NGAIO MARSH

Black As He’s Painted

Dedication

For Roses and Mike with love

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Cast of Characters

Map

1 Mr Whipplestone

2 Lucy Lockett

3 Catastrophe

4 Aftermath

5 Small Hours

6 Afternoon in the Capricorns

7 Mr Sheridan’s Past

8 Keeping Obbo

9 Climax

10 Epilogue

Coda

Keep Reading

Acknowledgement

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Cast of Characters

Mr Samuel Whipplestone |  | Foreign Office (retired)
Lucy Lockett |  | A cat
The Ambassador in London for Ng’ombwana |
A Lady |  |
A Young Gentleman | Of Messrs Able & Virtue |
A Youth | Land & Estate Agents |
Chubb |  | House Servant
Mrs Chubb |  | His wife
A Veterinary Surgeon |  |
Mr Sheridan |  | No.1a Capricorn Walk (basement flat)
His Excellency |  | The Boomer, President of Ng’ombwana
Bartholomew Opala, CBE |  |
An ADC |  |
Mr and Mrs Pirelli |  | Of the Napoli, shop-keepers
Colonel Cockburn-Montfort |  | Late of the Ng’ombwanan Army (retired)
Mrs Cockburn-Montfort |  | His wife
Kenneth Sanskrit |  | Late of Ng’ombwana. Merchant
Xenoclea Sanskrit |  | His sister. Of the Piggie Pottery, Capricorn Mews, SW3
A mlinzi |  | Spear Carrier to The Boomer
Sir George Alleyn, KCMG, etc. etc. |  |
Superintendent Roderick Alleyn |  | CID
Troy Alleyn |  | Painter. His wife
Inspector Fox |  | CID
Superintendent Gibson |  | Special Branch, CID
Jacks |  | A talented sergeant
Detective-Sergeant Bailey |  | A finger-print expert
Detective-Sergeant Thompson |  | A photographer
Sundry police, Ng’ombwanan servants and frequenters of the Capricorns, SW3 |  |

Map

CHAPTER 1

Mr Whipplestone

The year was at the spring and the day at the morn and God may have been in his Heaven but as far as Mr Samuel Whipplestone was concerned the evidence was negligible. He was, in a dull, muddled sort of way, miserable. He had become possessed, with valedictory accompaniments, of two solid silver Georgian gravy-boats. He had taken his leave of Her Majesty’s Foreign Service in the manner to which his colleagues were accustomed. He had even prepared himself for the non-necessity of getting up at 7.30, bathing, shaving, breakfasting at 8.00 – but there is no need to prolong the Podsnappian recital. In a word he had fancied himself tuned in to retirement and now realized that he was in no such condition. He was a man without propulsion. He had no object in life. He was finished.

By ten o’clock he found himself unable to endure the complacent familiarity of his ‘service’ flat. It was in fact at that hour being ‘serviced’, a ritual which normally he avoided and now hindered by his presence.

He was astounded to find that for twenty years he had inhabited dull, oppressive, dark and uncomely premises. Deeply shaken by this abrupt discovery, he went out into the London spring.

A ten-minute walk across the Park hardly raised his spirits. He avoided the great water-shed of traffic under the quadriga, saw some inappropriately attired equestrians, passed a concourse of scarlet and yellow tulips, left the Park under the expanded nostrils of Epstein’s liberated elementals and made his way into Baronsgate.

As he entered that flowing cacophony of changing gears and revving engines, it occurred to him that he himself must now get into bottom gear and stay there, until he was parked in some subfuse lay-by to await – and here the simile became insufferable – a final to wing-off. His predicament was none the better for being commonplace. He walked for a quarter of an hour.

From Baronsgate the western entry into the Capricorns is by an arched passage too low overhead to admit any but pedestrian traffic. It leads into Capricorn Mews and, further along at right angles to the Mews, Capricorn Place. He had passed by it over and over again and would have done so now if it hadn’t been for a small, thin cat.

This animal flashed out from under the traffic and shot past him into the passageway. It disappeared at the far end. He heard a scream of tyres and of a living creature.

This sort of thing upset Mr Whipplestone. He disliked this sort of thing intensely. He would have greatly preferred to remove himself as quickly as possible from the scene and put it out of his mind. What he did, however, was to hurry through the passageway into Capricorn Mews.

The vehicle, a delivery van of sorts, was disappearing into Capricorn Place. A group of three youths outside a garage stared at the cat which lay like a blot of ink on the pavement.

One of them walked over to it.

‘Had it,’ he said.

‘Poor pussy!’ said one of the others and they laughed objectionably.

The first youth moved his foot as if to turn the cat over. Astonishingly and dreadfully it scrabbled with its hind legs. He exclaimed, stooped down and extended his hand.

It was on its feet. It staggered and then bolted. Towards Mr Whipplestone who had come to a halt. He supposed it to be concussed, or driven frantic by pain or fear. In a flash it gave a great spring and was on Mr Whipplestone’s chest, clinging with its small claws and – incredibly – purring. He had been told that a dying cat will sometimes purr. It had blue eyes. The tip of its tail for about two inches was snow white but the rest of its person was perfectly black. He had no particular antipathy to cats.

He carried an umbrella in his right hand but with his left arm he performed a startled reflex gesture. He sheltered the cat. It was shockingly thin, but warm and tremulous.

‘One of ’er nine lives gawn for a burton,’ said the youth. He and his friends guffawed themselves into the garage.

‘Drat,’ said Mr Whipplestone, who long ago had thought it amusing to use spinsterish expletives.

With some difficulty he hooked his umbrella over his left arm and with his right hand inserted his eyeglass and then explored the cat’s person. It increased its purrs, interrupting them with a faint mew when he touched its shoulder. What was to be done with it?

Obviously, nothing in particular. It was not badly injured, presumably it lived in the neighbourhood and one had always understood its species to have a phenomenal homing instinct. It thrust its nut-like head under Mr Whipplestone’s jacket and into his waistcoat. It palpated his chest with its paws. He had quite a business detaching it.

He set it down on the pavement. ‘Go home,’ he said. It stared up at him and went through the motion of mewing, opening its mouth and showing its pink tongue but giving no sound. ‘No,’ he said, ‘go home!’ It was making little preparatory movements of its haunches as if it was about to spring again.

He turned his back on it and walked quickly down Capricorn Mews. He almost ran.

It is a quiet little street, cobbled and very secluded. It accommodates three garages, a packing agency, two dozen or so small mid-Victorian houses, a minute bistro and four shops. As he approached one of these, a flower shop, he could see reflected in its side windows Capricorn Mews with himself walking towards him. And behind him, trotting in a determined manner, the little cat. It was mewing.

He was extremely put out and had begun to entertain a confused notion of telephoning the RSPCA when a van erupted from a garage immediately behind him. It passed him and when it had gone the cat had disappeared: frightened, Mr Whipplestone supposed, by the noise.

Beyond the flower shop and on the opposite side of the Mews was the corner of Capricorn Place, leading off to the left. Mr Whipplestone, deeply ruffled, turned into it.

A pleasing street: narrow, orderly, sunny, with a view, to the left, of tree-tops and the dome of the Baronsgate Basilica. Iron railings and behind them small well-kept Georgian and Victorian houses. Spring flowers in window-boxes. From somewhere or another the smell of freshly brewed coffee.

Cleaning ladies attacked steps and door-knockers. Household ladies were abroad with shopping baskets. A man of Mr Whipplestone’s own age who reeked of the army and was of an empurpled complexion emerged from one of the houses. A perambulator with a self-important baby and an escort of a pedestrian six-year-old, a female propellant and a large dog, headed with a purposeful air towards the Park. The postman was going his rounds.

In London there are still, however precarious their state, many little streets of the character of the Capricorns. They are upper-middle-class streets and therefore, Mr Whipplestone had been given to understand, despicable. Being of that class himself, he did not take this view. He found the Capricorns uneventful, certainly, but neither tiresomely quaint nor picturesque nor smug: pleasing rather, and possessed of a quality which he could only think of as ‘sparkling’. Ahead of him was a pub, the Sun in Splendour. It had an honest untarted-look about it and stood at the point where the Place leads into Capricorn Square: the usual railed enclosure of plane trees, grass and a bench or two, well-kept. He turned to the right down one side of it, making for Capricorn Walk.

Moving towards him at a stately pace came a stout, superbly dressed coal-black gentleman leading a white Afghan hound with a scarlet collar and leash.

‘My dear Ambassador!’ Mr Whipplestone exclaimed. ‘How very pleasant!’

‘Mr Whipplestone!’ resonated the Ambassador for Ng’ombwana. ‘I am delighted to see you. You live in these parts?’

‘No, no: a morning stroll. I’m – I’m a free man now, your Excellency.’

‘Of course. I had heard. You will be greatly missed.’

‘I doubt it. Your Embassy – I had forgotten for the moment – is quite close by, isn’t it?’

‘In Palace Park Gardens. I too enjoy a morning stroll with Ahman. We are not, alas, unattended.’ He waved his gold-mounted stick in the direction of a large person looking anonymously at a plane tree.

‘Alas!’ Mr Whipplestone agreed. ‘The penalty of distinction,’ he added neatly, and patted the Afghan.

‘You are kind enough to say so.’

Mr Whipplestone’s highly specialized work in the Foreign Service had been advanced by a happy manner with Foreign, and particularly with African, plenipotentiaries. ‘I hope I may congratulate your Excellency,’ he said and broke into his professional style of verbless exclamation. ‘The increased rapprochement! The new Treaty! Masterly achievements!’

‘Achievements – entirely – of our great President, Mr Whipplestone.’

‘Indeed, yes. Everyone is delighted about the forthcoming visit. An auspicious occasion.’

‘As you say. Immensely significant.’ The Ambassador waited for a moment and then slightly reduced the volume of his superb voice. ‘Not,’ he said, ‘without its anxieties, however. As you know, our great President does not welcome –’ he again waved his stick at his bodyguard – ‘that sort of attention.’ A sigh escaped him. ‘He is to stay with us,’ he said.

‘Quite.’

‘The responsibility!’ sighed the Ambassador. He broke off and offered his hand. ‘You will be at the reception, of course,’ he said. ‘We must meet more often! I shall see that something is arranged. Au revoir, Mr Whipplestone.’

They parted. Mr Whipplestone walked on, passing and tactfully ignoring the escort.

Facing him at the point where the Walk becomes the north-east border of the Square was a small house between two large ones. It was painted white with a glossy black front door and consisted of an attic, two floors and a basement. The first-floor windows opened on a pair of miniature balconies, the ground-floor ones were bowed. He was struck by the arrangement of the window-boxes. Instead of the predictable daffodil one saw formal green swags that might have enriched a della Robbia relief. They were growing vines of some sort which swung between the pots where they rooted and were cunningly trimmed so that they swelled at the lowest point of the arc and symmetrically tapered to either end.

Some workmen with ladders were putting up a sign.

He had begun to feel less depressed. Persons who do not live there will talk about ‘the London feeling’. They will tell you that as they walk down a London street they can be abruptly made happy, uplifted in spirit, exhilarated. Mr Whipplestone had always taken a somewhat incredulous view of these transports but he had to admit that on this occasion he was undoubtedly visited by a liberated sensation. He had a singular notion that the little house had induced this reaction. No. 1, as he now saw, Capricorn Walk.

He approached the house. It was touched on its chimneys and the eastern slope of its roof by sunshine. ‘Facing the right way,’ thought Mr Whipplestone. ‘In the winter it’ll get all the sun there is, I dare say.’ His own flat faced north.

A postman came whistling down the Walk as Mr Whipplestone crossed it. He mounted the steps of No. 1, clapped something through the brass flap and came down so briskly that they nearly collided.

‘Whoops-a-daisy,’ said the postman. ‘Too eager, that’s my trouble. Lovely morning, though, innit?’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Whipplestone, judiciously conceding the point. ‘It is. Are the present occupants –’ he hesitated.

‘Gawn. Out last week,’ said the postman. ‘But I’m not to know, am I? People ought to make arrangements, din’ they, sir?’ He went off, whistling.

The workmen came down their ladders and prepared to make off. They had erected a sign.

FOR SALE

All enquiries to

Able, Virtue & Sons

17 Capricorn Street, SW7

II

The Street is the most ‘important’ of the Capricorns. It is wider and busier than the rest. It runs parallel to the Walk and in fact Messrs Able and Virtue’s premises lie exactly back to back with the little house at No. 1.

‘Good morning,’ said the roundabout lady at the desk on the left-hand side. ‘Can I help you?’ she pleaded brightly.

Mr Whipplestone pulled out the most non-committal stop in his FO organ and tempered its chill with a touch of whimsy.

‘You may satisfy my idle curiosity if you will be so good,’ he said. ‘Ah – concerning No. 1, Capricorn Walk.’

‘No. 1, the Walk?’ repeated the lady. ‘Yes. Our notice, ackshally, has only just gone up. For Sale with stipulations regarding the basement. I’m not quite sure –’ she looked across at the young man with a pre-Raphaelite hair-do behind the right-hand desk. He was contemplating his fingernails and listening to his telephone. ‘What is it about the basement, of No. 1,’ he rattled into it, ‘is at present occupied as a pied –’

He clapped a languid hand over the receiver: ‘Ay’m coping,’ he said and unstopped the receiver. ‘The basement of No. 1,’ he rattled into it, ‘is at present occupied as a pied-à-terre by the owner. He wishes to retain occupancy. The Suggested Arrangement is that total ownership pass to the purchaser and that he, the vendor, become the tenant of the basement at an agreed rent for a specified period.’ He listened for a considerable interval. ‘No,’ he said, ‘ay’m afraid it’s a firm stipulation. Quate. Quate. Theng you, madam. Good morning.’

‘That,’ said the lady, offering it to Mr Whipplestone, ‘is the situation.’

Mr Whipplestone, conscious of a lightness in his head, said: ‘And the price?’ He used the voice in which he had been wont to say: ‘This should have been dealt with at a lower level.’

‘Was it thirty-nine?’ the lady asked her colleague. ‘Thirty-eight.’

‘Thirty-eight thousand,’ she relayed to Mr Whipplestone, who caught back his breath in a civilized little hiss.

‘Indeed?’ he said. ‘You amaze me,’

‘It’s a Desirable District,’ she replied indifferently. ‘Properties are at a premium in the Capricorns.’ She picked up a document and glanced at it. Mr Whipplestone was nettled.

‘And the rooms?’ he asked sharply. ‘How many? Excluding, for the moment, the basement.’

The lady and the pre-Raphaelite young gentleman became more attentive. They began to speak in unison and begged each other’s pardon.

‘Six,’ gabbled the lady, ‘in all. Excluding kitchen and Usual Offices. Floor-to-floor carpets and drapes included in purchase price. And the Usual Fitments: fridge, range, etcetera. Large recep’ with adjacent dining-room, ground floor. Master bedroom and bathroom with toilet, first floor. Two rooms with shower and toilet, second floor. Late tenant used these as flat for married couple.’

‘Oh?’ said Mr Whipplestone, concealing the emotional disturbance that seemed to be lodged under his diaphragm. ‘A married couple? You mean?’

‘Did for him,’ said the lady.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Serviced him. Cook and houseman. There was an Arrangement by which they also cleaned the basement flat.’

The young man threw in: ‘Which it is hoped will continue. They are Strongly Recommended to purchaser with Arrangement to be arrived at for continued weekly servicing of basement. No obligation, of course.’

‘Of course not.’ Mr Whipplestone gave a small dry cough. ‘I should like to see it,’ he said.

‘Certainly,’ said the lady crisply. ‘When would you –?’

‘Now, if you please.

‘I think that would suit. If you’ll just wait while I –’ She used her telephone. Mr Whipplestone bumped into a sudden qualm of near-panic. ‘I am beside myself,’ he thought. ‘It’s that wretched cat.’ He pulled himself together. After all he was committed to nothing. An impulse, a mere whim induced, he dared say, by unaccustomed idleness. What of it?’

The lady was looking at him. Perhaps she had spoken to him.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr Whipplestone.

She decided he was hard-of-hearing. ‘The house,’ she articulated pedantically, ‘is open to view. The late tenants have vacated the premises. The married couple leave at the end of the week. The owner is at home in the basement flat. Mr Sheridan,’ she shouted. ‘That’s the vendor’s name: Sheridan.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Mervyn!’ cried the lady, summoning up a wan and uncertain youth from the back office. ‘No. 1, the Walk. Gentleman to view.’ She produced keys and smiled definitively upon Mr Whipplestone. ‘It’s a Quality Residence,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ll think so.’

The youth attended him with a defeated air round the corner to No. 1, Capricorn Walk.

‘Thirty-eight thousand pounds!’ Mr Whipplestone inwardly expostulated. ‘Good God, it’s outrageous!’

The Walk had turned further into the sun, which now sparkled on No. l’s brass door-knocker and letter-box, Mr Whipplestone, waiting on the recently scrubbed steps, looked down into the area. It had been really very ingeniously converted, he was obliged to concede, into a ridiculous little garden with everything on a modest scale.

‘Pseudo-Japanese,’ he thought in a panic-stricken attempt to discredit it.

‘Who looks after that?’ he tossed at the youth. ‘The basement?’

‘Yar,’ said the youth.

(‘He hadn’t the faintest idea,’ thought Mr Whipplestone.)

The youth had opened the front door and now stood back for Mr Whipplestone to enter.

The little hall and stairway were carpeted in cherry red, the glossy walls were an agreeable oyster-white. This scheme was continued in a quite sizeable drawing-room. The two bow windows curtained in red and white stripes were large and the whole interior remarkably light for a London room. For some twenty years he had vaguely regretted the murkiness of his service flat.

Without warning he was overtaken by an experience that a less sophisticated man might have been tempted to call hallucinatory. He saw, with the utmost clarity, his own possessions occupying this light-hearted room. The Chippendale wall-desk, the crimson sofa with its companion table, the big red glass goblet, the Agatha Troy landscape, the late Georgian bookcase: all were harmoniously accommodated. When the youth opened double-doors into a small dining-room, Mr Whipplestone saw at a glance that his chairs were of precisely the right size and character.

He dismissed these visions. ‘The partition folds back,’ he said with a brave show of indifference, ‘to form one room, I suppose?’

‘Yar,’ said the youth and folded it back. He opened red and white striped curtains in the rear wall and revealed a courtyard and tub-garden.

‘Lose the sun,’ Mr Whipplestone sneered, keeping his head, ‘Get none in the winter.’

It was, however, receiving its full quota now.

‘Damp,’ persisted Mr Whipplestone defiantly. ‘Extra expense. Have to be kept up.’ And he thought: ‘I’d do better to hold my tongue.’

The kitchen was on the left of the dining-room. It was a modernized affair with a service hatch. ‘Cramped!’ Mr Whipplestone thought of saying but his heart was not in it.

The stairs were steep which ought to have been a comfort. Awkward for trays and luggage and suppose one died how would they get one out of it? He said nothing.

The view from the master-bedroom through the french windows embraced in its middle distance the Square with the Sun in Splendour on the left and – more distantly on the right – the dome of the Basilica. In the foreground was the Walk with foreshortened views of pedestrians, parked cars and an intermittent passage of traffic. He opened a french window. They were ringing the bells in the Basilica. Twelve o’clock. Some service or another, he supposed. But you couldn’t say the house was noisy.

The bells stopped. Somewhere, out of sight, a voice was raised in a reiterated, rhythmical shout. He couldn’t distinguish the sense of it but it came nearer. He went out on one of the two little balconies.

‘Air-eye-awf,’ shouted the voice, and round the far corner of the Square came a horse-drawn cart, nodding with tulips and led by a red-faced man. He passed No. 1 and looked up.

‘Any time. All fresh,’ he bawled directly at Mr Whipplestone who hastily withdrew.

(His big red glass goblet in the bow window, filled with tulips.)

Mr Whipplestone was a man who did not indulge in histrionics but under the lash of whatever madness now possessed him he did, as he made to leave the window, flap the air with two dismissive palms. The gesture brought him face to face with a couple, man and woman.

‘I beg your pardon,’ they all said and the small man added. ‘Sorry, sir. We just heard the window open and thought we’d better see.’ He glanced at the youth. ‘Order to view?’ he asked.

‘Yar.’

‘You,’ said Mr Whipplestone, dead against his will, ‘must be the – the upstairs – ah – the –’

‘That’s right, sir,’ said the man. His wife smiled and made a slight bob. They were rather alike, being round-faced, apple-cheeked and blue-eyed and were aged, he thought, about forty-five.

‘You are – I understand – ah – still – ah –’

‘We’ve stayed on to set things to rights, sir, Mr Sheridan’s kindly letting us remain until the end of the week. Gives us a chance to find another place, sir, if we’re not wanted here.’

‘I understand you would be – ah –’

‘Available, sir?’ they both said quickly and the man added, ‘We’d be glad to stay on if the conditions suited. We’ve been here with the outgoing tenant six years, sir, and very happy with it. Name of Chubb, sir, references on request and the owner, Mr Sheridan, below, would speak for us.’

‘Quite, quite quite!’ said Mr Whipplestone in a tearing hurry. ‘I – ah – I’ve come to no conclusion. On the contrary. Idle curiosity, really. However. In the event – the remote event of my – be very glad – but so far – nothing decided.’

‘Yes, sir, of course. If you’d care to see upstairs, sir?’

‘What!’ shouted Mr Whipplestone as if they’d fired a gun at him. ‘Oh. Thank you. Might as well, perhaps. Yes.’

‘Excuse me, sir. I’ll just close the window.’

Mr Whipplestone stood aside. The man laid his hand on the french window. It was a brisk movement but it stopped as abruptly as if a moving film had turned into a still. The hand was motionless, the gaze was fixed, the mouth shut like a trap.

Mr Whipplestone was startled. He looked down into the street and there, returning from his constitutional and attended by his dog and his bodyguard, was the Ambassador for Ng’ombwana. It was at him that the man, Chubb, stared. Something impelled Mr Whipplestone to look at the woman. She had come close and she too, over her husband’s shoulder, stared at the Ambassador.

The next moment the figures animated. The window was shut and fastened and Chubb turned to Mr Whipplestone with a serviceable smile.

‘Shall I show the way, sir?’ asked Chubb.

The upstairs flat was neat, clean and decent. The little parlour was a perfectly respectable and rather colourless room, except perhaps for an enlarged photograph of a round-faced girl of about sixteen which attracted attention on account of its being festooned in black ribbon and flanked on the table beneath it by two vases of dyed immortelles. Some kind of china medallion hung from the bottom edge of the frame. Another enlarged photograph of Chubb in uniform and Mrs Chubb in bridal array, hung on the wall.

All the appointments on this floor, it transpired, were the property of the Chubbs. Mr Whipplestone was conscious that they watched him anxiously. Mrs Chubb said: ‘It’s home to us. We’re settled like. It’s such a nice part, the Capricorns.’ For an unnerving moment he thought she was going to cry.

He left the Chubbs precipitately, followed by the youth. It was a struggle not to re-enter the drawing-room but he triumphed and shot out of the front door to be immediately involved in another confrontation.

‘Good morning,’ said a man on the area steps. ‘You’ve been looking at my house, I think? My name is Sheridan.’

There was nothing remarkable about him at first sight, unless it was his almost total baldness and his extreme pallor. He was of middle height, unexceptionally dressed and well-spoken. His hair, when he had had it, must have been dark since his eyes and brows and the wires on the backs of his pale hands were black. Mr Whipplestone had a faint, fleeting and oddly uneasy impression of having seen him before. He came up the area steps and through the gate and faced Mr Whipplestone who, in politeness, couldn’t do anything but stop where he was.

‘Good morning,’ Mr Whipplestone said. ‘I just happened to be passing. An impulse.’

‘One gets them,’ said Mr Sheridan, ‘in the spring.’ He spoke with a slight lisp.

‘So I understand,’ said Mr Whipplestone, not stuffily but in a definitive tone. He made a slight move.

‘Did you approve?’ asked Mr Sheridan casually.

‘Oh, charming, charming,’ Mr Whipplestone said, lightly dismissing it.

‘Good. So glad. Good morning, Chubb, can I have a word with you?’ said Sheridan.

Mr Whipplestone escaped. The wan youth followed him to the corner. Mr Whipplestone was about to dismiss him and continue alone towards Baronsgate. He turned back to thank the youth and there was the house, in full sunlight now, with its evergreen swags and its absurd garden. Without a word he wheeled left and left again and reached Able, Virtue & Sons three yards in advance of his escort. He walked straight in and laid his card before the plump lady.

‘I should like the first refusal,’ he said.

From that moment it was a foregone conclusion. He didn’t lose his head. He made sensible enquiries and took proper steps about the lease and the plumbing and the state of repair. He consulted his man of business, his bank manager and his solicitor. It is questionable whether, if any of these experts had advised against the move, he would have paid the smallest attention but they did not and, to his own continuing astonishment, at the end of a fortnight Mr Whipplestone moved in.

He wrote cosily to his married sister in Devonshire: ‘– you may be surprised to hear of the change. Don’t expect anything spectacular, it’s a quiet little backwater full of old fogies like me. Nothing in the way of excitement or “happenings” or violence or beastly demonstrations. It suits me. At my age one prefers the uneventful life and that,’ he ended, ‘is what I expect to enjoy at No. 1, Capricorn Walk.’

Prophecy was not Mr Whipplestone’s strong point.

III

‘That’s all jolly fine,’ said Superintendent Alleyn. ‘What’s the Special Branch think it’s doing? Sitting on its fat bottom waving Ng’ombwanan flags?’

‘What did he say, exactly?’ asked Mr Fox. He referred to their Assistant Commissioner.

‘Oh, you know!’ said Alleyn. ‘Charm and sweet reason were the wastewords of his ween.’

‘What’s a ween, Mr Alleyn?’

‘I’ve not the remotest idea. It’s a quotation. And don’t ask me from where.’

‘I only wondered,’ said Mr Fox mildly.

‘I don’t even know,’ Alleyn continued moodily, ‘how it’s spelt. Or what it means, if it comes to that.’

‘If it’s Scotch it’ll be with an h, won’t it? Meaning: “few”. Wheen.’

‘Which doesn’t make sense. Or does it? Perhaps it should be “weird” but that’s something one drees. Now you’re upsetting me, Br’er Fox.’

‘To get back to the AC, then?’

‘However reluctantly: to get back to him. It’s all about this visit, of course.’

‘The Ng’ombwanan President?’

‘He. The thing is, Br’er Fox, I know him. And the AC knows I know him. We were at school together in the same house: Davidson’s. Same study, for a year. Nice creature, he was. Not everybody’s cup of tea but I liked him. We got on like houses on fire.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Fox. ‘The AC wants you to recall old times?’

‘I do tell you precisely that. He’s dreamed up the idea of a meeting – casual-cum-official. He wants me to put it to the President that unless he conforms to whatever procedure the Special Branch sees fit to lay on, he may very well get himself bumped off and in any case will cause acute anxiety, embarrassment and trouble at all levels from the Monarch down. And I’m to put this, if you please, tactfully. They don’t want umbrage to be taken, followed by a highly publicized flounce-out. He’s as touchy as a sea-anemone.’

‘Is he jibbing, then? About routine precautions?’

‘He was always a pig-headed ass. We used to say that if you wanted the old Boomer to do anything you only had to tell him not to. And he’s one of those sickening people without fear. And hellish haughty with it. Yes, he’s jibbing. He doesn’t want protection. He wants to do a Haroun el Raschid and bum round London on his own looking as inconspicuous as a coal box in paradise.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Fox judiciously, ‘that’s a very silly way to go on. He’s a number one assassination risk, that gentleman.’

‘He’s a bloody nuisance. You’re right, of course. Ever since he pushed his new industrial legislation through he’s been a sitting target for the lunatic fringe. Damn it all, Br’er Fox, only the other day, when he elected to make a highly publicized call at Martinique, somebody took a pot shot at him. Missed and shot himself. No arrest. And off goes the Boomer on his merry way, six foot five of him, standing on the seat of his car, all eyes and teeth, with his escort having kittens every inch of the route.’

‘He sounds a right daisy.’

‘I believe you.’

‘I get muddled,’ Mr Fox confessed, ‘over these emergent nations.’

‘You’re not alone, there.’

‘I mean to say – this Ng’ombwana. What is it? A republic, obviously, but is it a member of the Commonwealth and if it is, why does it have an Ambassador instead of a High Commissioner?’

‘You may well ask. Largely through the manoeuvrings of my old chum, The Boomer. They’re still a Commonwealth country. More or less. They’re having it both ways. All the trappings and complete independence. All the ha’pence and none of the kicks. That’s why they insist on calling their man in London an Ambassador and setting him up in premises that wouldn’t disgrace one of the great powers. Basically it’s The Boomer’s doing.’

‘What about his own people? Here? At this Embassy? His Ambassador and all?’

‘They’re as worried as hell but say that what the President lays down is it: the general idea being that they might as well speak to the wind. He’s got this notion in his head – it derives from his schooldays and his practising as a barrister in London – that because Great Britain, relatively, has had a non-history of political assassination there won’t be any in the present or future. In its maddening way it’s rather touching.’

‘He can’t stop the SB doing its stuff, though. Not outside the Embassy.’

‘He can make it hellish awkward for them.’

‘What’s the procedure, then? Do you wait till he comes, Mr Alleyn, and plead with him at the airport?’

‘I do not. I fly to his blasted republic at the crack of dawn tomorrow and you carry on with the Dagenham job on your own.’

‘Thanks very much. What a treat,’ said Fox. ‘So I’d better go and pack.’

‘Don’t forget the old school tie.’

‘I do not deign,’ said Alleyn, ‘to reply to that silly crack.’

He got as far as the door and stopped.

‘I meant to ask you,’ he said. ‘Did you ever come across a man called Samuel Whipplestone? At the FO?’

‘I don’t move in those circles. Why?’

‘He was a bit of a specialist on Ng’ombwana. I see he’s lately retired. Nice chap. When I get back I might ask him to dinner.’

‘Are you wondering if he’d have any influence?’

‘We can hardly expect him to crash down on his knees and plead with the old Boomer to use his loaf if he wants to keep it. But I did vaguely wonder. ‘Bye, Br’er Fox.’

Forty-eight hours later Alleyn, in a tropical suit, got out of a Presidential Rolls that had met him at the main Ng’ombwana airport. He passed in a sweltering heat up a grandiose flight of steps through a Ruritanian guard turned black, and into the air-conditioned reception hall of the Presidential Palace.

Communication at the top level had taken place and he got the full, instant VIP treatment.

‘Mr Alleyn?’ said a young Ng’ombwanan wearing an ADC’s gold knot and tassel. ‘The President is so happy at your visit. He will see you at once. You had a pleasant flight?’

Alleyn followed the sky-blue tunic down a splendid corridor that gave on an exotic garden.

‘Tell me,’ he asked on the way, ‘what form of address is the correct one for the President?’

‘His Excellency, the President,’ the ADC rolled out, ‘prefers that form of address.’

‘Thank you,’ said Alleyn, and followed his guide into an anteroom of impressive proportions. An extremely personable and widely smiling secretary said something in Ng’ombwanan. The ADC translated: ‘We are to go straight in, if you please.’ Two dashingly uniformed guards opened double-doors and Alleyn was ushered into an enormous room at the far end of which, behind a vast desk, sat his old school chum: Bartholomew Opala.

‘Superintendent Alleyn, your Excellency, Mr President, sir,’ said the ADC redundantly and withdrew.

The enormous presence was already on its feet and coming, light-footed as a prizefighter, at Alleyn. The huge voice was bellowing: ‘Rory Alleyn, but all that’s glorious!’ Alleyn’s hand was engulfed and his shoulder-blade rhythmically beaten. It was impossible to stand to attention and bow from the neck in what he had supposed to be the required form.

‘Mr President –’ he began.

‘What? Oh, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense! Balls, my dear man (as we used to say in Davidson’s).’ Davidson’s had been their house at the illustrious school they both attended. The Boomer was being too establishment for words. Alleyn noticed that he wore the old school tie and that behind him on the wall hung a framed photograph of Davidson’s with The Boomer and himself standing together in the back row. He found this oddly, even painfully, touching.

‘Come and sit down,’ The Boomer fussed. ‘Where, now? Over here! Sit! Sit! I couldn’t be more delighted.’

The steel-wool mat of hair was grey now and stood up high on his head like a toque. The huge frame was richly endowed with flesh and the eyes were very slightly bloodshot but, as if in double-exposure, Alleyn saw beyond this figure that of an ebony youth eating anchovy toast by a coal fire and saying: ‘You are my friend: I have had none, here, until now.’

‘How well you look,’ the President was saying. ‘And how little you have changed! You smoke? No? A cigar? A pipe? Yes? Presently, then. You are lunching with us of course. They have told you?’

‘This is overwhelming,’ Alleyn said when he could get a word in. ‘In a minute I shall be forgetting my protocol.’

‘Now! Forget it now. We are alone. There is no need.’

‘My dear –’

‘“Boomer.” Say it. How many years since I heard it!’

‘I’m afraid I very nearly said it when I came in. My dear Boomer.’

The sudden brilliance of a prodigal smile made its old impression. ‘That’s nice,’ said the President quietly and after rather a long silence: ‘I suppose I must ask you if this is a visit with an object. They were very non-committal at your end, you know. Just a message that you were arriving and would like to see me. Of course I was overjoyed.’

Alleyn thought: this is going to be tricky. One word in the wrong place and I not only boob my mission but very likely destroy a friendship and even set up a politically damaging mistrust. He said –

‘I’ve come to ask you for something and I wish I hadn’t got to bother you with it. I won’t pretend that my chief didn’t know of our past friendship – to me a most valued one. I won’t pretend that he didn’t imagine this friendship might have some influence. Of course he did. But it’s because I think his request is reasonable and because I am very greatly concerned for your safety, that I didn’t jib at coming.’

He had to wait a long time for the reaction. It was as if a blind had been pulled down. For the first time, seeing the slackened jaw and now the hooded, lacklustre eyes he thought, specifically: ‘I am speaking to a Negro.’

‘Ah!’ said the President at last, ‘I had forgotten. You are a policeman.’

‘They say, don’t they, if you want to keep a friend, never lend him money. I don’t believe a word of it, but if you change the last four words into “never use your friendship to further your business” I wouldn’t quarrel with it. But I’m not doing exactly that. This is more complicated. My end object, believe it or not, sir, is the preservation of your most valuable life.’

Another hazardous wait. Alleyn thought: ‘Yes, and that’s exactly how you used to look when you thought somebody had been rude to you. Glazed.’

But the glaze melted and The Boomer’s nicest look – one of quiet amusement – supervened.

‘Now, I understand,’ he said. ‘It is your watch-dogs, your Special Branch. “Please make him see reason, this black man. Please ask him to let us disguise ourselves as waiters and pressmen and men-in-the-street and unimportant guests and be indistinguishable all over the shop.” I am right? That is the big request?’

‘I’m afraid, you know, they’ll do their thing in that respect, as well as they can, however difficult it’s made for them.’

‘Then why all this fuss-pottery? How stupid!’

‘They would all be much happier if you didn’t do what you did, for instance, in Martinique.’

‘And what did I do in Martinique?’

‘With the deepest respect: insisted on an extensive reduction of the safety precautions and escaped assassination by the skin of your teeth.’

‘I am a fatalist,’ The Boomer suddenly announced, and when Alleyn didn’t answer: ‘My dear Rory, I see I must make myself understood. Myself. What I am. My philosophy. My code. You will listen?’

‘Here we go,’ Alleyn thought. ‘He’s changed less than one would have thought possible.’ And with profound misgivings he said: ‘But of course, sir. With all my ears.’

As the exposition got under way it turned out to be an extension of The Boomer’s schoolboy bloody-mindedness seasoned with, and in part justified by, his undoubted genius for winning the trust and understanding of his own people. He enlarged, with intermittent gusts of Homeric laughter, upon the machinations of the Ng’ombwanan extreme right and left who had upon several occasions made determined efforts to secure his death and were, through some mysterious process of reason, thwarted by The Boomer’s practice of exposing himself as an easy target. ‘They see,’ he explained, ‘that I am not (as we used to say at Davidson’s) standing for their tedious codswallop.’

‘Did we say that at Davidson’s?’

‘Of course. You must remember. Constantly.’

‘So be it.’

‘It was a favourite expression of your own. Yes,’ shouted The Boomer as Alleyn seemed inclined to demur, ‘always. We all picked it up from you.’

‘To return, if we may, to the matter in hand.’

‘All of us,’ The Boomer continued nostalgically. ‘You set the tone (at Davidson’s),’ and noticing perhaps a fleeting expression of horror on Alleyn’s face, he leant forward and patted his knees. ‘But I digress,’ he said accurately, ‘Shall we return to our muttons?’

‘Yes,’ Alleyn agreed with heartfelt relief. ‘Yes. Let’s.’

‘Your turn,’ The Boomer generously conceded. ‘You were saying?’

‘Have you thought – but of course you have – what would follow if you were knocked off?’

‘As you say: of course I have. To quote your favourite dramatist (you see, I remember), “the filthy clouds of heady murder, spoil and villainy” would follow,’ said The Boomer with relish. ‘To say the least of it,’ he added.

‘Yes. Well now: the threat doesn’t lie, as the Martinique show must have told you, solely within the boundaries of Ng’ombwana. In the Special Branch they know, and I mean they really do know, that there are lunatic fringes in London ready to go to all lengths. Some of them are composed of hangovers from certain disreputable backwaters of colonialism, others have a devouring hatred of your colour. Occasionally they are people with a real and bitter grievance that has grown monstrous in stagnation. You name it. But they’re there, in considerable numbers, organized and ready to go.’

‘I am not alarmed,’ said The Boomer with maddening complacency. ‘No, but I mean it. In all truth I do not experience the least sensation of physical fear.’

‘I don’t share your sense of immunity,’ Alleyn said. ‘In your boots I’d be in a muck sweat.’ It occurred to him that he had indeed abandoned the slightest nod in the direction of protocol. ‘But, all right. Accepting your fearlessness, may we return to the disastrous effect your death would have upon your country? “The filthy clouds of heady murder” bit. Doesn’t that thought at all predispose you to precaution?’

‘But, my dear fellow, you don’t understand. I shall not be killed. I know it. Within myself, I know it. Assassination is not my destiny: it is as simple as that.’

Alleyn opened his mouth and shut it again.

‘As simple as that,’ The Boomer repeated. He opened his arms. ‘You see!’ he cried triumphantly.

‘Do you mean,’ Alleyn said very carefully, ‘that the bullet in Martinique and the spear in a remote village in Ng’ombwana and the one or two other pot-shots that have been loosed off at you from time to time were all predestined to miss?’

‘Not only do I believe it but my people – my people – know it in their souls. It is one of the reasons why I am reelected unanimously to lead my country.’

Alleyn did not ask if it was also one of his reasons why nobody, so far, had had the temerity to oppose him.

The Boomer reached out his great shapely hand and laid it on Alleyn’s knee. ‘You were and you are my good friend,’ he said. ‘We were close at Davidson’s. We remained close while I read my law and ate my dinners at the Temple. And we are close still. But this thing we discuss now belongs to my colour and my race. My blackness. Please, do not try to understand: try only, my dear Rory, to accept.’

To this large demand Alleyn could only reply: ‘It’s not as simple as that.’

‘No? But why?’

‘If I talk about my personal anxiety for you I’ll be saying in effect that I don’t understand and can’t accept, which is precisely what you do not want me to say. So I must fall back on my argument as an unwilling policeman with a difficult job. I’m not a member of the Special Branch but my colleagues in that Department have asked me to do what I can, which looks a bit like damn-all. I do put it to you that their job, a highly specialized and immensely difficult one, is going to be a hundred per cent more tricky if you decline to co-operate. If, for instance, on an impulse you change your route to some reception or walk out of your embassy without telling anybody and take a constitutional in Kensington Gardens all by yourself. To put it badly and brutally, if you are killed somebody in the Special Branch is going to be axed, the Department’s going to fall into general disrepute at the highest and lowest levels, and a centuries-old reputation of immunity from political assassination in England is gone for good. You see, I’m speaking not only for the police.’

‘The police, as servants of the people,’ The Boomer began and then, Alleyn thought, very probably blushed.

‘Were you going to say we ought to be kept in our place?’ he mildly asked.

The Boomer began to walk about the room. Alleyn stood up.

‘You have a talent,’ The Boomer suddenly complained, ‘for putting one in the wrong. I remember it of old at Davidson’s.’

‘What an insufferable boy I must have been,’ Alleyn remarked. He was getting very bored with Davidson’s and really there seemed to be nothing more to say. ‘I have taken up too much of your Excellency’s time,’ he said. ‘Forgive me,’ and waited to be dismissed.

The Boomer looked mournfully upon him. ‘But you are lunching,’ he said. ‘We have agreed. It is arranged that you shall lunch.’

‘That’s very kind, your Excellency, but it’s only eleven o’clock. Should I make myself scarce in the meantime?’

To his intense dismay he saw that the bloodshot eyes had filled with tears. The Boomer said, with immense dignity: ‘You have distressed me.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I was overjoyed at your coming. And now it is all spoilt and you call me Excellency.’

Alleyn felt the corners of his mouth twitch and at the same time was moved by a contradictory sense of compassion. This emotion, he realized, was entirely inappropriate. He reminded himself that the President of Ng’ombwana was far from being a sort of inspired innocent. He was an astute, devoted and at times ruthless dictator with, it had to be added, a warm capacity for friendship. He was also extremely observant. ‘And funny,’ Alleyn thought, controlling himself. ‘It’s quite maddening of him to be funny as well.’

‘Ah!’ the President suddenly roared out, ‘you are laughing! My dear Rory, you are laughing,’ and himself broke into that Homeric gale of mirth. ‘No, it is too much! Admit! It is too ridiculous! What is it all about? Nothing! Listen, I will be a good boy. I will behave. Tell your solemn friends in your Special Branch that I will not run away when they hide themselves behind inadequate floral decorations and dress themselves up as nonentities with enormous boots. There now! You are pleased? Yes?’

‘I’m enchanted,’ Alleyn said, ‘if you really mean it.’

‘But I do. I do. You shall see. I will be decorum itself. Within,’ he added, ‘the field of their naive responsibilities. Within the UK in fact. OK? Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘And no more Excellencies. No? Not,’ The Boomer added without turning a hair, ‘when we are tête-à-tête. As at present.’

‘As at present,’ Alleyn agreed and was instantly re-involved in an exuberance of hand-shaking.

It was arranged that he would be driven round the city for an hour before joining the President for luncheon. The elegant ADC reappeared. When they walked back along the corridor, Alleyn looked through its french windows into the acid-green garden. It was daubed superbly with flamboyants and veiled by a concourse of fountains. Through the iridescent rise and fall of water there could be perceived, at intervals, motionless figures in uniform.

Alleyn paused. ‘What a lovely garden,’ he said.

‘Oh yes?’ said the ADC, smiling. Reflected colour and reflected lights from the garden glanced across his polished charcoal jaw and cheekbones. ‘You like it? The President likes it very much.’

He made as if to move. ‘Shall we?’ he suggested.

A file of soldiers, armed, and splendidly uniformed, crossed the garden left, right, left, right, on the far side of the fountains. Distorted by prismatic cascades, they could dimly be seen to perform a correct routine with the men they had come to replace.

‘The changing of the guard,’ Alleyn said lightly.

‘Exactly. They are purely ceremonial troops.’

‘Yes?’

‘As at your Buckingham Palace,’ explained the ADC.

‘Quite,’ said Alleyn.

They passed through the grandiloquent hall and the picturesque guard at the entrance.

‘Again,’ Alleyn ventured, ‘purely ceremonial?’

‘Of course,’ said the ADC.

They were armed, Alleyn noticed, if not to the teeth, at least to the hips, with a useful-looking issue of sophisticated weapons. ‘Very smartly turned out,’ he said politely.

‘The President will be pleased to know you think so,’ said the ADC and they walked into a standing bath of heat and dazzlement.

The Presidential Rolls heavily garnished with the Ng’ombwanan arms and flying, incorrectly since he was not using it, the Presidential standard, waited at the foot of the steps. Alleyn was ushered into the back seat while the ADC sat in front. The car was air-conditioned and the windows shut and, thought Alleyn, ‘If ever I rode in a bullet-proof job – and today wouldn’t be the first time – this is it.’ He wondered if, somewhere in Ng’ombwana security circles there was an influence a great deal more potent than that engendered by the industrious evocation of Davidson’s.

They drove under the escort of two ultra-smart, lavishly accoutred motor-cyclists. ‘Skinheads, bikies, traffic cops, armed escorts,’ he speculated, ‘wherever they belch and rev and bound, what gives the species its peculiar air of menacing vulgarity?’

The car swept through crowded, mercilessly glaring streets. Alleyn found something to say about huge white monstrosities – a Palace of Culture, a Palace of Justice, a Hall of Civic Authority, a Free Library. The ADC received his civilities with perfect complacency.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘They are very fine. All new. All since The Presidency. It is very remarkable.’

The traffic was heavy but it was noticeable that it opened before their escort as the Red Sea before Moses. They were stared at, but from a distance. Once, as they made a right hand turn and were momentarily checked by an oncoming car, their chauffeur, without turning his head, said something to the driver that made him wince.

When Alleyn, who was married to a painter, looked at the current scene, wherever it might be, he did so with double vision. As a stringently trained policeman he watched, automatically, for idiosyncrasies. As a man very sensitively tuned to his wife’s way of seeing, he searched for consonancies. Now, when confronted by a concourse of round, black heads that bobbed, shifted, clustered and dispersed against that inexorable glare, he saw this scene as his wife might like to paint it. He noticed that, in common with many of the older buildings, one in particular was in process of being newly painted. The ghost of a former legend showed faintly through the mask – SANS RIT IMPO T NG TR DI G CO. He saw a shifting, colourful group on the steps of this building and thought how, with simplification, re-arrangement and selection Troy would endow them with rhythmic significance. She would find, he thought, a focal point, some figure to which the others were subservient, a figure of the first importance.

And then, even as this notion visited him, the arrangement occurred. The figures reformed like fragments in a kaleidoscope and there was the focal point, a solitary man, inescapable because quite still, a grotesquely fat man, with long blond hair, wearing white clothes. A white man.

The white man stared into the car. He was at least fifty yards away but for Alleyn it might have been so many feet. They looked into each other’s faces and the policeman said to himself: ‘That chap’s worth watching. That chap’s a villain.’

Click, went the kaleidoscope. The fragments slid apart and together. A stream of figures erupted from the interior, poured down the steps and dispersed. When the gap was uncovered the white man had gone.

IV

‘It’s like this, sir,’ Chubb had said rapidly. ‘Seeing that No. 1 isn’t a full-time place being there’s two of us, we been in the habit of helping out on a part-time basis elsewhere in the vicinity. Like, Mrs Chubb does an hour every other day for Mr Sheridan in the basement and I go to the Colonel’s – that’s Colonel and Mrs Cockburn-Montfort in the Place – for two hours of a Friday afternoon, and every other Sunday evening we baby-sit at 17 The Walk. And –’

‘Yes. I see,’ said Mr Whipplestone, stemming the tide.

‘You won’t find anything scamped or overlooked, sir,’ Mrs Chubb intervened. ‘We give satisfaction, sir, in all quarters, really we do. It’s just An Arrangement, like.’

‘And naturally, sir, the wages are adjusted. We wouldn’t expect anything else, sir, would we?’

They had stood side by side with round anxious faces, wide-open eyes and gabbling mouths. Mr Whipplestone had listened with his built-in air of attentive detachment and had finally agreed to the proposal that the Chubbs were all his for six mornings, breakfast, luncheon and dinner: that provided the house was well kept up they might attend upon Mr Sheridan or anybody else at their own and his convenience, that on Fridays Mr Whipplestone would lunch and dine at his club or elsewhere and that, as the Chubbs put it, the wages ‘was adjusted accordingly’.

‘Most of the residents,’ explained Chubb when they had completed these arrangements and got down to details, ‘has accounts at the Napoli, sir. You may prefer to deal elsewhere.’

‘And for the butchery,’ said Mrs Chubb, ‘there’s –’

They expounded upon the amenities in the Capricorns.

Mr Whipplestone said: ‘That all sounds quite satisfactory. Do you know, I think I’ll make a tour of inspection.’ And he did so.

The Napoli is one of the four little shops in Capricorn Mews. It is ‘shop’ reduced to its absolute minimum; a slit of a place where the customers stand in single file and then only eight at a squeeze. The proprietors are an Italian couple, he dark and anxious, she dark and buxom and jolly. Their assistant is a large and facetious cockney.

It is a nice shop. They cure their own bacon and hams. Mr Pirelli makes his own pâté and a particularly good terrine. The cheeses are excellent. Bottles of dry Orvieto are slung overhead and other Italian wines crowd together inside the door. There are numerous exotics in line on the shelves. The Capricornians like to tell each other that the Napoli is ‘a pocket Fortnum’s’. Dogs are not allowed but a row of hooks has been thoughtfully provided in the outside wall and on most mornings there is a convocation of mixed dogs attached to them.

Mr Whipplestone skirted the dogs, entered the shop and bought a promising piece of Camembert. The empurpled army man, always immaculately dressed and gloved, whom he had seen in the street was in the shop and was addressed by Mr Pirelli as ‘Colonel’. (Montfort? wondered Mr Whipplestone.) The Colonel’s lady was with him. An alarming lady, the fastidious Mr Whipplestone thought, with the face of a dissolute clown and wildly overdressed. They both wore an air of overdone circumspection that Mr Whipplestone associated with the hazards of a formidable hangover. The lady stood stock still and bolt-upright behind her husband but as Mr Whipplestone approached the counter, she side-stepped and barged into him, driving her pin heel into his instep.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he cried in pain and lifted his hat.

‘Not a bit,’ she said thickly and gave him what could only be described as a half-awakened leer.

Her husband turned and seemed to sense a need for conversation. ‘Not much room for manoeuvrin’,’ he shouted. ‘What?’

‘Quite,’ said Mr Whipplestone.

He opened an account, left the shop and continued his explorations.

He arrived at the scene of his encounter with the little black cat. A large van was backing into the garage. Out of the tail of his eye he thought he saw briefly a darting shadow and when the van stopped he could have fancied, almost, that he heard a faint, plaintive cry. But there was nothing to support these impressions and he hurried on, oddly perturbed.

At the far end of the Mews, by the entrance to the passageway is a strange little cavern, once a stable, which has been converted into a shop. Here, at this period, a baleful fat lady made images of pigs either as doorstops or with roses and daises on their sides and a hole in their backs for cream or flowers as the fancy might take you. They varied in size but never in design. The kiln was at the back of the cavern and as Mr Whipplestone looked in the fat lady stared at him out of her shadows. Above the entrance was a notice: ‘X. & K. Sanskrit. Pigs.’

‘Commercial candour!’ thought Mr Whipplestone, cracking a little joke for himself. To what nationality he wondered could someone called Sanskrit possibly belong? Indian, he supposed, And ‘X’? Xavier perhaps. ‘To make a living,’ he wondered, ‘out of the endless reduplication of pottery pigs? And why on earth does this extraordinary name seem to ring a bell?’

Conscious that the fat lady in the shadows still looked at him, he moved on into Capricorn Place and made his way to a rosy brick wall at the far end. Through an opening in this wall one leaves the Capricorns and arrives at a narrow lane passing behind the Basilica precincts and an alleyway ending in the full grandeur of Palace Park Gardens. Here the Ng’ombwana Embassy rears its important front.

Mr Whipplestone contemplated the pink flag with its insignia of green spear and sun and mentally apostrophized it. ‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘there you are and for my part, long may you stay there.’ And he remembered that at some as yet unspecified time but, unless something awful intervened, in the near future, the Ambassador and all his minions would be in no end of a tig getting ready for the state visit of their dynamic President and spotting assassins behind every plane tree. The Special Branch would be raising their punctual plaint and at the FO, he thought, they’ll be dusting down their imperturbability. ‘I’m out of it all and (I’d better make up my mind to it) delighted to be so. I suppose,’ he added. Conscious of a slight pang, he made his way home.

CHAPTER 2

Lucy Lockett

Mr Whipplestone had been in residence for over a month. He was thoroughly settled, comfortable and contented and yet by no means lethargically so. On the contrary, he had been stimulated by his change of scene and felt lively. Already he was tuned in to life in the Capricorns. ‘Really,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘it’s like a little village set down in the middle of London. One runs repeatedly into the same people in the shops. On warm evenings the inhabitants stroll about the streets. One may drop in at the Sun in Splendour where one finds, I’m happy to say, a very respectable, nay, quite a distinguished, white port.’

He had been in the habit of keeping a diary for some years. Until now it had confined itself to the dry relation of facts with occasionally a touch of the irony for which he had been slightly famous at the FO. Now, under the stimulus of his new environment, the journal expanded and became, at times, almost skittish.

The evening was very warm. His window was open and the curtains, too. An afterglow had suffused the plane trees and kindled the dome of the Basilica but now was faded. There was a smell of freshly-watered gardens in the air and the pleasant sound of footfalls mingling with quiet voices drifted in at the open window. The muted roar of Baronsgate seemed distant, a mere background to quietude.

After a time he laid down his pen, let fall his eyeglass and looked with pleasure at his room. Everything had fitted to a miracle. Under the care of the Chubbs his nice old bits and pieces positively sparkled. The crimson goblet glowed in the window and his Agatha Troy seemed to generate a light of its own.

‘How nice everything is,’ thought Mr Whipplestone.

It was very quiet in his house. The Chubbs, he fancied, were out for the evening but they were habitually so unobtrusive in their comings and goings that one was unaware of them. While he was writing, Mr Whipplestone had been aware of visitors descending the iron steps into the area. Mr Sheridan was at home and receiving in the basement flat.

He switched off his desk lamp, got up to stretch his legs and moved over to the bow window. The only people who were about were a man and a woman coming towards him in the darkening Square. They moved into a pool of light from the open doorway of the Sun in Splendour and momentarily he got a clearer look at them. They were both fat and there was something about the woman that was familiar.

They came on towards him into and out from the shadow of the plane trees. On a ridiculous impulse, as if he had been caught spying, Mr Whipplestone backed away from his window. The woman seemed to stare into his eyes: an absurd notion since she couldn’t possibly see him.

Now he knew who she was: Mrs or Miss X. Sanskrit. And her companion? Brother or spouse? Brother, almost certainly. The pig-potters.

Now they were out of the shadow and crossed the Walk in full light straight at him. And he saw they were truly awful.

It wasn’t that they were lard-fat, both of them, so fat that they might have sat to each other as models for their wares, or that they were outrageously got up. No clothes, it might be argued in these permissive days, could achieve outrageousness. It wasn’t that the man wore a bracelet and an anklet and a necklace and earrings or that what hair he had fell like pond-weed from an embroidered headband. It wasn’t even that she (fifty if a day, thought Mr Whipplestone) wore vast black leather hotpants, a black fringed tunic and black boots. Monstrous though these grotesqueries undoubtedly were, they were as nothing compared with the eyes and mouths of the Sanskrits which were, Mr Whipplestone now saw with something like panic, equally heavily made-up.

‘They shouldn’t be here,’ he thought, confusedly protecting the normality of the Capricorns. ‘People like that. They ought to be in Chelsea. Or somewhere.’

They had crossed the Walk. They had approached his house. He backed further away. The area gate clicked and clanged, they descended the iron steps. He heard the basement flat bell. He heard Mr Sheridan’s voice. They had been admitted.

‘No, really!’ Mr Whipplestone thought in the language of his youth. ‘Too much! And he seemed perfectly respectable.’ He was thinking of his brief encounter with Mr Sheridan.

He settled down to a book. At least it was not a noisy party down there. One could hear little or nothing. Perhaps, he speculated, the Sanskrits were mediums. Perhaps Mr Sheridan dabbled in spiritism and belonged to a ‘circle’. They looked like that. Or worse. He dismissed the whole thing and returned to the autobiography of a former chief of his Department. It was not absorbing. The blurb made a great fuss about a ten-year interval imposed between the author’s death and publication. Why, God knew, thought Mr Whipplestone, since the crashing old bore could have nothing to disclose that would unsettle the composure of the most susceptible of vestal virgins.

His attention wandered. He became conscious of an uneasiness at the back of his mind: an uneasiness occasioned by sound, by something he would rather not hear, by something that was connected with anxiety and perturbation. By a cat mewing in the street.

Pah! he thought, as far as one can think ‘pah’. Cats abounded in London streets. He had seen any number of them in the Capricorns: pampered pet cats. There was an enormous tortoiseshell at the Sun in Splendour and a supercilious white affair at the Napoli. Cats.

It had come a great deal nearer. It was now very close indeed. Just outside, one would suppose, and not moving on. Sitting on the pavement, he dared say, and staring at his house. At him, even. And mewing. Persistently. He made a determined effort to ignore it. He returned to his book. He thought of turning on his radio, loudly, to drown it. The cries intensified. From being distant and intermittent they were now immediate and persistent.

‘I shall not look out of the window,’ he decided in a fluster. ‘It would only see me.’

‘Damnation!’ he cried three minutes later. ‘How dare people lock out their cats! I’ll complain to someone.’

Another three minutes and he did, against every fibre of disinclination in his body, look out of the window. He saw nothing. The feline lamentations were close enough to drive him dotty. On the steps: that’s where they were. On the flight of steps leading up to his front door. ‘No!’ he thought. ‘No, really this is not good enough. This must be stopped. Before we know where we are –’

Before he knew where he was, he was in his little hall and manipulating his double lock. The chain was disconnected on account of the Chubbs but he opened the door a mere crack and no sooner had he done so than something – a shadow, a meagre atomy – darted across his instep.

Mr Whipplestone became dramatic. He slammed his door to, leant against it and faced his intruder.

He had known it all along. History, if you could call an incident of not much more than a month ago history, was repeating itself. In the wretched shape of a small black cat: the same cat but now quite dreadfully emaciated, its eyes clouded, its fur staring. It sat before him and again opened its pink mouth in now soundless mews. Mr Whipplestone could only gaze at it in horror. Its haunches quivered and, as it had done when they last met, it leapt up to his chest.

As his hand closed round it he wondered that it had had the strength to jump. It purred and its heart knocked at his fingers.

‘This is too much,’ he repeated and carried it into his drawing-room. ‘It will die, I dare say,’ he said, ‘and how perfectly beastly that will be.’

After some agitated thought he carried it into the kitchen and, still holding it, took milk from the refrigerator, poured some into a saucer, added hot water from the tap and set it on the floor and the little cat sat beside it. At first he thought she would pay no attention – he was persuaded the creature was a female – her eyes being half-closed and her chin on the floor. He edged the saucer nearer. Her whiskers trembled. So suddenly that he quite jumped, she was lapping, avidly, frantically as if driven by some desperate little engine. Once she looked up at him.

Twice he replenished the saucer. The second time she did not finish the offering. She raised her milky chin, stared at him, made one or two shaky attempts to wash her face and suddenly collapsed on his foot and went to sleep.

Some time later there were sounds of departure from the basement flat. Soon after this, the Chubbs affected their usual discreet entry. Mr Whipplestone heard them put up the chain on the front door. The notion came to him that perhaps they had been ‘doing for’ Mr Sheridan at his party.

‘Er – is that you, Chubb?’ he called out.

Chubb opened the door and presented himself, apple-cheeked, on the threshold with his wife behind him. It struck Mr Whipplestone that they seemed uncomfortable.

‘Look,’ he invited, ‘at this.’

Chubb had done so, already. The cat lay like a shadow across Mr Whipplestone’s knees.

‘A cat, sir,’ said Chubb tentatively.

‘A stray. I’ve seen it before.’

From behind her husband, Mrs Chubb said: ‘Nothing of it, sir, is there? It don’t look healthy, do it?’

‘It was starving.’

Mrs Chubb clicked her tongue.

Chubb said: ‘Very quiet, sir, isn’t it? It hasn’t passed away, has it?’

‘It’s asleep. It’s had half a bottle of milk.’

‘Well, excuse me, sir,’ Mrs Chubb said, ‘but I don’t think you ought to handle it. You don’t know where it’s been, do you, sir?’

‘No,’ said Mr Whipplestone, and added with a curious inflection in his voice. ‘I only know where it is.’

‘Would you like Chubb to dispose of it, sir?’

This suggestion he found perfectly hateful but he threw out as airily as he could: ‘Oh, I don’t think so. I’ll do something about it myself in the morning. Ring up the RSPCA.’

‘I dare say if you was to put it out, sir, it’d wander off where it come from.’

‘Or,’ suggested Chubb. ‘I could put it in the garden at the back, sir. For the night, like.’

‘Yes,’ Mr Whipplestone gabbled, ‘thank you. Never mind. I’ll think of something. Thank you.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ they said, meaninglessly.

Because they didn’t immediately make a move and because he was in a tizzy, Mr Whipplestone, to his own surprise said, ‘Pleasant evening?’

They didn’t answer. He glanced up and found they stared at him.

‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ they said.

‘Good!’ he cried with a phoney heartiness that horrified him. ‘Good! Good night, Chubb. Good night, Mrs Chubb.’

When they had gone into the kitchen, he felt sure they opened the refrigerator and he distinctly heard them turn on a tap. Washing the saucer, he thought guiltily.

He waited until they had retired upstairs and then himself sneaked into the kitchen with the cat. He had remembered that he had not eaten all the poached scallop Mrs Chubb gave him for dinner.

The cat woke up and ate quite a lot of scallop.

Entry into his back garden was effected by a door at the end of the passage and down a precipitous flight of steps. It was difficult, holding the cat, and he made rather a noisy descent but was aided by a glow of light from behind the blinds that masked Mr Sheridan’s basement windows. This enabled him to find a patch of unplanted earth against the brick wall at the rear of the garden. He placed the cat upon it.

He had thought she might bolt into the shadows and somehow escape, but no: after a considerable wait she became industrious. Mr Whipplestone tactfully turned his back.

He was being watched from the basement through an opening between the blind and the window frame.

The shadowy form was almost certainly that of Mr Sheridan and almost certainly he had hooked himself a peephole and had released it as Mr Whipplestone turned. The shadowy form retreated.

At the same time a slight noise above his head caused Mr Whipplestone to look up to the top storey of his house. He was just in time to see the Chubbs’ bedroom window being closed.

There was, of course, no reason to suppose they, also, had been watching him.

‘I must be getting fanciful,’ he thought.

A faint rhythmic scuffling redirected his attention to the cat. With her ears laid back and with a zealous concentration that spoke volumes for her recuperative powers, she was tidying up. This exercise was followed by a scrupulous personal toilette, which done, she blinked at Mr Whipplestone and pushed her nut-like head against his ankle.

He picked her up and returned indoors.

II

The fashionable and grossly expensive pet-shop round the corner in Baronsgate had a consulting-room, visited on Wednesday mornings by a veterinary surgeon. Mr Whipplestone had observed their notice to this effect and the next morning, being a Wednesday, he took the cat to be vetted. His manner of conveying his intention to the Chubbs was as guarded and non-committal as forty years’ experience in diplomacy could make it. Indeed, in a less rarefied atmosphere it might almost have been described as furtive.

He gave it out that he was ‘taking that animal to be attended to’. When the Chubbs jumped to the conclusion that this was a euphemism for ‘put down’ he did not correct them. Nor did he think it necessary to mention that the animal had spent the night on his bed. She had roused him at daybreak by touching his face with her paw. When he opened his eyes she had flirted with him, rolling on her side and looking at him from under her arm. And when Chubb came in with his early morning tray, Mr Whipplestone had contrived to throw his eiderdown over her and later on had treated her to a saucer of milk. He came downstairs with her under The Times, chose his moment to let her out by the back door into the garden, and presently called Mrs Chubb’s attention to her. She was demanding vigorously to be let in.

So now he sat on a padded bench in a minute waiting-room, cheek by jowl with several Baronsgate ladies, each of whom had a dog in tow. One of them, the one next to Mr Whipplestone, was the lady who trod on his foot in the Napoli, Mrs Montfort as he subsequently discovered, the Colonel’s lady. They said good morning to each other when they encountered, and did so now. By and large Mr Whipplestone thought her pretty awful, though not as awful as the pig-pottery lady of last night. Mrs Montfort carried on her overdressed lap a Pekinese, which, after a single contemptuous look, turned its back on Mr Whipplestone’s cat who stared through it.

He was acutely conscious that he presented a farcical appearance. The only container that could be found by the Chubbs was a disused birdcage, the home of their parrot, lately deceased. The little cat looked outraged sitting in it, and Mr Whipplestone looked silly nursing it and wearing his eye-glass. Several of the ladies exchanged amused glances.

‘What,’ asked the ultra-smart surgery attendant, notebook in hand, ‘is pussy’s name?’

He felt that if he said ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘It hasn’t got one,’ he would put himself at a disadvantage with these women. ‘Lucy,’ he said loudly and added as an afterthought: ‘Lockett.’

‘I see!’ she said brightly and noted it down. ‘You haven’t an appointment, have you?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Lucy won’t have long to wait,’ she smiled, and passed on.

A woman with a huge, angry, short-haired tabby in her arms came through from the surgery.

The newly-named Lucy’s fur rose. She made a noise that suggested she had come to the boil. The tabby suddenly let out a yell. Dogs made ambiguous comments in their throats.

‘Oh lor!’ said the newcomer. She grinned at Mr Whipplestone. ‘Better make ourselves scarce,’ she said, and to her indignant cat: ‘Shut up, Bardolph, don’t be an ass.’

When they had gone Lucy went to sleep and Mrs Montfort said: ‘Is your cat very ill?’

‘No!’ Mr Whipplestone quite shouted and then explained that Lucy was a stray starveling.

‘Sweet of you,’ she said, ‘to care. People are so awful about animals. It makes me quite ill. I’m like that.’ She turned her gaze upon him. ‘Kitty Montfort. My husband’s the warrior with the purple face. He’s called Colonel Montfort.’

Cornered, Mr Whipplestone murmured his own name.

Mrs Montfort smelt of very heavy scent and gin.

‘I know,’ she said archly, ‘you’re our new boy, aren’t you? At No. 1, The Walk? We have a piece of your Chubb on Fridays.’

Mr Whipplestone, whose manners were impeccable, bowed as far as the birdcage would permit.

Mrs Montfort was smiling into his face. She had laid her gloved hand on the cage. The door behind him had opened. Her smile became fixed as if pinned up at the corners. She withdrew her hand, and looked straight in front of her.

From the street there had entered a totally black man in livery with a white Afghan hound on a scarlet leash. The man paused and glanced round. There was an empty place on the other side of Mrs Montfort. Still looking straight in front of her, she moved far enough along the seat to leave insufficient room on either side of her. Mr Whipplestone instantly widened the distance between them and with a gesture, invited the man to sit down. The man said, ‘Thank you, sir,’ and remained where he was, not looking at Mrs Montfort. The hound advanced his nose towards the cage. Lucy did not wake.

‘I wouldn’t come too close if I were you, old boy,’ Mr Whipplestone said. The Afghan wagged his tail and Mr Whipplestone patted him. ‘I know you,’ he said, ‘you’re the Embassy dog, aren’t you? You’re Ahman.’ He gave the man a pleasant look and the man made a slight bow.

‘Lucy Lockett:?’ said the attendant, brightly emerging. ‘We’re all ready for her.’

The consultation was brief but conclusive. Lucy Lockett was about seven months old and her temperature was normal, she was innocent of mange, ringworm or parasites, she was extremely undernourished and therefore in shocking condition. Here the vet hesitated. ‘There are scars,’ he said, ‘and there’s been a fractured rib that has looked after itself. She’s been badly neglected – I think she may have been actively ill-treated.’ And catching sight of Mr Whipplestone’s horrified face he added cheerfully: ‘Nothing that pills and good food won’t put right.’ He said she had been spayed. She was half-Siamese and half God knew what, the vet said, turning back her fur and handling her this way and that. He laughed at the white end to her tail and gave her an injection.

She submitted to these indignities with utter detachment, but when at liberty, leapt into her protector’s embrace and performed her now familiar act of jamming her head under his jacket and lying next his heart.

‘Taken to you,’ said the vet. ‘They’ve got a sense of gratitude, cats have. Especially the females.’

‘I don’t know anything about them,’ said Mr Whipplestone in a hurry.

Motivated by sales-talk and embarrassment, he bought on his way out a cat bed-basket, a china dish labelled ‘Kit-bits’, a comb and brush and a collar for which he ordered a metal tab with a legend: ‘Lucy Lockett. 1 Capricorn Walk’ and his telephone number. The shop assistant showed him a little red cat-harness for walking out and told him that with patience, cats could be induced to co-operate. She put Lucy into it and the result was fetching enough for Mr Whipplestone to keep it.

He left the parrot cage behind to be called for and heavily laden, with Lucy again in retreat under his coat, walked quickly home to deploy his diplomatic resources upon the Chubbs, little knowing that he carried his destiny under his jacket.

III

‘This is perfectly delightful,’ said Mr Whipplestone, turning from his host to his hostess with the slight inclinations of his head and shoulders that had long been occupational mannerisms. ‘I am so enjoying myself.’

‘Fill up your glass,’ Alleyn said. ‘I did warn you that it was an invitation with an ulterior motive, didn’t I?’

‘I am fully prepared: charmingly so. A superb port.’

‘I’ll leave you with it,’ Troy suggested.

‘No, don’t,’ Alleyn said. ‘We’ll send you packing if anything v.s. and c crops up. Otherwise it’s nice to have you. Isn’t it, Whipplestone?’

Mr Whipplestone embarked upon a speech about his good fortune in being able to contemplate a ‘Troy’ above his fireplace every evening and now having the pleasure of contemplating the artist herself at her own fireside. He got a little bogged down but fetched up bravely.

‘And when,’ he asked, coming to his own rescue, ‘are we to embark upon the ulterior motive?’

Alleyn said, ‘Let’s make a move. This is liable to take time.’

At Troy’s suggestion they carried their port from the house into her detached studio and settled themselves in front of long windows overlooking a twilit London garden.

‘I want,’ Alleyn said, ‘to pick your brains a little. Aren’t you by way of being an expert on Ng’ombwana?’

‘Ng’ombwana? I! That’s putting it much too high, my dear man. I was there for three years in my youth.’

‘I thought that quite recently when it was getting its independence –?’

‘They sent me out there, yes. During the exploratory period: mainly because I speak the language, I suppose. Having rather made it my thing in a mild way.’

‘And you have kept it up?’

‘Again, in a mild way: oh, yes. Yes.’ He looked across the top of his glass at Alleyn. ‘You haven’t gone over to the Special Branch, surely?’

‘That’s a very crisp bit of instant deduction. No, I haven’t. But you may say they’ve unofficially roped me in for the occasion.’

‘Of the forthcoming visit?’

‘Yes, blast them. Security.’

‘I see. Difficult. By the way, you must have been the President’s contemporary at –’ Mr Whipplestone stopped short. ‘Is it hoped that you may introduce the personal note?’

‘You are quick!’ Troy said and he gave a gratified little cackle.

Alleyn said: ‘I saw him three weeks ago.’

‘In Ng’ombwana?’

‘Yes. Coming the old-boy network like nobody’s business.’

‘Get anywhere?’

‘Not so that you’d notice: no, that’s not fair. He did undertake not to cut up rough about our precautions but exactly what he meant by that is his secret. I dare say that in the upshot he’ll be a bloody nuisance.’

‘Well?’ asked Mr Whipplestone, leaning back and swinging his eyeglass in what Alleyn felt had been his cross-diplomatic-desk gesture for half a lifetime. ‘Well, my dear Roderick?’

‘Where do you come in?’

‘Quite.’

‘I’d be grateful if you’d – what’s the current jargon? – fill me in on the general Ng’ombwana background. From your own point of view. For instance, how many people would you say have cause to wish The Boomer dead?’

‘The Boomer?’

‘As he incessantly reminded me, that was His Excellency’s schoolboy nickname.’

‘An appropriate one. In general terms, I should say some two hundred thousand persons, at least.’

‘Good Lord!’ Troy exclaimed.

‘Could you,’ asked her husband, ‘do a bit of name-dropping?’

‘Not really. Not specifically. But again in general terms – well, it’s the usual pattern throughout the new African independencies. First of all there are those Ng’ombwanan political opponents whom the President succeeded in breaking, the survivors of whom are either in prison or in this country waiting for his overthrow or assassination.’

‘The Special Branch flatters itself it’s got a pretty comprehensive list in that category.’

‘I dare say,’ said Mr Whipplestone drily. ‘So did we, until one fine day in Martinique a hitherto completely unknown person with a phoney British passport fired a revolver at the President, missed, and was more successful with a second shot at himself. He had no record and his true identity was never established.’

‘I reminded The Boomer of that incident.’

Mr Whipplestone said archly to Troy: ‘Y’ou know, he’s much more fully informed than I am. What’s he up to?’

‘I can’t imagine, but do go on. I, at least, know nothing.’

‘Well. Among these African enemies, of course, are the extremists who disliked his early moderation and especially his refusal at the outset to sack all his European advisers and officials in one fell swoop. So you get pockets of anti-white terrorists who campaigned for independence but are now prepared to face about and destroy the government they helped to create. Their followers are an unknown quantity but undoubtedly numerous. But you know all this, my dear fellow.’

‘He’s sacking more and more whites now, though, isn’t he? However unwillingly?’

‘He’s been forced to do so by the extreme elements.’

‘So,’ Alleyn said, ‘the familiar, perhaps the inevitable, pattern emerges. The nationalization of all foreign enterprise and the appropriation of properties held by European and Asian colonists. Among whom we find the bitterest possible resentment.’

‘Indeed. And with some reason. Many of them have been ruined. Among the older groups the effect has been completely disastrous. Their entire way of life has disintegrated and they are totally unfitted for any other.’ Mr Whipplestone rubbed his nose. ‘I must say,’ he added, ‘however improperly, that some of them are not likeable individuals.’

Troy asked: ‘Why’s he coming here? The Boomer, I mean?’

‘Ostensibly, to discuss with Whitehall his country’s needs for development.’

‘And Whitehall,’ Alleyn said, ‘professes its high delight while the Special Branch turns green with forebodings.’

“Mr Whipplestone, you said “ostensibly”,’ Troy pointed out.

‘Did I, Mrs Rory? – Yes. Yes, well it has been rumoured through tolerably reliable sources that the President hopes to negotiate with rival groups to take over the oil and copper resources from the dispossessed who have, of course, developed them at enormous cost.’

‘Here we go again!’ said Alleyn.

‘I don’t suggest,’ Mr Whipplestone mildly added, ‘that Lord Karnley or Sir Julian Raphael or any of their associates are likely to instigate a lethal assault upon the President.’

‘Good!’

‘But of course behind those august personages is a host of embittered shareholders, executives and employees.’

‘Among whom might be found the odd cloak-and-dagger merchant. And apart from all these more or less motivated persons,’ Alleyn said, ‘there are the ones policemen like least: the fanatics. The haters of black pigmentation, the lonely woman who dreams about a black rapist, the man who builds Anti-Christ in a black image or who reads a threat to his livelihood in every black neighbour. Or for whom the commonplace phrases – “black outlook, black record, as black as it’s painted, black villainy, the black man will get you” and all the rest of them, have an absolute reference. Black is bad. Finish.’

‘And the Black Power lot,’ Troy said, ‘are doing as much for “white”, aren’t they? The war of the images.’

Mr Whipplestone made a not too uncomfortable little groaning noise and returned to his port.

‘I wonder,’ Alleyn said, ‘I do wonder, how much of that absolute antagonism the old Boomer nurses in his sooty bosom.’

‘None for you, anyway,’ Troy said, and when he didn’t answer, ‘surely?’

‘My dear Alleyn, I understood he professes the utmost camaraderie.’

‘Oh, yes! Yes, he does. He lays it on with a trowel. Do you know, I’d be awfully sorry to think the trowel-work overlaid an inimical understructure. Silly, isn’t it?’

‘It is the greatest mistake,’ Mr Whipplestone pronounced, to make assumptions about relationships that are not clearly defined.’

‘And what relationship is ever that?’

‘Well! Perhaps not. We do what we can with treaties and agreements, but perhaps not.’

‘He did try,’ Alleyn said. ‘He did in the first instance try to set up some kind of multi-racial community. He thought it would work.’

‘Did you discuss that?’ Troy asked.

‘Not a word. It wouldn’t have done. My job was too tricky. Do you know, I got the impression that at least part of his exuberant welcome was inspired by a – well, by a wish to compensate for the ongoings of the new regime.’

‘It might be so,’ Mr Whipplestone conceded. ‘Who can say?’

Alleyn took a folded paper from his breast pocket.

‘The Special Branch has given me a list of commercial and professional firms and individuals to be kicked out of Ng’ombwana, with notes on anything in their history that might look at all suspicious.’ He glanced at the paper.

‘Does the same Sanskrit mean anything at all to you?’ he asked. ‘X. and K. Sanskrit to be exact. My dear man, what is the matter?’

Mr Whipplestone had shouted inarticulately, laid down his glass, clapped his hands and slapped his forehead.

‘Eureka!’ he cried stylishly. ‘I have it! At last. At last!’

‘Jolly for you,’ said Alleyn, ‘I’m delighted to hear it. What had escaped you?’

‘“Sanskrit, Importing and Trading Company, Ng’ombwana”.’

‘That’s it. Or was it.’

‘In Edward VIIth Avenue.’

‘Certainly, I saw it there: only they call it something else now. And Sanskrit has been kicked out. Why are you so excited?’

‘Because I saw him last night.’

‘You did!’

‘Well, it must have been. They are as alike as two disgusting pins.’

‘They?’ Alleyn repeated, gazing at his wife who briefly crossed her eyes at him.

‘How could I have forgotten!’ exclaimed Mr Whipplestone rhetorically. ‘I passed those premises every day of my time in Ng’ombwana.’

‘I clearly see that I mustn’t interrupt you.’

‘My dear Mrs Roderick, my dear Roderick, do please forgive me,’ begged Mr Whipplestone, turning pink. ‘I must explain myself: too gauche and peculiar. But you see –’

And explain himself he did, pig-pottery and all, with the precision that had eluded him at the first disclosure. ‘Admit,’ he cried when he had finished, ‘it is a singular coincidence, now isn’t it?’

‘It’s all of that,’ Alleyn said. ‘Would you like to hear what the Special Branch have got to say about the man – K. Sanskrit?’

‘Indeed I would.’

‘Here goes, then. This information, by the way, is a digest one of Fred Gibson’s chaps got from the Criminal Record Office. “Sanskrit. Kenneth, for Heaven’s sake. Age – approx 58. Height 5 foot 10. Weight: 16 stone 4. Very obese. Blond. Long hair. Dress: eccentric: Ultra modern. Bracelets. Anklet. Necklace. Wears make-up. Probably homosexual. One ring through pierced lobe. Origin: uncertain. Said to be Dutch. Name possibly assumed or corruption of a foreign name. Convicted of fraudulent practices involving the occult, London 1940. Served three months’ sentence. Sus. connection with drug traffic, 1942. Since 1950 importer of ceramics, jewellery and fancy goods into Ng’ombwana. Large, profitable concern. Owned blocks of flats and offices now possessed by Ng’ombwanan interests. Strong supporter of apartheid. Known to associate with Anti-Black and African extremists. Only traceable relative: Sister, with whom he is now in partnership, pottery business ‘The piggery’, Capricorn Mews, SW3.”’

‘There you are!’ said Mr Whipplestone, spreading out his hands.

‘Yes. There we are and not very far on. There’s no specific reason to suppose Sanskrit constitutes a threat to the safety of the President. And that goes for any of the other names on the list. Have a look at it. Does it ring any more bells? Any more coincidences?’

Mr Whipplestone screwed in his eyeglass and had a look.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said drily. ‘One recognizes the disillusioned African element. And the dispossessed. I can add nothing. I’m afraid, my dear fellow, that apart from the odd circumstance of one of your remote possibilities being a neighbour of mine, I am of no use to you. And none in that respect, either, if one comes to think of it. A broken reed,’ sighed Mr Whipplestone, ‘I fear, a broken reed.’

‘Oh,’ Alleyn said lightly, ‘you never know, do you? By the way, the Ng’ombwanan Embassy is in your part of the world, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, indeed. I run into old Karumba sometimes. Their Ambassador. We take our constitutional at the same hour. Nice old boy.’

‘Worried?’

‘Hideously, I should have thought.’

‘You’d have been right. He’s in a flat spin and treating the SB to a hell of a work-out. And what’s more he’s switched over to me. Never mind about security not being my proper pigeon. He should worry! I know The Boomer and that’s enough. He wants me to teach the SB its own business. Imagine! If he had his wish there’d be total alarm devices in every ornamental urn and a security man under The Boomer’s bed. I must say I don’t blame him. He’s giving a reception. I suppose you’ve been invited?’

‘I have, yes. And you?’

‘In my reluctant role as The Boomer’s old school chum. And Troy, of course,’ Alleyn said, putting his hand briefly on hers.

Then followed rather a long pause.

‘Of course,’ Mr Whipplestone said, at last, ‘these things don’t happen in England. At receptions and so on. Madmen at large in kitchens or wherever it was.’

‘Or at upstairs windows in warehouses?’

‘Quite.’

The telephone rang and Troy went out of the room to answer it.

‘I ought to forbear,’ Alleyn said, ‘from offering the maddening observation that there’s always a first time.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ flustered Mr Whipplestone. ‘Nonsense, my dear fellow! Really! Nonsense! Well,’ he added uneasily, ‘one says that.’

‘Let’s hope one’s right.’

Troy came back. ‘The Ng’ombwanan Ambassador,’ she said, ‘would like a word with you, darling.’

‘God bless his woolly grey head,’ Alleyn muttered and cast up his eyes. He went to the door but checked. ‘Another Sanskrit coincidence for you, Sam. I rather think I saw him, too, three weeks ago in Ng’ombwana, outside his erstwhile emporium, complete with anklet and earring. The one and only Sanskrit, or I’m a displaced Dutchman with beads and blond curls.’

IV

The Chubbs raised no particular objection to Lucy: ‘So long as it’s not unhealthy, sir,’ Mrs Chubb said, ‘I don’t mind. Keep the mice out, I dare say.’

In a week’s time Lucy improved enormously. Her coat became glossy, her eyes bright and her person plumpish. Her attachment to Mr Whipplestone grew more marked and he, as he confided in his diary, was in some danger of making an old fool of himself over her. ‘She is a beguiling little animal,’ he wrote, ‘I confess I find myself flattered by her attentions. She has nice ways.’ The nice ways consisted of keeping a close watch on him, of greeting him on his reappearance after an hour’s absence as if he had returned from the North Pole, of tearing about the house with her tail up, affecting astonishment when she encountered him and of sudden onsets of attachment when she would grip his arm in her forelegs, kick it with her hind legs, pretend to bite him and then fall into a little frenzy of purrs and licks.

She refused utterly to accommodate to her red harness but when Mr Whipplestone took his evening stroll, she accompanied him: at first to his consternation. But although she darted ahead and pranced out of hiding places at him, she kept off the street and their joint expeditions became a habit.

Only one circumstance upset them and that was a curious one. Lucy would trot contentedly down Capricorn Mews until they had passed the garage and were within thirty yards of the pottery-pigs establishment. At that point she would go no further. She either bolted home under her own steam or performed her familiar trick of leaping into Mr Whipplestone’s arms. On these occasions he was distressed to feel her trembling. He concluded that she remembered her accident and yet he was not altogether satisfied with this explanation.

She fought shy of the Napoli because of the dogs tied up outside but on one visit when there happened to be no customers and no dogs she walked in. Mr Whipplestone apologized and picked her up. He had become quite friendly with Mr and Mrs Pirelli and told them about her. Their response was a little strange. There were ejaculations of ‘poverina’ and the sorts of noises Italians make to cats. Mrs Pirelli advanced a finger and crooned. She then noticed the white tip of Lucy’s tail and looked very hard at her. She spoke in Italian to her husband, who nodded portentously and said ‘Si’ some ten times in succession.

‘Have you recognized the cat?’ asked Mr Whipplestone in alarm. They said they thought they had. Mrs Pirelli had very little English. She was a very large lady and she now made herself a great deal larger in eloquent mime, curving both arms in front of her and blowing out her cheeks. She also jerked her head in the direction of Capricorn Passage. ‘You mean the pottery person,’ cried Mr Whipplestone. ‘You mean she was that person’s cat!’

He realized bemusedly that Mrs Pirelli had made another gesture, an ancient one. She had crossed herself. She laid her hand on Mr Whipplestone’s arm. ‘No, no, no. Do not give back. No. Cattivo. Cattivo,’ said Mrs Pirelli.

‘Cat?’

‘No, signor,’ said Mr Pirelli. ‘My wife is saying “bad”. They are bad, cruel people. Do not return to them your little cat.’

‘No,’ said Mr Whipplestone confusedly. ‘No, I won’t. Thank you. I won’t.’

And from that day he never took Lucy into the Mews.

Mrs Chubb, Lucy accepted as a source of food and accordingly performed the obligatory ritual of brushing round her ankles. Chubb, she completely ignored.

She spent a good deal of time in the tub garden at the back of the house making wild balletic passes at imaginary butterflies.

At 9.30 one morning, a week after his dinner with the Alleyns, Mr Whipplestone sat in his drawing-room doing The Times crossword. Chubb was out shopping and Mrs Chubb, having finished her housework, was ‘doing for’ Mr Sheridan in the basement. Mr Sheridan, who was something in the City, Mr Whipplestone gathered, was never at home on weekday mornings. At 11 o’clock Mrs Chubb would return to see about Mr Whipplestone’s luncheon. The arrangement worked admirably.

Held up over a particularly cryptic clue, Mr Whipplestone’s attention was caught by a singular noise, a kind of stifled complaint as if Lucy was mewing with her mouth full. This proved to be the case. She entered the room backwards with sunken head, approached crab-wise and dropped something heavy on his foot. She then sat back and gazed at him with her head on one side and made the inquiring trill that he found particularly fetching.

‘What on earth have you got there?’ he asked.

He picked it up. It was a ceramic no bigger than a medallion but it was heavy and must have grievously taxed her delicate little jaws. A pottery fish, painted white on one side and biting its own tail. It was pierced by a hole at the top.

‘Where did you get this?’ he asked severely.

Lucy lifted a paw, lay down, looked archly at him from under her arm and then incontinently jumped up and left the room.

‘Extraordinary little creature,’ he muttered. ‘It must belong to the Chubbs.’

And when Mrs Chubb returned from below he called her in and showed it to her. ‘Is this yours, Mrs Chubb?’ he asked.

She had a technique of not replying immediately to anything that was said to her and she used it now. He held the thing out to her but she didn’t take it.

‘The cat brought it in,’ explained Mr Whipplestone, who always introduced a tone of indifference in mentioning Lucy Lockett to the Chubbs. ‘Do you know where it came from?’

‘I think – it must be – I think it’s Mr Sheridan’s, sir,’ Mrs Chubb said at last. ‘One of his ornaments, like. The cat gets through his back window, sir, when it’s open for airing. Like when I done it just now. But I never noticed.’

‘Does she? Dear me! Most reprehensible! You might put it back, Mrs Chubb, could you? Too awkward if he should miss it!’

Mrs Chubb’s fingers closed over it. Mr Whipplestone looking up at her, saw with surprise that her apple-pink cheeks had blanched. He thought of asking her if she was unwell but her colour began to reappear unevenly.

‘All right, Mrs Chubb?’ he asked.

She seemed to hover on the brink of some reply. Her lips moved and she brushed them with her fingers. At last she said: ‘I haven’t liked to ask, sir, but I hope we give satisfaction, Chubb and me.’

‘Indeed you do,’ he said warmly. ‘Everything goes very smoothly.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said and went out. He thought: ‘That wasn’t what she was about to say.’

He heard her go upstairs and thought: ‘I wish she’d return that damn’d object.’ But almost immediately she came back.

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