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  She offered Daphne a filter-tip which she took. They lit up. Ellie dragged deep on hers and said, ‘First of the day.’ Daphne took a quick, short puff, coughed violently and gasped, ‘First of the year.’

  ‘Why’d you take it then?’ said Ellie.

  ‘It’s hardly the most offensive thing I’ve taken from you this morning,’ said Daphne.

  Ellie said, ‘You’re a sharp lady, lady.’

  The door opened and Daphne who was facing it saw two policemen enter, removing capes dripping from the still pelting rain. One was an older man in the traditional tall helmet; the other wore the flat cap of a cadet beneath which a good-looking young Indian face peered out at the momentarily silenced customers, whose chatter instantly resumed when it became clear all that the newcomers were after was a cup of tea.

  ‘If I’m sharp, then it’s a sharpness I picked up at places like St Helena’s,’ said Daphne.

  ‘And boarding-school?’

  ‘I was a day-girl. It was only in Harrogate, but yes, it was a boarding-school.’

  ‘Well, to quote my husband again, that’s one thing you’ve got to give the English single-sex boarding-school. It teaches you to hold your own.’

  The two policemen were coming up behind Ellie in search of a table. The elderly constable glanced down and to Daphne’s surprise his stern hello-hello-hello face broke into a smile.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Pascoe,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

  Ellie looked up.

  ‘Well, hello, Mr Wedderburn,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Haven’t seen you in here for a long time,’ continued the constable. ‘How’s the kiddy?’

  Ellie’s eyes flickered towards her companion to see if she’d caught the implication of the policeman’s remark. She had.

  ‘Oh, she’s blooming. Blooming this, blooming that.’

  ‘Isn’t she good,’ said Wedderburn, impressed by the baby’s sang-froid.

  ‘In crowds and company and public places, yes,’ said Ellie. ‘She saves up her bad side for private performance only. She’ll make a good cop. Who’s your friend?’

  ‘This is Police Cadet Shaheed Singh,’ said Wedderburn gravely. ‘He’s just been learning that hell is the rush-hour on market days. Singh, this is Mrs Pascoe, Detective-Inspector Pascoe’s wife.’

  The cadet smiled. He looked like one of those elegant handsome young princes who at one time always seemed to be playing cricket for England.

  ‘Nice to meet you, missus,’ he said in a broad Yorkshire accent which made Wedderburn’s sound like Eton and the Guards.

  ‘You too, Mr Singh,’ said Ellie. ‘Won’t you join us?’

  Singh was clearly willing but Wedderburn said, ‘No, thanks, Mrs Pascoe. We’ll sit over here. There’s one or two of the finer points of traffic control I need to discuss with the lad here and you’d likely find it a bit boring. Nice to see you.’

  They moved away.

  ‘Well!’ said Daphne. ‘So I’m in with the fuzz.’

  The word sounded alien on her tongue, perhaps because her upper-class accent squeezed it almost into fozz.

  ‘And,’ she continued, pursuing her advantage, ‘far from being your daily port of call, this elegant establishment is merely a stage-setting to soften up your victims!’

  ‘Not quite,’ grinned Ellie. ‘But, OK, I did choose it specially this morning.’

  ‘To turn me into a Trot? Or, with your police connections, are you really an agent provocateur?’

  ‘What’s your husband do?’ asked Ellie.

  ‘He’s an accountant with Perfecta, you know, the bathroom people.’

  Ellie looked momentarily surprised, then said, ‘And how’s your long division?’

  ‘Terrible,’ admitted Daphne. ‘But I don’t see … ah!’

  ‘We may be one flesh, but the minds have an independent existence, or should have. We are not our husbands, nor even our husbands’ keepers.’

  ‘I agree, to an extent,’ said Daphne. ‘But it’s not quite as simple as that, is it? I mean, if for instance, I told you my husband had committed a crime, wouldn’t you feel it necessary to tell your husband?’

  Ellie considered this.

  Finally she said, ‘I don’t know about necessary. Suppose I told you my husband was investigating your husband, would you feel it necessary to tell him?’

  Now Daphne considered, but before she could answer she was interrupted by a large, handsome, middle-aged woman, rather garishly dressed and with an ornate rose-tinted hair-do, like a mosque at sunset, who was coming from the counter with a coffee in one hand and a wedge of chocolate gateau in the other.

  ‘Hello!’ she cried. ‘It’s Daphne Aldermann, isn’t it? Not often we see you in here. I always meant to keep in touch, dear, but it’s all so hectic, one mad round after another, time just flies, just flies. And so must I. What a lovely baby. Coming, darlings, coming.’

  This last was in response to a chorus of Mandy! from a distant table where three men were sitting. The woman made a valedictory gesture with her gateau and went to join them.

  ‘So you’re not so out of your depth here as I thought,’ said Ellie. ‘I’ll have to look for somewhere really low. You should have asked your friend to sit down. She sounded interesting.’

  ‘You think so? Well, for a start, she’s hardly a friend. And in any case, there’s no way you’ll get Mandy Burke to join two women and a child when there’s anything in trousers imminent. Just flies is the perfect motto for her.’

  ‘Miaow!’ said Ellie, grinning broadly. ‘Mandy Burke? I’ve a feeling I’ve seen her around.’

  ‘She runs a stall in the old covered market. Cane and mats and curios, that sort of thing. It’s a little goldmine, I believe,’ said Daphne. ‘Mandy’s Knick-Knacks it’s called. That’s where you’ve probably seen her, unless your husband wines, dines and dances you at the best night spots a lot.’

  ‘And what makes you think he doesn’t?’ wondered Ellie. ‘But you’re right. I know the stall. And in which of her milieux did you meet her?’

  ‘Neither. Her husband used to work with mine, or the other way round really. He died about four or five years ago. I don’t think I’ve run into her more than a couple of times since. Widowhood seems to become her. I should imagine women like her are a bit of an embarrassment to the feminist movement. So confident, so secure, so able, but absolutely anchored in a masculine world.’

  She spoke challengingly and Ellie was again surprised at the vein of aggression she was finding in this superficially stereotyped bourgeois housewife. But before she could reply, Rose suddenly let out an enormous burp, then smiled complacently at her admiring audience.

  The two women laughed and Ellie said, ‘Let’s have another coffee.’

  ‘All right,’ said Daphne. ‘No, I’ll get them. Don’t worry, I won’t embarrass you by pushing to the front of the queue.’

  She rose and made her way to the counter where Ellie was both amused and irritated to see four horny-handed sons of toil step back and wave this long, elegantly dressed, fair-haired lady to receive service before them.

  5

  PERFECTA

  (Bush. Vigorous growth, red-flushed blooms, heavy and

  susceptible to being snapped off in strong winds, otherwise

  long-lasting, some black spot.)

  Patrick Aldermann sat at his desk in the office which still bore the name of Timothy Eagles on the door. It did not bother him. It took a great deal to bother him as the staff of Perfecta Ltd had long ago come to realize.

  One of the junior sales executives had been moved by drink and seasonal bonhomie to philosophize on the subject to Dick Elgood at the office Christmas party the previous year.

  ‘It isn’t so much,’ he slurred ginnily into Elgood’s face, ‘that things run smoothly around Pat Aldermann, it’s more than no matter how many cock-ups have been cocked-up, he just keeps on running smoothly around things, you follow me?’

  Elgood had used his nimbleness of foot
to evade the man and headed for the bar, where he spotted the object of the analysis in close conversation with Brian Bulmer, the firm’s financial director, and a hawk-faced young man called Eric Quayle, an industrial chemist by training and a captain of industry by inclination, who was also on the Board and generally regarded as tomorrow’s man. My bloody heir presumptuous, Elgood called him, adding, but the bugger’s going to turn grey waiting.

  Quayle saw Elgood and turned away from the other two. Bulmer was doing all the talking, Elgood noticed, and he guessed that most of the Scotch from the bottle between them had gone down his throat. As Quayle approached, Elgood grabbed two glasses from the bar and a half of Scotch.

  ‘Enjoying yourself, Eric?’ he asked as he moved away, but did not stay for an answer. Besides having little desire for a bout of horn-locking with Quayle, he was also ten minutes late for a rendezvous in his private office with the new invoice clerk, who was so well-bosomed that she had to stand sideways to see into a filing cabinet.

  An hour later, he had just scaled this Alpine lady for the second time when the phone started ringing, rousing him from post-coital lethargy with the news that Brian Bulmer within minutes of leaving the party had skidded into the seasonal road-death statistics.

  The death had cast a light pall over Christmas which as usual he spent alone in his seaside cottage, braving the North Sea’s icy waters for his traditional pre-luncheon swim. Experience had long ago taught him that shared Christmases bred sentimental notions which could lead to an unhappy New Year, so now it was his one celibate season and as he lay in his double bed, listening to the hungry tide gnawing at the cliff face, he had plenty of time to think about Bulmer’s death. He mourned the man’s passing but his main thought was about his successor. Timothy Eagles, the Chief Accountant, was the obvious man. Competent, predictable and loyal. He wanted such men about him and whatever he wanted, the Board would ultimately agree to. The memory of Bulmer and Quayle with the quiet watchful figure of Aldermann between them hardly stirred, not even when Quayle had tentatively wondered whether or not a younger man, like, say, Eagles’s assistant, Patrick Aldermann, might not be a more revitalizing addition to the Board. Quayle was just flexing his muscles. It meant nothing.

  Then Eagles had died, collapsing in the washroom at the end of the corridor he shared with Aldermann.

  Immediately it became clear that Quayle meant business and that he was not without support. The battle was about Aldermann’s candidacy for the Board, but the war was about Elgood’s chairmanship. Aldermann’s suitability didn’t worry Quayle and his supporters in the least. He was merely their instrument to probe, irritate and display Elgood’s vulnerability. The more blood they drew, the more support they would get.

  He had started to use every weapon at his disposal and he had collected a formidable armoury. He had not even omitted the direct appeal to Aldermann himself. To win him to withdraw from the fray voluntarily was too great a coup not to be attempted. But things had gone wrong. Aldermann had hardly seemed to consider the matter worth bothering about. His detachment, his self-possession, the hint of secret amusement in his eyes, had got under Elgood’s guard. What had been intended as a subtle operation became a bludgeoning attack.

  ‘But it all seems so simple to me, Dick,’ Aldermann had said finally. ‘If I don’t get on, I don’t get on. Honestly, it won’t bother me, don’t worry about it for a moment. And if I do get on, the extra money will certainly come in very useful.’

  It was then, vastly irritated that this conversation should have been mistaken as an expression of concern over Aldermann’s feelings, that Elgood had moved from bluntness to brutality, made it quite clear what his own feelings about the issue were and ended by half-shouting, ‘And if you get on to the Board of Perfecta, lad, it’ll be over my dead body!’

  The little smile, the nod of farewell (or agreement?) and Aldermann had left, keen as always (Elgood guessed) to get back to his precious bloody roses, apparently quite unmarked by an interview whose memory continued to shoot little electric arrows of rage into Elgood’s chest for hours after.

  Well, that had been last Friday and a very great deal had happened since then. For a time it had seemed as if things were getting out of control, rising to the climax of his visit to the police. That had been an error, but cathartic, and in the twenty-four hours since he had spoken to Pascoe, he had returned to something like full control and true perspectives. The real issue was his own control of the business at all levels. Currently there was an incipient crisis caused by proposals aimed at meeting the falling level of demand for Perfecta products in the present period of recession. To deal with this with minimum fuss would confirm his standing both with the waverers on the Board and with I.C.E. head office.

  He pressed a button on his intercom. A moment later his secretary came into the office. She was a woman of nearly forty, rather square of feature with short cropped dark brown hair beginning to be flecked with grey. She kept herself to herself and the office buzz was that she was lesbian. Her name was Bridget Dominic, but no one called her anything but Miss Dominic, including Elgood, who had chosen her deliberately some years earlier, having learned the hard way that a mix of sex and secretaries leads to deadly dole.

  ‘Miss Dominic,’ he said. ‘Would you pop along to Personnel and check when Mr Aldermann’s taking time off this summer. Discreetly. And put an outside line through as you go.’

  The woman nodded and left. She would be discreet, Elgood was sure. And discreet enough too to give him a good ten minutes in which to make his phone call. But for once she’d have been mistaken about its content.

  He dialled a London number. As it rang, he examined the course of action he was contemplating and found nothing wrong with it. The phone was lifted at the other end.

  ‘Mr Easey?’ said Elgood. ‘Mr Raymond Easey? My name is Richard Elgood.’

  At the same time on the floor below, Patrick Aldermann was opening the mail he had brought from home. A bank statement and the contents of several buff envelopes were put aside after the lightest glance, but one letter caught and held his attention.

  He picked up his telephone and dialled. As with Elgood above, it was a London number. The conversation lasted several minutes. When it was finished he replaced the receiver and buzzed his secretary.

  When she came in he was removing the wrapper from a packet. It seemed to contain some kind of book. Her eye took in the office mail which she had carefully opened and sorted. The piles stood untouched.

  ‘Mrs Jones,’ he said, ‘I’ll be away on Friday at the end of next week. Could you make a note of that? No, come to think of it, better make it Thursday and Friday.’

  He had begun to peruse the printed sheets of the loosely bound volume, making quick little marks with a red pen.

  Mrs Jones, not yet thirty but already maternal, said, ‘You do remember you’re taking the following Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off, don’t you? Something about your little boy’s school.’

  ‘Of course. So I am.’

  He smiled at her and she basked in his smile which she admitted freely to her intimates made parts of her she didn’t care to name feel tremulous.

  ‘I dare say they can get by without me here for another couple of days, wouldn’t you say, Mrs Jones?’ he said. ‘I dare say they can just about manage that.’

  6

  RIPPLES

  (Floribunda. Free-flowering, lilac-mauve blooms, rippled

  petals, abundant foliage, susceptible to mildew in the fall.)

  When Aldermann got home that evening, he found Daphne’s Polo occupying her side of the double garage. He examined the bright new paintwork on the bonnet and then went into the house.

  Diana came running to meet him and he swung her on to his shoulders.

  ‘Mummy’s outside,’ she told him.

  ‘It’s the only place to be,’ said Aldermann seriously.

  The rain had stopped earlier and the clouds had continued eastward, leaving in their wake a perf
ect June evening. He went through the french doors of the lounge on to the balustraded terrace where Daphne was relaxing on a garden lounger.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘They seem to have done a good job on the car.’

  ‘They should do for the money. And they make you pay on the spot nowadays. No cash, no car. It’s very uncivilized.’

  He frowned slightly, lifted Diana to the ground and said, ‘The rain’s brought off one or two petals, I see.’

  ‘Well, let them lie for a while,’ Daphne said firmly. ‘I’ll get us a drink and you can unwind from your hard day at the office.’

  She went into the house and he removed his jacket, draped it over the back of a wrought-iron garden chair and sat down. Distantly the front doorbell sounded. A couple of minutes later, Daphne returned bearing a martini’d tray and accompanied by two men, or rather a man and a boy. The boy was in uniform, the man in a dark suit. Other claims to distinction were the boy’s Indian beauty and the man’s Caucasian ugliness.

  ‘Darling,’ said Daphne setting the tray down on the iron table which matched the chairs, ‘these gentlemen are from the police.’

  Aldermann rose courteously.

  ‘How can I help you?’ he asked.

  ‘Actually, it’s me they want to see,’ said Daphne. ‘It’s about the car being vandalized. We needn’t disturb you, darling. Would you like to come back into the house, Sergeant? You did say sergeant?’

  ‘That’s right, ma’am. Detective-Sergeant Wield. And this is Police Cadet Singh,’ replied Wield without much enthusiasm.

  Singh flashed them a white-toothed smile. Daphne had already recognized him as the boy she had seen in the market café but he had shown no sign of recognizing her. Perhaps whites all look alike to Asians, she thought.