Tanner's Virgin (Evan Tanner #6)

Tanner's Virgin (Evan Tanner #6) Page 9

I brushed her lips with mine, finished tying the shoe, crossed to the window. The damn thing was stuck, and I was convinced I was making a hellish amount of noise. Just as I yanked it open the doorbell sounded.

I looked at Julia. She shrugged. “It’s me,” I said. “I raced around the block in excess of the speed of light and got back before I started.”

She told me I was daft. The flat was on the first floor, which would have been a blessing if we were in the States. We weren’t, though. I crouched on the sill, tensed myself to avoid a flowerbed, and dropped ten or twelve feet to the ground. I landed on my feet, which was not surprising, and I stayed on them, which was. Then I headed down the narrow alley to the street behind.

It was still raining. I made my way around the block, solemnly cursing Nigel for not having had the common decency to sleep another half hour. Of course, I thought, the doorbell would have awakened him in any event, but by then we might have at least finished.

I plodded dutifully through the rain. All things come round to him who will wait, I comforted myself. Nigel Stokes was going to give a matinee performance that afternoon, and so would his sister and I, and this time we wouldn’t have an audience.

At the final corner, I stopped and drew a long breath. I needed some sort of story, obviously. I couldn’t very well say I’d been out to get a morning paper, or Nigel might well ask why I hadn’t brought it back with me. He might also wonder why I’d gone off without my jacket or umbrella. I thought for a moment and decided to tell him I’d spent the past few hours at an all-night café in Piccadilly. It had been clear when I left, I would say, and he could chide me for being a foolish American who didn’t know that one had to carry a brollie rain or shine, since rain was always a danger, and I could laugh along with him, and-

And I rounded the corner, and the street was cluttered with police cars, and half the policemen in London were beating a path to Nigel’s door.

Chapter 5

I looked at all those policemen, and I turned around and walked back around the corner. It never occurred to me to wonder why they were there. I certainly hadn’t expected them, but it was patently obvious that they had come for me, and that it was more than illegal entry that had brought them. I walked quietly round the corner and down the street and around another corner, and although it went right on raining I was no longer bothered by it. There but for the grace of coitus interruptus, thought I, go I, down the drain.

I offered a silent prayer of gratitude for Nigel’s early rising and Julia’s modesty. A brief prayer. After all, it was only decent that something went right for a change, and on balance I was still far behind. I was coatless and brollieless and wanted for murder by the most efficient police force in the free world. And I couldn’t turn myself in and try to prove my innocence because I didn’t happen to be innocent.

How much did they know? It was important to find this out before I did anything, and it was also important to get as far from London as possible before they spread the alarm. If they knew no more about me than that I had been a guest of Nigel and Julia Stokes, then I could leave the country more or less as planned. If they knew my name and had a picture of me, then the plans were useless. And new ones called for.

I took a bus to Portsmouth some seventy miles southwest of London. The trip took two hours and I spent them both with my face hidden in a morning newspaper. There was nothing in the paper about me or Mr. Hyphen. In Portsmouth I ate eggs and chips at a horrible café and went to a movie house. I saw the last half of an old Doris Day movie, a short on lobster trapping, a UPA cartoon, a slew of commercials, coming attractions for something, and the first half of the Doris Day movie. I stayed and saw the last half over a second time in the hope that they would change the ending this time through and let Rock Hudson lay her, but they didn’t and he didn’t. After my experiences with Phaedra and Julia, I was left with the feeling that the movie was true to life.

I went to another café and had steak and chips and some very bitter coffee, then found another cinema and saw an Italian thing in which everyone laid everyone else but no one enjoyed it much. Least of all the audience. When it ended I wasn’t hungry, so I went straight on to another theater and saw an English film based on the Great Train Robbery. The police were magnificently efficient in the film and everyone got caught at the end, so this one did even less for my morale than the other two. I was beginning to worry that Portsmouth might run out of movies before I ran out of spare time, but the third movie was the charm; when I left the theater the evening papers were on the street. I bought both of the London dailies, and they both had what I was looking for. One called it MULTILATION AND MURDER IN SOHO SIN FLAT. The other said AMERICAN SOUGHT IN SOHO TORTURE SLAYING. Aside from that, they both told about the same story. They both spelled my name right, and they both used the same photograph over it.

I read them in the lavatory of a side-street pub. They did not make me very happy. It was all my own fault, of course. I had left fingerprints all over the murder flat, mainly because it never occurred to me not to. I didn’t suspect that the English authorities would have my prints on file. Evidently they had obtained them a while back from Washington, because the body of Arthur Hook had not been discovered until shortly after midnight, and they could hardly have run a check through Washington that quickly.

It was fingerprints that put them onto me, but it was the two useless guns that told them where to look for me. The police identified them as theatrical props, routed people out of bed to check out various prop departments, and had them connected to Nigel in no time at all. I was beginning to appreciate why Scotland Yard enjoyed its extraordinary reputation. But not even the best police force on earth can cope with dumb luck, which was why I was in Portsmouth instead of jail.

Someone knocked on the lavatory door. I grunted in-articulately and went on reading. According to both articles, I was a Jacobite fanatic and known terrorist, and a variety of odd theories were advanced as probable explanations of my connection with Arthur Hook (alias Smythe-Carson, alias Wyndham-Jones). He had an interesting criminal record and I’m sure no one much regretted his death, but this didn’t mean they weren’t interested in getting their hands on his killer. All air and sea ports were being watched, all ticket offices had been circularized. Special attention was being paid to the Scottish border in view of my Jacobite connections.

This last bothered me. If I was going to get out of England, I was going to need help, and other members of the Jacobite League seemed like my best chance. They share my hope of chasing Betty Battenberg off the throne and restoring the venerable House of Stuart. There were any number of loyal men in the Scottish Highlands who would have sheltered me, but it looked as though that was precisely where the Yard would look first.

Another knock at the door. I folded the papers, grunted again, gave the loo an unnecessary flush, and sidled out of the door to keep the room’s new occupant from seeing my face. It was wasted effort; he was far more interested in the room than in its previous tenant, and I walked on through the pub and out into the street.

The Jacobites were out, I decided. And now that Nigel had been picked up, the Flat-Earth people might well be under surveillance. Even if this weren’t the case, I couldn’t quite see running to them now. A man has to be something of a nonconformist to uphold the theory that the earth is flat, but this does not imply his readiness to grant sanctuary to a murderer.

I had to find some political extremists, and I had to go somewhere close, and I had to deal with people who were in the habit of traveling from one country to another without going through customs. Of course I could use my passport once I was well out of England, but-

The hell I could. It was in my jacket pocket, and my jacket, when last seen, was in Nigel’s living room.

I found another pub. There were only a few drinkers in it, and none of them had newspapers. I ordered a double scotch and a pint of bitter, remembering to put on an Irish accent. People almost always hear discrepancies between one’s speech and their own, so the trick is to give them an alternative set of discrepancies. If I had tried an approximation of the local speech I would have sounded American. This way I merely sounded Irish, which was unusual enough to be noticed but not likely to be long remembered.

I thought of trying some IRA friends. I knew some names and addresses in Liverpool and one in Manchester, plus any number in Ireland. But Ireland was an ocean away, and the few in England were still a good distance from Portsmouth.

Oh, of course. The CSU.

While auto theft is not as exclusively American a crime as kidnaping, it remains generally rare in England. Even in London few drivers take the trouble to lock their cars, and outside of the major cities it’s common practice to leave keys in the ignition. I hate to lower someone’s high opinion of human nature, but it was that or risk a bus or train, so I wandered through Portsmouth until I found a Morris 1000 with the key in it and no one watching it.

This was less than a miracle. The remarkable thing was that the car had over half a tank of gas, more than enough to get me to Cornwall. After the extravagance of movies and drinks, I had only eight or nine shillings left. My money belt still held a thousand dollars, but the idea of attempting to change an American fifty-dollar bill at a petrol station left me colder than the rain, which was still falling and which the windshield wipers of the Morris were having a tough time with.

Minor problem, that. I kept my hands on the wheel and my foot on the gas, and the Morris, while not a good car, was a good enough car, and on we went. Cosham, Southampton, Dorchester, Honiton, Exeter, Okehampton, Launceston, Bodmin, Fraddon, and Truro. And just past Truro, at the end of a lonely ill-paved road, the thatched cottage where lived Arthur Poldexter, corresponding secretary of the Cornish chapter of the Celtic-Speaking Union.

I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the Celtic-Speaking Union. Not many people have. The organization came into being just a few years ago, spurred largely by the parliamentary success of Welsh and Scottish Nationalists and the concommitant interest in linguistic nationalism. The CSU is a five-branched nationalist movement aimed at joining in a loose political federation those geographical areas where Celtic languages prevailed longest. The five areas are Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and the French province of Brittany.

It would probably be infinitely easier to repeal the Law of Gravity than to transform the Celtic-Speaking Union into a political reality. This is nowhere more demonstrably the case than in Cornwall, where the old Celtic language of Cornish ceased to exist well over a century ago. As far as I was concerned, this only made the efforts of Arthur Poldexter and his fellows all the more admirable. Two of them, Ardel Tresillian and George Pollifax, had worked up a painstaking reconstruction of the Cornish language; I own a mimeographed copy of their manual and will study it as soon as I find the time.

I parked the Morris at the end of the lane and walked along a winding flagstone path, wishing as I walked that I had taken the time to learn Cornish properly. I knew just two words, and when the door opened to my knock I used them. “Free Cornwall!” I said.