Barbara Vine - The Birthday Present

This was the time when Ivor began to be restive. There was a phone in the car— he had a mobile, thick and heavy as a brick, and other people did, but to nothing like the extent they have now—and Dermot and Lloyd had our phone number and had been instructed to call him if there were problems. Ivor went out into the mews and looked up and down it, the way people do in these situations, though it doesn't bring the expected one any sooner. He grew afraid that the phone would ring while he was outside, so he went back indoors and as he came into the living room the phone did ring. It wasn't Dermot or Lloyd but one of our friends calling to tell us she couldn't come to a dinner party we were having. By then it was ten to eight.

Even if the traffic was very heavy, it was stretching things a bit to take fifty or even forty-five minutes, if Hebe had been late, from the Watford Way to the middle of Hampstead. Something had gone wrong. She hadn't come. Gerry Furnal had been late home or detained at work or the child had been suddenly ill. But if she hadn't come why hadn't Lloyd or Dermot phoned? At no time did Ivor suspect what had happened. He wasn't worried. He was angry. His anger grew and grew and at five to eight he poured himself a stiff gin with a drop of tonic. He wasn't going to touch the champagne just in case, by some miracle, she still turned up.

Was it possible Dermot and Lloyd had reneged on him, just hadn't gone to the pick-up place? He knew they had seen each other at least once after his encounter with them in the pub in Victoria. He had suggested that the two of them meet after a few days to arrange things, the renting of the car and the purchase of handcuffs, gag, and balaclavas, and had seen them exchange phone numbers. Maybe they had simply decided to pocket the first two hundred and fifty pounds he had given each of them and do nothing. There was little he could do about it if they had.

He might have phoned the car but he didn't know the number. Besides, he was angry, not worried. He waited there till eight-thirty, thought of going home but stayed on till nine. Then he changed back into his own clothes and left, taking the two envelopes with him but forgetting all about the champagne. At home he listened to no news bulletins, nor did he turn on the television. If he had he might have seen horrific pictures of the crash come up on the screen, though there was nothing that night about a kidnapping.

THE STORY IRIS and I read in the paper quoted the police as saying there had been a kidnap attempt and the victim was Hebe Furnal, 27, of West Hendon. Newspapers don't give precise addresses and often they don't give exact locations where events or accidents happen. They didn't in this case. They alluded vaguely to “a Hendon junction” and a “roads intersection in north London” and to this day I don't know exactly where the accident happened, though later on I did find out more details. The car had been “in collision with” a forty-ton lorry the paper described, American-fashion, as a “truck.” Hebe Furnal had been bound and gagged. The two men were wearing jackets with hoods. Lloyd Freeman was dead and Dermot Lynch, the driver of the car, was in hospital in a serious condition with brain damage and multiple injuries. The driver of the lorry, high up in his cab, I suppose, was unharmed.

There followed some biographical details about Hebe, substantially accurate except that her son was referred to as Jason, but no speculation as yet as to why anyone would kidnap her. That came later. Reporters must have been to Gerry Furnal's house to get the photograph they had used of Hebe. It was a nice photograph, not a studio portrait but a shot of her on a beach playing with her little boy.

I hadn't finished reading it before Iris was on the phone to Ivor. The phone rang half a dozen times and then it went on to message. She didn't leave a message—what could she have said? We kept trying to get hold of Ivor throughout the morning and at midday Iris said, “I think we ought to go back.”

We went back and, without bothering about lunch, drove straight to Old Pye Street. Iris had just stopped breastfeeding Nadine, so we'd parked in a lay-by on the A12 to give her a bottle and some tinned stuff and she had slept contentedly ever since. (I know this should be about Ivor, not me, and that I say too much about my daughter. I shall watch it in future but can't promise anything.) So to Ivor. He was in. Yes, the phone had rung and rung, but he hadn't answered it because he was sure it was Hebe with excuses for why she hadn't turned up and he was still too angry to speak to her. At lunchtime he had gone out to buy a paper and he'd bought the one we had seen.

Ivor's flat was very elegant, full of good early Victorian furniture and quite valuable paintings. He had a private income—a great-aunt had left him a house to sell and a considerable sum of money when she died ten years before—and he had indulged himself. A compulsively tidy man (anal, said Iris, but fondly), he was in the habit of having a place for everything and he put everything back in its place. There wasn't even a cup or a glass about.

Iris threw her arms round him and held him close. “I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry,” she kept saying.

I asked him when he knew.

“Not till about an hour ago. I don't bother much with bloody scandal sheets at the weekends, get too much of them all week. I read it in the paper shop. Christ, I had to go outside and sit down on a wall.”

It was then that he told us. It took a long time, but I think telling us did him good. Halfway through he wanted a drink, said he'd had a brandy when he got back to the flat after buying the paper, but Iris stopped him having another. She fetched him a glass of water and made him drink half of it. When he got to the end, to his coming back here and going to bed, still furiously angry, he looked up and said, “God, poor little Hebe.”

Those weren't quite the only words I ever heard him utter which might be construed as expressing grief but they almost were. I asked him what he had done. Presumably, he had told the police.

He looked at me and there was a strange expression on his face. Secretive, certainly. Covert? Incredulous that I should have asked? Perhaps all those things.

“Well, no,” he said. “I haven't.” His voice rose, was suddenly indignant, almost angry with me. “How can I? For God's sake, how can you fucking ask?”

Iris had been kneeling down by Nadine's car seat. She had wiped Nadine's mouth with a tissue and given her a quick kiss on the forehead. She got up.

“Ivor,” she said, “I'm not hearing this.”

“What aren't you hearing?” His face was very set and his voice was sharp.

“You must tell them. How can you, you say. How can't you? Everyone thinks she was really abducted, the police, her husband—her husband, Ivor—do you ever think of him? You have to tell them it was you, you set it up.”

“Look,” he said, calming down, “of course I've thought of the police. If it had been the accident only and nothing about their taking the pretend kidnap seriously, I'd have gone straight to them. I'd have told them and never mind the consequences. There's no doubt about that, I wouldn't have hesitated.”

“What do you mean, consequences?” Iris said.

“Gerry Furnal, for starters, and a snide little paragraph in the Mirror for another.”

I asked him what was different now.

“It wouldn't be a snide little paragraph,” Ivor said. “It would be a front-page scandal story. MP stages kidnap of charity chief's wife. Besides, it's too late.” There was a clock on the mantelpiece and a watch on his wrist but still he asked me, “What time is it?”

“Just gone four.”

“This has been news since—when? Last night probably. First thing this morning. All over the papers. On TV, I expect, only I haven't watched any. They're going to ask me, the first thing they're going to ask me is why I've only just told them. I can't tell them, Rob. It's too late.”