“Efendim?”
“Nothing, Emin. Carry on.”
“I met a man yesterday,” Emin said casually.
“Oh?”
Emin met many men in the course of his day, he said. He heard many things, too. A man will often let fall his secrets when swaddled in the barber’s chair. Niven waited patiently for whatever was to come next.
“A man called Azzopardi. Was sitting right here where you are now.”
“Turkish?”
“Maltese. A bad man. Do you know him?”
“Never heard of him.” Emin slapped cologne on his face. “Is there something I should know?” Niven coaxed when nothing more was forthcoming from the Turk.
“He is inviting your mother to meet him tomorrow. For afternoon tea.”
Niven barked with laughter. “Afternoon tea? He certainly does sound bad, Emin.”
“She should watch her back, effendim.”
“My mother is nothing but back, Emin.”
Niven clicked his fingers and Keeper stood to attention. Emin was duly paid and tipped. So, Niven thought, Azzopardi had set the wheels in motion. The man wanted something from Nellie, but just what was unclear.
* * *
—
Last week, when Nellie was still tucked away inside Holloway, Azzopardi had sidled up to Niven on the rails at the dog track and introduced himself. A prelude followed when flattery was purred in Niven’s ear, not something he responded well to, before Azzopardi eventually got to the point.
He was a large bull walrus of a man with affected mannerisms and silky speech and came across more like a pantomime villain than a threat. Niven wouldn’t have been surprised if he was not in fact from Malta but Ramsgate or Southend and had adopted this theatrical persona for effect. A clown, Niven concluded. His English was surprisingly fluent. His life of crime, he said, had begun when he was a boy with stealing a goat. And now, Niven suspected, he wanted to steal an empire. Nellie’s empire.
“Not theft,” he said. “Compensation.”
“Compensation? For what?”
The dogs came out of the traps.
Azzopardi offered a cigar. Niven refused and they watched in silence as the dog that Niven owned came in first.
“Yours?” Azzopardi asked.
“No,” Niven said. He sensed that this man didn’t like dogs, and it made him reluctant to confess to owning one. Keeper had been returned home, the dog track was problematic for him. “Not my dog,” he said. Lying came easily to Niven, he thought of it as a means of protecting the truth.
Nellie was an old woman, Azzopardi said. She was growing weak. Wasn’t it time for her to leave the field, to enjoy the fruits of her labours?
“She’s only in her fifties,” Niven said, amused by the man’s arrogance, “and if you’re after her clubs she’ll send you away with your tail between your legs.”
“You’re your mother’s natural heir.”
Niven laughed. “I think you’ll find that’s my sister Edith. And, trust me, we’re not about to inherit.”
Niven was a pragmatist, Azzopardi said, he could see the writing on the wall. Nellie was no longer hungry. “And the world today, Mr. Coker, belongs to those with the appetite for change. For new ways of thinking. The victor will take the spoils.”
“You sound like an anarchist,” Niven said. “Or an Italian fascist.”
“No, Mr. Coker, I sound like a businessman.”
The Sights of London
“You will need an evening gown for the Amethyst, Miss Kelling. Do you have one with you?” Frobisher had asked her, casting a doubtful eye over her old coat and worn shoes.
“Absolutely, Chief Inspector.” Best to sound confident, et cetera. The only evening wear that Gwendolen had brought in her luggage was an ancient velvet frock, probably more suited to a vicarage tea party than a London nightclub, not that she had ever been to either. Something more glamorous was clearly called for, something more à la mode. The sightseeing she had mentioned to Frobisher could wait. Liberty’s here I come, she thought.
“Going out again, Miss Kelling?” Mrs. Bodley said as Gwendolen passed beneath her sentry eye. She considered replying with something worthy—the British Museum or the National Gallery—but instead she enjoyed ruffling Mrs. Bodley’s starched feathers further by saying gaily, “To Liberty’s in Regent Street, Mrs. Bodley. I am on a mission to buy a new wardrobe.”
Mrs. Bodley rewarded this frivolity with an almost imperceptible moue of disapproval.
Too bad, Gwendolen thought. She had had her fill of rectitude.
* * *
—
In the York that Gwendolen had left behind two days ago, the daffodils were still lingering on the slopes of the city walls, but here in the public spaces of the capital they had long gone over. Gwendolen had not been to London since the funeral of the Unknown Warrior, when she and Mother had been part of the sombre crowds lining the route to Westminster Abbey. Like so many others they had been sternly armoured in the breastplate of grief. Barely a sob could be heard, just a rustling sound as if a great flock of black birds had descended silently on London. Then, the whole enshrouded city had been in muffled mourning, and to see it now, dressed for spring, was something of a shock.
Invigorating, too, and she swung her arms as she strode through Hyde Park. The “Cock o’ the North,” the regimental march of the Gordon Highlanders, had crept into her head uninvited and refused to be dislodged. She would have preferred some sprightly Mozart—the Clarinet or the Horn—but the martial music swept her onwards.
She had once formed a pleasant, short-lived attachment to an officer in the Gordon Highlanders. There had been a little sedate flirting between them, nothing more. (No opportunity for more, she remembered ruefully.) He had passed through her hands, literally, at a field hospital at Wimereux—shrapnel in his leg, not too bad—and was evacuated back to England. When he returned to the Front, she looked for him in the daily reports, but his name never appeared amongst the dead. He didn’t write, but then neither did she.
Everyone she worked alongside in France had been insatiable letter-writers and resolute diary-keepers, but Gwendolen had felt no urge to chronicle, no desire for an aide-mémoire. Life was for absorbing, not recording. And in the end, it was all just paper that someone would have to dispose of after you were gone. Perhaps, after all, one’s purpose in this world was to be forgotten, not remembered.
“How practical you are, Miss Kelling,” Mr. Pollock said. “How ruthless,” her mother said.
Would ruthlessness have recommended her to Frobisher?, she wondered. Or was he the kind of man who regarded women as delicate flowers to be nurtured and protected. He was a man of sighs, frequent and doleful, like a dissatisfied dog, and yet she was sorry he wouldn’t be accompanying her on Saturday night. I am going to dance on the stage, he had read awkwardly from the scented notepaper, and Gwendolen had had to stifle a laugh.
She made a small detour to inspect the new memorial to the Royal Artillery at Hyde Park Corner, out of curiosity more than any reverence. She disliked memorials. The truth of the battlefield was absent—the mud, the globs of bloody flesh, the scattered bodiless limbs and limbless bodies. The rendering of suffering into cold stone could not convey the horror. In York, Mother had insisted on attending the unveiling, by the Duke of York, of the City Memorial, a project that had been mired in controversy. Like many others, Gwendolen had considered that it would be better to do something for the living of York—a maternity hospital or a park like the one that Rowntree’s had donated to commemorate the men of the Cocoa Works who had died. Their name liveth for ever more was carved into the York memorial. Another lie. Who remembered Dickie now?