William Boyd - Sweet Caress

His canyon house had a fine, open view over the vast city and its coastal plain. Through the salt and smog haze I could see the blurred rectangles of the tall buildings miles away in downtown LA. Everywhere in the house — corridors, hallway, stacked against walls — were battered cardboard boxes with large, scrawled handwriting on them: Grateful Dead, Peace Sign, Marijuana, Naked Mickey Mouse, Ban the Bomb, Che, and so on.

‘Ah. T-shirts,’ I said.

He pointed at a box: ‘Never Too Young To. .’ He inclined himself apologetically. ‘Not our best seller,’ he said, ‘but steady. In fact I think I may owe you some money.’

He went to a study and came out with a wad of cash from which he paid me several hundred dollars and had me sign for them.

‘Let’s hope these Paris peace talks drag on,’ he said. ‘An ongoing war is good business. Just kidding,’ he added with a sly smile.

We sat down on his deck and he poured me a glass of red wine and I told him why I was here in Los Angeles.

‘My God. English mother comes to California searching for her runaway daughter. I’ll buy the movie rights.’ He leant his long torso forward and topped up my glass. I lit a cigarette.

‘You know, Amory — may I call you Amory? — I would just go home. She’ll come back as soon as she’s bored by her little adventure. How old is she?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘She’ll run out of money.’

‘She has quite a lot of money. That’s the trouble.’ I explained about Sholto’s legacy. I told him about the strange card sent to me and the letter to Annie with their pointed messages.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I can’t really see why it might appear worrying. . She says she’s happy—’

‘It’s not Blythe,’ I said. ‘I know her too well. Something’s happened to her.’

‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I think you need a private detective. I have just the man.’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

This morning, walking across the gravel to the car, I fell. There was no ice; I didn’t trip, stumble or stub my toe — my left leg just gave way and I fell over. I sat on the ground for a while and counted to a hundred. Then I stood up again. All seemed well, but I knew what was happening — the neurologist had warned me. I tested my grip, both hands, on the door handle — fine. But my throat was dry and I felt frightened: it was as if something else was taking me over — this sudden loss of power, sudden loss of motor control is the significant sign that the disease is gaining ground. Calm, girl, calm. . It comes and goes, chooses its own pace. It may be moving very slowly — don’t panic. One day at a time and all the rest of it. You have the ultimate say, remember.

*

Cole Hardaway of Hardaway Legal Solutions Inc. was the private investigator who Moss Fallmaster recommended. He had an office above a nail parlour in Santa Monica. If you looked out of his window you could see the ocean reflected in the windows of the building opposite. He seemed a little unprepossessing at first, not at all what I’d hoped for or had been expecting in a private eye. He was wearing pale grey trousers and a checked lime-green shirt — a man in his mid-forties with a lean and thoughtful demeanour that was rather undermined by his hairstyle: his brown hair was cut in a Beatles fringe, snipped off straight at his eyebrows. It did make him look a bit younger, I supposed, but any man over forty who deliberately combs his hair forward in a child’s fringe has something suspect about him, I always feel. Anyway, I tried to ignore it as we talked and, slowly but surely, I found myself coming round to a more favourable impression of Cole Hardaway. He had a reassuring deep bass voice and he spoke in a very measured way, always pausing to think, visibly pondering any question you might ask.

‘I was in England in the war,’ he said, explaining that he’d been an army engineer. He had taken part in the construction of several pontoon bridges over the Rhine in 1945. I told him my own experience of crossing the Rhine in ’45.

‘Wouldn’t it be funny,’ I said, ‘if I’d crossed the Rhine on one of the bridges you’d helped build?’

It was a throwaway remark but Mr Hardaway thought about it silently for some moments, nodding, weighing up the probabilities.

‘It would certainly be a remarkable coincidence,’ he said, finally. I agreed and we pressed on with the matter of finding Blythe.

I gave him all the information I had plus the fairly recent photograph of Blythe that I carried with me. He informed me that he charged $100 per day not including expenses and advised me to return to my hotel. Relax, he said, see the sights — he would call me as soon as he had anything concrete.

I saw, by the door as I left his office, a photograph on the wall of a young soldier in fatigues sitting on a pile of sandbags, smiling at the camera. It was obviously Vietnam — it could have been one of mine from Vietnam, Mon Amour.

‘I’m just back from Vietnam myself,’ I said, explaining why I’d been there.

‘That’s my son, Leo,’ he said flatly. ‘He was killed in Da Nang last year. A traffic accident.’

I forgave Cole Hardaway his silly fringe.

I saw the sights, such as they were, in Los Angeles. I went on a tour of Universal Studios. I took some photographs on Sunset Boulevard. I watched movies (2001:A Space Odyssey and The Fox ), I sat by the small hotel swimming pool and read my books. I was planning a trip to Anaheim to visit Disneyland when Cole Hardaway called, three days after my appointment with him. He had tracked Blythe down and I owed him $425. He suggested we meet up — it was a little complicated.

I returned to his office in Santa Monica where he offered me a drink. I asked for whisky but he only had bourbon.

‘Shall we go to a bar?’ he suggested. ‘Would you mind going to a bar?’

Not at all, I said, excellent idea — I liked bars. So we wandered down the street to a bar a block away — Hardaway was obviously a regular — and sat in a curved red leatherette booth at the rear. A waitress in a silver miniskirt and a tight black halterneck took our orders.

‘There you be, Cole,’ she said with a warm smile, serving us our drinks. ‘Nice to have you back.’

‘May I call you Cole?’ I asked.

‘Of course, Mrs Farr.’

He told me that the key factor that had allowed him to trace Blythe had been her boyfriend, Jeff Bellamont, who had unwittingly and obligingly left a relatively easy-to-follow trail from Downstairs at Paul’s — unpaid rental on an apartment, a car hire, a night in a motel, a run-in and a ticket from a traffic cop in Fresno — all the way to another hotel in Bishop, Inyo County. Cole had driven up to Bishop — over 200 miles north of Los Angeles. By now he had a photograph of Bellamont, a recent mugshot that he gave to me. It turned out Bellamont had a sizeable roster of crimes and misdemeanours and had even served time in Folsom prison for robbery. A certain amount of judicious asking around in Bishop (not a big place) had produced an accurate identification and a probable location.

‘I’m pretty damn sure I know where he is,’ Cole said. ‘And if he’s there, then your daughter will be there also, most likely. It’s just. .’ he paused for one of his moments of cogitation. ‘It’s just a kind of weird situation. Not dangerous, no, no. Just prepare yourself for something not normal.’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

Hugo called and invited me to see how his new house was progressing so I walked round the headland and met him there in discussion with the contractors. The roof was now on and complete and I could see it was definitely going to be a fair-sized home. Once it was sealed, windows in and so on, they could work inside through the winter, he told me. He hoped to be in by spring next year.