—
As soon as Ramsay parted company with Quinn it began to rain and, inevitably, there wasn’t a cab to be found.
He turned a corner and noticed the car parked beneath a streetlight that illuminated its shiny yellow bodywork. He knew very well whose car it was. He panicked and spun around, ready to run, but, as in a nightmare, there was Azzopardi himself, blocking his way.
“Going somewhere, Mr. Coker?” He grinned and waggled a finger at Ramsay, a gesture that managed to be both comic and horribly menacing at the same time. The reckoning was upon him, Ramsay thought, his stomach swooping high and then falling into the abyss. Azzopardi opened the car door and said, “Shall we go for a little drive, Mr. Coker? You’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve thought of a way for you to repay me.”
* * *
—
Azzopardi dropped Ramsay off in the same place that he had picked him up and drove away. Ramsay felt so weak that he had to sit on the curb to recover. He had promised Azzopardi the money he owed him, telling him that he would go to Nellie and ask her to give it to him. (Would she? Quite possibly not.) Or Niven, Niven had money, his brother would see him out of this hole. Surely? But no, it was too late for all that, Azzopardi had said.
Quinn was wrong—Azzopardi didn’t want Ramsay as a forfeit. (Would he have agreed if it meant it would clear his debts? It was an unanswered question.) But Quinn had been right about one thing—Azzopardi didn’t want money. He wanted something that he considered to be much more valuable. He wanted paper.
Ramsay lit a cigarette and as he looked up from the flame of the match his eye was caught by something on the other side of the street. It was that dratted Egyptian mummy from ten days ago again. Not lurching comically along like last time, but striding quite purposefully in the direction of Lowndes Square as if it were late for something. The Baby Party, presumably, although the dress code had been ignored. Whoever was inside all those bandages must be particularly fond of their horrid costume.
The figure no longer struck supernatural dread in him—it was absurd to be frightened of such a stupid mannequin, he thought. But then, as if it had heard him, the mummy stopped in its tracks and turned to stare at him. Its eyes were almost entirely concealed by the bandages around its head but nonetheless Ramsay could feel the malice in its gaze. And then, horror, it stepped off the curb and began to cross the road towards him. He didn’t wait to find out its intentions but scrambled up from the pavement and ran.
* * *
—
Quinn walked slowly around Lowndes Square. He, too, was trying to clear his head. He’d ingested rather a lot of dope and was beginning to feel quite unwell. Someone had told him that some of the stuff doing the rounds wasn’t good and he wondered if that was the problem.
Or maybe it was because he was feeling guilty—remorse was an unaccustomed emotion for him. He had delivered the head of John the Baptist.
He had taken Ramsay to that spieler in Belgravia at Azzopardi’s request. Azzopardi had a hold on him, of course. Photographs, taken secretly, and so on. He would be finished for ever if they got into the hands of his fellow members of the press. He’d end his days in a grubby garret in Soho, living off the charity of some old queen, or, worse, back in Kettering, living off the charity of his ageing, appalled parents.
Someone in fancy dress approached. The Invisible Man. Or, more likely, an Egyptian mummy, as people were so obsessed by Egypticity. Quinn presumed it was a man as the figure was quite tall. “Good costume,” he said politely as it drew near. Did it want something from him? An unlit cigarette dangled from its mouth, or rather from a hole in the bandages where he presumed its mouth was.
“Do you want a light?” Quinn asked. The mummy didn’t respond but Quinn felt impelled to pursue a conversation with it.
“Are you going to the Baby Party?” he asked, indicating the gardens with a nod. “They’re all dressed like toddlers in there. Behaving like them as well. Biggest bunch of nincompoops in London.”
The mummy spoke, slightly muffled on account of the bandages.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that. Oh—am I Vivian Quinn? Yes, yes, indeed, the one and only.” He preened a little, he loved being recognized. “Do I know you?” he asked. “Are you the—?”
The question remained unfinished. Quinn looked down at the large knife sticking out of his stomach in disbelief. A coup de grace. It was not the bull who had been gored, it was the matador.
Adieu, Adieu, Adieu
It was almost dark by the time they were back at the car.
By the light of a torch, Gwendolen read out instructions from the handbook while Frobisher wielded the starting handle, and then, of course, there was a whole new palaver over getting the headlights to work. By the time the road was moving beneath their wheels once again it was the deep dark that you only found in the countryside and they were totally reliant upon the weak beams. Gwendolen suspected her dreams would be haunted by the new vocabulary of “strangler wire” and “throttle” and “double declutch,” but it was exciting just now to be driving in the night-time, and they had been comfortably silent for a while when suddenly those same weak headlights were illuminating a road full of—
“Rabbits! Oh, Lord, rabbits everywhere, Inspector!” It was as if an entire warren had been tipped out onto the tarmacadam. Frobisher braked hard, jerking them both forward. Gwendolen wasn’t sure if any had gone beneath their wheels, she imagined the crunch of tiny bones, but the rabbits seemed unconcerned about the juggernaut that had borne down on them. The dog, asleep again, had woken up with an excited start at the word “rabbits.” Not such a city dog, perhaps.
The rabbits didn’t move. Gwendolen supposed that they hadn’t yet adjusted their lives to the terror of the modern combustion engine. Perhaps they never would. There were babies, too—adorable little things, frolicking innocently—although Frobisher seemed unmoved by their charms. He was a countryman, she reminded herself, he had grown up looking on rabbits as sport or food or both.
The rabbits remained unconcerned, claiming the road as their own, and eventually Gwendolen had to get out of the car and shoo them away, while Frobisher kept the engine running—God forbid they would have to start it up again. Eventually, the shooing being ineffective, she decided the best thing was to walk ahead of the car as someone would have had to do in the early days of motoring to warn horses and pedestrians, rather than rabbits, of the oncoming monster. There was a fairy tale she had once read about herding rabbits—or was it hares? Hares, more likely. It was considered one of those impossible tasks that the protagonist had to perform in order to be released from a spell.
She was laughing when she climbed back in the passenger seat and said, “Well, that was silly.” She felt, suddenly, rather ridiculously fond of Frobisher, and if he hadn’t been gripping the steering wheel she might have reached over and touched his hand, or even his cheek. She would let him kiss her when they were back in London. Of course, he might not want to.
They proceeded cautiously, but there were no more rabbits. “I shall expect to have you home by midnight,” he said.
“Before the car turns into a pumpkin?”
“Quite.”
She was prompted to ask, “And where do you live, Inspector?”
“Ealing,” he replied, after a little beat. She had never met anyone so unwilling to divulge information about themselves.
“Ealing? In a house?” She had imagined him in a bachelor flat in Marylebone or Kentish Town.
“Yes, a house. Do you find that odd?”
She was thoughtful for a moment. “With someone?”
“I’m sorry?”