Armadillo

Chapter 16

For Lorimer, the notion of an ‘At Home’ summoned up images of half a dozen bottles of Chardonnay chilling in the fridge, perhaps a bowl of punch, peanuts and crisps, a few olives, a couple of baguettes sliced into roundels and a demilune of brie. The moment the bearskinned guardsman pushed open the door to the front courtyard of the Sherriffmuir mansion Lorimer knew that he and Lady Fiona might as well be talking a different language. On either side of the flagged path to the columned entry porch were, immediately to his left, a fakir on a bed of nails, opposite him a troupe of dusky tumblers leaping off shoulders or hurling each other into triple somersaults. Beyond them was a fire-eater blasting his gasoline breath into the night sky, a snake charmer tootling his flute at a swaying cobra and a Cossack with a small bear on the end of a chain tottering around on its hind legs as a fellow Cossack played a squeezebox accordion.
In the hall a team of girls in dominoes and black cat suits relieved guests of their coats and handed out numbered tokens, before inviting them to stroll a gauntlet of tuxedoed, smiling waiters holding out trays of champagne, bellinis, bucks fizz, mineral water or fuming pewter mugs of mulled wine.
Lady Fiona Sherriffmuir, her son Toby and her daughter Amabel waited beyond the libation-bearers in front of a set of mahogany double doors. Lorimer advanced towards them across the shiny checkerboard marble, champagne in hand, his steps ringing out, worrying that the steels in his shoes might be carving out fine chips from the polished, gleaming squares.
‘I’m Lorimer Black,’ he managed to say to Lady Fiona, a bosomy, statuesque woman in a sheath of petrol-blue shot-silk. She had a tiny, perfect nose with highly flared nostrils and one of the best sets of teeth Lorimer had seen outside a Hollywood movie. Her grey-blonde hair was swept back from her high, smooth brow and two waves curled behind her ears, the better to set off the starbursts of emerald clipped to her lobes.
‘How is Angus, the old rascal?’ she asked, leaning forward to kiss Lorimer lightly on both cheeks. ‘So sorry he hasn’t come. Goodness I haven’t seen you since Mustique, you must have been thirteen or fourteen.’
‘Oh, Mustique,’ Lorimer said. ‘Great.’
‘You probably won’t remember Toby or Amabel, they were just babies.’
‘Just babies, probably,’ Lorimer muttered.
Toby was a gangly, loose-lipped eighteen-year-old with baddish acne. Amabel was a haunted-looking, hard-faced drug addict in a white trouser suit, chewing her lip and fiddling with the bracelets on her wrists. She could have been a decade older than her brother, as far as Lorimer could judge, her young face full of bitter worldliness.
‘Hi,’ Toby said. ‘Good to see you again.’
‘Yeah, hi,’ Amabel said and, like her mother, kissed him on both cheeks. ‘How’s Lulu? Is she coming?’
‘Lulu? Great,’ Lorimer said, thankfully hearing others on his heels, Lady Fiona crying behind him, ‘Giovanni! Silvana!’
‘Tell Lulu to call me,’ Amabel said, lowering her voice. ‘I’ve got something for her.’
‘Super,’ Lorimer said, nodded vigorously and then moved through into the first of a series of reception rooms – a drawing room, a library and a ballroom – which in turn gave on to a tented marquee pitched over the lawn of the rear garden, where food of all types could be obtained and there were fifty or so round tables with gold chairs for those who wanted to sit and eat. Not to say that food was unavailable in every other room, patrolled as they were by more waiters with trays of miniature crab cakes, miniature cheese burgers, miniature pizzas. There were also quails’ eggs, plovers’ eggs and gulls’ eggs, cocktail sausages, vegetarian cocktail sausages, goujons of sole, haddock and monkfish with assorted dips, chicken satay and doubtless many other nibbles that Lorimer did not spot and either sample or hungrily note.
The rooms were already comfortably full; Lorimer calculating quickly as he passed through them that at least three hundred people must have been in the house, not counting staff. In the drawing room some red-sashed Aztecs strummed guitars and snorted into nose flutes. In the library there was non-stop cabaret, currently a magician performing tricks with a length of washing line and scissors, and in the ballroom a jazz pianist picked out easy-listening standards on a grand piano in the middle of the sprung floor.
Lorimer wandered curiously amongst the throng – men in dark suits, women in elaborate finery – unnoticed, unrecognized and unspoken-to. By the time he reached the marquee – where half a dozen chefs stood behind hot plates serving everything from penne arrabiata to Lancashire hotpot – he had drunk three glasses of champagne and was wondering if he could decently leave. He retraced his steps – in the library there was another man doing astonishing balloon sculptures, squeakily producing a giraffe, an Eiffel Tower and an octopus in about ten seconds – but he saw that the Sherriffmuirs were still at their station and guests were still arriving. So he drank another glass of champagne and ate some mini-hamburgers to neutralize the alcohol.
He was staring at a picture, trying to decide if it was a Canaletto or a Guardi, when he felt a hand squeeze his left buttock and turned round to find Potts standing there with a look of faux innocence on her face and a cigarette in her hand.
‘I thought I recognized that bum,’ she said. ‘What a treat.’
‘Hello – or rather, congratulations. Is Oliver here?’
‘God, wash your mouth out. I couldn’t go through with the wedding. I sort of freaked out at the last minute and Mummy was furious but I couldn’t imagine wedded bliss as Mrs Oliver Rollo. Sorry, not for the Potts.’
‘What drama.’
‘It was. And it means I’m footloose and fancy free, Mr Black.’
Sir Simon Sherriffmuir appeared from nowhere and put his arms around Potts, hugging her fiercely.
‘How’s my favourite wicked lady?’ Sir Simon said. ‘That dress is a little dowdy, isn’t it?’
Potts’s dress, as well as being very short, had a transparent bodice that allowed everyone to see the semi-transparent, embroidered brassière beneath.
‘Dirty old man,’ Potts said. ‘Do you know Lorimer Black?’
‘Indeed I do. One of my superstars.’ Sir Simon briefly rested his hand, pontiff-like, on Lorimer’s shoulder, squeezed and said with apparent sincerity, ‘So glad you could come, Lorimer. Where’s that idle old father of yours?’
Sir Simon was wearing a silk suit that managed to appear both light and dark grey simultaneously, a cream silk shirt and a maroon, flecked tie. Lorimer made a mental note to check with Ivan about silk suits.
‘Very happy to be –’
‘Plenty to drink, you two lovebirds?’ Sir Simon carried on, heedless. ‘Don’t miss the cabaret, some amusing stuff going on.’ He blew a kiss at Potts and seemed to lean away, rather than walk, saying to Lorimer as he left. ‘We must have our little chat, later.’
What little chat? Lorimer asked himself. Was this the reason for the invitation?
‘I’m just going to powder my nose,’ Potts said, slyly. ‘Coming?’
‘Not for me, thanks,’ Lorimer said.
‘Don’t go away, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll be right back.’
She sidled off and Lorimer headed for the marquee at once. Progress was tricky now, the crowd seemed to have doubled. What did Sir Simon mean by ‘lovebirds’, Perhaps he’d seen Potts grab his ass. He decided that if he hid in the marquee for half an hour he should be able to make his escape unnoticed.
The noise level was reaching ‘uncomfortable’, with people beginning to shout at each other, and in the library a semi-circle of about sixty onlookers had formed around a man who was balancing four plates on their edges, one on top of the other, and about to add a fifth.
In the marquee he found a table behind a rose-entwined pillar and ate some cold salmon and new potatoes. He was alone for ten minutes, during which time he spotted three cabinet ministers, a news anchorwoman, a knighted actor, an ageing rock singer and a couple of flamboyant billionaire entrepreneurs, until he was joined by a middle-aged Brazilian couple, who formally introduced themselves and asked if they could share his table. The names of their host and hostess seemed to mean nothing to them, so Lorimer told them a little about Sir Simon and Fortress Sure just to be sociable and then excused himself, saying he was going for seconds. As he stood up they began signalling energetically to someone beyond and Lorimer turned to see a face he recognized approaching their table. Francis Home was wearing a white dinner jacket, a red stock and billowy black trousers.
‘Mister Black,’ he said. ‘Francisco Homé.’
They shook hands and cogs began to turn in Lorimer’s brain, but to little effect. Home said a few words in Portuguese to the couple and then said confidentially to Lorimer, ‘By the way, I am no longer with Gale-Harlequin.’
‘I know,’ Lorimer lied, and then tried an inspired guess. ‘I hear you’re with Dirk van Meer.’
Home shrugged. ‘On a consultation basis. Do you know Dirk?’
‘His son, Marius.’
Home looked around. ‘Is Dirk here yet? Simon told me he was coming.’
‘I haven’t seen him.’ Lorimer indicated his empty plate. ‘I’m starving, can’t think why See you later.’
‘I’ll tell Dirk we met.’
Christ almighty, Lorimer thought, dumping his plate, what is going on here? Sir Simon Sherriffmuir, Francis Home and now Dirk van Meer… He pushed his way through to the ballroom and headed for the front door. Surely he could leave safely now?
Gilbert ‘Noon’ Malinverno was juggling in the library. More precisely he was sitting pedalling his unicycle in a wobbling to-and-fro motion while juggling with five yellow Indian clubs. Against his better nature, Lorimer had to admit this was impressive stuff, an opinion shared by the large crowd which had gathered, yelping and applauding as the clubs went higher and faster. Lorimer discovered he was standing beside the plate-balancer and the magician.
‘Five clubs in a cascade pattern,’ the plate-balancer said to the magician, ‘never seen anyone do it before, outside Russia.’
‘And on a unicycle,’ the magician said bitterly. ‘Flash bastard.’
Lorimer began to edge towards the drawing room. Glancing at Malinverno as he did so, he saw that there seemed to be something wrong with his face. He had sticking plaster on his ear, a black eye and he noticed that when Malinverno grimaced upwards, calculating the tumbling arcs of his spinning yellow clubs, a wide black gap was revealed in his upper row of teeth, as if two were missing. To Lorimer it looked very much as if Malinverno had been struck across the side of his face with some force, with a hard, long and unyielding object – say the edge of a briefcase swung round in self-defence.
‘Bloody hell,’ Lorimer said out loud.
‘Pretty amazing, isn’t it?’ the person next to him agreed.
So it was Malinverno, Lorimer was thinking, incredulously, not Rintoul. It had been Malinverno who had jumped him – genuinely insane with jealousy. But to go that far – what had she told him about their ‘affair’? It must have been steamy triple-X stuff to arouse Gilbert’s passions so, to make him storm down to Lupus Crescent at dead of night with a juggling club in his hand and vengeance in his heart?… Jesus, Lorimer thought, with some excitement, this woman is dangerous.
Malinverno caught all his clubs and leapt off his uni-cycle and acknowledged the roaring crowd with a stiff, lopsided smile, from which Lorimer derived some satisfaction. Still hurting – good. He realized he owed Rintoul an apology.
A powerful grip fastened itself above his left elbow and he was drawn backward from the fringe of the crowd with some urgency.
‘What in the name of f*ck are you doing here?’ Hogg’s harsh voice enveloped him, hot in his ear, edged with a whiff of cinnamon and spices. Mulled wine. He turned: Hogg was red-faced, from the warm wine, Lorimer hoped, though he did look angry
‘Mr Hogg, nice to–’
‘You heard me, boy.’
‘I was invited.’
‘Bullshite.’
‘I think Sir Simon thinks I’m the son of an old friend of his.’
‘Stinking bollocks. What kind of cretin do you take me for, Lorimer?’
‘It’s true. He thinks I’m the youngest son of someone called Angus Black.’
For a moment he thought Hogg might actually strike him. His eyes bulged and Lorimer realized that the man was sweating horribly, a dark, damp rim where his collar bit into his thick neck.
‘I’ll see you in my office, Monday morning, 9 a.m.,’ Hogg said. And I want the truth, you bastard.’
He glared at him again and then left, his wide shoulders bumping people out of the way as he strode out of the room. Lorimer felt weak, suddenly exhausted and strangely frightened as if he had woken up in a circle of hell and realized only deeper and more sinister ones awaited him.
His eyes met Gilbert Malinverno’s.
‘Hoi! You, Black! Wait!’
Lorimer was off at once, though he would actually have welcomed a punch-up with Malinverno, knock a few more teeth out of that proud jaw, blacken the other eye, but he knew that Lady Sherriffmuir’s ‘At Home’ was not the venue for that particular showdown. He scampered out of the ballroom and down the stairs to the marquee, following a waiter into the screened service area behind the buffet. He picked up a case of empty wine bottles.
‘Get rid of these for you,’ he said to no one in particular and lugged them through a flap in the tent outside.
He dumped them beside some canisters of Calor gas and, glancing back over his shoulder, crept down terraced gravel paths with dark, shrubby borders on either side towards the rear wall which, as he knew it would, contained a firmly locked and bolted door. Along the top of the wall was some sort of vicious revolving spike device designed to repel intruders and on an iron post a swivelling camera.
He felt like a POW who’d just tunnelled out of his Stalag to find himself still short of the perimeter fence. He looked back at the blazing rear windows of the enormous house. He couldn’t go back in there – too many people looking for him: Potts, Sir Simon, Home, Hogg and Malinverno in ascending degrees of threat and malignancy. ‘Malign Fiesta’ wasn’t in it, he thought, and a bowel-loosening, unmanning image of Flavia came suddenly into his head, unbidden. That girl… What was she doing to his life?
He heard footsteps coming down the gravel path towards him, a light tread, not Malinverno, he deduced. Perhaps a waiter sent to investigate the theft of empty wine bottles? Lorimer put his hands in his pockets and whistled tunelessly, kicking at pebbles as if it were the most normal thing in the world to leave a glamorous party and seek some quality time by the rear gate and the dustbins.
‘Hi,’ Lorimer said, breezily. ‘Getting a breath of —’
‘Do you want to get out?’ Amabel Sherriffmuir asked him. ‘I brought a key.’
‘Yes please,’ Lorimer said. ‘There’s someone I’m trying to avoid in there.’
‘Same here,’ she said. ‘My mother.’
‘Right.’
‘That’s why I was sitting in the security room watching the televisions. I saw you.’
She unlocked the door.
‘It f*cking makes you want to puke, doesn’t it,’ she said with feeling, gesturing back at the glowing lit mansion, her home. ‘All this crap.’
‘I’m very grateful to you,’ Lorimer said.
She handed him a small cardboard tube – a ‘Smarties’ tube, Lorimer saw – it felt heavy and rattled, as if full of shot or seed.
‘Could you give that to Lulu?’ she said. ‘It’s a present. And tell her to call me.’
She kissed him on each cheek once again, Lorimer thinking that perhaps it did not seem the moment to disabuse her of the fact that he was neither the son of Angus Black nor, he assumed, the brother of Lulu.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Thanks again.’ He slipped out into the mews. Some rain had fallen and had made the cobbles shine. He was not the son of Angus Black but he was the son of the recently deceased Bogdan Blocj and so, as he walked briskly out of the mews and on up to Kensington High Street, he discreetly sprinkled the contents of the tube of Smarties behind him as he went, hearing the tick and rattle of the ecstacy or the crack rocks or the LSD tablets bounce off the pavement like small hail in his wake. Bogdan Blocj would have approved, he thought. He found a cab at a rank and was home before midnight.
Lady Haigh peered through the gap in her door as he crossed the hall. He could see she was wearing a hairy old dressing gown and a kind of night cap.
‘Evening, Lady Haigh,’ he said. ‘Cold night out.’
She opened the door a further inch or two.
‘Lorimer, I’ve been worrying about dog food. I give Jupiter the very best and he’s become accustomed to it. It seems most unfair to you.’
‘I don’t understand –’
‘To ask you to bear this extra expense, just because I’ve been spoiling him.’
‘Oh, don’t give it a thought.’
‘I tried him on a cheaper tin the other day and he didn’t even sniff at it.’
‘I’m sure it won’t be a problem.’
‘I’m so glad your friend has gone. I thought he was most uncivil.’
‘More of a colleague than a friend. He’s been having a difficult time. He lost his job and his wife threw him out.’
‘Sensible woman. He did seem to like rabbit, I remember.’
‘Torquil?’
‘Jupiter. I cooked him a rabbit once and he ate it. That can’t be very expensive, can it? Rabbit.’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
She smiled at him, a wide smile of relief. ‘That’s put my mind at some ease. Good night, Lorimer.’
‘Good night, Lady Haigh.’
Upstairs Lorimer made himself a cup of milky coffee and fortified it with a splash of brandy. He had two messages on his answer machine. One from Dymphna giving him the name and telephone number of a financial journalist who would be happy to assist him, the other was from Stella. ‘Hello, stranger,’ the message said. ‘Hope everything’s hunky-dory, dory-hunky. Don’t forget Sunday. See you about twelve. Big kiss.’
He had forgotten: a long-mooted Sunday lunch and he had a horrible feeling it coincided with Barbuda’s half-term or similar exeat. He had noticed a distinct increase of the Barbuda element in his dates with Stella and suspected she was trying to improve lover-daughter relationships. The lowering of spirit he experienced on hearing her voice told him something else too: it was time to bring the affair with Stella Bull to a decent and humane end.