘I am a businessman. What is there mysterious about that? This man of mystery, you know, I think he does not exist. He has been invented by newspaper reporters looking for a story.’ His smile broadened. ‘Perhaps by television interviewers too.’

The victim should not answer back. Hunter said sharply, ‘A businessman. What kind of business?’

‘Any kind that is offered. I buy things cheap, I sell them at a profit. That kind of business.’

‘Three years ago your name was mentioned in connection with an international report into the control of prostitution in Europe, and the shifting of prostitutes from one country to another.’ Mimicking Mekles’ accent slightly, Hunter asked, ‘That kind of business?’

It was his belief that the only way in which the interview could take on some sort of life was by his angering Mekles. To his disappointment the little man seemed unmoved. He said carefully, ‘As you know, I am sure, I was cleared of any suggestion that I had any connection with such horrible traffic.’

‘You own a shipping fleet?’ Mekles inclined his head. ‘Is it a fact that several ships of that fleet sank with valuable cargo on board?’

‘Four ships only.’

‘And that the insurance companies concerned refused to pay on the ground that the ships were not seaworthy?’

No feeling of any sort showed in the little dark eyes. ‘Not at all. One of the insurance companies paid without question. The other refused to pay, on what I could only regard as a pretext. I took the only step available to me.’

Incautiously Hunter asked, ‘What was that?’

‘I bought the insurance company.’ Without raising his voice Mekles said, ‘I am quite a respectable man, I assure you, Mr Hunter. As respectable as you are, perhaps. I have big oil interests, I own a great deal of property, some of it in England. Would you like me to tell you about that?’

The interview was going badly, creating the wrong impression. It was almost as though Mekles were the interrogator and Hunter the man under questioning. And it was hot, too hot under the arc lamps. Hunter felt the heat striking at him, soaking his shirt, making his collar limp, beating at his eyes and forehead, as he went on asking questions, making wild roundhouse verbal swings which Mekles parried with almost contemptuous ease, saying that there was no mystery about his passport, it had been issued by the Greek Government, there was no mystery about his origin, he was a Greek citizen, he had come to England merely for pleasure. ‘It is a very nice country,’ he said. ‘Your policemen are wonderful. Also your television interviewers.’

Hunter discovered in himself a dislike, almost hatred, for the little man sitting opposite him. He remembered suddenly a note made by Charlie Cash. ‘Mekles is supposed to be here to get in touch with Melville Bond, ex-MP, businessman, director Bellwinder Tool Co. Some sort of shady deal proposed, Mekles boss, Bond carrying out instructions. Like the furniture factory I told you about.’ Underneath came Charlie’s comment: ‘Unconfirmed. Don’t know what it’s all about. Just info., not to use.’

Sometimes a shot in the dark could be successful. It had happened before, it could happen again. He said, ‘So you are here purely for pleasure?’

‘Purely. I find all sorts of things pleasant. Even an interview like this one when I am being – what do you call it? – grilled.’

‘Business absolutely doesn’t enter into it?’

Sharply Mekles said, ‘It does not.’

Hunter leaned forward. The camera, looking down, showed his broad shoulders, the back of his head. ‘Do you know a man named Melville Bond?’

There was a flicker of hesitation, no more. ‘No.’

‘You haven’t been in touch with him?’

‘Not at all.’

‘You have done no business with him?’

‘None whatever.’

There was something here. Hunter could feel it. He said encouragingly, ‘Perhaps you used another name for the purpose? Or approached him through an agent? In an important business deal you might well not wish to appear personally.’

‘I have no knowledge whatever of Mr Bond.’ Mekles drew back in the chair, put out his tongue again, and Hunter was suddenly aware of danger, of a transformation from lizard to snake. ‘And on the question of using false names you have personal knowledge, I think.’

The attack was so sudden that Hunter was jolted by it, committed again the mistake of allowing Mekles the initiative. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that your name is not Hunter but O’Brien. You have spent several years in prison for a crime which I will be friendly enough not to name. I cannot admit that you have any right to ask me such questions as you have done. I must ask you to excuse me.’

All this the viewers in suburban semis delightedly heard and saw; saw, too, the bulk of the interviewer as Hunter stepped down from his chair and moved towards Mekles, arms swinging. Then the transmission was cut off and replaced by an urbane announcer, apologising.

In the room, Hunter barely grazed Mekles’ jaw with a right swing. He heard Jerry and Charlie Cash both crying out, and turned just in time to take a blow on the side of the face from the man with the cauliflower ear. He slipped sideways, tripped over one of the trailing wires, was conscious of thunderous bangs and crashes all about him, and then knew nothing more.

Chapter Four

Two people bent over, smiling at him. The smiles on their faces were upside down. His head ached. He put up a hand to it, and felt bandages. He closed his eyes and opened them again and the people were right way up, Charlie Cash and Anna. He was lying on the sofa in the living room of the flat which he shared with Anna. With that fact established, he closed his eyes again.

Anna’s voice, soft as melted toffee, said, ‘Bill, darling, are you awake?’

Charlie’s sharp Cockney voice said, ‘You’ve got those bandages on because you tripped and brought one of the cameras down on the side of your head. No serious damage. If you can open your eyes and talk, you’d better.’

It was Charlie’s voice he answered, opening his eyes. Anna knelt by the sofa, her soft pudgy face inches from his. ‘Are you sure you can talk?’

‘I can talk.’ He swung his legs to the ground and groaned at the pain in his head. ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘The interview was rotten. Then you asked some questions about Bond. Mekles came back with some stuff about your name being O’Brien. You took a poke at him.’ Charlie paused. With no change of tone he added, ‘That all went out. Anna here saw it. A million people saw it.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, yes.’ You can’t get away from the past, he thought, you can’t get away from the kind of person you are – or were, if the tense held any significance.

‘Then they cut us off. Your poke at Mekles just grazed him, worse luck. One of his thugs caught you on the face. You fell over, brought down the camera, and it hit your head. Exit one personal investigator, brought home by research assistant to his ever-loving mistress, who bandaged the head. Exit also TV technicians, in confusion.’

‘And Mekles?’

‘Also exit Mekles, but not as quickly as he expected. He was leaving England tomorrow, changed his mind and wanted to leave tonight, but police questioning kept him till three this morning.’

‘Police questioning?’ His head was aching badly.

‘He can’t talk,’ Anna said. ‘He doesn’t feel like talking. I won’t have him worried.’

The French clock on the mantelpiece said five minutes past six. He had slept, then, most of the night.

‘He needn’t talk, but he’d better listen.’ There was an edge to Charlie’s voice. ‘I’ve had the telephone cut off, but you’re an object of interest at the moment. To newspapermen. And the police. We stalled them last night, but they’ll be round this morning.’

He felt utterly confused. ‘Because of – ?’

‘We started transmitting at nine-thirty last night, right? You asked Mekles questions about this and that, and then asked him about a man named Bond. You implied that Mekles had come over here to do business with him, right? Where did you get the dope on that?’

‘From your research notes.’ The question held little reality for him. The past had him, gripped him like a pair of pincers.

‘But I told you it was background stuff. I told you not to use it,’ Charlie cried in exasperation. He took out a toothpick, put it in his mouth, bit through it, threw it away and took another.

Imprisoned in his dream of the past he said idly, ‘Does it matter?’

‘This much.’ Charlie rolled the toothpick quickly to the corner of his mouth. ‘You quizzed Mekles about Bond in the programme. Rather more than three hours earlier – just after six o’clock to be precise – Bond jumped out of the window of his flat. He lived in a block near Marble Arch. You didn’t know that?’

‘Of course not.’

‘He was dead when he hit the ground. It was in the late evening papers, a paragraph.’

Anna watched him anxiously. His mental processes were sluggish, he could only think about the past. ‘And so?’

‘So it looked as though you knew about Bond’s death and were accusing Mekles of being implicated in it. Naturally he was riled. But the point is this, Bill. I hoped you might have some good reason for mentioning Bond, beside the guff in my notes. But you hadn’t? Nothing at all?’ Charlie threw up his hands. ‘Then we’re up the creek.’

The doorbell rang.