How To Make Friends With Demons Part 9

"Can't it wait until the morning?" I asked.

"I'm afraid it can't," she said. "We'd like you to remain where you are until we've debriefed you."

Debriefed. That was her word. At least that suggested they didn't suspect me of any entanglement with Seamus.

I hid the exercise book behind a row of paperbacks on my bookcase. Then I switched the TV on again to look for some more news while I awaited the knock on the door. The incident was still headlining. Though I knew it would only be hours before Seamus would become a casualty of the larger war of indifference.

While waiting up I had a disgraceful thought: one of the buyers for my forgery was now dead. This made it imperative that we close the sale with Ellis. If he dropped out we would have to start looking for a buyer all over again-a process that might take months.

I waited until one o'clock in the morning before going to bed. The knock on the door never came.

Chapter 13.

I couldn't really go out the next day. I'd been instructed by the Police Terrorist Special Whatever Unit to wait for someone to come and interview me. It felt like house arrest. I had an attack of impatience in the middle of a bowl of Special Krunch cereal (having been rewarded for achieving middle age by occasional bouts of constipation, I was always impressed and heartened by Special Krunch) and put down my bowl to dial 1471. But of course, semi-secret agencies tend not to leave a call-back number.

I'd wanted to find out when I might be visited. I could instead just go about my daily business but, preposterously, I felt that might somehow incriminate me. I reached down the telephone directory and found the standard number for the Met.

"h.e.l.lo," I said to the officer who answered, "can I speak to someone from the SO13 Anti-Terrorist Unit or whatever it's called. Please?"

"Who is calling?"

I had to give my name and my address and my telephone number all before being invited to explain what my call was about. I was then informed that my message would be pa.s.sed on and that someone would call me back. No sooner had I finished my Special Krunch than the phone ring. A woman from SO13 told me that I would be visited before noon.

"Noon?" I said. "I haven't heard anyone use the word 'noon' in quite a while. Normally people say 'mid-day.'"

"Goodbye," she said.

In the moment I put the receiver down my doorbell rang. When I went to the door, it was indeed a gentleman displaying an ID card and announcing that he was from SO13.

"h.e.l.l, that was quick."

"What?"

"I was joking." Perhaps it was the crunchy cereal that was making me light and humorous in what were, after all, very serious circ.u.mstances. In any case the gentleman gave me a look which said, we don't do jokes in the Special Terror Whatever. "You'd better come in."

He was a ginger, or more precisely a copperhead, with a trimmed beard and refres.h.i.+ng, unblinking blue eyes. He was very short, with a long raincoat that he refused to take off, even though I warned him that I had my central heating thermostat turned up high. He took out an old-style spiral-bound notepad and pen. We went through it all, how I knew Seamus, how I'd come to be there with Antonia, how I knew Otto. He particularly wanted to know what Seamus had said to me when Otto and I had been talking to him at the railings. I told him everything I could recall, all of it, right down to the Queen eating pie in the palace.

"He said he had a secret he wanted to tell the Queen."

"What secret? What was the secret?"

I coughed. "I've no idea. There probably was no secret, unless it was something about you boys b.u.mping off Princess Di. You didn't do that, did you? Are you sure you don't want to take your coat off? You look pretty hot sitting there."

"How do you know there was no secret?"

"Look, Seamus was a homeless dosser. Mentally disturbed."

"Did he give you anything?"

"No. Why would he give me anything?"

"You are absolutely certain he didn't give you anything before you came back for the tea?"

"Certain of it, why?"

"We have a witness who says he saw something pa.s.s between Seamus and yourself."

"Witness? What witness?"

"It was the guardsman in his box outside the palace. He was about a hundred and fifty yards away but he says he saw something pa.s.s."

Of course. The guardsman. I slapped my brow with my hand, suddenly "remembering."

"But yes!" I jumped to my feet, and he did, too. "The explosion drove it clean out of my mind.

He gave me a rolled-up scarf. It should still be in my coat pocket."

I walked out into the hall, quite relieved that I'd returned Seamus's Arab headscarf to my coat pocket, and without the exercise book. The detective was very quick to follow me out into the hall. I went for the left pocket of my coat first, then "found" it in my right pocket. "Here it is." I made as if to unwrap the scarf. "What on Earth can it be?"

He reached for it but I was too quick for him and I stepped back.

"You're going to have to give that to me, Mr. Heaney."

"Can't I even look to see what it is? He did give it to me, after all."

"It's evidence. I'm sorry. We might be able to return it to you later."

For one foolish moment I thought about holding it high in the air like the school bully with a satchel, to make the short-a.r.s.e jump for it. I yielded it up to him.

"Thank you," he said. With that, he returned to the lounge and collected his notebook and pen. It seemed he was done with me.

"Can I go out now?" I asked him.

What was making me fret to go out was my lunch appointment. Somehow I'd made that arrangement with Yasmin, the lovely and intriguing woman from the Museum Tavern, and I still didn't know how or why I'd agreed to it. I wasn't certain what the point of our meeting was. I had a nagging feeling that it was what people tend to call a date.

Whatever, something made me rather nervous when I walked into The Plumber's Arms on Lower Belgrave Street. It's a slightly scruffy little waterhole, but a welcome relief from the wilderness that is Victoria. Half of the regulars in there were probably present the night in 1974 when a bloodstained and terrified Lady Lucan ran in after Lord Lucan had murdered the maid and high-tailed it. Our splendid aristocrats, they don't mess about, do they? The pub is all right but I keep seeing Lady Lucan's ghastly eyes peeping at me.

Anyway, she was there, having arrived early to save a table for us in the busy pub. Yasmin, I mean, not Lady Lucan.

She smiled. She had a gla.s.s of red wine on the table waiting for me and it was exactly the same colour as her lipstick. I don't know if this was deliberate. A trick. The light from behind the bar reflected in the wine, and her eyes, too, ran with warm catch-light. Her hair looked different from the time I'd met her in the Museum Tavern: a darker, richer mahogany contrasting with her pale skin. Her pretty dress left her arms bare. One of her exposed arms rested on the copper-topped table. A thin but expensive-looking bracelet glimmered at her wrist, drawing attention to her pale skin and the tiny blue veins at the crook of her elbow.

I sat down and unwound my silk scarf. She looked at me without blinking. Denied the ritual of ordering a drink, I felt it necessary to look away, at the bar, at the pictures on the wall, anywhere. Then I looked back at her and her eyebrow moved, I swear, microscopically.

"Well," I said.

"Well."

"You look lovely," I managed.

"Thank you." She hitched the slender strap of her dress a little higher on her shoulder.

"Have you looked at the menu?" I asked her. Two large cards lay on the table next to her white-skinned and beautifully veined arm. I grabbed one, grateful that it was the folding variety behind which I could hide my face for a moment. When I emerged to express a preference for a baguette, her hand was cupping her chin and she was still smiling at me. She summoned a waiter and ordered a baguette for each of us.

"I'm sorry," I said, "but I can't remember what our meeting is about."

She affected a stifled scream. "Haha!" she went. "Haha!"

I'm not sure why, because my question had been serious. I think. "What I mean is, I can't remember whether it was me who asked you here, or you who asked me."

"I think we asked each other."

"We did?"

"Yes, we did."

She flared her eyes slightly at me, and the gesture reminded me of someone, but I couldn't place who it was. I put the thought out of my mind. She had very mobile eyes: by which I mean that whereas some people's eyes are muddy and flat, hers seemed to be in a kind of constant flickering motion. It made me think of the invisible machine code behind a computer monitor. At least, I preferred to think it betokened a lively intelligence rather than an automaton.

Most of the lunchtime customers around us wore business suits. I asked her where she worked and she told me a little about it. When I asked her how long she'd worked there, she said too long. She obviously found it a boring subject because she kept trying to turn the conversation back onto me. I recognised the trick, and so I kept trying to do the same to her. Every so often while she was talking she would-completely unconsciously-delicately hitch the strap of her dress a little higher onto her shoulder. I don't think for a second that this was deliberate, but this reflex kept drawing my attention to her shoulders and to her neck.

The baguettes arrived. Before taking a bite, I said, "Are you certain you didn't ask me first?

To come here, I mean."

"Well, yes, but I was responding to you."

I chewed on that for a moment. "You responded to me?"

"Yes. To the way you looked at me. When we were in the Museum Tavern."

"Excuse me," I said lightly, "but I don't think I looked at you in any particular way. In the Museum Tavern."

"Really?" She was able to match my levity perfectly. "Must have been my mistake."

I cast my mind back to that day. I'm pretty good at disguising my thoughts and feelings, and I'm certain I gave nothing away. Not that there was anything to give away. Except that I do remember finding her attractive, and feeling a stab of envy that Ellis was probably intimate with her, though she couldn't possibly have seen that. Then a nasty thought resurfaced. Perhaps Ellis had asked Yasmin to spy on me. Perhaps she'd been sent to check out the book deal. That would at least explain her unnatural interest in me.

"How's Brother Ellis?" I asked mildly.

"Brother Ellis? I wouldn't know. Haven't seen much of him."

"Really? You don't see him any more?"

"I never was seeing him, actually. He was just a friend."

"A friend."

"You don't like him, do you?"

"I'd rather have my ears cut off than have to listen to his poetry."

"As I say: he's in the past."

"And what's in the future?"

She blinked at me. The long, steady blink. "Do you believe people can speak to you without saying anything? That day, in the Museum Tavern. You looked at me and you spoke to me.

Without even opening your mouth."

"I did? What did I say? Without opening my mouth."

"Oh, I can't tell you today. I will tell you. But not today."

I laughed. Not a social laugh or a polite laugh, or a let's-oil-the-conversation sort of laugh. It was unforced, a real chuckle, of the type that hadn't been triggered in a woman's presence in years. "Yasmin, you're a strange one!" I said.

"I am. Your gla.s.s is empty. Shall we have another?"

Chapter 14.

The next morning, after Fraser had slept off his b.l.o.o.d.y nose and I'd snored off my half-dozen pints of beer, I went back to his room. He was up and about. He invited me to inspect the damage I'd done to his proboscis. It had turned a peppery-burgundy hue, but I wasn't in a sympathetic mood. I wanted answers.

"I need breakfast," he said. "Let's talk on the way to the refectory."

The refectory was located in one of the much larger redbrick lodges a few hundred yards further up the Uttoxeter New Road. We had to walk past a Victorian cemetery populated with stone angels and divided from the pavement by black iron railings. Then we had to climb a short hill to get into the all-female building housing the refectory. Fraser walked very fast.

"What was all that about the dog? About someone not liking dogs?" I said.

"Some thing," he corrected. "Not someone."

"What something? What exactly?"

He coughed into his hand. "I seem to have called something into being."

I glanced over my shoulder. One of the stone angels in the graveyard, wings at half-pinion, hovered behind me. For some reason my voice lowered to a whisper. "Look, you're not making any sense."