36
Mr Scandal, I shall be very glad to confer with you about these things which he has uttered – his sayings are very mysterious and hieroglyphical.
William Congreve, Love for Love
Strike had thought that Simpson’s-in-the-Strand was an odd place for Jerry Waldegrave to want to meet for lunch and his curiosity increased as he approached the imposing stone façade, with its revolving wooden doors, its brass plaques and hanging lantern. Chess motifs decorated the tiled surround of the entrance. He had never set foot there, aged London institution though it was. He had assumed it to be the home of well-heeled businessmen and out-of-towners treating themselves.
Yet Strike felt at home as soon as he set foot inside the lobby. Once an eighteenth-century gentleman’s chess club, Simpson’s spoke to Strike in an old and familiar language, of hierarchy, order and stately decorum. Here were the dark, sludgy clubland colours that men choose without reference to their womenfolk: thick marble columns and solid leather armchairs that would support a drunken dandy and, glimpsed beyond double doors, past the coat-check girl, a restaurant full of dark wood panelling. He might have been back in one of the sergeants’ messes he had frequented during his military career. All that was needed to make the place feel truly familiar were regimental colours and a portrait of the Queen.
Solid wood-backed chairs, snowy tablecloths, silver salvers on which enormous joints of beef reposed; as Strike sat down at a table for two beside the wall he found himself wondering what Robin would make of the place, whether she would be amused or irritated by its ostentatious traditionalism.
He had been seated for ten minutes before Waldegrave appeared, peering myopically around the dining room. Strike raised a hand and Waldegrave made his way with a shambling walk towards their table.
‘Hello, hello. Nice to see you again.’
His light brown hair was as messy as ever and his crumpled jacket had a smear of toothpaste on the lapel. A faint gust of vinous fumes reached Strike across the small table.
‘Good of you to see me,’ said Strike.
‘Not at all. Want to help. Hope you don’t mind coming here. I chose it,’ said Waldegrave, ‘because we won’t run into anyone I know. My father brought me here once, years ago. Don’t think they’ve changed a thing.’
Waldegrave’s round eyes, framed by his horn-rimmed glasses, travelled over the heavily moulded plasterwork at the top of the dark wood panelling. It was stained ochre, as though tarnished by long years of cigarette smoke.
‘Get enough of your co-workers during office hours, do you?’ Strike asked.
‘Nothing wrong with them,’ said Jerry Waldegrave, pushing his glasses up his nose and waving at a waiter, ‘but the atmosphere’s poisonous just now. Glass of red, please,’ he told the young man who had answered his wave. ‘I don’t care, anything.’
But the waiter, on whose front a small knight chess piece was embroidered, answered repressively:
‘I’ll send over the wine waiter, sir,’ and retreated.
‘See the clock over the doors as you come in here?’ Waldegrave asked Strike, pushing his glasses up his nose again. ‘They say it stopped when the first woman came in here in 1984. Little in-joke. And on the menu, it says “bill of fare”. They wouldn’t use “menu”, you see, because it was French. My father loved that stuff. I’d just got into Oxford, that’s why he brought me here. He hated foreign food.’
Strike could feel Waldegrave’s nervousness. He was used to having that effect on people. Now was not the moment to ask whether Waldegrave had helped Quine write the blueprint for his murder.
‘What did you do at Oxford?’
‘English,’ said Waldegrave with a sigh. ‘My father was putting a brave face on it; he wanted me to do medicine.’
The fingers of Waldegrave’s right hand played an arpeggio on the tablecloth.
‘Things tense at the office, are they?’ asked Strike.
‘You could say that,’ replied Waldegrave, looking around again for the wine waiter. ‘It’s sinking in, now we know how Owen was killed. People erasing emails like idiots, pretending they never looked at the book, don’t know how it ends. It’s not so funny now.’
‘Was it funny before?’ asked Strike.
‘Well… yeah, it was, when people thought Owen had just done a runner. People love seeing the powerful ridiculed, don’t they? They aren’t popular men, either of them, Fancourt and Chard.’
The wine waiter arrived and handed the list to Waldegrave.
‘I’ll get a bottle, shall I?’ said Waldegrave, scanning it. ‘I take it this is on you?’
‘Yeah,’ said Strike, not without trepidation.
Waldegrave ordered a bottle of Château Lezongars, which Strike saw with profound misgiving cost nearly fifty quid, though there were bottles on the list that cost nearly two hundred.
‘So,’ said Waldegrave with sudden bravado, as the wine waiter retreated, ‘any leads yet? Know who did it?’
‘Not yet,’ said Strike.
An uncomfortable beat followed. Waldegrave pushed his glasses up his sweaty nose.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Crass – defence mechanism. It’s – I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it happened.’
‘No one ever can,’ said Strike.
On a rush of confidence, Waldegrave said:
‘I can’t shake this mad bloody idea that Owen did it to himself. That he staged it.’
‘Really?’ said Strike, watching Waldegrave closely.
‘I know he can’t have done, I know that.’ The editor’s hands were playing a deft scale on the edge of the table now. ‘It’s so – so theatrical, how he was – how he was killed. So – so grotesque. And… the awful thing… best publicity any author ever got his book. God, Owen loved publicity. Poor Owen. He once told me – this isn’t a joke – he once told me in all seriousness that he liked to get his girlfriend to interview him. Said it clarified his thought processes. I said, “What do you use as a mic?”, taking the mickey, you know, and you know what the silly sod said? “Biros mostly. Whatever’s around.”’
Waldegrave burst into panting chuckles that sounded very like sobs.
‘Poor bastard,’ he said. ‘Poor silly bastard. Lost it completely at the end, didn’t he? Well, I hope Elizabeth Tassel’s happy. Winding him up.’