Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

‘How’s the book going?’ I said as I sat again. ‘It must hold things up not being able to get out and see people.’

‘Doesn’t make any bloody difference. The book’s kaput.’

‘Oh, Ronnie!’

‘The editor I’d set it up with moved on to another publisher. The fellow who took over farted around for a bit looking for an excuse to cancel.’

‘They can be swine, can’t they? It happens again and again.’

‘Yes.’

No wonder he was depressed. No wonder that the pit had opened for him, too. Even in the slight backwater of Night and Day Ronnie had given the impression of living in the rushing midstream, like one of those fish native to Alpine rivers. Events and people had been his element, much more so than we had at the time realised. I remembered his liveliness on his visit to Cheadle, his sense of excitement with the projected book, and realised now that that had been a chance—very likely a last chance—to get out not exactly into the main stream again, but at least into waters where some current flowed. Not this stagnant and decay-smelling mud-hole. Something about the dullness of his last reply—about his whole attitude to my visit—struck me.

‘Was I the excuse, Ronnie?’

‘As a matter of fact, yes.’

‘Oh, God!’

‘They took the line that the book wasn’t worth publishing unless it contained important new material on Brierley, and they weren’t prepared to risk that if you were likely to come down on them with a ton of writs.’

‘But you needn’t have mentioned me. I thought I’d made that clear.’

‘They wouldn’t see it. As a matter of fact there was a complication. Apparently the editor who’d taken me over had had a scrap with you in some previous firm. I gathered you’d given him a mauling. Name of Eric Martleby.’

I remembered the specimen only too well. Handsome in a lanky, strawy, drawly way, but with the soul of a little blue-chinned thug. What they used to call a whizz-kid, which seemed to mean whizzing from one firm to the next, leaving a trail of mess and breakage.

‘Oh, Ronnie, I’m sorry. I suppose he wanted his pound of dirt, and if you couldn’t give him that he wasn’t taking anything.’

‘Maybe. You couldn’t have known. But they were looking for an excuse anyway. If it hadn’t been you it would probably have been something else. It’s not all loss. I got a third of the advance, and I can salvage two or three articles about the early days, Graham Greene and that gang. I could probably put together something on Brierley. Might even make a TV piece. Lots of shots of planes flying in and out of airports to pad it out. It’s just that I haven’t felt like starting.’

And wouldn’t again, ever, if he didn’t do something soon. Suddenly his needs and mine seemed to coincide.

‘That’s what I came to ask you about,’ I said.

‘Oh?’

‘I want to know more about Mr B for reasons of my own. Nothing to do with writing or journalism. When you came to Cheadle you told me you had a lead which you’d never followed up. I would very much like to know what it was. In exchange, provided you promise not to involve me or my family, I’ll tell you enough to get rid of your airport shots and replace them with something worthwhile.’

‘Oh, God!’ said Ronnie. The wickerwork squealed as he tried to slump even further. I seem to have spent a lot of my life coaxing or bullying men into doing what they don’t feel like, so I paid no attention.

‘I’ll start,’ I said.

Before I came I had made careful mental inventories of what I was and was not prepared to tell Ronnie. I found it remarkably difficult to keep to them. I had rummaged out my old manuscript a few days ago and had read it through with less distress than I had expected. It had even struck me that I could use it to help Fiona to see what sort of decision I was asking her to make, and that I understood the difficulty of the choice. But that had been about all I did understand. I had read with growing bewilderment, not simply at the events but at my own relationship to them. The words ‘my own’ beg the question. The gulf between myself now and the girl who had experienced the events and then written about them seemed almost unbridgeable. My urge to tell Ronnie more than was sensible may be accounted for as an unconscious attempt to close the gulf, to assert the identity and value of my single life. Perhaps the squalid and imprisoning little room added to the impulse, with its sense of last chances almost lost. Certainly as I was speaking I discovered in myself a longing for the day when I would give Fiona the manuscript to read and then tell her as much as I knew of the rest of the story, uncensored.

Even with Ronnie I was more expansive than I’d meant to be, so that time was beginning to run short before my luncheon appointment. He listened with little sign of interest to the details of our stay in Barbados, which I’d thought might stimulate him with its potential for television. I said B had been very nervy. I explained in general terms about my mother’s attempt to blackmail him, and how he’d taken it seriously although she didn’t appear to have any special knowledge to threaten him with. I said he’d managed to get hold of a very valuable piece of jewellery, which I’d been under the impression he’d sold in order to pay her off, but just after he’d left on his trip to Rio I found that he’d never sold it after all. I’d assumed he hadn’t paid her off either, but had recently discovered he had. Finally I told Ronnie about the men who had questioned me the Sunday morning when I’d first learnt that B was dead.

‘Interesting,’ said Ronnie when I’d finished, in something ghostily like his old voice. ‘A currency swindle of some kind, evidently.’

‘That’s what I’ve always thought.’

‘There was a lot of that going on. Remember the Dockers?’

‘Oh, he wasn’t like that at all. We once had a very stingy weekend in Paris. He hated not having money to spend, but he wouldn’t risk breaking the rules.’

‘Very sensible if you’ve got something big on. The Dockers got caught because Lady D was always in the gossip-columns, splashing it out in Monte Carlo. I gather there was a lot of money to be made if you could get round the rules. What he’d have been doing on Barbados would be selling a supposedly run-down estate so that he could show a low figure in his accounts of the transaction. But if he had it in good order it might have fetched a fair sum, with the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement due to operate soon. The sale of the estate would also have provided cover for whatever he was getting out of the transaction over the hotel. All that could have gone through on the side, in dollars. He’d have had a very good chance of getting away with it, provided nobody tipped them the wink at the Treasury.’

‘If somebody happened to tell a Director of the Bank of England there was something fishy going on in Barbados, you mean?’

‘That would have done. They couldn’t stop the system leaking, they could only make things as risky as possible for the leakers. They operated largely on hunch and hearsay. Those chaps who came and asked you questions at the end sound like Treasury investigators to me. They went in for retired bobbies. Did you tell them about this piece of jewellery?’

‘As a matter of fact, no.’

‘Very handy, that might be. Small, easy to smuggle, not gone through the trade, and so on. Professional jewellers had to report all transactions over a certain value, so something like that . . . until anyone noticed it was missing, of course.’

‘There was a very good replica.’

‘Perfect.’

‘But he left it behind.’

‘Perhaps he wasn’t ready to use it yet. But it raises an interesting point. We’ve been assuming that the deal on Barbados was set up for the general purpose of making a quick buck, but, it sounds to me as though it was for something much more specific than that. He had a deadline to meet, and something extremely nasty was going to happen if he failed.’